Rochie-sunny side up

My Monday paper and UFO religions

2012-02-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

Hello Monday. It’s the official day for the blues. And I’m sub-employed; my blues certainly feel more legitimate. I feel like a definite maybe. Making these life changing decisions certainly lifts the spirits and now I can reach out for my double shot of espresso without guilt and dig my teeth into the morning papers.

Trust the Toilet Paper of India to expose us to all kinds of information. I love this paper, it’s trashy and it makes no bones about it. I’m a garbage information junkie and this paper has kept me in the loop of all things irrelevant and all news inconsequential for years. Don’t get me wrong, I love the intellectualism of the Indian Express and the Asian Age but I’m usually found reading that when I either want to impress a younger partner’s parents or am wooing a much older man.

So this is what one random article had to say- In the early December of 2011, a band of astronomers restarted the iconic quest for extraterrestrial intelligence which was interrupted earlier by a lack of financing. So a brace of 42 telescopes were wired into action, hopping from star to star hoping to tune in to radio broadcasts from alien civilizations. Much money is being pumped into this exercise and many hopes pinned on it. Astronomers are cooling their heels, waiting for a squeal or a squawk or the tiniest bit of garbled gibberish which would signal the end of our cosmic loneliness. In short, we’d be asking one question less, “are we alone in the universe?”

Right, of course. Considering that we’ve conquered our inner loneliness and our eternal existential angst of being lonely in a crowd, it only makes sense to expand and diversify and look to aliens to add more meaning to our lives. But in some way it makes sense, we can barely stand our colleagues, we constantly wish our bosses were dead and once in a way everyone’s thought of swapping their partners. Or killing them. It would be nice to meet a flying mini T-Rex with red eyes or a bluish-grey being with a slit for a mouth or even a Nordic Humanoid, so long as it doesn’t talk and nods it’s head in the appropriate places while being talked to. What more do women need anyway? Just someone who will listen patiently without adding 2cents of their own advice. And having an alien at hand would be superbly cost effective in the sense that I wouldn’t have to log on to makemytrip.com anymore to book cheap air tickets, I’ll have my own flying saucer to take me around.

Interestingly, there are endless UFO Religions in the world, all more awe inspiring and bizarre than the other. Sample this – There is Raëlism, considered the largest UFO Religion in the world, founded in 1974 in which it propounds that life on Earth was scientifically created through genetic engineering by a species of extraterrestrials, which are called Elohim. Past religious teachers, like Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad are said to have been sent by these scientifically advanced extraterrestrials to teach humanity and the religion believes that ultimately a combination of human cloning and ‘mind transfer’ can ultimately provide eternal life. The Elohim are said to be planning a future visit to complete their revelation and education of humanity. Now that’s a visit I’d really like to see and while we’re at it, I’d like to be Angelina Jolie’s clone with my mind swapped with any Stephen, Hawking or Fry or even King if the first two are taken.

Then there is Scientology that talks about ‘space opera’ which isn’t like the usual opera where you go to experience temporary coma, this one is about extraterrestrial civilizations and alien interventions in our past lives. According to the founder of the religion, L. Ron Hubbard, when Human beings die, they go to a landing station on the planet Venus where they are ‘re-implanted’ and programmed to ‘forget’ their previous lifetime. The Human beings are then ‘capsuled’ and dumped back in Earth off the coast in California where the Human being then searches for a new body to inhabit. Hubbard suggested that in order to avoid so much trouble of inter space travel, Scientologists should simply refuse to go to Venus. I’d really like to give this religion a shot but Tom Cruise, the religion’s most celebrated and sparkling spokesperson explains it as “What Scientology is, is it addresses man as a spiritual being. Okay? And it gives people tools that they apply to their lives to improve conditions. And that is what it is" and of you happen to tell him that you don’t quite buy into the concept then all you get is "Some people, well, if they don't like Scientology, well, then, fuck you. Really. Fuck you. Period."

Also, Hubbard was quoted saying “The quickest way to make a million is to start your own religion.” With a guy who thinks like that, I think I’m ok being born a Sikh and then being born again as a Shaivite and then falling in love with Krishna, so on and Scooby Do. I think it’ll be a while before I exhaust the 330million Gods of India or be like Linda Smith and become a dyslexic Satanist, worshipping the drivel. In any case, my capsule to Venus will have to wait.

The first thread

2012-01-11T23:15:00.000-08:00

The speed of life is marvelous, on some days it moves at the speed of light, happening to us faster and quicker than we can even process and before we know it, a day is over, a week passed us by, sometimes months seem like they have been consumed other months.

Plans are made

Targets are met

But we forget

That there are slivers of magic floating all around us, little sparkles of golden and purple that we can't see because we get so caught up in the thick toxic threads of goals and deadlines.

For once, in this moment, forget that anything but you exist. Set fire to all thoughts in your head and just sit.

Sit. Do nothing. At first this will drive you crazy, there's so much to be done, so many plans to be made, people to be called, economies are under a crunch, countries are preparing for civil war, governments are being overthrown but fuck all these thoughts. Screw them. Nothing should matter. Nothing but you.

And then you will begin to feel a soft, velvet silence around you. It will come from within and slowly it will colour everything that is around you. Try and read the nuances of the silence, let it work its uniqueness into your being. Let it dance with abandon around you. Don't try and do anything with that silence, just let it flit around you, above you, within you. And then the silence will reveal a tune, a rhythm, a melody that'll sound very familiar.

Its the beat of your heart matching its pace with the beat of the universe. That one song will turn every disharmonious note in your life and make it a divine melody.

Unraveling the first thread, bringing you closer to yourself....

Love

2009-11-15T08:43:00.000-08:00

Which idiot said that love was ever going to be easy? Or understandable? Or capable of being slotted into pretty candytuft categories? Love is so real that it hurts with a pinch and so pungent that it can be elixir or poison.

You can lie in noisy corners, fearing the worst, hoping for miracles and all your loving, hating and loathing points in the general direction of love.

Ships that have sailed now have left behind harsh footprints that cannot be wiped off from the sand no matter how hard I try. I can’t wear the wind to shield myself from life, but that’s exactly what I am doing, dressing up moments in shades of violets and roses, giving them names to make them feel more ‘mine’ but in the end, one day, I will open my eyes and it would all have gone away. As moments always do. As people always do.

And then I smile, because I remember that all of this is one great carnival called life. It’s my carnival. I bought the tickets to the rides that rile me, pump my adrenaline, make me laugh, make me cry; sometimes even make me think that I’m going to die. But I like this illusion; it feels very…real.

I’m not wounded, despondent or agitated. I’m only stuck in the wonderment of the absurdity of it all. Where does it all end? What does it mean? Is what we get, that which we truly desire or do we learn to desire what comes our way?

Is it really possible to love without wanting possession of it all? Without needing to have a social security number that comes with a relationship? That’s what it is, right? A social security number, two people fall in love, hormones get going, then they start making these happy public appearances and that becomes their combined social security code. One of them breaks it and both suffer for it and thus the complicated urban dating ritual.

That’s what its become, love – a complicated urban phenomenon. Do we even care anymore to know if what we feel is an emotion that comes from some strange part of our heart or the heat from a definite part of between our legs or an unexplained need to belong. We call all of this and more just one four-letter word, and it doesn’t matter if that word is ‘love’ or ‘fuck’.

Here we go again...

2009-10-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

Come on in,

It's a feast of delight

There's abundance of sin

What's wrong will feel right.

Coming and going,

In fire and Cold

Dazed and unknowing

Of fate untold.

Love will break you

All great men said

And there will be no life anew

To its last burning thread.

But senility has its method to madness

And love, such a heady thrill

It pierces through with blinding sadness

And then just goes for the kill!

2009-10-03T04:18:00.000-07:00

See, the thing is that I am a strange sort of person as we have already established and I have no issues whatsoever that we have 365 days to go for the Commonwealth games and just look at Delhi, nothing seems to have changed in the city except painting one building pink and purple to denote that some work for the games is on, but that is not my problem.

My problem is that when we do fall flat on our face and Suresh Kalmadi does have to eat crow, he should at least not look like he borrowed his fashion sense from Subhash Ghai. As I was skimming through my Saturday papers joyfully, suddenly there I saw this monstrosity staring back at me. It was none other than Suresh Kalmadi looking the way he does (and that of course, can't be helped) and to add, wearing this hideous black and white and red tee-shirt that had me experience a brain-freeze moment without any ice anywhere in sight.

Someone should suggest a fashion stylist to the man, otherwise we'll end up apologizing for more than just the Commonwealth games being a feather up our arse instead of our hats....

Television has turned our brain into mashed potato!

2009-10-02T02:08:00.000-07:00

What in the name of Martin Luther King, is this world coming to? I am perplexed at what television is beginning to dish out in the name of entertainment...a half-bald, pot-bellied Rahul Mahjan is making a grand pretence of marriage on national television and threatens to be even more melodramatic than his predecessor, Rakhi Sawant. Wearing traditional Indian finery and sitting poised atop a garish red coloured chair, that ghastly vision alone can give many women a heart attack (and not of the swoon and die variety may I add)and while I nod my head in what has become of television, my ex-producer from Meow calls me up in a highly excited voice to say that she has messaged the numbers flashing on the screen of the wretched channel that is hosting this pathetic little play acting all through the day and has been asked to send four photographs of herself to the channel, two of which should be face close-ups and the other two, wide-angle shots along with an elaborate profile (as in CV). Given that I know how Moina gets her kicks, I know this is her way of getting some cheap thrills in a boring life, but there will be all these women in India and abroad, I bet, who are already looking up websites to find an appropriate name for her children with Rahul after she gets married to him on that wretched Swayamvar.

And that, is so not the end of my woes. On Star Plus the other day, I managed to catch a glimpse of a reality show called 'Perfect Bride' in which these some 10 odd women live with 10 odder, older women. Twist in the tale being that the younger ones are the single maidens while the older 'aunties' are mothers of eligible bachelors who incidentally also are a part of the show only that they stay in another part of the set called 'Kunwar Quarters'... bwahahaha...first this whole kunwar quarters business reminds me of servant quarters and most of the boys even look like that. The girls are shown being bossed around by the older women in the name of trying to please the potential mothers-in-law to be and when they are not doing the highly challenging job of sweeping and swabbing the floors, they are busy romancing the men in a special corner meant just for that purpose with a 78 camera set up I presume in which the women ask some really sensitive, real and heart-wrenching questions like 'what has been your happiest moment in life thus far' and the men so earnestly and unexpectedly reply by saying ' This one that I am living with you'! Need I say more?

Elsewhere on some other channel, all the serials look alike, with all of them being set in some Rajasthani village and all the women, serial after serial wear shirts which look like they belong to men, over skirts that look like they belong to an upmarket Khan Market store and speak in a dialect that sounds like they are all suffering from some intestinal disease.

But hell, why must I just be mean and bitchy about Indian soaps, 'Friends' on two different channels is being repeated for the 79464525282927354548503214575 time and by now, much like me, I am certain that most other people know what each character is about to say next. I mean, I have reached a stage where I have, out of sheer boredom of it all, starting counting the number of crows feet near Phoebe's eyes!

The only one, actually two things that I totally adore on television currently are 'Fear Factor- Khatron Ke Khiladi' and 'Dare to Date'. The former is aired on Colours and what I love about it is the fact that there are these death defying stunts that I totally trip on, and to add, there are these hot leggy women who perform them and its a pleasure to watch them wearing minimal clothing, flying in mid-air, swimming with cameras underneath them...you get the drift. I also quite like Akshay Kumar, I think he's very funny in a very vernacular sort of way...

Dare to Date, another one of my favorites, is on channel V with VJ Andy and its all about putting two very different people together and hoping that they survive each other enough to want to follow up with another date. Its sexy, its bitchy and hugely entertaining. I think I need to dedicate one entire essay on why Dare to Date works for me, but that in just a bit...till then, have fun chewing on this one....

Are you sunny-side up?

2009-09-28T06:33:00.000-07:00

I don't get people, relationships and well, people. Love is no longer that feeling of smelling vanilla cakes being taken out of the oven, relationships are no longer about sitting on a see-saw on a wet, rainy day. Its all become so complicated. People use big words like 'trust' and 'faith' and they all sound so empty, as if we are all on a podium, waiting for our turn to come so that we make a point and then wait for our medal to come our way.
I mean, really, why does life have to look like a complicated math equation? Why can't we just accept people the way they are, love them, and hell, if need be, even fight with them but in the end, still be able to read paragraphs out of books for those people while sitting at India Gate or something.
But everything, including ourselves, is painted in thick strokes of something. Something that doesn't let us breathe, something that does not allow us to love and give freely. My question is, such a long life and we spend it keeping an account of who loved who more, who broke whose heart worse and blah and blah and blah...why can't it be simple? Why? Why must it all bind us, make us accountable? So that we all end up looking, behaving and loving the same way.
People are making people turn into machines, robots who all behave the same way, understand hatred and cheating better than love and loving.
So here's something to think about, I have a friend called Himani, she keeps saying really nice, happy things to me and no matter how the rest of the world might be making me feel like shit, the things she says make me feel all yellow and golden with sunshine.
So try it,a quick fix recipe for a more smiley life - think happy pretty things and life will suddenly feel like a fairy tale!
Now what's your story morning glory? Are you feeling all sunny side up yet?

So what is this place called?

2009-02-19T19:14:00.001-08:00

I feel so differently as of the last few days that sometimes I don’t feel like myself at all.
The smallest things make me cry and the strangest things make me feel good.
Its almost as if the real me is changing, and so drastically that I cannot control any of its emotions and desires. The strange thing is that I feel no real desire, I feel strangely detached, removed from everything and as of right now, even the everyday occurring stomach ache.
Its not as though I am feeling existential angst, I am living with my existence in absolute harmony but the buttons that swell any sort of emotion inside me are all in a state of contented numbness.
Almost nothing is triggering me to react, unless it is just to cry. Sometimes because I feel overtly overwhelmed or extremely sad. I just read about India’s first domino liver transplant that helped saved two very young girls lives and that made me cry, without any provocation at all- I just saw their faces and the tears rolled down unremittingly.
What crossroads are these which come without a road map?

Hell hath no fury...

2009-01-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

I am so pissed and irritated tonight that its unbelievable.

So it turns out that you can spend all of your life being a dog-faithful and loyal and all of that but when people higher up than you in the corporate ladder feel like kicking someone to De-stress, it so totally has to be the faithful dog's ass, because he is the only thing other than a doormat that will not retaliate.

I never wanted to be part of a big company that has a shiny logo and no heart but isn't that what an organization is not - a person with a heart? Maybe I am feeling heartbroken because it has been a week that hasn't really fared well in my life and perhaps I left all my faith in myself lying by my work station and like everything that is left behind, it wasn't there when I went back looking for it.

I feel defeated tonight, all that trying and ashes in my hand at the end of it, but then who is to tell when ashes turn into star dust, but when that does happen to me, I'm in no mood to share it with those who forged me like a weapon in the hour of vengeance...

Aren't raging wildfires always started like this, in the heart of a woman scorned?

Starry starry night

2008-09-19T00:43:00.001-07:00

There is no hope left tonight. Its raining outside and there’s a candle on the table that threatens to burn itself out in a few more minutes. I will be left with nothing. Hope is the one human emotion that is our biggest strength and our greatest weakness. Don’t we always yearn for; hope that everything that burns intense as desire within us, spills over and paints reality just the way we recognize it to be?

Love is the greatest delusion we live by. Hiding behind it, believing that out fears won’t be seen and our cries will not be heard, having faith that there is always safety in numbers. Looking out for someone to promise us a lifetime of togetherness, to make us complete. Hoping for someone to adore us, for who we are, or who we could never be.

Separation and Venus nights

2008-09-19T00:43:00.000-07:00

Gathering oblivion and butterflies
The Venus night glowed outside
The windowpane;

While youth and memories
Rested in my hair.

The air is thick with the familiarity
Of knowing you were never apart

Yet I tumble over pebbles
And separation tonight

My fortitude goes planting flags
In the hidden corners of love for you

I love you like a clumsy girl in spring
You are everywhere

In the golden wheat
In the blazing war

In the delicate sound of a guitar
In the thick weeks that make a lifetime

While my mad heart
Gathers oblivion and butterflies
With the Venus night tonight.

2008-09-10T03:35:00.000-07:00

Moist doorways
Wearing silver light.

Green leaves
That now rustle in their yellow age.

The sweet river waters
That will turn to salt when they make love to the ocean.

Footprints in the sand
My solitary inheritance;

Grew roots that rose to you
Laden with dew and dreams

The sweet fragrance of jasmine
Invaded the heart with a raw pain

In this space between death and dream
I love you

And between pride and living
I am bound to your memory

I am tied into you
Like the sheath of the earth

You may not love me
And the stillness may die without survivors

But even in the death of silence
The smoke remains, to meet its fire.

Yearning...

2008-09-05T06:52:00.001-07:00

Desire, a word that is in today’s day and age, used to define the yearning for a car or a need to shed weight. Somewhere the word has lost what it perhaps really means. Desire is such mad joy, something that burns within, that possesses and yet liberates in its own longing. But why is the longing no more for love for the eternal quest of the other half of the being?
Maybe Shakespeare knew it better in his Sonnet # 129 when he wrote these lines:

Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

The silence

2008-08-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

So today is one of those days in my life when all I really want from life is the liberty to excuse myself from it as I know it and head north into the cosseted, reassuring refuge of the hills.

It is uncanny when you open your eyes to days which remind you that you have forgotten most things that make you and you end up feeling like a shell that stands at the shore, waiting to be swept off but you find that you adorn a hushed window pane and that is where perhaps you will remain till the time the perception of space and eternity dissolves itself for you.

Which brings me to the excerpt from a poem written by Pablo Neruda called ‘Pido Silencio’ translated by Alastair Reid, which reads something like this:

“ Now leave me alone.
Now learn to do without me.

I’m going to close my eyes.

And I want five things only,
Five favorite roots.

One is endless love.

The second is to see autumn.
I cannot be if the leaves
Don’t fly and fall to earth.

The third is the solemn winter,
The rain I loved, the caress
Of fire in the rough cold.

My fourth is the summer,
Plump as a watermelon.

And fifthly, your eyes.
Matilde, my dear love,
I will not sleep without your eyes,
I will not exist but in your gaze.
I adjust the spring
For you to follow me with your eyes.

That, friends, is all I want.
Next to nothng, close to everything.

Now they can go if they wish.

I have lived so much that someday
They will have to forget me forcibly,
Rubbing me off the blackboard.
My heart was inexhaustible.

But because I ask for silence,
Don’t think I’m going to die.
The opposite is true;
It happens I’m going to live.

To be, and go on being.

I will not be, however, if, inside me
The crop does not keep sprouting,
The shoots first, breaking through the earth
To reach the light;
But the mothering earth is dark,
And, deep inside me, I am dark.
I am a well in the water of which
The night leaves stars behind
And goes on alone across fields.

It’s a question of having lived so much
That I want to live that much more.

I never felt my voice so clear,
Never have been so rich in kisses.

Now, as always, it is early.
The light is a swarm of bees.

Let me alone with the day.
I ask leave to be born.”

I love defenseless animals, especially in a good gravy

2008-07-13T06:38:00.000-07:00

If it wasn’t for the chicken pox I am currently suffering from and if I wasn’t the well meaning philanthropist that I am, it being a Sunday, I would’ve made my way to Ego Thai, infecting all the hordes of hungry connoisseurs of Thai food present there tonight with my delicate bout of the pox.

But if I have little access to the outside world, it by no means stops me from reminiscing about the oriental smells that one is greeted with, each time you decide to step into Ego Thai. The entire restaurant is in a way, like a bit of an experience, including the darned boat that hangs high from the ceiling, holding a cascading bouquet of flowers, only that I always think it is biding its time before it recognizes the head it is karmically designed to fall upon.

But really, other than the boat, there are other memorabilia, which add to the ambience, and more so the books strewn across the first floor on shelves of different sizes, they just add a hint of an extra bit of pleasure; reading and eating, its much like sex, drugs and rock and roll, all rolled into one.

About the food, I am sucker for their fantastic Iced tea with either cucumber or cinnamon, both making for the ideal refresher. And that is just the perfect mild seduction to prepare one for the wonderful noodle soup, Tom Kha Kai, and the green and red curries. It is simply put-decadent.

It’s for times like these that I refer to my newfound Chinese diet – put all the food you want to eat on your plate, but eat with just one chopstick. Try it. It works!

In praise of music

2008-07-11T05:01:00.000-07:00

It was a few years ago that my brother decided that the only three-letter word starting with ‘S’ in his life would be the Sax. Hours, days and weeks were spent looking for that perfect saxophone, the instrument that would allow my brother to find himself.
Finally Gia (the saxophone is human too, I was told) made her way across the family threshold and my brother thus began his first tryst at lovemaking with the saxophone. It is then that I realized that the only difference between a saxophone and a chainsaw was the grip.

Then there was a time in my life when it was surrounded with musicians and a friend would often say about his band that when called on stage it would be announced thus ‘would the musicians and the drummer please come up on stage’. This particular drummer of the band could always be detected at the door, his knocking would always speed up, but he would constantly have trouble entering the room because a drummer that he was, he would never know when to come in. And the poor thing, each time he’d get depressed over being the butt of all jokes, he’d be cheered by saying that he’s better than a vacuum cleaner, at least he doesn’t need to be plugged in to suck!

But I have never understood why drummers have always been the brunt of jokes; I have come to realize that even clarinet players have hordes behind them, out to kill them. A master chef pointed out to me the other day in the course of a conversation that the difference between an onion and a clarinet is that nobody cries when you chop a clarinet into little pieces.

But then again, I have yet another mad musician friend who traded his wife’s piano for a clarinet, thankful that one cannot sing while playing the clarinet. He was of course the same person who would stand out in the garden, no matter what the season, each time his wife would play the piano before it was traded, he didn’t want any of the neighbors to think he was beating her.

To cut a long story short, I still think music is underrated, imagine what a beautiful world it would be, if life had some background music…

To be continued…

where sweet love found its forgotten wings...

2008-07-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

The sky was laden with twilight
And the night fluttered in your deep eyes
The moon, glowing on the traveling waters
Vagrant, as silence always is

Somewhere in the vastness
The mountains glimmered, alight with snow
And my heart searched to find its home
In you, around you, with eternal thirst

And then I found you
Made you mine
Amongst the sound of the trees
Orchestral and celestial

The intricate fabric of love turned
Black, red, smoldering and glacial
Till the night became a soliloquy
And life, a latticework of fragrance.

When you’re told you look like a peach, maybe they mean, all yellow and fuzzy

2008-07-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

So after a gruesome ride all through the countryside, all thanks to an auto rickshaw dude who was high on cheap booze and life, I tumbled out of that green monster looking like I needed a morgue more than a doctor. My limp hair was now departed in the middle, clothes clung to me as if out of fright and my rash had gone berserk, I now looked like a plump tomato on sale at the grocery store next to my house.
I trotted to the doctor’s chamber and stood there motionlessly, waiting for something to happen. I was hoping she would ask me my name, that would help us break the ice but instead she too looked back inertly, the kind of look someone would have on their face if they forgot the ‘recipe’ to make ice-cubes.
And then suddenly I felt like Indiana Jones’ female version, out to save both our lives by resuscitation through conversation and I began in my radio practiced voice about how a common friend who happened to be a doctor and a host with us, referred me to this wonderful little doctor who was seemingly down to earth but definitely not enough.
Suddenly my speech got interrupted with the doctor’s wish to check the rash all over my body. It was an almost pornographic moment, standing in attention, stripping at the orders of the doctor, only that the lighting was too fluorescent and the room smelt of antiseptic. Also, one little glitch was that the doctor seemed least interested in anything but the fluid deposits in the blisters on my body. My moment of pornography died a premature, ugly and dreadful death.
I was marched off to the blood sample collection unit on the first floor and as vial after vial of my blood was being siphoned off, the dark almost intense red of my blood was causing me to have morbid thoughts. ‘It is fatal, whatever it is’, I thought to myself.
Blood sample collected, I was on my way back home. Surprisingly, I was in good spirits thinking about the time that I’d managed to get off from work, even if at the cost of what most probably was chicken pox. As I smiled to myself and hummed a faint Frank Sinatra tune in my head, I bumped into a rather handsome doctor who must’ve thought that I was on the wrong floor. By his reaction to me, I am presuming he would’ve personally delivered me to the fourth floor where the famed psychiatry section of the hospital is.
I finished the rendition in my head and went looking for an auto that would help me get back home in one piece. If a half-wit could work part-time for NASA then this was it, the man who drove me to madness and then my house. This auto rickshaw trip was even more ghastly than the previous. This one was driven by a man drunk on stupidity. He made me realize that talk is cheap. The supply surely exceeds demand and in this case, I was hoping we’d run out of stock forever.
By the time I reached home, I knew that auto’s in Delhi were shared by two or more drivers, that this particular gentleman disliked people who kept their feet up on the rods and that he learned how to dance in his childhood when he and three brothers would wait in line for the bathroom.
As I reached my house, I wished with all my heart that Id have chicken pox and that I’d be put under quarantine for a lifetime at least!

Life in the time of Chicken Pox

2008-07-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

If you can smile when everything around you is going wrong, you’re probably in the repair business

It is sometime in the late afternoon and I recollect how just yesterday I was scurrying to reach work at that hour in the morning when most people are still snuggled in bed dreaming of an excuse not to go to work that day. My damp hair was just how it always was on most mornings, limp and facing extinction but at 7:30 in the morning, my only prayer was to be able to find that crazy access card that would allow me the key to the castle of radio madness.

As I entered I saw the ‘On Air’ sign, lit boldly up on the wall next to the studio and I knew that Seema ‘ji’ was singing sweet nothings to the listeners coaxing them to wake up. When she (Seema) had first walked in to work, my immediate reaction was to add the suffix of ‘ji’ to her name, not in an endeavor to make her sound elderly and worthy of the suffix, just out of sheer respect. Little did I know then, that it would become the proverbial albatross around her neck. Excess baggage. That is what I handed to her as she became a permanent resident of the hallowed halls of Radio Today.

The clock struck eight and my co-host was found bellowing from the insides of the washroom for me to scurry and that she would follow. The morning washroom visit; It has become a ritual for Jaishree (my co-host). No matter what time we arrive n the studio, she almost feels compelled to fulfill that rite before she takes on another kind of pressure starting eight o’ clock.

That is the time when the breakfast show comes in to play. The show we proudly call Meow Zindagi, which has been our playground, haven and sometimes even the squabble-zone. As we both rambled on and finally played a song at quarter past eight, I found myself rather itchy, as if I had accidentally rubbed myself against poison ivy. As the show proceeded, so did my itching. By the end of it, I resembled a raspberry cheesecake (not that delectable though). As we stepped out of the studio and exposed my cheesecake self to everybody, like a truly democratic society that we are, everyone used their fundamental right of free speech to mull over what the rash on my skin might be. Some jumped right to questions about who I was dating and if that person was hygienic. I was reminded of how sex is like air. Its really not important till you aren’t getting any. But of course, sympathy on that count from anyone was ruled out. Then of course I was told that I could be suffering from measles and not have known it (I was told even Aishwarya Rai has them, so its quite proper in that fashion to have measles and if it’s the German variety then better still, at least Id exhibit being a bit status conscious) or perhaps it was a rash from the thermal shock of being out in the sun and then coming back into a temperature controlled environment or as my Programming Head pointed out, it would probably be my desire for a vacation and her constant refusal to give it to me that had manifested in a fabricated disease to facilitate the much awaited holiday. As speculation of my rash subsided with greater matters like the ‘viagra computer virus’, which threatened to turn the 3 ½, inch floppy into a hard disc, at hand, I was finally asked to hurry along to a doctor’s office and get a final opinion (I am sure people back at work laid bets about whose version the doctor would side with)