I know for a fact that two of my girlfriends are on their way to ruining their lives. Ruin it because they are madly in love with the idea of love and the warm fuzzy feelings that come with it, but thats it. The engagement must be deeper. After the initial fuz of dating, every couple come around to understanding that love does not pay rents, dinners, vacations or even those beautiful clothes.

 My first girlfriend is a childhood friend. Her ignorance at the age of 28 is unbelievable, and she returned to this country with lots of suitcases and a broken heart. To overcome this grief she began the most tortous process of dating a long forgotten ex. In her desire to please she divulged information that must have been sworn to her heart.

 The Man turned out to be deficient, misused her trust and now is misusing her vulnerability. The saddest bit for me is to watch history repeat itself generation after other, where I reckon the relevance of Wilde's profound observation that "all women become like their mothers, that is their tragedy, no man does thats his."

 My girlfriend, albeit in a dillemma is barely intelligent to withstand the sudden pressures that seem to be invading her from all sides. She will buckle, get into a marriage and change all of herself for a man who perhaps would still love his mother more.

 I have done my bit of warning, advising, suggesting, recommending... but not much works with reason. And so I watch her head in the direction of her mother. And then it spirals to the kids she'll have and how they might be replicas of her and the catastrophe is just endless.

 I sit back mostly, amuse myself sporadically and believe that inspite of all this heartache, somewhere in between she'll be slightly wiser and undo her mother's mistakes.

 As far as the second girlfriend is concerned it must suffice to say she is older, in a long distance relationship which if thought very deeply about, frankly does not exist. What do I do when I cant seem to be able to save them? Why would someone willingly get into something that promises to destroy them?

Its the story of one such Amma,
And naturally the affable, hopelessly honest Threadman,

Amma walks in everyday with a spring in her feet-she greets a loud goodmorning' which is still a surprise in this part of the land-

and what follows next is childhood revisits all over again: Amma is constantly on the lookout, a keen observer, as she sweeps the floor, she slows down, its one tiny room, but Amma can take longer on this one-she steals glances constantly to see if Threadman is done.

Threadman is always reading, an act that baffles Amma, afterall, whats in there that he reads and she is missing out-is it a secret place, is it just a fancy story, but it cannot be the truth-that is Amma's realm.

The same meals to be cooked, the lack of variety, pushing a pack of reluctant kids to school, the tiffin for the husband,the scramble for water at 4 in the morning,and by the time the day breaks, its time to visit the houses-nothing could possibly be more real, more true than this for Amma.

And yet she looks, she fidgets, takes a little longer, waits a little more, finally Threadman does look up from his books-she waits for him to close it entirely, get up and take that stretch that his body has been craving-and his gaze falls on Amma-this is it, the opportunity for Amma.

Amma is overflowing with a cascade of seemingly unimportant conversations mixed with the local gossip and future plans to sell her share of the land and get her eldest daughter married in style: she dare not imagine, but would Threadman grace this occassion with his presence?

Threadman smiles, gently, knowingly and tells her she's getting late for the other houses-just before Amma leaves, she turns around and tells Threadman that she just loves talking to him, he seems kinder than a lot of the other babus she works for.

Its about two 30 something people. In love, unmarried and due for a baby. Burt and Verona decide to take a trip looking for that perfect 'home' for their daughter to be. On the way they meet bad parents, loony ones who believe strollers are a cause of modern day alienation and then some deeply sad ones.

Both make a few promises, sitting on a trampoline under the sky. Verona tells of the most heartening story of having hung fruits from an orange tree that never bore any fruits, just to see the expression on her dad.

Finally they do find a place called home and its very real and beautiful.

The music score is delightful, like the film.

living life

living life

The delight in Europe has a great deal to do with clean air, non-interfering people, healthy food, great shopping centres, winter style for women etc. But one of the most important elements, lest it be forgotten, is that most of them are 'walking cities'. Almost every city in Europe has pedestrian walks and cyclist's lane along side the main road. 'Walking cities' are easy to cover on foot, usually there is a single centre' located in every city, well connected by roads and efficient public transport systems, therefore the sprawl of the city as such is hardly much.

On the other hand in the US, especially cities like New York, the ditances between two parts are vast, but these are covered by a very efficient Metro system, that is running 24/7 come sleet, come snow storms, thankgiving or christmas. This is also true for all buses which run on schedule and make it easy for those waiting to time themselves accordingly. In New York, there exists a single swipe card which works for both bus rides and metro rides. These can be purchased for a nominal price every month/every week/annual depending upon your needs.

Recently, Chennai, India, saw the visit of Enrique Penelosa-former Bogota Mayor, who works for the institute for transportation Development and Policy. According to him, "the single biggest difference between the ifrastructure of an advanced state and a backward nation is its footpaths and not its highways. The quality of footpaths determine the quality of life in a city."

Delhi,does not have too many footpaths yet there are numerous pedestrians. There are no cyclist lanes. The roads are spacious, but they seem to be shrinking everyday, there are separate bus lanes but very often the private bus systems do not keep to them. Yet, one can see stupendous efforts to make Delhi dependant on public transport, the metro construction is going on 24/7 to meet the challenge of the commonwealth games, the numerous highways/flyovers are designed with the aim of reducing bottlenecks in key areas and wherever new rodas are being built-a pedestrian lane is being provided for. Infact, some parts of Delhi have also started the Swipe card system for buses aswell. New Delhi cannot hope to become a 'walking city'-its impossible to imagine anyone walking from South/East Delhi to the Centre(Connaught Place). However, greener spaces, parks,an efficient and reliable transport system and more sidewalks, will help both Delhites and foreigners explore parts of this gorgeous city and hopefully make it a delightful experience aswell.

Facebook Rehablitation:
I’ve been out of it. I’ve been clean for a month now. All Facebook users will sooner or later have to go through a process of rehabilitation. When I started Facebooking two years ago, I was hooked. It was addictive. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to see who wrote what on my wall, how many requests I had, how many people found me, how many did I find? The thirst was insatiable. All my friends belonged to the information age, I’d lost touch with so many from school, who was upto what? There was so much to catch up on. Plus, those absolutely interesting quizzes: ofcourse I wanted to know ‘how I was going to die?’, ‘Which FRIENDS character did I represent?’, What was my IQ?’, ‘What did my friends on my list think of me?’, how many compared with me’ and the list is endless. Within a month, my ‘blank’ profile, was so colourful with those little icons of all the quizzes I had taken. The possibilities seemed endless, I could send hugs’ and kisses’ and drinks’ to my friends. I could join a cause(Feed a child, Plant a tree) and pretend to make a difference? There was a time when I would pose for hours to get the ‘right’ angle for my profile picture. I was reading so many books, I wanted this ‘little world’ of mine to know, I was reviewing films, music, putting up posts subscriptions, all up for public display, so that ‘my friends’ could see what I was upto. Everyone around me was Facebooking 24/7. The frenzy unbeatable.
One fine day, I met up with a long lost girlfriend, another FB addict. The dinner and drinks was interrupted by long silences. I suddenly realized, I already knew all that I had to. I knew where she was working, I knew where she’d graduated from, the kind of TV serials she watched, so much so, I even knew her dog had bitten someone that day-her status read ‘Bosco bit a hermit today, naughty boy!’. So what was left to relieve these silences- nothing, Nada, Niente.
During my quarter life crisis, I sat down and started deleting from my list of friends, in my vengeance I deleted 175 friends. Well they were not friends-just people who come and go. Those who boast of 500 and above friends are faking it, and they are all on FB. You cannot pass it off as effective networking either. You make friends that you don’t even remember, let alone say hi to most times. The distractions are too many, and nothing is more true about “the interrupted life” than FB itself.
Its interrupted, because that’s how this web technology functions. Nobody who is online is involved with a single task. It’s numerous activities at once; from booking your flight tickets, to making online transfers, to writing important emails, to purchasing that new book, to googling about the latest release of your favourite band to responding to FB wall posts, twitter feeds, to publishing your own blog. Its an incredible load of multi-tasking, and each demanding vastly different thought processes at once. So where is the priority, where is the real involvement? Is it really possible to chat about your unrequited love and write about international diplomacy?
Among those I know who quit’, some were bored, few felt that FB was stalking their privacy, they spent hours doing nothing constructive: browsing first through a friend’s photograph, then one where he/ she is tagged and then the ‘Next’ which is of people you have never met, people you will never meet, sometimes you just keep clicking ‘Next’, because you are no longer in control, its easy, pictures of unknown people who look so involved with the moment. I had lost my discretion.
Everything I had joined FB for was done, it was over, I no longer wanted people to know what I was reading, what I was watching, what I was listening to: that’s me, all me, and you’ll have to meet me to know that. I had also found everyone I needed to, there was nobody left to be found, I lost many, and I am grateful I could do that.
I lost FB a month ago, rather it lost me. My searches are more organized, less wasteful and yeah those that I want to keep in touch with don’t match up to a 100 or even a 50, they are just a handful, but they are the ones I want to be in touch with, the ones I lose and find all over again.
According to Inside Facebook(http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/07/01/is-orkut-in-trouble-facebook-just-doubled-in-brazil-and-india/), Facebook exploded in May and June 2009, doubling from 1.6 million to 3.2 million monthly active users in India. While this is true, the Exodus has started in the Parent country (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-medium-t.html?_r=1). While I am predicting the above for FB users in India, it would be interesting to read alternatives: to where the FB phenomenon is headed?

MOMA(Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art),New York: 12.12.2008: Film: Herbert, Director: Suman Mukhopadhya.An adaptaion from a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya. This film is layered and as the director himself said, he places the protagonist Herbert Sarkar as a prism reflecting events from 1950-early 1970's, Bengal, India. It is a film that deals with issues of cultural imperialism especially of the Babu's of Bengal and their respective colonization.

The film is in Bangla, with english subtitles. It is a very niched film and requires specific knowledge capital(for instance knowledge of the state of Bengal post independence, the setting in of decadence, the naxalite movements of the 70's etc.)What makes this film unique is that the protagonist does not receive any formal education so to speak. He bunks school to spend time looking at pigeons, people, aeroplanes and Buki, his love interest.Therefore, he is never really instructed in how to figure out this world. Yet through the short span of his life, he is subject to events and happenings that he must deal with. That he is literally thrust into these social events, that he unconsciously becomes a 'comrade', that he unconsciously ends up reading from the little red book, that finally he is accused of being a terrorist reflect the chaotic modern existence of the modern man.

Herbert is a failure, in every aspect, he does not have a profession until much later, even then he is accused of being a fraud, a cheat, he somehow rationalizes the death of his friend, Robi, as his fault, a failed lover, an uncle who is as trivial as Tristram Shandy. He is the local clown, the joker that walks like an Ostritch bearing a black overcoat, a mockery of the colonized mind. Suman's film is a critique of how we as modern human beings seemed to have failed miserably.

The most heart rending is Herbert's inability to deal with accusations of cheating people. He vehemently refuses allegations of having played around with people's emotions. The audience is acutely aware of Herbert's sincerity, because through 145 minutes, the audience has seen Herbert's life, his triumphs but mostly his failures.His inability to forge friendships, his pathetic destiny to run underpaid errands for his cousin Dhanna, to b

Would Herbert have been totally different had he received some sort of formal education, that would teach him how to rationalize? His reactions would have been more sophisticated, somewhere perhaps the society would have feigned respect for yet another madman. Is it inevitable to become part of systems? Or was it merely as Dryden had written:

"There is a pleasure sure in being mad, that none but the madmen know"

The colors used in the film were primarily shades of blue, the twilight etc.

Suman believes that India is more than Bollywood and Indian films lie in its regional voices and stories.

Sex and the City: All the cliches that you ever heard about New York are in this film. But I am in New York, I am a 20 something, I am single, and happy. So heres the lead into remaining single for a long time to come. Its not a rip from the film "how to lose a guy in 10 days": they stuck around for 10 days because each had something larger than their 'love interest' at stake. But reality is far more exciting and doubly so when your in the City of Angels. The following discourse maybe both invaluable and worthless:Dates upon a whim, which tend to prolong themselves from a drink to dinner at a diner to haunting some of the more cosier cafes around the corner to ofcourse the promise of a 'kiss at the end of an evening...' Its about 'love' and everything that it entails. The things that you could/could not do depending on where you wanna drive into.

1) Talk constantly. About anything and everything. You have to have an opinion about everything. You could tolerate their views, but its just a rebound phase and it does not really matter.
2)Talk about your past boyfriends and relationships. And how much you wish things had worked out, that you were with them even as you drink that Cocktail, but most importantly that you are a pathetic learner, you never learn from your mistakes...glee...glee.
3)Say that you hate the one thing that he likes. For instance if you know that his element is Wine or fish or the sea life, insist how much you think all wines taste the same, that you thing Fish have no emotions and that you get nauseous infront of the wide spaces of the sea.
4)Be a shameless tease. There is a very careful distinction between being a succesful flirt and being a tease. You know, tease him crazy, get ever so close, have fun and do the touching and feeling and then ask questions like 'are we a couple?", "Does it look like we are going around?", "Do you think the others who see us will think we are together?","But you know dahling, we are not! Its only eveident because I did not say 'Darling' I only said Dahling".
5)Get drunk: and act worse than you feel. So there is no way he is going to take advantage of you. He will be worried shit. If he says he never took whiskey because its too strong for him, you order your second shot deliberately-stubbornly pretending that you can totally hold your liquor.
6)Continue to be stubborn like an Ox. Dont listen to anything he says, although you know that he knows better. For instance its below freezing and you dont have a scarf. You simply will not wear his scarf. Then he will be forced to say things like"Its clean you know", just so that you listen to him and you look at him doubtfully-I mean we are still talking about adult dating here.
7)Steal Candies from a store and tell him that this is totally not your style.
8)Plan out his life for him. Tell him you would like to take a roadtrip with him in 10 years. And if he says he cant because he would have a wife and kids and that his wife might have trouble letting him go with a 'particularly attractive' woman-tell him you wont remain so in 10 years and fish shamelessly and persistently.
9)If he turns out to be a foodie-look at him incredulously. eat particularly less when he's around and make him concious that you hate food, anything to do with the kitchen, that after a good love making session you'll never be able to cook him bacon and Pancakes-rather he might have to do it for you.
10)Invite yourself over to his place, just to taste his tall claims at cooking and be openly critical about it. Ofcourse you're only being yourself when you say you hate it that there is no salt in the marinated duck.
11)Never explain yourself logically:You dont want him to take out his car because you hardly know him and it weighs down on you like a huge favour, tell him your worried about global warming. If he argues that all Pornography is not violent and you suddenly begin to see his enlightened point of view, still argue otherwise, and irrationally if the need arises. Warn him that nobody wins an argument with you and never admit that your wrong.
12)Finally when you have had a rollicking time, at the end of the night, just indifferently kiss him on the cheek and go home.Act as if you could have had as much or more fun with just about anybody else. Post this call up numerously at odd hours without leaving any messages, apologise franctically and furiously for the misdemeanor of the previous night, that everything was such a huge mistake.

And even before you know, you would have lost the man.

The point is that whether you chose to be in a relationship or not is entirely dependant on you. Just as its therapeutic to be single, to do things alone for yourself, its also important to fall in and out of love or something like it.