wordswalk

Springtime!

2015-03-22T13:39:00.004+05:30

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.
~ Vikram Seth

Bus tales

2012-03-21T17:34:00.003+05:30

I’m sitting in a bus for about 16 hours, cramped and exhausted and grimy. The bus is full of villagers who are coming to the city, probably to work as labourers in the construction sites. They have a haggard and unwashed look about them and they talk rather loudly. Obviously, some passengers were not too pleased when the bus stopped to pick these villagers. But, after the long overnight journey all are quiet and exhausted. Then, just when the bus is entering the city and passing by the railway station, a man shouts out to the woman sitting in front of me. He’s asking her to look at the train outside. This woman balances a child with her one spindly arm, lifts her veil, and looks out of the window. There’s a look of amazement in her face mixed with awe, curiosity, and excitement – everything that showed that she’s looking at train for the first time in her life.
The bus I take out of the village square is being driven by an avuncular and jovial bus driver (a rare combination, I guess). He smiles easily, and smokes constantly. Holding a cigarette between his fingers, he often negotiates the sharp hilly bends with just one hand. Even with both hands, I realize, these roads will be considerably difficult to drive. To complicate things, this is an ancient bus that creaks with every movement. But then, he may have been driving all his life on these roads. He even seems to know his passengers. The teenage girls sitting by his seat bursts into giggles at something he says, villagers we pass by wave at him. All these, somehow, reminds me of this scene.
On an extremely crowded bus, I am standing and trying to keep myself steady by holding on to the overhead rods. It doesn’t help. The roads are almost non-existent, and they pass through sharp bends on the hilly terrain. I’m barely standing, swaying more. But, my co-passengers of the bus, the local villagers, are not much bothered by any of these. They go about their usual business, which is mostly talking with each other. Nothing deters them – not the deafening roar of the bus, the steaming heat, or the delicate balancing act. In fact, they often chuckle as if on a joyride. Anyway, when it’s time to pay the bus fare, I’m struggling to take out money from my wallet. The bus conductor, seeing the plight of a hapless outsider, swiftly pulls out the exact notes from my wallet, keeps the fare, and also puts the change back. Now, that made me chuckle.

Secret taken to the grave

2012-02-02T10:19:00.002+05:30

I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.
These words soar for me beyond all rules
without seeking support from actual examples.
My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation.

Discovery, Wislawa Szymborska

Notes from PIFF 2012

2012-01-24T15:28:00.002+05:30

Of all the films that I watched at Pune International Film Festival (PIFF) 2012, I found a common theme running – and that’s the theme of family – of people you grow up with, stay together, and sometimes turn away from. I watched relatively less number of films – 14 in all – and I personally didn’t find my experience of PIFF this year to be as rewarding. There were reasons many – inconvenience of changed venues, some utterly juvenile crowd, and to some extent the films themselves. Anyway, here’s some notes of my viewings.

Café Lumiere, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s tribute to Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, is a film that captivated me with its beguiling sense alienation. The film shows us a young Japanese woman, Yoko, who is a freelance writer living alone in a Tokyo flat, and researching for her book on a Taiwanese composer. She does have a family – a father and step-mother – who don’t really understand her way of life, especially the fact that Yoko is pregnant, but doesn’t want to marry her boyfriend. That’s just the surface of the story, and much of the film’s beauty lie in the way it conjures up a sense of profundity while showing us nothing but the absolutely mundane. In some ways in reminded of Somewhere, a film I watched at last PIFF. Sample the opening scene: Yoko is just back from her research trip to Taiwan, and is talking on her cellphone while putting her washings on the tiny clothesline strung outside her window. We don’t know who she’s talking to, but her voice is friendly and intimate. Just then, there’s a sound of doorbell (it’s her landlady) and putting the phone down Yoko moves to the door to have a brief chitchat. The camera, however, does not follow her and remains fixed like a still observer. We see no one in the frame except the wet clothes fluttering in the breeze, interspersed with voices of people we haven’t known yet.

The other Hou Hsiao-hsien film I watched, A Summer at Grandpa’s, is different – with its straight narrative, greater movement, and seemingly picturesque depiction of rural Taiwan and all the fun of childhood. The story follows two siblings who are sent away to their grandparents’ place for the summer vacation as their severely ill mother undergoes treatment in the hospital. I had personal reasons to like the story since much of my summer vacations were likewise spent at my grandparents place, doing things the kids are shown doing in the film – taking a bath in the river, befriending the village boys, climbing trees, and idling away the days without a care in the world. The other reason I liked this viewing was because I watched this in a near-empty theater (this being an early morning show) and the audience was really well-behaved (something I found lacking this year). Thus, it became easy to get transported in scenes like the one where we see kids play (racing turtles) under a big tree. A long shot shows us the activity from afar: we see the breeze caught on the tree's leaves, there's birdsong in the background, and hear the excited shouts reverberating in an otherwise quiet morning.

Iranian film A Separation was a surprise. It’s excellent in many ways – the story reveals itself in many layers, the cast is well-chosen, and it subtly affects our thoughts. It raises questions without being too explicit and it remains humane even in the most critical moments. The film opens as Nader and Simin, a married couple, are arguing over a divorce. The wife wants a secure future for their teenage daughter and wants to settle abroad. The husband doesn’t want to leave because he has a father who has Alzheimer’s and needs care. Amidst this discord they had to hire a domestic help – a woman who has her own problems of a unemployed husband, financial trouble, and her pregnancy. From here the film takes off to confront us with several themes – on family, social status, legal proceedings, and the grey line that separates right and wrong. This is as taut as any well-made thriller. Glad that this film ran to a packed house.

There was a retrospective on Yasujiro Ozu this year and I caught two of his films – The End of Summer and Floating Weeds. I had been unfamiliar about Ozu’s films but had read him to be a fastidious filmmaker (known for his tatami-level unmoving camera) concerning mostly with traditional Japanese family drama. I found both the films excellent, Floating Weeds more so. While The End of Summer deals with a patriarch (and his escapades) of a large business family, Floating Weeds tells us the story of an itinerant master of a travelling theater group who has a past to confront. Much of the things Ozu dealt in his films are now strange and foreign to many. They are rooted in a past that has changed beyond recognition. In an age of excesses, they remind us what is to be gentle, meditative, and spartan. To end, a special mention for Haruko Sugimura, the actress who appear in both these films (she was a Ozu regular) and superbly acted in such contrasting roles – in one as a somewhat feisty talkative woman with emotional outbursts, and in the other as a gentle old mistress who is surprisingly dignified and reserved.

Transcribing

2011-04-19T23:28:00.003+05:30

Out of whim I bought a pot of ink yesterday to try on the fountain pen I sometimes use. Since I found nothing original to test-write, I thought I'll transcribe something. The following lines, which I found quoted in an Alice Munro story I recently read, seemed good enough to begin with.

There is no sorrow
Time heals never;
No loss, betrayal,
Beyond repair.
Balm for the soul, then,
Though grave shall sever
Lover from loved
And all they share;
See, the sweet sun shines,
The shower is over,
Flowers preen their beauty,
The day how fair!
Brood not too closely
On love, on duty;
Friends long forgotten
May wait you where
Life with death
Brings all to an issue;
None will long mourn for you,
Pray for you, miss you,
Your place left vacant,
You not there.

These lines were originally written by Walter de la Mare (who, I confess, I never heard of) and the Alice Munro story, it appears, germinates from these very lines: ‘None will long mourn for you, / Pray for you, miss you, / Your place left vacant—’

Togetherness

2011-04-15T23:28:00.002+05:30

There’s this little-known book At Home in the Himalayas that I read sometime back. It’s a non-fiction, sort of an autobiography, that chronicles the life of the author, Christina Noble, who comes from Scotland to the little town of Manali in the ’70s on a hiking trip. What began as a hiking trip soon became a way of life for her – she went about setting a business of arranging adventure trips, got involved in the local life, married and settled down with two young children, and spent a significant amount of years in the high Himalayas. In this book she recounts the experiences of those years – from the awe-inspiring beauty and grandeur of the high mountains, to the practicalities of setting up business with the help of local folks and dealing with the challenges of going about daily life. But, the most interesting bits come in the form of those little observations she has of the place and the people as well as her personal equations with them; she’s not an aloof observer and her tone is caring yet critical. So, there we get glimpses of domesticity, festival and feast, marriages and deaths, trust and betrayal – all noted with candid detail.

This is a long preamble, but probably a necessary one. What I wanted to write about is a section of this book – just a few odd paragraphs, really – that has uncannily stayed with me for a long time. In those paragraphs is described the scene and mood of a picnic. It’s towards the end of the book, and the author had already lived in the place for many long years, and has already formed a close-knit group of people who she deals with – her domestic helps, families she had known and lived with, her employees of the trekking business, her milkwomen, suppliers, and some other acquaintances. So, on the picnic day, we see all these people, along with their families and children, scrambling up the hill to a grassy meadow. Up there, frenetic activity is going on – a makeshift chulha is being dug, firewood is being gathered, pots and plates are being gathered, wild mushrooms are being plucked, vegetables are being cut, meat is being cleaned, and local brew is being poured. It’s busy yet leisurely and the bonhomie is captured with a detail that’s endearing and, in certain way, poignant. After the cooking and feasting, women sing and dance putting their sleeping babies on the grass, people laugh freely, and memories are reminisced. It’s plain, simple, and merry.

I’ve often thought about the scene and wondered what’s it that makes it so appealing to me. Given my unsocial self, it should just read like a plain high-spirited revelry. But, for some reason, it doesn’t; rather, I wonder what it’ll be like to have a day of such unadulterated fun.

Anyway, what brought this scene back to me tonight is a little endearing film named Pieces of April, which I watched while eating my cold leftover dinner from a small bowl.

Dashing

2011-03-10T18:42:00.002+05:30

One of the first things I learned on the job – as a hassled-looking, grubby, emaciated, underpaid, overworked, and barely noticeable copy-editor – was the use of dashes. I mean the punctuation marks – en-dashes and em-dashes. I struggled then, and I still struggle, to get them correct. But, over the years I figured out a rule in my head to make use of en-dashes far more than em-dashes. Em-dashes—as you see—are “unappealingly long” (I’m filching a bit from Wikipedia here). And if you use spaced em-dashes — like this — it introduces an awfully wide break, which finicky readers may find unacceptable. So, my rule has been to use spaced en-dash – like this – at every place where I felt the need of an em-dash, which is mostly for parenthetical expressions and occasionally to elaborate something in a sentence. As should be evident by now, I like using dashes – en-dashes especially – so much that if I have to list my favorite punctuation marks, dashes are likely to stay at the top.

So, what is it about a dash that I like? I guess it’s the little wanderings it allow us mid-sentence. A dash is like a respite, a little escape, while not necessarily straying away completely. Well, of course not everyone thinks this way. More serious writers are likely to utilize dashes to infuse more supplementary ideas or give more elegant and winding sentences.

If I remember correctly, I didn’t like dashes at the beginning. As a rookie copy-editor it was a nightmare to proofread a GOP – that’s Galley of Pages, for the uninitiated – strewn with dashes. Justifying which one of these dashes stay put, and deciding which ones I strike off, were (to put it mildly) difficult. People who submits articles to scientific journals – though extremely sound in technical matters – are not always known for being careful with their language. It was rather scary to edit an article from, say, Taiwan, Sweden, or Turkey. And if they were full of strange punctuations we were in the soup.

But the initial dislike, in time, wore off. I moved from being the grubby, emaciated copy-editor to become the vain, well-fed guy who I’d have hated back in my copy-editing days. Anyway, some vestiges of copy-editing remained – often resurfacing when I had to re-read something I wrote and found them crawling with mistakes. I may not have made a competent copy-editor, but these moments told me I was not a complete failure either – I still had the eye to catch at least some of my mistakes, which I wish I never give away.

It’s only when I moved away from copy-editing that I found the pleasing sense of using a dash. I started using, and still use them – though often without fully understanding the grammatical intricacies. I hope the earnest copy-editors will ignore this fallen one of their flock. Please, allow me to use my dashes – however sloppily – and look elsewhere when I’m having some fun with them.

First book of the year

2011-02-16T00:48:00.002+05:30

Moral Disorder is the first Margaret Atwood book I finished reading. Earlier, I had managed to bring home a few of her books and then return them back to the library, unread. This, I’m afraid, probably doesn’t tell well of my reading habits. Anyway, coming back to the reading of Moral Disorder – which incidentally is also my first reading of this year – one feels the prowess of an author who is at the peak of her form. It’s as if the author lets herself flow – a measured, controlled flow, bearing the weight of experience – and the stories just take shape, almost on their own, following trajectories they had to follow, and described in a tone that’s perfect. These stories that do not overwhelm us with their spectacularness, but these stories that stay with us, linger in our minds, evokes strange emotions, and demands re-reading. I have already read it, in piecemeal, about twice; some stories more than that.

Moral Disorder is a collection of eleven short stories, which can probably also pass off as a novel, when viewed as a whole. These stories, brought in from different periods of time, essentially tells the stories of a fixed set of connected characters; the main character, Nell, being the apparent alter-ego of the author. There is much that tends to be autobiographical here, but that’s beside the point – this nosey hair-splitting business of how much of it is actually drawn from personal life – and it stands, like any good fiction, hovering over the tantalising realm of unknown.

It begins with Bad News, which is set approximately in present day, and introduces us to an elderly couple, Nell and her husband Tig, going about usual business one of the mornings.

In The Art of Cooking and Serving, the second story, we go back in time and meet Nell, who’s all of 11-year-old and is furiously knitting in preparation for welcoming her unborn sister. When not knitting, the girl is also taking care of household chores, because her expectant mother is not supposed to work much, her father is always away on his expeditions, and her brother away in boarding school. For some reasons, this is a story I have gone back to several times. This is a very beautiful and touching portrayal of a lonely childhood – pleasing and pensive.

The Headless Horseman, the third story, takes us much forward in time when we see Nell and her sister driving home to see her ailing widowed mother. However, as the story moves forward, the story, through reminisces of the sisters, moves back and forth in time – mostly about a Headless Horseman outfit Nell had created one Halloween and what happened to it afterwards.

In the fourth story, My Last Duchess, we see Nell on the brink of her high school finals. The title of the story is taken from a Robert Browning poem, which Miss Bessie, the English teacher, is teaching the class. In this story we also get a glimpse of puppy love between Nell and Bill, a classmate who Nell occasionally helps study English poetry. They break up over their different views of the Browning poem.

By the fifth story, The Other Place, Nell is an estranged, floating woman, living on her own, changing jobs and cities at will, carrying only her meagre belongings (books, clothes, towel) wherever she goes. This is a phase – uncertain, unsettled, and doubtful – that is not just physical, but also mental.

Monopoly, the sixth story, begins rather strikingly (“Nell and Tig ran away to the country.”) But, more than moving forward, the story goes backward from there, introducing us to the circumstances that brought Nell and Tig together. Alongside, we also meet Tig’s wife Oona and the “boys” (their two sons). With this story we also see a change in voice – from first person to third person – as if the author now wants to have a more critical view by observing from a distance. This is actually the first time we learn that the stories narrated earlier was by someone named Nell.

The seventh and eighth stories – Moral Disorder and White Horse – both deal, somewhat similarly, to the country life Nell and Tig tries to settle into. These two are expansive stories that have several pastoral themes running. There are vegetables being grown, animals being tended and raised, local folks being befriended. But, above all, it’s the several domestic animals – especially the lamb in Moral Disorder and the horse Gladys in the White Horse – that lend certain poignancy to these stories; Nell’s love and concern for them almost motherly. Indeed, we do get to learn Nell’s longing to become a mother (in Moral Disorder) and by the end of White Horse, we find Nell pregnant.

By the time we reach The Entities, the ninth story, much time has passed. Nell and Tig has moved away from the countryside. Tig’s first wife, Oona, now unhappy, lonely and ailing, now wants a home, which they eventually buy her. In the course of the story, Lillie, an ageing but fastidious real-estate broker also makes an appearance.

The last two stories – The Labrador Fiasco and The Boys at the Lab – are separated by a gap of few years but both deal with old age. The Labrador Fiasco is about Nell’s ailing father and The Boys at the Lab is about Nell’s mother on deathbed. Though they both deal with a similar theme – old age – they unfold differently. The Labrador Fiasco weaves a disastrous real-life expedition story into the narrative of a dying man, Nell’s father, who is gradually losing his memory. In The Boys at the Lab, conversely, we see memory being revived and reconstructed through a series of old photographs and conversations. Both these stories are unsentimental yet caring, sad but still full of life, even if these are the lives of dying ones.

It's probably not a suitable thing to briefly outline the stories, like I just did. It doesn't really give anyone a good idea about what these stories may be like. Much of the brilliance of these stories are due to Atwood's writing; one needs to read them to fully appreciate them.

From PIFF 2011

2011-02-03T19:43:00.005+05:30

Pune International Film Festival (PIFF) 2011 was a much eagerly awaited event for me. Especially because I had been irregular at PIFF for the last two years. And it turned out to be a much fulfilling experience this time, evoking memories of my first PIFF attendance. As it turned out, PIFF 2011 had enough in store – I discovered new directors, glimpsed new cultures, and tasted a smorgasbord of films ranging from average to excellent to moving.

I tried a little disciplined approach this year and actually made brief scribblings of the films just after I watched them. They are nowhere near a review though; just brief commentary on what I watched, and are definitely inadequate in bringing out the essence of the films. Here they are, anyway.

I began PIFF this year with the Australian film The Tree. I don’t remember watching any films from Australia earlier, and I didn’t know what to expect. All I knew about Australia was that they play all possible sports, eat kangaroos, and have unintelligible accent. So, it was a cultural education, sort of. The Tree shows the Australian countryside and of the lives lived there. Simone, the 8-year-old girl, who lives with her widowed mother and three brothers in a rambling house beside a giant tree, begins to feel the presence of her dead father in the tree. But, of late, the tree has suddenly started throwing all sort of trouble on their house – roots clogging the house’s drains, big branches falling off and destroying part of the house, unwanted creatures paying a visit (frogs in the commode, dangling scary bats in the bedroom). When it is decided that the tree should be felled to get rid of such troubles, Simone vehemently refuses the idea. Simone suspects that her father is gradually being forgotten by the whole family – her three brothers show no outward grief, and her mother seems to be warming up to a new man in her life. Well, that’s the bare bone plot. The film, though about the loss of a dear one, is not morose. Rather, it’s a delight to watch the children, who succeed in reminding the joy of childhood. The sadness just lingers at a corner, and the beauty of living is what remains at the end of the film. A good start to PIFF 2011.

Eight Times Up (8 fois debout) shows us Elsa, who is divorced, lost custody of her son, doesn’t have a proper job, and gets evicted from her apartment because she cannot pay her rent. In short, she has lost grip of her life and doesn’t know how to fight back. Her next-door neighbor (an unkempt single male who also gets evicted later for the same reason) is an equally pitiable character. They both keep appearing (unsuccessfully) for numerous job interviews, do occasional odd jobs for cash, and try to make ends meet somehow (again rather unsuccessfully). To everyone, they are what you call losers and better be avoided. Nothing is wrong about a film on losers and their hopeless lives. In fact, they can be excellent film material. However, to me, this was just about an average attempt. The strands of desperation were lost on me, not because I couldn’t feel it, but because it grew tedious. Even the attempts of hilarity at their pathetic circumstances looked too drawn-out. “Seven times down, eight times up,” is what one of the characters say. I try to believe it. Except that, by the end of it, I seem to have lost interest in what happens next.

Probably the most-liked film of the second day was Puzzle, which introduces us to the life of Maria, a middle-aged housewife who, to the surprise (and later dismay) of her family, gets more than involved in the game of solving puzzles. The film is beautiful not because how it’s shot, but because how well it’s written. The characters come alive with such subtle movements that we barely notice how they are coming into their own distinct persona. Small gestures (Maria making a fish pattern with salad dressings), fragments of conversations (the husband sweet-talking to a lady in their store to sell something), dresses worn (the carefully chosen dress that Maria chooses to wear on the competition day) – all suggests at things and carry the story in ways that are subtle yet significant. I admired the details. There are probably more things I liked (but unable to pinpoint now), but two things I did have reservations about. One, making Maria sleep with her games partner – which seemed unnecessary – not because I hold a prudish view, but because it seemed highly improbable that a woman of Maria’s intelligence would do it. Maria is portrayed as someone who’s in control of her actions, is measured and calculative about what she does, and is unlikely to get carried into a relationship that she’s obviously not interested in, especially when weighed against her love of her husband and the family. Two, the profusion of close-up shots in the whole film, which to me looked a little too obtrusive and unnecessary. Minor quibbles apart, this is going to remain memorable for reasons I’ll continue to discover.

R is a film I didn’t want to watch (I had to go for it because the film I wanted to watch was removed). So, R turned out to be every bit as expected, and will probably be forgotten very easily. Depiction of graphic violence and shocking visuals in films are dime a dozen these days, and they are unlikely to make a film any better unless the films are written well. R shows the violence – the way factions work, newcomers get inducted, fights fought, lives lived and lost – all within the confines of the prison walls. Barely a plot, lots of blood and gore, nothing memorable. Wouldn’t have regretted if I had skipped it.

Straits of Hunger (Kiga kaikyô) by lesser known Japanese director Tomu Uchida is a film that has a long drawn out plot, which unfolds to give different interpretations to the same story as it moves forward. The film has three distinct segments featuring the lives of a fugitive (who’s running away with a loot), a prostitute (with whom the fugitive spends a night), and a follower (a cop). The on-location shots of the film was very impressive (considering that it was a black-and-white era film) and the twisted story never fails to pique your interest (it never reveals the true sequence of events, and leaves it at your own interpretation). One complain though: the screening was cut short considerably (the original version, we are told, runs a length of 3 hours, but got to see just a little more than 2 hours).

Old age and happiness don’t seem to go well together. People get estranged, love sours, loved ones are lost, and experiences make one bitter. Therefore, it’s so wonderful to see the cinematic representation of a happy middle-aged couple (Tom and Gerry) wade through life with a rare contentment and placid joy even when their friends and families keep struggling with their own troubles and losses. Another Year by British director Mike Leigh is a film that has nothing spectacular. It’s so quotidian (for once, that’s the perfect word) that it contains nothing but a plain vanilla slice of life. And I’m so very impressed and moved by watching it. It evoked a mood that stayed with me well after the credits rolled, I walked out into the noisy crowd, and quietly drove back home. Sure, Tom and Gerry (and their only son Joe) have a rare fulfilling life, but it’s made poignant and more beautiful by the bonds they share with all the people – friends and families, who aren’t as lucky. It’s like by showing the contrast of these lives, we see what it is to experience happiness. It’s not the on-your-face happiness, but happiness of feeling a gentle wind, working on a vegetable patch, reading together, sharing a good meal, and comforting and caring each other, and being thankful. Another Year is just what it’s title says – just another year in the lives of these people. Full of small joys, a little sorrows, and the lives lived in between.

Mamas & Papas attempts to look at the gamut of emotions associated with parenthood. With four disparate situations we see the pain, desperation, hopelessness, and confusion. An affluent middle-aged doctor (she helps childless couples) has to cope with the tragic loss of her own daughter and flees to a foreign holiday for some solace; a young woman who is trying everything to conceive but cannot gets increasingly touchy and ends up driving away her husband to an extra-marital affair; a cash-strapped departmental store clerk, who’s already a mother of two children, is worried about her pregnancy and decides to put the baby out for adoption; and another young couple who cannot decide whether to have a baby drifts apart after an abortion. Four strands, one theme – parenthood; rather, the troubles of parenthood. Liked it okay, but cannot find anything ecstatic to say. Maybe, the pangs of parenthood don’t get conveyed so easily. Or, maybe, I'm overdosed with films that has several stories running in parallel.

The Rowan Waltz (Ryabinoviy Vals) seemed, to me, to have a very interesting storyline – of young Russian girls who were trained and recruited to detect and clear mines that were left in the fields of Russian countryside during the World War II. But, after some time into the film, I realized it to be a cliché-ridden average film. There’s a bit of drama, blooming love, heartbreak, and finally a love triangle. A linear, simple, and old-style storytelling. This will easily get drowned in the sea of week-long movie-goers experience. However, the pretty Russian damsels, absolutely beautiful countryside, and an overall sweetness should win some hearts, as we realized (much to our annoyance) by the shrieks, mutterings, and other such exclamations of our neighbors.

Majority (Çogunluk) is a film that, on the surface, looks like many other films that has touched a similar story – of an affluent aimless spineless young man who is just whiling away his time with his friends, hopping malls and discos, driving expensive cars when bored, and without having a care of the world. Things take a different turn when he gets involved with a young waitress (of an inferior “gypsy” clan) and realizes that his affiliations are more important than his own wishes. To me, what sets the film apart, however, is the excellently chosen cast – the visibly slacker young boy who still carries all the baby fat (I could greatly identify with him), the stern staunch foul-mouthed patriarch who knows how to manipulate, the timid lovelorn young girl who’s head-over-heels in love despite knowing the impossibility of it. The other redeeming feature of the film is that it doesn’t end with a reformed protagonist – it just ends with how the protagonist realizes the futility of resistance; and the film ends with the ominous hint that he’s probably just giving in by joining the ranks of the majority.

Sweet Country, the only film from Michael Cacoyannis retrospective that I saw, is a disturbing film – it shows the horror of political upheaval in Chile in the 70’s through the turn of tragic turn of events on a family who were close to the overthrown government, and of a US family who sets out to help them flee the country. Several strands of stories are interwoven (not often successfully), but the dark and disturbing pent-up pressure (some with the portrayal of graphic sexual violence) can be felt, nonetheless. The statement against military regimes is loud and clear, but cinematically, it doesn’t seem to achieve much great height.

The Poll Diaries traces the story of 13-year-old Oda Schaefer who, after the death of her mother, goes to join her estranged father living in a crumbling seaside mansion in pre-WW1 rural Estonia. It’s a politically charged time and the Estonian anarchists are fighting the Russian military. Oda’s disreputed surgeon father Ebbo, who has the horrid hobby (he calls it experiment) of studying and preserving the body part of the dead (often the unclaimed anarchists), teaches his daughter the science of surgery, which she uses to nurse a wounded anarchist hiding in the estate, and leading to consequences that changes her impressionable mind. The film is based on real life events of the poet Oda Schafer, we are told. The dark tale moves interestingly, the tender vulnerability and affection are well-portrayed, and the film doesn’t waver from what it sets out to tell. Liked it.

Hitler in Hollywood is set as a thriller where Maria de Medeiros (who plays herself) unexpectedly chances upon (while working on a bio-documentary of an European actress of yesteryears) a plot that was hatched years ago by the Hollywood studios to suppress a resurgent European film industry. I couldn’t warm up to the film for two reasons: one, the hand-held camera shooting style (I think I have problems with films shot that way); two, it was too conversational and many a times I was reading too much subtitle to actually enjoy the film. I envy the ones who know enough French to enjoy the film with relative ease.

Italian mafia is a subject that is so very filmy – I mean it can be made, and has already been made, into memorable films. So, it was no surprise that The Sicilian Girl got the biggest audience when it was screened (I had to watch the film sitting on the stairs of the theatre). However, The Sicilian Girl is admirable because the film shows the horror more than the heroics. This a film where there are no good and evil, where the mafia works and kills purely for the purpose of business and power. Based on the real life story of Rita Atria, a girl from a mafia family who comes out in public to testify against the mafia, it’s told with a right balance. The transformation of Rita’s initial vendetta (she initially wanted to punish her family’s killers) into a more acute desire to uproot the evil system, is as good as it gets. Abandoned by friends, family, and her lover, and finally at the cost of her life, we see Rita grapple with the hidden skeletons, some of which were from her own cupboard. A brief appearance by the director (Marco Amenta) in person at the venue, followed by a small talk, made the screening even more interesting.

Sweet Evil (L'enfance du mal) is the story sweet looking Céline who comes into the life of an affluent couple – a judge and his wife – and gradually starts creating a web of evil design. Céline is young, still a teenager, but she’s street-smart, and she has a ruthlessness that belies her age, or look. We soon see that it is revenge that’s on her mind – she is trying to punish the judge for something he had once done with a verdict. And she plans her way through it with such flourish that the judge almost looks like a sitting duck. The film ends, with the judge left dying of a stabbed wound, unattended on the road, and Céline deserting him with a sorry-I-cannot-help-you look.

Zeppelin! is a visually stunning film. Very atmospheric, mostly shot in black-and-white, lots of footage (original archive as well as recreated) of the Hindenburg disaster, and excellent reproduction of the giant flying object that was once nothing short of a miracle for the masses. Director Gordian Maugg takes the zeppelin and weaves a story around it – where all the characters are in some way molded by this giant airship. Inspiring love, loss, fear, and fascination – the airship becomes a character of its own, wielding its invisible hand and shaping the fate of three generations.

Twenty (Bist) is the only Iranian film I saw this time. And it didn’t turn out to be interesting enough to keep me awake all the while. The last time I watched an Iranian film at PIFF (Café Setareh) it turned out to be exceptionally entertaining. Bist revolves around, not a café, but a public reception hall which is well past its prime – it now hosts only a few weddings and funerals. The owner, Soleimani, is a bitter man and has a hidden past that’s started troubling his mind. He decides to sell the property and serves a notice of twenty days to his workers. The hapless workers, grappling with an uncertain future, huddles together in ways the defeated gets together. It all ends happy, though, and thereby also becomes forgettable.

Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s well-crafted film, is something that is so nuanced it almost fails to get your attention. Of all the people who watched it, the reactions varied extremely. People either like it ecstatically or hate it vehemently (source: a few comments from people around, and IMDB user reviews). Somewhere gives us a glimpse of a Hollywood star, Johnny Marco, who apparently is as clueless about his life as his super luxury sports car (which goes round and round, purring beastly strength, but actually has nowhere to go). We see Johnny going, listless, from one thing to another, but failing to get the stimulus. He’s simply inert to life and he struggles to understand what is failing him in spite of having everything he can desire. A chance vacation with his daughter from a failed marriage makes Johnny momentarily aware of things – of blissful moments of togetherness. The film has excellent moments of lingering shots (they are also the most complained about) which somehow brings in the desired effect. For example, the unusually long shot of pole-dancing girls, which contrary to arousing Marco, puts him to sleep. Or, the almost clinical shot of Marco being applied a full face pack that makes him inert for a few hours – and it makes us wonder what his hyper brain is up to in this moment of complete inactivity. Or, when the father-daughter duo is basking by the pool, letting the time pass by blissfully. We like Somewhere because it remains enigmatic – it’s a quest to reach somewhere without ever knowing where it is. This was my closing PIFF film, and it was worth it.

Passerby

2010-12-11T23:04:00.003+05:30

Tired of walking aimlessly, and feeling hungry, I choose a place, aptly named Sidewalk, where I sit down on their roadside table and wait for my sandwich. From the nearby temple, I see three devout-looking, sari-clad housewives coming out, chatting amongst themselves. As they are walking by, they stopped briefly near my table, and engaged in some mild argument. Then one of them turned to me and asked in a rather crisp and confident English, "To go to Esquare, do we take a right or left?" I tell her the way to the multiplex, and she departs with a hasty thanks.
At the big store, I look bewildered at the rack of yoghurts – various brands, big and small sizes, flavoured and plain. As I stand confused, a girl walks up and starts looking up the same rack, all the while chirping on her phone. She is so small-built, I almost mistake her for a school-going kid, until I hear her voice clearly, which is much mature and womanly. "You always think I lie, don't you? But I never lie," she speaks on her phone and then walks away, without picking any yoghurt.
A little detour from the bustling main road takes me to this neat residential area built around a splendid-looking lake. On the edge of this lake are inviting green lawns, leafy green trees, and serpentine walkways. As I walk by, I find this elderly woman reading newspaper. She is sitting on a low wall, basking in the mild winter afternoon sun, and her dangling feet making happy movements midair, just like a schoolgirl.
After my weekend vegetable shopping from the mandi, on my way back home, I pass by this narrow alley with rows of tiny cramped houses. In front of a blue-painted door, a frail-looking pregnant woman is slowly putting a bucketful of washings on the clothesline, her hands barely reaching the high-strung rope.
At the traffic signal, the girl on the motorbike stops abruptly and looks at her watch with evident impatience. No sooner that the light turns to green, she zooms past in a flash, her hairs flying like a running horse's mane.

Short

2010-12-04T00:18:00.003+05:30

The kitten died. Probably, in its sleep, quietly, lying on the bundle of rags that served as its bed. In the cold morning, its tiny body was was stiff and its head awkwardly tilted. One of its unmoving paw was still touching the milk bowl.

It had a brief period of stay in the house – from being an abandoned, wildly meaowing, tiny kitten rescued from the backyard to being a warm ball curled up at the feet when watching TV – hardly a month.

Now it lies buried in a small pit, which will get swamped in the next monsoon, and then overgrown with weeds.

Post match summary

2010-08-28T00:20:00.003+05:30

After the games are over, we lie down amidst the scent of wet earth and trampled grass.

Springtime

2010-04-17T18:30:00.005+05:30

April has brought in several colors. Increasingly, I can see red, pink, lavender, and yellow flowers sprouting from seemingly unexpected corners -- by the roadside, in front of the apartment building, near the office building. Out on a walk this afternoon, I spotted these blooming gulmohars.

And some yellow flowers that I could not identify.

PS: I'm resorting to the old tactic of putting up photos when words are becoming difficult to come by.

Sacred Games

2010-03-24T23:08:00.002+05:30

In my recent effort to catch up on dust-gathering, neglected books from my pile, I picked up Sacred Games sometime at the beginning of the month. Obviously, I was being ambitious because running into 900 odd pages, Sacred Games is a mammoth book, and looked daunting in every way – more so because of the fact that my copy was hard-bound and wrist-spraining heavy. But, once started, I was surprised how the pages flew once, and how it made me eager for the unfinished pages. In fact, many a times, I found myself hurrying through things so that I could go back to the book and resume reading. This is something that doesn’t always happen.

After A Suitable Boy, which was even longer by a few hundred pages, Sacred Games has to be the only such big-size book I could ever manage to finish. And in fact, though these two are very disparate – not only in their settings, but also in their tones – I repeatedly found myself comparing them both. People argue that besides the voluminous size and the sprawling saga there are no common threads that can link the two books – while one is set in set in the languorous time of just-independent India, the other is set breathtakingly close to our time. However, the common thread to me lay in the detailing – each has narrative that are painstakingly developed, a very close and compassionate eye for fleshing out the characters, a subtle way of conveying emotions through nuanced gestures.

Anyway, this is not supposed to be a comparison (which I don’t like to do), so I shall stick to my feelings for Sacred Games only. Like always, I begin a book by reading the blurb first. And the blurb of Sacred Games described it somewhat as a cat-and-mouse story of a disillusioned policeman versus a gangster of organized crime, and how their stories intertwine in the backdrop of a metropolis. As it turns out, this description is hugely inadequate in telling us what the book is about. Yes, it does have the crime thriller bit, the occasional racy suspense, but at the end it goes much beyond. Although the metropolis and policemen and criminals occupy much of the space, it carefully traverses to spread into a big canvas interspersed with a mind-boggling array of characters and plots. So, you have the reference of small towns of the Hindi heartland, far-flung corners of north-eastern India along with its insurgency and border problems, the glimpse of secret service agents, life of illegal migrants from neighboring countries, workings of Naxalite camps, the spiritual gurus, and even the horrors of partition. Plus, there are the heartbreaks, betrayals, adultery, extortion, murder, smuggling, police-criminal nexus, and, in unusual ways, tenderness and love as well. In short, enough to get you hooked.

However, despite such a spicy concoction, Sacred Games holds on to its own – it says everything matter-of-factly, explores the inner workings by going beyond the superficial, and Vikram Chandra, the author, does this with compassion and style. A special mention should also go to two things I found compelling – one, how Bollywood plays a big role in the whole book, right from the songs, films, filmstars, to how the characters are often molded by this invisible juggernaut; two, the language, which so heavily draws from the language of the metropolis in which it is set, throwing unadulterated cuss-words, film song lyrics, names of food items, mythologies, and many other words of endearment, disappointment, and anger. In fact, Bollywood and underworld is so heavily used that, at times, the real and fictitious characters are found mingling delightfully close at hand. And, about the language, it suffices to say that Sacred Games may have lost out much of its charm had it not been the unabashed use of language.

And finally, as I closed the book, I realized how the book carefully entrusted me, the reader, with more knowledge than any of the characters in it had. All the protagonists see a picture that is essentially incomplete and there are many things that are not revealed to them; they do not see the undercurrents that flow underneath, the motives, and the reason that drives each other’s behavior. In that, the reader gets an elevated position from where he/she can make more sense of what is happening below. However, ironically, this privileged knowledge does not give us comfort; it only deepens our feeling of helplessness as we watch the game go on.

A much satisfying read and well worth the wrist sprain.

Love, scribbles, and margins

2010-02-17T00:01:00.005+05:30

Sometimes, books borrowed from libraries prove to be rather interesting – you lay your hands on unknown authors and surprising topics. However, the book I’m currently reading, Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love, is proving to be interesting in ways more than one. Of course, it’s a rather interesting book – a non-fiction in the guise of fiction – where the two central characters are essentially used to emphasize and illustrate the emotions associated with falling in and out of love. Love itself is clinically dissected and various philosophical thoughts are liberally used with much deadpan humor. I’m halfway through the book and enjoying it. Besides what the book is about, however, there’s another interesting thing about the copy in my hand. A previous reader (a much involved and love-struck, I assume) has, with his/her pencil, made marks in the margin (scribbled stars) where he/she found it rather affecting. What’s even more interesting is that the stars have grown in number (much like the movie star ratings) according to the degree of emotion the person felt at the time of reading it. For example, a line like “Stendhal believed that love could be brought about only on the basis of a fear of losing the loved one…” managed to get one star, but the line “Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together’ – when subjectively, we feel dispersed and confused.” managed to get three stars. At places, the sentences have also been underlined (which is probably pretty common), the stars have grown in size (this must be unique), and a smiley has appeared (a result of too much chatting?). And finally, as if to sum up, on the last page there is also a list of important page numbers that this reader has made based on his/her reading and scribbled a line above the list that read, curiously enough, as “time wasting proposal” (whatever that means!).

Needless to say, this reader’s antics have heightened my reading pleasure. I personally don't like scribbling in the margins, but I'm ready to waive off for this margin-scribbling reader who seemed rather besotted with the whole idea of love. The author of the book must have been happy to find such a curious and keen reader who he’d been able to affect in such profound ways. I, for one, would have been.

Someplace else

2010-01-26T03:38:00.002+05:30

Standing near the timber bridge (from where I clicked the photo), you can see two distinct trees – a tall coconut tree and a rather dwarfish banyan tree – standing, rather forlornly, in a vast field. Except for them, the landscape looks flat, empty, and quiet. “There used to be another coconut tree, a pair, and the house was just in the middle of them,” my father said when I showed him the photo. He then went on and showed me where the small pond with blooming lotuses was, where the neighbor’s boundary began, and where, during monsoon, he put traps and caught fish. “Three decades back, there was a village here and this was our home,” he said.

The mango tree in their courtyard, my mother used to say, was of indeterminable age. According to her, it had the same old and gnarled look ever since she remembered – it neither showed much vigor nor did it die. Rather, this tree weathered many a storm and acted as a center of all household activity – during Summers, it used to provide cool shade; in Winters, the communal fireplace used to come up under this tree; on a flat stone near its root, masalas used to be ground; and the buffaloes used to lie around it at night. In fact, one of my mother’s favorite stories about this tree was (which she described rather animatedly) how during the 71’s Bangladesh War stray bullets flew and wedged on the very trunk of this tree. The tree remains till date. But, the courtyard is now empty and there’s no one left to tell stories about the tree.

The temple atop the hillock is modest by every standard. When we reach the place, there’s none of the hullabaloo that usually surrounds a busy temple. Encouraged by the lovely mild day of Winter, I walked about the place to explore more. Although never been to this place, I had heard many a stories related to this temple. For example, I knew the big entrance with statues of twin lions atop it, the adjacent pond where shoals of fish came up to feed on thrown food, the flight of stairs where rows of lights were lit on deepavali night, the little garden in front from where fresh flowers were plucked every morning, the nearby tomb of an exceptionally tall Mughal general who came here to conquer but ended up dying in a bout of malaria. It was funny how I knew the place without ever seeing it. And maybe because I had those stories swarming in my head, sitting on the steps I started conjuring up an image – of a young woman slowly climbing up the stairs, her bare feet dusty from all the walking, her hair still wet from the bath, her forehead glistening with perspiration, her slightly smudged vermilion bindi shining in the sunlight, her hands holding a puja thali, her face lit up with a smile – of my young mother.

Homewards

2009-12-18T00:34:00.002+05:30

In all likelihood, this looks like to be the last post of the year. But, this is not a summary of the year gone by nor do I intend to put up a year-end post. In fact, even if I try, which I did for a while, I don't seem to find any high (or low) points that could distinguish this year from other years. Of course, when I speak of an uneventful year, I refer purely to a personal state of being; apparently, earth-shattering events are occurring every other day in other peoples' lives, which I'm completely oblivious of. Once in a while, it does scare me though -- that I cannot feel any rise and fall in life, which everyone keeps talking of; that I am not getting too worked up by the seemingly endless amount of time I'm letting go, doing nothing; that, despite everything, I still feel as clueless or confused as ever. In short, horrifyingly enough, the start or end of a year seem to have lost whatever residual feelings of hope or despair they used to carry; and instead, giving way to a cold indifference.

Anyway, the year's going to end in a few more days. As with every year, I saw people moving in and out, rearranging their lives -- some committing to new things, some rising to new heights, some falling by the wayside, and some vanishing altogether. Oh, wait! Now that I started typing in, I do seem to feel certain moments linger in my head, some memories that I didn't care to look back, some days that indeed were different. Still, what difference those moments and memories are going to make, I am still uncertain of. As for now, I'm waiting with my packed bags, ready to start my much-awaited year-end vacation, a time when I reach a Zen-like state of mind and speculate on the greater scheme of things.

See you all, hopefully more regularly, in the coming new year.

P.S. New year wishes, everyone!

Behind the scenes

2009-11-04T23:19:00.002+05:30

The fragrant flowers

Late in the evening, if you came out to the veranda, you could tell the unmistakable fragrance of sewali flowers wafting from the corner of the courtyard. It didn’t take much wind to carry it; the fragrance would spread even when the air stood still, though not very far. And if you stepped down the veranda, notwithstanding the mild cold of early winter, and took a stroll near the tree, you would see it laden with tiny white flowers much like some studded jewelry. The air around the tree would be heavy with the subdued fragrance of newly bloomed flowers and you might possibly even want to pick up a few of the fallen flowers to be put by your bedside. Although difficult to describe in words this fragrance is variously associated with sadness, melancholy, or longing. It is notorious for making people pensive.

The river by the cemetery

The leafy green cemetery does not see too many visitors. Often enough, you would find yourself to be the only person walking by its neatly maintained rows of stones. Pink bougainvilleas and dark-green creepers adorn the walk-way that runs through the middle of the cemetery. Tall sandstone pillars bearing the names of unknown soldiers stand in the formation of an arc. On the grassy lawn, sparrows hop around much of the time. But, it’s the quietly flowing river that runs just behind the cemetery that gives the place its peace and charm. In such a peaceful little place, you might find it is easy to forget what prices these soldiers – young, old, and unnamed, coming from faraway corners of the world – had to pay to wage a war, and then perish, in a foreign land.

The Deepavali diya

As you would agree, Deepavali, contrary its beautiful name, is often more associated with noise than with light. But still, nothing captures the essence of Deepavali more than the image of rows of flickering diyas. Or, for that matter, even a single solitary diya that you might have lit and left alone on the balcony.

Wild grass

If you climbed the hillock that lay behind the buildings, and walked a bit further, you would reach a relatively flat grassy land that is unusually green for this time of the year. Partly because of the abundant rains in the last few days, and partly because not many people come walking to this side, the grasses here have grown tall, reaching as far as your waist. Tired by the climb, if you wished to have a little rest, you could sit on the rocks that lay partly hidden among the grasses and spend a few moment watching the grasses sway in the late-afternoon breeze as grasshoppers, dragonflies, and tiny colorful butterflies hop around.

Weary legs

If you happened to finally make it to the small, almost camped, cave that is carved on the wall of a giant stone on top of the hill fort, a stunning view would await you. As far as your eyes could see, there would be hills, their cliffs draped with passing clouds. In the valley below, the early morning mist would still be lingering languidly. With such a view for company, and the feel of gentle breeze blowing into your face, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to give your weary legs some much-needed rest here. If you wished, reclining on the stone walls, you could also click a photo or two.

The baoli

You would be pleasantly surprised if you discovered this baoli on the hilltop. It is hidden by a thick growth of wild shrubs and is often missed out by people who climb this hill fort. Nevertheless, once you have found it, you would definitely be impressed by the structure. Two flights of perpendicular stairs would lead you to the underground source of water that might once have served many (legend has it, that this place was once a thriving village that got abandoned after a vicious plague epidemic). Sitting on the steps of this dark and cool baoli you might experience time standing still between the ancient brick walls.

Picture-perfect?

2009-10-20T23:46:00.008+05:30

I had been going click-happy for some days now. And some of my experiments, obviously, had to spill over to the blog. So, here's an assortment.

the fragrant flowers

the river by the cemetery

the deepavali diya

wild grass

weary legs

the baoli

Of course, there are stories associated with each of these photos. But, those I save for another day.

Here and there

2009-10-06T19:54:00.002+05:30

The view of sea in the rains is an awesome sight – huge waves crash rhythmically on the sandy beach, the horizon is blurred with dark mass of ominous looking clouds, and the strong gale hits the face carrying hint of salt. It’s beautiful, yet you cannot miss the underlying fierceness of Nature on display. We just sit on the sand, looking at this splendour and hear the roar of the sea, as it rains all around.

At night, in the more trendy part of the beach, inside a few winding lanes, the clubs, pubs, and discos come alive. Live music, karaoke, and general noise floats in air. Huge swarms of people throng for fun and there is a festive bustle all around. For a few moments, it is possible to get so overwhelmed with the goings on around you that the sea, which is just a stone’s throw away, is almost forgotten. It could as well be a Saturday night in a city pub.

At the cathedral, despite the sizeable number of crowd, it’s surprisingly quiet. People sitting on pews – newlyweds, families, backpackers, nuns – all look around the huge hall and the altar in front. Among the group of mostly elderly nuns I spot a young one, almost a teenager, who looks a bit lost. She looks around at the surrounding grandeur in awe, looking much like a young girl who has caught a glimpse of some film star.

At the seaside fort, it’s all noise and crowd and cameras. It’s difficult to imagine how this place might have served as a watering hole for Portuguese sailors who landed here after months of travel on high seas. Walking around, I hear a Bengali father talk to his little son. Both of them seem to be unimpressed with the fort. The father says, “After watching Agra fort, all other forts seem quite run-down and not-so-grand, isn’t it son?” The son nods his little head in quiet agreement.

In search of some quieter beaches, we move down south on our last day of stay. Incidentally, it turns out to be an extremely pleasant drive. It’s a sunny day and the roadsides look impossibly green as we pass by paddy fields, ponds, coconut groves, and lovely little villages with quaint churches of all sizes. Our tour culminates with a sumptuous lunch we have at a quiet wayside restaurant. We gorge on the food, talk inanities, and mostly savour the salubrious air of sea.

Quotidian

2009-09-05T00:52:00.001+05:30

At first he thought it was raining in his dreams – as if he were somewhere up in the mountains and a mass of clouds covered him up with a sheet of drizzle. He seemed to be walking, surprisingly weightless, through a haze. He even felt the chill in the air and a whiff of wet barks and leaves. “Isn’t there a place dry and warm?” a voice seemed to sound in his head.

He rolled in his bed and a dim gray morning light, filtered through an overcast sky, fell on his face. Through the open door of the balcony his eyes first fell on the series of fat raindrops that clung to the iron railing. “So, it’s indeed raining,” he thought, realizing the source of chill in his dream. He instinctively checked the time – he had half an hour to get ready – and then looked out of the open door again. With a blurred vision – for not only because he was still half awake, but also because he wasn’t wearing his specs – he saw the raindrops trembling and falling off the iron railing, and then being replaced by another set of equally fat raindrops. “Is this how everything gets replaced, like raindrops?” he thought, “even memories?” For a few minutes, he got lost in a reverie. “Damn!” he suddenly muttered, “these rainy mornings sure give me some melancholic thoughts.” He stared at the white walls, a favorite method to calm his head, and looked intently at the hanging cobwebs.

Anyway, after a while of staring at cobwebs and shuffling in the bed, he woke up fully to realize that he had overstayed in bed. He hurriedly got ready, picked up the things he needed to carry, wore his shoes, checked for any electric switches that might be left on, and then finally locked the front door. He climbed down the stairs trying to remember if he had missed or forgotten anything.

Outside, the rain had diminished to the faintest of drizzles. The air was damp and heavy, and the trees were still dripping wet. Just when he came near his parked vehicle, a cat, all white with a few black stripes, ran across. The whole thing – the rains, the running cat, and the damp air – reminded him of something, but he could not seem to remember what exactly it was. “Just like déjà vu,” he thought. Only yesterday he overheard someone speak of déjà vu, and here he was experiencing it today. “How words catch up with us!” he thought again, with a slight nod of his head, the way he did every time he carried a conversation with himself. But he needed to hurry now, he realized. He hopped on the vehicle, started the engine, and swiftly went out of the building compound, onto the main road, and became a part of the rushing, office-going, quotidian crowd.

Words

2009-08-30T23:28:00.003+05:30

Stationery, arguably, is one of the most mis-spelt words – it’s spelt stationary with alarming frequency. Which makes me think: Have you ever seen stationary ever being mis-spelt as stationery? I haven’t.

It’s sometimes serendipity that introduces us to a new word. Like I found smorgasbord. I encountered this completely new word, just like that, twice, in two different and unconnected articles, in the span of a day. (By the way, smorgasbord means a wide variety or collection, usually of food.)

On Sunday night while I was watching Sehar (a surprisingly taut film, I must add) I came across a hitherto unknown Hindi word varchasva (वर्चस्व). As explained in the film, it means something of an absolute authority that can neither be shared nor delegated – only earned. Interesting, isn’t it?

Talking of film titles reminds me of Naseem, a film made by Saeed Akhtar Mirza, way back in 1995. I didn’t get a chance to see the film until recently, but I always remembered the title of the film because, I guess, I liked the tenderness the word conveyed. Naseem, in Urdu, means morning breeze.

At work, the other day, I came across this new word – L10N. I had to scratch my head few times before I got to know that L10N is actually "localization" when you replace the alphabets between L and N and replace them with the count of absent alphabets. Ah, such new things I learn at work!

Wanderlust

2009-08-04T02:07:00.003+05:30

Last Thursday, I embarked on a trip that eventually took me to thirteen different forts, numerous towns and villages, abandoned ruins of temples on hilltops and riverbanks, rock-cut caves hidden in the thick foliage of forests, carved inscriptions, giant fortifications, unknown tombs, water tanks, mausoleums and minarets. It continued for more than three days, across about 1400 kilometers, with little rest in between. So, at the end of it all, my mind is in a blur, and what remains are a few stray images – most of them for reasons I do not understand, yet.

The first stop of the road trip came at a tiny little village, where we reached in the wee hours of the morning (in fact, it was more midnight than morning), and wanted to take a little nap in the veranda of a house that we barged in. It was a magnificently starry night and in between intermittent sleep I would stare heavenwards thinking of things that are usually inspired by such nights.

Atop one of the forts where some of the old structures are still remaining, was a neat little arched pavilion standing on the edge, overlooking the endless spread of valley below. It was a place I would have wanted to sit for hours, with crumbling rocks for company and strong winds whistling about. But, alas, before I could have my fill, it was time to descend and move towards our next destination.

In a godforsaken little place, the only eatery left open was (guess what!) a beer bar, the owner of which was kind enough to let us sleep on its terrace after dinner. So, there we slept again under a open sky, but this time in the company of a staggering pile of empty beer bottles.

A series of unknown tombs – about 12 to 15 – lie on an elevated platform in the middle of the fort that we climb in. Most of the tombs had crumbled away – stone slabs had tumbled down and trees had grown up on them – and there’s nothing to tell us who lie buried under them or how they died. Going by the look, it seems they were significant enough to have got such big tombs erected for them and they must have died together. Probably, fighting in a battle, or struck by an epidemic.

One of the pleasures of hiking to lesser known places is the surprise element. So, there was this place we went to that had an excellent Hemadpanthi temple with exquisite stone architecture. A steep climb to the hill beyond it revealed three rock-cut caves – one of them containing astonishing life-size statues of Mahavira in the dark cavernous hall. Standing outside the caves, I stood transfixed, looking over the valley that stretched beyond the horizon in the fading twilight, as the jungle came alive with calls of peacock, raucous noise of langurs, and myriad other birdsong.

On the road, looking out of window of the car, can be a thrilling experience in itself – nondescript small villages pass by, the clamour of small towns give way to open fields, bunch of trees with inviting shades stand by the road, a church steeple peeks at a distance, occasionally a cemetery or a cremation ghat appear near a river, the clouds change shape and colour as afternoon rolls into evening, the moon comes up shining with pale ghostly light, and the sky fills up like a canvas with clusters of tiny glittering stars.

On our last stop, we stand near two ruined temples near the bend of a river. The temples face each other and look much like twins. On their stone walls are curved statues of supple women playing musical instruments, men with garlands around their necks, horses, elephants, floral patterns – everything to the minutest possible detail. I sit on a slab of rock overlooking the tranquil river water flowing past in the fading twilight as the cool breeze soothes my travel-weary body.

Silly office humor

2009-07-24T11:23:00.002+05:30

I am looking at a graph that shows the participation of certain teams in certain work-related activity. The timeline (in months) is on the horizontal (x) axis and the percentage of participation is on the vertical (y) axis. Ok, that much for background.

Now, out of the five teams, one team, I find, has jumped participation by a whooping 50% – from 20% to close to 70% – in just last one month. "Oh!" I exclaim and look for the name of the person who manages that team. As it turns out, the name of the manager is (indeed) Oh! Well, the exclamation sign is not part of the name, of course; I merely used it to show my surprise.

André Kertész

2009-07-23T15:07:00.002+05:30

I didn't know about André Kertész until I came across this link about an hour ago.

I liked these photographs, especially the way everyone looks absorbed into the words they are reading – whether it's a boy reading the cartoon strips sitting on a pile of newspapers; or, a university girl slumped on a couch, reading and (it seems) absent-mindedly toying with a ball-point pen; or, a circus performer taking a break in the dressing room, lying on his (or her?) stomach and reading a paperback; or, an old man carefully scrutinizing a book from what seems like a second-hand book sale on the pavements; or, a young man enjoying a book, quietly, sitting on stool, beside a big window and a few cramped dormitory beds, possibly while all other inmates are out – all these, an ode to the act of reading.