I hate that unclean stubble

Men may claim that stubble is sexy, but the target audience begs to differ. Stubble makes for an unkempt look, like the creepy characters in Roald Dahl’s The Twits, who had bugs feasting on the food particles stuck in their beards.

While godmen can keep long beards, the current status of godmen in India is poor. Men are lazy- there’s no doubt about this fact- so definitely shaving everyday’s a pain. But the payoff is immense.

You can admire yourself in the mirror with good reason then. Your significant other will enjoy stroking your chin without getting beard rash. You will be recognizable to long lost relatives as that innocent lad they remember from a decade ago.

Keeping a beard in shape is more challenging than being clean shaven, gentlemen. You trim it, and if it is lopsided, you’re a figure of fun. Even if you get someone to do your dirty work, he can goof up too, so be warned.

And as you age and you want to look young, this is an easier option than buying a Mercedes! It is believed that the clean shaven look became popular in military societies- enemies had less to grab on to. In these crime-ridden times, being clean shaven’s a good idea.

Protest Against Unclean Stubble Activity in association with BlogAdda.

Pondicherry on the cake

A road trip this year March culminated at Pondicherry. A sleepy town with French influence, it felt out of India. Although we were only there for a couple of days, we still remember the peace there.

A Jaipur friend had given a contact over there, and her recommendation for dinner was spot on. Rendezvous was such a pleasant experience, with its straw roof, open air seating and delicious everything- quiche to sizzler,  that we went back the next day for dinner too!

Shopping’s good here. Auroville sends a lot of colorful, cool stuff to the stores here- I am transported back to Pondicherry every time I slip in the pink pants I bought here. (The husband has a good eye for shopping)

So after checking out the stores next morning, we hit Auroville. Although we could only see the golf ball shaped temple from outside (renovation was on) that was impressive. An exhibition which detailed the inside of the temple- glass which caught the rays of the sun exactly- had us resolving to definitely come back and see the inside.

Lunch at a thin crust pizza place- with a ginormous oven- had the owner for the first time I can remember advising us to reduce our order! And indeed, when our pizza arrived, we couldn’t finish it, so it was a good thing we took his advice.

Walks by the rocky beach promenade at night, admiring the French construction, feeling the cool breeze- Pondicherry’s serene water deserves a repeat visit.

Pune!

After an adventurous road trip, where we were mislead by an out of date GPS, we finally arrived in Pune. The cool winds, rain, and hills on the way gave us an idea of the delights to come, at least weather wise. It felt good to be in a city bigger than Jaipur village :)

The wide roads, delectable eateries, and a fatter Pune Times, all signalled Pune's cosmopolitanness. Lucked out on a furniture sale- a nearby Good Home Store is closing down. With most of our possessions arranged finally, feels like we're settling in now.

The flat's bigger too, and the complex offers a sense of peace. A shady walking path is perfect to mediate on one's day. Went to the gym today- spanking new equipment, a music system, and a music scale! Felt good to have happy hormones coursing through my system again.

One mission is to evaluate all the vada paos I can get my mouth on. The first one- at Deepak Sweets in Aundh- was good. The dabeli thela at the end of our lane is my next target.Had dinner on the weekend at a neighborhood pasta pizza place in the open- yum and felt very European :)


Hope to get an active local number tonight- dying to call everyone and talk to my heart's content!

Torrential rain in torturous sunny land

I got wet in the rain after at least a year. So it deserves a blog post. Let me be timely for once. I’m disregarding the promised Pondicherry trip post. Or the one on movies that moved me.


The rain was cold and crooked. My umbrella only kept my hair dry. The auto ride was reckless. On empty roads we zipped, cursing SUVs which splashed us.

The lights went out. No problem. Sunlight there was, a bit and the weather was cool. Jaipur poured its heart out. The desert hard heart that had kept rain bottled up for what seemed like years. It was transformed in Calcutta for a few hours. Usually when it rains here, by the time I write “It’s raining” on Facebook, it’s gone.

Looking at rain from a covered house is very different from soaking it in outside. Only then can it permeate your being, cleanse you of daily dust, and be a memory for keeps.

I’m already missing you. Come back soon. Au revoir.

Jaipur Literature Festival 2013

The litfest was a wit feast. Not bad looking either, with blue balloons, orange decorations, colorful shamianas. Somak Ghoshal's article in Mint helped me figure who I should be watching out for and they did not disappoint.

I also looked at speaker profiles for more hints. This post is a collection of my tweets and fellow tweeters helped me keep track of the sessions where I couldn't be as I didn't have a clone or two. Day 1 began with rushing at 9 AM to the venue and the reward was no line for the pass :)

After suffering through the inevitable opening speeches by everyone and their dogs I made a beeline for the Google Mughal tent where there was a session on The Global Shakespeare. Elif Batuman spoke about how Turkish women put up a production of Hamlet, calling it Hamid!

Tim Supple was also good, pointing out how Indian local theatre forms emphasise more on the ancient. In the West the tendency is more to make fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream punks. So Shakespeare's ancient parts blend well with Indian theatre traditions. Then I hopped over to the Zoe Heller session where the question answer session had begun.

After some idlis from Garden Cafe to soothe a tummy that had gotten up early, I was ready for more fuel for thought. The afternoon session on The Art of The Short Story saw Yiyun Li make an interesting point- we always talk about show not tell, but we are storytellers...Very true. Storytelling involves craft, otherwise it would be closer to journalism, I guess.

Poet Simon Armitage's session was ribtickling. His reading of You're Beautiful was... beautiful and hilarious. His deadpan one liners kept us in splits. Writing a novel is too much like a job, so I'm going to stick to poetry, he said. I agree. Poetry is all about style, so you need to develop your own voice, he also said. I agree with that too.

Next up was funny man Howard Jacobson in a session on The Novel of The Future. The standard themes began to emerge- will the digital form kill the novel?

I gave the first session on Day 2 a miss out of consideration for my ears. Laughing, Weeping, Writing saw a lot of laughing certainly. I had wanted to attend a Gary Shteyngart session after seeing his antics on Twitter and he did not disappoint. "I tell my story to a shrink and if he laughs I know I've got a good one," has got to be one of the immortal quips of the festival.

Deborah Moggach pointed out that a novel is a noun, a film a verb- a succint way of getting the difference between the two across. Manu Joseph read a funny excerpt from his novel, which ended with a school kid writing Sita is the opposite of Ram :)

A quick shopping trip to nearby Bapubazar for Jaipuri bedcovers to satisfy my friends visiting from Delhi and a bite at Anokhi- we were back. Shabana Azmi's session was packed, as expected so entry had stopped. I did stumble on a book launch by her, Javed Akhtar and Prasoon Joshi after that, which led me to discover Amit Khanna's Anant Raag, which seems promising poetry.

Ariel Dorfman and Santiago Roncagliolo put up a rollicking session on Latin America. Very magic realist. How to Read Donald Duck by Dorfman is now on my reading list.

The Jewish Novel with my favorites Gary Shteyngart and Howard Jacobson followed. Their banter had us rolling in the aisles. Howard Jacobson pointed out that you can only be funny if your life is tragic, hinting at schadenfreude, to my mind.

My stomach finally collapsed so I had to give Day 3 a miss. I tried to catch the webcast but the slow net at home and the iffy webcast ensured that I depended on twitter.

I only went for the Michael Sandel session on Day 4. Is sexual violence linked to sectarian violence? A thought provoking question, but there were no easy answers from the audience.

So I was hungry for thought bytes on the last day, after my near two day drought. Howard Jacobson was funny as usual. The line for getting books signed by him was by now a mile long- guess people who heard him on the first few days were impatient for a keepsake.

Wade Davis then speculated on whether Mallory did reach the summit of Everest. He didn't think so, as Mallory didn't carry the required equipment. A long shot- if snow had helped create a slope on the second ridge he could have climbed the mountain...

Sebastian Faulks quipped that journalists were taxonomists, always wanted to pigeonhole everything...not far wrong, mesays. He felt that highlight one man's reaction to a woman walking in a room would be more impactful than just saying the room took a collective breath when she walked in. Makes sense. His inspiration was France, not England. Such a different culture, just a few miles away. It's interesting how the exotic can inspire you to write, although many say one should write on what one knows. Supriya Nair's mouthwatering boots set off Sebastian Faulks's suit nicely, leading me to tweet What suits are to men, boots are to women :)

Volunteers bagged front row seats for Sharmila Tagore for the closing debate. After the lengthy thank you speech, there was a cursory debate. Nathulal's deafening drum rolls would drown out loquacious speakers promptly.

Frank Savage was so scared of overshooting his four minutes he ended early. Michael Sandel spoke well, saying that altruism was like a muscle, which would strengthen with use.

These five days were the only Test match I've attended. I hope to be back next year from January 17-20, when Margaret Atwood, Amartya Sen, Yaan Martell, Mark Haddon, Umberto Eco and other yummy writers will be here. Otherwise, I'll just catch the videos, I guess. But Walter Benjamin's Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction applies to litfests too- the pain of attending the live session makes it seem worth it :)

So am glad to have discovered some fine new writers and while I get around to reading their work, some of them are on twitter..@bananakarenina's intriguing handle (Elif) lived up to her promise in the sessions. When she tweeted that she would miss India, I replied that we'd miss her too. She's favorited my tweet, so I think visiting writers have fallen in love with Jaipur and the other way round : )

Piya Bahroopiya

A wonderful take on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The kitsch image of the bard looking down on the performance, with a lotus- was very South Indian film starish. This refreshing spin on Shakespeare had the play in rustic language often, which would be the equivalent of how Shakespeare's comic characters would have spoken.

Usually I've seen Shakespeare as the canon, with actors declaiming long speeches in verse and marvelled at his mastery of language. Here, there was hardly any original Shakespeare. Some lines did rhyme, but the overall effect was much more Bambaiya.

The musical in Hindi was so powerful- much more so than the English ones I watched in London. Ironically, the Globe asked the director to do a Shakespearean play in Hindi- that's how this play was born.

The sheer variety of musical traditions used- the quawalli and so on- was also a very innovative device. Although some jokes were trite, overall it was a bold effort. A welcome change from tired productions which stick to the traditional way of doing Shakespeare.

Indian Tempest

This play too, was a visual extravaganza. The stage was set like a circus, with the shadow of a boat moved from within the big top to indicate the storm.  French, Malayalam, Sanskrit and English all blended well together.

Zuzu like creatures, ones with big noses, a Kathakali dancer all were marvellous figures. There was hardly any time taken for a scene change- actors crept on stage once hidden under a cloth and managed to carry a table too!

Shakespeare's words, as always, were spellbinding. Your voice can't be digested by the stomach of my senses- makes me want to read the complete works of the bard sometime. Live music, with the lilting tune that first drew me to this production, when I watched the trailer on YouTube, fused the tabla with the violin.

The curtain call, with a performer drumming, the cast singing and the audience clapping in tune was a lovely surprise. The Indians spoke French, the French sang an Indian song fluently. Shakespeare's beautiful language and this play surpassing the need for language encompassed both ends of the spectrum. Just wished the sound was better or they had used mikes like the actors yesterday so that they would have been more audible.

Fellini's Dream

The best part about the play was the innovative set. It seemed to be a tall panoramic mesh, on which light was projected and images too. This created varied settings. Actors came on stage by pushing aside the mesh.

The costumes were the height of fashion. One puppet was so life like that I realised only later that she was a puppet, when an actor spun her around and I saw that she had no feet. She was wearing a mask, I hadn't seen a masked puppet before- give me a break, people :)

A lady clown or two were  other novelties. I really want to go to Venice now- the land of the carnival, gondola, Casanova. There was plenty of gesticulation in the play, as was only to be expected from an Italian one :)

The songs were opera, I'm guessing- beautifully sung. I kept expecting the spotlight to shatter, like Bianca Castafiore manages to do in Tintin. Very episodic, but oddly enough that added to the dream like quality, as did the bright lights and the jumps from locale to locale.

I usually prefer plays with plot, but I went for this one knowing that it wouldn't have one. The photos had attracted me- of the lights, the makeup, the costumes- and they did not disappoint. Pity the hall was only 70% full.

The white sheikh was very dashing and the red light gave him a rakish look. Am keen to watch Fellini's films now.