1. 11 Jun


    Reading rooms.

     

  2. 8 Jun


    gibsongrand: So I was glad of the fog’s Taking me to you Undetermined summer thing eaten Of grief and passage where you stay. The wheel is ready to turn again. —John Ashbery

    gibsongrand:

    So I was glad of the fog’s
    Taking me to you
    Undetermined summer thing eaten
    Of grief and passage where you stay.
    The wheel is ready to turn again.

    —John Ashbery

     

  3. 4 Jun



    On the Moscow Metro and Being Gay

    Dmitiry Kuzmin writing about a very difficult subject in his country:

    The gay rights movement around the world has promoted a basic idea: we want to show society that we are human beings like everyone else. The problem is that the train driver at the Kashirskaya train station doesn’t necessarily think that those few dozen passengers in whose face he closes the doors are a priori inferior and deserve such treatment. He feels that he becomes superior to them by means of using his power over them. This sense of superiority can be trumped only by some higher superiority.

    And this particular bit he says is uniquely Russian isn’t true, I think:

    Russia lacks the concept of respect for another person simply because he or she is another person, a unique, independent individual. It is therefore useless to say here: “I’m gay and I have rights.” What you can say instead is “I’m a well-known writer and, besides, I’m gay and I have rights.” Or “I’m a prominent scientist, and, besides, I’m gay and I have rights.” Or else, “I’m a famous athlete, and, besides, I’m gay and I have rights,” and so on. 

    Bonus link: Here’s Stephen Fry talking about filming his documentary on the subject and lots, lots more.

     

  4. 31 May



    The clouds are dark and tracing their paths across the sky from the South-West. A faint sun is rising and the coffee is warm and comforting. The balcony is cozy.

    Switch scene: My bathroom.

    I don’t looking myself in the mirror. But my beard disagrees. “Look at me, I am magnificent”, it shouts back with such force that if pitted against Arnab Goswami in a debate, it’ll come out on top.

    I tend to agree.

    It’s black. And it’s white in the right places. Women dig it. It also hides some teenage trauma pretty well.

    Anyway, it needs a clean up and trim today. The Gillette razor glides across the edges. I  wonder how five blades feel. The blade reaches that precise spot where the beard meets the moustache. Delicate maneuvering required at this point.

    “Bharaaath, why are there three bottles of vodka in the fridge next to the dahi?”

    Mom.

    BOOM.

    The razor ever so slightly slips from my hand and true to Gillete’s marketing spiel it does a brilliant job of lopping everything, I mean, everything in its path.

    Nooooo.

    My beard. My chick magnet. My face resembles the scene from Asterix’s Mansions of the Gods where a patch has been cleared from the forest for a block of flats for the Romans.

    Nooooo.

    Anyway, this is the story of how I lost my beard.

    Not every exciting. But still better a better love story all Twilight novels put together.

     

  5. 29 May


    storyboard:

    Capturing Libya: Through a Hipstamatic Lens

    To photojournalism purists, it was pure blasphemy: a prestigious prize, third place for photo of the year, granted to a New York Times photographer who’d used not a 35mm to document U.S. soldiers in Iraq, but simply, his iPhone — and an app called Hipstamatic. Immediately, traditionalists went berserk: “What we knew as photojournalism at its purest form is over,” one photojournalist lamented. Using Hipstamatic in a news report, another commentator proclaimed, was “cheating us all.”

    And yet, to Ben Lowy, a conflict photographer who has made a career out of a certain brand of iPhonography — and will debut the first ever photojournalism-inspired Hipstamatic lens with his namesake later this year — the award was a well-needed wake-up call for photo fundamentalists. Last February, Lowy set out to capture the uprising in Libya from his iPhone, alongside millions of protesters who’d document the Arab Spring on their mobile devices. In October, Lowy’s Hipstamatic images of everyday life in wartime Kabul were published in the New York Times Magazine, prompting the magazine’s photo editor, Kathy Ryan, to defend their use on the paper’s 6th Floor blog. And since then, Lowy has published an iPhone photo a day — from dramatic images of war to mundane life in Brooklyn — on his Tumblr, captured under the title, iSee.

    Read More

     

  6. 15 May


    slaughterhouse90210: “I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.” ― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

    slaughterhouse90210:

    “I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.” 
    ― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

     

  7. 11 May



    Happy Box

    I want to kill myself. That’s all I could think of at that moment. She would have none of it. “If I am to be your doctor, there has to be no mention of wrist slashing and rat poison, ok?” Yes, ma’am.

    She was patient. She healed slowly, deliberately. Both the physical pain and the resulting depression.

    Eight months ago, I walked into her office.

    “My head hurts. My soul feels crushed. Tell me what to so?”
    “It’s a good start that you don’t feel like killing yourself”

    Chuckles all around.

    “Do you have a happy box?”, she asked.
    “A what?”
    “A happy box. Where your put away things you like for times when you feel bad and stupid.”
    “But…but what would I put in a box like that?”
    “I don’t know. Go home and figure it out.”

    Three weeks later, I found an old shoebox that once had my favourite pair of sneakers. A blue and white retro looking thing that I flaunted at wannabe hipster parties. I carefully ripped out the felt lining and for five hours thought about what I would put in there.

    I wrote about hers and my favourite memories. Folded the yellow, thick hand made paper, creased it sharply and put it in. A Pilot 0.5mm black pen. A sealed plastic bag of pistachios and walnuts. An old tape of me singing in horrible broken voice, Elvis Presley’s Return to Sender. A small USB drive full of Led Zeppelin, Mozart, Tina Charles, Yanni and John Coltrane. A small bar of 5-Star Crunchy. A pocket edition of The Three Musketeers. And a picture of me in my mothers arms when I was two.

    My happy box.

    “Have you used your happy box?”, she asked a few months ago.
    “Yes, I did. The pistas are gone and so has the 5-Star. I listened to Tina Charles for two straight days.”

    *****

    I am sitting in a car with my favourite little person in the world.

    “Please read me this story”. I am handed over a Dr. Seuss book.

    We read the story and laugh about blue birds and Guffs and Snuvs and beautiful schlops.

    We talk about moons and Saturn and Bangalore. I am asked about a nasty scar on my index finger.

    “Did it hurt when you got injection, Baraath?
    “Yes, I did”
    “Here, it won’t hurt again when the doctor sees you”. A kiss. And a hug.

    That car. My happy box.

    ****

    This house. This view. Three cats purring, not leaving my side. More laughter from mother and child.

    This too, a happy box.

    ****

    What’s your happy box?

     

  8. 4 May


    humansofnewyork: “If you could give one piece of advice, what would it be?”“Be in love.”“How many times have you been in love?”“Once.” And then he walked away. 

    humansofnewyork:

    “If you could give one piece of advice, what would it be?”
    “Be in love.”
    “How many times have you been in love?”
    “Once.”

    And then he walked away. 

    (via browngirlintherain)

     

  9. 30 Apr



    She was terrific to hold hands with. Most girls if you hold hands with them, their goddam hand dies on you, or else they think they have to keep moving their hand all the time, as if they were afraid they’d bore you or something. Jane was different. We’d get into a goddam movie or something, and right away we’d start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing the position or making a deal out of it. You never even worried, with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or not. All you knew was, you were happy. You really were.

    — J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (via larmoyante)
     

  10. 26 Apr



    Waiting

    image

    Observations, learnings and things to do while waiting at railway stations.

    • Be patient. The train will eventually arrive
    • More people are desperately dependent on the Indian Railways than one likes to believe.
    • We are a terribly filthy lot. We hawk and spit everywhere, shit without abandon and throw waste without thinking about consequences.
    • Rats living in railway stations are the size of cats.
    • The oil used to fry food items is often rancid.
    • Railway cops are quite violent when dealing with passengers.
    • In summers, one doesn’t carry as much Odomos as one needs.
    • Don’t trust an omelette if doesn’t have finely chopped green chillies in it.
    • Most people treat red shirt porters like donkeys.
    • Glue is the most common method by which urchins and runaway kids get high and get by.
    • The problem of kids in bonded labour is not widely reported nor tackled.
    • In the monsoons, never sit underneath the place where two sections of the roof meet.
    • If one needs to sleep on the platform bench for extended times, pin a small note to the chest that says “Don’t lathi me. I am waiting for train no. XXXX”. Protection from the cops.
    • Never drink coffee north of Hyderabad. Never drink tea south of Hyderabad.
    • Invest in good quality adult diapers.
    • A good way to ignore money-seeking eunuchs is to pretend to be vomiting.
    • If you are carrying a time-table, never keep it out in the open. You’ll be mistaken for a railway employee. “Behenchod, meri train late kyun hai?”
    • People cry a lot on platforms.
    • If you are in a city with many stations, make sure you are in the one that your train is scheduled to arrive. Dadar (WR) is different from Dadar (CR).
    • Slather on the hand sanitizer like there is no tomorrow.
    • Always keep a newspaper in hand. The Times of India is cheap and there is a lot of it usually.
    • Read. A lot.
    • Write.
     

  11. 25 Apr



    One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

    — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (via larmoyante)
     

  12. 23 Apr



    I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing.

    — – Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice.