Fairer than thou!

Marinating movies, pickling pikcharrs

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:27:00 +0000

It has been such a long time. Things could have rotted by now. Things have, actually. There is, for example, the pair of used socks that I had bottled up to observe the pickling effect of wine on absolutely used socks. There isn't much to write on that front, though, except that I see a curious connection between my roommate opening it during dinner, hunting for pickle, and buying a washing machine by the weekend.

But it's really been a long time. Blame it on the job; and life used to be so chilled out earlier. Or blame it on the fact that cupid stopped hitch-hiking and brought yon-fabulous-beaucephalous in true knight-on-steed fashion to accelerate platonic-turned-not-so-platonic-turned-absolutely-lovey-dovey-affair into a prospective marriage with the most awesomely elegant woman I've ever marinated, pickled, or generally sauteed my brain with by way of conversation. Well, I'm not married yet but en route and all.

So things have kept me away but I'm back now and absolutely committed to reconstructing the fun out here. So there was this all-too-appropriately clad 20-something who was more babe than dude with a definite dude name and some moustache thrown in to add to the confusion. Anyway, he passes off as a guy in most social circles. So we were discussing movies and I did mention that Rock On, the huge hype notwithstanding, was an extremely poorly made movie, at the end of which he concluded that I was a bitter old man. Pseudo-elitism rising from a taste in Western music, I can take (and aren't we all pseudo-elitist in some way or the other), but bitter and old, well, that's just weird.

Well, the bitterness notwithstanding, I did point out that in my equally frank opinion, he was more babe than dude than anyone would ever want to be and that that fact alone should bite him with the decency and frequency of a rather drunken crab with a knife jammed into the better part of its brain. It’s another matter that most crabs come into simultaneous contact with knife and alcohol only when sautéed in a wine sauce, by which time they’re very, very dead, while he, it could be argued, had never been more alive than those first few moments that followed his momentous you're-bitter-old-man judgment, which was instantly amended to a you're-a-bitter-old-man decision, for Mr. Dude, even when sautéed and knifed to your heart’s content, prides himself on his convent education and was in no general mood of having it compromised the way other smaller things like his reading taste, his choice of suicidal Greek philosophers and general chaos of facial hair have been.

Thankfully, the long drawn out conversation lightened him up (crabs can do that, they're a handy topic), and we reached amiable consensus on manliness and youth, his and mine respectively.

Speaking of movie reviews, there was the greatest furore over Dev D being given 5 stars on TOI, which is kind of fairly simple to understand once you realise that TOI never minds a huge fuss over something it prints out. A certain lady who gets very heady around French cinema pointed out that the movie was very poorly made and I did mention that some would consider her a bitter old man for saying so, especially given the parallel pseudo-elitism angle thrown in.

The other movie that has meanwhile left a good number of bitter old men in its wake is Slumdog Millionaire, which frankly, was little more than a simplified jab at what Midnight's Children did so much more elegantly, and minus the magic realism and with a good deal of marketing-the-exotic-India thrown in. But Rahman finally won an Oscar and I'm not complaining.

I hope I can write really often. The new lifestyle has killed a few things. I was 80% of my way towards finishing a novel and now, there just isn't time. So there it is on the back burner after 14 months of writing, lying around like a pair of absolutely-most-definitely used socks marinating in wine. Maybe we'll get a typewriter in this time around!

Even Einstein would've been pseudforced

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:35:00 +0000

What's to the left of right? You can't really tell! That's the problem with relatives! They're never absolute!

Relatives have been pouring in like sludge in the Buckingham Canal (and we refer to Chennai, of course) and well, some of them have been smelling that way too. Which is not exactly a problem on most occasions but when the cook back at home leaves a lot to be desired on the aroma front and the food is anyway difficult to gulp down, one doesn't need added incentives to puke sitting across, around and under the table.

We're still talking about the relatives obviously, though their positions relative to the table are relatively less important to their overpowering presence in my life at the moment. The truth is I've met too many of them in too short a span of time to be too gung-ho about it, frankly.

A certain notorious one, who has in the past been known to invest in Satyam shares (which some concur is equivalent to partaking of Ex-Raju's fiasco-ing) moaned, groaned and raised a significant amount of hell about the whole thing. Since that didn't quite help him enough, he decided a trip to the kitchen and a sequence of well-timed sneezes all over the exposed food was very much in order before he resumed his feeble attempt at fanfare of the pathetic kind.

Everyone is well aware of my aversion to rotund aunts, especially those who try to marry you off like it was some afternoon pastime and like life was one bright sunny afternoon. The particular specimen in question accompanied Satyam-bitten uncle, partly because she's married to him and is supposed to do all the accompanying but largely because there are few other souls in the world who display greater readiness to be crushed under her finger at every pretext.

Rotund aunt, of the aforementioned fame, did make her point about dowries and marriages and upholding the male family tradition and other such things and then got busy shouting at her husband asking him to raise a little less hell over the whole thing.

What with all the groaning and shouting, things turned pretty sour. Nothing much has been happening since then. Nothing much needs to. I've excused myself and am writing this blog while they create a general ruckus out there and as is evident, the little that they do is enough to fill a lot more space than the huge amounts a lot of others do.

That's so raven!

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:47:00 +0000

I feel like Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, all full of corny jokes, yet managing to be funny because I'm vintage.

Wrong feeling I guess cos at 25 yet, I'm not quite within the elasticity limit of the definition of vintage. So it's just the corny jokes then!

That can't be any good!

BTW, today marks an important day in my life. For the first time in my life, I met a 'Vegan'. Phew! She was sitting right next to me during lunch. And when I told her the meat tasted good, she just said 'I'm a vegan' the way rabbits would say 'I'm a rabbit' when tortoises challenge them to races. Of course, the rabbits don't really say it and end up losing the race.

Now that stumped me as you can imagine for Vegans are this group of really pseud people who look down on Vegetarians because they aren't pseud enough.

Vegan!

You might think the lady was from Finland. And Duh to that!

So that's cool. Eat grass and say 'I'm Vegan'.

I really love vegeterians. Trust me, I have nothing against them! In fact, I prefer eating vegeterians to non-vegeterians (and we don't eat lions in India anyway). So trust me, I love vegeterians!

But vegans! They are so IN! You can't help loving them.

She didn't quite echo my sentiments when I told her about my love for eating vegeerians and lost some cool and then she lost some more cool when I asked her whether cows could also be called Vegan!

We haven't been talking!

So there's this guy who thinks I've got the brainiest messenger taglines on the planet, which is a real good misconception to have targeted at you but which, sadly, isn't always true.

So well, when I had my tagline as Jackals on Juniper Trees, he actually gave me an entire explanation which involved monkeys and the tree as a metaphor for the corporate ladder and the monkeys looking up and down, and rather logically, no jackals whatsoever.

Which was fine except that he tried making sense of Langurs in Lingarajapuram, which frankly involved neither metaphor nor reality but just sounded cute (like Groucho Marx in Duck Soup).

And when I communicated my change in job profile as From Elevator Love to Elevator Pitch, he came back asking whether Pitch was a typo.

That was when in a moment of sitcom-inspired-frenzy (and for the thousandth time, I hate FRIENDS... that is the most boring thing being mistaken as funny, ever), I decided to put up the tagline 'Meeting Two and a half women'.

Obviously that never happened! For starters, where would I get half a person. Assuming for the sake of argument that we do procure half a person here, I wouldn't half find it savoury meeting someone who was just, well, half.

So he came back telling me that half a woman was a thin woman while two women were, of course, two women. When I asked him why two women couldn't just be a fat woman by his logic, he got confused, which was obviously a great excuse to accuse him of looksism.

Quoth the Vegan, 'Never More!'

That last bit doesn't really mean anything. Apologies to Edgar.

So there's obviously a lot happening at work. The lifts over here might not really boast the interior decoration that they did at UB City but with Vegans and Monkey-boys around, how could life ever get dull!

Do Gargantuan Gargoyles Gargle?

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:51:00 +0000

The question really is 'Could I care less?'

the answer, of course, is that alliterations do not really have to make sense, they exist purely for the kind of exercise that our tongues are denied when we hesitate to say supercalifragilisticexpicalidocious at the end of every sentence.

Sadly, my cab mates at the new company don't really understand this, which is probably why the guy sitting next to me shot two bloodshot sleepy eyes at me when I asked him about this and in a barely audible whisper, muttered, "Are you a North Indian?"

Now that's a question that's always confused me on account of my absolutely all-over-the-park ethnicity (i have blood from half the Indian ethnicities running inside me with a British great-grand-father thrown in). What confused me a lot more was how gargoyles or their gargantuan proportions or their gargling could lead themselves to any far-fetched Holmesian deductions on my ethnicity.

What's rather apparent though is I'm clearly not making the best of impressions with my new-found craze for alliterations in my equally new-found office-space.

Things should have obviously improved when I tried taking remedial measures by talking something sensible and telling one of my American colleagues that Sarah Palin could anagram itself to A Sharp Nail.

Things didn't! He didn't ask me whether I was a North Indian. He did muter something about Indians, though.

Nothing really made sense all day even as I sent an SMS to most of my friends looking for some meaning in the general scheme of things and asking them their opinion on the Gargling of the Gargantuan Gargoyles.

There was probably something really wrong with the phone networks. Alternatively, no one could have cared less. It was only at the end of the day, around the time I was absolutely washed out that I got a solitary reply lending some meaning to the day.

"Do Jackasses Jackass?"

Flash Fiction: The Last Page

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:50:00 +0000

I can never think outside that tornado of images, that moving window of light exploring the darkness of the room and its irreversible choice to illuminate!

In the darkness, the door to the room gaped like the mouth of a village idiot who didn’t understand anything about anything. A torchlight was directed into the room. Light leapt in at the speed of 300 million kilometers per second, as if in a hurry to reveal what lay within. The first intensity of flash hit the body suspended from the ceiling fan; protruding eyeballs, mocking tongue, contorted face, animating the stationary body making it seem like it had jumped out of the void. But the glare stayed making it as dead as it had been in the first place.

I was present at the worst place on earth at the worst time to be present there.

Good times don’t last and neither do good people!

I found her journal that night in that very room. I was surprised for I had never seen her write. She had never found it convenient.

Most of it was a scramble of scrawls worming formlessly. But that day, the parts that were actually legible danced together to form memories, not sentences, for most of it remained unintelligible.

Memories… of me holding her hand while she climbed the stairs counting the steps in a low voice and smiling every-time she reached the top… of her struggling with that last chicken pierce on her plate stabbing around till I held her hand and helped her fork it… of her tearing her dosa into tiny pieces and smiling while I spooned the chutney and sambhar onto them… of me applying make up to her face while she smiled foolishly and apologetically… of her trying the make-up kit on her own once and emerging hesitantly with the face of a circus clown… of her clumsily wading her way through the room hitting every table-edge and arm-rest in her way… of all those moments when she sat silently wishing she had more…

Every page thanked me wishing that she was less of a burden!

And memories clanged madly, like vessels thrown around in an angry kitchen, as I clutched the diary to my breast hoping it was her quiet body that so often racked with sobs, hoping she was there to see that it had never been a burden.

It didn’t matter anymore, did it?

I turned the pages, studying every one of them, deciphering scrawls, till I reached the last page. The last page! Rickety letters despite the labored care that had gone into creating them! Twenty-four words, not scrawled, but carefully written, knowing fully well that I’d need them to hang on for the rest of my life.

One and a half years of knowing you, more beautiful than many lifetimes! Life is too beautiful to be wasted on my blind eyes!

Flash Fiction: Courting Puberty

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 12:15:00 +0000

Again, the theme was Journal so the format is that of diary entries.

09/12/94
Riya is beautiful. I think I’ll fall in love.
Girls are good.
I hate my little sister Gudiya.
I love Pepsi and Pepsi ads! Daadi says it’s from America!

18/12/94
Cursed at the dining table. DON’T DO IT. This is for those who like to learn form other peoples’ mistakes and like to read other people’s diaries.

19/12/94
I wrote peoples’ and people’s because I wasn’t sure which was correct.
Beauty-Parlour told us today that it’s peoples’.
Sometimes I think I love Beauty-Parlour.
She is our English teacher.

20/12/94
Hi!
P.S. Being regular with diary-writing.
P.P.S. I wonder what P.S. means.

27/12/94
Riya didn’t let me touch her there. She asked why? She’s stupid. It’s obvious why. I told her it looked really round and fleshy and she asked me to touch my own. I asked her to take a close look at me and then she said sorry because I had nothing like that on me.
I asked her again for some touchy but she said No.
I wish people would be more open to letting me touch their pimples.

31/12/94
Aishwarya Rai won Miss World this year.
I think Riya could win Miss World.
I also think our head should grow Maggi noodles for hair. Daily breakfast, new hairstyle.

01/01/95
New Year Resolution: Make Riya my girlfriend. Show her I am a MAN.

05/01/95
I feel funny whenever I see her. Something happens between my legs. I don’t want to write about it.

11/01/95
Never try arm-wrestling. Never. Girls might defeat you. No’ it didn’t happen to me. It sounds impossible but you might lose. It wasn’t me, it was someone else.

17/01/95
We learnt that England conquered India. America is good after all. Daadi is stupid.

25/01/95
I don’t like sleeping with Gudiya. She has stopped wetting the bed. She has started wetting me.

27/01/95
I wet my pants while sleeping. I’m too embarrassed. I’m also scared. It was like glue mixed with water. Maybe I have cancer. I’m hardly 13.

29/01/95
I’m going to propose to her.

30/01/95
I’m going to propose.

02/02/95
Didn’t propose. She is my English teacher and can be scary.

05/02/95
One life and two girls. I feel like ShahRukh in… umm… which movie… all his movies actually.
Yeh Dil Maange More!

07/02/95
India lost to Pakistan. I stole Nadeem’s apple and said Kashmiri apples are ours. My eye hurts. Nadeem is six feet tall.

09/02/95
I finally decided on her. Yeh hee hai Right choice baby. Aha.

11/02/95
I’m going to propose to her. Valentine’s Day.

13/02/95
Tomorrow. Terminator-2. Judgment Day.

14/02/95
She tied me a Rakhi. How did she manage to get a Rakhi on Valentine’s day?
She said I’ll get gassy if I keep using Pepsi lines to propose. I thought you got gas by drinking Pepsi.

16/02/95
I’m her brother now. I hate life. If I’m her brother, I should be allowed to stay in her house.
No logic in life.

Flash Fiction: Poor Professor Higgins

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 09:44:00 +0000

The second of the submitted short stories! Same theme! Same word limit!

I never finished the story! I got married instead!

The smile animating her eyes stares into mine as she slides the ring up my finger. A lone tendril snakes wantonly up to the edge of her lips and she strokes it away reminding me of our first date.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked that night, perhaps assessing me.

I told her I was a writer, “Writing can be tough. I had this friend who wrote the name tags at a workshop for people with multiple personality disorder. It messed his head!”

Her laugh sounded rapt and soaking-in-the-moment like homeless children dancing in the rain.

“What are you writing?” She pushed the obstinate tendril off her cheek.

“It’s complicated!”

Love, though, was ironically uncomplicated.

And now she leans over, oblivious to the judgmental look from the priest, and whispers, “I dig you!” and smiles naughtily.

She coaxed it all out on the fifth meeting. The words slipped out of my brain, bounced twice on my tongue feeling the fleshy rebound, and gravitated out under an influence.

“We-ell, I’m writing the diary of a woman who is dating a man who is actually dating her to study women so that he can write a diary from a woman’s perspective denigrating women!” I blurted.

“Uhh…”

“Not worth a thought!” I hurried, hoping she hadn’t figured it already!

“Complicated enough to be fun!” she smiled.

“Do you, Christopher Varghese, take this woman as wife?” The priest rephrases a question that I’d first heard in my head a month back.

Was I really falling in love? Symptomatically-abundant love?

Did Pavlov drool over his dog?

Are guinea pigs worth a cuddle?

“Do you love me?” she asked.

Were the answers to all the questions the same?

“Uhh…”

“Not worth a thought!” she hurried, perhaps hoping I hadn’t figured it already.

But I had!

“Think Anne Frank or Bridget Jones! And this guy’s dating her to write a woman’s diary!”

“And the book’s the diary of that woman while she’s dating him?”

“Like a diary within a diary!”

“And does she know that?”

“In the end!”

“So he’s just taking her for a ride! Isn’t he a pig?”

“Uhh… yes… yes, he is!”

“Can’t they just date the way we do?” she pouted, “Can’t you make characters like yourself? Nice characters?”

But I already had!

Being a man, writing a woman’s diary is tough! Six months of research and twenty-one Barista bills, and then…

“I really dig you!” I said on our twenty-first date.

She smiled.

“Will you marry me?”

And the smile rippled across her face like a lazy drop hitting the water surface.

“That man in your book…” she asked me that night, “Still a pig?”

“He got better!” I said distractedly, “He might be falling in love!”

“And you… do YOU love me?” she asked, fishing for answers never supplied.

And I turn to look at the priest and smile, “I do!”

Flash Fiction: Many Strings Attached

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:34:00 +0000

Wrote a couple of entries recently for a flash fiction contest (entries less than 500 words) around the theme Journal. Will be posting my entries over here for the next 2-3 posts.

Purple pendulous lips talk of their obsession with smoking! I have a thing for lips; animating a toothy abyss, decorating a formless yawn, butterfly-flapping into words!

Cigarette-butt grinds against table-top. Mint pops into toothy abyss. She caresses me softly, her eyelids tired and drooping, and presses me right there where she knows I like it. And then she brings her lips dangerously close and whispers, so that I can feel the careful mint of her breath, the deep caress of her voice, the seductive spray of her spit.

And we talk!

She tells me how sick she is of sitcoms and all the pointless laughing, how cold the home-delivered pizza always is and how stupid some of those people are who lie down on her sofa talking for hours.

We hardly do anything but talk. That is, she does the talking. And I listen. Not that I have problems with the arrangement. After listening to other people talk all day, she needs to let out some steam.

And then, she sighs deeply and starts talking about him!

It’s the same story everyday; table-cloth-ful spread-out dinners tossed angrily, talk-it-out-please requests spurned, arguments that make her hate the sitcoms.

And then she wishes he were dead!

I’m supposed to disappear when he’s around. . It’s frustrating because he should be the one doing the disappearing. I’m the one she really loves.

“Me psychiatrist, me messed-up-life!” she purrs in a voice which sounds like Irony making love to Dreamy.

“I hate him!” She holds me close, wishing him away. Sometimes, he’s out all night.

She tells me how much I mean to her as she dozes off while I stay up all night listening to her light-kitten snore and the creaking fan overhead.

It is on one of these days that he catches the two of us snuggled together. He seems annoyed, and speaks of me almost as if I were some childish fancy, a boy-toy. Not once does he speak of me as his equal, his rival, and yet it is I in whom she confides.

I lie frozen for a minute before he catches hold of me there. Almost on cue, I tell him everything she has ever told me, as her face contorts in shock. I say it all word-for-word, helplessly, watching her collapse.

And when I reach her chants on how she hates him, his face darkens. And then he swings his seasoned tennis-playing hand.

Palm hits cheek and she cries but I hear nothing. The door bangs and yet I hear nothing. Unable to stop myself, I continue talking madly even after he’s left as she lies crumpled on the floor wailing exaggeratedly.

And yet I hear nothing!

He never returns!

That’s just how I am. I blurt everything out the moment I get turned on!

I wish I could have done something to stop it but as a mere tape recorder, an audio-journal of sorts, my options were always going to be limited.

They got history!

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:37:00 +0000

So yesterday could have been the kind of day where you end up meeting a random girl in a known way, a spark of a phenomenon known as Blind-dating or , in India, post-Orkut-friendship-making.

But yesterday wasn't.

Yesterday was me ending up meeting a known girl in a random way which involved a shocked exchange of hellos and an embarrassed silence where she tries hard to remember my name followed by absolutely no bulbs lighting over her head, largely because she isn't part of a comic strip, and I end up telling her my name and she is gracious enough to connect the rest of our history together.

On the whole, that's a good minute's work or so. If you really look at it, meeting someone from your past after a good deal of time is probably among the most productive minutes of your life where you flood up two biographies and spark a connection strong enough to take you beyond hello.

Kismet Connection or the lack of it, our conversation receives a fillip and a gallop with that bit of our pasts connecting. Both of us suddenly realize that we’re not all that obscure and that there was something in the general neighborhood of a first crush that happened to us oh-so-long-ago.

Or perhaps, it’s just me who remembers it for she just goes: “Long time no see!” when she actually, ideally and bring-some-politeness-to-the-table-already-ly should be mentioning our first crush with some sort of reverence.

She finally gets to it though. On the way, we stop briefly and often at other stops which go by ‘Lunchtime at school’, ‘Softies after school’ and ‘Hit me baby one more time’!

“Really?” she asks me, “You still remember how I used to dance to that song at the class party?”

Of course I do! It’s an impressionable age and the image of a schoolgirl swinging around to that song seems to have scarred me for life. Or, in the very least, is important enough to feature in my inventory of conversation topics much before H2G2.

She hasn’t heard of H2G2 when I ask her and she just goes “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?” in a tone which vaguely rhymes with ‘Duh?’. Almost simlultaneously, she realizes that we have been chatting all this while standing in the way of a lot of people who want to use the escalator, and if you know the yuppie Bangalore after-working-hours crowd at a mall on a Thursday evening, that actually is a lot of people.

That makes me tell her how convenient it is that it isn’t Saturday for we would have been holding a lot more people up at the escalator if it was and she just gives me that H2G2 look again, and now, even the look rhymes with ‘Duh?’

When we finally order some food (we’ve reached a restaurant in the meantime and are having dinner which even in the climax of our relationship around the ages of 14-15, hadn’t ever seemed close to a distant possibility), she tries to tell me excitedly about all the memories we have from our time together, and instead, just blurts out “Do you remember how you ran all over school when I tried to tie you a rakhi?”

I’d rather not remember for I was being rather inelegant that day. She had come up with a Rakhi and I’d just darted all over school trying to get away from her and when I’d finally stopped a few minutes later, she hadn’t been following at all.

It had, of course, gone worse when she’d told me later that the Rakhi had been meant for someone else. But that was the day she figured out that we were more than friends, for that was a state which made you fear the all-risks-no-rewards state of a Rakhi brother.

We started going around after that, which in its school-day avatar, largely consisted of passing chits during class and me hogging on the matar paneer she used to bring almost daily for lunch.

Suddenly, there’s more than just connection as we think of everything from the past. I can see it in her face, the eyes going starry, the look distant and appreciative, and the smile as she goes “Mmm! Nice food at this restaurant!”

So that’s how it goes. She insists we split the bill and I offer to pay which makes her offer to pay in response and we finally end up splitting the bill after a round fo negotiation and compromise.

When we finally part, it’s a lot of fun. It’s not everyday that you run into childhood flames who you haven’t met for a long time, largely because there has been no other recorded instance of a reciprocated flame at school.

So she’s special in a way, and kind-of-not in another for most of the special bits are part of history. Someone else is special now and all that and, anyway, let’s not get there or we’ll have to start a whole new blog on that with purple background and other stuff!

She calls me this morning and the first thing is say is “Check out the date, it’s eight eight eight!” which has a nice rhyme to it but also leaves me looking a bit weird and groggy, both of which I am early in the morning, and both of which could do without the unnecessary showcasing.

But somehow, I don’t worry about it the way I used to because of the history bit! I don’t worry about whether she thinks I’m weird and groggy, partly because I’m pretty sure of the answer, but mostly because it doesn’t matter either way. Another time,. Another place, I would have stammered an explanation. History and nostalgia make everything bright and easy. Somehow, it’s easiest to court a girl when you don’t feel like courting her! That’s when you’re at your most suave with her and the irony is enough to make you forget the date for a bit, isn’t it?

If I was...

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:07:00 +0000

a start, I would be: a false one
a day, I would be: someday. It's a lot more wistful than the otehr days.
a month, I would be: December, but in Australia. I want to know what it feels like to bathe in December.
a fictional character, I would be: James Bond meets Asterix meets Sherlock Holmes. That way, I would have the ladies but a least throw some puns instead of the regular James Bond corniness. Besides, it would be great fun to explain things to women while saying “Elementary, my dear…” Though, if things went wrong, I’d end up as a short gaulish warrior with corny lines and a long 19th century overcoat!
a foot, I would: prefer the mouth to the ass.
a festival, I would be: one without greeting cards.
an animal, I would be: an amoeba. They never die, they just keep splitting!
a direction, I would: have a Maruti Service Station.
a joke, I would be: the one about the guy who always lost at boxing. The one without the punchline!
a liquid, I would be: viscous and gooey and trying to get all over someone’s skin.
another liquid, I would be: blood, and hence, most likely already under someone else’s skin.
a wizard, I would be: Rincewind instead of Harry Potter any day.
a food, I would be: fast.
a foodie, I would be: faster.
a musical genre, I would be: Bhangra Death Metal. I would be worse than you could ever imagine!
an emotion, I would be: the-happy-in-the-happyness-in-the-pursuit-of-happyness
an emoticon, I would be: the one that keeps rolling on the floor and laughing ad infinitum but never seems to be able to laugh his ass off. Absolutely no wear and tear of the south-end!
a sound, I would be: one that would make you think it was coming from a human even though it was coming from a whoopee cushion.
an element, I wouldn’t be: Helium… it’s too girly a name!
from Jupiter, I would be: Sabu! I don’t know anyone else from there!
a song, I would be: a tune that keeps ringing in your head but that you’re never quite able to place.
a place, I would be: somewhere you could come.
a taste, I would be: chicken, milk and honey blended and tasted from a mixer.
sentence, I would be: the last one said at the end of a meal. And I would rhyme with the second last which would be Slurp!
a shape, I would be: definitely not an hourglass.
a book, I would be: Midnight’s Children.
a poem, I would be: one ridden with metaphors and yet proving useless to woo the lady.
a vowel, I would be: uttered often in pronoun form.
a consonant, I would be: ~.
a woman, I would be: confused. I would also make you fight over me!
a religion, I would: confused. I would also make you fight over me!
a finish, I would be: the kind that the runner always wants to bump against exultantly but never realizes till he actually does that someone already has.

And if I were you, I'd wonder why I was still reading this!

Ah! Laziness has me!

On how to choose yourself a career!

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:47:00 +0000

I was eleven when I first found direction in life! I had philandered ten years of my existence graduating from dreams of becoming a train driver to a breakfast cereal manufacturer to a librarian to a librarian with a shapely assistant librarian. But it was not till I was eleven that I finally decided on a serious career.

“I have decided to be an astronaut when I grow up!” I declared at the dinner table one day.

There was a sound of someone choking on the soup and someone else coughing out some food. I love adults! They teach you all the table manners and throw tantrums when you don’t obey them but violate the same themselves at the first available opportunity! Talk of double standards!

“He has lost his mind again!” It was The Aunt and there was a certain resignation about the way she said the last word.

I knew it! They would never try to understand me! I was like Noah with his Ark concept except that I was more fascinated with things that left the earth.

My statement succeeded in making an event out of a regular dinner!

“Astronaut? Do they have that in India?”

“There was Rakesh Sharma!”

“No, he was a cosmonaut! We were USSR loyalists at that time, remember?”

“Oh! Shut up on intricacies!”
“Oh yes! That’s the only astronaut from India. I’ve never heard of anymore. You want to be the second one?”
“Maybe he wants to go to America!”“Bah! Become an engineer and go to America!”

“No, let him be a doctor!”

“Or an accountant!”

“An accountant? That’s for the Marwaris! Anyway, between an accountant and an astronaut, I’ll let him be an accountant!”“You are SO confused!” The Powers That Be lamented in finality.

Me? Confused? Weren’t they the ones throwing multiple meaningless options about and not deciding on any?

Everyone sat in the drawing room after dinner. This was a classic interrogation session except for the dim lights and the torture equipment. Maybe they’d rely on psychological techniques.

It was a group inquisition!

“You should concentrate on your studies and become an engineer!”

“Yes, your job right now is to study! Let us decide on the career bit of it!”

They went on educating me on my priorities till one of them finally came out with it.

“How did you ever come up with this daft idea?”

I hate people getting too vocal with adjectives, especially opinionated ones.

“I’ve read everything about it!” I said straightening up, “And I’ve seen it on TV too!”

The best way to get a forty-five year old deadpan expression fully animated is to give a true-to-the-core eleven year old answer!

There was bedlam! Utter anarchy in what followed! People started throwing their hands frantically about. Some asked for the TV to be removed. Someone muttered a prayer. Someone asked for a Rasgulla to follow up the meal.

“You get your own darned Rasgulla!”

“OK! OK! Why are you shouting at me! I’m not the one who wants to be an astronaut!” And I was the central attraction in the room yet again.

I am of the strong opinion that one has seen enough of the world and has read enough by the age of eleven to take a calculated decision on a career path without having to piggy-back on the prejudiced conformist opinions of others.

Eleven is a strange age to be coping with a lot of changes around you. You start getting disinterested in cartoon action heroes and enter the real world of science fiction and espionage. Well, at least, in the books you start reading around that time and the movies that you see.

My choice of career had been a classic case of a well-judged choice by exclusion. Considering my complementary interests in spy fiction and sci-fi, I had come to the conclusion that I had three career options that fascinated me: Spy, War Pilot or Space Researcher.

I have a thing against favoritism, especially when I like both options equally! I decided to take the middle path and be an astronaut. An astronaut who could potentially be spying on aliens!

I decided against the War Pilot option owing to the enhanced mortality rate, what with the enemy pilots’ target practice adding to the confused birds flying into plane machinery. Civil Aviation had no appeal! In fact, it was an oxymoron! The cabin crew was a more tantalizing option in the company of the air hostesses but then, that was a no-brainer and didn’t call for superior skills at my end.

They didn’t like that either! And who was I to be surprised? Wasn’t that extremely predictable on their part already?

When evolution stops making sense...

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:31:00 +0000

As a kid, I loved watching National Geographic, but hated listening to it. I felt very disillusioned with the entire concept of the voyeuristic pleasure associated with watching the poor animals in their most private and intimate of moments. Add to that, the fact that someone from a different and self-proclaimed higher species was adding his interpretation to the whole sequence of events defining the life of an animal he couldn’t even remotely communicate with.

The National Geographic was a major sham! How can you trust a man who can’t even understand the nuances of a woman he lives his life with and communicates all day long with to understand the foibles of a Syrian Brown-Nosed Black-Butted Fox with whom he hadn’t been out even on a single date?

My imagination would take a trip and end up in a roadside café in Rome with the stereotyped commentator and the animal seated at a date on a Roman Holiday.

Commentator: What would you like to order for lunch, my dear? Scones and Jam to start with?

Date snarls.

Subtitles: Someone get me out of here! This is, by far, the most boring guy who’s ever had me for arm candy!

Commentator (turning to audience): Note how the female expresses her approval at the mention of food. (Turning to waiter) Get us some scones and jam please! (Turning to Date and stroking nose) There’s a good girl!

Date snorts!

Subtitles: Someone ask him to take off his hand or I’ll have it for lunch!

Commentator: The female is the more sensitive of the species and regards a reassuring touch from the Male as a precursor to the process of procreation. Note the response of the female to the touch of love!

Jam and Scones arrive. Commentator places the food in front of the Date.

Date sniffs and grunts!

Subtitles: Why doesn’t the fool get it? I need some good meat here! Not this!

Commentator: The female is sniffing the food! Note how it brings its nose up from the food to signal its approval of the food. Also note, the jaw being bared in anticipation. The fe… aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!

Date bites off a sizeable portion of the commentators arm and munches on it contentedly!

Subtitles: Finally, something nice about this date! Let’s see what he has to say about me now!

Commentator (in anguish): …aaaargggghh…!

Well, it does seem to make sense if you look at it that way!

Original Sin

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:10:00 +0000

1990 was a great year to start stealing. Especially if you were born in 1982.

Stealing was fun purely because the adults never understood it. They weren’t supposed to anyway, since we had just invented fun!

Sneaking out after dark was fun too and had, hence, been banned by the adults. We worked on extremely predictable dynamics. Things that were banned were fun and all things fun were invariably banned!

Besides, stealing was a challenge! Sipping milk at breakfast, from a glass that had been served while you were lazily ruminating over the previous night’s dream, wasn’t!

It was against this backdrop that I realized that the choice before me was an obvious one.

“Are you sure its going to be all right? I mean nine is really late in the night! And what if they have a dog or some superhero watchman?”

I hated watchmen! They made the whole act of stealing a lot more risky than it was ever meant to be.

I was fine with the nocturnal rendezvous though because the dark was never as scary with people around you.

The Gang looked at me sympathetically.

“It’ll be all right! Besides, we’re plucking wild berries! No one’s interested in wild berries! They’re wild!”

“But how do I sneak out at nine in the night?”

“Quite simple! Tell them you’re sleeping early! Fix up the bed with pillows and cover it with a bed sheet! Lights off and you’re out of the back door!”

The Gang was great at making you change your mind. They could have convinced a cannibal to live on seaweed if they had wanted to!

I was too young yet to have grown a conscience on myself! Even St. Augustine, of the introspective conscience, had gone on record stealing pears at a very young age, though he had later made a whole book about how he had felt very rotten over the whole thing at the end. I, for my part, was fairly certain that stealing berries was a lot less sinful than stealing pears in most moral codes.

That night, after dinner and past my eight-year-old parent-prescribed parent-imposed bedtime, while the adults immersed themselves in the masochistic indulgence of watching Doordarshan serials, a figure engaged itself in an amateur act of pillow sculpture, fashioning an eight-year old body under covers, and once done, unlocked the back door and stepped into the night.

And when I found myself plopping over the wall on to the other side along with four other equally eager wild-berry-pickers, I knew that this was definitely going to work!

Except that I wasn’t wearing a toga!

One of the hazards of growing up is ending up with tight white-on-red polka-dotted shorts which don’t fit you any longer and make you look irresistibly cute as victims to cheek-pulling aunts. The real problem with tight polka-dotted shorts, though, lies in their extremely nervous seams which buckle under pressure with exasperating consistency, especially when you’re halfway through your first attempt at stretch gymnastics.

As an unassuming eight year old, I was unaware of such irresponsible behavior on the part of the family of tight shorts. I was, however, acutely aware of a certain discomfort in that general area as I attempted to climb that tree laden with wild berries on that polka-dotted summer night. St. Augustine and the ancient Greek dress code of long flowing toga must have been significantly more conducive to the act of climbing trees.

I was the first to reach the top of the tree despite the tight shorts. And as I stood half-perched on that branch, I looked at the world of berries hanging around me and reached out to gather them.

At this point, several things happened in remarkably quick succession.

The first clump of berries, on disconnecting from the tree and coming off in my palm, seemed to set off a technologically advanced burglar alarm in the house resulting in doors being thrown open and a very nasal voice emerging from it carrying a well-built body in its wake.

Almost in response to the voice, someone in The Gang, at a relatively lower branch of the tree, woke up from profound existential thoughts and concluded “Shit!”

In about the same time that the conclusion was reached, the rest of The Gang, quietly and professionally withdrew itself from the berry tree and its whereabouts and clambered over the wall onto the street outside in one smooth motion.

Having watched The Gang desert me efficiently, I rapidly concluded that the best course of action was to remain perched at the top of the tree and set myself to the task of calming my nerves.

Realizing a mass emigration at play on the compound wall, The Nasal Voice emitted a high pitched “Stop, you…”

As a perfect rejoinder to the high-pitched shout, an extremely unwanted specimen of The Common Indian Owl suddenly materialized out of thin air within a few inches of my ear and let out a confused Tu-whoot-tu-whoo!

Almost a split second after the hoot, my nerves which had been undergoing a process of forced calmness up to this point decided to go all jangly resulting in me losing my foot hold and my legs spreading with the precision of a first time gymnast!

Nearly as soon as I had gained foothold again and decided on heaving a sigh of relief, the constraining tight polka-dotted shorts decided that enough was enough and that they had never been meant for gymnasts in the first place and upon reaching this conclusion, decided to elegantly start ripping off along the back.

In confused response to the short-ripping, the sigh of relief which was about to be heaved decided to stay put, and I started on an inelegant tumble through the branches in true Rambo fashion ending a series of thuds with a final thud on the ground.

The head, still reeling from the final thud, turned to notice two skirted figures hurrying towards it, one with elegant Barbie legs and the other with hairy nasal ones.

Still processing the skirts, I decided that it was high time I left the scene of action.

Having sensed such a decision at my end, The Nasal Skirt shot off in a flying tackle and landed on my tender, tree-thud-damaged, eight year old bones, knocking any remaining sighs of relief out of my system.

At this point, I blacked out!

And you thought the best thing was the Air Hostess!

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 07:43:00 +0000

OK! Those of you who’ve talked to me in the past week already know about this. But let’s get it out here.

I met a girl on the flight back to Bangalore. I know - it never happens. The seat next to you is always taken up by a fat, hairy man who tries his best to nudge you out of your own seat while snoring a soundtrack to the entire act. And, of course, there are the unwholesome cases where he may even plop onto you… and drool!

The seat next to you is NEVER supposed to be occupied by a cute little thing. And it wasn’t! The seat next to me was empty. It was the seat next to the empty seat that had the cute little thing. Except that she wasn’t little… she was, in a phrase – and a grammatically inaccurate one at that – goodly goodly athletic!

Perhaps it was best that she wasn’t in the seat next to me! Perhaps the distance helped.

It was only around take-off that we started talking. I turned and addressed a head full of hair and no face.

ME: Hey!

The hair turned around and the face looked me up.

SHE: Hey!

ME: You’re going to Bangalore? (Kicks self inside, like a mental kick and all) I mean obviously you are! So… I mean… this flight sucks, right? Two hours late to start with.

SHE (first smile): Quite!

I like girls who say ‘Quite!’ instead of ‘Yes!’, ‘Of Course!’ or ‘TOTALLLLLLLLLLY!’. It just, well, sounds refined. Quite!

ME: So, great view outside… the city and all…

SHE: Quite!

ME: And, I mean… uh… what do you do in Bangalore?

SHE: I’m not too sure… that’s what I’ll be discovering this time around…

ME: Oh… you’re not from Bangalore…

SHE: I’m going for an internship.

She filled me in on the juiceless details which involved her being a scientist of sorts or on the way to becoming one and involved words like ‘microbioloogy’, ‘genetic code’, ‘Kolkatta’, ‘shucks’ and ‘flibbertigibbet’. It was around the time we reached ‘Shucks’ that I realized we would probably hit it off well.

ME: Flibbertigibbet?

SHE: Yeah, have you ever wondered why people would make words like that? I mean wouldn’t it just make sense to make short words.

ME: Yeah… you mean like feg or jik or gub… such a lo of nice short words lying unused.

SHE: Exactly, why would they do it…

ME: Perhaps it’s onomatopoeic?

SHE: You mean like the word sounds like the meaning?

ME: Yeah… like when you Bongs say Roshogollaw… if you call it Rasgulla, you don’t get anything from the sound but Roshogollaw makes it sound like a really fat, round thing, possibly Russian too… like Kafelnikov or Warsaw…

SHE: I think Warsaw is Polish!

ME: Right, that’s a wrong example… but, you know what people have to say about details like that… they say… “Details, Baby, Details”… have you ever wondered what that means?

SHE (smiles): Oh it’s all about the dialogue delivery… it might be patronizing or it might just be happiness that he’s talking to his ‘baby’… that often makes me wonder… why do guys refer to their girls as ‘baby’? Is it like some masculine I’m-going-to-protect-you-thing?

ME: I dunno… Girls also call guys ‘baby’… perhaps that’s maternal then…

SHE: It’s all weird… do you refer to anyone as ‘baby’? Or am I getting too personal here… Sorry about that…

ME: ‘SSOLLRITE… no sweat! No… I don’t think so… it feels weird, the whole baby business… btw, have you ever thought about the term Baby Boomer… it makes you wonder that those people are actually on the verge of death and they are being called Baby Boomers… that’s the worst use of Baby ever…

SHE: Yeah… (thoughtful staring at the back of the seat in front of her) (then breaks trance suddenly) been watching IPL?

ME: Quite!

SHE: What? ‘Quite!’ doesn’t fit there at all… what you should be saying is something like ‘Yes!’, ‘Of Course!’ or ‘TOTALLLLLLLLLLY!’

ME: You read me!

SHE (grins): Are you a fast read?

ME (perturbed): What’s that supposed to mean?

SHE: Oh, nothing major… what do you think?

ME: I think it involves a lot of touching, though ‘touching’ and ‘fast’ add up to something which isn’t exactly a ‘compliment’

SHE (smiles): Quite!

ME: So IPL… luvvit

SHE: So what else is new… I loathe that chap though. SRK… jumping around… makes it all the more fun to watch his team lose…

ME: Yeah… by the way, you’ve seen this guy Vidyut in Chennai Super Kings?

SHE: yeah… you find him cute? Aww…

ME (ignoring her comment): What does Vidyut sound like?

SHE: Sounds like he’s a very holy Tam-Brahm boy obsessed with the threads on his body.

ME: Doesn’t it? Have you ever wondered why Vidyut sounds all holy and Tam-Brahm but Bijli sounds like an item girl when both of them mean pretty much the same thing

SHE (chokes on water for she was drinking it): OOOH! Never noticed!

ME: No one did…

We pondered over it for some time… it was good to ponder over something after having jumped all over a sea of topics over the past few minutes… though jumping over a sea is something which doesn’t make too much sense… even my analogies are losing it now… people can do that to you, especially when people are girls in plane seats near you, talking the way she did.

SHE: No clue…

ME: You know… I thin it’s like Scientific Names and Slangs… Vidyut is the scientific name… Bijli is the slang… it’s like, you know, Sus scrofa domestica …

SHE (incredulous): What’s Sus scrofa domestica!

ME: It’s the scientific name for the pig… you wouldn’t ever call a man a Sus scrofa domestica if he tried to get too touchy-feely, right?

SHE: Yeah… I’d call him Sus scrofa Wilda…

ME (chokes on water in a delayed reciprocation): You’re good!

SHE: Quite!

ME: What’s the obsession with ‘Quite!’ though!

SHE: It’s just everything that TOTALLLLLLLY can never be… it’s dainty and lady-like…

ME (grins): And isn’t it cos you’re contrary to popular opinion?

SHE (taking mock offense): Haven’t you known me too little to start passing comments?

ME: Umm… I’m… sorry…

SHE: No, I’m very offended… you should at least have had coffee with me to pass comments… after all, coffee is a date and we’ve just been having water from the start…

ME (laughs relieved): Coffee is a date, really?

SHE: Quite! That’s popular opinion… it’s a safe date… girls are ok with coffee when they meet someone for the firs time… I think it’s probably because they don’t have to act too nice for the amount the guy is spending…

ME: So the guy pays?

SHE: Of course!

ME: You girls are such a bunch of… Uh… you rap about guy-girl equality… why not split the bill… or alternate… like every alternate date…

SHE: Shut up!

ME: Right!

SHE: No… don’t give up so easily?

ME: Dunno… our acquaintance is still quite precariously poised for me to make comments on your gender, something about which you can’t do anything even if I convince you that it needs a change…

SHE: I wouldn’t mind being a guy… no pressure to be smooth in language and skin…

ME: Quite!

SHE: Now you’re saying it…

ME: To get back, you’re all sophisticated, right?

SHE: Quite!

ME: What’s your opinion on people using hip-hop language…

SHE: Dat’s ma style?

ME (grins): yes, that kind of stuff

SHE (scoffing): so blindly wannabe…

ME: aren’t we all

SHE: Yes, but in less blatant fashions…

ME: Quite!

SHE: Quite!

ME: Even your ‘Quite!’ is wannabe…

SHE: You’re full of wannabe yourself…

ME: As already stated, isn’t everyone?

SHE: Quite!

ME: Quite!

Both of us stayed quite for a bit.

SHE: Have you noticed how circular this whole conversation has become of late?

ME: Of late? That’s so weirdly formal (grins) yes… it reminds me of Catch 22.

SHE: Or of Vonnegut…

ME: you’ve read Vonnegut?

SHE: all of him… too preachy though…

ME: Quite! I prefer Heller, frankly… a lot less preachy, though he has written less… but Catch 22 was like a lot of books combined… like a war book to end all war books…

SHE: yeah… I’m kind of bugged about how Indians don’t read anything intelligent… they want their books like their movies… brainless, based on stupid assumptions and revolving around weak sitcom…

ME: easy on that… but yes, I totally agree…

SHE: Anyway!

ME: Anyway!

SHE: Have you seen Before Sunrise?

ME: Damn! I’ve been thinking about it like halfway through our conversation.

SHE: Except that Bangalore I hear closes early…

ME: It would have been fun though, no?

SHE: Quite!

ME: Maybe we should meet sometime down there… in the real world… I mean meeting in the clouds like this is…

SHE: Yes, yes… I get your point… please don’t get nauseatingly lyrical

ME (grins): Right!

The plane descends… of course, other conversation happens… but, like the load of crap that it is, it doesn’t deserve mention…

SHE: We should meet sometime… next Saturday…

ME: Totally… what’s your wildest dream, though?

SHE: That I’m a princess and someone kisses me and becomes a frog!

ME: Ouch!

SHE: Yeah, these fairytales should be written in reverse… If we do not like a guy kissing us, we should enable our kiss to turn him into a frog... that would stop a lot of rape and child abuse…

ME: Profound!

SHE: What’s yours?

ME: Huh?

SHE: Wildest dream?

ME: It’s like I’m in this room full of beautiful girls…

SHE: Damn! You men are all the same…

ME: No, no… this is like… It’ll be like being a mosquito in a nudist colony… you know, unlimited buffet and all, though it would be ironical…

SHE: Ironical?

ME: You know, I’m a guy… guy mosquitoes don’t bite... only the chicks do…

SHE: Ah! The chick mosquitoes… so you retain your gender in your analogy even though you change your species…

ME: Obviously, though, in real life, it’s a buffet… for the girls are there and I‘m there…

SHE: Do you realize that your analogy is falling apart unless you become a chick mosquito double quick…

ME: This and that and all… forget the analogy…

SHE: The plane is landing…

ME: Quite!

SHE: Unless we meet randomly, we’ll make it next Saturday…

ME: I don’t think the random meeting works outside movies… in movies, people keep meeting by coincidence… you know what I have against coincidences?

SHE: What?

ME: Coincidences never happen when you want them to! Coincidences are like writing your phone number on the wall of a public toilet hoping for someone to call you and ending up realizing that you two were meant for each other! These things never happen! That’s not how you find soulmates!

SHE: Definitely not!

ME: Besides, as a guy, you wouldn’t exactly want to marry a woman who uses a men’s public toilet!

SHE: Quirky!

ME: Yeah!

Plane stops. We get up along with everyone else.

SHE: I like to think of it as fertilization. You know, after sex!

A lot of people raise eyebrows.

ME: Fertlization?

SHE: It’s like I’m this egg, the female egg… and all you guys are sperms… and the chance of a random meet-up is one in a million…

A lot of people look at us again. We move out of the aircraft…

ME: What the… why can’t you be the aimless sperm… you’re being so sexist and all…

She gets into the airline bus… There’s no more space for me to fit in…

SHE (as bus doors close): That’s how nature decided it, my friend, the guy sperms are running around to get lucky even before anyone’s born… see you on Sat!

P.S. The last bit didn't happen... I mean the closing of the doors... we left in the same bus... but that's no closure, man! I can't write this blog post about how we waited for our luggage, and how the conveyor belt never workedetc etc... Closure Closure Closure... that's why movies end the way they do...

The Ordeal of School

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:49:00 +0000

School was an institution whose sole purpose was to teach you how to sleep while sitting. That’s an important skill to survive out there in an extremely boring world filled with people who can’t stop talking.

Besides with none of the pretty girls sitting next to me, there really wasn’t much by way of classroom entertainment.

It was, therefore, pathetic how teachers missed the whole point. To make matters worse, they resorted to corporal punishment!

I shook myself from my sleep as I was hit by the ruler on the head again and looked up into a pair of spectacles which had Shiny-Patch attached to them.

“Of all classes, my class? You have some nerve!”

“Uh… Sorry!” I mumbled groggily.

“AH! SORRY!” He bellowed, moving away dramatically, “I hate that word! SORRY! I hate it because for you kids, it means absolutely nothing! It’s like a pejorative slap on me!”

“What’s a pejorative slap?” I asked innocently.

“Shut up!”

That was just like adults. They said things which they felt sounded cool but had absolutely no answer if you cross-questioned them!

“And this is the last time I’m warning you! Never sleep again!”

Shiny-Patch was he school prinipal and his warnings were things that you really had to follow because he suffered from a habit which compelled him to involve your parents into the whole thing at a very early stage.

I wasn’t in the mood for any more restrictions at home!

“Hey Rip-Van-Winkle!” she danced towards me after class, “Getting into an all new relationship with the principal, are we?”

“What relationship?” I asked.

“One that will involve your parents pretty soon!” she winked, “So tighten up in class!”

I did tighten up in class. The problem though was that I failed to tighten up outside it which was half the reason why my four-feet-something self found itself looking up into those glasses again a couple of weeks later.

“Let me tell you some good news!” Shiny-Patch started off with a twinkle in his eyes.

I knew that look; it was his sarcastic day!

“The good news is that if I actually turn this watch back some 20 minutes, you’d be on time for classes! Now, isn’t that good?”

I smiled weakly.

“Yes! It’s good!” he continued, answering his own question, “Don’t you wear a watch?”

“No!”

“And why may I ask?”

“Umm… I’m always late… that’s why… they depress me!”

I felt like kicking myself the moment I’d said that.

“Really? That sounds so logical!”

“Uhh…”

“You know what else is logical?”

“Uh… no!” I dreaded the answer.

“A letter to your parents!” And he flashed me the toothiest grin I’ve ever seen on a Principal’s face!

It was curtains! It wasn’t my fault really! It didn’t make sense to be always on time! Why, the only reason someone would want to be punctual would be if he was bored to death with what he was doing at that moment! I prided myself on being interesting and punctuality wasn’t really my forte!

But then, that's just how school used to be: weird!

The joke at the Girls Hostel

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:14:00 +0000

Note: This story is actually inspired by a real life incident that happened with a friend of mine who also happens to be an avid reader of this blog. It has been rewriteen here with his permission with appropriate name changes and with him as the narrator.

Probation was the most dreaded of all things at college and a DP on your record wasn’t exactly healthy. Add to that the fact that you had to miss out on an entire term and effectively graduate a year after your batch. A surge of thoughts along these lines were running through my mind as I looked at the Sent Mail folder in my email account to discover a mail sent to one of the first yearites.

From: Ashish Dhawan [mailto:ashishd@iitk.ac.in]
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001, 6:50 PM
To: rachita@iitk.ac.in
Subject: A Request

Madam,
I wish to request your august presence and esteemed audience for a night of intimate pleasure and passionate oneness!
Regards,
Ashish

Oddly enough, it had none of the characteristics of a mail that would normally be sent for framing a person along these lines: no juicy descriptions, no going overboard with words that would be beeped out by the censor board. In fact, if anything, it was way too formal to be used for such purposes.

And that was exactly why it was so dangerous for it was the kind of mail someone would expect me to send across in a flippant, frivolous moment! It was the sort of mail that would definitely be attributed to me. My normally expansive usage of words was being played against me!

Balancing the contrasting emotions of finding something horrifying and funny simultaneously is fairly challenging, especially on the facial muscles. I grimaced and laughed for a few seconds but pretty soon, I realized that the joke was entirely on me.

“So were you able to figure out who sent it?”

“I have absolutely no clue! And if I did, I wouldn’t be standing here! I’d be there wringing his neck!”

“OK! Now don’t start freaking!”
“Freaking! Of course I’ll freak! I might get a DP here and ruin my whole life because of something I wasn’t even involved in!”

“Hey! Don’t worry now! The whole campus calls you Seedha! She will never think it’s from you!”

“That’s the whole problem! They would expect me to be extremely capable of sending such a weirdly worded mail!”

“Oh yes! Again, you will have to forgive me for this but I couldn’t help finding that mail simply hilarious!”

“Whatever!”

I didn’t really sleep that night! I would have liked to believe that I was up studying for the exams the next day but my mind was in such panic that anything even remotely related to RSA Encryption refused to register with it. My imagination went into overdrive thinking of what could happen! A DP, losing out on a decent job at the end of college, and live life dreading all application forms which had questions asking me whether I’d ever been on probation or suspension for indecent behavior.

Or perhaps she’d just slap me in front of everyone and let it be!

“My life is all Sushi and Akuri!” I moaned as the clock struck midnight.

“And that would mean?”

“It’s uncooked and ugly and a scrambled mess!” I told myh roommate (that's sposed to be the owner of this blog) and seeing his eyebrows still up, hastily added, “Terms from Japanese Cuisine!”

“Phew! How do you come up with the weirdest of things at this hour and that too when you have an exam tomorrow and a lady waiting somewhere for your ‘intimate pleasure and passionate oneness’?” he chuckled.

I was laughing and bemoaning my existence simultaneously.

And I bemoaned my existence all through the night. And I continued bemoaning it through the examination till I saw the invigilator come over and collect my paper.

I would have bemoaned it longer except that I heard someone utter the words ‘esteemed audience’ right next to me and throw out a string of suspended chuckles.

I turned to look at two girls from my class. They looked at me and chuckled further.

“Intimate Pleasure!”

“Passionate Sex!”

I had a good mind of correcting her on that since it was “Passionate Oneness” but I chose to put on the Whodunnit act and looked at them cluelessly.

“You’re so funny!”

“Me? What? Why?”

“All the girls know about it! It’s so funny she didn’t even want to complain about it!”

That was reason enough to drop the clueless act.

“She didn’t? She won’t?”

“Who would? You’re such a joke!”

“You mean joker… like a clown!”

“Uh-huh… you’re a joke!” And they walked off tittering.

I was a joke! I was a joke! I couldn’t believe this stroke of luck. I would just be the laughing stock of the entire girl’s hostel! Oh how I wanted to be that, just that, just the laughing stock of the entire girl’s hostel!

“I’m not getting a DP!” I shouted as I reached The Wing.

“Did she slap you?”

“Uh-huh!” I said smugly.

“She kicked you!”

“No!”

“She complained but they don’t believe her!”

“Nah! That’s highly unlikely, isn’t it?”

This was victory and I was going to savor it slow and beautiful.

“So tell us!”

I told them. They sat back and pointed their fingers at me and laughed while I sat exultantly in the center, the extremely thankful and willing butt of a joke!

And when they’d laughed enough, they continued to point and guffaw in fake bursts!

I was relieved! For at that moment, all I wanted was to be the biggest joke in the girl’s hostel! And nothing more!

Random thought of the minute...

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Thu, 01 May 2008 21:15:00 +0000

Apologies... really bad health... advised against typing... hence no activity... a real quickie to break the jinx... hopefully shall write more often... definitely shall...

Princess Diana was declared dead on account of a fatal overdose of speeding tunnel, administered under the formulaic guidance of paparazzi, more paparazzi and some more paparazzi. The speeding tunnel was, of course, a simple matter of Frame of Reference. The paparazzi were a case of curiosity killed the cat, except that it was the cat-hunter who was being curious!

Of Dirty Jokes and a Nagging Conscience

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:29:00 +0000

1993 was the year of Jurassic Park, experimental cloning, the Latur earthquake and news involving Michael Jackson, some little boys and absolutely no music.

1993 was also the year I heard my first dirty joke. That’s a bizarre snippet of statistic though, since I’m yet to meet someone who remembers exactly how or when he heard his first dirty joke. Dirty jokes have a way of virally working their way into your system. You never know when you caught them first or how you got so full of them but they’re all over you before you know it.

Especially when you’re eleven and extremely impressionable!

Despite possessing a mind which used to get rebellious on the double, I had always been a fairly obedient child. They’d tell me to look both ways before crossing the road and I’d look both ways while crossing the road! They’d also make it a point to ask me to stop burping at the table and I’d stop burping at the table! On the whole, I had been the least of hassles as I grew up.

I had always had an overwhelming sense of taboo on account of an overtly functional and often paranoid conscience. One fine morning in 1993, a narrative sequence with questionable undertones made it through my taboo filter under the guise of an innocent story and before I knew it, I was beginning to feel funny as a reaction to what I’d heard.

Hearing my first dirty joke… laughing at it…

It actually happened when I was sitting with The Gang for lunch. One of them had proudly proclaimed how he had extended his tastes to Indian authors and had started off with Khushwant Singh and how his life had changed overnight.

I had heard quite a bit mentioned about the great man and had considerable reason to believe that he was one of the main proponents of Indo-Anglican literature and was braving ahead with the baton of the English Novel in India. A pair of innocent ears perked up on either side of my head. Reviews of literary geniuses were always welcome!

“He is a master of humor!” started The Much-Improved Reader.

“Tell us more!” I heard my innocent lips and mouth sync out those words.

“So he uses words beautifully! He knows how to weave stories around simple words and they hit you right at the end!”

“Oh! So that’s like O’Henry? Or Somerset Maugham?”

“Yes! Yes!” he hushed me impatiently, “All that and more!”

I waited eagerly! We were talking partition literature here! Train to Pakistan! Maybe a dozen more on that country-rending event!

“So there’s this story about a man who’s trying to get into a bus, you know! And then he’s using a walking stick and he slips, you know! And there is another man with 12 kids, you know! And both miss the bus, you know! And the man with children tells the other man to put some rubber at the end of the stick, you know! For grip, you know! And well…”

And he continued narrating the masterpiece in his unique personal style which involved a whole deal of ‘you knows’ substituting the commas.

And I listened, munching on every word, till the recounting came to an end with a punchline and before I knew it, I was smiling for I’d heard something fairly naughty!

I hated myself! How could I ever fall to such levels where I could laugh at things which were not supposed to be talked about?

The Conscience took me to court for the rest of the day.

“Yerr honor! I would like to present before you the principal accused in this case!”

I looked around myself, as if rudely awoken from a dream, and found only three people in the room: His honor, The Conscience and Me.

The principal accused? Surely he couldn’t be talking about me!

The Conscience continued. He had no reason to stop.

“The accused has never had a criminal record in my books except for some secretly stolen cookies and an equal number of secretly stolen moments with a lady of his age whose hair seems to be a matter of prime obsession with him!”

I couldn’t believe my ears! I had no clue The Conscience had issues with my harmless games with The Childhood Sweetheart.

“The accused has been charged with extraction of unwholesome pleasure from the consumption of an addictive substance, namely a dirty joke, in the current case of offence. Yerr Honor! With your permission, I would like to interrogate the said accused!”

“Permission Granted!”

I looked around in disbelief. I had no clue whatsoever about the identity of this permission-granting judge.

“Where were you at five minutes past noon today?”

“Err… The Football Field!” I mumbled.

“And would you care to describe the nature of activity you were indulging in at that point of time!”

“We were talking!”

“What was the subject of discussion?”

This was getting uncomfortable in hindsight.

“Literature!”

“What kind of literature?”
“Indian... err… Indo-Anglican!”

“Which author in particular?”

“Khushwant Singh!”

"Did you get excited at the mention of Khushwant Singh?"

"I guess."

"This is a court of law! Not a game of dumb charades! Quit guessing! Did you or did you not get excited?"

"Yes, I got excited."

"And did your ears stand up?"

"Yes."

"Where were you at that time?"

What did he expect me to say? Where was I? Attached to my ears? Where else?

“In the field!”

“And what did the discussion comprise of thematically?”

I felt cornered. “Partition?”

“Are you sure? Wasn’t it something different?”

“Uhh… Buses… Public Transport!” I had to wiggle out of this one.

“Was that the central theme of the discussion?”

“Yes!” I said confidently. I needed to take a stand to wiggle out of this one.

“OK! Let me ask you another question! Was there a one-way narration in progress?”

“Yes!”

“And did you happen to laugh at the end of this narration?”

This was getting tricky again.

“I might have smiled! I usually do! It’s pleasant!”

“Did you or did you not laugh at the end of this narration?”

“I did!”

“Was it because you found it funny!”
No! It was heart-breaking, gut-wrenching, blood-curdling! That’s why I laughed! What a NUT!

“Yes!”

“Would you say the part on which you laughed had potential for innuendo?”

I was getting cornered once again.

“I don’t know! I couldn’t be sure!”

"Very well! I’m going to tell you a joke and you shall tell me whether you’ve heard it before."

And he proceeded to recount the joke word for word.

And like a giggly fourteen year old who has recently heard his first dirty joke, I felt the urge to snigger starting to overcome me.

I bit my cheeks! I was in a court of law and every giggle would be taken as evidence against me!

The Conscience reached the punchline and despite my efforts, I let out a chuckle!

“Ah! You laugh! Yerr Honor! He laughs!”

Of course I laugh! What was I? Some horror movie freak?

“Did you find this funny?”

I couldn’t help it. “Yes!”

“And what, in your opinion, is funny about two people entering a bus?”

This was getting tougher. He knew he had me so he continued!

“Would you say that you find the innuendo towards the end amusing?”

“Yes!”
“And have you heard this joke before?”

"Yes, I have!"

"Were you present when you heard it?”

No, I wasn’t! I was doing telepathy! Seriously, The Conscience was taking the Prosecutor role a bit too seriously for his own good!

“Yes!” I replied dutifully.

“Yerr Honor!” he started, turning to the judge dramatically and gesturing as if shutting an open case, “We have our man!”

A conscience on the rampage is worse than a long-term suspicious nagging wife laying hands on incriminating evidence.

And again, the amoeba can't really bark...

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:30:00 +0000

Note: Quickie #2

Consider the Amoeba!!!

And now that I say it, it suddenly seems like a big deal. It throws thoughts into having to procure a microscope, perhaps a slide… and at the end of it all, some amoebae!

How ironical that something as small and insignificant as an amoeba can throw you off guard and put you at a crisis of sorts!

A dog is easy! Consider the Dog, I’d say! And all you’d have to do is sit around staring into the mournful eyes of one of the dumbest creatures on the planet whose highpoint of the day is an oddly masochistic endeavor at ceaselessly pursuing its own bum to get a bite off it.

Not so the amoeba, which brings us back to the question of where exactly can one find it. We’re all aware of the near millions of micro-organisms in within an inch of our nose but none of you can definitely and unambiguously point me a source if I ask you for some amoebae!

Assume, for the goodness of things, that we finally have procured for ourselves, a slide of those hideous creatures and are now, like those voyeurs of National Geographic, robbing them of their unicellular privacy through the lens of a microscope.

The most striking thing one notes is the very thing all of us long for and yet amoebae beat us at it. One cell making a mockery of a have-not organism!

Binary Fission!

That one thing which would double one’s money immediately, finally solve the problem of ‘Why-can’t-we-all-have-Deepika-Padukones’, simultaneously solve the issue of ‘No-One-Can-Eat-Just-One-without-spending-a-ton-of-money’, effectually prevent all covetousness with the coveted objects multiplying at will and, most importantly, put an end to all those cheesy I-found-the-twin-I-lost-at-the-Kumbh-Mela Bollywood stories for the lonely twin could reproduce to create one for himself whenever he felt like it.

Yes, Binary Fission would have been swell!

As also the minor point that since the two resultant amoebae of a fission are effectively the same as the original amoeba, the first amoeba of all time is still preset in a gazillion different pieces, thereby solving the question of immortality.

Come to think of it, nature did have a reason for keeping those amoebae invisible to the naked eye because a species as crib-oriented as the humans would have gone on a collective depression spree just noting how good life was for amoebae to keep multiplying themselves at will and live forever.

Instead, Nature, and very judiciously at that, chose to keep us close to dogs, who in their relentless pursuit of their own bum, make us gold-diggers and rat-racers feel pretty good about our comparatively higher aspirations!

That's SO Not Life!

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:59:00 +0000

Author's Note: Apologies for the lack of activity here. Part of it owing to an oft-relapsing injury and part owing to involvement in a certain creative endeavor that I shall be disclosing sometime. In any case, I've just started this thing of sitting and writing whatever comes to mind for 5-10 minutes. I'll keep posting that here in between the regular posts (which can be differentiated on account of their length). Apologies again if the quality of the shorter posts swings wildly, but a lot of them are going to be quickies and quickies, though efficient, lack finesse!

The good thing about life is that more often than not, and that’s a fair deal of time, it chooses to behave the way it should… like Life. The problem really turns up when life, in a moment of quirky melodrama, refuses to behave like life and ends up behaving like, say a Bollywood production.

The problem, though, is that you never know when life decides to play truant next! You realize that things are wrong only after you get up one fine morning, in the midst of considerable turmoil, and hear the wailing police sirens! Of course, it’s all over already, for that’s how it happens in those Bollywood productions.

There isn’t much you can do about it! What’s done is done! Life was meant to be a series of sunshiny mornings you wake up to and declare in true Robert Browning style that ‘All’s right with the world’. And yet, when it plays truant, you know that all isn’t really right, that something is gravely and horribly wrong, and that a lot of that something is already spreading like a virulent disease!

You look around yourself, the liquid hands making their way, almost threatening to head for the corners of the earth like seismic shockwaves radiating from an epicenter.

And that is when you wish that you had been more careful, that you had not drifted away in that dream of confusion and that you had exercised more control over parts of yourself that were meant to be controlled.

You blame it on maturity, you blame it on upbringing, you even hope that they’ll excuse it because you’re possibly half-dog… but that never happens! And like a Bollywood movie, the police sirens ring only after it’s too late… and beyond remedy!

You want to do something about it, possibly retract those spreading fluid fingers and that rising stench, possibly cover up the crime and prevent it from reaching the corners of your world…

But at five in the morning, and at the age of four, such thoughts are beyond your comprehension, especially when you realize that you have just enuretically, and most compulsively, peed in your sleep!

Bildungsromane face-play: Of girly pimples and more...

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:23:00 +0000

This is rather a response to an earlier post where my 13-year old self shows an obsession with touching, feeling, rotating and mutilating pimples!

Some of the biggest breaks come your way when you are least expecting them. Sir Issac, who goes around by the name of Newton, discovered his new set of laws while lazing under a fruit-bearing tree and laws of physics are the last thing on one’s mind while enjoying a siesta under a tree. I got my first pimple as I woke up one morning in my thirteenth year of existence on the planet.

I instinctively tried to wipe it off the mirror when I saw the blemish and followed the failed attempt with an exaggerated sweep trying to wipe it off my face.

And then I realized that I had actually succeeded in growing my first pimple. It was perfectly true that I had absolutely no voluntary control over its emergence on my face but I liked to think of it as an achievement considering how I had fretted over getting it.

“Ooooh! You have a pimple now!” she said on the very first morning, “Now, you can stop being so obsessed with mine!”

I smiled happily! It’s common practice to smile happily when one achieves an end to a plaguing identity crisis.

“You’re finally getting older, chhotu! You should try Clearsil and get rid of it or it can be quite a bother.”

I withdrew in horror! People were already talking about removing something that had taken me 13 years to get in the first place.

I knew then that I would never get over the excitement of finally owning a pimple!

And the fascination lasted for exactly two days. By the end of the second day, I wanted to pierce it and put an end to the ever-balooning phenomenon that had hijacked prime real estate on my face.

At the age of 13, pimples are like female companionship. You crave for them and go all out to get one of their kind, or more! But once you have them, they just won’t let go and keep enhancing their presence in your life by the day.

I finally resorted to Clearsil. Applying chemicals to the face was extremely girly and unacceptable to my thirteen-year old psyche. And the luxurious confines of an attached bathroom saw me compromising the stand of my gender and age. But it was all for a good cause!

By the end of the fourth day, I didn’t have the patience to wait upon some farcical chemical concoction to start acting.

I decided that desperate situations required desperate measures!

Pimples aren’t like babies. They have absolutely no gestation period that a confused teenager can unambiguously lay claim to. And for all the technology around, they still can’t determine the sex of a pimple. Again, babies are easier! There is a school of thought, though, which believes that unlike babies, the sex of pimples is inherited and those on a girl’s face are girly pimples while the boys strictly sport guy pimples.

The Childhood Sweetheart hailed from that school of thought.

“I’m going to burst my pimple today and check out what it’s made of inside.”

“Oh cool! Go ahead!” She replied nonchalantly.

“Have you ever pierced yours?”

“Of course not! Mine are girly pimples! Guy pimples can be burst and they still won’t look any less hideous than they always have. Girly pimples should never be pierced! We are elegant and dainty!”

“You as in the girly pimples?”

She made a face! She was good at that!

She probably believed that girly pimples were like pet snakes, violate their modesty and they bit you back!

I was standing in front of the mirror later in the day holding a wire with the determination with which a surgeon holds a scalpel. This was going to be the first cosmetic operation on my face. In a matter of five days, my face had transformed into key experimental territory.

There is something extremely unnerving about a wire when it starts approaching your face at an irritatingly low velocity. There is something equally unnerving about the curvature of thirteen year old cheeks and the subsequent thoughts of wires slipping on curvatures and entering innocent eyes!

My hand started shaking and I decided to give the idea a pass. A subsequent experiment with a swiss army knife raised similar doubts in my mind and I reluctantly decided to give the idea a slip.

I concluded that there was absolutely no contraption known to man which could be used to poke open a pimple!

I spoke to The Gang over the weekend! Our weekend chats used to be most improving and had been a great forum for sharing survival strategies across the board.

“What do you guys do when you have pimples?”

“I just let them take their natural course! It doesn’t pay to interfere with nature!”

He seemed to speak from experience. I looked at his heavily-cratered face and decided to filter out his suggestions.

“You are one to talk!” jeered another, “your face is like the surface of the moon! Do you shine at night?”

And everyone burst out laughing.

The Moon looked disgusted! “You have a black hole for a brain! All empty and nothing in it!”

I decided to intervene before an argument of such astronomical proportions could gather more root!

“Focus, guys! We need a solution here!”

“Shave it off!”

Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that before? But there was a catch!

“I’d like to see the stuff inside it too! I need a delicate process!”

“Let me help you! I’ll pierce it slowly!” The Black Hole offered!

I withdrew in horror! I couldn’t have other guys invading my privacy when I worked on myself! What would they be offering next? Help with digging my nose or something? I shuddered!

“No! Thank you very much!”

“I know what’s best. Take the razor out of the shaving blade and run it down your cheek in a shaving motion! Your eye will feel safe and when you reach the pimple, you can just lightly start working on it according to your convenience!”

That made sense! Three hours later, I surveyed the general pimple area as I stood armed with a razor in front of a mirror!

The first cut pierced the pimple ever so lightly. The second cut was more deliberate and I saw a good deal of goo ooze its way out in a viscous flow!

And then it started to hurt!

“What! You were serious about that?”

She was shouting at the top of her voice. Childhood Sweethearts usually do that! Most women do! They love to shout!

“Excuse me! I told you about it as well!”

“Yes! But I thought you were joking!”

Trust a woman to distrust a man!

“And,” she continued with the same intensity, “you ask why it hurts?”

“Yes! Why would it hurt? I thought it’d just be some nice fluffy stuff coming out!”

“Of course it would hurt! You poke yourself with pins and needles and… Creeps! Where do you keep your brain?”

I figured she wasn’t really looking for an answer there since her knowledge of anatomy was arguably at par with mine.

It looked ghastly, to say the least! A smooth 13-year old cheek violated at one point by a huge blotch!

That was the last pimple I interfered with. Pimples value their privacy and behave equally erratically irrespective of their sex!

And a month later, I had my second one!

“Learn from your mistakes!” She sounded me off, sounding like The Sanskrit Teacher.

I fondled my pimple fondly! This wasn’t a candidate for the plastic surgeon’s table!

As of today, I sport a solitary gash on my face!

The Second-Biggest Shock of my life

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:52:00 +0000

When it first happened, I treated it with the seriousness with which Marie Antoinette treated the Revolution.

“Qu'ils mangent de la brioche” I told her without batting an eyelid.

“Blah blah what?”

“I was quoting Marie Antoinette! Let them have cake!” I declared trying to sound pompous and important like those people who write self-help books.

“What cake? We are talking about veg and non-veg food here!”

“Exactly! And you’re making a big deal of nothing. Like those French Revolutionists!”

“The French Revolution most definitely had a point!”

“Well, you don’t!”

She protested! That goes without saying. A lot of these conversations may seem to end with me but that would never have been possible since our relationship worked on the principle of “He shall never have the last word”! She had the strange obsession with playing the part of the uninvited full-stop to all conversations. She’d go ahead and extend our conversations at times just to have the last word. Were there two of us playing at this game, we would have made the nicest couple as per the marriage counselors. “Talk!” they’d say! And talk we’d do. Except that I had figured the rules of the game fairly early in life and had removed myself from fruitless competitive pursuits in such direction.

“… and it is absolutely senseless and farcical to argue over the need for proteins and other substances that vegetables…”

She was still protesting. I had forgotten to hum the customary “Hmm!” to signal my withdrawal from the conversation, a withdrawal which would be conveniently interpreted as acceptance and conformism but was anything but! I couldn’t care less though! Incorrectly interpreted withdrawals are fine by me as long as they lead to a hastened full-stop.

The Soulmate had just reached the fag end of a conversation which had stated with a declaration of extremely distressing proportions.

“I’m becoming a vegetarian!”

“Suddenly and all?”

“It’s the way to go! Killing animals is cruel! And eating meat is unhealthy!”

Another one of those fads! No one in their right mind would give up on delicious succulent juicy chicken and consider celery and asparagus as even passable substitutes. And her growing idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, The Soulmate had a very balanced head on top of those shoulders.

I smiled and gave her some Marie Antoinette and I knew that this too would pass.

Fads, by definition, are obsessive but short-lived. The problem really comes up when some of these fads, like Pokemon among the actual kids and Orkut among the overgrown kids, assume distressing proportions and threaten to transform into fashion, and effectively a way of life.

The first wisps of grey vegetarian clouds started looming on the horizon when she stamped her foot outside KFC and emphatically declared that ‘no chicken’ translates to ‘no chicken’ and that KFC was to vegetarians what Hitler was to the Jews. Well, she didn’t actually say that but her eyes darkened with some similarly sobering simile.

“No KFC?” I looked at her incredulously.

“No! I am an all-out vegetarian.”

“Really! Mess food is one thing! Even I don’t care for the chicken in the mess too much! But this is driving things way out, isn’t it?”

“A vegetarian is a vegetarian is a vegetarian! And KFC is the worst thing that can happen to chickens. They were even taken to court for it! Say no to KFC!”

“No! No one ever said no to KFC! I mean even with that rumor about the Ku Klux Clan and the impotency thing, people would still go there!”

“I wouldn’t care about a Ku Klux Clan! But KFC is among the primary reasons I decided to become a vegetarian! You should see the email forward on this!”

An email forward! Email forwards probably accounted for half the teen suicides in the world and for 97.9% of the remaining confusion on the planet. If they didn’t stop this soon, these email forwards would end up triggering The Third World War!

There had to be a way out! I just wasn't sure how or where! As Rushdie had once remarked, many a marriage and a prospective one are broken at the tip of Menaka Gandhi's quill! Or perhaps it was Khushwant Singh who'd said it! In any case, it was a most profound statement!

If animals weren't meant to be eaten, they wouldn't have tasted so nice!

Of territoriality and subservience

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 06:32:00 +0000

A close look at the history of India reveals that the men have always been obsessed with owning land, and this was even before the tax exemptions kicked in. It has, hence, led to the development of a certain territorial instinct in men. Even to this day, men like their ‘space’; at the office, at public urinals and in a relationship. This territorial instinct is also seen in the common Indian dog, which sniffs every pillar before peeing on it, to ensure that that pillar is his particular pee territory. Men also follow this religiously! You will never find men using adjacent urinals if they can help it.

Women, on the other hand, have traditionally been subservient in India and have consensually played second fiddle to their chauvinistic worse halves! Their docile nature is clearly seen in their preference of soaps and serials on in-laws threatening to claw out each others eyes when they might as well be watching men wrestle it out at the WWF.

But they won’t!

An elevator is the one place where these concepts are brought to the fore most expressively. Men, sensing their territorial spaces unpleasantly infringed upon, will act extremely discomfited. Their discomfort is manifested in their obsession with the digital ticker near the roof which flashes something as drab as a decreasing or increasing number series. Scores of television soaps based on domestic disturbances (read saas-bahu squabbles) and world peace (read Britney’s premature retirement) cannot capture this segment of the audience with the effectiveness with which this monotonous ticker does. All those jobless people who make a living out of fooling gullible people into believing that they can read body language will back me on this thought.

The women, on the other hand, are reduced to their typical subservient Bharatiya Naari posture which includes staring equally obsessively at the floor, at the watch, at other women’s shoes and at the heels of other women’s shoes. And this includes even those with back problems who have been advised against slouching!

As you can see, men and women are reduced to their basic elements within the confines of an elevator.

That is if the elevator is crowded!

If the elevator, instead, consists of only one man and a woman, the territorial instincts of the man combine with the subservience of the woman to yield the classic case of eve-teasing as popularized by Bollywood movies, namely a door closing on two unconcerned individuals and opening up on an extremely disheveled, entangled mess which becomes the cynosure of all waiting outside.

As I said, the elevator is a metaphor for life! Men are obsessed with constantly increasing (or decreasing) salaries and women with heels, when they might just as well have enjoyed the journey!

UP-Bihar for a kiss!

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 13:52:00 +0000

There are times in a person’s life when after considerable speculation, one arrives at the conclusion that a fat wallet, despite literally being a pain in the ass, is actually better than an empty wallet. On such occasions, one decides to economize.

That was the single biggest reason that I found myself in an obtuse-angled, cross-cultural sandwich in an unreserved train compartment in the August of 2000.

Add to that the fact that the decision to go home had been made in a matter of minutes and had, hence, allowed no time or opportunity to qualify me for a berth in the reserved compartment.

I had obviously rented out my brain at a very low interest rate while making the decision to travel across UP and Bihar in an unreserved compartment. A train journey in a general compartment is a case study in Darwin’s theory of ‘survival of the fittest’. Traveling across these states is no small deal and it is undoubtedly such an experience which had prompted a noted Bollywood lyricist to pen lines as crass as:

Lend me a kiss, my beloved
And take UP and Bihar in return

(Ik Chumma tum humko udhaar dei de
Aur badle mein UP-Bihar Lei le!)

Note: The beloved bit was just to put things in perspective. Also, one mut part with sophistication to quote certain sources. One apologises for having hurt the better sensibilities of certain readers. One must cease to spew senseless disclaimers now!

The time table had stated the departure time as 12:08.A system that works on approximating train times to the nearest hour must have had some audacity to publish times like 12:08. But then those were the days when the famous chieftain Laloo was not at the help of the Indian Railways and the system hadn’t yet been considered worthy of an IIM case study.

I studied the people around me who had sandwiched me from every possible side.

The guy next to me seemed to have a disconcertingly strong interest in archaeology as he proceeded to indulge in excavations of the nasal kind and subsequently rub all resulting residues on various articles of clothing around him, irrespective of whether they were hanging off his body or his fellow passengers’.

The guy on the other side meanwhile decided that it was high time the people around him witnessed a striptease and started removing his garments one by one. Thankfully, it was a false alarm and he was merely trying to remove the innermost of the three shirts that he was wearing.

One of the guys had meanwhile come to the conclusion that somebody was calling for auditions for a Close Up ad and started exhaling and blowing audibly, except that he hadn’t really done his homework and was exhaling copious amounts of malevolent fumes.

The train drew to a halt at a wayside station. There was a pronounced shift in the general ambience of the coach as people clamored in through all inlets. It’s an unwritten law in India that any markets operating within an unreserved train compartment works on the principle ‘Vendor is King, Customer is nothing!’ Contrary to general mentality, this is one law which is closely observed throughout the country.

It was in observance of this law that vendors, beset by some major cross country racing obsession, started trampling the length of the compartment. Walking across the compartment in such fashion can be an arduous task and was indeed worth applauding. Someone started the applause, almost in response to my thoughts! It was a strange world but someone did value the spirit of the vendors.

I turned towards the source of the off-beat applause and…

“Chiknaa! Out with some money!”

… drew level with the hideous smile of the Common Indian Train-haunting, Cheek-pulling HijraI!

He continued the off-beat clap as I braced myself in a mannequin act! The problem really was that the cheeks weren’t the only part of the body that The Off-Beat Clapper was willing to vandalize.

At a very early point in my life, I’d drawn a set of rules, one of which stated that between being a mannequin and a heated angry young man, I’d gladly choose the latter if the modesty of certain body parts was at stake. I was about to g on the offensive, not that that would have helped, but the train reached a station around that time and there was considerable movement which resulted in an efflux of Hijras from the coach and me getting a window seat.

The Window Seat, as is common Indian knowledge, is the highest rung on the unreserved compartment ladder. It is a state of being devoutly to be wished for within the confines of an unreserved compartment.

Lost in such thoughts, I felt the cool August breeze hit my face and bring with it a watery reprieve from the heat within. I had a moment of spray and surf before I realized that it was someone washing their hands at the adjacent window and the wind sending the water across.

Perhaps the much coveted window seat wasn’t that great after all! I swapped the seat with a swapper! In fact, people would have participated in an auction for it at that moment.

The new seat had its own set of issues, what with the manna falling from the top berth, which was more idly crumbs than honeyed-bread and which made you wonder why people were eating Idlies in Banaras an that did add to all the philosophical contemplations that held my mind captive at that stage.

Like all good things in life, that journey also came to an end! And without much speculation, I decided that a fat wallet, despite being better than an empty wallet, must be transformed into one while using The Indian Railways.

I don’t speculate much anymore!

One person's Shanty is another person's Home

noreply@blogger.com (Sangeet Paul) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:26:00 +0000

Readers had asked me why I never do movie reviews. Franly, because I never feel driven towards the same. But three cracker movies in a week have just driven me the distance. Well, it's like a movie review... not quite... well almost... Heaven, this one's for you! :D

I have had a most improving existence of late! I have watched three bollywood movies in a week. For a person who lives on Sitcoms and Woody Allen, this is a huge achievement!

I finally did watch Om Shanti Om! The movie has a history to it. I was originally supposed to watch it with a certain esteemed reader of the blog but she called me up a few minutes prior to the movie saying her sister was ready to claw out her eyes in Kill-Bill-2 fashion if she wasn’t allowed access to my ticket. Ergo, the sisters had a sisterly sisters’ day out at the movies. And, of course, Home Shanty Home is perfect for some sister bonding, what with all the early forties six-pack to ogle at together. A week down the line, a certain other reader of the blog asked me to check it out, to which I responded with the I-have-a-thing-against-over-hyped-movies line and she left in a huff with the I-pity-all-you-intellectual-arty-farty-movie-watchers-and-may-yo ur-tribe-cease-to-exist line.

As I was saying, I finally DID watch the movie! And I must say that I have finally found meaning in my life.

For the first time in a Bollywood movie, a Ghost starts blabbering English with Deepika Padukone (who has every right to go for the Curviest Ghost of All Time nomination, as also the Ghost I Would Most Like To Be Haunted By award) rattling off “YOU KILLED ME MUKESH! I WASN’T DEAD! YOU KILLED ME!” or some similar rants. So, English-speaking hot ghosts are in!

Speaking of which I should also talk about the other equally fascinating movie Darling which again has a curvy hilarious ghost whose sense of timing is worth the little finger on my left hand which I anyway find extremely useless while typing! The Darling ghost turns up only on occasions when the hauntee (that’s the murderous lover always) tries to get cosy with his lady making it all Boo when he actually wants some Coochie-coo!

There is also the other case of repeating a mistake ten times over in Das Kahaaniyaan where we again have ghosts coming out of water, pleading for sex and then killing the poor chap.

Ghosts, my friend, are having a field day in Bollywood. No longer do they need to wear funny masks. Soon you’ll have song and dance sequences with the ghosts running around trees and changing clothes with every step, which frankly should be feasible for the ghosts.

And while we are at the ten-story-movie, let me also make note of the first instance of selling a movie using communalism and seduction in tandem, which should not come as a surprise considering the story was executed with Neha Dhupia. Obviously, when Miss Dhupia saw a script on communal riots, she submitted it for her Only-Sex-And-Shah-Rukh-Khan-Sell-In-Bollywood test. Shucks! Test failed! Can’t get SRK? Oh it’s easy, we know what to put in.

So it’s the story of a man chasing a kid from another community and the kid enters the loo allowing Miss Dhupia to get a quickie with the man outside it. Normally, you’d expect the kid to be outside and the quickie inside but then this is Bollywood. And, of course, since its Bollywood, the quickie must only involve things happening on the face and so they start putting the face to uses we never ever thought it could be put to. That is until the man realizes that there is a time for a quickie and there is a time for killing kids and the two are not necessarily the same. He dramatically shoves The Face away and enters the loo. The rest as we know is history and an open window.

Getting back to other stories in Das Kahaaniyaan, I have learnt that one should not try to act smart with people in the neighboring apartment the way Manoj Bajpai does with Dia Mirza, especially when one is a writer. I have committed such learnings to long-term memory and have till date not indulged in any tomfoolery with the neighbors. The fact that all of them are hairy, geeky non-Diya-Mirza-like chaps might have contributed to the abstinence.

Anyway, enough of those ten already.

Getting back to Home Shanty Home, which is incidentally the overseas promotion title, I am impressed by the potential a lyric like London-Paris-SanFrancisco has. The amount of money that guy got for penning that line is probably more than some of us earn in a whole month. That’s like getting a month’s pay for writing the name of 3 cities such that the last one rhymes with Dard-e-Disco! I’m considering alternate careers already.

Hail the never dying spirit of the funniest movie studio outside Bihar! And, again, You HAVE to check Bhojpuri movies like Khatiyaa Khadai Le Takiya Sarkai Le to fathom the scope and purport of the aforementioned statement!