Miss U

Yes, I went to the extent of betting with two other friends on who would be Miss Universe and I won, not a fortune, but a teeny bit of satisfaction :). I predicted Miss Canada. In praise of determination, by the way, last year she went to the Miss Canada pageant and came out third runner-up. So she groomed herself and went back for it and became Miss Canada, then last night, Miss Universe. It's just hard on her credibility when she says she just came to give it a chance. I think she wanted it very bad, no harm in that.

Behind the Indian camera

This article called Behind The Scenes from Outlook India provides great insight into the work of the key directors, writers and musicians who are defining the new face of Indian cinema.

Have a look to catch up with the latest trends of this ever-evolving and exciting world.

Friends are angels sent by God.

Time

A mirror is standing on a silver thread
It glides backwards in front of us.
All it shows is what's here, and what's gone.

You reach out for the mirror,
You wish for a peek
behind the silver screen.
Can the glass turn to mercury?

A slim fog veils the surface,
Memory morphs reality.
From the veil emerge a thousand stories,
A thousand faces are blurred.

The mirror keeps receding
It will only reflect the past and now
The now that passes
with every backward step the mirror takes.

On the other side, hushed hurried steps,
for the mirror is arriving,and soon,
that future on the silver thread
will be revealed to now, and then past.

The same breathless anticipation,
the same apprehensions lie
on both sides of the mirror.
And it glides, impassive, deceptively passive.

22 March 2005

Hopes

Ok, I'm patriotic. And optimistic.

But I'm also realistic: we don't stand a chance. Here's our representative to Miss Universe. In a random selection, here's Miss Kenya, Miss Serbia & Montenegro, Miss India (who, despite what she says, could well be traipsing about in wet sarees in front of the camera next year), Miss Egypt and Miss Curaçao. Apparently, Miss Canada, of Russian origin, has all the journalists swooning.

Kudos to that Mauritian girl for trying though, and for getting there. And no, I don't have a problem with the competition. As I said last year, the feminists worked so well that women are now free to parade themselves on catwalks so that other women can gawk and men can drool.

Familiar strangers

There's a little café on St-François-Xavier in the heart of Old Montréal that's absolutely adorable. It's called Luna d'Oro and is managed by two ladies. They've made this tiny place into a familiar lunch stop for dozens of people who work around here. Their homemade paninis and soups and their fresh muffins in the morning keep everyone coming back. Mostly it's their friendliness. They know the names of their regulars, and their stories. We discuss books and weather and politics.

They're part of my list of morning people now. There's the bus driver who knows me and sometimes waits for me in the middle of the street if I'm running a little late. Then there's the white-haired man who's always coming the other way when I get off the bus and so we say hello to each other. Then there's the homeless guy who smiles at me all the time and waves hi every morning. And then the car park attendant whom I pass by on my way to the office. Somehow, I've gotten so used to this now that I miss one of them if I don't see them: my familiar strangers.

Ce matin...

...j'y ai été. Je me suis levée plus tôt que d'habitude et j'ai passé une demi-heure dans le parc au bord de l'eau avant de rattraper mon bus à temps pour le travail. C'était calme, frais, et très vert... un formidable début de matinée :)

Green!

Every morning in the bus, we ride past the park. It's mellowed by sunshine and all the trees have now spurted their shoots and buds. After months of trying to decipher shades of pale yellows, silver greys and icy blues, the sight of this enthusiastic green riot is blood-tingling.

Such a reaffirmation of life makes me want to step off the bus right there and skip work for a whole morning. I would lie back on the grass and stare up at the leaves. If I take off my lenses and use the full benefit of being myopic, all I'd see would be a watercolour of greens and yellows, with some skyblue flirting among the rustling leaves.

I look forward to a lazy morning like that...

Bollywood, non-desi style

I keep meeting non-Indians who are fairly interested in Hindi films. Two years ago I was already pleasantly surprised when I watched Lagaan at an outdoors screening in Montreal. We were surrounded by Quebecers, not just the regular desi bunch. They stayed till the end and actually enjoyed it. I put that down to empathy based on a theme common to the audience and the film: evil British colonisers!

The other day I met this French guy who bought the DVD of Devdas after he saw it; he hopes Aishwarya Rai is going to be his wife. Another French guy loved it too, and listens to the songs on his own all the time. When I went with my Quebecer friend to watch it the first time, I was worried she would find it overdramatic, but she was crying halfway through it and was totally into it. Recently I showed Main Hoon Na to a German friend of mine and she found it fun!

Beyond the more international releases mentioned above, it's so quirky to realise that some Russians remember Disco Dancer! Many know Raj Kapoor, of course. Two Romanian friends can't stop laughing at Hindi cinema though, and really believe it's just about dancing around trees.

My take on it is, if this is cultural globalisation, I'm all for it. We give some, we take some. Some recent films to start with: Yuva, Dil Se, Dil Chahta Hai, Virasat and for romantic hearts... Saathiya and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and, unavoidably, the classics by Raj Kapoor and Satyajit Ray...Oh, and Sholay!

Accras...

Ce week-end j'ai goûté à des accras de morue. Je n'avais jamais mangé ça avant, et c'était vraiment bon! C'est apparemment d'origine portugaise. Ça ressemblait beaucoup aux boulettes de fruit à pain que fait ma mère et c'était servi avec une mayonnaise citronnée...

Les boulettes de fruit à pain sont faites à partir du fruit bouilli qui finit par ressembler à de la purée de pommes de terre, mélangée à des échalotes et à du poisson émietté, et ensuite enrobées de chapelure, et frites. Ça se mange avec une sauce piments rouges, et c'est trop bon!

How?

Yesterday, while touring Trekearth, I found this picture. It's not the most beautiful beach in Mauritius. It's a little wet road in the middle of a sugarcane field. Just seeing it is like being punched in the stomach, swiftly, so that you suddenly can't breathe.

There's no effort: my mind immediately travels through the fields over the mountain across the green all the way to the sea. Seeing Mar Adentro didn't help actually, because he uses the same technique to visualise what he cannot reach.

How can a little island in the middle of an ocean exert such a huge power on a person's heart? There are so many of us scattered everywhere and we all have reasons for our choices. Still we yearn.

Homesickness is one of the most powerful human emotions, and one of the most helpless ones too.

Mar Adentro

Yesterday I saw Mar Adentro, the film by Alejandro Amenábar based on the true story of Ramon Sampedro. It brought me back to the reflexion I made about Terri Schiavo a month ago...

The film is not morbid or dark. It is full of humour, wit, love and warmth: a man, paralysed from the neck down from the age of 26, living like that for 29 years, fully aware and lucid, deciding that he would rather die than live that way, possibly because life is so beautiful that missing out on so much of it is unbearable.

Sampedro's conviction through his experience was that life is a right, not an obligation. I believe that taking a person's life, even one's own, is not a human prerogative. Those are my beliefs and my values... Where does freedom stop? I'm not sure. But I understood this man's will to die, as much as I can understand anybody's will to live.

An objective law seemed irrelevant when confronted with his plea.

Enfin...

Aujourd'hui, enfin, la température à Montréal devrait être supérieure à celle de Maurice. On est en sandales et ça fait toute la différence au monde.

Sun!

Yayyyyyyyyyyy! Blue sky, bright sun and.. watch out... 18ºC today!

I'm feeling a bit more like myself.

And Blair it is then... Although that's not exactly cause for euphoria, the Tories would not have done it for me. I did not follow the campaign much so I have to find out more about the Respect Party.

The reason why that poem by Vikram Seth moves me is that we often take for granted that people are going to be there. We get used to it.

Death is the one certainty we have in life. Knowing it is not depressing. It just is.

It doesn't mean clinging to people and never letting go. But it has to spur us to make time for those we love: a word, a call, a prayer... I don't know if I manage it all the time, but "loved-people"-time should be on the same level as work, food, sleep and me-time. And more importantly, I think expressions of love and affection to those few treasured persons should come before pride or habit. It's surprising how much lighter it feels afterwards.

How Rarely These Few Years

by Vikram Seth

How rarely all these few years, as work keeps us aloof,
Or fares, or one thing or another,
Have we had days to spend under our parents' roof:
Myself, my sister, and my brother.

All five of us will die; to reckon from the past
This flesh and blood is unforgiving.
What's hard is that just one of us will be the last
To bear it all and go on living.

-The Humble Administrator's Garden,(1985)-

An Indian at Cannes

Yep, another one. For once we're not talking design sarees and "most-beautiful-woman-of-the-world" nonsense.* Rather, a woman of more substance will be part of the Cannes Feature Films Jury this year: Nandita Das.

*For the uninitiated, this refers to Aishwarya Rai's stint on the Cannes Jury in 2003, where the fuss was about her dress sense rather than her adequacy as a film critic.