Five things

the hearts of sunflowers

being caught fishfaced at a moment like this

what would ordinarily be a creepy pigeon, but I can't hear it over the falling rain

banana oatmeal pancakes with honey and watermelon

drama outside my window

It's been a while since I sat up for dawn. Feels good. This hollow socketed feeling is worth it for the chilliness, ditto birdcalls, not to mention the overall pinkness of things. In an ideal world I'd be heading out for breakfast now. In this world I'm making myself maggi. I'm supposed to be writing something else somewhere else but fuck that, it's dawn.

It might look like a recent tendency but you can always depend upon me to tell the truth. The only reason I wouldn't is if I were feeling like Mario, running under a blazing blue sky with angry owls everywhere and nothing but red brick to run into and jump off. It needs some postponement of priorities because not having to take this shit is obviously more important than standing and wondering what the hell is going on. And with that moustache too. Insaane. Like setting yourself down in the midst of unknown people just so you can take a stock of things in general. So if I'm running and running and running and running and running and running and running and running till I beat my own tiredness away and suddenly I'm not anymore, you know how it is. Like Mario. I'm exactly the kind of person who wants to do a Thoreau but can't, I'll hover on the edge of the wild because I'm too greedy to give up on hearing human voices, so much easier to just maintain a passing from one to another because it's all permeable isn't it, everything is. Look at the universe. There and back again, to and fro and on and on. Not really an inconvenient thing, now that I think about it, just a type of constancy. Which is why my tall tales are also consistent ones. I mean them, no kidding.

Unearthed among markeddowns at bookfair:

Way in, then way out. I like doing this for fun sometimes, reduce saturation to zero. Then new things pop out, clothes look interesting.

All of these photographs look terrible in colour.

The other thing I do for fun is add watermarks to photos and feel important.

My two favourite cassettes to play all day when I was a kid were Teesri Manzil and Caravan; I knew the lyrics to every song and had watched the movies at least twice, and Caravan in particular was the kind of world I always wanted to live in. Happy bubble orange yellow sequinned clothes, you know, and feathers in your hair and general mayhem rounded off with campfires and dancing, that kind of world.

So I had this starved visual wackiness mood going all evening and YouTubed all my favourite seventies Bollywood songs. I can tell some things are wrong (and even depraved, sirs) because I've been exposed to feminism and colour palettes and shit, but so much more is awesome.

- Like Rajesh Khanna growling. Growling.

- Or people dancing with featherdusters. Also this song with the line sunta hai re babua, tu hi mera nahua.

- Or harem pants plus roller skates. How farsighted is that.

- Helennn. (Again Caravan, but seriously, this movie's the shit.)

- (Inexplicable)

- And spiky disco balls.

- Plus two from the sixties. Giant paintbrushes and flamenco dancers versus that thing in Asha Parekh's hair.


These are the ones I remember. Of course bethlovesbollywood has a much crazier archive, I just wanted these at hand for later, later as in hah, you'll never know when I've been watching these later.

I wasn't born to be contrary but
for a part two to happen things cannot cave in

they must not, because, well, look at ants
what we do (which isn't much, mind) either
lives on or sinks
into the soil

soil is porous
so is a sponge
and blotting paper and the atmosphere
and, I'd like to believe, the universe, although I don't
know enough physics
to verify that

=)

lol.

labouro'love.

Had a perfect Pinch Me kind of day. Like in the song. On an evening such as this, it's hard to tell if I exist. Like that. Because it rained the sky went mellow and everything looked like it had a vintage filter added onto high contrast, it's tragic this is the only analogy I can come up with but it will have to do. Made one think, all the strange hazy yellowness. Mostly of words, because after all the vintageness the evening gave way to something best defined by darkling; I was reminded of watching an electric tower from my old terrace, on evenings like this I'd be up there dragging bricks around on the floor making rusty floor plans and maps and things. Then I went home and overdosed on nostalgia. There was crackly old music on, then my shuffle played Guilty and there was more crackling and this overwhelming feeling of being weighed down by things, a heavy head and all the oldness of having lived during times that had things like film cameras and water coolers and cassettes. I miss cassettes, I miss winding and unwinding them. Then I decided to clean a little and came upon this book I looked at a lot as a kid, this photography catalogue for some competition themed "What Is Knowledge?", and as sanctimonious as the title sounds, it has some of my favourite photographs ever, grainy nineties images of people with shiny skin and sun spots on landscapes and slight shakiness towards the edges, I miss the shakiness too.

At dinnertime my mum was watching Dil Toh Pagal Hai on some channel, it reminded me of the time I was freezing my ass off at Kedarnath, '97 or '98, and was asked to wipe some spilt tea on the bed with a newspaper, but I refused to because it had a picture from the movie in it. Not only did I refuse, I jumped up and down saying "AAMAR SHAH RUKH AAMAR SHAH RUKH". It's profusely embarrassing now that I've rewatched bits of the movie but not so much, all things go.

Yeah, so all sorts of funny things are happening all around, but a good kind of funny, a steady comforting kind of funny. Like in the song, I could leave but I'll just stay. Aami ekta joyant. I'll topple over and chuckle myself silly any second.

Words I like:

peril

hodgepodge

charlatan

pristine

springbok

propinquity

blister

puddle

lepidopterist

grape

ragtime

poplin

Third cold of the season. At a time when I can safely apply the word stertorous to every action I do I find myself wanting to be a jazz singer. I want to have a vaguely white flower in my hair, with an old-fashioned dress black pumps net over my eyes red lipstick the whole jingbang, and I want to be on a podium and I want to have a voice that goes to everyone's head. Just like the wine. Just like the piano. I'm really very emo sometimes, only now I'm being stertorously emo. While I was stertorously reading the paper today I discovered that Monaco is now reclaiming land from the sea. Hah. HAH. Now they need land. No one will know what I'm talking about but as I have already mentioned, नो वन रीड्स दिस ब्लॉग।

Hello, hello, it's been a good winter, it's finally cold. I nearly died of hypothermia yesterday because nothing I wore would stop the bloody stertorousness, plus I forgot to wear socks. All this week the sudden cold's been getting me thinking about trying to be environment friendly the coming year, like conserve water conserve paper conserve trees stop global warming types. Only I bet if I made a list of all that I'd have to do it would entail living like... I don't know what, it's horrific that I'll have to be more hermitlike, nope, not happening.

But Monaco got a newspaper mention.

I have resolved not to write my masterpiece after all. I'd much rather write it during some joyless period in my life and then die before I can see how it performs vis a vis the world. That seems like a good idea.

One day to getting out. I will scream if I see anyone use 'arbitrary blackness gallops in' for a gtalk status this one day. I will also scream if I do not get the things I've been meaning to get done, done. When done is done I shall sleep on plane and then scream if I hear anyone say "Wazzaaaaa". Then I shall be polite intermittently (or intermittently polite, whichever works) and eat a lot of icecream, following which I shall scream if people do not comply with every unreasonable demand I make, including trying to sneak into Dharawi. I will also scream if they comply, doesn't hurt. I will sneer at people sleeping late and worry about where to eat next. And in case I forgot to mention, I will scream at the mention of shopping.

Afterclap

Chopta was the first time I almost scared myself to death. There was this guy at the chulha who told us we'd get roti and lauki ki sabzi, nothing else, he also told us that we'd better get back to our room quickly because sometimes panthers went by the village at night. I was nine and secretly neurotic already, and a panther was a PANTHER! but the folks stepped out anyway. Within half a minute of walking down the road we were in a kind of darkness you don't see anywhere else, pure pitch without glimmerings of any other shade. And since you don't need a panther if you're inside it already, my usual attack of silent hyperventilation started. Then I looked up at the peak of it all, and there seemed to be more light up in the sky than down here, more stars than I had ever seen in my life, spread out till as far as I could follow. All right this sounds really sappy now, like a parable or something. But it was huge then, like Complan powder on a granite slab, like spray-painting with toothbrushes (white paint, black chart paper) during craft classes. Charts of the solar system, encyclopedias with colour illustrations, science city, nothing compares. We sat down for a bit in the middle of the road at great peril to our bottoms and huffed out mouthfuls of vapour, and all I wanted was to get back to a lit room because as far as I was concerned a panther was following us back all the way from the village.

It's always been my favourite part of being in the hills ever since, looking up at a clear night sky on a dark road and becoming Microbe Number One. And a part of my refusal to learn to tell constellations apart, I think, is this need to not be able to discern, to not, for once, try and find a pattern to everything. It's not that it helps you survive a walk at night, looking up. It just distracts in a way I can't explain, almost subliminal, I don't even completely know what that word means. But there it is.

It's a matter of life and death being on the front right side of an auto; today I got stuck with an extremely concerned dadu who had managed to notice the same thing as me, Poncha mama's jilipis have this strange crust on them in the evening, coagulated ghee and the sadness of no one finding them desirable enough to eat. It's freaky that a dadu should notice the same thing as me, was Sherlock Holmes a dadu? Hercule Poirot undoubtably was, so was Perry Mason I guess. It's still strange that my eyes are eighty years old. No wait, I also noticed that the bhelpuri wala outside gate no.4 is different. This is unacceptable. Also, the rubbish below the comp. lit ledge has decreased, this is really a very sad thing to be writing about. But one's gotta do something. Stick a butterfly pin in my eye, I will never find a reason to die.

My grandma's watching Idea Star Singer or something on Asianet. I remember we visited Kerala when the finals of the show were on in 2008. We didn't get our food at a restaurant for nearly an hour because everyone, the proprietor the waitors the cooks even, all of them gathered around a little tv in the dining area and bickered about who the winner would be. It's creepy because the judges catch every wrong tone you sing and then show you how it should be done. Chicken 65 eventually arrived and the guy in charge still went on about why his favourite wouldn't win. It's nice that there's still passion around, but really?

Klimt :)