About looking

2007-11-01T00:39:00.000-07:00

Sorry, about no updates on rareview for a long time.
Though I have been writing here: Scribbleamus

Voyeur's delight?

2005-07-29T05:33:00.000-07:00

There is a distinct smell of hot dust, each house in this tiny locality looks uglier than the other, the coolers sit like warts on the building surfaces. An anthill of humanity, these 1+1 houses, a trade mark of Dilli, each with a limited view as thousands of tapped wires criss cross slicing the sky, the sparrows fly past weaving their way like fighter pilots past huge laser beams.

The young kuddi stands preening to catch the eye of the one she loves, timing it carefully as he moves out on his rajdoot , the blinding pink salwar kurta clad aunty stands yonder in the second building-first balcony keeping her eye fixed on this non verbal exchange, a juicy piece of gossip, something to tide her by her fellow fat league's sorrows of lazy husbands and naughty kids.

The oily haired kid stands marking out his cricket playing territory in the galli squeezed between ugly structures. He holds a bat as tall as him, looking up at the frowning woman wondering if he should ask her if 'Bunty' could come out and play, "Its only four 'o clock! Auntiji!"

The young man stops the bike near the kid, wondering if he could play a quick game, he feels the girl's eyes on him, he turns around and flashes her a lassi-white smile, she blushes and he swerves the bike away into the golden sunset lined with two cows crossing.
A neat circle. A quiet conversation, join the dots this is just one network among the millions of silent conversations..lost.

Nosey!

2005-04-29T02:54:00.000-07:00

Anyone who travels by the central railway, commuting from thane to CST, knows when they are near sion, without looking out of the window for the station's name, without asking anyone around them where they are at the moment, even with their eyes shut, the commuter knows.
how? With his nose silly!
Yes, Dharavi stinks, and you know where you are. The same goes for the dadar flower market, a distinct smell of dead flowers. Juhu, Chowpatty, Marine Drive have that distinct smell of the sea, degrading vegetable/fruit remains.
Colaba smells of sweat in the afternoon, walking at colaba causeway, your nose picks up the cloth dye smell from the various, kurtas, t-shirts stalls. Then you are hit with smells of different cuisines at regular intervals, as you pass leo's beer and steak, shwarma rolls near piccadilly.
Gateway smells like a dead pigeon. And the sea smells the same all over the city. Bandra lanes carry goan cooking smells, carter road,(of rotting plants) bandstand of sea and perfumed joggers, as they swish past you carrying their adidas or nike wear along with that expensive cellphone. Why would anyone want to carry their cell phone while jogging.?
Getting back to train travel, bandra welcomes you with the filthy canal, dadar welcomes you with people smell, there are just too many people at dadar station (east, west, north and south).
At the end of a day's walking around the city...what do you smell of?
'Get into the shower!'

Mispelt!

2005-04-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

As a six year old the only thing about school that made me cringe was dictation. The teacher would say a word and I would slowly loop and twist my pencil into forming it on paper. Hoping it was right. Spelling bees stung hard.

A relief now as I can write without constantly checking my spellings hoping to make sense with limited vocabulary. I can communicate. My palms still wait for the wooden ruler to slam down on them when I spell a word wrong. Thwack!

Coffee break. I head down the lane towards the small restaurant. A Ganpati statue stands guard suffocating behind marigold garlands. The Angles and Saxons would not be too pleased with him right now because what took them centuries to develop lies dead on the board above his serene head. COFEI HOUSE WELCOME

I finish my masala dosa and i wait for my chai. I look at the street lined with numerous hoardings; bright red,orange and blue typography, twisted looped signs that say JOIN THE VACATION CURSE FOR STD XII
Sigh! The English language and its glorious history we learnt in school flashes before my
eyes.

On my way home,roadside stalls show off food in psychedelic wraps. A red dragon with front and rear end on fire followed by a trail of yellow letters,hangs perilously from the ceiling. The board reads something to the effect of hungry eyes or ears. There is more scribble . Dish one SCHEZWAN PAWNS.
Chess anyone?

Stuck in traffic the truck in front of my cab has not gone for a p.u.c check in all its 500 years. My vision is blurred as the carbon monoxide clears out slowly. I see words through the mist HORN OK PLESE.

The one who wrote these signboards would be beaten black and blue by my teacher. He would be hit unconcious. How can someone spell something as simple as coffee, wrong?
Maybe he has a heavy accent that says coffeeeiiii! An accent,that is Tamil or maybe Bengali? A city like Mumbai has a sound box with a Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati,Bihari and many more accents put together.

You can walk in and have cofei. Play chess with the chinese waiter.
As long as the boards are the right way up, we manage with the misspelled instructions on them.

The city of Mumbai with its numerous hoardings and signposts, the words spelt like toy blocks put together by a preschooler to get the picture on them right, wobbly and out of place.
Would you put the entire city through a spell check? It would ask you if you want to spell it as Bombay, Bombai, Mumbai or Mumbay!

I think back at all my compositions that were sent home with red circles and my palms with new improved language lines, I remember my spellings. Thanks, to my teacher I can still hope to win at scrabble but I think I would lose or is it luse against the ones who painted the cryptic signs all over the city.

2005-04-28T04:02:00.000-07:00

Its about looking.
What ever you see and what you don't.