"SNAPS" MEANS PHOTOS

Today's Vocabulary Word:

Rajkumar = huge, huge HUGE Karnataka film star who died earlier this year and was so beloved that there were riots for days in Bangalore that more or less paralyzed the city (actually, the riots are said to have been caused by the opposition party, to discredit the BJP or whoever). They call Dr. Raj the John Wayne of South India Cinema, but he was so much bigger than that....




I just signed up for 3.6 hours at Sify, India's largest Internet something-or-other. This particular branch is on the way home from Gokulam, where I just was for Session Number Five of Rolfing with Ken. Today was psoas day. The left side is so messed up... Anyway -- Unlike Bangalore's lovely Cafe Coffee Day on Brigade Road, Sify has neither cappuccino nor hipsters. But they do have a wall of clocks showing the time in the US, UK, Germany and.........Canada.







The breakfast of champions; this is what I'd eat before class (well, one of each) before I discovered the purging power of CCD's Kodagu-grown espresso. At the moment my motions are so loose I don't need either.






These are the "cloths" you must search through at Sachin's when he's not there, which is often, so you can find out whether he's even started your order (my pieces are always missing for some reason; does he cut the patterns at home?). I saw Sachin last night and he seems to be back on form; he widened my armholes and even put some darts into the raw silk top. Now, if he could only figure out how to make me not look ten months pregnant...








Movie posters for the big-budget Bollywood fillum Krrish, starring the fabulous dancer Hritik Roshan (who also appeared in the Suketu Mehta co-penned "Mission Kashmir"). This was at the suburban Sterling Talkies, which attracts a lot of women -- including Muslims and Sikhs -- and is across from a huge Bata shoe store. Yet look at all the men.... Unfortuantely the film featured only a few songs -- all of which were good -- but I missed Roshan's dancing. And despite his mullet and ever-present shit-eating grin I found the film (in Hindi, no subtitles) to be one of the most fun I've seen this year; apparently it's India's first superhero movie.... Which could explain why it was so rooted in the eighties; there was even an unironic dance sequence featuring actual mimes. But the many arial Crouching Dragon-style fights and clever camerawork and editing made it all come together, plus parts were shot in Singapore *and* Roshan played dual roles. Either I'm getting a clue or films here are so broadly drawn here that any idiot can pick up what's going on, because more than once I knew what was going on before Prashanth did, and even predicted a couple of lines of dialog. There's a classic Rajkumar film playing at the Olympia Theatre in the city center this week but apparently the place has bedbugs and people spit all over the place during the screenings -- so we're gonna have to see something else this weekend.