parotechnics

  This essay was written for a special issue of Art India called What Keeps You Awake At Night   Questions are curious things. Except when they’re not.   If there is one question that rings out a death knell in the world of dating (amorous, not historical) it is this: “tell me about you” (most commonly asked by men). It is as if the questioner has no confidence in a question’s poetic ability   to make a connection bloom “as Spring opens (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose.”   As if, unable to bear the ambiguity of a moment that might go in any direction, the asker puts the onus on the other person to reveal themselves and prove they are in fact worthy of attention. It is a faux question, its missing question mark hinting at the absence of what makes a question most potent and alive: curiosity. Curiosity is vulnerable and open. It says I want to know about you, rather than, prove that you are worth listening to.   Quite like it, is 2023’s domina

This is a longer version of my weekly column Paronormal Activity.       The finale of Koffee with Karan, in a season that set the bar low, featured Zeenat Aman and Neetu Singh. I wondered as I watched the strangely staccato proceedings, whether it was just because one Fabricare couch is not enough for two big lives? My mind kept going back to the more fluid fun in what is one of the show’s all-time best episodes – the finale of season 1 which also featured Zeenat Aman with Hema Malini. Even at the time they had seemed cooler than everyone else who had featured so far. Not only because they had the easy confidence of those who had led multi-layered lives and adventurous ones at that. But also, unlike the others, they no longer had any skin in that game. Their irreverence ran deeper, alluding to the discriminations and sexual exploitation they had survived in an unabashedly male-dominated industry.   That male domination was on full display in a Season 3 episode featuring Sanjay Dutt

      This essay was written for the 2023 year-end issue of Frontline You can read it on the website here Plain text version below the images. Links to related writings below that. RAHUL GANDHI: A DIFFERENT MASCULINITY   With the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul Gandhi articulated a more open-armed masculinity of sweetness and hugs, but in a country so large and divided, his triumph of personal growth still struggles for electoral legitimacy.   PAROMITA VOHRA   For a while, after years of disdain, surprising numbers of people were all “I’m lovin’ it” when it came to Rahul Gandhi. They shared images from the Bharat Jodo Yatra and Instagram videos where university students asked Gandhi about his skin-care regimen (“I never use soap on my face”), vegetable preferences (“ sab chalta hai” , everything goes except spinach, peas and karela ), and matrimony (“I’m married to my job”).   As late as the morning of December 3, someone WhatsApped me a video of a charming

This is a longer (much much longer) version of my Sunday Mid-day column Paronormal Activity on Lust Stories 2, which you can read here. Also, my review of Lust Stories 1 is here - Lust to Dust In a time saturated with pornography, what can a collection of Lust Stories offer us? Perhaps a chance to experience the meanings of what sex does in our life, something that reveals an aspect of humanness beyond the functional arousals of porn. I am not sure Lust Stories S2 does this much. Like the first season, this set too features only one woman director (like, why babes? Yeh quota kisne decide kiya?). The other three films, are made by men. One film – R. Balki’s – is a #BoreMatKarYaar bhashan to shame any dadiwala. The other two are entirely fixated on the climax, and not at all on the cinematic sensuality that might build us up to it. All three are absorbed in the pleasure of their own self-congratulations. If this tells us something about how Indian men think about sex, you will agree fri

  REGISTER HERE   A rollicking trip through the grey worlds of copyright, art and the market in a story about love, money and crime.   WHERE: St. Paul’s Academy of Education, Alberione Hall, Opp Duorello Convent, Bandra (W) WHEN: Wednesday, May 31, 6 pm     ABOUT THE FILM   Who owns a song – the person who made it or the person who paid for it? Are those who download for free living out a brand new cultural freedom – or are they criminals? 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? What are the ethics of art in a digital era?   Full of wicked irony, great music and thorny questions Partners in Crime meets metal heads, folklorists, music archivists, anti-piracy fanatics, smooth street salesman, media mogul