i've totally forgotten how to write in html / css.

so i'm doing this post the nomral way. no fancy layout-work.

let's see.

yup. that's how long it's been since i last blogged. it seemed a shame to not to capture one month of soul-searching, eating, drinking, looking at bright colours, and walking, walking walking on bridges, through alleys, round quaint corners in london on this blog. but tied down by laptop i wasn't going to be.

along with my usual pillage of art-official (tickets, maps, brochures, more tickets), a fistful (ok, more like an overnighter-full) of H&M shopping, and some of this & that, one of the more easily relatable forms of baggage i brought back with me was a sampling of some alternative food. one was just cold-pressed sunflower oil, (while i've read up on a bit on the advantages of cold-pressed vs. regular, it's not something that's going to make as big a difference in my head as....) quinoa. also got organic butter beans and multi-grain flaxseed, spelt, [thingamajig] crackers.

back to quinoa. the thing that makes a big difference in my diet picture, and makes me so happy every time i cook with it, i want to don a fifties-style kitchen glamour suit complete with sky-blue apron and matching patent later heels and kick one up in delight.

falling head over heals

watching a bbc lifestyle show about a restaunteer looking for the perfect location to open a restaurant in Italy. Vito, the restaunteer, was excited by the commercial possibilities of a sight in Modena. But he fell head over heels, the narrator tell us, with the isolated property on the hill with a spectacular view, and the magic touch of florence gold melding it into sublimity.

its kind of how it is with men, isn't it? you can get excited about the compatibility, comfortability and confidence you get from a certain relationship, but you ultimately, perhaps, fall in love with something that just mesmerizes you.

or not?

The GRE - the "General Test" for life.....?

It's always a good conversation stimulant when people ask me about my GPA in college. I can then verbosely regale them with the fact that I went to a school where there was no GPA, no exams, and even (and this is where I one-up Bennington, my sort of sister-college based on its being populated by so many of my countrymen and classmates) ... no credit system.

It was therefore a nerve-wracking experience to suddenly be faced, after 12 years, with a testing procedure so regimented, even a fly couldn't get through any loopholes. Maybe it was the communal nature of exams in our formative years that made the experience so much more natural. The peeling, chipped desks with eager, innocent daylight gently stroking our faces in pre-partition limestone buildings were a tad bit less jarring than computerized one-minute compartments of time staring out at you in the cold certainly of a your isolation booth.

It was in just one such air-sucked vacuum of a cubicle in which I gave the GRE this afternoon. The dead-pan efficacy of it all was strongly reflective of our existence today. I was shown my result as soon as it was over. No natural gestation period of expectation or worry. Although I'm personally glad I got the whole procedure over and done with, the somber loneliness of the experience somehow ties in, for me, with the conversation I was having with R and S today about the frazzled, short-attention span everyone today seems to have. A vague blur of disjointed existence, the result of not being able to remember yesterday, or a month ago, or when a month ago was. Trying to imbue my mind with simple and not-so-simple mathematical concepts in a mental space that keeps getting sucked by deadlines, twitter streams, facebook photo comments, life-goals, my iPhone todo list, updating my iPhone apps, facebook wall posts, syncing my iPhone, and trying to live, feels like tugging at a cloth that keeps fraying towards nonexistence.

It was a tough test. Apart from the content, and more importantly, the time factor, that made it so grueling, it really is the regimented quality that makes the whole process so daunting. Little as I had prepared, the geek in me actually enjoyed practicing the Math, but I wasn't even able to complete the section, scoring not very well in it as a result. It was the constant self-conscious voice inside me that kept laughing at myself for taking a test like this at age 30. For the one hour that I was just sitting in another room before the test, I was playing mental table-tennis, trying to stop realizing how I had completely lost the carefree innocence and crazed, blind optimism with which I used to approach exams etc. before.

When I was Young.

some potassium with your muffin, dear?

Some say it's a key source of potassium, a good carb before a workout; according to my grandfather, a sheer necessity of life, the proverbial apple to keep the doctor away. From an entirely too well-stocked pile of stomach-upset-experiences, I know its apt to make hell freeze over, under that stubborn stomach hide.

In my kitchen, the banana  has become a bankable prelude to muffins.

Overdue comfort, a whiff of flour, a peek at those cuddly, fisher-price-esque plastic measuring spoons, and a few overripe banana's on the dining table.

Surefire signs that a batch of banana chocolate walnut muffins are in the offing.



Because it'd never be just banana muffins.

Not to take back my testament to their gooey wonderfulness. But it serves as such a perfect encasement for the comfort-oozing amalgam of melted, pliable chocolate and walnut. Not to mention, it's simply incomparable in its function as an enhancer of batter.

Talk about the consistency of heaven. Instead of milk, or excessive oil, or any of those other liquid elements that moisten dry ingredients, the mush of mashed bananas simply makes everything stick with a stodginess that would leave even the most nervous, scatter-brained baker feeling completely secure.

Thus, in a day dedicated to the fluff-realm of lets-pretend-we're-hip-amateur-cooks-who-know-something-about-food, S and I embarked on the non-stop banana-chocolate-walnut procedure.

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It started with S getting frisky with bananas, nuts, and his knife.
Innuendo was inescapable.

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[caption id="attachment_1860" align="alignright" width="150" caption="2"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1859" align="alignright" width="150" caption="1"][/caption]

Chocolate chopped. eggs. mixed with oil.

poured into pristine white.

glisteningly separate.

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[caption id="attachment_1864" align="alignright" width="145" caption="4"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1862" align="alignright" width="150" caption="3"][/caption]

This (Fig. 4)) is another one of those sights that reminds me of childhood. The sound of the plastic spatula scraping against the bowl, and the simplicity with which the yolk and oil mixture remains distinct from the flour. I almost hate forcing them to mix, and tend to just circle around the side of bowl so that the liquid merges slowly.

With the florid, reassuring elasticity of banana mush, everything turns warmer. The expectant piles of deep chocolate shards and smokey walnut browns are set off against the summery mixture.

So there you have it. The warmest, tenderest, cuddliest, most reassuring muffins to experience.

Mushroom Ivory Part 2

I know I've written before about my OCD mushroom ritual, but I think I got a little closer to capturing their compelling alabaster veneer with the camera this time. Thus it had to be shared. There's something about their squishy, rubbery softness when you slice into their sublime purity. So disarmingly whole, when they gaze (un-quartered), face upwards, like a one-dimensional collage of organic circles.

Until they're cut.

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Then, deep, velvety eggplant tinged cores bristling with fibry detail, softly blemish the inner edges of these unabashedly pristine fans of creaminess.

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Whether it's mushrooms and tomatoes sandwiched between mustard-slapped bread, or mushrooms lightly sauteed and salted along with spinach, their robust smokiness is always enhanced by a burnished garlic clove that's literally melted into them in the pan.

Break a clove upon the edge of your knife, slide it onto the fat in the pan, and watch its flavour permeate.

Sacrifice the virginal mushrooms to this smoldering altar, till they are sullied by heat and poignancy into a completely different form.









smoky hues of brown and violet fuse together as they sizzle in a lemon zing.




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A gulp of fresh life.

Despite all the twists and turns in my erratic, newbie and completely self-indulgent journey as a blogger, despite all the ten-thousand eye-burning nitty-gritty visual tweaks and CSS guesswork I've waded through, I still have the urge to SCRAPPPP it all and just sign up for that liberating, free wordpress blog with the most barebones theme ever.

Even now, I'm challenging myself to just WRITE instead of having to make a photo-essay out of everything, from baking, to putting a show-reel up, to reading at a cafe.

If there's any guarantee in life, it's that one season will be drastically different from another.

As I sat in my first few months of glaring, unabashed unemployment, attached to my duvet like a mushroom caught in melted cheese, I knew, that no matter how operatically and richly full the experience of sharing aesthetically charged vignettes of my life was making me feel; no matter how hooked I became day by day, that all this would simply disappear and be replaced by something else very soon.

And hey presto.

Movement and coordination suddenly took over my life. Travel. Budget. Money transfer. Shot list. Line Up. Paperwork. These were my stoic and distinctly un-malleable friends for the last two-three weeks. It's really funny that people used to think, in the later years of school, that I must be sensible and practical because I have a knack for maths. Yes, my mind clung around the conceptual beauty of the infinity of calculus and the symmetry of quadratics, but it seems that (with age) I increasingly turn into a flashing red lightbulb as anything to do with logistics approaches. A cold panic glazes over circuits which may have been logically more nimble once, the search for a receipt turns threatens to blow the lid off tightly compressed mental compartments.

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[caption id="attachment_1602" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="MS / WS view from Daamne-koh with Faisal Mosque, as requested"][/caption]

Despite juggling the logistics of two projects cramped in one week in this blind-sighted, brain-dead fashion, I'm really grateful for the experience. I got to leave town for a couple of days and breathe some fresh air. There's nothing like a shoot to get you up early. Although I'd been to Isloo many times to visit Abba & Co. during the teenage years, I don't think things like air quality meant quite the same thing back then as they do now.

It was also nice to work with such a regimented treatment/shot list. It's that discipline of vision, even if it's someone else's, that makes you feel like you are actually getting your feet wet in the process of making a film.

Up the crystalline clarity of blue ether, cheery sun and happy hillocks we went on our second morning.

What we were really there for, though was to capture footage of local Islamabadi's doing their thing. As my DP admitted, his one weakness is not being able to shove his camera in people's faces. He and I, I responded, don't really make a very good team then. I have the same problem. Nevertheless, we managed some surreptitiously obtained footage of a group of women, lurking about an ice cream stall like some highly instinctive grassland species.

After the hectic, extremely tense game of catch-and-run behind the scenes of Tehreema Mitha's emotionally charged first performance in Pakistan after some time, the serenity of this shoot was a welcome change.






[caption id="attachment_1599" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="some sort of wildlife park - we definitely saw exotically gurgling birds as well as the better known isloo natives - the monkeeeeys!"][/caption]

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I'd been violently sick just the day before leaving for Islamabad and catching a 7 am flight. The combination of my strange, twitchy phobia of drips, the dread and panic of a migraine, the rapid exiting of verve and energy from your body (regurgitation) and a feeling of not being totally prepared for the next day with a subject who I haven't even met yet, was all enough to terrify any possibility of sleep out of me that night. I was, for lack of a better word, simply smashed the next day. The quiet of my hotel room coupled with hot water, a change, two cups of room service coffee interspersed with one green tea (while juggling a meeting with a DP I had to brief (and meet) for the first time as well as the hyper-vigilant telephone monitoring of it all by my US-based producer) was minimally necessary to trick myself into thinking I could make it through the day.

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[caption id="attachment_1677" align="alignright" width="210" caption="Lens flare: easy on a silent, empty stage. illusive on the brink of performance"][/caption]

I'm glad its over, and I'm glad I squeezed it all in. I don't think I'll ever trust my self enough, (except maybe deep-down inside in some very instinctive place), to not stress out on a shoot like this. I know I have become somewhat better at trusting my cameraman. The skill of communicating the feel of the shot, so that its communicated from that deep-down grueling pit of fuel, while still making him feel like its his creation, is something to be reckoned with. Perhaps the root of overflowing layers of anxiety, though, is that, very frankly, I still have sublime expectations of every shoot, and I need to level with the equipment and resources available. And then there's the people. The people who need to be captured, who become completely different creatures when on the other side of lens. More importantly, I become a freak show, a sort of sullen anxiety-ridden peacock, a wildly probing force that's trying to balance a circus of physical toil, blustering life, the precision of sound recording, and the expectation of immaculate beauty.

Showreel Blues

It's one of those stomach-filling, incredibly reassuring sensations: the lifting of at least some of the haze that obscures our eyes.

I've come [at least temporarily] to a conclusion that this is one way of looking at the eternal question of what this crazy, bewildering, vast yet microcosmic, stagnant yet perpetually changing existence really may be at least partially about: illusion. It's as if we are submerged, at birth, into a hazy atmosphere full of dust particles [too much Star Trek, as per usual], and everything that we acquire, execute, plan and orchestrate is all within the limits of that obscured vision.

Goals that elude us, limits that haunt us, insecurities that plague us... we know there's a clue to unravelling all of these. Perhaps the key is to stop trying (but not too early), to pull back, detach, and perhaps then, some of the dust will evaporate, revealing glimmering fissures through which we perceive the truth.

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When I looked anew at the production showreel I submitted for grad school, I felt like I some of the layers began to thin out.

[The very term "showreel" makes my stomach quaver. It coveys images of cocky, action-oriented A-type personalities swaggering into a studio and securing a film deal through sheer arrogance and the veneer of championing some celebrated cause of the day.]

I look at this showreel now, and I see the a jam-packed linear timeline of a completely disconnected array of products that have been squashed together. The slow-paced, harmonious circles of an individual's life blending together in Urban Sketches lose their meaning when met with the abrupt assembly line of a sharply segmented, cut-and-pasted studio format that neatly packages break-neck speed tech-related information bytes.

Between the layers upon layers of "quirky" graphics, stylized montages and quick-paced edits, I see a myriad mouse-clicks, ribbons upon ribbons of my life-span sucked into the vacuum of transitions and 20 minute time structures.

I see an inner expression of the world impinged by the linearity of the [non-linear] editing timeline.

When I think of what I would say an interview about what I wanted to do with my, and as filmmaker, I realize I don't have a plan, a central driving force theme. It's not that the themes aren't there. They're in the process of emerging into focus like images from multiples lenses [the way your brain brings into focus the conflicting images from your two eyes].