Chocolates can be psychic

What do you do when a chocolate wrapper tells you You need to get your feet massaged or Look at yourself in the mirror and smile! I don’t know how anyone else would react to that but I am convinced they can see and are psychic, and also mum’s little prank on me (this is what happens when you have a mom who can look through and has a sense of humour to make matters worse).
It’s perhaps those times when every thing seems like it has underlying signals, books, music, billboards, places, conversations, smell…..even chocolate. (And then they call me paranoid!) For now its been four days of Zara’s, chocolates, work, a purple obsession and Dev D uninterrupted!

I watch

I've been watching films lately, watching everything around me actually, with an eye that perhaps never existed before. Everything feels different when you don't evade the many layers it might have and create an illusion entirely your own, finding in it a meaning that is so specific to your life and yet seems like it is out there in the open put together perfectly by someone who you don't and may not have any relation to. Its beautiful to let something symbolic remain symbolic and not a means of leading you on to incidents/ parts in your life. Its true nothing really evokes emotion strong enough unless related to something directly affecting your being/ evolving at some stage in life.
The point here being sometimes it helps to just watch, be that silent spectator, without a set of preconcieved notions or expectations. It's perhaps this they meant in all those lessons of objectivity towards being the oh-so- perfect journalist.
In about two days I have watched four absolutely diverse Indian films that take you through a plethora of communities, customs, religious associations and circumstancial concerns.
From Kaya Taran, a film on a Sikh-Catholic conversion during the 84 anti-Sikh riots to a documentary Sole Voice, Soul Voice about the first Rajasthani Manganaik female performer all the way to a documentary about Gulmohar Avenue, a Muslim dominated residential locality commonly called mini-Pakistan in Delhi and a feature Naseem set in the times of the demolition of Babri Masjid. The diversity of the films in itself left me warped and gazing into space for long hours merely trying to recollect all that I saw. There were times when I felt a connection, a deep relation to the movements on the screen which disappeared in a short span the moment my attention shifted to other details that made the words disappear to sound nothing close to understandable, almost inaudible. My mind seemed to be playing tricks with images appearing in flashes to never appear again, and voices, a babble of sorts. The little things I noticed made me laugh to myself, almost giggle loud enough to let the person in the next seat spring up in surprise. Devoid of thought attached to them films are a string of disconnected images that cloud your vision, with subtitles doing the trick with the speed making it feel like one optical illusion after the other.
More often than not I've drawn meaning out of things I have watched, tried to at least, making the visual display fade into nothingness with hours of discussing concepts and forgoing almost everything in filmmaking that comes in the steps to follow.
It's a rare feeling, a rarer chance of it staying, for now everything I watch is giving me a high and beckoning me into a new dimension. I can't help but enter the theatres with child-like excitement and douse myself in cups of coffee as I stare at the screen in complete rapture.

Bangalore!

Its a lil surprising how drunk and dumb a city can get, you seem to find humour in the smallest things everywhere you go, anorexic women, guys wid gelled hair and low-waist jeans who look exactly like each other. Makes you wonder if there is anything people here do apart from stepping out in fancy clothes and gracing the draught counterpart of what we call beer, not that Chennai gives you anything worth classifying as actual beer.
The past few days have been a weird mix of random things, a forced vacation or rather the inability to keep up to what I have taken up as a job brought me here at a mere half hour notice.
- Shopping at the Leela Palace, a wannabe palace like just like most of the city is, satisfied with a lil glimpse of what it could/ should have been
- Three girls in a liquor shop at the Leela (no I refuse to call it a friggin palace), bad bad idea. Sula was the only thing we could settle for without risking a bad liquor day. And which one came more out of a recall of a gift I'd rather not remember.
- Purple Haze, and the singing out loud. Chasing Cars and Caesar!....aimless talks....endless beer...kicks out of an old couple getting cozy adjacent to our table.
- Aimless drive to the faaaar away airport. The aimless search for a tea stall in the middle of the night...
- Roof top curd rice
- Ice Spice and the dumb boundaries, the waiters who felt shifting a few inches would make them fall right in the legality of the smoking ban. Honestly save the few inches I salute you for obeying the law.
- Wine at the shady Scottish bar, the friendly and not-so-efficient bar tender. Golconda wine with the unusual sweetness.
- Sula on the balcony and the silence.
- The tears and the hugs.
Bangalore, subtle and loud in its own way, dumb in another. The city doesnt really make you fall in love with it or anything about yourself but the strangeness of the streets is a comfort I haven't felt in a long long time. Its soothing and scary at the same time. Walking on the streets is comforting, crossing roads isn't. No one seems to look ahead while walking the roads, looking around seems more in vogue. Metaphorical as it may sound, looking behind is worse perhaps.

History starts now

Anonymity shields...laugh at yourself...cry at crossroads...and walk out feeling you are one amongst many...you are not alone...
Trying to gather and restore pieces of myself....rather whatever is left of me...
Hooked to 'World' by Five For Fighting... "Careful what you wish for, History starts now"

This takes the cake

This had to be it I realised while I was driving around not paying so much attention to the ever-blaring song-repeating radio station in my car. When a famous city doc (my job teaches me witholding names for fear of running/bumping into them and have things fired straight back at me) who was being interviewed went into mode senti as her husband called. Also a doc by profession he was asked to drop a message for his wife, and he ever so sweetly went....she is a good wife, mother...blah...blah. The smart RJ cut him short saying I can see her blush here to which the dude reacted saying, "Am I on loudspeaker?" There was utter silence untill the RJ realised what had hit him and went, "You are on air sir". Silence again until the dude said, "So she can hear me?" The conversation was obviously interrupted by a track that had been played a few minutes ago. The loudspeaker bit indeed took me by storm and I laughed for quite a while until I was back home. It beats me, How stupid is too stupid?... And how is the extent of it always proportional to the number of people witnessing/ listening to it?

Notes

Today's not-so-happening events :P

- I woke up claiming it was 10...to discover it was 2 in the pm :0

- I sat on a flight of stairs listening to SPB crooning away 'Dil Diwaana' with orange juice and red balloons for company.

- I threatened to take a cop to the police station, and laughed like a maniac.

- I sipped coffee alone at Amethyst...only to run into someone about four times.

- I watched Slumdog, finally, and it reinstated my belief in gujju potential.

- I sang crazy old hindi songs aloud on Chennai streets...

All this and more...I am 21 now...and this once I feel older.

Ma knows best

Ma very cutely put it, "Your English muscles begin to ache" when I tried telling her I wanted to be home again. It may not make much sense but it couldn't get more apt. Ma you know it all. I concur.