Let me illustrate by an example. Say a goose and a gander, try on a pair of jeans that don’t fit. This is sequence of events thereafter.
Goose
1. Starts minor hyperventilation
2. Tries to squeeze into jeans by contorting the body into weird shapes and not breathing
3. Examines the jeans to see if they have mysteriously shrunk and heaves a sigh of relief thinking they have indeed shrunk.
4. Tries on another pair of jeans just to prove the hypothesis
5. Finds out that the other jeans are no more accommodating than the first pair (pun unintended)
6. Minor hyperventilation progresses into medium sized hyperventilation
7. Goes through a mental checklist of what has been eaten in the previous two hours, wonders about water retention, salt intake, pms and other cheerful things
8. Tentatively (after wearing the lightest possible clothes in the wardrobe) climbs onto a weighing machine
9. Does an acrobatic back-flip in horror
10.Medium hyperventilation progresses to major hyperventilation
11.Calls best friends (2nos) and tearfully asks whether “Have I been looking fat these days?”
12.Hangs up after not believing them and sits in a corner brooding for the half hour
13.Goes through a check list of all meals and lack of exercise in the last three weeks
14.Curses Diwali, festivals and everything fattening
15.Kicks the offending jeans a couple of times
16.Make plans for drastic starvation and salad diet w/o sugar, oil, salt or anything edible in it
17.Curses genes
18. Make plans for rigorous exercise schedule
19. Make an excel sheet for diet and exercise tracking
20. Wallows in self pity
Gander
1. Waves the offending jeans at whoever is present and blandly and unconcernedly says “I need to get rid of all these jeans that don’t fit, they are cluttering up my cupboard”
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Sachin on a song
Dear Sachin,
I started watching cricket in 1991 or thereabouts - the buzz was around this fresh faced, young boy - a few years older than me, but certainly a contemporary, who was already been touted as the "One to watch".
And for almost twenty years, the world has watched - poetry in motion, the cricketing God, the one-only-next to Bradman - the praises have been so many and yet, none enough to describe who you are and what you mean to the ordinary joe or jane in the street.
You have stood for hope, when the country had nothing much to look forward to. You have stood for purity and what is right and pristine in a chaotic time. You have stood for passion in a country starved for heroes. You have stood for perfection in an imperfect world.
I have felt so many emotions watching you over the years - heady exhiliration at a sweetly timed cover drive, I have wept tears of joy when you led India to yet another victory, heartbreak and anguish when you were caught behind, and vitriolic anger against the umpire who dared give you a dodgy lbw, the odd vicarious brag ("Oh Sachin's house is right next to my college in Bandra"). But I have never felt the exasperation which say a Dravid used to occasionally elicit ( though I am a big fan of his as well) and never, ever disappointment.
Yesterday, watching you yet again, on a song, I felt another emotion - privilege - that I was born in the same generation as you and that I could actually watch you through all these years as a contemporary. That my growing years coincided with yours - and therefore, I could watch it with the same intense passion with which you played ( unlike the detachment I feel when I see the cricketers today) . And privilege that I have indeed witnessed genius.
When you are on , the world stops to watch.
CiW
P.S. Very gushy,incoherent post aiyo. *Blush*. But got very senti last night.Pliss excuse
I started watching cricket in 1991 or thereabouts - the buzz was around this fresh faced, young boy - a few years older than me, but certainly a contemporary, who was already been touted as the "One to watch".
And for almost twenty years, the world has watched - poetry in motion, the cricketing God, the one-only-next to Bradman - the praises have been so many and yet, none enough to describe who you are and what you mean to the ordinary joe or jane in the street.
You have stood for hope, when the country had nothing much to look forward to. You have stood for purity and what is right and pristine in a chaotic time. You have stood for passion in a country starved for heroes. You have stood for perfection in an imperfect world.
I have felt so many emotions watching you over the years - heady exhiliration at a sweetly timed cover drive, I have wept tears of joy when you led India to yet another victory, heartbreak and anguish when you were caught behind, and vitriolic anger against the umpire who dared give you a dodgy lbw, the odd vicarious brag ("Oh Sachin's house is right next to my college in Bandra"). But I have never felt the exasperation which say a Dravid used to occasionally elicit ( though I am a big fan of his as well) and never, ever disappointment.
Yesterday, watching you yet again, on a song, I felt another emotion - privilege - that I was born in the same generation as you and that I could actually watch you through all these years as a contemporary. That my growing years coincided with yours - and therefore, I could watch it with the same intense passion with which you played ( unlike the detachment I feel when I see the cricketers today) . And privilege that I have indeed witnessed genius.
When you are on , the world stops to watch.
CiW
P.S. Very gushy,incoherent post aiyo. *Blush*. But got very senti last night.Pliss excuse
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Love of Books, and Books of Love
The big problem with being a bibliophile is that one needs regular shots of books to keep sane. The bigger problem of being a bibliophile is that the only way to get these regular shots is to buy the dratted books. Nice, neat solution you say? Not if you are almost permanently broke and especially not if you live in a house where it is almost impossible to walk for five minutes without tripping over books (I really don’t know why though. I think the books have little baby books in the nights. We can’t possibly have brought so many).
So what does one do? One trawls the area and joins the only library which seems to exist in the city. And so have I.
Now this library (and I use the term euphemistically) has been started by one fellow K. It is about the size of a large walk-in-closet and is bursting at the seams with M&B’s, Archies, Joan Collins and not much else. So I have been wading through this not-much-else’s of his (I had taken a diksha that I shalt not read MB’s when I was 14have stuck to it so far).
K unfortunately labours under the illusion that he understands his clients. Thus, every unsuspecting borrower is ambushed with what he thinks are great recommendations and he gets quite offended if one doesn’t borrow the said book. I tried his suggestions a couple of times – fairly innocuous sounding titles and synopsis. And then I found books rampant with “six foot of virile masculinity and rippling abs with ( or without) tight Armani T-shirts” and “women who had sweat drenched shirts tucked in and open to show delectable mounds of bronzed flesh” which has endangered a severe mistrust of his must-reads. (Yes K, there ARE females in the universe who don’t like books of lovin’ particularly. Interesting sidebar, noticed how male porn is always visual and femme porn is always verbal?).
Now having gone through most of the readable books, and quite a few unreadable ones, I find myself having to confront variations of these soft-porn and romantic thingummies.
M&B of course I have vowed not to read. Other books in the genre which I have picked up over the years in book-drought times have been along the following lines.
Danielle Steeles – read some of her stuff in my teens and came to the conclusion that all her books followed the following construct
1.A misunderstood and difficult childhood wali heroine
2.With a name which was usually Alexandra ( Alex for short) ( sometimes for variation the hero was called Alex)
3.The heroine lost her virginity at age 19
4.She went through 3 men – 2 of them who died in tragic and heartrending fashion and left the poor heroine destitute and/or pregnant and/or completely alone
5.Tears and crying in approximately 76.31% of the pages
Nicholas Sparks’s appears to the male equivalent of DS. Only with more muscular hero who dies in the end – the hero can either be a fireman or a cop or a recluse living on an island. The tough masculinity belied by the tender-easily-broken heart just aching to love and be loved.
Then there was one female called Judith McNought – who apparently tried to write historical stuff. But then her heroes had names like ‘Wolf’ and ‘Fox ‘or ‘Raven’ (NEVER ‘Crow’) who ravish women and then fall in love with the “innocence shining out of their eyes” (and also the voluptuousness shining out of their bodies), but they tie themselves into guilt-ridden knots since they have raped the said women.
The woman of course, has this rather conflicted view of wolf. On the one hand, she is horny as hell and wants to be er...taken again. On the other hand, the woman is passionately in love with the misunderstood poor-little-rich-boy-ignored-by-his-parents-in-childhood-and-hence-turned-into-ravager and wants to reform him. But then she also mistrusts him because he has the power to “shatter her heart into a million splinters”. And then all ends happily ever after.
Frankly, I think most females would have a strong distaste for anyone who rapes them – even assuming the said rapist is an Adonis look-alike. But maybe, that’s just my point of view.
The BEST plot however goes as follows (I had read this a dozen years ago and I still remember it.) I cannot for the life of me recall the name of the book or the author though. The story went something like this.
Starts with a suicide of a rich, successful, handsome (blah, blah) man. No one knows why this fellow should commit suicide since he is on the verge of a marriage with a girl of his dreams who happens to be also twenty years younger than him. So she (or someone else) starts investigating into the death.
Flashback time
1.Rich farmer A rapes next door neighbour’s fifteen or sixteen year old daughter B
2.B gets pregnant.
3.B’s parents coerce A to get hitched to B.
4.A and B get hitched, have a baby son C
5.Three four years of misery for B pass, while A continues to plant his seeds in the neighbouring lands.
6.B decides enough is enough and takes off into the sunset leaving A and C behind. End of B
7.Fifteen years later, C is hotness personified.
8.C goes to the Riviera or somewhere, and has a steamy affair with a Mrs. Robinson – let’s call her D. D is also married to rich fellow E.
9.Affair ends, D and E fade into the background
10.Twenty years further on, C falls in REAL love with F. They romance, they slow dance and they prance.
11.And then C commits suicide.
12.Why?
13.Because he finds out that a) Mrs Robinson (aka D) was actually B- his mother.
14.And he also finds out that from that torrid affair of his, this D/B/Mother had conceived a child – who, hold your breath turns out to be F the same person he has been having a romance with which of course involves sharing the conjugal bed.
15.F is essentially C’s child, conceived with C’s mother.
Do you feel like throwing up now? I did.
After that I have a mortal fear of picking up any such books.
Sigh. I need a new library.
So what does one do? One trawls the area and joins the only library which seems to exist in the city. And so have I.
Now this library (and I use the term euphemistically) has been started by one fellow K. It is about the size of a large walk-in-closet and is bursting at the seams with M&B’s, Archies, Joan Collins and not much else. So I have been wading through this not-much-else’s of his (I had taken a diksha that I shalt not read MB’s when I was 14have stuck to it so far).
K unfortunately labours under the illusion that he understands his clients. Thus, every unsuspecting borrower is ambushed with what he thinks are great recommendations and he gets quite offended if one doesn’t borrow the said book. I tried his suggestions a couple of times – fairly innocuous sounding titles and synopsis. And then I found books rampant with “six foot of virile masculinity and rippling abs with ( or without) tight Armani T-shirts” and “women who had sweat drenched shirts tucked in and open to show delectable mounds of bronzed flesh” which has endangered a severe mistrust of his must-reads. (Yes K, there ARE females in the universe who don’t like books of lovin’ particularly. Interesting sidebar, noticed how male porn is always visual and femme porn is always verbal?).
Now having gone through most of the readable books, and quite a few unreadable ones, I find myself having to confront variations of these soft-porn and romantic thingummies.
M&B of course I have vowed not to read. Other books in the genre which I have picked up over the years in book-drought times have been along the following lines.
Danielle Steeles – read some of her stuff in my teens and came to the conclusion that all her books followed the following construct
1.A misunderstood and difficult childhood wali heroine
2.With a name which was usually Alexandra ( Alex for short) ( sometimes for variation the hero was called Alex)
3.The heroine lost her virginity at age 19
4.She went through 3 men – 2 of them who died in tragic and heartrending fashion and left the poor heroine destitute and/or pregnant and/or completely alone
5.Tears and crying in approximately 76.31% of the pages
Nicholas Sparks’s appears to the male equivalent of DS. Only with more muscular hero who dies in the end – the hero can either be a fireman or a cop or a recluse living on an island. The tough masculinity belied by the tender-easily-broken heart just aching to love and be loved.
Then there was one female called Judith McNought – who apparently tried to write historical stuff. But then her heroes had names like ‘Wolf’ and ‘Fox ‘or ‘Raven’ (NEVER ‘Crow’) who ravish women and then fall in love with the “innocence shining out of their eyes” (and also the voluptuousness shining out of their bodies), but they tie themselves into guilt-ridden knots since they have raped the said women.
The woman of course, has this rather conflicted view of wolf. On the one hand, she is horny as hell and wants to be er...taken again. On the other hand, the woman is passionately in love with the misunderstood poor-little-rich-boy-ignored-by-his-parents-in-childhood-and-hence-turned-into-ravager and wants to reform him. But then she also mistrusts him because he has the power to “shatter her heart into a million splinters”. And then all ends happily ever after.
Frankly, I think most females would have a strong distaste for anyone who rapes them – even assuming the said rapist is an Adonis look-alike. But maybe, that’s just my point of view.
The BEST plot however goes as follows (I had read this a dozen years ago and I still remember it.) I cannot for the life of me recall the name of the book or the author though. The story went something like this.
Starts with a suicide of a rich, successful, handsome (blah, blah) man. No one knows why this fellow should commit suicide since he is on the verge of a marriage with a girl of his dreams who happens to be also twenty years younger than him. So she (or someone else) starts investigating into the death.
Flashback time
1.Rich farmer A rapes next door neighbour’s fifteen or sixteen year old daughter B
2.B gets pregnant.
3.B’s parents coerce A to get hitched to B.
4.A and B get hitched, have a baby son C
5.Three four years of misery for B pass, while A continues to plant his seeds in the neighbouring lands.
6.B decides enough is enough and takes off into the sunset leaving A and C behind. End of B
7.Fifteen years later, C is hotness personified.
8.C goes to the Riviera or somewhere, and has a steamy affair with a Mrs. Robinson – let’s call her D. D is also married to rich fellow E.
9.Affair ends, D and E fade into the background
10.Twenty years further on, C falls in REAL love with F. They romance, they slow dance and they prance.
11.And then C commits suicide.
12.Why?
13.Because he finds out that a) Mrs Robinson (aka D) was actually B- his mother.
14.And he also finds out that from that torrid affair of his, this D/B/Mother had conceived a child – who, hold your breath turns out to be F the same person he has been having a romance with which of course involves sharing the conjugal bed.
15.F is essentially C’s child, conceived with C’s mother.
Do you feel like throwing up now? I did.
After that I have a mortal fear of picking up any such books.
Sigh. I need a new library.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Alter Egos
One of the problems of social media is that two separate worlds and two identities are starting to collide these days.
When I first started the online avatar circa ~2000 in the chatting era, life was very simple. There was the real life me. And then there was the online avatar. The people who existed in both spheres were largely disparate – maybe one or two very close friends aware that I was on the chat scene. Consequently it developed into almost two parallel personae – the online avatar the almost crystallized, distilled version of the quirky, carefree, irreverent part of me. The real life was more diffused – with responsibilities, work and worries and what not.
A few years on, some of the folks from the chatting crowd went on to become friends –leading to an exchange of names and telephone numbers. But for some reason, the chatting scene (or maybe it was the early internet scene) seemed to attract a fairly anonymity obsessed breed of individuals so it was fairly easy to keep the two identities separate (the geographical spread of the chatters also helped – almost all were in the US)
2004, a fascinating new thing called blogging came to my notice. I had no social life – my time being largely spent at work. A lot of the chat crowd in an almost synchronized, lemming-isque fashion had stopped chatting. And of course, that latent writing bug in me. So blogging was manna from heaven – a place to write, vent and read some other people. It eventually led to a forum to meet new people – but that was an unplanned (albeit very welcome) side-effect.
But the bloggers, unlike the chatters (at least the early bloggers) all seemed to coincidentally belong to the same large fuzzy circle in which the real life people operated (a remarkable number of them from the marketing/advertising/MR fraternity - the no-social-lifers with the same bright idea perhaps). Almost all of them were contemporaries and from the same tier of grad/post-grad schools. And thus every other blogger was only one or two degrees of separation away from me.
And thus the overlaps began – some meetings, some phone calls, many mails, chatting –the earlier purdah of real life versus online life just wouldn’t work anymore.
At the other end of the spectrum, the REAL life people started popping up with rather alarming regularity in the online life –, the boss on blogger, the client on twitter. And then chatting folks started blogging. And the blogging folks started chatting. And everyone and their mother-in-law started twittering and facebooking.
Very disconcerting to my poor alter egos. Should I continue with the online avatar in the online world irrespective of the fact that offline people (who had seen only the stone-cold sober side of me) or should I not? Would I like to show the blog/twitter avatars to a few people from real life?
The other aspect is that of anonymity – I am yet to ascertain for myself what it means to me. When I started chatting it was clear that I didn’t want the online folks to know my name or any other aspect– the internet was abuzz with stalkers and perverts and hackers who could do unnameable things if they knew who you were. But over the last decade ( aiyo rama- almost a decade!!!), where my anonymity paranoia has relaxed, I wonder whether I am more worried about the real life acquaintances coming to know of the more carefree persona ( the in-laws and outlaws hobnobbing with the chatting crowd – now that IS a terrifying thought).
And it’s all very confusing keeping them separate. I am very sure I will sign off an official mail with CiW one of these days.
Maybe I shall flamboyantly unmask myself one of these days. Hmmm.
When I first started the online avatar circa ~2000 in the chatting era, life was very simple. There was the real life me. And then there was the online avatar. The people who existed in both spheres were largely disparate – maybe one or two very close friends aware that I was on the chat scene. Consequently it developed into almost two parallel personae – the online avatar the almost crystallized, distilled version of the quirky, carefree, irreverent part of me. The real life was more diffused – with responsibilities, work and worries and what not.
A few years on, some of the folks from the chatting crowd went on to become friends –leading to an exchange of names and telephone numbers. But for some reason, the chatting scene (or maybe it was the early internet scene) seemed to attract a fairly anonymity obsessed breed of individuals so it was fairly easy to keep the two identities separate (the geographical spread of the chatters also helped – almost all were in the US)
2004, a fascinating new thing called blogging came to my notice. I had no social life – my time being largely spent at work. A lot of the chat crowd in an almost synchronized, lemming-isque fashion had stopped chatting. And of course, that latent writing bug in me. So blogging was manna from heaven – a place to write, vent and read some other people. It eventually led to a forum to meet new people – but that was an unplanned (albeit very welcome) side-effect.
But the bloggers, unlike the chatters (at least the early bloggers) all seemed to coincidentally belong to the same large fuzzy circle in which the real life people operated (a remarkable number of them from the marketing/advertising/MR fraternity - the no-social-lifers with the same bright idea perhaps). Almost all of them were contemporaries and from the same tier of grad/post-grad schools. And thus every other blogger was only one or two degrees of separation away from me.
And thus the overlaps began – some meetings, some phone calls, many mails, chatting –the earlier purdah of real life versus online life just wouldn’t work anymore.
At the other end of the spectrum, the REAL life people started popping up with rather alarming regularity in the online life –, the boss on blogger, the client on twitter. And then chatting folks started blogging. And the blogging folks started chatting. And everyone and their mother-in-law started twittering and facebooking.
Very disconcerting to my poor alter egos. Should I continue with the online avatar in the online world irrespective of the fact that offline people (who had seen only the stone-cold sober side of me) or should I not? Would I like to show the blog/twitter avatars to a few people from real life?
The other aspect is that of anonymity – I am yet to ascertain for myself what it means to me. When I started chatting it was clear that I didn’t want the online folks to know my name or any other aspect– the internet was abuzz with stalkers and perverts and hackers who could do unnameable things if they knew who you were. But over the last decade ( aiyo rama- almost a decade!!!), where my anonymity paranoia has relaxed, I wonder whether I am more worried about the real life acquaintances coming to know of the more carefree persona ( the in-laws and outlaws hobnobbing with the chatting crowd – now that IS a terrifying thought).
And it’s all very confusing keeping them separate. I am very sure I will sign off an official mail with CiW one of these days.
Maybe I shall flamboyantly unmask myself one of these days. Hmmm.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Horn OK Please*
After five and a half years of writing whatever drivel I chose too, I thought it was high time I got some feedback from my dear readers. So dear readers, I have introduced the star rating system for my posts - where you can throw bouquets and brickbats ( the former, for a choice. We drivel-writers have rather thin, vulnerable skin). Any super enthusiastic folks who want to go and rate the archived posts are also welcome ( No? Well, it was worth a shot)
I also just got an invite to be a Desi Pundit contributor - and as you can see, I am being very modest and NOT putting it all in block caps and NOT writing about doing the hula hula around the laptop after receiving the mail. A very, very big thank you to the Desi Pundit team - I am very excited.
And in this spirit of feedback, dear readers and dear lurkers, I would like to put in a question to you. Which would you consider the top 3/5/10/Heck-as-many-as-you-like-don't-stint posts, which you think should be made into DP ? Please comment with whichever titles, categories you remember. ( I have been struggling with choice. Also with the temptation of marking ALL 150 of them.So am taking the easy way out and passing the buck hyuk hyuk.).
* Wanted to wake you up you, dear lurking readers.
I also just got an invite to be a Desi Pundit contributor - and as you can see, I am being very modest and NOT putting it all in block caps and NOT writing about doing the hula hula around the laptop after receiving the mail. A very, very big thank you to the Desi Pundit team - I am very excited.
And in this spirit of feedback, dear readers and dear lurkers, I would like to put in a question to you. Which would you consider the top 3/5/10/Heck-as-many-as-you-like-don't-stint posts, which you think should be made into DP ? Please comment with whichever titles, categories you remember. ( I have been struggling with choice. Also with the temptation of marking ALL 150 of them.So am taking the easy way out and passing the buck hyuk hyuk.).
* Wanted to wake you up you, dear lurking readers.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Nothing official about it.
The hero seems to have acquired an office wife whose existence is causing much merriment in my life. AND she seems to keep hero in line without me having to do any work ( an ideal state of things,no?).
She is positively and definitely MUCH more wifely than the I am or am ever likely to be.
She tut tuts when he goes out for a lunch with the team the day after he has been sick (Keep him away from chicken when he feels like it? Very hazardous to health activity, that)
She cuts her hair and seeks his opinion ( I have come to the conclusion that unless I get a Mohawk cut, or get a tonsured head, there is very little actual chance of hero noticing.And if I were to ever ask him questions like "how is my hair looking", chances are that he will give some utterly inappropriate (and devastatingly truthful) response.)
She gets scandalized when he swears and tells him "mat karo" ( The official wife is proud of the fact that she has a better cuss-vocabulary then the hero. She is the co-author of that famous cuss-word dictionary after all).
And she, the unofficial wife calls him "Aeee"* in full marathi ayya-issha style( as oppose to "Abbe").
Poor fellow dreads work tete-a-tetes with her because he thinks she might start nagging about something.
I, of course, am shining in comparison.
So that philosophy that "If you want to look thin, get fat friends" seems to work here as well. If you want to be the cool wife, GET a scary wife.
* Closest hindi equivalent would be "Aeji" I think.
She is positively and definitely MUCH more wifely than the I am or am ever likely to be.
She tut tuts when he goes out for a lunch with the team the day after he has been sick (Keep him away from chicken when he feels like it? Very hazardous to health activity, that)
She cuts her hair and seeks his opinion ( I have come to the conclusion that unless I get a Mohawk cut, or get a tonsured head, there is very little actual chance of hero noticing.And if I were to ever ask him questions like "how is my hair looking", chances are that he will give some utterly inappropriate (and devastatingly truthful) response.)
She gets scandalized when he swears and tells him "mat karo" ( The official wife is proud of the fact that she has a better cuss-vocabulary then the hero. She is the co-author of that famous cuss-word dictionary after all).
And she, the unofficial wife calls him "Aeee"* in full marathi ayya-issha style( as oppose to "Abbe").
Poor fellow dreads work tete-a-tetes with her because he thinks she might start nagging about something.
I, of course, am shining in comparison.
So that philosophy that "If you want to look thin, get fat friends" seems to work here as well. If you want to be the cool wife, GET a scary wife.
* Closest hindi equivalent would be "Aeji" I think.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Happy Diwali
Wish you and your family a very Happy Diwali.
May it be full of light, and happiness and love and luck.
May it be full of light, and happiness and love and luck.
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