The Stolen Project 365:A Photo a Day for a Year #11

Hyderabadi Biryani served on a banana leaf at the dubiously named biryani place in Mysore 'RRR'.I wonder who they send to er.. collect the 'plates' from the trees.Or is there a small business somewhere that supplies banana leaves to eating joints around Mysore.

The city is quaint, with lovely weather ( no air conditioner required ),a fantastic zoo which is home to the only gorilla in south Asia, tapirs which I'd never seen before and rogue chimpanzees that grinned gleefully before aiming small stones at the visitors.(I don't blame them, I felt like throwing a few pesky kids into the gorilla enclosure myself).

The famous Mysore palace is absolutely beautiful.One of the erstwhile princely states of India, it was home to the royal family of Mysore till 1947.Unfortunately I don't have a single photograph because my phone decided to die on me.

The Stolen Project 365: A Photo a Day for a Year #10

The plane from Bangaluru to Mysore was the size of a bus, and the pilot announced that singing is not prohibited.

The Stolen Project 365 :A Photo a Day for a Year #8

Breakfast with F at Elma's Bakery and Tearoom.Hot press coffee and a waffle with cream and honey.I especially asked for flowery crockery.So pretty ! I love that this place has a lot of natural daylight.

The Stolen Project 365 :A Photo a Day for a Year #7

Hideous new pink dental chair at the clinic.This colour, all women are supposed to like.Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

I must admit I did not click anything on the 16th.

The Stolen Project 365 - A Photo a Day for a Year #6

I've been meaning to photograph this languid Bougainvillea bush,draped over that pale yellow wall for a long time now.I pass it on my way to work.Apparently the hotter it is , the more flowers there are,and it is highly tolerant to pollution.Now this is a flower I like - no nonsense, resilient, and stylish while seeming to make no effort.It drapes nonchalantly over the wall,showing Summer the finger.

The Stolen Project 365: A Photo a Day for a Year #5

Random cat in the lawn at Y.M.C.A .It was picking at grass and posed most graciously when I came towards it to click.

In other news,I may be not be in Delhi this time next month *fingers crossed*.But more on that later.

The Stolen Project 365 - A Photo a Day for a Year #4

Flower pots knocked over by a band of rogue monkeys that live around Y.M.C.A where I swim.I wonder if they take a dip in the pool when there's nobody there.

The Stolen Project 365 - A Photo a Day for a Year #3

Dead pigeon on window sill.If only the freak rain could have poured a day earlier.Fourth dead bird seen this summer.Ironically it died directly underneath an air conditioner. Ah Delhi Summer, thou art unforgiving.

The Stolen Project 365 - A Photo a Day for a Year #2

Janpath, New Delhi on a Saturday morning.

Janpath,in my opinion has become far too organized.It's starting to look like it's lost a bit of it's chaos, what with the new, numbered shops.Then again,it was only 9:30 am.Skip to 12:00 pm and I'd be jostling for space,trying to keep my bag from being robbed and looking for junk jewellery all the same time .

The Stolen Project 365 -A photo everyday for a year #1

I have finally decided to start the stolen project.The one I talked about earlier.



Durrell's 'Corfu trilogy' which I'm currently reading and a dainty, empty cup licked clean of butterscotch ice-cream.Here I must add that the weather is getting ridiculous as it usually does at this time of year and the ice-cream supply seems to be forever dwindling, despite it being procured in copious amounts at regular intervals.

Murmuring Furniture

Most of the furniture at my place is inbuilt.It is mostly full of books.Rows and rows of them.Old ones,new ones,on just about any subject.My family hoards them.So about five years ago,I noticed a strange sound from a book cupboard as I passed it, this faint pitter-patter, a bit like when you tap your nails against a wooden surface,only much fainter.You could probably hear it only in the dead of night or really early in the morning, it was that faint..Anyhow, after much standing against cupboards with ear pressed to them, my fam decided, much to my indignation that I was imagining it, our furniture was not really murmuring.

That is, until the day we came home to find one of the doors of one of the book cupboards collapsed.And rows of old books in it stuck together with some sort of soil like goo.It was official.Our house was infested by termites.Rows and rows of books were taken out,glued to each other ,their pages weirdly fused together with whatever it is that termites produce.They were put in the verandah where they lay for a while before being thrown away, because of the emotional attachment, Some of them were only partially damaged, I mean you could still open them, though they were falling apart at the spines.In fact I saw one ,lying in the verandah in a metallic container the other day.I have no idea why it is there (eccentric fam) .It looked so out of place ,open at a page about a fungal disease, in a metallic container which had last night's rain water in it.So I clicked a photo.

Oh and also ,the eccentric family tried to salvage the dying furniture by injecting turpentine into it.I mean literally injecting , with a big needle and syringe. Hahaha. Didn't help.

What I ate Today

A melon,3 mugs of water,cooked beans and potataoes with a tomato,cucumber,egg,garlic salad,a mug of south indian coffee,chocolate flavoured soan papadi.

What Makes me Love a Book

BEAUTY OF PROSE.

There are many authors who tell a good story,but simply don't have a way with words.Take Dan Brown for example.I remember not being able to put down 'Da Vinci Code' .I enjoyed it enormously at the time.The facts!I had me opening up dusty old art books from the top shelf to take a close look at 'The Last Dinner'.It is only later that I actually thought about how it was written.Was there a beautiful flow to the sentences? Did I stop and re-read a sentence simply because it gave me pleasure? I didn't. I gulped it down.

One book,while reading which I clearly remember constantly stopping and re-reading a sentence here,re-reading a sentence there was Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things'.Many sentences gave me goosebumps because of their sheer beauty.There is poetry in her prose.The characters she describes conjure up detailed images in my head.

Another author I love who, to put it mildly, has a knack of stringing words words together,of creating the weirdest characters,whose appearance and idiosyncrasies she describes in delightfully intricate detail is Zadie Smith.She Owns the genre of hysterical realism so to speak.

I'll confess there are times when one feels like reading what is popularly known as 'chick-lit' (chick literature! really? but let me not go off on a tangent here).Reading them is just plain entertaining,in a mindless sort of way.Like watching television.

...To be continued...

The Indian metro ( a fellow blogger's story)

Do I write?: In her own words

A film,Facebook and the beginning of a project.

I saw this delicious animated film, 'Mary and Max'.It's a story about an unlikely friendship between an eight year old Australian girl and an obese American man,who become pen pals.Both are odd individuals.Both have no friends.What is striking about the film is it's unlikely poignancy,which i would not expect from an animated film.

What else is striking about the film is that it is about two lonely people.It is made in 2009,the Facebook age, although it is set in the seventies(which explains the pen pals part). Almost everyone I know has more than a hundred friends on Facebook ,many have more than five hundred and a few have more than a thousand friends! What does this mean? Does everyone really have so many friends? Is everyone curious about what happens in the life of their acquaintances? Is it mass psychology? Of'course ,I appreciate how useful Facebook can be at times,in terms of networking,getting to know old friends again,and spreading-the-word.But a lot of the time it seems to be a space where narcissistic teenagers fish for compliments.It is a sort of unorganized, untapped common ground.It has the potential to be so powerful because of the sheer number of people on it.

Speaking of facebook, someone I know started something called Project 365 which involves posting a photo a day for a year.I really like the idea of chronicling the year in photographs.And so,I rather bluntly asked if I can steal the idea.I want to see if I can keep at it for a year.I want to test my consistency.I shall call it The Stolen Project 365.

'Snobs' by Julian Fellowes -An unfinished review

'Snobs' is about the English upper crust.The fake-fox hunting,tweed wearing,posh butler employing kind of people who say "I say!" at very short intervals(obviously, this comes from someone who has read far too many P.G Wodehouse novels,and never been to the U.K,and therefore erronously imagines the British aristocracy to be Woosterish) .

It is about how those at the periphery try to climb aboard , and if they stumble unelegantly while they're at it,then so be it.

It was Edith Lavery's mother, more than Edith herself,who wanted her to marry 'well'.And this she did soon after being introduced to the soporific Charles by her wanna-be aristocrat friends.
(Charles reminds me of Abhinav Bindra, the Olympic shooter,who has been described by the media as having a 'comatose personality'.He also reminds me of Anna karenina's husband).He is pretty bland,definitely not metrosexual and is terrified of anything overtly feminine.

And I shall stop at that.

Julian Fellowes, ze missing link

So animal-saviour friend arrived.This was obviously followed by a lot of cafe hopping, caffeine laden conversations,alcohol laden conversations,far too much food-laden conversations.Much conversation.(Think Disney version of chattering women).Anyway,so  one of these  involved 'Downton Abbey'.This was triggered by the sight of the book 'Snobs' by Julian Fellowes,peeking out of my bag.I had never heard of 'Downton Abbey' before,perhaps because it isn't airing on Indian television yet.Said friend is big fan of it.'Tis a period drama,set in around 1912,and is about the goings on in the family of Lord Grantham and the many servants of the house.
Turns out,the script writer of ' Downton Abbey' is Julian Fellowes.
Now, cat LOVES these sort of coincidences,they make me all excited for just a little while (friend did not know a thing about the script writer of 'Downton Abbey')

Lull before the storm..oh how i yearn to live curi
ous.

Long as an intestine unravelled

An insipid rice dish,a sterile plastic container.i find that as i sit it all vanishes into air, thick with heat.the heat of a thousands suns.Oh how i long to be in the mountains,to walk and smell something that reminds of something.It's a funny thing that smell triggers memories,mostly happy,and for a moment you forget.

A village that sells aam paapad.Only aam paapad.I imagine it smells of mangoes all the time.I would
like to work there for a week.A long roll of aam paapad i would make myself.A few hundreds of metres long.Long as an intestine unravelled.