It's not just the good things that leave you speechless....

Stupidity can do it too. For example. The group of 17 year old high school girls in the US who decided to get pregnant ( at 17!!!) and raise their babies together because they thought it'd be cool.
The fact the Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai are participating in the Gay Pride Parade, but Mumbai isn't. I'm wondering why, because Mumbai, well, her personality is such that I thought she'd jump at the chance.....after all, the fact that India is having pride parades marks, well, it's great that we're finally beginning to accept homosexuality and LGBTs for what they are..

The other thing that's left me speechless is the photography exhibition by Raghu Rai. For all you Mumbaikars, it's on till 20th july, at the National gallery of modern art, on M G road.
Dad went yesterday morning, as a punishment for going without me, I made him take me there again in the afternoon.
The hall at NGMA is, well, modern. Beautifully designed, with circular halls and spiralling staircases, making you feel like you're in a giant ammonite.
Raghu Rai's work is sheer poetry, most of it, and I can safely say that he's the kind of photographer I've always wanted to become, this is what I want to do with my life, chronicle the world with a camera.
Walking through the well-planned layout, almost each photo hits you with emotion, emotion that you can clearly see. The sheer volume of crowds, the angles that only an artist's eye can see from, the joy, the sorrow, the contrast offered by a Delhi picture titled "two old men"......His eye sees it all, his shutter freezes it.
On the second floor, a riot of colour, a livid blue wall hiding a Delhi washerwoman, wrestlers at an akhda, and many more. More often than not, his work shows comparisons, contrasts, but whatever it is, it just sweeps you off your feet. Photos that make a poet want to gaze forever and compose odes, make an artist want to reproduce them.
Dad passes a little section without stopping. "I've seen those", he says. "Terrible..." the word trails off.
I wonder why, I stop and look. The fourth photo there is like a punch in the gut, a hand and a child's head, eyeless. The caption reads "Burial of unknown baby, Bhopal gas tragedy". Yet another reads "Abnormal (or was it aborted?) foetus, Bhopal gas tragedy."
I leave, thoughts, words, emotions, pictures, all buzzing through my head. I know that's the kind of work I want to do, that's who i want to become. And off we go, looking at Mumbai with eyes that are now open a little wider.

Why do we instantly fall in love with babies? My sister's baby now has a name. Prerna. Sigh. Now the mother, son and daughter all have names that start with 'Pr' and the poor father remains the odd one out. A beautiful girl, this Prerna. Looks a lot like her mother. Dad was happiest with her in his lap, Prerna, like a little cat-baby, squirming in her sleep with her hands and her mouth moving. What do 13-day-old babies dream of? hazy impressions of their world, clouds? Do they dream? All the house was in chaos, and this sweet, soft baby was just oblivious to all of it.

Our little addictions

Pics of Manali are taking too too long to upload here, I'll do it when I get back to my lovely ADSL connection.
My little addiction is is the internet, obviously, for not-so-obvious reasons.
My little cousin, all of 5 years old, his lil obsession is the TV.
Looking at him, I feel very VERY good about my TV-less childhood. I mean, it's an addiction, almost a drug.
He came back from Talegaon last Sunday, and the first thing he did was switch on the TV. Let it be, his mom said, he hasn't watched for so long....
So he watched, nay, monopolised the TV for two days straight, first thing in the morning, first thing after he got back from school at 6 pm (horrible school timing, 1 to 6pm) . He knows the controls of the TataSky remote better than his mother does, he knows enough to change the TV language to Hindi everytime I think that Zack and Cody (or whoever's on screen) should speak their mother tongue and not mine. And he knows enough to know that he doesn't like the English language, no not at all.
He grumbles in a pureed trilingual mix of Konkani, Marathi and Hindi.
"Don't like English"he mutters, after I explain to him that watching his cartoons in English is an excellent way to learn. (I suspect that's how he speaks Hindi so well....)
"don't understand anything"
Another grumbling, "She just sits and reads books all the time, even while eating she reads." He turns to me. "Is it a hobby?"
"Addiction,", I tell him. "Obsession."
whoever it is, be they aged 6 or 65, I would not like them referring to reading as a "hobby". Philately is a hobby. Butterfly collections, those are hobbies. I suddenly feel the word "hobby" is rather inadequate, denoting a rather mild interest in whatever it is you're doing, it doesn't convey passion, or depth....Reading, it's a habit, it's a way of life.....I've never known my life or that of my parents to be without books. Be it comics, tween-chick-lit fiction, or crappy novels, or finally, the more serious-ish books i'm finally buying, I've loved books. Loved is an understatement, So yeah, I basically don't understand, never have, how people can be averse to reading. I love the smell of a new book, or even an old book, really. Not content with just reading books, I'll collect books, trilogies, series, and suffer space shortage. Sigh. I have the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, and Samit Basu's gameworld trilogy. Both modern fantasy, must-reads. I collected the 7 books of the Chronicles of Narnia a few years ago, I've read them all at least 7 times over. I dunno, when I get that dream house, or duplex apartment that I hope for, I guess I'll have one room there, with bean bags, and a bay window, and wall-to-wall bookshelves on three sides, and that'll be a library, my legacy.....where I can just go escape.....oh, yeah, I can see it.....All the great literary works.....in one room. My lil slice of heaven at home.
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Grr @ facebook. Stupid activeX photo control NEVER uploads. ugh ugh ugh. WHYYYYYY......

Sensory Overload

Yeah, well, I've been in Mumbai for hardly a week.....The DAy after i got here, I became an aunt, again. And the day after that, I saw my niece.
She looked.....well, like what most day-old kids look like.....tiny....red....soft....And I looked at her sleeping form and watched her face move as she succumbed to baby dreams, and I suddenly understood why everyone instantly falls in love with babies. She was precious. just precious. We don't have a name for her yet.....but she's beautiful..

And directly from there I had to go to a government hospital in Byculla, where scruffy cats competed with patients for food in a dreary ward, which looked, well, not all there.....

Spent a lot of time either in bookstore or rickshaw, bought 8 books, I normally average 14 every vacation, so I' definitely buying more.......
lesee.....
I found the 2nd and 3rd part of Samit Basu's gameworld trilogy, oh well, i'll just do the whole list later, shall I?
And went to Inorbit on a Sunday, BAD idea, the place was so full, I felt suffocated.....
The thing about this city that always strikes me, is the sheer effort most people take to dress up, just to get outs the house or whatever, the girls look almost model-like, most of them, in tight jeans and figure-hugging tops, layered with a jacket, and definitely some accessores.....you find people dressed so differently, from that end of the spectrum to very traditional, but you don't fing people looking downright scruffy like I do.... So today I'm wearing one of my dressier (and skimpier) shirts, and shorts. I cannot, cannot stand the heat.

Whenever I'm not out, i've usually collapsed on the bed in an exhausted stupor.....still recovering from manali....sigh....
anyway, cheers to me....look me up if you want to meet...can't guarantee, but i can try,.and that's something, na?

Back-to-Bom!!!

I'll just skim over Agra.....Almost 26 friggin hours straight in a bus, cramps you to no end, 14 to get to Delhi, % to Agra, just to see the Taj....most thought it wasn't worth it.....I enjoyed, as usual.....
Imagine.....throngs of sweaty, half interested people, each in their different coloured cliques, through all that, up rises the Taj, pure,almost virgin white, oblivious to the swarms of people buzzing around it like flies, inquisitive, probing, destroying......But the Taj is no virgin, she's been shamed, doubted, desecrated....raped.....
My group was least interested as usual....it's humid, we're all irritated.....the clouds look like painted wisps, all around is white........

Anyway. The night back to Delhi was one of the weirdest I ever had.....it's not fun when you're trying to sleep and you're interrupted every 5 min by daaku fuckin' daddy......oh how I loathe the song....

Airport? I had 4 hours to kill, I spent at least one of them in the toilet feeling like death and having diarrhoea. urgh urgh urgh......the Air india flight was pretty cool, individual tv screens and all......and who do i encounter on these screens? you guessed it....Daaku Daddy. The video. More ridiculous than the song. If that's even possible.

And now, well, I'm back in bitch city Bombay, currently in Kandivili......Met up with Rushi and Surhud yesterday, And i'm supposed to be meeting up again in about 5 min, but i'm stuck in a net cafe without an umbrella and it's peeing rain. story of my life. And mom insists I come home before I go out again. Story of my life in Mumbai. She's all worried and all. I told her I gotta learn how to live in this city some time or other, but she's still worried. You're not a boy, she tells me.....I wish I was....I've never cared......
Still.
And si, My fave cousin sis gave birth to a baby girl yesterday night!!!! I'm an aunt again!! But really, P never seemed like the mother-of-two kind, but yeah, the baby's here, she waited till I got to mumbai, and I get to go see her today!!!
:)
Life's lookin gooooood.

Manali Diaries part two....climbing the peak

One friggin thirty. In the morning. That's when they woke us up. Three a.m. is when we left, to climb this peak called Brighu. That's where I was the whole of yesterday.
The toughest part of it was supposed to be the first two hours. We did the first two hours in the dark, by torchlight, so I guess I didn't even notice. Haha.....
But yeah, well worth it.....
Before we went, we were standing in line, and our very weird instructor, Girish, makes us look up at the sky.......
Diamond dust on velvet is how Chikki put it....I couldn't describe it better, I think....It's just....with no artificial streetlights around, and in complete darkness.....Every single star in the sky......all over......This place, i tell you, is serene. I really wish people would put their music and phones away and enjoy it properly......especially Daku fuckin' Daddy......I've had more than enough of that song.......
So off we go, uphill. And we had NO idea where we were headed, we were just following. The thing is, we'd look down every now and then, and it was just amazing how fast we were ascending, the lights from the camp got further and further away and soon they'd gone......

At 4 am or something, it started to get light......Imagine this...you're walking on a green meadow in the dark, you know there are mountains on both sides....and then you look at them and you can actually see them, see the outlines, and then it got brighter, really fast, and the first rays of the sun poured down over a peak in the distance, and it was pure bliss. Wordds do NOT do justice, really.
After that....it just kept getting more beautiful, and then we hit the snow. Deep sigh. We walked over plain snow for I don't know how long, until we got sick of it, and the funny part is we were all Just too tired for even a small snowball fight. Strange. But yeah, walking for like 7 hours straight.....
Girish said before we started, we're all mad, the whole of India is asleep, and here we are, off to climb. He said that as the sun hit us, You are here, look at how beautiful it is, and your Hussaini sir is still in his sleeping bag (i think I detected more than a touch of scorn there. and rightfully so. weird guy that one, if I kept writing about every single thing that's happened........well......I only have so much money to spend at a net cafe.....the days are longer here, and more...full.)

So we deposit our bags at this "lunch point", a bunch of strategically placed rocks.....And then they show us the final slope we have to climb. Long, 500 feet ascent, i think. 85 degree slope. Almost straight upwards. Fuck fuck. Off we go. The local staff, Govind and Laalu, were Brilliant. See, you have to cut steps in the ice for us to climb.....And they make it look SO much easier than it is.....I tried.
It took us an hour or so to climb.....slow work, the high altitude hit all of us, i was the front and practially falling asleep as I climbed...........But yeah, an hour later, there we were, at Brighu lake.
Said to be holy. currently frozen. BEautiful. Serene. It's a pity people couldn't stop swearing, at least for a little while.
Beautiful energy that place has........

After the ascent, we gotta get down na? here starts the best and most screwed up part. We slid. On our jeaned butts. About 500 feet on that 85 degree slope. On ice. It beats......The fastest rollercoaster in the world woudln't be as thrilling.....
And after lunch (chana puri in wet-butt-numb-ass jeans) we had to slide again. and again. and i kept losing control. falling over, rolling, backwards. But fun.......like you can NEVER imagine.
And AFTER that the screwed up part.....two hours downhill in drenched jeans and shoes. My voice is gone. my stomach does weird things to me. I felt, in short, like a drenched rat.
\But yeah, we made it up and down. Alive. And after I got dry, I was even happy. VERY fuckin' happy.
Can't really put a fitting conclusion here except for this: Dad, I miss you, and you'd be VERY proud of me.

Manali Diaries, from manali.

So pissing off.
I wrote a complete post, but the server in the net cafe crashed just before i clicked post. three cafes later, i find server, but mem-card not working. shit. shit.

Anyway, here I am in Manali, thechnically in a net cafe in Vashishth village.....

I was looking forward to the Delhi part, but it turned out to be rather irritating, we didn't get to go to Connaught, and I was stuck in a bus full of 33 whiners who whined. Sigh.
Delhi had its compensations, I called up Reno, sorry I woke you up man......Lol you have a wonderful voice....
The trip to manali, damn, I almost wish it hadn't ended, khadus dumfuck teacher in front, music all the way, dance party in the centre of the bus, and wide bed-like back seat. Mmmmmmmm. swe-eet.
We stayed a day in a hotel, then off to the base camp, complete with tents and all, that's where i'm living now......

I've been crazy....I've been through freezing waterfalls shirtless, through a steaming sulfur spring shirtless and pantless, treks have been tough, way tougher than last year, but very much enjoyable. One of our instructors, Alok, is this crazy 24 yr old Man Utd fan who all of us love so much.....He wasn't allowed to come on today's trek....because there were complaints (i'm guesing, from dumfuck teacher,) that he line-maros the girls. whatever. we love him.
Lots has been done.....rappeling, FINALLY. I did it near perfect on my first try, so proud of meself.....
Trump has been played, with Sid and Matoo and Venky and Lakshay, Matoo wants an mention of him and the only gaali he knows....."gaandwaala"
I tell you. I've been practically living with these guys, I've picked up unimaginable gaalis, but I've also lost my voice.
sigh. that the way it goes.
Hmm, I think i'll stop now, I gotta find Sid, and there's this bakery I really wanna get to......
More will be done later....