Like most (eh?) five year olds who grew up on a steady diet of Manichithrathazhu, I was madly, hopelessly, somewhat anachronistically in love with Shobhana.

Without fail, the film marked the bringing-home of new video-viewing technhology. Post purchase of a VCR, VCD player, DVD player and so on, depending on the year, on the way home from one of the few weirdly architecture-d appliance shops (one was clad in a three-storey tall wall of glass and falling water) in Kozhikode, we would stop religiously at this video cassette shop in Kakkoor (that gave way to the CD rental shop where we reenacted the ritual with eerily similar longing despite the advancing years) and relieve the shopkeeper of a recent copy of the film. We continued the tradition long enough to watch the YouTubed version as we brought in the flat-screen TV only couple of years ago. Like Shobhana, Manichitrathazhu hasn’t aged a day since my feverish five-year-old-boy encounter with her uncompromising, wholesome grace.

Various heroines made mincemeat of what was left of my cardiovascular system and associated parts later in my teens. Yet Shobhana remained the sole, spirited image of a fierce, unattainable, truly significant, other. Over at r/kerala, someone mentioned this 2002 Karan Thapar interview with her and she is variously bold, beautiful (duh) and intimidating. If I say any more, this is going to sound like an unsent inland-love-letter. So, here is the thing.

And somehow, we as a culture may have stopped or are afraid to teach ourselves that pleasure is dangerous and that some kinds of pleasure are better than others and that part of being a human being means deciding how much of active participation do we want to have in our own lives. … It is a really (sort of) exciting opportunity to decide whether our relationship to the world is going to be fundamentally passive and infantile or one that is (sort of) active and hard and takes more work.

— DFW, in conversation with Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To The Best Of Our Knowledge” program, 1996.

The way we represent ourselves online has devolved from the quirky, personalised, HTML webpage-homepage of the 90s to the somewhat modular but still strange presence of a MySpace page, to the completely formatted and market-friendly presence of a Facebook page… What we’ve done is [we have] moved from personal, human, open-ended self-expression to completely market and computer-friendly, regimented and conformist expression. And that is because we have turned the net from a venue for self-expression to a way to render ourselves up onto the market.

Douglas Rushkoff, from Stare Into The Lights My Pretties

Also, zverina.com, the quirky, HTML home to an email newsletter I willingly receive and look forward to.

In an Umebayashi induced comagasm, the ATM queue snakes along the half unpainted chain-link fence, off absentminded Cuticura tracks and lucid dreams of a two-thousand-Rupee paperback, freshly minted. The girl in faded jeans and white dress-shirt and unintended RayBans finds a glass of black tea (or was it coffee) in the third canteen she terrorises. Everybody is happy, sings the last two stanzas of whatever they remember off Virinjuninna Parilum and goes their parallel ways. Sometimes they meet for clandestine shopping complex combings and sing Partisookthangal to each other over Parippuvadas and black tea they find in the third canteen the girl terrorises.

4 in the morning. This plus ginger tea off campus. All the right kinds of weird.

BBC Radio 4 (Desert Island Discs) interviews Douglas Adams. Hearts and Bones (Paul Simon), All of Me (Ella Fitzgerald).

JNU Students have a YT Channel up and the lectures are worth an all-nighter, if not a last-minute train journey to Delhi.