Stuff and nonsense

While I am delighted at the spread of my last post (the more people who know, the better), I was also getting sort of sick of seeing his face pop up each time I opened my blog, so it’s time, therefore, for a new post! Boy, I’ve had one hell of a crazy week. Two things crossed off my life list, if I was one of those people who had a life list.

 

I seem to have become a book launch-er. That is, someone who launches books. You know, the person sitting all calm and collected next to the author, offering questions and little insights, selling the book where the author may be too shy to. It was a sort of odd experience for me (one book done last weekend, another next week), because for the first time ever, I was sitting in a bookshop, by the microphone and not talking about myself. Wow. I know, right? Narcissist, much? There’s a trick to launching like anything else, and in this case, I’m going with the funny. People like to laugh, people like to laugh more when you provide some gentle humour, allow them to feel connected with the author, and at this point, they were sort of my audience as well. Plus, when I got out of Crossword, I noticed they had very kindly placed my books up front to sell as well, so win-win.

 

Then, I judged a debate. This is something that was a little hard for me, because a) I’m all about the non-confrontation and b) I sincerely believe that I’m going to be one of those parents who keeps telling their kids that LIFE is not a COMPETITION, that EVERYONE wins and so on. Sadly, when you’re judging, someone has to lose. The first team that we declared the losers, were very nice about it, came and shook our hands with grace but the second team, DUUUUUUDE, if looks could kill. They stomped off the stage, without even looking at us and I felt terrible. So not judging again. Unless I’m judging grown ups, where everyone has to smile big even if they feel awful.

 

This week, I’ve also been meeting loads of new people. Yes, it’s tourist time again in our tropical city, and that means that the next few months will be filled with activity and new people and parties for any random excuse. Good times! But that also means my self imposed deadline (finishing book 3 by my 29th birthday) is going to be harder than I thought.

 

Oh, also, I went to this art gallery thing all the way in Chinchpokli last Friday. We were supposed to go for the show, but after driving around for a couple of hours, missed the art part completely, and found ourselves just in time for the after party. Which was BRILLIANT. It was in this furniture store, sort of like a warehouse, hidden away unless you were looking for it, lights and candles everywhere, rose petals, throbbing music, and men walking around offering you cotton candy or popcorn. And, er, wine, of course. I had the best time. Now that’s what I call an after party. But if you’re looking to see the show (which I believe was very good) here’s a story a friend did about it.

 

Also, because of growing demand, I’ve decided to have the Grand Creative Writing Workshop II. Specifics, as before: three hours of intensive writing and critique, some writing exercises, and tips on how to get published and the best things for your career as a writer, all for a bargain price of Rs 1500. I’m thinking Sunday, October 3rd, so email quick: thecompulsiveconfessorATgmailDOTcom if you want to sign up. (I realise it’s short notice, so if there are enough people wanting to make a case for October 10, that’s next Sunday, I’ll switch to next week.)

Do you know this man?

My friend Ira is a lovely person. You’d like her, if you ever met her. She’s got all the old fashioned virtues of kindness and warmth and trust—stuff that no one seems to have anymore. BB and I had made it our mission to find her someone (the occupation of bored monogamous friends everywhere, I think) and were very pleased and curious when she announced to us a couple of months ago that she had “met someone”. It sounded like the meeting of your dreams—well, of our dreams anyway—you’re in a bookshop, you look up, make eye contact with a man and before you know it, you’re chatting away about books and life, and you’re making your purchases together and he’s taking down your number and it’s all very rom-com.

 

His name, he told her, was Anirudh Aiyar. He was a former vice president of something or the other over at Goldman Sachs in New York, now back in Bombay to set up a graphic novel publishing house. HIs education was impeccable—Oxford, LSE, Harvard Business School. He had a huge apartment in Breach Candy, which you could only enter with an access code and was a member at all the right places. We all met him, over the course of the next couple of weeks, Ira had never looked so happy, and he said all the right things. Except when he didn’t. The first time a little red flag popped up in my mind is when I tried to bring the conversation round to publishing—you know, this new industry he wanted to be a part of—not only was I shut down immediately, he also didn’t seem to have heard of Persepolis, that graphic-novel-for-non-graphic-novel readers. That was weird.

 

Then, it just started getting more and more fantastic. I began to notice that while he spoke about his $14 million settlement from Goldman Sachs, he never seemed to have any cash. He spoke about buying three cars—a BMW, a Porsche and a Jaguar—and went everywhere by rickshaw. He said, “You should all come over to my house and look at the Raja Ravi Varma’s I’ve acquired” and no invitation followed. Sure, he had pretty pat excuses for everything—a psycho ex fiancee had apparently broken into his house and cut up all his credit cards. She was also the reason he couldn’t keep his cellphone on. Or the reason he couldn’t party in South Bombay (“The press might see me”). Then his interior designer eloped, leaving his flat half done. Then, the ex trashed the bathroom of the Bombay Gymkhana (where he had put her up) and he had to pay Rs 2.5 lakh to have it fixed and was on probation so he couldn’t go there anymore.

 

I wasn’t the only one to notice all these little discrepancies. Ira noticed them too, but by then, she liked him a whole lot and was willing to take his excuses into consideration. When he kept breaking dates with her however—dates that involved fancy restaurants and not just sitting in her flat—she decided to call it off. And that was around the time that we discovered that Bombay Gymkhana? Has no rooms. A friend played detective and looked him up on the Willingdon club members list: he wasn’t listed. We all Googled him in vain, but apart from a Facebook profile (from where this photo is) and one defunct LinkedIn one, it was as if the man didn’t exist. “How is it possible?” I asked Ira, “If he is who he says he is, and also it’s almost impossible to not have a web presence these days.” No search results came back from the Oxford website either.

 

And through it all, he kept promising Ira that she’d see, the proofs would follow,etc etc. To give her credit, she did cut off all contact with him, until he emerged a couple of weeks later and told her he was dying. An old spinal injury had come up, a carbon injection had to be shot into his spine. Ira was terrified and heartbroken, she stayed in contact with a “friend” of his, who gave her updates via email. At one point, the friend said, “The heart monitor has stopped, it’s all over”. Imagine receiving that news. Imagine the regret and guilt you’d be filled with. But no, he didn’t die, he came miraculously back to life, she got him from the hospital the same day and didn’t question why he didn’t need any post-op care. Then, when she had more questions, his heart needed a something or the other. Then it was his brain. Finally, he told her he had 72 hours to live.

 

Ira’s a pretty smart young woman though. “Enough”, she told herself, and set about doing some research. And she had just received an email from an old colleague asking if she knew anyone called Anirudh Aiyar. Apparently, he had walked into an office in Marine Lines, told them he had just returned from the US, and all his bags had been stolen and he needed 500 rupees to get to the airport. He had offered his Facebook page as proof, and lo and behold, there was Ira listed as a common friend. This is when she called it off (FOR GOOD) and I went with her to go retrieve her things (we didn’t think it was a good idea for her to stay in her flat for a couple of days). There he was—Mr I’m-Dying-In-72-Hours—looking none the worse for wear, except a little haggard. In the next 24 hours, Ira systematically checked out every single story he told her about—and surprise, surprise, they were all completely false. The scary part? He had done this before. The ex fiancee had been a similar victim.

 

Here’s what we know about this man: his prey is educated young women at bookstores or coffee shops. He knows his lies—he can talk convincingly about Harvard or Oxford or whatever. He speaks well and is well read. The reason I am posting this, with Ira’s full blessing, is that we want to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Whatever information you might have on him would be a great help, and if you think any of your friends fits the above description of a girl he might meet, then please, send her this post. I have seen my friend go through very great pain and I don’t want this to happen to anyone else. He is, in short, an emotional leech and a con man. I haven’t put ALL the details in this post, partly because it would take too long, and partly because it’s not needed, but trust me, it’s pretty bad.

Smile please!

A lot of people have been asking me how I take my pictures. I want to be clear: I’m far from being an expert. I’m pretty amateur, in fact. But the way I took to photography has surprised even me. I didn’t know I’d like it so much, and therefore, manage to improve my skills considerably from the first time I got my camera to now. What flatters me is when people specifically ask me to bring my camera to social events, and of course, the number of Facebook ‘likes’ that I get every now and then. It’s all very fun—made even more so by the fact that this completely isn’t my medium.

 

I use a pretty basic camera, the Canon Powershot A480, which, in my opinion, is one of the best point and shoots out there. Ignore the fancy, slim ones, trust me, go for a brand that has proven itself. My Canon is bulky, so it won’t slip into my pocket, but it goes into my handbag, which I think is essential. I like that it’s light enough to carry anywhere, and has enough of a body that I can curl my fingers around it to steady a shot.

 

What I did, when I got it, was to play around with it a whole lot. I read articles online on how to make the most of your point and shoot (especially in low light conditions, which is when I take most of my pictures). Of course, I went through my macro phase, which is when I went super close to the subject and got all sorts of “arty” shots, tell tale of a first time photographer. I also did the equivalent of what you do to be a better writer—you read—I looked at good photos. I tried to see how they composed their pictures, what made one picture appeal to me more than another. While reading, I came across an article telling you that for great composition, you had to rely on the rule-of-thirds, and I switched my camera display, from just a face focus to a grid, where I can see exactly where everything is before I take a picture.

 

But let’s let them speak for themselves. These are some of my most popular shots off Flickr, which I think are a pretty good example of what I’ve been doing.

 

This is a picture I took one day while I was swimming at the Taj. It got a lot of comments, and I thought I’d share it here with you. It’s basically a reflection of the back of the building in a puddle. I liked the way it looked, and flipped it around so it looked right side up. You have to keep looking for interesting perspectives like this, so you get the best shot, not just straight up.

 

This one, I actually printed out and framed and have on my wall. It’s from a grey April day in England, at a farm shop, and I liked the texture of the table blending into the grey of the sky. The abandoned swing and bare tree provide a nice context, I think, for putting forward what the picture is supposed to make you feel.

For a long time, I didn’t put any post production work into my pictures, apart from cropping and maybe sharpening, every now and then. But sometimes, the pictures do look better if you fiddle around with them a little bit. For the “fiddling”, I use Picnik, an online photo editor which lets you do quite a bit with your photos. For this one, I used an infrared filter, blending into the photo, so that the main subject, this old man on Mohammed Ali Road, would be in darker colours, with everything lightened around him. I like that it puts him front and centre, and sort of makes everything else a little less important, unless you look at it closely.

 

And finally, an example of how I made macro work interestingly (I think). I call this picture ‘Money Changing’, and it was when I was emptying my wallet of all the other currency it had. If you look closely, you’ll see a pound, some Malaysian money, a dollar bill, all held together with the rupee coin. Sometimes, I like my pictures to be like a tweet or a status message, saying a lot with very little.

 

What I’ve learnt most of all, is not to care about the size of the camera. You get good shots if you get good shots. I am upgrading, but not to an SLR, but another point and shoot, the Canon G12, all the features of an SLR and I can carry it in my handbag, just the same as always.

 

What I propose at the end of this very long post is this: if you have a point and shoot, and you can get good pictures out of it, do a post on your blog with the picture and a note about it and your camera and send me the link. We need a sort of collective—a place where people who don’t have fancy cameras can still be inspired by good photography that their camera is perfectly capable of taking. I’ll choose the five best, and if there’s enough interest, I’ll make it a monthly thing with its own Flickr group. Send me your link no later than Saturday, 25th September, 12.00 pm, IST.

All the small things

*At a coffee shop, I wait, pretending busy, pretending I am a woman with a plan. Wondering at people, at noisy groups, feeling like a phantom limb, the taste of stale wine coating my gums, red wine lips, despite the scrubbing, new clothes sit in a white plastic bag atop a marble countertop—full of possibilities, and nights and days to come. When I am not That Girl. Alone. In. A. Coffeeshop.

* Things I find interesting:  People who live in other countries changing their accents when someone of the same country is present. People who use a word in a conversation that I have only read before. Angry comment threads on a blog. Particular lyrics of songs.

Today I heard: Some people think I’m the life of the party, because I tell a joke or two.

The idea of being in Tokyo. Other peoples lives when you’re no longer speaking to them.

*Things I could do without: Mould. White lighting in a room painted green or pink. The screech of tyres. Groups of boys just sitting together and staring when you pass them. The no smoking in public rule. Being somewhere without a book. Slow internet connections. Hostility when you are vulnerable.

* Things I have eaten recently:  The chipotle chicken pizza at California Pizza Kitchen. Bits of brain and kidney at Mohammed Ali Road. French fries with a garlic salt seasoning at WTF. A seekh kebab role from Khaan E Khaas.

* Sensations that I enjoy:  The feel of something heavy and metal in your palm. The beginning of a weekend when you have lots of plans. Finding out there are new episodes of a show you watch regularly. The satin underside of a quilt. Your own hair when it’s ironed. Finishing off all the work you had to do for the day—including replying to late emails—by early afternoon. The feel of the beginning of a holiday on the beach. A love story reaching a satisfactory conclusion. Meeting an old friend after a very long time.

We discover a new TC

So JC is here and since I don’t feel like dissecting my relationship for the internet today
(plus, I’m not sure where this is going, plus, I’ve always been great at NOT talking about whatever I don’t feel like talking about, plus, just call me Cleopatra, queen of denial.) Anyhoo. This a good moment to talk about my new favourite bar, which people who know me in real life are already kinda sick of.

 

If you’re on my Foursquare (and you’re probably not, because I’ve been reading all those Foursquare stalking stories, so I only approve people I actually know)  then you might have noticed that I am now the mayor of WTF. Not like literally the mayor of the state of being in constant what-the-fuckery, although I’m sure I have that covered too, but I do go, at least a couple of times a week to this new bar by Khar Station called WTF.

 

Now, my friends and I have been going to WTF since it first opened a couple of months ago. It began out of default—all the other places we frequented in Bandra were gone, and we got sort of bored of Toto’s. (Also, I think I’ve listened to all the retro I can handle for a while. Now my music of choice is jazz or alternative or fusion-y stuff.) Anyway, so back in the day, WTF was completely empty except for us and this other guy who’s always there, so we always had ample seating choices. My favourite was the sewing machine table, but I also like the charpoy. It has an outdoor section which means you can smoke to your hearts content (yay!) and the PRICES! Dudes! Sooooo cheap! It’s almost the same prices as Janata, but nicer atmosphere, you know?

 

I even took my mum to WTF while she was visiting and while she wasn’t too impressed with drive in (it’s sort of shady) the place itself was met with great approval. They only do bar snacks at the moment, and for the longest time they didn’t take credit cards, which meant you had to carry cash with you all the time. (But like I said before: CHEAP! which means not much of a dent in your wallet.)

 

Anyway. I wasn’t going to write about it, to keep it my little secret, but of late, WTF has become the place in Bandra to go. I run into people I normally only saw before in Zenzi or Olive, the outside section is completely packed by ten, people are actually dressing trendy and another adda goes down the drain. But I still go. I go by 9 so I can get a table, I go in a ratty t-shirt some days, I order my drink, I sit wherever (the waiters now know me, which is awesome) and I watch the world come to me, instead of me going to the world.