How I Spent My Weekend

One of the more wtf moments of this weekend was hearing Donald Trump say out of nowhere, "Fo' shizzle." Jesus.

We went to Troy on Saturday, which is a nearby quaint little riverside town with lovely old buildings and more people on the streets in a day than you see in a year around my place. It's quite a sight, that river in winter. Frozen solid, birds hopping across its surface. Found a rare non-chain, small breakfast-and-lunch type shop with oodles of homey charm and delish food. Best pancakes I've ever had, gigantic and fluffy.


New Economists keep arriving before I've had a chance to finish the old one. There's altogether too much competition for my eyeball-time these days. I'd stop subscribing to Desipundit, except that'd be one less link to India. Ah, who am I kidding? I've now officially lived longer outside India than in it, if you discount the first three years of life spent pooping, dribbling and largely unconscious. Sigh.

On the bright side, I made (yes, made from scratch) bele obbattu aka puranpoli yesterday, in honour of Holi and in a spirit of competition against my SIL, who also made them. If my food habits don't qualify me as incorrigibly Indian, your standards are too bloody high.

Fretted a little that Saurabh's AP* documents have arrived but mine haven't. Everybody thinks it's frightfully funny to joke about Saurabh making the India trip alone.

I read Norma McCorvey's I Am Roe on Saturday. I was going to put it down after the first couple of chapters because it was so wildly out of whack from what I'd expected - geez, this woman's an alcoholic, a druggie, practically illiterate, a whiner and generally more white trash than anything else, as far from a 'proper' activist as you can get. But danged if she didn't make me kinda respect her by the end. Her politics about abortion goes no further than bewildered disbelief that anyone would question her right to it (or so she says. I don't fully buy it but there's no question she's a little naive). Her love life's completely messed up, and though she says she's a lesbian she's got three children (the last one was the Roe baby). She sure as hell didn't write this book herself. But I was talked 'round to the view that it's right that the plaintiff in that groundbreaking case should have been Everywoman - worse, the underdog. That's who Roe v. Wade belongs to.

(Holy exploding camels, Wikipedia's telling me that a year after she wrote the book this woman got frickin baptised, became Catholic (!!), and is now a spokesperson for the same pro-life 'terrorist' organisation, Operation Rescue, that she blasts in the book saying they shot at her.)

Watched three movies, one of which was Hitchcock's Vertigo (1957). Saurabh remarked to me just as we begin watching, "Do you know more time has passed from the time you were born to now than from the time this movie was made to the time you were born?" This calls for a reassessment of my practice of referring to movies from the 80s as "fairly recent". I feel delightfully world-weary.

Vertigo was good, especially that one freaky pinwheel-dream sequence. Woooooo. Guru Dutt's Pyaasa was better, with fantastic poetry to boot. What the hell went wrong with Indian cinema? Though, in fairness, I could ask the same question of Hollywood after Billy Wilder and then again after the 70s. The best of the lot was Broadcast News, pathetic title, awesome movie. It's so rare to find characters who're allowed to be intelligent, you know?

So I'm in the library on Saturday, right? Lovely old building with marble statues and staircases, stained glass windows, trimmings in all the right places, etc.. It's one of my favourite places around here. But my boots make an unearthly din on the wood floor of the upstairs reading room. I always forget, and walk brashly in with clumpy steps, then cringe at the stares and spend the rest of my time trying to blend into the mahogany background, making on tiptoes like a fairy. So on Saturday I was stuck by one far wall of the reading room, contemplating shelves marked '92: Biographies, K - N'. Which is how I ended up borrowing I Am Roe and Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azhar Nafisi). For a while I thought that was it, that this time my trip to the library was just going to be my trip to '92: Biographies, K - N', and I might as well make the most of it. But biographies are so not my thang. How to pick?

One solemn green leatherbound book titled Thomas More caught my eye. Having recently watched the excellent but unfortunately titled A Man For All Seasons, I thought I'd get it, but then I realised dreary 18th century Catholic fanatics, however brilliant they may be as lawyers, hardly ever make good reading material. So now I've hit upon the one kind of movie that would be leaps and bounds better than the book: biographies. Goodbye, age-old question.

I reached for Mandela's autobio, The Long Walk to Freedom, but that was bound to be full of self-congratulatory, whitewashed anecdotes - that's the trouble with biographies of living statespeople, you've got to be in the mood for lies. There were about a hundred biographies of Marie Antoinette, which brought to mind Kirsten Dunst, eurgh. Five copies of a book titled, A Monk Swimming. Does that mean the book is good? Or that it's the biography of a local nobody who donated these five copies? Isn't the book being just a little bit despo by putting on such an arresting title? (Are monks allowed to wear swimsuits?) Nah, bound to be a bad read. Judge a book by its title, that's hardly unfair.

What about writers? There was another stately leatherbound tome about four inches wide: Summarising(!) Maugham. Sheesh. Maybe some other guy I haven't heard of, because if he's got biographers he's got to be somewhat interesting, right? Immediate recoil at the thought: am I actually contemplating reading biographies of random people?! It was time to make the valiant dash out of the wood-floored reading room to the main bookshelves. I didn't look behind me to see if I garnered more stares.

*AP = Advance Parole, and don't you run off with the idea that we're a couple of ex-jailbirds - it's a document that allows one to travel out of the country while one's Holy Green Card applications are undergoing their Mysterious Processing.