Ok, the only reason I’m writing this post is because I wanted to write a post sitting in Meghalaya. Also because I woke up at 6am because someone in the floor above me seems to be jogging on the spot. Which is no doubt lovely for his quads and other muscles, but thanks to wooden flooring, my ceiling is creaking with every step he takes and every move he makes (with apologies to The Police). So I figure, I might as well blog.
The name Meghalaya means “the land of clouds” and it’s known, apparently, as the Scotland of the East. I’m not sure if that’s a reference to the landscape or the locals’ willingness to drink and get drunk. Whichever it is, the tagline isn’t off-base even if it is somewhat weighed down by colonial baggage.
I’ve never been to Northeast India and I don’t know much about the area. Large parts of it are mined with separatist violence and one of the states (Nagaland) seems to have pretty much become Chinese territory. Meghalaya, however, is not one of the troubled areas at present. At least I don’t think it is. One part of the family was from Shillong and left a few decades ago. Not that you’d guess if you spoke to them. They keep talking about Shillong with a fond affection, as though they were in the hilly city last week instead of about 50 years ago. But they weren’t really the reason Shillong rang a bell when the opportunity for this mad dash of a trip came up. Given I’ve not seen any part of the Northeast, I’d have leapt at the chance to go to even Chinese-encroached Nagaland (that’d be very interesting actually. Hm…) but Shillong had an extra little caress of recognition because of Janice Pariat’s book of short stories, Boats on Land. Highly recommended if you’re looking for something to read. Like all collections, it has its ups and downs but Pariat’s language is mostly beautiful and very evocative. Her characters and the way they see the world linger with you. Charming stuff. Not a book that you’ll want to donate to charity once you’re done reading.
So yes, courtesy Boats on Land, Shillong seemed an excellent idea. And it was. Let’s be clear: the city is ugly. It’s just a crowded mess of hideous modern architecture. Everything seems crammed into each other and ready to topple. But walk around town and suddenly, you notice little dabs of violet in the sky and between the trees. The colour looks almost like a flitting shadow, rather than leaves or flowers; or like a bit of fairy dust that’s been sprinkled so that you don’t lose heart at all the terrible concrete that has besieged Shillong. I’ve no idea what these flowers are, but they’re so, so beautiful.
The thing to do in Shillong is leave. Because once you’re out of the city, within minutes, you’re surrounded by breathtaking greenery. (This is why seeing the hollowed out rock faces — mining scars — look particularly… murderous. The soil is red, the stone is often marbled with pale pink lines. It’s strangely reminiscent of flesh. Illegal mining is a serious problem in Meghalaya, I’m told. It does seem to have made the state rather prosperous though. Anyway…) The landscape here isn’t just beautiful, its quicksilver. One moment, it’s misty. A few minutes later, you’ve got raindrops the size of your face crashlanding on your windscreen. And just as unexpectedly, it all disappears and the sun’s out and everything’s bright and shiny and green and gurgly.
I’ve got about 200 photos to resize and compress — not to mention a 12-hour, westward journey that I need to embark upon in about 45 minutes — so I’m just going to end this post with a photo I took on my first drive out of Shillong. This was taken by doing that really expert thing of pointing the camera at the scene outside the window on the other side (why do I always sit at the wrong window?) and clicking confidently. Because when it’s that beautiful, all you need to do is point and click. Really.
Many more pictures later. Now, back to Mumbai. Gah.
There are so many logs in my backlog that I could build everyone in Switzerland a chalet, which is why I’ve decided to abandon any and all ambitions of clearing it. Them posts are just going to appear, hopefully. At the rate I’m blogging these days, they’ll probably never show up. It’s been harder and harder to blog of late. Part of the problem is that I spend most of the working day churning out copy and we use a WordPress template at work, which makes the thought of opening up WordPress after work extremely untempting. I find myself wandering around Tumblr instead, just because the interface doesn’t remind me of the rubbish that I’ve spouted during the day. Plus all this relentless ranting is making my online personality even more dull than my actual personality (ref: thisdrawing by TRP, which once rang so true. No longer.) Sigh.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing this is not to mope about how boring and bored I am but because David Bowie has come out with a new video, “The Next Day”. Like so much of Bowie’s stuff, it makes no sense whatsoever. At least it doesn’t to me. Why does Gary Oldman have slicked back hair as though he’s just trying to join an Italian mafia? What is that platinum blonde-haired woman doing wearing nothing but a veil and strategically positioned golden stickers? Why is Marion Cotillard in the video and why does she start squirting blood from stigmata? And is David Bowie supposed to be Jesus?
There’s a part of me that feels I should have some idea of what’s going on given I spent a fair bit of time (not to mention some 15 pounds) at the exhibition David Bowie Is at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was like wandering around a shrine put together by a particularly lunatic Bowie fan. There were old costumes, audio recordings, video interviews, video art, gushing comments from some people who had worked with him. The wall text was so full of admiration that I was quite certain that if I touched it, a little bit of drool would rub on to my fingers. It was great fun, particularly since Bowie has written some fantastic songs and there were some of the exhibits were absolutely gorgeous visually, like this one which showed two of his costumes and played an old recording of one of Bowie’s tv performances.
Photography wasn’t allowed so this is a smuggled photo. And it’s mine, my own. Not quite precious, but what the hell.
Fun as it was, the exhibition felt like being inside a rather extravagant press release that would like us all to believe that there hasn’t been a mind like David Bowie’s since Einstein. It’s as though he’d rented the V & A for an elaborate publicity campaign, which may well have been the case given Bowie has a new album. I remember telling someone that they should have titled it “David Bowie is God”, rather than David Bowie Is.
And the next thing I know, Bowie has dressed up as Son of God in his video.
Starring Jada PATEL. Yes, Patel. Let us do the garba in celebration. Now.
May might be a cruel month for Narendra Modi, but Gujarat’s star is definitely rising. Because when the newest Mills & Boon by Ms. Maisey Yates has a heroine named — wait for it — Jada Patel, then it’s time to take us brown people seriously. Ok, so Jada isn’t exactly a traditional Indian name, but hey, people name their kids after Greek islands and heaven knows what else these days. Her description, however, makes it very clear that she’s a proper Indian beauty:
Black, glossy hair, golden skin and honey-coloured eyes, combined with a petite and perfect figure, made her a very tempting package.
At some point she also says quite clearly that she’s Indian and a proud one at that, which may be deduced from the fact that she names her adopted daughter Leena. When this adopted daughter’s birth father, a hulking Russian hottie named Alik Vasin, questions Jada about Leena’s name, it’s an India Shining moment like no other.
“…Her name is Leena.”
“What sort of name is that?”
“Hindi. She’s named for my mother.”
“She should have a Russian name. I’m Russian.”
“And I’m Indian, and she’s my daughter.”
Take that, Russia!
Not just that, Jada’s no shy, virginal little thing. A widow — her husband was a good Indian lad called Sunil who had a heart defect and like many Indian men couldn’t handle his being the reason they couldn’t have kids. Aside from that he’s a perfectly passable husband — and unintimidated by Alik, Jada impresses the Russian Casanova both with her personality and her sexual flair. Ms. Patel makes the beast with two backs with Mr. Vasin while La Traviata soars in a packed Parisian opera. The next time they have sex, she’s so awesome that he can’t hold himself back and comes before she does (huge no-no in the world of Mills & Boon heroes). As a friend said with full admiration, “What. A. Wench.” Vatsyayana would be proud of her. This might be bigger than Jon Hamm roaming around India shooting for some film about a desi baseball pitcher (or something like that).
I was actually hoping that Alik and Jada would visit Brazil and China during the course of the book. Had Yates done that for them, this could have been a proper BRIC romance.
A few days ago, I wrote a post about the bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon. It also had a photograph from a Pulitzer prize-winning series. “On an unrelated note, the Pulitzer Prize for photography was announced on April 15. The AP team won a prize for their coverage of the civil war in Syria,” I wrote. Then last weekend, I read this article by Charles King. It’s one of the more balanced and reasonable pieces on this episode that I’ve read, but that’s not why I had a little… moment while reading it. Emphases mine, by the way.
In the long term, the Chechnya link will probably end up being less important than, oddly, the Syrian one. In blocking further international involvement in the Syrian crisis, Russian officials have long maintained that Syrian rebel groups are dominated by al Qaeda affiliates, whose victory in the Syrian civil war will have dire consequences for the region and beyond. Now, Russians have already begun to portray the Tsarnaevs as an unlikely link between Boston and Damascus. There are somewhere “between 600 and 6,000” Chechens from the North Caucasus fighting in Syria, said Kotliar in a recent interview with Russian media, “and from what happened in Boston, perhaps Americans will finally draw the lesson that there are no good terrorists and bad terrorists, no ‘ours’ and ‘yours.’” Keep arming the Syrian rebels, the argument goes, and sooner or later you will have to face the consequences of a Syria overtaken by Islamist radicals.
It’s a bit of a stretch and it’s also the Russian government’s logic, but whaddyaknow, perhaps there was a connection after all. Not a comforting feeling, though, to know that subconsciously I may think like a Russian government spokesperson.
The other article about the mysterious case of the Tsarnaev brothers that’s well-observed, is this one by Rania Khalek who asked a very pertinent question about what constitutes a terror attack as far as the American government is concerned:
…if a mass casualty attack in and of itself equals terrorism, why was the brutal massacre of 20 first graders and six teachers by Adam Lanza never labeled as such? Why isn’t James Holmes–who killed 12 and injured 58 at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theatre last summer–being prosecuted as a “terrorist”?
The prayers of half a continent were answered when the Boston police announced that the suspects in the bomb blasts were Caucasian and male, despite the pressure cookers, back packs and odd wardrobe choices (I think it was on The Daily Beast that readers dissected the Tsarnaevs’ footwear. Because that revealed to readers how foreign and fucked up the bombers were). But despite the announcements that the suspects are white and male, the message didn’t really reach everyone. Not even everyone in the police. At one point, hours before they finally found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in a boat, one cop reported that he had Suspect No. 2. Yes, he could confirm this. The suspect was with a companion and he had been apprehended in a cab. He’s wearing a grey hoodie and he’s Middle Eastern, said the cop who was sure he’d struck gold. Confirmed, he said. Twice. It took a while for someone to crackle in and point out that Suspect No. 2 is white, not Middle Eastern.
Very little — beyond the fact that a large section of America really needs to brush up on its geography — is clear about why the Tsarnaev brothers did what they did and what happened Watertown. Unsurprisingly, conspiracy theories have already started bubbling up. (The people behind at least a few of these must be those who are smarting at Reddit’s apology, which was much more gracious than the behaviour of many propah news agencies when they screw up.) There’s another one (didn’t save that link) that claimed that Tamerlane Tsarnaev had been “radicalised” by the CIA. Since Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is alive after having given a small army the runaround for hours and botched up a suicide attempt, there’s a chance we may yet hear the Tsarnaevs’ side of the story. No jihadist network has claimed them as their own. At the moment, the only ally Tamerlane the Insane (no, seriously. The guy sounds very, very disturbed) seems to have had was his little brother Dzhokhar. Dzhokhar’s friends, incidentally, say he was a regular, all-American guy. This is why people like Khalek are questioning the American government’s decision to categorise him a terrorist in possession of a weapon of mass destruction while Adam Lanza, who killed more people, is a tragic, twisted figure. What makes one a terror plot and another a domestic tragedy? Is a gun less violent or terror-inducing than a crude bomb?
Personally, though, what I find truly depressing is that despite the craziness and the questions, it’s still possible to come up with at least hypothetical explanations for the Tsarnaevs’ words and actions. The same cannot be said for a rather large percentage of North Indian men, many of whom are considered leaders. Take the latest example of Indian masculine brilliance, politician Satyadev Katare who informed his audience, “No man will harass a woman till she looks at him in a suggestive manner.” By which we are to deduce that it’s because of the come-hither-and-rape-me gaze that a 5-year-old gave Manoj Kumar Sah and his partner in crime, Pankaj, that the duo abducted the child, raped her repeatedly, inserted objects into her little body and strangled her. In Katare’s own state, a 4-year-old was horribly gang-raped and last I heard, the hospital had announced in a press conference that her condition was not good. All because of the way she looked at her rapists. Of course.
The world is just entirely too depressing. I think I’m going to ban current affairs from this blog and devote myself to escapism and warm fluffiness. Starting now.
Photo by Nina Leen—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
A friend told me once that she travelled by plane as often as she could because she hoped the plane would break into two or explode, “like it does in the movies”, and she’d die and wouldn’t that be insanely awesome? Sure it would hurt and feel horrible, because death in general must feel horrible since our bodies are built to do the opposite of dying. But if you die because you’ve fallen off a plane, then for a moment or at least half a moment, you’d look down and you’d see how incredible the earth looks once there’s a little distance between you and the ground beneath your feet.
I’m not sure what this says about me, but I get that sentiment. I’m not sure I’d actively chase plane explosions, but it’s true. Float up and away, and the details that make the world ugly become less visible and far less significant. Mumbai, for instance, looks like an overflowing treasure chest when you fly in at night. You can’t tell the potholes, the hardship, the breaches and the despair. It just glitters. I always think of my friend — who has, so far, not died but has notched up some serious frequent flier points. Bless — every time I land. Last week, I thought of her more than I have in a while despite having stayed very much at sea level.
I’ve spent much of the past week fretting over incidents and issues that don’t really affect me. Like earthquakes in foreign countries, like rapes of little girls whom I can neither reach nor help, like a bomb blast and a manhunt on the other side of the planet. I’m not alone in feeling that twang of horror when things like this happen. Thankfully, lots and lots of people feel this way. For those of us who are a little neurotic, it’s more than a twang. We follow the news desperately, we imagine scenarios, we froth around the mouth. The stories consume us, which is silly because these stories are not ours and we have no parts to play in them. We don’t help, we make no impact, but we care nonetheless. We think about them, turn their stories round and round in our heads, and all that we’re left with at the end is the depressing knowledge that there’s no protection against the bastards and idiots of this world. The rapists will keep raping; the bombs will keep going off; the young — suspects, terrorists, police officers, innocents — will keep dying; the stupid will keep talking; the ones with power will remain powerful; and occasionally, the earth will rumble.
The world has looked like a very ugly place this past week, unless you’ve seen it through the camera-ed eyes of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s stream of photos from space. Hadfield is the commander of Expedition 35 and he’s cool enough for me to have spend pretty much an entire Sunday watching YouTube videos of him. The last man I did that for was Viggo Mortensen after I saw The Fellowship of the Ring.
From Hadfield’s Tumblr
Hadfield is funny, he sings, plays the guitar. In videos, he floats around, ‘hangs’ upside down and does things like the Hadfield shake on the treadmill. And he tweets the most incredible photos of earth from space. If Hadfield posted blurry rubbish, it would still be pretty incredible to see images within minutes/ hours of them being taken in a space station that’s god-knows-how-many-thousands-of-miles away. But Hadfield’s photos are frequently exquisite. There’s no explaining why a photo posted of, say, the Bahamas makes my pulse flutter a little optimistically and makes everything around me seem a little less bleak. But it does and over the past week in particular, Hadfield’s photos have been like magic spells. Just for a little bit, the photos make you forget how messed up things are at ground level because from up there, the world is still beautiful. And in that, I find a strange, inexplicable hope. Distance and perspective — maybe that’s all we need.
Below are some of my favourites from Hadfield’s Tumblr, which is highly recommended for its loveliness. It’s an instant pick-me-up. Check him out on YouTube (this is how he takes the amazing photos) and look him up on Twitter. He’s delightful.
When I read about the bombs at the Boston Marathon, I couldn’t help wondering if those who’d planned this terrible plot had watched Four Lions. Meanwhile, there were some joy among a few people I know that the al-Quaeda hadn’t claimed responsibility for it. “Call it a silver lining, but it’s a damned relief to hear of a terror plot that doesn’t immediately throw up a brown, bearded man,” wrote an American friend in an email.
Then yesterday, the FBI said the bombs may have been packed in pressure cookers and my heart sank. As a friend said to me, “Let’s just think about which ethnicity is most closely associated with pressure cookers? After all, jo biwi se sach-much kare pyaar woh Prestige se kaise kare inkaar?” That Hindi bit translates to “If you love your wife, you won’t say no to the Prestige pressure cooker”, which was the tagline from an old Prestige campaign. It probably sounds like a somewhat non sequitur-ish line to many today, but exploding pressure cookers used to be one of the most popular methods in dowry deaths. Keep that in mind and the two parts of that tagline aren’t as disconnected as they initially seemed.
Setting aside dowry deaths, pressure cookers, despite having aided and abetted murder in the past, remain among the the South Asian cook’s favourite kitchen equipment because food is cooked in a jiffy and if you time it right, the meat is melt-in-your-mouth tender and the rice is fluffy and the world is a happy place. The abiding food memory for most South Asians of my generation must be that of a shrieking whistle going off in the kitchen and a white plume of smoke whooshing out of the top of the pressure cooker. That was the signal that the food was done. I believe pressure cookers have become sleeker, cooler and more discreet now. I’m also possibly the only brown person who has never used a pressure cooker. I keep imagining the damn thing blowing up in my face. Like it seems to have done at the marathon. A pressure cooker in a backpack. Paint or photograph that and it’s like a symbolic representation of a South Asian through clichés. It seems they’ve got video footage of suspects. I’ve rarely hoped so desperately that a face be Caucasian. But a pressure cooker in a backpack? As another friend put it, “This does not look good for brown people.”
On an unrelated note, the Pulitzer Prize for photography was announced on April 15. The AP team won a prize for their coverage of the civil war in Syria. There are some truly heartbreaking images in there, so harden your heart or keep the tissues handy before you click. One of my favourite photographs from the series though is this one by Narciso Contreras.
Night falls in a rebel-controlled area of Aleppo, Syria. By Narciso Contreras for AP.
It’s such a quiet but dramatic shot — the devastation and despair against the calm of an untroubled sky. The headlights that glow with a violent hope, an anger. I glimpsed the photograph yesterday and haven’t been able to forget it. “All changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born.”
Some of the most beautifully framed and harrowing images in the slideshow that AP has put up are by Contreras. Like the one in which a rebel soldier is reflected in a mirror, a father weeping as he holds the bloodied body of his dead son, a triumphant rebel on a street corner. Contreras has also taken some fantastic pictures in Burma and India (he’s been to Kashmir, among other places).
And now I’m late for work.
Someone really needs to pay me a salary just for, you know, existing. God knows, given the state of affairs in so many parts of the world, just staying alive is a bit of an achievement.
As much as I love Twitter, and I do, it’s one failing is that it’s easy to lose sight of tweets that deserve to be remembered. Like a set of tweets that was posted by Genderlog India about gender stereotypes in Indian textbooks. So, lest I forget, here’s a copy-paste collection of those tweets by Genderlog India.
The common biases & stereotypes of our society are reinforced by our textbooks: Religion, region, caste, class & of course GENDER.
Seemingly innocuous. Some examples of GENDER stereotypes in primary textbooks of most publishers. No names. Most have such stuff.
Social Studies/EVS – “My father is the head of the family. Mother looks aftr us Grandpa takes me to th market. Grandma tells me stories.”
Maths: “Arun scored 85%. Mini scored 72%. Who scored more marks? Mrs Sharma’s salary is Rs 20,000. Mr Sharma’s is Rs 35,000.”
Science: “We need water to drink.” Visual – boy drinking water. “We need water to wash clothes.” Visual – girl washing clothes.
English / other lang Readers: “I am Anuj. This is my sister Asha.” Never – “I am Asha. This is my brother Anuj.”
English/other lang Readers: “Teacher: What would you like to be when you grow up? Mala – I … a teacher. Manu – I…a doctor”
These books sell in lakhs per class, per major publisher. Year on year. Think how they reinforce, reiterate gender stereotypes/biases.
Meanwhile, as I’ve been typing, Iran suffered the worst earthquake in its recorded history. It’s the second Iran has had in the past ten days and this time, tremors were felt in Dubai, UAE, Pakistan and in northern India. The day began with news of two bomb blasts at the Boston marathon, the oldest in America.
It’s one of those days when whining about how terribly life treats you is a little insensitive and entirely too self-obsessed, unless of course you live in Khash. So I will gracefully exit and go follow the news obsessively instead.
Yes, this will totally convince all strapping young Indian men to join the Army:
Never mind whether or not you’ll get women like those pictured, rejoice that you may well produce such lovely ladies. Fires the patriotic pride and makes you want to gird your loins and sign up right away, doesn’t it?
For those not familiar with Bollywood, the ladies whose mugs you see in that poster are all actresses and starlets whose daddies were — you guessed it — in the Army.
I must confess, by the time I was about three days away from my flight back to Mumbai, there was a part of me that was quite looking forward to coming home. I guess it’s the advancing years, but there are things that I find myself missing some things when I’m abroad. Like, for instance, my desk, my books, my bathroom and what Thai expats call “the bum gun”. Also, the news. The bum gun I expect to miss. (I’ve no idea why this contraption isn’t popular outside Asia. It’s effective, better for the environment and generally genius.) I thought I’d be thrilled to be cut off from the news, because a) it’s depressing, and b) to get the news you have to read the newspaper or watch a news channel, which are both entire traumatising. Still, despite my resolute decision to not get drawn into the real world while on holiday, from time to time, I did find myself sitting in different parts of the First World and wondering what was happening back home. This is what happens when you live in interesting times.
As it turned out, only “small, petty” incidents took place. Like a 22-year-old student leader being killed while he was being held by the police in Kolkata. No biggie, according to Ms. Mamata B. The news of Sudipta Gupta didn’t reach me until this week and I’m still not sure if I’ve got all the information, but here’s what I do know. On April 2nd, four Left-leaning student organisations in Kolkata organised a demonstration demanding college union elections. The police arrested a young man named Sudipta Gupta, who is a student and member of SFI — Students’ Federation of India, I think — and who died a few hours later. Custodial killings are usually not considered a trivial matter, but Mamata Banerjee and her government seem to think it’s not worth discussion. There were attempts to brush the matter under the carpet. Understandably, many were not inclined to do so. From what I can tell, Sudipta Gupta’s death has finally given the CPI(M) something that they feel will turn the popular vote against Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress (TMC). There are also those who aren’t precisely comfy with the idea of a boy being beaten to death by the police, regardless of political nitty gritty. The official explanation for Gupta’s death is that he hit “a post” and died, thus reducing Gupta’s death to an accident rather than a custodial killing. The police said he fell of a bus while in their custody. The autopsy, however, suggests Gupta died of multiple wounds.
I’m not much of a fan of Times Now’s Arnab Goswami, but I do think he struck gold with this particular interview:
“How does a lamp post become a living object and inflict multiple injuries?” Good question, Arnab. Particularly when accompanied by that hand gesture.
On the subject of murderous lamp posts, artist Suvaprasanna has a simple response: “Nothing new in Calcutta.”
And you thought Delhi was unsafe.
For some reason, Mamata Banerjee seems to have thought that Gupta’s death would be forgotten in no time. Maybe she was hoping Narendra Modi visiting Kolkata would help her cause. It could have happened. There was an inordinate amount of interest in Modi’s visit and he apparently gave an electric speech to BJP workers in the city. If only TMC’s thugs hadn’t gone on a rampage in Presidency University (it hasn’t been a college since 2010), maybe Gupta’s death would have slipped into dismissal. However, for future reference, perhaps Mamata-didi will note that going ballistic against an entire university is not the best way to make people forget the death of a student. Especially if the university in question is Presidency.
Presidency happens to be one of the bastions of Bengali pride. It’s still considered one of the best universities in the country and it’s alumni include some incredible minds. When things got politically fiery in Presidency in the 1970s because of the Naxal movement, a number of Presidency students left mid-term and joined colleges in other parts of the country, like Delhi. Delhi university alumni from those years have told me that every time a student from Presidency joined a class, everyone resigned themselves to slipping down one rank. Because nine times out of ten, the Presidency kid would be a smartass who would rank at number one.
Of course when I saw Presidency as an impressionable teenager, it was an absolute mess. I remember going with my father, a proud Presidency alumnus, and being appalled by the graffiti and chaos everywhere. It was filthy, the classrooms looked primitive. The place seemed like a warzone rather than an educational institution. I couldn’t imagine myself in there and much to my father’s disappointment, didn’t even consider applying when it was time to send in forms for college. “You’re picking academia over a real education,” he rued. I rolled my eyes.
I’m not sure how I would have reacted to 100-odd armed thugs running into my college, yelling abuse at me and damaging property while the police pretend everything is calm and a-OK. The present batch of Presidency students gave back as good as they got, from the sound of things. Someone told me, “TMC’s thugs have no idea what Presidency is. They thought they’re going into a posh college. They’ll have knives and stuff, and Presidency students being polite and bookish will get freaked out. Except for more than half of Presidency, getting a concussion is as regular as giving exams, thanks to college politics. On the day of college elections, there’s always some bawaal (loosely translateable to “madness”) and it’s been that way for more than 30 years. It’s not the losers who do politics in Presidency. Some of the brightest students are in college politics and they aren’t afraid of getting into fights.”
Well, now the TMC know. Because not only did the students fight back physically, scores of them uploaded cameraphone photos and accounts of what happened on Facebook and other internet sites. Net result, when TMC turned around and said they had nothing to do with the violence at Presidency, there were photographs and eye-witness accounts that made it clear that the ruling party was lying through its teeth. The state government’s knee-jerk reaction was to lodge FIRs against two students who have been seen rallying students together and arrest them. This just goes to show how completely clueless these politicians are about the way things work these days. You can’t make people disappear when they’ve been photographed in leading Bengali newspapers and quoted by national media. You can’t pretend you weren’t involved because you made sure there were no press cameras at the ‘event’. The attack took place between 1pm and 3pm. By 5pm, students had returned home, told their folks, connected to the internet and put up photos on Facebook. By 7pm, the news and the evidence was everywhere. Arresting the ‘ringleaders’ won’t take away all those posts. It’ll just lead to more posts and outrage, which is exactly what happened. Even now, if you have Presidency students among your friends, you’ll see them talking about who needs to be warned, what word needs to be spread and what happened where.
Fortunately, the fact that Bengal is run by the equivalent of the Red Queen makes some things more predictable and anticipatory bail was quickly organised for these two. It’s worth noting that none of the people arrested so far are TMC workers, even though there’s photographic evidence of TMC councillors snarling away at Presidency’s gates.
I’m not sure what the TMC was hoping to achieve by attacking Presidency, but this move is going to be an epic fail from the look of things. My father, though, sounds inordinately gleeful suddenly. Not only has his alma mater done what no one in Bengal seemed to be able to do — thumb its nose at Mamata Banerjee — but his daughter who rejected Presidency is cheering for it now. All is well with his world at least.
The things you discover when you’re with Switzerland’s leading Bollywood expert:
Actor Salman Khan = A blow-up doll.
It’s like they were separated at birth. And no, that’s not a blow-up doll version of Salman Khan. That’s just a regular, buy-it-on-the-internet (Why? Who am I to judge?) blow-up doll.
In case you were wondering, I found the doll while trying to find a photo of Hrithik Roshan. Thank you, Aunty Google.
Incidentally, Salman Khan has one of the more entertaining Twitter feeds among those of Bollywood stars. There are the Pinter-esque ones, like “seriously?” and “Hi”. Sometimes, he tells you whether or not he skipped dinner. At times he laments about issues that bother many of us in Mumbai, like this one:
“haji ali juice center shuts at abt 12 ? Wow . Dint kno that, now that’s really sad,wonder y ? used to have juice n pizza’s at 5am.”
Then there’s tweets like this one that defy description:
“NOTHING JST ON MY WAY TO THE AIRPORT GOING TO DUBAI TO SHOOT FOR MENTAL HEARING A TRACK WAKANDA IN MY CAR BY DIMITRI VEGAS AND LIKE MIKE”.
This is how screwed up my head is. I look at that last tweet and keep remembering Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, in which an actor spends the entire day being driven around in a car that takes him from location to location. What if, in the middle of preparing for his next role, the actor sent out tweets like Salman Khan does? He’d add a layer of reality and authenticity to his performances and it would take the madness of Holy Motors to a whole new level of … god knows what. Holy Motors was one of those absurd, inexplicable and utterly mind-boggling films that a viewer — depending upon their artistic inclinations — will either tear apart for being high-on-crack rubbish or celebrate for being brilliant and insightful. Which, I suppose, is how one could also describe Salman Khan, given his heroic stature among many connoisseurs of Bollywood.
