parotechnics

“It’s almost un-American at this point to say you don’t want children, especially from an image perspective,” said Ms. Min, who spoke to The Observer the day her magazine broke the news of Jennifer Lopez’s pregnancy. “It’s almost like saying you’re a communist.” And not just in America either. I remember when I was in college we had a catch all solution to any question the teachers asked - why was X thing happening in the Rennaisance? Up would go our hands - the rise of the middle classes. And the teacher would go, oh those middle classes, they've been rising forever, they just keep rising. And so they do. Nowadays I find that if I say anything on above subject (Maternal Fascism) I have to ammend by saying, "Hey, some of my best friends have kids and I love them. All I'm saying is...."

See - my mtnl broadband saga was a sort of interruptus in the coitus of blogging from which I never recovered. Since it's all so dependent on the photographs, I've been writing a loooooong post about Italy with all pictures, one line a week I guess. Also - please note to the right of us - I am just a nice girl with a big backlog. I am being true to myself therefore and spitting at all those who sniggeringly think it's big backside instead of big backlog. But now that this huge number of two people are demanding I write,I am feeling important. Italy post will and must be completed and will appear before I leave. Thank god I forgot to take my camera to Kathmandu otherwise my backlog would have gotten worse.

"Lasch, by contrast, looked at the American and found him peering into a mirror, anxiously rating the figure staring back at him and wondering how to combat the inexplicable emptiness he felt." Not just Americans if you ask me.

The only time I felt no objection to the pornography of repitition that is Indian news TV. It is not possible for me to do any work when NDTV India shows a half hour program on the making of Dil Mein Mere Hai Dard-e-Disco. I don't know if the film will be as good as Main Hoon Na - whether it will be over-referential and overworked in general. I'm rooting for it to work. What I like about this song is that it doesn't just act smart and mock other people's work, in making an ironic comment, it also seriously adds to the popular vocabulary. Oh who am i kidding. I love SRK, his baady, his goofy grin, his knowing eyes, his tongue so firmly in cheek. So does she Dard-e-disco Come on now let's go

I have been trying to write - I have python deadlines which tighten as I struggle. And I am distracted by dragonflies. If you've got a window, look out and do you see how many there are nowadays? I squatted on my window sill for half an hour trying to take a picture but it's a fool's errand.They may look huge but they're fast and feckless and diaphonous after all. I never knew they could fly this high (I live on the 4th flloor and they are flying above the trees. A few days ago it was a profusion of yellow butterflies - didn't know they flew this high either. Distracted myself from work by trying to post about my time in Italy but got further sidetracked and ended up reading this somewhat amusing piece about Anonioni and Bergman in the afterlife. Not that it's all that funny - you may chuckle mildly on occasion, like at "Antonioennui" - but it's actually a more interesting way to read about two filmmakers about whom you may have already read so mu

I have broadband after 4 months of fighting with MTNL. I am hoping it stays on but well... And with more computer housekeeping happening, also, lovely pictures from when my friend Tara was visiting with her kids and her husband Jambi. I like it that they could come to my house and I'd been to theirs, that feeling of continuity and belonging. I also like how well trained these kids are in the massage department.The high point of the technicque is a little jiggling dance they do when they get to your bottom and believe me they don't even know the heaven this is in places like God's own country. And also how lovely they are. I do miss them.

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

Delhi summers have an inescapable quality. They make the kharbooza, tarbuz, aadu, aalu bukhara, dasehri,langda, litchi, cherry fruits plump up and glow orange, yellow, red, like the little suns. But the heat is intense, encompassing, draining energy and protest. Surrender is the only response - laying down your arms and lying down on your ass the only option. For this reason, once I got to Delhi I was fat with inertia, wanting to wallow in the cool waters of home, the curtain dark afternoons reading comics and murder mysteries, the hum of coolers and ACs, the bed made by someone else, the special food for the visiting badi didi. Summer temperatures and feudal ease are a deadly combo, I admit. Meena, my mum's cook, stood in the kitchen's heat as the morning grew hotter, slow cooking meat pulao on my last day there. But finally she laid down her arms and her ass and embraced the cool floor and the open door. My surrender was less wholesome. Samina and I went for pedicures one day

Back in very hot Delhi, I feel lethargic, lazy and loutish. I have to be lured out by various means - well only one means works really and that's decadence. So I readily agree when Swati suggests we meet for boozy long drawn out lunch at Mainland China, despite my suspicion that she has chosen Mainland because it is owned by Bengaalees. When I get there I see that Imperial Garden which once stood next door has shut down because their lease expired - now just an inscrutable Chinese sign over a bricked up entrance of a building being re-organised. I felt sort of sad looking at it. I always hate it when the old gives way to the new and all that other zen stuff... We are the first to arrive and more or less the last to go at Mainland China so it's a good thing we were paying customers. After her first capiroshka Swati felt despondent (or maybe drunk) and also like going to the loo. She returned with a shawl much to my amazement. Swati has been known to do several outlandish things

It was my last day in New York and it was crazily hot - full preparation for returning to the Indian summer. Of course I had a gazillion last minute things to do, including some mailouts at the post office. So I walked to the post office in the sweltering heat, dripping sweat and period blood, stood in a long line while Americans did the nice thing and chit chatted with the postal workers instead of just getting on with it. A woman in front of me was reading the New York Times and started a sort-of-conversation with me. The kind where she's addressing the world, but I am the only one smiling politely in response. She complained about the Republicans and George Bush, quite loudly. Her tone veered dangerously between political indignation and post office line rage. Then she started complaining even more loudly about a) there being only two windows operating when a while ago there were four b) people taking too long at the windows instead of just getting on with it. ("She's

That is New York. Word...No Doubt.. as Riley Escobar would say.

On Mother's Day, Saadia, who I bonded with on the basis of same taste in clothes and similar shopping mania, Tulin - Maria's Turkish friend who is a famous style consultant in Istanbul and has columns with glam pics alongside and also features on Turkish Page 3s - Nur (Tulin's aristocratic aunt) and I went to Harlem for a gospel brunch in Harlem. But since the sound engineer had an accident or something, we barely got to hear any gospel! We had to be content with southern fried chicken. A little mimosa drinking made the lack of music bearable. When the sound engineer arrived he did not look like he'd been in an accident so we gave him beady looks but he kept acting busy and ignored our collective glares. So we had to be content with Tulin's fantastic eyelid and hair trick in the entertainment department. Later we walked around Harlem, and took in the sights. I must say I generally agreed with the Harlem Point of View as expressed by Puppy.(please check out legend u