parotechnics

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T23:29:00.001-08:00

The Choice of Marriage

2011-08-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

So I've been amazingly bad about posting my column here - a combination of being extremely busy and somewhat lazy.

Can't put the last 3 months worth up now - so will just skip ahead to the last one! It's about people's anxiety around getting married, girls' anxiety more so.

I'd not expected the responses it got - I suppose if you notice something it means so do others - there was much discussion around it on facebook. I am constantly amazed at young people whose parents would basically be just a little older than I, who insist that their daughters must get married when they're just in the early 20s. I'm puzzled too by it...

BOMBAY PREMIERE - PARTNERS IN CRIME - COME IF YOU CAN!

2011-05-11T03:33:00.000-07:00

So I have a new film and we're having the first screening in Bombay tomorrow, May 12 at 6.30 at NCPA's Little Theatre.

MORE ABOUT THE FILM

Partners in Crime
(94 min. HDV. Documentary. Hindi and English, 2011, India)

DIRECTOR Paromita Vohra PRODUCER: Magic Lantern Foundation EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Devi Pictures CAMERA Shanti Bhushan, Bakul Sharma EDITOR Rikhav Desai SOUND Asheesh Pandya, Chris Burchell, Gissy Michael MUSIC Akshay Rajpurohit & Kuber Sharma

Who owns a song – the person who made it or the person who paid for it? Is piracy organized crime or class struggle? Are alternative artists who want to hold rights over their art and go it alone in the market, visionaries or nutcases? Is the fine line between plagiarism and inspiration a cop-out or a whole other way of looking at the fluid nature of authorship? When more than three fourths of those with an internet connection download all sorts of material for free, are they living out a brand new cultural freedom – or are they criminals?

Full of wicked irony, great music and thorny questions Partners in Crime explores the grey horizons of copyright and culture in times when technology is changing the contours of the market.

Metal heads who market their own music, folklorists who turn tribal aphorisms into short stories, music archivists who hoard and share everything they can get their hands on, anti-piracy fanatics who think piracy funds terrorism, a smooth talking DVD street salesman who outlines the efficiency of the illegal market, media moguls, lobbyists, “monetizers”, downloaders, uploaders, the biggest hit song of 2010 and the small time nautanki singer whose song it was inspired by – these places and people throng the world’s bazaar in which the film is set. Partners in Crime takes you through a story about art, crime, love and money to check if the times, they may be a-changing after all.

FEATURING: Vijay Dandetha, Thermal and a Quarter, Lawrence Liang, Demonic Resurrection, Pete Lockett, itwofs.com, Scribe, Rampat Harami & Rani Bala, Ram Sampath, Juma Khan, Irfan of Dil Ne Phir Yaad Kiya, FM Gold, CDrack.in and many others.

We are Like this Only - Ban It

2011-04-04T21:09:00.000-07:00

This week's Mid-day column, coming on the heels of the world cup (although not about the world cup, not about cricket etc.)

Just about our enthusiasm for censorship and such stupidities on the one hand so we can ignore how bigoted we really are and how much easier we find it to hate than to love. I don't know if that's just the human way as some tend to argue.

I know that I do equal number of things from anger or annoyance as I do from enchantment. So if those who express hate are expressing love someplace, why aren't we hearing of it more? Or do we not see it as love, because we are prejudiced against the thing they love.

Meanwhile, not quite connected but I found this amusing link - pride in being censored - while searching for an image of a CC.

Took the image from a rather nice site called Doc Bollywood btw.

Miz Liz

2011-04-01T21:57:00.001-07:00

I was on my way to Gorakhpur in a train, stuck on a bridge over the Ganga in Kanpur, trying to write a column on train travel, watching men on the parallel bridge playing Holi - 8 days after Holi, as is the tradition in Kanpur (a tradition begun since 1857 when the Brits banned Holi said my friend), when I heard that Elizabeth Taylor had died.

It was a shock, she seemed like she'd just go on...

This beautiful nude portrait of her was released only after her death. You can read more about it here.

Going on being Unlimited

2011-04-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

One Women's Day, many years ago, my friend Jabeen and I went to a Women's Day dance party. It was really a superb thing - it was in some pub type place in Mahim, the entrance fee was reasonable, the music was not bad and there were lots of women there, mostly who identified with feminism in an organised way, but perhaps some friends and fence sitting types also.

On the whole we had a lot of fun and it seemed like a really nice way to celebrate Women's Day - different than the same old Women's Day marches.

But as often happens, this sort of thing goes to the other extreme. I yearn now for those mixed up marches. Jabeen and I again went to a club on Women's Day along with our friends Anjali and Nidhi. It was a fund raiser, with rock bands. It was utterly depressing. It was expensive. A long line of people who looked like they had wandered in from tryouts for extras parts in Sex and the City stood outside. What is this with the FROCKS??? There was no connection with Women's Day in the shape of the event, there was no real relationship with it in the performers, who, talented as they are, are in that vague boho chic zone of politics (let's get together and have a gooood time while doing something for a meaningful cause). WTF? Get educated first and then maybe it will be meaningful that you are raising money for girls' education. All these so called alternative folks - they need to get a serious position going. As also better dress sense. Please stop wearing frocks.

I thought a lot about my discomfort with the event. And this is what I understood - that as such, I did not object to the event, in terms of it being a fund raiser. If well off people want to be stupid while contributing to a good cause, hey, bring it on. It just should not have been linked to Women's Day. Respect.

Here's my column though on taking back women's day.

Earlier posts on women's day here and elsewerhere

Lone on the Range

2011-04-01T21:19:00.000-07:00

Despite my best intentions I never do manage to update this blog on time and I somehow think it's not nice to neglect it - not sure why, not sure if others feel that way about their blogs. Yet Facebook has become such a default page and often you leave out friends who aren't on there in your news and sharings. I really don't like that - conformity to an interface should not determine social exchange surely.

And there is a strange passivity about all that social networking stuff, whereas somehow this requires a little more involvement. You have to at least MAKE a post, and there is something meditative and respectful about that.

Meanwhile after a very very very very hard working year I took a small vacation (much to everyone's shock). Just 4 days on a quiet beach. Slept a lot, swam a lot, read a lot. I'd like all of life to be like that.

So that weekend the column was obviously about the pleasures of traveling alone - the necessity too maybe...

And here's the blissful place I was in

(What, you thought I'd go without MY COMPUTER????? You think I'm a freak or something???)

furiously updating!

2011-03-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

So for the last three months life has been one long slog. I can't remember when I've just been in such a tunnel of work and nothing but.

Anyway the result is a new film - more about that in another post.

Meanwhile for Spacebar and others who've scolded me for my slackness in updating columns, this is a list of links to all the ones I've written since Mr. B's below. I think I was so thrilled that he had complained about it that I felt, chalo, ab ho gaya.

To list them, will no longer have a vulgar feel because unlikely subjects will then appear together, instead of a week apart, but here goes.

On the snobbery of some cult fictions (sci-fi, say) over other pulp (Mills and Boons)

On the strangeness of identity and the stranger still Unique Identity project

On Koffee with Karan and the episodes with Deepika/Sonam and Anil Kapoor/Sanjay Dutt

On censoring films

On girls liberated from one thing, but perpetrators of another

On the absence of hobbies among Maharashtra MLAs

On dirty drinking water and Shreedevi fast food

The next one, on Sea View, I'll post separately with pictures I think, since I want to write more about it

On the unprotesting 'apolitical' middle class

On Swapping Stories

On the importance of film festivals

On Zangoora

And FINALLY

On badly behaved schoolkids

Phew, that's a lot.

I feel like a good girl now.

Bade Bhaiyyaji ki vani, badi suhaani

2010-11-27T23:06:00.000-08:00

My column in Sunday Mid-day about Amitabh Bacchan's desire to copyright/patent his voice.

There's no point asking how much money is enough - none of us know the answer to this question. But have we got the pitsiest public figures in the world or what?

television purgatory

2010-11-21T08:00:00.000-08:00

My column on watching Bigg Boss - or rather not watching it.. with a mistake, poor Deepak Parasher got called Pankaj Parashar (although the latter may also feel he is a poor thing)

Of course now there is a stay order, so I am still not saved but hanging somewhere in between

the problems of plenty

2010-11-14T07:05:00.001-08:00

Today's Sunday Mid-day column, about the pleasures of libraries, maybe the necessity. What I couldn't expand on in the column but which people can check out from here are two excellent online library ventures - they will send and pick books up!

www.friendsofbooks.com

And this one just for comic books

www.leapingwindows.com

Labbu's birthday

2010-11-11T09:28:00.000-08:00

Today is my father's birthday and I am continuing my effort to write something about him as I decided to in 2008 and then managed to in 2009 and here I am now, writing in 2010, but at the 11th hour as he would have said :).

When my father was small he had very fat cheeks. His cheeks were so fat that if you slapped one cheek the other used to wobble. So his two older sisters loved to call him over and then slap him, and laugh to see the other cheek wobble. This exemplifies the love of Punjabi women, as many will know. They really did love him, as I saw over the years - he was the apple of their eye - and accordingly they had their own petname for him: Labbu - from Laabh, a blessing luckily gotten.

In all my years with him I never heard anyone actually call him that, although my aunt in Bombay would sometimes lovingly say: he is my favourite, I used to call him Labbu.

My father always laughed and loved to tell this story of cheek slapping. He loved telling stories of his childhood which was evidently a happy one - despite the hardships of Partition - and a very energetic one, full of going here and there with friends, trying to imitate Fearless Nadia by plundering the sofa for springs, learning to swim in the Yamuna, eating 6 boiled eggs at a time and getting up to every kind of mischief.

When he was sick we had to spend many days in the hospital for his chemo and he would tell me stories I'd heard many times before about his early years in Lahore. I always liked hugging my father but those months I did it a lot and often squeezed his cheeks, no longer fat, and soon I took to calling him Labbu-chand.

In this last year, there has been an addition to Labbu chand's family - my sister had a baby, I acquired a niece whom I call Kishmish and she has fat cheeks. Like me, she loves to listen to stories. Since she was two months old she's recognised the cadence of storytelling and always becomes rapt - her father makes up funny stories for her and now, at seven months, she has even begun to gurgle at them. Like my father - her grandfather - she loves being hugged and kissed. I hug and kiss her as much as I can. Sometimes I tell her stories too about a naughty little boy called Labbu, always getting up to mischief, always getting into trouble, but never reforming, running around the streets of Anarkali bazaar, somewhere near the Neela Gumbad, playing with Akhtar, the boy whose father owns the trunk shop on the ground floor, eating finger sticks from Moqam din and Sons bakery.

This being my father's birthday month I have started writing a story in which a little girl with fat cheeks escapes into the past with her grandfather and meets him when he is a boy with fat cheeks and then they proceed to be naughty together.

To remember is very painful, but the thought of forgetting even more so.

For Kishmish, who never lost Labbu, I hope he will be the happy remembrance of a little bit that went into making her. For me the story is like giving Kishmish a hug and a kiss on behalf of Labbu who would have been the best Nana a girl can have, a hugging and kissing and making you feel special kind of grandpa.

This is the first part of the story. I'll post more when it's written out.

KISHMISH AND LABBU GET UP TO NO GOOD IN ANARKALI BAZAAR

Kishmish had fat cheeks. Really really fat cheeks, that looked like clouds. Everybody loved to pinch them. They would say, oh so cute, and bend down and pinch both cheeks hard. Kishmish would glare, but did that stop them? No it didn’t.

Kishmish lived on the 7^th floor of a tall building. From the balcony she could see pigeons and crows, huts and shops, divali lights and construction dust, far away a hill, and hundreds of cars on the roads.

One day Amma was taking Kishmish down in the lift so she could play. The aunty from the 6^th floor got on. Oh how cute you look in that frock Kishmish, said aunty and pulled Kishmish’s cheeks. Kishmish glared at her. But did the 6^th floor aunty stop? No she did not.

Then the didi from the 4^th floor got on. She had a purple iPod and yellow nailpolish. Kishmishhhhhh! she screamed. You’re so cute! She pinched both of Kishmish’s cheeks. Kishmish glared at her. But did she stop? No she did not.

On the ground floor as Kishmish ran out of the an uncle she did not know, smiled at her. Kishmish smiled back. Then he bent down and pinched her cheeks. What a cute little girl! he said. Kishmish glared at him and glared at him. But did he stop? No he did not. In fact he started to pull her cheeks some more. This was too much for Kishmish. She screwed up her face. But he kept on. So Kishmish kicked him and he let go! Oh, that felt pretty good.

The uncle yelped.

Amma turned around and glared at Kishmish. Kishmish! That was very bad. Why did you kick that uncle?

Kishmish looked away glumly. Amma waited.

Kishmish said nothing - would Amma understand if Kishmish said he had pulled her cheeks? No she would not. She would say, oh the uncle likes you and you behave like this?

Fine, Amma said. No playing for you. Get back in the lift.

And so Amma and Kishmish came home. Amma put on her computer and started to talk to her friend on gmail chat.

That’s not fair! Kishmish said, you are playing with your friend on the computer!

I did not kick anybody Amma said, so I can. And I am not playing, I am working.

Kishmish went into the balcony. Nana was sitting there trimming his moustache in the sun. A shiny black crow was cawing loudly from the roof. Oh, Nana said, listen to that crow, looks like we’re going to have some guests. Kishmish did not answer. Nana laughed when he saw her face. Nana never pulled Kishmish’s cheeks – he only laughed at her always.

Nana! Don’t laugh at me! Kishmish said.

Oh Nana said, you are sulking are you?

No yelled Kishmish. I am not sulking.

OK Nana said, and went back to looking at his moochhi in the mirror.

I am bored! Kishmish said. I want to go and play.

Who can stop you from playing, Nana asked. Play!

No, I want to play with someone!

Ok, you can play with me, Nana said.

No! You are too old! You can’t run and play.

Hmm, Nana said. Maybe. Maybe not.

What if… we went to a place where I’m not old. Then we could play together.

Kishmish looked interested.

Where is that place?

Nana put the mirror and the scissors down. It’s called Anarkali Bazaar he said.

Now look in my eye, the blue one. Nana had one blue eye and one brown one. He could not see from the blue eye.

Kishmish came and looked into the eye closely, frowning.

Do you know what’s behind the eye? Nana asked.

What? Kishmish asked, her eyes big and round.

It’s the Neela Gumbad!

Kishmish peered and squinted and then yes! behind Nana's blue eye she could see a big old building, like one she'd never seen before, with a round domed roof of deep, beckoning blue. There were people around it, selling things on carts, going about in rickshaws or walking.

Do you want to go there? Nana asked. Kishmish nodded, a bit excited but a bit scared too.

So then let’s go, Nana said, to the Neela Gumbad, the Neela Gumbad, the Neela Gumbad. And in a minute they were there, standing inside a round building with a big blue dome. Next to her was Nana. He was 5 years old like her and he had the FATTEST cheeks, much fatter than hers! And both his eyes were brown. He did look different, but it was definitely Nana.

Come on Nana said. And the two of them ran out of the Neela Gumbad and into Anarkali bazaar!

TO BE CONTINUED

2010-11-11T04:09:00.000-08:00

Last to last week's Mid-day column - we had Divali holiday in between.

A couple of my friend's fought with me about it because they felt I did not take a clear stand on what I felt about what Arundhati Roy said about Kashmir - and I felt a bit frustrated by that. I somehow think there are many types of solidarity - I suppose one is definitely for many to say the same thing at the same time.

On the other hand I guess I am a bit more invested in trying to reach out to a more "regular" audience and also in the idea of debate which eventually is not about rights and wrongs but about the ability to listen. And I don't feel very interested in making declarations about matters of national importance (which is not to say that I don't think those declarations should be made) but interested in a rather more local voice and way.

Still, it's an uncertain thought, only half formed in my head and I'm still wondering.

Don't look left, Don't look right - just head to the cinema

2010-10-25T19:40:00.001-07:00

My friend Bela Negi's film is releasing this October 29th in Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore. Please do go see it and please spread the word around! Here's my column about it from last Sunday's Mid-day

The Young and the Restless

2010-10-21T01:26:00.000-07:00

My column from last Sunday:

Such a short journey for Aditya Thackeray and hopefully Meter Jammers now know that politics is a long haul

Munni's...

2010-10-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

...not badnaam enough for me...

Last Sunday's Mid-day column

vamps, victims and videotape

2010-10-09T23:04:00.000-07:00

Have been shooting so not updating but pasted below a longer version of my Sunday Mid-day column from last week, which appears today in The Delhi Guardian which is apparently Delhi version of The Independent of London (go figure). They don't have a website yet.

You can watch online the VAMP video as well as the documentary it responds to - Prostitutes of God

VAMPS, VICTIMS AND VIDEOTAPE

Recently a YouTube video called “VAMP Protests ‘Prostitutes of God” went viral.

Produced by Vaishya Anyaya Mukti Parishad (VAMP) a sex worker rights organization in Sangli, it was a series of testimonies by people who had featured in the VBS documentary by Sarah Harris - “Prostitutes of God” - which explored sex work around the cult of Goddess Yellamma and linked to the Devdasi tradition. One after another, these people asked the filmmaker why she betrayed their trust by insulting their gods, misinterpreting their culture and portraying them as craven victims.

VAMPs video is lo-fi and basic, but its power packed and direct. In all the verbiage about the possibilities of digital media, this stands out as a politically creative and impactful moment.

It’s not the first time people have felt this way about a documentary produced by a first world filmmaker/network about an “Indian problem”. Dana Briski’s Oscar winning “Born into Brothels” met with much criticism. Outside a small group, this was dismissed as the pettiness of over-intellectual, permanently discontented activist types who don’t understand what it takes to tell a good story. The VAMP video, as a direct testimony of the subjects themselves is hard to ignore as carping. It also throws light on how documentaries work, and so, how not to make them.

“Prostitutes of God” is not an exceptional film. In fact it’s a copybook example of what most networks ask for in a narrative about unfamiliar cultures. A central character – here the filmmaker - leads us through her journey among the natives, providing a point of identification. Her eyes become our eyes. What do Ms. Harris’ eyes see?

First, the never-before ‘insight’ that ‘India is a land of extremes, ancient tradition and modern capitalism’. Then the de rigueur bonding scenes to establish ‘intimacy’ - giggly chapatti making, arch condom games and fake sari shopping overlain with commentary about how ‘these people’ lead terrible lives, suffering the iniquities of tradition in a superstitious society. There’s some truth in these clichés, but are clichés the only way to understand the truth? These eyes see them only as examples who speak in generic sound bites. They never show us people with humour, sensuality, agency, choice or contradictions. Nor do we understand sex work differently from the common perception as a terrible fate to be rescued from, or the difference between an empowered sex worker and one who isn’t.

The filmmaker declares the Yelamma myth incomprehensible –some bizarre story about ‘fat gods in gold bikinis’. If the Indian informants were inarticulate, (as the film makes clear by using translators who can’t speak English well and using that for feeble humour) there’s Wikipedia. Reading the entry I found it comprehensible enough that the myth was a way of legitimizing courtesans/prostitutes to ensure respect and livelihood unlike the moralizing which renders sex workers illegal, unorganized, improverished and vulnerable.

Strangely, the film is part of series that is meant to take you into an edgy reality. But frankly calling people pimps and whores while mashing their reality into baby food for feeding babies is not much edgier than little kids using bad words whose meaning they don’t know.

Documentaries exist to deepen our understanding of the world. At their least they explain something simply and clearly. At their best they provide a textured experience of the unknown, and by presenting people as complex individuals, not types, create a compassionate understanding and awareness about the issues, the subjects and our prejudices. Unfortunately the form “Prostitutes of God” chooses, allows for neither.

Producers respond to this criticism by saying some things must be ‘simplified’ to help their audiences enter the unfamiliar. Have they read the comments on the film’s website? Most are in the unthinkingly racist “what’s wrong with these barbaric people” category. Maybe it’s time to try another method to change views that have existed for centuries?

The only thing that’s changed is the version of the documentary now on the website. After VAMP called them on it, the producers hastily removed a part of the commentary , which disclosed a characters’ HIV status without permission. The fear of litigation keeps us honest?

So much for the other defence producers make: we care. Maybe. From the film, Sarah Harris comes across as a nice enough person. But niceness does not prevent mediocre analysis or filmmaking. The hard work of questioning your assumptions might. And it would lead to a very different kind of film

In fairness, this is not limited to firangis. We can find unthinkingly offensive do-gooders among ourselves as easily. Noble intentions (sometimes called “human interest stories”) can be dangerous, for they absolve us of interrogating ourselves. We must cast others as fallen victims so we can be seen as their uplifting saviours. Sometimes being a devil, or his advocate, may be the better path.

let them eat cake

2010-09-27T07:16:00.000-07:00

My column in Sunday mid-day for September 27, which resulted in some facebook argument between my friend who doesn't like any ambiguity on how we speak of Pakistan and terrorism.

I don't like to dismiss these arguments even if I instinctively don't agree because I have a terror of falling into any formulaic secular elite attitude - as if it is self evident what is progressive and what isn't. But I also can't identify with any vehement patriotism. So not fully able to understand the merits of the other side.

Anyway, in that vein, Shabana Azmi's slum cake makes an appearance in this column - but personally I have to say I don't feel as hugely outraged by it. I can see the intended joke but I think some of the annoyance is in response to the feeling that we are not exactly sure what the nature of Shabana Azmi's activism is, or what her politics are. I feel the cake joke reminds me certainly of the elites who are very sure they know what's good and bad for others - who feel comfortable about suggesting how things ought to be precisely because they are part of a ruling elite. That's why they are not confused about the humour of the cake. Whereas those who feel less convinced that their felt politics are the right politics - may not feel as strongly angry, but may also not feel as blithe about that kind of joke.

Anyway - it's noticeable that the media did not pounce on this cake. And not a word about Amitabh Bacchan's EXTREMELY bad manners in tweeting about party to gazillion people while party is still on. Given how holier than thou he is about everything otherwise, grumble grumble grumble...

Aristotle for Facebook

2010-09-18T23:52:00.000-07:00

Mid-day column for Sept. 19

According to a new Canadian study “most Facebook users have low self-esteem.” You couldn’t tell from the friendship requests. It’s easy to laugh at the breezy: “Amazing pic wanna be a frenz”, “hey aren’t you the one who wrote/made XYZ film?” and “hi send yr nmbr as I need your inputs for my class assgnmnt.” Low self-esteem cannot explain this jaunty entitlement – poor upbringing might.

More complicated are silent strangers who know of you and have 10-100 “common friends”- but don’t introduce themselves, leaving you perplexed. Low esteem doesn’t explain this – excessive mother love might.

One thing does explain much of it – a crisis of contemporary behaviour. Today, more than ever before, we come in contact with large numbers of people, of different backgrounds and levels of achievement, but have very little idea how to behave with others, because good manners are considered square and courtesy or formality is old fashioned – and no new fashion has apparently been devised as replacement (though someone may be working on a good Facebook application).

Many disdain Facebook because they disdain networking. Some are idealistic, several disingenuous – because networking has been around longer than low self-esteem. Among 500 million users some are bound to be narcissists and depressives. You don’t need Facebook to channel your inner jerk – although Facebook might be one place you give him a turn. Many just seem socially clueless, an adolescent state reinforced by the lazy use of the word friends to describe the great diversity of relationships that exist in a society, to create the illusion that because we are on the same web page, everyone is the same as everyone.

These folks might want to check out Aristotle on Ethics, where he too used the term friendship to describe different social relations – but helpfully categorised them thus: 1) Friendship of utility: what we call networking, our parents called duniyadari and Mama Morton in Chicago describes as “when you’re good to Mama, Mama’s good to you” 2) Friendship of pleasure: friendly acquaintances, people we meet professionally or socially whose company we enjoy 3) Friendship of the good: abiding friendships based on love and shared values, interests and time.

True friendships of the third category are an ideal – shared with few and nurtured over time. As Aristotle says: “a wish for friendship may arise quickly, but friendship does not.”

However, friendships of convenience or of pleasure too have their place and genuine community can be achieved by treating them with the respect due – not thinking of them as inferior and therefore not deserving of our best behaviour – an attitude Facebook – and the internet generally - sometimes reveals. As if casualness of emotion means casualness of behaviour. At the heart of this is something we’ve become very comfortable with in the present culture – selfishness or self-interest. That we need only look out for our own requirements and get what we can from others without regard for what we offer in return. And if we can’t offer as much to acknowledge this debt through our respect. Don’t know about low self-esteem – but it sure is low esteem of others!

This is based on a fundamental miscalculation - the assumption that other people are stupid and fooled by false charm or brash informality; that generosity or tolerance exist not to appreciate but take advantage of. This sort of familiarity definitely leads to contempt, and people, no matter how kind, will eventually be fed up with bad manners and mediocre, self-interested “friendships” leaving one very alone in a crowd of 2,147 friends. And that sure could make you a Facebook user with low self-esteem.

The Godard of Small Things

2010-09-05T03:04:00.000-07:00

My column, unable to resist all puns on Godard, here - occasional silliness must be forgiven, friends ( I hope) :)

Daayen ya Baayen

2010-08-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

I recently watched Bela Negi’s film Daayen ya Baayen (Right or Left), which for all the tedious verbiage that fills our newspapers and magazines about the new space for independently minded (since it's almost all produced out of Bollywood, it's not independently produced often) cinema in India, remains unreleased, and un-promoted on the festival circuit for unclear reasons.

Without a doubt this comic drama is a labour of love and free from a lot of the generic quality that make films from India successful. It's a story in the mode of the droll, angular folksy narrative which is a tradition we haven't lately seen a rendition of, but the relief is in watching a film that does not feel puffed up and stiff with the desire to be seen as "world cinema" or "indie cinema" or whatever label is seen as cool. It's simply the film it wants to be.

What makes the film work - apart from the fact that its funny - is that through its rich local detailing and highly rooted story and characters, it creates a compelling portrait of the universal human desire to dream of utopias, to find in ourselves the best we can be: wise fools who want to love and be loved for the people we are and the poets we can be. In that it's got a clear sense of wanting to talk about some central human experience rather than be a clever description of some context.

The film fills us with a delight rarely found in recent Indian films: the delight of characters whimsical, eccentric, infuriating, flawed and funny in the way dreamers and hopers and no-hopers are.

Daayen ay Baayen is a densely textured tale of a man who returns a bit defeated from the city where he has gone to pursue his dreams, to his idyllic looking village– to his wife’s dismay at this reverse migration, a come down in this world if ever there was one. Indeed we understand her comic dismay compassionately once we pause from chuckling, because what can he do in this beautiful place where sheer rivers gleam, and trees sigh wetly and ghosts sometimes smile on full moon nights - but where a mixture of economy and culture robs men of ambition and possibility so that they sit around playing cards, drinking and farting around, making token plans of going to the city, while women slog.

But Majila, the main character is full of an ebullient optimism to start an arts centre. In pursuit of this slightly elusive dream he influences school kids into writing earnest verse, earns the adoration of his son, the mockery of the villagers– and wins a bright red car in a slogan contest. The car sets off scrutiny and jealousy and perhaps a few wrong turns as Majila loses the way to his dream as all of us do, cast asunder by criticism, ego and the uncertain business of being human with its certain desire to be successful or to prove oneself right maybe. How we finds the way back again is a ride that manages to be both sweetly and darkly comic; he arrives at his end a hero who is very triumphant and a little, just a little, as he says, compromised.

This is not a flawless film - and the screenplay would have benefitted from much stronger structuring, because in its current form there is a slight diffusion of intent, and the film is not always consistent in terms what approach to plot it is choosing - the incremental one or the overtly causal/eventful one. So we might begin to wonder a little half way through where we're headed, a feeling not always offset by the strong sense of where we are. In other words, while each scene is lovely and specific in itself, sometimes the weave is not tight enough.

However, with its very sure mise-en-scene, inspired performances from a mix of Bollywood and local actors as well as amateurs and dialogue full of local sarcasm and humour the film stays with us both with because of its feeling of enjoyment - I found myself chuckling to myself for a couple days after at the though of different shots, or dialogue or character- and its deeply humane view of people. There is a school principal who loves to say "and miles to go before we sleep" as a homily for ending speeches or while giving advice; an old lady, Harduli, who has used her husband's freedom fighter pension to buy a shiny new pair of sneakers for climbing the mountain to get to work and as she tells a villager -"what else do I need but this and a good pack of cigarettes. Indeed she has loaned the money to everyone in the village, because she doesn't really need much else. There's Majila's sister-in-law who is embarrassed by his city jeans, all colorfully patched, and throws them away in the field, toothless men who complain about the government while playing cards, Majila's gift to his wife - a backscratcher for scratching his back and all sorts of little things that we relish while and after watching the film.

The film's accomplishment is that it shows us that not all Indian film entertainment – and it’s entertaining indeed – has to come in a Bollywood costume or with a mediocre, meaningless pretend-social message. I do hope others can see this film soon.

Meet the Parents

2010-08-28T23:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a longer version of the column that appeared in Mid-day on Sunday Aug 29th

MEET THE PARENTS

As a non-parent, it was news to me that the PTA laws had been changed by the government because I did not even know that PTAs were governed by actual state laws. Going through them I’m not sure if I was impressed or alarmed at how much a parent could or should be involved in school activities.

Now, parenting – and especially motherhood – are becoming so hallowed all over again, although in new yummy-mummy bottles - that a non-parent probably has no locus standii to be saying anything at all about this stuff. But I’m going to claim my rights as a former child and current sufferer of the results of all this hot-house parenting to wonder a bit about some things.

The current noise, to recap, is over the fact that the state’s government has scrapped elections to PTAs and these will now be constituted by appointment. Naturally this leads to all sorts of concerns over whether this won’t favour the school managements and leave parents powerless – very valid concerns indeed.

But what are the mutual concerns? Are PTAs essentially a union body – to make sure the school gives parent-child consumers the things they promised? Or do they come together in order to ensure that the school becomes a positive and progressive preparation for public life, which is why we suffer through all that homework and torture from classmates in the first place (oh you didn’t? well, lucky well-adjusted you).

As with many democratic processes, this depends totally on each PTA. Some apparently have gathered to ensure a pension for retired teachers. Others have the usual complaint: most parents are unwilling to volunteer time or take responsibility.

I have a friend whose enthusiasm for attending PTA meetings (given that she routinely tells her kid that he should not take the school too seriously) is a matter of amusement between us. She attends each meeting with an agenda. Some of these things include: more Hindi (since its Delhi) books for the reading period. Good ones, not boring ones which make kids hate the language in comparison to the bright and funny books for kids in English. Of course she also leaves knowing that most of this won’t change because for all that parents want “alternative” education, many also want mainstream success for their kids, eventually.

I may be wrong but it seems there’s a great deal more obsession with parenting – especially mothering – in people of the upper middle classes – amongst people with h the surplus income that allows one partner, usually the woman, to be a full time parent. They send their children to schools and after-school programs that promise to turn out Spanish speaking, ballet dancing, brain gymming, precious wonders in touch with nature and their inner artiste via new teaching methods and air-conditioned classrooms. These experimental schools are often expensive – but good air-conditioning and CCTVs aren’t cheap. And you need good security to keep the kids in and maybe other kids out. Frankly, as a child, this sort of scrutiny would have sent me into permanent depression – I longed at all times to escape everything in the real world of adult anxiety and injustice and retreat to one of my own making - but I accept I’m not the ideal these parents and teachers are aspiring to. Everyone thinks their child has a special someone hidden inside that can be discovered. No child is allowed just to be ordinary then, I guess, at least in a certain class. What is this vision all about?

Is it a vision that the Right to Education Act might be interfering with for some? I quote from a circular that Bangalore’s Bethany High School issued to parents: “Under this Act, all private unaided schools will have to accommodate 25% of their strength of children around the neighbourhood without any screening. This means that any child will have to be allowed into school and share the classroom with your child. Eminent psychologists have said that this will be detrimental to the psyche of all children, yours and the others, and the school has to sit back and admit indiscriminately and cannot refuse admission."

Parents have quickly defended the circular because “it’s not saying underprivileged children will be ill-behaved but that if they happened to be, the school was not empowered to act against them. The school has piously declared it educates 20 children free.

You don’t need school (or parents) to teach you that meanings lurk between lines. The school seems to have a problem affording poor children education as a right but no issue giving it as charity, because charity keeps the power equation clear. The parents are uncomfortable with the idea of poor kids and their kids being in the same class. They are not bad people. But, their goodness prevents them from articulating exactly why they have this problem.

In the meantime, the BMC has asked that all new secondary school spaces should give 50% of their built up area for a municipal school in return for exemption on the FSI of the remaining 50%. This will help implement the Right to Education act apparently, with BMC schools being a sort of visible annexe, sort of like a servants quarters in those nice bungalows in Lutyens’ Delhi.

Today I watched a video of a popular guru giving gyan on parenting – to be a good parent you just need to stop living a distorted life and be the best according to your ideas. Isn’t it cool how he never defined those ideas – spiritual freedom, baby! I’m not a parent, godperson or even an eminent psychologist, but I guess it’ll have to do that I’m a former child: as bad as parents who can’t be bothered, are parents who care so preciously about their own little princes and princesses. They really have to think about all kids a little – and teach their kids to do so too. How else are those kids going to be good parent – or teachers?

Because Spacebar is Strict

2010-08-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

Here is last week's column :) in Mid-day about the price of your soul.

The Modesty of Outrage

2010-08-15T08:58:00.000-07:00

My column which appeared in Mid-day today. I'm not linking to the website because they made a mistake and added a line from Devdutt Pattanaik's column to the end of mine, which sort of creates a misreading of the whole piece!

THE MODESTY OF OUTRAGE

On August 3 Vibhuti Narain Rai resigned from the Jnanpith Selection Committee. Rai, a novelist, former IPS officer and VC of Wardha Hindi University created a brouhaha with his sexist remarks to Naya Gyanodaya magazine, roughly reported in the press as: “women writers in Hindi are in a race to prove who is the greater prostitute” and the entire “feminist discourse has been reduced to one about the body by over-rated, over-promoted women writers.”

The permanently hyperventilating press sought and received counter-remarks, petitions were drafted and Rai resigned. The truth triumphed? I wonder.

The tone of many reactions was strikingly similar to Rai’s own remarks. How dare he insult women writers by calling them prostitutes! If we think this is an insult, then, aren’t we subscribing to the same dessicated notions of purity or respectability we claim to condemn? A famous writer said: “being an IPS officer he is talking like a constable!” So constables are automatically crude, uninformed and jungli, while IPS officers are of a better, er, class? What sort of arguments are these?

VN Rai is not your average bigot. He’s a well-regarded writer, especially for his novel Sheher Mein Curfew, which looks at pro-Hindutva communalization of the police. So, given this, I assume the first thing you’d do is read his original interview, rather than rely on the fragments quoted by our media, world famous though it is for accuracy, sincerity and non-sensationalism. Or wouldn’t you?

If you did, you’d see that his interview is a complex performance of paternalism. On the one hand he acknowledges that a male dominated society, unable to stomach women’s sexual freedom or personal choices, brands them ‘bewafa’ or loose (in fact he uses “chhinal” meaning slut, not prostitute). He defends people’s right to choose their own type of relationships – although he feels gender equality is needed for this to be meaningful. He then uses this argument – of others’ regressiveness – as a reason for women to observe limits and to ‘lift’ feminist writing above trivial matters like sexuality, advocating a trickle down effect of sorts – after 500 years when men are enlightened, women can be completely free. Till then we must be economically and intellectually independent but “dignified”.

This patronising legislation of sexual freedom, couched in claims of feminist concern is the oldest line in the conservative game. Huge energy – from honour killings to beauty codes to ostracism of “slutty” behaviour (anything not Main Tulsi Tera Aangan Ki trademark) – goes into preventing women’s sexual freedom. I wouldn’t say any discussion of pleasure, desire and the female body is trivial in this context. Without rebellions, we’ve seen, there has been no change. Revolution is not a modest business. As for this hierarchy, where matters of “the world” are politically superior to personal life – get over it. Those who would have us behave modestly in return for other rights are certainly not as bad as those who want to slap us for going to a pub, but they are at least second cousins.

But censorship, banning, and shutting people up are ineffectual primitive acts - they stem from outrage and end only in outrage. The real battle is changing the terms of the debate through public discussion.

Sadly where are the spaces for this kind of public debate? Perhaps we will have to create them ourselves. The media, where ideas ought to be worked out with intelligence has reduced itself to a theatre of exclamations in which we have but modest roles of outrage. In the absence of dialogue, we can only display stock postures and loud poses – like we are acting in a silent film about the freedom of expression.

I'm lame like that

2010-08-07T07:36:00.001-07:00

Yeah it's kind of sad, that I have to pretend to update my blog by changing the template - to whom am I pretending? What do you call this sort of lameness? Thanks but that was a rhetorical question...

Anyway, all the un-posted Mid day columns. Along with the resolve that one day soon a post will be only for the blog (to whom am I making these promises. sigh...)

An ode to mmmm-mithun, which has proved to be a v. popular column which shows how much people love him... and that everything is not about being a rich girl with a 2 crore clothes budget or chiknu boys with waxed chests (SRK not included)

And a complaint about said folks who have gone missing

And maybe in New York-London-Tokyo they discuss the weather, but in Bombay we kinda talk about the traffic

And always, but always, about the movies and of course, men :)

Ok that's a month's worth but my excuse must be that I have been working hard and traveling - last to Japan - about which something some day.

This will not happen again (she promises herself).

After all tomorrow's another Sunday.

How to Be an Action Hero

2010-07-06T04:52:00.000-07:00

Mid-day column from last Sunday

and it's still raining, though not stories

2010-06-28T01:55:00.000-07:00

Mid-day column for the last two weeks... it comes to an end soon - and the sub-editor is showing this by giving the last one a title they used for an earlier column already! Perhaps I should ask for that job...

My friend P called up annoyed one day, scolding me for using a word she did not understand (au courant and pulchritude). I felt this was a good way for her to learn new words - but maybe the sub also does not understand some words and feels fed up and decided - yeh tou generally against normalcy type of character hai, so when in doubt let's just title the column Out of the Box.

Anyhoo...

Last Sunday's on Not Having The Number

And the one before on Stories I'd Rather Not Have (or Longing for the Ones I'd Like To)

Meanwhile here in Berlin it is summer.

People have put TV sets out on the pavement and were watching the match on the street with beer in hand.

I was told that if Germany lost the match yesterday, against Englad, there would be big, grown men walking down the streets clutching their heads in despair, gathering in street corners crying.

I was looking forward to it.

Instead they won, and car horns tooted, people walked around hooting and calling out German slogans which I mercifully did not understand, trailing cloaks of German flags. Nicole cringed while I was rather wide eyed and interested. When I said to her, come on, it's not so bad, she said: would you walk around on the streets of India with the Indian flag painted on your face? Hmm??

I was silenced and resumed chopping sweet peppers for the eggs, accepting my womanly position in life, even in sunny Berlin where roses bloom shameless on the streets and men go out on the rampage because "their team" won at football.

Love and Rain

2010-06-13T04:21:00.000-07:00

I used to think writing a column is like a little craft exercise - each time I've written one, I set myself a different writing task and try to keep at it. I find I get good at one thing - but often it becomes a kind of vice, a tic if I'm not careful.

Here are my last three Mid-day Columns

On archiving and film preservation in India

On the AOL "assassination attempt"

And on Love, when it's not turned out as we wanted

Now I realise it is more like being a different part of your personality - as today I went looking for a very old column I wrote for Mumbai Mirror in 2005. One could argue that that's life anyway, trying on a different part of your personality in different phases of your life...anyway the search for the column was prompted by the weather which has been promisingly cloudy but which refuses to rain..

HEAVY CLOUDS BUT NO EGGS

After the exalted sweaty suffering, when it rained last weekend, what could be better than to pile into a rickshaw and head to Sea View on Juhu beach for Sunday Brunch?

The rickshaw is not yet rexin curtain-ready for the rains so I reach with one pant leg wet. But Imran, my friend’s four-year old son, is with us and we are too excited to care. Imran and I have a Bunty and Bubli thing going, as I’ve had to babysit occasionally and due to a complete poverty of wholesome ideas, have resorted to corrupt practices – like film song and dance routines. I say, ok Bunty we’ve reached and he says, ok Bubli, that’s good. We’re a restrained twosome.

Sea View is without contest the best hang out in the suburbs, a verandah café so true to its name it makes you want to call your daughter Lakshmi. Its has the best view of the beach, friendly crows and English breakfasts.

But. No eggs, though it’s 11 a.m. “It’s because of the rains.” I try to solve the zoological riddle here but the waiter takes pity on my foolish expression. “ The eggs come from Dadar no, but first day of rain, so truck is delayed.” When will it reach we ask in dismay? “It has left, that’s what they are saying. Let’s see.” Welcome monsoon. Due to my fear of authority I don’t ask the uniformed waiter why he can’t get some eggs from the kirana shop at the corner for us old customers.

Anyway, driven mad by our hungry fantasies, we greedily order everything but the eggs. We eat quantities of very greasy bacon and very buttery toast and soon enough, feel heartily sick.

The rain stops and the city is a distant spectre in the mist. The clouds paper over the sky and the beach is full of people and vendors roaming around in a timeless light which flattens colours, makes them mute. Even the purple of the yo-yo we buy, with its shocking pink tinsel stars and green plastic cockroach floating inside is subdued.

I am sure as we head home all sticky, that the egg truck will have just crossed us. No matter. On Monday morning I call the Jain kirana store and order one dozen baida – they don’t keep but they will get – like good Bombay shopkeepers. I hang the yo-yo from a dead plant on my window-sill where it wobbles like a bad dancer in the wind. Monday sounds drift up - the 7 a.m., 1 p.m and 4 p.m Jana Gana Mana of three mournful shifts of students on the first day of school.

For some the rain brings homework; for some, fried eggs.

Continuing Paro-normalcy

2010-05-23T05:26:00.000-07:00

My column today on burqua brouhahahas

http://www.mid-day.com/opinion/2010/may/230510-paromita-vohra-burqha-ban-france-islamic-women.htm

And last week on discussions about politics

http://www.mid-day.com/opinion/2010/may/160510-opinion-political-thoughts-naxalites-democracy-paromita-vohra.htm

They persist in giving the dullest titles to the pieces - I'd like to think of good ones myself but mostly I'm just frantically screeching to a deadline.

And anyway I'm sure they'd change it instantly from my frivolous ones to these extremely NCERT type ones.

It's a losing game - if you write about political ideas (because it's not about politics as such the column) then people immediately become solemn and stodgy - and here you are trying to mix it up some and hoping to re-invest the discussion with some energy in your modest way.

Maybe I'm delusional and the title writer is right. In which case it's a good thing I only have another 7 columns to go before we're done...

paro-normal Activity - 2

2010-05-01T22:28:00.001-07:00

The bad thing about writing a column - you're constantly stressed out about what you'll write about.

The good thing - you don' t have to be stressed about updating your blog. You can just link to

This week's column

Last week's column

It's a good thing they rename the columns as the last one (now called Out of the Box) was formerly called Sex Sex Sex. It's my impression that columnists do not have to be like, imaginative.

Paro-normal Activity - 1

2010-04-19T20:19:00.000-07:00

I've started writing a column in Sunday Mid-day. It's weekly. My flirtation with commitment you could say. It's a general opinion column so can be about anything.

Here's the first one, appeared Sunday April 18 and it's sort of about

Love and Justice

dil toot gaya deewana - so let's do the twist

2010-02-20T11:59:00.000-08:00

My grandparents were both in the movies - but very differently. While my grandfather was very famous and is still remembered as an important part of film history, my grandmother is not someone people know of, nor did she do anything that anyone felt must definitely be noted. To a certain extent not even her own family.

She acted in some films until the early 40s and subsequently became a producer, making about 6 films, the last in the 60s.

By the time I came on the scene, she was just my somewhat glamorous and unconventional grandmother who had a cupboard full of wonderful saris and a painted tin box full of internationally acquired handkerchiefs - but more on that cupboard some other time. She played cards each afternoon, and the glowing colours of her plastic counters: pomegranate juice red, emerald green, the yellow of dal barfi, numbers written on them like varq on barfi in fact, seemed to be part of her very kaleidoscopic presence. Other ladies would come to play cards too - producer's wives or mistresses, all in wafting saris, waves of perfume surrounding them like a mysterious force field of adulthood. This was a serious affair, performed every afternoon with ceremony and punctuality.

Perhaps this is why I thought this was my grandmum's work and the counters translated directly into the treasure of loose change that sat on a silver thali in her cupboard (which I freely stole for purposes like buying ber and renting Richie Rich comics from Sarvodya which was in those days just a little lending library on the side of the shop which is today its DVD empire)

It did not occur to me that there may have been another life - why would it? When you are five you don't really question how things are, unless they aren't the way they are in your house! As a result I never asked much about her past and the things she'd done. Now it's not so easy to try and understand what the things she did meant to her precisely, nor to see their context or their impact on the context

I periodically try to find things about her online - searches rarely turn up much. In fact often if I google her name I get tons of hits for my grandfather. She is not known for anything historic - not even for being his wife, as they separated when my mum was 9. Her company Variety Pictures - I wonder whether it's still registered - who owns the rights to the films, where the prints are...was just one of many companies I suppose.

And then tonight, one of those nights when I can't sleep because I have so much to do but feel too paralysed to do it, I did a random search and found a song from a movie Nani produced: Shreeman Funtoosh. Apparently my mum and her cohorts (all kids in the family) would be shown the films on completion as a home grown market research method, to gauge potential audience response - the char anna class as they said. On seeing this supposedly science fiction narrative, they assertively declared that this was jolly good film that was going to be a jolly big hit. It not only bombed, it bankrupted my grandmother and she did not produce a film again.

However one song in the film was a big hit - yeh dard bhara afsana. It came often on Vividh Bharati - especially on Bela ke Phool and Bhoole Bisre Geet type programs. I was shocked to discover some time later that it was ACTUALLY from a film of Nani's. I mean, it seemed too seriously out there in the world, somehow indicating that the ordinary routines of the house - where my grandmother drank whisky and ordered about 8 things to be cooked for each meal, and I lay about reading comics, were not as reassuringly solid, definitely not the only reality there was. As if she could turn around and say "I could have been a contender."

However, this is not what she said. Rather, everytime the song played my grandmother would snort and say - there's that 64,000 rupee song (that was the budget of the film).

The song picturisation itself I believe is quite impressive. To declare heartbreak while all who are around you do the twist, other than showing panache, suddenly highlights the basically stoical nature of this particular dance form. It is worth each one of those 64,000 rupees to me, even if these are only presented to me in jewel coloured card counters.

It won't upload but you can watch it here:

Yeh Dard Bhara Afsana Where Everyone Does a Stately Twist

web-sighted

2010-01-19T01:07:00.000-08:00

After a saga and a half and rather too much fullness of time, finally, a website is up. I have no idea why it does not show up in Google searches, but it doesn't. Does anyone know why? I mean it's been up for a couple weeks already. Anyway, here it is:

http://parodevi.com/

Times change alright....

injured

2009-12-27T06:25:00.000-08:00

I have a story in the Tehelka fiction issue on the stands now - in case anyone feels like reading.It has 12 stories all around the theme of injury. It can be read here - but it's always nice to actually buy and read the 12 stories at leisure, in trains, in the loo or on the verandah or in bed or wherever you do these private things.

Open Review: Sagira Begum

2009-12-12T03:12:00.000-08:00

I've been doing reviews of documentaries for the website of Open magazine occasionally.

Here is a review of a film I really love - Sagira Begum, by my friend Sameera Jain.

More reviews either by myself or Sanjay Kak are here.

who so hunts to list

2009-11-16T06:47:00.000-08:00

"If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot. "

So says Umberto Eco in this interesting interview about how lists are the stuff of culture.

(Nice decor huh?)

I remember sitting, rather hungover, with a musician friend at Sea View in the early morning, and feeling a ching of recognition through the haze as he said this thing that a lot of Indian traditional culture is made up of lists - a list of kisses (Kama Sutra), a list of the types of relationships there can be between lovers (Gita Govinda - I think he said), and so on.

The idea of an EDL, a film's edit, as a list of images perhaps comes very close to this idea and reminds us, to make that list with care.

In every day life my propensity for lists has been talked about earlier, here.

I often feel that if I make the list in the wrong order I never get through it and if I make it the right way then it orders my day. Perhaps that's just an excuse but I would like to check with Mr. Eco first please, thank you.

And here's a listing song I love

In some ways, the words of this song (we may never never meet again, on the bumpy road of love) circle back to something Eco says in his interview

"We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die."

The Lost Bits

2009-11-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

If my dad were alive today he'd be irritated with me - always waiting till the 11th hour! he'd expostulate - why can't you do things on time? If you had to write me a birthday post why wait till the last hour of my birthday?

And I'd be saying - but Papu I had to do that other thing - and I scanned the picture earlier and..

And he'd say - always excuses, dash it! Koi system nahin hai!

And I'd say - that's not true! System hai. And it is being done before your birthday is over na!

And he'd say - don't teach your grandmother how to suck eggs.

And I'd feel like laughing but wouldn't dare.

Every year on my dad's birthday I miss him more than other days - that's natural.

But I feel it more - or differently - when it's the Sunday before his birthday and I see the horoscopes for those whose birthday falls in the coming week. It's a reminder that there isn't something to look forward to. I think about reading the paragraph under Scorpio out to him when he was alive. Us interpreting those tantalisingly suggestive horoscopes trying to fit them into the reality, a shadow jigsaw puzzle. Three years after he died these thoughts are still very hard to think without tears and pain.

Although other thoughts - seeing him as a person, and not just as my dad, filter in and they are more difficult to categorise.

What does death do to the person who dies? We have no idea.

But it makes other people claim the person who has gone. Sometimes to erase uneasy memories, sometimes to make up self-aggrandising memories. After all the dead person is no longer there to contradict us. We can remake their life, their relationship with us, and through it, our own story in the world maybe.

Earlier I used to feel angry at that - feel contempt at the falsely bandied intimacies. But now I sometimes think, what other way do we, who have only known life, have to understand something as remote and befuddling as death? Our only paradigm is life. And with all the pettiness and generosity that involves, we use it to make sense of the most absolute of losses.

I find the task of recovering my father as a person difficult - as difficult as perhaps it must have been in life.

I remember one summer holiday in Gandhidham, where my dad worked for a while, in a desperate search for things to read (G'dham was a total cultural desert with no bookstores or libraries), I asked my dad for keys to some old trunks and looked through the one that had books it in.

I was mystified by the books I found. For me, my dad was someone who read India Today. I'd rarely seen him with a book. But in that box I found some sort of esoteric poetry, a copy of The Origin of Species, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire in a silver coloured, multi-volume box set, Henry Miller, Harold Robbins, T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party in an edition that had martini glasses with faces on them, Peyton Place, John Steinbeck - all sorts of books, many with his name on the flyleaf - Ravi Karan Vohra or Ravi Vohra or RK Vohra, in my dad's stylised signature, looking less cooked than I knew it, as perhaps a young man's signature might. A signature still wet around the ears.

I sat for a while in the room full of trunks trying to imagine what kind of person my dad must have been who bought and read all these books. After a while I gave up - it was too hard to imagine him in any other way than the way I knew him. I took the books I wanted and locked up the rest.

Now, I wonder, if I were to look through his old things, his collection of pipes, his boxes full of Venus HB1 pencils (in the days when pencils had as many names as US visas) which he used for his navigation work I guess and got extremely irritated with me for stealing to take to school, his old letters - letters he wrote, letters people wrote him - I would find a little bit of someone I knew but a lot of someone I didn't. I could learn to love that person in absentia - that person after all had always been in absentia, since I didn't know that part of my father - but I could join him to the person I loved and expand my love to fit. Perhaps in death I could turn the paradigm of loving my father into the paradigm about knowing my father before he was my father and forging some odd relationship with it.

When we know someone, we know them only in terms of what they are to us. To be known as full people, perhaps they have to leave us?

The other thing about my dad that I had always known as part of him was that he had only one eye. He'd lost the other in the '65 war. To me that was never odd. My dad didn't just drive, he flew planes as a navigator, his missing eye did not really seem to come in the way. The only thing that underlined its absence was that every now and then my dad would be lying down with tears running down the side of his face. I remember the first time I saw them and was alarmed - until I realised that this was Albucid eye drops that he sometimes used. Later I learnt, fearfully, to put them in his eye for him. Although this meant he experienced discomfort, it was all done in a normal sort of way. I remember being perplexed when a little girl who visited got scared of him because of his bad eye - what was scary about it? It was my dad - who was very non-scary and a bit of a cutie pie, no? We never thought twice about it.

Did he?

He must have. What would it have been for a young person to suddenly lose one eye? Not just the functional loss, but the feeling that your face has somehow been marred? I can't know now. I know that he was generally a positive and very diligent person and he taught himself to overcome the handicap. I didn't realise that was why my dad, who'd been a swimming champ in college, did not swim, because the chlorine in pools bothered him. I just sort of took all these things to be a part of him without querying their origins.

He did think about it over the years because in many photographs he sort of looked down, not quite at camera, but at an angle away fro mit- although in life he looked people fully in the eye.

So many things a person holds inside them - letting them flow only in controlled rivulets to certain people and not to others. So many little bits of them that flow away from them as life takes its course.

So, in his memory, a picture I found of him before he lost his eye, and maybe some other parts of himself - before I was a gleam in his eye, before he knew me or my little sister, before I knew him, before he was our dad - when he was just Ravi Karan Vohra, trying on a signature for style.

And pictures of him looking right at you as he used to do in life.
MA AND PA AT AN AIR FORCE 'HUSBAND'S NIGHT' - THEME - SHAM-E-AVADH
AND ON A BIRTHDAY - I THINK MA'S - WHERE I AM DRESSED IN SOMETHING HE MUST HAVE SURELY FOUND DISTRESSING (AS USUAL)

Last year's birthday post.

festival seasons from other worlds

2009-10-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the government's inimitable way of reminding filmmakers that you can't have your torte and eat it too (no matter what the signs say) (and not to be confused with tort). It's art or commerce baby; success or goodness.

Unless of course you go to another kind of festival altogether and get some special boons

Electric Plug

2009-09-17T04:23:00.000-07:00

Electric Feather, an anthology of contemporary Indian erotica finally launched last week. It's been a while in the coming (the best things in life take their time). And since the last public erotic feather was in Mughal-e-Azam, I'd say about damn time!

I have a story in it and I'm suddenly wondering how people will respond. When I give the book to someone, sometimes I want to take it back.

Not because I have any issues writing about sex. In fact I was more or less willing to read a rather explicit passage in my story which features a starfish simile I'm kinda proud of.

But suddenly I'm coming to realise how few freely admit to fantasy and pleasure, how many are a bit squirmy about it and also, I begin to wonder how does this squirminess play out in one's more formal, professional relationships? I'm wondering if people will read, maybe even like, but hesitate to say anything because of their sense of propriety or privacy or prudishness - or need to wrinkle their noses in a camouflaging manner - as if to indicate that they aren't prudish, but isn't all this a bit, well, silly, not an enterprise to be considered? Or how may jokes about "aha, you have become a pornographer" are jokes of camaraderie and how many the camouflage that won't actually take the enterprise seriously because they find it so discomfiting.

But of course in the end, the reason you put yourself out there is to try and change something - shrug the awkwardness away by suggestion so to say.

Well, we'll see! As long as they like though, maybe it don't matter. But in a country where the most natural of things - our bodies, their smells, sensations, pleasures and peculiarities are being lost to guilt, shame and a strangely plastic, technological idea of beauty and sensuality I think it's time to read this stuff and talk about ple-aiyer at lei-aiyer as we Punjabis would say. Or talk about it loudly in libraries.

It's a pretty good collection - many styles, many ideas about/of eroticism and sex and lots of really good writing.

The editor is my friend Ruchir Joshi and it's half the reason I'm pleased too - I like doing things as part of a community and I'm happy that ongoing, tangential conversations turn into projects with and for friends sometimes.

Here's a link to his intro to the book.

Here's a review

And another

Go forth and ravish it, peoples. Salim and Anarkali would so approve.

What is Time?

2009-08-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

I am going away for a few days. Dutifully I tell my fellow scrabble addicted friends on facebook.

Where you going? One asks.
Goa.
Oh! Socegad! She says.
Don’t be so stereotyping I say. Besides, I’m going for work.

I am in Goa for a workshop. But I also have a big deadline I need email to help me reach. The hotel is supposed to provide internet to the workshop office. A few times a day I go I go up and ask hopefully: is there internet?
I get resigned looks. Wait they say, it’s coming the hotel people said.
I also sit down, and get that hanging about haplessly body language.

A hotel employee comes up. Internet is not working aan?
No.

He walks around looking intent, but gingerly, not touching a switch or cable. He hovers above the router looking at it with the blank concern of a nephew who is visiting an aunt he has never heard of before under duress and is actually thinking of the cricket match while he waits for the visit to end.

Ok, he says and leaves, never to return.

Desperate, after a day I leave the premises in search of a cyber café.
The reception tells me, ya, it’s here only.

But sterotypes or not, I’ve heard that one before, so I advance warily looking for someone on the street to ask. But there is only the sun-baked road and a dusty Tata Safari, black.

I spy one of the firangi volunteers returning from somewhere, also with hapless body language.

Know where the cybercafe is? I ask.

It’s here. But they’re all closed for the off-season she says woefully.

How can that be? I say, with a superior laugh.
I also said that, but they said nothing’s open.

I control panic rising in my throat.

I am a documentary filmmaker. I know to turn loaves and fish into po’boys. I can wring blood from a stone. I can find a cybercafe.

I do.

Sitting in the 60 rupees an hour (what would it be in season?), deliciously cool, iWay with its apostrophe shaped cubicles I do my email and tell my colleague I’ll check for his responses at night.

I ask the girl: till when are you open at night
Girl: Till 10.30 we are open
Me: Oh, ok, great!
G: But today we’ll close 5.30
PV: Oh! So you won’t be open tonight then
G: No, night, we’ll be open till 10.30
PV: OK, so what time will you open in the evening?
G: We’ll close 5.30
PV (now feeling frazzled but acting calm): Ya but you’ll open again na? You’re saying you will be open till 10.30
G: Ya, we are open 10.30 till
PV: Right, but not today.
G (with completely ambiguous intonation): Ya
PV: Ya, open till 10.30 or ya, not today?
G: At 5.30 we’ll close.
PV: Right, so you won’t be open till 10.30
G: We close at 10.30

What should PV do now? She should shut up. But does she? No, our heroine, her redoubtable Punjabi genes fully awakened, thinks.

PV (craftily): Today you’ll close at 5.30, right?
G: Ya
PV(to herself – aha!):So when you close at 5.30, after that what time will you come back and open it in the evening (phew, covered all angles) before closing it at night
G: Don't know

Beat
Beat
Beat

PV(defeated): What time do you open in the morning
G(airily): 9.30
PV (meekly): Ok, thank you

Well, at least I wasn’t asking her for directions. Stereotypes or not!

But not all conversations in Goa were so dead-ended. Some opened up like a box and starlings shot out.

here's looking at you kid

2009-08-07T02:30:00.000-07:00

If ever a writer had a drawl it is Mohammad Hanif. Whether it was the utterly fantastic, bitterly funny A Case of Exploding Mangoes or this piece on moving back to Pakistan, I always see the narrator leaning against the door frame, a cigarette in his mouth, drawling out the lines, the indolence masking the irreverence.

Although we've received it more commonly through American pop culture, this dry drawling style does of course exist as a tradition in the sardonic rhythms of parts of South Asia, in the erudite, ironic observations of litterateurs...

It is a glamour-evoking fabulousness indeed as styles go.

Walking along the Karachi seafront after returning from London, I worked myself into a self-righteous rage at these young women in black burkas hanging out at the beach when they should have been at school or in some mosque praying for our collective salvation. But then I looked closely and found out that many of them were on a date. Some were actually making out, in broad daylight, with men with beards. Covered from head to toe in a black robe, this is quite a spectacle – and provides just the right combination of challenge and opportunity. Walking on the beach with my wife the other day, we stared at a couple who were exploring the full possibilities of the burka, using their motorcycle to lean against. With the Arabian sea lapping at their feet.

At the other end of the fashion spectrum, nattily dressed fashionistas on TV have started mixing piety with plunging necklines. (We have two 24/7 fashion channels. Also three food channels and, at the last count, five religious channels.) They talk about their last shopping trip to Dubai by pouting "masha'Allah" (God willed it) and conclude their plans for next season's collection with "insha'Allah" (if God wills). Depending on what else is happening in the name of religion on that particular day on the news channels (23 and still counting), I find it either very cute or another precursor to the destruction of our civilisation as foretold by the leading magazines.

The Other Bhabhi imparts a moral lesson for all girls

2009-08-02T06:36:00.000-07:00

While Savita bhabhi may not be able to bestow her largesse on the world for the time being, the other bhabhi who is such a shining light in my firmament has returned after a long absence in the papers although I did scour everything for news of her on Sanju bhaiya's 50th birthday.

It's not a very specatcular resurfacing, but it is a reliable one.

Ah Manyata! If only she had been my bhabhi during the boards I would have topped - even in Maths!

If only she had taught me some lessons in youth, I would have avoided many a bitter romantic season instead of haring off here and there to pursue my goals, desires and other icky feminist things- Stand By Your Man!

Manyata pushes Sanju to work, work, work

Shahanaz my dingbat aunt has taken it upon herself to make me a star wife. It has suddenly become her life’s aim to marry me off to some filmi type so that the both of us can become red carpet regulars, schmoozing with the stars while her kitty gang begs her to get introduced to Shahrukh, Hrithik, Salman... She’s finally gone loco I tell you, as she is convinced the most stable marriages take place in Bollywood. To be fair to the old bat, she isn’t tripping on prescription medication, but has discovered a brand new trend in movie-land, thanks to the travel agent we share. Emraan pampering Parveen is not a rare occurrence in B’wood, even Sanjay Dutt is interested on spending quality time with wifey. He is planning a long holiday with Manyata to the US. But Manyata isn’t happy! Some women I tell you. She’s been egging him on to concentrate on his work and not divert his attention again.

Can’t blame her, says my mum. Because after his brief political stint ended, Sanju is seeing some of the best days of his film career, despite the failure of Luck. He has Ajay Devgan’s All the Best, Blue and Rahul Dholakia’s Lamha to look forward to. And of course, there’s Munnabhai Chale America too. So Manyata and his close friends, we hear, are keen that Sanju capitalises on the movies he has right now and signs on a few more. In fact Manyata has approved a few films for Dutt, while he just wants to holiday with her and is busy trying to convince her to chill.

She though ain’t interested. She takes her role, as the driving force behind him, very seriously and is pushing him to work much harder. She has agreed to holiday with him once Munnabhai goes on the floor next year and the shoot commences in, where else but, America.

Smart move, no? If heroines have pushy mothers, then our heroes have their wives.

I confess - whenever I read a piece I start writing Manyata bhabhi's dialogue in my head - dekhiye aap meri mat sochiye Sanjubaba-ji. Main chahti hoon ki aap kamyabi ki unchayee ko choomen - mujhe tho aap kabhi bhi choom sakte hain. Jab hamara ek nanha munna baba hoga usse kitna fakr hoga ki uske baba kitne layak actor hain. Mujhe aur kuchh nahin chahiye. Main aapke aangan ki tulsi banke rehna chahti hoon.

Melting and masculine Sanju baba heads off to another hard day of shooting.

As Manyata bhabhi has said in the past - she has more identity as Sanju baba's wife than any feminist can hope for.

Here is the smell of blood still... Who said that?!! How dare you???!!!

Manyata bhabhi aage badho hum tumhare saath hain.

and then, maybe sex is the revolution

2009-07-30T23:59:00.000-07:00

Porn comic stars don't die they just become speech bubbles I guess.

Shor Bazaar, a band from Bombay has written a song about Savita Bhabhi which most have read about but all may not so diligently gone to look for on the day of release as I did.

For those of you more gainfully employed than I, my middle name is happy-to-serve - it is HERE

Is it great stuff ? Well the comic was punchier and funnier and struck the right ingenuous tone- this song isn't really spark-y and it loses it's opportunity to use the small thing to talk about the big thing, to somehow combine pleasure and comment - but, it's trying at least and it wants to be fun. And it's local produce people. So I'll take it for now.

waiting for a revolution (just a small one yaar)

2009-07-28T21:28:00.000-07:00

People often say military rule will straighten everything out. And us liberals always of course fight with them - as we should.

But sometimes I feel like imposing military rule only on the entertainment business - because look what it did for Pakistan, man!

Thanks to a friend I've been watching a show called Coke Studio - which is a sort of Unplugged or Studio Sessions type show with Pakistani bands/musicians. Some of the stuff is super fabulous and I felt frustrated again that in a country the size of India we rarely have - or come across - anything particularly exciting in the world of pop music.

The normal response to that is that film music is our popular music. But I don't know - over time it has, like so much else, become so homegenised that although we hear a few good songs, they are all so similiar. Of course there are exceptions but just look - it's a country of over a billion people and so many languages and seemingly so little. A lot of singers in the film industries are really skilled singers - but with the exception of Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and to a lesser (much lesser actually) extent Dev D - haven't heard stuff that feels individual. There must be artists around the country but they don't seem to come to widespread attention.

I HAVE been listening to a lot of older Punjabi pop music lately and I think there's much more life and excitement and observational detail there, irreverence also - but Punjabi pop too has become so numbingly same now, you can get up and dance, but you're unlikely to really listen to much of the stuff (although again, many singers are very skilled).

There are so many singing contests on TV - but nothing that encourages originality of music and even HIGH individuality of performance. The need to stay in a dunlop-y comfort zone seems so strong. The obedience of it all!

It's a familiar grouse of course - that alternative culture, or commitedly independent world, doesn't seem to gain much traction in India. Everything gets sucked up into Bollywood in the end. But people need to think! What'll they do when Gulzar dies?!

I tried to watch some episodes of Launch Pad but I can't say it did a lot for me. The winners, Fardikot, can be listened to here

http://www.faridkotonline.in/audio

For me, it's a bit ho-hum - I'm hoping they can parlay their talents into something more unique or at least ringing with truth.

I know there's a few good bands like Soulmate for instance. I still am interested in whatever Rabbi does next - I've liked both his albums.
Perhaps I need to look harder - so if you know ways to correct me and inform me, please please do.

Meanwhile three tracks I really liked on the Season 2 of Coke Studio

This is supposed to be Pakistan's first girl band - two Pathan girls from a services background (oh that military motif) although they studied in the US. The song is in Dari and Pashto apparently and means - Bring me the glass that I may lose myself/I am in love with the intoxication of my beloved's eyes.

This collaboration also worked for me

I loved it when they guy from Noori sings Jo na jaane Haq ki Taaqat/Rab na deve usko Himmat/ Hum mun ki dariya mein doobe/Kaisi naiya, kya manjhdaar?

I'm trying to think of an Indian pop song recently that even casually has a thought like that in it - the declaration that everything is not cleverness and carefulness.

And this song many in India know - since Fuzon's album was very successful here and the Kagaz ke Phool type music video featuring Mr. Hotness, Shan played a fair bit on the music channels. But this version is lovely...

Of course there are those who'll say I am just blinded by the beauty of these boys. Who am I to contradict you?

On and by the way, for the sincere who happen to read this - I don't believe in military rule. It's an expostulation, not a recommendation.

The true meaning of romance

2009-07-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

Love, See us Into a Hall of Mirrors

2009-07-05T05:57:00.000-07:00

I have a piece in the Outlook's annual Bollywood special - which I'd love some feedback on. The theme this year is romance.

It's called Love, See Us Into a Hall of Mirrors

Writing in something like Outlook is a bit scary because you know anyone, anywhere in the country could read it. Or at least it is now - because I wrote a piece last year and at that time I didn't think too much about it. Only after it came out did I realise how many people read Outlook - I mean felt aware of it actually instead of in some abstract corner of my brain.

For a couple years I wrote a column for the Mumbai Mirror. Since those were my years of not taking the Times of India I never actually saw the column in print. As a result I wrote it with a peculiar sense of freedom - I had no sense of it being read by all and sundry and so, no fear of the inevitable shame and scorn that I otherwise live in constant dread of. Then I switched papers. Guess what I don't write anymore? Of course the nice girl whose horrible job it was to pester me for the column will laugh bitterly at this - all freelance writers are slackers trying to glorify their ineptitude and inconsideration she will say. They should try having a job or something, she will say. Maybe she's right. But then, who'd give me a job? And that depressing question should effectively keep me in a state of writer's block for another week. Ah well.

Here's last year's piece too, just to prove to her that I behave responsibly every now and then-the theme then was Stardom.

idhar udhar

2009-06-01T01:40:00.001-07:00

I've always been ambivalent about blogging, about it's potential to make people take themselves too seriously, about everything in life becoming peformative, about the silent spaces being taken up by more noise.

The generally trivial nature of this blog is a sort of testimony or response to that.

Then Karan Bali expertly makes me agree to blog on upperstall. I feel that I must take other people seriously, I struggle to be serious therefore to write sensible things.

The resulting contradictions end up paralysing me. I hardly update this blog - three months after going to Mexico not a single picture uploaded yet. I hardly update that one - as I'm often sternly reminded.

What to do? I find it hard to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds.

choli ke peechhe kya hai!

2009-05-19T04:11:00.000-07:00

Not exactly a case of saare bandhan todke dekho behnen aati hain but a victory against the forces that stigmatise the traditionally built nevertheless.. the link is too good to camouflage

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1178499/BRA-VO-Victory-women-Mail-M-S-axes-big-bust-surcharge.html

Becky didi aage badho, hum tumhare saath hain!

Thanks to Nandini R for emailing with this breaking news :)

The Other Song - Vikalp screening @ Alliance

2009-05-12T23:07:00.001-07:00

Vikalp is trying out a screening space in collaboration with Alliance Francaise at their auditorium.

We're flagging off with a screening of Saba Dewan's new documentary of tawaifs. It's called The Other Song and is at 6.30, Friday, May 15.

More details are at:

http://screeningspace.blogspot.com/2009/05/vikalp-archive-screening-other-song-by.html

Do come and let people know.

just an old recurring irritation

2009-04-28T00:49:00.000-07:00

My constantly cool friend Bishakha Datta has interviewed Nisha Susan for Tank magazine.

Do read.

I was most intrigued by how many progressives made false case against the Pink Chaddi campaign. I wasn' t in the country at the time so at first when I read about it I thought only, right on! But then when I read these spurious articles, I wondered for a second or two.

In the end I have to say the secular elites are always trying to maintain their own well-to-do activism and creating a discrimination of classiness and class (conflated in the term "dignified") in which there is no "vulgarity."

Why? Don't they know vulgarity means of the people? Sort of anyway.

Anger is vulgar, sex is vulgar, wanting more is vulgar.

The feminine/feminist is always getting corsetted. No sex, no anger, only beatitude.

Do we wonder then that women enthusiastically join up right wing groups which allow them to be angry? Because at least they allow them to be angry against others although of course never against the guys who deserve it in the first place.

Someone started a group against the Ram Sene lot called The Kamasutra Day -A truly Indian Cultural Event which seems to mostly have the goal of not celebrating sex. To the impassioned questions from many, including yours truly, about why not celebrate sex, there was only a pure silence.

People never say an angry man doesn't have a lust for life. But angry women are supposedly incapable of enjoying life's finer things.

I'd sure like someone to do a project on the wives/girlfriends/boyfriends of these angry man figures. Jaya Bacchan could explain her toxic expression to us in some other context then, maybe.

I've been having a lot of encounters with men in mainstream films lately. All of them want to make films in which women are not vulgar, but, pure. Talkative maybe, like Geet. That's the only excess they're allowed -a childlike excess.

A director I once wrote for said to me on reading a scene in which the heroine tells the hero her name - my god, if she tells him her name on the first meeting, he'll think she's a slut!

Yeah? In which case she'll think he's an asshole. Which I guess is ok as long as she doesn't say so.

A relative of mine, after 15 years, did say it though. However, it had taken her 15 years to even think the thought, and then, finally, hesitantly, speak it. The other night as we chatted she contemplated sending her not-yet-ex a pink chaddi.

No wonder they don't want the ladies to be angry. And what's more, this way they can keep the anger for themselves those glamorous revolutionary men and the less glamorous wife abusers.

Macbeth: The Sequel - or, Hamari Bahu Maanyata

2009-04-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

From today's Bombay Times, my favourite clever lady keeps writing scene after brilliant scene of her sparkling script. Kindly note:

"I love to make a cup of tea for him when he comes home. Or just listen to him tell me about his day. I’ve more of an identity than a lot of women do with their so-called individuality."

I want Trishala to come back: Maanyata

"If you thought Maanyata Dutt had retired in a sulk and was licking her wounds after being “denied” the opportunity to contest the Lucknowparliamentary constituency election in husband Sanjay Dutt’s place, think again. The spunky woman has put politics out of her mind and is thinking in terms of building up her family instead.

“I’m 30, my husband is almost 50, if we don’t have a baby now it will only get more difficult. We’re trying very hard to become parents,” she admitted. “Once I’m a mother I will have no more ambitions left. If this means being in my husband’s shadow, then so be it. I’m happy being Mrs Sanjay Dutt. I love to make a cup of tea for him when he comes home. Or just listen to him tell me about his day. I’ve more of an identity than a lot of women do with their so-called individuality.”

There’s more to this family dream of Maanyata’s. She’s keen on getting Sanjay’s daughter Trishala, who is studying in the US, back home to them. Not to be her step-mother, naturally. “I’m more like her friend,” Maanyata said. “There’s a difference of just six years between us. I’d love to bring her to our home after she finishes her studies. The family will be complete then.”

Whether Trishala, who is staying with her maternal grandparents in the US, thinks along the same lines is doubtful. She had expressed her reservations when her father took Maanyata for his bride against family wishes two years ago. But, since then, it is believed Maanyata has worked on breaking the ice with the headstrong young Dutt girl."

After this what? Trishala comes back and goes into murderous quandaries, subverts Hamlet?

Or maybe something more realistic - Maanyata gets her own cookery show.

I'm wondering if I should send SRK a slice of the focaccia I've been making? Would it win his heart over for me? Or any other part? Which will also chalega.

Of course I will send a picture which does not reveal that I have symmetrically consumed some of it already.

Lapsing into Seriousness

2009-03-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

So, to not be flippant in these parts for a change...

I have an essay in an online magazine called Phalanx which is here

I've been kvetching for a long time about how, while there is an increasingly sophisticated discussion about mainstream art and politics, the space to discuss the alternative seems to be amorphous at best. Blogs about books and literature are an exception - to an extent only though.

So it's quite nice that there are some initiatives that are serious about this other space - like Pratilipi for example, which has been running a series on the Indian documentary along with various pieces on other arts.

After all without a serious, vibrant critical culture, how are we going to make better work?

Arms and the Man (or dinga dinga dinga dinga dee)

2009-03-10T23:58:00.000-07:00

Well, when The Man wants to sell Arms he too must advertise - and use all the predictable gender tropes advertisers are accused of, keeping textual analysis academic types in ecstasy for at least a year.

I got this in the email from my friend Sanjay Kak, as a Holi greeting. You cannot fault it for not having colour.

And read more from those who think it deserves an award.

F-words, F-thoughts

2009-03-08T00:57:00.000-08:00

March 8 is women’s day.

I didn’t know this till maybe 1990 when I started working for a documentary filmmaker and through the political activist friends I made in that context, went along to a Women’s Day celebration. I was embarrassed that I didn’t know about it, even though I considered myself a feminist ever since I knew the term. For them all it seemed like such obvious knowledge, 15 August – Independence Day; 2nd October – Gandhi Jayanti, 8 March – International Women’s Day.

But how could I have known? It was not a National Holiday as it had been declared say, in Soviet Russia in 1965. It wasn’t common knowledge, a popular event, in the papers like say Nov. 2nd is (Shahrukh Khan’s birthday – you mean you didn’t know?!). I don’t remember it being observed even in my rather feminist English lit. department in Miranda House (I’m sure they considered it frivolous – or maybe they considered us frivolous and didn’t bother to tell us only).

Now look what a long way we’ve come baby.

Today’s papers are not ignoring women’s day.

Coming out smelling of roses, are DNA and surprise, surprise, the Times of India.
A main lead about a survey that shows economic change does not necessarily make for cultural/political change. 53% of women answered the question – Who should decide what a woman can/can’t do as evening entertainment with: Parents/Husband. There are various other depressing findings in the survey. But what I like about the piece is the title: Women’s lib? It’s a long way off. I like it because it implies women’s lib (although hopefully with a less retro name) is desirable and that’s as close to mentioning the F-thought as anyone gets in the papers today – since they can’t possibly say the F-word, we have to glean the F-thought.

Moreover, they have stories on the inside pages about women and HIV and in the rather standard women breaking barriers section which featured women behind the camera in film work and women entrepreneurs – but more interstingly, a Western Railway clerk who teaches a music class on the local train.

DNA’s lead story on a survey that shows how a male-ordered work environment is crippling women’s psyches and also had stories inside on rallies women can go to, little activist things they can do, along with the usual women achiever things. More interestingly I liked that they tried to ask some questions that were philosophical in nature – Are women power phobic? for instance or looking at how male competitive and hierarchical behaviours may not be the only way to succeed, and sometimes is the opposite as well as some stuff on bad-girl rockers and women and alcohol addiction. All in all I felt the attitude of the DNA issue was a little more interested in socio-cultural structures and tried to understand some experience for women in that context rather than just assume some falsely rah-rah tone.

I’m not of course saying that these articles were great pieces of feminist work. DNA’s recommendation of what men can do for women was fully lame (make her breakfast in bed. Why? Is it her birthday? Why not, go to a rally with her?). But at least for the most their articles were were based on a genuine, earnest approach to feminism, or as they like to call it, women’s experience. If someone at least raises some good question, maybe we can try coming up with better answers.

As always the press seems possessed of a kind of Hindi movie style lakwa mar gaya problem when it comes to finding stories of interesting independent or politically committed work. In their special section the only social activist they managed to muster up was someone from Sewa.

Please yaar. Uth jaag meri behna for crap’s sake.

Meanwhile the Indian Express, that dubious darling of us progressives could manage only a profile of a young stuntwoman. Gee thanks, folks.

Asian Age gave some grudging space to the Pink Chaddi campaign in its piece on young people who make a change.

In Mid-day, Devdutt Patnaik’s always delightful column on mythology featured Devis – but it’s an unorthodox and fun column. With this Mid-day felt they’d done their bit and then resorted to utterly shameful things like asking Deepika Padukone what she likes about being a woman. Some gems;

“- when I step out of the house, I realize I am a responsible woman of today and I know what I should be doing or shouldn’t be.”
“I get to dress up elaborately”
“I would say I am glad I ama woman because I can a be adaughter, a wgirlfriend, a wife, a mother, a carrer-woman, a homemaker. In a single lifetime, I get an opportunity to play a range of real-life roles.”

How right Deepika. You go right on role-playing.

Meanwhile HT Café asked some very thin girls called Diana Penty and Lisa Haydon (5’11” and 5’ 10” informed the intro) about being role models (since they’re already models, it would just mean adding one role after all).

They had nothing to say on this matter. Then asked about their ideals -

Lisa (instantly): Angelina Jolie! Many say we look alike.

Later in the interview:

Café: What’s your take on the Mangalore incident?
Diana: What incident?
Lisa: What happened?

Café: A group of girls were attacked (…) for drinking in a pub(…) apparently it’s a sign of loose morals.
Lisa: That’s horrible. I’ve never felt unsafe anywhere in the world. But that may be because of the choice of pubs and I’m mostly in groups.

Yes Lisa, go ahead blame it on the girls why don’t you. HT Café should hang its head in shame – they could have tried a little harder today. Or maybe this is a parody?

Meanwhile Kareena Kapoor, given a chance to ask Sonia Gandhi 5 questions for women’s day asked – “You are always so elegantly dressed! May I ask where you get your saris from?”, as also “Do you like my favourite Italian dish, Spaghetti Pomodoro?”

In between were two questions on eve teasing and property laws.

The thing that annoyed me most of all was how people went on about how the great thing about women is how they are always composed and dignified and calm and well dressed in the face of adversity, cruelty and general assholiticness from other people.

I say – what the fuck?! (on this blog we are not afraid of F words)

I am very sick of this problem with women’s anger. I think more women should get pissed off and fewer should be demure and dignified. I think for all these over dressed, self absorbed, nitwits that have been given space Feminism should be cancelled. Let’s see how they like it.

Oh and also to Big Bazaar – the only one’s to have a genuinely near feminist Women’s Day offer among the cosmetics and clothing bullshit sales. 36 XL sanitary pads (Brand: She) – good thinking. I like that they think of menstruation and aren’t scared to talk about it. However their ad then trills – 6 months of use in one go for Rs.199! Whoever thinks women use only 6 pads per period needs to be struck by continuous PMS (no, dear, it’s not a typo for SMS) for 6 months.

So happy being pissed off this women’s day and on several other days as well.

And for those who are going to ask that mincing question: Well what do you want yaar? Do you want nothing at all instead of at least this something? I ask only – can’t a girl criticize anything around here without instantly being given an ultimatum? A little heated conversation please (no dear, heated is not the same as being in heat, sorry).

I’ll tell you what I do want – I wish there had been one article anytime in the last few years that Women’s Day is in the papers, which told us the history of Women’s Day. This is a day for linking ourselves with all those in any time and any place fought for the lives we celebrate today and it'd be good to remind those who do not know and don't always have the chance to discover it.

Oh and if you think criticize is all I do, it’s often true, when I’m at home - over here. In other people’s drawing rooms, I say other things on the same day.

yeh ILU ILU kya hai

2009-02-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

So while it snows outside and I drink my espresso at Cup of Joe in Pennington, while my friend has some sort of meeting with other farm moms (don't ask).. this is just the sort of news from home you want.

"Just a fortnight ahead of Valentine’s Day, guess, who among the top Indian politicians went romantic. Well, it is railway minister Lalu Prasad, who in his inimitable style, said “I love you” in public. No, it was not his wife Rabri Devi, but one of his innumerable female fan’s who recently expressed her ‘true love’ for the railway minister in the latter’s blog."

Of course Laluji hastens to clarify - although he manages to do it without sounding too moralistic.

" spirited man that he is, Lalu took the gesture of his fan quite jestfully. “She loves me, I love her,” Lalu conveyed to his fan in English, in front of the TV camera. The spontaneous comment from Lalu left newsmen in peels of laughter, but the railway minister was quick to admonish them saying “that his comment should not be misconstrued, as love is something that should be comprehended in its entirety, that is, in a fuller, broader sense. "

How tame Valentine's Day is here - no protests, no misconstruals.

The rest of Lalu piece HERE.

Of which the most interesting information is that Lalu has his OWN BLOG!

Yes, hello goodbye. I understand.

But before you go, in other news - I have had my toenails painted emerald green with polka dots in pool blue, hot pink and yellow. Pictures soon.

in the Mood for Macbeth anyone?

2009-01-19T11:04:00.000-08:00

Manyata Dutt fascinates me. I'm bummed I'll be missing her on that totally, hilariously camp Abu Jani show First Ladies, next week.

But I'd love to be a fly on the wall for a couple days in this household. Now that'd be material for another Maqbool..

I GET TO SEE SOME DISSIPATION IN MY PLACE: HITTING 40

2009-01-15T19:11:00.000-08:00

So I finally turned the corner away from possibly young to definitely not and turned 40 on Jan 11. I'd decided long ago that I was going to have a party that lasted all day - and I had all that and more. My friends Samina, Swati and Reshma came from Delhi. My friend Ruchir happened to be here. My mum's in town. My friend Rahul who lives in Goa came for an hour as a surprise. My friend Jabeen whose husband Girish and I share the birthday came too for the first time, since there was lunch and so she had time away from the other commemoration. My uncle who was an avid photographer in his youth and took endless pictures of me as a kid and then lost them, found an old photo, photoshopped it till it looked good as new and gave it to me. My friend Ajay mixed up the dates and so decided to enjoy himself with a weekend in Goa, after promising to make one dish for the party, so we made goa sausages to honour his absence. My friend Madhusree had been claiming that she'd bought one of those rare perfect presents for me some months ago and she proved herself right - it was a bright red bag that looked like a can-can skirt, with two rosebuds on it.

BIRTHDAY TWINS
A WHOLE LOT OF TOASTING GOING ON

I was particularly happy my friends came because it was an affirmation of some sort of life I've chosen to lead where friends have been very important, where the endless discovery of each other over years of shared experience and shared conversation and shared annoyance, hurt or anger have been as important as any other relationship. This isn't always easy. Friendship - as another friend and I discussed - is that most romantic and ideal of relationships, with great spaces, room for change and deep appreciation embedded into it; yet it's the most complex and difficult of relationships because especially in our contemporary, neo-conventional times, it has begun to lose its ettiquettes, it has no binding rules and established primacies as do ordained relationships. All that holds it together with decency, honesty and love is the belief of the people involved in these ideas. All that prevents callous betrayals and unkind prioritisations is the decision of the people involved to honour this great, if diffused, institution, to make oneself vulnerable by claiming some rights in it, to cherish one's friends' vulnerabilities by offering those rights within it.

So, at the party there was many friends, much happiness and general dissipation at my place....

There was corruption - as a baby had her first taste of ice-cream and there was no moment of uncertainity as she asked for MORE, holding onto the spoon like a desperate addict!

There was food, the menu being:
Wheat crackers, onion khakhras and nachni chaklis with muhamarrah (a dip made with red bell peppers, garlic, walnuts and olive oil) and dahi-dill dip; roast leg of mutton, chicken and sausage stewed in beer, beans in sesame oil, thai tofu bean sprout salad, a salad of tomatoes, basil and garlic, strawberries and pineapples soaked in port wine with cappucino ice-cream.

There was alcohol naturally -And after some time there was hectic activity to make ever more varied cocktails - someone made one with tequila and strawberries; tequila vodka and lemon-sugar; cachaca and coconut water; apple vodka and mint and something, etc...

And then there were the results of the ever-varied cocktails which involved, silly smiles, looking into the distance, dervish like dancing, posing of various kinds (about which also more in another post)

Best of all, the previous night, there was a pyjama party with champagne and cake and getting of gifts and giving of back presents.

Followed by too much laziness in the morning and then crazed preparations in which I had a meltdown and Swati did some domestic work for the third time in her life maybe (chopping mushrooms. She is in intensive therapy to recover from the traumatic experience)

Well that was fun. Ambivalence will obviously follow.

I want to see some dissipation in my face: Eartha Kitt, R.I.P.

2009-01-02T07:47:00.000-08:00

I first heard Eartha Kitt on All India Radio. Or rather, I only ever heard Eartha Kitt on AIR - on Yuva Vani to be precise, most often her biggest hit Santa Baby (slip a sable under the tree for me).

The pre-globalisation nerd's window to western music (before you showed some enterprise of your own)was a handful of programs: in the mornings Play it Cool. In the evenings there was In the Groove. In the nights there was Saturday Date (well A Date with You to be precise) and Forces Requests. Although In the Groove for instance was presented by young people - the cool kids in college had often done some dabbling in this arena - very little of the music was actually contemporary. I imagine it's because the programing was limited by AIR's archive which wasn't exactly up to date. So it is that for structural reasons, our parents' nostalgia had to be our present - isn't that all of India's engagement with popular music for the most?

So mostly the music we heard was the songs my mum had taught us when the electricity used to go off: Lipstick on Your Collar by Connie Francis, Love Letters in the Sand by Pat Boone, Danny Boy by Jim Reeves. In the middle of it all there would be the occasional thrill of an Eartha Kitt song.

How can one explain the instinctive sense of connection one feels to a sensibility one has not yet begun to have, much less articulate? What are these connections, connections of really? It's not very easy to explain, though one knows it in one's stomach - or as Susan Sontag says in her famous piece Notes on Camp "A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about" - because the moment you try to pin it down, it slips out and becomes something else, changes even as you describe it. And camp, this sensibility that Eartha Kitt appeared to exemplify, especially is that chameleon that mocks seriousness. Sontag also speaks in the piece about the logic of taste (which totals up to a sensibility) - and surely I loved the exaggerated artifice, the so bad it's good posing, the glamour and extravagant sophistication (or role play of sophistication) that I heard in Eartha Kitt's songs - or saw in Helen's dances. This song - I'm Just An Old Fashioned Girl - was always a favourite of mine because its mockery was so clear. And while it was biting, it wasn't malicious. Of course that Eartha's black and that in this video she's very much the Southern belle gives it a whole other layer, but I hadn't seen the video then.

If it's true that many filmmakers actually want to be actors, then I have to say in my case, thanks to Eartha Kitt (who I discovered before I discovered Billie Holiday), I wanted to be a torch singer.

But I always wondered why it is that I had a taste for those things, what connection I could possibly have made with my own middle class world in a DDA colony on the edges of South Delhi.

Sure, as I've grown older I understand that there's an intrinsic irreverance for the pomposities of left and right, for the pretentions of high taste that I liked (and unlike Sontag, I don't consider this a-political). I liked this belief in experiencing something sensually as a way to thinking differently about the world. These are intellectual understandings I've come to value.

But I always wonder really about the community of the wounded that such Camp is really about - the stories of many who were great Camp artists have always been very tragic, very painful. Eartha Kitt's own early life was shockingly brutal - you can read her obituary here

And her later life was not always easy - perhaps because of the anger that those experiences created in her. Or, as better described in this review of one of her last performances (at age 81!)
"She spoke and sang in French, German, Turkish and Japanese. For every droll one-liner about loving men for their money - I'm Just An Old fashioned Girl - there would be a moment of almost unbearable poignancy that spoke of loneliness, and love lost or never realised."

I feel curious about these paleo-channels of sensuality, pain and glamour through which people find each other figuratively; I long for an archaelogy of these connections. I want to be able to say what I feel in clear words, but of course, that's not what the quick turning away from pain, which is the performance of amused - and amusing - detachment, allows for.

As for Eartha Kitt, I also think she was a great subversive because of the suggestions rampant in her voice, the raised eyebrows of a challenging invitation in her upturned phrases. How amazing that amid the dulcet male Lataji type notes of Pat Boone and Jim Reeves and Karen Capenter, All India Radio should innocently play, under the comforting moral guardian notion of "golden oldies" some growling song whose lyrics go:

"I want to wake up in the morning
with that dark brown taste
I want to see some dissipation in my face
I wanna be evil, I wanna be mad
But more that that I wanna be bad "

And not to mention

"I want to be horrid, I want to make news
And whatever I've got I'm eager to lose"

I have a lot to thank AIR for - that it allowed me to find women like this even if I never had the guts to actually be like that (but we can't blame AIR for that either. Or can we?)

Perhaps what I think was very amazing about women like this was the uncompromising relationship with the intellect. Their sensuality, while bodily too - Eartha Kitt remained a bombshell to her dying day, through assiduous exercise and no doubt, some face lifts - was also an intellectual product. I used to like Madonna for some of this quality at first, but somehow I think she never kept it that sharp as the years went by. Clearly Eartha didn't think so either because at a stage performance of "Santa Baby" (which is below) she said "I used to have a lot of fun with this song. (beat) (beat) - and then Madonna sang it."

A lot of people have sung that song - but I think what one sees as one watches the different videos is this: with Eartha Kitt there's a kind of ambiguous, unnerving, dangerous, very strong sensuality which is thrilling; with others, there's a sort of packaged post-modern playing with pornography but not really cuteness that's got its own sexiness (I've always thought Kylie Minogue was a hot one) but it's a predictable, easy and entirely unthreatening one, a Cosmopolitan sexiness.

Ironically, and fittingly, Eartha Kitt died on this past Christmas Day, 2008. I hope Santa Baby is getting her all the gifts she might need to be evil in her dissipated other life.

the continent of incontinence

2008-12-28T07:28:00.000-08:00

A suggestion no doubt specifically made for those of my friends (M and S you know who you are) who stop frequently to pee by the road

You will have to click on the picture to see what it says on the truck's ass.

therein lies the rab

2008-12-17T04:49:00.000-08:00

I am very concerned - and I say this without facetiousness - about Aditya Chopra's mental health.

I know that a lot of people will think Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is a crap movie. But frankly, I thought it was quite lovely to start with - uptil the scene where she tells him she'll never be able to love him. And it had a pretty good ending sequence or two. But of course in between it was like - as hapless as Suri's character. In the part where the female protagonist has her completely ridiculous epiphany I started yelling Bachao Bachao quite loudly much to my friend's horror. This sort of tapori-pan is much tolerated in Bombay but in Bangalore there was only a horrified silence. People acted as if they hadn't heard. Or perhaps they had been stupefied by the sheer gone-to-lunch-ness of the script.

But to return to AC's mental health.

Now, I genuinely feel this could have been a beautiful film. The ideas at the heart of it are eternal questions about love and romance: as we project what we think the object of affection likes, as we seek romance, how do we figure out what love is? How do we know if we are loved for ourselves or for the idea we have projected. And in the middle of it all, which is really us?

If the screenplay had handled this frivolously even that would have been something. But it's more like a certain incoherence sets in, an inability to explain what the script means.

Given the kind of relationships it explores (especially the easy homoeroticism of so many male friendships in the North), some of the very fine dialogue in the film (often spare, infrequently verbose), the moments that matter - Suri's deliriousness at getting his first tiffin for instance - you can see there is a genuine understanding, a mesured sensibility that embarked on this film.

What then prevented it from becomign what it wanted to be?

Basically I think, the stubborn-ness of the director-producer's idea of himself, ironic as that is. So insistent has Bollywood been that it is mediocrity that triumphs; that people don't want a thing of beauty and maturity; that they know the commercial formula tune to which the public dances, that it won't let itself go down the path which opens up. So neurotic is this interplay between the felt thought and the imposed commercial rationalisation, that Aditya Chopra stifles his own very bonny baby because he thinks he knows how to make a mannequin.(sorry I am sounding as incoherent, but you know what I mean I hope). It's almost as if this director wants to assert that he has not been wrong with all the movies gone by in the last couple years, even if it means not making the movie his heart tells him to make.

So, strangely enough, the film becomes exactly what the main character is - repressed. But instead of moving towards some sort of release and resolution, it remains impotent and turning its violence onto itself to become a lesser being.

Makes you feel so sad. And worry for Aditya Chopra's mental health.

Bishakha's 10-pointer on 24 hour news reporting

2008-12-02T02:06:00.000-08:00

While I (and others) have been flailing with incoherent rage at TV news coverage, my friend Bishakha has put together this excellent, coherent point-form critique below. Fan mail can be sent to bishakhadatta@gmail.com

10 problems with the 24-hour TV news reporting of the recent attacks on Mumbai:by Bishakha Datta

1)Speculative, not fact-based. The numbers of gunmen entering Bombay dropped from 20-25 to 10 across three days and from 5-7 at Taj to 4; 7-10 at Oberoi/Trident to 2. This causes needless panic; many of us still think there are gunmen out there. Ditto vis-a-vis boat routes to enter Bombay (one day Badhwar Park, next day Gateway of India). Don't report what is just said can't be verified - or atleast question statements from politicians! Otherwise, it's like reporting rumour: which is what happened Fri aft when channels reported non-existent gunfire at several places.

2)Unquestioning. How many gunmen were there actually? How many people actually died? How many boats came into Mumbai? How did the Wadi Bandar and Vile Parle blasts take place? How could 2 gunmen hold up a 350-plus room twin hotel like the Trident/Oberoi? These are just the first five - most basic - questions off the top of my head. Never heard any of them asked. I'm not even going into the lack of qs around 'Pak' involvement.

3)Class-biased. Where was VT on our TV screens, even though that was attacked at the same time as the two hotels/Chabad House - and which 40 lakh Bombayites use? After the first night, VT station and all the hospitals where the injured were taken - Cama, JJ, St George, Bombay - were taken off our radar (even though they are all in south Bombay, minutes from where the media was gathered in full force).

4)Opinionated, not fact-based. What does 'Pakistani involvement' mean? No distinction between Pakistani elements and the Pakistani state: particularly given the complex political situ in Pakistan; I have yet to hear one anchor or reporter ask the question: what's the proof? (In a hypothetical case, if a cell phone with calls to India were found somewhere else in the world, does it indicate that 'India was involved'?)

5)Simplistic. The coverage became a parable of good vs evil; 'bravehearts vs cowards' 'unsung heroes vs villains', which has now swung to 'Pakistan vs India'.

6)Stupid. What exactly are victims of gunmen supposed to say when asked how they feel? 'Did you feel scared'? (No, I felt elated after spending 10 hours hearing bombs explode around me!!!) Many such stupid questions incl those asked to Ratan Tata on Thu eve.

7)Invasive. The NDTV interview with Sabina Sehgal Saikia's husband when all the facts pointed to her probable death is a case in point.

8)Dangerous. Giving away the locations of those stuck or hidden in rooms/halls at the two hotels. Ditto with jingoism masquerading as patriotism/nationalism in the 'Pakistan' vs 'India' tenor of reporting.

9)Loaded. Constant use of emotionally-loaded terms: 'terrorists' not 'gunmen', 'dastardly', 'heinous', 'cowardly deeds' et al.

10)Theatrical. There was enough drama there; we didn't need faux drama on top of that. Barkha Dutt's coverage of the ground floor of the Taj is a case in point. "Shattered glass!! shattered glass!!" she hyper-ventilated in a broken voice. What did she expect to find? A rare orchid?

Bishakha

Tea for two - and everyone else

2008-11-30T22:59:00.000-08:00

(IMAGE BY SEBASTIAN E., BRAZILIAN ARTIST)

There is nothing more and plenty more to say about the attacks in Bombay this November end.

Watching the news has been frustrating, both for the kind of news and for the kind of views being bandied about. The one thing instantaneous media seem to resolutely deny the need for is reflection. Reflection inherently requires time and thought. But the very next day people want to talk about Solutions. Anyway, more about that elsewhere...

But another thing that makes me marvel is the easy talk of the Taj's iconic status. I don't want to be callous about those who've suffered directly by indulging in reverse classism. But I do think that before Ratan Tata and others demand that the Taj should be protected as PUBLIC icon, it needs to do something about becoming one.

Terrorists understand what really divides our society - and they've hit out at the things that they know we really value. They understand that the temples of modern India, like of the US, are the icons of absolute self-interest and greed, such as five star hotels and the WTC. Apart from whatever warm and fuzzy things they represent, they also stand as symbols of the extreme class divide of this country, the absence of the working poor and the dying poor in our mainstream consciousness; the divide which is a daily terror we do unto our own. As long as we live in this culture of self-interest alone, I really don't know how we are going to have a changed world. I mean the world has to actually decide to change, not just demand something else does. This is the sort of culture that makes Ritesh (no I won't spell it numerologically, what's he going to do about it?) Deshmukh and Ram Gopal Varma go so openly to prey on the event and shows that there is no lag between an occurence and thinking of what it can do for you.

So anyway, here's something I think the Tatas could do, just symbolically so that maybe the cliche of indiscriminate openness that people bandy about without a thought can be a little more true. Because after all, why should only the cabbies, the dabbawalas, the train commuters and the other regular folk have to bear the onus of maintaing the spirit of Bambai?

I think when the Taj is fixed up and restored, its ground floor sea fronted rooms should be turned into a public tea-room where not only the rich, but all sorts of people, can come in and afford the price of the tea. A place they keep as clean and lovely, if not as plush, as the rest of the hotel. A place which says - this building is a Bombay icon because the wealth of this city which was generated as much by workers as by industrialists, has also made it so - and this tea-room is a token participation in that idea. I think this would be a simple gesture and a step towards erasing those hard lines that keep one type of Bombayite far away from another, indeed, indicating which type of Indian citizen benefits more from our supposed democracy. Those are the things we also have to work at changing besides holding governments responsible for their duties. That won't require much money from them. But it would require a bigger heart.

the report card of love

2008-11-11T20:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I needed to find my Class X school leaving certificate- as that's what the government considers proof of age. I'd needed to find it for many days now, but I'd been dreading the exercise. Everytime I'd remember I'd go hot and cold with nervousness and feel that heavy feeling of gloom in the pit of my stomach.

Looking for it was part of so many pasts - it was the misery of those teenage years. Being 13 or 14, in a new school. Growing up and feeling confused about boys (not much has changed there!); feeling ugly, feeling dumb, feeling peculiar and not like the other girls, unable to translate their mysterious language of groups and giggles and arch phrases. It was the fear of board exams, the inability to soldier on past the inarticulate, inaudibe, intractable, self-hating teaching style of Miss Kalra from physics, Miss Saumya Das from maths, Mrs. Subramanium from chemistry. It was the confusion of seeing marks that had been really good, plummet to borderline pass, the fog of just not getting a thing in some classes and everything in others which made it impossible for you to just accept that maybe you were a duffer so why care? It was the emotional coldness of hostel - I was the type that hated it - the constant fucking surveillance, the suspicion of girls getting "too close", the public humiliation by a totally unbalanced Matron (what a designation) if you made a silly joke she didn't like, the enforced study hours, the one movie a month chosen democratically, which means it was always a horrible movie - the one time I got to choose I chose a strange but interesting sounding film called Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, came out walking on clouds, only to be stoned to shock by everyone saying - what ya, Paromita, what a stupid movie you chose (not much changed their either notwithstanding said movie's cult status). The whole control of your time, first at school and then at home so that there was no time for dreaming, for sleeping, for reading too late into the night because you could not put a book down. It was the loneliness of not telling your parents what you felt because you knew instinctively that parents do not have the strength or the spine to deal with their children's hardships. It was waiting for letters from the free world of no-hostel - when the letter came you were lifted up on the breeze of excitement and for the 15 minutes it took to read once and then once more, not trapped in this gridlock of timetables, but lost in the world of the letter writer, feeling their love, imaging them talking like those old movies where the face is superimposed on the letter, clinging to every little detail of what they did, what they'd been reading, a new cassette they'd bought. And then when you put the letter down, you were surprised to find yourself still there, as the blood that had rushed up in excitement settled down, the colour of the world went back to medium setting. If it was a letter from my dad it was a less extreme experience of course. My dad's letters were always in point form, written in his strong, squat loops and usually only came on birthdays:

" My darling daughter,

1. May you have a wonderful birthday
2. My prayers to God to give you great happiness and the best things
3. I love you

and sometimes

4. Love and kisses.

Your loving Papa"

I laugh about it now, but I always felt disappointed then and would read it over and over to somehow suck more up from it, wanting there to be more. And if Matron passed by she would always say some Manorama or Shashikala type thing that would emabarrass and deflate you, break the spell.
For someone as easily terrorised as I am, the last years of school were the final inhospitality of life and took years and years to recover from. And still show up in my awkwardness with belonging to a gang or crowd of any kind.

Added to that, the search implied some of the terror of early PMGP days. I was 23, depressed, uncertain about my future, living like no one in my family had lived before, doing something that didn't seem marginal, it just seemed pointless - and always broke, always wishing I could have nicer clothes, a table to eat lunch on. I would try to store important things in suitcases or in a big wooden box under the window. But the PMGP rats were not a force to be so easily fought. If the damp didn't get the papers, a scrabbling sound would eventually start up and you'd know that the rats had squeezed or chewed their way in. I would be scared to open the box in case they leapt at me. So I would bang away at it and run back. Once the beast had scurried out I would gingerly open the box. On bad days I would find a clutch of pink rat babies. On good days I would find only some juvenile poems or old college assignments chewed to bits and would feel miserable. I knew that the papers were probably lying in that same box and I dreaded opening it to discover that in fact the papers weren't there, had been eaten by the rats and I had erased the memory.

And intertwined with it all was my irrational terror of all things official - property deals, passport applications, income tax, Matron asking if it was you who had thrown a sanitary napkin down the commode and you standing there frozen and terrified even though it wasn't you.

But eventually I couldn't put it off so I went down on bended knee and forraged.

Out they came - the files of proposals for un-made films, scripts that were never produced; then a layer of production files of various projects (no wonder the rats chase me, I'm a pack rat myself!); and finally, that blue plastic Tata Steel file marked 'important papers'.

What I found there took my breath away - because perhaps I hadn't remembered it was there, or if it was, never thought about it's meaning.

There was my Class XII and Class X certs. My college certificates and mark sheets. My "Character Certificates" - our famously corrupt principle Mahendroo certifying that I am a girl of good character!

But that wasn't the main thing. In it was also an envelope my father had given me when he thought I was old enough and responsible enough (well!). I had forgotten I had it. In it was every single report card of mine from Lower KG onwards. Each one neatly and lovingly preserved and handed over to me.

Looking through them made me smile at the quaintness now of what was once valued. In Upper KG for instance Science and Sanskrit had been crossed out and subsituted with Rhymes (Fair) and Conversation (V.fair). It made me laugh to see how some things have changed: Remarks - Remains tranquil and attentive (!!) Makes good use of reference books (oh why did I become the girl who only reads murder mysteries and steamy romance novels? Well perhaps that's all the refernce books one needs in life?) Well mannered, QUIET and friendly; Does not waste time uselessly (!!!!!!!! a game of wordtwist anyone?) and shows originality; A QUIET and affectionate child! Clearly I was leading a Jekyll and Hyde life early on because I don't think my family has this memory of me! It made me laugh to see how some things really haven't changed - Remarks: weak in Hindi; needs little work in Hindi; she is a good pupil but can work harder; she is an excellent student but she could be much better if she tried to live up to her promise; It made me remember that even if the report card of youth in my memory is full of Unhappiness - 9 on 10; Alienation 10/10; Sullen Misery 8.5/10; Life (V.Unfair), that isn't the only assessment possible.

If my father had kept each progress report of his child so carefully, surely there needs to be a column in my head: Acts of Love - 100/100. Looking at it all I felt again the intense fragility and perfection of being one who is loved. People say to be loved makes them more secure - and in some ways I believe it does. But it also makes you aware of the fleeting, ephemeral quality of life, so unbearable is the beauty of being cherished by someone in this simple way, so full of pride; and of the wafting, wispy nature of love that can pass through the tightly packed wall of death. It was fitting that I looked and found these yesterday, November 11, which was my father's birthday. Because even though he is gone I felt once more enveloped in his kind and generous hug, in his simple, never second-guessing love - one perhaps, like everyone, I hadn't always felt aware of as a miserable child or an angry teenager.

That's my father on his last birthday. My mother and sister always buy a cake on his birthday and say they will celebrate his life and not cry. I am not yet that brave or beatific but I will get there. This year too, they each bought his favourite dark chocolate cake and cut it. As for me, I got the back-present.

The Other Me (would rather be the nice one): a rant and a half

2008-11-05T09:44:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to see Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion. Don't ask why please. I did. Maybe I'm growing old or what I don't know. But lately things like this arouse only utter violence in my breast. I want to run into Madhur B wearing Doc Martens (me, not him) and kick him senseless. To kick him senseless I would have to kick him in the crotch because that's where our man's sense and sensibility both reside. Then, as he lies there disintegrating and groaning I want to shout loudly - dude, ever heard of ANOREXIA?? No?? BULIMIA then maybe? Oh, you thought all those models that you saw throwing up during your ASSiduous so called research were just pregnant out of wedlock and getting a reminder for their next abortion.

How can someone be so unempathetic? Oh well, I guess it's easy if you're a racist, homophobic misogynist. How can anyone write such a bad script in which plot point 1 is - Meghna smokes a cigarette - drums and synth full power AND Interval! Plot point 2 - Meghna has sex with - not 6 men, one dog and an anteater - But-with - a black man - silence on the track and then racing heart music. Meghna wastes a whole box of tissues trying to rub out her face. Is she worried that the mascara giving her raccoon eyes is man's skin colour rubbing off on her perhaps? Breakdown happens.

And what is Madhur B's problem with women who have sex by the way? What? All the women in the film who have sex come before a fall. The one who comes out smelling of roses (Janet/Mughda Godse) is the one who has a marriage of convenience/companionship with a gay man. Even when the gay man asks her to marry him he never says - hey, we can be married but you can have sex with other people or be in love with them or whatever you want. There is only one straight man in the film and he's a bit of a jerkofsky - Arbaz Khan. So maybe Madhur B on the whole has a lot of discomfort with heterosexual sex? I don't know.

In fact I am thinking that if he didn't make films he might be a serial killer - so on second thoughts, carry on O progeny of Arthur Hailey and Jackie Collins who's loving nanny was Danielle Steele.

But why is it ok to make a film which is basically made up of all these moments of moral horror rather than a story which explains how each person makes their own Faustian pact as they move on through life? I guess because people are going to see it. And because so what if the US president is now a Black man - back home the MNS can go round beating people up and the Shiv Sena can burn valentines cards and... you know.

Oh and by the way I've got one more thing to say to Mr. Realistic Research Bhandarkar - Mathur's are not Punjabis! So there.

Anyway I've lost all claims to family values after this demure tirade, I know, but what else to do?? Luckily there's an Other Me. The inestimable Mr. Karan Bali has persuaded me to blog on upperstall.com and so there's a grown up, well behaved version of this post there. Hey the truth is complex. You can choose this version or that version.

latest object of desire

2008-10-22T11:59:00.000-07:00

With renovations in the house there have been many objects of desire which cannot be had. Handmade tiles in colours with polysyllabic names- chartreuse, turquoise and so on.. but priced at a 100 each.

But one cannot, even in one's fantasies, only think of the unreachable. It is necessary to reach into the inner pocket of your soul and find the thing that fulfils your most visceral desires.

In my case, this:

The Built NY Cargo Computer Sleeve. Those orange thingys are pockets. Sigh. Need I say more? Other than - I must have it?

What big, umm... you have mama

2008-09-29T11:18:00.001-07:00

I'm all for niche markets but this defied even my evil imagination. Anyway, all the mama bears out there, you cannot say you are not prepared with this handy helper. It is a book that tells you how to help children cope with MUMMY'S PLASTIC SURGERY!!

And there's more to be had HERE

Jhoota kahin ka mujhe aisa mila

2008-09-16T04:30:00.000-07:00

http://entertainment.oneindia.in/bollywood/news/2008/shahrukh-loses-six-pack-abs-160908.html

Not that we loved Shahrukh for his muskels... but it's hard to love him for the amount of dissembling he's been doing of late

And before anyone casts aspersions on my character or surfing habits - I only found it while looking for the show times of Mamma Mia!

Speaking of abs - I saw the broadway show of Mamma Mia! in New York last summer. There were a couple of items with very gorgeous effotlessly 6-pack boys. Maria who'd come along said she was seeing it for the second time and she did not remember all these half clad men from that time. I figure the show figured out its primary audience soon enough - women near-abouts 40 (who might have ABBA nostalgia) and gay men. So they rewarded us for our loyalty - any problems?

a certain azaadi

2008-09-02T22:36:00.000-07:00

A producer I'm writing for says - I'll call you in the afternoon, after I've read the draft. I say - actually you won't be able to reach me between 1 and 5 because I'll be at the Queer Azadi march. ""Oh," he says, "is that today?" Yeah I say enthusiastically. I wait for him to say, "Maybe I'll come too." He says, "Ok I'll be sure to call only after."

The day of the march my aunt and uncle stop by for raksha bandhan on the way to their farm, where they go on weekends. My aunt says, "why don't you just come along with us?" I say, would have been great to. But today's the day of the Queer Azadi march, so I definitely don't want to miss that. I see her trying to look poised even while her brain makes loud noises - is that why she's not married? But unlike in my youth when I would have only zoomed in on the disconcerted look in her eyes, today, I am impressed by her desire to remain poised, as if it's absolutely routine. I don't put her out of her confusion by clairfying.

I do clarify with my mum though - it's important the rest of us go to show support. In fact we're thinking of renting some kids to go along.

I wonder if Celina Jaitley clarified to her mum too. Later some older activists I am chatting with make some laughing but disparaging comment about her outfit. I of course a) loved it b) think she's redeemed all the bad acting with her presence while the rest of showbiz types stay away, even if their best friends, or at least best designer or best make up man are gay. Bollywood folks one expects nothing from. But I thought advertising types would come at least. Ah well..

It's been a long time since I've been at a rally where there are people of different classes present. A very South Bombay man in a fantastic rainbow boa and holding all manner of cute, come-on toys - rainbow coloured rattles mostly - tries valiantly to shout along with slogans. But "teen sau satt-at-at-at-sathar- satathar" is his defeat. But he keeps trying, which is entertaining for me and I end up giggling more than shouting slogans. A drag queen in spectacular high heels soon learns that performance requires rigour and has to take off the stilettoes and walk in green stockinged feet. People look on as always, although not as many as once used to, during the walk up to Chowpatti. Although they are the kind who can say teen sau satatar without a hitch, they don't of course know what it is or for that matter what sort of disease this homophobia is that we keep saying down!down! to. Moreover, since we keep saying 377 Bharat Chhodo, I am sure most think this is just an eccentric Independence day parade. But they kindly desist from saying, angrezon ne bharat chhod diya.

The press coverage was huge and it was nice to see - not homophobic.

The parade was not as flamboyant as I imagined, New York being my unrealistic index. I think in coming years it will be. But more than entertained, I was very moved. Because I meet most of the people in the parade in "progressive" contexts where sexuality isn't much of an issue in our interaction, I forget what it must be like to deal with families and the regular world, especially for the older people present who must have suffered a lot more harshness and loneliness. They are euphoric about being able to walk on the street and shout these slogans and dance and sing. A woman has covered her face so completely with dupatta and mask because she doesn't want her kids to know, that when she says hullo to a friend, her friend doesn't recognise her. Someone yells loudly - Paro! I turn around and say, what? thinking I will be instructed to walk in pairs or hold some placard. But she simply says Paro! again and hugs me in a state of excitement. It makes my eyes fill a little to see people so happy.

It also made me smile to see a couple of heterosexual men I know who had come to support. Their body language was a picture of awkwardness. As soon as we reached chowaptti, they scurried off calling out that non-partisan slogan - Taxi!

Some nights later a friend told me how hard some lesbian activists worked to get police permission. Apparently the traffic police guys wrote a letter saying - I have given them a fair hearing and their purpose is indecent so I cannot grant permission - or roughly that. Permission finally actually came through only a day or so before.

I just want to note, that we could not afford to rent children. I went in sadly un-flamboyant clothes (why try to compete with drag queens yaar?). Hansa, to make up for absence of any trappings of middle class morality, wore her most aunty-ji salwar kameez. I'd say it was a good attempt.

no more rain checks

2008-09-02T22:02:00.000-07:00

For the first time in years I've been in Bombay over three months running with only a two day trip to Poona in between. And luckily for me it's been in the monsoon, which has been pretty here - as if to underline the ironies of life: those of us who kvetched about the South and North Bombay divide as proven through drainage in the 26/7 floods never think of the ironies of the say Bombay and Bihar divide: where for us it's romance, for someone it's death. Although that also applies in an everyday sense here in Bombay for those who live on the street.

Because the monsoon light disguises the passing of the day I am less anxious and more able to think; yet unable to find the exact right answer of how to live with one's own pleasures without blocking out others' pain; to be compassionate of others' pain without disregarding of the small daily pleasures that sustain. To figure out that balance is obviously to be at peace, to be less pointlessly self absorbed. Some days you feel you may almost have found that elusive centre. And then you realise it's just a trick of the light.

Bye bye rains...

Searching...

2008-08-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

...for a recording of this ghazal sung by who-ever (I don't know who sang it though I thought it was Begum Akhtar)

Bas Ik Jhijhak Hai Yahii Haal-e-Dil Sunaane Me.n
--Kaifi Azmi

Bas Ik Jhijhak Hai Yahii Haal-e-Dil Sunaane Me.n

bas ik jhijhak hai yahii haal-e-dil sunaane me.n
ki teraa zikr bhii aayegaa is fasaane me.n

baras pa.Dii thii jo ruKh se naqaab uThaane me.n
vo chaa.Ndanii hai abhii tak mere Gariib-Khaane me.n

isii me.n ishq kii qismat badal bhii sakatii thii
jo vaqt biit gayaa mujh ko aazamaane me.n

ye kah ke TuuT pa.Daa shaaKh-e-gul se aaKhirii phuul
ab aur der hai kitnii bahaar aane main

The only person I ever heard singing this was my dad, who'd sing it beautifully. He was of the generation that had never studied Hindi in school. He couldn't even write his own name in Hindi (his name was Ravi, but he'd write it and say - see - and it would be Ram - someone had obviously taught it to him as a joke). He'd studied Urdu so his relationship with Urdu poetry was one of both ease and pleasure. When he was in hospital I used to try to make him teach me. I know that I wasn't quite getting it for a while because he'd keep correcting me. Some times I would get it right though. It is just one of those tunes that seem simple but it as a lot of nooks and crannies. So in essence I've been trying to re-remember it and I think I've gotten it back mostly. But if I'm not singing it right, my dad's not around to correct me any more. So it somehow seems to matter a lot that I should be able to sing it right.

So any afficionados or friends of aficionados, please let me know if and where I might get it.

the b-side of this whole rock music thing

2008-08-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

Sunday releases me from my newspaper dilemmas - I get 6 papers and spend the mornings voluptuously drowning in their various registers. Today's Times Life! quoted Riddhima Kapoor sister of Ranbir, saying "Ranbir has a wide social circle compromising both sexes." Now I see why the boy is a gay icon.

Also I read one of those survey type interviews with the heroines of Bachna Ae Haseenon, where they were asked to complete lines like - I am turned on by a man if he.... /I get bored by men who... etc.

In a bad habit I have had since I could read These Are a Few of My Favourite Things in Stardust, I imagined myself as a famous and sexy person being asked these sorts of pertinent questions. This would qualify as the most serious thing I did today unless you count eating last night's left over olive hummus and drinking a glass of rose as a noontime snack. I agreed with Minissha Lamba that what I like about men is that, well, they are men, my most heartfelt response was to I am bored by men who....think Pink Floyd is the eternal best thing in music - and nothing else is worth it.

Frankly nothing irritates me more. But there's an entire edifice supporting this provincial superiority.

I always associate this sort of music with something conservative - because it's the favourite of boys who go to IIT - because of which I call it IIT music - or IIM and BITS, Pilani - and the favourite of people who sit around talking fondly of college which seems to have been a Cliff Richards movie for them, bachpan ke din bhi kya din the, type of thing as if there was no angst, no doubt, no hatred of the cool gang.... oh wait! That's because they were the cool gang! Or what passes for cool when you're young which is a sort of alpha conformism, an all-rounder existence of no radical or even rather uncoventional choices, primed to believe every cliche the advertising world will seduce you with and to credulously use the trend-phrases coined by Sunday colour supplements (today's discovery being "alpha female" - what used to be called superwoman as a comment on how difficult it is for any human woman to manage work and home and all else - but alpha female sounds like you can become one just by gymming often enough and religiously following the cleanse, moisturise, tone routine, no?).

Anyway - for me that sort of musical monomania simply means a rigid nostalgia, a cultural varnashram system whereby you will only be exposed to certain types of music (and in the case of my generation this would be the previous generation's music). Thereby you will be the prime consumer of this music in some theme night or theme bar or whatever. Because you won't change tastes, acquire new ones, lose old ones - or indulge in nostalgia only very occasionally. I'm sorry to say that my Bengali friends do this the most.

Soon after thinking all these irritated thoughts I read an interview with Farhan Akhtar wrt the new film Rock On! - with no irony there - (I already don't want to see it - what sort of embarrassingly credulous, passe title is that?- but I will have to because of knowing people who worked on it). In this he says - the best music ever is - Pink Floyd. Sigh. Well not like any idols are keeling over in my mind or anyting, but STILL!

And it is with these thoughts that i came to read this article - and though I haven't read the book obviously, I already felt like I may not agree with it so totally, but still some bits, um, rocked? - no, they echoed some half articulated thoughts I had. For instance:

"Since at least the appearance of the first issue of Rolling Stone in 1967, it has been a common assumption that popular music, particularly rock and roll, is about social change....

...The great fallacy at the center of this thesis is that the cultural explosion that occurred when rock began carried such a heady charge because it was about overturning societal norms. In fact, the music was reinforcing orthodoxies that are as old as mankind. Put simply, most rock and pop songs, from Chuck Berry through the Beatles and including the latest single from Coldplay or Justin Timberlake, are about love. Not polygamous, destructive, selfish love, but about love for another person, monogamous love, spiritual love that transcends the laws of nature -- "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "She Loves You," "My Love." Pop songs are about heavenly love and the attempt to attain such love on earth.

There are, of course, exceptions. There are rock songs that are about rebellion and revolution, but they rarely become popular. "

You can say Pink Floyd are not all about love and all that. You may be right but you won't get no satisfaction from me.

the times they are a-changing back

2008-08-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

So a historic decision has been made in the Vohra-Andheri (E) household.

Some years ago, fed up of the page3fication of the TOI I decided to move to the Indian Express. It wasn't easy because all my life newspaper matlab TOI just like orange boleto Gold Spot. But if the Parle factory could change its goldspots to bisleri surely I could change my paper? In truth, I went back and forth - to the Express, then back to the TOI until I finally made the transition in 2003.

I stuck with the Indian Express for the next few years, even though it got thinner and flimsier and less and less satisfying. So what if the main paper was iffy - at least Newsline was good I'd tell myself. IE was the default choice of the progressives.

Then in 2005 the Hindustan Times which I used to read and like in Delhi, came to Bombay and without thinking I switched, relieved that I had a way not to give in to the insistent promotions of DNA and Mumbai Mirror. And I was quite happy with it for a while - it was a meaty paper with lots of interesting, provocative columnists and enough about environment, film, art, archaelogy etc. I didn't even succumb when Meenal, the editor at Mumbai Mirror said to me -'you don't get the mirror? Ok,I won't say anything.' although I felt a bit guilty given I write for them. Well, three years on, it's not quite so rosy. The papers gotten thinner than Kareena Kapoor. The columns are a bit centrist and shrill. They don't even really have an editorial of any gravitas. The supplement is depressing. They have tonnes of mistakes of language and of fact - recently in some article on porn the Milos Forman movie was referred to as Larry Flynt vs. Larry Flynt - when the real title is The People vs. Larry Flynt (as a google search would have confirmed). And even the initial campiness of Under Honey's Hat has gotten very ho hum and not fun.

So today, standing at the door, paying the newspaper bill, complaining - aap Tehelka itni der se kyon dete ho etc. - I slipped in the words I never thought I'd say - kal se roz ka paper Times of India.

I get the Times on Sundays and I've noticed that it's really improved. I see it at other people's houses and I do feel its changed in the opposite direction to itself. And one can just not read the Bombay Times.

Now there's been no change in the ownership, the basic philosophy etc. of the management so what's changed I wonder? I tell myself political growth lies in not being rigid but in responding to the reality as you see it.

We'll see what happens - tomorrow being the first day of my changing times.

To All The Girls I've Loved Before

2008-07-28T00:10:00.000-07:00

And while I'm thinking about all the ladies from the past whose style I love - the Miss Johras and the Sulochanas and the Sandras from Bandra, here's a piece I wrote for Time Out's last anniversary issue where they'd asked some of us to write about an era we'd liked to have lived in in Bombay..

TELEPHONE GIRLS

It’s the 1930s and freedom’s in the air. Not only because JRD Tata makes the first civil flight from Karachi to Bombay, or Gandhi issues a call to Do or Die from Manibhavan. Bombay in the 1930s is not a bad time and place to be a woman.

A Congress sub-committee on women draws up recommendations based on radical feminist ideas which see women as individuals with rights to work, property, divorce, and equality within marriage. Amid some shock, R.D. and Malati Karve start a family planning clinic with contraception counseling. The archbishop of Bombay suggests starting the Sophia College for Women.

An alluring magazine advertisement asks: “Have you a Telephone in your Home? If not you are denying yourself the pleasure of communicating with your FRIENDS and running the risk of being unable to call the DOCTOR or the FIRE BRIGADE in time of need.” A woman in fashionably striped sari and matching puffed sleeve blouse reclines on a sofa, a movie magazine in one hand, a telephone receiver in the other – the very picture of indolent seduction and modern facility. For 12 rupees a month, it suggests, a girl need never be lonely again and the lines between inside and outside could get deliciously blurry.

In fact on the other side of that phone line could be one of those new girls with a new type of job: telephone operator. And if that telephone operator was called Ruby Myers she could become Sulochana, heartthrob of millions, with her own Chevrolet, the handsome actor Billimoria for her reel and real life lover and, at 5000 rupees a month, a salary higher than the Governor’s.

Women emanated glamour, an eroticism and mobility as never before - and never again. It looked like a lot of fun – especially the crimped hair - and opened up a whole world of imagination and desire most visible in the movies of the 30s – Bombay ki Billi, Indira, M.A., Miss 1933. Female stars like Sulochana, Patience Cooper, Nalini Tarkhud, “the glamorous graduate” and Devika Rani guaranteed the success of a film – and so its primary choices -prompting a pained exhortation in Filmland that directors exert at least some care while casting male leads.

By the 40s, Chandulal Shah’s 1925 film “Gunasundari”, a dutiful wife’s journey to win back her husband from the venal world of clubs and cabarets had become the template for filmi femaleness and kissing on screen was banned. As for the Congress sub-committee: a 1970s study by women freedom fighters revealed the “brain shattering” fact that free India had not adopted or implemented most of these recommendation for free women. But the 30s had given us all sorts of desires. And telephones. That still counts and rings in change.

zara hatke meri jaan

2008-07-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

This is just a random associative post about words and language and life- one of those days when too many thoughts trip over each other in your mind without necessary developing into a big pattern..

Have been listening to Rabbi's new album. While much more uneven than his first - which I don't think people ever listened to fully - his big hit did him a big disservice - this album has a some really nice tracks and most of all, I think his ability to make very urban seeming songs and touch on some in between note of relationships is his strength. Another reason I like him is that he sings in Punjabi - a language I ought to know but don't, and now regret not learning. But because the jacket carries the translations of the songs, because they aren't the hey ho, let's bhangra type of thing, I can listen to the words and learn new ones and make pictures in my head. I think he's very good with grown up love songs (which means they contain an element of sexual tension and emotional ambivalence, guardedness). It is so also with the title song of the new album, Avenji Ja Nahi

I've been listening to this song over and over and learning the words some of which are lovely. You can listen to it here.

http://ajn.co.in/

Tere larian ‘ch
Din kinney beetey
Kujh kat gaye
Kujh jamaa keetey

Ni maen akk gia
Bol chup teri parhda
Taenu parhna na
Sohnie hai mere vas da

I'll do my own translation as the official one appeals to me only in parts

Days passed, borne on your false promises
Some were spent somehow, some really added up
And now I'm tired reading your silences and words
Reading you, sweetheart is not something I'm up to now

And it goes on to roughly say - forget the words and silences, the direct and the oblique, just tell me if you're going to come to me or not and so on.

I think this is the sort of sentiment of course has completely vanished from Hindi film songs which were once so full of ambiguity and texture when it came to romance - and not only when they were written by poets. A lot of early Rajendra Krishan lyrics are the equivalent of the Ande ka Funda type song for the '40s, but they manages to evoke the nature of relationships while trying to be 'modern' (he used a lot of technological metaphor or reference- mere piya gaye rangoon, vahan se kiya hai telephone and those other C.Ramachandra songs.

And it was what I sort of meant when I was cribbing in my Sex and the City post - that even if a man has written the lyrics, somehow the song does not seem to exclude the woman or her experience or speak for it completely.

And then I saw the video which I have blanked out of my mind completely, unable to bear the invasion of this uninspiring girl, who is just a silly tease, rather than the complicated creature the song calls up (what are you scared of, someone should ask you/do you just hide, so someone can find you/so if i come to to find you/will you let yourself be found, or not, will you leave a clue on the road, will you leave your door open, will you come to me or not?).

Anyway - I learned a new word - lareyan, plura of lara which means false promises. I knew I'd heard the word before and it came back to me in a conversation I had with someone today - I knew it from that old 1940s song - Lara lappa lara lappa laya rakhda... Ooooo dekar jhoote lare. This song often came on Chitrahaar/Chhaya Geet and I used to be both entertained by it but mildly resentful because the heroine, Meena Shori, wasn't glamorous and pretty. But I used to laugh at the words - aaj kal ke gentleman, khaali jeb, matakte nain.

Watching it now I was charmed and excited as I often am when I see stuff from the 30s and 40s - because women have more to do in the film and the language of their songs is so much more active and their body language is so different! This song obviously has a kind of simple feminist message which makes it all the more fun. Apparently the song was a big hit. Interestingly it was composed by a Christian who used a Hindu screen name so all kinds of stories within stories.

But the most interesting thing about it is that it is sung by Lata Mangeshkar. Whodathunkit? I mean this is a different person from the sweetly suffering voice that has been fitting itself into tighter and tighter corsets with the passing years!

So I did a little research on Meena Shori (procrastination procrastination) and I found this:

"She was born in Raiwind near Lahore in a rural and poor family. She was totally illeterate girl and jumped to Bombay in late 30's and became silver screen temptress and happiest girl in the Indian filmdom from 40's & 50's."

What happened to the happiest girl afterwards?

"She worked in Indian films from Sikandar (1941) thru Shrimati (1956) and then moved to Pakistan and worked here in films till late 70's. Eik Thi Larki (1949) made by her husband Roop K. shorie (at the time of marriage with R.K. Shorie, Meena changed the relegion to Hindu and later after the seperation, again she entered to Islam), dubbed her as the sensational Lara Lappa Girl"

And then...

"Meena got married with R.K. Shorie, Zahoor Raja, Al-Nasir, Raza Mir and lastly Asad Bokhari."

Celebrations of a spunky babe, hold on...

"At the last and final part of her life story that was also too painful to be real. No one from them was around her and she also had no issue from them. A bright star in glaxy of filmdom in 40's and 50's was reduced to extremely destitude living by the end her life before the death in 1989. In late 80's when she was seriously sick having no money for treatment, former Prime Minister Nawaz Shareefhelped her out and one time late Mohammed Ali also gave her moral support when she had stood up in a function begging for charity money to marry off her sister's daughters. Once she told that she felt like a dried up tree in a grove of green saplings that everyone is out to chop down and burn. It is said that her burial was arranged with charity money. "

It is indeed "too painful to be real." Parveen Babi anyone? The stories of all these women who didn't just stand for something different - they were someone different, their every inflection and expression declared it. Zeenat Aman, Rekha, Parveen Babi... one has to wonder.

And that's why we end up with something like Genelia's character in Jaane Tu - a sweet little spitfire with not much but marriage on her mind, whose erotic framework comes from the guy being able to go defend her from the baddies. Because she can fight in playtime but not in real life - for that a guy, even one who doesn't want to be macho, must step in and be one. it's too depressing because it's all about zara hatke - but only zara, very very zara. We end up with grown up (but of course upper middle class) people thinking this is the coolest movie ever because it's full of negative choices - hardly any positive, assertive ones, where you choose because that's what you want, not because you were a moron and realised you ought to stick with your own kind in the end. Whatever, little women, whatever.

Meanwhile I got to wondering what was going on in Pakistan while our films were going steadily the long suffering way borne along on Lataji's high notes. It was this. And this is from a 1956 movie.

Ya ya I know -that was then. But stil...

budding promises

2008-07-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

Yes! There are buds on the chinese rose plant - I'd been losing hope. Meanwhile the mogra is sitting as sullen as a backbencher - I don't think it's grown even a leaf since it came. But the double jaswanti blooms and blooms and blooms. Each morning I get up and shuffle out of the bedroom and then I see a fat, showy red flower blooming with its chest stuck out and it wakes me right up.

I hope this lasts.....

swingers

2008-07-07T05:11:00.000-07:00

Was talking to an unweildy writer friend about his chronic bad behaviour and inability to finish book. Was talking with knowing wisdom and the scolds prosaic intractability. When he pointed me to THIS PIECE

How accurate! How I laughed! But no, I did not write a word after, only this. But I did preen at the preening chinese rose and go out and scan a form.

not a good day for the roses

2008-07-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

Ever since I read Heidi (about a dozen times as a child) I've wanted a magical window - like her round one in the loft with its views of a starry night. I've been quite lucky to have a room with a view wherever I've lived. Even Baghdad where there was a panorama of the river Tigris (and the orange akak against a slatey dawn sky when the Iraninian Phantom planes raided). I struggled for a while with the balcony in PMGP, making a little seat there, but the shortage of space meant it was always getting used as a storage ground and was sat in very little. In this house the window sills are big enough to sit on. My dad, the only time he visited here, used to sit on the window sill and trim his moustache, read the paper, chill - the only time in my life I ever saw him so lazy and relaxed. He too reacted with childlike pleasure to the hidey hole feeling, that unexpected extra space the window sill yielded up and would like to put things there, neatly, as was his way.

Then one time when Samina and Imran came, Imran used to sit and play there, and make drawings.

I've not been using it all that much because first I had put a chair there but it felt ridiculous. I felt like Naseerudin Shah with his gramophone in the desert, like some clueless overseer sitting on a chair on a window sill, drinking coffee. Plus there's my fear of heights which would come and go in waves. But the coming of Oberoi Mall and a Lifestyle store has (yeah yeah I shopped there, castigate me so I may be absolved!) resulted in me acquiring the correct height ka stool.

Once the stool came then it seemed like two plants (of which one is a lemongrass plant!) was definitely insufficient, so the family has been expanded to include - double jaswanti, mogra and (my favourite) chinese roses (they did not have tibetan, sorry, I tried).

This has resulted in new visitors, whose names I do not know, but whose songs are sweet. Pappu can sing sala.

And then, the rains came and blew the tops of the flowers off :( decimated the roses and turned the mogra flowers the colour of apples sliced a while ago.

I bloody hope some new ones grow soon or I am boycotting Lifestyle store. >:-|

dragonflies in allahabad

2008-06-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

The two top unconnected searches that bring people to this blog:

Dragonflies - who knew so many people want pictures of dragonflies??

Group sex in Allahabad - this I understand. In Allahabad group sex is possibly easier because after all two people on their own would be frowned upon. Therefore orgies are the only way out. I imagine that like raves they have an underground information network and those outsiders who want in on the action are left with no option but to google group sex in Allahabad in urgent if tenuous hopefulness. Poor things come here and find only dahi bataase ki chaat and Wheeler's bookshop.

Also a search that often leads here is SRK without a shirt.

Not much explanation needed there.

ladies and gents

2008-06-19T01:24:00.000-07:00

This last month I watched three films that I've been thinking about for various reasons (instead of work)

-Sex and the City by ( I had to google this) Michael Patrick King

- I Am the Very Beautiful by Shyamal Karmakar

- Sherman's March - Ross McElwee

This is a rambling and maybe unclear post because I'm still sorting through the jumble of thoughts in my head.

Again it felt to me that while there's a cliche about how women are obsessed with love and romance (thanks for nothing Byron) they don't or can't seem to create works around this. Obviously I am not talking about Mills and Boons - nor am I dismissing them. That's just a separate discussion. I mean that Sherman's March and I am the Very Beautiful are obviously abiding, strong, resonant films about love and men - this is a very masculine perspective (and I am not in complete agreement that the women in this film - Ranu in IATVB and the 5-6 in SM are allowed to construct their own realities alone without the filmmaker imposing theirs over them. That sort of goes hand in hand with the myth of verite - which both of the films use masterfully. In fact the charm of both films for me lies in the fact that they are so strongly the filmmakers' constructions and it renders the filmmaker vulnerable and reveals for me very intriguing things in a way that involves me. I feel this way also about Hanif Kureshi's The Black Album - a very male book but transparently so in which it's almost as if got an intimate entry into a man's mind, otherwise an area of shall we say, speculation).

And then there's Sex and the City. I must say that while I was a bit leery of the class aspect and a little floral feminism thing going on there, I also enjoyed the first two seasons because they were funny and had something recognisable in them. But also because they were funny and very well written. It was kind of nice that there was a space where love and sex could be spoken of simultaneously although not necessarily together/in a causally related way and women had jobs as well as breakfast and all along you could indulge in the ultimate female pornography - role play through clothes.

But the film! When Carrie gets stood up I felt her shock and pain and well I just thought - yeah, that's what you get for wanting to marry Big! When she runs to be with Miranda on New Year's Eve while Samantha and Smith make out and Charlotte is playing happy families I really really thought the film would end. But no - it went on through the whole excruciating process of Big sending apologies and copying other people's love letters and finally Carrie marries him again and just forgives and forgets because "it wasn't logical, it was emotional."

Anyway this is not a rant about SATC as much as just wondering why women aren't making work about love which is more personal and honest. I know what stops me for instance. Like I've always wanted to make a sort of female Hi-Fidelity, going back to all the men I'd ever been with to ask what and why happened. I don't do it because it seems that I'll get laughed at - which is to say, I'll be exposed for being a loser, inviting comments about my appearance and my various shortcomings. I shouldn't care about it would be one way of thinking about it. But as Carrie says, it's not logical it's emotional. But the fact is, the fear of it never really being listened to for what it is ends up making the artist search for more disguised forms of this expression. If a woman made a film like Sherman's March, with that Woody Allen style voice over, people would call it self indulgent and self pitying. But this figure of the commitment phobic, self pitying, indecisive man is a convention and it's supposed to be honest and sweet.

I marvel at how in SATC Big is allowed to be, well, a guy. That's just how he is. I panicked about getting married so I didn't land up at the altar (oh that's ok, you know, men aren't able to cope with feelings so go on, forgive him). (Of course the entire subtext of SATC is that it's Carrie's fault because she wants a big wedding that naughty spendthrift). And the way too that both men in the documentaries mentioned above are also just allowed to be themselves even when that self causes hurt to the women around them. Those films are gentler to the women in the film and the sense of mystery that these women hold for the men filming them is a touching sort of filter through which we too see the narrative.

In contrast the women in SATC are constantly examining themselves, figuring out where they went wrong, trying to fix themselves ( so they can have men really but well, why not perhaps).

Of course one can and should point out that SATC is not written or directed by a woman. The original series was co-written by the woman author of the book Candace Bushnell but the film is written by a man. However SATC has that veneer of being about a life women have written for themselves. You can see that in the way groups of women come in to watch the film, giggle a bit too loudly at the generic chick culture jokes while they don't get the NYC references, but eventually lapse in energy. However their idea when they enter the cinema is to claim this film as something written by them in a notional sense.

Of course no one identifies with Samantha the one woman who makes a non-coupled choice in the film. Because Samantha is supposedly a slut however much they may celebrate her wild ways.

Anyhow - if someone knows work by women that's about love and in English - the anger, pain, sensuality and which is not written by Colette or Anais Nin (how faithfully they get trotted out everytime) please let me know, I am curious to read and think of this more. I think there's stuff in other languages which must be good - Krishna Sobti's Dil-o-Danish comes to mind though I've only read it because it is in English translation while I can't read others which aren't.But the work in English I am more curious about. Similarly if there's more films you know that I could watch that traverse this territory of men and love. I'm looking more for non-fiction than fiction but both would do really at this point.

Meanwhile there's also another film battling inside SATC - one that vaguely reminded me of Dil-o-Danish, in which when Kutumb, the wife, rails against her husband having a mistress she's told to stop being ridiculous. Women aren't supposed to consider men so important. The important things are the clothes, the jewels, the house, the kids. In SATC too Carrie says while at the NY Fashion Week - "I don't know if it was because it was just us 4 together or because it was the fashion. But for the first time in a long time I felt like my real self." And later she meets Big again only because she goes to bring back her pair of $525 Manolos which she left behind. It's very clear where the real love story lies here and the timid celebrations of it while noteworthy aren't nearly enough.

day trip in Alexandria

2008-06-06T11:44:00.000-07:00

While I was in Cairo I went along with my friends Svati, Sanjay, Tammy and Nehal to Alexandria for a day. I was kind of semi-aware of it - it's Mediterranean, somewhat European inflected history and that Lawrence Durrell had of course written a book there and various literary types had hung out there as they seemed to do with astonishing flexibility until World War II. How come we don't? How come we have to sit at our desks and wait for the monsoon to come so that we can write? Some of us anyway, sigh....

But I digress.

Alexandria lived up to its image as a fancy holiday resort but that was after. First of all we had to negotiate a highly tedious conversation with the Tourist Police (yep, a fine Egyptian institution specialising in befuddled expressions - and pictured below). Then, we ate breakfast in Rameses station and commented on how like VT it was and nodded wisely about the Brits.

Then finally we were on the train and all said how much nicer than Indian trains it was although a bit same - and how the sights outside were similar to those seen when leaving Delhi. I will say though that the train loos were foul requiring simultaneous levitation, eye closing and breath holding. Try peeing with all that going on - boys.

TAMMY ON THE TRAIN

Then... we got off at the station but rather than the picturesque period scene we expected we came out of a rather dank tunnel onto a rather dispiriting office type area like Nehru Place. We conquered our sinking hearts (oh gosh maybe it's changed and become like this in Modern Times) and thereby discovered we'd gotten off at the wrong station - apparently Alexandria has three. So, we got in a cab and drove.

And then there it was - the sea, or Corniche as they call the promenade with a row of art deco buildings along it, glamorous looking hotels where surely they serve a high tea with scones and in the far distance a 12th century Citadel.

Since we were told the citadel was only a 15 minute walk we set off. It was a lie - but it was fine because we had several interesting diversions on the way. First was a man who leaned out of his window to talk to us.

Then we discovered he was from Melbourne! And so was Sanjay so they had a happy animated conversation and he called his girlfriend out to meet us while another couple watched from above.

After a few more blocks we chanced upon the most baroque fruit juice shop - it reminded me of tablemats some relatives of mine used to have with a giant cornucopia from which grapes and cherries and figs spilled out in technicolour, plump abundance.

Along the way we were frequently solicited for tonga rides, which we didn't accept (till later, with consequences), but we saw some cool vehicle decorations alright.

The Citadel meanwhile was seeming very far yet near. When we got there I have to say it was worth it - it's huge and it looks almost as if it's new - the white stone next to the deep blue sea and lovers at every corners or sometimes groups of girls or groups of boys listening to music on their cell phones and giggling. Here Tammy and I also bought some highly touristy camel toys and while bargaining she uttered - no, please, I am unemployed, you cannot charge me so much. Needless to say the man was too stunned to argue anymore.

By now we were exhausted and hungry and made our way to a fish restaurant where there were huge fishes we could choose from which they would then fry or grill for us to eat along with hummus and baba ghanoush and sour pickles. I was too hungry to take pictures although I was moved by the soup..

Feeling sated we became falsely confident. At this point we began our misadventure with the tanga. We hired one of the solicting horse carriages thinking it would be a fun way to see the city - but it also turned out to be a real s-l-o-w way to do so. No cantering for our horse, oh no. It was all at a stately pace. Meanwhile Svati, who took a turn sitting up front discovered she was terribly allergic to horses and got an asthama attack. We might have had to go to hospital if it hadn't been for Sanjay having an inhaler (see, it pays to be prepared). At the end there was a huge fight because suddenly our driver said he had meant 20 pounds per hour and not for the ride, at which point the news read at slow speed pace became a little easier to understand. Svati, encouraged by her brush with death was very vocal in the fight and said various strict things to the tanga vala like - Sir! Be honest! and also, You don't only have to talk to him - you can also talk to me.

But either way - via the tanga we did see lots of the old city and could also take pictures while riding of the lanes, the buildings, the cafes - although no pictures of the catacombs (which were discovered in the 20s when, er, a donkey fell down the shaft).

After our tanga adventures we decided to resume trusting cabs and after getting directions written in Arabic from the tourist office, took off in cabs for the old Jewish souk which would apparently feature some striking architecture.

The cabs dropped us off at some market which had many exciting things in it but did not seem particularly to have any semitic connection. Of course this does not stop me from buying (cheap earrings, peachs and strawberries) and staring, although the other were a bit more dignified.

Sanjay pointed out that the sign here said "Oriental Antics" which is definitely a good one. I of course was too busy staring at the vampy ladies above it. Well that's why it's good to have company.

In this market I found a pair of 'bedouin' earrings that said I love you - and the salesman expressed the desire to take a picture with me - as also matrimonial/romantic interest which seemed to be an Egyptian sales tactic in general. If someone can tell me it's not a sales tactic but a real thing then baby, I am moving to Egypt very fast.

Anyway after a while it became clear that we were not in the old Jewish souk and people were also getting fed up with my frivolous behaviour and it was suggested we do something to salvage our last two hours. So we made enquiries and trustingly followed directions (tourists do not learn, that's half the fun boss), to a synagogue, which, if it was there, was constantly receding, and coqettishly hiding, the closer we got. In the end, we gave up, and ate ice cream - apparently Alexandria is famous for a particular type of icecream - and though I tried to ask some nervous looking girls if what they were eating was it, I don't think it was (they said yes yes gigglingly and scuttered off, as if I was going to pull of their scarves any minute). So anyway, we ate ice cream at a shop with a rather extravagant sign.

After that, feeling resigned, we used their fairly clean loo and made our way back to the correct Alexandria station. It must be said, it was every bit the picturesque building we had hoped to find on coming. So if not our entry, our exit was picture perfect.

egypt se cairo tak - part 1 (buildings)

2008-06-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

It had always been my dream to go to Egypt. Perhaps not unlike other people my age, as a kid I devoured factual books from the library. The idea of improving yourself was intimately tied to the the acquistion of "general knowledge" - and there was even a sense of classical romance tied to it. Before there was the world wide web and post-modernism, the things you could know about the world and about history seemed finite. If you could master this store of information, then indeed you could be the master of the universe - like the smart South Indian nerdy boys who were in Bournvita Quiz Contest and who would later clear the IIT-JEE or well, maybe jump straight to MIT (there was one such child wonder in my school, wonder what sort of life he's having now in this time of infinite perspectives, sigh). So it was that us pre-globalisation kids read along with our Riverdale High and ACKs, Tell Me Why, Wonders of the World and all other manner of encyclopaedically minded books.

When I was 11 my father was posted to Baghdad, Iraq - a desert when it came to books. The only source was the British Council Library and they were choc-a-bloc with books on ancient Egypt. Perhaps in a Reader's Digest condensed book I had also read with great avidity about the curse of Tutankhaman's tomb.

Thus primed, I consumed all the books in the library which were however of a drier nature - yet, absorbing because I think there was a strong sense of individual pharaohs and their stories. Until the age of 13 or 14 I could rattle of the order of the kings of the old, middle and new kingdoms, when their tombs were discovered etc. Thanks to my flighty intellect, this knowledge is now completely lost to me. All I retained was a keen sense of romance about Egypt and a great desire to go there, which I was finally able to do last month.

Cairo did not disappoint primarily because I had so little hard expectation of it - we see very little of Cairo in the media around us and so it has not yet become scaled down in our heads as have North America and Western Europe. It was very familiar feeling - a strange mixture of Delhi and Bombay. The structures are primarily low rise like Delhi - east Delhi with its refugee and resettlement colonies - or central Delhi with its boxy 60s government buildings and flyovers. But the density, the feel is like Bombay. Yet, despite these familiar things it really felt like going to a completely foreign place.

The city is full of layers - ancient Egypt of the Pharaohs, Coptic Cairo of the Christians, Islamic Cairo of the sultans, European influenced downtown Cairo of art deco buildings, Nasserite Cairo with its socialist buildings, contemporary Cairo with its Barrista like Cilantro chain and cool boutiques in Zamalek (a bit like Bandra).

OLD CITY

NEAR THE AL-AZHAR MOSQUE

THE MOSQUE AT THE WIKALAT -AL-GHOURI WHICH SPANS A FEW STREETS
THE MINARET SEEN FROM INSIDE THE MOSQUE
CARVINGS INSIDE THE MOSQUE

This is the place where there's also a school for whirling dervish dances and they perform free two nights a week. I went on my last but one night there when I was alone. Perhaps it is very touristy but it was still very impressive - especially the old guy who can whirl for something like 45 minutes without stopping.

This old part of the city also has predictably crazy bazaars, or souks, selling all manner of things - pots and pans and plastic and leopard print blankets and glittering scarves. Did I say glittering ;)
Oh yeah!

Basically full of the deliciously glowing reds and greens and roohafza pinks my (Muslim) grandmother would have called muslamani rang.

Of course it's not PC to say it, but it is the kind of stuff you see in the markets around Charminar, just on steroids.

In contrast to the hurly burly of the old city, the Christian mohallah or Coptic Cairo came as a bit of a shock - in fact it altered my entire experience of the city in one look. It's quiet, the streets are wide and empty - it's like stepping into the past.

There's a whole cluster of churches - and it says that one of them is the place where the Holy Family stayed for some time. The churches are interesting because the aesthetic is not how we classically imagine it - not europeanised or Portugese like as much, but definitely having a local inflection - the mosaics, the courtyards, the rounded buildings - and of course the ever present date palms.

THE HANGING CHURCH

SVATI AND ME AT THE HANGING CHURCH STEPS

The area was at a lower level, below the street and people seem to be living in houses there, and among the tourists you'd see regular kids returning from college, making cell phone rendezvous.

I was most fascinated by this neighbourhood - and it also had the best loos in all of Cairo!

DOWNTOWN CAIRO

Crossing over from the river downtown Cairo had a lot of lovely old turn of the 20th century buildings, arranged around a series of circles/squares. People said there was a strong trend of degentrification going on, that it was emptying out. There must be a logic of course (maybe like people who live in the old office buildings around Fort, but I don't know really)- but to the romantic eye, it seems hard to believe people don't want to live here.

Downtown Cairo has a famous cafe called Groppi which was once a chocolatier to the royal families of the Arab world and hangout space of artists and cool cats from Omar Sharief to Naguib Mahfouz. And they still serve a mean sundae.

CITY OF THE DEAD

Perhaps the most intriguing place I visited in Cairo was the city of the dead or Bab-e-nasr cemetery. Cairo has miles of cemeteries where people live -they've built their houses in the graveyards, hanging clotheslines across the headstones, using centaphs as tables. Clearly these are very poor areas and you feel uncomfortable being there, taking pictures yet fascinated and unable to tear your eyes away from this parallel life and death, macabre and routine space.

These settlements are built around clearly recent cemeteries - a few decades old. But the practice began a long time ago - it seems that at first the poor built their houses around the mausoleums of the sultans that were built outside the city - those parts now are layered and settled, old city mohallas, quite picturesque and perhaps no longer feeling as if they are next to graves - merely next to old buildings, with enough instances of the old mixing with the new (check out Merc Man below). One of these was just across from where the pictures are taken above.

The building in the picture above is an old and perhaps among the only remaining inns or sarais from some century - i forget - and many buildings in this neighbourhood were part of something called the Museum without Borders - where buildings exist in their regular space - with people around them, having opened mechanics shops and cafes in the stables - rather than as pristine, preserved monuments, although preservation and maintainance work is carried out.

And if you walk through this area you eventually end up back where this post started - near the Khan-e-Khalili, a crowded, crazy touristy (now) market that has existed for centuries - but more about that in the next post.

cairo se cairo tak - 2 (people)

2008-06-06T06:49:00.000-07:00

I was lucky in the way that I went to Cairo - it was for a conference/workshop -which for once was genuinely stimulating. I met old friends after a while - Kamran from Austin via Karachi, Svati from New York but who's spent some time in Bombay where I first met her; and made some new ones whose work I really liked and with whom I had many rich conversations - while floating down the Nile and walking around the city. It was the gentlest, loveliest time.

At a more pragmatic level, the fact that Kamran had done his fieldwork in Cairo helped a lot and insulated us from the usual despair of tourists at being constantly cheated, lost, confused, feeling that they're missing the main point somehow. And he is game for anything and makes everything so much fun. So a bunch of us would follow Kamran around, seeing the sites. For me this was so unusual because I usually travel alone - and this year this is my third trip when I've been with other people - people I liked - and I had a great time, and maybe should start to do this a bit more instead of guarding my splendid solitude so zealously.

I mean it was fun to have someone to talk to and someone to share the load and someone to fool around with like Svati and I did in front of Um Kultum's statue below.

Although of course we respect Um Kultum.

Here we all are at the Pyramids in Giza, looking funny and innocent like we're on a friendly family picnic, no?

And here are the pyramids without us

(BET YOU COULDN'T GUESS THAT'S THE BACK OF THE SPHINX'S HEAD)

And heiroglyphics too...
Or as the guide said pointing below - Woman, Man, Superman

And along the way it became very onvious that Cairo is a city of night. Shops don't close till past midnight - in tourist parts of the old city, even later. People are out all the time sitting in cafes, smoking hookahs, doing timepass, lovers hang out in corners and bridges and gardens. As evening falls chairs come out on bridges as if to indicate that the time for tafri has begun, time to let the cool breeze from the river wash over you...

Quite often we found ourselves at Fishawy's which is a famous cafe in the heart of Khan-e-Khalili and all guide books will tell you to go there - while this may seem like a reason to avoid doing exactly that I'd say one should go. It's exotically full of huge old mirrors but it serves amazing drinks - chopped up strawberries in their own juices, mint tea, hibiscus and tamarind juice, it has great atmosphere, very paisa vasool and it's good for people watching and even for mild banter with the dozens of people trying to sell you scarab necklaces and head-dresses and all manner of tchochke thingummys.

It seemed that Love was everywhere in Cairo - downtown was bursting with couples. People were always walking arm in arm and it was heart-heaven so you can imagine my state....

(Please note Hitchcock moment in mirror...)

At first sight one may think this is all marvellous - but I think one also can sense quickly that it's not so simple as Cairo just being impossibly romantic more than Paris and Rome put together. As my friend Nadia later told me - it's the opposite of what it seems. Restrictions and repression at home and downtown Cairo is seen as an anonymous space where you can meet secretly and un-noticed and these meetings are all furtive, often involving bribes to policemen. And you dont' see any evidence of same sex couples either - as one shopkeeper delicately informed me: if two homosexuals come into my shop I will throw them away. Well, the path of true love runs no smoother than the path of true lust and that's how both acquire their edge and messiness I suppose.

The other striking thing about Egypt is of course, the headscarves. 90% of the women you see are wearing tight headscarves. This has been a contentious issue in Egypt (especially among older feminists since in the 1920s, feminists publicly cast off the veil as a political act) - and I have strong feelings about the way we are allowing imperialist agendas to push us into cultural relativist arguments, but I won't get into it here. All I did notice was that the scarf is a sort of strange thing - symbolic of something I guess, but again as Nadia said, the more they veil, the sexier they want to look. And definitely I saw some rather interesting fashion statements going on.

No doubt about it, Cairenes like their style - the men too given how many "coiffure for men" places there are

Since I was going to be in Egypt for so many days I had thought that maybe I would go up to Luxor, to the Valley of the Kings. But in the end I thought it would all get too crazy and that it might be better if I just stuck around in Cairo and got as full an experience of it as I could. It was perhaps the right decision for I hope to go to Egypt again.

But on my last day in Cairo I went to the Egyptian museum - a good thing to do when you've finished doing everything else - because it's huge, stuffed to the gills and totally random in the labelling - sometimes no English, just French or Arabic.

I must say, walking around, taking in the antiquities brought in and kept here en masse I felt a twinge of regret at not going to Upper Egypt. I could feel the old romance which had sucked me in in the first place flood back, as I looked at the huges stautes and sarcophagi and the treasures of who else - Tutankhamen.

And perhaps, looking with a new eye I saw something of what is so compelling about these dead kings. And it's not just that I share their love of charm bracelets ;)

One of the things that struck me looking at the statues was their individuality - their sense of portraiture.

And it seemed that this desire to preserve themselves in this highly sophisticated civilisation, is so much like ours with our incessant photographing, blogging, facebooking. The desire for posterity both met and cast asunder by your bed, your personal goblets, your likeness being transported to a museum where in the end, you are just, dead and an example. It felt peculiarly fragile, vulnerable, heartbreaking, prescient of our futures.

So I think, the next time I go, I'll definitely be going to the Valley of the Kings.

make no mistake

2008-04-23T22:41:00.000-07:00

It's summer...

unheralded anniversaries

2008-04-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

Ha ha - now that's a fantasy picture....

So this blog turned a year many days ago and I didn't even notice. Which is a good thing.

When I started it I needed a way to show friends pictures of this unbelievably beautiful place I was in and it seemed effective. I was taking a break after many years of working and a period of difficulty and I also needed something to do which was meditative, somewhat creative but totally purposeless. Totally purposeless in my case presents a huge problem, since I have purposeful personality disorder.

I am the sort who loves to make To Do lists and go tick tick tick. I go through phases of extreme backlog and burn out when I can' t do much which stresses me, depresses me and instantly makes me imagine myself old, unemployed and wearing a smelly nightie.

For a person who has despaired of changing this part of herself - workaholic, unable to say no, working hard and fast, manically interested in many different things at the same time (and wanting many different shots to be taken simultaneously I can hear the saala camera friends muttering) and always producing something - this must be one of those baby steps for mankind things. For a year I've managed to make this blog totally meandering, rather unkempt, of no particular interest to anyone but my friends and even that only occasionally. It really has been/is a scrapbook I come to from time to time, for fun only, the way scrapbooks were in childhood. On occasion I've had to stop myself from writing about work things but on the whole, I've never felt inclined to be focused in anyway here. The free and easy ones might roll their eyes, but for the tortured diligents, this is how life is bhai.

I try to slow myself down when I write - there is no choice actually but to slow down and absorb oneself in the other world one writes of - but not being able to produce 5000 words a day (which moreover should not need rewriting) regularly casts me into despair and sense of failure. So, yes, whatever, get a grip girl, I agree.

Well I'm trying, but I am realistic.

In the rest of my life I will of course always strive to be on top of the To Do list (at least I have modest ambitions), so unhealthily long that I can only lose to it. But happy anniversary to my redeeming feature and my circumscribed spot of guilty leisure then. Late, but that's the point.

Chandamama door ke...

2008-04-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

I do not have a coffee table.

But I have my first coffee table book and it is.......

Yes, Chandamama has brought out a 60th anniversary collector's edition and I wasted no time in getting it. Chandamama, Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Flash Gordon, Target and Children's World - everytime we were transferred to a new place my dad would order these to be delivered by the newspaper wala. Being very young I couldn't quite keep track of which day was what so the coming of the comic was always a matter of great excitement and each page would be instantly relished in the lush hours of a Sunday morning while my parents slept late and the house was absolutely quiet.

My favourite was Vikram aur Betal (which the book unfortunately calls Vetal which is NOT how it was in the original!) - it seemed to prolong the pleasures of the Amar Chitra Kathas being a long detailed prose story, rather than a comic, and with its tantric type of illustration it sent a thrill of fear for me.

Always seemed to me King Vikram's uniform was a bit East India Company but these quibbles I will leave to the culture studies folks. After all unko bhi tho PhD karni hoti hai.

I don't doubt it will all seem totally retrograde now when I read it but just looking at those illustrations made strong feelings of nostalgia uncoil in my tummy and suddenly my ears began to echo with the sound of that song from the DD show....

Vikram (vikram, vikram)
Betal (betal, betal)
Vikram aur Betal...

And you can watch that here for the opening song

http://youtube.com/watch?v=pplEBsDXmKE

And for the glorious sight of Vikram and Betal wrestling while Betal laughs in a loop

http://youtube.com/watch?v=lHii9YLIEEM&feature=related

(Man, I want that DVD)

Even watching it now I feel it has a compelling narrative power and at a cultural level it's rather interesting to watch the cast of the Ramayana just before their Ramayana corpulence and glory.
Especially the redoubtable glee with which Sajjan plays Betal

In the words of the director, Prem Sagar

Why Vikram Aur Betal was made ahead of Ramayan?
We did it as a test market product. We were given the 4 pm slot on Sundays. For a 3,500-year-old story, it was a real bad slot. But it was a popular programme and started a new trend of special effects.

(An era of special effects! But these are more tolerable than the Ramayan ones because people don't look beatific in tandem with flying arrows. Here it's more like decapitated bodies and flying demons. Good stuff.)

Complete interview here

I think I was quite grown up and still used to watch it rather avidly - after all what else did I have before there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And in a 6 degrees of separation thing - the scriptwriter of the serial also wrote a biography of my grandfather (which is in Hindi so I haven't read it yet...)

More about Chandamama

Gawd, I'm growing older aren't I?

new business opportunity

2008-04-08T22:42:00.000-07:00

Maybe we can head back to Lakshadweep after all - Vidya could become a scuba diving instructor since she loved it so much.

And me, fashion victim that I am, I can sell THESE