Auld Lang Syne

Ever since I was a child, I have spent both New Year’s Eve and New Years Day with a tinge of melancholy hanging over my head. It might sound silly, but I feel a wee bit sorry and forlorn for the year just gone past given the resolve with which we all are determined to see its back. So, even though the lows far outweighed the highs in 2015 and 2016 is really starting afresh and new for me, I still can’t help but feel a sense of awwww for 2015.

Now, I am cursed with a strong instinct to play devil’s advocate at all times. I may agree 100% with somebody on something, but only because a particular line of reasoning has been adopted, I always find myself duty bound to argue from the other side simply because I have ingrained in me a deep sense of anxiety to make sure that all aspects of a situation are considered and debated. If there is no one around then I debate with myself. And long live Linda Goodman, but no, I am not a Libran.

So, amidst the flurry of HNY messages and new beginnings, this perverse streak in me wants to talk about the old. More so, because this year, I have been particularly romancing the past in many different ways. These are a few of my favorite old things that I am going to carry forward into the new:

1. Chor Bazaar: 2015 saw my love for garage sales/flea markets/bazaars at its best. Thanks to my mother who determinedly hunted down the exact location of chor bazaar in Bombay and we set out one fine day to explore the place. I have fallen irrevocably in love with this place. Though I returned with lots of old film posters the first time I went, for me, this place’s charm does not lie in shopping. My simple joy is in strolling through the alleys of Bhendi Bazaar to soak in the witchery of discards and antiques arrayed in the most unexpected of ways. It is a mise-en-scene drenched in nostalgia and a thousand questions about the past that you are free to make up answers to. The place is in danger as part of the Bhendi Bazaar redevelopment scheme and there is a stupid stupid stupid proposal to allocate space to it in a mall. They have to be kidding 😦 I can only hope that the chor bazaar association that is fighting this out on grounds of loss of livelihood and heritage value prevails because now that I have found it, I don’t ever want to lose it.

2. INTACH: I began a more systematic way of learning about Bangalore and its heritage this year thanks to INTACH and it has been delightful to travel into the city’s past. Ever since blogging found its way to India circa 2002-03, Bangalore and Pune have had a fair number of bloggers and I knew a great deal about the city, years before I even thought I would move here merely from reading them. While Pune bloggers are not very prolific in writing about their city, Bangaloreans are quite the opposite. In fact, it is because of reading so many of them that I found myself falling in love with the city because they narrated such good stories. One of the things that I want to get back to this year is learning Kannada. The classes that I took when I moved here helped in deciphering the script, but I still can’t remember a single Kannada word to save my life. I can never feel at home if I don’t know the local language of a place and for my own sense of being, it is essential that I do something about this. For the time being though, this is a shout out to INTACH for the wonderful trips the organize. I only wish it wasn’t so challenging to get into their trips. It is even more difficult that tatkal and the fastest finger first, wins.

3. Historical fiction and non-fiction: Unlike Chetan Bhagat, I do not carry baggage from IIT and IIM so I can state without reservations that I have always enjoyed history. This year, I picked up Indu Sundaresan and have been finding it difficult to exit the world of 16th century India ever since. It has been a wonderful reading journey and I can’t wait to dip into more. I went back home to Pune and dug through my library to unearth the earliest Dalrymples I had bought and look forward to revisiting them. I quite like wandering unseen through these eras and like how frenzied I feel about visiting what’s left of all of these places in real. Soon, yes?

4. Old parts of Pune: These past two weeks when I was in Pune, I went on a walking tour by myself of the Camp area. This is where I was born and raised and Centre Street, Taboot Street, Dastur Meher Road, Booty Street, Sachapir Street, and East Street are places that are a part of me. Barring East Street that has seen change, the other streets that I have mentioned remain ditto as they were from the time I was born. This is a part of Pune that oozes secularism from its very pores. This part of the city is home to Parsis, Iranis, Marwaris and other Hindus, Bohris and other Muslims, and Christians all living and doing business together in very close quarters. The entire area is suffused with the kind of ambience that makes my heart sing. Another entirely delicious reason for my fondness for this part of town is the ice cream falooda at Poona Cold Drink House. There is no other dessert in the history of this world that can ever satisfy my family as much as this one can. We have all been initiated into ice cream at the Poona Cold Drink House and I would like to die knowing that this place will be around so that I can haunt it on my ghostly sojourns to Pune. In fact, I am pretty sure that I will make my way to heaven or hell only after a detour here.
I also love the peths of Pune, but I don’t have as much affinity to them as the camp area simply because I did not grow up there. But, this time I made it a point to wander through the Kasba Peth part of town. There is one particular old house in this area that quite clearly screams its vintage. Given that it is a stone’s throw from Shaniwarwada, it is not difficult to guess that this was perhaps the stately home of some Maratha royal when it was built. Unfortunately it is falling apart and I hurried to take countless pictures of its facade. My amateur attempts at photography simply don’t do justice to the look and feel of this house. I plan to revisit it again and I hope it is still standing when I return.I very badly want to know its history and perhaps, I will venture to knock on the door of the advocate whose board hangs outside to make enquiries.

5. Radio and Vividh Bharati: I am a radio lover and one of the things that I missed most when I was away from India was Vividh Bharati and am thankful that it hasn’t changed too much. Their programs are the quaintest and given my immense love for Hindi cinema, listening to VB is an easy path to all the old melodies that I grew up listening to. This also, I have inherited from my mother and Vividh Bharati allows me to escape to Sunday afternoons when she would bustle around in the kitchen trying to goad a lazy and unwilling me into helping her cook. I find Vividh Bharati one of the best ways to learn about the country’s ‘north Indian’ geography. Each song is preceded by at least five minutes of recitation containing the names of the song requesters and the places that they come from. I most particularly want to visit Jhumri Talaiya in Jharkhand because it holds the record for sending the maximum number of song requests to Vividh Bharati and till date, you can be sure of listening to at least one request from this place every time you tune in. I hope you do.

6. Baansi biryani: I simply cannot talk about old things and not mention the one thing that tastes best when it is a day old. I am a biryani freak. I don’t think anything comes close to matching my mother’s cooking. I particularly love her chicken and prawn biryani both when it is freshly cooked, but more so when it is a day old. It tastes out of this world and in fact I sat down to type this after I had two helpings of her chicken biryani that she packed for me to bring back to Bangalore 🙂

So that’s all. 6 old things that I love as I slide into 2016. I hope it balances out the hoopla about welcoming the new. Have a Happy New Year y’all.

Calcutta

I have been thinking of cities since the past couple of days. Part of it was prompted by this piece of writing by Meena Kandasamy on Madras that I revisited because of a comment Sindhuja left on my post. It occupied centre stage this morning when I read SRK’s thoughts on different cities in the Hindu’s inaugural Bombay edition. I went back to reread Kandasamy’s piece and was full of envy for her relationship with a city that inspired her to pen something like this. I love my hometown Pune and won’t hear a word against it from non-natives – that privilege only belongs to us who have lived there enough to be a Punekar. Still, be that as it may, it has never once inspired poetry in me. Bangalore, on the other hand, just might. But, since I live here now, I am still trying to think things through about it.

So, then I thought about Bombay. I have romanced Bombay vicariously through filmmakers, but find that the large body of popular culture discourse that I have consumed about the city through books and films overpowers and overlays any personal experience I have of it. In any case, I am too much of a fleeting visitor there. The nature of these visits – GRE exam, visa interview, flight out of the country etc have also been ones full of tense moments so I definitely need to alter my agenda when visiting and seek to spend more time with it. As an aside, there is such a world of difference in the way ‘outsiders’ to Bombay glamorize the city in mainstream Hindi cinema, and the way a native such as Chaitanya Tamhankar integrates it in his indie ‘Court’, which at long last, I could watch this week.

I then looked northwards. I associate Delhi with poetry- another city that beckons and offers its heritage and food culture as a romantic bait that pushes all the right buttons for me. I could be on the brink of falling in love with old Delhi, but am also terrified of going on a date with it owing to the Delhi discourse in news media. So, I feel the need to visit it with company. Preferably someone who appreciates the poetry of cities as much as me. Thus far, barring a lovely afternoon when a friend who knows the city intimately, took me on a wonderfully guided tour through the Chandni Chowk area, I have not done much to satisfy my raging appetite to know the capital.

Disappointed, I almost gave up on this line of thought and looked sourly at Meena Kandasamy, when I realized that I had in fact had my own little love affair with one city. And it had been nine years since then. I am actually still digesting the fact that I had allowed myself to forget this affair. Maybe, it is the passage of time, but Calcutta keeps slipping away from me. I visited the city on a friend’s invitation and promptly fell in love with it. It is an easy city to fall in love with if you are me. And then I remembered, that I had also written about it. How could I have forgotten this? Granted I visited it in 2006 and wrote about it in only in 2011, but still. Meena Kandasamy, you are no longer the recipient of my envy though your writing I will always sigh over.

Once upon a time, I had also fallen in love with a city madly enough to write about it. And it did not even take me a lifetime of living there. All it took was 10 days. It was interesting to go back and read this post. It has been such a long time. I am no longer the same person who visited Calcutta. I am sure the city is no longer the same, but I am glad that it is a place like Calcutta that I can claim as my my first city love.

Reproducing the Calcutta bit below.

A friend’s Facebook status update prompted the following flying back into memory comment. I feel like I need to hold on to what I wrote. Those days seem like a long long time ago – when what was complicated then was actually very simple compared to today. They seem to be dissolving fast into only memories of what was once.

Calcutta was the first grown up thing I did. A train trip alone. For some reason, I can only think of color. The yellow of the taxis outside Howrah, the craziness at the nearby flower market, the big red bindis and the shanka polas of the kind women shopping in Gariahat, the book covers that paper the stretch of college street, the yellow cellophane covering that fat fish on a plate in a marriage procession, the why-are-they-wearing-white of the traffic policeman’s uniform. 

The trip to Kalighat where dirt and divine co-exist around a violent riot of red. That serenity of Dakhineshwar and vermilion streaked young brides  with wet hair and bright eyes. The husbands who walked two steps ahead in crisp white dhotis and silk kantha kurtas. My friend’s grandparents- Dida with her innocent dentured smile and the comforting earthiness of solid folk wisdom accrued out of a life that has seen both ugliness and beauty. We would hold long conversations. She only speaking in Bengali and me only speaking in Hindi.  Dadu who taught himself to read and write not only letters, but also palms. He looked at my right palm and told me things that I denied even though I knew they were true. He lived long enough to set things write for his granddaughter who broke everybody’s heart in one stroke and then died soon after.

Calcutta is that smell of lucchis and poshto and discovering the delicacy of muri ghonto. It is going to the fish market and getting a discount because the fisherman is more interested in teaching you a few sentences of Bengali and turns into the proud delighted tutor when you get them right. It is being welcomed into homes of rank strangers and served omlettes as evening snacks. Calcutta was watching my first James Bond film at Nandan. It was paying Rs. 4 for long bus rides and wondering about inflation. It was rosogullas in earthen pots sold at every street corner. It was haggling over terracotta figurines and carrying them back to Pune carefully wrapped with newspapers, hope and foolish love. It was the dusk when wrapped in her cotton sari, the housewife would leave her long wavy hair loose as she waited for her man to return home to her.

It was about living every Bengali stereotype you have read to the hilt. Everyday in Calcutta was like a lazy Sunday afternoon. You would reach a point every few minutes where you could stand, stare, make friends, get drawn into delightful conversations and never want to move on.

At the movies – Come… Fall in Love

I just got back from a day trip to Bombay. Some part of the trip was around movies. When in Bombay, visiting Mount Mary in Bandra and then driving on Bandstand past Mannat and Galaxy that are at a stone’s throw from each other has always been a must do and today was no different. I took a picture of Mannat from the car and got down to casually stand opposite Galaxy and take pictures, just for kicks. All I saw was a snobbish watchman lounging around at Galaxy’s gate looking at me with undisguised amusement. The brown blinds that shutter the first floor occupant’s balcony remained firmly shut. Some day, yes? ❤ ❤ ❤

Later, we went movie poster hunting in Chor Bazaar and I got to hold some vintage original print movie posters from back in the day- they cost Rs. 8,000 upwards. I bought some more affordable and smaller reprints for myself and gazed at a fabulous life size poster of Deewar that was released after it won all the Filmfare awards it had to win in 1975. The art print on it was awesome though the general grumpiness of the shop owner meant that I forgot to take a picture of the poster.

I came home and got on to Facebook to find the video below. I like DDLJ, but not enough to qualify as a DDLJ fangirl. But, I do love the movies so so much. And I do love all film folklore to bits. And from all the cinematic traditions of the world, it is as if, Bollywood in particular whispered to me, “Come… Fall in love” and fall in love I did.

It is a masterful marketing stroke by Rohit Shetty, no doubt, to remind and prime us for the Simran-Raj chemistry a couple of months away from the pair’s next screen outing. Still, what is not to love about the nostalgia in this video? However, it wasn’t until the end that I realized that Kajol was not wearing a bathrobe and she did not intend reprising the kal raat mere saath kya hua tha scene. Meanwhile, I continue to hope that I am able to catch both Dilwale and Bajirao Mastani the same day of their release. Cannot wait ❤