Stress Ball

The most annoying thing to have to deal with, when you’re grumpy, is other people’s cheeriness.

I Style!: Three Aliens Plus One

Back in February, I had the privilege of conducting a blogging workshop as part of the Kala Ghoda Art Festival 2011. Among the team, was my dear friend Moksh Juneja (also known as The Social Media Catalyst). Now Moksh is a regular teddybear, a fact known well to those close to him. He’s also a regular on the social media circuit. In another avatar, he moonlights as a college lecturer, a job that gives him all the practice needed in rescuing us from difficult crowd situations(!).

So what does a college lecturer/social media professional wear to a funky, artsy festival? Here’s what:

Now Moksh deserves an I Style! award just for that pose, never mind the tie, what say? Incidentally the photograph was shot right outside the Kala Ghoda office, by E Vestigio whose superb lens skills also it possible for me to blog about what I wore (I Wear: The Boheme At Kala Ghoda).

* Cross-posted to Divadom.

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Moksh isn’t the only one to incorporate a little fun into his wardrobe! See the I Style! gallery for more!

TV Talk

I’m faced with a TV dilemma!!!

Modern Family on Star World. The Big Bang Theory on Zee Cafe. They’re both on at the same time. How is one to pick? Sexual/gender stereotype humour or geekboy humour?A crazy set of characters…or a crazy set of characters? Gloria’s gabbing or Sheldon’s shennanigans?

Let’s see, Modern Family is on season 2, which in my opinion is the good one for any humour sitcom. Season 1 is usually spent just explaining the characters & their relationships. Seasons 3 and onwards go into flagging dead jokes or getting into the lives of side-characters who were never that interesting in the first place. The gay couple, Cam & Mitchell are starting to annoy me in this season, especially Cam as the excessively-hysteric-perpetually-PMSing gay guy. On the upside, the May-December family of Gloria & Jay are really coming into their own. This season focuses differences other than age such as races, countries & personalities. Manny could have been precocious but somehow manages to be delightful. This is really my favorite family of this series.

On the other hand, The Big Bang Theory appears to be airing randomly mashed-up reruns since Penny’s ‘honeying’ Leonard one day, avoiding his new girlfriend at the laundromat awkwardly another day and just being friendly girl-next-door after that. I didn’t manage to catch this series on its first run in India but I’m not really complaining. This way, I see each episode in isolation and not as part of the larger story. The jokes seem a whole lot funnier that way and Sheldon Cooper is always brilliant! (pun intended). Of note, I’ve never yet seen a bad The Big Bang Theory episode. Definitely still in the running to be my favorite sitcom.

This whole TV business is the boy’s fault since he got me hooked onto Dexter. I whined and fretted all along, about the monstrosity of relating to a serial killer, but I watched the last two seasons, regardless. Good stories turn out to be the only thing that the boy and I share a common passion for, never mind that our idea of what constitutes a good story or even which channels we receive them from, are worlds apart.

That seeped into the time before and after and soon I found myself tuning in to The Simpsons. My brief stint with The Family Guy put me off what they promoted as ‘even funnier than the Simpsons’. Sorry, I disagree, jokes about child abuse & rape are never going to sound funny to me. Go shrivel up, Griffin, you’re not funny in my book.

If the post-11pm slots are comedy, the pre-11pm viewing seems devoted to crime, of various types.Las Vegas was slightly interesting until they decided to knock off one of the protagonists, literally….by having her blown off the terrace of a casino. Huh, what??! I bleched & swore off after that. Even the new cast hasn’t helped. Tom Selleck as the new head of the Monteceito Hotel tries, but can’t be Ed Deline (played by James Caan who I recognized as Sonny Corleone from Godfather).

Castle with a female cop & a consulting crime fiction writer (insert obvious romantic spark) was briefly interesting but again, the ending was so meh! I’m dipping into White Collar a couple of nights a week now, but only if there isn’t anything else to watch. An ex-con working with the FBI is promising in a book, but in a TV screenplay it’s safe fare – predictable excitement.

Star World mostly reins as my number 1 channel with Zee Studio sitting tight on my ‘Pre-Ch’ (control-tab for the remote control) option. By around midnight, I’m usually in that nice just-before-sleeptime zone after a movie has gotten over or a good episode of Modern Family/The Big Bang Theory has just zoomed its credits. TV watching is like staying awake in that, if you don’t stop it at just the right time, it’s hard to ever stop.

A channel called Love CBS looked like it would replace Star World in my affections for awhile. Besides Oprah, Next Top Model, Racheal Ray, King Of Queens & Top Chef Masters were shows that gripped me. This channel has the plus of fewer & shorter ad breaks too and the promotime intro music doesn’t grate on your nerves the way Star World & Zee Cafe do (or perhaps that’s just because I watch them too much). But horror of horrors – the cablewallah menace struck! The channel disappeared (while the other less appealing CBS channels are still live & screaming), aborting what could have been a grand passion for cheesy reality TV. Worse still, it rendered this carefully created document quite useless since the channels all shifted one place (in some cases) or two after a certain channel number. GRMPH! My only hope is that Star World won’t disappear before MasterChef Australia (great, by the way, not at all like that horrible Gordon Ramsay-judged MasterChef America) finishes its run!

All of this spoilt-for-optionness is reserved for weekday evenings. Daytime & weekends are full of reruns of the same 3-4 shows. Weekends particularly get grating since they air the same show for hours on end and if you don’t particularly like one, you’re locked out of good viewing for a largish period. These are alternated by the cringeworthy Simi Garewal Presents India’s Most Desirable (and I don’t care to discuss this further, so don’t irritate me you Simi-fanboy-trolls!) The only good thing about weekend TV has to be Glee or now, Mad Men. Most times I miss these since I’m out in the 9pm-midnight period. Which is rather sad since both these shows seem to require continuity of viewership and don’t offer the viewer the same open relationship as sitcoms.

The boy points out that I can catch any of these shows online and without ad breaks. But…and how do I put this…I crib about the long ad breaks all the time…but *shuffles feet* the adrenalin rush of being able to catch a show at its time, without missing a single minute and even surviving repeat onslaught of fairness creams, automobiles & insurance advertisements…watching it online doesn’t quite do the same thing. :-p

I’m really watching too much television, aren’t I?

* Pictures from from Entertainment Wallpaper.

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If you liked this post, you may also want to read:

• Modern Couple
• Two And A Half Shoes

Ideamarked July2011: Social Networks, Twitter Talk & Internet Memes

Birthday month! Among my many gifts were a trip to The City of Joy, the last metro I’ve been to. I also had an article published in Marie Claire India this month and a post on FriendsOfBooks. That apart, I’ve been cooking, dressing up and having fun! Nothing much else to say I guess; happiness is simple!

• Bizarre but funny, this Twitter baby will probably be the next internet meme. (via Twitter)
• A striking review of Google Plus & Facebook (via StrikingArrow, link courtesy Pushpa). Also see my first thoughts on Google Plus.
• My second post on books – let’s go ride a dragon, let’s find a vampire to bite, a broomstick to fly, a tree to talk to…let’s go hunt some troll!: ‘Fantasy For Beginners: 10 Books To Get You Started’ (via FriendsOfBooks)
• Use the power of social media to give your career that edge! My article in this month’s issue of Marie Claire India ‘The Careerist: The Online Advantage‘
• A funny metaphor on food (via Twitter)
• A chilling story on how dreams are lost, by Sidin Vadukut (via Livemint, link courtesy Gautam Ghosh)
• The world’s first matrimonial social network! What an idea! Login to Youpid
• Former journalist & still a friend, Arcopol comments on the sad state of the profession he left behind. (via Twitter)
• The Indian middle class is apparently responsible for a whole lot of things! (via Twitter)
• An interesting look at India’s online celebrities, by Pinstorm founder, Mahesh Murthy. (via HindustanTimes)
• A list of countries that an Indian passport-holder could travel to, visa-free. I didn’t realize there were so many of them! (link courtesy Mahesh Murthy)
• Status update jokes are the new party trick. (via MakeUseOf)

From Island City To City Of Joy

I paid a flash visit to the City of Joy this month. Kolkata was the only major metro that I was not familiar with (I was born in Delhi, grew up in Mumbai, have family in Chennai and have stayed in Bangalore). Moreover, the artistic associations and all the many people I’ve loved, who hail from that place, beckoned.

One of my first thoughts was, the food was delicious! Everything from the roadside phuchka to the traditional home-cooked meal that I was served, to the maple syrupy pancakes I had for breakfast at a cafe across the street to the pop Chinese fare I devoured at a mall. We Mumbaikers really don’t know much about food, do we? Where’s the time for us to enjoy it when the train is 3 seconds away, when a bratty filmstar may come bearing down on us in our sleep, when terrorists may bomb our offices or our restaurants or even just mow us down on the roads? We live in perpetual fear and worry, a fact that’s glossed over and overglamorized when terror strikes the city with that hated phrase, ‘The Mumbai resilience’. Sometimes you need to leave home to understand where home really is. I don’t know if the City of Joy will ever be home to me but it certainly was a comfortable, welcome haven to me.

I was also delighted at the responses to my saying that I was a writer. Here, in Mumbai, that statement is met with an unimpressed (and disinterested), “Oh. Good, good.” with the obvious attitude of ‘That’s not really a job’. At best, I can hope to be mistaken for a script-writer since apparently that’s the only paying work for a writer and well-paid work is the only kind that matters to the average Mumbaiker. The people I met in Kolkata, instead, asked about my writing, talked to me about literary influences and were genuinely interested in what the world was like for a contemporary writer.

I came back to a birthday and overwhelming gestures of affection from friends and family. For perspective, that very evening, bombs exploded across South Mumbai and my phone, thus far buzzing with birthday wishes was innundated with phone calls checking on my safety. Mumbai, how long can I continue to call you home when I don’t even feel safe here anymore?

Much happened, all of which I’m still processing. But Kolkata gave me memories of a pleasant (well, not literally, the weather was sweltering) laidback city of delicious food and gentle people going about minus the stress I see in my own city.While I collect my thoughts, here are two distinct images I caught on Marvin:

Proudly displayed on the wall of an ice-cream parlour:

Spotted pasted on the walls of a bylane.

I Wear: Brown Girl In The Rain

This delightful young lady was in town recently. Not surprisingly, she had a hajaar things to do but she did manage to squeeze in a coffee date with me. Rather unfortunately, this happened to be last Monday when the skies opened up and poured out the kind of rains that this city sees at least a couple of times every monsoon (never mind that the sanitation department, safety authorities, public transport controllers and emergency services still haven’t figured out a way to deal with it). I also had a movie date in town a little later but I was meeting her in High Street Phoenix before that.

Frantic scrabble through wardrobe to find something that would be:

1. Suitable to meet self-possessed, smart, younger former-colleague-turned-friend from hip London
2. Not stick out like sore thumb in ‘oh, those ‘burbies’ (accompanied by sneer) townside mall
3. Dry easily without creasing, sticking to body or in general, making instant sauna for person wearing
4. Be warm enough when inside the over air-conditioned movie theater
5. Be comfortable to walk about in dirty puddle-infested roads in case of public transport breakdown

Here’s what I came up with:

A plaid skirt with a waterproof lining which I used to wear to work with a fully buttoned up shirt. Very power dressing in that avatar, very meh for streetwear on account of its beige-brown colour. I cracked that severe demeanor with a navy blue stretch denim tee-shirt/blouse that I’ve had for years and years and is still lovely (also worn here).

I have a sensitive throat that catches every cold virus floating about so I draped a long silk scarf that’s been lying hidden in my closet on account of its (again!) brown colour. My handbag would have to be the handy (pun, sorry!) red Baggit (also worn here) because of its waterproof nature, its just-right size and generally because I needed a dash of my favorite colour to carry me through a brown ensemble. Even with all that, though, my outfit felt too dreary and sober. In (what I thought was) a radical move, I junked my sandals for this sunny yellow pair of moccasins (also worn here).No other accessories except my handy steel watch and these very ladylike (and hence not used often by me) rose earrings. As an afterthought, I added a string of turquoise beads around my wrist like a bracelet, which is what I think saved this outfit. The blue and the yellow both match the swirls on my scarf.

As it turned out, I got to the mall before she did, hopping from home to autorickshaw to taxi. I made it in dry, then had my shoes soaked in the water flowing out of the mall, got soaked by the rain dripping off (well, pouring off) the roof and eventually squished my way in. Happily, I was almost dry in 20 minutes. And after coffee, I went through the ordeal again to get to town for the movie. Again, the outfit dried and kept me snug as a bug and happily watching Harry Potter’s last ride through our screens.

I Wear:

• Navy blue stretch denim top: Now non-existent shop on Hill Road, Bandra West, Mumbai
• Beige-brown plaid skirt: Van Heusen
• Brown silk scarf with blue & yellow swirls: Cottage Emporium, Connaught Place, New Delhi
• Yellow moccasins: Catwalk
• Red tote: Baggit
• Enamel rose earrings: counter on third floor, Mega Mall, Oshiwara, Mumbai
• Turquoise beads: Roadside stall, Elephanta caves, Mumbai

* Cross-posted to Divadom. The photographs were shot by Sveccha, my crazy date.

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See more on the usage of scarves in Scarfing It Up.
Meet my Native American with my red Baggit in Flourishing Feathers.
Walk my yellow Catwalk moccasins into The Boheme At Kala Ghoda.
See another place that navy and brown make magic at Coffee And Sunshine.

Survivor’s Guilt In The City Of Gold

When I wrote this post earlier this year, I doubted anyone would actually read it. It was something that I wrote because I felt I had to, for myself.

My first brush with this story was back in 2000. A young greenhorn, freshly out of college, I’d been given an internship that would take me around the city and (I hoped) be my stepping stone onto the corporate ladder. I looked at the list, clutched in my fist and read through the rainwater dripping off my hair, an unfamiliar address. It was the first time I had stepped off at that station called Lower Parel. In the years to come, it would become home station to me as I passed it everyday on my way to and from work. But back then, I didn’t even know about the staircase at the end of the platform that lead to an overbridge. I walked out into a busy market, even then as filthy as current-day Mumbai with its roads bruised by incomplete construction.It was pouring. I walked all the way through muddy puddles, broken roads and unidentified messes. On either side, high walls towered around me, the kind I had only ever seen in Hindi movies of the late 70s. Instinctively I recognized them as factories and mills.

A few years later, my career took me to the other side of the tracks to a place with the quaint name of Chinchpokli. The first time I heard that name, I really thought the speaker was kidding. But he wasn’t and the directions he gave me were ones I would follow for the next four years. I’d spend my lunch or coffee breaks walking around near the office. My wanderings took me past the plush building, past the post office, right through the heart of an old-fashioned bazaar (complete with clay pipes, stacks of tobacco shavings, religious pictures and plastic jewellery). The back gate of my office compound led into a narrow lane, which ended up at another picturesquely-named station, Cotton Green. Both sides of the lane were flanked by those same high walls, broken windows and architecture of another era.

My father is the one who told me the tragic story of the mill-workers in Mumbai. Once I saw a play called ‘Cotton 56, Polyester 84‘. The story of two mill workers whose lives are permanently put on hold by the strikes and their pathetic attempt to pass their days counting the number of people wearing shirts of either fabric stayed with me. I had no words to describe what I felt, though.

I spoke to the boy (a relative newcomer to Mumbai) about this sometime back.And he is the one who dug out this movie for me to watch. City Of Gold is the appropriately titled story of the greed, the desperation and the angst that collide and fuel this place that I call home.

The movie begins with the phasing out of mill divisions and the subsequent protest strikes by the mill workers. A mill worker was one of thousands who trained in a specific job and spent all his adult life doing just that. His peers were his colleagues, his friends and true to the Bombay chawls, his neighbors & family. This simple, defined world was thrown into despair when the strikes began. Not only did the mill worker lose his job, but his self-esteem was battered, his relationships worn down and the social structures that he belonged to, eroded.

The mill workers had been working people with all the sense of respectability and pride characteristic of the middle class of this country. But an entire generation was suddenly rendered jobless, unemployable and thus, impotent. Knocked over from their traditional roles as bread-winners, their families suddenly found themselves struggling to cope both financially and emotionally. Anarchy reined. Their women, traumatized by the shift in gender roles turned into incessant nags, dejected by life or fell prey to bad decisions with irrevocable consequences. Their sons, similarly tortured, varied between escapism of every way to crime.

City of Gold focuses on one family and some related characters and how these events shaped their lives. It’s sobering to see what one normally reads as a newspaper headline over morning tea, turn into a catastrophe that destroys entire families. The boy described the movie as ‘hard-hitting and pulling no punches’. I’d agree. It’s grim, it’s tangible and it’s real.

Speaking objectively (as much as I can, anyway), this movie could have been a dreary, heavy documentary but it wasn’t. The characters all felt real and well-defined. The movie also pulled together diverse sub-plots and zoomed between the larger reality of the mill strikes to the mundane dramas of everyday lives of the workers perfectly. What was most interesting was that a story with so much berth to fall into controversy, finger-pointing or preaching, didn’t. You can almost picture the story-teller, gritting his teeth to stick to the facts and pass no judgment while at the same time empathizing with the horrors faced by these people.

My only real grouse was with Anusha Dhandekar (who plays a very small role in the movie) since her bubble-gummy, glittery self seemed out of sorts in a movie of this nature. But the boy brought home the point that she was meant to represent the viewer (the entire story is a flashback, narrated to her by a man who grew up in the mill worker chawls). That touch actually makes the movie even more real.You and I after all, can have no more than a very superficial impression of what elapsed in that historic period in Mumbai. She is what connects us to the movie, just the same way that the glitzy malls and hip pubs that stand on those places today, do.

I loved the movie. It tells of a people I never knew, of a time that was before me. But it speaks the truth of the city that I call home. I cannot, in good faith, call myself a true Mumbaiker by enjoying the glamourous urbane life with no thought to what built it, after all. Mumbai, Island city, Maximum City is a place of much dazzle and money and it all stands on the remains of exploitation and greed. It is survivor’s guilt but I think that is the very least we owe to the people that lost everything to make this city home for us today.

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City of Gold was released in both Hindi & Marathi and directed by Mahesh Manjrekar.

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If you liked this post, also read:

• History
• Pipes
• The Old Mill
• Mills To Malls: The Monuments Of Mumbai

Google Plus, Facebook – The Race Is On!

I jumped onto the Google Plus bandwagon the day it was launched. For the following fortnight, my mailbox was innundated with notifications of people adding me to their circles. I’m still receiving requests to send invitations. Suffice to say Google’s ‘let’s make this an exclusive club’ policy continues to work wonders.

I’m still not terribly impressed by Google Plus, given that it just feels a lot like Facebook. The share-with-who-you-please feature that they rode in on, has been possible on Facebook too. I don’t remember if this feature was already there or if Facebook introduced it as a knee-jerk reaction but now I can choose who sees my status update right when I post it.

Google Plus’s Sparks gave me a chance to pause and think there might be something different on offer. But it turns out to be no more than a list of shared content under a particular tag. Well, it could be an interesting enough feature one supposes. Google Plus certainly is trying to straddle both the Twitter (with tag-searches) and Facebook (sharing, communities) worlds.

Some of the things that I’m waiting for Google Plus to come up with:

• Pages
• Login accounts on Seismic and Tweetdeck
• Comment with/ Share on options on website/blog toolbars

Facebook tagging doesn’t seem to be working. I usually link to related content on the Pages of my blogs (The Idea-smithy, XX Factor) and if the source is also on Facebook, I tag their Pages/Profiles. People who are on my friends lists and Pages I’ve liked are uniformly not appearing anymore in the drop-down menu after I type in ‘@’. If this is a bug, then it’s a mighty bad time for it to happen, Facebook. If not, I can’t see why Facebook would do away with a feature that makes it easier to connect and engage with people.

At the moment, I find I’m unable to Unlike Facebook Pages that I’ve liked before. The error message of,

“Something went wrong. We’re working on getting it fixed as soon as we can.”

is all I get for my clicks. This might seem like a simple technical bug (perhaps not as drastic as a security leak). But consider why a user would want to Unlike a Page that they’ve liked before. The Facebook algorithm that shows up only Profiles & Pages you interact with a lot means that most users probably don’t care to ‘unlike’ a page after it has been liked, even if they don’t care about it any more, because they simply don’t see it anymore. A user who takes the effort to visit a Page to Unlike it is aware of its existence and does not want to be made aware of it through updates any more. This is probably the most extreme negative emotion a user can have with a Page. Not being able to Unlike and hence being forced to see those updates on one’s stream can be severely off-putting. It made me shut my window and switch to the other one with Google Plus (where there were only friend updates and no marketing messages from brands whose Pages I may have once liked and was now unable to Unlike).

I’ve said before and I still say that a social network is only as good as its members. I’m on Google Plus only because most of my community is hanging out there at the moment. The minute I see them all moving either back to Facebook or onto something new, I’ll move with them. Features notwithstanding, I’m hardly likely to hang around a cool hangout if there are no cool people to hang out with.

Carnivore

I used to know somebody who said,

“Vegetarian khana mere dharam ke khilaaf hain!”

But I think the boy really believes that any vegetable or fruit he puts into his mouth will devour the meat that it finds, before his stomach can get to it.

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* Also served at Plain Salted.

How I Ended The Bhindi War

Snooty restaurants that palm off watered-down rasam as ‘Mulligatawny‘ would describe it as a ‘Okhra’. Indians prefer the quaint name of ‘ladyfingers’. I’ve never been a fan. From my very early years, I learnt to detest the violent green hue, the snappy texture (external) and gooey feel (internal) of bhindi. Apparently I’d start howling the minute mum’s hand moved towards the stack on the bhajiwala‘s cart.

Once, when I was about seven and mum was away or unwell or generally unavailable, dad decided to make us breakfast. With much a tada! and a flourish, he presented his best efforts – sandwich toast stuffed with raw bhindi. I think the trauma of that has never entirely left me.

Undeterred, mum and dad continued to coax, wheedle and force this vegetable down my throat. Most notable of all was the claim that eating bhindi would make me good at maths! To this day, dinnertable conversations when this dish is served are variations of,

Me: Bhindi again! I have a degree in mathematics. You would think that’s about enough maths for anybody!

Dad: And it’s all on account of the bhindi we made you eat!

Oh well, there is no accounting for tastes, I guess (all that mathematics notwithstanding). Recently though, I decided to give my parents a little surprise. Mum was returning from a fortnightly trip and I had decided to put up a nicely cooked meal for her anyway. I figured adding her favorite vegetable might be a nice touch. Obviously I’d also have to make it appetizing enough for me to want to eat it myself. Oil, salt and spice came to my rescue.

Ingredients:

• 1/4 kilo bhindi (My mother checks for freshness by snapping off the end. If it snaps off easily, it’s fresh. If it stretches, it’s not. Also drop any that look blackish or have bruises)
• 1 tbsp chilli powder
• 1 tbsp turmeric (haldi)
• 1 cube of ginger for garnish
• 1 tsp salt
• Oil

Method:

• Here’s what I started with – thoroughly washed (by soaking for a minute in bowl of water) bhindi.
• I chopped off the heads and the ends. Then I sliced each bhindi into half and slit it lengthwise twice. The result is quite gooey so it’s a good idea to do this on a chopping board & scrape everything into the vessel later.
• The masalas were simply sprinkled on top. I was really playing it by the ear at this point so I just mixed them all up using my fingers. In theory it could probably have been done with a spoon. However once the bhindi  is cut (especially to this extent), the gooey mess is unbelievable. I figured I could use that wetness to ensure the masala got coated evenly over the pieces.
• Once the masala was evenly coated over the chopped bhindi, I just had to fry them. Standard procedure – wait for oil to heat up a bit, grab a handful and toss it in (not too forcefully or a splash of oil will give you a painful burn). Fry till crispy brown.
• I garnished the bhindi fry with fresh grated ginger. This is something new for me. Ginger has always been something I ground into paste and used as a base but never as a garnish. As it turns out the crunchy fresh zing of ginger goes a long way in masking any residual bhindi sliminess and it also complements the fried flavour really well.

Serving:

I intended for the bhindi fry to only be a surprise for my mother and not the entire meal. I guess if I’d sliced it into longer strips (instead of halving them), it could well have been a nice appetizer. As it turned out, I also made some chutney aloo sabzi, sambhar, rice and some fresh kachumbar salad. Here’s what my plate looked like at dinner. Mum loved it!

* Also served at Plain Salted.