Red oxide tiles alternating red and green. Teakwood doors, century old iron padlock, hand-made, crude and transports you in one touch. Sunlight streaming from Kerala windows, through India red curtains. Semi conscious, nostalgic about the present. And on the back of the teakwood, sits a cut out from a magazine. On Brando. Best Italian mafia don ever. Large forehead, hair combed back, horizontally striped Italian men’s cardigan. And the article talks about how Brando is black coffee. Smile.
And now, Indian psychedelia. If that is not enough to make you sit up, get this: peppered with rock meets underground, slick, jazz funk boogie, earthy rustic sexuality, firang waif prettiness and tall strapping undescribable. Pimps, bright satin shirts, huge rings, black lips, crassly emulated moghul architecture, noir, asbestos shutters, garbage, Indian decadence. Solitary, spoilt, rotten, spoilt rotten. Gorgeous. And all this worn simply.
The movie begins and sucks you into the real real world. The phone conversations you’ve had. Hopefully you’ve had them. The extravagantly flattering wastrel. Sans ego, fully delicious. Beige trousers, beret, 70s flower power on eyes, ankle socks and oh-those shoes! Cruising life chewing salted carbs.
Teach the nation how to wear denim. Unhealthy thin, wiry, lean, lazy. Indian trance to Underground. Psychedelic anger. Stumble, stop, move, stumble. Yet slick. Oh to walk through noir streets. Vodka carton, leaning saunter, unashamed. Crusted lips, stubble. Rock music.
Brilliant musical. Unabashedly Indian, touching UK underground with rusticity. I mean think about it. Think about music which actually uses slick underground baseline percussions with rustic Indian vocals, throws in a bit of the Beatles India Tour after effect, a little bit of a grown up Kurt Cobain vocal sensibility, with a Mojo Risin attitude. Brilliant! Our own foolishly brave, Indian, manic depressive, addictive, bipolar – in all the Indian grandeur possible. The music rises up pointedly and then lingers above in space, undulating and sinewing across and around. Topple, tumble, revolve, trip. And then guess what he does. He wham bams the Indian shaadi brass band in your face. And that too, because it is supposed to signify ‘his’ whole world crashing down and clankering apart. Stabbing you with the perfect ‘emosanal atyachar’. Ridiculously over done bollywood lyrics, modern swear words and qawaali bravado in tight elvis suits. I mean come on! Such musical incest and incredibly evolved humour directed at self cannot go unnoticed. It IS the Devdas, Indian Ishtyle. And this is the new psychedelia. Bright, garish, colourful and obsessed with the grand fall. It’s simply unfair. To get it so right.
Smearing turmeric on sleeve and chest. Active colour. Leave the stain. Smile. Dimple. Hurt.
Misunderstood love, misplaced arrogance. Smile. Poignant. Lose innocence fighting for it. Extravagant out there drag queen in waif. Bright. Red. Gold. Loud. Pornographised silence. Loud loneliness. How brilliant! Face paint to make him smile. I can’t write anymore.
Miss verbal slapstick. Post dyslexic phoenixicity. Mary Poppins meets african blues. Tom Jones Ain't no sunshine follows fatboyslim fucking in heaven follows Suddenly I See. Accent narcissism. Poetic gluttony. Gluttoned poetry. Over the top loving. Shattered glass. DU kajal but eating with the pinkie out. Colour drenched but experience parched. Life as stream of consciousness. Patchwork emotions. Earthy. Browning creases. Curled lips ending edgy. Baby feet all woman. Convented. Cow belt dancer. Muted colours, straight lines, a-line contrast to extravagance in mindspace. Insult to stereotype, cliche. Enviably enviable. Everyone's best friend. But my adopted mindfuckbuddy. Pocketsized, amplifier brained. Slurpy little pancake.
Friday, February 20, 2009
:)
I have the best playlist ever in the whole wide world. And I've been liking everything I've heard off late.
The entire world has collectively taken out the trash :D
JJ spent a lovely weekend with her 'bust friend' - the Mallige from Malleswaram. And as is wont to happen, conversation hovered around our eternal favourite - the kannada-ness of ourselves. So apart from repeating promises to each other about making movies and managing that mean HR firm we are going to start one day in New York, my good friend and I gave ourselves a topic to research. Do catch up with us using this.
Yes, so one day, sandalwood will meet MM and JJ in a joyous marriage of boredom and poor sense of humour. And we will make movies with titles as eloquent as this one kannada movie that was called: '?'. :D do you get how ridiculously delicious the nomenclature in kannada movies can be? They do have others, viz. 'A', 'Shh', '' , 'Z' (by a rival superstar to the actor of A) and of course 'Om'. And no, I'm not making these up.
:) Marvel at the eloquence and envy the millions of cups of filter coffee and idli swimming in sambhar we have shared. Harsh, wacky, shameless wannabe Bengloor Kannada is my adopted mother tongue. I hope she never leaves me.
Wykay childrens, yenauff naansense. Nav my hoffis demands that I do the works.
So where's the lean, brown, wiry laziness in my living space?
When did you get to be so big in my head? I will never know. Maybe the entire time when I was soaking myself with uncountable cups of sick sweet chai. Or when I pretended to be sweeter than I really am. Or while walking up that winding path along bright red and yellow bell pepper. Maybe it was the moment i read the words 'hazaar fucked'. Or when cooking tamarind and spice wafted through the empty walls.
I know it's pretty when your head is somewhere else. All the time. But when did i lose the ability to land softly back? I wish I could redo the auto ride from the airport.
When you ‘get’ something – say a piece of music, art or a movie dialogue, doesn’t it delight you? And then you make your next conversation interesting with snippets of what happened, what you saw and why it was pretty, etc etc. Happiness! It genuinely delights you that there is something so right and so perfect and that you saw it. Wow!
And so over time you know what you will like, what you won’t, read up on it, find out, discuss, share, grow, learn. And you discover more people, artists, dialogues, movies, visuals that are like the ones you love. And so the familiarity and happiness spreads. Suddenly you have woken, you are a conscious person – alive with ideas, thoughts, memories.
And then you start becoming conscious of what you like, even if you haven’t seen it already. Like when you are going to look at the Mona Lisa and know that you are supposed to love it. When you look at a village setting and know that it links you to a past that isn’t yours, frozen in time and was and always will be the way it is. Exists with and without you, but you happen to see it and you know you are supposed to love it, feel relaxed, non-time bound and soak in the space; when you go to watch a comedy; when you are at a music concert. Sure it blows your mind away and it isn’t something you’ve ever heard before and all that jazz. But you know that you are being overwhelmed and you know why it is overwhelming and exactly what about it is overwhelming because that is precisely what is supposed to overwhelm the others as well.
And so you are pandering to the moment of suddenly recognized delight. You are preparing yourself for when you will be taken by surprise. What fun it is going to be! And how??!! Or you assume the convenient and tried and tested posture. You meet a new person. Or an old friend. Or someone you are not supposed to acknowledge something with. Or a bunch you shared something with once. And everyone is talking about what they do now and how they’ve changed. And what surprised them and what didn’t. And everyone collectively knows what to avoid talking about; exactly when to congratulate and when to lend a shoulder.
A massive colossal all encompassing pre-prepared déjà vu-ing of future moments.
And you play the part you know you have to play, want to play and you are genuinely only being yourself. But you already know you will be nostalgic, overwhelmed, surprised, happy, fat, thin, old, bitchy, furtive, ridiculous. And you will make that sudden glance at some spot that meant something to you, or does now because it didn’t mean anything to you then. And you will go everywhere you are supposed to go because you are supposed to be nostalgic and reliving the moments and you will think and remember the right jokes, the right embarrassments, the ‘silly fights’ and you will be grown up, put the past behind and condense the good into that little bubble of happy memories. And you also know how that bubble looks inside your head – the personal getty images log that you have of all the pretty images that were always going to signify ‘past, nostalgia, beautiful, lovely, happy, sad’.
And so you move along in life conscious of being conscious of being conscious.
I’m sorry, were you living in the moment right now? Awwwh!
This one is on the Importance of Being Original. So if you are one of the Original sort of peoples, kindly browse away from this silly webpage. It contains drivel. Other Lesser Mortals may stay.
I don't understand why I am still pre-occupied by a ridiculous obsession with originality. I confess, I still harbour furtive desires of creating something original someday - something unthought of, or un-done. Despite the multiple self-let-downs at such attempts, I still keep thinking it will happen. Some ox-headed, moronic (oxymoronic, eh, miss prometheus? ), ugly, silly form of optimism if I may dare to call it that. I wonder why, though.
Sigh.
Monday, February 2, 2009
I usually start my days watching the news on TV cos I havent managed to catch hold of the newspaper boy yet. Today there was a rather disturbing piece about a 6 yr old kid being harassed by UP policemen for allegedly stealing 280 rupees. From whom? Wheres the money? No one knows. But this man... this 'policeman'... took it as an opportunity to pull the poor lil street child by her hair.. and off the ground!!!
I was so stumped to watch it. And news channels nowadays seem to enjoy endless repetitive loops of the same scene. And so I watched the same little girl, crying and desperately hanging on to her head to get this nasty man's paws off her hair. And I saw the same clip around 15 times. And I'm sure it is playing on TV even now. The entire time I sat there thinking that maybe the pain of watching it 15 times or 20 times or even 400 times might make me understand what the child was going through. But then again, who am I kidding? I'm living on my own in a comfortable little space. What do I know about what the child was going through? All I can do is sit and cry about it.
And the worst part was not that. It was the 10-15 odd men who were standing around. Merely watching. With a look of impotent importance, like they were watching a just punishment. And the policemen himself... had the ugly glare of perpetrating, and consuming at the same time, a violence that he believed was his work right. A look of smug contentment at torturing the helpless child, at enforcing his frustrated sense of nothing-ness on someone who at worst was only answering her crying tummy. This wasn't Barthes' idea of the consumption of wrestling. This was the ugly underbelly of an anger that stems from being an inconspicuous dot amongst a billion and a half, but armed with a baton, lashing out at anything and everything.
This isn't lack of education, or deprivation of any sort. It is just a depraved mind and a depraved gathering that watches unashamed, things that they themselves in their 30 tall years cannot handle. This is angered haplessness that turns outwards and is blinded by its own self obsession.
I once discussed mob mentality with a friend who had seen a mob in action. And she was telling me about how there is some force that transforms a crowd of people once they were setting out to destruct. It was inexplicable and frightening to think that perfectly normal average men would suddenly drop everything to join in a chance to randomly beat, molest and maim others. Its like a collective rising... of desperation, misplaced anger and an extremely misplaced sense of power. It is sad to see that it reduces even the most normal of people into savage behaviour and if not, then into silent spectators eagerly consuming the spectacle of violence.
Barthes says that wrestling is the one arena where people can consume anger and justice in its most unabashed and dramatic face. I wonder what Indian mob mentality says about us. Why are our senses of self so vulnerable and un-thoguht out? Or maybe I don't get it.
