parotechnics

My house is smelling like America. People always talk about the smell of foreign that used to burst out of people's suitcases when they returned from abroad. But when you finally go to foreign you have your own idea of how it smells I think. The first time I smelled what I think of as the smell of America (to be correct the USA) was about ten years ago, in Crossword, when there was only one Crossword, next to Mahalkshmi temple. I had just started teaching at Sophia college and the occasional honorarium of (then ) Rs.450 seemed good for pleasure only, not the business of daily groceries. So I'd usually go to Crossword and buy a book, take a cab to the station instead of a bus after. And then one day standing like an upside down L in Indian fiction, then a modest shelf or two, I smelled the smell of good coffee, mixed with warm baking mixed with the heady smell of new books. I experienced severe disorientation. This was a smell that I smelled when I went to Louie's in Baltimo

For some days I think that I would like to put all my new pictures here - not pictures taken from roaming the world but pictures taken from sitting still, of birds seen on the tree outside my window - a red eyed male koel, a strange striped bird that was here for two days, a light blue chickadee. But I am spending some time trying to slow down life to the pace inside which I will know quite precisely but ductlessly what I am thinking, where I will not have to stop in the middle of things and hold my breath and let my eyes glaze over to grab the vanishing hem of a thought that got tired of waiting. While I try to figure that out I've been reading poetry and some have the rhythm I am looking for so, here. Out of Danger Heart be kind and sign the release As the trees their loss approve. Learn as leaves must learn to fall Out of danger, out of love. What belongs to frost and thaw Sullen winter will not harm. What belongs to wind and rain Is out of danger from the storm. Jealous passion

Stuck in a single truck jam in a narrow lane, I spy, on the back of that truck, this: "See, but love-ly" Wunderbar, no?

On the last night of being in Allahabad we go looking for a place to drink - three women. This turns out to be quite tough. N rings up P who says, Hotel Ashish (or some boys name like that) has a bar. I've seen it - it's fairly tall - although I am rooting for Yatrik, which is old and looks a bit like Claridges. We get in, it's fairly three starish, so we're hopeful. We sit down - but no, no booze. We ask them where. We feel our voices are too loud. He says Grand Continental. Par vaise khana yahan zyaada accha hai. We look down and say, er, we've eaten, we just want a drink. At Grand, the restaurant has none, but the bar does - it's called Patiala Peg, so we know we're covered. Inside, there is an ominous takht, indicating mellow music to come, and the musty smell of unease. We order our drinks. The man on the table next to us is young,drinking with a certain jauntiness, but jauntier than that is his ringtone, the angle of his head when he answers it. His ja

Were in the US - in the cold midwest, in autumnal New York, staying with my friends Anu and Arvind and New Jersey, staying with my friend Maria who has moved from New York to live on the banks of a river (traitor!). It was a swift trip, a screening tour. And once you've been in a place very often, you don't connect to your surroundings as much as before - the changing of planes, trains and buses, the blur of screenings and Q and A.. it's just to the people who are now the map of that place, old friends and new friends..(and the new shoes of course, not pictured here, because now it's getting embarrassing). A new friend I made was Deepti - hats off to her (not literally, since I love mine - in fact I lost it while in Champaign and we went back to look for it 6 hours later and they'd kept it for us!) - for being the main driving force behind organising some of the screenings. But also she and her friends entertained me in style, with a delicious dinner and the most pe

STILL LIFE WITH APPLES, PARADISE CIRCLE, SEC'BAD As a child I lived in Secunderabad - from the time I was 7 till I was 11 and perhaps for no other reason than that it is an impressionable age, it left an impression on me. In Secunderabad I made the big reading transitions: went from Enid Blyton to Nancy Drew, Amar Chitra Katha and Indrajal to Asterix and Tintin (although I still cannot resist acting like Ming the Merciless and saying out loud in my solitude: we'll met again Flash Gordon, ah hahahaha! Ok, maybe I shouldn't admit that but anyway no one reads this blog so it's alright) - and also, with needless and uncomprehending precocity, Of Mice and Men. And since I lived mostly in my head like most ill-adjusted kids, these were big signposts for me. I found a porn novel called The Barn with its reddish page edges, its busty 70s Bond girl cover and read it, also a bit uncomprehending but definitely, u