Armpits and I

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

Ramya's verses

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...

... Mangal!

... Hangal!

Faces - I

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...

It's called

Pubis and armpits.

Weekend in Bangalore

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

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

Amrita Rao on budget

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

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