Digging for Meaning

30 its just a matter of a few years. and there I will be. under the glorious arches of 30-hood.  30 The number shines brightly in my head. Its a milestone that constantly barges into my vision, wherever i may be looking. i imagine it to be a small leprechaun like creature that's running around in 2 concentric circles. One around my head - the constant running threatens to add creases on my forehead. and the other around my waist, where the constant running is adding to the roundness of my person.  30  it constantly asks me to look back. 'Look back!' it screams. and then it tries to hold steady my gaze back into my past. Its a direction I have not frequently lingered on. The opposite direction was much more alluring in the past, and now I live content being in the present. But 30 makes me want to take stock of what i was set out for, and what grounds I have covered. I have never been good with appraisal, and this one will be the toughest. (I am happy with my l...

heat. heat  is everywhere. the skin burns and eyes cower... With every breath of the sun, the curtains beg to be taken further inside the room. They flare and spread themselves in appeal. But then swiftly the relatively cooler winds of the home, throw them back to their guarding positions - the in between world of negotiations. the world between the hospitable world of inside and the savage world of outside. and yet, the heat is everywhere. The little home is not crowded. and yet, it seems as if books are shaking and pushing away the neighboring books. The used clothes lying carelessly on the spare bed are un-crumpling themselves and spreading themselves to cool off. Heap over heap of clothes to be washed. Books upon books, that are yet to be read. The heat is evaporating the will to engage with challenging thoughts and acts. These days, the sour, dour magazines are going straight to a corner of the room that has no future. The corner is a mini black hole ...

[This is a  ridiculous  story] Imagine. It was your usual Sunday afternoon. 1:49 to be precise . (why should you be precise? its a sunday! sacrilege.) It was my usual Sunday morning. The tea was on boil and i was browsing habitually through the multiple tabs open on my firefox browser. and as is the case with multiple tabs, none was interesting enough to hold me, but they formed a continuum, a circle of curiosity swimming in circles around my mind, and i couldn't break that circle. so i kept on surfing. switching the tabs. scrolling down and then up. then switching to the next tab. clicking on one link or another. then with impatience switching to next pane... furious and numb, simultaneously.  psssss.... the tea was boiling over, overflowing onto the hot plate. I threw my keyboard sideways and jumped into my kitchen. I was about to take the tea pot off the plate, when a bird exploded merely 3 metres from me outside of kitchen window. Poof. no sound. no smoke. ju...

[This is a  ridiculous  story] Imagine.  There's this huge evil alien. He is as big as Africa - a single living entity as large as a continent. (!imagine! with a double exclamation marks )   He has a gazillion tentacles snapping around in circles. ( !!I!! fulfilling a long held desire to abuse exclamation marks, before the end of the world. don't mind .) He rises slowly over the saffron horizon. and he laughs menacingly while rising up. ( ridiculous, if you ask me. ) and he is shaking a Polaroid picture. (to the tune of Outkast's 'hey ya ', no less) Now, all that shaking of a Polaroid picture is creating tornadoes and storms and what not, not that he minds. That Polaroid is as large as Uttar Pradesh. a flat rectangle of a Uttar Pradesh.  and while we are running for our lives (screaming, wide eyed with palms pasted to our cheeks), I realize that that Polaroid picture is not really a picture. well, not wh...

Sundays are sacred days. Not in a religious sense. But in its ability to shift the gear of time, in its ability to lend lightness and calm energy to the air. Lunch happens late, dinner comes early. Tea and kahwaa materialise by their own whim on the sole strength of habit. Movies and novels can and do get consumed. But its the new lazy toys, Picassa and Photoshop, that witness the deceleration of time. Without aim, the tinkering starts. and ends. Today was no different. Saw yeh saali zindagi, a film that could have done without some of its twists and turns. Then collated footage of lightnings for a future project. Uploaded a few pics to my pinterest page and compulsively checked if someone had liked/ repinned any of my pics. Then gave up after a while. Slept. washed clothes. Then saw another episode of Monty Python. Read a short story by Haruki Murakami about a couple who get hungry in the night and rob a Mcdonald's store for 30 of their burgers. an...

Moustaches. They are an endangered species. Not many nations and men wear them anymore. Ok, so Stalin and Hitler wore one, but that doesn't mean all moustaches are evil. They aren't the voodoos of gods of mayhem. They do not have a mind of their own. They are quite harmless really. well, most of the time. (tip1 - mind your kisses and curries for a healthy relationship with your moustache) Don't listen to what your mom tells you. For them moustache is a sign of you growing out of their nests. That's perhaps unsettling for them, it should not be for you. Do not listen to your love interest as well. Unless she has some rare hair-phobia, hair should never really be important enough topics of interest between two people in love. (which in reverse, essentially means, you shouldn't really be bothering her about her decision to wax or not to wax  her feet.) Imagine a couple on the arrange-a-marriage date. q1. Do you smoke? q2. Do you drink? q3. Do you plan to keep...

Well, thats what we (me, soumik, R-kay, Kashan) did recently. and ended up spending 4 blissful days in Sonapani. Its a small village in the hills near Nainital. The place was secluded with only a few hotels and houses a little distance further away. Sonapani film festival; that's what got us here. I had little idea about it apart from what R-kay and soumik had told me earlier when we had met at Kunzum cafe in Hauz Khas. It was a splendid affair - amazing hosts Ashish and Gurpal, brilliant filmmakers Amlan, Saba and Sanjay and a very intimate group of festival attendees who knew each other well. I tried to put together the footage i shot in those 4 days here and the result is this video. For me the biggest insight in the 4 days was in way these brave film makers lead their lives. They had to fight apathy, financial crunch and a host of other problems and yet they carried on and went on to make some of the most amazing documentaries I have ever seen. Saba felt strongly abou...