Remotely Related

Oftentimes, I wonder how certain spasms of memory are brought forth by the remotest thing possible. For example, how watching Tanushri Dutta brings forth faces of friends now lost, from doing "Sob Peyechhir Aasor" as a kid (this was something like doing "brotochari" and Calcuttans probably won't know what that was/is) because a certain "didi" would snicker her nose like that. The process of the remotest thing bringing on almost a whole equipment of memories is undoubtedly, the most common. Nonetheless, the links are thought to be connected, though remote, and I used to think that they could be best relegated to "memory".

Which is why, movies like "Ghajini" are made, so that people cannot find any related link, nope, not even the remotest, to any other.

The recent hullabullu over slumdog winning 8 oscars reminds me something that I had completely forgotten. Before your cheeks get flushed on the possibility of me rooting for the Slumdog, let me remind you, that cannot just be the case. But I was and am immensely curious of the reasons behind liking the movie. Not sarcastically curious. I really was curious.

And I asked people.

Now..... the answers had something that wasn't quite kegged in my perspective of the "possibilities". People said they just loved the visuals. The visual of the train going through the desert. The visual of so many individuals in the streets. And how beautiful India was.

As it could happen, I had to weigh in the possibility of whether they were being sarcastic or just plain sugary sweet. Out of human excreta, they managed to take home the visuals??!! As suspecting as we are made to be in this world, I had to look hard. For slip-ups. Of the real feeling.

But I had forgotten that what is commonplace, cliche for me, isn't so for these people (Canadians). Inspite of my more tangible and rooted connection of being an Indian, certain things are just taken for granted, and probably so for good reason. Without going into the whole Orientalism and post-structrualism debate, without going into Edward Said and Homi Bhava, I would just like to believe in people, when they look into things that are different from them and like them for their striking vastness and aberration. Further, this shouldn't sound like patriotic jingoism or anything like that, but a very comprehensible reason of what strikes people could vary, based on the background they are coming from.

No wonder, Yash Chopra made all that money by shooting romantic songs in Switzerland.

Let me finish this off with another anecdote. I was in Calcutta in December of 2008 and some part of January too and had to carry on almost endless interviews. Okay, no.... I did conduct a definite number but they seemed endless since they hampered with all my plans to meet and reconnect with friends and family. But let's not digress.

So there I was, doing these interviews for my own research. They were mostly semi-structured, and before they started, there were a certain amount of paperwork involved--signing the consent form, the honorarium receipts and filling out a half page demographic questions like name, occupation etc.

In very few of these occasions, I had a strange experience. I'm not going to state the exact number, but it did happen more than once, but not very many times. But I had absolutely no idea that this could ever happen. As I was saying in the beginning, it's quite strange how certain things brings forth associations you never though could come up!

So....in the half-a-page demographic details, there were these things such as: Name, Date of Birth, Occupation, and Sex, etc.

A very few times, people hesitated as soon as they arrived on "Sex". And after Sex, there were two boxes, entitled "male" and "female" (as I wasn't interviewing transgendered people I kept that category away).

And still, some hesitatated. Some wrote "No".

Some kept playing invisible tic-tac-toes hovering over the "male/female" categories.

It took me whole 30 seconds to understand what was going on before hastily adding that I was just interested to write down their "gender" (and we DO NOT write gender in any sociological research) rather than knowing about whether people recently had sex, whether people ever had sex, or whether people had sex with males or with females.

Strange how the mind works. And assumptions on how it works/should work.