The last time I met a guy who didn’t expect me to sleep with him the first time
and still didn’t call me prudish or say sthing totally stupid like I really want to make love to you
and understood that i would rather go slow like in college in bases
and who I’d actually want to DATE
has a place in my memory where the neurons are ageing
BHAM
Thank you
MAN
I am moving to Bombay , Mumbai to work for a television channel. I picked that over a newspaper in bangalore.I don’t know if i’ve sold my soul. My job sounds fun. The city is promising. I am hungry for life and newness. SO i leave all that I’ve known and move once again. Bangalore is littered with the past and the past has never done anything for me so Bombay, here I come .
I am finally a real journalist. 🙂
I’ve learnt this year that your hands can never be cleaned of the blood and sweat of others who didn’t deserve to be where they are.
No , don’t run away, It’s a small story. Listen.
I went to a free Tibet protest the other day. They screamed , they cried for their parents in Tibet who they were afraid to contact, in case the Chinese government found out. (They are quite arbit in their arresting routines anyway).
Long Live the Dalai Lama . Who is the killer? CHINA Who is the butcher? CHINA PEOPLE OF THE WORLD _ SUPPORT us.
All of the girls there including me were wearing those sexy skinny jeans made most definetely in China , atleast the cheaper species that students like me can afford.
In January, I made a film (ok WE , a group of 5) made a film about bonded child labour in Kancheepuram. Those beautiful kancheepuram sarees that your mother wore to weddings was probably woven in a dingy little room by a child who had to work the next twenty years to repay the loan his parents took.
Nine hours a day, everyday, weaving mechanically so that rich women can look pretty in weddings and rich men can flirt with them .
So how can you have a conscience without being hypocritical ? Go to a free tibet protest but wear jeans made under unimaginable sweatshop conditions by workers?
Nike shoes- child labour
coke- uses water that farmers don’t get to grow food crops
Benneton-racism
add to the list.
but you know what i mean?
Hide in a jungle and wear no clothes and then have a clear conscience
?
I remember Lhasa.july 2007. Even then I saw it coming.Because everything was so quiet and so abnormally normal.
The Barkhor Square is the Tibetan heartland .It has the holiest temple for the Buddhists – The Jokhang. A man was playing a traditional instrument. A large crowd was gathered around him.The police came and shooed him away.They were afraid of crowds. But the man seemed used to being shooed away and the police and him laughed .
The Tibetans selling gorgeous handicrafts and jewellery would ensure me that I was buying the best ”Tibeti, no Chinese’they’d say.They’d smile a lot.
They’d say they loved India, were grateful to India.
But below the surface, anger and resentment was brewing and now, before the olympics is the best time to let it all out.
A problem is an important international issue only when it is not politically dangerous. And nobody wants to displease big bad China.
OH MAN! My blog is so depressing. Like , please , I need to get a life. Who said it(life) was fair. Sometimes you are in impossible situations. Sometimes there is so little time and so much to make the most of. Sometimes you are with people who are older or smarter or more experienced and your ‘good’is not good enough.Sometimes no one really knows there are banshees wailing in your head threatening to wail out when you are making some
power point presentation in front of a crowd or filming some stupid thing.
But who gives a shit. You just do your best and go drinking in the evening.
I resolve not to write sad posts anymore!
In my diary that I kept for many years I always took to writing when I was sad. That means my sadness is so well recorded. And rare moments of extreme excitement – usually to do with boys I recorded with explicit details.
So those are the only recordsI have
So yeah no more sadness.
While shooting a story on the eviction of hawkers , I ended up in a dilapidated decaying complex. Shops here sold scrap, old laptops,antiques,fish, anything one can think of and birds.
I had birds when I was a child and seeing birds instantly transports me to worlds of innoccence and such intense love for these little creatures.
These birds looked ill , their feathers were discoloured and they huddle together . They were literally in clumps.Almost corpses. One bird was all alone in a cage and afraid of every passerby. Understandably there were many so he had no where to fly to in his cage.
Anyway, my emotions told me I must get the owner into trouble.
The shop assistant sat on the dirty floor, amidst bird shit and stray feathers relishing his fish curry and rice.
I asked him if he had macaws.
He suddenly sprang up and took notice of me. He went in to wash his hands and came back to call his boss. The boss wasn’t picking up.He kept trying while I waited patiently, half feeling bad,half thinking what a good story it would be.
He said , the phone still on his piece , that he could give me grey parrots for 23,000 and macaws for 2 lakhs.
He said that because of the bird flu,he didn’t have stock. BUt that I should come back after a month.
I said I would thinking I would bringthe cameras.
But suddenly I thought of this man living a sordid life making money out of birds and felt bad about cheating him.
Though my heart was still with the birds miserable and caged far from the glorious amazon forests where they belong,
I realised how hard it is to take sides.
I have many photographs.I have little droplets of ideas about great large things to write about.I saw a child in a posh cafe sitting so quite while his pedenatic father who talked business with a white man.The white man occasionally asked the boy
inane questions in a sickly friendly voice meant for kids. I thought that would be worth a post.
I made a film.
I went to Bangalore and had some fun.
But then in my heart I just feel so hideously empty. I just wish there was one person who really cared, really cared.
I feel like a fool for caring, really caring.I could sit in this library and cry . I have nothing much to write about, no poetry, no jokes.
2007 wasn’t the best year of my life. It wasn’t the worst.But it had moments of both.
There were moments I felt like this is how I want to be and live and that I am acting in my own dream. There were moments when i just lay in a dingy hostel room, my cosy home room,hotel rooms and cried uncontrollably of lonliness, hurt, confusion.
But the list of awesome things I did include
1. I said I want to go to Kashmir and I went in two days
2.I said I want to go to TIbet and I went. And to Nepal.
3. I said I want to go half way across the world , to America, to meet a boy and I scammed it and I WENT.
4. Things I can’t say here
5.I got into the college I ‘ve been wanting to get into since like age 15
6. I managed despite everything to stay in one piece
7.I didn’t smoke most of the year
8. I baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarely smoked up.
This year was just so damn tough though. I made smart decisions so far atleast but I’ve felt the intensest emotions and felt the lonliest ive ever been used as i am to having large groups of close friends around me all the time. I moved to new city and boy left and started from scratch all alone.
I learnt to be alone and not break.
I guess at a point after growing up you just begin to think of childhood as that slightly cute phase when you pretty much had no freedom and hence no excitement. I was just reading a very well written blog – woman just writing very well about average middIle class indian childhood memories. And suddenly and especially in the sudden context of all the terrible complications my life involves today i felt sudden tear inducing warmth for childhood.
Wow! I am in a class about some hot shot or suppossedly hot shot guy from the planning commission or some such is taking it.
Anyway , If you guys have ever gotten stoned and had a really good trip you might remember getting flashes of images from when you are really young. I always have a sort of a slideshow of memories from between 3 – 6. Times when I was really happy, with my parents and brother getting excited about a plastic doll and being excited about it for like three months .Converting a dupatta into a saree and playing teacher teacher with myself. When I was five, I was scared of locking myself in a room alone . But I was embarrased about my parents hearing my teacher teacher sessions. Even though they could hear it even if I shut the door.
Anyhow SO, i would make my nearly but not really deaf grandfather sit with me in the room.
When he died seven years back I was in boarding school and my parents didn’t even tell me till a week after. Which means I never saw him dead and lifestyle. I only remembered him as the lively man he was.
I remember being traumatized because my older brother Gog always said that the world will end in July 1999. That a man called Nostradamus said so and it was true. He has another version of the story which said it will end in 2000. This upset me to unhealthy propotions. Once I overheard an uncle say that he will see God by 2000. This seems absolutely hilarious to my present jaded, ‘rational’ , post modern mind but then it seemed to confirm everything. The world will end by 2000 so God must be seen before that.
Getting back to my adult culture, getting stoned is suppossed to activate the happy parts of your brain. Mostly the memories that come to me then are random child hood memories , the ones that were deeply submerged before. So it brings me to think that you are only truly trly happy when you are a kid,
Your parents take care of every damn thing and you don’t even have things like exams to worry about.
Yesterday I got a new shiny laptop but I wasn’t even really excited by it. I just went picked it up. And my old laptop was so loyal to me . She has all my writing and my pictures and is old and mishandlable. The other laptop is too fragile and bitchy like a mistress.
i think it is because i went home fordiwali but I am suddenly feeling the alien feeling of homesickness.
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