My Monday paper and UFO religions

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

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

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...

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!

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!

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?

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?