to make the mundane readable

It's funny, I have spent five years in the city and have so little attachment. Blossom and Pecos and Nagarbhavi are probably the only spaces that have been parts of my life. Was walking back from Brigade Road, and it was this indescribable sensation of no-sensation.

A city whose quirkiness was never quite revealed to me. Whose homogeneous cosmopolitanism somewhat suffocated me. Whose script and tongue I never got around to udnerstanding. Whose conversaton I was never a part of.

Kolkata was a city that documented my childhood and adolescennce. I adopted its conversations as mine, its furtive glances made sense to me. Delhi, has so far been a torrid love-hate affair.  The kind where you love the guffaw, and the fingers, and the odd joke, and hate the mood swings, and the sudden blank stares, and the chappals, and bad hair.

It's a city that caught my attention fro the word go, and I have a feeling it'll grow on me, and I continue to crib about it.

Here's to Chapter III then.... Cheers people.

Don't know when I'll talk in his space again.... hope we bump into each other at some crossroad.

Very blue skies, a unique relationship between two very quiet cowboys, flocks of sheeps, some donkeys,  and angsty, desterted wife, an angry, cigarette-smoking wife make for a not-so-unique story, that can be transformed through good-film-mkaing. Ang lee must be phenomenal if everyone sez he is phenomenal. He is a good-film-maker, but it's not a unique film.

Walk The Line dd just that- toe the line. Take  a biographical theme, pick a slightly forgotten character from American popular culture, show his heartrending journey through poverty and the extreme-South to reach fame somewhere close to Texas, then fall in love with another music-type chick (much hotter than his wife, needless to say), then drink himself over, take anti-depressant pills as the chick refused to set foot into his trap, and finally the chick marries him, when he proposes to her on stage. Shah Rukh Khan should have been in this movie.

Hollywood is proving increasingly monotonous, even to my barely-ticking brain. Give me South Pole penguins anyday. A 105 minute narrative by penguins (in Frech) on life in the Land of Hardhsip, and how they rather like it.....

In other news, my mother and I had a rain-adevnture uesterday ,when we were heading homeward from Brigade Road and it started to rain, I suggested to chill in Planet M for a while and wait for the rain to stop. She insisted we should run from pecos, into those lanes which open out close to St. Marks Road. As it would happen, she won, As it wuld happen, there were no autos, and the rain turned torrential in a matter of minutes. And we got drenched at various points, and finalle wadded our way back home. 

Moral of story: People at all points should listen to me...

A bunch of cutesey women, not 'provocative' dressed, not shouting slogans, hovering around- chatting, pasting some sticker-letters on themselves , scurrying abour on Brigade Road, maybe not the most docile, but certainly not aggressive- was enough to make yuppy coffee-drinkers, lecherous men, paranoid mall-managers, cops, middle-class housewives nervous.

Women standing around, leaning against the railings, doing nothing, attracted enough attention to start a political rally. Had it not been the strength of numbers, I would never have found enough courage to stare sleazy men right back in the eye, until they felt squeamish enough to walk off.

The Blanknoise intervention against street harassment of women, made me strangely ecstatic today, as we ran across  the crossroads of Residency and Brigade Road in seconds, between the stopping of perpendicualar traffic.

Most men stood around and stared, some laughed at the pamphplets, but I hope some took back the extended public imagination taht the traffic-crossroads, and railings on footpaths and malls are women's spaces too.

Ma is now in Delhi. Yes, she has a jetsetting social life, unlike her daughter. My mother's side of the family is very hip. That bring dates home, and get married to UPites and Punjabis, and have middle-aged mothers who are chic, worked-out, with toned abs. Whereas having lived in our house for close to twenty-five years, my mother has lost all of the genetic hipness, that she would have been heir to. Anyways, she is in the process of rediscovering some of that hipness. Which is why over the phone last night, she gave me a detailed account of who would be wearing a backless choli at which function at the wedding, with my grandmother sitting closeby. What kind of a family is this where twenty-somethings and fifty-somethings discuss backless clothing in the company of seventy-somethings?

My father's family is far more palatable, in this age of uncertain morality. You study real hard before exams.  Get into some engineering college. Your parents feel happy and flaunt you at family gatherings. Boys- what boys? Backless...(shhhh)... Sex (Hail Mary!)...Then you work in XYZ TEch Co. for two years, then write CAT/GMAT, and either to go to top-bracket B-schools, or the Land of Promise and Silicon. Then marry Bengali boy/girl with comparable accomplishments, and have compere-able babies and repeat the history. 

Speaking of diverse parents, D.H. Lawrence is back in my life with his snooty-mother-angst and miner-daddy, whispering sweet-nothings about the innner voices in women that look out for the unheard world beyond, and sweet, wholesomeness of working-class men, who have no choice but to be fucked-out by these enchantingly psychotic women. What sets a great work of fiction from random expressions of a confused individuals (which includes all those Russians, Mexicans, Japs, Bengalis who think its cool to make sense after the first one-fifty pages of fucking with your head) is that even when you don't understand where the book is going, every uttering in print is a valuable read- it ends up telling you something about yourself...Basically, I hate authors I don't understand.

My love affair with D.H.Lawrence goes back a long way. Beginning with Snake-the poem, that Chatto (English teacher with big red bindi and hot nephew) explained with all the sexual undertones. And then Lady Chatterley's Lover withe newpaper covering to hide the picture on the cover, at sixteen. Then Sons and Lovers and Women in Love. I think the miner-fantasy stayed with me, and developed through my pseudo phases. This fascination for the man that lives through his senses. Does not think. Simply does. Does not listen for voices, the voices are part of his everyday  world. And perhaps, David Herbert Lawrence bred in me the contempt for thinking, speaking men.

Anyways, along came a Judith Crantz from Scatterbrain, and fickle as I am, I have left Lawrence hanging in mid-air. For a therapeutic dose of Hollywood intrigues, millionaire beau, illegitimate children, passion, jealousy, cruelty and designer clothes. Cannot put it down...

I usually write bad poetry. Just that sometimes words come out in a way that can’t possibly be called prose. So I call it poetry. Today was one such day. That an intricate, somewhat pleasurable sensation seeping out of a very old memory, was troubling me right through the day. Words are a really poor tool of expression, on such occasions. If I could paint or make music, I guess the quality of the sensation could be done greater justice. Word is a tool for the conscious mind. Very often, failing miserably if its mastery is stretched even marginally beyond it usual domain.

So I put together some words and called it poetry, for the lack of a better-suited skill.

Not quite doing justice. To a sensation arising out of a memory of comfort in alone-ness. Of warm sun. Humidity. Teak-wood desks of the old-world. And fading chatter.

A troubled few hours spent at lawschool, almost scared by the feeling of detachment and unfamiliarity. And all the while digging up very very old memories, that I never thought would be stored within me until this day. And with it the sensation. Of an amusing sort of pain at the time that has gone by.

It's been a heavenly week vegetating at home. I guess I am savouring this state more than ever before, as the sensation of it's being limited is so intense. Crash comes close to being unforgettable, if you can ignore a few cheesy bits.  The screenplay has beautifully woven in multiple personal stories, with some comments on racism in mutlicultural societies and gun violence in America. It deserves particular applause considering it is so easy to fall into the trap of a 'political movie' with the sympathies of the White man and all that, when one chooses to make such a movie.

Trans America is a beautiful film, again about a personal story with socio-political comments, that successfully avoids being the 'these are  also nice people, we must love them' film. Not cinematic history, but definitely worth a watch.

It is funny how many Bengalis one runs into on MG Road on a Sunday evening. There are newly married women, imported freshly from the holyland, by their preppy, techie hubbies, the 'we are hereby hip' t wenty-something women, who have just crossed over to the land of tank tops, the 'sunday site-seeing' in-laws who are here to take back carry-bags full of Kanjivaram sarees, and gossip about their son-in-law's pay packet, and food that is cooked with coconut oil. In the course of a twenty-minute walk, I ran into two women from my famous floosie-manufacturing school. One junior, very pretty, Mallu-looking girl with a hottish boy (on his bike)-whose name escapes me (the girl I mean), but I remember her being one of those athletic types in the blue games skirt.  The other one, two years my senior, whose name also escapes me, was with a would-be-husband type bespectacled boy, who looked obviously Bengali. These are all women going places.

Talking of school, I must put on record how cool; our uniform used to be, and how the plus-two girls set trends all over the city. Yesterday, this chinky girl at Garuda, was wearing what the well-informed A would call 'culottes'- that is, you take a pair of pajamas, and cut them at the place where they reach the middle of your shank. This poor little chink babe, who obviously thought she was setting the trend, was unaware that the seventeen-year-olds in my school, wore them as part of the plus-two uniform for a year (mebbe two) way back when we were kids, in the mid-nineties, I think. This was just atfer, the HoD got bored of the karate pants and the bush-shirts. Now, she was ahead of her times. By the time, I came to plus-two we were wearing relatively conservative skirts, with a box-pleat in front, and these slip-on shoes which were especially made for us by a Chinese guy in New Market. Haa... now feel dowdy for the rest of your lives. As m and A are doing. These plebeians who went to school, wearing stripes shirts, and ties, and knee-length skirts.

It's possible I've blogged about this before, but the games skirt was, of course, in a league pf its own. These were the cutest, pleated, wrap-around, tennis skirts - that were, as per norm, six inches above the knee. Now that is hip! Of course, you're screwed if you if are fat, or terribly skinny and knock-kneed. By the time you're out of school, you've vowed never to get into the short skirt nature of attire ever again. 

Hence, that is a species of wearable is vociferously absent from my otherwise fairly-well-equipped wardrobe.

Speaking of my wardrobe, I have these printed pants, that are printed at the back and not the front, witha somewhat assymetrical effect- that I picked in Byla Kuppe. And these days, I am going through the phase of 'wear all the mad clothes at one go, coz you'll soon have to wear black and white and a ridiculous collar'. My mum who prefers the 'tasteful' brand of rebellion, put her foot down and said, "There is no way, you are getting out of the house wearing these, what will the watchman think of us?" in a sort of resigned tone of pathos and humour put together, coz she has seen me wear much worse. The high point of her opposition was when she said I must learn a few things from m!!!!!!!!!!!!!! As A and I walked towards the movie theatre, we saw a dusky beauty get out of an auto- the kind that boys want to bring hom to their mothers- in a demure salwar-kurta, with silver danglers to add a dash of seduction. Now that's m... Sigh... some of us will just continue wearing printed pants.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is another beautifully made  movie about the fucked up American mind. Kate Winslet surpasses herself. Do watch it if you chance upon the movie.

My hair is causing some concern. The daily jostle on the roads of Delhi did it some good, as strands of it  would automatically stick out and stay in mid-air quite obstinately and look like one of those artily done messed-up hairdos, and I was quite glad, as in reality, I am at present undergoing the painful phase of short-hair growing out. Back in Bangalore, in the comforts of an almost entirely slept-out day at home, it is looking limp and horrible. I am guessing this is my hair's way of telling it likes the proletariat life better.

I hated Delhi the first time I worked there, many years back, and its kind of grown on me. I am strangely amused and excited by the hardcore North Indian worldview- the strange practices (for instance,of eating raw radish), and lots of mehndi in the hair (even men), and blind faith in muscle-power, and the sequined sandals, and synthetic kurtas that stick to the skin on sweaty summer monings, and sprinklings of Punjabi every here and there.