Toronto street nights
Nights crawl and I get depressed. A day wasted. I must sleep now. I could use these hours, not use but enjoy with sketching, graphics or music. But I feel like I was slumping all day. Slumping in a couch and it sank down and down and down. And this night I have again reached the depths of the couch. Depths beyond the couch. An underworld, the real Bottom. I could take a deep breath, grab that escaping oxygen and walk around the room. I cant go out and stand head to chest with black guys in baggy jeans and oversize jackets.
They stand one in front and one at the back and say "Sexy gurrl". There is something dangerous about this. He says "Whats your problem I'm just saying hello. Why r you like Don't touch me and all". I never said that but he can sense it. I dont budge. Ego. He may grab my ass or push me back. But I dont give in. Stubborn that I am.
And then he could be right. Whats all this in my head? Cant I be civil to a fella on the street? But I am not answerable to him. I dont have to be nice. Reading my body and defensiveness, he could be my Dr Phil on the street. Sorting out my issues as I stand, waiting to step on the zebra crossing. But I can smell alcohol on his breath. And he is standing too close. And I feel I cant beat him up like I can handle guys in India. Maybe not win in India, but give it a good try. Here I would pound and he could laugh.
I am scared. But like the time the cop at the concert thought I was a guy and was about to lathi-charge me and I just wanted to talk sense and say ' Excuse me you cannot do this', I now say to the guy 'You are being weird. This is not normal.' As if he did not know. So he is the brat on road. I cannot be the screechy female. Why not? It's not me. Me is dumb. Thats all that is proven.
Anyway, so I cant go out. I will sometime. Maybe with a cycle to bang right into the front of a swerving car on an empty street and walk home with a bleeding knee and a cycle tire in one hand. But no cycle with me just now. And no enthusiasm to step out. No reason. I dont want to talk to chests just now. I dont want to be called sexy girl in my grey slippers and greasy hair hanging down to my shoulders.
So I slump back in my couch and watch 'So you think you can dance'. Sexy people. Sexy stuff. Just what I love. Talent, samba, fox trot, hip hop, break. It makes something leap out of my heart. But the rest of me slumps deeper. Rhinestone studded dresses. A curvy exposed back. Swan-like grace. A guy dancing fantastically in a waistcoat and hat. TV show over. OK..Now what?
Indian students going abroad
Here are things you should carry with you if you are going to study abroad
1. Adapter if you are taking your own electronics such as cell phone charger. The sockets differ, from flat to round plug-pins, in different countries
2. Software - esepcially in you are in design and use a big package of photoshop+flash+illustrator
3. Maggi (Unhealthy but..)
4. Stationary and books.
While a text-book costs $5 (Rs 200) max in India, it is $100 in Canada.
5. Hair Oil if you wish. Its possible to get it in Toronto, but with difficulty.
6. Dont take too many clothes. You can buy them in the new country.
A humourless TV watcher in Canada
I have to admit, days pass fruitlessly with me staring at the TV and I have now absorbed the Canadian TV content. So much so, that anything new on TV looks like a repetition.
Oprah with all kinds of oddities - families where the father or husband changed into a woman. Dr.Phil with a Hobo who abandoned his family. The Hobo meets his daughter on TV after 17 years to face a lot of resentment from her. Child prodigies. Fighting newlyweds who try to solve their problems amidst hitting, pulling hair and sessions of talking. A tattoed one-armed guy talking to his ex-girlfriend who he left for a whore on the Jerry Springer show. A lot of talk shows where sympathy and sadism go hand in hand. Montel discussing infidelity in marriages and talking to people from www.ashleymadison.com - a website that offers romantic options to people who want to look outside their marriages. High Drama. After sometime you get immune to untimely marriages and pregnancies, weird occupations, anomolous families and magic grass mowers.
Then there is late night TV with young girls strutting their stuff and asking you to call on certain phone numbers to 'make new friends'. It's always girls. There is never a guy asking you to call up. One of the girls looked like a female version of Jerry Seinfeld
Technicolor – 49 Ontario Street
Today I went to Technicolor as part of my film workshop classes. Its a company where film-makers, people who shoot TV commercials and music videos leave their tapes for post production services.
Some of these services are film processing, tranfers to better video quality, editing, printing, digital imaging, dvd authoring and audio solutions.
Parts of movies like Ocean's 13, Spiderman, Miracle, Chicago have been edited there.
It was like entering the NASA of film. A lot of their equipment was the best in Canada and they boasted of technology which no one else could use in the world, as no one else had it.
They had facilities to have the director in Los Angeles and the actor and editor down in Technicolor, Toronto.
IMAX technology and all..
One of the rooms was going to be used as a storage room until they realized that it was a very special room – a floating room. This means that
Ontario Province Elections
It’s the Ontario general election day today and the air is electric with excitement. People are voting to elect members of the Legislative Assembly (Members of Provincial Parliament, or MPPs) of the Province of Ontario, Canada.
It’s interesting to see what elections in Toronto mean. What is it that the candidates promise to the public?
Health Care is turning out to be a huge issue in Canada with people complaining about wait times in hospitals and the fact that each citizen does not have a family doctor. It astounds me as I compare this to India where certain places, especially in the Himalayas, don’t have even 1 doctor for miles and miles.
What I did notice is that in 1 month of living in Toronto, the manifesto of each candidate is very clear to me. That is something that did not happen in 20 years of my life in India. In India, elections meant
Nuit Blanche 2007
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A Bad Day For Limousines
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Nuit Blanche - White Night is an annual art and design festival in Toronto and it was held on the streets of downtown T last night. Roads were cleared of traffic and it was OUT there. SO many people were out on the roads, a novelty for Canadians and commonplace for an Indian!
(Photo by WordFreak on www.Flickr.com . You can see Ricky and me talking to the corseted girl)
Here are some of the things I did -
Walking in a Red Light Area that had been created by some artists. The entry was very morbid as my friend Ricky and I saw a girl walking around in a bridal dress with a goat's carcass. The carcass was complete with head and hooves and tail. It was skinned. She was holding it in her arms and caressing it, then raising it over her head as the internal organs of the goat threatened to collapse over her head. Next we saw she was playing with its intestines.
StuntZ and his friends at Dundas Square
some terrific dance moves in street dance and hip hop
i shot this video on the Dundas square where people are always performing - its a rock band, or a dance group or pavement-artistes with lots of chalk. Its great living in downtown Toronto!
[youtube]K8Cz9HtXhwk[/youtube]
Saturday in Toronto – CN Tower
Yesterday I went to the CN tower with my uncle. It is 553.33 metres (more than half a kilometre!) tall and can be seen from the looking boulevard or the skypod.
The skypod is right on top, while the looking boulevard is below the skypod. The world has changed and we have modern wonders. In India, we visit forts and temples and here in Canada, the attraction is an antenna! Ok, so it’s the tallest antenna in the world.
(Image taken from www.cntower.ca)
The best part was the glass (or plastic?) floor on the top on which you could walk and on looking below you could see Toronto far away right under your feet. It does give a feeling that you are going to fall through.
Ice cream Pakodas
Yes, thats right.
My family and I went to the amusement park near Pinjore Gardens. We desultorily studied the swings - Water wars, Shooter, Toy train, those Banging Cars etc. Finally we reached the snacks counter. Everyone suddenly perked up and began taking an interest in the park.
And here is what we had - ice cream pakodas. They actually do fry the ice cream and it doesn't melt! As for people who dont know pakodas, its an eatable like fried dumplings.
Here is what caught our eye first -
And here is what the cook does. He rolls a scoop of ice cream in coconut crumb, rolls that in some fruit jelly and again rolls it all it coconut crumbs. He fries this ball in bubbling oil. When he serves it to you, Lo Behold! Its hot outside and properly frozen cold inside.
Dancing bears & Taj Mahal stories
The last time I visited Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri it was about 8 years ago. The beauty of the architecture did not leave an indelible mark on me. What I was struck by was the number of dancing bears I came across - 12 bears on the short road between Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri. These large animals that should be shaking branches of trees violently with thier powerful arms or ambling down a forest path were tied to the end of a string, muzzled with ghungroos and made to dance for tourists on the hot tar road.
I visted Taj Mahal again in August 2007 and was very happy to see no bears on the road. We passed a bear rescue organisation and a large board that pointed to a bear and read "Bear dancing is fun? Ask him". I was one of the many tourists who had felt bad and gone on my way to appreciate Mughal architecture, but Kartick Satyanarayan and Geeta Seshamani did not look in the other direction and did do something about the cruel practice. Kudos to them!
They founded Wildlife SOS in 1995 which manages the World's Largest Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre for Sloth Bears in
Visit the site for more information on rescues and steps taken towards stopping cruelty towards animals.
The locals who used to be involved with bear dancing now look at Wildlife SOS for employment. Here is a photograph, taken from the website, of Ehsaan...a young Kalandar boy-turned-Bear keeper at the Wildlife SOS-managed Agra Bear Rescue Centre.
This evidence of bear rescue alone, made the trip worthwhile. Apart from that, the children who frisk around in Fatehpur Sikri offering to recite Urdu poetry for money made my day too! Who can fail to be flattered by :
"...Toh yeh hai Taj Mahal ki murat,
Par usse acchi hai hamari madam ki
(So this is the picture of Taj Mahal, but more beautiful than that is madam's countenance!)
The Taj Mahal was OK. What I really enjoyed about it was all the optical illusions incorporated in the architecture. The illusion is so obvious that you dont need any imagination at all to perceive it. For example, one of the minarets has four sides to it, but due to the zig zag lines drawn on it, it appears to have 8 sides when you stand back and look at it! Touching the minaret tells you one thing and looking at it tells you another!
I guess Shah Jahan owed it to Mumtaz Mahal to build the Taj Mahal. After all she must be an exhausted woman after giving birth to 14 children of His Majesty's. 6 of the children lived, 8 died. 4 of the six were boys, the youngest of them being Aurangzeb who had no qualms about killing his brothers and imprisoning his father to claim the throne. With a childhood full of artistic pleasures he decided that he had had enough of it when he became King and banned music altogether from the kingdom. He also put a stop to the second Taj Mahal that was to be built in black marble stating that enough wealth had been frittered over beautiful and useless pursuits and it was time to take matters into a firm hand. So Shah Jahan spent his last days imprisoned in the
Mumtaz Mahal had extracted 3 promises from Shah Jahan -
1 To never remarry (She was the third and most loved wife, the only one to bear him children)
2 To build a memorial that would be so beautiful as to keep the memory of her alive forever
3 To love their children unconditionally
Well, Shah Jahan followed the first two promises and looks like he followed the third as well with no rewards.
It is interesting to see the Brit presence in Taj Mahal. The Chandelier gifted by Lord Curzon hangs over the graves as a reminder of the toe the East India Company managed to wedge in during the Mughal rule. It is said that he arrived on such a big horse to view the Taj that they decided to mark the moment by putting up the horseshoes of his ride on the monument's door. The horseshoes can be seen as giants among those of other lesser normal horses.
A happy trip to make, a skip away from