Ode to eccentricities…

Why do I like to dream?
Of living in a tiny cottage with a huge library
In a desolate plateau on a distant mountain

Why do you dream to like?
Or be in love, with the bibliophile-
Yoga-loving, peregrinating, young since 1965

Why does he attempt to whet his magajastra?
So zealously just as did his 19th century forebear-
Cocaine injecting, ratiocinating, eschewing society

Why do they care for foibles of grey matter?
Rather than of heart, why do we mull?
Over the aesthetics of their care and the beauty of our solitude

To be able to brush aside the fly of spleen
From the face of our sense of wonder
To be dazzled by the maverick within, how did we manage?

To remain undaunted by the edifice of reality?

Amdo’s near NID: Reflections on an iconoclastic inn!

There stood before us a little, non-descript shanty,not different from the several others that stood in proximity in any way save for the words ‘Momos’ scribbled with chalk on its wall. Yet, I instinctively knew that this place would be like no other eatery I have been to in Ahmedabad. As we entered the shack, I took a second or two longer than usual to open my shoes-customers are to leave their shoes at the threshold here-because I was enthralled by the view that greeted my sight. I am no good with measurements and I shall, therefore, make no attempts to convey how small the room that housed the restaurant was. In the waning light of the dusk, I could not read the name of the eatery on the hand written menu card stuck on the farthest corner of the wall and it is my friend who read out the name of the joint-Amdo’s. It had no furniture save for the pieces of wood that were placed in a horizontal line along the walls to serve as tables for the customers who ate sitting on the floor. There were some unusual paintings or sketches on the azure-hued walls which, I guess, I could have appreciated better if I could figure out if they were drawn with oil paints or charcoal but the state of euphoric enchantment that I was in, had rendered me too nonplussed to try doing that. There was a little kitchen in one corner of the room where sat a wiry person of Mongoloid features, taking orders, cooking and watching some Hindi film on a tiny television set.
It took me no more than a minute to discover that the place had nothing to offer my palate because it was not serving vegetarian momos today but it was barely anything more than a trifling disappointment for me-my mind was in a state of excited frenzy at having discovered an inn like this one in Ahmedabad.Maybe, there are several others like it but for me who had, during the past five months of stay in the city, been wont to the sight of plush outlets of corporate chains of restaurants in ubiquitous malls and to smaller eateries which proudly flaunt ‘pure vegetarian’ signboards, discovery of Amdo’s was, to use the cliché, like discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb- there was a possibility of experiencing immense excitement. And so I did. As I sat at Amdo’s, staring at the back of the cook or rather at the message printed on the back of the his t-shirt, ‘I support free Tibet’ while my friend ate beef momos with a beatific expression on her mien, I decided to blog about the restaurant the existence of which is apparently not known to shop-keepers running stores at a distance that is less than a five minutes walk away.
I wondered, as I sipped lemon tea in the tiny restaurant, feebly lit by the weak streams of light of the setting sun at the hour of vesper, why am I feeling so ecstatic at this moment? If there is anything to feel, it should be anxiety because there is a great deal of work which I had left unfinished in order to be there. But unalloyed exuberance is what I felt-maybe because the sight of momos made me a bit nostalgic about my home town Guwahati, where every little inn in every neighbourhood have momos as a fixture on their menu-cards. Or maybe because, even when I woke up this Sunday morning I had not expected to find myself in so unusual a place at so beautiful an hour- a visit to a bookstore was what I could imagine as the most absorbing weekend activity until now. But there was another reason too.
The obscure location of Amdo’s, its unostentatious surroundings, its sinewy-looking host and its unusual menu all reminded of the coffee-house of My name is Red. The novel, in its vivid elucidation of the milieu at the coffee houses of 15th century Istanbul, portrayed them as a hub of dissidents, as a place where its patrons drank the socially and culturally forbidden coffee and in doing so, expressed perhaps, in the most idle manner, their protests against the existing socio-religious straitjackets. Maybe, I am being a little too maudlin in drawing parallels between Pamuk’s Turkish coffee house and the little Tibetan restaurant, tucked away in one remote corner of Ahmedabad; there is no blasphemous poet or recusant raconteur of tales of rebellion here unlike at the coffee house. But there certainly is something ineffable about the place that makes it redolent of iconoclasm-perhaps that ‘something’ is the beef on my friend’s plate which is not something the most-renowned and well-established of eateries serve in this city. Given the demigod status bestowed upon the bovine creatures in this land, it cannot be easy for these people to serve beef. Or maybe, there is another reason which makes this place so unusual,a better and profounder reason that I am yet to fathom. But I hope to be able to do that, in the course of my subsequent visits of Amdo’s. Amen!

Poster Perfect!

Every morning-well, almost every morning-I have the pleasure of traveling to work with Rani, Katrina, Kareena or Priyanka. Once in a while, I get male company too when I have Imran or Salman or John or even, Mithun as my co-passenger but it is the rendezvous with the girls that I look forward to. Their company animates me and inspires me to discover myriad of critical hypotheses to debate upon; when with them, I can very easily set aside my saturnine, brooding self and be almost as vivacious as these lovely ladies are. On the silver screen.
I cannot coerce myself here to reiterate the names above along with their owners’ surnames for the simple reason that there cannot be a human being on the face of this planet who offers flower festoons to the gods in temples, and also to local politicians at functions, who can claim to not recognize the people I am talking of by their first names.
These are the names which have beguiled me over and again to enter a theatre only to call myself a nincompoop, fret and eventually to daydream about Caesar salad or baked pasta. These are the names of matinee idols who sell a hundred goods, kindle passions, arouse awe, and inspire the auto-rickshaw drivers of Ahmedabad to ply with elan, their noble vehicles on the streets of the city on the banks of Sabarmati!
Yes, every time, I step into an auto-rickshaw, I eagerly-and now, instinctively- look to my left and my right to find out which film star is accompanying me on my ride; whose posters adorn the sides of the passenger seat? This is something peculiar to Ahmedabad autos-almost all of them have garishly bright hued pictures of Bollywood stars, mostly female stars, on their inner sides. Earlier I used to wonder aloud every time I stepped into an auto-rickshaw, but of course, only if I have company, as to what on earth made these silver screen sirens to agree to get photographed in such costumes which are bound make people suspicious of the refinement of their sartorial sense? Quite contrary to the chic, urbane attires, in which they are usually found draped in the pages of glossy magazines and on the broadcasts of television channels, in these posters they are invariably donning outfits which seem to be out of some pot-boiler that had grossed lakhs when released in the late 1980s but since then, has never been watched by anyone who did not sooner or later, suffer from a serious bout of indigestion. In one poster, Kareena Kapoor is wearing blood-red salwar kameez with refulgent golden embroidery and in another, Katrina Kaif is dressed in a turquoise lehnga-choli with wonderfully matching red-lipstick!
I found the answer to my question when once I came across a poster of Rani Mukherjee garbed in a scarlet wedding saree, and appropriately, gazing coyly at me. There was something odd about it, I thought. It took me a few seconds to notice the source of the oddity-the ghunghat which covered her mien, was a painted one! It left me with no option but to admit to myself that a misprision has been committed, a grave one, by me. What I had nearly attributed to the poor sartorial taste of actresses has probably been caused by the wonderous technology which enables morphing of photographs.
This discovery gave rise another reverie-why do auto-rickshaw drivers prefer to have their favourite ‘heroines’ dressed in so antediluvian a fashion?
Can relativism in fashion preferences, not be frowned down upon-if this is what the auto-drivers like, who can dismiss their taste as tawdry, publicly at least? More importantly, can these posters be considered part of popular art or do they represent a niche cultural preference ? Well, I shall endeavour to investigate these questions, even if in doing so, i expose myself to the risk of being asked, ‘Absolutely jobless, are you not?’