Love and War

The first Anne Tyler book I read was The Amateur Marriage, and I must admit I bought the book because the cover was pretty. There is this girl in a bright red overcoat kissing a soldier who was leaning out of a train window. A goodbye scene. Love in the time of war. How romantic! There is something urgent, something undescribably romantic, something real and true about war romances.

When I was a young girl I read "Battle Cry" by Leon Uris, in Mizo no less, and my heart went out to the young couple who were torn apart by the Second World War. Recently I listened to the song "Travelin' Soldier" again, and once again it left me feeling blue and sad. The lonely young soldier who had no one to write a letter to,the young waitress who waited for him and quietly cried when she heard of his death.

I know there is nothing glamorous and romantic about war in real life. All that pain, destruction, suffering, wastage, is something we could all do without. Blame Hollywood and authors for romanticizing it. But still, I love war movies, not that I've watched many, but I'm quite happy with the ones I've watched. And don't ask me which one is my favourite, because my answer would be "All of them." The Last Samurai ranks pretty high on the list, Saving Private Ryan, Enemy at The Gates, Lord of The Rings, Letters From Iwo Jima, The Longest Day, Braveheart, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, The Patriot etc are all very good. The best ones are the ones with a hint of romance in them. The English Patient, Pearl Harbour,Casablanca, Gone With The Wind (although there wasn't a single battle scene in the movie - as per Google search - it still ranks as one of the best war movies. Haven't seen the movie, but read the book ages ago).

I haven't seen the old ones like All Quiet on the Western Front, The Bridge On the River Kwai, From Here to Eternity, The Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare, etc, but will try to see them in the future. Haven't seen The Hurt Locker either. This post is turning out to be a list of the war movies I am yet to set my eyes on.

And the songs! I wish I could go on and on about the love songs about a soldier going off to war while his girl pined for him, but as I write this not a song comes to mind. The only song that surfaces is Green Day's 21 Guns, and I don't know if it classifies as a war song, it's more about the war within, methinks. How about you share the songs and I listen to them?

Mishmash

Friday night - went to bed with the most terrible headache ever known to man. You know the kind, it starts from your eyes, slowly moves up to your forehead before winding its way to the back of your head, right at the spot where your neck meets the skull, can you feel that little groove there? yes, right there. That’s the spot that hurts the most. You have this throbbing pain that feels like someone had planted a bomb in there and it is going off repeatedly, sending painwaves all over your head, the deadly tentacles reaching to every cell in your body. You can feel a stinging pain in your eyes, not just your ordinary eyeball-hurting kind of pain, but actual physical pain that feels like someone had pinched the inside of your eyelids. You feel dizzy and weak, like you are going to throw up any minute but you don’t have the strength to get up and walk to the bathroom. I thought I was having a migraine attack. I’ve been plagued with headache all my life, but all the doctors I've consulted always assured me it wasn’t migraine. Take rest, pop a few pills and you’ll be okay.

Saturday morning – woke up hoping to feel refreshed and clearheaded but to my dismay found that traces of headache still lingered. Got up, took the newspaper inside and went back to sleep until noon. Got up again, but was too lazy to do anything, ate lunch, and decided to read in bed. I know reading is not the best solution, but there was nothing else to do. Opened the latest Chetan Bhagat but before I could read a sentence closed my eyes and found myself drifting off…. Ouch!! That could only be an ant stinging my leg. I reached down and found the offender and crushed him. Is that something crawling on my stomach? Another ant, no doubt. Groped a bit, caught the scoundrel before he could make his escape and sent him packing to ant hell. Or heaven. I don’t know if he was a good ant or bad ant in his lifetime, so he could go either way. Another miscreant stung me on the arm, and I found myself committing another murder. Sleeping was out of the question now.

Got up, removed the bed sheets, and started The Hunt. The best way to go about hunting is clean your room inside out, crawl on your knees and inspect all the corners, making sure all squatters are evicted. And when you are finished the room smells of insect spray, a far cry from your regular room fresheners, but you are alone in the room again and that was the goal, wasn’t it?

Speaking of ants, have you noticed that they are most active in the summer? Makes me think of the story of the ant and the grasshopper. You know, the ant working in the summer while the grasshopper sings away and in the end the ant was the guy with all the food while the poor grasshopper could only watch with envy and a hungry stomach. No, I think he died. Make hay while the sun shines and all that rot. But if it was today’s world the grasshopper would be the richer guy (and with a fuller stomach) because we all know how much money a good voice could bring. If you are still unmarried I would strongly recommend you find someone who could sing, thus ensuring children with beautiful voices and their future taken care of, purely because of their heritage. But if they end up with your voice you could only pray that they are smart and good in studies. But still, there’s a 50% chance of them being born with a good singing voice. Life (and marriage) is all about taking chances.

And when is this temperature planning to go down? Of all the hot summers I've lived through, this year seems to be the worst. Met officials say monsoon will hit Kerala on May 3l, that’s tomorrow, but I'm not living in a fishing boat in the backwaters of God’s Own Country, am I? So it’s probably another two weeks before the much awaited rains, showers of blessings, so to speak. Then maybe I could write about happier stuff.

Estha

Estha occupied very little space in the world.

Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn’t an ‘exactly when’. It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. - The God of Small Things.

Sometimes I’d wish that I could be like Estha. Stop talking altogether. Wouldn’t it be rather nice, in a weird way? If you don’t speak and hence do not reply to people’s irritating questions, people will gradually stop talking to you and you could live in your own world but at the same time not unaware of things going on around you. You are not deaf and can still understand what people say, and there is absolutely no expectation or obligation to contribute your two cents worth on anything, anything at all. (Anything a-tall). The world is too full of people blabbing endlessly about things you don’t want to hear, things you are least interested in, things you don’t care about. Like the new flat screen TV they bought, the boyfriend’s name of a friend of a friend, your cousin’s sister-in-law’s niece who has her own flat blah blah blah….

I think I am deceitful. If we go by the theory “Birds of a feather flock together” then I ought to be outgoing, talkative, friendly and annoyingly cheerful. But I am not, while I seem to collect friends who possess the aforementioned qualities. While I might exhibit those qualities some of the time, there are times when I have been called boring. To my face, yes. And I have been asked why I keep quiet all the time, why I am so unfriendly and unapproachable. Maybe I don’t like you, maybe I have nothing to contribute to the subject being discussed, or maybe I always find myself short of words. Maybe I don’t feel like talking, maybe I am preoccupied with something more important than what you are saying. Maybe I have run out of conversation and have nothing left to say.

Russian Roulette

A crazy game invented by a bunch of crazy people looking for fun and adventure. Supposedly invented by Russian prison guards who were probably bored out of their skulls and decided to place bets on who among the prisoners would be the lucky winner to get the bullet in the head. Notice that the guards didn’t play the game themselves. How cruel is that? And the game came to be played by fools who saw it as some kind of bravery test. How stupid can one get? If you want to die, kill yourself in some other way where there are no chances of failure. I wonder what the player must be thinking as he put the gun to his head. Lord please don’t let the gun go off, but I have to do this because I don’t want to look like a weak person. Remember The Deer Hunter, where the players were drugged out of their senses and made to play the game? Very sad movie. I hoped that Christopher Walken’s character would not die in the end, I wanted him to get up and walk out, but he played and lost. Very disturbing scene.

Why do people commit suicide? Did they completely lose faith in themselves, in others and in the world? Did they just get tired of living? Some people kill themselves because they wanted to hurt their loved ones, the people closest to them. And I guess some did it to escape the shame and disgrace, to save face. Whatever be the reason, suicide doesn’t solve anything. You take your own life and in doing so booked yourself on the direct train to hell and eternal damnation; you hurt your loved ones and make them ask “What did we do wrong?” There is nothing glamorous in it. And I think it is a cowardly act. Things go wrong, you become sad and depressed, you think life is not worth living and that nobody cares about you. It happens to everyone, we all go through times like that. But look at the bright side, there is no place to go but up. Things can only get better. If you think that nothing will ever become right again, you cannot be more wrong. Give yourself time, be patient, and sooner or later the sun will shine on you again.