Joyous Devi

In an antique land, a modern-world kingdom | The Asian  Jordan – In an Antique Land Arriving in Jordan is supposed to be a hassle free, visa-on-arrival convenience aimed at bestowing  a charmingly Arabic welcome to  the harried, cattle-class fatigued visitor. Mine, didn’t quite fall in that category though, preceded as it was with an encounter with a suspiciously  querying visa officer, followed by three senior ones,  before my passport was stamped.  Enough to put a dampener on one’s mood one would agree.  But I decided to shrug this irritant aside, attributing the  brusqueness to the region’s currently troubled reality and instead  decided to concentrate  on the country that lay beyond its Immigration Section. And that was a revelation. Jordan is in many ways a matchless confluence of ancient stories replete with the whispers from empires long lost, Biblical  allusions and a  kingdom of the modern world. Roads w...

Joyous Devi: Urban Slums - A World of Images

The world on the other side of  the huge plate glass window revealed  itself in its  changing facets,   as the day shifted from  early morning   to the time when  the lights came on in the city, to  when these too were snuffed out. The view,  from  the eight floor restaurant of the  luxury hotel that I was standing in, as a result of several interesting circumstances, left one with mixed feelings. It showed a Mumbai rakish and suave in its  self-assurance, matchless in its fused identity of big money and glamour  and yet as my eyes roved over the changing landscape of luxury hotels,  forgotten relics of building  and the  ceaseless  activity centred around the construction of various infrastructural projects, they were arrested  by the naked visibility of its other face. One, raw with need  and the hunger to clamber up the slithery steps to a better life....

We still had two hours of daylight left when we left Chindwara  on our way to Panchmarhi – both in Madhya Pradesh.  It had been raining since the morning and its occasional ferocity threatened to wash out the Handloom Exhibition which had been sponsored by our organisation and  enthusiastically set up by the weavers from the nearby regions.  Our bullet point agenda  had already delayed us and we were wondering if it would still be possible to visit Patalkot, a tribal village, which entailed a  17 kms detour from the main road. The drive to Tamia, a picturesque town on the way, was like stepping back in time to a land infused with poetic images and an era, which could well have fitted into a passage in  history. Vast fields covered in verdure stretched into the horizon, its edges fringed by the rays from a watery sun.  Hutments bandaged in tarpaulin and guarded by herds of buffaloes dotted the land - no factories, no malls, no cafes in sight...

The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Writers must serve a social purpose More reason why people should refrain from commenting on areas that they have little knowledge of....

Joyous Devi: Ma! Let Me Be Born...

The trip to Jhansi nearly didn’t happen. Relying on  the self proclaimed largest  radio taxi network in the country Meru cab, was not such a great idea I realized, as I stood waiting  for the taxi to show itself,  vacillating between the extremes of anger and nervousness and feeling the biting cold seep through all my insulations. It was 5:30 in the morning, and despite frequent  calls to the cab’s control room, I didn’t see the cab anywhere in sight, until it arrived, tearing through the surreal fog like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, with barely 20 minutes to departure time. But make it I did, thanks to the energy levels of  two coolies who appropriated my  rather small pieces of luggage between them as soon as my cab drove into the station ramp. They  ran, like twin heroes in a Hindi film, undeterred by  baggage checking  machines or the crowds on the platform or even the inexorable tick tock of the clock ...