Saturday, May 8, 2010

Westminster curry

Can't help putting in my paisa-worth here as Westminster seems headed for coalition politics. But what's coalition politics without drama from the likes of Mamata, Lalu, Mayawati and Amma?

Monday, April 5, 2010

Things that Happen When Falling in Love

This is an event I will not be able to attend, but it has left me longing for a magic carpet. So here I post it for anyone who can make it to Gateshead, UK, betwen 2 April and 20 June. SIGH! [I literally sighed as I wrote that.]

Things that Happen When Falling in Love
Installation with Video, Photographs, Sculpture & Text by Raqs Media Collective

Venue: The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art,
Town/City: Gateshead-on-Tyne, United Kingdom
Time: Exhibition runs from 2 April – 20 June 2010


In early April 2009 the last of the distinctive Titan cranes from the Tyneside Swan Hunter shipyard in Newcastle (UK) were loaded up onto a heavy load vessel and sailed out of the River Tyne. These vast iconic forms were dismantled and shipped to a new life at the Bharati shipyard on the west coast of India. This narrative forms one of the starting points of a new installation - Things that Happen When Falling in Love by Raqs Media Collective.

The installation brings together words, ships and people on the move to create an image of a world where the fortunes of both love and labour are framed and dismantled by global forces. It is an attempt to come to terms with the fact that we finally learn to value a history only when [we] consider its departure, its passage away from our lives.

Things that Happen When Falling in Love reveals the emotional undertow of Capitalism’s wake as it traverses continents and histories. The North East of England and the West Coast of India are drawn together experientially through industrial and geographical change. The passage of a ship bridges this transformation.

In their notes towards the making of this work, Raqs write, “Like on-shore sweethearts bidding farewell to men in sailing ships, the world watches its own histories float away. Sometimes, when finally falling in love, only the words for knowing loss and longing remain.”

Friday, February 26, 2010

Phantom of the Opera



After several attempts to get tickets to what has become Broadway's longest running show, we finally got there on a very snowy evening in New York. Around 1991 or so --because I think this was just before the Gulf War--when I was searching for recordings of Pepe Jaramillo, in my enthusiasm for the piano, a shopowner in Shyambazar where I grew up, recommended Richard Clayderman. I listened to the tracks from Phantom of the Opera not knowing any more than that it was a musical. I liked the music, liked Clayderman, but still pined for Jaramillo. I haven't found more of Jaramillo than what I grew up listening to. The yearning for more of Pepe on the piano remains for I have always thought he must have been very interesting not only to listen to live, but watch. So on a day when my Facebook status update says that I am in a 'Phantom of the Opera state of mind', I must tag this post with Calcutta... like so many other posts.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Sthaniya Sambaad


The makers of Sthaniya Sambaad wanted, the blurb said, to make a film on Calcutta, for they felt that somehow contemporary cinema from the region has forgotten the city, and at a time when the cityscape is changing rapidly. I realized it has been a long time since I watched a film on Calcutta, that is, one that is explicitly concerned with the city. That, and the fact that I would be getting to watch a newly made Bengali film, and Moinakda’s film, sitting in New York. I have not been his student, but Jadavpur ties beckon. Growing up as a ghoti in North Calcutta though, I have experienced only second-hand the displacement across the Bengal border that ensued with Partition—through novels, autobiographies, memoirs, history, film, and narratives of family-friends, and later, my in-laws.

As I watched the film, and tried to understand the colony’s fascination with Park Street, I realized once again how much my North Calcutta middle-class ghoti femaleness marks my sense of the city. Park Street with its bars and restaurants was for the likes of me a forbidden adult world until I earned a little money, and the placeholder of the colony’s fascination with Park Street was instead New Market and Chowringhee, where one could make periodic, chaperoned forays. Prithviraj glossed Park Street for me anew—how his friends from the colony, where the film is mainly set, had this thing about visiting Park Street. Park Street, New Market, Chowringhee…the white town, sahebpara as we would often hear it referred to, the colonizer’s part of Frantz Fanon’s Manichean colonial city. Over the years other indices of Manichean division are becoming increasingly visible in the cityscape. My teenage having passed in the pre-mobile, pre-Barista, pre-shopping mall era, I too feel out of place nowadays in pockets of my own city. Planned housing in Calcutta in the years of my growing up meant Salt Lake; it has since come to mean these townships like New Town mushrooming around the peripheries of the city occasioning new narratives of displacement. The fact that this glitzy new Calcutta is part of our everyday lives through page three—even for readers like me at a distance—only serves to intensify the sense of disjuncture. Go towards City Centre entering Salt Lake by the inlet leading from EM Bypass into DA block: the stark contrast between the shanties and wayside shops and the Calcutta of the shopping malls strikes you immediately. I have sometimes wondered in recent years how much these changes register in cultural production from the city. In scripting the latest bit in the narrative of a particular local iteration of modernity, Sthaniya Sambaad takes up these questions head on.

Literally meaning 'local news,' the title of the film accrues a poignancy as the perspective of the displaced like Atin remains marginal to the city's narrative of development. The scene at Olypub is telling in this respect. As Atin's half-aware affection for Ananya makes him impatient to resume their search for her, city academics and intellectuals sit chatting over drinks at the table behind theirs, and who knows, probably over the very issues that are causing the likes of Atin to be displaced yet again. The film sensitively leaves a subtle gap between the subaltern and the intellectual. While Atin makes his first foray into that bit of the white town that has become a haunt for those who think alternatively, if his sensitivity resonates with the concerns of the intellectuals, his repressive Bengali middle-class sense of propriety marks his distance from them—the fact that Dipankarda is able to appreciate Atin's appraisal of Ananya's swanlike neck, and his preference for alcohol, outrage him. In nursing his secret attraction for Ananya amid the noisy inanities of urban development, Atin would remind Eng Lit types of the questing boy-hero in James Joyce's 'Araby'.

It was a wee bit strange to see in a film faces I know—Saswatada as music teacher, Subham Ray Chowdhury on the perch, the actor cast as Ananya’s sister, Bodhisattva Kar, Manas Ray, Shibajida at Olypub, and Bratya Basu. I am not acquainted with all of them, but know some of them from my years at Jadavpur, or have heard about from friends, or have seen them on television, or on Orkut and Facebook, and know one of them as a celebrity neighbour. These familiar faces also lend some more reality to the film for me while the two absurd characters, and denizens of the colony make their journeys into Park Street. Having married into a bangal family that located on Jheel Road, I have some sense of the peripherality of the colony in the film. The lanes look familiar though I don’t know Deshbandhu colony that well. And the CPM folk—as Moinak Biswas put it, during the post-screening discussion—you can’t live with them or without them, because they have become so much a part of the props.

This post has been churning in my head for a while, and now as I am writing, spring is literally erupting all over India… days after a goon associated with the Vedic Village episode has been killed. My mother-in-law is preparing for her special puja for Dol in the Jheel Road house. At Shantiniketan, Dol has begun much earlier in the morning with the prabhatpheri… khol dwar khol, laglo je dol…

28 February 2010

© Text: DURBA BASU 2010

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Baby Soda



After making a trip to Manhattan only to be baulked out of watching John Cassavetes' Love Streams (1984) when a screening was cancelled at the last minute, I decided to take the train back from Union Square, in the hope that the general liveliness of the milieu might enliven me. I was all the more disappointed because I had braved a big snowstorm that was forecast for later in the evening. And Union Square did live up to expectation, for there was the Baby Soda band playing lively jazz. So I stopped to take pictures on my mobile, and gave to myself one of their CDs up for sale. In the picture above, they are playing a soulful number.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Disappearing Professions in Urban India

Exhibition of photographs by Clair Arni
Seagull
6-14 February 2010

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

From the intended muffin...

I keep getting asked why I chose www.intendedmuffin.blogspot.com as the URL for this blog. I have for long thought about devoting a blogpost to the question, but have not got round to doing it. The truth is that this blog began on the same day as my baking misadventures. I had decided to use a sponge cake recipe to bake muffins, and even before they went into the oven, I knew they wouldn’t come out as intended. I began the blog as the ‘intended’ muffins baked. They finally turned out to be flat, soft but not spongy. Too soft to be cookies and not soft enough to be muffins. So depending on how you looked at them, you could call them intended muffins or accidental cookies. Since my blog was to be preoccupied with perspective, I thought 'intendedmuffins' would do very well for a name.

I am finally writing this post just after having baked my first perfect cake yesterday. It has been a long way from the intended muffins to the proper cake, with another misadventure in between, earlier this month, when I was stingy with butter. I thank my dear friend Amrita for generously sharing with me her grandmother’s tips and her own expertise, on the fine art of baking. I thank Debarati and Prithviraj for encouraging me to buy bakeware when I was hesitating. And thanks also to this recipe that I used with some modifications.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Edge of Faith

Exhibition at Seagull, 23 January - 2 February, 2010.
Click on image for details

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival, 15-17 January 2010

This event is open to all. Please find cards below: