parotechnics

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...

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 the...

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.

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 .

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 Wo...

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 b...