Radheya's feet

Having recently re-watched all of B R Chopra's Mahabharat, I was fairly disappointed with this Doordarshan classic. The performances were wildly over the top, the chief culprits being Mukesh Khanna as the venerable Bhishma unabashedly channeling a very overdone Dilip Kumar, Puneet Issar with his tendency to break into wicked grins and thunderous laughter at every opportunity and Girija Shankar's Dhritarashtra cutting an even sorrier figure than you'd expect. But what bugged me more was that so much of the epic that has a lot of impact was left out of show.

I can understand some of the sideplots like Kachchha-Devayani being edited out, which though terribly interesting do not bear a direct relation to the central plot. But there were several details which added a lot of impact to the main storyline which find no place in the televised series. Yudhisthira's chariot touching the ground after he utters the half-lie, for instance was a defining moment in the build-up of the character of Dharmaraja.

There is another small bit during the game of dice which I have always loved. Draupadi is being humiliated in open court and even Yudhisthira, that most equanimous of men is seething with rage. At that moment his eyes fall on Karna's feet and he struck by the uncanny resemblance they bear to his own mother, Kunti's feet. This immediately calms him down, to his own surprise. It's a beautiful little detail in an otherwise sordid scene.  

Where I wax existential about the nature of Test cricket

I haven't written anything cricket in a while. India managed to beat Australia in 3 days and one session. Are we that good or is Australia that bad? And if things continue in the same vein in this series and we win four-zip, what does it prove? Is Australia as rubbish in playing in the sub-continent as India is playing on bouncy pitches with lateral movements? Or is it that the creaking terminators in the Indian team, all but one (he who I have taken a policy decision not to discuss) have been replaced by youth, energy and exuberance? 

Has Ravichandran Ashwin evolved since the drubbing down under or as he claimed back then that he didn't really have a dismal tour, he is doing pretty much the same thing, aside from having inherited something in the vicinity of Laxman's ghost when he plays a back-foot off drive ever since Laxman traded the whites for the blazer and the sublime strokeplay for awkward analysis? Does Australia have truly no replacements for Ponting, Hayden, Langer, McGrath, Lee, not to mention Warne or this generation merely needs to go through what teams (even the Australian ones) routinely did while touring India in the 90s? Can Murali Vijay bat on a seaming Mohali pitch, let alone at WACA or Wanderers?

In a cricket as in life, there are a few near certainties. Cheteshwar Pujara is clearly the cat's whiskers in the current crop young men wearing whites. He is not quite the new Rahul Dravid yet, for one he looks a bit like a snake and is nowhere as pretty nor is his strokeplay as ornate. His hook shot requires some work before he jets off to bouncier foreign shores. But two double hundreds and an average of close to 70 clearly indicate that he is going to be around in that No. 3 spot for some time to come. Ravindra Jadeja is still not much more than a hairdo on any pitch where a flat trajectory won't turn and jump like it does on Indian dustbowls. Plus triple hundreds in the Ranji notwithstanding, we are not convinced he can really bat at the Test level. 

My city

A friend who is moving mentioned that she was glad in a way for her city had started becoming too familiar. I have never really known the feeling of calling a city my own. I lived in a small hamlet of a town called Purnea till I was 9. My parents still live there, it is the single place I have had a connection to my entire life and by the conventional definition, it should qualify as my town. But my years there were spent in a protective household providing little contact with the world outside home and school. There wasn’t much to do apart from playing cricket and getting bullied by girls in a convent school, the place must have its charms but it wasn't really Narayan’s Malgudi to me. I did meet my best friend here, so that’s something, I guess.
At the age of 9, I moved to Patna. This was a place largely synonymous with family for me, it comprised cousins, uncles, grandmothers, all of which both pampered and suffocated me. Families are at their best when they are an assembly of diverse characters – flawed, quirky, opinionated, performing largely the function of adding color to your life, sometimes in excess. Here again, I was an outsider looking inwards.
When I moved to Delhi, I hated it, pretty much for the same reasons anyone hates Delhi. But I continue to feel a strong connection to it. Though I wouldn’t want to live there, I never miss an opportunity to visit Delhi. Delhi was where I grew up, this was the place I started becoming the person I was to become. Yet, so strongly we disagreed, it would be laughable to call Delhi my own, in any way.
Bangalore is the city I moved to for college and where I currently, work. Bangalore has been kind to me, Bangalore agrees with me, the weather (despite the absence of a real winter), the rust in the Bangalore sky late at night, the conduciveness to a late night walk, and even though I am not really one of them I like Bangaloreans, it is not a mere coincidence that this city has produced Dravid and Kumble. I fell in love for the first time in Bangalore. There are things about the city I like to file in my head categorized as 'my Bangalore'. Yet, I don’t know if a North Indian can ever really call Bangalore his own.

Missed Opportunities

"Jim? Whatever happened with you and Lisa?"

"She doesn't wanna go out with me. Gave it a try."

"A try?"

"Yeah."

"'Gather ye rosebuds', you know what that means?"

"It's the first half of the first line of a poem by Robert Herrick."

"What's the second half?"

"While ye may"


Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime
You may forever tarry

Recently, I began letting my phone run my life. It was part of my whole makeover plan to live my life in an organised manner. But, like most things in my life, I have taken it to an obsessive extreme. My phone wakes me in the mornings (app- Alarm Clock Xtreme), it helps me choose and tie my knots as I get ready (How to tie a tie pro), it keeps a record of how much I walk and run (Endomondo), I read on the commute on my phone (Kindle for Android/Aldiko), once I reach work, I look at my open matters and organise them by time on a To-do List (Astrid Tasks), I make copious notes of anything new and relevant I learn on my phone (Evernote), I steal time every two hours to go through Twitter or Google Currents for interesting reads and save them on Pocket, I use apps to find places/menus to order in (Zomato/Local Beat/Handy) on days I do not want to cook, on others I use ChefTap to pull out recipes, my shopping lists are made on the phone, when I'm travelling Google Maps is a must, I have even started blogging from my phone. 

Despite this, every now and then, I am mistrustful of my phone. Everything you use tends to get a personality of its own, phones have a way of being temperamental and have their own quirks. My oldest phone - a hand me down Motorola  had this umbilical cord-esque attachment to me such that it would find its way back to me regardless of how often I lost it, plus, there was always something vaguely communist about it; I have had phones that have been prejudiced against my love interests and would refuse to let me court them by way of texting; the strangest, a Chinese phone probably aimed at kidnappers had this option to change the pitch of your voice when you spoke on it and it would do it at times on its own accord. 

My current phone has its own way of playing tricks on me. Typical behavior would run something on the lines of it showing a missed call from someone who at that point may be a source of great agony and heartache. When I wake up in the morning, there is a missed call from her, yet by the time I mentally prepare a breezy response, the log doesn't show anything. There are times I feel that I have some trouble with reality and fantasy, my dreams tend to extend into my waking hours, often times I am not entirely sure whether conversations happened in reality or in my imagination. So maybe this is not all the phone's fault. 

Stories

"You know I've had this poem for so long, much before I even met you."

"Its freakish, isn't it."

"It is this kind of tying of loose ends that makes my world go round. Make me feel like I am in a well-written book."

"Don't you think at times that we are just characters in a story?"

For as long as I can remember, I have felt like my life is a story. Sometimes well written and crisp like a taut screenplay, sometimes meandering and obtuse like a Proust novel, at times verbose and idealistic like a Sorkin script, on occasions replete with a background  track and wide angle lens shots. Often times, it is sprawling and messy, there are side-plots abandoned midway, staircases that lead to nowhere. Characters exit abruptly at times without it being woven properly into the story like a bad past-it-best-by-date-American-TV show. It has no real beginning and end, like the Great Banyan Tree in Calcutta. Somebody accused me of being terribly pompous and egocentric when I tried to explain this recently. I was at pains to explain that it was not so much that it was my story, I was just a part of a story constructed by forces beyond me. What could be more humbling? Nor do I feel that my life is particularly interesting. There is more  Dravid in it - ponderous and full of struggle - more ebb than flow, than the theater of Brian Lara or the artistry of Laxman.

Off late, I have come to realise that this lack of agency transcends to what we write as well. When I write, my stories never end up where I intended them to. They have a mind of their own. Fiction and poetry are supposed to be medicines that heal the rupture that reality makes on imagination. We try to get right in stories what we can't in real life. But, more often than not, we can't. Stories have a life of their own, they lead you down rabbit holes that mess with your head, they can surprise you and on rare occasions, even take your breath away. They are pretentious bastards up on their high pedestals looking down on you. And there is nothing one can do about it. I am completely helpless in front of them. Stories, quite literally make my world go round.

For some time now, I have been trying to write a novella. The process has been largely slow, laborious and frustrating with brief bursts of furious typing. Somebody told me recently she felt the idea of the muse was a made up one, an excuse when you can't write. But inspiration is a very real, living presence for me. She (she's always a she) visits rarely,  more often than not at the end of a tiring day, demanding that I write. There are days when she has to be coaxed, bribed even. And when she leaves, I miss her. I miss being able to think the way I do when she is around. Lately, I have been struggling to write the narration from the point of view of my central female character. There is nothing I find harder than writing for a girl, even that girl.