Dead Turtles

Which was mostly what the weekend has been about. Dead turtles lined up in a broken line, buried ostrich-like in an otherwise pristine beach. At twilight hour, a lone turtle being washed up on the shore, a lone moon directly above me with a lone star underneath and I, plopped down on the golden, silky sand, the sound of the sea enveloping all other sounds and the wind in my hair, the best caress one could ever receive. A seemingly endless beach with two occupants, one of them, sadly, dead and the other, feeling the waves lap at her feet.

And highlights from the world of Television :

• I watched Apna Sapna Money Money for the third time. Watching it for the first time somehow numbed me from actually providing an opinion. Decided to watch it a second time and write a review. The third time was accidental. However, the sneaking suspicion drew on me that I was starting to enjoy the experience. My system is not only immune to ASMM, but considers a regular dosage of it a health option. Is ASMM to me what Gunda is to Greatbong? Or Ingrid Bergman to Alfred Hitchcock? Or Shahrukh Khan to Karan Johar (more on this later in this post)?
• The trip was on a bus which played (horrors) videos. My poor earphones knew when they had been outnumbered. The insomniac in me gave way helplessly to songs from Muskaan, Kasoor, Raaz and songs from a similar genre. Of course, newer movies did get a chance with special preference to Fool 'n Final. Needless to say, today, I am a changed girl and will never ever abuse Himesh Reshammiya again. FnF has shown me light. In fact, while I type this, I am downloading three of its songs.
• Spent a Saturday evening morosely biting a biscuit and watching Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gum for what seems like the 42nd time in the last six months. Its when you do this that you begin to wonder whether this is how you thought you would end up once in college.
  
  Then again, you forget all about wondering that and begin wondering why you find Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gum so morbidly fascinating. You just stay numb and watch the idle rich fight the injustice they face from the world, the dictates of their hearts, moribund traditions and, of course, their sacrificial, all suffering parents who do not seem troubled watching their sons, husbands or even the occasional elderly father practically making out with the neighbour's daughter, but take offense at the slightest hint of theirs wishing to make the affair legal by the sacred ties of matrimony.
  
  I seem to have mixed up too many movies in this description, but then, who has not watched these movies. You may pretend to like Apocalypse Now and cry over Casablanca and argue about the significance of title of The Streetcar Named Desire, but you have, on the sly, watched all of Karan Johar's movies and have caught yourself laughing and sighing along with it. There is no solution to the eternal problem named Karan Johar. But its scary to think that a hundred years later, a new generation would be looking at our world and its culture through his eyes and find similarities between the the Greek and the Indian culture. Greece had its Helen, Menelaus and Paris. Our country had Shahrukh Khan, the rest of the world and Karan Johar.
• Kyle XY now has an additional character who looks uncannily like Michael Jackson and claims to be a female in love with Kyle. All this is obviously a diabolical plot by the producers to prove that Michael Jackson is actually a female android which is the reason he feels attracted to young boys. Boys because his soul is of a girl. Young because as an android, he lost out on the first 16 years of his life. Its a compensation for a lost youth spent under microscopes and brain scanners.
  

Okay, so I have just watched TV endlessly for the past few days and have nothing to write about and just desperately want to update this blog thing of mine.

Oh, I caught an oyster at the beach. It did not have anything in it sadly.

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Reflections on Oranges, Death and Om Shanti Om

Its five months since my first University examination (yes, this will be a cribbing, moping, depressing post again). They have been an eventful five months. I have been hospitalized, fallen in love twice, have suffered an entire month of joyous celebrations, have convinced my parents that I actually have an ambition by sheer glib talk and have made a foolproof plan of bombing the University building. However, the people in charge of correcting my papers appear to be having an even more eventful time, for the results are still as far off now as they had been five months ago. And there has been not one day since these five months I have not moaned and groaned and wished death on myself. Yes, I have been a pretty depressing company. My university does that to you. For all I know, my examination answer sheets have been recycled as flyers in the Nandigram issue, used to make temporary refuges in the cyclone ravaged areas (bit of a prediction here) or crafted into jhalmuri containers. They may never have been checked. I may not exist in the University registers. Its the sheer madness of uncertainty which actually brings on the severe depression and the forewarnings to close relatives to buy something white this Puja.

It was while I was watching OSO when i suddenly realized what is the implication of death. No its not the reincarnation jazz. My very own personal view of the movie is that its sheer rubbish and watching Budhdha Mar Gaya is more fruitful. At least you know what you are watching will give you the headache of a lifetime. But it did give me food for thought. So I will be more kindly to the movie and agree it has a few amusing moments. And I do wish Shahrukh Khan's hairdresser has that baby and gives him the damned hair cut already. He is beginning to look like a mop.

Death, I realized, is not just the end of troubles, its the end. A simple end of everything you know, wish, love, think and experience. Its not a forced removal of the future, its the discontinuity of the present. The end of the sheer excitement of existence. When I die, it just would not be the things I am looking forward to I would losing out on, even if they are rather nice things like finally getting to watch all the F.R.I.E.N.D.S. episodes, actually watch the last episode of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, know why Kyle XY has no bellybutton (I am thinking I watch too much TV), marrying Johnny Depp, and, of course, see how I finally turn out.

But there is so much more to life right now. There are some lovely things to live for even if Johnny Depp never finds me maddeningly attractive. (This post is just another way to convince myself that life is not all about getting a first class, bear with me). So I began listing out all the reasons I enjoy just being alive for. Here is a bit from the last revised draft

• Oranges : They mark the beginning of winter for me, my favourite season. What is winter if not spent on some rooftop, soaking in the afternoon sun, eating orange after orange and doing Maths? (This actually goes in good points about High School. Nowadays, I do maths with the radio on, snuggled in rugs, with mugs of coffee surrounding me).
• Mathematics : Much as I hate the subject, I love the organization which comes with it. It appeals to my messy self like a spirit finite calling to the infinite (I do not know what that means). It has begun affecting my writing style. Now whatever I write has to be bulleted. Its by sheer force of will power that I do not add footnotes.
• Mosaic floors: They have all these small stones where, if you squint slightly, you can actually make out faces. Marble floors are cold, inhumane things which provide us with no imaginary human company. When I have a home of my own, I will keep the marble floors and get a puppy. That, I think, will be slightly less mad.
• A.R. Rahman
• Chalk: I eat them. More accurately, I nibble them. I find the dry texture fascinating, despite the fact I often choke on them. Of course, I mean white chalks. Coloured chalks have a weird bitter taste.

So there you go University Examiners, even if you fail me now, I still win.

You have not broken me.

Yet.

As a byword, in case you watched OSO, they show SRK's reincarnated self was afraid of fire because he had died in a fire. I am afraid of

• fire
• water
• ghosts
• heights
• dogs
  

I am guessing in my previous birth, I died when the ghost of a dog, blazed in flames, attacked me on a rooftop, from where I was forced to jump, falling right in to the middle of a swimming pool where I drowned. Only then do all my rational fears make sense.

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Filler

Andha saalayil nee vandhu saeraamal
Aaru degeree-il en paarvay saayamal
Vilaki poayirunthaal thollayae illai
Ithu vaendaathe vaelai
- An excerpt from the song Hey Goodbye Nanba
Film Ayutha Ezhuthu
Lyricist: Vairamuthu

(If only you hadn't been on that street;
If only my eyes hadn't tilted 6 degrees;
There would have been no trouble...
For we have landed ourselves into unnecessary work)

Found this paragraph extremely cute which, obviously, led to an incessant need to share it with the rest of the world. In case people are wondering which song this could be, its the Tamil version of Hey Khuda Hafiz, from Yuva.

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Herbert- A Rambling Non- Review

I was supposed to write my more serious experiences during these Pujas. I had had the most amazing, earth shattering ideas, thought up the sharpest of phrases and probably would have won the Pulitzer for that post. Unfortunately, by midnight yesterday, I had forgotten all about those experiences. I am flaky, absent minded and, possibly, a blonde with a permanent brunette hair colour. I blame it on Economics. The subject does not suit my mental prowesses. I am taking up Philosophy as soon as I can scrape up a graduation degree. However, till that happens, let my once-widening-and-now-stuck-at-seven blog reading population suffer more of my flakiness.
(What? I am a brute! The last post says so.)

My results are coming out. Possibly everyone I have ever been acquainted with knows about it. I have cribbed about it, cried about it, and warned people not to be surprised at the news of my death. Behind this scared exterior, however, lies an even more scared girl. The University I am registered under is not a very kind University. In fact, its a positive lemon in the garden of Universities (more Wodehouse plagiarized lines here). It revels in making its students psychotic killers. Not surprisingly, all the worry and the wonder has turned me into a zombie. Or an owl, if you prefer it. Sleep eludes me until its day break and then I sleep for fourteen hours straight. I am, of course, hours away from being disowned, but that is a secondary topic.

Last Saturday, after partying hard for seven hours straight, I trudged into my home to face another bout of insomnia. Television, my solace and savior, beckoned and at two a.m., I was enmeshed between a sofa and many cushions, channel surfing like there was no tomorrow.That is when I came across a Bengali movie. Normally, I do not watch Bengali movies, not being very well versed in the language (my ancestors are probably rolling in their graves now), but this one had English subtitles. Needless to say, I was intrigued. Any Bengali movie with English subtitles is an intellectual movie, at least that is what I believe, and intellectual Bengali movies are just the thing to make one a politician. Thus, I settled down more comfortably and started a movie marathon journey called Herbert.


I was not mistaken. The central theme was politics. Unless it had some obscure inner meaning I completely failed to comprehend. It started with the investigation of the death of a man called Herbert, who had caused a terrorist attack. The movie thus began unfolding, telling the story of Herbert, as a young, orphaned boy who was brought up at his uncle's place, treated miserably as a servant, growing up to become the supposed terrorist of the present year.


The movie, as many reviewers have noted, is perhaps a time traveling journey through Kolkata, showing it in its many facets, from the politically tumultuous 1970s to the more urbane, conscious city we know today. And we see Herbert suffering through it all, losing his loved ones one by one, through this amazing journey called Calcutta (I revert back to the name. It wasn't Kolkata then). We first see Herbert as dysfunctional, gawky, the proverbial idiot nephew in every family. But he grows on us, and we begin to see a more defined Herbert, the one who has a beautiful penmanship, the one who writes nonsense poems, the one who needs a hiding place, the one who flies kites, the one who has a vivid imagination, the one who has his unnamed longings, the one who dabbles in paranormal studies. Suddenly, he is not the idiot nephew anymore.

Another extremely important facet of the movie was its language. Possibly all the Bengali expletives known to man (and apparently unknown to Calcuttan policemen) were freely used. My knowledge of Bengali khisti increased overnight. Sadly, after I woke up next day at some time late int he afternoon, I had forgotten them all. Hopefully, someone else might fare better.

Predictably, since this movie was about politics, my college had a bit role to play. Its like second nature, a movie with few political leanings and suddenly, my college is a part of it. Though they did have a good view of it. And I liked the way the Presidency staircase was juxtaposed into the the 'Odessa steps', the site of a workers' uprising supported by the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin and Lenin's Iskra, where hundreds of Odessan citizens were murdered on the great stone staircase (copy-pasted from Wikipedia). Some things, apparently, never change. Not that I understand anything about politics. I never did. I saw the movie from the viewpoint of a person wondering why the screen was moving. I did not attempt to delve deeply and certainly do not have any political illusions.

The movie also used several interesting techniques of movie making, among which, is an interesting craft, called by reviewers the Brechtian art of Alienation. I do not know what it means. I do know what it referred to, though. Herbert's parents were shown in certain shots, filming the life of their son, giving a tragi-comic twist to the entire plot line. Perhaps that was what it was about. A tragi-comic life of an idiot who got entangled in situations beyond his comprehension. The story of a foolish do-gooder.

It was a sad movie. A bitter one. Not a movie I should have watching in the middle of the night. But the memory lingers. There still is an impact. I am yet to fathom of what.

To read more coherent reviews of this movie, go here and here. I write rubbish reviews.

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Mostly About Bellybuttons

Disclaimer: If any reader actually thinks this entry will be perverted, explicit and a joy to an entire section of male population, I am afraid I will have to disillusion you. Not only is it only partly about bellybuttons, it mostly talks about male bellybuttons. There, you have been warned. Now proceed at your own risk.


A Saturday night is usually a very evil way of ending a week when you have

1. no life
2. no chance of midnight revelries
3. a broken down computer, mainly because you repeatedly curse at it

After weeks of slogging for *mumble mumble mumble*, I finally had a morning when I could sleep for as long as I liked, for I have been blessed with parents who actually think I need as much sleep as I can get (They live in la-la land). Which obviously meant that I had an entire night to myself to do anything I liked without parental control or sunlight (I personally am not very fond of sunlight. Its way too over rated anyway). Hence I gave up some of my most precious, treasured, cherished and rare to find free hours to channel surfing.

After wandering around aimlessly at a few Bachchan movies, I finally reached Star World where they were showing Kyle XY which is about some boy who is different from everyone else. Why? He has no belly button. Oh, granted he has this really super memory and he completed reading every section of some encyclopedia in just an afternoon, and, oh, he has these amazing reflexes, but I mean, come on, no belly button? How cool is that? Spiderman did that reflexes thingy and androids or whatever he is supposed to be have huge memory reserves. Everybody knows that. But absence of belly buttons is the most unique Superhero trait ever. They might actually call him the NO BELLYBUTTON MAN, for he would roam around masked but topless, the bellybutton-less, washboard flat stomach being his stock-in-trade. It also helped that the robot or whatever the lead character is supposed to be playing is gorgeously cute which held my interest wonderfully. But his bellybutton-less existence had me spell bound and I spent a major part of an hour wondering what would life be like without a bellybutton. Other than the fact that if one did not have a bellybutton, there would be just one lesser body part to pierce, nothing really came to my mind. Does that make the belly button a vestigial organ?

The next batch of channel surfing led to a not-so-obscure movie called Dil Vil Pyar Vyar which is basically a meaningless movie with too much of sentiment, something I abhor, but has a few songs by Hariharan. I realize Mukesh loyalists cringe at the thought of his classics rehashed, but personally, any song sung in Hariharan's mellifluous voice is magical and an entire experience in itself. Hence, I steeled myself to watch a movie I would probably whimper for the rest of my life at the memory of. Unsurprisingly for a movie with 14 songs, one soon came along with a skimpily clad Hrishita Bhatt and a horror called Jimmy Shergill who actually had the gumption to wear an orange floral shirt with white trousers and a white jacket. Mercifully, the camera did not concentrate much on him. It was too busy following Bhatt's bellybutton in and around the railway station the song was shot at. It was then I made an observation that Kyle XY would not be much good as an actress over in India.
Because he has no bellybutton.

It was over an hour when realization finally struck me. I mercifully went to sleep.

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Which FRIENDS character do i resemble?

Okay, so this may be a waste of time and space and effort, but I am most like Chandler!!! Yay me!!

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