How do you reconcile to an old blog?

I had relegated blogging to the space of unfashionable. I was lazy. 

I started a tumblr account and never followed up except to reblog angsty quotes by angsty writers and seek comfort on gloomy winter mornings like this one where I am sipping too-kadak chai and editing papers on neoliberalism. 

This blog was started in a small room in Jayanagar eight years ago and has been somewhat dishonest about my life..because..you know what if my parents read it. And how can I continue blogging in a space that records so much of what isn't me now? 

Let's see if I can make peace with blogging here again. 

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.