Hyde park and colourful India

London diaries day 2 - I am in London for some work.

Today after the meeting, together with my Italian colleagues, Gio and Davide, we all went to Hyde park. Gio said that he wanted to see the speaker's corner where some body can go up on a podium and speak his or her views. We went around the rose garden and walked along the serpentine lake. I took lot of pictures of ducks. But we didn't find the speaker's corner.

It is in that direction, a guy told us, pointing vaguely in the opposite side. Walking through the park, there were some really nice trees with trunks swollen like pregnant tummies - must have taken them centuries to become like that. Any way, we gave up before reaching the speakers corner. It was too far away and after two hours of walking, I was tired.

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Pirated Bollywood Films

Pirated CDs of Bollywood films are easily available in London. They are difficult to get hold of in Italy.

 

In the hotel, I also watched on my Laptop, initial parts of Bollywood film, Bunty & Bubli up to the Kajrare song. This film has very nice colours. It is also nice to see Rameshwari and Kiran Juneja after so many years. However, the film is pleasant but seems kind of synthetic - the small town feel is not authentic.

After reading Mukul's blogpost about Bunty & Bubli, I could appreciate the subtext of the background song from Umrao Jaan and dialogues when AB Sr meets AB Jr - those internal references about the personal lives and older films, are not understood by most of film-goers, but once I read about them in his blog, they seemed so obvious!

The part about selling Taj Mahal with the actor dressed up as Mayawati-kind of person is really good. Kajrare song is also good but didn't like Ash in it. Her vigorous heaving of bosoms made her look like a transvestite. Watching her reminded me of Praveen Babi when she was forced to wear bhartiya nari kind of clothes. Her jhatkas are good but on the whole it looks like she is trying too hard.

Later, I also watched Bride and Prejudice. It was not that bad and Ash was ok. I wish though they had reduced the " colourful Bharat" a bit. Made me wish I was kind of colour-blind.

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Ballet in Trafalgar square

I am in London for some work.

 

 

 

After the meeting, I went to Piccadilly circus, walked down the Reagent street to Waterloo place, where they have statues of Lord Lawrence, governor of Punjab in 1857, and of the better known Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon. There is an intriguing house there, near that statue, with a golden statue of Athena.

At the Trafalgar square I found a big crowd, sitting on the stairs watching a giant screen showing a live broadcast of Royal British Ballet company. It reminded me of going to watch films in Ravindra Rangshala in Delhi during the 1970s. However, my bum seems to have become softer or perhaps it is my age, because after a while of sitting on the stairs in Trafalgar square, my bones seemed to hurt from sitting on the hard stairs, making it difficult to sit. So finally I the beautiful ballet and resumed my walk.

British Modern Art Gallery behind Trafalgar square has lovely red colured boards announcing some exhibition - it is wonderful as a background to take pictures.

 

In the square, I saw a couple of British policemen (actually policepersons since one of them was a woman), I quickly clicked their picture - I could not resist it. I Love taking pictures of uniformed persons. Perhaps I need a psychological check-up to understand this attraction to uniforms.

 

Here are some pictures from this walk - you can click on them for a bigger view.

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The Anguish of Dark memories

I suddenly thought of the man and his daughter. I was writing about the daily "Sofie's choice" that you make as father or mother, when you don't know if you are going to eat that day, when you decide which of your children is going to eat and how much, if you can take your child to the doctor... and I thought of them.

He was from Rajasthan, he had said. His thin sun-burnt face was creased with lines. He had come to Delhi to break stones on the roads because there was nothing to eat in their village. His wife and two children were dead. Only that girl was left. 8-9 years old, thin with wise eyes. She was sick, swaying slightly. She had diarrhea and vomiting. And she was dehydrated.

It was Sunday afternoon and I had promised my wife that we would go out. I gave him some medicines for his daughter and told him to come back next morning. There was no other way.

I saw him after a few months. How is your daughter, I had asked. She died that night when we had come to see you, he had said simply. Without any hint of resentment or anger in his voice. I can't tell you how that made me feel, like shit. If I had not gone out that afternoon, if I had kept her in the clinic and looked after her, she would be still alive, perhaps.

 

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Every now and then I think of that woman, the mother of five daughters, whose husband wanted a son. In the quarters for the lower staff in the NPL flats. She was so anaemic and I had told her husband to wait, not to try for another child. 

 

Blood was soaking her sari. I was sitting there with blood on my hands, unable to do any thing.

She still comes in my nightmares, making me wake up with my heart pounding in my chest. Her daughters must be grown up and married. Wonder what kind of lives they had? And did her husband remarry?

 

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When the dark memories of my work as a doctor in Delhi in the early 1980s stop me from sleeping, I think of her. Living in the hut on the footpath near the Pusa institute crossing. It was very hot and she had been in labour pain for 2 days. I had put in an IV drip and gave oxytocin and after hours of crouching there in her hut, finally the baby came out.

 

 She called him Rajkumar. I hope that you could study and had a better life than your parents, dear Rajkumar. I think of you as I drift to sleep.

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Springsteen in Bologna

Last night Bruce Springsteen was here in Bologna. It was his first concert in Italy. When I heard about it, it was already too late. There were no tickets left.

Sorry to confess that I was not very familiar with his songs, except for the "Born in the USA".

Fortunately our local TV channel transmitted parts of this concert.

"Silence please", he asked for it and got a pin-drop silence from the audience. And then, he sang about the invisible world, the world of war, peace and loneliness of immigrants.

 

Plain simple words, accompanied by his guitar or harmonica. There was no orchestra. Absolutely wonderful.

Made me think of Gulzaar. "Hamne dekhi ha un ankhon ki mehkati khusboo.., sirf ahsaas hai yeh ruh se mehsoos karo..".

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Sexes and Old Buildings

Suddenly I thought about the differences in the male and female bodies.

 

Why are males full of force and muscular strength but have lower life expectancy while women have less muscle force, are apparently weaker and have longer life expectancy?

 

It is because they have to carry babies in their wombs, I thought, so they could not have participated in hunting and gradually over time, we ended with men developing muscle power and women developing other powers.

May be that is true for humans but is a tigress or a lioness, as strong as a lion or a tiger? I don't think that among the animals it is males who go for hunting while females wait at home, so both have to hunt and find food.

 

So then why did nature create males and females? Wouldn't it have been better to have hermafrodites, both males and females in the same bodies? It would have been more practical and reproduction (continuation of the species as the most important primordial impulse) much easier?

 

I think that it has to be something to do with mixing of genes so that if there are any defects in genes, they can be overcome. Confused? I don't know where this kind of thinking is supposed to lead but I am still thinking!

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I like the way they use old buildings in Italy to put them together with new things and the result is wonderful. Bologna has a wonderful university auditorium that was a 2000 year old ruin and they have kept part of old walls and added glass and steel to make a remarkable structure. I went to see a Rajasthani folk dance group there.

Or the way, they use old fountains and stairs, like the Spanish square in Rome that is used for fashion shows.

 

In India too we do it, like the Khujaraho festival, but we use old buildings for classical dances and similar things so it is beautiful but not contrasting.

 

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I don't think that this way of writing blog, a bit of this and a bit of that, is such a good way to do it. It might be better to focus on only one thing.

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Hindi Blogging and the Webring

Today morning I was looking for new Hindi fonts. I like Susha, it is really easy to use but there are some signs like the "half R" that I can't seem to get. So I was looking for new fonts and discovered a group called webrings, where they have list of blogs in Hindi. Really great. Result, I have started even a Hindi blog on Kalpana - Jo Na Keh Sake.

I am still without a good Hindi font. Perhaps the problem is with my Italian keyboard and probably people working on Hindi fonts make them for English keyboards. Since keyboards don't cost much and next week I am going to be in London, so I will see if I can find a new English keyboard to bring home and then try it for writing in Hindi.

Took some pictures of my son and our dog Brando today. They have come out really nice. One of those pictures is presented below. Having a digital camera is so liberating!

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PS: Over the past few years, Hindi blogging has been a wonderful adventure, I have made many friends and we are a group where people help each other. A friend has given me a programme called Takhti, which makes Hindi typing in Unicode font so much easier. Another friend has taught me some html commands. 

My brother Nikhil & Jia

We watched Jia today, with Angeline Jolie in the role of famous American super-model Jia Maria Carungi, who died of drug addiction and AIDS at the age of 26 years in the eighties.

Very obviously My Brother Nikhil is inspired from Jia (not in terms of its story but in the way it is structured). Compared to MBN, Jia is much more layered film and characters are more gray. Jia perhaps loves Tom Junior and he probably loves her. But the real love of Jis's life is Linda, the make-up woman. In terms of sexuality, the film tackles it head-on with a long scenes of love-making between Jia and Linda. 

 

MBN also copies the way story unfolds in the film through a series of flashbacks of people involved in Jia's life, so that some scenes are seen through different persons' point of views. Thus while some of the men in Jia's life see her as a sex kitten, almost nymphomaniac, women are more understanding about it, they see it as craving for affection and stable relationships.

Film has long sequences of Angeline Jolie in the nude and some scenes are very explicit. Watching them, I was thinking about all the big ho-ha Indian actors and actresses make about nudity and kissing. Why are we so shy about our bodies? and about sex? Perhaps it is not so much about being shy as about our image of being a good boy or a good girl? And if you expose, you are not respected any more. But perhaps even in India, times are changing. Persons like Pooja Bhatt could get away with it 15 years ago and persons like Mallika Sherawat are extending the boundaries today.

 

BTW, I liked MBN very much.

It is a national holiday today in Italy, the republic day. People just needed one day leave tomorrow, Friday 3 June, to make a four days long weekend and it seems 75% of the country has decided to do that. Bologna seems empty as happens usually in August when every body goes on summer vacation. So roads have very little traffic, buses are empty, finding a parking place is not a problem.

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PS: Some years later I had met Onir, the director of MBN, at the River to River film festival in Florence and had told him about Jia and he seemed to agree that the two films were structured in a similar way.