promiscuous spaces

Slumdog Millionaire

2008-11-24T12:44:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts….

Slumdog millionaire is a post modern film. It is also so important because it is a film that clearly brings about the dichotomy in two ways of knowing the world; and it is a film about history; knowledge; and how we come to know what we do.

We learn our history through an institutionalized, state sanctioned and governed system of education. But this film is about the history learnt; a history of the city, its events, its dates being at the periphery of the state and the periphery of the city, and yet part of it.
Where history is not linear but inherently violent and it is a lived not learned history. It is lived and created, through systems of survival, streets, tactics, rumors; through cheating, stealing, robbing; be it as a guide to Taj Mahal or stealing shoes of tourists at the Taj Mahal, or knowing that Ram had a bow and arrow on his right hand, through a communal riot. Where stealing or cheating is the only way of knowing and you create your life experiences from these, remembering every detail on the way, absorbing and absorbing, watching, observing. They can either be considered as illegal acts, illicit acts or as stealing from the state’s body or those privileged from the state sanctioned system.

The movie made Mumbai its home; it was the slumdog’s, call centre chai wallah’s perspective, it traversed places and situations that no movie I remember has in a long time. And yet what is love here, love is hope, love is rescue and you need love and you need Amitabh Bachchan, because he makes it seem possible to emerge victorious from the surrounding decadence.

As I lay there watching the movie, all I wanted to do was cry and cry. What was I doing in the United Sates as an urban planner, when the city I loved and I had grown up in needed people with my skills more than ever? What am I really doing here? Mumbai seemed like the planet of slums and yet it was not only Mumbai, I could probably say that about so many other cities like New Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata.

It also made me angry at directors like Karan Johar, Yash Raj, who spent millions and millions of rupees in Bollywood, in fantasgmoria, in godfather like underworld dons, in glamour, and hallucination, when a non-Indian was able to not only understand the fundamental dichotomy of different modes of knowing, but contextualize it in India. Though this is not to say that only “natives” of a country have the intellectual capacity or insight to personal and yet political narratives of a country, but seriously where are our directors? We have had movies that speak from the underdog’s perspective but they have been inherently nationalistic, paternalistic, and parochial. Danny Boyle has shamed the likes of Karan Johar and Yash Raj.

...Something.....

2007-05-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

I don’t have the luxury of pleasure

Love for me is excruciating

The pain of losing someone before I have him,

The fear of his loss before I’ve even gained him

I scratch me, scratch him

Scratch him till it itches and I want to scratch more

Scratch his face, his actions, make him meticulously imperfect

Imperfect for me

So that I can abandon him before knowing him

Because my body will not allow it.

Will not allow him to touch me

and then I can have sex.

2007-04-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

i love being drunkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.. its so much funnnn...
I'm drunk out of my brains............

Hysteric women and masculinity

2007-04-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

Though this may come at a much later stage, it opens the door to understand the constructs of Indian masculinity, most uninhibitedly expressed in the marital space. I will explore how the hysteria of the woman lays bare the fragility and violence of the masculinity of men. As his gender is loaded with power, power also has the unbearable pressure of being in power. There is “shame” or the fear of shame of not being man enough, of being repudiated that is internalised by a man’s body and plays out strongly in a relationship with a woman. The hysteric woman is an expression of that.

Can he have a relationship without the need to conquer? Can he "care" for his body? Is his identity determined by what he can "do" / produce? In a man, hysteria plays out through physical violence.

More on Pain...

2007-04-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

Pain is discomfort. It burns, it threatens to crumble you, disintegrate you, ashen you such that you will lose your solidity, it inflames, like the new skin peeling of your fresh wound. It is pointed.

It questions the hegemony of institutions one is part of by opening oneself to the pains of being objectified, racialised, judged by making it personal, by making it subjective. The avowal of pain allows us to embody ourselves. (I reckon, more intimately than pleasure, but I am willing to accept that I may be wrong… already) It disrupts continuity of oppressive (whatever that may be, capitalism, patriarchy, sexual normativity, physical wound) experience by injecting subjective experience.

How does the perception of the hysterical woman change then?

Something I want to research on...........anyone want to fund me?

2007-04-12T19:51:00.000-07:00

I want to start at the psychiatric space. The psychiatric clinic in Sunflower Hospital, Juhu Scheme, Mumbai. In the basement of the hospital, hidden underneath the superstructure of our lives, I want to visit the countless upper middle class families who come to this clinic to discuss their “private” problems in private. Each space leads to a smaller cell to hide and the more you’re hidden the more comfortable you are. Outside in the waiting room, everyone is a partner in an imperfect ideal.

Starting at the healing or remedial space, where families come to unite their fragments, usually the fragments in their mother’s, wife’s bodies, I want to explore the construct of the hysterical, irrational wife in the psychiatric space where these treatments take place. The body to be "treated" is usually her body. The domestic space, hidden from the world, through the psychiatric space, further gets enclosed, gets undiscovered and mystified into the darkness of the human mind.

Why?
Where hysteria has been perceived as an "illness", I want to understand hysteria as a form agency for bourgeois women in India. Families usually go to the psychiatric space when there is a break down in the family, in the domestic sphere, when the patriarchal household is consumed by the hysteria of the wife, mother. Her agency takes the most painful form here, for that moment in time; she claims subjectivity through pain, through the avowal of her pain. (The psychiatric space is the space of disavowal of her agency, where patriarchy regains control, sometimes at her wish, sometimes not). At that point, pain is her only self, it is the pain of expression of subjugation, domination, powerlessness, unrealised, unfulfilled desires, that is avowed...What kind of opening does it create? I dont know yet...

The Beauty of Borat..............

2007-02-15T17:39:00.000-08:00

Borat has invoked such strong reactions from people from those who claim to like him to those who have filed suits against him etc.

But theres something else that has happened. Which I call his beauty. He has become everyone’s alter ego. He has ruptured the heterosexual space and has created a space for heterosexual men, to talk about sex illicitly and dirtily in the public. And within that dirt he has allowed men to express their desire for women, which is dirty but erotic, which is dirty but titillating and because it is dirty it has desire. And it has allowed heterosexual women to respond, engage, and flirt in this dirty space.

When guys talk, they talk not as themselves but as Borat and in that sense are liberated from having to bear the moral consequence or conscience of their talk. He gives them that space. For example, when my friend rounds his forefinger with his thumb to make a “hole” and hits it against his palm and says “it is a taeeght”…. Or “I like-uh taeeght”…He talks like Borat. Or when he talks about “the vajeen”….Infact, he is Borat. It is Borat talking through my friend’s body. And hence when I listen to him, I don’t get “offended”, I laugh, I respond. I enjoy the sexual interaction. Because I think Borat is talking and not my friend. We’ve created a strange hallucinatory dirty space between us. As we talk we are making fun of Borat. He has been internalized by us and given our evil, dirty side, our alter ego an identity, his identity. Once done, he has allowed us to detach a part of ourselves, externalize it, bring it out in the public in his identity and make fun of him. We have othered it and then enjoyed it. And in that process he has a made of ourselves more public, or a “repressed” discourse public.

Now to think that if every man spoke like that, the woman would like it would be a misconception as well. Secondly I am not legitimizing his movie but am more interested in seeing how men and women have appropriated him in their daily bodies. Though does he give heterosexual women the same space to talk or does he silence them? I do agree that he does not give me space to talk about my body the way it liberates men to do so.

A lot of deliberations from my class…..

2007-02-01T10:32:00.000-08:00

What are the practices that institutions will not perform or that power will not allow them to perform because of its shakiness? It is because power is shaky that it resorts to/ needs to resort to violence. Violence is the most violent form of disguise which I would call cross dressing because the intention can be seen, I think. Power/ hegemonic intention will always have to cross dress itself to pursue its end.

This is not to justify the acts of violence that been undertaken for the pursuit of power but the question for me is then how does such an understanding change the way I perceive power and resistance. What roads does it open up for me to talk about resistance? What does marginality allow that power does not? What is the contradiction of power that will result in its collapse? At the same time does it mean then the marginal should not do anything because he/ she is already in the position of power by being a marginal? (which is extremely disturbing… and somehow just not convincing)

What are the scopes for resistance, self assertion, “subject formation” (a term I have to love in my feminist postcolonial theory class) at both the personal and institutional level without patronizing power.

I am trying to avoid thinking in binary oppositions, inner versus outer, true versus superficial, traditional versus modern, man versus woman, orient versus occident. This language was incorporated to initiate and legitimize the project of colonialism and I know it has become a language through which we think and the structure for identification and assertion of the self. I am going to try and see if I can do it. I want to force myself to look for multiplicities of thought instead of oppositions. It is inherently violent. Though Sartre said a very interesting thing (when I was reading about negritude) which plagues me.. and which I find myself doing a lot of times to assert myself with my all over the world friends……

“Sartre characterizes négritude as the polar opposite of colonial racism in a Hegelian dialectic. In his view, négritude was an "anti-racist racism" (racisme antiraciste) necessary to the final goal of racial unity…”

Our trip to China town

2006-07-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

Starting with me.. Me and mayur met at Bryant Park, close to Times square and decided to discover / see china town...

A thriving market right next to the subway, opportunistic? The light seems to carve a path through the tunnel of shops and their awnings.

2006-07-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

The vendors and their goods spill out on the pavement.

Looking past this "chaos" to find order beyond. Empire State building in the background.

2006-07-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

The fire escapes and their shadows create (beautiful? ugly? romantic?) much of the textures of china town and lots of the older parts of New york. For anyone looking for a characteristic architectural element for these areas, this would be the most predominant.

2006-07-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

There is no "boundary" that divides Little Italy and China town,

except these decorations and a significant difference in the condition of he buildigns. They are well maintained here and there are lots of restaturants and drinks and people overflowing on the streets.

A curious onlooker. The only one we found peeping out of his window. It was surprising because where one story unfolded on the street with wine, gellatoes, singers, tourists, beautiful dark postcards (I should have clicked them!) there was no parallel story above the street. It was quiet, self involved and seemed to reflect these sounds back, almost scorning them. (maybe thats why the street seemed more active as well)

Our trip to China town

2006-07-22T10:02:00.000-07:00

and ending with mayur at my house...

Rachu, buvi and me: Our night out....

2006-07-16T19:22:00.000-07:00

Look at us..........

2006-07-16T19:19:00.000-07:00

2006-07-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

Could they be more in love?

Me and rachu trying to rekindle our Goa (study trip in 2002) lesbian love....

Buvi and me waiting in anticipation for the "photograph".
(Me actually.. she was all ready!)

I love this snap.. its blurry but gets us

Its so crazy.... we were at South Street Seaport in Downtown Manhattan, the piers of which like fingers pierced the Hudson and were now converted to a very active public place with restaurants, bars offering spectacular views of Manhattan island.... and all we were interested in was us... We did n't care about context, about subject.... we were high on us and in love with ourselves.....

My first day with the Nikon coolpix close to Macy's...

2006-07-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

I am looking down Broadway.......in the glory glamour and awe of development........

Men and their spaces.........

2006-05-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

De Certau talks about the overlap of spaces of work and leisure. These overflow into each other and “create dents in the proper space”. He does not identify a person/ people but dominant language. We are all part of this language, a “victim” of and at the same time the creators/ reinforcers of this language.

What if I were to apply this theory to gender relations? What if we were to “trace” and describe events when gender relations are diffused, when men and women both act outside their prescribed roles, maybe instinctively and deliberatively. Though gender relations develop and demand a proper behavior vis-a-vis a particular space, these deviations are not specific to or constrained to activities related to these spaces (i.e. specifc to say religious spaces, institutions, markets, public spaces). Rather he seems to suggest that they are instinctive, dependent and slaves to opportunistic times.

When would these occur? Moments of pleasure, intimate exchanges or breakpoints when something about the other is revealed, guards relaxed, “boundaries opened up” as de certau explains it. Moments of instinctive desire or want, assertion on the other? Let me start somewhere.

For example, it was one of those late cold nights in the local train, when a friend of mine (cant mention him, he'll kill me!) and me were coming from work. We were tired, exhausted from work. It was winter I remember, because I used to carry my lip gloss as an attractive alternative to the more functional chap stick. We were facing each other. He was sitting in the direction of the movement of the train. We both had window seats. I can’t remember what we discussed but we were laughing, quiet at points, joking with each other, discussing our day. I was cold and he was dry. He asked me if I had chap stick. His lips were dry and he kept licking them again and again. So I told him I had a nicer alternative and produced my all purpose lip gloss. He applied it generously and then pressed his lips closer to spread it evenly on them. And at that moment, something happened. His lips were glowing! They were glowing with the desire that is supposed to occupy a woman’s lips but they were his lips, glowing, inviting as a woman’s would? I loved it! I poked him, I thought he looked beautiful. Suddenly he became more attractive to me because it had broken some part of him, made him softer, numb-er? It made him more vulnerable. He was incredibly conscious. He thought everyone in the train was looking at him. There were 4/5 scattered wanderers in the train (men’s compartment). They along with the train had transported far away from everyone, oblivious of everything except their thoughts.

He tried to rub it off and I stopped him. It was an incredible moment for me. I can’t say that work and leisure overlapped here, but this event did something. The lip gloss had ruptured a part of his “manliness” and revealed a conscious, more human person. (I know it sounds corny!) As men they are supposed to................. not be conscious of themselves or how they appear, to always conquer but not succumb, to conceal but not reveal. There was an incredible tension between his morals? and need. One that wanted to close the soft rupture, restore the wound back to its cold smoothness. The other, a physical need for the gloss because his lips were dry and hurting. I can’t say our roles were reversed. Yes, I was looking at him, however it was the imaginary gaze of those who did not exist that seemed to control him. He was aware and conscious of men around him.

I want to place this event in my larger (and currently intermittent) attempt to understand how men are constructed, how they think, what pressures /powers they are supposed to contain.... I realised a few things from this and some other experiences (I have elaborated below):

Men are conscious of men. They watch each other. They judge each other. They control each other. They are each other’s measure of power, virility and weakness. Does the woman’s body even matter here? The actions, gestures of claiming the woman’s body are silent dialogues between men, of reaffirming their position. Is the woman only a means of asserting that power? Is she a part of this dialogue at all?

Where women compete, look or are under their own gaze and that of other women and men,
men on the other hand, judge themselves by what other men think of them. There is a constant (and always unsaid) interaction between them, evaluation of their actions… Men are sources of self-affirmation and discomfort for each other.

There is however no space for a rupture to occur within their roles. This rupture has occurred through sexuality, through men who are uncomfortable with the expectations of “power” (that we now generally call chauvinistic and others “manliness”) that they are supposed to embody(usually gay/ bisexual men?). Though I don’t completely know or understand the discomfort. I don’t even know if I am completely correct.

This occurred to me while I was writing and from some of my guy friend’s experiences.

A guy/ man’s virility is affirmed within the male space, amongst guy friends and the discussion of their success stories.
The term faggot. It is an attack on the man’s masculinity and most “effective”/ disgusting when a man evokes it.
Why cant guys be close friends? They never exchange intimate secrets/ pressures. Do their interactions always have to be “productive”? Are the networks that govern relations between men so powerful that they are invisible (and hence cannot be questioned)?

My Saturday mornings....

2006-05-13T18:56:00.000-07:00

My Saturday mornings are the most beautiful part of the weekend, where time lazes in front of my computer and stops till Sunday evening. I create a space around my computer. My pal, my connection to all my friends, to Daniel Powter’s Bad day or Taxi drivers on Msn messenger…. I think through my keyboard. It holds almost all my secrets or at least those that I can pen down.

My desk is strewn with numerous reminders of chores….. my Columbia financial plan, the yellow post its with Citibank contact numbers whom I have to call to apply for a loan, the list of scholarships buttttttttt

my white ceramic tea cup…
with the soft but dirty brown malai at its rim and traces of dried chai, path of the warm elaichi soaked, chai masala flavored somras that eluded my lips and traced a determined path on the body of my cup

and the bowl of the haldi stained, gujju, sweet chevdaa drag me back to my lazy Saturday morning.

I’ve realized so many things about myself, about New York etc…. They are tit bits of everything… They will come in parts…

I enjoy shopping here for numerous reasons. Of course the avenues for looking beautiful are immense here. The choices of clothes allow you to enjoy your body. It does not matter if you are fat or thin, they have your size. Secondly, when I am shopping, each beautiful dress, each shoe creates situations for me, the possibilities of glances, future chance meetings, conversations and the possibility of a new love? The sexier the dress, the greater the possibility of new love. I forget intermediate stages, of discovering the person, of getting along, of boredom, of quiet situations when you are lost for words. I plunge into the world of romance and pleasure, of Mills & Boons (can you imagine?), while I buy new accessories, beautiful gadgets that are suffused with desire. I drown loneliness in beauty. I hope that beauty will be all pervasive…we will sail together on beauty. I wonder if thats why people enjoy shopping so much here......

New York is everyone’s destination but no one’s home. We (not only emigrant like me but even those who are born and brought up here) all stay/flock to New York for money or its hyper urbanity but everyone carries a home with them that exists somewhere else. New York is a point in transition. You cannot make it your own. Maybe because it is so diverse that it belongs to no one and hence can create space for everyone......

The space of Call Centres: JOHN AND JANE: TOLL FREE

2006-04-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

The movie was about how call centers (and the new IT service economy), the new boom of our Indian economy, claiming to provide new job opportunities to us; are becoming agents of a cultural brainwashing. To be efficient in these jobs and serve the customer better requires you to relate to their space, their malls, products, their systems. In the process of establishing this relationship there is a constant comparison, abundance v/s less, variety, choice, brands, better. (They play on our psyche as consumers to sell the product or provide service more efficiently.)

So I finally caught the movie John and Jane at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), a part of the HBO series for introducing New film/ New directors.

The audience: I went there expecting it to be like our Film festivals, a mixture of film enthusiasts like me, the cool critics in their kurtas and pajamas, young aspiring film makers and hoards of the directors friends. Well I was surprised (or should I have been?) 98% of the audience was white. Only 2% were Indians. I was excited when Ashim was introduced. He is from Mumbai. I felt a surge of pride as if I already knew him.

The movie started with shots of Times Square, as if shot from a car, the surreal, undying spirit of Times Square. It then moved into the house of a middle class Christian house in Mumbai, Glen and his mother. She had this irritating throaty accent, whenever she called out to her son “Glaain”(which I liked!).

I liked Glen; he was full of “fuck” all the time and in constant dissatisfaction with his call centre job. Ashim caught it in parts, the dissatisfaction of the youth that is restless, impatient and unable to adjust to the new kind of “customer service” job which does not fit into our imagination of a livelihood. We imagine ourselves to be doctors, engineers, of creating rather than serving. (Is it a middle class aspiration?)

With the call center boom being a relatively new phenomenon, starting only in about 2001, he captured to a certain extent the transition they are creating in our notions of self, work, social life and interaction. Glen’s dissatisfaction with the job because he does not get or Indian holidays but American holidays. It was not only a sense of betraying his country and accepting the loyalty of another I felt but also of getting cut off from his friends and social group or that he does not care who the anonymous customer at the other end of the line is and why he has to be subservient to him. His mother tells him matter of factly, that these are the demands of the job and he has to accept it. (Behind me, two white American women went tsk tsk... look what America is doing to this country. I was getting quite pissed with them)

The movie transitioned to other employees who liked the job and eventually to Shanti? who became the job herself. She transformed herself into a blonde, bleached her hair, her eyelashes and spoke with an American accent. She believed she was American. It was scary.

There was constant feeling of impending danger in the movie, an ominous sound playing in the background. I could not help but question the content. Like one of the audience later pointed that he had eliminated all context i.e. of family, of other existing job opportunities etc. Except Glen all the other employees lived alone, were Christian (hence English speaking), three out of the five lived in slums. Is that the profile of our call centre employees? I don’t claim to be an expert but I felt there was an enormous distortion of reality. Most slum dwellers rarely complete their 10th grade, are educated in Marathi speaking schools and cannot speak in English.

Also I think the movie was incredibly harsh. Even within the call centre fraternity, people form attachments and groups. They do not exist alone (which the movie implied). They go out together, go shopping, “party” together to cope and enjoy with their new life and money. It would have been interesting to know the spaces of pleasure within this new fraternity or how the transition occured from Glen to Shanti.

He excluded the entire middle and upper middle professionals for whom the call centre is job in transition, a means to sustain them till a more stable, “productive” job was found or teenagers as young as the 10th or 12th grade students for whom it is fast money and means to assert their individualism. More often than not they want the GUCCI glares.

I did relate to the married couple, where both of them worked in different shifts and did not have time to meet each other. They spent just 15 minutes together in a day. However the setting, a Mc Donald’s (symbol of American imperialism?), with him bargaining for a free toy. They are both eating a combo and she insisted that she wants a Mirinda. The scene was overstuffed. There was so much symbolism that it I did not know what to see, their lack of intimacy or Mc Donalds' overarching presence. I know a similar situation, where a friend of mine was complaining about how her relationship felt incomplete because she did not see her husband. He came home from a night shift at 7.30 or 8.0 am and she had to leave for her morning shift at 9.0/9.30am. They would have a super fast functional quickie. She missed him, the comfort of his body and their relationship. The movie missed theses nuances or even the harsh demands of these new jobs.

It was too busy relying on symbols without fleshing them out: The new buildings in New Bombay, Hirananadani complex, Mc Donalds..........

On the whole, the movie was disappointing. Rohan described it way too well.

Desi party:home

2006-03-25T11:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I coincidentally found kau6 online and was too excited. We just started talking and I mentioned to him that I often go to desi parties here.

To which he said that probably desi implied the “negative” aspects of Indians back in India. They became the other. Hmmmm….And the question was whom we called us, Indians like me who had migrated there or those whose parents were of Indian origin but they were born and brought up in America.

Later on I was talking to Mayur. I bug the guy quite a bit but he sometimes actually listens to me and we had a discussion about being desi.

When I first came here and we decided to go to a desi party, I found it ridiculous. Because i did associate the “negative” aspects of being “Indian” with the word. Indian did not sound as bad as desi.

What was desi and who was desi here?
“Conventional”, not “cosmopolitan”, provincial, not urban?
They became synonymous with …………

If your food would “smell” when you were eating Indian food in an office filled with White Americans. The smell (no aroma) implied oil, unhealthy, unhygienic. It was not hospital clean……

A Gujju diamond merchant.
Surname Patel….The Patel brothers as they are called… Patels here have a dubious entrepreneurial fame…. you’ll find them everywhere mostly in Indian grocery and food stores…and who have migrated here in hoardes…..
To those who listened to Punjabi/ bollywood music or someone who wore a sari/ salwaar kameez in the public space and had a strong regional accent.
Or with general things which got associated with uncultured immigrants…. like having dirty nails or unwhite set of teeth….

This politics of image completely dictated how your character would be judged and the same politics compelled you to throw your earlier clothes (like shedding your earlier image) and buy from here, from gap, or old navy (whose clothes are as good as the ones in khokha market, parle) or banana republic.

However this discomfort is not completely satisfied with buying. You have to watch the Nicks game, or know the Yankees, eat with chopsticks in a Thai restaurant, leave a tip of 15% of the bill, say thank you if someone holds the door for you (which is a nice gesture in any case) or be extremely conscious of someone else’s space….say sorry if your bag accidentally brushed someone or the strap of your bag touched someone….

For me......
Somewhere in this I also carried my own notion of desi. To me it represented men who would ogle at you in bombay or conventional men, the young Punjabi business boys who call a woman slut if she claimed her body her own and danced for her pleasure or to be looked at or men who are very stiff/ conscious of their bodies.

I wonder what was desi to the guys??

The Desi space......
Firstly these desi parties become a big meeting ground for long lost outoftouch friends. I bumped in to people I met straight after school i.e. 8 years! They become a space to find your own… look for familiarity…the desi space and particularly bollywood becomes home. You are connected simply by the fact you are here…. you don’t have to explain who you are or where you come from… you think you know someone because you relate say over a bollywood song .... say like ek mein aur ek tu hein or even beyonce’s count on it….

The question still remains.. whom do we call our own?

My virtual Identity

2006-03-18T10:36:00.000-08:00

After an intense introspection of what my virtual identity should be I finally selected one that would describe what I wanted to project online, flirtatious and loud at the same time, intrigue or disgust people enough to read me and most importantly describe my flirtations with different spaces. Promiscuous spaces.

I was simultaneously chatting with Harsh and Chintan, throwing names at them. Each time my expression would change, a mischievous giggle with “dirty intellect” to a dirty frown with “contaminated cravings” (Harsh’s idea), to a silent laugh (my sister is getting her facial done behind me, she’s covered in the white L’oreal mask, trying hard to relax and enjoy the “sensual” face pack, while I know her mind is racing with the chores she has to complete today) with “promiscuous platforms” (Chintan’s brainwave).

So here I am, all excited on a Saturday afternoon with a new identity and an excitement over starting a new project!