This girl called N and I have this intrinsic need to do stupid things. Whether it’s bargaining for a twenty buck brownie at Rex or smelling pickles at nilgiris and getting absorbed enough to miss a lot of the movie!!(Ya, being Cyrus, we missed a precious 15 minutes).

And only we find ourselves so amusing and laugh like retards and feel stoned.
One of the things on the agenda was to hitch a ride back home. So we ignored all the electronic metred autos for twenty minutes clumsily trying to get some car to stop.
Finally one did:
So this man from Haryana stops and we are glad about the air conditioned comfort.
Haryana man: (HM): Haaan so you are fair skinned you must be north Indian.
(N is forced by me to sit in front)
N: hmm hehe haaa actuallllyy…nooo I am south Indian .
H: you are tamilian?
N: No Mangalorean
H: Oh Bangalore and Mangalore not the same thing? I ‘ve been to Mangalore.
N: hmm heee no..Actually (turns around and gives me a sly yet sharp dirty look for getting her into this).
H: Mangalore stinks actually. Whole town. Maney goa mein tho no stink..Aishwarya Rain from there no??
(Wow stinky , largely dark skinned but atleast there’s Aishwarya Rai )
N: ya , but Mangalore has a lot of unexplored beaches . It’s less commercial than Goa.( patriotic, suddenly)
H: I love Goa. In Mangalore , I think near Kudremukh so all iron ores going into water and water is black.
N: hmm
H: Don’t worry haan I am not ‘that type of a guy’. Don’t be scared. In Singapore it is considered normal to give rides to people , here naa mane don’t know what the probleym is .
N: Ya , very true ; you just don’t get autos on Brigade road.( yeah , right)


But then we rightly realised that we can’t bitch about sweet people who offered us rides. Or we’ll have to wait till we can drive cars of our own.

I am so pissed off.
Because I paid 120 fuckin bucks for a sixty buck auto ride and I just didn't want to argue coz I was just glad to be back home safe.

Went to watch rehearsals of the theatre group whose last production I was part of. It was lovely and I felt like jumping up on stage and ACTING again.

It happens at Tunbridge high school which is made up of those beautiful old Bangalore type buildings. When you walk into the common room there are old women in dresses , all smiling and friendly . There is the smell of wet dogs. (sorry but really that's a smell and it's not as unpleasant as it sounds) .And a jacaranda tree that generously showers blossoms on the playground. Bangalore is full of these gorgeous purple flowers in summer and other flowers too.
It makes you want to forget the lousy traffic, lousier tempered auto drivers and the kacha kacha kacha clutteredness.
And you just smelllll and smile and feel all alive.
Like Spring in those English novels. Anyway Right now I wish a)I had a (fourth hand would do) maruti 800 or small car that I could DRIVE properly and b) I get a chance to ACT...

blueberry blues at 17!!!

You are 17 years old!!!

You Are 17 Years Old

Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

Oh dear!!!17?

I just bought a whole lot of yummmmmy toileteries- face wash ,shampoo etc etc. And ofcourse I had to come back home and immediately have a bath to test all of these. Hehe.

The woman at health and glow laughed at me the other day because i was relegiously opening all the bottles and smelling the contents..blueberry, cocoa butter whatnot.

And ofcourse i had some ten bucks in my pocket to get back home.

I've lived a full week without a phone after I lost the second phone in three months. I lost the first in Goa. God GOd GOD! I am trying to sound all undepressed but I am fed up of me and this world. I even messaged the thief saying I am a poor girl and to please have pity on me and that I will offer a reward of two hundred rupees . What world am i living in ? ? Tinkle Comics?

Boo Hoo..Tee Hee!!:)

Blank Noise Project

I was at first cynical about the blank noise project. I was wondering whether those 'road side Romeos ' anonymous hands’ will actually read these blogs and think ' Ah, maybe woman do have souls that might feel violated and I should get back to being a good man.' When I read the other posts , they echoed my feelings so much that it was disturbing.

It has achieved a lot. It's made me realise that this problem is as real to other women as it is to me.
That those invisible untraceable hands that grope your body in concerts, in buses don't only target me. There is nothing wrong with me as an individual except that like other woman I am a pair of breasts and ass in the eyes of these men.
Which is why when I use public transport, I wish I could somehow shroud my feminineness.
It's like when your growing up as a girl, the air around you turns oppressive so you hunch so your breasts don't show too much, you stiffen when you are walking alone on a road and you see some man pass by. Can I help it though? Just like I have a left toe and a right ovary, as a human female, I have breasts.
Chances are that the man is innocent and while seemingly he is staring at you, he is actually worrying about getting fired at work. Huge chances at that because there are a lot of wonderful wonderful men in the world.
But isn't that how prejudicing works. You don't want to risk trusting some strange man on the road by walking normally and singing aloud that song stuck in your head. Lest it makes you seem ‘available’ or some ugly connotation like that,
I am saving up all my writing money to backpack in the North. But as a woman alone I'll have to take 70 times more precaution; that is if I am allowed to go at all. Why why why why?
What is the use of all this liberation and independence if I can't walk alone on any road at any time I want.

I remember once (how can I forget ...duh! to me) On Brigade road, on New Year's eve two of my girl friends and I were thrown on the road and felt up by many men. Whoever came joined in! And the male friends who tried to help us were pushed away.

Another male friend , A , asked me after sometime whether I thought I was doing Satyagraha walking on Brigade road on New Years night.
Sadly , a similar echo floated around in my mind. Because , really, How can I expect a thousand men on a road not to treat the few women on a road in a stampede , as fruit baskets, soul- less objects to grab randomly?

How How How do you change things?

A ragged urchin , aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy;a bird
Flew up to safety from his well aimed stone :
That girls are raped ,that two boys knife a third,
were axioms to him , who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.

From 'The Shield of Achilles' by W.H Auden

Mood: disillusioned ...duh!

19 years of technorized me.

Trunk call ,STD, Cable (star) TV, Personal computer, Answering machine , Windows, Internet,Instant Messaging,Voice Chat ,Mobile phone , Caller ID , Camera Phones, Broadband, bluetooth,infrared,wifi,google,3g phones..'(and so u can correspond like damn fast and do alll kiiiiinda cool things like watching movies(and i dont mean mms type) but proper videostreaming .. in real time ..' says my friend in London who must be feeling sorry for my backwardness .and also says 'im not too knowledgable with this kinda stuff.' .but the thing is . ..can't keep up.

My Blog

is hardly ever read but still exists because I love writing and I love writing on the computer;

actually, this nice person has linked my blog on his so someone does read my blog


which is full of typos that I am sorry about .

Media Jungle

“Do I climb the ladder or go up the rope?’ I read this somewhere in a handout about a play, I think. Isn’t it so relevant for people like me - wondering what the hell to do with life?
An outlook journalist gave a talk at college yesterday. Generalizing on outlook I thought he must be those journalism is infotainment with not an ounce of social responsibility types. Thankfully he wasn’t and had a lot of interesting things to say. One of them being that it’s not all about low waist jeans, butt cleavage and donating one’s youth to M.G road and Brigade road. This made my friends and me cringe in a bit of well deserved guilt.

Anyhow there was some talk about whether newspapers will soon be extinct in this age of technology. He said firmly that they will not. However the print media will constantly adapt to competition from the broadcast and internet media and cater to shorter attention spans at whatever cost. Whether its sms alerts or shorter articles change will be rapid. In the west there are free DVDs etc for subscriptions which attract readers. Unlike in India where newspaper sales are booming, they are on the decline in the west.

Talking about the aggressive marketing strategies of the Times of India, he said that they employed this strategy he termed as dumping-conquering as much advertising space in a town as possible. Another strategy is, he said, cost cutting. A dealer would probably make more out of a bag of newspapers from the raddi wallah than actually selling it. This is obviously possible because of ridiculous amounts of advertising revenue from elsewhere. An advertising manager from TOI who quit apparently told him that he wouldn’t trust the TOI with is daughter .Interesting.

Then, again, I don’t think journalism is all serious stuff and intended to bore us to death. True, it is a valuable tool for democracy and its purpose is to create awareness. However,
The fact is that it has to inform in entertaining or at least reader/viewer friendly way to get the attention of the masses. There is obviously a thin line between sensationalism and good ethical journalism. Also there is a thin line between boring drab journalism and good ethical journalism.
About the tehelka tapes he felt, they were needed. The media is accessible le only to about 10% of a largely illiterate country. The tapes left no room for doubt about political corruption. What were the larger publications doing then is a valid question he asked. Has the print media become complacent just churning out the regular day to day stuff?


Outlook man felt the most boring journalism came out from Bangalore and Chennai. Possibly.
Anyhow what did I start with? Ya, the ladder and the rope. I’ve always been attracted to journalism. Now, I feel overwhelmed by the jungle the media is beginning to sound like As a journalism student it seems unnerving to enter it .

Prejudice

What is prejudice? Why do we educated urban people assume we are beyond prejudice?
In reality all of us are biased about economic class, alma mater, religion, brands and God knows whatelse . Everyone does however have their own prejudice. Some are unaware of their prejudices. Some are afraid to admit it even to themselves.
To have prejudice is to pre judge and to generalize. We did a valuable component on the nature of prejudice in my 7th std class. I know it is assimilated somewhere into my thinking but can’t remember the details now. My school didn’t believe in teaching s details of the numerous pacts and other History History things. Though I am quite clueless, I am glad about that.
Anyway the point of all that was that one of the abstract chapters we did was prejudice.


Recently, I traveled from Jammu to Delhi by a night bus. It was the first time I was taking a bus alone and I was the only female on the bus. For some reason, my mind turned all bitchy and I was shit scared of all the men in the bus. They probably were looking at me because they were letching or because they found it odd that I was traveling alone. I don’t know. Suddenly I began to have thoughts I was ashamed of .I didn’t even know I had such prejudices in me . Once, a friend had told me Sikhs in turbans were very trustable and I found comfort finding one on the bus. I was very suspicious of the Muslims and didn’t feel like trusting anyone in general because they were Men. Is it because I felt that my identity as a woman was threatened? In the sense that I felt unsafe being the only woman in a bus in some unknown town. Do prejudices pop up when one’s identity is threatened?
Anyway, I turned my head to the moving moon and distracted myself from vague thoughts.

15 , Park Avenue

I just watched Aparna Sen’s 15,Park Avenue. It is about Mitali(Konkana Sensharma) who suffers from schizophrenia and how her disease affects her and the relationships of those around her.
It is interesting because it brings into focus the schizophrenic’s point of view. What is reality anyway? Whose reality is more real? Meethi’s world of saddam and him helping her escape to her husband’s house where her five children are? .Or Anjali’s (her sister played by Shabana Azmi) world of being a physics professor and day to day life?
‘How would you feel if I told you, you were not a professor and you were imagining it’? , Meethi says making even the self convinced Anjali pause for a minute.
The film explores how such an illness affects people around the patient. Anjali feels responsible for her sister and has put her own life on hold, caring for her sister, leaving no time even for self pity.

Rahul Bose does a fairly good job playing the fiancé of Meethi who leaves her when he realizes he cannot be with a ‘woman he only feels pity for.’ A chanced encounter while on holiday in Bhutan eleven years later presents him Mitali who doesn’t recognize him. And yet believes herself to be married to him.
The most disturbing scene is indeed the rape scene. When on a journalistic assignment outside Kolkata, Meethi is attacked and gang raped by political men. Needless to say this aggravated her to a point of no return.
The scene itself is not as rape scenes in Hindi movies are portrayed dramatic. It simply shows the latching of a door and people walking in and out and moans. At the end of it Meethi I hurled outside bleeding and vulnerable.
It was terrible and made me think about how woman can never be free when the ever present threat of rape lingers around the corner .jojo’s reaction to the rape incident is shocking but real. One part of him wanted to hold her and the other was too repulsed to even touch her again.
That’s how things are?
The movie ends rather abruptly. It is open ended .But, I can’t think of any other ending that would have done justice to the rest of the film.

This is by no means a review of the film but Konkana was as always brilliant. Shabana , I felt was schoolish in some parts and the rest did a fairly good job.

fooling around with photoshop

Mcleodganj

Like in all tourist places, Mcleodganj has locals for whom tourists are part of a culture. It is as you know where the Dalai Lama sought political asylum after the Chinese occupation of Tibet. It is now his home and the exiled Tibetan government is here.
For Tibetans, their occupations revolve around their country. Whether it is selling antiques, traditional attire or T-shirts with Buddhist Mantras written on them, their day to day life revolves somewhat around selling bits of their culture.
As soon as one gets off the bus, hotel owners hound you claiming they’ve had a lot of “Delhi students’ stay with them before. From what angle we were assuredly Delhi students to them, I don’t know.

We were already tired of being cheated so we chose a room in a nunnery which was really perfect and had a terrace attached so it was lovely to see the snow capped peaks gleaming amidst the night’s darkness. For anyone interested in the concept of culture, Mcleodganj is the place to visit. Majority of the population is Tibetan and the rest of the inhabitants are migrants from North India or Nepal. The tourist population is largely Western or Israeli people in search of nirvana or drugs. There are of course the weekend trippers from parts of Punjab who just come for ‘sight-seeing’ (Oh, How I loathe the term).There was a lone mallu shopkeeper as well, longing for the coconut trees conspicuously missing (for him) in this mountainous confine. These mallus, I tell you, are everywhere.

According to the ‘other’ communities, the Tibetans are lazy because they get aid from Western organizations ‘fooled by’ pictures of ‘sad eyed’ children.’ They are, says, D, a Rajasthani, living on charity’. Following the alleged rape of a Tibetan boy (thought to be a girl because of the long hair’) by a Drunken Punjabi man, Punjabis have been looked down upon, says R, a Kashmiri. He warned us to stay away from them. The Tibetans however told us not to trust the Kashmiris and so did the Rajasthani. Another well meaning Indian tourist from Delhi told us not to trust the foreigners. The Indians resent the fact that Tibetans are so well off, even as refugees. According to some of them, the monks are leading luxurious,’ immoral’ lives ‘sporting expensive watches and getting pregnant’. Female tourists are harassed often.

Mcleodganj, in this sense is a cultural mess.
At the Dalai Lama temple, there is a beautiful sense of community as monks and punks sit together and pray and share meals.(No I am not saying that for corny rhyme value, I am referring to those guys clad in extremely baggy pants(gravity’s slaves) ,psychedelic colored T shirts and lots of (non- prayer ) beads. The monks and the chuba clad women carry those prayer wheels rotating them rhythmically to Buddhist chants. We were the only Indians there really, but they were very friendly and invited us to eat with them. We really felt like we weren’t in India and the meat in the soup was making my loyal vegetarian self very paranoid. I couldn’t obviously waste food that has been so graciously offered to me in near foreign settings. It turned out to be Tofu. Phew! (and yea , I was shameless enough to ask.)
There is a vibrant young crowd one meets at TIPA (Tibetan institute of performing arts). Whether it is preparing for Tibetan opera shows in Darjeeling, designing colorful traditional costumes or playing the Tibetan guitar and offering classes for tourists, the students here are an interesting lot. Enrolled for a five year course, they specialize in one aspect of the Tibetan opera in an institute that is struggling to preserve an ancient oral tradition. The 20 something guys playing the drums to western music, on hearing that we were from Bangalore, claimed proudly that when they came here, they hung out at Forum and Brigade Road.
Tibetans are in many ways facing an identity crisis. There is a little known past, the Indian identity and Western influences all merging into the modern second generation Tibetan identity. For the article on this that I wrote , go here or click on link above
.

The foreigners who come are mostly here for yoga and meditation following the new nirvana seeker brigade to ‘incredible exotic India’. There are many yoga, meditation and Tibetan Buddhism centers around town .In Dharamkot; there is the famous Vipassana mediation centre. (The course requires you to shut up for twelve days and eat very little and the other intricacies of Buddhist tradition, I honestly cannot do justice to.)
Perhaps the troubled Western psyche is used to market a lot of tailor made courses that advertise freedom from indecisiveness, stress, negative thinking and the like. Some of these courses, people claim are money making techniques. The Tushita meditation centre and The Vipassana centre, I gather from all the people who went there are very good.
For regular, tourists, there is not much to see except the dirty Dal lake, the Dalai Lama temple, pretty paths in the hills with mountain streams, meadows, amazing views et al.

Turkish Lover

Turkish Lover by Esmeralda Santiago is the story of a Puerto Rican woman who fights all stereotypical fates to lead a decent life and finally graduate from Harvard. It is a powerful personal memoir that starts with her migration to the United States and her life with a large family headed by her single mother. She graduates from the performing arts high school, having learnt Indian Dance. She finds various secretarial jobs and pursues courses from a Community college alongside.
Unable to find her identity and space in her mothers house, she moves to Florida with her lover , Ulvi. Ulvi who is much older than her is Turkish. Her mother, needless to say is more than just upset with her.
Esmeralda portrays the contrasts between her native culture and her adopted one beautifully. For those who have grown up in any kind of a multicultural setting, this book is a must read.
While she escaped from her mother for the sole reason of finding an identity, she finds that with Ulvi too , her individuality is submerged. He only loves the person who he thinks she is and cannot accommodate her individuality. ‘You are becoming too free, Chiquita.’
Finally, she overcomes his dominance over her life and graduates from Harvard University, a far fetched dream for a Puerto Rican girl in those times.

It’s amazing how one sight you saw when you were a kid can have more impact on you than your critical years in school or whatever. When I was about five years old, a 'caged' truck came and some people caught all the dogs in my neighborhood. (Rajaji Nagar , Bangalore). They yelped like I would if my eyeballs were touched up with cigarette butts. When they were sitting comfortably in the truck’s grilled enclosure, they were silenced, peering at passersby with gleaming soulful eyes.
My brother told me they were going to be electrocuted in some place. I imagined a special place just for killing dogs. Dogs would be thrown into a machine and feel lots and lots and lots of pain and finally die. I knew even then that it was because they spread rabies and all that. BUT there had to be some other way!!!!. The solution surely was not in just killing them so brutally. This was way back in 1991 and even bear trainers would walk the roads of Bangalore, their living sources of livelihood were often bleeding while being forced to do ridiculous tricks. Their small eyes looked so helpless; parakeets, monkeys, elephants.
Which perverted mind will see an innocent adorable dog walk on the road, minding his own business, aim a stone and laugh at his pain??
I don’t know. It’s always bothered me. While my friends were on their way to becoming engineers, lawyers, doctors, I always confidently said, I want to be an environmental activist. Now in the real sense, I don’t know how but I want to find a voice in me.

What manipulated crayons, we are!

Your Dominant Intelligence is Linguistic Intelligence

You are excellent with words and language. You explain yourself well.An elegant speaker, you can converse well with anyone on the fly.You are also good at remembering information and convicing someone of your point of view.A master of creative phrasing and unique words, you enjoy expanding your vocabulary. You would make a fantastic poet, journalist, writer, teacher, lawyer, politician, or translator.

What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?

This is one of the most sensible of the quizzes I can't claim to have not taken. What is my world view? (I was materialist) , What were you in your past life? …and others that I was too amused to take. (What rejected crayon are you, Kissing purity test, what is your underwear type)
I mean, who gives a shit?
It's catered for the self obsessed internet users/bloggers around the world. The creators are hoping that in the one second before they hurriedly start answering the questions assigned, they’ll glance at the car insurance and dating ads, and be tempted into them. The creators of these quizzes are probably bored students who are paid a bit for it.
It's a bright idea, though horribly manipulative. This new type of advertising. If you have a gmail account, you'll know that you have links related to mail content with every mail. A mention from an unassuming friend about his arrival in Bangalore is used to market 'cheap' airfares to Bangalore, property there etc!
Behind all this is the concept of knowing what you are most interested in and using that information for advertising. I am pasting an article I wrote for the college paper below:

Will the media be history?

We the smug students of Media Studies may understandably react strongly to know that the print media may be extinct in nine years. Will we be among the unemployed begging at Brigade Road signals then? Well, we can never be sure but according to an internet forward I got recently, Google will be responsible for the extinction of our profession? Huh? That harmless little know it all thing that saves you for every psychology project the night before submission.?

According to this particular internet forward called ‘The museum of Media History.’, one day Google will compete with The New York Times and the latter will lose and ultimately become a newsletter only for the elite and the elderly. Before I begin this sort of ‘futuristic’ History I want to emphasize that I am nor plagiarizing but merely re-stating what the net forward had to say and am not claiming it ……………….. to be the epitome of accuracy. (Yes, that was a disclaimer in disguise.) It is the year 2014AD. ‘It is the best of times. It is the worst of times.’ Everyone participates in the media and it is a ‘living, breathing medium.’ It all began in 1988 when Tim B. Lee invented the World Wide Web in Switzerland. Ten years later, two scientists from Stanford would invent Google, the world’s most effective search engine. Amazon.com was soon launched and aimed to sell everything online. Google news became a news website that had news edited by computers in 2002. In 2003, Google merged with blogger, a personal publishing tool that allowed one to publish unedited content and maintain a profile of one’s interests and aims. 2004 was when it really all began. Sony launched its first electronic paper. Google launched gmail which had unlimited storage. At that time it was a privilege to never have to delete a message again. It’s something we take for granted today! Eventually all of Google's functions were combined-news, blogger, mail etc and the Google grid was created. What is the Google grid? The Google grid ensured that one had functionally limitless storage space and access to information accessible from anywhere in the world .One could conceal information or publish it for the whole world to see. Internet journalism has matured. In 2007, Microsoft launched Botser, a program that ranks and rates news upon personal taste. The Sony E-paper was cheaper than normal newspapers. In 2008, Googlezon was launched .This combined the technology of Amazon.com which provided the social recommendation information in the form of consumption patterns, demographics and tastes. This meant that if you were a subscriber to Google they’d know that you were most vulnerable to consumer brainwashing a.k.a advertising after college hours, preferred McDonald’s to Pizza Hut and so on. They would have access to your blogs and personal files. In 2010, inefficient news gatherers had no business of prancing about the place writing generalized news stories for everyone in the world. Google discovered a new algorithm that would construct a news story for every user. The real struggle for conventional journalism began in 2011 when the New York Times sued Googlezon for violation of copyrights law and for unethical journalism. The case reached the Supreme Court and needless to say googlezon won. The New York Times went offline! In 2014, googlezon launched EPIC (Evolving personalized information construct).Everybody contributed to what would be news and most were paid. This was still a tiny cut for Google’s advertising revenue. Like we do today, all our news is delivered to us the way we want it. It has what we want to read about, how we want to read it and in the order that we want to read it. We could choose a combination of editors depending on our choice. So is news now, deeper, broader and more advanced’? They know our consumption patterns, our social status, our interests, our potential interests. They view us as a potential finance source for the economy, they tell us the news that will manipulate us into making decisions on what and where to buy and how to be. In this sense, it is the worst of times. There is no place for journalistic ethics. News is a ‘collection of trivia’ that is ‘narrow, shallow and sensational.’ Ted Grasse, dean of the Stanford University journalism program said that journalism is a ‘form of public communication and not a private service aimed at individuals whose demographics, advertisers find appealing.’ Perhaps the extinction of journalism won’t happen according to the exact forecast. No, I’m not saying it in the fear of being sued by Google (!) but the concept of journalism as objective presentation of happenings around the world, its aim being primarily to create awareness is fading.

Loos at The Leela

Yesterday we went to The Leela to watch a movie at the Levis store. Sounds random enough to be sarcastic but the (wannabe) tattered pieces of denim in glass cases there were intriguing. With special lighting effects and all that , there were denims made in 1937,1944,1952 and other such randomly assigned years. To me they resembled my now shapeless 1998 ones .The decor of the shop was interesting to say the least, with chains hanging here and there. Actually I could potentially describe it much more sarcastically. I don't however know political incorrectness limits for blogs. I don't mean to be so skeptical but the life of the rich is fascinating.
I don't know why I am bothering with college and all that. I could just buy some crepe saris from Shivaji Nagar and create some minimalist embroidery(read running stitch, and lesser the better, or more expensive.)I’ll sell it for seven thousand bucks, each . Of course I'll create this brand with a rich sounding surname , have black an white pictures of doped out models wearing them, make them hazy on Photoshop.
I'll go through Bangalore Times and hand pick models from page 3 . I mean those pictures are earnestly waiting there to be seen.( Neha,Sneha and friend) whatever. I’ll later have fashion shows and have actors from Bold and the Beautiful come walk the ramp for me.
Didn't one of those dudes come recently? The Hindu’s article on it had undercurrents of mockery ; in fact all the p3p type articles it does, have such a tone. If I am imagining it, forgive me. Deccan Herald was raving and ranting about him being so hot and all.
If I am unemployed enough for unwanted media comparative analysis, I might as well aim for page 3.
I mean , after using the loos at The Leela, it might not be all that bad, really. :P

Mess of love?

The Mess of Love
D. H. Lawrence

We've made a great mess of love
Since we made an ideal of it.
The moment I swear to love a woman, a certain woman, all my life
That moment I begin to hate her.
The moment I even say to a woman: I love you! ---
My love dies down considerably.
The moment love is an understood thing between us,
we are sure of it,It's a cold egg, it isn't love any more.
Love is like a flower, it must flower and fade;
If it doesn't fade, it is not a flower,
It's either an artificial rag blossom,
or an immortelle, for the cemetery.
The moment the mind interferes with love,
or the will fixes on it,Or the personality assumes it as an attribute,
or the ego takes possession of it, It is not love any more, it's just a mess.
And we've made a great mess of love,
mind-perverted, will-perverted, ego-perverted love.
--- © 1929 D. H. Lawrence
We did this poem in Lit class;I quite like it though Lawrence is not really a favourite except Snake which is lovely.Would love to write about it but will do later.:)

clinical vegetable?!

The Logical Song-Supertramp
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees,
well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they send me away to teach me how to be
sensible,Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so
dependable,Clinical, intellectual, cynical.
There are times when all the world’s asleep,

The questions run too deep
For such a simple man.
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am.
Now watch what you say
or they’ll be calling you a
radical,Liberal, fanatical, criminal.
Won’t you sign up your name,
we’d like to feel you’re
Acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable!
At night, when all the world’s asleep,
The questions run so deep
For such a simple man.
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd,But please tell me who I am.

the rapist,the suicide bomber,the drunken wife beater

I always try to look from the point of view of the rapist,the suicide bomber,the drunken wife beater an I begin to analyze why peole would retort to such things. And when one looks at possible childhood experiences and the evolution of a severe identity crisis,how the neurotransmitters have been conditioned to go out of control, I understand the situation better.This makes it impossible , almost, to find any solution. The world to me is a subjective mess.(Depends on how you look at it,There's no black and white,On one hand...On the other hand). Man!The shades of grey are fatally dizzying. Worse than that...is the fact that my spaced self is part of a category that someone has bothered to create.Post-Modernist. Imagine there a word for this spacedness that the air of today's world seems to have instigated. I and my spaced out buddies with whom I sometimes spend late nights typing messages about pointless issues.(Pointless coz in this relegion,there's no absolute truth anyway).. Feminist, I surely am.Won't bore you with the proof. So does that make me a Post-modernist,feminist,cynical weirdo??

Ooooops!;)

When i was at Mcleodganj, i faithfully forwarded my project to my teacher from some (excuse for a ) cyber cafe.In the mail, I said I was extremely ill and was sorry on having sent it so late.In short I posed as a conscientious student.
When I returned ,I continued the act.
Today however someone told her I was in Himachal Pradesh all the while!
oops!