Chiffonesque

As a rule, I don't like comparing places to Bombay. It's not fair to the place I think. No matter how laid-back a town or how frugal its facilities, it is still home to so many people. It is disrespectful to constantly measure someone's home to an impossible yardstick and delight in its shortcomings. And also because I partly think Bombay to be aloof, distant, yet complete. The rest of the world is just necessary accoutrement. So I don't really get belligerent when people say how much cleaner the other places are or how much warmer the neighbors. It is mostly true. I also listen quietly when people comment on how rumpled Bombay's fashion is - how tackily wearable the clothes and how impossibly practical the accessories. Fine. Sartorial elegance is a flippant virtue. However, I saw something on T.V. yesterday that made me very angry. It was one of those lifestyle shows that get launched with squiggly, psychedelic lines. A hep anchor was covering new watering holes ac...

I watched 15 Park Avenue a couple of weeks back. I can see why it could be panned as pretentious and austere. I can see why it could be heralded as good 'cinema', instead of great 'film'. 15 Park Avenue is a difficult film - to watch, understand, or apprise. And that makes it an easy film to remember for a long, long time. While the movie is about several things, its story is rather simple. There is a family of three - the mother (Waheeda Rehman) and her daughters (Shabana Azmi and Konkona Sen). Shabana is a vociferous divorcee who teaches Physics in Calcutta University. Her younger sister, Konkona, suffers from schizophrenia that got triggered off because of her rape. Konkona believes that she has a family with several children and a doting husband waiting for her at 15 Park Avenue. She insists on finding it and returning home but there is no such place. While that is the basic, plain-vanilla plot, there are several other flavours brought on by other characters. There...

It is ironical that one goes to a hospital to restore health. Health seems to be one of those elements that hospitals usually don’t allow, or allow very sparingly; like say, between 8 to 10. Since the last week or so, I have visited several hospitals and no matter how swanky the place, a hospital is the last throne of gloom. Interestingly, they all smell the same – of pus, wounds, antiseptic, and hesitant healing. I’m pretty sure that if I’m blindfolded and taken to any hospital (as improbable as that is), I wouldn’t be able to identify it with my olefactory senses alone. Now, I could do that with the Shopper’s Stop around Mumbai or the Fame Adlabs or Crossword. Each place, I think, has certain notes in their introductory smells – like Crossword, Powai is more tomato while Crossword, Turner Road, leans towards melted butter and leather. All hospitals, on the other hand, smell alike irrespective of whether they are public or private or government-aided or politician-sponsored. Interesti...

This morning I spent three hours arranging for blood for my father's transfusion. Mine wouldn't do. And we are blood related. I spent time at the blood bank in a long queue, ahead of a father who wanted ten bottles of blood for his little girl. They are blood related too.

I had a rather coarse palate. If certain web sites are to be believed, then my being Arien had something to do with it. Generally for me, food to be appreciated must have a strong dominant taste. And for food to be fully appreciated, that dominant taste must be spice. Because I am an Arien (according to the website) and because I am Indian (own observation), what I mean by spicy is the chilly type of spicy. Not the genteel, well-bred, Eton-educated spicy of thyme, basil, paprika, etc. So, spicy was only something that came garbed in red-hot parched skin and seared tongue, smoked ears, moistened orbs and got the nose to run. To me, then and only then, did food have any taste. Then I had typhoid and had to be off spicy food for an eternity. In that time, I must have eaten through three fields of wheat in the forms of rusks, bread – white, brown, and wheatish (funny), and chapattis. There were also boiled pulses or vegetables or chicken or very lightly flavored steamed fish. For the firs...

You have a stomach ache that is more like an intestinal tickle. You have not slept the entire night because you were trying to find that precious copy of ‘Bleakhouse’ but wound up looking for the black top with sequins. Neither was found. And because everything else was way too much trouble, you decide to simply switch on the T.V. You instinctively gravitate towards the comforting genre of sitcoms. After a few hours of canned gaiety, you flick over to AXN or to some debate on a news channel and find that you can laugh at anything. My sense of humor was never very refined to begin with, but I did have a discerning sensibility that now seems to have gone out of the third slat of a narrow window. So I hear anything or remember anything at all and lapse into a rather longish stint of tranquilized twitters. Examples: A Whose Line is It Anyway: Colin and Ryan are two people trapped in a pre-mutiny environment. One of them is Irish and the other is Scottish, so it’s a little unclear what his...

Having a brother such as mine made me realize that optimists are not really popular people. I would always try to cheer him and he used to mistake it for a surreptitious endeavor to bump him off from his desolate pedestal. In fact, in a rather circumvent way, he once mentioned that all the people who were assassinated were people who wanted to make others happy – against their wish. Well, there may be some truth in that. Right now, my new year has begun on a rather low note. I find myself single, jobless, without the book I was hooked on to, and with no luck of finding a Pulp Fiction DVD. It is rather tempting and cosy, in fact, to sulk and feel low and not be bothered by happy friends who dish out advice such as, ‘Plenty of fish in the sea. You should know that, Mukta, after all you’re from Mumbai’ (Reference to Mumbai because it is close to the sea – there are certain leaps of logic my pal is given to. She’s a lawyer, so one doesn’t ask her to explain things much.) The worst is, ‘Pul...