Fear of awkward silence

The most terrifying thing about meeting new people is the inevitable sales pitch you have to deliver for yourself, justifying your reasons for being, for doing what you do or in my case, do not do. In recent years, this is the one thing I’ve come to dread immensely.  It makes me want to crawl under the bed and stay there and never come out.  It begins innocuously, a simple question ventures out in the open, for the happy purpose of ‘breaking the ice’ and getting rid of the awkward ten second pause that follows the announcement of names.  I spend this time usually grinning like my life depended on it, and successfully scaring or scarring the poor soul stuck with me for life.  If,  I haven’t managed to drive them away then, I suppose my inherent Geek manages the job soon enough.  It can’t possibly be the fact that I speak ten thousand words per second about how the drive through Mehrauli made me feel so District 12. Nope. That can’t be it. It has to be something else.

 

 

One of my teachers in college used to call me ‘scary-looking’.  I suppose my scowling artist persona didn’t go down quite well with her but I have learnt since and worked on reducing my ‘scari-ness’. Thus, taking leaps and bounds from where I was then, I am now the smili-est person you’ll ever meet, scowls not present within a fifty mile radius.  I smile like a Cheshire act whenever I meet somebody for the first time, and I really believed it was working out well for me until someone told me that constantly smiling and being happy all the time was making me look obnoxious and would I mind toning down all the talking please, it’s getting on our nerves.  Why don’t you just sit and pipe down for once, let the sound of somebody else’s voice float about in the air.  Well, alright.

 

 

Stuck as I am, between two extremes, I find it takes a delicate balance to determine just how much talking should be done to keep the awkwardness at bay and yet allow the sound of myriad voices to bounce off the walls.  There’s nothing worse than someone talking all the time, every time. 

 

 

And that would have been fine by me, provided someone actually made the effort to pick up the slack.  But if that isn’t going to happen, for god’s sake let me talk at least we’d be free from declaring mundane inanities like,

 

“Oh, it’s raining.” 

 

“Yeah, they said it’d rain all week.”

 

Ho hum. A few murmurs of assent. Then, silence.

 

 

Fun, fun times.  

 

 

 

Final Destination 4 or Let’s get creative with human play-do!

Alright, I admit I was not exactly expecting a sublime cinematic experience by watching Final Destination 4, but yeah, on the off chance I thought….hey, how bad could it be?

Very bad.

So the basic premise of the movie is to tell the viewer that Death cannot be cheated, in which case, go ahead Death. Toss the Rev. John Donne (him of The Sonne Rising, Valediction Forbidding Mourning, and Elegie: To His Mistress Going To Bed fame) out of the window and tell him that Death may indeed feel proud since it’s out to get you!

And once Death has decided you’re on the menu, nobody, not even Rajnikant can deliver you from that fate.

So moving along, our movie has four teenagers in the Hollywood tradition escape death owing to a supernatural vision descending on one of them while they devour fries at a car race.

The flustered teen manages to rush his peeps from the stands and out on to the street just seconds before a car crashes, a beam falls from the ceiling, some mechanic guy gets impaled on a bench and a whole host of other icky scenarios involving blood, guts and metal parts happen at random in very quick succession.

Thence begins the saga of churning human body parts being tossed here, there and everywhere on the screen. People get slammed by ambulances, a lady gets her eye gouged out by a rock caught under a lawnmower, a PYT escapes getting scraped into pancake batter at the car wash and one unfortunate All American boy ends up spilling his guts all over a public pool because he…cough….gets drained through a tiny hole at the bottom of the pool.

Oh joy.

The rain’s a moody lady

Right about now, this very minute, 4:37 pm.

Its been promisisng to be a wet, windy and rainy sort of day for hours. The wind’s been blowing since morning and even with the twisted, sadistic luck my neighbourhood has with the rain, I can almost smell rain on the air. The trees are swaying in their characteristic slow, swishy waltzy way. Trees have a real feel for the entire dancing thing I think. Don’t believe me? Just go watch The Two Towers again. all those ballroom dancers you see on TV are no match for good ol’ Treebeard and company.

I’m hoping and praying that the first drops of raincome just before the sun goes down. That’s when rain is that its most beautiful. It’s twilight and the soft grey light of the evening becomes blurred as the drops begin to fall. It’s at times like these when its possible for anything, almost anything to be possible in the world.
Days like these are responsible for more than half the scifi and fantasy literature written in the world today. There’s something so magical, stern yet beautiful about a dark raincloud ont he horizon. It feels like its easier to believe and speak of dragons, of sorcery and witchcraft under a grey, wet sky.

I know for sure because that’s when I begin to mould the threads of my imgination together to form stories with the fantastic coming alive.

What do you think?

Anger Management

I don’t know what it is about angry people that is scary. Maybe its the twisted features of their faces, or the fact that all angry people (I mean ALL angry people here – you, me, your mother, her two thousand and fifty five relatives) all of them end up looking ridiculous as the anger mounts.

Now you may get angry over the state of the roads in Delhi, or the guy who has never heard of deodorent standing right next to you in the elevator or even the pesky kids that draw squiggly lines on the dusty windows of your car, but all of us angry people like to think that “our” anger is justified and upheld by the gods themselves; because we are oh-so-righteous and we know what we’re talking about and the other guy (everyone doing the perpetrating of injustice and evil ergo disagreeing with us and making us angrier) is plain WRONG. Don’t ask how we know it – he just is!

Don’t ask us why we’re angry. We just are.

Anger is fine.

Rage is fine.

Fury, too, is fine.

What is not fine is the way we gladly leave our humanity and compassion wilting in the dust when anger takes over. It’s alright to angry as long as you don’t forget that the person you are railing and ranting at is also a human being with feelings that have to be considered. You may consider yourself justified in screaming, shotuing and generally making a nuisance of yourself but if yourself through the eyes of the person you’re busy shredding to bits, you might perhaps reconsider the antics, and cool down.

Varun Gandhi wants better security…what a laugh!

Poor little boy Varun Gandhi…victimised and traumatised by antinationals who want to kill him. How funny is this? Maneka Gandhi seems to enjoy a very selective memory where she conveniently forgets that her son is the man who promises a crowd of people that he will effectively cleanse his constituency of a certain community – is that not tantamount to murder? But Varun Gandhi himself is a victim. Because he has not been given “adequate” security. I really want to know what adequate security is.

Perhaps we will find out once we figure out how to protect the scores of people who are living every day in fear expecting to be swatted like flies by the poor litte boy.

When jokers throw punches….

In the frenetic hours before starting a blog, I’d decided that this would be a blog that people would sit up and notice.  Something was going to be said, and by Gawd! It would be something momentous, stupendous, marvelous, remarkable, fantastic, something that would serve as a fearless catalyst to lingering moments of epiphany, something that would seize the reader (MY reader) by the unmentionables and make them want to burst forth in a creative supernova. 

 

That’s what I’d decided, and I thought it would be pretty smooth sailing.  I was going to talk about big, weighty issues that in part or as a whole commented upon the existential question, world politics, what’s holding us all back from coming together as a nation, a country, a planet even.  The state of education, the exploitation of women, global warming, the fact that the Male Chauvinist Pig refuses to die out, even natural selection fails us there (Get that no-good rat Darwin! This is not what we signed up for and we want our money back!)

 

The trouble with natural selection is that even if you admit it makes sense that the fittest should lead, procreate and continue the march of mankind on the world, somehow, owing to a twisted joke some guy with a Metaphysical hold on the universe decides to play on us, it almost never happens these days.  If it did, I am sure that the strain of weakness and the utter incapability to appreciate strength in another would be eradicated in all men cutting across class lines.

 

In this post though, I’m going to tackle the Mangalorean wimps who beat up girls in a pub. 

 

The inability to see strength, confidence and above all power in the hands of another, or as we learned to say in discourses of gender and inequality, ‘The Other’ really cannot be called anything apart from a debilitating weakness.  It is weakness and a deeply rooted sense of inferiority that leads to an almost ritualistic sense of inflated ego and perception of self that is supported through the conscious and deliberate dehumanizing and destruction of the ‘Other’. 

When a self image is defined and sustained only through an acknowledgment of difference and opposition from the Other, it leads to a problematic and uneasy construction of identity that is prone to rupture and decay as time passes and such constructions (that are static) find it difficult to negotiate with new systems of self recognition and identity. 

 

A man who identifies himself as a man only because he is something that does everything a woman cannot do and should not do will find it painfully confusing, infuriating and mentally destabilizing to watch a woman, indeed an army of women literally kicking his arse while they surpass and outclass him at what he does and does not do.  For the cardboard cut-out males produced by the million in this country and others, the revelation that a female is capable of using her mind, her body and her brain to function so that it serves her purpose and empowers her is a blow to the family jewels, an attack on the fortress of manhood, an act that robs them of everything precisely because their idea of self and self worth is determined by what a woman is NOT in relation to them.  It symbolically rapes them and leaves them devoid of a sense of being. 

 

According to the Mangalorean wimps, they are men:

 

1)     Because they have a Y chromosome in their DNA strands.

2)     They are anatomically men

3)     Wait, you need more reasons than that?!!!

4)     Well, they’re smart BUT they can’t be expected to think – that’s just too much trouble.

5)     They are brave BUT they need to be in a group of 10 to 20 guys to feel safe beating up three girls outside a pub.

6)     They’re custodians of Indian culture BUT it’s alright for them not to know what that ACTUALLY means.  I mean, how many things do you expect the poor fellows to remember when there are important things like Culture Defending to worry about.

7)     They are not scared of anyone BUT they piss their pants if they see a girl from their community talking to someone outside the charmed circle. (This is because they know the number of female options open to them is dwindling even as they speak and they really can’t afford to have these Other Religion guys come steal their women.)

8)     Profanity is their big ticket to manhood. Unless they can spout two or three curses involving copulation, they really don’t get the feel of being a man.

9)     They can talk and debate too BUT they would rather roar and growl and create several high pitched animalistic sounds to sounds how fierce they are. An extended vocabulary is for sissies.

10)                        They’re doing all of this to protect women. 

11)                        They really don’t get what the big deal is, all they did was beat a few girls o teach them a lesson, isn’t that the Vedic way to doing things anyway?

12)                        They’re getting their lunches packed.  They got tipped off that there are lewd, indecent and naked figurines of men and women involved in gruesome acts of Foreign Influence in Khajuraho, so they need to go there and bust things up.  It’s not temples; no way!  That’s just Muslim propaganda!  Our gods and goddesses were very well behaved and proper. 

 

When you have a psychosis as messed up as that, it is no wonder that some of these men have to prove that something still moves and breathes in the blocks of wood they carry above their shoulders. 

What say thou?

Kermit Flipflops make me happy!

The minute I get home from work, I tear my shoes and socks off and race to the closet where I rummage about in the clutter for a couple of minutes (it takes that long since I really have to struggle to see and fish things out of the way and it really isn’t easy when you have clothes, shopping bags, belts, hats, gloves, socks, shoes, heels, sneakers, deflated soccerballs, poky old hairbrushes, and a million other things threatening to tumble out while you stick your hands in one way then the other).   And finally, I have what I came for —-my Kermit the Frog flipflops!!

I slam the closet door shut and pull them on.  Take a deeeeeeeeeeeeeep breath. Sigh.

Heaven, thy name is flipflop.

Figo the Adventurous Squirrel

I want to introduce you all to Figo ,a very brave and downright crazy squirrel who lives in the tree outside my bedroom window.  Now Figo is no ordinary squirre.  This is not to say that other squirrels are ordinary.  Oh no, far be it from me to commit such a travesty.  I know any number of upstanding, patriotic and fine squirrels who would make their country and neighbours proud if their exploits ever reach the outside world. 

Squirrels understand the role of the media in propagating and projecting an aura of reason, rationality and sensibility upon a species and they are working on it, of course making time for such extraneous activities, however important for the cause of Great Squirreldom, is a very big challenge for the squirrel community at present. 

However I digress.

Back to Figo. 

 

Now Figo is quite the acrobat.  He’s always ready to jump around and switch the chivalry on to impress the ladies.  Now I appreciate a fellow like that.  Shows class, real class.  It’s not uncommon to see Figo racing to the topmost branches of the trees around the park in pursuit of pigeons (ugly, overweight nincompoops).  This presents its own difficulties in time, as watching the branch bend over to form a circle will find him hanging precariously.  But he never screams for help, even though a battalion of his comrades can be seen ready in position (formation 24 – 3 – 4 – 3-2-2) to save him.  No…Figo decides to take matters into his own hands by running, yes running the length of the branch (what remains of it..) and jumps (*gasp*) to land…cool as a cucumber….on the ground.  He’s not moving…probably broken his spine…but that’s the spirit. 

You can watch him limping off into the sunset.  Incorrigible.

I saw them practicing for the parade….

Yes, Republic Day is just around the corner, which is why you feel the difference in the air the minute turn into the wide radial roads surrounding India Gate.  The whole area seems spruced up….it isn’t really but its the parade build up that does things to your head, so everything seems greener, cleaner and the roads invariably wider.  They aren’t really…it’s all in your mind.

So there I am, all scarfed and buttoned up, ready to take on the chill. Die chill die!……yes, so I was saying, there I am sitting in the auto, listening to the faint reverbations of  Tito’s guitar when the traffic stopped.  I stuck my head out the auto.

The parade was on!   Actually it was a regiment of Delhi Police practicing march past for the parade.  I asked the auto-wallah to move a bit closer.  He looked at me as though I’d gone insane, then very slowly intoned, that he wasn’t going anywhere near a whole battalion of policemen.  Lord knows he got enough of them on his tail all day long without asking for the trouble.

I resigned to being stuck at the back of traffic while the contingent marched and drummed its way past.  But I did manage to get a picture.  You can catch a minuscule glimpse of mustachioed, uniformed Delhi belly-coppers between a row of cars.  I’ll try to get a better shot next time I’m stuck at India Gate.

In other news, I’m updating A Game of Chess in a few minutes, and Ramalinga Raju is a balance sheet chef, and he spoilt his broth rotten.

Misty Mornings

I think it was around 6 in the morning when the first rumblings of consciousness began to stir around in my head.  There was a faint whirring noise and a niggling chill creeping into my toes.  I pulled my foot back into the quilt and curled up, desperately trying to the snuggle deeper into the bedclothes.  It didn’t work.  It was cold.  It was freezing and I felt it.  It wasn’t letting me sleep so I thought I’d do the sensible thing and drag myself out of bed. 

I pushed the covers aside and swung my feet off the bed.  The cold floor stung my feet and I winced as a thousand needles of biting cold dug into my feet.  I jumped and hopped about till I spotted my slippers half hidden under the scarf I’d discarded the night before.   Slippers slipped on. Mission accomplished. 

I stepped out into the hall and looked about.  I was the first one up, the rest of the apartment was dark.  I pushed the door of the corner room open.  The parklights were on.  The park and the dirt field where kids played cricket was flooded with light.  They glowed softly beyond the windows.  A thick screen of mist covered all the windows and the lights shining behind the glass seemed like giant candles suspended in the air.  The whole field held a very eeire look.  There was nobody about, and everything was quiet.  The silence felt heavy.

I shivered.  It reminded me a bit of the witching hour.  True appreciation of Sophie’s plight as she stood at her window can only be understood by somebody who has been through a similar exprience.  At that moment, every shadow on the ground seemed sinister and every tree seemed to hide a murderous giant in its leaves.  A murderous giant who would hide by day and pick children off as tasty morsels….

What am I talking about…this is what happens when you let your mind run away with you.  I meant to tell you about the fog and mist that descended upon Delhi today.  It was beautiful.  Eerie yet beautiful.  You could hardly see anything.   Everything seemed covered with miniscule drops of water.

I groaned at the thought of trudging halfway across the city to get to work.  It’s too cold and too inhuman to make somebody work on a dreary, gloomy day like this.  It’s depressing, not to mention mindnumbingly boring.  I wouldn’t make my worst enemy work on a day like this…..and this, dear readers is the reason why I am 25 and without a team of my own to boss around.

Because there won’t be much bossing around happening.  I’d rather just let everyone be happy and enjoy their work, even if it meant I would have to chew them out later fot not finishing their work on time and making me miss a deadline due to which the project goes to some other company…oh heavens the list goes on.

Jokes apart, I think I would make a pretty effective boss. I’m diplomatic, I know what I want and how to get others to work without letting them know I’m getting them to do something for me. 

So…never fear.  One of these days…..my eureka moment will arrive and finally a team of my own!

Blissful dreams……