Post-holiday blues…

It’s never easy to accept the fact that your holiday is over. Mine is. And I am still sulking about it, through security check. It’s little consolation that I get another three days extra after I land in Mumbai due to the extended weekend. Right now, I am just missing mum, dad, sis and the kids.

Meeting my parents and my sister together after so long was like going back to Delhi when we all lived together under the same roof, which was a long, long time ago. I kept reminding myself to take a picture with my parents and my sister, before I left. There were many pictures that we took but one person was always missing from the frame, usually behind the camera. And as life generally goes, I didn’t take that picture, before I left. Damn.

I’ve always felt guilty about not settling down in the same city as my parents. They live alone in Delhi, while I love Mumbai and my sister prefers to call Kerala her home. My parents had always hoped that my sister would finish her medicine and settle down in Delhi but that didn’t happen. They were still hopeful that I would return to Delhi after finishing my course in Mumbai. But I couldn’t think of letting go of Mumbai, a city I felt more connected to, in the course of a year, than I had in my 21 years in Delhi. My parents, especially my mother, couldn’t understand why I didn’t return back to Delhi, after my course got over, couldn’t understand my decision to live apart from them and its probably caused her a lot of hurt. Its probably one area of my life that I feel I failed her. I don’t regret my decision to stay on in Mumbai, I regret not being there for her and dad through those lonely years leading up to retirement and after that, to now. My parents have grand kids to occupy their time now and a new house that is being constructed, to look forward to.

I just wish I could visit them whenever I wanted, without worrying about work and Mumbai.

What they didnt teach at Mallu-Land’s Film school…Happy endings

For as long as I can remember, Mallu movies were different from the rest of what the country produced. I saw a healthy dose of Malayalam films on bulky VCR tapes when I was younger, even though childhood was spent in Delhi, far away from Kerala’s movie making industry. 

Watching those films back then, gave me an impression of a Kerala that was made up of red brick houses, far stretching paddy fields, men in lungis, Mamoothy (quite handsome as far as I was concerned!), Mohan Lal and of course my all-time favourite- Srinivasan. People in those films didn’t lead rich opulent lives onscreen. Costumes (if you could call it that) were generally basic and fancy-free. Stories revolved around normal people, mostly the poor or judiciously middle class though they were still rivetting as far as I am concerned. 

But I couldn’t understand for the life of me, why, when the ending came and the hero and heroine were all set to unite, did the villain have to come in between and screw things up. Always. Without fail. Happy Endings as a concept was obviously something they didnt teach back in Kerala Film School. (dont’ bother looking up that on Google, made it up!) The hero/heroine always looked on sadly with regret at the loss of his/her loved one as the credits started to roll. And I almost always jumped up annoyed, from the movie, vowing not to watch another one.  What did they have against happy endings, anyways?

Mallu movies now are pretty straight-laced and tow down to the usual crude humour yardstick. I remember a Malayalam film director who I know bemoaning the crass slapstick humour that had become a yardstick for the industry today. When he released his film a year and a half later, i didnt come away feeling any better.  

Srinivasan’s ‘Pon Mutta Idunne Taarav‘ is one of my all time favourite movies.

gooey eyed fool or the house next to the hills

I haven’t owned any piece of real estate in my life. I do intend to, but I just haven’t gotten down to it. My parents, on the other hand, have meticulously invested in real estate through their life and now, are building that long-dreamt-of house in Kerala. With her typical resourcefulness, my mum would mail me the house layout plans, call me from Delhi and chat animatedly about which plan looked better? a, b or c? as far as i was concerned  they all looked the same to me. I still went along with the talk, not particularly moved by the thought of a new house. I was preoccupied with Mumbai, work and other mundane stuff. Till I visited the site a week back after landing in Palakkad. The house isnt going to be ready till March next year but still, walking through the plot as the workers went about their work and listening to my mom talking about what she had planned for each corner, I had this sense of a new beginning, a new place to call home. I could imagine coming home to this place in the holidays. Most Mallus talk about building a house in Kerala, many of them do so, too. But my parents had always seemed to be different. They were fond of their annual trips back to Kerala but liked the convenience of their Delhi life, something they didnt seem inclined towards trading off.

In the last one year, though, their plans seem to have changed and they’ve been talking of renting out the Delhi apartment and moving to Kerala. The house here has a beautiful view of the western Ghats, from the terrace, and is located in a quiet serene neighbourhood (at least for now) 

I’m not sure if they will actually do it, but suspect that once the house is ready, relocating may be too tempting a prospect. It’s their decision, of course, but I worry that they may not adjust to life in Kerala after having spent close to 40 years in Delhi. They have their friends, their circle of acquaintances, their routine and re-adjusting your life at 60 isn’t the most practial thing, perhaps. Anyways, they haven’t made up their minds yet so…

I’ve never been attached to Delhi, though I grew up and studied college there. Yet, a part of me feels sad about losing that part of my childhood when they do decide to relocate. Crap, I am contradicting myself. Nonsensical emotional stuff…

Planes are passe

I had to visit Palakkad’s train station the other day to pick up my parents and thats when I realised how long it had been since I set foot there, visited a train station, passed a Higginbotham store that used to be the highpoint of my train journeys back then. The sounds and smells (ok, not very pleasant, not gonna glorify that…) didnt beam me back to the past as much as make me aware of how much life had moved ahead. My parents still insisted on travelling by train, refusing to crunch their travel time from three days to three hours, they said they were comfortable this way.

I wasn’t exactly rolling in the greens when I was booking my tickets for my Kerala trip a few weeks back and given the recent upsurge in flight fares, shelling out 24 grand for a trip for two for Mumbai-Coimbatore-Mumbai seemed a tad much. We had shelled out 18 grand four months back for a trip for two that involved Mumbai, Goa, Cochin and Calicut. Yet, whatever my economic state, whatever the time of the month, I just cannot think of travelling by train anymore. Perhaps I should…

Palakkad Diary Part Deux…a detour to Kalamandalam

Day Four is when I have planned a day long trip to Kalamandalam, Kerala’s best kept secret. Its one of the finest art and music educational institutions imparting training in varied music and artistic forms including mridangam, kathakali, mohiniattam, thullal, kuchipudi, mizhavam etc.

It’s a promise I made to myself when I visited the institute six years ago, while working on a travel show. We shot an episode at the school and I had promised myself I would come back to absorb the place in more detail (the crummiest way to see a place is to work on a travel show, I assure you, you are too busy getting the best shots, to be able to take out time!)

It’s as beautiful as I remember it. I guess half the OMG factor of visiting such a place is the fact that even in this day and age, there are people who study dance and music at such an intense level for most of their educational life. They study from Class six right up to the time they graduate. In the last two years, they have also introduced a post graduate level degree.

 You feel like an intruder watching a class in progress, no matter that neither the teacher nor the student seem to realize your presence for the first ten minutes of your being there. They are so engrossed in the class taking place. One boy practicing the chenda starts to consistently mess up his timing on the drums after performing well for the first ten minutes and we discreetly walk away.  

In one of the classes which mostly has boys aged about 11 or 12, all the students are playing on wooden stands that will make do for real drums for the next two years. Until their hands get calloused and used to the rigors of drumming…

Palakkad Diary

Palakkad may not be the most exciting thing to have happened to Kerala and you would be forgiven for thinking that nothing really ever happens in this sleepy Kerala town. It’s not my favourite place in Mallu-land but by function of having family which has decided that Palakkad is home, I don’t have much of a choice… 15 days in Palakkad. Yayyyyy….!

Day One of course is spent sleeping and eating home-made food. Been a while since I have had both. Day Two is when Mum n Dad land in town so the day is spent chatting, being mollycoddled and eating even more sumptuous food. Mommy cooks best, be aware! Day three and I have, in a rare moment of generosity, promised to prepare my special mutton recipe for everyone. By the end of the day, I am regretting my offer as the couch seems infinitesimally more inviting than the thought of four hours in the kitchen. There’s the weekly CSI episode that I am bound to miss in the meantime. All protests are thrown out of the window by mum however and by the end of four hours spent cooking the mutton, I have made a mental note of the virtues of keeping mum when someone mentions mutton next time.