Brief Pause

Rukawat ke liye khed hai. Khed is a great word.

I think I have reached Peak Instagram™. Right now, my explore page is a mix of meal-prep recipes, quirky furniture, room-design ideas, some travel destinations. And cats; there are always cats.

The algorithm is acting this way because it has caught onto my search habits lately. Over the last week, I have read fewer pages of books than reels about the right kind of desk alignment given the direction of sunlight. It keeps blowing my mind how much influence one scroll of reels can have on the next thing I want to try, but hey, some of the recommendations are great, so why not.

Which brings me to this issue.

I am moving to a different city. After nine lovely, long years in Chennai, after a million visits to Murugan Idli for their podi dosa and filter coffee, after spending many quiet sunrises at the Palavakkam Beach, and after enough trips to Pondicherry that I can now recite cafes by street names, it is time for some kinetic energy.

When I locked in my seatbelt on that February morning in 2016, I did not think I’d last nine years in Chennai. I had never been here, so I was looking forward to what it held for me, but nine years is a ridiculous amount of time for someone who had spent two formative decades in Delhi. Chennai is just so...different.

And as ridiculous things go, it didn’t take me long to find home in Chennai. It is here that I met some of my lifelong friends who I now call family. I had outstanding food, maybe too much of it. I watched people turn up with percussion instruments at 4 am on a Thursday for a movie, and saw an old lady break into tears because, twenty metres downstairs, one muscular man from Jharkhand was walking in bright yellow clothing. I paired up with a saxophonist to play a raaga interpretation of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five to an amphitheatre full of grandpops and grandmums, and got the loudest cheer when another collaborator took our jazz jam into Ilaiyaraaja’s Kannan Vanthu.

It’s been a blast, and I’ll miss so much of it.

Lines on The Grass will be on a brief pause - maybe for two to three weeks - as I settle into a new place and use some silence to wrap up a couple of projects. One of them is a political documentary which started with a lot of indie-creator bullish confidence and has reached a point where one financer has pulled out. I don’t know the ramifications of composers getting hauled up by the cops, but I’ve been searching for the most legally-acceptable way of saying, “Sorrz, bro.”

Sport-wise, the timing of the move is, well, not ideal. The hardcourt season is on its final lap, the Premier League is entering the title-charge stage, the ICC Champions Trophy is starting today, but I am most sad about missing a big chunk of what looks like an insane Women’s Premier League season. Day one and day two were cult classics. Richa Ghosh..

In the meantime, my inbox is wide open. If you come across cool stuff to read, watch, or listen, pass the links like you’d, you know, pass a plate of soft cheese paniyaram.