Exorcising the Klimtmonster.

Didn't think about this. Argh. How expensive is gold leaf??

Oh but I may as well try and catch the wind...

He's like a hobbit. He even looks like Billy Boyd. It's silly-making, to hear this floofy pixiehobbitminstrel burring about black-eyed native girls. We all know what boys like him do in Mexico.


So I voted. A deformed purple exclamation mark on my left index fingernail proves that yes, indeed, I voted. What is there to say? I stood in line for half an hour early in the morning. It was breezy and nice. I said to my father, 'Look! A cat!' and pointed up at the ninth floor of a high-rise. My father did, and gravely replied, 'Your eyesight must really be failing. That's a pigeon.' I suppose I did wonder for a moment how the cat could swivel its head like it did... But I was far from the only person present with failing eyesight.
A little old lady with frizzy triangular hair scolded her not so little old husband as other old ladies snickered or looked away. The first polling officer outdid many of the hard-of-hearing voters: he was completely deaf. 'I haven't voted before.' 'WHAT?' 'Here's my library card.' 'WHAT?' The second polling officer was hard of seeing, and succeeded in detaching entirely my photo from said library card because he couldn't find the stamp. Eh.
I'm almost sure the machine I voted on was rigged. But no matter. It's not that kind of democracy anyway, and judging from the hysterical news coverage later in the day 'first-time voting' is overrated beyond all reason. As I said, no matter. My parents bribed me with yummy greasy fried breakfast; after which I promptly fell asleep, waking up not before three hours had passed.


'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Reread this last night, am going to the Tim Supple production later today. I'm quite excited by the prospect, although like any narrow-minded middle-class maiden I am a little worried about having to travel so late in the evening. Worse than any monstrous mouse, I tell you.

I was in the room when my mother was watching one of the Bangla TV programmes - you know the kind, with segments on cooking and health and law and fashion. The latter my mother watches to 'check out the competition', as I like to call it. Today's fashion segment featured a stinking rich, greasily complacent woman boasting about how she gives jobs to 'underprivileged children'. Um... does she know how creepy that sounds? My mother told me about this fifteen year old girl. She was hired by a boutique owner to do extensive embroidery on a sari. It was the girl's first real job, and did it with complete enthusiasm, staying up nights to finish it by lamplight. When she was finished, the boutique owner gave her... thirty rupees. The girl went home and cried because she would have thrown the money in the woman's face except when you're poor thirty rupees is better than nothing and it was - it is a form of prostitution but what can you do? I can't not hate these women with their fluorescent orange hair (a hundred henna treatments all gone wrong), with their mincing little-girl voices, with their expensive jewellery, going on these fucking 'women's shows' and making their name out of someone else's labour, the someone else invariably cheated out of her deserved pay.


Submitted my L&OA paper yesterday. It's twelve pages of doublespaced but solid prose. I'm quite sure it won't be boring, although I felt a little twinge of regret looking at everyone else's papers, all prettily foldered-up, with pictures to complement the text. I'm not big on the funky fonts, though, this is a paper and not a fan website. I have great hopes for my paper, I'll work on it some more.

Rap, or, I'm Not Kidding.

Re: my new fascination for rap as a form. I say rap as a 'form' and not as (misguided definiton of) 'lifestyle', because I have seen pictures of stupid NRI gangsta-rappa-wannabes and I cannot understand why people should wish to ghettoise themselves. I will be honest and admit that what I dig most about music is melody. And I haven't been listening to any rap lately. I also know very little about the history of rap beyond what was mentioned by the ubiquitous Professor Lal in one of the Lit & Other Arts classes. By the way, I like the name 'the ubiquitous Professor Lal', it has a lovely gangsta feel to it, I shall call him that from now on.

I took an interest in the work of Tupac Shakur and of Notorious B.I.G. - see, any art form or instution will be rife with Dead Males, whether Black or White. No I will not quote Michael I-love-children Jackson, thank you. Who else? Hmm, does Eminem count? I think him tiresome, immature and masturbatory to a disturbing extreme. Yes, and of course Public Enemy's 'Fears of a Black Planet', whose cover I once spectacularly misread as 'Fears of a Black Plantaganet' (I blame History cramming, but it's still charming).

Let me put it this way. I am going to listen to rap this summer and contemplate how a young brown middle-class feminist can appropriate and transfigure that experience. I have been writing rap, and because the internet is a crazy place and I am a crazy person I shall record my songs in .mp3 and force my friends to listen to them. Thence, naturally, to a lucrative record deal. Don't expect any gyrating women in the video, though - oh, all right, I'll throw in some dashingly pretty multiracial dancer boys. Happy? Good.

It is like a vacation.

Vocative.

O ... o. o. o.

The stench from the canal.

Only connect.

Everything is wonderful.

I have to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Thank you for the teenage angst.

I don't dig the sleazy businnessman/sex tourist look you've got going on, and your obsession with your testicles is about as bizarre as your militant vegetarianism, and to be fair I don't even like most of your songs, but there's just something about you, you silly old man. I will hear you sing a cover version of Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive' before I die. Or you do. Dear me, I'm so cruel. In any case, you shall have some of these digestive biscuits, for I have too many.

Endsems may be delayed by about a week because of voting. So I hope and pray. Who needs one and a half months of summer holidays anyway?

I have to buy at least five books, all college-related. This decision made after coming to the sad conclusion that I cannot borrow them, and it would be impractical in the extreme to make photocopies. It would be so nice to have a scholarship. Bah.

A man of means by no means

Reading by candlelight is interesting. If I'm really caught up in the book, the flickflickshadowflick makes it such a sensuous experience, even if the book itself is, say, Jung's 'Modern man in search of a soul' (you know what depths of despair a person is plumbing when they dredge up that title). So, yes, summer is here. Summer in Kolkata is always going to remind me of woesome things like mortality, and winter of freedom and warmth and wellbeing. Oh the joys of varying perspectives.





'Brokeback Mountain' on Sunday, the cheapest ticket, which was a meagre one-thirty rupees. My pockets have phantom pain. It was beautiful. It wasn't perfect, but if I put aside the criticism and consider what it means to me, it means a tremendous lot. As it did to many other viewers, I am sure. This may or may not include the group of giggling high school boys sharing the same row at Inox Forum (all dressed in virginal white...). I'm in half a position now to contribute, if belatedly, to the BBM-vs-Crash debate, but I don't particularly care for the Oscars (anyone in their right mind will tell you it's all about the gowns, and even the gowns are getting ugly), and after everything I've read about 'Crash' I can't come away wanting to see it instead of BBM a second time - or even saving up for 'V for Vendetta'.



Speaking of theatres and films. Apparently it's unusual, for someone like me (read 'J.U.D.E student') to not be a regular theatre-and-or-cinema- goer. Apparently this means I am stodgy (what I heard before college as, inevitably, 'bhalo meye, podashona kore, disco-fisco-e jaye naa') and lead a sad, sad life. I do actually have a sad, sad life, but not sad-as-in-pathetic.
There were some screenings of the 'right' kind of films, recently, that I saw posters of and wanted to go to. I'm talking about the Fell Beast Fellini. I should have gone. But I had no time. Horror of horrors, that must mean she's cramming for exams that are, well, a whole month away!
I've suspected this for a while: people who are ambitious, even aggressively so, but do not go around tooting and tuttling trumpets - there's this popular assumption that they're so radical they must be not radical at all. The seventh circle of Pomo hell. Occasionally, I admit, I feel like promoting my various talents (how many people in college who know me know that I sing? I paint? I swim?), but screw that. I'm going to do things my way, and not because I need the most impressive resume/a raving fanclub/whatever. That's what punk is all about.