Inside Out

The film we made for our final year group project in college. It has FINALLY been uploaded! I lost my personal copy of it. Thank you for this one, Dimple.

Do watch and comment:


Inside Out from Culturazzi on Vimeo.

On funerals and fame

This post is exactly what the title says it is about. Funerals and Fame - Two things that have been on my mind a lot recently.

My brother asked me after reading this, why I'm writing about the things I'm writing about (he meant death). I'm young, happy and all that right? Shouldn't I be writing about society, conformity, rebellion and things like that?
You will know how good/bad a writer you are, only when you write on things you feel passionately about. To see if your writing captures your strong emotions right and if you can make people feel what you're feeling. Some people feel passionately about everything, but that's a different case. I'm definitely not one of those. Who cares about genetic modification or what it does to oranges? I'm happy as long as my oranges are orange, perfectly round and happy-looking.


But now, about death. I've always been fascinated by it. Not because of ghosts, spirits, after-life or any such supernatural concept, but because of its conclusive nature. You are dead, you are done for. Over. Khallas. Soon, there will be no trace of you, unless you bother to leave one. People will forget. They will still love, fight, cry, laugh, study, watch films, make films, work and enjoy a good thrill once in a while. You are born, you live and then one day, you're gone. Just like that! That fascinates me. And so much more.
How much to talk about life, how beautiful it is, how challenging it is, how we should "live life to the fullest" and every other cliche you can think of? Death, makes for an awesome topic. Writing about it demands a certain acceptance, honesty, bitterness and a very perverse sort of optimism. It's like sex, needs to be talked about and mentally prepared for, before the "time arrives". *Chuckle*

Anyway, I've been reading up a lot on having my work published online. From this came 4 things:
a) I want to publish online and therefore be recognised (if not float in money and fame, that is)
b) I don't write enough
c) I'm thoroughly inspired to create once again (after day before, that is)
d) The wait to get noticed is going to be nothing but agonising.

Well, wish me luck!
I'm going to write about things other than death, yes.

EDIT> Could someone tell me how to get that accent on top of "cliche"? I've never known how to do that. And I hope be known as a freelance writer some day. Sigh.

Experiment with story-telling,

which turned out to be my first Vignette!
After a lot of feedback from a lot of people, I've discovered the reason people don't get this piece of writing is because I labeled it as a "Short story". So I read up a lot on the literary definition of a short story etc and realised that this piece makes more sense as a Vignette, because it's describing an incident, merely stating what's there. Painting a picture, so to speak. No judgement involved and no new ideas are imposed onto the readers. I've also edited it a little. Now, please do comment :)

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There was once a village, where cows mooed and birds sang.

Fathers ploughed and mothers made homes that smelt heady with muck and incense every evening. The children laughed and played, and climbed trees to glimpse at the new "Colour box" through the village doctor’s window. Its peoples came together in joy; and in sorrow, they all wept for the weak and coy.
When Murugan died one dry summer day, the village sat under the Big Banyan Tree.

“He was such a good man”, said someone. “What did he do to deserve this?” said another, shaking his head like one of the cows. A group of wailing women sat next to the body, swathing silk garments and garlands on it, that people brought to pay their respects. Once in a while, someone whispered. Now and then, someone slipped away, to feed the children or water the plants. But they sat there till the sun went down and the cattle returned, tired from wandering and grazing the hills.

An elderly man rose and walked up to the tree. He cleared his throat and spoke grimly: “It is getting dark. Murugan belongs to the Earth now. His soul must move on to a better place.”

“But both his sons are at the war-front!” cried a teary-eyed woman from somewhere at the back, clutching the ends of her sari over her mouth. All heads turned in the direction of her voice and hers quickly bowed down. There was silence.
Many heads nodded, there were whispers all around.

“Do you have a way to inform them, then?”

Silence. The whispering voices now rose like a rising tide.

Another man spoke “Yes, yes. We must do the needful. He lived a respectable life, now we must give him a respectable death. We can only pray that he goes wherever he wants to now."

The villagers nodded in agreement.

The next morning, the grave-digger opened his eyes to a soft breeze and scattered ash.

Outside, the cows mooed and the birds sang.

That thing that everyone talks about

I’ve wanted to work with picture prompts for the longest time. But somehow, this time I didn’t feel like poetry.



All of us wait for something at some time or the other. But some of us are waiting all the time. When does that start happening? When does past tense turn into past continuous? What makes us wait, knowing all too well that we may never get what we wait for?

Waiting suggests hope. Hope suggests optimism. Optimism suggests a healthy spirit.
We wait, in the hope that someday, something good will happen. Someday, things will change and our fantasies will turn into realities, our desires fulfilled.

But, why wait? Why not try to drink it all up, as the flood comes in? Why wait for the flood that may never come? Why wait for that someday, that may never come? May be that is not so much optimism as it is stupidity. But we still wait. In the hope that we will get what we deserve and that we deserve well. And that once the wait is over, the result will be worth it. Of course, the wait may never be over and if it is, the result may not be worth it. We know it. We know that sometimes, it makes life seem like a typewriter without cartridge, on which you type and type, but nothing appears on its pages. Isn’t it then like exposing a cavity over and over, just to see if it still hurts? But that is hope. It is positive, but can be positively bad too.
And sometimes in hope, fantasy and reality merge together so uncannily, that you cannot see anything but an unknown haze far far away. It is a haze that stretches endlessly beyond a vast ocean of waiting, standing unrecognizable and unreachable. Sometimes, it is like that breathtaking sunset that we wish to touch and realize as our own, but know it will never be. We know that we will never have it and it may not be all that we hoped for even if we do, but we still hope that it will be. And we wait, just to see.

Great hope, miserable hope. It has a strange way of killing you, while keeping you alive.

I too, will wait for my pages to be filled in. Because I don’t want to rush through to the end, only to realize that they have been empty all along.

I will not live in hope, but I will let hope live in me.

At a different time

I was talking to an old friend recently, about old times. But our childhood had nothing in common, except for one: Brothers. We both had brothers about four and a half years older to us. Once this was discovered, naturally, we did a whole lot of brother-trashing! Do not misunderstand people, we do adore our respective brothers and everything, but that’s just what little sisters (actually, any sisters of brothers) do.

So, first I will remind you that, as a second child, most of my toys were hand-me-downs. Things the brother was bored of, trashed, dismantled or tore the eyes out of. Out of these, I barely remember any, except for a very sad teddy bear, a freakishly tall stuffed doll whose very Country singer-like name I can’t remember, a white robot-something and a kitchen set that I barely understood. A kitchen set, yes. I mean how utterly presumptuous, conceited, sexist and all that! I usually either buried those little cups and ugly, floppy tables or used them to scoop out mud so I could build my secret cat-hideout. Oh yes, I snuck a stray cat (Jinx) home in my 6th grade summer break and religiously fed my share of milk to it. That was fun while it lasted, which was until my grandmother chased it away the very first day I returned to school. I know it has to be her, the way she went on about how “black” Jinxy was and how its bad luck will make me fail 6th grade and wash vessels for the rest of my life! I do mean to confront her one of these days about her racist attitudes.

Anyway, I digress terribly. I was talking about my favourite childhood toy - the white and blue robot-something. I have no idea what it was. I’d like to think it was a man. Robo-man! Erm...clearly, I wasn’t a very imaginative child. But he! He flipped and had wing-like things at the back of his movable hands. And the blue patches on his head lit up, when he was switched on. He even spoke what is now very sexy robo language! I don’t have many memories of Robo-man, though. But the most special one was that time he (I, with him as my tool) stabbed the living crap out of that ugly Barbie my cousin sister owned. I always hated those blasted creatures and never owned one. Alas, now I have several of those prancing about me. They’re alive too! Eech.

But since I’m on the topic of childhood, toys and bothers now, let me tell you an often-narrated story of mine. If you have a brother (younger/older), you will know what a pain in the backside they can be. I say, the brother and I had a perfectly inharmonious (translates to perfect) relationship. A wrestling, hair-tearing, biting, death-threatening, spitting sort of relationship, if you will. From him sticking chewing gum on my head so I had to chop off all my hair to get rid of it, to me “humiliating” him in front of his football buddies by showing them his most embarrassing pictures, we’ve done it all. But this particular incident, very curiously, seems to interest listeners the most.

It was a regular day. I was about 8 years old and the brother and I had had our regular dosage of fights the previous evening. I had, as usual stormed off to bed grunting about what an idiot (see, I didn’t abuse then) my mother had given birth to. We went about doing regular things that day, going to regular school and doing the regular kneeling down in front of class for regular not doing of homework and all that. But as I returned home that regular evening, suddenly things weren’t so regular. There had been a somber tragedy in my household. It was in our room, in fact. The evil, conniving brother had tapped my weakest link. It was pure, cold-blooded revenge. I walked into our room, to find him simply looking at the computer. But I sensed a slight smile, almost an evil smirk on his impish face. His eyes darted slowly towards the window and back. I followed his eye-movement till I stopped still in utter horror. His eyes had only briefly rested on the limp body of an abnormally large stuffed doll, with its livid-looking limbs hanging loose, like the roots of one of those really old Banyan trees. There it was! The doll, whose name I can’t recall. It was my favourite doll, the ugly, horribly dirty doll that wore the green dress with bold pink and white flowers and the purple hat till its very end. The brother had suspended her on the curtain rod, where I couldn’t reach. She was hanging there, from a thread tied to her neck and connected to the rod.

Then…

Then what! He convinced me she had committed suicide and I cried miserably for the rest of the day. The next day of course, I took fancy to something else. But oh, the hell I gave him for that!
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I write this today, as I remember. Brother, we may not be from a family who profess their love for each other. We may not share anything anymore, we may not wrestle or secretly watch sitcoms that I’m not allowed to or play basketball with a holed-in bucket or sit together for hours with my math text (thank goodness for that!), but you are a distinct part of my childhood…and life. I never thought I will, but today, I wanted to write about the brother. Someone very close to me once asked why I sometimes prefix “the” and not “my”, when I talk about a person. But you are not one such person, brother. This post is for me more than it is for you, my brother. For my childhood and yours, for all that we shared and will share.

Of course, I sincerely hope you never read this one. Ever.