Maximum City

Just when you are sick of this city, just when you think it has nothing more to give to you, just when you are pining for another vacation (it’s been almost a month since I got away, so yea, I am itching for a break), it opens up a new horizon just like that. I am talking about the first Times of India Literary Carnival held in the Mehboob Studio in Bandra.

I spent the whole of Sunday shuttling between Venue A and Venue B, the calendar in my pocket, excited like a schoolgirl. Now, thanks to my dad’s poor taste in friends, I have met a few of these CXO-type people, the who’s-who of the corporate world, and honestly, instead of being awed and inspired, I have always wondered what the big deal was. But yesterday, when I was faced with some of the eminent personalities in the field of journalism and literature, I felt a shiver down my back. True, I did stick out like a sore thumb despite my desperate attempt to blend in with my whole jeans-kurta-jhola-junk jewelry-generous dose of kohl get-up. This was an entirely new world and I was a wonderstruck kid trying to break into it, as I hung on to every word uttered on the podium by the likes of Bachi Karkaria, Vinod Mehta, Vikram Chandra, M J Akbar, Swapan Dasgupta, Jerry Rao, William Dalrymple to name a few. The only person I could identify with to some extent was Anuja Chauhan, the writer of the best-selling book, Zoya Factor (though I have no intentions to read it). After a long and successful career in advertising, she was also an outsider to this hallowed intellectual arena, as she sat perched up on the sofa, petite and confused, rarely opening her mouth (pretty much like me in most team meetings). It was only a sneak peek into my Garden of Eden, as I kept struggling to find the keys to it.

I also watched The Dirty Picture, the way it was meant to be watched: in a shady theatre on a Friday late night show, as we sat in the fourth row, right in front of the screen, amid rowdy men whistling each time Vidya Balan set the screen on fire (which was pretty much all the time). For a movie where the main cast was cleavage, Vidya Balan did manage to hold her own, albeit in the supporting role. Hats off to her for getting under the skin of the character, though the film was repetitive and tedious at most places.

And oh, I have a brand new 32” Sony LCD which has all these features that I have no intentions of using, but I got a good deal from a guy in Lamington Road, who knocked 20% off the MRP, and therefore I HAD TO HAVE IT, though I didn’t need it. Finally, to treat myself after all the hard work, I bought the most expensive pair of shoes EVER.
To think I spent so much on sports shoes… impulse purchases are so not worth it.

Anyway, now that I have a park close by, loads of eating joints right across the street, a TV AND a library membership, I just don’t have enough time to do all the things I want to do regularly: jog, read, write, eat out, watch back-to-back episodes of deranged serials. So I am seriously considering doing away with some of the excesses like WORK. Spending 10 hours everyday in that demented environment with people I don’t like doing things which doesn’t excite me is a sheer waste of time.

Time to set my priorities right...