yesterday at saat rasta

a new tower looms over the arthur road jail but faces a blank wall towards it so no one can see kasab. meanwhile at its base a slum waits for redevelopment. across the road and in the neighbourhood mass is held at st ignatious's church as more high rises surround the area and new shirin talkies is a neon fantasy in the lights of evening traffic.

apocalypse now . the wayward cloud

fever dream beauty- all very spectacular. a river snakes through a forest as a man hunts for an officer gone mad. on the way he witnesses other officers fighting the war with their own idiosyncratic priorities like surfboards and beaches. war and death are made gorgeous in the half light and darkness, the distant sounds of airplanes and gunfire. it is no wonder that the doors’ ‘the end’ is its anthem and as jim morrison croons his adolescent death pangs a line of fire burns the forest.


a romantic comedy about urban alienation and the simulation of love/sex, the wayward cloud is a sequel to ‘the skywalk is gone’. after the place where he sells watches vanishes a young man becomes a local porn star as water runs out of the city and is replaced with watermelons. the apartment building is an oppressive labyrinth of rooms – a device that reminded me of a similarly dysfunctional building in jagte raho.

kaushik at pundole and the guild

The works are guaranteed to work.

In a future world new life forms evolve assembled out of the debris of civilization. These fragments are assembled together to make war machines that create a spectacle out of comic juxtapositions and movements; a computing machine bleeds its wires all over the floor as it generates predetermined but random answers; a city is made out of what used to be part of its most basic infrastructure and a garden is created out of the fragments of our everyday life. In it is a longing for elsewhere. The other place is desire.

Tiny fragments enlarge to become part of a larger whole through a shift of scale, and vice versa. We recognize the pieces that make these machines only for a minute before the stability of the signifier disappears into the assemblage.

How long will these machines last or long should they? Once their life is over do these also disappear into what remains of our history- waiting for another purpose, another meaning- an afterlife?

kaushik : guaranteed to work

assembling together the most incredible machines; making gardens, war toys, cities... at pundole and at the guild from tomorrow..

the skywalk is gone . sweet movie

again a world without water but this time only for twenty minutes. a missing skywalk disorients a young woman as she tries to find her way amid reflections and moving traffic around taipei station. another young man auditions for a part in a pron film. the film ends with a pop song playing as a white cloud srifts ona clear ble sky.
i admit to being completely grossed out but still fascinated by ‘sweet movie’, dusan makajayev’s film from 1974. two women – one on a journey through the crass commercialization of america and the other on a boat with karl marx’s face carrying the corpses of children and her other victims – the bride of communism. while the first ends up in a commune where shitting competitions and vomiting over dinner is the real party, the other seduces young boys and kills the sailor potemkin as he is covered in sugar. references and cross references abound to real life massacres like the discovery of mass graves in katyn and other atrocities that were the results of communism, fascism and capitalism. if in this description the movie sounds crazy, i am not even touching upon part of the madness.

the watchmen . exhaustion

saw the watchmen. the possible mutual destruction of nuclear holocaust is kept at bay by the very blue doctor manhattan as his ex-superhero friends suspect a superhero killer on the loose. in spite of the ponderous tone and the easy pacing of the film that explored the background stories of all the characters and some characters (roscharch) being quite fascinating the political undercurrent of the film just seemed dated. also the actors just didn’t seem right.
What horrible days in college right now. i do not remember my parents ever coming to school or to college to defend my behavior or my grades. if anything went awry it was always assumed that the blame rested surely on my shoulders and not on the institution. today the situation is completely different. everything seems to be negotiable. the student is made even more childlike and helpless as it becomes the responsibility of everyone around to make sure that they attend, perform at work and go to the next year. the student has no responsibility towards education, it would seem. it is that time of the year again- and i dread the next few days with the complaints, explanations, excuses, tears, anger, accusations. exhausting.

sunday afternoon

at home and at meghana's