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I was recently commissioned by the Camden Council in London to respond to Sarat Maharaj's text "Pidginy Linguish" for Camden Kalā, as part of the UK-India Year of Culture. Below is an excerpt from the resulting essay, which was a reflection on walking, anthropology, and my time as a student in London.   Highgate Cemetery, London, 2012 Migrants are not churned out uniformly: they have varying status, staying power and agency determined by the legal machinery that processes them. How they are tagged makes this apparent: exile, émigré, expatriate, refugee, asylum seeker, detainee, deportee, alien, other, illegal, clandestini, sans papiers, removees, non-subject, non-citizen, job snatcher, benefits-tourist and equivalents [...]   - Sarat Maharaj (2003)  And then the category that described my own experience, but doesn’t quite fit any of the above: the international student. The non-EU international student, to be specific, whose status once the post-study work visa...

It was a crisp October evening in London. I was walking down Pentonville Road as she walked up it, and then I saw her, bundled up in a beige overcoat - so different from what I was used to - waving at me. I grinned and skipped forward to cross the road, and we chatted the whole way to McDonald’s, where we proceeded to order a box of chicken nuggets and exclaim at things. It seems fitting to open with this anecdote, not only because it was our first meeting in a foreign land - an apt beginning of new stories - but also because Shikha had just come from a talk at King’s Cross by Ann Wroe, who had been speaking about her new book on the myth of Orpheus. I’ve been fascinated by this mythological character for years, but this is really not about me; the point of this opening scene is that Shikha had just seen in person one of her idols, the obituaries editor of The Economist.  It’s an odd sort of trait to proclaim that you love reading obituaries , as she did, but hey, I love cemet...

I’ll begin at the beginning. I met her in 2009, when we were asked to be co-editors of the International Press of the Model UN conference at our college in Delhi. Those were the days when an MUN was a big shiny exciting event in most people’s lives. A few months after this big shiny event, I was to graduate. Being a sentimental and somewhat cheesy person, I asked my friends to write down a few words for nostalgia’s sake in a notebook as we parted ways. Dear Kriti, it is most unfortunate that I got to know you only a few months before Fate was designated to tear us asunder...  Her opening sentence goads me to this day, because: a. it seems terribly prophetic, if slightly belated, and b. it drips with her trademark sarcasm at the entire exercise, continuing thus: I really wanted to draw you a cartoon or dazzle you with some linguistic cleverness that adequately expresses the friendship between two people who have also edited newsletters together (a truly...

"Accept the seasons of your heart."                  ~ Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet "There is no such thing as static happiness ... happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals."                  ~ John Updike "...si poco a poco dejas de quererme dejaré de quererte poco a poco."           ~ Pablo Neruda, "Si tú me olvidas" [ español | english ] Have you ever fallen in love with a language you didn't know? --- Clissold Park, London October 2012

--- London 2011, 2012 Paris 2012

--- Neal's Yard, London July 2013

Just as the sun goes down. There are greens, and greys, and blues and reds and pinks and yellows, and water and ducks and sky. Best enjoyed in the company of another... ...but being there by myself (with my camera for company) was pretty great too. --- London, July 2013

So I went to London in the last week of July 2013. The occasion was my graduation, the excuse was my graduation... It was an expensive and long journey, but maybe happiness shouldn't be measured in money. Emirates is a nice airline, with nice food (like lamb biryani and apple blackberry crumble. They even have menus. Menus .) and I read stuff about flamenco and Bombay jazz in their in-flight magazine and watched German and French movies. I've now seen Dubai airport, though I'm not putting U.A.E. on my countries-I've-visited list because it feels like cheating. London was warm and friendly. I graduated. Threw the hat up in the air and all. Thanks for the photo, Thomas/family! I bought some second-hand, broken-spine books. I may or may not have been hungry... I walked around my favourite spots and hung out with some of my favourite people. I enjoyed not being stared at. I enjoyed alone time. Especially in parks. I went to Regent's Park, St. George...

--- London 2012

Last November, I covered a few events for the South Asian Literature Festival in London. Some of these were published on the SALF website. This is one of the unpublished pieces of the talk 'Shakespeare's South Asian Stage' on 3 November 2012. * The Bard’s charms have not gone unnoticed in South Asia, and his plays, with their universal themes and theatricality, provide immense room for adaptation. I vividly recall the cold May evening when my friends and I stood spellbound for nearly three hours in the yard of The Globe theatre. It rained mercilessly down on our raincoats, but we were too busy cheering and applauding the Company Theatre’s Hindi rendition of Twelfth Night to care. The Globe to Globe festival was the highlight of London’s summer, bringing together 37 of the bard’s plays in different languages to an enthralled audience. Image courtesy of mumbaitheatreguide.com On November 3rd 2012 at the Bush Theatre, writer, filmmaker and activist Preti T...

Last November, I covered a few events for the South Asian Literature Festival in London. Some of these were published on the SALF website. This is one of the unpublished pieces of the talk 'From Page to Stage' on 3 November 2012. * Does adapting a novel for the theatre take away the characters from the author? What is gained from such an adaptation? Why do playwrights choose to adapt existing works of literature rather than writing new plays?  It was a quiet Saturday morning at the Bush Theatre when, with panellists and participants seated in an intimate circle, began a talk about words and characters coming to life. Artiste Sarah Williams interviewed Tamasha co-director Sudha Buchar and theatre critic and playwright Lloyd Evans about the intricacies of adapting novels and short stories for the stage. In a day and age where nearly every popular work of literature tends to be shortened into a script for the screen or stage, Lloyd proposed the paradoxical idea that ...

                                       

At 7.45am, I arrive at Arsenal station for my last tube ride. My friend, who I first “met” over an internet forum when we were bound for the same London university, who is from my country, who has been the warmest person in a sometimes cold place, and who insisted on making the journey from her boarding in Notting Hill to mine in Highbury so that she could accompany me and my luggage to Heathrow, is with me. We drag three suitcases down the very convenient ramp, pausing slightly at the head of a short staircase. I’ve hardly got mine down one step when a man materialises, firm of grip and with a business-like air, lifts my 23kg suitcase easily, and deposits it at the bottom of the staircase. I’ve hardly begun to thank him when he’s back up the stairs to help my friend, before anonymously vanishing into the crowd. Our train arrives earlier than we expect it, and everyone waits for those inside to leave before getting on. For the next hour and a half, I am partly nostalgic, partly dro...

"Electricity has made angels of us all." This is the first line of the film Oh! What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me, and book by the same name by anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. It is also reminiscent of my very first class in London last October, when this line gave me happy thrills. In the 1970s, Carpenter's observations referred more to the telephone. Today, they apply equally to the internet. Coming home to the people I love has been interesting. Having spoken to them and seen them nearly every day for fourteen months, but not having hugged them or held their hand, makes it feel as though so much time has passed, and yet none at all. I started reading this book in the last few weeks before leaving London, and finished it the day before I left. It was like coming full circle. There's something pleasing about symmetry.

London November 2012

  Parliament, London November 2012

Theatres are intimate. No big screen to make you forget, dark but not dark enough. You can be absorbed in the performance, yet conscious of your neighbour's mirth at the same time. And there is unity in frequent applause. I watched Wicked last night. The Apollo Victoria was green on the outside, red on the inside. After collecting my ticket and being told to have a nice evening, I settled into my plush seat at the very back of the dress circle, complete with a pair of binoculars-for-hire for £1 (I did not get my coin back, thieves). The next three hours were spent laughing with G(a)linda, being inspired by Elphaba, and admiring the sheer genius of the cast and the spectacular stage. They came down in bubbles, they flew up in swirls of black, they roared with robotic lion machines, monkeys had wings. They made up words ("confusified", "hideodious", "congratulotions!"). A standing ovation. And I listened to Louise Dearman's " Defying Gr...

            London's West End, November 2012