Experiences

O Babe of the Bayou, Big Easy on the Big River, Cousin of Cajun, Creator of Creole, Mother of Mardi Gras, Queen of Voodoo, Purveyor of Gumbo, I bow to thee! For indeed thou art the hope, succor, and ultimate recourse to the depressed and debauched, serious and quirky, prosaic and bizarre. All my doubts about why New Orleans is called the Crescent City vanished as our flight descended. The mighty Mississippi (mighty indeed at this point) made a sharp U turn and formed a perfect crescent of a delta. We are told ad nauseam that New Orleans is built on layers and layers of alluvial soil that the river has been depositing on the delta for centuries. Which means that the city has no rock bed foundation. It is built on mud, which makes everything sink--buildings, roads, anything that depends on terra firma. On the other hand, buried things come floating up during storm flooding, like coffins. Which is why, as most of you might already know, the good people of New Orleans decided to bui...

The Ford Theater (a.k.a. Oriental Theater), a Broadway in Chicago theater, is a very entertaining building to be inside of. It was built as a movie theater in 1926 and is said to have been inspired by the temples of India. Its lushly gilt-edged art-deco interiors are a riot of South Indian temple architectural motifs: lattices, peacocks, swans, the south Indian version of the dragon called the Yali (I read somewhere that it was inspired by the sphinx of Egypt), lotuses, and decorative columns. But what amuse me most are the statues, which clearly represent a western interpretation of “native” Gods. The designers must have gotten their inspiration from the paintings of condescending Raj painters, some of whose work are on display at the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. So, right above the stage on the roof is a sexually indeterminate divine who sits in the most unnatural pose, kind of squatting while bending his/her arms out, all of which look pretty uncomfortable. And at his/her sid...

You know those fuzzy slippers-ratty PJs-limp hair-bar of chocolate-tub of ice cream days when all you want to do is to vegetate on the couch? You are perhaps depressed, lazy, anti-social, nursing a miserable cold, or confined indoors by inclement weather. You may be even celebrating a long awaited off after a particularly hectic stretch at work. What do you do on such occasions? Me—I watch low investment-high entertainment feel good romantic comedies. I do declare that there is nothing like a warm, witty rom-com full of beautiful people, clever banter, and just enough sex to pick one’s spirits and restore one’s hope for humanity. However there is one problem. They threw away the template of intelligent, edgy, and quirky rom-coms after they made When Harry Met Sally. And Woody Allen is definitely does not believe in knowledge sharing. So we are left with a dearth of good movies in this genre, with every new one failing miserably to get its act together. In the straight world that...

Ladies and gentlemen, please stand up and pay your obeisance, for a new movie genre is born—the Sci-fi Musical. Or the Sci-fi Masala. Or perhaps the Sci-fi Spectacular. I am truly speechless. As was the rest of audience who watched today’s preview show with me. It is saying a lot, because watching a Rajni movie with a Tamil crowd means you hardly get to hear the dialogues and return home with a ruptured eardrum from all the screams, whistles and applause. Shankar’s latest outing is truly a paradigm shift in Sci-fi movies. This ambitious, intelligent, witty an entertaining movie picks up where the Terminators, Star Wars, Iron Men, and X-Men of the world left off and shoots off into the stratosphere. True, the film is homage to all these movies—a lot of you will have a great time spotting all the references, like the R2 robot. But you want CGI? Oh we got CGI baby! 3X size! I haven’t seen anything like that climax in my life—I am still shaking with the adrenaline rush! You want...

It’s the stunt that introduces the hero. He is pummeling one baddie when another baddie crouching behind him gets a call on his cell. The ring tone is a loud ridiculous dance tune. The poor fellow has a deer-caught-in-headlights expression—will the hero thrash him too, now that his presence has been so raucously revealed? The hero turns to face baddie # 2 while holding baddie #1 in a vise-like grip. Baddie #2 swallows hard. Hero slaps his palm on his forehead. “Phone uthana!” he barks at him. Baddie #2 sheepishly takes the phone out and checks who it is. “Kiska hi?” Hero asks. “Ma sir!” baddie #2 replies. “Ma ko mera pranam kehna!” the hero says and turns to Baddie # 1. “Ma se yaad aaya, teri ma…” “Sir!!!!” baddie #2 protests, overcome with scruples now that his mother is on the line. “Nahi, mein yeh pooch raha tha ki teri ma hi ki guzar gayi?” hero asks baddie #1. The theater erupts in laughter. At least, I guess it must, if there are more than two people in the theat...

She didn’t have a phone. In order to find each other easily, we decided to meet at the northwestern corner of the Bean at Millennium Park. I told her: “I will have a white carnation pinned to my lapel and be carrying a back issue of the Wall Street Journal. Ask me this question: ‘What is a unicorn?’ My answer will be: ‘A unicorn is just a horse with a long—ay vey!’ Make sure that they don’t follow you.” She replied: “Roger that Betty Boop. Look for a juvenile delinquent in a green shirt. Ask, 'Aasman mein kitne taare hain?' If you hear, 'Hum sab tumhare hain,' start jogging in the north westerly direction. Stop near the Inn of the Frantic Frog. I'll see you there.” It was a nasty day to meet someone at a house of ill repute like the Frantic Frog Inn. Storm clouds hung ominously overhead, darkening the sky so much that at 10:30 a.m., it looked like it was 7:00 p.m. There was a mixed crowd on the train. While getting down at Union Station, I made eye contact ...

Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to take a little trip down history with me? We are not going far--just up to February 1764, to a small limestone bluff on the west bank of the mighty Mississippi, where Pierre Laclede Liguest’s (a French fur trader) men are erecting the first structures of a settlement, which is called Laclede’s Village for now. Although his French style village is small, Laclede sees “one of the finest cities in America” there. The population of the village steadily grows over the years, aided by the French-Spanish-French-American ownership of the land. Let’s move on to 1804 and be there to flag off the epochal Lewis and Clark expedition from Camp Wood, just outside our town. They are setting out to explore the land beyond the “great rock mountains” of the West, as decreed by President Thomas Jefferson. The nation’s westward expansion has officially begun. Our town, now called St. Louis, becomes the last post before setting off to the wild west. By the 1820...

Explain something to me. Is George Clooney a star or not? Is he a media darling, a celebrity, subject of many a female fantasies, and an impossibly good looking 49-year old or not? Is he a mainstream actor or not? Now what is he doing in a quiet, stark movie, doing a delicately nuanced character study of a taciturn assassin, dangerous and endangered (like the butterflies he likes to study)? The American is a take-no-prisoners art house movie. It is minimalist. It is deliberate. It has very little dialog. It has even lesser action. It is visually stunning. Even the plot of the movie is minimalist. Here’s an American assassin called Jack. Or perhaps he is Edward. He works for Pavel. We do not know what he is. It is not important. Only Jack (or Edward) takes orders from him without questions. Jack is forced to kill three people, including a girl (perhaps a prostitute?) in Sweden. Now his boss has asked him to lay low in a remote Italian village. He is supposed to build a custom ri...

In the interest of transparency, let me admit upfront that I love Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, made in 1991. I mean, what’s there not to love about the movie? There’s its (richly deserved) Oscar-winning music--every song, up until the last extremely romantic waltz number is joyous and bursting with life. This was an animation movie made before the era of CGI and yet, can there be a more satisfying enchanted castle? Just watch the spoons doing synchronized swimming in the soup! Disney’s Belle is a bookish, kind hearted girl with an easy ability to make friends--be it the Beast or his enchanted minions. And she can sing like a lark. The Beast is more like Ebenezer Scrooge--ill tempered, cantankerous, and achingly lonely. But the most fun is the Disney staple of absolutely endearing supporting characters, be it the charming Lumiere (the candelabra with an evil eye for a duster); the uptight clock, Cogsworth; the buxom teapot, Mrs. Potts; her chipped cup of a son, Chip; or the foo...

I believe that there is no other city in the world that is as embracing to the alienated and broken as Mumbai is. I sensed it in 1999 when I first washed up on its grimy shores, tottering on a fine line, in a state of primordial soup than a fully formed person. It enveloped me in its fragrant bosom, pooh-poohed my self-pitying whining, told me in its no-nonsense way not to wallow, and placed me in the middle of the unrelenting rat race with a twinkle in its eyes. Exactly 10 years later, in 2009, when I went back to being the primordial soup, it simply held my hand and waited patiently for me to form myself again. It let me maraud its congested alleys like a Genghis Khan gone rogue, giving me a sense of belonging among the heaving masses. It offered me newer surprises, like the graceful flamingoes on the viscous waters of Sewri or the multitude of birds in the entropic disorder of Powai lake. Its denizens offered their brand of casual and kind support. I was thinking about all this...

I am writing this blog post sitting cross legged on a dainty white bench, under the shade of tall trees, surrounded by the chirps of birds on their dinner route and the racket of cicadas, who seemed to have hatched a little late this year. Chipmunks are bounding around, standing on their hind legs and gnawing at the food they find from time to time. In front of me is about 50 yards of gently sloping lawn, a longitudinal patch of greenery tucked between wooden picket fence on one side and a line of trees which look like the seven trees that Ram sent his arrow through to kill Vaali treacherously on the other. It is a balmy evening, cool under the trees, with a soothing breeze. Wireless connectivity is excellent. I’ve found meself a little piece of summer idyll, right at the back of my hotel property. This is the sort of perfectness that has driven lesser mortals to write poetry. But I, gentle reader, shall desist. I shall give you an account of my week-long birthday celebrations i...