June 2010
1 post
December 2009
1 post
Gettysburg Address
Joe: Hey
Me: Hi
Joe: What news?
Me: Nothing great
Joe: That is great
Me: Oh! do you want the Zizek schedule?
Joe: Yes...
Joe: Where's sarai?
Me: CSDS
Joe: Delhi?
Me: Delhi, yes.
Joe: Is he in EFLU for only a day?
Me: Yes and then to Kerala
Joe: Okay, and you planning to travel with him?
Me: Nope
Joe: Try to do that...you can pick up a trick or two
Me: I suspect if I can meet him at all. I've taken up this Thrissur assignment...
Joe: Oh yes I got the poster from Shim
Me: ...for which the travel charge is quite hefty...
Oh! you know Shim?
Joe: Well... not very closely, but he is in my Facebook friendlist
Me: Ah! okay, so information is spreading alright. Good!
Joe: hmm...people like Gcool are in Thrissur; they might be interested
Me: Okay
Joe: So you are going to disseminate the seeds of film studies in Kerala...
Me: Yes seeds
Joe: Hope they get water and manure... and grow properly... into big plants and trees
Me: ...or cows and buffaloes
Joe: Cows and buffaloes may eat the leaves
Me: ha ha...I was using a non-Brahmanical idiom
Joe: i was anyway using a non-Brahmanical idiom. It is from a parable in the Bible.
Me: I see
Joe: I am Syro-Malabar, not Brahmanical
Me: I can see that
Joe: What else?
Me: I am trying to book tickets from Bombay to go to Kerala
Joe: When are you going to kerala?
Me: 25th, hopefully
Joe: Okay...hopefully we'll meet in Thrissur
Me: Oh yes, you can peek in and interact with students
Joe: Okay... I will get an intro from you guys, I'll be with the students
Me: Babe is there...will be there. So you can catch up with him.
Joe: What is Babe doing?
Me: I mean he is coming home for vacation
Joe: Yes, I know
Me: I have booked dinner at his home
: )
Joe: Cool. Any interesting readings these days?
Me: I am reading Pamuk's new book, along with some articles for the seminar.
Me: Love story
Joe: cool, between Jim don't give examples like 'why can't I grab that girl's boobs or ass'... pointing at girls sitting nearby
Me: ha ha okay!
Joe: Because one of the girls in that group who used to be friendly with me looked away when I saw her last
Me: Which group?
Joe: You were drunk; probably you don't remember. You were giving an example for fetishising and objects of desire or commodity or whatever
Me: To whom?
Joe: And you were talking about the boobs or ass of the girl sitting right next to us
Me: I was drunk?
Joe: Yes
Me: Jesus!
Joe: Yes. Jesus can't help, only you can.
Me: Which girl was that?
Joe: Anyway... and you kept giving socially outrageous examples like incest. A bunch of MA girls were sitting in the chairs next to us. It all sounded like one porn lecture.
Me: Oh! but they were not our audience right?
Joe: No... but you were talking very loudly
Me: That's okay. I thought I addressed them.
Joe: hmm
Me: Anyway, if I had, it would have sounded like the Gettysburg address
Joe: Do you think you are like Abraham Lincoln?
Me: No, but I spoke of freedom for the people, by the people, and of the people
: )
Joe: No ... you were speaking about the connection between psychoanalysis and Marxism ...
Me: Yes! but its all about our freedom
Joe: ... and you gave totally obscene examples to illustrate your point
Me: :)
See, the point was to free obscenity from its shackles and make it a point of discourse for the civil people...
Joe: I guess Osho did a much better job of it
Me: ...and not just for the “slaves”, you know?
Joe: Yes, anyway... I need to get to some work. Catch you later
Me: Sure. Bye.
Joe: Bye.
July 2009
2 posts
Wikipedia as the big other
One of the central paradoxes of present day life is the centrality of Wikipedia in our lives. In an era of falling certainities, split identities, weakening home walls (compared to the sturdy walls of homes constructed 30 years back, with the idea of ‘forever’, as opposed to the flats today), and relativist paradoxes of knowledge, Wikipedia, through an apparent collaborative effort,...
June 2009
1 post
MJ as subjectivity
Before Thriller MJ was refused adequate airwave by MTV, on the ground that he was black. Thriller changed all that and more. It paved way for black musicians like Prince to make headway. The song The Girl is Mine, in which Paul McCartney and MJ croon after a white girl, made interracial relationships and marriage a palatable topic in the living rooms of the west. One can say, MJ was not directly...
May 2009
1 post
A song for my blue girl
I know of a blue girl with a red ribbon,
Who prayed for her father’s death
And stained her red ribbon blue.
I know of a blue girl with a red ribbon,
Who cheated on my orange face
And stained her red ribbon blue.
I know of a blue girl with a red ribbon,
Who sent her red ribbon to the orange skies
And let somebody cut off her mermaid legs.
I know that the blue girl knows my orange...
April 2009
5 posts
She Wants Me As Her Whispers
You decided to be a wizard of secrets, sitting in your lonely room,
Defenseless against yourself, almost tragically so.
It does feel nice to sit in a lonely room,
With an overcast cloud above your head,
And rain lashing against the walls.
I am sure you like the music of rain,
Especially from the muffled comfort of your room,
And the way it falls on an umbrella.
Do you have an umbrella in...
Endmost Love
One could make out through the ruins of her dress that she was impeccably coiffed only hours ago. Now one of the buttons of her shirt was hanging loose, as if it was ripped off, and her hair was flying in the wind, becoming a tangled mess.
When she said bye bye, as usual he heard it as ‘vye vye’, which sounded like a strained puppy whimper. She could never bid adieu to him without...
me and e.e
we both lOOked from above and I fe t l that we are TOGETHER
on idealist and immedialist lovers
There are at least two kinds of lovers according to me. For want of better terms, I will call them the idealists and the immedialists. Of course, there are tens of thousands of kinds of lovers, but when we try to produce a generic formula, inevitably, we should try to abstract from the different varieties by straightening out the odds. Thus once we reach a formula, it would serve as a tool for us...
Image, Painting and Love
“But why do you bother about that nose?, just let it be” scowled Joe, as he got increasingly impatient with the fact that Catherine spent more and more time with the painting than him, ever since she started working on the self-portrait.
“Joe, you do not understand, in a painting the object of the painting matters, because there are only objects in a painting, only...
March 2009
5 posts
Owl
The owl sees and keeps awake through the night, to bridge the hours and the day that separates him from the bluethroat. The migratory bird lags a day but manages to make love to the owl in the same temporal space. Time is dense in the owl’s home, as the prehistoric haunts his memories like a foetus-dream. The bluethroat definitely lives in the future, or so she thought, till love made a...
Life as a blur is a fate
Life is just passing by me as a blur. I do not make an imprint on it, neither does it change me.
Life says touch me not, and if I try making a gesture of touching it, I get pricked on the tip of the index finger, which leaves a trail of blood on the floor.
This prick is the fate which haunts me always: the same fate which crushed my finger while I was hammering a nail on the wall, the same fate...
Oh...
Deep corner heart says things…
Utter not me
Furtive glances
Wearin slippers
Fallin guitar
Walkin thinkin
Lone bus ride
Torn pages
Makin love
Cuttin fingers
Smokin ciggies
Losin track
In my din
Da Da Da
Di Di Di
Du Du Du
Dancin man am
Lone moan am
Kitty cat am
Puppy lick am
Du Du Du Du
Di Di Di Di
Da Da Da Da
Bougainvillea
Dying insects
Instinct drives
Maaaarc...
“It has become impossible for us to love without a murder or a suicide.
How is...”
– Mary Lawrence to Lawrence in Ithra Mathram a play by P.M Taj.
On Being in Hindu and Muslim Cities - Redux
Okay, at the outset, this is about the cities where I have lived or am living. I come from a coastal town in Kerala, called Alappuzha, populated with Christians where I live. The Arabian Sea is just about a kilometer away from my house and one can hear the rumble of the sea all day long. The people most near the coast are generally Christain-fishermen predominantly from the Latin Catholic...
February 2009
13 posts
Solomon and Miriam
Suleiman spread a fresh mattress on the semen-stained floor and wore a skull cap over his mussed hair.
As he knelt down for the prayer and bowed low towards the west he could not concentrate, as usual.
All he could think of was Mary, and her sad face. He had decided, in spite of the anticipated troubles, to defend their love against the zealots. He remembered this particular verse from the...
Sparrow Love
The deceased are more important than the living for fishes, especially if they are in love with sparrows. Sparrows live only half-as-long as a fish does, and if life were a series of profound tragedies and if the dead loves were stronger than the living, then fishes would only dream of dead sparrows, as a never-ending preface to new loves.
If love were a swimming sparrow, a fish glide would be a...
Sparrow and Fish
“The antinomy of love is not hatred, but more love”, said the fish to the sparrow.
“I know. I know that love is predicated on death. But in your case…even if they force feed me, I wouldn’t touch fish”, retorted the sparrow wistfully.
Did the sparrow say this because sparrows have seldom seen fishes or because my life is the certainty of her life, pondered the...
Ant
How do ants love? Do they love in isolation. I would fancy myself as one.
Then, I would circumnavigate your resplendent glory with humility and folded arms.
I know you do not care anymore, ants do not come out in the night.
When they do, they shiver with uncertainity. The time makes a mammoth leap across the globe and I worry about how a sweep of your frail arms or smirk can mean different...
Fish
I am a fish not only because I am a piscean or because the symbol depicts two fishes pulling at opposite directions, but I swim in water.
Swimming in water is much more easier for a fish than to live outside it.
In thin air or thick love the fish can get bruised; water is best suited for its temperement because it is frictionless, for example.
I am also a fish because I drink like one and the...
“There was a strange fixity in his gaze at times. Like all very absent-minded...”
– THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky translated by Constance Garnett (A Penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication pg.28)
On Roots
I had to break my roots, to shift myself to Pune. I had spent an eventful half-a-decade in Hyderabad which changed me physically and mentally, almost irrevocably. The shift is not really a shift from academia to corporate life, but from the comfort of rootedness to the pain of molting roots which is cast off for fledgling wings.
Roots as wings, enanglements versus free float, during which I...
Me and KM are collaborating on a series of songs...
At Work
Can I work without doing a PhD?
No.
Can I do a PhD without doing work?
No.
I write, I work and I study.
Without which, I die.
January 2009
1 post
In Pune
After staying for a long time in Hyderbad, I have shifted to Pune.
Now I traverse between Pune and Hyderabad.
Earlier I had stayed in Lucknow and my native land is Kerala.
Now I guess I have become a true “national subject”, and have mapped the entire length of India from the extreme south to the extreme north: from the Arabian sea to the Himalayas.
I guess Pune will offer an...