The much awaited Bandra-Worli sealink opened yesterday. In the unlikely case that you don’t know what I’m talking about (in which case, what are you doing reading this post?), this is a bridge built across one of the bays between the islands that comprise Mumbai. It connects Bandra reclamation to Worli seaface and has been predicted as the solution to easing up the daily traffic snarls from the western suburbs to town.

The sealink has been a long time in the making, having faced some setbacks and delays as well. It has been a part of the grand plan for Mumbai for so long that it has almost made a mark in local lingo by now (Yeah, I’ll get a promotion by the time that damn sealink gets made, maybe then I’ll be able to afford a car too!).

Most Mumbaikers have seen its grow, inch by agonizing inch on the horizon, from each direction. Just last year, I looked out at the impressive seaview from the window of a friend whose Mahim flat faces the then under-construction sealink and said,

Whatever is taking them that long??!! There’s just another inch to go!

After much fanfare, the sealink was inaugurated by Sonia Gandhi last morning and thrown open to the general public at 7 a.m. There will be a Rs.50 toll to traverse the sealink but that becomes functional only as of next Monday. So for the next few days, you can expect most Mumbaikers to derive full paisa vasool rides, riding Mumbai’s first ever sealink.

Quite fortunately (for me) I had an appointment in town that same morning. Fortunate I say because I (like many suburbanites) detest the painful commute into town, even less by road. What a stroke of luck to have a reason to go into town on the very day the sealink was inaugurated!

So I nagged dad into turning off into Bandra reclamation, shushing his incessant doomsday prophesies that the sealink would only add to commute time and what was so great about that damn bridge anyway, it’s taken long enough to come up and blocked Mumbai’s strained resources as it is.

In a few minutes, I was ready to jump out of the car and dive for cover as we ran smack-dab into the middle of the kind of traffic that makes road-rage seem like a pardonable offense, not punishable by law. I think every Western suburbanite must have been on that road to Worli today, whether or not they wanted to go to town!!!

I actually saw a few cars take U-turns and head back out, presumably to get to their destinations, the old-fashioned Mumbai way.

But as we inched forward and the high beams of the sealink came into view, my spirits surged and even my father ceased his complaining and grudgingly took out his own phone to take a picture.

We passed an impressive-looking toll-naka. Oh okay, I know there’s nothing impressive about a toll-naka, I’ve seen the one at Mankhurd and what about that huge one leading out to Mumbai-Pune expressway that I passed, not three days ago?

It still was a momentous occasion, for we were on the brink of breaking new ground. As we passed, I’m rather afraid to say that the insofar well-laned traffic just sort of melded into itself and became one sea of cars going helter-skelter. The road curves a bit before it touches the sealink and the lanes just sort of get lost in each other. The authorities are just going to have to do something about that if they don’t want to face choke-ups every morning just before the Bandra end of the sealink.

Very near the sea, I saw a flock of crows flying around frantically and wondered aloud,

Why are there so many birds around? What are they so agitated about?

Dad said that perhaps there was an colony of nests in that place which had so far been pretty secluded and undisturbed. Displacement was a sobering thought to start the trip on, but well needs must.

Once we actually got closer and closer to the sealink, I could feel the anticipation electric in the air. Cars slowing down, audible gasps, people zooming their camera lenses and phones, excitement was rife.

I can’t even begin to describe what the journey was like. I am sure, in a short few days I’ll become as accustomed to it as the regular train and road commute. But today, this first trip was special. It was the realization of the great Mumbai dream. We were riding over water. All my hitherto unvoiced fears that the bridge would give way were blown away in the cool breeze. The bridge is rock-solid (not at all like Lakshman Jhula, ma, you can stop worrying, it won’t sway in the wind) and it would otherwise feel just like riding on a concrete road, except there’s the sea on both sides.

What an odd feeling to turn to one’s left and see Mumbai, the city, the familiar buildings and roads on the horizon but on the wrong side and from so far away!

I saw a media van pass in the opposite direction on the clear Worli-to-Bandra lane, with a journalist standing out of one of the windows holding a mike, and a cameraman standing out of the opposite side shooting her. It was a funny sight and I’m only sorry I didn’t have a chance to shoot it.

The image below shows the proud and cheering workers who were lined up to watch the first few travellers on the sealink. What a moment of glory it would have been for them!

The couple in the Qualis next to mine were carrying balloons and traversed the entire length of the sealink with their balloons held aloft and flying out of the windows. Viva, the spirit of Mumbai!

We touched terra firma again at the Worli seaface end. I’m rather afraid this means the end of those long, wonderful soujourns ending in masala milk and sandwich. With the incoming and outbound traffic to the sealink, the seaface is bound to become thoroughfare and lose the charm it has.

We’re losing a few lovely spots and the traffic problem may not really be solved. But the experience of riding over the sea is something every Mumbaiker should have. This link has been far too long in coming. In the larger picture, perhaps easier access will level out some of the differences of Mumbai’s very own caste system?

I can’t tell just yet. My head is still spinning with the adrenalin rush of yesterday morning. I really feel like I’ve been part of a grand day in Mumbai’s history, almost like the fall of the Berlin wall. It is a big thing for this city and as a Mumbaiker, I feel really proud.

I woke up half an hour ago with not a coherent thought except to enjoy a stress-free Monday at home after heavenaloneknows how long. Fifteen minutes back I walked into the kitchen to make my breakfast. I put the saucepan to boil and busied myself taking out tea leaves, honey and biscuits. My grandmother had come into the kitchen to talk to me so I turned when on the wall behind her I suddenly saw a blazing light where the dull grey shadows of the window behind me should have been. I turned back to find the gas range had caught fire. Not just the gas-ring under the saucepan but the knob below it too. 

I always thought I was calm in a crisis but the only thought I had was,

This can’t be happening. That knob isn’t made of flammable material, how can it be burning? This cannot be happening.

My grandmother with more presence of mind, but less mobility had already recovered and was directing,

Switch it off!

But how? I wondered. I couldn’t reach into the flames to turn the burner off. I had a vague memory of a fire extinguisher in our house but no clue where it was kept. And then random impressions of the fire-safety brochures that used to lie around the house. When I died, would anyone remember that I was the grand-daughter of the Chief of Fire Safety, New Delhi? Would anyone even know that when he was specially requested to extend his tenure for six months to organise a conference of fire protection teams around the world, he designed an invitation inscribed with the following words from the Vedas,

O Agni,
Be thee kind to us,
Be our friend and our guide
And keep us safe

This was topped by the picture of a baby with a wide, sunny smile. That child of course, was his much beloved grandchild – me.

Such were the thoughts that ran through my head as I stood and watched the kitchen cooking range catch fire. People who describe others as ‘frozen in shock’ don’t know what they’re talking about. I was perfectly mobile, my mind was racing with irrelevant thoughts.

I briefly considered grabbing the stick that we used to hang up clothes, to prod the knob shut but realized just in time that it was wood. I did manage to turn the fan on at full speed and holler my grandmother into going back to the hall. The kitchen tongs, made of metal would have been useful but they were hanging just next to the cooking range.

Finally I just ran next door to find my neighbor’s father. Neither he nor his wife were home, the only two ‘adults’ on the floor but his daughter followed me back into the house, asking what the matter was. I had come running back to stand and stare at the fire. Suddenly a man was standing next to me, asking,

Kya hua?

All I could say was

Aag laga hai. Kitchen mein aag laga hai.

(Fire. There’s a fire in the kitchen.)

He strode in and turned the gas cylinder shut. Then, as the knob was still burning, he just blew it out. Then he turned at me, smiled and said,

Leakage tha. Valve kharab hua tha. Saare building mein fael jaata tha.

(It was a leakage. The valve is faulty. It would have spread to the entire building)

It turns out that he was the gas service man, visiting next door and was walking out at that exact moment that I knocked on my neighbor’s door.

That in sum, is the story of this morning. My mother wasn’t home and neither was dad.

I don’t know what I should think or feel. I opened up the kitchen windows and asked my grandmother to stay in the hall, watching TV as she had been. And I lay down on my bed in my own room. It is too big a coincidence for me to digest, that a gas serviceman was next door at just the exact time there was a fire in my own house. What does it all mean? Was it divine intervention? And if it was, why was there a fire in the first place for me to be saved from?

If it is one of those ‘feel grateful for what you have’ kind of lessons I’m meant to have from life, it isn’t working. I am not feeling grateful or happy or anything at all. All I feel is a cold, hard knot of something that feels like anger. I don’t know what I have to be angry about or who.

I guess I’m writing this down so that I can take it out and examine it later. Nothing makes sense.

I’m just back from Pune Blogcamp2. My weekend began at 4:30am, being woken up by Astra who got the timings wrong by an hour. I grunted and went back to sleep only to get up and rush out half an hour later. Emboldened by the hour, I walked up to a bunch of guys standing on the kerb and asked, ‘Blogcamp?’ They looked at me blankly (no, that’s not true…they looked hungry and interested…tch, boys). Then one asked, ‘Where are you going?’. I said, ‘Pune’. To which he burst into a wide grin and said, ‘We’re not going to Pune but can if you want.’ Idiot.

Anyway, we found @sensonize and @farrhad standing across the road and not at all angry with us for our 45-minute delay. How sweet, they’re learning early. After a pretty comfortable ride down the expressway, away from Mumbai’s dirty grey weather, we were in Pune. Even the air tasted delicious!

I thought the Punekers were a much better behaved lot than the Mumbai junta at BlogCamps. I mean, no one shouted, no one got into any arguments, no one sniggered vilely and even the tweet-bitching was absent. Okay, I tried to add to the last but I since my recently buffed-up pal isn’t on Twitter, it lost its tang. Incidentally, the twitter hashtag to check is #blogcamppune which methinx was a tad too long (bcp would do just as well for next time) but thanks, Tarun for unorganizing it and inviting me too!

Meetu got BlogCamp to a promising start with a talk on niche blogging. In my opinion (and hers too!), WOGMA’s success really comes from the fact that Meetu is truly passionate about what she does, not because it is marketed well. Not all of us can find a niche but if one of you does, Meetu is your poster-child.

This was followed by a number of discussion on the big, heavies of the ‘how to make money online’ variety. Sue me but I think these belong to Barcamp or perhaps, Startup Saturday (if they’re innovative), not BlogCamp. But then again, I’m just the voice of a poor, penniless personal blogger.

I really liked Aditya Marathe’s session comparing Blogspot to Wordpress. He also had some cool (non-geeky) analysis on hit spikes and visitor profiles. This was through lunch and a number of people may have missed it but it was worth a dekko.

The Kabras were obviously in charge of revving up things since Navin kicked off the second half of BlogCamp with an intriguingly titled ‘300 years of blogging’. Among some of the interesting things he mentioned, he suggested tracking Google Alerts on keywords relevant to one’s blog to keep up-to-date on the topic and also for story ideas. That’s exactly the kind of idea that you look forward to hearing when you meet other bloggers. It’s simple, easy and workable.

This was followed by Sandeep Gautam who runs a science blog. Tech-blogs I’ve seen galore but this is the first time I’m hearing of a science blog. What’s really interesting is that while this is a niche area, it provides relevant, incisive analysis to its interested audience. One big difference between such a blog and the regular personal blogs is that the former is factual, written in a reporting style, akin to a journal which provides an objective look at current trends while the latter are purely subjective, based on perception and (in some cases), not supported by facts. I daresay the session came across as rather heavy but in retrospect, it was good to have been able to sit through it because of the quality of his content.

By this time, the post-lunch somna was setting in and the Mumbaiker restlessness asserting itself. With some egging on, Thakker was persuaded to take the stage. Since the rooms were both busy, he took his session out onto the staircase and would you believe – some 80% of the audience followed him! For an hour, our man held forth on the woes of a geek’s life, his (mis)adventures with dating and matrimonial matches and photography.

We ended BlogCampPune2 at the cafe next door with chai and bun-maska. The evening was fruitfully spent savouring Meetu’s bhajia spread at the Kabras’ residence (which requires a map – not to get there but to get around within). At 8pm we got going…no, not to turn in but to the beer tweet-up. The beer brewery is part of The Corinthians, a club/lounge bar/hotel on the outskirts of Pune. The sweet, really sweet part of the occasion was the free, freshly brewed beer on tap.

I tried and liked a wheat-flavoured beer, which tasted more like a nice fruit juice than alcohol. As the beer went down, the jokes began to come up. Not the intelligent ones that (usually) intelligent, evolved people make but the ones that can only be categorized as PJs. Here’s a sample:

How do you kill a black elephant? With a black gun.
How do you kill a white elephant? – Throw mud on it, it turns black, now use a black gun
How do you kill a red elephant? – Scare it till it turns white, throw mud till it turns black, use black gun
How do you kill a blue elephant? – Make it blush red, scare it white, throw mud till black, use black gun
How do you kill a purple elephant? – Choke it till it turns blue, make it blush red, scare it white, throw mud till black, use black gun
How do you kill a yellow elephant?- Pagal hai kya, yellow elephant kabhi dekha hai?!

Amidst elephant-homicide discussions, one of the guys started telling me a story about Eval Conneval (I hope I got that spelling right). When I inquired who he was talking about, he yelped,

Don’t you know the greatest motorcycle stuntman of all time??!!

When I protested, I was accused on being a bonafide girl-geek. I am most certainly not. I mean I get some of the geek jokes but I am not, not, not a girl-geek!!! For the uninitiated, girl-geeks are even lower on the social scale of geeks, than the geeks themselves (a rating of about minus forty-five). Hmph, just you wait, Mr.X (protected to ensure privacy from boy-geek-big-brother), I’ll see you at XXFactor!

This morning I woke up to a full-of-naughty-beans Rabad saying it was time to wake up and how long was aunty intending to sleep? Pune Mirror had a story titled ‘Fourplay at BlogCamp‘ illustrated by a photograph of the event, my bright red tee-shirt clearly visible in the very center of the pic. Bleh, even a girl-geek is just accessorial (men, I tell ya!!!). But the lovely Pune weather must have made me a Punekar too since I didn’t feel like grrrrring about it. (This post was written after I got back to Mumbai, good ol’ irritable Mumbai!).

As the toll-naka approached, I felt the surreal magic of Pune slip away from me as easily as the clouds surrounding us at the ghats vaporized. It’s a sticky, warm night and the rain is pelting down incessantly outside my window. I’ve been woken at an ungodly hour, endured cheesy pick-up lines at 6am, been called a girl-geek and been inducted into an elephant-homicide cult. But Pune is a mere 3 hours away and Meetu and Navin are each a phone number and tweet away. It was a glorious weekend, guys, thank you so much!!
After much dawdling over chai, ek aur chai and breakfast-nahin-pahije-na? Sunday morning, we went out to ‘yewdhe lambh!’ Flag’s for lunch. Full awesomeness happening, I thought to myself over a Turkish moussakka, Italian crosstinis, lasagne and pasta. Then we ambled over to the taxi stand and I rode back home.

* Photograph taken by Aalaap

I’m not a dog-lover. In fact I am not even an animal-lover, though I could fairly tolerate a cat’s company. It’s not that I have anything against them, animals just never touched me. I’m a people-person, not an animal-person.

But what if animals were people too, just on fours and oh, with paws and fur instead of fingers and hair? Hmm. My animal-loving friends tell me that every pooch, every kitten, every bird has its own unique personality, just like human beings.

I’m convinced, now that I’ve seen Bolt. Bolt is a white dog who adores his mistress Penny, frolics and chews a carrot-shaped toy and chases his own tail. He’s a dog like any other – with one difference. He thinks he’s actually a SuperDog with special powers like an iron-bending forehead, a fire-shooting glare and a SuperBark that can blow them all away (a special genetic contribution from his ancestor, The Big Bad Wolf, one supposes).

How does a normal well-fed dog with a loving owner come to suffer such delusions? Bolt, it transpires, is the star of a television series and the entire world that he sees around him, is an elaborately constructed set with actors playing every role. All so that he genuinely believes in the character of Bolt the SuperDog and acts accordingly. Method acting at its finest.

Bolt is a 3-D movie. Yes, the kind where you get to wear multi-coloured spectacles while watching! You can imagine how much that adds to a story about a dog with great powers and even greater imagination.

John Travolta provides the heart-warming, sometimes whiny, sometimes growly voice of Bolt. Penny, Bolt’s ‘person’ is played by Miley Cyrus. If you listen carefully enough, you can discern the shift in Penny the TV star and Penny, Bolt’s doting owner. During the shooting, when Miley began laying tracks for the scenes where Penny plays with Bolt, she imagined herself playing with her own dog and spoke as she would at home, with a Southern accent. So Penny naturally speaks with a drawl. But while shooting for the TV show, Miley was asked to record without the accent, so the actress Penny delivers her instructions of ‘Bolt, zoom zoom!’ on a crisp note.

When I first saw the promos detailing this story, I thought it was a tad contrived. But the nice part of the movie is that the story actually begins after Bolt accidently gets out of his set and what happens to him in the real world.

The story had a chance to go the ‘Babe in the city’ way with a smirking look at the mistakes of the uninitiated in the big, bad world. Instead, it took a strong bouquet of characters and carried a simple plot with style.

The bad guys are just circumstances (or circumstantial as in the case of Penny’s slimy Hollywood agent, but aren’t all TV agents supposed to be that way?), the good guys leave you wondering if it would be too much of a sin to give them a good kick now and then. Just like human people. We meet Mittens, the smirking New York alley cat, extortionist bully of the neighborhood bird community and expert in the matters of men and dogs. There is Rhino, an exuberant Bolt-groupie hamster energetically running around inside a plastic ball who alternately provides comic relief and the Yoda for Mittens’ hard-bitten cynicism.

And then there are the pigeons! Ever wonder what pigeons keep going on about while they goobgoob at each other from telephone wires and window parapets? Here’s what – they complain about bullies, they play tricks on people, they gossip about people (and dogs) walking about and in Hollywood, they even pitch movie ideas to any stars that they inadvertently bump into!

In all fairness, Bolt is exactly the way I see most dogs. Sweet, sometimes irritating in his antics, pretty lovable but nothing remarkable in himself. The other characters of this story are what make it really special and worth every minute of it.

*Bolt will premier at the multiplexes tomorrow, finally a good movie after the long wait! This movie was brought to me by The Social Media Catalyst.

Athens,
sleeps outside my window tonight
And so do you, a sea and a continent away
No camera can capture,
nor words describe what my eyes see

In the city of the virgin goddess, a mortal woman sleeps alone.

~O~O~O~O~

A year later, in a city of no sleep and too much sex, she looks for god.

No pictures have I
nor the fruits of my patience
I look at the handful of words and unspoken, broken promises
A sea and a continent and a first meeting away
You were closer to me then, than this day
in Mumbai

The literary world is never boring. And social media is never quiet. Put them together and what have we? My new passion is the NovelRace that Aditya and Samit have organized. Several people, serious writers and others are scribbling away furiously (okay tapping away on their keyboards), to see who can complete a novel of 60, 000 words first by September this year. Participants tweet their wordcounts and some like me, also share their little woes and joys about the experience. 

Well…since this is my own, sweet, undemanding blog, let me share what’s on my mind. I’m scared witless. Frightened, terrified, petrified, spooked, horrorstruck, struck dumb (not a good thing for an aspiring story-teller, I’m sure you’ll agree). What if it comes to rubbish? What if I discover that after all these years, I’m not that great at it anyway? Oh horror, there’s nothing worse than losing a dream. Okay, I’ll worry about that later.

Pull back and onto the point. What’s really interesting is what I’ve been learning about writing in the meagre few days that I’ve been in the race. For posterity, some of my big lessons:

1. You can’t write about a character that you don’t like. Get to know your characters well if you are going to tell their stories.

2. A short story can be created from a plot idea and the characters will just sort of fall into place (I know, I’ve done it). But a novel is different, you really need to work on characterisation and build a case for each character in your reader’s mind, for them to empathize with the story. So Character above Plot is my big takeaway.

3. Writing a chapter is very different from writing a short story. I’ve spent so much time ‘condensing’ my writing…into blogposts, into tweets, into 55-worders, into short stories, into read-all-in-one-page articles, into concise reports that I have to learn the art of writing with a lot of words and not boring my reader. I am finding it really, really hard to go beyond 1000-1500 wordcount. And that’s sometimes not enough for a chapter, or well the chapter just seem like fluff.

4. Just because you can string words together well, doesn’t mean you can tell stories well. BIG, HUGE lesson. But ah, I’ll come to dealing with this on a later date. For the time being, this experience is valuable for how much I’m learning about writing.

And hey! I got quoted in a Mid-Day article about Twitter and NovelRace for this, today.

There are others who use it to post recipes or haiku poems. In fact, Novelrace followers are even giving each other tips on what would be an ideal length of a chapter and style of writing. 

For instance: 

ideasmithy: wonders what is the right length for a chapter. 1-1.5K is as far as I’ve gone with short stories & now one chapter. Thoughts?
allvishal: @ideasmithy Break them up as you like. Wrote a story with 2K chaps once, this one is leaning to 5K. Some may have none or 100. 

Signing off now. I have a novel to go write. In the meantime (in a shameless self-plug), go read about my writing adventures on Twitter.