A reek of opulence

"Come, let's take a look," he says, striding up the corridor. I'm in one of the premiere, large-scale properties in the heart of the city, within an thirty minutes of most core Bombay and built for luxury. The place is huge, with multiple pools, tennis, gyms, 'library', clubs, cardrooms, restaurant, fountains, and a jogging track in the terraces. It's priced completely out of any possibility of my acquisition. This is just a visit. And though we both know this, the sheer pride and excitement of showing off this - the epitome of the high life, the measure of one's success, a chance to walk in the footsteps of the Rich - adds a spring in his step no expectation of wasted effort can dampen.

Yet.
I look around these mansions of the gods, and I feel - as Arthur C Clarke said - not envy, but pity.
The track is beautifully decorated with vegetation, to hide the ranks of construction cranes standing sentinel over the coming metro trainyard. The pools are long and wide, but only four feet deep. Everywhere. There will never be a cannonball in here, no sink into skullcrushing pressure until all you hear is your own blood. The clubs are decorated with plaster cast corals and random, mismatched brass and glass. There is no story, no ratty souvenirs. I think of the thirty-kilo geode D found in the Sahyadris and carried it for a day and a half down a mountain, taxi, train, and bus back home, that can far outclass anything on display here. These aren't even someone else's experiences, memories or even statements. They're an expression of an emptiness of mind, heart and soul, filled with objects. The library has more sofas than books. The children's play area has a nine-foot ceiling and accented mood lighting, where a single little girl sits quietly with her nanny, frightened by the hushed deadened soundproofing and the random parade of workers and supervisors walking through her play. An attached gameroom has two slightly older children listlessly gunning down faceless soldiers onscreen, unsupervised. The next room is bright, open, and airy... and filled with pool tables.
The rooms are tiny, open to rows and rows of windows and balconies. A chemical plant belches effluvients on periodic gouts of flame into the sky in the near distance. drills, sanders, grinders, and hammers are everywhere, and a fine,dry, powdery white dust fills the air, even if housekeeping keeps it off the floors as fast as it settles. There will never be a pigeon nest in these kitchens, a bat flying in from the ventilator or a bandicoot in the storage. There will be no feral, friendly cats or enthusiastically genial dogs. No lizards will stalk moths around a single yellow lightbulb in the shadow of a monsoon downpour. No cramped, tiny bookshops filled with more books than physics should allow. There will never be a trash leaves bonfire in the cold autumn evening with potatoes roasting in its heart.
I wonder where the kids will be able to get covered in mud. Which of the protected, decorative trees they can climb and brave the lines of red ants to get at semi-ripe, bat-nibbled mangoes. Where they can sneak out for a smoke, a plack-plastic-bag beer, or a sizzling greasy beef roll off the coals. Breathe in the dry, dusty smell of adventure from brittle, yellowing pages dug out of a stack of decades-old classics. Where they will not be under CCTV. Where they will not be watched and judged for their clothing, behavior, words, thoughts. Where they will meet someone who thinks so differently from them that a new side of the universe opens up.

You  will learn nothing here except that the world outside is a loud, dirty, dangerous place to be despised and shut out. The emptiness will grow and hole left by where fun should have been will gradually fill with arrogance, conformity, and entitlement.

And then they will wonder where they went wrong, or mh more likely, pretend it never happened and blame the Other.

We wanted to keep them safe and comfortable, so we locked them in a solitary padded cell.

In building heaven, we have created hell. 

On Bollywood

My relationship with Bollywood's been fairly interesting, I think. 

When I was growing up, Bollywood consisted of this blur of imagery and drama that would happen for a few hours in a week, maybe a Friday evening movie or a bunch of songs in Eastmancolor on a flickering, crackling, bulbous little CRT... but most of all, it was music. Music everywhere, on taxi cassette players, mikes on the corner, brassy, disjointed bands, and everywhere, radio. Single-channel MW bands on battery-powered transistors sitting in faraway corners, singing away in the background. Somehow, always associated with travelling, with holidays and memories, the comfort food of music. 

It's probably the nostalgia factor, but I guess also because I was most of the time too young to really get what was happening. 

Then sometime around Chunky Pandey, I got old enough to understand the stories... and hated them. And the music - however good it might be - was forever tainted from then on with shallow, selfish, misogynistic, boorish, and embarrassing behavior. 

But all that had come before - I think it's pretty much set the tone for what music should be, as far as I'm concerned. There has to be melody. Imagery. Erudition. The ability to paint a lifetime in a few charcoal strokes, just abstract enough to let you fill in the blanks with what you wanted the story to be. Soothing. Distantly on the edge of hearing, yet constantly there. Familiar enough so you can sing along. 

You don't know who's singing, who's composing, who did the music or what film it's from. It's like reading a comic from the middle of a series you found in a box of junk on a vacation afternoon when you had nothing to do. You don't know why they're singing. You don't have any visuals to go with them. 

All you know is - this is awesome. 

And I guess that's why there's always going to be that genre that exists only in my head - the soundtrack to those drives in the dark, the walks in dusty golden winter sunlight, browsing through second-hand bookstores... and sometime between KL Saigal and Baba Sehgal, a little golden RD-Rafi period that's can only be labelled 'the most awesome childhood ever'. 

a moment of perfect clarity

I was driving - struggling - with the return traffic, an infinite vista of reddened brakelights stretching away on the highway, some RJ yammering away about potholes on the radio...
it faded.
I was... still there, in the car, but inside my head, looking out through my eyes... something apart, disengaged from the warm body actually at the wheel. I was looking around at the experiences stacked up around me, the shelves full of memories, and they all looked the same.
Standardized.
Day after day of the beach run, the mindless comedies, the commute and the work
Week after week of the movies, the malls, the grocery shopping
Month after month of the salary, the EMIs, credit card bills
Year after year of birthdays, appraisals

It's all the same. Nothing is changing anymore. All the files are the same size, sorted, categorized, tagged and labelled. Sometimes there are DVD folders with a neat index pasted to the spine.
As I walk down the passage, into the dimness and the dust, this changes. Now they're random, different colors, different sizes, stained, worn, crammed into piles.
And they're all stuffed to bursting. They're filled with photos, tickets, leaves, pebbles and sand, bottlecaps, napkins, handwritten notes, locks of hair, maps, lists, manuals... between the files there are books, comics, scratched CDs, ancient floppies, pizza boxes and balled-up t-shirts, wires trail between them and there are boxes filled with random, rusting junk. There are trophies, too; not the plaques and the framed certificates, but the scabs and the scars, bands and letters.

I turn around, and the road is exactly as I left it.
The newer shelves are silent, brightly lit and clean. The older ones crackle and buzz, drip and creak.

I want to stay here, but I can't see the road from here.
I can see my hands on the wheel. They're driving.
I pick up one, turn it to me. Fingers flex.

There is a decision hiding around the corner of reality, and the corner is close. I can hear it breathing.

sudden

cobweb strand, floating in the current
single sliver of sun suspended
heartstopping heartbreak
remembered childhood
dusty summer days
this is here, now
dry hum of ac
receptionist
cold lobby
waiting
years
run
by
..