By Chuck Palahniuk

"Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."

"I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.
A spinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined."

"More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself."

"What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we cant decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables. There is only the inevitable.”

MUST READ!

Wow. I have always felt like clutching onto pieces of writing that I can relate to. This blog post by someone has answered way too many questions for me and has acknowledged some of my deepest feelings. Anyways, I am putting it up here beacuse I think its very insightful and interesting. Enjoy :)

Three days. Three movies. Three good movies

I am a weird person. Sometimes, watching a good movie makes me feel that this life is worth living. So you can well imagine the level of my optimism and happiness when I have watched three spectacular and brilliant movies for three days in a row.


First-Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin. The title took a major chunk of my attention because I am currently reading Orhan Pamuk’s ‘My Name is Red’ which is permeated with the iconic semi-mythic legend of Shirin-Khusrev. Thus, I was quite curious to know their story. However, what made it extremely special for me was the way this story was told by Kiarostami. The entire movie is a spectacle of a number of women who have been doctored by the director to elicit various emotions and these have been cut and pasted at appropriate moments of the story which is narrated only by voices. The story is a highly melodramatic one which I felt was interesting because that made me a captive to the movie. The post movie discussion revealed that Kariostami had shot all these women (including Juliette Binoche) at his house when he did not even know what story he was going to run along with the myriad of emotions that he was capturing. This was my first Kiarostami’s movie and his wonderful experiment has converted me into a fan. Time to source more of his experiments.


Second-Tom Ford’s A Single Man. Features Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. It’s based on a life of a gay man Firth who has lost his partner of 16 years. The movie is like a series of splendid photographs. Each and every shot of the movie is breath-taking, especially the close-ups. Mesmerizing. The relationships are dealt with beautiful complexities. I won’t go much into the story of the movie. Julianne Moore has a short and powerful presence. She looks like the perfect example of vintage beauty and plays her part of a single lonely middle ages woman with extreme panache. It’s a beautiful movie whose each shot is to be savored. PS: All the gay men in the movie are insanely good looking!!


Third-Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island. This one is a treat for the brain. It is the epitome of edgy psychological thriller. The movie features one of my most favourite actors-Leonardo DiCaprio who has once again excelled himself. The movie takes you through the realms of real, imaginary, dreams, murders, hallucinations, sanity, insanity in a bizarre and eerie land Shutter Island. It gripped me from the very first scene and refused to let go of me even after it ended. Me and my roommate, with whom I had seen the movie, could not let go of it long after we left the theatre. The credit of the story obviously goes to the writer of the novel on which it is based but Scorcese has left no stone unturned to make a chilling, thrilling and fascinating brain twister! Must-Must-Must Watch!!!

A quaint little town in Rajasthan-Pushkar

The scorching heat was a bit too much to bear but the enigmatic search for the highly talked about Pink Floyd Café in Pushkar distracted me from it. I and my friend found ourselves in a land covered with sun rays, colors and silence in the middle of a hot day in May.

After religiously following people’s directions and a 20-minute walk, we managed to reach our destination-Pink Floyd Café which was safely hidden under a mishmash of lanes. The first two floors have rooms to stay and the third floor is dedicated to the café. As we moved up to the third floor to deal with our hunger pangs and to quench our thirst, we saw rooms with psychedelic appearance, each based on a Pink Floyd song theme. The place was adorned with interesting posters on Pink Floyd, beer, Pushkar Camel Safari etc. There was an almost ubiquitous sign of ‘No Photography Please’. “That’s a bummer”, I thought. The third floor café was pleasantly airy but non-AC. The only thing that irritated me was a huge poster which talked about the heavenly experience of having chilled beer! Well, Pushkar is a no-alcohol land. So if you can’t effing serve me some, don’t tease me about it! Anyways, after a plate of oily pasta and gallons of fresh lime water, we went out to hunt for a comfortable and affordable hotel.

We zeroed in on Kanha which is run by a rather haughty old Rajasthani lady and is actually a haveli turned into a hotel. In fact, there are a number of havelis in Pushkar which have now been converted into guest houses and hotels. The hotel manager was gullible and we easily convinced to give us a discount. This was off-season as the cattle fair, which attracts tourists from all around the world, happens in the month of November. After a short nap, we geared up for the main part of our holiday which was to explore this dry, colourful, spiritual and humble town- Pushkar!

We started with a chocolate shake at Enigma Café which tried its level best to live upto its name with colourful prints all over its walls and a really mysterious café owner/care taker. A chat with the owner revealed the secret of the exotic menu. He explained to us that there are a number of foreign visitors who have now made Pushkar their home.

After this, we meandered through the narrow lanes to reach the main shopping market of Pushkar where one can pick up pyajamas, pants, kurtas, dupattas, stoles, chappals, wall hangings, vibrant umbrellas etc. I landed into a shop where I saw some western dresses which I had seen in the Janpath market at Delhi and I was curious to know if they were exported from Pushkar to Delhi or vice versa. The shopkeeper tried his level best to convince me that all the stuff is manufactured in Pushkar.

Exhausted with all the shopping, we headed to the Pushkar Lake which is sort of misnomer because the lake is non-existent now. It is just a vast chunk of baked land. Nevertheless, the view was peaceful and beautiful.

As me and friend both aren’t even remotely religious, we decided to skip visits to various temples for which Pushkar is famous. It boasts of the only Brahma Temple that exists in India. When the town began to brighten up with artificial lights in the night, we decided to have one more walk through the town. Technically, you can walk through the whole town in an hour.

The bright day and the silken twilight were wrapped up with sumptuous dinner which included freshly cooked dal, matar paneer and chapattis at our hotel and a conversation session accompanies with twirls of smoke.