bottom down

Unni. You are my inspiration for this post. And no, this is not one of those weepy and cute blog posts that will make him (and the people around him) go all teary eyed and say awwwww… how cute! What a wonderful friendship! I want a friend just like Ayeshea who will write blog posts inspired by me! (That would be the other people not him) Not that all this is not true in abstract - its just not relevant here. Unni inspired me because he was sitting at the second cornermost computer near the door and writing a blog entry. And I thought “gosh and heck.. if he must do it then so must I”.
We’re sitting here - Manamee, Unni, and I - and we’re waiting to go to this little shop that sells chillie beef and parata for dinner along with Sudeep, as per the unspoken arrangement that we have to end the day together. Nikhil’s playing his “arty” music in the background, having recently become the proud owner of a ten ruble coin from the Soviet Union. In due acknowledgment of the great event, we are tolerating the music. It is one of those completely inane and nothing moments - but somehow I know its one of those absolutely blissful ‘nothing’ times that I know I will remember once ACJ is over and done with and nothing but a reminiscence to friends who really wont give a rats ass about what I did or who played what music, ate where or did what. It’s these moments that are the great ones - where the people around you are the ones you are most comfortable with and you are just completely happy though not in a particularly active way. And you dont even realize that you are, until you either remember it, or recount it, like I’m doing now.
I’m glad I have this moment - this time here - in lab 3 on the computer next to Unni who is writing about some band (in turn sitting next to Manamee who is engrossed in a book and hopefully over the fact that I didn’t come to Fab India to pick a present for Arpita’s birthday tomorrow) And now in a while we’ll go have our Chillie beef and go home - and not properly interact with each other till around dinner time tomorrow - and it will be another day less in which we have to do it.
( sigh)

This is a test podcast done in collaboration with James Hardy, Murtaza Wardak and Jessica Irani. Its about music sharing and whether or not it is ethical.

No prizes for guessing where a bunch of avid (but poor) music fans like ourselves take this debate!

Click here to get your own player.

“I hope you dance” by Leanne Womack has one great line - “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean” - Being all of 5′2″, I feel small most times - but having grown up in my “tiny island nation” as my Imperialist friends like to call it, I know exactly what she means. One thing about Chennai, is that its a coastal city, which means I dont suffer the withdrawal symptoms that afflict my Bangalore and other land bound friends so frequently. And somehow I never fail to appreciate the sea - never. Yesterday was no exception - ok, so Marina Beach may have much too much sand and the water too far away and the pineapple was a tad too raw (I expressed these opinions much to Karthik’s outrage - I think he owns the Marina food franchise).. but somehow just sitting near the water and watching the waves and occasionally the ships, makes everything seem worthwhile and yet so insignificant in importance. It’s a bit dangerous actually, because its this kind of mood that actually makes people ask questions like “Who am I?” and ‘Why am I here?”, which I somehow prefer to leave unanswered. But also it allows you to ignore the grumpy people who get upset about trivial things like “I cant believe you guys were eating mango while we were walking around looking for you” - pish taw I say. Get over it.

Some are born great and some have greatness thrust upon them - or so the saying goes. Taking that one step further I guess we can assume that some people are born to write blogs while others have blogs thrust upon them - I fall into the latter category. Its not like I haven’t been MEANNG to write a blog - I’ve been meaning to start up a blog documenting my time in India ever since I got here, which was like erm.. 7 months ago? So I guess this classroom excercise is a pretty good thing, because now I can kill two birds with one stone. That is… I fulfil the requirements for this workshop and I finally get my blog off the ground.

Ofcourse there is the usual drawback. Where do I start? How do I condense seven months worth of experience into one blog post, sitting in lab 3 of the Asian College of Journalism? It’s been an intense time - friends have been made - some for life (or at least I’d love to think so), friend circles have changed with little or no regret, transitions have happened, there have been tense times bordering on the ugly, there is all that I have learned, there is all that I’m learning… there is what I will learn… both in class and out of it (such as how to eat pani poori and bargain with unscrupulous auto drivers in Tamil) and now I’m beginning to wish I had done this seven months ago.

But to use another cliche and hackneyed term - Better late than never… What we need here is a structure. So I will not attempt to recap - because that bores me and my notorious memory always lets me down. SO what i will do is blog in the present and resort to flashbacks as, when and IF they occur to me.

But I will give you an idea of who I am and what and where I am right now. (through pictures - because apparently they’re worth a 1000 words apiece)

Thats ME

And these are my FRIENDS: