Chasing Dogs

A recently acquired adrenaline addiction forces me out every night. In the past I never quite understood why people would run around the same building 5 times – but now I’m so desperate for a fix I’m willing to do precisely that. Of course, drowning my mind to discotheque (wonly the hexadecimal mix please) totally helps.

Af ter I walked around the same building 5 times, the dogs began to recognize me and its rude to ignore beings that recognize one, so I began to stop to pet them and say hello. Then I started worrying about them – who feeds them, where do they sleep, what do they do if they get thirsty and of course which ba&*^$d left them behind – because these don’t look like street dogs. Rather they seem to belong to the class of someone’s puppy but no one’s dog.

For a few days I patted them on the head and said ‘tomorrow baby’ and let the guilt build to critical mass. And today apparently was the day for that!  So off I went (to the tune of Salome ) once I saw the dogs and felt that unbearable pang of ‘poor baby’ to acquire something edible. Half a loaf of bread purchased, I came jogging back to do my good deed for the day only to find the two of them missing. It must have been quite funny to the other residents out for their gentle post dinner constitutionals to see me running around clutching a loaf of bread, looking underneath cars rather desperately and saying ‘bloody dogs’J

I did find them and feed them after a bit and never have I seen bread gulped down so fast! Of course one felt very very good samaritan. And that mixed up with the adrenaline. Very heady! Strangely though – these and other episodes are only serving to convince me that pet ownership is somehow wrong. But that is a debate for another day.

Caferati

Mr. Bukowski is wrong. Yesterday I met a bunch of folks who proved it does not work that way. If you want to be a writer you do have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen – the best thing I heard was what took someone six months to write. The other cool piece was offered up as not quite ready and needing to be read to somebody first.

Having it roar out might be a pleasant sound to oneself, but it is unlikely to please an audience with a more tasteful ear.  We did have a couple of people from the Bukowski school of writing letting it roar out – it was a little difficult not to wince and cover one’s ears, but the gynac and the gentleman in construction who write on the side did show me the one other quality writers-to-be need in good measure – courage.

Consolations on a Friday Afternoon

Its consolation in the first place that I can post this from the prison with high firewalls. Having said that let me move on to the others. 

I have been strangely cheerful despite much cause for depression, but the chemical in the veins causing this strange phenomenon seemed to have hit breakdown as of 1:00 PM or so. And when that blue blue breakdown feeling hits there are only 2 choices (atleast in the prison with high firewalls) – random page on wiki or random poem on minstrels. 

Today i picked the latter and found this which led me to this. Wow! Guess who is happy , chortling and dreaming of doing Nothing.

Realization!

I’ve been thinking I'm in the wrong line of business for some time but this finally convinced me. Obviously if one is serious one should be filling blogs with R code on SEM and ruminations on the merits calculating a quartile in R rather SPSS or SAS.

Really – I couldn’t care less!

Bheja Fried!

This week is rather depressing when compared to weeks past. Its not that something bad is happening, rather that nothing good is! Anyways to console myself, I covered for both the long term and the short term. In the long term I made plans to run away to the hills and for the short term I ran away to the movies and got my Bheja Fried. J

I remember someone saying ‘Oh, but it’s a remake of that French Film’. (yes it is apparently a remake of Le Diner de Cons). However, it still takes talent to translate something well to the Indian scene. The perfection with which accents of even the most minor characters– from the Jamshedpuri singer to the Mallu nurse calling in to report an accident – have been picked must be appreciated. Vinay Pathak and Rajat Kapoor carry off their roles very well – and they had a lot to carry off! . Most of the movie is shot within one room of an apartment and all the action is based on conversations. The completely indoor setting did give one a claustrophobic feeling towards the end, but it would have set in a lot earlier if it were not for the brilliance of the dialogue. Ranvir Shorey’s tax inspector was quite overdone, so that jarred a bit. Overall though – AAAFull Recommendation.  

Oh. Of course I had full paisa vasool because I learnt two new hindi words – ba#$%er and P*^%a – and a combination of the two results in a beautiful Captain Haddock like curse. Except more gross.

Speaking with other voices, Wishing for other lives

Letting this poem which spoke to me, speak to you.  

Unwise Purchases

They sit around the house
not doing much of anything: the boxed set
of the complete works of Verdi, unopened.
The complete Proust, unread:

The French-cut silk shirts
which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet
and make me look exactly
like the kind of middle-aged man
who would wear a French-cut silk shirt:

The reflector telescope I thought would unlock
the mysteries of the heavens
but which I only used once or twice
to try to find something heavenly
in the windows of the high-rise down the road,
and which now stares disconsolately at the ceiling
when it could be examining the Crab Nebula:

The 30-day course in Spanish
whose text I never opened,
whose dozen cassette tapes remain unplayed,

save for Tape One, where I never learned
whether the suave American
conversing with a sultry-sounding desk clerk
at a Madrid hotel about the possibility
of obtaining a room
actually managed to check in.

I like to think
that one thing led to another between them
and that by Tape Six or so
they're happily married
and raising a bilingual child in Seville or Terra Haute.

But I'll never know.
Suddenly I realize
I have constructed the perfect home
for a sexy, Spanish-speaking astronomer
who reads Proust while listening to Italian arias,

and I wonder if somewhere in this teeming city
there lives a woman with, say,
a fencing foil gathering dust in the corner
near her unused easel, a rainbow of oil paints
drying in their tubes

on the table where the violin
she bought on a whim
lies entombed in the permanent darkness
of its locked case
next to the abandoned chess set,

a woman who has always dreamed of becoming
the kind of woman the man I've always dreamed of becoming
has always dreamed of meeting.

And while the two of them discuss star clusters
and Cézanne, while they fence delicately
in Castilian Spanish to the strains of Rigoletto,

she and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,
fixing up a little risotto,
enjoying a modest cabernet,
while talking over a day so ordinary
as to seem miraculous.

— George Bilgere

Aiyyo. Its Gone.

Mourning time. The only good thing about MG Road is gone .  The promenade is being demolished to make way for the metro.  Click here for the full story.

Brodsky on the Brain

Its been a couple of years since I first came across Brodsky’s poetry. At the time this poem impressed me- it now seems less appealing; a product from a time when his creative juices had thinned. However, it did start off a long overdue ‘resolve these issues’ discussion with a friend, so for that atleast I will always be kindly inclined to M. Brodsky and his poetry. By the end of this conversation we had moved to Akhmatova . It seemed like a sign at the time, and still does. For it was she, that decided that M. Brodsky was (to quote the Nobel profile) ‘one of the greatest lyric voices of his generation’.

In my searches for more fixes of the Russkies I came across A Century of Recorded Poetry. Ohgod. Amazing poems, but most of them are too big for the human voice. Brodsky, for instance, is almost incomprehensible in his rendering of Odysseus to Telemachus. But he does sound very Russian and very Sexy J

Ganeshayanamaha!

I had today's post all planned. It was to be Akhmatova and Brodsky and the way they can chill the brain.  Also a little aside on Misha while we were on a Russian theme.  

But I must mention a couple of things before getting to the Russkies. 

a) Its new year's tomorrow and I didn't even realise that while I sat making grand resolutions today. Now I am SURE I will break them all.  
b) Today is Friday the 13th. I didn't realise that either. However I'm doubly thrilled I took the plunge with LJ on this of all days.

P.S. Does anyone remember this movie? 'Saturday the 14th'.  I want CD for tomorrow!