whose Bangalore is it anyway?

 

 





  

You suck!

I like constructive criticism . I really do. But sometimes I feel criticism is unfair and it buzzes in my head like an unwanted shadow clouding over everything else I do, making me rethink the basis on which I have ANY confidence in myself.
I think we should really think about what we say to people because you might end up saying something that will affect their self concept for ever and it's stupid especially coz you didn't even really mean what you said. Especially to children


How does one react to unfair criticism ?

old friends..

It's so nice to meet old friends after years and pick up just from where you left off.K , my friend from school who lives in Kenya came down and I met her just for a bit .frst time since school. Just for a bit because of my uncharecteristically busy schedule these days..
Anyhow, ya the thing with old friends is you don't know what to expect. They might come back looking completely different with the usual differences - accents, straightened hair, tatoos ,whatever ..but either they are essentially the same and you are chattin away like you don't have drastically different lives.
or you are all awkward and your desperately digging up memories to make conversation. Fortunately for me its mostly been the former and that is nice, no?


Anyhow , I seem to have lost my ID card again ...and the RED TAPE involved to get another one is headachy..for a non proactive fool like me..

What are we free from? Who are we? We meaning , the nation? What is a nation? People living within the space confined by political boundaries. Should I feel proud and patriotic about this fair skinned small eyed , mongoloid featured north eastern Indian soldier more than I should feel proud of a scientist in Sri Lanka who looks more like me?
I've never questioned what a nation is while wearing white kurtas with pretty chunnis , singing the national anthem when someone hoisted the flag.
Ok so we are celebrating our freedom from the British over 59 years ago.

But what a strong word freedom is?

Today I was happy I could get to Vasanthnagar really fast with less traffic for a holiday. That's what it means to me today.
Fine.We are free from the british. But are we really free? Isn't it bizzare. Colleges closed yesterday in Delhi because of a security threat on Independence day and before? Isn't that terribly ironic? What do you think we are free from?
But apart from the questions ...Happy Independence Day everyone. We're free in some way.

picstory

 
 
 


My name is Zarar. I am ten years old.
I hate school. I dropped out.I help these people with work.

'What do you want to do when you grow up?'

scrap


(He comes from an area whre the main occupation is recycling e waste/computer waste used to obtain heavy metal components , work that involves acids , heavt metals and is obviously dangerous.) Smart kid he is but . 

lechometer

You must've seen these seemingly useless mirrors in the inside of autos. They are called lechometers. Apparently one auto man confessed to some guy i know can't remember who that it is meant for looking at skirts and beyond.
So i finally manage to see what one actually can see through them. hehehe.




 
 
  

Statistics clutter a corner of

our morning newspapers while we put our legs up

on a couch and read lazily...


(first two links via indianwriting)


When your happy and you know it clap your hands.


58,000 rape cases pending trial in India.


la la la la la la la la la

China slaughters 50,000 dogs.


'sing a song of six pence pocket full of rye'



50 million girls in India are missing because of female infanticide.

tring tring tring old king kole had a merry old soul.........


In 1999, a total of 1,35,771 cases of crime against women were reported.


'Mary Mary Quite contrary how does your garden grow?'

The Bombay Blasts killed 44 people.
The Delhi Blasts killed 59 people.
The Varanasi blasts killed 20 people
The death toll in Lebanon is 800.

AISHWARYA RAI INJURED HER LEFT TOE.
This is another story about the alleged war going on between Bachchan and SRK, there’s nothing official about this war and the stars in question, Bachchan and SRK have always gone all out to deny it.

Source :Apunkachoice



So,

what

do

statistics

mean
to
YOU?

d e l u r k

Those who read my blog and have never commented are requested to ahem!
Delurk. Comments are fun.



Today the staff at Landmark must have fainted. I ACTUALLY bought a book . Me who plonks for hours and hours ingnoring sarcastic questions about whether I plan to finish the book there.
Yeah so I bought a Murakami book..Sputnik sweetheart. And a pack of catridges

Then there is a huuuuuuuuuuge line so i wait to bill.

An Arab woman comes with a daughter and a basket of( I am not lying) handbags.
When my turn comes , she quickly stretches and puts her stuff for billing. I put on my sugar coated can't be rude voice and tell her I have only TWO things and that I was BEFORE her.( I didnt say that) she whispered something that sounded like ' yeah go ahead but shoved her things for billing.

Sometimes I can't be rude to people even if it means waiting another 10 minutes for her to bill her million handbags. Why why why?

At Forum they didn't let a bunch of visibly poor women in on the pretext that one of them wasn't wearing chappals.

It's so sad , they were so excited and eager to look around Forum.


I've joined a semiotics class which is really interesting. Opens your mind to so much.Should I switch back to my old template?
and BLOGDOG where are you?

Kidnapped

 
 
 
 
/>
L and I just about escaped being kidnapped in Dharamshala. Technically I should write about this here but that will only pay tribute to my pompous assumption that I am this big succumbing to wanderlust every second kinda person. Which I would be if I didn't need to satisfy an attendance requirement that would give me a hall ticket to write an exam , after a set of which I will get a paper with a stamp on it that will qualify me to further my passions in this world . Also maybe I should delete wanderlust and start another one called feminist angst to filter this one of it

Anyhow, so L and I go to Dharamshala. I am the bookish knowledge expert because usually when I have nothing better to do I read travel books and dream. I did not however with my knowledge of even the Tibetan doctor's residence know that there are people in unlikely places who we will have to learn to watch out for.

Kashmiri man will be called Faisal though now I think that was his brother's name.
He spotted L and me outside his shop and said come in.
F: Not for business purpose, come have a look, see what you like...

So in we go looking at a more embellished version of Kashmiri shops that are all over Com Street. Some one tells me how do they make money? I mean, except for the gullible foreigners who buy things from 'exotic ' India..?
I don't know HOW but it ended up in him offering us to take us to Kashmir and us, silly, excited, AGREEING.

He offered us a good price, a ridiculously cheap price and an overnight journey on a Sumo from Dharamshala to Srinagar and accommodation on a houseboat...

Now Y , cynical , untrusting bitch begins to suspect something wrong.
But of course she is still tooooooooooo eager to go to Kashmir. ( Two days after that major October earthquake).
Then we find ourselves in this dingy little room in a narrow lane looking at pictures of the Dal Lake . L goes on about how her aunt , a journalist has shown her all these pics before.
Faisal shows us pictures of himself at various locations with girlfriends from different countries.
'At that time she was my girlfriend'.
(Ten years ago he may have been hot)
By now the cynic explodes.

He tells L: You seem like a very trustable person. It’s your eyes.
This was in acknowledgement of Y's cold , indifferent , bordering on rude behaviour.

He launches a new strategy. A French woman , he said will be coming too. One that he knows well and is friendly.
A man in the meanwhile brings a tray with three tea glasses. True Hindi movie style , he takes the small one , and we are handed tall glasses. This , he explains is Kashmiri tea. Some yellow thing whose taste I can't remember for reasons that will be explained later.

I wanted to be out of this dingy little room soon and be in the all pervading sunlight
He said we could talk to the French woman
L is assigned the task. French woman speaks worse French than me. And sounds more Indian than me.
We left , L gave her number and we agreed to meet for dinner before pushing off at night to paradise on earth
a) Just had an earthquake
b) Was a 24/7 59 year war zone
( I just calculated 59 years don't call me unpatriotic)
The plan was to avoid him for the rest of the day but Dharamshala is a small town. By the end of one day we knew many many many people and they knew we were south Indian women from Bangalore blah blah.
But yeah before all that I started feeling incredibly dizzy. I knew that either
a) There was something in the tea
Or
b) I was too influenced by Hindi movies
But since I survived I thought it'll probably be
c) By now my body is immune to intoxicants.

Yeah so later , that is for the rest of the week we SOMEHOW avoided the Kashmiri man who eventually got the point.
Yeah KLPD for you'll , we didn't end up in a harem in Saudi Arabia.

Anyhow that wasn't all. There was another guy from Arunachal Pradesh who was convinced we had run away from home and more stories later.

You have to listen to Susheela Raman . As J says , you can make love to her music.
And my college apparently is a soft target for terrorist attacks so yeah , may die.

On water , the freedom of expression and then what a brilliant movie it was

.

With blogspot urls being blocked in India, I've been off blogging and reading blogs for a bit. It just makes you realise that the internet isn't necessarily the free democratic belonging to all space that you conceive it to be.
Talking of freedom of speech makes me want to write about Water a film by Deepa Mehta who was forbidden to shoot it in 2000 in Varanasi when people burnt the sets and threatened to kill the Canada based Indian film maker.
The film is about the lives of a group of widows in the 1930's. Hindu widows had to renounce material comforts, shave their head and were even forbidden from eating sweets and fried food.
This was the period when the freedom movement was gaining momentum and Gandhi was just entering the political scene. The story is told from the perspective of Chuyiya a 7 year old girl. In the first scene we see her, young and innocent, a girl with long curly hair chomping on a piece of sugar cane as the bullock cart rattles its way along.
In the next scene, perhaps the most poignant in the movie, she is woken up by her father who asks her if she remembers having been ,married. She says she didn't. Her baba tells her that she is a widow now.
'Till when..?’, she asks, shrugging off sleep .


 
 


Chuiya is taken to an ashram for widows where widows renounce all worldly pleasures to live a life of austerity. The youngest girl in an ashram where very old women have been living since childhood, Chuiya is rebellious and child like. The realities sink in only later.
A child has not yet been conditioned to settle in the niche that a rigid society has reserved for her; she responds instinctively , intuitively to situations. For instance she asks the Hindu priests where male widows went and this is blasphemous to the women who have been conditioned from birth to LIVE for the male. They pray that such a fate never befalls their men and she is accused of uttering inauspicious words. Whether its revenge towards the bossy Madhumati or thoughtfulness for the very old widow whose only desire in life is to eat sweets that she has been denied from the time she was widowed as a child , Chuyiya's response is natural and spontaneous. The child's voice is the rational , unbiased voice.
When she first comes to the ashram , she harbours dreams of returning home but later she realises she can't. She befriends Kalyani (Lisa Ray) who is pimped by the leader of the ashram ,Madhumati (Manorama) and is the only one who is allowed long hair.

Narayan , an idealistic law student enters their lives and falls in love with Kalyani.

 
He is Gandhian and wants to work for the emancipation of widows. Talking of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and admitting to his conservative mother (played by Waheeda Rehman) that he wants to marry a , god forbid, Widow ....does he succeed?
His progressive father supports him but is he really that progressive?
Child abuse in the movie is portrayed realistically , without the drama. Chuiya enters the room saying ' I've come to play'. And it breaks your heart.

The situation of widows in India has improved in the last 70 years or so and a majority of widows don't have to live seperately in ashrams.
As Narayan reasons in the film , it was never about relegion , it was about money , about having one person less to feed in the household. Shakuntala(Seema Biswas) who has led the life of a ‘good widow’ wonders what to do if her faith clashes with her conscience. The characters are important in raising different questions. The rich bramhin male , the pious widow , the child , the educated idealist, the prostitute , the male priest.
He says that there is a new law that has been passed about widow remarriage. When Shakuntala asks him why she doesn't know about it he says that laws that aren't in tandem with religion are ignored.






I don't however think that the argument that portrayal of India as a backward, primitive culture to draw western audiences holds good as this person thinks so.

Please listen. If a widow remains a pure widow, she is respected. If she wants to lose the respect, she can remarry. Nobody goes and burns a widow if she remarries. But if she wants pleasure, naturally she will have to give up name and opt for pleasure.
Does an average Indian woman have an option?
Who prevents her? Tell me.’

Sure , there is technology ,IT , the booker prize , path breaking research in every fuckin field there is but isn't that a small part of the population?
Isn't there hypocrisy as well? The biotechnologist mother and the software engineer father still want to abort a female foetus. It is the same patriarchy that ostracized widows , that murders baby girls , that made a girl’s marriage more important and her Phd not at all.



Water has some brilliant performances. Sarala who plays Chuiya was amazing and surprisingly even John Abraham sheds his glamorous image to do a brilliant job. Lisa Ray is a tad too anglicized but she does a decent job but Nandita Das would have been better.Seema Biswas is good too.The cinematography is lovely with locales in Sri Lanka where Mehta has tried to recreate Varanasi.

You have to watch the movie..It stays with you.

Do you wear fur?

Even if you don't I beg you to watch the video on this site.
Rethink how you can in your day to day life reduce the suffering an animal feels.
I am not honest because I can't bear to watch the video anymore and am writing this instead. Who are we anyway?
Please don't buy fur. Then again what cruelty is more cruel? Killing a racoon dog for fur is worse than killing a goat for meat? Sure slaughter house methods are more humane thatn skinning alive but still.
How can you avoid hurting animals in EVERYWAY if at all you can?

Are you a girl with brains and do you burn bras??

R and I have this problem of reading gender issues into everything.
Ads, attitudes, conversations well...!!
I will try not to make this one big feminist rant but yeah...as she says recreating space: I can't get over this. If i think a gunshot sounds fun i am boyish, if i think it sounds dangerous i am girlish.">here about the test I've posted below.

I did the test anyway because I am self obsessed and I love taking these tests even though I don't take them seriously.
In the cantonement station , I saw this ad for a newspaper where the woman is shown reading the supplement and the man reading the main paper. Why? Because she is the one who is suppossed to sit at home and is likely to be interested in curtain sales in west Bangalore.Whatever!
I remember when I went 'trekking' outside Hyderabad with a bunch of friends they all said I was as good as a boy. What is that suppossed to mean?
Besides why is it a compliment when a girl is like a boy ( that is , according to society resourceful,independent whatever) and not vice versa?
Infact vice versa would mean pansy, loser etc.

It being a compliment negates the very idea of feminism. That equality is about being man enough.
Man I know I am being very inarticulate and this is a subject that I will write a long well thought out angsty post on but for now you are spared!! Ya another thing that baffled me is this community on

orkut

for girls with brains
Huh? That's an exclusive minority group among females ??

You Are 50% Boyish and 50% Girlish

You are pretty evenly split down the middle - a total eunuch. Okay, kidding about the eunuch part. But you do get along with both sexes. You reject traditional gender roles. However, you don't actively fight them. You're just you. You don't try to be what people expect you to be.

How Boyish or Girlish Are You?

Your Personality Is Like Acid

A bit wacky, you're very difficult to predict. One moment you're in your own little happy universe... And the next, you're on a bad trip to your own personal hell!

What Drug Is Your Personality Like?

You Are 40% Obsessive

You tend to have a few obsessive thoughts, but you generally have them under control. Sometimes your worries keep you up at night, though they usually don't interfere with your life.

How Obsessive Are You?

 


V clicking into the mirror, Me and A. I like this snap.In a random store we walked in to rest and pretend to look at shoes. 

 

Pritesh tagged me so here goes.


I am thinking about...

How indifferent this
universe is to my need to sleep after lunch instead of having to listen to what post modernism is all about

I want to...
a) not grow up


I wish...
I could draw.
I hear ...
anything that is beautiful and NOT jarring and strange sounds at night that scare me.

I wonder...


to an unhealthy extent
About why this world is so unfair
About whether there is some sort of a pattern to all this , the traffic I navigate on my ride back home , the clouds, why I was so rude to that girl , if there’s an equation to it, like some sort of a choreographed dance of the universe where we are just puppets.
Are we puppets of some force in physics called b say and if some bastard will win the nobel prize for figuring it out and no one will remember that it was Y who thought of it first…Or is it too large for the human mind to comprehend.
I also wonder about whether I will scare you off if I continue and answer myself in the affirmative.




I am...
A neurotic frog

I dance...
to hip hop in Azerbaijani

I sing...
When I am feeling dreamy, on bus journeys and we also sometimes sing vulgar Tamil class at the back of class.
I cry...
for stupid things but when its something big and not comprehensible, I just look cold ,
quiet and feel like sitting at the edge of a river and throwing stones endlessly .

I write:

Angsty
1) blog posts

2) Journal entries ( since the age of 7 )
3) bad poetry (" " " " " " " " ")



I confuse
ya..thats my second name. Just add ..ed

Bad grammar pisses me off .




I need:
My space
Deep conversations with my closest friends
Family
And one tequila shot right now.



And I tag R. It's the only way to make the bitch blog. 

Free

  

Doors of perception

 
Who is taller?


Our world is just raw material. Something as bloody intangible as perception makes finished products out of it. What is reality then?
Is reality a constant or is it a customized commodity packed to confuse the hell out of every individual?


'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is- infinnite' William Blake

What is fear for instance? I am scared of supernatural things. And at this point in life when there is no electricity in my house when I am alone it is really not a great idea to write .
Considering I missed being almost neurotic by one point in personality testing class.
HOWever, when i look around my house , it is the same things I see , just subtract the light.
The sofa, my slippers lying haphazardly ,the bottle of lotion with the cap almost not shut. Yet, a small creak outside the house causes unnessecary depletion of adrenalin from my system. I have obviously been gradually conditioned , tortured to believe that dark is scary.





When you have preconceived notions about something , no matter what signals you receive , you understand a situation in tandem with what notions you already have.
When I think about this , it makes sense to me. When I blog about it I have an inkling of dooubt creeping in. Do i make sense?
You on the other hand could probably think I am a retard.
AAAAH!perception. 

Sunday checklist

To think about:future

To learn : to say no to people

To get : Driving license


To use better: Camera

To save: money


My random Sunday checklist doesn't have any relevance to your lives bu tI will post it for my sake.

The world's oldest profession

A prostitute to her daughter - K. Satchidanandan


Dear child, say without shame
that I am your mother
and this city is your father.
Go, tell the chaste wives,
I teach their men how to love.

I offered myself
in place of a thousand women,
and became a saint.

Man, my child, is endless Desire,
you should cross that sea
the way I rose above my body.

Raise your head;
be my survivor, grow to be great.
You should have a tryst with tomorrow:
you should see the sun
that I could not.

I do not want to weep before Jesus
nor do I want Upagupta to weep before me.
Every night I turn red hot,
every morning I become gold.

I conquered lust;
you should transcend greed.
We are the bountiful Earth
and we, the giving Nature.


(Translated from Malayalam by the poet with Rizio Raj)
R was doing a project on violence against sex workers. I went with her to a dingy little room in K.R market, a group of sex workers working against HIV chatted with us there. On their profession, the challenges, the ostracization, life.



From Rio to Rome, from Dakar to Darwin, laws on prostitution are illogical and contradictory. They reflect the confusion felt by lawyers and by the general public about work so clearly connected with sex.

An estimated three million women do sex work in about 400 red light areas in India, approximately 30 per cent are children; a majority are dalits and tribals - issue.

‘My husband doesn't know I am a sex worker. I work by day and go back home by night. I tell him I am working in an NGO spreading awareness about AIDS'.

'My children are made fun of because I am a prostitute. They resent me.'

'Legalization will expose our secrets to an unaccepting society.'

'I hadn't heard about HIV, condoms, AIDS even years after joining the profession.'

'I am much better off living this life, earning a living than in my husbands house where I was beaten up, and our earnings were used for alcohol. My daughter is in the second year of Bsc . I can't afford it anymore. Tell me what opportunities she has.'


'At least now I have this support group of other sex workers. It helps me deal with it.'

'You are paid less when you insist they wear a condom. Out of four fifty rupees, I am left with hundred. The rest goes to the lodge owner, the police or the 'pimp'.'

The 'pimp' refers to the role that is inevitably played by a blackmailing male presence in a society where a man less woman is nothing. To rent a house, they need a man who pretends to be married to them.. Revealing the details of their profession will mean they will be vacated. These men constantly blackmail them and even threaten to break into their house. Hence trapping them into a vicious cycle.

'We can't complain to the police because they will say that we as 'lose women' deserve it. They will go to the other prostitutes when they want sex.'

'I need to drink to forget that I have to sell my body to earn a living.'
'Only they drink. (Disapproving). We are Muslims. We don't drink.'

‘HIV workers don’t care about sex worker welfare.’

'In my next birth I don't want to be born as a woman. That is the worst fate.'

We asked if they would mind alternate employment like sewing, working in a factory etc.
They said that if they were paid at least three thousand five hundred rupees a month, they wouldn't.

'We are sex workers. We are still entitled to a life of dignity.'

(Translated roughly from Hindi and Tamil) Photo from flickr.

Did the planet betray us?

I forgot when it stopped being an urgent thing to do.
When I was a child in Hyderabad , they cut down about seven trees that lined the plot next to our house. They RANDOMLY cut the Jamun tree in my house one day. The wires were causing problems . I was sick upstairs with Malaria then . I wanted to cry.


 








I wanted to grow up and save the environment and become an environmentalist.
I am extremist in loving animals. Nowadays when I think of the unimaginable cruelty meted out to animals everyday I shut the thought out , divert myself and start thinking of something saner.
I used to actually worry about what would happen when all the non renewable resources like coal and petrol got over.I used to consciously use less plastic, paper etc.
Over the years its just been ' why not?' without thinking. It's stopped being an urgent thing to do.
I've been caught up with my own life while doing small things like not going to McDonalds and KFC and putting up with being called an hypocrite.
That logic doesn't make sense . You might as well do SOMETHING and be called names than do NOTHING
One McDonalds beef burger removes for ever from this earth an average kitchen sized area of rainforest.

Last week I went to hear Medha Patkar speak. I was amazed, moved, inspired and ashamed.
I was ashamed of my relative indifference to what is happening in the world . I was ashamed of considering a career in the corporate world to be part of the little drop that defiles the entire ocean with its needs.
It was career confusion again.
Yet when I was at Mango yesterday I wanted that stupid soft grey t shirt that cost a thousand bucks. I told myself that I can afford it when I start earning.

link through chamique

I am 19.I am 19. I am 19 years old.

 


That might sound awfully young to some of you but the fact is I can't bear the thought of not being 19 anymore in a few days.

Because when I think I still think like' when I grow up' or when I think of what I have to do next i quickly run 'maths , english , social studies....' in my mind though I don't do these subjects anymore.
Not like am going to be a grandmother at 20 but still!
Because I have lived so much and done so little and don't know what the hell I want to do with the rest of my life.
I feel so young and am expected to be so old.
And that world that you are unconsciously promised to reach when you 'grow up' doesn't exist.Because I am such a baby and yet I can't deal with how Pipe Dreams: clinical vegetable?!">">dependable,Clinical, intellectual, cynical I seem to have become. 

little moments in a cluttered shared judging public place

 
The street isn't yours.You can't behave like its your bedroom. But there are moments when you are so lost , you lean to the side of the auto and look out , in awe of the cloudy windy weather that Bangalore is blessing us with these days. You sing and you are lost in your own world. Till suddenly you realise people are staring at you like you are weird. You quickly assume the defensive sitting straight, being rigid and attempting to buy your self respect back by typing self importantly on your phone.
These little moments in a cluttered shared judging public place are so beautiful.

Today V and I were walking on the beautiful tree lined road from Cunningham Road towards M.G road singing on the top of our voices. James Blunt and Coldplay type!
Suddenly it was all quiet. I was jolted out of my singing 'reverie'.
ALL the traffic had gone ahead and at that moment it was just V and me on that usually busy road SINGING.
Imagine a traffic less road in this city shocking me so much! 

Is there a cure for cynicism?

 
 
 


More here 

Was at Kodaikanal

  

adorable adorable adorable

 
 
  

Autumn in my neighbourhood

 


This weather is truly incredible. Cloudy and grey and introspection friendly. Just went for a walk.
The yellow leaves falling down Forrest Gump style making me believe I am actually in this British University during autumn walking to my French Literature class. The leaves are a dark dignified green and they cover the street lights . I am sorry to intrude on the imagery. You will however have to subtract the stubborn drone of traffic, the blood and death at K.V chicken shop, the dust from half constructed sites. This is Jayanagar after all ..
I was wishing I had a camera. (That pic wasn't taken today).


I’m always wishing that nowadays. Though when I actually have it I chicken out of taking all the lovely pictures of children laughing, men playing cards , a cow suckling its calf in the middle of the road with a silver building as background.
I chicken out because they might mind being photographed. (not the cow calf duo..) I don't yet know photo ethics.
I must study.
I must do a lot of things.

Ten days of heavy 'internalizing' ahead....

It is that time of the semester when we have those ubiquitous things called university exams.
Now, ever since school, I haven't really written real exams.
University exams are a farce. You go in and are tested on grammar that is second standard level and you write as slowly as possible. If you finish too fast, you'll end up getting bored staring at the yellow walls of college and scared watching other people write pages and pages.
They ask you questions like ' What was the colour of the dress Princess Doro Boro was wearing?' for 8 marks.
How much can you write?
She wore a red dress that had pink frills. (ugly) .She was in a pensive mood . She also wore black shoes.Go on for a page. Take a break to dream about where to eat lunch. Continue.
(I think one is encouraged to plagiarize/ ’internalize’ as much as possible from bad guides. )

Six months later some sheets will be put up on the notice board. These are the results of an exam you have forgotten about.
Needless to say, more often than not, the numbers will have no connection to what you remember having written in the exam. The evaluators who corrected your papers could be non English speaking people sitting in Gulbarga or double PhDs sitting in Frazer town.
It will remain a mystery to you.

Yet, to satisfy and be part of the ( ahem..) system , we go write exams that have questions about how to make notes , write memorandums , dialogues , blah.
Intellectually stimulating eh?

Now when I think of how I consumed a thousand pages of chem in school and managed to get decent marks, I think I might have at some point been intelligent.
University education ruined me, methinks. :)

Living alone

 
 
  

Blank Noise intervention-2

When I was travelling to M.G road, some men in a car blew kisses at me and were screaming. I had the courage to scream back at them. (Quite dramatically, I must add) which made them turn the car and speed off.
I would have never have done this earlier. I would have given them this mild (almost ) dirty look and walked off.





The girl who took part in the Blank Noise intervention was much more confident this time, almost aggressively so . To casually demand SPACE on leching zone, Brigade and M.G roads came naturally.

What we did was stand in the middle of the road in the line and give out testimonials from the blank noise blogathon to those who responded in some way to our gaze.
To reverse the gaze of ‘ starers’ and curious onlookers while handing them out the hand folded copies of the blank noise blogathon testimonials was easy. Some readily took it, some walked ahead, thought for a bit and came back to take it, some didn’t.

Most women were not interested. Some women looked me up and down and looked disgusted.

A lot of girls (college types ) had bemused expressions and were like 'what the hell do they think they are doing? ' .
Two women who asked me what it was all about read the testimonials and seemed interested. One of the women had just experienced 'eve teasing' and the two had been discussing it when I gave them the testimonial.
Another middle aged man read it intently and came and asked me what I wanted. I asked him to 'think about it'.
( I wasn't allowed to engage in conversation with them.)

Most people were extremely curious about what it was all about.

Personally I think it has helped me a lot. WHen I walk on the roads now I am not as rigid and scared as I used to be.




I think however to make a greater impact and to ' transform the nature of the place' we need a LOT of women. As far as eve teasing is concerned M.G road is friendlier .
Brigade road is narrower and gives ample opportunity for anonymous gropers to get away with whatever!
And if these interventions are carried out more often, it is going to make people think. The same people frequent these places: Brigade Road, M.G road, Majestic bus stand etc.


Apart from everything else it is interesting to stand on a street you walk on so often and observe people. It makes you realise how diverse Bangalore is and eavesdropping on the variety of conversations is fun. :)

okaaaaaaay then!

The Movie Of Your Life Is A Black Comedy

In your life, things are so twisted that you just have to laugh.You may end up insane, but you'll have fun on the way to the asylum. Your best movie matches: Being John Malkovich, The Royal Tenenbaums, American Psycho

If Your Life Was a Movie, What Genre Would It Be?

Marketing Strategies for elections-Unit 1

An election ,like everything else that involves power and money and people needs some sort of marketing strategy.
It needs to recognize a target audience and their needs.
What young girls in Tamil Nadu need more than education , health facilities and a status equal to that of their brothers is gold.
Voila.
Promise to give all unmarried girls four grams of gold.
Girls must be a burden to the grandparents , parents and brothers so , yes the whole population is targeted.
With the gold prices increasing it is so hard to accumulate a dowry. Thank God ,the government is so compassionate.

Now that the target audience has been dealt with.
Think about the enemy, the fellow contestor . Buy a bit of media and trash him on it as much as you want.
If there is any unwanted news ,dispose it in favour of more important news, advertising all the goodies that people will get when they vote for you.
After all ,your enemy is doing the same.