delhirious

Of Dreamworlds and Catastrophe ( Part 2)

2012-01-14T19:08:00.000-08:00

The railway station is an elevated platform in the middle of rice fields. I am told that a racket of land speculation is on the rise as many companies want to buy these lands. Agriculture is increasingly financially unviable, and the farmer prefers to sell off and have his sons do something else, than find himself entrapped in debt. Where was the middleman all this while? I ask. He was here, but operating more covertly. Now he has come out in full glory. He buys a cauliflower at 50p and sells at Rs. 5 in the market. The consumer worries about rising prices. The grower remains impoverished.

A story of a violent transition towards non-agrarian services on agrarian land is told to me. A structure of services exists, and a new one is called for. A broker steps in to make money off of this precarious void. Often quoting prices that the existing structure cannot support. Essentially an entrepreneur. Looking for the best opportunity. Its his business to sniff around and foresee change. The entrant of a company is heralded as an invasive outside force, determined to loot and ravage. If you manage to plug in, some of the loot will be yours. A scene, historically borrowed from the harboring of foreign ships up the Hooghly. Except, in this chapter, there is a ready grammar of interpreting the outsider. The outsider comes from the government to ask you the weight of your newborn, give him polio medicine, give you credit or fertilizer. The outsider comes to inspire you towards war against the powerful. The outsider comes to invite you meetings and micheels, for cha and biri. The outsider bats traveler-lids through digital lenses to capture your cowdung by the afternoon shadow. The outsider tells you – you are beautiful, you should not change one bit. Change comes banging at your door, and prices of land scale up.

The outside woman wears a hat on the stage. Jatra audiences laugh out aloud. A marker of the foreign is domesticated with disdain and wonder. She transforms into the good agrarian wife. She wears a red and white sari and comes back from her morning temple trip. The inside has conquered this round. Woman remains the last bastion to be held on to. The one that nurtures an old amour for her brother-in-law is a damned whore. For disturbing the equilibrium of Home. Home – the last fortress. Where woman waits for you to come back from your wars and carnivals, with a warm meal, clean towel. She is eulogized, just so she is not tempted to run off with one of the outsider, just so she doesn’t seek an evening out in the town. But she find ways out. Her heels reflect a mirror of outside fashion. On the odd carnivalesque occasion, she pulls up her tight jeans, brings out their lipsticks, and gets on the bus. It takes two and a half hours to reach Kolkata. Then a longish to the college. She secretly spread wings of desire on the way. She has a Facebook account. Woven in tinshed cyber cafes. She looks out for the next wave of change. To get a new pair of heels. You can’t hold her back. You can’t hold onto the land. You must move and make way. The middleman has moved onto to the next almanac of change.

Communitas

2012-01-07T20:53:00.000-08:00

Along the bridge, I passed sequin-shirted young men with surma-laden eyes, women peeping out of their scarves with eager eyes, children licking ice-cream off their fingers. This was the scene of any carnivalesque gathering. Except a threatening energy that the procession emitted as it slowly moved through the crowd. Four teenaged boys followed me in youthful vigor. The Grand Trunk Road (North) narrowed into Pilkhana. The crowds here were denser. On the diases, PA systems installed at corners proclaimed words of caution and camaraderie. Party banners made explicit the support of of this MLA or that in making this festivity possible. There came a deadlock in the movement. The crowd was being physically stopped in order not to create more chaos. I struggled to breathe. Looked around in horror and fascination. Tall bright triangular flags hemmed in silver sequin, glittery mausoleum sculptures mounted on rickshaw-vans floated slow and confident. Young men huddled in their bleeding shirts. Tall, slim swords quivered with every chant.

Royals and Pigeons

2011-10-27T21:56:00.001-07:00

The Andul Rajbari is a magnificent ruin, a short rickshaw-ride from the bus-stand. Its majestic pillars tell the old, tragic story of decay, as a sign-board Andul Sporting Club peeps out from behind. Coke chips cigarettes saris and dress material are sold in one of its corners. Next to the sporting club. I walk in through one of its tall broken doors. And pigeons trapeze through the quadrangular space inside. Long stretches of corridor look down upon me. My feet strike at piles of ruin, and upset an inner equilibrium of debris. Nostalgia meets nonchalance here. So what if this is a testimony to a long-gone moment of power and opulence, we are here now and it is our game that narrates this space. Say the pigeons. At one of the corners, petticoats of an occupant are hung out to dry. In a different quarter, quaint velvetted royal couches are obliterated by a loyal servant. No one who might be able to answer your questions is here now. Yes you can come back during the weekend.

Walking with the Madding Crowds

2011-10-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

[First published at http://www.mylaw.net/Article/Walking_with_the_madding_crowds/]

The word for ‘intellectual’ in Bengali is ‘aantele’, a rather derogatory word in some circles. One immediately imagines a man leaning back on an armchair, puffing intently, looking for the perfect word to end his sentence. His eyes are sunken after long tussles with insight. The ‘intellectual’ straddles the boundaries of art, science, philosophy, and politics with ease. He usually approaches these domains with fascination or despondency. The luxury of wallowing in thought, Marxians would say, is available to those in the higher rungs of economic structure – who then use the substratum of economic power to weave the film of ephemera around the material body of a society. An attractive political utopia is born out of this weaving exercise. The intellectual is blind to the insularity of his own universalism. The occupants of the worlds that he imagines do not always want to participate in his dreamworld. They might even be troubled by his formulations about the nature of their being. The intellectual’s imaginative empathy is often desirable only to him.

In the world of abstraction, the intellectual switches channels and looks for new friends. He imagines distant times and spaces in his intoxicated or mystic state. The wronged peasant or the mysterious terrorist emerge as live actors in his script. To them, he must speak. His ideal changes often. But the ideal is his only fodder. If at all there were to emerge a world of green pastures and secure livelihoods and pacifist sovereigns, the intellectual would certainly find some other discrepancy between the real and the ideal to carry on his dream-sojourns. This could propel him to articulate a new theory, as much as it might call for a tragic immersion in the world of utter decay.

In my attempt to think about thinkers, let me bring in Walter Benjamin’s flaneur. The flaneur is marked out by Benjamin as a peculiar product of early industrialism in Europe - subjects who have found an individuated existence strong enough to narrate with critical distance, as though in a tragic amusement. A light-footed urban stroll is the wont of the flaneur – the lettered dandyman. On the boulevards of Paris, he experiences the rhapsody of modern capitalism. The last incarnation of the flaneur is the sandwichman, and his last haunt the department store, says Benjamin. The surrounding of attractive commodities enlivens his inner life. The flaneur’s traipse on the cityscape is not the solitary walk of a thinker, neither is it the accompaniment of a rational declaration towards membership of a body politic. His vision is hazy, his gait unsteady. He absorbs the sights and sounds of the urban thicket in a dreamlike reverie. Soon however, he sees unity through this dreamwalk with fellow-street-urchins – the whore and the sandwichman. He is stimulated as also let down by the series of wish-images posed by the boulevards of Paris. Benjamin describes the flanerie - the mass-form of the flaneur - of the sandwichman, who lives and earns on the street, retaining in him the mass-form of the flaneur, constantly collecting the city as montage. This state of urban aimlessness is a form of intoxication, according to Benjamin.

The flaneur often watches the masses collect around a political party meeting or a product launch event. He walks with the current, but maintains rueful distance. His distance is his key to the immediate. Many things of the immediate reveal themselves as ruins of a distant past. Many loiterers of a distant social stratum spell for him a dreamy camaraderie on the canvas of the street. The waves of mass culture wash over the flaneur. He retains some grains in his fist. These grains tell him apart from the mesmerised collective. He does not run away into the wilderness to find solace, neither does he address the collective the way statesmen do. He spreads himself out on the landscape in a masterful camouflaging act.

Benjamin imagined the grains of the flaneur-fist to be the matter of written words for the newly produced urban readership. The flaneur - the journalist, the photographer, the blogger - mirrors for the urban consumer, his frenzied gait. He might have a concrete goal set by a magazine, but he jumps into the street-scene hoping for many distractions and associated dreams. Many among you are flaneurs. You traipse the cityscape with a camera slung on your shoulder. Or a notepad. Or an iPad. You know the quaintest chai-shacks in its farthest crevices. Eight-lane highways and landscape gardens irk you. You watch suffering in anguish, and strum your guitar to its hidden melodies. You read epics and scriptures and find their shadows in the frenzy of the bazaar. You hang around at bars and cafes, amused at the high-pitched political debate. You walk away as the crowd convulses to song or slogan. The crowd is essential to your being.

Fight

2011-10-17T00:13:00.000-07:00

Your moustache glistens in afternoon sweat. Bristles quiver in rage. How dare they call you a pickpocket. Maaderchods the whole lot. These were your wad of notes. You dreamt of them the night before. That you would drink with them, gamble with them, pay bills, go to the doctor, get some love. They came your way by God's will. Maaderchods the whole lot. The man continues to shout expletives. You should be kicked out of the bus, he says. But what about the bhara you paid. You're as good a passenger as he. The conductor holds you back by your collar. The kajal-girl stares at you as if you were a wounded animal. Aami ki kutta naki saala. They pull the notes out of your hand. A day's dream is lost. The afternoon sun sniggers. Maaderchods the whole lot.

Of Dreamworlds and Catastrophe

2011-08-30T21:40:00.000-07:00

You weave dreamworlds and catastrophe out of big-city rejects. Reject cell-phones, footwear, football jerseys, tie-up bras, sunglasses, CDs. Counterfeit doesn’t quite catch it. A mofussil version of commodity is created. A purely original creature of limited resource and fantastic urge. You may scoff at these products and their adolescent desire to be like the real thing. They adorn many adolescent breasts filled with eager sexuality. The morning runner carries around leaping jaguar on his thighs. Cell-phones are repaired with new batteries and new keypads. Carefully blanketed in plastic covers. These are blessings of modernity. They must not get blemished by rain and dust. Maruti vans are repainted. With a message for Champa at the back. Champa wears a shiny butterfly on the butt of her jeans. She smiles coyly and expects you get the message. If you don’t, she conveys her indignation in SMS short-form in the dead of the night. You would not want her wait too long at the bus-stop next to the B-grade movie hall. Next to a blown-up photo of exposed breasts and an angry man. Probably called Sunehri Raat. Or something in Bhojpuri. It would ruin your nightly fantasy if she stood there too long. Her innocence corrupted in the evil company of murky sexuality. But you’d like her to waver in the hedge behind the park sometimes. Retaining guilt and shame, of course. Or else your nightly fantasy would be ruined. It’s the only thing this nightly fantasy. It keeps you going as you hang out of the trekker, as you jump across heaps of garbage, brave the kicks in your lower abdomen, fall asleep in your sweaty armpit, expect the next dot to appear soon after you join the first two. You pull together leftovers and rejects from everywhere. And weave this world. Whatever floats across the river. Whatever the big city doesn’t care for anymore. Whatever turns into mouldy obsolescence, you pick up. It’s your next dot.

Platforms

2011-08-30T21:37:00.000-07:00

Waits for trains can be lazy or anxious. If the train is late and you are in a hurry, you may want to contract the time of wait that is inevitable. Worrying about whether you will get to your destination at the stipulated time or no. If the train is early, and you are late, you will dash across, trying to expand the pre-determined span of time that the train means to halt for. If the train is yet to arrive and you are not in any hurry to get on it, you will bide this time leisurely. Speaking to the timespace created by the elevated concrete dias called Platform. Plastic watches and fruit juice and urine will dance in front of you. Making you inhale time through the concatenation of thing and being that make space. You might also use this time to pull out of your pocket your own peculiar worries, pleasures and exhibits. Your prominent double chin or a lost lover will resurface at this point. It might mingle in the mixed company of urine and potato chips. The beggar might enter your personal thicket of worry and joy. A wafting tune of a B-grade film might entertain your wait. I am presuming that you, like me, are shy of talking to strangers. If you're not, then, you will probably make small talk about the declining state of the railways with a neighboring office - goer. I do not understand the lot of you chitchatters on platforms. I watch the peaceful sweat on fatty arms from a distance.

In a different timspace, platforms stage struggles with the harsh north wind. That one would have to pull one's wool collars up against. One might run into the glass cabins for waiting passengers. But I always found those nauseating. Grey residue of snow collected on the tracks. Grim, stout railway guards nodded as they passed you. You wondered if they liked their job. From the hazy grey, a pale light sharpened as your train approached. The drama of the cold ended, leading you into the respite of heated nausea.

Dirt

2011-08-07T00:07:00.000-07:00

Garbage is the intimate enemy. It greets you at the foot of your door. It crosses bridges between rich and poor, industry and commerce, agrarian and urban. It flows in routes of its own drawing, making new places for desire and disgust. Youth pass by carelessly, as if they were certain it would be wiped out soon enough. Deities look on forlornly. Women cover their faces with saris. Men square their shoulders. I shut my eyes. And it rains.

These narrow alleys house small blast furnaces, sooted sinewy youth, Bhojpuri movie theaters, locked factories, broken windows, handcarts, wheelbarrows, trucks, buses, swearwords, tears, sweat and blood. G.T. Road (North) turns into G.T. Road (South). Workers and small enterprises turn into shopkeepers and schoolgirls. They discuss today's exam. The boy teases them for the mistakes they made. They jostle for breathing space and stench-free air. Running until the stench dissolves. Chicken are chopped into biriyani. Blood turned into curry. Rats hidden away in dark holes.

The rains come down in merciless mirth. Tugging at doors and saris. Pulling out forgotten stories from dark crevices. Breaking boundary walls of clean and dirty. If they didn't come, we'd pray to the rain gods. And wipe our burnt faces. Water is boon and curse. It melts, wipes and runs about ungoverned. Solid is governed easier than water. A stone stays where you put it, if you manage to keep it there. But water flees. As if it can't read boundaries. Between garbage and commodity. Sacred and profane.

Summer Song

2011-06-02T05:11:00.000-07:00

America, summer is here now
Your sobs muffled in flowers now
Lovers kiss on skateboards
And the recession smiles
Your shopping carts brim
Your beards trimmed
Your beaches abound
Your towers aground
Your daddy loves you
Your pajamas are new
Black and blue.

America, you killed the sinner
You washed your hands
You kissed me tender
You brushed
You hushed
Me to sleep.

I memorized credit card numbers
in the dream
When you fucked me tender
America, summer is here now
I hiked a few miles
to see the world as if I were tall
And then came down
and gathered all my stuff
My credit cards, keys, underwear.
Forgot my phone
It rang
In the dream
As you shoved it in
Between
I wore a hat
In the dream
My thriftstore dress
On the floor
Of an elevator
America, your big dick
Shrunk
As the phone rang.

Clenched

2011-05-03T13:34:00.000-07:00

I clench my fists
so fingers won’t be cold
they curl into the womb of my palm
frightened babies
for the wind
it lashes out at them
again and again
And even the sun
And walls
And folks

And food.
So I clench my fists
Always.

And they lock inside
Frozen – like ice-cream
To be hammered back
into life and freedom
I hammer them
I hammer them
so they spread their tentacles again
but cold and stiff
they are
Clenched to eternity.

Act I

2011-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

Children stand for the spaces and feelings that we long for and can't afford anymore. Hence, they must be zealously protected. Their every whimsical utterance recorded in fond memory of what we are no more. Their cruelties ignored. Their colors accentuated, their lights turned up, their darkness shoved under the carpet. I watch their eerie dance of paper-hat and mirth. As they carry out miniature versions of empire and rebellion. Some run around daddy's legs pulling up feminine walls of pink. Some gaze curmudgeonly through the glass-windows of SUVs. One declares his supremacy in the middle of confused gathering of subjects. The blueprint of the real world is mapped out quite accurately. Kings, janitors, whores and wives have taken their place on the stage. Some soft percussion has begun to play in the background. As they wait to take their cues. And crystal-eyed parents watch them in wonder and oblivion. Having carefully cast aside the dark shadows on the stage out of camera-territories.

San Francisco

2011-03-18T14:10:00.001-07:00

San Francisco blows at you a moist wind, all of the time. So even though the temperatures are summery (at least by east coast standards), I feel chilly. Austere spires on an uphill road close to the Mission are often interspersed with parrot green or bright yellow facades. And murals of tall grasshoppers and hatted humans. Down at the mission coffee brews amidst Spaniard signboards. Hair is braided here. Yoga is taught here. Things come wrapped in avocado.

One walks down Valencia. Ignoring dimly lit community rooms of quiet spiritual quests. And peeping in at cafes that grew out of workshops. That's why their ceilings are so high. Cafe - occupants peer into their mac-screens concocting the next social media adventure. San Francisco, in all its light-footed sadness, is a bit eerie to me. As if it must eternally bear the markers of a long-ago carnival. People walk around in their costumic gait - as if sadly reminiscing about an old carnival, as if they never washed the paint off their faces, and could still hear the tingly laughter and trumpets, as they try to keep up the carnivalesque gait today.

Imaginative business, organic vegetables, moistness and a fear of any form of a shackle come together to make this weirdly free city. The show's over, and they just couldn't snap out of its spell.

Festive

2011-02-28T19:33:00.000-08:00

Many festivities today.
A few revolutionary fireworks.
Protests.
Tweets.
Red carpets.
Guns and roses.
Franco and Hathaway the high-school sweethearts.
Many fairies smile behind botox-veils.
Tuxedoes crackle under arclights.
A dictator turns into fairydust.
The demonic and the beautiful in my newsfeed.
Fear and loathing of wired workaholics.
They are taking breaks from races to deadlines,
while they make love to good revolutions and bad movies.

Mornings make headlines and hangovers.
Singles get engaged.
A broken hearted icon to ease your pain.
Sympathy and bottled vitamin water.
Damp roads and sunglasses.
A holiday perhaps in the spring.
Now that dictators have been chided enough.
Some sepia, some seafood.

Delhicate

2011-01-17T14:34:00.000-08:00

Bollywood's new bedfellow is Delhi. Started with Monsoon Wedding. Raw silk and pent-up sexuality inundated the terrain of plush green lawns, and yawning phirang-returns. Laid-back old money generated a nervous guffaw at the pace of Mumbai and eagerness of Bangalore. Then came Dilli 6. A haveli hidden in a maze of galis. Nostalgia bathed love. A lanky twinkly-eyed one switched from shimmery tight kurta to halter between Chandni Chowk and Rajiv Chowk. The spectre of brutal patriarchy that would marry a daughter off in the name of family honour, at the cost of her Indian Idol fantasies, pervades the film. Invariably, a brutal daddy awaits at home with an angry moustache. Girls' wings are always clipped here weaving a terrible tale of agony. Its vernacular chapter of dilli this time. Struggling in obsolescence, Islamic ruins, pan-stains and good-old warmth.The introduction of moronic man-beast figure in jagran gatherings of right-wing political blessing derailed the movie. And punctured the career of a very un-dilli lanky boy forever. Band Baaja Baaraat meanders the Dilli boat to Janakpuri - connected to the centre by the metro, and home to the trading middle class biradari. Shruti and Bittu start out as Janakpuri wedding planners, Sainik Farms is their ultimate goal. Chanda Rangan, the classy upper-class wedding planner feverishly articulates the dilli shame of being seen by the world as too loud, too shiny. The nouveau riche of Sainik Farms must now earn cultural capital. So Chanda recommends an aesthetics that rejects one's inner un-gentry affinities. Shruti and Bittu turn this inner conflict of the dilli rich on its own head. Some are tired of playing classy, and want their pampered kids to have the most enjoyably bling wedding possible. The Monsoon Wedding snobs hence came around to Janakpuri style band-baaja-revelry. Shamed too long and too harshly for its greed, its brutality, its jugaad-ethics, its go-getterness, its unflinching libidinality and its taste for the obvious, Delhi makes for excellent cinematic visuality and a weird knot deep down in the stomach.

Flaneurs and Whores of Our Time

2011-01-15T08:55:00.000-08:00

[An excerpt from a talk I gave in Bangalore recently, on Benjamin's work and its influence on my research.]

Benjamin’s writings defy disciplinary forms and notations of most circles of the academy. Susan Buck-Morss says, Benjamin has re-appeared as a fashionable theoretical instrument in many circles of the American academy. Perhaps, she was hinting at Benjamin’s own emphasis on after-histories, a form of which, his own work has transformed into today. Most of Benjamin’s work is in unconventional forms – essays, vignettes – some incomplete. I rely heavily on philosopher Susan Buck-Morss’ lifelong discovery and rendering of Benjamin to the uninitiated. The Arcades Project and One Way Street, both written quite un-academically, are often over-emphasized in their lyricism, says Buck-Morss. The Arcades Project which he worked on for thirteen years, and left unfinished in 1940 when he committed suicide, is a puzzling ensemble of text. Benjamin, SB reminds us, was writing as a philosopher and not a literary/aesthetic theorist. It was his specific methodological affinity to show philosophy in the visually perceptible form, that many of his writings took the shape that they did. Buck- Morss begins her essay ‘The Flaneur, The Sandwichman and the Whore’ with an unpacking of the nature of the Arcades Project:

In the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin left us his note-boxes. That is, he left us ‘everything essential’. Lamentations over the work’s incompleteness are thus irrelevant. Had he lived, the notes would not have become superfluous by entering into a closed and finished text. And surely, the card file would have been thicker. The Passagen-Werk, as it would have been: a historical lexicon of the capitalist origins of modernity, a collection of concrete, factual images of the urban experience. Benjamin handled these facts as if they were politically charged, capable of transmitting revolutionary energy across generations. His method was to create from them, through the formal principles of montage, constructions of print that had the power to awaken political consciousness among the present-day reader.

The Passagen-Werk, as the 1935 expose indicates, was to be a commentary on ‘text’ and ‘reality’. Benjamin recognized the difference. In the former case, he tells us ‘philology is the fundamental science’, in the latter case, it is ‘theology’. (PW 574) Crucially important to a theological reading was what Benjamin described as ‘telescoping the past through the present’ (PW 588). It means the elements of the nineteenth century which he chose to record reflected the concerns of his era. These connections are most often not spelled out in Passagen-Werk. Still we can, and indeed must, assume their existence.

Buck – Morss writes about Benjamin’s historian hat: “…he called historicism the greatest narcotic of the time – but for the shock of historical citations ripped out of their original context with a ‘strong seemingly brutal grasp, and brought into the most immediate present. This method created ‘dialectical images’ in which the old-fashioned, undesirable suddenly appeared current, or the new, desired appeared as a repetition of the same.” (34). Benjamin’s insistence on a spatial reading of history emerges from this dialectical view of the present that he provides in the Arcades Project and other city-writings – the present as a hellishly cyclical, repetition of nothing-new, an amalgam of historical residue formed out of debris from various fleeting spectacles from distant eras of history.

In the Howrah crossroad constellation of men, vehicles, concrete, asbestos, sound, smell, garbage – the quotidian comes alive from within a complex spatial relic. Many epochs, many histories seem to collide here in a transient yet euphoric sensation of the ‘new’, immediately turning into an ash-like heap of nothing-new. In a Benjaminian moment of a loosely arranged constellation of objects, images, texts and voices, I got thinking about origins and their relation to relics. “Origin”, as Benjamin understood it, is that which emerges in the ‘process of becoming and disappearing’. It is this constant process of becoming and disappearing that I refer to as the making of the ‘now’ time. In between the becoming and the disappearing is where we struggle to locate ourselves, very often, to be left out on its edges, sometimes in its shadows. I imagine it as a momentary flash of the arclights on an intersection of time and space, only to swiftly relocate its focus somewhere else, in some other time. So, the petty entrepreneur, the casual laborer, the migrant cab-driver, the elite Bengali ethnographer-in-exile came to inhabit this spatial relic at the same moment and shared a collective dream. The actors in this dreaming collective wore hats that I identified from the collective dream of nation, community and polity that I am familiar with – but the scene of the crossroad dream was unfamiliar, distant, unnerving. I theorized it in a research proposal as a case of time-warp – an aberration in an otherwise constant case of historic progression. At the time, I was not quite prepared to accept that the reading of the crossroad, much like the reading of the nation and the community through familiar sign-systems and theatrical scenes, was a desperate attempt on my part to locate myself on the boundary walls of the illegible and the legible, things I recognized and things I did not. As an ethnographer and trainee anthropologist, I found myself awakening from and recognizing the most recent registers of history (the postcolonial socialist regime of the state of West Bengal) as my parental world, the world that had given birth to me – I was Benjamin’s ‘child’ – navigating the thicket of objects that my parental history had surrounded me with; mimicking and re-enacting as a coping mechanism to compensate for the absence of empathy. [ Slide 5] And the pack of cards shuffle again, and again. Benjamin’s ‘historical object’ remains a solidified heap of ruin - necessary constituents of the present. This debris has a constitutive and not a causal relationship with the ‘present’. For Benjamin, the turgid ‘temporal nucleus’ that constitutes the ‘present’, is necessarily made of debris from the past, and is thereby, a re-arrangement of debris in the making of the spectacularly ‘new’. In such an argument, Benjamin sees the bourgeois and proletarian united in the affliction of dreamlikeness - to experience time as a dream, in the intoxication of mass cultures of industrial capitalism –a dreaming reverie that makes existence possible through the trauma of industrialization and industrialism. In this, industrialism provides its own antidote. He did not share the emphasis of his structural Marxist friends of the Frankfurt School of class-cleavage being the crucial lens through which this ‘temporal nucleus’ could be captured. The reduction of the world into dizzy kaleidoscope of wish-images in which to locate one’s consciousness was as traumatic for the consuming bourgeois as it was, he believed, for the producing proletariat. The force of the crowds on the streets of cities returned a sense of healing in the trauma of losing the capacity for experience. In One Way Street, Benjamin speaks of the magic visual power of print that assails the consumer/citizen in newspapers, advertisements, film and so on. He says (OWS, 78):

And before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colourful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight. Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what is taken for intellect for city dwellers, will grow thicker with each succeeding year.

The multiplication of mimic - technologies, for Benjamin, were instructive of this traumatized collective trying to keep alive a rudiment of its capacity for experience. Film, for Benjamin, was such a cathartic medium, which enabled drawing out of a moment, in a montage of visuals, in response to the ruthless shrinking of time and fragmentation of space. He speaks of the curious coping mechanisms that capital itself yielded for the numbing of feeling that it caused in the experiential worlds of its victims, he says (OWS, 86):

Thereby “matter-of-factness” is finally dispatched, and in the face of the huge images across the walls of houses, where toothpaste and cosmetics lie handy for giants, sentimentality is restored to health and liberated in American style, just as people whom nothing moves or touches any longer are taught to cry again by films. For the man in the street, however, it is money that affects him in this way, brings him into perceived contact with things. And the paid critic, manipulating paintings in the dealer’s exhibition room, knows more important if not better things about them than the art lover viewing them in showroom window. The warmth of the subject that is communicated to him, stirs sentient springs. What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not, what the morning red neon sign says – but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.

Flaneurs and Whores of our time

The flaneur is marked out by Benjamin as a peculiar product of early industrialism - subjects who have found an individuated existence strong enough to narrate with critical distance, as though in a tragic amusement. A light-footed urban stroll is the wont of the flaneur through the boulevards of Paris to experience the rhapsody of installation of modern capitalism. The last incarnation of the flaneur is the sandwichman, and his last haunt the department store. Here ‘things appear divorced from the history of their production’. Flanerie as a state of perception of the ‘phantasmagoria of space’ that is put together by modern capitalism, is recognized as this quality of perceptiveness even in the midst of the most urgent and overwhelming of sensory experiences induced by capital. Hence, it is a reactive critique to the influences that capital seeks to blind and numb its subjects with. The whore or the street-walker was the female flaneur. The woman of modern capitalism, emerges as a commodity, emitting many wish-images – of forgotten pasts, and forbidden desires – to a ‘distracted’, dreamy public of consumers. The flaneur and the whore continue to loiter their interpretation of the phantasmagoria of space that the modern city rendered. In their loitering lay their somewhat idle critique. As if they didn’t care for it much, but if you asked them they would tell you why things were fucked up this way and not any other. They were not enthusiastic deliberative participants of a public sphere. They were travelers in a spatial domain of time – collecting, kicking around, moving on. Remembering and re-enacting flanerie in the time of late capitalism, is one of nervous artificiality. Brooklyn hipsters who read poetry at bookstores, and sport cigarette pants and ironic top-hats could be read as the after-narrative of Benjamin’s flaneur. And maybe the loiterers at Koshy’s. The flaneur survives in a fraught relationship with capital. He is not the angry activist, neither the numbed consumer. The character of the amused and stroller journalist/blogger/columnist/photographer, much like some of you here, are probably contemporary versions of the flaneur. The flaneur gets more and more entrenched in the processes of capital, but even in his last avatar of the sandwichman, retains a fragile independence, in his ability and penchant for loitering.

Many years have passed since Benjamin wrote about the dreaming collective being led around by industrial capitalism in a reverie. He wrote as an ethnographer of the intimate – his most famous essays being about cities that his life was closely wound up in – Berlin, Paris. We are gathered here today in Bangalore, pumped with expectation of new wish-images in the same kaleidoscopic trauma that Benjamin described at the onset of modern capitalism in Europe. We walk around retaining a flaneur-like tragedy in our footsteps, pushed around by a crazy dazzled crowd. I am uncomfortable about asking questions like who amongst us is the real flaneur? Who is the sandwichman? Who is the Whore? How are they different in the Indian condition? I simply want to put forth the idea that in the flanerie of our time is contained in the tussle between heightened and tired temporalities, between events and their narrations, between spectacles and relics. Dreamworlds are constituted not only by wish-images of new commodities, spectacles and temporalities, but also in constant re-enactment of myths of uncertain and distant origins. The ingredients of this urgently new are then essentially components of old, and some very old.

Minescapes

2011-01-04T00:16:00.000-08:00

The Bhubaneshwar airport welcomed us with large billboards of steel and aluminium - Jindal, Vedanta, TATA, and tribal faces in yellow mining helmets, smiling. A fearful, uncanny underbelly of consumer capital. No lingerie, cars, airtel, axe effect, life insurance here. No seduction. But a nervously smiling iron fist promising that primitive accumulation won't fuck you up as bad as you think. You will smile too. But airtel and axe effect are not for you yet. We love you enough to protect your quaintness, your relic state of being - your banana leaves and songs. We must get on with business though. On the way, assimilating your quaintness, as fond remembrance in our journey towards glory. You turn into kitsch by night, and labor by day. And we continue to feel squeamish about the direct agents of violent change, more so about our tenuous squeamish participation in such violence.

Times and worlds away from the Bhubaneshwar airport, we surround ourselves with heady wish-images, pretending that the steel billboards have not much to do with the 3G billboards. The resource chain of capital is our suppressed demon, that plays apologia on the walls of Bhubaneshwar. We continue to buy fresh herbal oils, fabrics untouched by violent capital, postcards with quaint smiles, offbeat music. Capital has not fucked our heads - we scream out loud, at broken dreams in the dead of the night. We sweat profusely, and sometimes dream up outrage, sometimes tragedy.

Facebook

2010-11-07T19:15:00.000-08:00

The Social Network is a strange and elusive film. I am still processing it. Like Sorkin and Fincher, I am fascinated by Facebook and I refuse to sigh about it saying: what is the internet doing to our good-old, private, human existence. The movie gives out clues about the peculiarity of Facebook: we don’t know what it is, we don’t know what it can be. We only know that it is cool. Zuckerberg imagines that the quality of sociality that creates tiny barriers everytime it trickles through brick and mortar of society, will pull folks towards Facebook. You can’t get anywhere if no one adds you as a friend. This is not very difficult. Chances are the guy who lives down the hall from you, and says a shy hi every morning, will accept you as a friend. Even though you hardly know him. And this is where sociality starts, the acknowledgement of two beings having a tiny, tiny intersection in respective social worlds. If he is clever, he will put you in his list of Limited Profiles. So you can see his wall, but not his photos, or something like that. If he is even cleverer and Facebook-savvy, he will have carefully tailored levels of technological distance to apply on you, depending on how he grades the social distance between the two of you.

If he is a very private person, he will probably not have a Wall. Then you will know, he is an aloof kinda guy. If he changes his profile photo too often, you will know he is a bit attention-seeking. If he has too many sepia photos of forgotten monuments, he is the artsy guy who is kind of not yet got There. If he has too many party photos, and he pouts in a coupla those, he might be… you know… So Facebook does something very efficient – it offers you a text to read about a person whose interiority is not readily available to you, like you read the plaque in front of a charming heap of historic ruins. It’s not good enough to just be charmed right? You’ve got to know what the ruins were about – you can’t go home merely being charmed. A Facebook profile is a quick-n-dirty window into what a person wants the world to see them as. With cracks in it. Through which often Facebook betrays what the person seeks to hide.

Trouble is - which one of us is really, truly private. We secretly enjoy texts circulating about us in the real world- gossip, folklore, blurbs, praise, criticism. We couldn’t just be. If we wanted to just be, we’d like it, if in our absence, a friend said: she just wants to be. The discourse is important to us. Facebook simply offers an attractive portal in which to generate that discourse. Zuckerberg says in the movie: People want to see their friends on the internet. If only snazzy pictures would satisfy us, we would be content with celebrity gossip blogs. But we want stories about a real, identifiable person. With whom, then we can get our own stories. Even if the connection consists only of a hall-smile. The elaborate privacy apparatus that Facebook offers is testimony to the fact that it’s crucial that the being of private be performed in public. The public viewing of one’s walled off quarters in FB, with a keyhole view in, or nook or a crevice - is crucial to the making of Facebook personalities. Much like being on a chat portal, and having a busy or do-not-disturb status message. My fear is with all this text, is simply that things are getting too literal. Soon enough, we might forget how to read subtle social messages. Or start being offended at people for not liking our posts often enough. And maybe, such like-angsts will become normal at some point, and I will fall in, or become obsolete.

What remains is the generation argument. That Facebook is for Generation Why. Not for those that live sociality out of old family photo albums. Mothers and fathers, often, write on their kids’ walls, in an anxious attempt to become ‘friends’ with their offspring, who are oceans away, and threatening to drift apart. I know of middle-aged housewives who check their cool friends’ holiday photos daily. Are they obsessive stalkers? Well, that is one explanation. The other simply being that they are very very lonely – not for want of real human relationships, but for being left out of the speed-wars of our time, and entrapped in lives of pitifully slow pace.

Pace is a frighteningly seductive thing. Even as comments fly back and forth on every bad movie and murky political move. The remarkably original matt-blue livens up on your screen, in an inebriation of pace, every other week, as it asks you to define your social place, and then re-define it in a week, and then again, and then again.

Games of Love

2010-11-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

A friend mentioned, in a somewhat provoked and inebriated moment the other day, that most men don't really seem to like the women they are with - they are somewhat carrying along, hmm-ing and hawww-ing. I protested saying I felt loved and cherished. After a while, with the influence of intoxicants having worn off, i thought of the marketplace of sexual and emotional production and consumption. And felt, maybe Jim Scott and E. P. Thompson's 'moral economy' is being nicely practiced in the cliches of 'girls who are finding partners very quickly to seal the deal'. The market offers a range of possibility for those who enter the market historically equipped with stranger-sociability, cosmopolitanism and sex drive. Women complaining about men staring at them on crossroads, making cheesy conversations and wearing tight sweaters betraying their considerable bellies - are all talking about a market. Where they control natural resources, mass communication mechanisms, bureaucracies. The level-playing field is, hence, level on their side. And then they get eyebags and love-handles and the economic recession comes around and they want 'security'. The 'moral economy' is here evoked. Resource base to be protected for survival, and older indulgences of flourish to be abandoned. Much like the farmer's risk-hedging techniques. Profit-motive substituted for survival-motive. A pot belly with a secure credit card, and regularly rationed affection is traded for an eyepatch and a canoe and a talking parrot. Self-interest governing both scenarios. Sombre morality chanted in the latter ritual, guffawing drunkenness of power in the former. And the talking parrot dies, and along with him the ironic testimony to games of love.

Remembering Beauty

2010-09-28T17:50:00.000-07:00

My earliest memory of being conscious of beauty was that it came from postcards. Cherry blossom and cuddly babies and snow-capped mountains. It must necessarily be something far away – at a distance made distance mythical. Round the corner, at the grocery shop, at the moss-lined doorways of kitchens, on pencil-scratched walls, chipped mirrors, narrow alleys of course, there was never any beauty. This was the real – comfortable and ugly. It had a place for me in it. Similarly, beautiful people had no place in my immediate world. The neighbor, the domestic help lady, the grandmother, the school-teacher – with fat arms, double-chins, crumpled saris, and the smell of garam masala - represented the world as it was - comfortable and ugly. And then fairies danced on TV in the evenings and told you how the world was not. Of course, you avoided any thought that your world would ever have ‘beauty’ of the postcard or TV-fairy variety. You lived many many years toiling through the musty, moss-lined world. Traces of the postcard world whizzed past you sometimes, so you could manage just a quick sniff. And then, there came a time, when you found that the postcard and TV-fairy worlds had merged with your world. There were cherry-blossoms and picturesque mountains and prettily cooked food and fairy-like women everywhere. Somehow, the real world had merged with the ethereal distant world. It was now possible move back and forth between the two – in fact, it might have begun to be possible to live entirely in the postcard-world. This is wonderful. And I am now in it. In a postcard. Waving every now and then at other passing postcards. It has created a gnawing pain though, a disgust for all those I have embraced in keeping with the fraternity of this beauty era. It triggers a short, sharp cry for the smell of moss. A quiet cry for the asymmetric. It is embarrassing. The moment it is uttered in words, it assumes the postcard-beauty of nostalgia or some such beautiful thing. It must be felt on an utterly straight highway, and wished away.

Peasant Question Continued

2010-08-15T21:43:00.000-07:00

A brothers' counsel to commit suicide and claim compensation from the government and regain control over a piece of agro-land, had many Bangalore yuppies chomp at popcorn and laugh and cry at a high-end multiplex. Peepli Live spoke the pathos of a desperate subaltern in an innocent voice of life (in this case, death) getting entrapped in the juggernaut of modernity. State, media, vernacularity, cosmopolitanism, politics of spectacles, politics of sentimentalism, politics of subalternity come together to weave a sati-like celebrity around Nathha.

I was struck by the banality with which death was spoken of in the UP-tongues of the subaltern. The peasant question was reiterated - Bollywood-style. More erudite than the jaded jargonists. Talking of death as a new handle to move things around in the land of impasse. Death, here, is a word of promise, opportunity, bridging across an abyss. A young boy asks his father when he would be done dying, so he can be a thekedaar. A shriveled woman says her business would receive a boost. Perhaps, the subalterns offer a comment on 'death' beyond irony. Tugging death into the zone of the ordinary, just as they affirm that life offers too little to fear death. A vernacular righteousness - a bit too poetic - gets narrated in the wars between local and metropolitan media, local and central state, brutal and gentrified violences. And one comes away, rattled by the question - how is it different when a man dies, as opposed to when a man speaks his death?

I once met a poet

2010-08-09T22:35:00.000-07:00

Love comes from the city
Wearing a hat
Strapped boots
On an old ferry
Up the river
In jolts and starts
It rained that night
And you wrote bad verse
On a ballpoint pen

And love flew out
westward
Into the jungles
Where they camped
Around fires
And stones

And they tell tales
Of government
And road
And railway
And war
And real tragedy
Real stories

I once met a poet
Who spoke of loverliness
Emptiness
Under the bridge
Leaving behind a trail of ashes
With which to remember
Loverliness

I met a fable
She spoke of love
In the time of war
A ghostly lover
An old loverliness
Was it under the bridge I ask
She smiles
It was very very long ago.

On Rail

2010-07-31T02:56:00.000-07:00

The train line that is known as Howrah-Panskura takes one through the inner country anatomy of Howrah – Mourigram, Andul, Sankrail, Bauria, Chengail, Phuleshwar, Uluberia being my usual route – sometimes deeper into Bagnan. The trainride unfolds onto girls on bicycles going to school, fields waiting for rains, local ‘big shots’ loudly declaring their supremacy over the territory in concrete two-storey houses painted in pink, red flags, trinomool flags, colored flags on top of mosque minarets. Women sell guavas in the ladies compartment and men sell clips combs and ribbons. Sometimes awfully-sweet-candy. Invariably a madman or a blindman come on board. The blindman usually sings for alms. The madman is inevitably pushed out at the next station. I am always anxious to notice the sign on the engine compartment of the train as it approaches. If it says Panskura, it means it is going Up, and will pass my station. If it says Howrah, it means it is going Down. Asking people does not help, I have figured, as they have their own definitions of Up and Down. Invariably women meet extended family or neighbors or old school teachers in the ladies compartment. Some share stories of a wedding in the family, some of new jewelry acquired, some express concern over their kids’ health or performance at school. I like to stand near the open door (all the while fearing that I may fall out) to feel the wind on my face. That is on days that it’s not too hot.

The Grand Trunk Road

2010-07-25T01:12:00.000-07:00

The Grand Trunk Road maneuvers its way through the Shibpur Bazar and temples and jute-mill relics to pour out into the Howrah Maidan and onto the Howrah Bridge. The busride on it is rarely reminiscent of Sher Shah Suri’s majesty. Tall buildings look over it on both sides. These are brightly colored and have rusty railings marking their pigeon-hole windows. Most of them are held together by rows of shops, ATMs and bank branches at the bottom. Rickshaws wait patiently next to garbage dumps. We pass distinctly Mussalman neighborhoods on the Grand Trunk Road. Women here wear glass bangles. Some younger women wear embroidered jeans and platform heels. They board our bus in giggling groups. Sometimes, they are accompanied by a pan-chewing matron who battles the crowds to get them the best of ladies seats. Sombre and bearded men board the bus in lungis. They often travel alongside young boys with darting eyes and middle-parted greasy hair. Hindi-speaking not-Mussalmans board our bus with diamonds on their nostrils. Pulling their saris over their shoulders as they survey the status of the ladies seats. They are probably heading to the shops in Burrabazar that their menfolk own for a weekly visit. Ambition is conveyed to the Grand Trunk Road on sign-boards proclaiming LIC Agent, Desi Daktar Dawakhana, Muslim Marriage Registrar. The Grand Trunk Road remains sullen on Sunday afternoons.

The Human Condition

2010-07-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

So this is probably the crux of the constant invocation of the Third World in contemporary politics. A long and narrow neck of a highway penetrates peri-urban Howrah to provide transit for buses, trucks, cargo, bicycles,schoolchildren, rickshaws. An endless jostling for space. Revealing a tiredness at a constant reminder that this was not what it was supposed to be like to be human. Complete humanity is elsewhere. It requires less human beings, and more material - air, water, less quick muscular movement, comfort, a direct conversation with a mythical universe. To be human there must be toil and rest in perfect balance. And few or no monstrous vehicles coming at you. To be human, one must get to feel slightly divine. Even for thirty seconds in a day.

This noisy juggernaut is suffocating. Its strong-arm patronage offers little respite from making one feel like an insect caught in between a casual thumb and forefinger. It feeds a raw animal power, and a raw animal helplessness. It fails the driving license for humanity. It fails to neatly speed up, slow down, reverse, park, display a smart bunch of reflexes fitting into a logical apparatus of movement - those of judgment and power.

Here, they laugh out loud, cry out in agony, curse, shove, die, rot, and make sense of the next possible slot of space in which they could locate. While they are at it, they pump up the horn relentlessly. And retire, I suspect, with a tired curse on those that call themselves human.

Being in our time

2010-06-30T04:47:00.000-07:00

A wall graffiti at Goalpark cries out for rational approach to the world and to politics (juktibadi), and destruction of fascist forces. I couldn’t understand what party or faction it represented – it was half-erased. Rational approach to the world could mean straighter roads and minds, less chaos and traffic. It could mean a violent washing out of all troublesome elements in society to make a more rational future possible. It could mean re-opening ration shops that had shut down.

Some folks have gone on hunger strike beseeching the other folks making ‘Maoist’ war to stop killing. It’s a rational approach to political endeavor. Maoists and government are making war- coz they have been misled to believe that innocent lives are dispensable in reaching a radical solution to a political conflict. The same government or Maoist will respect, nevertheless, the threat to life posed by Bengali intellectuals going easy on food a couple of days, and are likely to bring the war to an end out of reverence for the threatened lives of the hungered protesters. The same Maoist or government that doesn’t give a shit about thousands of extinguished lives- that is. The inner rationality of such protest is thus ‘we will inconvenience our breakfast routines in order to move you powerful forces to stop merciless killing that you otherwise would not have found inspiration or provocation to stop’.

I like the rationality of rationed entertainment provided by the monstrously air-conditioned mall next to my house in Calcutta. It makes the most business at the phuchka counters at its entrance. Many throng the mall to gossip with their neighbor, cling to their boyfriend’s elbow, show off their butt in an aircon environment. And then round it all up with five-rupee phuchka. The rows of shiny sarees and striped shirts look on, in dismay. For this is gentrification gone wrong. Even as ‘talpata’ (some leaf-type thing used to make plates by street vendors) holds on even as Plastic charges forth into its empire.

Why i love men

2010-06-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

So this is an ode to Bollywood men who took manhood beyond the biceps and the pelvic thrust. Of my generation mostly. With a haunting shadow of angry, bloodthirsty, righteous Amitabh Bachchan of Deewar who takes kanoon in his own hands. The citizen who rises to embody the sovereign. A morality that is higher than law.

One. Omkara. Badland UP brahmin youth leader, obsessive lover of a virginish Kareena. (Not the incomplete man with bad teeth and a limp, whose hunger for power is devoid of the sense of sacred). I have desired him volubly on the blog before. His quiet masculinity is animated by a hunger for power, a pristine sexual jealousy, a beautiful butt tightly ensconced in locally stitched jeans, a hint of vernacular redness in UP-styled hair. A moral compass that directs the flow of love, hate and power. William and Vishal had a sharp sense of what marked the profane sidekick apart from the sacred violent sovereign. A moral compass.

Two. Dev D. Fucked-up rich boy from small-town (presumably) Punjab. Spoilt rotten. Spent a year doing some bullshit masters in the UK, mostly doing drugs and women. Comes back to childhood sweetheart and treats her like shit, makes out with other chicks on the side in the barn. Pastoral hurt is registered. Consequently, urbane disenchantment. Enter prostitute with heart of gold. Restoration of moral compass by the feminine. Man domesticated and beast locked in. Anurag Kashyap triumphs in telling a gripping story of self as a constant struggle for moral equilibrium, and woman as a philosophical tool.

Three. Raajneeti. A masculine dyad. Privileged fucked-up political prince takes on underprivileged angry-righteous-bloodthirsty up-n-coming politico on the stage of blood-n-soil democracy. One rejects biological mother, remains loyal to friend, sticks up for Dalit foster-parents, has no woman-angle. Other sacrifices hot chick and PhD to salvage family's reputation and brother's claim to CM gaddi. Intermittently plays chess on the cellphone. Both comfortably handle guns and bombs. It's a battle of two conflicting routes to moral equilibrium.

Wait for Day

2010-05-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

Foglights and fingers
Groping swishing
Across caffeine sidewalk.
Flicker goes the afternoon neon.
Wait for day.
Yet again.

Written on December 8, 2008.

Penitence

2010-05-09T16:59:00.001-07:00

They say Asoka wept among the bodies he had slain
And the mercenary wept at a tribunal
And mothers had wept for dead sons
Skies wept for yesterday
And I weep today
Amid debris and specters
Spirited returns
And maternal reminders
Godly percussion
They sing so I can weep today.
These alien tears
Like a leaking drain in a cluster of hutments
Soaking the dry debris
These are my debris.
From epochs of battling.
These are my dead bodies.
I weep to soak their crevices.
I weep to feed their specters.

Memorabilia

2010-04-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

From this window, I get a parking lot.
Strong calves in keds.
Mother-and-child-and-perambulator.
Cherry blossom, mixed paper,
Cans and bottles. Trash.
This is a window of mixed feelings.
Where rain sun and dust match scores.
The sight of yellow teeth is mildly repulsive.
As is a virile penis.
And earnest conversation.
And I wade through a riotous sheaf of papers.
Hoping to find nostalgia in old movies and chitchat.
But it’s not there.
Expiry date of memory has come and gone.
So now all is liquidy, clean.
Memory fumigated.
Loves and hates turn yellowish grey.
From a distance, they look like affections.
The moment passes slowly in afternoon sun.
Devoid of an annotation.
Dies as un-rememberable death.

Testamentality

2010-03-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

From the previous millennium, I pick out fragments of mythical time of exams. Those of heightened sexual desire coupled with precarious middle-classy self-crises. Times of repeated square walks around a quadrangular patch of public grass. Times of vengeance and empathy and lacerated ego. Times of leisurely flirtatious walks to a nightly cup of coffee. Loiter. Linger. Fidget. Procrastinate. Maternal pat-on-the-back. Neighborhood guards' sticks marking time into the night and closer to the day. Xerox. Psychlo-style. Paper-festivity. Sharp nibs of black. Always. Family tradition. Time of Facebook. Email. Blog. Huffpost. Guardian. New Yorker. Words, catch-phrases, powdered postcolonial theory, long-winded sentences saying simple things about subalterns and sovereigns to be patted onto the skin. So one looks pretty writing under the arclights.

Interpretation of Newsfeed

2010-02-25T07:17:00.000-08:00

Marshall Sahlins brings a curious account of history created in battles of sign-systems that get coded variously as 'events' in diverse historical registers. News-feeds on the virtual coffee-table of Facebook offers a good illustration. You evolve a sign-system of your own through photos and comments and links and friends, and bring it into a particular wiremesh (that you imagine is your social network) of other sign-systems intentionally through friends lists and privacy settings; and then into unintended/unknown dimensions of the wiremesh through leakages of privacy strategies, and comments of unknown friends of known friends, conversations of known folks in unfamiliar albums. Some of this immersion into the unfamiliar maybe intended; voyeuristic. Some of it nonchalant. Some of it feared, exacerbating, fetishised.

Thus grows a 'permanent dialectic of structure and practice'. One plugs in to construct a world according to a blueprint in one's head, plugged into a finite number of blueprints that one predicts one's own can fall in place nicely with. And also wanting in a strange fear-fetish way that unlikely ones will trickle into theirs. And then shit happens. Known travel-photos coming out of unknown sign-systems get continually interpreted along mixed metaphors and mythical realities. Histories are generated to contest and continue existing ones.

Europe and the People Without History

2010-01-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

I lost my Europe-virginity last week. Crucially marking the cosmopolitan milestone in my memoirs. Savoured the subtleties of duck-liver, herbed omelette, A-line fur coats, emerald rings, cigarettes, chocolat, cheese, wine, French beards, tall towers, cobbled paths, masculine-garments-tightened-around-the-waist,cravats, burees and all things symbolic of subtle imperialism. The hijab and Afro-rap eclipsed themselves from my starry-eyed tourist gaze. Things were delicate, shapely. Empire was not screaming out loud. Empire lay back and contemplated its Alpine contours and sipped sparkling wine. Pondered on its own poetics. Guarded in a fortress of trade tariffs. Cabs refuse to run on Saturday evenings (as they understand the precarious balance that work and life must achieve, shame America) and the government with its lefty baggage won't fuck with them, says a Frenchman. The suburban American accepts with shame and fortitude his entrapment in the labyrinth of capital, as he learns to create identity out of mortgages and SUVs and the afternoon run, he says. His French equivalent immerses himself in an odd vanity of history, as he puffs out and looks on at the indeterminate Alpine horizon. And if you want the rush of real capital and the raw pleasure of a taxi on a Saturday night, you're shamed.

I absorbed for a week the air of empire that lay back and did not strike back. That pushed up its tariff walls and aesthetised its whiplash. So Vicky, Cristina and the postcolonial come here, tiptoeing apprehensively into its castles and cafes, hoping some of the real bourgeoisie will rub off and cleanse their souls of their utter confounded petit bouregoisness. And I snap out of reverie at the JFK thud and a two-mile immigration queue of claim and comfort and a Hispanic immigration officer saying if you ever wanna talk about anthropology, give me a call. I love America.

Avatar

2009-12-24T18:57:00.000-08:00

Avatar tells the story of late imperialist self-loathing. Of the Other networked to his ancestor, who has the alternative key to supremacy. Whose minerals and leaves are valuable. But whose mind has greater value and must be broken into. Empire kneels down to assert its greatness, and the self-loathing anthropologist ensures that despicable modernity is defeated. This is the new Chapter of the Other. Seen through the lens of wisened Empire. With tired feet. That resurrects the real capital in the Other - that of feminine, elusive, catlike power. Much like the eyes of the feline warpainted Hottie. Empire switches to the good, wholesome, real, nourishing. For it needs re-fuelling.

Postcolonial Winters

2009-12-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

Friends and countrymen got married this winter in the midst of silks and cocktails. This made for weeks of Facebook voyeurism coupled with me-and-my-cats paranoia. Also triggered off an academic question about the factors involved in the concurrent happening of stable job, home loan, first car, love, foreign travel in the winters of one's being the age-group of 28-30. The fulfilling of life lived in the manner that our day and age require of us, is indeed a compelling drive-force. What is it that requires the accomplishment of material, professional and emotional stability all in one time-capsule as one heads towards a gratified thirty? If two freelance hunger journalists, or struggling artists get married, it does not make for very nice Facebook celebration of them having Lived. A divorced 28-year-old law-firm-partner would only give out the Facebook signal of being emotionally messed up, losing track of the right things of life. Professional and emotional stability is writ large on Facebook wedding narratives.

What is also writ in slightly smaller font is that everyone is their own person. Comfortable in their individual and communal skins. They know what they want in their partner, they know how much gold to wear at their pre-wedding cocktail, they know that holidaying in Switzerland is not much cooler than being hidden away in Uttarakhand. These are narratives of confident postcolonial completeness. Complete with kitch, silk, Silk Cuts, sepia, literature, film, chai, love, enough-money, happiness. And anxiety and ennui in their perfect measures. Vulnerability of the kind that Cadbury Diwali family advertisements portray. The Facebook-happy postcolonial, cosmopolitan citizen knows how to live outside the mad anxious race. She is not pushed around by her family to get married to the same-caste software engineer. She is not a victim of dowry, neither alienation. She does not crave Freedom-on-a-banner, as she takes for granted its warm wintry caress. She loves solitude as she has just enough community and camaraderie. She travels with abandon as she knows home awaits. She is the picture of contentment. She loves the Other as she knows the Self is doing quite well.She loves doubt as she knows certainty. She loves being witnessed in all her completeness. On Facebook. Or he.

So this is not just a time of families flying down to joke in the winter sun. Not just winter of bourgeois niceties. Or bickerings over dowry. These are not times of homecomings of Hazaaron-khwaishein-aisi defeats. Neither are these homecomings of bugled conquests. This is a winter of fruition and completion. Joy, excitement, comfort, warm, fuzzy all packed in a photo album that conveys enough satisfaction of wants makes one happy. In a real way that great philosophers could never quite capture.

Hate Art

2009-12-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

This was a jump of threat, a jump of abandon, a jump of machismo, maybe one of despair. These men wore blue Adidas sweat pants, and swung on one hand over three sixty degrees. And made sexist jokes. And threatened to steal flat-screen televisions of Japanese tourists if enough donation was not poured into their boxes. They spoke nonchalantly of their time at prisons and legwork learnt while housebreaking. They spoke of the larger world that their touristy ad hoc audience came from, that owned flatscreens, and fetishised street performance, and read the New York Times. And they only flirted with the big Mama.

This was political commentary and irony and gymnastics packed in one - these men were performing hatred. While nostalgia jazz was being bagpiped a block away, and a BBKing-esque man tried to move you to tears into buying his CD. These blue-adidas-gold-teethed atheletes made their way into the heart of gaiety-New-Orleans and swung limbs up in desperation. And said we love you, and we love your flatscreens even more.

Fall Nutrition Chart

2009-10-27T13:53:00.001-07:00

Two pounds up.
One down.
Carbs and syrup.
Rising hormones.
Protein in the morning.
Vits by night.
Blowing them calves up
With balsamic vinegar.
And maple syrup.
Leaf enough.
And peanut butter.
The diet of fall.
For one and for all.
For recharge of batteries.
For power and glory.
For love lives
And mindscapes.
Take care you.

Thought of Industry

2009-09-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

I think Hartosh's anger is more towards the fund-explosion in the publishing market, given the rising numbers of reading-English speakers in the Indian metropolis. My parents who were educated in English hardly had a habit a bit of looking out for new stuff being written. Good writing, in their heads, had to be written a century ago and had to be somewhat canonical. Dickens from the industrial England, Shorotchondro from late-colonial, caste-patriarchy-poverty-ridden Bengal and maybe Rushdie as the most modern name in the list of Good Writing. I was very excited reading Hartosh's article at first, and his irreverence is indeed contagious. A large chunk of writing coming out of the new publishing industry explosion is simply an economic phenomena. There is a market, there is marketing, there is enough raw material and a mechanism to channelise it, hence large number of finished products. The raw material, in my mind, is the large population Delhi/Bangalore/Calcutta public school youngsters, who THINK. And are the first in the generational line of English-speaking Indian gentry who can THINK for a LIVING. This is the kind of thing my parents warned me against. But it seems they were wrong, because they miscalculated the vast economic that were to take place on the metropolitan landscape in India. One does not need to get an engineering degree and join the ranks of the cyber-coolies who can’t THINK, to keep body, soul, medicine bill, school fees together. One can now be an INTELLECTUAL without worrying about daily bread. The curious darkside of this so-far-so-good story is that now there is a rank of the INTELLECTUAL. We multiply at a feverish pace in publishing houses, art shows, media companies, research thinktanks and social science departments in America. This is the consumerism of thinking.

It is not surprising, to dilute Hartosh’s tone of shock and awe, that a large number of such finished products should be mediocre. That is also not to ignore that a large chunk of anything written under the specifics of a time and place and very often, ‘conflict’ (be it holocaust, partition, sepoy mutiny or communal riots) are caught in the metaphors of the particular social and political theatres that produced the writing. And that needn't necessarily make them mediocre. So I have no grudges against the Adigas, Bapsi Sidhwas and Amitav Ghoshes on the theatre that they choose to stage their writing on. They are all speaking to the time and place they are entrenched in. It is a curious limitation of ‘literature’ that it comes out of and goes back into the mind that is equipped to think and articulate thinking in a coherent script (even if artificially scripted to be coherent to please the postmodern-wallahs) – a script that is mostly embedded in the material worlds of time and place that it comes out of. If the standard of literature is to lie in the measure of explicit communication of the most intricate of thoughts, then the Adiga and the Amitav Ghosh can be compared without bringing in what they write ‘about’, just as a Ghosh-Updike comparison may be possible. I read Rana Dasgupta’s Solo recently, and was somewhat let down by the lack of texture of the spatial moment. While an old-fashioned Rohinton Mistry (hackneyed as he is in the line of South Asia Emergency angst writers) could probably describe every crack on the staircase of the Parsi apartment block, Dasgupta fails to describe what is particularly ‘Sofia’ about his protagonists’ narrative. And hence, Sofia passes the reader by somewhat like the blonde-nymphette in the backseat of Sohail Khan’s car riding up the Alps.

While applauding Hartosh on his eulogy of the little, unknown author who didn’t have the resources or ‘connections’ to move and shake the resource-bed that is Delhi, I must also caution Hartosh against the ills of romanticising the obscure and parochial. A lot of eulogised Bengali poetry from the 60s up until today rides on the power of the aesthetic of semi-urban nothingness. As an adolescent, I was a huge fan of poets like Joy Goswami who endlessly crafted the defeated yet fiery small-town woman jilted by the big-city boy. Clueing into the new urbane of small-town Bengali women who are aspiring to win television dance contests and frequenting health clubs, I am almost annoyed at Goswami’s endless investment in the poetics of feminine defeatism. So the new euphoria of shopping malls is our reality calling for a new poetique, as much as the new economy of writing-professionals call for new critique that goes beyond the categories of good and bad literature.

Bicycle Daydream

2009-09-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

This is the bicycle daydream. It comes with cute ceramic water bottles filled with vitamin water tucked in against the waist. The gentle undulation of New Haven makes the perfect percussion in this conversation between woman and machine. The late capitalist euphoria of clean, pristine, wholesome, nourishing and moral seems less comical. As I breathe in the last whiff of summery air, and step up the gear. And feel like my calf muscles are playing the mandolin. So this is what it was supposed to feel like. To look forward to one’s prune and apricot. And vitamin water.

I even have a gelatinous knee to complete the show. Ripe pink and fleshy. Documenting the new experience with flesh. With machine. I pump up the beat so as to feel just enough liberation, not too much around sharp turns and traffic. Just enough to feel cavalier. And we move up and we roll down. Along the undulations of summery New Haven.

I buy cereal bars, and protein milk shakes and apricots and almonds. And ride forth into sunshine. The world bobs up and down alongside, brimming with vitality. And good cheer.

Devil's Gear

2009-09-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

Devil's Gear is the bike shop adjacent to my house. It could be called a bike museum. Or a bike gallery. Or a bike grocery store. Other than storing old and new bicycles of all shapes and sizes, it displays the minutest of bike parts, chains, pedals, tyres stuck to the ceiling, bike-water-bottles on the walls, pumping equipment, bike popular culture posters, bike graffiti. Three curious twenty-somethings work here. An athletic curly-haired girl with grease all over her temples and knuckles. A skinny bearded boy with thick glasses who could have been the math wizard in high school. And is the manager here I believe. A muscular late teen who carries bicycles up and down the staircase. They have bike catalogues of every kind. They would tell you what tyre makes for what kind of ride. What pedal is in fashion.

The automobile has generated masculinities and geekhoods of many kinds. The Bicycle probably does not make the automobile cut for the lack of an 'auto'component. New Haven is a site of late modern nature-machismo that re-eulogises the bike and the calf muscle. The body is re-painted as the original machine, that does not require an auto to pump up adrenaline. And greasy kids teach you to keep your calf-muscle-toning-machine in shape.

Love These Days

2009-07-31T23:23:00.000-07:00

Apart from an immensely charming Deepika, and an endearingly balding Saif Ali Khan, this chic Dil Chahta Hai reminder, is also many Bollywood firsts. Cool Indian woman who is not clingy, angsty, waiting to bear children for the hero in the next three weeks. She is hot and she knows it. She actively hits on the hero at a bar. Gets pissed drunk and it is not a fatal night of sin that she regrets for the rest of her life. A boy that is comfortable joking about his ex-girlfriend's present boyfriend. And about life that can be lived in its regular rhythms And two people who know that a day of uncertainty, ambiguity, irresponsibility makes for precious memories.

But over and above the cool-chick and nonchalant-boy that seem to be stamping the end of the era of love-Indian-family-prototypes of hetero-love, and pushing aside the end bits of turning all things around to fall in with Bollywood school of thought, Love Aaj Kal is a script of fragmented, ahem... postmodern... selves. The self that acknowledges doubt, admits multiple readings of the world, and dims the moment of climax with a pinch of irony. Controlling an urge to go on about fractured scripts of self, the Rishi Kapoor element is annoying, almost preachy. Pehle aisa hota thha, ab aisa hota hai angle wouldn't have been so bad, had it been a more scattered portrayal of the pehle-waale scenario (in consonance with the rest of the film) of options being limited, and circumstances being constraining. In which narratives solidify as cohesive because they are held by distance in time. Suddenly the pretty girl in pink shalwar has no freckles. The supporting mother has a grand moment of overcoming fear of social stigma. The boy has no other responsibilities tying him down. Moving between Delhi and Calcutta is that easy. Etcetera Etcetera.

All in all, an endearing film about self-absorbed people who sometimes have the courage to fall in love.

Bandh

2009-07-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

I write this a few hours into the twelve-hour Congress bandh. Digging up khuchro memories from my childhood and adolescence, where there was a belief that one could go to work and school on a Congress bandh. Because it was Congress after all. Maybe in the city, where it had some muscle, buses would be slow on the road. But definitely not in the hinterland. On the other hand, if this was a ‘lal’ bandh, one could safely assume that it would be a day of cha, beguni and gully cricket.

This is a cloudy July day. Perfect for a bandh. Many things have changed. Sumone had swooped into Bengal from his days of Pete Seger when I was thirteen. And and turned our rebellions jeebonemukhi (life-facing, mortality-facing). On a rainy afternoon, he entreated us to sing ‘Mon kharap kora bikel’ (can’t quite translate but sort of like twilight that brings sadness). And a whole generation turned jeebonemukhi (as if all this while they were facing immortality) and sung humdrum tunes of khuchro nostalgia and urban ennui. Sumone is today, Kabir Sumon, a triumphant Trinamool MP. Youngsters lament the loss of yesterday on Star Jolsha, one of the more popular Bengali satellite channels. On this lesser-known cross-road in deeper South Calcutta where I spent my childhood and adolescence, a wooden platform (not a stage really, but something like that) is raised, and an avuncular gentleman delivers boktrita on the PA system. I eat phuchka on the roadside and try to figure out what Kalar (colour/party identity) he represents. Turns out he is a Trinamool orator. Saying there are no jobs, nothing works, people are dying, these chaps are all bastards, what are we waiting for. Poornima-mashi says her young son goes to ‘party’ and she doesn’t like it. No mother likes her son to party too much, I say. I ask about the bandh climate. Whether there will be maar-danga (fighting, rioting). She says shob lal-kapor-er loke, aaj onno jaygay dhhukechhe (it’s all the red folks, they have now entered other domains).

I hadn’t seen a michheel (procession) in close to a decade. Until yesterday. Middle-aged Writers’ Buildings officials, of Congress leanings, protested the attacks on Congress leaders in Burdwan that was possible due to police apathy and negligence. There were hardly any banners, mostly slogan. Saying mene newa hobe na, cholbe na. (This will not be taken lying down, this will not do). Even as some tyres are deflated and buses burnt down in the heart of South Calcutta. The Congress is back. With a bang. Say the newspapers. These attacks have enthused our workers. A Congress leader is quoted. A feeble identity that was getting increased engulfed by the grassroot diva of the state. The good old pellet of political energy is back in fashion. The burning of the bus.

I think of disparate scenes from Ray’s Mohanogor, Gonoshotroo, and various Rituporno Ghosh films. Of middle-class dining tables, afternoon irritation, whirring fans, chilled bottles of water, khuchro angst - the texture of all being sharpened by the quintessential hint of a michheel. Memories of gentry lives lived in their whole range of pains and pleasures- from khuchro prem on lake-er dhaar to political outrage to business rivalries – across a continuing din of cholbe na cholbe na. Protibaad is a less popular word on graffiti these days. The words okormonyota, noirajyo- and various other versions of abyss, impasse, stagnation, anarchy, non-governance find adequate representation on posters of all kalars. Singur-e factory holo na kaeno is not seen as much as a question of land acquisition and industry, but a sense of the dramatised, deeprooted anger at the governing machinery was not being able to seduce an external mediator of capital/resource/modernity since they have not delivered goods themselves. This anger is not new. It would have been channelised very artfully into the tyre of a bus, into a chayer dokan session on a crossroad, or a PA system close to the bajar.

This protibaad strikes me as novel, even as its avuncular participants and their rhythmic shoulder-thrusts remain familiar. This is not a protibaad of not being treated unfairly, or an unkept promise, this seems the protibaad of aggrandisement, of opportunity. The protibaad of jostling one’s way in, as there seems no other way. Of a desperation to jump across a moat which one had seen in popular discourse as protective and succouring, and one has begun to see as a broken drawbridge keeping one from a nourishing pasture. I am shown around an industrial complex by a Site Supervisor, who proudly declares that power and water supply is impossible to interrupt, even during the Aila when the rest of the area had no power for hours, power here was disturbed only for half an hour. This is a space of exception. The pasture. From which others are kept out by a broken drawbridge and an alligator moat. Hence a disaster or a civil war or a spate of killings are not merely a cause for resentment, outrage. They are new handles to jump the moat. Having realised that the only way to jump the moat is by swinging on the alligator’s nostril. For that, one must do some odd jobs for the alligator.

It is also a time of new cravings. For one has sniffed the pasture. That promises one knows not what. But promises nevertheless. Joy Goswami, an age-old favourite angst-poet of Calcutta, reads somewhat hackneyed today. Stories of Pagli who ran out and never came back, of the seamstress who fell in love with the big city boy, suffocation of the suburban husband. Seem like they have been in storage for a decade. Jara brishtite bhijechhilo tara aaj Inox-er ticket ketechhe. (Those that got drenched in the rain have bought Inox tickets today). Mon kharap kora bikel sounds somewhat clichéd. And I lose a precious adolescent memory. Of reading Goswami’s Malotibala Balika Bidyaloy and thinking this has got to be the best modern feminist poetry ever written. I don’t think so anymore. And I don’t grudge them their burnt bus. It is their alligator-tooth. They have to swing by it.

Khuchro- small change
Protibaad- protest

Fishborne

2009-07-14T02:08:00.000-07:00

I bent over to decipher the nature of fishbone. And the young land acquisition consultant continued his story. Yahaan road bana dein. Thhoda landscaping kar dein. To it will be ideal weekend getaway. Some tit-bits about the government not shelling out money on time. Delaying completion of project. Hmmm. Haan. Someone is yelled out for. He needs a reminder for the fish to arrive. I look up to find the second young man waits for his turn. Squares his shoulders. Leans back. Talks about the fragility of projects in their early stages.

I ask for his card. And smile. The consultant is pleased. Though the moment is awkward. I gather pen paper bag and leave, leaving the some fishbone undeciphered. I promise to look him up. Next summer maybe. For more stories of land-hunt. His work is most interesting for my research. I say. We share the same terrain. We examine similar landscapes. We ask questions and try to answer them. We like to bash government over lunch. We like the smell of fish. Especially when it gets a bit erotic.

Royd-Elliot

2009-07-08T04:08:00.000-07:00

An odd moment of Dalhousie confusion led me into a taxi. To look for Suruchi. An old Bengali restaurant on Elliot Road. Where my father used to take us on Sundays. Snaking into Royd Street from Surendranath Banerjee Street, the cabbie and I found ourselves in a labyrinthine world of autos, rickshaws, burqa-clad mothers, skirt-and-shalwar-clad daughters, rubber pipe repair works, iron frame manufacturing ones, new and air-conditioned biryani places, their older and shabbier, disgruntled neighbours, sudden empty boxes named after Marwari builders in the middle of a continuum of old concrete box-buildings. Lesser known churches and their lesser known schools scrambling for attention. And seventeen-year-olds in maroon skirts, schooled by big churches sashay out. It is the end of a schoolday.

Religion, strategies to dig into economic flows passing by, culture-clothing, culture-food make up the labyrinth of Royd Street and Elliot Road. Very close to sheen of Park Street, the energy of New Market, the business-as-usual worlds of commercial Calcutta. Feeding off them. Feeding them. Making spare parts for their airconditioners. Stitching their school uniforms. Squeezing into secular worlds, covering legs in shalwars. Donning spectacles. And ensuring that biryani sells better now that there is air-conditioning.

And then Freedom Came

2009-06-25T02:40:00.000-07:00

BPL women gathered at a training camp in East Midnapore, to learn the nittie-gritties of bank management. They speak of the courage they had to muster to brave hostile in-laws and society to come out and team up for micro-credit and emancipation. They speak of Shonirbhorota (self-dependence) that has come their way since the time they were asked to team up for microcredit.

They cook meals for schools, tailor uniforms, market paddy, weave mats. And gain freedom. And voice. They say they defied the panchayat official, fought with the bank manager, pursuaded the BDO. Earned some money. More respect.

I think of a time when the intoxicating mantra of freedom was administered to me. By some cool women. They were called feminists. They carried cool handloom bags. And spoke of Steinem and Pateman and relativism and right. And cigarette smoke brought freedom. I ask them did you feel less free before, in your predominantly domestic lives? They say yes of course, we were confined in our homes, now even the babus listen when we speak, we are invited to talk at sabhas, we train other women.

Freedom comes, they say, when you relocate on a power ladder. When the babu talks to you. When in-laws stop nagging you. Freedom came when the local panchayat asked you to team up for micro-credit. Freedom came when you were told you could become free. Freedom came when you kept a ledger. Made entries. Caught a supplier trying to cheat. Freedom came when you figured out that home was unfree.

Afternoon Irritation and Gentry Bengal

2009-06-18T20:44:00.000-07:00

Local trains ferry casual labour, poor relatives, domestic help-women in and out of the the city of Kolkata into the hinterland. I appeared at Sealdah station to find that my train would arrive in about one and a half hours. Humanity scurried about its business. Trains arrived on platforms and poured people out, and similar numbers of people, icecubes, potato-sacks, bicycles, pushcarts would rush in and the train would take off on the next ride. Right then.

On this ride, I gathered one of the more curious things about Bengal train vendors. Vendors of spurious mango drinks, fake ballpoint pens, ayurvedic medicine, I gathered, were all hardcore bhodrolokes. So it hurt their sensibilities to say here, look at my pen, you have to buy this, or else you'd be a loser. They gentrified the process of train-vending instead. Some wanted to be your friend. Some said they could be your son. All clarified that their job was not to ensure that you spent some money. All underscored that they were not petty vendors trying to make a filthy buck. If you were interested you could try out their product. Since they were your sons or nephews, there would be no question of a petty commercial dealing between you and them. Also, they would be slightly hurt that you didn't pay them any attention. As they were not your petty vendor, they were your son, nephew, friend.

That afternoon, a rickshaw-puller urged me to wait for a bus instead of hitching a ride with him. The ride would cost a fair amount and I would go back to Kolkata and badmouth the rickshaw ethics of his neighbourhood. He would not have it. He would rather I wait for a bus, and he lose a ride's worth of livelihood.

Daughters-in-law, sisters-in-law, eighteen-year-olds (with bhelpuri and newfound love) dominated the ride back to Sealdah. There arose a complex crisis of space, sweat, weather, temper altogether. No one shouted. Women got progressively more polite, more aloof, more condemning. Of your lack of sensitivity. Morality. Culture.Gentriness of being. Their coldly polite responses told you that it was below their dignity to fight pettily.

If a fight is required, they'd rather have it the grand way. With guns, flags, languages of freedom and resistance. A fight for an idea. As long as the idea has a flag and some rebel-poetry. A fight for a seat, or simply a fight for relief from afternoon irritation, would be too petty.

Wedding. End of Story.

2009-05-31T22:37:00.001-07:00

Archie Andrews is getting married to Veronica. Various kinds of media are saying various things about it. Some are saying we grew up reading them, thinking American kids are so much cooler- they don't have board exams, get to smooch and go surfing. How we internalised them, much like the investigating lot of Enid Blyton (with the tunnels, treasurehunts, dungeons) as superior lives that could be lived only in the West.

I am left wondering what it is about a promise to marry that must result in the end of the growing-up series. Why is it that popular culture uses marriage to spell the end of youth, adventure, storytelling? Friends, if I remember correctly, ends with some weddings, some babies. Most chickflicks end with The Wedding minus the hiccups, usually with the bridesmaid or the weddingplanner at the altar. Sex and the City ended with the wedding with the lesser dress. Karan Johar and Adi Chopra tell the story of life, business, family, dance, song, sex, Switzerland- all culminating in weddings.What is it about our ahem post-postmodern lives that still clings on to a definitive conflict-resolving, love-reciprocating end that promises stability, peace, love even in the midst of economic recessions. And also the end of all things uncertain, all bickerings over unrequited love, all anxieties of expanding midriffs. What will Betty do now? Probably find the next banker and get hitched. Archie will probably resign to an expensive resort honeymoon and Veronica to baby showers and lunches-with-fancy-girlfriends. Yet so many stories of conflict and anxiety towards attainment of this bliss. After which there isn't much of a story to tell.

Writers' Block

2009-05-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

The Writers' building is a red,labyrinthine structure, the first version of which, I believe, was built as a shelter for junior Company clerks in the 1760s. One signs in a register to get a day pass, one fills up the pass and show it at a gate to get in. Then one lines up in front of the possibility of a cagelike elevator. One remembers Ray's Mahanagar where Madhobi and her Anglo-Indian saleswoman friends giggle in front the elevator shaft. No giggling Anglo-Indian women here. Only bespectacled grievance-carrying hopefuls. Few glances at papers show that pensions and money due from a public institution are popular causes for grievance. Others carried brown-papered sombre applications stating promises of investment and industrial endeavour from a neighbouring Sponge Iron Company.

One gives up on the possibility of a cagelike elevator and walks up the staircase. To find more postered grievances. In green. Red. From Customs Employees Union. To Port Workers Brigade. And promises of travel to the seaside. (Almost all travel agent billboard in central Calcutta even outside Writers' promise to take you to Puri and Digha). And one enters a grid of pale pink files and whirring fans. A bearded man. Somewhat flirtatious. Says please sit. And tells a departing lady to tell her sister to stop worrying. And love the grievance I suppose.

Apocalypse Yesterday

2009-05-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

The Aila flirted with Calcutta all of yesterday, and cleverly passed her by for meatier victims. And left behind urban heartbreak residue. Almost as if this was symbolic of political knots that are being undone and retied. Winds whistled in smug abandon since wee hours of the morning. Clothes battled the frontiers of clotheslines. Panes clung onto the succour of panels. Some broke. Chai flowed through networks of desire. Newspaper and internet kept up a remote semblance of sanity. News of casualties of human, tree and electric pole navigated with the wind. To add to the titillation. The middle-class quivered on an overdose of sensation. Text messages of concern and fear mixed with excitement circulated. I tried watching two halves of movies. But the howl outside made Hitchcock's Rebecca appear naive. Somewhat annoying. All is sunshine this morning. The newspaper man seems to have caved in.

Bengal motorcycles

2009-05-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

Amidst thunderstorms, raw mango chutney, sari-shopping, family-gossiping, recession-analytics and the UPA, my stint in Calcutta has begun. The slow whirring of fans keep time with the perspiring lethargy of shopmen. Jubilant Trinamool machismo rallies around in green gulal. On motorcycles. The red triangular flags hang on. Withered. Fierce. A dinnertable story is told about a domestic help woman who voted for Trinamool because they paid for a visit home and back. And stories are told of lament. At Calcutta lethargy. Decadence. Humanity. And food. And culture. And rains.

The walls are festive in this graffiti season. The age of the messiah-lady. The age of change. The age of knee-jerks and turnarounds and kickstarts. Of industry and roads and jobs and no more laziness. The motorcycles warriors sashay the roads chanting mantras of new energetic Bengal. Of green-powdered machismo.

Summer posting

2009-05-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

Summer has brought a gush of colour to our roads, traffic signal posts, grocery stores and coffee shops. It is a picture complete with speckled birds and poodled hotties. Sunshine smells of strawberry and barbecue and bluegrass. The graduate student sprawls out on the greens with poetry and fizz drinks. The evening air smells funnily like musty, humid tropical Calcutta. As if men had just jumped off running buses and flicked beads of sweat off their foreheads triumphantly. And women had slowly begun to disperse from their afternoon congregations, and crossing busy roads tightly holding onto distraught five-year-old wrists. Summer in New England brings a spate of activity. Sociality. Of chirping noises and freshly painted nails. Handholding. Kissing. Running. Cooking. Laughter. Forgetting. Swine flu. Summer in Calcutta would breathe an air of lethargy. Tiredness. Slowness. Whirring fans. Brustling newspaper. Elections. Handholding by the riverside. Whisper and coyness. Street food. Stomachache.

Tracing Subalterns

2009-04-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

Gayatri's Spivak's tracing of the 'subaltern' in her work, left me oddly inspired by the imagery of teaching literature and philosophy to adivasi kids, as well as troubled by the landscapedness of the 'subaltern'. The 'subaltern' seems to exist is her supple other-worldly wisdoms and pragmatics, while Spivak travels back and forth between her friends in Columbia and back-of-beyond. What does one make of the inerasability of the heiroglyphics of 'subalternity' of the foreheads of such nameless pretty people, who mediate an outer world through Spivak? Is Spivak's project lost if the 'subaltern' drinks Coke or moves to Bombay to make it big in the movies, or to Thailand to become a prostitute. Spivak's powerful thoughts on the need to eject thought from its Western jacket and take it and map it wherever else one might want to, leaves room for contradiction in her own account of taking thought to the subaltern and absorbing their thoughts. While Western thought is set free of its Kantian capsule, the subaltern must necessarily remain contained in her landscape and culture and lifeworld in order for Spivak to make her argument.

If the subaltern desires direct intercourse with the sullied modern, then her pristine Other consciousness is no longer available for Spivak's argument. The subaltern must necessarily remain an adivasi, and not start a hair-dressing salon in Calcutta in order that her consciousness can be contrasted with European institutionalised knowledge in all its pristine-ness.

Habermas on Pink Symbols of Self

2009-04-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

Women unite their public 'woman' voices on Facebook and virtual public spheres to bring down forces of patriarchy.Patriarchy takes the face of young goons with hockey sticks in urban Karnataka, that are anxious about the loss of masculine pride of their community. The Kannadiga. The Hindu. The wholesome. The organic. The authentic. The pristine. Which risks erosion when its women lose cultural authenticity. Young goons construct 'authentic' selves in their sticks and slogans.

Young women on Facebook. Construct selves too. In the typed word and uploaded image. Constituting 'privatised' pristine inner 'woman' selves, and then dauntlessly writing and fighting to protect their 'woman'nesses and underwear and autonomy in the public sphere. They affirm faith in a pink symbol of inner self as they write pink graffiti on virtual walls.

The patriarch inscribes his masculinity, community, authenticity on the firewalls of the internet. The autonomous women speak out the terms of their 'woman' selves inside the internet cocoon. A violent public forms at the fringes of the internet, while the liberal speaking 'woman' public expresses distress in the protected publicness of Facebook. They curiously fight in the same way, articulating their inner-nesses in the public domain. Becoming private by naming their private selves in the public.

They live by the sea

2009-03-16T16:49:00.000-07:00

They live on the sea.
Man and wife.
On ebb-tides.
And salmon.
And bread and wine.

They live by the sea.
Man and wife.
By rock.
By pebble.
By leather couch.
And television.

It comes and it goes.
Morning noon and night.
By their sides
The waves dry.
Like sparkling wines.
On sandspeckles.

They drive by the sea.
Man and wife.
And SUV.
In search of whole foods.
And expressways.

They talk to the sea.
Man and wife.
Sweet nothings.
And the waves dry.
On sandspeckles.
Like sparkling wine.

Skylight

2009-02-20T04:58:00.001-08:00

This warm caress.
After a snow-night.
East, west and the sky on top.
Illuminating the dusticles
On my spectacles.

This warm caress.
At 7.07 a.m.
Fingers the deadlines in my toenails.
And beingness of being.
Madness.
Forgotten.
And days lit up.

It is a convex glass.
Between the sky and I.
That speaks hushedly.
It has been a snow-night.
And now for it to thaw.
A warm caress.

Aspiria

2009-01-04T22:26:00.000-08:00

There are migrant labourers, migrants of marriage, migrants of faith. And then there are migrant of competitive examination. That migrate to the public service competitive examination neighbourhood of Mukherjee Nagar. A longish rickshaw ride from the Vishvidyalaya metro station takes you the bustle of the IAS-aspirant economy. Some stay here for decades pursuing public service aspiration. Some make it to square black-and-white photograph advertisements for IAS academies declaring how they nurture prodigies the best.

This rickshaw-navigated mohalla sports chai-stalls, and exam-material peddlers on its pavements. Advertisements for renowned Geography or Public Administration trainers and cheap Paying Guest establishments on its stratosphere. The concrete in between is all dedicated to cracking of public service examinations.

This aspiration for stable, respectable, livelihood makes Mukherjee Negar. My IAS-aspirant friend shacks up here with her compendia of information and concealed cigarattes. Amidst friendly chaiwallas, training-school-barons and some winter aspiration.

Snow Flakes

2008-11-30T08:56:00.000-08:00

Particulate snow collects on my spectacles and cries down my down jacket. Mourning loss of worlds. And a particular youthful lifeworld. An old man stands on the dias of the Korean Presbyterian Church and spreads happy expctations of Christmas trees by the corner of the Chapel. Spreads good news of donated children's books gone to good use in Zimbabwe. All is well for God still speaks. And they sing. And I think of an old Jim Reeves song called Snow Flkes (rather corny one) that my parents used to love.

And I think of the St.Paul's Cathedral. In Calcutta. And its ancient Gothic grandeur. The choir seats above. There is a pause between Christmas announcements on the dias. I slip out.

This is not a mourning walk. Rather a celebratory one. I took it a few years back when someone I knew from school died of illness. I take it when grief does not feel like a worthy sentiment to comemmorate a life. It's a walk to celebrate someone else's walk. That ended without due celebration.

Temperate

2008-11-16T15:32:00.000-08:00

This is Temperate Wind.
Sharp and efficient
Smiling sometimes.
Conversational.
How’re you today, miss?
Fine, thank you.
Have a good day.
Watch your step.
And it goes about its job.

Just as the lament of the church gong.
It is five p.m.
Five p.m. worth of darkness.
In this temperate world.

Of shivers and gloves.
And red and satin scarves.
Stand-offish high heels.
Leggings say hello.
From inner worlds of warmth.

Rustles of red.
Rustles of grey.
Rustles of silk.
Cigarette flakes.
Brush against the signboard.
Sidewalk Closed.
Please Cross Here.

Temperate crossings.
Stop go stop.
Turn. Stop.
Green. Yellow. Pedestrian.
Walk across.
Caution for the beverage is hot.

Morning yet again.
Consume. Produce.
Stop go stop.
Turn. stop.
For commodity is a social product.
Says Temperate Wind.
Have a good day.
But caution for the beverage is hot.

Mush room for capital

2008-11-14T10:21:00.000-08:00

William Mazzarella captures the aspirational commmodity fetishes of the Indian Middle class in the late eighties and the nineties, in his gripping narrative of the changing advertisement industry of the time. That sells modernity in the Indian package. That in turn packages Indianness and sells it as exotic commodity.

Corporate packaging of sentimentality is seen through the lens of advertisement as a mediator in a conversation between a brand and the potential consumer that creates the kitschy aesthetic of a roadtrip up Ladakh with a cute Ladakhi boy, the traditional housewifey mother suddenly turning goofy on woman-health-drink or the professional cuteboy husband doing laundry. The sensation of the new global, confident, powerful Indian citizen- that is a good husband, father, son and yet kicks ass in the boardroom. Retains culture and ethnicity and kicks ass in the stock market is opium for the middle classes.

Mazzarella traces the spectrum of Indian advertisement right from the controversial Kamasutra (establishing terms of new sexual liberation, in ancient historical kitschy terms) right down to cellular telephony marketing,which breaks free of the metropolitan landscape and gifts cell phones to village mothers and migrant labourers. Mazzarella does not quite engage with the strategy of targeting though.

I am compelled to think of Indian national primetime advertisement of our time. While the professional middle class man gets to avail of the Cox and Kings Diwali holiday discount and nice ICICI home loans, his wife is reconfigured in being the busy professional that remembers things like cushion covers while the cute husband watches cricket (Vidya Balan and Madhavan mushcapade). Girls giggle at their weddings and fathers sob quietly and mothers look stern and responsible. So they can all fit into the Honda Civic or some such.And drive off to Lonavala.

The girl that is looking to break free possibly of the oppressive walls of her small town home fins solace in Frankfinn's protective wing. For she must first fly across the skies, pick up the global lingo, wear the mini-skirt. Only after the global confidence has been inscribed onto her, can she jump around kitsch-shopping, unbothered by her periods. But first, globality must be attained. Then locality can be re-embraced.

Ode to Shaarode

2008-10-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

Prasanta's post left me overwhelmed and helplessly reconstructing my particular Bengali bourgeoise trajectory of wading through the economic/academic/intellectual pie, all the while carrying around a synthetic communitarian sentimentality, reproducing it in the cosmopolitania, very often peddling it to peers as exotic authenticity.

Let me also try to fashion my own South Calcutta memories (embedded in North Calcutta roots) of Pujo growing-up in the nineties. Prasanta's article mysteriously overlooks the Cultural Institution, that is Maddox Square. The hub of the social institution that is Pujo Prem. Boys aged between sixteen and twenty-five have to find a Pujo Girlfriend to show off in the Maddox Square see-and-be-seen festival. For budding intellectuals (all of fifteen-sixteen) like my brother, Pujo meant huddling in the periphery of the pandal with fellow-nonchalants, making approriate pooh-pooh noises to the mashi-kaku-ultramodernmeye outpour of Rabindra-enthusiasm. As a young adult, Pujo meant wrapping a sari and smiling coyly at a friend’s mashtuto dada, and huddling with lost friends in a mashi’s empty flat (for mashi is busy training five-year-olds to hold a complicated Robindro-note) rolling maal…

I am chewing on Prasanta's reflection of the leftist secularisation of the Durga Puja- sharodotshob to durgotshob… for doesn’t the shaarode also translate in terms of a cultural/linguistic universe of Shaarodiyo Shubhechha, Shaaridyo Desh, Shaarodiyo Aanondomaela? Is the Shaarode really so compartmentalised and secular? Is it also not inextricably enmeshed in recreating/reproducing/re-embracing material cultures, cultural materialisms?

Coming from a ghore shaakto clan of pathha-sacrificing Kali devotees, Durga Pujo was always more material/sensual/cultural for me, less religious…

But his Buffalo-Bangalore imagery leaves me with a recent Jersey memory of watching newly-married, jamdani-clad boudis in various stags of the run-up to childbirth? A friend’s fiance explained the trend thus- the sooner you give birth to an American citizen, the better your chances at the Green Card… I am compelled to think about this travelling material culture of the Pujo sentimentality which has to be repeatedly performed, reproduced, reconfigured, peddled, disseminated, indoctrinated- that maybe beyond home and homecoming, it is also part of the desperate attempt at home-building…. this way Kumoretuli and Birbhum artisans, and Kolkata rockbands find livelihood in the home-building industry through the expanding coffers of the Global Authentic Bengali… in the way I felt a moral/cultural obligation to buy Chaundrobindoo’s latest album, as they recreated the misogynist nonchalant cultural universe of my adolescence in Jersey… it was like throwing in the handsome chaanda for the promise of manufactured communitarianism amidst Jodhpur Park multitudes...

Glossary:

Shaarode- autumnal

Academic Shagging

2008-10-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

This range of literal construction and seeing the eco as a bounded Other could be seen as four distinct yet entangled thought trajectories- that of assertion of human control and ownership ( something to the tune of “I am master of all I survey” the immortalised lines of William Cowper), that of anthropomorphising - seeing components of nature as possessing human feelings and human character and using it to seek conversation with the natural Other (examples being that of the “sobbing deer” and various references to the tumultuous sea expressing anger, or variously, in Tennyson’s words “I am a part of all that I have met”), that of sexualising/sensualising/feminising the natural Other, and that of romancing the distant/unknown/alien- in furtherance of colonialist wonder at Other lands.

I find Gabriel Egan’s reading of the empty Shakespearean stage as the unlocalised colonial mind that could control whatever it chose to and the insinuation of deforestation of virgin forests by colonialists in the text of The Tempest, a provocatively powerful technique of telling the story of colonial sojourn. Robert Watson, very effectively reads in violence/control and exotic fetishisation of animals and Other peoples onto the act of anthropomorphising. That in a sense, provides moral sanction (through imputation of the ‘ethical quality of human relationship’) to the act of capture or annihilation. He complicates this relationship of anthropomorphisation by reading in the erotics of wonder, fear and demonisation, in his discussion of Actaeon’s horned appearance and the fear he inspires, of the wilderness, that might consume the colonial explorer and hence, he must find ways of controlling the subject of fear through linguistic tools. The flip side of the consumption of the fearsome is sensualisation (examples being the sexual wonder at naked Diana). The object that is understood in the ‘mirror of similitude’, is captured and cosumed therewith, in the shackles of linguistic representation. Watson also makes the comparison of wondered love at the Other (nature) being expressed by the human mind (the lover) to self-obsession of the mind, wondering at its own depths and contours. His further elaboration on the self-love as masculine attempt to capture feminine as expression of misogynist wonder, through which the female becomes an object of fantasy that is really about exertion of masculine power and dilution of female agency. (“Love and violence thus seem almost inseparable; you always hunt the one you love”: Watson 2006, 89) I can’t help the urge to read this thought into the correctional agenda of the ecological and development discourses- that seek to rid suffering populaces of their ills, or correct and conserve degrading landscapes, thereby harbouring and nourishing the ideal of restoring human existences and landscape beauties to an imagined, antiquated glory. Watson and Mentz’s writings open up for me the possibility of reading ecology and development movements as neo-Romanticism- trying to restore aesthetics through correctional/missionary agenda.

I find Foucauldian shadows here, of language as a tool of power, and the literary act as an act of capture and colonisation by the author. I am only partially familiar with the literature that discusses the author as a modern, romantic, humanist actor- who is also variously spoken of, spoken to, spoken through. So Watson’s self-effacing comment, at the end, about his own intentional fallacy getting mapped onto the body of Shakespeare’s work (Watson 2006, 107), provokes me into the thinking of linguistic inscriptions onto the body of the natural Other as an act of conversation as also atomistic authorship.

The development aid literature and scientific landscape readings, and I am thinking scientific/development/ecological/conservationist literature as literary here, as an act mapping one’s own cultural (knowledge, morality, aesthetics as a subset of culture?) mesh onto the land, sea, game, native humans. I don’t necessarily see that as more or less violent than the act of capture through the romantic act of authorship through the written lyric, film, music, art. I don’t necessarily see Latour’s moral censure of the act of dramatizing, by way of making the inanimate/inarticulate speak and advocating ‘secularization’ as any more of exoneration from the power of language- in fact, if anything, that too cries out for salvation from the guilt of violent representation (Latour 2004). I see literary (and am stretching the limits of literary as far as possible) tools of representation/conversation/capture as an inevitable act of human agency, that some of us enjoying power and privilege can exercise more often and more effectively, and can only live in the guilt and shame of the same, and in turn capture it in language.

Yours locally

2008-10-12T14:23:00.000-07:00

New England looks red and gold from the East Rock. With a hint of an idle blue ocean leaking out of its crevices. White steeples looking distantly in arrogance. This was as beautiful a moment as it was alien. Beauty and heritage zealously guarded for over centuries- I wonder where this arrogantly ancient local would fit into the global-local polemics. Where the local is small, vulnerable, beautiful, obscure- that is liable to perish under the Global bulldozer.

What local is this? Small and powerful. Quaint and arrogant. With sophisticated security worked into old Gothic doors. That toys with Global remote control. That can spare the extra dollar to buy fair trade coffee and farmer's vegetables. And heads out to learn about quaint worlds with the Peace Corps. All the while keeping its localhood protected. No Coke bulldozer rolls up here for water, no sweatshop to stitch up jeans. New England defoliates in anticipation of winter- in beauty and dignity and quaintness. Keeping its hands firmly on the Global remote control.

Posting on Postits

2008-09-21T15:33:00.000-07:00

Being back in school has brought a few old friends back in my life- one being coffee. The other being pen and paper. (I maintain Oriental status in class steadfastly refusing to open up a laptop). And yet another, being postits.

Unlike snooty anglophile Bengalis who sport the dowat-kaulome, I am new-age and happy with ball points. Provided the nib is super sharp. And the paper is a bit scratchy. Makes Marxist angst about machines bringing about alienation of labour suddenly come alive. Especially in the vicinity of White Macs grinning away in superiority.

Postit was a close friend from the time of marking important revelations in a legal file as a lawyer, and before that, as a moot courter in law school. The fluorescent colours against smoothened paper made them a yuppy sort of acompaniment for cerebral endeavours. Increasingly, I lost touch with them. But the stationery counters of supermarkets pouring out all shapes and sizes of fluorescent intellectual aides were too much of a temptation for me to resist. Right now, I am tripping on the chrome yellow ones, splashing them across the body of colonial ethnography.

Glossary: dowat- inkpot
kaulome- pen

Edgerton Musings

2008-09-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

Edgerton Park is home to the small travelling theatre company and the offbeat bluegrass group and the political country musician. Bringing to live the dreamlike notion of a happy community that comes along with its picnic baskets, deck chairs and wine bottles. On a lazy Sunday afternoon. It's eco-friendly and uncorporate and romantic. With older folks and children. And no drunken doped out twenty-somethings screeching from their boyfriends' shoulders.

This was the picture of the Other Possible World that we dream of when we wave jhandas at corporate demons. Through the Edgerton performance I found myself fighting a yearning for Coke banners splashing red. Or some music company claiming ownership of the song and the singing. Perhaps, the demons are really our fetishes. If the world were pretty and sensible and ecofriendly, maybe it wouldn't be as much fun. Maybe this fetishised unending battle against wrong and unjust and dirty and cruel gives us our mojo.

Desidual Rains

2008-09-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

In the security of uniformed police, fast internet, resplendent salad bars and academic shopping baskets, I have settled into New Haven. I think. The wonder of a pay check to think and write about what it feels for the Third World anthropologist to watch her Own People with voyeur sunglasses still sinks in.

This is a curious discipline. That is increasingly comfortable in its discomfiture. And apologises for its voyeurism. In the way that many disciplinary frameworks don't. It rains in New Haven. With an alien serenity. Rabbi Shergill sings in nasal Punjabi. Desi sentimentality echoes through yellow blinds.

Notes from The West

2008-08-25T13:19:00.000-07:00

I write from the Western Hemisphere. Feeling small and brown. And exalted for having jumped continents and conversed in English. Still taking in the euphoria of walking around in shorts and sitting alone at cafe's. For this is The West!

The excessive pisturesqueness of New England sinks in still. Quiet greens and gothic towers and bicycling modernities make the memories of the daily jostle for air, water, space, food, money, job, ideas, download speeds, movie tickets sharper. And prove the curiousness of the world in general. All the more. I marvel at the power of a fourteen floor library. And state-of-the-art buildings made to look Gothic. The cosmopolitan American marvels at small brown women speaking wordy English.

And then tea in the afternoon and good-old-feminist-bonding tells me that people are pretty much the same. Wherever you go.

God of Small Beings

2008-08-12T23:29:00.000-07:00

This was a strange religious trip. Where a long and fancy car pulled over in the narrow alleys of Brahminical neighbourhood of Bangalore tucked into Anonymity. Jolted out of reverie for the affluent Bengali women of three generations that emerged from this long automobile had emerged in search of the goddess of their homeland. Who is nurtured in this alien land by alien people.

This was different from the quintessential Kali Baris of Calcutta- the Lake Kali Bari, the one in Kali Ghat, various others. The Safdarjung and Gol Market Kali Bari in Delhi. This one was unnerving in its dry, non-sticky floors, quietness, absence of chaotic maddening crowds. Austere Veshti and shawl-ed priests spoke softly. The mother goddess dressed in bold red and zari and diamonds sticking a tongue out and hopping over Shiva was familiar, but not quite.

The garland of red hibiscus was missing. Some strange Bong brand of energy too. To add to that, the knowledge of no-possibility-of-slaughtered-goat made this worship ground more worship-worthy, less accessible. More godly, less friendly.

The women of my family were content though, to come somewhat close to their familiar deity, this far from home.

Self: New and Improved

2008-08-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

So this preparing to be hotshot grad student is proving increasingly trying. One feels floosie and ahem-less-cerebral induging in activities like Facebook-stalking, watching Love Story 2050, pulp-on-the-telly, reruns of Desperate Housewives. One feels the constant need to purge one's head of all unworthy thought- consisting of hot men, lack of hot men, avergely hot men, giggly phonecalls, possibility of hot men. One finds the relentless godly admonition of a winged voice ringing through one's head saying- You're not one of them. You are going to read cool books and write cool papers. You must think, read, talk, dream very important things.

Chastised. I find myself feverishly trying to fathom the Nuclear Treaty debates, mugging Parliament anecdotes off newspapers, grimacing at page three neckline-photo-essays, trying to make my hair look more dishevelled than usual, cultivating a kind of poststructuralist air, appearing supernuanced about bombs as well as bombshells.

It's tough building character. Building academic persona surely is way tougher. But I brace myself undaunted by the forces of floosedom that threaten like temptresses.

Forgotten notes of Calcutta

2008-06-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

The Bangalore-Delhi-yuppylawyer-talkbigger would definitely scoff at these songs of adolescence. Yet they brought back bits of my Calcutta adolescence today. These were songs of Calcutta talking to modernity- tackily made to sound bluesy. Sumon Chattopadhyay arrived from nowhere, when I was in middle school, with songs of soppyheartbreaks, madman-on-the-road, melancholic monsoon evening Calcutta. He turned repetitive in the later albums, having given way to an outburst of late youth frustration over Adhunik soppyromantic music that the cultured Bengali middle class had tresured so far. The Bengali press wrote about this new-blood-music as Jeebonmukhi.

And a tacky Nachiketa gave musical vent to schoolgirl-puppylove. And hordes of other twenty-something rock bands followed. Rampantly making up for lack of musical genius, with the arrogance of modernity-angst. Ripping liberaly off Bong folk and noted blues/soft rock numbers from the 60s/70s.

My favourite of this genre will always be Anjan Dutt, with his recurrent St.Paul's Darjeeling allusions, and a continuing exotification of the Anglo-Indians of Ripon Street (Mary Ann and Purono Guitar coming to mind offhand), and endearingly cliched celebrations of the decadent little stories of the city, slowly giving way to titillations of global capital. It was at this time that a long-forgotten 'alternative' group called Mohiner Ghoraguli started in the late 70s (I think) resurfaced in popular Bengali musical memory. Not as much modernity angst. Much more music.

I was digging up these scores of my adolescence from Youtube this afternoon. They are still entangled in rainy afternoon bus rides to a local swimming club, hushed telephonic attempts at romance, sights and sounds of a city that once used to talk to me.

Glossary:
Adhunik-modern
Jeebonmukhi- Life-facing (quite literally, can't think of a better translation)

Cine Bliss

2008-06-12T01:15:00.000-07:00

The new releases:

SATC is the sum total of outlandish outfits, forty-something-marriage-angst, sushi, Louis Vitton, Mexican resorts, and a nubile (albeit slightly wrinkled) Sarah Jessica Parker desperately trying to get hitched. Not much sex there unfortunately. Maybe that's reflective of aging women's backtracking libidoes.

Aamir was an interesting Sunday morning watch. Raj Kumar Gupta's snaking camera takes one through the sights and sounds of Muslim Ghetto Bombay in an applaudably arty way. While a hottish Rajeev Khandelwal plays the apolitical, ghar-girasthiwala, moderate Good Muslim, that resents the extremist, progress-clogging lot.

Sarkar Raj is a treat in RGV's treatment. Subhash Nagre's dilapidated house, with a narrow stream of daylight casting shadows on guns of bodyguards. A man who cries like a baby on his son's shoulders, kills in dozens in vengeance. Junior Bachchan pulls off a cute intense look, but having to speak dialogue does him in. The Lady in the Business Suit looks glamorous in understated style. Does not have much to do other than look at Junior in fond admiration. The same finger and lip closeup shots and upsidedown angles. They were exciting in Sarkar, but the sequel works only as Memories of Sarkar.

After having spent kiloes of money at multiplexes over the weekend, I resorted to a friend's homegrown collection and chose Woody Allen for yesterday's latenight show. The screwed-up nerdy film-maker with principles gets screwed over left, right and centre. And the nerdy-hot woman ultimately falls for the suave, salt-n-pepper producer. And the philosopher who celebrated Life commits suicide. Men make happiness out of choices, some choose crime, some are mere miscreants. Crime and Misdemeanour, enjoyably cynical and depressing, left me with bedtime thoughts of how moral agency is assumed by the Man completely, on lit and film canvasses. Agreed these are men's worldviews and they are being honest. But how simply wives and daughters and mistresses are reduced to tethers in the spectrum of moral choices. Be it a moderate citizen, a godfather, a new-n-improved godfather, a cowardly angster or the regular successful adulterous man. For three worldviews on the canvas of film, there is one mapping a twenty-first century woman and that's the one gets pushed around by Louis Vitton.

Towards Promised Land

2008-05-31T07:54:00.000-07:00

The guards outside the Chennai American Consulate office speak Tamil when they want to be friendly and English when they are waving their baton in your face.

- Move Forward
- One person a time
- Are there any sealed envelopes in your folder?

The documents counter was a novelty. For the first time, I found myself proving my human existence beyond a signature. Pressing my palms against the greenlight machine. The same way I had seen in a docu film sometime back, new cadets from Nepal and India were databased by the anthropological establishment of Empire.

We were herded (in way it was an equaliser of class/community/ethnicity divides- Tamil casual labourer, software engineer youth, newlywed mehendi women, despondent aged parents- we were all to America- the potential Immigrant) into the Interview Airconditioned space, and asked to sit here and sit there. The delays and Tamil asides spoken by the security guards and general air of chaos made it familiarly endearing. Like going to get you Driver's License in Bangalore. Somewhat.

The hooked-nosed, bespectacled, severe woman interviewer turned out warm and jovial to me. Like she was with the aged couple before me. Unlike that large, red-rimmed-spectacled lady in the next counter who sounded less merciful. And I hoped I would not be guided to her den.

In less than a minute, I was issued a five-year F1 and wished luck.

I felt like I came out of a Lion's Den, having shaken hands.

Capital Outskirts

2008-05-22T02:56:00.000-07:00

This blog was begun in an effort to come to terms with my trysts with Cowbelt and Yuppy Activism.

I floated across the city, now and then, in a way that I now realise all floating people float. Doing the touristy things- tombs, purani dilli, second hand book places, obscure eating places, film screenings, talks after film screenings, plays, the odd social do. It's sort of an un-Lonely-Planet guided tour of the city. Unwritten. Passed on through whispering of cosmopolitan's fantasy folklore.

There are parts of the city that route the cosmopolitan's fantasy-sojourn. And there are parts that do not necessarily. I can't really say how the latter can be dug up in a two-year floating-population stint. The same way a fantasy-tourist in Calcutta goes to Coffee House and Olypub, but will probably hear of Para sexual traditions from a Calcutta native friend.

So I lived here. Mostly a romance-digging cosmopolitan. Sometimes snigerring, sometimes traumatised. Chatting the odd Bengali rickshaw-puller in the rain. Or the Bihar/UP idiosyncratic chai lady in the outskirts of the Defence Colony market. Shoving about amidst Jantar Mantar multitudes. Absorbing high culture up at the Attic. Looking for home in CR Park fish markets.

And hardly ever sensing the para stories of Delhi.

When Reality Bites

2008-05-02T02:49:00.001-07:00

In Surrealtime

The Real Madrid

They play out of greed.

Pulp out some chemical

And preservatived fruit

You get mango juice-all Real.

And there are those of the

Real Estate Club,

That speak of the far left,

Uprisings of prices

And shoot up the shares of the Club.

The Real Madrid

They play out of greed.

Just as them artsies

Or armchair-angst aunties

And with them the funded bastards.

We have in our midst

The Realtime cliques.

With heartburns of Subalterns

And plastics of Exotics

They cross swords with them- the Pretenders.

The Real Madrid

They play out of greed.

But at least they pay their taxes.

Said Corporate gangsters

We work, we’re not Angsters.

Says the hard-news Journo

I’ve seen what you’ll never know.

The Real World- really not for you guys.

The Real World geeks

They speak out in greed.

In search of brown fundings

And deconstructed landings.

Speak not of them just in jest.

The Real World videos

Of cop-killing and weirdoes.

Of madness and civilised

Of pristine home left behind

This is art-culture-politics of the really Real kind.

The Real Madrid.

See, they play out of greed.
But we play for just bread n wine.

Poshington Post

2008-04-15T04:55:00.000-07:00

They inevitably make me feel conscious of the never-ending bad-hair-month. Sometimes, ill-read and uneducated. Quite often lewd and plebeian. They are the Poshingtons of Delhi. As a friend of a friend once named them. In a moment of awe and reverence.

They have country-cousins in Bangalore. Though not of quite the same sheen. Or remotely the same screen presence. They are inevitably the Thinking Lot. ( Some of us like to think we can think also, but what good is thinking, if you can't do the Think Ritual?!) They write books and make films and art and culture and exotic food, they have truckloads of sex (I am told in hushed huddles), they seduce over Lacan, and orgasm over Zizek. There are hierarchies within them (I am told by treacherous informers). I like to imagine that they have secret sexual rituals involving the chants of post-structuralist theory to tribal drumbeats, with earthy FabIndia drapes forming a shamiana. Somewhat like in Eyes Wide Shut, but in desi tones and hues. With a Monsoon Wedding element to it. Though my middle class imagination stops right there.

But I digress.

So the Poshington who reads Lacan and Assamese poetry and can do standup comedy and does some other supercool stuff that touch the boundary-walls of my imagination only tangentially, is on top of the food chain. I am told by sources. Reliable ones. The person is usually male. The source doesn’t wanna risk taking a call on his sexual preference. For fear of losing membership and access to action. Below him (no pun intended, in order to secure the loyalties of my middle-class audiences) is the PoshMeena. She carries a whip in the shamiana ritual of my imagination. Is sometimes the exotic innocent flowergirl. Sometimes the brutal goddess (to students of Lacan). At other times, the anchor of civilisation (of Poshingtons). Adolescent Poshingtons put up her poster. Gabroo jawan poshingtons sing her ballads in dark corners at drunken ritual-zones. And she sniggers at one and all. Especially the wannabe PoshMeenas who would at this point be having loud drunken conversations about the silvery-thong-feminisms. But never quite measuring upto our Lady.

Below her, on his lucky day, is of course, the gabroo jawan. Who walks into the ritual with a little velvet pouch of tricks- he has spun in the course of the day. They could range from a Lacanian joke to a raunchy pelvic thrust.

I will stop here in the interest of the Poshington informer’s life, livelihood and action.

I remain the eternal Peeping Bong to this elaborate socio-sexual ritual. Grateful that I got to witness some bits of the Lives and Times of the Poshingtons. To my utter voyeuristic glee. Forming a good part of my Memoirs of Delhi.

Of Jingo Sexualities

2008-04-10T03:15:00.000-07:00

Over some stoned Bangali adda into the wee hour of the morning, an age-old Kolkata stereotype of neighbourhood sexual exploits resurfaced. The neighbourhood, popularly known as para, is incomplete without a protagonist- a parar dada. The unemployed youth of the 80s (not so much the 90s) with the rugged despondent masculinity. The protagonista- she could be the unattainably snooty English Honours student, the noveau riche belly-button-jeans nevermindthelovehandles item number, the demure Boudi(an erotic category- the older brother's wife) in a nightie, or the virginal high-school girl, braided and schoolbagged, with a dash of mischief in the corner of her eye.

These sexual entanglements are of a quaint nature. Mostly hidden in the shadows of intersecting boundary walls, underneath mattresses, inside covers of books. Never out in the daylight. Never in ice-cream parlours or Baristas. Sometimes in a niribili(deserted, technically speaking, but not quite- the word conveys a sense of cosy isolation) corner on Laker Dhaar. These are not sexualities of Boyfriend-and-Girlfriends. Or Open relationships. Or Messings Around. These are rampant. Vibrant. Nameless.Borderless. Sexcapades. Our braided schoolgirl is not Carrie Bradshaw, neither Bridget Jones. Nothing metropolitan about her.

Sometimes documented in angsty short stories of Sunday supplements of Anonodo Bajar Potrika, where English honours downtown diva has irrepressible lust for suburban Math Honours cousin. Mostly passed down through gossip sweet-nothings whispered across parapets of terraces by Has-been Boudis.

The visible metropolitan sexual liberations that I have witnessed in Bangalore and Delhi, fade in comparison. To the vernacular ones of Kolkata middle-classes. The politically cock/vagina-sure sexualities of Pecos and Four S, Strawberry Fields and GIR, CP and MG Road, Lodhi Gardens and Cubbon Park are empowering no doubt. But not half as mischief-making, not half as mysterious. The merrymaking too voluble to be seductive. The mischiefs too theorised. One will call me a jingo here, but I would pick a demure Boudi over an LSR liberate anyday. A despondent Jhontuda over a glib libertine.
.

On grammarology: With Apologies to the great/late Derrida

2008-03-20T03:12:00.000-07:00

I sifted through some old posts. To find one dated April 22, 2007, on why I broke up with Vodka and my emerging relationship with Rum. Of course, Rum and I have come a long way now. The post ends with a line or two about my grammar habits.

I seem to have promised an expanded post on Grammar at the time. Well, as it happens, today, I feel like talking about my love for the full-stop.

The Full Stop (I also love Capital Letter) is, by no means, an expression of finality. I think. I add a full stop in a short, sharp stroke- like a bit of jeera powder in a curry. Not really as part of a strategy. But at that moment, it sort of fits. The Full Stop, to me, serves the very purpose of fitting into a momentary chasm in thought. Grammarians will say use a semi colon (I like to leave the semi-colon aside. For a rare moment. Like two twigs of lemon grass), it’s meant for exactly that. And I will say to Grammar-purohits that (aside: they could consider a hike) I mean for chasm in thought to be short and sharp. A staccato note. Not a lilting continuum where the break adds to the build-up in melody.

So my friend Full Stop comes in handy when I want deliberately not to think for that moment. Break into the rhythm of the preceding thought with an uncertainty as to whether it will continue on the same line when it resumes, and a finality. Implying that the present thought has been disrupted irreparably.

Wren and Martin had taught us in a junior class in Missionary School that a complete thought ends with a sentence. I say there is no complete thought. Some hang in mid-air. Some shock you like a sudden blown fuse and a sharp spark. Some others burn away like the remnants of a cigarette. Some illuminate and blow out like an anaar on Diwali. Some gnaw away in recurrent outbursts. For years. Against the walls of your intestine.

Homes and Worlds

2008-03-11T23:35:00.000-07:00

I head out for the Promised Land like any postcolonial theory-practise-confusion type person. In a few months. I had started this blog with a solemn promise to myself that I would not bring in the personal into it, it would be fundamentally musings about being a Misfit and Awestruck in North India and the Delhi activist type world.

But I feel compelled now to talk about the hairpin curve in my life. Somewhat in personal-meets-political-meets-blog way. As the ever receding mirage of the idyllic home floats further and further away. And I dangle my legs from a pretty caravan. Onto some new song-n-dance.

Kicking one more sandcastle. Of loves and hates and happinesses. Trying to cling onto my collected works of laughter and forgotten. And coffee table images of waistdeep waterloggings on Rawdon Street, eucalyptus lovemakings of suburban Bangalore, midnight kabab sojourns, midnight-ladder-sojourns on marijuana, midnight drunk poetries of broken hearts, bum-wrigglings on parapet-less terraces, neoliberal flyovers, glassy shopping malls, creepers of dilapidated North Calcutta, red-and-white goddesses, ilish and shorshe, beginnings of monsoons, wet cigarettes and unfinished orgasms.

I have had many homes. I have built several sandcastles. And kicked them all.

Yet another caravan beckons. Seductively. As I stand up to kick my castle.

The Warriors of Mindsapes

2008-02-12T03:35:00.000-08:00

This has been cooking in my head for a while now, as a cumulative response to work/social/dead-drunk conversations dissing nationalist heroes, Nehruvian enthu-cutlet reformers and big-dam messiahs. Whose intellectual postures, publicly-executed-personal-sacrifices, loincloths and goat-milk musings, Fabianisms and FabIndia activisms, dams and displacements, police-flogged-sepia-photos and prison notebooks collectively constitute the Messiah brand of sex appeal. Which have caught the attention of many an Edwina, Shabana, Arundhati.

But perhaps, it is unfair to ridicule the sepia poses of the Tagores, the Gandhis and the Patkars. (To flaunt some trivia: Tagore posed as the bleeding patriot publicly renouncing Knighthood after the Partition of Bengal in 1905) Perhaps, the hungry saviour in all of us who seek to live the life of the mind, finds succinct ways of foddering itself. There is the lawyering lot that poses as the Sexy Professional/No-NonsenseSaviour, spewing para 34 of Fazl Ali's blah judgment spelling out that Sexy Lawyers Have Been Salvaging the Basic Structure of the Constitution. Then there are the Grassroot Messiahs of the blood-stained, tattered dupatta brand of sex appeal. And the Journo-with-the-jhola-conscience (pun intended for Bongs) that exposes the wily corporate villain and his greasy, insider-traded palms. And the academic that writes out loud. At the euphemism that is the liberal state. And the artists they wield their brushes and nudisms in the air. Like gallant soldiers.

In defence of the life of mind. And in manufacturing Sex Appeal.

Each has her own manufacturing technique. That could range from use of charkhas to returns of Knighthoods to para 421.9 to cyber-warcries to tattered kurtas to censored manuscripts. Narcissisms of such sophistication. That buys us a letterbox in the Mindscape Apartment.

Begumhood Unparalleled

2008-01-22T03:06:00.000-08:00

Nadira Babbar performed at Kamani Auditorium on Sunday, to an enraptured audience- old folks emitting 'wah wah' noises at sharp edges of the Siddiqui script, young folks gasping now and then, at the extravagant delivery of Urdu dialogues. I remained focussed on the lady herself.

Not having much of a taste for resplendent performances in the traditions of yesteryears, I felt some discomfort with elaborate (in bits, tacky) sets of Begum Jaan. Or the conventional lighting, or stage directions. A cleverly and tightly written script delivered with panache and accuracy of timing by the other two young actors, who deserve credit. Babbar playing Begum Jaan did much more. Creating a mood for the dilapidated and the bygone, that must be remembered and romanticised precisely because of its tragic extinction. Bringing alive in her body and voice and demeanour the aura of a defeated diva, clinging on to the shadows of her dying arrogance.

There are performances that are brilliant, there are performances that carry the pace of a production, set the mood for a production, and then there are performances which transcend the production. So much so that they could have been standalone performances without the context of a script, other actors, an auditorium or a set. What I took back was a sensation of awe at a truly classic performance, and not so much a story.

Busrides

2008-01-14T00:39:00.000-08:00

From early school days, I have nurtured a fondness for window seats in bus rides. For years I boarded a bus at five minutes to nine, and took the window seat, on the second row on the left. And stared out aimlessly at a city waking up. It was customary to Revise in the bus, when en route to an examination. I didn't much care for this custom as it would threaten to eat into my stare time. The stare time was also usually interspersed with reconstructions of yesterday's nine o' clock serial, the Enid Blyton Midnight Feast that took place the night before, the lunchtime fight of the day before. These indulgences in consonance with queer sights and sounds of an awakening city effectively pulled me out of moral quicksands of Not Studying Before Exam.

At age twelve, I was shifted to posh Anglophile school (earlier I was in jingoistic, highbrow Brahmo Bengali school), where the bus had to be boarded at seven in the morning. After a few swift maneuvers in this new bus community, I established Flag and Fence over the left window seat on second row. This was brilliant. It was a boy-girl bus. Which added variety to my morning canvas. Yuppy accented adolescent pigtail-pulling enmeshed in early morning trucks and chai-shacks and nine o'clock serial memories made for a hearty breakfast.

In college, there were Monday morning car-rides back to hostel, with radio in the background. Playing Dil Chahta Hai, Dhoom, Dhoom 2, RDB and Himesh- across five years. These were Morning Mulls of an average variety. Sometimes, I took the Nagarbhavi bus to Majestic, then one to St.Mark's Road from Platform Seventeen. Back home on Saturdays. On Saturday afternoons, these were excellent widow-seat-rides. Interspersed with heated conversations between vegetable-women and conductors in an alien tongue. Alien robust masculinity on kingsize painted posters. Alien political slogans brandishing each other across walls. Alien lanes leading alien crosses into alien mains, forming alien layouts. The humdrum planned neighbourhoods going about their afternoon business.

It was in Delhi that the old feeling of bus-ride-bliss came back to me. I looked forward to the odd matter in Tees Hazari or Debt Recovery Tribunal ( in Jhandewalan) being allotted to me, for the love of the ride. I had to catch the nine am one, because by nine thirty they would be too crowded and the Aggression Battles would overpower me. Journeys to courts opened up obscure dargahs across the city, some alleys bearing names of insignificant British Lieutenants, some undiscovered varieties of Jat Masculinities and Heavyweight Vehicles. And the forgotten cities of Delhi came forth to chat me up.

At the Spin of the Longitude

2008-01-01T12:57:00.000-08:00

My oldest memory of a New Year's Eve is of having a new-born brother. Along with a blurred jumble of Year-ending TV programmes, flashing movie stars at parties, and Anu Malik and Abhijeet doing their bit for the masses. Closer to youth, there are the pre-Board examination woeful memories of parental grounding and envy of neighbourhood revelry. Coupled with middle-school pre-New-Year hip-girls' chatter about potential dates at the Saturday Club Do (that Have-Nots like me fantasise about till date).

Freedom from parental sensibilities and the ticket to debauchery came together at the law school. Where by dint of being low-life first year student, you are entitled to be ferried to a Party With Alcohol. Where you are told Random Hookups take place. Where Ex-boyfriends rise from the ashes. Or are woefully seen Hooking Up with Your Best Friend. And then you grow up to expecting that the Cute Junior Boy will hit on you Tonight. And then you grow old and cynical one year, when the Averagely Hot Phirang is making Cheesy Flirtatious Conversation, and you know you are Capitulating solely because you are Bored. And then, there are New Years of the Warm and Fuzzy Love-you-Forever variety.

Last night, I felt like I was happily back in adolescence. As I curled in at about one thirty, slightly stoned, at a friend's place, wondering what new stories will unfurl as our twenty-three-or-so longitude spins once more. Reminiscing the personal and the political. Bhutto killed and Modi triumphant. Loves lost and forgotten, loves almost fallen into. Little disgruntled. But mostly thankful.

One more winter-senti post

2007-12-14T00:40:00.000-08:00

Ice fist over Ice fingers
Breathe out misty ringlets
Fire-dance on sidewalk
Roasts hunched-up souls.

Roast in the morning sun
For the love of warm skin
For the love of art culture business
For the love of winter fog.

Roast in the afternoon.
In mausoleum shadows
For the love of methi parathas
And damp government jobs.

Roast in the evening
For the love of smoked moongphali
Cigarette- smoke pensive
Jolts of neat whisky.

Roast hand-me-downs
By the warm istri-coals
Hand some to the maid's kid
She runs about. Barefoot.

Roast hunched-up souls, you.
Roast while you can
Some roast in tandoor
Some tropical sands.

Mushrooms and Memories

2007-12-03T04:58:00.000-08:00

Delhi winters make me ponder on loneliness. It's the sort of painful loneliness that evokes pontification. As it evokes the urge for more cigarettes in a sunny dhaba over chai. Or on a chilly Sunday evening near Palika. Or in an icy auto at night, closing your fist inside the crevice of stretched sweater-cuffs.

Sometimes pleasurable. This loneliness. Watching delirious crowds in Central Park, from an anonymous corner. Dancing to Paki cuteboys. Or Bangalore Coolboys. Sometimes it's lonely in familiar company. Of friendly chatter over moongphali. Or amidst giggling girls in Sarojini Nagar. Negotiating the market value of export-reject jackets.

Last winter. I was introduced to the fearsome loneliness of walking up posh and foggy Defence Colony. Singing to a desolate streetlamp. To fight off the fear of the uncanny. And down the subway. Where the one-legged chap who sells moongphali through the day, would just be settling into a tattered razai.

This winter I cooked mushroom with peas and tomatoes. The way my kitchen-guru flatmate did last winter. Trying to remember how she used to cook it. Remember our quickfix meals amidst shivers. As her train left platform five. Nizamuddin. And I stood on the overbridge. Two minutes too late. In a Bollywood moment. Of nostalgia. And mushroom-memories.

Ode to JNU Afternoons

2007-11-21T00:51:00.000-08:00

A wintry afternoon and rustle of dry foliage of JNU and smoke ringlets made me remember winter afternoons in the grounds of Victoria Memorial, or in our back verandah in Kolkata. The impressions got sharpened through eavesdropping on two Statistics students (backslapping buddies who will ultimately get married in the middle of their PhDs), sitting on the bench of the Purvachal bus-stop. And cribbing about exam syllabi and the temptation of a Hari Prasad Chaurasia concert.

Interesting melting pot of micrcosms- JNU. The Hindi heartland discussing how to retain teaching jobs for their brethren in colleges in Delhi- pulling court or party strings. Bong lovers cooing poetry into each others' ears, and puffing Gold Flakes. Some chunks felt Hindi heartland, some smelt of the Malmafia, some of Bongbonding. A refreshing (almost startling) contrast from the cosmopolitan, professional school that I was used to. A hum of not-so-urbane tongues, in the background of a voluble chorus of Commie slogans (or maybe they were ABVP), resonating across a landscape of wintry sun and Gold Flake foliage made me nostalgic.

Of the worlds I grew up in, and hardly speak of anymore. Of humdrum, winter landscapes. Subsidised canteens. Milk-sugar chai.

I could angst about this n that, but to be very honest...

2007-11-14T03:20:00.000-08:00

You Spout some Cinema

You spout some Cinema,

Some realpolitik,

Hair flying incessantly

On Winter intrigue.

Smog silhouette Delhi.

You light up once more.

Neoliberal sex appeal

Is truly a bore.

Your silhouette darkens

You’re looking far away

Marxist thought jumps up

In a six-pack sashay.

You spout an obscure poem

Dalit vagabond.

Maybe he was afro.

I am getting genre wrong.

Debonair and Playboy.

All sexist bullcrap.

Yes yes but of course,

I dig feminist rap.

Your silhouette sharpens.

You light up. Again.

Fingers entangle in

Postmodern élan.

Impressionist. Structuralist.

You’re giggling away.

“The joke is from South Park.

And this way if you may…”

The Story of the Missing Tigers and Tusks

2007-10-31T02:59:00.000-07:00

In the texts of administrative laws (Wade and Smith being the fashionable names to cite), one is told 'public interest', concerns of the ex-chequer, and in some cases quasi-judicial reasoning informs the mind of the state machinery. One thinks later, what did our State think when looking to solve a problem of depleting forest lands, and disappearing tigers and wild elephants? It thought-"... it has to be these settlements of tribal people who have been collecting twigs and picking fruits through centuries that have driven roadrollers through forests, and poached for smuggle-market of tusks. It must have been them un-conservationist lot, who kill tigers, and wipe off our precious coniferous forests. They must be the ones itching to build themselves some highways and some shopping malls."

The state agency- in our case, it being The Bench (that I must speak of in reverence and reticence for fear of Mid-day Massacres), that is the Messiah and the Tiger and the Tusk- goes:
".... tsk tsk... these tribal chaps are nice and cute, but they know nothing about conservation. Since we must conserve our middle-class Romance of the Tiger and the Tusk, we must we must- the Tusk... the Tusk! Give up the Tribal for the Tusk. So we can shop by the highway in peace. And safari-hike in joy on holiday. And brag in elan, about our shopping-mall-cum-safari State."

So, says The Bench : " Off with their heads, coz they are too much of a headache, on a Friday afternoon. Give the miner his license to wipe out some wilds, put the tribal away into some mining crevice, place the Banner of the middle-class romance of the Tiger and the Tusk right in the middle, so Fourth Estate Blokes get a photo-op, to perhaps be the Mascot of our Shopping-Mall-cum-Safari State. Such peace gives Justice when it is done..."

Pujo Specials

2007-10-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

Pujos have always been the Bongsnob's snooty way of ensuring the live-it-up-and-don't-go-to-work for five days straight. What religious occasion demands no sacrifice (no fasting, no shave-head), expects no particular performance to prove your undying loyalty, and gives you a ticket to simply- fun?!

Of course, I have always maintained that Pujo is a middle-class indulgence- of opulent shopping, of bunking work, of overeating a little more, of carefree intellectual masturbation sessions at pandals. That said, I have been reminiscing about the various things that Pujos have represented for me through the years. Vanity, for instance, has always been a very Pujo-thing. For five days, I feel terribly deck-up-floosie and demure-vain. To the extent, that heels are pulled out a day in advance and kept aside, and hair-washes are timed right and arguments are carried out with Ma over what goes with what.

Flirting, is certainly a Pujo special. Like costume-drama foreplay at dinners, lunches, adda sessions- simpering to the boy's mother (who will invariably be some discerning Kakima). The boys that pulled pigtails last year, became antakshari buddies this year, and would become (ahem) Boyfriends next year, and would be away finishing semester exams during Pujos a few years hence. Would be Stopping By on the way from London to Hong Kong a few years thereafter. And would be showing off Bong Kultur to their German wives the next year.

Pujos are chronicles. Of heartbreaks and childbirths. Of Boyfriends who are not in the country to buy you Phuchkaa anymore. Best Friends who got married and moved and are no more giggle-and-look-coy buddies. Of grandmothers who are not well enough to cook Ilish Maach anymore. Of brothers and sisters who don't bicker any more. Of kakimas who stopped buying jaamdani saris, since their husbands died. Of homes fading away and homelands changing addresses.

Me on eM

2007-10-09T23:12:00.001-07:00

I remain a devoted reader of the Compulsive Confessor's urbane 'woman' exploit-stories, but am quite disturbed by her transition into a non-anonymous, linked-to-real-life-person blog. More so by the Telegraph UK article, in which she has been portrayed as the Indian 'Bridget Jones'. I don't know how her interview went, so not in a position to impute self-marketing to eM herself, but she is soooo no Bridget....not even close.

Bridget is endearingly fat, edgy, jittery about the world's image of her- endearingly lonely- endearingly intelligent yet self-effacing. eM, and I am a devoted reader, is a Cool Cat. A funny one at that, honest (though sometimes she sounds pretentious and self-obsessed, like all of us do) and very real for an urbane woman, handling various Indias, like me. So, reading her blog is fun for urbane twenty-something women. And maybe, marginally titillating for wannabe men, and ubercool for nineteen-year-old aspirants. But she is so Not Bridget. The difference being that her writing is definitely a bit cultivated, and she sounds a bit too vagina-sure for it to be real. So she sounds a bit like she is performing on the blog. Which is okay. It can still make for fun reading.

For all the SatC comparisons on Sepia Mutiny, she may even sound a little Carrie-esque. Who takes Vagina-angst to a different level altogether. And keeping aside east-west culture-shock bitching, if I were to read Carrie's blog, I think it would be something like eM's. (I love both their unapologetic Cool Catness, but they both no Pathbreakers, if that's what are being made out to be). But New York, Bombay or Delhi, neither Carrie nor eM are pathbreakingly feminist, or are writing sexcapades. For all her blowjob manuals, eM has never vividly described a sexual experience, not dated a married man/boss/father-figure-type-person/cradle-snatched/effectively-boyfriend-stolen...nothing about her sex life is terribly scandalous, for any single-in-the-big-city Indian woman. But, I repeat, identifiable boring and lonely Fridays make for fun reading. And zero scandal. Or titillation.

On the Feminising-Look-I'm-So-Rebellious coverage, she does sound like she thinks her drinking and partying is a big deal. (Read the About me Section, and you'll know what I am talking about) I can't imagine an urbane, hip, belly-button-gazing, vagina-sure English-speaking Outlook journalist living any other way. She is as rebellious as her particular social milieu accepts of her. Obviously, her posts will scandalise green-card-fantasising-wannabe-cool Indian men, but the test is does she scandalise her own kind. My take would be NO, coz they're all living the same lives.

That said, she remains a cute,funny girl-on-the-web. By no means scandalous, rebellious or pathbreaking. I look forward to reading some breezy chicklit when her book is out.

Weekend Cleanup

2007-10-05T23:44:00.000-07:00

Have finally gotten around to the long-pending Sort-Categorise-Update-Cleanup-doVirusscan drill inside my brain. Like I do with office-desks, when random printouts, keys, pens without caps, blah-important-person's cards, relevant printouts dogeared- pile up like a squatter settlement, that could otherwise a planned residential colony, with manicured trees, jogging tracks, basketball courts, swimming pools, shopping malls.

So I store information/thoughts/emotions/mindfuckingly brilliant analyses randomly, as and when it is created/fed into my brain in a Folder called Now. Categorisation, inventorisation, stocktaking happens at a later point. Sometimes it doesn't happen for a long stretch, and sometimes the Now folder gets overloaded, and some bits start talking to each other, quibbling, some brawls, and creating galata, and a red light blinks on the Now icon. Indicating that a SCUCV is required urgently.

So, the red has been blinking for a while now, and I have been ignoring it. And this is going to be SCUCV weekend. Check each file inside the Now Folder, delete if useless ( with reference to categories of life, work,daydream, people-who-matter, fashion, home, world politics, features, miscellaneous, cosmos). Check for files of future harm/debilitation potential- like irritating thought, petty comment from friend, funny brain-image of pimple-on-nose causing weird issues with the mirror. These are to be erased from Recycle Bin.

From what is left, check to see what corresponds to already existing folders- Friends, Family, Experiences with Opposite Sex, Sex, Delhi, Cal, Bangalore, Fiction, Non-fiction, Real, Imaginary, Cosmos, Daydream, Food, Books, Home, Aesthetics, Survival Skills, Being Unangsty Feminist, Being Angsty Feminist, Hot Men, Interesting People. Shift accordingly. From what remains, check for what can be clubbed together and put in a new folder. Possibly be named Things You Shall Never Do Again, Things You Have Enjoyed Thoroughly At Some Point But Now Find Terribly Boring, People Who Talk Too Much, Women Who You Don't Get, People Who You Find Inexplicably Attractive. Create such folders as may be deemed appropriate. Shift Files.

Remember: Sometimes things would require multiple copies to be stored in different folders. In which case, label such files ith names of folders where they are saved in multiplicity. To facilitate easy dig-up-old-stuff drills in future.

As a consequence, the Now Folder becomes empty, looks spotlessly clean (like hotel lobby floors), and you work it again from Monday morning.

Season-change post

2007-10-03T06:13:00.001-07:00

Something about the first nip in the air. Makes you imagine grey evenings when they are not yet grey. Smokes out of cigarette, DTC buses start smelling as though a firecracker just went out across the street. Full-sleeve kurtas are pulled out from the bottom of the pile. Razais are folded and kept ready at the foot of the bed.

As much as I turn up my bongsnob-nose at South Dilli, last winter, I must admit, I almost fell in love with the city. And with the moongphaliwalas lining the sidewalks of the city. There was a day in January, that I couldn't turn the page of an ice-cold file. I had never seen knee-length coats in pinks and yellows. And I had never known there were heaters in cars. In India. And had never imagined the weight of three blankets together. Just as I had never imagined that drinking and card-games were an essential part of a Hindu festival. At least its North-Indian version.

Delhi winters are charming. Somewhat like the city when it's not trying to assert conclusively its invincible makkhismo. Somewhat like a burly sardar cab-driver when he smiles ruefully and talks about his dead daughter.

Life and Laugh in a Metro

2007-09-29T00:23:00.000-07:00

The Cal metro started running from Tollygunge to Dum Dum in twenty five minutes, when I was in middle school.We would show it off to our out-of-town cousins, taking them on back-n-forth ride from Tollygunge.

The well-spaced-out recorded messages in a charming feminine voice in Hindi, English and Bangla and the approaching hint of a flickering light down the tracks, to assure the approach of a train- were the same when I first took the Delhi metro. With a friend. To get down at Chauri Bazaar.

And later to Janakpuri, down the western route, in a crowded metro. This was novel though.The intersecting routes. The touch your coupon to open the gates funda. And recently to Dwarka, Sector 9. A forty-five minute metro ride. Partly spent leaning over a diminutive-I-don't-fuck-obviously-migrant woman. With glazed glass bangles. And rib-bones peeping out from in between safety-pins guarding her cleavage. Next to her, chattering, were Banya women in fluorescent pink/green/sequiny synthetic-cotton saris. And mehendi hands. And pallus pulled over their heads. The lone man on the Ladies Seats, with a gaze frozen at an indeterminate point on the X-axis of the door.

Something about Ladies Seats. I thought. Giggling women personalising bits and chunks of public spaces. Maybe Jat constables and auto-drivers personalise an overwhelmed-in-sugar-chai-joint the same way. Creating a minute comfort zone. Maybe public spaces are just that. A jumble of personalised comfort-zones enmeshed together. The way the giggling women and the Jat constable and the Call-centre couple live different lives and laughs everyday. In the same geography.

U and I

2007-09-24T23:26:00.000-07:00

I have a profound theory about paradigmatic bubbles of Men and Women- but this captures it much more aptly than my attempts at profundity.

In other news, I am speaking to an old friend, Universe these days. Conversations are something like this:

U: So you must have it all figured out eh?
A: Of course, I have foresight. And I have been known to have taken sensible decisions in the past. My friends and family have known me to be independent, un-eccentric, head-screwed-onto-shoulders types. So surely...
U: Surely surely...
*****

U: So sometimes you strongly want to scream out loud and run like a madcap eh?
A: Not sometimes. Rarely. It's like 10-second sensation and then it goes. And I am back to being rational and head-screwed-onto-shoulders (RHSOS) again.
U: Of course, of course.
*****

A: U, you knew I would do this, didn't you? Why didn't you tell me?! U, you moron!
U: Then you wouldn't have done it, he he.
A: Of course, your job is to keep me RHSOS every time I waiver! Did you not know that, U?
U: My job is to keep you RHSOS. Relax, Her Sensibility is Often Surreal. My job is soo much fun, he he.
A: WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Art and Idiocy

2007-09-22T02:27:00.000-07:00

Hardam Mareez-an adaptation of Molliere's Imaginary Invalid- produced by Theatre Spirits (a Bombay group) made an unpromising Friday evening, mesmerised. By the sheer energy of the production. And I can think of no other word than 'energy' to describe the production. A refreshing change from years of mediocre 'tech-school-enthu-kids' efforts, and pretentious arty-thespian-guru productions, that I've watched in the recent years.

The first thing that catches one's attention about the play is a minimal stage, with a riot of colours thrown in by way of costumes. Halogen yellows, greens, pinks, reds creating a sense of absurdity. Of mesmerising ludicrous. With hoop-skirts and kaftans. And all footwear being coloured keds. A stylised dialogue-delivery in shudhh Hindi further consolidated the feel of absurd fantasy. More so, by exaggerated props (a cardboard lollipop, cardboard injection syringe, cardboard rose,empty wine bottles).

A hypochondriac man, a conniving stepmother, the damsel-in-distress daughter contemplating suicide (but never really...) out of unfulfilled love, her dreamy lover, a scoundrel of a stepmother's lover, eager-to-please suitor. And the star-of-the-show, the cunning maid-servant. Played with inconceivable artistry and stage-energy, by Shipra Singh, she is the cunning, sexual, assertive, foul-mouthed, garrulous, well-meaning woman. Whose every movement, every expression, every flirtation strikes the audience, with an injection of energy.

Art for art's sake. Epitomised. Two resplendent dance sequences.To what end, am not very sure. But mesmerising nevertheless. One by a cross-dressed, male dancer- an exotic, gypsy performance. Art of energy and madness. Unfettered idiocy. And sexuality. Spells out this production. No pretentious black boxes, and red scarves. No political, feminist, development, war, ethnicity, world bank angst. Refreshingly mad. Somewhat reminded me of a Nandikar fable-production I watched years back, in Cal, of course, with a higher skill-set of musical artistry (the Bong snob speaks). But, similar madness, energy, sort of a meaningless artistic journey.

If you're free this weekend shows are running today and tomorrow, at Shri Ram Centre, Safdar Hashmi Marg at 7 p.m. I am still reeling under the impact of Hardam Mareez.

version II

2007-09-18T23:37:00.000-07:00

A Hinge in the Middle

Something of a spongy sensation.

In age-old teak.

In humid morning shadows.

The edges of the desks worn out.

Of sharpness.

A hinge in the middle,

The lid folds into two.

It is funny-this hinge.

To run your finger along it,

Careful not to let it squeeze between the folding sections.

A lectern to rest your feet, carved like an inverted S,

Sheafs of paper tied together.

Answer booklet.

Please remember to number your answers in an orderly fashion.

A yellow plastic box

Yields a translucent ruler.

Sundrops turn rainbow around its edges.

If you wave it slowly near the window.

Suck candy.

Beneath summer foliage.

Section B- 30 marks.

Please attempt any three questions.

Wipe the dripping orange liquid.

Crumple dripping paper.

Press against palm.

Neatness- 1 mark.

Hinges along the window-pane too,

Along blue wooden panels.

Pindrop silence.

Along Iron-rust railings.

Iron-rust railings are two

f’s facing each other.

Run your finger along them.

Wet with sweat.

September 19, 2007

12.03 p.m.

This is something I first wrote on March 15, 2006. Out of a vivid junior school exam marijuana-induced recollection. The first version has been published. Found it amidst old documents this morning and took off most of the articles, especially the 'the's - they read like ugly decorative buttons on a black halter top. Fucked up the grammar a little here and there. This is version II.

Melancholy

2007-09-16T22:33:00.000-07:00

Melancholy is a word I learnt in High School, when we were being taught Midsummer Night's Dream. Sophisticated English teachers (who wore big red bindis, starched off-white saris, and were divorced) pointed out that Shakespearean imagery of winds and their sorcery was used, often, to depict moods. One of these moods being melancholy.

I graduated from the stage of cordiality with Melancholy, to that of familiarity in college, as I began to realise that PMS wasn't entirely a concoction of Oprah Winfrey and Agony Aunt columns of rave-n-rant feminists. When all my nonchalance gathered up, scraped- scrounged-piggie-bank-broken, could not put up a good enough fight for the onslaught engineered by Hormone army. And melancholy is the Lovechild of this cruel Hormonal onslaught upon my otherwise, ahem, Footloose and Fancifree self.

I am convinced PMS days can't be described better in any other term, in any other language, than the Shakespeare-favourite word Melancholy. In Hindi, it will probably be called Udaasi, but that fits only Greek Tragedy Queens, or Mala Sinha (from the 1950s) in a white sari. Can't think of an exact Bong word for it, but even if it strikes me, I'm sure it won't match the accuracy of Melancholy.

So last night, I experienced Melancholy (Vista version), where a book and good music and rains seem to gang up on you. Like school-bullies. And every third sentence in the book seems to resonate your Melancholy. And you confide in the spider web at the edges of the ceiling.

Dream Theatre

2007-09-09T22:17:00.000-07:00

This post brought back ruminations about Vishal Bharadwaj. I am an unapologetic secret lover. Of this budding master's easy dreamweaving around Shakespearean scripts. Creation of the surreal, the eerie, the dreamlike, the ghostly- is this man's brand of cinemagic.

Maqbool wove the edginess of forbidden desire, of an ambitious man of restraint, and a vivacious beauty trapped. Of feminine cunning. Of lovers, bent and broken. Of ambition losing its machismo. Of two quirky sycophants. Of violent intrigues being part of everyday life. Other than some RGV productions (Sarkar immediately comes to mind), I have not seen a filmmaker that creates unrealistic auras, with such elan. My filmwatching canvas, of course, being limited to Bollywood, Bangla Aantel movies, Hollywood purportedly Aantel movies, Oscar winners, and select Europe/Mexico/SE Asia movies.

Omkara is something I am a little obsessive about (as you will figure from my rantings in a fledgling movie blog that we dint ultimately kick off). Here too, Bharadwaj creates an aura of unreal cowbelt patriarchal society and internal power equations, which as urbane metro bubble-gum audience, I believe, every time I watch the movie. The machismo-wars that operate parallel yet entangled in the larger political wars, revealing the vulnerabilities of Boys with the Guns.

Chhatri Chor, similarly, creates an aura around a blue umbrella. A child's zealous possessiveness. A middle-aged man's innocent avarice. All the while spreading cinemagic amidst a sleepy hill-hamlet. Skies of peach and pathways of snow. Meadows of green, and cows of little girls. Musclepower, here too, of the fairytale variety. That one accepts, and does not scream out in outrage. Because it all fits in with Bharadwaj's dreamride.

I hear he is making a short film on HIV AIDS with Mira Nair, hope the dreamweaving will continue. And he will not break into the big scene and lose his taste for the unreal talking to the real. And I hope he will marry me someday. Sigh.

5:09 p.m. Machismo is my word for the week. Pronounced 'makkhismo'.

In Transit

2007-09-03T00:10:00.000-07:00

My new room can accommodate a small football ground, definitely a dance floor, maybe a lawschool party. Where one corner would be dedicated to substance and its disciples, the other to random snogging, the other to couple-angst, the middle to drunken dancing, some around the middle area to puking.

Yanyways, I am discovering that a deadly Housewife bug has bitten me. Such that I am noticing dirt on the edges of curtain roads, reminding our new Domestic Support System to lift chatais while sweeping, and remember to pick up a dustbin on the way home... stoned.

Ma used to come to my hostel room when term began to help me set up shop. Armed with a Cleaning Agenda. I would stand back bored, annoyed, wanting to run out to smoke-chai zone and catch up on holiday gossip, and wonder what the big deal about some dust on the window sill was. Increasingly, the specs of dust on window-sills are beginning to bother me, such that their elimination is becoming a life priority. So much so that the sound of cute suburban house- cocker spaniel-kitchen-garden-SUV- children-with-muddy-hands is not sounding so disgusting.

This is probably the Womanhood checkpost, and my baggage is getting scanned and the unnecessaries and untransitables are being gleaned out. As I stand back and watch heredity, peer cultures and hormones fuck my head.

Cartons and Brown Tape

2007-08-29T02:49:00.000-07:00

I am crossing the Ring Road this weekend, and looking to rehabilitate flatmate and myself on the other side. Packing and Moving, has somehow, been a recurrent image in visual memoirs so far. Cartons and brown tape to be organised. Suitcases and trolley bags to be dusted. House-shifting memories of Calcutta invariably throw up images of dust- everywhere, lots of pencils and erasers found, left companion of old blue ear-rings, forgotten broken toys emerged from underneath beds, half-baked angst poems written on last pages of Homework books.The site of our lives packed in cartons and brown tapes would always make me nervous, that when the cartons were reopened the alignment of our lives would be reconfigured.

Moving was sort of exciting. Reclaiming of spaces. Renaming of nooks and corners. Refighting over 'my side' and 'your side'. Remaking of friends in the new neighbourhoods. And never quite growing out of the old ones.

I went back to one of my old Calcutta neighbourhoods in my graduating year, in college, during the Pujas. To find fourteen-year-old boys still hanging around in groups, and making fun of girls in stretch jeans. And one or two lone bravehearts, crossing the bridges, and cracking South Point jokes with the Friend of the Pretty Girl. The names and faces were unfamiliar. The ritual was still the same.

******

After school, the moving became a me-myself activity. The shivers felt on the night before I was to be carted bag and baggage to the Hostel, all of eighteen. Straight out of missionary girls' school. Never having slept alone. This was the promise and jitter of Unfettered Freedom. And home on Saturday afternoons. And back on Monday mornings. For the next five years.

Friday-night Packing became a habit. Laundry, toothbrush, specs, lenses, project material, some reading. Leaving behind a boy to his Weekend Boys' Club respite.

Then there was Internship packing. For a month or so. Court clothes. Winter clothes. Ma's Handyman kit would contain medicines, san naps, hotel toiletries, facewash.

******

The next move was to Delhi. Which involved Ma's ruthless censoring of all things 'stupid teenager', that would not fit into 'Now you are a lawyer' era. So loud tank tops, tie-up pajamas, bandanas, glass bangles, stupid books, Aantel books, Aantel clothes, were mercilessly eliminated. Of course, a chapter of my wardrobe, that Ma never got to see, took the Karnataka Express directly from the hostel, in polythene bag, and came to Delhi. Independently.

And the New era over the last year and a half collected for itself, new Aantel books and clothes, new hats, new Sarojini pajamas, new unmentionables. And are now being cartoned and brown-taped for another round of the Pack and Move.

******

Glossary

South Point: A beacon in the Bengal realm of education, holds some Asia record in being a popular/populous school. Ask any Cal bong for cultural context anecdotes.
Aantel: The French and Bong way of saying 'intellectual'.

Legal Sized up

2007-08-23T23:58:00.000-07:00

By-laws and bare acts.
Judgments in juice-shops.
Legal sized.
Centres and Margins of
1.33 inches.
Heretofore
and Theretofore.

We screw or get screwed

Meticulously.
In ministerial wings.
In joint secretary's underpants.
In Corridors of gossip.
Courts of impleadment.
Impleadment of affidavits.
Affidavits of courtrooms.
Courtrooms of justice.

We screw or get screwed

Over
Dams of displaced.
Muck of minorities.
Quotable quotas.
Forests of the forensics.
Interim orders.
In territories of jurisdiction.
In terrorist movie-halls.

Heretofore, maybe
Theretofore.

We screw or get screwed

Likewise.

Of alone-times

2007-08-11T01:50:00.000-07:00

When we were in school, 'loner's were the weird scrawny girls who used to go round and round a big tree on the school grounds, during games period. When the rest were learning how to dribble. Or sprint. Or show off the tan on their thighs. Or walk around in groups chatting about their 'boyfriends' who buy them ice-cream after school.

Loners were girls who never took part in the annual play, or the elocution competition, and had their class-teachers tell their mothers "She is very competent, but should try to participate in more activities to gain confidence." Of course, I was never one of them. So my class-teacher always told my mother "She should chat less in class, be less distracted, and improve her handwriting." So I would do the school play, and the debate and the elocution and try my hand at the piano and try my hand at Bong poetry. And scoff at girls who ate ice-creams with cute boys after school. Of course, scoff at the cute boys per se. They were all so lame. And none of them offered to buy me ice-cream. So I was the vivacious, un-pretty, 'all-round' student. And not a Loner.

I never needed alone-time. In fact,in college, I would probably be a little worried about my popularity quotient if I found myself reading a book in the hostel, on a Saturday night. Alone-time, was what people who wrote thirty papers in a term, needed. And then there was a night, when it rained, and I had half a paper left, and six hours away from a deadline. And I smoked a lone cigarette perched on the tank, at the terrace, and watched eucalyptuses sway in the wind, and street lamps make eucalyptus-shadows quiver along the phallic pillar of the library building.

Through the next coupla years, I spent Sunday afternoons walking around Church Street and St.Marks, around the corridors of the Academic Block. Along Park Street, Free School Street, Dhaurmotolla, Sealdah Station, in local trains. In Lutyens' galis, around CP, in Chandni Chowk, in Tees Hazari, in the Supreme Court. Not wanting to participate, express, or improve handwriting. Very content to simply absorb. Perhaps, wanting alone-time. Perhaps, a Loner. A happy one at that.

Bongspeak

2007-08-06T03:41:00.000-07:00

I am increasingly beginning to get the feeling that Delhi digs Bongs lots. Especially the artsy-fartsy, wine-and-kabab-at-habitat Dilliwala. For whom the imagination of the Bong is thus:

- Men spout Goethe and Habermas in their nappies;
- The sexier men are photographers, film-makers, film crits, litcrits, wannabe writers;
- The sexiest men live in abject poverty;
- Marx is taught in nursery rhyme in the Bong home;
- The women are all dusky-hot with big eyes and crumpled cotton saris;
- The sexier women are film crits, lit crits, political scientists, dancers, actors;
- The sexiest women are very rich;
- The sexier of the sexist are enthusiasts of jazz, western classical music and robindroshongeet.

Now, I am thinking whatever is going to happen to the millions of sexy Bong men in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ohio, Dallas, San Francisco and Salt Lake who are :

- Spouting code in their orgasms;
- Sucking phirang (ahem..) organs to jump from green to purple card status;
- Knowing astrophysics, biotechnology or code;
- Knowing that their mothers are virgins;
- Not knowing rich any sexy dusky Bong women with big eyes and intellectual boyfriends;
- Making lots of money and no love;
- Living in perpetual fear of voluble girlfriends(who are giving no action), mother and sisters (who are, of course, virgins);
- Spending Dallas-weekends with Kakoos and pishis in Connecticut.

Further, I am also wondering and feeling somewhat sympathetic about the zillion Bong women who are:
- Rather adipose-friendly and devoid of intellectual boyfriends;
- Finishing PhDs in astrophysics, biotechnology or code;
- Finding Presi-Eco boyfriends or JU-English boyfriends to be devoid of prospects;
- Therefore finding 'prospect'ive boyfriends in Dallas or Ohio;
- Wearing tight slinky sequin dresses and daincing in Tantra when they are feeling frustrated at not finding Dallas boyfriends;
- Singing robindroshongeet and Linkin Park;
- Giving out subtle mate calls in Maddox Square, Kolkata during Durga Puja.

So, basically, I am feeling mighty flattered at the IHC-wine-kabab-modernity gang's interest in my clan, but am wishing they would be little more inclusive in their Bong-fetish, so that many more dadas and didis (including myself) can feel sexy.