I was on my way back from Dahej. It’s a nothing town,
hot and dusty and parched in May. The nearest train station is Bharuch, a tiny
municipality that’s been mostly known for the army presence there, in keeping
with the proximity to the Pakistan border. But now Dahej and Bharuch are both
exploding, due to the SEZ that was set up in 2004, I guess as part of the
incumbent PM’s push for investments when he was the CM of Gujarat. Chemical,
pharma and petrochem companies give the air a distinctly metallic tang, and the
mad dash of colourful and rundown buses ferrying people to work and back on the
state highways is something all too familiar in India, where urban planning and
infrastructure doesn’t keep pace with investments and ambition (see also Bangalore, Karnataka for e.g.). Despite
it all though and because all these things are still new (maybe been a decade
in the making), the places still retain a mufassil
charm, a place of tea-stall lean-tos, single-storey houses, cattle on the road
and patches of greenery hyphenating modest new building societies. They grow
cotton and groundnuts beside the highways, on land that’s not yet been given up
or taken away for building/expanding those highways.
It was a long drive, maybe 8 hours and a bit. It’s a tangible
difference as you near Bombay, crossing the Vasai creek. I had been napping,
the car doing a comfortable 80 on smooth highways that surprise you even after
all these years. As the car slows perceptibly, I wake up. You can look through the
window, your breath leaving patches due to the ac being near enough to
freezing. It’s almost surreal, your brain slowly waking up and trying to get
its bearings. Its row upon row of cars, flanked by high-rises and developments.
The city reveals itself, a honeycomb of thousands of cells with a hundred
thousand windows. Windows bathed in golden and cold-blue lights, some darkened.
Millions of strangers bustle inside, shadowed and in relief, as they attend to
the private business of the night-time hours. You can see them, unadorned and
naked and unknown, strangers to you, seen and unknown, exposed yet mystical. You
are all alone, surrounded by the teeming millions, physically proximity not
enough to dispel the inner isolation that comes from and characterises urban
living. Its nearly midnight when you do
reach home and as you stand on the sill of your Juliet window, smoking, you can
see car headlights on the highways. You wonder if someone is looking up from a
car, wondering at all the windows.
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Couple of quick music video mentions, putting music videos that I found interesting, one kinda old and one kinda new (I somehow can't find the videos through blogger search, so links will have to suffice):
1. UNKLE - Burn My Shadow. A storyboard. I thought Goran Visnjic would become more famous.
2. The Chemical Brothers ft. Beck - Wide Open. The making of the video is pretty interesting. Good work demands rigour - technology helps yes, but the work still needs to be put in.
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I saw a few movies - mainstream fare - Baahubali 2 (fun), Ghost in the Shell (I was prepared to dislike it and was pleasantly surprised, I wish the need for possible sequels weren't so obvious) and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (its different from the rest of the MCU movies in tone and palette and that's a definite plus).
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I am trying to remember which children's magazines I read as a kid.
I am trying to remember which children's magazines I read as a kid.
