Why watching Harry Potter in Mumbai is so bleh-blahh!

Part of watching a game in the stadium or doing yoga in a group or sitting in a satsang or watching a play at the theater or sitting in a music concert or going to a movie is the contributing factor of the group energy. The group, its collective appreciation, adds something to the whole experience. Comparable to or even better than having popcorn while watching an entertainer or wearing a good swimsuit when the body is toned:) It sort of completes the experience in a subtle but definite and powerful way.

Which is why it is always, for me, extremely disappointing to watch good films in Mumbai. Perhaps it is because of where I live -- Thakur village -- a place where English is really a foreign language. Where even teachers make the gaffe of calling kids, "ChildrenS!". Or perhaps, it is because the collective attention span of the average Mumbaikar is so limited that they cannot watch a film whose main strength may be its lines. Visual films make a bit hit here, I notice. However, if while attending a great visually strong film which also has super lines and you desperately wish for someone else to cackle along with you -- as while watching Shrek or Ice Age -- then you are a wishing for the impossible.

For instance, the latest Ice Age had so many great one-liners, what you may even call `Adult' jokes. However, the only time I caught even the teenagers laughing was at those slapstick moments intended to tickle the toddlers. When the toddlers laugh at those clownish pranks, everybody else is laughing!! But when those great one-liners intended to explode your funny bone roll off the screen, no one is laughing!! I remember the same thing at Shakespeare in Love -- feeling somehow of being in the minority appreciating those marvellous ageless lines as they rolled off the lips of the actors....

During Harry Potter, mid-way, you could hear most people talking loudly amongst themselves. Or making loud calls on their cell-phones.

Even the luxurious scenes of the film could not hold them, because most seemed not to follow or understand or bother to follow the film. The film had lost them. But since it was in the rave, must-see list people are going to say they saw it and how great it was.

Though this blog does sound snobbish about that sort of behavior, that is not the intention. It is just an expression of disappointment, that as a rule, since I have known it in Mumbai, only slapstick, or loud films seem to make an impact. That way, if you long for group enthusiasm in a cinema hall -- forget it. You might as well be the only one munching popcorn and having a great time watching a great film. But you cannot even make-believe that way, to shut out the rest of crowd. Because everybody else is determindedly ruining that for you, by walking about, desperately ordering samosas, or mobile-phoning away as if they were in an open park ....

Borivli National Park, on a wet Sunday

We were at the national park this Sunday. It was drippy green, brilliantly green, wet and looked like an overgrown jungle it was. I remember when we had first visited it we had spotted feeding deer, and were very charmed. In the monsoon too, on the several times we'd been there, we saw exotic mushrooms looking webbed white against dark, mossy trunks. Overgrown bamboos,burdened with their own extravagance, slumping elegantly. Groups from all over the city, all classes, trekking safely along the tarred roads, or eating their packed lunches, and guzzling booze from ill-concealed plastic bottles with deliberately misleading labels like Pepsi (instead of Old Monk:).
Kids, adults, groups of men -- loud, boisterous, drunk but jovial -- keeping within the limits of social good behavior since police vans are patrolling to ensure that there is no drunken mishap...

The monsoon this season has been weak, half-hearted, so the water levels in the otherwise dry rivulets did not surge abundantly as in the previous years. Only ankle level.There were no fishes yet, nibbling at our toes,in those little pools these temporary rivers form. We sat on the gushing water, as crickets chirped over the water's soft sweet rush. We ate our food and felt child-like. The men got drunk, but that is another story...

A visit to the Borivli National Park is a must. Ideally you must take a vehicle. Keep to the tarred roads. Going too deep or off the trails can be risky if you have a boisterous group that cannot contain itself. The rocks can get slippery. The rivulets can turn treacherously fast. The rocks are moving with the water, and walking barefoot in them could mean cut feet.. and when u walk with sandals you cannot quite gauge where to place your feet in that shifting surface.

Also, groups of men can get annoyingly boisterous(Middle-aged Indian men can act like teenagers in such occasions that it can be quite a kill-joy), so keeping to sides where people are, can ensure safety if you have women with you. Not all people immediately rush to your aid if there is a problem, but I remember once, here, when our car tyres got stuck in the mud and the men with us did not know to manoever the vehicle, some boys gamely lifted it out to safety....

All in all, only one of those few ways you can get back to nature in this concrete jungle -- a wet day in the monsoons, at the Borivli National Park...

Handwriting hassles in heartbreak city

Free MySpace Animations!My handwriting keeps changing. My Lic agent always says that when I sign a chq ... However, I know that a handwriting specialist will be able to decipher that it is the same person signing it. So I am not too bothered about that: I know I can get away with that shaky signature of a person who has not made up her mind what to be.
But this can be a tough one. I remember at my bank locker, the bank staffer looked oddly at me and with concealed irritation and archness asked me if I remember my full signature:) She must have thought, with the increasing prejudice my community draws, that I was just another illiterate in western clothes...
Any case, I am teaching a young boy to read and write English. At 26 and not having attended school as a kid, he is rather vulnerable though full of dreams. He signs his name with capital letters and small ones all jumbled up, but painfully separate. It looks like that of a four-year-old. Before I started him on cursive writing, which has not advanced further than `f', I warned him that he must remember his current signature clearly.Otherwise he will have problems at the bank or with other official stuff he has signed, using that childish scrawl. He grinned. He said he knows that already, how important it is to stick to his signature. One of his friends, also uneducated has had a problem at his bank. His account his now locked since his current signature is not matching his earlier one!!
Life...

This city is so full of people who come like that ... from small towns with big dreams...If that ever changes this would not be the Mumbai that is so beloved to all of us...If we could -- all of us who love it -- keep it clean, warm and safe it would be our tribute to this beautiful city ..

Leaking blankets, rain and a weird dampness

I picked up these blankets at D'Mart a few months back. New and wrapped and unused, I finally unravelled them for the monsoon when I need over four-five thick blankets to keep me from the dampness and chill. However, something peculiar about these bed-sheet-cum-blanket. They are oozing moisture. First time, feeling lazy and sluggish, before going to bed, about two hours ahead I spread all the blankets the way I liked them, layered, so that when I felt like hitting the sack, I could just slide in underneath them. It felt damp that night. I did not pay much heed since I thought it was the weather. Feeling quite sick for the next day or so, I shivered through two nights till I realised that the bed also was feeling distinctly wet and not just damp. Amazingly, there were wet patches on the mattresses. Since I am not not (yet) incontinent I wondered at that, and put a yoga mat on top of it, thinking I may have inadvertently left a window open that day when the monsoon descended... But the wet patch kept spreading.And with the other bed sheets feeling damp I was distinctly uncomfortable. I put all of them on my clothes drier, to dry them out. And amazingly found dribbles of a brownish sticky water oozing from the ends of each of these blankets.
Seems something in the blanket was trapping moisture from the atmosphere. Both blankets continued to leak this way while they hung up... and left an unmistakeable trail of water on the floor. Strange. I was glad I had not kept these blankets with expensive clothes, since they could have stained them... I have now dumped both blankets ...
Anybody has any explanation to this strange behavior of my blankets? I am all ears:)

Elpehantine garlands, only from Tamil Nadu

My husband and I got married here Matunga). Apart from the register marriage (where the registrar HAD to be given a box of sweets:) we had several ceremonies, simple, often just the two of us and two stragglers, either family or friends... because we were Muslim and Hindu. I was cooking for the friends and families, so it was not a wedding in the usual fairy tale fashion -- but it felt right:)

Any case, we bought garlands hereabouts I remember, at Matunga's flower stalls. Those were small garlands unlike the usual big, elephantine ones that are on sale here... Tamils, it seems, like their women, and their garlands, big!

I remember in Tamil Nadu, my father, a government official, would often be felicitated at speechifying functions with these enormous garlands. For days the house would reek of mogra,jasmine, roses, and the intoxicating lilies. We little girls used to try to retrieve some of those golden threads, complete flowers ... but that was always an effort. It bothered me that so many flowers could be cut off for a momentary felicitation where the man, burdened by the garland, would keep it aside, not to look at it again. We human beings.
But at least at Matunga the garlands are being made for god. And for marrying couples.
For couples, somehow, that makes sense... some moments to be remembered in a flush of floral bouquet... moments that reek of jasmine, roses and sticky sweet lilies whose fragrance lasts and lasts...
But that day, this year, last month Matunga's flower stalls were smelling of roses. Hey, if there is a floral association to be made that with Tamil Nadu, then it has to be jasmine. That way Matunga has changed -- from mogra to roses:(

Lying back to watch a film: cinema in style!!

Oh we were at the new cinema hall, Kulraj broadway (Kandivli East, Thakur village, off the western expressway). To watch Kambhakt Ishq. And see what we got for Rs 175 per ticket. Recliners. Amazing. At button push you are lying on your back and watching films,with a snack table attached to your chair, and waiters taking orders (heavens, that means I don’t have to stand in Queues where Indians have made it an art to jump) , and popcorn for Rs 55 and Iced tea for Rs 50 ( a tall glass) and samosas (WARMMM!!!) for Rs 30 only.
The recliners are an event clearly. At In Orbit cinema we pay Rs 180, but no recliners. The recliners – called Gold something – is around Rs 400 I think… I am being vague because it was so expensive that after asking once we have not even thought of it, with our middle class wallets and deprived class mentality. At PVR, which my tight-fisted husband cribs is very high, is Rs 200, no recliners etc. A fantastic theater, he concedes while clutching on to that wallet…
I liked the crowd too… something clean, not grabbing as I felt at the Shivam Vishnu hall, also closeby in Thakur village. Interestingly that is the experience all the women acquaintances who have been there and who have not wanted to go back. Not many like the Thakur Cinema too… smelly, now, with rats and the airconditioning sometimes flowing late if the crowd is thin… Suburban theaters each have their own personality. Some have become seedy… and I hope the Kulraj broadway does not go that way…

Ayyappan Tiffin Center: Madras food in Mumbai

Told u, was at Matunga -- generally to get a Chennai-feel, since my kid is there now:)
And at the Ayyappan Tiffin Center, at Telang Road, at Sankara Matam, had quite a feel of it, with all those South-Indian snacks. With some strange Mumbai concoctions: Pizza dosa (yuck!), Pickle dosa (tickles that tongue), and the usual suspects like Paneer dosa. But when you are nostalgic you don't want to experiment and settle for that simple good old food that your mother made and at which you turned your nose.. Can U imagine? Sometimes when I salivate over the stuff which I rejected as a kid, I wonder what perverse twist of fate makes me yearn for it now? My kid does/did the same thing with me. Karmic backlash. I tell her too:)

So yes, Pongal with sambar dripping over it, and some coconut chutney. My husband has his fav vada -- that lentil variation which you do not get anywhere except in a pure South Indian spot (another snacks joint that serves that up is the Dosa counter at the food court of Inorbit). I became greedy,and overordered (the excuses of pining women worldwide) and ordered an unending Ayyappan Special dosa which was filled with all sorts of spicy things and which made me feel very bloated... Avoidable experience -- though the dosa may be shared by four sparse eaters.

Palak dosa too! Though I mercifully resisted the urge for that one.

The center also caters apparently.

• A cute appeal: To park the vehicles elsewhere before coming over to eat here!
• The waiters, at this roadside stall, have their own uniform (See image!!).
• We managed to overeat, two of us, at Rs 60 for both. If you ate wisely (which I did not) you can finish a good meal for half that price!

Roadside food - I missed that at Chennai definitely though they have their stalls all over the place which seem, at the outset, to be male-dominated. Chennai-in-Mumbai is my style really:)