Wow, Have been neglecting my blog for too long. Several things have happened in life. And, you know, as they say, life got in the way. I feel it may be time to start blogging again. Have not written a short story in god knows how long. Would love to share more. Watch this space if you see this.

Escalator

Focus
Make sure the frame is right.
Lights.
Camera.
Action.
An escalator moving up. A person rushes by.
Tie.
Suit.
Boot.
Briefcase.
Moving up already ascending steps.
Fast.
Zoom out. Zoom out.
More and more people running up.
Flashing past the screen.
So fast they move.
Make sure you get this.
Focus.
On the two people standing still.
Content to move at the escalator's pace.
See how they get jostled and shoved.
Make sure you get this.
Zoom out. Zoom out.
So many people in a rush.
Zoom out further
To reveal.
At the bottom a cradle,
At the top a fire.
The Everyone's Pyre.

Payal's little anecdote.

Whenever I travel I get anxiety. it is not exactly anxiety but I get into some kind of zone. And I get into it when ever I travel alone. Travelling in groups is such a fuss. After reaching the destination having family, friends or a partner might be a great idea but not while traveling.
Travelling for me is an experience, when I am with myself and the mundane does not bother me. It takes me to a different world. I don't want music then, I don't want to talk to people.  I start thinking about my co passengers as who they are ? why are they travelling? why have we met? What is their story? Am I a part of their story? What is it that has got us together?
So many things come to my head. I keep thinking about the people in the houses that I cross? Who are they? What is their story? Are they waiting for some one? Is all OK in that particular house painted in pale blue? The pale ness of the blue and those red hibiscus is giving it such a tired look. Maybe the old parents are tired and want their child to come back. May be!
When I travel, and most of it happens to be my journey from the University to my home town. So when I come back after the weekend on a Monday morning, I see a lot of people getting back to work. The women and men look tired for they have a week ahead of battle. I seem to know them so well. I create a story about each one around. If two ppl are travelling together I think up a bond between them. I will not lie I try to overhear their conversation also. It gives me more food for my story about them to fly. So I am used to this madness about myself. But what happened today was different. Today I felt caged. I wanted to run away and run away really far. I was going to the airport to pick up my mother and sister. I was traveling with papa. It is my father's first car and I am all excited. I was in the back seat. I had my chips ready for my madness. It was raining but not heavily. After we left the town behind, it is a pleasure to travel that road. On either side there are sal trees. The sal trees always take me to some kind of a place where I have never been to. This happens because as a child my sister use to sing a bhatiali song " sal piyal er bon e ekto chele sish dei aar ekti mey nache". The song has stayed with me. I still see this chele mey under the sal. I see them dancing. I see their houses. I see them sitting beside the stream. Then suddenly papa calls me to show a small tea shop where he had tea with my grandfather 30 years ago. He tries to find the shop but somehow we cannot figure it out. Then my father settles down for a bylane and declares it to be the place where the tea shop once existed. It is strange how we carry memories and give different essence to it every time. We constantly change the meaning of our memories as we need. No memories are absolute truth or are perhaps as true as our imagination.

Kothanodi: Review

Kothanodi. Here is a movie all about the world its characters inherit. That is not to say the characters are not given importance. What I mean is that when the movie ends, the character that has lodged itself the deepest in your mind is the fantastic world of Kothanodi. What makes this all the more impressive is that this particular character stays in the background all throughout as the humans (and a vegetable) parade around making extremely strong cases to be remembered. Maybe it is because nearly every scene, every frame, serves the atmosphere that this movie works so hard to create. And this atmosphere is helped immensely by an amazing score that, though a little loud at times, never misses a beat, keeping your spine tingling to various degrees all throughout. The stories themselves are known to most Assamese people already and the movie stays faithful to them almost to a fault. This is not necessarily a complaint but I felt that while the storytelling was on point - character motivations taking the necessary time to form out of the mist of information expertly thrown at us in small chunks - a little more effort could have gone into making the story bigger than the sum of its parts. If I have a complaint, it is that one of the stories, that deals with (and I'm not spoiling anything here, trust me) infanticide doesn't make a particularly convincing case for being included here among the other three. Thematically, it felt a little disconnected from the rest of the narrative. But ultimately, the atmosphere and the world building do manage to tie it to the rest of the story and so it is not something that took me out of the movie. Another thing I noticed is that the low budget does rear its ugly head (or heads, three to be exact) in a scene or two but I believe it was inevitable, given the scope of what was being attempted here and the film makers, instead, deserve credit for the numerous scenes where it wasn't very obvious at all when it easily could have been. All things considered, this is an important movie because of where its focus lies. World building. We don't get that from Indian Cinema very often. Had this movie failed in its attempt at the same for innumerable reasons, it would still have deserved praise for the effort. As it is though, I guess we were in luck.

Watch the movie now at moviesaints.com

The new Tool album to be a Double album. Yay!

It feels absolutely great to be a music lover right now. A report claims that Tool are coming out with a new album this year after all. Its called Decem apparently and the track listing is out too but I will let you google that in your own spare time. It's a double album with all songs over 12 minutes in length. So that mean more that 2 and a half hours of new Tool material. It is impossible not to feel completely giddy. And, even though all this sounds completely legit, I have to consider the fact that this is the elusive fifth Tool album we're talking about. I will wait just a bit longer before I start dancing my heart out to Aenima.

It almost makes me wish I wasn't an atheist now so I could pray to God to let this be true. But I highly doubt that, even if God existed, he would have much power over when Tool albums came out. Tool albums are like wizards. They are never late, nor are they early. They arrive precisely when they mean to. Because now that it is here, a 10 year wait for 2 hours and 38 minutes of tool seems to make perfect sense.

"What if it isn't good?" That is a question I am not even being able to consider in my head. It is tool. Of course it will be good. And if it is somehow not, I would still want to hear it just to figure out what mediocre tool sounds like.Because that to me is like trying to imagine a new colour right now. Ok so I am a bit of a fan boy. Not ashamed. Not one bit. There are way worse things to be fan boys of I imagine.

Oh in other good news, Behemoth are coming to India. I am not a die hard fan of behemoth, though apparently the fault there is entirely my own. I have only heard their last album 'The Satanist' and that one I absolutely loved. It's just that I haven't dug into their back catalogue yet but I mean to. Wouldn't go to watch Behemoth unprepared.

Steven Wilson's coming to India too I heard. This I am super excited about. Love all his stuff. I am actually a big fan of his latest album 4 1/2 even though it is not a proper album. It is, if i am not wrong, some previously unreleased stuff and one remix. Whatever it is, it is really good. This man can do no wrong it seems. Well may be that's not entirely true. I do blame this guy for taking Opeth from me but I wont be petty here. A band can do what it wants to do. And 'Pale Communion' was actually not that bad.

All things considered, feels good to be a music lover right now. Fells great. Feels great.

Phobia: Review

Phobia is about a woman who suffers from agoraphobia, which is a fear of ordinary places and activities. Simple enough premise; exceptional execution. I really do not want to tell you a lot about the story. The trailer throws the most obvious parts of the movie at you and manages to keep you in the dark regarding most of the actual plot points. And you have to be thankful for that. Because this is one of the rare original Bollywood movies and one you really need to watch. Do not even watch the trailer if you haven't already. Let the movie surprise you.

The movie benefits from a really strong performance from Radhka Apte who has already made her mark in the industry by now. And yet I feel very confident in saying that this is one of her best performances yet, portraying the crippling disability of a person who struggles even to step out of her front door with immense conviction. None of the other actors in this movie initially seem to have a lot to do. But by the end of it, you do appreciate them as strong characters who are important albeit smaller pieces of a robust story. Having said that, this is definitely a movie that focuses more on one character in a seemingly hostile environment, taking us into said character's mind to try to give us a better understanding of what she's going through. And that is where the movie succeeds marvellously.

As a result of some stellar writing, taut screenplay and exceptional performances this movie creates tension by the bucket loads. And once it grabs hold of you it doesn't let go till the very end. There is a scene in the move featuring a television set that made me try to dig into my seat and disappear for a moment. And yet for all its scares, when the movie tries to go for a few moments of brevity, it succeeds at that as well with absolute ease, managing to get a few laughs out without making the audience feel they've been teleported to a different movie altogether.

The ending is a bit tricky. It must be said the makers completely and convincingly nailed the ending they were going for. And it is an ending I loved. But will everyone? Probably not. This is not a happy ending. Nor is it a tragic one. Of course you could interpret it as one or the other but that is not the point of the movie. It is, at its heart, a clever movie that takes pride in its genius. Does that mean some of the more human elements are not as well handled as the rest? Probably. But this movie succeeds in being what it wants to be and that is more that just good enough. It is, in my humble opinion, one of the better movies to have graced Indian screens this year.

The software engineer life: Pokemon Go and the broken phone.

So, last birthday dad got me this new phone. Well actually I got a new phone. He paid for it. The birthday gift aspect of it was more implied. And absolutely necessary, given my financial state at the time. Now, one year later, that phone is in a coma and I have been forced to revert back to my tiny Samsung galaxy pocket something something phone. 

It didn't take me long to remember why I was so desperate for a new phone last year in the first place. This phone is slooooooowwww. It is slower than an episode of a saas-bahu serial. The time between the Whatsapp notification and me getting to actually read it would allow for 10 reaction shots of the members of the Khurana family reacting to their new bahu forgetting to put tea leaves in the evening tea or something. If it was an image and I needed to download it then we could squeeze in the commercial break as well and the scene after the commercial break where it is revealed that bari bahu had replaced the teapot with the tea with a teapot full of warm water to make choti bahu look bad.

All Khurana family dynamics aside, this is not a comfortable phone to use. It's slow, it crashes a lot and its tiny. And tiny is bad because the microphone is a piece of crap and when I have the phone to my ear, it is too far from my mouth for the person at the other end to make out what I am saying resulting in me having to shout out every word or use the phone like a walkie talkie.

 So basically, it is either

"HAA MAAJI PRANAAM!!"

or

"Haa Maaji pranaam. Over!"

Needless to say, not one of the easier choices to make.

The Lenovo A6000 Plus I had got for my birthday was a good phone for the first six months. Then came along a system update, which frankly, had more similarities to a run of the mill horror movie possession than an actual system update in that it completely screwed my phone up. I think it was the update to Lollipop. I was perfectly content with my Kitkat. I am no techno geek. I am sure that's not even the right term to describe the people I am thinking of. I mean the people who know what version of software their phones run to the last digit and care about such things.

Someone had told me my phone was a Kitkat. And I was fine with that. It did all the things I would want a smart phone to do. It was quick on its feet. Graceful and all. And then came along the update. It was like my phone had just hit puberty. Oh the tantrums. It wouldn't save call logs. Switch off when it wanted to. It wouldn't charge up half the time. I would connect the phone to a charger, leave it alone for an hour and bingo. The charge on it goes from 25% to 7%. Where was it losing all that electricity? High voltage casino? Bijli Teen Patti? Weird stuff.

And now it wont charge up at all. I would plug in the charger, take it out, plug it back in applying more pressure, then less. But nothing. It felt like trying to bring a dead body to an orgasm. Wasn't going to happen.

So the phone lies dead in the cupboard waiting for me to drop it off at a service centre and find out what the chances are of a full revival. And while I am going around looking for authorised service centres for Lenovo my friends are out looking for pokemons in Pune. How friggin cool is that? And I am missing out on the one game that makes you actually get out of the house. Would I be playing it if I had a phone that didn't struggle with the basic screen unlock? Hell yes! Even though I know nothing about pokemons apart from the fact that one of them is a yellow bunny that shoots lightning every time it sneezes. And that another one with a Punjabi sounding name (Charminder? Charmander?) has its tail on fire (Hanumaan much?). 

But I am ready to learn. I knew nothing about the Avengers. And now I know that Vision eventually hooks up with Scarlet Witch. I even know what happens to their kids and stuff. Ow and spoiler alert. Sorry.

So while I wait for my phone to get fixed keep the hype up. So I don't become the candy crush request guy looking for pokemons in a city going "If I stumble across one more Eevee on the street, I swear to god..."

(Knows two pokemons other than the yellow lightning bunny- 20 points... No? 10? 5... lets settle on 5 points.)