This Her Tation

I am in full study-mode these days and the dissertation is taking up all of my time and attention (hyuk! hyuk! hyuk! hyuk! who'll buy THAT?) Ok. Every morning at about nine-thirty (I know!) I plonk out of bed and the tiny-tude of my new room ensures I land in the chair in front of my laptop. With bio-breaks, and brush-breaks, chat-breaks and tea-breaks, all the furious typing for the day happens in semi-awake condition. By the time it is twelve, I am done, and I have a bath, something to eat, and plan a half day of well-earned (hyuk! hyuk! hyuk! hyuk!) fun with wendigo, promising to meet her at three. I promptly fall asleep and then meet her at seven. By twelve, I have irritated her enough with my panicking about the dark for her to see me off at a bus stop. And then I surf idly till I fall asleep at two.
Now this is what you'd call a complete, whole, and healthy plan. Except for the minor detail that I am living here to write my dissertation, and that is getting the teeniest portion of my attention. The bursts of writing are a diarrhoea of simplistic sentences conveying the ideas of a host of people who have had no role in my course of study for the whole year. In fact, I cannot remember most of what I studied all year, if I ever did study. I'm handing in a ten thousand word gossip column to my department and hoping they have flexi-bendy rules regarding the intellectual value of work, and the sense of humor to give me a passing mark. Or maybe I'm going to stop being a lazy bum and start taking this dissertation stuff seriously. (hyuk! hyuk! hyuk! hyuk! who'll buy THAT?)

O Pihu Re, Na Jaiyyo Na

A song is lazily whirling and twirling and swirling like a tea bag in the cup of hot water called me. The music and the voices and the words are seeping into every corner and colouring it and flavouring it and making me heady in a way that is very non-conducive to academic writing.

O, saathi re
Din doobe na
Aa chal din ko rokein
Dhoop ke peechhe daudein
Chhaon chhue na, O saathi re
(Gulzar in Omkara)

Barry Happy!

Got my first birdie present of the year today: a collection of Dave Barry articles sent by The Boyfriend. It's awfully nice to open the pigeonhole at the hostel reception and find something addressed to you in it. Something other than National Westminster Bank telling you that you have sixteen pounds and thirty four pence in your account. (At this stage MSN informed me that I have received a mail from vegas@home) Been giggling on buses and in shops as I dragged myself around town to help wendigo buy clothes (a whole another blogpost, I assure you!)

I could not help but remember the time I was introduced to Dave Barry. It was by the first and only person in the world to have a crush on me. He was a beer-and-dance bar owner, who was also a bodybuilder with a shaved head, and was known universally as Shetty. How this character came to develop a soft corner for me is a long story. For now, it is enough to say that I was a wide-eyed benevolent spirit who set out to make friends with ALL my classmates in advertising school, and in the case of this person, I was the only one to have made this gesture. Before long, it was clear that I had started something strange, but I put a stop to it in my own militant and brutal fashion.

One day, Shetty came into the classroom where I was typing a letter out to my mom, and told me he was going to give me a gift. Having recently been threatened with a tubelight being smashed on his head, I wondered why he even wanted to talk to me. He gave me the URL to Dave Barry's column, and told me it was a precious gift that he had not shared with anyone, and I was not supposed to share it with all and sundry either. It was a really kind gesture, and I not only thoroughly enjoyed the articles, but was quite discriminating in choosing candidates to pass the good word on to.

Poor Shetty was feared even by the teacher, and he liked me and I threatened to kill him….

It's horrid and evil to let a gift from your boyfriend set off a chain of recollections about a guy who liked you, so instead of stopping I'm gonna add that he too was a photographer, and he too hated Delhi! :P

Sabse Badey Ladaiyya Indeed

Na ghilaaf, na lihaaf
Thandi hawa bhi khilaaf
Sasurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrri

Gulzar is the new item number king!

Thumbs up to Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara. Must take swearing classes just to be able to understand half the words! The irritating English subtitles were no help there…

Up next from Bhardwaj:
Hemlata, I say!!!

Now tell me, won't that be cool? Hemlata (Konkona?) with Zamindar father (Naseeruddin Shah?) and evil stepmother (Kirrrron Kher?) and ghost mom (Raakhee Raakhee) steady friend Harsha (Raima Sen?) and loose-limbed and weak loverboy (Zayed Khan-ish) in a village in Bengal and … ok ok…the rest is silence.

Weekend of fun is over! Back to ishtudy.

O ri rani, gudiya
Jag Ja!

Taxing Times

Almost 27 years, and I still haven't figured out which side is left and which is right. However, that is only because I spend my time and energy on greater things. Like the British tax system. Here's how it works. Each year, they pick a number between 4000 and 5000. The only condition is that the number has to be higher than the previous year's. So last year's was 4890. This is where the fun begins.

• Everyone in this free country is free to work freely and earn freely up to 4890 pounds a year.


• If you earn one pound more than that, the taxman comes knocking. On an income of 4891 pounds, you pay a ten percent tax, so they take away 489.1 pounds. Had you earned one pound less, you would have 488 more pounds in your hands.

Ten percent is the lowest tax rung. If you earn much more, you pay a higher percentage. So if they keep taking away bigger chunks than they're handing out, here is what happens:

• At 10,000 a year salary, they not only take all your money but also take away your car.


• At 20,000 a year, they take away all the cars in your neighborhood.


• At 50,000 a year, they allocate you to a soup kitchen van, where you can get slop twice a day.


• At 150,000 a year, which some of our professors reportedly earn, they allow you to have marathons held to raise tax-free money to keep your body and soul together.

Prince Charles, Lakshmi Mittal, Tony Blair and all those solvent people you see in this country make 4890 a year. Either that, or HM Revenue and Customs owes me an explanation!

See how much simpler this is than left and right. It's right when nothing's left. Now the job's gone too!



Update: Umm. Apparently it does not work that way. It works the normal human being-y way. Well, it never hurts to let out the spleen I say... :P

Fricken Fricker

Looking forward to going back home, where people don't hurl abuses at me for being Indian.
Only for being a woman.

Book Bazaar

Under Waterloo Bridge: yes, the same
that was built by women in the War
(It's left to women: the building of bridges)
there is a book market of modest fame.
It draws a decent crowd most days; for
not everyone would rather spend at Selfridges.

Undaunted by tourists and skateboarders, the books
are laid out in rows on makeshift tables of wood.
No doubt some "customers" are thieving crooks,
but all said, done and pilfered, business is good.

An imaginative and unlabelled arrangement ensures
that "Les Miserables" is next to "Let's Manicure".

To be fair, though, a cardboard box is reserved
for "Poetry": home to half a dozen paperbacks.
"One Pound Or Less": and those hardly deserved.
(As much as the nearby café's coconut flapjacks)

I have passed by the book market many a day
(the women's bridge often cries tears of rain)
and when I have time for more than a peek
I imagine my tuppence book next to "Fourplay!"
and wonder if publishing is worth the pain.
I hear Selfridges has slashed its prices this week.

Accidental Photographic Genius (Or So I Am Told)

"A Digital Camera Of One's Own": my upcoming book

IScream!!!!!

Against the wall of my residence hall a young mother stood her four year old daughter and three year old son last evening and spanked them soundly. They yelped like puppies as she alternately spanked them with practised art. In their grubby hands, the kids clutched ice-cream sticks; no doubt they had just finished a treat before fury was let loose upon them.

The ice cream sticks reminded me of an incident a week ago at Brighton, where a woman was wheeling a perambulator that contained her two year old darling boy. He had just been bought an ice cream cone, and was in the process of enjoying it, when suddenly, the cone slipped a bit and some ice cream smudged onto his right hand. I am sure it felt nice and cold, and the little fellow's reaction to the accident was most amusing. He decided to investigate the matter of the dirty right hand, and to lick it clean. For this purpose, he carefully set down his ice cream cone on his left thigh, the ice cream dribbling all over his pants, while he held his right hand  in his left and licked it clean. The mother did not notice this activity. Reminded me of the problem solving methods of my erstwhile corporate life.

Another ice cream incident that it bought to mind is from my childhood, when we saw a man bring his little daughter to the grocery store and buy her an orange bar. She was tiny, and unable to manoeuvre the thing correctly (I know many grown-ups who still cannot). In about two minutes, the orange bar fell to the ground. The man slapped her soundly in public and dragged her away. My Dad murmured something about cruelty, and the shopkeeper replied that the man did so every day! Some training that little girl was receiving.

And the last child-and-ice-cream story of all: when I was young enough to forget most details of my life beyond the preceding three months or so, I once said in righteous indignation to my bemused father: "Yesterday I did not have an ice cream and none today either?" He replied that it was not compulsory to have an ice cream everyday. My poor little heart could not take the shock! He actually implied that my existence did not automatically qualify me for an ice cream every day! How unfair is that!!!!!

Ok enough nonsense. Now everyone dig your nose into a tub of Ben and Jerry's. Dublin Mudslide for me please!

:-)

And it so happened that today at a bus stop near home, I saw a Black gentleman with a considerable potbelly, in a cream suit with black stripes, and a mauve shirt, wooden bead necklace, jooti-shaped faux crocodile skin cream shoes, and a cream straw hat, leaning against the bus post and whistling. Just that. At five on a hot July evening, a cool breeze appeared from nowhere and I felt what wendigo calls inner peace, and mom-in-law calls sukoon.

I am going to bawl like a baby when I have to leave London and the kind old Sikh uncles and aunties who work at Heathrow Terminal Four are going to have a tough time with me.

Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki?

I remember playing House with childhood friends. We'd have little dolls and a house for them, and each of us used to hold one doll and take up its part. With one friend, I took up Mamma doll, while she took up Papa doll. Early on in the game, it became evident that Papa doll was going to yell a lot and hit Mamma doll at every slight provocation. I was quite shocked, because neither my Mamma nor my Mamma doll would take a beating quietly. The game was clearly going nowhere and was abandoned.
I remember wondering then, as I wonder now, if her placid and almost painted-on-the-wall Dad hit her effervescent Mom. Perhaps one cannot judge, no matter how close you are to a family, what goes on behind closed doors. I know the family still, and I still wonder about the beating…

Parting Words

"Don't Miss Me, Be Mrs. Me!"

P.S. Back Soon

The Matricide

Today I was buying detergent after a long long time, and I browsed through the choices leisurely. Suddenly, I remembered a little incident.

When I was about five or six, and every new titbit of knowledge was laden with excitement, some girl in school confided in us: "If you want to kill your mummy, just feed her a little detergent."
This home remedy did not go down well with the group. "Hawjee! What a bad girl. How can she talk about killing her mother?" was the content of the buzz that went around instantly.
My first thought was: "My mother isn't stupid enough to be fooled into eating detergent! It tastes odd!"

The head. It is screwed on wrong.

A Moving Entry (Or A Moving Exit? Argh!)

Next to the house of God flows a river. The brown water is silt-y, not filthy, they insist. Across the river stretch the vertebrae of a metallic Gigantosaurus. Treading on them noisily, you reach the other side, where you see an erstwhile power station, which is now an art museum: the chimney meant to bellow out smoke now wearing a purple tiara, unless it is, as I have come to believe, a gigantic middle finger that Modern Art sticks out at its Seventeenth Century counterpart across the muddy waters. God-art and Machine-art attract Nikons/Canons with equal gusto, and make for good places to sell ice cream by.
Behind the art museum is a dumpy brown building that looks ashamed to be standing on the prime property it occupies, since its job description is not grandiose like its neighbours'. On the third floor, there is a room that is designed oddly, like the bit of cake left on the silver circle of cardboard when the candles have been blown out and everyone has been given a slice, and some people have even had second helpings, and nobody wants any more. The room has nine walls instead of the usual four, and the shower room attached to it has seven.
Outside the window is a building that has been under construction for over a year, and is still not quite done, although it is now abundantly clear that the glass monstrosity that is being built will look old the day it is inaugurated. That, and a patch of grass, and if you really, really lean to your left, a section of a railway bridge, completes the view.
This room I have called home for the last few months, and it is here that I am scraping Blu-Tac off the walls today, as I remove the posters (Van Gogh and an Archies Ganesha) that made the room mine. Bags of various sizes lie with their mouths agape, waiting to be filled with clothes, books, CDs, talcum powder, half-used packets of rice, and Septillin bottles full of spices, resourcefully packed into empty Pringles tubes.
I'll be in another, smaller place nearby, where nothing is as grand. The elephant close to it is not a patch on the gigantic art museum, and the castle is nothing compared to the house of God. The river that flows there is black, a sea of Black faces, and the black stroke of the Northern Line. It is a big step down from this place I've grown used to calling home (me and a bunch of students and a handful of millionaires). However, all is not lost… there is the furniture!
Nobody believes me when I tell them I came to London to see the furniture in the residence halls. A friend of mine got into the school the year before last, and told me the furniture was great. I thought that detail merited an application to a Masters programme. In case you're planning to study, you should apply here. The furniture rocks. No, actually it's quite stable.

Wendigo, you're right. My jokes suck. I'm going to cry by the riverside and flood London.

Guest Post Warning: Sound And Fury Ahead

This blog is very friendly and The Intended posts only photu-related stuff on his. Therefore, the following post is a guest entry: I take no responsibility for any damage, permanent or temporary, sustained by readers. (Not a very friendly gesture that.)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

We live in an era of 160-letter-SMS-attention spans, so stylistic similarities to Hugo is the easiest way to non-readability.

On a lazy Sunday evening, a funny thought crossed my mind. What would be the result if we were to juxtapose the terseness of Shakespeare (sort of, for he wrote in verse – one could argue that so did Homer but let us be granted that verse is usually terse for the sake of argument) with verbosity of Hugo? Over two hundred years separate the two authors, and so we should not expect the authors themselves to have undertaken such an enterprise jointly. But since providence and printing press have connived to erase the eras that separate the two, by putting both their works in my hands, let me attempt it.

The plot for the following text was supplied by Shakespeare on which Hugo erects his grandiose edifice (we use the word plot here a little too literally for comfort).

Without much ado,
I present to you,
Monsieur Hugo’s Macbeth

We introduce Enjloras into the story a little abruptly, and in that he may be considered a digression, but the reader would pardon us for this parenthesis, which, as shall be seen, has a good reason for it. We have in our possession a letter that he addressed to Marquis de Champtercier; wealthy and avaricious old man, who contrived to be, at one and the same time, an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairian, whose contents give us a startling insight into the ocular and oracular practices prevalent in the Paris of 1800s.

Enjolras that evening was restless; on what account, we do not know but we can guess with a reasonable degree of certainty, that nor did he. Such are the inner workings of the mind of a twenty year old. It takes little to upset the order, balance, poise, equilibrium of intellect at that dreamy age. The author, being long past that age, can offer no more conjectures. It occurred to Enjolras at that moment, that perhaps a quick walk would help him regain his composure. He put on his coat, tied a cravat about his neck, took his hat, and went out.

Once out of the house, he went to the Rue de Petit Banquier.

He had almost reached the middle of this street, near a very low wall which a man can easily step over at certain points, and which abuts on a waste space, and was walking slowly, in consequence of his preoccupied condition, and the snow deadened the sound of his steps; all at once he heard voices talking very close by. He turned his head, the street was deserted, there was not a soul in it, it was broad daylight, and yet he distinctly heard voices.

It occurred to him to glance over the wall which he was skirting.

There, in fact, sat three personages, flat on the snow, with their backs against the wall, talking together in subdued tones. What followed next is known to us through the account presented by Enjloras in the aforementioned letter. The first thing that he learned from their voices, although he hadn’t yet picked a single word that he could distinctly comprehend, was that those personages were in fact women. They were clothed in black, with a guimpe, which, in accordance with the prevalent norms of certain orders in the Parisian society at that time, mounted to the chin. A robe of serge with large sleeves, a large woollen veil, the guimpe which mounted to the chin cut square on the breast, the band which descends over their brow to their eyes,--this was their dress.

We know now, from this very vivid sketch his words drew in the letter that these women were a lot more. They were witches of the dark order of Orephia.

They spoke argot.

Argot is the language of the dark. Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy is bidden to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of that enigmatic dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement made visible. Every syllable has an air of being marked. The words of the vulgar tongue appear therein wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were, beneath the hot iron of the executioner. Some seem to be still smoking. Such and such a phrase produces upon you the effect of the shoulder of a thief branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly been laid bare. Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which are fugitives from justice. Metaphor is sometimes so shameless, that one feels that it has worn the iron neck-fetter.

That it was Enjloras who stood there at this moment, we owe to providence. For Enjloras, though not adroit with argot, knew enough of the patois of Orephia, for him to divine snatches of the conversation that transpired between the trinity of crones.

The women were at that point discussing a propitious moment for their next rendezvous. Enjloras gathered they had a strange predilection for tumultuous weather phenomenon – for he clearly heard these words pronounced in that dark tongue - mirlababi^*, surlababo ^†, mirlition^‡. The first witch, who spoke these words, said them with such a measure of confidence that Enjloras wondered if she was capable of summoning a storm at will.


^*Thunder
^†Lightening
^‡Rain

---

Of course this would then be followed by a long and winding prose on:

When the hurly-burly’s done
When the battle’s lost and won

And since the couplet concerns a battle, inadvertently, we’ll be taken to the Plateau of Mont Saint Jean, to witness that grand struggle between Bonaparte and Wellington.

-- written sometime in 2006 by an Indian inspired by an original work of an English bard in English and a classic English translation of a French author’s French novel by an English knowing friend of his.

p.s. certain sentences in the above text (in blue) were copied verbatim from Isabel F. Hapgood’s translation of Les Misérables (which can be downloaded from project Gutenberg), a few words come from a translation by Charles E Wilbour, the remainder we owe to the Indian author’s fecund imagination. If you are feeling inclined to reading Les Misérables, and your knowledge of French precludes you from venturing anywhere near the original, I highly recommend Charles E Wilbour’s classic (and somewhat tedious) English translation of the text. The gentleman was a friend of Hugo, and managed to publish his translation in the same year as the original was published in France. Available in a beautifully bound edition in Everyman’s Library, this is as close as you can get to the real thing.

A Prayer (And The Unbearable Weight Of Memory)

Aye maalik tere bande hum, aise hon hamaare karam
neki par chalein, aaur badi se talein, taaki hanste hue nikale dum

ye andheraa ghanaa chhaa rahaa, teraa insaan ghabaraa rahaa
ho rahaa bekhabar, kuchh naa aataa nazar, sukh kaa sooraj chhoopaa jaa rahaa
hai teree roshanee mein jo dam, tu amaawas ko kar de poonam
neki par chalein, aaur badi se talein, taaki hanste hue nikale dum

badaa kamazor hain aadamee, abhee laakhon hain is mein kamee
par tu jo khadaa, hai dayaaloo badaa, teree kirpaa se dharatee thamee
diyaa toone humein jab janam, tu hi jhelegaa hum sab ke gham
neki par chalein, aaur badi se talein, taaki hanste hue nikale dum

jab zulmon kaa ho saamanaa, tab tu hi humein thaamanaa
wo buraee kare, hum bhalaaee bhare, nahin badale kee ho kaamanaa
badh uthhe pyaar kaa har kadam aaur mite bair kaa ye bharam
neki par chalein, aaur badi se talein, taaki hanste hue nikale dum

Determined To Give Up Saintliness

Me: So now I'll go make dinner. Boil my three color pasta in one pan, and in the other, stir fry onions and capsicum and carrots and broccoli, add salt and cook, and add pasta sauce, a little cheese, pepper, the pasta, and oregano.
She: Ok.
Me: Ok? OK? Are you not drooling?
She: No. Such food does not make me drool.
Me: What makes you drool? Moong and Masoor Daal?
She: Yes.
Me (to myself): That is the reason I left home.

My mom is not impressed that I am cooking and eating healthy things. So I'm just becoming a drunk punk; let me have some fun at least.

P.S. Healthy food can be tasty. There are some leftovers in the fridge. Once I'm a drunk punk, I'm not gonna need them. Kitchen 4, Third floor. Help yourself.

The darkness of the music of the night

Close your eyes for your eyes will only tell the truth
And the truth isn't what you want to see.
In the dark it is easy to pretend
That the truth is what it ought to be.

- Charles Hart(?) for Lloyd Webber

Melted Brainhood

And in about twelve hours I will click my pen shut and vigorously tap it against the table in the examination hall with the pitpitpitpitpitpitpit sound that the bubbles in the coke can on my table are making, beating against aluminium walls in their impatience to be free from high-pressure captivity and dissolve into thin air. If some monster dare swallow me on my way out, I will emerge as a burp, but I will have my freedom!

London: The School Of Economics

"Nahin yaar, maine usey kal ke liye nahin bulaya hai, uske parents paise nahin dete use. 10 pound to entry hai, kabhi kabhi use 5 pound de dete hain McDonalds ke liye, 20 ki hoon kehti hai saali 17 ki hai, and it is not even like I have banged her yet….koi sense nahin banti yaar itna paisa uspe waste karney mein…"

Overheard by the riverside today.