Let there be Soup

Having survived yet another gruelling day of work, I am home. I feel lazy, so much so that I didn't stop at the unfriendly neighbourhood store to forrage for frozen dinners and now am left to ponder "what do I eat for dinner?" I have one egg, some rice, no bread, some mushrooms, cauliflower, onion sprouts and a can of sweet corn and tomato soup. I sense no real possibility here. I am stifled by my grocery makings. Damn! I'll have to walk after all to the store later before I sit down to do some actual work. Or we could just eat the can of soup and call it good, I suppose.

Leftovers are still in the freezer. Day three of the chicken sandwich is right on top. Maybe I'll opt to add some stuffing to the mayo, mustard, lettuce and the egg or so. It wont be much. I don't even need to bring bread for the sandwich then. I have just one glass of apple cider left, for that I will be sad to say goodbye to but all good things must come to an end, I guess.

Such grand plans. Sniff. In the end I had cold soup.

Homeward bound

In 6 hours, I head back home for a few days. I love going to visit, it’s so relaxing. After living in Hyd and now Delhi, it’s like an escape to another, calmer world.

Some things I look forward to:

warmer nights

coffee served everywhere, and its not the instant type

mega breakfasts (scrambled eggs, dosas, onions, chutneys and crushed up chillies, served with yesterdays chicken and super-thick, warm sweet sambhar)

the wide, quieter streets & overall lack of traffic (okay comparitively)

Briyani - non sweet, mixed uniformly, lots of meat

the warm air, the high humidity and the gusty winds - always occurring together

the smell of the fresh cut grass on the little garden that my mom rears

plush living in my parents’ house

driving cars again

chamiers

crossword puzzles - i only seem to spare time for them on airplanes

Things I love even more now that I have lived in delhi:

safe tap water and ice

even the most unassuming of people speak un-accented English

sane drivers on the roads. the most road rage that gets displayed is a muttered swear

everybody understands tam

murugan idli kadai

the beach

Catching zzzzzs whenever I want

Autumn Skies

Now is the time to be a spectator of autumn. We have been experiencing some crisp days. This is our opportunity to take a long relaxing drive, park and enjoy the blue skies above. There is so much beauty to behold. Look up. And make a wish. Look up. And be thankful.

The pictures in this post were taken during a late afternoon long drive in one of those directions you take for no apparent reason other than that you have never taken it before. For some reason, the trees are all coniferous-y.

Natural Blues

Listening to Moby - Why does my Heart feel so bad

And I'm up while the dawn is breaking, even though my heart is aching.

I should be drinking a toast to absent friends instead of these comedians.

- Elvis Costello

With Bated Breath

Anybody with even half an ear to the ground in the musty backwaters of spurned comic novels and little known super heroes, will no doubt be aware of the feverish anticipation which is being generated by every droplet of information which appears in relation to the movie version of Alan Moore and Davie Gibbons’ seminal graphic novel Watchmen. To the uninitiated this excitement may seem odd – comic book adaptations are in abundance these days, from the already well established (Batman, Spiderman, Hulk, Iron Man, Fantastic Four and so forth) to the obscure (Ghost Rider, Hellboy, BPRD).

But Watchmen really is different; an incredibly emotionally and politically complex work, which refuses to paint its world in terms of crude morality, but rather keeps a studied distance from the world it portrays, never shirking from the consequences of its characters’ belief systems, adored, rightly, by those who’ve read it, and regarded in some quarters as one of the peaks of late twentieth century literature. This is a complicated, multi-tiered mystery set in an alternate 1985 America where costumed crime fighters are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” - which charts the American tension with the Soviet Union - is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former c is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion–a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers–Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but then he realizes that nobody has watched over the Watchmen?



I can't help but be pretty excited and also slightly terrified that they will muck up the genius of the book. Because the book's straight-up apocalyptic darkness is what makes it a work of genius. And a beauty of a novel like V for Vendetta (again from Alan Moore) had to be hollywoodized with a hair-brained romance thrown in, which results in the mindless waif like Natalie Portman turning in to a strong, proud Vivien-Leighish heroine. The entire sequence ends up creating more holes than it deems to accomplish. Then there are the hurdles of intricate plot layering and the fluidity of time and space to conquer. Let's just say that I will be disappointed to the point of rage if it comes out all Fantastic Four-y.

It should be interesting to see where Zack Snyder (of directing 300 fame) translates the testosterone into superhero adrenaline rush for the Watchmen. Until then, we’ll have to pray every night that, coming out of the cinema, we’ll be glancing to each other, and saying, with relieved smiles, ‘Well, it could have been worse’.