parotechnics

You end up with a rhapsody in blue (OR floppy disks, remember them??????) And a study in yellow (OR what on earth do you do with all those VHS tapes that doesn't make you feel wasteful, profligate and like the sole destroyer of the environment, generally adding to your bad karma????) In other words you clean,and keep encountering past technological layers of yourself, and you realise, you're getting older and older and older and this world is spinning round way too fast. Also in between meals, cleaning, reading, living, you call MTNL and try to get them to supply your addiction. They torture and withhold. You overuse dialup and run up big bills and resolve to reform. You begin to like your new internet un-addicted life. That nagging pain in your elbow starts to recede. You start thinking you really must go for a walk every day. And then. It comes back. (Capriciously, so you don't get too comfortable, sending your roots just a little bit of rain so you may suffer the summer...

My friends Hansa and Sankalp and I have been trying to go to movies together every once in a while, followed by drink, dinner and dissection. We try to keep it on the Western Express Highway, so perhaps this isn't a seriously serious movie club. But we do all take His Himmness Remix Reshammiya seriously. And looming on our horizon was Aap ka Surrroor - The Real Luv Storry. So the three of us along with our friend Nandini Ramnath, went off with ritualistic fervour to see the film soon as it was released. Now, it's my intention/experimetn that this not be a blog where I comment on literature, cinema etc but stay resolutely mundane so I won't go into the delightful absurdities of the film or the absolute illogic of its narrative twists. No, I won't even talk at length about Hansa and me standing on the steps to watch the opening song (Mohtarma!). Because this is really about my travels. Earlier in July I was in a place called Stuttgart in Germany for a film festival. Part ...

For a month I've been unable to put up any of my quotidian pictures because no internet access and life's difficulties. But there's been travels and pictures galore, slowly being uploaded. Saadia and Swati, who can't be bothered to write to me, will now know my whereabouts (of the last month anyway).

You wait for the rain, sweat running down every crevice, corner, surface; humidity sitting like a hippo in the air between you and the wall. Then it rains and there's mud in and filth in every corner, crevice, surface of your body and the world. The auto wala says to me, arre baarish,maidam, na aaye tho tadpaye, aaye tho sataaye. But I love it. I love the sheeted light, the unchanging silver grey day, the kids looking like flowered humpbacks with their big bags under their raincoats. The day causes no anxiety, no requirement to react to changing temperature and signs of time. Coffee at 6:45. A window to watch trees, water, birds from. That voluptuous monsoon feeling. Makes you forget for a minute that the clothes which have turned your bedroom into a deeply unglamorous dhobi ghat haven't dried for three days.

Spent just two days in London and there was a certain sweet decadence to it, a certain freedom. Visits to other cities are always touched with a sense of the dutiful and the utilitarian. But the fact that I'd been to London several times before freed me. I was there for a thingie at the Tate Modern and they'd put us up in a hotel close by. I never really left the environs - just sat around by the river, walked around the exhibits, just let the time go by and the light slide on. There was just one afternoon when we had to go to lunch at the Italian embassy. I took my friend Ruchir along and he duly photographed the food, giving me a holiday from my normally self embarrassing behaviour. I should add that this was completely his own craziness, not mine imposed on him. Husseyn, one of the artists from Istanbul, who owns some very fly shoes, and various flamboyant T-shirts and loves to drink as much as Ruchir, got along famously with him, although he kept calling him Richie. From no...

First time going into town after being away for four months. I get off the train and cross the road and this is what I see. I nearly screamed. Yes, my thoughts exactly - what the eff? Is it all a bad dream? Well, thanks to the internet, you can go back and find an explanation for at least some of life's mean tricks - well maybe not explanation, but someone to blame, which is better. http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1100566 So typical - of course we'd like some public art and of course one girl's goose is another girl's gander or whatever - but why should what we get have to be so ridiculous, so ham handed? It doesn't matter if it's the government or the Indian Merchant's Chamber they seem bent on preventing people from being surrounded by any thing of beauty. Bole tho.. kuchh bhi.

In the MOMA store in New York in the kids section I found a little toy. . It's one of those prismatic thingies that help you to take cabaret style pictures-the kind which indicate the villain has drunk too much and now his lust has multiplied to 6 Bindus instead of 1. Bring it on babay! Anyway the look on everyone's faces when they see it is the same as the villains': delight, anticipation, covetousness and mental math and geometry and whatever else, at the possibilities.. Look what it can do.. It caused Nandini to peer at it in delight Witness, my friend Sanjay My friend Me But best of all, my cutie Imran, Samina's son, who has lately learned to whistle and does so like he's practising for an audition of some 1970s Bollywood orchestra. However this picture did not have a happy ending. Imran took such a shine to the object that he wanted to keep it and tried to clutch it, hide it behind his back, pretend to play with it for a long time in the hope that I'd forge...