The few minutes of hating Delhi

 are usually at 2 am in the morning wondering how the hell one must get back home. 

chatting with people from other jobs

 Sachida:  that's alright

so you come (home, sic) this evening with Miss Chauhan?

 Sent at 15:16 on Wednesday

 me:  I am unaware of the circumstances that will lead to dusk

But if they are favourable, yes

in terms of bomb blasts and journalism I mean

Mere anarchy may be loosed upon the world by then,

by dawn

 Sachida:  aren't blasts a journalist's thali?

 me:  You mean sensous scrumptous

wholesome

satisfying

productive

 Sachida:  yep

scams and some mistreated woman are his/her bread and butter

but a bomb blast? My god it's a feast

You may say I am a dreamer

We are the romantics. We put up pictures on our tumblr blogs of pretty wooden swings that fly above wet green grass in a village in Italy. We snatch beautiful words and place them for posterity. We gang up together in our little parties making the best drinks we can with the little money we have and get overwhelmed at the intensities that life throws at us. We make sudden travel plans that are hopelessly impractical and utterly exhausting because we like the practical people have jobs. When reality is gray and so so, we turn up the volume in our heads and our eyes and live in our imagination. We waste money on buying pretty clothes.

We fall bang into the dangerous space of love and do it again and again and again till it seems like we can endure better than the others but we can't. Not really. It's still Delhi here, and tepid fart like weather and a nice-ish day has ended. It's still Delhi and I am in a quiet restrained room, all alone, listening to music. 

Of thorns, selling and Shahrukh Khan

A book launch was simultaneously satire of the consumer world and star studded with Shahrukh's presence

 

The impression I got was that if I had to get your attention, I should start with speaking about Shahrukh Khan and his explanation for having said "I am the best." He said that only because he had an inferiority complex, apparently  -- he didn't feel that he was good enough. People clawed at him for autographing the book, followed him till they reached the hemlines of the backstage curtains through which he disappeared leaving a vacuum of disappointed children, ladies and gentleman. A small girl dressed in a ghaghra choli for the special occasion jumped up and down, smiling.

 

 Since very few book launches these days are complete without the Bollywood presence, IIPM dean Arindam Chaudhuri and his wife Rajita Chaudhuri invited Shahrukh Khan for the launch of their book Thorns to Competition about marketing strategies.

The lights were dimmed and a cardboard cactus (with one of the cactus stems deliberately revealing a middle finger) was surrounded by flickering blue lights. Shahrukh Khan arrived two hours late and pressed the remote control and out of this garish set up, the book burst forth along with jhink jhack music (that was played before the arrival of every important speaker).

 

Thorns is an acronym (Khan called it a pseudonym) but we come to that later. We knew that the modern marketplace is a war zone but we pretty much had to keep our satirical glasses on throughout the show.

Arindam Chaudhuri enters stage after the music aided anticipation. "This book is one of the best books, I believe," he says. Chaudhuri talked about how he kept gifting his father expensive watches, but his father insisted on wearing his old watch from high school, much to his son's exasperation. It was a problem with his father's generation. They didn't warm up to the consumer economy as well as we do. "They judged people by what they knew and what they learnt. Marketing teaches you to forget a person's worth. He appreciated things like music, art, literature etc," he said. Apparently, the more you read, the more you want to read, the more you listen to music, the more you want to listen. Now, that's increasing marginal utility. Before you switch off, an explanation will be offered.

 

Usually it is the generation that is in its teens and twenties that is criticized for its 140 character arguments, its Facebook status relationship breakups, the works. Arindam Chaudhuri superimposes a neat economic theory on all these varied life experiences. The law of diminishing marginal utility. The more you have something the less you want it. But at the same time, you don't want the old watch anymore, but you want the new one.

Just as you buy phone 4560, a radio host tells you phone 4560 is out and 4670 is in. "A satisfied customer is the marketing man's worst nightmare," said Chaudhuri.

 

Meanwhile, in the room with blue lights, cameramen were fidgety. When was Shahrukh Khan, sitting in the front row going to step on stage and do camera worthy things?

When he finally did, they screamed to the organizers. "Lights, lights, lights"

 

Shahrukh gave thorns to competition we were told. He endorsed women's products, he was the first star to accept a negative role in Darr (1993) and by the way, he has been "chatting with Lady Gaga and is doing a song with her." It's a marketing thing, he says. "We want to exchange audiences."

 

Khan was impeccable in his role for the night as the humble, saying Namaste to the old ladies and gentlemen invited to stage super star. He came across at least as humble and a little unsure.

 

 

He could be a dilliwalla, he insisted, even though he kept on his best theatre accent in Mumbai. "When I was struggling in Bollywood I wanted to hit many people hard. I can be a dilliwallah  and talk like (insert Haryanvi accented expletives). Loud cheers erupt from the audience that had till then held on to every word he spoke in a quiet, contained rapture.

 

 

 

The thousands at Ramlila Maidan

Here were people who had come with anger, with hope and with expectation. They were angry because they had taken the daily frustrations of living in this country as a given. That you have to pay a bribe to get a ration card, that state subsidized food is sold at high prices, that you have to pay to get into medical college, that people who worked less hard could pay their way into medical college. They had laughed it away. It happens only in India.
Suddenly, here was a man who assured them that it was alright to be angry. A man who allowed them to be angry. A quote I read recently makes sense in this context :

“If you don’t have self-esteem, you will hesitate to do anything in your life. You will hesitate to report a rape. You will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote; you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution, and our revolution is long overdue.”— Margaret Cho

Anna Hazare gave them this self-esteem. The people were angry and they were hopeful. “What makes you think the Jan Lokpal bill, just another piece of legislation, just like the others we have, will change this country?,” I asked all the 80 odd people I spoke to. The answers were varied and colourful but in essence – there were two types.

Type one: “This is Anna’s bill, not the government bill.”
Type two: “No problem can disappear completely. At least 70% corruption will go.”
Anna is the icon, the go-to God, the sacrosanct Krishna they have waited for. Santosh Chaudhury, a farmer from Darbhanga in his thirties, believes Anna has returned as an incarnation of Krishna. A follower of Baba Ramdev, he has been coming since April. “Yada yada hi dharmasya… glanirbhavati bharata…,” he quotes with great flourish. (Roughly, when there is too much sin in the world, Krishna will return to save it.)

Faith and religion were magnetic words that drew people by the thousands, and it buoyed the other important word—patriotism. Inquilab Zindabad (Glory to the revolution) was at best a quaint phrase reserved for Hindi movies or smaller, less televised revolutions. But at Ground Zero, Hazare, farmers, college students, middle class, lower middle class, wealthy designer wear clad men ,women and school children were chanting it together.
People were thirsty for a revolution.
People like myself – people from the middle and lower middle class had studied Gandhi in History class. They had seen Bollywood films in which heroes fall down and surrender to the police/to a higher power for the country. Where people die for the country to be glorified forever. They cheered to songs from Lagaan, Swades and Rang De Basanti.

People had expectations too. They expected to be heard. They had seen it all play out on TV. TV was finally talking about them. Their day to day problems – not being issued a ration card, etc were getting a sounding board in the national media. All you had to do was walk around with a notebook. (There is also the subtle class marker which identifies you as a journalist.) People came to you and said, this is me, I am from here, I came from there and I am angry with the government, they haven’t done a damn thing right. Shaheen waited three years to enter medical school because of corruption. An 85-year old man from Punjab had seen the British go, the world around him transform and he was deeply disappointed. Twenty two year old Suraj from Allahbad didn’t want to pay to get a government job.
Arvind Kejriwal, meanwhile, is the young hero and hero for the young. He tells the audience how the Government was trying to deny them their rights, how it played games and was trying to force Team Hazare to surrender. The scenes from those inspiring movies replayed in audiences’ minds when Kejriwal spoke.
“Doston, yeh sarkaar hamse kehti hai ki…(Friends, this government tells us that)…,” is the way he starts every line while telling the crowd about the discussions with the government. “Kya ham yeh maan lein…? (Can we accept this?),” he asks like a seasoned political campaigner and a collective ‘nahi’ is followed by another round of “Inquilab Zindabad.”
He then tells them how the government mistreated the Anna’s representatives. The fuse had been lit. Ministers Pranab Mukherjee and Salman Khursheed know the rest. The media rounded them up on behalf of the crowd at Ramlila Maidan.


The crowd at Ramlila Maidan came to you and asked you to write down its story. In front of the Prime Minister’s house, when the all party meeting was happening, a meeting in which talks would fail, a few protestors managed to sneak in. Roads had been blocked for atleast 4 kilometres around the residence. Only the media was allowed. The media had set up camp, with a row of black obedient tripods focussed on the white house. Nothing happened for a while. Vilasrao Deshmukh zipped by the car and the journalists awoke like birds fluttering at a stone.
Finally, a group of women and one or two men came in sloganeering. An alert camera man said to one of the women, “Madam, idhar hi kar lejiye,” Madam, please protest right here – where I have set up.
The women, the men they performed for the camera. The politicians were inside talking politics. Some of them slipped away. One man fell on the ground and said Vande Mataram many times even as the police dragged him away in the police van, to drop him off at Ramlila Maidan, the legal site for protest.


Images from Tehelka.
Some of this material has been used in my stories in Tehelka.

We are making heavenly smelling basil pesto. I actually want to grow
up into someone who can pluck basil and coriander from the garden and
dunk into food.

Of Butter Chicken and Co

I have noticed a rather worrying trend in the South and especially in Tamil Nadu. Dravidian Movement, Tamil pride apart, everyone on the street in Chennai seemed to be ready to demonstrate their knowledge of Hindi. The best indication of the North Indianization of the South- (apart from the extra glittered Kanjeevaram sarees) is food. To me, food is a metaphor for many things. When we went to Pondicherry (this was more than seven months ago), we stayed in a mid range business hotel. I am a fan of hotels like this - the clean bathrooms and the anonymous decor that brings us - the guests into central focus. 

However, their menu had only one South Indian dish on the menu - Chicken Chettinad, which in any case is a mainstream Lajpat Nagar dish. But since, I had to make use of being in the south, I was always keeping a look out for authentic food.The dosa in the Chennai bus stop can for instance put Sagar Ratna out of business in one day. Anyhow, so I wanted to try real Chettinad food. When I was growing up, I had a cook from Chettinad. My brother would (in his endless cruelty) point out to her birds from books like Birding in North Carolina  and she, who has never left South India, claim to have eaten all of them. She was in general, an interesting character. For example, when she was a child she said she had been scared that crows would steal her breasts away....but I digress. 

Chettinad food, like most well intention-ed cuisines of the world offers little to the vegetarian and yet I, the lover of Korean Bimbimbap and the braverer of Naga restarants persevere. The typical dishes include Roast Rabbit, the spicy Egg Curry, Kothu Paratha- mashed up Paratha seasoned with onion, tomatoes and spices with the option of meat, etc. 

So, we went to Anjappar, a chain of Chettinad restaurants that I have been familiar with since college in Chennai. 

Deeply excited, I settled into the musty smelling room. I went through the menu and with great difficulty settled on a few dishes I could try, prepared to over order because it would be months before I was back in the south. 

"What is available?," I asked the waiter. " Naan, Fried Rice, Paneer," he said. 

Now, you don't spend FIVE hours (despite my penchant for exaggeration, I don't plead guilty) convincing a European to try spicy South Indian "water dal" and then go to Anjappar and order Paneer Butter Masala. That would be loss of self respect.I walked out. 

Only to be faced with another buffet for which I paid the whole price to ignore the naan and the biryani to eat Rasam Sadam and Chilly Egg. And so, in any case this North Indianization of the South is something I fear. Homogenization of cultures to adhere to the idea of India which is artificial. Just like in most Bollywood movies, the characters are Punjabi or they have no specific culture but in some odd generic way, are mildly relatable to everyone. In any case, perhaps it's just easier to pack a kathi roll than rasam sadam and convenient packaging makes life simpler.

A woman in Louisiana can pee in peace.

I was reading this and remembered in retrospect how a conversation 
I had in 2008 was so surreal. It was with a woman who had sold her kidneys for 

Rs.40,000 to a middle man who would then make sure it was implanted in an American woman.

Yes, true. The details evade me now but it was in a slum on the outskirts of Chennai. It was hot and dusty and we were under pressure to put out a piece for the college Television bulletin that no one watched. The women fussed over my North eastern companion because she is light skinned. We were pointed to the house of the woman who sold her kidneys. There was a DVD Player, a TV and my horrified journalism student mind was thinking, "Damn, the kidneys paid for this." The family was not exceptionally poor by the standards of their community. The woman, lets call her Revati sold the fish that her husband, lets call him Gopal caught. The tsunami had changed their fortunes because they were shifted to apartment buildings far away from the sea. They still got by but the offer of money for kidneys just seemed too lucrative to ignore. And now a woman somewhere in (say) Louisiana can pee in peace. 

The fanatic who eats like a rabbit.

Being a vegetarian is like having to live in a cauldron full of defences - that you need to squirt frequently in order to eat your spinach cannelloni in peace or hold on to your love for Thayir Sadam.  You need to constantly reassure people that the reason you hate shrimp undertones in your Vegetables in Hot and Sweet Sauce is not because your are a Brahminical - ( and also, muslim hating, purity obsessed, superior thinking-simultaneously uncool, non-macho) piece of shit. Or *admit* that you are hypocritical because even as you type this the bacteria on your keyboard are being butchered to be mass produced on my fingers. Or explain that it's possible to *dislike* meat. 

For the record, I am not even bramhin to be brahminical. See, I am not even sure how it's spelt.  

Anyhow, this was merely context for my visit to Nagaland Kitchen recently in Green Park, Delhi. A, B and C had thier plates full with pig and fermented rajma, fish and smoked fish chutney. I had to order the only vegetarian thing on the Naga food menu (I don't want to go to a Naga restaurant and order American Chopseuy no). Mustard leaves and beans in boiled water without salt. I had it with Akhuni chutney- spicy and fermented-y. I am usually a fan of light dishes like this where you can actually taste the vegetables but this meal is best had if you are running a temperature. 

The deadline to kill a river.

My hair still has knots from the sea breeze. And my shoes have sand in them. How can the pile of rubble that claims to be my life in Delhi compare.

Drama aside, I have just returned from Goa. I love Delhi, don't get me wrong. But everytime, you leave Delhi and Bombay, and especially when you go to a place like Goa, there is a palpable softness - to life and to people. This time I experienced a vastly different Goa than before. My previous trips, to contextualise this consisted of general alcoholic debauchery and consequently I have very hazy memories of them. To digress and indulge a realisation I just had, the older I grow the more sensible and staid my trips become. From absolute debauched to quiet and romantic and finally more reflective. 

This time, we were away from the beaches in Fontanhas, a quiet and colourful ex Portugese colony in Goa. It was filled with lovely yellow and blue houses, white chapels, converted art galleries, the works. The thing is none of these were overly commoditized unlike in Pondicherry were the one small (mostly) street is over Frenched. The Alliance Francaise has a menu only in French. This made me a bit nauseous especially when teamed with all the emotionally exhausting memories, spaces of life I'd rather not go back to. 

In the case of Goa, the blessed green land where laissez faire is legitimate however, my memories (or the gaps in memories)  are always sparkling. I love the intense red (yummy red earth) of the laterite, the grey splash of the sea, and the green that spreads like a disease in the monsoon. Like my friend Ablong says, you can't leave anything out of the fridge in Goa for more than five minutes- it would catch moss/fungus. 

And then there are the mountains sold to DLF. Virgin mountains become the choicest brides to strip for open cast mines. And fields have been bookmarked to build malls. Yes, glass walled malls in Goa can only be conceived of by people with aesthetic cancer. Miners have stationed their private yachts on the Mandovi river. SESA Goa and DLF can have a big party but I truly had a heart sinky feeling. 

This was made worse by my brother's Goan friend A who while driving through Goa would casually point out to a whole range of hills and say 'Oh, these are sold to DLF' etc. But knowledgeable as he was, each green range became a vision of 

a Select City Walk future. That is my biggest fear about new India. It is spreading like a monster, buying off Environmental Impact Assessment Reports on the way and can take you by surprise. In places where no one  has heard off EIAs, the picture is even worse. On a recent trip to Anoopshahr, UP where I lived over a year ago, I used to take boat rides on the Ganges. The river there is a far cry from Varanasi's fecal possibilities. Was actually. In just over a year, construction projects have started on the bank. Ancient temples have new brick additions. (Aesthetic cancer reappears). 

And it takes only a year to destroy a river. 

To let a cat in.

When it comes to killing creatures that are inconvenient to us, our ethics melt as easily as the electric fly zappers melt flies.

My surreal problem of the week is that of bees. Four of them have been flying in my apartment all evening and I have been running. One was sinisterly perched under the cane table, another was standing guard on the door knob determined not to let its prisoner out. Another was writhing on the floor, prompting me to throw the book Chettinad Kitchen (of which not even one recipe has been tried) at it. PP however came and killed them all. PP is gay. I wish the landlords would realise he is not my boyfriend. But this brings me to the main purpose of men. 

I remember a scene in this movie that I saw 10 years ago. The woman is suddenly widowed. I remember a line " I don't want to want." And then I remember that a mother (rat) gives birth to babies in the woman's house. She is traumatised by this scene. She doesn't want to have anything to do with the killing and yet she is irked by their presence.She lets a cat in finally. 

pleasure is a thing, that also needs accomplishing

The Word

  Down near the bottom  of the crossed-out list  of things you have to do today,   between "green thread"  and "broccoli" you find  that you have penciled "sunlight."   Resting on the page, the word  is as beautiful, it touches you  as if you had a friend   and sunlight were a present  he had sent you from some place distant  as this morning -- to cheer you up,   and to remind you that,  among your duties, pleasure  is a thing,   that also needs accomplishing  Do you remember?  that time and light are kinds   of love, and love  is no less practical  than a coffee grinder   or a safe spare tire?  Tomorrow you may be utterly  without a clue   but today you get a telegram,  from the heart in exile  proclaiming that the kingdom   still exists,  the king and queen alive,  still speaking to their children,   - to any one among them  who can find the time,  to sit out in the sun and listen. 

-- Tony Hoagland

of the men who are corn flakes body builders

I cannot speak.

It's the dead of night and my insomniac self is typically awake. Sometimes, one rude gesture can cloud a whole evening. I think its worth the effort you need to make to be polite to people. 

The keyboard of my brand new laptop has failed me, the only way I can type is by holding the function key down all the time and this is major finger gymming.

My ATM card split into two and I spent a whole week using one half of it (it worked) till I cellotaped it back together.

Reliance keeps calling me with fictional bills from 4 months back that I've paid but they insist so I don't pick up unknown numbers anymore, to my loss.

Skype has passed away on my laptop.

My other laptop only works when I stretch the charging cord really tight. 

(All this sounds bizzare to you, you don't deserve this bad treatment, I know, I should have written about my theory on men and their google hypochondria and corn flakes body building habits) 

Technology has debilitated me into facing these surreal problems. 

I wish I was in the hills smelling pine cones and drinking chai, dressed in the cheap new clothes I bought today and staring at the mountains from the terrace. 

Robot, don't dead puppy

The Robot is reading this and should call. 

What Maggi tells you about Stalkers!

Most of us grew up on Maggi Noodles. We have many fond memories associated with it. In childhood, it was cold, comforting and in tiffin boxes. In boarding school, it was floating in spicy chilli garlic paste and was made in an improvised hot water from the tap way, not to mention eaten slyly without the feared House parent noticing. Now it is dinner after a long day at work, when your brain has been omleteered by the nitty gritties of commas..

In the late nineties, something very frustrating happened. Maggi Noodles had what they thought was a bright idea and changed flavours. My beloved Maggi Masala Noodles didn't taste the same for the next few years and I wondered why they would commit such a marketing disaster.

I was, even by then, used to brands responding with eager quickness to customer tastes and problems.

I am reading a book called Niche by social forecaster James Harkin. Largely, it talks about how our appetite for broad concepts (Super market, a "family movie" ) has vanished. How in this world, we cannot be all things to all people.

So, coming back to the question of Maggi and how it didn't respond to consumer needs, it makes me realise how our habits are always under scrutiny by larger forces. Data companies now have systems that process complex data about how we eat, think, shop and behave . One such system in the UK is Mosaic which maps people street by street house by house twice a year. At the end , it takes 21 million bits of data and divides it into 155 kind  of people, 67 household types and 15 social categories.

This helps political parties and companies understand the way we think and the way we buy and in turn they respond with their marketing / election strategies to lubricate the course of consumerism.

Coming back to Maggi Noodles, in the early 2000s I think, the packet said 'Your favourite is back' and I jumped. Those long forgotten Maggi Masala tastes of my childhood were finally available again. I despised Maggi for having such a bad marketing department, one that took years to get rid of  a flavour  that no one likes. I expected them, in other words, at the age of 14 to have surveyed our private instant noodle eating habits.

And yet, it is disturbing this idea.  A store like Westside entered India in the early 2000s. They had an audience in mind- women looking for practical, generic clothes. They had the typical 'ethnic' prints on Kurtas with a neckline sized spot of originality. They had plain Tshirts that every girl who had too much self respect to wear bling would buy. But now, the practical generic idea is a Westside person.

The definition deletes all the nuances the idea originally began with. Tide, the detergent in the UK has many many versions that play on ideas of Freshness, April, Spring, Clean etc. They are all essentially the same product dealing with the "image" of what people want to be.

The image, one feels, dominates everything in a world where you can manufacture it, and you are also encouraged to by buying a product that is associated with an image.

It is really a world of smoke and mirrors where it is impossible to separate image from substance.

 

I wonder sometimes with great fear indeed if politicians too are just images. Obama wrote a speech . ...aaaah next time but they are nooo

PS: there are soooo many ways to make Maggi. Most recent twist is to dunk in fresh parsley, coriander, chilli flakers and crushed garlic in the end.  

Of flirtatious parakeets and cockroaches

The best way to identify a "just arrived firang" in Paharganj is to look at their clothes. I saw a girl with grey jeans, and a tight grey sweatshirt, fresh from the funeral chic  camouflage of Europe presumably.When you arrive in Goa, Paharganj,Dharamshala the works, you have to loosen up, shed your jeans and let go. I love that. 

That's what we (Sou, PP, N and I) decided to this weekend, take our bags and go check into a hotel room at Paharganj to spend the weekend there. We are too broke and too busy to go on holiday but Paharganj is far enough from Delhi and the tranquil domesticity of CR Park. We arrived at 10 pm and checked into a dirty little hotel (Rs.500 for a four bed room) where there were about 15 cockroaches and the bathroom was for all practical purposes impossible to engage with. But the thing that I have finally realised as PP  has been advising me to is that Paharganj is very dirty and cluttered but you just accept it and let yourself loose in the rush of chaos and muddled geographies and idealistic hippies with delusions about India. 

Anyway, we went to My Bar, which is wonderful, really the Leopold's of Delhi and less racist too. It had a wonderful energy and cheap beer. Sometimes that's all you need in life. 

We managed to sing loudly and not be heard and mostly shut the crowd out. After a while, Sou and I suddenly realised we were the only women in a huge bar full of 

at least 60 customers so we thought it was best to leave. Then, we bought omlettes very matter of factly in the backdrop of a street fight. The night extended after we navigated the maze of streets romanticised in Dev D to reach our one night cheap hotel. 

We woke up to have the loveliest long (3 hours) breakfast - potato cheese omelette, fried mushrooms, hash brown potato rendered in a delicious sczhewan meets mild masala style, toast and the best chai in Delhi, I had off.  (At Diamond Cafe, you should go.) 

After breakfast, I entered a leather store lured by the kinkiness of the outfit the mannequin was wearing and there I met Mithu, the darling of this weekend. He was a self confident and flirtatious (hanging around in a kinky leather store!!) male Alexandarine parakeet who climbed on to my shoulder as soon as I met him even kissing me on my lips. We chatted a while in garbled Hindi and parrot talk(mossheee frumples froootlooooooooooooooopssssss fruit fry) . Believe it or not, this has made my entire week. I have an abnormal love for parrot family birds, they are so bright, and soooooooooooo cute. 

I also bought the beautiful huge white framed mirror of my dreams to assist my delusions of living in a villa near the Mediterranean somewhere.. I simply couldn't afford it but who cares, I can skip lunch for a while .. 

And now I am back and filled with love for all of us mad chimpanzees and for you too. 

Move here.

It is the middle of the night. Mols is asleep. Sou has gone to get more food (even though we've eaten Somalia's share of global food produce tonight). And the three of us who have known each other for 15 years were talking about the same things, the people around us and in our lives have changed but its amazing how we are fundamentally so similar. And it's really something to have friendships like this, unchanged despite living in different cities, leading different lives for years now. Where you (at the risk of sounding cliched) pick up where you left off. I think that's a boarding school thing. We were young enough for midnight feasts in the bathroom - eating aloo bhujia with tomato ketchup. At other times, we squeezed ourselves into the already tiny lockers to bunk PT in the mornings. And lived through the seemingly small things that changed our lives - a theatre workshop in college, one farmhouse party as lost 18-year olds.. There's also Ablong in Goa now  but he reluctantly murmured sentimentalities on the phone. My current project is to get everyone to move to Delhi. 

(Please move to Delhi, thanks.) 

Speedy generalizations ahead

Since the Mumbai vs Delhi debate never goes out of fashion though we sometimes descend to excessive romanticization (I don't believe anything is excessive btw) I want to join in. 

Recently, I was on the metro with Tulip and there were no free seats. We wanted to ask all the women there where they were headed to so we could plan our future seating according to when they got off. This is normal behaviour in Mumbai where three women can be in line for a small seat to accommodate the edge of your bum. The corporate Gurgaon girl we asked had a bemused expression when we asked her but we reserved our place anyway. 

Bombay is a city where you constantly have to make reservations, you have to be prepared for life. And what is interesting is that this enterprising spirit colours everything about life in the city, prized lines are recycled for every customer. Two examples illustrate this best, one in dreamy Chor bazaar, where they sell Bollywood posters and beautiful (but inane) trinkets, framed coca cola ads from the 50s, kababs etc. The other in Bandra : altey, Bollywoody and nice boutiqued, also old Catholic housey. 

(Are you screaming Susan George aka gossip girl?) 

So, way back in 2008 when I was still young and fresh, I went to a little clothes store in Bandra. I picked up an eraser (grey)  uniform shrug that I practically live in. So I tried it on and the gold chained shopkeeper said with great earnestness , "You will look like the sweetest girl in college tomorrow." Naive (old) me was more flattered about the college part than the sweet part. He thought I was a student. I love people who think I am a student so I loved him. 

Now, I went back there in 2010 to buy another inane shirt. I tried it on and walked out of the trial room to get the discerning opinion of  beloved bombay fag and the same shopkeeper goes " You will look like the sweetest girl in college tomorrow." 

What's worse is that Susan George and Monu Singh Dhillon, my blackberry babes claimed to have gotten the same "compliment" in the same store! 

Lets move away from the yuppiness of Bandra to the bustle of Chor bazaar. Chor Bazaar is very bit like Paharganj but kinder, more authentic and  less aggressive and MUCH more charming. Show (my room mate)  and I rabidly sought exoticism away from our corporate (media) jobs and we would often spend lots of money buying obscure photographs taken in Poland, Coke ads from the fifties and depressing novels among other things. In an attempt to make our staid suburban apartment more elegant, we thought about buying antiques. Like everything else in Bombay, even antiques are manufactured and  brand new "1745 English Docks" plates are placed on them, as if some British John of the East India Company got it as part of his wife's dowry when it was actually manufactured in some Ghatkhopar sweatshop by Bihari migrant labourers. 

So, Muhammad, the henna haired store owner lures me into the shop by telling me he's got the perfect thing for me. I don't remember any details about this antique but I remember that it had a Robert Frost quote inscribed on it. " The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep." 

I went back to the same market a couple of months later and he lured me in the exact same manner. "I have something for you that I just get a sense you'll like, " and offered me the same Robert Frost antique. (new piece)

Either he throws this at every self absorbed lost looking person who walks by or just at every person who walks by but the uniformity of this amazes me. 

Delhi Daredevils

On my way to an awesome new Nepali restaurant I saw an old Maruti Esteem parked at the corner of the road. 

Two big men had gotten off and when I saw them, there were BEATING up a paapa looking nubile North Eastern boy who had been driving a large lorry. He was wearing a grey vest and shorts. The men were standing on the road and punching him even as he just took it quietly. 

They were just continuously beating him up. Cars passed by uncaring. 

Can we just deconstruct this for a second? Why is this not the most abnormal thing in the world? To casually be beating up someone on a Sunday evening. Someone defenseless? Even if he had hit their car, they could take him to the police station, respond in a less savage way. 

I have surely seen more men beating up men in my one year in Delhi than in the other (more than two decades)  of my life. 

PS: I feel like the IPL team names have some sort of a marketing angle to it. This is pure speculation and half joke of course. But Delhi daredevils- because being macho seems to be the driving force of this city. Hmmm What else? Chennai super Kings. It's hard to explain but it's very Chennai, the whole Super King, Super Hero, Rajnikanth business. Bangaloreans want to be considered individualistic and be Royal Challengers. And Mumbai - we are all migrants and we are all Indian as long as we are united by the corporate world. 

Quotes from here and there

A woman's trauma is much more than a launchpad for male machismo. 

How can I stifle the enormity of all that I feel into an airport sentence. I'd rather not say anything at all.

Poetry is against the interests of capitalism.