Musings of a White Haired Teenager

I am not a feminist. But. I get annoyed whenever patriarchy raises its ugly head and wants to put women down. And you are saying, not again, but hear out a person who is seeing it in the World he lives in. This is not theory, or politics, it is hard core real. Where does it say that women – daughters, mothers, wives – need to answer to the male counterpart for everything the woman does? I know it is a stupid question to ask, and some male readers will shudder to see a World where they have lost control on their daughters, sisters and most importantly their significant others. The worst crime – the woman that they “own” have another male they rely on. But they need to “wake up and smell the coffee.” I have bondhus who are doing amazing things with their lives, only to be dragged down by a male-dominated system which wants them to conform to the imagined World of the male. In my personal life, I have tried to resist this impulse. A bondhu explained this really well. The person asked how

I think she smiled at me. This was at my neighborhood Lowes, my regular grocery store, she and I were reaching for the same loaf of bread, and I pulled back and I think she smiled at me. Behind her mask. For the past year and a half, I cannot always tell when a stranger smiles at me. It is easier with my bondhus (those who are late to the musings, “bondhu” is a word that denotes something much more than a friend – a virtual soulmate – a person who gets you). I have bondhus who always smile with their eyes. You see it in the pictures, you can take a picture of such as person, cover up everything and look at the eyes, and you see the real person who you call a bondhu. The eye changes, the little lines around the eye spread out in a unique way and you can see the unseen smile. And during Covid, because of the mask we all had to learn to look for those lines around the eyes. The mask saves lives. Politics, and the accompanying stupidity apart, the fact remains that the mask has saved many

I was going through old pictures. Today. And I realized how enormous our collections are. Anyone with a digital camera can now take nearly endless number of pictures. Some are bad pictures, some are absolutely memorable. Memories digitized into pictures. And life stories meshed into the images. The pictures certainly brought back the stories connected with each picture. I even shared some of the pictures with some people. And I wrote, “those happy days.” That is the fallacy. Indeed, they were happy days, but why do we have a tonal of lamentation in that statement. It is as if those days will not return. Certainly, some will not, the conversations with my parents at AC 140 and pictures that captured those moments will not come back. But there are many moments, memorialized in pictures, that are fountainheads of expectations. Yes, surely, we have the memories. But those memories set up the expectations for the future. If we had it once, the moments, the relationships, then why can we not

I went to watch a show. But found a community. As some of you know my son is a performer. He is in an act called “Grim Duplicity.” As the name suggests, it is all about death, the Grim part of the name is a direct reference to the Grim Reaper – the classic image of skeletal Death walking in a dark robe with the scythe in hand reaping souls. Thus, the Grim Duplicity is made up of two people, my son who plays the music of death and his partner who vocalizes death. Covid had stopped their lives temporarily, and now with venues opening up, they are performing. I spent part of the weekend to see their show. The performance was in a club called The Hollywood Comedy. Positioned on Melrose in the town of Hollywood – the club is intimate and popular to a special set of people who are not audiences but a community. And that is the community I found. A group of people, all young, going about their creative lives, entertaining each other, and supporting each other. The show became incidental to wh

The line is crossed. When the words cut through the veneer of superficial decency. The very structure of everyday life rests on assumptions that are paper thin and can be peeled away in simple acts that become tantamount to violence on the soul. It is not just an unkind word spoken in jest, but it is the sheer violence of intolerance and the soul breaking scourge of jealousy and suspicion. I am hurt and thus I write. The last few days has handed me certain experiences, not personal to me, but for people I care about that it opens up the need to question a kind of violence that is endemic. Happens all the time – in more ways than we may notice. I see it in my bondhus. Those who suffer, those who have to retreat to a new place, sometimes even create a “new me.” The reasons are many, and often recede to the background of hurt, but the reality changes and those who care would notice. Not noticing is as much a violence as the act of creating the hurt. Then, one tends to then look for the re

On this Sunday morning. There is a chill in the air. The autumn sun filters through the leaves that are battling to hold on to the chlorophyll as each leaf dies in a glory of color and it falls off. Eventually each leaf, on its own, no longer sustained by the community of the tree, meets its own personal death. Death is personal, isn’t it? In the end all the relationships, all that you thought you did, comes down to the ground to be swept away and be burnt in a heap of leaves. As I see the leaves fall it reminds me that we too will fall, some sooner than others, and when the fall comes will there be regrets, at the moment when the fall comes, will there be a moment of satisfaction that claims, “hey that was a good innings, had fun.” What is a good innings? As I sit on this wrought iron picnic table and watch the leaves come down, I wonder. What have I done for me lately? Many may have this question, but we do not want to confront it. Because we are caught up in the way we are perceived

When I Look in the Mirror. I see the white hair. Even though a dear bondhu said, “why do you worry about age.” And I look off the mirror I see a teenager. People ask me about the people I hang with. Why am I with young people more than with old people. And the younger look and see the white hair. Sometimes only. But the energy of the combination is electric. Instead of dwelling on cliched questions such as, “what is age?” I am increasingly finding it important to ask the question – “what memories do I need to make?” That gives me a timeline. A new timeline offered by COVID. Each of us were handled the new timetable and those who were creative were able to use the opportunities. I was at a presentation today, they asked me to speak on something and I spoke on entirely something else. The white hair saved the humiliation, but the teenager had a lot of fun. That is the irony of age. When I was actually a teenager I dreamt of driving around the city in a luxury car or being able to go to C