I think I am off to Goa. I wasn't sure if it would work or not till now so yeah think I am going.

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL!!

 

Tra la la la tra la la la la tra la tra laa

Dum Dum Dum Dum
















tra la la la la la la la la la la



















*************************************************************************************
The one month no smoking mark
*************************************************************************************
(Though I still don't know which adults read this blog I am tired of nicotinous and intoxicant censorship, please to be understanding. besides this is pressurizing myself to stick to it. Not for komal twacha or komal lungs but simply to challenge myself. :)

I am sorry I can't help having a right arm

I just went down the road from my house today to get change, sleepy , in a skirt and spaghetti. This woman saw me and said something to the effect of ' Shameless,vulgar,blasphemy'..I don't know exactly what but judging from her tone and facial expression -that.

I was so disheartened. Because of years of patriarchy blah blah it has become an unquestioned thing that women have to be apologetic about their body. People who I think are rational in every other aspect of life still don't find that weird.

R was saying that day that she hates stoles and dupattas because they are modesty garments. It is bizzare though isn't it that from the dupatta to the hijab , garments have evolved to shroud women's bodies and somewhat asexualize them.

I am not however saying that it is compulsory for supposedly progressive women to go about wearing as little as possible. The opposite stereotype also is true.For instance if I turn up in this extremely loose kurta I'd be said to look like a cow/old whatever.!

Also what is feminine or 'chicky' would automatically be associated with being 'ditsy' or blonde or whatever. That is because it is stereotypically feminine and hence that is dumb??!

Why ? It's just as simple about whatever you are comfortable with isn;t it. It is seemingly trivial but reflects a lot about societal attitudes.My maid always instructs me to not even go to the corner shop showing extra bits of arm or leg!

Now to talk about blank noise

What really is the point of randomly hanging out at the railings, being yourself, not fiddling about with your phone or bag but just standing around coz you want to.

It is so empowering to reverse the gaze, be unapologetic about yourself and that feeling transcends into daily life.

Once you've overcome physically shrouding your body 'protecting' yourself with your elbows and stoles when you navigate through crowded streets, I supposse you begin to shed the mental inhibitions too and start questioning gender stereotypes with more confidence.



One night at about 12. R and I walked into this really shady tea place called Kohinoor where they were shocked to see women so late at night confidently walking in. I really wouldn't have done that two years ago unless we had guys with us or something .

A bunch of women walking around in the middle of the night is not exactly sanity as many of our self appointed male protectors told us on our night walk.

Male spaces and times are so rigidly defined that to rebel against it is regarded as bizarre naivete.

'It's not practical yaar, night time , you know Bangalore na?'

Spaces like shady bars are so restricted to males and women would be labelled if they went to one of those.
I am also more confident about shedding euphemisms even if it means risking the wrath of my maybe fundamentalist male chauvinistic university exam corrector.

--




Photos from the blank noise blog

'War is Menstruation Envy.'

Hungry Kya?

I totally totally have to tell you 'll about this awesome site called www.hungrybangalore.com.
It has a database of all the restaurants in bangalore that deliver home , listed area wise, along with the menus.All you have to do is add whatever you want to your cart and they call you in five minutes and confirm your order and then bring you your food.
Awesome no? These are times when I feel like being in love with the modern world.

add words tise ments

I love being a substitute
I love my commute to work.
I love the company.
I love missing the last bus home.

Duh!
So Sony erricson plays with the sentiments of its target market-the corporate world? - plays with the sordidness of an urban life .


With the samsung blah blah phone, you can live two lives at once. Do two things at once. On an exoticised boat in Kerala AND in a board meeting. Helping an old wrinkly woman sleep on a dirty crowded bus and ..
In the inch of target audience that I am.
Be a travel writer and earn like an investment banker.
Be a trekker and not sink your youth in the flat foreboding screen of the computer.(caffeine aided,air conditioned)+perks ***

'I always wanted to quit on Monday Mornings.'
RECLAIM your damn life man with some bloody car.
even if all you can do is chug chug your car through traffic adventures.
'But I swear that monday morning husky voice sticks in my head whenever I am loaded with work and want to run off to some godforsaken part of myanmar.


But , honey , real life is not being advertisement.
real life sucks slightly more
and those bastards know that.

copywriter me become?

picture caption: Underexposed pictures of hot monks in coorg that i took even as the boat i was on was speeding away. And am not the only one guilty of finding them hot! What connection the pic may have to this post is open to postmodernist/Freudian intepretation. ANd i cant seem to upload it so later ok?
Im getting better at writing crap, I know.

To sell or not to sell?

Things that make me forget that I am a wannabe saver of the world and tempt me to sell my soul to a corporate job.


nice shoes,TRAVEL,alcohol and its cousins,food,ridiculously expensive clothes that I want to buy anyway,
Europe-( ah, well the idea of it, I've never been there), cover charge,
books-beautiful big ones with wowwwwwwwwwwwwwww photographs,books,
cameras and lenses!
SILVER jewellery,
an AC,


Antiques of all kinds
gadgets
pretty much a lot.
A semester before college ends,career confusion remains constant.

haven't slept a wink for some twenty six hours.And all sorts of Hydroxide molecules float around in my blood.

Everything in my mind seems to have deconstructed itself from conditioned , accepted norms.

When the cop says we're making a big deal out of 'normal girl boy teasing', I want to spit at this simplistic bloody view of life.

And I hand some woman one of the blogathon testimonials and she rushes back to me an hour later, finds me amidst the oppressive Brigade Road crowd, Today littered with the shocking presence of girls just leaning over the railing..

Some conversion pamphlet that says God loves me. Umm sorry religion doesn't work for me. All religions have some absolutely beautiful wonderful things about them. They ALLlack something somewhere , have gone utterly preciously ,ruining humanity type wrong with sometings and perhaps, perhaps , they all have most core ideas in common.
They just evolved to give humanity a feeling of security . Thus they varied in places acrss the world.

yeah so this woman felt bad for me that i handed an eve teasing testimonial? and tried to convert me?

Update:

Still haven't slept much. Having nightmares of a little ghost girl called Barbara.
Sylvia Plath- it's her fault- I've been reading too much.

Umm yeah thaats all, spelling grammer mistakes included

You are wanted

Savita: age 22 - I was walking down the road. Unknown hands 'accidentally' brushed against my crotch. Time 9 pm.

Mohini: age 25 - A stranger man in his rubbed his erect genitals on me. Time 3 pm.

Farah: age 16- I shouted at a man who was making sounds and looking at my breasts and the public started laughing at me. Time 12 30 pm

Sujata: age 13- I was waiting for my mother to pick me up after school. A man in a car stopped "How much for an hour?" Time 1 30 pm

Pinky: age 11- I was taking the bus to tutions. A hand up the back of my skirt. I was numbed. Time 4 pm

Sonal: age 13 - On the scooter with Appa. Two boys pinched my breasts as they speed by on their bikes. Time 8 20pm

Piya: age 27 2 men above the age of 50 passed comments about my breasts. I spat at them and hit them with my chappal. Time 5 pm

Niti:age 18. an unknown groped my breast and disappeared in the crowd. The hand is yet to be identified. Time 3 pm

Jaysree: age 19. I was walking home and a guy in a car tried to pull me inside.
Time 6 pm

Garima: age 16 was stalked for 1 hour and had to hide in a phone booth. Time: 7 pm

Laxmi: age 37 I was constantly 'accidentally' elbowed in my breasts by a man in front of me. Time: 4 pm

Alka: age 9 A man I don't know whistled at me when I was going to school. My mother did not let me go to school that day. Time 8 .05 am

Nupur: age 32 I was waiting for the bus. 4 cars with men stopped by and asked me to come with them. Time 8 15 pm

Radha: age 50 I was enjoying my daily morning walk until I saw a van kept following me and asking, how much? Time 7 am

Priya: age 17 He held me from the back and tried to drag me into a lane. I bit him and ran away. Time: 6 45 pm.

Meetu: age 7 was getting inside an auto. A man put his hand between my legs.
I am speaking about it after 20 years. Time 5 pm

Gayatri: age 53 I was getting inside a bus. A man put his hand between my legs. I reacted. I slapped him hard. The public also joined in. Time 6 pm

Anusree :age 21 Man on a bicycle rode past and spat on me. Time 6 35 pm.

Mansi: age 17 Anonymous man kept mumbling, whispering that he wanted to 'fuck me'. Time. 4 45 pm.

Sushma: age 31 A man squeezed my breasts hard and disappeared. Time. 9 pm

And you?


Who we are, where we go, what we wear, how we sit, stand, talk, walk in our very own cities. When we demand the need to make our cities non threatening , I don't expect anyone to think of me as their sister or mother, but to really look at women as citizens who have every right to be out on the streets, without any explanation. Sometimes we just love to walk, stand around, hang around, without looking 'available.'

We experience eve teasing, a sexual violation on an everyday basis but we ignore it, by justifying it as 'normal'. The impact of 'eve-teasing' on the victim is often discounted when it is popularly perceived as a joke or a prank. Blank noise feels that this is also damaging and has severe long term consequences on the mental health of most women. Blank noise seeks to enable women to reclaim their space. The idea is to form a collective, confront the issue by raising more questions, deny denial and heal. Blank Noise works with people through performance, blogging, and street interventions.

Blank Noise Project Bangalore calls for women/ girls/ ladies/ of all ages, languages, colour, and shape to be participate in a street intervention on Sunday Nov 12th. Venue: Brigade Road. By participating you will be celebrated as a BNP Action Hero.

We guarantee that this performative action won't ask you to be acrobatic, but to be yourself, and experience the site you act upon transform. Be the stimuli, be an action hero.

Confirm /ask us questions at 98868 40612. This street intervention will be approximately 1.5 hours

I've been instructed to blog and the only ting I feel like saying is in memory of all the plans I've cancelled because it's too late to enjoy an evening without worrying about being raped, robbed, hurt in anyway on the way back.

The Afghan Women

Come ok?
This Friday, 27th Oct , 7 PM , Good Sheperd's Auditorium , Brigade Road

'You are just another invader. You think you bring us a wonderful gift. You call it freedom. Free from God. Free from family. Free from all restrictions.'


'There is a yearning for a day when one person will be as good as another.When laws, not men , will rule us'.


'You live in another Afghanistan'.

To quit or not to quit

is not a question anymore..


You know things. Ofcourse you do.


But do you know that exact feeling when you realize what you've known all along and completely feel and understand it?
Wait, don't go away.. I will explain.
You use polythene bags all the time. One moment in a high school chemistry class you realized that the notorious thin material is made of ethene. Poly ethene. Many ethene molecules.
And your like oh yeaaah!

Or hmm.. more examples? Tell me.

Today I realized what it really means to be completely unfazed by constant discouragement, criticism . How to do your thing and to not give up when it is expected that you will.
I am a sucker for discouragement. I bend , break and QUIT. Stupid as it might sound , I've never really felt the urge to carry on when it becomes untakable.I move on and then feel overburdened by the load of half done QUITS. Invisibly haunting me and following me tainting other paths.
It 's a precious thing to have that tiny pocket of confidence within me though it might be a tad too late in my life. Like duh! it is. To rely on that little stream of confidence .


Today I felt that exact feeling.

  

WHEN I've had ENOUGH sleep ....

isn't it the best feeling in the world to go to sleep after reading a book a true book..not some thing remotely connected to education!
and then to wake up in the morning when i want to.
Not forcing myself out of bed with coffee shots and dazing myself through a million things each day. THAT's why i deserve to bunk college today . and do all these deleciously velaaaaaaaaa things like waste my time on orkut.

I found a friend who I knew in primary school!! wow! we were besttt friends then. We had sleepovers and picnics and played all these dream childhood games !
We went to farmhouses and learnt karate. (I have a blue belt in karate but I don't know what it means anymore) .We went to watch hum aapke hain kaun , a bunch of unaccompanied kids and felt very cool about it. In the pre multiplex era in some sidey theatre , that too. There was a whole gang but I only found one on orkut.Make that two actually. The other one joined my new school and have more or less kept track of her.

I found some others who remember vaguely as well. When I went to boarding school I completely lost touch with everyone and here they all are , gown up and living their lives all over the world . What did I expect? For them to be short and thin with baby voices , ready to run out after the lunch bell rang?
For a rootless nomad like me , it's even nicer to find someone who has the same memories as me. I sometimes think my memories are only mine and they were made in places I am unlikely to ever go back again. It's funny how nice it is to look at the past and the relevance it has to your present. What can i possibly have in common with these people though after seperate lives in different schools , colleges, cities , countries? Just that we knew each other in the first few years of our lives , I guess and that's nice , ain't it?

heeeheehaahaaaheheehhaaahaaas sorry heheeehahaha sorry no i swear hehehehe

Assuming I have an audience and a sensible mature one at that, I don't expect any one to emphatize with me in this post. Because I am not sensible and mature at all.
To get to the point , I always find myself in situations where I have crazy laughing fits in the most inappropriate contexts!
Today , at rehearsal ( serious , tense scene ) and every person on stage is in splits!

Delivering violent dialogues and laughing! How I pity my director but silly as it might sound , it's hard to control laughter when as much as a look from another person can have you in splits!

Most often, the situation won't even be conventionally funny much to the dismay of the mature spectator! And I especially feel like laughing when it is completely quiet and serious. In school we had this thing called astachal where the whole school goes and sits up on the hill in the evening to watch the sunset for fifteen minutes. I've excluded words like introspection , self reflection , meditation.....add it all ok?

Umm so yeah, once I saw this kid piling sand into her mother's lap with great dedication during astachal and my friend and I burst into a bizzare fit of uncontrollable laughter!That got us into so much trouble!!
And another time I die half way through the play and am carried on a stretcher . I used to laugh like crazy then ! !! a dead body covered with a white sheet shaking with laughter. unintentionally intended spookiness. When the real show happened I didn't laugh..THank god for that!And I hope I don't this time too!

Technology means to me
mailing my accounts to my dad's friend in New Zealand on Sunday night ,when morning just begins for them and then having it ready on Monday morning to submit.

Asking my brother in Malaysia through google talk about how to make rice.
..

and i like this poem

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

Even if you don't know what you want,
buy _something,_ to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

Rumi, 'We Are Three', Mathnawi VI, 831-845

Six o clock on a fresh new Monday morning with the promises of turning over a new leaf ...(in RJVOICE)

Wake up at five thirty to make sense of financials that I got my dad to do for me so I appear slightly intelligent in front of teacher.

Go to french class, all the way know that the metre is fast and consciously tell myself it's more important to enjoy the morning air, the empty roads, the green trees


but scream my nostrils off at the auto drive
and make myself sound like a martyr saying I didn't want to fight 'subah subah'.


Discover there is NO french class and nobody's been told.

Come back with auto fight routine and get bizzare mails such as this.


itz tru i dnt kno u bt i feel tht every beauty n sexy feature f ppl shud b told n thts me thts y my frnds call me hash!!!!!!!! wanna b frnds???????
dnt say no or else ill go on d top f forum buildin n thro a paper as if throin a memory frm d top..... i m waitin 4 a reply




Ho Ho merry christmas!!

Bangalore Central Central Bangalore

 
  

 
 
  

Random Bangalore pics