I confess I am a fan of old Hindi music, the good ones at least. Even those in the audience who are indif­ferent to such music will find much to appre­ciate in the wonderful melodies that they present to us. Certainly, the fact that they have remained popular to this day is indica­tive of their quality.

EDIT: YouTube removed the video. How lame.…

The music is not all though; there is much that we can learn by watching the actors and actresses play out their parts in their signa­ture styles, and under­standing the dynamics of old-style courtship.

The video above is a classic case-study in romance. Notice the remote serenade — maintaining a comfort­able distance is the first step towards securing your loved one. The theory behind this is that close proximity exposes your loved one to your human imperfections…that are best hidden at the start of a relation­ship. Do you see how the actors are never close enough to be seen together?

The next useful technique is that effort­less trans­mis­sion of sound across the forest that the actor achieves, even when he’s barely moving his lips. This is a classic ninja technique, improved over the ages. The key to this technique is the (appar­ently) casual manner in which he strokes his guitar and the (appar­ently) out-of-sync foot movements. With practice, you can generate the right frequen­cies of vibra­tions to carry the slightest whisper across the forests and plains, across the oceans if need be.

Finally, notice the effect that the serenade has on the lady, and her orgasmic convul­sions. This technique was invented by our ances­tors who travelled distant places with no good means of commu­ni­ca­tion, and were forced to come up with something to keep their wives happy remotely. Unfor­tu­nately, with the passage of time and the devel­op­ment of modern means of commu­ni­ca­tion and trans­port, this technique has become an extinct, forgotten art.

What do you think of when I say, “The Wall”? (Facebook users, anyone?)

This is more of trip down memory-lane. The apart­ment that I called home for the greater part of the nineties was on the coast of the Arabian Sea in Bombay. Maybe it was the proximity to the sea, or maybe it was just shoddy construc­tion — one of the bedroom walls used to be in terrible shape. On its best day, it had plaster peeling off (sometimes falling off in chunks). On bad days, it was home to forests of fungus. Trust me, it wasn’t pretty.

Strangely, of all the things about that house, this wall is the one thing that keeps coming back to me in my dreams. Almost every idea of “home” that my subcon­scious creates is some varia­tion on that house, ‘that house’ being identi­fied by a suspi­ciously similar wall. Not the view from the window, or the table with the crippled chairs, or the heavy iron cots, or anything else. Just that wall.