Wednesday, August 10, 2005

updates: homes, tushar, juries, parties, butterfly effect

its been a long time since i posted anything on the blog. that does not mean that nothing has been happening of course.. as the blog is supposed to document even the most mundane but as this post comes after a really long time, i must use this one merely to record as best as i can the weekend that passed.

friday: after unsuccessfully trying to give my car for servicing at sai services, andheri (they were dealing with the post flood car victims), mukul and me drove in his car to shai heredia’s huge apartment in a building overlooking colaba causeway.. ‘lucky inheritance’ she was saying. it must be strange living directly on the causeway. while for me it was always a place where only strangers exist, for her it was very different. she had stories of druggies she knew, the shopkeepers, the foreigners who lounges in the various back streets of colaba. quite a scene from that ‘shantaram’ book that everyone seems to have a copy of. met these two giggly girls there who work with her, one of whose mother is the director of vjti and live (she says) in a haunted house on the campus.
tushar's train compartment commuter travel enabler

tushar was having his opening at chemould on the first floor of jehangir and that was the primary reason mukul and me had come into town. it was his first opening since i have known him. there were about 5 or 6 pieces- paintings, installations, a movie and a web site, and tushar himself was in uniform. ‘unicell’ was the organization that claimed to create commuter enabling systems like footrests for people who hng on to the trains, etc. everyone was there.. sen kapadia, atul dodiya, madhushree, paro, sharmila (naturally), kausik and mohua, neera and arvind adarkar, tamal (whom i was meeting after years). i find chemould claustrophobic even when there are just 4 people in the room so a bunch of us sat on the steps outside smoking and nursing our drinks watching people go in and out and bitching about almost anything. the post-opening party was at a zhunka bhakar turned restaurant at the foot of the world trade center at cuffe parade. the entire bunch of people descended there having drinks from madhushree’s car and sitting in the pavilion like seating overlooking the empty parking lot gossiping and flirting.
mukul and tamal outside chemould

mukul and me left early for the party at velocity at tardeo. i never liked the space anyways, but this time it seemed even more tacky. double height space with the bar at one end and a stage. the music was all this revved up bollywood. nilima and her friend, mukul and me danced for a while and left soon after. alok and doc were there too and so was sushil madgaonkar whom we had just left at cuffe parade.

saturday: the big third year jury that started in the morning on friday restarted at 1 in the afternoon after the third year had its ‘journey of sewage’ film viewing. its turning out to be a very tough project. i think we will have to focus the students immediately into something very concrete soon.

sunday: mom, dad, geetu and me were invited over to dina and asif mehtas house for an all veg family lunch. the huge flat full of objects collected form all over the world is in a building right near ‘shreepati towers’at nana chowk - the tallest building in the city. spectacular views all over the city are now being interrupted by the newly reconstructed buildings courtesy section 33/7. aditya, their son, is doing his finance at ut, autsin with a minor in urban studies and played sim city 6 hours a day. asif mehta’s father was a bjp councilor and has books by and on gandhi everywhere you looked. after lunch we all went shopping for a refrigerator for geetu at sony mony, andheri.

got home after picking up ‘the butterfly effect’ and mukkampost bombilwadi on vcd form just dream.

‘the butterfly effect’ started out great, with all the disturbingly violent imagery. was quite spooked. until they took a good idea and beat it to death. ashton kutcher could not stop going back to his past to change one small thing that he does so that he lives a new future. it got pointless and quite boring.

No comments: