You know, stuff.

It’s a recorded message in Telugu that breaks my nonchalant routine. It’s something the (wildly obvious) Punjabi aunty beside me barely registers, as does her bespectacled son, who’s still ravenously running through his KFC munch-box. The rest of the process, though, from the now almost always messed up safety instructions, to the pilot’s oft-practised “We’re fourth on the departure list and should be off the runway in ten minutes”, is in order and I put my newspaper down, put my head back and ready for another take-off, homeward bound.

The coffee on the plane isn’t as bad as the last time I decided to shell out twenty rupees for that favourite beverage being served like it is in those American movies by skirted waitresses. Most importantly, it keeps me up for that depressing fictionalised account of a family going through the ’71 Bangladesh war that was a gift from the British Library, Chandigarh, part of the eye-opening trip to the green-and-gold fields of Punjab that Mal and His Majesty had taken me to. Soon after the landing at Hyderabad, the pilot’s throaty rasp was upon us again, informing us that the remnants of the winter up north were inexistent back home- the mere mention of 36 degrees had my hands sweating their veins out. The landing at (an incredibly further Anglicised) Vizag was rougher, the temperature six degrees lesser but I swear I might have passed out on the walk from the plane to the arrivals terminal because of the humidity. Ah, that’s the city I know as home, alright. The car’s angel lights and air-conditioning were veritably heavenly, as were Ma’s healing hand and Big B’s choice of boom-blasting music.

All along though, I kept wondering: where the bloody hell do pilots get their ruddy accents from?

***

Sometime last year, my brother tried to teach me how to drive a car. My incompetence beat my impatience in an uneven encounter: he gave up in two days. With my father expressing his surprise that with a little over a year for college to end and me being impotent with anything that’s motorised and has gears (yes, I added gears for that very reason, dear nefarious imbeciles), Big B brought himself to teach me to get two wheels moving, instead.
But, as he remarked himself, I must be the first person ever to be learning how to ride a bike when the cat to be belled has a 220cc engine.

For those who haven’t learnt riding a motorcycle yet, here’s a heads-up: it’s quite an emasculating experience. Particularly ironic for a vehicle that prides itself on being definitely male. Every single time I screw up the “press clutch – don’t accelerate – now shift up a gear” routine, the malevolent male bike gives its master’s male parts a proper crushing. Even Big B runs out of sarcasm when I manage to continuously achieve the holy grail of the neutral gear when trying to shift from the second to third. Yep - neutral gear at 30kmph, the fastest I got today.

As I deliver my well-rehearsed “belief in the public transport system” bullshit, even my most optimistic believer avers “You’re so never having a girlfriend. And your wife will hate you.”

I gobble another oatmeal cookie and snuggle in Ma’s arms watching F.I.R. on SAB TV. And stuff.

These kids

It’s a vile surge of anger, rushing to your head in a blinding flash. Pope’s dangerous little knowledge was producing that primal emotion that the rational me (better known as the pussy) forever endeavours to subvert. But, this time there is little restraint. I can’t hear what he’s saying. All I see is an enemy. My hands bashing his brains into the wall with manic barbarism. I shake it off my head, and a few minutes later, it’s the more familiar feeling of embarrassment. Of being shamed. Of being laughed at. More human, less primal, I console myself. I’m a loser, but at least I’m not a testosterone-charged ape. There, there.

I’m trying my very best. It’s the funniest I can get without referring to human excrement. It’s been a full hour- give me one full laugh, please. I’ve reduced peaches of men to rolling heaps, and more than just the odd woman, too. The distance, though, just keeps growing, and the vibes only get colder. And there it is again, a little spike from the spine growing into a raging monstrosity. I could take that chair and...

The ape inside thinks we social animals are such pansies. Bloody poofs, the whole lot.

P.S.- This is a fictional account based on true events. Or vice-versa. And stuff.

(Originally posted on March 12, 2011 at 2:53 a.m.)

Touch-me-not

It’s almost creepy how your mother can decipher the mood behind every “Hello” on the phone, even spotting the fake cheery ones. The last few replies have been exasperated pleas for better sleeping habits, if not “What’s wrong?”. That first utterance always sets up the tone for the rest of the conversation, with Ma using those Mommy superpowers to figure out the ethereal emotion around every breath and highlighting her inexhaustible will to make something of her lazy bum of a younger son. Such amazing abilities aren’t just limited to maters though- the elder siblings are similarly blessed, getting the drift behind a redundant emoticon or a mere drop of a shoulder. Big Brother, indeed.

These intangibles are pretty much the best excuse I give to my professor for taking no interest in artificial intelligence. Those networks and algorithms can learn all they want, but they’ll lack, to use an almost out-of-context phrase, a basic instinct. I just know that sentence is grammatically correct- spell check or no spell check. And though that picture is for all and sundry to see, you just know that that smile is for just the one lucky bastard.

Things- Good, Bad, Pretty Young etc

As I begin typing awkwardly on the stone cold keys of my keyboard, dawn slowly breaks on R-land’s horizon, its steady ascent only disturbed by my phone’s cacophonous alarm. I’ve been up for the past three hours; the frigid air penetrated through every strand of fleece in my quilt to end uneasy dreams of being George Costanza’s business partner (or something like that). Feet propped up in front of the heat convector on the tea table, I look out of the window to see the night’s pitch black give way to the snowy blue of the morning, eliciting a bright response from the birds in the blanket of trees behind our wing. What I like most about dawn is how the changes are never too sudden, never too alarming. You get time to think about what's gone by, and get ready for what's up ahead. The darkest of the night soon seems a long way back, only in an hour, with the sounds of dreary slippers dragging on the corridor floor waking you up.

The rigours of academics, however, aren’t as accommodating. A first ever six (followed by three sweet zeroes) will sit next to the colon on my latest grade sheet’s SGPA column, its rotundity eerily irritating the eyes used to the more robust sevens, even as its inverted brother remains as elusive as a semblance of sense in Tees Maar Khan. A fourth consecutive New Year’s Eve in the insti didn’t help the saddened mind, itching to join the rest of the family watching another farcical orchestra crooning Daler Mehendi’s legendary Ho Gayi Teri Balle Balle as midnight strikes.

Yet, despite the insti’s most monstrous efforts over the past four years, that resilient bug of optimism fails to go with the (outrageously cold) wind. Ladies Luck and Love await, according to random quacks in the newspaper’s horoscope section but what really gets me cracking for the day and year ahead is the Quote of the Day from yesterday’s Hindustan Times.

“Everybody should believe in something. I believe I’ll have another coffee.”

– Anonymous.

Three

Dear Blog,

Happy birthday to thee!
Today you turn three!

Love,
Me.

Slip Slidin’ Away

If someone who didn’t know asked me what the main ingredient for rasam was, I would have to answer- tomatoes. Yet, one barely associates them love apples with the steamy memories of the best piping hot rasams we’ve carefully sipped. Just the right amount of water, the careful tickle of the fingers to pick out just the right amount of spices, the hiss with the introduction of mustard seeds- tomatoes play but a bit-part role in the grand magic of rasam.

Such is also the magic of bookstores. Anything and everything from a cushion on the floor at the end of a long shelf, to a sitting ladder to reach for the dusty tomes at the top, my favourite bookstores have always been more about the browsing experience, even more than the buys themselves. The inscriptions on the first page of many a second-hand book in a makeshift street market have touched my heart. Sometimes, even overall disorganisation has made book-searching memorable; swimming through a pile of dog-eared, sulphur-teared copies looking for that elusive gem gives that heady feeling that Scrooge McDuck must have when backstroking his way through his money pool. Quite often, it’s the most fickle variables that bookmark a store in the memory, like the primly dressed man in the business section, the hep homemaker in the cookery area, next to the hippie in the travel section, or the giggling-gaggling teenagers “woo-hoo”ing whenever they spot a favourite in the chick-lit section. Or, of course, if you get (un)lucky, you could spot me secretly trying to finish the ultra-expensive Complete Calvin and Hobbes Collection.

P.S. - On that note, if you’re anywhere in and around Delhi, avoid Om Book Shop. For all kinds of reasons. Reliance’s Time-Out has a god-amazing selection, but makes book-searching seem like grocery shopping (something they are managing to do with every retail venture of theirs).

Red Letter Days? Not.

As another cold winter morning began with me wiping my drool off the pillow, I had a weird feeling in my stomach that told me it wasn’t going to be a great day. But it could as well have been the excess sambhar from the previous night. With this conundrum in my drowsy, lazy mind, I made my way to the toilet seat, where I proceeded to forget what I was doing and fall asleep in a pose not completely unlike The Thinker.

After some frantic shouting, shoving and shooing, I was out the door and into, well, a place I only knew as our front porch, but one could see no further than his own feet. Negotiating each step carefully while still trying to keep that icy wind off my nose, I somehow managed to see our school bus’ lights in the distance and made a dash for it. Getting in only after an exhausting sprint to the next stop, I got on wondering why I wasn’t allowed to take my Hero Kidd bicycle to school like my brother was. Even the usually chirpy driver seemed grumpy, and as I moved ahead, my usual spot with the Antakshari/Name-place-animal-thing gang was taken. I had to wind my way through to the back to stand between a couple of hard-nosed seniors I had no idea about.

Classes began, and my fears were confirmed when I missed two out of five spellings in the English class, earning the teacher’s rebuke. I was caught talking in the next class, and the week’s only P.T. period couldn’t have come sooner. At the football field, it was the usual: Chenab and Ravi versus Ganges and Satluj. Now, Satluj and Ravi simply hated each other; they were green and we were red- we had to! In those days of scrawny eight-year-olds, I was the ball-bashing midfielder. Well, that was more because every other kid wanted to be a striker, the fat-ass was the goalkeeper, and the abject losers were stationed at the back. Somehow managing not to fit in any category, I stuck around in the middle of the yellowish park jumping into tackles and passing it to the silkier, more skilful players up ahead. Trying to win one such ball, I rammed into one of the Satluj strikers, and having missed the ball completely, brought him down crashing to the cries of a badly mispronounced “Penalty!”. The penalty was duly argued over, taken a few times over in haste and finally agreed upon, and slotted. Now banished to the dreaded keeper’s position, I sulked between the posts. It did get better, though, as a couple of saves denied the rivals a win, and the match finished as a diplomatic draw. And my days as the permanent goalkeeper had well and truly begun.

The lunch break followed, and after filling myself with Mumma’s delicious creations, I finally thought the day wasn’t turning out that bad. As I went to relieve myself before the last period of the day started, I felt, well, relieved. The cold indolence of the morning had given way to exhaustion in the midday sun, and I let the bad day out; my head began to lighten. Strutting back in to the class with a dazed smile, I put my hand out and softly spoke “May I come in, Ma’am?”. Even before she could turn and nod, my daze was ended by loud screams. “The post office is open!”, “Letters, anybody?” and as it dawned on me, to the bemusement of the now-amused teacher, a loud chorus began... “Shame shame, puppy shame...”
I still pretend I don’t remember what happened next, but like that midsummer night which was to come a decade later, I remember every minute of that infinitely long last period and the subsequent bus ride home. They even sang “Shame shame, puppy shame” in the bus during Antakshari! I got through that day, and if I’d seen the Star Wars series by that time, I’d have known I was well on my way to becoming a true Jedi.

There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no death, there is the Force.