I made friends with this really, really sweet American girl, Calamity (ok, she’s not accident prone or anything, but her name rhymes with the word) from California, who finds herself slap bang in the middle of Mumbai slums teaching under-privileged kids. Mumbai slums via war-torn Afghanistan. Well, obviously don’t ask her for holiday destination advice. Calamity and her husband W (who was a journo) shifted base to Mumbai and now live in a non-descript suburb trying to make sense of “mystical” India. Thankfully, they aren’t the tie-and-dye hippie types, or ISKCON adherents, or Rajneesh/Maharishi XYZ spouting weirdoes, or the white-blubbery, stringy clothes wearing Goan tourists whose major draw is cheap booze and other things we don’t mention in polite conversations- they answer to no stereotype, but are normal people who believe in this cause we are working for.
They shop for refrigerators and furniture and rush to Pantaloons’ “up to 50% off” sales, eat in Indian restaurants by pointing out to the waiter the unpronounceable food items (much like we would in French restaurants), go to the local darzi to alter their clothes and relish onion and tomato uthappa, well, atleast Calamity does. She digs the accompanying sambar and the coconut chutney. She joins Conifer and me for our “Five-star fruit and nut after lunch” ritual. She digs the “Five star” too. Yes, they are that unremarkable. But, it’s so cool to see her discovering everything in India for the first time- the Mumbai local trains, BEST buses, kirana stores, udipi restaurants, speaking Hindi, the unavoidable Roadside Romeo gaze- things which function in the background or are like second nature to us Indians, but must be so novel and exciting and even bewildering to her.
But the woman stumped me. We eat lunch in this small room called the “pantry” (a misnomer, considering it has no food). The sink in the pantry was clogged because someone forgot to unplug the metallic cap thingy from the sink-hole. So, Calamity thrust her hand in the murky, yellow coloured water of the sink and unplugged the cap- when I just wrung my hands daintily in the background. But the stumping part came when she told me that the tiny black ants which swarm her living room through crevices in the walls freak her out. Apparently, groping about in a filthy, putrid, clogged sink is harmless, but black ants mean the bubonic plague or something. Go figure.
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Learnt an important lesson in the adage “Practice what you preach”. Only about .003% of all the humans to have ever walked the earth follow it. And they are all dead. I realize that it is very easy to pontificate and power-point your way through to instant office stardom, and have people ooh and aah at your wisdom and spirituality at the seminal slides with seminal messages that you show. But, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. So, dear pseudo, “example is better than precept”. You don’t read this blog, but if you ever do, I hope this makes you blush. I can’t believe you could meet my outraged stare after your abominable behaviour. For all your revolutionary ideas, you aren’t even worth the corn in Che Guevera’s dead and decaying left pinky toe. Yes, I’m naïve enough to think this is revenge. Ha. So, I should just stop expecting civility? Yeah, I bet you’ll quote The Bhagvad Gita about expectations. Guess what finger I’m holding up?
They shop for refrigerators and furniture and rush to Pantaloons’ “up to 50% off” sales, eat in Indian restaurants by pointing out to the waiter the unpronounceable food items (much like we would in French restaurants), go to the local darzi to alter their clothes and relish onion and tomato uthappa, well, atleast Calamity does. She digs the accompanying sambar and the coconut chutney. She joins Conifer and me for our “Five-star fruit and nut after lunch” ritual. She digs the “Five star” too. Yes, they are that unremarkable. But, it’s so cool to see her discovering everything in India for the first time- the Mumbai local trains, BEST buses, kirana stores, udipi restaurants, speaking Hindi, the unavoidable Roadside Romeo gaze- things which function in the background or are like second nature to us Indians, but must be so novel and exciting and even bewildering to her.
But the woman stumped me. We eat lunch in this small room called the “pantry” (a misnomer, considering it has no food). The sink in the pantry was clogged because someone forgot to unplug the metallic cap thingy from the sink-hole. So, Calamity thrust her hand in the murky, yellow coloured water of the sink and unplugged the cap- when I just wrung my hands daintily in the background. But the stumping part came when she told me that the tiny black ants which swarm her living room through crevices in the walls freak her out. Apparently, groping about in a filthy, putrid, clogged sink is harmless, but black ants mean the bubonic plague or something. Go figure.
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Learnt an important lesson in the adage “Practice what you preach”. Only about .003% of all the humans to have ever walked the earth follow it. And they are all dead. I realize that it is very easy to pontificate and power-point your way through to instant office stardom, and have people ooh and aah at your wisdom and spirituality at the seminal slides with seminal messages that you show. But, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. So, dear pseudo, “example is better than precept”. You don’t read this blog, but if you ever do, I hope this makes you blush. I can’t believe you could meet my outraged stare after your abominable behaviour. For all your revolutionary ideas, you aren’t even worth the corn in Che Guevera’s dead and decaying left pinky toe. Yes, I’m naïve enough to think this is revenge. Ha. So, I should just stop expecting civility? Yeah, I bet you’ll quote The Bhagvad Gita about expectations. Guess what finger I’m holding up?
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Wunderkind is a sweetheart- a sensitive, discerning male of his species with an exceptionally high EQ and a silver tongue to boot. We loves him, my precious. But, platonically and all. (Nothing scandalous please.This is a PG-13 blog, states my priggish antaratma). He was nice enough to talk to me when I thought I’d burst. I owe the averting of an impending brain aneurysm to him.
Ok, so you saved me again from brain aneurysm through some human agency of yours i.e. Wunderkind. But, why did you have to break the mould? Your sense of what counts as decency is appalling. You should go see someone about it. Oh, right. You can’t possibly have shrinks where you live. With the tidy packets they make, they must have got a more tropical climate for their Eternal Rest. You don’t think things through, do you?
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Learnt another important lesson about first impressions and how stupid and simplistic it is to judge someone based on an off day they may be having. I seem doomed to be simplistic and stupid- I never learn from my past wherein I’ve had to change my impulsive judgments of people, much to my mortification. So, here’s what I’ll do- if I don’t know somebody or just barely know them and they are lousy to me, I’ll just be a lamp-post with no opinion, turn the other cheek and smile sweetly. They may just be having a bad day. If someone I know well is crappy to me, God help them.
