Black Friday

Yesterday was holi. For all you readers in South India (all two of you), we had a holiday. Yes, there are more important occasions deserving a public holiday than Rajnikanth’s birthday.
Now, as a general rule, I do not like festivals, especially the kind that involves mass absenteeism at work (think Christmas, Diwali and now Holi and Good Friday combined) and the general air of celebration, happiness and loud music (What IS with this song, Faavicol anyway?), especially when I am stuck at work while rest of the world is enjoying at home/taking a vacation.

As a kid, I used to love Holi. Being an early riser, I would be ready with my cheap colours, gulal and water balloons sharp at nine, dressed in my most tattered clothes, all excited to get down and dirty, knocking on the doors of my other friends who were barely out of the bed. I wouldn’t even notice how the next few hours would go by, as I would run around the locality, pouring buckets of cold coloured water on one another, respectfully bending down to touch the feet of elders while colouring them with gulal and simply throwing balloons at non-suspecting strangers on the road and running away, only to discover that they have already reached home before me to complain to my folks. The next few hours would be spent in agonizing pain as my mom would try to get the colour off me with various cleaning agents, while I would pray that I would retain it and miss school for a couple of days.

But once I moved out of home, I was less excited about holi and the fact that it usually came in the middle of exams meant I couldn’t play even if I wanted to. But being in a hostel, that was hardly an option, and each year I would end up with colours/gulal and while I cribbed at that point, now I know how precious it was to be with friends who cared enough to drag you out of your miserable text books and give you some respite.

However, the Holi highlight has to be the two years of my MBA, when it was probably at its dirtiest best. No matter how much you refuse, how hard you try to stay away from the hooliganism and how determined you are to not participate in the mayhem, you ended up being dragged, bathed and caked. The more fuss you created, the worse would be your state. Today, when I look back, I could only smile at the hideous photos, the memories of the ‘maltreatment’ and the agony of getting back to a sober state.

In the last four years since I have started working, it has been one huge slide to loneliness: the first couple of years were good fun as I celebrated with a slightly childlike flatmate who took all festivals very seriously and another childlike boyfriend who made home, feel like, well, home; but after the flatmate got married and the boyfriend got back to being just a boy, I also lost the heart or the soul to celebrate: be it holi, be in Diwali, be it Christmas, be it New Year or be it any occasion.

Today, as I sit in a sparsely populated office, I wonder if my love for colour is gradually giving way to a clinginess to darkness…

Alpine Romance

This weekend was orgasm redefined: I spent a major part of it watching India’s young players give a drubbing to the Aussies, as they walked away with the Border-Gavaskar Trophy after a 4-0 clean sweep. I have been following cricket for the past fifteen years, but rarely have I seen such complete domination, and the fact that the Australians were at the receiving end of it, made it all the more orgasmic.

If that wasn’t enough, I spent the nights drooling over my childhood hero, Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open. While I have been an ardent admirer of his game, his colourful personality, his daring experiments with clothes, accessories and hairstyles, not to mention his failed marriage to Brook Shields followed by a low-key wedding to Steffie Graf had only added to his charm. Call it my fascination with the vulnerable yet rebellious appeal. However, after reading the book, I discovered new aspects of his life which only strengthened my loyalty towards him: his volatile relationship with his father, his troubled childhood, his special bond with his elder brother Philly, his childhood friend Perry, his coach Brad and his trainer Gil, his agonizing years in the infamous Nick Bollettieri’s Academy, his frequent showdown with the authorities due to his on-court antics, his controversial views on his contemporaries including Jeff Tarango, Jim Courier, Michael Chang and Pete Sampras. Now I had grown up watching all these players on TV, but when I read about an insider’s account of how they were as individuals and not just players, I felt a renewed connection to the game, which I admit, I had been neglecting a bit lately, purely because of a lack of personalities. Yes, I love to watch Federer play and I like Djokovic’s clinical assassination of his opponents or Murray’s raw talent, but I miss the colourful personalities of the nineties. Give me an Agassi or a Kuerten or an Ivanisevic any day over the modern day players.

But the highlight was definitely my three hours of temporary insanity when I blew up 20k on clothes, accessories, bags (yes, plural) and a huge suitcase. Imagine yourself among the most stylish clothes in Debenhams, and then imagine a 50% discount on the stuff that you actually like! How often does that happen? So there I was, posing in front of the mirror, wearing a sweater, a blazer and an overcoat on a hot Mumbai afternoon, with people staring at me. But I couldn’t care less, as I lovingly stuffed all of them inside the biggest American Tourist suitcase available. Just to complete the feeling of being totally loved by myself, I gifted myself a couple of oversized handbags in extremely pretty shades, but now I am feeling a bit guilty. Call it the morning-after awkwardness.

If you are wondering what made me splurge on stuff which would never see the light of day in Mumbai, I am not TOTALLY crazy. I am actually going to Switzerland for a couple of weeks for work, and hopefully I can venture into the mystic Swiss Alps while I am there.

The shopping was just the foreplay, the romance begins next week…

Mein Kampfe

Following my tryst with the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh, I realized that my appetite for morbid human depravity is far from being satiated. If anything, it has only been stimulated and lately I had been going back in time, reading about mass atrocities committed by "leaders", trying to understand the twisted psyche that motivated them to commit such outrages.

Which finally led me to Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampfe (My Struggle). Now, I had read Anne Frank’s Diary as a child, well before I read about the Holocaust, and therefore I was not able to fully grasp the context of the book, though purely from the literary point of view, being a pre-teen, I could well identify with some of the nuances plaguing a 13-year old girl. But the historical significance of it was quite wasted on me at that point. Later, when I watched Schindler’s List, it touched a chord, but I never explored it further.

However, once I started planning my visit to Auschwitz this summer (yes, I am on a two-week vacation to Vienna, Salzburg, Prague, Krakow and Berlin), I simply had to delve deeper on the subject. So despite all the negative publicity of the book, I picked up Mein Kampfe just to get inside the head of the man himself. Yes, it is an extremely biased portrayal, yes, it’s a tedious task to get through the pages and yes, the language only makes it tougher. But hey, it’s not called Mein Kamfe for no reason!

So on one hand, while I prodded through the book, on the other, I was struggling with my own mind, until, until, until I discovered the magic of the Ultimate Long Island Ice Tea during Happy Hours on a weekday!

Nine drinks later, the struggle seemed to ease off, the vision became a bit blurred and the judgment was hazy…

Legally Blonde

I have always been fascinated with legal dramas or movies: what started as a fleeting interest in The Practice and Ally Mcbeal as a kid, turned into an addiction to Boston Legal, not to mention movies like Kramer vs Kramer, Philadelphia, Primal Fear, A Few Good Men, Erin Brockovich and of course, The Accused. In parallel, I was devouring John Grisham’s books though To Kill a Mockingbird is my favourite.

So yes, I had a soft corner for the courtroom: I liked the idea of justice, I liked the articulate debates, I liked the suspense and most of all, I liked the closing arguments by the lawyers of both parties. While it came across as a noble profession, it had a certain amount of glamour attached to it, and even though I never seriously considered a career in law (thanks to my single-minded focus on being a mediocre engineer from some random college in Kolkata so that I can work with TCS in Salt Lake), Law was something which has enamoured me over the years.

Until this weekend, when I saw Jolly LLB. Now the movie was strictly average, though Boman Irani was at his suave best and Arshad Warsi once again proved that he is one of the most under-rated actors in Bollywood. But more importantly, it showed the gory side of the profession, especially in the Indian context, in which the crisp outfits, the swanky courtrooms and the successful, confident advocates were replaced by the realities of corruption, botched-up police investigation, the power of money vs. the helplessness of the marginalized victims and of course the struggle of a mediocre small-town lawyer with questionable ethics.

And then I realized, there is no such thing as a ‘noble profession’: there would always be people in ANY vocation (think education and think Arindam Chawdhury) who would give it a bad name and similarly, there would always be people who would be honourable, honest and conscientious, irrespective of what they are doing.

Everything has a shade of grey; the trick lies in painting it white…

Smallville

Most people like to spend their weekends relaxing, watching movies, partying or traveling out of the city. Once upon a time when I had a life, I would also do these things. But now, since I have a computer and no life, I do random stuff like looking up on the internet for interesting career options, mostly start-ups. Which is how I came across this interesting concept of Wunderbarkidz, which is essentially a start-up pre-school with a twist, i.e. it focuses on kids between 1-6 years to help them communicate in English and think in English. Located in far-flung parts of Maharashtra (with some in suburban Mumbai), it targets middle class or lower middle class families, where the exposure to English is minimal.

Now, I have already talked about my English speaking woes as a child in this post, and given the struggle I went through over the years to express myself in the Queen’s Language, I instantly connected with the idea. Not only that, I made an effort to write to the founders (two surprisingly young brothers from Insead and Dukes) who immediately got back to me and thus I traveled half-way across the city to New Bombay on a Sunday afternoon to meet them.

I had no idea what I could possibly gain from the meeting, nor did I have any specific agenda in my mind, but it was fascinating to listen to their story, the challenges they face, the grass root reality of starting a new venture, especially when it touches children from under privileged circumstances: despite their urban metropolitan upbringing, their Ivy-league education and their completely elite backgrounds, they were surprisingly grounded, surprisingly in sync with the reality that plagues our education system and surprisingly down-to-earth in their vision.

And there I was, like a little girl, looking down at the ground, identifying with a cause close to my heart, but unsure about how to deal with it…

The Promise

I finally managed to watch Kai Po Che: I had read the book (Three Mistakes of my Life) long back, when I was still young and foolish (now I am just old and foolish), heard people go ga-ga over the movie and decided to give it a 100-rupee morning show shot. The movie was definitely better than the book (though that’s more of a sad commentary on the book), and it did not drive me to insanity like say, any Salman Khan/Shahrukh Khan movie in the last five years.

What I liked most about the movie was change in protagonist to Ishaan from Govind. Having grown up in a middle class neighbourhood in Kolkata, I have seen a few Ishaans as a child: prodigiously talented, passionate, attractive and yet, equally lazy, laidback, undisciplined and directionless. So when I think about successful people (and here I define success in the conventional sense), I see three sets of people:

1.The talented people who are not born with a silver spoon. But they are committed, hard-working, focused and ready to give it everything despite all odds. And you get your Tendulkars, Obamas, Bachchans

2.The talented people from a privileged background. They are genetically gifted, they already have a platform waiting for them and the sensible ones manage to carry the baton forward. The history of sports, politics and entertainment is replete with such examples

3.The talented people who don’t quite make it. They show promise, potential and passion, but over the long run, it fizzles out. Sometimes, they get distracted, sometimes they become victims of their circumstances and sometimes it’s just bad luck, but at the end of the day, they become like any other anonymous citizen lost in obscurity. What follows is either they become a clerk, trying to feed a family of four and passing on the burden of their unrealized dreams to their kids, or even worse, they lose themselves in a haze of depression, drugs, alcohol, frustrations and self-pity.

But while it would be easy to classify Ishaan in the third category, he was also a rare exception, who fought tooth and nail to salvage a raw talent (Ali), to make sure that his gift did not go wasted, to protect him, to nurture him and cushion him from all the mistakes that he himself had made.

And there you go, that’s the beauty of promise, even more so if it’s undelivered…

Karthik Calling Karthik

For someone who works in a remote/captive set-up, lives in the world of netbanking/credit cards/online payments and stays away from family, a major part of my day is spent on phone calls.

So, if I am not arguing with my mom on potential marriage prospects (or the lack of them), I am cribbing to my friends who are in different parts of the country/world or listening to my kid brother go on and on and on about the latest model of phones, laptops, tablets, cars or other such things which are of no interest to me.

If that’s not bad enough, there are recurrent goof-ups by my bank, credit card company, telephone company or broadband company, who believe it’s perfectly customer friendly to put me on hold for ages with some terrible background score, at the end of which, I would be greeted with a not-so-helpful customer service agent with a confused accent. They are so NOT happy to help!

But the cake definitely goes to the people at work where I waste a major part of my youth. Since my boss sits out of a different country, we spend half the day trying to get through to each other, dialing the phone till our fingers are on the verge of falling off. Whenever I call, he is in a meeting/about to go for a meeting and whenever he calls, I am usually loafing around in the cafeteria or wandering aimlessly around Hiranandani, trying to pick up the pieces of my life. Then there is the problem of cross border communication, when we are trying to navigate through different languages/accents/dictions, getting more lost in the process, when one party just rambles on, though the other party has no idea what’s being said. By the end of it, you feel like Arnab Goswami, ranting like a madman, while the audience no longer cares.
Now, since we are in research, we have this inherent knack to find people who will LISTEN.TO.OUR.VIEWS, but since front-end bankers are too busy to save their jobs, they don’t have the time/enthusiasm to humour us. SO what do we do? We talk to each other: it’s a case of quid pro quo, i.e. you let me bore you, I shall let you do the same to me, as long as it gives the impression that we are all very busy! And just to give it a professional “look and feel”, we CALL each other up, while sitting next to each other, and THEN talk, so that we can hear ourselves, hold your breath, not once, but twice! As for what we DISCUSS, let’s just say it covers the whole of animal kingdom with a generous dose of phrases like “bull and bear”, “hawkish and dovish” or “headwind and tailwind”.

It’s like Karthik Calling Karthik, but just imagine close to two dozen of them, and it’s total chaos…

Crossword

Being back to the humdrum of the mundane life in Mumbai somehow restores the balance in my life: last weekend, I was living it up in Manila, without a care in the world. Few days later, here I am, back to my ritual of emails, phone calls, MS Office, not to mention cleaning, grocery shopping and selling old newspapers!

The fact that JB and PR spent almost the entire weekend at my place, cooking the most awesome chicken, while Murali Vijay and Cheteshwar Pujara treated the country to graceful centuries, making my return to commonplace reality a little less disheartening.

But the fact remains that I am desperately restless, never quite satisfied, always looking out for change, wanting to do something different, craving for a fresh start, longing to turn my life upside down, for better or for worse…

More than any external circumstances, it’s my inner self which is at war with itself, trying to find that elusive piece of the jigsaw which would make the puzzle complete…

And I continue to play hide and seek with myself, I continue to look for the intangible pleasures of life and in the process, I continue to delude myself that someday, it’s going to find me…

Someday, the puzzle would make sense…

Mystic Manila

Following our Cambodia trip, we headed to Manila for a few days, imposing ourselves on SH and AD’s friendly hospitality. Now, I had been to their Wadala apartment a few times while they were in Mumbai, usually a bunch of 5-7 people, usually drunk and usually trying to squeeze ourselves on the bed, the couch and the sofas, trying to make room in between all the beer, whisky and rum bottles, the pizza boxes and the laptops: yes, the good old days, when affordable housing in Mumbai meant a 1 bhk in some godforsaken area, usually in the East (apparently, in Mumbai, the West is the place to be. A Mumbaiite would always emphasize that he lives in Nahur WEST, though I don’t know how it’s more aspirational than Nahur East, but hey, what do I know? I live in Powai, which is universally sad, irrespective of the direction). Anyway, I digress…

So, from the 1 bhk in Wadala, they have now moved to a palatial apartment in Serendra, right in the middle of BGC in Manila, or in Mumbai terms, it’s the equivalent of a luxurious place in Bandra, minus the crowd, the filmstars and the hawkers. We admired the sprawling lawns, the greenery, the pool and took full advantage of its location: you step out of the building in the morning and you find yourself right in the middle of High Street with all its malls, showrooms and department stores. So while anon went berserk, splurging on Aldo shoes and wallets and Mango shirts and shorts, I was my cheapest best, settling for a Philippino-style short haircut, all for three hundred bucks! I must admit, it does look cute…

In the evening again, we would step out in our high heels, walk down the street and find ourselves in the middle of the most happening pubs, not worrying about parking the car, driving drunk or twisting our ankles. Add to that the cheap alcohol, the yummy food (I tried all sorts of food, which sounded funny, tasted different and covered the entire range of animal species) and the pleasant rains, it was the perfect holiday with the perfect set of people. Obviously, I continued to be my aggressive worst when it came to board games and card games, only to finish on the losing side, be it Scrabble, Trump or even Ludo: I KNOW I am the best, just that I get carried away and push my luck too hard!

We drove down to the Tagaytay Province, barely 60 Kms from Manila for a picturesque view of the Taal Volcano, which is the second most active volcano in the Philippines. As I enjoyed the Katsudon, staring out at the Volcano, I couldn’t help wondering if Bombay was gradually reducing me to a minion who was just too tired or too busy to really appreciate the things that do matter.

We also took a walking tour of the old town of Intramuros conducted by Carlos Celdran: an articulate but controversial entertainer with a razor sharp wit, who was jailed for his provocative and politically incorrect jokes on nearly anything and everything. As he walked us through Fort Santiago to the Plaza San Luis, touching upon the history, the architecture and culture of Manila through the Pre-Hispanic era, the American rule and finally the Japanese massacre during World War II. From the little exposure I had to the country, I realized that Philippines was a potpourri of different cultures, almost too many of them, resulting in “genetic denial” as aptly quoted by Carlos. At the end of the day, they were “a bunch of people with Chinese eyes, who spoke Spanish but wanted to be Americans”. So if you ask a Philippino if he has been to the USA, his answer is either “Yes” or “Not Yet”!

But of course, Manila for me was more about spending time with SH and anon, reliving our 213 days and going back a few years. While a lot has changed since then, some things have remained the same: both of them are as annoying as ever, though I have become more matured, more patient and almost a grown up.

Till it was time to leave, till I boarded the cab, till I cried…

Caught in Kampuchea

I have been enamoured by Cambodia for some time now: I don’t know if it was the exotic appeal of a lost country, I don’t know if it was the glory of being home to the imposing Hindu temples of Angkor Wat and I don’t know if it was the shadow of the mass massacre of a ‘revolutionary’ Communist, but the charm of Kampuchea had me blinded, which in turn led to beg friends/family/acquaintances to accompany me on a Tuktuk ride to the mystical Khmer region.

So when SH and AD moved to South East Asia, I was overjoyed (not because she was finally off my back) but because it meant that my dream to visit Cambodia was finally going to see the light of day. Convincing anon took some work, but there we were, all of us of Room No. 213, together again, with AD taking care of three hyper excited women!

And Cambodia didn’t disappoint me, though I found Angkor Wat a tad over-rated. Despite its majestic structure in the middle of nowhere, it failed to overwhelm me the way Ajanta Ellora did. Being someone who had visited the temples of South India, the ruins of Hampi, the marvel of Konark and of course, most recently, the breathtaking allure of Kailash Temple (Ellora), all that Angkor stood for was yet another masterpiece which was marketed extremely well! At times like these, I wonder if we tend to take our civilization for granted, that despite India having so much to offer, we hardly make an effort to promote them and that may be I haven’t seen enough of my country yet.


But otherwise Siem Reap was as charming as it gets, with all its delightful Tuktuk rides, the floating village on the Tonle Sap lake, the colourful roadside souvenirs, the experimental fish spa and the relaxing foot massage right in the middle of Pub Street, the street food comprising crunchy fried grasshopper and tarantula, the local delicacies (fish amok in particular), the dirt cheap alcohol (bottomless margaritas can make your nights longer), not to mention the happy herb pizza (for the uninitiated, it’s a generous dose of weed in your innocuous looking pizza) which can bring ecstasy to even the most depressed soul. And then there was the cab driver who drove us from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, who didn’t speak a word of English and coolly picked up a woman half his age on the way who snuggled comfortably on his lap while he drove for six hours, as we looked on, amused but slightly anxious, watching out for any sudden diversions lest he got distracted with the pretty girl’s ‘affections’. The ride back to Siem Reap was less adventurous as we decided to take a bus, not willing to trust our lives to an amorous cabbie.

However, for me, the highlight was definitely Phnom Penh, more specifically, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (the former Security Prison 21) and Choeung Ek (Killing Fields), both of which serve as a chilling reminder of the atrocities committed barely thirty five years back, when almost three million innocent Cambodian civilians were executed out of a population of less than nine million. What motivated this hara-kiri was the blind belief in Communism, the ideology of agrarian socialism and complete government control espoused by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Pol Pot. As we saw the mass graves, the remains of the victims, the tattered rags, the tree against which little kids were smashed till they died, the tiny prison cells, the naked skulls kept in the museum and as we listened to the blood-curdling descriptions, the gory details and the survival stories, we were left speechless by the human depravity and the sheer barbarism of modern times. For someone who has grown up in Kolkata and has seen the most erudite people swearing by the Communist manifesto, it was a familiar rhetoric and it scared me to even imagine that how easily we could have been in a similar situation but for our sheer size.

If you thought Cambodia with its depleted economy (1 USD is equivalent to 4000 KHR, the local currency), crumbling infrastructure and a gaping chasm between the rich and the poor, which was off the radar for the rest of the world, was just a forgotten dot on the map, think again, because...

it’s a country which makes you stop and think, while the rest are busy getting ahead…