SFGirl Says Farewell.
-
A free post—I’ve come to the difficult decision that it’s time to hang up
my Substack, so this is a heartfelt thank you and see you later.
1
Did you know A. R. Rahman still makes awesome music? I guess
you did but I accepted the fact only after his recent Unplugged appearance. And
the song to bowl me over the most was the one song whose lyrics made the least
sense to me. ‘Nenjukulle’ from a Mani Ratnam film called ‘Kadal’, made
awesome-r in this avatar. Rahman + Mani Ratnam always meant greatness. A given
fact.
The semester ending exam is coming closer and closer and the
inherent need to procrastinate becomes more and more powerful. Fuck studies,
you read Mary Wollstonecraft and Vivienne Jones the night before, skip through
Tagore’s view on nationalism and make up words supposedly said by Marx and you’re
okay. (NO EVIL BRAIN, YOU’RE NOT OKAY.)
Now that I’ve a kind of an okay camera and live in a very
photo-friendly city, I’ve been taking fewer and fewer photos. And I’ve been
getting drunk and stoned more often. Yay. I’ve also been writing less. This is
not what I’d envisioned about coming to Delhi to study Literature, apart from
the getting drunk and stoned part which I like a lot, thankyouverymuchbye.
I’ve been meeting too many awesome people since coming to
the capital and now I feel my anti-social self trying to make its quota of
presence felt. I’ve realised that people and places’re inherently connected. When
you leave a place behind and go habituate yourself in some other city, however grudgingly
at first, you also leave behind a certain amount of your past and future with
the people who made up the old place for you. Something silently changes, and you
can still be best of friends but the mechanism is no longer the same.
I’m unable to make myself finish even one of the many
stories I’d started while my classmates seem to write newer and better stuff
every week. And randomly, smoking up in the Ridge is not a safe option. Police will
come and ask you for baksheesh and go after making your already light student
scheme wallet lighter.
When I read whatever I’ve written thus far, I see how
all-over-the-place my thoughts’re, something I’ve noticed in my answers to Lit
questions too. I don’t wait to elaborate on anything and go on to the next
thing leaving my mind. A professor recently marked this as my ‘lack of
articulation’. I say it is ADD. Which brings me to Marx, because the professor
was then going through my answer to a Marx related question. You know how hard
his writings’re? The footnotes provided’re actually longer than the text itself.
And then there’re the laal selamis who name themselves ‘Marxist’ without even
reading anything about or by him other than his Wiki page entry.
You can get dis-oriented by drinking a lot of cough syrup
and this is something I’m experiencing right now. But this is different to the
kind of disorientation you feel after drinking alcohol or after smoking up. One
half you feel clearer about things than you’ve ever been and one half you feel
that life is one big budgeted Inception. And this round of highness was not
solicited. I got cough and a little cold and drank a little too much of the bittersweetsour
liquid. Not a good experience.
I guess I started this blog more as a memoir of things that happen
in my life so that years down the line, I could come back to these words and
know how much things’ve changed for me. Others’ve such amazing blogs that I
envy, but those are so impersonal, alike to being a painted actor acting for an
audience. One of the only personal-ish blogs that I liked reading and was
regularly updated was VK’s, but she has gone underground with her blog. Another that I liked is never updated these days.
I guess I write to remember. Too many days’ve gone by and I’ve
put down nothing here. I fear I’ll forget things, I who remember everything. So
for the future self, all this rambling is the product of a bottle of cough
syrup, the procrastination caused by the approaching exam and the selfish need
to remember memories. Today (or night) is the Choti Diwali, Parry’s birthday
and a day off college. The neighbourhood kids’re burning down the city and
after missing Durga Pujo back home, missing Kali Pujo is no big deal. Cheerio.
4
I might’ve been dead all this while. If one were to judge by
the frequency of my posts, then I ceased to exist long back.
I suppose moving to any new city’d include a bit of getting
depressed and that’s what the last post was all about. When I moved to Guwahati
for a year, I still was in depression, albeit for a really short time. Maybe
that was because I went there with 3 other friends from the pind and we pretty
much spent most of our time haunting the spaces around each other. Or maybe my
pumped out expectations made the move to Delhi a bit more depressing at the
starting. With the fading summer, the depression is going away too.
At the starting of this year, which seems a lifetime away
now, two very different free concerts happened; Anoushka Shankar and The Orphan
Land. The thing with free (good) concerts is exactly the same as finding money
inside pockets you’ve not washed for months. A month back, The YP Foundation
celebrated their 10th anniversary and The Raghu Dixit Project was
called in to provide it with the befitting finale. Supposedly Them Clones
performed the night before TRDP’s concert, which I missed because of my
ignorance of them playing there, thank you. If the pre-concert shared joint
with the room mate and the random autowallah and the architecture of the India
Habitat Centre were not things awesome enough, then the sudden meeting with Raghu
Dixit and the free plate of Buffalo Chicken Wings at the All-American Diner certainly
were. Yes, we were hungry and broke enough to accept the wings from the
casually-rich-laid-back-guy sitting on the stool beside us. If you’re reading
this, thank you random kind hearted, much deep pocketed bearded person. Also I
failed to recognise Shankar Tucker in the diner, which is a shame considering
the number of hours spent on his Youtube videos. About the diner, it was so sexy but so expensive that I won't be visiting it again.
Raghu Dixit is one class act and more definitely than not
one of the most iconic figures in the country’s Indie music scene. The way he
interacts with the audience, mashAllah. Also that was their first concert in
India after a string of concerts in the videsh, so we got to hear a lot of
songs from their second album the first in all of India. Yay, bitches.
Now something about The YP Foundation. They’re the country’s
biggest youth based Non-profit organisation and they’ve done hundreds of
projects throughout India. Started in 2002 after the Gujarat riots landed up
the then 17 year old founder in a state both helpless and confused, it has now
become one of the most active youth fronts in India. The people involved with
YP’re the more awesome persons of NCR and they sure know how to party hard
after working their asses off. Also, all of their meetings seem to happen in the
hep areas of the likes of Hauz Khas and Khan Market and yes, that surely earned
them many brownie points from me (yep, very shallow of me).
The bad, bad thing about working for YP is the military-like
time commitment. The volunteership seemed designed for people from or around
Delhi only. Which, honestly, is needed for the training for the roles of peer
mentors, but isn’t a 11 month commitment a bit too much when the volunteer base
is 99.99% college students, all of whom seem to be from Delhi University, and you’ve to figure in days off for exams, pre-exam preparations, post-exam hangovers, trips back home (for out-station students, hint: me)? Even though
I’d’ve loved to work with YP in general and their ‘Know Your Body, Know Your
Right’ campaign in particular, all my prior commitments and future engagements
(Merlin, I talk like a DU Angrezi teacher) would’ve made it impossible. (I hope
someone from YP googles ‘YP Foundation’ and reads this.)
Khan Market and Hauz Khas, the merry ground of all people
rich and happening in Delhi, ARE SO FUCKING AWESOME THAT I’VE TO TALK WITH CAPS
LOCK ON. While Hauz Khas seems more young and ‘rebellious’, with its dingy
lanes filled with designer boutiques and graphiti, Khan Market seems more
‘mature’ with all the re-re-refined elegance. While dining out in Haus Khaz is
still an attainable exercise (non-sponsored recco: Thadi), Khan Market has an
invisible ‘only for the Tatas and Birlas’ tag everywhere. Which, of course, did not stop me
from emptying my wallet over goodies at L‘Opera Patisserie. Macaroons, hello. Bread
pudding, hello. College Fund, bye.
The other place which seemed interesting was Majnu ka Tila,
which I somehow always twist to ‘Manju ka Lila’, which is where I had my first
bite of beef. I and my constant companion in crime in Delhi, Monsoon Chronicler, got over excited and ordered everything with beef in it. And butter
tea, for Majnu ka Tila is a proper Tibetan settlement, complete with the
beautiful prayer flags and Tibetan markets and board signs and everything. Let
it suffice with the sentence that I did not like it. As for the beef itself, it was
yummy but over rated. Mutton is a zillion times better. The record stands as
below:
Mutton>Beef>Chicken>Fish
The ‘illegal’ tribes of meat shall remain undisclosed.
The best thing about coming to Delhi University has been the
societies and all the frequent talks that keep on happening in the different
colleges. The Literary Society; Grubstreet, The Film Society, The Gender Forum;
Parivartan. These’re the ones I associate with as of yet. The Fresher Talent Show
and the short film we’re making for that keeps one busy the whole day long. The
Film Society’s focusing on Iranian cinema as of now and the Gender Forum is one
kick ass place. The Amazing Gautam-Bhan Man gave a great talk on Queer Politics in Ramjas,
which has turned out to be my second college in North Campus, what with my
French classes and Monsoon Chronicler studying there. D School and Law Fac have
become the best place to argue with Chronicler over the most mundane things with
a glass of iced tea in hand. And for most days, my breakfast and lunch becomes
the one 30 rupai wali Snickers. And the Daryaganj Sunday Book Bazaar the new
paradise (though not so in the first few minutes of getting drenched in the heavy rains and walking in road-meets-drain waters). Imagine buying gorgeous, vintage, hard bound editions of Hugo for Rs
30! Aiyo!
DU had its elections recently and man, it had all the anticipated rowdy North Campus political gundagardi. Smashed buses, bandhs, students being forced to vacate the college, booze for votes for hostellers (discriminating), disrupted classes, gang fights, girl getting molested. All of the drama. Even though 'Dil, Dosti Etc' was set in the DU political sphere, for me, the student politics in 'Gulaal' was a better representative.
Anyway, the University Delhi Ibsen Festival is going on right now and I got to see three plays out of the five; Lady From The Sea - The School of Art & Aesthetics, JNU, Jai Jawan Party - Ramjas, An Enemy of The People - St. Stephens. While I loved the first two, I found the Stephens play to be very disengaging. The lighting was fabulous, as were the video clips they used. And few of the actors, especially the guy who played the drunkard who appeared in between scenes every now and then, were very impressing too. But as a whole, the play fell flat.
The plays were so differently adapted that it's difficult to say, strictly on the basis of the plays, that they were by the same playwright. I guess it says both of the complexities of Ibsen's plays and the drama societies. While JNU's adaptation of 'Lady From The Sea', my favourite of the three, was aesthetically the most impressive, and the background score and the way that it was used rolled the dice in their favour early on. The costumes, the lighting, the props, the ending scene. While all of the actors got their nuances right, the one who played Ellida was the show stealer. The way she portrayed Ellida's anguish, her, apparently, loosing her mind, her dilemma was simply superb. The actress playing Bolette was another stunner. And the later use of Tamil and Meitei was rather interesting. This one was pure poetry.
'Jai Jawan Party', Ramjas' adaptation of 'The League of Youth', was as colloquial as 'Lady From The Sea' was 'classical'. The actors interchanged their roles at each new scene and the way to know which actor was playing which character was the characterisation and the costumes. The way the costumes were pinned up at the back of the stage and the actors changing clothes on stage with the lights dimmed down, was rather interesting. The play was great and the actors commendable. And after The Players, I see Shunya as the best DramSoc in DU.
Also, thank you Delhi for providing my eyes with the eye candies that you seemed to've in store in galore.
New obsession: Peekaboo from Karsh Kale's episode of Coke Studio at MTV season 2.
.jpg)
Anyway, the University Delhi Ibsen Festival is going on right now and I got to see three plays out of the five; Lady From The Sea - The School of Art & Aesthetics, JNU, Jai Jawan Party - Ramjas, An Enemy of The People - St. Stephens. While I loved the first two, I found the Stephens play to be very disengaging. The lighting was fabulous, as were the video clips they used. And few of the actors, especially the guy who played the drunkard who appeared in between scenes every now and then, were very impressing too. But as a whole, the play fell flat.
The plays were so differently adapted that it's difficult to say, strictly on the basis of the plays, that they were by the same playwright. I guess it says both of the complexities of Ibsen's plays and the drama societies. While JNU's adaptation of 'Lady From The Sea', my favourite of the three, was aesthetically the most impressive, and the background score and the way that it was used rolled the dice in their favour early on. The costumes, the lighting, the props, the ending scene. While all of the actors got their nuances right, the one who played Ellida was the show stealer. The way she portrayed Ellida's anguish, her, apparently, loosing her mind, her dilemma was simply superb. The actress playing Bolette was another stunner. And the later use of Tamil and Meitei was rather interesting. This one was pure poetry.
'Jai Jawan Party', Ramjas' adaptation of 'The League of Youth', was as colloquial as 'Lady From The Sea' was 'classical'. The actors interchanged their roles at each new scene and the way to know which actor was playing which character was the characterisation and the costumes. The way the costumes were pinned up at the back of the stage and the actors changing clothes on stage with the lights dimmed down, was rather interesting. The play was great and the actors commendable. And after The Players, I see Shunya as the best DramSoc in DU.
Also, thank you Delhi for providing my eyes with the eye candies that you seemed to've in store in galore.
New obsession: Peekaboo from Karsh Kale's episode of Coke Studio at MTV season 2.
.jpg)
1
Peace is in the teachers’ words, in the few textbooks and
the bright laptop screen. Peace is in the only two friends in this city of
millions. Peace is in closing your eyes and going to the land of your memories
and faces dear to you. The pervading feeling is of loneliness and the sense of
failing somewhere in making new companions. Your friends from back home tell
you that it has been only a couple of days, that settling in a place takes
time. But your head doesn’t listen to it. You see your seniors with their
friends and you think how much time will
it take for me to get friends like that here? You see your batchmates
tumbling along, probably feeling the same way, but it bears no balm to you. You
remember your old friends, the ones you made in the kindergarten, the ones you
made in your first school and the ones you made in the school that really
became your own. That only pushes you back into more depression. Texts, calls, mails,
chats. Minutes of that lost feeling and hours of groans. You’re told that the
first year is the hardest, that the fun begins the next year. But your brain is
already drowned under the bio-chemical responsible for lonesomeness.
Peace is relative.
Peace is retail therapy.
3
Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
The book starts with an ending; Eddie, the protagonist is going to die and the reader is taken along Eddie’s last hour as he goes on doing what he did for the last significant portion of his life, working maintenance in the Ruby Pier amusement park. It is also his 83rd birthday. Eddie is popular amongst the children, they like his non assuming self, while he evidently dislikes the ones who’d crossed the threshold of teenage, they gave him headaches. It is when a cart comes loose from a ride and is about to crash into a little girl, does Eddie’s end seem immediate. He tries pushing the girl away from the coming end and gets killed himself. And here ends the first chapter.
Eddie, as is evident from the title, goes to heaven and then meets five people, in five very different places, whose lives intersect with his in ways different from eachother. To reveal the persons and the different settings would be taking away of a lot of the joy of reading the book. Now, a lot of people've found happiness in annoying the heaven out of me by planning landmines of spoilers in the past (yes, I meant you. And you. And you.). But I'd be the better man and let it be. The book excels in what it seeks to do, which is tugging at the heart strings and making you cry. It is not of the tribe of Nickolas Sparks but something more bittersweet. Almost makes you wish that heaven were real, along with Santa Claus and angels and God... I digress.
What I loved the most was the part non-linear narrative. The independent accounts of his other, significant birthdays from the past and the memories awakened by the different people he meets in heaven. To sum up the book in two words, the book was 'heartfelt-ly pleasant'. It's a book which one could finish in one sitting, thanks to its size and content, but still would go back every now and then for some, let me say it, corny sweetness. My copy was bought from a second hand bookshop and it's previous owner left a lot of scribbling and underlining in the book. Now, I'm not the one for abuse to books, but it's always nice to find some humanising relics of previous owners in a thrifted book. The book's filled with thoughts inspired by the book. I don't get why someone'd sell a book so personal, but I'm happy he did (yes, I'm sure it was a he). The author employs no over dramatication, which'd've been very easy to fall into. The book tells you how everything is related and how all the different stories in the world're really just one long story. How one affects the other. I always wanted to read 'Tuesdays With Morrie', the writer's other book, and now I want to read it even more.
Maybe someday I'd find it in another secondhand bookshop with similar notes in the same handwriting and then, I can pretend to be in a Mitch Albom book myself.
***
I had this saved up for long and thought I'd publish this and get it over with. This is the official end of the 'Books of Exile' series. So many books were not reviewed and only my own lazy-assed-ness is to be blamed. The 'Books of Exile' series was also supposed to record my introduction to two of the greatest writers ever; Albert Camus and George Orwell. But A-L-A-S.
Expect random reviews from time to time though.
Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom
The book starts with an ending; Eddie, the protagonist is going to die and the reader is taken along Eddie’s last hour as he goes on doing what he did for the last significant portion of his life, working maintenance in the Ruby Pier amusement park. It is also his 83rd birthday. Eddie is popular amongst the children, they like his non assuming self, while he evidently dislikes the ones who’d crossed the threshold of teenage, they gave him headaches. It is when a cart comes loose from a ride and is about to crash into a little girl, does Eddie’s end seem immediate. He tries pushing the girl away from the coming end and gets killed himself. And here ends the first chapter.
Eddie, as is evident from the title, goes to heaven and then meets five people, in five very different places, whose lives intersect with his in ways different from eachother. To reveal the persons and the different settings would be taking away of a lot of the joy of reading the book. Now, a lot of people've found happiness in annoying the heaven out of me by planning landmines of spoilers in the past (yes, I meant you. And you. And you.). But I'd be the better man and let it be. The book excels in what it seeks to do, which is tugging at the heart strings and making you cry. It is not of the tribe of Nickolas Sparks but something more bittersweet. Almost makes you wish that heaven were real, along with Santa Claus and angels and God... I digress.
What I loved the most was the part non-linear narrative. The independent accounts of his other, significant birthdays from the past and the memories awakened by the different people he meets in heaven. To sum up the book in two words, the book was 'heartfelt-ly pleasant'. It's a book which one could finish in one sitting, thanks to its size and content, but still would go back every now and then for some, let me say it, corny sweetness. My copy was bought from a second hand bookshop and it's previous owner left a lot of scribbling and underlining in the book. Now, I'm not the one for abuse to books, but it's always nice to find some humanising relics of previous owners in a thrifted book. The book's filled with thoughts inspired by the book. I don't get why someone'd sell a book so personal, but I'm happy he did (yes, I'm sure it was a he). The author employs no over dramatication, which'd've been very easy to fall into. The book tells you how everything is related and how all the different stories in the world're really just one long story. How one affects the other. I always wanted to read 'Tuesdays With Morrie', the writer's other book, and now I want to read it even more.
Maybe someday I'd find it in another secondhand bookshop with similar notes in the same handwriting and then, I can pretend to be in a Mitch Albom book myself.
***
I had this saved up for long and thought I'd publish this and get it over with. This is the official end of the 'Books of Exile' series. So many books were not reviewed and only my own lazy-assed-ness is to be blamed. The 'Books of Exile' series was also supposed to record my introduction to two of the greatest writers ever; Albert Camus and George Orwell. But A-L-A-S.
Expect random reviews from time to time though.
4
Silchar:
An early morning text from a fuckingawesomebitch. I
qualified the Delhi University entrance test for B.A. English Honours. Yay.
“Respected parents, as much as
I love Architecture, I want to do this instead.”
Drama.
Drama.
Tickets booked for New
Delhi.
Bye bye, pleasant summer
sky.
New Delhi:
The sun burns patterns onto my skin.
Midnight strikes. First cut off. Delhi College of Arts and
Commerce, otherwise known as the college with the depressing, ugly buildings.
And inefficient, rude office staff.
Traveling from one table to another with more papers, forms,
certificates and photocopies of those certificates than two mortal hands can
carry. Frustrated people. Slowly moving fans. After going around for two days for a simple
admission procedure: Aaj aur nahin, kal aye. A girl tears off her forms in
teary anger. Somewhere a parent threatens to go to his old friend, the
principal – or was it the chairperson?
Yours truly is now a DCAC student.
Three days, the second cutoff and a few more annoying hours
at DCAC later, yours truly is a student at Kirori Mal College.
*insert happy theme music*
Red Fort. Jama Masjid. Humayun Tomb. Dargah Nizammudin Auliya. Qutub Minar.
No rain here. People dying because of floods back in Assam.
Haridwar:
4 am wakeup call. Sleepwalk to the car. Short
weekend-in-the-middle-of-the-week weekend. Plug in the earphone. Fiona Apple.
Sleep. Wake up. Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh. Breakfast at fancy resort. Shekar
Kapur’s The Sadhu. Sleep again. Wake up. Pine trees and milder weather. UK.
Uttarakhand, not United Kingdom. Kilometres long traffic jam. Haridwar. Humanity at its
worst. Humanity at its best. Bhajans set to the tunes of item numbers. Bells
ringing. “Uttarakhand police aapko Devbhoomi mein swagat karti hain.” Gushing
Ganga. Dirty Ganga. People drinking Ganga, bathing in Ganga, washing in Ganga.
Guru poornima. Crowd on crowd. Lodge room opening out to terrace looming over
the ghat. Monkeys on the roof. Monkeys on the terrace. Monkeys on the light
posts. Monkeys on the temple shires, above the gods. Evening aarti.
Synchronised fireworks. An reddish tinge over the scene. Devotees crying and chanting.
This unbelieving heart quivers. Reason returns in a while. Night falls. Tiny
specks of blessed fire floating over the river. Jai Ganga Maiya. Jai Bhole
Nath. Jai – watch where you’re stepping. Beads and shawls. ‘Off season rebate,
madam!”. Studying the ghat from the terrace under the pale shadow of the full moon. Midnight walkers of the ghat. Naked bodies on show. Slowly sleep
comes.
Rishkesh:
It’s raining in Haridwar as we leave it for its cleaner,
less famous sibling, Rishikesh. A giant Shiva bids us farewell. Never see you
again. Porcupine Tree on the earbuds. Sleeps comes again. “Bhaiya, aa gaye.”
It’s raining hard. A crowded parking lot. 10 rupees worth plastic, green
raincoats. With hoods. A guide from Calcutta. We get mistaken as Calcuttans.Temples built where the Pandavas
had prayed. A suspended bridge named after the flawed god-king of Ayodhya. Temples
built for the ficklest of reasons. A government approved museum cum jewellery
shop. White stones from the icy mountains sparking fire. A ek mukhi rudraksh. "Not for sale, saar, only watching." Sriyantra to maintain the vastu of the ghar, for the surakhsha of the parivar
and sukh shanti of all. A navratna necklace. “Action with phasion, madam!”
Rains? Where's the rain? Raincoats gifted to the driver. Bye bye, Rishikesh. The giant
Shiva passes again. As does the Ganga, muddy with soil washed from the
mountains. Lunch at the yoga baba’s humble 5 star medical cum yoga cum
whateverelse centre. Shanti shanti shanti hi. Bye Uttarakhand. Bye Uttar
Pradesh. Oh hello again, burning Delhi.
0
I'm in a mood to not let all the unpublished stuff go to waste, so I'm publishing this, even though I'd written this much time back.
I see that I've completely ignored my blog. Despite the promises made to myself of not screwing up the blog the second time round, I still seem to do the very same thing. Commitment phobia much? Anyway, a lot happened in these (many) few days. A few illusions and dreams broke. And broke with a lot of noise. But let's not dwell on the melodramatically sad stuff. I finally visited the country capital and it was just as I thought and better. Well, a lot of bling under the karakti sun lead to paining eyes but the pretty, pretty, pretty monuments undid it all. Witnessed no black SUV pulling in girls. Witnessed a LOT of beggars leaving their palm prints, the ones who still had their hands, on the car window glasses. And buildings from possibly all the time periods. Okay, not all, but most. A swanky airport. And the skin burning Delhi sun. A fort, three memorials to people long dead, a colonial gate and city children reigning over a fountain the masters left behind, the blocks of national governance, two towers, Two bazaars from different eras. A step well that was even older (seven freaking hundred years!).
I see that I've completely ignored my blog. Despite the promises made to myself of not screwing up the blog the second time round, I still seem to do the very same thing. Commitment phobia much? Anyway, a lot happened in these (many) few days. A few illusions and dreams broke. And broke with a lot of noise. But let's not dwell on the melodramatically sad stuff. I finally visited the country capital and it was just as I thought and better. Well, a lot of bling under the karakti sun lead to paining eyes but the pretty, pretty, pretty monuments undid it all. Witnessed no black SUV pulling in girls. Witnessed a LOT of beggars leaving their palm prints, the ones who still had their hands, on the car window glasses. And buildings from possibly all the time periods. Okay, not all, but most. A swanky airport. And the skin burning Delhi sun. A fort, three memorials to people long dead, a colonial gate and city children reigning over a fountain the masters left behind, the blocks of national governance, two towers, Two bazaars from different eras. A step well that was even older (seven freaking hundred years!).
UPDATE: Qualified for DU!
