joan as policewoman

joan as policewoman as statue of liberty as mourning lover for a drowned man

sunday concert at avon

cdsa

the cdsa campus is fantastic. critical regionalism without nostalgia for an idealized past. the stone walls and dark interiors never make for dreary space, the scale of the courtyards intimate and warm and the landscape straightforward pleasant. the pune monsoon wind helped. We were there negotiating the difficult terrain in between the interest of ngo’s, cbo’s and colleges of architecture for the housing workshop that begins next week.

sabad nirantar

in spite of (or maybe because of) my apprehension regarding any form of organized religion, and my recently discovered, aforementioned existentialism (see previous post) i was drawn to and moved by the devotion to a greater power expressed in the words of the bhakti poets and the voices of the folk singers of the malwa region - a complete abandonment of the self in a melting into the world and the heavens through the medium of music and poetry. metaphors are opened out as words within words and voices are vehicles towards the sublime. i loved the film.

and i thought i'd be a hedonist

	What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03) created with QuizFarm.com
	You scored as Existentialism Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life. “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” “It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” --Jean-Paul Sartre “It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.” --Blaise Pascal Existentialism 90% Utilitarianism 80% Hedonism 75% Justice (Fairness) 65% Strong Egoism 50% Kantianism 30% Apathy 20% Nihilism 5% Divine Command 0%

image post: the first day of college; morning car / visitors from way out west

portrayals

i don’t know why it is so, but i hate the word ‘portrayal’ when writing about movies of films. ‘the film portrays ….’ somehow seems like the narrative is the prime mover of the film and the structure or form incidental; or sometimes, in rare periods of honesty to myself, i feel maybe it is my own fear of appearing juvenile that it might seem like the ‘story’ is why i read a novel or watch a film (which i do all the time- especially in novels but not so much in film) as if such a need from art is childish. i don’t know where i get these kinds of ideas from. maybe it is the architectural urge to favor the frame rather than inhabitation.

in ‘john and jane’ portrayal is formal. its not only that the movie is about the dissolution of identity into amorphous other - like a portrayal of oneself as anew constructed on received images of perfection - namrata as naomi, or even glen as glen the rebel brat, but it also makes the portrayal of the ‘real’ self as construct apparent.

every relationship suffers a distancing through a consciously constructed artifice until they become archetypes or typologies to be observed, like fish in a bowl or blips on a surveillance monitor. these shadows of people, for that’s all that can possibly be portrayed- a part that is played- are empty outlines. we are not asked to empathize with them by making them ‘human’ in that cuddly way- by fleshing them out. their humanity is their vulnerability, their lives a hollowness into which we project our own sense of what it means to have be 'complete'; and we emerge feeling a gap- a huge hole waiting to be filled and finding only the eternal empty choices of a consumer society to help. the people answering those calls are like the waves of virginia woolf lapping against each other on a desolate dreary tubelit island.

this blog is a sort of diary. not the confessional sort. i don’t think i have it in me. i am too afraid of exposure and instead take on the odd cynical grating voice that even i can’t reread. this portrayal is an addiction whose trap i can’t escape. reading ‘henry and june’ i kept turning this idea over and over. what was the truth? who was anais nin, really? does this confessional diary or the portrayal of a diary tell what really transpired between her, henry miller and his wife- the mind games of domination and sex, the longing and self analysis. the writing must have changed it all into something else. i am sure of it. yet, the book is unafraid of making all the anais nin’s into real people. i am tired of books and movies that make motivation a simple equation between need and action. whose need? which version of the person? anyone who has been in love with more than one person at a time will tell you that things and people are not that simple when love takes so many forms ranging from duty to unbridled desire. or at least have not been simple for me.

am i veering into a confessional diary, finally?

to follow up ‘henry and june’ with ‘tropic of cancer’ millers novel written during his association with anais nin is turning out to be tremendous. nin plays herself while miller dons a parallel persona. it is like seeing two sides of the same coin- one laminated and precise/analytical and the other just as precise but volatile and wildly groping for the truth; one about the mind and other about the body; one elegant and the other incendiary.

ttmm

another day’s drive to pune but this time the weather was gorgeous. while going in cluds gathering over the highway and on the way back through those clouds with the window down. all the way and back we listening to the perfect, self contained pop songs of the 80’s – before pop ate itself up and got cynical, self-conscious, intelligent and much more apologetic for being itself. no pretensions of existential trauma here- just girls liking boys and boys liking girls- even if they are only stand-ins for other boys.

we learnt an important pune-ism yesterday at the meeting that i thought i should share. speaking of food costs and in between suggestions of hiring marriage halls and bicycling around the city as an answer to global warming we were told of ‘ttmm’. asking what this acronym stood for we were told ‘tu tuzha; mee mazha’. as in- you pay for yourself and i will pay for me. i thought that this phrase could have only happened in pune where it really is every marathi for himself; and said so- but my observation was not much appreciated by the fair skinned marathi woman. sorry. hopefully, more pune-isms coming soon.

vasai weekend - this was the last one

in which we drank ourselves silly in the company of rabbits and woke up when one of them was nibbling at my nose. red eyes and too small a mouth to be expressive, i don’t understand them as pets. but then that’s me. mohua and kaushik adore them.

the next morning rohit and benita took us for a drive through the vvvsr or the vasai virar sub region where they are inventorising heritage assets through the shopping complexes and housing colonies of the cidco layout that envelps the old villages still not completely erased. at diwanman talao a sleepy village square with a water tank was being upgraded by deepening and a metal grill on all sides. the benches faced inwards staring at the grill. a municipal market and school held two ends of it.

further down the road heading north numerous churches with floral facades and one on a hill with stunning woodwork holding up the roof and an indianised story of christ in the stained glass panels.

off the road we then came upon the ‘ashok stupa’ covered in blue tarpaulin being resotred. the shrine in front of it made of fragments of statues had a few devotees praying.

past the stained walls and already decrepit apartment complexes around sopara station, if you cross over to the other side you come upon a huge sea of low rise labour housing. benita said that someone told them it was transit housing; but did not know where they were transiting to. the bombay riots, i was told- or development projects. all the building industry gets its informal labour from here.

we drove back to have lunch in the residential enclave which threw my stomach’s constitution out of whack- and i have been at home all week resultantly. injections and antibiotics make me woozy and weary- until yesterday.

illness movie and book festival

an inventory of the last few days of illness in movies and books. the movies first; ‘do bigha zameen’, bimal roy’s lovely, though relentlessly sad, story of a farmer losing his land and being forced to become a rickshaw driver in calcutta; mission impossible 3, which i finally finished watching is darker than the other two, but not much better; ‘american dreamz’ which can be enjoyed if you are in touch with the blatant audience seducing tricks of an american idol styled tv show including the ‘character’ ethnic stereotype to be laughed at, the all american cheerleader, the ‘rocker’ and the boy next door. the political commentary on the iraq war and the president is an added bonus. obsession with stardom is also the theme of the even nastier black comedy ‘superstar’ with a bespectacled fat girl attempts to become rich and famous in the school by imitating the characters in films she rewinds for a living. it leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. ‘no country for old men’- the book- was unputdownable and thrilling as hell. could have done without the digressions into the sherrif’s psychoanalysis though- but i guess that was what took it above being another potboiler- have to see the film now. ‘the producers’ was the movie version of a broadway play about putting up a flop broadway show called ‘hitler in the springtime’. nonsense it was with gay jokes, fat jokes, jew jokes and a lot of german jokes- and was quite funny. ‘a league of extraordinary gentlemen’ was, even for me- a compulsive superhero freak, awful. naseeruddin shah makes a fool of himself in a beard and a ship with a shivling as the watchtower. there is something about dorian gray and vampires too and sean connry training tom sawyer. whatever.. cross cultural post colonial mish mash is witty and fabulous in zadie smith’s ‘white teeth’ in which boring englishman marries jamaican toothless hottie and is best friends with ex-war buddy bangladeshi waiter somewhere in london. mixed up immigration and miscegenation stories about the mixed up blood and genes- for better or worse that the past three decades have thrown up in western cities. funny and philosophical. also reading some short stories by pushkin- only because i thought i should. and i forgot the short ‘rewind’ that played before ‘be kind rewind’ which was terribly amateurish and wannabe tarantino. whats with all the americanisms in the voiceover? who talks like that for gods sake?

vanity on a saturday morning

it was morning on saturday and i was sweating away on the treadmill. like in most gyms the machines face outwards towards the windows and during my 15 minutes walking my reflection had turned into a silhouette as the sun came up and lit the street outside. my t-shirt and fabindia trousers to a fading outline through which i could see the street below and a truck collecting the debris of the demolished beauty parlor on the ground floor. as i moved from the treadmill to the stepper climbing artificial floors for my ‘lower body’, a young man’s muscles rippled in the morning light as he carried concrete and brick debris and piled it into the waiting truck. as he sifted through the garbage he found a fragment of a mirror that stayed the rhythm of his work. he dropped the pickaxe and picked the mirror and preened in front of his reflection- the smile, the profile, the biceps. and i kept climbing stairs to nowhere.

satyam shivam sundaram

for adults only: the amazing morning bhajans from ‘satyam shivam sundaram’. she is the only woman who can be sexy in spite of being, or maybe because, she is so incredibly ungraceful and awkward. it seems as if she is trying too hold her assets together as she walks through the forest and is not quite able to. while ‘bhor’ has the distinction of having the wonderful walk and the waterfall scene; the title track has the innocent belle doing naughty naughty things to a phallus in national flag filters. but it must be my dirty mind working- raj kapoor meant no such connotation. you tube the title track for your opinion.

strange dream no 277 . two novels

why were we in a restaurant having dinner at night which was a low lit cottage with a wide verandah, when paro and me slipped to the window looking inwards to admire charles correa and his wife angelina jolie eat food and laugh with their friends?

two novels of satire and farce. in ‘vanity fair’ i really wanted the bitchy and nasty rebecca to climb her way to the top and lost my patience with the long suffering amelia; and ‘don quixote’ whose rambling adventures are not managing to keep my interest, except occasionally.

dronagiri

its been a long time since i went to dronagiri, the node being designed to cater to the jnpt. nothing much seems to have changed as far as housing goes, but there are far more container yards and the toll road is piled high with rumbling trucks. so much infrastructure with no one around except for a w sleepy villages.
the last time i was in this part of new bombay was at least 5 years back when the huge monstrous kanvinde building was standing alone in empty barren plots with two other high rises. completely incongruous they were then and still are now. at that time all the buildings were completely empty and derelict. this time at least two of them looked inhabited while the kanvinde building was either being demolished or was undergoing some serious reconstruction.

be kind rewind

sentimental it might be, but that does not make ‘be kind rewind’ less smart, or less moving. in fact the fuzzy warmth is able to stay away from spielbergian cuteness by just being more real and that is something in a plot that reads like a madman’s fantasy. it would have been easy to let this rather oddball story of a man whose magnetic head erases all the videotapes in a video store, and when him and his friend are forced to remake all the films for the customers, into an adam sandler bumbling idiot trash film- or what passes for comedy in hollywood. instead the film is a lovable, witty and brilliant homage to cinema as an integral part of the everyday lives and the imaginations of ordinary people. film as folk art, as a handmade quilt assembled out of very ingeniously reinvented and recreated parts with the rough edges not merely shown, but displayed in full glory. the actors play famous parts with the glee of playacting children by donning costumes made by assembling readymade, reused, recycled objects. the makeshift madness continues with free flowing inventive rough handcrafted ‘special effects’ from famous films. perhaps the film can be read as being a little too romantic about the ‘loss’ of the tacky analog and suspicious of the digital. but i thought not. it seemed to be addressing more the way that technology can enable us all to be artists. a call for a ‘democratic’ art. youtube? towards the end of the film, cinema is used to invent a glorious history to save the neighbourhood from gentrification. “its our history- we can do what we want with it.” what a good film!

in which i try and figure out why i don’t like the raghu rai exhibition at the ngma

i need to think this through. as mukul, kuntal and me spent an hour or so wandering through rows and rows of enormous black and white prints and super saturated colours of india blow ups of of ‘classic’ raghu rai images i was left pretty much indifferent. i found the images to be over-framed and unnecessarily ‘constructed’ to a point where the narrative of the image is reduced to the most banal observations made by any traveler to the country., i.e. the ironies of juxtaposition- the old and the new, the rich and poor, the cow and the tractor.
or there is that 'one detail' that is supposed to make the photograph- the two umbrellas in the bottom right corner of a landscape, or the man scratching his crotch in a group shot. the 'punctum' i assume. although i have always thought that the punctum is found by every person within the image for themselves not thrust into your face until it becomes the photograph. it might as well then have been pointed out by placing an arrow on it and letting the rest of the photo disappear.

the over framed makes all into exotic and what passes for content is a simple minded one liner that merely repeats all the cliches of innumerable exotic india brochures. and for the sake of merely, for the lack of a better term, i can only call the ‘oh-how-cool’ factor. spectators of the great indian exotica show are supposed to drop their jaws in disbelief at the great ironies of the subcontinent. you are told what to think when you pause in front of every image like its an illustration of a children’s book.

and but far worse, and this is debatable, were for me the posed celebrity shots of artists. what makes the photographer and his model choose, for example, hariprasad chaurasia on a beach looking wistfully sideways with a flute in his hand as waves crash- as a portrait; or for that matter satyajit ray on a bed twisted on his back and making wild eyes at the camera. what extremely silly imaginations of the artist are being constructed and propagated through these images?

the disaster photographs of the bhopal tragedy were manipulative and coarse in their shameless sentimentality, the bombay photographs repeated cliches of speed and trains and marine drive, the benares photographs showed us half naked wrstlers, praying swamis, naga babas... the only images that did not make me cringe were the photographs of politicians and the immense street and crowd shots that let the image itself do the telling. these were spectacular and beautiful.

matheran

i must admit to being more than a little obsessive about finding the home where i stayed for 15 days with rahul and a bunch of bratty teenagers the last time i was in matheran. that was when i was 12 and i remember the place only from very vague memories of a glazed verandah and a clearing surrounded by a forest where we used to exercise early in the mornings. there was just a such a clearing in front of the hotel where we lived and i kept wondering whether fate had brought me back to exactly the same place 25 years later. what would be the odds?

'the verandah in the forest' was the rather romantic name of the hotel. non-hotel- it was billed at; which meant no air conditioning, no television. kuntal, nandita and meha could not make it, though it was their find, because of meha falling very ill on the day that we were supposed to leave. very unfortunate.

the said verandah was a wide airy space that ran the length of the house as it shot over the contours. somewhere toward the middle it widened to allow you to look through a clearing in the trees to the lights of bombay. i kept wondering about the longing for the city of the man who built this. on the day that we arrived the sky was crystal clear and the skyline shone in sparks- further in the distance the horizon of the sea.

as you can imagine we spent most of our time lounging in this verandah, drinking earl grey tea, being waited on hand and foot, reading novels. in the garden were hammocks for afternoon naps.

in the building the rooms had high ceilings and in the living room lovingly restored with peeling wallpaper stained glass shone orange and green light in. dinner was on an enormous dark wood ostentatious dining table complete with candelabras and walls with framed mirrors and dead englishmen and parsis. in the verandah all you can hear is the chirping of birds and the distant toll of the temple bell. how we soaked in the period piece luxury of four course dinners and wine, living it up like nawabs in the raj. this nostalgia, not only for a colonial languor, but also for pure uncorrupted nature was felt by us along with a few other english speaking upper class travelers from the metros and foreign travelers looking for romantic exotic getaways. a yearning for a gentler past where the lower classes and darkies were kept safely away or serving you tea in silver trays. mold, rust and ruin are strangely comforting. and so is the silence. can i stop being so bloody smug right now!?

it was lovely, for god's sake! a far cry from most of the other hotels in the city that blare hindi film music and are adorned with party lights. veg only gujarathi thali specials with swimming pools and water fountains. none of the senses was left to just be. every hotel had to be a complete work of art and artifice, glorious in exuberance of sound, sight, form and texture. the world is adorned. experience complete.

caught between the wilting nostalgia of the old colonial, parsi or bohra bungalows that are slowly disintegrating from age and lack of maintenance and the new glitzy holiday packages of the honeymooning couples and the families n their annual holiday matheran still manages to satisfy both. there are enough places to get away from the hindi film music and more than enough photogenic points to capture romantic memories on camera or to watch your favorite aunt dance like madhuri dixit.

i hope i am not as naïve to suggest one kind of matheran to be more authentic than the other. but give me the former any day of the week. long walks down red mud paths with looming trees on both sides with sunlight that filters down sometimes through the leaves and discovering new roads and getting lost in the dark. the red mud lifts in waves with every foot fall and every hoof print. it begins to rise along the roads taking over the lower leaves of the bushes and the trees until they are covered completely. in the rains, i am told, they will be green again.

we walked from point to point – louisa, porcupine, alexander, one tree hill until we had criss crossed the city many times by foot. once we even mounted horses. mine was glossy black and the other white. the hills are craggy and muscular with tufts of forest clinging to the cliffs. in the valleys dry rivers run grey and rocky.

at alexander point sujay with his binoculars surveyed the terrain trying to figure out the new roads, new tunnels and buildings that were being built. he had never been anywhere but here but seemed to be intent on knowledge from his lookout at the top of the hill.

amar, the horseboy lived off the railway track from dasturi to matheran in indira gandhi nagar with a group of men who worked with him. his employer for the 4 months of the season were a group of matheran natives who ran horses in the derby. he leanr to work with horses when he was forced to find work in the hill after his father died. in the off season he works on the farm with his crippled mother.

gomdas on the other hand has a full time job in the verandah in the forest. his home is in the tribal village in the valley near alexander point. once a month he walks down to it for his holiday. two and a half hours by foot- for him. for us it will be longer.

on the way back, maushi carried all our bags on her head while we struggled alongside, all the way from the hotel to the parking lot.

i finished two novels lounging in the easy chairs- ‘arthur and george’ by julian barnes about sir arthur conan doyle and half parsi man falsely accused of murdering cattle; and ‘in the beauty of the lilies’ by john updike- an american saga of the last century, complete with preachers falling out of love with god and in love with cinema, to a rage to riches story of a hollywood diva and a grandson who finds himself in a religious cult.