So ambition cut you down..

...Ain't a love as perfect

Everybody knows it

Something drove you down

While walking through Epping forest today, I was quite taken aback to see flowers which looked like kaash phool (or maybe it was). It made me think how much I miss India and especially Bengal. When I first decided to move here, I really thought this was it, there is no turning back. But as days pass by my pangs for India grow stronger. Its all very confusing right now.

Suffer in tenderness

Oh baby baby it a wild world

Its hard to get by just upon a smile. (Cat Stevens, Wild World)

It’s been exactly two years since I joined the Labour party. I never really thought I was the ‘political type’ (at least not the kind to join a political party). But it’s been an amazing two years being associated with a party that stands for the values I hold so close to me.

Ken’s recent loss at the mayoral elections to Boris Johnson has really shaken me. It is not because I had been campaigning for Ken more like at the apathy of the vast majority of the Londoners who despite complaining for four years at the rising cost of living, benefits being cut and basically the ethnic cleansing that is sweeping London thanks to some of the Tory policies; re electing this pathetic Eton educated posh boy back to power. I had really though Ken would win this time. He was standing up for the underclass and the deprived. He characterised the force which promised to control the ebb and flow of capital through a political system that was not just sympathetic to the City and its bankers.

In the present scenario, when we need someone to support local struggles against the excess of global capital, we have instead decided to let the Tory led political mechanism assume even more power. The nationwide asymmetry caused by the unequal flow of capital sounds an almost obiturial note for the local community who are just mere numbers in a world governed by numbers which some of us are even incapable of understanding. Boris stands for a state of imagined unity of a minority led faction who does not care for the subaltern struggle that we face every day. As Brecht once said in his poem addressing the students of the Workers and Peasants Faculty:

Your science will be valueless, you’ll find

And learning will be sterile, if inviting

Unless you pledge your intellect to fighting

Against all enemies of mankind

One of the governing metaphors associated with the current (Tory lead) political hegemony is that of economic disenfranchisement and the need to a final restoration of order through a series of austere measures (mainly on the already squeezed working and middle class). The rhetoric of ‘We are in this together’ is invoked time and again to remind us, this not ‘their’ (financial and global markets) fault but a collective failure. This is obviously wrong and steeped in a narrative of cultural nationalism which is inexistent. The collectivisation of identity which painstakingly reconstructs the supremacy of the nation State cannot be overestimated; it is nothing but a boost to a fractitious nation that is trying to find means to live when their basic livelihood is being snatched from them whilst the rich can still save their millions in tax havens.

This is indeed a dark time for London. We have squandered the tiny chance we had to change this. I don’t want this to sound like a caustic disappointment at ‘my party’s’ failure to regain leadership of the city. It is just this seething anger and sadness that I have on Londoners in general who will be facing one of the worst few years in terms of unemployment, housing rising rent and travel cost with no one (as Ken rightly said) in the City Hall to lend a helping hand. At this point, we would do well to pause for a moment before settling back into our (un)comfortable metropolitan livelihood. 

smritigulo kichutei pichu hate na

Jack be nimble

I wish I could say all those things I want to say. Somewhere in the process I seem to have lost my voice. There is no easy way to describe my feelings. Throttled by the fast pace around me, I feel engulfed by this collective hysteria of having to be- of having to choose a position. You’re either right or left. What if I am not? What if my liberalism is coloured by doses of conservatism? Where does that leave me?

I feel pushed and shoved around at this regulatory process of labelling and naming everything; of having to conform or not but basically choosing to be a straight line or a curved one. This creation of a normative index is driving me crazy and making me this person I swear I am not.

Discourses around the myths of liberalism and individualism are just big fat lies forcing you to exclude and enforcing partial amnesia. I am constantly haunted by the spectre of being a failure, of being scared at saying something politically incorrect, of backing the wrong horse (dog, cat etc etc etc). This land quantifies grief, of constantly being felt like an outsider- You’re either the outsider who needs to be checked at all times or you are the cause of collective melancholy at the plight of being the other.

Fuck off

I do not want your collective grief. I am not at a loss, neither am I a complex creature who needs empathy. I just need to be able to shout, but I feel I have forgotten how to!

Its becoming difficult, and I am becoming erratic. I am not sure what I need to do, maybe I should be more understanding but then I am trying, for god's sake I am.

Maybe I should consider Clifford after all.

On a different note I read this rather horrible queer fiction (Vivek and I) from India, which I understand was published last year. Seriously! I mean Penguin actually published that!.

*Drum Roll*


*contract signed*


Out in Bookstores: 2013!

Ghum pachchey kintu koto kaaj!

On my way to Oxford. Just heard the good news that I have been accepted for a panel at the AIDS conference in Washington this year to present my paper analysing the role of ICT and Digital Media within the MSM and TG community in Kolkata. Unfortunately it clashes with my own confirmation process at UAL and so it looks like I might not be able to go. Oh well, I atleast have the publication coming out later this year for consolation.

So I have finally said No to the summit at Tel Aviv. I was actually looking forward to attending it this december (not to forget a welcome leave from the cold UK). But then I heard my travel/accommodation was being sponsored by the Israel government. This I have a problem with.

This is the second time my personal politics/morals has left me in the cold (quite literally this time). 

Its 25th October again.We miss you, R.

i love submerging my head under the bath and listening to the amplified sounds i don't get to hear otherwise. 

Stop Stop Stop it bitch

I am an extremely geometric person. I like creating bar charts and graphs measuring success and failures. I have endless reams of papers neatly row-ed and column-ed with ticks and crosses measuring different aspects of life experiences. Often the crosses greatly outnumber the ticks, a measure of the severity of failures and inability to achieve certain things which I had put great emphasis on.

Unlike Montaigne, who thought some defeats are greater than victories, I fail to see or even acknowledge loss, seeing it as a personal failure.The failure to remove all these impediments are circles and squares brandishing a mark of weakness, albeit somewhat abstractly. 

I prefer rajnigandha (tube rose) over the rose because it is straight. In my own convoluted sense it creates some sort of geometric stability which the thorny rose doesnt. I dont smoke but love smoke rings and glass stains. It somehow fits within my sense of geometric stability. Are these all signs of a slow descent into madness..

Whoop

Courtesy PhDComics

Antidaephobia

I am scared of several things, chiefly ghosts, snakes and mobsters but alongside these I have had a rather peculiar fear, the disclosure of which definitely puts one in the category of those who might be err special. I am scared of ducks watching me. I am not yet sure what are the psychological implications of this but what I have discovered is that there is a specific name to my condition: I am antidaephobic.

I finally have a name to my phobia! Maybe we could all start a support group of sorts, and discuss remedial measures

It feels great coming back to London. 

Re-imagining

I want impossible things which i will never get. This city conjures in me grand notions of romanticism which does not exist. I love this city to bits, but this trip has reminded me how far i have come. I can never call this home, its too distant, its people too familiar. This city now represents for me the edge of a desert where transgressions can be played out without any significant repercussions. Escape is sweet.

Living on foreign soil, yearning to return, I find myself stranded in a strange space where i am surrounded by people who do not look like myself, who engage in practices i cannot relate to. This sense of alienation presses down from both sides. The recurring cramped spaces in the bus, metro and even the streets reminds me of the impossibility of mobility (both literally and non literally) The constant bag searches in the metro stations, abuse of power thematise the impediments to the individual's mobility.

I am strangely reminded of Conte des trois Diamants, about a refugee camp in Gaza, a non place where people live for the moment, dreaming of other places where they yearn to go. The sachcharine-ness of this moment and sociality around me saps away every little bit of energy.

Teenage dreams in a teenage circus

Thank you Mika. When the world mourns Winehouse, I have you to fill my musical void.

তুমি  কেমন  করে  গান  কর  হে  গুনি আমি  অবাক  হয়ে  সুনি , কেবল  সুনি

তুমি  কেমন  করে  গান  কর  হে  গুনি

Driving down the new Kalyani Expressway is like knowingly taking the road to hell. The roads were absolutely smashed up and full of holes with little ponds and there were these HUGE trucks wobbling on them. I was too scared one of them would topple and crush our car under its weight. Within fifteen minutes into our journey we encountered two accidents- One where a truck and car had smashed into each other and another where a motorcyclist had skidded and fallen in to a ditch.

Is the CM listening?

as I plunged through the clearing of fog i was greeted by a million shining lights

home

The London Film Festival and IMC conference was just brilliant. After Sohini's brilliant keynote speech on queer cinema in Bengal I felt quite incompetent to present my paper. Bit the paper went down very well, actually beyond my expectations.

The cherry on the cake was obviously chatting to Rituparno, and him giving me his number and asking me to call him when I am in Kolkata for a film discussion.

I am happy

University blues

I think I am just never meant to study at SOAS. Just when I was celebrating my studentship at SOAS, I have just heard I have been awarded funding from University of Arts London for the Phd in media and communication.

Now I am really torn. I have always wanted to study at SOAS (like always) but the funding I have got is for a second MA whilst UAL which is like one of the best arts and media school in UK is offering me a PhD. With all the cuts in the arts and humanities it might be the best idea to take up the PhD, I mean even after an MA from SOAS there is no guarantee I will get phd funding.

I am really torn and have no clue what I should do.

'Here one is rewarded for quoting one  brand name deconstructionist  theorist yesterday and another postcolonial high priestess tomorrow but punished for publishing in nonrefereed journals'

Thomas Waugh, The Fruit Machine 


I cant wait to cite this!

Sweet Caroline

is on loop. it reminds me of a particularly forgettable monsoon day in kolkata. menthol cigarettes, and a taxi ride to Princep Ghat. P and me walking down the rail tracks to Scoop. talking about the city and a future we were both afraid of. R cracking jokes and wanting to go back home. it is strange that I remember this day so well. it wasn't a particularly remarkable day rather it was pretty gloomy with water logged streets and fucked up transport. occasionally when i close my eyes and think back of kolkata i am reminded of that evening. meeting P, A and S somehow seems hollow with R's conspicuous absence. i wish i could go back and visually capture that day. if i had only known R would leave us all so far behind maybe i would have.
sometimes i wonder if i am just holding on to a past that is best left behind. i have been reading mark scot's paper on theorising grief and maybe that is what has triggered this. maybe its all just a part of of this well played out drama where grief is but a performance to be played out. maybe i will go back to princep ghat and walk down the road with P, only this time R won't be with us.

Just when you think, the concert is over, the doors swing open and the jester walks right in with his bag of joy

last week i sat down and started making a list about the things i miss about Kolkata. underneath it i wrote

rabindra rarobar lake
evenings in park street
smoking up in JU ledges
watching movies in nandan
drinking at oly pub
ilish maach at dida's place

when i lookback and see the list, i feel a certain amount of guilt at the absence of people in it. 

i was reading Azhar Nafisi's 'Things I have been silent About' recently and was struck by how easily some people manage to tell their life stories. My life is to complicated (incomplete?) to even try and attempt one. Actually I don't think I would make a good autobiographer. I would just end up skipping over the embarassing bits and display frequent amounts of amnesiac memory.

but go right ahead and buy the book, its a fascinating read about Pre-islamic revolution Tehran. Judd Books is currently selling the hard cover versions it for 2 pounds, so yet more reason.

Ugh, the pressure's building up and the signs are elusive. O sweet star where are you?

I have finally redeemed myself of the unnatural vice of gossiping. I have decided bitching is much more healthy. After all bitching allows me to voice my opinions in public without self censoring or having to maintain a certain amount of secrecy.

I am a bit nauseous of the complicated need to maintain social pleasantries.

....both boys and girls looked to him
to make love and yet that handsome
figure of proud Narcissus had little
feeling for either boys or girls


Ovid
Metamorphoses

i wonder how some people can fit so easily in any given situation. i am like perpetually awkward when i am around unknowns. i should brush up on my people skills. the last time i remember feeling relaxed in a room full of strangers was perhaps my interview for montessori school.

Megalopsychos

Would I rather be an unhappy Kahlil Gibran ( don't ask me why Gibran, it could very well be Plato, Aristophanes, or one of the numerous modern thinkers) or a happy dog?

Happiness is so overdramatised. I am not happy until I have savoured the deeply humane thought towards the road of self discovery, on the other hand I am often happy just watching Stephen Fry make scatological jokes on QI. Maybe as a dog I would be happy just eating and fornicating a random bitch once in a while but the point I am trying to make is those are/ would be my choice at happiness.

When people start wanting me to be happy because of things I should have done/ could have done or should do I get majorly pissed. My happiness shouldn't be at your expense but rather on my choice and it this autonomy of the mind and freedom of choice that I want.

Aristotle gave the label megalopsychos meaning great souled. We already have Ramakrishna and Vivekananda carrying the bastion of great souled Indians( some might even say Satya Sai Baba and a few idiots, Ramadev)however I am not great souled and I refuse to be tied down to fit your conventions governing the structure of happiness. I'd rather be a happy Gibran if I can achieve that rather than be an unhappy one to amuse you, otherwise I am just happy being a happy dog

Art functions as an utopian second world opposed to the monotony of the real world and I think popular bollywood film is the best example of that.
Watching Devdas yesterday I was quite surprised at how the colourfulness and 'epicness' of the sets dominated the film eclipsing the pale heroes. In fact I suppose if the film did not have a Shahrukh Khan as it's main protagonist, the aesthetic discourse of the background art would far outweigh the performances and storyline.

In the film life seemed lifted to an utopian level of wish fulfilment which was charged with bold colours, elegant style, dance and costumes.

I am quite addicted to the 'campness' that is provided by the film. Watching it after almost five years reminded me why the courtesan tale always wins hands down over any other genre.

Reed

Listen to the reed
How it speaks of separation


I am romanticising about Rumi again.
Reeds are such wonderful, beautiful things. They grow where they want to and not where you ask them to. Carefree and pretty

There are several little bits of paper scattered around my room today. It's one of those days when you decide to pick up a pen and paper and get back to traditional writing and then realise, you have forgotten how to. Every single word seemed alien. As if trying just a bit too hard to establish themself. So I tore them.

I like pretty things, sadly this wasn't one of them

everything disappears and one is just left thinking if it was an illusion all along