Bland Spice

A journey begins

2012-01-20T18:41:00.000+05:30

A whirlwind end to a year and a beginning.
Between 18th and 23rd I traveled to Behrampur, Murshidabad distt., for a theatre performance and with thick fogs along the tracks and trains delayed by days, was on the road for six days for that one-hour performance.
Returning back, I wrapped the remaining days of my corporate career and cleaned up my old apartment, thanks to a very special friend from Bangalore flying over to help me with that.
After sojourning with a friend in Gurgaon and my cousins in Delhi for the past two days, I leave for Auli today for a fortnight of skiing. It's so frigging cold out there and the roads so so bad (The drives to Joshimath are never a pleasure in the best of weathers) and I don't really know why I am doing this to myself.

My training will recommence in Feb second half and I still have not written anything for close to half a year now. To be honest, nothing feels different - it just seems like an extended weekend where I just happen to live out of several suitcases, repacking and shuffling stuff between them all the time.

Hopefully, Auli will break the pattern of these last eight years post-MBA.

Some things in life are like a smile spread in the horizon towards where I march and I am thankful for that.

A few portraits of friends, new and old, that were there with me in these days, tho', I realize now, only a sample from all that were there.

Day 1

2012-01-17T10:58:00.000+05:30

Starting a new day, a new life today. Strange how mundane it seems right now, like a lazy Sunday where I have managed to get nothing on my todo's and hence feeling a little overwhelmed by the time at hand. It is this lost connection with time that I somewhere seek to re-establish. To disentangle from the spools of imagined arbitrary deadlines tugging at my feet all the time, for all the inconsequential tasks without purpose and ends, forgotten the minute they are done. The motions without the movements.

In the past few years I consciously refrained from taking any direct responsibility where a task would belong to me and me alone and the measure of my worth would be how much I have been able to achieve to the targets set at the beginning. Instead, I took the consultative and coordinative approach, and lucrative as that line of career is, many a time much more than the direct line responsibility, I have doubts about its utility having been so close to the ground and seeing the grease of the cogs, hearing their straining screeches and clangs.

I am tired of dissembling now, of the half-hearted ill-planned plunge everyday into the pits where I do not belong. Of being someone I am not, of pretending to.

Much as the work ahead now looming like a hulking Cyclops and staring defiantly at me with that terrible eye, people are important. So many of them accumulated over the years and yet each as much of consequence as myself. I should never forget that. There would be some worthier of trust and affection, unimpeded, than others and I should never forget that too.

A new day looms ahead. Like every other day. But today I mark with a chalk, an arbitrary chalky beginning.

Stories are neither the beginnings or the ends but how the middle bit is played. The mundane, the routine, sans flourish. That's where stories achieve greatness.

No animals harmed

2011-11-26T13:12:00.000+05:30

Line from Edukators

2011-10-18T23:18:00.002+05:30

If you keep working for this asshole, you'll lose faith in everything.

Whose childhood is it anyway?

2011-10-14T13:59:00.000+05:30

There is something more special about a wedding when the actors are childhood sweethearts. To me it suggests a serious lack of imagination. But to the papers, it seems to suggest something warm, something fuzzy, beside the crap in the nappies. Where a boy meets girl, and the boy is not a middle-aged superstar hooked to sex and whiskey, and the pristine innocence we imagine on the big screen, behind all the blings and the blitz, still remains.

So I assume from all the coverage on the coverage of the wedding of boy-toyking of Bhutan. Which leaves me all confused when I read that the king is 31 and the "commoner" (another fairy-tale element overemphasazied by the media) bride 21. It makes me ask -- whose childhood? I would say that anyone below 6 is still an infant and seriously too young to commit to a sweetheart. Anyone above 16 has already been pleasuring him/herself for over a couple of years and been sprouting fur on his/her groins for even longer, and can be said to safely having moved from the childhood to the teenaged adulthood state.
How can a couple with ten years separating them have a choldhood romance together then?

Ride down an office lift

2011-10-13T01:21:00.001+05:30

One of the most conscious passages I have written lately. The idea is to effect an escape from the office and the claustrophobic ride in an elevator. One of the challenges I am facing in this story is that the narrator is not the type of person who would voice his thoughts in the English of literature fiction. The narration writes over the character's own words at many places and leaves a curious conflation of voices, some words belonging to me and some claimed by the character; a very exacting effort. Each adverb and word needs to be balanced, each comma, each semicolon deliberated on for minutes at end. I wonder if this controlled, planned effort takes away from the spontaneity of the writing.
The last rolling paragraph is supposed to stimulate the inescapable denseness inside the lift by its unbreaking relentless progress.

_____

A clutch of people waited at the bank of lifts, more than what he was accustomed to when he left at his usual hour. None whom he thankfully knew particularly well. Of the three lifts, two were on different floors below and coming up, the one in the middle was going from the first basement to the second. No use watching for that. He sidled to the door of the lift on the nearer floor even though it seemed to have been stuck there since he had walked into the lobby. Most of the crowd was herded in front of that door, intent on avoiding others’ attentions beyond a nod or few syllables. The lift started rolling again, drumming ahead its intention with a grinding clatter and then beginning to rise slowly with the low complaining rumble of a pensioner groaning to his feet. The handful split and wagering on the other lift started shuffling towards their lift. Unconsciously, he squared his shoulders and adjusted the strap of the laptop bag slipping on his shoulder with the other hand. Almost everyone toted laptops like him, slung on a shoulder, but a few carried backpacks. They must be much more comfortable, distributing the weight across the blades instead of printing an aching welt on one. But he was too old now, too far gone up the hierarchy, to be seen walking about with a schoolboy satchel, for that’s what it was, however black and dull and gray. That breathless anticipation as they sat packed, waiting for the hands on the clock to tick in place and release the peal trapped in the bell. The corridors racing past, the reverberation of their buckled hooves, shouts, whoops, gossips, fights – a babel released, everything rolling at once. The day still alive and sunny in its possibilities. Now only the long crawl back home – some of the people here would be on the choked roads for more than an hour – and waiting at the end of it, the joyless fix of television and sleep.

The panel over the door lit with the number of their floor. Everybody was in place now, the other lift now roundly abandoned. The lift clanged in place and in that brief comma before the doors rumbled apart, the tension was stretched like a balloon skin. A long-awaited bus rolling into a bus-stop. Worse. At a bus-stop you didn’t have to worry about keeping up your professional mask. If it came to a crunch, survival upped both civility and dignity.

The doors parted revealing a handful from the nether floors already cunningly stationed inside for the long drop back. They filed in without jostling and largely respecting the order in which they had arrived, but only just. He moved towards the back, anticipating the squeeze to only get tighter with the influx from the other floors. One of the backpackers moved to his front, an exceptionally tall and broad lad, and was now smothering him with his backpack, the embossed logo pressing on his forehead like a branding iron. He shifted his own laptop from the side to the front, poking him on the back of his thighs just enough to make him turn and realise there was someone behind him and that his boundaries didn’t exactly end at the skin on his back. He moved ahead a little, allowing him a snorkel of space. Everyone was in the lift now, packed and ready to be shipped down. He heard the doors shut.

The lift seemed to stop at every floor, moving with a lurch after every pause and pulling its squealing brakes even before it had gained full speed. Every time the doors opened and waited, he imagined a small crowd peeping inside, muttered counsels between themselves, the people packed at the door facing them blankly and awaiting their verdict, a fourth wall briefly disappeared, most of them outside deciding to give it a pass, but a few of the desperate and shameless squeezing inside; he felt the press inside becoming tighter with every stop. Trapped in his wedge of space, there was nothing he could do but absorb the sounds and shaking rumbles. He waited: a hand clenched around the strap of the bag, the other flat against the wall, daunted by its cool steely smoothness, only a callus grazing a scar etched on it. He did not have anxieties of closed spaces but he imagined being trapped like this for minutes, many minutes, because of some failure, and a flutter passed through him like the thought of one’s own death. He trusted himself to stay calm but what about the others? What if someone here got the panic attack in this confined space? Especially this giant who seemed too big for his own and others’ good. From here to the rush-hour. Over-packed co-existence was the new paradigm. The price extracted by progress. Claustrophobia was no longer a private phobia but a public menace: privacy no longer a right but a privilege. A raging madness – stampedes, pileups – which had to be confined and contained. The man in the front moved an arm, shaking it as if it had lost circulation. Almost like a spasm. Unconsciously, he turned his head to one side imagining the thick arm landing on his brittle nose in a flailing thwack. Whatever happened between these floors would be inescapable, beyond deliverance. They would be discovered only when the doors opened. A crushed pile tumbling out. The walls were so thick, he doubted if even their screams would be heard. To the people outside, they were something packed, boxed and in delivery. Schrödinger’s many cats. They might all be gassed and dead for all they knew. He wished the frame would not shudder so much between stops. He was beginning to feel a little light-headed and dyspnoeic. He had lost count of the floors they had stopped at but he felt that the crowd was starting to fan out again, people must be getting off. When the doors finally rumbled apart for him, he stepped out with the giddy relief of disembarking from a wearisome ride in an amusement park.

Reaction to a rejection

2011-09-14T03:57:00.001+05:30

For a man who did not speak much about himself, and had had no real confidant, he was driven by desperation to tell her, then, everything. Everything: the casual cruelties and betrayals, pinpricks, which had nailed him forever to what he had become since, faiths destroyed; memories so primal and gut-wrenchingly felt that he had not even acknowledged them to himself. But, to win her back, he bared himself of a lifetime accumulation of subterfuges, unshed before even in the privacy of his own company. He exposed the very underpinnings of his vulnerabilities, and waited throbbing and naked for her verdict.

A seven-day wait and then a two-sentenced rejection copied and pasted from the last mail. A few hours before the mail, she had blocked him in all the social networking sites and on her phone. It was in the end a cavalier dismissal of his stripped essence: the doorman called in to show him the way out , not granting him even the time of picking the pile of garments lying at his feet. He shivered with the pitiable indignity of a flower plucked of all its petals.

He shrivelled inside himself like a worm curling into a ball at a poke. He swore to never, never ever, tell anyone anything about himself. To never let anyone come close enough.

One day in class, a gang of pranksters from his class had cornered him to sing and he, innocent of their intention, had sang with his heart, only to be mocked by the burst of laughter when he finished. Since that day he had never sung to anyone else, and even to himself, restrained himself to humming when moved by an inspiration or notes of an old- memory wafting from somewhere, and only occasionally betrayed his resolve in snatches when alone and absolutely outside the earshot of anyone else.

To be joy, one has to sing, unfettered and unashamed. To love, one has to bare. But for him, the fear of the sting of rejection again became sharper than the pang for laughter and love.

उसके हाथ - १

2011-09-10T06:55:00.002+05:30

बात उन दिनों की है जब मैं कॉलेज से निकल कर दिल्ली में पहली-मर्तबा नौकरी कर रहा था. नौकरी में उस वक़्त के हिसाब से पैसे ज्यादाही मिलते थे और काम भी बहुत ज्यादा नहीं था. नयी नयी नौकरी थी, हाथ में पहली बार पैसे आ रहे थे. दोस्तों के साथ बहुत ऐय्याशी के साथ उड़ाये पर जल्दी ही उकता भी गया. दोस्तों की बातें फूहड़ और बकवास लगने लगी – हर वकत वोही टर्र- टर्र – लड़कियों के पीछे लार टपकाना और डींगे हांकना. मैं उनसे अलग ही हो गया. नौकरी में भी उत्साह जल्दी ही मर गया या यूँ कहिये की मार दिया गया. समझ नहीं आ रहा था की इतना कम काम करने के लिए मुझे इतने पैसे क्यूँ मिल रहे थे और इतनी देर क्यूँ बैठना पड़ता था. कॉलेज में तो तब भी क्लास्सेस बंक कर सकते थे, यहां तो स्कूल वाला हाल था. उस पर मेरा बॉस भी अव्वल दर्जे का घटिया आदमी था. बहुत कम आता था और उम्र काफी ढल चुकी थी उसकी. इसीके डर से घूमता रहता था की कहीं नौकरी न चली जाये या कोई मजाक न कर रहा हो. अपने काम से ज़्यादा यह फिक्र में रहता था की दूसरे क्या काम कर रहे हैं. दूसरों की परेशानियों और विपदा के किस्सों में उससे बड़ा मज़ा आता था पर ऐसे बनता जैसे सहानभूति कर रहा हो. हाय राम, बेचारा, च-च! मुझे ऐसे आदमियों से सख्त घृणा है जो मुंह पर कुछ और दिल में कुछ और रखते हैं.

कई बार सोचा नौकरी बदल लूं. पर आर्थिक मंदी के दिन आ गए थे – चाहता भी तो कहीं और नौकरी नहीं मिलती, या यूँ कहिये ढूँढने की मेहनत नहीं करना चाहता था. नौकरी मिल भी जाती तो और मेहनत करनी पड़ती जो मेरे उस वकत की मानसिक दशा में कम ही मुमकिन दिखाई देता था. जिस तरह से एक नयी साइकिल को स्थिरावस्था से गति देने से पुरानी साइकिल को कभी कभार पेडल मार कर चलाते रहना आसान होता है, ऊसी तरह नौक्रियों का हाल होता है. पुरानी नौकरी में बस सही टाइम से आओ, दर्जनों बार उठ कर चाय पियो, जो काम आये उसे कर दो. काम भी अक्सर ऐसा होता है की खाना-पूर्ती – चाहे जितना बेमन से किया हो, बस कुछ-कुछ हो जाना चाहिए. अच्छा कर दो तो शायद उल्टा भोगना ही पड़े -- ऊपर बैठने वाले पीठ पर पिशाच की तरह बैठ जायेंगें और अपना सारा काम भी आप ही से करायेगें और सारा श्रेय आपस में ही बाँट लेंगें. काम में अगर बेरुखी और मंदी का आलम रहे तो आप भीड़ से बाहर नहीं दिखोगे, कोई खून चूसने नहीं उतरेगा. कभी कभार टिप्पणियाँ मिल सकती हैं पर उसकी भी उम्मीद कम ही है – ऐसी नौकरियों में काम का स्तर बहुत नीचे होता है. कुछ हैं जो पूरा भार संभालते हैं: कुछ इसलिए के बेचारे मिजाज़ के मारे हैं – आदत है की अपना स्तर न गिरने दें चाहे स्थिति जितनी ही खराब हो – मैं ऐसे लोगों को मूर्ख ही मानता हूँ, और अपने पिताजी की गिनती ऐसे ही मूर्खों की सभा में करता हूँ. और कुछ हैं जो सोचते हैं की, बस, अगर अच्छा काम करेंगें तो तरक्की और जल्द मिलेगी. पर वो भी नासमझ हैं. ऊपर उठने के लिए काम के अलावा, बहुत मस्खे मारने पड़ते हैं. मेरे कुछ संगियों ने यह राह भी अपनाई. मेरे बौस की हर बात में हाँ में हाँ मिलाते, बल्कि उसके उत्सुक कपटी कानों में अफवाह-बाज़ी करते, और उसके मजाकों पर ऐसे ठहाके लगा कर हँसते की वो भी समझ जाता की ज़बरदस्ती हंस रहे हैं. एक जनाब तो दिवाली पर उसके लिए घर से इतने पैकेट मिठाई लाये जैसे अपनी लड़की का रिश्ता करने आये हों. इनमें से ज़्यादातर मेरे कॉलेज के सहपाठी ही थे और इन्ही के साथ मेरा शुरुआत में बाहर उठाना बैठना था. शायद इन्ही वजहों से उनसे मैं दूर होता गया. कॉलेज में जो कुछ-कुछ अपनी खुद की पहचान और दुनिया की ओछी रीतियों से दूर रहना की बातें थी, उन्हें शायद बातें जान कर हॉस्टल के उन बरामादों में ही दफना कर आना चाहिये था. उन्हें उस तुच्छ इंसान, जो सहयोग से हमारा बौस था, की चापलूसी करते देख कर लगता था जैसे कॉलेज में इंतिहान के बाद चंद नंबर बढ़वाने के लिए वो प्रोफेस्सरों के कमरों के बाहर चक्कर लगाया करते थे. जैसे भूके मरियल कुत्ते रोटियों के टुकड़ों के लिए किसी कूड़ेदान के आस-पास मंडरा रहे हों.

उनके साथ रहते-रहते भी मैं अकेले रहने लगा. पहले तो मैंने उनके साथ बेबाक दारु-नशा किया, थोड़े दिन जुए की भी लत् पाली, पैर मुझे इन सब नशों में कोई दिलचस्पी पैदा हुई. दूसरों को यह सब करता देख कर समझ गया था कि जिससे वो उत्साह समझ रहा हैं, वो असल में हकीकत से भागना है. मुझे अपनी हकीकत से डर नहीं था, मैं उससे समझना चाहता था जिसमें मैं असमर्थ था. मैंने सारे ऐब एक-एक कर के पाले, इस हद्द तक किये कि दोस्त भी डर गए: बड़े-बड़े ब्रांडों के जूते-कपड़े खरीद कर फ़ेंक दिए, जुआ खेला तो ऐसा खेला की सब दांव पर लगा कर हारा, दारु पी तो धुत्त नशे में सड़क पर ही गिर कर सो गया, एक-दो बार फिजूल की मार-पिटाई भी की – और फिर यकायक सब छोड़ दिया. अब मेरे दोस्त जब पार्टी करने बाहर जाते, तो बहाना मार कर घर पर बैठा रहता और कुछ नहीं करता. पहले पढ़ने कि थोड़ी-बहुत आदत थी पर किताब अब उठाई ही नहीं जाती थी. टीवी पर जो शो आते बहुत फूहड़ लगते थे, समाचार में रिपोर्टरों की बेफिजूली की उत्तेजना और चिंता के स्वांग को देख कर उन्हें जल्द-से-जल्द जिस खौफनाक मौतों का वो तमाशा बना रहे थे उससे कहीं बदत्तर मौत कि दुआ देता. घर पर फोन करो तो पिताजी से मेहनत के ऊपर लेक्चर और माँ से दूर के चाचा-ताऊ के किस्से सुनना पड़ता जिनके निजी जीवन से मुझे कोई दिलचस्पी नहीं थी. मुझे उन दिनों बस कुछ कलात्मक फिल्मों देखने का मन होता पर जब वो देखता तो बहुत बेकरारी होती की जाऊं कहीं और कुछ करूं पर जब आजीवन कुछ न किया हो, तो अब करता तो कहाँ से शुरू करता. वोही साइकिल का उदारहण – इस पुरानी खटारा पर निरुत्साहित पेडल मारे जा रहा था, चाहे कितना ही उतर के बदलने का मन न हो.

उसी वकत मैंने एक दो लडकियां पटांईं. की शायद किसी प्रेमिका कि सौबात में ही राहत मिले. बस राह-फिरते जो अच्छी लगती जा कर पूछ लेता. कुछ ने जूती दिखाई, कुछ डर कर भाग गयीं, कुछ शर्माते-शर्माते मान गयीं. उन्हें मैंने कॉफ़ी हाउस में कॉफ़ी पिलाई, लोदी बाग में हाथ पकड़ कर घूमा, घर ला कर चुम्मा-चाटी की. पर क्षण भर के मज़े के अलावा और कुछ न मिला. एक भी लड़की न मिली जिसकी अक्ल एढ़ी में न बैठी हो, जो खुद को दुनिया कि नज़रों में न देखती हो. कहने को कुछ नहीं होता था पर मुंह पर कभी ताला नहीं पड़ता. सोचा सभी लडकियां ऐसी हो होती हैं – जो बाद में ही पता चला कि ऐसा नहीं है. शायद मेरा उस वकत भाग्य ही खराब था.

इसी बीच एक लड़की मेरे गले पड़ गयी. शादी की रट लगा ली. धमकी देने लगी कि मेरे नाशिक-वाले घर पहुँच जायेगी पर मैंने उसे वहाँ का पता पता न लगने दिया. फिर कहने लगी कि उसने अपने घर पर सब बता दिया है और अल्लाहाबाद से उसके पिता रिश्ता पक्का करने कभी भी मेरी चौखट पर आ धम्केंगें. मैं परेशान हो गया और सोचा कि अब तो कोई और मकान ढूँढना ही होगा. अपने फ्लैट के मित्रों से मैं वैसे ही तंग आ गया था और कई बार ठानी थी कि अकेले ही कहीं खिसक लूँ. पर मैं निहायती आलसी आदमी हूँ. पीठ पर खुजली करने के लिए भी हाथ तभी उठाता हूँ जब बर्दाश्त के बाहर हो जाये. सोचा कि चलो इस बहाने इन दोस्तों – जिनसे न पहले कि यारी, न कोई सहानुभुति रह गयी थी – इनसे निजात मिलेगी.

Rote Rote hansnaa

2011-09-07T16:03:00.000+05:30

तुम इतना जो रो रहे हो

क्या ख़ुशी है जो छिपा रहे हो?

Hmm. The vice-versa doesn't really work.

But I would love to see a guy serenade the family of a bomb victim with this, softly and melodiously.

How would you describe a gloomy homosexual?

2011-09-06T17:51:00.000+05:30

gray-gay-rious

"Faux pas"?

2011-08-12T01:07:00.000+05:30

Mr. Krishna confused the facts of a question posed on the floor, and Rediff headlines it as a faux pas.Did i miss something here or was there some innate social custom here that was trespassed here in a blunder? Or is it just plain bad English from the Rediff team?

Mere coincidence

2011-07-16T02:05:00.000+05:30

Meet Rohit Shetty, whose Golmaals, or whatever Muppets-sets portions I have seen of them, should be sued for assassinating a name that stood for many years for comedy. Seen here deeply contemplating where it's his left nut that itches or the right, and if he should ask the left side of the brain to move the right side of his hand to the left -- no, no -- left, right, right -- frown, frown...

Anyway, Rohit, with all the brain bursting out of his forehead, is a man who believes in things. He doesn't profess to understand them but he absolutely does believe in them, whatever they might be. Depending on which direction the wind is blowing. Not the one from Devgun's greasy colon but you know the wind.... don't ask the man whether it be easterly or westerly... or the brain might burst out of that frown.

Like right now, he believes that we should stand by Mumbai cops. Because, he discloses, if we do not stand by it, we might end up standing in front of them and they might not see the evidence. Worse, they might mistake us for evidence and lock us up. Frownfrown intelligence you see.

The fact that his movie glorifying a cop (and in no way riding on the runaway success of Dabang) is releasing later this week is purely coincidental. RS is not a man who would freeride on tragedies like this for cheap publicity. NO sirrrr. Just like stars would never dance in private weddings for bucks. They do? Frownfrown. Well, I won't... I mean I won't dance... I mean freeride in weddings...no have tragic weddings... frownfrown.... That itch again....

Do I ask with the left or the right side of my mouth?

New low for Rediff

2011-07-15T23:56:00.000+05:30

This is the leading news story right now: Astrological doomsday predictions on state of affairs.

Link

Baat karte hain

2011-07-12T17:07:00.000+05:30

Why is the clown like a thumbprint?

2011-07-05T15:41:00.000+05:30

Content for Theatre Garage Project's website. The idea was to link clowning with thumbprints (theme for website) and the Mad Hatter.

‘Why is the clown like a thumbprint?’

‘What?!’

‘Why is the clown like a thumbprint?’, the man with the strange big hat and the tiny red nose asked me again.

‘I don’t know what you mean to say!’

He approached me and bent over, hands on his thighs, the shanks bulging under red trousers several sizes too small for him, two large brown buttons at the top of his fly undone, the cuffs reaching his shins; a big blue patch in the shape of a boot on one knee.

‘Why. Is. The. Clown Like. Ayyy. Thumbprint?’

‘Huh! What silly riddle is that’, I grunted, ‘You might as well ask why the raven is like a desk.’

‘Oh, I know that one.’

‘Huh? Why?’

‘Ummm, I forgot. It had something to do with a raven and a desk tho’.’

‘Great help that is’,

‘Tell me, why is the clown…’

‘Like a thumbprint. I got it. I don’t know and really I don’t care.’ Still lying flat on my back on the grass, I propped myself up a bit on my elbows but my hands felt too heavy to lift and rub the back of my head. I looked around, the sky was clear and blue, not a wisp of a cloud on it, and all around me was a spread of grass as green and flat as a bedspread. I looked above – no sign of the hole I had fallen through.

‘I know!’, the man shouted over my head again. ‘A thumbprint is hard, grows all the time and if you don’t cut its head off…’

‘You mean a thumb nail, you idiot, not a thumbprint! Look, I am very tired. I have just come falling all the way down a rabbit hole. One moment I was standing on my two steady feet planted solidly in my world…’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Huh?’

‘What were you doing there in your world standing on your steady two feet…?’

‘Yeah, yeah. Uhh– nothing. I was thinking.’

‘Yes, but what were you doing?’

‘I told you! I was thinking.’

‘Yes, yes. And while you were thinking, what were you doing?’

‘I don’t know what the hell you mean! I was thinking! What does one do when one thinks – one thinks.’

‘Yes, but what does one do?’

‘Dammit! One thinks! Thinking is a verb –‘

My words seemed to startle him and he sprung from the bent posture like a pair of springs had recoiled under his knee. His eyes, too large for the head – the head too large for the body – widened with surprise.

‘Thinking is a verb?’

‘Of course, it is.’

‘But a verb describes an action, I remember.’

‘Of course, it does. And thinking is a –‘ the word never came. I remembered suddenly what I had been thinking before I saw the rabbit hole and fell in it. I was thinking of what I would do next. I had stood like that for a long time. A long, long time. Thinking about doing something but never really doing anything.

Was I really doing something, or just thinking all the time?

I squinted at the hatter again. His pupils, large and brown like a pair of walnuts, were spinning fast like a pair of flies caught inside, both in the opposite direction. When they would meet at the centre, a hiccough would rise from him, his large Adam’s apple jump like a mouse over the large red-and-white bow, the top of his hat would lift letting out a huge belch of steam, and a small whistle behind his teeth. I watched him with horror as the pupils spun faster and faster like propellers, the hiccoughs gained speed like a piston moving to full steam, the smoke from the hat gained the size of clouds, and the whistles became the toots of a steamer about to set sail. Just when I thought that the pupils would burst from the eyes and go plonking on the grass like marbles, and the head blow off with the next burst of steam, the man jumped to his feet and waved his arms about, his feet dancing the most ridiculous jig I ever saw. He clapped his hands around something and brought it under my nose, with the look of a dog offering me a bone he’d just dug up.

‘See’, he opened the crack of his hands a little, and I bent and peered in the dark.

‘You saw?! You saw?!’, he clapped his hand back and shouted with beaming glee.

‘Saw what? There was nothing.’

‘Yes. You saw! There was nothing!’

‘Yes.’

‘What was that nothing? Tell, tell!’

‘Nothing, I told you.’

‘Yes, but you have to find something in that nothing. Look, see again.’ He opened the crack of his hands again. I knew there was nothing there, but something in his conviction made me peer again.

There was the black emptiness again, of course - a dark blank nothing. Irritated, I decided to stop this nonsense and ask him help me to my feet –

And then I saw it. A fly fluttering inside, a red fly with the swollen abdomen of a bumblebee and the stripes of a zebra.

‘Why! It’s a fly!’

He opened his palms now, keeping his wrists together and fluttering them. And I saw the red fly break into a pupa, the pupa become a most wondrous creature, a red pixie in a zebra striped bikini, wings fluttering behind her, shaking her mop of wild curls as if she’d just woken up, and staring at everything around with all the wonder and innocence of a first look at the world –

The wings, the palms snapped back on her, crunching her between themselves and she disappeared in the loud smack. A red juice trickled between them and he opened the palms and plucked something from the middle and popped it in his mouth.

‘You brute!’, I shouted and made to lunge at him. But my hands were still too tired to even twitch from the position I was caught in.

‘Ah’, he burped, ‘See. There was something in that nothing after all. I think I will conjure something salty to go with it afterwards.’

‘You horrid, horrid thing! You ate the pixie!’

‘What?’

‘You ate the pixie, you evil carnivorous beast!’

‘Pixie. I though it tasted more like red berry’, he stared at me with such intense wonder again that suddenly I was not sure what I had seen.

‘Is that it?!’, he screamed and jumped on his feet, ‘Is that why a clown is like a thumbprint? Because – because –’ Just as suddenly his knees buckled and he dropped on the ground, sitting on the grass beside me, his chin thrust at me, cradled on the palm of the elbow propped on the patchwork knee.

‘When you where there in your world, thinking and doing nothing, what did you do?’

‘Huh?’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing, I was just thinking.’

‘But you must have done something. Why are you still not there in your thinking nothing then?’

He was right. ‘I saw’, I shook my head, itching to rub the back of it, ‘A hole. A rabbit hole.’

‘Yes, yes!’, his eyes sparkled like a pair of twinkling bulbs, ‘And what was in that hole?!’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing, nothing, nothing!’, he was on the ball of his feet now, knuckles dug into the grass and hopping like a mad toad. ‘And what did you do with that nothing?’

‘I stepped back, what else?’

‘Why! Did! You! Step! Back?’

‘Because – Because I was frightened.’

‘What! Were! You! Frightened! Of?’ he was springing all around me like a spring-heeled jack, so fast that I could only see a blur.

‘I was afraid of that nothing.’

‘But! How! Can! You! Be! Frightened! Of! Nothing?!’

I suddenlyremebered that nothing and the fear. My tongue felt like a dry rag in my mouth and my head felt like there was a giant gong tolling inside. Oh, the world to give the back of my head a rub!

‘Look, can you help me? My hands are too heavy to lift all by my own and I need to rub the back of my head to think clear.’

‘Think, you think too much’, he stopped hopping and was suddenly sitting where he had sat before like he had never left the place. He was sipping from a porcelain white cup now, holding a brown saucer in the other hand. ‘I would have offered you some tea, but we’re out of wine.’ He set the tea on the saucer and fished under his waistcoat, and brought out a large sliver fobwatch which he consulted with a deep pensive frown. ‘Ah! Well, six o’ as usual. I guess we have some time to help you then.’ He set the tea and the saucer aside on the grass, and looked at my hand.

‘Why! You’re wearing a glove!’

I didn’t know what to say. I always wore gloves when I went outside.

He craned his big head over me and stared surprised at my other head, ‘And you’re wearing a glove on the other hand too!’

‘Of course I am’, I snapped at him crossed, ‘Gloves come in pairs!’

‘And they’re not even of different colours,! Tsk, tsk’, he sighed and started peeling off the glove from my hand slowly, holding it by an end gingerly like a soiled bandage. ‘So, tell me, why were you afraid of that nothing?’

‘I was’, I watched the skin of the glove slowly lift from my hand, ‘Afraid that I would fall into it.’

‘And what of it?’

‘Well, if I fell into nothing, where would I end?’

‘Well, I would say that wherever it was, it would be a lot better where you were, standing on your two steady feet – thinking’, he screwed his nose like he had said a dirty word.

‘Look, I was something in my world, okay. I might be doing nothing but I had my own patch of ground to dig my two heels in.’

‘Then why did you jump into that hole?’

‘I didn’t jump, I fell!’

‘Oh sure’, he snorted in disbelief. His fingers were lifting the end of my glove so slowly that it had risen only an inch or so from the skin of my hand.

I made to snap at him, and suddenly it came to me again. That gaping hole, yawning under my feet, my legs shaking with fright, and the fall – or did I really fall?

‘Ta-da!’, he snapped away the glove from a hand with a pull.

‘Ouch that hurt!’, but my hand suddenly felt light as air and I lifted it to my face. ‘Why! I am bleeding!’ Dripping was more like it.

‘Well, congratulations’, he mumbled absent-mindedly, sitting and sipping his tea again.

I peeled the other glove away and another bleeding light hand emerged under it.

‘Did you see something in that hole when you fell?’, I heard the clink of the cup on the saucer. I was sitting on my bums now, staring at my hands, flexing my fingers in front of my face, blobs of blood dropping off them. They were bleeding, but they were alive like they had never been alive before. Or – perhaps – once, a long long time ago.

‘Uhh—nothing.’

‘You saw nothing in that nothing again’, his voice sounded tired and disappointed.

‘Well, actually –‘, the throb behind my head became intense again, but this time I had a hand free to rub it, which I did, with my eyes closed, ‘Well, I did see something.’

‘Just one something?’

I remembered cupboards and bookshelves, maps and pictures hung on pegs, and jar labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE.”

‘No – many’, I was furiously rubbing the back of my head now, the throb of the back was like something trapped inside jumping and crashing against the inside of my head.

‘Did you grab at it?’

‘No! – Aah!’

‘Why?’

‘Because – because they were going away so fast!’

‘Well what of it?’

‘What if I grabbed them and got swept away with them?’

‘Where did you think they would have gone?’

‘I – aaah! – don’t know!’

‘Exactly’, he sighed.

The throb went as suddenly it had come. I opened my eyes and saw him bent over me again, peering at my thumb and holding his against it.

‘Your thumbprint is not exactly like mine’, he said slowly with wonder, ‘Yours are too squiggly and mine go about in quite a good-looking spiral, I must say.’

‘Of course they’re not. No two thumbprints in the world are the same.’

‘Is that so?’, he lifted his face to mine and I cried in surprise and terror. He seemed to have aged a hundred years since I last saw him. I suddenly saw that he was a lot smaller now too, and seemed to shrink with each passing second.

‘What’s happening to you?!’

He ignored my question and fished out the fobwatch and consulted it again. ‘Six o’’, he sighed, ‘I must be going now.’

‘No! Don’t!’

‘Oh, I must. I know now why the clown is like a thumbprint. I will go and search for some other riddle.’

‘What if I fell again?’

‘Are you sure you fell I nthe first place?’, he was the size of an overgrown toad now.

‘No’, I whispered.

He smiled, ‘You should have played with everything that came along. You never know where all you might have gone.’

‘Yes’, I was weeping now, ‘You sent me those things and I spent all night dodging them. I should have just let those things sweep me away.’

‘Oh I didn’t send anything. I was here all the time having my tea. You sent yourself those things – cough cough cough!’

I wiped my eye and looked at him. He was on his back now, an old dying frog with a white goatee. His eyes were grey and green and very tired, looking at me.

‘Please send me another hole. I won’t dodge the things now.’

He sighed sadly, ‘Oh, you will. Cough, cough! But that’s all right. When the things come out of you from that nothing, you will be afraid again. Because you don’t know what it might be and where it might take you. You’ll start thinking again and do nothing.’

‘Oh, I won’t. I will do something, anything. I promise.’

‘Ah, no one knows whether you will or not. Or if anyone will or not. It doesn’t matter really. What matters is that one tries.’

‘Yes! I will try!’

He smiled, looking very tired and small now, ‘You will?’

‘Well, I’ll try to – try.’

He smiled one last time and disappeared in a puff. All that was left of him now was the top hat. I stood on my feet and bent to pick up the hat. Under it lay the tiny red nose.

I lifted the nose, and the ground fell crashing away all around me, a wave starting from my feet and spreading to the horizon, the green stretches of grass collapsing in thunderous roars, leaving a vast gaping black nothing under me, and just a patch of ground beneath my feet.

My legs shook madly with fear again, and I spread my hands to balance myself in that slim purchase I was left with. Despite myself, I looked below and found an endless chasm of nothing. A howl rose from somewhere: I thought it was the whirlwind sweeping in that black hole beneath. It took me a moment to realise that it was coming from my own inside. I opened my eyes again and again saw nothing – yes, nothing – no, something – something floating – whose shape eluded me.

There was only one way to find out.

I put on the red nose and jumped.

Bliss

2011-06-02T18:55:00.000+05:30

The restlessness is like a coiled muscle at the back of my knee, screaming and refusing to let me sit. Like a fly trapped in a bottle that knows nothing but the beyond. I can step outside and walk the length of the corridors till my feet hurt and the sweat slosh in my shoes, and still it would not tire. I imagine the evening, alone, marijuana, sunk in the couch with my feet thrown across another, a book sprawled across my lap, my hands spilling limply over the armrests, the lights from the television dancing in my bleary half-closed eyes. Bliss.

the things people make and do

2011-04-07T22:55:00.000+05:30

people become really good once they put a lot of time into something. it's been my long-standing anguish: the wunderkindish skill of being a good beginner in most skills but knowing i won't have the perseverance and wherewithal to reach that transcendence.

Estranged

2011-04-02T01:20:00.001+05:30

When we were young, we were overwhelmed by the number of people around us, but how few there really were. Spread near us, their confines established, except for the distant visiting relatives and cousins.
The time we spent together, the sheer quantity.

Now that we are old, there are too many people and all the time we have is not really ours. That quantum of time will never return for us. We won't speak of it because that which cannot be regained can only make us sadder, and crack that thickening crust of time that's become our own skin.

We've changed in the time apart. We've become strangers.

Campaign idea for Kwality

2011-03-27T03:35:00.001+05:30

If Parveen Babi had played the Black Swan

2011-03-21T23:47:00.000+05:30

'The only person standing in your way is you, Nina!'

PB, screaming: 'No! I am telling you! It's Amitabh Bachchan!'

bipolar

2011-03-15T19:47:00.000+05:30

there are days when i convince myself that i am doing pretty well as a wannabe writer.
there are days when i read my stuff and think why i even bother.

was looking for a synonym for goosebumps.

2011-03-15T19:19:00.002+05:30

And got skin erection.
Gross.

I thought I was finally starting to play chess well till...

2011-03-14T23:28:00.002+05:30

my computer offered its Queen for a pawn on the fourth move.

Chess Puzzle for you

2011-03-10T20:15:00.000+05:30

White to play and win in five moves

Just idiot

2011-03-10T19:32:00.001+05:30

I keep getting forwards to the posts of VigilIdiot. I have never quite figured why it is supposed to be funny. The wit is low and the idea is to bare the entire plot in ugh stick figures. If the inspiration is MAD, it bombs stupendously.This post on Guzaarish , if the first few comments are to be believed, is one of its best. 1757 people have liked it.

I think we, as a nation, still have a long way to go to have good comedy centered on things touching our lives; just like good literature. Till that time, VigilIdiot, Sidin Vadikut and Chetan Bhagat with rule the roost.

Notes from a blood donation

2011-03-03T22:39:00.002+05:30

The nurse files the form in a drawer and rises and ushers me to a room behind the desk, a small vestibular affair, with a narrow desk crowded with ampoules and instruments, and three straight-backed chairs circling it. Another door at the back, frosted glass plate embossed with the wing logo and trimmed with steel. Niranjan hesitates to follow us and balks at the door. The nurse ignores him and pulls a chair near me and, in a smooth flurry, shakes and slips a thermometer shaped like a schoolmaster’s paddle inside my mouth, straps the cuff of a blood pressure instrument tightly to my upper arm, reclaims the thermometer and notes my temperature in a small slip, works the machine, pumping the band around my arm and then releasing the air, notes the reading from the monitor in the same slip, removes and rolls away the cuff and then, taking my hand in hers, cleans the pad of the middle finger with a spirit-soaked cotton ball – all without looking at me once. I examine her face with unconcealed challenge: the oiled wispy curls fallen from the tightly-pulled bun beneath the cap, the dark pitted brow, the fixed eyebrows, the surprisingly long lashes, the thick wings of the nose, the clefts at the corners of the thick lips, the full and healthy juts of her breasts. We sit so close, her face bending into mine, that she must surely sense the trespass of my eyes, but she remains frigidly indifferent, the cold clamp of the palm wrapped around my wrist. The lapel pinned to the sari announces her name –

‘Are you from Bangalore?’

‘The eyes lift for a moment, ‘Kochi.’ They fall and that is it. None of the commingling affinities of the world outside, here, only the unmixing water and oil of the nurse and the subject.

The prick startles me but does not sting. She squeezes a drop from my finger, coaxing it like a much-used tube of toothpaste, onto a slide and slips it inside a small lidded box. She rises without a word or a glance at me, and opens the door at the back and steps aside. I turn to Niranjan who smiles and gives me a thumb up.

The door opens to a vast white room, a row of donor chairs in blue vinyl running along the wall, each with its own set of stainless steel cabinet and IV stand and as snug as a private bed in an opium den. I take the chair she points to me; my neighbour, the only other donor in the room, looks up and nods; in his early fifties, strapped, the cuffs of his shirt rolled up and one hand spread on a luscious armrest. An orderly in shapeless light-blue pyjamas straps me with the same practised brusqueness as the nurse’s. My nerves tauten under the tourniquet like thin vine spreading on a wall. The dab of the spirit and the poise of the needle, the keen precision of its cold tip the very antithesis of the blue warm gurgling artery it moves to insinuate: it enters anticlimactically with the faintest sting.

chaaraa

2011-02-19T20:52:00.000+05:30

The Egyptian Revolution and G

2011-02-18T15:38:00.000+05:30

Extracts from John Berger's G. I re-read the book because of this very passage that I remembered in the wake of recent events.

They do not know exactly how many they are; but all of them sense that they represent the majority. This majority can claim what each has felt but cannot say when alone: Look at this head, this body -- ill-taught, badly-fed, poorly-dressed, overworked. It deserves the best the world is able to offer.

...It is they who have built the city and they who maintain it. They have discovered their creativity. In their regular lives they only modify presented circumstances; here, filling the streets and sweeping all before them they oppose their very existence to circumstances. They are rejecting all that they habitually, and despite themselves, inhabit. Once together they demand together what none can ask alone: Why should I be compelled to sell my life bit by bit so as not to die?

Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment.

The first volley simplifies, its echo kills all distraction. Nothing remains but what is in hand.

And my favorite:

The barricades are between the defenders and the violence done to them throughout their lives. There is nothing to regret because it is the quintessence of their past which is now advancing against them. On their side of the barricades it is already the future.

Myths about "The Social Network"

2011-02-09T23:07:00.001+05:30

Reading this rant, worth its weight in turds, and some other more distinguished, but still mistaken, reviews, let me dispel some myths riding on the steeds of fad-ridden hysteria, which we have seen earlier in the avatars of Dark Knight, Inception and, to some extent, Avatar itself.

Myths 1 & 2 are presented straight from the ill-informed and half-thought article in hyperlink; the others from what I have heard ad nauseum almost from all quarters.

Myth #1: The Social Network is about “how social networking has changed our lives”

Nope. It is about the lives of people behind the scenes of social networking. The growth of the phenomenon is a score mentioned then and there; a tempo, ticking and building in the background, raising the stakes and the pitch of the ambition and ruthlessness of the actors, with each college conquered. The only instance an immediate social need is being shown translated into a feature is the “relationship status” feature.

If anything, the movie is about one guy behind the phenomenon, an asperger-ridden genius pitted against the glib and privileged lot (rich beautiful Harvard grads whose lives and ambitions can hardly be mistaken as a dipstick for the average “us”) whom he sees as incarnates of the all-pervading mediocrity that denies him his dues. More on this next.

Myth #2: Zuckerberg is the villain

To quote: “Eisenberg's character is also a conscienceless manipulator who is seduced by power and screws his friends in almost every way imaginable. He's not exactly touchy-feely.”

Au contraire, asshole. Eisenberg's character (let’s agree to call him Zucker, sucker) is a very sensitive guy (that means touchy-feely). His pure genius, ruthless and impatient, is denied the credit due to it by the suave vocabulary of snobbery he does not possess –social gestures, stereotypes and pretentious rituals. Rejection stings hardest when the fraternity he was waiting an invitation from goes for safer stereotypes of harmless well-meaning and half-talented blokes like his room-mate. It is a privilege flaunted to him by two other chappies, the “row crew” twin who come to recruit him and who, he knows, together equal half his IQ and a tenth of his vision.

Zucker is not seduced by power, but the need to make a statement (I'm CEO, bitch!), especially given that he cannot express his anger any other way. A statement of a scale he knows only he can imagine. This suppressed need is brilliantly seen in that super-duper scene when Zucker first meets Parker, and realizes that for the first time he is talking to someone who is thinking at the same wavelength as him, throwing-up-his-hands relief as Parker glibly rolls his tongue around the thoughts, the grand vision, he had never been able to wrap his own inarticulate one around. The scene sizzles with the chemistry of two genius minds acknowledging each other across the table while the third (if you forget the mall), the CFO, remains blissfully unaware in his ignorance of the scale of what is being thought – is my favourite.

“If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook."

This is the answer the artless genius gives to his detractors. It is a statement of genius consummated, the sum of the protagonist’s life; it is the statement of the movie.

Zuckerberg is the hero, very much so, and deserves all the sympathy and admiration from us, but it takes a subtle mind to read the simmering anger and hurt beneath that brittle indifference.

Myth #3: The subject was “unfilmable”

I am hearing this a lot. Really. Granted it’s a tough subject, but can it get any tougher where the protagonist in a first-person narrative has a hand trapped in a boulder through the movie?

Myth #4: Nothing like this has been done before

Uh-huh. Put Van Gogh from “Lust for Life” instead of Gordon Grecko and you’ll realize a zeitgeist-ic context for genius and the price of its pursuit is a subject that has had few takers, yes, but not entirely untouched.

Myth #5: The movie is purr-fect

There is no denying the fact that the movie is fantastic. Its dialogues come as close to perfect as anything can. Why I would still take one golden star from it is the fact that for a movie that deals with the working of a complex socially-gauche genius, it explanations of the motivations are too facile. Everything – everything – starts with the break-up at the very start.
Zucker tries to vainly sell himself to his girlfriend as a passport to a fraternity she would otherwise never get to mingle in, cocksure of his own admission in it, and, when later passed by the fraternity, he turns on the half-wit happy-go-lucky “only friend” just because the guy he deemed his intellectual inferior made it through. Erica, the girlfriend, mentions “row crew” and his grouse against the twins is that they are just that. These underpinnings are reinforced in scenes when Zucker ends a funding pitch to the friend for his grand plans with a Freudian aside underscoring his envy; and the pause and the deliberate repetition of “row crew” when the twins introduce themselves.

The naive interpretation forces the only slackness in the tight-like-a-man's-anus script and dialogues in the end, when the lawyer-girl tells Zucker before departing that he’s not an asshole, it’s just that he tries so hard to be (Erica's departing taunt, you see.)
That five-minutes exchange is the sum of everything Zucker goes on to do - the big-bang to the demons within him.The dialogues from the very first scene come thick, fast and relentless, a machine-gun salvo making no allowance for average intelligence – if only the director had done the same with the subconscious impellents of the protagonist. Our motivations and fears are too complexed, too deep rooted in our infancy (as opposed to a date), to be explained so glibly. If only the movie had chosen not to explain everything, only suggested - and a little beyond a date - this movie would have been perfect.

To repeat, this is a very, very good movie but let’s not get overboard like we did when The Dark Knight came. Far better movies have been made. Cleverness and slickness can only be vehicles for an essence. The movie, in my opinion, takes on a very tough and complicated subject but falls just a little short in doing it full justice.

Aamir's next movie about a washerman on a rampage

2011-02-09T16:11:00.002+05:30

It's called Dhobhi-Ghatak.

Will the real Kambli please stand up?

2011-01-29T03:56:00.003+05:30

aThe mantra for the times seems to be confidence first, content optional. And I’m not only talking about the questions the preening jackass-parade posed to the authors in Jaipur Litt Fest. I am talking about this article in IE.

I consider writing on cricket more and more a very brave career choice because the standard of sport writing in cricket is very, very high. National level commentators and writers of just a couple of decades ago would find it very difficult to make it past the district league. The other formidable breed which has risen is the statistician, no doubt because now anyone has access to all the data on cricket that could be ever conceived and the statistical analytical tools that come embedded in the pirated spreadsheet of your laptop which could not be imagined not so long ago.

But then, I remember, these are the very times which have also seen the surge of Mandira Bedi-style “democratic” opinion-makers. It seems to be in that very vein that IE has published this tupenny article.

Let us not get into the standard of English (Sentence construction a throwback to Women’s Era days; and punctuations: Aah! The following paragraph is Lynn Trust’s nightmare come alive: Quite a controversy this. BCCI has something to answer for in Kambli's case, even though the batsman' flamboyant lifestyle had angered the aficionados a lot. Yet he was a gem that India needed and the matter required that Kambli be treated with 'kid gloves', so to speak.) But, in fairness, worse crimes than this have been committed in stunted SMS lingo.

Let us just focus on the premise – that what happened to Kambli was unfair and can never be justified especially when his average of 55 is considered.

Now, IE knows that memory is short, especially the public one. And once assured that a person is really down and out, we can think in encouraging terms of anyone. Think of how someone you couldn’t stand a second while alive seems so particularly endearing once convincingly dead.

More than a decade and a half have passed since we last saw a flabby, bleary -from-last-night’s-party, bald and ear-studded, Kambli take his stance, dutifully pass all responsibilities to the batting partner during his short stay, and lumber back to the pavilion; while his “bosom pal” (insidious aspersion-casting quotes IE’s) battled alone and remained the lynchpin to the batting where his dismissal would cut TRPs to a tithe and any hopes for a win from a fervid prayer to a fatal depression.

Let’s just focus on the numbers that the very article furnishes forth as damning incriminations.

Even though the basis of my career so far as has been statistics and analysis, or perhaps because of that, I know the damn lies the thing can be made to confess once arm-twisted enough. But, as I said, let’s take the thing at face value and delve deeper into why a man who has better test averages than VVS Laxman, as the article points, and “Despite scoring back-to-back double hundreds”, Kambli was dropped. Only on the basis of statistics.

And so here it is. Kambli played 21 innings, with one not out, between Jan ’93 and Nov ’95. His average has monotonously fallen since July ’93 and his average in his last ten innings, spanning more than a year and a half, was 14.7.

We know how statistics can and does lie. And that’s why Laxman, who I believe is India’s greatest test batsmen ever, still measure so short of even one-hit jokers like Kambli, leave alone the other biggies. But, here, even it screams the same story.

This is also a pretty good illustration on why you need to have an adequate size of sample before you start using statistics. Singularities can dominate otherwise.

My sympathies for Kambli – no one likes to end up a loser in life. Some years ago, he had shown more honesty and blamed his own attitude for his fall, even though he had been quick to attribute all the hard work Sachin had shown to his having an elder brother to guide him. Let another decade pass and even Agarkar will ask why he was dropped inspite of being the fastest man to get 50 wickets once.

But what to do of the diarrheic outpour that passes for journalism?

Chhod do aanchal

2010-12-02T02:59:00.000+05:30

Somebody please tell me why a geriatric actor, whose pedigree can be best described as Punjabi-raised-in-Bombay, and an even more geriatric-actress from the South are swelling with pride for a part of the country at least a thousand miles from their own land?

By the way, if this state is ever made, it would beat even Bihar in is glorious la(lu)wless days.

Better than coffee

2010-12-01T11:56:00.000+05:30

Research has confimed that you jolt awake 23% faster if you smell the post-binge barf you forgot to flush last night, over the coffee.

welcome to the nineteenth century

2010-11-30T15:04:00.001+05:30

my sms' automated word-finder does not recognize the word - damn.

Rajni jokes

2010-11-26T00:10:00.000+05:30

Is it just me, or is there a desperate apologetic note in the lame Rajnikant jokes?

I got a joke today regarding Oscars being nominated to the Rajni awards - and it reminded me of that Lalu and Japan joke - Lalu retorting to a troupe of Japanese delegates, telling him they can make Bihar like Japan in three months, that he can make Japan Bihar in three days - and I was wondering if the joke was really on the Japanese who cannot understand where Lalu comes from, or just Lalu.

In those who see the northie snub here, I think Rajni is only one among many super-celebrity hacks with little talent across industries. It's just the relentless lame jokes being forced down my throat.

From Don Quixote

2010-11-25T10:24:00.000+05:30

...a story known by heart by the children, not forgotten by the young men, and lauded and even believed by the old folk; and for all that not a whit truer than the miracles of Mahomet.

Ahem.

Of course, it is to be remembered that the tale was written four hundred years ago, at the time of the crusades or, at least, immediately after them.

Depite the hype...

2010-11-25T03:58:00.001+05:30

The Beatles were really quite good.

Seriously

2010-11-25T03:09:00.002+05:30

You just cannot hear some people out.
They will never stop.

Kazi, man-mauji

2010-11-22T13:49:00.000+05:30

A pastor who claimed that Facebook was a ''portal to infidelity'' has revealed that he had threesome sex with his wife and a male church assistant.

The Rev. Cedric Miller's secret past was exposed after he ordered church leaders to delete their Facebook accounts or resign.

He blamed the social networking giant for causing married couples to have illicit affairs and igniting ''old passions''.

Full story: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pastor-who-banned-infidelity-facebook-had-threesome-with-wife-church-aide/714427/

Something remembered from Kesavan - 'Stridency is loudest in the face of guilt and complicity.' (Actual construction might differ as not quoted verbatim but from memory.)

thanks for the statutory warning

2010-11-12T18:43:00.002+05:30

An intelligence long suspected

2010-11-12T00:48:00.000+05:30

It was Aniruddha’s birthday and we had been invited as a couple. It had been a few months since the day I had bumped into Sandeep, now twice the size and all but bald, and just as I jokingly asked him whatever happened to that girl he was dating from preschool, she joined us, pushing Aniruddha ahead in a pram. ‘What do you think?’, he gathered and squeezed her to his side, ‘She is the mother of my child now!’

Nidhi had to work late that night and I turned up alone an hour late. They had booked something like a conference room for the party, a large hall, darkened at one end, where a projector spilled their story on a wall –of growing together from school-bus to Anirudhha – as the ladies sat on sofas and chairs, and dutifully clapped now and then. I paused at the steps: the space was packed with suits and dazzling saris with kids racing and lacing between them like bees. I understood now what he meant when he had emphasised twice on the “something formal”.

‘I am wearing a shirt, dude’, I half-joked. Over jeans and sneakers. He smiled tightly and with a brisk pat on the back, returned to fawn over a huddle of bosses.

‘He’s very nervous about the promotion’, she smiled apologetically, ‘He should have got it last quarter, you know.’ I nodded.

‘Where’s Aniruddha?’

‘Oh, he was running a mild fever. So I put him to sleep in another room.’

I walked to the front and leant against a pillar to watch. A passing waiter brought me my whiskey. Three fat wives who could only belong to the middle-aged honchos I had seen him sucking up to, were spread in the middle sofa , bedecked and sporting enormous beehives, ignoring and cackling loudly over the slideshow. Some of the younger wives spread around them smiled and chatted between themselves, some sat alone, blankly staring at the screen. All of them wore an inordinate amount of jewellery for a kid’s party, but tasteful – all of them were very pretty. A particularly young woman, who reminded me of a girl I had once known, rocked a sleeping infant across her shoulder.

Krithika came hurrying, still the harried wife – dabbing at her perspiring face with the end of a sari or a dupatta, scurrying to the kitchen every five minutes, and apologizing about Sandeep’s last minute cancellations – underneath the makeup. I braced myself when she paused one her tracks suddenly, expecting her to turn around, something forgotten, and come rushing into me. But she remained rooted at that spot, by my side, watching the photograph like she had never seen it before. Them together in a school snap, the boys standing and the girls seated.

She blinked and turned and saw me watching her. She laughed embarrassedly and shook her head. ‘Is there anything left to know after twenty years?’, I asked. Anirudhha was born on the very day they had first met: the undiminished magic of their great love.

I don’t know what it was but I felt something change in her then. A slowness entered. She turned to stare at the photograph again. A stillness. ‘Sometimes you can spend a lifetime with a person and still not understand him’, she spoke flatly.

A slide clicked in place, the light on her eyes shifted. I turned to see the very snap Sandeep had kept framed over his desk, curls and lips. ‘I was a hopeless romantic then. I really believed us when we said we were different, that we had learnt from the sad mistakes we had seen our elders live in, that we would never become like them.’ I watched her profile, lit like a Vermeer from the reflection on the wall, and realised how young and beautiful she herself was. A group crossed before us, bustling and laughing, their gaiety hard and coarse like a callus, casting a shadow on her. When they, and it, passed, she was looking at me, for the first time in the eye. Something had changed – between us.

‘When are you two getting married? You are almost a couple already!’ She laughed.

I hesitated and looked away. ‘Not now. We are happy as it is.’ As always, I was pretending that it was me who was tarrying; paraphrasing her.

‘Spoken like a man, Gaurav’, she spoke evenly again, ‘You want to love but not be bound.’

It stung like vinegar. I watched the whirr of another slide click into place and then turned and told her. ‘It’s her. She does not want to.’

Love is...

2010-11-09T09:02:00.000+05:30

From Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup

... it's one of the tranquil pastimes of lvoing: he reads (newspapers) as if his life depends on what is there. The book she has been reading lies on her breasts, open face-down at a page where she has come upon a sentence, a statement, that seems to have been written for her long before she came into existence and came to this space in the time of her life. she has read it over again and again, so that is is written, read, on the air around her, around him and her, on the sky looking down upon them. 'I decided to postpone our future as long as possible, leaving everything in its present state.'

Salut Laxman

2010-11-08T23:40:00.004+05:30

The old phrase - we don't know when to start, we don't know when to quit. Most cricketers retire horribly. Denial of course is one of the foremost reasons... but I do not intend to discuss that.

This is the last stage of cricket that I am probably following. I do not enjoy organised sports on television at all anymore and much of the cricket that I follow is to do with the lot I literally grew up with. I have a very vivid memory of the news headline which announced the inclusion of sixteen-year old Sachin in national squad and see him speak for the first time, gauche and with that horrible fuzz on the lips that is the bane of male adolescence, in a brief clip.

Sachin is, of course, having the most glorious run right now and we can assume that this is the beginning of the end. A run denied to the other greats who have, in brief patches of the "golden age of Indian cricket", even eclipsed him - Dravid, Kumble, Ganguly. A little of this is the timing of the lady luck also though everything goes to the man. During the last stint of his career, the great Kapil out swinger just never came. A year (or a couple) down the line, in an exhibition match I remember seeing him swinging it by a yard. If only, it had come to him back a year ago.

Which bring me to records, something he is shattering seemingly for eternity or as far ahead we can envision it with current stock of cricketers.

There is nothing I know of Hammond and Hobbs other than their records. The little of Bradman that I know beyond his records is from the Bodyline series. In cricket, a seventy in time can be more vital than a double century (or even Gooch's horrible triple ton) when everything is on song... a five wicket haul depend on a wicketless, but more importantly, runless spell from the other end... but all this sadly gets lost in the dust of re-laid pitches year over year. All that survives is records.

I belong to the old school which judges the five-day format as the true test of cricket. In that sense, I feel that the one cricketer who has really come on his own in this year - a genius of the golden generation who never quite rose to the rank of the fab four - is Laxman. Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand.

There are Sachin detractors and apologists - most of it is unfair. The one reason why there are endless debates on the "truly" greatest someone of all time is that greatness comes in flavors. Who we ultimately pick from a pool who have achieved greatness in different forms (some like Sachin straddling more than one form) is ultimately which single definition we want to strain all these forms in.

Sachin is one of the greatest in many senses, but he is not god. There are no gods and whom we call gods are those we revere bribe and feat but not exactly.... like. Every tale of a hero, needs a tragedy. Like superheroes, our heroes need a fatal flaw to be human to us. Sachin is perhaps the all-time greatest as far as records and consistency go – but there will always be space at the top for the Laras who might have not been as consistent but who batted for a third-rate team and singlehandedly carved some of the greatest innings ever; for Bradman who batted without protective gears and in an era of different sensibility; for Gavaskar who came when there was no Gavaskar before him – and a few others.

Laxman's career, like that other hyderabadi great, has been chequered. He has half the centuries Dravid has and a third of Sachin's. But Laxman as the man who came good when it really mattered and clinched tests for India, consistently, needs no apologists now. To paraphrase Sambit Bal, he created symphonies, again and again, when sirens went all around. His fatal flaw – that weak bat dangling four feet from the body when the sirens haven't sounded yet.

The fact that Laxman was denied a century today does not matter. As I said, he will end up having a third of Sachin's centuries and his greatness never be attested on that basis. But with this year, for me, he would be at par with Sachin (and Dravid) as the greatest test batsmen of this golden generation.

There are things which can never be captured in records.

Risky risk-management

2010-10-13T02:14:00.000+05:30

From an ad on FB:

The biggest risk is not taking it: Yea, yea -but isn't risk management about minimizing risk and not adding to it?

A clarification

2010-09-30T18:36:00.001+05:30

(As appeared in CNN)

Except for...

बप्पी दा अलग ही हैं !

epiphany of the morning

2010-09-24T12:46:00.003+05:30

For frustoo bachelors, Utopia is a hand in the morning on the shoulder, gently shaking them, and whispering - 'Utho-pia!'

Kareena's best film

2010-09-21T13:31:00.000+05:30

From Rediff:

Refuge

2010-09-17T21:34:00.005+05:30

The first smoke of the day is usually a ritual –a gathering at the pantry at ten, the vroom of the machine and the spurt of brown caffeine in white paper cups, the jostling, the how-was-the-weekend moving through the week to any-plans-for-the-weekend, the procession to the stairwell to gossip over fags. I usually arrive earlier than most of the gang and have a joint downstairs – the narrow alley between the back of the building and the high wall where nobody ever comes. Right now, I just feel like a fag and head for the stairwell. A couple of unknowns hang there, their eyes dull and listless, telling themselves perhaps that they should have chosen more dangerously when they could have. I move towards a long dusty window beside the service elevator where a needle of light cuts a pattern of broken sticks on the flight climbing to the upper floor. I take a deep breath as I shake out a cigarette from the pack and look out of the window as I light; the dusty clumps of unclaimed wastelands rolling to a blue skyscraping horizon. The smell of the cigarettes, phenyl and the garbage which shuttles in black plastic bags in the service lift is sharp in this bare cement-and-steel space, bleached of the musty human smells trapped in the gray-blue carpet and the foam of the panels. I let out a puff and feel the heat break sweats underneath my shirt. Soon the sun would climb higher and the needle would shift and swell to a box here, hot as a bubbling cauldron.

I have a half-hour of work to spread over the next eight hours. One by sixteen – six point two five. I take a deep drag and try to think beyond – but all I see within is a concrete wall an inch away from my nose.

For a moment, the silence is absolute and I hold and savour it like a sip of single malt. No one on a cell phone pacing the corridor, no huddle of laughs two floors below, no guard shouting at another, no squeak of shoes, no thuds and wheezes of someone climbing up the stairs, the lift inert: no rumble of its ascent and descent, no rolling of its doors. Not the silence which passes for a quietness in the camp inside, still contaminated with the whispers, murmurs and shuffles of colliding intimacies. A barren and lifeless desert-like silence.

She loved me for my silence – that’s what she said. We joked that she did all the talking and worrying for the two of us. Every night, her head on my arm, she would tell me everything that happened in her office, the strayest of conversations, the blandest of jokes – suddenly, she would break away and ask me what I was thinking. “Nothing. Just listening to you and feeling your weight on me”, I would kiss the top of her head. One night, after a long silence, she whispered, ‘I sometimes feel like I’m talking to a wall.’

Someone clears his throat behind me.

Humour and tragedy explained

2010-08-12T21:33:00.003+05:30

Break a thing into a frame made of its underpinning assumptions.

Turn one of the assumption on its head. That is humour.

Remove one of the assumptions. If the frame still stands, that is tragedy.

The never-ending cycle

2010-08-02T20:41:00.002+05:30

Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray has blamed migrants for the outbreak of malaria in Mumbai.

Link

In 1348 there appeared in Europe a devastating plague which is reported to have killed off ultimately twenty-five million people. By the fall of that year the rumor was current that these deaths were due to an international conspiracy of Jewry to poison Christendom. It was reported that the leaders in the Jewish metropolis of Toledo had initiated the plot and that one of the chief conspirators was a Rabbi Peyret who had his headquarters in Chambéry, Savoy, whence he dispatched his poisoners to France, Switzerland, and Italy.

Link

K

2010-07-31T21:26:00.003+05:30

The door to his studio flat is open as far as it can on the rough arcing groove, etched over the years by the frame sagging on its hinge.

His room; six-hundred square feet of it. A small hall, a closet-sized kitchen at the back, and a three-steps bathroom along the passage leading to the kitchen: a step forward to enter and approach the mini-washbasin, a step sideways to the right to stand under the shower, and another with an about face to drop the pants and squat. The bed, lumpy and greasy mattress-pillow-quilt, lies rolled neatly in the middle of the hall and the books have been stacked against a wall in three canting columns rising to my shoulders, the built-in cupboard at the back bolted. The floor, a debris of books ash and plastic cups the last time I was here, is bare and glistens in the light streaming from the old newspapers stuck on the windows and blotched with the penumbral mottles from the letterings of a large headline; freshly mopped: damp patches still dry at the corners and the pail peeps from behind the door, the mop floating limply in the brown sludge. Even the smell of cigarettes is gone.

I walk to the end of the passage, to the kitchen. The sink is scrubbed and empty, only the kitchen rag drying on the ledge and a wet green soap. The thin supply of utensils – a pan, three unmatched mugs, a skillet, a spatula, four steel plates, a smattering of cutlery – are stacked hurriedly on a shelf. The electric stove stands alone on the rough four-by-one granite slab, two polythene bags filled with refuse under it, and the small window over it is thrown open. But despite the open window, despite the absence of clutter and smells in this narrow confine, I feel that anxiety again and walk back to the hall and look around as if I expect him to materialize in a corner any moment now. I notice the lump of the laptop under the mattress and hunker down to pull it out. My hands discover the rolled bundle of notes underneath it. I do not have to count them.

The man at the shop tells me that he did not see him go anywhere. ‘Bhaiyya cleared his account today’, he adds as I turn to the stairs. I turn to look him in the eyes but they do not tell me anything.

A thin ledge running along the parapet leads to the wide space at the back of the room where a black metal ladder climbs along the side of the open kitchen window to the roof and beyond, to the top of the water tank. A man in a vest watches me climb up with small, incurious eyes from a balcony – weight on beefy arms gripping the railing – of the building opposite, the building one amongst an uneven row of matchboxes standing on their edges, some of them tipping forward dangerously like drunks. He turns his head and goes back to his staring at a spot where there is nothing to stare.

I reach the top of the concrete tank and, after a moment of hesitation, walk to the edge where he sits. He has grown even thinner, vertebra poking out of the thin Tshirt on his hunched back, the shoulder seams dropping to the arms. I take a tentative, vertiginous, peek of the choked honking alley over which his knobby knees hang. The wires, like scratches keyed on a lift-door, would break his fall but probably electrocute him, leaving him hanging upside-down, wings splayed, a dead bat.

I light a cigarette and still see nothing of his face but the hair, grown to his shoulders now, skeins of silver running through them; not even the tip of his nose. I snap my fingers and offer the cigarette to him. He turns his head and looks up.

The man pauses at the gate and looks inside. I imagine what he sees –the tree lined front lawn, the driveway curling around it, the jut of the portico, the bungalow – but not me, sitting on the roof, watching him. He lifts the latch and steps inside, leaving the gate open behind him. The guard-room is empty – Gopal has stepped out to pee behind the alleys.

The man. Matted hair like a nest containing the wild eggs of his eyes; hair spreading to a shaggy beard and mangy tufts on the naked torso; a sooty rag wrapped at the loins; large bare feet, the rinds chapped and torn, the soles ashen.

He strides along the driveway, a cocky swing to one side, and leaves it to follow the path that cuts through the side of the house, separating it from the side lawn, and curving to an intersection where one path leads to the servants’ quarters and the other to the flimsy wooden double-door at the back of the kitchen courtyard. I follow his progress silently along the parapet, placing my feet in the bald patches where the gravel has been torn out of the tar, to make no scraping sound. The man pauses at the intersection and then takes the turn to the door and pauses at its doorstep – it is flung open. I crane my neck a little forward, hiding behind a black tank set at the corner of the roof, and see chachi sitting alone on the takhat, sifting grains on a chhaj. A rumble from the man’s chest startles us both – a clearing of the throat, a sharp admonition, a loud guttural belch. Chachi looks about uncertainly and then gingerly gets up.

She gathers a few handful of grains in the hem of her sari and rises from the takhat. She crosses the elevated courtyard shaded by a slab of roof, like a card resting on the bridges of the rooms spilt by the space of the courtyard, descends the two steps to the cracked stone floor of the lower courtyard, crosses the stacks of utensils piled on the square brick-lined basin under the tap – a sluice cut into the basin which gurgles with scummy brown water when Ba washes the utensils as it runs along the wall to disappear under the door beyond which the man waits. I watch the approaching black of her neatly oiled, centre-parted hair, peeping out of the half-crescent blue of the pallu, pause at the grey-brown ropy strands falling to his shoulders. I imagine the grease-smeared eyes holding her lowered gaze; of having unwaveringly followed her progress. Her hands rise, holding the hem of her sari, and diffidently offer the wedge of grains rolling and shuffling in its folds, waiting for him to bring a bowl under its tip. After an eternity, the man moves a hand below the rag at his waist and brings forth something – a dark tamarind pod.

Chachi turns and runs away – the hem abandoned, the grains scattering on the stone like beads from a broken necklace. No shout of shame or horror escapes her lips, even when she almost trips over her fallen pallu on the steps; only the slam of the inner door to the house. His palm opens, pink and callused, and the pod falls and disappears in the folds of the loin-cloth again. The head jerks, turns and lifts, and his dark eyes pin me at my spot. I lurch backwards, my legs, fallen asleep, buckling under me, and I fall on my back. A terror seizes me and I wriggle on my back, my shirt tearing on the gravel, my skin scraping, till I find the strength to turn over, rise and scamper away.

The smoggy skyline thins to a red strip over the straggly antennas-crammed roofs; the air dense and sticky.

‘It’s going to rain.’

He rises without comment, my hands poised ready behind his neck lest he stumble, and I follow him down the ladder to the room below, to the mattress where he squats to pull out the laptop and rolled bundle. I stand at the door, my arms folded, as he approaches me and offers them to me.

‘I told you I don’t want them back.’

‘No, take it – I can’t’, the words come in thick glottal stops as if snagging and tearing on phlegmy cobwebs. I do not unfold my hands; after a long pause, he crosses me and lowers them on the floor outside the edge of the jamb.

‘What about your book?’

‘There is no book. I do not have any story to tell.’

‘You are coming with me.’

‘No’, he steps behind the door, a hand resting on the edge of the open door, and declares with finality, ‘I am not going anywhere. Please go.’

I shake my head and my arms tense, expecting him to slam the door on me any moment. He does. I block the swinging door with my shoulder, and after a struggle, he flings himself at me. A long fingernail slashes under my eye and I pin his arms to his side as he pushes me with his head under my ribcage. I repulse him, his arms held pressed to his sides under my palms, his push hardly even makes me sway back on my feet. His feet climb over mine and he heaves again and again, but I do not yield. He collapses suddenly, his legs bucking under him, his head falling on my stomach, and I grab and hold him up by his bony arms. We stand like this for a long time, the sweat pouring from his hair from the struggle, soaking slowly through my shirt, my vest, its wetness reaching my skin.

‘Let me pack some clothes’, he mutters blankly.

Death and the mother - passage from boyhood: Coetzee

2010-07-30T02:41:00.004+05:30

this passage from Boyhood - Coetzee which i am rereading ( one of the best books i've ever read) evokes a memory. almost to the last nuance.

this is truly great writing. that can find that chord that exists in everyone and touch just the right notes.

the words in red are superfluous - otherwise, great passage.

He is a liar and he is cold-hearted too: a liar to the world in general, cold-hearted towards his mother. It pains his mother, he can see, he is steadily growing away from her. Nevertheless he hardens his heart and will not relent. His only excuse is that he is merciless to himself too. He lies but he does not lie to himself.

'When are you going to die', he asks her one day, challenging her, surprised at his own daring.

'I am not going to die', she replies, She speaks gaily but there is something false in her gaiety.

'What if you get cancer?'

'You only get cancer if you are hit on the breast. I won't get cancer. I'll live forever. I won't die.'

He knows why she is saying this. She is saying this for him and his brother, so that they will not worry. It is a silly thing to say, but he is grateful to her for it.

He cannot imagine her dying. She is the firmest thing in her life. She is the rock on which he stands. Without her he would be nothing.

Seven Deadly sins

2010-07-28T23:42:00.001+05:30

The man says it all.

How did I never hear this before?

The Seven Deadly Sins are wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, business without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice and politics without principle.

Gandhi

A paragraph worth a biography

2010-07-25T20:01:00.002+05:30

This is how 10 year old Paddy Clark describes a friend's aunt:

His auntie was nice. She walked from side to side. She said God the cold or God the heat, depending on what the weather was like. When she walked across the kitchen she went Tea tea tea tea tea. When she heard the Angelus at six o'clock she'd be saying The News the News the News the News. She had big veins like roots curling up the side and the back of her legs. She made biscuits, huge big slabs; they were gorgeous, even when they were stale.

Paddy Clark Ha ha Ha - Roddy Doyle

Sachin even in Murali's retirement

2010-07-25T19:56:00.000+05:30

Owned!

2010-07-22T00:57:00.002+05:30

I was just about to buy the book before I read this review.

"Someone who has spent as much time wandering through construction sites around the world should know that a scaffold is not a support or bridge."

Wo-ho-ho!!

inception

2010-07-22T00:29:00.002+05:30

With inception, Nolan returns to his favourite, and well-mastered, themes of time and memories.

Memento was about a man who remembers for only three minutes – his tale told backwards. Prestige was a tale of two men told from somewhere near the end, and weaving and cutting through their lives before and after in no particular chronological order. (The mere lyricism of it makes me rate it as his best.) There was little room to experiment with time in the franchised Batman series but Batman Begins dwells on Bruce’s repressed memories more powerfully than any movie before.

Inception is, on the surface, about the architecture of dreams, and from there out subconscious – and the memories embedded in it. Though fantastic, there is little of the dream within a dream concept that I haven’t seen and read of before – but here (to my limited knowledge) Nolan adds the concept of expanding time as dreams unfurl within one another. Hence, between the fourth level of the nested dreams being played in real time, at the first level, a car is plunging into a river in ultra-slow-mo. Decades to minutes. Very interesting.

Inception is going to be one of the most talked-about movies of the year but just misses cult status as it’s an amalgamation of themes that have been visited before.

Somebody compared it to Matrix and I could only shake my head and sigh at how time compresses memory. First, Matrix revolutionised sci-fi in movies like T-2; even after eleven years, the stunts, special effects and cinematography can stand up to inception and in portions look better. Second, Matrix brought the possibility of our world being unreal in a way Jurassic Park made dinosaurs alive for us. True, there had been similar movies before but our imagination was never fired so before. If people didn’t walk out of the hall shaking their heads and asking what it was all about, it was so because of 1999. People might have forgotten but the now seemingly-simple theme of Matrix left first-time viewers visually overwhelmed but totally at sea about which world was what.

But that was just a hyperbole that had to be shot down.

Inception is brilliant and worth a watch. I don’t know how far it could have still gone without Leonardo. And that, I feel, was the movie’s biggest flaw – the casting. Having Michael Caine do a cameo playing himself from a zillion movies, a clueless Ellen Page in a role similar to OmPrakash to Amitabh’s Sharabi (“Yeh aadat chhod de, Vijay. Yeh tere ko aur baaki ko bhi le doobegi.”) and Leonardo. It’s the lesser cast that shines and fires the movie. I like Leonardo but there is no difference of the Leonardo from Shutter Island to that of Departed to here. An anonymous weather-beaten protagonist (why does my mind always wander to John Cusack in his days of relatively lesser fame?) would have brought the freshness, and unexplored dimensions, that DiCaprio never brings. Sad for a guy who gave us Christian Bale; and could imagine Ledger as the boy to fill the giant shoes of Nicholson.

BGO of the month

2010-07-16T01:03:00.002+05:30

BGO = Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious

Should I?

2010-07-05T19:51:00.003+05:30

Interest received today:

"hi iam *****i want to good lucking patner & self depend honest educated family soft nature understanding he believe in family values."

This is it.

Not a word about who she is, besides the name; not even a photograph.

It's like applying for a company you know not the name of, the industry and what the job entails - a sweeper or a CEO.

Word for the day - patner

partner - someone who partakes a life with you

patner - someone who pats you on your bottoms, usually when you're in formal company

None shall pass!

2010-06-29T22:02:00.001+05:30

funny

how people moan

when time passes too quickly

but not when

the stools don't.

Rachel Maddow on Art

2010-06-28T08:51:00.001+05:30

http://dancingperfectlyfree.com/2009/08/10/rachel-maddow-on-dance-art-and-society/

A country without an expectation of minimal artistic literacy, without a basic structure by which the artists among us can be awakened and given the choice of following their talents and a way to get to be great at what they do, is a country that is not actually as great as it could be. And a country without the capacity to nurture artistic greatness is not being a great country.

Blame it on Psmith

2010-06-28T02:38:00.004+05:30

We all know the English are poor losers but this is ridiculous! Crying foul over a goal denied when they were thrashed by three.

My shirts on the washing-line ganging up on each other

2010-06-20T15:40:00.005+05:30

The Searchers

2010-06-15T00:02:00.001+05:30

I come home one evening and kicking off my shoes crash in the bed. Another nightout followed by a hard day of work where I had yawned and excused myself every five minutes. I lie with my hands spread at the side staring at the ceiling, too stunned with exhaustion to close my eyes. The mobile buzzes. I fish it out of my pocket and bring it to my face to read the SMS informing me that someone has expressed interest in me. The hand drops and holds the mobile loosely to my chest. After a few minutes, I rise, the mobile slipping away and falling on the floor with a clatter, and lurch towards the laptop.

A beautician from Allahabad, twenty-seven, a turned-away profile with heavy lipstick and sleepy eyes. “i know person who educate, self depend, resposible and support. i like govt. emp. person who located in good city.”

I blink at it and reread. My hand lingers on the mouse after declining her interest and moves towards the icon inviting me again to search for my life-partner.

Habit

2010-06-10T00:14:00.004+05:30

‘Doesn’t it get lonely?’, I’d asked Krithika after she’d tucked Ankit to bed and joined us in the balcony. A life – and a child – shared only over the weekends. ‘That’s what his job is like and, seriously, after a time it becomes a habit.’

Nidhi and I had turned to look at one another and behind our backs sought hands. We were still young then, the dullness of the hours at the office had not numbed us down yet and the novelty of being together was still fresh in us: we still made love in the morning and greeted each other with a kiss when we came back.

Habit sounded almost tragic then.

Splendidly funny article on Pakistani cricket

2010-06-05T23:14:00.001+05:30

The anarcho-syndicalist splendour of Pakistan

anger

2010-06-05T23:06:00.001+05:30

A friend came and was unreasonably snapping and angry at everything. My first instinct was to shoot back but I desisted.

Now i realize he might have been like that because he thought i was the only person he could be angry with.

Chronicle of a slow death

2010-05-24T00:02:00.004+05:30

For months, I would know what to write and yet no words would frame around the thought. And then an imagery chanced carelessly and they would spew forth.

The imagery that inspired this piece was this - one of Mary Cassatt's beautiful portrayals of mothers with their tots. I chanced upon it while reading about her late role in the Impressionist movement.

The passage of death through photographs is also inspired by Cassatt's chronicle of the slow death of her sister, Lydia.

The answer, in case any of you wonder, to why he took the photographs is the same as why Monet painted Camille on her deathbed - because he could not do anything else.

When we asked Ba about her life before us, she told us that her mother had died a long time ago and that her father was always drunk and in his rages would beat her and the new mother who was retarded and there were goats to take out to graze and there were the mountains and rocks she would scamper over before evening fell and then the scattered flock had to be herded and brought back. We accepted the unfaltering finality of her monotone, unbroken by a pause for breath, and asked nothing more. The idea of her life before us was not without a tinge of jealousy, suffered only with the consoling reasoning that she had to be somewhere till we were yet to be born. In fact, the brevity which summed her life before us sounded reassuring, very much like the waiting which it ought to have been.

Ba’s story for us began with the unspoken story of mother’s slow death.

Much of this story I came to understand from the cache of albums I discovered once in a storage loft in one of the rooms of Windsor Manor that I reached by climbing over the grill of the window-frame. These were not like the few photographs I had seen of her –sticking her tongue out as a young girl, holding a dazzling smile in place for the photographer in a gathering, laughing as she posed in a group in front of an excavation site, the Bear crushing papa and her in with a giant paw, the wedding album. There was no self-conscious posing in these discovered albums, no smiles and laughs held in place. Instead, they seemed to chronicle unconscious everyday intimacies where she would be combing her short hair in front of an oval mirror, chewing at a pencil as she frowned at a book laid on the easel of her raised legs on a chair, or raising an eye from a book, cheek resting on the palm of a propped elbow with the other hand holding the place in the book, to look straight out of the photograph to me, the smile suggesting not a coquettish flirtation with the lens but a serene assurance – of heels dug firmly in place and the reins of the life they were building firmly in her grip.

I never saw the albums again – they might be lying buried in the rubble somewhere or perhaps they really got lost – but all my imagined memories of her got overwritten by those photographs that day. When I would develop enough sensibilities, I would realise that they were brilliant portraits, even though all I saw papa ever click with the Pentax were artefacts. But at that moment, and for many days after, I was overwhelmed by a grief that seemed larger than myself, and understood, even as a child, why the adults had interred these albums here. And I asked myself again and again, through silent rage and tears, why? – why had papa taken these photographs? Because they were not only the narrative of their life together but also her slow painful passage to death.

I had always imagined her death as something which had happened to us suddenly, something from outside which had come hurling and caught us all unaware. The albums told another story. Even as Preeti entered the albums, even as ma suckled her beneath a blanket, bathed her, put her to sleep over a shoulder, buried her face in her tummy and made her cackle with delight – even as she grew in her arms – it was clear that she had started to slowly wilt like a flower in a vase. Her eyes widened at first, with fatigue, and the surprise springing perhaps from the first brushes with the idea of her fragility and mortality, as each bout of infection left her weaker and weaker.

It is here that Ba entered the photographs. Her first photograph showed her as a little girl standing behind ma’s chair as she held out the bowl in which ma dipped a cloth, probably sponge-bathing the infant Preeti spread on her lap, Ba’s other hand resting lightly on ma’s shoulder. Slowly, she shifted to the foreground as Preeti grew – combing her curls, feeding her from a spoon, washing her legs on a basin, drying her after a bath – while ma watched from a divan on which she rested heavily, a hand on Ba’s shoulder if she happened to be sitting below her on the floor, playing with Preeti. In another photograph, she held out Preeti to kiss ma lying weakly on the bed, Preeti’s tiny arm wrapped around her neck, the blur suggesting a nuzzling of cheeks and many kisses, a long exposure, a night time and a goodnight kiss – papa never used flash.

The surprise slowly waned to tired resignation as she seemed to sink deeper and heavier into the divans and beds she would rarely been seen out of now, the eyes drooping and closing. In one of the last photographs, ma lay in bed, covered in white quilt, her head resting on a big soft white pillow; her hair, which I imagined must have grown because sitting for a cut took too much toll on her fragile health now, seemed to be tied in a loose bun behind. A cup rested on the side-table beside her head and an arm fell protectively over Preeti’s lap, who sat in a chemise beside her, her loose curls spilling over her face as she appeared to peer at something in her hand. Her tired eyes watched Preeti, the mouth slack and without a smile. I imagined Ba must have been nearby, waiting to catch Preeti if she tumbled down, but she’s not in the frame. The palm of ma’s other hand was cupped loosely over the swell of her belly underneath the quilt, discernible if you were looking for it.

It was the only photograph I tore from the album and brought down with me, hiding it in the pages of a colouring book.

Painting serious sorrow

2010-05-20T02:31:00.003+05:30

Reading the letters of Van Gogh, came across this -

'As molting time -- when they change their feathers -- is for birds, so adversity or misfortune is the difficult time for us human beings. One can stay in it -- in that time of molting -- one can emerge renewed; but anyhow it must not be done in public and it is not at all amusing, therefore the only thing to do is to hide oneself. . . .

...On the other hand, there is the idle man who is idle in spite of himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action but does nothing, because it is impossible for him to do anything, because he seems to be imprisoned in some cage, because he does not possess what he needs to become productive, because circumstances bring him inevitably to that point. Such a man does not always know what he could do, but instinctively feels, I am good for something, my life has a purpose after all, I know I that could be quite a different man! How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside of me, what can it be? . . . '

[Letter #133 (to Theo), July, 1880]

...So you see that I am in a rage of work, though for the moment it does not produce very brilliant results. But I hope these thorns will bear their white blossoms in due time, and that this apparently sterile struggle is no other than the labor of childbirth. First the pain, then the joy.

[Letter #136 (to Theo), September 24, 1880]

I want you to understand clearly my conception of art. One must work long and hard to grasp the essence. What I want and aim at is confoundedly difficult, and yet I do not think I aim too high.

I want to do drawings which touch some people...

In either figure or landscape I should wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow...

This is my ambition, which is, in spite of everything, founded less on anger than on love, more on serenity than on passion. It is true that I am often in the greatest misery, but still there is a calm pure harmony and music inside me. . . .

[Letter #218 (to Theo), July 19-23, 1882]

Willy Loman of Facebook

2010-05-13T01:45:00.006+05:30

I resist the first temptation to block a thinly-remembered friend who clutters my wall. Instead, his streaming updates slowly engender a perverse compulsion to keep refreshing the newsfeed. He wakes up in the morning and duly informs me of the coffee he’s had. During the day, he tells me he’s missing so-and-so, that he just had another coffee, questions if we really need a politician in office, forwards a jingoistic appeal, gets nostalgic about the simpler times, declares that he’s proud of his identity, looks forward to the weekend, sings along to a song on an iPod, gleefully awaits a car launch, plans a trip to a pretentious restaurant, reviews a movie offering that the direction could have been tighter – peppering the updates with borrowed quotes and puns. No one comments, even when he marauds through the news-feeds of his 400 friends – “lol”ing at their witty statuses, vigorously nodding and adding “True!” to the introspective ones, “liking” each of their photographs and links, and intercepting their wall-to-wall exchanges with his own comments; but they do not reciprocate – even when he offers his witty two cents on a topical scandal they are commenting on elsewhere.

Through one of his updates, I discover his blog titled “Randomly Arbit Ramblings”. There I discover painfully constructed diagrams classifying Facebook users, more movie reviews, a blow-by-blow account of a trip to the top of some hillock, fierce ranting after another terrorist attack and only one comment and ten profile views in its six-month history; I wonder if the ten includes my own visit.

He turns argumentative – questioning the worth of the contribution of a cricketer when someone hurrahs a milestone; esoteric – “Never was a time.”; woefully desperate – “I feel like crying.”

One day he declares that he’s planning to delete his profile. We wait with bated breath when no comment still comes in and the updates actually stop. Just when I start believing that he has left, he limply hobbles back. The updates stream in again, albeit not the bubbling brook they were once.

“I hate fb”, he confesses. I almost decide to “like” it.

Facebook and the protagonist

2010-05-11T01:48:00.001+05:30

Around the same time, I join one of the popular social networking websites. Hundreds of faces and names suddenly bloom marking the disremembered motifs which had marked my life since Windsor Manor – corridors, truancies, football, picnics, borrowed bikes, canteens, photocopied notes, binges, lectures, politics, night outs, messes, beer cigarettes and marijuana, fall outs, uniforms – competing narratives snagging chafing and bending against eachother – and yet all bereft of their underpinning now; the intimacies which had defined these shared lives forgotten like shifting dunes.

I peek into the pages of these separated lives, read the comments they pile on each other’s photographs and statuses and flip through the albums marking their passage from ranging bachelorhood to domesticity – a wedding, a spouse, a honeymoon, rearrangements for better for worse, a bundled newborn, visiting greying parents, a toddler finding his feet, reunions, another child – gathering along the way the trappings of new-found prosperity. Their footprints criss-crossing the globe from Goa to Las Vegas to the seven wonders of the world to the thousand places to see before dying; some of them pinning and sharing their conquests in maps. How far we have travelled – and yet never strayed.

The eyes in the photographs suddenly swivel and pin me down behind the peephole. Friendship requests pile, I get tagged in a few photographs, poked, notified, receive invitations from groups around start-ups indie-bands communities books, launches applications links are suggested, howdy where’ve-you-been messages stream in. The vortex sucks me inside; briefly I resist; but the ache to belong is stronger than the anxiety. Within a week, I have added a hundred friends and more eyes swivel and more requests and invitations rush in.

A friend surprises me with an intimate message. He tells me about a failed marriage and how depressed he is and how he remembers the times from college as the best years of his life and how he was thinking of me only the other day – I take a day to frame a reply but instantly decide against posting it when his next message informs me that he would be in Gurgaon the next week and looking forward to catch up. I do not respond in the end and after a reminder message he also falls silent.

the life of a building

2010-05-02T13:33:00.004+05:30

A scaffolding anticipates a building, framing the slats along the path it grows - not to constrain, but to bolster and direct; setting its ascent from one stage to another. The higher the building, the higher it is to be, the stronger.

A building, ignored, undirected, collapses within from the weight of its own ambitions .

(Painitng by Turner)

Doesn't Kumble look like the stock Amar Chitra Katha character?

2010-04-25T01:27:00.002+05:30

Sneak peek into my stock answers for the matrimonial quiz

2010-04-23T08:57:00.001+05:30

'Are you a tee-totaller?'

'No, I am an all-rounder.'

'Are you a virgin?'

'No. Aquarian.'

'Do you do drugs?'

'Never by prescription.'

'Would you cheat on me?'

'I don't play cards.'

'Do you respect women?'

'Oh yes. I call them my daddy.'

The professor

2010-04-20T00:06:00.001+05:30

‘Why have you come here?’, his bloodshot eyes bore into me from behind the bush of unruly half-hennaed beard spewing out of the brown monkey-cap, donned even in this airless heat. He sits across the cluttered desk, half turned, a hand crossed across the chest and tucked under the armpit, the other holding an open book close to his half-moon Dumbledore glasses. ‘First time since you left?’

‘Yes.’

‘You did not come before because you thought that I would ask you what you have done with your life – and you would have no answers.’ I remain silent. ‘What do you do?’

‘I am a project manager.’

‘You’re not planning to embark on a campus caper?’, he waves the fresh copy of the bestseller at me, ‘He was your batch-mate, right?’

‘No, senior.’ I noticed the parcel it must have arrived on, a gutted yellow-brown affair embossed with the name of the publisher, scraping on the floor with the occasional wind.

He flips the pages with a coarse thumb, ‘How is it – crappy or awful?’

‘There is a generous reference to your character.’

He scoffs and starts to cough, ‘Hah! I – cough – wish – cough cough – he’d spared me the ignominy!’ His coughing eases and he throws the book on the littered desk upsetting a few files, pages fall from them onto the floor in muted shuffle but he doesn’t glance at them. ‘Do you still paint?’

‘No.’

‘Pity’, he raises himself with some effort from the old armchair, ‘You had some talent there with colours.’ He shambles to a corner, soot stain rising like volcanic ash, and places a kettle on a stove. The battered copper kettle with the turned wood handle on the Primus spattered with years of rust and burnt tea; I look around – everything in the clutter the same, only timeworn. The stove rests on the TV trolley instead of the shaky tripod I remember. He catches me looking.

‘I stopped that bloody film society after one of the girls complained of pornography to the dean.’ He mentions the name of the movie – ‘Used to be your favourite’. He turns to add water to the kettle from a jug. Behind the greasy panes of the lower shelf, I can still make the out the old Akai VCR and the stacks of VHS tapes we watched, their tapes mouldy and crumbling now I’m sure. I imagine the old television finally kicked the bucket one day, beyond any more resuscitation by generous thumps at its side, and he threw it from the window.

The afternoon sun streaming from the window behind his desk, arrested by the grime of the panes and the hanging dust, tints the room in sepia. Only a burning slit of it sneaks from the crack between the sash and the sill and saws one of the bookcases. The weather-bound books I had reverently perused through once now gather dust on them. Dust pervades – spinning under the slow creaking blades of the begrimed fan, gathered in the corners in balls and stirring under his shuffling feet, sitting in a film on the books on the shelves, the reams of files and sketch sheets tossed on the desk and the side table, only sparing a rectangular patch on the desk, and on the mildewy paintings scattered on the walls. The domineering abundance of paper in the room, in books and notes and lines, piled on the groaning bookcases, their shelves buckling under their weight, lends this tableau an air of fragile weightiness.

He complains as he adds the tea – the usual problems with the authority, the ever-increasing stupidity of the students, curtailed budgets, the times – pausing only to sniff at the milk in the packet. The moment, tentative and unsure, in the gentle blurry haze of the dust, comes as a mirage – the steady hum of the mini-fridge the singing sands –a world at its brink, doubting itself. The tenuous dusky shadow of a world already disappeared.

He limps to a book shelf, shuffling violently through piles of scrapbooks neatly stencilled with a name and a batch on the bottom right corner of their cover – diaries of our everyday experience with art around us – a newspaper cutting, a dead flower, a photograph, a sketch, a scroll, a muse. He pulls out a term book – that’s what we called it – and tosses it at me without looking at me, rising with a grunt and shuffling back to the kettle nearing boil. I flip through a few pages.

‘What do you make of them?’

I say something about the violence of the strokes and the overabundance of yellow.

‘What would you say about the artist?’

My eyes pause on a painting – the last of them. ‘Deeply disturbed.’

‘His name was Mukund Sachdeva. Tiny bastard with owl-eyed specs. He committed suicide shortly after this painting’, he turns and nods in the direction of the page spread between my hands, ‘Perhaps the last thing he did. I later got to know that he had dropped from every class but this. Perfect attendance – quite a thing for my classes. And I hardly ever noticed him there.’ He sieves the tea sloppily, spilling much of it in the floor, and thrusts a chipped mug at me. ‘What’s he written about me, your friend? Am I one of those endearing professorial buffoons, or an eccentric? I remember the bastard well enough – beamed at me like an idiot sitting over there’, he jabs a finger at the chair adjacent to me, ‘Trying to suck up to me, spoke straight from the notes but knew as much about art as a machine’, he settles back against the backrest, ‘Or perhaps, I am the villain in this junk – I did give him the only B out here, after all. Broke his perfect ten – and his heart too, I guess.’ His broken-toothed grin is a weak attempt at wicked levity. I leaf through Mukund’s sketches again. Despite the honesty, there is nothing in them but desperation; a doomed Icarus jump into the empty air. Any value there is to them now is in the fact of his death.

‘Is the company you work for big?’

‘No, quite small.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘You wouldn’t have heard of it.’

‘Hah!’

I offer the term-book back to him but he careless tosses it away to the same corner of the desk where he tossed the bestseller; it falls away taking a bundle of files with it.

‘That’s what I do now – to all of them – just throw them away at the end of the term and let my TA grade them.’ Another noisy slurp. ‘Every year, I put the same questions as the last year – they all know it now – How does the impressionist connect with his subjects? Discuss the inspiration and significance of Picasso’s Guernica in less than five hundred words? – my faithful TA tells me that even the answers are the same every year.’

‘I should have done this long time ago. I shouldn’t have wasted my breath on you slimy bastards – just taught from the text and let you waste the night mugging and be spared from sifting through your puke. Pity’, he points to the best-seller, ‘he would have scored a perfect ten if he had been here now.’

He stares at a spot on the desk, ‘It was a mistake coming back here. A mistake. You boys want to become what these places make you become. What crap you guys write about yourself these days! How unashamedly you crown yourself. Crème de la crème! The best! The brightest! What do you know of genius – you yellow-hearted runts! Afraid to struggle, to stand and fail for an idea!’

I light a cigarette unflinchingly like old times. The smoke trails lazily across the desk and a strand reaches his nose; he coughs. I stub and throw the cigarette away.

‘Are you married? ‘

‘No.’

‘Some rich pathetic kid I don’t even remember now sent me a snap from somewhere once – New York, I think. And all I can remember now is that I wanted to do his wife real bad. Why did you come to see me this time?’

‘I heard that you were sick.’

‘You thought I was dying!’

For a while, I had stood in this empty room deciding whether I should wait for him or check him out at his quarter – retiring for the day leaving the door to his office open would not be unusual from him. A faint rustling sound and I cocked my ear. I moved to the door, leading to the inner room where once he would secretly paint, and knocked. I heard something stir, a creak and a thin croak that I decided meant to summon me inside. I pushed the door. He sat at the edge of the folding bed, his body slumped forward, the blanket crossing a shoulder and tumbling from his lap like the robe of a Greek god in a painting, his hands clutching the edge of the bed. I remember his eyes, big and frightened as they took me in with the jaw hanging loose in a half-gape, the sparse hair on his head in disarray, the sunken cheeks – he looked around with the same befuddled terror – it was not me alone he was trying to place but the room and himself.

‘Are you?’

It took him a few seconds to recover before he was smothering his hair with a hand and scowling at me as if I had disturbed him in some deep thought.

‘Hah, it would take a hell lot more than this to kill me.’ I smile, and so does he, for a brief moment. ‘Why did you turn it down?’, his eyes soften with pain. I lower my head – I cannot look him in the eyes. I had been desperate when I wrote to him – I never really expected him to do anything about it – with his reputation for fights and my grades, what chance could have been there? And yet, against all odds, he had pulled it off. And I had failed him then.

‘Because of a girl’, I mutter.

‘Are you still with her?’

I shake my head.

‘Good. The canteen would be open now. This tea tastes like shit!’, he barks at me like I was the one who’d made it.

Armpits and I

2010-04-14T22:07:00.004+05:30

I’ve never been able to understand armpits.

Armpits come from the rather less-dwelled-upon family of joints giving our limbs the bends and pivots around which they can fold and execute so many of their machine-like actions – the bends at the elbows, the knees and, perhaps the most direct cousin in linking the limbs to the torso, the thigh-joints. All pretty insignificant hinges, silently creaking through the day, faint crinkles for most parts, hardly inviting any passing thought. Only the thigh-joints get any attention by virtue of their proximity to the crotch, marking two sides of the triangle containing the reason and compulsion of much, if not all, of our existence.

And yet of these, only the armpits have hair, with an almost feminine quality to them. Compared to these fine, soft tendrils the hair on the pubes look like the bristling, spiralling horns of a blackbuck - see right. Which I can understand – nothing but the best fighters to guard the family jewels – but why the wispy maidenlike strands on the armpits? There is some sexual connation to them, we realise, but just like the G-spot and our life, we cannot put our finger on its elusive unraveling. If a naked man were to suddenly jump in our path with his hands raised over his head, we are likely to take in the hair at the armpits in the same glance as we notice the other obvious parts – and yet of all the fetishes I have heard mentioned, the graphic sex read – I have never seen armpits and their hair play any role. I mean, people suck toes for foreplay!

And then there are the sweat glands. The function of these I would suppose is to regulate the temperature of the body by evaporation – but then why have so many in a region usually folded for most of the times? Why not the cheeks which are more directly accessible to the winds?

And one question that has always bothered me is – did thakur have armpits? With hair?

Did they curl?

Image source: http://www.employees.org/~atanu/photography/albums/FTP/Folder4/Blackbuck1.jpg

Snaps from Kasol

2010-04-10T12:17:00.005+05:30

Ramya's verses

2010-04-10T12:08:00.004+05:30

I really do not know when exactly I started following Ramya. For a long time, she was moimystique to me – a faceless, ageless girl tucked somewhere. It was some time after I came to Gurgaon that I discovered her blog and her tea leaf poem was probably the first I read. I do not know how I chanced on her blog – whether she chanced on mine –

I have had a history of anonymous friends – met over chat and emails – even random phone calls – that have torpedoed to an intensity and then suddenly come crashing down to nothing. I have enjoyed the anonymity, the facelessness of it – a couple of times I met them and decided that I should not have. Something about the watery shapelessness and possibility of their thoughts now confined to a shape.

I think it’s been only a few months that I know her name, her age, her face – the part of her confined to a biodata. I have even heard her sing now - though very faintly. The unfettered words, once darting and rambling boundlessly, now contained in the fence of that identity.

Ramya, all of 22, has compiled a list of her poems and come out with a beautiful, albeit thin, book called Inklings. My own contribution has been that I have been consulted on the shade of the green of the cover – thanks for listening, moimystique, it looks beautiful.

Here, she has been profiled by Deccan Chronicle – I only wish they had only shown her hands resting on an open page – but her pretty smile certainly takes nothing away from it.

I do not read verse. Ramya is perhaps the only poet I have consistently read. I do not have the words why I have liked them – perhaps a vivid expression of our everyday lives, urban yet profound – I believe the anonymity of her talent made it possible. Perhaps you’ll discover the same stirrings and order her book.

Jungle mein...

2010-03-16T20:13:00.005+05:30

... Mangal!

... Hangal!

Faces - I

2010-03-16T01:41:00.009+05:30

There are some faces that do not belong to a person but are abstractions, of ideas and times. A model’s face splashed on a magazine cover does not belong to her – it is a tablet etched with the ideas which a time – a place – the people inhabiting that intersection – define themselves with; a mirror they hold to themselves. It is the makers of opinions, the shapers of thought, who give these incorporeal ideas – of beauty, of virility, of fertility –a shape: tangible, seeable, sellable. Strokes of fingers, of scalpel, transmuting them to the lump of human clay – pressing, pulling, squeezing – fluting its curves, chiselling its features, carving its angles – and a face emerges. A vessel; scourged and emptied of its own idea – eviscerated; reduced to a container. To be broken and buried in the shifting space of time; and new vessels to be fashioned from its shards in their turns.

Head and shoulders has a new shampoo for other body parts...

2010-03-16T00:58:00.000+05:30

It's called

Pubis and armpits.

Weekend in Bangalore

2010-03-04T01:16:00.002+05:30

Going to Bangalore after almost a year. The last time I was there, there were not many people I could meet. I have to file the property tax for my flat. While going through its papers, I realised it’s been more than four years since I booked the flat.

Life has been a roller coaster. Four years ago, I would have never thought I would be here. Four years ago, I thought I was settled for life, that I would always be in Bangalore and when the flat got complete, I would shift there and have a not-too-ambitious but happy Bangalorean life. I was learning French, photography, salsa, playing good football 3 times a week, had friends across ages, nationalities and vocations, and doing some theatre on the side. I was reasonable happy and secure – my misery was only my work. A vague hope stirred that I might do something beyond what I was doing then and I started reading about retail if it would help me snatch a position in Reliance or Birla, away from analytics.

Here I am now. Nothing but this empty rented Gurgaon flat where hours pass without a sound, surrounded with books I have never found the patience of Bangalore to read, but with the job I could only dare to dream of four years ago. What I wistfully remember now is the life I had four years ago – the activities, the stability in personal affairs.

But I strangely don’t regret it. They say you should take each day as your last but this is only entirely applicable if you’re on death parole and on a one way ticket to the noose or the chair. In life, there are moments when you consolidate. The three years here in Gurgaon, alone and semi-depressive, have changed me at an age where not many of my friends have – only ossified. Perspectives abound – nothing like seeing it in your face. And perhaps it is the age but I have started acknowledging that I was wrong about a lot of things. I can see the difference of these three years in my writing.

Things will change again.

Till then, I await meeting three friends who so much defined Bangalore for me then. Some people are gone but some remain forever. As I was speaking to one of them – we never even realised it was one of our happiest times.

Never say sorry and thank you to a friend

2010-03-02T20:09:00.002+05:30

Instead, use "I apologize" and "I appreciate that"

Amrita Rao on budget

2010-03-01T06:18:00.002+05:30

Rediff has kindly ended my torment and shared Ms. Rao's thoughts on the budget.

Why do I still have the sneaking suspicion that these thoughts are not really hers? Even after seeing the proof of her concerns for the middle class, the rising costs of TV and that she can mention the amount of money alloted to healthcare casually.

Link:http://business.rediff.com/slide-show/2010/feb/27/slide-show-1-budget-2010-perfin-what-rajkumar-hirani-thinks-of-the-budget.htm#contentTop

Karthik calling Karthik again

2010-03-01T00:41:00.008+05:30

Image links:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Dinesh_Karthik_2.jpg/230px-Dinesh_Karthik_2.jpg

http://static.cricketnext.com/pix/sitepix/08_2008/murali_karthik_313.jpg

An image worth three words

2010-03-01T00:07:00.004+05:30

So you have this campaign of save the tigers, very well conceived, but with full of the new age internet petition fad.

sample this from an actual portfolio of facebook groups of a concerned hip-hopper:
SAVE OUR TIGERS!!!,
AS SOON AS THE TEST STARTS I ASK-"MA'AM HOW MUCH TIME IS LEFT",
LAMBORGHINI !!! Ill get you when im 27 !!!!

I am sure that so far the lack of these concerned supporters was all that was making the tiger population dwindle alarmingly.

Anyway, I thought I would prepare an equally effective campaign for the poachers.

Image link: http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/09_01/tigerDM0309_468x478.jpg

Remembering the Oscars

2010-02-28T01:43:00.001+05:30

The Oscars are around the corner. Are they seriously going to include Avatar in the list?

Sigh.

Remembering that last great year of the Oscars.

Have you ever...

2010-02-27T14:01:00.002+05:30

... seen someone in desperate pain? - she asked.

Yea, I have seen Arjun Rampal try to act.

Unneeded qualifications to popular proverbs

2010-02-27T13:47:00.002+05:30

A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Unless it is ostriches you are looking for.
A fool and his money will soon be parted. He will not even get good exchange rates.
No man is an island. Especially Iranians.
If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. And close the door behind you.
A man is known by the company he keeps. Unless he has a majority stake in it too.
Every man has a price. And if you wait for the season to end, you might even get big discounts.
A leopard cannot change its spots. Not even the underwear.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Unless they have a body odor issue.

What if

2010-02-27T13:42:00.002+05:30

Saw a couple of women in the office Awww over the nude snap of a baby boy. Presumably one of theirs unless they go around stripping and snapping strange babies. Was thinking if they would have found it cute if the kid had been aroused at the moment the snap was taken? I mean, nothing else changes.

Do not see any reason why not.

By the way, a friend had a baby girl some time back but I got to know of it today morn.

Sachin did not hit a double ton

2010-02-26T01:14:00.004+05:30

First of all, why can't centuries be called just that? Association with plywoods? And if they have to be called something else, the word is quintal.

It would take Sachin about a year to hit a double ton at his best.

And imagine how good an alliterative headline it makes:

Quixotic Sachin quintessentially hits a quality double quintal! Qrtics quietened again.

PJ: How would Auro (from Paa) describe a foreplay scene from the keyhole of his parent's bedroom?

Pa(a)-kis(s)-t(h)an.

Image links:

http://blogs.theage.com.au/business/executivestyle/managementline/archives/keyhole.jpg

http://bollywoodflicker.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/celebflicker-paa-5.jpg

How must it feel?

2010-02-25T22:07:00.002+05:30

You're sitting in a new dhabha you came across, serving your favorite dish. You roll up your sleeves, and order a plate. There you are, hogging on it, maybe even moving the morsels around inside trying to guess the spices - when comes a giant asteroid from nowhere and you're squashed thinner than a blotting paper; your tongue, in two dimension, still extending towards a bite.

How must it feel for that mosquito I squash sucking on my blood in that brief millisecond?

Ek rupiyah banaam ek din

2010-02-22T00:12:00.005+05:30

Read this.

It's seriously time to overhaul our law books.

Forget the fact that you need a century old act on an obsolete contraption to explain detention on suspected espionage. Just have a look at the possible punishment.

"... a prison term of up to three years, or with fine extending to up to Rs 1,000, or with both...."

Assuming that the first two options are somewhat mutually substitutable, since they are punishments for the same crime with differences in degrees, it translates to at the most Re. 1 for each day in the prison.

Sheesh.

Exchange Offer for Dostana

2010-02-21T03:40:00.002+05:30

Image sources: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_xlIAkzdAklU/SNjwwD1THSI/AAAAAAAAOPI/GRSg1yBkrvM/s400/priyanka+chopra.jpg

http://www.megamalls.in/announcements/images/bigbazaar_thegreatexchangeofferpuranodonayalo_pic.jpg

BGO - Karthik calling Karthik

2010-02-21T02:57:00.001+05:30

Source: IndianExpress

Facebook thots

2010-02-20T01:11:00.004+05:30

Is it just me or do the endless train of statuses and photos posted on Facebook evoke a sense of loss in you too?

Of the many lives open to us we are not leading.

Of the many places where we are not.

Of the many people lost to time and the weight of their own numbers.

I just realized...

2010-02-20T00:37:00.001+05:30

... I have a fear of people who describe themselves as bindaas!

Are journalists who can't finish a story...

2010-02-19T22:05:00.000+05:30

...suffering from Reuters block?

Thot on love and respect

2010-02-19T18:16:00.002+05:30

Heard someone say "I want to be loved - and respected" some days ago.

Perhaps, it's a single theme.

We want to be loved but on our terms. Even a pet dog is loved. Being loved and respected at the same time is being loved for a self, an identity, we know within and what we want to stand for.

Image of the day explained

2010-02-19T05:30:00.002+05:30

Image from Indian Express