string and timekeeping

On the awkwardness of a recorded number being taken cognizance of the morning after

2012-01-20T09:29:00.001+05:30

Oh.

Him.

Hm.

Being open

2012-01-19T16:41:00.001+05:30

Hi.

That's me.

#1

2012-01-18T22:36:00.001+05:30

I overturn the cardboard box on the table.

I noted that the box itself, a shoebox from Nike, had no plastic/vinyl outer layer, but had the decals printed directly onto the cardboard. This was fortuitous, for if my recollection served me loyally, Nike had both before and after used an outer cover plastered onto the box for its purposes, only possibly having a brief flare up of its environmental conscience to not do so, during which time fortuitously (again) i had cone into possession of this box.

Having overturned the preciously nested stack contents onto the table, i note wondered why i had done so. It seemed a lot more voluminous when in chaos. Analogous, perhaps, to the grace of a sheets of paper floating onto the floor versus an improperly gripped book flung into the air, which resembles a bird disoriented because it's just flown smack into a window.

I think i feel like that. A bird that's sped into a glass window. I think they usually die. Even if they don't, they probably do eventually. Depends on whether they orient themselves in time to not fall to their deaths. Can birds fall to their deaths? They seem awfully light, much like cats. Though a falling bird and falling cat might mean the cat preying on the bird once it his the floor.

I, blind, have been directed to fly as fast as i can and with as much faith as can be mustered. The faith comes slowly, the speed still a searching one for invisible razor wires drawn across low-flying areas and whatnot, and of course transparent windows that make the people inside dream of freedom and serve as perfect obstacles to those with. It must be by design. The faith is finally in bloom, the speed soaring and trust given in to. And then comes a window, soundtracked by a comically sad horn section as i ooze down its side, shedding feathers and life force, deposited at the bottom, perhaps still alive but only stunned, but nevertheless at the mercy of circling cats. The first one pounces for my neck...

The papers are one such mauled heap on the table. I'm irritated with myself. But, they're not just papers. I sort through the pile and pick out those materials that won't burn. I contemplate leaving the plastic in, but i don't fancy having to live with a singed smelly reminder. Then again, I'm not going to be here all that long either. Decisions, decisions. Ultimately, it's probably best to leave them out, if only because they're less culpable. Actually, no, they're equally culpable. Only tacit. I create a small heap of these non-paper items, and with one expansive sweep of my arm throw them all off the table and into a waiting bag below. Some spill over.

Are they to be read? I think back to something i once loftily claimed, no doubt pinched from a motivational poster or a cynical TV show. The past is behind, and the future not yet born. All we have is now. I'm pretty sure it was worded differently when i told her. Worded to sound less pompous, at the least. But i meant it. I couldn't guarantee her a future, not then, though i might say different now. I couldn't rest upon what we once were, for that we weren't, or hadn't been, for some time. We should make the most of what we had, and all we had was now...

...all we had was then. There's nothing now, and they wouldn't be any emptier now than they would sitting undisturbed in the box, unthumbed and forgotten. The words don't live by themselves. Any life they had was leeched out, slowly. Once she abandoned them, they died. Only their shells remained. Like fossils in the crust their imprint was clear but motives now thoroughly inscrutable. i reasoned that if she didn't stand by them anymore, they don't deserve the indignity of being disturbed.

I haphazardly pile them back in and set them alight. I wish i could say that the ink teared out of the paper, but it merely crackled and turned over.

I sat beside, weeping sullenly the whole time, embarrassed at my lack of control.

The box lay charred and inwardly curled. On second thought, a plastic lined one might have better retained its integrity.

Hm.

2012-01-17T22:09:00.003+05:30

As it transpires, if one person has blocked another on Facebook, neither can see anything of the other, including posts on common friends' walls... which must be a curiosity for the common friend(s) in situations such as both people commenting on a status msg, mutually oblivious, but only to each other.

Knowledge is power. France is Bacon.

2012-01-07T08:27:00.001+05:30

For 2012, i think I'm going to try sincerity.

And blogger app for Android.

Those two.

Ra.One (2011)

2011-11-06T00:59:00.002+05:30

I realise, with some curiosity, that the last three films I’veseen have all been Bollywood films – an indication of how my watching routinehas changed, more than anything else. Three in two months (the other two being MeriBrother ki Dulhan and Mujhse Fraandship Karoge) is more Bollywood seen than inthe decade that preceded it, I daresay. So, Bollywood tropes are lost on me, asare any winks at its history. Only the most axiomatic of pharmoola conventions may register with me.

Irrelevant, in any case, as Ra.One would seem, as per SRK’srumblings, to want, much like various films saddled with the tag in the recentpast, to be Bollywood’s coming out party to the rest of the world. At any rate,to secure a bigger slice of the worldwide (and not just the NRI) box office pie,so that its bloated production budget could be recouped.

My decision to watch Ra.One was whimsical. I was walkingpast the theatre to catch lunch, and just decided. The box office told me thatI could just show up and pick any seat I wanted, because the hall was empty. Ofcourse, this was at 1 PM, and the eventual headcount was around twenty people.

More significantly for my recent Bollywood watching habit,this was the first that I was watching alone, without a translator guide. Notthat it made much of a difference, but some of the punch that the dialogue mayhave aspired for would have been lost on me due to ignorance of the language,rather than comprehension and then fallingflat.

I haven’t followed much of the negative/positive presssurrounding the movie, though I haven’t been ignorant to it either. Notwatching much TV means I haven’t been subjected to SRK’s constant pimping too(though, a toothpaste advert running in the theatre before the film started wasone such pimp role). I also don’t (or, at the least, try) not to judge a moviethat I plan to see before I see it.

I have seen it, and now I judge it.

Well, just as I type this, someone on twitter responded to atweet of mine that called the film a cinematic abortion with “Ppl lik these rthe reason India wil nevr see bettr movies. If som1 tries new stuff, they fartwith their pessimist ass!” Oh, wait, this was a response to a tweet where Ipoked fun at a Bombay local train being too fast. Nevertheless, this reply is agood starting point, as is an earlier tweet of the user: “The problem in Indiais that, people are so used to the shitty movies, that they just don't want toaccept better technology.”

Ra.One is not original.

Starting with the title animation that has been nicked fromTransformers, the movie is not original, chucking any genre convention it canget its hands on (hell, creation coming to life is at least as old as Shelley’sFrankenstein) into its melting pot, regardless of whether its tone fits withthe overall scheme.

Is that a problem perse? No. I am perfectly capable of having an enjoyable time with a plot that’snonsensical (Hitchcock, anyone?), and even when the characters behave in anonsensical fashion independent of what the plot dictates [such as digestingthe central conceit of the plot with barely a shrug, or barely (beyond onerainy funeral) grieving a dead husband/father (keeping with the South Indianstereotyping, let’s call him Da.One) and gleefully accepting Da.Two, muchimproved/ North Indianised].

Let me start with what I liked about Ra.One.

Arjun Rampal is yummy. I want those cheekbones and abs. Themusic in the film (the score, not the songs) is suitably cinematic, and the ‘dundun dunn’ ominous riff caught my ear back when the first teaser dropped (duringlast year’s IPL? Can’t remember).

Note that I didn’t include Rajnikanth’s cameo. Being SouthIndian doesn’t mandate me to do so, unlike what the producers might think. I’mnot even going to go into the deeper socio-universal repercussions his appearanceas Chitti bodes (it would mean that the film was taking place in a universewhere at least one robot is acknowledged and at large), because clearly theproducers weren’t thinking beyond a nudge-nudge wink-wink moment. But, even withinthose goals, it’s such a completely non-sequitor and downright random scene that is preceded by absurdityand ends with an edit away. No context/closure provided.

What sucked? Everything else.

I’m not going to criticise it for the things usually left atthe door in this genre (boom-boom action family flick, oxymoronic as that mayseem) – tugging at the heart strings, kid that deserves to be slapped, dumbexplosions, monkeys at typewriter script etc.

Though, one thing to be mentioned is its nihilistic viewtowards life – whatever happened to the incidental people walking across thestreet not being reduced to collateral damage? Here, both Ra.One (ok, fairenough, if to establish how dastardly the character is) and G.One gleefully indulgein damage to person and property.

I’m going to engage this film on the plane that SRK wantsthe watching public to – technology. Better technology, as the twitter userwould say.

Is the technology better? (better than what? It’s not beingjudged against… Peepli [Live], is it?) Perhaps it is, but so what? It’s stillpainful to watch, and no amount of F/X wizardry is going to change that – the CGIis quite evident in a lot of places it’s not supposed to be (i.e. discountingthe nature of the video gaming beast), and it’s inconsistent in logic too –flesh and blood characters within a CG world in the video game.

Being pretty to look at does not make it something peopleshould want to watch. Call me old school, but I believe (as do a large numberof people) that the technical aspects should never eclipse the story of amovie. The makers shouldn’t feel that they deserve a pat on the back merely formaking something nice (even if absolutely masturbatory in its overblown nature)to look at, and they certain shouldn’t try to actively solicit it.

This is not a Western hegemonic critique where I feel thatRa.One is trampling on Hollywood’s toes. I don’t like brainless action filmsfrom Hollywood either. It also doesn’t mean that boom-boom movies don’t makemoney – of course they do, whether it’s the Jerry Bruckheimer oeuvre or thisone. However, of note is that this film goes beyond its call of Michael Bayduty and does not treat most of its characters with even a modicum of respect,and has no heart.

In trying to elevate itself to whatever testosterone explosionporn level of Hollywood, Ra.One has imbibed all the wrong lessons from it –marketing blitz, super-saturation of screens, utter contempt towards itscharacters, and being a cynical cash grab. Amongst other things.

Making a pile of money doesn’t mean it’s any good.

Sri Lanka #2

2011-10-11T00:00:00.000+05:30

Part One here.

There was a wee bit of confusion over the documentation thatwas required to enter the country. Calling the Sri Lankan embassy yielded onlya sing-song voices that seemed to differ, based on the person spoken to, oneverything except that the new Visa regulations, announced two days before wewere to depart, would come into effect on the first of January, 2012.

My father told me to carry passport photographs, to be safe,and asked me to remind Ka to do the same. I didn’t want to be a nag, andassumed that Ka would carry them anyway, having travelled to Turkey andVietnam/Cambodia in the recent past, and so (I assumed) fairly fluent in thelanguage of immigration. Just to check, I asked him after he had landed up inChennai whether he had any passport photographs.

Uh… Oh. Well, a couplecan be produced at a pinch.

Good enough.

He’d told me that he was lurking around the SpiceJetcounter, and asked me to meet him there once I entered. I was semi-trotting,trying to be quick about it, hoping I wouldn’t miss the flight due to theserpentine immigration lines that are the bane of international travellers fromChennai.

The first thing I noted was that it had been a really longtime since I’d flown international. The last time I had flown international, orso I think, the international check-in counters used to be what are now thedomestic counters at the airport. The new space given to the internationalterminal feels like an installation space – a vast room, with some puny (bycomparison) counters scattered over the area.

The second thing was the ubiquity of students from mycollege. Literally the first person I see as I’m trotting in is a junior. Aninvoluntary (and entirely unfair) curse floats through my thoughts. It getsbetter – turns out he’s headed to Colombo too, with two others from college.Oh, goody. Not that it affected me at all – I recognised even then that I was beingchurlish about wanting this to be my holiday,and not having it sullied by them. They probably felt the same way about me. Inany event, they were headed to another part of the country. I did, however,extract an affirming second, third and fourth opinion from them about thepassport photograph.

I find Ka. He’s wandering around like a lost puppy, deadphone in hand and ukulele in mouth. He comes up to me and paws at my backpackfor my charger – I still don’t know what he was up to the night prior, but he’djust barely made it out of Bangalore with his passport and ticket. Like a puppythat’s just dragged a bird into the living room, he’s wagging his proverbialtail and glowingly proud that he foraged out two passport photographs.

Where are they?

In my backpack.

Where’s your backpack?

Um… I checked it in.

Right. That bridge could be crossed at the appropriate time –never, as it transpired; they weren’t required.

I check myself in, and join the immigration queue. We spentour time staring at a couple of men in front of us, one of whom was a dead ringer(and I do mean completely) for Paul McCartney, circa 1966. His companion lookedthe non-descript slightly scruffy and greasy type who would’ve played bassguitar for second-tier mid-90s BritPop band like Suede. Ka started humming ‘TheDrowners’, and was impressed when I correctly identified it.

We’re filling our Departure Cards while standing in line,and come to the box labelled ‘flight number’. We look at our respectiveboarding passes, and under flight number, standing in proud, bold, blacksolitude, is ‘1’. That’s it. Just… ‘1’. It was the same for everyone, ofcourse. We weren’t about to write ‘1’ in the six odd boxes provided, sopresented the empty spaces and boarding passes to the lady at immigration –turns out it’s SG001. But SpiceJet are kool like dat.

The immigration lady asks the standard questions – what doyou do for a living, why are you going to Sri Lanka, when are you coming backetc. She asks for proof of return, and I produce it. Ka had checked his in, andwas in a bit of a pickle. I told her that he was with me, and she let himthrough, at which point I say, ‘wait. No. I don’t know you. Do I? Who are you?’He grins sheepishly and scurries away, his passport having already beenstamped, while she starts to have second thoughts about letting him through. Iwas informed immediately that this was not appropriate behaviour at animmigration counter. Oops.

Seated next to me on the flight was the sort ofworld-hopping Frenchman that I long to be. Though, not as smelly. Let’s callhim Henri. Henri had his hair slicked back over his balding head, had reallybad smoke-tinged breath, wore a ratty tee, shorts and Hawaii chappals, and wasfiercely protective of his jolna, inwhich he was carrying Mysorepau. We were sitting in the emergency exit row, andhe was muttering darkly about opening the exit out of spite because he had beenforced to stow the bag in the overhead compartment, the air hostess stony tohis protests of his ‘soft cakes’ being squished.

Henri was a bum kind of Frenchman, flitting betweenPondicherry (but not Auroville) and Sri Lanka over the year, living offundisclosed means (though he did mention something about an Army pension). Hewas a diminutive man, extremely talkative and effusively theatrical, possessingan entirely misplaced confidence that nevertheless sat well because of hisinfectious gregariousness, slippery accent and wholeheartedness, whetherrecommending the sandwiches served on the plane, the king coconuts on thestreets of Sri Lanka, or encouraging me to bang someone in Trinco.

What does he do with his time?

Oh, you know. I sit onthe beach, I read, I hunt women. I hunt them… never Sinhalese though. Never even look atthem, because you will get shot. But, the tourists. Aah, the tourists…

He flips open the in-flight magazine and looks at an ad withPriyanka Chopra.

Oh, who is she? I musthave her. She is in Bombay, you say? I will go to Bombay, and I will have her.Just you wait.

An in-flight announcement is made.

This is a page for Mr.Mohammad. Mr. Mohammad?... Uh, Mr. Mohammad sitting in seat number XX.

Ka was sitting behind me. We both burst out laughing at theperfect ambiguity of it, and spent the next few hours being gleefully PI –whether the same page on a flight to Dubai (Mr. Mohammad.. Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes?Yes? Uh.. Mr. Mohammad… Abdul? Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes?), or a page for Mr.Singh on a flight from Punjab to Canada.

And then we landed, went through baggage, and were out.

Colombo.

(to be continued)

Sri Lanka #1

2011-10-08T16:08:00.000+05:30

The concretisation of my Sri Lanka trip was pure chance. It’dbe incorrect to call it the ‘concretisation’, because there was no real plan tobegin with. When this gentleman informed me (due to a different number showingup on WhatsApp) that he had relocated to Colombo, on a whim I decided that nowwas as good a time as any to head there. And that decision was just about theonly thing that was concrete, cemented with the booking of tickets. Nothingelse had been resolved, whether who to go with, where I/we’d be staying, orwhat I/we’d be doing once in the country.

The only ‘vacation’ time I receive for the first year of workis a six day break over the Durga Puja holidays – it’s a break stencilled intothe calendar; I’m not allowed any time off per se. The original plan was tomope around at home doing nothing, but then I decided to take charge of my life(to whatever extent), aided by newly infused income, and go somewhere.

There was no planning involved, apart from picking the date.The flight tickets from Chennai, to and from Colombo, cost less than a one-wayticket from Kolkata to Chennai. The airline was SpiceJet. The duration of theflight was an hour, which is barely more than flying from Chennai to Bangalore,and considerably less than Chennai to anywhere that is not South India. No visawas required, so no pre-trip jousting with bureaucracy was called for – all thatwas needed was a printed-out ticket and passport in pocket. My father, veteranof travel that he is, helpfully slipped me some foreign currency and an internationaltravel cash card before I left – things that would prove invaluable once there.Nothing about it felt like an international trip.

I told a couple of people that I was planning to go. Thepurpose wasn’t as much to find travel companions as it was to commit myself tothe trip – I have known myself to be quite flaky about going to places that,while thoroughly enjoyed once there, had problems of inertia in the get-go. Oneof them, let’s call him Ka, said the equivalent of, "oh, cool. I’ll come too."And that was that. He proceeded to attempt to recruit one or two other people,but all of that fell through, and so is irrelevant to the narrative.

The next question was what we’d do once there. Constrainedby time, we could either attempt to cram a whole lot of things in, or try to doone thing leisurely. Initial suggestions of travelling to caves and palaces andother such ‘cultural museum type shit’ were shot down. I asked an acquaintancewho’d been there about interesting things to do, and she suggested whalewatching. But, alas, the whales had fucked off to other climes. Ka’s colleaguehad been a month prior, and he highly recommended Trincomalee, and so wedecided to be beach bums. One of the failed recruits in this journey hadsuggested a Scuba diving course. The two aligned. Ka mailed a couple of peoplein Trinco about the diving course; the response was "It’s the end of theseason, and everything is shutting down. But… we’ll see."

‘We’ll see’ was probably the motto of this trip, for me atleast, for that’s what I told my father, who constantly badgered me aboutdetails and itinerary.

Where are you going togo from Colombo?

We’ll see.

Do you have tickets totravel to Trinco?

We’ll see.

Have you made hotelarrangements in Trinco?

We’ll see… if we getthere.

And so on.

Two days before the date of departure, Ka calls me fromBangalore and asks me to book a bus ticket for him to Chennai, as he wasotherwise occupied. In tune with the vibe of the trip, I book him on a bus thatwas scheduled to reach Chennai at a time that would’ve cut getting to theairport very close – I’d booked it assuming that the time to be allowed was theforty-five minutes required for a domestic journey, and not the two/three hoursrequired for an international one. The ticket was rectified.

My flight from Kolkata was delayed by an hour and a bit,which meant I arrived in Chennai only around midnight. Completely exhausted, Inevertheless did not go to sleep, staying awake till 3 AM emailing people. Notpacking – that was hastily done the next morning, with colour commentaryprovided by my parents and grandmother, egging me along. I threw a bunch ofclothes into my pink tote (easily distinguishable on a baggage belt), made sure that I had the two things absolutely essential (ticket and passport), and ranfor the airport, hoping I wouldn’t miss the flight.

(to be continued)

because i'm bored/ones littering my margin are cuter

2010-02-02T14:59:00.002+05:30

Graph Shark!

well, i never

2009-12-22T00:23:00.001+05:30

I’ve almost entirely stopped watching sport on television, for whatever reason, but on occasion I do venture into places where the fanatical types in college watch and cheer – from where my room is, if there is a fairly unambiguous (in terms of support in the common room) match happening (an India v. someone cricket match, for example – it gets tougher if it’s Federer v. Nadal or something), I only need count the cheers for wickets fallen or the general state of the match.

However, tonight I’d eaten out with two such characters (R and P here), Tendulkar fanatics to the core,* who’d left the Sri Lanka v. India match for the sake of food. As far as they knew, SRL had made 239, and India had progressed with the loss of Sehwag. The plan post-dinner was to head to an ice-cream parlour nearby for dessert.

But then, as we walked down and were just about to leave, R peeks into the Café Coffee Day next to the restaurant, and says ‘dude, we need to check the score’.

He takes a step towards it, exclaims ‘Dude! MASTER IS BATTING!’, and they both run into the CCD, dismissing suggestions of heading to the ice-cream place with a scoff and wave of the hand (it should be mentioned at this point that R refers to Sachin Tendulkar as ‘Master’ with no sense of irony; he’d sound like Peter Lorre if only he snivelled a bit more).

They enter CCD, and promptly plonk themselves at a table that was occupied by a couple (couches, so the couple were canoodling on one, leaving the other free) because it was right in front of the TV. Eventually, they see reason and proceed to a table a little less optimal for viewing, and loudly pontificate on the state of the match and SRT’s prowess.

The state of the match by this point is almost a given – India were comfortably winning, with 7 wickets in hand and 40-odd runs required of more than enough balls in hand (that’s what she said) to trot home.

They, of course, don’t give a crap about that (well, not as much) – they’re frantically calculating the run difference between those required to win, and the number SRT needed to reach his century.

At this point, he was on 75-ish, and given the balls in hand, they were absolutely confident that Dinesh Karthik (who was at the other end) would do the right thing and defend out while given ‘Master’ the strike and means to win.

It wasn’t yet tight vis-à-vis runs left for victory, so they spent their time berating Chandigarh and the residents of Mohali, who deigned to not show up for matches where ‘Master’ was playing, whereas on the other hand this place knew how to celebrate when he scored a boundary (Mohali doesn’t put their back into it), and also that Yuvraj Singh doesn’t have sufficient respect for ‘Master’, and clearly, playing in this Indian team, you’d better have it, or else..

Now it boiled down to India needing 14, ‘Master’ requiring ten at the end of the 41st over. SRT takes a single of the second ball, moving to 91*.

These two are convinced that Karthik knows his place, and will defend out the remaining four balls, allowing SRT a go the next over. The first two balls he faces seemed to stick to the (or, their) plan – he defends, and didn’t really seem interested in scoring.

And then, fifth ball of the over, steps out and smacks one over the top and across the ropes for six runs.

I almost fell out of my chair laughing, while they’re staring at the screen, mouths agape and eyes blazing bloody murder, swearing that he must be dropped from the Indian cricket team forever, nay, from even the Tamil Nadu state team and be condemned to playing for India Cements the rest of his life, how dare he!

Now it’s seven to win, nine needed for the hundred, with SRT on strike. They settle down when he hits a boundary first ball of the over and a single of the second, when they realize that now he’s on 96* (two to win), and if Karthik takes another single, it allows SRT to hit a boundary to seal the victory and his hundred.

The ball is delivered, going down leg side – Karthik tickles it down to fine leg for four.

No dice.

The closing reaction, before the bill was paid with disgust and they stalked out: ‘Dude, he should’ve blocked that ball with his pads!’

* R is someone who, faced with a submission deadline, spat that ‘dude, where are my priorities? Master is batting and I’m sitting in the library footnoting’ and stormed out, and once refused to leave on time for a place we had to be at because Master was batting, and compromised by leaving when Dravid (at the other end) was dismissed instead.

aside

2009-12-07T16:56:00.000+05:30

yo mamma so dumb she set 4'33" as her ringtone.

a slight return

2009-11-30T22:58:00.003+05:30

There's a debate on in college, and seeing as I'm part of the committee that purports to organize the thing, I dip in and out of various facets even if my official post is that of being part of the tab team - perfect because the last thing I'm in the mood for is a horde of Delhi University debaters milling about the quadrangle; hiding in the tab room has a bit of an Upstairs/Downstairs thing going, but infinitely preferable to having to interact with the debaters themselves (I chickened out of having to head up and make an announcement to them, and delegated it to someone else after having gone up, drummed my fingers for half a minute before deciding I didn't have the voice for it).

But anyway, this isn't about the debate experience itself, but about one of the sponsors.

The thing has a load of money from its title sponsor (Corp law firm from England), but that deal went through quite late, before which we'd gained a bunch of smaller sponsors, one of whom is a stationery establishment from Chennai, a small business with a charmingly Mylaporean name.

Now, knowing the guy who did sponsorship, I wonder constantly about the lies thrown at them to make them contribute all the stationery required for the debate - along with which they've sent two of their people to set up a stall to sell notebooks (which they manufacture with self-proclaimed high-quality imported paper) with a 'pick any for Rs. 30' sign in front of it. The sponsorship guy probably promised over four hundred people, all hungry and willing to buy the notebooks; not the best idea when they're being provided with stationery for free, and DU students are hardly going to lug notebooks across the country, imported paper be damned.

Sitting in the room where they store their stock, it's the saddest thing, the absolutely saddest thing in the world to see them shut shop in the late evening, dejection across their faces, lugging all the unsold and still-bound stacks of notebooks from their stall, followed in the end by bringing down the advertising flex and carefully draping it over the stock so noone sees and is tempted to steal it.

I want to cry and hug him and tell him it'll be ok, but feel absolutely shitty about the fact that it may have been a possible misrepresentation on our part that caused them to ship a sizeable amount of stock from Chennai to Bangalore with hopes of (or so it would seem, given the quantity of stock) a fair amount of sales happening - and it's not a huge publisher or something who wouldn't bat an eyelid at not making much money in exchange for the exposure, but a little company who aren't going to get any mileage out of getting a little brand identification with the college crowd.

I can only fantasise that a twitchy smile and buying enough notebooks to last the rest of my college life will provide some succour.

But sigh, those sad sad eyes of the guy..

a word on stephen gately

2009-10-17T19:09:00.002+05:30

This is a hastily written post, so probably not a particularly cogent one – bear with me (yes, all good posts start with a disclaimer about lack of quality).

Stephen Gately of Boyzone died last week while on holiday in Spain with his boyfriend and another man in the vicinity. The post-mortem laid the matter to rest, and his funeral was held.

I was going to write about how it came as a shock that a person fairly well connected with my childhood – probably my first man-crush; I was ten years old – and one with some memories attached to it (more than Michael Jackson – ironic given A Different Beat had a cover of MJ’s ‘Ben’) had passed away.

But then, when reading about his funeral now, I came across a mention of Jan Moir’s comment on his death. My interest piqued (due to the amount of criticism it had invited), I sought it out.

Read it.

It reminded me of an episode of Queer as Folk (UK; Season 1. Episode.. um, four-ish), where the series takes a sudden turn after the general levity of the first few episodes, by having one of the amiable supporting guys go home with someone towards the end of the episode – he snorts cocaine, convulses, and dies.

It was brutal due to its lack of foreshadowing. On the show, at his funeral, his mother blames his homosexuality for his death, asking whether her son would have ever been in that situation if he had been straight.

That is pretty much what she implies – that his ‘homosexual lifestyle’ was to blame for his death, and that 33 year old men don’t just keel over and die. Not 33 year old straight men, at any rate. But that’s reading too much into her piece.

Yes, he died with two other men in the apartment – it probably means they were having/had/going to have a threesome.

So what?

This week, by the way, Britney Spears’ new single ‘3’ debuted at the top of the Billboard Top 100 singles chart. No, it’s not an abstract song. Fergie’s ‘London Bridge’ from a while ago was also about group sex.

Again, so what?

The problem is the hypocrisy with which being ‘edgy’ by singing about such things is accepted without much fuss, while the gay lifestyle is still considered to be a right royal Roman orgy on a daily basis. While the cases of Britney and Fergie aren’t extrapolated to the straight population as a whole, suddenly Gately’s cause of death is the sword of Damocles hanging over every gay person, a ticking time-bomb of a lifestyle that’s going to explode unless defused?

Ok, my views are slightly liberal, so I’m not going to be outraged (or even ponder over) lifestyles that include drink, drugs, dames/dicks and decadent debauchery on a daily basis (I may have gotten carried away with the alliteration there). But if the lifestyle is going to be ascribed solely to the gay lifestyle – the gay celebrity lifestyle and not the straight ones in this case – I have a problem.

‘…I am sure he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine.’

Does that imply that gay men are more impressionable than say, straight people who’re bombarded with the gangsta-rap lifestyle, with the Alpha-geriatric male virility of Hugh Hefner, and the general aspiration to an egregious opulence (Lalit Modi/IPL?) that is shoved down our throats by mainstream media?

And this is even without mentioning what she says about gay marriages (well, civil partnerships) – that it shatters the myth of happily-ever-afters in such unions. When did break-ups and divorces and general heartbreak become the exclusive fiefdom of straight people?

Not having my ear to the ground about such things (hell, came across this due to a mention on the BBC website), I’m not sure whether other deaths have had similar opinions published.

What immediately came to mind upon reading this was the recent death of David Carradine – the setting was (sleazy) Bangkok, died by auto-erotic asphyxiation, or so it is rumoured; the official report, of course, being something else – his family believes him to have been murdered. Michael Hutchence of INXS died over a decade ago, suicide being the stated cause, but the same auto-erotic rumour still hangs over that death too.

Their deaths were tragic. Any death is.

But they (purportedly) died of how they lived, not because of what they were.

Stephen Gately, and his death, deserves to be accorded the same amount of respect.

brevity

2009-10-16T14:08:00.002+05:30

you..

me..

we.

oui?

though a little subsequent googling reveals a 'you me oui'. ah well.

gwaaar!

2009-09-04T21:03:00.003+05:30

Once again, being easily amused...

While internet trolling, I came across the following name:

'Diana Soares'

What about it, you may ask (like she did).

Say the entire name out loud without pausing in between.

How cool is that?! (apart from perhaps schoolyard heckling vis-a-vis choice of profession/obsolescence)

have you heard?

2009-08-30T01:33:00.004+05:30

Oasis are over.

It could be said that it was a wonder that it lasted this long, given the history of murderous behaviour between Liam and Noel Gallagher. Their fights have been well-documented, and Noel and/or Liam have threatened to/have quit before – which lends this (to me at least) an air of disingenuousness/hot-headedness. And many are hoping that is the case.

Oasis were my first favourite band.

The year was 1997, and I thought they were the biggest band on the planet.

In a sense, that was probably the height of their popularity, or at any rate the point at which the curve started to drop. They’re released one of the most successful debuts in UK Chart history, and followed that up with (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, a sophomore album that cemented their legend. 1997 saw the release of their third album Be Here Now, which became the fastest ever first week seller – a record, if I recall correctly, that still stands (and probably will for a while yet, seeing the decline in album sales etc.).

And then came the fall, and all that went with it.

But I didn’t care. Well, I felt really bad that my loyalty (hey, I was 12 then, mind you) was with a band who were such… dicks. They were and still are absolutely arrogant uncouth bastards who badmouth pretty much everyone. It didn’t matter when they made music I cared for. I felt bad for the very decent seeming Damon Albarn, though out of some misplaced loyalty I didn’t start listening to Blur years later.

By the way, I didn’t think Standing on the Shoulder of Giants was all that bad. It was during this period of time though that I experienced the first Oasis crisis – Noel threatening to release a solo album, and Liam adamant that if that happened, Oasis was over. It didn’t happen; crisis averted.

My predominant thought at that point was that they, to me, had so much more to offer, in light of releasing the Beatles-go-to-India tinged ‘difficult’ album that tries (not a difficult prospect, seeing as they were playing with a couple of colours at most till that point, and seemed like they preferred to eat sand than draw) to expand the musical palette. Hardly experimental (coming out at a time when Kid A blew everything else out of the water), but at least they seemed like they were trying.

But three albums later, I’d stopped caring. I didn’t even give Dig Out Your Soul a proper listen, so utterly bereft of character it seemed on the first go, extending the rot carried over from Heathen Chemistry and Don’t Believe the Truth. Were they even trying anymore?

It could also be said that Oasis haven’t been Oasis for almost a decade, that regardless of the song-writers in the band, the ‘classic’ line-up brought with them a scraggly glow that was clinically cauterized after their exit. After Bonehead and Guigsy left, I never could tell the replacements apart. Behind standard-issue sunglasses and inscrutable pouts, the swagger in their music had been replaced with self-important boorishness.

Even looking at them (but I’m just reading too much into it here), the pictures in the article of them then and now… the joy is gone. Liam, incidentally, could be a ringer for Tom Cruise these days (see: the BBC article link; first picture).

Reading about it today, it made me feel sad, when thinking back about how much they meant to me – I had all their albums (till that point) on tape, and scoured Napster, iMesh and Audiogalaxy for B-Sides, covers and anything they’d done. On a dial-up connection.

It’s with some sadness and no relief that I admit to myself that I won’t miss the fact that they’re done. All things end anyway, and I hope it stays this way, lest they get back together and become this generation’s Rolling Stones.

But sigh, they’ll probably be back in a few years.

I refuse to title this post or make any references to 'Live Forever'.

winds of my actions

2009-08-29T11:44:00.004+05:30

It's not often that I go drinking in Chennai, and even less within those occasions to hit bars other than Zara's,* so with some delight I can say that I've been to two new places in the last week.

The first was 10 Downing Street, which is a decent place with food cheaper than Zara's, and a better floor plan - it's the ground floor of a house, so has segments, and feels spacious. Frankly, the wittiest thing about the place is the tags on the doors to the toilets - Maggie for women and Major for men. Truly, the '80s are alive.

The other, and by far more entertaining, was the Xzuberance Bar at the Raj Park Hotel (on TTK Road). Even as we descended I remarked that basement bars have a tinge of shadiness** to them, seeing as they don't have windows and can be a little more stuffy than I'm comfortable with.

The bar has no shoe policy at night and very reasonably priced cocktails (Rs. 160 per, compared to Rs. 300-400ish at Zara's), but oddly enough beer/bottle is priced the same (I am not familiar with the taxes pertaining to alcohol that probably causes it), which was heartening to know that the next time at Zara's drinking beer, I could rest easy and know that it's not too much of a rip-off by Chennai bar standards. Hell, even Chennai Cultural Centre (opposite Satyam Cinemas), place of the 10% levy if 'not a member', charges roughly 120 per bottle. That is, of course, if you haven't ordered a pitcher that's piss-flat.

Anyway, the Xzuberance Bar is also home to the Karmi Kaze, which is one c short of being a wind that's not only divine, but also retributive in the next life - presumably implied post-hangover. Yes, its constitution is pretty much the same as its cousin, except for an affinity for castor sugar, something shared by a fair number of cocktails on the menu. To be fair, was probably a fourth of the drinks on it, but it just seems an ingredient that stands out.

Shadiness of bar menu aside, little placards on the tables advertised Vodka Red Bulls - which at a place like this we hoped would be priced fairly reasonably. But when asked, the reply is 'Um. Red Bull is X rupees. Vodka is Y rupees. You can order the two and mix them. The ads are just there for the tables. We don't actually serve it.' So it went.

The place really lays it thick with free food, rendering the short eats menu useless. Even before the ordering started, preliminaries consisted of some five different eats laid out on the table, enough to suffice as dinner for two, and later on in the night they started breaking out the chicken too (sent back apologetically by two vegetarians.. for the night, in any case).

Oh, and it had Sun TV on, which was playing '80s music - glittery (like, actually glittering) costumes, bushy mustaches and sets that hinted at a future capacity for economic prosperity/profligacy.

Whee.

* Well, also did go to Zara's, which has introduced a bunch of shameless new 'fusion' drinks, which regardless of how they taste (mine had a bunch of constituents I didn't recognize, but sounded cool and Japanese), come with battery-operated glowing faux ice-cubes. In three different colours. The blue looks like Prometheus emerging from the depths of the Arctic, while the green looks like liquid Kryptonite. They're quite harmful to indecisive drinkers unsure of what to order. Ooh, ooh. Light in drink.

** We were aware though that the two of us were probably contributing to the shadiness of the place - one bald guy and another in black tee shirt and torn jeans. While we can and did comment upon the shadiness, other people seeking something similar possibly saw and took us into consideration when computing the shadiness of the establishment.

Two posts in three days. Scary.

bother

2009-06-24T01:15:00.001+05:30

Walking back at ‘round midnight (with due respect to Dexter Gordon), I realize that I never really did pay attention to the route I took when walking back from my pub of choice since before hitting legal age till date and home.

I don’t have much of a constitution, and whatever that I have is over and above my bladder capacity at any rate. As I stand up and walk out, I think to myself whether I should take a leak. Nah, I think to myself. I’ll last. The seed of a bad idea.

We stand outside, making chit-chat. Hugs ensue. I walk a woman back home – it is late, after all, and it’s not too much off my path. But it is off my path. I contemplate asking her whether I can stop at her place. But I don’t. Germination ensues.

I’ve walked this path a lot. I mean, not to exaggerate, but perhaps close to a hundred times. All at similar times of the night, though with varying levels of sobriety. It’s a wonder I’ve never been stopped by the cops, or been mugged, or had any incident at all.

This time though, like other times, as I’m walking back, I don’t really feel the distance. However, having walked someone else back, I had taken a deviation. Now I’m on the road, trying to figure out which way to go, even as it dawns that I have the capacity of a thimble, if one with a delayed release mechanism.

So, now, I’m walking by, wondering which way to go, in the knowledge that I’m in roughly the right direction, to emerge somewhere eventually, with a rapidly filling bladder. The question is, do I let myself go now, or endure.

Public urination.

Now, are there set conventions? I wondered, even as I tried to motor towards home base.

Do not urinate in public is the overarching one – flouted constantly.

When it’s twelve at night, what are the conventions?

For one thing, I thought that taking deep breaths of the night air would be a pointer – if I can smell the pee, it’d be safe to go there. Boldly go where many have gone before. But no luck, and no pee.

Pee where nobody is around the immediate vicinity would be one. It’s just not on to take a leak on someone sleeping on the pavement, or in his/her personal space.

But any people at all? Now, people squatting around at a distance where they can perceive what is happening is probably a no-no, but those who’re walking by can just keep walking – live and let live.

Pee on walls. That is to say, don’t pee on shuttered storefronts and the like. Probably more likely to get rapped by security guards in any case. The same goes for apartment buildings. Plus, they’re brightly lit.

Dark zones are required. State property seems to be a magnet – any transformer, fuse box or construction normally reeks of piss.

But is there an exception to the watchmen rule? I was desperate, and still some way off. I had my sneakers on, and broke into a run, but still couldn’t make it.

I stopped, pinching my parts to stop the urge. Looking around for a suitable spot that wasn’t well-lit or a storefront, I saw a house wall. But the problem was, I knew the people living there, and knew they had a watchman.

Too bad.

As I was relieving myself, the diligent watchman wakes up and runs up to me, thankfully mindful of my needs – waiting till I finish – and then starts yelling at me.

What can I say? I’m clearly in the wrong, and without excuse. And I can’t get a word in too, between his abuses and fist-shaking. Finally when he’s done, I look him in the eye and tell him who lives at the residence, and his parents’ and wife’s name to boot. Comprehension dawns, but the disgust remains.

However clearly I’ve gained the upper hand, and I rouse myself to haughtily tell him to merely inform his employers, and to get in touch with me in the morning, if they’re so concerned.

I unhook the phone before I go to bed. It might be a long day tomorrow.

i went there on business

2009-06-14T11:28:00.002+05:30

… and our previous product, the Sympathetic Overtaking Handlebar was a big success, so after that, we were looking to diversify into new territories, had a bit of cash in our pockets and… one thing led to another, and here we are.

(smiles)

You mentioned this Sympathetic…

Yes, SOH was introduced in Norway a few years ago and was a big hit in the modification market. Made for scooters mostly, it calibrates the handlebar to a level that causes the shoulders to droop considerably, while still remaining ergonomic, and this makes the rider seem depressed and sympathetic. Tests showed that when a driving who’d been side-swiped, for example, by a scooter, was less prone to rage when he or she saw the rider in such a position, rather than a more erect and confrontational position…

It was quite a success. We were commended by the Ministry of Transport for reducing road-rage by a not inconsiderable margin.

Well, moving on, some critics have said that your company’s service is akin to the Toyota Prius, in that it’s a symbol of being environmentally sound, while…

I know what you mean, seeing as we worked closely with the automotive industry for some years. Volkswagen for example makes diesel-engines that purport to give better mileage than the hybrid cars. It seems it’s important for people to not only be ‘green’, but also seen being ‘green’, which is a reason for the relative failure of hybrid options on production vehicles as opposed to a car that is only hybrid – the Prius effect, you could call it.

But I stress here that our service isn’t so. For one thing, what expansion we seek to achieve in other countries outside of Scandinavia, we’re looking to do with local resources only, and set up a decentralized network, wherein minimum input is required from one branch to the other.

And it’s nice to think of ourselves as a big tree, even if a little ironic.

Lastly, I’d like to mention that other critics, and I think this is a more serious criticism, say you’re simply making a profit out of destruction.

To be honest, I’d have to agree to an extent. It’s something that kept me up a lot when conceptualizing this project, but ultimately I’ve come to terms with it.

Basically, if we weren’t doing this, the world would be a little further down the slope, yeah? It’s making the best of a bad situation, seeing as they aren’t going to stop, and the best we can do is offset. We understand their concerns too, which is why we function for the most part as a non-profit anonymous-donation based, but recently bands have also been discreetly contacting us about the most efficient way to go about the task itself, and not merely looking at offset, which is frankly a welcome change in outlook. And we allow them to be very hands-on in execution, which gives them the satisfaction of the job done as well as the comfort that they’re not hurting this planet.

Bands have a fair degree of awareness and would do the offset themselves, but they’re lacking in the wherewithal, and the PR fallout would be... But they know that it’s something that must be done. Bands… responsible bands who recognize this have been vehement in their support of us.

That’s why we’re looking at expanding, because bands in Britain, Texas, Shillong, wherever, they’re reaching out and evincing interest in this project, which I think is laudable. They recognize that it’s compatible with their… proclivities.

On that hopeful note, I’d like to thank you for sparing your time, and wish your new business endeavour – Carbon Neutral Church Burning, all the success it deserves.

Thank you. Always a pleasure talking to you.

throwaway

2009-06-01T00:39:00.001+05:30

writers write.
authors haggle
for the copyright.

still easy to amuse

2009-05-26T00:43:00.000+05:30

'I'm a better juggler than you are.'

'Balls.'

it's no fun till someone dies

2009-05-14T01:10:00.000+05:30

Do you believe in curses?

When I heard that R (long-legged, blue-blooded, stiff-upper-lipped boy who also roams these parts) had cursed an auto-driver, I have to say that I subconsciously inserted an ‘at’ in there, and wondered what abuse the man had been subjected to.

No, turns out that R had indeed cursed the man. To die, no less, by… um, I think sometime now. Crash into a wall and die, I believe.

The exact words weren’t so much an invocation of the demon brothers; rather, a mothy wave of the hand (attributed) and a ‘Oh, I curse you to…’, much in the manner of ordering for antipasto with an upturned nose.

Of course, the curse wasn’t exactly concrete, seeing as it was very accommodating to the needs and schedules of the curse gods, being as it was a curse to smite the auto-driver (by way of death) ASAP.

As soon as possible, if that’s not too much bother, you know, seeing as you’re omnipotent and all, Curse God, by the weekend would be nice, and not too painless as well (impaled on a fence would be acceptable). Send in acknowledgement by registered post to undersigned, with maybe a chipped tooth or two as proof of specific performance.

I shouldn’t stereotype the kind of people who would, could and should be capable of administering curses (I myself have one looming over my head since mid-2007), but as was pointed out, R is hardly the sort of earthy, one-with-nature skull-necklace wearer who’d go around cursing people. He’s a little too… um, shadowy for that, whether or not the fingers twitch and twiddle with curses on his mind.

What’s shadowy? I’m not really sure how it’s being defined here, other than as one who purports to keep his nose (or at least his fingernails) clean, even will constantly poking at subject-matter with a pole.

In any case, here’s a solitary prayer for an auto-driver with an overzealous metre, one that refuses to be reined in by conventional distance discourse and iridium-platinum alloys lying in Sevres.

grouchy

2009-05-04T20:32:00.001+05:30

I’ve written a few posts about a cousin in the US who’s getting married to a Californian. Elder brother probably felt the pressure, and popped the question to his then-girlfriend, who said yes and so is now fiancé.

Like the good TamBrahm boy that he is (whether he/we like it or not), he promptly told his parents, who told their parents (my grandparents) and my parents, and from thereon in proliferated like a badly fonted (is that a word?) chain mail. Apt, given the number of people they’ve been sent to (I’ve received independent intimations from father, mother and grandmother).

For starters, my mother sent a congratulatory note to him, also CCed to a couple of other people – which I’d think could be a slight invasion of privacy for the cousin, having his emails to his aunt being promptly forwarded to other people in the family. But it’s probably par for the course in my family, and nothing unexpected.

My grandmother is currently in the US, helping (overseeing? Controlling?) with the wedding preparations for the sister of this one. She hasn’t met his fiancé yet, but heard from him, and is at her son’s (my uncle) place, and they’ve met her before – I would think that they’d provide a description of what she was like, and most definitely would have provided pictures of her.

She sends an email to dozen-odd family members, informing them of the news, saying blah blah blah, he proposed, she said yes, they’re both very happy.

Now, I should admit here that I’m being mean.

With that out of the way…

She provides one line of description. To be honest, I don’t know what I would’ve said.

‘Great news! X is now engaged. His fiancé is…’

Fiancé is… pretty? Is a woman? (hey, how dare you insinuate that anyone in this family be gay?!) She’s white? She’s tall? She’s blonde? She’s… qualified as whatever she’s qualified as, with schooling at wherever?

One line of description in the email, after mentioning that she’s his classmate at the University:

‘She is a Jew.’

Oh, how I love my family.

easily amused

2009-04-30T14:14:00.002+05:30

> To paraphrase a professor,

FGM* isn't restricted to a particular section of women in Africa. FGM cuts across religious, social and ethnic boundaries.

No pun intended, it goes without saying.

*What is FGM, you ask? Why, it's Female Genital Mutilation! Also goes without saying, it would seem.

kitty at my foot, i wanna touch it

2009-04-15T15:16:00.001+05:30

While the blog lists the post from the 18th of February, I heard of this initiative by the Pink Chaddi Campaign only a couple of days back.

Basically, they’ve gone Web 2.0 on our collective asses (arses?), and are soliciting videos from people doing ‘something we love, something we think is definitely a part of Indian culture (and let no one dare disagree) – therefore allowing anything to fly. Further strength is added when stating ‘… shared culture. Not the fake, monolith, imaginary culture….. it is messy, complicated, wonderful. Each of us define Indian culture differently. No one is wrong, no one is more right.’

‘Hey, it’s my culture, and being Indian, it would be Indian culture.’

Just imagine the possibilities of deadpanning…

Take 1:

‘I live near a railway station, and often loiter around the area. People always seem to have change in their pockets, and when extracting their tickets or whatever from there, invariably drop change on the floor. Some notice, most don’t. I pick up the change on the floor and look towards the person, but I’ve never returned the change, unless they happen to finally notice and then ask.

But, I can’t spend it, or I just never have. I stare at the money, the not-quite-ill-gotten yet not honest gains, and feel guilty about it. I have a roll upon roll of lost change, a shrine to the cracks of the economy through which loose change slips through and vanishes.

This is Indian Culture!’

Take 2:

‘I have a goldfish bowl just enough to fit my head, and I dunk my head in it, which causes all the water to flush out, leaving the goldfish slapping themselves against my cheeks as they expire.

This is Indian culture!’

Take 3:

‘I work at a hospital morgue, and during autopsies, after everything is done and nobody’s looking, I gut the cadaver, remove the small and large intestines and squeeze out all the undigested food that was in the body when the person died.

This is Indian culture!’

Take 4:

‘I throw puppies from my balcony, just to see if they bounce.

They never do.

This is Indian Culture!’

Take 5:

‘I lick condom rims.

This is Indian Culture!’

… and so on, not even to mention things that could be out of Tom Green flick.

projection. projectile?

2009-04-12T17:10:00.002+05:30

> A, B and BullShitter in an auto. A and B discussing books, and turns to Big Brother.

BS: Big Brother? Where’s that from?

A: Er… 1984?

BS: 1984? That’s a book? Who’s it by?

A: Er… George Orwell?

BS: Oh, George Orwell is one of my favourite writers. I’ve read all his books. My favourite is Animal Farm. But I haven’t heard of this one… is it famous?

> I've just acquired a new toothbrush.

It’s not that I didn’t have one before, but now I have two.

I’ve decided that the best way to go about brushing my teeth twice a day is by having two separate brushes - one for the morning, and one for the night, rather than have the same brush wear out twice as fast, from being used twice a day.

However, seeing as how the night brush would be for a shorter time frame (something like 7-8 hrs of sleep) and also involve no ingestion of food, the night brush is a cheaper model than what the morning brush, which while on the face of it may seem like cutting corners, a rationalization for having two brushes instead of one.

But, should the night brush be the better one? While it’s for the night and the teeth will be brushed again in the morning, it is the night brush in fact which would be scrubbing at the oral waste accumulated over the course of the day, with the morning brush serving as ancillary to it, rather than the other way around…

Hm.

I have two different types of toothpaste too.

an evening with mouse on mars

2009-04-05T02:32:00.006+05:30

Mouse on Mars to me is like the first Iron Maiden concert to the metal-heads of the city. Having such a band come to an accessible city was a first for me (sorry, Rolling Stones, but I got into you after going for the concert). Maybe one and a half, after Opeth. But still.

Unfortunately, while I was bouncing about in college after the news broke, surrounding reactions were muted, to put it mildly, when I breathlessly went ‘OMGOMGOMG MOUSE ON MARS ARE PLAYING. HERE!!’ – almost universally met with a ‘Eh? Huh? Who?’, or some variation thereof, which also dimmed my excitement a bit. Still, even with the show being scheduled right before my paper submissions, there was no way I was going to miss this show…

… which was exactly what I almost did when the person I was supposed to go with cancelled because of a prior engagement at a pizza place, after having waited for a bit to see if the dinner would end, eating into precious transport time. Standing on the pavement (with Lou Reed piped into my ears) and looking up and through the transparent glass, seeing him at the table with an animated American sharing Obama stories with them, I just had a horrible feeling about how the night was going to progress.

Further, Mysore Road was blocked because of some huge Hindu festival that had lots of people on the road even at midnight, causing a further diversion. This though was mitigated by a friendly Tamil-speaking auto driver who also had an honest metre installed.

Having missed the opening act (who were supposedly quite good), I went up the steps of Max Mueller Bhavan (a tinge of marijuana smoke in the air) to try and locate a couple of other people who I was supposed to meet at the venue, groping my way through the darkness of the hall (and unfortunately and unintentionally kind of brushing the bum of the same guy twice) which was waiting for the main act to take the stage.

Soon, the house lights came on. A remarkable (not surprising) number of Germans around – the only vaguely familiar faces I could make out were the drummer and guitarist of Lounge Piranha(s). I did briefly dally with going up to the drummer and introducing myself (I’d once called him cute in a rapist sort of way in some post; he emailed), but. It did make me wonder what they were up to, though. I miss watching them at Maya; live music ban be damned.

I found a friend/something I hadn’t seen for some time, and while chatting her up the other two people I was to locate also arrived, just in time for the band to take the stage. It may have been something in the air (and I could smell it), but I was slightly regretting that I was neither inebriated nor otherwise under the influence for the performance – which when told to the f/s, was met with ‘I am soooooo stoned.’ Knickers with yellow beer cans littered about.

And then the band came on.

They kicked off with a song (not sure of the title) which set the tone and the rhythm. Their drummer is a god. I was feeling all awkward and inadequate with a stuttering sway with hands in pockets, even as others danced around me. But, well, I was getting into it (sadly though, the other two weren’t quite getting into this kind of music, which dulled it slightly).

As I'm wont to do though, it was more fun watching the other people there. Lots and lots of Germans singing along, heavily (overheard - A: We're going out to smoke. B: Ok. A: And I don't mean cigs) drugged/slushed, frenetically swaying along. Up front, there were also a bunch of similarly clad women (strappy top, billowy coloured bottom, trinket-embroidered bag) swaying like hypnotic lemmings teetering on the edge, eyes closed in spiritual fervour, SLR camera in one hand with both paws held up. Most excellent noise, augmented by scrolling messages on the background that noone seemed to pay much attention to, and absolutely epilepsy-inducing lighting.

The sound was ear-shreddingly loud. I don’t mean intensity – the speakers were just so damn loud (up, up and way beyond 11) that pretty much every person was clutching their exposed ear halfway through the first song.

Once they started tearing through ‘Actionist Respoke’ (the vocals on that one always tickle me), and this is a song and a half in, mind you, the three of us were already feeling a little worn out, and retreated to the back – where the packed swayers give way to more spatially secure loose-limbed gyrations – before retreating downstairs at the end of the song.

The majority of the concert was spent on the steps leading up to the entrance, tickling a really cute brown dog (with completely soft skin). And we could still here the music clearly, if shorn of a little nuance. We headed back up in time for a ‘you’re a great audience’, but ducked out again after a few minutes to address practical considerations like beating the wave of auto-seeking people.

Even though I spent a substantial portion of the concert out of the hall, I can still fairly confidenly state that it was a really good concert - such was the volume. Yes, I admit that I'm probably not at all hardcore and this is what such a gig is about and all that. Please.

The band kicked absolute holistic ass, but it was a little peculiar that the ideal spot to experience the sound was probably on the landing halfway between the ground and first floor.

And, alas, they didn't play Subsequence.

overturing twitter

2009-03-30T00:59:00.002+05:30

> Discussing lunch plans on Ugadi:

A: Most of the shops are closed, but the Chinese place* is open.

B: Really? What, it's not like they're Chinese inside too...

* a grimy hole-in-the-wall joint outside campus.

> It's disturbing how the original Fast and the Furious is being talked about in some circles now as a minor classic (in anticipation of the latest entry in the series) - more an indication of just how bad the sequels were, perhaps.

> Mildly depressing to find myself accessing the iTunes libraries of other people to only listen to music that I'd already heard - and had in fact given to those people.

cue Jello Biafra

2009-03-17T20:58:00.004+05:30

written in/around March 2007. There were some pictures in the original post that are now seemingly long-lost, so any references to pictures should be excused. And, it's much to long to go through and clean up, so let it come as it is.

There's a part 2 too.

----

A caveat at the outset: exaggerations, misplaced spite, irrelevant detours and non-chronological interjections abound. Very little may end up having to do with the actual tangible sights of the country. And, very few names will be provided.

Aaaand…we’re off. Der Mozzer (dM) in tow.

Departure was a pain. Blue moon is international travel, and am glad. Was looking forward to bonding with D before she left for Australia (on a flight scheduled 15 min before mine), but blocks in the flow of things meant she boarded before I got past security, which meant no proper goodbye. Won’t see her for six months. Tch.

I don’t like flying in general; prefer to travel by land. Most beautiful and abundant starry night though. Well, every night, but this one I witnessed, high in the sky and above the smoke. When slightly high on wine. Red.

Side note: Booze is everywhere in Cambodia. EVERY. WHERE. Restaurants, departmental stores, the road-side, temples…everywhere.

Anyway, I’d forgotten that international flights serve booze. I was being all modest with dM sitting nextwards. Was quite tragic, especially with the different types of beer that were being shuttled across. Indians know how to take advantage of free booze. Observed on the flight.

Immigration is scary. I feel jittery and sweaty when the official looks up blankly to scrutinize each person passing through. I started giggling. Not a good idea, so ducked my head under the counter. Man was not impressed, but retained mask. Slight twitch of the eyebrow before handing back the passport. Recurrent at every airport.

There was this hot guy in a black tee shirt, shorts and pai chappals who was behind me at immigration. Not the hippie herb sort who wear Bob Marley, carry Che and seldom bathe. He was a clean chappie who wore GAP branded shorts. Delectable. Made a mental note to point him out to D. Obviously, that didn’t happen.

Transit at Bangkok. Bangkok airport is wonderfully Spartan in design (though that probably isn’t the word I should be using), and the toilets smell of bubblegum. Most wonderful it was. Best smelling toilet I’d ever paid a visit to. But, once relieved, that smell mixed with whatever is in urine to give of a scent most foul. Quite a letdown. Fidgeted in the lounge (a first. Bangkok Airways provides lounge passes for economy too!) and misled by the man sitting there vis-à-vis the boarding time, which almost led to missing the connection, but made it with a couple of people behind to assuage the guilt at holding up the bus. Landed in Siam Reap in the afternoon. Searing temperature.

Side note: It’s a trade-off for the Indian tourist vis-à-vis whether to escape to a destination that offers a climate cooler and more pleasant than home base, or to visit the discomfort of a place like Cambodia. The positive here is that the other tourists from the temperate regions all dress in mini mini shorts, the men are almost always topless and women in itsy-bitsies. Lots of sweaty eye candy for everyone.

The hotel did have a small pool, but it had been colonized by the French. French women look lovely when wet. It’s the way their hair smoothens out with the water running over it. The bikinis might also have something to do with it, but that isn’t really visible when they are in the water.

Ventured out in the evening to the market, and decided to sit in on a free concert (free being the operative word) advertised as ‘Music by Bach, songs by Beatocello’. Who Beatocello was, we had no clue, but was a pretty snazzy looking auditorium, which happened to be part of a hospital for children run by one Dr. Beat Richner (to paraphrase: I am Beat and this is my cello. Together we are Beatocello. And then he went on about Beatocellino, Beatocellisimo etc.). It was more a fund raising gig than a concert. One song was about the fund’s bank account number. He was a funny guy who reminded me of a Polar Bear stuck in a zoo.

Next morning, went to the Angkor Wat temple to see the sun rise over it. We missed most of it because we were stan ding in the wrong area. Took pictures of people taking pictures, and a couple of hazy ones of the sunrise itself. Hit Angkor Thom later on, which consisted of three (or four..or five) temples that remained in varying states of ruin, grandeur and seriousness. I divided my time between soaking in the place and stalking tourists. Unfortunately, had to delete most of the snaps of the other tourists when I started running out of space in the camera. However, a couple did survive.

Taking pictures was a chore, with dM instructing me to take X spot or Y bas-relief so that she could send it to her minions. After a point, I was egging the battery to die so that I could actually see the place (and people), rather than having to be at the end of many an ‘Isn’tthatnicetakeapicture’. Not to say that I didn't want any pictures at all, but to attack a monument camera-first seems wrong. She was also slightly irked that I was taking pictures of rubbish strewn around the place, or of someone's spit etc.

Went to a cultural dance in the evening, which was an hour of slow movement and dM c hatting up a family from Chennai who were sitting next to us. They were from T. Nagar. I must be alone in thinking that if I were that family, I wouldn’t want to be disturbed by general chatter about where children are studying etc. But, people from every country seem to gravitate towards each other (like the Iyengars below). Had my first taste of Guiness at this place, and dM took three fuzzy pictures of the process (only evidence that places me in Cambodia or this holiday).

Detour: The signs in and around Cambodia and Thailand were quite fascinating, even if utterly banal. The signs in Thailand were always most courteous, and also to the point of borderline apologetic when asking for a donation.

An interesting one (that I didn't take a picture of) was inside the Angkor Wat complex, which had around 8 symbols of things to do and not do. While the usual no smoking, no littering etc. were there, at the bottom was a white tee shirt encased in a circle with a blue background. Most European tourists roam shirtless, and so 'twas a warning to be clothed. Heh. Another sign in the royal palace (Phnom Penh) forbid sleeveless shirts and skirts/shorts that expose anything above the knee.

Ironic: A 'Please Respect the natural environment' sign nailed to a tree.

Anyway, the next day we visited the main temples of Angkor Wat, which are three creepy looking structures that were probably the inspiration for all the set design of Mortal Kombat. Or Shredder’s arm guard (probably not exclusive to him). It has a silent grandeur that isn’t moved by the chatter of the crowd.

The climb up to the chamber where the idols are kept is extremely steep, and I was unsettled during my ascen t by a German woman who kept shouting back to a companion below her to ‘luk dhown!’ It was finger and toe tingling stuff, and as I scampered up the final few steps, a thought about the statistics of the number of people who get injured there flitted through my head. dM had even more difficulty, she being afflicted with vertigo. But we both made it, and hopefully spent enough time up there to make it worth the effort. Up here was where I found the spit.

Back down, the four walls that surround it are absolutely infested with bas-reliefs that depict the Ramayana, Mahabharata and a couple of other Hindu tales. It contains enough for a fundamentalist to shit orange.

Side note: The Tuk-tuk, an auto-rickshaw type contraption that consists of a carriage hooked to a scooter is the cheapest mode of motorised personal transport in Cambodia (though the word in Bangkok refers to their iteration of the auto-rickshaws seen in India), and is a perfectly sensible and reasonably enjoyable vehicle to move around. But, I loathe the name, which, though probably derived from the sound of the scooter exhaust, seems destined solely to elicit squeals of delight from fat, middle-aged women who say the word and go into spasms of delight and want to pose in one so that they can show it to the eyes back home.

The next day was spent with the 2 Iyengars (which they themselves proclaimed to be their defining characteristic) of an advanced age we had run into earlier, thanks to dM who had coordinated with them for a variety of reasons (mostly pity, I think). One of them (anointed R) was writing a book on Angkor Wat, which, from what I gathered was to be based on a three day trip and ample cogging from literature provided by the Archaeological Survey. The other (M) liked to travel, say ‘madam’, prod a lot and correct the stringy pronunciation of the people there (who say ‘Hellooooo’ and ‘Pineappulllll’ with their voice trailing off towards the end). Both were also slowly killing the guide with questions and proclaiming the supremacy of Sanskrit over Khmer (local language derived from Sanskrit). R’s other hobbies included delivering unsolicited sermons to random tourists and hopping over restrictive fencing into prohibited zones. He also reminded me of Leslie Nielsen.

Ultimately, they weren’t able to actually visit the sites that were scheduled for the day, because of their weak legs and hilly terrain that was required to be negotiated. The first was a place considered sacred because of many lingas that were blessing a river (and quite worn out i n the run). Getting there was as much as the actual place. A half hour trek through a woody hill that strongly reminded me of Rashomon to get to the site where the lingas lay. The other two sites were small temples that had some exquisite carving (and where R did his rope hopping).

Side note: dM does not recommend Cambodia as a honeymoon destination, as seeing the place is too exhausting, leaving little energy for other things.

The next day, it was found that what we thought was the 1000 lingas wasn’t really the place, and had to go to another place to see yet more worn out (and decidedly less impressive) lingas immersed in the river side, with some river bed carving too. I think the people might have been doodling on route to some other destination. Next to this place was a waterfall that was a popular destination for tourists foreign and local, with an overpowering smell of foam, fish and coconuts. Also here was the ‘Reclining Buddha’, which is carved on an extremely large rock and has a little structure constructed at the top with stairs leading up to view it.One very intriguing sight was an old and pious looking woman who had her picture taken with a whole bundle of notes splayed across the base of the Buddha, and once done, stuffed all the notes back into her purse.

Side note: Only one dog in Cambodia was friendly towards me. No, I don’t repel animals.

From there, ploughed on to the floating village, a community of fishermen who live on the lake (egads..the name..the name) full-time, with floating school, two floating churches, floating basketball court and floating souvenir shop. I felt it was just wrong to take close-ups of the houses, especially the interiors, but most thought otherwise. Ah well.

In Siem Reap market, my burning question is about this picture. Been trying to find out who the artist is. Signed Luttrell, but copyrighted to one G.B. Lutrell (with only one t), google seems to draw a blank. Spotted at a restaurant. Nice way to live for the Italian proprietor, who married a Cambodian, hangs around all day while his staff does the cooking, and lives upstairs in a little bedroom.

Phnom Penh has a pizzeria by the name of ‘Happy Herbs’. Speciality being the happy pizza, or sometimes the extra happy pizza that turns off the light for a day or two. Disadvantage of travelling with dM. Hotel had a grumpy French owner by the name of Alexis who was also instantly ravishable, and was in the style of either a rehab clinic or a Columbian drug money mansion.

Over to Thailand, where by far the most enjoyable experience in Bangkok is the night market, where dM went hunting for a fake Rado watch (for a friend of a friend). Fake everything is over there, and with smiling Thais who make it extremely difficult to haggle with in spite of having full knowledge of a haemorrhaging wallet. Picked up seasons one and two of Grey’s Anatomy and season one of House M.D., and also Love.

Side note: When a mother wants to see a sex show, the son MUST refuse. It is a test. It is a test. It is a test.

Lingering image of an obese, large, half-naked, heavily tattooed and drunk American playing air-guitar and doing the sort of walk that KISS do on-stage.

In Bangkok airport, I saw a girl reading the novelisation of this movie.

Ugh.

day trip

2009-03-12T22:45:00.005+05:30

hadn't actually read through this before posting - realize belatedly how badly edited/formatted/written it is. plead clemency in lieu of fixing it.
--
The Taj Express was to leave for Agra at 715AM. Blathering unintelligibly in Hindi to the rickshaw driver who had fleeced me about bad things happening to him, I ran for the train at 650 in the morning wearing a tee-shirt and shorts. Ok, I’ve never been to Delhi before.

Once on the train, I stow my lone and quite puny looking backpack amongst the longer, thicker and definitely better endowed packs of the foreign tourists, they already having formed a gang to boss around my little pack, pushing it to the end of the line, leaving it cold and exposed.

Rescuing it from low temperature and exposure was this kindly looking gent, pushing 60 with a coat wrapped around one arm. Very harmless looking. People do touch other people’s packs for the purpose of stowing their own packs in the liberated room. But, this man didn’t have a pack. Ok. And this man was now walking away with my pack. Ok.

It was cold in the morning and I was snuggled into my seat, but behaviour of this sort was totally unacceptable. I should have been at his throat, calling him saale and chooth, the two Hindi words that I’d picked up from films. Instead, I politely prodding his ribs, asking him to return my bag. Please. After approximately the third intonation and seventh prod, the man slickly let go and kept walking. It really was a smooth and practiced release of the bag. He must have been at this for a long time.

So, back in seat and bag in tow, I had the feeling that this was going to be a bad day. Didn’t get better when on the train, the man sitting next to me spilt tea on my arm. Hot tea too. I should have definitely stayed in bed.

Once out in Agra, I was immediately accosted by a ‘guide’, one who guaranteed to show me around for Rs. 300, a massive pay cut from his usual fee of Rs. 475. Paying attention to him was my first mistake. To get to Fathepur Sikri, I had to buy a tour that used a bus. But no, this nice man on his auto insisted that was impossible. Believing him in my cold irritation was my second mistake. He very graciously proclaimed that he’d accept money only at the end of the day, after safely depositing me back at the train station. So guides make mistakes too.

Agra is a city where every individual looks to help out the economy. For example, if I ask someone to transport me to place X, I’d also have to beat away ten requests to buy shoes, leather bags, fabric and cane wheelchairs. Do they extract a commission from every sale made on a referral? Probably not. But their concern for the economy is touching.

So, once in the auto owned by Apu, though piloted by his brother to whom I wasn’t properly introduced, we set off for the Taj. Throughout the short journey, I silently berated myself for knowingly and willingly getting conned by these people.

En route, brother of Apu fills me in on the con artists who’d be working the Taj. Do not hire a guide. Do not buy anything. Marble is not cheap. Marble is not yellow. Mobile phones not allowed. You can surrender the phone to the cloakroom, or. Or you can give it to me. I shall keep it safe. For you.

Politely smiling, I stepped out towards the Taj, phone safely in pocket. A little winding road led up to the heavily guarded entrance. After removing my SIM card from the phone, I turned it in at the cloakroom, a place that inspired no sense of security.

As predicted, a guide latched onto me, offering his services for a mere Rs. 50, against his normal charge of Rs. 650. Even as my pleas for clemency fell on deaf ears, the surly looking soldier (later corrected to guard) picked me out for a random search, something that saved me from the guide. Scrutinizing my passport, he wasn’t convinced that I was suitable to enter the Taj. Well, until he looked at religion, gave the space and approving tap and grunted ‘Hindu’. Like that makes a difference at this place.

Once inside, I eavesdropped on the guides and rejoiced that I’d saved myself fifty bucks. Impressive monologues, but culled directly from plaques placed all over the place. I’ve mugged stuff for English recitation too.

The place is smashing, not drowned by hype, but personally, I found the people there more interesting, and took quite a few pictures of people taking pictures. Also pictures of people not taking pictures, pictures of engravings on benches and scribblings on the marble, children playing, couples, parrots, documentary filmmakers etc. And of the Taj too. I haven’t worn a watch in at least four years, and my source of time had been the phone.

Having surrendered that, I either looked to the sky or stole furtive glances at the not so naked wrists of other tourists. After what I’d estimated to be an hour and a half of soaking in the place, I left. Not because I wanted to, but because brother of Apu had told me to. In retrospect, what would he have done had I been late? Not much.

Still, once out, after collecting my phone from the room, I looked around. All paths were the same. Which way to Rome? Fuck. Picking one, I started, only to be blocked by hawkers and rickshaw-wallahs offering a ride to Agra fort. Breaking into a jog to avoid them, I broke free. And then I realized, the brother of Apu was nowhere to be found. With good reason, since this wasn’t the place where I’d left him.

Now, I’m guessing most people would have turned back. Even I would have turned back on a different day. But I was in no mood to encounter the hawks again, and so continued in the wrong direction, hoping to find a turn that’d lead me back to Brother. The turn never materialized. Instead, I walked to Agra fort.From inside Agra Fort, one can see the Taj. Drummed into my head just exactly how far I was from BoA. Spent the best part of four hours in there to avoid a (in all probability) pissed BoA and to kill time. While contemplating the immediate future, and watching overzealous photographers directing grumpy tourists to cup their hands so as to look like they were holding the Taj, Daeddy called.

After concocting lies about how wonderful the place was to the D, I decided to shadow this one tourist around the place. Alone and quite ravishing, it was fun being ten steps behind, in a stalking sort of way. He didn’t seem to mind. Didn’t take a picture of him though, out of respect. Yes, I am extremely aware that I make terrible first impressions.

Once I felt enough time had elapsed, I exited the fort to search for a place to eat. Carefully avoiding eye contact, I made my way to the dusty Hotel Akbar, dining house of kings. Only two tables were laid out, one occupied by an extremely noisy family (something of an epidemic in the North it appears). Too late to back out, and too hungry as well. Only a cutlet on the train and the liquid tea patch till 1600 hrs. I didn’t mind, but self imposed starvation usually leads to a terrible day-after. Something I had to avoid. Then again, I wasn’t so sure about that after sinking into their food.

Fed and watered, I needed a plan. No, fuck that. I just need to get out of here. But the train is only at 7. Let’s walk around then. Aligning myself in a direction that I hoped would lead me to the train station, I took off. Walking is wonderful in that it allows taking in the little things that would have been missed when speeding by in a bus or an auto. The gaudy fashion not included.

Pretty sure that I was lost, and with a steady drizzle slowly picking up, I waved down a rickety looking rickshaw. After turning down his looped offer to take me shopping, we started on our way to the station. This guy had been taking me in the wrong direction in the hope that I’d go shopping. Maybe the shop keepers offer transport too.

The man’s pedalling was the huffing-puffing-but-getting-nowhere sort. Excruciatingly bumpy and slow, at least the contraption had a hood that kept out the revving rain, only washing the mud off the hood onto the jacket draped over my knees. Like the heart monitor of an unattended patient going into cardiac arrest, the driver displayed fits of life before finally dying and declaring that his vehicle had sustained a puncture.

He helpfully flagged down another rickshaw and transferred me onto it. One without a hood. In the rain. And one with no discernible seat. And a wild-eyed driver with a penchant for tailing other rickshaws, occasionally nudging them and offering very hairy moments when braking. But, he did get me to the station in one piece, something I’m thankful for. Of course, he too offered to take me shopping.

At the station with over an hour to kill, I hid myself, fearful of having to encounter Apu or Brother of Apu. Yes, it was my fault. I was prepared to offer him cash too. Not 300, but 200. 100 for taking me to one out of a promised three sights, and an additional 100 for mental trauma that may have occurred. He never did come. Well, he might have, but once the train pulled in, I cemented myself onto my seat and looked at nobody until it pulled out of the station. I still think about him.

The three hour journey, extended to four, was made bearable by this Texan family who used phrases like ‘whipped yo ass’ and ‘who the chaymp’ while playing gin. And by an exporter of shoes who extolled his achievements over the past twenty years to the man sitting next to him, employing an accent that seemed to have an Australian tinge.

Back in Delhi two hours late, my only thought was to get into bed. I didn’t care that the auto driver was fleecing me. Again. After accepting the first offer tendered, and watching as his auto was extracted with Tetris like accuracy, we set off.

The auto sputtered and gagged. And stopped.

--

Written sometime in early 2006, salvaged around 15 minutes ago from an archival website.

not much of a bellow

2009-03-06T13:13:00.000+05:30

I met him quite by accident.

I never do this sort of thing. Really. But I have my limits, and sometimes the exceptions do crop up. It was him, after all. Serendipitous, and the chance of a lifetime.

But, how?

I stalked him for a little bit. He flitted in and out of little shops, politely forcing himself upon the nonplussed shopkeepers. Polite like a funeral director though, not like a doctor.

Predictably, he was hardly natty. Not grimy, but he wore his scars on his sleeve. Deference to his white skin may have kept them at bay, but they still regarded him with suspicion. No surprise, given each ominous sentence he spoke dripped with doom. I wondered if he was trying to provoke them, the few who did understand his accented English.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, he was enquiring about the cows. I might think it foolish to ask a modern shopkeeper about the common cow on the street, but maybe he was infused with a touch of oriental nostalgia that forced him to believe that in a country such this, the world is much more closely wound than in the West. He does seem old-fashioned that way, when not gleefully anticipating an apocalypse.

Quite abruptly, he turned full half-circle (or is it just a half-circle) and stared me square. He cocked his head to one side (his right, if I’m not mistaken, but I get confused. It could’ve been my right), but didn’t seem perturbed. He was rather forthcoming, I might add, and very accommodating too.

‘You’ve been following me,’ he stated. ‘Do you know who I am?’ I nodded. He too, in acknowledgment. ‘What do you know about flatulence? Cow flatulence, in particular?’ he asked, even before I could implore that I wasn’t an autograph seeker who salivated over matinee-idols.

It was obvious that he knew that I knew who he was, and consequently all the quirks he embodied (which was slightly presumptuous, I should say, though spot on), and so saw it pointless to dally on formalities, instead plunging right in.

This may also be a test of… character, if you could call it that.

I may have seemed wary as I pondered over it, for he eyed me with a grizzled glint, but I could also see a hint of a twinkle.

Now what?

‘Well, I believe that the sound it makes is actually governed a lot by the amount of hair around the opening. It’s better stifled if there is hair, acting as a buffer of sorts. A clean shaven arse-crack, on the other hand, offers little resistance, causing a most exquisite pop! to be heard even when the person attempts to muffle it.’

‘Is that so?’ he asked, not so much argumentatively but encouragingly.

‘Er. Well, I think so. I’d assume the same applies for cows. That’s… about it.’

He scratched his stubble and nodded in acquiescence, and offered his hand to me.

‘Nice to meet you.’

It smelled vaugely of dung.

This could yet turn out to be an interesting week...

nights

2009-03-01T23:54:00.000+05:30

The table has a rug covering it, allowing it to be used as an ironing space. Piled books teeter on one end, bending three-quarters up into the wall, steady itself. Adapters, chargers, headphones and other miscellaneous peripherals are scattered around the iron.

I am under this table, and I don’t know why.

It has a ledge, actually, quarter way up two of its legs, on which boxes of old discs are stacked. The rug forms a fringe in my field of vision, and, leaning on the ledge with my legs out, I watch television, though I’m not sure when it was switched on. The sound is muted, but films these days tend to be subtitled when beamed, it would seem. Or, so it seems.

It’s a scene full of rapid cut close-ups of lips. Heavy stuff, and with the lips being chapped, it seemed a touch avant-garde, too, but that may have been the effect of the lack of sound.

She seems so nice. She seems so sweet. She’s pretty too, even if her elegance is slightly pop-eyed. And she’s smiling. She’s being nice to the man she barely knows, I think. The close-ups may be misleading, but the phantom conversation is couched by tender dimples and twinkling eyes. Why not…

He doesn’t seem like the Mysterious Stranger either.

This man is less Humphrey Bogart and more Edward G. Robinson. He can’t have the main role here, he can’t – he’s a supporting player through and through, with a tight waist coat sticking out like a sore thumb in a sea of trench coats. He’s pudgy and losing his hair while the Bogie-clone dips his pocket comb in whiskey and slicks back his carefully tended tresses.

Oh, I know this story. It’s a story for the girl. She’s nice, he falls, she’s oblivious. He’s a wounded man, of course, crusty but not steely, proud but not hard. He can’t fathom why people are nice to him and can’t bear it either, so the few that are will be ground down till alienation, and then subsequently the unattainable is loved completely. It has the trappings of a tragedy, but not some sanitized psychosis through the eyes of Ron Howard. This is Lodge Kerrigan stuff, but better still. Heartfelt pathos, immensely measurable gravitas, and…

I used to be depressed in fits and starts. It’d manifest itself as a tightening of the jaw and felt like nodular growth – I could trace bumps in my jugular when it clamped up. Sociability would evaporate. I haven’t been to the theatre in years, and only mingle with morning show masturbators at the cinema. But when I did, I was always envious, heatedly so, of Musicals, because when the song and dance started, they stopped being people.

I was dizzy, I think. It made me wonder about why supposedly whatever keeps a body balanced is in the ear. I picture a Frankenstein laboratory with the Creator moulding the human prototype on a table (with lightning and gigantic Tesla coil buzzing in the background), very satisfied, but then stands it erect and realizes that the damn thing doesn’t hold, so hurriedly stuffs the balancing bits into the ear.

I think I remember now.

your dog, but not your pet

2009-02-17T00:49:00.001+05:30

An unsigned message, an unexplained number. Perfect grammar.

No doubt, something heroic.

The time could be symbolic, halfway between midnight mavens and morning risers.

Usually, this time of night would mean a rooftop, on my back and looking up. The higher the better; so too if less guarded. I saw a suicide once. Well, heard it at least. I’m not sure if those on suicide-watch wake early, but this one (He? She? It.) did. Didn’t notice me; I didn’t see it either. I could hear the scuffling of its feet, and then silence.

Sure, I was there for other things, but couldn’t help prick my ears up, trying to catch its motion. There was only silence, but I do think that I could tangible recognize the moment when it jumped. We were too far up for the sound of impact to waft through, but I may have heard an early siren or too a little later.

I’d like to think that it was a woman. She steps out, hovering perhaps, just for a second, on the parapet. With a delicate face and wide eyes and in the wee hours of the morning absolutely capable of bruising my insides.

And she jumps.

Another time, I was waylaid, spending tiptoeing through cracked ceramic in a cement park; unfortunate collateral to things unforeseen from the skies. It was a wonder that no errant being or amorous lover was flattened. Death by china – from Indonesia (or so the crate read).

Am I the only one? I’d like to think that there a few left (souls or otherwise) in the immediate city around me who’d at least want to know, if not need and crave, knowledge eked from the destruction of fragility. But on dull and dim but never dark weekdays, they only churn ever so slightly, rising and falling but never stirring.

None look up anymore. Who looks around even, much less above? Perhaps evolving parallel to the pervasive parochialism preached at the pulpit of modern society, the skies have been closed off from the modern world, or the world closed off from it, even as it was brought down to us, twinkling stars nestled within every tower, every night.

I miss my sky. I miss my clouds. I miss being in a position to look up during the day and see something other than stains on a false ceiling. I haven’t ever known looking up at night and seeing the world beyond this one, but I like to think about what it would look like.

An enormous tree… the branches of a tree, maybe, tipped with millions of orange and yellow hand-made paper lampshades.

Each with a flickering candle inside that, try as one might, can be blown astray, but never blown away.

lunch

2009-02-13T00:43:00.000+05:30

I felt like a fish that’d been spooned out of its tank in a gentle manner, still in a little pool of water to keep it breathing, only to be violently skewered by a knife into a wall. And it stays there, squirming and suspended, halfway up a whiteboard, dripping down water and blood and completely out of options.

Actually, maybe I felt like a similar fish, maybe not one that’d probably been egged out in a tank, but swam the oceans, only to be snared by a trawler net, and then to be put in a tank and then removed and pinned to a wall. There isn’t perhaps much difference between the two, only that one would hope that the second knew the feel of freedom before death.

Even that’s not right. I’m a fish, stabbed and pinned to the floor of the tank, and so are all the other fish in the tank. They all turn violent, and end up biting each other’s heads off – starting with mine, though in no particular order. Only that I’m half as bulbous and twice as meek.

No, I’m a fish in a music video. Tossed out of the water to twitch and tumble, but at the altar of entertainment, documented and filed away with no guarantees of being a single-take scene. It’ll happen again and again, until either the air-pocked and wasted lungs give way, or is haggardly rejected and flushed down the toilet.

I’m fry, picked up by a brushy whale. The irony wouldn’t escape me. I wouldn’t mind sacrificing myself as a pellet of indigestion bubbling up to the surface. It may hurt a bit, but it’ll be over soon.

I am a fish scrutinized by a ten year old snot, clutching a crumpled note and clawing at the feet of commerce. This shit owns a piranha, and feeds other fish to it. Is death preferable to rejection? Why, do I not live up to the brat’s standards? Am I not worthy of being eaten in an unclean, hazy tank?

I am a fish, sucked dry by mosquitoes and sizzling on an electric plastic tennis racquet. Bobbed up and batted out.

But there’s always tomorrow. And the rest of a lifespan to see out.

I’m a fish, and I’m all at sea.

soil to the supermarket

2009-02-08T00:00:00.003+05:30

Tagged by her – 21 random things about self (and to tag an equal number).

Though tagged on facebook, I elected to do the tag here because (a) I’m a blog whore; and (b) more randomly, I find this blog to be less personally invasive than facebook. But that’s not especially surprising.

This is a pretty lazy tag actually, with a lot of room for interpretation and allowing the tagee to be as self-indulgent as he/she chooses. I’m not complaining now, but I’ll feel dirty afterwards. And never admit that I like it. Kicking and screaming – that’s me.

1. I have pinched the title of this post from the tagger.
2. For the last two years, I’ve lived out of a jungle-green canvas tote bag.
3. I am not accustomed to being referred to by name in written communications. I blame the blog for that.
4. I used to be able to pull off what I considered a fairly decent rendition of The Spanish Inquisition a couple of years ago.
5. I am prone to cling to the belief that children should be referred to as ‘it’ until they start walking, talking and licking water from a bowl.
6. The Dresden Dolls should be listened to. Now. Fantomas’ The Director’s Cut too.
7. Beck needs to brainwash himself into believing, and subsequently behaving, like it’s 1997.
8. I like reading up about the lives of pro-wrestlers and porno actors on wikipedia.
9. I hoard second-hand books (invariably picked up at Premier Book Store in Bangalore).
10. I’ve typed out numbers 10 to 21 from here, all blank – filling out only 21.
11. For a while, I used to want to be manifested in sound as this little errant guitar bit in Sonic Youth’s New Hampshire, that’s audible only on headphones.
12. Do first; self-flagellate later. I follow that for that wrong things.
13. I don’t like the Doors. This appears to be a punishable offence in many jurisdictions.
14. While I am housetrained, I do shed hair.
15. I burnt myself with an electronic dog-collar that emits a little shock to stop the dog from barking – to see how painful it would be. Symbathiyempathygenineness and all that.
16. I don’t know how to smoke – the method of inhalation always seems to escape me (no pun intended).
17. This was the slot that was filled up last. No. 17.
18. I reduced it from 23 to 21. Options of 21/23/25 were provided in any case.
19. With absolutely no reference to the previous post, I’d like somebody to hug. With feeling.
20. Audrey Hepburn.
21. I believe in love. Oh yes I do. But just not in other people reciprocating mine; provided they know about it, which in itself is highly unlikely. But hey, I won’t complain if it happens.

I don't think I have 21 people to tag. But, for what it's worth..

Eyefry
Bibi
Nina (blog, woman!)
The Cat
BFH

a warm sleepy

2009-02-03T22:33:00.002+05:30

Hug?

Ok.

Approach.

Walk up normally. Arms aren’t at shoulder-level, anticipating the hug.

Be wary of knocking spectacles astray.

Or arms getting snagged on clothing or accessories.

Two kinds of hugs – intimate and stranger. Intimate hug, you inhale when you hug, so you’re reducing the distance between the other person, while exhaling increases it.

But it’s not a rule that both people inhale or both exhale.

No.

Oh, and there’s also the inner hug and the outer hug, since one person gets under the shoulders and gets to hug the torso, and the other is on the outside and has to hug the arms along with the torso.

Shorter person gets the torso. If you’re taller and inner hug, unless you stoop, you’d lift the shorter person by their armpits.

But if you’re going for a swooping hug where the lift and twirl is the point, it’s essential that the taller person is on the inside. Better grip, and the armpits provide additional safety from slipping and falling.

Duration of the hug?

Decided by the person who has the inner hug. Bad etiquette for outer hugger to unclamp inner hugger.

Arms?

Not too high, not too low.

Little movement. And definitely no movement towards the lower back.

Legs?

No shuffling about. No moving about. Some swaying allowed, but guided by the upper half. Sway may lead to falling on a bed, which is fine if executed without coercion. Half-sway mandatory to test reciprocity to swaying.

Taller person never to hug the head of shorter person. And never ever to push the head into the chest of self.

No messing with the hair, period. If hugging neck and hair in the way, flip the hair and get under it. Not to touch hair.

Fingers stationary. No tickling or groping and no feeling for vertebrae or ribs. If you’re hugging the bra-strap, be tactful and move your hand just below the strap. No fidgeting with it. And it’s not an excuse to go low. Low is creepy.

Avoid love-handles or fondling any skin.

Nibbling of ear is allowed, if circumstances already established allow for it. Or a whisper, but no talking. Talking comes post-hug.

Tears allowed only for the shorter person. No crying onto the hair. Taller person expected to sit and cry onto shorter person’s shoulder. No stooping and crying into face.

No cringing.

Smile? Smiling and happy grinning and even laughing is fine. But no making faces. It can be felt.

Sympathetic or empathetic clucking allowed. And sighing. Lots and lots of sighing.

No drooling.

Or sneezing or coughing.

Or spitting. No bodily fluids.

Chest?

Touching of chests is allowed, but if male-female, pre-conditional circumstances required to allow tight squeeze that causes compression of breasts onto chest.

Squeeze can be tight, but pressure must be administered uniformly and with smoothness. No sudden compressions and relaxations.

If male, no erection while hugging.

No.

And if erect, etiquette to jut butt out and arch lower half of body away from the other person so they don’t feel the erection.

Unless… circumstances already established allow for it?

No.

Ok then.

Ok.

Hug?

here nor there

2009-01-30T22:18:00.000+05:30

‘You… you’re just like your father!’

The smokes have caused a raging fever, or at the least a marked rise in body temperature, but I still look up, my head still cloudy.

‘Huuhh?’

That’s all I could manage before my attention diverted back to mentally picking out stray strands from my shoelaces.

But she started speaking again, her tone an aggressive plead for attention. My head raises itself ever so slightly, but thinks it not quite worth the effort to look at her face, positioning my eyes to hover around her neck and collarbone.

She says something about my father being quite the randy chap too. Too? It must be a dig at me; probably thinks I’m staring at her chest. Perfectly reasonable, I’d say. The men in my family aren’t renowned for their sensitivity.

I’d like to tell her that it’s a consequence of having sat in front of the screen too long, watching one foreign language film after the other. It’s inured my eyes to look below the lips and watch for subtitles.

But by now the tension in my neck has given way and my head is lolling about on its side, almost resting on my shoulder. Involuntarily, though not undesirably, one hand goes up in apology (second and fifth fingers twitching with expressiveness) while the other lunges for an adjacent chair, looking for a hold, even as I slowly come to realize that I need to take action if I’m not to fall off the chair and unto the grass.

Seeing that I had now attained a tolerable state of awareness, she repeated what she’d said earlier.

Only then did two things strike me. The first was that if she’d known my father when he was alive, she must be really old. Alongside that it dawned that I still hadn’t seen her face, and the state of nattiness of her sweater (quite chic, I’ll concede) was not indicative of her age. She’s probably new age; my head still refuse to look up, gazing at her closed shoes and drops of dew on it.

The second was just how reflexively repulsive it was to hear that I’m like him. I don’t have issues, please don’t be mistaken, but I don’t want to be him either. I can’t help looking like him, but I certainly will not act like him. But then she probably meant the former.

I grin and nod in response, but I think it came off as a grimace and casual sway of my upper half. Conversation I’m not interested in while in this state, but maybe she knew someone I knew. Why else would she come up to me?

‘Don’t be such a boor. I have no idea who your dad is, but it makes for a conversation starter if true, and an argument if not. And don’t let me down my backup line…’

I look up. She’s youngish, and clearly in a more placid state of inebriation. A flash of Anouk Aimee shudders through me. I start to form a sentence, and in anticipation of its delivery, I point with vague purpose. But then, the words dripped away, and suddenly all I could focus on was this errant finger that was pointing at her. It quickly curled back into itself.

‘What were you going to say, right that second?’

This sort of thing happens only to film directors in Fellini films, I thought. I was already drifting away, into the clouds.

inside i'm growling

2009-01-26T14:26:00.005+05:30

The Opeth show in Chennai. The Opeth show in India. A word to IIT-M – their organisation was terrible. A lot of people missed at least one of the opening bands while waiting to be frisked and let in. They really should have started letting people in earlier.

Waiting in line to be let in, I missed the entire Demonic Resurrection set, and I think I’m a happier person for it. The defining feature of the performance seemed to be a lot of pounding on the bass drum – which when you take into consideration that their ringleader is also the drummer (if I’m not mistaken), is not all that surprising. Sure, he’s supposedly a nice guy and all, but their music, I’ll return to sender.

And we’re in finally, just after Motherjane has taken the stage, looking from afar like they’ve all decided to pay tribute to the Joker/Heath Ledger. Only getting closer does it become clear that they’ve gone for half-faced Kathakali makeup, which possibly gave them the aura of looking less-mallu, while emphasising their mallu roots. Goody for them; I’ve never been too much of a fan.

They start strongly with songs like Mindstreet, and the crowd appears to be on their side, but ultimately, I think the audience had only a certain amount of tolerance for them, and after showing some semblance of respect for 3/4ths of the show, starting chanting ‘Opeth, Opeth..’ and in general were trying to wish them off the stage and summon their Gods (read: Opeth). While I felt bad for the band, it’s not like I didn’t want them to go – they got a little too boring after a point.

Motherjane leave the stage; the tension is palpable. When will they show? Breaking with the mood of the show entirely, a couple of gaudy Nokia commercials air with the most un-metal music that could be conjured – PCD (that’s Pussycat Dolls for the uninitiated) and Vanilla Ice are the two I remember. The techs go about their business of checking the guitars/microphones etc. for a good half hour, all while this chap behind me keeps yelling ‘Miiiiiichael!’ (his heart beats for Mikael Akerfeldt).

A clearly harassed gent from IIT comes on stage, pleading (and I do mean Pleading) with the crowd to move back from the barrier and stop pushing. They, understandably, being dunderheaded metal-types, tell him to go fuck himself. He seemed to be on the verge of tears. Later on, when Akerfeldt asked them to do the same, they dutifully complied with only a little good-natured protest. He was a lot less frazzled when saying it and more flip when asking them to buzz off, yes, but that’s also R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Can’t buy that.

So, the crowd waits, and then finally, Popol Vuh starts playing, and anyone who’s heard The Roundhouse Tapes knew that this was the point that the band were going to make their entrance. A thought did strike me, especially when Akerfeldt played pretty much the exact riff to check his guitar – whether they were just going to lip-synch to that live album. That however, was dispelled when they didn’t break into ‘When’.

The show… um, rocked. Akerfeldt is a lovely boy who didn’t disappoint me with his stage banter that was funny, and completely calm, and the band were (as expected) really tight. But to be completely honest, they didn’t blow me away. I thought that, at least from where I was standing (next to one of the speaker towers), the vocals and bass were too low in the P.A. mix (or conversely, the drums too high). I also zoned out a bit in the middle, when the songs seemed to be melting into each other, and the deafening cheers of the people around made me feel light-headed. But they came back strongly towards the end, turning the corner with ‘Bleak’.

I think I was a bit jealous of the Black Tee Masses (BTM) though. To completely lose oneself in the knowledge of who is playing and the music itself, some swaying, a lot of sweaty head-banging and rousing cheers and profanity and Satanical pledges and pissing contents to see who’s more hardcore and ‘metuhl’ (and the admittedly deserved abuse showered on Nokia’s crass commercialism*). It’s all a little repulsive, but perhaps only because I’m not a part of it. And the women. Oh so many attractive women, but all in the form of an intimidating goth-metal-emo amalgam, and with hulking boyfriend in tow. Such a pity.

The band played a really good set on the whole though, and the crowd lapped it up. To be fair, all Opeth had to do was show up, and the BTM were in immediate salivating, prostrating adoration mode. Not that I blame them, but being a casual fan of the band, I spent more time looking at the BTM’s antics than the band.

Before this show started, I’d bumped into someone I knew who was telling me of the Black Lips show a couple of days earlier, and the general insanity that was in the air. Well, he wasn’t appreciative of it, dismissing it with a pejorative ‘dude, that band is so GAY’. But that’s exactly what I want to see – lunacy in a show; people taking their clothes off, destruction, the band making out with each other, and above all – the scandal in the eyes of the BTM (who would’ve waded through hours and hours of shady metal, given this was at Campus Rock Idols).

Now that is a show.

* In lieu of an encore, Melvin (or something) from Nokia steps out, promising to bring back Opeth if the crowd supports Nokia. And then a little ceremony to launch a new phone happens, regional manager of Nokia in tow – presenting it to Akerfeldt. He seemed a little nonplussed by the entire thing, but took it on the chin, also slyly insulting them before starting the 2 song encore.

Couple of notes:

> Akerfeldt was wearing a Clutch tee-shirt. That got me excited. When I'd zoned out, I was also playing their Blast Tyrant inside my head.

> One of the songs played while waiting for Opeth to take the stage was Elbow's Fallen Angel - a song capable of moving me to tears (when in the mood). It's truly beautiful, and I hadn't heard it in years. A filip to dig it out.

orphans

2009-01-21T19:17:00.000+05:30

‘I hadn’t spoken to my parents in a while, but the last time I called them was in slightly embarrassing circumstances.

‘For whatever reason, the Company had pencilled in an adventure team-building exercise for us cubicle rats, and figured that our sedentary lifestyle could be sufficiently shaken by the trip. I daresay their motive was to push us into the wild so we’d feel thankful for whatever minimal manufactured lifestyle we were provided. Verily, they were keenly aware that the best weapon to use to shoot down any rebellious tendencies towards our work environment was to threaten us with the real world.

‘So anyway, this trip has been called, and the entire floor is going about it in the only way it knew how – draw up a list of things and go shopping, rather than working out or something that would ensure some level of fitness out in the open. But, well.. meh.

‘I knew it’d be a waste of space to buy the yuppie adventure-pack of tent, boots, solar water evaporator and that. I mean, all said, how wild are the white collared going to be? All I wanted was a good pair of cross trainers. And I owned a nice pair. Only, I couldn’t find them.

‘So, I called them… because the last time I could remember being active was when I’d passed through Delhi, heading towards the mountains. Which was way back when. And they remembered.

‘I call and casually chatter for a couple, making excuses about work being busy and being tired and sneezing all the time, to which my mother insisted that I do breathing exercises, and then nonchalantly asked whether my shoes were at their place.

‘She wasn’t buying it – she deplored me for ten minutes about my laziness and lifestyle and inactivity and that sort of thing. When I got a word in, I tried to do damage control by saying that I had a pair here, but only wondered if it was there. To which she yelled about being a spendthrift and that sort of thing.

‘Damned either way. And the stupid thing is, I really don’t know why I called them. What would I have done if the shoes had been there? We’re in different cities… ask them to mail it to me? Sheesh.’

‘Funny you say that. I hadn’t seen my parents for ages, but I took my mother to the book fair. Which was a scene in itself – she was imploring to the people at a stand hawking books by Jiddu Krishnamurti that she was extremely familiar with the concepts and often visited the Theosophical Society. Went over for dinner as well, and spent the night at their house too, where I’d grown up.

‘I’d like to think that I’m where I want to be in life at this age, but that’s bull. I’m not. Maybe I had a shot at getting it, maybe I never did. But that’s all past now. But I knew that I’d been in a rut for some time, spinning my wheels, going nowhere… that sort of thing.

‘This listlessness was my life in general, is my life in general, only that I’m there… and I’m having a bath at their place, and looking through the stuff on the counter, find this bottle of shampoo. This is a bottle that I’d bought probably ten years ago, just out of school or a little later, and used most of it. They still hadn’t thrown it away.

‘I think a lot about being desolate and all that in the present, and the past for that matter, but… I don’t know. Seeing the bottle gave me some impetus or something. It was like shaking a book and finding things stuck between it that you hadn’t noticed before fall from between the pages. It made me think of what I was then, what I wanted to be and what I was looking forward to.

‘And… I’m just standing there, under the shower, looking at this dusty bottle with a bit of goo at the bottom, and I really don’t know why it had to act as a catalyst or whatever for this train of thought. But it made me want to… be… something different from what I am now. What the bottle and the boy who bought it back then wanted.

‘I mean, look at it…’

(rummages through bag)

‘Geez, you’re carrying it around with you?’

‘Yeah yeah, I couldn’t leave it there. It doesn’t leak…’

‘I hope you aren’t planning to use ten-year old shampoo… I don’t think that bit at the bottom even has what it takes to get to the neck.’

‘No. No. Well. No. Yeah… no. Purely motivational, carrying it around.

‘It’s… can you hold onto it and show it to me once in awhile?’

warren beatty was supposed to be in on it too

2009-01-18T14:26:00.000+05:30

My parents have lived in their house for more than fifty years, the walls fortified by sand, mortar and emotion. I hardly ever visit them, outgrowing them along with my need for their internet connection. Three generations lived there once upon, and I think they outgrew each other too, retreating into themselves in the face of their impotency to break away or get along with each other.

But then, a few days ago, I stayed for dinner and spent the night – the first since I’d moved out of the region. The time and distance may have made me forgetful about mornings there; or just plain complacent about my own level of painless tolerance.

As I walked into the bathroom in the morning though, I’d started slipping back into the old routine, and remembered breakfast. Decades could pass (but they haven’t), and I’ll still be haunted by the breakfast table, the daily gathering of three generations and two branches of the family, a family web-spun parlour, whose sole purpose seemed to be to lay to waste hopes, aspirations and dreams. Or, Hopes, Aspirations and Dreams; they’d make you forever regret that you’d ever deigned to have had HAD. And never let you enjoy the meal.

Under the shower, I needed to keep reminding myself that they were all dead. Even those who seemed immortal in their mean-spiritedness, who made me feel guilty inside for wishing their deaths. Who made me wonder if they’d been feeding off my hate, sustaining their undoubtedly malevolent spirits. Who’d have made me poison them if they’d lived even a little bit longer. Who I’m glad were cremated, else I’d be scouting my shadows for them. Those who haunt the dust. Yes, I had issues with all of them.

I like to think that they’d have forced my hand, that I’d have emerged from my cocoon and killed them all. Every last one of them. Well, there were only five, but I could’ve thrown in a couple more once I got into the groove. It’s like flying, I think. I’m afraid to take the first flight (crash, death and all that), but each connecting flight becomes easier until the point that I stop consciously thinking about it.

Their eventual deaths were shocking though. The first to go was the oldest. But no, it was a surprise, because she was the biggest curmudgeon of the lot, and seemed destined to live forever, Tithonus-like, wasting away yet never dying. She was something of a cicada in life itself, it must be said. She was snuffed by a nurse’s pillow – it was either her or her, she must have thought. There were a lot of people who thought the same thing. Maybe they drew straws.

She was the widow. The other two went together, bickering to the very end. She’d studied no longer than class 7 (and never let her B.A. educated handmaidens forget it), while he’d nabbed her when she was sixteen, the two entwined for the next sixty odd years, completely incompatible. I used to think of a body rejected an unsuitable organ when I saw them together, only rather than accepting failure, they seemed to morph into something else altogether, bound by distrustful squabbling. By all accounts they never touched each other outside of conception (and waited long before conceding defeat), something that suited both of them.

So it was a shock when they died in a road accident, mowed down by drag-racing rickshaws with inebriated drivers. I think they conked them over the head for good measure post-mow. It’s shocking because the last thing either of them would have wanted was to have died in each other’s arms, reflexively clutching at the closest non-conking individual. My mirth at funerals has always been interpreted as an outlet for grief. Hah.

And now, ‘home’ again, I could do the same to two octogenarians – who’s going to doubt them ‘passing away’ in their sleep? Who’d even worry, weep or wonder? The next of kin? Um. No. Nobody cares, and a fair number would clap silently.

This is the vintage stock that flows through me. I’m going to linger in the shower a little longer.

bad word coffee

2009-01-03T22:01:00.000+05:30

I woke up.

More accurately, I was woken up – the entire diner conspiring against me, clunking a glass down on the soft wood, peeved that anyone could find peace in the dim buzz of a Sunday morning’s cacophony.

It’s not that I wanted to, but minute upon minute of watching nothing through a door frame is better (or worse?) than counting sheep for me. The sleep units dropped on the nape of my neck, block upon block, driving my head lower till I passed out on the damp surface.

The diner is never busy enough, and that’s the only reason I hadn’t been kicked out yet. Not that they didn’t want to free up a table – the owner kept giving me the stink-eye from his colonised corner while looking distastefully at the lemon juice that sweated drops onto the newspaper that doubled up as a feeble coaster.

Real people drink coffee in the morning, he probably thinks to himself, oblivious of my gambit. My coffee would go cold, giving him a reason to come over and offer a replacement (charged, of course). What does juice do? It’s safe, short of him whisking it away and popping it in the microwave for a bit while I was asleep.

In fact, he’d probably do it if I asked him to. It’s a hole of a place – scuffed furniture that may give way at any moment, ambiguous tiling that gives way at any movement, a purely ornamental table fan and walls that’d probably last seen fresh paint around the time of Partition. But, it owned a microwave that was the cynosure of its own eyes, and was possibly wont to microwave everything that passed through its kitchen (people included), given half a chance.

While you wouldn’t guess from the lemon juice – which I suspect is constituted of two parts water and one part detergent – the food was reasonably chewable and priced proportionate to its edibility. Being a three minute walk from home, I’d grown quite fond of it. I daresay they’re fond of me too, but I’m not going to test that theory any time soon. Still, I’m tolerated, somnolence and all, in spite of never having spent more than three rupees per hour on average in the odd year that I’ve been frequenting this establishment.

I think it works out well for him though – he uses me as bait to lure other customers in, as my territorial markings lend the place an air of occupation, and nobody ever likes sitting, or even entering, an empty diner. And I get to spend my Sunday mornings somewhere. It works out well for the both of us even.

In walked the first catch of the morning.

Bring us each a plate of idlis with the motherfuckers drowning in sambhar, the ringleader bellowed as they settled down at a table. He sounded like the indolent land mafia-finger shattering type, and looked it – goldfingered and a pair of acolytes nipping at his heels, obedient and whipped. Clearly, every time he heard his own voice, their dicks moved. Perhaps his too.

My translation is a little faulty actually – A plate of idlis drowning in so much sambhar that it’s flowing out of their cunts would be more accurate. Tamil is a wonderful language.

Cunt idlis on the menu might be a winner too.

Wait Until Dark

2008-12-22T19:04:00.002+05:30

Wait Until Dark started with sound and dialogue, but the visuals consisted of only different colours flashing on the screen.

It was about a blind woman after all, and I was pleasantly surprised that the director had taken such an experimental step in presenting it from what the blind woman’s POV, with only sound and no vision.

It was made in the ‘60s, and audiences back then were probably more accepting of such narrative risks than today (directors like Julian Schnabel have done something similar in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). However, it was after all an Audrey Hepburn movie, and it took some creative courage to meddle with the mainstream in such a manner, seemingly with no end in sight.

It was only after some fifteen minutes that I realised that it was a video codec problem and not an artistic flourish. Something of an Anthony Lane’s 5th maxim moment, I could say, though without the sunglasses.

Take 2 – The film is about three men who believe that a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn at her most glassy-eyed) is in possession of a heroin-stuffed doll, and proceed to take the long way around in determining whether she has it, and extracting it from her claws.

While there was a lingering problem in the film as to why exactly the blind woman had such an unexplained possessiveness towards the doll after she gained possession of it, it doesn’t really detract from the rest of the film.

My theory would be something to do with unsuccessful attempts at conception with her husband, also manifested in the manner in which Audrey Hepburn clutches at her abdomen as she folds in two every time she needs to express anguish.

Performances are important in such films, and it’s suitably anchored down by a slickly creepy Alan Arkin and Richard Crenna (who nibbled at my mind vis-à-vis where else I’d seen him, before I realised he was in Rambo. Hah), not to mention Audrey Hepburn.

Hepburn though, I notice, is wont to overact her dramatic scenes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of her work (and her), but it’s apparent in the early scenes of Roman Holiday too. She’s perfectly beguiling and full of charm when playing it light, but her dramatic scenes seem like a violently tugged marionette, jerky to the point of looking like a jump-cut. Oh, she was nominated for an Oscar here.

It’s a twisty film that revels in the manner in which it unfolds itself, rather than throwing the maximum number of twists that the running time allows. Staying true to its stage roots (apparent by the limited performance area), it builds dread not by actions, but by hinting at what its villains may be capable of, showing its hand only towards the end.

shining

2008-12-14T00:42:00.002+05:30

Three things came to my mind when sitting through bits of a screening of the Shining in college a couple of days ago.

The first was, in the grand tradition of many a film geek, the overarching concept of ‘cinema’ (as in, ‘this is cinemaaa!’). In other words, while I’d seen the film some four odd years ago, it didn’t strike me as to just how brilliant it is until I saw it in a dark room with minimal ambient noise. I’d decided to catch only a half hour of it while taking a break from working, but I couldn’t stay away. I stayed for the best part of an hour, and after tearing myself away from it, couldn’t concentrate, and had to return for the end of it. That Kubrick fella.. quite something.

The second, which has possibly been mentioned elsewhere (though I haven’t come across it), is the similarity between Jack Nicholson’s performance here, and Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. Oh, gosh darn, more space devoted to TDK. But really, it’s been well established that the Ledger Joker is far removed from the Nicholson Joker (from the first Tim Burton Batman). However, I thought there was a lot of common ground to be found here, especially in the early part of the film, where Nicholson has this barely contained simmering menace (before he goes full blown psycho). And also demonstrates what a fine line he straddles between acting and slipping into sneer-mode at times (something that’s been spinning further out of control as the years pass).

The third, SPOILER ALERT, was just how shoddily the Scatman Crothers character was treated in the flick. I wonder if the stereotype of the token black character that gets bumped off started hereabouts. Not only does he talk like a cotton grower's slave, but for someone who can ‘shine’, a lot of good it did him, leading him back to the hotel to get an axe through his heart. It’s almost as though the film really needed a body count, and so decided to write this in – one of the most ineffective and useless cavalry scenes in a film. Personally, I was rooting for the anthropomorphized naked mole rat that was Shelley Duvall (who is otherwise quite attractive) to bite it. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

Back to watching skulls explode in Scanners.

SF

2008-11-27T01:03:00.002+05:30

Another year, another duffel bag full of possibly blood money doing the funding.

This year’s Strawberry Fields (rock show) was better than last year. I refuse to say Strawberry Fields Forever and all that, but I’m most certainly willing to give it a chance for next year – something I didn’t this year, having resigned myself to the fact that it’d be populated by what has been termed black tee-shirt wearing motherfuckers.

One factor may have been that a combination of papers to finish and quizzes to set and conduct meant that I hardly caught any of the prelims – that cesspool of running black mascara and violent gestures, catching only two bands there, and also only catching two bands during the final and one of the two headlining acts.

I was lured out of my room by an absolutely storming cover of Come Together (the Beatles one) played by one of the bands, though they sadly closed their set with it.

Instead, I first caught Metal Messiah, a band I’d already seen and dismissed during the prelims. Really, if a band was planning to be a rip-off of a band that they were listening to in class 7, I’d rather they’d ripped off the Smashing Pumpkins than Korn.

But, whatdyouknow? They were quite popular, or so some claim. Sure, they were tight and non-threatening - I’ll give them that, but as aforementioned, stank of Korn. With songs like ‘Loser’ (accompanied by the singer pointing at the crowd and making an L sign with his hand) and lyrics like Can you hear me/I’m all alone, I think it’s fairly self-explanatory as to the kind of band they were. The singer also seemed to be the nu-metal doppelganger of Juggy D.

They also wore the same clothes that they did during the prelims, so possibly stank of something else too, but I’d give them the benefit of doubt and say they thought it lucky.

Chili Potato, the other finalist band I saw, were oh so much better. I admit that I may be partial towards them because I’m vaguely familiar with their music and kind of know the lead singer. It was funny to see a guy I’d always thought of as a Hobbit-y character shred guitar.

They’re the kind of band who should be in a rock show, and one of the reasons the finals were great (from what little of the rest I could hear from my hostel room) – the majority of the bands were rock bands and not metal bands.

Their photo was also featured in the Times of India write-up that appeared the next day, labelled Metal Messiah. Ouch.

The Extramentals – I hate the name. Hate it hate it hate it. It’s the sort of name the self-anointed ‘backbenchers’ of students in class 7 come up with and find witty. Shruti Haasan is hot. Yes, she is. I didn’t listen to them play though – was reliably informed that the uniform opinion was that they were terrible. But, she’s still hot. Yes, she is.

Pentagram – I love their music, and they were probably the reason I attended the finals in the first place. And they didn’t disappoint.

They only played for twenty-odd minutes before being shut down by the cops, but really, starting with a metronomic guitar riff pinched from Peter Gunn, they really got me going. AND, they covered Radiohead’s Climbing Up The Walls. Short of playing She’s a Superstar as an encore, it was perfect. I had my arms (ok, one arm) up in the air – that’s a very big deal for me.

But, later on I got to hear about just how big a sonfabitch Vishal Dadlani is from the organisers – rumoured to have thrown hissy fits, rumoured to have pouted noticeably while Shruti Haasan and co. (in the grand tradition of Microsoft, refuse to say the E word and reinforce the brand) were on stage and rumoured at one point to refuse to take the stage (had to be fed copious amounts of chocolate before he became more amenable to the idea).

It’s a pity that someone who makes such good music has to be such an alleged dick, but my enjoyment of the former needn’t be prejudiced by the latter. So bitches to the behind-the-scenes goings-on, given also that he’s quite the showman on-stage.

So.... ummm...

\m/

*giggle*

I think not.

scratch

2008-11-23T17:27:00.001+05:30

As she walked in, N was seated at a corner table, tapping his damp coaster with his index finger and staring out into the middle distance. He also occasionally rubbed his lips with the finger, thinking of French New Wave cinema.

His thought straying towards the Madison from Bande part, he thought of their last kiss. A brush of the lips in warm affection, he made a note to make sure that if the same happened, she caught his bottom lip – the upper one felt uncomfortably chafed.

She sat.

I tried calling you.

I know. I didn’t pick up.

Why not?

Well, we’d already made this appointment. So I figured that if you wanted to cancel on me, I’d put you through either the inconvenience of coming over to tell me in person, or the guilt of knowing you stood me up.

You’re a.. you’re twisted, you know that?

N grinned; so did she. She leaned over and kissed him in greeting. He was glad he’d made the earlier note.

You ever notice how we have cold opens?

Huh?

It’s a television thing.. like SNL. We never actually say hello at the beginning. There has to be a little.. play.

Are you complaining?

Not particularly, no. Hm, no. Just saying. Oh.. I like your dress.

Shut up.

No, really, I do. It’s a really.. nice.. dress. That’s it. I’m not going to say anything else about it.

But you want to, don’t you?

Well.

Well?

Welll.. No. No, no.

…

No.

…

Ok. It’s.. nothing actually. It’s nothing..

He’d inadvertently caught the waiter’s eye. Sniffing blood, the waiter made a beeline for the table, navigating through the minefield of diners with a menacing urgency that had a Don’t-Fuck-With-My-Progress air usually reserved for drag-racing ambulances.

May I take your order?

Two coffees please. She smiled at the waiter, but wasn’t sure if he’d caught it.

Meanwhile, distracted, N was tapping out a rhythm on the table that neither had a tune nor was metronomic. She found it mutely dissonant. He caught the twitch of disregard on her face and stopped.

So.

So..

You were saying?

I’ve forgotten.

No you haven’t. Out with it. What about the dress?

I’m just.. thinking about it. You know. Don’t take it the wrong way, and don’t think.. anything of it. It’s just an observation, yeah? But. It’s a really nice dress. It is. Very sexy too, if you don’t mind me saying. But you’re wearing a tee shirt underneath it.

Now for a dress that strappy to have a tee shirt hide what it wants to show means something. You haven’t shaved your armpits. How do I know? If you haven’t shaved your armpits, you, with your skin tone, really shouldn’t be waving from across the room while wearing a tee with a sleeve that ends over there. A little palm wave would have sufficed.

I’ll keep that in mind the next time I try to be enthusiastic about seeing you.

They both smiled. She fingered the napkin laid out on the table. He leaned forward, looking intently at a spot on a fake flower while idly fiddling at some growth under his chin. The coffee arrived.

--

I hate making up names.

elephants and spores

2008-11-14T17:09:00.003+05:30

I should confess that I don’t even like Guns N’ Roses all that much.

But, Axl Rose (and whatever revolving door of musicians that constitutes the band these days) has transcended from being a musician in a band to a totem of popular culture – the grimier and boozier Paris Hilton of the ‘90s. Nobody really knew what he did for the best part of a decade, but that didn’t stop people from writing about it.

Having incubated an album that in human years has hit puberty and been shepherded into adolescence, there is only one question that matters for the listener – is it any good?

Apart from the studio and management who worry about oh-so prosaic things such as production costs and money, hardly anyone is going to pay attention to anything other than two things – the quality of the album, and the lingering question of just exactly why it took so long. How long must it take for a band to produce an album? Also, how long should it reasonably take?

Rushing the completion of a product isn’t the best way to ensure quality, but taking time over it doesn’t guarantee that either. Looking at the film industry, some of the British ‘quota quickies’ (fairly self-explanatory) are masterpieces, as are a lot of the films produced by the almost assembly-line studio system in the first half of the last century – Casablanca being one of them.

On the other hand, there are directors cut in the Stanley Kubrick mould – perfectionists who become grouchy if they manage to finish a film before at least one Presidential term is through. And, it’s important to distinguish this from delays, which usually are an indicator of interference and meddling. The period taken can be lengthened due to either one or both of these factors.

Most artists in the music industry can be considered perfectionists to some level (are there degrees of perfection?), a few of them obsessing over their work to an absurd extent. There really aren’t parallels to be drawn to the movie industry, because firstly the number of people involved in production in the former is much smaller – band, producer and sessions musicians, and secondly the turnover time is a lot shorter in the music industry.

Similar to writers churning out screenplays that get optioned and eventually made years later, there are people churning out tunes and lyrics that eventually get recorded by manufactured pop musicians. But let’s consider the majority of artists, who write their own songs.

One approach could be to rationalise that as much time as possible should be taken when writing songs. Looking at bands that release five albums in ten years with roughly two decent songs on each album, can it be reasoned that if they’d taken a decade to write one album, it would have been all killer and no filler? Some obviously talented bands take pride in putting a time constraint upon themselves to produce an album, resulting in a sub-par product at the end of it (Jack White III, I’m looking at you).

On the other hand, David Bowie, in the ten year period from 1970 to 1980, produced eleven albums of original material which encompasses some of the best music he, and the era, ever produced – Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station, “Heroes” and Scary Monsters, to name four. A lot of bands can and have followed this make hay before the sun goes away method, but it’s often obstructed by commercial interests in squeezing the last possible buck out of one album before moving on to the next one.

But both fail to take into consideration external factors such as going on hiatus, infighting, creative differences, Yoko Ono etc. In the case of Chinese Democracy itself, a large chunk of its gestation period was fuelled by alcohol and acrimony, making it a bit of an anomaly.

The question itself may be flawed, for what may be required is to not question the artistic mechanism, but the patience of the listener, who in one sense has no real right to demand new music every alternate year, and should rather be thankful that the music gets produced at all... one can’t rush genius?

In Expresso (NIE, Blore).

I may be testing how low I can go.

the coming of Democracy

2008-11-08T17:16:00.001+05:30

This month, pigs will fly, and not just on Pink Floyd album covers.

Paying no regard to Russell’s Teapot, I assert that in a month’s time, at least one solitary pig in some nook of the world, driven by a higher force, climbs to the top of a barn and jumps, or convinces itself off the side of a cliff, only to sprout wings and soar towards its great unknown.

Why?

Because in just three odd weeks, Chinese Democracy will be out.

For those to whom that statement seems like a harbinger of yet another fairly unsolicited American aggression, let me explain. Guns N’ Roses, a band that used to be quite big in and around the time the Berlin Wall fell and one that has taken a proverbial elephantine gestation period, has finally come to the conclusion that their album should emerge before revolutionary change, and completed it. For those to whom that statement seems like a harbinger of the apocalypse, I agree with you. The non-release of the album was one of the comforting constants in the world, like celebrities breaking up due to ‘irreconcilable differences’ and torture on terror suspects. The release dates of this album were akin to the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and its surfacing will bring to an end more than a decade of second-guessing.

Whenever an artist, especially a talented one, lingers over a work that’s stuck on the edge of forever, expectations heighten and the legend grows. Whether the legend is favourable or not though, depends on the kind of work being considered.

For example, construction on Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona started in 1882 and still continues, but the design is available for all to see. A building’s construction can span centuries (Gaudi’s work currently optimistically scheduled to be completed in 2026) and still not be forgotten because not only is the design complete, but the construction, however slow, happens in public.

It’s a bit different for musicians, for while snatches of their work may be aired to the internet, the world still wouldn’t know what the album would sound like until at least the roughly finished version gets leaked onto the internet.

To use the Gaudi cathedral (no pun intended) as a contrast – once designed, people already knew what it would look like a hundred years ago. Today, models of the complete cathedral are sold as a souvenir to tourists. On the other hand, Axl Rose has been kicking around the studio since the fall of the Soviet Union, but only now will the world know if the culmination of his efforts is akin to forged steel or to rotted fruit.

Now I’m going to go ahead and say that the new GNR album isn’t even the most anticipated from the lot of long-gestating albums. That title would go to the fruit of the reformed My Bloody Valentine’s recording sessions, if only because Kevin Shields is more of an acknowledged genius and less of a petulant crank than Axl Rose. But all such albums share a common bond in that their materialisation is often greeted with a fair amount of trepidation mixed with the inevitable anticipation. Will the product be like aged wine or burnt soup?

Portishead, a band whose third album had been in limbo for a considerable time, proved that it is possible to release a decent – even stunning – album after that period. However, will Chinese Democracy be a disappointment? I think so. That’s not a judgment passed upon the quality of the music on the album, but rather on the cottage industry of expectations and the sheer myth that’s surrounded the production of this album.

After all these years and rumours, when I look at the album cover on the internet, it’s just an album cover. Looking at the song list that’s also kicking around, it’s just a list of songs that made the album. There is no way that it will live up to whatever standard has been set over the last fifteen years, just as there is no way a new Harper Lee novel would live up to the standard set over the last decades. It may be good, but it’s merely good. It may be brilliant, but it’s merely brilliant.

Perhaps the only way for GNR to have been able to salvage itself would have been to not release the album at all. But, that’s just perverse.

In Expresso (NIE, Blore).

the end

2008-11-02T22:19:00.003+05:30

Previous breadcrumb over here.

I get heckled in the morning by my mother, who is urging me to speed up inside the bath so that we could leave on time for the wedding. It should be mentioned that the entire process is a two day event incorporating various ceremonies, but the actual sealing of the deal was some two hours away. Also pointed out was that on this day of joy, was heckling really required first thing in the morning? Having gotten off the train some forty minutes prior (clinching a hat-trick of sleepless nights), I wasn’t yet fully functional, and the egging on wasn’t helping.

The result of the assumed urgency was that I felt that there was no time to shave (later chastised by a particularly scary aunt who beseeched me to at least shave for my own wedding), and this dishevelled look (hair sticking up too) coupled with sandals and a solid colour slightly faded-looking kurta made me look like a JNU political science student.

I also stuck out like a sore thumb, given that the rest of the men were uniformly in a white shirt and veshti – that homogenous look always seen outside katchhi offices. Moreover, none of the men on the side of the family have necks. Balding I may be, but I have a neck damnit, and am thankful that I don’t look like a land mafia don, complete with religious markings and fancy phones in a black pouch.

The vast majority of the people at this wedding were the stereotypical maamis, madisaar and flab in tow. The manner in which they roosted together, clucking about children and waddling around the floor reminded me strongly of the fattened pigeons from a Sylvain Chomet short that I adore. It was amusing to fantasise about these characters going ‘SPLAT!’ on the pavement and woozily walking away though.

After catching the eye of S – on stage but not on edge, the couple having adopted a Zen approach to the traditional customs, I deposited myself in a chair and fell into a semi-stupor while in a Rodin’s Thinker pose. However, my blissful coma was shattered by my ancestors, who blew into the room and with Gatling gun precision rattled off introductions, all while I’m sleepily waving and nodding along.

Preparation is the key to social events, and I really should have had an answer ready to the question ‘are you enjoying your course?/how is the course?’, which was asked by each and every (bar none) person I was introduced to/knew over there. And right till the last person asked, my answer was a shrug of the shoulders, wavy gesticulation of my arms and a shake of the head from side to side that may have been conveying a certain equivocal apathy towards it.

The other quip often heard when of age at weddings is a ‘har harr.. You’re next’, from an old and indubitably frustrated old mama/maami, to which the answer is usually a laugh and a pshaw, all while weeping inside. This time, my plan was to reply ‘oh, I eloped. Didn’t you get the memo?’, but then the night before, a couple of people advised me to respond with a ‘well, but your funeral is next.’ I thought it pithy. After a sputter, I received a ten minute lecture about how that certainly isn’t appropriate in public from my grandmother. The sputter was worth the lecture.

The wedding itself was a 21st century affair. I’ve paid scant attention at previous ones, and have been to probably two in the last seven years, but it struck me today as to just how heavily documented this wedding was. Flanking the stage were two big screens on which the proceedings were being projected, and there was a further screen in the dining area to keep track of proceedings. The camera people were doing nifty tracking shots, pans and split-screens, while the head priest doubled up as the director, instructing the couple not only on the intonation of shlokas while simultaneously barking out instructions to them and the camera operators – ‘you, go up front!’ ‘Smile for the camera!’ ‘That’s nice, now move on!’ It was all extremely clinical and brutally efficient. The priest was last seen making a quick exit as soon as the thaali was tied, no doubt having pencilled in an ad shoot for the early afternoon.

Weddings ebb and flow, and the musicians play a big part in keeping people alert. Fiddling away in the background as irrelevant things happen and the guests drift away mentally, they drum up an urgent beat when something important is happening, just to be certain that nobody gets embarrassed on camera. A singer had also been hired for this occasion, only to be usurped by the crows within the family who wanted to bust a node in the name of love.

Food always plays a major part in luring people to weddings, and it’s a good indicator of just how close a person is to the couple – directly proportional to the amount of time that they remain in the hall without being fidgety after they start serving food. As soon as the first round starts, the guests filter out of the hall, leaving it quite barren.

It’s all about the food, and how much one can eat. Breakfast and lunch were served an hour removed from each other, but that didn’t make the latter any less popular. I’d been starving myself for the kalyana sappadu, but the breakfast really did spoil my till-then undeterred march towards the sambhar (including not eating dinner the previous night).

I’d also been instructed to take pictures of the food. While I went about it without giving it a second thought, I did realise that this isn’t something people normally do. At all. Hastily, I acted like I was fiddling with my phone, rather than framing a shot, but that didn’t spare me the dirty looks from the management.

In the midst of all this, S&M were also getting married. It seems that while my entire family thinks that the only thing a lawyer ends up doing is arguing in court or posting bail, they are for some reason also strangely and unnervingly well-versed with Section 7 of the Hindu Marriage Act.

And in the midst of all this, I did still feel happy that they were getting married, and slightly older at that thought.

But I bet it didn’t show. And I still wanted to punch a singing kid.

padda pada

2008-10-28T07:30:00.002+05:30

Stop sniggering when I say it, but parties have never been my thing. Perhaps they could have been, but I was waylaid along the way by the internet and an obsessive desire to catalogue. As a result (the former, not being waylaid), when invited for a Deepavali/Diwali (hereinafter Diwali because it’s shorter) party, my first thought was wondering just how broad the invite list was if I was being invited.

Having a train to catch on the same night, the party would have been quasi-romantic in a Brief Encounter sort of way, only David Lean took the wise decision of not shooting the movie in Smell-o-vision. But that’s irrelevant. I would have declined the invite, but was flying high on having finally successfully completed watching a movie for the first time in ages (two, in fact), and am absolutely miserable at making up believable excuses on the phone.

After a knee-jerk acceptance, I fretted over the possibilities for the rest of the day. Of course, nothing bad or interesting would happen, but… you know. I called the host an hour before the scheduled start (is that the term to use for a party?), steeled with determination to cancel and proffer some uncle who’d invited me into his parlour as the reason. But, all of the said steel shattered within the ten odd seconds of ringing allowed before he picked up.

All I could manage was ‘so… what is the plan exactly?’ He already thought me thick, I daresay, and that wasn’t helpful. Clutching at an unopened bottle of white wine that’d been lying in my room for a considerable amount of time (won here, ignored since), I pre-emptively felt like a future bootlegger in a post-Ramadoss alcohol ban India, fingering the newspaper as I paid respects to my host’s grandmother as I made my way up to his terrace.

My fears of not knowing anyone dissipated for a brief period of time, when at that point of time, by virtue of being punctual, I knew or had met more than half of the people present. The ratio dipped precipitously as the evening progressed.

Colonising one section of the parapet wall, I appeared to have claimed what would in a club have been the spot that’s forever occupied by barflies. But I wasn’t drinking either (at that point of time in the evening) – antihistamines for a flaring of a fur fever (coherence sacrificed at the altar of alliteration).

A few people did gravitate in the general direction, because at that point the majority of the women were also by said wall. Cross-talk ensued, and I may have even said something vaguely witty about pinching visiting cards from pockets.

Settling down on my territorial piss for the night with a familiar face, the revellers came and went, most unidentified due to a sudden onset of night-blindness. However, the randomness of the net that had been cast by the invites was on display when I realised that the people in attendance included a classmate from school, one chap I hadn’t seen in more than half a decade, various Hobbit-y type people who were scuttling about, Germans, and a soap-seller whom I’d met and teamed with the previous day at an informal quiz meeting.

Determined to make a social bee out of me before my night was through, I was shepherded through the crowd and introduced to various people, most of the conversations proceeding beyond the name and a non-committal bobbing of the head that may have seemed like a pin or two coming loose.

Only one of these stranger interactions, a loose trading of fluffy insults between a law student and a bank employee about their respective fields, might have led somewhere, but had to be truncated with a slightly filmi ‘Um, sorry, but I have to catch a train in literally… two minutes.’

All in all, putting all the antisocial cocooning aside.. had a couple of drinks, was partially blinded and burnt by falling fireworks, chattered teeth with old people, and met a couple of new ones even.

They’ll make a fun person out of me yet. And so will I.

Question: Isn't it a given that at a diwali party, the prevalent atmosphere is one of 'Happy Diwali!!'? Would it be required to have to once again individually wish every person you talk to?

Sounds of Silence

2008-10-25T00:31:00.001+05:30

I’m on the top berth of a three-tier sleeper train coach with my eyes shut, listening to the surroundings.

Out of the five other people in closest proximity, one seems to speak Kannada, one Tamil, and the other three Hindi. The three Hindi speakers chatter away to each other, while the other two are on the phone. Each voice ebbs and flows, hardly worrying about skirting around each other, each attainting its own comfort zone of audibility.

I can hear the door being pummelled as people stream through it, vinyl suitcases squealing against the metal and the floor. Tinny monophonic music streams from a mobile phone propped up against a table as an impromptu boom box. The train makes mysterious noises, creaking, groaning and sounding petulant – irked at having been roused to locomote away from its cosy platform.

These are just some of the most superficial noises that filter through. Had I pricked up my ears and paid attention, I may have heard animals, whistles, vendors, wagon wheels and a lot more. I don’t think there’s an escape from sound apart from being inattentive, and even in that state of enforced ignorance, the silence sits like a blanket, reducing and muffling but not banishing in entirety.

John Cage famously visited the anechoic chamber (a room that absorbs all sound) at Harvard University expecting silence, but instead heard his own nervous system working. Concluding that silence is impossible, he went on to compose the royalty black hole that is 4’33” – composed for any instrument with instructions not to play a single note.

And it’s true. The self-aware silence (regardless of whether you’re ‘listening’ to 4’33” or not) sharpens the senses, and what the audience listens to is, well, the world at large. There are noisy auditoriums, but even the silent ones have a low hum of the air conditioning or the warm buzz of the life itself that populates the venue.

On the one hand, it could enhance one’s interaction with his/her surroundings, such as merely observing more about it. Too many people hear without listening, acknowledging the broad strokes of life without taking in the details and wantonly dulling it with noise-reducing earphones. Of course, one section of society would claim that this is easily surmounted by doing drugs.

On the other hand, there is so very much noise in the world. Aleatoric music is one thing, but I daresay that anyone who’s ever had to spend three minutes staring down a red light at any particularly busy traffic intersection in Bangalore would buy into the Rolex in a bag theory, renew their faith in a higher being and completely renounce any belief in chance happenings.

To the honking of horns, revving of engines and violent curses that viciously spew from the windpipes. To every parade incorporating reckless sloganeering, to every argument with raised voices, to every increase in volume as an attention-grabbing technique. To every college student who shears the silencer off his Swift and turns the bass on the stereo up to eleven. Please, hush.

And, as audiences at most college rock shows in Bangalore will violently assert, instruments themselves can either do good or be possessed by the forces of darkness. Worse still is when musicians are thick enough to take that as a compliment. Cage may have embraced it, but my irrelevant spin on 4’33” is that he may have been a pacifist, and something of a fence-sitter.

After Cage experienced the chamber at Harvard, he stated ‘until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.’ I don’t doubt him. But I do wonder, when sandwiched on a berth between rows of cacophony that seem in no danger of abating, about the leap he took from sound to music. We may live on a planet of sound, but it takes a bit of an effort to make music.

In Expresso (NIE, Blore).

SiC

2008-10-19T22:36:00.000+05:30

Fame and fortune have always gone together, but I really don’t know why. Isn’t it asking for too much to have both fame and fortune? While it’s sort of inevitable that when one gets famous the fortune often follows, the line gets blurry when people become famous solely for having a fortune.

In the internet age especially, it’s very plausible to be famous without being rich due to that fame – famous bloggers, self-esteem flagellating individuals on YouTube and so on. A lot of people are also rich without being famous – any number of people who’ve made their money in software development, only to have Bill Gates take the credit in the world-at-large.

Most musicians aren’t millionaires who own and have the things Nickelback sings about. However, even taking into consideration acts like Daft Punk (who function anonymously), musicians are famous.

Do they deserve to be rich? Rather, how much should they be making from their music?

It’s tough to quantify talent in monetary terms, which has led to a standardisation that’s independent of production costs – a roughly four-hundred rupee charge when buying an international CD (whether Slipknot or Sinatra).

Should artists make as much money as they sometimes make from album sales, and do they have the right to whine about piracy? Isn’t the artist’s prerogative to be heard, appreciated and loved, rather than trying to squeeze every last pie from the consumer’s bank account?

One factor is the record companies. To be heard, artists may require capital which they needn’t necessarily have, at which point the company steps in, and wants to maximise its gain. Getting them heard would make a lot of people happy and make them a lot of money, and this may not change anytime soon. Even independent music labels are ultimately for-profit companies.

But, the proliferation of Myspace allows for putting out music at minimum cost, and a lot of artists, especially the ones in penury, seem to be grateful if their music is merely heard, royalties and the good life pending delivery.

They also believe that the live show is their primary earner, and that by putting their music out where people can listen to it (even if for free), they’d be drawing paying crowds to their live act. On the other hand, a lot of artists argue that they live solely on album sales.

A model of earnings could be that when the artist produces a song or an album, it’s auctioned off to the highest bidder, who can then proceed to sink his/her fangs into the economics of replication. The artist gets no royalties from further sales, but would get a cut if the product is subsequently auctioned again. An artist who has produced an unappreciated-on-release classic that was before its time deserves a cut when the audience comes of age. But the artist still has rights to perform the songs, and can earn from concerts and keep tilling away for as long as he/she pleases.

Consider this – in almost every profession, the worker gets paid (unfairly or otherwise) on the basis of performance. Don MacLean, when queried about what American Pie meant, replied that it meant that he doesn’t have to work for the rest of his life. And the rest of the world hears it and also buys it?

If musicians want to bleed every last buck out of the consumer by way of royalty cheques for decades, they should at least have the deceny to pledge allegiance to Silicon Valley first.

I really am not proud of this one.

In Expresso, (NIE, Blore).

barbara iran

2008-10-14T15:54:00.002+05:30

At first blush, the process to apply for a visa to the United States at the consulate in Chennai is exactly the kind of process that the country needs to amend if it craves security.

While clutching at a processing fee receipt for $131.00 and walking past the winding line that turns a couple of corners in the blazing midday sun, the first thing that struck me was that this is the kind of practice that causes hate to germinate in the hearts of people, kindling craven desire to strike back at the Empire if rejected after spending roughly five-six thousand rupees to have an application ‘processed’ and having had no respite from the elements for who knows how long.

It did turn out that they were a tad more efficient than the day long line that wound down three stories at the passport renewal office. On the other hand, perhaps reflective of the current administration, the place rewarded laziness and penalised punctuality, allowing for those late-comers at the back of the line to move right up front.

All sorts were present – techies looking to boldly go where ever so many have gone before, geriatrics visiting their spawn, wannabe-immigrants etc., and some with reasons that even if true, sounded made up. In retrospect, attending the wedding of a cousin does sound slightly incongruous.

Standing in line, I thought of a classmate who’d be rejected twice. I thought of a Newsweek column from years ago where someone had said in the interview that he wouldn’t stay in the US because the coffee sucked (no, he didn’t get the visa either). I’d even quipped to the person in front (who was gaily hurtling abuses at his wife who was slow in progressing to the front of the line) that the worst outcome after all this paranoid groping by the guards would be rejection. The cosmos must be laughing at me right now.

You already know how this ends. After depositing my fingerprints at two different points and being a part of three and a half lines, the dreaded interview looms ahead. A person in a booth looking mighty suspicious asking questions, only to end (mostly) with a ‘your visa/passport shall be sent by courier to your home’. One of them was also trained in Hindi/Tamil, though making absolutely no effort at mastering the accent.

Hi. How are you today?

I just smiled. Did that make me seem shifty? Perhaps I should have said something.

What does your father do, and how much does he earn?

This is how a middle-order batsman from Zimbabwe probably feels when facing Glenn McGrath (insert legend here). You’ve known about it for most of your life, had various opportunities to try and deal with it, yet when it actually comes down to it, have absolutely no answer.

I’ve been asked the question for almost fourteen years (since the yearly information cards handed out at school), and all fourteen years I’ve made up answers, because I just didn’t know it. My father wasn’t particularly bothered either, and encouraged me to use my imagination. After admitting first that I didn’t know (BAD idea), I took a stab at it, which turned out to be a roughly correct ballpark figure. But, she wasn’t biting – tax returns and bank statements be damned.

How many years do you have left in your course?

Um, three-ish years, roughly. I think I said roughly too many times. But the accuracy of two two-thirds is far outweighed by its lack of resonance. It just doesn’t sound right.

Unfortunately, we cannot issue a non-immigrant tourist visa to you at this point of time because you haven’t proven that you have the financial and family ties in India to return.

I felt like she’d looked into my soul.

Did she know that I was relatively godless? Did she know that I wished my great grandmother should be snuffed out? Did she know of my contempt towards corporate lawyers?

Is this where all my careless ribbing of the interview process and cynicism towards life came back to kick me in the gut? Is the kick in the gut the loss of the money, or that I may have to repeat the process again (with the threat of being banned from the country forever, I am told, if twice rejected). Was it that I had to reject an auto in disgust after he courts me for five minutes, consoling me about it not being a complete rejection before shamelessly wanting to charge 100 rupees for the trip?

Mm, no.

That would be the completely non-refundable ticket that’d already been booked.

Cousin’s wedding, it seems. Phooey.

thank you, good night

2008-10-09T15:09:00.000+05:30

With players dusting off their walking sticks and downing blood-thinners as the India-Australia test series looms, let’s talk about retirement.

Retirement is delineated for sportspersons. They either stop playing altogether, or simply don’t compete at a particular level anymore. However, the lines blur in certain cases – working semi-retirements, such as Beckham joining the L.A. Galaxy.

Writers like Harper Lee just left the building without leaving a note. One can’t really ‘retire’ from writing, unless they amputate their hands. But, that’s inconvenient, because people use hands for other purposes. They could always hire people to be their right and left hands, and also, I suppose, dictate.

Actors retire – Paul Newman did, as did Greta Garbo. Sean Connery is retired too, though he didn’t say ‘never again’ again, so he still might return. Even Newman was slated to direct a play before his health scuttled it. As long as an individual retains some bodily functions, they always have the option of passing it off as performance art.

Unlike sportspersons, it’s more difficult to know when to call time for artists, because the signs aren’t as readily seen. The former retire because their bodies aren’t able anymore. The latter, if they choose to retire, is for more esoteric reasons, such as having finished delivering their artistic message to the world, having some conception of the kind of legacy they would like to leave behind and so on. Sometimes it just works out that way.

Do musicians ever retire?

A rare few actually crack the system and stay reasonably ahead of the curve: the Dylans and Bowies of the world. Most of them though, carry on – a phalanx of indestructible cockroaches, soldiering on while meteors shower down on Earth. Musicians never were realists at heart, come to think of it.

Think about it – while it did afford Bangalore the opportunity to watch them live, the Rolling Stones will never occupy the same pantheon as the Beatles only because they didn’t disband, survived the ‘70s without too many fatalities and went on to record Steel Wheels, Bridges to Babylon etc. They just didn’t know when to stop (see also: U2, R.E.M.).

Few artists seem to know or acknowledge when they’re over the hill, and nobody wants to tell them that they are over the hill. Neil Young may have said ‘it’s better to burn out than to fade away’, but even he hasn’t followed his own lyric. Young is a stupendous artist, but his last twenty years isn’t even a patch on his first.

What artists could consider is a partial retirement – retire from recording, but not touring. This strikes a balance between eking out a living (or for buying that island on auction) and giving the public what it wants. Few endure and most ignore new recordings, but as the accounting shows, reunited bands may as well be subliminally playing the ka-ching sound (or Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’, if you will) as people throng the turnstiles at venues.

And even if that doesn’t happen, it’s only a question of downgrading from arenas to clubs. They’d still make money from touring, just not as much. Regardless of what they produce in the present, when an old band plays their old songs, people will turn up.

It’s a little selfish really - an opportunity for the older people to recapture a time from their own past long since left behind, and for new audiences to either bask in the perspiration of legends, or wonder what the fuss was about (doesn’t matter as long as they pay at the entrance).

Too many bands call it quits when the going is still good, only to feebly attempt to recapture past glories when they’re past it and the rest of the world would prefer to rather only remember them as the legends he/she/they rightfully are.

Much like Michael Jordan making a comeback with the Washington Wizards, people wished nothing but the best, but kind of knew how it would (and eventually did) turn out.

Alternatively, they should have taken up the blues, because blues musicians seem to age like wine, not milk.

In Expresso (NIE Blore).

allergen

2008-10-03T03:42:00.001+05:30

I stretched my left arm to the extent of dislocation.

Nope.

I rested my right elbow on my thigh.

Nope.

Reached for a widget.

It’s still there.

Ooh.

It’s been a week, and it’s still there. I might be onto something. I haven’t thought of a name yet, but if it’s only on the right, it could be something like One-armed Pete or One-Finger Mack. But they make me sound like an amputee. Well, it’d keep the quarries in suspense.

Super-people and their powers – it’s all about a flourish. They can’t have bad posture with a bamboo-in-the-wind slouch and scratch their privates while sweating some.. err.. super… functioning fluid out of their palms (I hope that was the palm doing the secreting there). A sweaty palmed superhuman is just not marketable.

They draw themselves up to their full height, adjust their pants around if it’s too tight (my solution is to let the pant hold itself up only by the zipper, leaving it unbuttoned) and simultaneously thrust their arm and chin out, obliterating the enemy with their self-confidence before the purple beam of disruptive health even scratches their epidermal layer.

Some of them are bitten by animals, others fall into gunk or just have good genes, and a lot of them shoot something up. Me? The straw that broke the back was writing. A lot of writing. Endless reams of breathless scrawling later, my hand felt paralyzed. Thirty one hours of sleeping on my arm later, my arm existed only as a phantom limb.

When it returned, it was.. different.

For one thing, I kept reaching out to people. Mm, no. I kept reaching out for people. I put it down to hormones, but it kept happening, and in a manner that wasn’t entirely comfortable for me. I was there, but not quite, if you know.

Was the first time intentional? Hard to say, but at that point, I could have landed on either side of the fence. Well, at this point, I know that I’ve landed, but I’m not yet sure which side I did land on. Meh, they lap up moral ambiguity. But I’m not tortured by the deaths.

The last thing I remember about the first one is the material of her shirt, a really tasteful white shirt with the top button playfully unhinging itself. She looked resplendent. Resplendent, I tell you. Tragedy sets up a good foundation for guilt-driven need. Sigh, I so badly wanted to touch her. Soon enough though, my pointless doodling on the sidewalks had to be cast aside.

I knew my foe. I knew him.. intimately. He’d come into my house, charmed my family, shat on my lawn and licked my nose when I wasn’t looking. Yes, I knew him.

He was a master. He briefly went by a B, and was now known as C, but I knew his tricks. He was B. The B. He was someone.. or something. Something worthy.

The first time I faced off with him, I was under-prepared. No, that’s vanity, and I’ll have none of it. I was unprepared. While I anticipated heavy losses at his jaws of bone, I ill-equipped (not to mention that at that point of time my powers hadn’t manifested itself) for his plague of ticks and airborne follicular attack patterns that severely compromised my life systems. He’d found my weakness. Fisting anti-histamines, I fled for my life, but vowed revenge. REVENGE.

Isn’t that how all great wars begin? Flogged when powerless, I vowed revenge without wavering, but without means either. But then, when a cause is just, pure and has fairly feasible franchise value, God (or FSM, if you will, but they’re gratingly smug about their beliefs or lack thereof. Fussin’ heathens.) showed me the way.

Pep talk: he isn’t my nemesis. He’s antipasto.

Suppressing my scabby sneezes as he hit me with what he had, with a nonchalant movement I tasted the sweat under my nostrils and smacked him on the nose with my finger. The damage wasn’t fatal, but I wrecked his colon, I think. He does an impressive impression of flatulence at any rate. I take that as lesson taught, and damn well learnt.

Breathing in the dust of the devil, I steeled myself till the brink of being ready. But I wouldn’t know until I was. But then, I knew. But then… I knew. And know. Knew then, know now. Yes. I’m waiting.

I am the Edisinial Colossus.

Take my card.

Here’s a pun-heavy jingle waiting to happen.

Call me EC.

It’s easy.

me, you, everyone (apologies to M.J.)

2008-09-29T00:30:00.002+05:30

Picking at the fleshy remains of her good eye reminded of vultures. Ever see a vulture? Perhaps if I left it out in the sun long enough a vulture or two would come circling. Fat chance of that happening; sooner a shark would smell the blood and evolve limbs to pick at it than a vulture getting to it before the rats did. Not that I have anything against rats in particular, but I prefer mice.

People often can’t tell the difference between rats and mice – it’s all in the eyes, I tell them. It could be true, it could be false, but phooey to taxonomy I say (if that isn’t a nice word I don’t know what is), it should be in the eyes. Ever met a rat with thoughtful eyes? Thought not, and if you did, it was a mouse, you blind rat. You never did think to ask it, did you? But well, can’t go assume that people talk to animals all the time.

There a U/V guide for rats and mice as for crocs and gators? Could be because crocs and gators can eat you easier than mice and rats can, though I’d wager the former is less painfully drawn out. Even so, what good would it do other than to be able to tell the reporter(s) that you were partly mauled by a croc or a gator? I don’t think they discriminate, and neither should you. What, you’d feel better when dying in the jaws of a croc? It’s more aerodynamic, that I’ll tell you.

What the world needs are people-eating rats. Yeah, that’ll make you remember and look at the vermin’s eyes and not its chest or whatever part gets you through the night. I’m not looking to go all biblical and all, but they had a pretty thing going with those plagues, though I learnt about them from Dr. Phibes. Flying rats. The closest I’ve come when cleaning and watching is losing the top bit of my ring-finger.

Who uses that finger anyway? They’re vestigial. All I need is one opposable thumb and the first two fingers to follow. The rest are dead weight; more to aim at. Ask the Brits, they know all about sticking their pinkies out. It’s the little things that instil confidence in the Empire.

Let the rats out.

Why the hell not? The book may have had more of an impression than it should have, but reading it, I didn’t find it repulsive at all. The details are sketchy now, fading away like powdered paint, but there was a suction pump, chainsaw and a woman’s vagina involved.

Like some Stephen Gilbert wet dream, hordes of rats emerge out of their hiding holes, gnawing at the eyelids of the sleeping masses, frenching rat poison onto the lips and scurrying down the pyjamas of twitchy insomniacs and giving them one more sliver of doubt before the screams ring out. Who wouldn’t pay good money to see something like that?

Between rats eating babies and setting mop-tops on fire though, I’d have my hands full for at least a week. At least. The light was green; turned red when I tried plugging it in with an interloping wire underneath.

Sparks. Hah.

someone something

2008-09-25T00:01:00.000+05:30

Over the last few years music has seen an explosion of individualism. Just around the time when the Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls were on the wane and rap started its domination of the sales charts, the independent (or indie) movement was slowly gaining steam in a post-Napster world, filling the void that had persisted for the best part of a decade after the Alternative musicians (read: Grunge and all its trappings) went mainstream.

The internet revolution democratised distribution for music producers – no longer did an artist need a record label to be heard. Augmented now with the cheaper cost of putting music out, it also provided an enhanced freedom (not to mention rising commercial viability) to all artists, and not just punks and metallers, to break away from ‘the norm’. Indeed, they embraced it – this rabid loathing of being pigeon-holed also led to increased assertions by artists that they really were square pegs resisting the suck of a world of round holes.

Genre means squat to me. Many circles have admitted that it means squat to them too, so I’m not alone. While it may serve some purposes, the occasional pointlessness of categorisation is well illustrated when trying to classify Led Zeppelin (to borrow from Wikipedia): Heavy metal? Hard rock? Classic rock? Folk? Blues? Electric folk?

I’m not arguing against categorisation. Description is good. You want to be able to tell that X sounds like A and Y sounds like B. But sometimes, just sometimes, even when justified, it goes too damn far. Take metal for example. When I was growing up (a sheltered period, I admit), I’d only heard of people (engineering college students, to be precise) who listened to metal. But now, that tag is meaningless.

Saying you listen to metal just doesn’t cut it. You’d get asked “What do you mean by just ‘metal’?” Do you mean groove? Death? Speed? Stoner? Operatic? Glam? Folk? Nu? Gothic? Post? Progressive? Progressive-post? Post-progressive? Black? Blue? Avant-garde? Thrash? Trash? And of course, the death metallers would look down on the Progs, the Progs look down on the Goths, the Goths look down on the Grooves, and irrespective of who actually looks down on whom else, everybody looks down on Nu-metallers.

Genre has its purpose, but from the perspective of a dilettante, it’s all a bit confusing, especially when people start making their own genres up. What exactly is Brechtian punk cabaret? It does an abysmal job if it requires a further paragraph explaining what it’s supposed to sound like. Then again, who knew what rock was supposed to sound like when it was first incepted as a genre? However, the splintering of genres means that the new styles can no longer effectively fall under unhyphenated catch-all genres such as rock, pop or rap.

My inevitable reaction to any queries directed towards me on the genres of music I listen to is an uncomfortable shuffle followed by a mumbled ‘all sorts.. anything really.. eclectic, you might say’. I’d rather be vague than say that I have a particular affinity for Toho-esque speed-bluegrass that has a nihilist aesthetic of a Groucho Marxian-variety. Or that I like firang-core – a genre of music encompassing lyrics written in a language that I don’t understand. What sounds trite in English sounds oh-so romantic in French or Icelandic (the hook to the genre is blissful ignorance).

One profile I came across on Myspace had under its music column ‘Don’t ask. Things so far off the mainstream path that it’ll make your brain crawl out of your skull and run away’. Truly, individualism is proudly worn on the listener’s sleeve, and if you’re not with it, you’re out of it. But given that that’s kind of the point anyway, it’s a win-win situation… I think.

In Expresso (NIE Blore).

comfort in community

2008-09-20T19:15:00.000+05:30

As a somewhat earnest-looking concert-goer, a question that has long plagued me is whether one type of fan is ‘superior’. Spying with a tinge of condescension on Bangalore’s baying brood of black-teed and hirsute headbangers, inevitably I wonder about the populace in other places on the spectator spectrum. While it’s dandy to dismiss the issue with an ‘it takes all kinds to make the world’, it hardly provides closure to the issue (or the vicarious ego-boost of perceived superiority).

Recently, the results of an ongoing study that attempts to correlate musical tastes to personality were reported, and it had some interesting findings. More importantly, it provides valuable fodder at cocktail parties for strategic pigeon-holing in a time when people recklessly spew forth about global warming and the state of the world while treading cautiously over the issue of irate fanpeople (we’re inclusive).

The study threw up some surprising results, finding for example that fans of heavy metal are gentle people while indie music fans weren’t. I remain confident that nail-gun-wielding Slayer fans and light-petting swooners to Bright Eyes are in no danger of extinction. I also am confident that metalheads of the church-burning variety aren’t as interested in answering online questionnaires as the gentle and harmless (if still socially embarrassing) garden variety metalhead.

Less surprising are findings such as fans of Bollywood music are outgoing – probably the kind who’d dance around a traffic signal at the drop of a hat (or a shirt). Fans of chart pop have high self-esteem, but are not at ease. Understandable, given that while they perceive themselves to occupy a very healthy personal space in the world, the rest of the universe mocks them constantly, even while sometimes surreptitiously pining for that gay abandon to express questionable taste (indie kids of low self-esteem, I stare at you).

Obviously, the source of interest in such studies is to fill in the details – the whys to the whats. People could be hard workers because they’re mindless drones, or the root cause could be their upbringing as god-fearing students who went to the right acronymic universities and had all creativity leached out. The lack thereof could also be explained due to upbringing. Or because those people sit around all day either staring into the middle distance while Joy Division spins or stoned out of their wits.

But they’re all fully functional, whether with high or low self-esteem. Some listeners have high self-esteem because they know that they’re listening to an aural sophistication that evolved independent of electricity (any composer with a wig). Others fall into boxes of not giving a hoot, posturing being part of the territory, self-esteem affecting artistic integrity, and just plain who-what-me-where-omg-huh?!?

Ultimately, it’s about being comfortable in your own skin, which is what music itself is to a lot of people. Though, the ideal answer to befuddle any pigeon-holing surveyor is to testify to taking Lounge Piranhas with a dash of Extinct Reflections and Semmangudi on the side with Himesh thrown in for good measure.

In Expresso (NIE Bangalore).

indecision

2008-09-16T17:46:00.002+05:30

‘You know you want to. But do you want me to?’

He thought of the adage of yelling in forests as he shook his watch free from his cuff and kept an eye on the time. He could have been biting down on a cigarette, but a tooth of his was slowly killing itself – he couldn’t tell which one, but was confident of placing a tongue on it. The morning’s inspection has yielded a disturbing growth of what he hoped were nothing more than coffee stains.

Was he being vain in wanting white teeth, or was it a question of hygiene? Had it been hard-wired into him that white was pure, or was it a case of knowing by doing? Instinct told him that that sepia sewage-seeping-through-walls colour was just plain wrong. He’d have to get them cleaned soon.

Through his left pocket he could feel the hairs of his thigh. Feeling the bite marks of mosquitoes on his neck and chest with his other hand, he leaned into the lamp-post. The light was right but the time wasn’t, and the lamp was as yet unlit. It wasn’t desired in any case as he thought of wrapping himself closer into what should have been the glistening heaviness of solid construction but was rather a plastic sheen of flaking paint. It was scant consolation to think that the kind of people who did lean into lamp-posts died a Pavlovian death with the days of the bowler hat and ineffective earthing.

He wasn’t going to check again. No. Wiggling his fingers inside his pockets to keep them occupied, he thought of the ways in which he could avoid looking at it without having to break, disable, dismantle or dispose of his watch. It was past, and so the only question was her lateness. He’d done his checking, pacing, smoothening, polishing, picking, adjusting and licking. All before time, and he’d still gotten there early, and he was still nowhere near testing his saliva to see how it tasted.

Getting there early was his fault, he acknowledged, but her not being on time wasn’t. Some people manage their time based on their projections of how punctual other people are, as a result of which his standard reply was ‘got here a minute or so ago’, followed by a suggestive glance at the watch to make the other aware of late he or she was. It was only effective when executed with a certain helping of dryness that got the point across: ‘you’re late; I’m forgiving this time.’ But it’d long ceased to be a credible threat with her.

For all he knew, she’d been up at her window peering down just to see when he’d show up, and correspondingly deducted that time from the schedule – he was sixteen minutes early, so she’d be sixteen minutes late. She’d shuffle into view and say something about how she’d want to feel guilty about her own time, and not mine, and so to teach me a lesson, she added the amount of time that would have been on her conscience due to my being early.

Did that sort of functioning add to her extraordinariness? He wasn’t confident about whether she was or wasn’t anymore. No, he was still confident about her; just not his place. People didn’t cease to be extraordinary or special or exceptional simply because of their changing attitude towards him, he reasoned. But that still should count for something, shouldn’t it? It should, perhaps, but that would only serve to colour his judgment when trying to look at the whole.

He estimated using his last check that at least eighty minutes had passed. The stars were slowly warming themselves up. He could just walk up to the door and knock. Say something. Leave a note. Question. Apportion blame. Scratch his beard in a patronizing fashion while heaping sarcasm and nonchalantly stick a knife into that soft region where one’s floating rib can be felt.

He wanted proactive focus to do those things that he considered himself capable of. Sometime and somewhere, he’d completely lost sight of where he’d started from, and he couldn’t retrace his steps. No matter what the future held, he could never truly go back to the beginning of a blanked page without buying a new book. Furthermore, it was easier to tear and strike-out than edit and append. A penchant for cheap metaphors plagued him.

He really wanted a good, thick forest with hazel leaves, knotted trunks and squirrels with acerbic wit. He wondered about a line from Death Letter that looped inside - they let her down, but so did he, and earlier too.

It’s always good for a scream, but he didn’t feel like leaving his lamp-post.

blue sweat

2008-08-26T13:14:00.003+05:30

Over the course of two days, it seems sort of clear that my family has charted out my life path for the next couple of decades:

A: Find yourself a girl before you lose all your hair and settle down.

B: Become an income tax lawyer. There are lots of people with money who have a lot of tax problems. You don't even have to leave the house. You can sit in Madras and work out of home and make money.

C (dissenting slightly): Work in Madras, but you don't have to live at home. Live elsewhere, but we can babysit your kids, whom you can drop off and pick up everyday after work.

(paraphrased)

of a blue shirt

2008-08-23T08:24:00.002+05:30

I know that I've gained appreciably in vanity when I stare at the front pocket of a shirt that's had a Mentos ironed into it and wonder if it'll be perceived as nipple-sweat.

Daahlings, I'm ready for my close-up.

Primal Scream - Beautiful Future (2008)

2008-08-17T22:54:00.000+05:30

Primal Scream are a band with a colourful past, containing its fair share of drugs, decadence and stab-wound, with a catalogue that contains moments of splendour, repulsiveness and repulsive splendour in equal measure. They also seemingly have a sense of irony that I wouldn’t have normally associated with them in christening their latest album Beautiful Future.

Given that their career till date is book-ended by a couple of forgettable albums, interspersed in between by one very good, one very mediocre and two great albums, the title could be an acknowledgement of the rut they’re currently in and their attempt to lift themselves out of it.

For a band that hit their peak waging gloriously harsh auditory assaults, the last thing I was expecting out of any future envisaged by them was bells. Yes, bells. But that’s exactly what the album opener (and title track) throws up. But shaking off the initial bewilderment, it charges into ‘Can’t Go Back’, the track anchored down by its bassline. Bassist Mani was a bona fide legend before joining this band (being formerly of the Stone Roses), and his presence carries the aforementioned highlight and also ‘Suicide Bomb’, which sounds like The Cure filtering Velvet Underground.

The problem with this album isn’t a lack of good songs – it has its share, including the slowly simmering ‘Beautiful Summer’, the urgent ‘Necro Hex Blues’ and the oddly endearing ‘The Glory of Love’. Having Lovefoxxx (of Cansei de Ser Sexy) guest is also an upgrade over past luminaries such as Kate Moss (thought it has to be said, the Some Velvet Morning duet on Evil Heat was one of the more perverse gems on that album).

No, the problem is the atrociousness of the songs when their plans go awry. The utterly vapid ‘Uptown’ and the puzzling (and far inferior) rip-off of their own ‘Funky Jam’ (from 1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up) on ‘Zombie Man’ sees them either just getting it plain wrong, or rehashing portions of their past better left undisturbed.

When a band has been around for long enough, there’s a finite amount slack given before being written off. After they hit a particular point of consistent mediocrity in their output, nobody really cares anymore, and their commercial potential too is near-nil. That amount of slack is also directly proportional to the artistic and commercial peaks achieved in their prime.

For example, while the Who is rightfully considered one of the all-time greats, how many people listened to Endless Wire? And I’m not even going near the Rolling Stones over the past twenty years. Primal Scream are one such band – having been around for over twenty-five years without scaling the heights of either aforementioned band, every new misdirected step is only one more straw away from the abyss of musical irrelevance.

While Primal Scream are only two albums removed from what may wind up as their definitive contribution to the music scene (XTRMNTR), they’d been on an alarming downward slide, having put out one mediocre (Evil Heat) and one downright toxic (Riot City Blues) album. Perhaps the only direction to go was up, and Beautiful Future, true to its title, makes no promises about the present, but is certainly a stride in the right direction.

don't look down

2008-08-10T00:34:00.003+05:30

It didn’t start with the draft, but that could have been the back-breaking straw. I don’t blame the draft on the curtains (or lack thereof), or the gaps in the newspaper plastered over the window. I should be, but I’m not. It feels hollow when I do – I’d rather blame myself; mostly for not being constructive when out on the footpaths.

Does using ‘footpath’ make a place more romantic? The pavements of Bangalore are cemented, dusty and bright. The footpaths are probably still the same cement, but take on a tinge of cobblestone, are shot in gas lit black & white and are always damp and absolutely littered with people rendezvousing on bridges (but not running towards each other in slow-motion. That happens only on pavements).

But my Bangalore has already departed. It’s only been two years, yet my lanes and memories (however few) have rapidly curled up into nothing.

Walking the near-empty streets at midnight after catching a late show with shared smiles.

Semi-religious semi-free meals at Java City (also near-empty) with bad-mannered bubbling of iced tea through straws.

Wandering the little streets all around the area, not to tease out any nugget, but only to roam, still not knowing what came where.

Chats of undetermined periods sitting on the roadside or steps or benches or perched on walls or loose stones or coffee places that took a while to spot a non-customer to shoo away.

Dinner on a roof-top and boozing in Cubbon Park, trying our best not to look like the couple which we weren’t.

Even more recent walks through Miller’s, Cunningham, Queen’s, Raj Bhavan, M.G., Museum, Residency, Hosur Road and beyond.

I miss it. I miss the anonymity of the unknown and the rush of discovery. I also miss her. Particularly her - impossible to grasp anything meaningful unless in each other's presence. I always knew she was leaving, but I didn't think I'd miss her this much.

Alternatively, I can blame the acquisition of an iPod. Not to go Harper Lee on technology (hah, that rhymes), but it does blunt the senses and causes a certain self-absorption/bubble to form. But well, taking in the sights and sounds is one thing, but being acute about it is just creepy.

Walking down one of the streets, headphones plugged into my ears, hands in my sweater pockets and barrelling towards the bus-stop (walking slowly is another thing driven to extinction by the death of wonder) when a car lurches out of one of the myriad lanes that pepper the area. I should have seen it, but Meshuggah was playing too loudly and I was a little lost in it.

WHAM! More the noise of a thud on metal and a slight brake squeal. But let's go with 'WHAM!'.

Well, it could have been worse, but would have been better if I hadn’t been feeling cold and had my arms wedged into folds of clothing. But my shoulder took the brunt of it. The rest escaped without a scratch. The owner wasn’t apologetic past cursory concern, and I didn’t expect him to be. It was my fault. I’ve always paused at the very last minute (and minute proximity) when stopping for passing cars, and had been warned repeatedly over the last three years. If she knew, she’d probably say ‘I told you so.’ A little deficit of space goes a long way, especially when oblivious to it.

But the bruising was easily concealed. However, it was when the cold air snuck into my room and tickled my soles that I felt gravity. After a near decade of cynicism, I don't think a touch of angst will sting too much.

It’s just one of those things.

attention

2008-07-31T11:37:00.000+05:30

Looking cold enough for long enough

gets a hug?

bad taste

2008-07-26T14:44:00.001+05:30

So there have been eight blasts around the city of Bangalore, killing two and injuring twenty (according to NDTV). A ninth bomb was also found and defused that was next to Forum Mall, which functions as the Pole Star for a large section of the casual population of the city.

London.

Madrid. New York.

Mumbai.

International cities.

The reason they’re international is that people give enough of a damn about the cities to bomb them. Nothing says power-centre like a good bomb trying to take it away.

Terror may have returned to the IT city (NDTV’s words, not mine), but I do believe that this is an opportunity to feel proud. South India has finally been put on the map, if in a slightly wimpy manner.For years, Bangalore has had to suffer shame over the fact that water was its biggest dispute, and while it built IT park after IT park to try and put itself on the world map, Dawood Ibrahim took matters into his own hands and bombed the crap out of Bombay to make it cosmopolitan. Now, someone seems to have torn a page out of his book and tried to do the same in Bangalore.

But why then are 9 blasts, serial blasts even, wimpy? Imagine a conversation at Bomb Academy.

A (top ranker): Where would you want to plant your bombs? I’m thinking heavy duty areas, you know? Crowded trains (Bombay is beautiful for that) or some public gathering where lots of damage can be caused.

B (also a ranker): I agree completely. And what you need are powerful bombs, the kind of stuff that’ll blast you from one end of the city to the other. You want a bomb that’ll make limbs rain down on the survivors.

C (the Bangalore bomber): Well, I think you’re both wrong. What is truly needed to cause terror is to conceal bombs on empty land or some open space, and make sure it’s low-intensity. Nothing too flashy.

One of the blasts on Mysore Road was mistaken to be someone bursting crackers, and only after news of the other explosions spread did they suspect it to be a bomb. If you’re going to take the trouble of bombing a city, please take the trouble to do it right. Nine explosions and two deaths? What are the odds? They should be ashamed of themselves.

Really, what terror is to be taken from organisations blowing divets into the pavement?

silent night

2008-07-21T14:37:00.000+05:30

I asked her out to see a movie.
She didn’t say a word; walked on by.

*giggle*

pink teds and floating beds

2008-07-19T00:36:00.000+05:30

I haven’t seen Love Story 2050, and hence can’t comment upon its story, technology and logical canyons that I have been told of. I haven’t seen trailers of the film either, so I can’t comment on that too. However, I have seen its posters, and its Colgate MaxFresh white depiction of the future.

Cinematic futures are usually split into two versions – utopia and dystopia, normally dovetailing with utopia’s veil lifting in the closing minutes to reveal the rot within and shown for the true dystopia that it is. It also depends about the kind of movie it is – if the future is a major point in the movie (lots of 70s sci-fi), the pristine, cauterised and antiseptic world is shown to crumble in the end (lots of explosions and falling buildings), reaffirming the emotional quotient of life. Others that function within their own space in the future are less demanding, content to skip along in lurid costumes and epilepsy and sensory overload inducing surroundings (Speed Racer, seemingly Love Story 2050).

I’m not denouncing science-fiction depictions. Obviously, it’s science-fiction. But the perfunctory year that is provided at the beginning of a movie (such as ‘Year: 2050’ or ‘Year 2100’) causes serious problems. Will the year 2050 have pink bears being side-kicks? Doubt it. Even in a hundred or two-hundred years, will the future look like I, Robot or Minority Report? Hard to say. They're actually two of the more sensible ones. I’m being wishy-washy because I know that I’m not an Alvin Toffler (pick your favourite futurist), but the only way the homogenous, modular (not to mention garish) Dymaxion Logan's Run-type worlds seem plausible to me is if the previous world was razed to the ground first.. which is not entirely implausible.

I have a soft-spot for films like Code 46 (and to an extent A.I. and even the Star Wars universe), which have a future version that is more synergetic with the present. Blade Runner was the forerunner here. There is future-shock, and technological innovation, but the grimy side remains. Code 46 especially has a wonderful depiction that fuses current technology with plausible advancements. But unlike other worlds, the future still has poverty, hunger, dust and blood.

The other thing is the end of the world.

When films address a situation that is going to rapidly cause the demise of the human race, they never stop for a second and ask ‘so what?’ It wouldn’t make commercial sense. What sells is a grand flourishing affirmation of humankind’s right to existence with an ending that saves the entire race from some insidious force, leaving the survivors (though that sounds pretty desperate) to build a glorious future.

But is the extinction of the human race really such a bad thing? You, me, we shall all be dead. That’s it. The problem is that the process of getting to the end of the extinction tunnel is a painful one, and one that humans may reach only after taking out as many other species as they can. Because forget ‘lifestyle’.

When it comes down to survival, no amount of email forwards are going to save those baby seals from hungry hordes of humans looking for resources. In that vein, fuck nuclear disarmament. If people are stupid enough to blow up the world, good for the universe. It weeds out the dimwits. The problem with most (note: not all) movies is that the extinction factor is not humans, but some external force, facilitating unity and camaraderie.

The apocalypse has been handled really poorly in cinema. Fine, an apocalyptic event need not going to wipe out the entire race. But if films like the Mad Max series (and its bastard offspring Doomsday) are to be believed, the modified shall inherit the earth, and these communes would spend time piercing their nipples rather than searching for food and fuel. There may be effective management of time, but would you really want to spend time getting an earlobe extended when supplies are dying out? And of course, in the Matrix series, the end of the world is one big sweaty rave.

And that is why I eagerly look forward to the forthcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The book focuses on the bare essential – survival. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what happened or who was behind it. The father wants to save his son, not the race. The survival instinct extends towards his progeny, not some overarching crusade and effervescing heroism.

In any case, odds are that the random NYC theoretical physicist (and his hot side-kick lab assistant) who knows how to save the world was wiped out in the opening-credits sequence. Movies are incredibly discriminatory by making sure a certain number of the intellectually elite and morally pure are preserved.

But, well, that makes for a better story than watching Tom Green violate cow carcasses for two hours while thinking up ways to save humanity.

(Seems an almost obligatory note given it applies for most posts - written in a hurry, probably is disjointed etc. etc.)

SEP

2008-07-16T15:30:00.003+05:30

There was a point in life when I still felt cosily part of the ‘rest of the world’ – the non-globalised one. I’m on the fence as far as globalisation goes, legs dangling on the ‘no’ side, but growing up, things like McDonalds and Pizza Hut were things seen only on TV, not to mention Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota etc. I even (thankfully) remember a time when Pepsi/Coca Cola (can’t remember which one) wasn’t permitted to set up shop in the country.

Then of course they all flooded in. But even now, I thought the country was mercifully insulated from certain excesses. Celebrity watching and demigod-isms are of course prevalent amongst the cricketers and movie stars, but apart from posing for the Times of India, we don’t get (or at least get to hear about) boozy, druggy escapades and celebs going commando. Even that slowly turns.

I don’t know a lot about Scientology, but superficially, I must say that it seems a scam (and I’m being charitable). Not in the vein of the IIPMs, but a new-age-y scam nonetheless. Reading about the experiences of members who aren’t Tom Cruise or John Travolta is also a little disturbing, the religion seemingly structured towards celebrity and exploitative and non-egalitarian towards the rest.

But much like Britney’s cooch, it appeared to me as a concept that I’d constantly read about, but never see first-hand. So imagine my surprise when I walk into my college’s library to find a surly Kannadiga lording over a commandeered table with a huge banner that said ‘Scientology’ (sourced no doubt from the same chaps who make political banners – colour scheme and font gives it away) and a bunch of L. Ron Hubbard books on the table.

So, whee.. not only does Scientology have a presence in India, it actually has followers who proselytize as well.

That the college withheld permission for Falun Gong to do the same once upon a time (before mine) and yet allows frickkin’ Scientology to pimp itself is cause for concern. That the college isn’t supposed to allow propagation of one religious point of view (see FG) is further cause.

That these people were allowed only because the head librarian is a ‘sympathiser’ is most worrying.

(Scary man meant taking a surreptitious A-frame-type shot)

one sunday

2008-07-14T17:40:00.002+05:30

Eye and I had decided to meet for a drink followed by a Lounge Piranha concert. Never mind that every college person going for the show who asked and had been informed that I was with a friend assumed that eye was a ‘friend’. Some of them were bitterly disappointed.

My two main dilemmas over the course of the night were whether to a. go over to the drummer and say hi and b. to strike up a conversation with cute girl (who later got stuck in the elevator). The most I did on either issue was to brood over the former without acting and toothily grin at cute girl when she wanted to see my face, and later sympathetically smile/furrow my eyebrows when I could see her through a sliver of light between the elevator doors. The drummer is for another day.

The concert itself was quite blah. As K (who too is a huge LP fan) remarked, they sounded tepid. They’ve definitely played better before, and there was an energy lacking in the performance. It could have been just me, but I wasn’t the only one feeling it. The band had two modes on the night: Coldplay (bad) and Radiohead (good).

It was an extremely uneven show - they took some time to get warmed up, but after they got going, they tailed again before bringing it back for the finish. Further complicating it was the visual component. Instead of their usual stuff, they played clips from Jarhead (and also Downfall for a brief period), which was supremely distracting and didn’t go with the music at all, barring some confluence between audio and video during D-Jam.

The real story happened prior to the concert. Pure entropy.

So, we’d decided to meet at Koshy’s. It being packed, we drifted towards its sidecar ice-cream parlour. At the table situated right in the path of the newly entered sat a woman. A white-hair woman. Refer to me as ‘that white-haired woman’, and people will know, she later said. She seemed a cross between mage and Norfin.

She shooed us into seats while asking what we did, cooing that we were exactly what she was looking for (interpreting ‘work for a magazine’ as journalist and ‘law student’ as lawyer). We had entered her parlour, and she knew it. She started off about her rapport with the DG of police and his acolytes, portraying herself as a loveable sort who nonetheless is considered insufferable by most of the force. I was strongly reminded of the woman from the Ladykillers during this passage.

Then, she changes gears and talks of her ongoing litigation against the Tatas (‘heard of them? Oh of course you have. Ha ha ha.’). It was actually quite sad (and maddeningly typical), but she could help but paint the situation as SV (her; b. 1941) v. Ratan Tata, whom she wanted to punch on the nose (and beseeched us to do so as well).

She went beyond that into her writing (‘people say I’m a good writer.. I am.’) and a theory on her marriage having the structure of DNA encoded into it. Her husband and her father’s initials combined together yield the same letters as the four bases (A, G, T, C). Her birthday fell on the 26th of May. The 26th yields 2 + 6 = 8, which is the double-helix structure. The date of marriage (or was it her hubby’s birthday) was the 23rd. Twenty-three – chromosome number. Incorporated somewhere in there was also the fact that Genome has ‘Om’ in it, that pictures of the womb/uterus contain an image of the Ganesha, and after she publicised this, he came back into vogue.

It went on for an hour – the two of us, apart from interjections and dismay at a situation, probably offered ten words for the entirety of the time at the table. She could most definitely talk, and talk well (her lack of teeth causing doubt vis-à-vis whether she was smiling or not), and had a background. Laying all her court papers in front of two strangers, it did cause pause for thought after. She admitted to depression, and it was somewhat evident in her tenor.

She was a very sweet person, if somewhat scatterbrained, urging us to punch more people on their respective noses as she left.

I know that in college the word is overused, but the encounter is still best described by it: random.

alala

2008-07-11T15:06:00.004+05:30

> It depresses me when I realise that my class seems to express more consternation at unbroken chalk screeching down a board than it does at (amongst other things) capital punishment, animal-rights, bad etiquette, bad hygiene, Darfur, and (dare I say it?) integrity.

> I've also noticed that my sociability is inversely proportional to how miserable I feel about myself. But, well, at least I'm getting out more.

> Die, die, die, die, die..

He scribbled on his margins till he realised his latent gambling problem.

in daylight, i looked desperate

2008-07-07T20:19:00.000+05:30

I lost my phone a week ago. It was unloved.

Yes, I’ll admit it. I neglected my phone. I have never spoken to my phone or given it a name or felt sweet comfort when it nestled against my breast. I’ve never deliberated about ring-tones (always on silent), themes, cases and condiments. I’d like to believe that whichever auto-driver picked it up and helped it on its way to a whole new life did it a favour, and it’s now in a better place. Perhaps it even went carpe diem on me and leapt out of my pocket. Who knows?

There was this ad by a telecom company that had people visiting a doctor for bent necks – it caused by the amount of time people spoke on the phone, nestling it between neck and shoulder-blade while multi-tasking (presumably no hands-free available). Ideally, it should have freaked the consumer and been a statement about the insidious manner in which mobile phones have taken over lives, but no, it was for a cheaper call-rate.

My phone’s main use is to serve as an alarm, followed by serving as a time-keeper. Functioning as my e-collar (imposed by parents) and spam receptacle were its other uses. On a regular basis, I probably received messages from 2.5 people, and calls from 3 people (discounting parents/grandparents).

Now, I’m not questioning the efficiency of the mobile phone as a disseminator of information. I received a lot of messages from various sources about meetings, quizzes, classes etc. But that was exactly the problem (and this coming from an internet junkie) – constant connectivity. It has its uses, agreed, but it places the user squarely in the middle of an ever-tightening knot of information flow.

Phones take the romance out of life. When fixing a plan, if either cancels their plan at the last minute, unavoidable circumstances or not, there was no way of intimating the other. That’s what getting stood-up meant. It’s not a throwaway message five minutes after time saying that you’re sorry but won’t be able to make it – it’s waiting for an hour or however long before deciding that the other person is not going to show up and heading back pondering over possible reasons.

Ok, so being stood-up isn’t the best feeling in the world, and possibly it’s a good thing that time wouldn’t be wasted, but from some bizarre corner, I’d also think that it does to an extent cheapen whatever sentiment existed. That said, I hardly ever talk on the phone. I have a signed Post-It note verifying the longest that I’ve ever been on the phone from the person at the other end. Yes, it’s quite rare.

Even while connected, I just feel good about the fact that I was born at a time when class six students did not own phones. I know of a time when a phone modelled after a cosh sold for (at least) thirty-thousand (!) rupees. I know of a time when fake palm trees doubling up as towers did not take root all over the city. And indeed, I know of a time - and come, readers, let us all revel in nostalgic memory – when the Pug was just another squeezed-accordion of a dog (I really do want to kick that thing into touch). And hey, I’m only 21.

After four years of usage and living on-campus, I had 43 numbers on my phone at the time of its departure. I used to ruthlessly cut down its size, retaining only people I either communicated with, foreseeably need to/would contact, and those I liked/wanted to hit on. All of them were stored by their names too. No ‘crzy chik’, ‘monkey’, ‘da’ or ‘mother’. My mother took mock-offence that I’d stored her by name and not designation.

Apart from the occasional phantom rush of blood down my thigh, I had no withdrawal symptoms after losing my phone. I had abruptly vanished from the information spectrum. Sure, it had its occasional drawback, like not being instantly reachable to a couple of people, but I didn’t have to look down at the vibrating mass and think ‘ugh, I have to talk now’ for an entire week. I didn’t have to look at six missed calls and pray that I would be in the same position when call number seven came along.

Hm, I think I’m coming off as overly misanthropic. I did after a week of dilly-dallying (and constant egging-on by the darth) pick up a new piece and SIM. I decided that I’d rather get a new number than enter a police station to file a complaint for the loss of the old one. Tsk, tsk.

And as soon as I slipped the SIM into the new instrument and turned it on, it beeps. Eye had sent me a message. The pore child, it wasn’t his fault.

can't go back

2008-07-05T20:14:00.001+05:30

Would he die wondering? Hence he wrote
She didn't mean to set the cops on him
Wasn't it a suicide note?

--

I'm ill. Damn you, gummy lungs.

DCFC - Narrow Stairs

2008-06-29T10:14:00.000+05:30

One day in the distant future, long after passing from this mortal plane, Death Cab For Cutie will go down as the Henry Ford of indie bands. Every emo tween worth his/her eyeliner will make the sign of the ‘Cab and refer to epochal events in Gibbardian terms – pre- and post- DCFC. Try as they might though, the band, however important and influential they may become (and possibly bring about world peace on the side), will still be dismissed in some heathen quarters. That’s the occupational hazard of being associated with The O.C. and having ‘cutie’ on your business card. Still, they’re band who, at their best, can sound literate without being pedantic and wry without being hip.

A lot of just how much one likes their new album Narrow Stairs will probably depend on which category one falls into: pre- or post-Plans (their major label debut and breakout album). Then again, I’m not sure if it’s possible to be averse to this album. Along with its workmanlike sincerity, it’s so darn fluffy and optimistic sounding that it can’t polarise the listening audience – by that I mean it’s likeable, not impotent. And it helps that, without taking anything away from their last two albums, it’s their best album since 2003.

When opener ‘Bixby Canyon Bridge’ starts, it really sounds like yet another solidly engineered song. Pleasant, even good, but entirely predictable. Other such gems are the upbeat ‘No Sunlight’, the downbeat ‘Grapevine Fires’, the tabla-tinged (really, tabla is the new black these days) ‘Pity and Fear’ and sparse album closer ‘The Ice Is Getting Thinner’. Steady as she goes.

The tempo of the majority of the songs are such that they would form the perfect soundtrack to a wistful romantic rifling through a photo box of failed loves – memories happy, contemplative and melancholy. The mood of the album never rises above a mild pitter-patter. Even at its most urgent, it’s still gentle. Alternatively, these songs would clog any and all audible space in Garden State and derivatives thereof. Still steady and sticking to the blueprint.

Death Cab for Cutie are a band akin to the Fall. Sonically, they’re miles apart, but when you think about their bodies of work, they’re bands whose albums reek of a comfortable familiarity. They’re not retreads of last year’s model; just more of the same, only different. Of course, the Fall have been around a lot longer (and all of DCFC put together would still be less venomous than Mark E. Smith), but the way they operate is that once you’ve heard one album, you may feel like you’ve heard them all, but you’ll come back for more anyway.

The one and only place where they veer entirely off their trodden path and into relative wilderness is on the extended intro to first single ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’. It muses for a second about being a Wilco tune before plunging into four minutes of Verve-esque spaciness. Eventually though, it returns to home base for another four minutes of firm, if assembly-line, Death Cab. It was a sad moment in the grand scheme of things, because those four minutes were ultimately the one section on this album that I compulsively revisited. Whatever the merits of this album, it really could have done with a few more of those moments.

In the Bengaluru Pages music listings, July 1-15 issue.

Sex and the City: The Movie

2008-06-26T14:10:00.000+05:30

After numerous false starts, I finally caught Sex and the City: The Movie. Somewhere between the second and fourth attempted aborted attempts at watching the movie, it transcended from being just a movie to a rite of passage. I had to see the movie in theatres, if only because three weeks ago, I’d made a trade to provide company for it in exchange of the same for Indiana Jones.

On a Wednesday afternoon, apart from us three gainfully unemployed student (nicely positioned as UG, PG and PhD, as a matter of fact) types, there were students from other colleges that had given way to the holidays, a surprising number of men – albeit looking and acting for the most part like arm-candy, and a large number of Aunties with powdered cheeks and painted lips, roosting as a group and hanging on for dear life on the arms of each other, groping through the dark hall in sunglasses (reminded me of the Lane technique of summer movie-going).

At the outset, I should confess that I hadn’t seen the TV series, and also had no knowledge of the characters’ possibly quirky lives and back-stories prior to the film (not that I was enlightened after watching it). But, I should add that I’m not averse to what is commonly referred to as chick flicks/shows. Having ploughed through an entire season of Gossip Girl in 3 days and also the bad reviews of SATC, I considered myself adequately primed.

Without 90 episodes of emotional attachment to the characters, I felt absolutely nothing towards anyone in the film. I shall be surly and declare with vehemence that, barring two, none of the characters were deserving of their eventual happy endings, not to mention my empathy.

While positioned as a stand-alone film (thanks to a quickie prologue), perhaps knowledge of the show was really required to watch the film – or as reactions seem to indicate, hate it more. All the characters are self-absorbed, ditzy, enormously irritating and disturbingly superficial. Any film that equates (albeit roughly) love to Louis Vuitton deserves to burn in a special hell.

The script was also subversive, inculcating values of materialism, environmental unfriendliness (count the number of times Samantha jetted across the country?) and Aerosmith-aided fashion montages. It’s downright insidious, I tell you. Being screened in the land of Mahatma Gandhi no less! Live simple so that others may simply live! Deconsume, deconsume!! And films such as these make me an even stauncher supporter of the belief that more dogs need to be killed in cinema (see: The Royal Tenenbaums).

While The Happening was a bad film for its own reasons, with all its faults it was still only 90 minutes long. SATC, on the other hand, is one hundred and forty-eight (!) minutes long; that’s two and a half hours without song-and-dance sequences. The positively epic length contained the epic story that was Carrie Bradshaw’s Big Fat NYC Wedding. It truly does boggle the mind..

Think of the number of faces Chuck Norris could have roundhouse-kicked in that time!

The Happening

2008-06-24T22:40:00.000+05:30

Maybe it was latent patriotism, memories of Unbreakable or Zooey Deschanel (whom I’d follow till the ends of the earth). Whatever the reason, I was really hoping that the immensely negative buzz was wrong and that The Happening was at least a half-decent film. No such luck.

On paper, The Happening has a pretty nifty concept – that of plants releasing a neurotoxin that causes humans to kill themselves (‘HAH!’ said the poinsettia that would take no longer being trod upon). Once the cause is unravelled, the characters can look for solutions. Twist ending material, it is not.

However, Shyamalan doesn’t seem to understand the concept of foreshadowing – to him it’s one character (possibly a loon to boot) theorising correctly, only to be beaten down by others until at least halfway through the running time before appropriating it. Add to the mix moronic characters that spend precious time mugging dramatically for the camera when they should be running for the urban jungle, and a really vague concept of air-tightness.

Another problem was that the people just don’t shut up. Shyamalan gives his sometimes eerie imagery no room to linger, always upending it with yapping. When they do talk, the dialogue seems to have been pinched off a bad soap. And if he really thinks himself the new Hitchcock, one thing he could have gleaned from the Birds is that pointless exposition doesn’t matter. At all. Tree-toxin kills. We get it. Move on.

But he doesn’t. What could have been a fifteen minute short is stretched out to feature-length. Toxin makes people die. Other people run. Smarty pants theorises. Loop it for ninety minutes, and that’s pretty much the film until it ends - which by the way, was actually nicely done. But by then the incessant wheel-spinning, gag-inducing sentiment and sheer boredom had driven me into the dark recesses of my seat.

The acting was so-so. Wahlberg wriggled out of most emotive scenes by squinting excessively, while Zooey D looked like a bemused Tarsier (albeit a cute one). The rest were just stock characters – innocent kid, psycho woman, spooky geriatric, but it didn’t matter as most of them didn’t stick around.

Tension should have been derived from the uncertainty of who lives and who dies. I’d picked out the survivors as soon as the principal characters had been introduced, and wasn’t proved wrong. Kids were offed (in a downright glee-inducing manner), but Shyamalan really needed to be more bloodthirsty and less sympathetic.

For all its faults – the eeriness and dread crystallising into a ludicrous soup of ominous breezes (no Bob Dylan jokes), bristling leaves and human stupidity, where the film really jumps the shark and hit the point of no return is when Wahlberg apologises to a rubber plant.

After that, I was really really hoping for mutant plant creatures to uproot themselves and choke them. It would have been more fun anyway.

Someone needs to remake Day of the Triffids.

sliding on a sunbeam

2008-06-16T23:34:00.001+05:30

Family trip!

..to convey our condolences to the wife of a deceased uncle, and then visit another uncle who had been admitted to a hospital.

As we set off, my mother laments that all these geriatrics have to pick these years to die, as a result of which, festivals haven’t been celebrated for the past five-odd years. The way I’d look at it is that they’ve given bumper years of uninterrupted celebration years past by not kicking then, and they’re cashing in now. If you are finicky about festivals, why not put all the over-80s in a car and nuke it, or just poison the punch next Diwali? Perhaps make a plea to die separately or collectively, but in alternate years to free up odd/even years for festivities.

I didn’t even know who the uncle who’d passed away was. I kept trying to get an answer from my parents, but they were expressing it in terms of relation, which I’m really bad at. Still, I took it at their word. A condolencing we will go.

On the way though, there was a sudden change of plan. Would it be better to go to the aunt first, or to the hospital? Those at the hospital might get offended you see, if we visited after having gone to greet the dead, and so veered off towards the hospital instead. It’s not like they could have smelt it on us if we’d kept our mouths shut.

So, first stop: the hospital. The premises looked more like a Bruce Lee movie set than a hospital, complete with long, crumbly passages and vaguely oriental looking clubhouses. My grandaunt talks like a machine gun, effortlessly segueing from topic to topic. The conversation consisted of picking a topic, and each branch of the family (three were present) presenting a story from their own side, in the name of equal representation.

It was getting ugly too, descending into Monty Python-esque ‘my uncle had a disease that was far worse and more drawn out than your uncle’s illness.’ ‘Oh, yeah? My aunt suffered for seven months. Your cousin died all of a sudden. Hah. Take that!’ The uncle at hand, who is in a pretty bad way, dozed off after the first five minutes, and I joined him in being dazed until they shooed themselves out.

There’s a window to offering condolences; damned if I know what it is. We were turning up two months after the death, and unannounced. As was pointed out, we couldn’t have called up the aunt and told her to sit tight for we were coming to condole the crap out of her. There was a fear that she wouldn’t be at home. The first couple of weeks or so, of course she’s expected to sit tight and soak in the sobbing. But after a month and a half, c’mon, you don’t expect an endless stream do you? We received an answer to that question in the nonplussed expression and ‘eh?’ of the daughter-in-law who answered the door.

Once you land up there, nobody, and I mean not a single person talks about death. They talk about temples, they talk about cranky uncles who grope their grandnieces, food (always a big draw), marriage and the resemblance of one generation to people from the previous one (slam dunk), and everything under the sun except death. Fair enough. And then it’s time to leave. But oh no, you can’t just leave.

Like a Muslim getting married, someone says that it’s time to leave. For the first time, just to put it out there. Chatter for fifteen more minutes. Then comes the second one, with an added oh-look-at-the-time or oh-he-must-rest from some other person, with a conspiratorial look at the previous invocator. Now the party slowly pipes down and everyone reaches a point of uneasy silence and uneasy looks. At which point comes the final deal-sealing ‘we must go’ coupled with a push of the palms on the seat that gets you off the couch onto your feet. Oh no, there’s no clean getaway – the after-party carries on in the door and passageway, echoing down the stairwell until some intrepid soul decides to start walking. Out of sight, out of mind.

Only when heading back, already framing flippant blog in mind, my mother mentions some other things that helped me put a finger on the uncle. It snapped into focus, and I can picture his face, clear as crystal. He was stricken by an illness for the last thirty-seven years of his life, before which I’d been told that he was a gentle, sweet and caring man. But for almost twice my lifetime, he was someone else entirely - to be treated with wariness. I’m not good at grieving. I’m worse at grieving someone else’s memory.

one more mistake in life

2008-06-15T09:18:00.001+05:30

Back from college, and my grandfather and I are chatting - asking what I've been up to, what I've been reading etc. Sometimes I completely adore him. In the course of conversation, he on Chetan Bhagat's latest opus, 'The three mistakes of my life' (paraphrased to remove tamil bits):

It's a light read. His style of writing is that it goes very quickly. It doesn't have any great message or anything, but you can read it if you have nothing better to do. What the author does is that he starts out ok, but then he gets to this bit where the hero and his female tuition teacher start falling in love. And once they fall in love, he goes into it in gory, gory (yes, he said gory, gory) detail.

Take the book from my room and read it if you want. I haven't written anything on it. If there's someone you dislike utterly, gift the book to them. It's that kind of book.

I almost feel like reading the book now. Sad thing is, he was gifted two copies.

whining, dining and all ek glassy, do glassy what have you.

2008-06-14T10:45:00.002+05:30

I don’t do bars. Ok, first attempt, that came out ‘bras’. A keyboard lends itself so much better to Freudian analysis than pen and paper. Actually, I did do bars, but I just haven’t a lot in the past two years. Imagine the mood to be a giant cloud over my head that doesn’t get let in for refusing to abide by the dress code.

To whatever extent I have a watering-hole in this city, it would be Zara’s (or Zara. I’ve never been sure). Apart from a couple of one-night stands with other establishments, it’s the only place I’ve been to here. It was the bar where I had my first drink proper (a Long Island Iced Tea, if you were wondering. I should have been advised better), and later on, the people I hung out with were stains on its walls, as a result of which I never did explore other places. It’s full of memories and ‘remember that time’s, and to top it off, it’s only a twenty minute stiff stride from home.

It’s not flashy enough to be polarising, but the opinion of the people who dislike the place is that it’s boring, only above-30 types frequent the place, the music isn’t jumpy or loud enough, there’s no space for dancing and everyone is always sitting. The people who like it do for roughly the same reasons. I largely fall into the latter category, with one exception: the dress code - men will not be allowed inside if wearing anything but closed shoes. Shorts are a no-no too; they want pantaloons. I’m usually a shorts-sandals person, so that’s 0/2.

The pants were easily surmounted, especially after entering college, but I still didn’t own a pair of closed shoes (only recently did I inherit a pair). Sure, it’s not limited to formal shoes, but I didn’t have access to anything else. The drink is dandy and all, but having to stagger back home at midnight in those unwalkable (is that a word?) things is hell. I once went to extent of bringing sandals along in a bag.

Maybe it was the Box of Fortune telling me to swallow white adventure, or an insistent Q, but I finally headed there kicking and screaming, a week after reaching home. Being the only place I head to in that rare event of heading out, was it inexcusably long and just plain inexcusable? I wanted to mix cocktails at home. However, Q was adamant that she wanted to go out that night. 8 PM on a Thursday night, and we’re seated at a makeshift table doubling up as a speaker (or is it the other way around?).

The DJ was a sell-out – he was only tinkering with the fade-in/out on winamp, but played Peter, Bjorn and John, Blur (not Song 2) and LCD Soundsystem (though he didn’t stock Belle and Sebastian) when quarter-full. Once it filled up though, the Police, Steppenwolf and Green Day.

I was in possession of a Nehru cap, to be worn by Q along with her Bar Council mandated ‘plain dress’ (white salwar khameez with black waistcoat). The cap was in attendance, but the plain dress wasn’t – flimsy excuse duly provided. I should have let her wear it after she tried it on; it wouldn’t have run away with the napkins then. Mea culpa.

For most of the night, all we did was look at the table behind Q. Guy in pink (she swears it was orange, or tinged with orange or whatever, and was ready to ask him as he left) collared-tee moseys up to the table, swaying his hips and snapping his fingers, and doesn’t let up until closing time. He was funny-looking – HUGE shoulders, propped up cheek bones, beak nose and producted hair (on the head, not the nose). Maybe it was the twinkle in his eye. Maybe it was his lubricated pelvis. He was quite slimy, but also ever so slightly irresistible, if only to observe what he’d do next.

Sure, one can talk touchy issues (social lubricant and all that), but ‘Pubcrawl’ by Gautam Raja has this one line bemoaning boring drunken adventures. There’s no point, joy and admiration to be found in narrating an evening in the course of which one had twenty shots of what you will, only to struggle to pay the bill and stagger home. There needs to be a chain-gang, punch-ups and lots of leather involved.

All I get is a lost Nehru cap, a harsh Tom Collins and a jug of Sangrea that neither of were keen to finish. Oh, oh! And I used a credit card and half-trotted home in sneakers.

Sigh. I don’t even know why I drink really.

push barman.

2008-06-10T21:49:00.002+05:30

How do you sidle up to someone and introduce yourself? It’s hard enough doing it (not that I’ve ever tried) at a bar or any public place and in person, but via text without facial contortions and voice modulation? With emoticons? How did people write love letters anyway?

Now, there are two broad (and crude) categories of strangers: those you lust after and those you don’t. I was planning a cruder term at the beginning of that sentence, but got waylaid.

Current situation, I’m not talking about the former category, though we can address that in the comments section if you want to. Really, who would be averse to that sort of thing, especially when single?

Reading Henry James and the like, in the past, one was issued with letters of introduction when travelling to a new city – a condensed CV cum voucher cum horoscope, I’d imagine, that allowed a fresh-faced gent or wench to nestle under some portly patriarch/powdered matriarch’s wing.

Far more effective than facebook, it appears that back then, it wasn’t who you knew that mattered, but who they knew that mattered. Playing six degrees must have been a popular pastime, and once established that A’s brother’s kindergarten classmate’s wife’s cousin, once removed, was B’s baccarat buddy, the stage was set for A and B to get along famously and/or get hitched.

The issue at hand however, is one of introduction to my cousin’s fiancé. He’s a man who has met my parents (not a good thing), and passed word along to the children to mail him, so he can get to know us better. Well, get to know us at all. Honestly, I want to get to know him too. I quite like the cousin he’s marrying (wish I could say the same about the family he’s marrying into), and he seems like a really cool guy.

How would you write a letter that introduces yourself? Being yourself from the start is a horrible idea. Obviously. Given that he’s marrying my cousin, he’s probably going to run everything I say past her as well, at least to an extent. So I can’t veer too far from the truth. However, if I’m too honest (i.e. be myself), it’ll sound whiny.

I guess the same rule applies to both categories of strangers. Regardless of what I actually am, the image I need to present is one that isn’t overly aggressive, while at the same time not a complete whiner. To seem social without seeming overbearing. Gregarious without seeming garrulous. Conscientious without seeming peevish. Assertive without seeming boorish. Bashful without seeming falsely modest. I feel like twiddling a rubber-band on the tips of my index fingers. As Rents said, it’s a fookin’ tightrope Spud.

I will also, for the sake of appearances, at the outset at least, keep my cards close to my chest. He wants to know who I am, not what I think of other people. I can’t open by bitching about other people. I can’t open by bitching about myself either – I’m pretty certain that doing so would be a turn-off and not some grand sarcastic binge that causes him to snap his neck backwards and guffaw at my wit. He has the rest of his life to figure out this family if he so chooses. I really wouldn’t want to be feeding him opinions which in all probability would be dragging people through mud. They’re not perfect, a lot of them not even nice - but he can find all that out for himself.

I’d think myself as being far better at reacting to a conversation than initiating one (people in the abovementioned former category of strangers, take note). Neatly snip the conversation into constituent parts and respond accordingly, with leading questions to fuel the conversation.

I really wish he’d mailed me instead.

grave architecture

2008-06-08T18:59:00.000+05:30

In Reference to this post.

Making a will can really be a lot of fun.

Firstly, there must be intention on part of the testator to treat the document as a will. So no Rene Margritte type stunt can be pulled.

This is a will.

Conditions can be set for executing a will. The will would take legal effect only if, as stipulated in the will, the executor is wearing a Stetson, orange pants and talks in a southern Bible-belt accent – after invoking the prayer that is Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition skit. And, in the vein of John Peel (though he did it at his funeral), the august sound of Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme (perhaps by way of Duane Eddy) shall softly play in the background as the will is read out.

Being in the legal field, one has the opportunity to either draft a will that is absolutely kosher, or draft a will that is completely molten, so that it keeps the family running around for a month or so. While a condition can be thrown in instructing that only certain lawyers should be used to settle the muck, it does also serve to help people deal with the loss. I’m pretty sure property dangled like a carrot would take precedence over a pesky death.

Conditions can also be set for last rites, but in India, it seems that most of the time they open the will only after the last rites are completed. My dreams of having my cremated remains dumped into a chocolate fountain go up in smoke. Of course, anticipating that, a provision could be thrown in instructing extraction of my remains and then throw it at passers-by off a bridge.

You can set conditions to be fulfilled before a person gets a share of the property. Now, when asked to clarify whether those conditions need to be sane, it appears that it really doesn’t have to be.

So, the will can stipulate that X (male) needs to wear women’s clothing on Fridays for five years (to be administered and rigorously checked by the executor) to receive a share. Or, perhaps that Y would have to fight crime while wearing a cape for the next decade. The possibilities are seemingly limitless.

I wonder though, if conditions can be set for the execution of the will itself – can be executed only when Neptune wobbles in front of Jupiter while Mars turns red on the third Sunday of a leap year that saw elections being held in Biafra. That sort of thing. I guess not. Of course, most of my thoughts and hopeful loopholes in will-making is probably covered by the Act. Or not.

For the will to continue further, the executor must now do the funky chicken.

The bitchiest bit about making a will is that it needs to be signed by two attesting witnesses – but the two witnesses can’t have an interest in the will, for that may lead to influence etc.

Either find a bunch of people who are not versed with the law of wills, will away the moon to them, and then make them attest the will. Or, if actually in possession of a sizeable stash, go around lamenting to lawyer friend-types that ‘oh, I have sooo much property that the people in my will really are going to luck out. By the way, attest my will?’ and watch their faces fall. And, in your own lifetime, go around saying (as I did to bibi in class), ‘I’m not attesting your will. Take a hint – leave me something in your will.’

For the will to continue having legal effect, the executor must now down two shots of Smirnoff Apple Twist (have to be specific in wills) vodka between each bequest.

People in the will needn’t necessarily be named – they can be described too. Auction style, on the day of reading it out, items can be willed away in the manner ‘aaaand, this wonderful plot of land goes to any gentleman or lady present today with a mole on their left cheek and wearing an electric blue cravat and Mary Jane shoes. In the event these conditions aren’t fulfilled, this will allows half an hour for all men and women between the age of 20 and 45 who are not more than four degrees removed from the testator to run out and paint moles on their face and procure said garments.’

Why would anyone ever want to die intestate?

knights in satan's service and make up

2008-06-02T19:05:00.000+05:30

ABCs = Activity Based Committees.

They’re the cliques of college, with ample room for classification based on the committee one is in: ‘oh, he’s such an EMC whore’ or ‘she’s a total LawSoc pseudo.’, and a lot of (not unjust) accusations of self-perpetuation and incest flying about.

I have (had?) nothing against these committees, but they didn’t seem like my cup of tea – assertion not being a strong suit. In my first year O, who was then-convenor of the Literary and Debating (Lnd) Society, made me write out an application two minutes before the scheduled deadline. Being someone who’d only been in college for a week or two, what choice did I have? Plus, O was, eccentricities incorporated, in the manner he was leaning on the door of the classroom with a snarly grin on his face, very much the embodiment of Grease Travolta.

So, having submitted the application, I was duly selected for the interview, and proceeded to (somewhat unwittingly) sabotage it. When asked ‘Why did you apply to the committee’, I answered (pointing at O), ‘because he made me.’ I was lucky though, for that year I was the first one up, and though my interview went down in flames, I wasn’t subjected to having walk into the room with the Kaun Banega Crorepati theme playing (courtesy of future quiz partner K) – the sound hadn’t been hooked in till about the third interviewee.

In any case, I spent the first year trying to find my bearings. After a disastrous (overwhelming, actually) introduction to college and open quizzing, I did settle down, though still didn’t win anything until halfway into the second year. By the end of the first year though, it seemed I was expected, nay, obligated to apply to LnD. Every person and also every other person I spoke to expressed surprise at the fact that I hadn’t applied.

Not that I was anti-establishment or anything, but the committees did seem a tad bureaucratic, with lots of frayed nerves and devious whispering. Quizzing needs no selections and institutional consent, and I was happy doing what I wanted to without having to tread on any toes.

At the end of this year, the circus started again. Egged on by some people I couldn’t say no to and somewhat influenced by my barren CV, I applied. Due to the selection criteria (participation cap, organisational work etc.) that required a fair amount of scutwork that I’d either not indulged in or forgot to put down in my app, I didn’t make the cut. Sure, I was disappointed, but also slightly relieved. And then the real fun started, also vindicating my baseless stance that these committees were full of unnecessary petty politicking and manoeuvring.

Being a member is hardly an achievement anymore. Aspirations tend towards being at the top of the pyramid – convenor, joint-convenor, co-joint-convenor etc., all elected by the members of a constituted committee. Resignations abound after losing the vote, a battle for being convenor in a three member committee (I'm told it was resolved when two of them couldn't agree to collude and let the third stand uncontested) and coin-flipping to decide the matter does beg the question: do these people actually care about getting any work done?

I’m not naïve enough to ask ‘what’s in a title?’ - plenty when CV-whoring is prevalent. But, it’s disturbing when (at first blush) one of the most competent seems to be LnD – they were supposed to be the petulant tantrum throwers. No fair!

Yes, well, there’s always the option to apply for being a co-opt in a month or so.

Oh, goody.

starting out in the evening

2008-05-30T20:34:00.004+05:30

For one of the courses in college, the students are required to write a will - so that the teacher can pick on people to read it out aloud, laugh with the class and then dissect it. Perhaps not in that order. Her instructions were to write what we felt, laying down only the most basic rules - no format, no attestations, nothing.

What would you write? I mean, one obvious route (which I refuse to go down) is humour.

I bobo, in my 89.4365 year of existence, would respectfully endeavour to leave my house to my beloved mistress Charminar (along with a bottled, blackened lung), leave 34/549th (and my jar of preserved ears) of my remaining property to my first born son, 78/549 (and a hug) to my last born son, and 71/549 (and a snort of my ashes) to that one in the middle, whatever it may be - for in total I have left not more than 1/3rd of my property in spite of not being of the Muhammadean faith.

You get the picture. But to do so for class would only be an attention-seeking tactic, not to mention a waste of time - little by way of academia could be gleaned from an intentionally convoluted calculation. Then again, it could happen. Still.

First is the obvious question: what would I write in my will? It's not my last statement per se, so all the gripes and affection and sentiment can be left out. Who loved who, who backstabbed who and who was found squatting outside the bedroom window can be found elsewhere. Is a will supposed to have it? I wouldn't want mine to.

Am I supposed to go method when writing it? Imagine myself as eighty.. wait, I probably wouldn't live that long.. fifty. So, what do I perceive myself to own at fifty?

The romantic notion of myself would deem that I'd be in a rented (bourgeois pig!) apartment, living alone, though I'd have that special someone I occasionally go out for dinner and walk under the lamplight with. While wearing a scarf, of course. And horn-rimmed glasses. Every room teeming with books - I'd say DVDs, but musty books are just oh so much more romantic than dusty DVDs - thumbed through books worn with age and use, and also teeming with curios picked up from my wide travels. But this future is one where I'd also need floppy Hollywood liberal-arts professor hair that keeps getting in my eyes. Scratch this dream.

The other would be a loveless flat purged of all emotion and papered with money. Bleached walls and humming technology.. but no, I'm definitely not going to be that. Though, it is tempting - would make willing things away simple. Though measuring the comparative value of two items of hardwired metal would be tricky. But in this universe I'd be obsessive about organisation, so I'd have segregated everything into boxes, leaving Box A to X, Box B to Y and so on.

Maybe the will should rhyme.

To my niece from Chennai whom I had a crush on from before,
I leave three tenths of land and gold leaves - one part of four.

To my third born black sheep of a child who nevertheless can really crank dat,
Nothing immoveable, but a nice big chunk of change and my beloved red hat.

Most sensible would be a mathematical equation, with a legend provided at the bottom.

A = 3/7a + 5/11b
B = c + 2/7a > 1/2

Brevity is certainly needed - especially in the courts.

Or I'd simply be dead before I hit fifty. Or the world gets blown up. Or you know.. something of that sort. Revolution in India nullifies all property ownership.

Or, I just don't make a will - even at 21, with only some quiz winnings and a (as yet) unopened bottle of white wine. Not a written one at any rate - pictorial representations of people, stick-style, with the relative sizes of cows drawn being an indicator to portion received.

Or, to be really arbitrary and be snooty, make the will out in binary. Or Baudot code. Or in the Shavian alphabet with footnotes in Teeline shorthand.

Perhaps the will made for class could be dredged up and used. I may be gloomier than my roommates, but I really don't want to make a will. I think about my mortality enough as it is. I don't want to think of my mortality and pass judgment on people and quantify their value to me.

But I love the optimism with which I operate - that I shall have both property to will away and people to will it to.

fill me with your babies

2008-05-27T16:11:00.002+05:30

I've been doing a lot of 'feeling old', given that the marriage bug has bitten quite a few people I know. The feeling old of the 'OMG I've known this person for X years since they were Y young and now he/she is getting married???' sort. Well, a few of them are around half a decade older than me, so that's not to bad, I guess. The youngest person I knew who got hitched was 18 at the time (tch, these pesky legalities), who did it straight out of school.

A few months back I heard that a couple of women from my sister's batch were getting married. Both around 22 years of age. What's wrong with that? Well, I really don't know any details about these cases (supposedly they did everything together), but being pro-choice and all, do whatever. If you want to, go for it. Ultimately, they're from my older sister's batch, so it still feels somewhat removed. Not that there's anything wrong in marrying young, but. I just wish they were a little less young. Blame my upbringing.

And then, I bumped into a schoolmate of mine at a bar (the bar really, ye olde Zara's. Didn't think the bumping into people at a bar thing actually happened in real life. I should get out more. Anyway, back to the post..), who told me that a mutual erstwhile classmate was also doing that thing. This at the age of twenty (though probably getting married after she turns 21; not sure when it's scheduled), and this a woman I've known from 1994-2005 (yes, I technically still do know her, but divergent paths and all), and was somewhat close to somewhere in those eleven years too (and teased with in class five/six by both my parents).

It may just be me, but getting married before you've reached the stipulated drinking age is ever so slightly scary. I was discussing this with M, and she was of the opinion that all women should get married at that age (21-24). It is after all, the age at which the clock is nicely wound, ticking and keeping pace, and the hands don't stutter or lose time.

I said some asinine things in defence of the right not to marry, some extremely tenuous arguments, and declared with a flourish that marriage needn't be respected and was optional at best. M responded that it didn't stop me from sowing my mollycoddled oats.

While that argument wasn't particularly fascinating, she took it up again, wherein she said (paraphrasing):

You know, if you don't respect the institution of marriage, you aren't respecting women.

When a man has casual sex with a woman, he's not respecting her, or her body.

Women like that (having casual/pre-marital sex) don't respect themselves either. They just don't respect their bodies, when having sex before marriage.

The above statements were made six months ago and was lying in my drafts bin. But I still wonder. Really?

Portishead - Third (2008)

2008-05-13T15:00:00.000+05:30

Do you believe in mood music?

While some kinds of music certainly sound better based on the mood of the listener, I’d always clung to the (tenuous) belief that immediate external surroundings play little part in determining the kind of music I listen to. I concede that it could be a reflection of my internal mood, but I’ve simply not been able to listen to Portishead’s Third out in the open under blue skies, bright sunshine and blazing heat. In my mind, the space occupied by this album is dark, damp and desolate – perhaps a solitary flickering bulb swinging in a corner while leaky pipes feed the fungal growth on the stained walls of a grubby room in an enormous, featureless monolith of a building. It’s hard, frigid, and less than human.

The band seems to have made a deliberate effort to produce an anti-commercial album, and they’ve stated almost as much in interviews. With minimalist artwork and a throwaway title, they either wanted the music to speak for itself, or couldn’t care less after a decade. At the end of my first listen of the album, what came to mind was a speculative title for their third album that had been bandied about on the internet a year or two back – Aliens.

A lot of the music on this album ebbs like a panicking performer stricken with a stone tongue – a sudden burst with the spotlight trained on it followed by an urgent jostle for that upstage corner spot farthest away from it. The rest of it lurks like a vampire away from the light: never wholly perceptible yet always making its presence known through brutally metronomic repetition.

None of it sounds even remotely organic or warm, and most of it sounds like nothing they’ve done before. What this album is, with only one exception (‘Deep Water’), is heavy. Not so much loud as just absolutely dense. The sparseness of songs like ‘Hunter’ fills the canvas absolutely. Another, ‘Machine Gun’, sounds perfect to play over a dystopian sci-fi murder montage in a movie. The best track on the album is ‘Small’, which at the halfway point abducts a bash-‘em-up game’s BGM and stretches it out on a torture rack. It’s all entirely unsentimental and wholly brilliant.

Only on album closer ‘Threads’ does it creep anywhere close to the ‘classic’ Portishead sound. It would have been so easy for the band, releasing its first album in a decade, to fall back on a sound that it made its own in the mid-‘90s. Instead the track seems to imply just that while they could very well have made this album full of such songs and been received with flowers and fond memories, they were never looking over their shoulder at their own past. Their future is in the present, and it couldn’t sound better.

In The Bengaluru Pages Music Listings, May 15-31 issue.

Charlie Wilson's War

2008-05-10T22:14:00.002+05:30

Charlie Wilson’s War is a film that simultaneously encompasses the best and the worst Hollywood stereotypes. It’s a light, entertaining and slickly-made film by a cast and crew in possession of more Oscars than you can throw a bowling ball at, and yet there’s a nagging feeling of the facts being ever so gently sterilised and the repercussions of events depicted being sugar-coated.

Based on a book by George Crile, the film is about the true story of Operation Cyclone, carried out by the United States government to covertly arm the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Army. The tagline of the film, ‘A stiff drink. A little mascara. A lot of nerve..’ implies that a lot of the journey was one big party. And who are we to argue, especially when laughing most of the way?

Charlie Wilson is a Hollywood congressman. In other words, while he may snort blow and schmooze in a hot-tub with strippers, he still wants the volume turned up when Dan Rather reports about the Soviet situation in Afghanistan. While he may stock his staff with attractive women with epithets such as ‘Jailbait’, he still finds it in his heart to shed a tear over lost love. Regardless of whether the real Charlie Wilson lived such a life, when you get Tom Hanks to play him, the filmmakers know that the audience is behind him. Can you spell cult of personality?

Hanks plays Wilson capably and competently, but Julia Roberts seemed a little stiff, even bored. The show-stealer is undoubtedly Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is the only one of the three protagonists to bring his character out completely. Unlike Hanks and Julia Roberts, I never felt that I was watching the actor. From the get-go, he amps up the energy and unpredictability while also being the only character to lend a degree of pathos that seemed even halfway sincere. He possesses an edge that is sorely lacking in the others.

I don’t think that the phrases ‘responsible filmmaking’ and ‘based on true events’ carry much weight, and I’m not contesting that. To borrow a quote from another movie, ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.’ However, given the last twenty minutes of the film, I was expecting either no epilogue, or text clueing the audience in on what transpired post the events depicted. Instead, what is provided is a single quote from Charlie Wilson admitting that the United States ‘fucked up the endgame.’ Ignorance is one thing, but understatement is appalling.

While the film is a breeze to sit through, it seemed to me that both the screenwriter and director were unsure about the kind of motion picture that they wanted to make. Consisting of one part biting satire, one part comedy, a pinch of romance and a twist of drama, the film was on steady and stinging ground when sending up the American political machinations, and Hoffman provided a laugh-a-line. But, when it tried to slide into more serious territory in the last quarter, it came off as quasi-propaganda – Rambo armed with a remote control in a recliner chair.

In the Bengaluru Pages Movie Listings, May 15-31 issue.

no more

2008-05-04T18:14:00.002+05:30

Tagged by Aaki. Where relevant, I've just left her answers in. This is the way to spend Sunday evening.

Last movie seen in a theatre:

Gee, it's been a while. However, a quick glance at my documentation reveals that it was We Own the Night.

What book are you reading?

Murakami's After Dark.

Favourite board game:

I don't do those anymore. Sad, I know.

Favourite magazine:

Without a doubt. Newsweek. For its last ten fifteen pages on culture and lifestyle (as puddle said. I concur).

Also National Geographic.

Favourite smells:

I'm not much of a smell person, but currently, it's the metallic smell on the tips of my fingers after rubbing it against my set of keys. Oh, and thyme & eucalyptus shampoo.

Favourite sound:

That of a couple of people in class, including the guy who sits next to me, not talking.

Dunno. I take in all sights and all sounds.

Worst feeling in the world:

Mixed signals.

And possibly child crucifixion.

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up?

Please let there be hot water in the bathroom.

Favourite fast food place:

Nnngh. A bakery that cooks Maggi noodles.

Future child’s name:

Passing the buck.

Finish this statement, “If I had a lot of money I’d…”

travel. Or hoard books and movies and suffer from collectors' anxiety.

Do you drive fast?

No.

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal?

No. But a cow watches me sleep from the inside of a steel chest.

Storms - Cool or Scary?

Cool. Poetic. Etc.

Do you eat the stems on broccoli?

Yes.

If you could dye your hair any colour, what would be your choice?

Electric blue with violet streaks and pink tips.

Name all the different cities/towns you have lived in:

Chennai, Bangalore.

Favourite sports to watch:

I've stopped watching sport. Gun to my head - tennis.

One nice thing about the person who sent this to you:

Aaki. She appears to have nice teeth.

What’s under your bed?

Soon to be gone as I plan (and hope) to clean my room today, but currently: two cotton-buds, one empty J&J plastic buds dubba missing lid, a lot of dust, assorted scraps of paper/bills, a plastic bag and one (I have a few around) origami paper crane.

Would you like to be born as yourself again?

No. I'd like different genes.

Morning person or night owl?

Wake at 7 AM, sleep at 1230 AM-ish.

Over easy or sunny side up?

I don't eat eggs.

Favourite place to relax:

College library. Academic block in a state of emptiness.

Favourite pie:

Don't really eat pie. Apple? Why not. .

Favourite ice cream flavour:

Mint chocolate-chip from Cornerhouse. And the chocolate malt thick shake.

You pass this tag to –

nina, eyefry, manasi and chand bibi.

Of all the people you tagged this to, who’s most likely to respond first?

I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if any of them respond. But I'd say nina might be first. Definitely not eye or manasi. bibi just works and moves in mysterious ways.

bottles on the wall

2008-05-02T21:07:00.002+05:30

I can say with some certainty that my quiz partner K and I have transitioned successfully into being quiz whores – turning up at random events that we really shouldn’t have a. known about and b. had any business attending.

The first one involved a day trip to Mysore with an 8k bait: a college that, until we figured out that they were involved en masse in a treasure hunt, seemed dystopic in a Logan’s Run sort of way, a good quiz (in terms of questions), an audience-baiting quizmaster, butter chocolate and caramel cake in an Austrian café, boozing in an empty bar (the cultural landscape of Mysore, it seems, changed forever by the opening of a branch of Purple Haze) at 5 in the evening and a bus driver intent on drag racing with his brethren.

The second was a quiz we caught wind of only three hours before it was scheduled to start. We knew nothing about it other than the venue (which I promptly proceeded to forget) and start time – to me it was just holy release, having had my midterms till that evening. K wasn’t quite as driven, and so I had to give the truth some latitude. QM? Oh, I heard that it’s someone decent. Prizes? Well, hopefully there’d be some.. you know, stuff. Corporate quizzes usually pay well, you know. His drive dimmed further when the skies poured down – I’d already bought the farm (and didn’t dry completely till the end of the night), so had further incentive in urging him to turn up.

We arrive there, and turns out that a more detailed mail had been sent to other sources, and the teams that had turned up spoke of 200 questions, with some 60 odd being audio – rock music from the early ‘70s to 2008. It sounded promising – as it turned out, in a sense the audio round was our kind of round: The Kinks, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, Lynryd Skynryd, Supergrass, Alice in Chains etc. The QM also definitely had the most eclectic (and excellent) taste in music.

The quiz was conducted by a media company, something that we were filled in on towards the end of the quiz when the pertinent question ‘Um. What does the company do exactly?’ was raised. Held in conference room with eleven teams and no prelims, it may have looked more like a briefing than a quiz when it started – though there was a spread of soft drinks and chips. If we’d been thinking that was hospitable, we hadn’t seen the best of it.

It didn’t start according to plan: I had a brain-freeze on the first question, vetoing K and handing a point to the team next to us. Given that there were 11 teams in play, it could have been a costly miss, though thankfully it wasn’t. More contentious was a question on the claim to fame of a Hewa Bora airline. While most went for a particular feature (such as naked airhostesses), we did vaguely know that a plane had been involved in a crash recently; how it was distinct was not for us to question. But, neither of us could remember the country (Congo) it was from, and as a result weren’t given any points. But it was enough fodder for the rest of the quiz to be filled with ‘oooh, that team got Congo-ed’ from all teams (including our own).

The QM was a devious (deeeeeevious!) one. Apart from having a visual round that had some completely random (the poster of the Prom Night remake?) things, perhaps to accommodate everyone, he asks one on the significance of client 9 recently (the Eliot Spitzer scandal), and then proceeds to throw in pictures of both the prostitute and Spitzer in the visual round to ID. And he pulled a similar trick with Scarlett Johansson too.

Oh, prizes? Forget money. A bottle of Sula white each, along with assorted jackets, watches and caps. A bottle of white wine each! It’s not like the money won elsewhere or coupons wouldn’t buy a bottle, but that takes.. effort.

It certainly was a happy quiz, more banter in the room than most. Being packed like sardines could have been the reason, or that, you know, we were all good-natured and completely not quiz-boors. Or not. Once most had gorged on the chips and coke, out came the beer.

Free beer. Thirty-three bottles by an uncorroborated count. Proceedings became so much more lively and loose. I've long maintained (and hoped to practice) that quizzing really shouldn't be a serious activity with humourless quizmasters and anal-retentive quizzers doing their best impression of Ari Onassis.

All quizzes should have free beer.

REM - Accelerate

2008-04-28T23:31:00.005+05:30

REM are, or were, your favourite band. If they weren’t, they really should have been. After their independent years at IRS Records, they hit the perfect major label synergy of commercial art at Warner Bros. before timing their commercial decline perfectly with the signing of an eighty million dollar contract. No doubt that corporate tears flowed like an opened sluice gate while the band possibly had a quiet chuckle.

The last decade has seen REM in an artistic decline as well. It’s difficult to say when exactly they were actually at the bottom of the hill, rather than heading downhill, but I’d place it between their last two albums, Reveal and Around the Sun. Now, like most REM fans, I consider their last gem to be New Adventures in Hi-Fi, way back in 1996. It’s follow-up, Up, had its moments of beauty, but they’ve been off the boil for the last decade. And, REM is a band that is good enough to have its mediocrity stick out like a sore thumb.
Accelerate, the band’s new album, sees them trying to change pace, suggestive of their earlier album Monster (which incidentally was a blip during an otherwise creative purple patch), and perhaps also trying to do a Radiohead (circa Hail to the Thief) – trying to up their tempo a notch with the aggressive reintroduction of guitars.

It is a trick that’s not always successful – it makes the album slightly single-paced, though the album most definitely is the best work that they’ve done in a decade. That of course, is a loaded statement, which can be read to say that it’s not a crushing disappointment, but it’s not great either. It does have its moments of fun, and the band sounds encouragingly focussed here on their fourteenth album, though they do occasionally lapse into the occupational hazard (when having been around so long) of repeating themselves.

The album opener ‘Living Well is the Best Revenge’ kicks off with a heavy Joy Division-esque bass-line, is one of the best songs on the album. Sonically they sound recharged, though they borrow from themselves on a couple of tracks. Another – ‘Until the Day is Done’ – would fit nicely into Neil Young’s Prairie Wind. The album also appears to have been sequenced in such a manner to pepper the bright spots with dead weight. This is in evidence right up till the last two tracks, where they follow ‘Horse to Water’, which is as good as anything they’ve done in the last fifteen years, with album-closer ‘I’m Gonna DJ’, which is an absolute stinker that is as bad as anything they’ve done in their entire career.

I must mention that on first listen, I didn’t like this album at all. The tracks felt like a homogenous lump of sharp guitars and sharper vocals. Subsequently though, it grew on me. It’s inevitable that after a point in a band’s career, every album is touted as a ‘return to form’ – this isn’t one. REM aren’t flashy enough to pull off that sort of trick, though with this album, for the first time ‘not for a lack of trying’ can also be added. While not vital, give the band a chance and the benefit of doubt, and it may just be worth your while.

In the Bengaluru Pages May 1st issue, Music Listings.

count inaccurala

2008-04-25T00:23:00.004+05:30

My futile feeling
a blunted pebble - the moon
in your endless night.

--

I know I'm no poet.

Humour me, please.

ignite the bus!

2008-04-21T22:11:00.002+05:30

neglected lover
she does crave intimacy
lick my armpit hair.

in which i try not to be emo

2008-04-18T15:28:00.003+05:30

Weddings are raining down on friends and family. To be more accurate, engagements are raining down, but I'm fairly confident that all of them are either in love or out of options and so the weddings too will go ahead.

I would think that ‘romantic’ stops when a couple morph from being hand-in-glove (as metaphors go) to being the flesh-gun from Videodrome. I would hazard a guess that a couple of them may have the proverbial videotape embedded into the vaginal opening in their chest (which proverb is that, I wonder). I did though, find out the hard way that regardless of whether it’s nice or not to make fun of engagements, it’s definitely not appreciated by the people/person in question. Whoulda thunk it?

Oh, I just realised that I’m in hot water with not one, but two twining-in-waiting. The first was a direct consequence of a tasteless indiscretion. The second, for which I blame myself and blame another blogger who shall remain unnamed (but fie on you), is a more remote matter in which the couple themselves can’t yell at me because they don’t particularly know me, but made their rage (never poke mallu rage in the eye) known through an intermediate. The thing here is that my greased-tongue indiscretion (don’t ask about what) need never have reached the ears of the couple – but Bloga Wormtongue thought different.

In other news, a 'States-bred cousin also got engaged. Obviously, even as the progeny of the branch that fluttered across the Atlantic came of age, the inevitable whispering started. Louder, because not only did the standard rules apply (please not be gay, please not be Muslim or Christian - in that order, please not be older than the groom, please not have tattoos in immoral places etc.), but also did muted cries of 'please let it be an Indian' in vain.

Not that there should be anything wrong about two Indian-origin firangs getting together, but what are the odds if said children aren't the religious/indigenous sort and refuse to get socially networked at temple gatherings or the local screening of Sivaji?

I have been privy to such sighing (oh, why can't they go out with an Indian?) from my grandparents (paternal - whom we share) regarding their love lives in the past, not least one (albeit tinged with facetiousness) lament about a past girlfriend of the eldest cousin being *gasp* Jewish!

Anyway, the one to get engaged (R) is neither conventional nor tinged with what my stereotyping native bumpkin imagination paints as ‘phoren desiness’. And I love her for it. Not to ruminate too much on the who or what exactly was responsible, but she (and her siblings, for that matter) is definitely amongst the coolest in my family. For example (though not substantiated), her engagement ring was one of those lollypop rings. No word if it was carrot flavoured (har).

She was, however, also hopelessly naïve if she really thought she was going to get more than an hour and twenty odd minutes of peace before the family descended upon her (via various communication devices) like a swarm of locusts (or would they be piranhas?) to congratulate her/needle for details.

She first told me about the Russian (her hubby-to-be) a couple of years back. No, he's not actually Russian, but I had a petty thought a few days back that would peg him as one (Soviet really). As a result, I really wasn’t surprised when my mother broke the news to me, and also wasn’t surprised by the slight necrotic undercurrent (no, this you really don’t get to know here) that accompanied the news. It was all in good faith, abetted by the fact that at their advanced age, they’re less romantic/more pragmatic than I am.

Obviously we’re not the first family to have a firang marry into (hell, he’s not even the first within my extended family), but does he have any idea what he’s getting himself into? In the end matters naught but his love for R and they can isolate themselves from all detritus (which may include me), but in the beginning, I would think it’s like encountering a tidal wave when expecting one that reaches your ankles. It’s really cute that he used ‘Thatha’ and ‘Patti’ in his letter instead of grandfather/grandmother too.

The other cousin (aunt, actually) who’s getting married is from Delhi, and I really don’t know what went through the courtship other than meeting him through a friend etc., so filmi script type. However, what I do remember about this aunt is that years ago, when her mother had decided that she was of age, circulated a note on her daughter, detailing why exactly she’s a prize catch. Not to say that she isn’t, but it’s hard not to look upon any note without suspicion when it contains the sentence (not verbatim) ‘.. a perfect blend of the traditional and the modern’. Again, not to say that she isn’t, but would you really believe it if it were put down on paper?

While many find it hard to believe, I’m a sucker for weddings. I don’t cry, but, you know.. that, and the supposed after-party.

Bring it on.

psychic war paraplegic

2008-04-15T00:40:00.001+05:30

How important is it to wish someone on their birthday?

I've been thinking about it for a couple of months, after I missed one and then profusely apologised while wishing said person on the next day. While she was in a very tolerant mood, I did wonder. Does it matter? Well, possibly it's an issue of degree.

When looking at a social circle in terms of spheres of influence, it radiates outwards. It starts with the inner-most core who you love to bits, mean the world to you, stronger than dirt, pact-making, anything flies-no apology required yet you do anyway and mean it too type BFF. Then comes the middle section – not an inconsiderable number, but perhaps filling a bus or two (standing space excluded) at most, of those who do mean something to you, but you don’t know them cover-to-cover, and you also don’t know whether you mean the same to them as they to you. Indiscretions may not go unpunished. The third and wide exosphere of a shell is filled with all the flotsam that life kicks up, populated with people naughty and nice, perfectly amiable yet completely emotionally unattached. They’re the hicks. Don’t matter one way or the other – they just ain’t caring. Even if it does register, you know deep down that they’re forgetting in a day or in a week.

I should mention at this point that personally, I treat my birthday like any other day and don’t care one way or the other about doing anything ‘special’ or getting wished. Most years, I'm snugly somnolent as the clock strikes the day, and anally brush off any queries about unanswered calls with excuses of either ignorance, sleep or a very shady technical argument - I saw the light at 9 AM. So at 12 AM so many years ago, I would have been on a dry run, preparing for the tunnel or whatever. But I am aware that a lot (if not most) people don’t see it that way.

I really don't care if anyone at all remembers/wishes me. Inclusive of that (obviously) is that if the core people forget, I really don't mind. When one of them told me that another had sheepishly emailed her asking for my date, I was touched. I don't expect any of them to remember, but that they cared enough to not want to forget.. On the other hand, I do my best to wish all of them, regardless of which corner of the world they’re in. I forget rarely, but have a couple of times, and felt terrible each time. Ay, there’s the rub.

It's a situation where your absence may be acutely felt while your attendance may (and I stress the 'may') not be particularly acknowledged. And it’s understandable, isn't it? How much ever someone tells me that I needn't wish them, I'd still feel the need to do so. For what joy.. to prove that I care? Possibly. I don't really wish people with a 'happy birthday' (though I did break that with a straightforward one today). It's more along the lines of 'pappy mirthday', 'we're going to pour tea like it's your birthday' (to the tune of In Da Club) and so on.

The outermost sphere of facebook-y dregs are the easiest to handle. Unless hormones force a wish to that cute person who hasn't been spoken to in half a decade (much in the vein of 'oh, the band is crap, but that keyboardist is cute'), in spite of the dusty silence that prevails post an unsolicited add on everyone's favourite social networking site, zip is more than welcome. It is a nice way to get back in touch with them (if you so choose) though, with a 'hey, happy birthday! how've you been?'. Then again, that thread of conversation would probably end after an exchange of 'I'm good. You? Good.' and an unspoken 'How am I? Why bother? Five years older. You want a book written about it?'

The middle ring is the tricky bit, though for the most part, I think I function on a level where rather than being noticed for not wishing, I just get neglected. Especially true when the vast portion of these people are in a different city. Communication is sporadic, neither party close to the core ring to have a constant flow of information, but I’d say that when one eventually gets in touch with the other, the conversation is (I hope) sincere, if a little hollow.

This is not to say that I’m indifferent to the middle section. On the contrary, I’m immensely fond of quite a few people in there. But the middle section is maintained with a fairly comfortable silence, broken by the occasional update and/or flurry of information, and distinguished from the core mainly by a lack of details. They may know me, and know me well, but they may not know a lot about me.

And so it is with this middle that I’d think (or like to) that it’s a requirement to display (now and then) the fact that you do still care and keep a person within the gravitational field, and also in this middle that a wish is appreciated, in a ‘oh, wow, you actually remembered’ sort of way that adds to whatever sheen/glow one may have in the eyes of the other. Wishing the person also gives a reason to have a chat and catch up.

But even with all this idle thought, when I apologise for not wishing someone, my first thought is that it’s completely presumptuous and self-centred. Discounting overly crabby people who maintain a check-list of people who should be wishing them and get pissed if they don’t, regardless of whether you wish the person or not, said person still walks into the day and goes about life. It doesn’t change does it? Apologising almost seems to come attached with the assumption that you form a substantial (or halfway vital) part of that person’s life, and the apology itself seemed to me to be horribly overbearing.

I guess it’s easier to just remember.

Gimme Shelter

2008-03-29T21:49:00.000+05:30

I’ve been on a bit of a concert film run recently, this being my third one in a row (the other two being a Demme double, Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold). While the two Demme films placed the music front-and-centre, Gimme Shelter is a different beast altogether.

For one thing, the music isn’t all that great. Of course, the songs themselves are some of the most famous and loved, but they sound out of tune or something here. I’d seen the live version of Jumpin’ Jack Flash from the MSG concert that is included here, and it’s one of my least favourite versions of it. I could say that they have a raw sound in the concert footage, which they do, but frankly, they just don’t sound that good here.

But the music here forms a very small component of the film’s core. The Altamont Speedway concert is as infamous as Woodstock is famous from ’69, for diametrically opposite reasons. It was a concert where four people died, including one stabbed to death by a Hell’s Angel after he pulled a revolver, and the concert as such is regarded as a symbolic end to flower power.

The film opens by informing the viewer of the deaths at the concert, laying the foundation for events to come in the film. Interspersed through the songs is footage of their lawyers and all the backroom haggling over venues, permission etc. to make the free concert a reality.

When the film winds through the MSG concerts and the build-up and the Altamont concert finally gets started, it really gets going, ever threatening to detonate. It’s a frightening atmosphere. The Grateful Dead cancelled on their performance after hearing of events in the morning, when the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane was beaten up by the Hell’s Angels. The atmosphere is tingling, electric, but not in a good way. It’s a powder keg of drugged out hippies placed under a sparking transformer of Hellish (hah) security.

The defining image was not the footage of the stabbing that was captured, but what came just before it. As the Rolling Stones play Under My Thumb, the camera looks beyond Mick Jagger and at one of the Angels on stage, very obviously drunk and flexing fingers and all, but the primeval expression on his face is terrifying, with the camera not cutting away for some substantial time. I’m glad thirty years and lot of longitudes separates me from that guy. And while the film does show the Angels canoodling with each other, those scenes are more than outweighed by their repeated acts of brutality. In other words, them some hard, bad and bastardly motherfuckers.

And explode it does. The sense of dread sensed by the organisers and musicians culminates in the stabbing of Meredith Hunter, but even before that, during the set of the ‘Stones, the place was in chaos as tempers and blood alcohol levels rose, all of which is captured on film, making it not only a concert film, but also a significant historical documents, which is something the directors probably understood even then, when the film released one year after the events. There’s little sympathy for the devil when your surroundings are scary as hell.

I read this article the same day I saw the film. No surprise, given that the Angels were supremely pissed off with Jagger, something that is displayed at the beginning of the film in an audio clip played of an Angel who called-in to a radio show after the concert.

pablo picasso never got called an..

2008-03-26T14:50:00.003+05:30

A classmate of mine attended a handwriting analysis workshop, and was asking for samples. I supplied one of them, scribbling out the blurbs on the back-cover of Richard E. Grant's By Design because I wasn't supposed to think about the way I was writing.

So, I have a dual personality - of the mind and the heart - that's in conflict with each other because the beginning of a word slants in one direction, and like a Thanjavur Bommai sways to the other side by the time the word is complete. All in all, the way she made it out to me, it sounded like every word of mine was surreptiously flashing the heavy-metal devil's horns gesture at the reader.

My writing also has one or more of what she oh-so-casually referred to as "Hell's traits". Something about how not completely looping the g and the y implies physical frustration, either due to a lack of exercise or a lack of a fulfilling relationship. Hm.

Overall, the assessment was (forgetting a couple):

a. Conflict between mind and heart
b. Physical frustration due to lack of exercise/relationship
c. I'm an introvert, in the sense that I can talk about a lot in the world, except myself (of course, she doesn't know about this blog. Hah)
d. Easily irritable (I'd like to think that's incorrect, but what do I know?)
e. Analytical thinker
f. Good concentration in short spans, i.e. three minute session followed by fifty seven minute break
g. Low self-esteem

Low-self esteem was thrown in somewhere in between on her list, but really, maybe she tossed it in after looking through the rest of them and deciding that it really should find a place.

The question is whether it's a chicken and egg situation. Am I so because of my handwriting, or is my handwriting so because of me? Will I be a better person if I whip my handwriting into shape? Is that why my script has evolved?

I was unhappiest in class 8 when my English teacher (can't remember her name for the life of me, but I can vividly picture the huge, hairy mole that she had on her cheek. Or was it chin? But I remember the mole) decided to give the entire class a lesson in writing well, and picked on me especially. I didn't have a particularly bad handwriting. Small, but neat. Ok, barely legible is what most of my exam papers used to return with - one geography teacher wrote 'I need a magnifying glass to read this - but it was by no means untidy or a scribble.

However, she decreed that a script that slants to the.. left? right? think it was left. . was that of Damien children, and took it upon herself to exorcise me, which consisted of being given pages and pages of homework that consisted of. . doodling loops. And my loops were horrible. Flaccid, puny loops that were made fun of and beaten up in the playground by fat, 10 chapati per meal eating, loop growth hormone chugging alpha-loops.

Come to think of it, I wrote in print back then (now I write in quasi-print if not scrawling), and she also declared that my print (not all, just mine) rang hell's bells, and I had to switch to a cursive script. Possibly the result of which is the quasi-cursive/print. I'd say I'm pretty happy with my handwriting at this moment. There is room for improvement, but I think fully looped 'g's are ugly. If only I can remember what an incomplete g meant. That might have been the physical frustration bit. The closed loop g's guide to physical gratification. Hm.

If my class 8 teacher thought my handwriting was bad, it's a good thing she didn't get to my sister.

With little exaggeration, she writes like a Richter scale readout.

if i could be with my friends tonight, bury my friends tonight

2008-03-23T09:30:00.003+05:30

A further update on this.

So, that was the engagement on this side.

Where the couple actually were, they rang it in with an exchange of rings. Or something. Supposedly it's up on youtube, but I haven't seen it.

However, where it gets depressing, given that he's the twiggy, chicken-legged yardstick by which the rest of the cousins, myself included, are measured.

He's light, he's bright, he's oh so sensitive and caring.

He bought her two rings.

In different sizes.

Why?

One to wear bare on the finger in normal course of use.

And the larger size? The churlish ones would say in anticipation of chubby fingers to be, doubt about the diameter (even after holding her hand for five odd years), kinkiness etcetera.

But no. The lad bought an extra large so that she could wear it while wearing gloves.

And the family back home collectively melts thinking about his thoughts in the cold Australian clime.

I'd think that you'd wear rings inside gloves, no?

Rock in India

2008-03-19T20:38:00.005+05:30

Free pass to Rock In India. Fuck yes. It’s like having the gimp suit of being obligated to watch Megadeth unzipped. Intention to watch Junkyard Groove, TAAQ, Pentagram and bugger off after. Acknowledgment and thanks to the chocolaty lump of man fry eyefry for said passes.

It’s easy to rip into metal melas, starting with the pigheaded passion to wear black tee shirts in the heat. And then having to expose themselves in the name of either being sensible or, shudder, being metal. Also, the topless guy I was treated to, was wearing his undies bunched up around his navel. So, rather than do the low-riding thing and wear your jeans at crotch level exposing undies, our man went the other way round and hooked his undies up. I do wonder about his inseam.

The more tees, the more hardcore, it would seem. Thankfully noone seemed to be carting around a wheel-barrow with their collection, but a definite hierarchy seemed to exist. The yuppie sod who had the brainfart to wear a Jon Bon Jovi tee (though black) definitely sent to the back of the bus. Some older gents cast a baleful eye on the young 'uns, and those who owned Megadeth tees before the concert perhaps acting superior towards those picking them up now. And the imagery, oh the imagery! I'm definitely forming a flower power metal band at some point in life. *Pada pum cymbal cymbal drum blast pada pum riff growl Frolick through the fieeeeeeelds mother fuck love in the time of WAAAOOORRR in my crabby depressed mind of bright shiny YELLOW ! end growl head bang*

Oh, and head-banging? It was demonstrated in front of me by two young 'uns that vigour and enthusiasm is good, but it still looks like dogs humping when space is badly utilised.

The overheard sentiment floating about in the air seemed that a lot of people present were there solely to bask in Mustaine’s sweat, with the rest of the acts (possibly excluding Machine Head) existing solely to pad out the day. This was amply illustrated by the number of people who were entering the venue at around 7.30 PM (proceedings have started at around 2 PM) and by those who had camped out in front of the second stage where the phoren acts were to play.

That in itself was sucky. A two-stage system, one stage to be untouched by the lesser Indian bands, with another for the international bands. What gives? Fuck, it’s not like Machine Head are a bottom-feeding band. Ok, they may not be, but its discrimination nonetheless. Is this what the salt march and our forefathers fought valiantly for? Testify brothers and sisters, what freeeedom is about, a land where our sisters and brothers (the less randy ones) can lock arms as one, scant attention paid to colour, creed, ethnicity and hygiene, and rock out as one with the Laaaawrd Almightteeee!

The Junkyard Groove set seemed to be plagued by sound problems, at least to my ear. They did give it a sincere try, disadvantaged by being the third band up (in baking post-afternoon heat), though their popularity was evidenced by the number of people who nonetheless thronged to the stage for their set, rather than listening from the shade. The bassist and drummer also seemed to be putting slightly bandha, though guitarists Sid’s cuteness more than made up for it. Seriously, the man seems to be getting cuter at every subsequent gig I’m at. Helped by the fact that he tickled out the Addams Family theme in between songs. All together now: Awwwww!

TAAQ were meh. They were doing some nice things, but overall, wasn't really into them, though definitely bookmarked to have another listen. Award for most entertaining mallu band though goes to Moetherjane, whose lead singer I thought bore a passing resemblance to someone I knew. And 'tis he who provides the moment. That moment of completely ewwness, but at the same time being afflicted with Stendahl's Syndrome, can't look away (and also experience dizziness and swoon). Wearing a shiny black shirt, suddenly the sun spotlights him, breaking on through to the other side, now exposing our man's torso (our man at this point with arms held aloft) to one and all through the fibres of the shirt. Nnnngh.. wow!

The stand-outs by far were the last two bands to play before the action turned to the International stage, namely Millennium and Pentagram. Millennium, a band that’s been around for twenty plus years, obviously knew the game. The moment their lead singer (wearing a Ramones tee-shirt) walked on stage it was obvious that the guy was cool. Fuck, who covers the Clash and MC5 today? They just oozed confidence as they ripped through their set, the burgeoning crowd also getting more responsive as the evening progressed. Add to that that his banter was sensible and not all ‘I am B-grade anger personified, worship me!’

Impressive as Millennium were, they were only the appetiser for Pentagram. Are they my new favourite band? Maybe, maybe. Their stage presence is incredible, and their sound is like the unholy bastard child of Rage against the Machine and Aphex Twin/Boards of Canada. Their latest album (It’s Ok. It’s All Good) is really nice (not all good. Har), though overlong and slightly repetitive (would be a stunning ten song album. Runs sixteen), but their live show is PA-blowing flat out awesome. Of course, I heard from a Floyd worshipping counterpart two days later that ‘The Pentagram set was shit and they were deservingly booed from the stage’. I thought they had a great (and deservingly so) send-off. Completely Rashomon moment wonly.

My only gripe is that their sets were too short. While I could be wrong, it seemed to me that the duration of sets were progressively reducing as it wound its way through the evening. For sure, I’d have loved for Millennium and Pentagram to go on for at least another half an hour, keeping in mind the constraints of the festival format.

Pentagram done, headed for the exit, even as full scale lightning show ensued. Irate Norse God wants his mythos back? Or maybe a royalty cheque or two cut for the use of imagery and all those damn Valkyries being raped..

loose thought

2008-03-17T22:17:00.004+05:30

An announcement was made today by Perry Oxide, spokesperson on behalf of the Social Union of Climate & Atmosphere (SUCA) that the atmosphere had ratified a proposal to go on strike.

Citing poor working conditions and no room to negotiate better pay and perks, the atmosphere will with immediate effect refuse to be inhaled by all human beings on the planet, and resist being put to work in industry.

Quoting Cardinal Oxide, '..and we've come to a collective decision that the only manner in which we can work together is if we first shows them what they can and can't do if we stop. We're acting in our best interests, and obviously it's not a complete shutdown. The world can use a little thinning, and we can all use a holiday.'

An emergency session of Congress convened, with proposals for outsourcing and appeasement mooted. Especially controversial were calls to cull the more obese of the species, the faction reasoning that the atmosphere was more likely to favour beautiful people. No decisions were reached at the close of session, and their spokesperson was not available for comment.

This intrepid reporter however heard frenzied cries of 'I'm gonna git you SUCA!' from within the four walls of the house.

Further developments will be reported as they are conceived. Back to the studio.

--

Spazzy even by my bucket-scraping standards, I know. Hail TP.

here comes the happily

2008-03-09T21:02:00.004+05:30

What would be the first part of the story is here. The happily happens now, the ever after soon to come.

The thing to remember about this sort of function is that its subscriber base has been seriously eroded by social networking sites. In the pre-Facebook days, this was about the only place where preening hormones were afforded any face time. But, that's not to say that people don't turn up. Perhaps one is either required to be close to the family or devoid of any social life to want to attend. Or, horror of horrors, someone likes this sort of thing.

Actually, that's a very myopic view. Of course people like this sort of thing. Two reasons to attend functions: to lech and to eat. Engagements and weddings are creepy-uncle magnets. So very many luscious pre-pubescent heads to ruffle, cheeks to pinch and bums to pat. And the in-bloom women just have to be hugged, and have their shoulder rubbed or collarbone poked.

Dress code. There's a whole exclusion thing happening here, which deems that you are to be dressed in a manner that bounces the most light of the photographer's flash, and if you aren't you shall be banished to the outer reaches of the hall. To me, a dress code is the minimum format required to be worn that results in you not getting kicked out of an establishment. However, it was only for some vague reason that I assumed that there'd be only four people at this gathering, and so turned up in my best tee-shirt and shorts (below the knee-length please. I'm from decent family). Only when I entered did I realise just how big a folly it was. Not only did I not know anyone there, but I also stuck out like a sore thumb. Wearing a sari flashed through my mind. It abated.

This sort of event is also an opportunity for the geriatrics (the especially crusty ones) to get treated like Vito Corleone. It is also an opportunity to seek exactly how far one throw (well, several actually. One set) of an oat goes. Start with two people. These two spawn some eight. These eight, even if spawning two each, now have sixteen. When currently at the stage where these sixteen are starting to manufacture children, the word 'populate' gives way to 'infest'.

Paying lip-service to things like the amount of resources required to raise each kid and the apportionment of affection, think of the number of birthdays that need to be remembered and the number of birthday parties to be avoided and later guilt-tripped about. They could do a favour and coordinate conceptions, at least to the extent of a few weeks or a month. And then hold one big shebang that covers all of them. Really, the familial reproductive system is as effective as spores.

Hell, forget birthdays. What about names? The entire function was one big circle of smiling vapidly at someone, and then turn to Ai (the only person I actually knew for sure) and ask for directions. Moses got nothing on me. Still, they did a reasonably sensible thing and printed out a family tree and distributed it. Now, here's where you'd really need a pre-Zuckerberg facebook. A Rogues Gallery would serve the same purpose.

Of course, the standard issue introductions did ensue. The first part consisted guessing whether the new entrant was from my side of the family or not. Turned out that something like 95% of the people who turned up were, but I wouldn't know it. I do wish they'd exercised the prudence of M's side and had only eight people show up. Even better if I hadn't been invited.

Oh, which reminds me. Um, the prospective married couple were a no-show, they being cosy in another country. For that reason, I was hoping to weasel my way out of the function. Really, what's the point if they're not present, right? Without the vicarious eye-candy, it's just a bunch of people in various states of undress at their most penitent, handing things to each other. This probably does come under the definition of 'essential ceremony' under Hindu Marriage Law, but honestly.. who gives a crap? Alas, all was going well and my campaign was afloat till last week, when I dined out with his parents. I couldn't very well say that I was boycotting their son's engagement. And all the wind left my sails.

Still, the solution they came up with to keep the invitees interested was pretty trippy. Brought a laptop with a wireless internet card, hooked a webcam to it and fired up Yahoo! Chat. An opportunity for every well-wisher to voice their two cents and show their face to the happy couple. Keep it decent though, it's kind of impolite to be erasing your chat history when a queue has formed behind you.

The couple of course, had no webcam at their end. Is it the ultimate fantasy to do whatever while your engagement is in full-swing with your respective families on-screen looking all pious?

It could be. Should it be? Hm.

yeah, so..

2008-03-06T08:32:00.005+05:30

My dog was put down a week ago.

I wasn’t going to blog about it.

But then, something happened.

My family had two dogs, one acquired after an earlier one died some five years back. The one that was put down was twelve, while the other is four (I think. Four-abouts).

He’s always been a bit of a prima donna, having his way, moseying about being an ingrate. That said, he’s also an extremely affectionate chappie.

So, when my other dog was put down, he went into what my family perceived to be mourning, by refusing to touch his food.

That lasted about a day.

But, he misses her at night, and howls the night away until he’s let into the house. What my family tries to do is to get him to get over it, so he is left outside every night, and if he starts howling, we let him in. Of course, this takes time, and he’s possibly outside for an hour, maybe longer. I always feel terrible about it, both for him, and the racket he causes at something like 10 P.M, which obviously would cause discomfort to the neighbours.

7.45 AM.

I had just returned from a haircut, and am rummaging through the old newspapers. The bell rings. Being closest to the door, I answer.

Enter European prick: possibly German, going by his accent, though I’m no expert. He works for Sony Ericsson (the standard issue ID card dangling from his neck), so perhaps he’s Swedish. Definitely continental European, with an accent similar to the guy in the (absolutely brilliant) Spike Jonze IKEA ad, though pudgier and more capitalist-looking. And, had moved into the new flat that had been built across the street.

And he says (not a quote, but the expletives were his own)

You must do something about that dog of yours. Do you know that he was barking the whole night? If that fucking dog barks for one more fucking night, I’m going to make him disappear.

I’m going to call someone, and I’m going to make him disappear.

(I mumble something about mourning)

No, I don’t care. Do you understand me? If you don’t shut that fucking dog up, I’m going to do something about it. Do you understand me?

At this point, my father comes to the door and I, valiantly trying to control my giggling, retreat inside.

What was I supposed to do really? Yes, we were in the wrong technically for not shutting the dog up. And stereotypes aside, this Kraut wasn’t even listening to pleas to his arctic heart.

I did have visions of going filmi on him and yelling things like ‘eyyy! Enga Mama yaaru theriyumaa?!?’* with a lot of finger wagging and counter-threats of cutting off his Johnson (yes, I love the Big Lebowski) or go Pacino on him and yell ‘You’ll make him disappear? I’ll make YOU disappear. I’ll make your entire mutherfucking family and their borscht disappear too!!!! YEAH MOTHERFUCCKER!’

Or something like that.

At the very least, I should have said 'where do you think we are? Russia?' or ‘well, if he does disappear, I know where you live and who to blame.’ Geez, what a way to make a threat. I mean, this country isn’t completely lawless, and the animal rights activists are some of the most rabid (har) people I’ve met. I should know, I was incubating in one for nine months.

But well, instead, I retreated trying to conceal a grin and left my dad to do the yelling. He’s better at it, and did subsequently tell him that he'd make him disappear. And also something about how he's a visitor to this country, and that he should be polite. ZING!!!!

I hate confrontations, especially with big European mofos with the might of Big Corporation behind them. Yes, we were to blame for the boyo not keeping his mouth shut at night, but Sony Ericsson man came out guns blazing. As Jahwn Wayne might say, 'Wehll, It jusst aiin' Americuhn'.. which affects neither party. Ah well.

My dog has a death threat hanging over his fat little head.

Gah, my neighbourhood has really gone to the.. err..

* Tamil expression. With a lot of effect leeched out of it, it translates to ‘Oi, do you know who my/our uncle is?’)

... Without wanting to sound like a total bastard, I wonder if the moral here is that I don't blog about death unless there's a funny story.

Yeah, that would seem about square.

Stop Making Sense

2008-03-03T00:57:00.002+05:30

At the outset, I must mention that I like Talking Heads a lot, and they're definitely a band whose live show I'd sit through.

Stop Making Sense is considered one of the best concert films of all time. I can't recall the number of concert films I've seen, but this one is definitely the best of the lot. One of the best ever? Hard to say, but it's certainly a great film, prejudiced I am due to my affinity for their music, rather than coming in as someone who is unfamiliar with the band.

The music ranged from good to great. And that's all there is to it. It's a straight out concert film with the camera focussed solely on what's happening on-stage, with no cuts to the backstage area or.. well, talking heads. Also, as has been widely noted, the camera is static (though not boring), ably directed by Jonathan Demme, rather than having a cut every .42 seconds, as is the norm these days.

But while the Talking Heads have great material, the same can't be said of the Tom Tom Club (which consists of members of TH minus David Byrne), who sneak in a single song that sticks out like a sore thumb, though with only minimal damage to the overall film.

The glue that kept the film together was David Byrne, who, though chronologically earlier, looks a dead ringer for the bastard child of Cillian Murphy and Casey Affleck. For an hour and a half, Byrne singularly keeps the viewer entranced with the happenings on screen.

The film was made in 1984, and it shows in the fashion, and possibly demeanour as well, of the people on stage. But Byrne, wearing a suit (before he dons his Big Suit), is in a sense timeless. With reptilian neck and writhing body movements, he's a magnetic presence.

The aforementioned problem I had with the Tom Tom Club could even simply be that Byrne wasn't present. Take Byrne away, and the rest of the performers look like a bunch of typically over-eager New Romantics who don't know whether they're, as the term goes, taking the piss or not. However, Byrne, with a psychotic intensity in his eyes, could have been completely sincere, and possibly was, but through the hokey stage movements and all, he maintains a certain aura that elevates him, and the film, above stage antics.