Brush strokes

I have been having some fun with watercolor lately.

Geisha, Sept 30

Bamboo, Sept 21

An unusual friend

I was talking to my brother when he reminded of one of the most unusual friends I had as a kid.

It was a crow with a broken upper beak.

One day, it stood on a brick wall separating our home from our neighbors on the west. I was in a good mood and so I sang a song to it I composed simultaneously , something about a faraway princess and his being her messenger. (How I knew it was a 'he'- I don't know, I just assumed).

He eyed me dubiously at first, and relaxed at the realization that I was a bit cacophonous but innocuous. I thought I should reward such an enduring audience and borrowed cookies from my mother and placed them on the wall. He performed a sort of war dance around it stepping side-wise to and fro, then suddenly picked it with his broken beak and rushed to the quieter end of the wall where he munched on it. He flew away without saying thanks.

The next day, however, I heard a knock on my bedroom window, south of the house. I don't know how he realized it was my room, but he got me a half eaten fish-bone and cawed, coaxing me delicately to eat it. I was surprised at this gallantry. He probably sacrificed his lunch for me. I begged some more cookies from my mother.' It is that wretched crow again!' I told her he got me something too. She couldn't believe her eyes when she saw it.

I often shared scraps of food with him. One day, he even got his girlfriend along. I wondered if she was the reason he broke his beak. Was she worth fighting over? I guess she was. I looked at them like a mother regards her grown-up children. She fussed with him and they fed each other bits of food. He wasn't as lonely as I had imagined him to. It was good to know.

*

I had almost forgotten about him, and then Dada mentioned him in a conversation today. Crows live a good many years - over a score. I wonder if I will still see him if I visit our old house.

You know about my pet dog, did I tell you I had a cat too?

Crime City on Google+

Vote for your favorite game avatar:)

My favorite is the last one- looks more professional and dressed for combat. Sometimes, I put a FBI vest or a tank top on her, and change her pants to military monochrome.

That's my gang attacking my mobster boss- Natty Blunts.

Raksha Bandhan

Raksha Bandhan or the bond of protection is primarily observed to celebrate the bond between brothers and sisters where the sister ties a rakhi or sacred knot around the wrist of the brother and he vows to protect her through life. The brother could be related by blood or be a muh bolah one. My post is about the later.

There are several historical mentions of the rakhi-bond; as a kid, I read about Krishna-Draupadi, Karnavati, the queen of Chitor and Humayun, the Mughal emperor. There was a time when it meant something. But I have become a cynic over the years.

A psychoanalysis session might yield the following as a causal event of my attitude:

A boy (A) in my class had a crush on a girl(B), everyone knew about it - including the
girl. On Rakhi, the greatest fear of a boy was to get a rakhi from someone for whom he had a romantic predisposition. Many skipped school  on that particular day for the same. However, A was not so fortunate. When classes got over, B got hold of A and tied a rakhi round his wrist. I saw his face. He waited until she turned her back, took it off, threw it in the ground and stomped on it like a maniac, with anger so real that it hurt me even to watch him.

Many girls have resorted to this technique. When a certain undesirable wooer tries to seek affection, the girl waits till rakhi to crush all his dreams. I am a woman but I feel it is foul play. I can understand the fear can be real for some who know the havoc unrequited love can create, but trying to extinguish feelings by spray painting a pseudo-relation? You can't force anyone to love or unlove. This age old ceremony became an arrangement for emotional castration. Worse still, I saw a rakhi brother and sister date- something equivalent to incest- at east in my books.

I am not a syngenesophobic, but I hardly ever call anyone my 'brother' until I really mean it. I have tried calling one of my very old friends,'Dada'( elder brother in Bangla) on several occasions, because I see him that way. But I have noticed he feels offended by it and protests vehemently. I will never know if he dislikes it because of the age connotation or because he thinks it makes him feel like a asexual being. It is the tragedy of a generation that has seen sex appeal being overrated in media and probably thinks sex is the only way to connect.

Whatever the reason- my only supplication is - girls, please don't use a rakhi as a protection from the one you are tying it to- it disrespects the sentiments associated with it. And boys (not men- they know)- don't try too hard to capitalize on your sex appeal- there are a lot of relations worth more than that.

Aarakshan

It is a misnomer. The later half deals with commercialization of education, the first half is equivocal about reservation.

Prakash Jha tried to create a cinematic sonnet by stating a problem in the octave and proposing a solution in the sestet. The ninth line might be where Mrs. Anand (Tanvi Azmi) suggested scholarships for meritorious but financially backward students and remedial classes to cope with the weaker students from disadvantageous sections of the society.

It had great potential, but the pseudo-intellectual attempt ruined it. And they banned the screening in Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh? What a laugh.

But it is good to see contemporary Indian film-makers make an attempt at least.

Travelogue: Las Vegas

I

Each place you visit teaches something about yourself- something you never knew or something you had long forgotten. Las Vegas, which means ‘The Meadows’ in Spanish, has something to offer to everyone. Whether you will remember it as the ‘The Entertainment Capital of the World, or ‘Sin City’ or by some other name depends on what you are looking for in your trip, and what you find really.

He said he wanted to spend his birthday with me- just me, and that he wanted to take me to Vegas. Soon enough, we made reservations for our hotel, rented a Jeep Liberty (usually, we don't use our own vehicle on road trips) for what could be a 8-10 hrs drive- depending on the pits stops and the traffic. We knew it would be a gas guzzler, but we found comfort on the road and were happy with the choice of our car. Initially, we wanted to see Death Valley on our way, but later gave up on the idea to save some time.

We started early morning on his birthday- July 8th, Friday. On our way, we stopped by San Luis Reservoir, and at Bakersfield for lunch. Windmills always remind me of Don Quixote - the canonical ideologist disenchanted by society.

We saw Boron, named after the element, which inhabits the largest deposits of borax in the world. A dead river at Mojave made me sad. There were interesting posts that said :
'Water=jobs, Keep water flowing into farms'
'Congress created the dust bowl'

We always stop to buy some farm fresh fruits on our trips. The spiced pistachios we picked from a fruit stall made delectable munching material. He drove, I DJ-ed on our ipods & the satellite radio, and we sang old favorites together. When the first road sign mentioning Las Vegas appeared, we were still a couple of hours away. But the appetite to get acquainted with the city increased.

A couple of billboards said,’ Going to Vegas? Go where Vegas began. Flamingo.’

One of the most celebrated early resorts; Flamingo Hotel was built by the mobster Benjamin’Bugsy’ Siegel, a member of the Meyer Lansky crime syndicate. Lansky and Siegel were lifelong friends and the former is said to have convinced the Mafia to place Siegel in Vegas. Lansky had heavily invested in the Flamingo, like many other syndicate bosses in the 1930s who invested their illegal profits in a smorgasbord of ventures.

After long delays and cost overruns, the hotel was still losing Mafia money. Most of the bosses wanted Siegel dead. It is said that Lansky bargained twice to save Siegel and give him some time. But in 1947, Siegel was shot and killed in Beverly Hills, California. The crime went unpunished. Only his brother and a priest attended the funeral. Much of Siegel’s life is the subject of the 1991 movie,’Bugsy.’

The Ten Commandments and another billboard stating,' Not everything stays in Vegas freeSTDcheck.org' prepared the wayfarer morally for what lay ahead.

Just for fun

                               Motion sequence with a very obliging model :)

My brother says that with frizzy hair I look like a lion :D