Manto Ismat haazir hai!

Last week, as a finale to the TIMES Hyderabad Festival, they had organized a Mumbai theatre group to perform plays based on the works of revolutionary and bold playwrights Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai and was appropriately named Manto, Ismat haazir hai( Presenting Manto & Ismat).

The plays were in Urdu (as they should be) and were well appreciated by the crowd. On my part, someone who is not well versed with Urdu( read the youth and the Gults), it would have been something of a disaster. Disaster because, the USP of the play was the language used, but as such I didn't find the play to be that great theatrically. The dialogue delivery was a little too quick for an amateur like me to understand, but I guess that's how it goes.

The story was quite gripping( if only I could understand it then) and dealt with social issues such as lesbianism, sexuality and war. And for A Woman of a conservative Muslim family or actually anyone to come up with something like that right after partition is something commendable.

But here's the interesting part, despite the just-above average performance, the hall was jam packed. At first glance it might seem like it was because entry to the show was free.

But there was something else.

The play was directed by Naseerudin Shah. And that really had the effect. It really did. What a crowd. Needless to say the management screwed it up by allowing people to enter through one door(when there were 4) because of the shortage of metal detectors I believe.

But I am pretty sure most of the people came hoping to get a glimpse of Naseerduddin Shah, but ended up merely expecting him and never really seeing him.

Advertising works wonders, especially if you attach a big name to it.

Encounters on Gulf Air

When you change 4 flights in eight hours crossing two time zones, things get a little freak, especially if you have had a lot of wine on board (its free right?)

While on GF130 (that's Gulf Air) from Bahrain to New Delhi, the gentleman in front of me was hardly a teetotaller, after chugging three glasses of whiskey the dude wanted another shot, just for old times sake I presume. The steward, who looked arab but sounded jamaican came forward and in his polite tone asked Jack Daniels to ease it a little bit. But our fermented soul would not go down without a fight.
If the alcohol is free then why should it ever stop flowing. Its not like I am going to harm anyone. Let me be.
Something on those lines.
Steward replied in hindi, in his thick jamaican accent, that the guy should just sleep and enjoy the high for he ain't getting another peg. What continued for the next half an hour was a one sided negotiation between the drunk man and the steward, the steward simply brushing away all possibilities of a consensus, asking the man to go to sleep. He also said that drinking a lot would only make this man reveal the true animal that was inside him(for he didn't seem to have the capacity of an irish dock worker from any angle) which would only invite the police who would be more than happy to invene to bust his sorry ass.
Finally our man just reclined back on to his chair and started murmuring some gibberish.
Just an after thought:
I wonder if airlines possess strait-jackets.

Changes.

Thats what been new this semester. I'm cleaner, fatter and hopefully my sleep-cycle won't be messed up.

Oh and this caught my eye while I was browsing the net

Bad Santa

More updates coming soon

I've been contributing to quite a few other. The links to these blogs is on the right side.

See I've been a sweetheart and pointed it out too(With blood red color).

Do check them out when your're free(and you know what means don't ya)

Mother’s day is celebrated throughout the world. On this day children present gifts to their Momma’s/Maatashri’s/Mum’s/Amma’s, it can be looked upon as a payback for all that milk they sucked when they were infants.

Its origin varies from nation to nation.

Some believe that Ancient Greeks sparked off the tradition for they had a festival called Mother Worship to honour Cybele, a great mother of the Greek gods.

In USA, the tradition emerged due to something totally different that what many may expect. There was this woman, Ann Jarvis. A young married cleanliness freak, she wanted to promote sanitation (probably back then they were perpetually covered with dust). During the Civil War she organized the Women’s Work Days, and this legion of her would go around and clean whatever they could find. This trend eventually caught on in 45 states, before hitting the entire nation.

Today is Father’s day

No rich history here. It was just made to complement the Mother’s day, for the sake of secularism I suppose.

I am suffering from what most of you refer to as a writer’s block. The earlier sentence was thus framed because I have never suffered from a writer’s block before, or if not that, then for a very long time at the least. I use the word “suffered”, as though it’s some sort of disease because it is. It a really pathetic feeling to have when you have the drive, but you lack the what’s that again? Yeah, that’s how it is. I don’t even know what’s missing.

Generally what happens when one suffers from this terrible disease is that one cannot bring one’s self to write anything that remotely makes sense to the target audience(if there is one intended) and neither to ones own self(which is actually bad). This is usually because one is devoid of any ideas in one’s cerebrum, which I believe is the main controller in our brain (something like the brain of the brain)

This is what generally happens.

Sometimes what happens is this:
Your brain gets overloaded and you don’t know what to do. By overload, I’m referring to all those ideas that are jam-packed in your brain. And yes everyone has ideas.
Now when you feel like writing something, and get the pen to paper or your finger tips to the surface of the keyboard(which ever suits you), in your brain there is a volley of random ideas each of which is quite unique and would make for an excellent write-up, story, play-you name it.
The initiative for your writing something is generally a central theme, a rough mental picture of what you are going to write, and then gradually you build up on this skeleton until something concrete comes up. And finally you polish that and voila!
Now this train of ideas in your head clashes with your central theme. Before you start to build up on this central theme you are confronted by a few thousand other ideas and you feel like including all of them somehow in this write-up of yours.

What you do then is erase whatever you have written up till then and start over.

By now you would have guessed that this is a case of infinite recursion.

Okay,perhaps not infinite.

This is a picture I had taken when I was in Delhi. This was taken at the underground platform of the Delhi Metro. The picture according to me quite rightly peeks into the human psychology, the way we humans think.
Notice, how the woman near the stairs is actually contemplating whether to take the stairs or to take the "more" preferred option.
Would you rather wait in line, a line which would move so slowly? Or instead take the stairs?
What frustrates you more? Waiting in a long congested queue? Or having to walk that extra step?
Keep this between you and me: I took the stairs!

Winter has hit Pilani late this time, or so I have been told by those who have been here for longer than I have been. Winter coming in late means winter leaving late. It also means more torture, especially with the comprehensive exams(nicknamed compre's) inching closer towards us.
Ah! The compre-s. Its like a swarm of bees. Buzzing constantly. You can hear it, but can't quite see it. See it clearly that is. And then it becomes clearer, and you realise the horror of it all, until the day when it presents to you its full form. Standing in all its glory, it looks down at you. And you know this moment will either make you break you. Ok, maybe I am exaggerating a little, but its still important to a certain extent.
Leaving academics for the time being, our fest Oasis, was sort of a let down. Its probably not that the fest was bad, its just that I didnt have as much fun as I'd have wished for. Let me not go into the reasons as to why that happened. All I am saying is that, sometimes we expect too much out of something and hype it up. In reality, it isnt that big a deal.
Come to think of it, nothing is, is it?
People always try to glorify things, amplify things, exaggerate things. They make things appear to be something that they're not. Sometimes, its so much that, the thing doesnt even relate to the initial thing anymore.
So much effort is put into packaging a piece of information so that it suits the crowd that the actual essence of that information is lost. By the time a version of an incident reaches your ear, what you get to hear is something totally different from what actually happened.

I just wrote what was on my mind!

cheers
Rishabh