Flirting with Istanbul by night

This is probably my favorite self portrait, you can see my silhouette in front of the bar. Despite the jet lag and dirty taste in my mouth I was super excited to see the Istanbul skyline- the Bosphorous, the Sultan Ahmet, Hagia Sofia, Topkapi Palace, world famous bridge connecting Europe to Asia; the monumental sites nestled among sleepy apartment buildings, half open windows giving a glimpse of urban Turkish life at 9pm. What I found the most endearing were the mellow yellow lights preferred by every household I could peer into. I was standing on the rooftop restaurant ‘Leb-e-Derya’ in Taksim, an area that prides itself as the heart of Istanbul.

Silhouettes..

Some moments are so personal, I wouldn’t have the courage to capture them on camera. Which means I can’t write about them either. There is a part of this journey which is me. No matter how many hints I drop, unfinished sentences I write, it will always remain unspelt. The silhouette will be a shadow. If you pay attention though, you can feel it. It breathes life into these diaries.

Body is the new brain

From today, my body is my brain. Instead of puny 8 kgs (estimated weight of a head), my new brain weighs 58 kilos! 59 actually. Since I have started dancing, I have gained weight. I’m assuming its all muscle.
For a dancer, it’s the body that responds. They hear the rhythm in their feet, not their ears. They feel emotions in a trembling arm, a tightened butt. They express joy in a complex footwork, split second jumps. And they swirl in the same spot, like earth encircling the sun to commune with god.
God, of course, is the greatest dancer if you’re Hindu. The greatest beloved if you’re Sufi. Most just if you’re Muslim. Most kind, if you’re Christian. For Buddhists, you, yourself are the Buddha. If only you realize it. Overwhelmed by the first chills of a Mediterranean winter, all these qualities merge. They seem like different aspects of divinity. If only I could see the divinity in me.
On stage, Muge, one of my dance teachers has the smile and excitement of a little girl in wonderland, and the grace and confidence of a woman. When teaching, she pays attention to all the students, and helps me overcome many obstacles. It may sound like counter-intuitive behaviour, but generally, the slow learners in our class tend to haunt the backbenches, and all the confident, good dancers stand in the first row. Muge insists on telling me that standing in the back row will make learning more difficult. She also expects me to ask more questions when I falter. She doesn’t allow me to give up.
“You think too much! Don’t count your steps, let yourself loose!” she yells, as much as her soft voice permits her. She is constantly telling me to let my feet, not my head do the dancing. To pick rhythms instinctively. So I am trying to make my body my brain.
Most people spend their childhood jumping over gates and walls, punching, kicking, dancing, cycling, playing in general. When I look back at my childhood, I have no clue what I spent my time on. I skipped school, I skipped the swimming classes, cycling, badminton. I would cheat in exams, space out in singing classes. I am probably the only adult on this planet who can’t hit 3 balls in a row with a racket, cant balance, can’t even jump!
Out here I am constantly told to carry my body’s weight in my abdomen. If I want to spin or jump and land in the same place, I must carry the weight of my body in my tummy. It’s a beautiful thought. Using your navel to find equilibrium. But I have no freaking idea what this means. Period aches and gas are the only times my awareness shifts to my belly. I am sure most of you will be laughing at me at this point. Which twat doesn’t know how to clench their tummy when someone punches them, or when they jump. Guess what, some of us just get punched.
All brains need to unwind, especially when they are burdened by their own weight. And swimming, I’ve just discovered, is my body’s meditation. The water steals the weight from my feet, gently picks my knees and carries me instead. It washes away most aches and helps me stretch after hours of intense tightness. It’s the closest to my mother’s hug I get these days.
But sometimes, actually very often, the pain doesn’t go away. You stretch, you swim, you sauna, you sleep, you pray that when you wake up, the pains gone. But as soon as you lift your leg to get out of bed, the pain wakes you up to remind you you’re human.
Since I’m straddling between two worlds; the instinctive and the intellectual, the physical and the mental, I hold on to analogies to make sense of things. Incessant physical pain may be a new acquaintance, but I have lived with pain before. I think anyone who’s bothered to fall in love has.
When an activity is this physical and sensuous, the sexual can’t be far behind. And most of the spare time here is spent practicing the peacock dance of display and attract. I, though, am a penguin. I waddle miles away and towards my emperor penguin. This means I generally come home immediately after practice and read a book instead of coffee with big nosed, six packed beings.
And on one such early night, I happened to go through special folders in my email inbox, full of intense exchanges, passion and heartbreak. In life, after each heartbreak, I’d not only shift continents, I’d also pack all those email relics away into a folder and change email addresses altogether. Don’t ask me how many email addresses I now have.
Anyway, I could never go through love mails the past without crying, without feeling cheated, hurt, and worse, heartbroken all over again. Each mail would rip the fragile scabs time had placed.
But for the first time in my life, in a totally new country, I could read my cherished love letters without shedding a tear. Ofcourse, there’s always remorse and longing, but the pain didn’t overwhelm me.
I was fine. I slept well.
So I reckon if broken hearts can breathe new life, so can broken limbs (painful knees in this case). And now you know why I’m always a beat late in my dance steps, why Muge yells at me to stop thinking. I’m a daydreamer. I use the heart’s wisdom to pacify knees.

My life as an 'Extra'

Being an ‘extra’, the artist in the fringes can be quite a task. I’m the girl who fills the faceless crowd in a music video, while the singer shmoozes the model. I’m the girl who’s head gets cut off in shots. If I’m lucky, I will get to wear a shiny cloak in the last row in the musical ‘Troy’, and dance like phosphorescent sea waves, while Hector bids goodbye to his wife Andromache. It’s a heart wrenching scene, as Hector too, like the audience, knows that Troy is doomed, and that’s the last time he will see her.
Life is tough being an extra. You’re caught between professionalism and daydreaming. Struggling to keep invisible in the darkness beside the spotlight. Even your struggles remain invisible. Like all artists, we too, require rigourous training and inspiration, and suffer from artistic insecurities.
My career as an extra began when my friend who was directing a music video on a shoestring budget, desperately sought fillers-in for her nightclub sequence. For free. With good intentions, I washed and conditioned my hair, wore some slinky dress at 9 AM and showed up. Only to be insulted by the make up dudes, who thought my hair needed re-doing and caked my face like the Joker from Batman.
If watching life pass by is a hobby of yours, then I would recommend the patient, thought provoking job of an ‘extra’. On the music video set that day while I tried to catch up with my favorite author Naguib Mahfouz, some models snorted a line of coke or two (for inspiration I’m assuming). As your role increases, the pressure to be inspired does too.
When my two minutes of fame- a shot where I try to seduce the singer away from his ladylove did arrive, I royally screwed it up. I had to sing the following lyrics in a seductive way. ‘O mere raja, paas to aaja, dono milke naachenge’. (oh my king, come closer, lets dance together). My laughter got worse each time I’d repeat the lyrics, and I just couldn’t get myself to look into his eyes and sing those words with a straight face. In the end I was in splits, with tears in my eyes.
My second experience as an extra was again when one of my dear friends, a filmmaker was ditched last minute by an actress. And that’s how I played the headless mother. Headless because the film is from a child’s perspective, and anything above the kids eye line, was cut off. I’d gone clubbing the night before the shoot, and it ended badly with my partner getting into an accident at 4 AM. So when I entered the shoot in high heels and a saree the next day, I was a zombie. The first few scenes were alright, I had to hold the protagonist, the child’s hand and take him to his grandfathers. The next one though, tipped the balance over. In the scene we discover the grandfather to be dead. And in the camera we see my back as I walk across, kneel down, hug the child and cry.
Irony is an over used, often abused word. But I can’t think of any other word that can describe the horror of shooting and re-shooting that scene, only to find the cinematographer complain my back couldn’t emote. He couldn’t see the tears that rolled down my eyes. My heart lay with an injured boy, and I had skipped seeing him to come for the shoot.
Every extra has her day. In August I applied for a fellowship that gave people a chance to follow their dreams. I got through, and am now in Turkey, living as part of a dance troupe ‘Fire of Anatolia’ for three months as a dancer.
The first few days were tempered insecurities and home sickness. I was too fat, too ungraceful, too shy, too amateurish to be in Istanbul with great dancers from the world over. It felt like I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was living someone else’s dream.
Have you ever silently mouthed the lyrics while a song plays? So while you sing, it is the voice of the singer that emerges? Bit like what our heroes and heroines do, make believe song and dance; shot over a span of days, edited into few minutes. This, in a way sums up my relationship with dancing. I love it. I groove all the time, be it in meetings, on the pot, in the car, shower, flirting, eating. I live vicariously through the great dancing I see around. The only time the music stops in my head is when I’m crying or fighting. That’s when make believe ceases.

When you meet me, you’re bound to notice the straight face I maintain. if I was to crack a joke or admonish you for your behaviour, you wouldn’t be able to decipher it from my face. I live in my head, and express myself through words. Which doesn’t make for a great dancer or actor. Feeling emotions, and expressing them are two different things. Expressing them with words, and expressing them with your body even more different.
Which makes being part of a world class dance troupe like Fire of Anatolia a challenge at best, stressingly stressful at worst. I must begin at the beginning, while everyone else is close to the top. I must learn to move in rhythm. I must learn to look at myself in the mirror. I must feel like the King of the World. “I want to see Shubhangi in the steps. I want you to use your arms, stretch them out. I don’t see you in your dance” complains my choreographer instructor Muge. And I smile back at her. The simplicity and enormity of her demand stumps me amidst the dance routines.
Muge is one of the lead dancers and assistant choreographers here. She is the girl with the winning smile, wooed by rows of dancers on stage. In other scenes though, she is also the masked girl in full black on the last row. Fire of Anatolia is probably the first glamorous group I have witnessed with an almost Gandhian style of working. Apo, who is currently handling the entire show here in Antalya, orchestrates everything with a mobile phone, walkie talkie, and a broom in case it rains. Two days ago, when it rained while the troupe was performing outdoors, Apo was among the sweepers who swabbed the stage in the interval. I could give you a million similar instances. Sinem, the gorgeous lead bellydancer has entire sequences dedicated to her moves in each show, including ‘Troia’. After completing those scenes though, she adorns the common costumes and joins her dancing mates in enacting the phosphorescent waves, while Hector bids good-bye to his love.
So when I say if I'm lucky I will adorn a shiny cloak and play the part of phosphorescent sea waves in Troia, I mean it. This is a dance troupe where no role is small enough for anyone. Being an extra, isn’t an apology for the being in the spotlight. It’s a role in itself. Which requires practice, hard labour and yes, inspiration. Extra’s too suffer from artistic insecurities. They too feel fat and ungraceful on days.
And that doesn’t mean we have a low self esteem. You don’t have to be in the spotlight to feel special. I know my family loves me as much off stage/on stage. And my friends have always stood by me.
So if watching life pass by is a hobby of yours, then I’d recommend the patient, thought provoking job of an ‘extra’. I'm always running late. As a journalist I pass deadlines, and as a dancer I'm almost always a step or two behind. But when I see the rest of team waltzing ahead, it is inspiring. It inspires to me catch up, to try harder and join them. In case I can’t, I just give up. Sometimes its either not worth keeping up or too plain difficult. Which is fine too. As my mother puts it, “eat good food and relax. Tomorrow is a new day.”

things to do before 30

Snuggled between the curiosity of 16 and adventurous spirit of 17, I stuck a piece of paper on my cupboard, and jotted all the things I wanted to accomplish before I turned 30. 30 back then was as far as I could plan for. It wasn’t just a milestone. It was a dead end. It was where life as I knew ended. And another one began.

Being true to my muddled brain, the master list included adjectives, verbs, life long desires and short-term curiosities. I wanted to start eating breakfast, something I loved skipping as much as early morning showers while growing up. I had to learn to be non-judgemental. I had to be a belly-dancer and a mahout, among others. A decade has passed since then. That paper was unceremoniously removed when I shifted houses and now exists as a fragile, mellow yellow reminder in a handmade file. I had never really forgotten the contents of that paper, but over the years, it became a secret of sorts. In the privacy of Google searches and daydreams, I would plot the budget required for learning belly-dancing in Cairo, search for volunteering options in elephant orphanages and so on. One day, a TV channel approached my boyfriend with a proposition. Ask any question you want to our panel of experts, and they give you an expert opinion. When he asked me what I’d ask, were I in his place, the secret slipped out. “What is the cheapest and best option for me to view whales in the wild?” Rather amused, he did all the research and gave me the answer. He even gave me an estimate and volunteered to come along.

That’s when I came out of the closet. I’m 27 now. For more than a decade have I harboured a loony bunch of dreams I would like to accomplish, like being a belly-dancer, performing magic, gazing wide mouthed at whales in their natural environment, unlike the circus of Ocean Parks.
And suddenly, it seems possible. While I was planning my December date with blue whales, my friend, a serial forwarder, forwarded me an application for a dance fellowship in Istanbul. Kicked by the idea, I applied. And while waiting to hear from them I cried. Working as a journalist gave me no energy to fill out lengthy applications, and I had applied at the cost of work and sanity.
Focus is a strange concept. We are taught to go on doing what we are good at, until we become better and finally start earning money. And the minute you begin to question this bogus concept, you lose focus. While waiting for the fellowships results to come, I actually began doubting myself. Perhaps I was wrong, even delusional to daydream.

Anyway, something proved me wrong. It generally does. (Which is why I’d like to learn to be non-judgemental in this lifetime). I left for Istanbul on 30^th Sept 2009 to join the ‘Fires of Anatolia’, one of the biggest dance troupes in the world for three months. I am leaving 5 kilos overweight and I wish it was the luggage. In my attempt to get a fancy haircut, I chopped off 5 inches of hair and now look like a smart cockatoo. If I touch my toes for more than 10 seconds, it hurts.

This blog hopes to capture my adventures of conquering my list of things to do before hitting 30. The timeframe, I admit, is arbitrary. But then so is my list.

List of things to do before 30 (Please feel free to add to it)

Belly-dancing

See whales in the wild

Be a mahout

Learn to be non-judgemental

Eat breakfast

Read Politics of Sexuality by Foucault

Read some book by Samuel Beckett

Be a fairy