Monthly Progress Report: I'm a cinephile bibliophile chef!

So, yesterday I realised it's been more than a whole month since I got here, and abominably, I simply can't remember how I spent it all. Which is a great sign for someone who hadn't taken her mind off the To Do list for a nanosecond over the last 6 years, I consoled. And then I had to advance my Delhi flight by 10 days because goddamn JNU registration is in July, which made me realise that I now have less than a month to enjoy this little piece of heaven called vela-spouse-life-at-ISB!

Have been totally paralysed by the idea of so-much-to-do-so-little-time (when will this phenomenon finally push me into doing the so-much, like it does to other people?). So anyway, in state of paralysis, I did some stocktaking to blast my month-long amnesia. Next thing I know, this good ol' OCD of mine has taken over and I'm making lists and lists and lists of the (worthwhile) things I have done at ISB, which I have to say - after pulling my jaw off the groud - is rather impressive!


In less than 40 days, I've cooked more than 50 dishes, read 5 books and watched 9 good movies (am discounting the zillion craptastic ones I saw on tv; also cuz I simply don't remember their names :-P). If I let my 1/8th MBA husband loose on this information, he'll probably produce a skewed graph/ pie chart (which might be a good thing; I can use it to explain why I haven't lost any weight despite using-abusing the numerous recreational activities available here), but I have my own efficient way of tabulating information. It's an archaic pre-technology-age system called numbering. So here's my little log, which am pretty proud of, despite its shallowness. In an effort to not intimidate my scanty blog readers, I am trying to shorten the length of my posts, which is why we start with the movies today, followed by books and food in the next two posts:

Movies
The Bicycle Thief - Finally, I figure what the fuss was about! Now I know what exactly this film was, to have the kind of influence that changed Bollywood into all its golden 50's-ness with directors Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, even Ritwik Ghatak so very, very influenced at India's first International Film Festival of 1951. I think the movie's really sad-sweet, in that very ordinary-hero's-life's-little-big-tragedies way but... I don't know if it's the 58-odd years that have lapsed, or my cool-cine-student jadedness, or simply my dislike for linear narratives, but I couldn't understand how Italian Neorealism ushered in that new aesthetic in Bombay cinema. There's obviously a major ingredient we've all missed in the transition from De Sica to Ghatak.

The Heartbreak Kid - There's something about a Farrelly Brothers' movie that has me absolutely entertained yet paralysed with horror. You know, when the joke's so gross it's psychotic funny. And I think I'm beginning to transfer this feeling onto Ben Stiller (sorry floatin', for calling him ugly yet attractive and all that).

Shall We Dance - Ample-bottomed Hispanic rockstar doing the tango with a twinkly-eyed, salt-n-pepper haired well-aged-like-wine hero - nothing could go wrong with this romance movie, you'd think?! Just watch this one and you know the cinematic equivalent of a KLPD.

Chungking Express: Oh, just the fun-est movie, and so very definitely the most accessible understandable HongKong cinema I have ever watched. Love love love the impish popstar-turned-actress Faye Wong in it, and all her nasal long-drawn Chinese vowels.

The Man with the Movie Camera: Blew me away, sure did! This is the ultimate movie about movies; the most inexhaustibly creative way of telling the story of how cinema comes into being and what it does to us, not just in the theatre, but in life, in the mind. I can watch this movie a zillion times and not fail to be thrilled and rocked and made truly truly wondrous.

The Hours: That Virginia Woolf splinter in my brain that was lodged in literature class in college is now big churning Turner sky pulsing under every bit of my daily life. Watch the movie and you'll know what I mean. And tell me which of the three stories spoke to you the most - for me it was the one with Julianne Moore.

Being Cyrus: Hmm, so now I know what the brouhaha was about. All that talk of the pathbreaking-ness of this PYT director's first movie that's supposed to be Bollywood's first real toe-bath in dark humour. It has its moments, this film, and it definitely is a teeny bit radical for a 2004 movie. But it was just too wordy and smart-alecy-voiceover-y for me to enjoy in a movie. It sounded more like a playscript to me, and with too much peanut psychological origin explanations for all the 'dark'ness of it. Hmm.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: One of those movies that you wouldn't have loved if it hadn't been based on an autobiography. Also one of those movies you wouldn't have loved if its director wasn't just the most alltime dishy-est thing in Hollywood, despite his fascination for waitresses for love interests (when it's Clooney, we call them quirks). Hm, but personal lust objects aside, the movie's brilliantly cast (Drew Barrymore's so very the seventies hippie, among other things) and well directed, except that somewhere in its telling, the story fails to give that punch. I don't quite know what feeling I'm supposed to be left with when the credits roll.

Amores Perros: I'd heard so much about Inarritu (confession: I just fell for the chiming, quirky sound of his name actually), that I had to pick this one up. It's sort of the Spanish baap of the Crash storyline, except this one is just so much better and so not wearing its post 9/11 political correctnes and self-righteousness on its sleeve, unlike Crash. And uff, it's just happy eccentricity that lets you into its world with a big open door at one end of a thrilling swinging rope bridge. And the way he uses dogs as a thematic is just so very wondrous-cheesy-cool ('Life's a Bitch', the title says in English) - sort of like the cinematic translation of the strangely enjoyable under-your-skin eerie feeling I got from Hannah Tinti's brilliant short stories, Animal Crackers.

Coming up: Husband taking me to watch New York. And am being so very snobbish miss-nose-up-in-the-air about it, it's actually fun! (Hm, now I know why those people at film festivals look the way they do).

windy, drenched evenings at ISB

It's just lovely when it rains here. I guess in Delhi you had to stick your nose out and upwards to find the romance of rain, amidst all the clutter of pigeon-shat balconies, hooting bikes and traffic, the squelchy sounds of slush gaining volume. That is, if your first thought was not 'ohfuck there's gonna be a 5-hr jam at Nizamuddin!' or 'damn why does it have to rain the day I do the laundry?'.

But out here, like everything else in its moderate, efficient, well-regulated disposition, even the rain falls gently, sweetly, cleanly. Which is quite sweet, really. It's the ideal way to enjoy rain, the kinds we only sighed about as we tried to get romantic, staring from our tiny heavily-grilled Delhi windows. Mostly it drizzles, for a nice, long long time, so you can get your coffee mug out and take a walk without getting bone drenched. Once in a while it does a seductive number, with filmi winds sweeping the place (and due to lack of general verticality of habitation around ISB, when winds blow they really blow, full-full and all) and raindrops turning into serious showers that come right into the room, passing through every tiny atom of me and making me feel like I've been born again. Or that what is this if not a waste, since at this very moment I'm not a chiffon-sari wearing movie heroine at the helm of a desire-drenched superhit song?

Today I decided it was a waste, an utter utter waste to stay indoors while it rained so gorgeously (although the apartment does turn rather heavenly at such times, with the numerous bay windows making it so airy you'd think you're on a cloud). So I got my fiver out, got a cuppa hot Nescafe from the vending machine downstairs, and explored some of the student village I live in. The longer I stay here, the more I tend to fall in love with the design of this building complex. It's very clean and modernist type, which also means it's rather uniform for all apartments and their blocks, but there's a really beautiful play with lines, angles, shadow and light, and garden and water spaces between concrete built structures. I can spend hours just looking at them. They give the hackneyed 'harmonious' a new life.

For one, I love the way the architect has left so much space for nature within the built structure. There are patches of green lawn outside every apartment. Flowering bushes are planted in hedges. Champa trees grow in clusters. Water lilies line the shallow pool-like spaces (of course, too tedious to keep filled and clean). Neem trees spread their ample shade over perfectly butt-comforting clusters of rocks. And of course, there are the giant rocks left stunning-ly in the middle, as if testifying to the formidable quality of nature itself.

Plus, there are only one or two levels, which means you get to see more sky. Which is also probably why I have been raving over the gorgeous sunsets at Hyderabad that just flame out in the most exquisite glow of colours, like a Raphael ceiling mural, or a Turner skyscape. (And to think that this pic was taken in a moving bus with a phone camera - can you even imagine the real thing?!)

And so I spent a lurvly lurvly perfect rainy afternoon here today. And just to prove that my theories about well-behaved rain are correct, lemme tell ya that even after 2 hours of deciding-walking-clicking-coming back-writing, it's still drizzling softly, pitter-patter-pitter-patter like it was when I decided to step out. As if it's telling me I could do it all over again!