Dedicated to the types of tigre and dags who actually read my first blog post! And wrote comments too!!
I’m still dazed from my 14-day marathon absence from office.. don’t remember when i last did that. Since june ’00 when i started my career, leaves were mostly prolonged weekends, sometimes with an additional Thursday or Monday thrown in, so i was never really away from work, but this time it was different. Very enjoyable nonetheless, and the best part was the feeling of having had less time at hand. Unfortunately, that also meant i had to give a slip to many a thing that i had on my ‘must-do’ list.
The good things first – i was able to spend a lot of time at home, took mom to Benaras and Papa to Vindhyachal, talked unendingly with kids at home, ate so much i added a couple of kilos (no gym, of course), got the kids a puppy ‘kish-mish’, met a lot of old timers i hadn’t seen for ages, rekindled friendships, drove to Delhi from Allahabad, and many more.
The bad part was to see an intoxicating place like Allahabad slowly but steadily turning into a shit-hole, rather, as somebody put it recently – “a city decaying but not ready to die yet”. No hopes there, no matter how much i love the place. I’m seriously questioning if i’d really like my kid to grow up there!
Some of the places still have some of their old-world charm though – the chapel of St. Joseph’s where i studied, the banks of Ganga at 4 in the morning, the Hanuman temple on its banks where the deity is lying down instead of standing, the chaat stall of Shiv at Tikoniya, the robbers’ tribe that goes by the name ‘Pandaa’ – in the name of religion, they have self proclaimed rights to loot everyone who comes to the Ganga..
On my way back from Delhi to Bombay, i watched Federico Fellini’s ‘Eight and a Half’.. a bit slow in the beginning, it can test your patience. It grew on me later though – fantasy and real life intertwined with such magnificence! I really liked the boldness of the dream sequence where the hero Guido gathers all the women he loves, under one roof (!!!) – mesmerizing, (sadly) possible only in fantasy, but still requiring a lot of gumption to showcase it on screen. A must watch!
I’m hoping i’ll be able to start work by tomorrow. Keep sending your comments.
dubes
dubelight 
….and here we go. Sad to hear of the city’s decay but good that it’s not dead yet, wonder whether it is possible ever. It’s our own cidade de deus.
The decay of a city reminds me of a small township where I spent a considerable part of my childhood. Place I was really fond of – Nepanagar – already dead. The newspaper mill went bust. And that took toll on everything. The cute little colonies in the big dense forests and the cute little roads that connected them, sunday picnics to the botanical nurseries and blair-witch kind of haunting escapades into forests, malaria shots every monsoon from Madhu, Bengali Durga-makers during navaratri, Ramayan and Aarchestra on the school playgrounds for 9 nights, the social stratification of B-type, C-type, D-type and my own separate New Kalony, the trinity of mountains housing a mandir, a masjeed and a church, CMDs bunglow which overlooked the township in the character of Kafkaesque Castle, the ghost stories of government guesthouse… gone everything gone.
All the people I knew have left. The remaining either have hopes with the mill or have given up hopes from life itself. Very sad. It feels as if some part of my childhood died with the town.
Hey it was good.. its mostly the depth of water/space or the intensity of fire that sets one thinking…i wonder why. Good going dubelight..
🙂 please keep coming back with your comments
It’s amazing how you always manage to uplift the mood with a movie recommendation. For a moment I was windering if there’s a sublime connect between the theme and the movie…am still not sure. Though I must admit that personally movies I’ve watched most recently, do influence my writing.
🙂 i do feel that the vast canvas of emotions and situations that films expose us to, is incredible.. plus if one gets into the habit of watching good films alone, it’s exactly like the way you described devouring a book.. of course there are millions of differences.. but some of the characters are so strong they never go out of your mind..
there is this movie called departures (japanese).. or les invasions barbares (french).. or la meglio gioventu (italian).. once you watch them they’ll never, ever leave you.. the last one is a six-hour epic, but you won’t feel like leaving the screen for a moment.. they make you so involved with the characters you actually cry with them sometimes..
i’ll keep sending the recos, see how many you can get to watch.. if your books permit, that is 🙂