Nine: Man at Work

A couple of weeks ago, when my mother was looking through an ancient box of unsorted photographs, she put aside some she especially wanted me to see. Of these, I picked a few to scan. Rather rashly, I put them ALL up on twitter and then swiftly changed my mind and deleted them all.

This one, though, I want to put up. It's my dad at his desk at Geoffrey Manners. This was probably shortly before he got married; we're uncertain of timelines, and because there's no one left who can answer the questions we now have, we just have to speculate. I am not certain this is 1968, but my mother thinks it probably is.

If I cared enough about history, personal or general, this would matter. I care more for memory, though, and for that purpose, this works just fine as it is. There are clues, tantalising enough, in the posters at the back, his clothes, hair.

What I really want to know is, who took this photograph and why was my dad pretending the photographer was absent? Also, why was this photograph put away in a small envelope along with other photos we've never seen, among my dad's things?

Once again, there'll never be answers to these questions.

Leaves of grass

As we were leaving from a place yesterday, we noticed this deep maroon flower. "Cotton family," my mother said, authoritatively, and I took her word for it.

I got into the car. My mother gestured for me to return. She was bent over that 'cotton' plant but for some reason now, she kept saying "grass". 

I looked at her blankly. 

"Marijuana!" she said, as to someone particularly slow.

Oh! I looked. And sure enough, those leaves. 

 I have to say, at this point, that I have never actually seen a marijuana plant. I don't know what it looks like in situ, or what kind of flowers it has. I just know the shape of the leaves.

We stood indecisively over it (I really couldn't tell you why. In addition to our general ignorance about the plant in its raw state, we were also pretty unlearned in processes. And we'd finished admiring the flower early on in our acquaintance). 

A couple of people gathered around us.

"What is this plant?" we ventured to ask.

"Gongura," the lady replied. Apparently it can be cooked and eaten.

Well, of course, I thought. (Also irrelevantly, I thought of brownies).

I took a couple of photos and plucked a flower with a leaf attached. It withered on the dashboard before we got home.

Karachi. A murder.

Of crows. Tsk. What were you thinking?

This is from my hotel window on the last evening. 

There will probably be one more photo post and then I'm done talking about my trip. Mostly because I'd like to let the experience steep in silence but also because the series is now in serious danger of becoming exotic and banal all at once.

Doha Diary: Layover

We had over eight hours in Doha and Qatar Airways were obliged to give us a room. It took an hour for the paper work and travel to, but we had plenty of rest and a shower and tea and felt somewhat human by the time we returned to the airport.

In the interval, we saw glimpses of Doha from the bus and from our respective room windows. I got construction.

Doha: View from my room

Kavery got a mosque and kids playing football. That's the luck of the draw. 

Doha: View from Kavery's room

(That aged look to the photos is merely badly washed window panes.)

On our way to the hotel, we found our driver speaking with a strong Malayali accent and - because that's how these things happen - I was speaking to someone in Tamil for the first time in ten days*. 

Oh, and the guy at Reception was Pakistani and I got to hear someone say, one more time, 'Koi maslaa nahin." The gap between experience and nostalgia gets shorter and shorter.

Before all that, however, there were timely reminders that it was time to return.

Lahore: Paradise takeaway

 If there is a Paradise...

__

*Excluding conversations with my mother, of course.

Karachi Diary: Placeholder

My S10 is more than ten years old and is now on its last legs. The photos it can manage are grainy, even in adequate light. There were reasons I couldn't bring my SLR but since the reason I'm not blogging in words today is because there's barely time to sleep, let alone process things and blog about them.

So here's the creek by our hotel. Early morning and at around sunset.

Creek. Early Morning. Karachi.

Creek. Sunset. Karachi

The Same Other: Photos on Hamburg by Serish Nanisetti & Sridala Swami

Five years ago, I went to Hamburg for five days and came back with hundreds of photographs I had to pare down to a manageable 50 to exhibit. It was a crazy time and some of that was described in these posts.

This year, the Goethe Zentrum Hyderabad celebrates 10 years of its existence and, as a part of those celebrations, is having a retrospective of some of the things they have done in the city this last decade.

So, in celebration, what was Posting the Light: Dispatches from Hamburg, is now leaner, with 20 photographs and some text, and has merged with Serish Nanisetti's photographs (which juxtapose Hamburg and Hyderabad) and it all looks very wonderful.

All hasn't been smooth sailing, though. One important photograph - so important that I nearly didn't want it to go to someone else - can't be a part of the exhibition even though I'd wanted to include it. I asked the person who has it, if I could borrow it and he said yes. He was to send it to the GZ but he claims that his driver took it to Nalgonda instead. Ya, right. 

Serish has a gigantic image - photographs printed on canvas and I wanted to see it very badly yesterday, but it hadn't yet arrived by the time I left. 

I have no idea how it's all going to be ready by this evening, but - in the words of Geoffrey Rush - it's a mystery.

Here are the details. But in short, The Same Other opens at 5pm, Journalists Colony, 11th December 2014.

This is what the place looked like in the afternoon yesterday. It'll look different today, I promise!

Prepping for The Same Other December 2014

Spaniard Was Here

Yes, I know it's been ages (and ages) but I'm not sure what to say about that. Iowa happened, then Chicago, DC and New York and then I came back.

And I haven't felt like blogging, that's what. Not sure things are going to change around here. This silence, absence, whatever - it's not a slump. I feel energised, actually. But I also feel I should be pouring that energy into other stuff.

In other words, life is elsewhere.

Of course, going by my past record, I need only announce this in order to want to blog the heck out of the remaining few weeks of this year. We shall see, but don't hold your breath.

I leave you with a photo.

BANKSY WAS HERE. November 2013.

That was where the Bansky truck thing was.

Consider this a portrait of the space he occupied.

South Asia Calling

These days, when I cross roads, I scurry across them in case cars won't stop.
I see Volvos and Hyundais everywhere.
I look for drivers on the right instead of the left.
I see parking signs that look like timid imitations of those back home.

There's a crowd outside a building? Of course I want to join it to see what's happening.
Then from a few weeks ago, I remember a door we passed by on the way to Snug Harbour in NOLA.

Asia is calling. It's time to go home.

An Unboastful Reader

In Oberlin, I was given (ok fine; I bought some) many books and I briefly considered wearing everything I took with me so that I could make space for the books I was definitely carrying back.

Reader, I didn't need to. They fit anyway.

When I returned and arranged the books proudly on what is really the top of the TV cabinet but passes for a bookshelf in my room, I briefly considered listing all the books by title, author and even thought I'd link to Amazon or something.

Reader, I didn't want to.

Instead, I took photographs. You know what they say about their worth.

It hardly needs to be said that I'm crowing. How I am going to take this stuff back is a question I'd rather you didn't ask me.

Instead, take a photograph that stands in for a question. That's how many millions it will be worth.

The column on the right, in the first picture, is all library books. Which is why there's no close up of those books.

But look at the others! Just look!

*

Of course, there must be a cat picture to convey just how self-satisfied I feel. Therefore:

Later, Gator

I turned my back on being a vegetarian for the four days I was in New Orleans. Basically, this  meant I had shrimp once and oyster twice. The thought of alligator meat, however chicken-like it's rumoured to be, still turns my stomach. I guess I am not a true meat-eater. Huh.

*

The turn-off into the Barataria Swamp Tour has a sign that says 'PARK & PRESERVE'. I assumed these words were verbs and was rather puzzled by them until I realised that they were being used as nouns. Then it made sense. Or not.

*

This is a photo post. The words will come later.

I. Another Pichavaram

Pichavaram in another country

Spanish Moss

Eerie Ent

II. Louisiana Story: Oil

Sentinel

Remaindered

 

III. And Gators (In Captivity & Otherwise)

Heads

 

Tails

 

and then there were four

teeth

 

churning

 

Marshmallow Gator King

IV. Baby Gator 

Baby

 

*

I'm travelling again Monday, so more silence is expected from this blog. But soon there will be time, there will be time.

Or so I keep telling myself.

Times, temperatures

I steal the title from the lovely Banno's blog. (Somewhere by an abandoned swimming pool, Andrew Scott screams, "That is what people DO, Sherlock!" Writers, maybe; poets, certainly.)

Times, temperatures. I want the days to slow down so they can last and last. You'd think I'd be mediating the whole experience, camera held to my face all the time, wouldn't you? But no. Instead, I sit on the bench by the river, notebook, book and a clutch of pens and stare at the sky and the water. People have been to the Draco Farm for a dose of repraried Mid-West but for me, this is all the rural I need.

Time to read (or, indeed, write) has to be wrested from the day. Our calendars arrive in our mailboxes and under our doors every Sunday and we lurch from meeting to reading to salon to screening. It's all good, but I've read one book since I arrived. Before I left, I was averaging one book every other day.

I have JJ: Some Jottings on interlibrary loan from Chicago. I feel like crowing at the possibility of this; the ability to request something from my room, walk over to pick it up, and all the while some complicated journey has brought this book that is now out of print in India, to me.

And the best part? I get to participate in this semi-academic life without any of the responsibilities that come with it. This is the addiction of residencies: the temporary leave of absence from adulthood, in order to create in as child-like a state as is commensurate with an independent life.

This is why it is completely unsurprising that at the same time as we sit on this same bench talking about whether we have hierarchical notions about what poetry is (the questions remain variations of what they have always been. It is the answers that shift like water), someone is arranging to have cars driven by ex-Writers Workshop writers, take us on a grocery run.

The bench now. It is like a book cover. No, that's not a gratuitous simile like the one in the previous paragraph. Wait. See for yourself.

So: JJ and Red Doc>. It makes for a strange switch of...temperatures? Emotional registers. I have introduced my friend Patricia, from Portugal (why is this still necessary to say? We seem to flaunt our global diversity as if it was its own kind of passport, though to what I'm not yet sure) to Carson. I'd like, equally, to introduce her - and others - to Su Raa, only that kind of transfer seems to happen with less ease.

Kofi Awoonor died in the Nairobi mall seige (what was it? Seige? Shootout? Attack?). I didn't know him or his poetry, but the IWP mentioned that he was at Iowa at some point. It seemed somewhat outrageous that as writers, we - some of us - had a sense of loss when Heaney died but felt nothing about the death of Awoonor. Any man's death diminishes me, but we keep defining 'man' and 'human' and 'woman' in such exclusive terms. At the fiction discussion yesterday (that I butted into, not uninvited, I hasten to add), this led to some minor kerfuffle of opinions.

I am struggling with two things: how to continue to interact outside my comfort zone of hanging out with people with whom I have a lot in common; and how to deal with the frustration of being surrounded by people who know nearly nothing about the writing from my part of the world without becoming an Ancient Mariner about it. (At the same time, I don't demand that other writers give me a synopsis of their literatures; and it's not as if I've read very much - if anything - from some of these countries. Maybe they feel a similar frustration at my apparent lack of curiosity.)

What this amounts to is a state of mind in which I feel off balance a lot of the time. Things appear to run along familiar lines of debate and discussion and then suddenly they don't. Then there's a lot of think about. Every writer's reading and introduction of themselves and their work in class has been a revelation. Who are all these talented people? How did I get to be put ina  hotel with them for 10 weeks?

This is why, when I feel off-balance - as I frequently do - I find myself on the bench. Bench time we call it. We is the smokers, though I don't smoke. But this is where they gather and I, like Clinton, don't inhale; but we sit, we talk, gossip. We're lizards in the mild sunshine. (Yes, km, I'm sorry. I said lizards. This is what happens when you don't answer your phone).

It's time for breakfast, followed by bench time. Later, I will have to gather myself enough in order to finish a paper I've been putting off for the last five days. Today. Absolutely, today. Because Sunday, we leave for New Orleans and I must create the vacuum that can contain those other stories.

Memory/placeholder

This is a pleasant memory.

This is welcome reality.

It's raining. It's getting chilly.
(I am trying not to pepper this post with exclamation marks, though the heat of it will be welcome).

Hello, fall.

View (Point of)

Exhausted. There aren't enough hours in the day, there isn't enough sleep in the night.

Yet I feel I'm learning more than I have in the last two years. As if I am being awakened and therefore I long for sleep, for the comfort and familiarity of it.

Defense mechanism. Or automatic knitting machine. It all depends on how you look on it*.

__
*I need to sleep on it before I can decide.

Food is where the heart is

A week or so before I was to leave for Iowa, a lot of my mother's veteran families-in-the-US friends asked me if I was going to take pickles, podis and things. I laughed and said I'd be fine. In my head, I thought, I can adapt to the food; I don't need to have sambar and rasam and find the nearest temple for food from home.

I'm still not going to be looking for a temple any time soon, but one week in and it's become clear that all of us are suffering from some sort of food homesickness. We have a microwave, a mini fridge and a coffee maker in our room. For those who need tea, the coffee maker is useless and the microwave a travesty.

We bought an electric kettle and we have that in our common room for anyone to heat water for their tea.

But what to do about rice, about actual hot, cooked food? (Leave rotis out of the equation entirely. This is not going to happen.)

Before coming here, I checked out how to make rice in the microwave. I have never owned or used a microwave so it was always going to be a challenge. But for the last two days, I've been thinking of spices, of oil, of soaking the rice, cooking times.

Yesterday was a beautiful day. It was warm but with a cooling breeze and the promise of a sharper bite in the days to come. There were pretty, puffy clouds in the sky and a green river to sit by. I lay down on a bench and read, looked at the clouds and had a brief nap.

There was so much contentment in that: in not having to worry about who will look at me while I'm pretending the entire outdoors is my own private domain. There was so much freedom in the ability take that nap under the patchwork clouds and sun.

Later that afternoon, after the first Prarie Lights readings featuring IWP writers, I felt restless. The day had to have a different end than an indifferently consumed meal at a pub. We got talking about cooking and a few of us decided to pick up some supplies and head back to my room, where I had a menu shaping in my head: pulau, cucumber raita and salad.

It wasn't that hard. Not having a cutting board slowed things up a bit, but we did it. There was no nimbu for the salad but we squeezed tomatoes. Erez made a mean dessert with berries, mascarpone and dark chocolate.

Here is the evidence.

Pulau, Raita, Salad

All the sinfulness!

And here's the river and the sky.

A matter of perspective

I had to be at Shambaugh House for a meeting. I had a few minutes before I needed to go up so I read poems, looked out the window and quite out of the blue, decided to sketch all the lines and squares I was seeing. I'm the world's worst artist, and there wasn't much time, but later it occurred to me that it would be fun to go back and take a photgraph from the exact same spot and see what the two images looked like together.

So here they are. 


Shambaugh House, from the 2nd floor landing. (Hasty) pen sketch.

Shambaugh House, from the 2nd floor landing. 

Celebrating a 100 years of....Talkies?

I hesitate to interrupt the beautiful silence here, but since I have had Thoughts after a long time and about cinema after an even longer time, I thought I should get let them out in case of system overload.

*

Indian cinema celebrated its centenary on 3rd May this year. What it marked was the centenary of the release of Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harischandra, which is as good a place as any to mark a beginning. Naturally, there have been special issues and programmes and things and they have been the usual mixed bag of celebration, nostalgia and some good writing.

In the middle of all this, there is Bombay Talkies. 

It is a compendium of four unlinked short films by four different directors and you can google anything you want to know about it. This post is about the state of my mind after watching it last night.

(There were aunties who came inlate - while the title song was on - and congratulated themselves for being on time. 'That is a matter of opinion,' I muttered under my breath but the auntie next to me was busy talking on her phone. During the interval, one of the said, 'How do they allow this kind of thing? Do you want to leave? We can leave if you want. It's up to you.' The phone aunty got up and left. The other one followed and tread on my toes while doing so.)

First off, general puzzlement: I know the Hindi film industry likes to pretend it's the only one around, even while they help themselves to story-and-plotlines from Telugu, Tamil and Korean films; but surely Bombay Talkies could have found directors who were not only mainstream/semi-mainstream Hindi film makers?

Also, Talkies. Someone needs to work on their titling skills, because as code it's inaccurate if somewhat efficient. Harischandra was silent and the studios were still some time in the future.

Thus my general discontent about the nature of this celebration on film: narrow, short-sighted and - for a celebration - minimally aware of its own history.

But the films themselves were fairly enjoyable, if uneven.

I was thinking about what the filmmakers were saying about Cinema-with-a-capital-C beyond the stories themselves, as they must have been because otherwise why bother to string four diploma-length films together, right?

So, in order of appearance:

Karan Johar: Karan Johar is such an insider that he doesn't even need to think about what cinema is. Because - isn't it obvious? - what he does is cinema and why is even a question? We celebrate a 100 years by making more of the kind of film that brought us upto this point.

If there's anything larger he's saying about cinema it is, possibly, that film music is cinema's umbilical cord and tells a kind of truth that transcends all the lies we tell ourselves and let our stories tell us.

(Yeah...that's farfetched. No it isn't. Yes it is. N- Whatever.)

That said, though he's no Wong Kar-Wai, his film had a few genuinely heart-stopping moments. Pity he let the last five minutes of his film slip away from him.

Dibakar Banerjee: There are big stories in small things. That's DB's definition of cinema. Or at least, his definition has sympathies with Ray's vision because he chose to film a Satyajit Ray story.

Zoya Akhtar: Tell 'em what they wanna hear. Hers is the least interesting and most cynically

blasé of the lot. 

Like Johar's film, hers is the work of an insider who is attempting to view the world of cinema through the eyes of an outsider or a misfit. But when you think of all the misfits and outsiders and deadbeats who made even mainstream Hindi cinema (never mind all the other kinds of cinema in whatever language) the memorable thing is is, it made me feel slightly ill to hear that what we need to do to make it is follow our dreams, nurture them in secret (and pray to Katrina Kaif dolls).

Anurag Kashyap: Cinema is misdirection and (a satisfying and necessary) illusion. Of the four, it is perhaps Kashyap who put any kind of thought at all into why he was a part of this exercise and for me that raised his film above the others.

It was clear that while KJ and ZA are one kind of filmmaker, DB and AK are another. These last two, being outsiders to the industry but who are beginning to slide their way in, are less concerned about the truth-telling and lie-nurturing nature of cinema. They don't care if cinema is about truth or lies; what they care about is, that whatever it is, it has the capacity to nourish small and real lives like any great art. 

And that is why we obssess about the movies even today, a 100 years on. Even when we download them carelessly onto our computers, and experience them as a solitary pleasure instead of communal festivity, cinema can attach us in precisely the same way it did a hundred years ago. And at least half of Bombay Talkies celebrates this.

*

Oh wait. I'm not done. I feel I must congratulate the Censor Board for this piece of cleverness.

[Apologies about picture quality. Bad phone camera and bad light.]

*

Wait. I'm still not done. 

I want sympathy and alcohol because I watched Star Trek Into Darkness. In IMAX 3D. The sight of Benedict Cumberbatch weeping in rage and sorrow over one half of an IMAX screen (in 3D!) still gives me nightmares. And I still have a half-crush on the man (at least, on his voice). 

Basically, JJ Abrams has watched [Spoiler Alert!] The Wrath of Khan and has scavenged dialogues wholesale over both his films in the reboot. That's not entirely a problem; what is, is that despite its cheesey sets and costumes, the earlier film was the better one. 

**Spoiler Alert**

Plus the racefail of having Cumberbatch play [the even more namefail] Khan Noonien Singh. (Seriously, Hollywood. Get your act together.) 

And he's So. Deadly. Serious. Gah!

The best part of the film for me was when Kirk is so frustrated with Spock that he expresses a desire, to Uhura, to yank Spock's bangs (not at all innuendously). 'I know he's your boyfriend,' Kirk says, 'but.' Uhura says she knows how Kirk feels. And then Kirk has this priceless dialogue:

"Wait. You guys are fighting??! Oh my God! I can't even imagine what that's like!"

To me that, and the scene with Kirk, Spock and Uhura in a pod, going to meet the Klingons, was worth the price of the ticket.

New Year Resolution (Singular)

How many of you read that as Will Work For Free?

No.

(Also, Happy 2013. Be good!)

Search engines, writing advice and miscellaneous trivia

What did you expect? It's Saturday, idyllically sandwiched between Friday's anxious socialising and Sunday's frantic preps for the week to follow.

Of course there's work but everyone knows what to do with it on Saturdays.

(If you don't, I'm fairly certain link #1 will have the answers).

And even though you should be prepared for time-wasting persiflage, with no further ado, I give you...

1. The Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine, which I found on Slate, while reading...

2. Kurt Vonnegut give his students the kind of assignment I wish my teachers had given me.

3. Oh, and of course you wanted to know that Yoko Ono's Lennon-inspired menswear collection has a bumless (I don't even need to say any more, do I?).

4. While we're on the subject of The Beatles, a story about George in Rishikesh.

5. And just to creep you out, this image.

A Diamond for Spaniard

Guys! This is the 1000th post!

To celebrate, and since no one else is likely to, I thought I ought to give the blog a diamond.

This is a house (yes, really) in the neighbourhood. It is brilliant and I hope people actually live there. It is also more splendorous than it looks in this photograph.

What's not to like about purple?*

PURPLE REIGN!

Bonus purple in this Passion Flower which is not currently in bloom.

*First there was pink. Now there is purple. Someone find me a purple luggage tag.