Don't be a chicken... cross the damn road, will ya!

A few answers to that eternal question "Why did the chicken cross the road?" from the men and women working towards making the world a better place for all creatures:

• Rahul Gandhi: I have asked our state units to induct chickens en masse into the party, so that they can take my message across the street after they have crossed it safely. No, there are no Dalit chickens that I know of. I love cuddling them all.
  

• Mayawati: I am ordering my men to erect my statues on all busy thoroughfares, so that the chickens may hop from (my) handbag to (my) handbag till they have crossed over safely.
  

• Raj Thackeray: Chicken is an English word... I will NOT have these alien creatures hopping across the roads of Mumbai! Jai Balasaheb.... err, i mean, Maharashtra!
  

• Karan Johar: I apoliogise to all chickens who have been offended by anything I might have said that might amount to their motives being called into question. My next movie will be a heartwarming story of a chicken's undying love for the road. It will be set in "Mumbai". (Did you guys get that?) Rajji will be there to bless us at the muhurat. Only chai will be served. What's Koffee?
  

• Maneka Gandhi: Karan Johar is making a movie with real, live chickens! Is the cast vegetarian?
  

• Shilpa Shetty: I'm a veggie, and can balance a bhindi on my washboard tummy. I would like to invite all you chickens to participate in a new reality show being produced by my bankfriend... uh, I mean, my boyfriend...uh, fiance... Raj Tundra... uh, Kundra. In the end, the chicken that can cheer the loudest for Rajasthan Royals will be ferried safely across the road in my new car.
  

• Ratan Tata: For every 100 Nanos I sell, I will give one to chickens so that they may never have to cross roads on foot again.

• Medha Patkar: Dam the chickens! Uh, I mean don't build dams... so that all chickens may swim freely to the other side.
  

• Shah Rukh Khan: Kkkaunsa chicken? Kkkahan?

• Salman Khan: There's a chicken on the road? Screeeeeech..... Oh shit!
  

• Aamir Khan: Chickens sometimes cross roads. DON'T KILL THE CHICKEN. It's Ghajini you want. Don't kill.....

now I'm bored and there's work to do... ok, end of timeout... so, over and out. More later if I feel inspired (or bored) enough.

PS: Look at Aamir's glistening six-pack, and remember to drive safely, y'all!

Tattle for the sexes

Who can forget Meg Ryan's very real tribute to the fake orgasm in When Harry Met Sally, or its slightly varied encore by Katherine Heigl in The Hard Truth? Now, if that wasn't enough for men and women to sit up and take notice (for different reasons, obviously), here's something from The Guardian today that made me smile -- nay, giggle -- while primly pretending to read the NYT on weather forecasts...no, atmospheric pressure rules... no, climate change negotiations, methinks.

A rather hilarious article about a new, (revolutionary?) book tells us Why women have sex. And the reasons, girls, are a total of 237 (an odd number and, yes, like the author of the delightful piece, I gave up trying to decode its significance).

Here's a sample:

• for "genetic" and "resource benefits" (so you'd sleep with a misogynistic hot dog and, if his boys don't swim fast enough, you're likely to run off and marry a celery stick of an accountant with that mansion in the suburbs)...
  

EXHIBIT A, my lord: "Jane Eyre, I think, can be read as a love letter to a big house." and B: "that is how Bill Clinton got sex, despite his astonishing resemblance to a moving potato. It also explains why Vladimir Putin has become a sex god and poses topless with his fishing rod."

(Yessss, of course... that is why you don't hear starving Russian matrons complain, do ya?! The men? They's still taken to gulags)

• for charity... "women 'for the most part, are the ones who give soup to the sick, cookies to the elderly and . . . sex to the forlorn'."
  
• (Ahh! men are still milking that lost-puppy-needs-a-warm-bed-and-loving-care routine! did i hear you say dog?)
• for love... "Love is apparently a form of 'long-term commitment insurance' that ensures your mate is less likely to leave you, should your legs fall off or your ovaries fall out." (sigh! how romantic...) simply put, "if people don't have love, terrible things can happen, in literature and life: "Cleopatra poisoned herself with a snake and Ophelia went mad and drowned."
• to spread the joy... give men who might have/have the potential to break their hearts... STDs! and sundry other reasons to remember us by...
• for loose change... promotions, money, drugs, revenge, a new car etc etc etc
• to even the odds... Well, since "there isn't this huge pool of highly desirable men just sitting out there waiting for women", we girls make do somehow.others "liberate desirable men from other women? We 'mate poach'." and how do we do that? "We "compete to embody what men want" – high heels to show off our pelvises, lip-gloss to make men think about vaginas, and we see off our rivals with slander. We spread gossip – "She's easy!" – because that makes the slandered woman less inviting to men as a long-term partner."

And then here's a line that might make sense... or not: "Take that, Danielle Steele – you may think you live in 2009 but your genes are still in the stone age, with only chest hair between you and a bloody death."

Now, tell me, how many of you (women, of course) have sat wondering....why can't he see through her? She's just using him...? I'm guessing all of us at some point or the other...

But you know what? Men know they're being played, but the game is too addictive to give up. And why should they?

Its a neat little set up... the good girls get their heart broken by bad boys and marry the good guys. The bad boys finally tire of the bad girls, act all reformed and marry the good girls.

Then the good guys marry the bad girls, cos they make their bland life look cool...

Later, the bad girls and the bad boys sometimes break free from wedlock, get together again and in the end, the accountant FINALLY marries the behenji. THE END.

So, the bad boys and good girls and good boys and bad girls are back on the market and it all begins again....

Phew! That's all very well then. Now, before you start wondering about my affiliations in the story... don't. I'm still figuring it out for myself. Lemme see... hmmm... sometimes good is bad and the bad's the best.... and the bad is bad and the good beats the rest... or maybe not.. oh, forget it!

it's all good... who wants to know why?

But ladies, before we start celebrating these new revelations about our ability to be more men than men, (and men think they've finally figured out women), we should sneak a peek at the bottom line again: women still need a REASON to have sex.

Most men just need a woman.

PS: See, we had you all figured out ages ago :)

Anchors aweigh...

It's flashing on the screen, that frozen hue,
when new was old and the old anew.
The memory of a day long ago,
when about almost nothing there was much ado.

Skip to the part that I loved most,
when this silly heart ran from pillar to post;
and found the beat that matched its step;
swaying to song, more drunk than most.

The music's soured and so has the wine;
oh! my sorrow so sweet, my pain divine:
Must we part ways and not look back
to when I was yours and you were mine?

But the sunrise beckons, I must not stay;
let go, dark night, and don't think of me this way,
for I'll be leaving now and won't be back;
Anchors aweigh! anchors aweigh...

Jo jeeta wohi bandar?

I remember the time when I was in primary school and the highlight of the winter term used to be the Fancy Dress Competition. While my mother strove, year after year, to dress us up in style, her inventive ideas never seemed to go down well with a small-town jury. So all those bandages, which took her hours to bundle me up in, and the anaar juice that I was supposed to dribble down the side of my nervously clenched jaw through lips that had to open just the right amount for preventing the 'blood' from becoming a bloodbath, came to naught.

And that was because inventiveness never won a fancy dress. Real recognition and accolades lay only in conformity, which ensured that the competition would be between clones of Rama/ Sita/ Hanuman, the madari and the sabziwali, diffident dakus or heavily made-up princesses and frilly fairies. The beaten path was where you would probably not be beaten. Really.

I mean, really?

In fact, the trauma of NEVER winning has made me suppress all thoughts of that (rigged, I tell you!) competition. I even forget what I was supposed to be doing on that stage in bandages with pomegranate paan-type substance for company. Well, at least by the end of the show, I was feeling quite like the bruised-and-battered-got-hit-by-a-truck type person. Or was that what it was? Utter humiliation, I tell you, compounded by the realisation that I was unlikely to ever own a properly kitschy costume, other than a shroud conjured from a generous donation made by an uncle's nursing home. But my mom refused -- and I repeat, REFUSED -- to dress me up as a gopi or gowala, arguing that it was just too blah to be so predictable.

Well, to be honest, I used to often worry about being different from the bansuri-dhari Krishna avataars and all those runny-nosed Radhas with the risque make-up, feeling like a misfit amidst all them clones and clowns. But as I reflect upon those awardless contests (rigged, I tell you!), and juxtapose and triangulate my mom's faith in the extraordinary with my now-practised ability to somehow fall off the beaten path, I think I was a bit too hard on myself.

But yes, it did help me get others things straight. Like hide my mortification in a crowd, even as I can't bother with hiding my age, while holding the much-humiliated ol' head up high as well as that 6th drink... and I feel strangely rescued. From conformity. From anonymity. And from the fear of just being myself. Strange, but I guess I kinda' feel on top of the podium right about now :)

Shoe! Go away now...

Yes, yet another shoe post. There are a number of factors that conspired to lead to this moment. The one that refuses to shoo-off from my head is the deteriorating nature of political discourse in this lofty nation of ours. A few examples: the fluctuating age of the grand Old Party aka the Budiya-gudiya Congress; exploits of the Great Lotus Slayer and its thirst for chopped-off Islamic hands; doodh ka farz and mamta ka karz (or, if you're in Bengal, then Mamata ka curse!); lauh purush versus duh-uh purush; full-frontal assaults by shifting Fronts (and their sequels: Left, Right, Third, Fourth and so on...); all of which portend to the sad fact that, despite the multitude of issues begging attention, our politicians are beggaring off in a more personal direction.

Keen watchers of action replays on TV channels might have observed that, as a seemingly direct result of this, the means of protest in this country are roughly keeping pace with -- and thus deteriorating in direct proportion to -- the intellectual level of our leaders. In other words, its all down to ground level and we're merely lifting things off that ground to throw in protest. In the last few days we have seen the shoe, like a heat-seeking missile, being lobbed off in the general direction of our Men in White. But, even as we bear witness to the birth of a new form of political protest, somehow, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to make fun of what's going on all around me. (Including the slowly sinking reality of zero increments. Ah, but more on that some other day...)

So, while I can't help but admire the calm with which PC dodged the fallout of that flying Reebok, I can't say the same about young Naveen Jindal and his reaction to an old man's worn and dusty equivalent. Before I say anything further, I have to admit that though I ain't a great Congress fan, and basically keep an equally healthy distance from all things political, I have been keenly observing the Congress's youth brigade march to, what I was hoping would be, the beat of a hip new drum. Cool, calm, collected and above board: is that too much to ask of a generation of leaders who claim a certain sophistication in pedigree?

So, while PC sought moderation in his appeal to disregard "the emotional actions of one man", while promptly forgiving the shoe-thrower, young Mr Jindal's response can, for the lack of any sophistication on my part this time, be only called dumb. Or stupid, if you prefer. Also, annoyingly arrogant. Ok, so the poor old man had had a bit of his daily tipple. The fact remains: he was poor. He was old. And his son had just lost his job. So, he lost it. But what about Mr Jindal? I'd say he merely lost a bunch of votes, along with his perspective, that was hurled out along with the shoe that found its way back to the thrower.

Allowing party workers to beat up a poor old man, a retired teacher to boot, for an angrily flung boot that (SADLY) missed its mark, and then acting all prissy about it could certainly have been PC's prerogative -- since the shoe was flung directly at the Indian State, by virtue of its target's position as the Home Minister -- but in this case it reeks of spoilt brat behaviour. Whatever happened to youthful tolerance?

So, in light of all the above, I say... If the shoe fits, throw it!

Living in PC times aka Mera Joota Hindustani

The shoe was bound to reach Indian shores sooner or later and who better to pioneer this particular brand, in the mother of all adaptations (a cheeky sneaker), than that most enterprising of races: sadde apne Sardars!

In a characteristic move that is reminiscent of the waves that hit distant shores in search of a better life, a Sardar has, once again, gone and done what few have dared before. The joota is no longer Japani, Iraqi or Irani but unmistakably Hindustani.

But what I can't get over is the target: PC ?!

I would have expected shoe throwing in India making its debut with a Kolapuri or two being hurled at Balasaheb and his kin, by an out-of-work-and-threatened-by-extradition-to-the-Northern badlands-of-UP/Bihar job-killer cabbie;

Or, a heart-shaped silicon breast finding its way onto a stage hosting that seemingly heartless bachelorette lacking the mother's bosom - Mayabehn(ji);

Or, the reluctantly shaved off beard of Mohammad Salim, the schoolboy at the fuzzy centre of a 'Talibanisation' controversy, being tossed at that chikna chubby little national security threat - Varun;

Or, some tortured goat's milk splashing the ooooozing-with-motherly-love Maneka the goatherd Gandhi;

Or, even a previously-failed Agni miniature, with US spare parts this time, being nuked off to Manmohan;

Or, for lack of anything else, some pasta al dente daintily landing at Sonya Madam's feet...

But for a sneaker to whizz past PC's right ear? He didn't even have to duck, man! Well, the only thing I can say about why that able and willing representative of India's greatest martial race missed his target is because it was PC. I mean, the man does not inspire a shoe shower somehow. If it was his useless predecessor's well-oiled-and-combed pate at the end of the flight path... now, that would make for a fine landing! But dhoti-wearing, eco-jargon spouting, legal-eagle PC?

So, I'm thinking maybe this was just some harmless target practice, for which the 'braveheart' has promptly been bestowed with a hefty bounty, courtesy Siromani Akali Dal. Boy, they sure live up to their acronym! Anyway....So near, yet so far, so good. Which brings me back to the most important question: who will be next? Bets anyone?

The Great Indian Vanishing Act

Hours would be spent rallying the parents for just one quick peek, backed by days’ worth of impeccable behaviour. Friends, neighbours and cousins would be enlisted to rustle up a respectable number. And finally the much-awaited day would arrive. Armed with various goodies (yes, we all did carry a mini-picnic basket everywhere in those days!), and wide-eyed with anticipation, we would make our way to the end of town, where a magical world awaited.

Upon entering the colourful tents fluttering madly in the breeze, the awful stink and jostling crowds would fade away, the half-opened bar of chocolate forgotten and the cold Gold Spot in my hand would just sputter and fizz out, as I watched the delights unfold within that cramped space. The stale air would resonate with the roar of animals, mixed with loud yells, whistles and hoots from the audience.

For such was the magic of Baby Jyoooootsnaaaaa! Now, till this day, I have no idea if the said Baby Jo (of Amar Circus fame, if I recall correctly) was the nimble little lady who comfortably fit into the mouth of the hippopotamus or Lady Hippo herself, but the name and the flourish with which it was announced are burned into memory, the words as clear as if it were yesterday. Sadly, though the memory survives, the origin of this childhood fascination is dying a slow, painful death.

For, almost 130 years after the circus as we know it first made its debut in India, it’s slowly fading into oblivion, hit by rising costs, ban on the use of wild animals, animal rights activism and the rise and rise of malls, multiplexes and amusement parks. Though it continues to exist on the fringes of some little towns or neighbourhoods, its days as mainstream entertainment are definitely over, barring a miracle.

I read somewhere that only one-fifth of Indian circus troupes are still around, and those too are barely hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Sadly, while we are enamoured by the latest state-of-the-art stunts in mobike advertisements, there seem to be no takers for those with the real josh who would spin their deadly motorcycles round and round in a metal globe suspended from the ceiling, while we craned our necks to marvel at this great feat that we would never get to see on any street. Suitably called the “Chamber of Death” or some such fearsome title, the guys who dared to enter it were the closest you got to cool!

In fact, it seems that this generation has no idea that King Khan was once part of a very famous circus group! On TV. Way back in 1989. In the hugely popular telly serial Circus, on Doordarshan. And the audiences lapped it up. Just like we slurped at our melting ice-creams, awestruck and trying not to cower as the lions and tigers were brought on stage, nearly jumping out of our skins every time the trainer cracked his whip nearby. There were no cages as the magnificent animals strutted their stuff, while doing strange antics with footballs and hula hoops and what not. And those growls...

Then there were the brightly dressed ladies with their sequined ballet tights and heavily made up faces, who swung with both grace and uncanny ease from ropes strung a mile high, or so it seemed to us little ones. The ease with which similarly bedecked male trapeze artists caught the swinging ladies brought forth gasps and claps in equal measure.

Now I often hear the same gasps from those who think that a circus is the greatest exploiter of both animals and humans. While that may be true in part, a circus troupe is also a great community –bridging the gap between master and animal in its larger-than-life magnificence. It’s sad that an art that has the potential to lift us above the ordinary – without any computer-generated tricks or big ticket stars – is slowly disappearing in India, while it continues to sizzle in newer forms in some countries.

The world-famous Cirque du Soleil (French for ‘Circus of the Sun’) has given a modern twist to the good ol’ circus routine. Without animals on stage or performing rings, it is a fusion of circus styles from around the world and its daily show in Las Vegas alone draws a crowd of thousands each night! Maybe I'll catch it someday soon, after having passed up the chance once... But how I wish I could magically transport half its success back here, and then maybe get to see a real smile on those sad sad clowns with the painted faces.

Holi-er than thou

Slippery stats, eh? Not as slippery as I was planning to be this Holi. Alas, it's back to the boonies after three long years, where the family awaits with open arms and an open-er bar, and bucketfuls of colour and melodrama. Tradition has it that to make a right honourable splash on Holi, all members must be truly sloshed! So, here I am, setting sail for yet another dip in the holy (vodka and tonic) water.

I guess I'll have more than my fair share this year. The fact is: I'm suddenly petrified of Holi. Yes, its the same me, who used to give the local pests a run for their pichkaris. I simply loved the darn festival! Come to think of it, what's not to love?

You wake up (sometimes with obscene drawings on your face, if you're familiar with boarding school rules), oil yourself up like the reigning champion of the akhara, check the ammo, attack first, at random, and make sure that the first strike leaves enough for the others to retaliate (poor strategy, but it's Holi dammit! How would you feel if no one threw anything at you?), then you run around like a headless chicken for the next few hours, blindly ducking missiles you can't see, briefly stopping to re-hydrate with some chilled beer and re-energise with sweet squiggly gujiyas (clean ones; we're bhang-averse, for some strange reason, the origins of which are rather hazy now), till you stumble into the shower in an exhaustion-cum-liquor induced daze, only to scrub and clean furiously/half-heartedly (depending on your state of inebriation), till your heavily-depleted sobriety helps you to stagger into a clean bed that's sure to later bear the scars of many an unholy ambush, as retaining traces of these are gonna help you stagger back to office the next morning, armed with tall battle tales of a wet'n'wild one...

Which would probably help to distinguish you from the pseudo-types, who ever-so-gently-profess: " Oh, Gawd! I just can't stand Holi... I'm allergic, you know... it's so rowdy and pointless... Diwali is so much more civilised... only organic, homemade gulaal for my little ones this year... we had a few people come over this year for a quiet lunch at our farmhouse... the city's maddening, with all those people running around drunk and uff, those loudspeakers with the rang barse crap... it's so scary and stressful... and people just don't leave you alone! Don't they know all that colour can make you go blind with cancer?? "

Phew! Just thinking about all of the above makes me feel old. Because I can't believe what a rowdy I once was, and equally can't believe the dowdy I'm turning into.

Holi cow! It's almost time for the office party in the "backside" parking lot. Now where's that excuse I was looking for??

Hey daam!

So, Gandhiji's glasses have finally found their way home and all true patriots are busy rolling out the red carpet for Bapu's chappals and feast the return of his katori thaali and what not. And here I am, indulging a rather traitorous thought. What's the big bloody deal?

Now, as for the rest of you who are true Gandhians, you must forever fly Kingfisher to repay your eternal debt to the Baron, its soaring prices and plunging necklines be damned. All is forgiven, brother. Much beer under the bridge. After successfully acquiring Tipu Sultan's sword, Vijay Mallya seems to have won another bloody battle by snatching joy for a billion plus, from right under the hammer in just a wee minus 2 million. Wah wah, Mallya! Taaliyan Taaliyan...

But the government, never missing the bandwagon, was quick to climb aboard, huffing and puffing, with some heavy duty self-patting on the back - the very same one it had almost turned against the Mahatma's memorabilia, for fear of being taken to the cleaners. In fact, I am quite surprised the bidding stopped at 1.8 million. I mean, Mr. Otis could have cleaned out our entire foreign exchange reserves if he so wished! What's a few hundred billion when national pride is on the line, man?! Won't you bail out your own father? And this little guy is the father of the NATION, duuuuude!!

Alas, my conspiracy theories have met a sad, lonely end. There was no mysterious bugger planted by the Pakis to proxy bid, no Zionist cabal to make a dog-in-the-manger India think that the Palestinians were rigging all counter bids, and (sigh!) no national crisis in which all the Indian maa-behens were asked to take off their gold and load it onto a ship leaving for American shores. No mass mela of charkha weavers who maniacally started weaving right into China's lead in textile exports. Life's so darn unfair! We're back to sqaure one and community service on Oct 2nd, on a holiday that still unfairly eludes a few.

Finally, I couldn't help but think that had poor Bapu's soul, may it rest in peace, been hovering over the auction somewhere, watching Sant and Toni bid away - the might of firangi butter chicken pitted against desi beer - might he not have gasped yet again and hollered "yeh daam????!!"

Our Rah-Rah man!

So, we've lived through the biggest anti- anti-climax of the year, definitely bigger than when George W. Bush flew away from the White House in that chopper, without any shoes being rocket-launched from American porches at the departing bird. Though that is not to say that he didn't get the bird from all those on the ground and glued to their TV screens, who let out huge sighs of relief. Apparently, taken as a whole, they were loud and loaded enough to power our next mission to the moon!

More on that some other day. For now, its on to what is probably going to be the ass-saver of the day for the Indian media, most of whom had written their own scripts and acceptance speeches way before we grabbed all that gold, and by "we", I mean "we", Brit claims be damned.

What if Vikas Swarup had not writen that book? What if Loveleen Tandan had cast Johnny Lever as a "naye zamaane ke jailer" instead of the brilliant and suitably sardonic Irrfan Khan, or that eternally bugging Aditya Narain as senior Salim, or (heaven forbid!) Amitabh Bachchan as himself? What if Anu Malik had crooned a "baarish" number in his desperately smoky voice, set to a hat ke maha-'original' score, with Pinto and Patel getting jiggy with it at the suitably grand Grand Central or Paddington tube station? Actually, what if there was no Bollywood at all? And, WHAT IF there were no (at least a fraction of a billion?) Indians glued to their screens to boost the TRPs of a show that saw its lowest audience ever last year!

The strains of Jai Ho! are echoing through the entire floor I work on from countless TV screens tuned into a myriad channels and my brain's about to short-wire. How we hop skip and jump from event to event with matching anthems. If Chak De was the clarion call at the Olympics, and Singh is Kinng captured the short-lived triumph of a smiling, V-flashing Man-Mohan after he won/lost a few hearts with the nuke deal and the trust vote, Jai Ho! is our war cry as we get set to invade Hollywood.

Oh, I'm definitely proud of AR Rahman and all that, but he has set abysmal standards as far as acceptance speeches go... indirectly proportional to the magic of his music. I mean, Resul Pookutty is my man! Sweet little thing. He probably had less reason to rehearse his speech but definitely more passion than Rahman, who was a poor match for the elegance of his sherwani. And of course, there was Sean "almost-PC" Penn, and Danny "Pooh" Boyle, and Robert "I so still love you" De Niro with his crackling introduction of Penn's gay gambit for yet another Oscar.

I had some to drink last night so missed the early morning red carpet stuff and barely caught a bleary-eyed glimpse of Mrs. Mummyji Rahman. Cho chweet, bringing mummy to the Oscars and all that, nah? By the by, has Piranha Pinto let go of Poodle Patel's arm since the Globes or not? Oh, of course, she must have... for she was a presenter too!

And with kitschy pink ghagra cholis in the backdrop, and Rahman exhorting us all to soar, was it any surprise that poor futuristic Wall-E got trapped in Bolly-in-the-hood while his mushy anthem got lost in the cacophony of desi fushion cheer? And now I'm entering the ramble-strip of all blog posts... enough said. More when I recover from the shock of this anti-climactic, oh-my-Gawd-we so-believe-it orgy of celebration. Clap ya' hand over ya' mouth in shock and awe, y'all, and talk about dedicating your life to world peace... we won!

Jai Ho and Rah-Rah man!!!!

♪ ♪ Sab ne pehna di chaddi... ♪ ♪ ♪

I am not sending them perverts a pink chaddi.... and this has nothing to do with the fact that I am petrified of posing for photographs, for as I write, there is a photo shoot in progress where all our in-house chaddi chuckers are posing with the package.

Now, there is no way I am parting with any of my killer pink underwear for the under-developed morons that populate the over-hyped misogynist Senas of the world.... but to go all the way and buy one to send out? Well, now THAT is what you call a moral dilemma! What to buy? Cotton comfortables from your neighbourhood store or uber-sexy unmentionables from the lingerie store downtown? I know I speak for a lot of women who parted with their panties this week, for it all boils down to one thing: what does you underwear say about you?

Now, I am willing enough to wear my slip on my sleeve, but I am a bit petty about what I let peek. So, do I want to make a general statement or a much more specific one? Hmmm... now which chaddi to send?? The luxe, lacy one, or the one in the corner of the dresser whose elastic has reached the point of no rebound, but which survives as a sentimental souvenir? Do I inscribe it with little hearts? What perfume do I spray on it: the floral for the demure or the spicy for the saucy? And what should my message read like? Love you hamesha? Or... Kutte!! Mein tera khooooon pee jayoongi?

The problem is that the chaddi campaign seems to be taking on the avatar of a snob hit. Much like Dev D, the psychedelic psych-fest I quite enjoyed this past weekend. For there's a whole lot of grey amid the pink. I'm fiercely independent, jealously guard my privacy and right to be and love the odd pub-hopping night out. But do I think that the next time I have to leave my favourite watering hole well before the guys, as it is 'getting late and I need to drive home alone', the thought of Muthalik and his Morons sniffing a carton full of lingerie is going to make me throw caution to the winds and decide to linger? Or maybe that the next time I hear that old hat about "ladeej who drink and have cigrate", all I need to do is strangle the bastards with a pretty pink peignoir and all will be well?

Above all, what I find a bit baffling is that by christening the FB group that started it all a "Consortium of Loose, Pubgoing... blah blah", i.e taking two steps back in trying to take one forward, they might have lost the plot way before they hit the climax. I mean, isn't that the same connection those cretins made? So, are we throwing them the gauntlet or throwing away the game by beating the issue pink, instead of ignoring those ignoramuses and truly painting the town red?

Oh, its all very well, I suppose and maybe I am just pissed cos I couldn't strike a pose while finding the heart to part with my pretty pink polkas! So, for now, I'm holding on to my chadds and getting the hell out of here. Man, I need a beer. Aye Ganpat....!

Tathastu!

Imagined conversation pieced together from what was supposedly overheard at a corner coffee shop today:

Dilli Billi One: Slumgod (sic) Million-air dekhi? Lots of awards it is getting, I tell you, it is being nominalised for Oscar too. Rahman is thee God.

Dilli Billi Two: And Anil Kapoor is so so ignored, and now he is all over the world as famous star. Look at what ae generous speech he gave at that Soggy (SAG?) award function... giving credit to the little childrens... so down to the earth, nah?

One: Did you see the way that Farida Pinto girl was sticking to that Jamal ? I think she is wanting to have ae role in thee haystack with him.

Two: But he is so little. She is like his big sister, and our Indian culture would not allow him to make hay with her.

One: Talking of Indian culture, what is with this Ram sena goondas beating ladies at bars? Thank thee goodness we are coffeetotallers only.

Two: But did you see the clothes those girls were wearing? In Delli you will not get antry into ae pub with so so plain tee shirt and pant. What pub was this??

One: Maybe this was media plantation to make some hype. They are very nosey peoples who keep filming thee people beating people, burning people, smashing window, breaking door, wagairah wagairah and just keep filming and filming.

Two: What do you expect them to do... They cannot put their hands into the law!

One: I don't know, no one seems to be putting their hands on anything (except that Pinto!), only their noses are going everywhere.. Anyway, why are we not attacking Pakistan?

Two: Because we are waiting for ae big country like America to take our side, so we can beat them together-together.

One: Oh, I suppose we have to collect more of thee evidences to convince Mr. Obama.

Two:I know! I mean just look at the bad luck of our country! On Sunday only they have catched two Pakistani terrorists who was asking for directions to India Gate to attack the camels and hathi in the parade. One had a big guns sticking out of their shoulder-bag which he mistook into a dhaba to ask for guide map from man who also was ae police informer and who sent the policemans to chase behind them, but the poor terrorist could not ask for help from Pakistan because they had forgotten to bring their pre-paid mobile! Oh no, I only wish they were having mobile with them and then we could have traced the calls to Karachi and give some more evidences to the America country.

One: But I heard that one of thee man made dying confession that he was Pakistani? That is proof no? I mean like it is happening in movies when dying mother is telling thee son who he is to take the badla of her death from? No? Anyway, I am saying we should just drop thee bombs on them and seal thee borders. All this frandship train and peaceful bus is making trouble... i tell you... bas!

Two: Tell me, do you think they have the girls who go to bars there?

One: I think they are not drinking country. So, tell nah, do you think Slumgod (sic) will get thee Oscar? I am praying in temple tomorrow for thee worldful success of our stars from slum.

Two: I also am hoping to get ae Oscar final time! May be then we will get the evidences that we are great country and America can see we are being serious enough on the worldwide stage to attack Pakistan that is tormenting terror on our soils...

Hmmm......Tathastu!

Retro roadtrip

Long time, i know.

So, tell me, have you ever found yourself stuck in an elevator between floors labelled ‘their times’ and ‘our times’? Let me give you a hint. It happens when people begin sentences like “In our days….”, and you end by saying “But that is so retro!”, or whatever is the expression these days. As I inch towards the real grown-up-hood, I am horrified to find myself in unfamiliar terrain. A year ago, I had gone back to my school for our half century of existence. While visiting my old dorm, I discovered that it had become a holding house for the new kids. So, when I said hello to one of them sitting on the bed that used to be mine, she asked me what batch I was from. 1993, I replied. "Oh (she giggled) Ma'am, I wasn't even born then!" Uh, oh....

Suddenly, terrifyingly, after years of making fun of someone else's purana zamana I am smack dab in the middle of a triangle: two sets of yesteryears (shockingly, one of them is my own!) and the here and now. And for the first time I realise that “their” world couldn’t have been so bad. Because mine rocked!

The other day, while watching the promos of Chandni Chowk to China (shudder! shudder!!) where Deepika Padukone in her Chinese avatar as Miss Meow or something goes flying over the heads of a few dozen extras, I felt I could relate with some of my parents’ nostalgia for the good ol' days. In an age where most action movies are shot in the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style, with action sequences involving invisible suspensions, I must confess that sometimes I miss the sound of the loud dhishoom dhishoom of Bollywood, which often came a few seconds before the punch or a wee bit after, and is now hopelessly lost in the glamour of gaudy gizmos and surreal special effects.

Well, thanks to dear old Doordarshan, my earliest memories are pretty much a jumble of bi-weekly Chitrahaar (kind of like half an hour of Channel [V] Zabardast Hits of today but only twice in a week and with no repeats); the original Mahabharata in which an arrow took an entire episode to reach its target; ad breaks that were actually more fun than the actual programme (really!), the melancholic DD tune instead of the dhinchak ....

This was what we called "popular entertainment" (though I wouldn't go so far as to count krishi darshan, which is when my educator-turned-son-of-the-soil grandpa hogged the TV!), till Atari video games came along and I lost my measly popularity due to extremely poor hand-eye coordination. Unable to make a snivelling chicken cross the road in one of the popular versions, I quickly becoming semi-famous as the ‘chicken killer’, baptised thus by mean neighbourhood car crashing champions. But then what seemed to me a most violent game in “those days” now seems almost like the Gandhian avatar of some of the more bloodthirsty digital games that are popular “these days”.

Here’s the thing. The familiar images have been switched and there’s change all around me, and I am terrified of losing the old impressions. Microwave cake-mixes are in, but I miss the messy, tedious and infinitely long process of baking one in the oven, along with my super baker sister (who has grown up to shun all culinary activities!) and tasting it all the way from the raw, eggy muddle till the gooey mid-bake version.

In fact, I can't fathom some recent phenomena. So, while reading about Barack Obama’s aversion to low-slung jeans, I wasn't not too sure whether to rejoice that I have something in common with the groovy US President, or feel sad for the poor dad who’s heading for a somewhere-in-the-future couture clash with his young daughters!

But I guess as far as fashion is concerned, “their” times continue to visit “ours”, what with wedge heels, tight churidaars and big shades flitting in and out of fashion. Pictures of my mother in bell-bottoms, and dark glasses larger than the flare in her pants, come to mind and then so does another thought. How, when I was growing up and arguing with the parents about dating and such like, I would try and imagine them on one. Yes, they did date in those days, but I guess it’s kind of difficult to imagine people who were once iffy about your dates going out on one of their own.

So, in my mind, it went something like this: it would begin with a Coca Cola (now better known as Coke) worth a few annas (which came in quaintly shaped baby bottles and not shiny little "my" cans), and zip around town on fuel worth… hold your breath… a single digit. This was followed by a movie in the “balcony”, or the “upper stall” if tickets were tight, and a quick lunch (dinner was perhaps off-limits), and probably rounded off with a hand-in-hand stroll in Lodi Gardens or any other not-in-the-neighbourhood green patch.

Now you may wonder why I would foist such a dull outing upon my parents. But that’s just it! All that surrounds us tints our reality, making it difficult to imagine another world, a world that can only exist on celluloid or in the fading images of a past we insist was just a teensy bit colourless than our own. So when young nieces and nephews ask me about growing up, they are often left stunned. What??!! No cable TV? No Internet? No emails? No malls? No PSP? No CCD or Barista? You’ve got to be kidding me! No mobiles either???!!!! And I say that some of this was a bonus really: no mobiles, plus landlines that seldom worked in the homes of a select few - not anyone I wanted to know - where we could be found by the hounds....So what exactly did you guys do those days?

Uhh... ummm.... we got along... well, kinda ;)

PS: How else do you think I have those great stories for the grandkids?!

XXXxxxx...... mas is here!

It's Christmas and I am getting just a wee bit nostalgic.

I don't like being away from home, and not being able to hang my smelly socks in my parents' loo. Come to think of it, that's the same reason that I'm not too happy being over the big Three-Oh. I mean, if I was to hark back to a fuzzy yonder and put my smelly socks up in gleeful anticipation, some people might think it to be a sign of either late retardation or early dementia.

Whatever you may think, I miss that happy little custom, though I'm sure Dad (Ooops! I mean, Santa.. nudge nudge, wink wink!) must be heaving a sigh of relief, year upon year, and sending a prayer to the North Pole that his pesky kids don't get extended Christmas breaks from their quest for bread n wine to come knocking on his loo door anymore. In any case, by the time the tradition tapered off, as we flew off to faraway Christmases, in pursuit of our dreams, he had started stuffing crisp notes in our not-so-crisp discards, and everyone woke up happy on Christmas morning.

I just remembered... Why did I never get that xylophone I pestered Santa for ... in fact, it's the one item on my list that failed to find it's way into my stinky stocking, year after disappointing year. Maybe I gave him too many OR... OR... options, in neat alphabetical order, and we never did get to the X? Hold on a sec, did he never bother to read the entire list EVER, always stopping at A??? No wonder I got Appalacian springs water, Aroma candles, Alcoholics Anonymous t-shirts, Apple flavour ganja, Aamir's headband from QSQT, Anil Kapoor's chest hair.... etc etc, but never the damn Xylophone! Too late to start a backwards list, you think? Sigh..

Then in boarding school Christmas came a month early as we kickstarted the cheer before leaving for the winter holidays... Sweet ol' Mrs. John would dress up as Santa and come riding through the dining room at dinnertime, throwing paan flavoured sweets and orange candies all around the benches, while I stoically refrained from lunging at the goodies, given my strict rule: "Thou shalt not get excited by free food", the one thing I never did outgrow, despite having joined a profession that frowns upon such terribly non-aggressive starvation-by-choice type behaviour. Most journos, like lawyers, should suffix three letters to their names, L.L.F.... a.k.a Long Live Freebies! Me? I'm a stubborn fake.

Sometimes I think of the way Christmas is changing and will continue to change over the years, as we Indians clumsily embrace it in a giant bear hug. I just heard of a bakery, with branches in the Punjoo heartlands of Karol Bagh and Rajouri Garden no less, which offers the best Christmas cake in town. Imagine that, amid the chhola bhatooras, tikki bhalla papri chaat Roshan di kulfi and mixed froot joos, and you know that here it's a very Brown Christmas. Oops! Have i crossed the LoPC - the Line of Political Correctness?

Can you think of a PC X-mas? Santa would have to either shape up or ship out. And I mean that both literally and figuratively. See, we can't call him fat, for that would amount to outraging the sensibilities of the weight-challenged, and even if we addressed the reality suitably, these high cholesterol, hypertensive, junk-the-junk times that we are living in demand that he start sending out a more.... errr.... be-FIT-ting message to the mortal millions. Maybe we could help by putting out digestive sugar free cookies with some soy milk for the ol' man.

A more svelte Santa? Nah.... But then do spare a thought to those poor reindeer, lugging him and the presents around. Animal rights, shmaminal rights, you say! I say maybe it's time to start demanding e-vouchers to cut down on shipment costs and give the red-nosed one and his friends a break. Besides, global warming will soon ensure that they have no snow to run in and the given the abomination of, and social censure attached to, parking in the PH spots, Santa'd have absolutely no place to park his sleigh... unless he's willing to pay the congestion charges up there and the MCD's overnight rates down here. Ah, the sleight of fate!

And finally, do you really think it's advisable to go shouting Ho-Ho-Ho in the streets these days? But then the proof of the (Christmas) pudding is in the eating right? Go try it, I say!

Oh Oh Ohhhhh......

Merry Christmas, y'all ;)

We, the 'notion'

I’ve been too upset to write. Smile even. How would you feel if armed men barged into your living room and took you hostage; merely because you were pig-headed enough to allow those responsible for your security to make you believe that no one could get to you at home? It’s what I have been feeling ever since I turned on my TV on Wednesday night. Enraged. Helpless. Vulnerable. Violent. Violated. And intensely stupid for allowing things to get to a point where a bunch of sadistic men could drag a country like ours down to its knees.

In the last few days, I have sat at my workstation as blaring televisions and uncaring news anchors wove a tragic web around what I consider as the most serious affront to our nation, unable to go through words that needed my attention, yet unable to tear my eyes away from the events (and their reportage) long enough to have a good cry. I have sat stunned with friends who, with their eyes brimming with tears, have variously screamed obscenities at politicians of all faiths, the central government, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu apologists, Pakistan, the intelligence apparatus and even defunct metal detectors and dopey security guards. But somehow I can’t shake off the feeling that the blame must lie collectively with all of us who call ourselves Indian. It’s all very well to blame Pakistan and lament the futile inhumanity of terrorism, but we have enough self-goals on the board to disqualify as the deserving citizens of a mature democracy. Without any help from the Pakis. And this is our wake-up call.

I ask myself this. How can we blame our leaders for politicising terror, while we continue to allow incendiary politicians to ghettoise us against those with whom we don’t share a caste, state or religious beliefs? Can we really blame the electronic media for allowing crucial rescue operations to be compromised, even as we are so apathetic that accident victims lie on roads for hours while we all try to overtake ambulances carrying critical patients? How can we blame terrorists for leveraging the indifference of a nation, while we continue to feed the frenzy of 24 hour news updates, yet don’t report swerving drunks flashing beer bottles in cars to the nearest police post for potentially endangering lives?

How can we completely dismiss the notion that some of our own might be involved when we all have, at some time in the past, argued with or thrown big names and petty cash at a policeman simply for violating traffic rules? How can we theorise about porous borders while we continue to balk at security checks in public places? How can we blame corrupt and inefficient politicians even as we continue to think that it’s okay to not vote for all the difference that it won’t make? Most of all, how can we allow ourselves to forget that this has happened before and will happen again, lest we forget.

Through all the despair, the courage of ordinary people, doing what they do best – whether it is protecting, defending or serving others – is what I wish to choose as my enduring memory from the horror of the past days. In fact, I was most struck by a statement made by a British gentleman who was rescued from the Trident/Oberoi. After praising the hotel staff for their courage and service, under fire, he said something to the effect that it is this Indian spirit that the tourism industry should flaunt as its USP. I use the word 'spirit' in as far removed a manner as it has been (ab)used by our impotent politicians. I speak of it as our only hope. For the tragedy and loss is not Mumbai's cross to bear alone. Nor is the ‘spirit’. And that is something we tend to forget too often.

A recent personal experience has made me realise that neither the arrogance of ‘this can’t happen to me’ nor the confused vulnerability of ‘why me’, can shield us from what lies in store, or prepare us for the tough battle ahead. Sadly, we in India have chosen for too long to be victims of both.

Say, what! But.... obviously?

There are questions that people sometimes ask, the answers to which should be obvious (duh..uh!). But, for some unfathomable reason, aren't to those who so infuriatingly continue to ask 'em. Sample some of these, as also the real answers they deserve, instead of the usually baffled and slow "ye...aaah":

In a movie theatre:
Q: Heyyyy, are you also watching the movie?
A: You think? Actually I've just followed you here so I can stick my much-chewed bubble gum in your over-sprayed hair. And I hear the popcorn's low fat. Gonna carry that back to watch Seinfeld re-runs at home, right after I stick your head onto the bucket seat.

In a shopping mall:
Q:Oh, hi what are you doing here?
A: Hmmm... Nothing much. Just here to push some kids down escalators, right before I wire the underground lot to explode once I exit. And I hear Balaji's holding auditions for their next Baa the Agelss at the ground level. My gawd, have you registered yet?

On a flight to Goa:
Q: Hi, Where are you guys off to?
A: Dunno about you, but this plane's going to Waziristan. (Oops have I said too much??) Ummm... err... excuse me.... oh blast it all.... where the hell is that plastic fork I lifted from the salad bar?!!

At a wedding:
Q: My God, do you also know these guys?
A: Not really, just that the groom and I sort of go back a long way... We were, like, co-kidnapees a while ago, and we both suffered from the Stockholm syndrome, you know, fell in love with our kidnapper and had a kinda' threesome and all that. Oh, but that was a while ago and as you can see we've all moved on... BTW, he's at Guantanamo now.

In the maternity ward:
Q: Omigosh, you're having a baby?
A: Not really, I was abducted by aliens and held captive by mutant lizards. They visit me sometimes and only go away if I steal a new-born baby for them every once in a while. And the tummy? There was this strange thing they fed me on Mars....

At a high-priced sold-out cricket match:
Q: Oh God, do you like cricket too?
A: No, No. I'm actually working for PETA these days and am monitoring Harbhajan Singh. Just here to watch out for any verbal abuse involving Symonds... oooops! simians, I mean. Ah, miss those good old days when people would just stick to calling fat Pak captains a starchy veggie... These animals, I tell ya'!

And finally, what is it with people who respond to a humbly offered "I'm sorry" with an arrogant "You ought to be!" But I just said I am... Oh, bollocks to it all!!

Grouchy and hungover

Since I slept only after six in the morning and was at work, bleary-eyed and beery-fied, by 11:30, I suppose I could very well have left it at that, but then there's more where that came from. So, here goes my Gripe of the Day:

The very same evening that you decide to snip off your talons, AND drink a gallon of beer at a pre-wedding party, why is it that the naara (cord holdin' it all together!) of your salwaar will always-always somehow manage to tie you hopelessly up in knots at the exact same (inopportune) time that you have finally found a moment to unshackle yourself from the mind-numbing, yawn-inducing stories of leech-type relatives/acquaintances and hit the loo? Why, pray? Why?

Head-on collision with one embarrasingly damp salwaar avoided successfully, and that too just in the nick o' time, you will hear a sonorous "Ah, there you are!" just as you make a beeline for the safe confines of that dark li'l corner where similarly beseiged co-sufferers have taken refuge and are discreetly waving at you to make a dash for cover. Alas! The three-inch heels have ensured you are a head taller than even most of the men in the room, AND you gave up hunching along with your braces in the 9th grade. Would I coulda done the same with civility....

So while I'm having a whale of a time (sans replenished beer mug in hand), listening to yet another story about how Master bada shetaan hai! Bunty is such a wholesome, delightful little moppet, since he can dance to "Haai Pappi", chant the Gayatri Mantra and look up women's skirts with quite the same aplomb, I've reconciled myself to my fate and am now thinking this:

Why doesn't India have anyone in the government who even remotely looks like David Miliband?

Little solace and a quantum of disappointment

So, as you can sort of guess, I have crossed over, from the bleak ranks of the unfortunate few who have still not seen the new Bond flick, on to the other, not-so-happy side. Bond or bust? That was the hottest topics of debate in our daily meetings this past week.

Now i must say that I'd like to take a Buddhist stand on it: that of the middle path fame. Neither loved it nor hated it, drooled as usual over craggy Craig, wished I was born in the Ukraine to a Mr and Mrs Kurylenko and like any hot-blooded Bond buff, was mighty upset about the absence of all those flashy gadgets from the latest edition.

C'mon all you Broccolis or whoever at Eon!! Who wants vegetarian sophistication (an eco-terrorist?? Oh, puhleeeeze!), when we can have all-you-can-endure red-meaty kitsch?? You can get a measure of my frustration that when Mr. Bond handed out his visiting card to this guy in one scene, I fully expected it to blow up in the dude's face, even though I knew this was a much-used old trick from the annals of spying :)

Also, James has somehow transformed into Jason. Of the Bourne fame, and while you can assess the quantum of my longing for another Bourne show here, I can't make-do with an altered version of my favourite spy to scratch that itch! You see, it's to do with all that visceral hand-to-hand combat stuff, where our James is busy killing with more than just his roguish charm, which he seems to have dropped along the way, together with his penchant for shaken martinis. And Danny Boy's surely earned my name for him: Bond. Thames Bond. Ooooh, icy.

Still, I like my Jameses different from my Jasons. So in the next one, let's see some more of your tools, boy! ;)

God, an Old Lady, and the Word

I did the unthinkable last evening. I swore in a house of worship. That too on the biggest b'day bash of the year at the said house. Sort of, ummm.... because I was, partially, pissed off by a Rep of the Order. I had reason but perhaps no justification. Yes the two are different.

There is this (hopefully not too blasphemous, and certainly NOT made up by me) joke about Lord Hanuman, in which a Surdy claims that the monkey god was one of his kin, making the rather irrefutable argument that no one else would have been that eager to set his tail on fire in another man's battle against the man who kidnapped his wife. In other words, you neither get the babe nor the glory. And THAT my friends is what happened to another Surdy.

So, a security guard wouldn't let this old lady's car up the ramp. Apparently because such guards are always under orders from the powers that be to brook no resistance whatsoever from those who aren't happy with the basement parking lot, and here no distinction is to be made between kids on roller blades and tottering old aunties.

Unfortunately for the guard, while I was dutifully parking my car in the dungeon, I saw a couple of cars go up the ramp, with no distinguishing features whatsoever that indicated the reasons for this horrid man's preferential treatment, and was instantly enraged about the plight of the old old Auntyji. So even as the nasty man in ill-fitting uniform brushed aside the weak protests of the faithful old pilgrim's kin, I took it upon myself to argue her case.

Very politely. But then it got ugly. Rapidly. He shouted. I lost it. And so I turned to another man in holier uniform. Only to get an unholier shock when he told me to stop lying in a place of worship, saying that no cars had gone up the ramp (i could see them even as he spoke). Then he made matters worse by informing me that his conclusion was the only correct one and that its authenticity was based solely and surely on the fact that he was drinking a glass of "holy" milk, on which he kept his hand and swore. Yes he did. To imply that only the truly depraved would doubt such an oath, which should be treated as being purer than the cream in his rapidly cooling cup, and more unquestionable than the integrity of our politicians.

And that's when I used the 87+13-96 letter word. In my defense, it was mumbled so far under my breath that i could hear my one ear saying to the other "Eh, did you 'ear that??". (Sorry, terrible one.) But HE knows I said it. And it was HIS birthday.

I'm sorry I spoilt your party with my momentary lapse in judgement. Just don't hold it against me. I promise never to help any old, defenseless ladies ever again. Unless asked by them specifically, on a sworn affidavit signed by the Pope. I swear. Shit. Cancel that one too, please. Thanks, I do love you. And I know my way of doing that is not in any manual, but then that's why you created only one of me.

Phew! Thank heavens for that, eh? :)

Some kinda blue

I looked outside my window this morning only to see that the smog's come early to Delhi this time, becoming thicker as the day wears on, and choking the pale sunlight, till nothing remains but the dusty olive outlines of past-monsoon trees. The world looks like a laminated photograph, made timelessly grainy by its faithfulness to the forgotten wall to which it clings.

Driving to and from work on such a smoggy day, I feel much like an impatient puppy trying to get out of a grey sheet thrown on it by a bunch of frisky kids, one who's heart is just not in the game, and who emerges from its unwelcome, raspy cocoon only to listlessly whimper back inside and snooze after discovering that its tormentors have forgotten all about it anyway and moved on to play "ice-pice"at the neighbour's. Yeah that's what all us kids called it way back then (and probably do) and yes, that's exactly what a smog filled day in Delhi feels like when you're just ever so slightly sad, and can't pinpoint the exact time of, or reason for, being hit by the weepy wave.

I feel treacle-tired, like you would get if you were to wade through a stream of treacle... your limbs feel syrupy and all you want to do is either let the sweetness lull you under or over to the other side: the one that's waiting for your warmth starved soul like a hot shower and a plate of eggs, sunny side-up.

I do believe the sun's on the other side of this moony Monday and till it's back peeping through my window again, I guess I'll just have to rustle up a reverie to cheer myself up and out of my melancholic meanderings. Hmmmm..... Bahama-mamas on the beach anyone?

The wrong end

Unlike Terminator (who is robotically programmed to warn of his return), but very much like Delhi's dengue (with its element of "surprise", year after bloodsucking year, season after unprepared season), I'm back.

Tough luck for those of you who thought the squeak had been silenced for good. C'mon, don't be greedy. You only get to say goodbye to one freak this week, and George W. Bush has a head start on the packing. So, as a welcome present to myself, I present to you......

The Ridiculousest Quote of the Day.

(Note: There always are more than one here, in our great nation, on any given day. Yes, we are blessed by the Gods of the Gab). Here goes.

"Each part of the body has a certain use and if it is put to some other use serious injury is certain and this is happening. If an act is unlawful it cannot be rendered legitimate because the person to whose detriment he acts cannot consent to it. No person can license another to commit a crime".

This was the ingenious argument advanced by Mr. B.P. Singhal, a former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader, while arguing that homosexuality.... brace yourselves................ can result in grievous injuries. As if the Indian law is not bizarre enough, we have seen a profusion of beyond-belief arguments to preserve its sanctity.

And what exactly was that again? Let's see:

"Each part of the body has a certain use..." : I guess he's hinting at Himesh Reshammiya. Right notes (hmmmm), wrong orifice. But perhaps someone should also tell Mr. Singhal to keep his money far far away from where his mouth is, and put the latter to ... umm... er... better use.

".... and if it is put to some other use serious injury is certain...." : I don't think any "grievous injuries" have been reported from the hallowed corridors of powers, where many of Mr. Singhal's ilk walk around freely spewing smoke from their rotund rears.

".....and this is happening." : Ever heard of a Ms. Lorena Bobbit? She found out her husband was putting a key body part to "some other's use" and inflicted some "serious injury" with a kitchen knife. Ouch!

"If an act is unlawful it cannot be rendered legitimate.... " : Bushisms, anyone?

".....because the person to whose detriment he acts cannot consent to it." : Really? We have been consenting to politicians like these to what should very much be our collective detriment for years now, but look at us. Even the yummy Daniel Craig has said that he wanted the Indians to see his new movie before the Americans do. Imagine that.

"No person can license another to commit a crime" : Early release or not, has the man never heard of James Bond or his MI6 approved high level clearance license to kill?

As for me, I sure have, so I'm off to oblige Bond. Icy Thames Bond.

Sssssslurrrrrrrp.

Time-bomb mein twist hai

A wise man (my sister's husband & thus ever more wise because he married her!) made a remark the other day, the thought of which has made me chuckle a few times already. He said, and i quote, " Ever wondered that there would have been no Hollywood but for the nuclear bomb, and there would definitely have been no Bollywood without the time-bomb?!"

Come to think of it, the most horrifying plot in almost all of the jolly good Bollywood pot boilers of yesteryears (a fine tradition that has morphed into quite another thing with the use of sophisticated gizmos and gadgets) centres around the time bomb. Various unsuspecting innocents have been the shikaar of this ingenuious device, planted on their persons by the oh-so-devious baaaaad man.

Some Fuzzy Flashes:

The partially blind mother, who has only just realised that the mysterious blood donor who saved her sorry ass after she came under the villain's car is her long-lost son, reappears on screen with a bundle of disco-light emitting sticks strapped to her eternally maternal bosom, weeping silently into her tattered saree pallu while saying this to her son: meri chinta mat kar beta, isko iske kiye ki sazaa zarror dena!" (Don't worry about poor ol' me son, just kick ass! For i only gave birth to you, while he wishes to give you DEATH!!)

The said son finds himself in the same room as said mother after also being mysteriously informed by the said villain's sidekick that "tumhari maa, aur uski hone wali bahu hamare kabze mein hai, unko zinda dekhna chahte ho to Aravind Adiga ke pachaas hazzaar pond lekar bangley par aa jao" (you mother an her future daughter in law are in our lecherous keep; if you want both of them to atttend your upcoming nuptials, for which you have already booked the pandit and the bandwallah, get us Aravind Adiga's recently won Booker booty at the bungalow, ASAP!)

No address is given, but our wily protagonist, tired of keeping tabs on the two women by now anyway, has also mysteriously managed to locate the said bungalow, carrying what looks like .... did he also find a time machine to travel to London and back? did Adiga actually give in so easily?.... but it's only a Louis Vuitton bag stuffed (they don't know it yet) with the clothes he plans to take to the Bahamas with him. But more on that later....

So the swashbuckling son arrives to find his love-disinterest trying to wiggle out of the chains that bind her, in the process of which all she has managed to actually wriggle out of is half her clothes, while Mataji has been trying desperately to shield her jhopdi ki izzat from the roving eyes of the raucous sidekicks with said tattered saree, all the time working gingerly around the time bomb that's loudly ticking away like a large pendulum clock.

Enter son. Loud cries of hope and fear pierce the impending doom of the time bomb. The beady-eyed boys attack him one by one, each patiently waiting his turn to be disposed of in a tangle of kicks and grunts.

As Jack Nicholson says in A Few Good Men "Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You..?", and here in Bollywood we live in a world that has rules. Yes, rules, my boy. And the keepers of those rules are men with country-made guns smuggled from neighbouring Nepal. The cardinal one being: "Being the evile scumme of the earthe, thou shalt not fire thy katta but once, and then only one at a time, ever-patient till the chosen one has sent your homie flying out through the flimsy walls, with a mere belch."

Getting back to the story, suddenly, there is a loud roar and a burst of evil laughter, as a gaping hole opens up under our as-yet-unvanquished-and-unscratched hero's nimble feet and he is swallowed up even as the ladies in captivity let out loud shrieks of Nahiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin (Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo way! Now what??!!), and in the very same instant, the heart rending screams drowned out by a visual treat of exploding saree and tank top, played in slo mo, over and over again. A horrific The End.

Whaaaaat? You killed the LV bag, you philistine??!!

I know what happened, but, for now, I leave that up to you. All you who are still loyally reading this crap, send in your entries and i will carry the one that pays a befitting tribute to the brilliant logic of Bollywood storylines....

And now i can hear somethin' a tickin' back here. Time to get some work done. Make me proud, ppl! What do you have to lose except your sanity?

Of mares and men

This past weekend, i shopped. Ate. Drank. And survived, In fact i'm almost feeling human after a long time. Through a drunken haze, i noticed two things i've probably never paid much attention to before.

1. Most Chinese restaurants in Delhi (those which are not safely ensconced in pricey all-stars) have a paan shop right outside them. Huh?
2. The volume of squealing children in the park on a Sunday evening is directly proportional to the intensity of your early evening hangover. Aaaarghhh!
   

Is that really a horse?

Nope. Probably the missus.

Which brings me to two random observations from Indian baraats (wedding processions). One, about the use of ghoris (mares). Why the female? My uneducated guess is that since the event marks the beginning of a journey in which the female is most probably going to be carrying your shit around, it's time to learn how to place your trust in the species, while riding, nearly blindfolded, amid exploding firecrackers.

Sit tight while others enjoy the ride.

Two, the bandwallahs alway play "Yeh Desh Hai Veer Jawanon Ka" (This is a nation of brave young men), right after the groom gets ready to vroom towards his fate. Why that particular song, I used to wonder, till a wise woman enlightened me. Saying something along the lines of 'blessed are the brave who take the plunge into the murky waters of matrimony' and all that.

But i think it's because none is braver than the one who has entrusted his life to a spooky old mare, well knowing that the wedding party is carrying a bag load of crackers, perhaps enough ammunition to blow up a mid-sized nation. But then that's just me. What's life without some murky waters, eh? And besides, if the shit gets too much to carry, all you gotta do, girl, is to just rear up those hind legs :)

Penultimate Paranoia

.. is a new term i think i have coined today. Do pardon me if it already exists.

Penultimate paranoia (P2) is actually the fear that you feel when you are watching the tail end of your favourite TV series. It's the fear of the unknown. The fear of not knowing what would eventually fill that particular weekly spot once the series actually ends. And the fear of never finding one nowhere near as good as the one bidding you farewell.

Being penultimate in nature, this particular fear hits you only at the very end, just an episode or two before the curtains come down. In extreme cases, this fear is said to coincide with season finales as well. And might manifest itself, unnaturally, even while watching rented re-runs. The phenomenon is not confined to television alone. Ask any Pottermaniac. As someone who has not read a single Harry Potter (i know. bite me.), but who waits anxiously for the movies, i am already entering the paranoid zone. It's time for the second last in the series to be released, and after one more, the supply will end.

I am also branded by Bourne. Jason Bourne. As the amnesiac agent swam away from his killers in the very last scene of the very last (or so they say) movie, i couldn't help but feel depressed for days. I feel Bond diehards have an unfair advantage over fans of characters who cannot be re-incarnated in different shapes and sizes of sex appeal, while retaining the oh-so-groovy Brit accent. Bond's universal appeal and the eternal stream of Bond movies have probably made "The name's Bond. James Bond." the most rehearsed lines in front of the mirror, probably with the actors who have played the the sizzling spy leading the count. I know i've said them out loud oftentimes, occasionally without even bothering to replace the James with Jane :)

P2 has various other avatars, as i am slowly discovering. Like the fear of gobbling up the very last sausage too fast before you take a vegan pledge. Or the strangely psychotic expression on the faces of would-be quitters while puffing on what they swear (yet again) is their last cig. Or the feeling you get on the last evening of your insanely expensive, once-in-many-many-many-years dream vacation. Or even the very last bite of that exotic cheese from an unpronounceable European village with the magic cows, which someone charitably decided to partake with you. . .

I must stop now, for i am paranoid about discovering any more things that i don't yet know i am paranoid about!

Oh, and the TV couch awaits with that season finale. Time to break another Bond.

Designed to torment

Certain things have been designed by the wrong people. And given their unchallenged monopoly, the torture continues.

Take most toilet bowls for example. Definitely the brain wave of mean men. So while their kind can safely direct the flow anywhere for a smooth and silent spray, we women continue to shift our bottoms endlessly, and in vain, but can never get to the bottom of the matter - how to pee noiselessly. Highly embarrassing on a first date 'at the pad', especially if it is a bachelor zone designed for awesome acoustics. Or if you are unfortunate enough to answer a call you thought was from a harmless fellow sufferer, but ain't, smack dab in the middle of a can't-hold-it-any-longer loo break. Ouch!

Then there are sinks/washbasins which are definitely the creation of midgets, conducive to being placed only at certain heights. Tall people: use at the risk of your back giving out as you bend over, nearly double, trying to get that toothbrush under the tap, while nearly buckling at the knees to take a look at your mug, in all its morning glory, in the mirror- the top of which probably reaches shoulder level. I'm gonna get one that I can look at even in six-inch heels. Will definitely remember to keep a platform for all you li'l ones out there, and given the origins of my misfortune, don't any of you dare to throw that old "heightist!" at me.

Or take low to medium-budget cars. I mean if you have a lot of money and can afford the fancy life off the road, then why is it that you get to also afford the fancy, gadgeted-upto- its-eyeballs car as well, since chances are that you ain't gonna be driving any of them in the first place? So what makes your lazy driver - who snoozes the day away in the air conditioned parking lot - more deserving of crawling the traffic in luxury than a multiple degree holder stuck in the world's lowest paying profession, who is a hard-working, wide-awake, caffeine-supported self-driven car owner traversing the long distance between the office and home in a car with the shortest distance between the wheel and the clutch? Design for the deserving destitute, for they actually drive these things! Split the costs. Anterior luxury interiors for the poor; plush posteriors for the shamelessly undeserving backsides. At no extra cost. Socialism with a twist, much like a certain view of the American bailouts. Fair play, i say.

And finally, the female form. And i don't mean the un-average type. I am specifically referring to the average one that, if left unattended, begins to self-destruct in no time at all. Men at least need to down a requisite number of pints to even get close to losing the battle of the belly, or cross a numerical threshold for the hairline to cross the danger mark, but we get hit with it the minute we take our eyes off the mirror. Wham! To top it all, the guys got the thick skin too, AND the confidence to live in the blissful belief that saggy or shaggy are mere synonyms for sexy. But no, no such luck for the other half.

Come now, at the risk of sounding blasphemous, what were you really thinking dude?

Gimme five!

Top Fives of my (currently playing in a theatre far far away from reality) life:

• Songs on repeat

1. Love should - Moby
2. Far away - Nickelback
3. Here without you - 3 Doors Down
4. Ahista Ahista - Bachna Ae Haseeno
5. Nothing else matters - Metallica

• Dream (filmi) getaways

1. The house on the hill in the Thomas Crown Affair
2. The old building or whatever where Keira Knightley's Elizabeth and Darcy kiss in yet another re-make of Pride and Prejudice
3. The beach in From here to Eternity
4. Casablanca, of course!
5. The typical/standard Bollywood feel-good nachna gaana shoot route (empty beach, mountain, desert, city, tree, lake, snow in chiffon, whatever...)
   

• Questions i'm asking
  

1. Mithun Da kab retire hoge? (also, directed at Dev 'Saab' Anand)
   
2. Citibank kab bankrupt hoga? (apologies to Mr. & Mrs. S!)
3. Saala, India ko gussa kyon nahin aata? (sab kuchch chalta hai!)
4. Where's the rest of my paycheck?
5. Is it time to 'respectably' go home yet?
   

• Causes to espouse

1. Traffic Free Dilli
   
2. More Chicken for my Sub
3. Somebody... Stop Himesh!
   
4. Goa not Gurgaon
5. Five Day Week now (four, actually, if you consider the mounting arrears)

• Things to do when in doubt

1. Look in the mirror
2. Call Oprah
3. Vote Democrat
4. Blame the "previous government" while decrying the "incumbency factor"
5. Head for the drinks cabinet

• Time-fillers

1. Blogging on crap like this
   
2. Intra-office 'networking'
3. Coffee breaks and working lunches
   
4. Making organised lists
   
5. Meetings (especially with dazzling Power Point props)
   

• TV series
  

1. CSI- all
2. Criminal Minds
3. Coupling
4. Seinfeld
5. How I Met Your Mother

• Ways to die (or survive to accost the cause)
  

1. Drown in a vat of whiskey
   
2. Drown in a cask of beer
3. Drown in a tub of cream cheese
4. Drown in a pond of maple syrup
5. Get crushed in a blender making a banana-strawberry smoothie

• Places to re-visit someday (i guess no separate section on fab foods/beverages needed!)

1. Ladakh before snowfall
   
2. London ANYTIME AT ALL
   
3. Times Sq. NY in the fall
   
4. Langkawi in winter
   
5. Paris in summer

• FINALLY: Favorite excuses

1. I can't
2. I won't
3. I shouldn't
4. Who cares?
5. Are you out of your mind?

Another sunday cometh and sloth's back in fashion

i am in trouble. of the deep, deep sort. because i'm becoming lazier by the day and crazier by the night, for that is when i take stock of the day of a thousand procrastinations and enter my very own private hell.

As the unread newspapers pile up on my coffee table, random thoughts and article inspirations are jostling for breathing space like people in a DDA cheap housing scheme queue. Yet, i can't clear the backlog fast enough through the half-open window of my working side of the brain to prevent them from pushing up against each other in a desperate scramble for attention. Disheartened, many have left, and i am sorely tempted to put up a sign, true sarkari style, saying "Out to Lunch", to shoo off the stubborn ones.

Enter: sunday.

Another one to the rescue.

You can imagine the extent of my slothful transgressions when i tell you that it's taken me three whole sundays to complete one painful cycle of preserving what's left of my youth, and the tattered shreds of my vanity are highly offended. I mean, one poor Sunday and four limbs to wax, two eyebrows to painfully prune, two feet, a pair of hands and all of twenty fingernails to pamper, not to mention the daily ablutions that keep the rest of the 'best face forward' in working order!

Yes, ALL this in a country full of men who are back to balking at the word 'metrosexual'. The much-vaunted concept seems kinda on the way out, along with male manicures and papa pedicures. To be fair to the Indian male, he's retained some of it, albeit highly selectively. So, while pink-the-new-blue is here to stay, the candy coloured shirts are back to acting as windows to hairy souls infested with a tola of gold chainees, while the proud pappi in pink is back to prowling the streets in Papaji's Pajero with crusty soles.

So, i'm going all Euro-sexual this week. No visits to that high temple of superficial splendour, aka the neighbourhood beauty parlour. No desi homemade stinkies on the face a la facade al fresco... whatever that meant! Basically, i'm vegging out, (pun definitely intended, it is navratras!) and reading on and uglying in. I know i'll have to pay a heavy price for my reckless behaviour requiring some extreme damage control, but what the heck!

Vanity enslaves. And THAT is exactly the truth behind assertions that it's a man's world. They haven't surrendered. Thus they rule. And it's time for me to reclaim my tiny space. Not to mention my day job.

Oh, slothful sunday, here i come!

Yes, violence. Seriously? On a day like today?

It's Gandhi Jayanti. Happy birthday, Bapu, but can you, like, send a message to the guys up there that we, like, really don't like working on your birthday... we sometimes don't like working on other days as well, but it's, like, your birthday today and all that, man! Makes me kinda all violency about it, this violent assault on our freedom to stay at home on a national holiday. They call this a "free" media! hah!

Gandhi said "Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy." So, i agree that it ain't a day to be lyin' around doin' nothin'. I mean i do want to, like, get up late from my extremely non-violent Caribbean dreams and eat some, like, organic cereal from the Khadi Gram Udyog and stuff, and then, like, meditate, ruminate and pontificate on loftier things... and languidly debate the merits of freedom (of sexual orientation), non-violence (when faced a sub that was delivered 15 minutes too late), khadi (of the non-scratchy variety) and purposeful walking (to the drinks cabinet), while trying very hard not to swat at the pesky fly that seems to be seeking refuge in my living room. All in the spirit of the day, of course.

While driving to work today, i noticed that even the doggies are off the streets, let alone patriotic Indians, who are probably ringing in the occasion with home brews on a dry dry day like today. D' ya think they'll really care if they don't get their newspaper tomorrow, groggy as they'd be from partying on a mid-week day off? But then with a sinking heart i remember what Gandhi had said once "I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers", and i know where the discrimination stems from.

But then my spirits lift a little when i recall what Gandhiji also once said "Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.". So here i am honestly differing with the management. Shall i expect a healthy bonus in the next paycheck? Oh, i'm inspired by his words: "You must be the change you want to see in the world.", so here i am putting my head on the block, all in the interest of the greater good, and asking the powers that be to please re-consider the six-day week! Just in case you were thinking it's all about personal gain, shame on you, you... you... non-believer!

Now i have come to the worrying conclusion that a lot of what the Great Man said can be misconstrued and applied to furthering personal gain. Like if we were to interpret "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it" to mean that stealing petty cash from a US investment bank predictably almost going under in a couple of weeks might be an insignificant folly in the large scheme of things, but that it becomes absolutely imperative for the employees to salvage all they can. Or, that when Bapu said "As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it", was not an endorsement for shoplifting Victoria's Secret innerwear!

But then, following some of his pearls of wisdom ad verbatim might just cost us more than a loss of personal pleasures. Like when he said that "I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it. I can only teach you not to bow your heads before any one even at the cost of your life", he definitely did not mean that Vijender Singh stand tall and exposed against his most ferocious Cuban opponent in his Olympic boxing bout.

And then when he said that "Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right", he certainly forgot to add the caveat that the management might not be so tolerant of your expression of freedom. Err too often and they'll... errr... kick your butt! My defense against my various indiscretions at work is another one from his collection "Hate the sin, love the sinner".

Now this brings me to one that i use to sum up my life's failure to reconcile my existence with my destined place in the world, something that causes me eternal grief: "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony". I think i can do with a little more of god's attention, but i say i'm content with what i have, and i do all i can to stay afloat. And then the trusty old man offers me a clue to express what it is i really want: " I want freedom for the full expression of my personality. "

But then at times when i am expressing a murderous thought, through the full force of my personality, to someone who has just appeared from nowhere, going the wrong way, in a one-way street, I recall his words decrying vengeance "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." To which he provides the answer "I think it would be a good idea. "

.... and THAT'S Gandhigiri for ya'!

A re-incarnation that deserves death. now!

I am in pain... of the searing physical variety. No, i'm not hurt or bleeding or anything, though for a while i was afraid i might just vacate my buzzing brain and self-inflict some serious damage on the windows to my soul... oh, my eyes... oh, oh... and oh... the things that they have seen!

Why all the drama, you may ask? Well because, last evening, while idly swapping channels i chanced upon the trailer of the new Karrz. Or was it Karzz? Karrzz? Whatever. It cannot be allowed to be reborn. It must die. While my heart twisted at cap-less Himesh Reshammiya's resham-straight locks, it nearly stopped at the words "Monty is back".

Noooooo...!! There are a lot of reasons why they absolutely CANNOT remake one of the best films that Bollyland produced. ever. to present my case, i list a few here, chosen from about a thousand:

• Monty is reborn as a rich Marwari (yes, again) and is happily living with Tina; is close to the top of the Fortune 500 list, runs marathons to keep the images of previous lives at bay, probably owns half of India instead of a crummy guitar, dons designerwear instead of dhinchakk monkey suits and now the happy couple have an enviable line-up of luxury sedans with no place in their multi-level garage for beat-up murderous jeeps... besides, they own a jet for that odd trip out.
  
• The prim and pristine Simi (aka Kamini) ain't gonna be happy being re-born as a screaming Bhoot, who walks the world of the living as Ms Urmila Matondkar
  
• Pinky ( in her pre-grieving sister of Ravi Verma avatar) might have to forgo her pink frilly frocks (what will we call her then?)
• Ba, the much in demand dudette, is too busy doing the telly rounds to be reborn as the eternally suffereing Verma family matriarch... besides, for that you need to die first, right? and Ba's nowhere close to kkkkkkickin' the bucket at a 1043 years... when i last checked.
• In the age of the well-groomed metrosexual, how will they ever find anyone with a wild profusion of body hair to soak in a tub with a firang madam, like our bezubaan badmaash Sir Juda from the original?
• Unless they re-sing the original, there ain't another song that can give you goosebumps like "Ek Hasina Thi"... tilting frames, shadowy characters enacting the crime backscreen, Rishi's accusing eyes, Simi's horror from a dozen different camera angles, Honeymooning jeeps, and some really intense guitar playing by The Monty of mint chocolate chip dreams. From which you think you have the right to wake me up rudely with a Himesh? shudder! shudder!!
  

But in any case, if, despite all my efforts, this Karrzzzzzzzzzzzzz is repaid, the producers might like to answer a few questions for me, like how Sir Juda (a filmi take on Judas?) lost his tongue, and whether he has patented that very unique form of "tinkling" communication yet. Like who knighted him in the first place? The Queen? Did she not stop to think that all that fuzz on his chest and arms might be hiding a device to blow Buckingham Palace to bits? Like, were you allowed to get married in a school uniform back then? Or how did grown up college kids, of an obviously very marrriageable age, get away with wearing candy coloured frockies?

As the questions swirl about my mind like Sir Juda's hair filled jacuzzi, it's all too much for poor, in-grievous-shock me. I must hurry home, disconnect the television showing promos of the new and re-connect with the old.... better not put on the music while i'm on my way, all driving in the movie was horribly, fatally, tilted... jeep over man, man under jeep, wife over jeep, re-born man over remorseful ex?wife, and so on... for, i am not ready to be re-born unless i am personally guaranteed that i can get to keep my avatar from Second Life. But i know what i will be humming if anyone dares honk at me tonight:

roo ru rooo roooo, roo ru rooo roooo, roo ru roo roo rooooooo....

"bel far niente..."

.... is Italian for "the beauty of doing nothing". Here are some of my favourite nothings:

• Popping bubble wrap, of course. So, if you see a shady type lurking outside gift shops, looking for throwaways, or if you get a very very fragile gift knocking around freely in the box, you know who stole the bubble wrap!

• Driving like a woman.... I turn the wheel of justice in the direction of skeptics who insist that women can't drive. How? By giving them exactly what they expect. So, i dream at the wheel while the light turns goes from glowing green to an angry red, make mental lists of who i'll invite on my years-away fortieth birthday while navigating rush hour traffic, all the while weaving in and out of lanes at the speed of 23, while pretending to have broken hearing aids and a missing rear-view mirror... then suddenly I decide to wake up to a change of tact and start honking at everyone in or out of my way, while attempting my closest imitation of Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction. (Note: I suggest that all women put this on their partners' to-view-before-saying-I-do list. I mean even I was scared of her!)

• Staring into space and humming Moby's Love should... There's just something about the song (besides the fact that it is very un-Mobyish) that reminds me of tangled sheets, intangible regrets and transcendental love. The very best of all there is in life.

• Pressing the i button on my Tata Sky remote to read synopses of random programme episodes/movies. You'd be surprised at the way they reduce the histrionics to four lines!
  

• Changing my phone language settings to Filipino, just to see how familiar I am with my handset and then to French to figure whether i can recognise commands from a two week crash course in French from five years sgo.

• Watching a crackling fire.
  

• Getting wet in the rain, and then standing under a hot shower with a shot of scotch at hand.

• Adding up the digits on the number plate of the car ahead of me to try and figure out what the driver's lucky number is.
  

• Hitting the "bullets" button on any feature... MS Word, Blogger et al :)

• Finally... pushing my keyboard tray in for the day... and turning the key in the ignition.

Oh, don't look!

What is it about human nature that even as we build layers around ourselves to keep out the wretchedness of the world, we continue to be fascinated by the morbid? Remote control in hand, we switch channels to get the "best coverage" of recently exploded bombs, even as we shake our heads in disbelief at the depths of human depravity. I cannot explain why, but the images of the two airplanes hitting the twin towers of the WTC stubbornly persist in being able to send goosebumps down my spine. Yet, i am re-drawn to those images, even as my heart plummets, everytime i see those moments captured by amateurs, just as those buildings did on an unforgettable day seven years ago.

When i logged into this space this morning i was wondering about what it was that i wanted to get out of my system today. And promptly got distracted. While i continued to be wrapped up in pending work, with a reluctantly consumed cafe dosa for company (which, by the way, was utterly foul), and with moments of introspection interspersed with general gossip and thoughts on what not to do this Saturday evening (which would insolently have me presume that i have lots to choose from!), news just in tells me that there has been another blast in Delhi, this time at Mehrauli. I can hear colleagues arguing over how many have died... "do? ...nahin yaar, paanch.... nahin doosra channel laga ispe toh kuchch nahin dikha rahe hain!" reminiscent of a snippet i overheard two long Saturdays ago. "Site pe chalein? .... nahin yaar kya fayda wohi sab kuchch...abhi toh bheed hogi, police wagerah.. nahin toh hospital bhi jaa sakte hain.."

They say some people, in the course of their specific nature of the job, get immune to blood and gore. Or that violence inures, as it comes with its own antidote: apathy born of repetition. But i still believe that no amount of familiarity with death can prepare you for the fragility of human life. Or the cruelty of the senselessness with which it is sometimes taken away.

In the last few minutes, i watched, again, the by-now familiar images on TV and listened to excitedly screaming reporters and play-acting news anchors who were breathless beyond belief in their affected attempts to give us a callous run-through of the carnage. Sorry, but that is the only way to describe the insensitive reportage which lacks all occasion-propriety.

(Note: what makes Indian television reporters think that it is only by standing in the middle of a straining crowd, and shouting at the top of their lungs, that they will catch the requisite frequency to transmit their banal banshee-like analysis via distant satellites to presumably deaf viewers with strong heart muscles?)

And there they were again, stunned thoughts from a fortnight ago, which were crowding in on me once more, asking me questions for which i still have no answers. How do you explain an act for which even the supposed motivation defies all logic? How are you supposed to just pick up your car keys and drive down to the nearest market (as opposed to a sterile mall) for a kathi roll? How are you supposed to limit your on-the-spur-of-the-moment weekend excursions to a 'not so crowded' area? Most importantly, how do i reconcile my need for freedom with my fear of being caught all alone if one of those things has my address on it? Having heard the sound once, how am i then supposed to command my heart to be still everytime a bus's silencer whoops past my car, or when a truck loudly hits a pothole on a very silent night outside my window?

So as i go through the motions, calling and checking up on those near and far, while assuring them that i am safely ensconced in office, here's yet another Saturday making me terribly weepy and sad, as i mourn the loss of my right to just be. Here. Now. In the city i love beyond its myriad idiosyncrasies and often only because of them.

Oh, my Delhi! Where will i go when you, my true home, can no longer wrap your safe arms around me?

Friday Fundas from Chollywood... yes, again!

TGIF. yes, again! OK, i know that in between one set of fundas and the next, there has been precious little and even i feel cheated! what's this crap? a dwindling number of snooty swindles that's what! basically, here i am, again, willingly taking whatever blame you might feel free to heap on me, and making it my very own grouse before you can say oh, no.. not again!

So, peace, yo! and all such other outdated angst-ridden war cries. Here, sample some funk (junk?) for another Friday, a day of the week we hope will re-visit us real soon....

• When you hurriedly decide to rush into an elevator in a multiplex, to go up in a hurry, you will invariably discover, upon the shutting of its doors, that it is actually going down to the basement.
  

I've discovered that there are two choices to kill the time it will take, to get back to the floor on which you got on, and then stop at every other floor on its way up to, to reach your desired level, which in all likelihood is the highest the place has to offer. The first is to fixate on the glowing numbers on the panel. -2: the highest score you got on your chemistry paper after negative marking; -1: the temperature of the pole on which you happened to stick your tongue while re-living that scene from Dumb and Dumber; 0: the number of boyfriends in the year just before you first got your heart broken; 1: the number of books you safely hope to publish in this lifetime; 2: the adequately chubby, well-adjusted, un-cranky, semi-angelic, come-with-a-pre-programmed-semi-automatic-self-adjusting-timer-mechanism- and-growing-into-universally-tolerable-moderately-tolerant-genetically-good-looking kids you hope to have some day; 3: the least number of moochable men whose stories buy you respectability with your grandkids; 4: the number of places in your garage for the total set of wheels you hope to alternate driving altogether (BTW, eight different coloured TVS Lunas don't count!); 5: the number of differently shaped bathtubs in your dream house; 6: the least number of zeroes following the first number on your take-home salary cheque, sans all decimals; 7: ooops, i haven't been to an Indian mall that goes all the way up there, yet! phew! lucky at that, huh?

The second option is to familiarise yourself with the faces of the others who have made the same grave mistake, so that the next time you find yourself stupidly having to share the claustrophobic cubicle with them, you have a conversation ice-breaker. Which brings me to my carefully researched second funda of the week.

• When in a crowded lift, you will definitely meet at least four of these usual suspects: the crouching tiger, the hidden dragon, the snake and the eagle's shadow. (Yes, i continue to watch a lot of dubbed Chollywood stuff, during times with a lack of anything better to do, or gaze aimlessly at, and yes, I also thought that Bruce Lee spoke fluent colloquial Hindi till I was about 10)

The crouching tiger (CT) will most likely be this tall, jeans-clad Panjoo-looking gel-haired specimen, crouching down to whisper sweet nothings into the ear of a giggly, scantily clothed, pint-sized side-kick whose most-uttered phrase during the eternally frustrating muti-halts trip will be " you, nah....!" said with a delicate swish of the free hand, the one not tightly grasped by the CT (i mean, it's not as if the lift will plummet and she'd go into free fall.. you can ease up on the grip buddy!)

Then, just when you are nauseatingly wondering what's awfully cooking in there, you notice the hidden dragon (HD), breathing fire with his onion breath and gastro-grenades, crouching away in the corner with a "can-you-just-smell-that?" and not-quite-as-guilty-as-outraged expression on his if-i-can't-see-your-disgust-i'm-not-even-here face. And you try desperately to recall the long-forgotten swimming lesson where you flailed about trying to hold your breath. At every stop, you let it out in a rush, and then the doors menacingly close again....

You feel the snake before you see him, as you are jolted out of your breath-halting feat by a light yet strategic exploration of your bottom. It's annoyingly vague, exasperatingly effective and very difficult to assign, until the snake attempts it again, by which time you are busy exhaling and inhaling at the temporarily open door. You might as well let your hapless bottom be, for he's awfully good at this stuff, for he's probably been practising at various malls in and more challenging settings. They probably have a club or discussion board or something to tally their shady triumphs!

And the last one is the Eagle's shadow.. This one's a kindred soul, shoved similarly into a corner, who's been watching, like you were initially, as an amused big bird, ever since the journey began, and probably is as astute an observer of lift-land as you are. The only difference is that the while the amused smile was wiped off your face with the shenanigans of the snakey bot-patting, his only grew wider. And when the big bad box thankfully disgorges you on the penultimate floor, he waits to let the others off, before chivalrously, and a tad smugly, stepping aside to let you disembark first. The next time, I'm praying he goes for your buns, buddy, and then we'll see!


And now, work beckons and so does a cold lunch. As i look at my own culinary creation with a fair amount of trepidation, here's wishing you cosy dinners, empty express elevators and close encounters of the worst ... oops... first kind: by invitation only. toooodly do!

Spill it sister!

So, this crazy chick i know cheekily chose a select few to do some homework, or prep, as it was better known in the world's best boarding school.. and i was scared that if I didn't turn it up on time, i will not be able to live with the spoilsport tag that would in evitably follow!

As i replace her answers with mine, all l can say is, thanks babe! for i haven't taken this so seriously since i was twelve and scribbling furiously into hobby books, while hiding the answers from prying eyes with my left arm:)

Before i begin, here are her rules, which i might break with impunity:
People who have been tagged must write their answers on their blogs and replace any question that they dislike with a new question formulated by them.

People who have been tagged must Tag at least 6 people to do this quiz and those who are tagged cannot refuse. These people must state who they were tagged by and cannot tag the person whom they were tagged by. Get it? Now spread the love.

(More like the mayhem, Nim!) anyway, here goes...

If your lover betrayed you, what will your reaction be?
voodoo, plain and simple. go for the gonads, girl!

If you could have a dream come true, what would it be?
fit into that awesome pair of tight jeans i tearfully abandoned in 1995.

What would do with a billion dollars?
disappear before you come knocking for a cut.

Will you fall in love with your best friend?
pass pliss! been there, done that. fell and got bruised.

Which is more blessed: loving someone or being loved by someone?
The second. Was it the great philosophers Aerosmith who said "Falling in love (is hard on the knees)" and after the big Three-Oh, i'm fast hurtling towards planet osteoporosis!

How long do you intend to wait for someone you love?
OK. Hypothetically, of course. If they're around making me wait, then as long as it takes to say, "if you're gonna make me wait, you ain't worth it!" and if we're talking about that oh so elusive love, then perhaps till i have to stop looking at the clock of hope every few hours

If the person you secretly like is attached, what will you do?
knock him out and revive him with a magic love potion, of course!

If you could root for one social cause, what would it be?
unsolicited phone calls. wish i could track down every single caller from every anonymous call centre, line them up in a dark room without food and water and call up every five minutes with an offer for a loan to bail them out, alternating with a 'polite reminder' about when they have to pay their next instalment! yeah, i DO feel THAT strongly about it. its tearing the flimsy fabric of our society apart, i tell ya!!!!!

What takes you down the fastest?
smiling non-resistance in the face of an unreasonable hormonal outburst

Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?
enjoying the royalties from my third book.... at the very least

What’s your fear?
losing my laughter

What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
Nimpipi: my daily dose of uncomplicated craziness in the complicated sanity of this our workplace

Would you rather be single and rich or married and poor?
married and rich... what???? sorry, can't read the rest too clearly :)

If you fall in love with two people simultaneously who will you pick?
the one whose eyes light up when they spy me

Would you give all in a relationship?
oh, totally everything... except the number of my Swiss bank account

Would you forgive and forget someone no matter how horrible a thing he has done?
i notice the bias in the use of the word "he", so.... forgive maybe, not forget, if only to remind myself that i have a lot to learn. anyway, it's an all too live situation, so answers after the ad-break here please

Do you prefer being single or in a relationship?
in a single relationship.

think. pause. speak.

i have a dubious gift
a special one, no doubt
that is i never know exactly when
i should put my foot in my mouth

so try as i might
and repent as i may
i never do find the right time
for all the silly things to say

but being the Saggi that i am
i somehow worm out of trouble
but just when i think i'm home free
along comes disaster, quick on the double

so i fret and i sweat
while others can't believe my cheek
alas! little do they know
it's only a hole to die in i seek

so while i crawl about in shame
and promise that i will not repeat
the faux pas, that i so avoid,
continue yapping at my feet

so all ye who i might have tormented
with a word i was too quick to utter
please know that i yearn for the day
when i will stop causing an unnecessary flutter

now that i have been suitably contrite
for something that's outta my control
i'm sure i can go back to bumbling
till i'm arrested by the think-before-u-speak patrol

there, that's poetic laziness for you. for i'm conserving my prosaic energies for the week ahead. another long one it might turn out to be.....

Friday Fundas and the week that was not....

i'm in a kind of fugue state.... better still, i'm floating and its all happening in someone else's life.... even better, i'm plain absent and that tick in the register is a proxy... would it were that simple, though. sometimes, you get hit by a stray cricket ball, at other times you run right into the willow. that's life for ya!

why am i so maudlin, you might wonder. because this has been one of the most confusing weeks in my recent past, and there have been some baffling ones, believe me. triumph and loss have jostled for space with anger and humility, while bad judgement has tried to usurp the embattled throne of good sense, and despair has reluctantly, mistrustfully opened the door to a sliver of hope. and that hope hangs on the tenuous thread of my own conscience. which is telling me that it's sick and tired of playing second fiddle to self-doubts and that i need to kick some ass. you win, babe. so be it. amen.

and now on to some snippets of gyaan for the week that was not, and might never be...

• Into all lives some rain must fall, though it never does when predicted during the monsoons and always re-appears just as you are getting ready to drive back home in rush hour. SUVs double up as your al fresco car wash, dousing your tiny-four-paws with the spittle of a hundred paans, the sorry butts of soggy bidis and sloshy remains of roughly a million Indian pit stops by the roadside.
  

• All the world's a urinal and the Indians are the longest-surviving imperialists. plunder with paan. pillage with pee. paint the town yellow. while we're on the subject, the original colonialists have much to teach us still. a small tip: avoid the red phone booths in London, except when you gotta go... i mean, unless you really gotta go...then there ain't a better place, or so say the Brits.... you pee!! ooops, i mean, you see!

• A bar may list a hundred different brands of beer, but the one you crave on that very exact day will always be "out of stock". and the one you order will be the warmest, yet the "coldest" they've got. aaaaarrrrgh! Enough to make you froth at the mouth, like the warm glass now staring at you from across the table.

• All things in life that are seemingly free, come with an expiry date. The choked with toxic-whatnot air won't be worth breathing in a few years' time; water with god-knows-what-shit-in-it won't last despite fast-melting glaciers; the earth that we walk on.... ooops! that's already been swallowed up by DLF/DDA, groaning as it is under the weight of progress.... breathless, it awaits the final verdict from the Franco-Swiss border.... and we all know the longevity of promises. freely made, short shelf-life..... love? i'm still figuring that one out.

so, maudlin i may be
but all ye, it won't last
for the dumbest thing to do
is to let your future be led by the past

i see from my dirty window
that some rain has fallen today
and as i prepare to leave now
i wonder if i might get sloshed today

for the car needs a wash
and so does my hair
so why worry about the future
i'll know what happens as soon as i get there!!

so have a nice weekend folks
and remember to do everything that i won't
and when you screw up big time
i'll pretend i did tell you don't!

Terror... err...error

unable to resist, i went this morning (at about 8 am) to GK I, M-block market, the site of one of the blasts that ripped through Delhi on Saturday evening.

and it was business as usual, with the early morning sweepers casually emptying dustbins (in which bombs had been planted in other targeted parts of the city) as i just drove slowly past all the familiar shops that have been an inseparable part of my life since i came to Delhi over 15 years ago. for M block is one of my favouritest places in the city. love it. can't live without it. and can't go too long without paying obeisance to its haphazard existence every once in a while (tempered from the almost-daily visits of our college days).

the only reminder of the terrible tragedy was a signboard put up by Aaj Tak news channel which had a backdrop of a nuke-type explosion, saying something like "aage bhadhenge... (and) aatankvad se nahin darenge..." (we will move forward (and) we will not be afraid of terrorism) or thereabouts.... for couldn't read too well from the car.

and driving past that semblance of normalcy in a city jolted by five bombs, i thought: fear is one thing and escapism is definitely another. we are a nation of ostriches, ever-believing that if we bury our heads in the sands of denial long enough, what we refuse to see and acknowledge will all go away somehow. but the one thing that these most recent terror attacks did seem to shatter was our smug sense of 'untouchability' with a horrific threat too close for comfort. i thought about this as friends from all over the country and even from around the globe called me to ask if i was ok, often with a common concern: "It's a Saturday evening, we thought you might be at GK for your favourite golgappas!"

the truth is that sometimes work comes to the rescue, for i was in office and heard the blast rip through CP (the one at Barakhamba road, i'm guessing, barely 500 metres away). and promptly dismissed it for thunder, curiously looking out of my window to check if i would have to make a dash to my car later on. and then ten minutes later, i was on the phone to my family and friends to assure them that i was ok before they saw it on TV and before mobile networks got jammed...

and for the first time ever, it seemed real. too real and too close. very loud and crystal clear. terribly scary. and for a while, as news poured in about yet another blast at Central Park, barely 500 metres away again, i looked into a kaleidoscope of anxiety, fear, confusion, horror and eventually sadness mixed with relief, mirroring my own, on the faces of my colleagues... we were safe. for now.

but the one thought that i know was running through all our minds was, this could have been any one of us. we park in CP, take those same roads home every evening; often spend aimless hours over weekends browsing shop windows, sipping nimboo-banta from Prince Pan and stopping to collect trinkets from the little "shoplets" at GK M-block; and do a bit of our wedding shopping in the crowded bylanes of Karol Bagh.

yet we refuse to acknowledge that we are, collectively, a nation under attack. perhaps that's because the shattered lives that we read about have been far removed from our zone of reality (and here i mean the sense of false security that envelopes the upper middle class), and we are quick to turn away from the bleeding faces and horrifying images, only to repeatedly shrug them off as yet another 'blip' on our close-circuit radars. i admit to having done that in the past, and i also admit that i am finding it difficult to be quite so blasé about it this time around.

so i keep asking myself why? and i have no clear answer but an all-pervading sense of sadness, outrage and vulnerability. beginning with the fact that i saw a colleague crying silently in the bathroom minutes after the news of the blast, for she couldn't get through to her family, and also because she was feeling the way i did: confused, angry, shaken and somehow, attacked and affected and curiously dazed... and then because another colleague, quite shaken, informed me that her mom and sister had just left GK market an hour ago.....

and because two of my my brother's best friends were on their way to GK when they heard the news.... and especially because had my brother been in town, he would have been sipping coffee with his fiance at GK.... and because i shared a plate of chaat with my mom and sis a few weeks ago at the same spot the bomb went off.... and also because, i was in Pallika market last week and, more immediately because, i heard the blast just as i was reaching for my car keys to make a trip to Wengers in CP to pick up pastries, while wondering if the trip would be worth the effort in a downpour.

and that was the extent, the sum total of my troubles, the evening when so many people lost their lives to the senseless logic of a handful of maniacs, and for that triviality i feel guilty somehow. guilty of losing patience with security guards who take too long to check my handbag at the movie theatre, guilty of finding an excuse to delay removing my car from a no-parking zone, and of numerous other little infractions that add up to a big catastrophe, just because we refuse to empathise with the fact that we all are potential victims, live targets who are lucky enough to see a few more dawns, eat some more golgappas, to shop, laugh, love and live another day.

the average Delhiite has had to discover, three years after we were last hit, the survivors' "spirit", much as the Mumbaiite has been forced to muster the same on countless occasions now. we are told that it is our spirit, our courage, and our bravery in the face of all odds that the terrorists are targeting. all this by a Home Minister who is on the warpath over a wardrobe 'malfunction', despite changing more clothes in one evening (while he made polite appearances at various blast sites) than he has tactics, to counter the moving targets who have us all in their cross hairs today. and they have brought the battle right to our doorsteps over his last four and a half years in office.

oh, i'm terribly sorry to burst your bubble of banal banter, Mr. Home Minister, but its your incompetence that they are leveraging. in not winning the battle against our own complacency we're losing the war to those who know, perfectly well, that we're not even warming up to the challenge yet.

Hangin' up on better judgement

i feel like crying. i was "velly velly lude" to this sweet boy at an obscure call centre somewhere. well, the conversation began reasonably enough and then went something like this:

"hi, yeah......blah blah blaaaaahhh...." is how it all started... going on to "please hold the line while we transfer you to... blah blah blaaaaaaah", and more of the same (holding and tranferring... holding and transferring.. and so on)

.... till the crucial part:

Sweet boy (SB): I'm very sorry Ma'am to keep you waiting on the line for so long and i thank you for your patience, but we cannot deliver it today, due to a echnical fault in our system that did not register your original request.

Meanie Me (MM): What do you mean you can't deliver it today? If there is a bloody technical fault, then aren't you supposed to inform me in advance?

SB: yes, i agree madam ... and i personally apologise to you. i really am very sorry and this will nto happen in future.

MM: oh yeah i know it will... should have listenened to my friends when they said your service sucked! (though by this time i knew i was being rude 'cos his voice fell and he really seemed ready to cry)

SB: we will compensate you in your next bill, i am personally sorry, and...

MM: (cutting him of) i don't want the compens...

SB: (really scaredddly cutting me off ) can you please speak a little louder ma'am i can't hear you...

MM: no i will not speak louder cos i don't want to shout!

SB: yes, ma'am i also don't want you to shout please...

.... and this is the point, the point where i should have apologised to him for he sounded so penitent and sad and overwhelmed by my unnatural rudeness (in all modesty, i am not a rude person by nature and i think that my unreasonableness caught me as much by surprise as it did him), but as it is with mistakes, they're seldom alone, followed as they are with a second-in-command at their heels, and so it was with that i made a second, graver, one.

i hung up. and promptly wanted to cry. weep. actually, bawl like a four-year old who finds he can't have all the pop tarts he can possibly, even actually, eat.

so i called again. thrice. but the person(s) who answered didn't sound at all like the poor boy whose weekend i might have ruined, battering him as i did with a full-frontal assault by my PMSing alter-ego. so i hung up. thrice.

i'm sorry whoever you were. more than you'll know. more than i care to admit. and i hope you have a nice weekend. and i also thank you, for i have learnt two important things today:

that worse than our first mistake is the one that follows....

and that sometimes we shouldn't just hang up when we make a mistake, no matter how angry we are, for we might just end up discovering that the person at the other end of the line is long gone.....

Friday Fundas...GoTSoT !!

TGIF. To celebrate my blog's self-designed, papppppi and kitschy new look (taaliyaan, taaliyaan...!!), and honour the first few comments that i have ever received (ahem!), and as a logical corollary (according to my warped sense of terminally ill-logic) of these historic developments, i hereby launch "Friday Fundas".

Though there was to be a ribbon cutting ceremony and all that, i couldn't get any Bollywood celebrities to endorse this space since they are all worried about the lack of Marathi subtitles in here.

So, here i go again, endorsement deprived and celebrity-less, and these are some more of my humbly rendered, and truly random, observations for the week gone by, and the one that will be:

• Seat-belts have a hidden and loftier motive

And that is to keep you awake and alert while driving. Have you ever noticed how they dig into your skin, just around the collar, causing you immense grief by keeping you awake when all you want to do is nap while taking the India Gate circle, lulled as you are by the beauty of Lutyen's Delhi? AND they are so very obviously designed by men and for men, given the fact that guys have the option of tucking the offending strap under their shirt collar to avoid chafing. Besides which, they are significant contributors to road rage, making hormonally charged women into deadly weapons. I say, you want to get to the Pakis? Send in a bunch of PMSing women armed with seat belts and voila! we'll be sitting on all of Siachen in a week!

• The sheen has come off the Pakistani cricketers' hair
  

Well, this has been a pet peeve for years. Years ago, when i used to give more than a damn about cricket, i dreamt of meeting Shahid Afridi of the roadside romeo locks, Rameez Raja of the trendy tresses, Imran Khan and Wasim Akram of the MBish overgrown curls tantalisingly brushing their sweaty collars, crowning their roguish appeal, and Shoaib Akhtar of the flying forelocks and Waqar Younis of the chic close cut only to ask them what shampoo they used! With the Americans not to happy with the Pakistanis these days, and with all that crap being collected on the embattled glacier that is cumulatively flowing down the Indus into our neighbours' showers, perhaps we have to be content with Ishaan's shaggy style statement now that Cap'n Dhoni has gone respectable. He gives the phrase "bad hair day" a parallel universe to exist in.

and now for a mini, "does-it-really-require-any-further-comment?" section called GoTSoT! (Gosh That's So True!): and this week it's the movies (& Bollywood rules!) -

• If you reach late for a movie it will always begin on time, and vice-versa

• The length of a movie is inversely proportional to the quality of its content

• If the fakely-traded punches are evenly distributed, the fight will only end once the opponents discover they are long-lost brothers.

• The less leg space there is in a movie theatre, the more are the chances of you being seated in a row of latecomers

• If there are 3 heroines to 4 heroes, chances are one of the guys will die before the end

• If the title begins with Kkkkk infinitum, then its definitely..... oh, sorry, that's the one a kindergarten kid told me
  

Which means its time to sign off with this:

there was this kid
who really liked milk
so he soaked his cookies in it
and then they tasted like silk

and then there was this girl
who liked to act like a boy
so she would cry like a baby
till her mommy bought her a toy

then there was this boy
who wanted to grow up smart
so he changed into a girl
and now with his baniyan must part

and finally there were these folks
who were fed up of working all week
so they told the boss they won't
and now are asking for bheekh

Caution: Gents Ahead, Ladies Cursed

have you ever noticed how we girls always ONLY get the food menu when out with men? i mean, unless you go to a hardcore bar, where there is no food menu (a near-impossibility in a country obsessed with kuchh kabab-shabab with their sharaab) OR on a girls' night out, there is no way that the steward will give you a liquor menu. at best, he will delicately proffer you the 'wine list'. perhaps the unspoken gesture is his way of saying: "madam, only Sirji is allowed to make an ass of himself in our bar after a few drinks, and when we tire of him you must drive him home, for, hawwww, good girls only drink 'shandy' in public and brandy in bed".

and this is what Italians and Indians ALSO have in common. a few years sgo (in my young young days) at a restaurant in Brugge, this Italian patriarch refused (just REFUSED) to serve me grappa in his family-owned eatery, pampering me with everything but that wonderfully potent brew! i almost broke into his damn place at night just to gulp down every last drop of the garrullous granpa's grappa.

back home, after ordering a scotch on the rocks just to piss the pesky puritan off, you have to leave the bar at a 'decent time' to head home, often only to come head to head with the same parking dudes who were sniggering while you were trying to squeeze your little car in between two macho SUVs, the very same creeps who held a mini yajna praying for your failure to parallel park. hrrrmph! park you did, but also (in a very lady-like fashion) locked your keys inside (upon discovering which you cussed in a very un-ladylike fashion).

this was obviously done while basking in self-righteousness after re-writing Zen and the Perfect Parallel Park, a fact that was duly noted by the sniggering snakes to be savoured later, just after you curse and look for the elusive keys in your overcrowded handbag and just before they procure the magic futta to recover that damn piece of odd-shaped metal.

soon you're vrooming away. stopping at the first traffic signal on the way back home you might encounter pappoo sharma, guddu kapoor, chhotu varma, bunty singh, kittu nair, and babbal arora out on the town in sunny soni's mummyji's borrowed Mrrrooti 800, all of whom just can't get over the fact that "a ladiss is driving car at odd hour in a so so unsafe city like Delhi". after being gawked at by the goggle-eyed occupants of the overflowing gaddi, you shake your befuddled head only to encounter a grown up, drunken, lecherous and much more sinister version of the previous set.

points to remember here: skip the next light. don't try and slow down to a point where they may over take you, but don't drive fast enought to lead them on to believe you're a tease who wants to race. as you put on your most uninterested, dumb bimbette, i-can't-even-see-you expression, and sigh, you send a silent prayer up to heaven... to get you home safe and for someone who'd refuse these bastards a liquor list every once in a while!

phew! a few more skipped red lights and some clever driving not unknown to a woman, you crawl back home, vowing to drink only at lunch, safely sitting at your desk, OR take the office cab back on semi-adventurous night outs, OR buy a sleeping bag OR find more single friends who are willing to take you home in a doggy bag OR look for a former Mr Haryana to be your driver OR horror of horrors! become 10 again and not leave home after dusk!! oh, you could always pretend you are living in M. Night Shyamalan's (The) Village.

in fact, a colleague and i went out for a drink last night and while lazily strolling to our cars we wondered what it might be like to have a pub on the premises... imagine calling up and asking: "Hello, is this the Hadron Collider? yeah, could you please send up eleven pints of Kingfisher and some masala peanuts please?.... yes, that would be to the area with the important looking cluttered desks with a bunch of hard-working people emitting intell-type frequencies, poring over the fine print of political pandemonium.... oh, what the heck! just follow the hangover and you'll find it!"

One two ka bore, four two ka none - PART I

i am in the process of developing a rating system for the future. trials are on to perfect it, so that i may be able to patent it by 2062 and buy that wheelchair that goes 55 miles per hour, runs on the calcium my bones lose everyday, stores the potty and and is eco-friendly for it is guided in the dark by my glow-in-the-dark dentures.

here are some early samples from the prototype stage. afraid that i can't share with you HOW my team (that would be my ego, id and super-ego) reached these wonderful conclusions (its still being developed, remember?).... so here goes, in ascending order (first the worst, last the best and all in between are a viper's nest) :

Openability of ketchup sachets

• McDonald's (worst than their iced tea)
• KFC (better than the veg meal..... hello WHAT is THAT?!)
  
• Hall's (yeah, probably marketed by the lozenges guys to give you a raging sore throat which they can then cure)
  
• Heinz (better, no teeth involved, and perhaps why the heir's hubby the toothless Kerry lost)
  
• Our cafe's cottage industry by-products, tied in smelly polythene bags! (oh, pour some kaddu ketchup on me...)
  

Maximum Irritability from unwanted Song Hummability aka they-play-in-my-head-just-because-i-hate-them

• Luuurcky boy, you're my luuurcky boy from Bachna... (unfortunate luck in topping charts, and kinda' growing on me now)
• Umberrrelllaa ae ae eh by Rihanna (won't share this umbrella even in a nuclear storm!)
• You're so beautiful (i'd risk being ugly, just to avoid being reminded by this song! really.)
  
• Signaaaaal, pyaar ka signaaaaaal from some movie i've staked all on not to remember (just skip the traffic light, baby, and drive far far away from this one!)

Best gyaan written on backside (of Indian public transport, silly!)

• Buri nazar wale tera bhee bhala (cho chweet. a regular Gandhian. turnin' the other butt cheek)
• Hum do aur hamare do (acchha yaar, red aur blue wali teri, black aur white wali meri)
  
• Dulhan hee dahej hai (aur jo yeh kahe woh sabsa tez hai!)
  
• Latak mat, patak doongi (all-time personal favourite, a badass DTC babe)

Most irritating salesmen in Dilli

• The dude who sells men's hankies in KB/SN/Janpath/LN etc etc. dunno, just bugs the shit out of me.. he's this little pest who sidles up to you, time and again, and sort of is your constant companion on every shopping trip, accompanied by the naara-wala and the aluminium foil seller.
• The encyclopaedia man who is out offering highly "discounted" parallel education nonpareil and can be seen lurking where those who bunk school/work gather in large numbers, ie. multiplexes, near shoopping arcades)
• The churan guy in Def Col. I mean, he got away with blackmailing me into buying (and then charitably distributing) stinky smelling stuff for years. he's old, and he hangs out till late catching satiated diners and weaving drunkards and sells his stuff by appealing to their wasteful habits which he feels should make natural room for just that one churan packet he has spent his golden old age in perfecting. i'm over the wily old wheedler now. tip: just DON'T make eye-contact.
• A "women's delicates" salesman i had the distinct fortune of encountering during my own delicate teenage years, but who has left an indelible impact on my ...ummm... girly shopping.. forever! after lecherously telling me to feel the "sopt matrial" as demonstrated by his wandering fingers (yes, he did say "sopt"), he proceeded to look me up and down and advise me to buy a slutty pair as it would "look good", all this after stuffing cotton wool into a particularly hideous specimen to emphasise its ...ummm.. "generous" appeal. i hid behind my mom for years after that, and continue to glare even those saleswomen down who are only there to help me find that perfect fit! as you can see, i could go on and on for this one... i'm scarred for life.

and on that happy note, i must get back to work. watch this space for more, while i go back to my lab now that that other lab on the Franco-Swiss border has failed to end the world ... yet.

I spy with a jaundiced eye....

TGIF. and i have some random observations from the week that was, and will be, all over again, next week:

• The parking situation here really stinks
  

you see, the parking lot behind our office has been dug up to make way for a space-age multi-level parking space, but due to the Indian timetable of doing things it is still growing sprouts, and so we all have to park and walk to office, which i avoid doing in the mornings, for i dread the fact that i would no longer be able to sashay past anyone with casual confidence, leaving a delicious trail of designer perfume behind which pales in comparison to the stuff that follows our fashion editor. yummy:) which is what i can't say for a lot of the others in this place. but why blame parking woes for all jammy toes, huh?

• Autowallahs in Delhi want to go nowhere.
  

really. nowhere at all. SO, this one old Sardarji at the auto stand near where i park is always reading the newspaper (go literates!) in his auto and when i ask (almost daily, just in case i get lucky) he shakes his head morosely, almost as if he needs to be left alone to ponder all that plagues our sad sad world. so i say: "read on with some joy, Surdy Boy"! and then move to the next naysayer. i've tried naming different directions, just to see which one they prefer, but they really don't want to go anywhere these days. desperate i ask, "kyon bhaiyya, bathroom toh jana hai ? hain?" and walk ff in a huff till i find one who is apparently lost in CP and basically sees me as his paying ticket out. and that is that. maybe they're just escaping from the wifey back home. "chalo, ab chain se bidi piyoonga, ab ek aadh bewakoof sawari hee kafi hai kamane ke liye."

• Indian men will risk probable castration, just to cross a damn road

look around you. there are new pedestrian subways, overbridges, underpasses and what not mushrooming all over the city but the Indian male is willing to risk his polyester trousers, life, limb and what might go worse than limp trying to acrobat his way across the forbidding fences to cross the road at forbidden points, while others wait impatiently to repeat the feat. for single friends who complain that the Indian male has lost his mojo, here you go, for now you know!

• The entry door to our office floor is pink

That's the one you have to walk through if you take the stairs to our office level. well it's pink. yes, PINK. probably no big deal, i guess, but its new and i just noticed last night. does the contractor realise he's a dude? oh, sorry, i promised not to be too sexist today!

• Today is Teacher's Day (valid for today only)
  

just to mark the occasion, i have to say that i terribly miss Teacher's Day in school. we kids would wear the pretend mantle of authority and take classes to ease a half-day burden for the harried masses. My hat's off to them all, for they did a splendid job for the rest of the year (while we always, always messed the sideshow up!).
wow.

• Salaries always suck
  

so yeah, sometimes, i complain. at most other times, i'm too busy listening to others grouch. i have that effect on people. and now, as i must leave for my daily meeting, a point to ponder: how might that idea work if the above applied to our work places. boss a bit over the bosses, eh? they teach us a lot of good stuff too, no? dunno about you sparky, but i could do with giving myself a raise ;)

Patience, now!

A fortnight after yet another Independence Day is as good a time as any for us to reflect on why we, as a nation, are progressively losing our patience. Let's face it; it's a highly infectious national disease that afflicts us all. For we are increasingly snapping our fingers at attendants in parking lots and restaurants, jostling our way past haphazard queues, cursing at slow internet connections, and beating down the doors for our next job in the fast lane.

So while we ask our yoga instructors for instant tummy tucks, we’re still not satisfied with the speed at which we get our Big Macs. We wrestle the rush hour traffic in a murderous hurry to get to work, only to begin clicking our tongues and the keyboard in a hysterical bid to meet our deadlines and be on our way to curse, honk and swerve some more on our way back home. We want to get married, have the requisite one point two offspring, but are seldom loath to invest more time in them than it takes to microwave a pizza for dinner.

What’s deeply disturbing is that these are mere symptoms of a national malaise, plaguing the highest echelons of the powers that be. Take, for example, our cricket selectors, who impatiently churn out lists ad nauseum of probables, ever eager to punish a sloppy day at the crease by months of penitence at the benches, instead of finding out whether it was just a bad day for a budding national hero. Or, better still, our netas, who, when faced with a potentially embarrassing political situation, are quick to rearrange the administrative jigsaw – as if that would somehow produce the miraculous permutation required to crack the riddle of missing funds, unsolved murders and crumbling infrastructure – instead of patiently unraveling decades of neglect.

All of this I find most acutely reflected in my daily nemesis, that psychotic driver, with his palm glued to the horn, frantically trying to squeeze past my car to get a few feet closer to the traffic signal that is good-naturedly glowing red. Frankly, while trying to pause in a world whizzing past on some kind of jagged video in fast forward mode, I feel like I'm kind of watching a barking Pomeranian dog going round in frenzied circles, desperately trying to catch its tail!

In our last-minute hurry, and empowered with broadening bandwidths and shortening fuses, we’re hurtling headlong to join the rest of the world that is fast losing patience with us. Tragically, we seem to have forgotten that it was the infinite endurance of a forgotten few that slowly wore off the patience of the English sahebs, till that stiff upper lip wobbled enough to give us cause to celebrate the 15th of August.

Well, what did you expect?

i have come to the painful conclusion that ours is a nation of forbidding expectations when it comes to our personal lives, but of zero expectations when it comes to governance as we continue to crib and crib about all that's wrong with our great Republic, even as we take great pride in being staunchly proud, who-the-hell-wants-to-vote denizens of this great civilization. i say denizens, not citizens, for even as we continue to burden the system with our physical presence, our spirits reside elsewhere, most of us dreaming of the Great Escape.

back to expectations. check out any matrimonial ad and you will be hit by your marriage-material inadequacy as reflected in the long list of wanna this and wanna that, by all sorts of wannabes looking for that perfect mate.

it don't matter if the purported White Knight aka prospective groom is a dark as night former Kendriya Vidyalaya kabaddi centre forward, or a chocolatey, pink-lipped, gel haired Panjoo boy struggling as a salesman on Daddyji's pocket money, or the tied-to-mommy's-petticoat strings family man holding an MBA (Master of Banal Allocutions) correspondence degree from Rattanpur, he still wants the standard fare: "convented" (what the HELL is that anyway?), "fair" (could they mean like a referee with a perfect record of unbiased decisions? hah!), "b'ful" (boxfull? bashful? bountiful? ahh... beautiful!), AND "homely" girl, of just the right physical dimensions.

as for the girls, its simple: most of us gaze intently at the glossy cover of our favourite Mills and Boon, desperately willing the roguish brute to step out of its pages. alas! this is real-life and its back to choosing the lesser evil from the above-mentioned "catches". we all want more, so we continue to look beyond the ads column and some of us are lucky enough to find "the" man from among the boys. and if we don't, we crib some more, dream some more - always being very specific about what it is that we're looking for.

in fact i remember a time when one of my friends' moms asked a group of us (all single at that time, years ago) what exactly we were looking for in a perfect partner. after taking turns listening to us as we rattled off all the desired attributes of this "husband-material" type (it took us all through lunch and dessert to get to the bottom of it all, with some continuing over coffee!), she shook her head at us with a combination of shock and bemused exasperation and remarked : "tuade nakhre taa khota vi nahin chuk sakda!" (Even a donkey cannot bear the burden of your tantrums/expectations!).

luckily for us, and perhaps unluckily for them, we all managed to find husbands, and got hitched, after periodic intervals following the historic dining table conversation. what we all realised that in a marriage you must periodically reverse roles (the master and the donkey) to balance these high expectations. most survived, i did not :) but that's another story for another day, for it turns out that i really was a donkey for expecting anything!

my question is that even as most of us fail to budge or compromise as far as our personal lives are concerned, why do we prostrate ourselves at the altar of expectations, in abject dejection, when faced with bigger national problems affecting the quality of our lives? in my experience, we mostly react like this:

• on a newly constructed road: "Arrey, abhi dekhna, baarish aayegi aur sadak khatam!" (Just you wait, one downpour, and that will be the end of the road!)

• on a 'clean' politician (oxymoron? see, i knew you'd say that!): "Yeh to zyada din tikne wala nahin hai!" (He won't survive for long!)

• on a day without a power cut : "Kyon bhai, koi bada saheb sheher ka daura karne mein aaye hai lagta hai!" (I wonder if some big shot government-type is here on a visit!)

• on a project being completed before time (even on time is surprising here): "Suna hai Japani engineers ko contract diya tha banwanae ke liye!" (I've heard the contract was given to some Japanese engineers!)

• on our team winning a cricket match: oh, nothing here, we're just really excited when they win sometimes :)

• up until a day before our first individual gold in Olympics : "Pata nahin hum itna bada contingent bhejte kyon hain, jab ek bhi medal to kabhi mila nahin!" (Why do we send such a large Indian contingent when we have never won a medal!)

and finally:

• on Aishwarya Rai marrying Abhishek Bachchan: "Suna hai woh gay hai aur pata nahin kyon usne shaadi ke liye haan kar di?" (I've heard he's gay and wonder why she agreed to marry him?) ooops!!! sorry! that was just most of my male friends/colleagues/family-members and all other Indian men, married or single, from the ages of 10 to 90 talking, while trying to plug the gaping hole in their hearts with comfort food that was just really a big bowl of sour grapes!

well, what did i just say about scary personal expectations? now, only if John Abraham was really seeking some "inner" beauty!! sigh....

Homemade marmalade anyone?

yesterday, while a colleague and i were struggling to wrap things up for the day, we were startled out of our work-trance by a man who was, you will NEVER believe it, selling aam papad and churan! yes, smack dab in the heart of this great establishment, the hallowed portals of which are guarded against intruders by smart card entry-points, important looking securitymen and the forbiddingly brooding hangdog expressions that accompany most journos (FYI: since i'm a wannabe scribe, it don't apply to moi, and i manage to look charming, starry-eyed and altogether lovely, thank you!), my first thought was, how did the poor bugger get in?

so he asked us if we wanted to buy any of his premium homemade concoctions, from a huge bag, the mere sighting of which would've spurred most American offices to declare an istant code orange, or whatever suitably alarming colour is the Dept. of Homeland Securty's fave these days. aghast, i imagined myself in a dusty sarkari office in Bapu Chowk (there must be someplace in every city that's called that), where such an intrusion might be the highlight of one's day. but here, sitting in a semblance of corporate plush, my finer sensibilities were somewhat short-circuited.

now, i have nothing against flatulence-inducing tid-bits, and enjoy the odd anardana bombs that some colleagues chew all day (a revered indian post-meal tradition, mind you), absolutely love to hungrily wolf down all forms of Indian street food, and am a sucker for good bargains out of the bag. but having a jholawala salesman come up to my workstation to offer me gastronomical delights is a bit much to digest, won't you say?

so, we politely said no, thanks and the man moved on to entice someone with far better taste, i guess. upon which we mutely exchanged puzzled, semi-horrified glances and got on with the insipid tying-the-loose-ends routine of a not-at-all-insipid job. (and this ain't a pitch for a raise since the boss ain't on my mailing list!)

but, in retrospect, in this day and age when door-to-door selling is fast giving way to desktop-to-tabletop ordering in and mean looking coffee-machines spewing large lattes to go, i thought about this cute little tradition of peddling home made wares and felt a bit guilty about ditching my small-town persona (of the little girl who simply waited all week for the malai kulfi guy to come ringing his bell in the summers - most AWESOME treat ever!), in favour of the Delhiite's corporate starchiness, and felt kinda' bad that i didn't peek inside that bag.

let's just hope he got a few hits to make another pitch sometime soon. this time i'll be waiting with a few scrunched up notes from my pocket money :)

Hats off for a hero

It seems that not only are our politicians getting on the wrong side of historical facts, as far as Bhagat Singh is concerned, they have managed to get on the wrong side of style too. Miffed at being un-consulted by the government, the martyr’s family have got their knickers in a twist over his ‘look’ in a recently unveiled statue in Parliament. The look, apparently, is off by more than a mere whisker.

While de-Westernising his attire in favour of the respectable kurta pyjama, a hot favourite of our netas, the sculptors have generously mis-proportioned the firebrand to look too chubby for his family’s comfort. And they’re twirling their moustaches down in annoyance over the upturned tilt of his, which, evidently, doesn’t quite gel with his traditional Indian look.

Historians, too, are unhappy with the image, which seems to have been conjured out of a hat, depriving the freedom fighter of the European one he wore in the years before he was hanged. Also been found hair-raising is the abundance of fuzz on his face and the length of his locks, which he had shed along with all religious symbols including the turban adorning his head in the statue. History has been unkind to statues, generally the first casualty at the turn of every era. Let’s hope the row over a mere idol doesn’t overshadow the message of the man whose image we’re fighting over.

Ennui

empty verses have no voice...
as for me, i'm waiting for something.

that reminds me....

there was this girl,
who was working all saturday
and then she went home
just to wake up on sunday.

and another one....

there was this guy
who wanted to be hip
so he changed into a girl
and started waxing his upper lip.

and now i can't stop...!

there were these people
who wanted a smokin' new caper
so they hired some hot stuff
and so you have this newspaper
so here we sit
yawning over tomorrow's news
while all this time
the world's havin' a snooze

ok, gotta go.

Taken as given

we all live with presumptions, none more potent than the ones we try and super-impose on our ideal-turned-reality of the perfect mate/spouse/soul-mate/better-half (really?).

in presuming that we are saving the other from a solitary fate, we are all too eager to set about restoring the lost balance in their lives. some people, in their rush to 'give all', take away the most important thing that truly made them fall in love with "the one": their spirit.

consider the words that most men and women choose as their silent (and sometimes ever too vocal) vows, before they are entangled in all too (un)holy matrimony.
the man's might go something like this:

"dress no longer in off-the-rack rags, and fear no more the dragon boss, m'lady, for, from this day hence , i shall be thy sole provider of riches, thy slayer of dishy dragons, the protector of thy virtue, and gatekeeper to thy soul, so that thy pure aura may never be sullied by the vile invasion of financial independence, the joy of employment and burning ambition. fear not the empty minutes, for i shall fill them with exalted household chores and vacuous pleasures worthy of the mistress of my heart and hearth."

the women, never to be left behind, might pledge the following:

" fear not, m'lord, i know thou shalt not lose focus on my welfare, for i shall gouge your eyes out if you make eyes at another, flood thy refusals with the rivers of my mascara'd tears, keep you fit and healthy by making you sweat to earn every penny that you squander on my upkeep, chase away the dewy-eyed damsels of your drunken dreams, slay the myriad pleasures of your bachelorhood, complete every thought you didn't even know you had and never leave your side long enough for you to have second thoughts."

ahhhh.. i know i am the reigning Queen of Hyperbole, or am i?

A nation on song

India needs a new anthem. no,no, of course i don't mean that we need to replace the great Jan Gan Man (still my fave tune in the whole wide world - there's something to be said for patriotic fervour!) i mean that other anthem that's been burning the airwaves for a while and is fast heading towards burnout - the title track of Chak de India!

i watched with fascination as about 150 of my colleagues stood in unison to cheer on the dishy Indian boxer, Vijender Singh, as he knocked a tired-looking man out, to reserve the bronze, if not the big G.O.L.D (or, Goddamned Olympics' Lame Ducks aka India) medal.... though none of us girls really knew what was going on, especially why the two men kept hugging each other in a very suspiciously gay fashion (eat that, Article 377!), we cheered when the men did. there was a thumping of desks, blasts of fervent clapping, cries of "start filing that copy..." etc etc etc.

but seriously, what is it with men and contact sports? or just plain contact? to my utter consternation, there is this one colleague who sort of slapped me on the back when i made a (squeaky clean) joke the other day, only to realise that my withering (or cock-eyed, depending on where you were standing) look did mean that i was trying to decide which kitchen knife to plunge into his neck when he next attempted the infuriatingly testosterone-induced gesture. he hasn't tried it since, but once was enough. eew! anyway, there was more hugging than punching and i find it hard to fathom why two sweaty men would want to repeatedly touch and hug each other with a million people cheering them on?

all to the tune of chak de oh chak de india on the haazar news channels...... i mean, now that we have medal winners coming out of the woodwork( two definite bronzes today, with scope 'n' hope for more), isn't it time for some new patriotic songwriters to stand up? oh, standing up reminds me: without demeaning the fervour and the occasion, i still chuckle at the memory of my friends and family, happily tipsy on our Independence Day party, forced to sing the REAL national anthem (THE Jan Gan Man), after two of us lustily broke out into the opening lines :)

thanks, you guys, for singin' with me my favorite song!

Chak de... er..ummm ... i mean, Jai Hind!!

Are you being served?

what is the bloody matter with our hospitality industry? it seems to me that most of its minions are treading the thin line between extreme apathy towards the customer and downright stalking.

don't believe me? walk into any restaurant and you will meet two kinds of servers. for the statistical record, these two species make up about 99.653436 % of the fauna - the rest ( do the math, will ya!) belong to that near extinct species of "normal/ satisfactory" (and that once-in-a lifetime-GREAT) category and so are, well, extremely rare, as you might have (in)correctly tabulated. sightings are few and far between.

so, the first kind is obsequious to the point of resembling Lalita Pawar's bent-over Manthara from Mr Sagar's telly-Ramayana. faced with such colonial servitude, i often make it a point to switch to Hindi. why, you might ask? besides the fact that i find that this often puts them at instant ease, it also helps to dispel lingering doubts - just in case they are labouring under the misconception that i'm firang and expecting a larger-than-my-weekly-salary tip! i have found that this usually bores away the pretenders to the "customer-is God" throne. but, scarily enough, that leaves me with the real McCoy: the STALKER.

this specimen rushes to fill your glass every time you take a mini-sip (even if it is just to make over-the-rim eye contact with the hottie at the next table, a move that is effectively blocked out by the eager-beaver); jumps in with unsolicited information about the specials (our chef does a mean chilly chicken, madam!); or launches into a paean for the kind of grapes trampled into the house wine (usually the sullied Sula, the grovelling Grover or the revolting Riviera).

during the course of the meal, he keeps rushing over to serve you, like an over- enthusiastic Punjoo hostess, right up to the last babycorn from the misspelt, yet unpronounceable, recommendation that is really just a giant veggie cauldron of unrecognisable stuff; and continues to hover expectantly, as if ever-alert to help you complete even that naughty li'l thought you might have about the partially eclipsed hottie! frankly, by the end of the meal, when he comes up, for the umpteenth time, to ask me if he can get me anything else at all, i am all too ready to scream: "how about a restraining order, buddy? do you think you could manage to procure that in the amount of time it took you to get me a chilled beer?"

frankly, by the end of this extremely harrowing performance, i am already missing the snooty, apathetic, bored-since-i haven't seen-you-on-page-three, th(r)ong left behind by the fleeing British. for this is the second species, that exalted and exclusive set that epitomise 'fine dining' in our great nation. signs (not an exhaustive list) to know that you've hit the reigning hotspot include servers that:

• don't give a damn if you get your menus (you tryin' to tell me you need a menu to order a bundle's worth of buttery lentils, chicken tika masala, assorted Indian bread and saffron rice, lady?);
  
• keep pretending not to see you, as if you're the super-hot girl who laminated and prominently displayed their misspelt v-day card, for the world to see, in the fifth grade (for the record, i never did that. would've adored the vocab-challenged bugger! and nor was i super-hot);
• silently damn you with the unmistakable arching of their supercilious brows for requesting 'regular' water over its sparkling or still bottled avatar and (horror of horrors!) to share a dish (never mind if you have just come from Mrs. Chadha's great-grandson's mundan and poolside chaat-party);
• with relief writ large on their faces, place a long bill that includes a hefty service charge, well-knowing that you know, and also knowing that you know that they know that you ain't gonna pay a penny beyond the bottomline. hah! gotcha, cheapskate :)
  
• to add a final insult to the injury, frown at your silver credit card. "don't believe in platinum, madam? oh, and would you like the giant half-eaten naan to go? for the mongrel at home, of course?"

that's it! i'm ordering in. that's a personal pan pizza, yes, just for one. no, i don't want the weekend jumbo special. what? you don't deliver under 500 Swiss francs? or over 200 metres? uh, well, thanks for nothing, pal!

hi, Ma! yeah, for how long do you boil those orange lentils to turn them into yellow dal?

Chance pe dance

Got a flat tyre on your way to an important meeting? Most people would just curse, change it, curse some more and move on, after a few frantic calls to re-schedule. But heaven forbid if you’re a Russian diplomat called Yuri Popov. For, then, a flat tyre might just be the karmic blessing your country needs to go out and flatten a pesky neighbour.

If the British newspaper Sunday Telegraph is to be believed, it was this historic flat tyre that caused a Russian no-show at a crucial meeting, which punctured Georgian egos enough to launch a hasty offensive. So, while the world was busy watching the fireworks in Beijing, the eager Russians did what a hit Bollywood movie Jhankar Beats popularised as a “chance pe dance”, and unleashed some fireworks of their own. Just like the fate of the Roman Empire is believed to have been delicately balanced on the length of Cleopatra’s nose, the success or failure of many a military misadventure has hung on a delectable little thing called chance.

For chance is a dangerous thing. Ask the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. Gavrilo Princip, the sickly Serb high school drop-out, was only the last in a line-up of seven assassins – six of whom missed, who would ‘chance upon’ the royal couple, after they had missed a turn, and hastily shoot his way into history books as the man who possibly triggered World War I. Alas! Had they only hit a pothole and flattened a tyre, the world might have looked a lot different than it does today.

Smile and beer it

so, it finally hit me last night. i'm getting old. why, you ask, have i chosen to suddenly wake up to an ugly truth?

it's because my head's about to fall off after about 2 glasses of beer, that too, at my own party. TWO glasses! not bottles. not even mugs. no, not even two proper beer glasses (shudder!). but two measly, slim, harmless looking, benign water tumblers filled (not even to the brim. shame! shame!) with a Thai version of the divine liquid that are responsible for tumbling me throbbing-head first into a depression. all on account of undeniable proof of the shocking effects of aging on my capacity to shoot back the 'amateur' stuff. there! i said it. (oye, who's the amateur now?)

but now, sitting in my office, pleasantly hazy from dunking Tylenol with fresh spring water, semi-recovered and basking in the warm gooey feeling of a party-well-thrown (and well-attended, where guests stayed well-beyond the Cinderella hour), i've been able to gain a pretty balanced perspective on the events of last night (and this lousy morning).

it was the food. something, somewhere caused the brain pain. can't be the alcohol, now, can it? we're a family of seasoned drinkers (not drunkards, mind you). proud pros from the Land of the Five Rivers, who have withstood the assault of molasses and fermentation for centuries with a grin and a spin. what's two measly tumblers of Asian brew, huh? (it wasn't even the European stuff, man!). old? age ain't nothin' but the number of years your whiskey's been lying around in vats.

so, bring it on, its a new evening! and damn chicken biryani, that dodgy harbinger of bad news!!

What's in a name?

i'm shedding skin. and baggage. (alas, no pounds, yet!)
as i try to look beyond the greatest betrayal of my life, slowly inching my way towards yet another self-discovery, i've decided that such a journey can allow no baggage from the past, including a post- marital suffix to my maiden name. so, today, i took the semi-final step towards leaving the same by the wayside, along with motley dreams and the attachment to what definitely was a more Googleable entity. the cruel hand of fate, i say!

yes, this definitely is a confession of sorts and does mean that i DO admit to a certain narcissisim in Googling myself every now and then just to see where all i turn up and how often... besides, its good to know what kind of spooks are using your printed word to embellish or espouse their lofty (or shady) causes. but being blessed with an eminently (and horrendously) common Indian name-surname combo can surely throw a spanner in the works for Page 1 celeb status (on google search, of course), and to add isult to injury i ain't Page 3 material in any case. never will be, i strongly suspect :)

but i have to admit that this particular departure, in a long line of them over the last few months, has been an uplifting experience. feels like i am back from being the shadow of my former self, even though one may ask, what really is in a name? perhaps, for me, its the essence of who i had forgotten how to be in the last couple of years. its three syllables exemplify the craziness that my parents unleashed upon the world three score (and then some more) years ago; the sing-song way in which all my friends have cheerfully addressed me over the years (and continue to do, which makes newer acquaintances wonder why they ALWAYS insist on hitching the family name to my christian one while addressing me! for the record, that's a school thingy); AND, most importantly, it's just who i was before... well... before, it all went downhill. meaning that i must begin the excruciating climb up another hillside (new future, new home, new job, same holiday package, new twin-sharer... blah blah blah) before i go over the hill. but... boy! this has been one great descent into a pasture that's greener than i imagined:) but then let me not get ahead of myself.

in the last few weeks, a lot of people have tried to shore me up by saying that this is my trial-by-fire and what-not, some even going to the poetic extent of telling me that i am going to rise from the ashes, Sphinx-like, to reclaim all that's been lost. (oh, believe you me, i am NOT making this up!) i don't know too much about mythological morale-boosters, but what i do know is this: i'm doin' kinda ok. and that's the kind of optimism that goes with the name. and with the same, i hope that you will, as dedicated friends, keep scrolling down the search pages to reach a result that remotely hints at this poor ol' girl.
all this same, PS is clawing her way back up. and how!
see ya at the top :)

An (al)right kind of Leftie

Harkishan Singh Surjeet passed away last week. The veteran Communist leader was different things to different people: king-maker, master strategist, power broker. But I will always remember him as a gruff but amiable Gandalf-like figure from scattered childhood memories.

Born months apart, my paternal grandfather – a fervent grassroots Commie, who moonlighted as a feudal landlord – and “Comrade Surjeet” met in Ludhiana, where he used to come and visit my granddad on a bicycle, and they sporadically kept in touch over the years. My grandfather was what you can call "progressive", not an active hands-on firebrand like his comrade, but more of a logistics, materiel and moral-support provider to the cause. Grandpa was perpetually berating us for being spoilt capitalist brats, to which I responded by haranguing him about all those “fake” Communists with their lavish lifestyles. I did this just to piss him off and this particular Comrade was usually his ace socialist-with-a-soul defense against my wild insinuations.

It was a battle without end and wherever the truth may lie, two incidents stick in my memory. The first was narrated by my dad, and the second I was witness to. Years ago, my father travelled with him to Kolkata by rail and he never tires of narrating as to how “Surjeet Uncle” stepped out at en-route stations to buy guavas and other goodies. Upon arrival, he patiently waited with dad to get a taxi, for well over an hour in the sweltering heat, even though he could have just asked for a party car.

Another time, while he was visiting us in Bareilly, my grandfather had to suddenly leave for the farm, leaving my mother in-charge of making our guest his (obscenely) early morning cuppa. She woke up, horrified at having missed the alarm, and rushed into the kitchen only to find him, on his knees, rummaging through newly bought rations for tea and sugar. He further humbled my deeply apologetic mom by insisting on making her a cup as well.

I have really been missing my grandfather, who passed away this March, merely to rib him about the mayhem in the Left’s ranks, at which I am sure he would have scoffed: “These are not Communists, these are Opportunists!” I somehow get the feeling that he is just waiting up there to pounce on his trusty old friend for some answers of his own. May their souls rest in peace.

PETA (Please Eat The Activist)

(... and the edit function on this website. apologies for the formatting. just can't get it right!)

i thought that i did not need to say this after "Terrible Tuesday", but Indian politicians (and wannabes) are getting curiouser and curiouser... i hereby sincerely invoke divine protection for the causes they choose to espouse, after this little gem from today's oped page in the Pioneer (titled "Beat the urge for meat"), written by that environmental fundamentalist (read terrorist!) lady, the other other Mrs. Gandhi...

when she wrote a passionate piece about the plight of the poor pigeons who were exploited during the shooting of the SRK starrer Paheli, i finally realised that she needs help, a conclusion i am sure i share with others. for the undecided, i present to you her latest vituperation of meat eaters.... here are my favorite bits, which must be seen in light of the fact that i am a pious non-veggie: BRACE YOURSELVES! (Black's her; the red is moi, of course!)

here goes....

Everyone's life is strewn with incidents wherein they have a chance to become bigger than themselves (this point contradicts a later one linking meat eating to obesity), to be nobler and kinder and happier (by being veggie? are you kidding me??!!). Some people don't recognise these opportunities but they return again and again, so you still have time to open your eyes. However, some people go in the opposite direction-they take the chance that life gives them and they abuse it and strangle it till the little luck they have squeezes itself out the window and runs for its life. (don't miss the helpless li'l chicken-that-we-carnivores-have-been-terrorising-for-generations analogy!)

Take for example someone who has the good fortune to be born into a vegetarian family. (good fortune and vegetarianism? that's like saying you are fortunate to be born in Mugabe's Zimbabwe!) Why they would lapse into a carnivorous diet and pick up disease, obesity, bad odour, (eh?) and bad karma is beyond my understanding. But people do. Every now and then, I see people from proud (eh, again!) vegetarian families eating meat....... These are the reasons spouted by ex-vegetarians for breaking the faith:

"I belong to the privileged Brahmin class. I need to do something to show my solidarity with the downtrodden Dalits. So I consume meat." (Then why not live in the same place and manner the way they do? (uh oh!!) Or even better, invite them to share your own privileges. ("...carefulllll!!) But that would be asking too much of our fashionable leftist.) (are we talking Guevara here? 'cos being a leftist in India went squarely outta fashion this week!!)
{Boy! someone is NEVAH getting a ticket from Maya Aunty!! }

"My college friends say I am a nuisance at picnics and that I shouldn't be such a fanatic." (So you should suffer cold ecoli-ridden chicken sandwiches just to go along with the gang. Giving up your beliefs to suit others' convenience is pathetic. If they don't value you, change your friends, not your food.) {and what about trading your yummy BigMacs to show solidarity with your fussy "i-eat-only-organic" vegan soy-sucking friends?? change 'em?? i say.... you're probably right!}

"Eating meat makes me seem more normal and fit." (The same argument is given by smokers and drinkers.)
(come now! leave that outta this. i feel attacked on all fronts! for the record, i am neither fit nor normal. not by a long shot.)

.......soyabean and dal are the highest sources of protein and all the world's biggest and most powerful animals like elephants, rhinos, giraffes, bulls and horses are vegetarians.
(.... ok, this is actually funny... can you imagine all thse big guys sitting down to an environmentally-friendly "save the world" seven-course meal of soyabean and dal??? the animal kingdom's answer to our pathetic G8!)

"Poor people grow goats and if we stop eating meat those poor will be deprived of their livelihood." (So you are actually eating meat as a social service? Give up your car and ride in a tanga to support the poor tangawallahs, and wear hand-spun material to support the poor weavers and eat in earthenware to support the poor potters.)
(grow goats???? really? whay have we not written about this unique mutation miracle? is the government secretly subsidising these poor people? its a giant genetic conspiracy! and is it not cruel to exploit the poor horse that drives the noble tanga?? is PETA listening? and what of the tired hands that spin and our mother earth that we will be exploiting?)

"My wife/husband eats meat and I cannot cook separately because it's too exhausting." (Why not just lump everything together - soup, main course, dessert because it's too exhausting to make them separately? And why not share clothes to reduce washing and ironing. Put the whole family in one room to reduce cleaning area. All the more reason to cook vegetarian because it's what both people can eat. Should your partner want meat, let him/her go hunt for it.)
(no comment. seriously. quite like the image of this neanderthalish kibbutz!)

"I eat meat when someone offers it to me. I don't want to impose my class/caste views on other people." (So then you would go anywhere you were taken, watch anything you were shown, read anything you were given. That's just what this world needs- mindless robots).
(either that or we choose to take your advice and choose NOT to read the baloney that you write and in return you stop imposing your views on us. howzzat for karmic balance eh?)

She ends by saying:

Do you recognise yourself?

i throw this back at you Ma'am.
do YOU?

Just another day at the office...

O-H my G-A-W-D! i know that with the benefit of hindsight and armed with all the action replays of all that i missed LIVE! today, i will update this tomorrow, but for now..... what a day it has been my fellow country men (and women)!

somehow, in all the mayhem and shamefulness that Parliament had to offer today, i felt strangely one with my fellow Indians... we stood united while craning our necks and straining our ears to hear Laloo and Rahul baba speak, just as we were united in shaking our heads and smirking at the circus on television and the drama that unfolded throughout the day; i felt the nation gasp as one when the bundles of money came out (helpfully pointed out by a giant hand on one of the Hindi news channels!) and then i heard India scratch its giant head when the first results came in and we all wondered where the missing MPs went ?? now i am sure i am not alone in wondering where those bundles of money came from and where they might eventually land up!

and i felt terribly nostalgic too, constantly reminded as i was of the first grade, when the Speaker kept telling everyone to "keep quiet" and "please sit down", requesting them to " kindly return to their seats"...

but i have to admit that i have my favorite characters in this "Comedy of Horrors". the first, undoubtedly, was Somnath babu ... especially when, after he was asked by one speaker as to why he could not stop another from interrupting him, he replied. "what should i do? should i strangle him?" he cajoled, shouted, wrung his hands, helplessly dug his nose and tsk tsked his way into our great nation's doctored history books.. (update: and got expelled from his party for his efforts... what a shame!)

and then of course, there is my eternal fave: Manu Bhai. love him. he's chooooo chweeeeet. i agree with one of my senior colleagues that of all the PMs that this had to happen to, it happened to happen to him.... what was that sentence again? whatever, you get my drift. i could almost picture him, late at night, finally away from the spotlight and alone at home with his wife saying "hun bas. that's it for me, Gurshu, wake me up when this nigthmare's over, and we'll move to oxford". i like his new Guru Gobind Singh inspired avatar though. sad how it all came to pass but.... way to go, dude!!

so, in the end, i just decided to hum along with the HIndi channels... "Singh is King, Singh is King, Singh is King ..... " never mind the ring-a-ding-ding!!

The Staircase and the Sign

a friend of mine, who was working in Manhattan at the time, told me that she had to take up smoking, after living healthy enough to see the big three-oh! as a non-smoker, just to stay in the loop at work. be that as it may, i have to now endorse her view that yes, well, the smokin' staircase is where its at!

... to think that the nation's storytelling often has its origins in the whispering that goes on under the big "dhoomrapaan nishedh" sign... yes, this is where the hallways of power converge, guiding the mighty keyboards that bring you your daily news! "the sign" itself presents a fitting analogy for the goings-on in our political system. its status is somewhat akin to the Indian President, if you like - that quintessential figurehead of our wayward nation. so it is with "the sign", i'm afraid.

all sorts of measures are in place to make ours a healthy republic, but we carry on nevertheless and it is only in times of acute crisis that we reluctantly turn to that great emblem of authority: "the sign". like after the Great Fire, when the guardians of workplace clout invoked "the sign" to smoke us all out of the stairwell... you see, this place has a long history of revolutions and counter-revolutions to abolish/re-instate the right to abuse our lungs, ever since that last bastion of creative oomph: the vaunted first floor, fell to the bearers of "the sign"; but, mitigating circumstances apart, most experiments ended in abysmal failure.

oh, they banned it. what followed was a sudden spike in loo breaks, working lunches, strolls to the parking lot and, of course, sheepish hanging around the stairwells and other suitably shady corners. for this is an incorrigible bunch, much like our parliamentarians who are, as we speak, making impassioned speeches on national TV, all the while wondering who it will be within the hallowed portals of the House who will stab them in the back... and for how much! you see, the system is flawed, its twisted and more crooked that Tinu Anand's teeth, but it works. not very well sometimes, but it chugs along, and there is only so much that a rubber stamp can do. so, it is with "the sign". the rule of thumb here is: Thou shalt decree and, sure as day follows night, it shalt be flouted.. again and again and again....

so there we all are, puffing away with impunity, and the republic's back in business... would i could say the same about the other Republic that's older than "the sign" and is still pointing in different directions but going nowhere... alas! we can only fight one injustice at a time my friend.... and its time to find out what's with the damn coffee machine :)

Cheeky chicanery, eh?

seems to me like we are loosing the Battle of the Front Page, even as i am told, by many a faithful reader, that we are winning the War of Readability (oh, but our page ROCKS!). every morning, on my way to the daily meeting, i hear the rustling in the conference-room, and have to try very hard to resist a peek inside to see the gladiatorial parade of the pages... our successive front pages, jostling for wall space with our nemesis', while the various lords do a SWOT analysis of the home team. but today, i'm sure, those voices must have been tempered with moments of confused silence and mild to vehement defense/denials, their eyes going back to the travesty that was Page One... in fact, for a moment i thought someone had ripped off a section of my copy's masthead... for the rest of the day, my eyes kept returning to the scene of the crime, tortured as i was by the near-headless monstrosity. enough, already. can't bear to talk about it anymore!

oh, we are also losing some of the other battles. like against inflation and rising costs.. today there was no air conditioning in office, ostensibly due to some maintenance work, but my conspiratorial mind seems to think there is some sneaky cost cutting going on here... the coffee machine at the entrance often has no mineral water dispenser. so we go to the one in the Hindi-heartland, which, for some reason, never has any cups. but by the time you go to the one near the entrance for a cup, those have miraculously disappeared too and so have the tea bags at another machine... and so on and on....

so, in the end, you land up either going without tea, or have to find a pretext of another meeting to get a more palatable version made by the office boy. ok, so that last part was a fib. i do only have one meeting to attend daily, but the ruse comes in handy to avoid pesky calls during office hours, avoided by murmuring importantly into your handset, suitably muffled as it is with your hand clapped over it.. yes, yes, i am a dedicated worker, and no the last time any of you called, i was really in an emergency meeting! you know nah baba: Leftie Inc, Softie Singh, etc etc have been running circles around Manu bhai and Sonya aunty after all.... its giving me dark circles for crissssssake!

but now i am getting ahead of myself. so, we have stolen one of our foreign editor's portable fan, who is enjoying better (physical, not security-wise) climate in Kabul, and stuck the offensive Page One into the grimy window to keep it open. oh, another fact that supports my cost cutting theory is that why would you do this on a saturday, albeit on a day there is, mercifully, a decent breeze blowing, and why would you 'slimily' place portable fans at strategic locations (lots of hyperactivity in one hour), if this was to be only a one-day-few-hours' job! why, tell nah, WHY? now, i'm getting pissed. its hot. and we have to watch how much paper we use in these inflationary times....damn, there goes our paper boat sailing competition in the loo and the air show in the sports section :( AND they only keep mirinda (and no fanta!) in the cafe. does it cool with less power, i wonder? oh wow, its 7 already!

cheerio! i'm off to drive off in the AC confines of my car... crap! how much did you say that barrel of oil was for?

So, where have you been honey?

in the adventurous, rugged, often bleak, and sometimes treacherous landscape that modern marriage is, its hard to imagine anyone who has not had mutinous thoughts of shedding excess baggage and just taking off on an arduous journey of introspection, hoping that the battered half (my take on the Indian "better-half") will still be there to either pick up the pieces of an experiment gone horribly wrong, or share in the spoils of a successful odyssey of self-discovery.

sometimes when people set off on this path, they have no clue where they might land up. they can choose to moan the loss of the familiar and painstakingly re-build the imperfect, or they can embrace the unfamiliar and throw fate the gauntlet, and gear up to see what it throws back at them.

i believe those who cowardly choose the former shall perish, while the latter will eventually live on, stronger, to fight another day. Amen.

Lean your unclean on me

i remember this episode from Friends, when Rachel makes Monica in-charge of making all future decisions for her, after a spate of some spectacularly bad ones (obviously involving men!).

i wish i could do the same! alas, life ain't a sitcom and although i have equally messed up uber-loyal and infinitely dependable friends; unfortunately i was born with a pre-programmed "take-responsibility-for-your-actions" microchip, embedded in the depths of my conscience. the masochistic logic behind this irritant, according to me, is that i can never blame anyone else for my variegated foibles. but it is times like the ones i am currently living in that make me yearn otherwise...

so it is that i was fascinated by a story in the TOI that talks about a hat-ke outsourcing firm, that tackles your dirty jobs for you. AskSunday, and its Indian avatar GetFriday, can break up with your girlfriend, cancel your date, and perhaps do sundry other "don't-wish-to-getcha-hands-dirty" stuff for you, while you sit in your storm shelter, with curtains drawn, and pretend not to be home.

wow! why didn't I think of that one before... given my penchant for gettin' down and dirty ;)

A montage of memories

its amazing how clearly i can remember the first day i met most of my school friends... the ones that continue to matter, that is. and every day that passes by seems to salute my choice... and theirs, i hope!

whether it was "Blongdie" who offered to hold my hand as we walked, double file, to classes while i was still new enough to be wearing 'home clothes', and whose cute giggles still lighten up a gloomy day; or "Brilliantis" in pink 'home clothes' who joined us a few hours before we were leaving for a camping trip to the jungles of UP, and with whom i sat chatting as a one-year veteran, sharing my insights of a boarding life away from the ordinary; ever the perfectionist (as well as the undisputed "Empress of Erudition"), these days i am teaching her how to be messier, starting with gleefully throwing a scrunched up napkin on the table after some fine dining!

and then there is "Mother Mary" my 'new girl' mentor all those years ago, and now good friend, who continues to enlighten me, however unwittingly, fervent in her belief that all sinners can be saved! outrageous as she sometimes can be, i know few who are so resolved in their insanity!!

and then there are those who are closest to my heart, the ones i simply can't do without, but whom i have no recollection of meeting for the first time! yet there are shared recollections that are burned in my memory, either as a one-flash imprint that somehow defines our friendship, or a montage of memories...

.....like how as two 12-year olds, "Aloofus" and i sat in a sandpit and planned our then-oh-so-far-and-now-s0-upon-us future. it still amazes me how she went straight from the sandpit to swanky banker in the bat of an eyelid, or so it seems after all these years. oh! how she used to endlessly worry about marrying a geek and not being invited to our parties on account of a dull spouse! for the record, he turned out ok :) and she turned out to be more than that - the intellectually rock-solid dispeller of doubts and one of the best things that ever happened to me... in her banal view of life, i sometimes find the key to truly living it up!

and then there is "Vanity Insanity", whose sheer delight in being alive is a rare commodity in these moody times. i can never repay her enough for being there, every other sinister night, to sleepily stand guard while i went to get a mid-night drink of water under the creepy pitter-patter of the flying fox that mysteriously resided somewhere on the roof.... alas! she has not been all that generous about not stealing my "baby boy name" ;) oh, she is quick to remind me that i can't hoard baby names forever with no intention of having one soon, and in any case, what the heck!
together we were the three members of a girl band that was a flash hit in those days, constantly trying to appropriate the cooler character for ourselves ! oh, but these two are the joy of my life, my rudder and lighthouse, anchor and lifeguard all rolled into one.

then there was "Still Waters", with her nose buried in some pretense or the other to be left alone, who would get distracted just long enough to tsk tsk my latest madness (most often of the Martian variety), but who would dutifully risk extending her hand across our neighbouring beds, in the bitter January nights, to calm my petrified nerves after yet another nightmare.... of course, i have to mention "Dusky Sarco", super-mommy as she is now better known, whose volatile "on-off" friendship kept me guessing for years, and which, thankfully, i can now fall back on with eyes closed... nothing like a little crisis to help you separate the tharra from the Single Malt!


i cannot afford to forget my bawling partner-in-crime, "Chin Up", even though there was nothing criminally insane about her singing as was the case with mine, as we traversed the tennis courts after dinner each night, till we had finally chased away the others.... or "Primarella" who shunned all recreational activity till her bed was crisply made, clothes freshly laundered and hair dutifully washed, till she fell in love and found a new reason to sit on her freshly made bed and write neat, primly passionate poetry to her beau.. basically what she lacked in the hectic socialising department, she made up for with her earthy charm, thus becoming the first to cross the finishing line in ensnaring an "official" boyfriend in our last year.

or "La Vagua" whose inner thoughts remain a mystery to all even to this day, but to whom i owe a great debt in terms of some of my best "out-of-school" moments (countless crackling Diwalis and vibrant Holis) as also for being connected through the same gene pool to my first big-girl crush, thus introducing me to my very first blushes... sigh...sigh.... i never did find out what she thought of my childish obsession and i presume her poker face continues to befuddle her two kids! good for them!!

and then there are those who lived in a different hemisphere at school and are now an inseparable part of my world, like the "Cheeky Chica" who constitutded the other half of our Joke Club at college, shared my gushy sentiments for toothless Mason from Santa Barbara and has, over the years, taught me how to take things in my stride without being too strident about it all. Grace in mayhem. Amen!

at a time when my life has taken a tumble for the topsy-turvy, it is the protagonists of these memories who have kept me afloat, never asking why and silently shouldering my pain when it gets too much to carry alone, splashing my darker moments with the luminescence of their outrageous theories and generally kicking my butt when i get too morose!

words are weak stilts on which to build my eulogies. thanks for loving me as i am: cheerfully imperfect, and incorrigibly messed up.

The Motorcycle Diaries

(This is the first piece I attempted for the Edit Page, which finally got edited beyond recognition. The newer version was, admittedly pacier.... but here's mine anyway!)

Pictures of CPI leader A B Bardhan and I&B Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, riding pillion on a motorcycle conjured up images of the legendary Che Guevara. The impulse to hit the country roads on a two-wheeler might have struck Mr. Bardhan later than it did his incendiary ideological cousin, and might never inspire a movie; it’s possible that the octogenarian leader is looking for a few thrills before he steps down in favour of young guns.

In the era of aerial surveys, one can’t help but admire the earthiness of the veteran leader, and with oil straining the coffers at close to140 dollars a barrel, a motorcycle seems like a definite improvement on a cushy airplane. But he might as well have gone the whole hog on a bullock cart to really identify with the aam aadmi.

Besides, with the various speedbreakers that he and his esteemed colleagues have been busy building on the policymaking front, one could have expected Comrade Bardhan to at least have worn a helmet. At the same time, it is heartening to note that he has finally found common ground with at least one of his UPA buddies, also seen throwing caution to the winds riding side saddle without a helmet.

While their individual road trips are commendable in an age of hands-off politics, one wonders if our leaders even care about the message they are sending out to impressionable young minds. Oh, and are the traffic cops watching?

Swirling Mists

the city is awash with early rains. yes, its the monsoon and its here already, splashing the dusty streets with the force of its benevolence. but hey, wait, this is not what i expected, i say, as i look at my own life and how it is suddenly afloat, with nary a raft in sight. the deluge wasn't supposed to be here yet, i'm not prepared, my storm shelter is still a jumble of crooked lines crisscrossing a soggy canvas...

There's two of me....

i think that i have (self-diagnosed) bi-polar disorder.

i mean, all the symptoms are there, gesturing obscenely at me:
i feel euphoric and deflated all in the span of a few minutes; sometimes, i love the world and hate the people in it, and at other times, love the people and deplore the world they inhabit; i look into the mirror and am awestruck by my un-comeliness (there ain't a better word!), and then i am amazed by the (by now messed) up genetic gift of grace that is me; i am a failure if i do try and tabulate my successes and successful if i count my failures; life's often like the first sip of beer on a sweltering afternoon, and then it is suddenly like warmth-resistant toes sticking out of a shrunken quilt; suddenly i think there is somethin' cheeky in me somewhere, and then this is all there is....

I had a dream last night....

i had a dream last night. its a song i heard as part of the Beverly Hills 90210 soundtrack.

but i did really have a dream last night... it went something like this : Pakistan had attacked us.... Delhi was trying to fend off a blitzkrieg... we weren't succeeding because all India had to offer in the name of defence were some hundreds of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, generally used for surveillance/reconnaissance), and they were sponsored by Reliance so they were not very conducive to the whole speed, secrecy and stealth business, conspicuous as the were painted with triangles of red and blue!

ok, so they weren't all that useless as they did manage to confuse the Pakistani planes as the latter weaved in and out of the trusty Reliance network. so, now that i have set the stage, i am going to walk in for a cameo... i enter as i am leading a group of people from inside a hospital (which had somehow been wired to explode!) and being the smartass that i usually try to be, i am trying to tell them to run in a zigzag to avoid being hit by a missile (like THAT is gonna happen!), or flying shrapnel (like you can zigzag enough to avoid flying glass and things such like!) so,(and now it gets ugly) ten seconds after i break into a run, i'm hit in the neck by a piece of flat glass (large enough to serve biscuits on) and it lodges itself in my neck. i don't bleed but i know that i am dead.

now for the boring part: the rest of the dream (and it seemed like the rest of the long night), i am like the walking dead, looking all over town for my husband so that i can see he's ok and then in true Bollywood fashion, i can end my life on a half sigh-half sexy gasp, after telling him all the things i don't say when i should, all the while clinging onto precious life, for anywhere between 15 minutes to half an hour (i always have at least THAT much to say to anyone, except on the phone!).

that's it, that's the dream. in real life though, that's how i sometimes feel.... lost. dead, but not bleeding. always looking for something. not knowing what i'll say when i find it.... and then again thats how i feel when i hurt the one person who i go looking for when i'm hurt... like there is a piece of glass lodged inside of me, and no one can see me bleeding, btu i know its there. and it hurts like hell. only this time, i know what i'll say. i'm sorry. i know i'll probably be an ass again. but for now, i am sorry for what is past. and no, i cannot guarantee the future, but i'm sorry. NOW.

No pages till page 3

i used to know this boy once… No, this is not one i was in love with, not by a long shot, though a lot of women i knew probably were - he was that sort of boy. Floppy hair, boyish, and a helpless air that made a lot of women want to take care of him, to save him from his own helplessness and, in the process, help him spend a lot of money he seemed not to know what to do with!

One day we paid a visit to his home to find him facing a crisis beyond his young years. His mother wanted to buy him a hardbound set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He wanted her to contribute the same amount towards his home theatre system fund instead. Neither was willing to negotiate. Somehow, we convinced ourselves, in our self-declared wisdom as relatively more mature human beings (being girls, we wore the mantle with ease), that we must convince him of the merits of that horribly expensive set of ‘useful’ books.

Oh, but there was a little problem here. He didn’t know what the Encyclopaedia Britannica was! Yes, i know, we were aghast too at the time, but we soldiered on nonetheless. ‘it’s a great storehouse of knowledge’, one of us said. ‘What do you mean, like, explain it to me’, he said. We needed no more persuasion and set about our task, strongly believing that this was our version of the “White Man’s Burden”.

‘It’s got information like how many eggs does a fish lay in its lifetime?’

‘How many is that?’ (Round one to us: we had lit the flame)

‘Well, it depends on the type of fish we are talking about?’

‘What type are you talking about?’ (Round two to the boy. The flame flickers precariously, as we look at each other for help)

‘Hmmm…the average type.’ (Ah! Lord Ambiguity to the rescue!)

‘What type is that?’ (Match slipping away from us, change of tact required.)

‘See, that is just the kind of information these books will provide you!’ i said breathlessly.

Here, i’d like to believe i had won us a reprieve, but then this is my version of the story so i can afford that luxury. However, it would turn out to be a short-lived one (as is the definitional nature of reprieves) for what we didn’t know was this: never underestimate how far a man will go for a desired gadget, in this case a state-of-the-art home theatre system.

On another tangent, i have learnt this lesson well for life ahead and have consequently abandoned all attempts to dissuade my husband from aspiring for and acquiring his desired gadgetry. There’s little we women can do about that actually, so we might as well accept our man’s childlike fascination for flashy, complicated machinery as yet another bizarre fact of life. Such acceptance must be a two-way street though, so all you men out there, this is for you: a woman can never have too many shoes. Oh, and just to make you feel you’re getting a better bargain, they cost much less than your must-have technological wonders! Well, at least some of them do.

Back to the boy now and his story. That afternoon we trooped out, feeling all chuffed up about the powers of female persuasion. Only to return a few days later, en route to a night on the town, to encounter the beaming owner of a new home theatre system. After delicately wriggling out of an impassioned plea to watch yet another documentary on Jim Morrison (we had already watched some on his old VCR), we were led into the bedroom by the suitably smug negotiator. And lo and behold, glinting off a newly installed bookshelf was the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica.

‘But…. how?’, one of us managed to stutter. So a key was swiftly fished out from one of the drawers and he opened the glass door for us to have a look-see. The first volume came off the shelf easily, too easily, in fact, for a tome THAT loaded with eternal knowledge. ‘Well, go ahead, open it!’ And we did, only to discover that that was all there was to it, the cover. More confused stuttering followed. Another smug smile, and finally the truth was revealed. Apparently, in a fitting tribute to the ingenuity of Indians, he had managed to custom-procure an entire set of embossed covers, which would occupy pride of place in his room, under lock and key of course, for a price that left enough for a down payment on the real object of desire.
And THAT, folks, is what they call game, set and match.

We lost touch not long after the happy ending of this family saga, but have seen him on page3 a few times after that... and somehow, my mind always takes me back to the pageless books that might no longer be adorning that locked shelf.

Risks and Rewards

i feel, every now and then, that i am breaching the rules of the game, just because i don’t know what they are. given my penchant for shooting my mouth off, my impulsiveness has got me into quite a few scrapes in life. in trying to navigate the blind alley of relationships i further seem to have developed flippancy into an art form and often shy away from straight answers, usually saying the first thing that comes to my head before my brain has had time to process the thought behind it…i have no ready answers… i rarely do. But, yeah i think a lot and then i think some more and sometimes my brain’s like Schumacher’s practice run!

someone asked me a question a long time ago: how far would you be willing to go in order to make someone see your point of view about a relationship (real or potential)?
i don’t know if there is an answer, or even a limit... any personal relationship is based on some special discovery or another.. perhaps something seen by two people in one another no matter how trivial or how long ago, to paraphrase Hugh Prather. One just has to recognise the relevant sign and then follow its lead. in my humble experience, it usually takes you just where you want to go.... provided you are not howling at the moon but at a much more achievable target! so howl away till the other person just has no excuse left to not be with you!!

we are all afraid of taking the risk.... leaving yourself open to hurt is a lot like splashing your eyes with water …. the normal human reflex is to shut them tight, but you just have to keep trying to keep them open till it becomes a habit. i have always been over-cautious about opening my eyes most of the time, the flip side being that i did miss out on a lot that i refused to risk! maybe i was searching for that perfect gamble. now i know there are none. well, i guess we live some, lose some and learn some.

besides, in any relationship, you can never know which way it is going to swing till you get past your very first crisis….. for example, if one person is always looking to exaggerate the problem and avoiding the solution, however hard that may be, then the other one will forever be picking up the pieces.

oh and call me hopelessly uncynical, but i refuse to agree with those who say that romance/attraction/whatever dies blah blah blah… i agree that it takes frequent breaks, maybe even hibernates for a while, but it takes the right combination to revive it! in the end, you can be "sensible" all you want but most times you just have to play it by ear.... and if you get too involved in the “properness” of it all, you’ll never get past the pleasantries.

sometimes, there is nothing. no sign. no bells. no answers from the heavens. and things just drift... sometimes we wonder and sometimes we don't.

Marital Martial Arts

there are times when the husband and i fight and he has often asked me, at moments when we have nearly forgotten what the original issue was, why i feel the need to always win whatever argument is the flavour of the tirade. i suppose his irritation stems from the myth gleefully perpetuated by men (and some women) that the woman must always have the last word in any argument (apparently, anything that follows is the start of a brand new discussion!)... alright! perhaps. but winning?

i have thought of this at length and the answer is always the same. no one wins. anyone who thinks they do are just fooling themselves, and whats worse, i would like to ask them this: what do you think you are winning and against whom?

there are times when he makes me lose my cool enough that i get so uncharacteristically angry that i don't really know what i am arguing about in the first place.... and it is times like these when i feel like i have lost. big time. everytime. i lose against an enslaving temper, against my better judgement, against the power of good memories and pre-marital pledges, and against previous victories spurred by honest self reproach. and then i am angry for allowing the Trojan Horse of anger to breach the walls of my tolerance, patience, faith and common sense.

so, for all those who still think they won, it is nothing but a shadow of victory. can you spot your name on that glorious roll of honour? oh, and could i please have a look at that glitzy trophy?

Ladies who lunch

A lot has been written about girlfriends. And i don’t mean treatises on an unfathomable species by generations of exasperated men, but glowing eulogies by grateful women... heartfelt tributes to an extraordinary species of time-resistant, shock-proof, battle-hardened partners-in-crime, belonging to an exclusive members-only cult if you may.

Before Sex and the City epitomised the lunching ladies of the Big Apple, i had already written a billion eulogies in my head to all those wonderful women who i thank for my daily, sometimes even hourly, sanity.

Every once in a while, my husband casts an annoyed glance at chattering 'chicks', who seem to be blissfully unaware that they are ruining many a peace of mind, while i grin sheepishly in the simple and comforting knowledge that i too proudly belong to the not-so-secret tribe of ladies, who quite simply, lunch. Ok, we also shop, guzzle beer, shoot tequilas, ogle (oops, aesthetically appreciate, i mean!), and often chase away the other patrons of the local watering hole by a cacophony of “no, you didn’t!”, “shuuuut uuuup!”, “he said that?!” and other such suitably loud and vacuous phrases, the loaded significance of which is incomprehensible to lesser mortals.

So yes, at the risk of acknowledging my peskiness, i’m proud to have been there, done that. And by that i mean being unrepentant in unashamedly chasing away grumbling unhappy people who could no longer bear the dissonance of deafeningly discussed diets, bare-all banter on the biceps of the boy next door and the hotly debated merits of insanely expensive accessories.

For all those of you who have had the misfortune to chance upon just the kind of scene i am describing, sleep well my dears... rejoice in the knowledge that there is someone out there who is lending a shoulder to all your girlfriends, wives, mothers, sisters to cry on, an ear to bitch to and a hand to hold, allowing them to let off steam that could very well be scalding your helplessly wrung hands at this very moment! And the next time you happen to lose your patience with one of our kind, making a nuisance in a public place, all you have to do is smile at the thought that some of your precious time is being saved for crucial pursuits like scandalous scratching, girl gawking, cricket couching and buddy boozing, time that could very well have been hijacked by ladies who.... hmmm... er... prefer not to lunch.

Cannabis cities

Have you ever been driving under the neon lights of a brightly lit fly-over on a November night.... just before the breaking of dawn.... mellow drunk, with Def Leppard on the stereo and one elbow resting on the rolled down window...... content in the sense of belonging that threatens to overwhelm your senses, causing you to nearly veer off the road, lulled as you are by the euphoria of knowing there might never be a more perfect moment?

Ah, for there ain't a greater high than zipping past the dawn kissed familiarity of the streets you love...

I have often wondered what is it about Delhi that makes me feel like i am the extension of its being? What is it that makes my hands itch to take the wheel every time the husband and i are getting back from a late night party? Is it the fact that this is the city in which i was born? Or is it because i have studied and lived here for the best part of the last 14 years? Is my attachment to the city a natural corollary of my parents' having spent their growing-up years, curiously charting its corners as i often do? perhaps all of these and more. What i do know is that the sight of the Red Fort after a few days away is like none other, navigating the traffic is often more exciting than a favourite video game and there's always a part of me that's missing every time i am away.

anyhow, here is a list of things that make Delhi more irritatingly adorable than any other place in the world (ever since Dehradun lost out on the top spot for a variety of reasons), borrowed, for now, from an email forward someone sent me a while ago, a list of things (not exhaustive by a long shot!) that Delhiites swear by:

• 1. The Other Side Law: If my side of the road has a traffic jam, then I can start driving on the wrong side of the road, and all incoming cars on other side will be re-routed via Meerut.
  
  2. The Queue Nahin Rule: If there is a queue of many people, no one will notice me sneaking into the front as long as I am looking the other way.
  
  3. The Mind Over Matter Law: If a red light is not working, four cars from different directions can easily pass through one another.
  
  4. The Auto Axiom: If I indicate which way I am going to turn my auto rickshaw, it is an information security leak.
  
  5. Spit and Span: The more I lean out of my car or bus, and the harder I spit, the stronger the roads become.
  
  6. The Cinema Hall Fact: If I get a call on my mobile phone, the film automatically goes into pause mode.
  
  7. The Brotherhood Law: If I want to win an argument, I need only to repeatedly suggest that the other person has illicit relations with his sister or mother.. .
  
  8. The Baraat Right: When I'm on the road to marriage, all the roads in the city belong to me.
  
  9. The Heart Of Things: If I open enough buttons on my shirt, the pretty girl at the bus stop can see through my hairy chest into the depths of my soul.
  
  10. The Name Game: It is very important for the driver behind me to memorise the nicknames of my children.
  
  11. Parking Up The Wrong Tree: When I double-park my car, the road automatically widens so that the traffic is not affected.
  
  12. The Chill Bill Move: When I park and block someone else's car I am giving him a chance to pause, relax, chill, reflect and take a few moments off from his rushed day.
  
  13. The Brrrrp Break: The louder I burp in a public place; the more it helps other people digest their food.
  
  14. The Bus Karo Law: If I stop my bus at the correct place near the bus stop, the city will explode and blow into 6 million pieces.
  
  15. The VIP Rule: There are only 7 important persons in this city - Me, I, Myself, Main, Mainu, Aami and Moi!

Arranged derangement

(Note: this is an altered version of a piece that was published earlier this year... was considered by most friends as apparently misleading, hence i have made some corrections to drive home the point !)

i spy from behind a pillar, trying to ascertain the latest in the long line-up of potentials that my parents ceaselessly foist upon me. My eyes settle on a tall, similarly discomfited specimen in his mid-thirties, wearing (No! It can’t be) a cravat! Even as my brain is crawling towards accepting the futility of escape, we’re suddenly face-to-face.

Like two captains mid-pitch for a toss, we size each other up, each tentatively coming up with a distracted greeting. Perhaps it is just my fevered imagination, but my reluctance is mirrored in the stranger’s steady gaze. Yet he isn’t a complete stranger for we have had a few absorbing conversations on the phone, and he seemed nice enough to be spotted with in a frequently visited Barista by friends who would immediately recognise a parental hook-up.

And he does pass the early tests: holding the door open for me, waiting till i am seated comfortably, and then zealously whipping out his wallet to procure two steaming cappuccinos. i decline a bite, not wanting him to know right away my penchant for all things edible. Educational backgrounds are discussed, career choices debated, music notes exchanged, and with some well-needed investment advice from Mr. Why-would-a-man-wear-a-cravat-in May, the awkwardness of the moment is temporarily dispelled.

A pregnant silence follows while we each ponder the merits of chartered accountancy versus research, Dire Straits versus Megadeth, fat pay packets versus petty change (mine, obviously!) and the fact that, well, parents will be parents. Then, the inevitable happens. He leans in slightly and just as he loudly asks me what i am looking for in a “life partner”, the music stops and suddenly it seems that everyone around us is more interested in my reply than their cooling coffees, Scrabble squabbles and tuneless guitar-playing.

i mumble something about needing some fresh air and stumble out, nearly hyperventilating. Is this it, i wonder? So i throw the question back at him. And, after a small speech on values and compatibility, suddenly, deliverance! He asks, ‘hypothetically’ of course, if i am the kind of person who would be rebellious enough to go on a girls’ night out while he clocks a self-inflicted 90-hours week.

Three years later, i can still feel the warmth of self-righteous relief as I walked away after five more minutes of polite talk. Now as i look at my husband sleeping next to me, i’m sure that Mr. Cravat would be someone else’s perfect match. and just when i had thought i had finally found mine.....Ha..Hah!

Bite of the Big Apple

(Note: i apologise for the confused grammar in this one... still haven't figured out what tense to use!)

New York. There simply ain't no better city in the world in which you can leave your prescription glasses in a taxicab. The same New York, where you stick out like a sore thumb if you do not possess any of these accessories: dark glasses (to be used even at night as you sit dozing in the subway), an iPod, a suitably uninterested expression and oodles of indifference.

So leave those glasses behind, if you may, but hey! Remember to take the bill from the cabbie and make sure you are carrying a mobile phone, in the absence of which it is absolutely imperative that you have a prearranged emergency “what-if-we-get-lost” code with your spouse. Phew! it was our lucky day because we had none of these.... And to think that i only ever wanted to go to New York to hold hands with the husband on Times Square.

So, if you are unfortunate enough to get left behind on a subway station, with your sunglasses on, DESPITE all the precautions that you did not take, just remember never to carry any quarters, to make the experience a truly memorable one. For starters, your pocket will be lighter and you will avoid the high blood pressure that comes from cursing at the evil phone booth that snacks on loose change. What’s even better is that you might get asked out for the evening in exchange for those elusive quarters, right after you explain that you need them to call your husband whom you seem to have lost! Twice. Which is more dates than i had in a single year back in high school!

So after you dutifully store the scraps with hopefully scribbled mobile numbers in your handbag, you can use the change to call your absconding relatives in Indianapolis, on whose answering machine you may leave a message in the hope that your spouse will do the same, and pray that they will check their messages in time to connect the dots and realise that you have been separated, Bollywood style, by the closing doors of a train at a grimy subway station.... Oh, and whats more, if you are lucky, they might just do it in time, given that you have only one day to absorb the sights and sounds of a city you have wanted to visit for as long as you can remember!

So in your search for quarters and during the endless wait for a manna from heaven, you get into a polite conversation with a pleasant albeit geographically challenged American commuter who heaps praises on your country, right after you tell him that you are from Delhi, which on his First World map is an inseparable part of Pakistan and yes, yes, of course, “Gandy” was a great guy. You suffer his map rearranging till you find a good (and rather cute looking ) Samaritan who ignores his approaching train, and good naturedly walks out of the station for a mobile signal, allows you to make two frantic calls, and then also uses his subway pass to get you back into the underground. Wow! Was he for real? i told a New Yorker friend about this kind stranger... the epitome of unbelievable kindness (he missed his train. and went patiently back to wait for the next one.) so when i told her, she sat in horrified silence for a few seconds and then whispered to me not to tell anyone about him, as nothing less than New York's reputation was at stake!

In the meantime, more messages have been left on various answering machines and been picked up, analysed, replied to and soon you are on your way to a rendezvous with your lost (and by now, rather annoyed) spouse at Times Square, that quaintly magical neon jungle of crass consumerism...

So you see, i finally did get to see Times Square with him, after two silly quarrels, one moment of sheer panic and with the aid of heaven sent messengers who made it possible... thanks to all of them! .... as they say, all's well that ends well. Amen.

"Kick religious dogma in the balls!"

... so as the quotation marks indicate, this ain't an original line, much as i wish it were, since it was uttered in a kinda i'd-love-to have-said-that' moment. i was at a friend's place last night, having dropped in for some kebabs and a pint to kick in the navratras... feasting before the fasting, if you like.

sadly, the husband was away with his buddies in Gurgaon, happily ringing in this bi-annual season of abstinence {with some rather pleasurable exceptions, of course ;-) } as i made my way with half a heart, expecting a fun but quiet evening with my friend of many years (and many tears!) . little did i know it would be a laugh riot, and the one thing that would loosen our tongues would be an animated discussion on our misplaced religious beliefs. mind you, i say misplaced, because i don't think anyone has got it right.... which is perhaps how the all-knowing gods intended :-)

It was in the midst of a gorging orgy when the conversation inevitably drifted to the reason-we-were-there-in-the-first-place, and someone asked the all-crucial question .... why fast at all? aren't all days the same? so for the next half hour or so, we debated the merits of religious austerity versus decadent living... till 'to fast or not to fast' was no longer the issue, giving way to the rather controversial "how to fast"?

What exactly is the difference between true fasting and tashan (fad) fasting? should you smoke, or is doing so defeating the purpose, assuming that one fasts only to ease one's guilt (another opinion, not mine)? taking the argument further were such issues as should you eat meat/drink alcohol on Tuesdays? if you are a Hanuman bhakt, and you think that you must abstain from the above mentioned pleasures, then why not do a Full Monty and go celibate as well? or, as in the case of another gentleman present, is it alright to be a true Shaivite, yet go piss-drunk to rub sandalwood on Shiva's lingam, in honour of this particular lord's hedonistic reputation? and on and on and on...

as far as i am concerned, my relationship with my Gods (yes, i do believe there's more than one..) is purely practical, and i have long-suspected that my practicality springs from the need to add all the possible strings that i can, without worrying about upsetting the divine applecart- all of it geared towards easing my guilt over not being the puja-paath types! but do i need to feel guilty if i am not conforming to what others feel is their way of paying obeisance to their myriad Gods? i don't think so, since i know that i don't even conform to my own pitiably low standards most of the time....

all i know is that my gods are probably smiling down on my cheekiness right this moment. and yeah.... religious dogma be damned!

Miscellaneous Music

My head is like an Mp3 player, only that it stores a dream number of songs… those from the past and those that I make up (and I had hoped to sell to Richard Marx one day!).. loony tunes in my head, especially when I am happy. Why the sappy Richard Marx, you ask? Well, that’s another story… later maybe. Actually, to cut a long story short, I loved his song "Endless Summer Nights", but hated the video, which made me enjoy the song just a wee bit less.... so, I decided to write him some lyrics, and ask for the rights to re-make some of his old videos! Ah, the dreams of youth!!

But, seriously, think about it - if MLTR (Michael Learns To Rock, for the uninitiated children of the 21st century - a horrendously poppish popular pop band of the 90s) can have a hit song with the lyrics "I have never seen/ such a lovely queen....From the skies above/to the deepest love...", how bad can I be? Oh and did you know, Richard is married to "Penny"? If you have seen "Dirty Dancing" even half the number of times that I have, she was that awesome dancer who gets pregnant... Just imagine the stuff you learn from 'lifestyle' mags!

On our wedding anniversary, my husband gave me one of my most cherished possessions, an iPod, but then even before that I had plenty of melodies playing in my head. They’re happy songs, for I save the melancholy for my poetry. Yes, I do like to believe I’m multi-faceted though there’s a fine line between self-confidence and delusion, or so I’m told. However, I choose to believe I’m on the safe side of that line, whatever that might be.

Every memory, every era, and every self-discovery comes with its customized song menu. I belong to an era when the toothy band members of A-Ha ruled and Madonna had just hit the scene. Yes, I’m that old, only I look much older than the still-revered Queen of Pop, don’t have her oomph factor and can only hope I dance with a tenth of her chutzpah. What a sad way to be, you must be thinking. But, hey, I have my delusional belief in myself and that must count for something, eh?

The truth is – not all of us can be Madonna, which is a good thing for we could all be Paris Hilton! One shudders to think of the possibility: all that money for a name that sounds like, and is, in fact, a hotel. Still there are worse ways to live. Like the fact that you decided to read till the end of this. So, where does that leave you?

Bliss

• a lazy train ride after a lazy week away...
• the ramparts of the Red Fort... another homecoming...
  
• yet another drive through infuriatingly tricky traffic, which you barely notice...
• long hours of sipping tea across the dining table, with the rustle of the newspaper and the soft clicking of a laptop keyboard...
• mindless television and a naughty nap...
• a stroll through a familiar bazaar...
  
• scrambled eggs and sausages for dinner...

can a day be more perfect?

love?

What is love?
Baby, don’t hurt me… don’t hurt me…
No more!

(A one-and-a-half-hit wonder band called Haddaway, 1993)


What exactly is it about teenage love that makes everything that we do wrong turn out so right; when everything that we try and do right in an ‘adult’ relationship often turns out so horribly wrong?

I used to watch the televised versions of the great Indian epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata. There were these long battle scenes, with arrows flying thick and fast: atrociously dramatic and curiously effective. Those who have grown up with cable television will find this hard to swallow, but the state-run Doordarshan was all we had and the epics made our Sundays eventful, if only due to a sad lack of choice. So, in such exaggerated battle sequences, whenever the two opponents were men of comparative significance, there would be this meeting of arrows in the air, while all of us held our breaths, followed by the inevitable and rather loud neutralization of both arrows till the ‘better man’ fished the figurative ace up his sleeve and neutralized the ‘lesser mortal’, who was obviously of a somewhat questionable integrity. It is kind of like a Bollywood scene with evenly traded punches between two protagonists who often find out they are brothers by the end of the fight that neither seems to win. (Unless one of them is the leering “villain” out to bother the village belle, in which case the knight to the rescue wins, after a few scares.) However, I’m digressing, and should now get back to my story.

I used to feel that my love-life (or periods with the shocking lack of it, since I believe that I have been considered eminently eligible by more than a discerning few) resembled just such a battle sequence, in which Cupid’s arrows were often neutralized by those fired by the Avenging Angel of Unrequited Love. Much like Richard Gere’s rueful admission in the hit movie Pretty Woman, I seem to have a special gift for impossible (near-) relationships .... Somewhere along the way that changed and I thought I had found the "one". And i thought, so far, so good. (PS:How wrong I was.)