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Name: Anindita
Country: India
Metro: Mumbai
Birthday: 4/27/1983
Gender: Female
Interests: Cinema. Indie, short films. Linguistics. Liberty.
Classic, alternative, folk Rock. Paul Simon, Nick Drake. Tagore, Kerouac, Cummings, Garcia Marquez. Scrabble. Semiotics. Shoes. Imagist poetry, free verse. Scented candles. Pinot noir. Travel, trekking. Mythology.
Industry: Media
Message: message me
Member Since:
6/29/2005
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With time, people can lose their capacity to
comprehend the unsaid. And then, a moment of silence starts to weigh upon their
eardrums like the incessant knock of a wayward branch on a glass pane. The air
that dwells in the space between two bodies sours. It curdles and addles
and raises up a stink.
You have to move apart and let the
cacophony of a Monday numb your senses. Allow it to deafen your ears to the piercing
silence. Let the vast expanse of space that surrounds you now to let you
chase yourself. Play peekaboo.
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| Drown your woes in Bubble wrap
My favourite time-wasting space on the web is a virtual bubble wrap gallery. Try 'manic mode' for superlative de-stressing.
My second favourite time-wasting site is a DIY art page ( click mouse to change colour, print screen and copy-paste in Photoshop or Paint).
Third in the list is an indexical highbrow art and culture site ( which incidentally led me to the second favourite).
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| No Spoilers I loved Babel. Inarritu's first movie, ' Amores perros' is one of my all time favourites. I suspect it's also the reason I started to learn Spanish. Amores perros was brutal, raw and set completely in Mexico City. The three stories that converged were gripping but they belonged to another world, not mine or yours. But Babel, his third, is seamlessly fluid and painfully real. It's real even when it takes you to places you've never been to, and into the lives of people you'll never meet- a Mexican nanny, an adolescent goatherder in Morocco and a deaf-mute teenager in Tokyo. It’s Bay-bel- from the iconic Tower of Babel that men tried to build to reach heaven. The Biblical story narrates how God thrust a host of languages on man to breed miscommunication and so the Tower was never built. The Nagas from North East India have a similar story, only that it involves a Goddess who cursed them. The curse is a reality for the Nagas who recount this, because every Naga tribe speaks a language that is almost mutually unintelligible. Babel is about how we don’t listen to oneanother, and how we’ve managed to make ourselves unintelligible to the other. It’s also Babble- from the incessant chatter that we’ve filled our heads with. It’s about how we need to filter out the white noise to hear each other.
I heard more than one complaint about the boredom that Babel brings before I saw it. Really,who cares about less screen time for Brad Pitt when you have Gael GarciaBernal? That apart, I did hear a fair amount of cribbing on the exit stairwaysas well. All I can say is- you, you and you don't deserve the movie. | | |
| Empress Unimpress
I was invited for the Kingfisher
swimsuit calendar launch aboard Vijay Mallya’s luxury yacht on Sunday.
Not me as a person per se, but me as someone with a press card. To
detract from the glitz, the invite wasn't addressed to me-- I
haven't been around long enough. But my colleagues were very benevolent
in handing me a pass. It was a pass for two, and between us we had two
of them. A very ideal scenario for a team of four people and so we were
all supposed to go. On Saturday night, the rest of the gang (who I now
have a new found respect for because of their discretion and judgment of
such events) made imaginary alternate plans. They could, because it
wasn't a work thing for us. We don't cover events.
Lately I have become very obsessive
about five-day plans and timetables. I suppose it’s a need- based,
temporary obsessive behaviour but it’s the only way I can make my way
through the work week. So, to stick to my ‘schedule’, as silly as that
might sound- I went.
It was a particularly scorching
Sunday. I hadn’t dressed up ‘cause I thought I should be proper and
press-like (yes, I realise this is beginning to border on
ridiculousness). But it worked. At the green gate of Ballard Pier,
where we were supposed to enter, one of the boys at the event
registration desk looked up and said, “Media?”
I was quite dismayed with being
given a Media badge because I thought I might have to pretend to be
soaking in the events so I could write about it- when all I wanted to
do was to sip Mojitos on a Sunday afternoon and check out what the
big deal with this luxury yacht was. But then I also thought that the
“Media?” sprung up because I have this distinct air of intelligence
about me, which distinguishes me from the‘real’ guests. After five
minutes on the barge, I realised it was the ratio of clothed areas:
bare skin which distinguished the media from the real guests that
afternoon.
I had taken S along and he had
voiced concerns about the whereabouts of our footwear since the invite
read ‘ no footwear aboard the Indian Empress’. I, with my zero
expertise in such areas, had assured him that there would definitely be
some sort of fancy locker room arrangement. We’re talking luxury yachts,
I even had images of cute, disposable deck slippers being handed out.
Anyway, coming back to the
registration desk, that boy decided I should be someone called
‘Gayatri’ for ‘security reasons’. I think that precise moment was the
beginning of the randomness that the afternoon was. We drove through
the green gate, we were two hours late as per the invite but I’d
thought we would still be the early ones. We weren’t. Promising yacht
parties get people out of bed early even on Sundays. We had to walk
down to the floating barge. Dr. Mallya, the stage, the bar, the MC, the
swimsuit models- everyone seemed to be there. I was a little confused
then because I’d really thought we were all going to be ON the yacht.
The yacht was accessible from the barge via an unstable bridge and it
was lined with people leaning out of the deck with drinks in hand-
looking very tizzy already. The unveiling happened. No actually, nothing
happened. The MC made some moronic jokes and invited people to play
beer-drinking games best confined to junior college birthday parties.
I was trying to be happy with my
drink but it was a little difficult to do that with the sun shining
through my glass. I had visions of magnifying glass- paper burning experiments. At that point, seeing the sea of tired smiles around
me, I felt really glad that I was under no compulsion to pretend to be
having fun. The only people I knew were some of the tizzed ones leaning
out of the deck and we exchanged long-distance greetings. Through the
course of the afternoon, one woman did some air-kissing and asked me,
Teju, how I was doing. Later, at the buffet a newbie model type guy
gushed a ‘Teju!’ and realised I wasn’t her when I looked up. I don’t
think the air-kisser did. I don't know who Teju is but I suspect she is some socialite type who sadly, looks like me.
To sum, the afternoon was about sun
shades, summer dresses and shoes strewn about. Oh, the shoes. When I
was done with the barge, and even a smile from Upen Patel, we were
ready to see the yacht. As we walked towards it, we saw it- the mightly
vast sea of shoes. Stamped, lost, falling off board ( okay, not that).
Anyway, I had to go on the yacht so I decided to risk forsaking my new Nine West pumps. But getting on the yacht wasn’t as simple as that. We found
ourselves in some sort of a queue! The man in charge- a wrinkled ( not
with age, but with the wind) bony white guy said the yacht had a
capacity of 120 people and there were already 200 people on board. He
would let us in only when 100 people offloaded. That didn’t look like
it was going to happen. The MC announced some things about how people
should circulate so everybody can get a chance to see the Indian
Empress. But people just didn’t come off. They leaned out of the deck,
waved to people, sipped at their drinks and stayed there. Finally, after
half an hour in this line, they let a batch in. I walk in and I see that
poor S is still beyond Bony White’s outstretched arms! Yes, Bony-Man
had to outstretch his arms ‘cause people were trying to sneak in
through him. But he was fair in his dealings, I must give that to him.
Being Unindian, he was unaware ofo ur societal hierarchy where
Bollywood tops the list, models and society types come second and so
on. He wouldn’t let Preity Zinta, the chief guest in. He didn’t know who
she was till someone whispered into his ear. He grumbled some and then
let her pass.
Enough said. Point being, I waited
on the deck for S to come through for half an hour or more. I exchanged
sympathetic glances with girls whose dates had also been left behind
because of the cruel ways of Stony-White. Then the sun and air-kissing
got unbearable and I walked down, had some dessert because the dessert
counter was closer than the lunch counter and left.
After that torturous and vaguely amusing afternoon, I know nothing about the Indian Empress or the swimsuit calender.
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| TheGlorious mornings
I have never been, whatthey call a morning person. I like my sprawling, eventless late nightsinterspersed with the occasional very late night, when I contemplate the state of
my life only to conveniently forget the poignant bits of it the next morning.
Lately though, I’ve been waking up at a very impressive 6:00 a.m to trymy hand at the wheel once again. That’s forced me to think of morningthings-to-do because I can’t go back to sleep after a torturous sessionof not being able to drive. The to-do things have been few andfar between and that’s given me excessive time for introspection.
This is today’s hypothesis: Every time I read Kerouac, go to Goa, seethe first few seasons of The Wonder Years (when it was more about lifeand less about lust) or listen to Paul Simon- my life seemsinexplicably incorrect.Thereare of course manymore things, but those are too tedious to be explained. Things likeeverytime I hear that particular line of this particular song or every timeI’m at this specific spot at that exact time of day are best leftunexplained. But anyhow, if somany things make my life seem incorrect to me, there must besomething terribly wrong with it.
Everything is normal, proper and correct in the general sense. Anobliging and loving boyfriend. An accommodating family.Colleagues who agree to my choice of lunch places. Friends who put upwith all my swings and tantrums. All the elements of a biographicalmovie called ‘The Good Life’. And no, I’m not romanticising melancholy.Maybe I am a drama-queen afterall, and I need some pain to keep me going on. Or some madness. Or magic.
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