After the Key: Mockumentary by Unk

This one is called Jasmine in all moods possible. I actually like the fact that I am acting crazy in every shot possible.After staying in UK for so long, I think so I have started loosing my basic instincts, like anger, jealousy, greed and so on. No am not trying to sound like some ascetic here! am just stating the fact that I have been repressing my feelings most of the time, I have been too nice, too polite, too good and there are serious consequences with regard to this!
 this set of photos tries to capture me in perfect moods! moods i have so tried forgetting!

 So here I was trying to figure out why exactly am i trying to help this bespectacled guy in my life. He is irritating, mostly self obsessed and worse repeats the same thing atleast 20 times, this is a kind of talent that people need to acknowledge! anyways I was trying o figure out among my other innermost feelings, Y the hell was I trying to help him!

 And the answer seemed like because we were friends, and this was the point where I started loosing my patience. Friendship at such a big cost! There was a limit to things and there was limit to friendship too. sounds rude! well this is exactly what happens when one tries to hide emotions for such a long time, in my case it was 8 months! so yes I shouted at him, screamed at him, abused him in my mind alteast! and had a jolly timing making faces!( well evident from the pics)

And I wish I had stopped this social experiment, but no I had to go on! Cos I never thought these moods or to be precise these faces I was making was being captured by some smart ass!(in this case It would be winnie and david) so yeah, thank you guys!!!! it just helped me realise how much i missed these faces as well emotions!

 There was a time in this experiment where i was asked by the director : did i know why i was part of the project : honestly answer was : no idea, but i did say something fancy and then came the next question , did i know what was i doing in the project . and trust me i stared at him for a million light years ( that's how i felt in my mind) and i thought : really, what kind of question was that!!! but i gave him an answer : and that was : something to do with metaphors and am pretty sure, in that instance both him and I were confused.
But thinking about it now : maybe I do the answer : I was tired of this, was tired of this blankness, was tired of this silence and somehow this experiment gave me all the reasons to jump out and scream. and what was i doing in the project : I was trying to find both myself and him.

So Unk, This is a way of saying Thank you. It was great working with you and Winnie and David you just made me realise it was so much fun being idiots on camera ;)

My women in colours.

and I am finally about to reveal my first ever stint with painting brush. I must admit most of the work was done when I was depressed and the strokes of the brush were the only constant boredom I enjoyed! Its nothing great and honestly most of the work has been hurried to some extent. But still it feels good about painting. Just getting the colours on the paper, just getting the mood. just knowing the fact that I would like my woman to be coloured !

 There is a reason why my woman are of different colours, I dint want to restrict them in any colours. I wanted different bodies, different hair, different structures and I wanted all of them to be happy in their own bodies! so gave them colours!

Woman's Hysteria

Every time I look at a heartbroken woman, I sympathize with her, I even join her in bashing and abusing the man. I would not say I am proud of this act. But there is something tragic about woman in love, something tragic enough for me to call it romantic. The idea of loving with all your soul and then not ever getting this love returned. Yes, Yes, before I got slaughtered for being an anti-men feminist and writing an anti men article,I would just like to say : am about to write about woman's hysteria (an uncontrollable unleash of emotions), a madness that was once was made so famous by Mr. Freud. He was right : woman suffer from hysteria, and this time I call this hysteria : love.

Let me state my background : I had a long chat with my best friend : she always excites me, I see all my brain cells active and the best part : I see no point in hiding my inner most feelings , my thoughts, I go hysterical and funny enough she gets this language of mine. mind you, it is a very well developed language. You need to be a woman, and be aware of being a woman and capable of being a woman to posses this skill for this language. So here we were discussing, and all of a sudden , I started talking about hysteria. Madness, the tragedy of love, the so called passion of a woman in love.

My friend said something about a movie, that once touched my heart and soul.7 khoon maaf (7 sins forgiven), an Indian movie about female protagonist's quest for love that leads to a series of marriages, each ending in the mysterious death of her latest husband.According to my friend, in each killing protagonist was providing redemption to the men. She was saving them and she was only capable of true love,and she had to kill them to be truly honest to them. This thought obviously struck me. I had felt a great sense of grief after watching the movie. I was alone in the theatre and felt really helpless. I so wanted to tell the protagonist, she would not find this love. This is hysteria,where she would only get lost in her own language.

This theme again repeated in novels, Madam Bovary(French novel) and again in Anna Karenina(Russian novel). Both masterpieces had  protagonists who were affected by something supernatural. They were trying to find some love, that would fulfill this purpose of life. They were unmanageable and they had fits of emotions. They wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. They cheated on their husbands, had various affairs and were never ever happy. They were always turmoiled by their emotions, their lack of control on their emotions and their ability to love was uncontrollable to the extent that they were no more aware about what did they want in their life. They both committed suicide. 

It sounds all stupid, it does not make sense and it never seems possible . Hysteria was considered a major disease to the extent that it was supposed to be affecting woman during their menstruation periods and sexual frustration. 

But is it possible that these woman were actually in love and it was the sole reason for them to behave in this wild , mad manner? Obviously in all the above mentioned 3 stories, they ended either committing suicide or finding redemption in religion. They had to be saved from their diseases and the creators of the characters, did provide them with this redemption. But I want to ask something else, Y did they need the redemption, Y do characters like these end up with death? Y do woman who go mad in love, become a tragic love story? Y is that there was never a language for this hysteria ? Y was Freud so keen in curing these woman of their disease called hysteria ? 

I am not seeking for answers here. I am just trying to take an interest in a language which was lost in this disease called hysteria , I wanted to produce a thought to re-invoke this idea of love and madness without the contempt of mockery or pity. I do not want to be forgiven or saved. I want to be heard. 

Lost in Translation!

I never knew language could play such an important part of my life, never knew language would hinder my friendship, restrict my love affairs. prevent myself from growing. in short never knew i could only understand people who spoke my language. I am referring to the language we use on daily basis. the language we use to communicate what we feel .have you ever thought about, how restricted we are by this medium.


I have a good friend, who is Chinese. Its recently that I came across this issue of language as a barrier. she tries to speak in English and I try to learn mandarin. There might be hint of love and mutual admiration thrown in this, but we still struggle. After 8 months of staying together, yes we understand each other, but there have been moments when I see myself hoping that one day we would be able to talk in a language that both of us know. To communicate in a medium which would not limit our conversation. obviously the fact that English is the common language, does help a lot, but still, there have been instances where words have failed us. we just stare at each other or maybe each other's helplessness.


we could have been lot closer, we could have shared a whole new world, we could have explored so many different ideas. but we sometimes dnt understand each other, however hard we try. we are limited. and however hard we try, we are very well aware that, the other person is lot different from what we understand her to be.

it does hurt me to acknowledge the fact that, i might even love based on this language barrier, all this idea of true love would also be limited by my knowledge of languages. the love has to be expressed within this medium, and ill only be capable of understanding this expression of love.

this acknowledgement itself came at a high cost. the very fact that I had to struggle this far to make a good friend, kind of describes my situation. but there is an element of sweet romantic tragedy to it too. Ill be never be able to know my friend fully. Ill always have a limited picture of her. ill never know her completely . maybe i dnt have to . 

SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)

A word  that I was introduced to when I reached United Kingdom. I was given the rough idea, definitions and different clauses attached to it. Do not by perturbed by the acronym of the word, indeed there was something sad about this word.

SAD is a disorder that human beings go though when there is a change in weather, change in weather sounds so casual, so let me repeat myself here, When there is a drastic change in weather and weather tends to take major part of your life, your moods, your topic of discussions, basically anything that affects a life cycle. I would not like to include animals in this chain of victim hood as they are smart enough not to attribute too much of importance to a simple natural thing called weather. But we humans are different, so here I am discussing weather on my blog. Yes, I am finally getting affected by SAD.

When you get up in the morning, you see rain, some water drops falling of the roof top. That should sound poetic and beautiful . Now multiply that with every day of you life for next 3 months. Lets fast forward this : So I get up, see the drops and stare at the window, next day again I get up , see the drops and stare at the window. By the 14^th day, I would have stopped staring instead I would stop seeing the window and get up with a gloomy face. You should ask, Why? When ?> How ? Its a simple act of getting up, but I do not know and I would not like to know ( let the neuro-scientist and the consciousness camps work on this aspect) why a simple act of seeing rain , and mind you I have not even decided whether to venture out in the wonderful weather, spoils a persons mood.

And by end of 2 nd month, yes you would be depressed, and blaming the weather, taking all kind of self help books, resorting to all group activities and finally eating sweets and junk food. I like to think weather is working in favour of corporate world, it works in collaboration with the TNC, trans-national companies.That's the only reason I can see for this weird cycle of events.

So here I am blaming the weather, for all the bad things happening in my life. Since I am doing a simple act of blaming weather, one should always remember that one tends to exaggerate when one is suffering from SAD. Its funny and tragic at the same time.  

cities seen through my eyes...

waitress : woddy allen was right

De-constructing harry had a scene in the movie : woody allen asks the stripper what does she work for living . And she replies saying that she is a waitress and she hates it. To which , woody allen replies is that every waitress I have met keeps repeating this part.

She has been a waitress for last 7 months and life behind the scenes have been far more teaching than I could ever learn from my philosophy books. Would not romanticise lest she give any wrong impressions. she stick to stripper's lines : too hate the job. But she would give the reasons for it unlike woody allen, who just threw an idea on to our face and decided the audience to be smart enough to understand it!

Reasons she would hate this job : ( let me redefine the word hate here : before she go into any more details : hate in its purest sense , extreme sensation, it affects you in a serious way, you dream about it often ) yeah, this is the true meaning, unlike its regular usage , which has reduced its relevance now days . So going back to hating this thing.

a) one always has to be happy : even when one is tired, even when one is pissed off, even when one is fired, even when someone dies . One has to be always smiling

b) customer is always right : whoever made this rule , did know that ego is the only thing that matters at the end of the day and idiots customers have to kept happy all the time

100. you start talking to cutlery's, floor, dishwasher everything possible except human beings .

500. you are no more sure about the difference between faking and having a normal conversation, you continue being waitress everywhere

e) you always are looking things to clean, to clear up, your mind always is looking for dirt

f) you start talking like them ( by them I mean the professionals in this field, who have been in this industry for a decade and do not find a need to give it up) . You are angry, shouting and most of the time frustrated .

g) by this point, I have started realising that I am basically writing about problems faced by ppl in any of the sectors : be it customer oriented, product oriented .

h) so what makes my waitress story so different : the fact that it was always supposed to be a disguise , an alternative life, the most romanticised notion of a dreamer , of a genius struggling to make ends meet before striking the pot of gold .

And she was wrong : not everyone makes the ends meet. Not everyone strikes the pot of gold.

You know y :@ waitress forgets that it was her part-time job, she makes it her life . And life makes her a waitress.

Life decides for her that she was worth only being a waitress.  

De-constructing

i heard this term first time in my first day of law school : deconstruction : with Calvin and Hobbes as the background ;) i did not know a thing but loved calving and Hobbes too much to accept that i did nt know a word! and honestly i have deconstructed ever since, every idea, every thought and every book i have read. and i still enjoy that word : deconstruction!
and problem starts when we start deconstructing ourselves : our moves: our lives : our intentions , our Goodwill's out thoughts everything .. and what do we get in the end : one ball of fur : that can be hidden within the palms of my hands! and yes : i keep deconstructing and i keep thinking : and then comes the point : when we stand at the cross road and then decide whether to grow up or not! and answer has always been a big naaaaaaaaaaa. and will always be a big naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

i have got everything and yet ill sit in the room and get confined to myself. with every liberty in my hand i would not dare to jump off to amazon... with every wish to be fulfilled , it will still be restricted to thoughts ! whats the point . if i am supposed to re-live every day with an imaginary world that i would never enter : its like the woman who always wanted to live in the country side but never had the guts to jump off the city building .. she just stayed behind and yearned for it everyday .

so where was i ? yes, deconstructing . and well i started doing it woody allen : but he had sex and other fallacies for him to take care and my deconstruction looked really boring and pale in front of him . but i knew about human relationships. i knew about human weakness !and i too had a deconstructing story for everyone to hear .

if you keep going back to your childhood one tends to get tired, cmon, it was one of the best days of my life and i keep looking back . deconstruction does not seem to move from there. it stops and lingers and plays a violin to give me a smile on my face. and i do smile . cos i love smiling . and then i just elope to my wonderland and keep thinking why will i like to deconstruct , its not like i am going to learn anything from that , going to change anything from that . not being stubborn . just stating it : was too much in live with my life : to accept any of my myths as reality.

so where does it leave me : deconstructing : de-construct : de: con: struct : de: co : n : str:uct ... and goes on ! thats life ;)

and again i was plagued by the word : deconstructing : and this time it was a movie : deconstructing harry and woody allen as the background : and was too naive to accept that i knew what it meant!

madam bovary

with the french classic fm playing in the background, i had the sudden urge to write : have not written for months . and i would blame the fact that my muse got lost in my upheavals of ego. i would like to write : as i am feeling more than anything now days. i feel for the characters . am back to dreaming about paris , back to getting excited about prospects about being someone's muse and back to staring at sky. does life keep giving you these extreme breaks : and you keep getting these shots without realizing we are falling into the trap of continuous ennui.

with the books : it gives me a feeling that  am looking for a specific character in the books : a woman who is confused : and what level of confusion am i seeking is something i am still confused about . but the woman is confused. i like it when woman are confused and when they trying to justify their acts, their thoughts , their silly dreams, they fears. everything becomes like a elaborated scheme . yes : on one hand have madam bovary who is doing a fantastic job of giving me a great solace and on other hand woman writers are giving me the hope that there does exist this language of confusion. maybe i am looking for a language , and since i am not sure of the script of this language, i keep referring it to as confusion. cos when i was Foucault girl talking about my experiences and she talking about hers : it was all conundrum of thoughts : and i could see the pattern of confusion : just like madam bovary : whose sighs, hysteric convulsions : everything seem to make sense to me .
maybe its not repetition after all, its the inevitable which i have been procrastinating   . things keep happening and after sometime one does realize the pattern . and worse is if one refuses to accept the fate . and one pretends to fight the forces of the nature . and pretends that one is going to change this pattern. one is going to break away from the cycle of repetition. i do not know what is more scary , the thought of breaking the pattern or knowing the repetition and yet reliving it everyday.

so y is woman's hysteria playing such a big role in the backdrop of this repetition. the only thing that keeps me from drowning in my nightmares of thoughts.

if bovary wanted a life, she would have run away but the problem is she would have never run away : just like the Foucault girl , she would have never leapt out of Foucault world. she was right : french world was different from ours. and i was living a life which was neither based in paris and neither in london . i could never understand their pain and neither their romanticism, even though i felt it. and i am still feeling the same what i felt 5 years back. just the degree of it has changed and so has consequences. 

My Women!

the