my carbon footprint

I have nothing at all to say except that everything, even saying nothing on a blog that nobody reads, leaves a carbon footprint.

Plastic bags have been banned, but our cornershop seems to be the only one on all of Delhi that's paid any attention to the ban. Loaves of bread, packets of milk and strips of peanut chiki are being shoved into fast-tearing paper bags by Batra Store. People in our kaloni are anyway too dazed by other stuff to really care very much about groceries collapsing on the stairs before the front door.

The saddest time

Have been away, stuck with work, coming home too tired to do anything except go to bed. I just wish that that's what all the people killed in Bombay could still do - have a tough day at work, a frustrating time in traffic and then come home in time to bitch about their colleagues to their best friend in the whole world.

I didn't sleep at all last night, walking up and down, my heart sinking and this feeling that something terrible had happened.

I had a dream a couple of nights ago about one of the people killed at the Taj. I dreamt I saw her standing beside my bed, and I jumped up in joy and surprise, saying : "oh my God! You're safe! How wonderful! Oh I'm so glad you're alive!'

And that's all that I can do now. I hope that wherever you are, all of you, you're safe and quiet finally. You all deserved to be alive today, and your families do not deserve this burden of grief that they will carry for the rest of their lives.

And I also think that it's terrible that those who murdered all these people probably never thought for even a moment that they were doing a very wrong thing. They died thinking that they were doing the right thing. And there is such a thing as wrong and right. This is a moral universe.

can i please just say

that I thought "Rock On" was a totally crappy film. I was so so bored with this boy fantasy of "Yo dude! Rock on, man!" Ugh ugh ugh ugh. Am I supposed to care about Farhan Akhtar screwing his life up in some multi-million dollar apartment? How am I supposed to care when the script is so bad? The turnaround between him screwing/not screwing his life up is about half a scene. And I'm also fed up of designer Bollywood masquerading as some kind of bearable cinema, just because it's so coool. Krakt me if I am wrong ji BUT haven't we seen everyone before, somewhere? Miserable investment baker who's boxed up his dreams, sweet loving loving wife, cool dude genius failed rocker, fishwife hussy wife, friend dying of BRAIN tumour, nerdy friend whom everyone likes etc etc and all of them with perhaps two good lines between them!

It bothers me that these flat uninteresting characters can be up on screen as acceptable. It bothers me that people can accept that this unsustainable "lifestyle" is the happy end., the dreamed-of end, with everyone swilling beer at some super-expensive resort because they're finally where-it's-at, which is, like, "Look at me! I'm rich! I'm beautiful! I'm successful! I'm silhouetted by the sea like the last scene in Philadelphia! My wife is happy because she's a fashion designer finally, thank god, and wearing white which shows off her lustrous rich lovely brown skin on which a makeup artist has slaved for many an hour! And we all love the children, the lovely lovely children in their frocks dancing around us cause we're musicians, and we're free and happy happy!"

The only interesting fella was Arjun Rampal because his sad eyes and laid-backness had something authentic to say about what failure feels like. The rest just acted it all. Not as bad as the scriptwriter who invented it all with little imagination. When that Channel V competition came up again, I began laughing. I thought it was a good joke - but it wasn't a joke! They took it all seriously all over again, rather than saying, fuck it man, bloody losers that lot at Channel V., let's just do our stuff this time shall we? Why doesn't Farhan-boy just bankroll the album? And how bad was the audience at the show? I thought that wave-thing went out years and years ago.

I noted with interest that Javed Akhtar said recently that he thought that Indian rock was a poor imitation of American whatever (as in the film). I read the article. Of course it was nothing other than a self-congratulatory thing on how good his lyrics were.

And this whole context-thing. Ok, let's forget that because Bollywood is all fantasy mostly, but oh hell, was I bored!!

Today, with my Tibetan brothers and sisters I say

Bhod Gyalo!
Bhod Gyalo!

Long live the Dalai Lama
And may His Holiness return to Potala Palace before Losar!

Tibet Will Be Free!

Rangzen!

one of the greatest talents

is the ability to fall asleep. I am the most stressed-out person! At the moment I have empty hours at work, and my head is aching with lack of sleep - but can I curl up on the couch and fall asleep? no. Though I would love to. There was this cameraman friend of mine, and he had mastered the art of sleeping anywhere - standing in a crowded bus, or on a pile of oddly-shaped rocks in a dry riverbed in the Chambal valley. He was lucky and happy indeed.

Here are the things that go wrong when I try to sleep:

i) I need to pee at ten-minute intervals after getting into bed, even though I may not have drunk huge quantities of water.

ii) I start thinking about how miserable everything is. Naturally, this doesn't help in falling asleep at all

iii) My girlfriend lies next to me, deep in peaceful sleep and this, for some strange reason, makes me start thinking she doesn't love me after all (the reason is not strange when I think about it: obviously my illogical mind expects her to share my misery and not sleep either) and this makes me even more tearful and miserable

iv) I also think about all the stuff I have to do the next day

So the solution is to STOP THINKING AND STOP PEEING. I'm trying. I'm trying.

here is a something I wrote

I wrote it quite a while ago. Anyway. My girlfriend didn't think much of it, but still:

In my dreams my favourite ice-cream
Tastes like a bad hangover
And the faster I run from the monster
Of course I go slower and slower
And I miss by a second the familiar bus
That goes to the house of my lover
And when I do get there in the end
I find her dead in the shower.

At this point, I wake up, check that she's still breathing, and turn over.
And she turns too, looking like an angel, my otherwise psychotic significant other.

When I tell her about it in the morning, she takes out her Jungian de-coder.
The monster is easy: it's obviously my over-controlling mother.
The ice-cream is our sex-life, the less said about it the better
And as for "missing the bus" - she's been trying to expain that to me forever.
She frowns for a bit over her dramatic Hotchkokian murder,
And then says I should "talk more about stuff", not fantasise about killing her.

I watch her get ready for work, mentally kissing each little toe and finger
I would never never want you dead, my irreplacable, wonderful lover.

It took this long for my computer to be repaired.
Well the monsoon is here. No more watering the plants. My adenium bulbosa died because of natural over-watering, It was left out while I was away on holiday.
The monsoon means: drying clothes under fans, frequently upset stomachs if not actually full-blown gastroenteritis, quite nice mid-afternoon sex if it's raining and you're on holiday and the most gorgeous woman in the world is lying peacefully with you on a huge double bed with her light, flexible body wrapped around yours, both of you half asleep...
Monsoon in the hills - another world! Why did we ever come back?