Kaala

Watched Kaala. Loved Selvi.

Watched Kaala again. Loved Selvi again.

 

Image Credits: Cinema Express

Wrote a piece for TLF. Read here.

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Once Upon a Rainy Mangalore Day

When it rained in Mangalore, amma made us wear raincoats and carry umbrellas but we’d still get wet. One afternoon after school we went looking for a new house in an auto. The broker was on his bike in front of us, his feet slanting upward on both footrests. We followed his yellow raincoat. The huge bungalow we first stopped at had two coconut trees growing out of it. The trees shot upwards from the roof, and looked uneasy like the swords I’d sometimes seen emerge out of Swamiji tongues in Kanyakumari.

I looked at Amma. She squinted at the trees and looked miserable. I looked at the broker. He sighed and started giving the auto driver new directions for a new house.

I wanted to tell him no. I had already imagined spending all my free time under the trees. Never before had life organised itself so beautifully as it did on those house- hunting days where the space of a new home offered dreams of being good girl – set up a solid routine, do homework on time, sleep at 9, wake at 6.

Amma and broker were damaging my creative juices.

The second house was inside a huge compound sharing space with another house. I stepped out of the auto and into a puddle, slowly, deliberately. The water seeped into my socks making it squishy. I walked around carefully listening to each squish.

A girl climbed out of a school van in front of the other house and watched us. I recognized her as a classmate but struggled to remember her name. Amma was quick to notice when we greeted each other shyly. I’d already started day dreaming a routine – this time my new best friend was in all of them.

When I was pulled away from the house, and from her, and thrust into the auto – I was beginning to bawl. Amma patted my back loudly and said that closeness is not ok. It will ruin your life.

***

B.I.N.G.I.N.G

Through the month spent binge-watching House MD, I worried that the irony of losing eyesight from watching a medical show would be too funny.

My eyes are tired now but the head is clearer. It scares me to think of the times when I’d look up from the screen to speak to someone and my eyes would begin watering.

I don’t know what to do with all the sunset that is suddenly falling on my desk now.

But I am glad it’s over. I didn’t know that a big part of binge-watching is also the bleeding hurry to get it over with and move on with life. I will miss listening to the words Tachycardia Lupus CT MRI Cardiomyopathy Cushing’s Vicodin Pithy Psychosis.

Goodbye, House. Thank you for believing that work really is everything. Even if proved otherwise.

A Twitter case of Amul Baby

Image credits: Deccan Chronicle

Have you watched this really cool Simi Garewal interview with Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh that’s more like a PTA meeting? No guesses for who the child is.

It’s like watching tragicomedy. Not because Rishi Kapoor is an *Amul baby (cos who doesn’t know that?) but because it made me wonder about Neetu Singh in the way that I sometimes wonder about my mother and her mother and everyone’s mothers – wouldn’t they all have been better off without marriages and Amul-baby husbands?

Yes yes, their choice, and like Neetu Singh repeatedly says – she has always wanted the life she now has. When Simi Garewal asks her if she could do over her life, would she still marry Rishi Kapoor? Neetu Singh loudly says YES.

But it was still amusing to watch that throughout the show, even though the Amul baby is worse than his twitter self; Neetu Singh is pretty much telling the world ‘listen up peeps don’t take my husband or his tweets seriously cos even I don’t. Plus he’s drunk out of his mind when he’s tweeting’

My favourite part of the interview was when Neetu Singh and Simi Garewal exchange looks over Rishi Kapoor’s horrible parenting skills. Simi Garewal is like that really sweet well-wishing, tch-tch-tching moral science teacher. ‘Please go home and think about what being a father really means to you’, she says.

I remember Neetu Singh as the lovely Salma Ali from Amar Akbar Anthony – the only film after Mr. India which I watched as a child over and over again. Simply because those were the only two video cassettes we had. I liked Parveen Babi the most because she was Christian in the film and back then I was fascinated with everything Christian.

I watched it again today and was smitten by Salma Ali – the doctor who is given one fleeting moment in a hospital scene where she is absorbed in her work despite being wooed by Akbar (Amul Baby) in the same shot.

A nurse comes running to tell her that a patient needs blood urgently. Ali begins to worry, Akbar says he’s leaving and she just brushes him off saying haan haan bye and gets back to brooding. It is a three second shot but delightful.

It is the same energy she brings to Comedy Nights with Kapil where the host asks her what it is like to have married into a khandaan full of super star actors and she says ‘Main bhi toh thi award-winning actress’ (I too was an award-winning actress)

It almost erased some terrible flashbacks about watching her instructing Ranbir Kapoor on Simi Garewal’s show. ‘Women come with either scissors or needle. They either break or make families. Pick a girl with a needle’

Needless to say, no matter what instruments they bring, what can you mend Amul babies with?

*What is an Amul baby?

Watch Dhanush’s VIP.

 

Featured Image credits: Deccan chronicle