So last Saturday I reached Mumbai. While still inside a rick, I ringed Tota to let him know I was in town. I told him I would get back to him once I reached Subbu’s flat. I then called Jhopad up to ask him if he was coming. He said he would let me know. That kinda meant he wasn’t. He was busy. Even Sadhu, whom I called up next, responded with a ‘I will let you know’ answer. May be this was a Mumbai thing. When people don’t have time to meet you (which they usually don’t),  they don’t tell you they don’t have time to meet you. They tell you they would let you know. And then they never really let you know. Because you know it already. And they know that you know.

I called up Mamme to ask him if he was in Mumbai. He said he was. He asked for Subbu’s address. I smsed him. And then I called up Til. I already knew he would not come. Not because we were enemies or something. But because Til was Til. And Til lived up to his reputation.

I reached Subbu’s flat in Kandivali.  And what a lovely view the window in the hall had – lush green hills adorned with white water-falls. I went online. I put up an open invitation to all on my Google-talk status message. For my birth-day. CSLV and Proto responded. They said they would come. And then I wrote an e-mail to Chutki. I wanted her Mumbai number. So that I could talk to her and ensure that she came over (I wasn’t going to get a reply till next day). And then I thought I should also call up Tota. Not to invite him, because he was obviously coming – but to ask him when exactly was he coming and all that.

Tota asked me if it was okay if we could meet the next day. He had already partied and all the previous night and his place was very far from Kandivali. That was like a 100 pin-pricks at the same time. And at the same point in your body.  I told him it was all cool and I understood. But I didn’t really understand.

Neelabh and Sweety arrived from Hyderabad late in the afternoon. Just for me. And the pain of the pin-pricks started subsiding. Slowly though. It was a fairly cold rainy day and when evening descended, I went out running for half an hour. When I returned, Tota called up to tell that he would come if the rains slowed down. Neelabh was watching some news channel on TV and told me they had just announced that the rains were not coming down anytime soon. I laughed out loud.

Neelabh had arrived with his detachable flash and for quite some time he tried clicking nude pictures of mine. Some with clothes on too. The one that I like most is the following. For obvious reasons.

I don’t know if the rains really slowed down finally but Tota did show up later that night. And I was so fucking glad he came. I can’t express  how depressing that night would have been had he not come. And that’s not because Neelabh or Subbu or Sweety were not good enough as a company. That’s because, I had left a big part of myself with Tota when we had moved away from each other few years ago, and though I can never get that back, when he is around, I at least get as close to being what I was. Same goes for Maina too. But then expecting her to come over for this party was kinda over-expecting.

The only other person who joined my party was Proto – an insti-junior and a good friend. I had helped him with few poster and t-shirt designs during my final year at IIT. Mamme was caught up in another party so he couldn’t come. I would get a mail from CSLV the next day that he did take a rick all the way from Powai to reach Kandivali. Only to get a ‘this is a wrong number’ response when he tried calling me to locate the address. CSLV returned. I only hope that CSLV actually did call a wrong number because if he really called me that night and I indeed replied what he said I did – God will never forgive me. He came all the way from Powai to Kandivali and had to return. God should never forgive me.

So with Subbu, Sweety, Neelabh, Anshuman and Proto around, I cut a cake embedded with magic candles that just never went off, however hard you blew. A little bit of the cake was smudged over my face. May be more than just a little bit. And when we sat down after the cake cutting and eating session, we realized that all beer was over. So Tota and Subbu went to fetch few more bottles. Proto left too. And then Maina called me up to wish me and chatted for a while. The last time we had spoken ‘on phone’ was when terrorists had attacked Mumbai. LoLy had called up a while ago (and Tiwari called the next day). And when Maina put down the phone, Tota and Subbu were back with more beer. And the night went on as usual. Except that I had grown older by an year.

Prologue

I did catch up with Maina. And Sadhu. When we went to see Inception together. Of course, for lack of sleep the other night, Tota and I kept crashing and entering different layers. No one even gave us a kick.

Chutki did call me up finally the next day. We promised to meet each other the next time I came to Mumbai. I did not tell her how much I missed her the other  night. May be she understood.

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Why don’t you come over to Subbu’s place by evening on 24th July 2010 (it’s the coming Saturday)? We will sing and dance till 12 in the night. Then I will cut a cake and you will sing the same boring happy birthday song for me. And then we will eat the cake. And get back to dancing and singing. And then go hit the beach first thing in the morning. For the rest of the Sunday, we shall crash like dead pigs.

Beer (and only beer btw) is on me. And so is the food. And the address is:

D-201
Bhoomi Valley
Thakur Village
Kandivali East Mumbai 400 101

(click on the map below to see a bigger map)

PS: Please leave comments to confirm participation – Neelabh, Subbu, Sweety and Jhopad are confirmed as of now

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I finished reading ‘On the Road’ by Kerouac today. It had a character named Dean. This is how somebody in the novel told him what he was:

You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time.

As far as the last line is concerned, I think I am like Dean. Also, Dean was crazy. And in retrospect, the real spirit that the book had, belonged to Dean. Dean Moriarty.

Bali and I rode to Ahmedabad to see some of the Indian Idol contestants who were here for a short and free performance. In the Himalaya mall.

Above: Sriram

Above: Bhumi

I posted just two pics but there also was Swaroop – the pagdi vaala, Jerry mouse – baal vaala, and Anu Malik (or however else he spells his surname) – badaa vaala.

And now back to the book. Here are some of the interesting lines from it:

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets go-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

…the whorey smell of a big city.

Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.

The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don’t frighten them with imposing papers and threats.

‘I like it because it’s ugly.’ All his life was in that line.

The ideal bar doesn’t exist in America.

People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal.

…anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.

…the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.

The waves are Chinese but the earth is an Indian thing (note: in the book’s context, Indian meant Red Indian)

For the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me.

We agreed to love each other madly.

More later.

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I went to Hyd this week. In Hyd, I went to Snow-world and Ramoji film-city.

Snow-world was like a garage. It smelled like a refrigerator. And felt like one too. With all those yellow lights inside, it also resembled a studio. The ambience looked cute initially, with all those white smashed ice spread across the floor. But in a while, the artificiality of the place started getting on my nerves. Soon, from cute, the place turned ugly. And suffocating. And cold as hell. But we had a nice time till we moved out – bro, sis, ma, papa and I. It was funny to roam around in shining slithering red and blue jackets and hood caps.

The film-city were we went the next day was a funny place. We mostly moved around inside an AC bus and passed buildings that didn’t have rooms; only frontal facade with doors and windows. Then there were buildings with all faces different, like there was one with one face of that of airport, another of that of hospital and another of that of church.  These buildings were like adults. Fake and funny.

Then there were some shows in the Film-city – the action-show were chinkies in cowboy attires did some rather cool stunts, the dance show that was kinda boring and the most entertaining of them all – the Basanti show, where we were shown how green screens were used to edit video-backgrounds.

I had known the funda of green screens ever since I had known what Adobe Premiere was. But I liked the way they presented the funda anyway. A random lady from the audience was dressed as Basanti and made to sit inside a stationary wheel-less tanga. One could see a green screen behind the tanga. The wooden axle of the wheel-less tanga was long enough for Basanti’s husband to sit outside the camera frame and hold the axle and keep vibrating it, and thus the whole tanga in turn. And that’s what he did. Basanti in the mean time, kept  throwing the lagaam in air once in a while and kept turning back occasionally as if there were people chasing her. And as they kept doing this – Basanti and her husband,  a live video was started being projected on a screen behind them. In the video, the green background had been replaced by a video of a handful of dacoits riding horses. It was funny to see this live and most of us kept laughing throughout. Except Basanti and her husband who couldn’t really understand for a long time, what the whole laughing deal was all about (here’s a link to YT video).

There was nothing further spectacular in the Film-city to be written about. We mostly took pictures of each other with life-size putlas of Batman, Spiderman, The Mask and even Jackie Chan. We are cute family. LOL.

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And his body is in Irvine (USA) where he was pursuing his PhD (University of California). His name was Nai. Also Mahesh Mahadevan. He died on 10th April 2010 but his body was discovered few days later. If any of you reading this post knew him and liked him, and have some money with you, please contribute to this fund that shall help his body to be sent back to India. Thanks. And yes, most of us from IIT Madras are feeling sad and weird because of Nai’s untimely death – even people like me who mostly met him at Gurunath.

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UPDATE: there is an update to this post below – please do read it

Rashmi Bansal’s book launch was pretty depressing. Not for her. For me. I felt very awkward for some reason. I entered the shop – Crossword – and I found her inside. She didn’t recognize me. I didn’t bother to introduce myself anyway.  I never feel like to going to people and telling them who I am. The last I did that was in Bhubaneswar- may be because there was something pure and nice and child-like about Miss Short Story.

The book was formally launched after 10-15 minutes of my arrival. A couple of middle-aged and older men who had been featured in Rashmi’s new book – Connect the Dots – were present for the occasion. There were 20-30 onlookers too. The onlookers sat on the others side of the table on one of those white coloured fibre chairs. I was one of the onlookers. I could see a copy of the book lying in the lap of the guy sitting next to me. I asked him if I could check the book out. He passed on the book to me. I opened the book, saw my name written inside – just like it had been for SHSF – closed the book and returned it back to the dude. Believe me it feels good to see your name inside a book.

Rashmi and the middle aged and older men who had been featured in the book spoke for 2-3 minutes each. Then the question-hour session began. That was when I spoke to Rashmi for the first time. I asked her if the writer in her ever felt desperate to break-away from her “20-25 interviews put together as a book format”? She told me she didn’t need to break away from the format as long as the format worked. Hmm. She said she didn’t want to do anything new for the sake of doing something new. She said that her daughter (who was sitting on the other side of table along with other onlookers) wanted her to write book on vampires. I don’t know why she made this suggestion from her daughter sound very stupid and childish and all that. May be she was trying to confess to herself and to everyone else  present there at Crossword – in the most indirect way – that she wasn’t sure she could write any other kind of book anyway – like book on vampires. I found the writer in her scared – scared of being rejected – scared of being sneered at at by publishers who after having looked at a book on vampires by Rashmi Bansal, might casually tell her to stick to what she is good at. But then, not her fault. Even Amitabh Bachchan had to grow old before he could stop being the angry young man for Christ’s sake and could do roles like that of Auro.

Then there was this guy out there yesterday – yet another onlooker – who asked for the microphone during the QA session and declared to everyone that he didn’t intend to ask any question. He said he wanted to share his experience  of reading Stay Hungry Stay Foolish. In the next ten minutes, he did exactly that. And I felt very small.

So this guy passed out an year or two ago with a campus placement. In a month or two, he realized he didn’t want to keep going to a software company office day in and day out. So he chucked his job. He chucked the job and then he figured out he didn’t know what he wanted to do anyway. So he got pretty freaked up you know – depressed and all that. And then, suddenly he laid his hands on SHSF. He had never even read any novel before. In the four hours that he read that book, his life changed forever – that’s what he proclaimed yesterday. After having finished the book, he wrote an email to one of the guys featured in there who ran the Ekalavya school in Ahmedabad (still does). Mr. School owner replied back the next day. Within few days, our man reached Ahmedabad and was given shelter and job by Mr.  School owner. Ever since then, he has never felt that he does any work. – he loves his work so much. He thanked Rashmi for book and I could see Rashmi getting very senti and all that. I was getting a li’l senti myself. And feeling very small. Because it’s going to be almost two years now and I still go to my office day in and day out. And once in a while I design book-covers and go for book-launches where I don’t even feel like letting the author know who I am.

I thought it was going to be very rude and ill-mannered if I left the place without letting Rashmi know who I was even till the very end. Also, she had emailed me earlier that she would be passing a cheque to me. So I went to her a little while later – after the buzz of the book-buyers who wanted to have her signature on the book, calmed down a bit and the show almost approached its finishing edge. I went to her and grinned sheepishly – hey, this is Amrit. I guessed she had figured that out all this while anyway. I guessed so because she didn’t really seem surprised. Rather, she seemed slightly upset – may be because I hadn’t bothered to say hi to her earlier. After some time, everyone left. Rashmi and I talked for few minutes before that. I told her I would see what I could do with the cover of the third book. And then she left. She had forgotten to bring my cheque. She even forgot to pass on a copy of the book to me. That was kinda depressing you know. Or may be I was simply in a weird, awkward, lonely  bad mood yesterday evening. May be, after many years, when I look back at life, I shall be able to connect the dots.

PS: Rashmi – in case you end up reading this post, I want to let you know that I don’t hate you. Yesterday was just not my day.

UPDATE: I received my cheque and my copy of the book a few days later. Rashmi did end up reading this post, but thankfully she did not mind much. In a rather polite way, she explained to me that she was rather tired that day. We are still working on the cover of her third book.

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