For Nalini

For Nalini,

Who is still attempting to decipher Vamsi's statement.... This is not a descriptive on how that statement came about... that would be self explanatory....

I hope you've been to hyderabad sometime... if u were, I am sure you would have noticed these....how do i describe them??? these small restaurants... i wouldnt call them that... indeed,if you forgive my romantic idealization of hyderabad, they are like the cafes of paris... nice wonderful places where you are served flavoured tea -"maska maarke"... I doubt if bangalore or any other place in India has an equivalent of hyderbad's irani chai or irani tea stall...

These are the places where blue collar workers, labourers, bill collectors and all the bhadralok ie proletariat of hyderabad converge, in the hope of tea, smoke and entertaining conversation... It is not a place for us white collar types... I doubt if any one in my family ever had tea in an irani tea stall... or would even approve of the fact that I did it... We white collar bourgiouse(alright I am weak with spellings and the french are terrible with theirs....) prefer our tiffin centres, restaurants(tiffin 330-7 pm only) or as has beeen seen nowadays, the I am too hep for you because i work in an IT company and I make less then the Irani stall owner kinds always prefer CCD, Barista...(tea costs 55 bucks there...wtf!!!!)... I guess the wonderful thing abt it all - wrt us - is that we are supposed to belong to the white collars... not the bhadralok( its a bengali term for the proletariat!) and yet there we were, drinking tea, smoking fags (people at home, I doubt, still dont know abt it :D) and of course - discussing SPSS and Excel....

I guess this rag tag picture of amusing anecdotes could not have been complete without our mode of transport - A 4 lakh car!... I believe it is like some kind of rock music isnt it? the jarring sounds have a beauty of their own and become music... the hilarity and outright ridiculousness of the whole incident is wat makes it so wonderful!

Hope you could understand....

-ani

We've come in a Santro to an Irani cafe, had 2 irani chai's and Osmania biscuits and talked about SPSS, Microsoft Excel.

-Anirudh !

The bollywood effect

Most of us Indians learn our Hindi through movies. A fellow male colleague of 23, hailing from Andhra and identifying himself with the foregoing category of hindi learners, wants to invite his female Delhiite boss of 28 to the next client meet... He goes up to her and asks, 'Tu aati kya?'...


and he didn't know he'd committed a folly!

The betel leaf is one of the more exotic specimens of flora in India...Popularly referred to as the Paan patta in central and northern parts of the country, it is an efficient digestive, an object and mark of hospitality in old muslim khandaans of UP and Bihar, a delectable after dinner treat and a very interesting base for culinary experimentation. Try the following quick stuffings if you are bored of the conventional choona, supari do's:
1) Whipped milk cream and seedless cherries
2) strawberry sauce
3) Paan coated with hot melted chocolate
4) maybe melted white chocolate too
5) Thick sweet rabdi
6) ground dry fruits coated in honey

Its time the popular Indian delicacy was subject to a little innovation after all.

Dr. Sania Mirza / Can someone give me a Honorary Doctorate?

Why not i thought when i read that some lame ass university in Tamil Nadu is conferring a Doctorate to Sania Mirza, so let's recollect her achievements

• Got a kick ass sports deal from one of the sport biggie footwear firms
• Churns mixed feelings, by skirting it all up :P
• Wears designer jewellery and sarees and walks "error free" on ramps !
• The current face of Hyderabad, popular after Biryani and Charminar
• She manages to play tennis too after finding time for all this.

Honestly, when i first read about her in The Hindu's sports space, explicitly dedicated to the men and women of India who're doing what they wanted to do and manage to excruciate their experience through photographs and deals. She did pretty well though, managed to win the junior Wimbledon doubles trophy with an other lady about whom I have no clue today or have read about to flaunt off further achievements. Eitherways, if you've read till here, you'd know this post has no structure and plain ridicule stretched across the borders of the post, so I am guessing you can take it further if you like.

After all this i began to wonder where did i go wrong in the process, I have no single police record, i drive after drinking, i bribe the cops honestly and they salute me back some times for the generosity, I tell my paper boy he can kick my door to announce his arrival he's happy doing it, my watchman uses my flat's uncomfort-freeing facilities and blesses me as soon as he comes out, I ash my ciggerettes in a dust bin and that too, in the cover neatly tucked into it so that the "amma" who comes to clean it up has no issues with it. So, i guess I am being a good citizen, not sure if it's more than what Sania does everyday, some activities could include one of the following

• Stretching harder for the lensmen (Psst: Sania, Paparazzi have a different meaning in India)
• Wearing those ultra-clever-revealing things/whatever (DAMN !)
• She's always had more than 90% in her report cards (Who would not in their school, ask anyone and they'd all say "I was really good back then but now . . ." and the story starts)
• Sumptuous biryani a day, would keep the fitness at bay ( :D )
• Visit the tennis practise place from outside and see people play, and worse call it "Studying, the anatomy and the response element for success"
• Checking her FB/Orkut/some other lame rip off (Wonder what they'd write on her wall, Ex - "Hey babes, did u see that movie, the heroine was so cute . . . . . " damn, there it ends ! )
• Air guitar practise with her tennis racquets, she must have atleast 10 guitars errr, racquets.
• Look sick and wave from her house balcony (refer to point 1 for paparazzi quotient)
• She's probably thinking of an other piercing (Oh yeah !)
• Wonder about her bedspreads and think they dont go well with her sports shoes.
• Change the name plate outside her place to Dr. Sania Mirza

And all this in exchange for a Doctorate which i was considering seriously, which I still am, though now I have some variables changed, dosent this remotely make you feel a thing and people let it pass without a hitch, the two things i thought when i read that news paper that day was, What kind of a shitty university is this ? and Did they not have a better marketing plan for themselves if they didnt have the right results to show ? Probably the first question has a decent answer, the second question speaks volumes for itself and ensures one not to get into a place where Doctorates are distributed like chana-wrapping-papers. Then i wondered what would she wear to the ceremony, that got the better of me for a certain time, but i managed to get back to my senses. Flawed marketing has cost people it's lives (remember that Cindy Crawford hoarding on some random freeway in the US and the sudden increase in accidents) and hope's (Do you want a doctorate ??). Now i wonder where will this goto and Yeah I also did think of what she would talk, if she is allowed which I am thinking is mandatory/stupidly irritating at times. She'd not forget mentioning her sponsors but would've forgot the name of her first coach or her current IQ level, which should revolve around the smalles two digit number existing for comfort and (interestingly) cofidence.

Yes, I am pissed and No, i still like her only in the news paper photographs !

Comment is free

I don’t generally compose entire blog posts centered around comments on my previous posts. In this case I make an exception. I penned a stand-alone post after a significant interval as is apparent from the inactivity on my personal blog site as well as the rare piece of writing on this one. A comment rendered directly to the author in a chat window on my previous post read:

‘Nice, Its come out well. I’ll provide constructive criticism later.’

Going by the person I know the comment giver to be and going by me own apprehensions about the quality of writing in the post-mentioned, the translation reads:

‘I cannot tell you in your face that the post was not much good. Hence I choose to postpone the moment of my agony from subsequent embarrassment when I am forced the reveal my true comments to you. And I have no intentions of voluntarily heralding the moment any time soon. ‘

Other offline comments were not too-praiseworthy either. The verbatim reproduction and translation of one of them goes as follows:

Comment reproduction: ----blank----
Author’s response after a few disconcerting moments of silence: Have you no comments to offer?
Response to author’s query: no.
Translation: Add an (s) to the colon’d word.
Translation(s): Numbering infinite. Changing form with the author’s changing mood.

If anyone thinks this post narrates the sulk story of a not-in-an-exuberant-mood writer, they are not entirely right. It intention is to relate her observations on the responses to a mimic’d style of writing. Tragically this act of felony is not a rarity in the field of writing. Too many writers have aped other writers who have aped some other writers. The evolution of writing has become stagnant in this midst of all this mimicry and with it so have the tastes of its audiences. Rare gems of originality are few and far and readers who could appreciate them, rarer. In a later post maybe I’ll list some pieces of literature, which I think belong to the latter category. For now, I go back to my rant on my previous post and end with a few confessions thereupon.

Confession #1: I was hoping not many girls read the post, a few deciding to give me a dose my own medicine. I could be a fashion disaster in a detail or two mentioned in the previous post. If I am in fact, I pray the other women are too. After all, there is nothing that consoles one on his/her imperfection as does another’s imperfection.

Confession #2: I had asked Vamsi when he’d invited me to contribute to this blog, what mood he had wanted to preserve for the blog. I don’t quite remember what mood he had answered, but I am 90% sure the mood of the previous post was not what he had envisioned. I wouldn’t say I don’t intend to repeat my peevish takes at transforming this blog into a woman’s magazine!

Victim or Victimizer

I have always maintained that dreams represent unconscious anxieties. Yesterday I dreamt about shoes. Day before I dreamt about clothes. Two days of transitory shopaholism can be the cause of much anxiety in my life. And I am not alone. I share the fate suffered by the million and more victims of modern society, the half referred to by its other half as the fairer sex. Its just one of the plights the man bestows and the woman bears. It’s called ‘fashion’. A woman’s clothes and shoes are a small part of it and relentlessly run into a long list nonetheless:
1. Casual wear for friendly outings.
2. Casual wear for family outings
3. Casual wear for casual Fridays at office.
4. Casual wear for Sundays at home.
5. Day wear for an afternoon date
6. Evening wear for a dinner date
7. Hi- fashion wear for a club outing
8. Sports wear for gym
9. Different sportswear for badminton and tennis
10. Formal wear for work
11. Light formal wear for general family functions
12. Heavy formal wear for the ‘heavier’ family functions
13. Night wear for sleep
14. The aforementioned categories are mutually exclusive and repetition of outfits can be fatal.
And then we come to the shoes:
1. Formal shoes for office
2. Heels for the dates
3. Sports shoes for the gym
4. A different pair for tennis
5. Flats for shopping
6. Ballerinas for the denims
7. Strap-ups for the skirts
8. Morjaris for Indian wear
9. Comfy wear for travel
10. Footwear for home and for the frequent visits to the neighborhood kirana store
11. And make that at least two pairs of each… coz a colour mis-match is an unforgivable crime.
And the list doesn’t end with the 20 pairs of shoes and 52 pairs of dresses. It includes repetition of the shopping exercise every quarter of a year and extends to what we wear in our ears, our necks, our hands, our fingers, our hair and a rare unconventional area of decoration sometimes. We are artists at work, constantly renovating with every changing fashion season. We invest time, money and patience and sacrifice our peace of mind to the end of being perceived as modern. The trick, we say, is to look like a winner- one, we know, works with men. And the trick is not secret. There’s an entire industry built on its foundation and every move is out in the open. Yet, men succumb to its charms. Substance-over-form is the loser’s maxim, belonging to the dud who can’t get the babe and the achievers in the conquest are a marketer’s dream. Whatever happened to the natural order of the male attracting the female, we love playing the reversed game, and with flair.
No woman would say it easy being a woman. But it’s definitely a lot of fun.