sonal

birthday picnic and architecture tours

2012-01-27T23:39:00.000-08:00

I asked for a picnic as a gift and got one.walked to the jewish cemetery, and the beautiful 80's built brutalist 80's monument to the shipwreck victims .
I saw samira's work.
I loved her house that is made to weather and age and transform. that makes its own rules and architectural language, which playfully and shamelessly conflates the mundane and sublime.

also extremely inspiring to see such amazing work by a girl making her own idea of what architecture can be. such few women architect role models while studying architecture. I am fan, amazing architecture- madness and beauty.

walking with apu and oohing all the modernist architecture of bombay is also fun. This time it was the godrej building. which i fell in love with on my occasional walks. It has the belief in new material- glass, aluminum, with exquisite industrially produced cladding that is elevated to ornament and tracery with beautiful detailing. The green glazing clad by a lace-like veil of aluminum cladding sections. The ground floor clad in granite that mirrors the crenelations of the aluminum, over which the veil floats. The plinth is articulated as a thick slab on which the entire building sits. and the roof visible in fragments from which the watertank box and the straggling branches of champa trees rise, a garden on the roof, that must have fabulous views of azad maidan. The layers of the building each clearly articulated- function elevated to ornament.

poem of the day

2012-01-23T18:27:00.001-08:00

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). Poems. 1881.

34. Les Silhouettes

THE sea is flecked with bars of grey
The dull dead wind is out of tune,
And like a withered leaf the moon
Is blown across the stormy bay.

Etched clear upon the pallid sand 5
The black boat lies: a sailor boy
Clambers aboard in careless joy
With laughing face and gleaming hand.

And overhead the curlews cry,
Where through the dusky upland grass 10
The young brown-throated reapers pass,
Like silhouettes against the sky.

orbit

2012-01-19T22:23:00.000-08:00

This morning
We were going straight down the road,
Trees garbage, kids, cars flying off in all directions
Propelled by our path
Which in turn was rotating slowly towards the sun in the east
In which the angelic white buildings smiled with their glazed eyes
Which soon would have the sun bleaching their terraces
And in the school classroom, the boys in their grey shorts are taking notes
And making diagrams of the spheres that rotate around each other ceaselessly
Pencils propelled in straight lines that should be arcs.

skywalk walk

2012-01-17T23:55:00.001-08:00

vajreshwari again

2012-01-15T01:18:00.000-08:00

bought salt from naigaon in the saturday market near virar station
and ate jambhool after many years
watched the girls of many sizes do rope malkhamb practice in knee length tights and tucked in tshirts and ribbons in hair.
waited two hours for an interview, listening to a group nearby discuss politics like it was shop talk
just an hour and a half away and everything is so different
minutes warp into hours recorded only by the sway of the trees and rustle of leaves a walk in the sun or a long wait in the verandah.

harihareshwar

2012-01-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

i wish i could draw the rocks at harihareshwar. we sat for long stretches. tracing them with our eyes, following curve and line and cavities, patterns within patterns, taking pleasure in their scales of repetition and variation, some caverns for the eye to disappear into or a mollusc to take shelter in, some for a body to perch in, and some that swept up into the sky overhead. walls of filigree rock that you could climb over play lizard.
feet following hieroglyphs carved by the waves into the shelf of rock. the sea surging and roaring underneath you sometimes.
it is the most spectacular rock formation i have seen with the sea wild, crashing and sucking out holes into the rock. and just across the hill, was the mtdc's flat shelf of a beach and the ocean extending placidly to the horizon.
i remember last years two beaches were so different. and all on the same coastline.
but the loveliest moment was catching sight of the dolphins, their slippery curving dives among the waves. made me gasp.

the end of the gods

2011-12-28T21:05:00.000-08:00

i like about her books because of their love of language as a way of making worlds.
all the characters come with their own ways of seeing. they overlap and connect through metaphor and in language. the book makes this world in which these different ways of seeing connect and collide with each other and where words things and lives entangle.

the chapters in this one are quite mad. in each the narrative and sense is forsaken to lush lush description and metaphor.beautiful creatures, each mythical character becoming not just a force but a pulsating twitching feeling alive body, sea-serpent wolf giantess They claw and hunger and suffer and rage to bring about the end of the gods.

tetrapod peppermints

2011-12-04T19:34:00.000-08:00

what all can you do with the tetrapods?
they make a lovely undulating landscape of concrete limbs that tangle and cradle in turn,
the bodies and tangling limbs of lovers that perch on the tongue of land that stretches into the sea
they should make little tetrapod peppermints, to roll all over your tongue and swallow

Towering beautiful

2011-12-04T19:31:00.000-08:00

Sunday and churchgate can be a magical place; walking aimlessly between the towers beautiful:the details of skin and turn and crown against the sky. Looking up all the time with loving camera eyes, as the fins turn the corner, windowed facades are framed through the trees. The skewed beehive skin against malad stone of the mantralay or the mother-of-pearl-like marble paneled skin of the air india building, the black veined mosaic of express towers and its heavy articulation of railing balcony beam and fin: each clothed in gorgeous thick material deep enough to weather the sea breeze.
There was this two-storeyed box building in the sbi compound where we went to draw some money. With white one inch square mosaic tile all over the two storeyed column-panels that made up the walls, with full length slender windows in the gaps. Beautiful concrete stair that spiraled independently around wall and plugged into it.

A huge husky with black masacaraed eyes: giant animal on a leash, big head and heavy paws like a lion,prowled in front of the minister’s bungalows in the shadow of the towers beautiful.

silly creatures

2011-11-17T00:36:00.001-08:00

peri pheri with the paul

2011-11-05T06:00:00.000-07:00

boy-dreams

2011-11-02T00:57:00.001-07:00

I think I am into boy-books these days
I read Michael chabon who writes stories about boys, whose writing I absolutely love. The characters are soft and deeply drawn, there are always spaces and images in the books that I find unforgettable.
Then I finished the selected works of ts spivet last night. Been reading it off and on for a year. Like a friend or a favourite haunt I had at my bedside. Always reliable, a nice place to be. I know I can re-read it in parts. I have read it in parts. skipped parts, reread others went back and forth. The passages and sentences offer enough to immerse yourself into.
The book is the story of ts spivet a boy cartographer. If you love the idea of maps and mapping the world. If you’ve tried to measure and draw the world around you, and have felt the impossibility of maps and the transformative magic of them, you will love the book or you will know what its like to feel maplove.

strange

2011-10-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

or quaint
weird or bizarre
sometimes aka cool

is a creature-word
you may encounter

it takes anything
and
makes it
dust

belly

2011-10-24T19:04:00.000-07:00

fish-eye

2011-10-11T01:08:00.000-07:00

In the eye of a fish, a stone eye to swallow whole, is a seed of another fish, that will germinate inside your tummy
And soon schools of fish, flipping fin and tail will be wriggling through your bloodstream.

bandra boy

2011-10-03T20:08:00.001-07:00

swimming pool

2011-09-26T20:19:00.000-07:00

the swimming pool offers solitude thats rare these days.

its directionless expanse where you splash about making your own path, floating lazily.

the shimmering surface constanly changing under the lights at night. dark, warm,soft water.

or in the mornings cool and blue like a sky you can enter and traverse.

dream creatures

2011-09-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

meghu and me are walking across the courtyard of a pink yellow building we come to a small verandah and go up the plinth steps and a furry black ratlike thing jumps onto my shoulder.. next thing I'm in my bed with the black monkey clawfingers gripping my fingers so they cannot move and black eyes and snarl over my shoulder. told myself it was a dream and i had to prise the claws open to wake up.

dream of girls on the horizon

2011-08-28T21:47:00.000-07:00

Welded together all the lips, of all the metallic girls, unable to prise them open: their bullet eyes and torpedo breasts, lying in a tangle just outside the city. The distant solitary hill bumps up the horizon while clouds float across it in the evening light.
Me and my friend from school, sitting at the edge, on the parapet of the terrace, looking out over the heap, staring, willing the pile to rise up and march towards the city.

janmashtami skywalk

2011-08-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

the boys in short shorts clambering all over each other
so much testosterone, they almost mauled the campy boys dancing to sheila ki jawani who ran back and hid from the assault.
but the skywalk strung together the dahi handis and party pandals and became a gallery for watchers today.
there were lovers in the lonelier places.
borivali station is amazing. the market has become much madder with mall and the skywalk makes everything visible. the quiet backs,the beautiful old bungalows annd the layered shops spilling over each other and the crowd like a sea milling and moving constantly.

Bird Sky

2011-07-31T22:12:00.001-07:00

Looking up at the sky grey and clouded past the circle of shadowed leaves,
criss crossed and pinned up in between every streaking path from tree to tree
of bats with skin-wings stretched taut and translucent in the evening light.
of cranes long necked and finger-winged,
of the cormorants slow glide with its arrow-head.

auto

2011-07-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

Colour pencils

2011-07-19T03:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve been buying stationery for pleasure. I’ve been drawing to fill up empty days. And colouring with my new staedtler , soft colour pencils which are: super sexy. They get crushed against my moleskin paper. They crumble beautifully as I fill up the gaps between those black lines with yellow, green and pink.

I also have a brand new set of staedtler fine-point pens—0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.5 and 0.8. The 0.05 is great fun to draw with, tangles of fine tendrils, or veins, masses of curls and curlicues, double-lined overlayed.

tongue

2011-04-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

Blackened pink

Borrowed

Fat

Tongue

Squirming,

like a snake in its tooth-box

Swollen with hunger

Laced with babble

tongue (longer)

2011-04-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

Blackened pink

Borrowed

Fat tongue

Squirming, like a snake in its tooth-box

Swollen with hunger

Laced with babble

slips and slides off saliva floors

Yet

the damned thing released

twists, bungles, trips itself up

flakes off wisp-words

limp syllables

that eddy to the floor

in a mad cackle of mouths

teeth snap and shut

cut and free

its writhing tip forever

Fallen to the floor

it trashes around

the tail of a lizard

automaton

garden

2011-04-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

it is the most beautiful book i have ever read. couldn't put it down at all and cried like mad in the middle. beautifully written and made. simple and precise. with descriptions, names of things and flowers. the diary of a personal garden. strewn with ideas through the garden but not too much. i love it. will recommend to everyone i know.

weight
i always love jeanette winterson because she writes like there is no wrong. no middling, no pretense, every book a work, messy, like a person
i loved weight which was the atlas myth told and then retold remixed with her own personal desire . reminded me of apu so i gave it to him.
and received in return
this framed in white.

kandarpada

2011-04-12T20:25:00.001-07:00

dehiscence

2011-04-07T19:46:00.000-07:00

nice word
summer word

forest fragments

2011-04-03T19:28:00.000-07:00

some treecreeper/liana

cannonball tree/Couroupita guianensis/shiv kamal

kumbh /Careya arborea

Shweta/ Panthera tigris/ Bengal Tiger

shweta and i took an early walk through the colony. it was beautiful. fresh cool morning air. the forest girl identified the trees i would visit in summer cycling trips through the colony. she made me super happy. she loves them more. showing me seeds, fruits, telling me forest tree stories. we walked into the lic management training centre. id never been inside before. we found a forest fragment inside. lianas, forest trees, rocks, signs all over the place saying beware of snakes. another back of the colony I'd never been to, with a huge rocky pit which looked like the remnants of a quarry that had gone into the stone walls of the buildings.

The fragment was like a fragment of an old map, with clues to what the hill must have been like before the mango orchard and buildings were planted into the wilderness.

A new old place and a fragment of wild in the sweet madness of lic colony .

mumbai darshan

2011-03-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

godzilla tower

mall

2011-03-20T10:54:00.000-07:00

balloon boy on big moon day

2011-03-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

full crack

2011-03-18T06:42:00.000-07:00

fallty footwear song for the girls who fall

2011-03-18T03:30:00.000-07:00

falling

2011-03-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

today i think im black and blue some places under my skin. the fall yesterday was so much fun. toe caught and then headlong towards the floor. i rolled in the air and fell on my bum. knee vaguely bruised. shoulder dully hurting.

felt like a child. when every day a fall or jump would give that rush. and moving, running was always an experiment with the body.

substance of evil

2011-03-11T02:11:00.000-08:00

i bought it fascinated and reluctant a few years ago
it seemed to be the distilled evil of all of humanity ,all my dark thoughts, the coagulation of black-blood and all unnameables
dense thick and sticky leaving its petroleum sweat on your fingers

you could slap it around, fling it against a wall
it just flopped around formlessly
subsiding into its own black hole of matter
persistent, opaque

i couldnt take it home
and have its meaningless black blob
darken the corners
remind me of the dark
insides and undersides and unseens
at the centre of the world
i threw it in a dustbin

Harriet The Spy

2011-03-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

Fabulous drawings. I found my copy again after many years at the local street bookseller and was super happy. meghu and i shared this book and loved it equally.

see more drawings on my picasa web album here

ghosts

2011-03-06T05:04:00.000-08:00

last evenings recordings were hauntings
stories calls and utterances and songs
probably into the pale faces of scientists
and the vacuum of their instruments
resounding hollow and alone and beautiful
travelling across decades and seas
to echo and flicker inside that room

props and paint

2011-03-05T18:51:00.000-08:00

in a city of masquerade

cut-out

2011-03-05T18:32:00.000-08:00

paper-thin, it is a cut-out of a thing.

can curl itself about any tongue

and flutters with the slightest wind

hides,

by merely turning on its side.

so light you might completely miss

its existence

as it whispers

as it clings

climbing plants

2011-03-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

are creatures without a spine
releasing curling tendrils

that gently cling

but do
irritate
as they,
(pretend -shy)
lie-
and in spiralling,
avoid your eye.

climbing plants

2011-03-03T19:36:00.000-08:00

are sap- suckers
are motherfuckers
that hang heavy
with bloody fruit

delhi

2011-02-20T23:59:00.000-08:00

Old delhi

is the most beautiful city i have been to. decaying and regenerating cell by cell like some organism
born out of processes of accretion, layerings, like some mineral form.
The street, is also the most beautiful street, insane in its mixes, and gorgeous facades that tier and teeter in beautiful iron lacework , festooned with cables and grime.
It is a pile, a stack, a creature, that breathes the breath of its million lives, that sheds its skin slowly scale by scale only to reveal older shinier skin, or take on new ones.

New Delhi

is a garden with perfect edges. A giant garden or carpet with its crystalline geometries. 30,000 gardeners tend to its hedges and lawns, in the centres of which are perfect buildings, white or sandstone. You can hear the orchestras play as you turn the roundabouts and cruise down the avenue. tantarararara

Gurgaon
Is a monster, made up of ruptures and sutures spewing diesel breath, littering the landscape with construction rubble ,held to the city by the leash of the metroline that lead to ac cars and perfect homes in perfect buildings.

And what is real fun its that you can take the metro, with its sullen faced office goers, gaggles of gorgeous giggling girls and scared first time travelers and string up all the three cities in a day.

church

2011-02-15T02:35:00.000-08:00

monster

2011-02-09T19:28:00.000-08:00

crawling out of the forest with a million eyes and tentacles that slithered across the ground gathering insects startled in their dark burrows suddenly blinded and blinded again by the sun at first and then by the press of putrid flesh
the million eyes roll in a million directions
the forest is captured and shattered in their glassy rounds

a little girl swinging skirts

climbs over and is swallowed

G U (l) P

kitchen knife mood

2011-02-08T23:45:00.000-08:00

is a happy cutting up of thought
into little bits and pieces
with precision

capturing animals

2011-02-08T22:59:00.000-08:00

i read ted hughes on capturing animals.
and he makes a lovely metaphor of the poem as an animal
that if the words fall flat is maimed
in which the parts are connected or
if not carefully tended to lie dead
and when joined writhe together like an animal newborn

mendacity

2011-02-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

mendacious

the word has been in my head these days
bringing image of snake
and black slthering slime
a slow viscous flow

the word curves around itself and slithers away with a hiss
men-day-sheeee.....oussss

some words just work.

girl

2011-01-15T19:38:00.001-08:00

she was skinny calm comfortable and charged
beautiful
and played and sang like she had mad talent.
only 21 years old
and had this mad punklike volute on her head.

f a n

aftershave

2011-01-09T19:05:00.000-08:00

Waking up in the morning I swallow and stare into the mirror, the air that I breathe, smells of my fathers aftershave, molecules entering , I feel them as twinges of pain in my skull, buried in some soft mass, toothpaste and water flows swirls into the perforated cover

kinds of anger

2011-01-09T19:04:00.000-08:00

Black cloud
Volcano
Thunderstorm
Snail
Firecracker
Knot
bullock

Bile

Venom

cupboard cleaning

2010-12-27T05:47:00.000-08:00

the clothes- gifts from friends, folded softness, and caressed as substitutes
the old drawings- make you wonder at all that has occupied your head
relief that that world with snails and solitary women, and pages and pages filled with lyric and rambling words is a messy world left far behind
amazed at the forgotten movements and flicks of finger and wrist that made that line that became finger and curve of head, garbage and creatures born only of drawing.
the black suitcase snapped shut and tucked away in the corner inside the cupboard contains all the things faded away
catalogues of worlds gone away
riffling through them today like a ride in a fair
stacking them neatly
all the dead selves
with pleasure that comes from cleaning

sky

2010-12-21T23:30:00.000-08:00

edge

2010-12-19T17:56:00.001-08:00

Landscapes of waste

Homes made out of scrap

Lives made out of scrap

Garbage streams

Tattered plastic and sewage wind

dust

Trees mangled with wires

Images faded

The breath of stale dust that mingles with your insides
That tells you that you are the same

Can you escape from the 26 letters of the alphabet?

2010-12-08T01:28:00.000-08:00

I bought a book. Children’s books are always a good buy for drawings. This one offers so many pleasures. There are first of all, the drawings. Elaborate exquisite drawings of cities and landscapes in the shape of alphabets turned into labyrinths. The poems, with mythical creatures that inhabit them, that are trapped inside the alphabet-labyrinth-worlds.
And then the overall idea of being trapped in the alphabet, the rigid outlines of the letters and of exciting wildernesses outside , or the alphabets themselves grown wild by the invasion of wildernesses.

Shadows and sounds

2010-12-06T15:29:00.000-08:00

Seven pm and the light outside pools between shadows, under streetlamps.
My walk that day was one symphony.
The constant rhythm of my feet intercut by the sounds of horses hooves entering and fading, horns, the rumbles and enginegrowls of cars.
Shadows soft and dark become corridors islands regions lurking at the edges
My own shadow growing long and short caressed by the shadow of a man passing
Caught suddenly trembling in the weeds at the edge of the road in headlights
the shape of a tree black cut-out against the white sky, eyes pulled and pricked by lines
the hazy darkness at edge of the mangroves with all the new lines of reinforcement, buildings, eskay
these holidays mostly its just another world and time that becomes visible outside.

the ground beneath her feet

2010-12-05T16:49:00.000-08:00

so i relent
not the librarians curse, but my quick judgement about the book i was reading.

it had to be finished,
he takes all the trite-ness turns and turns it into song at the end
tying it up into voluptuous catastrophe, magic and metaphor

the book disappears into a crack in the ground
and is covered by a lovely peaceful every day.

more than anything else
i love reading novels again
feels like a full meal.

my Winnipeg

2010-12-01T01:32:00.000-08:00

soft swirling grey film, foggy and dark through which shapes and forms emerge in the moist dark swamp of the fork of rivers, and the lap of Mother. I’ve been feeling this house my room college and everything like that swamp that cloys and doesn’t let you go.

It is inertia, a numbing comfort and those spooky recurrences, like the girl I met with baby with the face of the girl in mary immaculate uniform, just a little changed.

And uncle at the corner the same twisted smile everyday, sardonic hi, eye following me go about errands, circles, singing in the same patches of forest, the same old compound wall, grey and grimy, the tree smaller and less magnificent.

Everything smaller, tackier or disappeared.
like the false sky in Truman show.

the librarians curse

2010-11-20T00:16:00.001-08:00

may your tongues rot and crumble in your mouths
and turn your insides bitter
may your toe nails grow inwards and pierce your heart

and my books that lie forgotten in your shelves breed malicious dust
that slowly and completely poisons all of yours against you

so that they shut and latch themselves against your prying claws

who has my dylan book?

goddess

2010-11-17T07:44:00.000-08:00

queen
diva
goddess

unfortunately my language is tainted by the trite hyperbole of the novel that im trudging through that conflates the sublime and profane with predictable glee in every sentence .

but but
sunday morning and i had a religious experience, which always happens when i hear kishori sing
she has found it
that place of beauty
and makes these things that speak of it
that soak your skin for sometime
and makes you believe in god or music or whatever for sometime

and its really not the ground beneath her feet but all the worlds that she creates and connects in her music that you love

faces

2010-11-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

i get very relieved these days. i rarely travel by train. and in the bus you never really see faces. and in my familiar forest of faces in school all the contours of physiognomies are coloured by my relationship with them and by love. In the train all the faces are foreign and in the distance and accommodating breadth of a civilisational register, i scan the creases and smiles and flashing and sleepy eyes in a distanced inventory of possibilities of stories and lives.

d sundararajan tales

2010-10-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

the stories of my parents early young married couple life seem to belong in some surreal story book.
these tales have been told and retold at evening drink sessions, over rum and now whisky and gin.

the hammer flung at her boss seetharaman in anger, i can see my mum doing that.
my dad laughing over the story of the young mechanic who slyly told the scientist at tifr, that he should keep something out in the sun for a month till in melts, ( because the scientist had suggested that to reach its melting point, they could keep putting it in an oven and taking it out)
both of them young and living in a flat at parle, whitewashing the house themselves after work...
my dad being chased by a drunk man with a sword, when he went to rescue the watchman who was gambling with some goons, and my mum on the balcony dropping a dustbin on the goons head as my dad ran back into the building.....
and the poor man washing his sword after that.

my favourite- a lion peed on my mum at byculla zoo when i was still inside her. and gulshan dropped her bag because she was laughing so loud. my mum too exploding with laughter.

i love all these stories, i have full faded colour filmy scenes in my head.
i cant remember them all

gilbert hill

2010-10-04T02:05:00.000-07:00

weather

2010-09-23T21:49:00.000-07:00

feels like the beginnings of summer today
really soft warm light on the lawn out of the shade

Matheran with the matheran girl

2010-09-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

I dont know if matheran haunts shweta or shweta haunts matheran, but they are merged together or soaked in each other like the mist and cool air and she knows it like someone would know their own body, with its scars,places of pleasure, histories, and familiarity.
The place in its isolation , its privilege and rawness in the forest, was like the inside of a children’s story again, a whole parallel world with gnarled jamun trees that look like they could speak, giant tall mango trees, monkeys squirrels and horses tall and gorgeous.
The house was a small cottage, with thick walls, a verandah, that expands inside suddenly into tight rooms with high ceilings under the timber roof. Doors and windows, rooms shrink to accommodate its changing volume, old wooden furniture solid and voluminous fills up the corners.
Houses have names of the people that lived there waiting emptily for trespassers with the voices of the caretakers echoing through the empty rooms.
Tourists trudge about in the corridors of the forest, monkeys watch and attack.
The laterite turning to red mud crumbling cracking and flowing like blood under the weight of the monsoons, the forest burdened with water, the hills standing like creatures alive and filled with geological, vegetal, stories.
shweta and i walked down rather slithered down the slippery path down the hill, meeting beautiful old men and rescued by hari and raju finally.
super fun.

missing depth

2010-09-02T23:47:00.000-07:00

a handshake, a conversation or a glance
is sometimes like standing at the edge of a forest

every old sock meets an old shoe

2010-09-02T23:46:00.000-07:00

kate love magic again
sweetness and flight
softness
worlds and whorls of song
of notes trilling and burrowing
swirling my insides and the air around into one trembling fleshy organism

blah..

2010-09-02T21:07:00.000-07:00

seems to be the word of the generation
saturated with so many images
and language
words things come at you in their quirky uniqueness, with such nauseating regularity that in their very uniqueness is a sameness that makes you yawn..
smoother and smoother everything gets
so blah this, blah that
and theres not much else to say.

how do you get through? is there anything left to get through?

A whole genre of

2010-09-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

Girls romance novels
shy vocabularies of forests gardens and fireworks.
that skirt around names for sexual organs in floral metaphor
that tickle into bliss, float little utopias of Romance
and then subside and collapse into nothingness beforethe mundane and familiar cycles of married life
repeat in endless boredom-the climax of sexual union.

sensation

2010-09-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

evening train ride
rain outside
clouds gather inside

Nausea

2010-08-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

Things things things and things.The world is a collection of things of fragments that pile up over each other, everyday a new layer of dirt.
The derelict flagpole and its chipped discs,Piles of stones lines curling knotting and spilling over each other. The tattered flag blaCK at its edges.a brand new checked shirt.
disgust

dogs

2010-08-14T18:41:00.000-07:00

stuffed toys
with bright eyes
taxidermists' pets

leeches

2010-08-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

fat

on my blood

(salt sprinkled, fallen,

and they are

so soon

fat on anothers)

end of the world

2010-07-25T02:16:00.000-07:00

i have not moved out of a close circuit around my room since yesterday; rain keeping me in and glued to my laptop, watching movies in the afternoon.
In the eveneing ranjit and i decided on our way to coffee to go up to the church that you can see off holy cross road, across a grassy wilderness in the distance. Walked circuitously, around,and up a hill, through a gaothan-esque compound, thomas compound past it to the crest of the hill.
Its a very nice place, with some innovative community housing in two long buildings on two sides on a street, a spanking new church and two rooms/workshops whose walls are creepers.
A place on top and cut deeply into the rock of the hill.
Another end of the world within my neighbourhood.
Mary immaculate; my old school where i came everyday for six years, with its high walls and secrecy was just beyond and invisible.

akbar

2010-05-18T17:27:00.000-07:00

Despite all my fascination with young auto drivers, their forearms and backs of necks and the charge in their bodies as they swerve through and in between best buses trucks and past motorcycles with womens hands resting lightly on male thighs, i did not give him my phone number.

And although he was the most exciting guy i had met in a long time he just wanted to give me some work as an architect or get me builders licence.( he knew all the biggest builders and had sat on rizvis lap when he was little).

He said he was only driving for the day, wearing his friends borrowed clothes and driving his friends borrowed auto, for fun.
He had called me to his auto and as soon as i sat started off with the mad story.
32, orphaned or without any family, spent 14 years in the gulf (financed by a rich woman on a whim and trust), working as a mechanic, driving bmw's and fancy cars, owns 6 hotels in bombay with 130 rooms. Can draw the plan of any place in half an hour, had prepared master plans for several hotels.
Had had dinner with Obama and rubina once.
Wants to settle down now on his 8.5 lakhs per month from his hotels. Get married and have kids.

And with his contacts could get me a builders license if i would go meet him in bandra. bright eyes, muscular like a goon, and bright boy face.

total badmaash company story.

the taste of hide

2010-05-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

Equus…

I loved the play.
I just wish the boy and his obsession didn’t fall prey so easily to the logic of the plot. Where every act and passion was explained away by some trauma and repression that took their place comfortably in a Freudian triad of father mother son with sex and repression playing games in between. Horses equal god equal suffering equal sexual ecstasy equal and on and on the plot followed in relentless resolutions and mathematical decisiveness.
If the point of the play was to place religion/belief and/or imagination against the murder of these by psychiatry I wish the characters and their obsessions didn’t serve so easily the Freudian logic of the plot.
Although what I loved was the bodies of horsemen glowing in red pajamas and the white adolescent body of alan and their performances. The eroticism , and the vulnerability and gorgeousness of naked bodies on stage.
Very beautiful. And they gave more than the plot did with their bodies and their voices. I have to see another production to see whether the play can do more.

Tori for fun

Caravaggio

I have no idea whenever I watch his movies, why I love them. I think its how messy they are. how its not about some truth out there but your struggle with it.
Its playing out the characters, making them like you wounded and split and mixed up. and sometimes embodying power in fancy dress and tweaking its self assurance.
History and ideas and power played out in bodies, by bodies.
So visually spectacular also.
Those boys the light and the paintings as tableaux.
i also love the fact that i can draw one straight thread through him, stipe's body in that video and rem stitch it to mine in a song

Hospital visits
When things get real about mortality and the physical body then all the dramas and the caricatures we make up everyday look really silly and the pure physical beauty and weakness of the body cause an amazement that just fills you up. sorry for the mush. But my grandmother is just beautiful.

Crush with eyeliner
Im wearing blue nailpolish till it chips. And my toes are red red red. I am smitten. Im the real thing.

a few days later reading at night i found this

water tower place

2010-05-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

anyone come here with me?
desperate to share it with someone.
forgive these bad resolution videos but i promise, its lovely.
you can see the forth floor terrace of a building near shanti ashram at eye level
there is only the slightly unpleasant smell of rotting mangoes

and the veined rocks that look like the weathered skin of some buried dinosaur
is this the unique geological feature that they made the park around?
i like the park as it is
forgotten with that small gate and path overgrown in parts that circles around the ufo tower.

window drama

2010-04-29T20:42:00.000-07:00

i have put plants in my window. and a leaf fell on the sill today!

summer holidays and day at home

2010-04-24T21:10:00.000-07:00

i spent the day at home. and it felt great. the house is really the best in the day when all the colours glow in sunlight. then mohit came over and we had beer through sankat city which is a super fun film, hilarious, moves really fast and i loved the anonymous generic bombay landscapes that had that sense of loving tacky magic in the accidental encounters of old and new that you see everywhere in the city.
the walk through lic was fantastic. we wallked down all the old shortcuts and went into some new places.. old red fiats, old trees id never met- like one huge huge old banyan somewhere off the back road.
found a new old place. around the spaceship like old water tower at the highest point in the colony- a real khopcha where some pretty boys hang out- from where you can see down to the shanti ashram side..
there had never been any place in lic that felt like a prospect place except terraces... this is a real corner. beautiful.
waiting to take ranjit and vini there.

irla: boy in white

2010-04-24T01:53:00.000-07:00

summer music

2010-04-16T19:59:00.001-07:00

Burning down the house

she blinded me with science!

Airhead

Immersions

2010-03-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

We are the world is a bouquet of voices in the morning.
Terrible song but full of fantastic arrangements, juxtapositions overlappings of gorgeous voices.
Im still trying to rid myself of the tack-lens that has glued itself to my eyes since last evening, after Vinita and me walked out of the theatre into the spaces of raghuleela with the pouring of chains and buckles and fake and flat and imagining cameras everywhere. Reading every figure on the road through the caricaturesand violences of the movie. Very unsettling it was. Didn’t let you watch it with any sense of what your reaction should be. all the spaces of the malls, vajreshwari couples in those rooms, haunting me today.
Then this Sunday akka was felicitated by the karnataka government and sang for twenty minutes just one raag and a thumri. She killed everyone with the ease that comes from 78 years of thinking and singing- mad complex dense tight arrangements like delicate neckalaces strung through the air that would disappear before you caught them, leaving open mouthed aahs all around the room.

all the flowers

2010-03-12T20:43:00.000-08:00

enjoy the silence

2010-03-11T02:14:00.001-08:00

sawantwadi asniye

2010-02-24T19:40:00.000-08:00

dad and me on terrace

2010-01-17T09:41:00.000-08:00

fleshwounds

2010-01-02T22:00:00.001-08:00

On days when skin feels too placid to all the blood boiling within
the mouth opens like a wound
to sing

lovely day

2009-12-30T23:13:00.000-08:00

Everytime I do one of my girl in the city days I have a great time.
Diane cut my hair again and i held my breath everytime her fingers moved close. She is too lovely.
I met madhavi in the train on my way to the performance.
The light outside the train windows was orange where the sky met the roofs.
I reached late, and was let in in between applause.and was thrilled to go sit on my empty seat right in the centre in between an old man fast asleep under his beret and middle aged woman from chembur.
And then waves and waves of sound filled the room.
I liked all the dense pieces where the notes rose in rushes and filled the air.
All the melodies were too sentimental and too plunky for me but his hand was unbelievably light and gentle so that notes lifted gently into the air or struck sharply and rumbled deeply.
Gorgeous skill.
Lovely sounds.
And then I left the theatre, with the sea breeze pushing across me as I walked along rjbx’s wide parapet to the sea. Got my shoes polished by the same boy who recognized my boots which made me too happy.
Got into a train filled with boys who were horsing around entertainingly, and one of them, a very very handsome boy with black eyes and black curly hair held my hand to get me off the train.

humming buzzing morning

2009-12-29T19:08:00.000-08:00

the tar hummed with the tremble

of the bus coming around the corner

it woke the pack of dogs alive and hunting for garbage

who were quickened to chase the trucks and autos that ventured too close

crows swooped across and in front of the garbage truck

everytime i thought it was the red bus it was another schoolbus empty to pick up the kids

humming buzzing morning time

metro

2009-12-26T00:08:00.000-08:00

goa

2009-12-15T04:34:00.000-08:00

anups baby

anup and febin at kala academy

view over panjim

anup at the ccd in old panjim

i met anup and febin and firdaus
two lovely boys took me around goa
up and down the hills around the curved edges on a scooter
with all conversations that went over and around them and some others
met a very old and very lovely man who had lived for ninety four years
and who was teaching in an octogonal corner room all sorts of sizes and ages the violin
with elaborate notations on post its and ruled notebooks in a shaky and deliberate hand.
a real gentleman in his iron-creased green shirt.
his casual hellos and conversations in portuguese, konkani and english with old friends we met on the pavement.
anups office was tucked under a sloping roof, open airy and filled with lots of things from everyone who loves him. drawings, photos
very very comfy and very relaxed visit it was
not like the tourist goa i had always been to before which always left me with a sense of unreal and contrived fantasy.

another music quote i like

2009-09-26T20:16:00.000-07:00

‘ Take a good look at people who try to dedramatize, to desymbolise and designify. They seem to think they can achieve complete demystification and reach things per se, in all their unadorned nakedness, revealing the aims and values that lie hidden beneath the mask. It’s pure platitude, too black and white. With no symbols, no fictions, how could you carry out the cruel dialogue between the I and the me, between living and life? How otherwise could this tale be told, with all its ellipses and silences? Without images and symbols how could you condense the vapours of the living, how could you trace man’s long journey into the dark recesses of his own memory? How could you conjure up the past, that zombie, how could you reanimate it in the name of what is possible, unless you call upon the power of images? If it is true that life as it is lived was always more shoddy and more lousy than could be expressed by a glorious and tragic symbol, at the same time it always makes something much vaster. Music, for example. What does music you make become? Everything. Small worlds and the world at large. The universe. All moments, every one of them. Love, play, knowledge, calmness. An inexhaustible presence- time overflowing with presences- takes hold of you, sweeps you away and changes you by becoming your own presence and your own present, the present moment which- at last- you offer yourself as you enter the realm of everything possible. Everything: joy and suffering, serenity and pain, more and ever more. Inexhaustible depths: a translucent abyss unlike that of the sea (which swallows you up) and the sky (which fascinates you and drowns you in its luminous void). The purest, the simplest, the noblest, the lowliest, divine and demonic- this is what music makes you become. The distance between life and living is bridged. You are clothed in splendor, the splendor of totality. An illusion? Not entirely. Alienation? Maybe, but an alienation which disalienates you before it negates you once more. So do not hesitate to glorify yourself.’

Henri Lefebvre, The message of the crucified sun- Introduction to Modernity

gardeners

2009-09-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

all these years he mowed the lawn, trimmed everything, all alone, now hes got some company.

night flight

2009-09-14T07:49:00.000-07:00

vapours/dreams

2009-09-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

lic colony lies on the edge of the creek almost. the stp, the vapours from the gorai landfill, the smell of rotting leaves in monsoon make their way into your every day and the scaffolded growing rcc stubs, slowly sprout through the weeds at the edges of new roads into the mangroves.

the vapours from the edge- mixed with smells of strange poisonous leaves, shit and chemicals i think have done things to our minds.

the boys who collected tadpoles and fish from the creek backflows in gutters, knew that when they beat their wives years later remembering how they tied and tortured lizards, dug up cemteries, and dreamt of being gangsters combing their oiled hair in rearview mirrors.
the quiet man who spoke only to his chairs and took his roses for walks on a string must have been driven by that stench lingering in the morning air.
the three thin sisters who never spoke to anyone, rode their bajaj scooter till they disappeared one by one into the air must felt it like all the spinster girls in costume lonely in their dark afternoon houses waiting for their new boyfriends to come ,hopelessly sure nothing works out really.

all this i thought on my late night journey across the dark edges of charkop, with the mangroves silhouetted black against unknown greyness, and patches of buildings shadowed in the street lights.

believing in some way that this edge business makes you little hopelessly fatalistic. things were always too apparently mixed, and simultaneous here.

PJ Harvey Dress

2009-08-21T03:05:00.000-07:00

Put on that dress
I'm going out dancing
Starting off red
Clean and sparkling he'll see me
Music playing make it dreamy for dancing
Must be a way that i can dress to please him
It's hard to walk in the dress, it's not easy
I'm spilling over like a heavy loaded fruit tree

If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on

It's sad to see
Lonely all this lonely
Close up my eyes
Dreamy dreamy music make it be alright
Music play make it good for romacing
Must be a way I can dress to please him
Swing and sway everything'll alright
But it's feeling so damn tight tonight

If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on

"You purdy thang,"
My man says, "But I bought you beautiful dresses."

"You purdy thang,"
My man says, "But I bought you beautiful dresses."

Filthy tight, the dress is filthy
I'm falling flat and my arms are empty
Clear the way better get it out of this room
A falling woman in dancing costume

If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on
If you put it on

Mrs. Bartolozzi

2009-07-30T00:13:00.000-07:00

I remember it was that Wednesday
Oh when it rained and it rained
They traipsed mud all over the house
It took hours and hours to scrub it out
All over the hall carpet
I took my mop and bucket
And I cleaned and I cleaned
The kitchen floor
Until it sparkled
Then I took my laundry basket
And put the linen all in it
And everything I could fit in it
And all our dirty clothes that hadn't gone into the wash
And all your shirts and jeans and things
And put them in the new washing machine
Washing machine
Washing machine

I watched them go 'round and 'round
My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers
Oh the waves are going out
My skirt floating up around my waist
As I wade out into the surf
Oh and the waves are coming in
Oh and the waves are going out
Oh and you're standing right behind me
Little fish swim between my legs
Oh and the waves are coming in
Oh and the waves are going out
Oh and the waves are coming in
Out of the corner of my eye
I think I see you standing outside
But it's just your shirt
Hanging on the washing line
Waving its arm as the wind blows by
And it looks so alive
Nice and white
Just like its climbed right out
Of my washing machine
Washing machine
Washing machine

Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy
Get that dirty shirty clean
Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy
Make those cuffs and collars gleam
Everything clean and shiny

Washing machine
Washing machine
Washing machine

Kate Bush's birthday and This is where i want to be

2009-07-29T23:24:00.000-07:00

birthday today!

and my day at home.

imagining silly magical coincidences.

im celebrating listening to wuthering heights.

and everything!

no place

2009-07-29T20:58:00.000-07:00

Lying on the lawn in college after school, on the curved hump of the giant creature buried underneath

Feet pointed towards the s-w corner framed by the corner of the building and the baby gulmohars

Crows in a line perched on the parapet in the corner of my left eye

And the kadamb balls swinging low in the dark curtain in my right

Looking up at the soft grey cotton clouds coming up the triangle like a sheet to cover me

Shweta and I rolled down the back of the lawn

Giddied and girly.

sinking into hibernation

2009-07-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

My mother is piecing together the mad map with horses, and the whole world tasseled ribboned land and water overwritten by mad curlicues while I type this. and its looking as insanely compltcated and tiresome as everything looks to me these days.The rain now even more mixing up all flesh cars trees nails hair limbs dirt voices and everything into one big tight ball like the mad filled circles on my mums jigsaw.
I am really waiting to slowly sink into hibernation with some more easy book-world that rohan will leave for me soon hopefully.
Ive been in and out of two amazing books.

Messiah was a diagram with breathtaking spaces in between the dots that made up the people. i liked the coldness.
Kavalier and Clay I liked as a tale of tenderness and friendship between two boys more than anything anything else.. , bringing together the two boys and their webs and meshes of family loves comic dreams in a space of tenderness in arms thrown over a shoulder, kisses, in the hooked space between their fingers and the palm over ruffling hair and head filled with mad dreams.

Ranjits diabolik and birthday happened on rain washed late magic night with vinnie glowing in the back seat in bandana, shorts tshirt and shirt, and ranjit looking beautiful in his fathers shirt. we rode on the gorai road and eighties music bringing back my college days and red eyed rides on dark wet road.

. ive been unable to post. and these posts repeat themselves. like that circular song- nothing ever happens
But the journeys in the train and st buses to vajreshwari again were good. The city emptying itself as you speed past cross the creeks,there was that forlorn man standing with the head of his penis held between thumb and index finger out to all the passing trains whom i cannot forget, and industries and quarries and villages, all the skinny couples on their way to the hot springs heads bent over mobile phone pics and aishwarya rai with fingers and elbows tangles.

Everything has changed . Im looking forward to this next year in college. lots of new people. and less to do for me. im determined i will have time to open a few new doors air out some old rooms. and hibernate into some otherworlds.

and lastly, girls, there are people, out there that make a sport out of grabbing womens breasts as they cross the road. its happened so often its almost funny.