Category: Uncategorized
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Holi – Amitabh Bachchan, Jung, Bergman
Today is Holi and this is the most classic of all classic Holi songs, one that has to be played every year, each time someone even mentions the word Holi. The song scenario is quite something: two past lovers, married to other people, are now having an affair – and on Holi, perhaps high from…
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On Bollywood
It so happens that when one has watched countless Bollywood films, one starts believing in certain impossible things. For example: Honesty will always be rewarded in the end. Your long lost friend, brother, mother will come back to you (if not in this life, then in the next) True love never ends, never, no exceptions.…
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The law of retirement
Who is this girl? I am not sure but I think she’s one of my grandmother’s sisters, married at the age of 14 to a rich zamindar, owner of mango and banana plantations, and several houses in British Calcutta, annual host of an obligatory kangali bhojan (“the feast for the poor”) – fast forward a…
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A bar in Helsinki
Who wants to be a fucking writer? Who fucking wants to write? This typing of a sentence is killing me, I hate myself for typing this, I hate myself for wanting to type anything on anything. Why is this blank Word document not a dingy bar in Helsinki where I can sing those old gypsy…
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“I’m the bad guy”
Yes, I know, you are a wonderful writer, and if one were to cut open your heart, nothing but compassion will flow out of it, not even blood – that disgusting red liquid belongs to lesser people – and if one could have access to the innermost sanctum of your unconscious mind, one would see…
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The cult of the family
There is something that I’ve refused to do all my life: to be a part of a family photograph. The idea has repulsed me ever since I was a child, and I consciously stayed out of all such photographs – not because I hated my parents, quite the contrary, but it seemed absurd to subsume…
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Salt, lips
Your lips are chapped, it’s the gift of the leaving winter you eat something sprinkled with coarse grains of salt the salt is now on your lips, and it tingles, hurts just a little, you should probably remove it with a napkin, but instead you take some lip balm and rub it gently on your…
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Coppélia
Franz has fallen in love with a doll reading a book on the balcony. Swanhilda must now remind him of reality. So, she disguises herself as the doll – and starts dancing in front of an almost unconscious Franz. In illusion, there is no space for reality. In reality, there is enough space for illusion.…
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Gold dust
It is indeed accurate that when Frida Kahlo met with the most devastating accident at the age of 19, she lay on the street with an iron rail inside her abdomen, covered in blood and the gold dust that was carried by another passenger. Don’t you want to be that dying girl on the street…
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Rasāyana
Don’t look to the West for any answers, my mother said to me today. Love falls under the Sringara rasa, and thus must include all elements that make it so. It’s simple chemistry, if you change the composition, it becomes something else. In ancient Indian poetry, love without an earthly reality is devotion. Devotion, then,…
Beyond Six Rivers 