and the year rolled out

There were snow showers on lexington street this past week. i spent it in a messy little room in an ancient building in soho. the streets were deserted, as london had left town for the holidays. the heavy front door had to be thrice locked (one modern buzz lock, 2 old jammed keyholes above and below, just out of reach) everytime anyone came in or out or when the mail had to be picked up by freezing fingers. the stairs were wooden and very smelly. the ground floor had a obscure old print store and a writer's clubhouse, dimly seen through the exterior windows sometimes. first floor was an actual editorial office from the 20s, with a fading sign saying 'no whining' outside the door. my hole-up was on the third floor, un-findable unless you went through a door saying 'access to roof' and squeezed past a pista green ladies room door. the office itself was full of i-macs and ornate mirrors, and oh so many books. in piles on the floor and crammed into bookshelves.

here i learned to use apple computers and vectorworks (i still maintain that cuteness value does not make up for certain innate irritatingnesses of i-macs - and autoCAD simply rules!) and to be patient with a crazy co-worker who decided at 3 am that the building was haunted and being robbed at the same time and that we must. leave. at. once.

i guess it was worth working on a marginally interesting project, albeit as a drone, for not much pay, just to realise that as long as imagination survives, london cannot fail to enchant me.

and the walk home on that haunted-office day was the best one i've had in a long time. i observed how my favourite parts of town behave at 4 in the morning. reacquainted myself with the river and the mucky backflow when the thames gateway's closed. i was completely alone, freezing and very happy.

christmas blues

tere bin sanu soniya koi haur naiyyo lagda

kate naahi raat piya tore kaaran kaaran

baanwra mann dekhne laga ek sapna

jaan jaati hai jab uthke jaate ho tum

unrequited passion sucks, especially when the object is a quasi-fictional character, who disappears from the daily circuit in the christmas holidays. i am surviving on regular chocolate intake. have also landed a demanding job, on top of all the essays and reading i was going to do. i also have an unexpected but welcome house guest.

sadly all of the above, individually and in tandem, are failing to save me from myself.

chill, there is a lot more to my life than maudlin-ness, though you wouldn't know it, looking at me now. i am reading about the stories of bangladeshi immigrants in london, for one thing. very insightful look at how the way people tell stories about their lives and times adds a whole new layer to the narrative itself. the book also talks about how narratives are never told (and therefore lives are never led) in a political vaccuum. the idea jumps on to my recent train of thought about everyone being a political being; what's left to us is the extent to which we shun our civic duties, such as the duty of expressing oneself in public, the duty of living by our beliefs and the duty of caring about what happens to our common shared world.

grinning from ear to ear

there is a silly bumpkin in a plane, possibly peering out through probably cheesy islamic arch shaped windows. must be wondering why everything is so grey beneath.. well, that's cause it's london, baybee! little does she know, sleepy as she is just now, having crossed the united states mainland as well as the atlantic in more or less one go, that she has to now stand in an endless line for about 2 hours, to eventually prove (to turbanned and maybe kripaan-ed airport personnel) that she is fit to enter the united kingdom.

now, if we had had immigration 200 years ago, do you think the east india company would have bothered to set up outposts in india? cheeni, japani aur byzantiyon ke saath line me khade rehna padta. so much for the march of white progress.

victory

Imagine a white room, stripped of everything. An off-white curtain truncating the skewed perspective formed by a series of modest grey partition panels. And, in this minimal, sparse, rarefied space, imagine a bright white object, dense and convoluted, with the tiniest glimpses of colour, context and storyline peeking out. The 'casbah object' (ha ha ha) is suspended from the pure white ceiling by clean and thick plastic parallal bar string; it skewers the perfect space of the grey, muted inner room. An apple i-notebook (also silvery grey and muted) hides inside the casbah, running a film that you can (almost) see from various angles, looking into the condensed, petrified, typified, objectified, built-up islamic core of Algiers. Another film runs on the curtain, touching the white hanging jumble sometimes. This film shows bits of parisian obsessions, fetishes, of Parisians ecstatic and miserable, choreographed in a mad dance of desperate urban people. When you enter the room (through a white door) you see the film first, with an annoying shape obstructing your view slightly. Then you realise that something's inside the object of your annoyance, too. In trying to see what's in the annoying obstruction, you circumnavigate the space and unconsciously follow a locus of viewpoints. Now you see only one film, now both, now one and a quarter; and all the time the voice of Algiers struggles to reach you through and over the hip, happening soundtrack that is Paris. These struggles give you snatches; moments of tension that are unique to this fragmented juxtaposition, moments wavering on the edge of reality, fragile moments that you may or may not catch.
I think it helped to be such a scattered bunch, after all. We didn't come up with a Grand Narrative, forcing our impressions onto and through those of camus, sartre, picasso and that lot. We, somehow, managed to tack together a tangible representation of our confusion and wandering between the themes of the two cities. Something like this can only be a rough draft; and that's why we won I think.
And there was conversation - oh my... conversation in the paris room, in the Milan/Venice that tried to be so much, with such substantial layers and layers of meaning, and even postcards! In the LA/New Orleans that struggled to find one storyline, and failed, I think. And much discourse went on in Cooper's bar after, with free drinks and snacks. oooo.. no dinner, no wonder i'm awake at 5. Many interactions happened last night, with the crazy coot of a studio director, who is so lovably passionate about his own, irrelevant, input in my life. Also with classmates whose admiration and camraderie it was very precious to receive. And with the poor, floundering program director, who came in for much flack from my tipsy, completely un-diplomatic self on the subject of his subject. Let’s see if he remembers and is petty enough (or human enough) to flunk me. And with Greeks. Who were not treated like gods for once, but spoken to on equal grounds about topics of mutual interest, for hours on end, or so it felt. ahhhhhh.. I can die easy now.

p.s: worrying thing. It seems it’s getting harder to find work in London for completely niched-in people like me. This dream could soon be over.
p.p.s: now i can truthfully add adobe premiere skills to my cv. would that help, maybe?

i go out on friday night and i come home on saturday morning

i'm making a movie now... strange and mysterious are the ways of evolution.

well, not so much a movie as a video clip, cleverly timed to desolate sounding songs (see title). what might an architect, aspiring urbanist, be doing, trying to compose the most pathos evoking images in a series with arbitrary fades in and out, in a completely new software, in a big hurry? must be a dream. anyway, am inspired, in my dream, by the goodbye sequence in 'swades', when hot school-teacher woman gives Shahrukh Khan the masala dabba (which reminds me...) and the camera shows each different coloured masala cubicle in time to rehman beats.

i always knew i was secretly filmy, very filmy....

test your gaydar

a friend put me up to this...

http://www.blairmag.com/blair3/gaydar/gaydar.html