The post my Mom didn't want me to publish..

Good rains, soaring sensex, real estate boom, electricity in all homes, supply system of drinking water; Modi’s rule is auspicious and his one-liners, fantastic. The farmer is happy and the middle-class man is making lots of money.

The entire show about secularism and liberalism is good for nothing. They, at the most, decorate drawing room talks, text books and Barkha Dutt’s gibberish. When you are worried about where your next meal is going to come from, you, more likely than not, would not care about ‘merchants of death’ claims of the have-nots or the controversy surrounding ‘the two rupee coin’.

Liberalism is only an indulgence of the rich. If you ask my servant maid something similar, odds are she will give you a more venomous answer. Hey! And so is morality. And spirituality!

Don’t fight the vegetable vendor for a deserving extra onion or for that stem of spinach, he has kids half the size of yours; with their ribs showing vis-a -vis, the rotund-ness of your kids. And then, ‘corruption’ is imperative because everybody else is doing it.

The farmer grows the vegetable in sweltering heat, hardly managing a single meal a day! He shouldn’t be convicted for selling to the village businessman, 0.8 kg instead of 1. The village businessman travels everyday in those dilapidated buses, whose jerks can play havoc with what-ever intestines, add to it, the whole day that he has to spend in the infernal monda-market. Our vegetable vendor, washed out with hackneyed bargaining practices of the market, then commutes through the horrid traffic that is compulsively sickening even to the Ford-Icon driver. It is THIS vendor that you looked derogatorily at, arguing over deserving 3 stems of fenugreek instead of 2!
For these people, feeding their kids is more important than indulging in the rich man’s luxury of ethics/morals. And it is actually rational. You don’t need an Economic Times to tell you this.

They talk of morality and equanimity and their other scary equivalents. These are guys that make your evenings interesting, they sleep in controllable-AC rooms and move in cars that make even the Ambani boy’s green-eyed.

Morality is in not condemning these vegetable vendor type-s, in not cribbing for a 10 rupees e-top card, in not shooing off mendicants..

Tip the waiter in the restaurant, benevolently. Pay the office boy like it is his birth right. Don’t call it ‘bribe’ and make the society ‘corrupt’. Show your xenophobic protectionism here.

It is not the people or the system that is making the society corrupt. It is the moral police that is!

Of justice and flashy tails

I was reading some of my old posts today; there is more to the posts then what comes across..my posts remind me of where I’ve been; intellectually, physically and emotionally. They are a like a photograph album, only with more dimensions.

People who either have a lot going on in their lives or nothing at all, it seems practical that they write posts. I confess I have no such excuse. But I’m sad there ain’t an ideological justification for the hiatus either. If I said I had better things to do then I’m only telling a conscious lie, one that I’ll be saying to justify the premise that there was a hiatus because there deserved to be one, and that it deserved to be replaced by a “superior” activity of CAT conquest. The real formula of the story is much simpler. I ‘actually’ neglected my blog and I feel like a fool of the first order, now. I shuddered as I was reminded of the saying, “"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” The words hung heavy in the air as if in suspended animation. My blog deserved better. It deserves poetic-divine justice in fact..so here I am; writing again. This is a very emotional moment, may I add.

I was writing a mock CAT yesterday. While doing a Data Interpretation set, I looked at the guy sitting next to me; beneath a fringe of moussed hair and few millimeters of the skull was a maelstrom of stress, of tension, of competition actually- the only substantive difference between us and the species we regard as food or pets. Competition??

This fact is seductive not only because it tells us something about ourselves but also because the answer could give us insights into things that’d help lash age old misconceptions- you thought intelligence was the differentiator, didn’t you!

I don’t say animals don’t compete, but we are evolved because we compete at higher, sometimes scarier levels. When a lioness catches a deer, she’s likely to snag one of the dumb ones. The lioness has a meal, but the level of competition among the deer has been raised for the next day. Result? The dumber lions will have harder time finding a meal, and the lions have to either compete at a higher level now or just drop out of the leonine gene pool. This way, the competition ratchets up with every single sun-rise. Like my dad says, “As is true of all growth, a seedling bursts forth into a sapling and thence into a giant colossus, offering, as it were, succour and nourishment to its teeming millions..”, competition has also evolved from the food-chain days to relative grading in acads to percentiles in CAT, and believe me its tentacles are only fanning out faster each day..

Why does a girl pitch for a brainy boy? Brainy boys as in boys with brilliant grades and IIM call getter profiles? It’s not a quirk of her youth nor is it a rush in her adrenalin, it’s a good reproductive strategy! So when a peahen spies a male with a flashy tail, she can be sure of passing down good genes; their offspring will have survival advantage! Survival in competition=good brains=good genes; flashy tails that’ll be!

The game is simple. Guys strut their stuff by crooning, being witty, speaking glibly, while girls use these as clues to sort out the best one to take home to Mom and Dad. The girls here have to be smarter, there are at a higher evolutionary pressure; they have to invest smartly to pass on good genes to the offspring. So competition returns to where it started off from; genetic code!

And..I became an Aam Aadmi..

People in the bus kept giving me weird glances. I ignored. The glances grew weirder with each stop. I looked into the driver’s mirror. My brother would call it “the smuggest look I’d ever managed”, I thought. I sniggered.

Like Churchill said, “No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of the little (wo)man, walking into the little booth with a little pencil making a little cross on a little bit of paper,” after all.

The bus stopped in a jam. I looked out of the window, saw the Chief Minister in the Salaam-Alaikum hoarding, Eww! I huffed. The Congress party banner brought to the mind, Italy’s Durga Mata and her “skin show.” And ‘naturally’ followed the Rajnath’s 13, this being the only coherent thing they ever say! The left and Yechury’s “netizens don’t represent citizens” quip wrinkled my forehead to bring forth an ugly scowl on the face. Suddenly; all the ‘newspaper editorials-weekly magazines-articles’ readings seemed to make sense. I looked back at the hoarding with a wry ‘I’m-going-to-decide-your-destiny’ smile as the bus honked, screeched and accelerated. It felt nice. Very nice.

I got my Voter ID today. I feel like an ‘Indian Citizen’ now. When I got my passport, it felt more like ‘I’m only second to Whiter people!’ [Whiter? Oh well, my watchman’s daughter said to me yesterday, “You are so white!”] It was more ‘guilt’ than ‘pride’. I went to get the signatures of our neighbours on those papers and they asked me, “So, Foreign aa?” And evidently embarrassed I retorted, “No, just like that!”

The old auto-wallah on whose sawaari I came back home was not very excited at the prospect of my becoming a voter though. He managed to finally ask me why I was feeling so overwhelmingly ‘self important’.

I told him, “Ab desh ke netaaon ka bhaagy mere haath mein hai” pointing to him my nail that’d soon be inked!

“Beti yeh aapki galat faimi hai!” he said poignantly and turned away to drive.

I indulgently inquired, “Aap aisa kyun sochthe hain?”

He spat his pan and smiled saying, “Aap tho padi likhin hain, aap un sab baaton se anjaan thodi na hain!”

In a flash it brought to my mind the deformities, grave flaws and egregious deviances in the executive, legislative and judicial instrumentalities that Krishna Iyer had talked about in his recent editorial. Disturbed; I looked towards the road, nudging myself to change moods, saw another TDP leader’s banner and went back to feeling self-important again.
The auto-wallah who caught my eye through the rear view mirror, spat his pan again and smiled broadly.

what-is-it

Telangana vs. Andhra..

..Lives have been lost, political careers made and ruined, promises broken, effigies burned, lies masqueraded as gospel truths..naxalites and their guns!
I’m not sworn by the concept of `Vishalaandra' [integrated Andhra Pradesh].

I want a separate 'HYDERABAD'. We have a distinct history, distinct language, distinct cultural ethos…Our aspirations are different from Andhras and Telanganas. We are a hundred years ahead of them.
Bring back Chandrababu Naidu. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, World Bank, the Mc.Kinsey boys..the fellow put Hyderabad on the world map!

Reserved India:
Backward castes should ask for a separate country, not reservations. Meira Kumar, their Prime Minister. They can have their own IIM-A, IIM-B and IIT-M!

2 plus 2 is not 4..
“Mishti”, said Mishti, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, to MFC on her chances of getting that gold medal, “has about as much chance as a one-armed blind woman in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat's left ear with a red-hot needle.”

what-is-it:
My mother and I were watching YSR’s interview with Karan Thapar. YSR spoke with a certain *what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually what-is-it, he was far from being what-is-it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Karan Thapar dies in car accident soon. That smile on YSR’s face when he shook Thapar’s hand at the end of the show!

Rakhi Sawant is the best thing that could’ve ever happened to Bollywood:
On Koffe with Karan, with enlarged nostrils, she says in her Mumbaikar-slum accent, “Main kissi bhi aadmi ko mujhe choone nahi doongi.” and saying this, touches Karan Johar.

Heart-burns and A**-burns:
Richard Gere kisses Shilpa Shetty. Shiv Sena activists are Jealous. Media makes money.
Kids got to watch it all ‘uncensored’ on News channels. I’m furious.

MFC and Non-MFC. *guffaw* Don’t fight. *one soft low gentle cough**guffaw*

* what-is-it: The adjective that is used for describing a sinister, leering, underworld sort of animal, the kind that would spit out of the side of its mouth for two paise.

Clutter,sanctimony and the obtuse..

“Clutter”:

When I went to college last week, I realized that I was smiling at every geezer in the college, returning “hellos” and “hey’s” and “sup’s”.

I had a bizarre dream that night. The clutter in my room came to life, procreated and became more clutter, that multiplied 10 times and each piece of clutter bore zillions of little clutter.. I got up with a twitch, decided that I’ll do away with the clutter forever.

After days, no, weeks, no, months of deliberately ignoring "hidden clutter" in my room, I decided to spend some quality clean-up time.

It's astounding how many cords, papers of every size, shape and colour, discarded clothes, answer papers of class 2, shields, files, books and every other just-in-case-I-need-it’s and other sentimental pens and watches and combs, yes combs..I keep! I have too much STUFF…It totted up to 6 sacs of clutter ..and imagine..my room features on most people’s ‘top 10 cleanest rooms’ list.

I decided to aggregate all of these little things; ditch my silly emotional attachment and get rid of them all. Clutter is like cancer. Left untreated, it only metastasizesà and not just clutter in the room, even clutter in our lives.

De-cluttering lesson:

1) The most important step in de-cluttering is “identifying” clutter as clutter.

2) Clutter can be a pamphlet that you forgot to throw in the waste paper basket or a relationship that you are brooking.

3) Throw off pamphlets and split up with people you cannot put up with anymore.

4) When you are throwing off the clutter, throw with force, it has towed your happiness all the while. Similarly, you can slap your friend/relation on their face if that gives you any pleasure.

5) Start with your cell phone. It is plagued with contacts. Delete them all. Keep only contacts that you have put on your speed dial. Even there, if you have contacts on all your speed dial options, beware, you are prone to cluttering.

I’ve done an even better thing; I threw off my SIM in the manhole.

I’ve de-cluttered my room and my cell phone..and the most deadly clutter of all--undesirable- relationships, I’ll kick them off soon. Very, very soon.

“Sanctimony”:

There is actually much more to the word than what you will find in the lexicon.

Sanctimonious people are not just the stereotypical saint-like, overly glum, po-faced people with a painful ‘Heaven-is-reserved-for-us’ kind of smile on their face.

Their false piety and heresy of quietism are repulsive and revolting to the vitals. They are those people who fake concern about your health; they want you to stay healthy, so that they can poison you and watch you die!

“The obtuse [as in dumb]”:

People who while seeing news channel headlines for deaths, train derailments, floods and plagues, must have also seen budget reports and claim that there is NO change in life; pre-budget and post-budget! There is more to newspapers than soft porn! An irascible “ha”!

Are these statements offensive? So be it!

The call to true human-ness, which is the prerequisite for a man’s personal sanctity, is anything but non-offensive.

The Birthday challenge

A birthday means that we're one year older.

This time it meant more…

It meant ‘bye-bye teens’ for me. It is scary to type, even scarier to live. I’ve just hit "The Big 2-0." It is not a tragedy in itself but there is something about turning this very specific number that I did not quite like.

I can no longer blame my teenage for my idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. Now there are all MINE and here to stay. We tend to compare where we are with where we thought we'd be at whatever landmark age we've reached [20 is one such horrifying watershed] and so did I. The results are not even remotely remarkable. I haven't met any of my Cinderella-style benchmarks. I don't know what I'm going to do, but with youthful certainty I know that by 25 I'd be tremendously rich and deliriously happy. Fancy that!

People like me should not be allowed to have birthdays. At the start of our special day we should be taken into a quiet room and sedated. When we wake up the next day, then we might celebrate the end of our birthday - the over-ness of it. I have too many expectations from it. Take this year; my own particular brand of birthday paranoia has been sleeping nicely for months but that sleep ends as the first phone call buzzes in my ear. I get a coupla early morning calls, but with each one I attend I think of another three people who should have also called. Why didn’t X call me, and when exactly did she stop? I can't stop thinking of all the people who did not call me, so I try to distract myself by yelping in an extra high pitched ‘thank-you-for-calling-so-sweet-of-you’s’ . I notice that most of the callers had very little to say; just a "happy birthday"or a "many happy returns" that had replaced the “many many many happy returns” of last year. My paranoia wants to know why there is no larger message, something witty or kind, and something really for me? Evidently these people don't actually care; they are just ticking the boxes of long-term friendship: calls for significant events, tragedies, or some other formula.

Without warning I am swamped by all my bad birthday memories: 'me' crying at one of my parties, me fighting with friends at another, me overwrought and crying on my first teenage birthday outing, me jealous of my friends getting more attention than me on MY special day, me demanding a friend to swap a goodie bag for the birthday present she had given me earlier, me sobbing over duplicate presents, over unwanted presents, and lately, over my ageing self. That is a hard thing about getting older, the baggage mounts and the fallout sometimes threatens to smother you. Birthdays are like challenges..I’m more like “Oooookay..okay God bring it on..bring it on!”

The knotty thing about this birthday is that it was ‘also’ exceptionally enjoyable making expectations for the next birthday zoom off to newer, earlier un-jaunted levels..
particularly..the flattering fan mails…. “Mishti fan club member roll no:6758" wishes you.. ha ha ha..!”

The next birthday paranoia has set in earlier than usual..this time with larger magnitude and greater expectations..Holy cow!

There is not even a ‘pretense’ of civility here...

Venomous language, bitter deep-seated ill will, prolix attacks, name calling, character assassination, back handed slaps..there is not even a ‘pretense’ of civility here.

“This is the first time she is in a terrible fix. I’m enjoying it.” , said the mudslinger to my friend.

I am NOT undone. I am not sitting silent because I’m doomed to extinction. It is not a cagey avoidance either. I won’t dignify those questions with answers. I could sling back the mud on the muckraker but I don’t want to descend to the gutter.

I’m a celebrated student. People are jealous of me. They say things. All the time. Hauteur, arrogance, superbia, and all its chance variables..mud slinging is not new. It is part of rhetoric I’ve seen all my student life. Only this time, it has reached an all time low.