one of those days

So, you have one of those days, in a strange city, when you've just had about enough of hotel food and hotel beds,

when the car you hired, comes in late, then has to go fill diesel, then it's a/c conks off, then the driver decides to change it for an ambassador, which is very romantic, but very slow, and creaks a lot, and it's raining outside, and the driver's shoes are not smelling that good,

and you have to run out in the rain to be on time for a meeting with a corporate honcho, and you walk into his office with your pants wet, and he is immaculate with a tie, and has a pretty girl sitting with him taking notes, and he offers you tomato soup, and talks of everything else but business, and you are meant to smile politely and be impressed,

and then, you go to a meeting at a government office, which is situated in three different blocks of the same building, and in the absence of any signboards, and the presence of receptionists, who are busy gossiping and giggling on the phone, you end up walking up all three office blocks, before you reach the right one,

which should have been new, but looks like government offices have done for the last sixty years, and already the computers are swamped by piles and piles of paper, and the peon offers you some water, which you take thoughtlessly then worry about it, and after an hour or so, the clerk says it's better to come another day, because saheb's conference will go on for some more time, and another clerk suggests that you go to another office, and meet someone else, who is at the other end of the town.

Finally, you decide to go to the airport an hour before you are scheduled to be there, and you still get caught in traffic, but you doze off, exhausted, and the driver wakes you up to ask you if you are going to give him more money than you had agreed on, and you get caught in an argument,

and then you go into the airport, and it's freezing, and as usual your clothes are not right, and hungry, you eat something which is cold and doesn't agree with you, and you just want to sleep, but can't

and the plane too which you get into after two hours is cold, and you can't sleep and your stomach doesn't feel that good, and it's a turbulent flight, and it needs to circle for 45 minutes before it can land,

and then you sit down in a rickshaw, and the guy drops the meter, and does not haggle for money, and drops you safely home, even though it's the middle of the night, and you are alone, and the air is warm, and smelly as Mumbai always is, and you remember for a few minutes that you do love the city, and you are home, even when you will be back to cursing it tomorrow.

Kinkies

Yesterday, S said that the fact he drinks 8 to 10 litres of water everyday, much to his doctor's horror, is his kink. Whenever he is at a loss for something to do or say, he drinks water.

P began to relate the kinkiness of a friend who had a fixed routine every time she left the house. First she switched the gas cylinder off, then lovingly traced the gas pipe's path to make doubly sure, then switched ON the fan for 'Bhagwanji', and then after locking up the house, banged the door and pulled the lock several times.

S wondered if 'Bhagwanji' would not be happier with the AC on. All of us began to conjecture, couldn't 'Bhagwanji' switch on the fan Himself if He wanted to do it, wouldn't He like to regulate the AC temperature Himself, wouldn't there be times when He felt cold, and wanted the damn AC or fan off?

Anyway, set me thinking about what my kinkiness was. Could be my endless making of lists - task lists, accounts lists, reminders lists, movies lists, books lists, lists about what happened, lists about the people I met, lists about the people I did not meet, lists about lists.

Of course I don't remember a word of what I've written in them, and that makes me all the more eager to come up with categories of lists I should make, so that I don't forget anything. Or find it transformed in my imagination into something else. Which is fine by me, but sometimes not fine at all by Dhanno and Teja whose version of things is more rooted in reality.

monsoon fare

One of the important tasks I have each morning is to check out the Mumbai Times for the films we could possibly see that day. If at all we have to inveigle Teja into taking us to the mall which is not the nearest to us, but the one that Dhanno and I will deign to go to, because of its rating in terms of smell, sound, light, crowd, shops, food places, then we have to make sure there is a Hollywood offering.

Yesterday, when the Rain Goddess stopped dancing the tandav, and was only humming to herself for a bit, I found not one but two films we could see one after the other. If Teja sees the possibility of saving a car trip, he can be tempted to make one.

'Ocean's 13' is the perfect monsoon film. Crisp, hot, and with the tasty zing that food with no nutrition and lots of empty calories has. And if you have George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon to look at, it's hot green chutney thrown in for good measure. The plot is laid out right from the beginning, you are told at each step what the con is, and how it is going to be executed, so you can concentrate on just having fun, and not wasting energy trying to figure out the details. What I also liked are the inane conversations between George Clooney and Brad Pitt, which have nothing at all to do with the plot. I believe strongly in inane conversations in a film, though they are actually very difficult to put into the narrative.

Then, Dhanno and I had a frenzied bout of shopping for "costemics" (Teja's word), in the break, before we went off for a round of hardcore action in 'Die Hard 4.0'. Couldn't help but think of Sunny Deol, as Bruce Willis refused to be stopped by fighter planes, collapsing bridges, gas explosions in a power plant, and all kinds of other mayhem, in his mission to save America.

Dhanno likes reading the girlie books by Meg Cabot, Jacqueline Wilson, Georgia Byng. Why deny it, I do, too. The other day, we had a big row because I read a new book before she did. What's the big deal, I thought, a book is a book, the older the better. I like old books, library books, stolen books, stinky-smelly musty books, falling-apart books, long-forgotten books, books that are liable to give me thousands of germs. But to Dhanno, the book was a shiny, new thing which I had somehow spoilt.

To get her back on me, she said, "You won't even remember the story in a week's time". I said, "Well, I can tell it to you now." She screeched. She said, "Tell me the story of the book you read last week - Avalon High". I said, "It's about a ... school." She rolled her eyes and said, "Tell me something that is not so obvious." I rolled my eyes and made funny faces to get out of a sticky situation, but she was not letting me go.

"Ok, tell me about that book you liked so much - Double Act". "It's about twins", I said facetiously. "Oh yeah, and what about that book - Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism". "Oh, I remember that, it's about this girl, Molly who knows hypnotism, and becomes a model, and very rich, and there are all these other kids who are imprisoned, and she rescues them, and they all run away." She said, "NO ONE runs away in the book."

"Fine, so I confess I am a book-binge-r, and hardly ever remember what I've read. That's why I think it's really good you read so little, but read it well, and remember it," I said, to make peace.

At the FTII hostel, with Dhanno, a little infant, curled up beside me in bed, I'd be reading, lost somewhere, and then suddenly she would kick the book, and I'd look at her, and she'd look back with an angry scowl. No wonder it took her years to bother with reading a book, unless she was told to.

When Banno And Teja met O, the French journalist

It's only when O, her eyes half-shut asked, "So is there anything at all that you like about Indian cinema?", did I realize that Teja and I had been ranting about what one of our seniors, KS, from the Film Institute calls the "Bandra school of film-making".

I immediately said, "Oh but, I grew up on Hindi films, and I still need my weekly fix of them." To cover my embarrassment I asked her, "And you, what do you think about it all?" She said, "Well, I see everything I can, and I like it all, from 'Devdas' to 'Mr. and Mrs. Iyer' to 'Kabhi Alvida na Kehna'. And I cannot be objective about it, even if I know what's good and bad, because it's all so different to me, so exotic. In fact, it's French cinema that I am fed up of."

I guess that's true of us as well. I'm ready to accept almost any kind of narrative form, pace, technical finesse, in a foreign film, but am much more critical when it comes to Indian films. Even when she asked, "Which are the films that have influenced you the most?", the names that come most easily to mind are the films of foreign directors, Fellini, Ozu, Truffaut, Zhang Yimou, etc, etc. But I suspect that is only a pat answer.

In truth, I am more influenced by the films that I've seen the most, and those that I do love, from Guru Dutt, V Shantaram, Bimal Roy,K Asif, Manmohan Desai, even at times David Dhawan. I like the films made by Sunil Dutt, Manoj Kumar, Chetan Anand, Vijay Anand, Nassir Husain, Mehmood, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Shakti Samanta, BR Chopra. I don't instantly like Karan Johar's work, but I've watched 'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai' and 'Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gam' several times on TV, and I do love watching his TV show. The same goes for Sanjay Bhansali's 'Devdas' and 'Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam', even though I hate his retrogressive chauvinism. I liked Farhan Akhtar's 'Dil Chahta Hai' and his 'Don' with all it's glaring mistakes, more than the original one.

I love the old Muslim socials like 'Mere Mehboob', the mad hatter films like 'Padosan', 'Tere Ghar ke Saamne' and 'Chupke Chupke', and even some of the early Jeetendra films like 'Farz'.

And I am not even talking about Ray and Ghatak and some of Mrinal Sen, and Mani Kaul, and even some of the old Marathi black and white films I used to watch on Saturday evening Doordarshan, including some old Dada Kondke films.

This list-making could go on for another year, by which time I'll have seen many more films. Makes me wonder how much of my life I have actually spent watching films, as compared to doing other things.

guava juice and pomegranates

Two private screenings of "Lilkee" last week. One to a small group of Gujarati women writers, Abhivyakti with a full farsan turnout, including lovely red guava juice from Bhavnagar. The second to a film club of 8 and 9 year olds at Shishuvan School in Matunga, organized by the Pomegranate Workshop.

I cannot yell if my life depends on it, so it was Dhanno who took over the noisy, excited children and their scores of questions.

"Did Lilkee really live in the village? Was that her real mother, her real sister? Where are they now? Where are her friends?"

Seeing Dhanno's cell phone peeping out of her pocket, one child asked, "Where was her cell phone in the film?"

One little girl wanted to know how we had got a shot of the beach from so high up. A little boy answered, "Oh, they must have done it from a helicopter." I said, "No, there was a hill, and a fort, and we took a shot from the top." To which he replied, "Oh, you could have done it from a helicopter".

An important scene in the film is when Bittu, the baby swallows a bead, and the children take him to the doctor, and Tutu comes home and does not find the kids at home. After endless queries about Bittu's welfare, and whether he had really swallowed the bead, and whether he was really crying, a couple of the kids wanted to know why in the film, we don't actually see the children going to the doctor. One of them piped up, "Because they did not find an actor to play the doctor." Another said, "They did not want to show the operation." A third said, "Because the children did not go to the doctor at all."

Each one of them had their own favorite moment in the film, for someone it was when Lilkee went to school, for someone else when the girls went to the beach, for a boy when they all played football, and for another boy when Dadaji told Anushka that you should always do what you think is right, even if no one else agrees with you.

Dhanno had to sign 50 autographs and give her cell number to all of them. She was feeling very pleased with herself, certainly. And she had her two best friends along to show off to.

errant cells

At midnight, I started reading "Twelve Tissue Remedies of Schussler" which Teja had got off his table-tennis mate, and which I had promptly Xeroxed (yes, I know it should be photo-copied, but I'm pretty sure it was Xeroxed, or actually Modi-Xeroxed).

It was reassuring to learn that all my problems including my laziness, my inclination to procrastinate, my over-active paranoiac imagination, my crankiness, my reclusiveness, etc, etc, were due to the "disturbance of the molecular motion of one of the inorganic tissue salts", and the subsequent loss of cell equilibrium, in my body.

Later at night, unable to sleep because of my errant cells, I went blogging as usual. I've decided to buy myself some cell salts over the counter, but in the meanwhile, I did find some funny blogs, through my friends and friends' friends'. The usual route.