Drumroll, Perhaps?

All the world's a stage and I'm suffering from a dreadful case of Stagefright.

Life. It's Overwhelming.

I can't believe all that I have never known, felt or experienced and the fear of the possibility that I never might is pretty scary as well. Life often seems to be full of pointless exercises that lead to nothing. Dead ends and fears. It all seems so useless sometimes. But I choose to believe that there's a point to it all.
It'll all make sense. Someday.
Just not today.

To do or Not to do!

Because someone said we download more than we upload. My contribution to the Meme world.

Mommies and Frandships

I sent my mother a message this morning saying "Hi Frand"

This was a symptom of a special sort of boredom which mostly infects me during exam time. It usually causes me to spam people on farceboob and tag everyone in everything just to be obnoxious, send the same sms repeatedly to people to annoy them and send e-mails without punctuations simply because I can. Nothing new, nothing special.

My mother called me back at night to ask me why I was calling her a FRAUD

:|

The End

Sometimes you reach the end before you want to, the end when the music stops and there is only a  few minutes of silence and clarity before the madness starts all over again.

At the end of these days, I'm thankful for the lack of sense at all times, a reasonably clean bed, a friend to call when I've reached super-panic mode and most importantly, I'm thankful for 8 rupees Sugarcane juice.

Salam, Mumbai!

A horse carriage trots along the road, with velvet cushions and sparking lights.

Three kids, two girls and boy, trot along behind it. They exchange surreptitious glances and look around, hoping to make sure that no one else sees them.

The tourist horse carriage stops at the signal. The carriage driver, whose attention is focused on the signal ahead, probably hoping that the lights will change to green if he stares hard enough, does not notice the children seize the moment and sneak under the carriage.

The kids sit on the rods connecting the wheels and grab on for their free ride as a sly smile breaks onto all their grimy, unwashed faces. They know that they've dared and they're proud even though they know they don't fairly deserve it; but Life has dealt them a hard hand and they know that they have to do what they can with it. Maybe they've been told that or they've learnt it already, I don't know.  At any rate, they seem to know.

The biggest girl of the three, dressed in what is clearly a discarded piece of clothing that once belonged to someone who now owns better clothes, gets off the carriage to make sure the smaller boy is strapped on properly. Either due to the incessant starring on the carriage driver's part or the sufficient passage of time, the signal changes and the carriage begins to move before the girl has a chance to finish her sisterly duties. She decides against jumping on and instead, she holds the little boy in place and runs along side the carriage, laughing.

Mumbai, The City of Dreams!

Two Oh One One!

Guidelines on how to spend an indoor New Year ( Views are subjective, resultant feelings objective )


Sit around and look at eachother's faces, know that you're with your people. Talk a little, drink a little, leave a movie unfinished to wish a few people. Strum a guitar, play some music, dance without moving. Laugh at your people, laugh at yourself. Talk about boys, talk over booze. Feel your head spin, try not to move. Watch the clock tick, laugh a little more. Watch the sky, bear your heart, look at the darkness turn to light. Feel some love, give a few hugs. Pass out.

Happy Birthday, 2011. First impression has been very impressive.

Do it for Yourself, Not for Myself

Snips and Snails and Fairy Tales!

Photography Assignment.

"Narrate a Fairy Tale", he says. "But narrate it in black and white"

Take one annoyed coffee day manager. Two friends who don't mind the camera. Two IITians - one who can pen pwetty lines and another to push you to finish what you started. Some coffee, some laughs, some words of frustration.

Fairy Tale narrated.

Ta-dan! 

Racist Mother

Conversations with my mom can be very amusing. Mostly for her and the general public. For me though, it usually serves as a reason to proceed forth in the quest for a wall that I can bang my head against, repeatedly.

Here is something that transpired between me and my racist mother -

Mom: So that's why she's here?

Me: Haan. She was only--

Mom: What is that sound you keep making with your nose?

Me: Huh? WHAT? What sound?

Mom: You know, the one you just made. [Proceeds to make the sound of a donkey with nasal problems]

Me : Ayyooo! Ma! That wasn't a noise. I said 'Haan', It means 'Yes' in Hindi.

Mom: Oh. It sounded like a Hindi snort. I don't like it.

Hostel Lessons

Living in a hostel can teach you many important lessons in life. That's something we all know.
However, what I have recently deduced is that living in a hostel can reinforce a lot of the lessons you learnt in school and this time, you will actually remember the lessons.


PHYSICS


Do you remember how you learnt about all those free electrons that travel in the empty spaces in metals? How they gain kinetic energy from the fast atoms and how they give energy to the slower ones? No? Neither do I. Turns out, this is the reasons why metals are such good conductors of heat.


I figured this out when I was heating a glass of water to make tea. My hostel-mate, who was handling some hot noodles, said she needed the vessel I was using because her's was too small. I used a pair of tongs to transfer the water onto a cup, rinse the vessel under tap water and place it on the stove. 
My roommate screeched, "Quuuuick. This thing is going to overflow. Put on the damn stove" In my enthusiasm to help, I pulled the vessel aside with my hand, dropped it on my toe, shrieked like a 12 year old and figured, vessels get too hot, too quick. I didn't have to go to school to learn this.


ECONOMICS


I had 100 bucks in my wallet which was supposed to last me for the following four days, till I got home. That might seem like a lot of money but it isn't. I live in a city where a 10 minute bus ride to college costs me 7 rupees. So that's 14 rupees a day gone just on travel and I still had to figure out a way to get my three meals for the day. Resources need to be planned and used judiciously.


Day 1 - It's your friend's birthday, which means...BRUNCH TREAAAT! So that just leaves dinner. The remains of the previous day shall come to your rescue. Ha! 14 rupees shall be incurred for travel.


Day 2 - Get up late and don't go to college, thereby saving up on bus fare and breakfast fare. Eat the maggie for lunch and the top ramen for dinner which have been lying around in your shelf for the past month. Easy and economical, no expenses.


Day 3 - Eat 12 rupees idlis for breakfast from college canteen. Another friend's birthday... LUNCH TREAAAAT! ( How it pays to have friends!) Visit a friend late in the evening and smile politely when her mother asks you to stay for dinner. Air punches can be performed later. Inclued with the 14 rupees spent for travel, the day's expenses shall amount to 26 rupees.


Day 4 - Eat 6 rupees Vada Pav for breakfast. Take a 20 rupees cab ride to the train station, a 8 rupees train ride, followed by a 20 rupees rick ride to the airport where you can catch a flight home and make evil plans to spend your parents' life saving all the way there. 


Total expenses amount to 88 rupees, leaving enough money for 2 vada pavs if need be. And that, my friends, is how I learnt to allocate resources. 


POLITICS


If your roommate likes to be a bitch and keep the light on till 2 in the morning, thereby making it very difficult for you to sleep and show up for your 8 am lectures the following day, deal with it. If you fight with her, stand up for yourself or do something to MAKE SURE that the light is switched off when you go to bed, she will pee on your bed. Like literally.

She was gone!

There was something unusually serene about the room that morning. The white curtains swayed in the wind and I could see a glimpse of the green outside as I lay there on our bed, touching the part of her pillow where her head should have been beneath a mass of curling hair. I walked upto the window, pushed the curtains aside and looked at the view outside as the sun hit my eyes.  

She always looked lovely standing by the window each morning, sipping a cup of tea that she clasped with both her petite little hands and looking at the lush green outside. But she won’t be able to do that today or tomorrow or… I did not want to think about it, it would be too difficult to think about the days that would follow. 

I thought of the day I had ahead of me and all at once, I felt an inexplicable feeling in the pit of my stomach that began to envelope my entire being; I sat down on the bed and let the feeling pass.

Her absence was overwhelming; I got up and went into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. I had never had to step into the kitchen in all these years that I had been married and now that she was gone, I had a feeling that I was in enemy territory. I slowly found my way around the alien atmosphere and ruffled through the cupboards with that unfathomable feeling twisting me more and more inside. 

I hadn’t had a cup of home-made coffee since the day I had been married. She drank tea in the morning and that became our morning drink. It’s one of those things you do when you are married for that long, you like everything the other person likes, you care about everything the other person cares about, you share everything with that significant other… None of that mattered at that moment. 

I didn’t have anything to care about or share; and I didn’t have to drink tea because she wasn’t there. The feeling squeezed me more and more from within and I felt myself shouting, shouting to no one in particular for I was alone now.

I walked into the dining room, coffee in hand and saw the remains of the consequence of her absence from the previous night. I stared at the half empty bottle of alcohol that was left on the table and it suddenly hit me stronger than ever; she wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the room, she wasn’t in our home, and she wasn’t breathing the same air I was breathing. And again, that inscrutable feeling that seemed to drive my actions consumed me as I reached for the bottle on the table and surrendered myself to the spirit.

The phone rang loud and clear and reverberated all around the house. It was late evening by the time I got up from the couch with an awful headache and looked around the living room.

The phone rang again and this time, it seemed to get louder and louder with each ring. I tripped on the empty bottle of alcohol which was now on the floor by the couch as I staggered to pick up the phone. I heard Hari’s voice, magnified a thousand times in my head say, “Dude! Are you Okay? I’ve been calling the whole day and I was really worried when you didn’t answer. Are you alright by yourself? Do you want me to come over? I was thinking I could – “

I hung up. I did not want him there. I did not want anyone there.  Why did no one understand that I just wanted to be alone? I wasn’t a child, I could handle her absence. Her absence, the one single thing that seemed to redefine my reality, took me over with a feeling so intense that I could hardly contain it.

It was all too sudden, no one anticipated it and yet, she was gone, wasn’t she? She was gone and what was left was that feeling inside of me that I was struggling to come to terms with. The thing was, no one could blame me for the way I was feeling. After three years together, after two years of marriage, her absence was a new phenomenon. 

I walked back into the bedroom and lay down on our bed. The room looked different as I lay there by myself, taking in the colors of the room that somehow looked brighter, the song of the birds outside the window that seemed louder and the smell…the smell of alcohol on the sheets, on myself. 

She would never have allowed me to drink during the day if she was around, but she wasn’t there. She would never have allowed me to wake up at noon or drink coffee or fall asleep on the couch in the middle of the day, but she couldn’t do anything about it now because she wasn’t there. 

I got up off the bed and jumped and screamed and punched the air as that enigmatic feeling that was a culmination of happiness, joy, freedom, awe and excitement came over me again.

I sat back down once I had put myself together and reached over to the bedside cabinet to find the note that had brought me such divine bliss. There, written on a yellow piece of scribbling paper in her neat, cursive handwriting were the words that spelled my freedom: “Dev, I have to leave to visit a friend on short notice. I’m just gone for the weekend. Please behave yourself. If I find some skinny blonde in my bedroom when I get back, I swear I’ll divorce you”.

Self Amusement

My brother is eight years older than I am. He went off to college when I was 9 years old. My neighbors, as I had mentioned in an earlier post, were not all that amusing. So I pretty much had to keep myself entertained all throughout a major part of my adolescence. By the time I was in my final years of school, I had mastered the art of self amusement. This video, which was taken on a random afternoon while I lay bored and squirming on my bed in 2007, holds testimony to the same.

I know. I know. I'm awesome. And amusing. And awesome.

You may applaud now.

My Mother just doesn't Understand Me!

I sent my mom a text message

“I’m feeling nostalgia and boredom. Do you think I should drink Tea?"

The first part of it was a mere statement of fact and the second was a question. Now this message would make perfect sense to anyone who knows me.

I have exams starting Monday which means that I should be spending majority of my time studying, which is not what I'm doing. Instead, I stare into blank spaces or lie squirming on my bed thinking about studying and hence, I get bored.

I live away from home and any little thing can set me off and make me nostalgic. Since it’s exam time and I usually spend a lot of time pre-exams engaging in futile activities like cleaning out my inbox, sms and looking through old greeting cards, nostalgia comes as a common illness.

I have a weakness for Tea and coffee. If not for Tea and coffee, I’ll probably die or sleep or do both simultaneously. I ask people if I should drink tea/coffee because it makes me feel better about ingesting so much caffeine.

Now my mother, who calls me only if there’s a commercial inbetween the program she’s watching, called as soon as I sent her the sms to tell me I’m an idiot.

Mom: What does nostalgia and tea have anything to do with eachother?

Me: I just want Tea mummu.

Mom: Idiot!

Me: Whaat? Don’t scold when I’m feeling nostalgia.

Mom: Do you know what ‘nostalgia’ means?  Go check with a dictionary. It’s called nausea, not nostalgia.

Me: Er! :| 

My mother, of all people, expects me to be logical on a hot afternoon before exams.

She just doesn’t understand me. I almost died of emotional trauma but fear not, Tea saved me.

Hazy Conversations

It's been a weekend of excess. Excess of this, that and some other things as well.

Some lines were crossed, barriers broken, bonds formed and confessions made. Most importantly, after over a year in a new city, strong lines of trust and friendship have been forged.

Memories of this weekend shall always be hazy, colorful, with a tint of guilt and a mixture of happiness, loneliness and conversations interrupted by bouts of laughter.

Bombay might be the city of dreams after all.

O When the Swine Flu!

It was the summer of 2009. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the flowers were in bloom and there was Swine Flu in the air.

Everyone was paranoid, as was I. The first obvious step was to go marching to the nearest store to get one of those night burglar masks that everyone was talking about. After which it was only human to laugh at those who did not own a mask and go “Ha! Ha! Suckers!” when they weren’t looking. It was also imperative to visit a doctor every time someone in the same room/builing/street/city sneezed. It was the swine flu protocol we were expected to follow.

Amidst all the madness, the inevitable happened. Schools and colleges shut down, which sent me packing off to my little Chennai village.

Little Chennai village did not care about swine flu. Pune was too far away, so what difference does it make if Eight people were dying there every day because of this new disease? Little Chennai Village did not give a shit.

I was still paranoid.  So I decided I needed a bottle of sanitizer to fight the flu. I’d never seen too many people use sanitizers in Chennai, except my best friend who has always been a compulsive sanitizer user, but I didn’t think it was a ‘Chennai thing’. I was soon about to find out.

I went to all the local medical stores to check for sanitizers. They were either out of stock or had no idea what a sanitizer was. The following is the translated Tamil conversation that took place in the last medical store I went to (and it was the last one for good reason):

Me: Do you have sanitizers?

Shopgirl: Sanitizers? What’s that?

Me: Err… You know the thing everyone is using because of the swine flu?

Shopgirl: Oh, that!

Shopgirl turns to storeguy

Storeguy: What does she want?

Shopgirl: Sanitizer.

Storeguy: What’s that?

Shopgirl: You know that thing everyone uses when they don’t want to wash their hands?

Storeguy: Oh, that!

:|

kala Khatta

Today, I had my first gola.

Gola is an ice candy made of crushed ice and flavored syrup, not very different from an American Snow cone. Kala Khatta is the name of the tangy syrup that was poured on the gola I had today.
I thought it tasted like a weird but satisfying mixture of uncarbonated coke and chat masala.

Golas are a Mumbai thing. Every Mumbaikar, who was ever informed that I had never tried a gola, launched into a sermon about how that was an absolute shame. It was part of the Mumbai culture. If you are a true Mumbaikar, you should have the guts to eat something off a roadside stall and live to tell the tale. If you die, you were never meant to be a Mumbaikar.

I had never tried a gola before, primarily due to the fear of diarrhea, death and similar things. But today, I faced my fears.

I'd gone to Girgaum Chowpatty to shoot for a short film project for class. One of the scenes involved my classmate buying a gola and that incidentally turned out to be our last shot for the day.

We got the shot and while everyone returned their caps and cameras to their bags, I was left holding the gola. Now I had seen how the gola was made, all the while twisting my face into many comical shapes and making various "eww" noises, but when I held it in my hand and felt the gola stare at my eyes obsessively, I was a goner.

It truly was the taste of Mumbai and standing there and eating it the Mumbai way, knowing that I might not survive to tell this tale made me oddly excited. The gola was ultimately yanked out of my hand and I was left giggling like an idiot, a little high on crushed ice. 

If you come to Mumbai, try a gola. If you don't die, promote the product and publicize it. Only Rs. 5.

20 Franks worth of Irony

Kaushik felt he was being an ethical bastard. He had met a guy who was collecting money for an aid organization on his way back from work. Now, Kaushik is the sort of big hearted person who'd let me write about him. He is also the sort of big hearted person who'd donate to charity, so he pledged 20 franks for this chap's cause.

Unfortunately, he realized that he didn't have enough cash to spare. So he asked the guy if he'd be around the next day. This guy said he'd be at the same place at 6.45 the following day, so Kaushik promised to come back and give him the money he pledged.

The problem was, Kaushik had an internet rendezvous planned with his parents the following day at around the same time he told the charity chap that he'd come back. He knew this at the back of his mind, but it didn't strike him when he made his promise.

Kaushik felt disturbed when he realized this and it kept pricking his conscience. Like I said, he felt he was being an ethical bastard. Being the good hearted Kaushik that he was and suffering from the chronic illness of love for mankind and similar things, he could not just shrug off the feeling and let it be.

So he decided to call off the weekly rendezvous with his parents. He figured he'd rather have his parents mad at him than have a bad conscience. The boy decided to stay back after work, so that he could meet the chap and give him the money that he had promised.

After a lot of guilt and obsession over his conscience, Kaushik had a plan and he implemented it. He went to the same place he met the Charity Chap the following day and he waited. He waited and he waited and he waited.

Guess who stood him up!

The New Age Hero!

You know Tamil movies where there’s a hero who’s trying to do some good/bring justice/save the world?

You know how this hero always has to face corrupt government officials?  You know how at first he has to run round and round the government building looking for the right officer to address his problem, refuse to budge even though he’s been told that he’ll have to come back four days later, get frustrated because of the lack of accountability of the government employees, contemplate what will happen to the country when a government office is so unorganized, stand outside a conference room waiting for the officer to come out so that he can have his cause heard?

I did all that today.

Only, I did it all in my pseudo-hindi style!

“ Nikki, I’ll talk to him in English if he understands.”

“ Noooo, Raveena! Hindi first and then I’ll start slowly slowly using English words and we’ll see if he recognizes them. Then we’ll switch languages.”

Life Under an Umbrella

NikiD and I set out from college by 2 pm with an umbrella over our heads. Tup tup. Drip Drip. Tup Tup over our heads.The cabs drivers were being picky about their customers, leaving us standing like orphaned children on the road. Finally, after half an hour of abusing cabbies, we found one with a charitable heart to take us to the train station.

We got on the train headed to Dadar, at first being a part of the noise and later just sitting silent amidst it. I should mention here that we weren't just taking a joy ride, we were on a mission. A mission, as NikiD says, "To save the world. One coast at a time."

We pushed ourselves out of the train at Dadar station and watched some women fight to make their way into the madness.

" Which side is the beach, Niki?"
" Isn't it always on the west?"
" Yea? Why?"
" Because, Raveena, it's the west coast!"
" Oooooh. You're so full of wisdom" ( This was said with genuine appreciation. No sarcasm. Really, I'm just that spaced out! )

Turns out, the place where Uma Thurman trains her child
warriors is in Dadar!

We made our way through the cramped, cacophonous station saturated with the smell of rotting vegetables. The cabwallas were still keeping up their hormonal behavior, so we walked on hoping to find a cab on the way, only we never did.

With sore feet, we got to Dadar Chowpatty, which overlooked the Bandra-Worli Sealink and looked absolutely stunning. We walked towards the parapet, knowing that we'd find what we had come looking for. And sure as hell, there it was stretched across the beautiful landscape - Garbage! 

"Omg Niki! How can we clean this up?! "

" We can't say we aren't going to clean it up because it's too filthy."

" Counterproductive, that!"

Niki was as excited as ever to have found the garbage we had come looking for and I was left feeling appalled by the sheer amount of the garbage we had found. I was also bogged down about the idea of inviting people for a coastal clean up after having a first hand look at what it involved.

Niki and the garbage she's going to
clean up! =D

We walked on, looking at everything else the beach had to offer and finding amusement in all that we saw. That included a stranded pumpkin, some onions, a comb, a matka to cook food in, plastic cutlery, stranded coconuts and lovelorn couples under umbrellas. It was insane, all the things that could be found on a little beach.

Turns out, Dadar chowpatty is not meant for people who are crow-o-phobic or have the tendency to annoy crows. They seem to form the majority of the population, followed by the couples under umbrellas.

We walked on, seeming much like NGO employees with our Kurtas, Jhola bags and our college ID cards hanging around our necks, looking at the beautiful water that was oblivious to the garbage it hosted. 

We left when we saw a large cloud edging its way over our heads. It started with a small tup tup, drip drip, tup tup on the umbrella over our heads till it grew so loud that it drowned out everything else. 

By the time we got to the stench of rotting vegetables at Dadar station, we were drenched front and back. NikiD made her way to the platform where the north-bound trains arrived, while I went on to find the train that would take me back to college. College meant hot Chai and that's all I was thinking about all the way there.  

It was one hell of a day - seeking garbage, finding it, wanting to clean it and planning it.

If you are from Mumbai and you would like to be a part of a small change, you should come for the clean up, because someone needs to care and you have the choice to be that someone. 

Ross Geller: Well, like that, only instead of a chair, it's a pile of garbage. And instead of a jacket, it's a pile of garbage. And instead of the end of the day, it's the end of time, and garbage is all that has survived!

Golmal, God, Gravity

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