My life...so shabu-shabu

When in doubt, party. I've been having serious thoughts about where I'd like to spend the next phase of my life, and in between mulling over various options (staying back in the US, returning to India, some place completely different) and all night discussions with Junri about them, I've managed to do some serious party-shartying over the past few days. And its been quite shabu shabu (Oh, how I love analogizing!) Let me explain. In shabu shabu (swish swish), you take all these disparate ingredients (meats, veggies, noodles) and swish them about in a heated bowl of broth, to make a dish that comes together quite appealingly. Likewise, the past few days have been a composite assembly of disparate, but overall, wonderfully cohesive social commitments. Let's see - first was an elegant dinner at the superfab new home of the wonderful Michele Oshima where the theme seemed to be India. All guests had some connection or the other. These included Bimal, a bridge player for the Indian national team (whizzing through the city, en route to Portugual for a tournament), MIT folks like Maya (as Sindhi as Sindhi can be - with 5 questions, she could place me in her Colaba Sindhi network), Dr. Ajit (if only all doctors were so hot) and Tracy (bedecked in her new jewels and full of her Indian holiday experiences), Chee-Keng (dapper scientist who cooked us a fragrant Malaysian rice)....The food was wonderful, especially the monkfish and butternut squash dishes. I took along two coffee cakes - blueberry and apple, that were greatly appreciated. After rice wine shots, and some spontaneous dancing, we all trooped along to the Harvard Square Loews, where we encountered a long line of strangely attired college kids, waiting for the midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Show to start. Lots of flesh and leather - dog collars and feathers. I was particulatly struck by a rather rotund Hamlet - white tights, black tailcoat unbuttoned, and full fleshy pale belly dangling over the waistband, swaying gently to its own tune as he held a plastic skull aloft and gazed intently into the distance. We bypassed the line and went in to see Capote. Nice - Philip Seymour Hoffman is certainly my contender for the Best Actor Oscar this year. His textured tortured sexy performance really got me into the skin of Capote and made me feel for him, even though there were so many things about his personality that were difficult to like (his narcissm, his moral ambiguity about not helping the killers with their final plea; their not dying would have really messed up the ending of his book). I liked the film because it resonated strongly with my own issues of getting really close to the object of one's research. How far can you go - and at what point does an intense engagement with one's subjects become too intense? Can there really be anything such as too intense? Where does journalism/anthropology end, and manipulation begin? In Cold Blood was the result, of course - the first non fiction novel ever produced, and the film gives us a highly stylized, and subjective version of how Capote grappled with issues such as these in the process of writing the book for which he will be most remembered. I only slept for two hours that night because I had to wake up early the next morning to have brunch at the dorm of my MIT rakhi sister - Kriti. It was parents weekend at MIT, and I was substituting. We went shopping later, to the shops at Downtown crossing, where I purchased some elegant cashmere lined brown sheepskin gloves, and crisp cotton shirts (made in India) that I shall wear under my sweaters this winter. I also caught up with Fred Thys over the week, who spent his childhood in Mauritius and Africa, worked all over the world with NBC TV, especially Mexico and South America, and is now doing radio in Boston. We spoke about men, love and depression (not that the three are connected, of course), among other things, while dining on delicious oysters and blue fish at the Summer Shack - a Boston legend that I had never been to before, but shall certainly revisit. My friend, confidante, mentor and professor Tuli Banerjee came over for breakfast at 8am. It was another early morning wake up call for me after sleeping only 2 hours (I compensate by sleeping through the days - the privelege of joblessness) and we fried some bacon and eggs and washed it down with Earl Grey, before going together for an event that she was organizing as the head of the MIT India program - a tete a tete with the Executive Director of ICICI Bank. (Did you know that they are involved in absoultely EVERYthing under the sun, besides banking? I certainly didn't). And then, Junri and I met up with our friend Jason over shabu shabu - who's an American writer of Russian origin and who'd spent part of his summer exploring his roots in Israel. It was an interesting sight. Three guys, one Indian, one Japanese and one Russian American, having Japanese food in an Chinese restaurant in Boston's Chinatown, loudly discussing sex, women, men, Bollywoood and French new wave. Viva la globalization, hanh!