muted thoughts.

stuff.

K. — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:54:12 +0000

My parents place is clean and disinfection.

There’s no space for useless kuppai here.

Can someone please gift me these? Or atleast one of them? Okthankyou.

K. — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 14:47:33 +0000

Nostalgia overload

K. — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:09:18 +0000

Cleaned the corner cupboard after five years of dumping memorable stuff into it and closing it.

I have test papers from my sixth standard. Board papers. My first ever butter sheet. The entire design process of my nursery school. Photographs of my brother and I. Eight rupees fifty paisa. Cinderella. And tons and tons of things that I once felt I had to preserve forever for some sort of identity.

I threw most of it out today.

The camel is out. And the lion’s just getting started.

I live in a house that shifts and lives and breathes.

K. — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:59:27 +0000

The tube light in my room didn’t work for three weeks in a row. It did the next day and the day after. It quit working again. But it’s back on now.

Between the white and orange and green ink that’s spilled on my white board and yellow book, I wonder about a world without defined colour or light.

Some questions on tradition, architecture and traditional architecture.

K. — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:53:18 +0000

The word Neo-Conservation was something I never understood. Not the idea behind it, but rather what it sought to converse. When Yoko Ono and John Lennon started one of their many infamous campaign/exhibition art about protecting the family, they weren’t talking in the same lines as, say Mrs. B from a Bible Belt state who thought divorce is a sin.

The same closer home. Heritage, Culture and Tradition are words you are bound to hear everyday in India. Hear, Experience, Feel, See. With a history spanning more than more than three millennia, with more than thousand different philosophies, it is hard not to. The most truthful cliché about India is that it is a land of contradictions. The land of Jhansi Rani, Durga, Mira Bai and countless satis. The land of Khajuraho, Osho and the most stringent censors. The land of Vinoba Bhave and Bhagat Singh. Of Balasaraswati and Rukmini Devi. Of Deivadasis and Devadasis. Every story, every legend, every history is a tradition.

So when we talk about heritage, conservation and tradition, which tradition are we talking about? The one where women were burned at their husband’s funeral oyre or the one where a sexually liberated dancer was the most respected person in society?

Every history and tradition has its good parts and bad. And the problem is, no one can agree on which is what. So how to do then decide on what can be ‘conserved’ and what cannot be? Was Constantinople recaptured or did Constantinople fall?

overheard in the nook of a million nerves.

K. — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 05:57:39 +0000

‘Are you arrogant enough to think that you have the power to actually make the building’s user walk in the exact same route you want her to? Or are you just plain fascists to even want to control the way a person perceives a space. Whatever happened to free will and independent thought? Or am I talking about outdated notions here?!?!?!?’ Then stop telling me how you think the user would feel when he walks into the space you’ve designed. There is no software by which you can determine that, no calculations. I’ve seen the happiest people in a shack and the most miserable people in some of the best buildings in the world. I’ve seen a beautiful nursery becoming a meth lab, and I’ve heard the best performance of Di Sarli in a stinky alley. Space is mute, space is silent, spaces don’t communicate, spaces are neutral. BUT. They can help people communicate. If any of your designs ever get realised, and looking at this bunch, I hope not, and if you ever see two people having a dialogue, not incidentially, but intentionally, then call yourself an architect. Don’t sit here, tell me that a three second walk down the corridor is going to change a person’s life forever.’

I don’t have poetry or pretty words.

K. — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:39:24 +0000

They wanted me out tonight. I guess it was a sort of goodbye. Goodbyes are a safety measure. There are no expectations and even if something unexpected happens, there are no regrets. And goodbyes are much more dramatic.

The thing is the closer it get’s to the date of departure, the more I want to stay away from people.

I said I don’t want to go out tonight. Why don’t you want to spend time with me, she asked.

I’ll walk with you in Auroville. I’ll watch that awful Soleri documentary with you. I’ll shoot with you in George Town. I’ll sketch with you in Triplicane. I’ll share lime juice with you in Tea Kadai. I’ll make a bamboo bed with you in your terrace. I’ll eat bajji with you in the beach.

I don’t want my goodbyes with a group of strangers. I’d rather tell you see you later, one friend at a time.

Three days of hard hitting reality. Bare facts laid out in front of you.

K. — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 14:11:13 +0000

We live in times of great depravity, of great betrayal. Every thing has an issue – a cause, an attempt of a cure, and effects. Effects aren’t changes in perception anymore. Effects are a boy born without eyes, or with no nails or hair. Effects are a bad caricature of humans. Effects is to deny the touch of another. Effects are to label love as a shame and dishonor. To love isn’t to support, it is to suffocate. Noble intentions have killed more people than outright malice. To protect is to deny.

There were thousands of numbers I heard those three days. Numbers that should have made me want to kill myself, numbers that showed me the difference between the oppressors and the our supporters was non existent, numbers that shattered any illusion I continued to have about this country. Numbers that should have made me turn in despair. But those three days I saw hope.

Hope isn’t high energy or amusement or excitement or pace. Hope is a tall man riding a bicycle everywhere. Hope is the basket in his back made by a hungry woman who didn’t understand the difference between sad or happy, where the daughter wasn’t once wasn’t his, but now theirs forever can laugh at the lunacy that her brave father fights. Hope is the love he shares for his brother, whom his family told him was incapable of touch. Hope is the fat woman who can understand water as much as she can understand how to talk to the man who wants to destroy it. Hope is the big smile on her face when she performs a song from her home, a home that was destroyed so that I can wear ten clothes a day. Hope is the boy who told non existing people to pluck hair when they tried to buy his submission. Hope is the woman who walked into her greatest nightmare to find her biggest dream. Hope is the woman who quit her job to drag those minions into court every other day, even if you and I think it’s pointless.

Hope is the most courageous people I’ve met, sitting in the small farm in the midst of the goldmine, listening to the grasshoppers.

Things to remember before you let her break your heart again.

K. — Thu, 20 May 2010 09:16:43 +0000

Last day at Geeta’s class, the unwanted published material, the cold blooded censorship of innocent ramblings, kashmir, move back to an emply heartless bungalow, one million broken promises, tennis lessons that never happened, spanish lessons that never happened.

seeeeeeekeeek

K. — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:50:33 +0000

Been roaming lately. Not someplace specific. Or for the sake of it. But I’ve been roaming around town, much to my mother’s displeasure. She’s convinced that I’m going to die of sun stoke. I’m looking for something, I’m not sure what. But I didn’t find it in lunch with friends, an entire day walking down memory lane with my grandfather (as amazing that was), or sketching at a temple or in a drunken haze.

I can’t sit at home. Nothing to do with boredom or my grandmother. It’s this something that doesn’t mind walking out at 2:30PM without lunch just cause I was in a hurry to go somewhere else and do something else.

V says I suffer from chronic dissatisfaction. I think she’s watched Vicky Cristina BArcelona way too many times.