VVS Laxman, the photographer

I woke up this morning to the beep of an SMS. It was from VVS Laxman, saying that I should credit him as the photographer of the small picture on page 10. It was strange. I wondered why, but I wasn't going to fight it. So I thought 'ok' and lay back in bed until it struck me that I wasn't awake, and therefore VVS Laxman didn't message me. Then I woke up. It was a message from someone else.

It has everything to do with closing the magazine. Yeah, that's it.

Right. Now back to business

After the magazine closed last night/this morning, this is what I'd been working on: a piece about the ICC's proposed changes to cricket. And if it doesn't read right, it's because of very little sleep. Regular blogging begins soon. Cheers.

Magazine goes to bed...

...and I stay up telling it bedtime stories. Blogging resumes soon.

Rise! Write!

The writer finally wakes up, and posts here.

3:30pm

Fingers double-click, the mouse wheel is rolled back and forth, a chair creaks. The air conditioner, packed away above a false ceiling, hums a deep hum. Paper slides through the laser printer, making a scraping sound as it moves. A writer lies sprawled across a table close by.

Pilgrims

Unlike a typical adventurer, the pilgrim seeks not to conquer the worlds he visits but to surrender to them; and unlike a missionary, he seeks not to preach but, in the silence of his supplication, to listen. A pilgrim does not have to be moving toward something holy, I think, so much as toward whatever resides in the deepest part of him: It could be a poet who gave wings to his soul, or a lover who broke his heart open.

Or a writer looking for nice travel writing. More Pico. More truths. Read the full thing.

The Storyboard Treatment: Sunglasses

Dressed in a salwar-khameez, she walks across a road carrying a notebook. She drops it accidentally. In the distance a car appears. It is a slow car and will take 35 minutes to reach her. She bends for the book and notices the car. Still 34 minutes to go. But there is horror on her face now. There's no way she can avoid it. No, in the 34 minutes left she will remain frozen to her spot, shielding herself from the inevitable nudge. Quick cuts follow, signifying action of some sort, and we assume the worst.

Cut to a hospital. She lies in bed with a bandage wrapped across her eyes. The doctors unwrap it slowly, as we grow more anxious, bursting with sympathy for this flower. Yes, it turns out she is blind. So she must wear Sunglasses. Big bulky ones that look like two black television screens. A lover places them over her eyes and leaves in tears. Another man enters her life, but she is doomed to blindness. Nothing can be done. Or can it? After sharing life for a while, he pays for her operation and she can see again. Such kindness. Now she will never leave him. Or will she? Her old lover appears at her doorstep one day with a rose, catching her and her new boyfriend off-guard. She rushes forth with her passions to reunite with her former lover.

The end.

The Storyboard Treatment

There are good music videos, and there are bad music videos. This is about the bad music videos. The ones that make you go 'wha...?' or, in sms, 'WTF?!' Videos that can be linked to some long-ago abuse. Videos that have nothing to do with life or love, though they depict both. Videos that tell a story, or several stories, in five minutes - including the singer's journey through life and how he or she helps the lovers reunite at the end before vanishing in a puff of glitter, and you later realise he or she's actually god/an angel/a fairy godmother.

This is for the videos that put the entertainment back in music, for those that put women where they really belong: in cholis three sizes too small. The ones that are timeless for they skip the 60s and 70s, and aim straight for the stone age, where men watch the mating dance with intoxicated eyes before dragging a mate by her mane. The ones where emotions never simmer, they roar, for happiness is depicted in a mile-wide smile, anger with an ugly frown; think yahoo emoticons on people's faces. Yes, this is for those videos. The ones that deserve The Storyboard Treatment.

Cutting them down to size

Being part of the edit team on the magazine is delightful. Fine writing has been coming in since the day before yesterday. Writers who can write, writers who make you think, writing that makes you laugh - there's an inspired paragraph by Kamran Abbasi - some statistical writing, and lots else. The mails that come in are also fun. One says, "I know you asked for 600 words, but will 800 do?" One writer forgot what he was writing about. That was after I had reminded him he was writing a piece. Another's gone missing in Pakistan.

This is a change from being on the web team, where so much happens that sometimes I want to go missing.

Reach for the clouds, but remember the safety net

Barely a day ago a man fell off the under-construction high-rise opposite my place. The worker had been balancing on a ledge before he toppled over, or so we thought. Today a local newspaper announces that he wasn't a worker but a producer and real-estate dealer who chose suicide. There were no financial problems, his friends said. Cases like this go away eventually, but not before the media digs up something. So we'll know more before long.

That's one matter. The other is, there are workers who walk on the edge of this skyscraper without a safety device. There are no nets, not even a rope attached to the waist. I see them on the ledge on the 16th floor, balancing precariously - it always looks precarious at that height - on the 19th floor, heck, even a fall from the first floor could hurt some. Do the workers even know they're supposed to have some sort of safety nets? I'm going the easy way and blaming the builder on this one. He has a real-estate empire in Bombay, and though his money-making skills are respected, the methods aren't. Yes, it's possible in Bombay to build a posh building and tell the government its actually middle-income housing, while selling each apartment for over $350,000 - that'll get you three brownstone flats in Brooklyn. It's possible to build that building without safety procedures. It's even possible to work around-the-clock and disturb the peace around the construction site while the police shuts down Christmas music performances at 10pm.

Bombay, city of dreams; you can do anything here.

Do...do that thing you did

In a past life I was an art director who wrote copy. Now I'm a writer designing pages on the side. Harassing the magazine art director with design suggestions is fun.

Toot-toot

I came upon this site only recently and wish it had never shut down. Salon.com's travel site, Wanderlust has beautiful writing. Here's a sample from Eric Lawlor's Close Quarters, about a train journey in South Africa with two coloureds, one black, and an oven:

For the fourth time in several minutes, the train shudders, eases forward and jolts to a halt. It can't seem to make up its mind. I eye the door. I have snared the only empty compartment on this train, and I'd like to have it all to myself ... The train begins to move again, this time with more of a sense of purpose. We clear the platform and then the station, and for the first time in more than an hour I can breathe easily. But it proves premature because, just then, the door to my compartment opens suddenly and two people enter, one a tall man in his 30s, the other a girlish-looking fellow in his late teens. For a moment I think I'm hallucinating -- that lack of sleep again -- because they're lugging two very large, very ornate mirrors, which they stow in a luggage rack. And then, without speaking a word (they act, in fact, as if they haven't noticed me), they leave.

Read the rest of it. It made me want to pack up and get on a train.

Kapil Dev and the other porn

After carefully watching channel C2 and MH1 for nearly a day, I now know that remixes are the other porn. No plot, no sense, just a lecherous camera. Mind-boggling. Like Kapil Dev this fad hangs about well after its expiry date.

He waits and waits and waits

Steady now, absolutely still. His eyes glance about before settling on a man charging at him. The man stops abruptly and moves his arm all funny, as if throwing a round-house wallop from ten meters away. The steady man raises his arm as his eyes leave the charger. There is no time. Instinct takes less time than thought, so he gives in to it. What does he do? He responds to the thrown punch by stepping back slightly and curling his body as his arms pull back like a trigger. And then the self-created tension uncoils at the speed of instinct. Arms rush forward while he twists his waist balances on the toes of one leg with the digits of the other barely kissing the ground. Then he waits and waits and waits. Steadily, absolutely still, before granting himself a single nod of approval.

Watching a Tendulkar six over midwicket was theatre.

Life in song

If life were a song, I’d make it noisy and raucous and loud and loveable. And each breath would have meanings that needn’t always be understood but whose beauty was understood. And the notes of each second would hit high and low, and each note would know its history, and know its place in the world.

A few days ago, I asked a friend whether modern songs had become less memorable, or were we just getting older? She explained to me that songs had changed because this was earlier the domain of poets and writers immersed in poetry. Then standards dipped in the 70s before dying in the 80s – this I can confirm, for the classic of my childhood was a Jeetendra musical called ‘Mama Mia! Pom Pom!’ This left us with Gulzar and, to a lesser degree, Prasoon Joshi, who can write some wonderful songs. But these are only two – there must be more – in an industry of average work.

But I wonder if writers who don’t write for a living can be moved enough to compose songs of their own. Song-writing, from what I hear, can be a personally rewarding experience. With blogs sprouting everywhere, it seems like every other one of us wants to publish a book. A bit of help, and many could adjust to creating songs. It’s exciting to imagine that there’s a talent waiting to be exposed so we can all be blown away and feel songs and music again. But who could? Or should? My nominations are Chandrahas and one other, who I'll link to later. I haven’t read too many blogs, but of the few I read everyday, there’s something of the poet in this bunch.

There's also one more, but she doesn't blog.

Courage the cowardly dog

An extract from Joshua Doder's book for children, A Dog Called Grk:

Most of the verbs are irregular. Half the idioms make no sense. The [Stanislavian] dictionary is full of words which are almost impossible to translate into any other language.

'Grk' is one of those words. There isn't one single word in English which means exactly the same as 'grk'. To translate it, you would need at least three words, and probably more. In a rough translation, 'grk' means brave, generous and foolish, all at the same time. You would use the word 'grk' to describe a warrior who lost his life in the service of a noble but rather pointless cause.

When Natascha Raffifi was given a tiny puppy by her parents, she thought that he looked very brave, very generous and a tiny bit foolish. So she called him Grk.

Read the whole thing here, at the Guardian.

Un-Bombay

One day, I’ll actually get used to this. The jostling for space, as if every second has to be spent moving forward and forward only. I was one such jostler today, battling cars for a right to cross a busy road, as much holding my left arm out valiantly to stop them as to block them from view; if I couldn’t see them, they didn’t exist. Such tricks traffic plays on you.

Anyway, I crossed it to run right into more traffic: the two-legged kind. But this I didn’t mind. This was at Juhu beach, the city’s longest, most visited beach. To get there, you have to pass a great wall of eateries, where boys offer you samosa, dahi wada, dosa, whatnot. I remember these as shacks of dubious exteriors when I was a child, corrected now, visually palatable only because of one of those occasional frenzied modernisation drives that grip Bombay every so often. This was where camels’ owners fought for attention a dozen years ago, where miniature ferris wheels squeaked and rattled to add to our horror as we hung on to life when the wheel reached its terrifying nadir of eight feet. The horses were gone, the air guns that we used to shoot at balloons were gone. Only the people remained.

Only people remain. I found her, arms folded, standing straight as children of a young family ran around her. She was watching the sun go down. It vanished softly, taking its colour with it. The moon was a sliver of white in the sky, lost in the light blue now, but it would distinguish itself soon. (Wait, wait, your turn will come.) So under this ambivalent sky we walked and talked, the direction of both of which were familiar. Joggers bounced by, giggly infants raced ahead and then cried at how far behind their parents were, couples linked fingers and arms and themselves in scattered formations over the beach and voyeurs sat nearby to watch. The seaside is a great provider for all sorts in this pressure-cooked city.

According to her, the roasted ear of corn was good, the chana had too much masala, while the dry bhel was the work of an artist. We ate using strips of a magazine cover as spoons, with only the glow of lanterns and streetlamps lighting the beach. If, at that instant, all the lights went off, there would be shrieks, giggles and the sound of clothes rustling. Power cuts should happen at night, when the pent-up heat in this city needs somewhere to go.

Homes that took us to Goa mixed along the beach with buildings that cruelly brought us back. There was a time when this was Goa. Then things happened, the city grew up, grew beefy, grew mouldy. But she loves this city. Like many other who hate it also love it. But we were far from all that then, far from the city’s sounds and opinions. One by one the families left with their children, leaving the sea sole rights to address our ears and calm us. During the day there is no time to think; at night, by the beach, with the sound of waves in the ears, we are not allowed to think.

On some days we find actors rehearsing for a play in a corner, a cigarette in one hand and a dialoguebook in the other. Always animated, eternally alive to life. Today there were none, so there were no rehearsals and no dialoguebooks. The roles we played were our own. She strode lazily, pausing to ask questions, and then started abruptly and walked quickly if the answer was snide. I would pace behind, stepping on her footprints in the sand until she slowed down. So it went like this: talking, moving forward, tracing footsteps, and then moving backward. It was wonderfully un-Bombay.

And so a day at Juhu passed.

Hello, I'm Mr. Drill, your new neighbour

"It's 5:30 now," I imagine the owners of apartments 13b, 15b and 14a connive over a teleconference call, "let's wake up the Bhatias." And then it begins. Thak-thak-thak-thak says a hammer on the upper floor. Wheeeeeeeooooo says the drill machine from below. And from the flat next door come shrieks and shouts of labourers and a bone-vibrating slam. What space do sleep, conversation or silent thought have here, in this chaos? Plates vibrate off tables, remote controls off their resting places, cracks on walls stretch from ceiling to floor. Construction work out there spells destruction in here. As I begin writing, some intuitive guy has begun drilling.

I ran upstairs in a huff on one particularly noisy day and discovered why the 15th floor home had taken over nine months to do up. The floor was of wood, as was the ceiling, the walls, the commode and the bathtub. It was, by far, the most senseless house I had ever seen. Nine months of noise in the morning, afternoon and evening and this is what they come up with? But hope was alive, for their work was gradually ending, as was the next-door neighbours'.

Then one day, the floor went 'tap'. It was a soft tap, as if someone had knocked once. A while later, there came another tap, with more conviction. By the third tap I knew we were dead - construction was about to begin below us. We were in the unenviable position of being under siege by powertools since early 2003. And when this is done, I suspect the guy above will discover his house is a monstrosity and tear everything down.

A silent afternoon. What I'd give for a silent, peaceful afternoon without drilling and sawing and hammering.

Aishwarya takes on Jerry Springer

And the Times of India loses. This is hilarious.

Light and music

After a long time, gorgeous mornings are more common. When the view outside is a watercolour painting and the sparrows, crows and pigeons outside the orchestra. And I feel a cool breeze that others can't. There's been no catalyst for this. Nothing out of the ordinary, but then nothing's been ordinary either. Every day seems like a satisfying movie.

These days hinted long ago that they would come. And they came, jarringly at first, but more fluidly after, perhaps hastened by my recent move to Wisden Asia Cricket, which gives me twenty days to write before production kicks in. Or it could be the 58 books bought in the last three months, including Maps for Lost Lovers.

And it's good to know these mornings could get even better a month from now when the rains come and wash the streets with their own pitter-patter beat.