I have 412 contacts on my phone, and not a single person I can call right now. I just wish I was somehere. And think something else, but it's not happening. It's turning out to be a Joni Mitchell day...How long can this go on?

Muzak

So…I haven’t been doing anything productive for quite some time now. It’s that time of the year again when the internet becomes my best buddy. Which is the case, um, all through the year.
I’ve heard such great stuff lately, and self just realized self has never blogged about music…
First I’ll set away all the I’m-going-to-kill-this-year-but-have-in-acuality-fucked-up-bigtime-records. I’ll be honest about my expectations with Tiesto’s new release (Just be) this year. There were none. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to listen to it only to bitch about it later when a friend dropped in the cd. It sucks. It’s repetitive and sometimes he’s really going too soft. Looks like the end of the legacy erm?
Bon Sinclar Sound of Freedom has too many people going orgasmic this summer. Somehow, this Sean Paul + Carrribean flavour in Sounds of Freedom single is not really my thing. Needless to say, all consoles from Goa to Bangalore are going to play this song to death and eventually, force many to love it. Like that cheesy Children of the Sky. But do I see myself dancing when ‘give a lil’ love’ is playing in the house? Hell yes.
And I truly love the cover art. So Joplin.






And now over to the Gunners. The 2 best albums so far this year – Sound of Silver and From here we go Sublime. I‘ve never really believed that techno is dead, and artists like Alex Willner prove me right. Everything about this album is perfecto. Every song is taking out a new sound. And it doesn’t veer towards the boring image ambient music is increasingly being accused of, it’ll really make your head spin.
I won’t say anything about Sounds of Silver. It’s hasn't got off the hook on my player since 4 days soo….


And Chromophobia is another superb album. Electronica is going mad!





I love Pocket Symphony. No matter what anyone says about Air, I’m always going to check out their releases and faithfully load it onto my machine. Too many people call it boring, and I find it so ridiculous to classify music like this because NOT everything can be played in a club for you to dance to, and with that dumb logic, I can’t deviate from half of the best music the world has to offer.

Someone put me on to Kings of Leon. I love the whole sound, weirdly; it reminds me of Frank Zappa. The whole brazen vocals, the crazy riffs. ‘Charmer’ is my new drunk song!





And the most bizarrely beautiful female of all times has finally shut them up after the lull. You say it Bjork!



Yet to hear Cassadaga and Neon Bible. They comprise my future week agenda.





I love the heat! It truly gives me wonderful excuses to hibernate.

Just saw another one of those abominable fairness cream ads on tv. HELL. It had this girl who wants to make her theatre group work but has no audience. So she puts the solution-of-all-measly-female-problems(FAIR & LOVELY) and becomes Ayesha Takia pretty... becomes an actress. and lo behold! everyone wants to see heroine material doing her drama thingy now.
What the fuck? Who believes this shiite anyways? So if someone is not an actress and is then consequently not pretty, What is she supposed to do? Go die? And is this what the measure of success really is? To strut your crotch out to the world and do the shimmy?
I remember once they had another one of these freak-show ads where this young girl is getting married to a man who looks about 60, because she's dark skinned. and then she gets fair and hooks up with some 24 yr old computer engineer.Wowie.
I wanna know how many of these retards who churn out this crap in the name of advertising are actually fair skinned themselves? Or their daughters even?
If they are all fair, then there's no problem because then they are obviously superior human beings so the matters's closed.
But if they are dark, do they recognize their immense dickhead potential? And do they feel the burden of the trauma they make millions of such gullible consumers go through.. Who truly believe that putting some dumb lotion on your face will turn your life around.

Why is it that a man can choose not to shave,live like a slob, have a house with a refrigerator...beer..and music, and still be cool?
And a woman can be smart, witty, well read, and a dozen other things, and still have all these godforsaken typecasts falling on her from all directions?

My dear friend M has to hear constant jabs from her ugly stupid and dumb boyfriend N... only because she's put on 2 kilos.. so she, inspite of looking as great as she always does, is now having paranoia attacks over stepping out in public in a pair of shorts.
Why is everyone so busy with fucking up each other's peace of mind? All these dumb men who go to UASSS to study, come back and tell me their exploits and their own version of life-and-times-of-a-west-coast-hustler..Bah!
But these morons will still get married to a fair,tall, beautiful,homely,cultured,can cook girl ..their mamas will choose for them.
They are too mentally stunted to be capable of accepting and fathoming women of any other category. And even though they can't count the number of continents or remember dating any good looking girl in school... they still want some model-type in bed.
And society is pandering to their right to feel justified over thinking such drivel? By making women some sort of clone tube where you keep on feeding some new data that she just sooo badly needs to aquire into her personality to be palatable to men so that they can be induced to fuck her..and marry her, for those good girls who don't dream of sex.
Now every Indian girl after 21 realizes that you don't need to do jackshit to get a man in this country. But noo. We are not going to limit your role to just that missy.
You need to be beautiful because there is no other way. And after we define beautiful, if you try to exceed your defintions of that.. we'll just term you a slut if you're unavailable.

Whatever. .Like I give a damn. Last I heard someone filed a PIL against these parasites.Wonder what happened to that.

*****

Yesterday I finally went for City of Djiins. Well, I didn't expect anything great from the play considering the book was such a caricatured outlay of Delhi's history...I'm pleasantly surprised. The production was beautiful. It feels really good to see the theatre scene in Delhi coming up so well that it's finanancially viable to put up something this grand.
The only part when I felt sad about watching it in Delhi was when most people sitting around me started smirking uncomfortably when the eunuch depiction came up.
I've never been able to comprehend the ostracization of eunuchs. Their lives do not get documented and no one really gives two hoots about them here. And I see this scenario only in India, as most of the South Asian countries have transgenders and asexuals dictating their laws regarding property,marriages and employment. And having legalised sex change operations.

Maybe because as of now, we can't even admit that Indians do actually fuck. So to reach the point to enable open-mindedness about people who have sexual aberrations will surely take a long time.

****

Bjork's coming out with Volta on May 8. Dum dee dum dum.

India

An 8 year old girl has been watering our garden since the last 3 years. Her mother irons clothes near our building and doesn’t want to send her to school. The girl’s name is Geeta. She runs around all day doing menial work wearing clothes I wore once. She plays with my toys and can buy chocolates for herself. She always gets bright eyed whenever she sees me coming from the airport. And I see those eyes and the pony tail once more when I’m leaving. Just four times a year.

But her family can’t afford anything for her. No food, no education, no life. She’ll never wear Aldo shoes and discover the wonders of mascara. She’ll never contemplate on the emotional security a man can give you. Sex without condoms for her will never be risqué. She’ll never drink cognac. She’ll never travel out of the country to see the world.

These things have become so important to me that I find lives without them so… unimaginably dull. And bereft of any kind of pleasure?

But there are millions who go and fetch water from a public tanker 3 km from their tin huts every morning, precisely at the time I get up and think of waffles. And there are countless who are suffering malnutrition worse than Africa in my country, at the time I refuse to eat food made at home which is enough for 4 simply because I want to eat dumplings. There are too many instances that make me feel like a prize capitalist slave who doesn’t have two minutes of compassion time in their life other than to buy a flower off a traffic signal.

I never cared about these things 2 years ago. There was too much to think about. Also, modern times have given people like me the luxury to entertain depression and just think about our past until we get over it. But someone is not thinking even after 4 pregnancies and 3 miscarriages simply because the man refuses to stop.

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on the blogosphere for quite some time now. There’s been so much that feel like déjà vu. And much reminds you of thoughts you once indulged in and then put them away. But recently I’ve read some bloggers declaring their preference for continuance of British rule in India. And how the country is basically one big shit-hole and nothing can be done to change that.

Such juvenile crap burns me up so much that I can’t even write about it. I guess currently, it’s much in vogue to be pro-India after movies like Rang de Basanti and such making such an impression on the popular mind, for better or for worse. So I don’t really talk about this.

How did I suddenly get so patriotic? I can’t think of a better word, although it seems so darn serious, but patriotic it is. It’s there is every thought. Even when I heard about the Virginia shoot-out, all I though about was how terrible it would be to die abroad. I know how delighted I used to be if I came across a sardar in London. It really used to make my day.

And it seemed so surreal, because I never respected anything about my identity when I left. I can’t say that I was a victim to racism but I surely saw it happen and never did anything about it. Gradually, it occurred to me that my cultural identity is perhaps weak?

And it’s considered low-brow by most societies. It really wasn’t such a big deal to be an Indian. And I used to be so happy on the numerous occasions I was mistaken for some other nationality. Who wants to belong to that ‘brown’ country anyways…

I didn’t end up living that farce for too long. And felt this intense need to protect my country. The name, culture, past, freedom struggle. As I grew up to be more individualistic, it became a more defined part of me. And just as I won’t tolerate someone mocking my family, I would certainly fight for my nation.

And the day I came back to Delhi airport. Saw tube lights. Ugly tube lights all over the airport. Ugly airport. Rude taxi drivers. Beggars. All the stuff that’s become classic India to most movies.

But it didn’t disgust me anymore. It just felt mine. I didn’t care. There was enough I’d read by now much to understand why we were at that economic or development phase. And why it would take us more time. And how congenitally, so many people and their civilizations are dissimilar to us. And how thankfully, we will never become an America.

As long as I’ll have it, I’ll give something towards the future

And it pisses me off to see people like Anil Ambani and Amitabh Bachhan donating 1.5 crore to Tirupati temple…wtf…What do I marvel at? The sheer stupidity.. or the bigotry.. the decadent superstition…

And I see nothing wrong in enforcing compulsory National Anthem because it’ll take a lot of time for Indians to love their country as much as the Americans to sing it without being asked. There’s nothing wrong with banning a bikini having the national flag… because we are different. Just like no one wants to be us, why are we dying to ape others?

All this is sounding so maudlin to me… hmm, especially since I have never devoted much space for beliefs in my life. And even though after this I’ll head out for a cigarette and really forget about it…

But it’ll hit back at me from any street in India. Because it never fails to remind me that it's mine. And that I have to do something for it.

The great Indian Clan

Lately I’ve been seeing so much of Rahul Gandhi on the news. Future of Uttar Pradesh.Finally (phew!), rahul baba is here to solve all our worries and struggles with this state, as glowingly reported by Congress workers.
It’s difficult for me to exactly corroborate the vastness of my issues with what he represents. It’s pathetic that even after being so educated, the money and power will make a seemingly decent chokhra boy like him to express pride over the dirty clan politics of his family like a blithering idiot. The impassioned ‘speech of the moment’ which would have been cunningly devised by some IAS who would know UP caste frictions all too well to capture the right pulse, while Rahul baba perfects his Hindi in an air-conditioned van. Just like his mother who memorizes her Hindi written in English.

So Ayodhya wouldn’t have happened if the great Gandhis were involved? It never dawned on him to think how his mother could have intervened at that time if she really gave a flying rat’s ass. And not surprisingly, ‘madam’ has picked up Cabinet Ministers who were in power the time Ayodhya happened to comprise her government presently. And the great Congress regime is not helping the farmers, youth, or the middle class, so why would they really bother with a mosque at that time? Or maybe they would, just like the Government didn’t have the money to fund education till 14 years for all children, and now has the finances to support Urdu and regular education for Muslim children across Uttar Pradesh and the rest of the country.
This is because the Congress wants Indian Muslims to believe that they indeed are really poor and downtrodden and need to be spoon fed in whatever they plan to do. We’ll fund your primary and secondary education. And get you seats in colleges you wouldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams on the basis of marks such as yours. Then give you scholarships for the additional years that you would obviously take to pass out of such colleges. And then assure you great jobs in the corporate sectors, for which General category has to kill for… don’t worry, we are working on it. Azim has a problem with that right now, but it’ll surely be taken care of. And then if you wish to do the Hajj, we’ll fund that as well.

Brilliant.

The actual statistics for illiteracy and unemployment amongst Muslims would be out in some time hopefully, giving a picture truer than the one projected by the Sachar panel. I do not have issues with providing help and economic benefits, but just as you want to be convinced that the beggar in Colaba is not going to shoot up heroine with the money you give her and will indeed feed herself, (ok, bad example), it's necessary to understand the various channels such benefits pass through.
If the statistics are different, which they would be, considering these figures are 15 years old , then we can probably concentrate on poverty- based benefits instead of the illogical caste- based ones. If the country is trying to grapple with the passage of casteism for so long, is there any point in harnessing that ghost all over again to continuously remind people of their origin? But what is truly classic is Congress's peeve with administrating such a Census. Apparently they don't want to divide the country on caste lines wherein ordinary citizens are questioned on the basis of their caste and economic conditions related to that..against secularism , Gandhi ideals yada yada yada. Ok. Secular point taken. But expectedly, they would not view reservations from the same prism. That is for betterment.

So now that I have gone completely off the topic.. Hmm, Rahul Gandhi should probably sit at home and read some coffee table books on the rural heartland of his country that was never exposed to him in his student days abroad. But it’s really so hopeless. He’s most likely to get illiterate votes as it often happens in India when a Gandhi scion calls himself the ‘son of the soil.’ Just like Sonia Gandhi is the ‘bahu’ of each and every home of Bharatland. Gawd.

And I don’t even see the foolish idealism of Rajiv Gandhi in him, so maybe he’ll make less fatal mistakes that won’t atleast cost him his life.

So I talk to this asshole after 4 fucking years and he waits till 5 in the morning to profess his carnal desires for me. I feel like such a slut. Why is it that I let creeps like him get the better of me every bloody time?
I mean, really, what is it with men? Did he forget the time he cried over his dog's death in front of me for 4 straight days. Or when he felt insecure about his writing career and broke that whole i'm-the-man-with-everything-going-for-me-glorious story. And everything else. How we reached a point beyond mindless conversation. How I could do the flamenco in front of him and feel more beauty than what my art could give.

But no. It's really true I guess, that people forget everything that you say and all that you do for them. All that remains is being horny within the sheets.
After 4 fucking years...he cannot even be bothered with maintaining the pretence of having a cup of coffee first. Nooo....I'm the red-blooded Indian male who will eternally conform to my expected levels of female commodification.
Fuck you bastard. I hope someone hangs you by the thumbs till you die. And then I'l make freakin' lampshades out of your sex-starved skin.

Consistent bad luck

Whenever I experience some passage of time in my life, I get complacent about its whole course. Probably this is the point where it'll fit in nicely. Will reach somewhere stable. But leaving that ridiculously maudlin illusion, it never fails to burst on my face in pieces .. in its prime ugliness.
And that is why I'm still grappling with the venom flung at me by people I shared my mascara with once. Shocked by all that people seem to know about me. Numb that the dreaded thought was repeated once more, this time in front of more people who will chuckle at my analysis over coffee.

So I have a 'black' spirit. I do not leave people without first breaking them apart from others. And no relationship can stay intact if my presence happens to steer close to it: people leave each other for me ( even though it seems too bloody juvenile to state things like this, I just have to go on and bitch), And women start choosing each other. All because of me. And someone has lately discovered this and is stating it with much delight.

Even though it seems preposterous that ANYONE would bother to give me such importance and control over their lives, a part of it still fits a sound description of a 'witch' like character. And of course I've ideally ranted against such attempts before... I wonder if anyone knows of the nights I've spent holed up in my room with drawn curtains , making passing words spin around in my head.

The first time I ever heard this was from a man I was trying not to know too well. And of course it surprised me as it was my little secret. And now it is from a woman. For long I had convinced myself that groups break with my arrival because I end up exposing the farce and circles within them. But that conclusion sounds so self-involved that I've firmly rejected it by now.

One month has been spent predictably. Shaking imperceptibly when I heard it and now just going on with my work. All the time devising ways to cause her enough pain to understand my mind and the time that was. Why is there no dignity left after people exhaust each other's utility values? And then sleep dreamily envisioning many people apologizing to me , and then we all walk ahead towards something different.

I mean, hell, of course, I don't care about people and all that. But its a nice thought to get drunk over.
Obviously I'll get over all this just like things in the past. And then wait for another blast some other day.

Even though I've never felt the dire need to surround myself with voices, the dynamics amongst them really gets me thinking.

I see so many trying to be someone they are not. And too many doing such sick stuff. To their wives. Their daughters. Their 'best' friends. But we still exalt them to a better place. All in the name of what? culture...family.... Why is it that when you don't pretend, no one seems to understand you?
Maybe all personalities are already laid out in pretty boxes and there's no room for dissimilar ones. World is too busy with black and white. On the periphery.
And anyone eating alone in a restaurant is necessarily lonely. And anyone who thinks nothing of gender divide is necessarily a slut. And anyone who doesn't fit into our boxes is fucked up. Even the all-American Brietney Spears.
Maybe that is why I can be nothing else but 'black'.