Challenge. Accepted.

When you troll people on Twitter you find amazing things.
I found an open invite to the Godawful Poetry Fortnight curated by @zigzackly.
I don't write or perform poetry and I just spent the evening listening to people who do.
Obviously these are two qualifications I needed to begin poeming.
 *****

Follow the trail of embroidered beards
and cultivated disinterest
Find yourself 
In the hipster capital of the Capital
Mind the jazz
It has
A beard of its own

Leaning rhymes
Against the bass, a double
A couple
Which you are no longer
Part of
This place of beards & poetry
You know it

You had one once
A beard
with a poem
With a text you've been missing lately
"Delhi seems extra rapey tonight,
Call me when you get home safely."

*****

Post Colonial Rage

For the last 6-8 months I have been working on a TV series about India's colonial past - how the British Raj came to be, then un-be and everything in between. It's an international co-production, where the most incompetent dolt turns out to be, not Indian as the stereotype may suggest, but in fact a British gentleman.

Over the months, while the rest of us have made goof ups, his messes have been of exemplary (yet always polite) fucked-up-edness. Yet he has managed to slip under the radar and deflect most of the blame upon us.

I don't think any of us on the crew is particularly thirsty for revenge from British imperialists or has a Tharoorian hankering for payback for the centuries of physical & psychological violence, thievery and plunder they inflicted on our people. For most of us patriotism is reserved for cricket matches or grumbling in long immigration lines at Western airports.

But there is a moment, nestled between the volley of angry emails going back and forth between Delhi, London and Singapore, where the forces of history collide and the man's incompetence is finally brought to light, less than a week before broadcast on August 15th. He gets his comeuppance. And from the most atavistic (albeit immature) depths of this Indian woman, cc'd in on every blame-bomb, emerges: a vengeful giggle.

Peace be upon us brownies. Happy independence day.

Brownies on Elephants circa 1930: Pretending they own Stuff & Freedom