Celebrations!!!
As my city’s weathered soul wriggles towards, what the pundits want to call a metamorphosis I can see celebrations all around me…a puddle full of a promoters unfelt guilt plays host to the revelries of dengue causing mosquitoes… open drains gurgle past perfectly respectable middle class neighborhoods in such unbridled glory that they would put Le Corbusier’s carefully designed fountains to shame… and more than anything the populace is celebrating its right to relieve itself anywhere, anytime; school walls, road dividers, electric poles you name a corner and its most likely that an on- the-move Kolkata man is relieving himself there at that very moment…why go to Bohemia for self expression when u have millions of men painting the wall with what seems to be the expressions of their innermost being…
Yay my city is celebrating!!!
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Posted by serendipiduous at 3:25 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
my initial reaction was that u're being unfair to the city, but then it is perfectly reasonable to think that people show off the "spirit" of the city by having titanic sized replicas of taj mahal to leaning tower of pisa..
why sometime back they even built the titanic.
My assumption is that the duality of the situation is that the larger the celebration the heavier the traffic on the nalas
so u see that they are interdependant.
And belive me if there were no poor people not being alowwed to sleep on the roads they do for a few days, it is only because u cant have pavement dwellers on your way to the leaning tower of pisa constructed with bamboo poles and cotton sheets.
i know am rattling off incoherently but then its this that signifies the spirit of the country love it or hate it.
2 last point of reference: read the last jet engine laugh by ruchir joshi n secondly and completely unrelatedly, i just remembered the pan chewing belly sticking out seth at home this year who bought crackers worth 3k n haggled for a 7 buck rick ride which was perfectly reasonable.
Alas that is our dichotomy, love it or hate it this is where u live...
u know what after naipaul u're the next guy i've read writin about people takin a leak or a crap if u may.
its the most jarring yet regular site on our roads and no one writes about it naipaul complained in An Area of Darkness.
personally i dont like him and read most of his works just to know why he's so talked about
but i will quote him here:
"These squatting figures-...-are never spoken of; they are never written about; they are not mentioned in novels or stories; they do not appear in feature films or documentaries...But the truth is that Indians do not see these squatters and might even, with complete sincerity, deny that they exist: a collective blindness arising out of the Indian fear of pollution and the resulting conviction that Indians are the cleanest people in the world. They are required by their relegion to take a bath everyday."
How clean perhaps the memories of the bathrooms we shared in our esteemed and priveleged univ would remind u well enough.
But then u've always been my benchmark for personal hygeine in the testing shitholes we had in the name of bathrooms and toilets the very image/stench of which was repulsive enough to constipate some1 for a week...
whew i think i overdid my annual writing quota by a huge margin.
cya later
whoa!!!
wokay let me just assimilate everything ...
first of all its probably coz i havent read much of ur prose earlier but i love the breezy,freewheeling tone of ur writing here ...i love what u wrote, makes me wonder WHY dont you blog more often...
now let me address everything one by one ...the timing of this post was probably unintentonally apt...i couldnt agree more with ur theory, my intention as you have correctly pointed out, was to point out the other side ...i will be the first one to say that i embrace my city with all its squalor and depravity but that hardly helps any cause...
as far as me and my chuddi yaar naipaul being teh only two writer talkin about defecation in public how could u forget Agastya's bemusement with the crap on a leaf ????
sigh i miss the c wing toilet ...it at least made me feel alive ...
Post a Comment