parotechnics

So Simi Garewal's show is coming back! Here's an old piece I wrote about her in Time Out Mumbai (which alas, is not online) a long long time ago, thanks to the encouragement of Nandini Ramnath. NOW YOU SIMI, NOW YOU DON’T It’s time to hold hands in a pink and white freeze frame again. Rendezvous with Simi Garewal will kick off its ninth season on Feb.12 with new sets – although let’s face it, how many shades of white can you do on TV? But news of this return isn’t exactly generating thrill and thrall. First there are those who hate to love Simi. They look ambivalent and sheepish, then cite the Camp Defence. Yes, Simi is truly the queen of camp. But the kitsch poshness, the demented whiteness, the insistent well-keptness can take you only so far. The truth is – we love celebrities and Simi pulls in the A-list and makes them talk, not just re-state their celebrity, which is what makes the show a delicious indulgence. In much larger numbers are ...

Since my father passed away in 2005, I’ve tried on his birthday to write something for him, to remember him in. I haven’t always managed to do it here – of late it has been small things on Facebook I guess. Today too, it is almost the end of the day when I have the opportunity to write this, a fact that as usual would have made him tsk tsk about my misplaced priorities, my lack of real discipline. There were many things about my father, which, as time has gone by, and as I too am older, with a head and heart more weathered than before, I see now, were truly special things. One of these was his love of poetry, especially Urdu poetry. As a child in Lahore and even after moving to Delhi during Partition, he had studied only Urdu and English. I am not sure where his great love for Urdu poetry came from actually – whether it was part of the cultural milieu or whether he had acquired it from some friends. But I knew it was always there. Ghalib was his favourite poet. I did not understa...

This is part of a story that I wrote for a collection of erotica edited by Ruchir Joshi. It's a fantasy - about time travel, about loving sex between strangers, about the feeling that every encounter is an intense piece of travel, equal parts intimate and unknown, unknowable. As are places, so are people. And yes its a thinly disguised Shahrukh - or a character made up of Shahrukh's emanation of sex-love-love-sex, no dhoka. So, for Pragya Tiwari, who asked for this story on SRK's 50th birthday, here's an excerpt :) The whole story is in this book. (Side comment - writing a blog post feels oddly like time travel in its own way! And so, a little bit sexy to.) TOURISTS - AN EXCERPT Sartaj squeezed me tight. He had beautiful forearms. I could feel the thickness of his hair on the back of my neck. ‘It’s going to be a mess getting up. And we don’t have other clothes, so better not put these on,’ he said. We tiptoed naked past the sweeping ...

SUNDAY OCTOBER 27, 7.30 PM @UNIONDOCS   322 Union Ave  Brooklyn, NY 11211 (718) 395-7902 Brooklyn http://www.uniondocs.org/2013-10-27-partners-in-crime/ WEDNESDAY OCT 30, 2013, 4 PM @NYU Kriser Screening Room, Department of Anthropology.  25 Waverly Place, NYU Campus. http://eccmedialab.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/film-screening-on-the-music-industry-and-copyright/   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, visionar...

NEW YORK @Uniond ocs, Brooklyn Sunday, October 27, 7.30 pm http://www.uniondocs.org/2013-10-27-partners-in-crime/ @NYU Wednesday, Oct. 30th, 4 pm Kriser Screening Room, Department of Anthropology, 25 Waverly Place, NYU Campus.  http://eccmedialab.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/film-screening-on-the-music-industry-and-copyright/ ABOUT THE FILM TRAILER -  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 ...

Outrage might not have been an inappropriate response to the discovery that a Class VI CBSE text book published by S.Chand and Sons and titled New Healthway: Health, Hygiene, Physiology, Safety, Sex Education, Games and Exercises says that non-vegetarians "easily cheat, tell lies, they forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes." But perhaps we should be more concerned that while the book has been in circulation, no one thought it fit to point out its problematic content, which also included pronouncements like “to get married without earning a bad name is every girl’s dream.” Did no one point it out because these prejudices more or less synced with the average school teacher’s world view or because no one is actually reading any text books in schools? Who cares? Not the educational establishment apparently. On TV, one school principal declared they would discontinue the book because “This ...

This week's Mid-day column. By the time this appears, Karan Johar’s new film, Student of the Year will be out and probably have been declared a box office hit, endorsing Ram Gopal Varma’s remark, made with his customary affection for KJo that it will out-hit "3 Idiots." I don’t plan on watching this film. That’s not because it is KJo’s first without Shah Rukh to whom love has tied me for life, despite recent misdemeanours and meltdowns. I think the film will be quite ok with me not watching it, because we both know, I was not one of the people the marketing people were counting on as audience. Yaniki, it is not made for people like me. Which is supposed to be part of the film’s merit. Yaniki, it’s not for the arty farts but the ‘general public’, implying they are the majority, hence this is like democracy, right? Wrong. The multiplex going audience does not constitute a majority of the country, just the majority of a certain elite, but theek hai, to eac...