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Spring Rain

Posted on May 29, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

Now the rain is falling, freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,

a Pacific squall started no one knows where, drawn east
as the drifts of warm air make a channel;
it moves its own way, like water or the mind,

and spills this rain passing over. The Sierras will catch
it as last snow flurries before summer, observed only by
the wakened marmots at 10,000 feet,                             – Spring Rain, Robert Hass

The day began beautifully, with just enough specks of white cloud pinned against a blue sky. It is Memorial Day weekend and summer is almost here.

By the time Maya woke up from her afternoon nap, the sky was gray. I want to go to Dolores Park demanded Maya. Shanthala demurred because she thought that it might rain. The prediction says less than 1 mm, I said, lets take her to the park. So we set out.

As we reached the park, water came down like a fine spray, too fine to be a bother, but not insufficient to be ignored. Maya dashed off to play. Shanthala and I sought shelter from the rain under some slides. The spray turned to drizzle and drizzle turned to a fine rain. Spring asserted a reminder that it wasn’t yet done.

But, Maya couldn’t be deterred. Most parents were scurrying home when we reached the park. The rather crowded park was mostly empty. A group of young people were dancing to beer and loud techno music. Maya stood under the rain staring at them. Soon, she began to sway to the incessant rhythm of the music.

I remembered what Sir Ken Robinson had said in his talk. Why isn’t dancing as common in the curriculum as math and language. After all, don’t we have bodies ? I remembered my awkwardness at dance. My father loved dance music and took the opportunity to shake to the rhythm whenever he could. My mom thought it shocking or at least, unacceptable for a grown up man to do what he did. I imbued my mother’s shame and not my father’s abandon when it came to dancing. Probably, I also felt that if I couldn’t be good at it, I shouldn’t try. How strange, what we chose to copy and what we chose to avoid from each of our parents.

The city, usually a brilliant sight from the park, was almost invisible in the rain.

The night before, Maya woke up in the middle of the night and vomited. She vomited three more times before she slept fitfully the reminder of the night. The sheets were a mess and we retired to another bedroom to sleep. As I struggled to fall back asleep, I thought about how unfazed we parents of this generation are with our children’s malaises such as vomiting. Two generations back, at least in India, it must have been so difficult for a parent to know what to be afraid of and what not to be. Children died of the most simple things, things such as vomiting. But I also think about how easy my parents made parenting seem. I think I’d go mad if I had to stay home and care for Maya full time and cook and take care of the house. And I don’t think this is because I’m a man, thought that may have something to do with it, with how I was raised and what I was told was in store for me.

But parents also thought differently. I know of no one of my generation who wasn’t scared of their father. I don’t want Maya to be scared of me. But she does get scared when I lose my temper, as I sometimes do, when I can’t find a way around her obstinacy to even simple requests. For example, she insisted on eating an unripened banana despite my attempts to explain why that wasn’t a good idea and offering her a ripened one. Sometimes, the explaining helps. The other day, she wanted to wear her underwear back-to-front i.e. wearing what is front at the back. Insisting and pleading that she wear it the right way didn’t help. I then got out one of my own and wearing it the way she wanted to, explained the problems with doing so. She immediately switched to wearing it the right way. My parents would’ve whacked me and made me wear it the right way.

As frustrating as her obstinacy seems, it also makes up for a lot of rewarding moments, because she doesn’t give up at many other things. She did about 10 minutes on the treadmill on Friday. After almost a month of saying she wanted to run on it, but refusing to when I offered to help her, she did it mostly on her own on Friday. I found it delightful watching her slow up the ante, going as fast as 5 mph before deciding that 3-4 mph was far more comfortable. She first figured out if she could stop the treadmill when she wanted to, without my help. Then she slowly increased the amount of time she spent walking before she switched off and integrated (that’s my theory) the experience. Then she increased the speed. She is resolute in trying to figure it all out by herself, asking for help only when she’s in trouble or can’t figure it out.

The year is almost half over. I often wonder how effectively I use my time. Maya has been listening to Pink Floyd’s classic “Dark Side of the Moon” of late, especially the song Time. It was one of the first songs whose lyrics stayed with me. I especially ruminate over the ending.

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say 

I’ve always rejected the notion of hanging on in quiet desperation. I’ve rejected waiting till I’m older, more settled to do something more such as explore the world, play the guitar or enjoy a sunset. What no one told me about parenting is that it involves a lot of waiting. Everything else has to be mostly put aside for the first few years. At least, that’s how it has seemed to me. I wonder if half-scribbled lines is all I can show at the pearly gates. I’m so numbed at the end of the day, I just lapse into mindless activities like browsing or checking email (not even responding) instead of doing something more productive. It takes me a while before I can tackle chores or even indulge in a little writing.

Life knows no moderation. We have this relentless demand on our time when they’re young and a relentless ache in our hearts when they’re older and not around as much as you like them to be. Why can’t you, life, show some moderation, moderation that is demanded of us for a good life.

Yes, I miss my solitude. But then, when Maya holds my face and says “I love you Papa”, as she did for the first time last week, with a tenderness in her eyes that made me think she said the words with knowledge, not a mere parroting, I think the price has been worth it. I remember that with parenting, time has a beauty that is both casual and intense.

There were orange poppies on the table in a clear glass vase,

stained near the bottom to the color of sunrise;

the unstated theme was the blessedness of gathering and the

blessing of dispersal—

it made you glad for beauty like that, casual and intense,

lasting as long as the poppies last.        – Spring Rain, Robert Hass

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While I Was Gone

Posted on May 4, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

A small brown wren in the tangle
of the climbing rose. April:
last rain, the first dazzle
and reluctance of the light.               – Cuttings, Robert Hass

While I was gone, April has turned to May. The fickle weather has given way to blazing heat these past few days. Will the very wet winter yield to a very hot summer ?

And then in mid-May the first morning of steady heat
the morning, Leif says, when you wake up, put on shorts and that’s it for the day.
when you pour coffee and walk outside, blinking in the sun.
Strawberries have appeared in the markets, and peaches will soon;       
- Late Spring, Robert Hass

The very wet winter has created such a lush life that pollen allergies seem to be all the rage. Maya and I have been plagued with runny nose and Maya had a low grade fever for three nights. Local newspapers speak of pollen counts are the highest in 20 years.

I wasn’t gone anywhere. Had just battened down, caught up on the daily rhythms of waking up to Maya’s “Papa”, the knowledge that Shanthala was ten thousand miles away. Caught up in the cooking, cleaning, working that filled my days. And time spent with friends visiting us from India who stayed for two weeks. Caught up in placating Maya who thought that their appearance had something to do with Shanthala’s disappearance. Who expressed her unhappiness at their presence, showed what seemed akin to sibling rivalry, an unwillingness to spare my time and attention.

While I was gone, a final chapter in the story of Osama vs Obama was written. Osama had been dead for two days before I came upon the news. That’s how conversant I was with my laptop.

While I was gone, stories kept unspooling in my head, but went unsaid, unwritten. The eyes were held spellbound by the chiaroscuro of light and rain, sun and clouds, of the beauty of spring flowers, lupine and california poppy, ice plant and feral cabbage. But the hands remained frozen, unable to sculpt the words that spoke of what the eyes saw, the body felt an my whole being experienced.

A man thinks lilacs against white houses, having seen them in the farm country
south of Tacoma in April, and can’t find his way to a sentence, a
brushstroke carrying the energy of brush and stroke    – Spring Drawing, Robert Hass

And now I’m back from my exile. Again. Thank you for waiting, dear reader.

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Musings From An Airplane

Posted on March 29, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

I envy men who’ll see their wives and children tonight.

Exactly three months shy of Kitty’s departure, I got on a plane to Prague to attend the same conference that I attended when he was alive. He was alive and Maya was just a wisp, a dream. Now, I’m on my way to Prague again and he’s the wisp, a slowly, slowly, fading memory while Maya is real, probably upset at being unable to make me stay and not knowing how to express the feeling. I left like a thief, unable to even kiss her goodbye as I left, afraid that she’d cry. This is the first time I’ve traveled for more than a night away from her, and even that single night has been only once. “Don’t forget the two times you left us alone in my mother’s house”, I can hear Shanthala say.

One the plane, a book called “Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name” kept me company. It told the story of a woman who goes in search of her biological father when she learns that the man she called father was not biologically so after he dies. She had been abandoned by her mother when she was thirteen. Her mother vanishes and is never found. It is a sparse, literary thriller, a thriller not in the sense of a whodunit, but a thriller nevertheless for creating a tension in the woman’s quest for her biological father, for an attempt to decipher who she is, of who she may be. The writing is simple, unadorned, nothing got in the way of the story. When I pause in my reading and look outside, the plane is over some mountain range, the white of the peaks offset by the black of the valleys. I wonder if the plane went down and I couldn’t keep my promise to Maya of returning soon, would she grow up seared and searching. I’ve heard of a woman who lost her mother when she was six or so. Her father remarried. To help turn a corner on the past, they forbade any discussion of her biological mother and severed all contact with her relatives. I heard that even when she was sixteen, when everyone was in bed, she’d comb the house looking for pictures of her lost mother.

Loss. I knew the word, but not what it meant. Now I know the word like I know breathing. I know now that I can never protect Maya from ever knowing it’s meaning. With life comes loss. Just as the poem said, the ledge itself invents the leap:

The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,
Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,
The merest thought of airplanes. You can call
It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;
But it isn’t the unfathomable fall
That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,
It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap. – Fear of Happiness by A.E Stallings

It’s light again outside. I see the landscape is no longer wild, desolate, mountainous and snow covered. The day looks beautiful. Just enough wisps of cloud to accentuate the blue of the sky. I see a winding river with boats and barges plying its waters. I wonder if it is the river Rhone, wonder if Shanthala had passed this way when she toured Europe with her parents. I imagine people on the boats, the captains navigating the vessels, the crew working the ship. I wonder if they live nearby or if their homes are far away. I wonder what their lives are like. In so many ways so much like mine, yet so different. All those differences adding up to such different lives, to such different people. They say the devil is in the details. But as I imagine their lives, I think god is in the details, the mystery is in the details, the wonder is in the details.

A few months ago, I was on my way to the airport, the first time I was leaving Maya for a night. As the cab approached the airport, I saw two giant planes, taxiing to their runway. Flight. Escape. Runaway. Bolt. The words had come unbidden to my mind. I wondered why. Did I crave for a break from the relentless of parenting ?

As the cab approached my terminal and slowed to edge itself in front of the terminal, I saw a man hurriedly hug an older woman and rush into the car to drive away. In one of the few scenes I remember from the movie “Love Actually”, a narrator says that if you ever think that love is dead, just go to the arrival lounge of an airport and you’ll see people surrounded by love. If the arrival lounges are where love blossoms, are departure lounges where they wither or just seek respite ?

I felt like I was running away from love that morning. Love that lay asleep in bed. Love in the form of a toddler, almost three, and Shanthala. I longed to hold both of them for a while before I left home, but that would’ve woken them up and Maya would not have let me go so easily. If she had started wailing, I would have found it difficult to leave. That day, as I waited for the taxi, I heard her stir on the baby monitor and ask for me, but thankfully she went back to sleep without fully waking up. I say thankfully, but I’d be lying if I didn’t add that I was also a little saddened. I wanted her to wake up and demand me, make me not go.

That time, I was at the airport because I wanted to surprise another loved one, my sister – younger by 9 years – who was graduating that week. I knew that she wanted me to be there when she was awarded the certificate. I wanted to be there too. My sister is how I  discovered that I had a side of me that loved babies and wanted to care for them. This graduation would mark the end of a journey began 10 years ago when she first came to this country. The road had meandered and almost gotten lost in the undergrowth. Not that it mattered to me that she didn’t finish her Masters. I wanted her to be content is all. But I was heartened to see her return to the course years after she had walked out of it, return of her own accord and finish it with flying colors. So I wanted to be there when she walked on stage.

That weekend was also my mom’s birthday and I thought that she might be pleased at the gift of my being there for my sister’s graduation. “There’s only the two of you,” she’s fond of saying, as if we were the sole inhabitants of a lonely outpost from Cormac’s “The Road”. “You must take care of each other”. She frequently asks me to visit my sister, on the other coast, always worried that the geographical distance might become the metaphor for the relationship.

Leaving Shanthala had always made melancholic. With the coming of Maya, this has only gotten worse. I wondered if I was really sad or if a part of me was only aping what I’d seen my father do in such situations. When he was away, he’d never really enjoy himself. Even in a city playing the latest English movie, which he so loved to watch and which he got so little opportunity for in the provincial towns we lived in, he’d not go to the cinema. “I don’t enjoy watching a movie without you all”, he’d say.

I didn’t understand him then. But on a plane, crossing oceans, I envy men who’ll see their wives and their children tonight.

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City Lights

Posted on March 20, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

When I went to Paris in the fall of 1990, one of the first things that I did, like everybody else, was to go see the Eiffel Tower. Take line 6 and get off at Dupleix metro station, my colleagues told me. Stay by the right window and you’ll be treated to an especially grand sight of Eiffel Tower from the metro, they said. Sure enough, one of the most lasting memories of Paris is the first sight of Eiffel Tower as the metro goes over Pont de Bir-Hakeim. I looked up Wikipedia and lo and behold, it lists the view as one of the most breathtaking panoramas of Eiffer Tower (this is the best photo that I could find that was licensed under Creative Commons). I liked this photo (on Flickr too) much better.

Image Credit Happy A, Flickr

Now many years later, in a city half a day’s plane ride across the world from Paris, I face a similar sight. In San Francisco, as the J-Church metro emerges from behind houses onto 20th Street, seemingly snaking its way through people’s backyards, I’m amazed by a gorgeous vista of downtown San Francisco. This point marks the crest of a little hill from which the tram steadily descends the rest of the way, burrowing deep underground until it reaches the end at Embarcadero. As the tram pauses at the station at the intersection of 20th and Church, I can’t stop myself from snapping a picture from my iPhone.

Today, the first day of spring, as the city emerged from behind dark rain clouds and the steady rain that it brought for the past two days, I liked the way the light caught the city towers.

On sunny weekends, Dolores Park is a hubub of activity. This past November, on a particularly glorious fall evening, as Maya played in the park below, I tried to capture the end of the day.

San Francisco is a beautiful city. It is fast becoming the city of my adult life, much as Bangalore was the city of my childhood and home.

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After the Storms

Posted on March 1, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

We were socked with two big storms over the past two weeks. On the tail end of the first storm, we celebrated Maya’s birthday for the first time in the US. We hosted the largest party we’ve ever held at our house. Some 20 odd people including kids showed up. Overall, the party was a success I’d like to think.

The next day we went for a hike. The air was crisp and fresh after the almost four days of continuous rain. Maya had been demanding that we take her to climb a hill and so we eventually did. Gray rain clouds still clung to the sky, but co-mingled with snow white clouds and great patches of blue sky. The whole thing was quite atmospheric (pun intended).

After I got the iPhone, I hardly take the regular camera any more. The iPhone does a pretty good job most of the time. It is only in really low light conditions that I have difficulty getting a good picture (the picture is too grainy). I purchased a couple of apps a few months back and that coupled with a free app enhance the photographs taken with an iPhone quite well.

The first one is called Pro HDR. It simplifies the technique of taking HDR pictures. HDR (high dynamic range) is a technique whereby you combine two photos taken with different exposures to obtain a single photo that uniformly lights all the subjects. For example, if you’re shooting against the sun, the foreground is quite dark while the background is quite well lit. If you place the focus on making the foreground bright in such a condition, the background is too bright, a complete washout. But our eye can see both the background and the foreground quite well. To affect the same illusion, a HDR image is one that is created by combining two such images, one with the foreground dark and the background correctly lit and another with the foreground properly lit and the background a complete washout, to produce a single image that has a high dynamic range of illumination.

Pro HDR is one of the several HDR programs available for the iPhone. I picked it up on sale and because it was one of the higher rated HDR apps. With it I’ve captured several gorgeous pictures. Here is one taken on the hike with Maya up Rancho San Antonio County Park. Compare it with a similar photo taken without the HDR program.

Here is another good looking picture taken with the HDR program.

Notice the ghost at the far left, caused by an object that moved between the two differently exposed pictures.

Another program that I purchased is called 360 Panorama. This allows you to shoot panoramic pictures quite easily with an iPhone. When I had gone to my sister’s graduation, I was impressed by a camera that my cousin had, the Sony Nex 5. He just pressed the shutter and fired away as he swung the camera in an arc across the auditorium. The camera automatically composed a panorama out of these pictures. Compare that to the panorama mode in most cameras that I had seen till then with the panorama stitch assist mode. A few days later I ran into the 360 Panorama app which does pretty much what the Nex did, except that it ran on my iPhone and cost $1.99 (yes, less than $2).

Here is a panoramic picture taken with this program.

As you can see, the picture is not that great because of the poor light conditions. I’ve come to realize that the more professional cameras are more forgiving of adverse light conditions and poor photographers while the cheaper ones or like the one with the iPhone produce great pictures under a limited range of lighting conditions.

Hardly had the first storm abated than the second storm hit. This one came with far greater expectations than the first. A cold front from Alaska was bringing brrrr! temperatures. Snow was expected, snow so rarely seen in this part of the world. The excitement built up so much that a website called  IsItSnowingInSFYet.com sprang up. The local paper carried the headlines:
“‘Coldest storm of season’ hits Bay Area; snowball fights in San Jose
still possible”.

Sure enough, the temperatures dropped to record busting lows. Oakland and San Francisco Airport had their lowest temperatures recorded for the month (34 and 35 degrees Farenheit, I know nothing Arctic, but hey, this is Silicon Valley). Nearby Mountain View and San Francisco had temperatures that tied with the existing record. But no snow came. The local paper this time said: “The much-ballyhooed Great Blizzard of 2011 was more like the Great Fizzle.”

But catching a break in the rain on a slow work day, I went for a trot on Friday morning. It was quite cold, but after a mile or so, I had warmed up enough to not notice it. I wanted to see Stevens Creek in spate.

The creek was a roar compared to its usual silent flow. In places where the path descended to the level of the creek, the creek looked like it’d overflow. The creek was a rich, chocolate milkshake brown, frothing white as it tumbled over rocks and sudden changes in gradient.

The second picture above is another image shot with the HDR app.

As I ran down the trail, my mind raced over some news that I had been browsing in the past few days. The East Coast of the US had been hit with one of the worst storms in its recorded history, Australia had suffered devastating floods. I remembered that my friend at the non-profit that I work with had titled an essay on how weather is affected by global warming as: “How the 100 Year Flood Became An Annual Event”. If that sounds too dramatic, NYT blogged back in 2007 that:
“Floods that happen every 100 years could come as often as every 10 years by the end of this century, Long Island lobsters will disappear and New York apples will be just a memory if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.“

2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year in recorded history (since record keeping began in 1887). The weather all of last year was quite irregular. So what, you say ? Here is a chart put out by the BBC on world food prices:

According to the article, titled “Q&A: Why food prices and fuel costs are going up“:
“… in 2010, severe weather in some of the world’s biggest food exporting countries damaged supplies.

That has helped to push food prices almost 20% higher than a year earlier, according to the FAO. (The 2010 figure was slightly below the annual measure  for 2008 as a whole.)

Flooding hit the planting season in Canada, and destroyed crops of wheat and sugar cane in Australia.

In addition, drought and fires devastated harvests of wheat and other grains in Russia and the surrounding region during the summer, prompting Russia to ban exports.

As a result, wheat production is expected to be lower this year than in the last two years, according to US government estimates.”

Meanwhile, in the US, we voted Tea Party led Republicans to power and what have they started ? Attacking EPA and climate change regulations that they claim hurts business. Yahoo had an article titled “Congress Begins Assault on EPA’s Climate Change Regulations“. In Montana, there’s talk of passing a bill that would declare that global warming is good for business! Discover, the popular US-based science magazine, said that the number 4 science story of 2010 was: “Climate Science Wins a Round, But the Campaign Goes Poorly“. This was after the so-called climategate scandal, in which some conservative hackers hacked into University of East Anglia and retrieved more than 1000 emails that they said showed how scientists were distorting the evidence and that there was no scientific consensus on global warming. There was no evidence of distorting evidence, of course, but that didn’t help the cause, especially in the US. Pew Research found that the percentage of Americans who believe that human activity is causing global warming fell sharply to 34% in 2010 from 50% in 2006. Only 13% of conservatives believe human activity as the cause for global warming.

As I ran, I wondered how we would come together on such a divisive issue. The US especially is so deeply anti-science and anti-global warming that I find it alarming. Even friends who seem to accept the problem, do little to change their lives to act in a way that reduces their carbon footprint. Of course, I’m no saint when it comes to reacting to global warming either. I may do a little, but there is not as much integrity or depth to my responses.

Last year, Time magazine carried an article titled: “Climate-Change Strategy: Be Afraid — but Only a Little”. The article said that research by two Berkeley psychologists showed that: “when people are shown scientific evidence or news stories on climate change that emphasize the most negative aspects of warming — extinguished species, melting ice caps, serial natural disasters — they are actually more likely to dismiss or deny what they’re seeing. Far from scaring people into taking action on climate change, such messages seem to scare them straight into denial. … The results, Willer and Feinberg wrote, “demonstrate how dire messages warning of the severity of global warming and its presumed dangers can backfire … by contradicting individuals’ deeply held beliefs that the world is fundamentally just.” (WEIRD warning alert, of course).

I think like recycling and driving less, some minimal actions that can help the cause is how we shop for food. Buy local produce. Avoid purchasing goods that have been produced and shipped from across the country or worse, from across the world. If you have farmers’ markets, shop there, especially if you can afford it. Run the heater a little less in the house. Do these really help or are they only feel good actions ? I think that once we decide to factor carbon footprint and sustainability into our decisions, even just a little, there is a potential to affect a larger change. I also hear Gandhi’s quotes, “Be the change you want to see in the world” and “My life is my message”.

I finished my run in good time and my legs felt good. I was glad for the lull in the work schedule and the rain that I could go for a run. My mind harked back to the Derrick Jensen quote that I have written about: “We are really fucked. Life is still really good.”

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