Plans of going to Rohini for a lazy lazy Sunday lunch.

As aditi put it beautifully the other night: "It has chicken and coke and tv...what else do you need??"

I want to cut. I want to cut. I want to cut.

Dal-bhaat

There should be a law that auto-drivers cannot refuse a sawaari. For two nights in a row, around 15-20 auto-wallahs have turned me down the moment i utter 'Indira Nagar'! This happened at 6, 7.30, 8.45 and 9 pm.
In fact, they don't even bother to stop and bargain. No! For that would ask for too much effort- a waste of their precious time, that could be better spent ogling at ammas near the tea-shop.

Auto-drivers in Bangalore are above all that. There is a technique to appease this elusive deity. U must shout out the name of your destination across the street for him to even acknowledge your presence. If he likes the syllabic sound, he may deign to come nearer...but keeping sufficient distance enabling him to bolt in a second. Ur hopes high, visions of hot kaapi awaiting u at that cosy place u call home, u say "ABC chaloge?"
And you get... The Look. That gaze of utter contempt. He might even sniff, derision wrought all over his greasy face. I have even gotten a few laughs!
WHAT THE HELL IS SO FUNNY? and wat do these jerks have up their asses, that prevents them from entertaining legitimate requests? No city in this country has 14 bucks as minimum auto fare...and no place has auto-drivers as rude and arrogant as here.

Calcutta

I was reading the Giant's blog and she'd written a lovely post on Home. Yes that idyllic place of memories and parathas, homework and adrak ki chai, ma and her nagging... it's such a part of me that the capital H comes on its own accord.

But these hols Home, is not tiny Doon, but languid Cal.
I wanna gorge on tiger prawns at my masi's place...
go to my favourite restaurant Mocambo and have their famous prawn cocktail, then zip to Oxford to spend two glorious hrs browsing random books... aah!
and then! sigh...eat puchkas on a rainy cal evening, half-drenched, giggling...

sit on the terrace when it gets too hot...aadabaazi-ing, all the while trying to catch that tiniest murmur of a breeze...damn that Calcutta weather!

Cal, for me has always conjured the images of Ol' Cal....possibly because my earliest memories of the city are of Victoria Memorial (I used to run round and round the building in a polka-dot frocka & white ribbons in my hair. That my mother did not die of exhaustion trying to catch an abnormally energetic 4 yr old is a testament to that woman's strength); Howrah; Blue Fox, a colonial restaurant which is has succumbed to the recession Calcutta has been facing long before America; and my sojourns in North Calcutta with my chhoti masi where I'd eat all the sandesh & then promptly throw up..

While growing up, in my teens, Cal now took the form of The Forum on Camac Street, Pantaloons at Goriahaat, endless rides on the ancient metro. And frequent bouts of indigestion i suffered at the hands of my dida's spicy bong preparations.
The visits grew more f
.
.
.
These holidays, hopefully, I shall be going to the city after 4 years. I've no idea what to expect. Has it changed? Will i like my cousins now that they re growing up? What about the tidal wave of relatives who would want to know all 'bout my blood group, height, weight,roommates,college,teachers,career,cgpa,boyfriend,marriage plans and everything under the blazing Bengal sun!
I don't care..
All I know is I'm going to Calcutta!!!!!

unstructured & prosaic

I respect the works of Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap. Because their movies respect my intelligence as a viewer. Oye Lucky... for instance was brilliant. I am one of the few who liked No Smoking and wouldn't mind saying it when among friends.
No, this is not a reflection on how discerning a critic I am, or how I am the only one to 'recognize the diamond for what it is' yada yada!...
We have enough people who can sit and "analyze" a movie for ages, insistent on finding korean philosophy in a ghati bhojpuri flick, unsatisfied if a documentary lacks subtitles and pleasure themselves over Bolivian noir cinema (Gupta, I am looking at you!)

This post is to acknowledge the intensely relieving fact, that there are writers out there, film-makers who make the movies that I like to spend an afternoon watching. And my afternoons are very precious to me. Where are the discussions on Firaaq, Gulal and Barah Aana? I didn't find Khosla funny, bittersweet more likely...and I felt vindicated when I read an interview of DB saying that he never intended to make that movie a comedy... Anurag Kashyap wrote Satya, boss! These people take a concept, break it down, deconstruct it to its very elements. The screenplay takes you by your balls and twists it around... grabs all your expectations and jumps on them. They discard the bloody predictability and make the final product, a part of their very essence...unafraid, unmoved.

Would love to chat with DB and AK one day...

ummm...lovely weather!
A certain place on the Nilgiri terrace has become our haunt...

Addabaazi till the wee hours of morn...

Has it happened to you too?

residual travel fever - part III - One Night in Brugge

It was a 14th century townhouse converted into a cafe. The cobbled streets refused to reveal their ancient secrets. And under a dark sky, millennia old, I brought the mug to my mouth and sipped the cold beer slowly..

This was Bruge. Bruges to the English. Brugge to the defiant Dutch who were pained at the massacre of their pharyngeal grunts.
The Jupiler beer was only 1.90 - the cheapest I had in whole of Europe. B seemed very happy, giggling over a colourful cocktail. T had gone to escort G back to the hotel, because he was convinced he would be raped in Europe. I saw M poring over the menu, contemplating his next poison of choice. Friendship with him, here on a different continent, surprised me. He was wonderful company, especially drunk ;) !

I settled deeper into the cushioned settee, comfortable in the knowledge my packing was done. The Bell Tower glowed in the distance. Someone cursed in fluent french. The other responded, just as enthusiastically, in lusty Scotch broth. Aaah it was sweet!

I had done churches. Seen the only Michelangelo sculpture outside of Europe. Wept at the sight of Belgian chocolates, custom-made to titillate even the least decadent of us. Soaked up the sun in the square, watching students of architecture take notes...And kicked myself for not carrying more money.

Good trip. And this last bit sums it all up for me -

residual travel fever - part II - The Tube

The

London deflowered me. I lost myself in that city. It was all they had said it would be - noisy, gray, yellow teeth, bad breath, brown overtones to the essential ruddy heartiness. It was all that and more to someone who was so new to travelling alone. In that moment, when I took the first left to the Underground from Heathrow, I was, completely and absolutely, in love with myself!

The Tube. After changing trains so many times, befriending ticket-sellers at every imaginable stop,not only can i tell you about the unpredictable tantrums of the Victoria line, but I could teach you how to jostle your way to the best seats.
Fell in love with that crazy jazz they call the Tube, listened to buskers playing in the station all day long...even threw a precious pound to one of them who had the sexiest voice...befriended a Russian lesbian artist on my first night there, when I had yet to step out into the much-maligned London air...

I used to choose any station..on a whim!...step out of the Tube, run up the stairs (I hate taking the escalator..I am convinced it will eat my foot! You have a certain X-file episode to blame). Baker Street, to me, shall always be a lane of pigeons, postcards & endless charm. Oxford Street is for the warmest waffles and costa coffee. And oh Covent Garden! that quaint ancient vegetable mart, now with its immigrant punk attitude, crazy jugglers, jazz musicians, pashmina shawls next to pictures of a masturbating Christ. It was wild in there! Liecester Square with its falafel shops and the smoothest humus filling.
I spent a lifetime in the London Tube...once or twice over

(to be continued)

residual travel fever - part I

Quotes open. Enter obscure quote by famous author/feminist/poet/quirky film-maker on travel. dot.dot.dot. Quotes closed.

I realized I love to travel. In the middle of the Red Light District in Amsterdam, surrounded by gorgeous women peddling their stuff in neon-blue bikinis;inebriated Scot fans yelling "Amsterdam, Amsterdam! YAAAAY" and me, neatly stepping over dog poo, I had this brilliant moment of clarity. The kind that only strikes alcoholics.
I REALIZED.

with the smoke of dutch grass burning my urban angst...
In a coffee shop which was so freakingly sterotypical that I almost laughed! Faded graffiti on peeling yellow walls. Thick sweet fumes. Loud Russians, and Clapton coughing on an asthamatic telly.
First drag. A resounding disaster!!! Let no one fool you into thinking otherwise...Smoking is a science! People don't smoke because they are worried about their lungs, they don't because they don't know how to!
The owner of the coffee-shop...Sheeba...if i remember the name of the place correctly, smiled at us indulgently, teaching me to suck in the air the right way. Awww, he looked like such a proud papa when I took a successful drag!

S said it looked like I was making love to the joint, puffing it so languidly with my feet perched on the table and my head thrown back. Clapton wheezed on. It did feel like love...

Toothpaste hates math

X-files

ZeeCafe has introduced a lovely concept called Old School Classics. This is where I get to see all my childhood favourites like Different Strokes, Who's the Boss et al.
One incredible find has been the X-files. See, when it used to air on Star World, I was just a kid and was just intrigued by the weird things that kept happening on the show and thinking Agent Scully had such pretty hair! But now as I re-watch the episodes, I'm blown away by the awesomeness!!
Chris Carter, the show's creator, instead of tying each episode with a neat little bow in the end, deliberately left things unexplained. That there is no answer to alien abductions, that conspiracy theorists may not be wacked on weed, that maybe there is some truth behind all these lovely monster stories. It's like your mother telling you the Boogey man will come if you are naughty, you are scared...yet you almost want to see the boogeyman....a sense of disbelief mingled with a tiny voice telling you 'What If?'
And the show's writers played with those 'What Ifs?'
They did not deny that there needs to be a semblance of logic to explain something like Tooms - the mutant cannibal, but in the words of Mulder...the show encourages you to believe!! just open your mind to impossibilities....

I also love the use of symbolism in the show. Whenever you look up in the sky and you saw black helicopters, it's the government..hiding things, covering up the facts. Black oil on the ground...there is an alien nearby, probably bleeding and you are about to be infected with a deadly alien virus. I mean who thinks of such stuff!!! This is bloody brilliant!

....and Amen to that!