Tag: #everyday jottings
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Nastagio degli Onesti
In a dream, Nastagio degli Onesti calls me by name and shows me a painting : a knight hunting a woman he once loved, ripping out the heart from her dead body. Beyond the frame, the knight weeps. The woman, restored, weeps too. After life, the cruel fate of people who reject love. The next…
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Bhangarh
In a ruined ancient village of Rajasthan exist all the erased stories of the world. There, sometimes, among the weeping peacocks, and dancing bulbuls, one can hear the forgotten dictum. I was alone when I heard it, and now I go mad. I would whisper it in your ears, but do you have the courage…
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Jaipur and Dostoevsky
Taraprakash Joshi, an old man from Jaipur, he’s probably more than 90 years old now – a friend of my parents’ – is a poet and playwright. He was also a magistrate. He once pardoned a man – I don’t know for which crime – by quoting from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He said he…
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The one who didn’t leave
In 2014, at the Abu Dhabi airport, while waiting to board a connecting flight, I was picked for random security check and they took my passport and boarding pass convinced that I was carrying drugs. Nothing I said mattered, and I just had to wait for a senior official to arrive. It was chaos :…
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The case of the disappearing intellect
I have heard this many times in life : a person who spends too much time thinking about their appearance doesn’t have anything better to do, that (the mythical) ‘intelligent people’ concern themselves mostly with intelligent things. Every day, I sit in front of the mirror with my lipsticks and mascaras, and bronzers, and look…
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Dolce and Gabbana
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSBygi7MhyI There is a mood I have, which is difficult to categorize. I call it the D&G Black Swan mood. *I wrote this column on Dolce&Gabbana Winter 2015.
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Desert fish
There are, it is believed, gold fishes to be found in the desert, swimming, sometimes writhing, and rarely, if ever, to be seen. Will you come with me to look for the fish that is never found?
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On Warsan Shire’s ‘Women Who Are Difficult To Love’ / or, a poem that everyone loves
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who lives in your head and you tried to change didn’t you? closed your mouth more tried to be softer prettier less volatile, less awake No.
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A perfect marriage
In Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Jeanne’s son often, casually almost out of habit, points out her deviations from a perfect appearance – an unbuttoned button, her slightly disheveled hair, minor things like that. I know someone, who’s been married for a couple of years – to a really perfect man : educated, rich, responsible, polite.…
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Corpses and graves
As a child, my primary interest – apart from playing, usually quietly, all the time – was painting, I even covered the inside and outside walls with crayon drawings, on paper I used watercolour : I gave up painting soon, though, when I was about six or seven – after regularly attending drawing classes at…
Beyond Six Rivers 