One Long Rant.

New Blog Link Cleverly Camouflaged by Series of Digressions.

2010-10-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

I've made peace with Wordpress; at least, that's what we're telling the curious neighbours. Wordpress and I can still barely stand each other, but Cosmo says passion keeps a marriage alive so we are hoping for the best.

Speaking of blog hosts, Xanga is extremely weird and almost equally funny and Typepad is full of celebrity blogs; one makes you want to be a Japanese middleschooler with gender-identity issues and the other makes you feel terribly outphallused, what with no ad revenue in sight. Everyone knows baby blogs need a no-pressure environment to be happy, so of course, it had to be Wordpress.

(It could have been Angelfire but I remember having an Angelfire homepage in middle school and I'd like to believe I've grown as a person since then.)

Anyway, I just want to record that the Wordpress Dashboard layout makes me contemplate violence, and not in an awesome way.

(Is there an awesome way?)

In the spirit of the title of this post, I love Jeeves and Wooster!

I'll Sing It One Last Time For You

2010-09-21T08:48:00.000-07:00

When I started blogging, almost exactly four years back, blogging was already a 'thing', but I may as well have been Amish for all I knew about it. My first blog host was so tiny, it imploded in on itself a few months after I left it, and is now a cobweb on the ceiling of the Internet. I shifted to blogspot and began to record the whiny saga of my life for the benefit of those who did not have the privilege of ring-side seats in real life.

Staying in one place too long makes me fidgety; I've felt the urge to cut and run many times, but in the end, seduced by the sheer span, depth and vintage of the inside jokes and memories on this blog, I've made the decision to stay 'just a little longer', choosing to quell my boredom for the moment with template changes and spandy new blogrolls.

My mother is fond of conferring the title of 'lambi race ka ghoda' on people who gain her approval. I'd be hard put to think of a more depressing fate for myself. As horses go, I'd class myself as more a Mollie than a Boxer, and this ghodi's in the mood to defect.

(Displaying an unexpected sense of humour here, Microsoft Word corrected 'defect' to 'defecate'. Nice try, Word, but not really.)

Long story short, this blog's finished. It's been four years of a good run. I always wrote for an audience, but it never really stopped surprising me that people actually wanted to read me, so thank you, all. The Daily Mail tells me the Internet = creeps with no life (there's a point in there somewhere - 4chan, anyone? (I'm kidding, 4chan, don't kill me!)) , but at least we're creeps who can spell well. That has to count for something, right?

Right??

*crickets*

Ta.

Love Song with Unimaginative Rhyme Scheme.

2010-09-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

Now you've given me a ring, and asked to be hitchin',
May I never have to enter a kitchen,
May we never fight more than a titch ('n'
May my rhyme scheme always be bitchin');

Love- may you never be heartless;
May our pairing forever be partless;
May your digestion always be fartless;
(Note how I am endearingly artless.)

Listen well! My name is Spaz,
Not to be confused with Cameron Diaz;
Indeed, I has far more pizzazz;
(Think I googled for rhyming words? I haz.)

I am the Copa to your Cabana,
I am the tobacco in your Havana,
I am awesomer than your grandma;
(Yes. Lame is an understate-mah.)

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This is undoubtedly the lowest point of my blogging career.

Undoubtedly.

An Excellent Argument for One Paracetamol and Eight Hours.

2010-08-22T12:10:00.001-07:00

The nights are too warm. It sounds like Mister Jaipur-wala DJ is playing Justin Beiber feat Imran Khan and one, two, five, twenty, fifty five people are dancing dancing dancing to it. I look up and the sky is orange. They say there's no pollution here, but I do believe that half the Indian desert is suspended in the air. Red sand, red moon, dark blue sky. And I look down and it's Justin Beiber. A night like this and it should be Yann Tiersen. But law school is never what is should be, law school is always inappropriate; you sit back and laugh in disbelief and affection - if you are old - and simply in disbelief - if you are new. Old, young, young, old.

Never is the line between youth and cynicism so obvious as on Freshers' Party Night. First come the young ones, the fresh ones. Their faces are washed and their moustaches are bleached, so cute. Their ties are tied. Eight o' clock, nine o' clock, ten o' clock and the dance floor is filled with the cream of joyous undergraduate youth dancing away, powered by little more than alcohol and optimism, although I'm feeling kindly tonight, so it'll be only optimism then.

Law school parties are a cheap investment; the rich harvest of gossip that they produce is well worth the cost of a Jaipuri DJ and a sound system. The posters and other fripperies are probably best appreciated by those not contributing to the making of such gossip. Sometimes I seriously consider abandoning all pretence and converting this blog wholesale into an anonymous law school gossip blog. Perhaps throw in something about myself as well, which is the closest I'm ever going to get to being a Bad Girl. A gossip blog, yay!

But if you follow that thought to its logical end, you'll wish you hadn't followed that thought to its logical end, for all gossip has at its crux either lust or alcohol, and usually alcohol fueled lust. One libidinous misadventure in the shadows on that side, and the awkward initiations of a first romance on this side. But tonight, here in this sweaty neon Daler Mehndi-themed moment, how is one to tell the difference? How?

Even in gossip, one must be fair.

I used to want to play the part of the ideological rebel and dis parties as part of that plan, when I realised that I did not have an ideology to go with the plan of dissing parties. I simply do not like parties for no fancy reason, and there is no getting around that. So I am doing what I like to do and sitting on the off side of the dance floor, inconspicuously eating boiled corn and watching the parade of high heels trip down the sand and lodge themselves in sticky mud. The zenith of a college romance is having your boyfriend pull your heel out of sludge, aw, so cute.

I feel nothing.

Come, rest your feet, collapse on the grass, the food is bad. But that's okay because no one is really tasting it tonight. The move from smoky shadows to harsh tubelights is a little disorienting. The chowmein is hosting a housefly dinner party. The bhaji has congealed but the pao is still fried and crisp. Come to me, fatty goodness. Come to mama.

It's past midnight and the sky is so black it's purple. Shoes are coming off and feet are slowing down. Foundation has caked on your face; I must say the middle of your forehead is positively glowing tonight, darling. Lipstick has left the corners of your mouth and oddly stains just the middle of your lower lip - you, do you know you look like a burlesque star? Dita von Teese, tadka laga ke. Tee hee, tee hee.

Everything is just so funny tonight. I play act, I am commentator to my own life - Spaz Kumari sharing the box with Nameless Mangy Cur:

SK: The air is charged with anticipation! Will the creepy seniors make a move on unsuspecting freshers or won't they?

NMC: roots about energetically in the dustbin

SK: The creepy seniors are leading by an advantage of several years! What chances do you give the young 'uns, Cur?

NMC - gets head stuck in a cardboard box and falls about confusedly

--

I'm suddenly tired. Off to bed.

Pip-pip.

Confident Faffings on Stuff I Know Nothing About.

2010-08-17T10:54:00.001-07:00

This is a super self-obsessed post. It is on my sins against gender stereotypes.

I am of the school of thought that believes that to acknowledge stereotypes is to perpetuate them, so I've been sitting really quietly in a corner and hoping this tag will pass me by, but mera bad luck hi kharaab hai and she thinks I should do this tag, so here it is.

1. I cannot dance. I will not dance. I do not like situations where I am expected to dance, and I will shamelessly sit at the corner table, eat everyone's food and drink all the Pepsi while they are living their brief alcohol-fueled Hrithik Roshan delusions. If you try to force me to dance, I will not like it, and then I will get agitated and then I will pass out.

2. I do not wear makeup because I hate how it feels like a plastic raincoat on my skin. I began wearing kohl a few months back, so on a good day I'll be wearing earrings and kohl. On a regular day I will be wearing neither.

3. I have a very dirty mind and a a huge appetite for off-colour jokes. I swear a lot in ordinary conversation and I love learning to swear authentically in different languages. I am an equal opportunity letch; I letch at men and women of all ages. I regularly objectify people and I rather enjoy it.

4. I am a very focused, very quick shopper. I love my friends, but I will never accompany the more finicky ones on a shopping trip because I enjoy the glow that comes with not having killed anyone.

5. I have a very literal mind and I usually do not 'get' hints. If someone wants me to do something, their best bet is to ask me directly, otherwise it will never happen.

6. I do not remember birthdays. I have on occasion, forgotten my own birthday, and having been reminded of it by a friend, acknowledged it and proceeded to ignore it. It's a birthday, it's no big deal.

7. I can't cook. I can't even boil water without help. However I can make very decent tea, and a passable maggi. I have a theory that the Food Pyramid requirements are covered by tea and maggi. If they are not, I'm going to have a very short life.

8. My deepest desires are to go paragliding, parasailing, waterskiing and bungee jumping. I also really, really REALLY want to learn to shoot, in pursuit of which desire I have spent two whole days taking buses from dingy office to dingy office in Madras, only to have an assortment of moustachioed idiots tell me that there are, of course, places to learn to shoot in Madras, but I probably can't because I'm too skinny and too female. To these men I offer the one-fingered salute, and the privilege of being my first targets when I DO learn to shoot.

9. I do not like newborn babies. To call them ugly is to downplay the sheer animal STRANGENESS of their faces. They can't focus their eyes, and their irises simply bounce randomly about in the sockets. Their mouths are shapeless and lipless and always open in some silent primal scream. Their heads are constantly lolling about. They look like miniatures of the grandfather who had a stroke in Thevar Magan. There is nothing charming about that. Nothing.

This list stops at nine because it will pain me to stop at an even number.

Now, why I don't know if this tag is a good idea:

I've read many many blogposts by many different women who have done this tag, and I find the gratuitously self-congratulatory tone of most of them somewhat self-defeating. Acknowledging the breaking of a(n alleged) stereotype as a 'big deal', simply attributes legitimacy to that stereotype where none may really exist. I must confess that stereotypically 'womanly' women have been the exception in my life, and most women I know straddle gender roles with ease and display no special sense of accomplishment for having done so. So forgive me for suspecting that the 'womanly' stereotype is simply some highly fictionalised, excessively romanticised construct that may at some point in time have had a strong basis in reality, but which no longer has that.

In other words, it's no big deal to sin against this stereotype, because no one really fulfils it to begin with.

Feel free to call bullshit, I have no training in sociology.

That's Why This Lady is a Tramp.

2010-08-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

Two beady black eyes on a six inch high body, staring you down. You are armed with a jhadoo and your opponent is armed (toothed?) with teeth. You are poised like a ninja. Your jhadoo shivers in the breeze. Six inches of bottlebrush tail bristle in response. You are evenly matched and the world stands still to watch the Battle of the Balcony.

My jhadoo, your tail. My jhadoo, your teeth.

There were a few tense moments there, I can tell you.

So what I have learnt from Glee, is that Lea Michele needs to shut up. I suspect there were many more important life lessons (shrinkwrapped in Autotune), but my comprehension of them was punctuated - eventually overshadowed - by the desperate desire to get Lea Michele to shut up. Also, the Great Internet and my friend in the Yoo Yess inform me that jocks and cheerleaders are no longer the Aryans of high schools, but Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield told me otherwise ten years ago, and I am loath to unlearn the lessons of my youth. New tricks, meet old dog.

Old age is coming upon me with the speed of the bus in Speed. Yesterday my sister informed me that "in those days", there were no CDs or DVDs, and people recorded things on cassettes, how funny! Oh ye child! - said I, stung - What knowest thee of the modest appeal of an unlabeled cassette tape! Of the prospect of uncovering untold delights hidden within a squat black clumsiness of form! Of the exquisite agonies of desire as one waited for it to unstick itself inside a dusty VCR! What knowest thee of the romance of anticipation? Ye worshipper of the pagan Gods of Instant Gratification, what knowest thee of such subtle joys? Said I in passion.

And then she said "........OOOOOOOkay..?"

And then I went quietly to a corner, braided my grey hair, beaded my chin hair, tallied up all my wrinkles and bawled like Kapil Dev after the matchfixing thing (which again only I remember because the demon sibling was at the time mere demon spawn, with a jurisdiction of terror spanning only her kindergarten class.)

As I casually skim through my dose of tabloids for the day, I eyeball many stories of women stabbing significant others (of course, now significantly dead others) in the eyes with stilettos, and young children with faces like dessert killing other littler children with faces equally angelic, and I wonder, what makes human life special? Is human life really special or it the idea simply a vast joke engineered by the evil West, like fat-free cheese?

Oh, and fat-free cheese is a joke. Trust me on that one. It is, however, not a joke everyone finds funny, and a fantastic illustration of why Europeans are more evolved than Americans is in how Walmart has aisles full of fat-free food brands, but France will likely revoke your citizenship for eating fat-free cheese. I'm pretty sure the only way you'll ever eat fat-free cheese in Paris, is if you have it made from a fat-free cow.

Of course, if you can find yourself an unclaimed cow wandering the roads of Paris, then you deserve to eat whatever the hell you want. If the cow aforementioned is clad in jeans and a sweatshirt, you may want to return her to the US Embassy instead, to avoid regrettable - but almost inevitable - political outrage, in the alternative.

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And that right there, ladies and gentlemen, is your racist, weight-ist and misogynist comment of the day! Be warned that the sachharine content of Glee marathons may produce similar compensatory reactions in the best of you. Quell now your outrage, and proceed with me to...

Chuck Palahniuk.

I've been re-reading me some Chuck Palahniuk recently, and I note with pleasure that initial impressions aside, that man is full of Teh Bullshit. Aside from the sniffy pleasures of a critic watching an Establishment crumble, I also experienced amazement at the sheer bravado with which he has hitched together a (half-decent) plot with not a lot more than gimmickry. I speak only of Diary here, so narrow your aim as you converge upon me in righteous anger.

I deny your Palahniuk! I deny your God!

And now I get some sleep, goodnight.

Rainy Days and Broken Professorial Spirits.

2010-07-05T06:47:00.000-07:00

You fondly watch his eyes glaze over, and you sigh proudly as he shouts ineffectually above the cacophony. You are delighted when he decides to throw a chalk, and you blink back tears of affection as he threatens to withhold attendance. His voice eventually peters away and he is a shadow of his confident self. He finally decides to ignore the rest of the class and teach only the three people in the first row. When the bell rings, he slinks quietly away.

You look around at your class with an unmistakable sense of brotherhood and pride; in the grand tradition of things, another new teacher has been successfully broken in.

But it takes so long to train them, and before you know it they are gone. It is a thankless job, but well. Sunrise, sunset.

It rained today and the earth smells new again. There is a quiet, gentle romance about the rain in the desert. There is no lush greenery that follows it, just the opening of tiny star shaped flowers, gaudy in their colouring and few in their number, blooming between tiles and pushing up stubbornly through cracks. We step on them all the time, but they persist. The people here are exactly the same. Proud, hardy and coloured like tropical birds.

People are prettier in the rain too. Umbrellas fly away, hairpins are lost and clothing sticks in funny places. This makes people awkward, so they laugh for no reason and the cold brings out the pink in their cheeks and the whites of their teeth and melts their makeup and the walls they construct around themselves. It's nice to watch the death-metal fanatic smile stupidly in the rain.

The rain in the south is so different from the rain in the north. The rain in Chennai is warm and grubby and the roads fill with grey sludgewater, with an enthusiasm that is only matched by the people who wade through them, nodding joyfully to each other, saying aiyoo every year the rains come earlier, this global warming also no, god only knows what will happen to our weather now, the last time it rained like this it was in 1958 and my auntie was pregnant with chinna, you know chinna? chinna's son is doing yem yess in yoo yess, and how old is your daughter now?

In Bangalore the rain is cold and clear and people do not comment on the rain because rain of course a part of Bangalore's weather, and no Bangalorean worth his Bhagyalakshmi Butter Gulkand would dare to insinuate that he is surprised by the fabulousness of the weather. But everyone is happier, and if you are very shortsighted like I am, you should sit on a bench in Cubbon park with your spectacles off, and watch the rain come through the fuzzy canopy in fat crystal drops magnified by the aquarium light and your faulty eyesight. And you can watch the lazy pie dogs settle themselves in puddles and bark with anger and suspicion at the drops bouncing off their noses. And you can drink your excellent hot coffee and think, perhaps I should have brought a book? And you can be happy.

The rain in Cochin is the cleanest, friendliest rain I've ever seen. The rain comes in a wave of water and washes through the whole city. Crowds of women with purple-black curls, chitter excitedly like birds and disappear under communal umbrellas. You take your glass of pink water and stand outside your restaurant to watch as a gaggle of nuns in white sarees tumbles confusedly out of a tiny matador van and splashes energetically to safety. And as suddenly as it came, the rain is gone. The sky, the trees, the roads and the white houses with colourful roofs look scrubbed clean. People pause at the sudden absence of pattering raindrops and juddering traffic. Someone laughs, a child jumps tentatively in a puddle. The pause is broken, and Cochin is on the move again.

In Jodhpur, of course, drama is two for a penny, so we don't just have rains, no sirree, for how would that please the foreigner tourists? No, the droplets are icy bullets and they swirl in the midst of a dramatic sandstorm. The air is red and the sky is purple. There is thunder and there is lightning, and in the best tradition of all bars of lightning, trees will be struck and burnt to black skeletons. Occassionally there are hailstones. These storms come prettily accessorised with fallen buildings, flooding dams and dead pedestrians. O, you white man who has come from Yoo Kay, are your pitiful London rains anything like this? Are they?? Huh?? HUH?? Yeah, I thought not. See why National Geographic loves us so much!

Perhaps this is unnecessary to say, but I love the rains.

Books and Birthday Blatherings.

2010-06-07T01:07:00.001-07:00

This post is arranged in order of importance, so first, here is my birthday wishlist. (Why is this up here? Why not?)

[Books]

The Sandman novels

(and the rest, sorted by author)

Kurt Vonnegut -

Breakfast of Champions (because I think it'd be nice to compare with Joseph Heller's Something Happened)
Slaughterhouse Five
Mother Night.

Stephen Fry -

Moab is my Washpot,
The Hippopotamus
Making History

Terry Pratchett

it's alllll good.

J G Ballard -

Crash
Super-Cannes

[Music] or the players thereof)

Any good mp3 player of a capacity between 8 and 16GB (I'm a little iffy about iPods)

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I want to read the Time Traveler's Wife; it has been variously described to me as "sooo romantic!" and "hardcore sci fi", but has universally been praised to the skies. This is suspect, and I intend to make investigations.

In other news, I am halfway through Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice , which is a confident, lucid, unceasingly rational series of arguments towards a practical end. Individual sentences are constructed with a spare elegance that is wonderfully appealing to the eye, not least the mind. I am tempted to re-read some paragraphs simply because of the beautiful relentlessness with which they march to a conclusion. I read The Argumentative Indian just prior to this, and it's a nice amousebouche before the meaty stuff.

I gave Haruki Murakami a shot and I know I won't be going back there; minimalism can be taken too far for too long and I was bored to distraction. I read Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players, and I think this is one of those few stories that the film told better. Either that or it was written in Bengali and I have a crappy translation, and if this true, I deserve it for expecting great things from a copy sold for fifteen bucks.

In still other news, I wish to rhapsodise - Worli Seaface on a cloudy monsoon afternoon. The pillion seat on a bike makes an excellent vantage point, especially if said bike is moving at what feels like 80kmph. Language cannot describe that explosion of joy, so I ask instead that you look up and shut your eyes,and imagine the golden lightness you see as the sun shines down upon them. And then I ask that you draw breath in, and you imagine the taste of salt on your tongue, and the warm, sticky wind whipping your hair about your face and condensing it into stiff curly clumps encrusted with salt and sand; I ask this of you, and I ask you to open your eyes, and if you are not smiling, you have surrendered your humanity somewhere along the way, and I am sorry for you.

I admit that litchis are perhaps not all bad. It is a grudging admission. I have the folks at Naturals to credit for this unexpected change of(in?) opinion.

Byebye.

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PS - Who will watch Rajneeti with me? On a weekday, evening show?

PPS - Mr S Bhehnchod and Miss A G Glass are highly recommended as companions of a Saturday night. Thank you for the excellent weekend!

PPPS - I am not going to thank Suk and Divi because nothing less was expected of them ;)

The Unbearable Lightness of Carpet.

2010-05-24T02:29:00.001-07:00

I work in an office with an unhappy carpet.

Never before have I seen a carpet that that is so obviously not a Carpet, but a carpet. It is a carpet in what I have suddenly realised is my least favourite colour ever, which is pale beige. Pale beige is not so much a colour as what is left when you scrub colour away and leave behind only musty memories of spilt coffees and free weekends.

A pale, watery dirt coloured carpet watching us all, accounting for every coffee spilt and plotting revenge for every stab by an Aldo-heel attached to a Performance-Bonus-shoe.

A foreshadowing over all who walk over it.

I do love to be dramatic to no purpose at all.

I spent one entire evening sitting by myself at M.Drive. I was not sitting there alone by design - although it strikes me now that it would be infinitely cooler to claim as much - but by compulsion. I was critically contemplating my abnormal toes and eating a bad batch of masala peanuts, and I was sulking that I had no company. Company was either working in Bangalore, or holidaying in Bangalore, and Company that was not orbiting Bangalore was not prepared to fulfil its duty as Company, because apparently, it wanted to sleep (I'm looking at you.)

If anyone wants to meet me on Sundays, please do. I will eat at my cost and talk for free. If you are rich, please considering sponsoring the accommodation and education of an overworked and underfed Cog in a corporate Wheel. At least until she figures out a method to get to her home that does not involve taxis.

In other words, I was abandoned, and in line with glorious tradition, I was fully prepared to revel gloriously in selfpity, and so I did. I revelled in a bed of peanuts and sticky candy, and then I took a bus home.

I like the Mumbai I see when I walk towards Churchgate station at night. I like the long stretches of empty Marine Drive and the tired men walking out of Nariman Point with the day's BSE/Nifty high marked in their eyes and the lines on their foreheads. I like the sliver of warm yellow light I can see peeking from behind the door at Not Just Jazz By the Bay, hinting deliciously at crowds of mildly drunk friends making lovely double-visioned memories behind it. I like every single cab driver whose cab I have ever been in, and I know, without exception, the why-I-came-to-Mumbai story of each one of them.

I'm almost afraid to admit it, but I think I detect just the faintest beginning of a like for the local trains also. I think. Colour me shocked.

Bombay makes me happy, and I don't even like wearing skirts, but I'm wearing them just because I can, because it's Bombay. :)

For the Moral Benefit of Genda Phool Jr.

2010-05-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

In that parallel universe that flowers live in, where flowers watch movies starring flowers, you think that just at the moment the guy flower and the girl flower are going to do the dirty, the scene cuts away to two humans having sex?

Appa, My Father.

2010-05-03T01:23:00.000-07:00

(Note: This was meant to be published on May 2. Adjust maadi.)

My dad was never around when I was little. I saw very little of him and I did not like much of what I saw. He was always curt, unfailingly grumpy, and seemed to turn up for the express purpose of telling me to get into bed, quit sitting joblessly on my fat arse, wash my neck properly or eat the tomatoes in my rasam. (*vomit*)

He was my mother's secret weapon at the Daily Battle of the Bath, otherwise known as Rowdy Reveille. My parents made an incredibly efficient army. My mother would mount the first offensive by informing me of the time (6.30am), and my father would bring up the rear by picking mine up and making off to the wash basin. He brushed my teeth for me until I was five years old. I did not like waking up and I liked brushing my teeth even less. Being the angel (idiot) child that I was, I made my opinion known fairly regularly. I inevitably threatened to bite his finger if he dared to stick it in my mouth, and I was inevitably hung, drawn, smacked on the butt and frogmarched into the Tower of Shower. I would emerge from the bathroom in a delicate mist of flowery scents and in possession of most of the dirt I went in with. I would be sent back in with (O, Ignominy!) a bucket, a mug, and threats of bloodthirsty violence. I would emerge again in a while- cleaner, pinker, humbler.

Our rather colourful, if somewhat one-dimensional relationship evolved quickly into a strictly commands (him) and strictly monosyllabic answers (me) dynamic. Amongst other things, I disliked mathematics, I disliked him for being good at it, and I disliked the thinly veiled pity he displayed when I questioned the intelligence behind the manufacture of bathtubs with pipes simultaneously filling and emptying them. This was made worse by sundry grandaunts and their voluble daughters who would pop up like fungus everywhere, refer to my blushing father as the 'family genius' (I kid you not) and ask for my report card in the same breath.

I have a creative soul! I wanted to cry dramatically to the Universe. I never want to go to IIM! I never want to learn accountancy! And by God, I never want to wear high-waisted pants!!!!!

(...high waisted pants!)

(...high waisted pants!)

(...high waisted pants!)

(silence..crickets chirping)

(That was the dramatic echo, dumbasses. I SAID the cry was dramatic. I warned you.)

Anyway. My cry reverberated through the Universe, and someone, somewhere, heard it. I have, by the Grace of Superman, never yet had to suffer accountancy, management, or chest pants.

Soon after I reached class seven, my father stopped teaching me math as well. The immediate effects included a drastic improvement in my marks, a drastic drop in his blood pressure, a visible spring in my step and twinkle in my eye, and in my father, the wearing of button-down shirts in the(by my father's standards) exciting, borderline racy shade of maroon... *GASP*. He must have been truly ecstatic. God knows I was.

[ Remind me to tell you one day of my father's extensive collection of shirts, encompassing a dazzling plethora of shades from Pale Blue to Pale Blue. ]

So the elimination of math from our lives reduced the tension between us a little bit. We never spoke casually and I did not have an easy relationship with him. I always felt I was a delinquent child, and a little bit of an academic disappointment. While I grew up kicking and screaming against his authority and his IIM-ness, I did, reluctantly grow to admire and respect him very much. No one has the quiet charisma, the work ethic or the intelligence of my father, and no one's standards will ever be higher than his, to me. As I grew older and calmed down, and he did likewise, I came to see my father as a person wholly apart from his job description as My Father.

I was never a remotely sentimental child, but in my old age I am surprised to learn that as little as I know you, I love you appa.

Have a happy forty ninth birthday; for both our awkward sakes, I hope you never have to read this, and if you do, by God, I never want to know.
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(Umm. Dad, if you really are reading this - please don't read the last few blogposts. I say 'fuck' a lot. And by 'fuck' I mean 'shit'. And by 'shit' I mean 'ayyo'. Of course.)

Metathinking and Other Indulgences.

2010-04-04T08:20:00.001-07:00

I haven't been writing because I thought I had nothing to say. This is not true. It turns out that I had - have - things to say, but nothing that I thought was fit to post here.

And why not? I OWN this blog, after all. But the problem with being slightly paranoid about the nature of the information one wishes to make public, is that it results in the construction of a blog with a distinct personality; my blog has gone from being a benign white template accepting of posts of EVERY description with loving, open arms, to a snarky, judge-y Cruella de Blog. Everytime I would approach her with a nebulous idea for a post, she would raise one skinny eyebrow.

Awww, shawty be intellectual and shit, y'all. Ain't that cute.

And while 'intellectual' is a word that will never be associated with me, it is true that I am in a little bit of a think-ey mood these days (hold the derisive laughter). Right now I don't want to be flippant, I want to be earnest, and really, who likes earnest? Flippant is snark and cigarettes, earnest is chest pants.

I'm not doing a lot these days except thinking about thinking; specifically about the way I think, the assumptions I rely on and the validity of those assumptions. The idea is to treat nothing as sacred... once you put your life deliberately on shaky ground, interesting results emerge. I'm still playing with the idea of starting a separate blog that will be for these things alone. To be honest it probably won't materialise, but it's worth a thought.

There are very few songs I know all the words to, and they are all either by the Killers or The Who. What does this say about me?

I'm reading the Bhagavad Gita, if an English translation alongside a mishmash of commentaries is 'reading'. I was simultaneously slightly icked out and intimidated by it. A few days down, the ick is gone. It's early days yet, but I'm beginning to understand why some people read this book every day of their lives.

I've hit that phase again where this blog, this template, this text, this font, they've all begun feeling constrictive. It's time for a change I think, so suggestions for a new blog-host are solicited.

Kindly do not suggest Wordpress, however. Wordpress makes me want to stab nuns. I cannot code to save my life and something very fundamental in me is deeply annoyed that I can't upload templates of my choice. Livejournal is a little..odd..and typepad is... middle aged? Shit, the politics of bloghosting.

Where do I go from here?

The Sum of My Farts.

2010-03-06T06:51:00.000-08:00

The first time I ever heard Daniel Powter's Bad Day, I was struck by the absolute wrongness of the phrase 'blue sky holiday'; it was an instinctive no-no-no response. I don't want me no blue sky holiday. I think this comes out of the summer afternoons I use to lie spread eagled with my eyes shut on the open-air stage in college, wondering what the fuck I was doing here.

(Free Advice - When you're contemplating existential dilemmas and you're located in a desert, it's probably not the best idea to pick a summer afternoon to do it.)

Kolkata was a nice surprise. I am seduced by the absolute lack of ambition that this city seems to possess. The city stumbles along in a comfortable sort of stupor... warm muggy days coalesce into warm muggy nights coalesce into warm muggy days and time doesn't tick by briskly as much as drip stickily, slowly, like honey; hesitating just a little bit before it goes plop. Everyone always has the time for one more tea, one more conversation, one more pakora. The malls seem to be the only real concession to Modernity (as defined by my beloved Bombay), the rest of the city seems perfectly happy to preserve the Great Colonial Hangover. Not even the malls are MALLS, like the ones in Delhi or Gurgaon. The malls in Kolkata are not as shiny, their displays not as snazzy, their paintwork definitely more on the side of 'grubby' than fresh; even the new ones seem faintly apologetic about their newness. You will note that this is in sharp contrast to the I AM SHINY MALL, HEAR ME ROAR attitude of the Delhi/Gurgaon malls.

One happy discovery I made was that Kolkata is full of sexy smokers. As I have previously described in gratuitous detail, my physical intolerance for cigarette smoke is only matched by my fascination for people who smoke sexily. Somewhere at the beginning of my walk (along Esplanade) I discovered that I was apparently in the middle of the annual meetup of the Sexy Smokers Society, Kolkata Chapter, and for the next twenty odd minutes, I could barely walk straight. Everywhere I turned there was a someone lighting up in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. By the end of my walk I had 1. asthma and 2. whiplash.

And of course, I was DELIGHTED with the Metro, a little bit because of the nice Tagore poetry (translated!) in squiggly text on the walls, but primarily because of the HUNDREDS of weighing machines on the platforms! People who know me know that there are few things I love as much as a weighing machine that has a glass case with shiny glass spinning awesome thingies inside it (you know what I mean), and a slot for coins and another slot that spits out a ticket with your weight in the front and a tactless judgment on your life, on the back. I literally cannot resist these machines, I am helpless in front of them. I only have to look at one and I am a drooling idiot. I have to physically prevent myself from walking over in a hypnotic daze and surrendering all my loose change at its altar. That shit is IRRESISTIBLE.

My most recently obtained ticket has '54.5 kg' on the front and 'Expediency is not an excuse for Falsehood' on the back. I laughed till I cried.

A good friend matter-of-factly refers to my blogposts as 'farts'; there has never been any preliminary or any explanation for this . I am struck anew by the uncanny accuracy of her observation every time I think about it. In any case, I am more than the sum of my blogposts, as of my farts.

I hope.

Which brings us to the last and the most important question - Asterix or Tintin?

(Hint: The correct answer is Asterix. Seriously, what is the appeal of Tintin?)

-----------------------

(PS - To JD and anyone else who cares - I have not forgotten about a follow-up to the last post, it's planned for a later time.)

Where We Interrupt Regular Programming to Kick Our Own Ass.

2010-02-08T18:57:00.001-08:00

I've forgotten what it feels like to be proud of the work I do. There used to be a time when I would vouch for my work in absolute confidence of its kickassawesomeness as a reflection of my own competence.

Not anymore.

There are more excuses than there is proof, and I am tired of trying to prove desperately to myself that this is not true, by taking on more work than I can deal with and letting it all settle down into an incoherent, incomplete, heartbreakingly average mess. Such a deep sense of shame, that sinking, dull feeling in your stomach when you hand your work in and you look up to see first incomprehension, then understanding, then - and this is the absolute, punch-in-the-gut worst of all - pity.

I am being pitied. I can see it.

I've had enough.

Tomorrow onwards I kick ass again. Nothing leaves my hands without being up to my standards. I am not going to get through college feeling sorry for myself, I am going to make other people sorry they aren't me.

Tomorrow.

---

PS - While I do not put up anything intensely personal here, as a rule, I need to see this on a regular basis to shame myself into doing something about it.

Lips of a Scumbag.

2010-01-29T07:40:00.000-08:00

So, WTF Song of the Moment - Hinder's Lips of an Angel. Why was this song such a hit? What could possibly be remotely appealing about a whiny man-child who whines to his ex on the phone in between nookie with his current girlfriend, in HER HOUSE? The mind boggles.

Nickelback is an equally infuriating band. I may be bizarre, but I even I have limits, and one of those limits is a stringy-blond man with no balls and a fake growl. And I am not even sure whether the worst part of that is the fake growl or the lack of testicles.

(I could be wrong about the no-balls bit, of course; maybe they just retract back into him in shame when he sings things like look at this photograph, everytime I do it makes me laugh )

I think I'll go with the fake growl. Either you've got a creepy-but-hot voice or you haven't, and everytime you put your fake bedroom voice on, I run screaming out of my door and kill a small animal. (Hear that, Chad? Every time you sing 'Photograph', a kitten dies. Think about that.)

Since I am on the topic of music, let me say I enjoy lots of music. I am not barbaric. I even like classical music, though as a dyed-in-the-wool Tam Bram, I was brought up on a wholesome diet of curd rice, rasam rice, fried papad and Hindustani-music-is-NOT-classical, with a healthy side order of HA-HA-those-deluded-Naarth-Indians. But I am sophisticated. I like qawwals (Altaf Raja) and Sufi music, though I draw the line at A R Rahman's heartfelt but indisputably Tamil-accented 'kwaaja jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee'. It's supposed to be a cry from the heart, but I always snort.

And by snort, of course, I mean laugh delicately but cuttingly. Derisively.

Anyway, winter is over. Or that's what it looks like from inside the cave I'm in, which consists of two sweaters, a sweatshirt, a muffler, a scarf, two pairs of socks, leg warmers and two pairs of track pants, two woollen blankets, a fleece blanket and a bunch of pillows. My pillows wear sweaters because I find that they get really cold otherwise, and I hate the feeling of cold cotton on my neck. All this warmth makes it difficult to haul myself out of bed early in the morning. I start out grimly determined, but the inevitable happens.

So, a couple of things to be noted here -

1. I am too cool for Photoshop.
2. I think I may be too cool for MSPaint also. :( alternatively,
3. Don'tcha love my mad MSPaint skillz? :)

Ahem. Moving on.

Wearing too many warm clothes makes you physically schizophrenic; wherever you're covered, it's the Bahamas, but where you're not, it's Siberia. What I mean is, I remember a couple of weeks back, I was typing out something pointless and formatting it perfectly, when I realised that my fingers and nose-tip were freezing, but I was probably reading a 103 degrees Fahrenheit on my tummy. There is something truly creepy about that.

In other news, I am in love with Amy Winehouse. Such an amber honey, midnight sky voice. A shiny crimson pointy nail stroking black velvet voice. A smoky nightclub, beaded dress, flapper party voice. A voice to fall in love with for a few hours and then go home alone to a cold bed. She says she's trouble, she's no good, but she's lazy drawling like she knows you'll follow her anywhere.

And you could follow her anywhere, if you wanted to. She's orange, and her implants look like they'd glow in the dark. She's a little hard to miss. Such is the magic of fake tan and silicone. Things like this are the reason that I hate watching music videos of the songs I fall in love with. You should form your own fucking images and never let anyone else's images mess yours up.

These days I like music that makes me unhappy. It's almost as though I don't know how to unlock all the sadness inside me unless the right song comes along, and then all is sweet release.

And so it is

Just like you said it would be

Life goes easy on me

Most of the time.

And so it is

The shorter story

No love, no glory

No hero in her skies..

I'm entirely aware that this blog is one Dashboard Confessional lyric away from being an emo blog.

But life has to get better than this. I am too awesome to be sad.

Bye.

(P.S. - Please send me icecream.)

A Confederacy of Idiots.

2010-01-09T11:47:00.000-08:00

So I watched 3 Idiots, and it was ..um...how shall I put this? 'Terrible' sounds like it would fit, but 'saddening' sounds closer to what I'm feeling.

An IIT-graduate is the Indian Elvis-cum-pornstar. I know that. I grew up in Tamil Nadu, for Christ's sake. I was interested in this movie because I thought the story had a fertile premise; three young men make it to an institution that everyone and their brother wants to go to. They all have their issues and they deal with them. Eventually they learn that happiness is when you do what you enjoy. And of course, there is an endearingly awkward romance alongside the main story. I thought it would make for a good movie, because of all the above, and also, um, because of the inexplicable crush I have on Sharman Joshi. Ahem.

But it wasn't a good movie. It wasn't even an indifferent movie. It was a ridiculously bad movie, and a large part of the problem was the shallow characterisation.

I mean, who was that shifty-eyed guy with the permanently guilty expression of a four year old caught with its fist in a jam jar? I've never seen a seventeen year old with that expression, and it annoyed me because it was clearly meant to be 'cute'. I am not a fan of 'cute', especially when the allegedly 'cute' person is employing said 'cuteness' to come off as childlike and endearingly naughty. I also intensely dislike it when the whole deal has the 'Look at me! Aren't I cutely childlike and cutely naughty? Aren't I just so irresistibly cute?' vibe about it.

Along with being cute, Aamir also multitasks as a saint. He has no flaw. Not one. He never gets angry, impatient, tired or frustrated, would risk his career for his friends, who, incidentally, he neither ever fights with nor grows impatient with, and is basically a ray of freaking sunshine. He eats rainbows and shits butterflies. He divides all of his time between being -

1. cute
2. shiny
3. a genius, and;
2. preachy

Which brings us to another itchy spot; isn't it enough being a genius these days? Or is there a group of critics somewhere complaining that they're tired of plain ol' geniuses, and that geniuses who are also saints are the new in-things?

My point is, Mahatma Gandhi wasn't a playback singer, a gymnast, an Olympic gold-medallist and a mathematician alongside being a political activist. He was just a political activist. And he was a genius. And that should be enough for us, unless we plan to convert the IIT-JEE into a qualifying paper for the priesthood. Which we haven't, so there's no need to be this creepily saintly.

As for the preachiness, my God, seriously. It's almost as though the moviemakers are telling us, "See, here is the point!Have you got the point?" And then they pick up the point and hit us on the head with it multiple times, just to make sure we've got the bloody point. What happened to subtlety in filmmaking? Perhaps more importantly, what is this precious point?

Who knows? It's there somewhere, suffocated under all the rubbish that was put in to, I don't know, accessorise it? But seriously, why disguise the perfectly simple and interesting point of the movie with a stormy-night-childbirth, a runaway bride, Ladakh, Shimla, 400 patents, an identity-swap and Javed Jaffrey's father's ashes in a toilet bowl? Why was there so. much. clutter?!

Th clutter really really annoyed me.

But what annoyed me even more than all of the above multiplied by 100000, was fellow movie-goers admitting that perhaps the central character was ridiculously saintly, the principal cartoonishly evil, and movie clumsily made, but it was a brilliant movie nevertheless because it had a message.

Now the above statement is so very WTF that it is difficult to immediately respond to it.

The message - howsoever goodhearted - of a movie, can never excuse bad execution. Especially when the message is nothing original; that is not to say that all good messages are original. I firmly believe that the education system in India requires some serious reconsideration.

However that is not the message in this movie. The only message in this movie is that you could die from peeing on a spoon. (Corollary - Spoons are potentially evil.)

And that, my friends, is simply not good enough.

Badly played, gentlemen.

Old, Fat and Critical.

2009-12-28T02:45:00.000-08:00

The year is over and I feel old. I have been home for nine days, and I leave in six more. Each day that I stare at the health faucet in my loo during my early morning commune with nature, I am tempted to rip it out of the wall and take it with me to college. Rip the health faucet, i.e., not the commune with nature. I am mixing up my phrases. It is a result of great emotion and (I think) indigestion. I believe I may have, at lunch today, erred on the side of fried baby potatoes, and not caution. I am perfectly willing to err on the side of caution the day caution comes eight pieces to a plate, fried golden, to exactly that brilliant crispness between 'almost brilliant' and 'burnt'.

I also went on holiday to Pondicherry, and no, I will not call it Puducheri. It could be my shameful Tamil, but does not Puducheri translate to 'new slum' in Tamil? No? Just checking.

I have watched Kurbaan, Paa, Rocket Singh - Salesman of the Year and Avatar. My observations are as follows -

1. Kurbaan has its points. However it also has Vivek Oberoi. Therefore it falls into the deep, dark, tragic abyss (transferred epithet, I'm right, shut up) of bad movies that are not bad enough to be AWESOME.

2. Which reminds me, who wants to watch Jaani Dushman with me? Bring a DVD. I'll buy it off you. Shopkeepers cock their heads thoughtfully at me when I ask for this movie, as though idly questioning my upbringing. I am tempted to invite them along for the watch-a-thon... truly, what is a life if it does not include the (very) occasional watching of Jaani Dushman. The epic love, the epic pathos, the EPIC cross-species coitus above a meditating sage...what's not to love?

3. In a burst of petulance, fate has denied me tickets for Three Idiots, which means I will sulk silently while my insensitive friends discuss plotlines and characterisations and draw parallels to that excrescence of a book. (Though I have to admit I thought that Ryan guy was hot. Wasn't he? Wasn't he? Wheeee)

4. Back on topic - it's been said a thousand times before, but it bears repetition: kids with progeria are NOT almost seven feet tall, and it's more than a little disconcerting to see a Shrek-lookalike Amitabh Bachchan acting out his little fantasy of being son to his son who is his father who doesn't want him but then wants him, interspersed with an interesting, if highly WTF message about how not using condoms sucks donkey balls when you find yourself with a little diseased, unwanted son, but later proves to be awesome because you've grown to love the son you didn't want but you had anyway because you DIDN'T USE A CONDOM, DUMBASS.

Also, here is some punctuation dedicated to Vidya Balan's unexpected pro-babies lecture - ?????!!!!!!

But little kid Amitabh manages to be truly endearing 80% of the time. And as though vindicating my faith in her as being the prettiest woman in mainstream Bollywood today, Vidya Balan GLOWS like a (classy, understated) bulb in a nice holder. Or whatever. But woman is pretty, God, she is. And importantly, shoutout to fabindia who (I presume) clothed her in the movie - I'd lost faith in you guys, but you are indeed tres hot. My apologies, and I am coming in right now to buy more clothes that I don't need.

Lastly, Abhishek Bachchan? A couple of things - i. Remember that crush I had on you during your Bluffmaster days? Consider it ended; ii. Stop pouting, you are jowly, and you are not Hannah Montana iii. Bring the face fungus back.

4. Avatar is a mediocre story in a mindblowingly cool package. Like Nirvana, but that is an argument for another time. (For clarity, the mindblowingly cool part is Kurt Cobain, so maybe I should have said 'mindblowingly cool and dead'; but seriously, have you seen those eyes? *swoon*)

5. Rocket Singh is excellent, if you excuse the questionable morals of the premise (maybe it's only me, but I was mentally shaking my head in disapproval of the undeniable illegality of the whole deal). But it moved quickly, didn't take itself too seriously, and (thank you God!) did not involve itself in an uninteresting love story. Also, it stars Prem Chopra as an absolutely edible grandfather, which shocked and delighted me, having only seen him so far in OBSERVE!-I-AM-EVIL-BWAHAHAHAHA roles. Y'know what I mean?

6. Also, I eat my words and Ranbir Kapoor is the next big (mainstream) thing.

Okay, everyone, please blog. I have six days left here and it feels like Death Row. :(

Before I forget - oh valorous commenters, be not deterred by the Word Verification thingie! I have been courted by spam kumar, spam kapoor, spam verghese and spam balakrishnan and WV is my shelter from their unseemly affections.

Ta.

Bengaluru - the Interim Post.

2009-11-21T00:57:00.001-08:00

I hope I have appeased local rowdies with the usage of 'Bengaluru' in the title. I will now proceed to say 'Bangalore' throughout the post. Adjust maadi. :)

So I am in Bangalore. A proper Bangalore post is creating itself at the moment. It will be unleashed as soon as -

1. it is finished, and
2. a freak - and highly localised - earthquake causes my landlady to move her good self away from her PC.

You see, I am highly internet deprived. My fingers tremble in the night, but there is no keypad to soothe them. My eyes glaze over in expectation, but there is no ugly monitor to stare at. I lech at the three hundred and eighty seven cyber cafes on my way to work, as they beckon to me with their curvaceous modular keypads and their beautiful dark cable modems; my poor financial situation leads me to rebuff their advances. I stare sadly at them for five seconds and then go eat excellent tomato rice (with thick coriander chutney and thicker coconut chutney, with side order of excellent tadka dal) at Imperial Hotel, for the princely sum of eighteen rupees. Yum.

I think I will bring the two-lunch system into fashion. You will eat one lunch, and then you will eat another, just to keep the first one company inside your stomach. Cows may eat eight lunches, because they have four stomachs and of course, for a proper partay you need two lunches for each stomach.

(I am not responsible for any cows keeling over and dying out of indigestion.)

If your digestion is not strong, you have no place in the world I am going to create. The same one where I am going to be Supreme Lord(-ess? Ramu, your opinion?) where I will eat two lunches out of respect for the law (which I have created) and two lunches each for every unfed citizen in my country, just out of the kindness of my heart. I will cry copious quantities of fat, sympathetic tears for them, but I will stop as soon as I get to the puliyodharai, because you know how the rice tends to be quite salty to begin with.

I have seen some lovely sights in Bangalore, including the interestingly named Philistine Auto Repair Works off Old Madras Road, and Bux! Bux! Bux! on Bannerghatta Road, the latter being a bookshop. I have keenly observed its location (in between Chamundeswari tea shop and Chamundeswari Auto Repair) and as soon as I figure out where in this neverending tangle of roads, this bloody Bannerghatta Road is, I will run off and check Bux! Bux! Bux! out.

Strawberry Fields is a nice place to spend a jobless weekend afternoon. There is a nice assortment of good South Indian boys with curly eyelashes and adorable little jiggly paunches in place, who are cunningly attired as METALHEADSSSS. (Ya right.) There is a relaxed atmosphere composed of lots of sun, good egg rolls and a general happy unwashedness.

But seriously, some of the bands are quite nice.

--

PS - To Kannada-knowing peoples: I have been faithfully trotting out my extensive Kannada vocabulary consisting of "Oudhu!" "Illa!" and "X Colony olige hogitha?" at regular intervals, to sundry bus-drivers, bus-conductors and bus-terminus Enquiry Officers. Oudhu and Illa have worked ok, but one bus-driver laughed when I asked him whether the bus, X-Colony olige hogitha. How exactly have I screwed up? Kindly be enlightening.

PPS - One excellent side-effect of my luck to always be finding auto-drivers with road-rage problems, is that I may not be able to ask where the loo is, in kannada, I may not be able to order food in kannada, I may not be able to ask for directions in kannada, but if I am pissed off I can shout Nin Hendruna Kaiya! But I have been advised that this is not a smart move. Whattay bore.

Bye.

One Day..

2009-10-31T12:07:00.000-07:00

I will write a book.

Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Mohammed?

2009-10-24T02:09:00.000-07:00

I want to know from anyone who reads my blog- how does one choose one religion for oneself, if one wants to?

On what basis do you evaluate a particular religion? Does it even make sense to 'evaluate' a religion, i.e. examine it using logic and reason, when belonging to a religion is completely dependent on not logic, but faith?

If you insist on examining it critically with logic, in an absolutely unbiased fashion, then you do not have faith. And if you do indeed have unequivocal faith, truly objective criticism is impossible. Consider a devout Catholic attempting an objective evaluation of Catholicism; it simply will not work. Equally applicable to all religions.

Here is the circular trap as I see it -

I've read over fifty accounts of islamic apostates, i.e. people who left Islam, and at least as many of people who've left Christianity, and most accounts of why they left their respective religions are logic-based. I'm finding it difficult to understand how a logical criticism of a religious text can be a valid criticism when religions simply ask you to have faith.

If you are sceptical of it in any way, (one way being attempting a critical evaluation of it) then how exactly do you have faith? And even if you go on to prove successfully, that the primary religious text of a particular religion is logically inconsistent (say it is full of anachronisms and self-contradictions), what exactly have you proved? Your criticism will not make any difference to the devout, for they have faith, and faith is not critical. Your criticism can only make a difference to the skeptics, which makes no difference, because by virtue of being skeptical, they do not have faith to begin with.

So when you have no faith, and yet you cannot criticise, how do you choose a religion?

Or do I have it on backwards, and does the religion choose you?

Regular commenters, please oblige, and lurkers, please make an exception and delurk, pretty please. :) I want as many opinions as I can get. Atheists, agnostics, everyone please come forward.

Thank you.

***

(No disrespect is meant by the title; the title stays as it is because it seems to sum up my problem perfectly.)

I am a Ninja, and you are Not.

2009-10-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

Allow me to comment on the weather once more. It is in that blessed twilight moment between summer and winter, where summer seems to pause on its way out and look us straight in the eye, and we have caught that moment, captured it indefinitely in our skin and our eyes. Crisp and cold and so strangely clear in the mornings, with that large white winter sun that simply cannot heat, unexpectedly hot afternoons, where you pull off your sweatshirt, cursing (or if you are a Dilli-person, you point and laugh at the 'Saooth-Indian' who, poor her, is feeling cold already and it isn't even winter yet. Are you reading this, you Saddi-Dilli-type person? POO on you. One day you will call for me in a weak, shaky tenor that comes from chest catarrh, and extend a pale shaky arm to me for help and I will coldly watch and even more coldly laugh, and with infinite pleasure swat your pleading arm away. Ahahahahahaha. AHAHAHAHAHAHA.) and chilly nights, where you observe all the work that you have planned for the night, and then you observe all the warm, toasty blankets you have piled up on your bed, and the work does not stand a chance. And you climb into your bed and assume a foetal position and remain in said retarded position until four minutes before class.

I am the first to admit I spent the first winter here freezing my extremities off, drinking much shitty coffee and declaiming loudly to the world in general what a very large craphole University is, and what a much larger unwashed craphole a desert winter is. I never realised what a fan I am of warm, humid, rainy winters (think Madras, think Pondicherry, think Bombay!) until the Jodhpur winter snuck up and stuffed icecubes up all my orifices when I wasn't looking. And left them there for three months.

But, you know, I really like this winter now. I like the cold that brings tears to your eyes (literally), I like the fact that winter clothes beautifully camouflage any and all flab you have gathered eating rasagollas with with every meal. And of course, I like eating rasagollas with every meal.

What I DON'T like is having to hover sneakily in the freezing bathroom to fill my two buckets of hot water every morning before it runs out. HOT SHOWERS, DEAR GOD! By Methuselah, has nobody heard of MODERN PLUMBING?!

But this post has gone in a different direction than intended. No really. Sometimes I do come here with a specific intention in mind; of course, it usually happens that I end up doing happy backflips in an entirely different direction, and remember my original thought only when I am exhausted and flat on my back and dreaming of Honey Nut Crunch ice cream from Baskin Robbins, to satisfy the keening, growling sugar craving I have from doing backflips on the internetz.

Anyhow.

My original intention was to applaud the neat social structure that my University has developed. It appears to follow, unhappily, the standard format of every high-school American show I have ever watched. But it is still a nice, neat social structure. And by neat, I mean dependable also. Like we are a bucket of pondwater where the layers have settled down, and you pick it up and shake it, and when it settles down, the scum is still on top and the gravel is still on the bottom. So this social structure. Nice and exclusive. Each little clique talks to its own little clique and watches the same shows and hugs the same teddybears and dates a generic boyfriend, who wears a generic shirt, and also generic undies, which he will duly display above his generic jeans. Or I may be referring to only the Ballerina-Flats Clique. You know the ones, yes?

"Do you watch Friends? OMFG wasn't Joey so cute, there, where he pulled the same stupid face he's pulled for ten seasons and paused for just the right amount of time and made a deep yet funny comment? OMFGROTFLMAO. LOOOOOOOL. OMG what did you say? You don't watch Friends? Like, how can you not watch Friends, like, where have you been, like, ew."

I am forever put off ballerina flats and white pants, I think.

Look out for them. They have horns and fangs. And straightening irons and hot wax.

I'm the quiet one in the corner, the one in the extra-large hoodie. The one who you know, instantly, is a NINJA.

*Dramatic closing music*

Oh Yay, Vitamin B tablets!

2009-10-04T15:04:00.001-07:00

This is a hot, sticky night, cold desert nights are a myth. Suffocation, and the smell of vodka and pineapple juice is not leaving my tshirt. Hairs, too many hairs on my head and they are tired and dying moist, sweaty deaths on my neck, my itchy, salty neck, the one that I would like to cut off and cover carefully with a sheet of cellophane and store in the freezer for 3-4 hours. Allow to set and serve with whipped cream and a sprig of mint on top.

This taste of salt is everywhere, and MY GOD, WILL EDDIE VEDDER SHUT UP NOW RIGHT NOW, iTunes, iTunes, pause! Pause pause PAUSE pause pause!!!!!!!! Oh no, it hangs, oh please don't hang my project is open like a bombay duck sliced into half on a cold dead slab like itself, but not a slab, a fish, adjust as per taste, and Crawford Market is a smelly, smelly place. Don't believe them when they say it's Historic, because what use is Historic when there is Smelly? They try to con you with that OO LOOK IT'S HISTORIC PLEASE OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND MAKE APPROPRIATE AWED NOISES at Agra too, but you just say I don't care if it's historic, I'm not going in there and two people are dead in there and there is no eternal love cos there's no bloody romance when you're bloody smelly. Being dead is secondary, or tertiary or even quaternary because you have saat janam anyway but I don't know what comes after quaternary or I would have said it.

If Kurt Vonnegut wasn't an angry man I shall be disappointed with fate, because I Vonne Gut someone too, but I was not blessed with a name like that, was I? No. It would make everything so convenient, like who are you? i am Vonnegut and what do you want? i Vonne Gut.. that is hilarious, that is. LAUGH.

If I could do a keg stand, would it be worth it if I were teetotalled? No. I would have to be totalled. That just goes to show you not to aspire for things that are not within your grasp. ..Grasp is SUCH a satisfying word to say, like 'debilitating' and 'ridDONKulous', which is the way 'ridiculous' should be said, but it is MY way and if you say it like that without my permission I will shoot you with a Colt .22 cos I have no aim, and That Person says you don't need to have aim to shoot with a Colt .22. That other one said I'd suck at shooting too, but that's what they told Gandy before he put on his dishcloth and went to London to see the Queen. Pussy cat, pussy cat what did you do there? I executed my diplomatic responsibility, but that doesn't fucking rhyme now, does it?

Anyway, that's not what they told Gandy, they told Gandy he SHOULD shoot but he said he didn't wanna.

Happy birthday Gandy.

Oh your birthday was three days back. Oh shitttt.

Oh no, oh no, Vitamin B...

I Love the Smell of Crazy in the Morning.

2009-09-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

One good way to concentrate directionless anger inside you is to read Ann Coulter back to back until you've either kicked the computer screen in or unintentionally redirected the Slice in your mouth to your keyboard via your nose, thereby precluding the ability to scroll to read further.

She says good science and good religion are based on the same principles. She says these principles include the ability to be factually proved.

I'd say WTF, but I have come to the conclusion that quiet understatement is the only way to go here.

In connection, I think some women are meant to talk and be heard and some women are meant to be quiet and look pretty. Ann Coulter looks like a skinny blond horse - a fairly pretty horse, but a horse nonetheless - so I was momentarily perplexed as to what to do with her. I have come to the conclusion that she could be a potted palm. Inoffensive, quiet and pretty in an anaemic, apologetic way. Hotel-doorway-ficus-plant. One would put Coulter's feet in the planter and fill up with good nutritious mud. Then one would stretch her arms out and fertilise them. Water regularly until green shoots are seen.

If she remained quiet, people would pass her by without comment. If she began talking, little boys would pee in her and people would surreptitiously dump bad Paneer Butter Masala in her. I often wish that this could happen to her in real life.

I grew a plant when I was six, as part of a school assignment. It was a little kidney bean. I put it in a plastic cup (sorry, I didn't know of Al Gore.. Not that anything has changed now that I do.) and filled it with cotton and arranged my bean artistically in the centre. Then I watered it and watched it night and day like a hawk (Would I be that mum, the one giving her kindergartener kid advanced algebra lessons?). My bean cooperated commendably, textbook-fashion (shoots on day 1, lengthening on day 2) until the third morning when I was to take it to school where it would sit on a shelf and compete in size, colour, positioning aesthetic, length of shoot, shotput, weightlifting and 100m sprint with all my classmates' beans. But when I picked it up and did the final rearrangement, the shoot broke off the bean. I was unfazed, reckless and not excessively encumbered with scruples.

I stuck it back with fevikwik.

What?

I was discovered when it remained the exact same size for the next three days when the other beans in class continued to show off, pushing out fat little shoots of suspicious length in an obscenely enthusiastic manner with no consideration for the delicate sensibilities of their disabled brother. When confronted with an accusation of Sproutal Malpractice, I maintained at that time - and this continues to be my official position - that my bean was simply suffering from performance anxiety.

Modern parenting is a fucking headache.

It is an indicator of delicious weather that your first reaction to it is the barely controllable urge to tear off your clothes and run through the sprinklers in the football field. Or anywhere. Personally I prefer sprinkler-dampened football fields. Temporary insanity is uplifting, but hot asphalt will bring you down to earth, which would be ok if the earth weren't so skin-peelingly, nose-shrivellingly, hair-fryingly hot. In any case, I do not run (not dignified, and my limbs protest and jerk about stupidly in different directions. I look like a 1956 washing machine that's come to life without notice. The day I run in a cohesive fashion, I will run in public. This excuse may or may not be a poor cover up for my sudden and inexplicable desire to own Juicy Couture trackpants.)

Oh, and I do not go naked, because my jiggly bits are shy, unlike my talky bits.

When my throat gets very dry and I keep talking, I sound like Billie Holiday. (At this point, a friend wishes to record her rather offensively strong dissention; apparently I sound like an aging bullfrog. To my good friend I say my blog, my opinion. Go make your own blog. Gngngngngn)

Modern American biology textbooks are enjoyable for the reason that they're very, perhaps too approachable; they make complex discussions of mitochondrial function sound like something that can be learnt off a Magic School Bus episode. You're always left with the vague but persistent feeling that it's got to be more complicated than that! It is for the exact same reason that I dislike American Physics textbooks; they make me feel like an idiot for having whimpered miserably at the mere mention of Physics my entire life. IT WASN'T THAT EASY, OK?!

The world is slowly and inescapably moving towards anarchy. One good way to prepare your children for this is to teach them to hunt for their own food. Place a Milano biscuit packet across the room and have your child stealthily stalk it with silent grace until the perfect moment where he (or she) may attack and be sure to succeed. Then take the packet from them and eat all the biscuits in front of their eyes. What? You're bigger, it's the law of the jungle.

Sleep appears to be a good idea, but I won't really know for sure until tomorrow morning, will I? Unless there are larger, more distant repercussions unknown to me now, which I will be sure to record here for your benefit in the last few moments of my life.

Bye.

Revolutions begin with Haikus in Loos.

2009-08-31T05:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you need a template that matches the mood (mood = dark, not constipated; also, NO, the mere reference to a toilet in the header does not mean you're invited to make toilet jokes. I've heard them all, anyway. I've even made a few.)

Speaking of headers, many thanks to this girl, whose habit of arming herself with permanent markers and skulking around communal bathrooms occasionally produces interesting results. ;) Welcome to National League of the Underperforming, Jodhpur - even our showers are educational. As the man has rightly said, Revolutions begin in the Bathroom*.

We are toying with the idea of doing a whole series of these.

If you were religiously inclined, for example, you would no doubt appreciate this little effort in that direction (I cater to the masses; after all, it has been so correctly said, pee is the great equalizer*) :

And now I sit me down to wee

Dear God, I hope the seat is clean

I hope the pot, of proof, is free

Of someone, earlier, having been.

Haiku enthusiasts?

one stream of water

showerhead blocked (surprise?)

bath will still happen.

also,

O soap that vanished,

i left you on the wash-stand!

soap thief!! i smite thee.

More as and when inspiration/insomnia strikes, or public enthusiasm/support is shown.

Oh and before I forget - Revelsign, this post is dedicated to you.

Please don't kill me. I couldn't resist. :D

------

*Or Charles Dickens did, only may have used the words 'Charity' and 'Home' instead. Quiet down, nitpickers, I aim to capture the spirit of quotes; accuracy is SO 1997.

*Susanna Moodie in Life in the Clearings versus the Bush, 1853 (though wrongly attributed to Thomas Carlyle) and she was talking about death, but it's a fairly flexible phrase, no? Oh shut up.

Hello, trolls..

2009-08-21T01:22:00.000-07:00

.. you little shits. I love receiving email from you, if only to marvel at the creative spelling and the vacuous mind that thought it was kewl to spell that way. I also wonder, idly, where you get my email from, but that is probably my fault, my ID is everywhere on the internet.

Dear illusion_of_the_mind, I quite enjoy my sarcasam, thanks for asking. I gathered from your long and rambly email to me that you do not like my sarcasam. Because it shows I have a 'cowardly mind which cn only make fun n not fight bravely'. Tell me, dear illusion_of_the_mind, is your ass nice and roomy? It must be, no, considering you sit on it all day to think up these startlingly novel critiques? Why don't you stick your clever little head up your ass and rest in peace, then? Unless your posterior has an inbuilt modem, I doubt you will ever be troubled by my sarcasam again. The day your ass acquires an internet connection, do email me, I'd love to hear all about it. Also, compliments from my sarcasam. He loves to be the centre of attention, and the next time you write in, remember he enjoys truffle pastry. Thank you for writing in. :)

Dear sumit, thank you for writing in. You were greatly amused by my post on f****** like b******, and told me I was "cool.... to be writin on f****** wid girlz" . While I blush delicately with delight that you have enjoyed my blogpost, I must express my horror at the idea that I enjoy writing on asterisking with women. I was brought up well, and in my family we do not asterisk with women. We do not asterisk with men either, nor pets, and none of the household appliances has ever complained of being asterisked. Asterisking is frowned upon - nay - asterisking is taboo. I assure you, dear sumit, we do not asterisk.

Fucking is different though. Everyone enjoys a good fuck.

Keep writing in, sumit! :)

Dear elvenwindow, hi. No, not interested in an ab machine, though God knows I could use it. Which reminds me, how did you know I was a fat slob simply through my blog? Perceptive. But creepy.

Do keep writing in, elvenwindow..... NOT!

heh. Sorry. I'm a bit of a sucker for not-jokes. :D

-----------

The above are the only three trolls I've had the privilege of interacting with over the last year. Last year there were only two, one of whom tried to sell me Viagra at an unbeatable price. These people simply do not do their market research properly, do they? Who tries to sell a poverty-stricken, celibate law student Viagra? What would you try to sell me next? Prams? Pampers? Breast pumps?

The rest of nice people who wrote in with funny stories and all (numbering a grand total of two), thanks. :D I read your email, I just don't reply.

But for all of you trolls out there? Do write in, loves, mommy's simply aching to write back to you. ;-)

Ta.

What Would Uma Thurman Smoke?

2009-08-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

So, the Lord of the Rings. Shoot me, but I've never felt the magic, and god knows I've tried. Due to my policy of not watching the movie until I've read the book, I have no idea what you're talking about when you rhapsodise over the perfection of the casting system that picked Gollum, or was it Gandalf. Dude with the long hair that should have been Dumbledore, yo.

I like Pulp Fiction. As a rule, I do not watch movies more than once. I barely watch movies at all, but I have watched Pulp Fiction three times. All three times, my breath has caught a little bit at that moment that the camera follows Uma Thurman's bare ankles and feet around the house. If there is one moment in modern cinema that exudes pure, effortless Sex, this is it.

School reunions sadden me. We have not grown out of the shadow of the people we were convinced we'd be by now, and we have not grown into the people we will become. Somewhere in between what should have been and the absolute least that we could be, we've paused in an uneasy sort of equilibrium that we try to defend to everyone else with high-pitched laughter and different clothes. No one ever tells anybody else exactly what they've been doing for two years. No one is going to get along like they used to; indeed, no one ever got along quite as well as their memories would have them believe. Why do people do this to themselves?

Me, I go for the discounted pepsi and the smiley potato patty things. :)

Sometimes it feels nice to simply be quiet. Six unbroken hours of silence, and you float quietly through the day. Perspective, order and unless I am very much mistaken, acuity. Watching your average joe emote while tuning out the bullshit he is saying generates a far clearer picture of what he means as opposed to what he'd like you to believe he means. Intuition is not, I think, the word for it; in any case, the closest to a 'gut feeling' I've ever had is indigestion.

Apparently the only close-to-healthy way you can eat Maggi, is by cooking the noodles by themselves in water, draining away the stock, washing the cooked noodles in cold water and dry tossing the masala in, as you would toss a salad. I'm probably also the kind of idiot that would rather die than switch from Marlboro to Nicorette, but if this was the only way to eat Maggi, I would not eat Maggi. No offence to Maggi - baby, you've been by my side through thick and thin. Though these days, you are tending more and more to thin... it's all the cost cutting at the factories and as an informed enjoyer of a quality noodle of generous thickness, I protest the new Size 2 Maggi. I like my Maggi old-school: fat, soupy and simply exploding with the goodness of Vitamin FUCK-this-is-bad-for-you.

There's an age and a personality to perfumes. Chanel No.5 is for the quiet sexiness that comes with some age, much maturity and a comfort in one's own skin, like those women who modelled Chanel's early suits, wearing berets and seamed stockings. I don't know if the pictures ever showed them smoking cigarettes, but in my mind, they always are. And this might be an anachronism - I have no idea, does anyone know? - but in my mind, they are smoking Gauloises. Why? Because it is French, and also because it is short and stubby and unfiltered and black and so totally not marketed towards the chicks, but they smoke it anyway, and of course, understated rebellion is so feminist, and so very 1920's Chanel. No?

See:

Coco Chanel in one of her own suits, and happily enough for me, smoking a cigarette. Is that a Gauloise?

It could be any other cigarette, of course. I know nothing about cigarettes.

Speaking of things I don't know, I don't know Chanel today. Karl Lagerfeld and suntan-in-a-bottle are BFFs and I don't like my designers orange.

Chanel No. 5 is one of the few perfumes whose progressively changing scents I both noticed and liked. Lacoste's Touch of Pink smells dramatically different at first go - aggressively bright and citrus, like one of those chirpy , vacant girls who used to annoy you in school, but by nightfall it is all gently sweet and wistful and musky, and I can't help but like it. I am convinced that more people would both try and buy perfume if not for those annoying people in malls who follow you everywhere with perfumed paper strips and stick em into every visible orifice, until you smell like a flower market, but you don't know because all you can smell is alcohol. But I mean, paper strips. Really?! Philistines.

Also -> boy readers who wear Axe - please don't. Thanks. :)

Simply out of curiosity, why are you opposed to consensual, non-procreative incest?

I wonder when this topic-jumping incoherence is going to end.

Digression

2009-07-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

I am aware that this blog is reserved solely for ranting convenience of self, but I simply must record that the weather here for the last week has been beyond excellent. I have heard it said and I must now agree that there is nothing more beautiful to watch than the metamorphosis of a desert land in the rain.

My spirit is exploding in little electric spurts of happiness, at my fingertips, as I write this. :)

Where the snowflakes were still, but I was floating up...

2009-07-15T03:34:00.000-07:00

Laughing, burning heat, and you can't see farther than five feet in front of you because the white metal sun has lit up on everyone's head, where each hair is a wick and every wick has caught fire in a tiny explosion of light, and you shut your eyes, and people are a talking, laughing, gently undulating sea of blue shoes and brown umbrellas and white noise around you, and then suddenly, without warning, the noise is gone and you're all alone in a vacuum, and the happy, oblivious world does not even notice. One moment of isolation so complete it feels like you're drowning, and your mouth, your throat, your nostrils are filling with loneliness so fast that you can do nothing, and all that there is the world, in your head, in the universe, is you.

And in that one moment if you realize that you like yourself, you know that you will be safe anywhere.

Dorks PWn.

2009-07-12T22:55:00.000-07:00

...also, how much do you love me? Show me. Buy me a tee shirt. :D

Seriously, though, just because I am a dork with an affection for androgynous clothing does not mean that I too, cannot have a fashion wishlist. The existence of couture thankfully means that the term 'fashion' can be prodded into literally any direction. Exhibit A:

Also, the fact that fashion tends to repeat itself means that sometimes dorks can be credited with prescience. You are absolutely correct, I DID precede Heidi Klum in the boyfriend jeans trend. *smug* The poor man's Micheal Kors, that's me. And now I define this year's trend in tee shirts. Not just any tee shirt, no. Tee shirts wholeheartedly espousing the cause of Dorkdom. Tee shirts celebrating the superiority of Dorkhood. Tee shirts that would gel fabulously with the persona of people with usernames like prince_of_dorkwood. Not that I know anyone with that username, of course not. (J, you can hide inside my cupboard until the scary internets peoples go away. There's a good dork, now.)

In keeping with being on the cutting edge of fashion, I will now present my all time favourite tee shirts. Needless to say, I possess none of them, although websites selling them have invited my lascivious attention for very long. Here they are, in any case. Kindly direct your drool to the comments section -

1. "ARMANI - Just another Sindhi tailor" - What, I ask, is not to love?

2. "FREE TIBET - with purchase of another Tibet of equal or greater value." - Let's see; one small territory fighting heroically for a semblance of independence from a modern behemoth? check. Poignant photos of the Indian youth expressing intellect and solidarity at Janpath? check. Several weighty philosophical, moral and legal issues? check, check and check. Good, ya. Where's the popcorn?

3. "PillowFight Club" - That's right. If it's your first day here, you must fight. And if you don't know who Tyler Durden is, please go back to drooling over The Notebook posters.

Front of t-shirt -

Right side corner (even more awesomeness.) -

And that covers, for me, as of July 13 2009, the Holy Trinity of tee shirts. Subject to change at any time, of course.

In case you are wondering if this is the (lukewarm, you think?) limit of my passion for fashion, I'll have you know that I also do possess a healthy appreciation for Christian Louboutins. However, while my relationship with these t-shirts is convivial, my relationship with Loubous is like yours with God - stand at a distance and WORSHIP, ye undeserving. :D

I leave now, but always remember - I am a Dork, and all your base are belong to us.

Over and out.

The One with the Halfhearted Chocolate and the Morally Upright Parakeet.

2009-07-12T04:50:00.000-07:00

White chocolate icecream with hot coffee syrup snaking black, sticky trails of awesomeness all over it. I am not really a dark chocolate person anymore, I think. To truly be a dark chocolate person requires just a soupcon more snobbery than I feel capable of at this moment. At the moment, I am not feeling capable of much more than a languid sort of snobbery. I am not feeling capable of much more than a general sort of languidity at all, actually. The comparison I am trying to draw is between a ferociously active 24x7 Queen-Mother sort of snobbery ("WE are ROYALTY. We look like HAW-ses, go to EE-ton and pet our CAW-gis") as opposed to a half-hearted, minor-English-aristocrat brand of snobbery ("I'm sorry dah-ling, we only do snobbery from two to four on Tuesday evenings, could you please go away now so we can bathe our temples in Eau d'Cologne, lie gracefully on our French chaise and have our aristocratic afternoon headache in peace.") . I now subscribe to the latter school of thought. More energy-saving, I find. It is to reason, then, that I enjoy white chocolate better now. Also, I prefer Milkybars to Lindt Blanche Truffles. Thus do the great fall, eh?

White chocolate, incidentally, is a thing after my own languid heart. It is so halfheartedly chocolate that it isn't even chocolate.

Outside, the sky is a sharp, clear blue. The air is cold and crisp. The grass is green. There are puddles everywhere. I spent a significant portion of my morning personally paying my respects to each individual puddle. I am now left with itchy calves and feet, and a pair of boxer shorts resplendent with grass stains and high caste Rajput mud. That is, I think Rajputs are high caste.

Company Law, I think, is beyond my understanding. The professor tends to bandy words like 'debentures' and 'equity' with an ease that is frankly frightening. I had an earnest discussion on the topic this morning with a delightfully green parakeet. While the specifics of his opinion escaped my comprehension, I concluded that he felt strongly on the issue by the explosive manner in which he shed a hundred bright green feathers when I asked him, and followed it up promptly with a rather forceful poop on the local tree branch. Having metaphorically expressed his opinion of insider trading thus, he flew away with silent dignity. I have a new respect for parakeets, those chaps do understatements rather well.

Birds remind me, Hark! I believe I am hearing the soft and distinctive call of that rare and elusive species, the Carpenteris Jodhpurus. I quietly open my door. I see his earthy plumage. I shall slink off and attempt to trap him forthwith, with the aid of my indisputable charm and whiny voice. I have a shelf that lost its battle with gravity six months back, that needs to be restored immediately.

A wooden shelf, I meant.

A wooden bookshelf.

Perverts.

How much I am loving you all. :)

Ta.

Government-sponsored Debauchery.

2009-06-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

Ya, ya. I know there are roads and mohallas and cute lil dead-ends in your city glorifying washermen and cobblers and goldsmiths and silversmiths. But in my city, you have -

Text loosely translated as - "The street of the dude with the beer".

Next to Beerkaran Street No.1, we have -

Text loosely translated as - "The SECOND street of the dude with the beer."

So I am trying to say this in a sophisticated, indirect and non-confrontational manner:

Beat THAT, suckers. :D :

My Friends are Retarded.

2009-06-14T05:01:00.000-07:00

No wonder I like them so much. Also, they sometimes buy me lunch. And say the following:

"I hate the idea of male gynaecologists. The very idea that I am showing off everything I have to a man and he is STILL not going to fall madly in love with me, is too depressing. I want a female gynaecologist."

"Divya, talk to me. Don't be silent but violent."

"Same sex couples confuse me. As an engineering student you learn several things... here is a nut...and there is a bolt... and you can't do jack with two nuts or two bolts."

"Divya you have a blog?" (yes) "Am I in it?" (no) "Why the hell not?!"

"Pakistanis are just Indians with bad judgment and hot sisters."

"You study in Jodhpur! Awesome, I love Gujarati food."

"Divya's like Gujarat in peace time. No alcohol and constant yammering."

"Let's get married and have lots of babies. I'll even have some of mine with you."

----

Good times, good times.

I don't want to go back to college. :(

If only I could work a Milk Cooker.

2009-06-09T05:37:00.000-07:00

I hate my shoes.

Thisis the primary aftertaste of my internship days. I was curious to see what it would be after the first week of interning, and this is it. I hate my shoes with a degree of loathing I normally reserve for overweight Iyers with control issues and South East Asian tastes (I wonder if I have been vague enough), Vodafone and jackfruit.

These shoes are, quite objectively speaking, a fantasyland of ugliness. The salesman told me it

was bought by office-going women, which is unarguably an accurate description of the kind of shoe I was looking for. But these shoes, please note, are black pleather with metallic rivets in straight lines. Observe:

No? Not disgusted quite yet? Observe again:

Grim , what? They aspire to be worn, presumably, by the Tamil housewife who goes to work in Andhra Bank from 8 to 5 and secretly aspires to Vengeful Gothdom. (However said Vengeful Goth activities must cease by 4.30am, because then it is time to put on the milk cooker.)

That reminds me of the time I expressed my desire to know the ideology of Goths, to a Goth. She told me "We do not support society and we protest." Protest what, I said. ""We protest society" she said. Yes, but which bit, I said. "We just protest" she said, and left. I am very sure that she is wrong. I opened the Wikipedia page on Goth subculture and Ctrl+F 'd "protest". No result.

I took a day off from work. I feel delightful and slightly dangerous. This could be because of one of two reasons -

1. I am reading Chuck Palahniuk, which always arouses in me feelings of deliciousness subversiveness, or

2. I successfully faked a (resounding and rather impressive, if I may say so myself) hacking cough on the why-I'm-absent phone call to the office today, and immediately afterward gave my reason of absence as a back-ache. (Sing with me... What the Fuck?! I know. I spend a large quotient of my time wondering why I do the things I do in the remaining part of my time.)

I got a tee shirt with a lovely print on it, for my birthday. However the neckline of the tee shirt is humongous and strangely amoeboid, and therefore I am flummoxed as to the correct way to wear said tee shirt. If I wear it so that I am modestly covered in front, A good third of my back is aired. If I protect the modesty of my back, there remains much nakedness to be addressed in front . My mother is of the opinion that I should let her take a sewing machine to the tee shirt. I am tempted to let her.

And to everyone who this concerns - they know who they are - I am not buying skinny jeans. I tried them on. Without exception, they cling annoyingly to my leg instead of flopping around comfortably and shapelessly. Absolutely unacceptable, what.

Ta.

Edit: I bought the shoes for 140 rupees from a hole in the wall near where I work, because I'd gone to work with my bathroom slippers on and the partner of my firm is anal about formal dress code. I insert this back-story because, after she saw the travesty that are my shoes, a friend said I should include the reason I would possibly buy them. I agree. My shoes scared her dog. Her dog is an abominably large and scary German Shepherd.

Hmm.

Suddenly I like these shoes.

Fueled by Frustration.

2009-05-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

The same circle of faintly pretentious faintly good blogs, the same breakfasts, the same wet, salty, heavy air, the same face in the mirror. (Not same, exactly, though. I believe I see the precursor of a zit on my forehead. Definitely absent yesterday.)

I tried to drive it away with books, so many books, and I ate them all with the desperate sort of grabbing hunger that you see in middle class people for upperclass-hood and therefore for plasticsheet-protected sofas and dustjacket-bound English books that nobody reads. I met people and drank oversweet tepid coffee and warm masala pepsi and took buses home that surprisingly went nowhere close to home and walked beach promenades and lost a slipper to the Bay of Bengal and made a sand angel halfway to Pondicherry (if you see it, it's the one wearing a tipsy crown) and ate furiously off roadsides, which were all good enough experiences in themselves I guess, but now I'm out of things to do (bad) and out of people to meet (good) and the very sight of books is annoying me, which only annoys me further, and that halfheartedly albino man who was in Johnny Gaddaar is singing incessantly on the bloody TV and my idiot sister is singing with him and one of these days there is going to be a hole in the TV screen the shape of my sister's head.

Jagdish Bhagwati should be compulsory reading at undergrad level at least... the whole concept of a pointwise defence of globalisation is very appealing. There are some issues with what I believe are patches of unwarranted optimism, but it's a very nicely laid out argument overall. Order and method, order and method.

Which reminds me... how hot is Bips? Really. Phew. (Observe how I say 'Bips' like I've been living next door to her and lending her one cup dahi everyday all my life.)

Also on hot-list was Obama, though his sex appeal quotient fell rapidly from greek-god to snotface-perv when the US tripled aid to Pakistan. What the feckin fish, what? Sorry Obama-man. You're going to have to settle for Michelle. Who is not a bad bargain actually, except that she:

1. Doesn't have my sparkling personality, and

2. Has too many double-toned fluorescent dresses.

Point two should be sufficient to draw sharp and flattering (to self) contrast to self.

If I have to face one more morning with nothing to look forward to but breakfast, and then nothing to anticipate but lunch, I will murder a cat for the sheer activity of it. I swear I will.

If you live in a different city, invite me home. Now.

Keeping Up with the Cojones-es.

2009-05-26T04:34:00.000-07:00

They say when your life is in imminent danger, it flashes before your eyes. I only swallowed much muddy Sutlej and energetically kicked a rock. I have the beautifully purpling bruises to show for it. My life did not flash before my eyes, unfortunately. If I had only remembered at the time that this was supposed to happen, I would have concentrated more on it. The idea is definitely interesting... I would finally find out if that boy I lusted after in class eight was indeed more important to me than my winning the math proficiency prize that term.

I have sometimes been called a nerd. I don't mind... always been attracted to nerds anyway.

What is almost as interesting as the rafting itself is to watch the other Gujarati family in the raft fiercely compete with your own in rafting prowess. Who gets to sit up in front, right in the Mouth of Danger? Jethalal or dad? Who can make more ineffectual-splashes-per-minute with an oar? Savitaben or mom? Family-group expeditions are always such wholesome, family-friendly episodes of do you have the Cojones, losers? So very Yum, no? :)

If you're Gujarati, these are all pseudonyms. What? What was that? Yes, I rather do enjoy regionalist-stereotyping actually.

Now that I have river-rafted, I only have paragliding, bungee jumping, rock climbing and doing several, mostly illegal things to Gael Garcia Bernaz, left on my bucket list. To all of you sceptics: I am perfectly aware of the possibility that some of these ambitions may not reach fruition. I have doubts about my capabilities as a rock climber. See? I am firmly in touch with reality.

I watched craploads of television on that darling big tv in that lovely big chain-hotel in Shimla. It has been five months since I last watched TV. Why, you idiots, did none of you tell me about Coupling? What a very excellent show... in my more spazzed out moments, I simply watch it to hear them say 'bottoms' in that BBC accent. Is it only me, or does the word 'bottoms' immediately bring to mind my (or generic, really) great-aunt's admittedly respectable but sadly unexciting posterior? It just cannot describe a young and pretty bum, can it.

The multiplex strike confused me. Then I read Filmfare on the Kalka-Shimla narrow gauge, and everything was immediately Light. Now I am only annoyed at the multiplex strike. I am growing very suspicious at the Tamil film industry. The same songs that were playing on the radio when I left for college two years ago, are still being played. Everyone I confront regarding this abomination gets all shifty eyed and mumbles something about a multiplex strike. I have decided to frequent that antiquity, the single-screen theatre, to check whether tamil films are still being made. I very much Doubt It. I am a Doubting Divya. I am a Deadly Dastardly Doubting Divya.

I bought four very decent and very large gravy-stuffed bun thingies and one disgusting but large chocolate pastry for sixty rupees from a posh baker on Shimla's Mall Road. If that's what posh costs in Shimla, I will grow two more chins and grey stubbly chin-hair and live like an Angrezi Mem in one of those delicious cake-like cottages. I would also wear brown tweeds, but they are remarkably unsexy. I am not talking about the New Styles in tweeds. An Angrezi Mem would not wear pink silk bustiers with tweed miniskirts. That's Just Not Cricket, luv.

One more year of law school down; I am no closer to knowing what I want to do at the end of it. Sometimes I shrug and think I may as well become a lawyer. That would be such an anticlimax though, no?

Ah well.

PS: I now have six followers. Such cheap thrills I am having I tell you.

Light reading this Summer.

2009-04-20T03:35:00.000-07:00

I have no patience with people who want to kill themselves, and even less patience with people who talk extensively and lyrically about wanting to kill themselves, yet, poor unfortunates, never really manage to get it right. Try, try until you succeed, like my mother said, but as with all courses of study, half the battle is arming yourself with the correct textbook.

The author is one Mister Geo Stone, and the book, 'Suicide and Attempted Suicide'. This delightfully organised work begins with a 'Background' and proceeds to 'Methods' where it systematicaly summarises common methods used to kill oneself and proceeds to evaluate them on a pros versus cons basis. The major arteries are detailed, along with the bones they lie alongside, for easy identification. The angle of slashing is explained. If you're still in practice, he helpfully suggests locations to cut that will result in least social attention. And if you'd rather slash-and-tell, more prominent places as well.

The book is full of these gems:

"..You may prefer to use an ankle vein in order to avoid wrist scars, and subsequent tedious cocktail-party conversation."

"As methods of suicide, cutting and stabbing have little to recommend them: compared to lower-trauma asphyxias (see "Hanging" and "Asphyxia" chapters) they are, generally, more painful, and no faster or more reliable. Their major advantage is that (depending on site and method) you may, after the injury, have some time to change your mind."

Apart from the excellent and commendably detailed instructions, also very entertaining glossary section (H: Hanging (suicide, attempt to; see also Method (impractical), Method (slow), Method (unsuccessful) ), I find it supremely refreshing that there is no moralising.

A short and precisely worded Background chapter makes a classification of the persons who are likely to attempt suicide and some speculation as to their reasons. There is no Bible thumping, none of the usually inevitable and wholly tedious Right to Die argument, no sympathy, no justification. Just no emotion at all.

I loved it.

Dude the Obscure.

2009-04-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

The urge to cut and run just when things have cautiously indicated that they are going to go well, is an urge that is tiringly familiar. It's annoying, but it's there. Like a puppy that insists on following you everywhere and humps your leg when you stop moving.

I'm not an animal lover. Kittens frighten me. Puppies, of course, hump my leg.

Anyway.

I've spent most of my life being invisible, being a part of the walls; beginning to blog was the decision to walk out of them and put myself 'out there' in some limited and (limitedly) controlled manner, to make a change. But this has become less about the posting and more about the reactions. It has become less new, less sexy, less fun. I'm bored.

I'm going back into happy obscurity.

Until I'm back - if you've any good taste, you'll miss me. ;) For everyone else, there's always the one-fingered salute.

Love y'all. Some more than others. Most, not really.

Ta.

What the Sparkly Says.

2009-03-26T09:56:00.000-07:00

No, this post is not over with the sparkly thingy. After the jump is the actual birthday post :) (check after midnight, on March 27)

Pale Hands I loved Beside the Shalimar

2009-03-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

What an annoying song, God. What a terribly annoying song. It progresses from a vaguely nice-image-evoking first line to become a cloyingly sentimental travesty of words eleven lines thence. Bah.

It being a particularly inappropriate time to post for several reasons, I, of course, make it a point to do so.

Lindt milk chocolate has a taste like no other brand of milk chocolate, which leads us to wonder if the difference is in the milk, chocolate or the makers. Or whether the milk, chocolate and maker simply share a dynamic that transcends comfort and approaches romance. Whether those cows are born and bred delicately in full view of the Lindt factories as a gentle reminder that their produce is to be used to satiate the evolved palates of nineteen year old asian girls with vivid dreams and limited funds. Amongst others. Of course.

Do they know that they end up as dog food if they're not good enough, those cows?

(What an anticlimax all this will be if it ends up being buffalo milk. But I expect better from the Swiss ;) )

But I digress; the chocolate. It must be the cows. Because Amul milk chocolate is the shittiest milk chocolate I have ever had the misfortune to taste. And I had it for free, so if I am dissing it, it was that. bloody. bad.

Or it could be the Swiss pastures. Are Indian cows pastured? Or are we reluctant connoisseurs left to contemplate the delicate and competing flavours of sundry Indian roads and garbage cans, in our chocolate? Are cows pastured at all, or am I confusing them with sheep? Aren't cows just 'driven'?

I've never seen cows 'pastured' exactly, and I have been to villages, thank you very much. Two, in fact. Cows're just sort of let loose on scraggly grass patches not far from roads. Hardy looking cows.

Maybe I'm having just having a Ruskin Bond hangover. Where all villages are on hills and there's lots of luxuriant green grass and things. So the whole pasture-deal fits in perfectly with those 'bucolic' images on imported cookie tins. Complete with spotted cows spotted in an eye-pleasing symmetry. And arranged in eye-pleasing symmetry. On satisfyingly pointy hills. With snowy caps.

Alternatively, these villages I visited just may not have been particularly 'rural' villages. They could be one of those bastard ones that are spawned awkwardly on halfheartedly used State Highways. Like satellite townships that grew indifferent before they quite reached 'town' status. You know. Or maybe not. Neither do I, incidentally. Hi, are you new here?

'Random' is a much-abused word. It is almost as though people are frightened of titling their facebook photo albums anything in specific, though the running theme of these albums is often specific enough. Tenuous friendships, shiny photos. 'Random'-ness appears to be 'cool', that other much-abused word. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, darlings. It's not called 'cool'. It is called 'lack of imagination'. Or 'lack of vocabulary'. Equally bad, as far as I am concerned.

Freedom is, roughly, choice. Is a choice a choice when making it alters every other variable that you meant to keep constant? Are only equivalent choices choices? What of conditional freedoms?

And what of the law? There is no compulsion to follow the law if there is no fear of consequences. The law does not require us to fear the consequences. We choose to fear the consequences. Does the law then impose upon our freedom at all?

What of these consequences? Prison we construe as a limitation on physical freedom and consequently mental freedom, though far be it from me to make a distinction between 'freedoms'. Therefore we allow to law to limit our freedom in the fear that if we do not allow this limitation on freedom, we shall have our freedom limited in some other manner? What? Clearly we require naked literality to frighten us. The gun is scarier than the gun-laws. Idiots.

Arundhati Roy's face is planed so beautifully. High cheekbones, liquid eyes and that iridescent honey-gold skin that girls with uneven tans and sunburnt noses will always be envious of. And she wrote that one book that I shall never be sure whether I like or not - God of Small Things. For all the knee-jerk cynicism, I'm a sucker for happy endings. GOST has no happy ending.. GOST has no ending that I could make anything of, actually. But she has a beautiful turn of phrase. 'A viable, die-able age', she said. What age isn't?

A viable, die-able age. Singing syllables.

Provogue Jodhpur does not carry skinny jeans in size 28. Asking for said jeans in said size appears to be reason enough to invite exaggerated expressions of disdain and pity in salesman of said store. I prefer to take this as definitive indication from the Universe that, inspite of all the well-meant encouragement of my enthusiastic and pushy friends, I am meant to spend my life in washed-out, one-size-too-large, held-up-by-clunky-belt blue straight jeans. I hear they're called 'Boyfriend jeans' and that Heidi Klum is wearing them these days. Fashion apparently does come full-fucking-circle.

I must stop blogging when I'm ridiculously sleepy. I just must.

Goodnight, me homies.

In Other News...

2009-03-12T02:12:00.000-07:00

Anurag Kashyap just birthed the love-child that he had with Baz Luhrmann. Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie have also registered claims of parentage. Along with roughly every minor director involved in neo-European cinema over the last thirty years.

(Attempts at determining paternity have failed because the child, fondly named Devender Singh Dhillon, pooped unceasingly and unabashedly on every person who attempted to get within twenty feet of him.)

As far as I am concerned it was one big, happy, politically incorrect orgy.

Congratulations, aap sab baap ban gaye hain. :)

Also, all you peoples simply must watch Dev D.

Because it has a actor in the lead role who is not only delightfully debauched, but proceeds to indulge in said debauchery against the background of arguably the best soundtrack of the year.

Because I live in a college that abounds with drunks of every variety and I know what drunks look like. When Abhay Deol wants to look drunk, he looks drunk. (Pertinent case study - compare with Shah Rukh Khan. In Shah Rukh Khan's world, drunk clearly equals spastic.)

Because he is the Snark. (*spoiler* the Haldi-wala sequence at the wedding!! ooohhh swoon */spoiler*)

Because he has dimples.

Because he can act despite his dimples.

But mostly because of the dimples.

I kid, I kid.

(It's actually his arms. What lovely arms. )

I have a thing for arms, clearly.

Ahem.

But seriously, please watch Dev D. It's important to watch a movie like this one purely for the privilege of being able to develop an independent opinion of it irrespective of whether it is favourable. In a sea of self-satisfied silicone-enhanced mediocrity, exposure to the noir side of Bollywood luxuriating in its own selfpity is necessary for perspective. Even if yours is different from mine.

I am Tired and you are Stupid.

2009-03-05T06:32:00.000-08:00

You know when you're tired and you reach that point when words are simply bunches of syllables strung together for no reason at all and people are just talking blablabla the words are only sounds and all the sounds are the same and look the lamp's making a pretty pattern on the wall right there and what were you saying? and you squint at talking people but now they know you hear nothing know nothing and the words die down slowly and they stare right back and their stares and your ignorance and your tiredness go straight back into your head and warp and implode quietly inside the oatmeal that is your mind.

And the someone says WHY AREN'T YOU PAYING ATTENTION. IT'S ONLY COMMON NICENESS TO PAY ATTENTION. I AM DYING AND MY LIFE IS OVER AND I WANT TO KILL MYSELF AND YOU'RE NOT EVEN BEING NICE TO ME.

Firstly, niceness isn't common. It is extremely uncommon.

Secondly, I am fundamentally a nice person. I eat rainbows and shit butterflies on a regular basis. This is just my off day.

Thirdly - yes, I believe you should break up with your boyfriend. Partly because you are "not on the same plane of Emotional Maturity as far as commitment is concerned" and "maybe our lives are just beginning to run their Natural Courses in different directions from each other" and you are "Destined for different things" , as you so eloquently put it.

But mostly because I know he is cheating on you. Sadly, so do you.

Now stop talking to me about it.

The Small Print, Only Bigger.

2009-03-01T08:33:00.000-08:00

FORMAL NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF BORROWED MATERIAL (garnish liberally with 'respectively'):

To both of you Unknown Persons who own sites good enough to show up within the first two pages of search results for "angry jumping woman" and "anal British butler guy" - observe left hand side and right hand side respectively of (BRILLIANT NEW!) header, respectively - please note that I have borrowed your (?) creations and made me a new slap-up header. Which I love. I am sorry that I have forgotten the links to your webpages. However please note that this would not have happened if your webpages had not been eminently forgettable.

Ooh, I almost forgot:

Please don't sue me.

I love you despite your catastrophic taste in colours (Dear Angry Woman - did an extra large bag of peppermints throw up on your dress? No? Then we have a problem.) And is that not the truest love?

Ok i'm done.

I Watch You Smoke.

2009-02-17T02:36:00.000-08:00

It is all peer pressure, she said dismissively, with all the happy confidence of one who has had her opinions gifted to her shrinkwrapped, for easy consumption / long shelflife.

She said, Cigarettes are Dangerous and Smelly and Dirty, how could they possibly be sexy.

I don't really know if I like the smell of cigarette smoke.. I've never had the luxury of choice, my sinuses have been making their opinion obvious for as long back as I can remember. I cough and I sneeze, repeatedly and embarassingly, around anyone who chooses to light up anywhere close to me. For every five minutes that I spend in an elevator with a smoker, I sneeze four days. Quite understandably, I try not to linger.

But I look at smokers, that doesn't hurt. I watch them gather in straggling groups around paan shops and outside the highway dhabas, and walking along the railway tracks, and sneaking behind the city hotels, and very rarely, braving the danger of their hostel balconies, standing facelessly in the scary opaque blackness of winter nights, the tips of their fingers lit up faintly by the smouldering ends of their fags. I look at them and for every ten fumbling idiots puffing away at their stubs, there's definitely one sexy smoker.

There are those smokers who clutch their cigarettes gracelessly with three stubby fingers, puffing on them jerkily with a sort of sullen singlemindedness. They smoke furiously, right till the filter, with the urgency of asthmatics with inhalers. Sometimes they pound their fags into their little plastic dip-tea cups, stubbing them out until there's a papery, grey-brown sludge at the bottom of the glass. Sometimes they belabour themselves into doing party tricks and force out a marching parade of stiff, unhappy looking white rings, looking pleased with themselves. These smokers and their silly, pouty, ring-producing mouths are a pain to watch. I don't like these smokers.

I like the other ones.

The ones that inhale slowly, absentmindedly, with their elbows up on the table and their fingers completely relaxed, the cigarette between them barely an afterthought. They inhale, and you see nothing for two seconds, and then they breathe out gently, in faint white tendrils. Their lips barely move as they smoke, the act of smoking itself just an accessory to the whole thinking, talking, laughing performance.

The ones in whose long, tapering fingers the cigarette stays suspended almost miraculously, as they move their hands around while talking. The thing dangles carelessly between middle and ring finger, and they flick the ash away from them in that pretty wrist-flick that they don't even notice they do. It dances dangerously, threatening to fly from between their fingers when they start waving their hands around as they talk excitedly, and pushing their hair away from their faces. They never notice. It never falls.

Then the smouldering tip begins to fade, and they stub it out halfheartedly in their cups, and they leave.

I walked into a dhaba once, on the Madras-Pondicherry highway, to buy chocolate. I saw a girl with long, shiny, messy hair, mile-long fingers and a beautiful mouth smoke a Djarum Black while talking angrily into her phone. To this day I am not sure whether I bought a Dairy Milk or a Gems, but the tableau of that girl and the beautiful long black cigarette dancing angrily at the end of her beautiful, skinny fingers is burned into my mind, like one of those pretentious black-and-white photographs they call 'high art' these days. But this picture is not black and white, of course. Dark brown gold hair, freckled brown fingers, black cigarette, pale gold band. The colour is only too alive.

Smokers should quit. If they can't, they should learn to be sexy smokers.

I mean, if you're doing something that is going to stain your skin, kill your breath, block your blood vessels, collapse your lungs and stop your heart, the least you can do for yourself is look hot while doing it.

No?

Watching Shoe Porn..

2009-02-15T00:03:00.000-08:00

..is an excellent way to spend a Sunday morning. It leaves you full of delicious visions of orgasmic silk ballerina flats (transferred epithet, ya -- shoe is satin and I am orgasming) and deLIGHTfully vertiginous patent mary-janes, and you float through the next hour or so in a pleasant haze composed of the million shades of purple that only exist in celebrity shoemakers' minds.

Then you switch off your computer, wear your dusty Nike floaters with ankle socks (what? my toes get cold.) and go downstairs to eat your puri-bhaji.

I have no intention of owning any of these things, these Blahniks or Choos or Loubous or Ferragamos. I love my floaters most of all the shoes I've ever owned; yet, you know, I believe that to obtain a sense of perspective, it is necessary to know that perfection exists at a height of four and a half inches from the ground. It has a delicious little moue nose and wears plum silk.

And today, it retails on eBay for $10.50.

I don't have $10.50.

Today is not a good day after all. I better go back to sleep.

I Half-heartedly Crushes! Oooo <3

2009-01-28T03:25:00.000-08:00

Jon Stewart on Fox News, which pointedly insisted on covering Bush going home, while all other channels were watching Obama:

"Let it go. If you love an administration, let it go. If it comes back to you.. well, we're all moving to Canada."

I think he may just have won himself a provisional position on my (sadly underpopulated) Sexy Persons List.

--

A little late, I know. But dah-links, you know I can only find the time to watch American comedy show clips absolutely irrelevant to my syllabus and cumulative grade point (which shall be INSTRUMENTAL in getting me a JOB, and do I want to end up as a HOBO in these HORRIBLE RECESSIONARY TIMES?! Yes, I love you too, thank you ma.) the night before an important assignment.

But a girl needs a little romance in her life, ya know. Even if it is (temporarily) wrinkly, pink and slightly (very) meh. Like a dried prune.

Not to mention one-sided.

(So that would be half a dried prune?)

Hm.

I'm going to die alone, aren't I.

The One where We dream of Vanilla-Butter Cookies and Plot to Sneakily Eat Brownies.

2009-01-26T22:15:00.000-08:00

Quite the spoilt one, I am, I should think. The mess food is pretty damn decent and the different-dessert-with-every-meal scheme they have during the winters is a stroke of fucking genius. Four rasgollas with lunch and four jalebis with dinner? Yes, I see one very happy fatass waddling into the girls' hostel. But you know, their baking is not up to the mark. Their baking, in fact, is non existent. Efforts in this direction are restricted to the buying of crumbly yellow cupcakes with disgusting tutti frutti bits within and oily plastic wrapping without, from local manufacturers, no doubt, who'd be unable to tell their muffins from their mawa kachoris (sidenote - YUM.) Hell, I'd be unable to tell their muffins from their mawa kachoris.

Here, then, is the reason I dream about my mother's sunny yellow vanilla-butter cookies the diameter of my palm and the taste of a hundred happy vacation mornings (and afternoons and evenings and midnight snacks and after-breakfast-but-before-lunch snacks and so forth.)

I could, of course, go down to Uncle Sam's Pizza, the Jodhpuri abode of surprisingly good kimchi and pizzas infused with the delicate taste of cardboard, where, for the princely sum of thirty five rupees they will pack me a slab of THE BEST BROWNIE EVARRRR, which I will hold to my heart and protect with my soul, all the dusty way back to campus.

And which I will sneak quietly into my room, without bringing to the attention of fellow resident hyenas that I have in my possession an edible of the chocolate kind (the smell draws hostelites like blood draws sharks.)

And which I will eat sneakily and quietly, crumble by crumble, nibble by nibble, quiet as the proverbial dead man, on my bed.

And whose evidence I shall dispose of with speed and efficiency by springing in two graceful (and ninja-silent) leaps to the floor-dustbin, thus completing my crime.*

I think I may be just a little hungry right now.

--

* hostels usually follow the Communist Approach to food. Alternatively known as the Pulp Fiction rule (mi casa su casa.) Unless it is bad food. Then it's all yours.

Are you part of a Louving Relationship?

2009-01-23T00:33:00.000-08:00

If you are, firstly, hello. Thankyouforvisitingmyblog. Pleasecomeagainsoon.

Secondly, please remove your intolerable self from my line of vision. I don't like you. I am possessed by a barely controllable urge to throw stones at you when I see you. And while it is undeniable that I have the hand-eye coordination of an arm-amputee, I am PERSISTENT. And there are MANY stones.

Are you celebrating your anniversary? Don't tell me. Are you celebrating your monthiversary? I will slowpoison you. (It hurts more apparently.)

Your cuteness repulses me. Your love is retarded.

Do not rub your coupledom in my face. I will rub your face in the ground.

--x--

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA GOD THAT FELT SO GOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDDDDDD :D :D :D

*zen-like happiness*

Kindly speak up, Treasured Visitor, what did you say? You think the blog is just a smidgeon too ranty?

On the one hand I could agree. Alternatively, I could say - Suck it up. It's my party, I'll cry if I want to.

Oh and if you're the guy from Denmark here looking for "sexing like bunnys" again, what do you know, you just might be in luck this time. Love....rabbitlike sex... here in Mandore, Jodhpur, you'll never know the difference. Try once and see! :D

--x--

If you're part of a couple I know - pretend you never saw this and I'll pretend I never said it ;)

The Inside of my Head..

2009-01-16T07:59:00.001-08:00

..is a perfectly fine place to be. A little dusty, true, but fits one person perfectly. With all the other voices that live in here.

Yes, I can feel the walls coming up, the bolts falling into place. Sounds of comforting finality.

I like it in here.

Tag thingy.

2009-01-10T13:51:00.001-08:00

Yeah I know it is almost 4 in the morning. So what. I'm feeling oddly awake. Not so much in the sense of 'very awake' as in the sense of how-could-i-be-awake-at-all. Anyway, I am. Everything carries a moral, and this one's is that six teas in an hour (is?are?) a very bad idea. Not even the sight of my fabulously pink and delightfully fuzzy Tinkerbell blanket is making me sleepy.

However I could deflect the blame for this wide-awake-ness on the fact that I am freezing my unmentionables off. Have I mentioned I live in the desert? Yes? Well I would like to point out to all my dear readers, in whose minds visions of sand dunes cluttered with camels and men in frocks (both tending to an excess of facial hair) no doubt manifest as soon as I say "desert", that yes, certainly, the desert can be hot, very hot, oh-god-i-am-evaporating hot, and it is, too, for most of the year. Then it changes its mind and decides to be cold. And when I say cold, I mean cold. Cold. Cold. I cannot sleep in the cold. Having absolved my six teas of any blame in keeping me awake (They're dip-dip. As much caffeine-content as baby formula, and about as much random particulate matter), I have decided that I am awake because of the cold. Thus I have attired myself in two pairs of socks, and three layers in everything else, as also a locally made ugly fat black muffler and a large green knit cap. My nose, only, is exposed to the elements. Which would explain its healthy red colour, abnormally large size and shiny tip. I would cover that as well, but then I would have to stop breathing. An interesting side effect of such is that I would die. I am brought almost to tears at the thought of the waste of all that potential; at the altar of humanity, then, I sacrifice my nose.

(also my nose doesn't like being bundled up. It is big-ish. Note the '-ish'.)

(anyone who says anything to the effect that the fat nose is less due to the cold and more due to the fact that it is actually fat, shall be spammed. And I mean it.)

I am, for lack of anything else to do, going to pick up the tag Divya left me. Here:

RULE #1 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 themselves.

RULE #2 Tag 5 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. Continue this game by sending it to other people.

1. If your lover betrayed you what would your reaction be?

An overwhelming sense of pity for him. He has deprived himself the fabulousness that is me.

2. Whose butt would you like to kick?

Ooh several people's! But first, Big Butt's. I want to test the bounce-back quotient. I want to see if it bounces back nicely like I believe it will or caves in like the beanbag it looks like. Purely scientific venture, clearly. I'm the ideal student. Excuse me for a moment. I believe I am overcome by my own awesomeness.

3. What would you do with a billion dollars?

Wait patiently for the IRS to make it into half a billion dollars. Buy myself a tropical island, a boat and Johnny Depp. Spend rest of my life taking advantage of said boat and said Depp, on said island.

4. Will you fall in love with your best friend?

Have.

5. Which is more blessed: loving someone or being loved by someone?

I have to have both to be happy.

6. How long would you wait for someone you love?

I wish I knew. Especially now.

7. If the person you like is secretly attached, what would you do?

Nothing. Mostly because they're secretly attached. Dumbass.

8. What takes you down the fastest?

The sensing of a real probability that I might not be as fabulous as I believe I am. In other words, loss of conceit.

9. Where do you see yourself in 10 years' time?

Someplace with a toilet that has a FAUCET. And (dare I hope..?) a shower with RUNNING HOT WATER!!!!

I've been told such places exist! Really!

Stay strong, fellow inmates. We shall see this faucet-ed and hot-water-ed heaven soon. Hallelujah.

10. What's your fear?

Losing faith in my ability to pull anything that I really want, off.

11. Would you rather be single and rich or married and poor?

Single and rich.

12. If you fall in love with two people simultaneously who would you pick?

Someone else entirely, and have torrid affairs with both. :) I am nothing if not impartial.

13. Would you give all in a relationship?

I have.

14. What's eating you now?

Literally, nothing. Since I am effectively spherical right now due to the abundance of clothing, not even the most diligent of insects can get close enough to me to matter. But usually "what's eating you now?" can be answered by "i don't know, i think it's a new species, its bites look like a series of ginormous hickeys, and that fraud-doctor on campus is treating me for leukoderma. With Crocin." The desert is not short of crawlies of the more malevolent and less known kind, have I mentioned.

But figuratively? The fact that I am misspelling almost everything I type, the first time. This is mostly because of the (deadly!)cold. But I am also firmly convinced that it has more than a little to do with my fingers themselves, which are roughly four miles long each. And then the nails start. Instructions given at one end are lost by the time they get to the other. I'm glad I don't play the piano. I'd be Lady Divya Banana-hands. Charmingly succinctly descriptive, but nothing I'd be happy about, you understand.

15. Tag 5 people...

Ah just do it if you've read it, no. I'm too bored to think.

---

See, Divya. Indignant at your allegation that I will probably be funny even in answering such an unfunny tag, I have applied myself as seriously as I can. Aside from the occasional ramble, I've managed, no?

Also, I NOW UNDERSTAND WHY I AM AWAKE.

I'm hungry.

For the LAST time.

2009-01-02T01:35:00.001-08:00

To you, you miserable engineering student from the college that is possessed of both the size and academic repute of my parents' bathroom; you, who stuck your misshapen nose into the air, and asked me, why are you doing law?, labouring under the delusion that you were being original, witty and interesting, here is your answer.

I am not 'doing' law.

Law is having its violent way with me.

I heart Internship.

2009-01-01T04:00:00.000-08:00

This is for everyone who asked about my internship. You will remember I'd said it was uniformly boring. I forgot to mention that it has its points. This is one of them:

"My client is having so much of affaction and is a santimantally smooth man, not enjoying any of the bad habits and a very ordant, desiplined and extinct son. Thusly it is urged of this Learned Court that the petitioner has brought an unclean suit and relief of (---) is subsequently prayed."

This is an extract from one of the more delightful plaints that it was my job to read, enjoy and...well... they said "edit" but I thought that would simply kill the dramatic effect. And that would be criminal, would it not. I love the telling little details. That the respondent is a man who may possess the odd bad habit, sure, but he is very careful not to enjoy them. If that isn't virtuous I don't know what is. Not, also, for our dashing respondent, the attractions of modesty; he is quite clear that he is not only ordant and deseplined, but also extinct. I am not quite clear how being extinct is interpreted as being an argument in his favour, but perhaps it has something to do with the exclusivity of it. ;)

I had no intention of editing this plaint (amongst several others), and I do not regret it. The only thing I do regret is being unable to catch this particular case in court. I'd have loved to hear that judge on this one. This judge has been known to question advocates' knowledge of the CPC in open court. Advocates knowledge of pretty much everything, actually. In much detail, with much glee. He is an evil, evil old fart. I love him.

Ha, yes. I think I quite liked this internship.

Even though I've worn my legs six inches down by dint of walking around the same staircase thrice in the same twenty minutes. Which reminds me, is it some sort of tradition to lose your way the first ten times you visit? Or do the traditions merely stop with the distinctly unflattering polyester waistcoats and tacky gown-thingies? And damp towels slung across the backs of judges chairs? And drinking rose - or badam or chocolate - flavoured milk (i kid you not.) in the lunch break?

Have I mentioned that I have completely eliminated any idea I may have had about practising in the Madras High Court.

(the filter coffee is phat, though. And free. That makes it double-phat. Very phattening, basically. Eh heh heh heh. Sorry. I'm shutting up now.)

Next.

2009-01-01T03:34:00.001-08:00

I swam today.

It's been two years.

The water was as beautiful as always, the pool fabulously, invitingly, empty. Cold sapphire coloured water distorting the cheap granite facing on the tiles underneath. Little orange buoys bobbing at the other end, asking to me to lift a leg, stretch an arm, cut through cold fluid, come over. Come over. Little drops of water'd coalesced on my stubbornly brown skin, paling now because of the cold. Fine black hairs standing up on the tips of tiny white goosebumps. Orange sky. Faintly oily, slightly slick skin. So much for waterproof sunblock. Oily rubbish. Cheap shit.

The water is so cold, I love it, so cold. My arms are freezing. My mother will kill me. I began to swim. I swam. I was done in an hour or so.. I left.

I hated it. I'm never doing it again.

Inexplicable, really, how you can be so completely indifferent to something you once felt so much for. For all that I loved to swim once, I felt nothing close to enjoyment this time over. This is it, then.... swimming bores me now. I've been wondering when it will happen. It's not often that I sustain an interest in things as long as I have in this.

I wonder what's up next. And how long I will take to tire of it.

Indifferent and happy on facebook.

2008-12-28T05:12:00.000-08:00

okay see.

This is my winter break. Considering I spend all my free time, and considerable chunks of my working time asleep, it is not such a very crazy idea to grasp that my legs/arms/fingers/etc have not sen more exercise than absolOOtely necessary, this vacation. I have spent as MUCH of my time as humanly possible, parked firmly between bedsheet and blanket. I have only bestirred my happily prostrate self to eat, drink, crap and stalk people on facebook. Facebook is most of the time, it's fairly passive, uniformly annoying self, not interrupting my voyeuristic joys except to log me out mysteriously or ask me What Kind of Boyfriend Will I Have?

BUT. But.

I am an observant person. I have, through my keen observational skills, noticed the presence of evil on this site. Evil in the form of persons whose lives revolve around getting other people to change their display pictures of the national flag. Or plain black. Or plain white. Or.. strangely, Red Bull (?!).

Now you know me. I have the same fairly spaz pic up on facebook that I have always had. I log in. I stalk harmlessly. I find out what Jaane Tu character I am most like, the type of boyfriend i am going to attract, what kind of car I am, what kind of gun I am, and what That 70s Show character I am like. I log out. (Sometimes I also not log out, but I fail to see the relevance of such in the point I am trying to make.)

I do not form Groups to End Social Evil. I do not Protest Evil Globalisation. And I certainly do not send my friends amusingly breathless messages commanding them to turn ur display photoz black to protest d mumbai teror attcks!!!!!! turn ur dispix white to pray 4 worldd peaceee!!!

I am not NOT cooperating because the connection between my changing my dispic and muslim terrorists dropping dead is non sequitor. I am not NOT cooperating because facebook is a social networking site, and there is nothing more annoying than a social networking site that begins to put on airs.

I am not cooperating because I simply don't want to cooperate.

And that, I think, is as good a reason as any.

Ta, ye faithful. Happy New Year; I wish you all sobriety at midnight.

I has read a book. REALLY.

2008-12-02T09:11:00.000-08:00

Four, actually.

However, it was only the Twilight series. I suppose that doesn't count, that's like saying I listen to Contemporary Music and then bursting into Baby One More Time... hmm. I like that song. Fun tune, composed of that delicately balanced combination of sugarcandy and acid reflux that promises to drive you up the wall by staying in your head till kingdom come..

ANYWAY. Twilight.

Twilight is a story about an obsessive teen-vampire love thingy. Wallflower teen stalks broody vampire who wants to eat her cos she smells of flowers and other nice-smelling things, but can't because he's sworn off humans. Eventually he decides to address that problem by dating her (don't ask me, I didn't write it.) So then they have a true (and truly obsessive)love characterised by what characterises all true love stories. You know, the usual. The unearthly(unearthly-ly? unearthlily?) beautiful monster and the emo teen girl who pees everytime she sees him. Cos of his Beauty. And how it Overwhelms her. And cos of his Beauty. And cos of..

Yes, well.

But seriously, twilight starts off okay, and Stephanie Meyer can pull it together better than some (many) other teenfic writers I've read. And I get that Edward Cullen is supposed to be the unattainable: the beautiful, considerate and delightfully sarky boy with shiny skin and perfect hair. (And bloodsucking, of course. That's hot. That's just how we roll ;D ) It's just that there's only so far you get on the believability scale when pretty much half the novel is taken up in whinily insisting to the reader, in something like the mental voice of that ten year old cousin you secretly want to choke with rubber tubing, that Edward is beautiful, Edward is beautiful, Edward is unearthly, Edward is beautiful. Stephanie Meyer ends up falling from the precarious position of almost-successful-teenfic writer to the depths of the depths: yammering-Edward-groupie. Sad, yesno.

Oh, the rest of the series?

Ok, there's a bunch of werewolves who don't quite like the vampires, but of course they bond over love for poor fangirl here, and the four books (each one a little longer than the last, until the last is the effing Encylopedia Brittanica: Harry Potter Syndrome?) , after a torturous and largely boring journey, culminates in the birth of a bloodsucking fangirl; fruit of the union of guess-who and guess-who-again.

Who, in turn, is pursued by vampires but loved by werewolf and.....well, you get the point. There's Lots of Love. And Unearthly Beauty. And Descriptions of Unearthly Beauty. Long, Detailed, Oh-God-I-Get-It-Already-Please-Stop-Now-Please Descriptions of Unearthly Beauty.

I guess I've outgrown pretty boys with delicately sarky tongues and fabulous hair and Deeply Tortured Souls. Awwww poor me. This must be my coming-of-age moment. :D

It was nice spin anyway. Maybe I'm just pissed cos they chose Robert Pattinson to play Edward.

I'd have gone with Hugh Jackman. :D

Shleepy

2008-11-29T05:04:00.000-08:00

Been a nice long time since the last post. Time to do one of those resuscitation things again, if only to save this nice happy soda-type orange template that sindhu gifted me when I was template-less and footloose and hanging to her door by my fingernails, whining to her to get me a sexy new template. Of course, she picked my fingers off her door and kicked me out with the least snazzy template she had, but whaddaya know, I seem to like it after all. Live another day, friend. ;)

Today is a feel-fat day. I don't have these very often...hell, they don't even bother me too much; being declared medically obese in upper kg kind of takes the edge off these things.;)

I've done my daily quota of blogsurfing and after eight posts on the unmentionable-event-in-bombay (yes. I said bombay. Not mumbai. Deal with it.), and an equal number of posts on proposition 8, I have decided that I shall not be left behind.

Proposition 8: Try all you want, gay people are going to keep having fabulous sex and living together if they want to. *Wave* to Ashim and Nishanth, keep showin' em haters. I know you're having better sex than them ;)

Bombay attacks: this to the newspapers: The 'Spirit of Bombay' thing is getting lamer and more annoying by the second. Give it up, nobody believes it anyway.

I want a nice cheesy pasta, garlic bread and poutine right now. Now. I also realise I have hit the bottom of the pit of coherence and articulation. I am going to toddle off and snuggle into a blanket now. Or two. Three? (What? I grew up in Madras! We don't HAVE winters!!)

Hands up, all you reading types.

2008-10-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

It's been too long since I read anything in specific; while I acknowledge that the study (or whatever passes for it) of the law (or whatever passes for it :-D )sometimes allows drifting into land that can only be described as 'academic' by the most optimistic, I don't want to drift into it this time. I want to read...non-fiction is ok too, as long as it sounds interesting. I have some ebooks with me, and some ideas on what I want to read; if anyone thinks they have a better idea, would they please raise hand and give me a shout?

Here's what I have with me:

Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions (reading already)

Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman

George Bernard Shaw - Collected Plays

I also want the following:

Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere

Anything by Terry Pratchett and G.K. Chesterton.

If anyone has Neverwhere, or any Pratchett or Chesterton in ebook form or knows where to find it, please leave a comment. I will be yours for life. In the detached, long-distance way. :-D

May I make clear here that I am on a student budget. This means a total of 0.00 in cash of any denomination has been set aside to fund this reading. For the simpler of intellect - I am talking free ebooks here. Yeah I know that probably means piracy. Morality is the luxury of the rich, or something like that* said Goebbels, and my senile grand-uncle. I am aware it does not do much for my argument to rely on a Fascist war criminal and a senile geriatric, but an opinion is an opinion, yesno? I firmly believe in the democracy of bullshit. This is why I don't think idiots should be shot**.

Anyway, I digress. People, please find me books! Of course, if you love me truly you will buy me the book and have it hand-delivered with a hundred orchids wrapped in the finest Central European tissue, by a Hugh Jackman lookalike, preferably announcing his arrival and your eternal devotion to me in a Hugh Jackman accent, but yeah -

I'm a cynic ya. I know true love is a lie perpetrated by the filthy capitalist pigs in Hollywood offices. I'm only asking for some online suga ;-) Cooperate, no. Please.

Please?

----

*He didn’t say ‘something like that’. I did. It doesn’t matter, the rest is misquoted too anyway. None of you is likely to catch it and I’m too lazy to make the effort. Cheers :-)

**I believe they should be laughed at till death***. More fun.

***I meant that we laugh and they die. You got it, no? No?****

****Yeah I know I should quit the pointless footnotes. Blame the mood and law school…they just make it that much easier :-D

Fuggoff : A Sonata in B Whine-or ;)

2008-09-30T04:46:00.000-07:00

When pigeons flap (and screw and crap)
on my grill and window sill
When the wind beings the desert in
I'm tired of sand, I cannot win:

I say fuggoff.

When my project is a futile dream
I have a directionless team
Deadlines come and deadlines leave
I whine, and then I fail - I grieve:

I say fuggoff.

When September gets in line,
The sun gets bigger and ups the shine
My clothes are limp, my mind is dead,
I sweat, I tan, my feet are lead

I say fuggoff.

And then I sleep.

-zzz-

Mridula.

2008-09-24T09:24:00.000-07:00

I did not know as well as I could have, when I could have. I messed up pretty substantially. I've been sorry for very long...I should have spoken sooner; it's amazing how easily youth believes itself to be immortal.

I know your passing was not easy, but I'm sure you were as spunky as I've always known you to be.

Here's to your rescuing many kittens, eating many puchkas and generally being your chatterbox-type four-foot-eleven brand of fabulousness in heaven (or its midget equivalent) :-)

Cheers..

-Peace-

...so they were Indian.

2008-09-22T08:35:00.000-07:00

Two interesting blogposts on Sepiamutiny were the genesis for this post. Also read Deep_Thought for a similar take.

The first is on Atul Vyas, an Indian who died in the recent train crash in the Los Angeles area of the United States, and the second is on Minal, who was one of the 32 victims of the shootout at Virginia Tech. Both articles are essentially eulogies, by people who did not know them when they were alive.

While the general idea of the posts is as far as I can gather, to remember those who passed away in tragic accidents - the specificities and general tone of the articles I find objectionable.

The article on Atul Vyas, a bright med-school aspirant is essentially the AP article on him supplemented by the blogger's own jarringly disproportionate emotional reaction to those details. For someone who came to know of Atul's existence only after his death, the "my heart turned to mush" reaction is a bit much.

Yes, Atul Vyas was an Indian twenty year old boy who loved waking up late and weird dancing, and was well-loved in general. He was bright and smart and while it is generally acknowledged that his passing was a loss to the world, I believe that as long as we did not know him, this whole "he was an Indian victim, and we are all Indian so, of course, we will all behave like we all knew him in person" reaction is extremely patronising, and by virtue of such, certainly disrespectful to the deceased himself, whose identity was certainly more than the cloyingly cutesy stereotyped-twenty-year old image that is being projected to generate mass emotion in all his "brother Indian expats". Not to mention how annoying this must be for all his friends and family, the people who genuinely knew him and miss him for the person he was.

This farce is taken about a couple hundred steps further in the article on Meenal, who the blogger has adopted as her - wait for it -"Choti Behan". Meenal's love for earrings and icecream have been lovingly culled from, of all things, her orkut profile, and all her scraps have been carefully examined and appropriately sobbed over by the blogger. The whole article has the approach of a hastily researched 'Human Interest' project (1 orkut profile, 1 newspaper article, 3 blogposts) tossed with as much overdramatic breast-beating as discretion will allow.
The only motive appears to be the generation of large-scale sympathy for one of the very few brown victims of the tragedy.

While the general idea of remembrance of people who have passed away in tragedies such as these is no doubt commendable, the whole tone of the article is more than annoying. It is cliched, syrupy and cringe-worthily teary for someone who didn't even know the victim personally. While I would certainly like blogposts written on me I die, I'm damned if I want to be adopted as a "choti behan" and cried for purely because I was Indian and brown. That's just insulting.

Posts of this kind have one main problem, namely the disproportionate focus on the brownness in anything. The tragedy and the other victims are mentioned and then summarily ignored while the blogger labours in his endeavour to "humanise" the sole brown victim for the benefit of the collective tear-glands of the entire expat Indian community. There is nothing that distinguishes the brown victim from the other victims except the brownness. In a world where racial profiling is legitimised and all guys in beards are Osama Bin Laden, this sort of passionately ethnocentric mourning is disturbing. If loss of life has transcended colour and ethnicity, so should remembrance and mourning.

Sympathy is fine, but sympathy dumbed down for the Lowest Common Denominator transcends funny, and cannonballs right into pathetic-land.

The bottomline is - leave the eulogies to the people who are qualified to write them. Anything more is patronising and disrespectful. The only exception to this rule is available to The Hindu, which will inevitably, when you die, inform the world that you have "attained the Lotus Feet of Rama." :-)

But then, that is The Hindu. And really, how can you not love The Hindu. :-)

Opinions?

Much of a Muchness..

2008-09-12T23:44:00.000-07:00

So it is the morning of a September Saturday, which is the only time in September that I oversleep without guilt. Other times, I feel a vague guilt somewhere in the depths of my stomach and then I roll over and sleep anyway. At least, I think that may be guilt. It could also be indigestion. Or my cellphone vibrating under my stomach with my mom calling me to get the hell up, have I gone into hibernation or what?

In any case, I'm pretty sure a cellphone vibrating on a full stomach can cause indigestion too.

1. Why is Sunday morning mess breakfast always aloo paratha or chola bhatura? What is so special about either? I am getting rapidly turned off by both. Not good.

2. I like my (okay, Aloo's ) big Eeyore tee shirt. So what if it looks like a nightshirt. It's a Saturday morning (9am...as far as I am concerned, that is still predawn) and if i want to wear an Eeyore tee shirt to cheer myself up when the University expects me to walk half a kilometre to the acad block to fill in a sudoku grid, I will.

Aside: all of you who don't like Winnie-the-Pooh or don't know who Eeyore is, I hope the Heffalump gets you tonight.

3. There are three people on my google talk list right now who's status messages read " is bringing sexy back!" I see I'm going to have to choose my friends better.

To all of you: One day I will be rich, and then one day I will be old and rich. And sometime around then I will make a will. And I will not forget that one dark day of my youth, you all quoted Justin Timberlake. And not secretly and furtively, either, but in PUBLIC VIEW. Next you will bead your hair and read Sweet Valley High.

Ok I think I just grossed myself out. ><

4. I don't like rats. I'm sure they don't like me either, but that is neither here nor there. I am indifferent to rats when they remain in their territory (read: Universal Set (Everywhere) less Set (my room) ) and I'm sure they are quite the well-bred charmers on their homeground, but what they are in my territory is UGLY, FAT, NOSE-WIGGLING, BUTT-JIGGLING, TREMBLY FREAKS.
I want them out, and I want them dead. The next bhaiyyaji who benignly watches while the rat is calmly climbing out of my room and I am shitting my pants in fear/annoyance/revulsion/shock (HOW CAN YOU JUST STAND THERE, YOU LOSER BHAIYAJI??!! ) at the same, and informs me that they are "bhagwaan" gets my Agnostic foot up the business end of his God-fearing ass.

5. I am not ever going to any Yahoo or MSN related site again. All they can talk about is fall fashions. I have much to say about fall-fashions too. They consist of worn out floaters, limp dupattas, crumpled, limp cotton, feet so tanned that they are stripy (If you like me, I look like a zebra, and if you don't, I look like a leper.), and the all-pervading odour of perspiration and depression. And damned if I can decide which odour is the worse.

But, you say, these are SUMMER fashions!!

I nod meaningfully.

I think I have made my point. *Smugness*

6. I am suddenly philosophical. I ponder on several deep and fundamental questions but I find no answer.

Will Cute Giggler ever give me marks?

Will 3 spoonfuls of Vanish Shakti O2 burn a hole in my shirt?

Overpriced milky cold coffee or sickly-sweet milky cold coffee? (Yeah we have 2 competing mess caterers...who was the smug b---- who said competition increases product quality?)

Decisions. Questions.

I exhaust myself.

I think I will sleep now.

See y'all soon, me homies. Or maybe not. I have a vague feeling that I will sleep right into Sunday evening. Again, this feeling could merely be indigestion. Have I mentioned this before?

----

PS: Sindhu - I haven't forgotten about your tag. I just dont like the loser pics google is coming up with in the search results. Will post as soon as nice pics are found.

Bitch-brand pontification.

2008-08-19T00:55:00.000-07:00

Actually Bitch-brand, Soapbox-style pontification, but hehe, it never does well to advertise one's weaknesses, does it... and I have a terrible weakness for alliteration! :-D

Anyway. I digress.

Okay, so it makes sense to say here that ordinarily I would never blog on something like this, but a decent-sized group of friends has been going through shit in recent times, and some of them have, against their better judgment, decided to compound their unhappiness by asking me for advice (note subtly introduced, classy self deprecation! note, note!! :-D).

But seriously. I am complying not because I love giving advice but because I have a suspicion this will sound (and be) more cogent if I write it down, rather than if I say it. I don't mind giving advice, but I really don't do love advice. I suck at it...so if you find me being insufficiently sensitive/sentimental, live with it. This stuff works fine for me, and should for you too, even if you aren't a paranoid pessimist narcissist.

There are some things that should be obvious to the mushiest of minds, the lowest of intellects, the hopeless-est of romantics, but since you tend to lose sight of the obvious when otherwise amorously occupied, let me state the obvious for you:

The Great and Superior and So-Obvious-that-it-is-Duh! Love Theorem :

Never EVER love anyone more than you love yourself.

All that follows from here is purely corollary. If you're smart, this is all you need to remember.

If you're slow or have recently fallen in love (same difference)...

Corollaries:

1. Never assume the best in anyone...always begin with worst-case scenario and move upwards if reason sees fit. Every guy who shows interest in you begins at Level 10 - Psycho/Rapist, and the burden of proof is on him to show he isn't and move upwards. Eventually he should prove himself to be sufficiently normal/entertainingly abnormal for you to date him. Now do so.

2. Never EVER trust blindly. Trust isn't 'just trust'. Trust is all you have. Sacred. It should be won, not gifted. If you trust blindly, you will attract scum, and if you are so starry-eyed as to trust so easily, you deserve it. Stop whining and fix it.

3. You never look for anyone to 'complete' you. You are as complete as you're ever going to be. You merely look for a complement. Preferably, the complement comes looking for you.

4. Don't date anyone you just 'kinda sorta like'. You're going to be 'kinda sorta disillusioned' three breakups into your love-life, give or take one depending on how romantic a person you are.

5. If you are in it for the lust, kindly remind yourself of such every so often, and do not confuse it with love when you eventually break up (which you will). Love and lust are optimally overlapping, but essentially greatly different. One has its roots in the head, and the other....well...a good deal more southwards.

Ooh yes, and if you ever break up: kindly do everyone a favour and DO NOT involve your friends or have them 'intervene' in any manner whatsoever. Your break-up is yours. This is not transnational arbitration. Making it a public free-for-all is not just immature, it is obscene. And will wholly eat up any chance of getting back together, if at all.

If you break up amicably, good for you. Everything'll be the same as always, 'cept you'll have to go dutch. Darn.

Alternatively if he was mean to you, of course, arson is justified. You will need your friends for this... go right ahead. :-D

Just kidding.

I think.

Hmm...

;-)

Chipps, Conspiracy, Creepy Giggler.

2008-08-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

Uncle Chipps (plain salted kind) are getting thicker!! Not one or two, gentlemen, but packs and packs! And packs and packs and packs!

My survey, completely objective and wholly in the interest of the Uncle Chipps-eating-fraction-of-the-population (larger than you think, you Lays-eating snob), has led to my being absolutely convinced that someone, somewhere, in Village Channo (Punjab), Ranjangaon (Pune) or Kendua Panchayat (West Bengal) - depending on how far you trust the back flap of an Uncle Chipps packet and your personal regionalistic preferences- is sleeping on their job.

I demand my rights as a consumer. (Sindhu will no doubt elucidate the nature of these rights on her highly lawyerly and intelligent blog, adequately supported/opposed/i'm-not-sure-exactly-what-he-does, by Markiv. You will, no, Sindhu? :-D )

Anyway. Uncle Chipps. Someone call Quality Control and sue their asses. How can I work when my primary nourishment is substandard.

If my mom is reading this: not that this is my nourishment, you understand...that's just to kid with the masses....I drink milk twice a day and also eat fruit. I sleep from 10pm to 6.45am. I also braid my hair to class, and remember to pour the oil film out of the oily dal tadka in the mess before I eat it.

PS: Big Daddy exits stage Left, enter Creepy Giggler. It is to be noted that Creepy Giggler is in a relationship of (sufficient cordiality to reasonably infer) friendship, with Facepack. For this criminal lack of taste/judgment alone she should be beaten across the head, slowly, with a Pollock and Mulla on the Law of Contracts, until she begs for mercy in three languages.

Yes, I have not had much sleep recently. Your point being?

I also...

2008-08-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

...take the liberty to do some renaming. Mister Bengal shall henceforth be known as Paablik Internacional Low. Thenkyewkindly.

When we read..

2008-08-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

What happens when you get online one evening, completely prepared to subject yourself to the assault of whatever irrelevant manure law school wishes to throw at you at the moment, but you end up reading Pablo Neruda and Emily Dickinson?

You cannonball into lots of Ogden Nash and Gustave Flaubert and Vladimir Nabokov, and go to sleep feeling like the aftertaste of a Christmas cake... you know, slightly annoyed and dissatisfied with the raisins and figs, excessively sweet, happy that it is well offset by just a leetle orange peel, citrusy and tart. Heady and sated by all those fumes rising persistently (and deeLISHiously) from that solemn, gigantic mass of deep, dark brown, and amused, of course, by the the discordance...the flippancy of the lone red cherry on top.

I always loved poetry, but then I choose to call very little of what I read poetry (hark all ye who write bad sad verse on their blogs) . Poets are great men, and as is the unfortunate tendency of all great men, their poetry is not consistent. Of course, this is the unfortunate tendency of all humankind itself, but the quirks of the everyman have never interested anyone, have they? ;-)

Neruda is all light and fire and touch and naked emotion, sometimes overtly wistful and sometimes not so much... I always thought his From 20 Poems of Love was very similar to Shakespeare's Sonnet 138, and I still maintain that I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You is as much a fine answer to a question as a title for a poem. :-)

You should read only a little Neruda at a time. Just when you think he is going to get cloying, he pulls back deftly, just a little bit. And after a time, you learn to watch for this... he was good, that man. Sometimes even I, postergirl of Why Bother? am tempted to go learn Spanish, if only for the pleasure of reading Pablo Neruda in the language he thought the thoughts I now read, their edges lost, no doubt, in translation.

And then you move from Neruda to Emily Dickinson, move from summer bonfire to antique crystal, music to mathematics. The contrast is very very entertainingly clear. Economical phrasing, tight meter, and quiet, delicious understatement.

Then, for old times' sake you move to Nabokov...Lolita. Someone once described to me Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red as a sort of scene within scene thing....the closest work I find to this description is Lolita. While Humbert is the essential snob, and his sharply contemptuous, unwillingly affectionate observations on everything, not least his "darling Dolores, my Lo, Lolita" are fun in a mean sort of way, they only serve to bring out the author's own contemptuous affection for Humbert himself, and somehow everything comes together to generate an almost sympathetic fascination for the trembling paedophile in the reader...an unusual reaction at best, but then the language is so effortlessly evocative that you feel almost obliged to agree with the aging sex offender's opinion. :-D

And Ogden Nash, himself, the cherry to my cake:

An Ode to a Baby

A bit of talcum
Is always walcum.

-

The case rests. :-D

Becky Bloomwood strangles herself with her Denny and George scarf...

2008-08-06T05:15:00.000-07:00

...and DIES.

I wish.

I just HAD to record that my first determined, conscious foray into chick-lit has been absolutely disastrous, and that all existing copies of any book in the Shopaholic series should be pounded up with all the other kinds of garbage and used to generate biogas, in which role they will provide far more entertainment than they do presently, and will be far more tolerable.

The first time I'd heard of the Shopaholic series was when it was described as a second cousin of the other-chick-lit-thing-that-got-plagiarised during the big Kaavya Viswanathan debacle, I think. So I read Opal Mehta when I happened to come across someone who had it, and thought mehh boring shit. But y'all know the big deal chick-lit is, these days, and I thought I wouldn't judge by the one book.

So, full of the happy, warm glow that comes with knowing that I am being fair, reasonable and perfectly amiable , I pick up Shopaholic and Baby from the King's County Library, Bellevue (YOU ROCK......MUAH!!!!!!!) and slowly come to terms with the fact that I have found the one book that I will never read again, even if the all the libraries in the world spontaneously combust and the only three books that are left behind are You Can Be a Winner and Chacha Chaudhary, Hinglish translation.

I mean, lead character Becky Bloomwood is brainless without being entertaining, superficial without being suave, and anNOYINGLY indecisive. She lies at the drop of a special-edition Lagerfeld, but has not one redeeming ounce of wit to save her.

I genuinely don't understand....what is so entertaining about a woman who spends two hundred out of three hundred pages in her book detailing the excruciating details of her inability to make decisions and learn lessons that most of us learn at ten? She's frighteningly stupid and irritatingly childish, so she is 'emotionally giving' and 'childlike', which is why the big, confident business guy wants her? And more criminally, is wanting to have BABIES with her?! I mean, did someone say POLLUTING THE GENE POOL?

One of my friends, a staunch champion of the Shopaholic series brought up this interesting comparison of Becky Bloomwood of O' Hara, pointing out that both are essentially non-intellectual lead characters, yet endearing to readers, in the classic usage of the overly 'human' lead everyone can empathise with. This deserves to be examined.

Firstly, Scarlett O' Hara. While non-intellectual is right, she is not guilty of anything that would be called stupid in a vacuum, in the sense that while her independence, ~~crude~~ forthright mind and tendency to marry frequently may have been against societal norms, the woman was not vacant between the ears. She was honest, clever and a survivor.

Becky Bloomwood on the other hand, is called stupid for a reason. Her conflicts are not with society, they are with her Bank Account Manager. Her problems are not with herself, they are with the rest of the world who just doesnt understand that a Miu Miu skirt can be a household item. She wavers indecisively throughout the book, shows an absolute lack of judgment or wit, and shops like her life depends on it.... with someone else's money. This is a woman to be pitied, if you're in the mood for it (I call it the Jesus mood...ya know...Psalm 3:2 : Let thouest tolerate them retards, for the tolerant will inherit the Lindt factory) or exterminated, if you're normal , so that she won't have babies and ruin all chance humankind has to survive...it's called survival of the fittest for a reason, and Becky is about as smart as Birthday Barbie's left toenail. Maybelline nail varnish, please.

I just want to know why this thing sells, that's all. Do you like the Shopaholic? Why?

Of the night.

2008-08-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

Of colder air
and sparkling dust
in a streetlight cone
sharply alone
against the lonely
tired street
bereft of hurrying
daytime feet.

Darkness now; the sun is
a fading memory, a kiss
from a childhood lover, gone
where all memories belong..

--

I love the night. :-)

Face-pack and Big Butt sitting in a tree...K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

2008-07-31T06:57:00.000-07:00

So we've been having some exciting weather-variance here in Jodhpur... it isn't hot and dry anymore. It is hot and humid (what did you expect? snowfall?). We're all walking around looking like construction workers. Burnt visage, sweaty everything. You know? The sinewy legs are yet to come... going to take a good long time coming too. Uncle Chipps and muscle don't seem to like each other, apparently. Ah well.... there was never any competition anyway.

Big Daddy gave us 'homework' yesterday. I wish to God he'd call it an assignment, at the very least. 'Homework' makes me feel uncomfortably like I should be doing it on a four-ruled notebook and hoping for three stars and a smiley...

So anyway, yeah. This homework. I'd forgotten all about it last night, and I woke a little too late for comfort this morning. So what do I do? Do I get to class and:

1. cog it from Miss Goth?
2. cog it from Miss Responsible?
3. cog it from the commentary on contract law that Providence has left on my desk?
4. ignore the whole deal and fall promptly asleep? (not the exception, I assure you)

No. I gird up my loins (figurative, ya perverts) despite the fact that i have no time whatsoever and DO the WHOLE thing myself. Every little bit. How cool is that, eh?
And then i tog up and walk to class in a self-satisfied glow of so-what-if-im-late-i-still-did-his-lousy-homework-HAH.
And what sight meets my smug self when i walk into class five minutes late? Is it:

1. the goggly, slightly insane-looking red-veined stare of Big Daddy, to whom, when demanded, I can demurely submit my homework and pretend that it is no big deal for me to do so and that, as usual, i had actually finished it the previous evening and filed it away in my colour-coded binder in the section called Contracts?
2. the lack of any professor, which may yet be excusable?

NO. It is The Dancer. Who politely asks me for my roll number and gives me attendance. Just like that. No drama. Goddam him.

I mean, I love The Dancer, don't get me wrong, but he pisses me off sometimes. He doesn't even ask for the stupid assignment to give to Big Daddy. I stare at my paper and feel stupid.

I always knew it was a mistake to do homework...i just needed the reminder. Thank you, God.

Potential shut-eye time lost between 6.55am and 7.10am. I better go make up for it.

PS: Hey, Face Pack; i understand you resent your job all you want to do is model for facepack commercials and be someone's modest wife, but even if you so desperately wanted to escape from the packs of out-pass seeking students to flirt with a prof, couldn't you have picked someone better than The Butt ? I mean, I would have loved to find you in flagrante delicto with..say..the Hot One, if he weren't gone (BOO HOO!!) or even flirting harmlessly with The Cute One, but noooo. You pick The Butt...Tremendous Tush, Rump Royale, whatever you want to call him. I must say, there's no accounting for tastes.

PPS: the next time you whine to me just because I laugh outside your room, i am locking you in it. I promise you.

PPPS: You're right. I'm being mean. He doesnt look like a Butt. He's just a curvy man. One large, convex curve.

I'm a laboratory rat.

2008-07-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

Been an exceptionally long time... then again, I have had an exceptionally uneventful time. Even by my standards, and my standards seem to get lower everyday.

This agricultural commune I call my college never ceases to fascinate me...all right, fascinate is a little bit of an exaggeration, but the fact remains that after a full minute of pondering its eccentrities, i am generally ready to go one more minute doing exactly the same, and not too many things or people can claim this privilege.

I am convinced that the whole deal, this let's-drop-a-law-college-into-an-obscure-patch-of-land-surrounded-by-villagers-who-hate-it is some sort of social experiment dreamed up by a giggly, scheming septuagenarian bureaucrat who has been given a thousand sheets of bond paper and two secretaries and embalmed in his dusty windowless room in the back end of a crumbly red-brick building somewhere, just so he doesnt get in the way of his workmates, who no doubt wish to be left alone while they perform their functions as the Managers of Modern India. (Nobody has determined the nature of said functions yet.. what Government servants actually DO as part of their job is suspected to be a State secret, passed only from one bureaucrat's immediate senior to himself, in a midnight pagan ritual of initiation involving fire, incense, chanting, polyester safari suits and many binder pins.)

Anyway. Social experiment. I'm saying social experiment cos i'm posh that way - you may also call it Survivor, slummed-down.

My college is perfectly placed to conduct the kind of survey my Statistics teacher would have approved of. We:
1. are isolated (and i dont mean metaphysically; i mean the OH-MY-GOD-WHERE-IS-THE-REST-OF-INDIA-OH-GOD druggie-rehabilitation centre kinda isolated.)
2. are thinly spread. (500 people, 50 acres. Go figure.)
3. are gasbags. (We tend to a lot of talk and not much else. Blame the weather - this is the desert, after all. Any revolutionary spirit you have will be soon bored into a coma and buried in sand. )
4. are dying for ANYTHING new to happen, ANYTIME. (OMG did you see that guy?? He's wearing flipflops to class! OMG!!)

The only good thing we COULD, upto some time back atleast, make a claim to, was some decent teachers. (Oh what was that about infrastructure? Yeah, yeah, the single room, LAN connection, etc etc.... all that sells before you figure the sand and the pigeons in. To any pigeon who may be reading this: I resent your attachment to my grill. Take yourself and your bodily functions away. Now.)

I liked some of our erstwhile teachers. I really did. The Hot One, the Dead One and the Old One. (I didnt know the rest. I was busy mourning the departure of the Hot One.) But they are gone...the first casualties in the "Great Indian Social Experiment - Lets See How Long Law Students Last!!"
This experiment apparently involves throwing the pick of the refuse pile of the legal teaching fraternity in India in the general direction of Jodhpur, aimed for the Laa College and seeing how we react to them. I hope they're satisfied, I'm reacting already. They're a collective itch I can't quite scratch.
And this is only the beginning...I have only experienced the Big Daddy, The Face Pack, The Imposter and Mister Bengal so far.

My general reaction to all may be recorded as follows:
1. Big Daddy: wary stiffness, unusual politeness, bad homework and a tendency to avoid 'you hab not understood. Meet me in my chAmber.' moments.
2. The Face Pack: many tendencies, all classifiable under 'murderous'.
3. The Imposter: so far, only a sense of desperation, and a hallucination that she will soon go away and The Nice Smiley Tam will come back.
4. Mister Bengal: a new patience at having my name mauled and spat out, Bengali style, and quicker reflexes at avoiding the famous halitosis.

Anyway...Two weeks. Pulse check. I'm alive. HA!

*plays Survivor theme*

Indian.

2008-04-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

As anyone who knows me knows only too well, I am incurably lazy. I have firm opinions on some things, and none on others, and I never defend them. I have them, and that is all anyone needs to know. I also do not believe in expending energy in getting people to agree with me. Mere numbers neither validate nor strengthen a viewpoint.

Sometimes, however, I am forced out of passivity and provoked to express my opinion. This is one of those times.
One of my friends who moved to Singapore for higher education, recently began dating an American, and had him Skype with me for a little while. He was intelligent and articulate and we were settling into happy-powwow mode discussing Lolita, when he said "Damn, you're a pretty good bargain for an Indian!"

End of bonhomie.

After explaining to him clearly and slowly, the full extent of his repulsive racist self, and asking him to kindly insert his head up his anal orifice so that no one would be disturbed by him even if he felt like talking, I hung up. I was slightly distraught.

I love being Indian, and I love Indians. I love our food and festivals, and I love my family. I know there's much scope for improvement and I am the first to admit it. But I love us fiercely, for and yet inspite of all our idiosyncrasies. I love our stereotypes and those who pretend to be above them, yet revert to them secretly in the privacy of their homes. I delight in the way we brutally dissect our politicians and yet leave them in office. I love the way we hold Are Indian Women Truly Emancipated? chatshows on Women's Day every year, and reach the same conclusions (No) every year, and wait for next year's debate with the same sense of expectation. I love our creaking, whining, beat-up, almost human public transport, and the evil, evil auto drivers ("Metre-aa?" *shakes head negatively"). I love how we have a festival only for squirting coloured water on each other and getting high.
I love our showbusiness for being flamboyantly, unashamedly unreal, and our parallel cinema for being alternatively hilariously pretentious and shockingly thoughtprovoking. I love the fact that we dress up a bunch of advertising models as a cricket team, and manage to sell the idea to the country. I love how Shahnaz Hussain can put her face on her beauty products and still manage to convince people that they work. I love how we take our Gods off their pedestals, forcefeed them milk, put mobile phones in their hands and iPhones in their fannypacks and then drown them.

I love how exceedingly alive we are, and I love it all.

To anyone who doesnt like Indians: You all, as do everyone, have the right to an opinion. Just don't stick it in my face.

A Romance in Ten Courses.

2008-02-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

First:

http://www.electpress.com/loveandromance/page13.htm

Please do check this page out. Jaded random-webpage-hopper-and-ridicule-er though I may be, I was still stumped by this particular page: ten professionally written love-letters for ten neatly delineated stages in a perfectly formed romance.

Though the idea by itself is repellent, let us give the thing a fair chance; who knows? Fiery passion might yet come through when addressed to an ""...delight and wonder and intoxication might yet survive, even when the object of such ecstasy is ...err..."Name".

Notice, dear reader, that the thoughtful creator has dedicated an entire letter to 'Yearning', at Section 10 and not before. 'Yearning' is apparently just one more phenomenon in an admirably well-regulated series of many, appearing right after 'Pleasant Memories'. (Is it only me or is 'Pleasant Memories' reminiscent of the hilariously mass-produced Season's Greetings cards that all of us receive by the ton, for New Year? The ones with the regulatory snowman/snowflake/Father Time/clay diya/fireworks graphic plus "Season's Greetings" plus "Kindest Compliments of Balaji & Sons Hardware"?)

Where were we, then? Yes, 'Yearning'. God forbid that you, poor lovelorn man (yes, masculinity is assumed here; no woman would be fool enough to use a template for a love letter.) should feel 'Yearning'(Section 10) before 'Excitement' (Section 6), which latter, similarly, must follow right after 'Wholeness'(Section 5). That would upset the entire scheme of things....the object of your affection will be thrown into a state of confusion, and will lose track of events. Your object, dear lovelorn-guy, is obviously to keep it as simple as possible, so that there is not the slightest risk of confusing your woman - who obviously makes Barbie look like Marie Curie - and thus ruin your chances with her.

Also, dear lovelorn-guy, please be careful not to betray the raging passion in your breast; unless read very slowly and very carefully, your letter should possess the same cautious, friendly, slightly fake tone of a commercial advertisement. Like so:

"I can't recall when I had a more pleasant time. Everything felt so natural, and you were very easy to talk to. "

See? Exactly like an approving testimonial for a blender-mixer on the appliance website, if only you replace "you were" with "it was", and "very easy to talk to" with "very easy to use".

This tone of objective appreciation is what you must strive towards, so that the lucky object of your affection feels like a puppydog that has fetched the ball in a sufficiently competent manner. Of course, not being overendowed with brainpower, she, of course, will enjoy this feeling, which will prompt her to continue to the next paragraph, where this gem will hit her square in the eyeball:

" Well, I guess I've said enough for the time being. (Name), have a wonderful (week/day) and, hopefully, I'll see you again real soom. If you get a chance, (write/call) me and tell me your thoughts."

Now isn't that just fabulously charming, almost overwhelmingly irresistible, girls? Concluding with a "have a nice week, hope to see you again"? Perfectly in line with the entire dubious-salesman-with-fixed grin approach. Very endearing.

And finally, the signoff:

"Until I hear from you, take care of yourself.
Always,
(Name)"

Isn't it interesting how he assumes he is going to hear from you.

Fecundity spectrum.

2007-08-26T06:18:00.000-07:00

Four startling instances of news of fecundity in one day.
To N: Congratulations, if you are reading this - though knowing the extent of your Net-ineptness, I'd bet my ass you're not - I heard you are expecting. I know A and Ishita must be very happy...

This to P; I heard you are expecting too...though, now, 'expecting' seems rather inappropriate. If I were you, I'd ask 'expecting what?', and what a pertinent question that would be. What, then, are you expecting? More importantly, what do you expect to do about it? M tells me you want to keep this baby; and what happens to college, then?To being eighteen, footloose and fancy free?
You must be either inordinately brave or inexpressibly reckless or superbly sentimentally stupid (Even in wonder, I alliterate. God save me.) . Or all, actually. All, yes.
Why did you do this? You were supposed to be the golden girl. You were held up to all of us; 'be like her', they said. Study, but be modest. Be pretty, but bashful. Be good, be quiet, be soft. And you were. You were good and quiet and soft. And now you are pregnant.
But then, as you would say... shit happens.
All the best.

Now, S. You're pregnant too, I heard today. How does it feel, to be forty four and pregnant with a son already in college? In case you were wondering, by the way, Akash is ecstatic. You won't be getting any flak from his side...or, for that matter, from mine. Rock it, woman. I hope it is a girl this time...this world cannot take one more Akash.

Last of all; K told me today, the pigeons outside her balcony are nesting.
Superb, God, thank you.
That's all we need.
More pigeons.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!

Law school, inter alia.

2007-07-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

And I am in law school. Have been, for seventeen days now. And I am neither yet emotionally broken or missing a leg...this place certainly has some bad press. I was told by a friend, for example, that law school is one long instance of 'Here comes the pain'. The academic load is horrible and the professors are poorly disguised cannibals. If that is true, I just haven't seen much of either yet, I guess.

But since when has the 'law-school experience' been exclusively about academics? Seniors, professors, homesickness..pick one and screw up the equation, right? Well lets not go there right now; seniors are, apart from being rather avid blogwatchers, like chocolate; you cannot generalise. (Not that I've ever needed any excuse to make sweeping generalisations, but I still like my life too much to do so on this forum.)And the professors have been fairly toothless so far (hairless also, if you consider one in question, and mannerless, if another, and English-less, if a third; but they all deserve a separate post someday, so I'll keep them off this one.).

Law school, inter alia, I'd said. That, however, was just a lame attempt to make believe that I have a life outside this place...but considering that this place is ten kilometres out of Jodhpur, Jodhpur itself being not quite the epitome of hepness (camels, hot sun, turban-uncles, hot sun, ghoonghat-aunties, hot sun, National Handloom, hot sun, Sheesha, hot sun, 15AD, hot sun, finish. Hot sun. And did I mention, hot sun?), I don't really have too much opportunity to paint the town red. I'd die of heatstroke quarter way through.

Ah, who am I fooling....NLU could be Tokyo and I'd still not have a life. (*Silence while the selfpity builds up*)

The campus here is pretty, though...ah...fairly treeless, and the buildings are goodlooking. What is really nice, though, is the profusion of puddle-hopping mynahs and luridly green, insolent parakeets, and darling little velvet-button-like ladybugs and scores of loud jungle-babblers, and the occasional hummingbird, and the profusion of geckos and chameleons. Oh, and lest I forget, Cutlet, Dopey and Coffee, the much-loved and very spoilt campus strays.One thing I hate is that the pigeon population is as huge as it is...I hate pigeons, they're so flamboyantly dumb! This apart from having no point in life but to make nasty constipated sounds, shit a lot and have lots of babies. Yes, Prateek, I have noted that they are possibly the only birds that can do a graceful job of shitting upside-down on the ceiling. So why am I not in madly in love with pigeons yet? Garn.

Anyway. Even in the midst of nice food, nice friends and nice immediate seniors (no sarcasm, dead serious.), this place can be scary sometimes. Especially if you've been in southern CBSE schools so long that you've forgotten what non-science oriented intelligence looks like. Law school is full of smart people, some extraordinarily smart, and the rest so articulate and disarming that you don't much care even if you know they don't even pretend to be even vaguely gifted up there. Ah, I'm beginning to get a complex that I can feel even through the extraordinarily, almost grossly fat buffer zone that my ego is...

All this, and the moots haven't even begun.

Like Shasthri says: Divya, Divya; what have you done, Divya?!

Shoe alert!!

2007-06-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

Didn't do much today...dragged myself to...urrrgh...school(excuse the nasty language :P) to pick up a 'personal character certificate' from a 'member of faculty'..ie got a teacher to make a formal statement that I am not a criminal.

Got home and decided to go buy Franny and Zooey, from local bookstore. And this is where it happened...you know, not so long ago at all I'd pick up a book if I were bored. Now I listen to Clapton. Earlier, anything that came between a bookstore and yours truly, would be summarily ignored. Or trampled. But today...I was walking towards the bookstore when something pink caught my eye. And I couldn't help it, I smartly swivelled ninety degrees and started walking towards it, Franny and Zooey be damned.

Once I got to it, I paid for it. Like in a dream.

Here it is. Watch and slaver, people, watch and slaver. (Though it looks far prettier in actuality I still think; the pics don't do it justice.)

And again.

I have never bought anything either this gaudy or this pink before. I was a black/beige person, really.

You live and you learn.... :D

Of English and Ngls.

2007-06-17T04:57:00.000-07:00

I just read an interesting post on Sindhu's blog(which, by the way, is an example of thought-out writing, not an orgy of rants like this one... :D )on the the way English today is a mere shadow of its former glorious self.

I personally cannot claim to like SMS-lingo. I hate it, in fact. I like words to have both vowels and consonants, and adjectives to precede nouns, and sentences not to start with 'because' , because 'because' is a conjunction, because that was what I was taught was correct, and that is what I have come to appreciate as a mark of intelligence.

This does not take away from the fact, however, that if there is one thing that can be said about the evolution of the English language, it is that it has always been changing. At breakneck speed.
It began with being Celtic, and yet how many words in contemporary popular usage can be said to be of Celtic origin? Most of it is Greek, Latin, French or Hindustani(as Hindi, Persian and Urdu are clubbed). Some are Irish(seance) and some are German(doppelganger). Some are even Tamil. English is possibly the most bastardised language in the history of the world. It has no scruples about encroaching, head and shoulders, into any other language, and it is for this irreverence and flexibility that I love it.

Most of the rest of the words we know , are, of course, Shakespearean. That's right. That guy we all deify as the 'father of modern english drama'? Him of the complicated romances and long-drawn-out tragedies? Well he invented words left, right and centre, and any other time it pleased him to, if existing words were too colourless for him. And even otherwise.
He was famously an astute businessman too - far from the popular myth of struggling idealist artist in cold garrets, he was prosperous, canny and inanely productive. He was on the payroll of several local theatre companies, and created hundreds of drafts a year. Plays came not out of isolated creative bursts amidst intellectual dawdling, but as a steady - and overwhelming - stream, out of business interests. He was responsible for some of the most long-lasting innovations in practical theatre structure as well. He was innovator and a businessman - not an intellectual.
Far from being horrified at the 'degeneration' of the English language, he'd be delighted at the size of the new audiences he could reach, not least the market they represented.

We may all love the English language, and some of us may rue the demise of the time when capitals and periods were considered intrinsic to sentences. But love of the language should not blind us to its faults. Apostrophes, for one, are widely considered to be one of the most clumsy grammatical devices ever, apart from, in historical times being considered too colloquial and indicative of the lower social classes.

The upshot being - English is moving on. Shortening, twisting, scrambling, but moving on. As it always has. We may mind, but it doesn't. Never has. We can only try to influence the evolution, not control it. That would be sadly against the very spirit of English.

Oh and - I assure you that everything I have said here has been sourced from either a book or a newspaper article, and I will put up some references as soon as I can find them online. Excuse the lack of footnoting.

There are some days...

2007-06-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

Ye Gads and little fishes! Can a girl be not left alone to just simply think, sometimes? Be quiet? Alone?

Oh, but 'alone' is definitely a problem. You cannot say the a-word without the place suddenly becoming absolutely pill/razor/even-vaguely-sharp-thing(figuratively) free and your parents adopting funny worried expressions and making subtle hints in the form of we-are-always-there-for-you-in-the-event-of-any-kinda-trouble dinner-time speeches, that often end in awkward expectant silences that expect me to come up with stunning revelations, and fall, sobbing, on supportive parental breast. Often I have been tempted, out of the kindness of my heart, to save them from disappointment and announce that I am pregnant; the only drawback is that in such event I would have to produce the other contributor to my productivity, and I cannot think of any one person amongst my considerable set of male friends who would be willing to volunteer to be so honoured.

In case you're wondering, actual event: "What happened? Why'd you all shut up? Is there anymore lemon pickle?"

Also, I have always preferred my own company to others', and my family is used to the sight of me staring vacantly out of the window, non-responsive to calls/yells/insults. Familiarity with given scene doesn't prevent them from making pointless, not least repetitive enquiries into it, though. And since, most of the time, I begin with thinking random thoughts, and let them lead to other thoughts, and just basically 'watch' from a third-person standpoint, the flow of randomness( or specificity, whichever direction my mind has agreed to take out of its vacuum), there isn't much to tell curious askers. I mean, I could attempt to do so, but:
1. I don't have the patience
2.If I did, my family would dismiss it halfway as "Satkeli hai"
3.I would agree with them, which would do nothing for my ego
4.I prefer my ego healthy, ergo
5.I don't tell my family.

So, almost on reflex, when asked "What are you thinking of?", or "What have you been talking about for one and a half hours on the phone?", I answer, "Nothing..", and bang!:
"Why are you so moody these days?"
"Am not.""Yes you are."
"Ok."
"What ok?"
"What ok ok? Ok I'm moody!"
"Now you're getting mad."
"Am not."
"Damn right you are.."
"All right."
"All right what?"
"All right I'm getting mad."
"What for?"
"Will you leave me alone?"
"THIS is what I meant."
"So I agreed with you, didn't I?"
"Don't YOU get fresh on me, young lady..."
"Ok."
"What ok ok for everything? Retarded or what?"
"Ok you're right. Yeah, I'm retarded. I also want to be alone. Will you please leave a poor mental case alone, then?"
"Oh my god, Divya, I don't know what to do with you these days!"
"Join the club."

There are some days...

Masterpieces.

2007-06-14T05:30:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about the prep I put in, in April, for the law entrances, while cleaning up the paper rubbish in my room, and I found some absolute gems, written in moments of either absolute exhaustion, boredom, or piss-ion(not a word? so what?).

I must include this as disclaimer: I did not ever take writing short notes myself to be a serious form of prep. In retrospect, stupid decision, but hindsight is always 20/20.
From the point of view of idle humour(here I am saying that I am idle, and expressing the hope that you have a sense of humour), however, they provide, on the whole, an excellent index of how interesting I found the prep.

Here they are:

The Singur issue: Kindly inform me as soon as you find out.

Land acquisition and the Tatas in Bengal: It happened recently. People are fighting, and dying, even! It is a national tragedy in whose remembrance we will doubtless have a holiday , in the near future. Also, the Tatas are rich and Bengali women are hot. Forty words up?

Voluntarism: The spirit of wanting to do accomplish tasks spontaneously and without external force. I am sadly lacking in this, if you go by my mother. Newton's law says it is impossible in any case. Indians, as a whole, interestingly, are sorely lacking in the spirit of voluntarism, which is why, no doubt, Indian law makes a provision for voluntarism.(right?)

Voting for French Presidential elections in Pondicherry:I am fairly sure of the fact that there were elections in Pondicherry. It seems to me to be a prerequisite for democratic functioning. Though now I come to think of it - is Pondy a democracy? Is it part of India, even? Anyway - I have full trust in the people of Pondicherry - they have exquisite taste in bagels - and I'm sure they can elect an able leader. In the light of all this, who really got elected is rather superfluous.

They're all true, I swear.

Of idle hours.

2007-06-14T01:19:00.000-07:00

For two years now I've been cribbing for, inter alia, hours of absolute joblessness;for a state of such absolute emptiness that the emptiness be the most exciting thing about it.

I've been cribbing, in fact, for what I actually have now. I wake up in the morning to a day of having absolutely nothing to do. Of course, I have three weeks before I leave for college, and I'm supposed to be making three kinds of lists and packing, but - ah well, lets just say that these sound exponentially more interesting than they are( which is certainly saying something, because they even sound just about as interesting as a bump on a log.).

Given freedom to do so, I'd just turn over and go right back to sleep, but my parents seem to object. My mother also seems to feel that I should be spending my time learning 'life skills'(read: cooking/washing/ironing).

I have made it to law school. Already I have exceeded my expectations; and now they expect me to learn to cook as well? Me of the runny-dishwater-dal and papad-variety-roti? I mean, isn't there some such thing as moderation in desire?!

The cooking part my mother is yet to accomplish - everytime she begins about 'survival cooking', I insert my argument about Maggi/coffee and the we generally end up in stalemate - but I have learnt to wash clothes by hand, which are - applause, here please - wearable, on drying.

No, really.

So much for the domestic side.

What I have found time to do, finally, is listen to music. Phil collins, def leppard, the beegees, the beatles, jimi hendrix, eric clapton, mark knopfler, the oasis, the doors, some deep purple, lots of simon and garfunkel, some sting, just a leetle billy joel, some country/western, even.
Out of these, I have fallin in love all over again with Eric Clapton and Art Garfunkel.

Thanks to youtube(many, many, many thanks!) I've been able to locate some absolute gems...the S&G Sound of Silence performance in 1969, the Hendrix performance at early Woodstock, some vids of Phil Collins' 1990 tour... very very nice.

No, I don't listen to linkin park/greenday. Why is it their music just doesn't excite me? The only track that comes anywhere close to even limited repeated-listenability is boulevard of broken dreams, in my book. But then, I got bored after two songs of each, so...

Oh and I've also located some old favourites; some Jagjit and Chitra Singh ghazals, and Hindi film music of the 60's and 70s. Mausam hai aashiquana (pakeezah), and Yeh zindagi usi ki hai(anarkali), and Yeh raat bheegi bheegi(chori chori), and Babuji dheere chalna(CID), and O maajhi re(no clue), and Chaudhvin ka chand(no clue, again), and Awaara(Awaara), and...oh, so many more.

All hail Youtube.

Why is Himesh Reshammiya still in business?

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi

2007-06-01T02:25:00.000-07:00

I saw Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi today.

I generally do not attempt movie reviews, but I doubt too many people have seen this, and since I want them to, I will write something about it.

Nothing I can say about the film will be new, but it does no harm to repeat that it certainly is a wonderful movie.

For one, it has this student-documentary feel - you know, no panning out to an awe-inspiring(if a trifle boring) Swiss vista, no rave-worthy camera effects , except for the home-video feel in some places that I liked.

Also, it has the lovely Chitrangada Singh. Apart from being graceful and convincing, she is certainly one of the most beautiful women in Indian cinema. Also, you cannot miss the startling Smita Patil resemblance. Smita Patil had this barely-under-the-surface smouldering intensity, which Chitrangada Singh, however good, lacks, but this lady more than makes up for it with her very wonderful nose!

Umm..almost. :)

KayKay Menon's firebrand act, and Shiney Ahuja's very slick transitions from Gandhian-by-default to wheeler-deeler to loverboy are well executed, and very much appreciated.

One thing about this movie is, that though everyone has carried through very well, the appreciation of their individual performances can only be complete in context of each other. As in Shiney Ahuja's brilliant pragmatist against KayKay Menon's raging revolutionary, and Chitrangada's armchair idealist against, interestingly, Chitrangada's political awakening vis-a-vis Siddharth.

Many of the flame-ups of modern India's political scenario - very volatile in the time the movie is set (Indira Gandhi's antics, for example) are captured very nicely, in context to the characters and their lives, and not, as is more conventional, as a subject by themselves.
This allows the movie fluidity and continuity, and puts the three characters in focus, allowing us to watch them be influenced by each other, and the turbulent times they live in, and grow into who they are by the end of the film.

And if you feel, at some point, or at every point, that the political scenarios are exaggerated to the point of being entertaining in themselves, or that neither such powerful turmoil exists that it can pull into its vortex ordinary people like us, nor that such people exist, who'd want to make a difference anyway ; or if you're just plain tickled at the circus they show us, and call the Indian Government...

Well then, wake up. This is the truth, and perhaps the source of the greatest sadness.

As for the movie itself...I cannot be sure who I liked more...I know it is Shiney Ahuja, but I'm tempted to say Chitrangada, because, well, she is so beautiful.

Ah well.

After dreams die.

2007-05-30T05:26:00.000-07:00

The IIT JEE results came out today. More broken hearts than when Abhishek Bachchan got married.

This is good ol' Tamil Nadu. Land of Temples, Thevars and Techno-geeks. And potential technogeeks, three a penny. A hundred thousand potential technogeeks die every March, and unfailingly a new crop is up, fresh and eager, and not in the least pessimistic, every year. I've always suspected it - there's something in the infant formula....(yeah, I love conspiracy theories! :-D)

Going for IIT classes is a status symbol. The fact that ninety percent of those idiots have about as much chance of clearing it than I do of morphing into Salma Hayek(I wish), is immaterial, of course.

The fact that more people have found true love(initiated, sustained, and- hehe - terminated through note-passing) than have passed the aptitude tests, is immaterial, of course.

The fact that other engineering colleges exist, and that, in May, one Siva Subramania Nadar in the hand is better than two Indian Institutes of Technology in the bush(look hard, you'll find the idiom), is immaterial, of course.

The fact that in-state, at least, supply has almost exceeded demand, and that it doesn't take an expert market-analyst to infer that it's hard to get a job, is immaterial, of course.

The funniest part is, every year, headhunters cry themselves hoarse that IITians aren't so hot anymore, they'd prefer people from second and third-tier colleges for a variety of reasons that I refrain from mentioning because:
a.I'm sure they will be misconstrued
b.they're repeated every year, and
c.I'm incurably lazy.

So: It is inanely hard to make it to an IIT, it is inanely hard to stay in IIT if you do happen to make it, and - it must be Christmas - it isn't even all that worth it once you pass out.

Ergo, the only reason you'd hope and pray and dream vivid dreams of IIT is....because...well...it's a dream. The place is enveloped in this golden aura and Mozart plays in your head when you think of it.

And it may not make much sense to others; hell, it may not make much sense to you, but you still go on (stupidly! stupidly!)dreaming. And when your dream goes up in flames, and when the last ember has died down, and the smoke has cleared and the dust has settled, and you finally get that fact past your insanely huge ego, that you're just not good enough for Number One....

You shrug, kick away the debris, and go to Number Four.

Wait, wait, wait.

When did this post start being about me?

2007-05-29T03:27:00.000-07:00

I just took a quiz on Blogthings, on something I have always not-so-secretly wondered about.

Here's what they tell me.

There's a 33% Chance That You Need Therapy

You may need therapy, but you're probably doing okay at working out your own problems.In general, you are able to solve any troubles that come up. But there's no harm in talking to a professional.

Do'>http://www.blogthings.com/doyouneedtherapyquiz/">Do You Need Therapy?

I have a thirty three percent chance of needing therapy, eh? Hmmm..is that the same as saying that a good third of me is screwed up? Or are you to interpret that as saying that a have a thirty three percent chance of screwing up? They are not the same thing, mind.

If it is the former: well whaddaya know, two thirds of me is still normal. Or what is popularly perceived to be normal. Normal is kinda subjective, but for the sake of convenience(yes, I am a lazy bum), and brevity(correction, I am the poster girl of lazy bum), we will go with normal.

If it is the latter: This is slightly more worrying. Can we snowball this phrase into a future-telling corollary? As in, I am well on my way to screwing up in the near future? Taking into account the facts that that I am about to move two thousand one hundred and seventy eight kilometres away from home, and that even right here at home, I haven't had any problems, really, in screwing up either health or head, and last, that I am royally pessimistic when it comes to myself, I really wonder if it is all worth it.

Or maybe they're referring to the academics. Doesn't worry me; been there, done that.

But the options...hm.

When you are a walking(try falling, skidding, slipping) example of the things legendary klutzes are made of, you really begin to wonder if you shouldn't give up on college altogether and do the correspondence course thing. They even have that nifty video thing, where you get to sit at hawt Formica tables, elbow to elbow, wear these big clunky black headphones, and watch people giving you staticky lectures.

Cool, no?

Um.

Ok.

I wish I could grow out of this clumsiness, though. I want some grace, some smoothness, some polish(the next idiot who pops up with a Brasso joke at this point will regret it. I promise.).Inside a month, hopefully. I mean, a bedroom-to-kitchen journey usually involves two stubbed toes (one each on the doorpost and bed), and this, when the bedroom and the kitchen are ADJOINING ROOMS.

Save the applause.

So I have successfully begun a discussion(okay, okay, a dead boring monologue) on whether I need therapy, and converted it to a whine about my clumsiness.
With just a soupcon of college thrown in.

Darn, I must be bored.

I've been Bangalored to Jodhpur.

2007-05-29T03:06:00.000-07:00

So I am now here.

For those people who used to regularly read my blog - two, at last count, one of whom, almost irritatingly accurately described it as the name for this blog - this new blog shouldn't end up being markedly different from the previous one. I am still me, life is still life, and last time I checked, I was still pissed with it.

Ah no, I am not depressed. It is just a combination of fresh proof of personal incompetence, and the very obvious distance between desire and gratification that is pissing me off.

Yes. I did not make it to the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. So, ya wanna make something of it, huh? Huh? *chin stuck out, sleeves rolled up*