I sat on the grass for a long time. It felt like it, as I breathed every second that passed. The grass felt comfortable under my butt and thighs. Like a carpet? No, I’m a Mumbai girl, I’m not used to carpets. The park is full of little mounds and grassy gradations and the contours of this patch of land fit comfortably under my legs. I don’t remember the last time I tasted comfort like this.

I was facing the jogging track and people walked by me, heads angled in front, not a glance here or there, focused on building up their heart rate and burning their calories. It was odd to be ignored quite like that. How have I not noticed it earlier? Maybe because I’ve been one of them. Truly, we city people miss the lovely things right before our eyes as we chase after other things.

How often I myself have pounded down this same track, my feet keeping up with my thoughts, an Ipod plugged into my ears or a phone conversation happening in parallel. I’ve been running away from things that are too much bear, rushing through conversations that must be had. And that’s exactly what I see written on all the faces that whip past me on the track today. I hope they find their peace. I really hope. It’s all around, abundant and just waiting to be experienced.

Last month I carried anger and indignation inside me, frothing like a bottle of coca-cola in the backseat of a car that’s zoomed down one of Mumbai’s roads. It rose inside me, threatening to burst forth from my lips and eyes any minute. Any damn minute right now. And I struggled to contain it, to settle it. My best friend had thrown a tantrum when I spoke up for the first time in 15yrs. Another friend had spoken up for the first time in 12yrs and burst forth with things that had little to do with the occasion. The irony of the two events happening in the same week was not lost on me. While I labeled the first one a tantrum, I called the second one an excessive and uncalled for response. I was torn between the two and my anger at the end of it was the stress I felt torn between the two diverse roles I played in these events.

Then there was the person who wanted me to work for him for free. Worst of all was his condescending attitude, an impression of ‘You’re not working so let me give you something worthwhile to do’, an air of doing me a favour by letting me do his work. I wanted to toss it all in this face and flounce out angrily but of course I didn’t. Seething, seething, seething.

Then, an ex- told me that I was just the same as ever, everlastingly full of angst. But he laughed as he said it, just as he always has. And I realized even if he were right, it didn’t matter anymore. I am just myself that’s all.

And A jauntily told me that it was a good thing to replace one’s friends. Relationships outgrew their purpose too and permanence was overrated, he said. There’s some solace to be drawn from that. Can I then let go of all the shackles that hold me back without fear? We hold the keys to our own handcuffs and we hold it with tight, fierce desperation.

It’s time to breathe. A deeeeeeeep breath. And let go.

Yesterday the temple was crowded, as it always is on Saturdays. I found a relatively empty spot and sat down to collect my thoughts. Ten minutes later, when I was walking down the road, a young man passed by and said something. I unplugged my earphones and stared back. He said,

When you were doing your puja, you looked very peaceful and serene. It felt good to see that.

And he walked away. Peace, happiness, contentment, so elusive. I think I’ll stop trying to figure out how to get them and keep them. I’ll just stay in them when they do occur.

                          

Table of contents for Ideart

1. Ideart: Peacock
2. Ideart: Kathakali
3. Ideart: Rose Garden
4. Ideart: Good Karma, Bad Medicine

A few days earlier I had a thought. The words

Good karma, bad medicine

just formed themselves in my head. I can’t quite explain the thought. It was one of those ideas that just showed itself and vanished before I fully explore it further. It still sounded interesting. I put it up as my Twitter/ Facebook status to see if I could glean anything from it from seeing it in print. Still no luck. It was one of those things that you can just about see from the corner of your eye but never quite catch it straight-on. That’s when it occurred to me that the best way to communicate this thought may be visual and not verbal. And I realized that it had been awhile since I wielded a paintbrush.

The minute I had that thought, the image I needed flashed before my eyes.That was just it. The idea was a picture, not a sentence or story. After that it was just a matter of executing it. Luckily I had a plain black singlet handy and kept waiting for just such a time. A budding artist learns to store away material that could come in useful.

This is a tank top, that I picked up the first time I saw it because it is the thin, stretchy tee-shirt cotton material. There are no big logos or pictures on it and the cut is basic but curved along the sides rather than the straight up-and-down of unisex tees. I hate those since they hang and tug alternately.

The first thing I had to do was figure out a way to get rid of that little logo in the corner (little as it was, it was still in a white rubberprint and stood out) since that would certainly not do with the idea I had in mind. I was out of black paint so I tried dark blue and dark green but the rubber print of the logo showed right through both of these. Finally I coated it with Fevicryl Pearl Black no. 306.

I wanted the picture to be exactly in the middle of the visible area of the tee-shirt. If you are painting a tee-shirt for the first time, I recommend putting it on and marking off the area while still wearing it. Otherwise, one is used to the stark, solid borders of paper and too often the artwork goes over the visible area or looks too small or big. Clothes fall on each person’s body differently and ideally you should always see the garment on the wearer before painting on it. This area usually comes to about 8in x 8in or 20cm x 20cm on my clothes (and I rather smugly report that it turned out a perfect square without using a ruler or even pencil sketching!)

I started with a swirly line using a thin brush and Fevicryl Pearl Spring Green no.311 and then Fevicryl Cerulean Blue no.32. But I realized that a psychedelic design with multiple colours would need to have broad strokes for each colour to be visible and not get lost in too-intricate strokes so I switched brushes. After that it was a random selection of colours applied in strokes, splashes, squiggles and splotches. I painted over in a number of places and in other places I also used the same brush in multiple colours without cleaning the brush. This last gives the effect that you can see to the right of the second dot on the right. The yellow and pink run parallel for a bit before the yellow strikes out on its own. The colours must not be too liquidey if you want this effect since otherwise they’ll merge into each other.

This is one design where red (my favorite colour) was not the most striking note. On the contrary, the red quite got lost in the gloss of the other pearly tints so I used it as background in a number of places. When I had covered the entire square, I dabbed on circles with the Fevicryl Pearl Spring Green no.311 and you can see the colours beneath through the thin veneer of the green, in places.

I originally intended to paint the words over this design in black or white. But I realized the paint area was too small to fit in words and besides, it was too striking to waste as background. Besides, there was enough room above and below for lettering.

I tried for a digital-looking font and a religious-looking orange (Fevicryl Metallic Red no. 356) for the words ‘Good Karma’. In contrast the words ‘Bad Medicine’ at the bottom are in a more graffiti-like font in a Fevicryl Pearl Lemon Yellow no. 302.

Finally I noticed that the painted-over patch over the logo in the bottom right corner had dried and was standing out against the black. So I painted on a stretch in the same colour across the tee-shirt, a sort of rough underline the way one would highlight a graffittied sentence.

I’m not sure whether the finer points like font and colour would be noticed but I’m guessing they would register at a sublimnal level. The message just is one of those things. I wore this with worn-out blue jeans, a silver chain double-looped around my neck with a New Age faerie pendant. It got some appreciation.

Good Karma, Bad Medicine

Garment: Sleeveless ladies tee-shirt

Material: Hosiery cotton

Background colour: Solid Black

Paint colours used:

• Fevicryl Pearl Black no. 306
• Fevicryl Cerulean Blue no. 32
• Fevicryl Crimson no. 04
• Fevicryl Pearl Spring Green no. 311
• Fevicryl Pearl Pink no. 303
• Fevicryl Pearl Lemon Yellow no. 302
• Fevicryl Pearl Metallic red no. 356

                          

1 Comments

• At March 6, 2010, Prolific Dyslexic wrote:

  This looks nice :)

  Next stop, Etsy?

Damn it all! No more coffee for me. Even if it’s only one cup of filter coffee in the morning and a Tropical Iceberg in the evening. It makes my brain wuzzy by nighttime. It might have been okay to dream about monsters and stuff that scares you. What about stuff that disgusts you? Where most people have nightmares, my subconscious dregs out warty toads.

I dreamed of an ex-. For those of you who know me well, if I told you who this was, you’d stare at me in wonderment. Yes, not one of those major things, just a short by-the-by one that passed with no major damages on either side.

If it was weird to dream about him, the dream itself was even weirder. I dreamt that he accused me of taking his suit and throwing it in the mud. And the suit! What a suit! The minute I saw it, I knew that if my dreams were literature, they’d be classified as parodies. It was a beige horror in 80s style with humongous shoulder pads, white piping (a la brass band uniform) and with the jacket ending sharply at the waist. Hain?

Then the phone rang and it turned out to be my stupid phone company asking for the third time about a bill I’ve already paid. I don’t know which was more disgusting – the call or the dream. Apparently my subconscious knew so I drifted back into the same damn dream.

The ex- pointed at me and I sat back in smug nervousness thinking that the very idea was ludicrous. Mud splotches on a suit were so contrived! But he held it up and there were no splotches, only these glaring yellow patches which looked like clothes that have been unsuccessfully laundered after being used to mop up oil.

And no one seemed to believe me. Then I ran out to find a car pulling out which had one person who I had thought might sort out the mess. But he turned his face on me and pulled away. And I started bawling (how mortifying!)

Mercifully the phone rang again. And brought me to enough sane wakefulness to hope that that stupid dream is behind me! So this very rambling, ranting post is a thank you to my knight-in-shining-armour who woke me up this morning and rescued me from the parody-dragon in my head!

                          

The Corner Coffeeshop was open for business but its traffic was at a lull. It was too early in the evening for the post-work crowd, too late for the students and AC-enjoying unemployed to be hanging around.

Outside, the sun had gone down but that curious combination of atmospheric density and light’s acrobatic bending made it seem like daylight was still around.

Such were his thoughts, where another person would have called it twilight. He grimly thought to himself that she would have referred to Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Nights’ while all along he’d be thinking of the diagrams in the physics textbooks about light refraction.

He was already seated on the bar-stool near the window, his bag on the seat next to his, to save it for her. In front of him was a cappuccino. With deliberate precision, he emptied two sachets of sugar into the cup and tossed the empty packets into the dustbin near the end of the table. She preferred espresso shots but he couldn’t stand their acrid taste. But he didn’t want another lecture on calorie count either.

Outside, the object of his ruminations had just neared the door and was standing but not entering. Then she squared her shoulders, took a deep breath and walked in.

He saw her from the corner of his eye and put down his coffee mid-sip to receive her kiss. To his surprise, she turned, picked his bag off the seat and sat down with it in her lap. A second later, she seemed to have second thoughts and put it on the table.

Then she turned and said in a rush.

I need to tell you something and I need you to not interrupt. I’m going back to Delhi tomorrow.

But…

She held up her hand.

Don’t say anything. I’m going. The ticket is booked. And it’s one-way.

Her face was set in an immovable mask. She looked beautiful. But unrecognizable. Like a cold, marble statue that was displayed in someone else’s house.

When you called me here for coffee, I thought you were trying to rekindle the romance in our relationship.

Her stiff expression didn’t change. She hadn’t even put her bag on the table. He tried again.

I know we’ve been arguing. But we’ve been through worse stuff. It’s…what are we doing?

She wavered and in a slightly watery voice said,

You’re having coffee. I’m leaving.

Come on, you don’t have to do this. Let’s talk about this.

Let’s not.

she said. And those were her last words to him. He would think about that often. For such a talkative person, she was leaving him with so little. As if she didn’t want to spend another precious minute or word on him.

Across the street, she plugged her earphones into her ears and switched on the iPod. It wasn’t serendipitous, the song that came up.

Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say
I said something wrong, I long for yesterday
Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play.

She’d been listening to the Beatles all evening on her way to the coffeeshop. It helped her relax and focus.

He hadn’t said anything wrong. How do you tell someone that they had never said anything right in the first place? How do you explain that after three years? And how do you erase the memory of your own wrong choices?

You don’t. You just stop and turn away.

She turned the corner and stopped under the street lamp. She asked herself, shall I reconsider? and turned to look in the direction of the coffeeshop.

It was dark now and the bright lights of The Corner Coffeeshop were attracting their clientele in now. She couldn’t see him anymore, there were too many people around. Night had fallen.

Should I?

And in the same breath, the thought crystallized into realisation.

Let me not.

She took a deep breath and walked away.

Coffee was never going to be anything but bitter after this.

                          

5 Comments

• At March 2, 2010, le wrote:

  Gorgeous writeup. I like how some of us rip off the bandaid. Its faster, easier and more practical.

• At March 2, 2010, anand wrote:

  //How do you tell someone that they had never said anything right in the first place? How do you explain that after three years? And how do you erase the memory of your own wrong choices?

  //You don’t. You just stop and turn away.

  Well to begin with:

  1. it is cowardly

  2. Unfair to the guy in the long run.. i mean yeah it will hurt him a lot, but explaining it will help him better in the long run..power of honest feedback...never underestimate that...

• At March 4, 2010, Parth wrote:

  Hola! Got here through E Vestigio and just wanted to say hello. Always good to stop and read bloggers from Mumbai, especially the prolific kind :)

• At March 4, 2010, IdeaSmith wrote:

  @le: And yet, no less painful, all things considered, in the long run. Our relationships, no matter how they turn out have a long-reaching impact on the people we then become. Thank you for commenting.

  @anand: And maybe she wasn't strong enough for that honesty. But some would say it took strength to make a decision instead of struggling along for the rest of both their lives. Such is the complex nature of a relationship with two people's motivations, perspectives and conflicting desires.

  @Parth: :-D I paid you a return visit and left a comment! Thank you for introducing yourself. E Vestigio is a very dear pal and I'd love to know her other friends.

• At March 4, 2010, Radha wrote:

  This is my first visit to your blog and the first post I read. Really well written! Crisp, concise and articulate. I am hooked :)

This is for Dee, the editor I’d like to have, who quite literally showed me the way.

~O~O~O~O~O~

Where do stories come from? she wondered. Her editor had told her that her writing had a quality of finesse in it. But, he said, the spark was missing. She wanted to protest, it had been such an effort to get to here after all. But anticipating just that, he had moved his hand in a wiping gesture, as if trying to clear away a fog around her.

“It’s that madness, that raw energy that used to make one want to read. Bring that back. It’s you. Unleash it in your writing.”

She brooded over it for a long time, all through the book-browsing date and the high tea that followed. Then she decided to take a walk. Taking long walks and watching people and noting down what one saw seemed to be the right things for a writer to do. The sea had always held appeal. But somehow, the effort of crossing the road, dodging bratty rich kids in their oversized cars only to scrounge a garbage pile of people on the other side, for seating space…wasn’t an appealing thought at all.

The city is no place for an artist, she told herself. How was one supposed to be inspired by this relentless struggle? It didn’t even have the elements of drama like a war or a revolution or an uprising, a famine or a flood. It was just everyday, niggling grievances. Who would want to read about those? Who would want to write about those, she retorted inside her head. Then she shook herself. Arguing with oneself is the first step into insanity and she’d be damned if she was going to live up to that pathetic stereotype of a writer-gone-crazy before she was even published.

The girl hopped off the last bogey, the one that she had just managed to jump into as the train pulled out of the station. In one hand she clutched a little notepad and a magenta pen, her chosen colour for the day. She did have one thought that should be captured before it vanished into that abyss of forgotten inspiration. One hand holding down the page, she expertly popped off its lid with her mouth and twirled it around to cap its end with practiced efficiency.  Rapidly she wove a messy magenta web over the ideas that had caused her to almost miss her train.

Mumbai Metaphors

I stood on the opposite side of the road that runs along the seaface. It was the wrong side, not the one that had the seating parapet along its entire length but the junction of the seaface road and the arterial conduit to the station terminus.

I stood under the tree that has survived attempts to build bigger and more buildings, broader roads and wider pedestrian walks. The same gnarled tree that stands on the side of the road like a senior citizen with memories of a slower, more human-paced city but no energy to brave the pace of today.

The sky was just turning that indefinable shade of evening like the colour of the last dregs of black tea in a chipped white saucer. Sepia, the colour of nostalgia, that one extra element that changes the picture of a dirty, overcrowded metropolis to the magical visage of home.

A rare wind was blowing all around me. February in the city picks you up as gently and playfully as the waves and takes you to the edge of the shore of winter. I felt like I was standing in the middle of a swimming pool, only it was filled with moving, insistent air around me instead of water.

When she looked up, she was standing at the threshold of light, surrounded by darkness. The very edge of a station, flowing slowly into light at the other end. A rusty carriage sat on incomplete tracks, a long discarded project of the metropolitan train network and peered at her through unpainted metal bars. On the other side, across the tracks and the other well-lit platform, high over their roofs rose the skeletal inner beams of discarded mills. Like a will being contested over the rotting body of a dead person, the future of the land they stood on was being dueled over, with no thought to the buildings that still were.

Places have memories, don’t they? Memories of lives that have passed, of habits that were housed under these roofs, hidden behind these walls. The paan-stains, the half-buried cigarette butts, sneaky but woeful reminders of escapes, of stolen glee. And then the finality of ashes that came from burning who knows what? Paper? Cloth? Oil? Human beings? There were stories that led to the ashes but there was no way to trace them back. This place had its endings but not all it was in ashes. Everything else was memories that could be traced by anyone who cared to listen, to pick up those strands and imagine where they led. They were stories to be told.

She looked down at her book again, an abrupt swooshing action. The white pages even with their magenta words glared back at her in defiance. Those words meant nothing and in her mind’s eye, she imagined the magenta whorls and lines slide off the pages. Blood, the only thing that would stick. Hold a pen to a nerve and write, he had said. So she turned a page and begun,

Something was burning.

                          

5 Comments

• At February 26, 2010, Samir wrote:

  Surely, this deserves an important spot in The Sticky Writer? :D

  Wonderful piece. You have a flair for the poetic, and a fondness for writing semi-memoir writings on writing, it would seem. Good work, keep going.

• At February 28, 2010, vishesh wrote:

  ? this...nothing else to say

• At February 28, 2010, vishesh wrote:

  er..the "?" is a heart symbol :P guess this comment box doesn't like it :P

• At February 28, 2010, umashankar wrote:

  This chap here is hooked! You had me riveted till the very end. Will surely return again.

• At March 4, 2010, IdeaSmith wrote:

  @Samir: Thank you. Your insights are remarkably useful to me. The Sticky Writer if it ever comes to be, will be attributed to you. :-)

  @vishesh: :-D Muchly thengyu.

  @umashankar: Thank you very much! Fiction is a relatively new pursuit for this blog and I'm happy you liked it enough to want to visit again. More comments on future posts, please!

“And this is Kunal.”

“Are you on Twitter?”

“Yes, I’m @c00nal.”

“I don’t think I FOLLOW you.”

“I don’t follow you either.”

Kunal frowns as he turns to the Hot Dog stand.

“I think I hurt his ego a bit.”

“You just met!”

“Social boo-boo, telling someone you don’t follow them on Twitter.”

“What rubbish, nobody cares about these things.”

“Some people do. Maybe he’s one of them. Shit, I blew it.”

“Shh, he’s back. Ice-creams? Isn’t that too…I don’t know…something?”

“Ice-cream is cool.”

“Or maybe it’s c00nal.”

“No, this is c00nal.”

He says, holding out a spoon with a bit of ice-cream stuck to it. It’s green, not an appealing shade for food, she thinks.

“Ooh, you got her an ice-cream, c00nal?”

“A bite-sized version.”

He grins.

“A twitterized ice-cream.”

She replies, smiling back as she takes the spoon.

                          

The person I wrote this for, when he read it, told me,

You don’t yet realize that we are beyond this.

It was a fitting end in every way possible.

                          

We concluded the first Mumbai BlogCamp of 2010 on Saturday, 20 Feb 2010. First of all, thank you and congratulations are due to Gaurav, Adil, Arushi and their team at ACM for setting up a great venue for us. My backbencher-at-college days of yore had not prepared me for the spanking new campus, the soft cushioned chairs in an airconditioned room complete with whiteboard, podium and projector. Boy, colleges sure have changed!

BlogCamp really began for me about a week ago when I wrote a post announcing it. After that I got swept away in the thrill of helping organize the event. At last count, the night before the event, 189 people had registered. Fewer people than that actually showed up. The good thing was that several of them were newcomers, first-timers to BlogCamp. I say this is good because the purpose of a BlogCamp is certainly to widen the community and interact with various people whose only common point is that they blog. We had a wonderfully diverse bunch.

The familiar faces were the other unorganizers Netra (but of course, it’s not social media if it’s not Netra), Neeraj (who set up the BlogCamp website), Annkur (responsible for getting us the venue) and Moksh (whose superb compering peppered jokes, glossed over bloopers and held the day together). Hardik made a surprise entry at 10 in the morning reminding me of the other person without whom it’s never going to really feel like BlogCamp. He brought a Microsoft sponsorship with him. The event’s blogging partner was Indiblogger while Harish & Nirav brought in media coverage with BlogAdda.

I had the reluctant privilege of opening the BlogCamp with my talk on ‘Blogging for Writers’. The idea for this really came from Novelrace but I’m afraid I erred when I put it at the very end (hoping to build up to the grande finale) and I ended up having to rush through the last bits.

Satish and Ranjeet did a brief interlude talking about their pet project, The Sapling Project. Their talk was unscheduled but short, brief and it touched a chord in all of us. Perfect.

This was followed by Sanjukta (whom I have only ever twittered with, never met before) speaking about the ‘Bell Bajao’ campaign on social media. She talked about breaking the stereotype of a social worker being a jhola-toting, bearded, impoverished man, which provoked much laughter. Her talk was to set a tone for the rest of BlogCamp. It has to be a sign of the community maturing that we’re moving on from talking about money-making ideas to cause-related initiatives.

The last BlogCamp touched on how we feel about our families having access to our blogs. This event added a different perspective to that notion. The third speaker was the Hobbitt (a.k.a. Jaya), the housewife blogger. She talked about how she got into blogging, what it was like to be the only one of her peer circle in this activity, what she wrote about, her personal highs (getting a comment from tarladalal.com on one of her cooking posts) and lows (being trolled). I found her talk surprisingly smooth and relaxed, considering how little experience she had with public speaking. The content was not new to me but I was proud to be able to say, “Whooooopeee, that’s my mum there!!”

Meetu, Pune’s celebrity blogger stepped in for another brief interlude to tell us about Dr.Major Ritu Biyani’s drive against breast cancer. She took all of 5 minutes and galvanized what could become the next social media-for-a-cause case study.

Shaun Tassavur took us through a description of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, a blown-up picture of which had all of us shrieking,

Change the slide!!!

Annkur, jumping in the spirit of things took us through a series of exercises that supposedly check the onset of the syndrome and help combat it.

Kalyan concluded the morning sessions with his talk on the ‘Food Blogerazi’. This was one that I tremendously enjoyed. I’ve been a reader of Kalyan’s blog for a good while and it was refreshing to hear about a passion so different from my own and yet expressed with the same enthusiasm as I bring to my own. I particularly liked Kalyan’s observation that blogging need not be seen as a revenue-generator in itself but could be a facilitator of other means to that end like a book deal, for example.

Lunch was pav-bhaji served up downstairs and delicious in a way that only college canteens manage to be. No, I’m not being sarcastic, don’t you remember what fueled those adrenalin-ridden teenage years? I however passed up this golden opportunity at nostalgia when Hardik ordered a bunch of us out with,

Vada-pav! Gurgaon mein vada-pav nahin milta hain!

So our lunch hour was spent at the stalls opposite Mithibai college, munching vadapavs and Chinese dosas.

I’m rather afraid that the morning’s highs and that roadside banquet in the sun rather lent a drowsy air to the rest of the afternoon. The first speaker post-lunch, Akshay Surve, was already letting himself in for trouble already when he took that slot. It might have helped if he had kept it to the requisite 20minutes but most of us were too woozy to argue when he persisted with a,

Wait, this is important!!

I understand that he was quite passionate about his cause but since most of his talk went right over my head, I think he quite lost any benefit that could have been derived. We’ve had quite a bit to say about avoiding outright marketing spiels and tech talk (and we tried our very best to keep all that out this time). I’m probably going to get a lot of flak for this but I have to say it. Championing a cause is just as much of hardsell as marketing teeshirts or books or movie tickets online is. No one doubts the significance of the cause, or indeed the propagator’s belief in it. But at the end of the day it is an advertisement and you do your audience a disservice by forcing it down their throats, even as they protest.

I’m sorry to say this …. but your fervour turned me against you rather than for your cause. You may be doing something noble but BlogCamp is not the forum for you to crusade your cause. If it is a new idea, take it to Startup Saturday. If it involves technology, drop into BarCamp.

This incident rather turned the mood of BlogCamp around, forcing Pragni to take up the mic and voice a protest. She asked,

What is the real purpose of BlogCamp? Is it to share our views on where we see this phenomenon going and how it affects each of us personally? Or is to push a personal agenda?

A pertinent question, I think. Only as one of the unorganizers, I must hasten to add that it is not exactly within our control to restrict the actual event. The essence of BlogCamp is lost if a small group of people decide to dictate who can or cannot speak. At the end I think it boils down to the responsibility lying with each member of the community to speak up but also respect the feelings of the rest of the community.

The second half of the event was considerably salvaged by the other speakers. From 16-yr-old Farrhad’s talk on Corporate Blogging to Monish speaking about the legal issues surrounding slander on the blogosphere to Monik sharing his experiences to 11-yr-old Raj who talked about his blogs on cookery (!) and gaming, the young ‘uns quite saved the day! One of the last talks was by Sunoj about meeting his now-wife through blogging.

Moksh concluded the event with a random pop quiz (Who fell off the chair? What was the URL of the food blogger? What’s Ideasmith’s real name?) and giving out teeshirts and caps. Hmm…so to take stock. We heard a housewife and three minors. We heard about fiction-writing, food critiquing, social causes, health issues, finding love online, legal issues and corporate blogging. We also had a great lunch, a BlogCamp argument and some great sessions. If you think this was fun, it serves you right! Get to BlogCamp next time and be a part of it!

Pictures of the event can be seen here: Ranjeet, Preshit, Kumar.

The twitter coverage of the event can be found under #blcm and for posterity, here’s a specimen of tweets:

@Lol_Bot RT –>@monikkinom giving a session blogging now, he has his english exams in school this monday #lol #blcm

@imasoom Freedom of expression as a limit #blcm, Debate between@manan and @mihirlakhani continues  #blcm

@Netra @fundacause – Chandni speaking on social media for social change #blcm @ideasmithy @sanjukta Someone ran away with my pepsi at #blcm

@shirrin_k Listening to @ideasmithy @mihirlakhani talk behind me rather than the speaker upfront…shhh..quiet guys…:D #blcm

@si0007 Hardik from Microsoft speaking on Windows live writer using the much loved and hated MS live essential suite. #blcm

@gameboyzone Attended [IndiBlogger] Blog Camp and it was good to connect with the best of bloggers in Mumbai. Food was good. Overall 3/5 for it. #blcm

@nehabagoria #blcm sessions on bloggin tricks,personal bloggers’ experiences,NGO support,bellbajaon,project sampling,filmkar-short film on slum were nice

@_nwaz great so this is what it feels in a #BLCM wanted to voice my views on bdutt issue but well just sat to hear instead:)

@bombaylives I think everyone forgot to Thank the Caterer for the Amazing Pav Bhaji

Others who have written about this event:

Jaya: Blogcamp Mumbai-Mukesh Patel School of Tech.Mgmt & Eng

Kalyan: “This one time at Band camp”… BlogCamp Mumbai, Mumbai College Eats

Satish: @BlogCamp Mumbai

Priya Kanwar: My First Blog Camp Experience in Mumbai

Anu: BlogCamp Mumbai – Experience

Moksh: BlogCamp Mumbai – January 2010

                          

8 Comments

• At February 22, 2010, Amit Agarwal wrote:

  Excellent round-up.

• At February 23, 2010, Kalyan wrote:

  Hey, great reading this. Thanks for the vote of confidence. Perhaps I'll prepare next time. or maybe I shouldn't. Could completely relate to your part on stories hanging around all over. At times I feel so impatient when I am away from my keyboard.

  Thanks for putting all the inks. Er, lifted them and updated my post with 'link love'. With full credit of course :)

• At February 23, 2010, Akshay Surve wrote:

  Hey I like your attention to detail in the post and thank you for a patient ear - there is a fine line between making a point and forcing one; may be for you I crossed it and I am sorry but if I could reach out to just one more person because of it, I would be more than happy :)

  Oh and... wait this is important!

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWUAUePm8o

  =))

  I blog at www.akshaysurve.com do give it a dekho in your free time :) It is a *personal* blog.

  Although, I promised what I said was the last thing... but what I want to say now is more important! "Thank you" for organizing the BlogCamp :)

• At February 23, 2010, Gautam wrote:

  Thanks for the great summary of the BLCM, Ramya.

  Makes me wish I could have been in Mumbai that day to make it there :)

• At February 24, 2010, IdeaSmith wrote:

  @Amit: Thank you! :-)

  @Kalyan: Heh, thank you. Link love is only good. :-D

  @Akshay: :-) Thank you for taking my words in the right spirit. I really appreciate (and respect) it. And yes, I did see your blog from your twitter bio. I'll visit again.

  @Gautam: I wish too! It's been too long since your last visit. *Hint Hint*

• At February 24, 2010, Blogging4Good @ BlogCamp Mumbai » Ads4Good - Engaging people in the act of Giving wrote:

  [...] Food & Fiction, Housewives & Health, Causes & Gripes, All At BlogCamp Mumbai 2010 [...]

• At February 25, 2010, Mumbai Blogcamp! Bloggers Day Out wrote:

  [...] over to theIdeasmithy for all that you need to know about the Blog Camp. Photos by @ranjeet_walunj [...]

• At February 25, 2010, Aarti wrote:

  Wow, sure sounds like fun... read some more from Anu's blog.. i wanna attend a camp. so do organise one in Chennai or Blore... [would also love to be part of the organising team, if possible:)]

Another writing exercise and this one I thought up myself! (Pat on the back…thank you, thank you). The challenge was to write a 140-word story about Twitter. Samir and I did this under a timer. And finished in close to 14 minutes. I call this a twory.

~O~O~O~O~O~

An 80s song went,

“The instant generation….Instant food, instant love.”

They didn’t know half of it, thought Sanjana. The Internet hadn’t even been around then. They didn’t have Twitter, that two-edged boon that make it permissible to follow somebody.

But was stalking allowed? Her eyes darted about before returning to her screen. Email hacking was passé. His Twitter account lay open to her. With only a moment’s hesitation, she clicked on ‘Direct Messages’. Even her suspicions hadn’t prepared her for what she saw. A screen full of naughty messages, bordering on risqué. That much she had expected, even if the numbers shocked her a bit.

She only didn’t expect to see a row of male faces.

She forced down a wave of nausea and logged out. A few clicks later, she finally took the drastic step as she hit UNFOLLOW.

                          

5 Comments

• At February 18, 2010, Mumbai Paused wrote:

  The length is just right for my attention span.

  Good one. More please.

• At February 18, 2010, IdeaSmith wrote:

  @Mumbai Paused: :-) Coming up soon. Stay tuned in.

• At February 19, 2010, Anirban wrote:

  There is a nice game that goes on when someone follows a whole bunch of people with the hope that you'll follow them back. As soon as you do they unfollow you. Figure!

• At February 22, 2010, Anil wrote:

  Awaiting post-Blog Camp reports from attendees :-)

• At February 22, 2010, Ranee wrote:

  More please. Would love to see more of this interesting exercise.

Vineet was an ordinary young man with one remarkable talent that came to fore only in his late teens in college. It all started with an inter-collegiate festival.

His college and the hosting campus had a long running feud and the annual festival was both, a new episode in the war as well as a chance for each batch to showcase its coming-of-age skills. When Anveeta, the cultural secretary had called for participants, he had been standing nearby, waiting for her to finish so he could leave the class. But she turned to him and snapped,

“Name?”

and his mind had gone on auto-pilot. Before he realized it, she had written it down and moved on to the next person. He didn’t even have time to tell her that he wasn’t into anything remotely cultural. Anyway, he wouldn’t have. Anveeta was not the kind of person one ever said no to. Not that she had ever asked him anything. Anveeta went with the power pack in college and he doubted that she’d recognize him on the road if they passed. Now that they had spoken, he realized that he would have agreed to anything she asked. Even though she had not really asked.

The festival had twenty-five events with about twelve colleges competing for the trophy. Each event awarded a point apiece for participation and more for clearing each level of the competition. The college with the highest total at the end of the festival would win the shining silver cup.

A bunch of 15-odd people were going to sing, dance, act, talk and strut down the stage for the various events. Vineet found himself herded in with the numbers to grab the participation points. These were the small runs, the ‘singles’ as his buddies on the cricket team called it. First to go were the accomplished artists into the music, elocution and art events. Next were the trained and rehearsed teams – the fashion show troupe, the debating team and the dramatics group. The sports teams had gone straight to the grounds and would catch up with them only at the end of the day.

That left four of them. One of them headed to the advertising contest, having set his sights on an internship at an ad agency that summer. The other two trouped off to the personality contest, more to ogle the participants of the opposite sex than anything else. They left Vineet standing in front of the schedule board.

What could he do? He ran his eye speculatively down the list some three times before he found an event right at the bottom. There were only 3 registrants so far and it sounded easy. So he signed up and walked towards the door he was directed to. To his dismay, it turned out to be a small sized auditorium rather than a classroom. What’s more, it was almost half full. Most of the students were using it as a resting point to lounge in the airconditioning, secure in the knowledge that the peons wouldn’t be able to evict anyone on this day of the festival when it wasn’t clear who was a visitor and who, a student.

It was too late to turn back since the co-ordinator who had registered his name was jostling him from the back. Too bad she was so pretty. She was the only girl to have even looked at him that day. So he took a deep breath and walked up to the raised podium and sat down with the other three participants.

It was two hours before he was able to escape from that room. Outside, his team was waiting, Anveeta hopping impatiently from foot to foot as she gave him an annoyed look.

“So how many points do we have so far?”

Each person spoke up their share while she added it to the tally. When the stars were done, she stopped listening and just starting counting off the remaining heads to allot 1 point each for participation.

“14…15…16…17…shit, we’re tying for third place. We’re never going to get there, dammit!”

“No, we’re at 24.”

Vineet ventured timidly

“Hmm?”

she paused in distraction and looked down at her tally again. He waited patiently while she recounted and turned back at him with a frown.

“The tally is correct.”

“No, you only counted 1 for me. I got 8.”

The rest of the group was listening now. Boldened a tad, Vineet raised his voice a notch but he was beaten by the captain’s low octave.

“That’s not possible. You’ve to cross all rounds and win to get that high.”

“Err, yes, I won.”

“What?”

She was looking dumbfounded now.

“Twist-a-tune.”

He heard the girl behind him whisper to her friend,

“What’s that?”

“It’s a music event. They give you two songs. You have to take the words of one and the tune of another and sing them without a break.”

Still dumbfounded. With a supreme act of bravado, Vineet opened his mouth and launched into an encore of his performance.

“Jaadoo teri nazar, khusbhoo tera badan”

It took everyone a few minutes before someone whispered,

“But that’s…that’s…Om Jai Jagadish Hare…the tune is that”

“Tu hain meri kiran”

finished Vineet.

He was rewarded not with applause but with a shriek from the captain herself.

“24 puts us in the lead!!!!”

“Excuse me”

said a voice at his elbow,

“You didn’t tell us your name.”

The pretty girl coordinator from the mini-auditorium was smiling back at him, pad in hand. Vineet grinned. Well, when she asked like that…

And that was the day Vineet went from being an extra participant to a winner.

                          

3 Comments

• At February 16, 2010, Manoj wrote:

  Ahh Vineet won it :-)

• At February 16, 2010, Roy wrote:

  and what of the pretty girl?

• At February 17, 2010, IdeaSmith wrote:

  @Manoj: :-) Exactly, the big wins of the little people.

  @Roy: Wait for the sequel? ;-)