Travelogue. Or something.

The summer of 2010, Orenburg, Russia. It's the quaint, sleepy town you've never heard of. The balconies with baskets of chrysanthemums, the shining horizon and no skyscrapers. Expanses of clarity. The warm sunbeams on your naked back, clear and watery, sans those golden flecks of dust. The parks and the walkways. Tulips everywhere. The houses, those structures you learn to draw in 2nd grade. The kind of cleansing coolness Ben Gibbard talks about. The air, clean and cold. Those evenings on the European terrace, staring at a part of Asia that sparkles in the distance. Right out of an Of Montreal song.

The museums, oh, they're pieces of languid history frozen behind glass doors. The people, so proud. "So how do you like our city?" I'd never call Delhi mine. Their soft voices, the streets devoid of conversation. Spasiba, which means thank you, resonates. So.. civilized. They talk in a neon blur. "Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear." Ye niye gavaryoo paruski, "I don't speak any Russian", becomes your new anthem. The place has it's own force, it calls out to art and literature. To creation. I've never drawn and read so much. The townsquare and the library, they transport and lift. The granite and the marble. The Russians revere their literature, statues of Pushkin at every other redlight. There’s culture in the cement and clay.

The Russian secretary. And her brother, her very hot brother. Who doesn’t speak English. Heh. The other secretary who passes out on my bed after 2 glasses of rum. The picnics and the strange food. The lines of bath and body stores, the salt scrubs! The pool. The super fast internet that downloads 8 gb worth of Star Wars in an hour! The live singing in the restaurants.

The Russian ballet and the opera.. oh god the opera. You know, how you read about it filling you with a deep sense of awe, pregnant with emotion? That’s a lie. It does, however, make you stop. And just stare. “Beautiful isn’t the right word but it’s the first word that comes to mind.” Such opulence, such splendour.

The war killed so many men. And now Orenburg is the feminist’s dream. Women run the city, you see them everywhere, in super markets and police cars, in the courts and the clinics. Women that look like supermdoels, make you want to work out. Their high heels and short skirts. An incipient matriarchy Virginia Woolf would bask in.

The deep seated communism. Where your dad's doctor is a taxe driver by day and your maid is a trained account on alternate weekdays. Where tiny tenements, brimming with families still exist. And on the other hand, the government gives you central heating and hot water, and medical insurance.

The bridge that divides Asia and Europe, with a river running through it. Bicycle rides, ice-skating and bowling. The nightclubs, with the dingy bars and the men who think I’m 14. Exotic but 14. Bollywood is popular. And for the record, I'm not Apu, neither is "jimmy jimmy aaja aaja" anythign CLOSE to a line. Pfft. They love your “tan”.

And what is this small town for a 19 year old, on the verge of entering what is going to be the hardest year yet? Time, so much time. To introspect. Character construction. Like those summer breaks in school when you discover music and art and literature that will define who you are for a long time to come. Complete seclusion, no phone. The leisure to draw, to sketch, find latent talents. To write. That idea for a book that will make you rich and famous, the easy way. All that underground music that will always remind you of this sombre, quiet time. Insomnia and catatonic fits. Late night conversations with the people closest to you. You know what I mean. The kind of soulspeak where all real epiphanies are made. Where you formulate opinions you will later use in those "intellectual" conversations with the ex.

The kind of vacation where you grow and feel older. That feeling you crave for every birthday but never experience? That feeling, right here, is tangible, you could wrap your hands around it and marvel.


..And in a week, Delhi will happen. In a week, everything will change. And I’ll go back, with Russian songs on my new Zune. And the sort of languorous maturity that makes you stop being a child, finally.

Second-hand.

His room's just little pieces of imagination strewn everywhere. Books, canvases with impressions of Impressionist art, music from the 90's, music from the 80's, music from the 17th century, music from Denny's basement, music from New York and Bellingham. Movies, mute movies, foreign films, post- modern plays. Every Sunday afternoon, we go over our.. list.

I have this habit of lying across the floor, the bare, cold, deliciously cold marble floor and looking at his half-painted ceiling and trying to fix the Rubik Cube. No painted, glow-in-the-dark stars there, nothing cheesy. He is trying to copy Manet's Olympia. It's really just a naked woman with a cat staring at you, though he hasn't painted the cat yet. The cat's weird, it would creep you out.

We're tired teenagers, is all we are.
We have big dreams and we want to be cultured. We want topics of conversation. Common interests. We're as original as a dead ant. But we get by. We drink from other people's goblets and pat ourselves on the back for "getting" it. For appreciating all this.. art. So vicarious. Sam Beam made a great record but who cares about Sam Beam. I'm the artist for having heard it and you're not because you don't even know such genius exists. Muscle flex.

We're just tired teenagers, is all we are.
He's sprawled over my sofa, his shirt's undone. " You know, dear, dear.. dear. You and I are worse than the rest. We KNOW we ape. Those kids don't know they ape. They're happy being sponges, at least something goes INSIDE and remains there, you know what I mean? You and I.. well. We're looking for education in all the wrong places."

I'm not really interested in this piece-of-crap, overplayed broken-record conversation. We have it everyday. But I play my part. " I'm not looking for education man. I'm just looking for.. an outlet. Don't wanna be a mouse with just one hole to escape from. Those stupid humans could shut down the hole, cover it up. Then I'd be a dead mouse in a covered hole. I'd rather just be a mouse. With reality and another "ism" to escape into."

He's sort of.. right though. This Sunday afternoon scavenger activity, looking for literature and poetry to wolf down, glut down is no education.

It's no second hole either.

It's just us 21st century, tried teenagers wanting to say a new word. And realizing that all the smart words have already been said. That there are no "isms" left to start.

He’s twirling a pen between his fingers and he’s drifting off to sleep. An old Cut Copy song’s playing.

“But we’re better than that cat I’m too afraid to paint, we’re better than mice... we are.. We have to be. ”

Emo rant.

I can deconstruct and then demolish anything you give me. At least in my head, I can write off almost anything no matter how great it is, how thought provoking it is. What is deep is also pretentious, what is light is way too superficial. The mainstream alternative on the radio is too "commercial" and sell-outy, the indie that is made in the basements of Austin, Texas is too half-baked and wanting-to-be-different. This.. incredible capacity to hate. It's worse than nihilism you know. They seek to "clear the ground" because they're a force that needs to account. Force without matter.

This brand of.. absolute loathing or contempt for every intangible idea and concept, every breathing entity. Its purposeless. We're not seeking to clear the ground, we're not seeking to establish a new order the way those 19th century realists were. We're only seeking to hate.

You see it everywhere, in those case-taking sessions in college where it's a who-can-hate-more competition thinly garbed as humour, in class where you hate the feminists for wanting everyone to be a lesbian and you hate the sexists for being sexist. It's a gift.

OF course, I'm not saying that I'm some emo kid who hates everything, naw. Just lamenting this capacity I have. It's POSSIBLE, you know. Like I COULD be an all-loathing emo kid so easily if I wanted to.

And that's a super-power I don't want.