Manic Mambo

Amigos Para Siempre

2011-09-03T12:38:00.001+01:00

In recent weeks, a particular playlist of favourite music that I've had on loop has brought back a flood of memories, vivid in my mind but softened by nostalgia. Like an out of body experience, the opening bars of particular songs transport me to a different time and place, and remind me of long-forgotten moments and the people (you know who you are) with whom I shared them.

So, people, since there's no earthly way to disassociate you from the music in my head, here's to you, and thanks for all the fish.

Comfortably Numb. Pre-ISC. Debdan, Dodo and I, who have been spending a lot of time "studying" together, are sitting at RadioVoice (in my memory, we're almost always at RadioVoice), across the road from home, waiting for notes to be photocopied. Doom is imminent, and we know it. Whatever happens next, we're hurtling towards some unfamiliar precipice, and life as we know it is over. Debdan perches on the edge of the table, and in an abandon-hope-all-ye kind of tone, sings Comfortably Numb at us (no, not to, at), while Dodo and I laugh uncomfortably.

Goin' Wild For You Baby. Skiving off college and hanging out at Park Circus, surfing a tidal wave of tea, cigarettes, hilarity and empathy, in the grip of a love affair that has crept up on me sneakily, while I wasn't looking. Bonnie Raitt and Joan Baez interspersed with a rare pep talk from Bubu. I've been looking for the Bonnie Raitt version of this song ever since.

Kiss that Frog. Escaping from college to Tiru's to listen to music, drink tea and smoke on the sly on a balcony shaded by an enormous tree. Exploring his music collection while he pronounces my taste "quite good for a girl," a misogynistic slur that I forgive when I discover a wealth of music I don't have, including Peter Gabriel Live at Modena. It takes me a while to persuade him to loan it to me though.

Oh, Happy Day. Sunday morning, Park Circus, chai from Aashiq's stall, From Every Stage blasting from the windows. Such fond memories.

Wish You Were Here. Harmonising with Vittesh through the years, but most weirdly, in that little "literatura y artes" pub in Cusco, where we really were the best singers around!

Rhinestone Cowboy. Nigel as troubadour, bringing his guitar and voice. Singalongs. And eventually, singalongs at Sonai's kiddie camps, with a whole bunch of kids singing "Sundeep Jain's scooter has a puncture in the tyre." You can't make stuff like this up!

Theme For A Dream. Lawrence Hall during break, Tina, Sherene, Kavi. Singing our way through school. And then, continuing to sing this our way at all kinds of inappropriate places, in front of all kinds of inappropriate audiences, especially to the total mystification of guests at Sherene's wedding.

The Bear Necessities. Walking down Calcutta roads, arm in arm with Mona, singing and dancing, alternating on the Baloo and Mowgli parts, while our companions pretended not to know us. Happiness!

You've Got A Friend in Me: Toy Story at Nandan, with Sonai. The first of many treks to watch animated films followed by sandwiches at Atrium, or pizza at Rooftop. :)

The Phantom Of The Opera: Padma and I, in my 7th block home in Bangalore. Phantom on around the clock, while we attempted to hit those high notes, and much abuse and reluctant awe directed at Sarah Brightman each time we failed. Long nights of Russian coffee, conversation and calm. And the occasional Yahoo grin.

Fragile: Dodo introducing me to Sting, oh so many years ago! India A vs. India B, and "what's a differential equation?" on the eve of our ISC Maths exam. Ambling around the military camp, and the horns of Dodo's perpetual dilemma - should he take the Garia mini, or try his luck with the Gariahat-Howrah?

I'm off to listen to more favourites, and revel in some more nostalgia. But as a bonus for reading through this entirely personal post, here's Comfortably Numb to get you started on your own musical associations. Enjoy!

Thanks for all the fish...

2009-11-27T22:06:00.005Z

In keeping with the season, here's a list of things I'm thankful for - both big and small, meaningful and mundane.

1. Agatha Christies in a lamplit glow on chill, thunderous evenings.

2. Mangsho - cooked the Bong way, super-jhal, with lots of alu.

3. Places to go, places to see!

4. Peppermint tea

5. The sheer random luck of being alive, here, today.

6. S and S, my rocks, the people I turn to for comfort and succour, or just to talk, for never failing to yank me out of the blues. And for making me laugh, whether intentionally or un.

7. PG Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, Tolkien, A.A. Milne, Jack London, Michael Crichton, Ruskin Bond, Roald Dahl, Saki - not necessarily in that order.

8. Coffee. You are my lifeline.

9. The Internet. Viva!

10. My family, for supporting my wildest decisions, encouraging me to take the road less travelled, being there when I need them. They're still learning how not to ask the wrong question at the wrong time, but they'll get there!

11. Dogs. And, in particular, Baloo, the joyous, the curious, the ever young-at-heart.

12. Bookshops, music stores, coffeeshops, pubs.

13. Rationality.

14. Possibilities. :)

Intermission

2009-11-05T12:06:00.002Z

1. The Buddha walked into a pizza place and said, "Make me one with everything."

2. Why can't the Buddha vacuum in corners?
Because he has no attachments.

3. How did Darth Vader know what Luke was getting for Christmas?
Because he felt his presents.

4. An ethics question: If you cloned yourself, then took the clone up to the top of a tall building, stripped it, and pushed it off, would it be
a. Murder?
b. Suicide?
or c. Just another obscene clone fall?

Calcutta - Kolkata

2009-06-29T14:38:00.006+01:00

Being back in Kolkata is like walking in uber-slow-motion, neck-deep through molasses. Everything is so excruciatingly slow. Traffic inches along. People plod. Dust drips onto everything. The city sags in the April heat. Women sit in doorways near the local school, waiting for their children. Or plod, sweating flakes of talcum powder, to the local bank, where officials have, over years, mastered the art of making each transaction last decades. Customers wait, mute and uncomplaining. Everyone waits for everything. For CESC to deal with cable faults (apparently their monitoring systems don’t alert them to these – they find out only once irate customers start calling). For the cable company to deliver the channels it’s supposed to. For electricians, plumbers, carpenters, who arrive days after they were due. Because if you live in this city, you know the secret to survival here: acceptance of one central idea: "eikhaney tho erokom-i hoy" - this is the way things work here.

I didn't grow up in Kolkata, but in Calcutta, a less bonglicised, more cosmopolitan, livelier, more interesting scape. I went to the best school in the universe, had the coolest family on the planet, and spent all my time with the most fun friends ever, in this most astonishing of cities. Calcutta was the celebration of every festival - Diwali and Pujo, Christmas and Eid. Calcutta was the annual book fair, the Dover Lane music festival, English and vernacular theatre. Calcutta was Hari Prasad Chaurasia and Herbie Hancock, Kishore Kumar and Frank Sinatra. Calcutta was winter mornings at the zoo, and tea and contemplation in the monsoon. Calcutta was coffee houses and bars, jazz and blues, the enlightened, liberal left, a city of artists and writers, musicians and movement. Calcutta was the unquestioned cultural centre of the universe.

Of course, “this best of all possible worlds” perspective is easy to maintain in school, with relatively little direct interaction with the outside world. Through the last 14 years, as my connections with other cities have grown, and my time in Calcutta decreased, the fiction has been increasingly harder to maintain. Kolkata has steadily decayed, so that each time I turn around to take a look, it is just a little greyer, a little duller and more provincial, while cities I once abhorred as soul-less cultural vacuums – New Delhi springs to mind – have grown and greened and prospered. The Calcutta of my childhood has vanished, with neither bang nor whimper. Which makes me wonder, did it ever exist, except in my mind?

I left Calcutta in the summer of 1998. In 11 years, I’ve moved around a fair bit, and through it all, at some deeply-buried emotional core, I have always thought of it as “home” – the city I know so well that I could walk around blind-folded, the city I love so fiercely that it brings tears to my eyes. Then, earlier this year, I decided to take a sabbatical in Calcutta. Except that it was Kolkata. And it drove me up the effing wall.

It isn’t just the decay – after all, great cities decay and are reborn. Or the fact that pollution has actually caused weather change – Calcutta no longer sees the violent, refreshing norwesters for which I remember waiting excitedly. It’s so many things that I don’t even know where to begin. The steady un-greening of the city. The complete disdain for traffic rules by ALL SECs (justified by the entirely unreasonable explanation of “everyone does it, this is the only way to survive here”, and by the somewhat more offensive “you won’t understand, these foreign ideas don't work here"). The bottles, cans and plastic bags thrown carelessly from car windows onto streets. The apathy. The make-a-fast-buck mores on display in banners that urge ill-informed students who have failed class XII board exams to “save a year” by enrolling with some seedy college, unrecognized and unaccredited by anyone. The ludicrousness of a government that, attempting to ban the polluting, 2-stroke-engine auto-rickshaws, managed to “stop” only 60 of them, across the city, when autos remained running, in defiance of said rule.

But I think, more than all the physical manifestations, it is the perspective of Calcuttans that is the most worrying. In all civilizations comes a time when paths diverge around one word: change. Those that embrace change move on. Those that don’t, fall back. In Calcutta, change is a distinctly dirty word. Old is gold, none of your new-fangled rubbish for us, thank you very much. Couple with this, the peculiarly Calcuttan lip-curling sneer of disdain for other cities, supported by empty pride in the cultural achievements of previous generations. (And I cringe to think that I was once the poster-child for this kind of thinking.) The rallying cries of “Tagore” and “land reforms” (an achievement in itself, but subversive in the way it draws attention away from how little else has been achieved in three decades of uninterrupted rule by a single party) are alive and strong. And, worst of all, nobody seems to be interested in what goes on elsewhere. For too many people in Kolkata, so sure are they of their superiority that there is no elsewhere worth knowing about.

But all of Calcutta’s claims to fame are dead. Culture? Delhi has book fairs and music festivals. Bombay has Kala Ghoda. New York celebrates every damn thing on the planet. Cosmopolitanism? Count the non-Indian people in other cities, and then let’s talk. Industry? Sure, at one point in the dim past. But now, between the CPI(M) and the Trinamool Congress, any hope of real economic development in the next 30 years has been successfully scotched. Congratulations, West Bengal, you just shot yourself in the foot.

I am a product of a particular Calcutta space-time, and proud of it. I grew up in the most fantastic city in the world. But – and I begin to realize this only now – perhaps that city was fantastic because it was fantasy, a child’s view of a gentle jailer, a fond mother’s insistence that her criminal child is better than anyone else. And even as this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, there’s no getting around it: Calcutta, your day is done.

Baloo: 1996-2009

2009-05-12T21:57:00.005+01:00

Baloo chose us.

We had heard about someone who had a litter of Labrador puppies she was desperate to find homes for, and persuaded ourselves that we would only go to see them, nothing more. There was no question of us bringing home another dog - Bagheera (our rather ferocious and uneven-tempered Boxer) wouldn't stand for it.

And then, as we walked in to a room, this one puppy, pushed around by all the others, toddled up to us, looked up and smiled - and just like that, the decision was made.

That was the summer of 1996. We've had 13 years with the happiest, smiley-est, gentlest, most joyful of beings. And now, suddenly, she's gone.

We try to focus on the fact that she lived a full and joyous life, that she didn't suffer much or for too long at the end, that she went peacefully, in her own bed, that she was our best beloved. But there's a hole in our lives, an ache in our hearts, and the world feels darker, full of tears and untamable grief.

RIP.

Goodbye, Mr. Crichton

2008-11-05T23:26:00.004Z

Over many years of reading, my taste in books has gone through distinct phases. At different periods of time, I have been addicted to thrillers, westerns, comic strips, biographies, math-and-science non-fiction, chick-lit, philosophy...

Regardless of literary phases, however, there are some books that I have been able to pick up and read over and over, anytime, anywhere. These are the books that have kept me up at night, engrossed and trapped in the story, no matter how many times I have read them before. These are the books that have traveled around with me wherever I've moved - a permanent piece of my baggage, an integral part of my sense of home.

Thank you, Michael Crichton, for all the great books - for Travels and Andromeda Strain and Terminal Man and Jurassic Park... but most of all, for Congo. For "Peter tickle tickle Amy, Amy good gorilla." For the book I've read about a hundred times since I was ten years old, each time without the two pages that our copy had lost (I've never read those two pages - I still have no idea what happens there, after twenty years of addiction to the story). For capturing my attention with the Mercator projection, changing my view of the world and firing my imagination.

Rest in peace.

Hope

2008-11-05T04:12:00.001Z

Scratch the earlier post - the people have spoken (with about 50% of the counting done). There is hope for the world yet.

Wooooo-hooooooo!

In The Final Count...

2008-11-04T22:28:00.005Z

It's a grey, glowering day in New Jersey as America goes to the polls to vote on the next four years. People across the country have been lining up since before dawn, in some places, waiting hours to exercise their vote. Arguing with election officials and volunteers at booths about their right to vote, waiting for their names to be found on the lists.

Meanwhile, some said analysts and journalists are writing articles like this one.

So in keeping with the story of the hour, and pushed to the end of my tether by this kind of writing, here's my take.

1. The US is the biggest debtor country in the world. Its economy has gone to pot, its financial system is falling apart thanks to at best negligent, at worst outright fraudulent rating of securities. Unemployment is on the rise. People are losing homes, jobs, healthcare.
2. The Iraq war has been a front for control of oil. Think about this for a moment: the invasion of a sovereign country for control of its resources. With the public being hoodwinked every step of the way.
3. And then kept in line, despite the systematic removal of individual freedoms, by an administration that thrives on fear and ringing cries of "never forget".
4. America's claim to moral superiority has been razed to the ground with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the invasion of Iraq, a sovereign nation (it was ludicrous to watch Cheney rebuke Russia for invading South Ossetia recently).
5. American "foreign policy" is a disgrace, the constant sabre-clanking with Iran and refusing to sit down across the table being just one example.
6. America uses more energy - and more oil - than any other country in the world. And yet, the US is not on board with international agreements re reducing carbon footprint, energy use, global warming impact, etc.

And yet, the issue to focus on, as per Peggy Noonan, is how Obama addresses abortion?

"You only want a medical practice to be rare when it isn't good. For Mr. Obama, whose mind tends, as intellectuals' minds do, toward the abstract, it all seems so . . . abstract. And cold. And rather suggestive of radical departures. "That's above my pay grade." Friend, that is your pay grade, that's where the presidency lives, in issues like that."

President Clinton once said that abortions need to be "safe, legal and rare". I agree on the first two points. Outlawing abortion will lead to a black market situation. Like the organ trade in Dirty Pretty Things, this would mean back rooms and coat hangers. (The same applies to prostitution: legalization empowers sex workers, gives them rights, protection, health.) On a side note, there is an interesting argument in Freakonomics, that talks the correlation between crime and unwanted babies - specifically, relating the drop in crime rates in the US to Roe V. Wade. It may not be provable, but it's a cogent, powerful argument, and a highly logical one.

In the final count, this is an issue that needs to be left to a woman and her doctor. And a decision that needs to be left to the woman. The government's involvement in issues of right and wrong should extend only to areas where there is a victim. Enough with the regulation of victimless crimes. Enough with stuffing one group's beliefs down the throats of another.

So what is the presidency about?

Enabling citizens to earn a better living. Building and maintaining strong, mutually beneficial trade and policy relationships with other countries and regimes. Creating opportunity and economic growth, reducing debt, showing fiscal prudence, creating necessary regulation and providing necessary oversight. Enabling access (in whatever way) to healthcare and education and sustainable livelihoods. Providing "common goods" - infrastructure, parks, clean air and water.

If I had a vote to cast in this election, it would have been Obama's without question. And this was true even before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate - although that should have tipped the balance for any thinking person. I don't necessarily agree with Obama's policies on the economy - I'm all for the economic ideal of perfect competition. But I also see that an Obama presidency has the chance to make the world a slightly safer place. I like his foreign policy approach. I think it's high time America sat down at the negotiating table with other countries and sabre-clanking and fist-waving at the drop of a hat.

It is interesting that, in an era of nuclear proliferation, escalating terrorism and bloodshed, where no two warring parties will talk to each other, the potential leader of the only (but only just) super-power in the world is being evaluated by some people - people who matter, who are listened to, whose views are noted - not on his ability to impact the country's (and the world's) safety and peace, but on his approach to interfering with the personal domain of an individual.

Fall

2008-10-17T23:28:00.002+01:00

More at The Whimsical Pictures Blog

Taste of India

2008-10-13T00:01:00.003+01:00

Shubho Bijoya, all.
And for those of you who couldn't make it to a pandal somewhere, here's a little taste of Pujo. (courtesy S)

Notes from the US of A

2008-10-03T02:52:00.003+01:00

1. In the first presidential debate and the first (and only) vice-presidential debate, it is interesting to see how candidates have to tap into specific terms. Sarah Palin's audience ratings climb when she repeatedly talked about "our freedoms." What freedoms, Governor? (Or should that be Governess?) Let's talk about the Patriot Act, why don't we? Let's talk about women's freedom to choose. Let's talk about gay people's right to marry (yes, marry, not have a civil union - although, to be fair, Biden doesn't support gay marriage either).

2. I don't get all the talk about women's preference for Palin. This is the woman who is not just personally "pro-life" (which, incidentally, is the most ridiculous term), but who wishes to inflict her beliefs, her CHOICES, on ALL women, to take away their right to choose for themselves. You could almost turn this issue into a mobius strip.

3. Palin talks about how America can't allow Iran (Eye-Ran) to develop "nucular" energy or weapons. I'm as alarmed about nuclear proliferation around the world as any sane person, but excuse me, who exactly is America (A-My-Ri-Ca?) to decide who can or can't do something? And by the way, while on the subject of foreign policy and diplomacy (or coercion, as the case may be), shouldn't American politicians - indeed, politicians around the world - be made to, at least, pronounce the names of the countries they talk about correctly?

4. It IS interesting (as Amit Verma pointed out in India Uncut) that a politician in America has to be, or at least pretend to be, a "believer". No atheists allowed here. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Pick up your faith at the door, however. (Aside: I suspect that in India, candidates' faith is not always explicitly investigated, but is none-the-less assumed. Perhaps this should be considered a factor in any study on the level of progress and democracy in a country: would the populace vote for a non-believer?)

5. Freudian slip by Palin in the last few minutes of the debate, while talking about McCain: "He is the man who needs to leave" (quickly ammended to "he is the man who needs to lead.") Well said, Governor, I couldn't have put it better myself.

6. I love Palin's self-congratulatory "we're the mavericks", as though she has been bucking trends her whole life instead of clinging to her guns and religion!

7. Why was this woman selected, again? Is this a sign of McCain's senile dementia?

Days Like This V

2008-09-09T22:55:00.001+01:00

Without going into grotty detail, here is the question: Having made one's bed a certain way (a way that makes one miserable, one now realises), should one grit one's teeth and bear up? Or should one say, the hell with it, life's too short, and move onto something that might be better - or might be equally bad?

In the context of, say, a job, to stay or to quit seems like a simple enough decision. Placed in the context of one's deeper beliefs, the question resounds with conflicting arguments that lead to the eternal questions - who am I? What do I believe? Must my actions reflect my beliefs? Should they?

Sitting at my dining table, looking dully out at a gloomy sky that glowers in at me, I sense I'm working myself into A Mood. The sonorous sound of Boots Randolph playing back to me the warm glow of my childhood makes me lonelier still. The year-end black funk seems to be beginning early this year.

The question stands. I'm not looking for answers (like hell I'm not), but feel free to write in if you want to offer opinions. As someone once wrote to me, I need a sign, a motif, something to show me the way.

To Life...

2008-05-20T22:46:00.004+01:00

To P - my sole remaining reader, the only person who still checks in with this blog from time to time and sends me anguished mail from time to time demanding new posts.

What could be nicer than driving down a highway on a luscious rainy day, listening to one's favourite music, getting off at a new exit to discover a new way home? Finding one's way home to make a mug of hot tea (ginger, pepper, no cardamom) while dancing to Kodachrome? The evening spreads out in front of me like an intriguingly lumpy present, waiting to be unwrapped. There are books to be read, a documentary to be watched, this week's Time and Economist still to open. There is new music (all of Queen, U2, Sting and The Beatles - thank you, R) to catalogue. There is a visit to S this weekend to be savoured.

Suddenly, each moment feels like a gift to treasure and celebrate and dance to, to capture and drink to the lees.

Thank you, P, for reminding me.

And in the spirit of things: it's always exciting to do something new - like go canoing. And if your canoe happens to capsize, so much the better - a little more excitement never hurt anyone, even if you did happen to leave one shoe lying full fathoms five and had to sacrifice a favourite watch to the gods of adventure! To life, to life, lechaim!

Shubho Nobo Borsho

2008-04-14T16:16:00.003+01:00

In keeping with ringing out the old and bringing in the new, and the mantra of "change" that presidential candidates in the US have been spouting, I will be signing on with a new company on Wednesday. Huzzah!

Meanwhile, I could make vows of regular blogging, etc. for the (Bengali) new year, but what the heck - I'll write when I write. Live with it!

Shubho nobo borsho, all. Here's to excitement and growth and new things to explore. Have a wonderful year - I know I will.

Exotique!

2008-02-28T04:22:00.001Z

A Liberian taxi-driver told me today that my eyes looked Indian, but apart from that, he'd have put me down as a Mexican. Huzzah! How much more exotic can one get?

One for the road...

2008-02-24T04:32:00.003Z

At some inevitable point over the course of yet another convivial, drunken evening, the conversation moved to great actors, and must-watch movies. M mentioned The Last Of The Mohicans (Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, watch) and said, "I believe it's also a pretty good book". And although the book is a classic, and has been on the bookshelf at home forever, I've never read it. Perhaps because before I knew it was a book, I'd heard the term "the last of the mohicans" used as an alternative to "one for the road", and figured there'd be nothing new in the book.

In other news, V decided that supermodels (as against non-super models) are those who wear their underwear over their clothes (like superheroes, get it?) and we giggled for rather a long time about that. (In our defense, we were already 4 bottles of wine down, and on the last of the mohicans.)

Salut! To Beginnings

2008-01-01T21:52:00.000Z

Coffee and laughter at Starbucks, with S, whom I have known, in his words, forever and a day. Wandering around the city for a few hours. Chicken rolls with plenty of chopped green chillies from the friendly Moti-da at Kati Roll Company. Midnight on a subway, in the bowels of the earth, while trying to figure out which stop to get off at. Brooklyn. Alcohol, food and much watching of childhood Indian ads on YouTube. Loud music and inane dancing. Watching dawn break over mid-town, on the first day of the year.

A great beginning for what I hope will be a wondrous, active year for me - and for you. Happy new year, oh ye who still pop by.

Happy Birthday, D.

2007-12-22T05:01:00.001Z

Circa 1980.
Home. Morning. Or evening. Or pretty much anytime, actually. Me standing in the corner (standard punishment for having done something ghastly). D walks up.
Me: sniffle!
D: Ke bokechhey? Ma bokechhey? Acchha, ami ma-ke bokey debo.*

Circa 1982.
Bonfire night - presumably St. Paul's Cathedral, in the crisp Calcutta winter.
Me: (Having really heard the words to "Rudolph" for the first time) What does "He went down in history" mean?
D: (Deadpan) It means he failed history.

Circa 1985.
Interior of jeep, Hazaribagh forest, pitch black night, competing for a favourite uncle's attention. D telling joke, me trying to cut in.
Me: I saw a tail, I saw a tail! I just saw a tail hanging down from that tree.
D: Was it a long tail or a tall tale?

Circa 1987.
Home. D (18) and a bunch of his friends hanging around in his room. Me (10) insisting on hanging around with them.
D: Progga, now do your disappearing trick.

Circa 1992.
Platform, Ahmedabad station, waiting for the train home after visiting D on campus for a few days.
D: So... what else has been happening?
Me: (the first time I'm speaking to Family about Something So Very Important)
Ummm... so... ummm. I think I like this boy... (kicking clods embarassedly, voice trailing off)
D: Really? And? Tell me more...
Me: I don't want to talk about it.
D: OK.
(Not another question about this, ever.)

Circa 1996.
Me hysterical, sitting at the top of the stairs, howling so hard I can barely speak. On phone with D, calling from Bangalore.
Me: And I fell off the train. And I can't figure out if I'm hurt. My knees are numb, I can't feel anything. I'm scared. Don't tell Ma and Baba.
D: (trying to understand what I'm saying and respond calmly instead of calling the parents pronto) OK. First, go see a doctor, and let me know what he says. And sometime - tomorrow, next year, 5 years later, whenever - make sure you tell them yourself. Don't let them hear from someone else.#

Circa 1998.
Me in Bombay, talking on the phone to D in Bangalore.
Me: What the hell is the deal with men? Why the...? What the...? *%@!#&! (non-stop ranting for 10 minutes.)
D: (resigned tone) OK, I can see we'll have to have that man-to-man chat about sex now.

And on... and on... and on...

To the world's most outstandingly annoying sibling... my tormentor for years... and idol for many more. You may be old but I still think you're pretty cool.

* Who scolded you? Ma? OK, I'll scold Ma then.
# It only took me 3 years, by the way.

And what, then, is there to write about?

2007-12-19T03:10:00.001Z

Miserable weather, mostly. Too cold, too many flurries, too soon. Grey, wet gloom and ice slicking the tarmac so one has to pick one's feet and walk carefully. Office thermostat malfunction, so that one's feet freeze through the day. End-of-year blues. Deathly malaise that makes it difficult to drag oneself out of bed and into work each morning. A crippling incapacity to do anything remotely productive... and an environment that robs anything productive one does of any excitement or value.

Crib, bitch, whine, moan...

But ah, the one silver lining: the discovery of the Telegraph quick crossword online. Oh Calcutta-morning-ritual joy!

None of These Dots Connect

2007-11-21T07:27:00.000Z

1. Airplane stationary between runways, waiting for a gap in the every-9-seconds take-offs and landings to taxi to the gate. Sunset, a steady stream of flights appearing magically, hey-presto, out of crimson and grey cloud banks, landing lights ablaze. Magical. What is it about watching flights land and take off that fires the imagination?

2. Red sofa and sheets in lamplight, warmth against the drizzly cold gloom of a too-cold-too-early winter.

3. A week-long vacation at the Grand Canyon. Driving through desert, past vermilion cliffs, across the mighty Colorado. No laptop, no Blackberry, no thoughts of work. A daily dose of beer, If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler, the Gotan Project, family. More, please.

4. Family get-together. Arrivals timed to make me go to the airport thrice in 48 hours. 5 of us in my 1-bedroom apartment, getting in each other's way - and into each other's hair. All the inevitable squabbles and then some. Still perfect.

Faith & Reason

2007-09-03T02:54:00.000+01:00

An astounding series of interviews with prominent authors about the twin ideas of faith and reason, and how they impact our lives and futures. Watch.

Link courtesy M.

Crime & Enjoyment

2007-08-22T20:39:00.000+01:00

I'd totally buy these.
Though I suspect that the real cosies come from reading the originals, while snuggled into a squashy sofa lit by the glow of a single lamp, on stormy evenings

Link from M.

Familiarity breeds... ummm... contempt?

2007-08-13T20:10:00.000+01:00

Me: LMAO
(short, telling silence)
S: Are you trying to make cat noises?
Me: No, but I KNEW you'd say that.

~ ~ ~

S: aghotrrj
Me: have you gone insane, or is your cat walking across the keyboard again?
S: ha ha ha - I KNEW you'd say that.

Yippi Ki Yay Mo

2007-08-09T04:03:00.000+01:00

So I just got back from watching Live Free or Die Hard, which was a spectacular movie. Spectacularly bad, that is. Although highly entertaining. Among other things, the movie features Bruce Willis hanging from every conceivable item (a walkway, an F-35 plane, the open door of a car balanced precariously in what appears to be an elevator shaft), jumping out of a car at the last moment, to send it up a pillar with such precision as to collide with and take out a helicopter, surfing on the wing of the aforesaid F-35 as it's about to crash, and in a spectacular wheelie with an 18-wheeler, which Mr. Willis gets out of, against all known laws of physics, by turning the steering wheel in the direction that will actually disbalance him more. (At the end of this scene, I wanted to jump up and cheer, and throw loose change at the screen!) And, of course, there were some scenes that were lifted straight from other movies (the elevator shaft scene carries shades of one of the Jurassic Park movies, for instance).

And as we stood around rehashing and laughing hysterically at some scenes, the conversation rolled around to the worst movies we've ever seen. Immediate contenders for the rank of world's worst movie were:
a. Independence Day (Best line: "Today will be known as the independence day of the whole world.")
b. Dante's Peak
c. King Solomon's Mines
d. Matrix Revolutions
e. Commando
f. Air Force One (Best line: "Get off my plane!")

What thoughts, people? If I wanted to watch some really, really terrible movies, what would you recommend?

Conversation

2007-07-20T21:34:00.000+01:00

R: Do you want to play Dumb Charades?

Me: Yes, let's! But we'll need to get the others to play too, not just the two of us.

R: Yes. Because that would be dumb.

Me: It would be a charade.

R: Yup. We're all done here, aren't we?

Learning

2007-07-12T03:13:00.001+01:00

1. You may be as much in the right as it is possible to be, but the customer is the customer. You don't have the right to tell her she's irrational, unprofessional or mediocre. You don't have the right to grab her lapels and shake her into comprehension. You don't have the right to scream and shout and kick her shins, even when she's beating her fists on the floor and throwing tantrums about your being unable to resolve her mistakes, even when she offers no gratitude for the help you offer. Yours but to offer the assistance you can, keep your temper and know when to walk away from games of "who blinks first".

2. Hope dies eternal. Walking away is difficult. You always think, around this next bend will be a solution for us both.

3. Serenity prayer.

Bombay, Meri Jaan

2007-07-10T05:56:00.001+01:00

Suddenly, I am yearning for Bombay. Even the rain and waterlogging. Remembering my first weekend in Bombay, drenched and happy, sitting at Yankee's and singing loudly, chasing away customers. Gokul's tiny pieces of cheese and boiled eggs, served with cheap one-for-one alcohol. Leo's chilli beef and beer. The thrum of Colaba. Sitting on Marine Drive at sunset, drinking oversweet tea and smoking, existentialism in the air. Even those fucking trains. I miss the late night clack of the handrails in the trains when I was the only passenger. The feel of standing at the door and watching the city pass by, faster than fairies, faster than witches, bridges and houses, and lots of shit-filled ditches. I miss the solitude and anonymity the city afforded me, the people, the things we did. Bandstand in the evening. Churchgate station. Go 92.5 FM and Good Morning Mumbai with Tarana and Jaggu. And the chai wala who would make you half a cup of adrak wala chai, kum shakkar, in a city made to order. The sandwich wala who had a cell phone and would deliver a sandwich up to the 9th floor for you when you called down. My little place in Juhu, with windows opening onto green leaves and aerodrome hums. South Bombay at night, roads wide and empty, fluorescent lamps gleaming. Trying to buy shoes on Linking Road. Imagining J trying to buy furry handcuffs on Hill Road. Our trips to Apple Cake, where we embarassed the Bong waiter and P in one fell swoop. And where was it that P ate cake before dinner and they laughed at us? And oh, Pot Pourri, dammit, hallowed site of so many of our sessions. And Toto's and the Shack. And karoke night at Starters. And taxicabs. And all the places where we sat and bared our souls and gurgled with laughter. Zara hatke, zara b(n)achke, yeh hai Bombay, meri jaan.

Intermission

2007-07-08T15:50:00.001+01:00

1. Why was the dyslexic devil-worshipper upset?

Because he'd sold his soul to Santa.

2. Did you hear about the dyxlexic, agnostic insomniac?

He stayed up nights wondering if there was a dog.

Tranquility

2007-07-08T14:59:00.000+01:00

Following weeks of waking up late and heavy-lidded, I awoke relatively early today, to a glorious, sunny day. After an evening of excellent company, great food, random hysterical conversation and great waves of laughter, not to mention copious quantities of wine. In time to listen to my favourite weekly radio show: Breakfast With The Beatles. Morning coffee, newspapers and pottering, the day stretching out in front of me. Perhaps some chores. Perhaps visiting friends. Perhaps just sacking out, watching movies and reading. Perhaps posting about my trip to the Grand Canyon. The possibilities shimmer and hang in the air.

What in the world could be better?

Whose Right Is It Anyway?

2007-07-02T15:25:00.000+01:00

A colleague and his family, on their way for a break, had a major accident this weekend. My colleague, following his GPS, took a detour off the highway onto a small road, which turned into a single lane road. Not realizing this, my colleague, who has an unsafe driving record, drove onto the left side of the road, which, he thought, was the passing lane. By the time he had realized it wasn't, and that he was driving in the lane for oncoming traffic, it was too late. Head-on collision, everybody injured, some people air-lifted to a hospital, cars totalled. My colleague's two little children have had steel pegs put in their legs, and his wife is still in critical condition. Nobody seems to know the condition of those in the other car. My colleague is relatively unscathed, though frantic with worry and guilt.

So now, he has been charged with "failure to keep right", and has to respond with a guilty / not-guilty plea. If he pleads guilty, he assumes blame for the accident, and will, in all probability, have his license suspended. (In suburban USA, this is equivalent to having your limbs cut off - you are effectively paralyzed.) If he pleads not guilty, and his guilt his proved, this might happen anyway. However, with a good lawyer, there is a chance that he may get away with something more minor. And thereby keep his license and keep driving.

My heart goes out to him and his family, still in the hospital far away from home, wondering how it will all go. But does this man deserve to drive again? It scares the shit out of me to think that through no fault of my own, someone might come barrelling down the wrong side of the road and plough into me. That what happens to me may not be a function of how safe a driver I am, but of how effective the system is at taking and keeping unsafe drivers off the road. That ultimately, what I do may have little impact (unfortunate term) on what happens to me.

Let's hope the system works.

Ranting

2007-06-16T21:22:00.000+01:00

What on earth makes us think that customers wish to read pages and pages of our company's history (when we ourselves can't read through it)?

What makes us think that as long as we fill a proposal with gobbledegook and make it 100 pages long (thereby rendering it completely unreadable), it's alright to paste the exact same paragraph and diagram in multiple sections?

What makes us believe that proposal writing demands the unconditional surrender of both, the English language and logic, so that under the header "Project Management Methodology", we are compelled to write, "This section explains ____'s Project Management Methodology"?
And what makes us think that "project management methodology" as a part of a sentence is deserving of proper noun status?

And finally, why does nobody responsible for writing these proposals ever think about these things?

I think that the Indian offshore IT industry is in severe need of good communicators who:
a. Can write in short, clear sentences.
b. Approach communication from the customer's perspective, asking not "What do we want to showcase?" but "What would the customer like to see?"
c. See the function of communication as clarifying a point, not obfuscating it, and weigh content by substance, not by the pound.

Aaaarrrrgggghhhhhh.

Puppies!!!

2007-04-30T21:19:00.000+01:00

So Puffle had pups. 7 of 'em. We now have, therefore, 10 dogs at home. This is my dream come true! It's like Santa's making up for lost time, for all the years over which I wrote to him, begging for a puppy because I had been "a good girl this year"! Of course, the fact is that I'm not home now, so :(

But still. Isn't this awesome?

Now let's all say it together: Awwwwwwww!

PS: Much as we'd like to keep them all, we will have to find homes for the pups. If you know of anybody in Calcutta who's looking for a Labrador Retriever and who will meet our high standards in fit-to-be-honoured-with-one-of-our-babies-ness, please let me know.

Free Hugs

2007-04-21T19:12:00.001+01:00

This is awesome. Here you go - with a hug attached.

Courtesy of N.

Home Life

2007-04-17T02:00:00.000+01:00

A long day of delayed flights, pointless trips, power outages and cancelled meetings. I arrived at Charlotte at 2:30 and took the 3:10 flight back. One would think that people would wisen up and get generators or something.

Back home, to work for the next couple of hours, while Pollini plays Chopin's Preludes & Etudes just for me.

Meanwhile, here are some pics.

Murphy Lives!

2007-04-12T16:55:00.000+01:00

So I finally gave in and decided to buy some furniture, so friends could choose to sit somewhere other than on the floor. After weeks of research and a couple of trips to IKEA, I purchased the stuff and arranged to have it home delivered. Couldn't wait to set it up.
But...
(And you just know that there's a "but" to this story, right?)

Murphy is laughing hysterically from his perch, somewhere. Because

a. Instead of the chair-sized futon I wanted, IKEA sent me (and charged me for) a sofa-sized futon. But just to taunt me, the cover they sent was for a chair-sized mattress.

b. My sofa arrived in three boxes - frame, cushions and cover. But, without hardware, without instructions, and most importantly, without arms or legs. IKEA informs me that "the arms and legs come separately, you have to buy them separately." Naturally. How stupid (slapping side of my head in self-flagellation) of me not to have specified that I'd like the arms and legs with the sofa too, that I don't want to just lean the frame against the wall.

Aaaaarrrrggghhhhh.

A Week In The Life

2007-04-12T16:22:00.000+01:00

Sunday
Late night conference call.
Monday
Early morning conference call.
Work till 7:00 p.m.
Late night conference call.
Tuesday
Early morning conference call.
Work.
Flight to Cleveland.
2-hour drive to Erie.
Late night conference call.
Wednesday
Early morning conference call.
Meetings.
Late night conference call.
Thursday
Early morning flight to Cleveland
Run km in Cleveland airport to different terminal for connecting flight due to depart in 20 minutes.
Work.
Late night conference call.
Friday
Morning meeting an hour's drive away.
Work till 3:00 a.m.
Saturday
Work 9:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

This is not a life, it's a disease.

Snow and Sunshine

2007-03-19T01:42:00.000Z

For no other reason than that it's wonderful to be out on a crisp day like this.

King of Swingers, aka Jungle VIP

2007-03-09T00:43:00.000Z

Today is different.

Today I left work at 3:30 p.m., without a stab of guilt, indeed, gripped by an overwhelming belief that I deserved to go to the pub for a drink. Or several.

Today I didn't feel the cold.

Today I noticed how the bare branches of trees are beginning to bud.

Today I opened my first new account. The first new account for the company this year. (No doubt, there will be others tomorrow and on Monday, but let me have my moment of glory.)

It's taken only nine months. Nine months of pursuit, occasionally joyous and occasionally wearisome, with periodic highs as we crossed each stage more-or-less unscathed, and frequent, overwhelming setbacks making me want to stay in bed for a month. Much midnight oil burned, and the occasional warning to my boss that I was about to throw myself out of the office windows (which, by the way, can't be opened, presumably to dissuade people like me who shrink from the inconvenience of first needing to throw chairs through windows in order to be able to dispatch themselves thereafter). Nine months. It feels like forever.

But it's all been worth it. :) I feel like a king. A somewhat drunk king, about to drink some more. Let there be light. Goodwill on earth and peace to all mankind. Bring on the dancing girls with their hoola hoops and war-whoops and paint the town red. I certainly will!

Update:
The town has been painted red. The dancing girls are wearily whooping their way back to wherever they came from. The documents are signed. And now, back to the program.

The Spirit of Celebration

2007-03-03T15:28:00.000Z

This is worth watching. And acting on.

Link from India Uncut.

The Writing On The Wall

2007-03-03T03:43:00.000Z

Is it a sign of the how addicted I am to work, or of how sad my life has become, that I find myself, at 10:44 p.m. on a Friday night, after returning from dinner with a friend, standing at my kitchen counter (I still haven't invested in furniture), laptop open, feeding in forecasts and filling in the CRM? Calling R to discuss the numbers before sending them out, my brain filling with thoughts of where those remaining numbers, the difference between the forecast and the target, are going to come from? Tea grown cold next to me, suitcase unpacked since I got back home last night, a book, face-down next to the laptop, not quite as enthralling as the calculations in my head?

Ze addiction, she is alive and well.

Mind It!

2007-02-14T20:25:00.000Z

We Calcuttans are very civic-minded.

Doggus

2007-02-12T16:46:00.000Z

Yes, yes, I'm still alive. Photographs will have to suffice for now. Updates later.

At Long Last, Home

2006-12-28T04:40:00.000Z

2 things of note.

ONE

New home. Total furniture comprises 2 bookshelves, a mattress, some cushions and rugs, and lots of floor lamps. Love it. LOVE it. :)

TWO

In approximately 8 hours, god and airlines willing, I shall be on my way across the Atlantic, thence on my way across Asia Minor, the Red Sea and wherever else, en route to Bombay. Where I will revel in Nariman Point dosa-wallah's idli, chilli beef at Leo's, that lassi in a bottle, masala alu sandwich, et al. And also meet some old friends. And thereafter, Cal. Sleep starved and brain-dead, there is still a grin, ear-to-ear, on my face tonight.

More from home, the land of phuchka and shingara, New Market and Park Street, and my room with green leaf sunshine and the warm breath of dogs on my face in the mornings. Huzzah.

Holly, Berries And Yule Logs For You

2006-12-25T14:56:00.000Z

One of the nicest things about growing up in Calcutta was, I think, the fact that there was almost no festival that didn't belong to one, that one couldn't celebrate. Pujo, Christmas, Easter, Diwali... all were celebrated with equal enthusiasm - either as occasions to enjoy the warmth of family and friends, or as opportunities to overdose on the city's carnival atmosphere: Ferris wheels in corner parks, fish fry and biriyani at food stalls lining the streets, midnight mass at St. Paul's cathedral, huge warm bricks of fruitcake, walking down Lansdowne Road at 3:00 a.m. on New Year's Eve, being passed by cars full of extremely happy people serenading one with new year wishes (or, in some cases, when they had imbibed a little too much alcohol and gotten confused about the date, yuletide greetings). Calcutta took every festival and inhabited it. Every religious festival was an opportunity for everyone interested to get involved and enjoy themselves.

Which is why I find it strange that in the US, it is politically incorrect to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Apparently, some people might be offended by a misplaced greeting, be it ever so warm and well-meant. When you greet someone here, you can, at best, wish them a happy new year, and if you really want to be correct, your greetings stockpile is limited to a bland "Season's Greetings".

But to hell with political correctness. To all, a Merry Christmas. May you enjoy the season with brownies and samosas (as I did every year, after the school nativity play). May you catch the Christmas special on TV, with that little boy with the awesome voice singing "O Holy Night", and may you sing along loudly and tunelessly. May you have fruitcake after inedible fruitcake delivered to your home. May you revive yourself with friends and laughter, wine and feasting, and not be sick afterwards. And may you be big enough to celebrate festivals even when you don't observe them.

Random Thoughts

2006-12-03T19:12:00.000Z

Atlanta, Georgia. I take the team out for dinner on Peachtree St (of Gone With The Wind fame) and get back to my hotel at 11:00. Work for a couple of hours. Before I know it, it's 1:30 a.m. I have a 4:30 a.m. start, and begin to wonder if there's any point in sleeping at all. Even consider the idea of going to bed complete dressed for the next morning, so that I can tumble out of bed and into the car the next morning. Go into the bathroom (this aids contemplation, in case you were wondering) and stare at myself in the mirror for a while. Brush my hair. And as I do, I see that the few grey hairs I've had since I was 18 have begun to procreate and produce new ones. Almost in a daze, I begin to count them, separating each strand. 1, 2, 3, 4... when I get to 16, I stop counting.

Kansas City, Missouri. On Tuesday night, before I left for Atlanta, the weather forecast predicted crisp, cold weather in Kansas on Friday. As the aircraft zooms down low over Kansas City, I wake up, and notice the ground covered in patches of glistening white. Hard to tell from up here whether it's sand or snow. I remain undecided until we land, and then, as the plane taxies to the terminal, patches of ice glistening on the runway catch my eye. Shit, I think. An unexpected snowstorm the previous day has covered freeways and roads, and on my way to my meeting, I see cars stuck in snowdrifts on the road. Once off the freeway, we get onto roads that the ploughs have not tackled yet - icy roads on which cars have slowed down to a crawl. Absolutely nothing all around. "Buckle up, Dorothy, cos Kansas is going bye-bye" runs endlessly through my brain. The airport has tornado shelters. Needless to say, my flight back to Newark has been delayed - thunderstorms near Newark have caused all incoming and outgoing flights to be grounded. When the boarding announcement for our flight is finally made, the waiting crowd cheers loudly. Suck as it may, I will be glad to get back to Edison.

Joy

2006-11-10T17:54:00.000Z

My first memory of dry leaves in winter is from a walk in the woods around Khajiyar when I was four.

I was holding Baba's hand - I probably had to reach up for it, his arm hanging down, mine reaching up higher than my head. The woods were shaded brown and ochre, and peaceful, my first memory of communing with nature. The leaves and pine needles, yellow and crumbling, rustled and crackled and crunched under our feet with a satisfying scrtsssstchhhhhh sound as we walked. I remember - I still remember - that momentous feeling - the feeling you get when something wonderful happens, or is about to, or when something touches and awes you, even when you have little comprehension of what it is. "Pa tule h(n)ato", Baba told me. I used to drag my feet (still do, sometimes) and he was trying to break me of the habit. I breathed in the smell of pine - pine cones and broken pine needles lying everywhere. Occasionally, sunlight pierced through to the ground, dappling it in shade and shadow. We crossed felled logs, Baba striding casually over them, me scrambling.

Where was everyone else? Ma, and Dada, and Didi, and Bui? I know they were all on this trip, but for those minutes, I have no recollection of where they were. All that existed was the wonder of a wood - an actual wood - and the smell, and the cool air, and the crackling leaves, and holding onto my father's hand.

Why am I suddenly thinking of this? Well, I suppose, because the leaves are lying thick on the ground, and gusting across the street and onto my balcony. Because the smell of pine is almost overpowering in some places. And because, for some reason, my memories are suddenly emerging from long-ago places and dusting themselves off and creeping towards the sunlight.

On days when my mind is crowded with long-ago-and-far-away thoughts, I sometimes wonder why we don't all implode under the weight of every moment we've lived through, every conversation and touch and smile we've shared, every story intertwined with our lives, every rare, wondrous moment when we've suddenly stared at the sky and felt the thrill, the sheer random luck, of being alive, here and now.

Oh, The Places You'll Go...

2006-10-25T13:56:00.000+01:00

Cincinnati... Schenectady... Albany... Philadelphia... Washington DC... Cincinnati... Pittsfield... Anaheim... Atlanta... New Jersey...

Long drives. Tedious lay-overs in sterile airports. Staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, in alien hotel rooms. Flights at every unreasonable hour. Trying to navigate to strange airports down unknown roads in the wee hours, without a GPS, and watching the sky grow light on the way.

The days have begun to blur. The one shining light at the end of this haze is, at the end of this year...

HOME!!!!!! (This is where the soundtrack kicks in, softly at first, and then rising gradually as the scene fades out. Paul Simon, singing "Homeward Bound." How cliched can one get?)

Meanwhile, quick updates, for those interested:
1. No, Paul Simon didn't happen. (JAP, looks like your curse worked, you evil person.)
2. But (HA!) Roger Waters did - the Dark Side tour, in Virginia. He is THE man. I had goosebumps through most of the concert. (I wish I'd also had some of the stuff causing the blue haze above our heads, but unfortunately, that wasn't an option.)
3. The Bartimaeus Trilogy, written by Jonathan Stroud, is absolutely brilliant. Entertaining and witty, makes mincemeat out of some other popular wizardry-related series. Please pick it up.

I try to have all updates or learnings in nice round numbers, like 5 or 10, but my day's beginning to blur again, so hasta mañana.

Paul Simon, anyone?

2006-09-14T16:09:00.000+01:00

This is a cry of despair.

Paul Simon is playing at the Radio City Music Hall in NYC on Saturday, 21st October. I'm desparate to go. But none of my friends here (at least, the ones I know in person!) are interested - not quite their genre.

Anyone out there wanna go?

Cultural Confessions

2006-09-13T16:31:00.000+01:00

For the longest time, I thought Jessica Simpson was a character on "The Simpsons".

I haven't read "7 Habits" nor "Siddhartha", nor watched "Citizen Kane."

I have, on the other hand, read "Congo", "The Andromeda Strain", plenty of Alistair Macleans, Louis L'Amours and Sudden time without number.

And watched Sleepless in Seattle, The Man With One Red Shoe, See No Evil Hear No Evil and You've Got Mail several times.

And (the kicker) I still, just occasionally, listen to Cliff Richard, The Carpenters and Abba.

(Head hanging low) I'm a cultural pleb, hoi polloi.

La Dolce Vita

2006-08-31T18:44:00.000+01:00

The end of a journey of little sleep, delayed flights, late arrivals and early meetings, malfunctioning credit cards, miserable weather, incorrect GPS information and other such. A final delay, sitting in a tiny aircraft on the runway for an hour and a half, cell-phone and laptop so out of juice that I could neither talk to anyone nor work, nothing to read or write on. Finally, clearance to take off. A rocky take-off, the small plane buffeted and tossed around by a powerful storm, the world invisible as we rose through clouds banked miles high.

And suddenly, as we emerged from the cloud, a perfect, perfect circular rainbow against the clouds, and our plane sillhouetted within it.

Wonder lies in the little things. As long as there's something to make one go "wow!", most other things fade into insignificance.

And now, even the song is over

2006-08-25T20:37:00.000+01:00

Why don't we stop fooling ourselves?
The game is over,
Over,
Over.

No good times, no bad times,
There's no times at all,
Just The New York Times,
Sitting on the windowsill
Near the flowers.

We might as well be apart.
It hardly matters,
We sleep separately.

And drop a smile passing in the hall
But there's no laughs left
'Cause we laughed them all.

And we laughed them all
In a very short time.

Time
Is tapping on my forehead,
Hanging from my mirror,
Rattling the teacups,
And I wonder,
How long can I delay?

We're just a habit
Like saccharin.
And I'm habitually feelin' kinda blue.
But each time I try on
The thought of leaving you,

I stop...
Stop and think it over.

~ Overs: Simon & Garfunkel

Rethinking Frontiers

2006-08-24T20:48:00.000+01:00

My Very Elegant Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pins will have to be rethought.

Alien-ated

2006-08-22T14:25:00.000+01:00

So there was a blood donation camp in my office building a few days ago. Posters were up for ages, asking, begging people to please donate. And as a good donor from years ago, I decided I would.

Off I went, on the appointed day, to the van in which the donations were to take place. Only to come back, because they needed ID. Back with the ID. Return again, to figure out my social security number - without which they wouldn't accept a donation, and which I never remember. Some time to hunt through documentation to find the number, then back again to the van. Fill out forms, extensive, long-winded forms about exposure to disease, sexual promiscuity, etc. Get finger pricked for blood-type testing. Wait for the nurse to be free to see me.

Only to discover that if you've been in the US for less than 3 years at a stretch, and especially if you come from sub-Saharan Africa, or India, or "places like those", they don't want your blood. Rationale: you've been exposed to malaria (I know malaria stays in the system for a while after you fall ill, but does it have that long a gestation period?!!) and "other such diseases".

I feel like I'm in a bad movie, where someone with a guttural Germainic accent is telling me, "So you fink you kan gif blood, eh? Vell, you're wrong. Go back to vere you kame from, filthy Indian."

Alright, so this is an exaggeration. Still, I'm feeling intensely alienated right now. Ironically, that's probably just how the INS wants aliens to feel.

Learnings

2006-08-17T03:45:00.002+01:00

1. Hyperbole is usually a substitute for any real knowledge.
2. Technical information should still be readable English, but often - mostly, almost always - isn't.
3. You would think that there is a limit to the number of times the words "extensive experience" and "strong expertise" could be repeated in a 40-page document. You would be wrong.
4. Clearly, Very Few People are taught the Secret Code of using Capital Letters in Sentences.
5. If you're the only person trying to control quality, it's hard not to just give up at some point.
6. Especially if it's 11:30 p.m.
7. Drat.

Watch

2006-08-14T01:00:00.000+01:00

This is worth a watch.

Courtesy of M.

It Is A Lovely Weather...

2006-07-21T23:11:00.000+01:00

After days of stifling heat and humidity, the deluge has begun.

Complete with darkling skies, thunder, sheets of rain and that strange grey light that accompanies Indian monsoons. And only yesterday, I was trying to explain to a colleague the beauty, the absolute wonder, of the monsoon. Thank you, universe, for listening.

My flat is not made for rain-spotting. No grilled balconies where the spray comes glancing in, which is half the fun. But through the time I was growing up, I had a balcony to sit in. Cosily wrapped in a ragged "kantha", sitting in an "easy chair", with a mug of steaming tea and a couple of books balanced on the arms, I could watch the heavens burst open. A book would lie open (and forgotten) on my lap, and my senses would swell with the smell of wet red earth, as I watched the rain streak in dirty lines down the sides of once-white houses. Little puddles would form in the "maat" in front of our house, and swell to rivulets that would wind their way through the mud. Occasionally, a hapless cyclist, desperately trying to shield himself with the aid of a garish green plastic sheet, would go by, leaving deep squelchy ruts in his wake, and the rivulets would wind through these. Shivering crows would take shelter in the eaves of the balcony, or in trees.

And the sound! Everything else was drowned out by the companionable pattering of rain interspersed with bouts of rrrrrolling thunder and cracks of lightning. And you could just sit there and watch... and watch... and watch... and let your thoughts drift and your train of thought run away into far-away lands.

As a seasoned rain-spotter (no, I'm not sorry!), I knew when the rain was going to begin, and when it was going to end. And once the clouds had spent their fury, and the rain slowed down to a the occasional big fat drop, all the neighbourhood dogs - and the kids - would come out, to jump around in the mud and run around screaming, exulting. The air would have cooled, the skies grown a little lighter, and there would still be the occasional rumble of thunder, like the muted sound of someone's indigestion, promising more rain to come.

Not strange at all, I suppose, that of the thousands of songs that I learnt through years of singing classes in school, the one that sticks in my brain the most has a line that goes, "it's kind of nice when rain falls."

*******************************
Update:

I wrote that last bit while I was still safely ensconced inside office.

Then I stepped outside. Traffic lined up for miles. My usual roads home awash with water, the rain pounding down so hard that even at the fastest wiper speed I could barely see. Driving through ocean-sized puddles that my temporarily-opaque windscreen had rendered invisible, making sheets of water rise from the wheels like the parting of the Red Sea. Crawling through foot-deep puddles and patting the wheel of the car reassuringly, murmuring, "Come on, Bootle, don't let me down now," looking at all the cars that had got stuck and praying it wouldn't happen to me. The world outside looked like this:

But I got home, finally, and opened my door to the rain, and stood in the doorway for a while, cradling a mug of hot tea in my hands and watching the rain, and all was right with the world again.

Delightful, Delicious, Delovely

2006-07-11T03:33:00.000+01:00

London in summer. Blue skies and sunny conversation, laughter and love. Food and wine (read: beer, Baileys, vodka, scotch, Kahlua. And, of course, wine). Picnics and exploration, history at every turn.

Walking down Southbank, soaking in the city, poring over books and old maps, wandering through the streets, figuring out the Underground, and gradually a city maps itself out in your mind.

Old friends - sometimes actually sitting on park benches. How strange and wondrous to feel someone kicking in one's oldest friend's stomach. To meet friends one hasn't met in years, sit in the sunshine on a boat on the river, talk of this and that, share old stories, talk of plans and dreams and just look out at the street.

Family, laughing hysterically into the night about old stories and new, dawdling at the table over dinner, enveloped in contentment. Big family get-together, teasing and laughing at each other. Photographs and memories. Happiness.

Lazy mornings, coffee and conversation. Home. Perfection.

Unclear on the Concept

2006-07-08T01:16:00.000+01:00

Quick update, just for the moment. Pictures and stories will follow soon.

Proxy Update

2006-07-08T00:54:00.000+01:00

This says everything.

This Blog Does Not Encourage Behaviour Modification

2006-06-30T07:24:00.000+01:00

I just realised that I have, several times, told readers to "watch this space" for follow-ups. And never followed through. Hmmm... food for thought.

Not, of course, that I'm going to do anything about it.

In Passing...

2006-06-30T06:27:00.000+01:00

Writing about China on the basis of seeing two cities would be like judging all of India on the basis of Delhi and Bombay. Not that there's much of a comparison between Delhi / Bombay and Shanghai / Beijing. And of course, where language is a constraint, travel can't open up new vistas to the extent one would like: one can see other people going about their lives, but not really understand what they're all about - what they want, what they think about, what they really think about the cultural revolution and Chairman Mao and the world and their place in it.

Still, a story about the trip will be posted soon.

For the moment, more travel is on the cards. I'm off to London tomorrow. A week with family and friends, time to think and recharge my batteries and figure out my life a little, and hopefully when I come back, I'll know in which direction I need to start hacking to clear the undergrowth a little.

It's 1:30 in the morning. Dylan's birthday tribute plays, yellow lamplight sets everything aglow. Outside, it's thundering and lightning-ing, and there's that old feeling of excitement creeping in. Tomorrow promises a great quarter-final too, the kind that needs to be watched with friends, with copious amounts of beer and raucous cheering.

And ultimately, who cares what happens tomorrow? In the final count, may the best team (Brazil) win. :)

Update:
These @*%#-ing Brazilians. Now I'm seriously depressed.

Days Like This IV

2006-05-18T19:34:00.000+01:00

1. Waking up to nasty emails.
2. Rushing through morning ablutions to get to work by 7:30
3. Missing 2 important calls on the way
4. Getting on a series of conference calls that flow into each other
5. Missing lunch, because there's no time to have it
6. For a conference call with an idiot
7. Who loves listening to the sound of his own voice and keeps on talking
8. So that one has to stay connected when one is desparate to take a leak
9. With hours of work still ahead
10. Spilling into offshore working hours

But still, China! Beckons! Woohoo!

Shanghai Ahoy

2006-05-12T17:16:00.001+01:00

Takla Makan. The Gobi Desert. The great wall of China. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. The BRICs report. The world's most populous country. All those old jokes about sardarjis who name their third child "chang", because every third person in the world is Chinese. Printing technology, huns, the way of the dragon. Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Ho Chi Minh. Tiananamen Square. Google's China problem, or China's Google problem, as the case may be.

Hallelujah, China, here I come.

OK, so it's just a few days, and just one city / area. Still, I am thrilled beyond belief.

Shanghai it is. Any ideas, people? Things to see, things to do? Cheap hotels, if you've traveled there at all? Overcoming the language barrier? Any other tid-bits? Historical / geographical cultural info?

I shall keep posting my research. Meanwhile, in honor of this event, I shall finally buy that digital camera so many of you wrote in about so long ago.

Watch this space!

Music to live by...

2006-04-10T19:13:00.000+01:00

"I'm so tired,
I haven't slept a wink.
I'm so tired,
My mind is on the blink
I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink
No, no, no..."

~ The Beatles, "The Beatles" (The White Album)
© 1968 Northern Songs

Does anybody find it strange that you can think of lyrics to match almost any mood? Or does everybody out there have a soundtrack for their lives?

Excerpt

2006-03-13T04:20:00.000Z

This is an excerpt from a piece called "Just Say No To Rugs" by Dave Barry, Pulitzer winning humor columnist. He wrote for the Miami Herald till recently (and is now on sabbatical), and has published several books. In my book, he's one of the funniest people in the world.

With all due attribution, I can't help but post this excerpt. It had me in splits for a full ten minutes after I read it. Because I can see myself (and several others I know) doing exactly the same thing, in all seriousness.

**************************************************************************

Mousse was a Labrador Retriever, which is a large enthusiastic bullet-proof species of dog made entirely from synthetic materials. This is the kind of dog that, if it takes an interest in your personal regions (which of course it does) you cannot fend it off with a blowtorch.

So anyway, Mike and Sandy had two visitors who wore expensive, brand-new down-filled parkas, which somehow got left for several hours in a closed room with Mousse. When the door was finally opened, the visibility in the room had been drastically reduced by a raging down storm, at the center of which was a large quivering down clot, looking like a huge mutant duckling, except that it had Mousse's radiantly happy eyes.

For several moments Mike and Sandy and their guests stared at this apparition, then Mike, a big, strong, highly authoritative guy, strode angrily into the room and slammed the door. He was in there for several minutes, then emerged, looking very serious. The down clot stood behind him, wagging its tail cheerfully.

"I talked to Mousse," Mike said, "and he says he didn't do it."

*********************************************************************************************************

I haven't found this piece of his online, but you can find other stuff he's written (if you don't already know) here.

Seven

2006-03-10T04:19:00.000Z

Tagged again, darn it.

Like a Rohrschach test, these responses are straight off the top of my head. Let's hope you find them interesting, Shakey!

Seven things to do before I die - not that I expect this to happen - I think I'm immortal, ineffable and so on. Still...

Get back to playing the piano.
Travel through the Congo.
Ditto the Savannah. Kenya, here I come.
Also Latin America.
Learn to play the saxophone. Alto sax a la Boots Randolph and Fausto Papetti.
Win a Booker. Or similar. (Modesty is not my virtue. Practicality and realism are not my mores.)
Swim with dolphins. Or whales (though preferably not Orcas)

Seven things I can't do:

Abide cruelty to animals
Make small talk
Play bridge (despite years of begging people to teach me)
Listen to music - any music - without tapping my feet or trying to sing along
Deal with dishonesty / a particular brand of smarmy sucking-up
Refrain from making cooing noises when faced with puppies
Fall asleep without reading for a while (unless excessive alcohol renders me unable to see straight, and even then, I try, while my crossed eyes try in vain to follow my finger across the words)

Seven things that attract me to Europe (really? Does it have to be Europe, or can it be any place that fascinates one? Oh well, going with the flow)

Language. Spanish, specifically.
Old looming cathedrals
History
My colonial roots
Wine & cheese
Adventure, or the hope of it
Je ne se quois

Seven excellent books:

To Kill A Mockinbird - Harper Lee
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Great Indian Novel - Shashi Tharoor
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Impossibility - John D. Barrow
The complete Winnie-the-Pooh (OK, so it's not "a" book and I'm cheating. Still.) - A. A. Milne
Falling Off The Map - Pico Iyer

Seven good movies:

Jungle Book (Disney animated)
Brokeback Mountain
The Usual Suspects (speaking of which, almost every Kevin Spacey movie I've ever seen)
Monsters, Inc. (yes, I'm an animation freak)
The Untouchables
Those Magnificent Men And Their Flying Machines
Beckett

Seven people on whom to inflict this!

Behold the Bootle

2006-03-09T15:59:00.000Z

Yet another silver Japanese car in a sea of silver Japanese cars.

But isn't it sleek and shiny? :)

Apropos of nothing, here are some photographs.

2006-03-07T19:52:00.000Z

Long straight roads on deceptive blue-sky sunny day (with bitter cold and frosty winds outside), we raced an Amtrak for a while. And out-ran it. But there's something magical about shiny steel train against flat, bland countryside.

The bridge on the mighty river Missouri. Perhaps it's the wrong season, or the wrong place, but it didn't seem that mighty. I've always been fascinated by bridges, though, so this picture is really my favourite from the whole trip.

Blue skies, bay and mud-brown earth. Coffee and music as we speed by. Heaven in a package. Not much of a picture, but go with it, go with it.

The St. Louis gateway arch, designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1965, towers 630 feet above the Mississippi river, commemorating America's westward exploration in the 19th century. Taller than the Washington Monument and more than twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty, even the giants from Mount Rushmore, had they bodies proportionate to the sie of their heads would be able to stroll through the arch.
The romance of the arch, however, lies in the idea of pioneering expeditions to the west, in intrepid explorers in boats and on horseback, crossing the river to go where no man they knew had gone before.
The Arch refused to fit into a single frame, no matter how we tried. Here's how it looks from below.

I had thought the view from the top would be something spectacular. It wasn't, in the normal sense of things. But for the first time, I could see the curvature of the earth. I checked this photograph with a ruler, just to be sure I wasn't imagining it. Yes, you can really see the curve.

Photographs courtesey R.

Missing the Mardi Gras

2006-03-01T03:45:00.000Z

The Plan:
Fly to Chicago on Friday evening, meet a couple of friends, then drive out to St. Louis early Saturday morning in time for the Mardi Gras parade. Stay overnight in St. Louis, drive back Sunday morning. See the city (if you can ever see a city in one evening) on Sunday. Fly back early Monday morning and head straight to work.

The Problem:
Meeting friends on a Friday evening, and expecting to drink sufficiently little that evening to wake up sufficiently early the next morning.

The Reality:

R wakes up at 6, as planned, and begs, grovels, for an extra hour's sleep. Since he's going to drive, and since we're all in the same shape as he is (but too dignified to beg), we aquiesce.
R wakes up at 7, and begs for another hour. We agree to half an hour.
By the time we're all ready, it's 8:30. After stops to buy coffee and food and for smokes, we reach St. Louis finally at 2:30 p.m. The parade is over, and only its junk remains - debris from the floats, broken beads on the ground. We settle for being tourists, go up in tiny steel cubicles to the top of St. Louis' arch. The view is strangely disappointing, as the trip has been so far. As must be, when strangers decide to be friends taking a trip together somewhere. Starving after no meals throughout the day, there is, really, only one option: alcohol.

The TrainWreck:

We walk into "TrainWreck" - a restaurant / pub / nightclub, and things begin to get happy. Copious amounts of beer and vodka are consumed, happy people at the next table join us, and we all get up and dance (around the tables, thankfully, and not on them), and exchange phone numbers. S calls from Delhi, and I speak to him for half an hour, but have no idea what we spoke about the next day - I only have a vague memory of using the F word fairly often.

R wants to drink on the way back, so I drive back part of the way on Sunday. Open roads, miles of nothing all around, wonderful driving. R plays DJ, inserting CDs and going ga-ga over some song before losing patience and skipping to the next one, till we are at the end of our tether. (It is annoying, when singing along loudly and tunelessly with Billy Joel, to suddenly find oneself singing loudly and tunelessly on one's own while the CD searches for the next track.)

The Madness:

Chicago is big, and R doesn't know his way around yet. But we manage to find our way to a comedy club, where there are some decent performances, then onto downtown Chicago. As we drive around, R, who can barely see straight by this point, shrieks at us desparately to keep our eyes open. "Quick, what's that road? what's that road? Is it Michigan?" "We're on Michigan already, aren't we?", I ask, poking my head out of the window to check. "Shit. OK, so is it Congress Parkway?" And so we navigate on.

The Sight-Seeing:

And so, if you visit Chicago, let me recommend that you see (based on my somewhat unconventional tour, which comprised coming across things more by accident than design, and my even more unconventional and somewhat pickled tour guide who made up for his lack of information with liberal doses of scorn, alternating with careless inventiveness) the Millennium Park (which we saw from a distance, and which, as per R, "has some structures and shit"), the famous Chicago theatre (which is "famous for some shit") and the Magnificent Mile (a mile of road on Michigan avenue, famous for shopping, but with some old architecture that is interesting). The Millennium Park, R says, letting go of the steering wheel and gesturing grandly with his arms to the near-detriment of the car in front of us, is the biggest park in the US. P and I both look suspiciously at him. "Bigger than Central Park?" "Oh, Shentral Park!" says our guide, "yeah, that might be bigger. OK, sho it'sh the shecond largesht." Moments later, he tells us that Chicago's Hard Rock Cafe is the second oldest in the US. A moment of thought, while we just look at him suspiciously. "I jusht made that up", he tells us proudly. "Do you even know this city?", I ask him. "Not really", he says in rare moment of honesty, following it up immediately with another whopper. But to do him credit, he does find his way to the House of Blues (where we missed B B King playing the previous night), entirely by the hit-or-miss method of "that looksh short of familiar, let'sh go that way", and eventually does manage to find his way back home.

The Epilogue:

I sleep through the ride to the airport the next morning, and all the way back on the flight. So we missed the Mardi Gras parade, and so we didn't end up doing anything we couldn't have done in New York or Chicago... but it was a fun trip anyway. And it's fun to have strangers become friends.

Update:

Pictures are here

Further update: cross-posted here

What Has Frog Been Doing?

2006-02-14T18:26:00.000Z

1. Getting her New Jersey driving license

How she did it: Waited and waited, procrastinating until the day before her Indian license and IDP were about to expire. Then spent a night reading the NJ motor vehicles manual, before running to the testing center in the morning. Took the knowledge test (multiple choice questions) and vision test (unless you're totally blind, this shouldn't be a stumbling block).

Aside: The cool thing about NJ is that if you have a long driving history in in some other country, and you pass your knowledge test OK, they can waive the road test - as they did in my case.

2. Digging her rental car out of 20 inches of snow.

Two and a half hours on a Sunday afternoon. Charming weekend. And to really provide us with a challenge worth sinking our teeth into, every hour or so, after all of us trying to liberate our cars had more or less cleared the snow behind it, the snow-plough would come back and push all the snow from the road into banks behind the cars.

3. Buying a car.

How she did it: She shopped around for weeks. She spoke to dealers, did some test drives, searched the web desparately for the cheapest cars, certified used cars at reasonable mileage and prices, and despaired. And finally, she walked into a dealership, test drove this one car, and said, OK, that's it, here's my cheque. Or, you know, here's 10 bucks, and I'll get a loan for the rest and come back and pick the car up.
So anyway, my 2006 Honda Civic LX will be with me on Monday! Woohoo!

4. Attendant hassles:

The problem is, when you buy the car, you need to buy insurance. And for these guys, no driving history in the US = no driving history whatsoever. (To be fair, perhaps records are not easy to access - and it's difficult to believe that there could be a driving record for each licensed driver in India. Still, in one's nastier moments, one tells oneself that this is the same mind-set that calls a national event "the world series".) Which means, high premiums. *sigh* But, the silver lining - the insurance business is not all about making money - there are caring insurance professionals out there. Like one guy Frog spoke with, who told her he wasn't comfortable giving her the NJ state minimum coverage because what if she got in a collision and got sued for more, and had to pay it all herself? No no, he'd feel really bad if that happened, knowing he'd OKed the coverage, and so he was going to give her higher coverage and (of course) charge her higher premiums. Frog almost broke down and cried, at how this individual was shattering all myths about insurance professionals. Then she told him where he could put his premiums and rung off.

5. Traveling. Like fury.

Hurrying from meeting to meeting, whirling across the east coast like a ... well, hurricane, she guesses.
See also: waiting around at airports for delayed flights, waiting around at airports for someone to provide some information about whether the flight I'm scheduled to take is just delayed, or has disappeared into the blue, waiting on board flights for delayed take-off, waiting on flights circling airports to be cleared to land, waiting at airports for connecting trains. NB: A margarita, taken just at the point where the waiting is beginning to climb over the hill of bearability and grab you by the throat, preparatory to making you grab someone else by the collar, is wonderfully calming!

Movie Recommendation of the month: Brokeback Mountain

2006-02-10T04:14:00.000Z

Brokeback Mountain, based on a book by Pullitzer prize winning author Annie Proulx, is one of the best movies I have seen in a very long time. It's not that the story's so unusual - after all, it's a love story, and what could be more common? OK, so it's a love story involving two people of the same sex, but that's not unusual either.

It's just that the evolution of their connection, from spark to romance to tenderness to angst and resentment, all the while growing stronger, is shown so beautifully. And the starkness of the story against the starkness of the landscape - a land where men are men, not "queer"s - gets under your skin and nestles there, refusing to leave. One viewing will not be enough. (I'm headed back to the theatre this weekend.)

Powerful performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall. I know nothing about direction, but if the Director's job is to get the movie to pull you in and get under your skin, Ang Lee has worked wonders.

This is not a movie review. It's just that I can't stop myself from writing about this movie. Even though I can't seem to find the right words to describe it. So go watch.

You Know You're Becoming American When...

2006-02-08T16:09:00.000Z

... Someone asks you how much she has to pay for the gas this month, and you say, "Gas? But we just filled the tank on the way to work."

HELP!!!!

Learnings

2006-01-23T22:32:00.000Z

1. I'm not yet old enough to not secretly enjoy my birthday.

2. I miss having someone turn up at my doorstep with cake at midnight.

3. Finding one's way around using mapquest directions ain't so scary after all. Except when it's dark and rainy and nothing looks the way it does during the day.

4. Quietly, sneakily, my house is taking on the feeling of a home. Things have Their Own Places, cabinets Contain Things, the boiler's hum-and-gurgle routine has become Only Background for my pottering around, or reading, and has ceased to annoy.

5. I used to love twilight, once. Dusk once stood for the reluctant close to a happy afternoon of play and stories, coming home and skolling half a bottle of cold water straight out of the fridge, bath, homework, dinner, TV, reading. Or perhaps it stood for coming home. But yesterday, as I watched the sun set over dull brown rooftops, and my room turn from gold to ink and shadows lengthen, I felt mopey.

Yule-tide Greetings

2005-12-23T16:14:00.000Z

When I was about 7 years old, my cousins and I discovered the art of card-making. Instant thrill! We could finally wish everyone we knew (about 3 people) with a personalised card, hand-made to their specifications. A hand-made card said, in the nicest possible way, “I'm thinking of you”. It also said that we had too much time on our hands and not enough entertainment... We didn’t discriminate: everyone got their own card. Mostly the kind of card that’s sure to give you a paper cut - badly cut, created by folding a sheet of chart paper and running a knife down the creases. Crooked cards, that stood only with support from other cards, and that never, in all the years we persevered, fit any envelope.

Diwali inspired flames, leaping from red and gold diyas on muddy brown earthen plates. Not-quite-believable sparklers and tubris (anars) spat sparks all over the white paper, and chorkis spun across the landscape, narrowly avoiding upsetting the diyas and causing carnage. Lacking the capability for accurate representation, we decided to settle for flamboyance: our flames made up in colour - red, orange, yellow, blue, green - what they lacked in credibility.

There were no cards for Pujo (we knew better than that, and scornfully corrected non-Bengali classmates who had the gall to wish us “Happy Pujo”). Pujo was new clothes and “thakur dekha” - going from pandal to pandal to see the different protimas and murthis (earthen images of the goddess Durga, her 4 offspring, her vahan and the asur she’d killed. The asur always looked defiant, even with his chest cut open and spurting blood. Durga herself always looked serene and peaceful, and it always impressed me that after having battled for so long, she didn’t look scarred and bloody, that her expression never reflected the wrath of god. But that was as far as my spiritual wondering went. Pujo was less about religion and more about that particular colour of light, when the sunlight turned to sunshine; about riding endlessly on Ferris wheels in fairs after a cursory pronam to the protima occupying the same park. (Many years later, it would be about wandering around the city all night, eating indiscriminately from food-stalls, commenting on the resemblance of the asurs to the demons of the day - at various points, the asurs in Calcutta pandals looked like Saddam Hussain, the Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park, Osama Bin Laden, George Bush, etc.)

But the approach of December was when the home-made paper card industry really boomed. All month, we’d be busy drawing crooked, cactus-like holly leaves and berries, none of which we’d ever actually seen. Attempts to draw Yule-logs blazing merrily in fireplaces were beyond our artistic abilities and died a natural death. But on occasion, and only for very special people, we would persevere with an almost completely inaccurate “Christmas tree”. This always took weeks and many drafts to create, dusted with what we fondly imagined looked like lightly fallen snow (but what, in fact, looked like some strange and virulent form of white fungus that was slowly engulfing large sections of the branches) and decorated with enough round, shiny ornaments hanging from the branches to make the tree collapse. (It never occurred to us that a tree was unlikely to be covered with snow and ornaments at the same time.) The piles of wrapped presents under the tree was where we really went to town – hideous wrapping paper and red ribbons emerged from our hours of effort, making us almost salivate with vicarious glee. “The kids” - younger siblings - got cards with torturously mis-shapen Santas creeping through the snow, reeling under the weight of huge sacks bigger than themselves. Occasionally, Santa would be sitting in a mysterious vehicle that looked like a chair with runners, but turned out, after much examination and huge leaps of imagination, to be a sled. A magical, self-propelled sled (in the manner of the Knight Rider), because reindeer, too, were beyond our ken (Irish for "can do").

I can’t remember the last time I even sent someone a card… or made one for them, though, in my mind, it still ranks up there (with the making of mixed tapes) as a way of showing abiding affection. It’s been a while since I’ve sat on sheets of chart-paper strewn around the floor, surrounded by scissors and crayons and rulers. And I suddenly wondered if I could still, at a pinch, draw a semi-believable Christmas tree and gifts. So here you go – this one’s for you. Merry Christmas. :)

By the way, the strange thing behind one of the presents is a puppy – something I asked "Santa" for every single Christmas, until “he” finally caved in under the unrelenting pressure of my “I have been a good girl this year” letters, stopped worrying about pee on the carpet and fur everywhere, and got me one.

Learnings

2005-12-22T14:46:00.000Z

a. If affection is to be judged by the volume of email one gets from someone, then the only people who truly love me are someone-Volkswagen, something-or-other-Honda, la-la-la-Toyota and whoop-de-do-Kia.

b. It is strangely liberating to watch a movie on one's own at a theatre. No worrying about your sweaty palms or someone else's. No interruption from someone leaning over and asking you to explain something. No distraction in the form of frissons of pleasure from your knee touching someone else's. Nada. Just you and the big screen. Everyone else fades into oblivion and you sink into the movie.

c. Of course, when it comes time to get pop-corn or a drink, it's more fun when someone else is there.

d. Even when it's not snowing, it can be @#)!%$* cold outside.

e. Speaking of which, feeling cold is partly psycho-somatic. 15 degrees F doesn't sound too bad, until you do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and realise it means MINUS 8 degrees C. That's when you really begin to freeze.

f. Nothing tastes better on these freezing nights than green chillies, added by the pound to everything you cook. Of course, the chillies rather drown out the taste of other masala you put in, but that's sort of the point.

g. There are few things as wonderful as hearing friends' voices from across the oceans, even when you can also hear the sounds of their morning ablutions over the sounds of your laughter. Happy birthday, T. :)

h. It is possible to get really tired of listening to "jingle bell rock". Really, really tired. Claw-out-the-damn-radio-and-throw-it-out-of-the-window tired, because every%!_)*! channel is playing it.

i. Procrastination is bliss.

j. Russell Peters rocks.

Pandora

2005-12-22T04:52:00.000Z

What he said.
The internet is fascinating!

Secret World

2005-12-15T16:57:00.001Z

Sitting at the office, working on a humongous project, I plug in my ear-phones and slide in a CD I haven't heard for a while. (Secret World Live, in case you were wondering.) It's been a while since I could concentrate on work with music playing in the background - the habit I carelessly took for granted through school and college seems to have rusted out.

Today's an exception though. For some reason, the concentration is unflagging.

Perhaps because some albums, particular pieces of music, bring up sharp, distinct memories, strong enough to assault you. Memories that make you take five minutes off from work to remember and laugh, send a quick email to people associated with the picture in your mind, and then return peacefully to work.

This particular album is one of those... the first time I heard Peter Gabriel was at my friend T's house. T was a year senior to me in college, and given that I attended college once in a blue moon (at my viva, I was asked, "are you sure you belong to this class?" - and I can tell you it was tempting to say, "No, sorry, my mistake," and walk right out of there - which, in light of the carnage that followed, might have been the intelligent thing to do), it was a wonder that we became friends... but we did. Right from my first day at college, when he singled me out from the others being subjected to somwewhat un-inspired ragging, to make me treat him to a coffee and smoke.

T lived reasonably close to college, and on winter afternoons, when the desire for some good music pushed the desire not to attend classes over the tip of the scales, we'd go back to his place to listen to generations of rock, drink hot, sweet tea, sneak smokes on his balcony (conveniently hidden from view by large-leafed trees) and talk about life. (Mostly, since he had an inconveniently good memory, we'd discuss my exploits, which he'd drag up at every opportunity, and I'd rue the day I'd ever told him about... but that's another story.)

T and I haven't met too often since we left college - we've been playing the "gechho dada" game for too long. So, when I was in Bombay, T was in Cal. When T moved to Bombay, I moved to Kozhikode. When I finally moved back to Bombay, T moved back to Cal. And so on.

T's not much of a talker on the phone either, so we haven't spoken much over the years. But each time we've met, after we've shared a drink and a smoke and updated each other on our lives and the new music we've discovered, T's managed to dredge up, from the depths of my chequered past, incidents that even I don't remember, incidents that I've then spent years erasing from my memory.

Until I meet T again, that is. Even when they remember things about you that you'd rather not - or, who knows, perhaps precisely for that reason - thank god for old friends.

B Flat Minor

2005-12-08T21:55:00.000Z

You know how it is when you have a particular tune running through your head, over and over in a loop, stuck inside your mind without your even being aware? It plays itself out all day, barely causing a ripple in your consciousness... just a pleasant sense of something different about the day. You go about your work, letting your mind dance to a different tune. You drive home listening to the radio, but as you drive, the tune starts taking over, making itself heard over everything else until, by the time you reach home, you've turned off the radio, and you're humming it. Almost on auto-pilot, still not entirely aware of it.

You walk up the stairs, dump your bags and coat on the floor as you walk in, take a shower, make some hot tea with ginger and look out the window at the first snow of the season. Still humming. Still unaware.

And suddenly, the tune goes into Dolby stereo mode, with full Technicolour effects, and you sit up, half delighted, half nostalgic, and start humming it, na-na-NA-na-na-na, and remembering others that went "with" it.

There are times I've had awful tunes stuck inside my head - like that awful song, "no life without wife" from that awful movie, "Bridge and Prejudice" (yes, yes, I AM prejudiced). But for the last few days, it's been Chopin. Conjuring up a storm inside my head with a Prelude I can no longer identify, though my fingers, through some form of mystical physical memory (perhaps we're all made of memory foam?) remember the ebb and flow of it.

I went through a whole day of routine without noticing its sudden presence. It was only that night, reading in a yellow glow, that it came crashing through the fog and accosted me. Distracted me. Disarmed me. Twisted me around a corner and whirled me into the sounds.

And now, I can't get it out of my head. I've been googling desparately for a couple of days, trying to find some free downloads of Chopin's Preludes and Etudes. No success. Perhaps I should just get a piano and the score and start teaching myself all over again. Meanwhile, the tune goes na-na-NA-na-na-na - if you can identify which Prelude it is, please let me know.

So This is Hell

2005-12-02T23:19:00.000Z

On a hypothetical Friday evening in the hypothetical month of December, a mythical woman sits at her desk at the office, poring over an 80 page document that she must - MUST - (hypothetically, of course) clean up and send out to her hypothetical client.

On page what-feels-like-three-hundred-and-seventeen-and-a-half (hypothetical documents being allowed to have "half" page numbers - though undoubtedly, imaginary numbers might suit them better), she reads the following:

"Hypothetical-company-name follows the above mentioned methodology in general for all application developments and can be further tailor made to suite the specific client requirement, whatever it is. One of such tailored execution approach is depicted below"

Incorrect. What's below is my hypothetical head after I put it through the shredder.

Karmic Chaos

2005-11-30T20:54:00.000Z

Observing the behaviour of some of the people around me, I marvel at their ability to do certain things. Things I consider heinous, or at best, unforgivable - with complete nonchalance, a casual flick of the wrist, a flash of eyes, a half-contemptuous turn.

And suddenly wonder: What if my conception of things is entirely, irrevocably wrong? What if I'm the stupid one, unable to comprehend that the path I want to be on can be reached only by going through a thick web of dishonesty?

Worse, what if they're "right"? What if "lying" and "cheating" are in fact "good"? Rather like Calvin's dream of a Santa who gives toys only to naughty kids? What if my karma is upside down, inside out, right-side wrong?

Dogs & Niggers Will Not Be Served

2005-11-22T18:14:00.000Z

So I went to New York City weekend before last, to meet up with S, who was visiting from London, and some other friends. And after we had eaten our fill at a cozy place down the street, we went to a pub called Uncle Ming's, at 225 Avenue B. And one of their bar-tenders not only refused to serve my friend R, but even gave us his "reason" for the same: "I'm racist, what will you do?"

Not only that, when N argued with him about this incident, he actually called the bouncer to evict N from the premises. Upon which, we all followed N down the stairs behind the bouncer, talking loudly about racial discrimination.

And here's the next twist: there were actually cops standing on the stairs, listening to us tell the bouncer what had happened, hearing the term "racial discrimination" over and over again.

Test question, to see if you know what the world is about: Did the bouncer, on hearing the story, or the cops, on over-hearing the story, ask us to go back inside? Did they apologise? Did they, as a matter of fact, do anything?

If you answered "yes", you're sadly naive. Nobody did anything.

And, eventually, neither did we. Our objective was to make the most of our evening, and our priorities elsewhere. It did leave a bad taste in our mouth though, that hasn't entirely gone away. Perhaps because we let it slide too. Perhaps we should have done something, though I'm not entirely sure what.

Any ideas?

Survival & Insanity in the USA

2005-11-21T01:16:00.000Z

So recall an earlier post where I'd spoken about not wanting to room with a "ree-ree-ree" flatmate? Well, it appears I don't learn from experience. I decided to share an apartment with her in the US, and well, I sure learnt my lesson, when she almost ran out on me with a full 700 bucks. $, not Rs. Not a funny story, and below this blog's dignity to go into in detail.

That and other things have been sort of occupying the lion's share of mind-space, so things that I meant to write about have not been written about. But coming up soon (I hope) is the survivor's guide to the US - truly, How To Be A Legal Alien (with all due apologies to George Mikes and Sting).

Right now, though, there is just the unutterable delight of having my own space, warm wooden floors, soft lamplight glowing, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong crooning about the Autumn in New York, and some good books by my side. Life seems to be falling into place again.

Brrrr...

2005-10-27T00:44:00.000+01:00

Give me the tropics any day.

And In Other News Tonight...

2005-10-17T15:23:00.000+01:00

Shubho Bijoya (a trifle late, but I'm not fond enough of worms to be the early bird).

The spammers have found me. Apologies, but this blog has no option. Spam-protection in the form of word verification is now enabled here.

A wonderful, restful week at home, with home food and dogs and peaceful afternoons and my room filled with green leaf sunshine. That particular shade of sunshine. This is what I know, I kept thinking, a city I can negotiate in my sleep, old hangouts and friends and conversation that range over the impossibly important and to the completely inane. Cups and cups of coffee and tea; phuchka (distinct from and far superior to both gol gappas and pani puris) from the phuchka-walla outside my house who greets me fondly each time I return. Pujor abhawa - a sense of mild festivity and goodwill towards all in the air, and children in spanking new clothes walking down the road, foodstalls selling fish fry and kochuri and radhabollobi and ghugni on street corners and in parks, ferris wheels and hurdy-gurdies and Chicken a la Kiev at Mocambo with catching-up conversation glinting in the lamplight, and warm doggie fur against my leg as I sleep, and warm breath on my face as one of the doggies tries to stare me into waking at 5 in the morning.

No wonder, then, that email and blogging were ignored and put aside for later while I wallowed in peace.

But we're back now, and making resolutions and doing things. This blog will come to those, in due time. For now, though, the rutted roads and darn traffic of Bangalore are already driving this blog to road rage. And this blog has some paperwork to do as well.

Ah'll be beck.

The Magic Box

2005-09-30T14:07:00.000+01:00

Planning to buy a digital camera.
Any suggestions / recommendations?

Life, or Something Very Like It

2005-09-23T12:49:00.000+01:00

Conversation 1
B: (to friends at large) Why don't you come over for lunch on Sunday? My cousin (that's me) will cook something.
F-a-L: Sure. We'll be there.

Conversation 2
B: (to other friends at large) Why don't you come over for lunch on Saturday? My cousin (me again) will cook.
F-a-L: Sounds good.

Conversation 3
B: (to her friends-at-large - people I barely know) Have dinner with us on Saturday night. My cousin (by now you know who this is) will cook.
F-a-L: Great.

There's a pattern emerging here, I just know it.

Update

2005-09-16T08:45:00.000+01:00

Packing my stuff - to leave behind, to carry back home and bring back again - takes a few hours. As I'm sorting through stuff and trying to fit it into bags, I'm suddenly tired. I feel as though I've been packing all my life, all my life, packing, packing, fitting things into bags, getting on trains and planes and buses and into cars, leaving. Suddenly, I can't face packing any more. Instead, I go downstairs and stand outside the hotel and look up into the night sky. No Mars, but some stars and a sickle moon and clear air flood my head with my earliest star-gazing memories - on trips and treks, sitting outside in the cold cold air and breathing in the calm fullness of the place.

******************************************************************
My Air India flight to Bombay via Paris takes off 1 whole hour late - apparently all systems at Newark have shut down. I imagine skynet or whatever it was in the Terminator movies, or the whole Matrix phenomenon. Machines taking over the planet and deciding to shut down un unison. Incoming flights frozen in the void, temporarily bullied out of existence by Newark's IT failure... else reduced to circling the airport endlessly.

By the time we lift off, passengers' stomachs are growling so loudly that they could be doing sound effects for a whole other airplane. To prevent us from eating them, the crew hastily throws packets of chips at us. As they put dinner together, the smell of fragrantly spiced mutton curry almost drives me crazy.

After dinner, I try to sleep. But a stewardess has other ideas. Each time I start nodding off, she jumps to my window and snaps the shade shut. The sound wakes me. I open the shade again, send unpleasant thoughts and quelling looks-that-kill in her direction and try to drift off into dreamland again. (Repeat from beginning of paragraph for 4 hours to understand the true meaning of endless night.)

We're flying into daylight and into timezones ahead of ours, so dinner, breakfast and lunch all take place in the span of 9 hours. Part of the time, I read Tears of the Giraffe - the second book in Alexander McCall Smith's "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series - set in Botswana, and highly recommended. But mostly, I'm just jumping in my seat with anticipation, can't wait to land in Bombay.

And when we finally do, I can see rain beating against the sides of the plane, and I think, "shit." So much for the anticipation, the anxiousness to be back.

Immigration, baggage claim, and out the door. The humidity hits me like a solid wall. The rain is a snivelling drizzle - the type I hate most. A is nowhere to be seen (turns out later he's waiting at the wrong terminal). I've lost my phone and can't call or message. Welcome home.

******************************************************************

After a warm, cozy weekend, I leave Bombay on a sticky grey Monday morning. A sees me off at the airport and a grey sheen hangs over the city and our goodbye. My flight breaks through the cloud cover and Bombay suddenly vanishes, just like that. No long last looks over one's shoulder. Perhaps that's as it should be.

******************************************************************

Bangalore sucks.

Learnings

2005-09-07T19:01:00.000+01:00

1. Toilet paper can scratch your ass raw.

2. Seasons change real quick. One day there's bright sunlight, the next, you remember old geography lessons as you watch the morning light slant across the park.

3. It's dangerous to go within a 1 mile radius of Cheesecake Factory.

4. It's even more dangerous to get caught in a corridor with Cheesecake Factory on one side and Cold Stone Creamery on the other.

5. If you can survive the temptations of the corridor, you will, inevitably, reward yourself by giving in to temptation at the Barnes & Noble at the end of the corridor.

6. Hotel rooms are difficult to keep clean. It's not your's, so you don't care.

7. It's eminently possible to live like a slob for 2 months, washing dishes only when the fungus starts to creep out of the sink and attack books on the counter.

8. American ads really suck.

9. Speaking of which, there seem to be, broadly, 4 categories of products advertised on TV here:

Automobiles
Telephone network providers
Medication (mostly for penile dysfunction and post-partum depression - and you have to wonder about cause-and-effect here)
Insurance

10. It's always nice to get a dosa. Even one that costs 4 bucks, USD.

What Was I Thinking?

2005-09-07T00:35:00.000+01:00

Spring Fest, 1996

Perhaps it was the effect of all the un-imbibed dope lingering in the air...

Seeing Red

2005-08-29T03:02:00.000+01:00

See the red planet! The closest we've ever seen it. The closest Mars has ever been to the Earth in recorded history. Closer than it'll be in the forseeable future. Let's call this "The International Doorstep Astronomy Week". Night sightings. Daytime sightings. A big red orb hanging in space. Opening up debate about the Zone of Life theory again... See Mars, as big as the moon (actually, it's a whole lot bigger, but you know what I mean). It's like a bloody fiesta.

I just have one question: WHERE THE !@#!% is it?

I've been looking, I really have, and I'm yet to see it, and it's already past 27th August (the day on which it was supposed to have been closest to Earth). Would someone please point me in the right direction?

I have a dirty suspicion, though, that I'm not actually going to get to see it. Years later, people will ask me, "how could you not have seen it? The whole world saw it." And I'll say, "Ummm." Really. These things happen to me.

Years and years and years ago, when Halley's Comet was doing it's once-in-70-something-years fly-by visit, we decided that those who planned ahead and prepared and got to a good sighting spot, saw. So in we piled, family and extended friends, into a couple of cars. Aluminium folding chairs in the boot (yes, it's a boot, not a trunk), gallons of coffee in flasks (and, possibly, jerry-cans). Stomachs full of food (luchi and alur dom, I suspect), and hearts filled with adventure and a sense of momentousness, off we drove to Diamond Harbour. And over the course of a long night, we waited and watched, and played word-games and I-spy (note to G: and some of us worked out 2 to the power 52, manually, something for which we will some day get our own back at the people that made us do it). Unfortunately, nobody spied the malevolent comet. Really. So I've got to wait for another 50 odd years for another shot at that.

So please, I'd really like to see Mars - up close and personal. If you have any information about where it is, please write in and tell me. I'll pay for the information. And oh, btw, it looks something like this:

Photograph courtesy space.com

The Big Con

2005-08-27T01:13:00.000+01:00

I learnt a lot today.
Mostly about how to make things up and sell them to peo... whoops, sorry, I meant about consulting.

Here's how: A couple of days ago, I went ahead and told a prospect something that I thought we could do for them, based on a briefing session by the head of consulting (HOC). And I provided numbers and everything. The same numbers the HOC gave me.

Me: Sure, we can save you 20-25% of ongoing ___ cost. As a matter of fact, we're already doing this for a, y and z.

Client___: (getting interested despite himself) I don't see how you could do that. I mean, there's not that much to do on an ongoing basis... ummm... are you sure about these numbers?

Me: (full of righteous salesmanship, basing my statements on the rock that I think my HOC is) Of course I am. In fact, let me do something: I will send you, by the end of the week, a roadmap, showing you how we're doing this, and then we can talk numbers, and see what we can do for you.

Client___: Sounds excellent.

Me: Alrighty then.

So, bursting with pride for getting somewhere selling a fairly new, unknown service, I go to my HOC, and tell him I need specifics - numbers and roadmaps - to send out to Client___. And he tells me, "Just speak to A, and get the numbers. She's the dude when it comes to this. And oh, if she can't get you good numbers, just ask her to make them up. I mean, she's better equipped to make them up than you are."

When I get over my coronary attack at hearing this, I spend 3 days chasing A and team (who ignore my pleas for information and keep saying, in an appalled manner, "you believed numbers that HOC gave you? Why, for the love of god, why? He's a consultant, he'll say anything!). Finally, with self-imposed mailout-deadline-cum-professional-suicide hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles, at 6:00 p.m. today, said team and I get into an empty conference room. We spend 45 minutes making jokes about the consulting profession (yes, they are consultants), throw some numbers around, do some tweaking, decide to call them real, and put them down for posterity.

No, the mail hasn't gone out yet - it'll be in Client___'s mailbox before he gets in on Monday morning. But next time, I'll be less worried about sending out information like this, secure in the knowledge that if I don't actually have information from consulting, I can just make them up. After all, whether they're making them up or I am can hardly matter.

Oh, and btw? These numbers are now going to be used to sell this same story to other prospects too, now that we have them.

Meanwhile, thinking of all this reminded me of one of the coolest columns ever: Fast Company's Consultant Debunking Unit. Here you go. Enjoy.

That Thing That Makes The World Go Around

2005-08-25T02:25:00.001+01:00

This is an ironic title for this post. Because, truth be told, I have no idea what that thing I've blithely put in the subject line is. None. Is it friendship? Music? Alcohol? Good conversation? Pink Floyd? Hot home-cooked food? Laughing till your sides ache and your jaw gets stuck?

Whatever it is, it's working for me, at least for now. My weekend was one delightful, delightful extended moment in time, with all the above. The kind of weekend whose essence you want to distill and store, safe in a stoppered glass bottle in a cool dry place, and take out to sniff once in a while - but delicately, delicately. Imagine a 5 hour journey, with conversation about everything and nothing and whatever lies in between, a hot, home-cooked meal and good vodka at the other end, a room draped in shadow and shards of light, someone plays a guitar while others sing everything from hyms to Floyd, and somewhere along the way, the first song they ever remember trying to mumble the words to, ever spotless, ever pure, melody and harmony. Imagine excited conversation and the meeting of old friends and dear, squeezing together into one small bed and laughing into the night and everything has changed and nothing has changed and I thought I saw Mars out the window on the long way home and isn't the world wondrous?

In words that only some people who read this blog will understand, and that might make others who read this blog stop reading this blog, I am dzust laabh.

Learning

2005-08-16T22:09:00.000+01:00

The suicide rate among cold-callers must be sky-high.

Update
This from B, 25th August 05:
Why have you stopped blogging? Spending all waking hours thinking of innovative ways to commit suicide?

Cozy-ness

2005-08-15T04:35:00.000+01:00

It's thundering and lightning-ing outside. A bad-weather front that was not supposed to touch the coast has indeed struck the coast, and New York City was treated today to a deluge, a real storm. During which I was stuck at Penn Station, waiting for the North-East Corridor Line to be made functional again, and thinking to myself, nothing really changes... had I been in Bombay, I might have been stuck at Churchgate, waiting for the Western Line to be made functional again after heavy rain and flooding.

But now I'm back, and cozily sitting in my room, and thinking of the godawful workday I have tomorrow. And still smiling, because I picked up a couple of very exciting books from the Strand Bookstore today. "Over the Edge of the World" - the story of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, by Laurence Bergreen, and "Mercator - The Man Who Mapped The Planet" by Nicholas Crane.

And also because, this time while I was there, I saw signs for Bourbon Street and Bleecker Street. It's fascinating when street names from songs suddenly appear in front of your eyes, unbidden. Bleecker Street didn't look bleak, and the moon wasn't over Bourbon Street (it was a dark and stormy night...) but I still grinned like an idiot when I saw them.

Tomorrow will mark the first time I'll be working on the 15th of August. It'll be strange not to attend a flag-hoisting ceremony somewhere, sing the national anthem - I can't remember a time when I haven't. I'll miss the cars going by with little paper flags stuck in their bonnets, kids waving them around everywhere, shops selling flag pins to stick into blazers and collars. So distance does matter, after all.

Here's to all the flags that get stuck at half-mast, those that refuse to unfurl properly and that have to be taken down and re-hoisted... and the burst of pride one feels (even if one is a global citizen) each time one sees the flag open out and ripple in the wind.

On The Road Again

2005-08-06T18:54:00.000+01:00

So before you ask, let me tell you that
a. I didn't screw up at the meeting. (In fact, I barely spoke!)
b. It went OK (we agreed to have a meeting with the real buyer, and that will be where we stand or are shot to pieces. Imagine music from spaghetti westerns here. In fact, imagine me dressed in a shabby green poncho, squinting down an office corridor, my hand hanging by my side, hovering next to my Blackberry Handheld, ready to beat my opponent to the draw, the noon-day sun beating down outside the air conditioned office... But I digress...)

I had one heck of a day: 11 hours traveling or in transit, for the sake of a one hour meeting in the middle of the day. Holy Toledo! (hah! managed it!) And since it's the journey and not the destination that matters... here's an account.

To begin with, managed to catch an express on the NJ Transit, without realising (this blog is dedicated to the retention of Queen's English, at least as far as spelling goes) it. And guess what? The damn express doesn't stop at Newark Airport... only at Newark Penn Station. What kind of dimwit country has express trains which don't stop at major stops like an airport? It'd be like a fast train on the Mumbai western line not stopping at Santa Cruz or Parla, the closest stops to the airport... oh, wait. Umm. Hmmm. (Embarassedly drawing circles in the dust with my big toe.)

So anyhow, had to pay an extra 7 bucks to get back to the airport... found my way to the right terminal, boarded. Measured out my time with Sierra Mist. And then, looking down, saw this familar shape - a huge water body, shaped like a diseased pancreas... Lake Michigan! (I still can't get over the coolness of seeing things straight out of a geography book live and in the flesh - if from a height of 30000 feet). I'm told that in winter, the lake freezes over enough for people to drive trucks and buses over it (instead of all the way around).

Disembarked at Detroit, and made our way to Hertz to rent a car to drive to Toledo. Detroit is much as I'd imagined it in my mind: bright blue skies with wisps of cloud and noon-day heat shimmering over sprawling concrete. But we weren't there for long - just long enough to rent a car and get the hell out. My boss told me conversationally that we were just 10 minutes drive from the Canadian border, and since he's lived in Toronto and keeps talking about what a great place it is, I wondered for a few moments whether he was going to make a dash across the border (what a great movie this would have been: high-noon, the good the bad and the ugly and the three fugitives all rolled into one). But he didn't, and we set course for Toledo.

Over the course of the 1 hour drive to Toledo, Ohio, I could see how easy it would be to fall asleep at the wheel on highways like this. Long, straight highways, heat-haze making me squint and not much around. The sameness of what you see can drag, pull ones eyelids down slowly. A friend of mine drives from NJ to Washington DC every week, and he tells me that music on the radio alone is not enough - he sings, to keep himself awake.

The coolest things about the drive, though were:
1. The hertz direction finder - a device that maps roads, shows you which turns to take and where you are... you programme it to where you want to go, and it guides you... so you keep looking at it, and take the turns indicated, and voila, you're there! I could barely keep my eyes of it, but eventually got distracted when we passed a sign for
2. Telegraph Road!!! There's almost certainly no link between this road, one of the major thoroughfares in Detroit, and the Straits song, but there's an ironic link between the words of the song and the economic situation in Detroit and other such towns.

And so, driving down the highway, we finally came upon a sign that said "Welcome to Ohio" and soon after, Toledo. Toledo seemed a small town - Calicut might be bigger - with tired peeling old brick buildings and a depressing air. I concentrated on our meeting, then left. I'd ordered a car from a place which ran out of smaller cars and sent me a limo! Unfortunately, the driver of the limo was a total conspiracy theorist, and for the one hour drive back to Detroit airport, regaled me with how George Bush was a CIA agent, or ran the CIA, or was run by the CIA (depending on which particular story he was telling); how if only the world knew how many murders Clinton had ordered, his image would be different, and so on... finally ending with how he wanted to go to Goa, and live in India for a year, and how he thinks India is the best democracy in the world. I don't know whether to be touched or just plain scared for the country when he lands in Goa.

The rest of my trip back was a crazy mishmash of varied versions of Murphy's law: my flight was delayed due to bad weather and we were told we'd have more information in 30 minutes, then, as I was buying coffee somewhere, 10 minutes later, I heard the last boarding call, forcing me to sprint the rest of the way to the gate with laptop, purse, wallet and coffee all over the place. Some disgusting passenger had spilt some gunk on the floor of the aircraft, as a result of which my laptop bag strap is soaking wet and smelly, and the padded part will probably discolour my clothes if I put it against my shoulder. NJ transit trains were running late, so I had to wait at the platform for 20 minutes (grumble grumble in Bombay there are trains every 4 minutes) when all I wanted to do was sink into a bath. NJ transit lines lost power while I was actually on the train, so that we were stuck on the track, with the air conditioning and lights out (grumble grumble at least the Bombay locals have ventilation).

Finally made it back at about 8:30 p.m. Staggered in, checked my mail (how I love wi-fi), and slept for a straight 12 hours.

Enjoy your weekend. I'm sure going to enjoy mine!

A for Anticipation

2005-08-05T03:35:00.000+01:00

So I have my first client meeting tomorrow.
In Toledo, Ohio.

Scared shitless, hoping I don't screw up.

Excited, raring to go. Don't think I'm going to get a wink of sleep tonight.

Of course, given my history of work related gaffes, there's every chance that I'll screw up royally. Say something completely inappropriate, in an utterly FRIENDS moment.

So watch this space. The potential for mass entertainment looms large.

And until then, Toled-le-oo.

On Second Thought...

2005-08-02T02:44:00.000+01:00

The continuing saga of Christopher Columbus' daughter, many times removed.

People. Friendly, after all. So not everyone's a customs official. "How're you doing" greetings bouncing off the walls. Perhaps with fewer people than back home, it's possible to individually greet everyone whose eyes meet yours.

New Jersey. Clean, wide roads. Greenery. Woods. Backwoods, actually. Life here revolves around Route (pronounced to rhyme with "pout") 1 and Route 9, call-a-cab services, watching traffic zoom by on the highway, exits 131 and 130. And road signs. Every 5 yards. Still no people though - except, perhaps, at Metropark station, waiting for trains or cabs. Indian suburbs - filled with Kanha sarees, Dimple Fast Food, Dosa Express (muy excellente dosa) and Subzi Mandi.

New York. May-the-lord-be-praised-it's-a-city. I see land. Smelly. Noisy. Dirty. Tall buildings. Bars. People. Activity. And smack in the centre (center) - or close enough, Central Park. This is my heaven. Complete with two of my temples: 59th Street Bridge and Central Park. Fire engines passing by with shrieking sirens every 15 minutes. Confusing and chaotic - I bet this is how all non-Indians feel when confronted with an Indian city. I feel like the quintessential tourist, staring with open-mouthed wonder at the mythical monster. And recognising (recognizing) in it the family pet.

Hmmm. Yep, as long as I can get a weekly dose of The City, I think I'll make it.

Requiem

2005-07-25T00:13:00.000+01:00

Bharat's gone.

I can't believe it, it's not real. Even after two days, every ten minutes or so, it suddenly hits me again. And again. And again. I'm thinking of a funny story, telling someone about our crazy days together, and saying, "Bharat is this totally something guy..." and suddenly I realise that he isn't any longer - he was.

It's unreal. An Omen-ish quality of nightmare: blue skies and light wood and sunshine and laughing people getting on with their lives and all the while, a voice inside me is repeating no NO NO it's a mistake it can't be true it's a horrible horrible mistake and I'll wake up tomorrow and the world will be normal again and all 7 of us will be whole and alive and still ready to conquer the world - as we were 7 years ago, the unstoppable team ready to change the universe. And all the while, in my head, a refrain plays itself over and over again: And then there were six.

How long it's been, the road we've travelled together. Seven years ago, seven kids set out to conquer the planet. We were kings, lords, the world was our oyster and we knew we could do anything - anything at all; we were family, we drank together and starved together, and burnt the candle at both ends together and pulled each other through rough patches. And when the year was up, we still held on to the threads, wherever we were, as went our own ways. And now there are only six, scattered, shattered, drawn together in a virtual group hug of sorrow and solace and shared tears and memories - team days and team building, but Bharat's not here, never will be and oh god it's so unfair and pointless and stupid and there's nothing anybody can do and the world no longer makes any sense.

I don't know whether I believe in the immortal soul. But I think I believe that somewhere, Bharat's sitting on a cloud in the sunshine. Drinking some good whiskey, smoking a cigarette, relishing his butter chicken. Looking down to tell us, "chalo, koi nahin." And as squints into the sun and takes a drag on the cigarette, he slaps his thighs and laughs out loud - with his particular guffaw - at the absurdity of the world.

Learning

2005-07-21T21:16:00.000+01:00

1. "Funspecs" aren't fun.

2. Delivery isn't as delivery does.

3. Happiness could be a warm gun.

4. Something's turning.

5. Laundry relaxing. Soft and warm the clothes out the dryer.

Off to New York tomorrow night. Other kinds of learning. And to meet some very old friends.

Days Like This II

2005-07-20T21:38:00.000+01:00

1. Spilt water all over pantry floor (including on pants of poor guy who was giving me gyan about cold calling. He stopped.)

2. Spilt coffee on my pristine white shirt. My NEW pristine white shirt that I like so much. Spent about half an hour scrubbing it with handsoap in the pantry, and I suspect the stain hasn't gone - it's just lying there, dormant, until the shirt dries, when it'll resurface with a roar.

3. Boss tells me I have to start cold calling (that awful first step to Sales) on 1st August. 1 full month of cold calling. And I have to have my script ready by next week. And the script is based on the industry, obviously. And I know nothing about the industry I've been assigned, so I have to read up about that... and about the ITES and BPO industries... and about a hundred other things... besides shadowing 2 proposals that are currently on.

When oh when am I going to read Harry Potter? Do my laundry? Learn to drive on the right hand side of the road?

I should have been born rich instead of beautiful!

Update

I came home and spilt orange juice all over my counter.

Some days are just like that.