Pyaala

From you library, Maden?

This is the latest on the Kohi... Mero front: a poster! In 2010, Love will find you.

Yeah. That's exactly what is going to happen. But only if you buy tickets and watch it in the theaters. That will be the biggest reason why *I* will go to watch it, day after day. I will stand outside with over-sized glasses, pretending to hide from the masses, but not really, only casually mentioning to every pretty woman in the audience that I just might be the person with his name on the poster... Yup. That is the plan.

Utsav--I was in your institution's library, waiting for Vijay Khadgi. There was time to kill, so I thought checking my mail was a good idea. NTGK was frantically reworking the questions to ask the experts, and I had an assignment to finish, although I didn't quite know how to tackle it [a commercial website's front-page... I couldn't think of a way of finishing it]. So, I thought I'd post a cheeky little message to you. So I did, calling the blog post "Blogging from ICI***"

As a joke, I wrote: I am posting from ICI*** library's "research" computer stations, misusing the resources. It took people in your office less than five minutes to hunt me down with a print-out of the posting, green high-lights over the offensive words, phrases that made the institution look bad, I guess. It was scary--either they were monitoring all traffic from the library [I had been answering some rather personal emails], or they have some way of knowing whenever ICI*** gets mentioned on the web.

"I guess, as an institution you can't afford to have a sense of humor," I said to the person who'd accosted me with the printout. He was huffing in anger, as if the sky had come crashing down on his head. There was a long "hehehehehe" after the sentence that mentioned "misuse," but nobody was hehehe'ing with me, it seems.

So I had to deleted the post. I am surprised you got an alert about the post and the authorities didn't rain down upon you with all of their wrath.

It is a nice place, ICI***, but a tad too sensitive, it seems. Very helpful people, of course. But, surely, they aren't infallible in what they do. I wonder how well they take criticism of the scholarship they produce, if they can't let a chappal-padkaoing freelance writer hehehehe from their library computers.

So you be careful, too, Maden! You are deep in the draconian lair!

hehehehehe...

Photos by Deepak Shah

Kalakar took these pictures in Bandipur... Prasanna and I had been imbibing, and it wasn't easy following Deepak over all those rocks, scrambling through scratchy brambles, walking with a sweaty pair of feet in thin chappals, but the reward was fitting: rocks shaped by sun and wind and rain, two valleys sweeping to giant, distant ranges, nothing but the breeze to listen to, a hawk so meditative and playful that it reduced the entire text of Johnathan Livingstone Seagull to a punctuation mark.

I must have sucked my stomach in for the photos.

Kohi ... Mero

www.kohimero.com

Expect a music release party soon, which is to say, a party for me, and for you, the music to be available in the market... there are a few very melodious songs in the movie. I near frightened Moitra yesterday, trying to sing a song from the movie, my ineptitude compounded by the fact that I had forgotten both the words and the tune...

It is possible I will get to see the final edit of the movie soon [before the background score is put in, and before the final, final version is prepared], because it might be able to use a few more lines of writing, and I still have to do the English subtitles, anyway. That is going to be a weird ride: translating into English the dialogues I originally wrote in Nepali [which the actors improved, no doubt]. It will become painfully apparent to me how terribly or how well I write dialogue.

When work is play

That false adage about finding something you love to do so it never feels like work...

No matter how much I love what I do, there are days when it does feel like work, especially when the bitch [that is, my professed art and craft and cloak of self-definition] don't give me no lovin' right back. These have been just such days.

In case you are in Kathmandu on the 21st, come to QC in Jawlakhel for the Tavern Tales... or, it might be at the Indian Embassy Library, at Sundhara. Best thing to do while there--wander out and keep a sharp eye out for second-hand fiction books...

I picked up The Friendly Brook and Other Stories by R. Kipling from there for Rs 60. By far the most rewarding collection of short fiction I have read in years. He proves to me the utility behind the longevity of a writer's career, the importance of speech and sound in enfolding a multitude of ideas into one expression, and the need for a mind that is expansive but acute, as a preparation for a career writing fiction.

Maia R. Lee is an painter/poet preparing for a solo exhibition in about two months. She gave me A Clockwork Orange to read. I had always only browsed through the book, reading no more than a few pages at a time, loving instead the Kubrick movie, never feeling anything on the page really tug at the mind. I have to say the most interesting bit about this edition of the novel was not the novel itself, but the introduction by Anthony Burgess where he details his choices. Sometimes--with Kipling, for instance--the work is much larger than the writer, the mind is the basis and not the flourish. Other times, the mind is the flourish and the work is subservient to it. That is what it felt like, reading the novel. A very good read, no doubt, but nothing like reading Kipling.

Many readers of the book seem to think that Burgess achieves something quite grand by the way of a linguistic experiment in the book. I would invite these readers to search the stories by Kipling for real writerly work done with language--the living, actual, spoken language, what we call dialects, and see how much more can be achieved with a just pair of ears and some affection for the vessel and table called language.

Khadgadevi's Temple

Deepak took this photo in Bandipur.

We'd just spent the afternoon scrambling over rain-sculpted, razor-sharp rocks, following goat-trails over a ridge, admiring Prasanna's sunglasses.

Back!

I am back!

I plan on not telling anyone about the renaissance of my poor blog. Mostly because there is not much to write about these days--I have tired of writing about Kathmandu, or my work [and lack thereof]; and I am working towards yet another movie script that can't be discussed. A man who sits at his desk all day and has nothing new to say--not very exciting read, is it?

But,

I can talk about Dalan, the tele-serial by Nabin Subba and Aahuti and Jagaran Media, for which I am engaged in writing English subtitles. The work is in turns tedious and heart-rending. I haven't finished much of it, and I can't post clips from Dalan here, but the more I think of the work, the more I have been consumed by the notion that a novelization would be a great idea. It could go episodically, perhaps start as short stories by a handful of writers who take an an episode and make it into a short story.

I doubt if you, who've come to this blog, have seen Dalan. However, there are over 400 "Dalan Film Clubs" around the world now. Once the tele-serial gets translated, it should reach more people. But, a chapter-by-chapter novelization would reach even more people, I think, from it being available as text.

In any case, here I am now.