Some time at last to post...

That seems more like it. It looks like another age and era when I used to post regularly. It looks like another millennium since I posted anything worth-while. School's really hectic. It doesn't give much time for intellectual existence. You're always preparing or correcting something or making someone regurgitate things from those CBSE books. Poooh! Shithole existence.

Nevertheless, I have accumulated like another dozen fiction, a handful of scripts for both mainstream and adults... and another shelf full of classic dvds of movies from before 70s. Some interesting Charlie Chaplin and Ingmar Bergman collection. Besides, recent European movies. And I am back at my long-forlorn-into-extended gestating novel - DARKEST BEFORE DAWN! It has taken a new avatar and has started sputtering and staggering to a re-start. Some improvements to the plot. I am not sure I will post any more on the web. I don't want to be pointed fingers at for plagiarising my own stuff at any point of history in the name of someone else's work! I am giving myself another year before I am going to approach a publisher with some serious aspirations to becoming yet another Indian writer in english!

In the meanwhile, we (Masquerade) have finished premiering 3 productions and played 13 shows in a space of 5 weeks between the first night of NIB and the last night of Dystopia. Three new artistic directors - that's exciting. Even more exciting, I am not pressed to churning out shows to keep up the annual 4 shows from our stables. Come to think of it, after Jigsaw early this year, the next event I was involved was recently the launch of the CHENNAI DEBATING FORUM at the Oxford Bookstores on 26th Sept. That was fun. We performed some story telling - subverting and repackaging Indian mythology in contemporary terms, read some steamy Roald Dahl for adolescents and Carol Ann Duffy. At the end of it all, 8 people debated in a combination of Worlds and BP style about "The Need for Reinventing, Rediscovering and Repackaging Culture". Not too many people in the audience. About 15 people at the small Cha Bar beside the Masquerade and MYT people. So it looked like about 50 people. Though... the floor debate we generated at the end of the speaker debate was like 100 participants. Quite interesting. We have quite a lot of interested people wanting to be part of the Chennai Debating Forum and we meet again on October 24 - 4.30 pm to 6.30 p.m at the same Oxford Bookstores, Haddows Road, Chennai.

I have been reading heckuva lot. There's a performed reading of all 6 short-list nominees on the eve of The Man Booker 2009 at the British Council. Of course, we are reading on Oct. 10, while the winner would be announced on the night of Oct 6th. So, we would really be reading from 5 nominees and THE WINNER. I am in the middle of two books. The other 4 I would have read before 10th. So, lot of work happening. No complaints. Or perhaps... one: not able to sit and put that pen to the paper and post some articles. Hopefully this should leave a hangover and I should post one tonight later or tomorrow latest!