Click here to view the video on YouTube.

And yesterday I stumbled across this, which made me love the song even more.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

We live in a beautiful world. But you already know that.

(Possibly more on Coachella later)

(For those who cannot see what’s below, it’s supposed to be an embedded Slideshare iFrame. Here’s a direct link to the page.)

Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest. And like a forest it’s easy to lose your way…to get lost… to forget where you came in.

This leads me to make two specific observations about myself and my life.

One: I find it very hard to respond to the question “what kind of books/movies/music do you like?” It is hard because I have never been able to figure out why I choose that particular book to read next, or this movie playing in theaters gets my pulse racing while I am cold towards another, possibly equally-good film. Or steadfastly refuse to listen to some albums until … I don’t know … I feel like it.

Warning: this may sound pretentious and somewhat obvious. It’s like I am in this forest full of trees blooming with psychedelic flowers and populated by mysterious creatures, and I am trying to find my own way through. I forget why I came in, what I am doing in that forest, and where I am going, but it just works out that way. I like it. I guess that’s all that matters. I am reading two books now - Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes, a title that sounds too frivolous than what it is, a bunch of scientific observations about sex, human nature, relationships and biology. Questions like “how do your parents’ age determine what kind of partner you will be attracted to?” and “Why are blue-eyed men attracted to women of the same eye-color?” are answered seriously, with a dash of statistics and an odd tongue-in-cheek comment every now and then. It does get repetitive sometimes, but it’s fun. Why am I reading this book? Because I went inside Piccolo – the second-hand bookstore opposite my office – last week and paid attention to my favorite shelf (yes, I have a favorite shelf there, it displays the weirdest books, especially hidden behind others, most of a dubious nature. I found David Carradine’s Kill Bill memoir there too, which led me to watch the movie again, and ergo, the quote above – a nice game of connect-the-dots, don’t you think? Oh, and all books at Piccolo are a dollar each.) This book was hidden behind one on steamboats, and it took me a few seconds to flip through it and realize that it was going to be read next, even though I was pretty darn sure that morning about beginning to read David Byrne’s How Music Works, on my e-reader.

Then yesterday, I attended a Suzanne Vega concert, my first concert of the year, and I reached one song too late. Which in my book was okay-late, not omg-late, I took a minute or two to park the car and walked inside the venue a little faster than I usually would have, because there was nobody standing outside. I still do not know what the first song was, but ‘Pale Blue Thing’ was playing when I got in, and ‘Caramel’ began next, which turned my knees into jelly and made me forget that I had driven 600+ miles in the last 36 hours. When we were nursing our teas in the foyer of the building during the break, I not-so-unpredictably found myself next to the merchandise table, and my wallet not-so-unpredictably unloaded its contents in the general direction of the cheerful volunteers there, especially when the magic words “signing” was mentioned. Among what I got was The Passionate Eye: The Collected Writings of Suzanne Vega, and today, when waiting for code to compile and run, I opened it up. Boom, next book on the reading-immediately pile. Did I know about this book’s existence a day ago? No. Is poetry/essay/interview collections my thing? Not unless it’s – y’know – Suzanne Vega.

Umm yeah, so my reading habits are sort of a forest too. A Totoro forest, not a Baba Yaga forest. Ok, maybe a Baba Yaga forest where Hellboy and Price Ivan team up.

Two: I really really like revenge as a sub-genre. This probably dates back to my appreciation and love for The Count of Monte Cristo, which I have talked about in the past. But it is amazing how many of the films I run to watch at the theater without a second thought, or rewatch any day have this as the theme. Think about your favorite revenge flicks. Chances are very high I will have watched them, and liked them, and that I will like you for having liked them.

(For the record, Taken 2 is a terrible movie.)

So yesterday was terrible.

It began in the morning, when I woke up debating with myself about whether I should really try to get one of the Mondo Looper posters that were due to go for sale in a few hours. Unable to decide, I reached office early anyway, where I spent a few minutes with my boss in the kitchen, as he made fun of me for getting in at that (by my standards) ungodly hour. At 8:55, my alarm rang, and I hurried to the Mondo website. Made it in time for Dredd and Looper posters to show up, added them to  my cart, and was about to pay for them when….

…I closed my browser. Took a deep breath. Waited a minute, and then went back to work. I mean, seriously, I was going to drop $50 on the poster of a movie that I hadn’t even seen. Would it be one of my top 5 movies? Hell no! Would it be my favorite movie of the year? Uh huh. So there, I saved myself $50, and I felt proud of myself.

But then I began thinking about what were my top 5 movies, and wondered how many of them did have Mondo posters. There was Tyler Stout’s Kill Bill poster, which always struck me as a little too busy, too cluttered for my eyes. But it still had the nice grindhouse vibe to it. Too bad it was selling for upwards for 450$. Not my cup of tea at the moment. Then I remembered the Totoro poster, the one that got away. I was in Romania when the Mondo guys made the drop, sipping on a cup of rooibos and diligently clicking refresh on the page every few minutes. I was determined to own that print at the cost price. But a colleague Skyped me about something important, and I headed out to respond to her without having to type a lot. I come back a minute later, and it was all over. My rooibos was not even cold, it was over that quick.

So I looked around a bit at the forums I hang out, and saw a bunch of Totoro prints for sale, at prices that lay somewhere between astronomical and batshit-insane. There was however a panic sale going on, and being the kind of ruthless low-baller that totally takes advantage of panicky merchants, I shot off a PM, asking him if he would accept my low-ball offer (which, come to think of it, was not that low-ball. It was the six-month average selling price for the piece. Thereabouts. Give or take a few tenners. Mostly take.) As it turns out, he did accept my offer, and I realized, with a silly grin on my face, that I had actually gotten one of my top 5 movies up on the wall of my future apartment. A definite improvement over Looper, I would say.

Then I sipped my coffee and flipped through my Facebook feeds, where an update about GTO: The Early Years made me pause. Apparently it was getting over with volume 15, out very soon indeed. Which made no sense, because I had always thought it was a 31-volume series. Hasty realization: the US reprints were oversized, covering two volumes’ worth of material in one. No wonder. This meant that I needed to get up to speed with the adventures of Onizuka before he became Onegai Sensei Onizuka as soon as I could. Not an easy task considering that the series had two publishers, one of whom went bankrupt and all its catalogue went out of print – that was Tokyopop, for those who came in late, who had brought 10 volumes of the series out last decade. Volume 8, in particular, was selling for 50$ and above in the secondary market. The others could be obtained second-hand, off Amazon sellers or eBay. Vertical publishing was coming out with the last 5 volumes of the series.

On an impulse, I looked up eBay, and hit a 20$ best-offer on a set of the first 4 volumes. The seller accepted within 5 minutes, and as soon as I completed payment, he changed status to “shipped”. That was…quick. The package got here 3 hours ago. Probably the fastest eBay shipping EVER.

At this point, I was done with my shopping for the month. I should not have opened the email from bargaingraphicnovels that said “IDW Sale”. I should have deleted it without even opening the dang thing. But I did, and seeing the 70% discount on books that I had always wanted weakened my soul. The final pass, after much culling of the shopping cart, involved the complete Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse hardcovers by Ben Templesmith (I mean, at $7 each? Why not?) and The Cape hardcover by Joe Hill, Jason Ciaramella and Zach Howard. That will get signed at the next Wondercon, for sure. It felt a little better when pal Pablo agreed with me at the sinful nature of the discounts, and joined in the revelry.

You thought that was it? That was not it. In the evening, I was reading Oishinbo, and was thinking about how much fun it would be to read something like Eden, which was out of print too. Impulse check on eBay, seller with a full run at a deep-discount price, and also selling Sho Fumimura and Ryoichi Ikegami’s Sanctuary, another must-have. I stopped thinking. At that point, I felt unclean already. I closed my eyes, thought about lust and self-control and the need to avoid eBay for a couple of months. And then I opened my eyes and bought both the lots. Because sometimes, the retail-gods win. They win hard.

Update: 24 volumes of Gantz for 175$. At 7.1$ per volume, with free shipping? Going for it.

(The day did not get better. I misplaced my good shirt. Turned out later that some wise guy had stowed it at the back of the class almirah, and had left school early. As a result, I had to go back home in the torn tramp shirt, one size too small for me, and to top it all, the bus conductor was rude to me.)

But the fancy dress contest was the final hurdle before the climax of the Teacher’s Day celebrations – the food. As soon as prizes were distributed, and the polite clapping had subsided, the teachers would crowd inside the ‘nursery room’ – which was not a horticultural entity, as the name might suggest. It referred to a biggish classroom in the center of the school, meant for kindergarteners in the morning, and which doubled as a multi-purpose hall in the afternoons, everything from extra classes to antakshari competitions to mini-exhibitions. On Teacher’s Day, the nursery hall would be decked up with flowers and paper streamers, and the caterers would prop open their steaming pots. And we students would politely watch the teachers eat. Some of us would get out and celebrate our own way, in other classrooms – jumping up and down benches and desks, whooping and shouting and dancing.

I like the concept of Teacher’s Day. I like the fact that students go the extra mile to appreciate the authority figures at a crucial stage of their lives. The ones that inspire, prod, poke and belabor the willing and the unwilling to face real life from within a flawed education system. Good or bad, capable or not, they deserve respect every single day of our lives. They make us, in more ways than one.

What I do not like is the reason why we celebrate Teacher’s Day in India. The birthday of an ex-president. Why his birthday? I have no idea. The same way Children’s Day is really about the birthday of an ex-Prime Minister who “liked children a lot”. I am not sure why this bothers me so much, probably because it reeks of sycophancy. Hmm.

Most of it boils down to the fact that the art of writing by hand is no longer a broadcast medium, nor a medium of exchange. In the real world, that is. In schools, or at least in most schools around most parts of the world, pen on paper and chalk on blackboard is still the default medium of information exchange. It makes sense that children are trained to write down words in a uniform legible script, and all idiosyncrasies and personal quirks of writing have to be stifled, ironed and rinsed from their system. After all, they have to write examination papers, which have to be checked and corrected by time-constrained examiners, and you do not want illegibility getting in the way of that. Obviously, nobody tells the kids that the time and effort they put into getting their cursive writing right makes absolutely no difference outside of exams. Oh, and do not sidestep the fact that teachers themselves have fairly atrocious chalk-on-board handwriting.

I am not aware of how much good hand-writing matters in schools right now, but I can make an enlightened guess things are exactly the same as they were 20-25 years ago.

Doctor-prescription jokes aside, does handwriting matter any more after you get out of your academic life? Writing has already been superseded by typing, which itself is on its way out. Sure, you take notes during a meeting, which in all likelihood you will glance at once or twice, and maybe capture it in a more permanent format. No one will come to you and remark on the aesthetics of your handwriting or the deficiencies in your personality because you were not legible enough when taking notes. You sit down and write a letter by hand, to make it more personal. But why does good handwriting matter in that act? Isn’t the very effort of taking time out to write the letter reason enough for the receiver to feel good about the act? I cannot think of a situation where they would complain about bad handwriting – sure, it can be hard to read, but it is you, not an artificial, homogenized hand. (If they do complain, I suggest that you type it out next time, and add a signature at the end. Make sure you say “Yours faithfully” too, just to rub it in.)

The more I think about it, and the more I discuss it – on Twitter, yeah, where civil discussion and clear exchange of ideas is possible, despite what you may think – the more I think that the myth of “good handwriting” is just something that is propagated through memetic traditions prevelant in India. Like the music of Pink Floyd or the sayings of MK Gandhi,  where a combination of nostalgia and personal belief that something is “important” or “good” stiffs any attempt to rationally understand why it is so, or look at alternatives. “It helps”, one may say, but it is hard to explain how good handwriting helps. “First impressions.” Really? Like you will appreciate a person better after you have seen the way he writes down – what exactly? Signing a check? A signature is meant to be unique, not aesthetically pleasing. It is highly unlikely that people besides the ones closest to you will ever get to see what your hand-writing looks like, and as long as your handwriting is not brazenly illegible, there should be no problem at all. Pretty handwriting may impress someone, but if you try to figure out why they are impressed by it, it will probably be because your handwriting is prettier than theirs. Or so they think.

You could also point out about the importance of graphology, the science of handwriting analysis and people interpreting your personality (especially in organizations, as a means of identifying character traits. However, I have never really seen any organizations actually resort to graphology to judge potential candidates). But there again, the traits in your hand-writing, the way they are, represent you as an individual. “Good” or “bad”? Does not matter.

Let it be noted, however, that I am not talking about calligraphy. Which is an art that needs to be sustained and encouraged. Calligraphy is something that is to be evaluated purely from an aesthetic perspective (after all, it is ‘beauty in writing’) and I do not need to go into how much modern typography revolves around it.

I also pondered about the complete lie that is the concept of participation certificates, but that does not need any explaining. At all.

A few years after I began working, I began to cook for myself. Hesitant, tentative attempts at first, and most of the time I would be on the phone with my mother, asking about spice proportions and marination time and the number of pressure cooker whistles. We’ve all been there, right? I got better at it and the distress calls wound down. It would get weird on Sundays when we would have our weekly conversation, and ma would say something like, “I cooked this the other day, you would have liked it”, and I would say, “That’s fine, I will cook it tomorrow” and then she would be like, “Oh. OH. I forget you cook nowadays”. A little accusatory, a little proud and happy.

Now TT, that was something I never cooked for myself. I would get the recipe every single time I was at home. Day 3 would be around when ma would serve it on the table, usually at dinner. (Day 6 was when I would get completely sick of home-cooked food and long for some biryani) And it tasted great, of course. Every time, I asked her the precise steps – and it was simple – no onions, just ginger and garlic. Mustard oil if possible. That’s it. But somehow, somehow, TT was her’s specifically, the memory and taste of it associated with Guwahati and train journeys. I never even tried to cook it myself.

I met my mother at Amsterdam last month, for a day. She was visiting my sister in Brussels. I was on the last leg of my trip, and met her on a rainy Sunday morning, after having spent the whole night dancing like mad at the Sensation White festival. For some demented reason, my sister wanted to visit the Heineken Experience. I had absolutely no desire to go myself – the hotel receptionist’s horror when I asked for directions to the place was reason enough (“It’s shit! Don’t go!”, he shrieked. “I have to meet someone there”, I said. “Well, tell them to not go! It’s shit!” “Too late, they are already there”) I went there, waited an hour at a delightful pub next door – it was a rainy day, and the cup of coffee and the apple and nutmeg pie cheered me up despite the tiredness I felt. I had not seen ma in a year and a half, and as it turned out, she had woken up at 6 AM that morning and cooked some TT for me, along with fried chicken and some puris. We sat in the car, rain pouring around us, and wolfed down the food hungrily. I did not care much for the chicken, the fried potatoes hit every pleasure center in my brain. And then some.

So I’ve been lying around at home thanks to a bout of chicken pox. (I know, right? Who on earth gets chicken pox at age thirty goddamned two, forgoshsakes) And the craving hit me. I needed to eat some TT. Which also meant I needed to cook me some TT, and I did. But I got adventurous too, and added cauliflower to it. And sausages. Some thinly chopped carrots. When it was done, I finished the whole dang thing with a packet of microwaved tortillas. I made some the next day too, and finished it in two meals. And later that week, I called up my mom and told her that I had made my version of TT. Or as I called it, TT2. Fuck yeah.

Intimidation Game sounded like it meant business. Begins sounded like a Nintendo product – kid-friendly, whimsical and not at all Batman-y, if you get what I mean. Until you saw it. When did you see it? Do you remember at all? Before I saw it for real, at the IMAX theater in Hyderabad, I was there that first Friday, at Rex at Bangalore. I am fairly sure other people I came to know later that year saw it there too, and the comic-karma part of me – the one that gets goosebumps at the cheesiest references and storytelling loop-backs – sort of wonders if all of us roared at the screen in unison when Bruce Wayne stood up in the cave under his mansion, even as the agents of childhood dread swooped around him. That moment when the two-note leitmotif throbbed and soared through the speakers in the theater and you could not stop grinning like an idiot because good God, you never thought things would look this good, Christopher Nolan, you magnificent man.

Digression: If there has ever been a case of my wanting to go back in time and apologize to a creator, it would be to Hans Zimmer, whose theme for Batman Begins I dismissed as being ‘not memorable enough’. I thought his two note theme was  pedestrian, that they could not stand up to the grandeur of Elfman’s Spider-Man, at that time my personal benchmark for memorable superhero scores. I was wrong. I was so, so wrong. Those two notes, coupled with the variations on the swirling sonic tapestries in the lower register – the rumbly whoosh of bat wings, and the slowly-building orchestral sweeps – showed me how less is more. Add the dissonant Joker variant of the same two notes in The Dark Knight, and the primal chants echoing throughout the third movie, and you have probably one of the finest examples of minimalism and compositional idiosyncrasy on display. And I won’t even get into the playfulness of the piano-based Catwoman theme. Deep breath. This soundtrack is destined to be on repeat in my playlist for quite some time.

And you should also go check out the official app. Yes, Zimmer has actually come up with an iPhone app for the soundtrack, where the music, on auto mode, shifts based on what you are doing. In-app purchases let you buy the complete music suite (far more than the 52-minute soundtrack release) for $4, and enhanced auto-modes (there is one that plays at night, and another at sunset). Your fingers brushing against the mic can create interesting Gotham-city effects in the music. It’s been a few hours since I downloaded the app, and I feel giddy with happiness.

End digression.

So, uh, you watched The Dark Knight Rises, right? And you hated it, or were underwhelmed, or loved the shit out of it. Does not matter, really. What matters is this:

For the first time in the history of this 73-year old character, we have a complete story, with beginning, middle and end. The life and times of Bruce Wayne as the singular vision of a creator (and his sidekicks, if you count Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer along with Nolan senior) No studio interference, no pandering to fans, no insulting the audience. With all respect to the likes of Frank Miller, Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams, Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale, Bill Finger/Jerry Robinson/Dick Sprang et al, you tried, gentlemen, and you got really close, but this man did it. He gave us a beginning, a middle and an end. He stole, borrowed from and was inspired by you, he built on your work in a different medium, took audacious decisions on his own, paid absolutely no attention to studio demands (the Riddler? Seriously?), did not throw us knowing winks and in-jokes (or as I call it, scraps and bones for the masses). These weren’t the comic-book movies that Marvel Studios churn out every summer, those disposable, interchangeable three-act popcorn fests.

These were Something Else. Something that gave us a city where street names do not end with surnames of artists and writers. The Mark of Zorro was replaced with Mefistofele, and instead of skin bleached by Axis Chemicals, we had knife-blades and make-up. We saw that third-degree gasoline burns are just as potent as acid thrown at one’s face. Analgesic mists instead of steroids pumped into one’s bloodstream, a complete lack of resurrection-inducing medicinal pits or wise-cracking youngsters. A butler with a military background rather than one in theater. Random characters that had more lines of dialogue than Bruce Wayne’s mother ever did, the poor woman. Concentrated writer-directorfu thrown at your faces, howdja like that, huh?

But of course, with great directorial vision comes great personal baggage as well – gobs and piles of unadulterated plot, movies that felt crammed with Things Happening everywhere, a trilogy that could probably have been unpacked  into a septalogy, or at least a quadrology. I would be lying if I said that all three movies do not exasperate me at times, with their convenient cause-and-effect scenarios and their over-reliance on technological paraphernalia. It would have been nice to not see the Batman buffeted about by agents beyond his control – because we all know that Bruce Wayne is a control freak who plans every contingency, who has all the escape routes mapped out. (and we are wrong. Wrong fucking universe. Repeat after me – this isn’t a comic book.) I am hardly a Nolan apologist, the man does not get everything right. But even with some atrocious trees in there, the woods are lovely, dark and deep.

The Dark Knight Rises is also the first work that manages to come out of the shadow of Frank Miller’s imposing epic. Rises makes use of its ending to tell us that Bruce Wayne’s story is done, that there is no comprehensible need for a man who has given his all to his city to return as a broken old man. (it’s somewhat fitting too that the acronym TDKR leaves people confused about what’s being talked about – the 1986 or the 2012 version) And let me tell you, this is monumental, you guys, this getting-out-of-Miller’s shadow thing.

(Oh shit, I think I am now getting into emo-mode when talking about the film. Let’s talk about old-timey boyhood stuff instead)

Knightfall, cheesy as it feels now, was the Batman storyline when I was in high school. The first time I found back issues in Guwahati stores was in 1996 or so, and I did not finish completing the run (yes, Knightquest and Knightsend included. Yes, single issues painstakingly bought from the AH Wheelers and Western Book Depots and various Book Fair sales over the years. This was before BitTorrent and Flipkart made your lives easy, young ones) until 2003 or so. One painful moment in 2002 was seeing Legends of the Dark Knight #63, the final issue of the Knightsend saga in nemesis Chun’s collection. I found it a year later at a book-store in Delhi, if memory serves correctly, but the sting of seeing that one elusive comic-book in a collection that is not mine still lingers. Knightfall is also emblematic of 90s DC, where the company was shaking up every major character right after Superman’s death. Batman was broken, Wonder Woman was replaced by Artemis, Green Lantern went nuts. It was fun just looking at the house ads at that time. And things did not end with Knightsend, no sir. There was Prodigal after that, where Dick Grayson became Batman. Troika, that was Bruce Wayne’s return, complete with Black collectors’ cover. And followed by an endless slew of editorial-mandated crossovers – Contagion, Legacy, Cataclysm, No Man’ Land.

Times and editorial divisions changed, all these nineties “events” were swept under the rug like embarrassing relics of a chromium-cover-infused past. Batman fans got onboard with Hush, along with recommended Bat-canon books, the perennial Millers, Loeb/Sale’s Long Halloween and Dark Victory. Funnily enough, Batman RIP and the newer Morrison stuff did the exact same thing, getting rid of Bruce Wayne and having Dick Grayson replace him in the regular comic-books, and obviously nobody bloody remembered that it had all been done before. Bane became a one-note character used for much sidekickeSuch is the nature of the comics business.

Bully for Nolan, for a masterful use of a little-remembered, much-misused character in a lucha mask and the concept of a dystopian Gotham City cut off from the rest of the world. Most of the No Man’s Land comic read like sci-fi to me, somewhat divorced from the tone of what we expect from a Batman story. The way the winter of the Gothamite’s discontent was portrayed in the film is completely in line with what has gone before, Cillian Murphy’s I-am-not-quite-all-here appearance being the icing on the cake.
“Life-affirming”, the person I talked about this movie for the first time after watching it, said. “It’s like Bruce finally understands that not having a fear of death is great. but having the will to live is far far more powerful. It’s such a great, counter-intuitive message to put in a Batman movie, man.” I know how it feels. The Dark Knight Rises made me want to go to work (my 3:40 AM show finished at around 6:22 AM) and finish all my goals for the next quarter in a single day. It made me want to go rewatch the first two movies – yes, I had not indulged myself, partly because I did not need to, I remembered every detail of the last two movies. I did watch them again over the weekend, and now I need to figure out how many times and when I should pop in next-door (one of two true IMAX theaters in LA, FYI) to take in the moments of the film again.

Last point: I loved the way Anne Hathaway is introduced. Was the simpering maid act in the beginning a back-handed reference to Michelle Pfeiffer’s clueless Selina Kyle in Batman Returns, before the cats resurrect her? The way she changes her expression as she realizes that she’s been found out – oh hell yeah. Oh, and the “cat-ears” are sunglasses. Well-played, production team!

It took about a year to move my books here. I was undecided about whether I should cart them off to my parents’ or my sister’s place. Chandru, over in Chennai, offered to put them in cold storage in a room at the office, but I wasn’t sure how I would get them over. A lot of people had conflicting opinions to offer about moving stuff to the US. Some said books in bulk were not allowed to be imported, others reported packages being returned to India after months of sitting in customs. I spoke with second-hand book sellers – none of them had experience taking books into the US, just exporting them out of the States. Thankfully, pal Ajanta had no problems babysitting the books, but time was running out – even she was to move out by end of the year.

I am not sure how I stumbled onto the R2I forums, but that got things moving. Based on the positive experiences people had with movers in some sticky threads, I emailed a couple of the names mentioned there. 21st Century Relocations, based out of New York was the first to respond, and their responses left me pretty confident that they would do a good job. They went to the apartment one weekend, sent me a reasonable quotation and a week later, packing was complete. I did not even have to mail a check, just sending a scan was enough. Had to printout, sign and scan in a boatload of documents, but they did all the running-around for customs clearance. Things got a little complicated because my departure ticket to LA was not a direct flight – I had to stop at Romania for a month, and my ticket was through Delhi, while the books were in Bangalore.

But it all went well, and by end of November, the books were enroute.

They arrived end of January, in a truck whose size made me very nervous about whether all the books would fit in the apartment. But fit they did, though my room looked like a cardboard hurricane hit it.

I had a Minor Adventure while buying bookshelves from Ikea, where the gentlemen with the pick-up truck decided to hijack my items and go make three other deliveries on the way. With me in the truck too, of course. And then proceeded to give me a ride to a movie theater, with a convoluted 20 mile side-track. It was a weird day.

In the course of the week, shelves were assembled, cartons were unpacked, muffled curses echoed through my chambers. It’s not an easy task, arranging 70-odd packages of books on your own, but I managed. Strangely, I managed not to get distracted by the books I hadn’t seen in a year. Though I confess I felt complete when I arranged the Walter Moers volumes on the top shelf, and smiled at the Tom Sharpe collection, putting them aside to reread Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. Srividya Natarajan’s No Onions Nor Garlic joined the maybe-I-will-read-soon pile, as did the Lee Siegel books. Some left me rolling my eyes – what on earth was I thinking when I bought the Clarke Gable biography (called Long Live the King) or the book on Obie award-winning plays. Or the piles of Star Wars novels. Oh well, at least 2004-version of me must have been a happy camper.

And it was done. Almost. The comics and manga were in my room, and the books went to the living room. The DVDs (the manageable pile of originals that I had the nerve to get into the States, the rest being disposed off quite some time ago) were still packed (2 boxes), and about 4 more boxes of comics remained still – I had run out of shelf-space. There was no way I was going back to Ikea any time soon, and so these boxes remained unpacked for a few weeks, affecting my zen calm every time I entered my room. Last weekend, I figured I had had enough – went to Target, bought a non-Ikea shelf and finally, finally, it was done. My preciouses were home! मेरा पिया घर आया! やった!

And now, presenting a bunch of pictures. Whee!

Download here.

15 songs, tag-stripped, no theme in particular. (Or maybe there is, and I am not telling)