The Soundtrack of My Life

The songs listed here are songs that bring to mind specific times, places, and people. In some cases the song was actually playing in the background and in other cases the song is not actually playing but my memory associates the song with that time. Since memory works in funny ways, the time frame I’ve assigned to each song is approximate. As I write this I can think of many more songs that I haven’t listed. This is not a list of my favorite songs, some songs I wish made it on the list don’t bring a specific memory to mind and therefore are not included.

Age 4, 1984: “Beat It” by Michael Jackson

Gigantic first-graders performed a dance at an Indian cultural function in Lubbock, Texas dressed as doctors to “Beat It”. It may seem that a Michael Jackson song and a bunch of six year-olds dressed as doctors has nothing to do with Indian culture. Ha! These children were obviously being indoctrinated, pun intended, at an early age: all Indian parents hope their little Hrithiks and Madhuris will one day become brain surgeons skilled in synchronized dance routines.

Age 7, 1987: “The Way You Make Me Feel” by Michael Jackson

In Ames, Iowa now, I am holding what I perceive to be a life-sized lion stuffed animal up on its haunches and talking to my friend Priya while listening to Michael Jackson’s album Bad in the basement of the townhouse my family lived in at the time. “The Way You Make Me Feel” is the second song on the album and it starts with a animal-like roaring sound. I scream, thinking my stuffed lion has come to life. I remember telling my mom that I thought the lion, a gift from my uncle Ajay, was life-sized. She laughed at me, because real-life lions are much bigger than seven year-old girls.

Age 9, 1989: “Cover Girl” by New Kids on The Block

Tuhina, Priya, Pooja, and I are in Tuhina’s bedroom. My assigned New Kids on the Block boyfriend is Donnie Wahlberg, Tuhina gets Jordan Knight, Priya gets Jon Knight, Pooja gets Joey McIntyre, and apparently Danny Wood is the reject. Even though Donnie isn’t my favorite New Kid I accept him as my man and swoon when he sings “Cover Girl.”

Age 10, 1990: “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel

I walk into J-4 Rollaway, the local roller-skating rink, with Priya and Tuhina and yelped loudly because this song was playing. I don’t know why I was so excited to hear this song but apparently this disproportionate and inexplicable animation is quintessential Manisha.

Age 12, 1992: “Jump” by Kris Kross

In the Ames Middle School gymnasium on a weekend night all the “sevies” including myself are jump-jumping to this song. The boys’ voices singing-slash-rapping this song have yet to change. This is when I learned the difference between a Mack Daddy and a Daddy Mack.

Age 12, 1993: “I Will Follow Him” from the Sister Act soundtrack

Joy and others who went to Saint Cecelia, Ames’ Catholic Elementary School, are my group of friends in seventh grade. We act out and sing along with Sister Mary Clarence and the other nuns in front of the television in Joy’s basement.

Age 13, 1994: “Mausam Ka Jaadu” from Hum Aapke Hain Koun!

“Can you play the songs from Who Am I To You?” my four year-old cousin Ishani asks my parents in a youthful, high-pitched voice from the backseat of our car. I think it’s funny that Ishani can’t remember the Hindi title of the film but instead remembers the formal-sounding English translation. The Bollywood film song begins with a heavily-accented man exclaiming in English 10! 9! 8! 7! 6! 5! 4! 3! 2! 1! Let’s! Start! The! Fun! Ishani, my brother Nitin, and I are sitting in the backseat and burst out in extreme laughter.

Age 14, 1994: “The Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show

How I convinced my mother that going to a midnight screening of this film about characters from the planet Transsexual with my friend Caity was an okay thing to do still perplexes me.

Age 14, 1995: “My Name is Jonas” by Weezer

My stereo, upstairs in my room, is on full blast playing Weezer’s blue album. It is early in the summer after my freshman year in high school. That summer I biked to and from the school gym for a weight lifting class three times a week. Uh huh, that was the buffest I’ve ever been. “My Name is Jonas” is the first track on the album. I am downstairs in the kitchen, home alone, doing dishes and dancing and shouting out the lyrics.

Age 15, 1995: “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” from Paul Simon’s Graceland

Ankita and I sat in her living room and picked this song apart line by line. It was my sophomore year and I had done this exercise for “The Boy in the Bubble” last year for Miss Eddings’ ninth grade World Studies class. She engaged us in learning about apartheid by showing us a video of Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo singing about the South African freedom struggle in Zimbabwe in 1987. Now Ankita was in Miss Eddings’ class and she had the same assignment. We thought “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” to be one of the more cryptic songs. We appropriated a meaning to every stanza. Essentially, we interpreted that “diamonds on the soles of her shoes” was a reference to the South Africa’s wealth of diamonds that helped the world ignore the atrocities of apartheid.

Age 16, 1997: “With or Without You” by U2

Driving in my dad’s white Geo Prizm on Grand Avenue in Ames past the mall, Wal-Mart, and Cub Foods with Wendy on a steamy Iowa summer day, we decide to leave the windows rolled up and the air conditioning off because the heat feels good.

Age 17, 1998: “La Flaca” by Jarabe de Palo

My Spanish host-sister Beatriz and I are at a pub in Manzanares near Colmenar Viejo in Spain. This is my first distinct memory of being flirted with and flirting back. A boy said something to me in Spanish and my giggly reply was “¡No Me Mentiras!” (don’t lie to me!).

Age 18, 1999: “E Ajnabi” from the Dil Se film soundtrack

My stereo moves into the third floor lounge of Stanley Residence Hall, two doors away from the dorm room I share with Heather. Liz and I pretend to study our engineering coursework as we turn up the volume of this ethereal song obnoxiously loud.

Age 19, 2000: “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison

My boyfriend Marc comes to visit me at Dance Marathon, a 24-hour event to raise financial and emotional support for selected families of children in the pediatric oncology wing of The University of Iowa Hospital. Soon after he arrives, “Brown Eyed Girl” plays. Marc is lost somewhere in the crowd and we search frantically for each other because this is “our song”. We find each other and our dance is captured in a photograph that appears taped on my door, pasted on a red construction-paper heart with the title “RA Lovers”. Both Marc and I were resident assistants on the same dormitory staff, and either my residents or fellow staff members posted this image on my door.

Age 21, 2001: “Dil Chahta Hai” from the Dil Chahta Hai film soundtrack

My cousins Mayank and Akhil and I are posing at Fort Aguada in Goa, India, attempting to recreate a scene from the Bollywood movie Dil Chahta Hai. I argue that we are not at the same fort that Akash, Sid, and Sameer are at in the movie and later watch the film to find out I’m right. Every time I watch this film or see the soundtrack I remember this Goa trip and posing at the fort.

Age 22, 2002: “Ray of Light” by Madonna

Allison, Tim, and I are on a frequently-stopping slow-moving train from Jaipur to Jodhpur in Rajasthan, India. Allison and I are feeling grumpy. I had purchased headphone splitters in earlier in Mysore, and now we plug two sets of headphones into my Discman so we can both listen to the song that consistently cheers us up. It didn’t quite cure all this time, but we were mildly less irritable after listening to it.

Age 22, 2002: “The Power of Goodbye” by Madonna

I am on a three-wheeled yellow and black auto rickshaw on a curving road in Bangalore. This song was not playing at the time, but when I hear it this is where I envision myself.

Age 23, 2003: “A Long December” by the Counting Crows

Marc, sitting on his bed in his dorm room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tells me on the phone that he is listening to this song on repeat. I am walking around my dorm room in Philadelphia and we are breaking up.

Age 23, 2004: “The Way You Move” by Outkast

Andrew is expressively mouthing the words to this song. Elizabeth is dancing with me. Andy (different than Andrew) is the DJ, as he is for every city planning department party. Several other classmates surround us in our merrymaking somewhere near Rittenhouse Square.

Age 24, 2004: “Dil Le Gayee” by Jasbir Jassi

On the highway somewhere in California, Tuhina, Priya, Neha, Nitin, Tushar, me, and all our luggage are packed uncomfortably into a rental-SUV. Neha and I request this song and pass the CD forward from our leg-room impaired back seats.

Age 24, 2005: “Let’s Get Retarded” by the Black Eyed Peas

We decide to eat pizza at a café in Samaná in the Dominican Republic. Stacy, Jeannette, Curtis, Christine, Katherine and I are discussing the roles of men and women while a few songs play on repeat in the background. “Let’s Get Retarded” is the one that sticks with me.

Age 25, 2006: “Kala Chasma” by Amar Ashi

Every Thursday, January through April, Sujata and I go to “Sutra Night” at Red Maple, a trendy Baltimore club. We rename Thursday night, officially called “Sutra Night” at Red Maple, “Brown Night”. The DJ never fails to play “Kala Chasma,” which pleases me extremely. Then in May I am in India and do not escape “Kala Chasma”: my cousin Heemanshu is just as obsessed with the song as me. In the bedroom near the main entrance at the house in Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, I remember my brother Nitin, Heemanshu, his brother Mayank, and I dancing to this song – and Chacha (my uncle) telling us to turn the music down.

Age 26, 2006: “Sada Dil” by Bikram Singh

I have designated myself the driver and Mitesh, Madhvi, Angie, Dhaval, and I are on our way home after Mitesh’s birthday. My road-ragey, distracted driving probably frightened my passengers on our way to DC, and now, on our way back, I am trying to keep myself awake by singing along to my newest song obsession “Sada Dil.” Nevermind that I do not know Punjabi or that my passengers have endured way too much of my so-called singing on this night already.

Do not call me exotic

Exotic is an odalisque in a painting. Stare at her, lust for her, she is beautiful and barbaric. Marvel at her private staged world for a small fee. Long for her mystery. She quenches aesthetic and carnal desire. She is an oasis in the strange, teeming, impoverished, and splendid land from where she comes.

She is not a companion. She is not a specimen to study and understand. To see her in full is to make her real. To unlock her mystery is to destroy her. The oasis is a mirage, come too close and she will disappear.


people talk about my image
like I come in two dimensions
like lipstick is a sign of my declining mind
like what I happen to be wearing the day
that someone takes my picture
is my new statement for all of womankind
- Ani DiFranco in her song “Little Plastic Castle”

Diwali

Every year my family has a Diwali party at our house. Past parties have included as many as sixty of our closest family friends. Everyone in the family has a role. My mom cooks a feast that includes at a minimum kadu (spiced pumpkin), poori aalu (fried bread and potatoes), dahi vada (lentil donuts in yogurt), and a variety of desserts: cham-chams, rasgullas, badam burfi. My dad is in charge of vacuuming and cleaning the house, my brother puts up the "Christmas" lights inside and outside the house, and I am in charge of decorations including candle and flower arrangements.

Since college, this ritual has become evermore important to me. Part of our Diwali tradition growing up including my mom telling us the story of Diwali and doing puja by our fireplace. Because our party is not always the same weekend as actual Diwali, it is sometimes a challenge to convince my family not to forego this part of the tradition –I am only in town for a couple of days and getting ready for the party takes precedence over the religious part of the holiday.

Whether or not we do the puja before the party, I love the feeling of our house prior to the party. It feels clean, fresh, and warm. We all are filled with the anticipation of guests arriving, the women decked out in their finest saris or salwar kameezes or lehengas. We turn on lights throughout the house and light candles, not only to welcome our guests, but Goddess Laxmi as well. Elements of the party include feasting, mingling, lighting sparklers and fireworks in the backyard, gambling with pennies as poker chips, and lots of laughing.

Growing up, I used to think of Diwali as Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one, since there would be decorating the house, new clothes, a feast, and fireworks just for that holiday. What makes it even better is that my holiday season starts as much as a month before Thanksgiving and continues through New Year’s. This is also a challenge, though, because I always want to take time off for Diwali to be with my family. Perhaps if Diwali were at the same time as Christmas and Hanukkah, I wouldn’t have grown up celebrating Christmas as well as Diwali – but lucky for me I get presents on both :-).

I have gone to great lengths to savor my mom’s Diwali feast. One year I traveled home with a cooler to bring food back with me, and got stopped at airport security because they objected to me taking a cooler and I didn’t have enough time to argue. I called my brother to take it back home with him and my mom actually Fed-Exed food to me a couple days later.

Diwali is a week and a half away. This year we are not having a huge party, just a low-key one with the two families we’re closest to. My mom’s father passed away in late July and she doesn’t feel it would be appropriate to have a large party, nor is she up for it. Nevertheless, I think all the essential elements of going home for Diwali are there (family, friends, food, fun) and I’m really looking forward to it.

Creating Community

With four years of experience as a freshman dormitory resident assistant and a budding career as a city planner, it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that I have a passion for creating community. These things are largely about encouraging and fostering a sense of community among others.

This past year, however, has been my first experience with having to focus on creating a community for myself. It has tested me, exposed my insecurities, and stretched me. Several months ago I realized that this was the first time some sort of community was not built into my everyday life. Until last fall, I had been in school, which always created an automatic community for me to some degree. Another community I had was the Indian families in Ames who my family was close with.

I grew up in a college town. When I moved here, it was the first time academia was not a part of my daily life in some way. This is why I feel so at home in Charles Village near Hopkins’ Homewood Campus, and why a lot of my friends that I have made in Baltimore are graduate students. Being around nerdiness is a norm for me.

In the last several months I have been accused of being not just outgoing and social, but very social. This is so strange to me. I think sometimes I still perceive myself as the timid, insecure grade school kid I once was, the girl who always had this inner confidence but who felt like a big dork socially. But when I had a party in June and had sixty-five people on my evite, and had almost thirty people crammed in to my one-bedroom apartment, I realized that there was something to all those accusations. How did I go from knowing virtually no one in Baltimore to sixty-five people I felt comfortable enough with to invite to my party? Since then the number of people I know has certainly multiplied, which is even more mind-boggling.

Creating community is not about sheer numbers, but numbers do help. You start feeling like you’re a part of a place when you can randomly run into people wherever you go. But if I had to choose between having a hundred people I could call friends versus one or two people who are really close friends that I can count on regularly and who count on me, it would be the latter. These would be people who don’t mind driving me to Dulles airport if I can’t get a flight out of BWI, people who will ask me to go to the doctor with them because they’re nervous and want moral support, people who call me just to chat, people who actually care about the inane details of my day-to-day life, people who don’t mind requesting me to bring extra food to their parties when they have them. It’s great to know dozens of people, because apparently, I am super social. I thrive around people-energy. But what floors me is that I have made a half dozen or so close friends who really care about me and expect things from me and who I can count on.

Creating community in the absence of a pre-constructed “box” to put the community in has been a challenging and rewarding experience. The people in my Baltimore/DC life are a diverse group of people, and though I think I may always seek my comfort zones such as university communities, I have enjoyed constructing a box for myself.

Anyway, this post was precipitated by my feelings of insecurity earlier today when I felt I had invited myself to someone’s party and that perhaps I wasn’t really wanted there. The people throwing the party have never done anything to make me feel this way, if anything, it’s been just the opposite. But for some reason, as social as I supposedly am, that insecure little girl inside shows up anyway. Thankfully, I had community to rely on (two close Baltimore friends, one best friend three time zones away, and one mom) to tell that little girl that her feelings were valid but to please shut up and stop being so paranoid. And then I went to the party, and surprise surprise, I had a fabulous time. The little girl will never go away but maybe she will slowly grow up. As she does, I will continue to build and strengthen this box of my creation.

Watching Movies and Re-runs Over and Over Again

My latest obsession is Casablanca. I have a subscription to Netflix but I've had the same movies sitting in my apartment for more than a month. So basically, I am wasting twelve dollars a month while I watch re-runs of Girlfriends or Nick at Nite or put in one of my DVDs or VHS movies that I've seen at least a dozen times.

Is it my ADD-tendencies? Yes, partially why I end up watching what I've already seen is because I don't have to pay that much attention and I can multi-task. I can be cooking dinner, checking my email, even listening to music while watching something I've seen.

Is it because I have a deep appreciation for cinematic genius and classic stories? How many times do I need to see a certain line delivered over and over again? How can I still laugh at Will Smith's cheekiness when I already know verbatim what he's about to say?

Every once in a while I look up from my multi-tasking and I notice something new and clever about one of my favorite movies or sitcom episodes.

Check out the above picture from a scene in Casablanca... look at the way the champagne glasses are placed! Equally spaced apart, Sam's in the foreground. A lot of thought went into every scene in this movie... getting everything on the screen so it was just right: body language, the placement of objects, the camerawork, the soundtrack and lighting -- all make a subtle statement. Some of the lines in this movie seem so cheesy, and we've heard them referenced so many times that it is hard to evaluate the movie from a fresh perspective. But given that I've watched this movie half a dozen times since I bought it a month ago, I think I like it for itself and not just for its impact on pop culture.

Anyway, in my true multi-tasking-attention-deficit style, I got distracted from doing something else so I could write this post. And now my movie is almost over... what to do, watch it again, watch another one, or turn off the tv?

I think I'll watch it again.