Looking out of the window

Running in the rain on wedges wearing an ankle length skirt. It can’t be a better recipe for disaster. Fortunately I don’t slip or slide on the road and get into the car safely with only my hair getting wet.  The ride is long because of the freaking BRT, a Rs 200 crore cruel joke that the state government has played on the city, masquerading as traffic regulation construction.  Everything is splish-splash swishy washy. It is unusual, this kind of continuous rain in Delhi. But after the killer heat, no one’s complaining really… While I sit in office tapping away at my keyboard, through the gaps in the blinds of my window I can see the rain washed city.This is what I am thinking. You know those urges you have to jump out of the shelter and get wet in the rain, it’s funny but I don’t have them anymore. Actually I haven’t had them for a while for now. When I was a child and innocent( yes I  was those things), jumping into a muddy puddle of water in your school shoes or dragging your feet in the cold rain water collected on the road while walking and letting it soak your skin ,making your toes all pruny was one of the greatest joys that nature could give to me. But now all I am ever obsessed with is how do I get my wedges from not getting wet or think about all the dirt and dust that the rain water contains or wonder why the hell its raining at all? Of course being an adult makes you enjoy the rains at a ‘mature’ level. Steaming cups of tea, aloo-chat and just inhaling the muddy aroma of the damp air, watching the rain from a window, dry and safe while the world outside gets wetter and cleaner and greener- there isn’t a better form of therapy.

Why do  events of great significance always get overshadowed by their own glamour ?   When Aishwarya Rai goes to Cannes like a yearly vacation, everybody is obsessed with what she wears. Its like May madness. Everytime the woman leaves  for the Riveria, reams of print get written about what she’ll wear ,what she wore , how she looks and whether she’s finally one of the cool people from the Sunset strip. This year rumours that she would be indianizing her wardorobe to fit in with her Bacchan Bahu image started floating around.I am no great fan of Aishwarya Rai but I am  not  an Ash-basher either. However, I am coming to wonder if this psychotic obsession with stars at Cannes  and their buzz-generating wardrobes is solely an Indian thing.  I have been looking at news websites and portals from all over and they never seem to concentrate with such earnest glee over Julianne Moore’s gown at the premiere of Blindness. But Indian newspapers and websites devote pages and pages often doing flashbacks tracing Ms.Rai’s gowns and sareers from 2002 onwards.  Nobody ever bothers to question the fact that her presence for the last three years has been solely as a representative for Loreal Paris and is at it’s best a glorified PR exercise. There’s nothing wrong with that of course because Cannes is not the bastion of quality cinema that  people make it out to be. It is a prestgious event but also one of the most commercial, a fancy  arena of publicity and image building. The problem lies in making out Aishwarya’s presence as an over-rated symbol of Bollywood in the global platform.  Screenings of Indian films and the presence of the Indian film fraternity always gets touted as Bollywood’s second coming, but the simple fact is Cannes is a business venue, and anybody who can pay can be there.  But how would anybody think about that, when all we can think about is whether Indian actresses can carry off evening gowns.  Maybe when we all  grow up and get over our India everywhere euphoria, we’d like to know about some of the films that they screen there too.