A shot in the art

On Saturday went to the HK Art Fair. The idea was to get sense of what is out there and how much it costs since I’m seriously considering buying something. And of course to look look look since I’m the kind of person that can spend an entire day in an art museum.

This was my first experience of actually buying a ticket. The problem with having been a journalist is that you get used to freebies. The first year of this fair there were so many tickets lying around, it made me allergic to buying a ticket thereafter. Even up to last year I could get a ticket from my friends back at the newspaper. But this year, the fair seems to have got much bigger and tickets were really tight.

So after finally determining that I was not going to get my hands of a free ticket, I finally bought one. I got a two-for-deal so V came along too. Except I am not a good person to go to these kind of things with because I tend to lose the person I’m with. That’s ok if that person is my husband, because I’ll always find him eventually.

Except that this time I got a little irritated because we were supposed to be looking for something to buy – although V thinks I should buy in India as it will be cheaper – and I suck at asking for the prices of anything, apart from the fact that I’d like V to like what I pick too. But when I tracked V down, he kept marching me through everything at high speed, kind of how he does when there are a lot of sale signs in the mall, so I ended up getting very grumpy and we parted ways after convening for a coffee.

V claims there wasn’t that much interesting stuff which is so not true because there was tons. Not if you’re marching through at the speed of light, I suppose. What I saw:

1. I always discover one new famous artist to love at the fair and this time it was Julian Opie. ‘New famous artist’ sounds like a contradiction in terms but what I mean is new to me but already famous. Opie’s work is really simple but just makes me smile, especially the electronic figures with the swishing ponytail/skirt.

2. There were the usual smattering of Picassos but what I realised was that they were not as unaffordable as I thought. One rare gallery had put up the prices next to the artwork – more on that later – and the Picassos were priced at around HKD1 million. Now I am not sure I can personally afford HKD1 million because I have a poor sense of awe when it comes to money and I have this problem of thinking if I can afford HKD100,000 then I can afford HKD1 million which is of course laughable when what I can probably afford is HKD40,000. But that is why I need V around to keep my reality in check. But the point is I expected Picasso to be more than HKD1 million, even though these were probably not his best work – they were in black and white and could have been etching. I didn’t look closely because I was so excited at the thought that I might have been able to afford a Picasso. Anyhow, the Julian Opie was HKD70,000 which I thought was also not bad.

3. So I don’t understand why galleries don’t just put the price tag up with the art. What is with all this mystification? I have a feeling they are losing customers because wimps like me will just assume the art is out of their range and not ask the snooty salesgirls. When what do you know, I can probably afford an Opie even though I don’t look like much and was wearing Bata sandals.

4. On the subject of which, I know art is supposed to be all la di da but the art fair is huge and it just makes no sense to be wearing six inch heels. Why do we women put ourselves through this? And then we sniff at women who cover themselves up with a burkha. Give me a burkha anyday over feeling compelled to spend upward of two hours standing in six inch heels.

5. I also some beautiful Damien Hirst butterflies. It annoys me when I find myself agreeing with the hype. But there you have it. The man’s work is cool and funny.

6. I also spotted one nice Subodh Gupta painting – too large for me to covet – and one ridiculous huge-ass plate.

7. Suddenly Anish Kapoor is all over the place.

8. Ditto with Korean artists. They are all over the place. It reminds me of when I went to Seoul on an art-related junket and we went to the Korean International Art Fair and someone noticed that all the Hong Kong galleries had Mainland artists and they asked “but what about artists from Hong Kong?” Well.

9. I booked myself into one of the free art tours (by ParaSite) which is what I recommend for anyone going to the fair, especially if you’re clueless about art (which I’m not but I still benefit from structure. Unfortunately the only tour I could get on was the last one for the day I would have dearly liked to have left by then… or seen the tour as some sort of intro and then made my own way around. I almost skipped the tour but I’m glad I did it. The guide introduced us to a few interesting pieces, some of which I had missed and others which I had spotted but which she gave a new perspective on.

10. Thanks to the guide, I finally got what Murakami is up to. But still, not sure I like his work. In short, it hurts my eyes.

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Diamonds are a girl’s best friend

Just as I had discarded the idea of buying a diamond in favour of what I hoped was a higher pursuit in the form of art, V decided to get me one anyway. At some level, I think he had got so into the nitty-gritty of the diamond trade that he couldn’t just give up the quest. But mainly, I think, he wanted to thank me for being the goddess that gave him his son.

So, I accept the gesture of thanks with a smile. Ok with delight and stamping of feet. It’s not every day that a girl gets to have her diamond and her painting too (if I could ever identify and decide on one painting).

Now, that I am the proud wearer of a serious stone, I feel the need to be worthy of it. Thus, I feel that my clothes must be smarter, my nails well done, my hair in place, my shoes a little higher, my perfume tasteful and my bag upgraded. Definitely, the latter. It is not in me to turn down the excuse for a new bag, however, flimsy.

Oh dear, I do think this ring is turning out a bit Gollum-esque. But as they say, when the economy is in need, every citizen must do their bit.

Ok I’m going to say it.

I love my job but I’m so tired of reading badly-written shit by other people. I fully recognize that I would not have a job if that were not so.

But still.

I am tired of thinking it’s bad because it’s a translation. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s bad in the original language also.

And why can they not break out of this boring pompous mode? Everyone is fully aware that noone is actually going to read this entire drab spiel. So why not ditch the big words and long sentences and just get to the point?

Or at least let someone who knows how to get to the point with a modicum of elegance write it. That someone would be me.

The End

The final episode of SATC made me cry. Not because it was the very last episode and there would be no more but because it was so poignant, and so romantic.

Alexandr Petrovsky reminds of the self-centredness of men. Of how easily they ask and they take and they let go of your hand. How easily your sacrifices are forgotten. Oh, the entitlement.

The real heart of the episode though was Magda watching Miranda bathe her mother-in-law. As Magda told Miranda: “That is love.” Miranda’s represents the ultimate SATC transformation – the tough, cynical, self-sufficient, cold woman who rushes down the street frantic with worry over a woman she doesn’t even like.

A close second is Samantha and Smith, another testament to how the steadfastness of love can break down the tallest barriers. It is perhaps fitting that the toughest two in the foursome were melted by men the opposite of them – naive where they were sophisticated, loyal where the women were commitment phobic, nice where they were bitchy.

In all of this metamorphosis, Charlotte and her baby coming through kind of lose out. It is aww but not ohh.

And finally, in Carrie and Big we get, as we always wanted, our fairytale ending.

Lessons from Mommyhood

Shilpa tagged me to write about ‘what mommyhood has taught me’.

The tag:

It’s been a while since us Mommybloggers came up with something to celebrate, well, mommyhood, so the lovely Monika and I came up with this. A tag that has us list out five lessons of life that Mommyhood has taught us, these could be sweet, bitter, funny, touching, whatever. These could be survival tips or cooking tips, or something as simple as the best thing to get puke smell out of hair.



So, the rules are simple. Put the badge up. Write out five lessons that Mommyhood taught you. And tag five mommybloggers.

So here goes:

1. To give up control. Newborns cannot be controlled. They will eat, sleep, cry when they want. They will fall sick and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it but wait. The ‘nothing you can do about it’ was the part I found the hardest to deal with. When your child is sick you want to do something, anything to make him feel better. It can drive you insane to sit around watching and waiting and doing nothing. When my son had reflux, the doctor told me he would get better in three months. But that seemed like eternity – I kept trying different things, going to different doctors, and then I ran out of things to try and doctors to go to and I realised that basically, I couldn’t handle not doing anything and just accepting that this was out of my control. I cannot imagine what mothers whose children have more serious issues do.

2. To have patience. I never realised how impatient I am but sometimes when I am trying to put Benji to sleep and he will keep fidgeting and whining for half an hour, I borderline lose it. Nothing has tested my patience like having Benji because he cannot be rushed. He will do what he wants in his own time. These days he has this new whiny noise that he will do increasingly loudly (ending in complete howling) if he is not picked up. That noise has become the soundtrack of my life. I have to find a zen place inside me to not completely lose my mind.

3. To love babies. To be fair, I started to like babies when I moved to Hong Kong. Before that I thought babies were at best uninteresting and at worst, ugly and annoying. But something about Chinese babies – the way their hair sticks up like a porcupine, their look of complete surprise when they spot you, and their general lack of yowling – made me interested in babies. My niece La was the first baby I felt a connection with. Both V and I were terrified to hold her, tiny as she was at three days old. But Sil insisted that we do. V held her for exactly three seconds and then passed her to me. I held her for half an hour – I sat perfectly stiff, my arm going numb, terrified I would wake her, marveling at her look of utter self-containment. My niece Sibear was when everyone realised I could be maternal. Granted, I was pregnant at the time I first met her at a little over than a month old, but I surprised everyone at the enthusiasm at which I rocked her, sang to her, jogged her around the house to get her to sleep. And then Benji arrived and clinched the deal. Now I coochie-coo at every baby I see, I go all googy at particularly the very small babies with their dopey faces because Benji is past that stage and I miss his Benji-buttonness. God help me when he’s a teenager.

4. That I could have a physical connection with someone not attached to me. When Benji just arrived I couldn’t sleep because I could hear him crying two rooms away over the noise of the TV. I have outgrown that, stretched the umbilical chord so to speak. But the chord is still there. I cannot watch Benji being sick without tears in my own eyes. If he is howling, I find myself getting hysterical too. I never realised I was such a wuss. It does not bode well for the cry-it-out method.

5. That my husband is a great dad. V was the one who pushed for us to have a baby. I would have delayed indefinitely. I grumbled to my sister that it was very convenient for him to want a baby but what if once the baby came he stuck me with it (like most Indian men) and I had to manage on my own (which I was pretty sure I was incapable of). My sister pointed out that V does a lot of work around the house and I shouldn’t just assume he would lump me with the baby. V has exceeded my expectations as a father. He is so into Benji. There is a special expression in his eyes when he looks at Benji that is completely new and reserved only for his son – tenderness, amusement, pride, love. Second only to Benji’s grin at me, V’s face when he sees Benji is the most precious thing out of this whole experience.

Now to tag 5 mommies. I had to struggle to think of 5 mommies to tag because I read only a couple of blogs that profess to be mommyblogs. And even among those who comment and whose blogs I have checked out, can’t remember who is a mom and who is not. Anyway, I tag:

1. 30in2005: You like writing in 5 points don’t you?
2. dipali: For the perspective of a mommy whose kids are all grown up.
3. R’s Mom: The one of two blogs I read with Mom in the title and whose entertaining stories about her little girl I enjoy
4. Ri’s Mom: Who I used to know as Su and recently realised is a mom
5. Garima: who commented when I was going through the worst of Benji’s reflux.

On Simple Stories and Indianness

Came across this interview with Amitav Ghosh in Guernica magazine (what a fascinating name for a magazine, and don’t there seem to be so many new magazines around?)

Three aspects interested me:

I

Amitav Ghosh’s view of his own art:

1. He graduated as an anthrologist and sees this as having an influence on his writing: “It trains you to observe, and it trains you to listen to the ways in which people speak.” In my view, every writer must have this capability. However, maybe Ghosh’s novels are more anthropological. Do you agree?

2. His comparison of his art to painting reminded me of my own comparison.

“If you were to divide writers,” he says, “like people do divide painters—between the abstractionist and the figurative painters—I’m definitely a figurative person. I mean it’s the world that interests me.”

Bingo. Maybe that’s why I can’t into his work. I’m more of an abstract art person.

3. His views on American writing (which sort of mirror MinCats and the New York Review of Books article she/I linked to earlier.

“It’s just so ironicized, it’s just boring. I can’t read any American writing anymore; it’s just not interesting to me. So I think that’s what happened really.”

4. And he contrasts that with Indian writing in English

“I think, in a way, a certain condition of American life where people become very isolated from other people eventually reflects itself in the work. Often when you read it, you just get a sense that people are not curious about other people. Or else that they are so curious that it becomes obsessively concerned with the sort of psychologizing of people. But you know emotion, and passion, and all those things, I think that’s why people all around the world read us, because people know that those are real things and they respond to them.”

And how good Indian writing is always political because that is so much a part of being Indian (discussing politics) as well as of being a great writer.

“I think all important writing comes out of some sort of passionate engagement with the world around it… So yes, I mean I think you know the political world is very important. And that’s also a part of being Indian. Whenever I’m in India, just growing up in India, half your conversations are political, as it must be with Iranians.”

Ironically, that is why I also love reading Indian writing (sadly only in English, because it’s the only language I can read in). Just that Amitav Ghosh is the writer I like least among the big Indian names. But overall, he is spot on about the surge of talent, and recognition of that talent, in Indian writing.

II
Amitav Ghosh’s views on being Indian:
1. That the word “Indian” escapes definition.
“People often talk about identity. It’s not one of the things which really is washing about in my head at all. One of the reasons why is because anybody who’s lived in India knows that India is incredibly, incredibly diverse. I mean it would be almost impossible to define what it means to be, moreover to say that everyone who identifies themselves as Indian is [the same as] what they are. That’s one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; it lets you be exactly who you want to be. And in many, many different ways. At the same time it also offers you these incredible civilizational resources.”

On the face of it, this could be taken as an extremely privileged statement. Indian society can be extremely restricting, the opposite of letting “you be exactly who you want to be”. However, Ghosh is talking here about identity. I, with my English-speaking, growing-up-listening-to-Madonna background, is as Indian as anyone else.

As he says, “I always tell my wife: any statement you make about India, whatever you say, the opposite is also true!”

2. That India may be no longer exclusively about territorial location

“the most interesting thing about being Indian is that India is not in one place. I think this is in some very important way the pattern of the future. What we see today in that nation-state is fading to be replaced by these enormous diasporic civilizations. India is one, China is one, England is one, France is one.”

This speaks to me a lot. I know I will always be Indian because that’s where my roots are but what about my son? I was puzzled by the Facebook status of a cousin who is an Australian citizen who was cheering for India in an India-Australia match. This sort of thing provokes a great deal of anger in the ‘local’ population but maybe this is one of the consequences of globalization – that one no longer needs to be rooted to wherever one has moved.

“In this generation, I don’t think one can even talk of diaspora anymore. I think the myth of countries of immigration like America is that when people come here they renounce their other identities and become American. But in fact what we see today is exactly the opposite.”

And also that the Indian diaspora is not just out there, sending back foreign exchange and Kraft cheese:

“Now the diaspora is exporting to India. The diaspora is determining the ways in which cultural products in India are shaped.”

3. About not needing to be located in India to write about India.

This is a biggish debate among writers in India because so many of the early crop of successful Indian writers were diasporic. He cites a friend who says that unless you’re coping the reality of life in India every day, the bad traffic, the drag of bureaucracy etc. you can’t authentically represent India. There is some truth to this. It’s kind of how people get so irritated with those of us who live outside India and then say “why can’t this or that change”.

But his point about the diaspora and how India is no longer in one place is also true. So maybe diasporic writing can be another kind of Indian writing, that is equally valid, just as there are so many kinds of Indians.

He also makes an interesting point about the confidence that comes with writing as an Indian writer

“I was very lucky in that unlike Naipaul I was from a large country—a large, increasingly self-confident country. Often I think the weaknesses of Naipaul’s work come from the fact of his having grown up in a circumstance where there were very intense small conflicts. Where he, I think, could never really claim Trinidad for himself, and never felt enabled to claim it for himself. But I felt very much that I was looking at the world as an Indian. So I think that was certainly one of the huge differences.”

4. On language being more important than location

“For example, the idea that what you see increasingly nowadays, of say Englishmen, or English Indians living in India, writing about India without knowing the language, or any of the languages, it just seems so odd to me. I mean I think language is much more important than location.”

As an Indian who speaks only English, I think he is struggling here. I agree that speaking and thinking in a local language is a great claim to authenticity. But he glosses over the fact that there are Indian such as certain groups of Christians and Parsees who may grow up in India speaking only English. And they are a validation of 2)

III
About fiction and non-fiction:

“That’s why I think I’m drawn to the novel even more than writing nonfiction, because only the novel allows you the completeness of representation. To me, the novel is important because it’s such a complete form of utterance. It allows you to represent your utterance in all its nuances, in all its representative possibilities, in all its expressive possibilities in a way that nothing else can.”

I am totally a fiction person. The first non-fiction book I really enjoyed was Eat, Pray, Love (which most people hate, I know) and I think it’s because it read like fiction, or like a blog with an intensely personal voice. I think this is a new category of non-fiction, where a personal voice is allowed, and it’s the only kind I can read.

If it’s a straight kind of biography in the old style where the author takes this omniscient, historical perspective, I can’t read it. I remember enjoying Alison Weir’s The Lady Elizabeth so much that I read everything by her I could get my hands on, and then when I finally ran out of options, I took a chance on Elizabeth the Queen, her non-fiction biography. It was interesting but I just couldn’t get through it, not just because it was an enormous tome.

My brother-in-law doesn’t read fiction because he thinks its “useless”. (He does watch movies though, hmmm). I have never been able to articulate why a fictional work can be as stimulating and “useful” as something that sticks to “what really happened” (apart from the “fact” that the ability to “know” “what really happened” is a myth.)

Here is another gem that might add weight to this debate:

“The Indo-Burmese diaspora is now spread out around the world. And you know, when they read The Glass Palace, it gives them something to recognize who they are, where they came from, what happened, the entire history, because they didn’t know. Because what I do think is true is that human beings live life in narrative. Where the narratives don’t exist, in some way life doesn’t exist.”

History does this as well. But fiction does this more powerfully because it is allowed to have emotion.

My Son

Never did I imagine
I would weep
over the downturned bow
of a sleeping mouth
over a little hand flayed
outward
over eyelashes and eyebrows
and curly ears
but here I lie
Besotted. 

On Single Men

Apart from feeling a bit like a visitor to a zoo who had formerly been an inhabitant when I went to Toit in Bangalore, I was also amused to take note of the difference between my husband and his friends, both of whom are unmarried, one divorced.

Both these guys are now older, saner and wiser now than the last time I met them, which surprises me because I didn’t think the day would ever come. But shockingly, it has, hallelujah!

Despite this, they bear the markings of The Single Urban Yuppie Man. Both of them are smartly dressed. Their t-shirts/shirts are slightly form-fitting. Their forms have not run to fat, or the fat is well-concealed (actually one of them is, I think, fat but hecleverly gives the illusion of muscle). Their hair, where it exists, is carefully gelled into careless perfection. They smell good.

Even more tellingly, they are solicitous of women. One of them kissed me on the cheek whenever we met.* This is such a Single Man thing to do. I don’t see my husband kissing anyone on the cheek anymore except, under duress, older aunties. Poor him.

More amazingly, the other friend, who was picking me up from somewhere and dropping me home, told me not to bother to get out of the car when I needed to buy some medicine en route. Instead, he parked, took the prescription and went to buy the medicine himself. When it wasn’t available in the first shop, he repeated the whole routine again down the road. My protests were waved away, and I decided to just stay put and enjoy the luxury, especially when it started raining. I would never get this treatment from my husband. Unless I was sick, there would be no question of me sitting in the car twiddling my thumbs while he hopped around buying medicine.

This is perfectly fine by me but it was still nice to be pampered, even though I am no longer single and therefore unavailable to offer whatever a Single Man might be leading up to with these courtesies.

*I am not a fan of cheek-kissing. Belonging to a Goan family, this is a very boring ritual that happens at every family gathering. I spent pretty much my entire childhood avoiding it to my mother’s embarrassment and dismay. So even when transplanted to a nightclub scene with young turks and swans exchanges kisses, I find it tiring and unnecessary. Oh to be just able to shake hands!

Of simple stories

Was having an interesting discussion with MinCat yesterday about Amitav Ghosh.

I have always felt that he is an author I should like. In my mind, he forms part of the triumvirate of Indian authors – Salman Rushdie at the pinnacle and then Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth as the two underpinnings. So much so that I think I tend to confuse Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth. Like I just said to myself, maybe because they are both Bengali – but I’m not actually sure Vikram Seth is Bengali (though Wiki tells me he was born in Calcutta).

I’m definitely a Vikram Seth fan. I enjoyed A Suitable Boy (though not sure if it deserved a Booker) but I thought The Golden Gate was his crowning achievement (I mean, a novel in sonnet form, come on!). I loved An Equal Music and more recently I read a non-fiction work by him, Two Lives, which I also loved.

When I try to think of an Amitav Ghosh novel that I absolutely loved, I’m hard-pressed. (Belatedly, I remembered The Shadow Lines. Yeah, I liked that one, but I thought he was doing something similar to Rushdie there though not quite at Rushdie’s level). I definitely like the covers and the titles and I rush to acquire his books with the same enthusiasm as I do Vikram Seth’s but the question I am asking myself now is… why?

Take Sea of Poppies which as usual I felt obliged to read. I suddenly realised why I find Amitav Ghosh hard going. I think it’s because the narrative style and the writing is too simple (with maybe the exception of The Shadow Lines and The Calcutta Chromosome; the latter still left me cold). It took be back to 19th Century literature. I don’t remember the last time I read something quite so straightforward.
MinCat’s point is that this is exactly why she loves Amitav Ghosh. That he is simply telling a story and telling it well. She questions why all writers today feel the need to be obtuse.

I agree to the extent that there should definitely be a space for people to simply tell stories. And people do I’m sure. Bookstores are full of books that tell stories. But.

Amitav Ghosh is not your run-of-the-mill storyteller, not even just a popular bestseller novelist. He is a little more feted. He is generally accepted as literary, his books are studied in university (Thankfully, the one we studied was The Shadow Lines).

And thus we come back to the age-old question. What is literature? What qualifies as art?

For me the definition is the Russian Formalist one. Art exists to “make the stone stony”. As one of my professors put it, many of us may want to write about poverty. But poverty is such a tired subject, most people have stopped noticing it even in the streets, even starving children don’t make news. So how do you get people to notice poverty? How do you make the stone stony?

That is the purpose of art – to jolt, to surprise, to move, to outrage. And sometimes the content is not enough. Poverty is no longer surprising as a subject matter, for example. So you have to experiment with style, so that the form of your work of shakes up the viewer. You have to provoke with your technique so that the viewer is forced to think.

A novel written in straightforward narrative, however competent, is to me like those paintings of women with saris with pots on their head. It certainly takes some skill to execute those paintings. But are they Art, with a capital A (and I am aware that I risk fetishizing art here)? Do they make me think, except in some vague nostalgic way? Do they make the world new? I think not. That’s why the women with pots on their heads are they hanging in some middle-class home while Piet Mondrian’s work hangs in a museum.

This is not to say the simple cannot be art. Piet Mondrian is a case in point. In the literary world, Chinua Achebe might be an example (though I am actually not a fan of his). He writes in an excruciatingly straightforward idiom but it could be argued that he is making a point – he is using it as a counterpoint to the hegemony of complexity and the monopoly over the right to Africa’s stories held by the West. He is reclaiming.

One could also take a bygone style and use it to discuss a modern subject, like those redone Mona Lisa paintings. There is a jarring there that makes the viewer sit up.

There is also something to say for taking a narrative style – from whichever era – and executing it flawlessly. I have a feeling this was why Vikram Seth won the Booker for A Suitable Boy – for taking the form of the novel and writing it in the Indian context, the finest example of Great Indian Novel so to speak. At least this is why I hope he won, because otherwise it would just be because they wanted to give the prize to an Indian.

I guess this is what Amitav Ghosh is doing in Sea of Poppies at least, and having finished the novel, I have to grudgingly admit he does it well. Though it is a narrative style that I just cannot feel engaged in anymore, if I ever could. This is just a personal thing.

I have to admit that I found the content of Sea of Poppies intriguing. I really knew nothing about the opium wars – or even that India was the big opium supplier though the poppy seeds in Bengali food recipes makes sense now. I am in awe of the research that must have gone into it. I am once again appalled by the hypocrisy of Western powers, that built their fortunes on forcefeeding another nation drugs (apart from forcing the growth of poppy for the purpose on their colonies), who get all sanctimonious about it now. I am back to being angry with the British more than a little bit. There is a line in the book that sums up my attitude – every nation will do whatever it takes to make itself more powerful; what is intolerable is when they try to act all virtuous about it.

But back to narrative style. While writers are free, of course, to write however they want, we live in a world in which we are constantly jumping back and forth in time and space, in which technology has shaped how we experience things. Our way of seeing and experiencing the world is different. It would be weird if we continued to write the same way as people did even a decade ago. And maybe that’s why some of us cannot even read the same way.

MinCat pointed me to this review in the New York Review of Books. I have little to say about the overall point of the piece but I found this bit interesting:

Shields admits that Franzen’s “might be a ‘good’ novel or it might be a ‘bad’ novel,” but that “something has happened to [his] imagination” such that he simply can’t find a desire to read such books any more.


I think this is what I am trying to say. Something has happened to my imagination…

Mall rats

After so long, I’m finally into shopping again. Pregnancy hormones, for good or bad, killed the shopping impulse mainly because I didn’t want to spend money on whale-sized clothes or itty-bitty clothes for Benji that he would grow out of in one minute.

Brands I discovered:

Mastina: This is a local brand with clothes that surprisingly fit me very well. After Benji, I had sort of given up on wearing dresses because I was sure my tummy would show and put people in the awkward position of wondering whether number 2 was on the way. To save polite starers the agony of not knowing, I was ready to eschew dresses altogether. Miraculously, I stumbled upon Mastina and the dresses are tailored in such a genius way that I look (fairly) svelte. I bought a couple of sale and they weren’t too expensive. They have some interesting t-shirts too.

Maud Frizon: I first became aware of this one when I saw a sticker ad in the train in the MTR. The ballet flats looked so beautiful but I just assumed they would be hideously expensive because it said Paris under the brand name. Not so. The flats in reality were more beautiful than in the ad, very comfortable and cheaper than some of the local brands like Le Saunda and Stacatto.

Zara: Okay, this is not new. But for the first time I actually loved practically everything in the store. Normally, my feeling with Zara is that a lot of the linen stuff can be got in India for half the price, and with better tailoring and embroidery. This time, however, just walking around touching things was inspirational. Most things had this luxe feel, with proper lining and stuff. And the bold colours and the designs just had me not wanting to leave.