Doing Nothing

This was a post I had written about six months ago

"By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing; so on the seventh day He rested from all His work.” - Genesis 2:1-2

In most places, we pretty much rest on both the sixth and seventh days. Or atleast, theoretically we are supposed to. Not in the great urban milieu. Between going to the gym, attending my French classes and fitting in a social life, my weekends moved at supersonic speeds. That was till I spent a Saturday morning lolling around in the bed. I have promptly abandoned, if not the routine, atleast the guilt involved in not sticking to the routine occasionally. Life seems a little more relaxed.

It turns out it is not just me. Almost everyone in the urban landscape seems to be doing it. I spoke to an old colleague who chanted out her routine –gym, therapy, massage or parlour, family bonding time, children’s school shopping. She actually found going back to office on Mondays restful.

Another colleague spends most weekends driving down with her family to Pune to play golf, gets stuck in rush hour traffic both ways, helps her son with his homework between trips to the course and hurriedly squeezes in gym time before leaving.

There is a Calvin strip in which his dad justifies their lousy camping holidays on the grounds that their normal lives will seem so much better if they traumatized themselves on vacation. The new mantra of weekend busyness seems to be based pretty much on that. Kill yourself in the weekend trying to juggle multiple things, and the office politics, unbearable deadlines and target pressures on weekdays will look positively relaxing.

The option of course is to sit at home, with a good book or a nice movie, take a deep breath and then spend your time wondering if you are the only loser doing nothing.

Personally, I think Doing Nothing as a hobby has been grossly underestimated. When I have Doing Nothing time, I end up finishing niggling little things that tidy up life like clearing up my mailbox or filing away my papers. I end up talking to friends from out of town (the ones who are not busy rushing from point A to point B) or long lost relatives. I read the multiple magazines I subscribe to and the interesting stories on topics I would not have normally read about. I catch up on mindless TV. I gaze out at the lovely sea view my house provides.

And somewhere during the course of writing this entry and abandoning it, I seem to have given up on French, I go to the gym in the weekdays and spend weekends Doing Nothing.

Life is great.

Water water everywhere….

“10 per cent water cut from today”

Page 4 of Hindustan Times screamed.

I sat up with a bolt

No longer was I the languid Mumbai morning person browsing the papers in bed. My mind had travelled back in time to when I was a kid in Chennai, filling buckets and drums with waters during those terrible years of terrible water shortages. Terrible, terrible.

I read through the entire article.

“The delay in Bombay’s monsoon was causing this shortage”

No surprise there

“Mumbai receives its daily supply of water from six lakes – Modak Sagar, Tansa, Vihar, Tulsi, Upper Vaitarna and Bhatsa”

Hmmm. More lakes than Chennai. That does not sound bad.

“While the water level of Vihar has reached its lowest – 152.52 m, Tansa has water that can be used to supply the city only for the next few days”

Gulp

“Alarmed by the dipping water levels, the civic officials…”

Ah. I knew the public authorities would swoop right in and come up with some engineering miracles

“….. have performed pujas at the Tansa and Vaitarna lakes”

Huh.

Really?

Time to get out those buckets and drums.

How to prepare Mediterranean Grilled Fish

Save recipe sent by sis in the recess of computer.

Four months later, in a burst of enthusiasm order 500 gms of fish and invite friend over to help cook.

Read recipe and notice it calls for Mediterranean seasoning like parsley, basil and olives. Quickly consider switching to Kerala Meen curry. Quickly switch back upon evaluating level of skill required for Kerala Meen curry

Call up local grocery store and find out they stock everything (!)

Chop up 4 table spoons of basil, 1 table spoon of parsley, 1 table spoon of garlic and mix in bowl with 2 tablespoons of juice of lemon.

Use brush bought a few weeks ago to rub each piece of fish with olive oil. Feel super professional.

Arrange fish on grilling rack, douse with herb mixture and toss some freshly ground pepper on top.

Stuff into microwave cum grill.

Cook for 5 – 6 minutes, take out and begin process of turning fish over to the other side.

Notice grill is hot, drop the rack and watch the fish plop on the floor.

Sit by as friend picks up pieces and puts them back on the grilling rack and explains that the microwaves should kill any germs caught from the kitchen floor.

Repeat process of coating fish with herbs and cooking in grill.

Take out, garnish with lemon slices and green olives and eat.

Feel the fish get your intelligence levels up and realize that you don’t particularly care for fish, grilled or otherwise.

Delete recipe.

Evolution of a facebook user

Sit out the Facebook revolution for several years.

Listen to friends indicate that you are a dinosaur and may be left off the ship earthlings will use to emigrate to the outer worlds when apocalypse hits.

One fine evening, sign up

Cautiously accept pending invites (and wonder how one can get invites even before one even has a Facebook account. This is so Big Brother)

Start responding to messages.

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Realise on one slow day that office gives you access to Facebook.

Start commenting on everyone’s pages.

Invite a few friends

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Notice number of friends all your friends have and realize you look like the class loser with a pathetically low score.

Get competitive

Start inviting half of your batch from college and B School

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Realise you are getting updates on Dinesh Daswani’s life frequently

Realise you have not exchanged more than two words with Dinesh in your entire 2 years at B-School

Realise you are not interested in Dinesh’s life at all.

Spend time contemplating between de-friending Dinesh, abandoning Facebook and turning to Yoga to remove competitive streak in self.

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Figure out tools for seeing updates only of ‘close friends’ and feel like an international diplomat bringing smooth solutions to conflict-torn areas.

Realise this is the kind of meaningless work you were worried Facebook would thrust on you.

Kick yourself for succumbing to peer pressure to get a Facebook account and make a mental note that you don’t want to be on the emigration ship. Esp if it has Dinesh Daswani.

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It is always a pleasure to take in a good movie and a halfway decent play in one weekend.

Edge of heaven

Screened as a part of NDTV Lumiere’s Cannes Festival selection at PVR, the hall contained a handful of people. Luckily the quorum was sufficient for the movie to be screened (unlike the last time I went to Sterling with a friend and was told that Turtles Can Fly wont be screened since we were the only two people who had booked tickets)

The movie itself is a nicely wrapped slice of the lives of its six lead characters. The story switches between Turkey and Germany and traces the blip of passion, love, lust and beliefs that registers in each of these characters before the world settles back into rhythm.

The story telling tight, the crossing of paths of the characters, unknownest to themselves is nicely done and the symbolic beginnings and ends don’t feel too clichéd. The movie also encompasses in the periphery a larger vision of lives of Turks in both Turkey and Germany.

An interesting view of a different world.


Don’t Look Now

It is difficult to pull off spooky movies. It is even more so with spooky plays. But ‘Don’t Look Now’ manages fairly successfully with a well-written script, believable cast and wonderful settings. Aparna and Sanjay are a typical upper middle class urban couple who lose their daughter Nitya at the beginning of the play. Trying to find peace, they visit Shanti Niketan – a conscious effort to dwell on better times as the couple had met there. The duo bump into two sisters dressed in black and looking quite witch-like. One of the sisters is psychic and warns them to leave Shanti Niketan. Aparna is wont to believe them but Sanjay finds the whole set up ridiculously fraudulent and superstitious. Things begin to get weirder and weirder for Sanjay who battles between his veneer of logic and his instinct and gradually realizes that some forces are beyond normal reasoning.

The play handles the mystical elements well. The central point is the big banyan tree, imaginatively designed to give a great atmosphere. The lighting works beautifully, especially when Sanjay has nightmares. Add to that the excellent mannerisms of each individual character (except perhaps for the witch sisters who appear a bit one-dimensional) and the villagers entering and exiting the scene adding a naturalness seldom found in the sparsely populated plays one sees at NCPA. On the whole, the play is definitely worth a watch.