Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Hollywood actor Owen Wilson attempted suicide? Depression…sign of the times!




There is a story in there, about people having it all and yet going over the edge.

Now that the official reports show that Police were called to Wedding Crashers ’ star Owen Wilson's home because of an attempted suicide report, it is talked about that the star was depressed and actually calling for help.

Depression is so commonplace and yet so unrecognized, few realized that it can happen to anyone, anywhere.

You do not need the Santa Monica Police Department’s log of weekend calls to show that there are more Wilson around. Anyone depressed is giving out subtle signals that he or she is depressed.

Wilson was found bloody and dazed after trying to commit suicide by overdosing on pills and slitting his wrist in the wake of a blow-up with a close friend, a source told the New York Post.

Fox news also quotes a source close to the "Wedding Crashers" actor, 38, telling "Extra" that the actor did indeed attempt suicide over the weekend, saying Wilson has been depressed for the last few months, but not over a broken relationship.

The source also told “Extra” that Wilson’s famous younger brother, Luke Wilson, found him and that Wilson’s family and friends are shocked.

"It's hard. He's such a wonderful person," a source told the New York Post. "He's such a great guy and so smart and just ... nice. We're just hoping he gets better."

One neighbor told the Post that when she heard the ambulance, she was surprised because Wilson never causes any trouble.

"All the neighbors like him, he's a friendly guy. He never has any crazy parties or does anything wrong," Betty Miller said. But Wilson has a history of depression.

"It's very upsetting. People are complicated. It's not just one thing," a friend of the actor told the Post.

On Monday, Wilson was receiving care Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and was in "good condition," a publicist for the hospital said.

Meanwhile, Wilson asked for privacy in a statement released through publicist Ina Treciokas.





"I respectfully ask that the media allow me to receive care and heal in private during this difficult time," he said.


So this only proves that the new age mantra of ‘Having it all’ is taking its toll. Helen Gurley Browns of the world not with standing, the rage to achieve too much too soon is killing people in the process.

It makes little difference here that Wilson was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the screenplay The Royal Tenenbaums. He starred opposite the likes of Jackie Chan, Ben Stiller, Gene Hackman, Will Ferrell and Eddie Murphy.

If you are cracking under the pressure, fact is you need help. And if you are so sick with depression that you do not realize you need help, then you better have a brother like Wilson’s who arrived in time to play savior.

Unlike Britney Spears’ family who have been unable to get the ‘Ooops’ Pop tart back on even keel.

People, depression is treatable, just like other (physical) maladies. And like ‘if Mohammad cannot go to the Mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammad’, the family must rally around before wrists are slit…irreparably.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

India: Partition of a soul














Millions were displaced and killed in the chaos after partition of India in 1947.

I can never forgive the colonist British for their final blow to the jewel in their crown. They proved a simple policy: If we cannot keep it, we will hand it to you in tatters.

People tell of millions of scared Hindus fleeing the suddenly declared ‘Islamic Pakistan’ side of Punjab. Someone said that the train loads of dead bodies kept on arriving till the Hindu leaders on the Indian side of Amritsar border sent a trainload of Muslims dead or near dead.

An article on www.bbc.co.uk provides glimpses into the mayhem during the partition.

The entire act was wrong, say papers unearthed by the son of the now deceased Mr. Beaumont who was private secretary to the then senior British judge, Sir Cyril Radcliffe (the chairman of the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Commission) in 1947.

Radcliffe was responsible for dividing the vast territories of British India into India and Pakistan, separating 400 million people along religious lines.

"The Punjab partition was a disaster," he writes.

"Geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment.

"The trouble was that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were an integrated population so that it was impossible to make a frontier without widespread dislocation.

"Thousands of people died or were uprooted from their homes in what was in effect a civil war.

As an Indian who has never experienced the pain of partition but has seen it in the eyes of hundreds of survivors, I feel even if the Queen were to apologize, it is not enough. Sindhis lost their entire motherland. The Sindhu river civilization is the oldest and most developed one in archaeological terms, mind you.












Mohenjodaro- The excavations pertaining to ancient India (Sindh) that once thrilled the archaeologists, now in an unconnected surrounding and hold- that of Pakistan.

Today’s Kandhahar, which was the erstwhile Gandhar province of Prince Shakuni of Mahabharatha, is in Afghanistan now. Manasarovar, the Hindu pilgrimage spot is in China held Tibet.

India was a religion, a brotherhood and a way of life…untill the mayhem of Mughal and Arabic invasions destroyed it and the British served the final blow.


Saturday, August 11, 2007

Racial bias and business sense


A friend who works in the US of A said once to me that there may be no overt racial bias seen in the country of Uncle Sam, but it exists!

You do not see it, it is not talked about but lies in subtle happenings. You feel it but cannot say a thing. I wondered how that can be. "The native (read White) Americans work with you by day, but when they can chose who to socialise with in the evenings, you are clearly out! We do not get invited for family outings together or mixing, generally!" That is why, long ago, in India- one often heard- It is better to be an equal citizen in your own (not so developed) country than be a second-rated citizen in another (developed) nation. But with India's 300+ million middle class consumers that even President Bush eyed and mentioned in his visit, the business sense is beginning to prevail, one sees. Like the introduction of the Indian origin American character - Raj Patel- in the Archies comics. Please read the link below to understand the business sense that played a big role in the creation of a very likeable character as Archie's friend.


"...The Archie comic series has undergone a change and Archie now has a brand new Indian friend. There's a new kid on the block in Riverdale. The latest addition to Archie Andrew's gang of friends is an Indian-American- Raj Patel. The creation of Raj Patel comes at a time when the advent of computers and video games like WII and X box is affecting readership for the comic series across America...

Meanwhile, over a million Archie comics are sold in India every year..." I read on the net.


''The fact that there will be an Indian character in our comics on a regular basis will bring more attention to the comic and hopefully more readers in India will vie to read Archie and we will sell more Archie comics in India,'' said Michael Silberkleit, Publisher, Archie Comics (Quoted from NDTV's story http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20070022253)


For a change, the (Riverdale) boys hobnob with eachother, share agendas and do not fall into racial bias traps.

The creators say a lot of research went into conceiving the Patel family. While they insist it was not intentional, the Patel family is the stereotypical Indian-American success story. Raj's father is a doctor. His mother, who sports a bindi, is a research scientist. .. Says the same NDTV story! Aha!!! I must say, as my heart leaps at the sudden equality!!! As an Indian, I feel that the stereotype of an educated family from India, trying to fit in the American scenario, is a hard earned on.


For generations, Indians have toiled in research laboratories, hospitals and industries as the brains that helped the rise of America.

Now, the children may face less bias, maybe that's the 'pay-back' religion often talks about.
But does this also mean that if India was if India had nothing to offer in terms of market, the racial bias would have remained? Man, Money Talks!!! Doesn't it?

Nature's small wonders


I guess we all are overpowered with a sensation of 'Wow!' over simple things in life. Like wanting to get drenched in a rain shower...sitting in a window and watching the sun set behind the hills or mountains!

My children do plenty of the both.

They love rain, and when in Nasik, my son loves to sit in the window of my sister Jyoti's third floor flat and watch the horizon in the evenings.

This video I am including next is something from the same adventurous flavour we all seek in plain matters of life.

The caterpillars are nibbling away at the leaves with what gay abandon! Watch this is the link to the video I have pasted below.

A member of my yahoogroup shot the video and I have included his note.

Have fun. I am sure you will watch it again and again.


Hi guys,
Here is a time lapse of caterpillar eating awaay the leaf...unfortunately, my cam's battery was over before I could take a much longer video of it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3263294504127164755&hl=en


Recently, the pets are in the pupa stage and maybe emerge in a day or 2 as a moth or butterflies.The interesting thing was that they made the pupa using there own droppings maybe, because there was no sand or other material I kept for them in the box.
Cheers and good wishes.
Hitesh Gusani

Sunday, May 27, 2007

They ravaged my green town


The Nasik I lived in as a child was a small town.

Families knew each other. To begin with, there weren't too many, anyway. A few thousands, amongst them a few were natives of the place and the rest migrants.

There were good schools and streets were safe enough to walk to school.

What a joy it was to walk to school as the academic session began in June. Rains would be pouring down and one's biggest dilemmas in life were whether to wear the raincoat over the school-bag slung on the back or to save the bag in some other way.

Streets were more like avenues where ancient trees dotted the walks on either sides and the road. The streets were punctuated on either sides with villas and old style bungalows in stone and wood.

This part of India has always been safe for women and children to walk the street even at 2 am, barring a few, very rare mishaps.

So we could scamper to an aunt's place even at an unearthly hour, chaperoned or otherwise.

Job and marriage took me away to Mumbai first and to Delhi next. Now Nasik is the place I visit in summer holidays and it still is the cool, lovely and clear air here that draws me at least once annually, apart from my maiden family that remains here.

But...

Lots has changed as the rapid and planned industrialization has brought people from all over India flocking to the place. Can't blame the peoples' influx, its God's land and no one owns it.

I lament however, the change of fabric of the city.

The old, 'colonial' plus the 'native Indian' mixed look and feel is gone.

Malls, huge residential complexes and huge roads sans trees make the face of the city now. The population is maybe twenty times more of what it as two decades ago.

It still is safe. But the feel of 'my town' and a sense of ownership and responsibility is missing.
I do not recognize the place, the people and at times feel like an alien...

They ravaged my town in the name of development...is there a 999 helpline I can call?!!! Is there a Ctrl Z on this, anyone???!

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Depression - Just another condition


It is yet another memory.

We had moved into a new locality. I must have been ten or eleven.

A neighbour had an heart attack and his children ran wailing out aloud to our bungalow. My mother ran out with the kids with a handful of mustard.

Of course, the man did not survive and mother was with the grieving family through out the day and for hours each day after the funeral.

I quizzed her later about the handful of mustard.

"That was for heating on a pan and throwing on the chest of the person who has suffered the heart attack!" she had explained.

No mumbo jumbo this, I now know that it was the first aid people conjured by who had no ICCUs at hand immediately.

A kind of shock therapy, I guess. We all resort to desperate measures to make a difference, to help, to see something through...some times.

What touched me is my mother's innocent belief that she must try and it was her duty to rush to the aid of the family in distress.

The effect hangs on...after all these years.

A friend called in this morning. She has had major changes in life of late. An early marriage, change of work place, stagnating career etc...

What alarmed me is that she repeated what she had said a few times before- that she has just lost the confidence, professionally and personally.

All these past few weeks I have been trying to hunt down a placement for her profile. She insisted that since I was better in terms of contacts in the industry and the courage to break ice, I must do the honours for her.

I had been trying but always noted that when I fixed up appointments, she would develop weak knees.

Her excuses were so weak, I wonder if she believed in them herself.

Some times it would be the lack of transport or the distance, at anothertime- the lack of confidence whether she could do it.

Calls to our collective mentor (a lady who dotes on us since our student days) and to her husband to push her into action have not helped.

What alarmed me, I repeat, is her breaking down while on the call.

So I asked her to see me in the evening.

I felt that I had to help her out of this. It is no favour to her. It is a duty I feel I am bound to do for a friend.

She could as well have been another woman in the street and I still would have wanted to help. I guess her call felt clear and urgent.

Unless she is fetched out of the vicious cycle of 'depression', it will do a quicksand effect on her. The more she will struggle, the deeper she will sink.

So I went to see her in the evening. It was an effort to throw her a rope. I wished to step out of my selfish existence for a while and do my duty to society.

I wanted to bail her out without her knowing that I did.

I am no saint, far from that. I am not writing this so that someone gives me accolades.

I wish this to have a cascading effect. This is an attribute I learnt from someone who acted instead of talking about it. She may be no more, but I have learnt my lessons well.

So I sat with this friend and heard her out. She felt lighter already, she said. Then I spoke to her about dilemmas everyone, even I, face in life.

Soon, she and I parted ways with promises to stay in touch and also work on a plan to get her professional career on track.

It was vital I had felt, to run and help than speak at length about how nice a person someone was.

After all Depression is just another condition and whether or not I can make my friend seek professional help, at least my presence as a friend will make her stronger.

I am the one who is enriched by this experience, by a rewarding friendship.

We all must carry this 'fistful of mustard', I feel, sometimes if not always.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Domestic violence is not a sudden phenomena


Aishwarya Rai does a 'Provoked' and India sits up.

"This happens in UK, not India. Women are worshipped here." This was one opinion.

"Only an Indian woman could have taken so much. They are used to so much of subjugation, they take it with their chins up." was another.

Really, you cannot draw geographical, communal and class lines where violence is concerned. One perpetrates violence and the other is so trapped that he or she lives with it with hope that it will end on a happier note someday, that there will be light at the end of the tunnel.

But the truth is that a violent person is in need of treatment, consultation and reorientation. He or she resorts to violence as a means of venting out or leashing out suppressed feelings. The victim often is in a dependent situation like that of a financial dependence or emotionally dependent one.

So the dependent person gets blackmailed into playing along and really does too because he or she fears that a revolt will harm either one or all of them.

What the close ones of the perpetrator must realise is that if the person is not given professional help in time, it could harm any or many of them in the long run.

It is a vicious cycle and needs intervention; which if it is not forthcoming from within, should arrive from without.

Because there's only so much that anyone can take.

Monday, February 5, 2007

A Flood of Memories




The memories just won't go away, try as I might.

In my nostalgia, I still stand there, an eight-year-old, on a summer vacation at my family's farm at Chittegaon village in Nasik city. The early mornings were an ensemble of cattle-bells, farmhands shouting and cool breeze gushing around.

Mum was on vacation, too, away from her killing routine of city life as a housewife. She was ever the graceful and patient woman. She would give us (to my brother, Manoj and me) a quick breakfast that we would digest in no time at all, running around the fields.

The house was a structure in mud, cement and bricks. The front yard had cattle tied to wooden poles embedded partly in the earth. The labourers would untie the black cow named 'Kapila' and the pair of oxen. The cattle would head for the water pond and a meal of green grass thrown before them. Then, the farmhand would wash the cow's udders and milk it.
The dogs would go crazy running around and keeping trespassers at bay.

Soon, we could run into the fields where the farmhands were weeding out unwanted growths amidst the crop. It was wonderful to run into the sugarcane field where the rough leaves disallowed smooth passage and often cut through the skin.

The farmhand called Dattu 'Kaka' (meaning 'Uncle') would tell us of scary tales that wolves frequented sugarcane fields.

Dattu Kaka enjoyed having us, the 'cultured' children around, because living in a joint family from the Marathi heartlands had ensured that we were always courteous, within limits of socially approved behaviours and never rude, 'even to servants'!

I loved to stand beside the scarecrow and watch the birds feast on the standing crop. A farmhand would spin off a stone or pebble from his 'gallore' as they called the contraption they fashioned out of a two-faced branch and a rubber strip tied around it. The birds would fly out in a flurry only to resettle elsewhere closeby in a few seconds.

The field would be aflush with marigold flowers blooming on small shrubs and another adjacent one would have green grass being cultivated for the cattle on the farm. It looked like fenugreek and I would ask Dattu Kaka if they ever did the mistake of carting away some of the green growth to the market and selling it as fenugreek vegetables. I was only eight and my brother Manoj, a year younger.

"No, Kittu Tai," Dattu Kaka would laugh, adding the suffix 'Tai' to show respect for the master's daughter. I hated anyone calling me 'Kittu' which was my pet name and would rather they called me 'Kirti' but it was no use beginning the exercise with Dad's subordinates on the farm.

The wet fields, cool from the water that had been fed into its folds from the canal, would beckon us to walk into them. The mud felt soft under our tender feet and often a stiff twig or two would prick at the tender skins of the two city-bred children. But we would carry on, attempting to look like 'real' farmer-kids.

Many a time we would run into dry, ploughed sections of the farm and bruise our feet badly. I had come over wearing my cousin Manisha's 'chappals' (an Indian word for open-toed and open-heeled footwear) and the frequent runs amidst the clods had ruined the chappals while also chaffing the skin on my tender feet.

The breeze on the crop would send a ripple and we could sense that the grains (we couldn't easily tell what was the crop of the season) were dancing in slow motion under the Wind God's caress.

Soon, it would be evening and the birds could be seen rushing across the sky in flocks, racing against the setting sun, to reach their babies tucked away in the shelter of some trees somewhere.

The setting sun, like a globe of orange, would look amazing and breathtaking on the green crop. Soon, it would be time to return to the walls of the house and be tucked away into bed. We would return with a heavy heart like yet another lovely day had gone by and soon the vacation would be over.

But these were also times when Mum seized the chance to subtly inculcate humane values in us. She never preached, only allowed the message to be drawn home in an effective way without making us look like bumbling fools.

Once, Dattu Kaka took us to his home after seeking permission from 'Aai', my Mum and 'Anna' my Father.

We noticed that we were being pampered and everyone in Dattu Kaka's household made us seem special. So, we continued behaving ourselves and asked not an awkward question, though the village lifestyle left us dumbfounded.

Soon, it was mealtime and Dattu Kaka's family was once again busy trying to play the good hosts to the master's children.

The special dish of the day was the 'bombil' or the dried (Bombay Duck) fish, as they would say in English. It is a kind of fish that is dried in the open air and stored away. As and when, one needs to cook it, a vesselful is cooked in a spicy curry till the fish goes soft. It is considered a delicacy but not for us, who had been spared the 'nasty' smell of ill preserved fish, all our lives.

To add to it, they were serving it with bajri chi bhakris, which is a coarse western Indian bread baked made from the flour of bajra (millet) grains.

Both of us, a brother-sister duo, were put off but with every attempt to sound nice, we could only turn away and say that we were not hungry.

Soon Dattu Kaka dropped us home with a word to Mother that 'maybe' we were hungry because we had not eaten a crumb.

Mum got to task immediately. No canes and cudgels from the woman. She served us food to tide over hunger, soft wheat bread called 'chappatis' and a vegetable picked fresh from the farm. Then she sat us down with our version of what had happened.

"Aai, they served us 'bombil' and do you know how horrible it smelt! We couldn't stand the awful, rotting smell and how could we have eaten?" we offered.

"They are poor people and they thought that you will be happy with the dish which was all they could afford," Aai said.

"We would have had chappatis and water, but the pieces that we broke from the bhakris were tough to swallow. You do know we do not like it," one of us said.

Aai would not let it go at that. "These people may be monetarily poor but they have hearts of gold. Do you realise that they must have felt sad and inadequate that a guest returned hungry from their doorsteps? Do you realise that they must have tried really hard to cough up enough money to source the 'smelly' Bombil fish, as you choose to call it?" Aai continued in a gentle but unrelenting tone, anyway.

Of Course, we realised. But how could we undo the harm we had caused, we wondered.

That evening, Aai cooked some Bombil and Bhakri, herself and served us.

Needless to say, Manoj, my brother and I ate it without a word of protest.

"I am happy you co-operated," Aai said before retiring that night and added, "this will ensure that not another caring but the poor family feels pained when they call you over to share their bread next."

Those were the times and those were the days. The people I mention here, are all gone, save for Manisha, my cousin, Manoj, my brother and I.

But I can still feel the breeze on in my hair as I stand on the huge expanse of Marigold many years ago.