Nothing much

-
I am in the middle of some work but I will take some time out to write a little bit.

I was just going through the shelves of my bedroom. Now that I am in Bombay, I don't have a room of my own. So I don't get to go to my bedroom anymore. But today I did. I found a notebook in which I had written earlier. You know what I love and hate simultaneously? Notebooks that have so much written and a few empty pages. It's like an invitation to stop everything and purge your soul, writing and writing and writing. I wonder if there is a parallel to do through writing what Buddha did under the tree - meditate and not move and not give up until enlightenment is acquired. 

Long time ago, in college, I had once told a friend that I would like to die after having finished writing a book. Just put in the last word, cap the pen, close the book, settle down in a rocking chair, and go.

But then I changed my dying dream again. I thought of going away parked in one of those nice, quiet, leafy neighborhoods in Juhu. I am sitting in my car, listening to a song. My hair is long and it;s tied in a pony-tail. I don't know why that is important. Except that sometimes these details come to me. In the completed book version of me dying that I have written about earlier, I am wearing a pink pleated skirt. And a thick white shirt with large roses printed on it. I had such an outfit earlier. In college or school I can't remember when I was very very fat and could not fit into jeans. Also, the pleated skirt made me look hippy. It had box pleats. But it was so comfortable. 

I love skirts and dresses. I just love them. And I also like palazzos a whole lot. I don't quite like denims. I don't like anything that is tight or constricting around the navel.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
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
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
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
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more