Urban Jungle

For a change, this weekend I did the “cool stuff" that you are supposed to do if you are in Mumbai: like dressing up, going to Bandra and spending one hour sweating in the traffic just to travel from Bandstand to Carter Road to Pali Hill. If that wasn’t being a “happening” Mumbaiite, we also had dinner at a nice-sounding place with very expensive alcohol. But of course, the climax was the 11:30 3-D show of Ra.One! No, I would not like to waste blogspace articulating what I thought of the movie, but let’s just say, I would have loved it if it remained a video game and did not inflict excruciating pain on the audience by turning into a “movie”. Even Ravan would be turning in his grave after this mockery of anti-heroes. Anyway I guess these days there are two kinds of movies: good movies and movies which make money, and unfortunately 50 percent of the reigning Khans of Bollywood are ONLY making movies for money. Now I am having recurrent nightmares of Ra.Two…

For a change, I also became this social person and visited my relatives (don’t you just love Mumbai for its lonnnng distances between places which always provide you with excuses to not meet people you don’t want to). After sitting through a two-hour discussion on death, diseases and failed marriages (I am not implying any correlation among the three completely separate topics), I was finally rewarded with the elaborate spread I had been eyeing ever since I entered the house: indeed, there is a reward for patience, and who am I to refuse a reward this delicious?

For a change, I also decided to pay attention to company policies and got my annual health screening done. Now I have always been a strict believer of ignorance being bliss. If I was carrying some deadly disease, I preferred not to know about it, even if the knowledge came for free. That would only reduce my life expectancy further. Besides, repeatedly having my blood sucked out of me or peeing in the cup or having strangers (even if they were doctors) feel me up wasn’t my idea of a perfect Sunday. But it turned out to be quite an experience: if you are a single woman in India and opt for certain tests (even if it’s because they are free), it gets the hospital authorities all hot and bothered, reaching out for all kinds of consent forms and asking all kinds of concerned questions that only make you laugh. If it wasn’t so regressive, it would actually be funny…

After so much of uncharacteristic activities, I restored some sanity by reading this year’s Man Booker Winning novel, “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes. Thankfully, all award winning books are not all hype. Or may be, this one struck a chord because I identified with the sheer mediocrity of the protagonist. There is some comfort in the story of an ordinary, unimaginative, conventional, slightly coward guy with dysfunctional relationships and all the human insecurities and imperfections.

There is comfort in other people’s shortcomings…