An Unusual Arrangement

Today I am hosting KayEm who blogs at Never Mind Yaar. She is also the author of the novel ‘Never Mind Yaar’ that was recently published in India. I have been following her blog from some time now and she always come across as a very level-headed person who is passionate about changing the world to become a better place. Her posts like Does Multiculturalism breed Intolerance, One of the Greatest Strengths of Social Media, Footpath Vendors and Rape – Where’s the Connection? were insightful. She also writes short stories and collaborated with Abhy (A cartoonist) to create a unique way of telling one of her story – Babhuti, the Barber. You can also read about her journey and experiences of writing her first novel here. 

Over to KayEm

Photo provided by KayEm. Samson is on the right

Mummy Diaries! We named him Samson because he was puny and had the softest of curls. He grew. His curls became stubborn and tight. They were – still are – a nightmare to brush. But when they are and when he’s asleep he looks angelic. 

Sammy is the friendliest of dogs. With his owners. He slobbers all over us. He brings his little toys and invites us to play. He looks at us quizzically when he’s trying to understand the sudden sweep of an arm, an accusing index finger pointing at him and the loud, wailing sounds like no-ooooo barking or go-ooooo away that humans emit from time to time. He sleeps by 8 pm, waking up constantly to follow us around, distinctly droopy, from room to room. But let a stranger pass our fence or come to our door and it changes him completely. He turns into a wild, untamed beast. He barks like barking were going out of fashion. He dodges the owners to reach the door first and usually succeeds. He is impossible to rein in. We’ve tried many things including a dog training school. He holds the equivalent of a PhD but as soon as we have strangers at our door our learned friend forgets all his weighty dissertations. 

That’s where Steve comes into the picture. Steve is our house-sitter. Whenever we go out of town he stays at our house, making it look lived in and taking care of the dogs.

Early this month we decided to meet up with our other kids – the human kind, and asked Steve if he was free to house sit for us for a few days. To our luck he was. Steve had met Kara before but it was his first time with Sammy. We told him how unfriendly Sammy was with strangers but it didn’t seem to worry him. His girlfriend, wanting to reassure us, said that even the growliest of dogs soon became his doting shadow. I smiled weakly, sure Sammy would prove to be the one exception.

Sammy didn’t take to Steve. Our hearts sank. We’d booked our tickets and couldn’t change our plans at the eleventh hour. I felt nervous. Steve seemed confident and relaxed. He had two dogs of his own and took them for an hour’s walk down by the riverside every day. Perhaps Sammy would enjoy that and the company of other dogs. With fingers crossed we handed our dogs and house keys over to Steve and left.   

[We had a super time with the kids. Much refreshed and reassured to see them reasonably happy with life, we returned home to our canine family.]

I’d been worried for Steve and Sammy. At the same time an idea had begun forming in my mind. I desperately wanted Sammy to be friendly with humans. I believed it would enhance the quality of his life – he could be free of his leash when I took him walking, for example. He walked off the leash only with Steve and my husband.

When Steve came by to drop off our keys the next day, Sammy barked like crazy. Oh no. Was it back to square one? Steve tried to give him a little pat but Sammy backed away, still barking. “Forgotten me already?” said a disappointed Steve. And then it happened. Once he was in the house and sitting down, Sammy jumped on to his lap and gave him an affectionate nudge. Oh joy! Both Steve and I felt relieved – he, for having proved Sammy had taken to him and I, for realising there still was hope.

It was now or never. Wondering if it was quite the wrong thing to ask and aware that no one might have put such a proposition to him, I asked Steve if he’d continue walking Sammy along with his own dogs for a couple of months. In exchange I’d cook him and his partner a dish, daily. A desperate situation calls for desperate measures. I waited. At worst, he’d say no.

From the way his eyes lit up at the suggestion I think he liked the idea. What a relief. 

Today was the first day of this unusual arrangement. Sammy came back excited and happy. Steve said he got along famously with his own dog, Charlie. The most telling proof – when it was time for Steve to leave, Sammy didn’t bark. I am beginning to think this just might work.

 

A failed suicide attempt

I held the blade close to my wrist. Its cold, sharp edge ready to slice my skin and spill my blood. It reminded me of cold winters. I tried hard to slash it, to end everything. My hands did not tremble but that was not courage. Courage is much more than that.

I do not remember my parents forcing me to become a doctor or an engineer. Maybe they were confidant that I will choose either of the professions eventually because I topped every year in my school. I, on the other hand had pretty much no idea. It is sad that we are asked to make important decisions of life at such a young age, when we do not know our mind and the implications of our decisions. That is why it is so easy to mold a person into thinking that what the rest of the herd is doing is best for him too. I did not prepare for the IIT entrance exam with much zeal and failed. My parents, teachers and friends felt bad. They always thought that I was destined for bigger things, like I was supposed to be the Prime Minister. 

During my stint in Delhi University, I saw everyone prepare for the GATE exams conducted by IIT. Yes, the mammoth was again in front of me and I was supposed to tame and ride it. Everyone in the college believed that our best shot at a decent job was to somehow get into an engineering stream, otherwise you would end up being a PhD student which a lot of us abhorred. My parents were silently observing my moves. They had too much faith in me. And so I started preparing for the GATE exam.

I gave it a year and put my heart and soul in it. I would study for hours and lose track of time. I would study travelling in the bus to college. I would study late at night till I would realize with a start that I was drowning the book in my drool. I believed that there was no college mate of mine who was putting in so much hard work as I was. I found out later that everyone had the same notion about themselves.

I took my entrance exam with half of India. Thousands of us were fighting for a few hundred seats. When you see such a rush of students who sit with you and solve those questions, you are always hit by a wave of doubt. Maybe you should have prepared more. Maybe you should have prayed harder so that God would have sneaked in an extra one hour in your daily routine.

I was at a friend’s home when the results were announced. Both of us immediately went to an Internet cafe near her house and checked the results. My name was not there. I checked again and again. Maybe there was a mistake. My friend looked at me with pity and rubbed my shoulder. I checked the result for another friend who I believed had studied very little. He was selected. I got up from the seat and told my friend that I was leaving for home. She ran after me and called my name but I was not listening. I kept walking towards the bus stop. I felt desperately lost. It was as if my life had come to a grinding halt.

On my journey home, I thought about various ways to commit suicide. I thought of jumping off the terrace but I knew I would never be able to do that because of my fear of heights. Drinking poison was also out of the question because that might turn extremely painful. Finally I came up with slashing my wrist at night when everyone was asleep. I thought that I would bleed to death by morning and no one will know.

When I reached home, I did not disclose the result to my parents. After dinner, I sneaked into my parent’s room and took out a blade from dad’s shaving kit. That night, when everyone was asleep, I held the blade in my hand and tried to cut my wrist. I tried for almost the whole night, building up courage again and again and then failing like a coward. I imagined the scene in the morning. I imagined my mother crying after seeing my corpse and the bedsheet stained with my blood. I imagined my father and sister going in an uncontrollable grief. I imagined their world crumbling to pieces. I imagined their life ahead.

I was not able to slash my wrist that night. I was awake when the sun arrived, when the birds started their morning rituals, when people started coming out of their homes for a morning walk. Then I got up and kept the blade back in my father’s shaving kit. It was not worth it. My death would not have been an isolated incident. My family would have died with me.

It has been 10 years since that incident. Now when I look back, I understand what a fool I was. I was about to kill myself because I did not pass an entrance exam. Had I done that, I would have missed everything that happened in my beautiful life in the past ten years. The bonds of friendship that I created during my stay in Kurukshetra (where I did my M.Tech and finally became an engineer) would not have existed. All those amazing memories of the time I spent in Bhubaneshwar and Chennai would not have existed. I would not have visited Kodaikanal, Rameshwaram, Munnar, Pondicherry, Konark, Agra, Amritsar, Goa, Manchester, Paris, London, Scotland and Switzerland. I would have never seen snow falling like soft cotton from the sky. I would have never got married and fallen in love (yes, it happened the other way round). My daughter would not have existed. I would never have seen those tears in the eyes of my parents when they held my daughter in their hands for the first time. 

When I think of all the beautiful memories of the past ten years, I shudder to think of the consequences if I would have slashed my wrist that night. And then I burst with happiness that I didn’t. I have realized that our life is too important to lose it over such minuscule hiccups. It is more grand than any of us can imagine. It has so many unknown twists and turns that it can leave us breathless.

Trauma hits everyone of us and we do certain things in the heat of the moment that we later repent. For better sense to prevail, it is a good strategy to allow things to cool down. Maybe I would not have taken the drastic step if I would have thought about it for a day or two.

Nearly a million people commit suicide every year. They leave behind a trail of destroyed families who might never recover from the shock. I wish everyone is as coward as I was that night. They would then know that Forrest Gump’s mother was right. Life is indeed like a box of chocolates.

[image from here]

Related reads – Suicide Warning Signs, Suicide Awareness Day

USC’s MSW Programs Blog Day.

Message in a Pen – II

Read Part 1 of the story here – Message in a Pen – I

The gang of ten was now two concentric circles – eight of us as a surreptitious circumference around Saahil and Neelam.  We savoured their melting. We were elated when their meetings multiplied, when their eyes oozed their enviable blissful future. I kept raising doubts at intervals in various octaves, sometimes guilty of vehemence because I was scared for them. Neelam and Saahil would then sit with me and pacify me. They were devastatingly optimistic. It almost broke my heart but I always smiled in the end. Sometimes the gang agreed with me that the gap between their communities was too wide to be filled up in our lifetime. Honour killing was still a rampant reality. But Saahil and Neelam were sanguine, with a thick veil of love settled on their existence. 

“If the need arise, will you contemplate running away?” I asked both of them once over a cup of coffee in the canteen. It was just the three of us.

“We haven’t thought about it but we might,” Neelam said.

“You haven’t thought about it or you are scared to think about it? Do you realize what will happen to Saahil’s family after both of you elope?” I asked. Both of them looked at each other.

Saahil had discussed the relationship with his family and his parents had no problems with the match but they made it very clear that their family getting insulted will never be a part and parcel of the deal. If Saahil had to elope or marry secretly, then he was on his own. 

The couple persisted. The courtship was now about to complete a year. It was the first time that I had seen a woman blush a beetroot red at the sight of a man. The smile won’t leave their faces as their fingers found each other’s hands. Their eyes gleamed with dreams of their future together.  

                                                *           *           * 

The lunch was eventful. The five of us talked about various lecturers and professors who taught us during the one and a half years we studied together. There were too many people we had mimicked and made fun of during that time. We lived it again, choking on our food as we laughed. Arnav clapped his hands while Kirti moved her head from one side to another and smiled. Our past danced around the dining table but the girls were not in it. It was a tacit decision to erase them. I had no idea how much Kirti knew and so I went with the flow.

I loosened up a bit by the time we finished eating. We clicked a few pictures. One of them had Rajat and Saahil sitting in front while I, Gaurav and Sumit stood behind them. It was exactly like a photograph clicked during our college farewell. The faces were not the same. Mouldings were seeping into our pictures with time.

“Arnav needs to sleep. I am going in the bedroom for a while,” Kirti said to Saahil and went inside.

“Come,” Saahil said as he held my hand and asked me to get up.

“Where are you guys going?” Rajat asked in alarm.

“We are taking a stroll in the park. The three of you can take a nap,” Saahil said.

I got up and went out of the house with Saahil as Rajat, Sumit and Gaurav gave difficult-to-comprehend expressions. 

                                                *           *           *

We had a preparatory break twenty days before our final examinations. Most of us stayed in the hostel because they were our last few days together. Neelam went home as Saahil would not let her study. She talked to him in the evening after reaching home and that was the last time any of us got a phone call from her.  

No one had any idea what had happened for almost four days when a call came on Saahil’s phone one evening. The five of us were in his room discussing what to do next when the phone rang. It was Neelam’s father on the other side. He was shouting so piercingly that all of us could plainly hear his words. Saahil tried to reason with him but his reasons were not working against death threats. Fifteen minutes and an avalanche of swearwords later, the phone was abruptly disconnected. We sat in stunned silence. It was a perfect I-told-you-so moment but I kept my mouth shut. Saahil was blinking away tears.

“I have to go home and talk to my parents,” he said as he suddenly got up and started packing.

“Tomorrow,” Gaurav said.

“No, I have to go now.”

“I said tomorrow Saahil! You are in no position to ride a bike on the highway,” Gaurav said.

Saahil threw his bag violently on the floor. The clothes tumbled out of the bag. I got up to pick them up and kept them back in the bag.

He went home the next day to convince his parents to talk to Neelam’s family. They were very clear that Neelam’s family has to spit out the anger and talk to them in a civilized manner. Saahil called up Neelam’s father to convince him for a meeting. He was told that the next time he calls, his family will not find a single piece of his body.

“Please tell me if she is alive,” he pleaded. The line went dead.

I kept calling Saahil that day but he did not pick up his mobile. Optimism was now an unrecognizable corpse buried deep within the soil of practicalities; the practicalities of staying alive. I had never thought that I would wait for Saahil in our hostel room with my heart ramming into my ribcage with a deafening ferocity. I imagined reporting him missing to the police and then identifying his body. I imagined Neelam hanging from a ceiling fan, her battered body swinging slowly. Love had turned into a blinding pain from being blind.

Saahil came to hostel the next day. His face was different now. He had woken up from the dream. 

                                                *           *           * 

We sat on a bench in the park. The weather was agreeable.

“Neelam is in America with her husband. They went to Egypt on a holiday. She loved the Pyramids,” Saahil said. I stared at his face for a while.

“Are you in..”

“No. Rajat told me. He got an e-mail from her one day. Now she writes to him sometimes to let us know that she is happy.”

“What about you?”

“What do you think?”

I silently stared at the swings moving slowly with the winds.

“You really don’t get it, do you? You saw what I went through, what Neelam went through. You saw her when she came to write her exams. After going through all that turmoil when I had no intentions of staying alive, here I am sitting with you. I am married and I have a kid. Would I be able to lead my life like this if I still loved Neelam?”

“But how can you fall out of love with a person like this Saahil? You were crazy about each other.”

“I am in love with Kirti and Arnav. Right now that is all that matters. Our life is not as one dimensional as it seems. The seasons change for a reason my friend. The pendulum swings without rest. The first few months were difficult, when she was forcefully married but there was nothing I could do. Her house had turned into a fort. I tried reaching her. You had left for Chennai. Rajat, Sumit and Gaurav were there but I knew that I had to come out of it or I would have gone crazy. Even then, when Kirti was refereed for an arranged match, I said no initially.”

“I know.”

“I told her about Neelam the first time we met. She was very understanding. She told me that she liked me but I cannot enter her life with the burden I was carrying. We started talking and said yes a month later. Neelam was already in America by then.”

“And now?”

“I am madly in love with Kirti. Don’t you see? She healed me. I was never so much in peace with my life as I am now. When I see Arnav’s face, I don’t remember any sadness that existed in my life. It was always about Kirti and me. This is where the path was destined to lead me.”

“I am happy for you,” I said as I caressed a piece of paper in my pocket. 

to be continued…

[image from here]

Message in a Pen – I

Based on a true story. The names have been changed to protect the identity. This is a 3 part series. 

I stared at the flaps as they extended. A few moments later the wheels were kissing the airstrip amidst roaring air. It was a strange feeling. The city felt alien and that too in just three years. My parents were waiting outside the airport, scanning strange faces for a glimpse of familiarity.

“You are dark,” mother said the moment she filled her hands with my face.

“Don’t worry, winter is almost here,” father said and smiled. I smiled back. 

Even if you have lived in a city for years, there is something inexplicably uncomfortable when you see it after a gap. The sunlight feels different. The air smells strange. New bridges and buildings have sprouted. There are monstrous pillars on road-dividers with trains snaking on them. Faces are buried in more lines. 

Rajat called in the evening. The cheerful baboon wanted the gang to meet even before I had unpacked my bags.

“Where shall we meet?” I asked.

“Saahil’s place. Tomorrow,” he said. 

The four of them have been meeting regularly. I was the outcast, thrown away by destiny. I had been to Delhi twice in the last three years but the trips were fleeting, not stretching for more than four days. I haven’t seen any of them. Saahil was married now – the only married man of our gang. Who would have thought? 

I was late. I bought a box of chocolates and a kilo of apples. Kirti opened the door. I had never met her before. There was a one year old in her hands who was playing with her gold chain.

“He is here,” she turned around and shouted at the living room.  

There was a sudden roar from the sofa and a crowd of faces filled my eyes. The moment was surreal. Rajat, Gaurav, Sumit and Saahil encircled me like an eight armed octopus, the way they had done three years ago on our last night in the hostel. I was engulfed in sounds of laughter, questions and recollections of the better days my complexion has seen.

“Chennai does that to you,” Gaurav said.

“I will be ok in a few weeks. It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Really?” Gaurav asked raising an eyebrow.

“It’s just skin.”

“How is the job?” Sumit asked.

“I pay my bills regularly,” I said and smiled.

“We missed you. Every time we met, we always wondered if the five of us will ever be together some day,” Rajat said.

“At least all of you met. All I did was sulk.” 

I tried not to look at Saahil and he noticed the gesture. My face was brimming with questions. It would have been an embarrassment. He was holding his son as Kirti had sprinted towards the kitchen after greeting me.

“I am still angry with you for missing my marriage,” he finally said as Kirti appeared with a cup of tea and some biscuits.

“I know,” I said staring at the tea. 

There wasn’t any reason to be cross with Saahil but I was. I could not explain it to myself. It was immature. He made a choice and he was blissful but then how could he just whisk away all that had happened? I wanted a moment with him to give my mind some rest. 

“Is anyone in contact with the girls?” I asked. Chatter fell off the air and everyone looked up at me. The question was a mistake.                                               

*           *           *

Kurukshetra was a scary place. The fact that I had to travel through unknown villages and towns of Haryana in a roadways bus to reach my college made it scarier. I had never lived alone in a hostel and my parents were failing miserably to put a brave front. My mother behaved as if I was a soldier going to war. Dad tried to be emotionless and strong. The college was three hours from Delhi and I promised to be back every weekend with loads of opportunities to use the washing machine.

Dad went with me to the hostel and helped me clean the room. Thankfully I did not have to share it with anyone. He gifted me a Nokia mobile so that I can call them in case someone was trying a sword on me. Certain narrow-minded communities in Haryana were famous for their flair for weapons. Dad stayed for the night in a hotel in case he had to take my body back. He was relieved to see me alive the next day and bid me farewell. Suddenly the fact that I was all alone in a town in Haryana manifested itself in all its glory and I went weak in my knees.

I met Rajat, Saahil, Gaurav and Sumit in the hostel. I clung to them as I found them surprisingly calm. I was later told that this was not their first time in a hostel. Saahil and Rajat were from Sonepat which was another small town in Haryana. We were ragged incessantly by our seniors but the versions were mild as we were post-graduate students.

Classes commenced and I met inhabitants of the girl’s hostel. There were five of them – Neelam, Ruchi, Sneha, Amrita and Kiran. The fact that the ten of us were away from our families brought us closer. Also, there was a hope that five love stories might blossom in the process. It was too much of a coincidence that the gender equations were so levelled out. Our dreams were shattered a few weeks and a few unsuccessful wooing attempts later when Ruchi and Sneha confided that they already had boyfriends while Amrita and Kiran were too scared of their families to even think about it. Neelam gave a mysterious smile and did not disclose anything. Their heartbreaking revelations were made during a game of truth-or-dare in the ruins of Sheikh Chilli’s tomb, a Mughal monument in Kurukshetra. By the time we reached hostel that evening, Saahil was having great difficulty in breathing.

“Neelam is not engaged to anyone!” he screamed with joy the moment the five of us were alone in his room.

“Yes, we noticed that and also the drool from your mouth reaching your foot,” I said.

“I am going to propose to her tomorrow,” Saahil said.

“What!” the four of us shouted. The windowpane vibrated.

“What is wrong in that?” Saahil asked innocently.

“What is right in that? She belongs to a Jat family from Haryana. They are influential businessmen,” I said.

“So?” Saahil said.

“If you want it so bluntly loverboy, then here goes. You belong to a Scheduled Caste community. If her family comes to know of your affair, your family will end up collecting pieces of your body from farms all over Haryana,” I said.

Rajat, Gaurav and Sumit nodded. There was silence while the news sank in.

“I think I love her,” Saahil said.

“Oh for God’s sake!” I got up and threw my hands in the air.

“They can always talk to the parents. They might agree,” Sumit said nervously, with an unconvincing tone.

“Don’t encourage him! He will die!” I shouted and stormed out of the room. 

*           *           *

“Lunch is almost ready,” Kirti said from the kitchen. She and Saahil were making the chapattis. Rajat, Gaurav and Sumit were cutting salad while I was playing with Arnav, Saahil’s son. Arnav held my finger firmly in his hand and was staring at me as if trying to place me from his previous birth’s memories. It is said that children remember their previous birth till they begin to speak. I looked at Arnav’s face and wondered if that was true. And then I wondered how his face would have turned up had Saahil married Neelam. I suddenly felt ashamed.

“There was no need to ask about the girls,” Gaurav whispered.

“I am sorry,” I said.

“As you know Ruchi and Sneha are married to their respective boyfriends and happily settled in Bangalore. Amrita is divorced as her parents married her to a jerk and Kiran is in Sonipat, married to a businessman,” Rajat said.

“Amrita is divorced? When did that happen?” I asked a bit taken aback.

“Two months back. She is in Gurgaon working in an MNC,” Rajat said.

“And…,” I said.

“And nothing,” Sumit said pointing to the entrance to the dining area where Kirti has appeared with the cutlery.

“Why are you so glum? What has happened to you?” Gaurav asked.

“I don’t know. All of you have moved on but for me our life together is frozen in that hostel. I can’t time travel,” I said.

“Pretend to be normal. Ok?” Sumit said. I nodded. Rajat wiped tears from his eyes. He was slicing onions.

Read part 2 here    

[image from here]                        

Report Card of my Mistress

To tell you the truth, I was not expecting a readership when I came back after 2 years of blogging break. I bet a lot of you don’t know that this blog was dormant from Jan 2009 to Oct 2011. I wanted to finish my novel before it poisoned my brain. I had to throw the story out of my system. Yes, it is done and lying on its ass in my laptop since a month awaiting another important decision of my life. In layman’s terms, it is in queue. I have gone through the story so many times that it seems that all that exercise of throwing it out of my system was in vain. It is flowing in my blood now.

Anyways, another thing that happened in those two years of sabbatical was that I met Geet and we got married. We did it the old-fashioned way by not even meeting up before we said yes. Wait! Don’t faint. We had a webcam chat or two and a month of telephonic conversation. It feels surreal now that I write it. What if she had 4 legs? You surely can hide that in a webcam chat. And no it wasn’t a sex chat. So, we got married and moved to Manchester for a year and explored each other (Ahem!) and the beautiful Britain. I spent all my savings and we went to France and Switzerland and bought coats worth 10000 Rs. In short, we lived that year in a very expensive Yash Chopra movie.

While all this was happening, my blog was always calling me back. It was like a wailing, abandoned child whom I have left behind and felt guilty about it. So, when I returned back to India, dust, honks and heaps of people (read Delhi) in 2011, I thought of picking up the child again. It wasn’t easy. The readership was almost gone. My blogging friends of old had almost vanished. But once I started writing in Dec 2011, the joy knew no comments. The dam was broken. I found all of you, one by one over the course of last one year. Some old friends returned and were happy to see me back. It was all exhilarating.

Geet was shocked. She hasn’t seen me giving attention to anyone except her and here I was juggling her with a blog, a novel and a movie novels and watching movies (corrected the sentence after readers thought I was writing a movie script! 😐 ). It took her some time to stop calling MashedMusings my mistress and absorb the juggler in me. I told her that it was like preparing Rice, Rajma, Paneer Makhni, Chapati and Dahi Bhalle all in one go – like I did for her on Karwachauth in 2 hours flat. I bought her a diamond to pacify her.

So, thank you everyone for reading this blog and appreciating what I write. It means a lot to me because I do not think very highly of myself (I keep telling Geet that she must have been really blind to marry me. I say dialogues like – ‘what were you bloody thinking?!?!’ while she gives me a really scratch-head-confusing smile). So, all this appreciation is very humbling.

Now you must be wondering why I am in a self-critical mode today? Well, I accidentally read my Yearly Report Card on WordPress today and felt good and thought of thanking everyone which now that I read it, is more of a blabbering.

Cheers!

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 130,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Sex Education in a Madhouse

The year was 1997. It had been a year since my father had brutally picked me up from my pampered public school pillow and dropped me in the fires-from-hell of a government school. It was the top government school in the area but a cultural shock awaited me there. Draconian was an understatement. Boys were not supposed to talk to girls in front of the teachers and sit separately. And you could be given a third degree that would put Uttar Pradesh Police to shame. 

The teachers in my new 1857 era school were a terror. If technology would not have advanced enough, Steven Spielberg could have used them in Jurassic Park and nobody would have noticed.

My Physical Training teacher had a fascination for throwing mischievous boys on a wall behind the principal’s office. So, like a Nazi, he would just pick up a boy with both his hands and throw him on a wall. I believed that the Principal was aroused by the thud of boys colliding rapidly one after another with the wall behind his seat. Once I saw him enjoying grapes from a huge bowl with his feet up on the table as the boys thudded behind his back.

Thud. Chew. Thud. Chew. Thud. Chew.

My Biology teacher had a fascination for young girls. Somehow, he was not able to stop his right eye from fluttering like a bloody butterfly the moment he turned his head towards the row in which the girls sat. Then he moved his neck towards the boys and the fluttering would stop.

Flutter. Stop. Flutter. Stop. Flutter. Stop.

My Chemistry teacher would never face the class. He would enter the room facing the blackboard and leave the same way. He loved copulating with the black board and all he did was write till we could not differentiate where he ended and the chalk dust started. He entered brown and exited white. I hardly remember his face.

My Physics teacher too never looked at us. All the while he was blabbering (he jumbled up sentences and then scratched his head to figure out what he said and then started all over again), he looked outside the room as if India’s next satellite was to be launched from our school playground.

My Math teacher had a recurring habit of suddenly walking out of the class making horrible sounds and then spitting in the school gardens. The moment he would walk out in the middle of an equation, the whole class would go – Chhhiiiii!!! And then there was silence when he returned.

Aaarrghhhhghhaaarrrr! Chiiiiii. Silence. Aaarrghhhhghhaaarrrr! Chiiiiii. Silence. Aaarrghhhhghhaaarrrr! Chiiiiii. Silence.

The principal reined the kingdom with a whip in his hand. The students were equally crazy. The principal hated that the students would stand in the corridors and chitchat between two periods. He would come out with his whip and smash them like flies and students would scream and fall over each other to get back to their seats. It was a scene straight out of Sholay when Gabbar attacked the village with his goons.  And it happened again and again. The students enjoyed this.

It was in that school when I got my first slap for something I didn’t do. It was there when I was made a murga (where you have to touch your ears with your hands coming out of your butts) and humiliated. The topper in me wanted blood.

It was a crazy two years living in that madhouse.

And during that period, one fine day, it was decided that the students of class 12^th needed sex education. Thankfully it did not involve all the crazy teachers to do a Full Monty in front of the whole class but a man and a woman (from some external education group) to come and talk to the students and tell them about AIDS and babies.

The girls were taken to a separate room and the boys were left with the guy who enlightened us about various aspects of sex and female arousal techniques (indirectly) and AIDS. The boys looked at each other and giggled and asked him all kind of stupid questions like the capacity of sanitary napkins and producing babies by kissing. Since I was the topper of the class, I kept my nose high up in the air and maintained a dignified silence complimented by my glowing hot red ears (My ears go a shade of lava when I am embarrassed). The guy somehow took it for ignorance and thought that my vital organs were still in the process of development and all this was Hebrew for me.

“Don’t worry. If you haven’t started shagging yet, it will begin very soon. Some boys start late”, he said giving me a quick look.

My ears caught fire. I wanted to stand up and yell the names of all the porn movies I had seen with my best friend sitting right next to me. But then I turned around and saw the Principal, Physical Training teacher, Math, Biology, Chemistry and Physics teacher all huddled in the window of the classroom and peeking inside like girls eavesdropping in the room of a newly wed.

The lady who was educating the girls soon came in and told the man that the girls were shocked and embarrassed to the point that they look like a sack of tomatoes. He consoled her and sent her back and ask her to show them the condom.

And then he took out a condom from his pocket and started pushing it on his index and middle finger to show us how to wear it. He pushed it the other way round by mistake which emancipated a smirk from me. Watching a man wearing a condom on his fingers in that madhouse was the last straw for me.

In the end, after we said goodbye to the man, the girls returned to the classroom. They behaved as if they were not wearing anything. I had never seen my classmates so quiet and nobody spoke for an eternity. Days passed and it seemed that the man and the woman were always in the room in spirits, hovering near the fans and wiggling their condom covered fingers mischievously at our faces. It took a mega Diwali bomb which went off in our classroom despite the Principal’s warnings to bring things and laughter back to normal. The bomb was so powerful that by the time we knew what hit us, the ceiling fans were swinging violently and plaster was falling from the ceiling in perfect lines. The spirits were nowhere to be seen.

And then the Physical Training teacher picked up my classmate who set off the bomb and threw him on the wall. Thrice.

Thud. Chew. Thud. Chew. Thud. Chew.

All of us (including the classmate who thrice slid down the wall like tomato ketchup) threw our head back and laughed. The madhouse was back to normal.

[images from 1,2, 3]

I can see them

I belong to the generation who, while growing up, treated the word internet as something divinely unattainable. It was like a spaceship from another planet which crash-landed on Earth – exclusive and quarantined. I remember, while doing my Masters, someone pointed a guy to me in college and whispered in my ears that he had an internet connection at home. I looked at that guy with awe and from then onwards behaved with him as if he was Tom Cruise. I came very close to kissing the ground on which he walked.

At that time if anyone would have suggested that one day internet will be available on mobiles, he would have ended up like Galileo.

Sometimes, the leap which technology has taken in the last twenty years boggles me. From a time when mobiles and internet connection were unheard of, we have reached a point where a street vendor has a better mobile than me, where my maid talks to her boyfriend all the time while doing the dishes. My mind still does not comprehend the fact that I can browse internet on my mobile. Was it another life when I visited an internet cafe to browse for twenty rupees an hour on a rickety 56 kbps connection? Was it another life when I had tears of joy in my eyes when I heard the mechanical sound of a dial-up connection in my house for the first time? It is amazing that I once had the capability to derive joy from such minuscule things.

I also belong to the generation who has lost a lot of friends to distance. Leave aside internet, telephone connection was a distant dream for my family when I was in school. The only way I could keep in touch with my school friends was by calling them from a local PCO (which I did religiously) but then soon gave in to my college studies. When we finally got a telephone, it was a necessity not a luxury.

It is being argued that internet has killed real-time conversations. I do not think internet has anything to do with it. Our life is not similar to that of the previous generation. My friend circle is spread over continents. We do not meet in years. In India too, we are spread over various cities. I haven’t seen so many of my friends in flesh since ages. So, it’s not internet that is responsible for the changing equations, it’s our work culture, it’s our lifestyle that has changed. Sitting with friends over a cup of tea in the evening has turned into a privilege only a few could enjoy, just like an internet connection two decades back. The irony is palpable.

Time flies!

That is why I think internet is a blessing. I can pick up my mobile, login into a social networking website and share a moment with my friends. I can see them going for further studies and enjoying their new friend circle, I can see them getting engaged, getting married, going for honeymoon, having babies, celebrating birthdays of their children, enjoying their holidays. I do not need a PCO to hear their voices, I can have a video chat with them. For someone who once tried desperately to keep his friends from dwindling, you cannot begin to imagine the joy all this brings.

Time is a running Cheetah and we are sitting on its back. But then all of us need our moments of sanity and who else can give them if not our family and friends?

My mobile is like a window in each of my friend’s life and internet is the latch. I can open the latch any time and be a part of their lives and make them part of mine. It’s amazing how our lives are shared virtually by zeroes and ones. Who knows, a few more decades down the line, we might be sharing pictures of our children getting married. And who knows humans might have discovered teleportation by then and our children will laugh at how we used internet to connect. But, till then, I have realised that I still have the capability to derive joy from minuscule things. I have my mobile and my internet connection and I can see my friends.

Yes, I can see them.

[This is my entry to Indiblogger’s Internet is fun contest]

www.vodafone.in/fun

[images from 1,2,3]

Facebook photos uploading etiquettes

A lot of people go on holidays so that they could upload pictures on Facebook for various reasons. Enjoying with their family is the last thing on their mind. The reasons for uploading photos might vary from –

• Making their friends jealous (Hey! Look at me! I am hanging in the air upside down! Stare Stare!)
• Making their relatives jealous (Hey loser! dream on!)
• Making their colleagues jealous (Work smart party hard suckers!)
• Marinate in the comments (Lovely couple!! Beautiful Background!! Where did you go? I am sooo jealous of you guys! Blah!)
• Collecting likes (A dislike button is the need of the hour)
• To achieve inner satisfaction because people are jealous because they are happy.
• Sharing them with their family and friends (Didn’t I tell you that this is the last thing on their mind?)

Now, We are not against all the photo uploading sho-sha but there should be a level of decency to be maintained. You really don’t have to behave like Mount Etna and erupt your trip lava on our wall. So, here is a list of tips which might help people actually go through your pictures instead of hurriedly liking them and putting bland comments and be done with it. Here goes:

1) We understand you like mountains and lakes and deserts and trees but can you please not click the same bloody mountain from all the sides and dump it on Facebook? Also, standing and giving different poses with the same tree makes you a retard. Mountain, mountain, mountain-man, mountain-sheep, mountain-cloud, mountain, mountain. Seriously?!?

2) We know you love your partner. You are madly in love. No one, and that means no one, can love each other as much as you two. But can you please not drip all of us in your honey scooped butter scotch love? We don’t like to see couples entangled with each other like two grasshoppers where you cannot differentiate where one starts and the other ends. And we don’t like to see people slurping each other like dogs.

That poor thing is going to drown!

3) Your dog and cat are great! They must be really unique but for us, they are just an animal. So, it gets a bit amusing to see your dog’s photo shoot in all its glory. We are sure that they could give more expressions than a lot of our Bollywood stars but that is no reason for them to pose nude on our wall.

4) Oh! You had a kid! That’s so adorable! The poor thing can’t even open his eyes yet, but you have already thrust a camera on his face scaring him out of his wits and forced him to make all those take-this-thing-off-me faces while you click him. Your kid is beautiful but try not to put a picture on Facebook of his diaper changing activities. That’s Gross. And also, try not to put those pictures of that white cereal paste hanging out of his mouth. That’s equally gross.

5) Sunrise and Sunsets! There are already millions of pictures of our only star popping in and out of the Earth, so please don’t bore us with another of those pictures unless you have taken them from a space shuttle on a mission to re-fuel the Sun. Ditto for flowers, birds and insects unless you have unearthed a new species.

6) We are sure you love adventure sports. So you went to this cool destination and enjoyed paragliding but can you please not upload twenty pictures of you flying over mountains? Honestly, we can barely make you out in those photos. You might have just googled them and posted them on Facebook just to make people jealous.

Are you sure you are in there?

7) We hate blurred and shaky pictures. It’s hard to understand the psyche of a person who uploads a photo of his left hand or his girlfriend’s breast or his kid’s foot. We understand you clicked such pictures accidentally and we give you a benefit of doubt that you uploaded them accidentally but there is ALWAYS a delete button. It’s not a nuke which you have deployed accidentally and can’t retrieve back. If you don’t have time to check your photos before uploading or after uploading them, then don’t fuc*ing upload them.

8) You went to a disc and had a lot of drinks and enjoyed with your friends. Great! Try not to dump all your evening on our wall. We really don’t like to see people getting drunk, dancing as if controlled by a random number generator, taking off their clothes one by one and puking on their friend’s face. You are not making us jealous. You are making us groan.

9) Pictures of Gods and weird Independence day and Republic day pictures also make us dizzy. “Jai Mata Di” is great but first make your life straight. And if you are uploading a “Proud to be an Indian” picture then stop bloody wasting your time on Facebook and do something worthy of being proud of. And those “Happy Diwali!!!” pics on our wall make us very dizzy. Our whole wall seems to be on fire.

10) Stop tagging us in every picture of yours even when we are nowhere in the pic. We are not your dog’s tail or your best friend’s ass. Spare us the embarrassment of moving our mouse on your sorry torso to find out which body part of yours is named after us.

I hope you understand the mental trauma we undergo while we browse through your photos and will try to make honest corrections.

Thanks,

Your fellow good for nothing Facebook addicts.

p.s. We must admit that we ourselves indulge in a lot of the above mentioned activities. So, don’t take the post seriously. Keep *groan* uploading.

Coupling two Software Engineers…

..is a recipe for disaster. You may ask why? Of course, if you consider ‘making pots of money’ as a consolation, then it might work for you but keeping the money-mindedness aside for a second, here is a list of reasons why it would be better to put your hand in a pit of vipers instead.

1. Both of you might end up in different countries. It is not always easy to say no to an onsite opportunity when you have a home loan, a car loan, a washing machine loan, a diamond necklace loan and a pack of underwear loan and an over pressurizing manager. And then, practically speaking, the long distance SOS (Sex On Skype) fizzle out in a few days, simply because the ‘feel’ is absent.

2. Both of you might end up in different shifts which is worse than being in different countries. Leave alone SOS, you will not have the real one in days. You will wake him up after coming from office and crash yourself on the bed as soon as he gets up and vice versa. Your conversations will end up being – ‘Hi honey’. ‘Bye honey’. ZZZZZZZ

3. Completely forget any trips to Simla, Munnar, Singapore, Andaman or Malaysia. Getting an off together for 5 days for a holiday will be task more difficult than getting Katrina Kaif to act and Manmohan Singh to open his mouth. You can beg, rub your nose on the ground till it bleeds, pull out your hair but it just won’t happen.

4. On the rare occasions when both of you will be at home by 9 pm, you will bitch about your managers till 10 and vent out all your frustration and completely forget to cook. You will end up having bread with soup, which will be good actually considering your expanding bellies.

5. Home made food will be available only on Saturdays and Sundays, if at least one of you is not working on the weekend, which will be as rare as scams in India. You will end up eating pizza, pasta and punjabi thalis at malls. Whatever good the bread and soup were doing will adjust to inflation.

6. All the family functions will carry on without you. Your cousins will get married and will have babies. You won’t be there in their marriage albums and videos. You will meet them, maybe, once in 5 years and wonder where all the time flew away.

7. If you are planning to have a baby, forget about it, simply because you should get some time to ding-dong, which you won’t get. If you somehow manage, the she-engineer’s manager will make sure that the baby is delivered in office alongside the project deliverable. The baby will already be stressed out by the time he will come out because of your 15 hour shifts.

8. Your parents will wither away trying to make sense of what hit them. You won’t have time for them and they will end up cursing themselves for giving birth to a machine and then marrying him off to another.

9. If the she-engineer somehow manages to pop out a baby, the baby will grow up thinking that the maid is his mother. He will not recognise his father on the rare occasions of bonding simply because he has never seen him awake. The first word he might learn will be ‘Basanti’, which will be the name of the maid.

10. One day, while buying Cabbage at Big Bazaar, you will pick up one in your hand and wonder what the difference between both of you is.

p.s. Don’t take the post seriously. It’s a funny take on what I see people around me going through.

The price of Happyness

Do you remember this photograph?

Well, if you don’t, then you better READ THIS. Anyways, the point is that I have to change the photograph a little bit. This is how it looks like now:

(Clockwise from top : S, A, L, P, Ra, Ru and Me)

I need answers. I feel like exploding. I want to scream. I feel like a human who was abducted by aliens and had no idea where he was in the last two months or why this happened to him.

I want to know if this happens only to me or are all of us sailing in the same boat?

This has been a salient feature throughout my life and it freaks me out at times. Whenever there is a small tinge of happiness in my life I always have to pay a price for it. The bigger the happiness, the bigger the price. No, I don’t want to balm myself with all the shit about You-wont-know-the-price-of-happiness-till-you-know-what-pain-is. Believe me, I have been through so much pain for so many small tiny happy moments in my life that all I remember is the pain. There is a shloka in Sanskrit which roughly translates to – If you don’t get things at the right time, the rasa(taste) of happiness is not the same. I think either that Shloka was written by me in my previous birth OR someone in the past wrote it when he saw my life through a Crystal Ball. Does this happen to everyone? Or is it just me?

I have always dreamt of seeing the world. To say that I was “happy” when I was told that I would be working from Manchester would be an understatement. I was elated. I was on cloud nine!!! But there was a price attached to it. I could almost see that cynical, mocking smile on God’s face.

“Do you think you are going to get all this for free? You fool!”. And the smirking followed.

I moved to Manchester in February and soon after A and L got married(to each other, that is) that month. We were sad and happy at the same time. For the first time in my life, I understood what “Mixed Feelings” meant. None of us(except the couple) could make it to the wedding. Four of us were in USA and I was in UK. 

I was somehow trying to console myself when the second bomb dropped. Ra and Ru got married(to each other, that is) in April, although we were hoping that it won’t be scheduled before December. Thankfully the newly wed L and A were in India and they were able to make it. Even if the rest of us could have thought about a plan to fly and attend the wedding, the great storm of “Recession” was already looming on the horizon.

I had never imagined in my wildest dreams that I could miss those two weddings. These six fools mean so much to me that I will never forgive God for doing this to us. I was talking to Ra a few days back, and I told him that I have lead a very happy life and if someone would have asked me to go back and change one moment of my life, I would have never done that. But now, everything has changed. I want to go back and change things. If I could somehow go there, and be a part of it….

I was in control of my emotions since the last two months but while looking at the wedding pics which Ra has uploaded in Orkut, I came across a photo of Ra and Ru’s wedding reception where they were sitting with A and L. The caption below the photo read….

2 couples.. and we see many other invisible friends whom we can never forget…

That was it! When I read that caption, I completely broke down. This was the price of my happiness. I got what I wanted. I am in Manchester. But God took away something very very precious to me. Something, which will never happen again and I will never be a part of it.

Does this happen to you too? Is there always a price to pay? Is destiny God’s way of playing cruel jokes on us? Or are we entangled in our own webs of crisscrossed dreams?

p.s. We finally cracked the formula for keeping a group intact. Just marry the girls. 😉

[Photographs are copyrighted by me]