“Haa se Haam”

“Ee se Imli”

“Hee se Himli”

“Eeee se Eenth”

“Heeee se Heeeenth”

A little girl’s parrotting of the Hindi alphabet floated through the air, thickened with her flawed accent and the humidity of a Chennai summer. I was reminded instantly of the summer vacation many years ago when my grandparents’ next door neighbour requested me to help his young daughter in her English lessons. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the project. My knowledge of her proficiency in the language meant I was to spend lesser time with my beloved books and siestas meant especially for a long holiday. Eventually though, I took it up most grudgingly.

I don’t remember much of those lessons, except this one particular poem, which I think was titled Dogs.

Her task was simple- she was to memorize the poem from top to bottom, perhaps for some oral revision test of some sort. So one balmy July evening, we seated ourselves on the rooftop of my grandparents’ house; me with her book in hand while she recited away. Word-for-word, here is how it went:

“Dawgs.

The dawgs Ai knooew,

Hafe meny shaphes,

Fawr sammaaar biggundd taaall,

Und sammaaar smaawwlll,

Und sammaaar theeeen,

Und sammaaar fhat und shaaaarrrt,

Und sammaaar leeteel beets aaf phluphh,

That hafe no shaphe at aaawll.”

I could make out that at parts, she would linger over the visual image of the words she had in her head, and piece them together as she recited. I don’t think she understood what she had been learning, but as her young tutor-friend, I did try to tell her.

I chuckled to myself as I had previously on numerous counts of remembering that evening; turning the corner to the now diminishing sound of that Hindi lesson;

“Haie se Haiinak”….

Earmuffs.

That’s right, a cold wave appears to have  hit Chennai, sending temperatures to as low as 20 degrees Centigrade, prompting Chennaiites to prepare in advance for the ‘winter’ (to be read with a generous dollop of sarcasm). Of course, the weather at 22 degrees is simply teeth-chatteringly chilly in Chennai. Young and old alike, on their bicycles or two wheelers in the early morning, gracefully poised against the cold Madras morning gale, sport the new rage – the Chennai Earmuffs. An item of haute couture I must add. With a pattern that could pass off as leopard-print, these are also available in some pretty trendy colors, to match perfectly with or stand out against your veshti/sari, or maybe even your sweater/jacket. One can’t be too careful about the winter, after all. You know what they say – better to safe than sorry.

If you’d like to catch a glimse of what’s doing the rounds around Namma Chennai, stroll along the wind prone zones like Besant Nagar, Santhome and Marina early in the morning, or well into the evening. Or keep an eye out while in traffic. And if you’re convinced, you might want to purchase a pair for yourself, they seem to be selling quite well along the beach.

It’s interesting to note that a drop in the ambient temperature has left us Chennaiites rather handicapped. You can’t blame us, can you? We were, after all, in the process of evolving a thinner layer of skin to beat the heat (thickened only at points to beat the autorickshaw wallas). Pity though, that we’re still wet.. er.. cold behind the ears.

Happy New Year, y’all!

The other sort, are the ones who were born to love the limelight. They just can’t get enough of it. They couldn’t care if there were 10, 100, maybe 1000 people in the audience. It’s almost as though they’re intrisically aware of the fact that nobody would ever laugh at them or boo them off stage, because they’re just too adorable to do that.

What these two categories have in common, is that as long as they are children, they could never ‘act’. Not even if they were taught to gesture in the right way while they learnt their lines well. I’m not being biased here, but truthfully, children are precisely that – children. They are at that time of their lives where the innocence, the naivete, is completely manifest in what they do or say. So, when you put up a child on stage and make him/her ‘act’, they’d just say their lines and move themselves about, while experimenting with stage space the first few times, ‘learning the ropes’ as it were. And that’s precisely what makes them so adorable to watch.

So how do you write a review for the Xmas Panto? You can’t actually. And that’s why I can’t be critical about the way the kids danced, or said their lines, or wore their clothes. I only wish they didn’t use those microphones in Museum theatre, it being, accoustically, one of the best in Chennai. I had to peice the story together when every once in a while I caught snippets of the it in the madness of echoes and reverberation. The music drowned the singing at times. But the characters were endearing, and some of the jokes truly funny. And yes, Shylock’s oversized paunch made me feel very slim indeed.

All in all, completely worth the money (especially since tickets are going at Rs. 100 and Rs. 50). If you’re in Chennai and have kids who’re feeling bored (or are rather young at heart yourself), you should definitely not miss the panto.

Up until this morning, I was wary of watching This is It for the very same reason. If this was going to be a bunch of clippings of people fawning over MJ and how great he was and how smooth his dance moves were, I wasn’t planning to stick around to watch it.

… but I was proven wrong. The film moonwalks through extensive rehearsal sessions peppered with some of Jacko’s best songs, with the occasional soundbyte from members of the crew. Well, of course, they did have good things to say about MJ, but not nauseatingly so; which actually made it much more genuine. There was no need for the random dancer/singer/designer to gush about the man’s greatness; the footage just spoke for itself.

On another note, the Human Nature song set me thinking. Look at it this way - here’s a guy who probably consumes as much as an entire township does at his private residence in Neverland, CA, and who also probably ran sky high electricity bills just REHEARSING for a major concert. He also sings songs to save the earth and all of nature. See what I mean?

But I digress. Without further ado, I pronounce This is It watchable at least once, even if you never were a great fan of the man. Let’s face it: MJ was a phenomenon more than a person, and has been a part of all of us- be it performances at the school Annual Day, or a scene from The Company Theatre’s Hamlet. And of course, if you’re a die-hard MJ fan… I suggest you catch it as many times as you can on the big screen. There is something magical about watching that man move on 70mm that no DVD could ever bring you.

And to quote a good friend of mine: “Keep watching till they send in the cleaners”.

November 5th and 6th saw the return of Swami and Friends to Sivagami Petachi , where it ran to packed houses (yet again, I’m told) in spite of the incessantly heavy Chennai rains. I had missed it the first time around, and some of the mixed reviews I’d heard piqued my curiosity enough to go watch it…. even if it was on a weekday.

Adapted by Manasi Subramaniam, and directed by Aruna Ganesh Ram, the play starts off with a scene at the Sarayu river. Swami and Mani have just returned from the station, after having said goodbye to Rajam, who is leaving Malgudi for good to go to Trichinopoly with his police superintendent father and family. Then, going back in time to when the boys first met Rajam, the play courses through the events of one and a half years, highlighting the shenanigans of the little boys living in the quaint South Indian town of Malgudi in pre-independence India. From getting expelled from school on account of bunking class and breaking the school windows while participating in a demonstration, to forming the MCC cricket team, the boys are enthusiastic to welcome excitement and adventure into their worlds. However, Swami soon finds himself soon dodging Drill Class to train for an upcoming match, and in the process is expelled from school yet again. He then tries to escape the wrath of his father (T.T. Srinath) by running away from Malgudi in search of Madras.

As a wide-eyed wondrous 10 year old, the challenges that Swami (Ujwal Nair) must face include understanding arithmetic, standing up to a religiously intolerant Scriptures master, dodging Nallappan while stealing mangoes from his grove, passing First Form exams, and… um, many more. I fail to remember because, truthfully, the most memorable parts of the play were in the first half where Swami and Mani (Shyam Sunder) make friends with Rajam (Ajay Kumar Ramachandran) and go on to introduce him to the quirks and eccentricities of each of their teachers (P.C. Ramakrishna, Mohamed Yusuf, Shankar Sundaram) at Albert Mission School. Other memorable scenes include the ones of the boys writing their First Form examinations, and of Swami parroting to his granny (Sushi Natraj) Rajam’s tall tales of himself. The rest of the scenes could’ve been handled in an equally experimental manner, for it seems the kind of rigor that went into the thought process of directing the first half, disappeared somewhere during the second half of the play.

The set design was a brilliant idea, an intereactive, ever changing set, where three tall wooden boxes were placed to form (depending on the story) a pier, a column, a tree, a wall, a sofa, a table, benches, an orchard… it was a creative display of set changes. At some point of time, it did become slightly tiresome, with some arrangments not making any sense as to why they were moved and placed in a particular position at times. For example, why the Z-shaped arrangement for the scene where Swami runs away from Malgudi? The scene could probably have played itself out without those having been there in the first place.

Though the play seemed to strike a low point in terms of its narrative somewhere into the later half of the play, the energy levels of the actors was commendable- simply for the consistency that they succeeded in maintaining throughout the show.

A special mention to kanjira vidwan B. Shree Sundar Kumar, the man behind the lilting sound of the tabla that kept the mood alive through most of the play.

Being one of the the first R.K. Narayan stories to be staged as a play, we must remember the sole literary creation of the author’s that has occupied the minds of his readers for decades now, each in a form that is given shape by the readers themselves in their mind’s eye: Malgudi. Does the Malgudi of the play live up to the Malgudi in our heads? Or, more importantly, could it ever? Although the scene changes were handled such that each scene blended into the other almost seamlessly, and although the lighting was reflective of the particular mood on stage; I can’t help but ask- Where was Malgudi in all of that? The only answer I can give to that is that probably the stage design was meant to give the audience the room to relive the Malgudi that was mapped in their heads, and superimpose it upon the play as it moved from scene to scene.

Also, being an adaptation for stage of the most loved English writer in India, its hard not to miss Narayan’s soothing narrative in all of it. Once they were moved onto stage, the mangoes of Nallappan’s grove were no longer succulent, and you didn’t feel the air hang heavily down from your shirt onto your back as you walked along the banks of the Sarayu.

The debut joint venture between Madras Players and Landing Stage was definitely entertaining, and engrossing at points. However, if the play were to be rewritten to liven up the second half, so that it swept you away with its speedy narrative like the first half did, in all probability I would find myself being a very enthusiastic part of the thunderous applause at Mani’s closing line.

Looking at those slippers, I couldn’t but help notice the familiarity of the scene to something I was accustomed to not too many months back.

Just over a year ago, I was still a student. Back in Ahmedabad, it was the culture of working in studio till late at night that got us used to sleeping in the studio / lab whenever the occasion demanded it – which was rather too often now, come to think of it! It was not uncommon to walk into a studio and spot an insomniac dog trotting about on its midnight rounds; until of course you caught sight of a student or two curled up on a drafting table, or sprawled on the discussion table, their slowly heaving chests the only indication of the life in them.

Sleeping in studio was something you needed to get accustomed to. People used to bring mattresses, chattais, bedsheets, pillows, and the occasional mosquito repellant to ensure a comfortable, albeit short, snooze before a jury. Some were innovative enough to dismount the drafting board and place it on a set of bricks that turned it into a makeshift bed for the fortnights of night outs before the finals every semester. This was in the days before they built the luxurious bathroom with the shower stall. Once we had a place to bathe on campus, nobody wanted to go home at all!

Me, on the other hand, I made sure I carried the bare necessities for a nightout. A bedsheet, a toothbrush, a toothpaste, a hairbrush and some facewash.  Come 2 am every night, I’d open the windows of my big balcony (the view of which I posted here), spread out my sheet – but not too close to the railing- remove my shoes and put them someplace I wouldn’t see it first thing in the morning, place my laptop bag under my head, and I was good to go. In the summer nights, the breeze would blow like a lullaby to my frazzled nerves, and I’d find it hard to rouse myself 6 hrs later to start the new day.

And then, one day, I saw a rat the size of a cat darting from one balcony to the other, and that pretty much ended my sleep-in-the-studio-sessions.

Something about those old man’s slippers made me realize how much I missed being a hassled, stressed out student sleeping on a balcony for the 6 hours of her day that was really worth all the torture.

I am dangerously close to turning this into a ‘nostalgia’ post like this one, so i shall promptly change gears.

I guess there’s something about the spirit of an education that makes you want to be dirty, sleepless and basically, eccentric… for a very short period of time, of course. Quote from the play I’m currently rehearsing for:

“Angelica: Are you hungry?

Benjamin: Only for knowledge.”

Yeah, I know… corny line and all. But it symbolizes a lot.

Like?

Beats me. I don’t have to figure it out for a review/jury! I’m off to hit the sack.

Goodnight!

One of our fun escapades took us to the Landmark store at Spencers Plaza. This was after having scouted around the mall looking for a particular silver jewellery shop that was unfortunately closed that Sunday afternoon. It was 2pm, and we thought we’d quickly step in and out of Landmark for Namz to pick up some reading material for the flight, before we headed out for lunch.

As soon as we walked into Landmark, Samz headed out to look up the choicest of Archie comics to take back home to his collection, before which he would mull over the fate of Jughead’s love life while flipping through its pages on the flight back home.

Namz and I turned to the Indian Writers section and busied ourselves looking for a good read apart from keeping an eye out for Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City.

That was when I saw him as he walked past us. The ‘Dude’.

It was not like I ‘saw’ saw him. As he walked by, he was just another one of those non-existent entities that make up the hushed hustle and bustle of a bookstore. Someone you saw, but conveniently noted as the background to a bookstore setting.

We shall refer to the ‘dude’ as Blacky for ease of description, as he was dressed in a plain black, skintight t-shirt (complete with bulging muscles) and a pair of black pants, with a hint of a bootleg cut (While this ‘fashionable’ attire did not exactly stand out in contrast to his skin complexion, I shall refrain from adding that to the reason behind his nickname, lest I be termed racist). In short, he was somebody my brother would have eloquently termed a Gym-Baady.

“Excuse me”, said Blacky, interrupting the little chat Namz and I were having, “would you mind suggesting a book for me to read from here?”

In that moment, the non-existent entity turned himself from an element of the background into an undesirable irritant in our foreground. But what irritated me more than his presence was the question he was asking me. How do you suggest a random book to a random person randomly?

I sized him up in a glance, and pointed at Vikas Swarup’s Q&A, which I’d spotted on one of the shelves a few minutes back. With the entire Slumdog Millionaire buzz in the air, surely he’d want to read that one?

Completely ignoring my helpful gesture, he continued, “I mean, which one of these would you recommend to me, if I’m looking for a fast read?”

I glanced up at the shelf in front of me. Names like Khushwant Singh, Anita Desai, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth and the like stared back at me in apprehension. Please don’t suggest us to ball-brained Blacky, they seemed to plead. In a last ditch effort, I tried suggesting Q&A to him again.

“You could try that one, it should be fast”, I said, and proceeded to trace my finger along the section of books in front of me- as if to signal my absolute disinterest in the rest of the potential conversation.

“Slumdog Millionaire? Isn’t that like the movie?”

Well, you’re intelligent, I wanted to tell him. But I politely smiled and said something about a missing love angle in the book. Or so, I believed. I haven’t gotten to reading the book myself.

“So…”

Oh no. Clearly, the direction this boy was taking meant that he simply WAS NOT getting the message. I was so sure that Namz was thinking on the same lines as I was, as she quietly sifted through books while I hoped this little pest would simply walk away.

“… are you guys with any book club?”

Maybe clipped answers will work here, I though. “No, no”, I said, nodding my head at the book I randomly pulled out to flip through, desperately trying all measures of displaying disinterest. But, much to my disappointment, I found myself answering some of his dumb questions, in the same clipped answer fashion.

“Are you from here?”

“What do you do?”

“Oh, you’re an architect? So am I. That’s funny. I haven’t met someone who’s an architect this way.”

Alright, Blacky- this is the frikkin’ last straw, I thought. Not only am I pissed with myself for divulging so much information, I know you’re probably lying through your nose (don’t ask me how)! I gave Blacky a long look and then decided to call his bluff.

“Really, what college are you from?”

“R.V. College, Bangalore”.

At this point, I thought I’d throw some names of people I know from that college (yeah, don’t mess with us architecture students. We have a pretty good networking system in place), but decided against it. I tried the other trick question.

“So where are you working then? When did you pass out?”

“I, er, passed out in 2007.” He was fumbling, and I was liking this. Apparently, as he went on to fumble some more, he told me he wasn’t doing much since then. Strange. I wondered if it really was the truth, that must be some magically maintained body (or a rich father behind it all, but I rule that option out for it being such a killjoy alternative).

With that, he quickly walked away, while Namz and I gave each other the ‘what was that?’ look and went back to our book browsing.

Shortly afterwards, Samz told us he spotted Blacky hitting on a poor, clueless looking chick  at another section. From the description of his conversation, it seemed to me he’d succeeded in going past the recommend-please-what-do-you-do-thread to something that sounded like let-me-take-you-out-sometime thread.

Why would someone want to pick up chicks in a bookstore? I understand intelligence is a turn-on for some men, but Blacky… he takes the cake!

So how do you escape it? Do you escape it? Well, that is entirely upto you, but in case you were thinking of it, here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

a. If you’re really sick of everything as it is, there is no better solution than to quit your job and move to a new city. This works best if you move to a place where none of your previous friends/acquaintances live. Even if you do know somebody there, it helps if they don’t care that you’re around.

b. Naturally, get a new phone number. And DON’T share it with everybody on any of your buddy lists. If you must, share it with your immediate family and best buddies with strict instructions not to hand it out to anybody else. A less harsh alternative would be to give out the number to your landline, and not your cellphone. Get an answering machine – it gives you the option of not having to attend/return certain calls.

c. Delete (or abandon) your Orkut/Facebook/MySpace accounts. That’ll probably puzzle your friends, but the ones that don’t matter will probably stop caring after a while. I like to call it a Friend-o-Filter

d. In case none of these measures are drastic enough for you, you could also try the philmy stuff – change your name and your hairstyle (your face if you like… Khoon Bhari Maang, anybody?), your history or maybe even your profession (periodically for added effect – remember Catch me If You Can?)…!

I doubt if it makes a comprehensive step-by-step guide… but at least if I had to do it, I’d do it this way

So what’s the story behind this post?

In the last two years, I’ve been in three different cities, sometimes having to move from one house to another. Yet, wherever I’ve gone… I’ve taken my virtual world along with me. My profiles on social networking sites teeming with hundreds of friends ensured that I never felt the drastic change. In fact, for five months of my life, my social life was on Google Talk. I’ve always prided myself on the fact that I have 500-odd friends on Orkut and 200-odd on Facebook, and soon hope to make my following grow on Twitter. Even if I was spending the evening alone, I was still in conversation with some old friend, thanks to instant messaging. I doubt I have ever been ‘lonely’, so to speak. Off late, though I get the feeling that the social network I’ve built so carefully over the last few years has turned into a hunters net, collapsing over my head, leaving me cornered and trapped in a place I once enjoyed being in so much.

And that’s when I felt it… an inexplicable and desperate need for anonymity. The need to go somewhere and take life as I know it far from the virtual madding crowd. The need to drop off the face of the earth.

Naturally, I tried to figure out how I’d do it. Paradoxically though, I ultimately decided not to do a Houdini, but rather blog about it. The anti-climax to this post is that all my friends on Facebook are probably reading it right now.

I really am an incorrigible and compulsive socialiser.

Sigh.

It used to be mightier than the sword.

We should mark December 14 of last year as the start of the slow demise of an old adage that inspired writers, poets, and journalists for centuries together to wage war, but with their words. Thanks to Muntadhar al-Zaidi, journalists around the world are now discovering a new medium of expression at press conferences. After the Iraqi journalist, Martin Jahnke and Jarnail Singh each took up the initiative to target a high profile politician for a cause they were deeply concerned about.

It turns out now that it is the shoe that is mightier than the pen. This, in my opinion, is an important paradigm shift for world journalism. Judging by the images relayed on television comparing both the events, there clearly is a decrease in the intensity at which Singh threw his shoe, in fact, it was more of a toss. Singh’s fling was lesser of a throw than an under-arm bowling action. This is probably indicative of the fact that shoe-flinging now is a metaphor of ‘protest’, as the Sikh journalist put it. Effectively this means that a shoe suspended in mid-air, belonging to the interviewer, and travelling in the direction of the interviewee, signals the fact that the interviewee is being strongly disagreed with.

What if this new form of expression were to leave the confines of the press conference and seep into other walks of life?

Out here in Tamil Nadu, the term ‘Seruppaal Adippen’ will develop a whole new meaning altogether.

Shoe-pen-knife could be the new rock-paper-scissors.

We could be looking at a situation where footwear could be banned at all public fora. Corporate culture would require all employees to leave their footwear outside meeting rooms, or much worse, discourage them from wearing any at all. Traffic signals/roundabouts/junctions may see the occasional shoe-fight, and the traffic police would require to be trained especially to dodge the occasional Identified Flying Object.

Fashion designers would be delighted to release their next barefoot-themed line-ups, including shoe-less corporate and party wear. Of course, all is not lost for the shoemakers themselves, who would definitely cash in on the opportunity to make newer ‘aerodynamically’ designed shoes with specially designed grooves to allow for easier grasping, thus allowing a shoe to travel quicker through the air for a stronger impact. If nothing at all, at least certain brands will experience a sudden rise in sales.

Wikipedia, as always, has made a head start on the turn of events with an article on shoeing. With shoe-flinging becoming such a common event within the space of 4 months, could it be only a matter of time before mud slinging becomes more than just a metaphor?

Getting back to comfort zones, I must admit that I am guilty of the crime, if at all it can be called that (most articles on success and fitness use very powerful words to want you to get out of your ‘comfort zone’, so I’m assuming it is a crime). I have begun to notice a pattern every time I move to a new place. A pattern that makes me want things the way they were the last time I was happiest. I plead guilty to combing the Subway website and trying to figure out the closest outlet, even mapping the route on Google Earth; and of course, since I use public transport, which is the cheaper option for me to get there if I want to incorporate it as a part of my regular meal plan.

Why Subway?

In late 2007, I spent some of my best days in Ahmedabad in the company of one of the best roomies I’ve ever known. Eating a subway makes me think back to those days when everything seemed just right, even though I had to deal with stuff like anti-rabies injections after a freak dogbite and what not. At least I learnt how to cook, after years of being the kitchen klutz.

Off late, I’ve begun to obsess about the happiest times of my life.

Some mornings, after the walk from the bus stop to the office, something makes me want to walk to the college canteen and order a poha-sambar and chai.

On some days when I step out of the office for lunch, I’d love to walk back to the mess with my friends and wait in line for some mess-style lunch to be doled out, which oddly enough, I really miss these days.

And then there are those days at work, when it’s barely 4 in the evening and I’m counting the seconds up to teatime. That’s when I wish I could just get up, walk down the stairs and grab a chai for a session of idle chat with the gang.

At the end of the day I climb up the apartment stairs, and almost expect to turn to the left into the computer lab where a dozen people might be crowded around a single computer watching a weird Korean movie.

Sometimes when the phone rings, I answer it half-expecting a call for a department movie/birthday bash/terrace party.

Most of all, there are days when I wish I could just hail a metered rick and jump in without having to bargain. This probably stands a better chance at materializing than my other ‘wishes’, but then again, I wonder.