Parul's Journal

brokeback mountain It is a little hard to imagine how cowboys, their image being somewhat-working hard, riding alone in the desert sun..or the Dallas Cowboys-America's soccer team image.., sharing duties in a faraway isolated world find themselves drawn into a relationship. And not just any relationship, the kind that is made impossible by time and people with whom they live. Or maybe we have always imagined people in these relations to be of a particular kind in our minds, always. But then, the Marlboro man is an icon of U.S. culture that has always colored our minds unconsciously and the other way round too. Cowboys and gays put together…oxymoron combination perhaps. But then maybe we need to look at things closely and differently. But the movie reaching Oscars, in a land where homosexuality has proved to be a contentious issue and where homophobia is common was perhaps the greatest challenge faced and perhaps won.. some good cinematography and direction,not to forget the concep...

CELEBRATING JNU I must confess and you must agree that there is something intensely erotic about this place. What is it? I don't know exactly. May be the greenery. May be people like Visvanathan and her polar opposites like Sharma [and I have equal respect for both the species]. May be people like Anand Kumar who have mastered the art of conversation. May be the element of freedom. Inhaling the JNU smoke and getting a hang of it. Initially one gets easily disgusted because it takes not more than a week to realize how false are all those grand notions that people outside the campus have constructed about this place. So reputations and expectations fall apart. The presence of the dirty check shirt wearing deehaatees landing up in the city for the first time holding the ladders of quota and quartile disgusts one. One gets disgusted by the moustache-wala, IAS-walas all around with their caged definition of success boxed within the white ambassador with red bulb on top. One gets disgust...