'Mamma Mia' and some memories

Today evening was fun. Guha and I went for the Mamma Mia musical. We'd both been pulling long faces about this earlier. Both of us had started watching the movie in December, and I had gagged before the movie got to the middle and then fallen asleep....so when we heard that the musical was coming to Purdue - we pooh-poohed it.

For some reason though last week when I saw the posters, all the all-too familiar ABBA songs and some vague memories of memories came back to me, and I told Guha on a whimsy that we should go for the show. That musicals are always better watched as musicals than as movies and in any case it would be fun hearing all those ABBA songs after so many years.

And so Guha got the tickets today. And so we went. And so it was. Great fun.

They were all accomplished singers and performers but the young woman who played the role of Donna was the one who had an astounding voice.

As I heard the songs there were some memories that came floating by:

1. How as a 6 year old I'd heard the song Super-trouper and I was quite convinced that the lyrics started off with "super-duper" right until I was 12 or so....

2. How when I was in class VII, I was given some of my pocket-money to buy my first cassette and an ABBA cassette it was indeed. They sang almost all my favourites from that cassette today....and I can't remember ever hearing all of the ABBA songs in one go apart from the time I was in school. And today's performance didn't disappoint me. There was my secret favourite and quite frankly risqué : Does your mother know. Voulez-Vous, which was definitely a dance number as well... Gimme, gimme, gimme! and Take a Chance on Me followed. 'Course I've never minded dancing on my own by myself, and today I was grinning in my seat and doing my "thumbs-twirl dance", which embarrassed Guha to no end - even though nobody was watching. He did join me though a little later for some very short minutes on some air drums...The performance was absolutely delightful. I'm talking about the performance-on-stage, that is.

3. There were the other quiet favourites: Chiquitita, The Name of the Game and The winner takes it all, Thank you for the Music (rather ironic that last one) and I remember listening to these as a school-going kid when I wasn't particularly cheery but was feeling not too terribly miserable either. The ABBA songs (and these in particular along with Fernando came to haunt me when I was in classes XI and XII. After I was a year into my undergrad in Calcutta I don't remember listening to ABBA much.

4. And then they performed the song I have a dream today that sent my memory bells pealing quite noisily. When we were in Class X, Sumki and I took it upon ourselves to direct the Class V play for Teachers' Day. We decided on Cinderella - which was fine. Sumki wrote the whole play on her own, which was better than fine. I was supposed to write one Act but never got around to doing that (and in any case she was the better writer). But the story doesn't end there.

We took it upon ourselves to make the play into a musical.

Why two mortally tone deaf people who couldn't sing for nuts would do that is beyond my powers of understanding. But we did. I don't exactly remember how we managed to teach the songs to the kids. Who was teaching them? Surely we couldn't have tried teaching them on our own by ourselves. The kids were exceptionally gifted. The girl who played the part of Cinderella (Moutushi) could sing like an angel, and the girl who played the part of the Prince (Debiparna) - even though she didn't have the intimations of musical greatness, she did have oodles of charisma and a brilliant clipped accent, and I think she pulled off the couple of songs that she had to sing (one being The Carpenters - I'm on Top of the World) pretty well. It was Cinderella/Moutushi however who had to sing I have a dream, and she was perfect....I couldn't help but be amazed today - and after all these years, as to how Sumki and I with such utter gall went on to direct a musical of all things!

5. The other memory comes from not a pleasant patch of a year - but the memory by itself is - oh well. Here goes.

It was my second year here. During the end of the Fall semester we had a stack of end-of-term papers to write up. Beth and I would meet up in the department on some late evenings to work, and sometimes there was more of snickering and exchanging of notes on random topics than paper writing. And on some evenings there was too much to type and there were too many papers (with some methodology and theory bits) that were thrown at my head (by Beth) so that I could fit them into my inching-along paper for any horsing around to happen.

One evening, Lorrell and Alyson - two other batch-mates/friends joined us in the department. We met relatively early on in the evening. The computer lab was otherwise deserted, and after 17 minutes or so of focused work, Lorrell started entertaining us with some songs from ABBA.

She was listening to them on her comp but was singing along as well -

Friday night and the lights are low

Looking out for the place to go
Where they play the right music,.......the swing
You come in to look for a king....

And then she really got into the lyrics and with a lot of head-shaking and air-guitar playing, she belted out -

You can dance, you can jive...having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene.....dancing queen...

At which point I had to join in with my voice and my dance.

Beth gave us big stares, which translated meant, "What on earth is that?"

"ABBA, Beth. ABBA. The Swedish band...."

"Muriel's Wedding. Seen Muriel's Wedding?" Piped in Lorrell before going back to her head-shaking and singing.

Beth shook her head and said, "nu-oh."

"Take a chance on me...." Crooned Lorrell some minutes later....by which time I had had to reluctantly return to my paper, which was glaring back at me from the screen. "Get on with the self-esteem bit you iijit. You've written enough about creativity...."

In the middle of the night all of us felt terribly hungry and the cheapest and the closest choice was what else but McDonalds. We all had some nasty burgers (apart from Alyson who had some equally horrific looking chicken nuggets) and washed them down with some Coke, and trudged back to campus to finish our papers. Beth kept wanting to break an arm or a leg so that she wouldn't have to turn in her paper. I kept reasoning with her that that wouldn't get her out of handing in her paper. She'd have to do it at some point so she might as well finish it that night. So much of brilliant sense coming from myself startles me at times.

So there we were. I don't remember how much of my paper I had done but all of a sudden I heard the noise of squeaky wheels over the whatever-song I was listening to on the net while working. I looked around at Beth who was looking back at me with her eyebrows lost in her hairline somewhere. Through the corner of my eye I saw a chair (with someone on it) swinging and making its way out of the computer lab. I took off my headphones and heard Lorrell telling herself, "Coke. There has to be some coke in the fridge....coke. Gotta get some coke." I left the computer lab to see that Lorrell was sitting on the chair and rolling along on it all the way down the length of the corridor to the kitchenette, which houses the rather ample-sized fridge.

What happened after that is ridiculously silly. Lorrell came back on her chair and then (the exact details escape me) she and I decided to have a wheel-race on speeding chairs down the corridor. Alyson, quite excited at the prospect of a race came out to be the judge and as soon as she said, "Get, set go!" both Lorrell and I were off whizzing down the corridor like wheely-bullets. We were in splits of course but we took the race very seriously as well. I got ahead of her quite soon and just as I was nearing the end of the corridor - quite the clear and easy winner, Lorrell lunged forward and tried grabbing me. She was trying to cheat! Well I was having none of that. I gave one mighty swing forward while fending her off...and I don't know whether I was partly responsible for what happened next - but she went crashing into a recycling bin (which according to Beth is still the only recycling bin in the department to have a massive dent). There was a mighty ruckus in that building as Lorrell banged into that bin with her chair. We waited and stopped in our tracks to see whether we could hear any sirens but that was that. Lorrell was unhurt, and the recycling bin while it wasn't that lucky, and had suffered some damages still stood straight - sort of squashed up against the wall. Laughing hysterically we rolled back down into the computer lab. Alyson and Beth, if I'm not too badly mistaken were also in fits. As far as I remember I didn't get off the chair but wheeled back down the corridor as speedily as I had come. At some point Lorrell and I noticed a couple of fairly largish cameras (or what looked like cameras) near the ceilings and we hoped that nobody had recorded our antics.

These were only some of the memories that came back on being there at the musical today.

For the encore the cast performed three of the songs Mama mia, Waterloo, and Dancing Queen before the curtains went down for the evening. Oh it was marvelous fun and I'm glad Guha and I managed to kick our lazy habits for the evening.

The show was pretty packed but for the entire evening there were three empty seats on my right, and I kept looking to see whether they were going to be taken all of a sudden.

Now, that would have been something.....

*Note: I've provided the links for all the ABBA songs just in case anyone wants to hear them*

Saturday late-noon II

The weather too is absolutely outstanding (better than the grapes...).

Cold, crisp, and sunny.

The photo does not do justice to what's outside.

It's a lazy Saturday late-noon. One of those late-noons, which seem almost perfect.

As usual I've taken my lazy shot - a shot of the trees opposite to my apartment.

Some of the leaves have started changing colour.

I shall go out for a walk in a bit.......

Saturday late-noon

Got the goodies on the side from the Farmer's Market today. The local farmers sell their goodies some five blocks away - fruits, vegetables, breads, cakes, cheese, eggs, meat....every saturday (morning-ish), from late May till the last week of October. The coming weekend I might actually take a photo of the farmer's market - and put some comments by way of explanation.

The grapes were outstanding. There were more than double the number of grapes in the basket. I finished the ones that do not appear in the photo. I'd forgotten that grapes could taste so real, sweet and slightly sour at the same time, so flavourful, and so abominably good. Fuzzy, pearly purple on the outside and a translucent white on the inside. Two apples have been eaten as well (not by me) - two remain. The cake on the right, which does not look like much - I'll admit (it looks like some lumpy unsightly mass of half-baked dough) - is so pleasant and wholesome that it needs to be tasted to believed (I had err...more than half a cake last week - so I know). It's moist, soft and crunchy - all at the same time and it's not too terribly sweet. The uneven, ungainly '8' shaped hole in the front right-hand corner is there because I dug out a piece just to make sure that the cake could be consumed by the other human inmate of the house. The bread rolls in the back taste very good (either as grilled sandwiches or with some jam) but this particular batch has not been sampled as yet. They are challah rolls made I believe with some bit of honey.

Oh, and yes - some jam was bought too today and a cabbage roll. A jar of apricot jam, which is inside the fridge. The cabbage roll, filled with vegetables and minced pork (somewhat like a momo is how I'd describe it) is inside my tum'.

Oh dear!

I must say that I was very surprised and my brain fairly boggled when I saw the * BBC frontpage today. (*this isn't a link to the frontpage - since the frontpage changes everyday - it's a link to the main bit. The video is rather erratic in a funny way. The only thing that would play yesterday is the 32 second clip on 'Ardi' from the Discovery channel). I thought it was some sort of a prank but I've never known the frontpage of the BBC to be pulling pranks of any sort (unlike the Calcutta edition of The Statesman, which many years ago had pulled a hilarious prank, which wasn't a personal prank, and that was on April Fools Day. The BBC radio once did pull a prank in the 70s I think it was, on April Fools Day...but about that some days later!).

This instance (not a prank) comes very close to the instance when another gentleman was given the award for making a documentary. A documentary!

In the current instance I actually feel rather bad (and sorry for him actually) on a couple of counts at least. 1) It must be embarrassing (since he knows...) 2) His detractors are going to be laughing their pants off and will not stop jibing him for a while now.

But on another note: who knows what The Committee may yet do in the coming years? Award a to-be-writer who is very articulate and has a good imagination in the anticipation that she may write the grandest book ever?
Boy, oh boy.

A Quote and a Picture

Photo from Suvro da's collection. Taken at the National Gandhi Museum, New Delhi.

"One cannot follow Truth or Love so long as one is subject to fear. As there is at present a reign of fear in the country, meditation on and cultivation of fearlessness have a particular importance. Hence its separate mention as an observance. A seeker after truth must give up the fear of caste, government, robbers etc and he must not be frightened by poverty or death."

------ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Three experiments

There are three experiments in social psychology that have horrified and intrigued me ever since I first read about them. These are - The Stanley Milgram Experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and The Solomon Asch Experiment.

(*There are plenty of other websites other than the one that I've highlighted, which deal with these three experiments.)

The first experiment looked into the problem of 'obedience', and how far people would go to obey orders coming from someone (a 'scientist') working in a respectable university.

The second looked into roles and their 'power' over individuals - even when the roles adopted were essentially 'fake'.

The third of the lot seems on the surface to be rather staid in comparison to the other two, since it wasn't ostensibly looking into the underlying aspects of cruelty and abuse but was simply investigating the aspect of conformity and how far people would conform to what a group (of people) was saying even though the individual had all the reason to believe that the group as a whole was dotty, blind or had at the very least severe visual deficiencies. There's one very short video clip available on youtube here, and there is something grimly humorous about it.

Each of the experiments raised many contentions and later on ethical concerns as well, and of course some people may say that the 'samples' were not large enough. There may be some seven hundred and seventy-seven other problems with all three of the studies. That's all fine.

Yet there is enough in the world to show us that the experiments were not completely off the mark. Yet while the aspects of obedience, roles, and conformity do provide clues as to how and why humans act the way they do - what still remains a mystery to me is why/how some people choose not to engage in barbaric, cruel, and inhumane behaviour no matter what. What accounts for this difference? It's all very well for sociologists and social psychologists to be looking into environmental factors in order to explain why people act in horrible ways, and to say that good people can be bad because of external factors. But that's precisely it. Good people - really good people do not go and torture human beings. That's what being good means. Not being a goody-goody two-shoes but being really good. And being really good takes an enormous amount of courage. Standing apart from the crowd takes some doing.

I could keep writing but I'll end this post for now. The next couple of posts (at least) will break off from this path.

Evil...?

To go along with the fruitless series:

1. If there is evil that exists in the world - in the form of human evil - what can we do about it? Should evil human beings be allowed to roam around free? Should they be subject to capital punishment? Should they, if they are caught, be kept locked up in a place where they are unable to harm other human beings?

....we don't on the whole seem to care much though one way or the other as long as we are safe and if we ourselves are evil, we are able to rationalise (and if 'we' don't - I do).

Sometimes I wonder....!

2. How would one deal with brutal people? Are brutal people just 'born' brutal and evil? There are some kids who like hurting animals and kids smaller than they are, and there's no point or sense in saying that little kids who are victims themselves victimize others. It might be the case for some but there are kids who are victimised and yet they grow up to be kind and sensitive.

3. I've been reading Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness again - there's little point in saying that I don't agree with everything that Fromm has written but there are parts there that have made me travel through the corridors of evil and abuse. Add to that Scott M. Peck's People of the Lie - and Peck isn't given to being dramatic or over-the-edge just for the sake of being thus. He seems to be a calm and quiet person but doesn't seem shy of saying things that are seen as being politically incorrect in many circles, such as - 'evil people' exist. The other books that I've been reading and some essays too and their rather perceptive authors are goading me along. Haven't read an Agatha Christie in the last one month - but then I don't need to read her to remember her. I can hear her in my head alongwith Poirot and Miss Marple, thank you. I can't but feel that people who think or try to think the best of human beings regardless of how they behave are a little gullible if not downright foolish.

4. I guess all of the above would require me to define evil....or at least describe what I mean by the word. For all that - some other day.

6. I say the above is fruitless because I don't think I can really know for sure whether evil exists. I had been utterly convinced at some points that the idea of pure evil is something that I must have constructed to scare myself even though I've seen some evil myself in this world. I've seen more of hypocrites and liars and just plain vacuous people who are pompous more often than I'd like to and these sorts are no better really - but evil....I've seen it more in specific actions of people - which seem to be motivated by nothing other than evil. It really couldn't be anything else no matter how hard these people may rationalise.

7. Sometimes I am quite sure that I sense evil within me, which has nothing to do with anything on the outside....

So much for now.