Meesai Machismo

So such a serious blog name doesn't mean I am usually a serious person. Maybe INFPs are the intense kind generally. But maybe being a joker is a defence strategy I've developed over the years to a fine art ;) This preamble simply to say you're going to get no soul-searching outta me tonight. If any of you are reading, and are committed to handlebar meesais, you should probably not read any further! Coming up: one full-blown rant on unfashionable facial hair types.

I call them meesais and not moustaches because they are prolific in the motherland. And I associate them with the oh-so-Tamil man - and woman, for that matter - and self-satisfied smirks of fatal attraction possibilities! Get this for example:

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=S7C_5NB4bSU&feature=related

Ha! My dad had a pretty big moustache and other people I respect do - and my mum swears that without a moustache every weakness of the mouth shows so that one can only giggle in response to 'hello'. My poor mother. Still I am scarred by encounters with the meesai.

I walked out of school one afternoon, blazing hot 1 pm sun. And I walk circumspectly edged against the wall that lines the long, narrow driveway into the alma mater, knowing every incoming car knows the schoolgirl comes first. I was 11? 12? Anyway, I'm swinging my starched, A-line not-long-enough, not-short-enough skirt, holding my unwieldy lunch basket and shifting 13 kilos from one shoulder to the next (such troopers we were) until I'm nearly certain I don't have any more shoulders. And I'm glad school's done for the day, when who should come along but Biker Dude, in wanna-be black sunglasses and all-black shirt and jeans. He only gets classified dud in retrospect though - so I don't know how coloured my historiography is! At the time, I chose to name it The Curious Incident of the Uncle in the Afternoon. He must have been a little younger than the going rate for uncles generally, with handlebars that vied with his bike's for symmetry and attention. And he tried, from a distance of several yards in a harmless attempt at humour, to block my path. You know it - you go left, they go right, and you do that little dance, so often unintentional. And then he grinned - and oh sorrow, he waggled that meesai at me. I crossed the road. Dance over. No, 'hello, uncle, I'm studying in 3rd standard' opp for you, bud.

Scarred.

Again, switch slides to another after-school journey back home. What do we have here? Policeman combing his badge of honour down either side, twirling it manfully in the face of a police bike's rearview mirror. Guffaws of laughter in the backseat. More tarnishment of the poor meesai.

Not so scarred, but etched for life.

Upward curls on pot-bellied policemen. Tarnishment - check.

Prerequisite for the upswung lungi, symbol of extreme proprietorship, Mallu and Tam landlord images, swaggering but uncreditable machismo. Like, check this out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aCShcWz5XQ&feature=related The moustache is what you get ID-d on. No entry into Kerala's hottest and most exclusive, or TN's for that matter, without.

More tarnishment. From a colonised, conditioned, Peetru. If you don't know what that is, embrace your identity in Madras terms.

Headless Driving ;)

Ever heard that expression '... like a headless chicken'?? Well, I think I know its equivalent now. I've never understood, always thought it was a heartless comparison, and it usually put me off my curry ;)! Now, however, I feel like said chicken. Decisions, decisions.

Someone wisely reminded me a couple of days ago that God has these questions already answered in his perfect plan. It is comforting to remember that... That however much 'headlessness' I encounter in my everyday decisions and interactions, He's got it covered. So tonight I am going to put my goals down on paper. These are my goals. Some of them I know that God put on my heart. Others I can simply trust him with. Much of my wondering boils down to this one question which I wrote down in a blog post, on another blog.

What is it about missions and worship that makes me cry and hurt so much both with happiness and longing?

I sometimes wonder if this decision-making process would be easier if I weren't in India, in Chennai. Some day soon I'll blog more about this - hopefully it'll make you guys laugh! It almost seems as if one is answerable to everyone else but God and oneself here. Suggestions, opinions, ideas - they all become quite categorical, and turn into moral issues. And I have to struggle hard within myself to focus on the One person who must influence all my decisions, to whom all my answers must point, in the final instance. I've taken a pretty major career decision on that one pivotal idea. Now to stick it through! Whether I choose a job in the corporate sector with a fat enough pay-check for those goals, or go the teaching route on this school contract and gain the international corporate management experience in the evenings, or take up a position abroad, I'm hoping pretty hard to choose the shortest way possible to be doing both those things.

D'you know that involuntary cringe when your patient but ever so slightly annoying SatNav lady wheezes: 'Tu-urn missed! Go 2 miles and take the 2nd exit off the roundabout!... Tu-urn missed. Go 1 mile and...' Lol, and everybody in the car groans harmoniously... Uh. I'm switching on my SatNav, cranking up the volume to max. Ecce, dominus.

Hugs

I could do with a big, huge, I-am-never-going-to-let-go-even-if-you-fear-awkwardness kind of hug. There are hugs and there are hugs. Awkward side hugs, hugs with only one person kissing, the full, frontal-grab hug, the macho back-pat hug, the back-rub, the hey-look-our-noses-fit-into-our-shoulders hug... hugs at different angles... When you know someone is coming over to hug you, you switch into alert either welcomingly or with a mental uh-oh (you know what's coming: contaaaaaaact!) and bend over with gently bent arms to be ready. At this point, you and the other hugger have both completed similar preparatory manoeuvres and are at a 135 from the feet. This is the bum-sticking-out hug. There's the you-can-cry-if-you-want-to-I'm-holding-you hug.

That's the kind I want today.

Pastry and punctuation?

Well, I just felt like alliteration. Since my last post, I HAVE HAD a dosai... scrumptiousness. Not quite Woodlands or amma's standards, but who's complaining? Also, baked an intensely chocolate fudge cake for the housemates last night - SLUURRRP.

There was something I'd been asking about for a time - a yes/no answer. Today from God (and Facebook!) I've decided to consider it a 'no'. Sigh. That's what I came to log.

I don't know if I can carry it off this term. So much to do and so much more expected of me than I have done. I am scared. I am unable. I am trying. I have God. And that is that. Some more healing in the family recently - God loves them so much. And I am so glad that I have this crazy family whose craziness fits (mostly) perfectly with mine!

In my breaks, I'm reading Lynne Truss's apparently popular book - Eats (,) Shoots and Leaves. Makes me laugh out loud! Not that I agree on all points but she's growing on me. JW thinks it's geeky - eeerrm, well. Have you read it?

Dosais and other things

When somewhere between your stomach and your throat, it feels like some internal organ is being rolled up into the kind of dosai your mum makes when you haven't got time for a plate with chutney on it... you assume, without any respect to physiological facts, that it's your heart. And you sort of know which specific, inexplicable things might have that effect.

I have a list - somewhere on Facebook. But I'm blogging now about something that is not on that list. Not in detail anyway. Children.

This is not a long blog; this is an exercise to help me remember if I should look at this again in some distant future. There's something about adopting children that has that sit-up-on-the-end-of-your-seat-take-quick-shallow-breaths effect, I think. I try not to grin and I try not to cry. This might be why I'm writing, because something has to come out somewhere. Recently when I thought I might be at a loose end with my life, I was thinking about social work or missions... They aren't different except politically. If Christ lives in you, He goes with you into whatever grimy context you choose to enter. And whether you preach or don't, Christ still calls you to be His ambassador in an Isaiah 61 kind of way. No? But I noticed I was choosing the mission based on where I could serve children or young people.

My parents tried to adopt a child. Although I had prayed before for a sister, I remember praying at the time not for a younger sister but just to be able to adopt. God, even if you don't allow us to open our family just now, please please please let me able to adopt children when I'm older. Lots of them.

Weird. But my picture is so beautiful, I don't want to let it go. I am single. My parental units might be too old to take on the challenge of providing a family from scratch to wide-eyed, little strangers. I see how all this sounds strange. But humour me and think about it. Socio-economics, ethnicity and history would not give them a 'family-ness'. But it would be. Sort of like God's church.

Colour

Do you think some of us run away from intensity? Father, forgive me.

I know I have been away for some time - I have had a rollercoaster ride of a few months! And boy, do I mean that. I had supervisor problems - race, being one of them. I have learnt that people everywhere can be racist and not. I have learnt that I have a lot to learn - at least in so far as blinder-ing myself to what others do and don't do that strikes me as so wrong. And I've also become a lot humbler in thinking that I am not above certain emotions...

I am so mad when people say 'I want a black/white guy' or 'International students are not as intellectually capable'... People, that second sentence is a whole story but not for here and now! I went through years of being mad at members of extended (and not so extended) family being caste/colour/race-prejudice-ridden. White people aren't different. I'm saying white because, in post-colonial India, they used to be the other. Political correctness is all very well, and I love us all, but for the purpose of this blog, can I just call us by our colours? I am brown. There are shades of us. And black and olive and white. It gets me somewhere deep inside and twists my gut in a pre-sick feeling when I hear it being called 'our culture' - when what they mean is our race/nationality.

Are we really that different?

We're loving whatever our colour. We're racist whatever our colour.

I had an interesting class this morning. One student called another 'not Chinese deep inside your heart' because she had learned English at a young age and so 'was corrupted by Western culture'. Another crime was watching 'Western' movies and listening to the music.

I hurt. She hurt, but she was the bigger person. It hurts. And the more you hurt, the more you grow. Why must this be?

Running

It just feels like I have been running after myself. Sometimes away from myself too. Trying to catch a shadow that is somewhere inexplicably behind the light. Maybe I should let go of me... Deal with the new image - let it make its own shadow. And then I can start to run after what I used to run for.