The crib

Parenting Advice!

2012-01-18T03:25:00.000-08:00

So Mia is all of 9 weeks now. Since that makes me a sufficiently old hand at parenting I think new moms everywhere can benefit from my advice. The rules keep changing as your child grows, so before the lessons I’ve learned need to be unlearned and learnt again, let me put a few of them down in no particular order of importance.

Never get into a staring contest with a baby, she’ll always win hands down. (Seriously, Mia, blinks, like, once in 10 mins; and by that I mean falls asleep and wakes up again.)

2. Speaking of hands down, if you’re rocking a baby to sleep (especially if she’s been crying for 2 hours and you’ve just managed to calm her into a semi somnolent state), do NOT move your arm to scratch the itch on your nose, because an itchy nose is a positive delight compared to what will inevitably follow this rookie mistake.

While we're on the topic of putting her to sleep, do not look directly AT her when she's just falling asleep because the baby will take that as a challenge to engage in another staring contest.

3. Your baby does not hate you. Not all the time anyway, only from 6 to 8 pm. At other times, she kinda likes you.

4. One does not need to be bitten by a radioactive spider to acquire superpowers like enhanced hearing, sight and smell. One just needs to have an insomniac baby who will start into wakefulness if the lady in the next building drops a spoon. One must also watch out for psychopathic tendencies involving using said spoon as a deadly weapon on neighbor ladies with butterfingers. You will also marvel at how suddenly NOISY the world is, no doubt echoing what your baby thinks too after the muffled comfort of the womb. People talk unnecessarily loudly, in fact, talk unnecessarily. Period. They drag their shoes across the floor, cough just to annoy you, and don’t get me started on how frivolous laughing is. All the doors and windows creak, and the neighbours upstairs, though always a noisy bunch, begin to throw riotous parties every Friday.

5. Do not attempt to reason with your 2 month old.

Baby: Waah

You: Are you hungry?

Baby: Waaah

You: Tell me, sweetie! Does your tum-tum hurt?

Baby: Waaaah.

You: If you don’t tell me what the matter is I can’t help you!

Baby: Waaaah.

And so on.

6. Do not let the harried doctor dissuade you from bringing your baby in to be checked up every other day. Treat his assertions of “it’s normal” with great suspicion. (Just kidding.) Jokes apart, if you have an alarmist doctor who enjoys stirring up your anxieties, dump him and go to a sensible dr. who rolls his eyes, smiles and says. “It’s all normal. Can you please not come back tomorrow??”

7. Most importantly, enjoy your baby. My mother has this theory that babies are created cute so that everything is worthwhile and I must say I agree. When you are greeted by toothless, gummy grins and delighted squirms when she sees you first thing in the morning the world just seems a better place. If she’s yelled herself hoarse in someone else’s arms and falls silent in yours, you feel like you’ve done something worthwhile. After she holds a long conversation with you entirely consisting of ‘aa-coo’, ‘abuh’ and ‘enge’ you feel so proud at how smart your little girl is that you could burst. So keep all of that in mind during the sleepless nights, the endless worrying over health alarms, and the inconsiderate timings of her desire to be picked up.

8. Also, you should learn to type with one hand really fast.:)

P P.S- There's some weird stuff happening with the format. Will correct it when I get the time, tata!

Prayer for My Daughter.

2011-12-04T03:50:00.000-08:00

My daughter is 19 days old and a handful. But this post is not really about that. It’s about what I wish for, on her behalf. We had her almost exactly 7 years after we got married. From the third year itself, as is people’s wont, we were inundated with highly personal questions regarding our plans for a family, which we (on the whole) politely dodged. Then we started seriously thinking about it, and though I don’t know what went through my husband’s mind (I usually don’t) my hesitation stemmed from the awareness that this wasn’t always a wonderful world to bring a child into. That I would be passing on my genes, which, along with curly hair and brown eyes, included a strong propensity (especially among the women—sorry Ma!) to completely ignore the great bounty of blessings heaped upon them and instead grouse and obsess about the less than perfect aspects of our lives. In short to enjoy the act of picking at old sores and watching them bleed.

But then I thought, who knew? He/She might take after his/her father: a more non-tragic, cheerful man I haven’t met, bless him. Also, I had a few good things to pass on as well (some from my parents, some my own) and if we were lucky we could create somebody who would be the best of all of us.

So, now that my daughter Ahana (or Mia, as I call her) is here; with fat cheeks and a little pointed chin like me, and a prominent nose and huge eyes like her Dad: this is all I keep saying over and over in my mind as my blessing to her.

Let this little girl grow into a woman who has many joys in her life; but more important still – let her have the capacity for Joy. Let her have the wisdom to know her blessings and enjoy them fully. And Please, Grand Universe that creates all life, let her have good health, many friends and a family (in her long life after us) that loves her.

And please, let her not blame me too much for all the mistakes I will surely make, while she is my responsibility and one of the two people she depends on the most.

Let her not be too much like me. J

2011-08-30T02:06:00.000-07:00

La Tomatina and Third World guilt.

2011-08-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

Someone on Facebook posted a link about a ‘La Tomatina’ festival in Bangalore, of all places. This is, of course, a regrettable fallout of the move Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, which I enjoyed enough to watch twice; and not only because I think Farhaan Akhtar is HOT. But honestly, they filmed the scene in Spain (I think. Unless there really are that many white people hanging around film sets in India.) and to that extent it’s not inappropriate; as I assume no little Spanish children were dying of starvation in the vicinity of the actors (Including the delicious Akhtar) as they frolicked among tomatoes. I still wasn’t comfortable with the scene but one cannot carry one’s local prejudices around like baggage, can one? So I relaxed and just watched the movie.

Hosting one such thing HERE of course is a totally different thing and wildly inappropriate. I’m sure you see why but I’ll tell you anyway, because I’m writing after a long time and fancy a good vent.

People DIE here, because they have nothing to eat, all the time. There’s just something so decadently Marie Antoinettish about it: “If we don’t have bathwater let’s use thousands of fairly expensive vegetables instead.”

Food fights are a staple in a certain kind of Hollywood movie, and they’re welcome to them. What galls me is that some dumbass Hindi movies have started copying it; ignoring the cultural context I’ve just rather unnecessarily elaborated above. They’ll rarely pick up on some of the better values that these movies expound, like holding doors open for people, smiling at passersby, or thanking the waitresses. But FOOD FIGHTS? Oh yes, let’s do what these pretty people do, right after we’ve rubbed in the 4 pm application of our preferred brand of whitening cream.

Unfortunately this has percolated to one of our everyday practices as well. Birthday cakes. Where 10 years ago everyone would very soberly eat their slice of birthday cake, poke around for crumbs, wish the relevant person “Many Happy Returns of the Day”(always in Capitals) before heading off to the basin to wash out their mouths with water; we Indians will now pick up chunks of perfectly edible cake and smear it over the person’s face, in aid of God knows what purpose, and laugh hysterically like this is not the most appallingly wasteful thing to do with expensive cake; and not gross to boot.

In the interests of honesty I should confess, that unlike many conscientious people here I can get a little wasteful with food. If I can’t finish the food on my plate in a restaurant, I don’t have a nervous breakdown wondering what I should do with it. I do let the waiter clear it away. We have on occasion, allowed food to acquire a rare maturity in the fridge and then thrown it out. It is never done with a clear conscience, but it has happened. Normally if there’s food (untouched) we know we’ll never eat we give it to our cleaning lady, who accepts it with a pathetic eagerness that always sends a lance of guilt through my heart. Imagine then if instead we decided to stockpile the lot, call a few friends over and fling it around at each other? How grotesque would THAT be?

I hear that the organizers say the festival will use inedible tomatoes. Whatever that means. It would be better still to just wait for Holi to come around and use our usual toxic colored powders that make people break out in a rash, and land some others in the hospital with temporary blindness.

Atleast you’ll know it’s so poisonous people would be better off not eating it. You're actually doing them a favour. And you can treat your chemical burns with a clear conscience. And a clear conscience is far more valuable than frolicking with a 1000 barechested Farhaan Akhtaars as they rub squashy tomatoes all over you.

...I walked all over my point, didn't I?

Time to watch the movie a third time, methinks.

Jerome.

2011-08-10T04:23:00.000-07:00

Jerome K Jerome is one of my favourites. He's one of those writers you wish you'd known personally. There are others you greatly admire, but heave a huge sigh of relief that there's no chance of ever having to make light social chit-chat with them.

Me to Tolstoy: "I hear you're very good..."

Me to James Joyce: "Some people seem to like you...er..."

Me to Stieg Larsson: "I mean seriously, I don't NEED to know what make the gun is and where and when it was first manufactured, get on with the story already!...That said, sorry you died and all..."

But this Jerome guy seems an amiable soul who seems to echo my very thoughts on most matters; even though we're divided by nearly two centuries, nationality and gender. Here's an essay (I'm sure he would've been a blog writer if he'd lived in our times) to show you what I mean.

http://www.online-literature.com/jerome/idle-thoughts/10/

An Attempted Exorcism

2011-05-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

It rained during the day. It being a Sunday, I had a huge-ish lunch and took myself off to snuggle under the covers with my book in the natural air-conditioning of Bangalore during the rains.

I woke an hour later with a yearning for phuchka. I lay in bed and fantasized about being passed a medium-sized phuchka stuffed with aloo and dripping with tamarind water. I would open my mouth wide and force the entire thing in my mouth whole. When I bit down it’d explode with a crunch and the sweet tamarind juice would flood my mouth. After wrestling to not choke on the whole thing for a panic-stricken second or two I would turn to the none-too-clean phuchkawallah again to await my turn as he went around the circle of hungry customers. And the whole process would repeat again.

After braving death-by-choking some 12 times (2 plates) I would wander off, burping hideously and wondering if I would dream of clowns chasing me through sinister streets all night.

But it’s ALL worth it, there’s nothing like a good phuchka, I say. The best ones are in Calcutta of course, but one makes do with what one has.

Unfortunately, I don’t even have access to a local one today. It’s been hours since I woke up from my nap and I still pine for it. Other snacks have been brazenly used as substitutes so I can slake my terrible thirst and forget it for a while.

But it haunts me still, the way the sweet and red-hot liquid rushes around your mouth and makes you splutter…how sometimes if you breathe wrong it goes up your nose, or dribbles out your mouth the days you forget to bring a handkerchief…the way the brittle edges of the broken puffed bread cut into your food pipe, scouring the skin as it forces its way down your gullet…
ENOUGH…I’m-I’m getting the shakes…for the love of God, someone get-get me the name of a good phuchka excorcist…!

Disturbing

2011-04-30T01:33:00.000-07:00

Everyday in the papers I read of some busybody who has the time and the inclination to lodge a public interest litigation against some actress or model who has gone against ‘Indian culture’ by saying there’s nothing wrong with pre-marital sex, or more recently because another offered to strip if India won in the World Cup. If you want my opinion the first lady was just telling the truth (which according to the Indian Culture Guardians is a no-no especially for a woman) and the second woman is desperate for attention. Finally she didn’t even keep her word, so one can’t even admire her guts (or other assets she promised to have more obviously on display.)

But going back to my original point, there are worthy Indian citizens who have energy, and righteous indignation enough to lodge cases in the “public interest” against such women, because after all it is a known fact that grievous mental and physical harm is caused to Indians when a woman is sexual of her own volition (be that in good or bad taste, that’s a different issue and a matter of opinion.)

I have just taken two examples from an embarrassingly high number of such cases. One would think we live in an otherwise perfect, crime and injustice free paradise that citizens can worry their little heads about such “improprieties”. What makes my stomach churn is how far from the truth this is. Recently (and just bringing this up makes me nauseous but it has to be said) the papers had reported that a gang of thugs in Pune were ambushing courting couples and forcing them to have sex with each other while they recorded it, after which, of course, no doubt as ‘punishment’ for being so licentious the men took turns raping the woman. And guess what? The police can’t consider this a case until ‘someone files a complaint’.

I don’t know if I missed the report where many public minded citizens then sprang to the defence of the victims of these horrifying crimes, and lodged PIL after PIL, but I’m guessing The Indian Culture Police didn’t really think these incidents worth their outrage.

What’s going on here? What’s behind this attitude? It’s fine for a woman to be a victim but not the mistress of her own body, is that it? Well let me tell you something, that’s not Indian Culture. If you had a little bit of sense of history you’d know that.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say. It’s disturbing.

Block

2011-03-07T10:14:00.000-08:00

I want to write I want to write I want to write!!!
Have loads to tell but no words to write it with.
Will try a laxative.
BTW: Bill Bryson rocks my world.
Toodleoo.

The Top 5 Things that make me want to beat a person to a bloody pulp.

2011-01-22T01:40:00.000-08:00

What bothers me is when people fill in the gaps with fabrications that suit them, when you don’t supply them with the inside goss.

“We all know you left the party early because you were invited as an afterthought! Don’t think we’re so stupid-aa?”

“I left early because YOU were there and you really ARE that stupid. Now you know.”

Or :

“…I know how you are, you must’ve said something to upset him.”

“Hello??? Were you THERE??? Do you know ANYTHING about what happened that day???”

“Now you’re being defensive”

(Throttling noises)

And so on.

I think drawing conclusions is a compulsive human habit, but surely this free reign you give to your imagination should be kept to yourself, and not so proudly displayed. It’s not a skill, unless you can write a book with it.

Another thing people do is act all innocent when they’re being offensive. Leaving you baffled and even madder than if they’d said it in a catty way.

After asking how much I weigh (which in itself is offensive) and then after some lengthy mental math, person says in girly voice“Does that mean I’m heavier than YOU?? It can’t be.” (This actually happened recently.)

I mean honestly in which universe is that not down right bitchy? So stop lisping like you’re two and just admit you wanted to get in a punch right in the wee-wee.

On a slightly unrelated note, but still equally annoying, are strangers who walk through a door when you hold it open for yourself/people walking with you. They’ll sweep past you with their nose in the air while you’re left holding the door open and wondering if you should click your heels together and salute. I do not exaggerate that once at a shop I had to keep the door open while no less than 20 people trooped through for about a minute and a half -- without acknowledgement or even once offering to take my place as unofficial doorman.

Now that I’m older and wiser, I just make sure my group is through and then let it swwwwiiiing back into these people’s faces if they attempt to make a break for it.

If I see a person do this even once, however wonderful they might turn out to be later; they are utterly, irrevocably DEAD to me.

Another annoying thing which unfortunately I seem to do a lot myself nowadays, (I’ve inherited this from my parents so it’s their fault); is to think every statement made in your hearing is a desperate request for advice.

I caught myself giving copious marriage advice to a colleague who happened to mention he was getting married next month. 10 minutes later, I stopped myself mid-flow on noting his glazed expression, and sent him on his way. 20 years later, no doubt, I’d be waxing eloquent on the benefits of exercise and eating a healthy diet to some unlucky youngster who made a random comment about cotton candy.

I also think Posers are annoying. You can tell that there’s a particular kind of image that these Posers want to project, and would sell their own grand aunts if it meant society would promise to see them that way. Sometimes it’s not the natural thing to say or do in a given situation, and you KNOW that the person was probably leaning towards a more standard reaction, but it’s almost as if the image whispers into his ear at the last minute, and says “You HAVE to make a sexist comment about that woman in front of you RIGHT now; because it’s thoroughly inappropriate and people will TOTALLY buy your arrogant playboy image (viz ME).”

“But…”

“But nothing boy, just because she’s a policewoman investigating your grand aunt’s disappearance doesn’t mean you’ll slip out of character! Man up and say something about her chest!”

To my chagrin, I realized a few days ago I can be a poser too, especially when I want to impress people. And I have to hold the pose even if I’m tired or the people around me don’t care. It’s a compulsion and it’s annoying. If you don’t know already, my pose is the “ Says self-deprecating and hopefully funny things about herself.”

(See? There I go again.)

Since I seem to be guilty of 2 of the 5 things that make me wish bodily harm on a person, you are permitted to give me a bruised shin or a black eye when you meet me next. I guess it’s only a matter of time before I start doing ALL the other stuff I mentioned here, in which case you have my permission to beat me to a bloody pulp.

Who knows?

2010-12-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

A year ago, my two cousins (my Aunt’s daughters) were in splits about a competition one of them had participated in with her husband. Apparently it was some kind of ‘how well you know your spouse’ contest against a few other couples. The couple who came first got a perfect score, a 25 on 25 (if I remember correctly) and my cousin and her husband got 1 on 25. She said she was very upset with her husband because they even got the ‘where did you meet each other first’ question wrong.
Though I laughed along, I inadvertently started wondering how well I would fare in such a competition. I’ve known my husband since 1999, and I like to think - extremely well. But who really discusses their favorite colors barring adolescent girls? (“My name’s Britney, my favorite color’s pink, what’s yours, Whitney?” “Pink too! That’s, like, SUCH a coincidence!” (giggle and jump about, holding hands.)
Favourite flower? People actually have a favourite flower?? Shouldn’t wives be worried if their husbands have a favourite flower? Bearded man says solemnly in a deep baritone: “My favorite flower is the lily, which is also what my alter ego is called.” I comforted myself that maybe we would’ve got two on 25 because we both remember where we met first, viz, JU.
It’s not only about knowing your husband’s favourites. What deeply troubles me is that I have no idea what my own favourite color is. Is it red, is it black? Who knows? I wonder if that says something about me. Favourite food? How much time do you have? Favourite actor? Anyone who dresses up in spandex and gets a stuntman to jump off buildings for him. Favourite book? I can name my top 20 maybe…but my head would explode if I had to come up with one. And so on.
All this ‘favourite’ business doesn’t take into account that a person is always evolving. That every single day something happens that changes you forever, however slightly. I think asking someone what her favourite is, is just another way of labeling that person. People have this pathological desire to pigeon-hole other people. Needless to say it annoys me extremely. Probably if I say my favourite color’s ‘blue’ they’ll call me a closet man behind my back, I don’t know. I have in my lifetime, been declared ‘outgoing’, ‘very reserved’; ‘good with kids’, ’bad with kids’, ‘good blog writer’ ‘bad blog writer’, (I would like to point out, in my defence, that the person who made this observation, is inordinately proud of her own blog which, to put it diplomatically, sucks big time.) . ‘soft-spoken’, and ’demon bitch from hell’. And take it from me, I’ve been ALL those things at one point of time or the other.

So let’s add ‘confused’ to all those other epithets, shall we?

Ushasi by any other name, is just as sweet?

2010-10-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

31 years ago, my mother gave me a lovely name: Ushasi. I still think it’s lovely of course, but living with a name like this has its disadvantages. In Calcutta, amongst my own people, my name was wrestled with constantly. Apart for the usual “Urvashi” or “Ushashree” mistakes, my very first poem printed in the school magazine, to my extreme dismay, was attributed to (in beautiful curly-wurly letters ) one "Mahasi Sen".

University was smoother, except for one stupid know-all senior who lectured me about how there IS no such name, and that I should let my mother know. He even told a friend of mine that he wondered at parents who give their children nonsense names. Of course he didn’t know what he was talking about, which is the case with most pompous assholes who presume to lecture others about things that don't concern them.
My name has a meaning of course, it means “Dawn”. When people ask me what it means and I say “Dawn”; it’s met by gales of laughter because they think I said “Don.”

Really the world is FULL of idiots.

Then came my move to the South. My first stop was Hyderabad for a little under two years. People at my first job, a tiny ad agency, began to call me Usha. I was NOT cool with that, but they didn’t particularly care. I didn’t feel like an Usha at all. So I made sure the moment I switched jobs and made new friends that I would be called Shashi instead. This new organization, who's famous for (among other things) their concern for employee comfort, took to ‘Shashi’ with a vengeance; and I was quite happy with my new name.

That was of course, until I got married and moved to Bangalore. My first job HERE, was a nightmarish sweat shop of a publishing company. And not surprisingly, it was “Usha” again. In fact, some Bangali and Assamese colleagues of mine freely discussed private things around me in their mother tongues, because they thought I was “Usha Singh”. When the bells ringing (for start-of-work, lunch time, and end of work) got too much for me, I brought a rifle to work. (JUST kidding—I felt like it but never did it). Not surprisingly, when I quit that sorry place and moved on to a high-end merchandising website, which I have good memories of, I was “Shashi” again.

Now that I’m in an investment bank, people swing between “Shashi” and “Ushasi”; which I’m fine with. Of course they pronounce it all wrong (like they're sneezing); but still its much better than plain Usha.

However, the curse is not entirely gone; I have been called various things over the last 3 years:
1. "Ushani"

2. "Ushasai"

3. "Usha C. Basu"
4. "Basu"
5. "U-u-u-u", and various other variations like "you there" or "Jeet's wife"(Grrr.).
6. And the best one so far, at a nearby hospital --“Ushaji”.

If I ever have a daughter, I’m calling her Tina.

Lessons I’ve learnt from Horror movies

2010-09-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

I believe you can learn from anything. I mean even the pulpiest piece of trash fiction can teach you, if not anything else, that even the worst writers can get themselves published – so not to despair.
Similarly, as I am a martyr to my husband’s taste for scary movies, I decided I should turn this into an opportunity to grow as a person. And by that I do not only mean the weight I put on from sheer fright.

So here they are, things you would’ve had to learn the hard way, if I hadn’t just handed them to you on a plate.

1. One basic rule is, if you’re out house hunting do not, I repeat do NOT fall for the whole rickety old house for a throwaway price racket. All these real estate brokers are on the take from shady old ghosts who give good money to have their houses filled with brand new inhabitants to scare shitless. So if your spouse hasn’t read my blog and sighs ‘I have fallen in love with this grand old house, I don’t know why…and look how cheap it is!” just scoop him or her up and run all the way to a spanking new, one bedroom flat over a very noisy bar – preferably at a very bad bargain.

2. If you have ignored my first rule and happen to have taken a big old rambling house in a deserted part of town with coyotes/wolves howling and owls hooting aggressively in the background – do not fear (yet) there are several other rules that can save you. Do NOT make friends with your neighbours. Throw their cake-bringing, ‘welcome to the neighbourhood’ asses out the door the minute they try to step into your house—they are devil worshippers feeding you up for their bi-weekly sacrifice, or worse – totally innocent people who will come to your rescue just a couple of minutes too late; therefore useless.

3. On the first night in your new house, if you’re suddenly woken up by a weird noise downstairs, I beg of you, just curl up into a foetal position, draw the blanket over your head and cry yourself to sleep again. Nothing good has ever come from an excruciating trip down the creaky stairs.

4. If you MUST go down the stairs at the dead of night to investigate doors banging and growling noises; at LEAST switch all the lights on first. I mean, DUH.

5. If the lights inexplicably do not work please don’t go down to the basement to check the fuse box thingummy. Please. Which is why I say, stay in bed – that way you won’t NEED lights.

6. If however, you are so monumentally stupid that you have done the above, atleast heave something heavy against the door so that it doesn’t slam closed after you --leaving you in the pitch dark.

7. If the lights start flickering on and off, don’t feel relieved. You were better off not being able to see what’s crawling towards you in a white nightdress.

8. “Hello, is anybody there?” is not the appropriate conversation opener in such a case. I would advise something like “Eeeeeeaaaaagh…get off me get off me get off meeee” or, if you pride yourself on your negotiation skills “ I’m new here. I was not the one who locked you in this basement 40 years ago, and honestly, I don’t see the sense of such an action, I totally understand if you’re frustrated.”

9. IF that works, which I doubt, but sometimes it does – and the door swings open and the lights turn on and you get up to bed alright – do not waste time researching the history of the house and trying to convince your spouse/psychiatrist/devil-worshipping neighbor of what you saw. They will all behave like they disbelieve you and lock you up in the loony bin, or even worse -- the basement. All the while, holding secret ‘Sacrifice that stupid cow’ meetings over cake and coffee.

10. If you survive all of the above, I repeat, run all the way to a spanking new, one bedroom flat over a very noisy bar – preferably at a very bad bargain. Better late than never.

Bird

2010-08-07T00:54:00.000-07:00

The phoenix is rising from the ashes...

Other Animals - Part II

2010-04-02T23:33:00.001-07:00

Sorry it took me so long to write this next part – I was catching up on lost sleep.

Once we realized it was the owls, we started seeing them every night and hearing them through the day. Much like ghosts. I’m not saying the owls were like ghosts (they were, but I’m not making that point HERE.) I’m saying, it’s like when the protagonist (usually a young, pretty single mother in those movies we watch through the cracks in our fingers all the time) finally REALIZES there’s a ghost in the house that the ghost seems to gain in confidence and does its thing. Similarly my owls.

So now with our eyes newly opened to the owl situation; we saw them grunt and wheeze all night and day on our windowsills or on our balcony and wheel about overhead. I thought owls were dignified loners but these were ‘party till we drop’ owls on STEROIDS.

“Dude, that note you hit on C Major is SICK. Can you teach me how to DO that??”

“ SCREEEEEEECH.”

“Ha-ha (sniff). That reverb is AWESOME.”

“Hey, a little birdie told me this chubby human has a meeting tomorrow morning. Shall we leave her alone and party on some other balcony tonight?

(Raucous avian laughter)

“Yeah RRRIGHT! Where’s the beer??”

And so on.

But we started to get used to it, and would tsk-tsk resignedly much like an elderly couple with a bunch of gregarious single people next door.

That was of course until our guests came. (Humans).

While one guest looked startled when he saw me walking around one afternoon, and exclaimed,“You’re awake! What’s that noise? I thought all day yesterday that it was you snoring!” (Which was offensive on several levels. First of all that I would snore that loud, and that he thought I’d slept all day when I palpably had not.)

I warned another guest too late and she spent the first night wide awake, wondering if one of us was having fits of some sort, or if the flat was haunted; and in agonies of indecision on what to do in each case.

Just as, it seems, we learnt to drift off to sleep accompanied by the wheezing and hootings of ‘our owls’; one day it just stopped. “The owls are quiet today” we said the first day and several days after that, craning our necks out the window to see if we could spot one.

And that was that. It’s been over a month now that they’ve gone, and for all the complaining we did about our owls, we kinda miss them now.

Nothing like a posse of owls to brighten the workaday lives of a city couple. I take comfort in the fact that they’re out there somewhere keeping other people awake and poohing on their windowsills in some other neighbourhood, or state. And perhaps they think of us sometimes.

Perhaps they do, and will turn up again sometime in the future, to give us a sleepless night or two.

Other Animals.

2010-03-10T10:43:00.000-08:00

If you were to look up as you, say, approached my building on foot; you would see largish things circling the various tiled roofs of our building, occasionally flying silhouetted against the moon.

Once you got closer, you would hear the occasional scream and the whump whump whump of massive wings coming from above. No we haven’t settled in Mordor (“Go left from Sauron’s fort, past the Orc kindergarten, and turn into the blue gate next to the Nazgul enclosure”), but close enough.

It started tamely enough a few months back. Our area was thick with pigeons which went ghuuu ghuuu in that bubbly orgasmic way of theirs. One night we heard an asthmatic wheezing on our windowsill very late at night. “Poor baby pigeon doesn’t have much longer. Awww.” We said.

Turns out it lived very long and wasn’t much of a baby pigeon, unless a rampaging horde of big-assed owls can be considered 'a dying baby pigeon'.

That’s right. I’m angry.

First we had the whole monkey episode, and then big black hairy buffaloes began to chase cars down the streets. My theory is that stray dogs thought outnumbering us humans two to one wasn’t bad enough; they had to introduce these otherwise docile, water loving animals to the joys of cantering down the streets of our neighbourhood and snapping at the tyres of panic-stricken vehicles.

Then the pigeons with pigeon poo and feathers flying everywhere; and now this.

To get back to the story at hand, we withstood the death rattle of the dying pigeon (as we innocently thought it was) for a sleepless week or so. Then one day, I came home from work and thought I saw a white shape leaning against the railing in our balcony. It gave me quite a scare, it did, because (a) my husband inflicts ghost movie after ghost movie on me, which can make the bravest person jumpy, and (b) it was a white shape leaning against the banister, in a most affectedly casual manner.

After I’d done being startled, I walked over to the French windows to get a closer look and was amazed and very relieved to see a HUGE white owl sitting on the banister with its wings crossed behind its back, looking for all the world like an elderly portly gentleman taking the air on a full moon night.

More like the little girl in “The Omen”, I decided, as the bird rotated its head all the way round to blink at me ominously.

So we had an owl, how delightful. I resolved to take picturesque photos and show them around proudly. "See how we live in the lap of nature", I would say.

Next day the dying pigeon started up again and I staggered out of bed at the dead of night with every intention of ending its misery. Imagine my surprise, when not one baby pigeon (at death's door or otherwise) but two owls freakishly spun their necks around to regard me curiously. "Hoosh" I whispered and flapped my hand at them feebly. (Sleep deprivation). They just cocked their heads at each other and smirked as if to say “Check out this human. Does it think we are a dying pigeon to hoosh at us?”

And believe me I huffed and puffed and flapped my arms and called them names, but all they did was spin their heads around like the freaks they were from less than a foot away.

Then it dawned on me and my husband that we had wasted sympathy on nothing while these strapping owls in the pink of health wheezed and panted through our sleepless nights and occasional fitful nightmares.

(To be Continued)

Bag Life

2010-02-05T05:33:00.001-08:00

Today, I was putting on earrings in the office loo, and dropped one of them. Initially I was hopeful as I looked around everywhere, on the floor, in the basin, even behind the (blech) dustbin. But when I came up with nothing, a horrible thought dawned on me.
It could’ve fallen into my bag. I mourned my lost earring with misty eyes, it had been my favorite pair, and went with everything.

See, my bag is no ordinary bag. It is a black hole.

As I write this and clean my bag simultaneously ( I have amazingly limber toes, especially on Fridays) I have found and thrown out:

a receipt for my box of chewing gum they confiscated two months ago at the movie theater, and which I felt too tired to retrieve after the movie.
A bill from 3 months ago at the parlor (When will it be fashionable to be hirsute again? I mean, not only will it be saving 100s in parlour bills it’ll save us the trouble of buying warm clothing.)
Some dusty green globules rolling around at the bottom of my voluminous bag, which I presume is Pudin Hara that popped out of the metal leaf that contained it. (yup, just found the leaf, poor thing…looks bereft.)
One hairbrush, one eye-pencil (sometimes I carry two of each of these items if I’m doubtful of finding the other one), several lipsticks, one shade of which I hate.
Lots of paper bills of smaller denominations, including a torn one rejected by auto drivers in three cities across India. (I would never try to give it to anyone else.)

Clean or full of the vestiges of the last 6 months of my life, all the handbags I’ve used throughout my life have followed a particular pattern. To start with it’ll be innocent -- eager to please. The bag will hold out helpfully anything I might be looking for; with dewy eyes and a simper.

Then the descent into surliness begins, the zips refuse to open, the bag hides from you in an unlikely closet when you’re late for work and desperately looking for it.

To outright disobedience: the bag will drop heavily into the fold of your elbow when you’re carrying a particularly orange gravy, splashing it lavishly on a new outfit, or worse-- on somebody else’s.

There comes a phase in every bag’s life, when it indulges in random violence: it lies in wait around corners or in the middle of the living room when the lights are turned out, and trip you with their noose-like arms. One particularly aggressive specimen had gone so far as to turn on an innocent victim; and regrettably nearly tripped up a waiter laden with food at a wedding I went to.

But then the bag matures, and gets frayed around the edges, the buttons and zips lose their shine, and the whole effect is kinda ropey and threadbare. That is when its true malevolence comes to the fore. Knowing that the violence of its youth had served little purpose, it turns to passive disobedience. And that, my dears, is the shittiest phase, as the British would no doubt tell you.

Having acquired, with great age and long association, the ability to read its owner’s mind; it will hide from her the very thing she desperately rummages for. At this stage, the owner can be often found down on her hands and knees in the corridor in front of a violently overturned yet smug-looking bag -- while lipsticks and pens and coins roll crazily everywhere. If you were to approach her, she might babble incoherently about finding every key she ever owned but the one to the front door, and could she please use your restroom?

Similarly, the said person’s colleagues will see her weeping quietly to herself at her workstation. On further investigation, it will turn out that she’s already 10 minutes late for a meeting which she can’t attend until she finds her desk key and gets her notes.

But it’s not only the bag that gets smarter with time. If a lady (and owners of man-bags) have long experience of owning bags, she will eventually learn how to bend them to her will. Since the bag is a master of reading minds, she can trick them by looking for the desk key when she stands at the locked door of her flat, and of the expired sachet of ‘eno’ first thing in the morning when she wants her desk key, and so on.

Once that happens, the bag loses the will to cross swords with its owner and becomes quite complaisant. The only problem is, by the time a person has broken a bag in, it’s broken. Death comes in a variety of ways – the strap snaps and the bag dashes to the ground as a last gesture of defiance. Or, it fades away in a few weeks, a bedraggled embarrassment to one and all.

One can’t help feel a pang of loss as one goes out to buy a new one. For all the difficulty each bag gives you, there’s also the thrill of besting a worthy adversary, the grudging respect that one has for the other.

That day hasn’t come for my latest bag yet, though it’s now in the mind reader stage, so the end isn’t too far off.

I shall now go and look for a torn ATM receipt from December. (It’s actually the earring, but don’t let’s talk about it.)

Lesson # 12

2010-01-15T11:04:00.000-08:00

Happy Endings are not a myth. I see them everywhere.

Respect the Bubble.

2010-01-04T22:25:00.001-08:00

I have a thing about personal space.

When I was in college this girl would come over and stroke my back, and one day I’d strenuously objected on several grounds, the main being “I have a bubble of personal space. THIS is my bubble right here.” (Indicating a wide arc.)

“I will penetrate your bubble” she’d said.

But we digress.

Needless to say I hate it when a strange person in a public place trots up and companionably stands on your foot like it’s the most natural place to rest from all that walking. She will look adoringly into your face with a “This is nice and cosy, innit?” expression until you beat her off with your umbrella. She will then wander off to find a more hospitable foot -- only to have another one take her place. By the fifth one you lose all interest in life, and let them have their way with you.

Then there are those who think, while standing in line, it’s mandatory to keep some physical connection with the person ahead of them. Like it won’t be considered a queue unless their palms are flat against your back or their arms folded across your shoulders.

What about those people who grab your shoulders and push you aside when you’re (unknowingly) blocking the way? Ever heard of “Excuse me”, *&^%ers? “ssSide plisss” even?

A friend and I were discussing this recently and she said her pet peeve is when strange guys in clubs put their arms around her waist and move her around. I’ve never encountered that, and don’t think they do it for the same reason the others mentioned above do it, viz, ignorance about personal boundaries and stupidity. (Well maybe, but not the same KIND. Creepiness is material for a different post.)

Perceiving my lack of enthusiasm for that one, (“I KNOW, right?…erm…actually come to think of it…is it the same thing?...no…I don’t think so…), she came up with an example much closer to home. She talked about an ex-colleague we shared who had the habit of bringing her face two inches away from yours if she had anything to say to you. Like everything she said was a secret. With every word you would inch away, hoping to put some distance between you and the head talking up your nose. By the middle of the conversation you would be up against the far wall of the room, eyes darting around madly in search of an escape route.

Needless to say people can rarely remember anything about her anecdotes, except that they’re stressful.

Which is why I say -- Respect the Bubble, people. Evolution has given us tongues in our heads for precisely that purpose.

Wishing all my readers a happy and push-free New Year!

Lesson # 11

2009-12-09T05:31:00.000-08:00

There are few things worse than regret.
The hard thing is, you can never know what you will regret until you go and do it and regret it.
Bummer.

Lesson # 9 & # 10

2009-11-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

Lesson # 9 The only accurate generalization is: No generalization is accurate. (So beware of all my posts from the beginning of this blog.)

Lesson # 10 It's always a good idea to be kind to a person who has done you no harm. Even if it's easier not to. Why? you ask? Probably because it's the right thing to do, and there's no nobility in bullying an easy target.

Also, remember the occasions when YOU were the easy target and kindness was shown. Remember the immense wave of gratitude that you felt roll out of you to the other person, and think that someone else could be feeling that way about you.

Wouldn't that be nice? So be nice.

Lesson # 8: Don’t give in to the ‘Cool Police’.

2009-11-09T00:13:00.000-08:00

Every few months people will change their ideas as to what is ‘cool’. But surprisingly for something that’s so changeable, they’ll be complete Nazis about whatever the current fad is.

I of course true to form waded into the bell bottoms-resurgence era wearing skinny stretch genes much to the amusement of all. 10 years later when all the women are trotting about ludicrously in skinny jeans and pencil heels (like a troop of hippopotami), it finally registered that the cut I favoured is uncool. My brain of course had processed a decade-old message and as I started flapping around in a pair of bell botts and flip flops it eluded me why there was so much pointed staring at the immediate vicinity of my legs and feet. Strange, I would comment to myself and hurry off, looking like, I presume, Jumbo about to take flight.

Similarly, I’ve bought several pairs of Patiala salwars two months after everyone changed to wearing tights and short kameezes. I coloured my hair the day after black hair became the rage. I’ve discarded my thick frames because they’re broken from all the times I’ve thrust them into my bag because they’re uncool , just when all the hip people start wearing them.

This isn’t me being an iconoclast, this is me never being able to catch up with these furiously changing fashions. So I’ve now decided that the best course is to simply find out what suits your body type, and face and hair and STICK to it, and if they change, change your style accordingly. Thinking back in retrospect, I’ve done justice to that philosophy. When I was skinny and my legs looked good in skinny jeans, I wore them. When I was chubby I wore bell botts. When I had money I coloured my hair. Simple.

So my message is, if you can’t be one of the fashionable people, call them Nazis and be done with it.

Jokes aside, what my actual point is, style should be more about what suits you and your pocket rather than sometimes ridiculous fads that make people look like they’ve come off an assembly line. Also remember, it can’t possibly look UGLY because it was the height of fashion at SOME time, hence MUST be flattering (at least to 80 year old men). Take my jeans example, I was laughed at for my skinny jeans by the same people who I presume are happily preening themselves in a pair right now as you read this.

Similarly in any other sphere of culture. There are some things you take your life into your hands by admitting to enjoy. I enjoy …do I dare? The occasional Britney Spears/Michael Bolton/Backstreet Boys number, especially when I’m er… boogying. Oh, but if I say that in polite company, I only escape being lynched because they’re squeamish about touching my Bell Bottoms (bad fashion sense is contagious by touch).

There are also fashionable books, fashionable movies, etc etc. You HAVE to say you enjoyed Catch-22 whether you actually did or not. Ditto Pulp Fiction.
Well I DIDN’T OK, I DIDN’T, and I LOVE Michael Jackson. Do what you will with me.

Lesson #7

2009-11-08T22:57:00.000-08:00

Anything, and I mean ANYTHING can be given a positive or negative spin, depending on how the speaker is disposed towards the person in question. “He didn’t cry at all at his wife’s funeral, I always knew he had a heart of stone.” (Disgusted shake of the head.) “He didn’t cry at all at his wife’s funeral, he’s always been the bravest person I know!” (A slow nod of approbation and a sympathetic twist of the lips.)

Lesson # 5 & 6

2009-11-08T22:47:00.000-08:00

Lesson # 5 It’s a sad but true fact that the people you love most are the ones you yell at and make the most miserable. While the ones you hate get off scot free.

Lesson # 6 The very fact that you think you know everything there is to know proves that you don’t. Also that a lot of people find you profoundly annoying.

Lesson # 4: It's never over.

2009-11-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

There's always more toothpaste in the tube.

Lesson # 3: Things.

2009-10-26T03:01:00.000-07:00

Something else crucial to remember is “All things shall pass.”

Ok, MOST things. (Things = People, situations, your own personality traits which makes life difficult) Some things just hang around all your life making you miserable till the day you die. The good news (of course I talk about good news in my blog, sillies.) is even in those cases; you get more and more anaesthetized to how much they bother you.

But apart from those eternal thorns in your side; there are some things which might bother you spectacularly at some point; but seem astonishingly trivial a few years down the line.

Perfect the art of throwing your mind a few years into the future every time you think this is the worst you’ve ever felt – and you will always see that the worst is yet to come. What seems earth shattering right now will be shoved neatly into perspective by the next horror that awaits you around the corner.

And then you will feel positively Zen about any bad thing that happens to you.

I hope my lessons are helping you, boys and girls, to lead a happier, more productive life.
I’m glad to help.

Lesson # 2

2009-10-20T23:43:00.000-07:00

It is very important, if you’d like to survive a full-sized life on earth, to have a sense of humour about yourself. It’s easy to laugh at other people, but are you secure enough to laugh at yourself? More often than not it’s, “that person is a failure, the other person is ugly; but my neighbour’s sister-in-law said that her cousin’s friend thought I was attractive. I was looking lovely in that sari that day. Blue is my color. Of course so is every other color. I’m talented too. Did I mention I can sing and dance? At the same time? With a pot balanced on my head as I hop on one leg?” Brrr…get a life, you desperate Loser.

If you don’t take yourself too seriously the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune won’t cut you as deep. How pitiable is the above person when someone finally tells her to her face that blue, and every other color besides, is definitely not her color. And had she stubbed her toe on something? She sounded like she was in a lot of pain, too.

However, I would like to warn my younger and ergo, less experienced readers, that self deprecation has its own pitfalls. If you get too carried away, you might end up with low self esteem, with you and the people around you believing every horrible thing you say about yourself.
I guess what I’m saying is one should be self respectful, but not delusional. Be prepared to laugh at the embarrassing things that happen to you. But never run yourself down to such an extent that people think it’s OK to join in. (“She’s always carrying on about her weight! How would I know she didn’t want ‘Happy Birthday You Big Fatty!’ written on her birthday cake?”)

Same goes for laughing at your own community, country, gender. It doesn't mean you aren't proud of your identity. It just means you're alive to the foibles and flaws of your group; and thus that much closer to improving those things.
I have often been accused of not being patriotic enough because I’ve had the balls to discuss some common flaw all of us have.

Please remember, Boys and Girls -- Denial does not equal Self Respect.

30 things I’ve learnt in as many years and if you don’t agree you can piss off

2009-10-20T01:15:00.000-07:00

Lesson # 1:

Your height is the only thing about your appearance which doesn’t go to hell if you let things slide for a while. For everything else, unless you don’t wax it thread it put cream on it take vitamin tablets for it take regular exercise, drink water for it everyday or in extreme cases go to the doctor for it, it’ll get worse every time you check in the mirror.
Can you imagine going home every time and having people comment on your weight AND your height? You have got SO MUCH shorter! You should do headstands at 4 in the morning like your Auntie, look how tall she’s got.

(Coming up...Lesson # 2)

The Big Three O.

2009-10-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

In two days I won't be in my 20s anymore.

It's a powerful thought.

I'm not particularly sad because it isn't like a whooped it up in my 20s, so there's not much to miss. (Three negatives in a sentence! I wonder what Freud would say to that if he were alive. It is well known, of course, that Freud in his free time hung around blogs; analysing each word of little-known, middle-aged Bengali women.)

But what hits me like a brick in the head is that this means another decade gone and a few more doors closing. I probably never will be an ice skater like I wanted to be. Unless I can turn something around in the next two days. (Can anyone loan me a frilly little pink number in size L? And a magic wand, if you see any lying around.)

I know 30 isn't old at all, even if it was (I hasten to add to all those youngsters rolling their bored eyes with a 'yuop dawg right, aigh' expression) : age is but a number.

Not to mention that the line of work I'm in (i.e. writing documents noone ever reads) there's no sell-by date. If I had had a more exciting life as an actress, or an ice skater, or an er...lady of the night -- I would've been thrown over by an 18 year old smug bitch by now.

To list a few other pros (no, I'm not talking about ladies of the night anymore)-- now that our life expectancy is around 90, I've only covered one-third of my life. I just hope all my body parts last the rest of the way, they already show plenty of wear and tear. (Call me if you'd like further details on my health.)

I, jokes aside, really do believe I've learnt a LOT in these 30 years. About life and love and the world. I intend to save the pearls I've gathered for a later blog tentatively titled "30 Things I've Learnt in as Many Years -- If You Don't Agree With Me, PISS Off".

My sister tells me not to worry; she feels much better at 35 than she felt in her 20s. And she's not just saying that, if you knew her you'd see for yourself.

She may be right.

It's a Friday night at home; I loll on my bed tapping out this post from my husband's laptop (our PC died half a year ago and the laptop took her place in our affections); and he plays along to Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" a few feet away from me. I've had a full and not unpleasant (despite all my posts to the contrary) day at work, I've visited a friend and played with her little son, and spent a pleasant couple of minutes (every now and then) conversing with friends; both at work and at home by email. I've just been handed two birthday cards from my thoughtful in-laws and have spoken to most of my family members in the last 24 hours. My birhday weekend promises to be a full one: with cousins, nephews, poorly done waxworks ("Louis Tussauds"; some wild oat of Madame's, I presume), a Mr. Big concert with husband and friends.

There's no getting away from it: life's good. 20 wasn't too bad, but the life I've made for myself at 30 is pretty damn good as well.

'Nuff said. Happy Birthday to ME! :)

Love thy neighbour

2009-09-03T01:58:00.000-07:00

Every evening at around 8 pm, I get off my cab at the main road, and walk the half kilometer to my apartment building. (My concession to everyone’s view that I’m too fat and should do all sorts of fancy exercises so that people don’t lose their lunches looking at me. Protestations that I don’t have time to exercise is met with a “If you really wanted to, you would’ve found the time.” Which is patronizing yet unfortunately true.)

So I start the rather enjoyable walk homewards by the lake, and occasionally look over my shoulder because the lights don’t work half the time and a dead man had been fished out of the lake 2 years ago; so slightly shiver-making. I walk for a vigorous 3 minutes or so, occasionally passed by a whooshing car or a rotund neighbor in evening-walk gear. I think of this and that: about the day at the office, how pretty my building looks twinkling across the lake, whether I’m stepping in poo in the dark and whether I ought to leave my shoes on the doormat because of it. I listen to the frogs croaking and the lake lapping and it’s always nice to be outside for those fleeting 5 minutes in the entire day.

Then casting a last glance over my shoulder, I gain the building compound full of more neighbours out for a stroll. (My neighbours are very big on strolling; one particular couple is there when I come in and is sometimes seen by my husband when he leaves for work the next day. I have my suspicions if they’re a new breed of bums posing as walkers; they might actually live on the front lawn: jumping up and strutting about vigorously the moment they see anyone coming, so as not to be evicted from the vicinity. Dunno where they change their clothes though; they're always fully clad when we see them.)

This is where things become trying because – I’m a terribly un-neighbourly person. I’ve lived in this building for 2 and a half years now and don’t know a single neighbour’s name. (I believe there are some 60 families in our complex.) My neighbours for their part (especially the housewives; poor things, they don’t need much to interest them.) find me endlessly fascinating, and appraise me through the corner of their eyes which slide away the minute I turn to make eye contact.

It’s my fault as well; if I had been smiling and approachable from the first I’m sure they would’ve been telling me their secret idli recipes (handed down for generations) by now. Sometimes I try to undo the damage by smiling broadly at them but most of them give me the hard-eyed up-and-down look typical of certain kind of people. Expected in a small town in a backwater somewhere, but startling when you face it in an upper middle class housing complex.
I dare say, if that decomposing man had been fished out any later my husband and I would’ve been the prime suspects.

Everyday in the papers they write about serial killers: “Police apprehended the suspects and have released an official statement. The couple had been murdering morning walkers and storing them in their closet for the last 20 years. They are still investigating how one ended up in the lake. Neighbours have stated that they kept aloof, except for cooking gas or plumbing emergencies.” More than the 19 bodies in the closet, it’s that last line which is most damning.

I often wonder why we are this way.

I don’t think we’re particularly unfriendly as people in general. I mean, we’re not gregarious party butterflies either, but I don’t think people who mix with us socially think we’re serial killer-ish at all (Do you? You can tell us the truth, we won’t hurt you…we have a nice roomy closet you’d die for...) Even at work, I seem to be on smiling and talking terms with a surprising number of people. And I know for a fact that my husband is much more of a people-person than I.

But when it comes to our building: it’s awkward silences in the lifts, questions whether we’ve just moved in at the store, and on good days weird do-I-smile-don’t-I-smile-do-I-look-don’t-I-look moments. And it’s entirely our fault for not being neighbourly, because everyone else, as far as I can tell, get along like a house on fire.

I can honestly say we’re improving because in the first home we moved into together we’d left the faucet on by mistake and went out for an entire evening. We returned with guests to a building in an uproar and the family in the adjoining house desperately trying to save their carpets and furniture from the water flooding into their house from under the connecting door.

One of the guests we'd brought with us ("Come and check out our new place! It's nice and DRY") sprang into activity and after shutting the tap off, starting sweeping the water into every available drain; while I stood in a corner, ashen faced, and babbled about always checking taps and doors and switches 42 times before I left the house, how could this happen?

Our neighbours were nice people (maybe we should’ve asked them what their names were, now that I think of it.) and grudgingly forgave us after we nagged them silly with apologies.

We can't say the same about the watchman, who had a proprietary air about the building. Till the day we left several months later, he would watch and listen to us through windows and ‘alert’ us if we’d left taps on even if it was only to wash our dishes or brush our teeth.

I sometimes toy with the idea of introducing myself to our neighbours and telling them this story, just so they know how lucky they are that we’ve improved over the years.

On the other hand, maybe somebody’s TOLD them already. It would explain a lot.

Hokum & Hooey.

2009-08-24T05:10:00.001-07:00

I was watching a fairly enjoyable movie and something Chris Rock’s character said really echoed what I think. Something to the effect that “living every day like it’s your last” is a bunch of hokum, because you’ll probably live till you're 80 with all your (definitely regrettable, with that attitude) actions till then.

I mean really, it sounds grand when people say it. Like so many other things people are fond of saying but don’t believe a word of themselves. Apply it to your own life and you’ll know what I mean, if you don’t already.

Take my life. (It’s my blog, so don’t expect me to talk about yours.) If I took it into my head to live tomorrow like it was my last day -- this is what I would do, in all honesty:

Shave my head. Call up a lot of people and be ‘honest’; just like they’ve always been with me (You’re not all that good-looking yourself, and you have an ass the size of Madhya Pradesh, man!). Quit my job. Put on a LOT of make- up, something tight; and go out and blow my life savings on something fun.

Problems will arise the next day, when the sad fact that even though I lived the previous day LIKE it was my last day, it actually wasn’t. I’ll look like a chubby Sinhead O Connor. No one will speak to me. I’ll have no money and no means to recover what I’ve blown on a Paris Hilton style party in every city marathon. As well as a faint chance of a night in the lock up.

So the resultant situation may push me towards making the day my last; but that isn’t what they meant, was it?

Similarly -- “Nothing is impossible”.

A lot of things are impossible.

Boys and Girls, PLEASE, puh-leeaaaase don’t listen to sappy children’s movies or books that have the good-looking and sincere ‘Daddy’ character consoling his offspring, who has just spent a day trying to invent a time-machine, but-just-couldn’t. Boo HOO.

“If you WANT something badly enough, and go after it, Nothing is impossible, darling. And remember Daddy loves you very much.”

Excuse me while I shake my head sadly. What’s the matter with the good looking but sincere Daddy? Doesn’t he know that if what he said were true, the world would be full of flying pigs? Messing up children’s heads with all this nonsense is what drives them to alcoholism and crime anyway, because they’re thinking, “If everything is possible and after all my hard work it still didn’t happen… then how big a loser does that make me???”

At the most one could say:

“If you already have the prodigious ability (tested by several doctors) and patience at 5 years old to build a time machine, and a multi- billion dollar corporation financially backing you on the project; nothing is impossible.”

Kinda different, innit?

And so on, really. “Be yourself”; “It’s the thought that counts”; “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose; what matters is that you TRIED”; "We're ALL winners."

It’s all hooey. Someone hand me a shovel.

Of Straw and Silver Bullets

2009-08-21T00:14:00.000-07:00

Speaking of monkeys; I know a psychotic monkey talker.

For people who’ve never met the likes of her; let me tell you 9 hours of not being able to finish any of your sentences, 5 days a week, for 2 years can have a detrimental (stress on mental) effect on your mind.

I carry a bag of straw around so that when I finally go round the bend (which’s a few weeks in the offing) I can have the straw handy to stick into my hair.

It also makes you a humongous bore when you DO get people who will hear you out till the end of your sentences. God help you if they’re the sort who leave a bit of a silence hanging in the air even AFTER you’ve indicated that you’ve finished with a particular train of thought. You stop for a moment or so; baffled by this new situation. Is he going to jump in and cut you off just as you begin talking?

You vacillate for the length of a second…and then decide to risk it and dive in, and the feeling of being able to say what’s on your mind and being listened to is such a relief that the words just keep coming, like the gush of water that has been stoppered up in some dark underground place.
Problem is after you’ve talked yourself dry and are sitting there; spent yet satisfied; an awful thought creeps into your head. You’d gabbed on endlessly, you hadn’t let the other person talk, in your gush of words you’d spilt out many ill considered things which perhaps were private or stupid and needn’t have been said.

You’ve been turned, like a victim from a teen vampire novel, into a psychotic monkey talker yourself!

So that’s what’s happened. When I meet blameless, polite people who listen I turn into a monster. Consider yourself warned.

Also, if any of you has a silver bullet; or a cross bow with a silver arrow – you have my permission to put me down the next time you encounter me.

It’ll be a mercy killing.

Hyderabad Part III: The Final Chapter

2009-08-20T06:24:00.000-07:00

And then I went to Hyderabad and had a lot of fun and Hyderabadi Biriyani with my friends Maya and Satish; and my Dad, Prithwiraj.
And then I came back to Bangalore.(Phew, that monkey’s off my back at last!)

Hyderabad Part II: Only I can't seem to get to the bit where I'm IN Hyderabad

2009-08-03T06:52:00.000-07:00

I’ll give this another shot then.

I packed very little, because I take great pride in travelling light, and then borrow or buy most things when I get to my destination. But I didn’t forget my trusty maroon shawl because I have a great horror of feeling cold, feeling hungry, and needing to visit restrooms on train trips. The shawl wouldn’t be too useful for the latter two (unless in desperate circumstances) but the very knowledge that my big red shawl glowed quietly to itself in my tiny overnight bag made me feel positively toasty.

Of course I had to take out a lot of other things to make space for it: like the lower halves of all my outfits and toothpaste, but it was a minor sacrifice. And I had no use for my shawl because they give you blankets on trains and once I reached Hyd the friends I was visiting rolled over laughing at the sight of it; because well, it was Hyderabad in July.

Anyhow, I get ahead of myself. I asked around at work about how long it might take to get to the railway station from work (distances are stupid in this city) and I got advice ranging from 3 hours to an hour. So me being me, I left 3 hours in advance, and again, as is usual with me, I reached my platform two whole hours before scheduled departure.

I perched myself on a bench under the relatively merciful Bangalore sun and swung my legs as I read my book about teenage vampires. Profound literature is a MUST on long train journeys. The platform was entirely innocent of fellow passengers, so I kept the dogs and several unsavoury characters company until some people started trickling in.

This last paragraph will give you the impression that I serenely passed the time reading my vampire book; but that isn’t entirely true. Every 12 minutes or so: I would root around in my bag for my ticket; inspect it as if for the first time in case I had got something wrong, like the day, or the coach, or the train; and then…affecting a casual attitude, I would carelessly hoist my bags and water bottle over my shoulder and amble over to the train that was still locked up tight. I would then proceed to scan the list of passengers and locate my name; and ensure it hadn’t, by some dark magic, vanished off the page since the last time I checked (viz. 12 minutes ago). Satisfied that it was still there; and telling myself that it was too late in my life for another Ushasi Sen Basu to crop up in the same compartment; I would try the door handle once more and saunter back, relieved for the time being.

This I did for two hours. But despite all this activity I unfortunately managed to finish most of my vampire book; which left me with only a few pages when I finally boarded the train.

(To be Continued...promise to be in Hyderabad by the next post)

Intended to be Hyderabad Diary 1: However post is afflicted by Damn Digressions.

2009-07-29T02:49:00.000-07:00

Though I'm a gem of a person otherwise... (I’m not blowing my own trumpet. Long ago when my age could be counted in single figures a schoolmate of mine had called me a diamond. I repeat the conversation to you verbatim -- you be the judge of how impartial this comment was.

Me: Your sister is so sweet! (ruffling a little runt’s hair on the Ashok Hall Junior School bus.)
Girl: Don’t touch my sister!
Me: Why? Is your sister a diamond?
Girl: YOU are a diamond!!! (accompanied by much frowning and shaking of fists)) ...

...As I was saying, though a thoroughly priceless sort on the whole, one major flaw that people nag me about is my staying-in-touch skill, or lack thereof. So while other people manage their time by calling friends and relatives on the way to or back from work, or while eating lunch (as -- I must add -- the person they’re having lunch with gets more and more furious), in the loo (I've never been great at multi-tasking), etc – I never seem to find the right time to call people up. It happens therefore, that some friends tire of being the ones to make the effort and just stop calling.

It was with considerable alarm that the realization dawned on me: I had started getting news from my husband about all the friends I’d left behind in Hyderabad 4 and a half years ago. So when my Dad called me to say he’d be in Hyderabad on business and would like to meet me, I seized the opportunity to kill several birds (birds - aka friends and relatives; and kill them with kindness and company) with one stone (i.e trip---you must try to keep up with the metaphors, let me know if I’m going too fast for you.) and resolved to travel to Hyderabad for the weekend.

The husband begged off citing work after stringing me along till the last day or two, so I went alone. I'm quite used to travelling alone by now, because it’s very hard to coordinate spur-of-the-moment trips with a workaholic spouse.

Besides, we don’t believe in sitting in on private conversations of friends we don’t share, smiling inanely at private jokes that have to be explained, and essentially being a pain in the ass to the friend who isn’t comfortable discussing private things in front of a person just because he/she is married to a close friend.

That wasn’t the case with these friends (and of course my Dad) in Hyderabad, but I was just explaining why we travel around a lot by ourselves.

OK, to get back to what I was saying before I was rudely interrupted by a damn digression. (‘Damn Digression’ is a good name for a rock band.) …

Actually, on second thoughts I can see I’m going nowhere with this travelogue – I’ll give it a shot again tomorrow.

Since I’m meandering all over the place in this post (senile dementia) ; I’ll mention two more things before I go.

1) Thank you all for taking the trouble to add yourselves as my followers. It’s a very sweet gesture. (And unexpected in one or two cases.)

2) I watched ‘The Notebook’ yesterday and have decided Ryan Gosling is quite definitely hot. Weird that I’ve seen him before and never felt it. I have decided I will watch his other movies closely and come to an educated decision.

A World Without Labels

2009-07-13T05:48:00.001-07:00

Are you one of those people who can’t REST until you label other people? So much so, that you will take some half-assed impression you haven’t even bothered to verify with a second look, or by comparing notes with another acquaintance of the labelee, and just slap on a tag so you can feel better?

And of course labels are made for sharing, you’re too unselfish to keep them to yourself, so once you’ve come up with one you make sure everyone gets a persuasive speech in its favour. Those who resist of course get labels of their own, so it’s all good.

Once everybody is neatly labeled off( like what my mother in law did with all the spice bottles in my kitchen cabinet --“Jeera -cumin”-- with pieces of paper and a ballpoint pen); you can feel that you’ve introduced some order in the madness and uncertainty that is human existence.

Now-- you think, as you stretch your arms luxuriously over your head and congratulate yourself on a job well done – now I’ll know exactly what to expect from so and so person. There will be NO surprises and I can in fact predict and pre-empt everything he or she does.

Every action that confirms the label will be announced “I always TOOOOLD you she was clumsy, now she goes and falls off a five-storey building. No of COURSE it wasn’t depression, silly, it’s CLUMSINESS like I always said. We all know she was CHEERFUL but CLUMSY.” Every action that contradicts your summing up of a person will be instantly forgotten, because it’s unimportant.

I find, that people are full of surprises (both pleasant and unpleasant, I hasten to add.). Especially as they change (for the better or the worse) with years and experience . The same label can never cover the same person in different situations at different times. Those I would condemn as resoundingly stupid from their outlook and beliefs might turn out to be brilliant at their jobs. Those I think as gentle and wonderful will reveal an unaccountably vicious streak. People you think will pounce on you and kick you when you’re down sometimes turn out to be more understanding and supportive than the others you were counting on.

At the most you can, if you MUST, label a person like so: “she’s stupid, but only about things that matter to me. I daresay she thinks I’m stupid too because I don’t know what Vishnu’s fifth son was called.”

Somehow, that judgement lacks a certan something. It lacks the satisfying slap of a label stingingly and irrevocably delivered. And it leaves one confused. Shades of grey wherever one looks.

On second thoughts, bring on the labels. Atleast I’ll know how I’m expected to behave (clumsy but cheerful) and be able to deliver a stinging judgement on someone else when I’m irked.
If the option is chaos and murder; I choose labels.

Here's Looking At You...People.

2009-06-29T05:01:00.000-07:00

Though I have occasional bouts of acute misanthropy; what redeems people in my eyes is that everyone past a certain age is a story.
Some of these living, breathing stories don’t know that’s what they are. Of those who do, 90% don’t know how to tell theirs (urk, don’t even get me started on how resoundingly boring people can be when they tell their life stories… “ Then I was born at 7 am, and I opened my eyes at 7:02 am…” (two hours and several wishes to die a speedy death by the auditor later)…”and then I said “…tubelight. Call the electrician.” …) but bottomline is every life is enough of a story to have a book or a movie made on it.

Of course, the movies are of all kinds -- sepia tinted, pre-independence period costume movies, arty depressing movies where the protagonist just sits in a dark room and cries, action movies, comedy movies, teen ‘coming of age’ dramas, Oscar winning movies, masala movies where the hero and heroine dance around in the rain on a weekday afternoon in Venice, or ‘slice-of-life’ quirky movies about very normal people (read: ugly) doing very, very mundane things. But they’re all still stories.

I look at a lot of people around me and wonder, “I wonder why she only wears red and black. What’s the story behind that?” (I don’t work in a colony of red ants: that was an example.)

I had a physics teacher at my school, who was as vindictive as they came. But on every weekday morning after our school bus picked her up; she would take her usual place right up against the front glass of the bus next to the driver, settle in, and then take out what appeared to be the same tattered letter everyday and read it with lingering and evident pleasure all the way to school. It made me wonder about her, and frankly I itched to know what was in that letter.

I look at extremely domesticated, traditional housewives, busy with their daily work of looking after their husband and kids; and often wonder how they were when the world with all its glorious choices held its doors open for them. Did they have different dreams? What was their story? Had they a crush on the north eastern student on the mini bus to school?* How different would their lives have been if they acted on that impulse?** Had these women thought they would make a good doctor or an actress before they were told to marry someone their parents chose for them?

The paradox of my constant wondering about people’s lives of course, is that I have a horror of acquaintances*** who volunteer a blow-by-blow as I mentioned earlier. I also shy away from asking people about their lives, disgusted as I am by some of the regrettable questions I myself have had to dodge quite often from total strangers.

Sometimes it happens that people vouchsafe interesting confidences about their life to me without any prompting, maybe BECAUSE I’m not always sniffing around for information. Sometimes such exchanges are so profound or startling, indeed, that it renews my faith in how absolutely fascinating human nature is. I live for such conversations -- but they are rare, and more importantly, cannot be forced.

So I am destined to remain eternally wondering about most people; which, if you really look at it, might be best for all concerned.

*Wait…that was me…
**NOT me. He had an acne problem, to be honest.
***note to my friends to pay especial attention to the word ‘acquaintances’. I EXPECT all the gruesome details from you guys.

Lotus Bum.

2009-06-22T04:06:00.000-07:00

I occasionally get -- though they’ve been getting fewer and farther between, with the years -- out of body experiences. I won’t call them experiences, because a split second can’t really be an experience. That reminds me of an episode of Frasier. A woman calls into his radio show complaining about sex with her much older husband, and says,“I’ve been inoculated slower!”. (Ha ha.)

That was a total digression, this post isn’t about that, however much my readers cry out for it.

So going back to what I was saying, I very once in a while get a feeling like I’ve just popped out of my body for a wee second, and everything is as clear as day. It’s almost like it’s your body which confuses you. For that one moment you get to slip your skin; and as you hover a few feet away everything makes sense, everything is in its proper perspective, there is no pain, no annoyances; the things around you just ARE, nothing more. And then as though your body realizes it’s mistake, it tucks you back in with a quick imperceptible action, like a lady with an errant bra strap, and it’s all normal again.

There are other times, when I’m not thinking about anything In particular, that I get a different version of it. You know the trance-like state one goes into when you’re a passenger on a car or bus (I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re driving the thing); where you’re just vacantly staring into space until you get to point B. My eye will happen to alight on one of the hundreds of people that I pass on every trip, and I get a quick flash in my mind’s eye of a window or some such. I like to think it’s insight into that person’s life, and feel a little bit like Bruce Willis in ‘Unbreakable’, on the rare occasions it has happened.

So far I haven’t put it to the test, viz, follow these unsuspecting people home and check if the grills on their window match the one in my vision. I’d rather not, because this makes me feel like I have a superpower and I don’t want proof that it’s an eye infection or mental disease. Though totally useless and unreliable; a superpower is still not something you sneeze at.

Do any of you have a superpower? Let me know if you do and we can form a League Of Totally Useless Superpowers for the Betterment (or not) of Undeserving Mankind. (LOTUS BUM).

What's the deal with famous people?

2009-06-18T06:03:00.000-07:00

I don’t know what it is about famous people that fascinate us so. Whenever I get some spare time on the computer I hungrily devour everything there is to know about famous people.

They’re not always predictable ones -- I just googled Rani Lakshmi Bai and then Ben Cross in succession, one leading to another through the whole 1857 rebellion-The Far Pavilions- Ashton Pelham Martin (my first love)-Ben Cross progression.

Yesterday I looked up Igor Stravinsky and George Harrison, and that led to Don Henley…I go where my thoughts take me. Long live Google and Wikipedia, I say.
I anxiously read through facts about their childhoods. Facts which, if a boring acquaintance were to share about his or her own life, I would condemn as the most boring thing I’d heard all day, and pretend to fall asleep immediately after. There’s just something else about famous people; darned if I know what it is.

And look at this whole Shiney Ahuja thing. (‘Shiney’… did his parents think he’ll turn out normal with a name like that? He must’ve been beaten up routinely in school.). Shiney and his wife ‘Anupam’. A marriage made in heaven ... the groom is called ‘Shiney’ and the woman has a dude’s name. (what’s up with that?)

What you all know and are groaning that you have to read about here as well is this: He has raped his possibly underage maid. No he hasn’t touched her, this is preposterous. OK I might have had a little consensual sex with her… Of course he hasn’t, my husband is a good husband and a great father… Ok I might have had more than a little sex with her… No the medical reports make it clear it’s rape, does he think he can get away with this because he’s a famous actor, etc etc.

Kudos to the victim for stepping forward and I hope he is castrated and rots in jail.

But wait! The media won’t leave it at that…over and over and over goes the looped tape of Mister Shiney in a tight t-shirt being bundled into a police van. We all watch agog at the same footage over and over and ‘tsk tsk’ disapprovingly. All the while there are women out there being raped in our country every minute. Raped and then raped again. But hey the media’s not interested, neither are we, because is your rapist’s name ‘Shiney’, madam? Not even Goldy? Then get over it. Such things happen.

I am not making the pompous point that the News should just be a long list of all the nameless victims of rape across the country to the exclusion of all else, because that’s not possible and people would stop watching the news. What I’m trying to say is, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing we would’ve given this young girl a passing thought if a famous actor hadn’t been involved. In fact, even now, we’re interested in what his wife is saying more than what the victim’s name is.

It’s just bizarre about celebrities. However stupid or boring or ugly they are as people, they’re as irresistible to us as a Shiney (ha ha) trinket to a magpie.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to google why Jeffrey Archer went to jail.

Obviously!!!

2009-06-16T02:32:00.000-07:00

Shall I tell you what ELSE annoys me? The word ‘obvious’. It looks innocuous in itself, but hides a wealth of smug, know-all, if-I- get-more-full-of-myself-I’ll-burst patronization I am yet to encounter in any other word.

Why are you angry with me?
I think it should be obvious.

(If I’m asking you it’s not obvious. And there’s no need to torture me further, because really I care enough to ask you and you should be happy about that.)

What does the word ‘equity’ mean?
I can’t believe you asked such an obvious question.

(I’m sorry, were you born with that knowledge or did someone tell you, you pompous git??? Now quit wasting my time being snotty, and just tell me.)

Is the earth flat and does the sun go ‘round it?
Zounds! Thy asketh the most obvious queries!

(I rest my case.)

Bucket List

2009-05-20T03:49:00.000-07:00

Now, with the big 3 O looming ahead of me, I have got to thinking about life experiences. There’s no doubt that it’s better to burn out than fade away. Use up the breath allotted to you doing stuff, experiencing the things which comprise life; rather than just blamelessly, joylessly doing what keeps your heart beating (eating, sleeping, working) and then be washed away from the earth as easily as a speck of dust.

I’m not talking about fame, that’s a very narrow gauge of a life lived. (I don’t know of any famous Eskimos, does that mean no Eskimos lived life to the fullest?)

I admire people who go out and DO. Of course the moment you’re a do-er, there are things which you do wrong, people you upset. You change the course of some events, which in retrospect, might have been better left undisturbed. But that’s a small price to pay for making every breath count I think.

I’m ashamed to admit I fall into the blamelessly eating, sleeping, working category of person. But I could try to change perhaps. Say I did change (…say), what would my bucket list be to make up for nearly 3 decades of inertness?

Bucket List
1) Look like I did when I was 21. (Maybe I could aim to be a little better dressed than I did in university. Tutoring brats doesn’t get you a great wardrobe.)
2) Travel !
3) Publish my novel.
4) Er…write it first.
5) Quit soul-killing life sucking job.
6) Find alternate source of income. (preferably not soul killing or life sucking)
7) Smile more at people.
8) Not care if they don’t smile back.
9) Buy little, thoughtful gifts for friends and family (especially husband who’s always getting me thoughtful things). Make sure they get it, i.e, doesn’t go the way of some of the gifts I’ve bought in the past…given away to other people, used by self, lost or thrown away on deciding its hideous.
10) Buy little but well-appointed hut by the sea: (my friend Hillary has promised to visit) and live bohemian life. (9 and 10 hinges on point 6)
11) Be happy! (hinges on 1, 2, 3, 5 most definitely, 8 and 10)

Will let you know in 40 years how many of those I managed to cross off.

Memento Mori.

2009-05-19T06:06:00.000-07:00

How does one get to know a person after he’s gone? I recently lost a close relative by marriage whom I’d never had the occasion to get to know.

I’d seen him in various hospitals over the last two years. And a few weeks ago, I was there when his son brought him home for the last time to a dignified yet deeply mourning family. I stood on the sidelines, secretly thanking my stars that I needn’t share in the sorrow, but trying in every way I could to comfort those who weren’t as lucky.

But during the swaran shobha, when all his family spoke about him, I realized I wasn’t that lucky after all. I started to wish I’d known him, because he sounded like someone it would’ve been fun to encounter. I felt like I was the unlucky one, for not having seen him at his jokey, resourceful , leg-pulling best, and I said as much when I was asked to speak.

Apart from the memorial service, and all the stories told by relatives and friends who poured into the house on the days succeeding his death; it struck me that I knew him quite well in another way…through his son.

People made many references to certain qualities his son had inherited, and it fascinated me to think how one can leave little pieces of oneself embedded in the next generation; who then pass it on in turn; over and over. A quality I had always thought was exclusively my husband’s would turn out to be, from an anecdote someone would tell, actually his father’s.

I felt better, and a little less of an anomaly as one of the principal mourners, once I realized that.
He lived, by today’s standards, a short life; but it sounds like he lived it fully. When I go, I’d like to be remembered similarly -- with smiles and laughter and affection.
I’d say it would be a life well lived then.

The Art of Fine Conversation

2009-04-14T01:21:00.000-07:00

The more malicious among you who know me, have just finished rolling their eyes and saying to themselves, “What does SHE know about conversation. She takes an hour just to finish a sentence, and it’s STILL not the best thought-out sentence.” To them I will only say, “You should hear the brilliant conversations that go on inside my head. So there!”
Now that I’ve furnished my credentials to write this post, I shall plunge straight in.
If you hope to impress and amaze all with your sparkling conversation do NOT:

1) Chatter away like a psychotic monkey when you’re with other people. For one, if you’re talking THAT much, chances are you’re thinking aloud -- gibbering on about shopping lists, train timings, and the same anecdote for the 20th consecutive afternoon because the smell of coffee always triggers that memory. For another, though the thought has never crossed your mind because you’re too busy trying to eat and talk at the same time, other people might want to talk too.

2) When you’re telling an anecdote which took place in the evening don’t start with what you did in the morning “You’ll never guess what happened to me last night! …In the morning I got up, then I brushed my teeth, then I switched on the geyser, then I read the paper, then I took a bath...” Everyone is burdened with their own banalities, they really don’t want to have to experience yours second hand.

3) I don’t know about other people, but I find self-congratulatory speeches annoying (even if delivered in a self deprecatory way). The auditor in the conversation feels harangued somehow, like it is being implied that she’s a piece of shit. And the ‘self-deprecation’ doesn’t fool ANYBODY. “ I wish I could be more like you…I’m such a workaholic, I can’t read a book if I know there are chores to do.” This of course invariably follows some confession by the other person that she spent the weekend with her feet propped up on a pile of unfolded laundry, reading a book.

4) This next point is a tricky one, it works both ways: your conversation shouldn’t exclusively be an indiscriminate outpouring of venom about other people. Contrary to popular belief, it can be dreadfully dull after the first flush of excitement that gossip brings. On the OTHER hand, it’s also disquieting when you complain to a friend about someone else and they remain non committal. One invariably makes a mental note later on not to share anything more with such a person.

5) Do not go ON about people unknown to your listeners. “And then Rachna said, boy is Rachna a HOOT!...she said that Richa is the biggest slut EVER, though in my opinion that prize goes Varsha, if you know what I mean” (much waggling of eyebrows). No I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU mean, who are these people, why are you telling me about them, why don’t you just shut up?

6) Also, if the conversation has taken a different turn (once you stopped to draw breath and lost your monopoly) do not keep breaking in with a continuation of your story. It can get pretty hairy if there are several people in the dialogue.
A: I went to watch a movie yesterday, it was…
B: That reminds me I was driving down MG Road yesterday and this man just dashed in front of me.
C: How does A watching a movie remind you of that?
D: That reminds me of an aunt I had who was totally deaf…
A: the movie wasn’t great… the hero looked like Raju from the next building.
B: …so he runs in front of me, and I veer to the left and hit the lamppost.
C: Which aunt are you talking about? The one with the moustache?
D: She had a moustache and an ear trumpet. She wasn’t much of a catch my poor aunt. My uncle developed incurable depression towards the end.
A: the person in the movie had an aunt too. She was normal though…a little on the chubby side maybe…
B:…So I was, like..”Dude…do you have to dart across the road like that?”

Of course after all these don’ts some of my readers with nervous temperaments might be tempted never to indulge in conversation again.
That might actually constitute my Dos list. Communicate only if someone’s standing on your foot or such like. I’m telling ya, after having all these types inflicted on them, people will call you to every party and hail you as the greatest speaker EVER.

A pearl a day

2009-04-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

Today morning I was standing in front of the office restroom mirror and sulking about my life as usual; when a frightening thought struck me. What if this IS the happiest time of my life? What if this is the time I look back upon and say with a nostalgic sigh…”aah to have an office restroom mirror to sulk in front of.” (Which could mean in the future (a) I mightn’t have an office to visit the restroom of. (b) the office I’d work at in the future won’t have a restroom.© For some bizarre reason, my future employers would have no need of mirrors. (creepy))

Because really, if one looks at the broad outlines my life is fine (I wrote “near perfect” then changed it to ‘fine” because I don’t want the jinx pixies to get me). It’s the details that are screwed up, that’s the problem. What if, heaven forbid, the broad outlines go awry too? Then I won’t even be able to look at the details, things will be so bad, and I’ll be sulking something fierce on a pavement somewhere.

It’s a sobering thought, and quite robbed me of the simple pleasure of my daily sulk. While I look ahead for that elusive day when everything will line up just like they ought, my last few months in my 20s are fast running out. Then it’ll be my 30s and my 40s and very soon, I’m in a home somewhere telling a bored attendant for the 20th time that day,…”I had everything but I didn’t know it until now”.

I know this may contradict what I said last week…and I’m not saying I’ve changed my mind about that. Let’s just compromise and say we should keep one eye on the ‘daily little problems’ aspect and another on the broad outlines; and then we’ll be fine.

Cross-eyed but fine.

No Problem!

2009-04-01T05:44:00.000-07:00

This is a bit of a reiteration of an old post (one of my initial ones 2 years ago) but it’s been on my mind again; so I thought I might add something to it.

Whenever I’m upset about something, people try to cheer me up with the most bizarre - not to mention inappropriate things. “Think of all the people born without arms and legs!” they’ll exclaim with the air of one handing out treats.

But it doesn’t really work because (a) what kind of a monster claps her hands and says “Coo, thoughts of such people make me laugh all my troubles away, they do!” ?(b) it upsets me more to be reminded of the misery this world is steeped in, and (c) it’s my problem and my life and so, despite the fact it’s just the smallest microbe of a problem in the universal scheme of things (10 being an asteroid heading towards the earth causing total annihilation of all living beings, and 5 being global warming…how would you rate your problem on a scale of 1 to 10?) it’s still bothering you because it’s YOURS.

I also don’t think it’s the healthiest thing to sweep your problems under the carpet, however insignificant they are in “the scheme of things.” If it’s bothering you it’s a problem. If it’s your problem you should try to fix it so that it doesn’t classify as a problem anymore.
“Oh, my parents called up yesterday, said they had a long discussion about me. They’ve decided I am devil spawn and wish they’d killed me when they still had the chance. But hey, think of all the kids who don’t HAVE parents to phone and call them devil spawn, eh? Hee hee, it makes me feel warm ALL over!” Chances are, it’s THAT attitude which has given your parents ideas in the first place.

And because of your damned sense of perspective you totally ignore a situation which face it, kinda sucks and can be improved.

“ Hello, Mother? I didn’t appreciate being called devil spawn and would like to know what you meant by it. “
…“ The fire in ‘82? That was the dog! Tiger was devil spawn, not me!”
…“That’s OK, at your age one forgets. See you on Sunday”

Problem, ladies and gents, SOLVED.

I’m not saying we should lose all sense of perspective, but let’s admit that we’re human and individuals. Our problems naturally come first. People who mouth the whole “Children in Somalia” line usually freak out at the smallest sign that their plans are not going as they would like.

Of course there’s a flip side to this argument. (Isn’t there always?) There are some people who, when you tell them you have a problem, just can’t shake off the feeling that their problems are similar, but they’re dealing with these much better than you.

“Stomach cramps?” Looking down on you curled up in a ball on the floor. “I’m having one right now. You just can’t let them affect you like that, you need mental strength…care for a game of tennis?” Of course there’s not even the hint of a suspicion that yours might be worse than hers. Just that you’re an inferior being, and ergo, not in the mood to fool about with a racket and ball just then.

In other words, it’s fair to say your problems should be most important to you because they’re yours, but retarded to expect people will take the same view of them as you.

…And someone tell me what Somalian people say to their friends when they get depressed.

Pippin.

2009-03-25T02:20:00.000-07:00

Today I finally got around to writing something for my blog, and that makes me very happy. :)

I could of course, tell you how busy I was, how much work I had heaped on my desk (figuratively…I use computers nowadays), how badly my health has been behaving, etc. But I find I get very irritated and defensive when other people say they’ve been busy (‘Does she think she’s the only one who works around here??’) and really my ill-health doesn’t make very fascinating reading. So I’ll go straight to the last and by far the most entertaining reason why I have been neglecting my pore ol’ blog for the last month.

I went to Calcutta at the end of last month. This time, it was much more than the usual trip back home (though I always thoroughly enjoy even those-- full of relatives dishing out insults and food with equal abandon). This time, I had a date with a blue-eyed young man I had been hearing a lot about the last 10 months. We’d exchanged pictures, witty banter over chat (to quote him, “99jhjdk” “ksbhbd000”…cracked me up every time.), and he’d sung some of his own compositions to me over the phone on a few occasions. Needless to say, I was dying to meet him and his parents and when they flew down to Calcutta from the UK to meet my parents, I followed soon after.

I first caught sight of Pippin (Syon to everyone else) sitting quietly like a little pixie in the crook of his mother’s arm. I don’t know if it was because he was my nephew (blood runs thicker than water, yada yada) or because he was just so prodigiously cute (like a Trait-R tested bunny from my super hero post). As we regarded each other solemnly, I felt quite an unprecedented rush of maternal affection, and I hoped we could be great friends in time.

I always thought babies were pricey and quite insulting in how they chose some people over others. This wee chap won hearts by how social and nice he was to everyone. It is more surprising considering how unsocial his mother’s side of the family can be. Fortunately so far he hasn’t seemed to have got those genes. Only our beauty and wit.

Before the night I landed, I had alarming visions of his turning away shrieking whenever I approached him for a bit of aunt-nephew bonding. Needless to say, I was greatly relieved when he regarded me with great interest as if saying to himself “Coo, this lady’s cheeks look nice and chewy, innit?”(He is from the UK, I am introducing dialect for verisimilitude.)

In no time at all as the days progressed, we were crawling about the floor together, or when the Ma-sheep (moi) took a break for the trillionth cup of tea he would grace me with a little visit, pushing his grandmother’s cane stool ahead of him like a walker. My mother or I would pick him up and walk around with him, if his harried parents needed their hands free for some other baby-care activity, and he would head-butt me in the teeth (10-month old heads are HARD, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) and pull my hair until some strands gave up the fight, as signs of his affection. I took his parents aside, out of Pippin’s earshot; and advised them to wean him off this particular habit, lest 20 years later, irate mothers of young women called and complained about brutality.

Most gratifying of course, was when he would laugh uproariously (all 8 teeth on show) at the same old game of peek a boo, as if to say “Corblimey, Ma-sheep luv, you’re so funny!” or feel safe enough to fall asleep in my arms as I sang to him.

Not to say things were all sweetness, poor Pippin was a martyr to his tummy and a cold while he was in Calcutta, and hence fretful at times. Those were times nobody would do except his parents, and he would bawl loudly if the others in the house had different ideas.
I also noticed his hilarious habit of grumpily pushing his lower lip out … the spitting image of my sister when she’s in a temper.

For all the Mashi-bhagne bonding though, I would be lying if I claimed I was his favorite in that house. First prize went to his grandfather, with whom he spent happy evenings wrestling. I think my Dad is getting all the contusions on his head looked at now, a consequence of being the favourite.

His great- grandmother was also thrilled to meet him, and would complain bitterly that we didn’t bring him by as often as she would like.

It was very hard to part with him, and I’m ashamed that I was more of a baby than him when I had to say goodbye to that house full of people. My grandmother sitting in the verandah thinking back on her life, my parents pleased as punch with their grandson, my sister and Steve -- proud parents, and little Pippin. MJP was full of life and joy and laughter; mealtimes bedtimes voices raised in admonishment because the baby had crawled under furniture; songs being sung; people breaking into impromptu jigs to entertain baby. Hard as it is to come back to our work home in Bangalore every 6 months, leaving a home that just overflowed with life this time was a wrench.

But there’s always next time, that’s the best thing about family. And next time maybe Ma-sheep could actually hear what Pippin has to say instead of guessing, and sing songs with words together.

Here’s the deal. Plagiarism is NOT okay.

2009-02-20T22:50:00.000-08:00

An Ode to Friends.

2009-02-11T07:05:00.000-08:00

My husband always wonders at my addiction to Friends. “You’ve seen this episode 12 times before!” he’ll cry and change the channel to a music video he’s watched …12 times before. He watches as much as he can, that is, before I clobber him with a chair and retrieve the remote from his unconscious grip.

It’s an addiction that comforts and cheers at the worst of times. I was bereft when Friends ended, and think nothing of watching reruns of the same episode as many times as they show it.

I know every ‘Oh-My-GOD”, every “How YOU doin’”, every “Could you BE more …” in the 10 seasons of Friends. Yet I laugh when they laugh, shake my head patronizingly (“that Joey”), and hope Ross and Rachel won’t break up; like it’s…maybe not the first time…but certainly only the fifth time I’m watching that episode. I feel like I’m sitting on that couch with them in Central Perk, ribbing the others (sometimes cruelly) about some trial they’re facing at the moment.

Sad, I know.

I think it’s because it takes me back to when people had time to be friends in my own life. I’m particularly attached to this sitcom because it reminds me of my gang back in college. We were a mix of girls and guys (apart from three of us the combination changed when we graduated to Masters Degree), and we would hang out all the time. We would sit on the back staircase on our floor in JU and pass the time of day just like the characters in Friends. Of course we weren’t half as good looking, and were students rather than working people alone in the city -- but it was much the same.

Just like them, we would josh each other about sometimes sensitive things (I got no end of grief for my Bengali. I thank God I wasn’t overweight at the time, the teasing would’ve been merciless!). We would just be glad to be in the company of like-minded people and laugh uproariously at each other’s jokes. Conversation used to be stimulating—we would try to outdo each other in wit; sometimes there would be flashes of profundity in our naïve exchanges that I find SO hard to come by in my “adult” conversations nowadays.

I guess when I watch Friends all of that comes back to me. That feeling of belonging, of wondering what madcap thing your friends will come up with next; of that sudden flirtatious spark with one of the gang because you’re young and happy and attractive and everything is right and fun.

Now I’m still friends with most of the group from that time, though except for a few who I consider my closest friends still; everyone has got on with their lives and rarely get a chance to catch up. Not one is in the same city as the other; and I doubt with the sundry trials and tribulations that a near decade can bring, we could ever share the light-hearted banter that was at the heart of our closeness so many years ago. I know for a fact that we’ll never ALL be in the same room together, and in fact, there will be some who won’t even agree to it.

Now, 8 years down the line, some of us have done better than others, some have got married (not to each other; none of the Monicas and Chandlers made it oddly) and had kids, others haven’t. I find it strange that a group of people who shared such a close bond could be so different now. Yet, I feel confident that however happy or busy our lives are now, every one of us have a flash of nostalgia when we think of the staircases and window ledges we used to haunt for hours every day, chattering about everything and nothing.

And that’s the time when I switch on the telly and watch Friends re-runs.

In case you were wondering if I'd chickened out of putting in my two cents about this one...

2009-02-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

I’m angry.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that 2008 had been a GodAwful year, what with the Financial disaster (Capital F), bombings and what-have-you that wiped the smug ‘India Shining’ smiles bloody straight off our faces. Now we have complete lunatics entering our pubs and beating up women for “going against Indian culture” (yes, THAT again.) and giving quotes to the papers to the effect that they’ll beat up women in jeans and noodle straps (these thugs seem to have a keen eye for fashion, I thought men didn’t know the names for these things) and that they’ll forcibly marry off any couples they see on Valentine’s Day.

Of course very few people condone it, but the very fact that such mad men are allowed to run amok like this and clearly state their intentions to disrupt the peace and inflict bodily harm on peaceful citizens disturbs me. And obviously they have taken a huge leaf out of the book of ‘More ignominious chapters in Indian culture’ in this idea of forcibly marrying people off, ignoring the fact that a marriage wouldn’t even be legal if it’s done under duress by some gundas who come along.

Here’s my advice to such weirdos. Get A Life. Maybe you’ll be able to BEAR seeing other people happy or having fun then. Get a JOB. Maybe you won’t have to accept money from politicians for politicizing total non-issues and disrupting the peace then.

All of us, in our heart of hearts, feel bad for you guys and the singularly joyless, perverse existences you live – where every woman is a sex object and thereby “provocative” unless covered up.

Oh and also, stop saying that you’re on opposites sides of the divide with your fundamentalist brethren from other religions, because from where I’m standing your little tricks the past couple of weeks, and what the Taliban does to women, are just different by a few degrees, is all. (You guys should have a fundamentalist convention and have team building activities like, “Shoot the provocative 11 year old girl in the legs” or attend lectures on “How you can enforce culture without knowing any culture at all”.)

Shame on all of us, for allowing such losers to grow on our soil.
And Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!:)

My attempt at a superhero story. :)

2009-02-01T21:53:00.000-08:00

A bus full of ordinary office-goers (one of those red ones with the closing doors which charge a bomb) plunges into a suspiciously lumpy looking canal. Turns out that a multi-crore pharmaceutical company has been secretly (i.e at 2 pm on weekdays when everyone is at lunch) dumping their factory wastes into that canal. Among sundry gross things is a strong concentration of their experimental drug “Trait-R” which when tested on bunnies brought out and enhanced their dominant characteristic, that is, made them cute on monstrous proportions. It has sometimes unfortunate effects on humans, humans being rather unfortunate as beings. But if they’re dumped into a whole soup of this chemical the effect is disastrous.

Thus were born a league of superhumans, with their own dominant traits enhanced to the point of excluding every other trait (like a sense of humour or love for dogs.) In such a concentrated form they are:

The Fabricator (credit to Chris and Rema of office)

Clad in little white Lie-cra fabric, She saves the world one “You don’t look fat at all!” at a time.

Where the Fabricator is, peace and love and deluded fat people follow.

Blunder Woman

The antithesis of The Fabricator, Blunder Woman produces great unity wherever she goes. How you ask? Armed with her relentless faux pas (they’re smallish, blunt objects but hurt like hell if they’re hurled at you) she brings even the most mortal enemies close to each other in shared annoyance of her.

Not to be confused with, Cat Woman (alternatively called “The Bitch”)

Where Blunder Woman cannot keep her foot out of her mouth ( “Those allergies must be awful to make your face swell up like that! Oh dear…no allergies…you say…”) but is greatly pained by her super power to annoy and upset people; Cat Woman is greatly feared for her calculated and sometimes deadly blows to the human pride with her weapon of choice -- her hatchet Spite. (“Those allergies must be AWFUL to make your face swell up like that! Oh dear…no allergies…you say…” Walks away with a smirk.)

Super power: No Egos where she Goes.

The Incredible Sulk

More identified by the dark thundercloud hanging over his head than unconventional skin coloring and ‘fits all sizes’ underpants, The Incredible Sulk has the unerring power to feel affronted and victimized by anything people do. He will throw a hissy fit and then go outside and sit in a corner until people (who are usually the ones in the right, but ‘let it go, you know he’s like that’) search him out and insincerely apologize to him, so he starts acting like a normal adult again. This superpower helps people build extreme patience and tolerance; or alternatively buy a gun.

Stupor Man

The healer of all insomniacs and the bane of all others who already get their 8 hours and don’t want any more…Stupor Man will put anyone to sleep with his involved, self-congratulatory, and mind numbingly boring accounts of what he said and then what she said, and what he thought when she said that, and what he told her when she said that, and so on.

Superpower: An encounter with him, and you feel so much better about your own life.

Who is a close cousin of Direction Boy:

Armed with exhaustive directions to every place he’s ever been, in fact every place he’s ever heard of, and an eternal thirst to know directions to every place mentioned in every anecdote—Direction Boy has the superpower of interrupting the most interesting anecdote so many times for EXACT directions that people tire of the story and wander off. (“Hang on hang on; the cannibal bit you where? Papua New Guinea? Where in Papua New Guinea? North or South? Near that darling little shrunken heads shop on Eat Street?”)

Bag Lady

The whole world is in her purse, including a bill for a box of gum bought in 1973.

Super Power: Is guaranteed to root around in her bag and produce a half-crumbled stomach cramp pain killer when you have cut your finger and are bleeding to death.

And last but certainly not the least is

Fat Man

He can kill you just by sitting on you. However if you run away real fast, he’ll never get the chance – so it doesn’t really matter.

Travel Diary: Kodaikanal Part II

2008-12-31T01:38:00.000-08:00

As I’ve forgotten the order of our visits and on which of the 3 days we went to each, (we returned only two days ago but my memory is like a freaking sieve, I tell you) I shall list the rest in no particular order.

1) Pillar Rock(s). The first day we went it was quite unexceptional, because there was nothing but mist beyond the railings, monkeys who posed patiently for pictures with practically an arm slung across the brave shoulders of tourists, and the ubiquitous stripy ear muffs. We paid a woman 5 rupees to take a picture of us sitting next to her stuffed toy tiger. We didn’t want to stand next to the monkeys, yet found the experience lacking a certain something if we couldn’t have any animals in our photos. The next day we visited again in case the mist had cleared up and was rewarded by an awe inspiring view of rocks jutting up into the sky like pillars. It was magnificent, like the product of special effects in a Spielberg movie, and I almost expected to spot a pterodactyl or two near the misty summit of the rocks.

2) Bear Shola Falls. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Very few people. NO ear muffs. A tranquil walk amongst coniferous trees ended in a prodigious rock with a waterfall spilling down its length. Its solitude made it my favouritest place in Kodaikanal.

3) Green Valley View/Suicide Point. A colleague had told me before I left for Kodai that there were people employed to collect bodies that pile up at the bottom of this place. I have a sneaking feeling this is ENTIRELY why my husband agreed to take a day off from work for the Kodaikanal trip. Unfortunately by the time we located this place (it’s actually not called Suicide Point, hence the confusion) Jeet had fallen quite ill (hills never agree with us, ask my college buddies. I was so notorious for falling sick on trips to the hills that the professor meant to accompany us on one of our college trips to Sikkim showed great reluctance to take me.) and stayed in the car while the rest of us went to investigate.

I guess I was expecting something spooky; or at least a lonely, desolate place where people feel they can die in privacy. “I was on the top of the hill, and the sun was shining down on me. So I figured it was a nice day for a bit of a suicide.” What I didn’t expect was stairs lined with earmuff shops ending in a viewpoint protected with a high spiked fence. Frankly, if one has the energy to climb all those stairs, fight off the earmuff vendors and the teeming multitudes that constituted their clientele, and THEN be limber and tough enough to scale the nasty looking fence – I would enter my name in the Olympics instead of providing employment for the body gatherers of Suicide Point.

4) Pine Forest: We went to a stretch of the Pine Forest that looked quite touristy, and therefore, thick with retired Bengali people taking a stroll in their shawls. Again, my husband and I stayed put in one place, as our friends went for a walk in the pine forest. We watched a particularly foul tempered Pomeranian dog chase monkeys and a cow indiscriminately around the clearing where we waited. The monkeys shinned up the trees in a trice, and the poor cow looked wistfully after them, like she would’ve liked to but was too dignified to make a monkey of herself.

5) And last but certainly not the least…The Kodaikanal Lake. It’s a man-made star-shaped lake at the heart of the hill station. A view of the lake from higher up on the slope is quite something. The day we arrived in town all we could talk about was the boating. “When shall we go boating on the Kodai Lake? Shall we go now? Later on in the day? Tomorrow? The day after?” “I don’t KNOW. STOP asking me!!!” We finally went to the Kodai Lake on the second day around 5 in the afternoon and were told by the first boathouse that they’d closed shop a little while ago. So we resolved to walk to the next boathouse along the lake where we would be sure to get a boat. 5-odd kms, 2 hours, one corn on the cob, one cup of tea, and a few fists of masala muri later we had done a complete circuit of the lake and all three boathouses without any luck.

Once I’d got home and taken off my one-size-too-small-but-pretty Reeboks, I decided the walk had been great fun.

And that’s about all we did before we set out again for Bangalore early on Sunday morning. This time we (I use the term loosely) drove during the day, and like the wind -- towards home.

Aaaah. (Say it with me) There’s no place like HOME.

Travel Diary: Kodaikanal Part I

2008-12-29T02:33:00.000-08:00

A very old friend of mine called me up one morning and asked if we would like to join them on a trip?. (this friend is the oldest that I have, I’ve known her from when I was 6, at a time when I was friendless and alone at school, and the only friends I had were of the imaginary kind. Actually, come to think of it I didn’t have too many of those either, compared to the raucous imaginary-friend parties some other little girls seemed to have. Those imaginary friends, phew, do they know how to have a good time!)

So we said yes, and away we went a week later at 1 in the morning in my friend’s car to drive for 9 hours and 450 kms to Kodaikanal. We had gone to our friend’s place to spend the night and start out early the next morning, but after we were finished with dinner starting off just then seemed like a jolly thing to do. So off we went at 1 in the pitch dark and it was quite jolly because the others drove. I didn’t sleep however, because I felt morally obliged to sit bolt upright scowling fiercely at the road ahead, thereby lightening the drivers’ (i.e my friend’s and my husbands’) burden significantly.

We got there at 10 the next morning. And it was beautiful. Beau-ti-ful! Ooty was a shabby little ugly duckling hill station compared to this one. (and let me tell you, when I went to Ooty I thought it was ugly even without seeing this place.)

And COLD. We kept wondering how cold it was, and discussed it repeatedly: “It must be atleast 10 degree centigrade…don’t you think?” “I have no idea. Stop asking me.”

My friend has a bit of an OCD about cooking and keeping house, so she instantly launched herself into making the guesthouse like home, (which as I very helpfully observed as I propped my feet up on the center table and flicked through my book ‘kind of defeated the purpose.’) Apart from all the cooking and cleaning and constructive sneering, we managed to take in the following sites:

1) Coalker’s walk. Don’t ask me what that means, my interpretation would be that if you’re high on coke, this is how the world would look to you. (Yes, yes not the right spelling – give me one that works better, smart asses.) It’s a pathway cut into the hill (the 21,300 meter high Palani hills) and provides you a wonderful view of the world swathed in mist. You can also walk there should you wish to rub shoulders with people who wear summer clothing accessorized with tiger-striped ear muffs in an attempt to look trendy or die of hypothermia, I’m not sure which. After a refreshing snack of cotton candy and barely concealed snickering at the ear muffs, we took ourselves off to the next tourist spot which was:

2) The Horticultural Gardens. It was a lot like other horticultural gardens I’ve visited, except that there was a very ugly couple being filmed with a video camera. Jeet said he thought they were getting married, and the others thought they were actors. I just thought they were ugly and the cameraman in dire need of money. My adventurous friend struck off up the slope following no apparent path and we followed obediently behind. I was grateful that Jeet waited for me as I hopped awkwardly over rivulets (looked like drainage water, nothing fancy) and yawning gaps in the hill while the other two walked briskly on ahead and disappeared round bends. Once I was sure I wouldn’t roll downhill and stop half dead near the feet of the couple being filmed, I decided it had been quite an enjoyable walk. Tip to tourists: Do not touch the cactuses in the greenhouse, even if a solemn 14 year old boy swears it won’t hurt.

(To be continued.)

What Indians do-do in books.

2008-12-19T22:32:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a long one, so anyone who can’t read beyond 500 words may wait for my next post and skip this one.

I just finished reading the Booker-prize winning book the White Tiger, which my friend Chiquita was kind of enough to gift me as a birthday present. It was excellently written and quite riveting. (Can you sense the ‘but’ coming? Here it is.)

I was unfortunately reading Shantaram simultaneously. So the whole effect was one of overkill. When I read one of these books, I can’t help but be overwhelmed by how well…sub-human and ridiculous… Indians are made out to be. Have you noticed? I can’t deny most of the stuff that is put in these books, I would be lying if I tried. Yes we live in the Turd World, 90% of people use the great outdoors as a Great Outhouse. I refrain from explaining further because you only need to pick up one of these books to learn all about this phenomenon.

90% of us are, of course, desperately, miserably, “the pavement is my home” kind of poor-- that’s true. And when you’re describing the conditions they’re in I understand that one needs to linger lovingly over each scatological detail – ostensibly to portray the sickening existence they endure. But, why, oh why…do Indian authors in English (which Shatantaram is not, we’ll get back to that book in a moment) feel compelled to describe the bowels of even the upper class (evil, upper caste, murdering raping) characters of the story? They go to their gold-inlaid, made-with-the-blood-and-sweat-of-downtrodden-untouchables bathrooms. So why this detailed inventory of what they did there for the readers? I’ll tell you why. Because it is expected of an Indian book in English. It’s almost as if the publishers send the draft novels back to the authors with a note: “Dear Indian Writer in English, there isn’t enough faeces and sputum in the ninth chapter. Please rectify this mistake. Regards, the Editor.

Apparently shit sells.

Do these Indian authors (all of whom invariably come from upper caste/upper class, western educated families, with the luxury to take a year or two off from paying bills, so that they can write a book on circus-freak, black-and-white India and get a Pulitzer prize from the West for writing a 'no-holds barred, gritty expose on Indian society') talk about their bowel movements at those posh wine and cheese parties they meet each other at? Would they even talk to a person who does? No. But when it comes to writing a book, they have to discuss it over two revolting pages for each character, in all its Technicolor disgustingness. The West reads it with fascinated disgust and showers accolades and prizes on these people for ‘telling the truth about India in all its shittiness’.

Do western people not go to the bathroom? If you read their books one might even think that is the case. And that’s how it should be, because it’s a foregone conclusion that all human beings do and there’s no need to dwell on such details just for cheap thrills.

Now that I’ve used the word “shit’ 24 times, “bathroom” 19 and “sputum” once, I shall expect my Booker at the address provided on my home page, thank you very much.

Moving on, I want to point out some things I have noted so far in Shantaram. You can still forgive an Australian for talking about Indian do-dos (after all kangaroo crap is perhaps the only thing you can step in over there) but what I find outrageous (though terribly entertaining) is the exaggeration. Apparently he saw a man with his head on fire running into the sea to douse it while he was riding into Mumbai on a bus from the airport. I have been to Mumbai and traveled that stretch he’s mentioned a few times and never seen a man on fire. Neither have I been in a car accident the very next day and been dragged out of the taxi by my stereotypical cheerfully amoral and perennially ridiculous Indian guide, just in time to be saved from being lynched along with the taxi driver by an Indian mob.

All the Great Indian Novel stereotypes are tiresome. There are millions of people in this country of all shades and beliefs and humours. Are we all to be divided into cruel overlords and tortured low caste farmers? This is not to say that the sordid stuff they put in books about India doesn’t happen at all (they DO happen, unfortunately) what I object to are the generalizations. I read with disbelief as Adiga made sweeping generalizations about how people treat drivers in India. My parents have hired a succession of 3 drivers over the last 10 years (the drivers leave when they get better opportunities, my parents didn’t kill them, nor did they hunt down and kill their entire families down to the last third cousin when they turned in their car keys.) and not once has their been any rumors of my family members asking these gentlemen to wash their (the former’s I mean) feet in hot water. Nor in cold water, I hasten to add. They have never been asked to sweep the courtyard or play ball with the children either. Strange but true. And as for their being asked to pour whisky for their masters from a bottle that’s always kept in cars for the purpose AS they drove, let me tell you I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life. And it hasn’t been such a short time for me in India either.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Adiga spent a lot of time in the West because he refers to the character throwing away food in anger in two places in the book. Indians, especially someone as poor as the protagonist, NEVER throw away food. At the most, you might throw away some on your plate that you JUST could NOT eat…but throwing your share of the chicken curry against a wall of your mud and thatch hut in anger? That’s just fiction. If an Indian family has an argument over dinner they shovel their food into their mouths as fast as they can and stomp off only when dessert is done.

I wish someone would write a book or two about the wholly different trials and tribulations of the middle class, maybe a family that doesn’t torture the help, if we can be so daring. Maybe we can just put a note at the beginning of the book that it is understood that these people DO go to the bathroom, but entire chapters have not been devoted to it in interests of brevity. Maybe this family’s problems can be more universal, like yours and mine…problems at work, problems in love, problems with parents and kids, making friends losing friends people dying (but not necessarily because an upper caste overlord beat them to a pulp because the temperature of the foot bath was wrong, or because they tried to escape from being a sex slave)…you get the drift.

I will personally give such an Indian a prize. The story might not be exotic or Booker worthy, but it’ll be a subtle story about lives many of us literate middle class professionals live; and thereby identifiable. Anyone brave enough for the challenge out there?

Weird But True Excerpt

2008-12-16T03:46:00.000-08:00

I read this here: http://www.nypost.com/news/weirdbuttrue/weirdbuttrue.htm

Thought it was hilarious so pasting it here for your reading pleasure.

"A Chinese man discovered the dog he had raised since it was a puppy was actually a rare Arctic fox.
The guy figured his all-white pooch was a Pomeranian that happened to be difficult to tame.
He also thought it was weird that the critter couldn't bark, that its tail kept growing - and that it stank something fierce. "
A zoo broke the news.

The Others.

2008-12-12T22:18:00.000-08:00

It’s funny that I’ve never discussed this on my blog, but I’m a total sucker for ghost stories. Once I feel I know a person well enough for him/her not to think I’m a weirdo for asking, I ask them if they have any ghost stories they can tell me. Most often than not people say they do believe in ghosts but never have any concrete instances to tell me about.

Of course the next question is, “Do I believe in ghosts?” The answer is No. In fact I don’t scare easy either. But that doesn’t stop me from getting that pleasurable goosebumpy chill when I hear stories about things that go “Do you remember me? I’m back!” in the night.

I, in fact; had I been a believer, have had ample ‘evidence’ of the supernatural. Who hasn’t woken up from a perfectly undisturbed sleep in the middle of the night with one’s heart thumping, and eyes swiveling around looking for…God knows what. It isn’t a bad dream, it’s a sudden certainty of something horrifying in the room with you… you just can’t SEE it.

Then there was that time when I was 7 years old and I had a 104 degree temperature. It was broad daylight and I saw a man, dressed all in red, grasping the second story window grille from the outside and looking in on me as I lay alone in bed. I had been so sick that both my parents were at home looking after me, and my panic stricken screams made them rush in from the next room. Of course that can easily be explained as delirium, which it was -- or Spiderman. My point is, if I wanted to believe, I had an actual ghost sighting – right there.

Then much later, a very lovely couple who still are very good friends took me in when I was a singleton in Hyderabad. They had a soft spot for strays so I and the two stray dogs fit right into the establishment. Weird stuff used to happen in that house. (No I don’t mean my money disappearing; that was the maid.) They would some times go out to do couple things like attend parties and whatnot and gave me and the dogs the run of the house for the entire evening.

I’ve always enjoyed having a house to myself. When I was a kid in Calcutta, I would try on my mother’s lipstick and my sister’s earrings. During this Hyderabad phase when I got some time alone, I would watch all the TV I could manage without having to worry about intruding.

One such night, as I watched the same Friends rerun for the umpteenth time with my favorite dog, Tiger (a mongrel with Alsatian blood) curled up next to me, a strange thing happened. He sat up with a start and looked directly at a point several feet off the ground in the doorway connecting the bedroom (where we were) and the living room. I thought maybe my friends had come back much earlier than planned, and expected to hear the front gate open any minute. (Tiger had wonderful hearing, he could tell his masters were home from the time their car drove up 3 storeys below.) What must be obvious to those who’ve got the drift of my story by now, no such thing happened. Tiger growled low and deep in his throat and stared unblinkingly at the connecting door for a few more seconds. Then, growling all the while, his eyes moved from the door, following a trajectory that cut across the TV, past the dressing table mirror and towards the bed where I lay.

It was at that point that the charm of having the house to myself began to pall. I had watched enough TV and felt an overwhelming need for human company. So I called a friend up and kept up a hectic pace of conversation until my friends returned from their party.

Another story, of course no ghosts feature in this, I find fairly sinister. I moved out of these friends’ place (I leeched off them for 6 whole months and we still remain friends!) and into a shared accommodation with two other girls. I was an illegal sub tenant of one of the girls, and was to share her room. I was her ‘sister’ if the landlord ever asked. Well this girl was terrified at night. She would ask to leave lights on, she would start at the slightest noise, and by the end of it I was as much of a basket case as she was. Later I heard from my second flat mate that this girl was a widow and that her husband had been cruel. He beat her and never let her meet her family or friends. When he died of a heart attack, she was glad. At least that is, until night fell every day and she drove me up the wall with her “what was that? Did you HEAR that??”

I cleared out of that place in double quick time let me tell you.

What was the point of this post you ask? There isn’t that much. Except that I’m alone at home, and had just turned in for the night. As I lay in bed, my mind had just started to skate into nothingness, when all of a sudden I was jolted wide awake…

So I turned the lights on and sat down to write this post.

;)

Blue.

2008-12-04T01:03:00.000-08:00

When you finally succumb to a lousy mood, it’s almost a relief, like your spirit can finally lay off rallying to find the bright or funny side of everything. Even though it’s laying there on the ground feeling really bad for itself, for the body it inhabits, and for the long fight that lies ahead when it inevitably has to pick itself off the ground, shake off the ennui and start rallying once again – it’s a momentary break from the struggle. A time of rest.

So your mind wanders about weeping with self-pity, without even a pat on the back from its bed fellow spirit. Your mind has a much harder task to do for the years and years and years that you live. Because no matter WHAT happens, it has to hold things together, and apart from cursing that wuss spirit for letting it down every so often ( I’ve observed it happens once a month, I wonder why that is.) it has to still function (“put your right leg down first, then your left, heave yourself up, walk to the sink and brush your teeth, etc’) while your spirit lies curled up in a foetal position, the slacker that it is.

Let alone taking a break, your mind has to work overtime to make up for the absenteeism of spirit. “Smile, smile, SMILE at the founder of the company.” “No you cannot make a face and punch her in the nose when she asks you how you are!” “Comb your hair, you can’t look like that in public, even if you couldn’t care less today, you’ll regret it tomorrow!”, etc.

So while your spirit takes a bit of a time-out, some ‘me-time’ if you will, so that it can loathe you and your life at leisure; your mind and body jerks around in a numb uncoordinated way all day (or week as the case may be).
I’m having one of those days. I shall let you know if my spirit finds some sustenance to revive soon. (There actually are plenty but I already told you that when the spirit is down and out; it refuses to entertain such thoughts.)

Soapbox Part II

2008-11-28T08:41:00.000-08:00

Been watching the news all evening today as well. I don't want to be too controversial and have people baying for my blood, but some things occur to me as I watch these images.

1) Though I have followed all of this night and day, I have a sneaking feeling the media have been inappropriate in how relentlessly they've covered this story disregarding the safety of the people inside and the pleas of the police not to let slip information that might help the militants. I don't know if anyone else noticed this yesterday, but Barkha Dutt (someone I hugely respected) revealed in her piece to camera that the security forces were using a secret passage to smuggle hostages out of the Taj, and then proceeded to tell us exactly on which floor it was and connecting which two buildings. Would it be so hard for some informer to call one of the terrorists inside the Taj to say, hey I was watching the news... you better check out the 14th floor? Does she have blood on her hands in her thirst to get the exclusive before the 15 other channels covering the carnage 24/7? Even if what I just said wasn't an issue, I may have misunderstood--or she may have been given the info after the threat to those people had gone, but it still seemed unnecessary just to slake our curiosity.

Another is the insensitive interviewing of family members outside. When a woman said she had no doubt her husband would come out alive of the hotel, a visibly unbelieving Dutt gushed, "That's what you SHOULD think to keep your spirits up. What a braave woman you are!" (Facing back to camera) "This is a woman who hasn't seen her husband in 24 hours and hasn't heard from him in 12."

Atleast these journalists were doing their job, what sickens me to the GUT are the people who have gone to gawk and position themselves right behind the journalists, looking straight into the camera with a "Look Ma, I'm on TV!" expression. There were such a crowd of people that the police had to ask the camera people to switch off the lights, because after all crowd management should've been the LAST thing on their minds right now.

2) My second point is, these terrorists who're captured alive should be shown a brand of their own justice; but in our self righteousness, let's not forget that justice is still pending for the 1000s of people who were systematically murdered in Gujarat. Not only do we know who did it, we allow him to remain Chief Minister of that state, and that's a crying shame. So when we bay for these terrorists' blood (as we rightfully should), let's add Narendra Modi's name as well to the list, and let's ask to avenge our murdered countrymen in Orissa as well.

Note.

2008-11-27T06:51:00.000-08:00

I've been watching the news channels all afternoon and evening. I can't imagine how it feels for everyone in those hotels, and for the families of all the people mown down senselessly at the railway station, hospitals and the pub where it all started.
These were people who were well-adjusted enough to go about their lives; instead of throwing 20 to 25 years away (i'm guessing that's the age group these terrorists fall under) on total lunacy, total misguided malevolence. What will this evil get them do they think? Are they enjoying it? Or are they going about it like we do our jobs, necessary but sometimes unpleasant? Have they been so brainwashed that they think these monstrosities will get them 'justice' in this life and heaven in the after life?
If God existed he would spit on such aberrations of nature. I'm suprised that hasn't occurred to the 'Deccan Mujahideen' as they shot down and bombed innocent people. People in hospitals for God's sake, can victims get more helpless?
Talking about it further would trivialize it so I'll stop here. The crisis isn't yet over. I hope our army and police get these men and make them pay. And my respects to the brave people who're trying to get things under control.

I am a Salsa Dancer.

2008-11-20T01:07:00.000-08:00

When I first heard of the salsa course comprising 13 workshops that my office had organized I was thrilled to bits. I applied immediately and was rejected. (Apparently there were many other thrilled takers in the organization.) So much so that they announced a second batch and I applied again. This time I was accepted. Hooray!

I had that floaty feeling I get when I feel something big has happened. This will be the beginning of the rest of my life I thought. I had always wanted dance classes but somehow it had never happened. (Read: I am a Lazy Bum.) Now here it was handed to me on a plate and I was going to make the most of it. What did I expect from it? To learn dance of course. Daydreams of being crowned “Worldwide Queen of Salsa (Senior's competition)” played through my head.

And then came the big day. My class was at 6-30. By 6 I was ready and fidgeting at my desk. By 6-20 I was upstairs and looking around for my classmates. I saw a long stream of men with skullcaps heading for a room and I thought I should ask, just to make sure. “Is this salsa class?” No, came the curt answer. It was Ramzaan and they were reading Namaaz.

Alrighty then.

By the time I located the class I was 15 minutes late and the last one to get there. A stern look from the instructor with the John Abraham hair made me feel sorry for myself. That first class, as we learnt the steps, my plans of dazzling people with my innate dancing talent looked bleak. Something I hadn’t accounted for was all the touching strange men you had to do. And very unattractive ones at that. I think that was the prevalent feeling among all the class (male and female alike); and the instructor (George) quickly explained that if a man’s hand slipped; not to slap him straight away; but to just pick his hand up and place it back firmly where it belonged, i.e just under your shoulder blade.

Midway through the class George stopped his count abruptly and asked, “what are you doing?" I shied like a nervous horse and turned to face the worst. Luckily he was looking the other way at another couple dancing. The man looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “Why are you holding her with tissue paper?” I noticed that the man in question had tissue paper stuck to the palms of his hands, and he was holding on to his partner like she was a hot dish straight off the stove. “Er…I didn’t want to get sweat on her…”

“No, no. it doesn’t matter! We all have to get used to the sweat.” He then went on to smilingly explain that he often got so sweaty that he had to quickly change out if his shirt into a new one. I think I heard a few ragged female cheers from the back of the class.

So that was the eventful first class. Of the 13 classes there is now only one that remains. I’ve missed 4 of the 13, two because I was on leave and two because I didn’t feel like hopping around like a bunny rabbit at the end of a long, hard day. (of course, I later realized that’s precisely what one should do at the end of a bad day. Rabbits – except for when they’re being hunted down and eaten - are rarely stressed.)

I feel sad that it’s all going to end so soon, and my life will settle back into the go-to-work-go-home-pay-the-bills routine without a dash of salsa to spice things up.

Let’s see. Maybe I’ll take up something new. Like bungee jumping.

Or dusting.

Quote of the Day...

2008-11-18T00:05:00.000-08:00

'A pen can be a nuisance instrument if it is absent.'
- A wise colleague who was looking for a pen.

No Time Like the Present...

2008-11-06T02:45:00.000-08:00

Though I always crib about modern times, I’m always cured off my disaffection when I give myself pause and think , “what would I have done if I’d been born 500 years earlier?”

With my artistic leanings (read: no practical skills whatsoever) farming or business would’ve been barred to me as occupations. I’d probably have gravitated to the royal courts of the land and eked out a living there:

“Birbal!”

“Yes, your majesty!”

“What was that?”

“That was our new bugler sounding the war bugle, sire!”

“I thought my elephant pooted.”

“No indeed, lord, it was the bugler: he lacks lung power somewhat.”

“String him up by his thumbs when we come back from battle, we can’t have the enemy dying of laughter before we get to them, can we?”

“Very good, sire.”

Or,

“Anarkali!”

“Ji Huzoor…”

“Please ask that back up dancer not to eat from my guests’ plates.”

“I will, sire” (Anarkali begins to back away)

“Atleast not while she’s dancing, it affects the aesthetics of your show…”

“I’m terribly sorry, Huzoor.”

“Anyway she should knock off the laddoos, look how chubby she is.”

“A Thousand pardons, my Lord.”

So, apart from the off chance of being born as a princess with loads of dowry to bring to a marriage (with my luck I would’ve been the sort of royalty who’s severely inbred with buck teeth and eventually gets burnt to a crisp when her 90 year old raja-husband cops it) I would’ve, male or female, been a sorry failure back in the day.

So next time I complain about how horrible our times are, you are welcome to remind me I wouldn’t have had a job to help keep body and soul together -- nor a blog to write about it in, in any other time but the present.

What a tangled web we weave...

2008-10-30T23:06:00.000-07:00

It’s an established fact that I’m a terrible liar. Not the mean “I have to be honest you looked awful on TV” sort of not being able to lie, but a different sort. (In those cases, I acquit myself not badly at all, because I don’t like hurting those I hold nothing against. ‘You looked very in character! Hey look at the time!’)

I mean the sort of fictitious answer one must think on one’s feet to give. For one thing I don’t enjoy being on my feet for long, I tire easily and my brain works much better lying down. You should hear some of the fantastic dreams my sleeping brain produces…I would tell you if I ever remembered one after I woke up. (Wow, that was a strange dream! Oooer…I wonder why it was strange?)

Today, one of my colleagues has been admitted into hospital with a very bad case of ‘the curse’ (this is a family blog, people! My nephew reads it!). Along came a male colleague and asked me where she was and I gave it some thought. She’s been admitted into hospital with a gynaecological problem, I declared. Would it have killed me to say something else? Probably.

I remember when I was 15 or 16 I had gone to my cousin’s place in Durgapur with my Dad about 3 hours away from Calcutta by train. My father had to come back in a few days but my holidays stretched before me and neither my cousin nor I saw any reason why I should go home that soon. “Don’t worry,” she told Baba, “I’ll find someone going to Calcutta and send her back with that person in a week or two.”

Of course, the moment he left I told my cousin in no uncertain terms that I’d go home alone, and didn’t need a babysitter. She wasn’t opposed to the idea but we both decided that nobody should know because Baba had made us promise I wouldn’t go home alone. ‘Tell them you went home with a Mr. Chatterjee”, she instructed me. I started to worry…what if they wanted details? What he’s like..what he said to me on the train? “Tell them, he was a very quiet gentleman (chaapa goccher bhdorolok) and didn’t say anything to you at all”.

The sheer simplicity of the lie made it a brilliant one. In anybody else’s mouth it would’ve slid out effortlessly and no one would’ve been the wiser. A few hours after I’d got home safely and just starting to hope no questions would be asked, my mother idly asked me what my escort on the train was like. Again, I gave it some thought. It has to come out just right, I thought, or people would suspect. My cousin and I would be in trouble. “He’s an…er…chaapa goccher bhodrolok?” I volunteered. My mother fixed me with a look and burst into gales of laughter.

There are plenty of other instances where I’ve been caught out instantly and in a most humiliating manner. Sometimes I’ve told the truth but was so worried that people will think I’m lying that I came over all shifty eyed and guilty. “Er…I’m 29.” “Um…(looking down at my shoes)…really…I am…”

It’s really a pain in the butt. Speaking of which, I look forward to telling my colleague I’ve shared her dysmenorrheal troubles with everyone on this floor when she finally recovers from it and gets here.

“I…erm…told them you had a c-c-cold…” “You told them didn’t you? “ “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

Two and Two Makes Four

2008-10-05T01:31:00.000-07:00

Though I enjoy Sherlock Holmes enormously, and have read and re-read most of the mysteries several times; the part where good ol’ Sherlock starts making observations about a prospective client seemingly out of nothing; like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat; makes me pause every time and say ‘oh come now, it's not quite as elementary as that, my dear Sherlock!’

I say so because (a) it's time somebody made Holmes leave poor Watson alone, and (b) In real life, just because a man is wearing a shirt with a missing button doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a wife.

There’s a whole host of possibilities behind the missing button, for example (a) His wife doesn’t like sewing buttons on shirts, (b) she’d run out of buttons, but this was his favorite shirt and he wore it anyway, (c) it had popped out in his headlong rush to Sherlock’s house, because frankly, if your father in law is putting snakes through the air vents at night to kill you; you would be in a tearing hurry as well. And all this talk of missing buttons and a lack of wives would seem bally extraneous and rubbing salt in the wound, old fruit.

A friend of mine told me a story about a girl he knew in college who’d called him up one day and said “I’m in love with my best friend, should I tell him how I feel?’ He realized she was talking about him and told her in no uncertain terms that it was best for her not to say anything to her ‘best friend’ because her ‘best friend’ probably didn’t love her back, and in fact, didn’t consider her his best friend. (Ouch, I say.)

As I listened to this story a puzzling conversation from a long time ago in my own life; nearly a decade; fell into place with a rusty but almighty CLANG. I have these occasionally; something which didn’t make sense at the time would lie coiled up in my subconscious; until a decade or two later some other event pokes it in the eye -- and it leaps up with a prodigious “Sweet Mother of God, that’s what that was!?!”

This anecdote of my friend’s reminded me of a VERY similar conversation I had with another friend of mine (let’s call him B) when I was in my second year of college. We were talking on the phone and I said to him, “You know what, a very close friend of mine seems to be acting a little different nowadays, I wonder if he has a crush on me. Do you think I should talk to him about it?” Usually a very nice guy, B replied with unusual venom “Every guy isn’t in love with you, you know. This friend of yours probably isn’t either.”

I was stung to the quick, because whatever my faults, thinking everyone is in love with me was not one of them. Quite the opposite. I puzzled over B’s vehemence for quite a long time after that, but forgot about it eventually, because he has always been, apart from that one sharp comment, unstintingly sweet to me.

And then with this recent story 10 years later, the truth dawned on me awfully. (Awfully!). Oh the shame of it all! To be thought of as so presumptuous! I really was talking about another friend (C), and not B.

And all the while, as C made sheep eyes at me and wrote me poetry, I kept thinking, “Ushasi, this guy doesn’t have a crush on you! Remember what B said!” Stupid, stupid me didn’t realize that B had only made such a retort because he’d thought it was my roundabout way of asking him if HE liked me. Grooooaan. To even think I could say such a thing to him, and his thinking that I thought such a thing, made my toes curl in embarrassment, even 10 years on.

Moral of the story is: If you see me with a cane made of an exotic wood found only in the deepest jungles of Papua New Guinea, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m an intrepid adventurer. It might mean I walked down and got it from the store around the corner.

Think of this before jumping to conclusions next time: Two and two sometimes does make four.

Doppelganger

2008-09-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

Today, after a long time, work was slow; and being a little fed up with some things at work; I decided to have some ‘me’ time and not do anything remotely productive for a change. From after lunch till the end of the work-day I scrolled through this blog and that (in case my boss is reading this: I actually worked very hard and everything I’ve said till now in this post is a complete lie and an attempt by my competitors to malign me.) and came across a blog entirely by accident that really got me thinking.

By itself the blog isn’t at all the sort that would get anyone thinking. It was a very self indulgent look into a young female college student’s life (though excellently written I must admit.) No, what struck me hard was the idea, that this was ME 6-7 years ago. Correction, this was someone I might’ve been. Same city, same university, same department, even – and I have a suspicion from one or two mentions, she lives in the same neighbourhood as well. She makes references to professors, syllabi, tests, that I was thoroughly acquainted with half a decade ago; and as I got more and more into it—the whole effect was surreal.

Our situations 6 years apart were identical. But, from the accounts of her personal life, she just seems to be doing more with the opportunities we both got. Performing in plays, a bit part in a Bengali movie, parties at Someplace else, hanging out with cool people, buying stilettos, loads of clothes…

I could’ve done all that, I thought. That’s what made me a little sad. Usually I make excuses to myself when I look at people leading very interesting lives...oh I didn’t live in that city, my parents weren’t in the performing arts, I’d say…it all went kaput with one random visit to a stranger’s blog.

Of course I’d like to say here, that she seems a mite taken with her cigarette smoking vodka drinking anti-authority self. I’ve never been guilty of self-satisfaction and have always been mature enough to see through most of the trappings of ‘coolness’; and have done all of the above without much ceremony. But I guess she’ll grow out of that with age.

And in the meantime, I’ll visit her blog now and then and live my early 20s over again, and enjoy vicariously the life I had but, to the most part, didn’t live.

A note.

2008-09-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

Several people have asked why I don’t write any more. That they look forward to my posts and would like to see some new ones. (Thank you for that.)

I feel sucked dry nowadays, like there’s nothing that needs writing about. I rarely get to talk to people who actually care what’s going on with me; in the office I usually reduce myself to a silent listener of incredible banalities for every break, and rarely volunteer any conversation that might matter. So I guess it’s become a habit, even when I converse through my blog. (I apologize for that.)

So that’s that, I guess. Enough said. I hope to write something complicated and witty soon.

Till then: adios.

Lyrics

2008-09-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

Spend all your time waiting
For that second chance
For a break that would make it okay
There’s always one reason
To feel not good enough
And it’s hard at the end of the day
I need some distraction
Oh beautiful release
Memory seeps from my veins
Let me be empty
And weightless and maybe
I’ll find some peace tonight

In the arms of an angel
Fly away from here
From this dark cold hotel room
And the endlessness that you fear
You are pulled from the wreckage
Of your silent reverie
You’re in the arms of the angel
May you find some comfort there

(Sarah McLachlan - Angel lyrics)

All about the sixth sense, a second sight, and a third eye

2008-08-18T01:30:00.000-07:00

There are some people I know who are very big on bad feelings. “I had a bad feeling last night about the meeting today and sure enough the boss yelled at us.” “I had a premonition the trip would be a disaster and so it was.” Some people have dreams that people will die and they do.

I really envy such people. Not because bad things keep happening to them, because bad things keep happening to me too. It’s just that…I never have the satisfaction later in telling people, “I told you I had a bad feeling, didn’t I?” I feel like an idiot, blundering into bad situations without telling someone in advance that I’m sure it’s a bad situation. It’s awful I tell you.

To remedy the situation, I tried to heighten my sixth sense. I would open my mind up and let it wander where it will. I would sleep extra long (more than my customary 9 hours) in the hope that premonitory dreams, less ready in my unconscious than in others, would finally reveal the future to me.

To no avail. Letting my mind wander only had the unhappy result of reminding me (alas) about the unfortunate things that have happened in my past. Sleeping extra long no doubt left me refreshed, but not much wiser about the future. I have the most pleasant dreams (alas) all about me sitting in a tree when I was 18 and skinny. The worst dreams I have is of frying meat, miles and miles of frying meat, after I’ve been particularly gluttonous at dinner. Could that be classified as a bad feeling? More like indigestion.

And then probably because I brooded on it too much, one day I had one. I had a terrible bad feeling, and I called one of my friends up all in a panic.
Me: “Are you OK?”
Him: “Of course, I’m OK! Why?”
Me: “Er…All righty then.”
Him: “Bye.”
Me: “Ta!”

It was a bit of a let down let me tell you.

And then to add insult to injury my sister and one of my cousins started having bad dreams about me, all at once. (So far only my husband had complained about nightmares related to me but he meant the waking variety.) My cousin made an ISD call all of a sudden on a weekday to ask me if I was OK. “Yes, I’m OK” I said. “I just had a dream about you sobbing and sobbing inconsolably so I thought I’d just ask.”

Well isn’t that just dandy. “No, I haven’t been crying for unusually long periods…I’m fine.”

“Aah, well, I’ll go back to sleep then.”

“You do that,” I said a trifle resentfully, and that was that until my sister called about a month later, all in a panic. “Are you OK?”

(SIGH) “Yes, I am.”

“I just had a dream about you…You were crying…and trying to drown yourself in a bucket of water.”

Dear God, why couldn’t I have dreams like that? Trying to cover the naked envy in my voice I reassured her that I didn’t even own a bucket (at the time -- I own several now; I’ve moved up in the world) let alone be limber enough to drown myself in one.

“I’ll just go back to sleep then.”

“Right-o”.

I gave up the idea of having prophetic insights or dreams myself, and waited with interest to see if my cousin or sister’s dreams would come true. Happily enough for all concerned, nothing happened. Not even the mildest urge to pop my head into passing buckets for a minute or two.

So my question is: obviously my family sucks at this, but what about the others? How do they do it? One could be that they have bad feelings all the time and only tell people when it comes true. The second option is, they really have a sixth sense, a second sight; a third eye.

It’s not entirely out of the question you know. Have you ever wondered HOW you can tell if someone’s looking at you even if you’re turned away and at a distance of 50 feet? These people probably have that skill but honed to a point where they can not only tell that someone’s looking at them right NOW, but that something bad will happen later on today.

Or they could just be yanking your chain so that you get all envious and devote a whole post to their talents.

I plan something clever along the lines of sneaking up behind one or two of them, braining them with a cricket bat and asking them later if they'd dreamt of it the previous night. Expect results in the net post...

Apologies.

2008-08-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

Apologies: a reader told me Deepa Mehta hadn't won the Oscar. Anyhow, my point remains the same. :)

We Object -- All the Time!

2008-08-13T05:24:00.000-07:00

One grouse I have with social groups (and when I say ‘groups’ I don’t mean always religions, it could also -- in fact more often is -- along state lines, caste lines, and language lines) is how ultra-sensitive they can be. I am all for one being sensitive about the failings of an individual, especially to his or her face, but the extremes to which demands for political correctness have gone nowadays is worrying.

Nowadays any movie that strays a little bit away from the poor boy falls in love with rich girl and rich girl’s father goes chasing after poor boy with a gun storyline is doomed to be banned in some state or the other.

Take the case of a certain movie about a couple who lived a long, loooong time ago. They lived such a long time ago in fact, that I would’ve thought people wouldn’t watch the movie, let alone care what was said about them. Imagine my surprise then when people started throwing stones at cinema halls and eventually got the movie banned in the state this lady belonged to. The contention: not that the movie had depicted them in a bad light but that the two historical people had been shown as a couple, whereas I hear these people say she was the guy's daughter-in-law. Now if the lady concerned had thrown stones at buildings herself I would've understood, because let's face it, it's gross to be linked to your father in law. But it being banned in a whole state because of it? Incredible.

Some ultra sensitive members of another community, though very happy to have representatives breaking into a good natured bhangra in every Hindi movie ever made; had a problem with two movies made in the last 5 years because the movie makers DARED to depict one of them with ‘negative shades’. Apparently villains can only be from majority communities.

Speaking of majority communities, one would think they would be secure enough to keep quiet about such things; but no. Deepa Mehta was forced to abandon filming ‘Water’ because she showed widows being starved, abandoned and forced into prostitution in Benares. Not on the grounds that it was untruthful, because we are all proudly aware that it’s been so for centuries; but for the sheer gall of the woman for making a movie on it. ‘We want it banned because there are no poor boys chasing rich girls, and dads going berserk with rifles’ I believe is the gist of their written complaint in High Court records.

Deepa Mehta finally took her business elsewhere, and ‘Water’ won the Oscar in the Foreign Film Category for CANADA. (“Haha, India” – Deepa Mehta is quoted as having said later.)

Another ultra-bizarre one recently is when Madhuri Dixit’s return vehicle hit an unprecedented controversy because of the lyrics of a particular song which referred to goldsmiths being more fortunate than shoemakers. The shoemaker caste objected to the lyrics being prejudicial, and the producers issued an apology.

I of course speak of the country I know, but a recent blog I visited (Thanks for the link Nisho) complained of ultra-sensitivity in other countries as well. Apparently, some employees of an organization in the UK or the US (I forget which…hehe aint that convenient?) demanded that their boss apologize for saying
“All the documents are going down a black hole” or something to that effect.

Best bit is…he did!

Bans-Galore!

2008-08-12T00:12:00.000-07:00

It’s so outrageous that I thought everyone must be mistaken. Live music and dancing has been banned in all places serving alcohol in Bangalore. You heard me. Even though I kept it under the mandatory 6-decibel-or-you-go-to-jail limit.

From what I understand I am forbidden by law to do the following things in this city:

1) Sing
2) Dance
3) Play music louder than 6 decibels
4) Eat or drink after 11-30 at night
5) Laugh

If you do 1 to 4 you get your sorry asses in jail. The fifth doesn’t need to be enforced.

(Oh no, you’re mistaken they say. Only in pubs and bars and restaurants. You can do all these things at home, as long as you keep it down and don’t tell anyone. )

If you don’t believe me read this article: http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080061080

Is this really happening? What nightmare world have we come to inhabit? How come some complete lunatic (does my sorry ass get thrown in jail for calling him that? Do I get thrown in jail anyway for saying ‘sorry ass’ so many times?) gets to steal our culture away from us without anybody else in power stopping him?

What’s next…seriously? They already tried to ban women in most sectors from working in nightshifts. For our own safety of course. All of these bans are for our own safety. So that, after our nights of debauchery (music and dance is the devil’s work, the Commissioner is liberal in so far as we’re not being dragged to a stake and burnt) we don’t get robbed. Robbed by those criminals the police would have done better to focus on, rather than doing the rounds of pubs, bars and eateries checking if people aren’t God forbid…dancing.

So, in what new and novel ways will we be saved from ourselves? What’s next? I have no doubt there IS a next. A ban on women wearing pants and skirts? For our own safety? Because we all know rapists don’t attack if you’re wearing a sari? No woman walking about unattended by a man, so that all the criminals the police are too busy to catch don’t rape us? No looking up at the sky when you walk because you might fall into a manhole, the cover of which was stolen by a thief the police passed by in their hurry to get to the nightclubs to check if anyone was singing?

You can however by law:

1) Refuse to take a customer if you are an auto driver, and if you don’t feel like a refusal, cheat him/her, leave him in the middle of the road and abuse him/her in front of the cops. And get rewarded by the government by a hike in your starting charge. (you’ll be too upset and broke to get the wanton urge to sing or play the guitar!)
2) Spit (atleast it’s not as filthy as being a criminal musician)
3) Urinate on walls (It’s been in our culture for centuries)
4) Flash women while you’re at it ( the police blame dancing for it.)
5) Leave gaping holes in horrendously uneven pavements if you are a municipal official. (if someone falls in at night: Aah well, she wasn’t supposed to be out so late, and we suspect she had a weakness for singing and dancing. If someone trips over an uneven slab and breaks a foot; atleast he won’t be doing any illegal dancing, eh?)

If this bizarre and arbitrary talibanization of Bangalore goes on, there won’t be that many people left in this village masquerading as a cosmopolitan IT capital. Which, inspite of the slim pickings by way of bribes, might be exactly what the police want.

She's Got the Look!

2008-07-14T04:06:00.001-07:00

One time when my parents came over to visit me in Bangalore, I took a day off and dragged them to the National Park (where I take all our guests, so that they don’t complain I didn’t show them around, and because its 4 kms from my house. Some people dig their heels in firmly and hold on to passing furniture to hint that they’re not interested to go, but my persuasive powers win over in the end. The only exceptions are people who are pregnant, have been to national parks all over the world, or have incontinence problems.)

Anyway, to get back to what I was saying. Since I was on holiday and in a festive mood, I dressed up more than I do usually, and looked quite a sight standing in the dusty line alongside harried parents and their offspring with severe phlegm issues.

So, as I was saying…I was all dressed up with hoop earrings and what not, and my father suddenly observed to me in an undertone “Those women are looking at you more than the men are!” And he sounded surprised. Honestly, after 60 years on this earth it came as a surprise to him that women check out women FAR more than men do. (That is, unless you look like a double-humped camel.)

Earlier the quick up and down sweep ( hair..top…shoes..away.) from women used to unnerve me, and I would rush to the nearest mirror to check if I had phlegm issues of my own. Because the unpleasant thing about ‘the look’ is…it rarely looks appreciative. Though I totally disagree with those women who say “a woman is a woman’s worst enemy” (and proceed to live according to that maxim.), it IS true that when another woman throws you that look of intense scrutiny, her face seems to say “I came, I saw, and I found it distasteful.”

But now that I’ve been a woman for a longish time, I started taking it as a compliment. Women reserve the hair…top…shoes look-over for when they think you’re wearing something interesting. (I hope.) Sometimes they linger over the shoes with a contemplative…'hmmm, I wonder if they have that in black...' stare.

When you’re cringing underneath a dozen ‘looks’ in your best outfit at a swanky restaurant, always remember that these same women wouldn’t have bothered if you were in a tracksuit and doing your shopping with your hair standing up in all directions.

Remember that, and take heart. And throw back a sweeping glance of great dislike in their direction. After all, they dressed up just for you and the other women in the room. (And those poor saps with them don’t even realize it.)

The funny thing about Humour

2008-07-02T21:16:00.000-07:00

The funny thing about humour is, how very different it is from one person to another. One man’s humour is another man’s sorrow. One woman’s humour is no humour at all to another. A third person’s humour might make him a celebrity, with people rolling over laughing when he says ‘hello’. I would say very broadly speaking you can group humorists in three broad categories. Usually people are a mix of all three, only the proportion of each varies.

Type A: those who mask their spite with humour. They will make jokes at everyone’s expense but their own. But the moment someone turns their wit on them, they are very, very bad sports. Almost without exception. “ When I said that I was JOKING, OK? You, on the other hand, are just plain offensive.”

Type B: Those who always make fun of themselves, to get a laugh. Sad thing about these poor saps are that people think it’s fine to join in, and that’s when all hell breaks loose. “Even I”VE never said that about my mother!!” they’ll sob after the fight has dispersed.

Type C: The ones who don’t have a humorous bone in their body. “Hahahaha…you’ll die laughing when I tell you this…hahaha…I just saw, gasp…a man…giggle…fall down the stairs. He just lay at the bottom of the stairs…hehe..GROANING. They say he may have a….concussion. HAAAAAhahaha..”

I think the test to know which one you are is if you think back on the last joke you cracked today and ask yourself:

a) Was it something hurtful about someone else?
b) Did you laugh much more than the target of the joke?
c) Did the person stop talking to you right after?
d) Would you never make the same joke about yourself?
e) If someone else made the same joke about you, would you report him to the office HR for unprofessional behaviour?
f) If you make the world’s worst gaffe do you run to tell your friends about it?
g) Are you pleased when they laugh?
h) Do they call you a clutz and a loser?
i) Do you wish you hadn’t told them?
j) Did you find the Type C joke funny?
k) Were you one of the people in PVR on April 27th who laughed when the kid in Taare Zameen Par got bashed around for flunking his exams?
l) Did you just think as you read this post that it was frivolous and redundant, and that the author was at a loose end when she wrote this?

Scores:
(a) to (e) -more than 4 ‘yes’s You are SO type A. I hope I don’t meet you at a party on a bad hair day.

(f) to (i) – more than 3 ‘Yes’s. Type B. You are asking for what is coming to you. Stop clowning around if you don’t want people to call you a clown.

J, k, and especially l - all three ‘Yes’s. Resoundingly Type C. I would recommend a book list that includes ‘Roots’, ‘Diary of Anne Frank’, and the ‘Kite Runner’ should you need a few giggles on a dull day.

Lyrics

2008-06-25T04:25:00.000-07:00

He walks away,
The sun goes down,
He takes the day but I'm grown,
And it's OK,
In this blue shade,
My tears dry on their own.

--Amy Winehouse, Tears Dry on Their Own

Me-ness.

2008-06-10T03:29:00.001-07:00

Do any of you ever get the feeling that your rational mind is just a wee part of you, objectively standing back and judging as the rest of you does, feels, and says completely unadvisable things? It’s unstoppable, like your ‘me-ness’ makes you a separate person from your rational self.

For example today, I was asked to rate my own work on 10 in a meeting with one of my bosses. Let’s see…I don’t want to seem conceited, my rational self thought quickly, so forget 9…don’t want to put myself down…so 6 is out of the question…7.5 seems like a nice well-adjusted number…that’s settled then…say 7.5.
“ I’m a 5.5!” my Me-ness declared brightly, to the shock of one and all, while my rational self kicked my Me-ness squarely in the shin.

There are days when it feels like everyone dislikes you. You just can’t shake off the feeling. That guy didn’t smile at you like he does on other days, your Me-ness declares shrilly. Those people stopped talking when you walked past, that girl was curt when you said hello! and you slowly sink into a gluey bog of self-pity, much as your rational self tries to pull you from it.

Rational self: Pull yourself together woman!

Me-ness: waaaaaaaaaah

R.S: That guy’s busy, those people had finished talking, and that girl was as nice as she always is!

Me-ness: waaaaaaaaaaaah!

R.S: Oh, forget it, you fuckwit.

Me-ness: Glop glop glop. (Drowning in self pity)

Sometimes you just feel depressed for the heck of it.

Rational self: Why the long face?

Me-ness: Sod off, I feel like it. (Sulking)

R.S: But why? What’s wrong with your life? You have everything you could want! There are so many starving children in Somalia who…

Me-ness: (Roaring) And you know what the starving children of Somalia say to you???

R.S: (prissily) There’s no need for bad language I’m sure. (withdrawing huffily).

The same for anger too. You know what you say makes no sense at all, will make matters worse, and will be held against you for the rest of your life, but bloody Miss Me-ness will just have to say it.

R.S: You just had to say it, didn’t you?

Me-ness: Aah, I feel MUCH better now.

R.S: Sigh.

And so on. I’ve met perfectly rational people saying they couldn’t control themselves: Jealousy, gluttony, OCDs (R. S: For the 20th time…the door is locked I tell you!!
Me-ness: Just let me go back up and check one last time…I promise!), bitchiness, depression, excessive optimism, crocheting, etc.

For a lot of people, the influences of RS and Me-ness are equally balanced. RS is all but beaten to a pulp inside my head.

It’s unfortunate, but liberating. Who needs two voices bickering in your head all the time anyway?

(Manic smile.)

The Web.

2008-05-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'm alone, my husband away. It's a Friday night, and my book is at an unexciting stage. So I gave myself permission to browse the net without any intentions, googling people's names, chatting with everyone on my list, sneaking around in other's orkut and facebook pages, trying to catch a glimpse of other people's lives. As I listened to my music, I aimlessly went to people's pages, and went on to their friends, etc only hoping at the back of my mind I won't be caught out.
It left me somehow unsatisfied. I looked for heart to hearts on Gtalk, wanting to delve into the very root cause of everything, but noone had the time. I peeked into other's albums, and even went to the extent of adding an old ghost (or should I say ghoul) from the past as a friend just so I could access her otherwise locked album. That's how bad the voyeurism got. But it didn't help--everyone was happy, smiling, with their babies cradled on their hips, or tell-tale captions telling me they studied in exotic or upmarket countries.
I don't know what I was hoping for...OK ...I knew exactly what I was looking around for. But I didn't find it.
It's 1-10 in the morning now, and I probably will go to sleep in a while and have nothing to show for the last 4 and a half hours of surfing except an empty stomach (I decided to forego dinner in my thirst for knowledge), and very low spirits.
For all the ties that the world wide web binds you with to other people, you're essentially so alone.

On The Fickleness of Babies.

2008-05-19T00:35:00.000-07:00

My sister had a baby 15 days ago (Congratulations, Rimky!). Since then we have been poring over the pictures she and her husband send to us. Because they live very, very far away it’s the only way we can take a look at him. With each installment of pictures a new argument breaks out within the family -- about whom the little thing takes after in the looks department. So far the conclusions we have come to are:

1) He looks like me, his aunt. (Suggestion put forward by me.)
2) He looks like my Dad, his grandfather.
3) Since I look like my Mum he looks like my Mum.
4) He looks like my Dad’s Sister.
5) He looks like his mother.
6) He looks like John Stamos of ER. (Which essentially means we all look like John Stamos of ER.)

We have very occasionally and grudgingly conceded that he looks like someone on his Dad’s side of the family, but it takes a great deal of self-sacrifice and soul-searching before it is said.

It’s strange why it’s such an ego-boost that one of the next generation looks like you, but it always is. It’s like Nature herself has paid you a compliment, as if to say, “I thought you weren’t half bad looking, and considered it a good idea to repeat the same kind of look again.”

But your shrill assertions that the new baby resembles you finally comes to nought when he goes and changes completely overnight and becomes the spitting image of an aunt by marriage on your husband's side. You feel slighted and aggrieved by the fickleness of the child and regret your haste in naming him the sole benefactor in your will.

Right now the baby isn’t cooperating and looks like his cousin on his Dad’s side. I disapprove of how frivolously he cast aside the chance to look like me, and have decided to give him a year’s time to redeem himself.

I shall keep you posted.

Ooty Story: "Say Cheeese!"

2008-05-14T02:53:00.000-07:00

That was about the people at the hotel. But what about site-seeing, you ask? That pretty much sucked. It turned out to be prime ‘tourist’ season: spitting, pushing, lungi-tying hordes of tourists. We hired a car and queued up dutifully at the ticket counters of all the sites. The tea museum we took one look at and fled. Somehow, though quite an avid tea-drinker myself, I could not find it in me to pay admission and look at different kinds of tea leaves from between the shoving shoulders of my fellow tea-enthusiasts. My husband’s plight was even more pitiful, he didn’t even like tea.

We squared our shoulders and shoved our way to the ticket counter at the botanical gardens. I’m glad we did, because the gardens were lovely and very, very old. We took each other’s pictures in front of a lot of flowers and left.

We begged off going into the boat house of the famous lake at Ooty after a particularly muscular woman pushed past and planted herself before me in line. I made a few loud comments in Bengali to the effect that I thought she had cooties, and having thus revenged ourselves on her we fled for quieter tourist spots. We were told that the Rose garden would be as crowded so we headed for St. Stephen’s church instead. This at least was tranquil and picturesque. After taking permission from the people there, we looked around the old graves behind the church, though we restrained our vulgar, macabre instinct to take photographs. But it really was lovely. The epitaphs told so many stories…it made us quite thoughtful.

And then we went back to our hotel, satisfied that we had done our duty as tourists and had earned our right to a hearty slap-up meal of chicken stuffed with cheese and ham for dinner. The next day, though I made some mild comments suggesting we dive back into the sea of site-seeing humanity, my husband made it plenty clear that there was a bench with his name on it on the lawn and I was welcome to join him. So after a very, very good breakfast (suffice it to say there was a lot of cheese and meat involved) we hit the benches and only came off for a lunch of pasta with cheese sauce and bacon.

We decided we shouldn’t waste the entire day lolling about indoors, and went for a walk in the afternoon after it stopped drizzling. By the end of it we were half-dead for want of breath, and made a beeline for the kitchen to calm our nerves with a plate of French fries and two steaming mugs of hot chocolate.

We spent the entire next day on a bus, sleep deprived, and cheese deprived, but happy that our weekend had been well-spent.

FIN.

Ooty Story: Part 2

2008-05-13T03:19:00.000-07:00

I looked at her parents more closely after that and decided; as much as I disliked her mother who seemed very full of herself (an older version of her daughter with heavier bosom and hips); I disliked her father more, who, for all his NRI talk and expensive clothes, could well be a wife beater. I never found out what she had done, and whether her Dad did slap her mother.

The other guests were very interesting as well, and taken together would have been great fodder for an Agatha Christie novel:

15 strangers stranded in a hill-top cottage. They all have their secrets. But one has the most dangerous secret of all, he has killed before and will strike again.
The white-mustachioed, red-nosed patriarch, whose word was law. His mild-mannered son and quick-witted, fun-loving daughter in law. The sad-eyed single mother. Three enormously tall expatriates. The wife beater. His trophy wife. His annoyingly affected child. The witty writer who is destined to solve a 200 year-old mystery and her doting husband.
A story set against the backdrop of the wild hills where the wispy mist rises of an evening, and where the crackling fires within doors lend an impression of safety to the unsuspecting families. A simple game of dumb charades turns into a riveting and deadly drama of human passions.

Of course none of that happened. No shot rang out in the night, no one got smothered in their sleep, the five year old didn’t take a hatchet to the 10 year-old boy who spurned her. We all played dumb charades politely and tried not to let on that we hadn’t caught each other’s names during the round of introductions. One wondered whether the cheese and corn balls ordered during the game would be charged to one’s own room or the other family’s.

Before leaving, the hearty patriarch with a volatile temper shook my husband’s hand (he’s always more popular at these places, people find my brooding artistic temperament intimidating) and said, “We’ll meet again some day, some where.”

It sounded very profound, and reinforced my view that these random meetings change our lives, even if in the tiniest, most infinitesimal ways.

It remains to be seen how, but it’s always more interesting to think that way.

(Coming up: What we ate, and how awful tourists are.)

A travelogue for a change.

2008-05-12T05:27:00.000-07:00

We went to Ooty over the weekend. I am tempted to write a complete travel log but will restrain myself, since my main audience are readers who complain bitterly when I cross my 500th word. (Don’t look around you so innocently, you know who you are, Philistines.)

I slept through most of the overnight bus journey to Ooty until I woke up with a start at 4 in the morning. Everyone else was asleep and the bus had just reached the foot of the mountains. It was pitch dark but for the headlights of our bus and the one ahead of us and I stared fascinated outside my window as the headlights caught the trees glowering above us. The buses crawled up and up and round and round the mountains like two beetles up a prodigiously hairy giant. I gave myself the creeps imagining ghostly shapes in the wintry slopes looking down on us wondering who we were. It was beautiful, sinister, and very personal – I was lucky to be awake when I was—the trees menaced and the shadows flitted just for me (I assume the driver was awake but not as fanciful). I fell asleep as soon as light dawned two hours later and the rest of the bus started stirring.

We arrived 4 and half hours too early at the hotel. Our room was booked only from 12-o-clock, so we were very politely asked to hang around (and hold our bladders) until the current occupants of the room left to catch their bus. I asked everyone around if there was a common loo for people waiting, but it seemed everyone just sat around until their rooms were ready. Well, then. Luckily, both my husband and I have bladders of iron, so we sat on the benches in the lovely, dew-soaked garden and snoozed in the wintry sunshine. I watched as my husband nodded off on the bench, woke up, looked around with great interest, nodded off a moment later, looked up at me and said “This is heavenly!” and slid off the bench in one fluid motion onto the damp grass and went back to sleep.

The small hotel with nine rooms was remodeled from an old British cottage and the carefully manicured lawn fell away down the slope to the more populated parts downhill from where you could hear distant noises of people and cattle. It really was lovely: my head drooped on my chest, and I made a mental note to tell my husband presently that he would catch his death, soaking up dew as he was like a sponge at my feet.

We got our room much sooner than 12-o-clock, we were well ensconced in a cozy little room with a fireplace by 9.

We had some very interesting hotel mates. They were all families with children. There was one very dramatic little girl who looked like she had walked out of a TV advertisement, all curly-haired, doe-eyed and pretty in pink. She, we quickly caught on, nursed an unrequited passion for an older boy called Krishna who was also staying at the resort, and was admirably unabashed about it. While he played ball with the other children she would stand next to him and gaze longingly at him, while leaving the room she would say “bye Krishna” and ignore the others, and at night when her parents insisted they turn in for the night, she asked, “Will you come to my hotel (room) Krishna?” A very forthright girl -- we warmed to her enormously, despite her dainty mincing ways. Needless to say Krishna’s friends and sister especially gave him hell, calling out his 5-year old girlfriend’s name until he was purple in the face. He did his best to give her the brush off, though I feel he was secretly pleased for being singled out. Give it ten years, I thought, and if they ever meet again the roles will be most decidedly reversed.

The second day there, I found her wandering disconsolately in the dining room. She turned to me with an urgent toss of her head and said, “I’ve done something very bad.” I wondered if she’d finally done the object of her affections in and buried him under the azaleas, and asked her warily what the matter was. “If my father finds out he’ll slap my mother.” Whoa! I thought, is this domestic abuse the little girl is unwittingly talking about? “What did you do?” She muttered something about breaking her pony and wandered off, twirling one ringlet with her finger.

(To be continued. I decided to do the travelogue instead, it's my blog.)

A picture speaks louder...

2008-04-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

I sent pictures of the conference I mentioned in my last post to a lot of people. Of course I vetted them and sent out the ones where my hair looked fairly OK, and my double chin was hidden behind the potted palms as much as possible, but beyond that it wasn't like I felt the need to photoshop my flaws out of existence, because these pictures were merely to show photographic evidence to people "See! I really did have a good time at so-and-so place." As far as my expectations that people would send me medals by post for my beauty, and renewed wedding proposals ...I didn't have that many.

But see, that's something most people don't get. I put up one of these pics as my google chat picture and one fine evening a friend pings me to say, "hi...if you don't mind my saying this..you look fat in the picture." Just like that.

I just didn't get it. For one thing, Yes, I DO mind...and I told her that atleast I don't look as fat as she does in HER pictures. Something my superior manners restrained me from telling her earlier. Second, she KNOWS I talk endlessly about my weight, so it couldn't be that, as a friend, she thought she was pointing out something I hadn't noticed, so that I could thank her tearfully later on when I was all svelte and beautiful again.

Third. I didn't put up the pictures in a fond moment of belief, as I mentioned earlier, that Bollywood scouts would catch sight of them, and ask me to be Aamir Khan's new leading lady. I think, at the risk of sounding intolerably swollen headed, I have a VERY good idea about how I look and torture myself endlessly about it. I send out latest pictures, again, to show people that THIS is where I went with THAT group of people and so on. Something even my parents don't get frankly, so this friend of mine can be forgiven to a certain extent, except that she didn't MAKE me, and raise me, and so have entitlement to make rude comments about me.

I remember having a lark with friends (incidentally one is the fat-caller) in Goa, and taking pictures in very bizarre outfits and sending them to everyone saying "Check this out, we had a BLAST!" My folks remained ominously quiet about the photos until I thought I would hear the worst and called to ask if they hadn't seen them. My mother sounded instantly uncomfortable. "Yes dear, I did." "Well?" "Well dear, none of you look very...er...nice in the pictures." What about the blue, blue sea in the background, what about the funny headgear, what about the huge, big grins on our faces??" "Yes, yes, dear, I saw that."

See what I mean? Of course if anyone does compliment me on my recent pictures (yes, my darlings, that happens rarely but still does) I won't pretend to say I'm not inordinately pleased by it.

But on the whole, I feel the people who really get it is the bunch who write back saying: "Whoa! It looks like the trip was a gas! What is that person doing with that watermelon in the background??"

If not for those questions, all I really needed to do was keep circulating my college and wedding pictures ( saying stuff like 'this is me at the office party I attended last week!! Why am I dressed like a bride you ask? And why is my mother-in law in the picture, you ask?') at regular intervals and enjoy the compliments pour in, until I dropped down dead at 92.

Get down and boogie.

2008-04-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

I’m just back from a conference at a resort with 60 other colleagues and what can I say I just couldn’t stop dancing. My boss’s boss’s boss personally came up to me and begged me to stop dancing lest I hurt my foot again and had to call in sick but I wouldn’t listen. Just the very mention of a Hawaiian night in a pub called Liquids and I could feel my dance hormones coursing through my body. It was almost like a chemical reaction. For the life of me I couldn’t stop dancing.

I’ve seen a few other people like me, and there’s some comfort in that I’m sure. Otherwise, as you faithful readers know, I’m not a person who likes to draw attention by doing anything unusual in the work place and have been known to try to look as much like installation art as possible in meetings so I’m not asked to speak. But lead me to a dance floor and I give a damn who looks at me and what they think. And this attitude has always paid off (apart from one party where I drank too much and was pretty much a three-hour-long wardrobe malfunction) I have always come away from these parties feeling like I was on a high.

Give me music I don’t hate and clear a little area of the floor so I don’t trip and fall too often, and you can sit back and wait for Ms Jekyll to take over. It’s just not me anymore.
As it is I find myself on the dance floor quite embarrassingly early. I know the modus operandi is to hang back and act like you don’t care for dancing…but that just wastes time in my opinion. I walk in and hit the floor and don’t come off until they switch off the lights, explain that they’d stopped the music 15 minutes ago, and that they had families to go back home to, could I please leave?

As I walk on to the dance floor and a song I like comes on, I can feel all my hesitation falling away, and my body comes up with all these wild dance steps I didn’t even know I had in my repertoire. It’s quite an out-of-body experience. Whether I’m great at it I don’t know, I’m not half bad, that’s all I know and that’s all I need. I don’t do it for other people any way. This is my me time, when I get to feel happy in my skin, and lose all the nonsense that goes through my head every waking moment of every day since the day I was born. The music plays, the beats take hold of me, and if I have a half-way decent partner (read: who doesn’t complain that the music is bad, his feet hurt, and threatens to stop dancing after every second song) I am the happiest (the out of my mind, sing aloud, jump-in-the-air kinda happy) woman in the room. And I don’t even need booze. I just let loose, whirl, and twist and turn, and in general go haywire.
And then after those three hours of near-religious furor, I drift back to bed and think happily back about those few hours of oblivion.

Because of my foot injury this time of course, I limped stiffly about the hotel all of the next day, but I had an awfully big grin on my face to set it off. I still haven’t stopped smiling, and have started planning my next fix. Let’ see…

Stage Fright

2008-03-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

My stage fright knows no bounds.

In a most perverse way like much of the rest of my life, my talents such as they are, lie in the area of the performance arts. Before my ‘me-ness’ took control of this body, I was not a bad singer at all. Then somewhere in the process of growing up, I decided I would rather die than be on stage, and that was that. I forced myself on stage a few times after this malaise gripped me, hoping to conquer the fear and knowing that one good performance would do wonders for my confidence. These turned out to be occasions of such bitter failure and nightmarish shame that the fate of my singing on stage was sealed. Nowadays, if anyone were to ask me I just say I can’t sing. There’s no shame in that.

I thought, as did many others, that since I wasn’t bad with the written word, I would logically fare well in debate and recitation as well. But then again, though I conquered my fear of performing in public to the extent that I could be pushed onto the stage, gagging and willing myself not to throw up –when my turn came to speak, I would start shakily and then entirely forget what it was I was meant to say. The resounding silence of the auditorium would echo back at me, and I would open and close my mouth like a pop-eyed fish flopping about at the bottom of a boat.

Acting! By the time people had started suggesting acting to me, I had wised up to my condition, and lived my passion for it vicariously by helping out backstage as bouncer, makeup person, and general busybody.

But now that I’ve weeded out most things that inspire such terror (except trying on clothes in front of those ghastly lit mirrors in stores) I haven’t felt stage fright in a long, LONG while. (I’m a coward, but bravery is overrated anyway.)

Until yesterday that is. I went to the hospital for an abdomen scan. Apparently one needs to feel like one needs to go wee-wee, before they’ll do the scan thing on you (you need to feel the urge to go, but not go, of course.). People would keep coming at me and asking if my bladder was full, and despite the fact that I’d drunk an entire litre of water earlier on I could only shake my head miserably and whisper “not yet”. A little while later I tried to brazen it out and pretend that I needed to go. But the technician caught me out convincingly when he began the scan and sent me out with a flea in my ear, to sit and wait ‘For toilet to come to me’ in the waiting room.

An hour later and people were giving me the disappointed looks that teachers gave me in school when I walked off the stage after saying “Ladies and Gentlemen, the topic of debate for today is…is…excuse me I need to barf”. My husband, usually the most patient of souls, started looking quite distressed after one and a half hours of waiting for me “to get the urgency” as one of the staff described it. I felt like I was letting him down, the hospital technicians down, and most of all myself down. It was standing on stage all over again, I just couldn’t do it. ("feel the urgency", not do it).

I eventually got the scan done successfully, but that stage fright of mine made the simplest thing the hardest thing to do.

Goodbye my friend...

2008-03-10T23:55:00.000-07:00

I must say after breaking my foot, my view of people has changed. I’ve been coming to office for two weeks now, the first week in full cripple regalia with a cast on my foot, and two crutches under each arm. The next week I toned down the image a bit and came in a modest crepe bandage, enormous surgical shoe, and one crutch tucked discreetly under the right arm.

My faith in human nature has almost completely been restored. People have gone out of their way to open doors, offered to help me in and out of places, and asked me incessantly how it’s happened and where the fracture was. Complete strangers have stopped me and asked “ So…what happened? Not well-ah?” ( “Ya, my foot has caught a fever, so I’ve wrapped it up warmly in brickhard plaster.”)
I have been told the fracture and torn ligament stories of everyone on this floor (let me tell you it’s one helluva large floor…try walking across it on crutches and one leg), been advised to take calcium tablets, and consult a homoeopath -- usually by people I’ve never seen before and not seen since. The drivers of my morning and evening cabs have been accommodative enough to drive as close to lifts as possible. One driver even took it upon himself to haul me unceremoniously out of the car by the arm despite my loud protestations (as he dragged me out) that I could manage myself.

Of course there is always the boor. (What would my blog be without boors? Insipid.) This one guy probably thinks I bring a crutch to work as a fashion statement, and lets doors swing back in my face if I’m following him in anywhere. Of course I give him the stink eye whenever I hop by his desk, so he’s not getting away with it.

I went to the shopping mall Forum (just me and my crutch) last week, and the advantages were numerous. Not only did I get to sit down unchalleneged on the “For Handicapped and Senior Citizen’s Bench Only” next to the entrance, strangers actually held lifts for me, and offered to stand in the billing counter for me while I sat down.

A visit to a jam-packed Hard Rock Café told the same story. We were shown directly to a table with my husband commenting in sotto voce throughout that it was my crutch that worked the trick and that we should never go anywhere without it for the rest of our lives.

But now the time draws near to wean myself off my trusty crutch. Back to being pushed aside, stepped on, yelled at. Back to having people not asking me where it hurt and not having a receptive audience as I tell the story of how it happened with a brave “I’ll be OK, don’t worry” smile on my face.

Siiiigh…Goodbye my trusty crutch, it was real special, but we knew it couldn’t last…

A brief madness

2008-03-04T01:25:00.000-08:00

People, regardless of age or background, have a few stock phrases and responses when they’re angry. I, having been in the midst of many an angry skirmish, am well placed to draw up this list of the rather senseless things people say in anger. Note that this is in no particular order:

1) When one says “I was busy” the invariable retort is – “ As if I’m not.” Noone said YOU’re not busy…I was merely saying that I WAS.
2) One often makes accusations and then adds a “and you know it” to add weight to the accusation. Often it is the first time that the accused has heard that he’s a sonovabitch, so he can very well claim not to know it.
3) “Don’t tell me what to feel!” Is another comment that puzzles me. If the reaction is far beyond what the stimulus warrants and you point that out, this is often the comment that comes whizzing back at you, even though it makes absolutely NO sense whatsoever. If I choose to laugh heartily through Schindler’s List and people turn around and give me outraged glances, does it make sense if I say “Hey, Don’t tell me what to FEEL, OK???”. Probably not. (On an aside I laughed uproariously through most of the tragic parts of ‘Life is Beautiful’. Not because I’m a chump; but because I had aimed to comfort a friend who was crying inconsolably next to me, and groped her quite comprehensively instead.)
4) If you point out certain flaws in near and dear ones, you will roundly be accused of being a complainer and a whiner, who can never appreciate one’s good side and will always harp on the bad things. In the ensuing heated argument, the original accusation is entirely forgotten, in which case this is quite a good tactic and shouldn’t be here. (But the point I was getting to before I recognized this as the brilliant ploy that it is -- I wasn’t saying that you are entirely bad, I’m just saying your habit of being selectively deaf is something I would now wish to exclusively talk about, at length, and in high-pitched tones. Again, of course you’ve done a lot of good things, but we’re not talking about that JUST now. )
5) This is somewhat similar to the last one, only from the other person’s perspective. When someone has really got into the groove and is in the middle of calling you every name in the book, you start saying things in self-defence like “Don’t you remember I lent you money two years ago, and I picked up your crazy aunt from the station because everyone else refused”, etc. and generally remind him/her that you’re not all bad and have done some rather nice things for him in the past. Pat will come the completely shameless dodge -- “Oh so you have to throw my poor aunty in my face now. There’s no point in doing a friend a good turn if you bring it up later… and now that we’re on the topic I’m glad she bit you.”
6) “When I die you’ll feel bad you said that.” With a sad droop of the shoulders, like you’re dying as you speak.

And so on, you get the drift. I dare all my readers to delve into their memories and deny they have either used these arguments or had them used on them These comments distract people from the issue; making the arguments confusing, long-winded, and not as intellectually stimulating as they otherwise could have been.

But then again, anger is a brief madness, and generally not a recognized forum for the exercise of intelligence or time-management.

Universal Language

2008-02-28T01:34:00.000-08:00

Something I’m very ashamed of is, though I’ve spent a little over three years here now, I don’t know the language at all. It’s very strange -- usually you can’t avoid picking up a few bits and pieces here and there. After living in Hyderabad for two years I could roughly gauge what people were saying to me, and could nod my head sagely and say “wonkay” (aubergine.)

But over here, it almost seems like I’ve formed a mental block because of all the people telling me what scum I am for not knowing the language.

Three months into my stay here, I went to a doctor near my house and as I walked into the room, he asked me something in Kannada. I said “excuse me?” and “I beg your pardon” two or three times before I realized that he was speaking to me in Kannada so I explained to him that I’m Bengali and don’t know the language. To which he demanded to know how long I’d been here, why I had come to Bangalore, and why my husband had come. By then it was already 10-15 minutes into my sitting with the doctor and he had yet to ask what ailed me. (Not too much to expect from a doctor methinks -- I presume even people from Bangalore don’t make appointments with doctors to discuss the erosion of local culture.) He concluded the little interview with “you should learn Kannada if you want to stay here. It’s not nice to talk to people in another language if you want their help.” Or something to that effect. I was a hair’s breadth from walking out, but felt too ill and had waited too long so I stayed put and took it quietly. I felt a great urge to ask him if I should give him the consultation charge in rupees or Kannada money, but again, I was too sick to care about anything much.

On some level, I quite agree with some of what this guy was saying, though expecting someone to speak fluent Kannada after living here for 3 months is ridiculous, it IS true that there’s no excuse for not knowing it three YEARS down the line. In the last three years I’ve been lectured by autodrivers and a few others that I should learn if I want to stay here. I feel too sometimes, that since we’ve all but settled here and might eventually bring up little thingies here as well, it would be nice if we could communicate with people better and understand the lyrics of the songs apart from the part where it goes:
“Oh daarrrrlling, please-a come-u/I lou you maximum-u!”(I’m not kidding.)

People here feel very aggrieved about talking in Hindi and dismiss the national language argument as a lot of twaddle. I only wish to make them understand that Hindi is not my mother tongue either, and in fact is a language I don’t speak very well, and only use it to make myself understood. So it’s not like I’m any less uncomfortable than the delivery boy who I say “Ekdom bhul-bhal jinish laata hai” to. Now if I had spoken to them in Bengali, arrogantly assuming they’d understand…THAT would be obnoxious and deserving of a full lecture.

Anyhow, I hope the xenophobes here will forgive me for making one last observation from MY point of view. I lived most of my life in Calcutta and wasn’t too put out when I had to converse with people in Hindi and English when they didn’t know Bengali.(In fact I have a relative back in Cal who insists on conversing in the most outlandish Hindi if she realizes a shop-assistant or such like is non-Bengali. So it happens that often the man will talk to her in faintly accented Bengali and she'll battle on in the most excruciating Hindi). It didn’t occur to me (because that’s how it is in Cal) to feel hostile towards them because of it, or imply that they should learn Bengali (and make it snappy) if they wanted to be treated decently there. If the non-Bengalis spoke Bengali it pleased us enormously, but that’s as far as it went.
But anyway, in Rome do as the Romans. This is not Calcutta. I shall now switch on Sun TV and try to emulate the hefty heroine doing complicated gyrations in the rain. Then maybe I can reach out to my Bangalore brethren with the universal language of dance! (dramatic stamp of the foot and snap of the fingers.)

The Pros and Cons of a Broken Foot

2008-02-15T05:53:00.000-08:00

I broke my foot recently. Always one to capitalize on an experience (good or bad) for my blog, I thought I would share with my readers the Pros and Cons of a broken foot:

Let’s start with the Cons:

Very few people can really wrap their minds around the concept of a fracture. It really isn’t a big deal; but it is true that a broken foot pretty much incapacitates you for some time because striding about the world with a broken foot, though heroic and indicative of a great threshold of pain and selfless disregard of one’s own health, might not be the best thing for the healing process. So it gets to you when some people say stuff like this to you – “you haven’t BROKEN anything…it’s just a fracture! I nosed around in Wikipedia and this is what it says: ‘Any type of bone break is a fracture. The word break is not used in a formal orthopaedic terminology’. How about I fracture your foot, and then we can sit down and talk about it knowledgably shall we?

Some other acquaintances (most often than not of the professional persuasion) expect you to gaily scamper out of the hospital after the plaster is done and catch a bus to work.
People will give you strange advice like: “Snap out of it! It’s just mental strength that you need.” Right. And how about I then go on Oprah and say, “ I decided I hadn’t broken my foot painfully and walked around the world immediately afterwards to raise money for the Osteoporosis Foundation!” (Accompanied by hurrahs and tearful applause from the audience.)

Then there’s the cast that you have to wear for a whole month. For one thing you had asked for a cream cast so it didn’t clash with your clothes and they give you a neon yellow one when you weren’t looking. Then they say you can’t wet it and have to put a plastic bag over it when you bathe. So to add insult to injury your husband gets you a bright green ‘Pantaloons’ plastic bag which you tie over your bad leg with a rope and hop to the bathroom everyday.

And the itching! Sweet Mother of God you feel like ripping your cast off and raking the skin underneath with your nails. (Two more weeks to go before that’s possible.)

And then there are the obsessive compulsive doorbell ringers. If they ring once you can ignore it…but the moment they ring twice you start to think it must be really important. So you hop to the door to open it only to find whoever it is has given up and gone away on their two good feet. Then when it happens the third time in the same day you start shouting as you grab your crutches and get up: “Aaata hoooooo” “Mut Jaiyyee, main abhi aa raha hooooo” all the while working your crutches like you’re in the special Olympics. After three very exciting minutes for everyone concerned, you open the door to find a very frightened man who had come to ask you to give your baby polio drops. “Can you see a baby anywhere?”, you dangerously enquire, and he backs off and leaves before you can hop within range and club him to death with your crutches.

The Pros, of course, are numerous:
You feel like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. Except that if you DID have binoculars, (which you don’t) you could only have watched a bevy of fat old women hanging their washing out to dry.

Just like there are people who are disdainful of your weakness in the face of a broken bone or two there are others who are wonderfully sympathetic. Your husband spoils you to death, calls and emails come in from well-wishers who patiently listen to your grievances.

A broken foot satisfies both your sense of drama and your chronic hypochondria.

You are not required to do any work around the house and have people doing your bidding when they’re around.

You get some time off from work (despite the daily calls from office: “You’re not coming in today either??”) and read up a storm. You read some books that needed time and patience, which you would never have got around to in the fret and fume of everyday life.

You have the whole day to sit in a chair and think about life, and apart from the people I told you about in the cons, no one will blame you.

And of course, you have one more thing to crib about in your blog…

The Philistine Speaks Out

2008-02-12T00:19:00.000-08:00

Should anyone ask, I would instantly call myself an artistic person rather than one with a scientific bent of mind (please!). But it has occurred to me that either the whole world is (for whatever nefarious motive of its own) seeing artistry where there is none, or I am a singularly tasteless person with nary an artistic bone in my body. The third option is, like so many other things about me, that I am a throwback to a simpler, earlier age.

After starting this blog I’ve realized I don’t feel comfortable with modern technology, I don’t like how people are nowadays (I suspect that would’ve held true whichever age I would’ve been born in), my weight that has made me a pariah in modern fashionable circles would’ve granted me appreciation as a noted beauty two centuries or so ago. And now this realization about art. Maybe I should’ve been born two centuries ago, and been burnt to a crisp by now with my dead 80 year old husband. Would’ve served me right.

Take visual art for example. Paintings. The stuff which is all the rage nowadays and are featured in newspapers simply appall me. They sell for crores and crores, and though some of the colors are quite pleasing sometimes…I honestly don’t see art in the intentionally crudely executed drawings. The distortions are deliberate, childish, and frankly…lazy. I mean, I could draw like that! (I’m of course making a generalization here, there are some pretty cool painters out there still-- I’m talking about a trend.) If you can’t draw straight why be a painter? More importantly, can’t the buyers see that they could just hand their 6 year-olds a huge canvas, a couple of brushes (or maybe not), and a pleasing combination of midnight blue and yellow ochre paint and ask them to knock themselves out? Then they could splurge on a really fabulous frame for the painting, and still save some money to put in the kid’s college fund. Not to mention keep the kids occupied for an entire afternoon.

(Oh yes, ‘Philistine, philistine!’ everyone is crowing by now. ‘Why does she comment on that which she doesn’t understand? Art is not supposed to depict the external but the internal, perspective is a conceit, proportion is something imposed on the artistic few by the majority with commonplace minds. Reality is relative, etc.’ I would’ve appreciated all that if art was a mixed bag, with both realistic and er…whatever schools of thought. But I don’t understand why modern art has to be in most cases..well… so ugly, why a common person has to risk damnation to claim to like it. All I’m saying is art could be prettier. (Shame on me.) It could look more skilled, like the person hailed as the great artist can actually DRAW. And by saying that I know I will be condemned as the bourgeois that I am to the end of my days.

But I’m not the only one, there are a lot of closet realists out there, people who secretly wish to put up beautifully detailed cityscapes, and pictures of ripe mustard fields, rather than tortured depictions of half creatures in magenta with big boobies.

Granted I don’t understand these things, but I thought the main thing about art was to reach the heart rather than exercise the mind. If I actually have to school myself in art to understand and appreciate it, then how is it different from science?

The same goes for music. I felt incredibly old and ignorant yesterday as I watched the Grammies. People, who in my mind were very frankly singing (if you were lucky,i.e, the rest of it was rap) a lot of bad notes and were obviously striving more for volume than tunefulness, got standing ovations. Standing ovations no less. The audience got to their wildly expensive designer heels and put their bejeweled hands together to applaud men and women who came and talked or shouted their way through 5 minutes. Then Andrea Boccelli and Josh Groban sang an operatic tribute to Luciano Pavarotti that, even though opera is not my thing, took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes. Finally, I thought, a performance suitable for the Grammies. But the beautiful people just sat firmly in their seats as if to say “Yawn, singing in tune is so passé. And it didn’t have the word ‘fuck’ in it even once!”

I KNOW I sound exactly like my father here, but that’s how I feel nowadays. I feel bewildered and unhappy that what I find beautiful and touches my heart is considered laughable by all the rest. Admit to liking music by the Eagles, The Corrs, or Mariah Carey’s older stuff and you’re just asking to be lynched in a musically knowledgeable crowd. (Even MENTION Bryan Adams and you’ll have to change your name and move to another town.) I know much more about music than I know about art, but I still have to disagree with the intellectual school who insist that Bob Dylan is a great singer (he can’t sing, people! He’s a GREAT poet.) and contradict the ‘homeboys’ of the other school who swear by Kanye West. (He don’t sing no song, my brudders, he only talk, y’all.)

There is of course no accounting for tastes and I respect that. What I don’t respect is the way people go by herd instinct and claim they LOVE stuff which will make them fit in. That’s what I’m ranting about here. The people who had been touched by Andrea Boccelli yesterday (and I’m SURE there were many) should’ve had the courage to get to their feet and applaud him (regardless of the fact that he couldn’t see them;)) and those who thought Kanye West makes crap music should have stuck to their seats like glue.

And now, I shall put my things in order and write my will, before I die of old age (which sounds imminent) or the pitchfork wielding lynch mobs show up at my door.:)

The Highwaymen came riding, riding, riding…

2008-01-27T23:24:00.000-08:00

So I’ve been dancing around this topic ever since I started the crib. I kept putting it off because, for one, until very recently I had to interact with these people twice a day and felt very strongly about them. (That’s an understatement.) Now that I have some distance I feel I can write more objectively.

For another, they have asked the Government to raise their basic fare and the fare per kilometer and that really got my blood boiling.

Auto Drivers, ladies and gentlemen, are scum. Scum from the lowest reaches of hell. Dante was wrong -- there are actually 10 rings of hell and one is reserved exclusively for auto drivers. (A glaring oversight on his part.)

A month after coming to Bangalore, I was walking down a slightly deserted road at night and couldn’t believe it when one of these worthy gentlemen leaned out of his trusty auto and snatched at my bag. Luckily he couldn’t get a good grip on it and sped off into the night. That was a very appropriate start to what would be a very long and interesting relationship with the members of this profession.

In these 3 years I have been asked to get out (nowhere near my stop) in the coarsest language (sundry times), grabbed (twice), threatened (the exact words were: “I know where you wait for autos, I’ll be there tomorrow.”). I have been cheated out of 100s of rupees, on top of being asked—almost without fail -- to pay more than the meter indicated.

I do not even count among these offences the constant ‘No’s I have had to face whenever soliciting their services. Sometimes it feels like in their frenzy to reject customers, they turn down perfectly lucrative opportunities. I understand that they believe they are striking a blow against the moneyed classes by thus rejecting us, ‘look at who is begging whom now’ is what they no doubt say to each other as they sit back in the auto stands and discuss philosophy. But then maybe they shouldn’t masquerade as auto drivers and take up something more constructive, like join a Maoist group (if it’s not too much hard work.).

The rare few who actually feel like putting in a few hours’ work and consent to take you (they pick and choose customers like the belle of the ball chooses suitors, and as carefully), will always ask for more, stating that where they’re taking you is so out of the way that they would NEVER get a customer to bring back to a more sensible location. So we are supposed to care about how much they earn (or don’t in this case) even after we have been dropped off. Even though they show no such consideration when you are standing in the pouring rain at 9 at night, begging one auto after another to take you home. On one such occasion after some 20 refusals, I remember asking the auto driver in desperation, “So where do you WANT to go? I’ll go wherever you want, as long as you take me…”

Of every 10 auto drivers that come your way nine will reject you (unless it’s a very desirable location like MG road or Commercial Street). But this is the fun bit of it: they declared a STRIKE to protest a night bus that the government wanted to introduce saying it would THREATEN their livelihood. The government actually gave in and it was bye-bye night bus service. They STRUCK work again (which frankly isn’t much different from a work day for them.) when the government decided to introduce the Metro to Bangalore, again because it would ‘deprive them of their livelihood’. It’s like highway robbers complaining of too many policemen on the road “We haven’t been able to surprise any victims! I haven’t cut a single throat in days!”.

Fortunately the government was sensible for a change and didn’t give in to their ridiculousness.

Now they’re asking to raise their fares, and apparently the government is considering it seriously. Hello? What about the fact that they always take more money anyway? Do you think they’ll change their ways just because you’ve raised the fare? How about ensuring they’re not all borderline gundas and thieves before allowing them more money?

And for those people who obviously have never taken an auto in Bangalore, and think this is all a much ado about nothing and that if we just reported them to the police everything will be just hunky dory -- lemme tell you something, you %$#@s. This one time, a friend of mine had walked up to a cop who had seen the whole thing and complained. “Say that again in Kannada and I might consider that a complaint” the good policemen had responded.

So there you are. People here have so taken this behaviour for granted that they simply advise you to buy a two-wheeler when you tell them of your auto woes. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that Bangalore gets an increasingly bad name simply because of auto drivers and refuse to look at the issue as a serious law and order problem. I came across an old college classmate who shifted to Bangalore recently from Bombay. She said she felt awful here and missed both Bombay and Calcutta miserably. On further probing it turned out she was shocked by how auto drivers lived by their own rules here and that she felt on the verge of tears every time she prepared to ask one of these thugs to take her somewhere. “Even normal human codes of conduct don’t apply to them it seems!”

Though I have SO much more to say, I won’t. If I were to give you details of some of the incidents I just touched upon, it would shock non-Bangaloreans to the core no doubt (people from here would just drawl “ I told you to get a two-wheeler”.) but it would take days and days to do.

I should mention that I have met one or two decent auto-drivers in my time here. I consider it a little bit akin to the “prostitute with a heart of gold” phenomenon.

Anyhow, now that I have that off my chest I feel much better, and even better still at the thought that my office cab-system allows me to avoid these rogues like the plague.

Wishing all my fellow-city dwellers similar good luck.

Weekday Mornings

2008-01-23T01:30:00.000-08:00

The most difficult part of a weekday is the morning.( No surprises there.)

1) We have a very zealous garbage collecting system. The garbage people will keep ringing the bell at the crack of dawn and threaten to break down the door if you don’t mollify them with some garbage. So even if you’ve eaten out the previous day and have nothing in your trash, you make garbage (just chuck in a few newspapers) so you can slip them a little something to keep things quiet.
2) Then right when you’ve slipped back into your soft, warm bed and drifted off to sleep again your maid comes a-ringing. I am convinced she counts off ten minutes after the housekeeping people leave. She NEVER comes with them.
3) After you’ve let your cleaning lady in, and exchanged a few heated gestures (pick up a spoon and make a disgusting face to mean ‘it was cleaner before you got to it’ and she points to her nose and then to me to say ‘I completely agree, but what’s your point?’) you slip back between the sheets and promise yourself you’ll positively spring out of bed in 5 minutes.
4) Of course you don’t and the sheer lateness of the hour galvanizes you into activity the next time you wake up. You somehow manage to get everything done (or do you?) and close the door behind you (or do you?)
5) On the way to the office you realize:

· It was shampoo day and you haven’t.(shampooed)

· That’s Ok, because if you tie your hair up it doesn’t show that it hasn’t been shampooed.

· No it’s not because you’ve left your scrunchy on the dressing table. All you have is a pin, so you stick it into the side of your head and check the effect in your little mirror.

· You wish hats were allowed in the office. You consider taking up Islam just so you weren’t miserable on such days.

· After you’re done bemoaning your hair, it strikes you that you may have left the gas on. Did I, didn’t I?

· And the taps? ‘I’m pretty sure I left that one tap running…it’ll flood the apartment’.

· ‘If only I had checked everything before shutting the door’ you think. The door!!!? Did I close the door? By this time you’re ready to turn the car around and head back home to check all of the above.

· Of course you can’t because you have three other disgruntled cab mates looking daggers at your greasy head. (Don’t ask why they do that, short of distributing sweets I’ve tried hard to win them over.)

So you worry all day about your apartment, and only hope the waterlogged rooms will prevent the fire from completely ravaging it. And that the thieves will be deterred from stealing anything with so many natural disasters going on. “Bad working conditions, boys, let’s rob some body else’s house or pick up a few passengers in our autos.”

And then you return home and (in most cases), find that except for some nauseatingly badly washed crockery (note to myself: Point outside the window and then the utensils to say “Those monkeys would do a better job than you!” when the cleaning lady comes the next day) everything is fine with your home.

Aah, home sweet home. There’s no other feeling like coming back to an undisturbed apartment and settling down to your daily fix of TV. Easily the best part of the whole ordeal that is a weekday.

J

For love or for money.

2008-01-21T23:14:00.000-08:00

All of those people who get paid for doing something they enjoy should be hunted down and killed. It’s not fair that ever since I started working I’ve had to CHOOSE. Get paid, or do what you’re good at and have fun with.

When I whine about it everyone claims that it’s the same with them but that’s not possible right? They’re just saying that to make me shut up.

The creative writing jobs come with the assumption that the work is its own reward. That’s all very well, but job satisfaction don’t pay the bills. And the jobs that DO pay the bills make one so miserable that eventually I think there’ll be a psychiatric bill in there among the grocery and electric bills. It’s such a vicious circle.

About Junior School

2008-01-04T04:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to watch Taare Zameen Par. What can I say, I thought it was beautiful. I cried, I laughed, I shook my head indulgently, I gnashed my teeth in rage. It was everything a good movie should be. (and the fact that there was minimum singing and dancing was a HUGE bonus.)

It also brought back to me the hell I endured in Ashok Hall Junior school, right after my family came back from the Phillippines (where I had spent all five years of my life till then.) I didn’t know my own language at all and was also quite unaccustomed to the work pressure in Indian schools. My difficulty with Bengali made me a prime target for a sadist of a teacher (My mind seems to have repressed her name) who thought up the most humiliating and sometimes painful punishments to inspire me to do better. I was given a place at the back of the class, along with a few other worthless children who didn’t deserve to sit close to the good students. I would stay as quiet as a mouse, hoping the teacher wouldn’t pick on me at least that day. But she usually did, slapping me around, making me and the others kneel down inside or outside the class, and when she felt like it, making the ‘good students’ mete out punishments to the bad ones. I still have a friend who was from the ‘good side of the marks’ and had to lead me out of class by the ear, though neither of us talk about it much.

Let’s be honest. I was no angel either, Bengali under this woman’s tutelage had fast become the bane of my existence and I was damned if I would spend one extra minute having anything to do with it than I had to. So to the mirth of one and all I would be kicked out of class for not having done my homework, almost every day for 5 years.

There were several other teachers who were almost as bad as this fiend, if not worse, because whereas I really was a dud at Bengali, looking back I can’t believe that I have come across the occasional history or even English teacher ( I remember a particular Mrs Ohri who took an instinctive dislike to me, which was unfortunate because she was my class teacher for a year and had a tendency to make profoundly spiteful comments in front of a class full of sycophantic students) who tried their best to break any spirit I may have had. Needless to say I was a complete wreck in junior school and spent many an evening after school crying in my mother’s lap, feigning stomach aches every Monday morning, or plotting fierce revenge the moment I grew up.

I hated school with a passion, and consequently apart from the time I spent at home, I would say between ages 6 to 11 I was a very, very unhappy little girl.

It took me four more years and a wonderful teacher in my senior school called Mrs. Anima Bose to change the way I looked at my own mother tongue. She talked to me like I was a human being (of course it helped that by then I was in my teens and teachers hesitated to torment older students who weren’t quite as helpless.) In fact she did much more than that, she gave me respect and convinced me that if I was good at one language I must be good at others.(Turns out that wasn’t true about German..I was awful at it.) I recall one day we were discussing my problem and both of us had tears in our eyes. Needless to say, my Bengali improved almost overnight and I ended up beating the topper in my section in my Board exams. (Again—Board exams are a joke, proved by how I was nearly at the bottom of my class in the English paper. But still, it makes a pretty dramatic point.)

Anyway, my point is this.

I wasn’t dyslexic. I wasn’t too stupid either. A little respect and a bit more attention might have done wonders for a little girl feeling lost and out of her depth in a new country, with new languages, and in her eyes, very unpleasant teaching methods. Instead my school made every day miserable—reinforcing my dislike for school and all things academic until I got promoted (mercifully every time) to senior school; a release from hell.

Once the oppressive atmosphere and daily beatings and humiliations ceased I began to come out of my shell, made some wonderful friends, started doing better, and though I wouldn’t go so far as to say I had a good time—had a tolerable enough time for the last 7 years of school.

Maybe it’s time teachers and the school system began to think how to encourage students to do better, rather than punish them mercilessly, incessantly, for doing badly. Maybe they should enquire why a student is doing badly, and if so what they can do about it…instead of cultivating an exclusive club of ‘good girls and boys’ (I remember thinking they were all teacher’s pets and spies until I grew up) who alone deserve the teacher’s attention.

Maybe we can let our children be children and help to develop their individual strengths (accept that kids, just like their parents, can’t be 100% good at everything) instead of trying to squeeze and beat and slap them into a prize child we can boast about at the next dinner party we go to.

Easier said than done, I can hear people mutter who had the patience to read this far.

I never said it was easy… but it’s the right thing to do.

You had me at Hello.

2008-01-03T01:01:00.000-08:00

What I find profoundly annoying is the way politeness manifests itself nowadays.

Number one on my hate list is the ubiquitous “how are you?” question which seems to have replaced the ‘Hi’ Or “hello”. I’m well aware that the more old fashioned “how- do you do-very fine thank you’ exchange is as old as the hills in the West, but over here until my parents’ time, unless you wanted to really KNOW how a person was feeling on a particular morning you refrained from asking him how he was.

I am a real throwback to an earlier period (not Neanderthal, wiseasses, a little later) and just cannot shake off the habit of responding to a passing “how are you?” with a genuine, well-considered list of the pros and cons in my life so far. “Aah getting along…my back’s troubling me a bit and that fish I ate yesterday was not the best…” and trail off when I see my questioner disappearing round a distant corner.

I have been told by well-wishers I am supposed to say “I’m good.” Regardless of the fact that the fish I ate died of some horrible disease before I got to it. “it doesn’t matter if it’s inaccurate” they patiently explain, “just say ‘I’m good’.”…” No… whether you’ve been very, very naughty also doesn’t change the answer” (a quick roll of the eyes)—“next time just say “I’m good’.

I still don’t get it though…why not just say “hello” then? There is no chance of my saying “my Grand aunt is very serious” if you say “hello” to me, is there? Why trick me into thinking you care only to walk off while I’m showing you my appendicitis scars?

It’s just impolite that’s what it is.

Pearl

2007-12-20T02:03:00.000-08:00

Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in that person’s shoes.

That way, when you do criticize him, you’re a mile away and also have his shoes.

(Not mine, but brilliant never the less.)

The SOB

2007-12-16T23:03:00.001-08:00

Though I find superstitions quite funny, I must concede that some have their uses. Some were created to scare people into a good habit, because we all know that you can’t get a person to do anything by just saying it’s the ‘right thing to do’. Tell him he’ll lose his life savings if he lets his nail cuttings fall to the floor and you’ll see him conscientiously cutting his nails over a waste paper basket or into a spread newspaper. Tell a typical Indian family that a woman is unclean at a particular time of the month and she gets to spend some time resting in bed and not as a glorified chambermaid.

There’s a charming superstition about a ‘Nishi’in Bengal -- a creature that prowls about at night calling people by their name. Once she lures you out she does all sorts of unpleasant things to you, which is probably why children are told to wait for a third call before even considering a suitably worded response. Because you see, the Nishi calls only once, and if you hear your name being called two times more in your Mum’s voice it probably is your mother after all (Who’s probably hopping mad by this time.
Mother to child: What happened? I called you downstairs a 100 times to eat your dinner!
Child: Really? I thought you were the Nishi.)

My own mother told me this story but also explained that this was how people in Bengali villages discouraged sleepwalkers from wandering out at night and walking into swamps or other sorts of very nasty trouble. I suppose if your subconscious has internalized the whole Nishi-r daak story – warning bells will ring even if you are asleep and dreaming that someone you love is calling out to you. Now don’t ask me what happened if your sleeping mind tricked you into hearing a third call. I suppose if your subconscious so wanted you to fall into a tiger pit then you just gotta.

I would like to propose a few more superstitions. (How do you institute superstitions? Does it get passed by Parliament before they’re followed by people? Those clowns who represent us would probably not be averse to a few more of those: the more wrapped up in ignorance we are the better for them.)

I suggest a few; maybe my readers can start up a petition to get these passed in Delhi.

1) If a man pees in public his equipment withers and falls off.

2) People who shout along to songs at concerts get kicked in the groin (accidentally on purpose). Oh wait, that’s not a superstition – that actually happens to people at Scorpion concerts standing to the left of the stage. My bad.

3) If people spit (especially in close proximity of another person’s feet) the evil spit fairy sucks you dry of all liquid (because she believes, quite rightly, that since you’re chucking your saliva about you have no need of it) and you die all shrivelled up and crying out for moisture

4) Diabolical politicians who kill people for sport and for the majority vote don’t get re-elected.

And so on… you get the drift. Draft some of your own, why should I do all the work?
And maybe we can collate all of it and send it along for The SOBs (Superstition Observation Board) to have a look at. With the assurance that it’s common knowledge the Nishi will be spitting mad if they don’t.

Wrong Window Syndrome

2007-12-10T01:52:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who suffers terribly from wrong window syndrome. I feel great empathy for her because it is a 21st century cousin of my more old-fashioned foot-in-mouth disease.

Keep in mind that all of the instances I am about to narrate has happened to the same person, and is 100% true.

The first I heard of her affliction was when she IM-ed her immediate boss on Google talk by mistake. She was rounding up all of her office-buddies for the customary coffee break one afternoon with a “Let’s go for coffee!” and accidentally pinged her boss as well. Her poor manager, thinking that his team members finally wanted to bond with him, replied with a cheery “Sure. Where?”
My friend (shall we call her Anamika?) was annoyed by what appeared a really stupid question from one of her regular coffee-buddies and answered with a curt “What do you mean - ‘where’??”. Only to belatedly realise that she had just asked her boss to join them for coffee. (Never a good idea). “Wrong window!” she replied and fled to where her friends were waiting.

A few months later the whole team went out for an official dinner. And our Anamika had to miss it. The next day she gleaned some information about the dinner from her team mate sitting right next to her. Wisely deciding that the more interesting gossip couldn’t be discussed loudly within the office, she turned to her system and proceeded to pump her colleague in earnest about the spicier parts of the evening. “What did Ron (the Vice-President of the company) say about his girlfriend last night?” she briskly typed out and waited -- all agog for the response. The VP of the company replied with a “hehehehe…” that said it all. She still didn’t get it, and turned to her friend to ask what he was playing at when the truth dawned on her. “Sorry…Wrong window!” she replied and nearly wept from embarrassment.

This story has passed into the lore of the company, and is still discussed over lunch by many.

One would think that Anamika would’ve learnt her lesson, but of course she hadn’t. Just for variation’s sake this time, she SMS-ed her husband one night with a “Sweetums, where are you? I’m hungry and I need to have dinner. Come home fast!”
Of course, you all know she didn’t actually send it to her husband. That would be too simple. She sent it the MD of her company, no less. He sent a message back (you have to give it to these guys for being great sports) saying “I am not Sweetums. And if you’re so hungry fix yourself some dinner.”

One last example and you’ll be as convinced as I am that she suffers from A-grade ‘Wrong Window Syndrome’. Her gang has a tradition of getting a surprise cake for each member’s birthday. (Of course the whole question of how much of a surprise it is when it’s a tradition has been discussed but never seriously considered.) On one such occasion, she and a friend went to pick up a cake from the customary place but found it locked up tight. So they had to make do with an unsatisfactory cake from a rather downmarket bakery nearby.

Anamika came back and pinged another friend of hers about the cake: “Yes, the birthday boy WILL be surprised…by how godawful the cake is!”

Yep, you guessed it. She sent it straight to the birthday boy…

:)

Happy Wedding Anniversary to me!

2007-12-06T20:52:00.001-08:00

Today's my wedding anniversary. A friend was asking what it was like to be married 3 years and together for 8 and I said "Comfortable". We might not have that breathless feeling when we're around each other anymore (unless one of us sits on the other by mistake) but it's nice to know there's someone waiting back home who understands you through and through and doesn't hate you for it.

It's a nice, solid feeling-- having a rock to support you through the nasty times, having private jokes nobody else gets but can provide you with endless amusement to the perplexity of people around you. Being able to show your supremely ugly side without worrying TOO much about it. (If you think I'm moody now you should see me on a weekday morning).

And it's also good knowing that here's one person who would probably tell you what's bothering him before anyone else.

It's comfortable, and dare I say it? Nice. I like Nice.

Happy Anniversary to me! (I mean us.)

:)

:)

Sunday afternoon

2007-12-04T01:11:00.001-08:00

I went for a walk today.

Don’t ask me why, I hadn’t done it in the entire year of living in this neighborhood. But today being a Sunday, and me being spectacularly unfit, and there being nothing on TV, and nothing amusing on the net, and the protagonist in the novel I’m reading having just finished her third suicide attempt (all of them unnecessarily complicated and painful…she should’ve just thrown herself off the roof and left the municipal authorities to clean things up, what did she care?) I was getting a little bit stir crazy. To stop myself from getting into a fistfight with those people who consider bell ringing a fascinating hobby (ooooh! What does THIS pretty button do…?), I decided to take my sneakers out of retirement and hit the road.

Blue, blue Bangalore sky; cooling breeze; new secret paths to discover on a Sunday afternoon. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? In this new spirit of adventure, I struck off on a kuccha road I’d never been through before. Two minutes into my walk a couple of two-feet high children attached themselves to me and proceeded to imitate my walk behind my back. They tired of that soon enough and ran ahead of me screaming ‘akka, akka’. (Note to myself: Does ‘akka’ mean ‘Beautiful stranger’ or ‘Grandma’: look it up.) They were very sweet and I would’ve squeezed their cheeks but for all the snot.

But soon the way they dogged my steps in the empty streets seemed most sinister and I wondered if these miniature thugs concealed any weapons on their pint-sized persons. I accelerated--just a brisk trot, I don’t run away from three year olds-- and decided to stick to the more familiar roads.

Past a pack of belligerent looking dogs lying in the dust of a side alley and I was on the big highway I knew. Much better. I strode purposefully on for a few minutes straight into a thicket of men standing around, scratching their crotches.

“Poor woman” I could hear them think, “she obviously has nothing better to do and no man to be with, look at her wandering around on a Sunday afternoon. Ah well, nothing a quick squeeze to the tushy can’t fix! Let’s see if this Kannada song doesn’t cheer her right up!”

I headed on towards my goal (the bus stop) after doing some nifty footwork to avoid my newfound admirers. Once there, I turned around and headed back for home. “Aah there she is! I KNEW she liked this song!”

By the time I got home the toes on my right foot had curled into a tight ball to stop the chafing against my shoes. (Note to myself: Can one’s right foot grow after its 28th birthday: google it.)

But I was feeling great. My mind was clear, the cabin fever was gone, my blood was circulating, and it was GRRRREAT to be home.

The coolest one!

2007-11-26T05:25:00.001-08:00

How cynical you are is how cool you are.

I’ve found in literature down the ages characters who luxuriate in their own sense of being worldly and jaded. To be cynical is to know all there is to know, to be a person of the world. One who belies a sense of enthusiasm about something new is somehow vulgar, a cad.

And this is a very true to life. I have been a few places by now, done a few things. And from college onwards I have encountered a species of people (who usually travel in packs – the ‘in crowd’), who seem so booooored with the world. Like if something didn’t happen soon they’d just dieeeee of boredom. And the more gauche among us would watch them and wish they could be as bored as them. Because like it or not—it’s cool to bored. Cool to slump in your chair with a pissed off expression like you’ve seen all of that before. Run to them with something you find novel and exciting and they’ll look at you with sleepy eyes and sneer ‘Oh thaaaaat.’

Brrrr…it was so cool you could hardly stand it. But somehow try as you might, you could never manage to be half as unimpressed by the new stuff that happened around you. Especially in college, everything was so new, so exciting. ‘It’s OK not to attend classes? ARE you freaking serious? Am I actually using the word ‘freaking’ without being beaten to a pulp by my teachers?? It’s so wonderful I can barely think straight!!!’ Relay such sentiments to the one or two cooler people you knew and they’d stifle a yawn with thinly veiled contempt.

But on some level, I’ve always pitied them. Though not the most cheerful person at the best of times, I still can work myself up to a high pitch of excitement if something seems interesting enough. Almost a decade after I attended my first class in college, I still get all obsessive about a new book (most recently – Harry Potter) to be released, wait breathlessly all week for the next episode of whatever serial catches my fancy at the time, gush endlessly about how much fun a particular holiday destination is regardless of how passé it might have become. I still go into rustic tourist mode and gaze at famous landmarks (ask my friends and family) with my mouth very frankly open.

I pity them because these are the moments which make life worth living. If I couldn’t be thrilled about a good looking guy across the room giving me the eye, or my husband (I hasten to add) making a sweet gesture unasked, then life truly would be banal and brain-numbingly depressing.

If I refused to enjoy the fun moments of life and smothered it all with ‘Oh my God, how passé is that!!.’ Then I might as well blow my brains out before boredom did the job for me.

Clothes undoeth the working woman

2007-11-22T02:30:00.001-08:00

In my earlier office, one never had to worry in the morning about what to wear to work. Since there was no dress code and not too many people who cared what they wore, I was comfortable. I would slouch into office almost everyday in jeans and sometimes flip-flops to be extra daring.

Now Monday to Thursday one is expected to be in formals, and on Friday --‘smart casuals’. So though a lot of the time I manage to plan enough ahead to have both the the kameez and its corresponding salwar washed and ironed at the same time, it sometimes happens, usually by mid-week, that the whole process goes awry and falls out of sync. So I’ll have a reasonably unwrinkled kameez but its salwar will be dripping sadly on the clothesline outside. Those are the days you sigh deeply and prepare yourself for the ordeal ahead.

For one thing, the sight of the wet salwar outside is a signal for you to start trying on your formal trousers again, in the hope that you have miraculously lost weight since last Thursday and/or the button has miraculously attached itself to the front of your pants while it lay in the closet.

You try on your other outfits –you look too fat, too squat, too poor, too much like a cow in all of them. So you eye the one decent kameez (note to the men in my audience—a kameez is the top and salwar is the bottom in a salwar-kameez set) lying on your bed and you decide that it will just have to do. So you start trying on different salwars on the off chance that one of them matches your kameez but you’d just never noticed earlier. After trying on an appalling array of clashing bottoms you finally settle on the one that clashes the least.

By that time you’re late and tired -- and have just seen the most horrible color combinations in your mirror. So you pick the least offensive one.

Of course by the time you’ve walked into office your indifference to how bad your outfit is has worn off. And it doesn’t help that people keep darting alarmed glances at your legs and hurry away as though bad dress sense is catching.

So you spend the day writhing with embarrassment, darting behind tables and potted palms to avoid the inevitable shocked gaze from colleagues. You swear you will plan all five outfits over the weekend, and dazzle all with your sartorial elegance henceforth.

That is of course till Wednesday morning comes along again and you trudge wearily to the closet to try on those trousers.

Tips to tackle telemarketers

2007-11-21T23:42:00.001-08:00

Though I completely understand that it’s just another way to earn one’s bread and that in most cases it’s not their fault that they’re tooth-achingly annoying, let me just say that next to autodrivers and bollywood comedians, telemarketers are the bane of my existence.

They’ll call you faithfully right in the middle of a tense meeting with an irate boss, or on a Sunday afternoon when you’ve just got to sleep after a heavy meal.

Yesterday I got a call that went like this:
(Trrring trring)
Me: Hallo? (I would love to have a more stylish way to answer the phone like “Good morning, Ushasi speaking” or just “Ushasi” in a firm voice with a hint of the sensual. Nothing erotic, just enough of it to make an impression. But in the excitement of getting a call I always end up with a high-pitched “halloo?”)
Which is just as well because it turns out to be a call from ICICI bank offering me a personal loan. (Where are they when you actually NEED the loan?)
Telemarketing girl: Who am I speaking to??
Me: You called ME, why don’t you tell me who you are? (A hackneyed but valid question.)
T.G: (Her bank spiel)
Me: I’m sorry I’m not interested right now.
T.G: Oh, OK. But could you tell me who you ARE?
Me: My name’s Ushasi Sen Basu.
TG: Usha what?
Me: Exactly. Tuh-tah!

Today I get a call from Barclay’s Bank.

(Tring tring…humor me on this…I’m trying to write it like a play.)
Me: Us…er…Hallooo?? (Drat! Foiled again, will practice in front of mirror tonight!)
TG: GoodmorningmadammynameisPeskyCallerweareoffering blah blah blah yadee yada yada talk talk talk…read at terrific speed straight off a typewritten page somewhere.
Me: I’m sorry I’m not interested right now.
TG: (SLAMM!!!)

Wow. That really brightened my day. Guess what Barclay’s bank…you’re never getting business from me.

I have a senior at office who was brought up in the US, so has an American accent. Whenever he gets one of these calls he simply says “You’re calling America!” and wait politely for the person to have a minor panic attack and hang up.

Maybe I can try that. “very sorry Pesky, this is Bangladesh...” and hang up quickly before she beats me to it.

Someone once told me that a friend of theirs says completely outrageous things to telemarketers: “Since you’ve called I had something to sell as well. I have a divan that’s just slightly used…”

Apparently he gets 100% results.

2007-11-21T23:39:00.000-08:00