A LITTLE MOPING AND LOTS OF TV WATCHING

I have been moping around today because I have a cold and cough and no fever. Murali has been going through the same since he returned from Mumbai and I have been nurturing him back with vetha khozhambu and molugu rasam and the likes. Today morning I complained of exhaustion and he reassuringly tells me to stay at home and not even go for my daily chakkar.

Let me digress. If you do not go out everyday you lose track of new roads, new cafes, new restaurants, new sari shops. They all seem to be sprouting overnight. Like new flats. You would have crossed some sand traps, workers carrying on their heads and little children running between their legs and of course the ubiquitous blue sheet and by the time you are checking out the other parallel road, the flats are ready, the sand traps are still there and in fact there is also a truck unloading something. I have heard of pre-fab but this is something else. So if I am not working on an idea or a story, my going out is important because I am keeping watch for my pals.😅😅

So, I lay myself down, applied the standard Tiger Balm and took a nap. Then I turned to ask him something and he is wearing a goddamn mask. Of course I got up with alacrity and gave him a mouthful and reminded him of what all I had done for him since marriage and so on. Did I tell you he is slightly deaf (and not selective) and so he kind of looks at me calmly and tells me to lie down again and offers to rub some balm.😡😡. The damage, as they say, had been done. So, I literally moped around, played around with the phone for sometime till the battery ran out, then cooked myself (obviously for M too) and felt pious and then switched on the TV.

Most often our tastes differ. I watch whatever Murali watches, except when he is watching some Trump dressing down on You Tube. I draw my line there. This means that I can watch all the Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali and various other Indian languages on my own, uninterrupted. He draws a line to Spanish, German and the other foreign languages. I get ideas from Raju, my driver, or some pop up on Google Chrome and of course the Indian Express Sunday edition, last page of the magazine section, which gives you an update. In between I watch tennis and other sporting events.

I watched Shuzhal, the vortex and came back feeling swamped by colour and small-town shenanigans. Typically it is a bit stretched and they run to conclude it and the end is a bit of a dampner, but nothing will match the Mayana Kollai festival and the awe that the Mother Goddess evokes in you.

Then there was the calmer Recce. While it is a tense production, surprisingly there is no colour and Anantapur does not lack colour. They also show a festival but nothing in comparisan to Suzhal. 

Saw Anek and short of being a documentary it talks about how North East is ignored by the greater country of India and how it is riddled by those who want a separate state. Never realised that Ayushmaan Khurana had such thick eyebrows. You watch it with a compulsion because you wonder what will happen.

I must accept that I forget names of serials or movies once it is switched on and then I have to go back to check what I am watching. Today on Disney Hotstar I watched a 35 minutes and 33 seconds small movie called Laali with Pankaj Tripathi holding your attention throughout. While it is all about loneliness and one can relate at some level, I came away feeling I wanted to be the red dress for sometime.