NEW PASSPORT

Finally, the wait is over! After exactly 74 days, today I got my new passport! Indian embassy website says, "Normally, new passports would be mailed back within 5 working days". Indian officials have a notoriously dry sense of humour, I understood.

All's well that ends well. I love the Indian Govt. for clearing my case, and issuing me with a new passport! Information gleaned: Anticipation heightens the satisfaction!

RELATIVELY SPEAKING

Gone are the good old days of father-mother-son-daughter family. Nowadays, things can be pretty messed up. Culture shock is evident for newcomers to an alien land- and in this place one gets to hear things like "single mother", "married but still looking", "common-law partner (gays, lesbians included)", "working towards a successful marriage", "my mom's boyfriend", "my dad's girl friend"etc, etc.

Once I met a girl, who was "together with her husband, but living separately, each living a separate life". Couples nowadays are both celebrating their "individuality" and insist of giving and receiving more "space". And girlfriends/boyfriends can be taken and dumped off at will which isn't an issue at all in the first place. This whole concept of "freedom" and "personal space" in couples is what I think is driving them to insane ideas, and divorce. One can learn a lot from the oriental traditions and cultures of how forfeiting your "space" actually results in happier, stable, peaceful, and noble families.

From just "father" and "mother", it has now to be specified- biological father or biological mother. The DNA make up of a person is exactly 50% from each of his parents. But "family" being so twisted now, the term "biological" has to be mentioned too. There are so many such cases in the west (North America). I met a black guy here, who greeted me "Howdy yo, brother from another mother!" And apparently, being a "brother from another mother" or a "sister from another mister" and other variations are pretty common within a family. Even in the case of biological parents, somethings are even more messed up. For instance, an egg could get fertilized in one woman (or a lab) and then transplanted into another woman's womb. She is not the biological mother, yet the baby grows in her! All this leads to a myriad complexity of relations, both psychologically and medically. Just yesterday, I was watching a movie "BLACK CHRISTMAS", where a girl's father and brother are the same person. And I am pretty sure that if we keep tagging along "my aunt's boyfriend", and "my husband' girlfriend" type of relations, poems like the one below (I got this once in email) would be common place.

Many many years ago when I was twenty three,
I got married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter Who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her, And soon the two were wed.

This made my dad my son-in-law And changed my very life.
My daughter was my mother, For she was my father's wife.
To complicate the matters worse, Although it brought me joy,
I soon became the father Of a bouncing baby boy.

My little baby then became A brother-in-law to dad.
And so became my uncle, Though it made me very sad.
For if he was my uncle, Then that also made him brother
To the widow's grown-up daughter Who, of course, was my step-mother.

Father's wife then had a son, Who kept them on the run.
And he became my grandson, For he was my daughter's son.
My wife is now my mother's mother And it makes me blue.
Because, although she is my wife, She's my grandmother, too.

If my wife is my grandmother, Then I am her grandchild.
And every time I think of it, It simply drives me wild.
For now I have become The strangest case you ever saw.
As the husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpa!

Now ask Confucius to draw a family tree for this!

DISGUISES AND MAKE UPS

I have always been fascinated by the deadly art of illusion in the Hollywood movies- the images of ghosts in EVIL DEAD for instance, is a truly remarkable art of make ups. The make up artists dedicate considerable effort to bring out the grotesque, beautiful, scary, princely and alien faces. Of the recent movies, I have shown here two images of "works of art", one Hollywood and the other Bollywood.

The hollywood and bollywood comparison is always bound to happen when I splash two images- and Hollywood is still light years ahead of the rest of the pack. But Bollywood is slowly but surely catching up in the make-up department. The first picture is from 300, and it shows a grab of the persian warrior elite(The Immortals), as shown in the movie. The movie is itself is a technical masterpiece with unbelievable graphics and costume design. The other picture is from the Bollywood hit DHOOM 2, and it is remarkable in the context of Indian cinema make-up history. Very few images come across my mind as splendid as this. True, this is nothing special in Hollywood but it really did fool the audience into thinking that this was someone else, and not Hrithik.

Surely, we can expect some good movies with better graphics and costume design in the Indian movies of the future. There were many disasters in the name of make up and camouflages in Indian movies until very recently. A mere moustache would make a woman into a man and the joke is, the movie goes about seriously with that disguise! Many instance of a wig being very obvious is also seen; and a lot of other ventures in the name of "graphics" looked like playing a 90s era computer game! But good news is that Indian cinema makers perhaps have taken note of the comedy show and they are getting pretty serious about it.

Shankar is a remarkable director who always uses some sort of graphics or employes elaborate make ups for the actors in his movies, and his techniques though not really on par with Hollywood, are definitely a cut above the rest; Ram Gopal Verma focusses on the grotesqueness in his horror films (which is getting better) and we have a host of budding wannabe artists who are getting there at the top.

Maybe we will soon see an Indian version of movies like Jurassic park, X-Men,...

I AM A REFUGEE

You read it right- As of now, I don't have any proof of status in this country. I have sent my passport for renewal, and along with that I have sent all other immigration documents (like study permit, etc.). Now, the funny thing is my NEW Indian passport should have been received by me in 5 days' time. And so I waited. Waited for a week. A fortnight. Three weeks. A month(ooh..), month and a half now.. and still no sign of my old/new passport and my other documents! A very precarious scenario, if you know what I mean.

Right now, my status here in Canada is... NOTHING. A refugee. Asylum seeker. Tom Hanks' travails in THE TERMINAL is vivid in my mind, and I am reading stories of how in the good old days Punjabis and Gujaratis from India used to flush down the passport in the flight's toilets to seek refugee/asylum status in UK and Canada when they land. Seriously, I cannot go out of the country now. 5 days is the normal time, and it has taken me almost 50 days now. Of course, I have been trying to call the Indian consulate in Toronto(where I sent my application), but without much success- Success I define, by talking to a human... let alone inquiring the status. The IVR there is wonderful- I mean it serves no definite purpose. It welcomes you, then gives you office timings and road directions to get there. Then, you hear a voice? No, the line gets cut. If you are lucky, you hear an operator speaking sometimes, only to find that the person in the passport section is unavailable at the moment. I have called so many times, that I became friends with her. I just have to say, "Hi, my name is Shailendra...", or "Hi, I am inquiring about my passport..." and she would recognize! After many phone calls, I came to know of the timing of the passport section there(duh..), and finally one fine afternoon I was able to ask them!

Initially I wondered if Canada Post has anything to do with the mess up. I know cases(read: cases, plural) where express post (with tracking numbers) got mysteriously lost, or got delivered abysmally late. But now after finally talking to the proper person in the consulate after breaking through bureacratic and administrative hurdles, today I learnt that my application reached them promptly(Good job, Canada post!) but I have to get some clearance from the authorities in India(!)

I sighed a heavy relief to know that my passport and other documents are not lost, but in safe hands. But clearance from the Indian government? Hmmm, seems that Indian sleuths are very alert. Maybe the stones I hurled at stray dogs while in India got recorded in my "file" and there is a black mark. Anyway, it is great news that my passport is in safe hands and though I am still without any proper documents now, I can be rest assured that it would reach me soon. Unless, my "file" has other suspicious activity...