foibled spirit

a few metaphors got displaced, there were new placeholders

2011-07-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

When poetry of sign became poetry of signal,

a few metaphors got displaced

there were new placeholders

why talk about how beautiful he or she was,

when you could talk about how beautiful his neurons are, her cells were

Camus exhaled existentialism looking at the streetcar

but existence and desire might have shifted to the traffic signal

In Santa Barbara, on a sea fog night, you will see the traffic lights develop halos,

if the color red was almost pink, you could then compare the red traffic light poles to cotton candies

the critique of capitalism is no longer, some say,

in decrying that poetry in the ad jingle for a car or the coffee,

it is perhaps in writing a new poetry of the speed-breaker or maybe the microscope

When poetry of sign became poetry of signal,

a few metaphors got displaced

there were new placeholders

For Isabelle Stengers, Jean Baudrillard

an enormous ballon filled with helium

2010-10-08T23:09:00.001-07:00

A much loved professor of mine once told me that almost everybody in his Tamil Brahmin family grew up to be a scientist and so he decided to be a social scientist, and when people asked what did he research within social science, he said "Scientists." He turned out to be a Science Studies scholar studying scientists. I want to hold on to this account and build an analogy with something that recently happened with a set of novels I bought. At a book sales here at Santa Barbara, I purchased four sci-fi novels - the list was almost a refresher course in sci-fi with Le Guin, Clarke, Banks and Bradbury paperbacks thrown in together with McEwan's novel Enduring Love.I started reading the first chapter of each of them. Here I was trying to re-read the science fiction canon and falling in love with McEwan's novel which actually is about a science fiction writer.

Enduring Love, among McEwan's novels, redoubtably has the most compelling opening and along with the openings in Raj Kamal Jha'sThe Blue Bedspread, Kiran Nagarkar's Sat Sakkam Trechalis, Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Rosalind Belben's Choosing Spectacles, has been one that has for those ten minutes spent reading, made me loose myself completely in the text. Each of the openings of the novels mentioned also do share a common trait which makes me a bit wary about my choice - they are (with the possible exception of Belben's sinuous prose) emphatically visual and endearingly cinematic. Not surprisngly therefore one often sees McEwan's novels being adapted for movies. The nagging question (often talked about), which is almost a conundrum is whether the all-pervasive cinema, screen and television presence around us, has fundamentally molded the way we read novels and ostensibly shaped the way novels are written today. If this question has bothered you, the only balm I could offer is reproducing a few lines from the quietest of stylist McEwan's prose --

"What we were running toward? I don't think any of us would ever know fully. But superficially the answer was a ballon. Not the nominal space that encloses a cartoon character's speech or thought, or, by analogy, the kind that's driven by mere hot air. It was an enormous ballon filled with helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including our selves and all our thoughts" (p.3)

Waiting

2010-06-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Conversations about Franz Kafka's The Trial often lead to discussions on the activity of Waiting. Often reading Kafka itself is like undergoing a waiting exercise for a 'probable' triumph of knowledge, only to realize it never was perhaps designed as such, and that there is knowledge in waiting itself. The 'waiting' theme/trick/idea, quite explicitly so, then can be seen in Beckett's work and also in Ha Jin's novel entitled "Waiting : A Novel" - reading them, it appears that waiting can become synonymous with almost leading life itself - the absurdity of mindless waiting becomes a joy - the reader's joy of reading it has to do with, at least to some extent, on the bet that perhaps the character/person doing the waiting enjoys him(her)self too.

There are others too - that charming writer of nothingness Javier Marías who through sleights and diversions arrests time, Milan Kundera who through his unbearably light novels meditates on where the pleasures of slowness have gone. And my two beloved philosophers - Paul Virilio who has dedicated his life to studying speed and Shiv Visvanathan who in some of his inimitable newspaper columns has asked us to re-feel "boredom".

S.K. caught me looking at this painting as I was circling through these thoughts and yet one can agree that waiting is not a joy always - the impatience of it as one sees in this painting. A tram or a train is yet to arrive, it has been hours in the line for bread, one cannot wait for a lover's next kiss, one cannot wait to see God...and yet we do like to wait sometimes, we do like to eat slowly sometimes if not drive slowly...we do like to get bored sometimes and not give in to switching on the T.V., we like to watch melodrama sometimes and not Action films.

You gave me a poem to write

2010-05-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

You were going back

I would have to wait for the reason

You talked relentlessly about the weather

I noted that only old people talk about weather

You said you were old and you were re-starting your life at 27

I said I re-started when I was 24

You said 3 years is a crucial difference...

What really happened in a week?

I cannot possibly know

You were talking about the weather because you said to talk about anything else was painful

I could not guess what pain it was

You looked sad putting up a brave face

I was sad and did not know how I looked

Did you count the number of times we met?

I often term them as meets and not dates

Lately you often looked impatient in those meets

I was so glad to meet you that I deferred the Paul Austeresque investigations

You perhaps wanted me to enquire

I perhaps should have been less hesitant- more forceful in my inquiry

You guided our conversations to me, Tagore, Ray, Calvino, Madame Bovary ...

I never steered them away to you

You gave me a poem to write

I should have made you the poem of my life

To 'You' and Paul Auster

what kind of travel is that?

2010-04-28T21:37:00.000-07:00

she wonders whether,

she ever will be able to write a poem

that is not about her

that has got nothing to do with her

it strikes her that

she has never written a poem

when she is sad...

she has written poems, also many sad poems

only when she is happy

happy with condescension

when she has heard girlfriends bitching about boyfriends on phone in public transport buses,

happy with tears in her eyes

when she has heard Mazzy Star, read Murakami, watched Ghatak

she writes poetry only because she has a blog -- her self-flagellating moment;

she writes poetry because she enters ennui and has a feel for the texture of metaphors -- more forgiving;

she writes poetry because she wants to be read by a boy in Romania under a mulberry tree -- day-dreams;

she writes poetry because she cannot travel, because she does not have a car -- pity;

'she' writes poetry because she wants to be 'he' for those two minutes -- what kind of travel is that?

For Müller and Flaubert

my father opened the window as we skyped and I heard the Dhak

2009-12-22T23:06:00.000-08:00

The three pictures are of the construction site of the Pandal, I saw in the lead up to the Durja Puja. I never could see it completely built because I was not there for Puja. I had hurried back to Santa Barbara, a bit nervous about TAing for a silent film class, to get the class schedules and be done with all the formalities for getting a phone. However, thinking back I regret not having stayed back for the Puja -- my third successive year of missing it. As I write this post, and i know you (my readers) will realize, I should be careful about not lapsing into the all too familiar "longing and belonging" that not-so-often-great Diasporic writers are guilty of. And yet, perhaps I have of late been too harsh on them.

With the winter vacations having set in, there is immense time, especially since I ended up striking off all plans to go anywhere, partly because of meagre dollars and primarily because I cannot but remember. I write this blog, therefore, to fill time, the time it takes for a YouTube video of Kandukondian Kandukondian to buffer. I promise this is not going to be long. In fact, when I started blogging, people would say it was a way to make ones' narcissistic self reach out to others. Nowadays, trite smart facebook status postings serve that purpose/motivation well enough. Shorter the posts, better chances are they will be judged as being well written. The ecstasy of speed is doing overtime nowadays in all walks of life - scatter-brained and limping, I am always left looking for prosthetics. Forgive this aside.

Before I forget as to why I wanted to write about these pictures and memory, I must mention they are related to the conversation I was having with my parents today. All of these pictures have been taken from my second floor balcony adjoining the room from where my parents video chat on skype with me, on a static desktop pc. As they talked to me today, they opened the door leading to the balcony and I could hear the man coming to sell fish shouting Mach Mach. My parents talked for a while and then I asked them to wait because I needed to go the kitchen and set the potatoes to boil. When I came back to resume the conversation, I could hear the Kashmiri shawl and sweater sellers calling out to people in the apartments - it is winter time there too.

I came back to SB seven days before Puja - the pandal construction finished soon. I knew it when seven days later, my father opened the window as we skyped and I heard the Dhak.

of fables by a sociologist

2009-10-28T00:27:00.000-07:00

A first time experience of taking an AC bus from Jamshedpur to Ranchi brought more surprises : Samsung LCD TV showing Sunny Deol- Karishma Kapoor - Salman Khan - Tabu starer Jeet. The AC trip was partly spent sleeping in the comfort of the conditioner and the rest of the time was devoted to watching Jeet and having just read books on Ambient Media though I feel tempted to write about In-Bus entertainment, it is best saved for another entry. So, it was the journey from Ranchi to Jamshedpur with my friend who just passed out from IIM Ahemdabad in a ramshackle bus that felt more like a journey with lively conversations, the yet thought of pristine beauty of the land of forests (Jharkhand) enveloping our thoughts and the bus driver's occasional bravados with the steering wheel. Having more than two hundred common friends, the conversation often seemed like a report about the lives of our friends - small fact finding missions about their place of work, marital status etc. etc., a laugh about remembered idiosyncrasies , small surprises at changed attitudes, gentle judgements and twisted gossips.

And then some issues on which we have differed all these years. Chetan Bhagat - my friend who took to him since "Five Point Someone" and who believes I have not given Bhagat a fair chance blinded by elitism. I continue to find it difficult to get on with more than 15 pages of CB. Don't get me wrong, when Chetan Bhagat comes to public forums and says that the basic problem of our higher education system is not class 12 syllabi/board question papers but lack of good universities to catch up with the growing educated population, I love him. When Chetan Bhagat talks about the strategic pricing of his novels at Rs99 and making his ideas accessible to a wider Indian audience, I want to hug him. But when he says and then keeps maintaining that most so-called great English writers in India basically write to get a Booker prize or be read by international readers and not for Indian readers, I can't contain an annoyed chuckle.

The other contentious issue being the problem of Jharkhand, its continued underdevelopment despite having abundant mineral resources. My friend sticks to the dominant development paradigm as he keeps identifying the illiteracy of the tribals in Jharkhand as the main cause of their being fooled by activists, who he says, are ready to protest against any new industrial project in the state. What he is oblivious of and which i continue to emphasize, is his stubborn insistence to not see the tragedy of displacement such projects hold for the tribals. To continue to equate their "desire to live their lives in the intimacy of familiar soils, waters and trees" to "illiteracy" is an illiteracy of another kind.

We reached the Jamshedpur bus station and then took an auto-rickshaw to the XLRI management institute. Found ourselves immersed, the next few days and nights, in parties, having inimitable chicken rolls @ Dadu's, looking at the never sleeping Tata factory resembling thousand fireflies from the terrace and walking the campus seeing students gazing over Powerpoint presentations waiting in line for Chai. After returning home, I chanced upon this article written by a professor both me and my friend studied under. The writer is a sociologist who has never stopped inventing fables for our times. I wish we lend an ear to the wisdom in tribal stories and consider our education as always incomplete without these stories.

Not only because it was plain maths without calculators

2009-07-11T21:38:00.000-07:00

Just out of a popular Mexican film
in which beautiful people made love to each other,
the woman from the land of Hans Christian Andersen
is having tea with her boyfriend from the land of Dalai Lama

She is soon shifting to pursue a Masters,
and is going to see less and less of him
He is upbeat about his getting a job next to the university,
about being able to continue to sleep by her side for many more years to come

He is saying something...She cannot hear
this music from the land of elephants is too loud
But would listening help - how could they understand each other
Not only because that writer who loved peeling potatoes in his novel Women in Love said so...

She had met this cute little Buddha four years ago,
He was 19, she was 31, she was 31 after a 12 year old relationship
with a man from the land of Euphrates and Tigris...of Saddam Hussein
She had gone through his papers 12 years ago in the embassy-he was 5'10'',he was 31

Little Buddha shifts his gaze from Chicago Cubs on the giant screen
He is looking at her - her white wrinkled skin, her blond hair, her blue eyes
traces of cinnamon from the pastry on her lips...her lips quiver to tell him that
they would never understand each other,
Not only because it was plain maths without calculators,
but also because that writer roaming the streets of Prague said,
almost said, oh why did he say that in No Saints or Angels

For Ivan Klima, D.H. Lawrence
Picture : Anant A.

So this blog

2009-05-03T00:09:00.000-07:00

So much for chain of thoughts. I just took out my Berkeley shirt from the washbasin. The green mark won't go away from the white shirt. A mark I put on it as I celebrated my first touchdown rolling without any reason on the green green grass. A trinket seller in Berkeley, who had his stall next to where I had bought the shirt, told me about Lalu and Indian elections. He gave me his card and promised to call me regarding Dalai Lama's visit to Santa Barbara - he never called. A trinket was taken from his place; a peacock feather in the form of an earlet found its way to my friend's hands and then to K. Writing on Walter Benjamin today, and hearing Kabir Suman mentioning the grammar of words in heart gone wrong, I remembered the trinket seller again and looked for his card, I had lost it. So this blog.

Naseem : Grandpa's stories as history through a caravan of personal memories

2008-12-28T02:54:00.000-08:00

While indexing a book on Partition Cinema, I came across a discussion of the film Naseem directed by Saeed Akhtar Mirza. Reading about the film compelled me to watch it.

The film mixes the personal and the political. It renders history through a caravan of personal memories and asks the audience to remember it alongside the pedagogical official histories.Tracking the everyday life of a Muslim household in Mumbai around the time of communal tension in 1992, the film with great nuance through each small incident/altercation makes one ponder over one's perspectives/views.

Watching Naseem, it is impossible not to note where films like Gadar and LOC go wrong, unleashing as they do at times a pornography of hypermasculinist(ic) violence to drive home messages, which seem to be limping over (secondary as they become to) the specter of high pitched rhetoric and bombardment at the audience of spectacular scenes.

Naseem portrays issues relating to religious conflict/amity, class conflicts, rewritings of history, and about a past which saw many futures for itself. This is the politics of the film (and it is wise in refining (and not prescribing) ways of coming to terms with trauma). The film also has an affective dimension.

In the film, Grandpa (played by Kaifi Azmi) tells stories to grand-daughter Naseem. While Naseem's brother and his friend continue to belligerently contend that the time for Grandpa's stories has come to an end in the midst of such communal strife, Naseem however, retains the innocence to imbibe the stories. Such an innocence means to understand the value of laughter while being told (so what if unscientifically so? that) the sky is blue because one painted it so and not yellow.

The main pivot of the film rests on these conversations between Naseem and her grandpa. Grandpa's stories are of those of his pre-Partition everyday life lived in Agra. Around the spectacle of the build-up to the Babri Masjid demolition, in a dim-lited room, dawn-fresh Naseem (the name translates as "morning breeze" in English) listens to her grandpa as he fades into the dusk.

On a personal note perhaps all of us start loosing our innocence when our grandparents' stories stop making sense. Rationality of "the history" which preaches the either/or logic needs to be seen alongside histories of Grandparents' stories. We need to re-member those stories.

animating it

2008-12-25T23:54:00.000-08:00

she drew eyes on the cloud
animating it
and he fell in love with her then...

little did she realize
he hardly knew anything
about the pain she felt...

mousing the eyelashes
setting the cloud free
on a blog page...

A visit to a friend’s house has its own secrecy

2008-09-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

In book stores, it is quite probable that you might find “Midnight’s Children” seating next to“Freedom Song” under the shelf, Indian Fiction. If these two starkly different objects were to talk to each other, I fancy an antagonism. The former revealed Salman Rushdie’s magical genius putting him in the company of a Gunter Grass and Garcia Marquez, while the latter is Amit Chaudhuri’s most defining work. Both these writers however not only have differences in styles and sensibilities, but hold dissimilar views as to the use of the ‘English’ language in describing India, its Indianness – the term holding a certain amount of irony for Chaudhuri.

Chaudhuri’s fiction also does not showcase an overt attempt for ‘discussions on’ and ‘concerns about’ nations, ethnography, science and technology - that distinction would go to Amitav Ghosh.

In terms of prose quality and its inherent beauty, he is often compared to Vikram Seth; both of them seem to have a musical quality in their prose, almost poetry in prose.

Of the Indian writers, writing in English staying in India (Chaudhuri is now settled in Kolkata), he shares with Geetha Hariharan, the absence of any great resolutions taken by characters throughout the novel as also in the palpable lack of any great apocalyptic or climactic endings. The differences between the two do exist, but the one of greater significance would be that Chaudhuri believes even more in the “act of understating”, there is a conscious effort on his part for creating a lack of dramatic moments in his novels.

Chaudhuri found the address of his first novel “A Strange and Sublime Address” to be a house in Calcutta (most of his fiction has been on the city, three novels and a collection of short stories,barring ‘Afternoon Raga’ which was on the life of an Oxford student), its setting partly inspired by Sir V.S Naipaul’s “A House for Mr. Biswas”, where a school boy from Bombay, Sandeep, is visiting his relatives and here itself Chaudhuri through his very young protagonist, who also wants to be a writer someday, lays down the defining point of story-telling - “The 'real' story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.” The story will be about deviations and digressions, and so it was, following which Chaudhuri has with great linguistic preciseness, immense discipline, poetic subtlety, and an even greater courage in one novel after another demonstrated this obsession with digressions, echoing perhaps Italo Calvino’s assertion “Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it.” As far as my reading of Chaudhuri is concerned, he hasn’t uptil now, till his last fiction “A New World” ‘denied’ it.

Lets take up the story of “Freedom Song” – an elderly couple in their sixties Khuku and her husband Shib, Khuku’s younger brother Bhola’s family members especially his wife whom we know as Bhaskar’s mother, and Khuku’s childhood friend from Sylhet, Mini, make up the main cast. What happens over a wintry month following the Babri Masjid demolition, in Calcutta – Khuku and Mini spend a few days together in Khuku’s house which are a holiday for Mini who is a school teacher; Bhola’s household is planning to marry off their son Bhaskar. Ending notes – Bhaskar does get married and prepares to go to Darjeeling with his wife for a honeymoon, Mini resumes teaching and Khuku lying in bed thinks of golden old days, and yet “Freedom Song” has so much life to offer.

Is there any great drama – well there certainly were chances created but – Mini’s arthritis pain could have gone worse, could have made her bed-ridden, but after the vacation she is walking again with that usual pain and struggle. In the arranged marriage-setting scenario, Bhaskar could have been smitten by a girl and would have left his home for that girl, he infact does have some feelings for a particular girl but the girl’s mother feels a bit averse about Bhaskar’s socialistic leanings, his commitments for the party and so Bhaskar does not get the girl of his first choice, he is sad only for a day and relents as regards choosing the second one. In the wake of Bombay riots following the demolition, one could have expected a heated discussion between Khuku and Suleiman, Khuku’s tabla accompanist, but there is only a blush of shyness and embarrassment.

Authors are intuitive beings, they love to gamble. In Franz Kafka’s stories there is an obsession with the pursuit of a greater thing, the story mirroring life seems to be a ‘process’ of finally realizing something, the digressions there point to obstacles in addition to problems of communication. In Chaudhuri’s elliptical most befittingly realized prose in “Freedom Song” the digressions serve as distanced observation. There is an obsession here too, if Kafka’s gamble is to bank on a possibility to achieve the end, Chaudhuri’s is to observe and describe “lived experience” of unfolding lives.

In ‘Freedom Song’ he has worked with a greater number of characters than “A Strange and Sublime Address” or “A New World” bringing with it a sense of chaos and delineating the layers of middle class existence. The latter two have a tendency of being pushed into describing a more sheltered existence – a house or an apartment flat.

Sometimes characters move and as they move an evening in a locality gets described, as they get up from their bed a morning Azaan is interpreted. While peeping into the lives of his characters,Chaudhuri mentions musical maestros Tagore and Nazrul littered here and there are their lyrical compositions, adda and street theatre, saris and colors, the experience of living in cramped flats and servants, streets and the state of public sector undertakings, their drawing-room conversations hinting at soft-Hindutva feelings, dust on leaves and birds humming, critics wontedly point to the realism of Joyce’s Dubliners.

If there is a more taut plot in “A New World”, Freedom Song had bargained for poetic trajectories, the characters drifting in thought. As a reader, one becomes aware of the necessity for reminiscences similar to a novel like “Mrs. Dalloway” but not really in the technique of “streams of consciousness”. Plumbing into the lives of his characters in a very unobtrusive way, almost gliding, Chaudhuri tries to connect the disparate stories together and along with his lively evocations of feelings and places serves to stitch together a story of ‘the city’ and ‘the coming of old age’. It is difficult to map a few lines towards the end of a novel with surfacing of ideas, but I will leave you with them to perhaps gain an understanding of Chaudhuri’s concerns.

“A visit to a friend’s house has its own secrecy. Sometimes there seems no reason, except a slight sense of boredom, hint of life’s emptiness, a memory of familiarity and a promise of pleasure….she’d come to this city with some trepidation and uncertainty to make her home here in old age. The young leave this city if they can; the old it seems, return to it; and this had been the incentive for coming here – the possibility of experiencing in ripe old age, the buoyancy of visiting known houses through this roads, of watching the old apparently arrest and embrace time as children and grandchildren grow taller and older surprising one.” (pg 197-198)

Book referred here is Amit Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song, PICADOR, 1998.

that which has been <-> what has been

2008-09-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

Coming from Ohio into California, you notice that continuous mountainous range as one drives in a car. Of course they are the "landscapes and sites", you would want to capture in photographs - telling the world, proving that you had been there, had felt it. Maybe "felt it" is a word not that readily associated with "images". Maybe "seen it" is, and again I guess, I am wrong, I am ambivalent.

"Images" and "Memory" are obviously bound together. Memory comes with, almost invites feelings. Marguerite Duras's protagonist in "The Lover" would qualify as a proof/witness, in her recounting life through seeing images from childhood.

So, dropping from Ohio into California, I recounted (not without a bit of that whimsical playful imagined memory-ing) the contrapuntal transitory scenes in "Annie Hall" from the interior snowing New York to sunny sunny California. That cinematic moment each time it came to my mind as we drove in California, gave another moment of joy.

So far, I have been completely "out of form" with my pictures, infact I was horrible in that "capturing act" of photographing because I never seemed to have the camera when the right image happened to be there - presented it-self in front of me. Leave alone that, when the camera was there, the battery was down or actually gone. So, when I was on the Amtrak Starlight coach, seeing the Pacific Coast and with nearly everyone of my fellow passengers clicking pictures of that wild vegetation, of those flying birds, the ocean and the mountains on an evening horizon, I had to figure something to cognitively fight my regret away.

I would never be able to say if I did not have the pictures that "i was there" , that "i had seen it". I could say, yes I did take a "picture" - picture in the way Ethan Hawke takes of Julie Delpy in "Before Sunrise". I could close my eyes, take a breath and let the image "sink in" :D, silly me.

I told myself, what Roland Barthes had said to the world a long time ago- the photograph is about the ‘that which has been’ and it certainly is not the "what has been". But "what has been" - will i ever be able to articulate it in words? - the beauty that I saw, and there you go because "what I saw" is not the same as "what was". My memory will be garbaged by trivial memory of route maps to remember, passwords I ought not forget, citations I better am able to cram for my prelims.

Washing Our Hands Off -- A Short Short

2008-07-13T01:06:00.000-07:00

The child is giving final touches to a crossword, which has shaped into the form of a toy - a female body. The child is thinking on fifty-six down, the last word that has a hint - anagram “EITLYSXUA”. The child figures it out. Mother sees Father hooked up to the T.V. – a ball match. Father is taking no notice of the child’s report card, which she has given him. Father switches to the News channel as ads come up. Mother tells Father that they are responsible for the child’s conduct today. The child had e-mailed a photograph to one of the child’s girl classmates. The photograph was of a M country's girl taking off pants from a near naked Z country's soldier’s body. That girl classmate had found it disgusting. “The language it contained,” mother says, “it was so sadistic.” Father says, “This is a common problem. Parents cannot force their children not to use the Internet and see pictures, and then mail it to someone they found interesting. They have every freedom to do it. It is the society, which has given it to them. Parents just have to follow the norms, give them their due. One cannot always supervise.” After a pause, he adds in a demonstratively consoling voice, “I will talk to him.”

Mother fumes at Father. The child resolves the anagram and puts the “Y” of “SEXUALITY”. The doll toy starts to talk and pleads in a very seductive voice. The child looks on with wide open eyes and with an expectant half-fulfilled smile playing on his lips. The doll says, “I am a feminist. I want to be like a man. Rearrange the acrosses and the downs. You genetician, do it for me”. Mother is calling to the child, “Dear, come here, papa wants to talk”. The child speaks to the doll, “Sweetie, the rules of the game made me do this. You asked for it. Mother is calling, if only parents could stop parenting. I will see what I can do. You chose this and I am not responsible.”

The child makes his way through the rooms into the drawing room. Father is listening attentively to the latest sound byte. The president is in the middle of a speech, “…the death of Harry is unfortunate. But he ought to have to have read the instructions. This is a time of deregulation. The State needs investments and consumers are free to choose. He should not have taken more than six pills. We are not washing our hands of this episode. It’s just that we want to liberate our citizens…”

Long Jottings

2008-07-13T00:41:00.000-07:00

Having the blog dead for a long time, I thought of thinking not too much and writing the largely un-happening things in short paragraphs.

We went to the Fourth of July celebrations. Families, Music and Fireworks. Heard and actually made sense of the music of the band there – thanks to a former university music student amongst us. She told us that both she and her husband now teach at an international school in Mussoorie. With Susa’s composition playing in the background, all of us ended up talking about the inevitable mixed feelings of loving and hating certain things as one lived in another world after having lived for so long in one. And some of those likes and dislikes just stick to you. Glued memories make dreamy eyes and fascinating conversation. Pointing to the instruments played around by the band, she explained to us - the newly arrived Indian folks, with awesome patience the difference between a bassoon and trombone.

The weather in Mid West (in end-summer now I guess) is just about perfect. One could sometimes do with a little more of the breeze perhaps. Thursday night movies at the mall and the walk back home are pleasant. Thursday nights are the party nights.

I recently read a colleague’s auto-ethnography. The story there went like two South-Asian straight men apparently when they were returning from the mall walking; a couple of drunken college kids yelled at them as being “Fags”. When they later went to a restaurant that same night, and were waiting in line to order food, another incident occurred which made the incident a story for reflection, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. A boy and a girl couple came and were looking at another boy-boy pair there with a kind of look in their eyes. The boy-boy pair just reacted, “We are not gays.” The whole Heteronormativity thing plays out in interesting ways – eyes tell tales too. One of the South-Asian boys who witnessed it and then wrote the auto-ethnography also mentioned, “We could not afford a car and were labeled. The incident, which followed later made us think we could not blame it completely on postcolonial and race etc stereotypes. Cultural codes take a different turn and remain ambivalent too.”

A resilient fetish of the society with the “norm”. Auto-ethnography continues to be regarded by some as navel-gazing, similar to blogs. Coming to think of what stopped me from blogging for such a long time, a couple of thoughts had perhaps contributed to the hesitancy – some views that blogging is just navel-gazing, selfish self-sensitivity.

Some other quite striking incidents related to me by my friends could also have played the role.

A would be father-in-law dismissed his would be son-in-law – a guy his daughter loved, on the grounds that because he blogged, he was selfish and would be preoccupied with himself to take care of his daughter.

My writer friend told me that she quit blogging because she was unable to write any good five pages of a fictional story while she was writing blogs. She introduced me to blogging when apparently she enjoyed it and now she has not only stopped blogging but finished a novel as well. I can’t blog much anymore and instead of writing fiction, I am still investigating the tragic loss of my novel of my pre-blogging days. Obviously these are stray incidents and one could argue against the presumed interpretations drawn from these perhaps more idiosyncratic mentioned cases.

To end these jottings, I recently watched some fantastic films belonging to what could perhaps be called post-Third-World Cinema (I hope I did not use an extra hyphen). Relatively contemporary ones included Sissako’s “Bamako”, which made me remember Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Even if they speak, are they heard? Can their statements/expressions be comprehended? From the position of the subaltern, the incomprehension in the face of people who are even willing to listen to them, perhaps makes even wanting to express difficult. Suicides are expressions too.

comparitive experiencing of Newsgames with critical literature, films

2008-03-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

Ian Bogost and his studio Persuasive Games took their take on Newsgames and started steadily being published in the OP-ED section of the NY times during May of last year. Bogost's jottings on the same and the first game called Food Import Folly are a classic precedent. Some others like Points of Entry have followed leading to crudely polemical and candidly refreshing long discussions on various aspects of 'games' and 'serious games' at Kotaku. Starting from a discussion of whether games need to provide fun or not, the discussion steadily diverges and forks into various concerns like how does one understand 'fun'? Can 'engagement' be concerned 'fun'? Gamers also seem to be acknowledging how subjective that 'fun ' derived from playing a game can turn out to be. While extreme positions definitely exist on both sides - some saying serious games are only for stupid pseudo-intellectuals while the other side at times coming close to being condescending as regards people who play violent games by terming them as largely unsophisticated.

Various other pondering(s) find their place - Do such games betray too much of a political message from their producers?, What does it mean now for them to be freely accessible to a large number of Internet users? What happens when one no longer requires specific set of skills to engage with games?

Perhaps the question which is really at stake is ...Do such games help in developing informed critical thinking? Does reading a comprehensive article in NY times about the immigration problem and playing a game over allocating merit-based green cards develop similar consciousness about challenging and probing issues? Maybe the question needs to be worded differently. Obviously, different media forms are experienced differently and one is certainly not asking for superficial effects-oriented studies. Yet, one could very well interrogate the comparative experiencing of these new set of serious games with say critical literature, or film on similar subjects. Certainly questions worth pondering upon as one thinks of persuasive games/serious games/edutainment/critical simulation/ideological videogames...

cracking pass-word(s), yes

2008-03-07T21:57:00.000-08:00

In 2146, an historian found an archived entry in some media form which used to be called a blog. It was dated from 8th March, 2008...

"I got up from my bed, and looked at the mirror, to look at myself. This act of mine is not much different from my experience of writing this blog today. I felt old today looking myself in the mirror and the same feeling stays with me as I write this blog. When I die, to write my biography, people shall look at my blogs I guess. People won't look for those diaries in stacked corners, in labyrinth cellars, or behind pillows. No diaries but blogs. Also, no correspondence through letters but they would be analyzing my emails, cracking passwords;cracking pass-word(s), yes."

Inspired by a reading of Javier Marias' "All souls"

much like an editorial response...

2008-03-02T17:29:00.000-08:00

The question again and again asked is whether these are 'simplistic videogames' or indeed even 'videogames'. One does not find a story/narrative/plot nor immersion. While September 12 seems to be a reaction at the collateral damage happening as a result of the war on terror, Madrid is an expression of 'empathy for /solidarity with' the victims of 2004 Madrid bomb blasts . There is no sense of victory in either games. No adversaries, no heroes in sight. Frasca's games are unconventional if at all considered games. Frasca has at times categorically mentioned September 12 is a simulation, not a game.

Both the games certainly are critical simulations of situations, adding more meaning into them by reconstructing say the 'war' and/or 'bombings', however, it would be safe to presume that one cannot be expected to play the game more than ten times. It does not have repeat value for the same person playing it. However, it is a credible response against a position, an ideology...much like an editorial response...

derrida, lights, aesthetic, comma,,,

2008-03-02T17:04:00.000-08:00

blur, dim, perceptible, passwords, signifier, derrida, lights, aesthetic, comma, hyphen, cine-ma, referent, enigma, coke, classified, sip, muffle, crackle, dawn, dusk, excrescence, sim,,,

what is poetry but the joy of

2008-02-27T19:21:00.000-08:00

Ironical to have not seen everyday life in normal curves

our statistics teacher gives us an opportunity

to write about a thing which gives us joy;

she must have had a hundred answers by now

and she must be exclaiming differently to each

the joy of visiting bolivia

the joy of sitting on a beach

the joy of imagination

the joy of sleeping for eight hours without an alarm

the joy of scoring a hundred out of hundred

the joy of getting to see a child smile

the joy of having done something for someone

the joy of having a cup of coffee after a walk on snow

the joy of teeth touch with ice-coffee

what is poetry but the joy of putting a misplaced metaphor amidst the order of language

what is music but the joy of putting a dissonant note in the sea of consonance

what is life but ...

Nintendo Gamecube

2008-02-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

From the flash game mentioned in last class, I progressed to Nintendo Gamecube. Thanks to first seeing two young players Jojo (7 yrs) and Lala (6 yrs) play it, and then with their help finding my way through the some games in ‘Sonic Adventure Two Battles’ like ‘Metal Harbor’, ‘Emerald Finding Race’, and ‘City Escape’. While I tended to enjoy the more slower analytical game of finding the emerald, Jojo and Lala yearned to play the racier ‘Metal Harbor’. The former is a treasure hunt, probing for the treasure in oceans and caves; the latter is a dizzying race in a harbor with many obstacles on the way. With the control in ones’ hands vibrating giving a tactile sensation, when one was hit helped because an inexperienced player like me could not always be sure of where and what I was on the screen. Also, though there was violence involved, the visuals were rather calm and soothing, and not gory.

I especially liked the ‘story’, which came in as a kind of ‘cut-in’ between two games when the Sonic or Metal Sonic (player character in the game) can go to Chao garden where eggs are kept. The story for the same goes like this – you can either choose to be Hero Chao (in which case you will be saving the world) or a Dark Chao (in which case you will be destroying the world). You get to have a hand in the Chao selection if you can make your way to the Chao garden where the eggs are reared. You have the Hero Garden and the Dark Garden for the respective kind of eggs. What was funny as well as clearly palpable and that drew laughs from both my young fellow players were the contrasting scenes of the two gardens. The Hero garden with flowers, butterflies, greenery and blue streams resembled ‘Heaven’ and the Dark garden with red black flowing streams and caricatures of devils dancing resembled ‘Hell’.

For my next Gamecube experience, I have decided to photoshoot Jojo and Lala playing, and improve my motor hand and finger skills with the control if I have to beat Jojo in the games.

Jhadoo Maro flash game

2008-02-23T12:33:00.000-08:00

‘Jhadoo Maro’ flash game takes place in a situation, which takes its context from the larger narrative of protests and negotiations that have taken place between Dow Chemical officials and activists involved with protests surrounding Bhopal Gas tragedy. The game is rather simple to play with the game player being a woman hitting with a broom an official of Dow Chemicals. Dow Chemicals took over Union Carbide whose industrial plant in Bhopal had led to the disaster. One tends to get points based on the timing of the broom hit as well as the force with which the hit is affected.

It is interesting to observe that the player is impersonating a woman and there is an identification that is being asked for from the player/audience because a majority of the survivors/victims of the Bhopal Gas tragedy have been women. One can also find pictures of women with Jhadoo in their hand protesting outside Dow Chemical office buildings in the earlier demonstrations undertaken by the Bhopal activists. Thus, while playing the game, one could experience oneself being an activist. In addition to that, I did experience a certain thrill in perfecting the art of hitting with the broom.

However, if it was meant to be a complete resemblance, one would have expected the woman in the game to be wearing a sari or a more authentic indigenous Indian costume. That is not the case. Though, one should be cautious of reading too much into this, the fact that the women is wearing an improvised ambiguous costume, it could mean that the character has been kept open and the player could fill in his/her own interpretation. It is also possible that with the local movement in Bhopal getting allied with transnational advocacy networks throughout the world, the representation of the woman is left ambiguous in the hope that more multiple fluid identities of the character can be formed, thus reaffirming that local disasters could have global answers and people in developed countries as global citizens can play their part in speaking against MNCs like Dow.

and the book we could not read together

2008-02-17T22:36:00.000-08:00

She came to me

so that we could read a book together

She wrapped us around a shawl

We had returned from mountains

Somehow we could never read the book together

Her hands traced the alphabets in black slower than mine

I would end up wanting to talk about what I saw in them

She would put a finger to my lips

and then she went to sleep

A deep sleep and I could not go to sleep

So I sat and looked at her

and the book we could not read together

interpreting punctuations of snow in the sentence of a road

2007-12-19T22:37:00.000-08:00

I take the daily walks to the main university library, called the Jerome Library. I do not regret it the least;having got a Javier Marias and Paul Auster, I can take rest in the cosy comfort of some delightfully inventive fiction.

After my first semester here, the inactivity of vacation is endearing...and that reminds me I still have a couple of activities for tomorrow - doing the laundry, cleaning the kitchen, shopping for groceries, attending a lunch invitation, seeing a film and thinking up my research proposal

And I might not just do any of these for the Auster novel that I have picked up and hope to get wrangled with...long walks in the snow are very much bearable for now as one finds oneself looking for and interpreting the punctuations of snow in the sentence of a road

For now it is poetic, then it shall turn melancholic, and then after five months depressing

2007-12-08T19:32:00.000-08:00

It is almost there everywhere

When they ask me 'Aren't you not overwhelmed coming from a hot and wet country'

Some of my other PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate Students) friends have quite often gestured

A bit derisive about my lack of reaction

It takes sometime for me to see and remember some of the pictures from my favorite American movies

And then connect them together...

For now it is poetic, then it shall turn melancholic, and then after five months depressing

mixture would remain just a memory

2007-12-03T00:46:00.001-08:00

The autumn came and by the time it left,

bared the tree...

When it was not winter and the sun still used to come

With my back to the sun facing the laptop

I could see the shadow of the tree on my laptop screen

This sight would fill me with a mixture of melancholy and joy

For the time of the winter I guess,

that mixture would remain just a memory...

a trip to Walmart today

on a broken-pedaled cycle seemed an adventure

what with rain coming and the wind blowing

all at the odd coincidental time

waiting at a traffic signal,

i looked at more fortunate people in cars

moments of self-pity left me soon

when a 60 year old sweetly wrinkly lady

passed me by

saying a hello

riding a tricycle,

smoking merrily a cigarette

a 60-year old lady

will that lady be another memory

or shall i meet her the next time

in Walmart, smoking merrily and saying

Have a Good Day

on a windy, chilly, rainy day!!

the link with the body and the mind could not be more poetic

2007-11-16T07:31:00.000-08:00

some events, which help one to breathe out of the cooking, eating, sleeping, studying routine

actually too many of them for a week

and yet this week one also got to mull about evolution and human society...

about relationships and what forgetting them means at the moment of remembrance...

not to say the least that a lot of good food and bad talk is always difficult digesting

Tahader Katha came up as a film which builds around the theme of 'digestion' - both mental and physical

it also hints how if dreams for which one struggled seem still far afar ,

one's ability to digest other people's shit talk lessens...

the link with the body and the mind could not be more poetic

I want to walk with that girl for whom I started reading my first story book

2007-10-14T19:19:00.000-07:00

Why does rituporno put a rabindrasangeet in certain scenes of his film

Why is one inclined to sleep more as temperatures come down...

Why do I want to walk with that girl for whom I started reading my first story book, once again today

Why do I remember each day now that the puja countdown has begun

All of these questions have easy answers, but are they the only answers!!!!

in a trimmed ohio field with a cemented pitch

2007-10-09T17:27:00.003-07:00

a really really long weekend passed by

four days of length it was

spent in dis-engaged activities

reading, cooking, sleeping

and oh yes a haircut -- really really short

and actually cricket - a couple of indians and desis getting together

in a trimmed ohio field with a cemented pitch

for a ten overs match with drinks, served by local farmer households

american countryside is an experience, a warm one

should reality be represented?

2007-10-04T18:04:00.000-07:00

any representation of reality is not the correct representation

so, should reality be represented?

reality should be represented in a way so that social change is possible

i do not know which way to concur!!

happy to hear stories, deep wonderful stories that religion has endowed us with

myths of religion - these stories, these beautiful stories....

narrated images into my eyes

2007-09-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

finally with the laptop in university library

but with the tactile pleasure of holding a NY Times this morning too

some good old Japanese fictional novels came my way

and they narrated images into my eyes

stacks and stacks of books and journals,

people laboring on....wish i could snap a photograph

Can we make characters talk to each other , in the way they talk to themselves!

2007-09-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

Highlights of this Week

Two quickly written papers, not very satisfying...

Reading Swartz and understanding power and resistance to it

Seeing Goddard's 'Breathless', I came to the question - is the intra-personal communication at any point of time excluded from the inter-personal communication?

Can we make characters talk to each other , in the way they talk to themselves!

Consumerism seems to be the 'act' or 'activity' in SL, all my peers were trying new clothes, new hair, new skin and I as a newbee just looked around...completely lost as I do if a shopping mall does not have a bookstore

The pictures one gets to snap in SL sometimes remind of a pastiche-ness of Cubism and Neo-constructivism, i could be mistaken but then i am not an art historian :)

haven’t I drooled over expressions like ‘sunny rainfall'

2007-09-09T17:35:00.001-07:00

This week has been a week of readings. So, I have read and intend to READ throughout the weekend. There is an exasperation and a certain feeling of seductiveness accompanying the process of ‘reading’ and the reason I cannot write more on it is because of my inability to find reasons for why this READING process is the way it is……..wonderfully ambiguous and oxymoronish…haven’t I drooled over expressions like ‘sunny rainfall' and ‘optimistically pessimist’, partly an explanation…certainly and certainly not... before I actually get my hands at a camera here, lets have some SL pics of BG

all cash starved, all looking for cheap meals

2007-09-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

Well the weekend was long, really long

three trips to Walmart and meeting fellow students there - all cash starved, all looking for cheap meals

and then i am home listening to tapes about people discussing how to stop this incessant consumerism

its a pain listening to them, it really is, and the fact that i have to write them down

i surely like the philosophical bent of it

written in despair by the greats

the adornos, the gramscis, the marcuses

but but but... can they be the alternative?

the fact that i am even making this question

suggests there is a possibility

So, from now on, it is going to be like this.

2007-09-02T08:08:00.000-07:00

Coffee, and biscuits (if you are lucky)...writing papers, finding related text and putting them together, constructing meaning by putting words together, deconstructing also in the process.

Coffee in tongue, I am beginning to hate it. Its utilitarian purpose, stops you from going asleep.

Well if that was the week, the weekend was better. S

some good papers to go through,

some wonderful beer and smoked salmon,

and Wong Kar Wai. sometimes it is good to have fetishes - his fetish for smoke coming from boilers, cups, kettles, cigarette stubs sunk in ashtrays, fog lifting itself as lovers are in the mood for love.....

it should be a blog about J.

2007-08-08T16:08:00.000-07:00

If only a journey over three flights can be called an ordeal or better an odyssey. To be six hours late and be greeted by so nice a person as J. , can be a treat of sorts. One comes with zero expectations and finds nice people. The subject of this blog should not be an incessant narcissism about my imaginary travails I guess - there were none (i slept through them ), it should be a blog about J..

J. seems to be a fantastic guy : with so many nice people , J. would still be the pick of the week . Had my best conversation of the week too with him as he told me about how he thought a referee's decision in a football match mirrored the ambiguties in postmodern ideas (as I sat embarrased by the way I negotiated a mustard draped sandwich of which i was making a bad mess - thanks to my timidity). J. has a cute face by any standards, a much cuter mind, has no qualms about being labelled a geek in a good way of course. (his glasses and those intonations which seem to break as he concentrates on a thought before he spells it out add to the effect). Is genuinely curious and finds time to help people inspite of having a tough schedule. He also seems quite intuitive in grasping what the other person is thinking.

J.'s wife T. has a more assured voice, a more matter-of-factly tone. She has a better handwriting. Their cat Senora seems characteristically attentive, is flawlessly soft-pawed and quite un-naturally 'not pampered'.

kafka's idiom - space left for communication

2007-06-29T07:51:00.001-07:00

Through the various interpretations of the parable that the priest and K. discuss in the course of ninth chapter (Kafka, Franz – The Trial, Picador, 2001 ) one understands the limitations of words and communication itself as a strategy. Kafka through the insertion of this parable in the story alludes implicitly that there is a passage to Justice, to law, to truth but in the act of taking permission, in this thought that he ought to take permission the countryman finds the doorkeeper ordering him not to. The doorkeeper, the priest stresses, does it because it is his duty and he may not be actually suggesting that but language plays the trick or as this following interpretation from a Kafka scholar elucidates - it is the inefficiency of the language or its ambiguity because each word can be subjected to multiple interpretations, can hold multiple meanings.

“This seeming contradiction, between a door intended solely for one person and that person's inability to use the door, is decided by the prison chaplain as common, to be expected, even natural. According to the chaplain's reading, which is also one of Kafka's readings, a proper passage (e.g., meaningful communication) is always subjected to certain torments of its logic (e.g., polysemia, overdetermination, etc.). On this reading, the law, due to the very fact that it leaves the borders to its logic open, will always drift to a degree. And its borders cannot but be open, at least so long as it is being read.”
(‘Kafka, Language, Pain’ by Colin Koopman, part of the Kafka Project).

The real communication would be a passage which will lead to truth, which will give an understanding of the meaning of one’s existence, one’s purpose, one’s responsibilities, the knowledge systems in life but such a passage or space for communication shrinks on its own account, it suffers from its own inability. As long as K. waits asking for permission, trying to see whether he can get through, he goes on waiting not asking the important questions to himself nor the others he runs into. In his tortuous ruminations also he never ponders over his guilt and as to why the court is not addressing that openly. He does not seem to be bothered about that. He wants to escape it, keep it ensconced somewhere, resisting it, still trying to dabble outside the realm of real understanding and communication.

A short excerpt from my paper, do have a look at Das Schloss's site on Kafka and also the essential Kafka project website.

repetition is seductive - What causes this repetition?

2007-06-24T07:54:00.001-07:00

Rajnikant's film opened in Pondicherry in the Ram Cinema Hall, Anna Salai Rd. The last Hindi film which opened in Pondicherry in the same hall was 'KANK' and I was told, before that had come 'Fanah'. For consuming Bollywood stuff, we depend on trips to Chennai and Bangalore. During other times, a compromise follows with personal laptops acting as halls playing the un-original DVDs picked up from roadside sellers of the Sunday evening bazaar.

My Bengali colleague S. who also speaks Tamil cajoled me into coming to see the BOSS film - first day third show. I was interested but apprehensive, not sure how much I will understand it. After work, as we checked out of the ICICI ATM and hailed an auto-rickshaw, discussion with the driver immediately centered on 'Shivaji'.

He said the tickets are running 700 rupees. S. reassured me, he will handle the sellers, we will get the tickets in black cheaper. By the time we had reached the hall, the same driver was of the opinion that tickets are now 300 rupees. We finally got them for 120, only to find out they had no seat numbers printed on them. We were told to take our seats in the passageway. There were many like us seated alongside, grateful to catch the star on the very first day. The air-conditioner was thankfully working.

For a student of film and media studies, it was a lesson on fan culture, on audience reception theory. The film was every bit entertaining. It was both a Rajni as well as a Shankar film. I had last catched up on Shankar's Nayak and found a similarity of structure in the screenplay. Problem 1 is wholly or partly solved with Solution 1 to encounter a transformed problem requiring a different solution . A sequence of such problem-solution series follows...song-dance sequences fascinate as do Rajni's acts...the film proves once again that repetition is seductive

What causes this repetition? - the star says he has a responsibility towards his fans. S.V. Srinivas has through a series of articles taken the facade out of the belief that 'fans are passive - they are controlled, they do not control'. By throwing light on the activities of Fan Associations (FAs) both political and apolitical , Srinivas has partly reversed the case. Fans play perhaps the key role in the star's film turning out the way it does. Their role in the commercial success of the film too is pivotal as through their control of public spaces like halls, cinema toilets, wall graffiti...through their acts of hyperbole, exaggeration and excess they often govern the popular perception of a forthcoming or just released film. So at the end of the day, whose film is it?, is a tricky question...

confront the dream within anxiety

2007-06-08T08:09:00.000-07:00

Stressed out he lies, on a bed deep in thought, about nothing

When subjective answers decide one’s choice, the choice being a black or white 'objective', a binary flip flop

The unfairness of the system, the final judgment : A make or break, leaving one with an 'ah' or rather an 'oh' with exclamations

Lying, he keeps lying. What will he do, getting up?

Another day in that place where one looks into a screen, involved in a maddening fetish where
one finds those objects facing each other who just cannot stand each other’s face

He will be late for the bus, He will have to rush through a hurried breakfast, The auto rickshaw would make haste, He will be denied a look at that school girl, at that 9’o’clock rose

Even the summer sunlight has found its way through the curtains so early, Even in its morning softness, glaring at you, as you wake up

Living that shipwrecked dream, The dream to start all dreams, The dream to end all dreams
Still unfulfilled, uncertain the dream

The dream which causes the anxiety, The dream infected by pathogenic schizophrenic anxiety
a part of you - this anxiety, it came , stuck and stayed creating an anthill, a spider's web, a viral network

A whole new day that dream and that anxiety, eating and filling the time in the mind, within and between its perspiration, broccoli food, scampering feet watching out for the dog poodle, the noise of wordy people car horns, and dizzying bikes

goes to bed again, hearing a lullaby on a Windows Media Player to confront the dream within anxiety and the anxiety within dream yet again

the story of his false starts and promises

2007-06-03T04:55:00.001-07:00

----

he has little intuition for birds

leave alone the butterflies

is blind to a cat’s stealth

and the sad look in a dog’s eyes

---

he is an interior person

opens the door of his house

only on steamy summer evenings

for the breeze from the sea to waft in

---

ever since he has taken up

this broadband connection

he has left the idiot box

and watches only buffered news

---

he is an unapologetic bachelor

with a lot of false starts and promises

goes for lonely walks and writes poetry

imitating bukowski without a typewriter

---

reading the Myth of Sisyphus

he asks himself an existential question

why does he not contemplate suicide

living a nothing life as he is

---

he dreams up a reason that

he wants to marry one day and

he wants to tell his daughter someday

the story of his false starts and promises

----

For Charles Bukowski

they have smelled nothing, felt everything

2007-05-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

A town with no cloud cover in the night

The breeze blowing in streets perpendicular to the sea

Sweeping ladies with their Jhadus making swishes

accompanying the barking of dogs

An old man finds himself being looked at

by me as he raises his dhoti to do ablutions

Among cobbled stones as I walk past a French boulevard

I feel the color of crayon yellow on the buildings, I smell urine

I look at a couple seated on a bench,

sitting, it seems for a long time

All by themselves,

shadow of her fingers on his forehead

touching the Vibhuti, my imagination

eclipsed by her withered jasmine caressed plait

they have smelled nothing, felt everything

taking stock

2007-05-27T21:09:00.000-07:00

a guilty walk-through of some books read in the last four months or so, assuming time as space

Characters invariably confer, and ask existential questions

2007-05-22T00:03:00.000-07:00

Lem’s science fiction writing as also Huxley’s, is essentially a novel of ideas. To create an imagined futuristic situation of an extreme kind, and then let characters introspect. Having come to see the whole world and outside, the characters search themselves within themselves. Characters invariably confer, and ask existential questions (with others and within themselves). Sometimes these questions strike as moral questions thrown at events propelled by desired freedoms. But different science fictions become popular too if not survive which appeal to those popular myths of outsider, nationalism, anticipated fears….

Truffaut character in Kanchipuram and education

2007-05-21T01:06:00.000-07:00

Francois Truffaut gave his vote of interest for ‘people behind ideas’ rather than ‘ideas in themselves’.

People matter more than ideas. The debate could go on and on, rankling few, obsessing others.

Ordinary people matter – they do, they do not do?? Another ‘point of no consequence’ debate but delights from an observation by ordinary people could be extraordinary.

One keeps coming across them and falling back on the last part of the statement, somewhat an aphorism now.

SA. came across this flower-seller in Kanchipuram. She addressed him in Tamil inquiring about whether he would be having some flowers.
SA. said “Tamil Ille”.
She started speaking in broken but sound English about her aspirations for her two children – one needs to go on to be IPS , the other should become an IAS.
Ostensibly intrigued, SA. probed further to find she was a 12th standard pass and had been married for a long time. She regretted not having studied further and therefore wanted her sons to have the very best of education.
When she asked SA. “What about you, married or not?”
He replied rather coyly ‘No girl for me so far’.

She chuckled and said “Human Beings are married to the world”. A Truffaut fan would like to have a character like her in his future films. The other striking factor is the value of education and service cutting across economic disparities in an Indian individual’s mind. Maybe, one gets pointers about interrogating the questions of status and service also.

P.S.: Picture and story courtesy SA., who btw is an aesthetically intuitive photographer. Do contemplate his silent musical compositions on http://www.flickr.com/photos/visio.

it is arational..not irrational...but arational

2007-04-23T11:36:00.000-07:00

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation

Czeslaw Milosz, lines from dedication

heres S. arguing with me that east european poetry might have its own individual characteristics but reading the poems from that region you feel as you feel while reading any other good poem...a quivering of sorts...he then turned to talk a little about czeslaw milosz as an exemplar

"sample this..i think milosz is good...his writings have that incisive quality...his prose especially....reading captive mind was like reading a textbook of logic..his talking about things in that manner..and then you approach his poetry..he no longer operates within the confines of logic..it is arational..not irrational...but arational....not bound by reason that can be located in space and time..in the way the most beautiful things are...no longer burdened by the signs and the symbolisms..it acquires a universal character...that is no longer east european..or post world war 2.. or communist-era..in fact it is outside history...totally untouched by the vagaries of history..yet it can not be anything but a product of his personal history..that is what makes it all the more fascinating..

but in the end..milosz is good.." (S. in a conversation with me, 2007)

fragments of stucco works, pavilions, arches supported on columns communicating with us

2007-04-19T22:36:00.000-07:00

Certainly not one of the pictures which could do justice to Thirumalai Nayak Palace. We look for information boards and knowledgeable visitors to garner information - the palace was divided into two major parts, namely Swargavilasa and Rangavilasa. We try to make out the royal residence, the theater, shrine, royal bandstand, quarters, palanquin place - my sister remarks one of the songs from the film 'Guru' was shot here. She is ready to step into a dance when I have an urge to find out where the king would watch dance performances., hear musical evenings and literary discourses. Is it the same place where today people come to watch evening dance programs - maybe not. An interior palace museum opens up and I feel it is a more befitting place for the same. It was also a place where the wives lived with concubines - or did they not?

One cannot but think more about those individual construction workers who built it. More than the king, more than the architect he employed for the purpose. That during those days they shifted palaces My mother gives me snippets of vital information as we ruminate on them immersed in the palace - its fragments of stucco works, pavilions, arches supported on columns communicating with us - The harem and the queen's place has gone. The grandson of the king Thirumalai Nayak, Chokkanatha Nayak broke down the palace and took materials for building another palace in Tiruchirapalli.

I start remembering lines from Marquez's "the autumn of the patriarch" and again note india might have a different magic reality to present.

capture the fact that CMBT bus stand was ISO certified

2007-04-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

Somebody recently told me he looked like Ajay Devgan. I said to her he was more of an Irfan Khan - equally intense but more handsome. ( all this when he grows a beard over this picture) . This is in Chennai's local train, we are on our way to City Center Mall , Mylapore near Marina Beach. After too many days of calm and sea in Pondicherry, one likes a day of seeing the city fare of multiplexes and shopping malls. Saw a forgettable movie that day and brought home a brilliantly absurd play by Ionesco. Landmark is turning out to be the best place for finding fictional treasures. To top it all, we had a lovely biryani in the evening and were caught by a policeman trying to capture the fact that CMBT bus stand was ISO certified.

they say 'money'....'money' ...'money'

2007-04-19T21:04:00.000-07:00

Somebody told me - he could look at this picture and keep looking at it. Dhanushkoti for me was a place one could keep walking, on sand, straining to look at the sea on both sides amidst an old church, an old temple, some hamlets all in ruins. a whole village lived ( no thrived) we are told by the guide till 1964 - a cyclone came. My father tries to find his own people in the historical imprints of this place pointing to a narrow gauge railway track, barely visible covered by sand. He tells me grandfather came here on a train...I wander, hopping broken windows, wiping sand from my fingers as i support myself on rocks to come to smiling children engaged in a game. I take out the camera for a pic. they laugh, i think of taking another pic, end up taking three more, they pose for me in wrestling positions, they are in a battle in the next, and peep through a tyre for the third, when I am about to leave, they say 'money'....'money' ...'money'

sent us mesmerized and maybe rocking as well

2007-03-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

After a month or so, a time to look back at some musical experiences.

Four weeks back on a weekend like this, a Sushila Raman concert at Dunes. A different world of black magic rendered not only in the richness of Tamil Voodo music but the symbolically rich attire of singers and accompanying musicians so central in creating the effect. A trip to Mumbai last week made it impossible to attend her next one at the Dunes, this one again bringing a fusion of sorts with Baul singers.

Three weeks back was Freedom Jam. A treat to watch if you are in Pondicherry. On the beach road five concerts happening together. A south indian violin jamming with western guitar, a Rajasthani musical cum folk play, American country music with a guitar and mandolin, a bangalore band desperately trying to get a 'Doors' song right. We finally settled for a French rock band. A French rock band looked like any other rock band except for the brilliance of a pipe instrument player. He played the flute, clarinet, horn, basson and what not that day and sent us mesmerized and maybe rocking as well.

regurgitated thoughts, or just impulses

2007-03-01T23:19:00.000-08:00

Two cities in one – the cliché of a statement about Mumbai

You gape, what stops them from running with their crockery as weapons

From the adjoining slums to those concrete structures, the buildings

Banging the air-conditioned people out and taking their money away

What stops them –

Civilization, honesty, integrity, humanity…

Politicians, Media, NGO, Police, State

Du Mont, Gramsci, Gandhi…

Maybe “Absence of Realization that they can do it”

People who call them out to do it, their intentions

Such interrogation of intentions ends up in a confession

Solving the personal problem through political means

Sad, Sad, Sad, Sad…

Revolution, Mediation, compromise…regurgitated thoughts, or just impulses…

I could only tell about them, their problems

2007-03-01T07:12:00.000-08:00

Wrapping up our field studies

We met her, almost by chance

Somebody said, she cooked for flood victims

It’s a walkable distance, another suggested

A Sunday afternoon,

Third Day of

Heat and Pollution in Mumbai

We crossed a garbage pool

And then came drains choked by plastics

Undulating pathways, cesspools greeted us

We negotiated them, also an oath from an elder ragpicker

We came to her settlement made on earth

Separated from a similar settlement by plastic, polythene and tarpaulin sheets

A lotus in bloom she was

Arms folded

She smiled

She offered us water

She told us to mind the ceiling fan

‘It is low, you might have an accident’, she said

‘Tell us a bit about yourself’

I am Lakshmi Mote

I do not believe in Hindu-Muslim divide

I am a Muslim married to a Hindu

Of my two children, one has a Hindu name, the other a Muslim one

My basti people are a smart lot, they also do not believe in such divides

We are poor, we cannot afford it

We do not have cards but does that mean we do not have a right to live

‘How she cooked food,’ we asked, ‘during those hard times’

As cooking always is

We got clean water, We got firewood, We borrowed cylinders

We got money, We got the vegetables, We cut them and We boiled rice, We had food

Somebody asked ‘any new design or technology solution

That might have helped you then’

She is pensive for a minute

Somebody else says 'our unity is enough'

She replies

People said we could put some things underground

Flood will come and go,

The things will remain; they will not be washed away

As she cooks tea for us,

Somebody tells her to narrate to us her WSF experience

She smiles, and then sighs

I notice the golden ring on her ear lobe and on her nose

She says

I went to Nairobi to tell them about us, our problems

Seeing the condition there,

I could only tell about them, their problems

Communication problems

2007-01-21T21:06:00.000-08:00

I would argue that Priyadarshan has relentlessly brought out and addressed the problem of communication in our society. This problem of mis-communication or a lack of communication happens due to different reasons. In the latest ‘Bhagam Bhag’ the small mis-interpretation of ‘heroin’ for ‘heroine’ (due to a trick of hearing and the incomprehension of a ‘Dehati’ played by Govinda for the word ‘heroin’) leads two innocent guys into a mad world of deception and merry-go-around chase. In ‘Malamal Weekly’ greed and fear involving intertwined ‘murder and lottery prize’ become the reason for people ‘to lie’ and then ‘lie over a lie’ and so all three – ‘greed, fear and lies’ multiply and proliferate. It is the same fear which leads Paresh Rawal’s character in 'Hulchul' to go on lying in a comedy-of-errors manner to hide the fact that he is married.

Characters in his films speak a lot; they seem deeply perturbed, talking very little sense and giving vent to their frustration. Also, they are very bad listeners. Priyadarshan brings out the absurdity of over-communication as a lack of communication brilliantly. Rajpal Yadav playing Bandya is a luckless servant bound to Gundya (Paresh Rawal), an equally luckless master in ‘Chup Chup Ke’. He seems to be complaining all the time about his condition and ends up worsening it. Through all his garrulous talks, he only invites further wrath from the family of Prabhat Singh Chauhan (played by Om Puri) and their servants, the silent Jeetu (Shahid Kapoor) however gets away. Bandya’s dilemma is that nobody is prepared to listen to him, he just cannot communicate his suspicion about Jeetu or his observations about him, and he gets mixed up.

In Priyadarshan’s films, the supporting cast is important because through them he creates a world of total chaos. Films like, ‘Chup Chup Ke’, ‘Malamal Weekly’ are undoubtedly inspired form other flicks but they also show a director who has an eye for an ironically grotesque world - a world where people are driven by the weight of such compulsions that mis-communication becomes inevitable – a son thinks that by killing himself his father can use the money from his life insurance and pay off his debts, a poor person earning a rupee a day suddenly sees the possibilities of one crore rupees and ostensibly looses his head.

His side-kicks recall parodists like clowns in circus or cross-talk comedians in a music hall, and by showing the fact that they always keep getting kicked, Priyadarshan also symbolically poses the problem of the ‘Others’. The hero’s friend ironically named ‘Lucky’ played by Arshad Warsi in ‘Hulchul’, an incredulous guy who with great commitment helps his friend in carrying out pranks, always bears the brunt of people while mistakes are done by somebody else, many a times notably by the hero himself. The character of Gullu executed yet again by Rajpal Yadav has the same story to tell. An Indian taxi-driver in U.K., Gullu wants to help Indian guests coming to London but ends up getting cursed and beaten again and again.

Ivan Klima - Moments when love pops out unexpectedly

2007-01-03T09:23:00.000-08:00

Chekov's short stories have travelled continents, inspired writers speaking, thinking , dreaming and writing in different languages. If the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian takes a leaf of minimalism from him, another genius, the Czech writer Ivan Klima is equally sparse and equally concerned about the brilliance dimly perceptible in banality.

He has a strategy in those collection of short stories "Lovers for a Day". When the two lovers fall in love, they seem so unlikely a match and their falling for each other happens in such uncertain circumstances, and yet, they do, then love flies away as quickly as it had come. Some compromise and stay, others get up from the bedside, leave the dim room and are gone into their early lives, there is a compromise here too. Through all this Klima gives hope too, a slight one.

He seems to be the asking the question - "Why do we talk about love all the time, when do we start talking about it, can it be the point where it has ended, can there be sympathy between two people after love between them has gone, can there be love-filled moments when we take calculated risks and then discover them to be blunders"

Elegant and he does not write even an extra irrelevant alphabet. Much less political than his earlier published novels, a lovely read.

biting sadness and happiness engulf you at the same time

2007-01-01T05:43:00.000-08:00

It is surprising how I forget she has an impairment of sorts. It has been thirteen years since she got hurt and it stuck to her. We were shocked , traumatized and dismayed, then slowly with time, it left us for most of the time, revealed itself to us only in moments. During these times, I have been jealous, loving, condescending, arrogant and tender towards her. How should I react to her impairment?, has been a question I have asked myself. "Normalize Things" is what people say. Recently she has come to terms with her impairment and when she tells it very matter-of-factly, I miss a beat each time. I feel very proud of her then. When she told me recently, she has had it verified from the doctor that she has no vision in one eye and then asked me how does she look today draped in madurai silk, I told beautiful and she said the greatest moments in life are those when both biting sadness and happiness engulf you at the same time. I could only say yes -- sibling affection as we paired together to cross the traffic and have Biryani.

He replied "Saddam"

2006-12-30T10:15:00.000-08:00

At Tanjore, we admired the Bhadisvara temple in a way that architecture illiterates are expected to do. We could see people around who did exactly the same thing. They were very eager like us to capture the temple and more so their visit in photographs and videos which they themselves were producing. While leaving, just at the temple gate, we were accosted by a sweet little bright boy, selling incense sticks. When asked about the price, he said "ten for the sticks and two my commission". "Please take the sticks" my mother said and I took them and gave him a ten rupee note. He repeated "ten for the sticks and two my commission", mildly complaining to my mother about her stingy son, it appeared. We could not help but smile.My mother gave his ruffled hair a maternal toss as he smiled taking in a breath and showing those broken newly growing incisors. Mother asked "what is your name".
He replied "Saddam".

Out came a butterfly, from another tree full of leaves

2006-12-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

Too sweet, the tea today morning, an irritation as P. looked up from his crossword to complain to the bare tree overlooking us. Out came a butterfly, from another tree full of leaves, the winter wind so slight in morning sun, and soon in his eyes a doubt of whether it was a fly or the leaf itself flown by the wind.

That small incident, that ambiguity, was enough to create the mood swing as P. drank the rest of the tea and solved his crossword.

too much of it, now lets progress

2006-12-08T10:44:00.000-08:00

After the erasure of ‘graffiti from the walls’ in the last Assembly elections, another quintessentially symbolic trait of West Bengal politics and everyday life of Kolkata – ‘the STRIKES’ it is felt need be engraved in fleeting nostalgia. People of the city seem to be saying or the purported mediated political rhetoric is – “too much of it, now lets progress”. The historical phantom of counter-cultural kitsch and the political satire of limericks and caricatures might yet again be a part of city walls, due to an amendment legalizing graffiti passed by the State Assembly lately, ‘the STRIKES’ however, seem to be an insignificant drone around the defiant hunger-strike of Mamata Banerjee.

sifted from them the one dream of dreams and interpreted it

2006-12-06T08:34:00.000-08:00

I said...

I looked at your dreams, sifted from them the one dream of dreams and interpreted it. it was about you wanting to have a choco-dip. I wanted to laugh at you and then felt so sorry for myself, I was laughing at your innocence, that you were a small girl.

You said...

I looked at your dreams, sifted from them the one dream of dreams and interpreted it.it was about you interpreting my dream of having a choco-dip. I wanted to laugh at you and then felt so sorry for myself, I was laughing at your innocence, that you were an old man.

Imagination of a Disaster

2006-12-04T23:11:00.000-08:00

The responses to the Bhopal Gas "Disaster" have been recurrent and multiple, sufficing it to be finally labeled a "Tragedy", with resistance against perpetrators brought in forth by empathy, imagination and crucially so, "bare need". A professor of mine recently recalled," how strange we have not been able to do better", considering "all Indians are Activists", I told him a bit stubbornly i believe "at least we are getting better and better". "Ah"...he said..."but its not enough"... and became lost and I left him to come with an "Imagination of a Disaster"

Woody Allen would make a film on us.

2006-12-03T08:08:00.000-08:00

thought, really did, that
I will go to that small beach we discovered together

thought, really did, that
You will come today there in the morning at 5

thought, really did, that
I will come with my laptop and play you the tune of the sea kissing the rocks

thought, really did, that
You will come with your hair over your ears and listen to it

thought, really did, that
We will lie over the fisherman's raft and talk about Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse

thought, really did, that
Woody Allen would make a film on us.

act of aping

2006-12-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

A fragmented screen. The visuals interpreting the text written between the communicators in its own hyper-real space with the text occupying half the screen. The screen had a de-centering effect. You were neither in the text nor in the screen and you knew it was not real. You enjoyed sometimes maybe trying to be puppetted by the visuals, in the parodying act itself you wanted to make fun of it, avenge your disgrace. You wrote the text as if you were the scriptwriter manipulating the visuals. Sometimes nobody cared. Nobody actually should get so psyched up; it is just a friendly tongue and cheek. Still, you did ask for it when it was offered. The rebellion of the powerless against the powerful - act of aping.

Excerpts from my unpublished novel.

thought again today why

2006-12-03T07:27:00.000-08:00

real good Wine and yet I shall be a bit dissapointed with them . After those scent-filled sips and the sea so beautiful, they talked about work, brought it to dinner table after 5, then told me to eat it too with wine, it did not taste well, could it have?

A weekend so dreaded because of the boredom it brings, came and is passing by. A trip to Chennai cancelled, a plan for Mahabalipuram dropped in mid-air. sunday morning left with newspapers, cut a few of them across bylines, read a few lines in the literary review twice over coffee ( the only thing i made today), invented an idea for an article, lost it after having lost myself in Vanilla Sky...

thought again today why i read books? and then looked up the two paragraphs above this one...

comparative aspect - urban migration

2006-11-21T21:05:00.000-08:00

the yearning for the lights and life(style) of a metropolis.

For Mahashewta Devi, it could be the yearning of a civil servant stuck in the tribal land of Palamu for Ranchi.

In Tamil cinema, it could be the idea of Chennai for a rural Tamilian.

In a Chekhov play, the secret desire of a pilgrimage to cities like St.Petersburg.

Ritwik Ghatak's Kolkata sucking refugees into its growing suburbia.

The city of Mumbai portrayed in Indian mainstream and parallel cinema.

The enchantment with the city, the migration to it, the ineluctable love-hate relationship of the dwellers with the city here.

and with it the call of the village , its nostalgia.

two things come out clear even in this muddled putting down of things.

The comparative aspect involved in the idea of a city - the migration of a person based in Palamu to Ranchi and migration of an inhabitant of Ranchi to Mumbai.

Secondly, initiation of this process of migration and resettling has long begun,
looking for greener pastures in concrete land is an age-old phenomenon.

throw their hands into the air in exasperation

2006-11-20T23:54:00.000-08:00

It is strange how many people do it, scan a thing, summarize it and reproduce it down. Maybe they put in a something of theirs into it as well. Pollute it and also beautify it in equal measure. Then, another person does it, adds in something of his. When it comes to me, and as I read, see, hear and smell it, I am supposed to think about IT, try to make sense of IT. what an illusion and the absurdity of IT ? - All people throw their hands into the air in exasperation when this thought comes to them....

thus spoke R.

2006-11-17T02:54:00.000-08:00

"Saw a cat, remembered a friend of mine who had the same eyes. i did not like him, had a reason then, to not like the cat. Do i make up these reasons for not loving pets? Why can i not relate to them? Have i made an effort? Why am i so concerned only with the human? the 'human' takes up my entire day? am i making that transition from nature to culture? can''t i have both?"
thus spoke R.

men went on dying, women were left pregnant and widowed

2006-11-03T23:01:00.000-08:00

something happened to a tribe at a certain point in history, then they were inducted into the big thing, they could not relate to it, they were told - drinking alcohol is bad habit, they were told - wearing animal bones is a bad habit... they were educated.........

they rebelled but were confused, did not know whose side to take, men went on dying, women were left pregnant and widowed

a writer went there and told their story, he had a man and woman falling in love for his story to be read and within it he captured a moment in history, endowed it with the permanence of art

dislodging the utopia

2006-11-03T22:53:00.000-08:00

The "blogosphere" is prognosticated to become the "public sphere". bloggers shall leave their petulant and sentimental personal diary reports and start talking about political and judicial issues in and around them. An exchange of views and couter-views will occur. Links will be there, comments will be left posted which will again be counter-commented upon, such is the new evolvment of public sphere and yet there are challanges of rank, inclusivity and accessibility -- issues which help in dislodging the utopia of a perfect ideal of "public sphere" into the too rational too modern now a history.

levi and pakeezah - life sailing in poetry

2006-10-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

to read periodic table and see pakezaah, one cannot complain of a dissonance, for both are life sailing in poetry - the former takes us to a life having lived an experience which still resonates in Europe, the other is a sad fable about the vulnerability of dreams, the sad demise of the unbreakable --- levi makes me remember the smells of my chemistry lab, also instructs me about characters, passing on the wisdom that the genius lies in finding the majestic in the trivial, pakeezah raises her fingers towards the sky, my eyes follow, asking me to search destiny in clouds, weather, sun and the moon...

a cultural performance - la sa ra

2006-10-17T10:41:00.000-07:00

saw a south-indian classical performer with a French artist dancing together to tunes from both countries, eyes flitting from one to the other sometimes it became difficult to follow both their movements together, as they played and fought one another, waited for their men, envied each other, their reactions varying one found one of the inevitable ways in which cultures coalesce people together, touch them unawares, the fuzzy boundaries of nations, and the beat of the inter-national or rather cross-national, if left to "la sa ra", at times during the performance, it felt god came and touched you

sarat babur golpo

2006-10-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

S.C Chatterjee's writings have very powerful woman characters. Chatterjee has his men flitting around from here to there, engaging in a directionless meandering, seeking anchorages in places inhabited by women.The man is a wanderer, in his roaming around, in his journey one finds ambitions, also a mental quest for finding answers to questions, also perhaps a journey to understand, make sense of the mystery and depth of a woman.

"talk to her" it said and he stopped thinking about his loneliness, if not only for tonight

2006-10-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

he felt lonely, took out the mobile from his pocket and tried his three friends - 2 males, 1 female -cold statistics. Unable to get to them - some did not connect, others kept ringing - matter of factly, he went for a walk, realized he was tired, felt his sweat and entered a conditioned library, went through a book on a "Subaltern Studies" - to be precise, and then took leave from books to roam a little further, meditated on loneliness - to have remembered, till he saw a tamil family clustered around the verandah, and then thought further about family, till he came to the sea, then he thought about gazing at the sea, singing a few songs to himself, but, there was no space, all around were couples, it was weekend time. He thought about eco-tourism, then finally he did find a place to squeeze himself, started singing, and then got up, then he took a walk back home, and saw a almodovar movie,"talk to her" it said and he stopped thinking about his loneliness, if not only for tonight

objective points through a power point presentation

2006-10-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

Creation becomes secondary in an industry where market rules, your creation looses its subjectivity, it is reduced to objective points through a power point presentation and then it is sold as an idea, dissenting voices, voices which still try to listen to their inner voice, are silenced by efficient and smart marketeers, to say it happens in capitalism is another reductionsim

contours of imperatives a novel will try to rise upto

2006-10-10T12:53:00.000-07:00

The novel surely engages in interrogating the individual pulse, giving it a form. In making characters reflect on what has occurred, what they have experienced, sometimes a melancholic nostalgia is associated, during other times, important realizations concomitant with a theory also get realized. At other times, contrary to held perceptions or ideologies, events and thought-processes unfold. In a world of changing trends, fashions, and technologies and post prefixed phenomena, characters think whether they are happy to be duped by the advertising market, are they actually duped into consuming, do they feel they are resigned to participate in such a consumption process, or are they happy being part of the consumer lifestyle that gets defined for them by presumably invisible forces? Does “sterility of real actions” in the face of imploding images really bother people or are they actually indifferent to it all?

One tries to chalk out the contours of imperatives a novel will try to rise upto

would also sound like an anachronism

2006-10-10T12:16:00.000-07:00

Staying encrusted in a small town in India, reading and then interpreting Baudrillard, his despairing vision of hyper-reality, seems foreign. A distance gets created, and yet a few years of exposure to ICT, the consequent debates regarding AI, Virtual Reality, and Simulation, growing also in an India where both (pre- and post-) industrialization is simultaneously taking place, placing ones’ ideas for a not so quite distant science-fiction in India, would also sound like an anachronism, for don’t cities like Mumbai have potentials of burgeoning Simcities, attaining the status of a “Post-Metropolis”, like Los Angeles or New York, soon, very soon?

setting the goal

2006-10-10T11:55:00.000-07:00

The frustration of youth, such a driving force, gives one an ability to fight and be the one (s)he wants

The stubborness of youth, to not hear anything except the call of ego and desires, sometimes also the super-ego, to fantasize the last image and run after it

Negative energy sets the goal for positives to act upon, and when the positives fall flacid, become lazy, they are there to give them a kick in their behind

shaved in the morning, and thought i had it all wrong yesterday

2006-10-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

I was happy, I talked of the -isms in life, deconstructing all those thinkers, what was good and bad about them, she listened, all the time thinking me a rut and intoning the hmms...hmms...and she looked at me with her eyes so big, her signature smile conveying to me that i was so splendid and i came back crushed my pillow and thought what lovers would think, after a dream , shaved in the morning, and thought i had it all wrong yesterday because she was not there and that i could play the fool again when she would look at me with those eyes ... confessions of loverlorn lover should perhaps be relegated to a diary or should they not, a pastry filled mills & boons romantic confession can never be a blog entry, blogs are serious business, but the last three sentences make blogs self-critical, each form looks inward at itself...thats an -ism, take a guess...

love, a short process

2006-10-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

the look in her eyes, the look in mine as i look at them, the pouting of her lips, her smile, the invisible something in the tone of my voice as i tell her an idea, we comunicate in signs, our misinterpretations, our deliberate misleading of signs --- love, a short process,

life lived between breaks

2006-10-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

Mass Media looks for breaks in everyday life, therefore it covers life when events become a breaking news, diligently capturing the spectacle of the fight between a Narayana Murthy and Deve Gowda, it then runs the tape of repeated simulation of the captured spectacle for a few days together, then forgets, looking for some other breaks, at times remembering some spectacular breaks in the form of anniversaries. The shocks through the breaking stories are essential, they come up as stock taking situations after years of neglect but the question comes up - Who will connect the life lived between those breaks? Who will track the mercury of the silent indignation of a local as he sees his old city destroyed by rising prices, traffic jams and rowdy nightlife given vent finally as an outburst including the indifference, vulnerability and failure of the software engineer to see those signs? Can fiction be the answer?

poets do...their words make people cry and fight, remember and forget

2006-10-06T23:47:00.000-07:00

Poets are very fond of history because they too are people who cannot forget. So when a dictatorial government comes up with its scriptwriters and tells them to write a certain kind of history for its subjects, two kinds of poets emerge - one poet who writes about the history he cannot forget, the past as he knew it, the names of streets and places that remained imprinted in his memory in a language he remembers, ...the other poet is the poet of the ruler...he writes hymns in the system's praise, he eulogises, he compares the leader with some great historical god of the past, he makes a whole nation forget, spells a charm of collective amnesia over them...what do poets do...through their words they make people cry and fight, remember and forget

antonioni , melancholy and innocence

2006-10-06T23:27:00.000-07:00

Antonioni's films have a sense of gravitating poetry about them, the poetry is in the gaze that he offers, the innocence of the medium of cinema, its breaking from the narrative of cause and effect, the new images, new shots, lots of silences, strange characters with their adventurous foibles,their attempts to find desire and satisfaction, their melancholy, their squeamishness, their emptiness among arificial plenitude, the sheer amount of pontification over a decision which at the end is relegated to a mere instinct, and in the end an eclipse, one's hand on another's hair, brushing it , consolation and forgiving, a giving in to making love out of pity or clarity no one knows, a tiring for nothing, the characters feel it, you as a viewer feel it ....the exercise of the spectator and a discerning audience...connecting dots

Others

2006-09-23T03:53:00.000-07:00

"oTHERS" , everybody talks about them and still they remain where they are. They are talked about everywhere especially in cinema, literature and art - how far do they possibly help the others...can they?

every entry into this blog must be a question, after all every work of art is also a question, is it?

translation of "lived-experience"

2006-09-09T13:57:00.001-07:00

Software engineers are the best subjects to chronicle the times of post-liberalization of India. The story should have a proustian flavor, also something what anthropologists call the translation of "lived experience". The rancounteuring should essentially encompass more of software engineers, rather than about stalwart CEOs.

read kafka, see goddard

2006-09-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

When people say that they go to see a film for suspense and get pissed off when they are told about the ending, I wonder why it should have so much bearing on the question of whether to see it or not, the challenge perhaps is to tell a story where you tell the ending right at the start, and yet make everybody watch the story till the end. how to do it -- ??--read kafka, see goddard.....did they do a similar thing in their work --- maybe not....but they are the champions of nothingness...

the gamble of lived experience

2006-08-12T23:29:00.001-07:00

can u bet a story with no dramatic moment, no ending , just plain unfolding of life, the gamble of lived experience...

how to begin

2006-08-12T23:22:00.000-07:00

tutorials tell u how to begin, a good amount tutoring starts off the affair.