Chiffonesque

I am at Athena and Merlot again tonight. This time I’m by myself and inside. I sit between tall, wooden shelves holding ceremonial bottles of wine. The French windows separate a cemented courtyard from an interior suffused with the educated intoxication of Viognier and Chardonnay. I can see palm leaves through dark, wooden slats. I’m sipping a garnet coloured drink from a flute glass. Wooden shelves criss-cross a mirror and light from red candles prick through the darkness in lacquered alcoves. I just finish a cup of shrimp cocktail. The dish is a fine example of culinary restraint. The 1000 island dresses and not smothers the shrimp. It’s one of those dishes that one has in moments when you savor minutae – take tiny bites of succulent lime and wine flavored prawns, sometimes with a shred of lettuce or a sliver of olive. Food gives the notion that a little, sometimes, is all. A group of beautiful people walk in – tall, feline, and glowing. Hair falls soft and straight on sculpted shoul...

Just watched Crash. And I write this in the quiet gush that follows after watching something stunningly evocative. I don’t think I will catch the next person on the road and tell them to watch this film. I will not SMS in frenzied urgency. I will wait because my time to recommend this film and my turn to say why will come. Not tomorrow perhaps, not next year perhaps, but much, much later. Maybe fifteen years later, when my children get involved in a group that insults foreigners...or maybe when they are the outsiders that people insult...maybe then, I will tell them about this movie. Until then, I'll probably live that story. About how discrimination begins at home, how angry people beget angry reactions, and scared people hate. How the weak person can be strong. How the timid can be fierce and the loud can be dumb. How sometimes you let the authorities molest you and how sometimes you watch and let it happen. How the molester is probably a guy with a sick father who helped the voi...

After working twenty hours straight with naught to eat or sleep, except for some gruelly coffee (two words that should never be together), I decided to walk home. It wasn’t really late but it was 9:30 p.m. - the time rickshaw fellows enter their doozy nocturnal timezone to charge midnight fare. Really, how do they tell Cinderella’s story in their world? She left the ball early and sat polishing the fireplace in her taffeta gown waiting to be turned into a turnip that didn’t happen until much later. (Turnip meant figuratively, although that too would have been a sweet turn of events.) Takes the magic out of the fairy tale, I think. Anyway, I was a little tired and heavy headed but thought I would walk home anyway. I just needed to have a chewy thought to engage my mind. Therefore I turned my meager faculties (meager at that time only. Otherwise, I’m an impresario of intellect) to how nobody ever laughs, ‘Hyuk! Hyuk!’. Now, as anyone who has read Archie comics would know, ‘Hyuk! Hyuk’ is...

Salty winds and jeweled brine Lashing sea and clouds that shine Memories of plenty and things I lack Looking forward to looking back.

A couple of nights ago, I was at ‘Fire and Ice’ on complimentary passes. Such passes now determine whether I go dancing or stay home and plan visits to Khadakvasla in my head. J, my steady date in such exploits, usually accompanies me after putting her baby to bed. However, Friday night, the nocturnal arrangements were speeded up as the three year old had social engagements of her own. She was invited to sleep over at a friend’s house. And since such prospects merit severe immediacy, the child ran in, shouted ‘Goodbye’ to her mum, waved at me in manner of dismissing a fruit fly, and was off. J and I got dressed. She, resplendent in a white, sheer number, and I in a merlot, stretchy thing that doesn’t need ironing. (I’m quite no-nonsense in my attire as untidy people are wont to be.) Now, Fire and Ice is J’s favorite jaunt. Personally, I think it’s more like Extinguished Fire and Melted Ice. The bouncers are rude, the DJs are insipid (I’ve seen more zing in a Windows pop-up), and the mu...

Limp, insipid, lame, stale, soggy, callow, soppy, langorous, somnambulist, thesauritically surfeited lazy Monday. Pages and pages of convoluted content. Mind getting fussy and stupid. Time getting susky and sore. And then, conversation in adjacent cubicle: Very very senior writer to whittle twittle rookie: I want you to do some groundwork before you begin storyboarding. Rookie: Yes? Senior: Take this book. I want you to brush up on colons. Rookie grimaces: You mean... Senior smiles: Grammar. Would have been interesting to see the picture in rookie's head.

Tonight, J and I tried out Athena and Merlot in Koregaon Park. Because a harried Sunday needs to end with something slightly despondent and intrinsically beautiful – like a tear, perhaps, or a last embrace on the beach. Sometimes a day’s epitaph must be written in elegiac form, in ink, in a foreign language, in entirety. Sometimes, you must end a day seated under an open sky, among dancing flames of candles and lanterns, amidst perfectly curled leaves floating on glassy water on granite. Sometimes, you must end a Sunday gingerly twirling the fragile stem of a glass. Sometimes, you must end a Sunday dipping skewers of fruits in a pot of melted chocolate and then giggling over drops that fall on your gleaming white plate. Sometimes, you must end a Sunday opening your heart carving ham glazed in orange sauce. Sometimes you must end a week in an impulse dipping the meat in chocolate and squealing with surprised ecstasy the taste brings. Sometimes that’s how you end a Sunday – with a fine p...

Yesterday, I was going through some mighty technical documents. These documents were peppered with acronyms beginning with rarefied alphabets that don’t find themselves in common use – X, Q, Z, E. So, whilst I trudged from one paragraph of incomprehension to another, I thought of the word ‘behoove’. It’s a nice word and strangely, doesn’t find itself used too much. This is despite people doing so many things because they are behooved to do them. What I also find nice is that it can confuse a person so effortlessly. “Why did Ernie kick the cat?” “It behooved him to do that.” “So that means he isn’t going to the Derby?” Now, it isn’t so funny if you think Ernie to be a man. But it is clever if you think Ernie is a horse. So if Ernie the horse is behooved, it doesn’t mean that his hooves aren’t there anymore, it means that he found kicking the cat necessary. It is also hilarious if you don’t know whether Ernie is a man or a horse. I am not in favor of the idea though, by man or beast. 1. ...

This morning, I went for a spirited, revitalizing jog in the Osho garden. (A moment to bring everyone’s attention to the word ‘jogged’. I ‘jogged’ – that is, I ran like an intoxicated duckling. I didn’t just perambulate like a sleepy drop of molasses around South Koregaon as some people think I do.) Anyway, after my aforementioned stint of blood rushing exercise, I perambulated like a sleepy drop of molasses around South Koregaon. Now, South Koregaon has some lovely, plush bungalows. Gardens with marble statues and sofa-sized swings upholstered in peach chintz. White wrought iron furniture. Long driveways and arches. Manicured lawns fringed with delicate blossoms. And my favorite – marble name plates that say, ‘ Poona’ , instead of Pune . Houses with vintage je ne sais quoi where breeding rubs off on the pedigreed canines. They cover their mouths with their paws when they cough and strut around as if on high-heels. I’m sure they all have Burberry raincoats for the monsoon. Anyway, out...

My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...

I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...

I have loved the movie so much that I can’t write straight. Words are just tumbling out from everywhere and there’s no reason, really, to hold them back. Yes, the outcome is a bit chaotic but what the hell? It’s not everyday that a film like this gets made. ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ is the most exquisite, delicious, scrumptious swirl of an adventure with chopped bits of mesmerism and dollops of pounding drama. I want to remember everything about this movie and remember it forever. Every single moment that I sat through was filled with that tremble that you can only feel as a child about to embark on something new and happy – like getting home to read a new book or putting sparkly stickers on a letter to a pen-friend, or finally eating a huge bowl of jelly and ice-cream. There is something ageless about innocence. The excitement of a child that is so piquant and dreamy at the same time. ‘The Chronicles..’ captures that essence very artfully. You f...