Billi in Dilli

Arrived this morning (spot on time, much to my amazement--11 sharp) to Delhi via the Something-Kranthi Rajdhani Express. And Delhi ('dilli', locally) is *cold*. 18 hours of train travel really gets you in gear for jumping into the middle of things...not. But I managed astonishingly well harassing the rickwallas until I got the price I wanted to get to the production office.

Some quick introductions to the crew at Reel India Pictures Pvt Ltd, then off to the hotel for a shower. 2 rooms later and some exhaustion-slash-fortitude-slash-desperation prepared me for the hotel shower...it was a lot like being peed on by a troupe of cold midgets. Parse that one, Noam Chomsky. Anyway, it was cold, and I'm not a big fan of cold--hello, why else would I move to India?

I survived the shower, patted myself on the back for packing my long underwear, kicked myself in the ass for leaving my good l.e.d. flashlight on the train (stupid reading habit), and went back to the office to catch up on what's been happening.

(In case you've been following the blog already, my bombay life was in a bit of turmoil this past fortnight: getting evicted from my apartment thanks to a shiftless coward choot of a former flatmate, a mad search for a new place, actually finding a great flat and signing the leave & license in 3 days in bombay--a minor miracle--then getting hit with the news that all of a sudden India decided to completely screw up their visa regulations, to the tune of possibly not letting me back in the country for two months following my 179-day visa run, and so having to make sure bombay life, and most importantly my 2 cats, was taken care of for the next two months just in case...rather a hectic couple of weeks, in short.)

So I missed a solid week or so of pre-production, but feel like I'm pretty well caught up by the end of the day with what's been going on. We breezed through the auditions again and locked down most of the secondary cast, went over some visual stuff with Mohit (production/art direction), checked out the location recce photos, and the ever-popular passel of new Excel spreadsheets. Man, you gotta love those spreadsheets.

Or not.

At any rate, Reel India is already a bit more 'real' than a lot of the gandus I've worked with in bombay--young, chill, not carrying a chip the size of himachal pradesh on their shoulders about me being firang, et cetera. Which I'm very thankful for. I'm encouraging everyone to contribute often and freely to the blog / twitter / facebook propaganda machine, let's see how that goes.

And...holy crap, it's really happening finally! Hurry up and wait finally happened. Ready for our 15 minutes, Mr. Warhol....