Women's Art of the Everyday

I am happy to see that Tara Books have posted my blog on a wonderful workshop they conducted in February 2011.

Selvi, a very gifted Kolam artist and a lovely woman, passed away tragically earlier this month. I am touched that   my friends at Tara Books have dedicated the blog to Selvi's memory.

Please read the blog HERE.

The Dangerous Talk of Balance

(Written for my column "Monthly Misgivings" in Media Voice magazine)

I am always amused at the idea of me that people who don't know me seem to have. Recently, someone asked me if I could speak to the members of a club about how I balance my work and life. Ever the first one to laugh at jokes - unintended or otherwise - made at my expense, I had to exercise great control to keep up my serious demeanour. "You are always doing  a lot of things, travelling here and there. It all sounds like a lot of fun," he said. Amidst feeling flattered, I did not fail to notice the beautiful haziness of it all. He only knew I did a lot of "things" and that I travelled "here and there." A big thought bubble formed over my head, and inside it was my face with an evil grin etched on it, and the lines, "Oh... so that is what I possess. Mystery value. No one knows what I do!" 

It is not as if I try hard to conceal the details of my work life. But the idea of one full-time, salaried job is such an oppressive norm that it has spread its tentacles over people's heads and sucked out from them any possibility of looking at life and work differently. Someone quite innocently asked me what I do. In all earnestness, I listed out the different things I do. The poor soul looked completely baffled and said, "But what do you do full-time?" It was my turn to look baffled. I said, "I live full-time. Everything else I do part-time." It was only a few minutes later, and only after being prompted by the cheers of the other people around, that I sensed I had said something that could be considered witty. As usual, I had been witty without meaning to be so. My baffled responses to everyday queries from people have earned me a questionable reputation for being witty. 

But I love it that people think I am so put together and focussed. Little do they know that I am as focussed as a ........ Sorry, I drifted off.

It often happens to me that I realize that the person I am talking to thinks more highly of me than I do myself! I have sort of resented it, too. When someone thinks highly of you, there is a certain pressure to live up to that image. When you protest and try to disabuse them of their fancy notions, they think you are falsely modest! There is no way out. You just have to quietly resign to the faith that time will reveal to them their delusions, that they will soon know what a nincompoop you are! 

On the other hand, we are never good enough for some people. But we would flagellate ourselves to make this crowd understand our worth. Who cares about those who think we are wonderful when there is a thronging mass of people, often close at hand, that makes you think your worst suspicion is true - that you are worthless? 

On a serious note, how hard it is for some of us to accept compliments, believe them, and see us in our own true glory! As my favourite poet Wislawa Szymborska says in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself." 

Very true. I would like to believe in my merits. And I resolve do so as soon as I find out what they are. Also, I need to do something about this wretched force of habit that finds in my faults a richer source of humour than in my merits, whatever and wherever they are. The moment I find something else that makes me funny, I will drop my self-deprecation. I promise, my dear poet!

In the mean time, I have agreed to speak at this meeting about my work and life. But I managed to bypass the murky terrain of balance, or its utter lack there of. 

Failing at Epic Episode Scale, and the Epiphanies Therein

A recent experience brought to mind the first half of the title of JK Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Speech of 2008: “The Fringe Benefits of Failure….” But I think I feel this way because of my proclivity to drama. For neither did I encounter failure, not were the benefits so fringe.

Some of you might have heard about a performance piece I have been working on for a few months now.  Some of you were there the first time I performed it as a work in progress in March 2011 at Madras-Chennai Local’s event, “Dancers – Separate and Together,” a video of which was taken and uploaded by friends at www.archive.org/details/Brihannala.  Some among those some were even kind enough to watch it again, when I performed it for the Justice Rocks fundraiser for campaigns working with pollution-impacted communities, on 5 June 2011. This second performance of the short version of Brihannala, which is developing into a longer and more fully fledged performance piece and taking me to exciting places (speaking both figuratively as well as literally), brought with it a staggering moment of insight and humility.

For those of you who have not watched the performance or the video: the piece is in the form of a self-narrative by an actor who plays Brihannala repeatedly as part of a theatre tradition. He maps his gender non-conformity and same-sex desires onto the character of Brihannala, an ephemeral persona in the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. Brihannala, is, in fact, Arjuna, one of the heroes of the epic, spending the last year of his exile with his brothers and wife, as a eunuch.

An obviousness that could perhaps use some stating here is that a big part of this work is also autobiographical: if not the specific details, at least the essence of the desires and dilemmas spoken about are. In thinking about the kind of inner resources that Arjuna dug into in being Brihannala, in the work, I wonder where he found the  energy within himself, what he was sublimating in thus castrating, almost literally, himself, one of the most celebrated heroes of Hindu mythology, possessor of a sort of an iconic masculinity even. Reflecting on his own repeated performance of Brihannala and his love for the character Arjuna as well as the actor who plays the part, the speaking subject, which is me, says that he knows how he keeps his sanity, what he sublimates in his performances. I had ended the script and the first performance of it with the lines “I think I know” repeated over drumbeats and some mad stomping of feet.

This moment and the kind of certainty of knowing something that it offered me were, I had assumed, pivotal to the piece as well as my current reading of my compass of desires. In the second performance of this piece, however, the rug was pulled from under my feet. When I came to the moment where I compensate for my lack of clue about Arjuna's psyche as Brihannala with an admission of my knowledge of my own mechanisms of forbidden desires, self-sublimation and sanity, I froze momentarily. Right there, while performing in front of a hundred people, I was presented with the recognition that this time around, I was not so sure I knew what I sublimated in my performance of genders, what I did to keep myself sane. There I stood, deprived of the impressive sense of sure-footedness with which I had ended my script, which I had assumed I could just stick to for any number of performances. There I was, a mere few months after the scripting and the first performance, having lost that certainty.

But I could worry about those later. What was more urgent was to decide what had to be done right then, while faced with this realization that ran completely counter to the script. Someone said epiphanies happen outside time. Wasn’t it James Joyce? Virginia Woolf had a remarkable phrase: “a moment of being.” I chose to be truthful. And the performance ended with my saying, “I am not sure. I thought I knew. I thought I knew.”

The insight was not only that I did not know whatever it was that I thought I knew. It also had something to do with a question: what do I do with such knowledge, albeit knowledge of an ignorance, while I am in the middle of giving an account of myself, even when that exercise is in the form of a performance. Not that I have resolved this question forever in favour of a candid disclosure, simply because I managed to do it once. All I know is that I did it once somehow trusting that the universe and the audience present that day wouldn’t laugh at me even if the performance capsized under the weakness of the moment. I do not know what I will do next time. Well, I do not know what will happen next time!

Why did I refer to JK Rowling’s speech about the fringe benefits of failure? Well, without being too harsh on myself, I can say that I did fail a little that day as a performer in not being able to deliver a power-packed performance that is rock steady in its course. But at a personal level, I am immensely grateful for this experience. In thus admitting aloud my not knowing some things, in recognizing that some of my answers are makeshift, I was able to get updated about myself. It is generally good to catch up with one’s truths at least once in a while, I guess. It could keep the effects of self-delusions at check, if not entirely at bay.

Back to Essentialisms

I have been a little bothered about a conversation I had with an online friend about my previous post, "Shut up and dance? Really?" Basically, she felt that much of what I had written was unnecessary thinking on my part and that I had allowed it to come in the way of my letting go and dancing, in my path to finding bliss in dance. Besides a suspicion that she perhaps thought I was kind of playing up my gay identity in my writings, I have also been discomfited by a near-total refusal on her part to engage with the crux of the piece. Of course, if what I consider to be the crux of the piece did not come through in the writing, it is only me who is to blame. 

Don't get me wrong. She meant well. Very well, in fact. She genuinely felt that I was thinking too much and allowing that to come in the way of enjoying my dance, in reaching a self-forgetting abandon or bliss that I seem to have suggested I crave. I am touched by the concern. When I said, for the sake of argument, that perhaps I did not want to forget my self in dance, she pointed out to the hollowness of that argument by showing that I did indeed seem to desire it, by directing me to what I had written.

She was right. But the thinking, however unnecessary may it be in anyone's opinion, does not end there. It is not only a question of putting up roadblocks to one's experience of bliss in dance. It also includes the questions "what specific roadblocks?" "what specific dance?" I think it is a place of privelege to be able to prescribe abandoment of thought and processes of making sense of oneself as a general panacea for issues of self-identity. I now realize that what is at the core of the issues that I have discussed in that piece is not a subjective lamenting of my inability to transcend my self. It is, in fact, an attempt to recognize that this space -- Bharata Natyam's contemporary caste-class-gender matrix -- arrogantly calls for a relinquishing of a self that it does not care about, that it positions itself as a pseudo-spiritual space that suggests differences do not matter in way only hegemonic spaces and narratives can. 

Then the question is not so much whether I want this space for the sublimation of my self, but more about whether we should spend more time teasing out what various things we mean by words like bliss, self, etc., about the several layers of essentialisms that are mounted over these terms. And when someone speaks about being at loggerheads with a cultural practice one has engaged in, could we be more respectful than to call their thought process "unnecessary," even if it appears to be so from some haloed hall of privilege? 

Bharata Natyam's history, its texts, its relationship with issues of caste, class, religion, gender and sexuality are very much situated ones. They have definite loci of power. To construct it is as a spiritual space of great levelling of differences is also an exercise that is part of that same history. There is so much to be teased out, including the apparent contradiction in the fact that despite so much "unnecessary thinking," I continue to engage with the form. That engagement feels like a dance in itself.

Shut up and dance? Really?

 (This is a piece I wrote a couple of years ago when I was down with an injured knee, off dancing and with a lot of time to think.)


I read a quote somewhere that was attributed to Samuel Beckett: “Dance first, think later.” I do not know if he really suggested that sequence. I also wonder if it works that way all the time. He might even have used “dance” in the sense of celebration, revelry, letting go. But dance as art practice, even as it has all of these, is hardly just that. It may not be truly possible to separate dance and thought into two neat, separate boxes. Thoughts can dance their way into our heads sometimes; thoughts can also impede movement at times.

So we may not be able to put aside thought for later after all. Specialized thought, particularly academic and intellectual discourse, may have huge impacts on an activity like dancing. It could freeze you momentarily; lurk around the corner you are about to turn and cast a petrifying charm on you.       

Despite these possibly discouraging effects, theorizing is an exciting process for me; as much as dancing is. A commitment to theorizing essentially means allowing self-reflexive ruptures into practices - having small and big explosions of insights into one’s performance of, adherence to, and association with social, political, cultural and economic practices. Some of these ruptures could take the form of epiphanies that change the course of a person’s life and practice of art into brilliant directions at once. Some might find theory and politics immediately empowering. For many others, an engagement with theory could sharpen the edge of self-reflexivity and drive it as a wedge between the self and its current practices, the body and its performance, the individual and her/his self-narrative. Here’s my experience!

I started learning Bharata Natyam when I was 6 years old, on the Vijayadasami day of the year 1988 in my hometown, Kumbakonam. Initially, it was just plain, unadulterated joy to be dancing; the kind of unreflective joy that is a prerogative of childhood – the kind of exercise where you hear a huge “YES” in your head every time you think about it. Kumbakonam has a strong presence in Hindu mythology and south Indian history as a pilgrim site and a business centre for the Cholas. The Iyengar¹ community I come from also has an embedded history in this space. My family could demonstrate, with great ease, its link to the town and its temples for several generations, notwithstanding the fact that a few generations before us had not lived there. Therefore, there was an easy coherence to my childhood self-narrative - the way I thought of and spoke about myself - dancing included.

Such innocence was not to last. Dance became a zone rife with questions of self-identity during and after adolescence, because of the gender inflections it began to receive. It was an issue for the boys in the classroom and hence became an issue for me. As an activist now, I may reclaim “sissy” and wear it on a pink badge, but even the intensity of such reclamations usually says a lot about the strength of the wounds. Despite these issues, there never was an impasse,  I never thought of quitting dance. In fact, the same dance that made life as a boy complex and rife with everyday negotiations of power in school also became a therapeutic space. But dance, I started realizing, was going to be a difficult space. It was not going to be the romantic forget-your-worries-and-dance kind of a space. This was because dancing was singling me out from the boys of my age. This alienation and the anxieties it provoked were to last into adulthood.

Much later, something else, that initially appeared innocuous, made dancing - dancing Bharata Natyam specifically - very hard for me. It was the exposure to scholarship that historicized and theorized Bharata Natyam^2,  that dealt a major blow to my emotional affinities to it that I had left unscrutinized till then. But it was not the revisionist understanding, per se, of Bharata Natyam that was difficult for me to deal with. That Bharata Natyam was not an ancient art form but was one constituted by ruptures with tradition was, in itself, not a disconcerting fact. But the fact that these ruptures were located within the politics of caste, nationalism, gender, sexuality and religion was the specific locus of quiet but disabling anxiety for me. For almost all of these categories already had a not-taken-for-granted aspect in my life: a brahmin boy from Kumbakonam, with parents who had strong anti-brahminical and anti-casteist personalities, a boy who was beginning to understand that he desired boys, a boy who has been called "sissy" in three different languages, a Hindu boy with strong misgivings about religion.

One result of all this exposure was the opportunity to get a deeper and defamiliarized look at different aspects of Bharata Natyam. For instance, the nauseating claims to spirituality that were being made (I quite literally grew up among these voices) were making "spirituality" itself a term and domain in need of active reclaiming. If I am now a spiritual person and a Bharata Natyam performer, it is also true that I am a sexual person and a Bharata Natyam performer. In fact, my sexuality is more in the public domain, as a visible problematic, than my spirituality. Also, once I could clearly see the strong hetero-patriarchy permeating the texts and practice of Bharata Natyam, it became an absolute necessity for me to see what subject space I could claim within it. I needed to know if I could be feminist and queer and still find a location within Bharata Natyam to “speak” from, without feeling compromised. I also needed to know if I could find a way to happily marry off aesthetics and politics in a relationship that constantly sustained the tension between them, without attempting, naively, to "resolve" it.

Adrienne Rich, American poet, talks somewhere about the importance of announcing one's subject position; to be aware of and make clear where one speaks from. My dilemma has been in recognizing my subject position with all its limitations and simultaneous centralities and marginalities – caste, class, gender, sexuality, etc. Announcing and declaring it is are simultaneous concerns. I will not sequentialize them. I don't think the (re)cognition and announcing of one's subject position are sequential acts. Often, I have known my own positions only in the stating of them.

Modern scholarships on Bharata Natyam, history, casteism and politics have made access to a lot of things very mediated and anxiety-ridden for me. They have made me see the complex links between identity and performance, both as everyday modes of being in the world as well as specialized and staged performance. And that, I think, is quite excellent. As a gendered and sexualized subject with a caste and class identity in modern India, I see that Bharata Natyam is not just dance for me. It is a practice I engage in, that is at once crisscrossed by several histories; histories that have also written themselves over my body. These are histories not just of community, art and excellence. They are also, very significantly, histories of gender and caste oppression, notions of masculinity and sexuality, even the history of the idea of the Nation.

Theorizing my relationship with Bharata Natyam, hence, amounts to theorizing myself from a few perspectives. It is an instance of acquired knowledge playing upon one's notion of the given. It offers new ways of re-imagining oneself. But it has taken sometime to be able to attenuate the edges of my anxiety with the understanding that I can re-fashion and re-imagine my selfhood; that the seemingly innocent prefix "re-" powerfully questions the givenness of the givens themselves. 


Until learning to live in and appreciate liminal zones and interstitial crevices, until learning to willingly make myself vulnerable (for I now think that a true way for me to relate to another is by dis-covering my vulnerabilities), I felt both dancing and speech had been made difficult for me. I thought every movement I executed and every utterance I made were screaming my location to the world - what I saw as the incongruity in being a Bharata Natyam dancer/ Brahmin boy and an anti-hetero-patriarchal, same-sex loving self, social worker, activist, etc. But to this day I find myself ‘doing’ Bharata Natyam, attempting to find new ways to sing my own songs, dance my own dance, as it were. I am thankful for the existence of these etceteras; they allow me new and unknown possibilities of being.





Notes
(1) People of the Brahmin Vaishnava (worshippers of Vishnu) community in this part of the country are called Iyengars. The priestly caste in the Tamil region have Iyers and Iyengars as broad sub-groups, with several sub-communities under each, with various levels of interior hierarchization. 

² Bharata Natyam has a history of discontinuity from that of Sadir, the dance form performed by devadasis and rajadasis in the temples and courts of south India until the early decades of the twentieth century. This history is located in the politically charged space of colonial reformist movement that sought to end dancing in temples and the dedication of women to temples. This culminated in the passing of the Devadasi Bill in the Madras Legislative Council, spearheaded by Dr Muthulakshmi Reddy. The revival of  Sadir as Bharata Natyam is attributed to people like Rukmini Devi Arundale and E Krishna Iyer and to institutions like the Madras Music Academy. For a little more on this, see Srinivasan, Amrit. 1985. ‘Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and her Dance’. Economic and Political Weekly, 20: 1869-76

The Little Boy Who Danced!

Strange are the trappings of a troubled boyhood. You might think you have grown up, weathered the many storms of adolescence, teenage, and those particularly painful years of early adulthood that were made bearable only by bad verse and long love letters that were never posted; you might think you have outsmarted those years that made you flagellate yourself with a sudden sense of responsibility that pushed you to make it in the world; you might think you have finally come to occupy your body with a reasonable degree of comfort. But small things could catch you unawares and, in a flash, make you that little boy again, who stood petrified in front his classroom as the other boys jeered at how his long arms flailed, and how his limp wrists weakly sliced the air every time he flung them about...

That was how I felt today when I went to be part of a lecture-demonstration by my dance guru, Chitra Visweswaran, in a school. I was fumbling about in the staff room, that had been graciously offered as a greenroom, trying to get at least some of the creases out of my dhothi that was crushed beyond measure during the long, killer commutes through Bangalore city.  The sweet young lady who had received us at the entrance walked into the room and introduced herself as the dance teacher at the school. She said, "I am delighted you are here with Chitraji! Lots of girls learn dance here, but the boys, even those who want to, don't. That's because there is a general belief among boys that it is not a very masculine thing to do. Today, they can see you and see how wrong they are!"

Though I laughed and managed to appear flattered, I was very aware of the churning feeling in my stomach, the same feeling that has gripped me in its throes several times before. Many years ago, I used to experience this so often that I was convinced these were the shudders of another creature that lay coiled within me, that was sensing danger around. This feeling of dread, which I would feel in my very gut, was like a response to a threat to my survival. It would start in my core and send out its tentacles that held me tight and made me breathless. But, strangely, it also gave me, every time, the will to brave whatever awaited me, to show up to the world no matter what, to live through whatever instance lay ahead of me. "This won't last for too long," I would tell myself, "this will be over soon." And in a bizarre paradox, I would draw my strength from this same threatened creature in my tummy, and manage to live through those instances - the several performances in school, the many times I had to respect the urge to put up my hand to ask the teacher a question, the umpteen speech competitions where I looked, as I reeled out my prepared speech, determinedly in the direction of the girls, who were always, for some inexplicable reason, wordlessly empathetic.

Today’s setting, I realized, was a scary re-creation of those school days. Here I was again, just a stride or two away from being thirty, feeling like a young boy again, acutely alarmed at the prospect of performing in front of boys and girls gathered in a courtyard that had an uncanny resemblance to the one in my school back in Kumbakonam. I did not know where this other scared and threatened creature lay inside me all these years. Don’t get me wrong. I have not exactly been an intrepid embracer of life in the years that have passed between then and now. I have had other frightened, upset and angry little creatures inside me that I have been, one by one, releasing patiently, compassionately and with a great love that I have had to learn to feel.

While I struggled to get the thread into the needle, my teacher waited patiently to secure her ornaments onto her costume with small stitches. My hands trembled, and I felt great love and protectiveness for my body that was manifesting in these tremors trauma buried deep within. Quietly, I started to speak to this creature that was responding in conditioned ways to perceived threat to its survival.

Once I chose to address this being with love, I saw that it was no mystical creature. It was a little boy shuddering and gasping. He was cowering under memories that were weighing down on him. I held his hand and said to him, “Please do not be scared. I am here. And there is help. Remember we have done this before. Many, many times. Don’t you think it is funny that this situation should arise now after several years? May be this is a chance to do something more about it. May be we don’t have to give ourselves the temporary assurance that this will pass. May be we can do better than dealing with it in such provisional basis. I am sorry I did not know you were still hurting, suffocating, and hiding. Let’s go and face this squarely in the eye. Let us not cower. And let us not be armed. Let’s just go there and have a good time. Remember the pleasure we have always felt in dancing, in surviving. No, not just surviving, but living gloriously. Come.”

And we went, me and this scared little boy within me; we went not to war, but to dance. Oh boy, did we dance! No one would have known that I was not dancing alone, that I was dancing with a little boy who badly wanted to dance, but was too scared to let go of his fears and drop his guard. No one might have known the joy both of us felt, or heard a little boy’s laughter floating in and out of the cheers of a happy young man. But it happened. They both had a wonderful time. They danced like no one was watching.

I am very lucky that I have a great teacher and friend in Chitra akka. Though she had been part of the conversation with the school’s dance teacher about boys and their notions of masculinity, she chose to circumvent this troublesome and unproductive terrain when she spoke after I performed. She said to the many boys and girls gathered there, “Did you see how much he enjoyed himself? Didn’t it look like he had a lot of fun dancing?” And the crowd of children went in a thunderous chorus, “YES!”

For now, that is all that matters.

Panappaarai Mattam - The Treasure Mountain

I am on a train back to Chennai from Coimbatore. Last evening, on the long drive from Panappaarai Mattam to my parent's place in Coimbatore, I got to reflect on my four-day stay at my friend Siddharth's at Panappaarai Mattam, an hour from Coonoor in the Nilgiris. My friend Lakshmi called me to ask about the trip and that helped me further in unravelling the bundle of amazing thoughts that I felt was snuggling inside my heart.

A few days ago, I was sitting in the guest room at Rana's (Siddharth) house, the big windows completely open, giving a clear view of the mountains and the valley in front of me, a red-whiskered bulbul playing in the bushes right outside the window, a jungle fowl incessantly crowing somewhere nearby, and I was writing to a friend of mine. I wrote that I thought the primary purpose of this trip was for me to heal. For that's what I felt when I arrived at Siddharth's place. I have heard and used, innumerable times before, phrases like “breathtakingly beautiful” and “unbelievably beautiful,” but when I landed at Rana's place, I felt I had been very loose with language, that I had hitherto used these phrases rather flippantly, not really believing either the “unbelievableness” or the “breathtaking-ness” of the beauty I was praising.

The place was so - and I say this with a great degree of consciousness now - breathtakingly beautiful that it made speech difficult. It commanded nothing but a respectful silence. I feel very grateful for having friends like Rana, friends who care for me very deeply, who love me, who say so at every opportunity they get, who express it in the most beautiful ways.

Yesterday, on my way down from the mountains, I realized that this trip had had two more purposes, actually more like two sub-purposes under the grand one of healing!

One, to be reminded of the fact that I am a very ancient soul. I live close to the sea in Chennai. In the last many years, I have formed an interesting relationship with the sea. Just the thought of it calms me down. Sitting by the sea makes my heart jump with joy. By the sea, I always feel like a very young, rather new, soul being cradled by the eternal waters. But, in the past few days, taking long walks and hikes on the mountains, I felt like I was an ancient soul who has walked these hills and vales several times before, that these mountains have known me from before. For everything seemed to smile and nod in recognition. It was good to be reminded of my eternity.

The other purpose of the trip, I felt, was to be able to access a quality of quiet that let me hear each of my thoughts. And I am glad I came to this after I had done some good work with non-judgment. For many of the thoughts I heard passing through the thoroughfare of my mind were not ones I would admit publicly to have entertained, let alone be proud of! I could hear each thought and let it keep moving. I could release these thoughts gently over the hills and the sun and the sky, trusting that these powerful healers would heal them for me.

Siddharth is a wonderful friend, one of those people whose friendships I have always doubted if I deserved. And one genre of thoughts that I let go of  this time were such thoughts of unworthiness. They don't help. They are not respectful to the wonderful people and experiences that life tirelessly brings my way. To suggest that they are wasting time with someone unworthy of their time and love; to suggest that life is doing a mistake in bringing along all the many lovely experiences it does bring along, is not very respectful. Our sense of unworthiness is actually a source of disrespect to life and to all those who see our worth. We take the impossible position of deeming ourselves unworthy while somehow being capable of knowing how others are settling for less by choosing us! Such twisted arrogance!

Anyway. Panappaarai Mattam has been so named because it is believed that Tipu Sultan hid some treasure there somewhere under a rock. I don't know about that, though, I must confess, it makes me want to write a thriller fiction about a group of people going in search of this treasure. But Panappaarai Mattam has already revealed its treasure to me with great openness and generosity. The treasure of finding more of myself.