Incredibly depressed.
from The Songlines, Chatwin quoting Baudelaire:

This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by the desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window.
I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.

from Anywhere Out of This World!

Another reaching out for distant possibilities ‘post’, if you will. I read an interview of Alexander Skarsgard, who plays vampire Eric Northman on True Blood. He is in his mid-30’s, Swedish and his father is Skellan Skarsgard (who has starfish growing out of his cheek in Pirates of the Caribbean 2, I think, and who plays the bullish math professor in Good Will Hunting. AND Goya in Goya’s Ghosts. It was very good.)
Alexander Skarsgard is a TV actor, mostly, and his home is Sweden. He talks about his work schedule, it is very gruelling and about staying with friends in LA and not wanting family right now. And well, how attractive that was. To be tall and work hard and alone. To be free of the compulsion to settle down, if ever. To do it tomorrow or when it came along. To not even have children, if it didn’t work for you. Even if children were beautiful and a nice thing to look forward to.
And I saw House, the first episode of the season finale of 5 where he begins to hallucinate. And there’s Cuddy, who is very much in love with him. And he is in his 40’s and she going to be, and they are still falling in love. She is. And he lives alone and he is, as David Shore says, incredibly self-aware and he has fears. He hangs on by a slim thread.
God, I shall not live by stereotype. I don’t think they make me happy. They are pretty, people with nice children and falling asleep sharing nitty gritties with a husband. But I don’t want em, not in that combination and not now. I am 26 and I am a little scared even to write this, at how big the words are. But I hope I live up to them.

Was Chatwin a bit of an Orientalist, I mean in believing that the East stood for mysticism, where he would find a life that would be different from the frenetic pace of the west? Did he feel trapped in the torpor of the war that swung around him and did he find sunshine in cultures that lived unaffected by the Europe’s turmoil? I was reading a random page of The Songlines and the well, compulsive quoting from texts (very lovely, mind you) felt like a mind working frenetically to find a way out, to make sense.
Reading from a random page was soothing, without the compulsion of having to follow a storyline, but then, probably he felt that way too, the need to cut loose?
What I long for greatly now is to find my way to a small town in the Deep South like Bon Temps. I might hate it, never mind, but it seems so attractive perhaps because it has no frame of reference to my current life. I hate to say perhaps. I know that is the reason. I hate to have to give an adult explanation for a longing that sounds juvenile, otherwise.
But, well, what Chatwin says, that wandering is not the sign of neurosis, dissatisfied sexuality, but natural? What can I say? When I think of places away from home, I don’t think of forging ties, of friends (if I am lucky, perhaps), I think of a quiet heart, one that does not rage against its present, that walks in silence, utterly soothed by the sights it sees, the people it meets, without feeling the need to touch them, to form life-long bonds with them.
Is that the flaneur? Perhaps not. I dunno, it’s ok if it ain’t.
Here’s a few from Chatwin:

“Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis, a form of unfulfilled sexual longing; a sickness which, in the interests of civilization, must be suppressed.
Nazi propagandists claimed that gypsies and Jews – peoples with wandering in their genes – could find no place in a stable Reich.”

“A very brief life of Diogenes:
He lived in a tub. He ate raw octopus and lupins. He said ‘Kosmopolites eimi’. ‘I am a citizen of the world.’ He compared his wanderings through Greece to the migration of storks: north in summer, south to avoid the winter cold.”

“We Lapps have the same nature as the reindeer: in the springtime we long for the mountains; in winter we are drawn to the woods.
- Turi’s Book of Lapland

I was subbing a copy on a science show. It dealt with pressure, density and vacuum and brought forth these images from Class VII, the terror, the rough-paper of the physics book with its killingly bland diagrams that today seems curiously maya makhano because I remembered baba drawing those experiments again and again to explain those principles to me. And they seemed so tough, so tough and baba would say, how can you find it boring? It’s so interesting, it explains everything. And pressure was a terror, and I was always a very average student, but I remember I did well in the class test and I remember the teacher’s opaque recitation of the principle, smooth voice and smoother handwriting and red lipstick. She thought she was explaining and the smart ones in class probably got stuff too, despite the bad teaching. But it seemed so like a puppet talking. I know because I have spoken like that sometimes, with my mind completely somewhere else, and people haven’t understood even though I wasn’t saying a thing wrong.
But think how pressure diagrams can seem so loving in recollection, even the fear and the hate.
Is literature, writing, feeling an exercise in indulgence? I thought I would leave all that behind, but it has gripped me again. And I am without any spine to deal with it except to take refuge in silence. Also, it seems so infernally stupid that I have nothing to say. So I choke with rage and sputter.
(the pic is a refraction diagram. Eta slightly easier chhilo)

I feel very very depressed. When will this ever end? When will I have, among other things, nice delicious sex?
But that’s not the worry exakly. What is, is how depressing everything. I am 26, not on the road to what I want to do. I want to quit and sit at home and then find something else to do, apply to begin with. If that doesn’t work, something else. I am tired of being cautious, of distrusting my instincts, of second-guessing myself constantly. We are all given what we deserve.
I got myself a beautiful blue book shelf, it’s huge, tall and wide.
I have a black, soft dog who looks at me demandingly, with complete conviction that I am the one she will go to for whatever it is she might be wanting. She yelled in rage when I came back home last night, at having been shut out for so long (two hours). She sleeps curled up on her paws at the foot of my bed and lies lazily on her stomach beside me, her fat tail erect after I have just woken up and am deciding to get out of bed.
I watched a serial about vampires and people yesterday. Six episodes back to back. The concept is awfully kinky, but the acting is quite awful, it’s so sad. They think they can pull it off by piling on the sex appeal and shut out every other aesthetic sense? But there’s also this town, Bon Temps, which is almost a village, really, and there’s this tremendous atmosphere: the black woman who is a complete drunk and a devout Jesus groupie, mane oi bhishon classic Bible belt stuff, like, who goes to an Obeah (that what they call traditional healers/ mystics???) to get the demon (the alcoholism) out of her. This Obeah drowns a caged possum, into whom the demon has passed into, in a tub of water. There are layabouts, like Jack Stackhouse, mama’s boys, over the hill, heavily-made-up, thrice-divorced waitresses. And then, ah then, there’s the vampire bar Fantasia and fang bangers, who like to hang out with vampires and being bitten by them. And True Blood, artificial bottled blood for vampires trying to go mainstream into society. There are vampire rights groups and staid vampires who watch TV and invite prostitutes for a shag in exchange for blood, a potent aphrodisiac and rich, spoilt hippie girls who are addicted to it.
Then there is the broad broad accent that’s wonderful. I really love it.
The title song is the kinkiest. I had initially thought it was real footage put together, but found they’d actually gone and shot it. Tar moddhe, there’s a shot of wall graphiti saying ‘God hates fangs’ and a newspaper headline saying ‘Angelina Jolie adopts vampire baby’. Both of these two were told me by the boy, which effectively lured me into wanting to watch the series. And then I armtwisted him into downloading the season for me as a birthday present. Sweet love, hahahahaha. So, he doesn’t like it, because it’s not interesting enough, which I see. It won’t hook you, or exhaust you like House, by engaging your head, emotions, curiosity at the same time, giving rise to a thousand possibilities. But oh, ah, I am sold on all of what I wrote before.
All of it so so kinky and only if there was a thaash bunot, it could be so much more. Eesh, aha re. Mane, the sexy vampire Bill Crompton looks like a complete addlehead, off his rocker, when he smiles dnaat ber kore. Karon, haashle toh dnaat berobei, so you can’t really help it. That’s unfortunate. And Anna Paquin’s always had very curious expressions, mismatched with what she’s saying. Now you know it’s just that she can’t act. Also so unfortunate. I want to think that southern 25-year-old women who can listen to other people’s thoughts are like that, mane, not earthy, sweaty, in-you-face like us. Perhaps they do have this kind of fogginess.

It’s a pitTy, really. I wish Alan Ball had directed it too.

I want to leave, dear whoever you are that is sunshine and all things hopeful, help me go away. I want to breathe, not feel mouldy dampness clinging to every breath I take, not struggle to talk, to think, because all that you do makes you want to bolt, revolts your senses.

1. Bare jeans suck. Unequivocally. Their bad fit is unparalleled. I have seen no worse in my short jeans experience.
2. I had horrible momos the like of which I haven’t had in a while. Probably a close parallel would be momo in a hari of shinni, as a friend of Madhura and Dibbo saw in a dream.
3. I was sitting outside a shop beside Chungwa today, shortly after the ore baba, live music session had ended. Singers and their patrons spilled out. I sat for a very long time, nursing my tea and a Gopalji cake, bland and very soothing. No one noticed me. The singers, besequinned in shiny clothes, synthetic sarees, loudly flirted with their customers over tea and muri aloor chop. It felt good that no one considered me a presence. I have wanted that for a long time. To melt in a crowd.
There was a man among them. In his 50s, thin, balding, cheap slippers, ironed shirt and trousers who wore a watch on his right hand. He had a thin leather bag on his shoulder. He was distributing 100 rupee notes to the singers. He tried to touch the women. I am wondering, does he spend a great deal of the money he earns on this? Perhaps it’s a small pleasure in an otherwise nondescript life. I suppose one would dislike him, his lechery, his habit of giving out money. But it’s not what I feel. It feels ok.
And can I write about the clothes they wore? I can’t get over it. Or can’t have enough of it. The horribly uncomfortable-looking synthetic sarees worn in the think of summer, with choomki of the sort you used in your craftwork at school, the bangles, the lipstick. Have you liked things on others that were completely alien to you? Their laughter, toothy smiles, the chatter….. eh, the moment has passed.

4. I like solid colours, not fading ones. I almost bought a black three quarter trouser in cord that I didn’t like. I had set my sights on the sale for so long that I couldn’t bear to leave without a bargain, and the jeans, as we now know, were all from Bare, which is and always will be an unequivocally horrible brand for jeans.

Travel does not bring me exuberant happiness, I don’t find myself smiling when I am alone on a road away from home. It is perhaps a bit like Forrest Gump, who only knew that he had to run, not the why. I went on the trips I did because I wanted to go away from where I was desperately. In Darjeeling, I did not think. I think one can accept that one will not be exuberantly happy to travel, but that one will need to go away again and again, to be on the move. Perhaps it is peace for an unquiet mind in this. And reconfirming faith in oneself, in one’s ability to stand up for one’s happiness, to push one’s limits a bit for it.
I wish it is always like this. I wish to travel more and more, for longer periods each time.
When you return home, you think you are such a different person, you will certainly handle the world differently. But everything remains the same, agonizingly. You don’t find more strength to deal with your hell, you want to go away from it even more desperately.
About Darjeeling, there isn’t much to write, great food, very crowded.. I was very quiet, I hardly spoke and the slight cold makes talking something from an even rarer realm. The quiet is a very even state of the mind. I want to go away again and again.

I had an ordinary day today. The pleasure of days ordinary is that you savour simple things, things absolutely without incident. Also, like today, when I was cleaning our drawing room basin while sweltering in the heat, you feel the pleasure of it in the recollection of it more than while actually doing it.

It’s back to Calcutta summers again. You can’t walk five steps, or turn in bed without sweating a little for it. And today I watched night change into day. I’ll remember it by my first sight of the day: the loose petals of radhachura swaying in the rare cool breeze. I had watched Ugly Betty and then began watching an Indian film on world movies about a boy who becomes an elephant catcher in the forest, and nice though it was, I changed channels and found Mrs Parker and The Vicious Circle. Which I liked very much. The rhymes spoken with that tight nasal droning voice, the preciseness of the poetry, and her need for her dog. At one point, she tells her editor: “Woodrow Wilson died.” And he says, “Yes, about a year ago.” And she says something I don’t remember, but WW was her dog. And even while thinking of the dull pain of losing your dog, you think that she named her dog after the President. And the dogs change, and you think of her need for an animal, even though she can’t care for herself much. And I thought of Floppy. Her huge round soulful eyes, that stay that way even when I am late in feeding her, does she complain? Or is she too sad, resigned, or doesn’t know any better than me?

After seeing the morning, I looked up Dorothy Parker on the Net, to songs from Travis’ The Rubber Band. And I love the songs, but my head was throbbing, and I thought my eyes would melt out of my socket with the strain of it, I wasn’t wearing my specs. And DP’s rhymes in writing felt plain, a little tiresome, I wanted each song to be over so I could concentrate on the poem. And then I’d had enough. I switched off everything and went to sleep. And Floppy came in from the verandah and slept at my feet.

Ends

I am writing here after a long time. So much has happened. I think I look forward to Floppy at the end of every day. Whenever anything goes wrong, even more. You would think it’s a selfish way of looking at someone, in terms of their use for you. But as House would say, we do that with everyone. And it’s easier to think of that about people.
Things at home: I want to go away. My grandfather is going to have an operation to have a growth in his urinary bladder removed. They’ll biopsy it and find out if it’s malignant. Dadu is 83 years old. About. He can hardly walk now. His mind is lucid, though he does find it difficult to remember things, and he can’t read the newspaper. He is also very selfish. In a vocal way. Not like my father at all. Not like me either. My mother is like him.
Floppy is very naughty. She’s destroyed one sofa completely, holed the other, eaten bits of the corners of the big one. She’s also destroyed my pillow, torn two of my bedsheets. Chewed the corners of tables, broken a few plastic bowls, peed on my bed, bites and scratches us. She’s about five months old, I think. They say it’ll stop when she’s a little older. I look at her extremely grave face with the white muzzle and moustache and I cuddle her to death. She has unbelievably silky ears. I washed her forehead with shampoo today too, and it came out shiny too. I was thrilled.
A senior colleague of mine has said, if my husband and I lived together, our marriage would explode. And someone also said, she was a peripatetic prophet. She’s my classmate and married to a techie and living in America.
Because of the recession, people are all sitting tight on their jobs, even if they hate it. You are lucky to have a regular source of income. As my boss has taken a 5 month leave, I do both our work. They are 8 hour days on an average and a bit of work, but I don’t mind. For the time being. Work is perhaps always an anesthetic.
I love the songs of Gulal. My boyfriend says they are earthy. I love the full-throated singing. When Piyush Mishra sings Duniya in his perfect diction, with the Urdu words dripping from his lips, with casualness and great mastery, it seems to me, I feel intensely attracted to him. I remember his hooked face in the film and his belly straining against his vest. And then the round framed glasses
I went to the handicrafts fair today. I bought a jute owl. It has large wings and jute tassles hanging below. Met a very senior reporter there. He kept fingering me whenever he encountered me. When I returned home and thought about it, I could easily summon a dazzling smile and polite reply. But there, I was breathless.
I think I am big on gestures, but no good with actual responsibility. Right now, that doesn’t bother me too much.
Floppy is sleeping beside me on the bed. I sometimes say what my father used to when I was very small and we were in Delhi: tui meyeta chinir cheyeo mishti. The sweetness of this had been lost when I was growing up, when my father gave me a pretty bad time and the words only tasted bitter. But now he is not, and all the nice things seem better still, as real life incidents in the present don’t intervene.

This is the kind of post people come to read blogs for, I guess. Quotidian detail with a bit of rumination, yech!
I had a lovely day today. Something I mentioned in fb. In my room, summer, with my dog, playing with her, fighting with her, beating her, being bitten by her, sigh..
Sleeping, pray throughout the day, lying awake, the cool darkness of the room with the door closed, the frequent loadsheddings, finding new ways to keep Floppy occupied. Made myself a snack in the evening, cooked after ages, that is. Then on the Net, where the descent starts. I am going off now, gah!

Which Calvin and Hobbes Character are You

http://www.quizilla.com/quizzes/result/100393/10410/

You're Calvin! You're imaginative and hyperactive. For the most part, you are an average six-year-old kid (except for your extraordinary vocabulary...) You have an imaginary best friend because most other friends your age don't really understand you.

(I think that's stretching it a bit far)

A few days ago, I found a few days-old pup mewling in a box, under a thyalagari, in the darkness while coming home. I like animals etc, like most people do, and I am not completely in love with dogs etc, though I really like them, and would actually like one if K and I set up house some day. I am generally greatly buoyed in this wish by K’s obvious rather more obvious wish for a dog. He talks of their pet Daschund Shabitri (they called him Shaboo, Shabi bhalobeshe), who would, (well, isn’t this a darling?) when the boy was a mewling infant, guard him when he had been given his oil massage and apparently left to sun on the dining table.
I brought the thing home somewhat instinctively. I was also curious, and probably a little glad to have such a young thing on my hands, even if just for the time being. I called PFA the next thing, because I knew they would take him, and that would mean that he would live.
Well yadda yadda, I brought him up to our flat, ma fed him, I got over my squeamishness and held him up by the scruff of his neck (it was flailing its miniscule paws) and put him in a clean shoe box. Frantic calls to people, to K, who suggested making him a bed of rags. When I did it, he promptly dug inside and buried himself underneath and fell asleep. The people who received my calls were all kind. Then, the PFA guy came and took him away.
He’s at their hospital, I went and saw him today, and people are asking to bring him home, or else she (it’s a she) might have a reduced chance of survival cause germs/infections abound in the hospital. Ma has thrown a fit after being told I want to bring her, she doesn’t know that I am so doubtful about it. But well, once again, it’s a wish, and a bit of curiosity, to have her, to play with her, to feed her and stuff. How hard can it be? It’s not so much guilt as dreaming how nice it will be.
I dunno what I’ll do, I might not even bring her. It will be an instinctive decision, probably. It was such a spirited thing, mane she didn’t have her mum, but she wasn’t scared, y’know, she was ever so inquisitive: think, she couldn’t even see, but she’d managed to stick her head out of that box, extricated herself out of it, and was going out for a small exploration of her surroundings when I came to her enclosure. I mean, I dunno, but this one certainly feels like it’ll live if there are people to love her, even if she doesn’t have the immunity you get from mother’s milk.

(And it was easy for one person to say it was a hasty decision to give her away to PFA. To not bother about infrastructure and pass judgement.)

i was going to feel really angry about k. i saw today's pages and they are really empty and lots of stories, and i saw the stories that are going, and most of them i like very much, and it seems like a handful of a good day's work. it might not be that enjoyable for those who have to sub it, but if you look at the pages now, you can't help but feel satisfied.
and yes, there are problems galore.
also, i am going to bishnupur this weekend or the next. haven't figured out a companion yet. i guess i can say people are welcome to join.

days that come to an end

O leaves on Tuesday. I have little idea of what to do after.

about trees

following the thread in https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=28397684&postID=5381586477227978588&pli=1

i thought of that too, that if it were being done with the permission of the authorities, you couldn't really do much, could you? but a) you have to let people know what is really happening, and what the rules are. and that rules are being grossly violated. most of us see trees with branches trimmed in so many places that we pass, but we don't know that there is actually part of an organised racket in the city. b) about taking action about it. when the tree outside my flat was being hacked off, i called up a reporter in my office who has been working this field and knows people high-enough in the hierarchy that he could make some calls to people who would ensure that the hacking was stopped. but i found that the guy who'd asked for it to be cut, had approached the local cpm goonda turned political honcho for permission and he's been given it.

the police came and eventually the forest dept officials too. but i recognise that they did it to begin with, because of the reporter's contacts. of course, none of this would have happened if i hadn't pushed both my reporter, and another actually: the guy who covers the area i live in and knew the thanar OC, to help me out. i haven't figured out yet what it will come to if the tree came in way of, say the politician honcho's real estate interests and he had to have the tree removed.

one effective tool that i see is to get it to the media. the media does only as much as it serves its own immediate interests, but this is one kind of story that papers still carry, as opposed to the version of events that people who've visited Singur will tell you.

and meanwhile, i do think we can go far by letting as many people as we can know about it.

and madhura, do you really care if people think you are overreacting? would you not do what you had to do cause people thought you were overreacting, or any other term they had for it?

Here

'What will your obituary say?' at QuizGalaxy.com

I was reading Supriya di's Novel and Modernity blog. It was extremely calming, the seamless flow of words about people in a book. Is it that in today's world, you have to learn to be happy by yourself, and never otherwise, the fragmented nature of modern existence etc..
I am listening to Indian Ocean, stuff that RIM had given me. Feels like I didn't hear before. Although it is more beautiful than not, my ear is aching a little from listening to it as loudly as I am. Yet that's the only way to listen to full-throated song, this one, anyway. I am hoping that sometime not very far into the late eve - early night, I'll tire myself out and feel at peace.

To begin with, may I say that Rock On is a horrible film. People often have reasons for liking a movie that have nothing to do with its merits. The film echoes things I remember, but well, that makes no difference. The story is, may I say, pathetic. Farhan Akhtar can act, and I loved the songs, but is it cause I nurture hidden wishes of being a groupie. Seen in the crowd of apparently ecstatic people in the audience were disenchantedly clapping extras. Heh.

I am so depressed, at the complete lack of flight, nothing, rien: it’s as if the world might not have existed and no difference would have been made either by living or dying. How can another person do so, do this? I could not have existed and the world would have been the same. And my room felt so dirty, unwelcoming for anyone except me, or anyone who would make it his/ her own. Where to from here, where can I escape?

Which fantasy, where inside my head, when all the fantasies have been explored and feel like ashes?? I wish I could take myself away to someplace where I would not have known myself.

In real life, the Adityas who go away as far as they can from what they loved don’t find it again so easily. I wish I could become another me like Aditya.

I feel so completely alone, I wish I could go away, go away.

I was awake through the night, after a three-hour sleep till 2. It’s 5.30 now, and light has awakened. In the nights, I feel free. I was watching Seven Years in Tibet, and thinking about, well, so many things.. It felt so light, and completely untied to any obligations. Why do people need drugs? For a fix of this? It was as if there was nothing you couldn’t do, nothing you couldn’t imagine, anyway. Dropped my plate of dinner, ma came along so kindly and took it away, and gave me whatever rice was left, I felt so broken at another thing going wrong in the course of the day. It was so nice, to be comforted like that, and the space to let one be: she didn’t yell at me cause I’d dropped food.
We had a fight of sorts, K and I, and I was indulging in all sorts of possibilities, of going away etc, combined with work ambitions, wishes if you like. And while contemplating dire possibilities, following them through, I thought, you know, that it was too much of a good thing to let go for this, at least. Not unless something happened that I had no control over.
The night gave over to morning, and I didn’t worry that I didn’t have enough sleep to see me through the next day, cause I didn’t have to go anyplace. That’s such a liberating knowledge. And looking at Brad Pitt as Heinrich Harrer walking down Lhasa streets in a distant shot, and of clothes, customs, and the stories about the Forbidden City that they seemed to talk about, I wondered if I would find myself doing that too.. that is, leaving what I was doing cause I didn’t like it, without something to fall back on, and look for something to do. I probably won’t, I might. I hope I do, without better back cover, though. In the mountains, there you feel free. There is something to this solitude, the knowledge of having nothing, or rather, of not having exactly that which you longed greatly for, that sets you free. There’s nothing to anticipate, and all experience comes without strings attached, implications.
And Heinrich Harrer found peace in a young boy, did he? Who was as much a reflection of his own self, as the son who he could not meet? It’s a curious tale, cause heroes are rarely so imperfect..
If I were to go far away, to indulge in those thoughts of mine again, would I welcome K back into my arms when I returned, and more importantly, would he?
It’s a beautiful morning, all the nicer cause I was awake as it came alive. I wish I didn’t have to sleep, that I could go on being awake. I want to sit down to a good bout of reading.

"I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going," Ledger said. He confided to the reporter that he took a prescription sleeping pill and, when that failed, took another.


I think he was lovely.