Zaalim.

Why I raise hell when I can't settle with a person's history will always be cause for concern to me. I sidestep around the games people play, and then I realize I have been playing them all along. Heaven help you if one day I decide to go rogue and lambast all of you with my ego.

Plainspeak in Suburbia.

The summer breeze makes my shirt billow outwards like a tent, and the soft drink I am sipping through a straw begs to acquiesce. It is one of those oh-too-lazy days where nothing really gets done, and through the maze of mildewing bath-towels and half-eaten brownies, you try to compare your life with an idyllic one and see what semblance it bears towards the latter. More often than not, you end up unearthing quite a lot on the topic of relationships and how they affect the more professional aspects of our daily life. Sometimes, when I am feeling upbeat, I like to think about myself as an Icarus who soared too high and burned out his wings of wax. Fell to my 'death', consequently.

No one likes to think of their relationships as dysfunctional. When I was young, my teachers instructed me in some of the teachings of Austrio-German social scientists, most of which basically contained the maxim - You have to provide for someone in order to be provided for yourself and have your affairs in order. Most relationships - filial, marital, sexual or otherwise - operate on a level of co-dependency. You fixate on a person's strength of character while you fill in on the points that need filling. One does this on a conscious or unconscious level. When it is done on a conscious level, the relationship is more volatile than what it would have been if the individual had not seen his cards before laying them out flat on the table.

Besides, it is easy to idealize a relationship. It is easy to 'connect the dots' and say that you have it all figured out. What I think, though, is that all relationships grow more if the individual is eager to learn. I think the mistake I make (and most of us make) is bring the baggage from the previously concluded relationship to the next one. In doing so, we wrest the fairness of the 'deal' from the hands of the other individual. So, for now, lets say that the Zen of relationships is that we must always empty the cup. Easier said than done, though. The process of constant cleansing requires that no dregs stick to the bottom. Most of us are vulnerable to emotional volatility. We might handle the stimuli themselves with varying degrees of stability, but our perception towards these events remains the same. We still know that our next response to a similar set of emotional circumstances will be quick and efficient. That forbears on my judgement of a relationship pattern. I have heard friends saying that they feel manipulated and used when a relationship takes a turn for the worse. I have no advice to offer to them - none, whatsoever. It is because one can only control the events that are directly related to oneself, you cannot bend a behavioural trait in another individual to your advantage. The least you can do, at this point, is to be honest and hope the other is honest too.

I have seen some relationships that are so spontaneous , so effervescent, so beautiful that they are almost too good to be true. These have involved little to no efforts from either of the two individuals in the relationship. Probabilistically speaking, this is indeed possible. There must exist two people with the same value-judgements and the same moral compasses, and when you bring them together you will get a relationship that works with the least friction. There is just the slightest bit of turbulence by external factor(s), which then gets eschewed into the relationship and finally is excreted because the relationship has strong roots, and hence can shake off the snow. It is resourceful to think of oneself as being constantly on the make, because there is nothing much that one can do to avoid turmoil in relational landscapes. When I say this, I speak from a direct subjective standpoint. It is easy to be objective and say that two plus two equals four, but what happens when the screen gives you five? The least we can ask of the other person is to be authentic in his claims and his desires. History, theology and philosophy have always influenced its students to one particular end - do your best to salvage what you can from the ruins of your last relationship and graft it to your new one. Because, then you are more wise, more objective. But, let us ask ourselves one thing, what does it really mean to be rooted in objectivity? All that we achieve from this one-sided objectivity is a myopic vision of where a relationship is heading. Let us now see what happens when you broach the topic subjectively. Yes, you are more vulnerable because you don't know what to expect, and you don't know how to read the writing on the wall and draw the lines that need drawing. But, you do feel a tremendous enthusiasm to look things in the eye and honestly accept the fact that you are giving what it takes to keep the relationship going strong. Feeding it, nourishing it. One might argue then the enthusiasm dulls with time, and that honesty dulls itself through and through. Contextually, that is in line with our bourgeois conformist values because whenever we feel that we are not getting our share of the relationship pie, we wear out our welcome and cease to see things as a story, as a continuous opportunity for growth. Cookie-cutter responses to day-to-day stimuli may be very well relaxing, but they do little to alleviate the pain of that constant cycle of emotional instability.

I have no stratagems to apply here. I am learning too. All I can do is grab hold of life by the horns and hope it doesn't blow its nose

Good good. So, our affairs are in order.

Colloidal pellets of celluloid.

I think the Indian Cinematic Experience (or, the Experience) is skewed in principle. Or what's left of it, anyway. If the hallowed,musty, mildewy interior of a Prithvi can be likened to a Miles Davis concert, then the Experience can be, for all I know, a Miley Cyrus musical. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Every time I guffaw at some grammatical flaw in Rakhi Sawants English or at Kashmira Shahs lack of tact, I feel something is amiss. Why does the industry spawn thousands of crass starlets and wannabe actors every year, and then discard them - or rather, distance themselves from them - in some, nation-wide pogrom reminiscent of the bubonic plague? The beautiful thing about us humans is that we can draw from our hypocrisy, as and when we see fit. That alone makes the Experience worthwhile.

Many of these aspiring actors come from the humblest of financial backgrounds. You can see their mothers swabbing floors in high-rise buildings and their fathers drinking - or moonshining - in peeling-paint chawls, while the eyes of their siblings are staring listlessly into celluloid fantasy. In spite of all the accusations the tabloids chuck at them on a daily basis, one should not forget that these people are not so much as potential thinkers, as they are performers. You can't expect them to be all aquiline and laid-back, because that's not the function society wants them to carry out. They are entertainers. They are marionettes. So, while they straighten their ties and smoothen out any snags in their frilly dresses, let them be. You haven't given them enough to work with, stay off their case. They come from the slums, you want them to shake a leg and expose their collective cleavage, and then you want them to be aesthetically articulate, too? Well, that's just not done.
Because you can't lay to rest these little inconsistencies of thought. You have to go through a certain lane of influences, and only then will you land up in a place where you can perpetrate puns and throw around articulate witticisms like nobodys business. When you trace these individuals to their backgrounds, and the tremendous cultural inequities they've faced (unlike many of us), you can't help feeling sorry for them. The creativity a producer espouses, the creativity a director envisions, the creativity a cinematographer enjoys - they are all markedly different from the creativity the performer chooses to show. His limbs are his property, and he chooses to make do with what he has, to let cinema-goers have the time of their lives as they pop their popcorn. When you see a Shah Rukh or an Aamir, you fail to see that their ability to make the nation hold it's collective breath has stemmed from a single, repeated stimulus - they learnt through trial-and-error what makes Indian audiences happy (i.e. the sights they want to see, the sounds they want to hear, even the people that they would like to see as their favourite actors' arm candy). So much so that a vast portion of a celebrity's life is public. They can't even trim the unwanted facets of their life at length because the critics start questioning the motives that led to the trimming. So, be judicious in your judging of the nautanki.

It's an evoulutionary imperative. Now, as for whether this thought process follows positive or negative evolution, I cannot say. What the film fraternity deems as an useless appendage, it will discard. No one can say whether the discarding was appropriate, given the shifting focus from artistic endeavour to commercial profit. There will be subdivisions in cinema. There will be always be commercial and arthouse cinema. It's upto the audiences to pick one variant and stay connected with that cinematic code. Or follow the worthier nuances of both. The pervasiveness of Bollywood in the Indian cultural ethos is commendable. There are computer-generated vinyl movie-posters plastered over 'stick-no-bills' walls and the product endorsements dot the faces of many a tea-stall and barbershop across India. It is an ubiquitous aspect of our daily life. It permeates everything - from haute couture to popular music, from talk shows to billboard adverts.

It is more a study in economics than a study in visual aesthetics. The law of commodities - You agree with a product's reliability, you stick to it. The value we associate with a product reflects on our choice to cherish it. This is a necessary catharsis. Film pundits may tut-tut at the lack of brevity in the dialogues, but you can't ignore the buying power that is being credited to Bollywood through the churning out of a thousand films a year. Moreover, soapbox feminism is on the rise, what with the disillusioned stay-at-home mom finding her feet in the chauvinistic quagmire that is urban India. Now, this is where I draw a complete blank. I am seeing my feminine counterparts swoon over articles of clothing that grace the shoulders of the leading ladies on celluloid, I am seeing them speaking in hushed tones about weepy sob-sisters and I am at a loss. Some of our films subtly insult the collective consciousness. So much so that to a vast majority of the Indian middle-class, the insult goes ignored. It is just another cliche to them. Maybe, it is symptomatic of the wider rift between consumerism and minimalism, or of the integration of a more culturally-endowed India to Western demographics. Only time will tell. Till then, lets sit back in our swivel chairs and enjoy the show.

This too, shall pass.

Don't look at me like that, you fool. I slept with an older woman. Does that make me so different from you, you who try to look at the hem of her skirt like you might expect it to burst into flames any moment.

I'm an object of surprise now. Suddenly, everyone is coming to terms with Ayan Ray, the Gargantuan man-slut.