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Jhappi to Bappi Da
When I was a kid, I found this song impossibly beautiful, inside of my limited Hindi, and my desire to rubberstamp the statement Hindi is not our National Language over every Chitrahaar number that I fell in love with.
That somebody could have shrunk to nothing more than a pair of eyes with waiting, only to see another person again. A smol part of ( Read more... ) -
Birdshit on the Berlin Wall: Another Opinion
Hey
I would think like
a bird, a rules-minded one
rolling nothing: neither
eyes, nor boulders. Sorry.
You thought it was the green stuff.
I would be rules-driven and constitutional
wondering about nothing
because I needed to solve
a problem in heights and distances.
High-school trig to you
but the ritual that means morning to me.
Gathering urea to ( Read more... ) -
Wallop him, child
The world of Sarpatta Paramparai is around us much before we’ve seen enough to select and compose such an understanding. It arrives in the slow moments before the opening credits roll up. We hear first the whistle of a train. As the names turn up in the appropriate shade of bloody red for a boxing film , we hear bicycle bells, passing trucks, ( Read more... ) -
Standing with Stan
Many people spoke at the condolence meeting for Fr. Stan Swamy on Monday. Some were his companions in the Jesuit order, some co-sojourners from civil society outfits. One broke down as he remembered four years spent working with indigenous people in Bihar out of a two-room hut that he shared with Fr. Stan.
What interested me most was something ( Read more... ) -
Looking, again, and again
The closing moment in Karthik Subbaraj’s Jagame Thanthiram (The World is a Snare) speaks more eloquently than many others in a film that holds, or tries to hold within its compass such diverse things as Brexit, immigration, adventurist foreign policies, various citizenship acts, the tragedy in Sri Lanka, and a critique of global capitalism. As the ( Read more... ) -
Inky Pinky
Shazia Ali Khan's Pinky Memsaab brought back memories of a category that was perhaps created for Doordarshan. Telefilm, as they termed it, was cinema that seemed to aim for the intimate feel that comes from looking into a box rather than at a screen. Or summat, since I saw it on Netflix.
Pinky (Hajra Yamin) is a wife cast off because she cannot ( Read more... ) -
Hallelujahs in the lockdown
It's not solid, but there it is
bending the length in your hand
enough to break it, till you
slow. The next three seconds are
patient tussling. You push, but stop.
It doesn't respond, because amorphousness
is intelligence. An unwillingness to give
away what it might be. To answer your questions.
You hook your hand
and now that flexible bit of ( Read more... ) -
Not from cats, Eunice
but from dogs.
Not from home-fed fatties, but street-shinned slinkers
thinner than Roman villains, and comelier than life. Learn
from the answering shine of their eyes when you call,
the wag, the sit, their bum on your toes, the proffered paw
the moan that is just for you, and for anybody else who calls.
Learn also the quick going thereafter. ( Read more... ) -
Mangoes, and after
Since it isn’t given to ordinariness, despite Hindi jokes, the mango may be a way of talking about desire.
I don’t know where the poets begin, but in the tight sheen of an Imam Pasand I can remember the first moment when skin spoke to me, and did not say aa jao or anything like that.
After all, it is skin, not a mouth, and yet, I felt invited, ( Read more... ) -
Unseen
Somewhere, in a tucked away corner of the Bangalore's CBD, whatever that might be, a reliable moment of comic entertainment unfolds every evening for about an hour, with spectators on some days, and without any on others.
Men are ridiculous. Almost-50 men more so. And when, instead of vanaprastha, they try a different kind of detachment, cringe ( Read more... )