Happy!

The best thing about a perfectly gruesome day at work is that your lovely evening becomes so much the better for it. This wonderful wonderful pair – Regis Gizavo and David Mirandon – played at the Chancery last night. I knew I was going to a concert but I was not expecting this super-joyful foot-tapping soaring warbling that filled the room. Though I usually consider dancing the worst form of torture, when I hear these guys, it made me want to salsa (or whatever else its called). It also helped that they were serving free cocktails at the place. And that David is a treat to the eyes.

A very tipsy, happy me was dropped off at home last night. A very big ‘hah!’ to the evilness that pervades corporate offices…there will be enough music and alchohol to wash us all clean.

Virginia killer becomes prime-time star

And it’s happened again – American teenager goes beserk and kills everyone around him. It started with the Columbine school killings, or so the media seems to suggest. And now the Virginia massacre is all over the media. I was happy at first to find that the killer went nameless – that the papers were focussing on the victims, but there was nothing…no fame, no attention for the murderer. The Guardian has this really interesting article about a school-kid who intended to kill his classmates and how his intentions were simply that they were ‘bad’ (because he hadn’t really thought it out and it seemed easy). 

A college-student psychotic killer is a little different though. What do you imagine a loser-type loner who got all the attention he got only because he was disturbed wants? What do you imagine he wants, if he has filmed every step of his murder-spree (with pictures of him smiling and pictures of him fierce, pictures of him posing and pictures with his ‘message’) and delivered them to the media? Attention! And he got it. So there’s a message for all the pycho-chappies, the potential killers, who are watching…go ahead and murder lots of kids – it is a great way to get famous, it is the best way to make the world listen. Your words will be on air, your pictures in the paper and everyone will spend months obsessing about you and what you were trying to tell them.

Fireflies Festival of Music

It was held at the Fireflies Ashram near Bangalore. I can’t think of very many better ways to spend a night than this – sitting back against a granite step, stars shining in the clear sky that is revealed every time the dark leaves above you sway apart in the breeze, beautiful music wafting up from the stage below the banyan tree that stand in the centre of the arena. Beautiful music all night!

A haunting violin, a Baul with a voice like the wind*, a Balkan song by a Serbian guitarist that makes you want to weep, Quawwali from Nagpur, Veena from Bangalore, accordians, a sitar with a harp, and the  friendly neighbourhood band from the cafe on church street.

[A blog post by somebody who was also at the festival]

A song by Karthick Das Baul can be downloaded from here

Ghost of me

The odd part about coming back to a city how you turn a corner and run into your own ghost. 

Like walking up Lavelle road and feeling that you are walking alongside your 14 year-old self who is pestering her mother with questions about this new cafe that they are walking towards, and who looks at all the pictures on the wall and settles down to have a spinach and walnut pizza on one of the charming little marble-topped table. Your 16-year old self is also there, in school uniform, with three friends.  Each girl is wearing a coloured badge which says ‘Captain’ and is filled with a sense of power and freedom. You are eating mocha ice-cream and plotting against the sports-master. The other ghost of you is 19. She is wearing a yellow kurta and is eating rum and chocolate cake with a boy at one of the corner tables. He says he wants to see her world, and while part of her is trying to show him, part of her is trying to shield her world from his gaze- so she is avoiding talking about all the other ghosts of herself that linger there. The 21 year old ghost eating pizza (which now smells like shoes) with fellow-interns ignores her.

Unravelling

If you are unravelling, stretched thin and fraying…is there any way to ravel? To curl up again into a cool secure unstretched pile?

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