There is a lot of clever writing in the world. It does not say much. It preens on a page, dressed in clever alliterations and metaphors. It does not change much either. It's purpose is to fill space, fly off bookshelves and magazine racks. I do not want to be a clever writer.

Inshallah, Kashmir

Inshallah Kashmir : Living terror - please read disclaimer from ashvin Kumar on Vimeo.

Don't live in denial.



You can also read about Ashvin Kumar, the documentary filmmaker who made Inshallah, Kashmir here.

2012

Somewhere on top of the long list of things I'm trying to sort out in life, is, ' STOP WASTING SO MUCH TIME ONLINE'. Given the octopus-like effect the internet has come to have on our lives, it is harder than you can imagine. At the very least, I can turn some of the time wasted online (on Facebook and while watching random, mostly awful television shows) into mental-yoga and utilize trash to write interesting things. At it's best, the internet is my library, museum, amusement park and directory.


Another resolution, sternly-made but barely-kept, is to write at least 1000 words every day. I won't subject you to all of it, but the hope is that for every 10,000 words of utter nonsense, I will write a few sentences that I can be proud of, and that you might carry with you in your head for a while. The hope is also that this public declaration will gnaw at me enough to keep me writing.


Here is something I wrote for Tehelka a while ago, about what happens to Facebook profiles when you die. (Morbid, but what is worse is the thought of dying while actually ON Facebook. Can you imagine doing something so utterly devoid of joy at the moment life is snatched away from you? ) The edited version of the story is available here






To Mourn, Click Like


2011 has been the year of electronic grief. An icon passed away, a Tiger burnt brightly and faded, the voice of love and a thousand ghazals was silenced, the Junglee broke our hearts, and last week, an evergreen hero decided it was finally time to leave. As each legend passed on, we became sub-editors and video-jockeys — anguished, aptly worded status messages and YouTube videos were our eulogies at the largest funeral in the world — on Facebook.
The new age equivalent to ‘is a noise in the woods a noise, if no one hears it’ seems to be — did it happen if it didn’t appear on your newsfeed?

It is hardly surprising in a universe of blue boxes that ‘Death’ also has a page on Facebook . The latest of the morbid yet kindly updates on the page reflects, ‘When the rich and famous die, the world seems to stop to pay tribute. From substance abusing musicians, philandering tycoons to scheming politician to deserving humanitarian. But doesn't the impoverished mother who struggles to raise a child deserve to have her life remembered too? But hey, I'm just Death...what do I know.’

The sentiment finds some resonance in Facebook’s prism of faux-celebrity-hood. News — global and personal — is shared, photos uploaded and tagged with feverish speed. As our communication and memories become increasingly virtual, so do our imprints on the lives of others. We may not pick up the phone to call old classmates anymore, but we are aware of each phase of their lives as it unfolds — vacations, promotions, marriages and births, much like we would read about and ogle at film magazines in the past. Given this careful documentation of one’s life online, the question arises unbidden — what happens to your facebook profile when you die?
With the many painful logistics that the death of a loved one forces upon us (of the body, of possessions, of wealth), deactivating a social networking account should be the least traumatizing. But a quick glance at Facebook’s ex-Chief Security Officer Matt Keller’s blog in 2009, announcing the company’s decision to ‘memorialize’ profiles of deceased people, will shatter such insulated assumptions. ‘Memorializing’ is essentially freezing an account, once Facebook is informed of someone’s death, so that no future attempts can be made to log in to the account, or access prior conversations the user might have had with his/her friends. What well-wishers can do, is visit the profile as a place of remembrance, write on the ex-user’s wall, leave tributes like songs, poems and photographs.

Hundreds of Facebook-users have commented on Keller’s blog begging Zuckerburg and Co to revoke the memorialization — as one comment by a heartbroken mother states — ‘it may sound crazy but the amount of work and life energy that goes into some people's accounts is priceless. It is a shame to lose this information forever.’

Then there are the profiles that escape mummification. Pia Mukherjee (23) lost her best friend Karan to a car-crash when the two were eighteen, and Facebook had just begun connecting the world. Karan’s profile continues to be ‘managed’ by his friend — ‘Ocassionally, he gets new friend requests from people who want to reach out to his family. But every year, friends write on his wall for his birthday and death anniversary, sometimes just to share some good news,” says Pia. In her review, ‘Generation Why’, an analysis of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network and Jaron Lanier’s book ‘You are Not a Gadget’ ; Zadie Smith expresses her misgivings about people who will write ‘missing you babes’ on a murdered teenager’s wall. She asks, befuddled, ‘Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?’

Fiza Jha (17), who lost her best friend Aarushi Talwar in the country’s most hotly debated double murder barely had a few hours to grieve before images of Aarushi and her friends at birthday parties began flashing on news channels. “There were pictures of us in group huddles, or in sleeveless shirts being shown on the news with captions about her sexual orientation. Aarushi was relatively inactive on Facebook, and we immediately realized they were being taken off our profiles. We had to delete every one of our photographs with her at once to stop the rumours. I barely time to look at those photos and think about her or what I had lost.”

The caution was not misplaced. In one of its many blundering shots in the dark, the NOIDA police chanced upon a message from one of Aarushi’s thirteen-year-old friends that said “Argh! I’m going to kill you!’ and insisted upon interrogating the child to see if she had motive. Another email, from Aarushi to her parents, apologizing for something she’d done which she’d never repeat again (going for a movie alone with her friends and lying about the fact that an adult was present — not the gravest of sins a fourteen-year-old can commit) was used to insinuate that she’d had sexual relations with someone, which her parents had found out about.

The fact that Aarushi’s facebook profile still lies buried in cyberspace (her last status update, three days before she was murdered — ‘Yippee! School’s closing!’) is testament to the fact that as her friends grow up, they like the idea of having a space, even a virtual one — where they can revisit the memory of the young girl they once knew and the conversations they shared. “I wouldn’t want that last bit of her to go away. I have know that she isn’t around anymore, but I don’t want to feel like she never existed,” says Fiza.

If the idea of Facebook-driven existentialism sounds fantastic, consider the death of 21 year old Gudiya at St Xavier’s college in Patna. Gudiya had been seeing her boyfriend … for a few years when her grandmother betrothed her to someone else. Enraged, he waited outside Gudiya’s examination room for an hour armed with a khukri, seized her by the hair when she stepped out of the hall and beheaded her. Dropping the khukri on the spot, he began to flee the campus. Eyewitness accounts claim that outraged friends and faculty rushed after him, thrashed him and handed him to the police. The remaining students filing out of the classroom, gathered around the body, held up their smartphones and began uploading pictures of the body on Facebook. News viralled and condolences began pouring in as friends of friends began to be tagged on the image of Gudiya’s decapitated body. ‘Love Aaj Kal’, the image was captioned.

It’s easy to dismiss digital tears. They don’t smudge your make-up and you can always change the tab if the death-updates get too depressing. One can only thank the universe that Camus wrote The Stranger before Facebook and Zuckerburg could memorialize mother’s death.

So You Want to Be a Writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.



---- Dear God, thank you for Charles Bukowski.

Being Naked

The bodies of two women have been on our minds this past month.

First, there was Aliaa Mahdy, the 20-year-old Egyptian blogger who got us hot under the collar — in a self-portrait taken in her ‘parents’ room’ — Mahdy stands naked except for black fishnet stockings, red ballet flats, and a red bow in her hair. She stares defiantly at the camera, one leg poised on a stool, and writes, “When a woman is the sum total of her headscarf and hymen – that is, what’s on her head and what is between her legs – then nakedness and sex become weapons of political resistance.”
Closer home, adult film professional Sunny Leone (An Indian-Canadian by descent), was invited to the 5th season of reality show Bigg Boss — ostensibly to hike the show’s flailing TRP ratings. In a bigger tease than Pamela Anderson’s barely covered bosom from the last season of the show, Leone turned coy from the moment she entered the house.
While dailies churned out gleeful double entendres like ‘Sunny Side Up’ and ‘Porn Enters Mainstream’, Ms Leone herself has divulged nothing about her career on the show. Not only does she deflect questions about her work with maddening vagueness, but even more schizophrenically — speaks to the camera every time she is alone, telling the audience that what she does for a living is ‘our secret’, and that she is a ‘good girl’.

What binds Mahdy and Leone’s stories together are the familiar tropes of ‘restive’ young girls gone awry. While thousands supported Mahdy’s political statement on her blog, (some even posting nude photographs of themselves in the same pose); literally millions lashed out at her for ‘belittling the revolution’ through her ‘attention-seeking behaviour’. Stories of how her rebel-blogger boyfriend Amer Kareem coerced her into taking the picture began to be circulated to make her story more palatable to the public. It is evidently impossible for a young woman to want to take her clothes off in the glaring public eye, even if it is for a cause as important as her life itself — or in Leone’s case, just to earn her a better life.
Born to Sikh-Punjabi parents in Ontario, Canada; Leone, a pediatric nurse-in-training admits that her family threw a fit when they found out about her career as a pornstar. ‘They didn’t know the adult film entertainment industry is actually that – an industry,’ she mentions in an interview given prior to her entry on the show. “My father eventually told me to do whatever I wanted, but to do it well and with honesty. I wanted to do this work because the money was just so good.”
But even a hard-headed and unapologetic businesswoman — (Leone speaks of the 60-70 hour weeks of work she put in to launch her creative label, Leone LLC under which she writes and directs her unique brand of adult entertainment and produces merchandise modeled on her body parts), used to taking her clothes off for the camera, otherwise comfortable with the distinction between pornography and prostitution, familiar with the willful objectification of her body, must play at being an ingénue to be accepted by a mass audience.

While Leone’s shyness might be the result of kindly warnings from her half Indian-half Canadian family; a well-strategized PR decision to ease her entry into tinseltown, or both — a side of ourselves is being bared to us as we watch her red-faced, waiting for the pornstar to tumble out of the smiling young woman. In covering up the bodies and individuality of young women like Mahdy and Leone, it might just be our own voices that we end up silencing.

Why We Dance

The music hit Shonan Kothari (23) about a year ago, standing in the juice aisle of a supermarket in London. A group of people who’d been walking around with shopping bags a second ago, burst into song for no apparent purpose. They were singing a ‘made-up’ song about juice, and before she could comprehend what the universe was throwing at her, it was over and every one was shopping again.
She discovered that such ‘happenings’ were not infrequent, and had occurred several times in the world before (the earliest recorded ‘flash mob’ was held in 2003 by Bill Wasik, editor of Harpers Magazine). Shonan finished college at SOAS, became a researcher at Harvard CSR and came back to Mumbai. And one fine day, the music came swimming back. “I’d always wanted to be part of a flash mob, so instead of waiting around for it to happen, I decided to plan one.” At it’s inception — when Shonan began by sending out an e-mail to 20 of her closest friends, who forwarded it to interested parties— the ‘mob’ had no political intention, no statement to make. Flash mobs have traditionally lacked political motive (as opposed to ‘smart mobs’, which are driven by specific intent to spread a message) — and are recognized more for their pageantry than an overarching message.
For the group of 200-odd people aged between 4 to 60 that met for rehearsals every week for a month, skipping homework, household chores and official errands dancing to Rang De Basanti only took on special significance once the date of the performance was decided (27/11, a day after the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai).
Four days before the event, Shonan and her core team still hadn’t picked a venue — when they finally decided on CST (as their other venues began to fall through) it was as if ‘a whole lot of different energies began coming together,’ says Shonan. The Mumbai police, the BMC authorities, the station officers and staff from Indian railways — watched Kothari’s 10 minute video presentation on flash mobs and unanimously loved the idea of it happening in Mumbai. “It was slightly insane — we’d be at the station late at night, and the station officers would be climbing up on poles looking for the best spots to place cameras for us. They were thrilled about playing the song on the railway announcement system. It wasn’t just our mob anymore, each of them had become part of it,” Kothari beams. At first, the sight of thousands of people rushing towards the dancers had Kothari more than slightly frazzled, but she soon realized that the good cheer of the dancers was infectious. Before she realized it, the original mob had doubled in size — even the distant fringe of he 500-strong crowd was moving it’s feet rhythmically to the music. What began with a surprise in the juice-aisle became something more. We dance; the people gathered in Mumbai seemed to say, because we can.







Plan Your Own Flash Mob: by Shonan Kothari

1.Pick a Venue: CST is a beautiful structure that offers a great indoor space and high footfalls, so that was my dream location for a flash mob. We’d also considered parks like Priyadarshini Park and other open spaces. It might make sense to short list a bunch of venues because some may not grant you permission.

2. Make a Presentation and Show Up Unannounced: reate a solid presentation on what a flash mob is and how it will benefit the venue in terms of publicity, footfalls, virality etc. I didn’t have contacts or appointments at the cop station, railway station or park, so I just showed up during work hours and made sure they listened to me. I soon saw that everyone was super co-operative – that I had no commercial gain from this made it easier – and I received permissions from almost everyone I approached. If you’re planning a CST mob, Mr Atul Jani, Senior Divisional Commercial Manager, Central Railways is the man you should be looking for.

3. Sort out Permissions: You have to acquire three different authorisations - from the venue, as well as the BMC and police. In case of CST, there were a million internal departments that had to grant individual authorisations as well – we even needed a separate permission slip to get a ladder on the premises.
4. Recruit Your Mob: In order to make my presentation attractive I lied about having 200 dancers on board. Since I lied, I had to make it happen. The best way to do it is send out an email to 20 of your closest friends, and get each one to recruit 20 more.
5. Swear to Secrecy and Find a Good Practice Spot: It’s not easy to get 200 people to perform routine dance practises in public spaces and keep it a secret, but we tried our best. This involved not using any social media pre-event and splitting up practise into batches. Priyadarshini Park at Napeansea Road provided their grounds for the same.
6. Rope in Experts for Less: If you are able to sell the idea well enough – it’s still novel in India – you can get cool choreographers and film companies to shoot the event at a subsidised cost or even for free! Ours was choreographed by Bhaumik Shah (he’s worked on a bunch of music videos and Bollywood shows) to the Rang De Basanti song because I figured you can’t go wrong with AR Rahman.
7. Blend In: The whole point of a flash mob is to look like people at the venue, in our case, commuters. No loud or revealing clothes, no garish make-up.
8. (You Could) Sell Your Flash Mob: Although we kept it under wraps, word got out to a few brands who approached us for in-mob branding. I chose not to do it, but you could.
9. Crowd Control: Where we failed was to control the crowd, who formed a ring around the first five dancers, thereby ruining the initially planned formation, as well as some really cool entries and exits. Make sure you take measures for crowd control.
10. Make it Viral: You should have a multiple camera set up at the venue to get shots from several good angles, do a quick edit and put the video online as soon as possible.

Good Day Sunshine

I know there will come a day when I crave the peace of this morning. The constancy of my room, my dog's excitement just at the fact that we are both awake and that a new day has begun. I will miss the little things like picking the color of my teacup and thus my day (red). I will miss the yellow roses my mom left by my bed and her lasting perfume when she hugs me before leaving for a trip.

May we always remember the simple joys of life and the great loves they sustain.

Good morning.

It is a strange thing to write. On one hand there is the arrogance of believing that you have something of relevance to say, that you are the best person for the job. On the other, you must be completely ego-less to become a sieve through which the world tells its story. My new favourite writer, Ray Bradbury in (his aptly titled book, Zen In the Art of Writing) asks that you wake up every morning and explode. Let loves and hates and mysteries seize you so when the words come, they do not stop. Learn your craft well so when there are words, there are also people to read them. He types twenty random words that come to his head the moment he gets out of bed every day. He never knows why he chooses those particular words, the answers become apparent only when in the course of letting his muse take over, the subconscious weight of those words gives a definite shape and form to his stories.

Bradbury's enthusiasm is all the inspiration I currently have. My muse is trapped under piles of clothes and books that I have no time to clear away. (I had a friend who used to cover all the disorganized and distracting piles in his room with bed-sheets so that he could avoid looking them. In the end, we sat surrounded by small fortresses of paisley prints and stripes and dots, unable to look at anything at all). My muse is wasted on weekends when I seek to escape rather than find her. (I convince myself that I will go crazy if I think about work all the time. But it is hard to love anything else right now). When I start to write my muse takes one look at the cobwebs of unpaid bills and unanswered messages chipping away at my confidence, and flies away.

Like a zealot, I stare at the ceiling or my computer screen repeating to myself 'bad writing is not a character flaw' or just an endless string of 'itwillhappen's. I marvel at the effortless ease of other people's prose, and only feel relief when I chance upon one of my editors bent over drafts of her own work, or typing-deleting-typing with a wild-eyed look in her cabin. It feels great to have written, but writing in itself is not pleasant. It cuts and cuts away at you until you feel yourself standing in the middle of the room in your bare bones waiting for someone to read you and tell you it's okay, you can go to sleep now, we can start this all over again tomorrow.

Can love turn to poison? Can someone you once loved and wanted to spend every waking and sleeping moment with turn into someone toxic that you must avoid at all costs?
There are days when the phone doesn’t stop ringing and there are days when it doesn’t ring at all. Today began with insistent flashing red lights and turned into a deafening silence. Sometimes the weight of loneliness is like an armor that you must bear, to guard yourself from words that you are not ready to hear.
The boy called, demanding to know whom I’ve been with since he left me on the side of the road, broken into a million shards. I tell him that I didn’t notice there were other people in the world until he left but he does not listen. He asks why I am happy and how I stopped reaching out with a million tentacles of love. He says it proves that I never cared, that he was the considerate one all along.
Perhaps we must build our own myths to explain why a particular love couldn’t survive, in order to survive. I do not care to labor over the darkness I plunged in to when he left. It took everything I had to emerge out of it. I realize now why it is important to lock your heart away, and how as you become more of a person, you learn to feel more, to love harder, to let someone in to places you do not know how to extricate them from. I worry about how easy and mechanical it has all become — a blinking green light that says 'online', a lack of grand gestures, the sufficiency of finding a common song that you love with someone you may never meet again. It seems to him, and to everyone peeping in, that all it took was two weeks in a city that was not mine, and the arms of a stranger to change my heart. In truth took months to stop seeing the world closing down before my eyes, to stop seeing his face at every corner I turned. It took endless mornings of cold realization. Even the arms that I found respite in only offer temporary shelter.
The Gladiator is perfect in his carefully maintained distance because he is everything I need when I need it, and completely absorbed in his own being for the rest of time. He taught me how important it is to be selfish and ambitious while continuing to be kind. We share a childlike greed for each other but exchange equally friendly goodbyes. The most important thing that he taught me was that the very same habits, once endearing in the fugue of love, can turn you sleepless with irritation when you do not want to be tied down.
I feel poisoned for having loved. But hopefully that will pass with tonight.

Working through Blues

The thing about being an 'adorable little black hole of need' as my friend Aporia describes it as that you push away the ones you really need for the ones that don't want you around. Right now, I just want to push away everything. I don't want to utilize my time. For once, I just want to be. In the competition for worst day of the week Monday has already raised the stakes with its PMS and people-induced headache, the annoying whispering of million little monsters and a copy that failed to rouse any sentiment. Nishkamakarmayoga is a state harder to attain on Mondays.

Thank god for wine and stereomoods.