I never thanked you….

It was rude, I know. I haven’t been raised this way, you know. You DO know. Of course, you do. You ARE omniscient after all. I should have thanked you earlier. It is funny that when something bad happens, or something goes wrong, and I’m debilitated by grief or confusion or anger, I waste no time in railing at you. I rave and rant. I scream and cry. I abuse you, I revile you, I ask you “Why? Why me?” .But now that a thin shaft of the sunlight of hope and joy seems to have pierced the thick pall of gloom that had set in, I dither in thanking you.

I think I know why, though. Maybe my eyes are so accustomed to the dark, that light is painful and suspect- it’s like one would mistrust pleasantness in a desert, thinking it a mirage. Light hurts now and my brain instructs me to be wary, to shun celebration, and to suppress the expression of joy. Do you think me blasé, jaded, an ungrateful brat even? That I doubt your ways? That I stand at the brink of the calm sea that you have set before me- dipping a toe in, doubtful of the calm, wary of violent undercurrents? Do you think I lack faith, or do you understand this state of being?

You know, I had toyed with the idea of disbelief. I tried to be one of those who dismiss you as superstition, myth, a figment of our imagination or the resort of the weak and cowardly. Some say I could go to Hell for such sacrilege. But, I know that the whole idea of “Heaven and Hell” was something you let them believe- it was just a practical joke you played on them, to keep them in line. I know that Heaven is a place on earth. And so is Hell. And that’s how you intended them to be.

I won’t argue with your logic, but I think you are taking the “mysterious ways” bit a little too far, don’t you? Wouldn’t it be just easy to give us a bird’s eye view of your grand schemes for us? So we know that the black weft threads interlaced with the gold warp ones actually form your rich, beautiful tapestry of a plan and are both equally important for the integrity of your plans? So we bide our time during downs and are sedate during ups? But then, you never intended this puzzle to be simple right? I agree. But still, there’s no harm in negotiating, right? Right.

So here I go. Thank you. Even for the black threads and especially for the gold ones.

Confessions of a closet bigot

Did someone say “sugar and spice and all things nice” make girls? Ha, this should teach you to be wary of stereotypes, especially those in nursery rhymes. A case in point, Tommy Stout may have been nicer than Tommy Thin, but not all those with adipose to spare are jolly. Look at Idi Amin. Look at the woman who nearly pushed me off a running bus. (Ok, mean-fat-people examples are getting scarcer and scarcer with our “size zero” fixation.)

But I digress. A few days ago my nerd-dom was firmly established and now I discover that I’m a bigot too. This is adding insult to injury, I tell you. Now that I’ve been found out for the unusual hybrid of a Ku-Klux-Klan member and Steve Urkle, my mum’s groom hunting has received a setback of biblical proportions, quite unbeknownst to her, poor dear. Us digressed again, my precious. Us has to stop running pell-mell. Where was us now? Oh yeah, bigotry.

My biases are many and varied. Some are not even logical or rational. They just are. Evidently, I’m a pathological bigot. And all this while, I’ve been pretending to be a purist or whatever-else-ist. But let’s not mince words. In the spirit of “outings”, let’s call a spade just that.

Sample my bigoted views.

Music bigotry
I judge people based on their taste in music. I will hang up on a person if I don’t like their caller tune. Heck, I won’t even be polite to them. Let alone fraternize with them in broad daylight. And I will air my disapproval quite overtly. Anyone who likes techno, trance or stuff that goes “dhichak-dhichak” is no friend of mine. People’s ringtones have to be tasteful too, or else. Who think Himesh Reshammiya is God’s gift to those with sound aural faculties- “I heartily invite such birds, to come outside and say those words”* .Those who go into whirling dervish trances on hearing the pretty boys from 98 Backstreet, Britney and her ilk, Shakira and her ridiculous lyrics, Enrique etc , had better stay away from me. I wouldn’t put unspeakable acts of cruelty past me, should the opportunity present itself. The list of those at whom I would crinkle up my nose is long and going strong.

Book bigotry
This close friend of mine once lent a guy Five Point Someone and a Wodehouse. The guy had the audacity to think the former funnier; he saw no humour in my beloved P.G.W. creation. Wodehouse compared with Chetan Bhagat. The nerve. This girl told me that she thought Catcher in the rye was trash, “Don’t recommend this to anyone ever again”, she said, right after going gaga over God of Small Things. Bloody murder, cried my inner Nazi. This is what I’m talking about-those who read Nancy Drew, Mills and Boons, Daniel Steele, Sidney Sheldon and such atrocities and call themselves discerning readers and actually, and this is rich, recommend these books and then maddeningly enough compare a Sidney Sheldon with O.Henry. It’s like comparing Marlon Brando with, oh I don’t know, Adam Sandler may be? I am busy thinking up something violent and macabre for such criminal ignorance.

Food bigotry
Veg. Manchurian (which in itself is a mongrel of sorts) with Naan, Tandoori chicken/paneer pizzas- another hybrid, diet/sugar-free mithai- either eat these the conventional way with tons of ghee and sugar or don’t eat at all, papad with everything (lasagna and papad, falafel and papad, fries and papad), adding dollops of ketchup to food- it kills the inherent taste of whatever you are eating, insipid and diluted coffee, cookies/biscuits with no character-plain bland varieties not worthy of human consumption, non-chocolate candy- totally not worth the empty calories and sugar rush (Rich, dark, chocolate? ummm, now you’re talking!). These push my buttons in so many ways it’s not even funny. Gas chamber? Impaling? Firing squad?

Film bigotry
Those who think that a film is good just because it’s in a foreign language (read: English), not only have a colonial hangover but also have cheese for brains. So these people catch a C-grade English flick with Paris Hilton in the lead and then brag about watching an English film, “Oh look how sophisticated we are”. Engage them in a conversation about quality cinema (they have never even heard of The Godfather) and they will look at you like you are the interloping square egg and label you arrogant. One tight slap!

Language bigotry
Don’t even get me started on this one. This is where I am an inexorable purist. The normal, everyday language that we speak is peppered generously with words borrowed from other languages. I speak a curious mixture of English, Hindi and Bambaiya with my friends. Fair enough, ‘coz let’s face it, regional languages express some ideas more succinctly and beautifully than English does. My problem is with hybrid words- marofying, talofying, fekofying; take a verb in Hindi, suffix a –fy and voila, you have a stylish (?) new word. How I wish I could tolchok these words and their progenitors into oblivion. Also, copious usage of the word “like”- aaarghhh. I see those in the entertainment business lacking adjectives; almost anything can be qualified by the oft-repeated ones- “rocking”, “mind-blowing”, “amazing”, “awesome”, “sexy” (why, but, why?). I plan to buy them all their own personal copies of The Roget’s Thesaurus, even if it results in my bankruptcy.


I have made new enemies, haven’t I? Sigh.

*Borrowed from Dorothy Parker. She said this of Charles Dickens:

“Who call him spurious and shoddy
Shall do it o’er my lifeless body.
I heartily invite those birds,
To come outside and say those words!”

Borrowed from Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange

It's official. I'm a nerd.

There. I've said the taboo words. There go my mum's chances of ever finding me a groom, at least no male who reads this blog (assuming that there is such a person) would be suicidal enough to be yoked to me. Er, but those perusing my blog form a microscopic minority anyway, so Ma don't move to the Himalayas yet.

I have always had this sneaking feeling about my nerd-dom. It was always the wart I tried to camouflage with make-up. It was a side of mine always hushed up or spoken about in muffled undertones. It was always the chink in my armour. But now I'm outed and don't know where to hide. Political correctness be damned, I don't like being a nerd. Period.

I should probably begin at the beginning. I took these two quizzes that my friend had sent to me- "Which character from Friends are you?" and "Which Harry Potter character are you?". And I took these quizzes on two different days, so there was an outside chance of getting a cooler personality evaluation (don't ask me why, I thought these are like fortune cookies or Orkut fortunes- totally arbitrary and your evaluation is randomly generated). But no. Never try to second guess online quizzes. Here's my evaluation (drum-roll, please)

1. You are Ross Geller. You are the most intellectual of your friends and you know it! You're a realist who knows rational thought and doesn't get carried away with the moment. While people may view you as slightly uptight, most people find it to be a sign of responsibility and maturity and when the time is right, you definitely know how to have a good time!
(Yeah, right. The "good time" bit was only to handle my achy breaky heart with kid gloves. I'm a nerd you know, don't insult my intelligence)

2. You are Hermione. You're a bookworm always in search of answers. When pressed, however, you can always be counted on to put away the books and help your friends.
(see how they use the euphemism "bookworm" instead of "nerd". Damned kid-gloves again.)

And did you notice the imperious declaration? "You are...". Why not say, "You seem to be.."? At least then there is a tacit admission of the possibility of erroneous or faulty assessment. But no. We have to rule on people with booming, authoritative voices (in this case bold font) gavel and all.

Well, what the hell? I'll be a nerd. The geek shall inherit the earth. To Nerd Pride. Hurrah.

P.S. Shouldn't I get brownie points for willfully inviting public humiliation? Can I then be Chandler and Dumbledore?

To new beginnings

The silence has been deathly on the blog front for a while now. Not that I’m delusional enough to think that anyone was waiting for my next with BATED breath. (Still, one hopes)
Not that anything even mildly exciting, anything of the least import transpired. Yes, sometimes even I wonder why I blog.

* * * * * * *

I started work again about two weeks back. And this after a six month long sabbatical the better part of which was spent inanely chasing a wild goose, an impossible dream. But that’s not the point. (Bygones, to quote Richard Fish) .The highlight (if any) of my re-integration into the working population of our great nation is the changing of tracks- my joining an NGO after purely capitalistic pursuits, after four years of engineering and two years with a software major. (“Lucy, you got some ‘splainin to do”, as Desiree Arnaz would put it).

Thankfully, my parents spared me the whys and the wherefores (well, at least the whys and the wherefores were not gone into ad nauseam) - they were just over the moon because I was making myself useful (according to my dad, wasting youthful energy is criminal- an act warranting Puppy Manohar’s “Linear execution”). But a close relative (whom I generally admire for his wisdom and prudence) lectured that community service is something that retired people pursue in the autumn of their lives, after amassing wealth and wallowing in materialistic pleasures (or is an antidote to “affluenza” induced ennui). Well, I chuckled, finally something that I’m too young to do.

But seriously, it would be spiffy to have a ready reckoner of these rules. Every time someone throws the book at me, I only smile sheepishly and bury my choicest retorts in incoherent mumbling noises. Really, is there a “Big Fat Book of Life’s Rules”? Is that where I would find the rule about age, sex, caste, creed, nationality, race, colour, religion, weight, bank balance and what have you determining and cordoning off your options in life? Or that one about Indian parents hitting the panic button when their daughter reaches a particular age? Or the one which says that you can’t work for an NGO because you are an engineer? Or that one about birth, marriage and death being the only milestones worth attaining in a person’s life?

* * * * * * *
Passion and dedication. These have been the motifs of my life for the last two weeks. Well, not my life, per se (drifter that I am), for I’m only an innocent bystander, a mute audience member to the spectacle of the extraordinary work executed by ordinary people- people who dazzle me by the sheer brilliance of their efforts, people who reach sublime heights through their actions, people who embody passion and dedication. And it’s not as if they are social outcasts, or corporate refuse or losers without direction. Some have left cushy jobs for the causes they believe in, some who probably worked very hard to get into Indian “Ivy League” colleges and gave it all up for unenviable jobs and then some who have left their families in lands far away to serve strangers in another country.

There’s Di, Conifer’s and my dream English teacher. Di’s commitment to her work takes my breath away. The rapport she shares with the kids she teaches and their families touches a chord. And she’s young, funny, intelligent and wonderful company. The kids adore her. And I’m a gushy groupie.

There’s Wunderkind, a minor celebrity of sorts. But he’s so unassuming and down to earth that you are instantly comfortable around him. And I’m jealous of his clarity and focus. He’s only a few years older than I, but reaching his level of wisdom is something I can only aspire to. I have the greatest respect for him.

These have been the superstars of the fortnight. And I’m sure there will be more in time.