The Shh Diaries

Being ill

2012-02-06T12:36:00.000+05:30

Let me start by saying this - I'm grateful for what semblance of good health I have. I am. I'm grateful that I'm not battling a life threatening disorder or disease.

That being said, I have, since January 29 been very ill. It started with a routine throat pain and difficulty to swallow, and very soon ventured into full-blown cold / viral fever territory. The thing is, I can deal with all that. A cold and me are good friends. Have been since I was a little girl. I thought we had grown apart when I was in my late teens and early twenties, however, it turns out that it was a trial separation.

I had such a bad cold that there was water dripping out of my nose. I couldn't keep my face level, the way most people do because my nose would drip. Yes, drip. That's the right word. Drip. Say it once with me. Drip. Imagine a dripping tap. Drip. Drip. Drip!

Of course, I had gone to see a doctor. I don't need to be insured to go see a doctor. I can go see a doctor whenever I want. So, when I first felt ill, I got one round of medicines. Two sleepless days later, I couldn't breathe properly. I was up all night sneezing. I barely slept. My mother was convinced I'd end up asthmatic or something. So, on my second visit, the good doctor gave me more medicine. Yay!

I've got so many medicines to eat until tomorrow. I get the feeling I might experience some form of withdrawal!

In other news, my wallet got stolen in a theatre [this happened back in December]. I've lost all my photo ID cards. I need to re-apply for all of them. FUCKITALLTOHELLANDBACK!

I need to be gainfully employed. I hope that my decision to freelance will earn me some money, if it doesn't, I'm working full-time. For sure!

Calling women crazy

2012-01-29T14:42:00.000+05:30

It's so cliched.

Then of course these men go on to talk to their friends about how women are crazy and then they make memes, "popular" jokes and such. I hate it.

It's about time people, women included, realised that calling women crazy is old, lame, and more importantly uneducated.

It is also time for men to get over the cliches and spend some time understanding the women they are with, rather than referring to old joke books and manuals and feeling joyful in having figured out what women want.

Truth is people are different and everyone wants to be an individual. In the pursuit of individuality, we often forget that we turn into mass-manufactured drones.

Calling women crazy is just one example.

Blogs I find funny

2012-01-23T20:19:00.001+05:30

The Local Tea Party (an Indian Blogger, not at all related to America's Tea Party) is a hilarious blogger from my city.

This post of his, by far the funniest piece of his I've read!

The language, for all my non-Indian friends, is Pidgin Indian English.

Haffun, everyone!

Getting married to adjectives

2012-01-10T19:03:00.003+05:30

The dehumanisation of the matrimonialprofile

It's a preposterous title, I know. But,here's the thing – I blame this on the existence and proliferationof the 30-word matrimonial profile. Thanks to an entire segment inthe daily classifieds dedicated to them, these brief, uninformativebiographies have come to stand as an indicator of the kind of personyou were going to marry, if you chose from a newspaper ad that is.

Here's my problem with those fuckingads. They've over-simplified the whole process to the point that someentrepreneur made an algorithm off it and started the hellhole ofmatrimonial process that is shaadi.com / bharatmatrimony.com andother such choice centres.

Despite my contractual obligations tobe nice about online matchmaking / matchfinding, these sites are theroot cause of my problems in life today. You have read, at length,the drama that my family has been putting me through in order to getme married.

As of 2011, things have become absurd.You know, where I go to temples and pray (I try to!) and my motherlooks suitably anxious, my father feigns concern, my aunts chide my“negativity”, and other assorted nonsense.

This morning, it got epic. My fathertells me

“A proposal's come. The boy is fromCanada. His brother in America called. What do I tell them.”

I was drinking something at the time,so I couldn't do much. I didn't want to choke or anything. So Icalmly gulped down my Horlicks and told my father

“Canada is too cold.”

Dad : “Even that skinny Mini survivesCanada. You don't want London, you don't want Canada, you don't wantKerala, you don't want Dubai, what do you want?”

I was tempted to say – I want tomarry a human being not a place or a social status, but he's myfather and he's rude when he's defied. I don't have to deal with itat 27.

I just left for work.

Apparently – Engineer, MNC, Canada,and “they called me, I didn't call them” is enough of a basis formarriage.

O_o

Things I've done

2012-01-09T21:30:00.000+05:30

What a nonsense, last week was!

Hurt my leg, was basically immobile because my back was also giving me trouble. Pain medication, cold compresses and the like dominated my weekly acitivities. Aside from the occasional nod to Facebook and Twitter. Sigh.

I have also, in a turn of events entirely technological, activated the mobile template of my blog. If you have a smartphone and you choose to access my blog via that, you can now able to read without too many issues. Unless, of course, the template I've chosen is shitty. If it is, please, please tell me; I'll change it.

Have you checked out my site recently? Lots of fun things. Well, I think so! Also, one of the articles I wrote for the site was published here. All those in favour of cross-country sisterly bonding, do a Vodka shot please? Thanks.

It's Pongal this week! It means an annual much-looked-forward to brunch at home. Sigh. Smells of ghee and joy are already here. Following Pongal, the calendar barely registers an holiday until April 14. And 2012 is one of those years where all the holidays are either on Saturday or Sunday. Nonsense! I don't like years like this. They are pointless to me!

Don't kill MP's cows!

2012-01-03T18:37:00.001+05:30

Happy, happy 2012 world!

Let's not focus on the now-extinct Mayans and their predictions and enjoy the year as much as we can? Good idea? Okay.

I'm going to bulletize first -
> Please read this - A superb article on my favorite social crusader from India, the venerable Mr.Anna Hazare. Just because something is a good cause, that does not mean it has no vested interests or hidden agendas. It's important that people realize this. More importantly, when someone has been set up on a pedestal, chances are they will fall, at least once. Again, I'm anti-corruption and anti-Hazare. Yes, they can co-exist, and they do. To dismiss democracy just because a goal has not been achieved is wrong, especially considering the fact that democracy hasn't been given a chance to live up to its potential.

> Reading that article brought me to this - another superbly written piece about caste in politics. I do believe that the issue of caste has been blown out of proportion and the media has not given the country an objective report of things. This report makes me want to ask Anna Hazare one question - if you believe in hierarchy so much, why are you challenging it? The Prime Minister is the boss of all bosses in this country, he has a job to do, let him do it. Why are you, who is not the Prime Minister, not doing your job?

I will not dwell on Anna Hazare any longer. Dwelling on Mr.Hazare has not been productive for this blog in the past. I will redirect your attention to Madhya Pradesh where they've banned cow slaughter.

I have no issues with cow slaughter. Yeah, I said it. If someone is making a living out of killing cows, let them. I wear leather and use leather, so I cannot have a righteous opinion on slaughter and so on. The law being passed means a certain kind of meat is no longer available for public consumption in Madhya Pradesh. Also, they are behaving as if cows are endangered species. Honestly, in India, as evidence from the photostreams of most tourists would prove, cows are not endangered species. The reason for this ban has some basis in religion, and that is problematic for me.

I'm Hindu, yes. I'm also vegetarian (quite by accident, not by design). However, that doesn't mean I'm some poster girl for religious virtue. I don't believe that a state has the power to decide what foods can be eaten by people. That's beyond ridiculous. It's about time India's virtuous Hindus realised that beef-eating is a reality. If they don't kill cows in Madhya Pradesh, how the hell is the thriving leather industry in Madhya Pradesh going to survive? For the most part, the leather industry needs cows to sustain itself. At least that's what I think. So, no more cow-killing means what for the leather industry?

What about dairy products? The mass manufacture of dairy products is not some kind of pleasant process where it's all sunshine and rainbows. Except for the co-operatives, the dairy industry does not employ sustainable practices, what of "intent to slaughter" then?

I do think that some laws need to be in place so that animals get treated better, however, this particular one reeks of too much control.

It is also highly likely that I don't get the complicated legalese and fine print. I will update this post soon as I do figure it out.

Moo!

Resolutions and randoms

2011-12-31T14:37:00.002+05:30

On December 19, 2009, I started this blog. I cannot believe that it’s been two years of me going on about my life and I haven’t once gone on a long sabbatical. That’s a big deal for me to be honest. I have this amazing habit of completely switching off and not writing for the longest time. It is this behavior which will ensure that I will never write a full-length book.

Not that I can’t do it. I can. But, I’m happy blogging, tweeting, spamming news feeds on Facebook, offering unsolicited commentary on my company’s blog (“unsolicited commentary” is my new go-to phrase). I am writing. I am saying things I want to say. I am laughing at too many inside jokes that no one knows about. Work-wise life’s good and fun. I’m not going to be over-ambitious and try to write a novel. I mean, no thanks. To sit and write some 100,000 words might actually end up with me having nothing left to say to the rest of the world. I cannot imagine a life like that.

That aside, I’m going to jump right into the mass movement called the year end celebrations, and make a new year’s resolution.

My resolution for 2012 – punctuality.

Punctuality is something I’ve struggled with forever. I suck at managing my time. I know I want to be on time. I try, but I never can. So, in 2012, I will do my very best to be on time as much as I humanly can. If I fail every once in a while, it’s not for want of trying.

On that note, I’m going to end this. I have two books to finish reading.

Happy 2012 my dear frands on the interwebs. I hope you have the most epic fun ushering in 2012.

Books and others

2011-12-26T16:10:00.000+05:30

I cannot begin to tell you how happy Iam that 2011 is finally ending.

The year can be best described with theword – shitty. However, I don't want to be crass, so I will justsay 2011 was a bad year for me.

There's a lot that happened that didn'tget mentioned here. It was too emotionally demanding and mentallystressful for me to deal with, hence the silence. That being said,one good thing did happen this year, I fell in love with HarukiMurakami all over again, via 1Q84. I mean, there's something aboutthe realm of the unreal that's appealing to me and to have thatpresented in such amazing words and sentence choreography, is to me,a sign of genius.

I've also been on a huge Flipkartbuying spree. Cash on Delivery is a RAACCCKKKSSSTTAARRR featuremeans!

Thanks to Flipkart, I've read two morebooks by Devdutt Pattaknaik. He's amazing. Just, plain amazing. Noother word describes what he does. What makes him that much moreawesome is the fact that he is not all over the place about hiscontribution to the world of re-telling, quite unlike Ashok Banker.I'm a huge Ashok Banker fan, have been since 2003 when I first readThe Ramayana Series. That being said, I have several issues with howhe over-states his role as the storyteller. If he could tone it downa wee bit, I will find him more tolerable. But this is a highlypersonal viewpoint. I don't expect people to agree with me or evenlike it, I don't care.

While on the subject of books, there isone book I'm reading that has completely overwhelmed me. It's anon-fiction title – Indlish. Written by Jyoti Sanyal, this book isa searing look at the way Indian English-speaking people have made ahuge mess of this thing called written communication. The problemlies with our education system. When English teachers don't know thedifference between the words “wedding” and “marriage” what doyou expect them to teach their students? When the English Departmentof the University of Madras encourages its students to study aparticular set of questions before the finals, how do you expect people to think forthemselves?

I don't know Mr.Sanyal, the future isbleak. There are no good English teachers left. The ones who do teachas best as they can, thump Wren & Martin at every givenopportunity. Grammatical propriety is a must, I will not let anyonetell me otherwise. Because I cannot have “writing as one speaks”accommodating “cannot able to” as acceptable Englishcommunication. If it does, then I'm going to stop writing altogether.

There's wrong English (featuringmisconstructed and grammatically incorrect language) and there'swrong English (featuring flawed sentence construction). If you areasking that we be rid of the latter, I will join the eradicateIndlish movement immediately. If this movement is, in any way orform, accommodative of the former (grammatically incorrect language),then please count me out. I'm happy in my world of verbiage.

Indlish is a must read. There's no twoways about it. If you're a writer, chances are you will experience asearing sense of shame at having written the way you have for yearsand years. As a reader, you will be armed with enough to send theeditors of newspapers scathing letters pointing out the flaws inlangauge. If you are that one writer who has been writing asMr.Sanyal recommends you write, then you, dear anoynymous person, areeligible for a Nobel.

That thing they call modesty Pt2

2011-12-17T00:30:00.000+05:30

First off, I want to group hug everyone at Chennai Hollaback! I just do. I don’t know how they got a hold of my previous post on this subject, but they did and they’ve passed the word around on Twitter and I’ve been getting a lot of positive shoutouts. My sincere gratitude. This blog’s sole intent is entirely and completely selfish. If it finds a resonance with people, then I’m all the happier to share my stories with the world.

Let’s get to part 2 of this dialogue shall we?

The main reason for this faceless violation of my body was because some random man thought I had either “asked for it” by the way I dressed or by the fact that I had big boobs and a round ass. I honestly cannot attribute any other reason to this form of sexual violence except one’s physical appearance. There’s no other logical reasoning for something this pathetic. What else do you think could be their motivation? Sex-depravation? Uncontrollable impulse just like that suspicious twitch in the left eye some people have? A woman’s body is the only reason.

As a teenager, my breasts were the bane of my existence. They still are, but I like them better now and do a lot less to wish they’d disappear forever and leave me gloriously flat-chested…

[If some shit-resembling man mentally thinks that women are never happy with what they have, I will find him and burn him alive in Anna Square bus stop.]

…The fact that my 14-year-old body ached from the weight of my breasts didn’t help my daily travels to school. I was in a pinafore, awkward as hell, and carried a school bag that was doing everything in its power to snap my neck. On that 17D to school, there was barely any room to stand, and yet, there were men who had the wherewithal to snake their arms around the throng and grab a boob, because, you know, boobs are the equivalent of a bus ticket and they need boobs like they need bus tickets.

I mean, the fact that I was wearing a school uniform had no bearing on the hand-snaking. Absolutely no bearing. It’s pathetic.

I’m not sure if this contributed in any way to my issues with my appearance or in my opinion of men. I have a feeling it has. I don’t see one single word in this blog post or the previous that in any way redeems men. And I will not take away this umbrella hatred because the How to Judge a Person handbook excludes the “nice, non-harassing guys”; you might not grab my boob, but you sure as hell have spent time wondering what they look/feel like and that puts you in the category too my nice, non-harassing friend.

Ever since I started working, I stopped taking the bus to where I had to go. This auto-taking has left me with zero savings, but having zero savings has never felt this liberating!

That thing they call modesty

2011-12-06T08:01:00.000+05:30

"She had it coming."

Those are by far the four most disgusting words I've heard come out of a person's mouth.

Mostly used in the context of sexual violence, it makes these words all the more vile. A sort of moral commentary on a woman's body, that is uncalled for and completely unnecessary. Choices I make, or any woman makes, are not subject to the scrutiny of a man's moral and social compass.

These videos online about someone commenting on the morality of a bikini, on the morality of showing a woman's eyes/face/body are repulsive to say the very least. The very, very, least.

As a man, there are certain things one feels entitled to. The freedom to do and say just about anything is one of these things. And this freedom, as is the case with most things freely given, is exploited everyday. Take for instance, the random dude standing near a tea shop, smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of tea. For starters, that tea shop is an illegal structure, built on a footpath that is supposed to serve pedestrians, however, legality notwithstanding, the corner tea shop is the scene of the seemingly innocuous scene of violence - commentary. [Carol Ann Duffy explains her response to this quite beautifully in a poem whose text I simply cannot find online or remember the title of. When I do, I will edit this post and link to that poem.]

Walking past a tea shop does not mean, I am game for some asshole's thoughts on my appearence, or any other woman's appearance for that matter. It only means the tea shop is an incidental location on my way to some place, not that every man standing there can, while drinking tea, wonder aloud at my breasts, ass, face, clothes. The fact that I choose not to confront them is a sign of assent, to let them talk freely and not allow myself the frustration of being a woman.

But assent brings with it a host of other problems, assent means I am giving a strange man the freedom to access my body in any way he should choose, whether it is by words, touch, or in any other way. Assent, however given, makes me a willing and consensual party in the process that is sexual crime. That knowledge is the most difficult thing to live with everyday. It colours just about everything I do. When I get into a bus, especially one that is crowded, I know that I will silently deal with some faceless, spineless, bastard who chooses to rub an erect penis across my back. Yes, it's true, it happens, and there are scores of women who silently deal with this everyday.

My question is - why is it a given that men are allowed to rub their crotches on women's backs and these same men go ahead and talk about the ownership and possession of their wives/girlfriends? Their bodies seem to be forcibly thrust onto silently unwilling women, so why do they feel the need for monogamy? Why do they get the freedom to access bodies other than those they have supposedly tied themselves to, and us women are expected to be virgins/monogamous and untouched/unsullied by other men.

To be perfectly honest, the two years on the local trains when I was studying at Madras University, were by far the best years of my life, public transport wise. I left early, 8.45am-9am, the trains were running mostly empty and I could sit anywhere, read a book, relax until my stop. The buses ran empty too, just feeling the sea breeze hit you while you made your commute helped me deal with the bullshittery that was travelling back home by bus after classes were over. The funny thing is, my toe rings, a supposed sign of "wedded bliss" seemed to not have an effect on these faceless, spineless, bastards. Apparently violating some other nameless, faceless man's "property" was an even bigger high.

[And another series begins.]

Let's talk about God Pt1

2011-12-04T23:24:00.000+05:30

Some of my more "inspired" writing, comes from conversation.

As I type this out, there is a chat window open, with me talking about a subject that I'm a little afraid to broach generally, God/Religion/Faith.

There was a point in time, my late teens I think, when I was very clear that I believed in God and that I was a religious person. But somewhere down the line, something happened, and I seemed to have lost the plot? I don't know what happened, but I'm no longer under the religious label, that's for sure.

I have a few valid, at least what I think are valid, reasons for this - what I can't see, I cannot believe. When we were in the Chemistry lab in school doing flame tests to find out which salt we were "analysing" the flame turning green or red meant something tangible. It was evidence, it was something that I could understand and, more importantly, see for myself, which is why it was easy for me to enjoy Chemistry lab hour, there were things to do, things to see, and things to mess with. Things, real things. Things that made the smell emanating from the Cooum seem like floral bliss. So many things.

With religion, however, there are certain things that I have issues with.

Like knowing.

What are the references? Where have these people gathered their evidence from? On what basis am I expected to believe "knowledge" that was "discovered" so many millenia ago? I mean, why?

We're talking about texts that were not accessible to my people at one point in time because we weren't socially acceptable. Now that there is temple access, and available translations of religious texts, what am I expected to do with it? Assimilate everything and just accept it because some wise man said so?

Who is this wise man? Who or what made him wise? Why does everyone think he's wise? What sets him apart? Why does he want people to follow him and reuse his words? Why the propaganda? Why the staging of miracles? If he's really wise then why didn't some of these "godmen" not have the brains enough to not get caught?

I don't know if I've been able to articulate this properly and appropriately. There must be many loopholes here. Which serves to prove my point about my own personal issues with this entire thing. I don't know what it's about to begin with, and then to have it thrust on me just because everyone else believes in it, is pure and utter BULLSHIT.

There's more to say here, and I will. When I stop feeling like my brains have imploded in my skull and when the light doesn't seem to want to pierce my retinas and travel through my nervous system to destroy my head, I will talk, a little more clearly about... religion.

When friends are a letdown

2011-12-02T23:01:00.001+05:30

Yes, it is possible that sometimes, despite what I keep harping on about, friends can completely and without a fucking care in the world, break you. No, wait. Make that destroy you.

See, the thing is, you get used to having friends around no matter what. To misappropriate one of The Huffington Post's headers I believe that "Boyfriends may come and go, but friends are forever" ("Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever" is the original). When even a friendship cannot withstand the flux that is life and circumstance, it is damn near impossible to believe that anything can be right with the universe. How can it be when the people you trust blindly are themselves incapable of courtesy?

It bothers me that the people you expect the most from are the last ones to live up to them. I mean, family, as I've said before on this blog, has it's own agenda. However, friends are people you assume a certain truth and honesty with, and when that openness is taken for granted, it seems to me that there is something fundamentally wrong.

How is it that you can be selfish with a friend? Is it because you know that this person is not going to bring it up and confront you with it? Or is it that you have gotten away with far worse in life otherwise? Whatever it is, the reason and the reasoning are wrong.

I could keep going on and on, but it will all boil down to this, sometimes in life, you're the only person you can trust and expect highly from. The rest of the time, if the situation calls for it, it's best to keep a distance and STFU.

Kyuk and eecee

2011-11-17T17:13:00.000+05:30

I'm trying my best to use seriously bastardised English. Only because I can and because I think it's fun. Does that make me smug? It might, but it's okay. It's good for my health. I use "proper" English to communicate at work anyway, so once in a while to slip into non-English English is good for my health!
I'm turning into a Twitter addict, about two years too late. I think. I don't know. All I did was put "Justin Bieber" on a tweet and I had about three new followers within the hour. Please remind me not to say unsavoury things about him online. I don't want death threats.
This is my new workplace. Please do check it out. It's quite different from the things I complain about incessantly. If you're on Facebook, please do hit "like" and hit "follow" if you're on Twitter. Thanks. My work at the site can be found here.
I'm still broke. Since my wealth generation plan was a fail, I'm going to be a civilised child and wait for my salary to get credited next month so that I can live peacefully ever after.
TRAVEL PLANS! Colombo from November 24 to November 27, for a wedding. Sigh. One more, and this time it's an international love story. Singapore from December 1 to December 6, chumma justlikethat.
There is a pending long post, coming soon.
Right this moment, I need to get back to online stalking so that my company's blog can get new writers. KTHXBAI.

For a friend

2011-11-09T13:52:00.002+05:30

Thinking of mortality in your 20s.Thinking of death, actually dying, dealing with insane and too quickways of dying in your 20s cannot be a good thing.

It's highly selfish to be thinking likethis when someone you know has passed away and you are mourning theirloss, but then again, when you are confronted with death and thepossibility of you also dying under similar circumstances, it isdifficult to keep selfish thoughts at bay.

This year, birthday month was usheredwith bad news, again. My friend Mamta, who was a very dear friendfrom my MA days, succumbed to Dengue fever on the morning of November5. In the four years since I finished my MA at Madras University, Imet Mamta just once. She moved cities and we were in touch, rabidly,on G-talk and sms and phone calls, but we never met.

Finally, four years later, sometime inJune this year, Mamta and I, met for a long overdue lunch. I must saythat it was one of the best catching up meals of my life. I'm sohappy that I met her after a long gap and got the chance tore-establish our friendship and be in touch again, texting, emailingand chatting.

This news has shaken me up and I don'twant to think that I will never see her again or share some of thethings that she and I did. She was my favourite gossip buddy in thisworld and she's no longer here for me to take the freedom to sit andcackle with.

Mamta, I miss you terribly. I hopeyou're in a happy place. After everything you struggled for, andafter getting what you fought for, I'm sorry that you didn't get thechance to live long enough to enjoy the fruits of that. Know that youwere loved immensely and wherever you are, I hope its the awesomestplace on this planet!

Love always,

Shru

The endemic of nonsense

2011-10-31T14:07:00.000+05:30

This one is for Sumedh Mungee, who likethe lady who wrote an open letter to Delhi boys, seems to havegarnered quite the response to his article on leaving India.

For starters, his last name kills me.It honestly does and I don't mean to say it contemptuously. It's justhilarious. The number of times people must have made some funny jokeabout it, I cannot imagine and don't think I want to either. Poorguy, some small part of him must be eternally angry at being handed aname like Mungee.

Now, jokes aside, let's get serious.

I don't like his article. Who thehell is he to pass judgment anyway? He chose to leave the country tomake something better of his life or to study, either way his reasonsare based in Economics not in some altruistic, aspirational dream oranything. He probably went in the hope of getting a good degree andwith that get a super-paying job. Money. That was his driving factoras it was for many non-resident Indians. I have nothing against them.I do, however, take offense when they start behaving like my favoritetype of people, the tourists.

I'm sorry, does dirt and poverty botheryou? Never seen an unbathed person before. Wow. You must live in sucha sanitized world. Wake the fuck up and take a good look aroundperson.

Dirt, apparently this curious phenomenon exists in countrieslike the USA it's so shocking no?

Poverty, again, exists in the USand if recent statistics are anything to go by, exists in abundancetoo.

Misery, er, existential angst came from Europe thanks to theSchpenhauers and Nietzches of the world. [Even if existential angst is a state of mind that originated elsewhere, I'm just going to keep this here for the purpose of being mean to someone and not having that flow hindered. Indulge me.]

Unemployment, again I urgeyou to look at the recession and statistics please. I am not going tosit here and articulate these things for your benefit.

There are so many phenomenons that areassumed to be some kind of third-world constant. People who livein first-world countries are devastated by it when they come toso-called third-world countries. Okay. Fine. Be devastated. But youare many levels of common senseless if you think that your firstworld nation is prosperous and problem free.

And what is with this hate-filledattitude anyway? What? You don't like domestic help because theysteal and lie? You mean you don't?

You don't like bad drivers? So youfollow traffic regulations to the letter and have never once violatedrules?

I don't understand why thisholier-than-thou attitude even exists? Who the hell are these randomswho have exalted themselves to some kind of bizarre socially elevatedpedestal from whence they look upon a deteriorating society? I mean,who are you, really? Please do me a favor, find a country that hasperfect infrastructure, zero bureaucracy, zero poverty, zerodiscomforting realities and go live there. I think the name of thecountry is Utopia. Find it on the map, book a one-way ticket, I'msure they don't have visas as well because entry is free and no oneis a foreigner in Utopia, and please build a perfect home and livethere. Everything will be peachy, perfect and delightful. You willnever be angry or upset. Perfect balance of emotions shall bemaintained and you will live happily ever after.

Please continue to stay in a land far,far away. The more of you that live far, far away, the more space Iwill have to roam freely. Thank you for your cooperation.

For those interested here is Mr.Mungee's response to the online venom that followed post his rant in NYT.

Here is one writer's response to the original article. I think it is quite interesting.

Letters to entities

2011-10-17T16:47:00.000+05:30

Dear god in heaven,

I write to you because I sincerely think that it is not possible to think ofyou in any time except crisis. And right now, I’m in crisis. The crisis is ofcourse related to money. I’m perpetually running short and I don’t like it onebit.

I propose that we come up with a wealth-generation plan. Basically, I willbury a Rs.1,000 note underground [because that is the highest denominationavailable] and you will, with your epic powers, multiply that Rs.1,000 into may1,000s.

Since you played a part in my gaining wealth, the money cannot be termedill-gotten. Yeah, I didn’t exactly earn it because of my hardwork or anything,but heck, I am a child in crisis, help me out here.

That’s all for now. I will be in touch during my next epic crisis. Please dothe needful as and when a need arises.

Until then, a very poor and a very distraught

Shruthi

Dictionary

2011-10-10T12:31:00.001+05:30

Hai!

I've been waiting a while for a nice word to put up here. And today's word comes courtesy of Nrithya.

Stupidhead. (meaning) boys who don't know better; boys

Best used in context of dissing the mentals who act like fools when we don't but they assume that we are acting stupid. Hence, stupidhead.

Check out Nrithya's blog though, she's hella awesome. :D

Recollections of the strange kind

2011-10-03T21:53:00.002+05:30

Did you ever go through a phase when you only wanted to discuss your period? I was 12 when that phase happened. I don’t know about other countries, or cities in India, but in my Chennai and specifically in my school, this one subject was something that almost every girl talked about, at length and in some cases with an unhealthy amount of smugness. To be perfectly honest, I never got the hype behind it when I was in school, I still don’t, but now I have come to terms with it and I know that I have only a couple of decades left before it stops altogether.

In school, however, we had these weird strange conversations centering around our period. I have no idea why I am thinking about it now, but a strange advertisement involving blue-coloured liquid being soaked in a sanitary napking probably brought it on.

What are the strangest period conversations you’ve had?

What were the most bizarre myths you encountered?

I have a cracker – one of my seniors in school, she was in the 12th grade, asked a Proctor and Gamble rep “Will I lose my virginity if I use a tampon?” I was in the 9th grade then and I knew that a tampon and virginity were not in the least bit connected!

Oh well. I’m off to sigh over MasterChef and then watch Criminal Minds.

Idiots and other things

2011-09-30T13:14:00.000+05:30

I’m quitting my job.

There, I said it out loud. I’ve been terrified ofarticulating it, but I said it, I’m quitting. Okay, I’m done talking about thatnow, onto other things.

The main motivation behind this post is a woman. Usually, Ilike women, I have some amazing woman friends who are very dear to me and whoalso love me a lot. The dynamic and honesty in those relationships really makesmy life a much better place to be in.

However, there are the girlfriends, complications, and otherassorted relationship categories who will want to mess with you because they’recrazy, I dedicate this to them.

Dear crazy lady,

God clearly missed out when moulding the many segments thatmake up your non-existent brain. Which explains your complete lack of a decentsense of humour. Since your head is hollow and light, and your liver ismarinating in alcohol [an excuse you use all the damn time, mind you], and youcannot look past the blinders you’ve got on, I am not going to waste my timetrying to explain what friendships mean.

You are way too insecure and I cannot deal with your shit. Iwill not entertain you, who has no concept of boundaries, texting me from yourboyfriend’s phone. I’m usually not a very nice person, when people like youbehave the way you do, I’m inclined to being more terrible than usual. Whichleads to a confrontation with my friend, which leads to him distancing me,which leads to you being happy.

Which brings me to I don’t like it when you are happy. Forthe most part, I’m very peace-loving. However, when you are this annoyingintentionally, then you will have to live with the fact that I don’t like youbeing smug. I just don’t. I don’t care if you’re his woman and two of you loveeach other so much. I don’t care, really. I do care when you take a joke, aninsider thing, and make it an issue. Like I told my friend today, you need abrain and a one-way ticket to Antarctica.

And please, don’t tell me this was a drunked episode, itwasn’t. You wanted to stake claim to territory, I don’t feel like letting youdo it.

So yes, your boy is my “husband”. He always will be. I don’tcare if it makes you miserable. I don’t care if your insecurity is toooverwhelming that it kills you every time you hear it from me. I don’t care ifyou think that being the love of my friend’s life gives you privileges. I don’tcare.

Sincerely,

The “Wife”

Okay, I’m done.

Sunday questions

2011-09-18T11:14:00.003+05:30

Is it just me or has the "Blogs of Note" segment in the new blogger interface disappeared completely? Might be me. Just asking to see if anyone knows where I can access that.

Also, I think my father just wants to spend his money on some showcase wedding so people will think we are socially appropriate. I mean, not once has he shown me any profile online that is worth any kind of discussion. The last one I saw, I just shuddered. I mean, I think I can do better, but as time passes and my father's "picks" get worse I'm wondering if this is all just a joke to him or if he thinks that these boys are actually worth my time because their parents are hounding my father. It can't be because he's feeling pressurised no? It can't. Can it?

There are two short stories that are in draft mode. Two. I haven't been able to finish them and it is seriously bothering me. I don't like it that I haven't been able to. Shit. What's this bleddee nonsense?

Do you like runny eggs? I mean, I love eggs, cooked any which way, but it should have at least coagulated you know? Soft boiled eggs that still look transparent bother me a little. Does it bother you?

I don't like this point format writing that I've been doing a lot of in my recent posts, but then, so much to talk about, how to make everything an essay and post it at one go?

What do you do when you meet someone who arranges currency notes the exact same way that you do? The only other person, apart from myself, who does this is my father. I recently met someone who does the same thing - arrange currency in descending order arranged in a way where Gandhi's face is in the same direction. Sigh. I was so overjoyed, I almost kissed him at the coffee shop we were standing at. Maybe I should marry him and have his babies? At least we'll have the same values to give our children, No? Yes?

Have you read this? I think she's an idiot. She's making me and others like me look like a complete mental. The reality of women in the South is completely different from her "empowered" self that it makes me sad to watch how she keeps going on and on and also, it's not a very objective opinion! She then comes up with this to deal with the viral blog post and trending topic on Twitter. I have nothing more to say except, you should have thought it through. For someone who rants as much as I do, I think she kind of overdid it. But hey, mine is a personal opinion, as is hers.

Happy Sunday everyone. I hope you woke up late and are lazing! :)

Dental

2011-09-15T23:15:00.001+05:30

Mindfuck. It’s a term that I’ve used a lot in the recent past. Especially when it concerns the men that have come and gone from my life. To me, it means a place where you are having an eternal conflict with getting your ego on and telling guy-who-hurt-you to fuck the hell off and balling up in a corner and crying your eyes out because you miss the idiot so damn much. It’s about being in an unhealthy place where your every thought is about someone who doesn’t seem to care about you as much you care about them. A mindfuck is a pain in the brain of epic proportions.

However, an emotional mindfuck pales in comparison to what happens a dentists office!

I got a root canal done today. I had an anesthetic injected in my jaw and the right side of my face went a little limp and then, after 15 minutes in the waiting room I watched as a dentist with a drill was fixing my tooth. I didn’t feel a thing. I heard everything, smelt something strange, watched as the dental assistant used some kind of suction device to get the muck out of my mouth, and saw stuff being put in my mouth and then it was over. I didn’t feel a thing, obviously. But knowing what was going on and not feeling it was, well, a mindfuck. Not that I wanted to feel it. I get the feeling I would have passed out in pain or something close to that.

The last time something like this happened, I was getting my wisdom tooth extracted. Now that was a whole other kind of tableau. That poor dentist had to yank really hard on my tooth while I just chilled on a reclining chair not feeling a blessed thing, while this poor man had to stand up, brace his foot on the stand and yank. I was torn between laughing and pretending to wince in agony. After that procedure was done, the rest of the evening was spent talking through a mouth stuffed with cotton with people hovering over me.

To make today’s trip to the dentist even more exciting my darling friend Poornima sent me a link. Ogden Nash’s poem was prescribed reading for me in Class 9. Thanks to the poem, I was thinking of the dentist’s drill accidentally drilling my cheek open, and like another colleague at work thought it through, possibly leaving a hole in my face thereby disabling my ability to drink water and other liquids. Honestly? I don’t know what I would do without people like them.

I might be a little high on painkillers and antibiotics at the moment, so I’m going to stop rambling, yes?

Goodnight!

September things

2011-09-12T15:32:00.001+05:30

Onam has come and gone. My favourite festival this year saw some 50 people coming home for an epic sadya. My mother’s avvial was just awesomesauce. Then were my aunt’s payasams (both ada pradhamn and pal payasam), gorgeous! I love Onam so much! What’s not to love? It’s the one day dedicated to vegetarian food. Sigh. Joy!

My friend over at Moonshine and Dubito has left Chennai for Scotland where she will be working on her masters in Creative Writing. I miss her terribly! It makes me sad to see people leave Chennai in the search of better things from life. There is a sudden paucity of coolness that occurs and in Chennai, we need what little cool we can get. Add to this brain drain the hipster culture that seems to have taken over and I want to throw up. I mean, really, you think you’re cool because you’re not interested? Then why don’t you tear yourself away from your phone and look at the damn leaves to kill time. Why text?

I need to write. I feel like my writing’s been too neglected for too long. I mean, I can write, that’s the reason why this blog is running and people read it. So this need to keep pushing myself is a little wrong. This is why I sort of dislike a career in writing, it doesn’t leave you the mindspace to have a creative writing career. Or maybe it does, and I am, as always, the last person to know these things.

Have you seen my magazine?

I strongly dislike younger siblings. I love mine, but I also want to smash his head in from time to time. Keeps harping on fatness and ugliness. I know, bro. I know. Stop pretending to be a talking mirror if it’s not too much trouble. I’d like to not be in a bad mood thanks.

How sad the death of Hazare hype after the High Court blasts? Everything is still the government’s fault. Everything always is, has been, always will be. Now, Narendra Modi’s case, India’s War on Terror (only because we’re incapable of coming up with original names for our wars) and other things are at the forefront. Hazare is threatening other things of course, but it’s no longer the headline-making monster it was in August. It will be again, the people behind the whole operation are nationalistic propaganda artists par excellance, Hazare will be headlines again, soon. I’m waiting for it.

People bother me. Especially people who pretend to be close to me and then spout steaming turds of bullshit like “you’re awesome”, “I love you”, and then come up with some inane reason not to have conversations with me. Reason? They’re busy. I mean, really? Really? You’re busy? Are you fucking kidding me right now? You want me around when you’re having a crisis and then you expect to be a silent spectator when I’m having a crisis? Go and hang yourself from an old ceiling fan!

I am on Twitter (@shruthipady if you're interested :D). I finally caved. I have managed thus far to make a point in 140 characters. It’s a little boring to be honest. I mean, you have to keep tweeting (I don’t like the word “tweeting”). I need more characters to make a point, which is why I love blogging, so much space!!!

Important things I think of

2011-08-26T15:03:00.001+05:30

It’s raining an insane amount of rain as I’m typing this [August 24]. On my rooftop office, the sounds are heightened. Almost as if the water drops are little pebbles being artlessly dropped by the bucketful by some playful cherub. It’s, well, annoying and beautiful. Annoying because I need to get home and I live in a particularly traffic-congested part of the city. Getting there, in this rain, with the autos acting like complete bitches (which I don’t appreciate because they don’t have meters and I hate that I depend on them) is going to be a bit of a problem. Beautiful because I’m a fan of this kind of rain, drizzles annoy me as do “mild showers”.

So anti-corruption – they made the PM cave, but with more time passing there seems to be plenty of voices of dissent and non-support coming through. A lot of people just don’t like Hazare and what he’s doing and how he’s doing it. Truth is, it’s getting into blackmail territory now and it’s not pleasant. I genuinely do not appreciate the way in which the Parliament is being threatened and cornered into doing something. The laughing matter is this; the BJP supports the Lokpal Bill and the creation of a Lokpal. Sigh. It’s disgusting. If Anna Hazare says the BJP is a clean political party and others should emulate them, I’ll just have a minor heart seizure!

Note to negligent parents – while crossing the road, with your young child, please ensure that you create circumstances for your child’s survival. Letting them be on the side of oncoming traffic is selfish and well, wrong, for the lack of a better expletive. The footpaths might be too far away from the point on the road that you want to cross, that does not mean you walk on the middle of the road during peak traffic hours holding your child’s hand. Do you want to die? (Or as they ask in Tamil, “Enna veetile solittu vandirikkiya?) Idiots. Don’t you dare blame the doctors at a government hospital for the death of your child because it was probably your fault that the poor thing got hit in the first place.

Note to contrary people – stop blaming it on being modern and young and “confused” and “post-modern angst” or even, and this is priceless, being Libran. I’m going to hunt you down and slash your damn jugular! For the sake of peace and sanity and the non-necessity of a world war, if you don’t know or don’t remember what you said, STFU and find a corner to sulk in! I will not tolerate you coming my way and telling me different things every single fucking day. If you have an opinion, air it, post which, please do NOT change your mind about it. It’s annoying and a lot of work to keep up with your ever-changing moods – I’m not your wife or mother! Fools.

Note to drunk people – hai! Naice to meet the you. Let’s be in deep and abiding friendship forever. However, if you have an alcohol addiction issue, don’t call me. I happen to like my liver enough to not have cirrhosis and then die or something. If you just like drinking every once in a while, let’s be frands okay?

To the English – thank you for the language. It is much-appreciated. Really. Today, every city has a localised and khichdified version of your language, many of which have Wiki pages and guides. It’s fun to communicate with these horrendous spellings and pronunciations from time to time. It more than makes up for my lack of finesse whilst using my own respective mother tongues. When other Indian children, especially the ones that live abroad and think they’re better than me, don’t get it, I’m happier and my ego takes a huge climb up the ladder to megalomania towers.

The linguistically challenged – need to go die. Especially when they come up with “my hairs are so soft, I want to keep touching them” on national fucking TV. I refuse to like the ad and go out and buy the product. I absolutely refuse. On the same line of thought, there’s something about “here” pronounced as “hair” that really annoys me. There are some specific people who think “hair” is the actual way in which “here” is pronounced. I blame their shitty English teachers. I blame the English teachers who don’t teach their kids pronunciation and then claim to have taught them the eight parts of speech, the twelve tenses, and then claim to have done a good job in teaching children English. Uh, what? It’s a first language in this country dearincompetentone, how on earth do you assume the right to misteach and then have the gall to be proud of it?

Of replies and outrage

2011-08-21T12:01:00.001+05:30

It turns out that someone does not like what I have been writing here about Anna Hazare. Here are his comments. He goes by the user name "kooldude1782".

"Hi Shruthi,
I dunno who you are, what you do. But by reading this blog, I can see that you are one of the privileged kids in the block.

It seems that you must have never been to a government office for any paper work. If you have a habit of writing and want to develop your essay writing skills, then please write something about you, your folks, about nature and general topics. Please dont write about things which you have never experienced or never come across.
Little knowledge is very dangerous. Its always good to know both sides of case before coming to a conclusion.

In other countries when we require any paper work from the government, there is a website which says whether I am eligible to receive that document, and what will be the requisite supporting documents and the duration taken by the office to get the paper issued, otherwise I can file a case against the office for not giving me the papers. And the judiciary also does not function like in India,
Do we have this or anything similar to this...?
Few years before there was a bill passed called "Right to Information Act" which says that the citizen has the right to know the process and what is happening for a particular case. But that Act does not mention anything about what to do if the duration has passed due.

Small instance:
when applying for a ration card(this is the card given to every middle class and lower class and BPL citizen, not sure whether you know what it is) I received it after 1.5 years. The first time when I visited the office to apply, the requisite documents were no where mentioned, they just told to submit whatever document we have. After 2 months when I went to the office to know when I will receive the ration card, I was asked me to submit a different set of documents.After 5 months we heard from the neighbours that on a particular day all people who had applied for ration card in that area will be receiving it. But the issuance was put on hold due to elections. The government changed and then the new government took another 6 months to verify the supporting documents and issue it finally after 1.5 years.

When I turned 18 and I wanted to cast the vote, I couldn't because I dint have a ration card to prove my age and identity. those times when I was able to cast the vote, illegitimate votes would have been cast, but how will I prove it...? to whom will I report it...?

I had applied for voters ID card when I was 18, now I am 29 and still have not got it. Even if I get it, I wouldn't be allowed to vote since I now look different than how I was looking when I was 18.

I have a very simple question, when any person gets a job, his performance is monitored on regular basis by people who have selected him. Same should happen with MPs, once they are selected their performance should also be monitored by public. So, public has right to say that MPs are not performing well and voters should also have right to make a complaint against an MP if he/she is not performing well. And by passing the JanLokPal bill we are giving a platform to our voters to exercise this right.

BR,
Citizen of India "

I have a few things to say to this person. However, before that, I would like to clarify that the comments are not intended to be malicious. They are a response.

A) My mother is the principal of a school. She was a school teacher before that. My father is a retired army Colonel. My grandfather was a freedom fighter with the INA and my paternal grandfather was the headmaster of a school. I come from a family of mostly teachers and some privately employed individuals. I do not form part of the "privileged kid on the block" club. I find it extremely annoying when educated, English-speaking individuals who have blogs are thrown in the "privileged kids on the block" club.

B) I have been to government offices. Shocking I know. But it's true. I have chased my passport from pillar to post all because one sheet of paper was put in the wrong order. So, I spent way too much time climbing stairs and running around Shastri Bhavan, Chennai, for a document that I was entitled to own. I have my passport now. It's valid for another eight years. And surprisingly, my family has a ration card. I know right? I do know what it is and I have been to the civil supplies office. Oh yes, I have a driver's license too. For which I went running in circles. Turns out it is a small, laminated document that is too tiny to justify the amount of circle-running one has to do. As for my voter's ID, in a completely bizarre chain of events, people came home and took down my details and I went to a, wait for it, government office to pick my voter's ID up. Thus far, I have taken the time to vote in every election held since I turned 18. Now, I don't know if my privileged upbringing has to do with the fact that I am in possession of government-issued documents. Last I remember, an FIR I filed two years ago is still being "searched for" by the police station. I need a copy to get a replacement of my Army-issued ID. I keep hounding them. At one point, I threatened them with my press ID, didn't work. I'm still hounding. I haven't, however, paid them money to search for it. Paying them might magically aid in the finding of this document, but I don't feel like it!

C) My essay-writing skills, as you so politely put it, are not for writing this blog. I get paid to write. I used to work for a national newspaper. If there is one person in this particular conversation who has been acquainted with ground realities, it's probably me. Therefore, I take offense to the fact that you feel I should be writing essays on nature, about myself and my parents.I vote and pay taxes my friend, this is my country and I'm free to express my dissent. Not supporting a person does not mean I am privileged or even pro-government. There is actually a provision in the Constitution that allows a citizen to register a non-vote. This country lets you be free enough to be a registered apathetic citizen.

Please keep in mind that we are a country of 1.2 billion people. If you would like a proportionate consensus on this issue, everyone needs to be on board. This is not a middle-class movement, nor is this a movement of a certain section of outraged people. This is something all the citizens of the country should agree to. I would appreciate a referendum on whether the Jan Lokpal should exist or not. Let the draft of the Goverment's version and the original be read and studied by the people and let the people decide what they want, without Anna Hazare and his supporters cramming Facebook and the TV news channels with their campaign. Let every citizen of this country make an informed choice. I don't see that happening. Instead, the people who are questioning the motives of this bill are being categorised as anti-change and a few other unpleasant things. I don't appreciate it. Feel free to call me names, don't expect me to feel shameful and cross over to your side of the corruption movement. I live in a free country, I'm free not to like something, as are you.

Stop pressurising agencies like the government and tell the middle-class, that is standing behind Hazare to stop paying bribes. The Lokpal is not an agency that is elected by the people. The Lokpal will be an independent body that is not answerable to anybody. There is no assurance that a non-elected body will keep the best interests of the people at heart.

A few questions - Are you telling me, despite the history of corruption and political avarice in this country, that so much power is good for one organisation to have? What is the point of going through so much trouble and voting? What good is my vote if someone I voted for is knocked out because the Lokpal feels that he is corrupt? Who is going to arrest the people who give the bribes? The Lokpal? The police? If a police official who arrests a bribe-paying citizen is found guilty of corruption by the Lokpal, then what happens to the arrests he/she has made of people who pay bribes? Will they be termed wrongful arrests? Who is going to run the government offices if most of its staff is suspended because they are guilty of corruption? If the MPs and ministers found guilty of corruption are thrown out of office, who will run the country? The Lokpal? [I don't want someone I have not elected to power running this country.] What if the Lokpal does not process a complaint within the time frame that it sets, who is monitoring the Lokpal and the Lokpal's efficiency? [Let's face it, judging by the surety of everyone's assumptions that everyone is corrupt, the Lokpal will have an immense volume of complaints to wade through. If each and every one has to be addressed in a satisfactory manner, it will take time.]

As for Mr.Hazare himself. He's threatening the government. He says he'll fast till death. That's mutinous and childlike behaviour. By being unreasonable, he is saying that he and all his supporters are people who are not keen on discussion and consensus. How do you trust an organisation like that to function objectively?

Comparing his protests to Gandhi's protests is wrong. Gandhi fought for us to be able to rule ourselves. He fought against foreign rule. We are ruling ourselves. We have a system in place. By saying that this system is not working, you are, in some way, trivialising people like Dr.Ambedkar and their work in creating a secular democracy like ours. We live in a country that affords us the freedom to do as we please, and a country that has a free press. Despite this, India is one of the most unhappy populations. A simple example, we bitch about traffic like it's going out of style, but do we take the effort to drive as per rules? We don't. How the hell does a population that is this scornful of simple rules get the right to bitch about corruption?

The Constitution was framed by Dr.Ambedkar for the population of this country to enjoy equality. Caste, education, hunger, basic healthcare, palliative care, care for the aged, women's rights, prostitution rackets, drugs, communalism, and so many things need attention. Instead. the media has sensationalised this issue to the point where people are no longer driven by common sense but by media-fuelled outrage. Ask the media to shut up first. They should have all killed themselves after the Nira Radia tapes came out.

Corruption is a problematic term. It is complex and problematic to understand. Leaving a tip at a restaurant over and above the service charge is not charity, it's corruption -- it's currying favour from a person in order to ensure better service for yourself the next time you go there. Being nice to your boss, sucking up to him/her despite your dislike of him/her is also a form of corruption. You are ensuring that you get decent performance reviews and a better pay and better treatment at work. When there are so many definitions, making one version of corruption go away is not going to create a cleaner system or make things easy.

Here is something else we should all be thinking about - freedom. We, as citizens, have the freedom to do as we please. This is a tolerance-preaching, secular, democracy. To see this framework exploited to achieve a goal whose long-term consequences are not known cannot be, in any way, good for us.

I am not going to be tolerant of people accusing me of being privileged because they assume that I don't know what I'm talking about. I talk about what I know and understand. If I don't get it, I will say that I don't. I do not have the time or patience to sit and write a pretentious piece about such a big issue because I have a blog. I am a citizen of this country, there are enough documents to prove it. If you don't think I'm thinking the "right" things, it's okay. I don't care. I don't think you're thinking the "right" things either. The beauty of being Indian is that you and I can continue to live our lives in disagreeable agreement.

Why it’s important to slap the citizen

2011-08-17T14:45:00.001+05:30

Sorry, but my mood off late is social commentary.

It cannot be helped. Such is the nature of the events unfolding in the country at the moment. For those interested, kindly Google “Anna Hazare” for more information on what is happening.

I just have a question to ask – why are these citizens being all self-righteous suddenly? They claim that this is a new “freedom struggle”. I find it a little ridiculous. The fact that it doesn’t occur to anyone that they are free to protest and call the government on its bluff is a little strange. How do these people feel shackled? They are allowed to elect. They are free to follow rules, or not. I’m willing to bet that some of them spit on the road and follow it up with “my forefathers fought for a free country, so I will spit. This land is my land, etc, etc, etc,” and some other truckload of tripe.

Have none of these “protestors” paid a bribe? Ever? Really? I find it hard to believe. In a country where minor traffic violations are pushed under the carpet with a Rs.50 bribe and no challan issued, it’s a little strange to see people gather by the thousands and be morally upright about an issue that clearly requires two parties to participate.

Let’s not look at corrupt officials and governments and government offices for a moment. Let’s look at citizens who go ahead and offer up bribes and under-the-table ways of dealing with an issue. They don’t pay bribes because it is the only way. I’m sure there are enough and more people in government offices that don’t need to be bribed for your work to get done. The way people are protesting, one is led to believe that every single government official is corrupt and so on. Truth is, most of them might not be. If you go someplace and act desperate and say “I will do anything, just please clear my paperwork” it won’t occur to the government officer to call the cops on you. He/she will take what you are offering and get on with his/her working day. People don’t realise that these people get paid anyway and they get employee benefits anyway. Anything more than that is probably going into their kids’ college funds.

I don’t appreciate the fact that self-righteous citizens are taking to the street protesting. I want them to ask themselves if they’ve ever paid a bribe, willingly. If they have, they need to stop protesting against corruption, ASAP. These people are exactly like the fuckers who don’t vote and then bitch. If you haven’t voted, then who the fuck are you to tell the Prime Minister he’s shit? Aren’t you being undemocratic by not exercising a system that has been created just so you can create a governing body that will benefit you and others in the long run? If that is such a failure, then on what basis are these new watchdogs of society going to function? Are they officials elected “by the people”? No. Then how do people know that they have the best interests of the people at heart?

To me, this fight against corruption seems like a war with the government officials and corrupt ministers more than it is about the problem of corruption itself.

When the desperation to get work done is what governs most requirements, and there is a willing populace to encourage a rat race of “whose paperwork will get cleared first”, how the fuck is corruption ever going to go away?

The unfortunate, or fortunate, reality is that India is a secular democracy. Everyone here has the right to do and say as they please. Sometimes it’s fantastic that we do have this freedom. Sometimes, not so. In the instance of Anna, the hypocritical, right-wing, in desperate need of a retirement plan, Hazare, the freedom to express dissent is being misused to its nth degree. He wants a non-corrupt system. It’s difficult to achieve, but not impossible. In order for this lofty ideal to even pretend to be some form of reality, the second hand in the corruption clap needs to be slapped – that of the bribing citizen. However, what Hazare wants is a non-elected body of civilians to scrutinise every move of the Prime Minister, the CBI, and an assortment of other government offices.

Erm, a little Big Brother / 1984-ish, no? Probably worse.

Apparently, the existence of a watchdog entity that has the power to bring down even the highest political authority in the country, the Prime Minister, will eliminate corruption. History has proved time and again, that power in the hands of those who don’t know what to do with it, always gets abused. I don’t understand why “the people” don’t see that we’re headed straight towards a massive spiral of complete chaos. The existence of a secular democratic system while a non-elected superbody exists simultaneously, is at complete odds. It is at odds with the ideals that this country was built on. I don’t see how a part-dictatorial system is democratic in any way.

Corruption is not just about A Raja costing the exchequer a ridiculous amount of money or Suresh Kalmadi misappropriating resources to make the country look like an inefficient entity. Corruption is also the offering of an “incentive” to someone in order to push your work along. Corruption is about mutual benefit to both parties. The fact that only one party is being targeted in Hazare’s protest is a little weird. I want the jails to be overcrowded for sure, but by both the people who took the bribe and by the people who offered it.

The fact that only one part of the corruption equation is being held accountable for a problem that clearly needs two participants is a little ridiculous.

Dear upright citizens,

Kindly stop supporting Anna Hazare if you’ve ever bribed someone in life. You’re the reason why A Raja thought he could get away with it. When you supply, there will be more demand. It’s a rule that governs just about everything in life and reality. To think that you’re not asking yourself what kind of citizen you are is in itself indicative of the kind of people who will be in the Lokpal. I don’t want to be governed by two agencies. I’ve elected one, while in the full possession of my faculties. Don’t ask me to stand by and watch as random people with a so-called sweeping ideological match with most of the country’s moral fibre decide which of the government officials I elected are worth being in office. As a citizen, I find it personally offensive that my vote, and my democratic rights are being undermined because Anna Hazare feels that the government I elected needs to be scared of someone watching over them. You are trivializing a process that requires time, money and a lot of hard work.

Shruthi

There are some people who have articulated their non-support for Hazare rather beautifully. This particular one (by Peter Griffin) was epic and also led me to discover Facebook’s character limit (500) –

“1. I'm anti-corruption.

2. I'm anti-Anna Hazare.

3. Hazare is a sanctimonious right-wing tyrant so cloaked in his own virtue that he believes he is above the law.

4. The law is frequently an ass.

5. Nevertheless, the law is frequently our only hope.

6. Better the elected asses than the dictatorial unelected.

7. The government is playing into Hazare's hands with its idiocy.

8. Yes, these views can be held simultaneously.”

The trouble with people who put themselves on a pedestal is that they don't have the option of making mistakes. When Hazare called himself a Gandhian, he had already begun a process of intense scrutiny. The truth about his ideology was bound to come out sometime. When self-righteous, do-gooders think they are the shit, they are setting themselves up for a fail. I’m sorry but when you decide that you are above any kind of moral scrutiny, then you need to understand that you should have a flawless record. Those that don’t should shut the fuck up and move on.

I, for one, am not a perfect citizen. I am not going to be a part of this “fight for freedom”. I already am a free person in a free world. I don’t see the need to fight for freedom, again. I’m not being suppressed, oppressed or anything. Underpaid, maybe, but nothing else.

Have I paid some police uncle somewhere some money so he will not hassle me, yes. Does that make me a bad citizen, yes. I don’t like that I did, but I’ve had to. There is no justification for a mistake made. However, when I do see my type going to town and acting like they know better, it irks me. When you cover up your mistakes and pretend to be a person you’re not, then what’s the difference between Kalmadi / Raja / Kanimozhi / Bellari and you?

EDITED TO ADD THIS link

Rants from "the concerned person"

2011-08-05T16:22:00.000+05:30

The terrible, terrible thing about going to a friend with a rant is that you forget an existing forum for spilling your guts and articulating your mind the way you want to without having someone constantly interrupt with their opinions. The comments section opens up after I’ve typed so this blog is a form of self-indulgence I’ve missed, IMMENSELY. Not that friends aren’t awesome, just that sometimes you just want to keep “talking”, uninterrupted.

There’s a lot going on for me off late, and I don’t think I can talk about it here just yet. I’m not sure of how it is all going to shape up, until then it is silence. However, the world and its infinite idiocy continues on, uninhibited and fearless, giving me so much to bitch about. So much.

We’ll start with the Lokpal Bill (Tehelka's article has a huge part to play in today's social commentary from me), ‘kay? This is a mammoth issue in the country at the moment. However, the protests are mostly on Facebook, since, well, Facebook is the place to go if you have promotions to do and no money to spend except your internet usage bill. After many Facebook and email petitions, the numbers were small when compared to our gargantuan population. In India 100s is a big number, so who gives a fuck about a disproportionately numbered consensus? The person behind it all is Anna Hazare, a man who is Gandhian but will not hesitate to flog people who don’t follow rules set down by him to the point where international media will be given one more excuse to stereotype us. Case in point:

When some villagers were found to be drunk they were tied to poles/pillars of the temple and flogged, sometimes personally by Hazare. He justified this harsh punishment by stating in an interview to Reader's Digest in 1986 that “rural India was a harsh society”. (from here)

This is a man who talks peace, but acts like a petulant child when the government does not agree with him. If his version of the Lokpal is not approved by August 15, Independence Day, then as of August 16, he will protest again. Now, the terrible thing about this is that the 24/7 news media is behind him. Rajdeep Sardesai will begin to screech from CNN-IBN, Barkha Dutt will start talking (*shudder*), Arnab Goswami will take it upon himself to conduct a panel interview with him being the only one allowed to talk. Facebook will cram my news feed with more and more “concerned youngsters” looking to make a difference in the corrupt world that is Indian governance.

It isn’t like I’m not concerned, but if you think corruption is such a huge problem because corruptible people are in it and you seek to check that corruptibility with incorruptible people, then have fun. I would like to see this panel of righteousness last, incorruptibly, forever. Do Hazare and his minions even know why some people choose government jobs? Job security. There is nothing more than that. These government servants get a ton of employee benefits. It doesn’t make a difference to them one way or another if your file is not pushed. They get paid at the end of every month. They get festival bonuses. They get pensions and gratuities and a whole host of benefits. Do you think they care? Who are you trying to filter out of the system?

Let’s look at replacements. If you throw everyone out of presently functional offices, I say this because corruption has ingratiated itself so much in our system that one will be hard-pressed to find one sincere person in that office. Now, if you throw everyone out, who are you going to put there? Civil supplies needs people right – where is the aam aadmi going to get subsidized grocery supplies from? The RTO (Regional Transport Office) will need people – how will you get a driver’s license? What about the passport office? It is one of the most crowded offices in the country. I don’t even want to start off on the others.

If Hazare and his camp think they can root out corruption and find a new and more efficient and upright citizenry to run the machinery, then it’s good. I would appreciate it. I do know that paper-pushing and bare minimum wage is what drives some of this corruption. Employee benefits aside, a position of power drives this corruption. The problem is in selling these jobs to the masses. When some peon knows that he has access to the big boss and so on, he will sell his accessibility on a regular basis to people who will do what needs to be done to finish first.

In a country of a billion people, everyone thinks they are entitled to get there first. From admissions in educational institutions to traffic signals, just about everything in this country is governed by this race mentality. On the road, be a chooth piece and cut lanes and drive like there’s no one else there. Waiting to pay the bill at the supermarket, look irritated with someone who has bought fewer things because all three of your carts will only take 5 seconds to bill. Boarding a bus, shove all the 10 other people trying to get in, because your Rs.5 fare is secretly worth Rs.5,000. Travelling by train, since your luggage contains nationally relevant luggage you need to make sure it’s under your berth so that no one else can put their bags in the space they have paid equally for.

Never mind that people pay equally for everything. Everyone in this country feels entitled to more. Probably because their great grandfathers wiped Gandhi’s ass and felt the need to share it with the family, which then went on to become a mythological text, which went on to become the source of some sincerely misplaced entitlement, which is making my life miserable. Thank you. Please drown in the Cooum.

So Mr.Gandhian, self-righteous, morally incorruptible Anna Hazare, have you never committed an illegal act? Have you never done the wrong thing in order to protect your own interests? There is something in the Bible along these lines, although I cannot for the life of me quote it verbatim. The essence is this – if you’re judging someone then you ought to have a lived a life that no one can point fingers at. If you have, then please lead the way for humanity. If you haven’t, then please leave the building thank you very much. If Mr.Hazare thinks people are incorruptible, then he really should look back and ask himself if he did the “right” thing at all times. I don’t think he did. Threatening a national government that he will fast unto death is the wrong thing to do. Asking that a country equate the success of your protest on the same day as its Independence Day is cheap marketing tactics and the wrong thing to do. Expecting to be on national television all the fucking time because the government is not listening to you is the wrong thing to do.

You want to change the system? Infiltrate it, study it, analyse it, change it. Don’t be unreasonable and most importantly un-Gandhian. Gandhi was non-violent. He never threatened. He only asked that we all raise our voices against injustice. We did. That’s why we’re free today. Someone like you does not have the right to wear white, be impertinent just because the constitution allows you to, and then equate yourself to Gandhi. Gandhi was man enough to admit he made mistakes; the question is Mr.Hazare, are you?

Glass bangle tales

2011-07-20T18:17:00.000+05:30

Bangles make me happy. That’s just how I roll okay. Glass bangles especially. Since our magazine is setting up shop in Hyderabad, I honestly believe that a work trip is in order. I want to go to Charminar and buy bangles and just die in happiness. Just. Die. In. Happiness.

I don’t know from where or since when this bangle thing happened. I know that it has been around for a while now. My earliest memories with glass bangles are from having watched my aunt spend Sundays cleaning out her box of bangles, neatly arranging them according to colour and wiping the dust clean with a soft cloth and then using mildly soapy water to clean it proper-like.

Watching her bent over her bangles intently, with her long hair falling over her shoulders with the Chennai sun blasting in through the open balcony doors, must have left an impression. Of course, back in the day, I couldn’t be trusted with anything perishable, food included. So, I found myself with an enviable collection of plastic and metal bangles. Each set bought to match some insane dance costume that I had to wear for the insane Annul Day productions in school. Over the years, my capable-of-breaking-anything-breakable habit went on hibernation a little. Once that happened I wore glass bangles more often. While my mother was convinced that I would break everything I ever wore, I kept buying!

It was in college that this love for glass bangles became unhealthily obsessive. I had a partner in crime – S Bhuvaneshwari Rao – who encouraged my tryst with bangles and cotton sarees like it was going out of style. Bhuva and I would plan saree days and dress up – bangles, anklets, bindis – the works. Those were days when someone followed me till the bus stop to declare his undying love. I mean, I don’t see how a fat girl in a saree showing off her thoppai excites you, but it does apparently. I don’t see how you think passing on that information to the source of your excitement is going to make her swoon in absolute adoration. Fool.

Which brings me to July 2011. I have three full boxes of an assortment of bangles. All kinds of bangles in all kinds of colours and almost every single one of them is closely linked to the sarees in my mother’s cupboard. The only reason that my collecting has hit a roadblock is because, well, they don’t make glass bangles like they used to. These says, almost everything is covered with that unsightly glitter that falls on your clothes and face and you end up looking like some character from a school pageant! I want plain, cut-glass bangles.

I’m told that Hyderabad has all kinds of bangles and I hope that they have not commercialized to the point of making my favourite kind of bangle extinct. I’m looking forward to my work trip to Hyderabad. And I hope it happens soon. For now, I will be content with what I have. Chennai does not have a market where one can go mental and buy bangles. Yes, Mylapore, but even that is difficult to wade through. Till then, I have to deal with owning metal bangles like these, which seem to uncannily match the clothes I’m wearing today (I wore them because they uncannily matched okay!)

Harry Potter and silly people

2011-07-15T11:09:00.002+05:30

So today is the great release of the last Happy Potter movie, and apparently there will be so many sad people out there that a) Kleenex is going to have a fucking field day selling its products b) chocolate manufacturers are rejoicing at the potential spike in sales caused by depressed women everywhere turning to chocolate after the franchise’s end.

I don’t want to be a bitch, but the way things are being hyped, it’s giving me a damn rash.

I confess to never having read any of the Harry Potter books, except Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix. I have watched the movies part 1 -5. I like the concept and the setting and the creation of a parallel universe that all of us as children have wanted to escape into. Magic, wands, spells, things that humans cannot understand – Narnia was like that as well (forget the biblical references for a second please?). Since I haven’t read the books, I will not venture to comment about what Harry Potter means to my childhood.

Here’s what bothers me bout the movie franchise hype though. It has spawned a generation of pathetic people who think their lives are irretrievably twined with the release of the next film in the franchise. It makes me sick. Some women have gone on the record to say that they will never be the same again because they have nothing to look forward to now. Uh, I want to tell them to go read the books, but fuck, these women probably will complain about how intellectually over-burdened they are because of the emotional intensity of the books.

I don’t get it. The books still sell. The books are the ones that gave the movie studios the idea to make the movies in the first place. I don’t see how the movies’ ending is going to affect such a huge change in the emotional landscape of some people that they will be forever psychologically damaged. It makes me want to vomit!

Considering how the Harry Potter hype is shaping up, I don’t think I appreciate the fact that the books are getting undermined because the movies are successful. I mean, get over it man. If you’re so upset, buy the DVDs and watch it whenever you would like. If you think you will never be the same again, buy the books and exercise your brains a little, you will find that it will be good for your health and you might evolve to be a slightly more intelligent human being.

The world is full of surprises and I want to be surprised by non-readers who discover books. But if I ever find out that you think the movie is better than the book, chances are your skull will be cracked open, with great glee and joy, by my hands with the heaviest book I can find.

Diva-ness

2011-07-03T20:12:00.000+05:30

It isn’t often that I find myself teary after a confrontation. This time, it happened because the reason for the confrontation was something really important to me – food.

In my house, I’m the odd one out. In a large population, my vegetarian/left-handed self would be part of a generic statistic – the one-in-every-500-is-a-nutter type. However, in this specific case, I am the odd one out. Basically this means, when my family sits down to elaborate Sunday lunches, my plate would be the least appetizing-looking. Why? “Shit, you. I forgot” would normally be the reaction.

Over the years, I got used to it and it even became a joke. But when I’m hungry on a Sunday and there is nothing for me to eat, I feel entitled to feel like a neglected child.

It’s that simple. I mean, you get to eat things that you enjoy because that’s what everyone’s eating? How fair is that. All I’m asking is to at the very least pretend to remember that I exist. That’s all. At the very least be consistent about that.

It’s hard to not make this whiny. And I know that some people will tell me about just going with the flow and becoming non-vegetarian, here’s what I want to say to you – “shut the fuck up bitchface. I’m vegetarian, I will remain this way. Just fucking deal with it. Am I asking you to be vegetarian? No. Then you back the hell off. Got that?”

I wish food wasn’t this necessary to life. I’d deal with this somehow or the other. However, food is a necessity. We all know that, so any deprivation of any kind is not acceptable.

As for the starving, poor children in the world who don’t even have the opportunity that I do to eat and be alive, I’m sorry for it but this once, I’d like for this to be about me, okay?

Cross-linking

2011-07-02T12:34:00.000+05:30

Two stories.

One is at Monkey Bicycle and the other is at The Medulla Review.

There is a third that I want to share here, not the same writer, but an amazing one nonetheless. It's a brilliantly written piece and I think it will have a resonance with women, particularly those who have experienced violence in some form or the other. Please do share these stories with your friends.

Sh.

P.S: I will be back with more self-styled social commentary because this blog wouldn't be what it is without that now would it? Meh.

The meta of life

2011-06-24T16:18:00.003+05:30

I’ve reaslied that this month has come and gone and I haven’t posted worth squat here. It’s bothering me that I’m suddenly bored with a lot of things. Blogging included. More than bothering, I think I’m just plain scared that I have lost that interest in writing. Unless, and the following might be the actual criminals responsible for my present state of being - I’m wasting my time texting waaayyy too many people, I’m too into my new BlackBerry and of course I’m doing too much statusing on Facebook. This idiot need to constantly type is affecting my blog’s survival.

I’m not going to take a resolution to post more regularly. The fact that this blog has been running for more than a year, in a more organized manner than my previous one is enough for me. For now. This isn’t a writer’s blog, or a blog about writing, so, in some sense a lull is justified. To me. I don’t know about how my “avid readers” will feel about this!

But this is not about what I make of blogging. I don’t think I’m up to writing about that just yet. Maybe after I have 5,000 followers! Maybe never!

Today, I would like to talk about institutions. I wish I was talking about tangible structures that people can point out to, but these are abstract spaces that we traverse on a regular basis and yet, we don’t realize it because we’re so busy being.

This post comes from a long, fun, much-needed lunch conversation with a very dear friend. She was telling me about someone she knows who “hates institutions”. Now, of course, that set me off. And I wanted to know precisely what this “I hate institutions” means. Most everything in the real world is an institution as far as I know.

Some people try to make some things abstract and talk about how the time-space continuum does not allow humans’ tiny brains to comprehend the scale of the epic-ness that is this intangibility. What I want to ask them is this – did you get educated at an educational institution? Anyone who has had a formal education that has been prescribed by society loses the right to talk about institutions, unless and until said person is doing something about breaking down the system of institutionalising itself.

Sitting in a coffee shop, talking to like-minded people about how education ruined you a la Rousseau, does not an institution-breaker make. I don’t know how some people get away with being so meta while operating out of a structure and defined space. There are some people I know who are in universities or are part of a collective and then go on about how institutions suck.

The word institution itself applies to one specific institution and that is what really gets me. The institution being, of course, marriage. The “I hate institutions” refrain so oft-repeated in this specific context that it has lost its original meta-ness and has whittled down into the “worst excuse ever” category. What “I don’t believe in institutions”? Why can’t you come right out and tell someone to their face that you don’t want to marry them.

Yes, the excuse is that you are profoundly in love with her or have this cosmic bond/connection or some twisted shit like that. The reality of it is simple – she wants to get married and have babies, you don’t believe in institutions. You are on opposite sides of the camp, why bother trying to meet halfway? Because you’re in love? Really. If you’re in love then why in the hell can’t you meet halfway about this? It’s a tough question I know. But knowing the direction of a relationship and wanting something out of a relationship is important. Altering it to suit the convenience and comfort of one person is just, well, wrong.
It’s called compromise for good reason and that needs to exist in just about every aspect of a relationship. The fact that someone selectively applies nonsense meta theories to simple situations that can be resolved with some degree of common sense is a little offensive. I mean, for everything else there has to be dialogue and communication and so on, but for something that you are not comfortable with, out comes the meta, the post-modern existentialism and so on and so forth.

When people use big words, you should be afraid. They are the ones that are sales pitching something that you don’t need in your life. Look at all the times you fell for the nonsense you saw on TV and ended up buying cereal that tastes like sawdust and deodorant that doesn’t exactly make you smell good all day. This selective sales pitching for selective situations is the reason why so many people have these epic mindfucks and then go and die!

You want to be selective, then please be selective in the way you choose partners. Find someone who, like you, is living in some weird planet where nothing is institutionalized. Apparently, family, friendships, corporate employment, formal education, etc, are just social necessities that will arm you with enough ammo to talk about how you hate institutions. Do the world a favour and stop being a social human being, because society is a fucking institution. Don’t vote, don’t comment on the government, cancel your passport, don’t have a bank account, don’t get a telephone connection, and don’t do anything, because you “hate institutions”.

Someone ought to have the balls to actually live that life and I would like to meet that person. I’m just pissed that some people assume the mantle of truth and honesty while lying to the world and to themselves about their “principles and value systems”. The worst? They get away with it.

Quotable from Nat Geo

2011-06-08T18:07:00.001+05:30

National Geographicise - it's the adjective that I am using to describe the gora in the Incredible India ad. It's the adjective I have referred to many times on this blog while telling off namma tourists who come here with their white skin and wide-eyed wonder at all things poor and ratty and tatty and bothersome.

However, that doesn't mean that Nat Geo is a bad thing. It's epic in terms of giving people opportunity to showcase our world in the harsh glare of the reality spotlight. We need to deal with it. We need to see it. We need to understand it.

On that note, I'd like to direct you to an essay. And would like to quote some mild WTf-ery from the Nat Geo stable. The essay is, overall, brilliantly written (I learned a new word "moxie") but has its moments of white-superior gaze that bothers me a little.

Here are a couple of excerpts - "Her mother had moved to her husband's village, as rural married Indian women are expected to do..." & "The very idea that young women have a right to select their own partners—that choosing whom to marry and where to live ought to be personal decisions, based on love and individual will—is still regarded in some parts of the world as misguided foolishness. Throughout much of India, for example, a majority of marriages are still arranged by parents. Strong marriage is regarded as the union of two families, not two individuals. This calls for careful negotiation by multiple elders, it is believed, not by young people following transient impulses of the heart."http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/06/child-brides/gorney-text/1

Fathers and daughters

2011-06-05T10:22:00.000+05:30

This, my 150^th, won’t be worth salivating over. I need to get something out of my system and if I don’t articulate it, chances are some poor friend of mine who likes me will end up being the recipient of a complaint that has, in the last couple of years, become exceedingly repetitive.

Somewhere between the battle of the sleeveless kurta and the hunt for marital happiness on KeralaMatrimony.com, is a silence in this house that gets me every single time. The chief proponent is my father. My mother comes a close second. And ironically, all of us claim to be a family that is honest with each other. That’s a lie. Yes, my mother knows that I go out for a movie with my friends from time to time. She also knows what “dinner” and 2am walk-ins mean. That doesn’t mean my father knows any of this. He’s a second-hand recipient of all this information and he takes it badly. He doesn’t understand why we go out for movies with friends. Why we sometimes want to get out to catch up for a cup of coffee. He thinks it’s strange. To me, his attitude has always meant huge fights at home about my need to be “independent” and “exploiting the freedom they gave me”.

Post my stint in Delhi and my MA, things were still the same. Simple things like chilling out always meant coming up with convoluted reasons for being out of the house. Apparently, they are only looking out for me so that people will not talk about me in a manner that is deprecatory and my reputation as a good girl from a good home will be intact. It’s that simple. And to me, that much more complicated. This good girl from a good family thing is a part of my self that I have been in constant conflict with. I don’t see why a good girl from a good family cannot also spend time with her friends after work and spend some money shopping. I mean good girls need to be clothed right? To be clothed, they need to dispense some cash, right? So why is shopping with girlfriends considered a very, well, meh? I don’t know.

Then there is the issue with the friendships you cultivate. Yes, people are important in your life. Sometimes we meet the wrong kind of people and sometimes we meet the best people. The fact that my parents had an opinion about who I should be friends with rankled on many, many levels for me. I couldn’t get past that level of intrusion and need for control with them. These days, it’s the same story. Only worse because they’re trying to find me a husband and the more often I walk in at 2am, the harder it is to read the day’s paper in the same room as my father. The stoic silences are no romantic representation of an old-school man, but of some kind of seething anger that stems from having disobedient children. This is, IMHO, exactly what my father thinks.

I cannot imagine him being quiet because he has nothing to say, he has plenty to say when the occasion least calls for it, so his silences are not simple. They run deeper and with those silences are disappointments which never fail to rear their heads every single time we sit down to eat, as a family. It’s ridiculous to me that some degree of honesty does not exist in this relationship. It bothers me. My father thinks I’m one of “those “ girls. You know the one who goes clubbing regularly, gets trashed regularly and sleeps around ALL the fucking time because she goes clubbing regularly and gets trashed regularly. To top this all off, I’m Fat (personally, I don't think so, but my father will tell you different) , so my wearing certain kinds of clothes is some kind of bad thing for my health, I mean you can see that I have a sizeable chest area and a big bum, that can’t be a good thing!

I’m not sure if I should be crying or just throwing up my hands in the air in utter exasperation. It’s a struggle being daughter to this dad, however, I do know for a fact that if I need it, he’ll drop everything just because I need him to be around for me. Making this issue even more contentious than necessary! I love my father, but he’s also all of this. What the fuck do you do?!

#fail!

Why men can be annoying

2011-05-19T18:00:00.001+05:30

There are some hits that you will take because you probably asked for it. There are some hits, however, that come your way because the universe is pissed off with you and your happy place and decides to put a stop the simple pleasures of your life - I’m having one of those days.

It’s amazing to me the circularity of some things. Why people won’t let go of you because three or more years ago you were connected to them and since you’ve moved on and have turned into a healthier, less-neurotic self, it’s not cool any more that you’re no longer connected to each other. Why? Seriously, why? Is it not enough that I’m happy without you? Do I have to struggle with a nasty thought and then think about how happy I am? Do I need to validate my everyday happiness by comparing it to the mindfuck you were? Do I?

One of the most appalling things about the series of random events that have unfolded since yesterday afternoon is one fact – men, the attention-seeking ones, are trash talkers to the very extreme. I mean, hello! If you’re not getting any that don’t mean you make up a nice little story with me as the protagonist you chooth piece! Stop lying about things that never happened. Just stop.

When more and more shit like this is unearthed, the bigger my reasons are for not liking men. Yes, I was consensually involved with a few at some point in time, but if they didn’t act like trashbags post the event, I’d be less angry about this. Act like complete douches after, why don’t you? Give me reason to inventively tell you to fuck the hell off of this planet. Being classy, being adult, being mature was never part of the agenda. I guess that’s precisely why a lot of women indulge in man-bashing that almost always ends with – “what the fiuck was I thinking?”

I think, I wasn’t thinking.

*****

On a more happy note – post 150 approaches – and with it the dilemma of how to make it memorable. I made 100 a very interesting subject. How do I usher 150?

How some human beings are idiots

2011-05-14T12:30:00.001+05:30

Self-preservation

(sĕlf'prĕz'ər-vā'shən)

• Protection of oneself from harm or destruction.

• The instinct for individual preservation; the innate desire to stay alive.

(Courtesy www.answers.com)

Here’s what I want to do to self preservation – I want to chop it into tiny little pieces, then sear it in burning hot coals and then use it as fishing bait in the Cooum River until it gets eaten completely by the strange bacteria and other toxic chemicals in the water. If there is any remnant of self-preservation after that, I would like to flatten it under a speeding train and then have it crushed under some heavy machinery that is currently constructing the Chennai Metro Rail.

The only reason I’m undermining the dictionary meaning is because this word has been abused by idiots that I have the extreme displeasure to be acquainted with. If a turtle employs this method, I am completely okay with it, because without this instinct, a turtle would, well, die! Same goes for the touch-me-not plant.

However, when human beings, whose lives are in no danger whatsoever, use this “technique” to avoid communication altogether, I have some very serious problems with this so-called survival tactic. How the hell does friendship/a relationship/love call for self-preservation – Are you being mauled by political gundas because you’re a good friend or are in a relationship or are in love? Does someone have knife to your jugular? Did someone threaten to crack your skull open with a rock? If the answer to all of these questions is no, then you simply do not have the right, constitutional or otherwise, to employ self-preservation. It’s that simple and there is no fucking way around it.

I don’t care if you’re a post-modern junkie who has issues with the basic existence of the human race. I don’t give a damn if complication seeks you out and fucks you ass ways because you are too much of a spineless shit to stand up and do something about it. Self-preservation kicks in when you are at your lowest and you find the need to be alive more than the need for suicide. When you find yourself grudgingly making the right mumbles about everyday mundanity? That’s self-preservation. Your inability to reach out? That’s called being a total chooth, in all your choothness.

God! I hate moronic nonsense like – my soul needs soothing because the world we live in is messed up. As per every religious text, we live in a time of strife, pain and heightened callousness; hence, we are fucked up by virtue of being alive in this time, so take your needs-soothing soul and jump off a snowy peak and freeze and die in the cold because the world doesn’t need you.

If one more shitfaced idiot, male or female, comes to me with this self-preservation nonsense, I am going to turn into a serial killer. Really. The only way to deal with this problem is to employ the method of slow and carefully carried out elimination.

One more Chennaiite bitches about the heat

2011-05-04T15:04:00.001+05:30

When I was young, there was this fascinating thing called gum. It was sold in a blue bottle and was used by all school-going children indiscriminately when they wanted to cover their school books and for their craft class.

The image should tell you what gum means exactly.

When it’s summer in Chennai, the humidity, which is at 56% today, coats itself on your body like the gloopy gum in the blue bottle. The trouble is that with 36˚C temperature, the humidity adds to this strange burning feeling. And, 36˚C actually feels like 46˚C. In the coming days, it’s only going to get hotter.

This heat is something I’ve never really understood about this city. We’re coastal with an unbroken coastline, and yet, the weather here is this bizarre heatwave-ish thing that everyone is constantly bitching about.

I don’t mind the sweaty, but, when my body feels like it’s been coated with a finely brushed-on layer of Camel gum, I don’t like it at all!

To make things even more wonderful are the timed power cuts across the city, the mad voltage fluctuations and the fact that most electronic equipment cease to function in this weather. When you work in a glassed-in office like mine, a non-functioning air-conditioner only means one thing, torturous hell.

I just need a ceiling fan to get by. One working, fast-moving ceiling fan.

My friend the poet

2011-05-04T11:08:00.002+05:30

There's someone I know, who is this amazing woman. Super friend and the light of my life since 2005. No kidding. We met during a two-year course that was marked by disillusionment and theatre. They were two of the best years of my life and two of the worst.

We watched the rain come in from the sea. We talked, endlessly, about what we thought and how we came to those conclusions. We shared so much, we held back so much.

Two years later, when the time came for goodbyes, we wrote letters. All that's stopped now and I think on some strange level, we don't need that conversation any longer.

I met her recently, a couple of months ago, and it occurred to me that friends like her are rare and even if I think Facebook is a great way of keeping in touch, as long as the feeling is the same when we meet, it's all good.

My only problem with her is the fact that she never shares her creative writing. This time, however, she went ahead and got them published. Do read.

Shruthi is somewhere else

2011-05-03T11:42:00.003+05:30

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I've written, or should I say - I sent a Facebook response to someone's note and it got published? Either way, I had mentioned Writing Caste earlier and Malar has published my response to her here.

Thank you for reading, and for linking, if you have.

Lowe

Bras, bullies and me

2011-04-30T12:32:00.002+05:30

“So cute!”

“Gundu (fat), no?”

“Fat.”

“Fatty.”

“Jelly bum.”

“You look so unhealthy. You need to exercise.”

“Keep eating more chocolate, you’re beginning to look obese.”

Since I was a baby, people have been using the F(at) word around me indiscriminately. As if it’s their prerogative and some kind of bizarre birthright to call someone fat. I sometimes wish their judgements were justified. Unlike the King of Tonga, I don’t need to have a special chair made for me to accommodate my so-called fat self.

It didn’t help me in the least when, at the age of 14, I had more curves than most teenagers I knew. And teenage girls, insensitive bitches that they are, enjoyed making fun of trainer bras for some strange reason. It didn’t matter to them that they wore said bras a couple of years later, but I couldn’t wear them because, well, they didn’t like it. Those were the times I wished I was non-descript.

I’m not sure where this sudden need to talk about it is even coming from.

In school, there were some characters who, thanks to a then-released movie Kaadal Desam, thought it was cool to ask me to bend over and pick something off the floor. Our pinafores prevented any cleavage show, even then, those idiots thought it was clever and for some reason I should have felt honoured that I was being asked to please bend and pick up a coin.

Then of course were more teenage girl comments about the size of my ass and chest. I never understood why the fuck it was fascinating for boobless women to go all – “dude, your big boobs are so fugly” – on women with boobs. In school, that taunt was a little more annoying because these skinny children with no thighs and boobs to speak of seemed to be very popular with the boys and possessed a secret that some of us wanted to get our hands on. They were also very snide and for some reason enjoyed snarking on the girls who had more flesh on them.

The boys in my batch who were getting the attention? Not that good-looking or interesting even. I’m sorry to go on the record to say this. Truth is that some of our relationships have grown only after school when we acquired some semblance of personalities and character, more than what our grey hospital-patient-esque uniforms afforded us anyway.

To imagine being approved of by these boys and to validate our teenage awkward selves with our popularity with them is something I never really understood. My general hate for how I looked prevented any amount of self-confidence. I was angry a lot. I yelled a lot. I was a teacher’s daughter, so there was a grudging acceptance of me in the classroom, and I don’t think it was anything more than that.

The people I went to school with are the ones I’d cut my left arm off for now. I cannot imagine a life without them. Now, however, has no bearing on then. And then, to be perfectly honest, is a time I’d like to erase from memory, if it’s not too much trouble!

It was only in college that body types was a concept that my poor scarred brain was able to embrace. Even my sneaky Mills & Boon reading in class 11 accomplished only one thing, the women were gorgeous and skinny, only a hint of curve, but otherwise perfect. I gave up.

College opened another thought mechanism. That of actually thinking and assessing and analyzing and figuring it out. Since I am a possessor of a sizeable chest area, some women were jealous. I was amazed! You hate that you don’t have boobs? For real? Whatte!

There were some others who were comfortable being whatever they were, and I decided then that I would try my best to be comfortable with the body I had and via that get comfortable with who I am.

Those three years studying literature and criticizing archetypes helped me get over a lot of my adolescent baggage. Sometimes a red bra can help compensate for the strap-snapping bullies in ways that I cannot explain.

These days, people still indiscriminately use the F word around me. I use it on me. But no significant brain damage has been caused due to the same. I’m in a better place and sometimes when I really need to feel better, I just pull out a red or black number and smile to myself. It's hella better than chocolate sometimes, and for me, that's saying a lot!

Letters

2011-04-29T22:48:00.002+05:30

Dear father of mine,

Reverse psychology never helped in creating mature individuals with 'character'. It only messes people up. So, stop talking? You're 62, you need a rest from constantly finding-fault with your fat daughter and your son who, according to you, will never amount to anything in life. Just stop.

With much gratitude,
The fat daughter.

Sometimes, I pontificate

2011-04-27T20:49:00.001+05:30

“I want to stand in Fabindia and soak up the cotton-ness of it all and buy a kurta,” I said to a friend.

“Why do all you women love Fabindia? I don’t get it,” my friend replied.

“Well, I personally like the fact that in Chennai cotton is my best bet. Fabindia is not some exclusive place, I know that about 30 other women will wear the same prints, but I like it anyway,” I say.

A long time has passed since that conversation was exchanged, but I realized that almost everyone made sweeping generalizations about other people. It’s such an easy thing to do with our time. Even though I’m talking about this, I’m not sure how conversations would be if all of us were non-judgmental souls. Can you imagine that?

I don’t think even the hippies were capable of being non-judgmental! It’s that difficult not to snark on people.

***

On a completely unrelated note, Dove shampoo’s campaigns are utter, total and complete nonsense. They don’t ask “real women” to endorse their shampoo. All the girls that did the Dove ads have magically proliferated on every other cheeseball advertisement and even posed for one of MTV’s shows, making them professional “real women”. Bleddee. Lack of integrity in product promotion only. Unethical foolishes!

***

My brother’s quit his job and come back home. As much as I love him to pieces and love having him around, I find his nonsense approach to doing laundry completely irritating. I don’t get why boys think wearing dirty clothes is cool and manly. Bloody disgusting!

***

Also, I don’t think I will ever be a meat-eater. I don’t get the hype. I don’t want the fucking snark that comes with the territory. What the fuck are you loser non-vegetarians bitching about? Don’t you idiots realize that you have more to eat because I don’t? Try being happy about that. Asses! Keep going on about how “you’re missing out” – uh, I don’t think so. I don’t want to eat meat. Respect that and get over your nonsense and stop giving me grief about the fact that I don’t eat what you do. Bleddee.

***

News, views, stuff

2011-04-26T22:52:00.002+05:30

The persistent need to tell Facebook that I’m doing something or I am in the midst of a giant, earth-shattering, for me, epiphany, is getting a little annoying. I think I would like to hide some place and not come out at all.

I wish life was suddenly not about my online presence. I mean, a friend of mine re-activated her Facebook profile to tell me – “I’m here because it’s hard to live in the same city as you and stay in touch”. I was rightfully enraged, sorry di, but I think she’s right. There’s more information about me online than there is in other people’s email and SMS inboxes. That’s bloody sad. I want to be the girl who overshares in a café and has other people bitch about her and not the other way around. I like getting out of my house to get some fresh air and Vitamin D, not sit at home and type a lot. I’ll end up being lady type-a-lot and friendless!

Anyway, that’s just self-indulgence.

There’s a new blog. Writing Caste. Check it out.

This blog came about with a very interesting back story. Malarvizhi Jayanth, a former reporter at The Hindu wrote two rants on Facebook after The Hindu acquired exclusive access to Wikileaks’ India Cables. Malar had a huge grouse against the paper and it was expressed in two parts. The first part was the classic – my former employer is a jerkwad-style piece and the second hit a more raw nerve, caste. Now, caste is a subject that this country grapples with on a regular basis and continues to be completely anal about it because our social structures date back to a time way, way, way before colonialism even happened.

The responses to the second post were so multifarious that Malar decided to put together a blog of contributions and responses. I wrote to her too, you can’t blame me! My name is one of the most misleading in Malayali history. As recently as Sunday I had someone ask if I was Brahmin, when I said I wasn’t, this person was like, "but your name". That’s how it goes with me.

I for one, as mentioned earlier, don’t know this problem, nor have I been a victim of caste. However, this word has been a part of a lot of my interactions ever since I got that certificate from the CBSE just before my class 10 board exams. In my MA, the word took on a new significance. As a student of post-colonial literature, etc, the word became part of debate, but it never meant anything to me. As someone who lives the regular middle-class city life, I haven’t had to deal with it on a personal level.

However, watching the people who come out of the sewer manholes, reminds me that there is a part of my country’s social fibre that is tainted and stained. I think the Supreme Court’s decision to make Khap Panchayat’s illegal is a step in the right direction towards eradicating the unreasonable levels of right-wingness that persists in this country.

I’m going to leave it at that.

One more blog you should be reading is this. She’s a junior of mine from college and she's awesome and she’s getting married and she’s a fantastic writer, so please read okay?

I go now, I will come back with lots of more kuppai. There’s a bachelor party I have to go to because my idiot friend has more women friends. I’m sure something will come out of that event that I will write about.

Abusing he who is worthy

2011-04-21T11:02:00.001+05:30

Murphy, you sonofabitch!

I hate you on so many levels, it’s astounding!

The one day I decide to dress like its summer, and it rains. I can’t help but think that you have a hand in it.

If my white linens and Birkenstocks get damaged because of the weather, I will find you and torture you to death you little shit.

In memoriam

2011-04-20T14:23:00.002+05:30

Eight years to the day since my maternal grandfather passed away. I almost forgot what today was. I cannot believe how much time has passed since 2003. I always thought I’d remember and mark the day in some small way. This morning, unusually, I woke up early, 6.30 to be precise, and decided that I would try and kill the shruthi’s-always-late cliché and reach office before my designer did. It was when I went to pack my lunch did my aunt tell me, “It’s apupa’s death day today, will you come home for lunch, I’ve made his favourite things.”

It was only then that the significance of the date sink in. I was shocked that I had forgotten, puzzled that I would forget, but then again I’m constantly monologuing with myself all the time, so I’m not surprised in the least.

I’m a little clueless about what one does in remembrance of a loved one. Is only remembering enough?

He would have been 90 this year if he had lived. Some part of me misses him every single time I do something important, like get a master’s degree for instance. To my grandfather, Sid and I were special beings that were given to him so he could look after us and generally gush about our awesomeness. I remember going home after winning this lame prize at MCC. It was a Rs.100 cash prize for a collage thingy and my grandfather thought it deserved mention at all dinners for the rest of the week. He was cool like that. Every little victory, every little thing mattered to him and I think it’s an awesome trait to have possessed.

He was his happiest when we were eating, laughing, gossiping, talking and he sat at the head of the table.

The only time he ever lost his temper was to tell us exactly what he thought of Nehru. As a Lieutenant in the INA, my grandfather never thought much of the non-Subash Chandra Bose way of freedom fighting and leadership.

Onam was another time of year when my grandfather was in his elements. For some reason, he never really understood why cutting vegetables for avvial was so difficult. My grandmother and my mother were constantly being quizzed about how far the cooking had come and why the avvial was looking so suspiciously badly cut. My grandfather was great at giving instructions about food. He's the reason behind our slightly mad love for food.

He was fascinated by his youngest grandchild, Prem. A tiny, then two-year-old, boy who insisted that my grandfather swallow his medicines one by one, insisting that only he knew how to give apupa medicine.

Somewhere in the rut that is my life and my ranting, I’ve forgotten my grandfather’s smile. His silence. His joy in simple things.

For him taking Sid along for a haircut and getting conned into buying more Frooti than necessary meant more than a lot of things.

His children and grandchildren were his whole world. To them he bequeathed just one thing, unity under any and all forms of sometimes over-stressful diversity.

Manic Mondays

2011-04-11T22:42:00.001+05:30

I have a strange feeling I’m living two lives.

One day I’m the temple-visiting good girl who will go along with any plan that her parents have for her and for her future. On the other I’m falling off my friend’s couch and getting a 25-paisa size burn on my upper arm because I couldn’t sit straight after all the alcohol I consumed.

My liver and my stomach protested extremely strongly. After a Saturday night I would rather forget, my past caught up with me in a manner than I don’t think I am entirely comfortable with. However, I need to prove a point, so I am going to see how the hell this pans out.

And just to make a point, some men will remain ever creepy. Marriage is the last thing that makes a difference to them!

More, later.

Undo, re-write, replicate

2011-04-09T12:16:00.000+05:30

The trouble with writing on Word is the Ctrl+Z option. I think it’s cool when you need to use it to re-work something you’ve written, one the other hand, people like me abuse the function to delete possibly revolutionary content. All because I’m too much of a wimp to tell you exactly what I think. This need for propriety is going to kill me one day and I am going to blame someone else. Blame society perhaps. Society takes the blame for a lot of things; it may as well carry this also on its little head!

On that happy note…

There has been so much going on recently. India won the Cricket World Cup, thank god for that. It only means that when we play in Australia in 2015, people will expect us to pull off one more win. Not that it isn’t likely; I just don’t see it happening. In the meantime, if the Chennai Super Kings win IPL4, I will be extremely grateful to them. If Chennai can’t get the ‘cool city’ tag, we may as well have the badass-est cricket team in the country, no? It gives us more incentive to toot our horns. We need something to yell about.

And there was one more wedding that I went to. Since October, I’ve only been doing one thing consistently, go to weddings. Whether I want to be there or not, the point is that I am an attendee at weddings and that means a lot of things, both good and bad. The recurring joke is “who’s next?” the recurring answer is “it could be you, you’re old enough, get married”. I like to think that these things have a matter of time surrounding them; however, time is not something the world concerns itself with. They want to be humorous and funny and smart-mouthed and make people like me defensive. Recently, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, she had one question for me, again, a question that has become standard question when in conversation with me – “how’s the groom hunt at your place di?” I had to ask her why she asked me, as was everyone else, to which she replied – “Because you put it up on FB a lot, so people are obviously going to ask you.”

I had to concede that she had a point. I’ve been going to town with this husband-finding process for quite a while now. So much so that it seems to be the only thing that people want to have a conversation about. My answers vary depending on my audience. To some people I’m mature and am approaching this very level-headedly, to some others I’m plain neurotic, for the most part I’m just irritated that it’s the only thing that my parents want to think about and it’s the only thing that people want me to talk about. How hard is it to not talk to me if you have nothing of relevance to discuss? But no, you need to make conversation, so you will bring up a subject on which I can talk about for hours and hours and then complain to me that I only think of this one thing. Poda ________! (In Tamil, poda dash, aka, the blank, is one hell of a way to tell someone to please get lost in the dense jungles of the Amazon basin and not bother to find their way out!)

And again, with the nonsense

2011-04-01T16:58:00.001+05:30

• Two blog posts were drafted and abandoned – one on my non-existent tolerance for cricket (it’s sacrilege to be saying it considering that I’m Indian and all, but it’s ok, I can stomach the T20 format well enough and that does, in some miniscule fraction level, redeem my kenainess [loser(?)ness] with my friends) another was familiarly righteous and indignant about some illiterate person saying some equally illiterate thing that annoyed me. But they’ve been deleted, so I’m not even going to bother recalling the point I was so vainly trying to make.

• I am going to share a link. A link that leads to an article that is long, a little painful to get through and is one more irritating example of the fascinated American in India. I’m sorry I’m being such a complete diss bag with the lovely people who support the Incredible India campaign with such fervor and sunburnt enthusiasm, but when you throw in nonsense like “thin national narrative” and give me one more heartfelt portrait about India’s tiny streets and tiny children and other NatGeo-worthy nonsense, you need to allow me to lose my temper and call you a fool. That’s all. It’s a fair deal. After all, you come from a country that people migrated to because they were sick of Europe. After landing in America you persecuted the natives for reasons best-known only to you. For a country that’s only 200 some years old to even think to compare itself to a country whose politicians (read Chanakya/Shaguni/Krishna) have been in existence before some religions even came to be is blasphemous to say the least of what it is. It pisses me off. In a way, I’m glad I have your language so I can tell you off.

• Off late, most of my reading material has been stuff that has the potential to really rile me up. The summary of all my reading is quite simple – I live in a country that has forgotten the ideals of the people who fought for our freedom. Governance is no longer possible here because every single bureaucrat has proven that he/she has a price and they only have it because they know that there are enough people with the money to meet their demands. It’s saddening and infuriating in equal measure. I’ve had long and impassioned conversations with my friends about how upsetting it is to live here. Yes, we’re moving ahead, but those of us who want to enjoy the benefits of progress have only the luxury of a rant and nothing more. Like I’ve said before in this blog, my vote doesn’t matter. I’m literate and capable of making a living and telling a politician to go to hell. Giving me a free laptop or TV or ceiling fan is not going to improve the quality of my life. I choose to be a drama queen about this whole situation because I voted and paid taxes and feel entitled to ask questions, lose my temper and throw a tantrum.

• So far the only good thing going on at the moment is the fact that summer is upon Chennai. It means the odours of the city are at its most pungent (yeah, that only means the Cooum!); it means watermelons; it means mangoes and mango pickle, which is incidentally an addiction of mine; it means humidity combined with a strange burning in your skin because of the sun; it means mostly that Chennai is in character and delivering on all counts. Not a single person in the city is capable of remembering the city when it’s more pleasant and less humid. For most of us, Chennai is the heat. We secretly crave the bouts of sweating!

THE END.

Sleeplessly speaking

2011-03-28T17:50:00.001+05:30

Sleep deprivation. It’s that weird condition that a lot of people seem to suffer from these days. It’s a sort of limbo that you’re stuck in, a state of being where it seems like you’ve slept, but you haven’t actually. You go through every day, seemingly bright-eyed, but you’re not actually. You are seemingly wide awake, but some dark corner of your mind has shut down and refuses to reboot because you’re too much of a bitch to fall asleep and let your brain recharge for a blessed few hours.

Bothersome to say the very least of what it is.

But how does this condition arise? According to poets, especially the ones that write lyrics for film, this non-sleep that I am in probably indicates that I am in love with someone. No one, except a paramour, is capable of giving someone sleepless nights. Since that is not the case with this particular blogger, I need to find an explanation that is seemingly romantic and also practical.

Imagine when you think you’re tired after a long day and you turn the lights off in your room and close your eyes and hope that in a few minutes you will drift off. A few moments later, you’re staring at the ceiling, at a fan that seems to have decided to run at a ridiculously slow speed now that summer’s approaching, wondering why the hell you’re not drifting.

All too suddenly, you’re acutely aware of the pillows that your head is resting on and you know that you’re in a lot of pain and that your neck is stiff. As you shift trying to find a more comfortable angle to sleep in, you wonder if all those grandmother’s remedies are any good. So on one day, you try warm milk. Another day, you count sheep. On the third day, you give up completely and play those almost drone-making games on your phone hoping that the monotony of hitting the keys 2,4,6 and 8 while watching musical notes fall in line will magically make you sleep. On the fourth day, you just stare at the ceiling indefinitely, close your eyes and pretend sleep. On the fifth day, you’re bitching to everyone and your so-called flirty texts are reading like lectures. On day six, you hope that you can inhale mentholated balms and sleep. On day seven, you’ve become so used to not sleeping that you fight to stay awake.

At this stage in the insomnia process, you’re too sleep deprived. You’re thinking of probably finding a behind-the-cupboard friend to indulge in some behind-the-cupboard-ness just so you’ll enhaust yourself and get a few hours of sleep. Somehow that behind-the-cupboard friend is no longer an appealing option to you.

You’re considering medication, but you don’t want to depend on drugs. You’re trying to adapt a more holistic mentality, in the hope that a more open-minded you will be receptive to grandmother’s remedies.

Nothing seems to be working at all.

This is the point you realize that perhaps, stressing about your insomnia is probably making you sleepless and hence, you need to stop thinking about insomnia as a problem and embrace it, maybe when you start dreaming about not sleeping, you’ll know that you are, finally, asleep.

Advertising

2011-03-28T13:08:00.004+05:30

Before I get to what I want to post about, here's a blog/project that a very good friend of mine has started.

I'm excited about this because the Thirukkural is something that I have always been interested in learning. It will be a great experience for me, personally.

I want people to read this blog because of the way an ancient and relevant text has been presented in a way all of us, irrespective of language/nationality/educational background can relate to.

We are much the wiser for knowing what Thiruvalluvar had to say so many centuries ago. This blog reaches out to the secret Tamizh ponnu that I actually am after four generations of life here.

Please do read. Please follow and I hope you can take something very interesting back from it.

Friday headlines!

2011-03-25T16:52:00.002+05:30

Hi,

Have you read this? What do you think? I think it’s ridiculous! Only because mice, who incidentally have 99% genetic commonality with humans, are being subjected to this nonsense. Poor mice. The ones I’ve encountered were in Dharamshala and they were grey and had tiny pink ears and walked in a line across the fireplace. I cannot imagine those tiny things being injected with neurotransmitters and whatnot!

In other news – I’m reading The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli. So far, so interesting. It’s a very well-written book, my only concern is that there are too many intertwining narratives happening and it could get confusing. I’m hoping it won’t.

Now India went and set up a semi-final match in the cricket World Cup and that too with Pakistan. I want to roll over and die at this unfortunate turn of events. Cricket elicits high levels of lunacy in this country. I don’t see anything interesting about the game, except maybe the 20/20 format. It takes too long for a one-day match to get done and as for test matches, the lesser said the better! Too many people have too many opinions about how and why this game should be played. My Facebook news feed is being spammed by my entire friend list and their cousins throwing in a good word about the matches. I can’t deal with it.

A nineteen-year-old intern from my former work place insists that I am a maami and that I should get married NOW. Apart from telling him about the fact that calling a malayali a maami constitutes a misnomer, I don’t know how else to respond to this redundant topic of discussion. I’m done with my lifetime’s quota of clowns and I don’t think I need to get into a long-winded discussion with some child about marriage.

Which leads me to this point: Teenagers in 2011 seem to think they’re really evolved and mature thanks to all the time they've spent in the virtual world. I wish someone would tell them to go and look up the meaning of the word virtual. Their sense of reality is a little skewed. If it were up to me, I’d throw them all in offices that have no internet access and that pay you nonsense salaries and force you to have interactions with human beings from all backgrounds. The same people also have this habit of spelling “lose” as “loose”. It pisses me off!

At KeralaMatrimony.com, someone is looking for a “girl with good humour sence”. I was appalled. I told my parents, considering my MA in English, the least that they can do for me is find someone who is comfortable enough with the language to be grammatically and spellingally correct! It hurts my feelings when I’m asked to ignore bad articulators of the English language because “the horoscopes match”. Tiresome.

Are you ever tired of reading the news? I sometimes am. Especially Indian news these days. The opposition supposedly engineered a deal with the sitting government. Then they accused the sitting government of being corrupt bastards. When the truth came out about the opposition being the actual reason behind the sitting government looking like losers, everyone lost their temper and started yelling! Yeah, somehow when you’re guilty yelling is going to make you look innocent. Like I told my friend, politics these days is entertainment. Governance has become a distant dream!

On that happy note, this blog post is now concluded.

Kthxbai.

Indignation

2011-03-23T12:38:00.001+05:30

I love how me and everyone else get righteously indignant about the news and what ought to get showcased in the media today. Everyone is pissed off at sensationalism and headlines that scream hyperbole. Everyone is so concerned that the media is not acting as a transparent and ethical enterprise because they let big companies advertise.

I have a request for all the righteously indignant people, please come and run a news publication. Honestly. I’ve been in the industry for two years, and I know a little better than you sitting at home and reading the paper every morning and getting upset about the paper having whored available space to the corporates. If you hate the corporates so fucking much, don’t buy the fancy cars or sign up for the fancy insurance policies or buy the fancy clothes or buy the fancy food products. Self-sustain. That way you can wag your indignant little fingers at the machine and the media without some little cog like me telling you off.

The Amish have a better chance than you do at making a relevant point about the state of the world today. They are not on fancy websites, succumbing to the pressure that pop culture puts on you to be cool. The Amish, now they can be righteously indignant. The rest of us? Who are, in some way or form, dependent on corporate entities, ought to stuff it and sit in a corner.

For as long as big advertisements are paying the salaries, (you know how money will pay for three meals a day and other things to keep you alive, right?), journalists will bow to a corporate whim or two. The Eagles’ fantasy of love keeping us alive is rubbish. People don’t live on love and fresh air, if they did, starving farmers wouldn’t commit suicide.

Philosophy and righteous indignation is for the rich person who doesn’t have to worry about anything. The middle-class, the regular, everyday average person? They just have to deal with nonsense and get on with living a life under the radar. Reality doesn’t support fantasy. If it did, we’d be living in a perfect world. Everyone can’t be rich and content with life. The chi of the universe will unravel if that ever happened. For someone to be rich, someone has to be poor. For someone to be happy, someone has to be sad.

That’s just how it goes. For every righteous journo/news publication there has to be a sellout media organization. If you don’t appreciate it, spend your time and money following “authentic and genuine public interest journalism”. When you get sick of those people telling you that everything, including you, is a shit pit unlike any other, you’ll buy that glossy magazine that sells you an experience that gives you, if nothing else, a few moments of escapism!

The man is bigger than all of us put together. You can’t escape him. Do yourself a favour and succumb. You’ll find that happily ever after is not hyperbole.

Crisis Management

2011-03-22T14:31:00.002+05:30

1. Are you the person people call when they are in crisis?

2. Do you like being the person people call?

3. If yes, then are you the type that gets over-involved in someone else’s situation?

4. Do you give them advice in the hope that you will be the one that solves their problems?

5. Does it piss you off that they take so much of your time but don’t listen when you’re talking?

Here are my answers:

1. Sometimes

2. Yes

3. Yes

4. Yes

5. Yes

Now that we’ve established that I’m a wannabe shrink. I need to tell you that since November 2004, ever since my best friend from college committed suicide, I’ve been taking crisis calls less seriously than I did when SB was alive.

For SB, S and I were people she’d come to when she was in misery, and she was constantly miserable. S and I would try our best to talk her out of it, but with some people, misery, like drugs, is an addiction that they can’t control. Despite spending hours telling her to walk out of a situation that was never going to get better, SB lived in the hope that her fairy godmother would rescue her from the shithouse that her life had become. Her fairy godmother never came along.

Maybe she was meant to live only for a stipulated time on this planet to show people like me the meaning of friendship, laughter and joy. Maybe that was her role. She was the quintessential clown with the sad face and happy demeanour. Since her death, we’ve moved on and we’ve wished for her to be around every time we get together as a group.

I don’t want to talk about SB here today. I want to talk about being the go-to person during someone else’s crisis.

In the recent past, I was introduced to a girl who wanted to do her masters at the same place that I went to in 2004-2005. She would call me and have long conversations about going to study there, etc. However, she was also the person who needed to call 10 times if you didn’t pick up the first time around! That was irritating and it was a habit that she never really got rid of. Thing is, we have common friends, so the conversations also got personal after a point.

What I didn’t realize is that this person has a small problem, addiction to misery. In the years that I’ve known her, she’s never been someone who has once told me that she’s happy where she is. She’s chasing a dream and I’m not sure if anything is ever going to be good enough for her. I told her as much.

The thing is, after these long-drawn conversations with troubled souls, I feel like something is slowly and surely picking my sanity and messing it up. I don’t enjoy the sense of trauma I feel when I’m done steering a person through a problem. In my case, someone else’s problem is also about me! After all, this person made the effort to call me and gave me the credibility and intelligence to sort them out, so I will make this about me! Sorry, it seems to me like the only person who has her shit together in this situation is me, not you.

My point is, everyone has a rant, or five million, about how things are in the world today. However, that doesn’t mean that we take each problem so personally and go about having a stressathon about it. We don’t deem the rest of the world to be a pile of nonsense because it doesn’t meet our lofty ideals of what it should be and what it ought to be.

This girl has been crying to me about how there are too many things in her life that are out of her comfort zone. She cannot cope with stuff that she has decided she cannot handle. What does that even mean? If some of us can pass math, even though we were never any good at it and even though we didn’t have the option of taking another subject, then getting on with life is something we can attempt to manage, no?

I know, I know. Life and math are two completely different things, but I still don’t get it. Why is it so difficult to make a compromise once in a while about some minor thing and get on with it? You don’t compromise, you don’t try, you sit and whine about how some people are not as intellectual as you and hence, the fact that they get any attention at all is beyond your scope of comprehension. There could be two things going on here – you’re the true avatar of awesome or you’re delusional.

Another factor is, well, envy. This petty and unsaid jealousy that one has over someone else’s prettiness, someone else’s so-called perfect life, someone else’s amazing relationship with their sibling/parents/family, someone else’s ability to be honest enough to be themselves. Aspirations are great as long as the efforts you make to reach your goals are sincere; they’re not fun if you’re doing it to look like a version of something you envy. Chances are, when you get to where you want to be, you’ll be envious of something else.

People like this person I’ve discussed are never going to be happy. No matter how much “tough love” you serve up, there will always be something missing.

To be honest, I don’t see how an employer asking you to use your mind and think is a variable you are not comfortable with. I don’t see it.

I like this girl. She’s a lot of fun when she’s not worrying herself towards a breakdown. But when everything is overanalyzed to the level of minutiae that you cannot even imagine, it gets uncomfortable to have a simple conversation with people. I cannot deal with angst. I simply cannot. I used to love the thrill of being the caring and sensible friend that everyone loved to listen to. I don’t enjoy it any more. And it isn’t because people won’t listen to every word I say and take my advice, it’s because I don’t like watching intelligent people destroying themselves over something silly. If you’re intelligent, you should have the brains and common sense to be able to figure it out, right?

Politics, yeah politics

2011-03-19T12:19:00.001+05:30

One of the hottest debates in Chennai at the moment is – who to vote for? Thanks to enough and more campaigns about voting and so on, people are becoming a little more conscious of using their rights. I mean, if you don’t vote, you lose the right to be righteously indignant about corruption and corrupt politicians! It’s that simple. No vote means no voice.

In Tamil Nadu, the electoral system is really twisted. People here will vote for you if you give them Biryani! I’m not kidding.

However, the country has been unraveling under the weight of scams that began with the Commonwealth Games and continued with the spectrum allocation. All you need to do is Google Suresh Kalmadi and A Raja and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The money that these people have cost the exchequer and the humiliation that they have caused to the country, is profound. I don’t want to sound like a commentator, but the truth is, I stopped researching this stuff the second it went viral. Everyone is talking about it and suddenly people seem to have woken up to the fact that the scale of corruption in India as showcased in the movies is not exaggerated. In fact, the movies don’t exaggerate enough!

The proverbial shit has hit the proverbial fan and we’re all smelling.

There is an election around the corner and people need to vote. They’re confused. At one point earlier on this year, I was contemplating not voting at all! I mean who do I vote for? A party that is building the metro, ensuring that BMW and Hyundai and Ford all have factories here all while amassing an insane amount of wealth or a party that has a leader who is disgruntled and will probably spend her term arresting and silencing the people who pissed her off when she was not in power?

Politics in India is a joke. There is not one single leader who thinks with a semblance of common sense. They speak against the ruling government and gather listeners and promise them what the ruling government denied them and come to power. Once they’ve been elected, they all have selective amnesia and bi-polar disorder and other mental illnesses and forget completely that they made promises.

In the meantime, folks like me go and vote and get nothing out of it except fantastic news to read on a regular basis.

I could go on. The only thing I do know is that I’ve changed my mind about whether to vote or not. I will vote. No vote, no voice!

After I vote, I have every intention of bitching about the politicians that piss me off! Thankfully, India hasn’t got to the level of having an Adjustment Bureau just yet. Maybe we do, I’ll never know until I veer off plan, right?

Stories we tell

2011-03-18T18:14:00.002+05:30

Here is the meaning of the word gossip. I am referring to the act rather than the person. Today, it is the act that is pushing me to post this. Being born into my family means that I have inherited an intense love for talking non-stop. We’re all unstoppable when it comes to talking. How we have a meaningful and purpose-ridden conversation is beyond me on certain occasions; and yet, somehow, we manage.

But within family to talk about each other and others is justified in some sense. I don’t see why my mother will go to town about what I told her. The only other people she gossips with are her two sisters. Who, in turn, will gossip exclusively with their older sister. Ever since my uncle came back from Saudi Arabia in 2007, he’s been inducted back into the group! When my grandfather was alive he was the nucleus of this circle, sitting on his chair in the room laugh-coughing and adding his own two-bit worth of stinging sarcasm. After he passed away, my brother and I were inducted. Hopefully, if we last as a family, my children will enjoy the nonsense that comes with being related to us.

With friends, however, it’s a different story. I have an inherent paranoia about people. I know that I over-share on plenty of occasions, but I don’t trust people to treat personal information as sacrosanct. If you’re a friend, I will take the liberty of not filtering what I’m saying. Doing that only means one thing; I expect the same level of openness from you.

People talk. There’s nothing anyone can do about that. We love talking ¬– talking about other people, talking to other people, talking to complete strangers about everyone we know. This talking is how I met someone I know. To make my life even more wonderful, this person showed up at a time when my friend was going through a major crisis. So we bonded over this crisis and became friends, etc.

However, the next thing I know, he became some form of BFF. Calling, chatting, texting on a constant almost clingy boyfriend-ish level! Following which, he became BFFs with my friends. It was such a bizarre cycle. To say that it happened when we were unconscious and drugged would be denying the role all of us had in developing a relationship with him. At one point, I thought I had met someone who was going to be a friend for life. We talked a lot and he was there at a time when I needed someone who would just listen and not judge. However, things did go wrong. I need to figure out if I’m the villain or if he’s actually a burgeoning nut job!

With time, something about the “friendship” got a little unhealthy. I began to draw away from it. He comes up with – “I understand baby, you need your space. I understand you very well.” The hugging lasted a second longer than it should have. (I’m a hugger and it bothers me when hugs are treated with disrespect!) It was getting a bit much. This invasion then expanded into my group of friends. The problem is, he was there on most occasions on invitation and when he is in the room it’s impossible to make movie plans without including him. We’ve also taken him up on his invitation and hung out at his place when the bars and nightclubs have shut down.

Yeah, we were at fault big time.

The most painful process is putting a distance between you and someone who thinks you have a very close and profound relationship/friendship. I find myself at my most rude in such occasions. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve offended because of my rudeness. However, my behavior has ensured that I am not surrounded by people who make me uncomfortable. It works out for me.

This tale gets even more sordid! The boy, lets call him U, offered to give me a writing gig at his work place. I was more than happy to consider it because it meant not being unemployed. U went and assumed that coming into his office meant express assent at working in his office full-time and after a meeting I was inducted into his organization without any recorded proof.

After this happened and a few other similar this’s happened, I was left with no other option but to deny all offers of employment from said U! I sent an email to the boss and said I won’t be able to take them up on the offer. U imagined that I had offended his sensibilities in some way or form and kept calling me. My not answering the phone meant him calling my friend and whining about my being unreachable. When I called them back his boss greets me with a – “Shruthi, we thought something bad happened.”

This was around the time I had an offer from another newspaper and I told U’s boss that I wouldn’t be able to help her out. I would try, but I was not making any promises.

After rejecting a few offers, something else came up. I emailed U’s boss and said, I’m working elsewhere, please don’t mind.

Of course, responding to emails is an alien practice in some cultures, so I have not heard from boss lady. Frankly speaking, I couldn’t care less at the moment. I know I’ve offended the hell out of some people, but I don’t have to run around rescuing people’s feelings for anything. U is crying foul about the fact that I had the gall to work in a so-called rival establishment. He is telling people I don’t talk to him and so on. Despite people telling him to take the hint, he pretends obliviousness.

Apparently it’s easier for him to whine about me than to actually call me a bitch to my face. This situation begs the perpetual question – why am I acquainted with these people again?

I don’t care any longer. I have a job that I’m excited about. I’m waiting for the excitement of a launch and regular work to kick in. So, I’m wishing that drama will leave me alone for a few minutes so I can put my feet up, but I need to remember that I have walked into many a shit pit of my own accord. And this time, I intend to disinfect myself good and proper. It’s okay if I suffer a few second-degree burns in the process!

Updates

2011-03-16T18:20:00.001+05:30

This proclivity towards laziness that I have is going to one day manifest itself as a killer abcess. I’m sure of it!

In more relevant news, I am not employed. I’m working at a Chennai magazinw – Taxi – as its editor. It’s very random for me to go from correspondent to editor without making a profound stop at the “senior journalist” stop! However, I think 26 is a good age to mess around with importance and so on. I think so at least.

After three months of steadily shuttling in and out of Chennai, my travelling stopped as of February 20. I must say that it was a very bizarre thing to be living at home in between trips. They were not as frequent as some of the travels undertaken by some traveling businessmen of my acquaintance, but that’s work.

This state hopping has brought one thing to the fore, I love my people not the place they inhabit.

Advertising

2011-03-04T14:27:00.002+05:30

So, I found this new blog online. And I think everyone should participate. It's called Loser in my Inbox. Basically a travails of women who get stalked on FB/other social forums.

That's all. I won't say more. Go there, read, and figure it out.

Sh

Attukal in photos

2011-03-01T12:33:00.009+05:30

So this is Attukal, through the lens of my camera. No candid moments. As of the morning of the Pongala, I hadn't slept for two days, on the trot. There was honestly no mood to change the settings of my camera to anything more than "auto". Apologies!

That's my mother. At 6am-ish. We were standing in line to grate the coconuts for our payasam.

From L-R - my mum's first sister, my mum's sister #2 who flew in from Singapore and my uncle's sister-in-law! Yeah, complicated family structures. Long story behind this picture. The ladies in cream used up all the jaggery from our bags to make this appam. When we had to make our payasam, we had to find more jaggery! bah!

The pots lined up for the Pongala later on. The fire in the temple was lit at 10.45am.

The pot, decorated and ready to be Pongala-d.

The fire for the pots from the temple.

All pongified! :D . The pots from L-R - my Singapore aunts', mine and my mother's.

After this, it was only adding the jaggery, which we discovered was stolen, and coconut and cooking it with ghee and dry fruit. Mine turned out a little burned, my aunt's and mother's was just fine.

There's Attukal. After this its a lot of candid photos of us eating slices of watermelon, drinking lime juice and my cousin insisting on not photographing our faces but our big fat bums! :P

One more before I sign off. See, I had to take this one. It's just something that I do.

so much to say?

2011-02-25T11:28:00.000+05:30

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m a bit of a TV addict. I can spend an entire day watching TV and not regret the day of inactivity. In that context, who has watched MasterChef USA? Do you like the show?

My mother and I fell in love with MasterChef Australia when it first aired in this country. The whole show, the fact that we were learning new things about how to cook food, etc, was extremely fascinating for amma and me. For instance, I discovered what Gnocchi was after watching MasterChef Australia. However, MasterChef USA has a very different format and I find it extremely annoying.

Sometimes it seems to me as though the judges and contestants are having a private conversation and the audience is just supposed to sit and watch like cheap eavesdroppers! Okay, maybe not that extreme, but I don’t like that they don’t do a master class.

Anyway, it’s just a small complaint. Someone else is funding the show and writing it, what they do wit the show is their business.

***

I’m faced with a very weird situation at the moment. I’ve suddenly gone from being unemployed and no money in my purse to having two job offers in my wonderful Chennai. I had a long conversation with my friend J about what I should do. I’ve been having long conversations with some of my very close friends about what to do next. I never really anticipated having choices when it came to jobs.

I was actually holding out for this one offer to come through, it never did, so I have to move on and consider other prospects. And while I am, I’m getting thoroughly confused. What I decide now will set the course for my career.

I just hope that I don’t regret the choice I make two or three months down the line!

***

In the midst of all this, I am also eating too much chocolate. I now look like the muffin in the muffin top adjective!

***

I want to watch Tanu Weds Manu. It seems like such an interesting movie. I may not be able to relate to all the Punjabi-ness in the film but I know I will enjoy the fact that this girl is suffering from the same disease that I am – overexposure to earnest single boys from my community who have evinced interest in wanting to marry me despite not knowing a damn thing about me except for my name!

***

Trivandrum and followers

2011-02-23T16:47:00.002+05:30

Wow! 50? 50! Wow!

Thank you for stopping by and hitting the follow button and reading the nonsense that I mostly indulge in... I appreciate it.

***

So, Attukal. What can I say. It was a bit more organised than it was the last time. At the temple, I actually didn’t have to worry about who was trying to grab my clothes in the pretext of trying to get darshan. This time, I actually went to the temple on time and I managed to see Devi. Good stuff.

I enjoy going to temples. I do. It’s a lot of fun listening to the stories associated with them. I especially like the hope that permeates the ambience in a temple. Just a sliver of it. For once, people leave their lives in the hands of the irony-loving universe hoping that they won’ t get slapped, again. At Attukal, especially during the time of the festival, women come in droves to put their faith in the hands of Attukal Amma. Only they know what they’re praying for, whatever it is, it seems to fill the air, palpably. You can’t help but be swayed by all that emotion.

I get really corny on occasion. This is one of them and I honestly don’t mind. My trip to Trivandrum this year was especially fun because both of my aunts were also there. My aunt flew down from Singapore just for this. For the first time since 1999, she left Singapore without her son and actually had a good time. Of course, my cousin was having a major case of separation anxiety and called at 3am IST crying his eyes out before he left for school to tell my aunt that he missed her and was waiting for her to get back. I feel bad for the guy who has national service to look forward to in 6 years’ time.

Once again, I visited too many extra temples. One of them was our kudumbakshetram, or family temple, on my maternal side. It’s one of my favourite temples in Trivandrum. It’s quiet and most importantly, it’s mine. The thing about Kerala is that all temples and religious institutions follow the most strict versions of their respective good behavior code. People like my good self, who go to temples to find a minute of silence, and not god, are bound to get the cold shoulder from the gods from time to time. It’s hilarious.

However, I’m a “good daughter” when I need to be, so I prayed in all sincerity and hoped to GOD that something does come out of it.

Onto the Pongala* itself. For some reason, this year it wasn’t as pushy-shovy. I chose to put my pongala outside the house and not in the shade of the banana trees. The sun on my face, my sunburn (see, I’m a Chennai girl, and yet, every time the sun shines, my skin looks like it belongs on a tomato and not a human being. It’s absurd.) and my pongala which cooked fast this time around made the whole deal very interesting.

I enjoyed the way I walked around like a so-called pro doling out unnecessary advice to my newbie pongala-putter aunt and managed my stove and my mother’s when she needed it.
The deal is that you have to put pongala for three years. That’s the (I don’t know the appropriate English word for this) of the whole Pongala.

So, I will be going back again next year and maybe a couple of years after as well.
Highlight of this trip? – LIME JUICE!!!

Fresh lime juice, nimbu paani, naarengya vellam, whatever the hell it’s called, is something I’m really fanatical about it. I judge the worthiness of a restaurant on the basis of the lime juice they make. I can’t make lime juice worth a damn. However, every third person and their grandmother can make awesome lime juice in Kerala. You need to taste it to believe it. It’s awesome, or to use an Urban Dictionary euphemism, awesomesauce.

To make my poit more specific - no one makes lime juice like the good folks of Trivandrum. Visit the city just for the lime juice and if you’re a Hindu, go to the Padmanabhaswamy Temple too just so you can look at a very Buddha-like Vishnu and very Balinese dwarapalakas (guards).

Remember, when in Kerala dress modestly and don’t hire a tourist guide. There are enough Malayalis in the world to help you out, for free also!

(*Pongala – it’s a rice dish that can be made either with coconuts and bananas or milk, coconuts and jaggery. Of course, the main ingredient is rice and you can go with a sweet or savoury dish. But it will have to be cookeed on a stove fired with coconut-tree by-products. There’s a lot of smoke involved.)

***

I will edit this post with pictures soon enough. And will be back with more unemployed sarcasm!

Annual events

2011-02-17T08:51:00.002+05:30

Last year, I had written about the Attukal Pongala. And guess what? I'm going again this year. I'm told that the Pongala is the kind of experience that you will want to repeat. This year, the Pongala is going to be a lot more fun. Both my aunts - my aunt in Singapore is coming down for two just for the Pongala! - are also coming along which means it will be the three mothers and me and two of my mother's aunts. Eight of us from the Chennai family will be at Attukal this year.

Kerala newspapers are reporting that around 2,500,000 women are expected to throng Trivandrum for the Pongala. I just hope that we get the same spots we did last year.

I'm really looking forward to this weekend. I have so much to post about when I get back.

Sh

Anonymous

2011-02-16T21:12:00.002+05:30

Awww! I have a hater!

Someone called Anonymous called me a "dumb fuck bitch".

Poor Anonymous. Won't ever be on the record for having the spine to come right out and say it.

This, this anonymity is the only problem with the internet. So many people are getting away with doing so much that it's not funny any longer.

Anyway, Anonymous, please do keep dropping by, I'm going to keep deleting you.

Always,
Sh

Overanalysis

2011-02-09T16:57:00.000+05:30

The thing about talent is the simple fact that it needs to be discovered. Of course, Simon Fuller will know a thing or two about discovering talent, but that doesn’t mean he’s the only one.

All of us have some kind of talent. When I say talent, I don’t mean things like singing, dancing, all that does require talent, but it’s a little clichéd. Talent can also extend itself into territory like your behavior, for instance. Some people are talented at social faux pas. Uttering completely kuppai statements in situations that don’t warrant it and yet managing to be part of a friend circle. They are talented people as well.

The trouble with this broader definition of talent is that you are forced to ask yourself what it is that you have a talent for. Me? I’m talented at fucking up. Royally.

Be they relationships or work, I have a knack of ensuring that any and everything that is smooth-sailing in my life will eventually sink and hit rock bottom, irretrievable and irreconcilable. I do this simply by cutting myself off from people. It’s a very moody thing. Some days I can’t be more of a social person, on some days, I’d rather be cooped in a corner with a book and a bag of chips. This swinging has cost me so many relationships, it’s no longer funny.

The thing is, I continue to do it. I know I am. I know I should stop, but I can’t seem to stop myself. You can call it an addiction. I can’t seem to stop when it is happening and I don’t see a solution at all. I fear for myself because the way things are going, I know that I will end up sitting all alone in a dingy apartment wondering how the hell my life went by.

My only wish is that I don’t get killed by the people I push away…

Begging

2011-02-07T23:30:00.001+05:30

I’m humanly incapable of keeping it together. I just can’t.

I’m the lunatic who will bluff her ass off to convince you and then go hide in a corner until you give up trying to find me after having been impressed. I’m that person. I don’t know why I’m that person but I am.

It scares the kuppai out of me. I want this behaviour to stop. I want it to. I’m not sure if it ever will. If someone out there has a remedy, please do be kind and offer it to me. I need to stop hiding from things and from people.

Incredible India

2011-02-03T16:37:00.001+05:30

I’m sick of this India that is being paraded around the media today.

Sick of fascinated white people coming here with their funny accents, reddened faces, dirty footwear and cameras.

Sick of the same people taking a select few photos and going back home and expounding to more fascinated white people about the “life-altering” experience they had while visiting my country.

Sick of these people telling everyone – such a beautiful country, but so much poverty.

Sick of all the TV commercials made by Indians and aired on Indian television about the fact that every Indian child is poor and suffering and needs Rs.X to live to see another day.

Sick of the Incredible India tourist attraction scheme.

Sick of a national newspaper using its front page to talk about this country of “contradictions” and then proceeding to tell all potential participants in a contest to explore the theme of Asli Bharat – the unshining India with the beggars and drains and whatnot. (The Times of India, dated February 3. Read the specs of the contest. The online version doesn’t link directly…)

All this makes me wonder if I live in some alternate universe.

Do I even belong in the same country as all these poor and underfed people? What about me and all the other Indians like me? The ones who speak English and don’t say pisa for pizza. What about us?

In fact, we’re so insignificant that the politicians don’t ask us to vote for them. No one takes us seriously. All we have to do is work enough to push up the per capita income to around Rs49,990 something. We need to be around to ensure that MNCs are investing. We need to work to ensure that the GDP is in order. We need to run the posh-looking businesses so people can say this is a prospering country. We need to be around for the Incredible India campaign. We need to be around so people can call India a country of contradictions where people wear their Cavalli's with the same elan as the shopowner lady wears her saree.

Pain and torture make for better drama and add effect, I know that. But what the fuck is it with selling ourselves short? I don’t get it.

I have only one question though, is India the only beautiful country with poor and underfed and homeless people? Are we the only country where suffering is the subject of our illiterate and idiotic national-level contests?

Sometimes, happiness sells. Ask the damn chocolate makers!

Existential Angst

2011-02-01T15:08:00.002+05:30

As is apparent on this blog, I have expressed my irritation at the entire arranged marriage process plenty of times. Now, I am not changing my mind and going on this quest for true love. Purely because I don’t think I’m the find-love-and-live-happily-ever-after type. Moreover, I don’t have the patience to go through the process of finding someone, finding out if said someone likes me, liking said someone and then letting it proceed further. It’s too much work and I’m too lazy to spend that kind of time on anything. I’d rather sit here and rant my ass off!

I’m bringing up this idiotic topic again because there was yet another (yeah, this phrase irritates me no end, but when it is delivered in an Indian accent, it is all the shit) argument at home. More tears. More accusations. More paranoia. Now, the fault is mine, leaving home at 10pm and waltzing back in at 4am. I am pushing it. However, it isn’t like my family didn’t know where I was. The people I was hanging out with are friends of mine. People I trust and people whose company I enjoy, apparently that just doesn’t cut it.

My mother’s comment was this – “This AP, your so-called friend. He doesn’t respect you. He will never marry a girl like you.” WHAT THE FUCK IS – “a girl like you”? What the fuck is it? Honestly! Sometimes I wonder why my mother went through the trouble of getting pregnant and giving birth to me if she was going to be this traumatized in life!

Then she goes on to say – “I regret bringing her up like this. I should have brought her up as a typical middle-class girl. None of this would even be happening”. Now, I’m sorry, but what the fuck happened? Nothing. Sunday evening, when I was getting the lecture, I honestly wish there was some drastic news to deliver. But, nothing. I’m not pregnant. I’m not secretly married. I’m fine. Safe. Healthy. Sane. Apparently none of this matters because ever since I crossed a certain age barrier, I’ve become a product.

A product that needs to be marketed and be put out there on the websites so that eligible young boys will be dazzled suitably and will flood my father’s inbox with “Express Interest” emails.

Sorry, but this new-age arranged marriage shindig has nothing to recommend it. At least in my mother’s generation there were the matchmakers, now it’s all online and it’s insulting to say the least to be on a matrimonial website looking prettified and photshopped and 22 and allowing myself to be assessed to be good enough for some complete and absolute stranger.

Of course, my father will never take the trouble to look like the villain in the picture. He’ll stew in his own juices while I tell them I’m leaving to meet a few friends and then turn around and yell at my mother for bringing me up to be this kind of person. He will then top it up with – “she’s your daughter after all, I’m not surprised that she’s like this”. Him and my mother decided to live apart for 14 years while Sid and I were growing up because of his army travelling etc. Well, good choice people, but did you really think that Sid and I would be docile little do-gooders? Really? Congratulations on your excellent evaluation of a blindingly easy situation to assess!

The funniest part is how much they brag about how cool we are to other people. Somehow, at home we’re assholes who are making them miserable. To the rest of the world, my parents are damn near perfect. Beautiful and forward-thinking. At home, I can’t even wear a sleeveless kurta without my father getting offended! It’s a strange dichotomy. You cannot say that this is a classic generation gap – this is sheer lack of basic common sense.

You were 26 in 1982 for god’s sake! It was different from when your mother was 26, right? I’m particularly annoyed because my parents are educated people. My mother has been working at a school since 1980 – for someone who deals with imparting an education and intelligence as a career, and for someone who spews a different set of values to her kids, this “I should have brought her up different” BS is a shock to say the least. You never should have bothered with the frocks and the other paraphernalia if you were going to talk like this one day.

Sometimes I want to write them both an apology letter –

Dear Amma and Acha,
Your daughter, the one you wished for, was supposed to be the patron saint of virtue, moral goodness and social propriety. I’m sorry that you got played by the universe. Please go and cry to your gods about this, I’m sure they will deem this issue relevant enough to intervene.

My mother will say, someday when you have kids, all this will come back to you. That's for me to deal with. For me to cry about. For me to worry over. More importantly, I don't think I'm having children, so I don't see the problem really.

Dedication

2011-01-25T22:41:00.001+05:30

Between 2001 and 2004, I was doing my bachelor’s degree. Three years in one of Chennai’s so-called “top” colleges. The place was, initially, a huge culture shock. Having grown up in a co-education school, it was hard for me to fathom an educational institution that comprised of only women. Some women seemed better at it than others. Some of them came pre-programmed with a big circle of friends and rules and regulations and who they liked and who they didn’t like. It was all so easy. Or so it seemed.

From the outside, aka, the bakery across the road, my college was a dream. A place full of all kinds of women. All shapes and sizes and personalities. It was, in short, dream land.

I met some of my best friends in this place. I remember dressing up to go. My mother checked what I was wearing. Since I was going to her alma mater, she assumed she was the best person for these things. Of course, this only meant that I fought with her almost every single day. She had problems with everything I wore and then she’d sit and complain about how un-hep I looked. It was extremely strange.

I’d completely forgotten by then that my mother was the crazy lady that dressed me up when I was a little girl. Perfectly delightful frocks, stockings, patent leather shoes, a handkerchief pinned to my frock and a perfect smile pasted on my face. I was, in some sense, the quintessential cute little thing. I could also roll across the floor much better than I could walk, I was that fat.

College was also three years of the worst dressing of my life. The worst. The nuns were obsessed with how we were dressed, so much so, that after a point, in my final year of college, I took to wearing sarees more often. It saved me a lot of trouble. The nuns were only too happy to encourage girls who dressed like that.

My three years in college also meant, Bhuva. S Bhuvaneshwari Rao. SB Rao. SB. She was one of my best friends and one of my biggest fans. I loved her and loved the contents of her lunch box. I remember her in the first year. She had long beautiful hair and she seemed to know how to be a friend. She was the girl everyone liked instantly. That was just the beginning of it.

It was only in our second year that Bhuva and I became close. Apart from constantly eating each other’s lunches and helping each other out with work, Bhuva, S and I would sit for hours having long conversations about life and so many other things. There was so much to talk about. So much to learn. So much to understand.

It was many conversations later that I began to notice something. My friend was in pain. She was hurting, worrying, traumatized about something and there was nothing any of us could do to help her. We knew that she was finding it hard to move away from her strict and orthodox upbringing and do things that she wanted to do. Simple things like cutting her hair.

By the time we were in the final year of college, she was in a relationship that was not helping her in any way. There were too many things going on in her life that no one knew too much about.

For all outward appearences, she was still the happy, sunshine person she was when she walked in to college.

We didn’t know what to tell her. We kept telling her break-up with him. Stop falling deeper into this mess. Get out of it. But, words were the only things we had. Words, words, words, useless fucking words.

The night she sat at home, crying her eyes out, telling us that she wanted to leave but that this guy had a knack of making it all feel right. It hurt me physically to watch her in so much agony. Again, all we had was only words, words, words.

After college, I left for Delhi. Far away from everything familiar. Far away from Bhuva. She would send me texts, inspirational texts, good mornings and I miss yous that made my day in a city that I loved and loathed in the same breath.

I remember the thrill of flying down home for the Diwali holidays. I stayed from my parents’ anniversary until my birthday. The day I landed, Bhuva came over. I remember the welcome back hug. That was her thing, hugs. She always came to you with her arms open, her smile on her face and you knew that it was going to be okay.

A few days later, my best friend called me to say that Bhuva had killed herself. We don’t know why. We’ll neverk now why. We tried so hard to search for an explanation. To figure out if we knew what the reason was. We wanted to know if we could have prevented it. She never told us once that she was in that much pain. Sometimes, I wish I knew someone who could have intervened.

Six years since it happened. I went back to her house to meet her parents just once. I didn’t want to go back again. It was like she never existed in that home. Her room had been cleaned out sanitized almost of her art work, her trinkets, her glass bangles, her spirit.

I could go on and on about this girl. But I remember her for two things – my mother and her shared birthdays and behind the cupboard.

She’s given me so much to smile about. I don’t know why she’s not around any longer. There are landmarks I’ve celebrated where I wish she was around, laughing her inimitable laugh and hugging me to celebrate.

To not party

2011-01-21T17:25:00.002+05:30

So, I don’t like this living at home thing. I’ve never liked it, to be perfectly honest. It’s one of those weird Indian social propriety things that kids don’t leave their parents’ homes unless they are married. This applies to sons and daughters. For as long as this system exists, I know that our vague sense of entitlement at dad paying our bills and so on will exist. In times of crisis, call dad. That’s how we live in these here parts of the world. It’s not a rich kid’s prerogative. It’s every kid’s prerogative.

The only problem, however, is the simple fact that you can’t really do anything. You have to be home by bed time. This, if you ask me, sucks! It wasn’t until I was 24, that I got the keys to my front door so that I could come home whenever without disturbing my mother. It was a big event. My curfew until then was 10pm. Any time after that was just not acceptable.

Of course working in a newspaper only meant production days were late nights and I couldn’t help coming home after 11pm on a Friday. That’s when the rules relaxed a little bit. In a way, I’m glad my parents were a little strict. I can’t imagine this late night lifestyle any earlier than now. I would have become a little jaded with it. It’s still fun. It’s still interesting. I’m not sure how long it is going to last though. My best friend is leaving for the UK next Friday and I don’t know who I am going to hang out with. It’s not like I don’t have friends here, it’s just that they are not my it’s-Friday-let’s-go-out friends. They are my shit-we-haven’t-met-in-forever-let’s-get-silly friends.

I find it a little trivial to be sitting and complaining about this. I cannot imagine weeks and weeks of going to work, coming home and hanging out with my family. Dear god! I’ll go insane in 72 hours!

Not like my family is not cool. They’re fun. But I can’t do B-52 shots with them now can I?

This is what happens when you’re a 20-something in this country. Everyone gets married or is in the process of getting married, and as the last one standing, you’re stuck in a rut. It’s not a nice rut. It’s a bag full of shit that smells so bad that the entire room and a half is reeking with its stink.

Take last night for instance – I was home at 2. My mother had, by then, called me about 50,000 times already. When I reached, she was calling me names she usually reserves for people she wants to send to death row. I was more than a little angry. Fuck angry, I wanted to turn my back and walk out. This is not the first time. When they found out I was seeing a boy, I became a slut. Yeah, it’s that extreme with my parents. When they found out I drink my father took every chance he got to say – “Well, this is what life is all about right? Boys, booze and partying”.

Of course, he thought he was making me think about the immorality of my actions. He works with reverse psychology. That’s his MO. It hasn’t worked at all on either Sid or me.

This conflict is something I’ve had my whole life. This “You come from a very respectable family. This is not how girls from decent families behave.” BS I’ve been hearing since I was a teenager and I was talking to boys. Well, when you put your kids in a co-ed school, you should have thought about talking to boys, right? Never mind if the fees are subsidized because you’re a teacher.

It’s more than a little annoying to explain to parents about having normal, reasonable, non-sex relationships with some men. Especially, if you’ve known them since kindergarten. They, of course, don’t give you the credit of having a functioning brain and instincts and judgment. According to your parents, no matter how old you are, you’re always the kind with an IQ of 5 when it comes to life. This is especially true at home.

Sometimes, on particularly bad days, I wish I was the oily malayali. The one who centre parts her hair, uses coconut oil liberally, has curly hair (I don’t!), wears only salwar kameez (when she wears jeans of course she will wear a bindi and anklets and a synthetic kurta) and spoke with a thick accent (my mother’s convent Englishness would roll over and die, but I do wish it sometimes).

My life would have been easier. My parents would have nothing to complain about. I would not have had to deal with any of this nonsense. I wouldn’t be sitting here, in Chennai, hoping that I can move out ASAP just so I can sit at home all day because that is what I want to do.

It’s weird. It’s trivial. It’s nonsense. But this is precisely the kind of angst some US-heading software professionals are escaping from.

Fighting

2011-01-19T22:30:00.005+05:30

Do you like fights? Instances when you watch in absolute amazement as two or more people are confronting each other with accusations and whatnot. One is yelling, the other is justifying – that’s a decent fight. Some fights have two people calling each other names for the simple reason that they just don’t like each other or something the other person did.

Yesterday, while I was on the bus back home after my haircut, two women who got in started fighting. One woman had four kids and I couldn’t get a good look at the other one. They were calling each other some very serious names. They were pulling each other’s hair. The kid who was setting in the seat next to me was laughing his head off. His baby brother who was sitting on his lap didn’t get the fuss.

A few seconds later the bus conductor comes forward and tries to break it up. The driver is pissed. Some people got off the bus because they were getting too impatient. I wanted to know why they were fighting, but no one around me seemed to know. Finally, at one signal/traffic light the lady with too many children got off, all the while she was hurling abuses at the bus, the driver and conductor and spitting in the direction of the Metropolitan Transport Corporation behemoth!

I would have loved to know what they were fighting about. This kind of incident is a great alcohol accompaniment.

There’s something about fights that I enjoy. They’re honest. Raw. Human. Devoid of pretense. Who in this world can be fake in a fight? No one. I prefer watching fights. The people I see in a fight are interesting people.

In the movies too, fights are fun. A Kollywood (Tamil) film hero jumps through the air with this bizarre cycling action, and the entire gang of 20-odd villains writhe on the floor in pain. If you were watching Vel, like I was, a couple of years ago, you would have been subject to my little cousin screaming in the theatre to his mother – “amma! Tell Suriya to turn around amma, the villain is right behind him!”; “Oh no! Amma! Suriya is going to die! No, Amma, NO!” and other assorted warnings for Suriya to please watch his back.

Of course, we weren’t sitting in the last row. There was a family behind us who couldn’t watch the movie because my darling cousin was on his seat and yelling his head off!

Bollywood fights, well, after that locked in the garage beating up scene in Coolie, nothing really compares!

My favourite fights are when the comedians get involved. There’s something very interesting about trying to make a funny man fight. You’re so used to laughing at what they are saying that you don’t think they are capable of doing anything else in the script. Maybe it’s for effect, maybe fighting is not reserved for the alpha male, but comedians fighting is funny, in its own way.
Then there are verbal fights. Those are my personal favourites. When people let their vocabulary do the talking, oh man! What fun!

Ok, I’m going to clarify here, mudslinging is not cool ok. Equally matched verbal abusers fighting it out? Now that my friends is a great show. Butter up your popcorn and watch/listen!

Since I made movie references earlier, I would like to tell you about my favourite kind of movie verbal fights. The one’s where this one guy loses his temper and yells. Someone’s always yelling right? If you’ve watched the Lethal Weapon series, there is a scene in the third movie, I think, where Joe Pesci is brought in for the umpteenth time and he’s really upset. I was laughing the whole time. The whole time. People around me thought I was a complete nut job, but these things don’t seem funny to you? Really? Why?

Then of course there are the scenes in the Malayalam movies when the hero, who also sometimes doubles up as a comedian, is in this really weird situation, and you can see his agony. In that one instance, he makes a face and says something, not completely, but you know exactly what he means. For me, the king of that situation is Innocent. The look on his face sometimes, you have to watch it to know what I mean.

My grandmother, when she was in her right mind, would sometimes give either the vegetable lady or the fish man a piece of her mind. Good times. It was just the way she said it that made the whole scene hilarious. When I was that young, I trailed my grandmother all the time. Everything she said was so interesting. When she got annoyed and wanted to make a point, she launched into this thick Trivandrum accented harmless Malayalam abuse, which was so hilarious when delivered! I wish she was still like that. After a point, when I was a teenager, I would keep asking her to say a certain few words – “amamma, please?” and she’d oblige.

Sometimes, I want to say “amamma please?” in the hope that she’d get the cue…

***

In other news, this is the new love of my life, Sheep. So angry! I fell in love with this the instant I saw it. Some bank gave this to my mother as a new year present!

***

One more wedding. January 17. One more long-winded gossip session accompanied with Whiskey, Brandy and my boys from school.

Me and other things.

2011-01-19T14:14:00.003+05:30

Yesterday, I tried writing a post about myself. You know the self-deprecatory post, just to show a bit of humanity in my otherwise indestructible- from-the-outside self. I scrapped it. Not because I don’t want people to know, it’s the kind of introspection that will make me delete this blog! Yeah, I’m crazy like that.

It’s a person’s responsibility, in a way, to look at their mistakes and try to become better people. If you’re open about putting yourself through that process, it’s amazing. I, for one, am that weakling who simply cannot put herself through a self-improvement exercise in public. It’s precisely the kind of oversharing that makes me uncomfortable.

It’s ironic because I overshare. Not in the this-is-what-I-did-at-16:26 Hrs kind of way, but more of a mini-biography-of-Shh kind of way. It’s a little creepy on hindsight, but I seem to do it and I seem, SEEM to find people who will listen also!

So, here’s what happens ok, I talk too much. Some kind and well-mannered soul listens for a while. Then there is absolute silence from the other side. It’s very confusing. Are you quiet because you want to hear more? You’ve fallen asleep? You’re so bored you’ve spaced out exactly the way you did in History class? You’re dead? You really don’t care? So many possibilities to consider . The worst of it is that people won’t tell me anything in fear that I will launch into another long-winded profound speech.

It’s a scary process.

Off late, I've stopped doing this. I only end up thinking something's wrong with me and let's be honest, no one wants to feel that way right?

***

So, next up in my travels is Kerala. Two consecutive weekends. One weekend I am going to this temple in Angadipuram to sit through a pooja that requests the universe to kindly align the stars in order so I can get married! The next weekend I will go back to Trivandrum for the Attukal Pongala. I can't believe I'm repeating events on this blog! It's ok, this time, I think it's going to be more fun. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. If all goes well, my mom #3 will make the trip.

***

And yes, I am back in Chennai. Home. And you know what? My family forgot that I was reaching on Saturday. So there I was outside the arrival gate of the airport and who do I see? No one. I called home and my father was sleeping! To make things worse, I left my phone behind in Singapore. I got my number back but I still can't get over my parents thinking that I was coming back on Sunday! I took a cab and spent the last of my money. I'm now completely broke. Have only Rs60 in my bank account. Sigh. I need a job!

***

Habits

2011-01-10T19:50:00.002+05:30

Bad habits. They’re things our parents reprimand us for when we’re babies – you know constantly figuring out ways to tell us in Baby that boogers are not healthy snacks and that eating mud is not a carb substitute! As we grow older, these bad habits seem to take on another dimension and suddenly swallowing boogers seems like the habit du jour compared to the wonders of adolescence and adulthood and independence.

Sometimes, I wish bad habits were abstract. Things you justify to your children with logic and admonition.

But bad habits are not just concepts. In a lot of instances, bad habits are people. Flesh and blood human beings who seem okay on the outside but for some inexplicable reason have a hold on you that you can’t even justify, let alone articulate.

Joss Stone sings about her bad habit in one of her songs. Maybe she loved the guy she was singing about, but a lot of us don’t love the guy we’re talking about, and yet, we seem to cling to him in the vague hope that this once the bad habit will not be all that bad after all.

I don’t know where the whole saga begins, because it all starts off, as most relationships do, with a simple and innocent “hello”. The introduction slowly and surely slips into knowing each others' names, life histories, insecurities, loves and hates. You find yourself accumulating information by the second and processing it and storing it and re-hashing it just to be sure that you’ve got the facts down pat.

The next thing you know, this person is the centre of your universe and you can’t seem to find a way to justify this strange need you have to constantly be in this person’s presence. Just when you think all’s well in paradise, you’re crying all the time and wondering where the hell paradise went.

Even with all the crying, it’s impossible to let go. Somehow this person knows how to draw you into a circle of needing, constantly.

I really wish they're put this phenomenon under the “substance abuse” label, somewhere.

The irony is that the people who find themselves in this situation are often control freaks. In an everyday situation these people would not let someone past the giant, 10-foot thick brick wall they’ve built around them. However, some loophole in this seemingly flawless system allows the presence of this person to ensure that your little remaining sanity is f--k-d up.

The worst of it all is getting rid of a bad habit.

From cutting it off completely to sweating through an intense withdrawal, the process is painful to say the very least of it. The pain of it might be killing you on the inside, but one the other hand there are some who manage to derive some pleasure from your pain and go to town about their joy. I don’t know what the kick is really. It isn’t like people take advice seriously.

There is a moment when everything seems crystal clear. A moment when you wake up and no longer crave your bad habit. It’s the strangest thing, but you wish to go back to a more controlled intake rather than an overdose.

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I don’t know how to say no. Maybe I’m the only one who gets into these situations. In my four years of getting rid of a bad habit, I’ve learnt one very important lesson, saying no.

Because of this, there are days when I think I’m the only person on the planet. There are days when I read 100 pages more of a book because I have nothing else to do with my time. There are days, unfortunately, when I eat a bag of chips extra because I have no one to talk to who “understands me”. The rest of the time, when I’m not feeling miserable, I get on with my life because I know that five years down the line, I won’t regret this choice.

GO AND VOTE!

2011-01-07T12:38:00.002+05:30

Now, for those of you who have been regulars in the blog universe, you probably know about the Bloggies. It's the longest-running award for this part of the interwebs and this year, I'm doing a wee bit of campaigning. Not for me! I'm not that shameless. Yet.

I want all of you to please vote for my friend Thauseef. I've been following his blog since forever and I must tell you, the one thing that has remained consistent about his space is his ability to let you see every painful detail in as microscopic a magnification as possible.

He's painfully honest about his life, loves and losses and tells a beautiful story. ensure he gets nominated for the "Best Writing of a Weblog" category, and if you agree with me, pass the word around.

Voting closes on January 16th for nominations. So, once again, please vote for my friend and pass the word around.

Lowe,
Shh

BS

2011-01-02T22:50:00.002+05:30

I saw an interesting post on Facebook today about the right to post on walls and the right to delete friends. It hit me then that friendships have moved on to a whole other dimension in the 2000s. There was a time when a friend didn’t have to adhere to so many things in order to be called a friend. A friend just was. Acceptance and distance was alright. Somehow the complexities and niceties that one has to maintain today was not even a talking point in the pre-overconnectivity era.

***

This long holiday and break-from-everything-familiar is an interesting gig. I like it. A lot. However, in some instances, I really wish I was around things and people familiar to me in a routine kind of way. It would have made my life so much easier knowing where everything is and getting work organized, and more importantly, getting work done. This, this time zone and waiting is a pain.

***

Someone told me that I now have nothing to rant about. I want him to read a previous post. Just about everything on this planet irks me. I’m one of those people who will never be happy with the sun, moon and stars. I need things to be a certain way. The response to this will either be a smirk or one of those self-righteous spiels that I care not to paraphrase here. Truth is, everyone has an opinion and everyone is living life on their own terms and doing the things they want to do. It’s fucking unfair that everyone else gets to do it and I don’t!

Why is it such a big deal when people express dissent? If the dissent itself is not causing grievous or bodily harm to anyone, it’s ok. It’s called democratic. It’s called individualism. It’s called the death of the genre. I’m sorry to say this, but in a world rife with deifying the individual, the time has come for generic to become archaic. Labels are so dated. Everyone is an expert now and statistics only apply to the individual. It’s called labelism this crime of dumping individuals in one basket and calling them all one thing. So, stop.

***

Forgot to add my biggest crime to that list I made. I do overkill like a pro – from jokes to hypotheses – I have an uncanny knack of making a point perfectly beautifully and then hammering it home like there’s no tomorrow. Case in point, direct your eyes towards the previous two paragraphs and figure it out.

THE END

AWARDS!

2011-01-01T19:54:00.004+05:30

And the new year in Shh world dawned with an award! My first award in blog town. I'm loving it I say. The award comes courtesy a girl who is very empathetic towards my case of the get-her-married-somehow parents. First off, THANK YOU, to Runaway Bride for the award. I'm honestly surprised that I won.

To begin with, here's a picture of the award itself.

Now that that's out of the way, here are five things about me you may, or may not, know
1) I freeze in front of a mike. I mean it. If I were singing or dancing, whole other story, however, extempore, and it's like my tongue ran away to Siberia or something
2) I keep wishing I was skinnier. It's an everyday thing. I look in the mirror and wish and wish and wish
3) I'm possibly the laziest person you'll ever meet. Unless I'm pushed to the point of not being able to handle the pressure, I won't do a damn thing!
4) I lose interest in just about everything, except a book. People, life, work, things, I'm not sure why, but I can't even being myself to sit through one episode of one TV series without flipping channels at least 10 times!
5) I'm terrified of being married to someone. I'm scared that a few weeks into it I'll run out of the house screaming.

Right, so that's out of the way. Here are blogs I'm in love with...

1) Kid in the Front Row - one word, awesomesauce! As for the rest, go read and find out no?
2) The Bottle Chronicles - she's 20-something and a mom and is all out when it comes to what's on her mind. I've been following her blog for ages and I do honestly think she deserves a read.
3) Sharanya Manivannan - not only is she a good friend, but she's also a brilliant writer.

The other people on my blogroll are folks who are on Blogger's awesome blogs listings, so it's okay.

Happy 2011 world.

Fiction and all

2010-12-28T09:16:00.002+05:30

(Ok, now I have no clue where this has come from. You’ll have to excuse this non-autobiographical occupation that I will sometimes indulge in. Kthxbai.)

Time, the day, the hours, the minutes, the seconds, are ticking painfully past me. I can hear it in the sounds of this silence that I’ve wrapped around myself. It’s painful to even imagine the kind of trauma that this solitude unleashes in my brain. The immense helplessness that I straddle every waking moment that I spend in the quiet.

I’m not alone here, in this space. It’s filled with thoughts of you, who I don’t know. It feels like we’ve known each other forever. I know it’s an odd thing to say, but it’s true. Seems a little cliché to even think it, but I can’t help myself. I have nothing else to do. Sometimes I yearn for the sounds of the dusty city I’ve left behind just so I will stop myself from reaching out to you every single time I can’t bear this isolation.

And it is an isolation. A self-imposed hermithood. I’m far away from everything I know, from everything I love and from everyone I should be around. But I choose to remain here, alone, surrounded by people who are 7 degrees away from being mine.

I wish I knew what you thought and what you make of us. I want to know. I need to know. But I’m terrified that asking you will only bring another silence and my already overwrought mind will collapse with the force of it.

This is me, then, leaving it be, hoping that when we do have a conversation, it will being back the comforting noise that soothes me. Until then, I contemplate in this silence, this quiet, this maddening, deafening place of no relief.

The intolerables

2010-12-27T01:26:00.001+05:30

- people who spell ‘aww’ as ‘awe’ – the words mean two different things for god’s sake. Why do you do this?
- people, like me, who can only talk about one thing – getting married. I’m in no desperate hurry, but I don’t understand why it’s suddenly the only relevant topic of conversation amongst my friends.
- overanalysing types. You know how you went to the club with your girlfriends and ran into someone you didn’t like. Then you proceed to spend the next 72 hours telling me how this should not be discussed with anyone else and what you made of his eyelash twitch at 11.21pm as he exited the club. I didn’t notice, since I don’t wear my glasses often there’s no point in asking me to notice. Most important being, I don’t care.
- Oversharing. You scratched your balls on the way in? Really? How exciting. Like, that truly made my day.
- Exes. See, you are out of my life. There’s a reason we’re no longer together. When I was 18 and swayed by the BS that Bollywood was selling, your sales pitch to weasel your way into my life would have been so touching. Now? It’s just creepy. So, stop. Ok?
- Best friends who met me 5 hours ago. You love me? “Awe”. I mean, what more could I ask for from life except maybe friends like you. Do I know you? Want to know you? Need to know you? If I’ve answered no to all of the above, then fuck off?
- Quiet ones. I need to know what is on your mind, if I’m going to be dealing with you. So, please, don’t expect me to pick up all of your telepathic signals because my antenna is faulty. Direct communication, sans the noise factor, is extremely effective!
- People with defective spelling who roll out mile-long spiels about grammar and linguistic propriety. Self-explanatory no?
- People who let you talk too much. Since you’re the bitches that bitch about the talk-too-much folks on the side, please run. I’m looking for you with a butcher’s knife in hand. Be scared. Be VERY scared.
- Know-it-alls. The kind that will rattle off jargon about some total buzz kill subject of dinner table conversation and then look importantly around to see how many people have not understood. It’s nothing to be proud of!
- Pinch-faced prudes. Are of the opinion that sex=eeewww, gross? Do not ever try to attract male attention and then marry it and then procreate. I might actually follow through on the death threats.
- Malayali boys. You have a thick moustache and a thicker accent. You only want “freaky girls”. You think attacking a woman “who had it coming her way” is actually cool. I fucking hate you. You should have been a pile of steaming horse turd.

How I met my husband! Part 0

2010-12-25T22:11:00.002+05:30

One morning, at 9.45am, as I was getting ready to leave home for office, I couldn’t find the keys to the grill door. I asked my grandmother about it and she said she dodn't know where it was and she started looking for it too. This was a very dice-y situation. My grandmother is 79 and she has dementia. She doesn’t remember a thing, the only thing she knows with absolute clarity is that she’s Vasanthi Chandran and that she’s from the Veliyakainilayil Tharavadu in Murukkumpuzha, Trivandrum.

She has this habit of hiding things under her mattress. Especially the keys to the front door because she’s scared that someone will take it. She also thinks I’m the bitch from hell who’s come to torment and murder her! So, on this particular morning, when I was looking for the keys, my grandmother joins me and goes on crying about how she’s never going to get out of the house and that someone had locked her in.

By 10.15, I’d started to panic. I called my aunt in school and asked her if she gave the keys to the neighbours, she said no. At this point, I knew that I was going to be late to work. I’ve always had trouble being on time and just that morning, I did what I could to be on time so that I would a) get an auto, b) go past the crowded traffic signals a few minutes before the pile-ups began. I was also hoping that my boss, who had informed me that she was getting a little sick of my late-coming, wouldn’t notice. That was not going to happen.

10.20, and I’d lost all hope of being on time, so I called the neighbours and they told me, "can you please check under the mattress, she hides things there". And I did, and there the keys were. I almost cried, to be perfectly honest. I almost did. After yelling and letting off some steam, I left for work and landed almost half an hour late. My boss was, obviously, pissed off. I couldn’t really tell her that my grandmother hid the keys to the front door under her mattress, hence, it was difficult for me to get out of the house. Who’d believe that? That would be like telling my class 5 teacher about the complicated way in which my math homework disappeared!

That’s the day I realised that Murphy, that lunatic who exists in every single pop culture reference about karma and whatnot, had a soft spot for me. In fact, I think somewhere along the trope of one of my misadventures, I gave in and married him! I mean, how is a girl to refuse someone who ruins her day on such a consistent and persistent basis? All he does is to make sure that I know that he’s watching over me. It’s so sexy, it makes my knees cave!

I could go on, endlessly, about how much Murphy loves me, and how much he cares for me. I mean, look at what happened last year, on Christmas Day, while I was in Bali, I got Chicken Pox. Chicken fucking Pox, while on my most-anticipated holiday. It’s almost like he didn’t want me to leave his aura in Chennai and come to Indonesia, where the tourist joy would overshadow his bullshit. No, he managed to weasel his way through that and make a point. Bastard!

Every single time I think I should do something positive, he comes along and ruins it. I don’t want to sound like someone who is refusing blame for her own inherent faults, but I don’t see how getting Chicken Pox or my grandmother hiding the house keys, or no one being at home to see me off before I left for Singapore on the 22nd is in anyway my fault!

Murphy, I know we’re married. I hope I’m keeping you entertained and happy, because you know that all I do is think of you!

Always,
Shruthi

Holidaying

2010-12-24T23:26:00.001+05:30

So, it’s day three of my “holiday” in Singapore. It doesn’t feel like one though. The trouble with visiting this lowelee island nation is the simple fact that I don’t take in the sights and ‘experience’ the place. I eat home food, hang out with by-marriage family, shop and go back to Chennai.

Not that I don’t enjoy it. I do. But, I wish I could take a holiday with only my friends for company and really explore a new place. I don’t mind if the trip only lasts a week or even three days, but I would truly appreciate the time I take to look around and lech at a tourist destination.

Tourist-y leching doesn’t happen when I’m in Singapore. I’ve become a little jaded with the place. That’s not a kind thing to say. If my aunt reads this, she’ll probably want me dead, but it’s true. On an almost bi-annual basis, I’m in Singapore. Apart from Singapore, my passport’s been stamped for Thailand and Indonesia and Sri Lanka. I want to go to Europe and Australia and a couple of other places where I know the chances of me falling ill to a mysterious forest virus are very miniscule!

However, for now, my foreign travel is restricted to Singapore.

In India too, there are a few places that I would like to visit. For starters, Mumbai. Then Rajasthan. Then Gujarat. Then UP and Orissa and West Bengal.

I think my PoA for 2011 is going to be to at least attempt to travel to one of these places. If not alone, then at least with my idiot younger brother, who’s far better company than I give him credit for. At least, my parents won’t worry and for an unmarried girl, male sibling for company would be appropriate no?

Oddly enough, I said the same thing about my plans for 2010 too. Apart from the temple-hopping, nothing really materialized. You know how sad that makes me? I wish, I truly wish I was like my darling friend N who saved money and traipsed off to Europe in June this year. I want to save money and traipse. I like traipsing!

Ok, so, I stop whining, yes? And I continue to enjoy this tropical country and my half-mad extended family!

Chronicles

2010-12-22T10:02:00.002+05:30

I could give this a timeline and make things easy for everyone. But, these are stories that began when we were all three years old. The stories of us who walked into school crying and kicking and screaming and left in pretty much the same condition I’d say.

Somewhere in the process of being around each other for 14 years, we all became friends by virtue of spending too much time together!

“If you had to pick one person from class who would be your booty call today, who would it be?” is the question that is raised past midnight, I don’t quite know if it is Tuesday or Wednesday. There is, as always, an equal representation from both sexes. That’s how it’s always been with our class. Always an equal representation.

I escape with, “you know who, and he was the only decent looking guy in the entire batch”. Everyone nods and passes the question on.

There is an awareness in this room, amongst the people talking, that we’ve all come quite a long way from the days when we were skinny teenagers in school with bad hair and worse uniforms. We’ve grown up, made some mistakes and turned out alright. The possibility of losing out on our relationship with one another is so huge, but somehow, thanks to social media, we’re in touch.
Staying in touch is important. Its how we know if whatshisname still has a soft corner for that curly haired girl and how the two of them talk to each other now, as opposed to never having spoken to each other in school.

It seems like there’s so much to talk about. We’re asking the same questions about each other, re-living moments from the past, a decade ago, looking at things, justifying and analysing and wondering how we managed to keep it together enough to get degrees and get jobs that paid well and re-assured our parents.

We’ve turned 26/27 too quickly it would seem and this is oh-so-apparent at a wedding. From a class of 64, which included students from the Science and Commerce streams, there are a few of us remaining who haven’t tied the knot and had babies. We congregate at each wedding/trip to the home town of Chennai and bitch and moan about how our parents are traumatising us about getting married and then go on to make fun of people who have done the brave thing – get married.

It occurs to us that being 26/27 is about the best thing to be, in a normal world. However, in India, South India to be more specific, being 26/27 and single and living under your parents’ roof is about the stupidest thing you can do. For starters, because you live with the folks, there are curfews and suchlike stupidities and other assortments of guilt trips for all the times that you neglect family dinners and go out and get drunk instead!

I text all the available-in-Chennai folk for a spontaneous midnight gathering and everyone says, “Yes, we’ll be there, name the time and place”. So, we meet, bride included. It’s a snapshot send-off for her. Only the people she likes and cares about are sitting at the table, talking nonsense as always. We’re asking her how she met her husband and how they decided to get married. It’s a time to analyse our own love stories and wonder why we never thought to be sensible.

We’re set to meet at 11, and some of us are on time. Well, I’m on time, which effectively means, everyone else will run late. If I be on time, the world is definitely running late! We meet, we talk, laugh, hug, wonder, ask stupid questions about who’s getting married next. Wondering if we’ve gone to meet A and S’s baby boy yet. At the end of it all, when we had to leave because Chennai is not open longer than 11.30, the bride is happy. We’re waiting to meet at the wedding and talk some more.

The next day of practice sees us introspect a little more. Confide a little more. Find out more common friends. Because, Chennai is a little English village and everyone knows everyone else and their brother. P and I hide behind the curtains to get our steps right and the boys are secretly pleased. When we come out, there is a camera recording the proceedings in the great hope that we were actually up to something. So they settled for the sexy dance step instead. “Girls, I don’t think you’re getting that step right. Priyanka Chopra does it really well in that song. I think you should rehearse it properly.” We can only roll our eyes and get on with it.

More songs are chosen, YouTubed for steps and so on, clipped, choreographed, perfected and finalized. At the end of it, after much back and forth, AP has one thing to say, “We may not put on the best show ever, but one thing’s for sure, thanks to P, we won’t repeat a single step!”

Dinner conversations are pure rewind. It’s never tiresome. We bring up a few uncomfortable topics of conversation – the misunderstandings we had. If this was an American movie, at this juncture in the narrative, the protagonists would have had a big ass fight and walked off and the group would have had to split up. “Shit, what was that about? We were so idiotic then, right?” is the common consensus.

It is exactly then that I know, 20 years down the line, spouses and babies notwithstanding, we’ll still be friends. And friends are about the only relations for whom you don’t have to trip over yourself to prove anything.

Weddings and all that - Pt 1

2010-12-20T04:24:00.004+05:30

As I’m typing this, the henna on my hands is an insane shade of almost-black. If I were a bride, then it would be a sign of the deep and abiding love that my to-be husband will have for me (is the grammar ok on this one?). However, for this wedding, I am the bridesmaid. So, most people will only tell me that the blackish henna tattoo on my palms is an indicator of the immense love I will get from my future husband. Good.

It’s 4am, I’ve been staying up since Tuesday and by late I mean start dance practice at 7pm and end at 5am. After dinner, “practice” is just us sitting around in P’s living room talking, gossiping, asking questions, re-knowing each other, despite having gone to the same school since kindergarten. From being the kids in wan gray uniforms in school, we’ve all grown into very different people – some of us have some flesh on our bones, some of us are losing hair, some of us talk more, some of us have better hair and clothing, etc. We all do have one thing in common, we’ve known each other for way too long for us to ever be fake/weird around each other.

There’s always an element of TMI in our conversations. The same information would be met with a great amount of censure in any other social circle, but not this one.

There is a certain comfort in talking to each other. A certain complacence in not minding manners or words. These friends of mine deserve a lot more than a few measly I’m-too-tired-to-compose-right-now posts.

Hence, excuse the delay, and please to lech at the byootiful henna on my hands. Thanks.

Wishes

2010-12-17T11:36:00.001+05:30

In the best interest of my once-existent waist, god, I would much appreciate the gift of fortitude from you. The fortitude to resist the temptations of cheese and chocolate and carbohydrates and other things that are not healthy.

It’s something that I would like to take up more seriously, because honestly, I’m sick and tired of feeling like a big blub of flab. I tried yoga, in the hope that all that bending will whip me in shape. However that turned out to be an epic fail because I don’t think I’m good with bendy. Bendy is not me. Somehow, being from India, I should be all about the bendy, well, I’m not.

So, God, once again, I need to stop eating, else I’m pretty sure I will resemble a blimp and won’t be able to sleep on my bed because most of me will be falling off the sides. I beseech you, make the eating stop!

****

Now, it isn’t like I’m anorexic nor am I going to turn bulimic just because I need to lose weight. If I don’t do something now, I’ll be arthritic, my teeth will fall out because I’m eating too much of the sweet stuff, and I won’t fit into my clothes. As it is, I face the occasional embarrassment of not fitting into any one of my saree blouses because these love handles have just popped!

Truth is, I never was the skinny kid. I wish I was. I truly wish. Then I would have had cause to complain about how I’ve let myself go, blah, blah. No history there.

This, this fat phase of mine, is pure lethargy. It is the inability to say no and the absolute need to keep eating. It is also the inability to think, for one second, that I won’t accumulate all the nonsense I’ve been eating despite the fact that my stomach protests at the slightest provocation…

****

In other inappropriate news, I think washing machines are bad for people like me. Because, I own half the world’s underclothes and they just pile up because I know I have enough to get by and that I can shuck the lot in the machine and get it all washed in one stretch. I should be a little more conscientious about this, like I was when in the hostel in Delhi, but then again, conscientious and me are not very good friends, as illustrated above.

****

My best friend’s getting married on Sunday, and her being Sindhi (they who were once in Sindh, Pakistan, but ran away during the partition), means her wedding is a three-day do, which starts today. And since Pooja and I are such good friends, we’re dancing at her engagement party. We’ve been practicing since Tuesday and instead of being good children and practicing ever harder yesterday, we decided to try out three parts dance with one part vodka just for fun and ended up being all kinds of buzzed until 5am this morning!

Thing is, Seema and I have been best friends since we were 11 (and she was 12. I was the youngest in class, etc). We also went to college together. Most of our friends are people we’re studied with since kindergarten. These are boys and girls who’ve grown up with us. Thing is we were all pretty close as a class and over the years, we’ve taken the time and trouble to keep in touch.

Sometimes I puzzle over high school-related drama that I watch on TV or read and I think, “I would never have these issues with the monkeys I studied with”, I guess it also helped that my mother was the English teacher. But that should have made my life miserable. It didn’t, unless you count “Shruthi, what questions are coming in the Lit section of the paper?” being asked incessantly during exam time. For the life of me, I could never understand why people thought English was a tedious subject to study. More importantly, why they never studied English. I mean, you speak it, how hard can it be to understand?

But, I digress.

This weekend is all about my best friend, and her wedding and the fact that she will be moving to the UK after. I won’t have someone asking if I’m okay, because after December 19, that process will become an international text message. No more cupcake birthdays and shopping sprees and angst on email. She’ll be married and in another country and time zone. But I don’t care about that. She’s my best friend, we’ve been through nonsense together for the last 15 years, I think we can pull this long-distance thing off.

And on that happy note, I shalls post a more nostalgia post after the wedding is over…

100

2010-12-15T12:01:00.001+05:30

Salivate.

It’s what happens when your mouth is suddenly filled with a thin, non-viscous fluid. It’s an instinctive reaction, something out of your control, it’s what happens when you experience a fleeting moment of intense want, no, need.

Salivate is precisely the term for me and my reaction to mango avakkai pickle. When I open the bottle and stare down at cubed raw mango pieces pickled in a thick mustard paste with salt and chilli powder and enough gingelly oil, I salivate. What else can I say really? If you’ve ever sat down to eat rice, curd and avakkai pickle, you’ll know. If you’ve ever eaten a bowl of curd and avakkai pickle you’ll know. If you’ve ever mixed avakkai pickle in hot rice and some ghee, trust me, you’ll know.

And this ladies and gentlemen is my 100th post.

Travels and travails

2010-12-14T09:12:00.003+05:30

We're on the train. This time, we know about the bed bugs and cockroaches lurking behind the curtains of a A/C 2 converted into an A/C 3 bogey. (As per the Indian Railways a bogey is, in Indian English, is the entire carriage, and a compartment is where you sit/sleep.) This time the food was packed for fewer people, so there was lesser chaos. This time, it was just us and the people who were seated in the same compartment who were also going to the same place. This time, we set the alarm for 4am (that was my mother) to make sure that we got off at the right station. The trouble with travelling on the train to an in-between destination is that you have to know at exactly what time the train will arrive at your destination and what the previous station is so that you can get your luggage out.

Except at the first and last stops, trains don't wait at in-between stations too long, unless they're loading food or they're running late.

That's how my mother, two aunts, cousin and I went to Palakkad. This time, I was there for my younger cousin's wedding. S's wedding was fixed in September, we got the call on Vinayaka Chathurti telling us that she was getting married in December in Guruvayoor. My mother announced this piece of news with a very heavy heart. Not that she was resentful, just that she was really hoping to organise a wedding before my father's younger brother got the chance. As was my mother's sister no1. She actually told me one night, "don't worry, we'll make sure you get married before S does", yes, this is a race and I really want to win it, thank you so much for understanding the inner workings of my mind!

In Tamil, there is a saying - "Veedu katti paaru, kalyaanam panni paaru" - or something to that effect. It means, try building a house, try organising a wedding. These two are some sort of definitive events in the life of every average human being and will, in some way or form, add to one's life experience, or so they say. Organising a wedding, in a country like mine is a pain to say the very least. The entire family gets involved at some point and just about everyone who can articulate their thoughts will have something relevant to say about it. Whether it is about how much gold the girl will wear, to what saree she should wear, to which beautician she should go to, etc. But the second you announce that you intend to get your daughter married in Guruvayoor, the process takes on a whole different direction.

To begin with, Guruvayoor weddings, like all Malayali weddings, are blessedly brief. They don't take too much of your time. But Guruvayoor is also the place where you have to wait in queue for about 5 hours if you wish to see Krishna, the presiding deity at the temple. The place is a pilgrimage spot of sorts, so it's crowded almost every day. If you're there during Ayyappa season, then you will be dealing with an insane amount of humanity! On a good day, aka, when the stars are aligned to ensure that the bride and groom will live happily ever after, at least 300 weddings happen in Guruvayoor.

Thankfully, the weddings happen in these tiny mandapams built outside the East Nada or the door that Krishna is looking out of. However, since 200 other people are getting married in the same venue, chances are you could find yourself exchanging garlands with the wrong person! It has happened to a few people, almost happened to a few others. We knew this and made sure my cousin and her fiance were the ones who got on the mandapam. Thali-tying and garland-exchanging later, we went to eat.

See, eating at an Indian wedding is about as sacred as getting married itself. It all hinges on the food, if the sadya/meal is bad, rest assured that your wedding is an epic fail. Never mind how pretty the bride or how much gold she was wearing or how many people showed up. The sadya is the key factor, I'm sure the food at a wedding is the key factor everywhere. I don't think human beings are charitable enough to come to a wedding just to bless the couple and take a few smiling photographs and leave. Everyone wants to eat!

In the midst of all this, my parents managed to sweet talk one of the wedding photographers to take some pictures of me that could be circulated in Shaadi.com/to marriage brokers/ and other assorted marriage-related people. Me and my Copper Sulphate blue saree. The guy was taking pictures like there was no tomorrow. I refused to pose, of course, so half the pictures look like my facial muscles are convulsing of their own volition.

The worst part is the relatives. My father has 8 other siblings, which means I have some 20-odd first cousins. Then, both of my paternal grandparents, who are thankfully not related, also have a huge number of siblings, which means my father has his own share of the cousin market, meaning I have way too many aunts and uncles who only have one inappropriate question for me - "enne ariyo?/ do you know me".

Dear relative, especially you, who I don't know how I'm related to. I live in Chennai. I come to this part of the country once a year and only meet my immediate family, how on good god's earth am I supposed to know who you are if we've never met, and more importantly, have never been introduced. Tell me? Seriously, tell me!

My parents won't be around at such opportune moments and then I have to go looking for them, with unknown relative in tow, find them and deconstruct the relationship, and then smile a big smile and answer questions.

After plenty of this the next round of my trip involved going to one more temple to book one more pooja so I get married. We also went to my cousin's husband's hometown. All of this by car and on Kerala's lovely two-lane, undulating highways where everyone has this weird habit of driving exactly in the middle of the road and dodging one another at the last moment. Not to mention the buses which are all racing one another to get to their stops first. I was ill the whole time. Phlegm and cough and fever and what have you. Shruthi's Annual Mega Sinus Blowout was in full swing and there wasn't a damn thing I could about it except hide it under make-up, which didn't work.

By the time we got back to Palakkad, I'd spent too many hours in a closed vehicle. I needed some Chennai dust, as delivered by auto rickshaws. Of course, on the morning of December 13, the day I reached Chennai, or yesterday, to put it more succinctly, Chennai vaguely resembled some hill station (that's what the Brits created when they couldn't handle the heat/dust/humidity of India). There was dew and a mist for effect. To think of a mist floating above the Cooum is just bizarre! The auto ride from Central was a bit of a shocker, my mother and I were stunned for a few minutes while driving down Spur Tank Road.

I like Chennai like this. But this won't last for too long. Humidity (Humidras [humid+Madras] as a friend T re-christened this city) is the hallmark of this city. My next mission is to find a way to get me to stop hocking all the phlegm that seems to have replaced my blood. Turmeric and milk apparently does that or what is known as "masala pal" (pal [pronounced paal]=milk). My mother only had this to say about the combination "if you're brave enough, try it".

Ponders

2010-12-13T16:33:00.000+05:30

I’ve always loved writing. That’s pretty much a standard response that you’d get from most writers, or should I say writer types?

I’m the writer types, I like saying “I’ve always loved writing”. However, the lady who put the “This is a 10-mark question, where is the rest of the answer” comment in your English answer sheet will have a different tale to tell. That lady is my mother, my English teacher in class 12/12th grade.

I had to write an ‘essay’ about this Keki Daruwala short story – Love in the Salt Desert. That question was worth 10 marks in a section for 55 marks. I was expected to wax eloquent about the ending of the story. Did I want to? I don’t think I did. Somehow when I was 16, having to wax eloquent about two people from two different countries who fell in love when their eyes met, was not my specialty. I was just happy writing three paragraphs of relevant sentences that made the point they had to. Hence the comment “This is a 10-mark question, where is the rest of the answer”.

I really and truly wish that I could go on and on endlessly about things. I mean look at some of the articles and columnists out there, read how they write with a certain amount of wit and panache about just about everything under the sun, even your chaddis if you let them. Well, I think some journalists have attempted to write about underwear, but it’s not in very good taste, don’t you think? I like good underwear, who doesn’t? But to sit and read about someone’s inners? Not very interesting, if you ask me. However, columnists still live and they are still talking about all and sundry, good for them. I tried to do that, for roughly two years, turns out, as much as I like spinning a verbal spiel and the next writer, I can’t run around being a commentator about all and sundry.

Now, what next? The writing gig didn’t work out. I should have taken the hint in class 12 when my mother pointed out very helpfully that I should attempt to pay some attention to what’s being asked of me. If I’d known then, I would never have attempted poetry and thoroughly embarrassed myself by creating a blog of poetry! Le sigh!

It’s that time of year, again, when I’m wondering, nay pondering the purpose of life again, and once more, I have no answers.

Nose and all

2010-12-08T09:29:00.001+05:30

I tried writing this very profound post about weddings, etc. Then I realized the subject has already become redundant, in a manner of speaking, in this blog, so that post was abandoned.
Now, I’m too ill to think straight. Now sounds like ‘dow’ when I say it. My eyelids are all puffy and I’m beginning to look Chinese – it isn’t like I’m some doe-eyed Indian type anyway. This mega event that I’ve christened ‘Shruthi’s Annual Mega Sinus Blowout’ happens once a year - when I get so ill I can barely stand straight for a few minutes at a time. The rest of the year, it’s just a mild or non-existent version of things. Unlike my friend P, I have it easy in the allergies and sinusitis department. There was a time, however, when things were different. A time when all I remember was being ill.

This was school. There were about 3,000 other students there. I was in a class of 50-odd kids. Sat right in front and had to answer ‘how do you write with your left hand?’ at least once a day. I also remember having to blow my nose a lot. When you’re in my kind of school, it’s not the best thing to be doing.

Primary school was about the worst time of my life. Nothing, and I mean nothing, beats how annoying it was. To begin with, I was younger than the entire lot – born in November 1984 in a class full of people who were born in 1983 or early 1984. Then there was the matter of how short my hair was. My mother’s reasons were very simple, if my hair was long, she’d have to oil it, wash it, keep it pretty-looking. Short hair meant less work for her and fewer lice, yes lice. Any average Indian child in the under-10 category has a lice phase – it’s not cool. The girls in my class all had thick, long braids and I was so jealous of them.

The most standout commentary of my life as a school student was – ‘look how fat she is’ and other vernacular and more insulting versions of it, ‘her hair’s so short, she’s a boy in disguise’ and other vernacular and more insulting versions of it, and the worst ever, ‘mookuchali’ or snot. That’s right, a lot of the kids in my class called me snot and they loved every sniggering minute of it. To add to my worries, I had this maths (in India we say maths not math, ok?) teacher (or to be more appropriate, maths miss), who enjoyed giving me nose-blowing techniques and would constantly send me out of the classroom to go and blow my nose because me and my snot bothered her. My snot was a fairly big talking point for a few people and no, I’m not exaggerating for the sympathy votes here, one of my friends’ mothers remembers me as the girl who always had a tissue to her nose!

It didn’t help much that this was not just a childhood thing. Most of my adolescence was also spent tissue pack in hand. It’s only recently, since I stopped going out so much – you know school, college, masters, travel by bus/train within the city, inhale all this lovely dust – that my nose has settled down a bit. Working in an air-conditioned office as its advantages, except when those bums spray room freshener a few centimeters from where I’m sitting, and my trouble starts all over again!

Letter

2010-12-06T12:30:00.002+05:30

Dear extreme honker,

The other vehicles on the road? The ones moving in the same direction as you in the pouring rain, they have nothing against you, really.

Everyone is going someplace, in pretty much the same hurry as you are. It isn't like you're the only vehicle owner on the road who is going somewhere important - everyone is.

Now, if you could only get your tiny brain to process that information and drive reasonably, we could all go where we need to, in better tempers, and with our cars in better shape.

Thank you,

Sincerely,
Shruthi

New in Shh world

2010-12-03T15:07:00.003+05:30

Since November 22, I’ve been waiting for that feeling you get when you have no job, with the entire day stretched out in front of you and you’re thinking, “shit, I have nothing to do with my time!”

It hasn’t happened as yet, and I don’t think it will until January. That’s how much time I will be spending with my family, visiting temples, travelling out of the country, etc, etc, etc. Now that I’m not enjoying it, however, I don’t enjoy the fact that there is no pay cheque at the end of it all.
And that’s that for opinions.

********

(that was a sign on the window of the compartment we were sitting in)

14 people travelling in A/C 3 of the Indian Railways on the West Coast Express going to Mangalore is about as adventurous as I can think of being! The cast of this trip includes my 79-year-old grandmother who has no recollection of time or space or people. A home nurse we’ve hired to look after her. Our neighbour who, as a physiotherapist, is constantly telling us how to look after my grandmother. My mother and her three siblings who were all loud, opinionated and insisted on doing things their way, my father who really wanted to stand by the door of the bogey and get some air, me who really wanted to read a book, my two cousins, 11 and 7, who were constantly jumping from one upper berth to another, my mother’s brother’s wife, two relatives from Singapore who were travelling by train the first time and who had tons of hand sanitiser and suchlike.

We’d planned this trip to the Mookambika since June. And since June we’ve been planning the menu. With my uncle going to Sabarimala, the menu had to be vegetarian add to that the fact that the trip was, primarily, a temple visit, the menu HAD to be vegetarian. Now, when the possibility of no meat in a meal looms in a discussion that my family is having, things don’t turn out great. They just don’t. My aunt, my mother’s first sister, thinks vegetables are god’s curse to mankind and she makes such a production about no meat in her food that you’ll be forced to make something chicken just so she’ll shut up. The only vegetable that’s given any due consideration by the family is the humble root, the potato. So after much deliberation it was decided to make chappatis and potato podimas (it’s one thing made of mashed potatoes). Then we had to decide who was eating how many chappatis. Making the chappatis was nothing compared to the packing of the food bags.

My family takes an immense amount of time and effort into packing train food bags. When Siddharth and I were younger, and we travelled on these mammoth train journeys to Assam, Himachal Pradesh in the summers to see my dad, amma would pack enough food to last us those journeys and then some. There were times when we offered food to our co-travellers. From biscuits and chips to slices of vegetables and bread and butter and jam and cheese and boiled, unshelled eggs, tissue, and so on. If she could, she’d have carried an induction stove too! Those were good times on the Indian Railways.

So this trip, the food bags were loaded with roasted cashews, Pringles, mixture and chips from Grand Sweets, the dinner we’d made, water, the works. You know what? I couldn’t eat a damn thing! Yeah, that’s right, I couldn’t eat any of it. I had a stomach infection and I had to watch what I was eating, drinking, etc. So that happened and I was sulking pretty much the whole time. The fact that people were passing around food indiscriminately while I was sitting in the middle of the chaos of the train was not helping me one bit. The one thing that can truly send me into one of my infamous rants is the lack of food. I get really angsty, I get really annoying and I can’t fathom a sane reason why vegetarian food is such a bitch to cook. I really don’t. Anyway, I’m a pampered nut job whose mother still cooks for her so I should STFU. Even then, why is it so hard to cook some vegetables my family, WHY?!

(The Mookambika Temple)

Bitching about food aside, the trip to Mangalore turned out great. (Except for the prayers for “chinku to get married soon, please!”) The thing is I love temple-hopping. There’s something calming about being in a place of prayer. The only thing I don’t like though is the fact that people are constantly hinting at the amount of money you should be spending on doing a certain pooja that would guarantee you good health and other such wonderful life-necessary amenities! Temples, especially the ones in South India are built beautifully. If you’re not keen on praying, you’ll have plenty to look at. That’s something, no?

Updates

2010-11-30T20:29:00.001+05:30

I'm unemployed. I don't have money. I'm happy. I'm travelling with my family to temples and more temples to pray and pray that I get married. I'm sick of it. But it all makes for a great post. A post that I am too tired to post at the moment, but a post that I will write in 48 hours.

kthxbai.

Turning 26

2010-11-23T09:53:00.002+05:30

I am now unemployed. No work. No deadlines. No more journalism. Ah well, it had to come to an end sometime. Right? Right. It had to.

I will get back to working in 2011. But until the end of 2010, I have every intention of not doing a damn thing with my time, except perhaps write. Bore you, my 30-odd readers, with the mundane details of my life. I only hope that there is something interesting to say these next few weeks. As of now, I'm chasing an interview(s). I just hope that the people that I am trying to contact revert with a yes.

However, I must tell you about how non-alcoholic my birthday was. I found it more than just a little strange that every person who saw my swaying and happy drunk self when I turned 25 popped up at the club on Friday where I was. Everyone. It was random and for some reason made me think of circles. As you are well aware, I don't like circles. One thing though, I'm very happy that I didn't have a gigantic hangover while going to Mahabalipuram in insanely humid weather the next morning with relatives and biryani.

Here's to the occasionaly bouts of sobriety. And I'm hoping that 2011 will indeed be the year when astrologers will stop telling me I should have been a boy!!!

Deep feelings!

2010-11-20T11:21:00.001+05:30

Because it’s my birthday, and this is my blog, and I’m an attention-whore, I want to share one happy birthday wish that my lovely friend Nina posted on my wall in Facebook – “To the sister i should have had, wishing you hotness in a man, coolings in a chilled glass of sex on the beach, a lifetimes supply of retail nirvana with a bank balance to match. Happy birthday shruts.” I love her to pieces. Truly. That’s why, five years later, I flew to Delhi to surprise the nonsense out of her.

**********

Do you see her? That one, with the yellow-framed glasses, yeah. That’s me. Blank expression on the face. Probably with my nose buried in a book. In all likelihood, having a very interesting mental conversation with self and smiling to self about it. Tons of people find that weird. I used to care deeply about what people thought about that. It bothered me that people thought it was weird. The trouble with caring deeply about people is that it fucks you over so bad, you’re not sure if you’re sitting up or flat on your back staring at the ceiling wondering how in the hell to tie that loop so you could hang, snap your neck and end it.

That’s me. Former mental train wreck. Grappled with that eternal teenage issue – no one gets me. For a while, I was listening to some heavy duty angst music and thought that was an outlet. It wasn’t. The lyrics were great, as were the instrumentals, however, they did nothing to deal with the absolute rage of being misunderstood. One fine morning, I had this fine epiphany – almost everyone has the same problem. Everyone’s thinking ‘shit I’m a weirdo, no one gets me, how the fuck do I deal with this’. Clubbing oneself with the rest of the world is extremely problematic. You begin to feel even more insignificant. The whole tiny-speck-in-the-gigantic-universe syndrome. So how does this existential conundrum resolve itself?

It’s something I think about constantly. I want to be the right kind of person. And that is exactly the point at which I stop. Me being the right kind is about the stupidest thing I can think of. I’m really good at giving these long, sincere spiels about being the right person, but, I personally, am not. It’s an effort, and maybe Mahatma Gandhi got it right. However, he did sleep on the same bed with two young women to fight, and overcome, his sexual desire (bothersome detail that). I don’t mean to trivialise his struggle or what he stands for in this country. But this happened even to him. This pain we all suffer with, of wanting to be right, is going to kill us or get us born as a leaf insect in the next life! I’m pretty sure of it.

That being said, it is impossible to think that everyone is going to get it right. You’d have to be a saint no? Or some level of saint to ‘be the right person’. It’s that thing we call dharma here. Following the righteous path. Landed the Pandavas in crucioland for all the good that did. I mean, even Rajni is awesome as a villain than as a hero, so ideally everyone should embrace their villainy no? (May seem like I am telling all the rapists and killers of the world to please go ahead and get to work. I’m not. This is for folks with little bit mental filtration system. People who want to put themselves through the reverse osmosis process can also apply!)

Next point of pondering. Villains always lose. The right ones have these Karan Johar type lives and live in this beautiful golden light forever after. Who wants to right? I know that I won’t last in that atmosphere for every long. My mind won’t let me. I’ll go completely insane if I do.

And this post, this exact post is why I hate the fucking rain. Plenty slush pits. Plenty clouds. Zero sunshine. No vitamin D and mood-uplifting rays. Just clouds, gloom, doom and philosophy. Not good. Not good. Some mofo in some part of the world romanticized this weather, I want to castrate him and serve his balls to him for post-death meals. It can rain over the reservoirs and over the rivers where the water is. But I do not want it raining in my street and flooding my roads. I can’t see what’s under all that water and I don’t like things I cannot see and therefore cannot perceive.

Humbug!

Names

2010-11-16T23:17:00.004+05:30

LOCATION – Somewhere in Trivandrum, Kerala.

OCCASION – a cousin’s wedding.

SCENE – everyone’s dressed up. Everyone’s busy discussing the next wedding in the family. There’s obviously a lot of inappropriate commentary being directed at the unmarried girls. There’s a lot of loud laughter from the girl’s side of the family. The boy’s side thinks they’re a bunch of hoydens. Only women form representation for the girl’s side. The boys in the family are busy looking very busy. Introductions are being made all around. Especially the out-of-Trivandrum ones. One such conversation…

“Chinks*, meet Sudha. She’s my cousin.”

“Hi, Sudha… (long pause)”

“Hi mol…”

*we smile at each other and she walks away. I turn to my mother and ask*

“So, amma, how are you two related?”

“Well, she’s my cousin.”

“Ok, so what should I call her? Kunjama? Apachi? Valiama?”

“Not sure. Let’s see. She’s….”

And it went on. I stuck with Sudha aunty. Because it’s the safer option, until amma figured the relationship out! The last I met Sudha aunty was at my cousin’s wedding in July. We’re still figuring out what to call her.

The first time I ever saw Sudha aunty was in a 4X4 black and white picture. She’s sitting on my mother’s tricycle with this big grin on her face and my mother looking most morose. She and amma are a year apart in age. She grew up in Singapore and now lives in Trivandrum. She’s related to me twice over. Because, well, my grandparents are cousins. So, my mother is related to everyone in her family twice over. I’m related to my maternal family twice over! To make my life and memory retention an even more delightful place is designations. See, if you’re Indian – I can’t say Mal here because this is a common phenomenon in this country of mine – chances are that relatives on your maternal side have a different form of address from the relatives on your paternal side. There’s also names for the older relatives to consider.

I love the fact that my father’s side of the family is insanely huge. He has 8 siblings. I have 20 first cousins. My father’s parents also had many siblings. So on and so on!

I die. Slow, excruciating, nomenclature-filled death.

Sigh.

(*It's bad enough that I'm Chinku to my family. It's mental how Shruthi became Chinku. My mother's reason? "You were just a Chinku, so we called you that" uh, what?! Chinku is bad enough, my family's coolness compels it to make Chinku - chinks, chinka, chinkama. As stated above, I die. Slow, excruciatin, nomenclature-filled death.)

P.S: We don't say aunt sudha, unless we're Anglo-Indian. Sudha aunty. That's it.

Siblings

2010-11-15T16:54:00.004+05:30

(Before I get to today’s edition of Rant 101, Sh Pady style. I need to re-direct you good folk to a blog that I recommend. Nothing but Ficus. He’s an awesome writer and a good friend. I do hope that you drop in.)

****

Here’s what bothers me about democracy – people get away with just about anything in the name of ‘the freedom of expression’. It just plain sucks. Take for instance this.

The last paragraph, with the bits about creepy things going on in the homes of ethnic minorities really got me. Even if the writer is being sarcastic, this shit cannot be sold in the name of social commentary. It is shit. It is racist. I don’t see how this stuff gets run on a medium as large as the internet. Where is editorial discretion? Who lets this shit pass? More importantly, why and how did it get passed.

I know of this website as a place where a lot of content is about issues like bullying (they hate the bully) and women’s issues. Most of it is dealt with well. They even made a big brouhaha about that Marie Claire article about fat people. I’m surprised that this one got published.

I guess I am a little annoyed that this post has been made on a forum that I follow and to some extent look up to. However, that doesn’t mean I have to be so biased that I will let this website become my touchstone for appropriate mass opinions. Sorry. I can’t able to do that ya!

As much as I’m all for saying my piece and telling the world to eff itself in the process, I do think that approach can be dangerous if it goes too far. On some level, we should all realise that a public forum has its share of responsibilities. Especially, if said forum deals with opinions. A follower of a website, any website, is a person who, to some degree, espouses their opinions. That being said, I don’t think I want to espouse this opinion. For one, I don’t see how this is even remotely sensible.

Siblings are bad? Really? – even if you don’t get along, at the very least you will have learnt how to deal with a person you don’t like, who is constantly in your vicinity. I honestly think that an only child is someone who will grow up to lack some very basic social interactions that big families bring with them. Too many siblings (my father has 8) might be a bit over the top, but one, or even two, is not that bad.

I know of friends who can’t really see eye to eye with their siblings. They get on with life. I know of friends who have siblings they absolutely love but are not overly coddling with them. I find it immensely annoying when almost every relationship has some degree of a sexual overtone attached to it thanks to some ‘study’ and some ‘expert opinion’. Freud, thanks a lot, buddy. I truly appreciate your immense contributions to helping deconstruct the true nature of human relationships.

Having a sibling has been, for me personally, a great experience. My brother and I grew up fighting with each other (I remember times when my mother sat somewhere in the house crying because she was convinced that Siddharth and I would never see eye-to-eye), kicking each other (WWE (nee F) had a lot to do with this) and constantly vowing that we’d never speak to the other again, ever. As we grew older, moved to the army quarters in Chennai and interacted with more kids, we grew to like each other better. My mother was a bit more peaceful when we were living apart from my grandparents and aunts and uncle. She had the time to establish the simple fact that she was the main authority in our family and Sid and I just had to deal with it. Complaining to my grandfather after my mother was giving us the cane was not going to cut it or have an impact for that matter. Not that it mattered, if we were being brats, the consensus was pretty uniform. After a big crying and complaining session, if I got a you're-a-brat-so-I-had-to-use-the-cane-but-I'm-crazy-about-you hugs, nothing could be wrong no? My mother was unflinchingly honest about the fact that Sid and I were annoying sometimes and needed to be disciplined so that we could understand that writing notes while in class is the right thing to do. Eidetic memories are not for everyone!

This article implies that ‘white’ adults with siblings are miserable and have issues. ‘Ethnic minority’ adults don’t have such issues, because some hallucinogen is involved. That hallucinogen, you lunatic, is called family. A unit you probably snort at when you watch a Disney movie and awe at when you watch The Godfather. However, if ‘space’ and suchlike is being given to children then they shouldn’t have ‘issues’ right? It makes me sick to sit and read through reams and reams of print devoted to the many ‘issues’ that children have these days. What issues? Why issues? These children live in developed countries where just about every system is in place. Ambulances reach on time, school education is free. There is a thing such as social security. They are documented citizens of their country. They have all that and yet they have issues. What do they need? Love? Free Hugs? Are these issues the reason why they leave their countries and come here as tourists to sit and exclaim over every stinky waterway and beggar and landscape and then proceed to write something as nonsense as Eat, Pray, Love? (That book is total rubbish. I don’t know how it sold so many copies. One more book by one more white person about one more cow and I’m going to try my best to ensure that they all NEVER be given a visa to travel here. The Bhagawad Gita is not the most sacred text of Yoga, you dumbass. It’s a treatise on dharma.)

The word issues has so many things wrong with it in this particular context. So many things. People need shrinks in times of extreme distress, but a sibling sure as hell is the wrong reason to need a shrink. If you think your mother doesn’t have the time for you, then just fucking deal with it and be glad you’re alive. I don’t want tell you about the innumerable number of instances when little girls didn’t live to see the day because their parents wanted a boy instead.

Mull-it

2010-11-13T01:47:00.002+05:30

Birthday month, for everything that I’ve hyped it out to be, is turning out to be not so great. For starters was Swetha’s death and now, Nandu. Nandu Narsimhan taught me at IIMC (not to be confused with IIM-Calcutta, PLEASE). He was 45 and died of a heart attack last night. Nothing more to say really. He was the favourite professor of all the Advertising diploma kids. We journo kids didn’t know much about him. We only sighed from a distance.

The thing is, when you study at an Indian government-funded college, life’s pretty nonsense. Everything is subsidised, including the quality of faculty. However the Advertising and PR diploma kids got a better deal. They learnt from the people who were in the industry. They learnt from the people who had the fancy cars and cool jobs. Journo students? We had an ape wannabe called P Mathur who said, and I know this because I counted, ‘and all that’ 125 times in class once! The rest just read aloud from a book all the time or told us not to eat food at a press conference.

Suffice to say, most of my time at IIMC was spent escaping from the rude reality that was ‘a premier journalism education’.

Running back to November. Apart from untimely deaths, this has been, so far, a month that I’m enjoying simply because I will be unemployed starting November 22. I want to be unemployed. I want to experience no-salary withdrawal symptoms for a bit and then get back to the corporate grind. In the time that I am at home, I hope to be writing more. Long ago, I had poetic aspirations (can be found here); I want that stupid feeling back. It’s a fun feeling – this combination of feeling artistic and very relevant.

The trouble with me and writing is this – I never really aspired to write. Ever. All I knew was that I had this great talent for not having studied squat before the exams but writing the appropriate words well enough to get decent marks. There was no yelling at home, my mother didn’t need to get her cane out, and all peace was maintained. (Ok, here’s the thing readers of mine, I’m from India, disciplining a child in this part of the world includes a smack or two. I’ve got my share. I don’t resent my mother. I don’t think she hates me. I don’t have ‘issues’. I was, still am, a pain. My mother, almost always, acted out of exasperation. You would too if it was the day before the final exam and your daughter’s school books were empty.)

When I was in my final year of college, Ranjit Hoskote visited for a week-long residence. I thank god every day for it. He re-introduced Arun Kolatkar to me. I owe him big time! Ranjit’s after class activity for the BA Literature students was a poetry workshop. I signed up too. My poem? Sucked ass! I hated it. He hated it. However, I re-worked it and it was much appreciated. When I was told that rhyming was not a pre-requisite to good poetry, I was pretty thrilled. That’s when I chased this grandiose notion of having the gift of poetry. It led to a lot of writing that my old blog had a lot of. I deleted all of it. Some of it is still alive, somewhere, in some online forum. I’m going to delete everything, I think.

I’m not sure what to do with this writing shindig any longer. Maybe journalism is the profession for me. I get the opportunity to make a piece of cake sound like a slice of heaven, why not, right?

All this resignation business has given me a lot to think about. What next is something I’m not letting myself answer right now. Let’s see where this is all going to go. For now, I just be angsty on blog, yes?

Overanalysing

2010-11-09T15:30:00.002+05:30

When 2 + 2 suddenly looks like 42 (Douglas Adams, I would like to thank you profusely for this connotation attached to the number 42), it’s probably because my overanalytical mind is at work in full force and capacity. Some of the things I dream up are things that you’d never ave thought of and you’d probably turn around and say, "Shruthi you’re completely vetti (jobless) please get a life!" I’d have to agree with you, but then where’s the fun with idle time if you cannot over-imagine, right?

Half the nonsense in this blog is because I over-imagine. It is this tendency to over-imagine that leads to what I call writing overkill - making the same point in five to six differently worded sentences. I do that sometimes, and I’m not too happy about it. But then again one of the precepts of effective communication is reinforcement – it could either be wild gesticulating or making the same point until you get it.

I’m self-introspecting because of a convoluted connect I made about a person I know. I was watching some meant-for-brainless-viewing-only TV programme on Channel V about celebrities and their zodiac matches and consequently led me to think about someone I know, who is slightly obsessed over zodiacs and how she managed to have a crush on and go on to develop a relationship with the person whose zodiac is best compatible with hers. That thought I had while watching this inane TV programme almost killed me. Why I was thinking about that person is beyond me. Why I even made the connect is beyond me. I did think and I did make the connect. I did make 2 + 2 = 42.

Lists and all

2010-11-07T11:10:00.004+05:30

Death has this funny way of remind you that it exists. I don't like that. This morning I woke up to the news that my youger brother's classmate from college died in an accident. He's devastated. She's the second friend he's lost in two years. It's not fair. Something about it is not right. I don't know what karma her death completed, whatever it was, it just wasn't right. To me at least. OR as my mother put it, maybe this was all the time she had on this planet. If that is the case, Swetha, wherever you are, I truly hope it's a better place.

My parents celebrated anniversary number 27 yesterday.

Have you heard of dhoti pants? Kindly Google it. My friend bought me a pair from Goa and I wore it to lunch yesterday. My uncle was most fascinated with it and insisted that we source this clothing item for everyone in the family, including my 11-year-old and 7-year-old cousins, and take a family photo wearing dhoti pants. The dhoti family apparently.

Diwali or the lack of it

2010-11-05T09:32:00.002+05:30

Today is Diwali. Festival of lights. The biggest mithai gorge-fest. Diyas. Firecrackers. Some burn injuries. Some safety messages from fire and safety department. Diwali releases, which unfortunately did not include ant Rajini or Shah Rukh Khan film. Mutton curry and idli for breakfast (apparently in rememberance of Raavana). Oil baths. New clothes. A day in the life of people where there is no bickering, random disagreements and fights. It's a day to welcome Lakshmi into your home and generally have a blast.

That's about it. There was a point when Diwali was exciting for me. It isn't any longer. My brother is not around this year. My aunt is too scared of firecrackers for it to be any fun. This year it will just be diyas and so on. Nothing much. I think my family should start this send out mass greeting card system. Just so there is something to do today.

I'm Mal. We don't do any festival except Onam and Vishu. Everything else is just a cursory nod to the religious calendar. Which is good in a way. We even celebrate Christmas with homemade plum cake (rum-soaked dry fruits, etc, my mother is a rockstar with that) and wine. All in all, festivals are a good time to just soak in the ambience and have a good time about it. Can't say more really.

If you ever want to get a feel of festivity, come to Chennai around Diwali, catch a first day first show of a Tamil Diwali release. Hoot with the crowd. Go a little mental. Enjoy!

birthday

2010-11-01T14:43:00.000+05:30

It’s November.

I turn a year older this month. I wait all year for this month.

I’m one of ‘those’ people – the ones that like their birthday and are all shrilly about it. The rest of the time, I’m unconcerned about things at large. But November is the only time in the year I get a little crazy. See November 6 is my parents’ wedding anniversary. Nov 14 is my best friend’s birthday. November 20 is my birthday. November 22 is my uncle’s birthday.

So many occasions to celebrate.

November is also a great time of year to be in Chennai. Slush pit notwithstanding. The heat and humidity are more tolerable. The green, what little there is of it, is greener. Over and above all that, it’s my birthday this month and what better time of year that your birthday? I don’t see how people can rate birthdays below festivals and girls nights out. To me, a birthday is the one day in the entire calendar year when it’s all about you. Simple. No one can argue with that. No one can disagree with the fact that it’s your day and you should be having fun. If you’re smart, you will take the day off and have a 24-hour party. Weekday birthdays especially are the best times to do this.

Anyway. It’s just a thought.

It's raining!

2010-10-30T22:30:00.005+05:30

I don't like coffee. I'm really not a fan. But Chennai is obsessed with it. We serve what is known as Kumbakonam Degree Coffee, go figure! The morning breakfast here is idli, vada, sambar and one steaming cup of over-sweet, strong coffee.

However, I slip up on my I don't like coffee rule when I'm at Sathyam Cinemas, which has now also expanded to include the awesome Escape at Express Avenue. Their cold coffee is milky, coffee-y and sweet and goes perfectly with their cream doughnut. Top that off with a freezing movie theatre and a good film, I'd say its a great combo overall, no? Well, I think so.

Ok, that is just a digression here. I'm thinking of other things today. Such as the rain. See, Chennai is a humid, humider and humidest city. Add to those conditions some nice average temperature of 35C and you have such a lowelee weather that most of us bring out the sweaters and such like when the rains and "winter" happens. It's hilarious to watch really...

Take for instance, this little roadside stall adjacent to Ramakrishna Mission Boys School in T Nagar. The place opens only during the rainy season and stocks some garish woollens which concerned mothers buy their children and dress them up in it when they travel to school during this time of the year. If you're travelling on a motorbike, then you're probably wearing one of those weird, striped head dress type things. Sometimes I think it is out of place, but I realise that for Chennai anything below 30C is little bit cold wonly.

Despite our intolerance for lower temperatures, we love going to Ooty and dressing up in more woollen clothing. I'm mostly amused by all this dressing up.

I've been in a winter that I can remember (I spent the first three years of my life in Dharamshala, in Himachal Pradesh, Dalai Lama's town. Dad was posted there and amma is the one remembers the agony of being a mother to two kids in that weather, my brother apparently walked out of out our quarters in in his perfectly clean woollen rompers and right into the post-hail slush. not good.) once in my life, when I was 19/20 and studying @ IIMC, Delhi. The temperature that December was 2C and I had never encountered such weather. No humidity, no need to bathe at least thrice a day to get the grime off your skin, no over-oily skin. (how I loved my skin in the Delhi winter, no breakouts, nothing, just clear skin, I miss it)

The rain, which is the indicator of the change in seasons and also the harbinger of cold weather until January in Chennai, turns this city into one giant slush pit. The Chennai Corporation suddenly woke up one morning and decided that they wanted to re-do the cabling, etc, in the city, but forgot to cover it up and re-lay the roads. More importantly, the minute the North East monsoon hit the city, all the labourers left the worksites leaving huge pits of unfinished wire work and consequently tons of slush and other disasters. The seasonal cycloon that always is supposed to hit Chennai but bothers coastal Andhra instead hasn't happened this year. Last year the Saidapet subway was flooded and a 45A bus was under the subway when that happened. This year, I don't know what kind of drama will ensue. I only hope that those of us who walk the roads can walk on level ground and not sink under the many open manholes... (Some smart asses think that leaving a sewage manhole open is the best way to ensure that excess rain water will not flood the roads, but this is the effing monsoon, there will be too much rain, what makes you think it's a solution jackass!)

Hormones and other things

2010-10-27T15:53:00.001+05:30

A hormonal female is not person to blog, unless she does want to talk about her being hormonal. Even that will not work because men the world over, have made it clear that women and their hormones and hormonal issues are of no concern to them. This is just to inform you that when I’m at “that time of the month” (fuck! To think that is going to be my state of being for the better part of the next 20 years makes me shudder!) I cannot write anything that reads like English. Since I don’t write in any other language, it effectively reads as, I can’t write!

Since most of my writing is one long rant, I should be able to talk even more eloquently when I’m PMS-ing, but I just can’t able to [sic]. (This ‘can’t able to’ rubbish is something that most Chennai people will serve up, from official communications to everyday speech, it’s a phrase that is hilarious in parts and also brings up some serious concerns in terms of the evolution of the language as spoken in the country. If the number of words from Indian English, such as the hideous ‘prepone’, getting inducted into the English dictionary is any indication, can’t able to is, in all likelihood, well on its way…)

Anyway, PMS is not something I go to town about. I find the acronym to be most overused and abused when women try to justify their callousness and stupidity. “I’m PMS-ing and depressed, please go away” is one of the most common things I’ve heard in my life. It’s an issue. God knows I have to grapple with it month in and month out, but that doesn’t mean that women are entitled to use it as a means to some weird end. If we’re out there fighting for rights and so on, then on what basis are we allowing ourselves to fight from the comforts and so on of things like PMS. It just doesn’t make sense.

This brings me back to the whole double standards thing. It’s incredible to me that one set of rules work for one situation/person/time and another set for another situation/person/time. It reminds me of a very interesting conversation I had with the ex three months into our relationship. He was in another city and suddenly asked me to come up with a list of things I disliked about him. This was all on chat. I took a serious amount of time thinking that up. The next day, when I asked him to make a list, he just rattled it off. Apparently, sir had made a list of things wrong with me, but did not think it would be a very good idea to tell me without context, so he made me come with a list so he wouldn’t look like the villain in the piece. I told him then that I thought it was total shit and he’d never hear the end of it from me.

What amazes me about people, and sometimes about me, is the ability to switch rules and regulations as the situation demands. More so, when the situation involves sex. That’s when the waters get murky and thoroughly interesting. People seem to have an opinion that is both moralistic and “appropriate” and “right” the same person will, in all probability, be the king/queen of behind the cupboard activities. I may come across as judgemental in that comment, but if there is one piece of wisdom that I have accumulated in these last 25 years, it is this – irony is the ruling world order – Newton’s third law; Murphy; whatever you want to call it. It’s how things function on this planet. They called it Karma in some religious text and I think it’s just plain awesome…

Being cool

2010-10-26T14:10:00.001+05:30

I’m awesome and I love it

“In a casual sense, the term "entitlement" refers to a notion or belief that one (or oneself) is deserving of some particular reward or benefit — if given without deeper legal or principled cause, the term is often given with pejorative connotation (e.g. a "sense of entitlement").”*

(*Source : Wikipedia)

The thing is, most of us young in-our-20s people seem to be born with this bizarre notion in our heads that we’re supposed to be right at the top of the ladder without having to take the effort to climb it rung by rung. I don’t know where it comes from. I have a feeling it’s the parents who are feeding their children these ideas about them being child prodigies and how they should be the bosses the day they join an organization rather than having to working towards it for a few years for the privilege. It’s amazing to watch these people though. Absolutely authoritative about the fact that they know better than most and they should be taken more seriously than most.

It amazes me this myopic world view. I wonder if these specimens ever got one tight slap from their parents, ever. I don’t know if this need to work hard and prove a point is a typically middle-class thing. Here’s what I don’t like about this type ok, they’re all over smart and talk total nonsense, but when it comes right down to it, they’re incapable of handling a situation. The amount of time they spend dissecting a problem can be productively re-directed towards getting a move on and figuring it out. Of course the dilly-dallying also includes asking a million questions that can only come out of a lack of basic common sense.

It’s mentally stressful to be around such people.

*tears hair out in frustration*