Online, in line

bits & bytes

Have you ever come across that online portal called Second Life? You get a chance to live a whole different life at minimal payment. It gives you a chance to live your dream, like you never could in the real world. If I had the money to spare for a second life, I’d probably be living on Sunset Boulevard, an established dancer, with 3 beautiful children, two adopted. (NOT psuedo-Angelina Jolie aspirations, may i clarify!) But, reality does not allow it, as all my spare money is destined to go to the apparel industry. sigh!

Anyway, meandering back to the point of this rumination, virtuality is becoming evermore reality by the hour. And a space, identity and existence in this parallel planet ( that, in my imagination, hovers above the real one like a cloud of ghostly mirrors ) has become fused, almost siamese-d, with the more tangible, if mundane, one.

And you don’t really need Second Life for this. Daily accessories like Facebook, Gtalk, Linkedin, Twitter and the entire blogosphere are big parts of mine. As they are of almost everybody i know. A day’s not complete without sharing pictures on FB, thoughts on Twitter, gossip on Gtalk and presses on blogsites.

My most memorable class at ACJ had to do with virtual identities. Our dragon of a New Media prof decides to have a virtual class, just to prove her point. So, we were all to log on to the Yahoo group created specifically for our class. Upon entering, we encountered our first assignment – to discuss how our online life is different from the realtime one and how the new identity makes a difference in our behaviour.

True enough, I felt waaayyy more comfortable putting my points across and asking questions in our online class than I’ve ever been in concrete ones. Maybe it was the anonymity that sitting in front of a laptop afforded, or maybe it was the fluidity of identities that the Web encourages, that made us all so vibrant. The shyness and hesitation evaporates, or maybe just gets hidden behind a veil.

And this goes beyond the class. I catch up with friends more often on FB than over coffee. I am more relaxed when Gchatting with friends than when I am in person. I find, and this is a no-holds barred confession, that I am a cooler person in my alternate online life. And the reason for such public display of private emptions is that I feel I am not alone in this perception.

And while some of us may always find ourselves just a step or two faltering, technologically speaking, building living rooms, personalities and conversations in net cafes instead of Nescafes, can’t be hard ever again, thanks to the Larry Pages and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. The downswing, then, can only be a Wall-E kind of eventuality, where big Macs, obesity and one spaceship company owner rule the world. Horrifying as that may be, we’re going to continue surviving, if only in ‘bits and bytes’,  eh!

A tribute to women’s magazines

in the 1950s..

We all have our little escapes, don’t we? The secret little worlds we build in our heads that become places of refuge when things are wrong, or just not that right. And those worlds get their expression and even engendered from objects and places around us…

The other day, not too long ago, Pree n I were passing a magazine stand. The new Marie Claire was out, and in an unnatural state of excitement, I picked it up. Pree bemusedly watched me through all this from outside the store, since she thought she’d catch up on her smoke, and later said to me: You know, I’ve only ever known one other woman who spends good money on these good for nothing, weirdly expensive magazines. And that one was such a weird ass, got married at the age of 18 and all she could ever talk about was clothes and sob about all the men who’d broken her heart and think that the tests that these mags have defined her. I’d never really have thought you were one of those!”

Now, I don’t know if that was a backhanded compliment or just a plain snide remark against those that read the ugh-so-lame mags, but later it got me thinking. Let alone the fact that I’d loathe to be classified as one of those females, there was something still in what pree had unwittingly (as always) said. Why do a certain class of uber cool women who are given to defining themselves and generally identified as intelligent, sort of denounce women’s or fashion mags as the dust on their prize bookcases, or even as a conspiracy against them?

And then I was reminded of myself circa 2003-04, when I’d look at my aunt’s ‘Grihshobha’ or my mother’s Femina, and go – eeeuuch! Ma, how can you read such rubbish? Don’t you have any self respect? She’d give me a puzzled look and say, what’s self-respect got to do with it? And for some reason, I could never really explain my ‘feminist’ anguish to her.

It was undoubtedly feminist because the associations we’ve come to make with these beautiful, big, glossy pages is another male conspiracy theory of yore that women rebelled against by burning bras: that of keeping the woman involved in her life, and defining this life as an involvement with homes and gardens, children, the husband and a woman’s office and temple all-in-one, the kitchen.

I got a forward from a friend that had a scanned clipping of one such magazine from the 1950s which was a list of directives on how to be the good wife. It included tricks of the trade in the line of ‘never sulk when your husband re-enters the house after a long day of work. Always look fresh, with perfume, lipstick and smile in place because he will be tired from work which he does to bring the bread in.’ and there was worse, believe you me.

In other words, subjugation. Structuring the place of the woman in the family as the dependent and the slavish. Of course this was masked under heavy jargon of feminine strength, dependability and the real driving force. After all, every successful man has a capable wife and all that jazz.

But really, being career-oriented, rebellious and wild wouldn’t necessarily make a woman stop from being slavishly devoted to a man, even a wrong one at that, and reading such mags might not make any woman a given walk-over or brainwashed enough to take the nonsense akin to that of six decades ago and live with it. Hell, we have pre-nups today!

My mother’s reason for reading femina then was that they used to have good recipes. She has a folder full of yumminess, scraps cut out, Xeroxed, even stolen from her sisters. She’s stopped reading the mag since then, simply because she can’t identify with it anymore. And to extend the point, she’s equally, no, maybe way more fond of Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell. And an excellent cook. My grandmother loves to read ‘Sarita’ because it gives her stories, real and fictional, of courage and happiness that she says she never saw in her on life.

I guess we need to get over our prejudice against this gloss, because unlike then, they don’t really come with an undercurrent of compulsion any more. If the arts professor at Wellesley college in ‘Mona Lisa Smile’ is agitated, she has reason in the proximity of those stormy events, and the possibility of a relapse. We urban women of the 21st century, on the other hand, do not really need to have our guard up so much.

Be cautious and own pepper spray, but not act militant against the innocent.

And me, I am a fan of Marie Claire simply because it is one of my escapes from the mundanity of daily life, ugliness of this world and what not. It does have some good features on social cultural positions of women, but mostly, it is the still beauty of places, ideas, being, existence and movement in their sprawling pictures that is my pull-factor. Nothing criminal about wanting to get away, I’m sure.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Here’s an old piece, rediscovered. I love this book. And the man behind it.

one hundred years of solitude

When human nature endeavors to survive the arid desert of Time with all its might, Time too brings out its most ruthless weapons to quell it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ most famous novel, One Hundred Years Of Solitude, dictates such a hopeless predicament, while bringing forth much more of the fantastic in the face of the gross mask of reality the world feigns to wear. The novel talks of the rise and fall of Macondo, a secluded civilization in a distant plain somewhere in South America. More specifically, it talks about the trials and tribulations of five generations of the Buendia family, who are the founders of Macondo as well as the last ones to die in its ruins. We are given a vivid description of characters such as Ursula Iguaran, an unlikely but powerful matriarch, under whose rule the Buendia family as well as Macondo prospered; Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who had 17 boys during his days in the war; Remedios the Beauty, who ascended to heaven (literally!) as her rightful place of being; and Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo, the twins, who changed names in juvenile mischief and whose identities remained confused till their death as a consequence.
Macondo,a fascinating place, is endowed with all the characteristics of growth and existence and enriched by the imagination of the writer. Written in the post colonial form of writing called Magic Realism, the novel contains a myriad imagery, where storms of butterflies, clouds of yellow flowers, blue houses and incessant rain for four years seem more believable than the ugliness of civil war, the capitalism of a Banana Company, Guerilla warfare and a dictatorial government.

What is most fascinating, however, and what essentially is the crux of the novel is the final, irrevocable and endless solitude of each character of the Buendia family as well as of the whole community. Trapped in the cells of their minds, tortured by insomnia the characters seem to transcend the normal and exist on an exotic plane making them very enticing to the reader.

The novel is a masterpiece of read-between-the-lines revolutionary ideas, and what we as readers can enjoy is his somewhat satirical notion of a civilization. The existence of a strong political statement makes it intellectually stimulating and issues of life, love, identity and death are brought up without any answers. All in all, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a must read for all those who would like to indulge in a bit of contemporary reading. And otherwise.

…And more in the name of wishing Mr Muthalik’s health in pink!

a small, inspired moment of very naughty inspiration, and here we are today, garnering support from even the BBC. here’s a second opinion piece on the biggest movement of the year…

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Subverse/The_power_of_pink/articleshow/4107798.cms

bloom(er) on!

Emotional Atyachar that liberates

red pickle

Disclaimer: This review is hugely biased, mostly because the critic (hah!) is totally, head-over-heels floored by the brilliance of the movie and has written from a slightly starry-eyed vantage, so all pointed-out flaws are purely coincidental.

“Do you touch yourself?” whispers Dev to Paro, over a long distance call between two countries, while in the back seat of a cab in London. And from the word go, Anurag Kashyap’s embodiment of Devdas makes you cringe with his absolute self-involvement, submission to desire  and with his utter disregard for others’ feelings.

The story progresses largely on the lines of the classic, but with a twist, a dash of lemon in a pretty damn tame cocktail, or in the way the traditionalists, romantics and fundamentalists would  have it. What our director has done, is to contemporise a story so outdated, that made Shahrukh Khan look laughable, probably even to himself, in Bhansali’s version about 5 years ago. To make a story like Devdas contemporary means a healthy dose of raw, animal passion, and admitting to the ’sin’ of raging hormones in one’s prime, peppered with drugs and alcohol and gross self-indulgence. And so, the driving force behind Dev D becomes a physical expression of a horizontal wish (to alter the line from Shall We Dance), and not sacrificing, soppy love, which, lets face it, hardly exists anymore.

That’s your post-modern touch, the honesty of which is a refreshing bloom – where contradictions, confusions and the ensuing pain is not in the domain of sentimentality, but in-your-face self-love and craziness which is painted in shades of grey and blue on every just-human face. The message is clear: Nobody’s a saint, howsoever much they might fall in love, not Paro, not Dev, not his father. And the irony of it all – there is still some redeemable good in everybody.

And then there is Chanda. An inspiring character, consistent and solid. Subject of scandal, daughter of a civil servant who shoots himself, and a mother who abandons her for her evilness, the 16-year old girl shows inordinary spunk and becomes a (surprise, surprise) randi, who can talk dirty in any language you want her to, in any getup you desire. And, she does this to put herself through college. So there – the good in the stereotypical baaad. There’s no plain surfaces in this one.

It is not just the characters in the movie who reflect a point of departure as alter-egos of purer selves intended by the author. The movie is a product of art – and finely engineered stuff at that. Beautiful shots of Chandigarh, the rustic village and Delhi, excellent cinematography (from close ups to the attempted making out session in tall grass), poignant moments – like the one where Chanda and Dev stand in her balcony, she’s painting his face into that of a joker and unmasking herself – and very good music. The Jonas Brothers make an impression too, acting as the chorus, Dev’s three-headed conscience, and comic relief, all-in-one. or three. The point is, such perfectionism usually gets botched up, but here, you get the feeling that he’s handled it very very carefully, like holding a still beating heart – his own – in his hands. You love it as much as he does.

And the final point of departure is from postmodernity itself – the happy ending. Lightning strikes, reformation happens. Sitting in a red tub, being scrubbed by the love of his life, our anti-hero’s self-love brings him back to his senses. So then, all’s well that end’s on a slightly less morbid note. And you’re allowed to fall in love with Abhay Deol for an excellent performance.   

Maybe a dose of this is what the likes of Muthalik need to shock them into their graves.

Sheer Beer Pressure!

heh. - www.cafeultravioleta.files.wordpress.com

…And so it is saturday night, again. At a loss for what to do, there is always the fallback option, at least as far as i am considered. Pubbing. Pub - jumping – cruising – hopping. Whatever. And top of the charts is Peco’s, on Rest House Road. Just off Brigade Road, this beer spouting little tower has only recently acquired a neon signpost, since it might have finally penetrated the manor’s masters that not a few enthusiastic new patrons on the block are at a loss for its whereabouts…since it was expected that word-of-mouth alone would get you crawling up their steep creaking staircase, in search of your nirvana. Or your next hand-me-down maid/prince..if you like.

So once you do manage to locate it, sandwiched between ’fashion sense’ and another non-descript bar, and as you manage the crawling towards superior chambers than what first impressions might shock you into sensing, the greasy smiles of the chambermasters, thudding music and whiffs of the many kingfishers and fosters being downed, in addition to a certain ‘herb’ being rolled up and lit to flames, you might be transported into ‘relaxo-world’ (that of the chappal fame, possibly).

The darkness engulfs you, as does the evergreen (in more ways than one) crooning of Jim Morrison, begging you to assist him in his immolation (oh har-de-har-har!), and you can just about make out scattered popcorn, ash on wooden tables, chairs, floors. The ceiling is black as a moonless night, ie, if there is a ceiling. Mirrors and rock legends glare, and simultaneously wink at you, depending on your degree of intoxication, and no, you’re not subjected to a self-study on identity, or crises, or the like. Since, at this particular juncture in time and space, you’d rather fly, and the smiling wizards will help you do just that.

Bob your head, head bang, on tables, sing along, dance on table tops, do whatever you like – there are no rules. They’ll keep smiling through it all. It is another world, a much live-in-able one, despite the 50% diluted with water beer. And of course, they know how to make chilli beef, and keema dosas. If intoxication is not your thing, pay them a visit on a weekend morning, before noon, and you’ll get a reportedly fantabulous buffet. Reportedly, since i’ve never bothered to wake up at that ungodly hour. *shudder*.