Regression

Too tired to make an effort to frame a structured slew of letters, the heroic blogger resorts to random rants about shoes and ships and sealing wax and I am the eggman, they are the eggmen, I am the Walrus…

Everything here is in regression. There hasn’t been a movie worth seeing since Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, which was some five years back. Instead, they put all their money into self-congratulatory crap like Om Shanti Om, which, in its effort to milk ‘70s nostalgia actually gives you a crash course in how things got to the sorry state they are in today. There hasn’t been a truly memorable ad on TV for a long time. Television has been stuck in a horrible stupor for about a decade. Brain-dead for all practical purposes, it raises its head only to look to Bollywood for inspiration, which just makes things worse. And music may be the saddest scene of all, because you have a bunch of diverse talents all wasting their fucking time trying to be the bastardized son of Laxmikant-Pyarelal with Bhangra beats, while Rahman continues to innovate from a brilliant parallel universe.

Literature doesn’t seem to be going anywhere significant either. When will that book come along, that elusive rebel yell I’ve been waiting for all these years (and which I doubt I want to read now because it must be a young book or else its useless), the one whose realities are our realities, whose dreams are our dreams, whose broken, innovative, transfigured language is the kind that we, young of this country, have spoken for close to a decade now. Give me no more NRI displacement sagas, no matter how sensitively wrought. And stop showing me Rushdie, we do not speak like he thinks we do. We are a unique generation, rapidly growing old, and in need of a good chronicler.

Take me back to those last 2 years of school. In rock ‘n roll terms, that time was like a fantastic chorus; it all came together, and we brought it all back home. Fifteen jugglers, five believers. I’ve never known a crazier bunch of people; it was like we were all wired together, but the wiring was loose. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we were all together today. I should probably call them…

Anything else? Yeah, the Government. As the Stiff Little Fingers said “Its time the bastards fell”. And corporate culture. And ranting self-obsessed bloggers. I hate them the most.