Cobweb Clearing!

Ok I’m not dead. Dusting off the cobwebs once again like I’ve done many a times before. I wanted to be back with a bang, with some meaningful writing, a story perhaps, but no meaningful writing seems to be coming to me any time in the near future. So I’m back to the kind of writing that requires no meaning or thinking whatsoever. Rambling.

In the past few weeks,

Was admitted into a hospital after a long time. Actually, a very long time. So long that now I don’t even remember being admitted in a hospital before. Not even a vague memory. Amma tells me often that as a child I was admitted into a hospital once at a very critical stage and after 3 days there, I pointed to my tummy and made hand signs asking for food. She says she feels like crying every time she even thinks about that incident. But I have absolutely no memories of this supposedly ‘emotional’ moment and getting to stay in a hospital now was a very exciting and new experience. I actually liked being there for a lot of reasons. For starters, everyone was doting on me like never before. All that extreme paasam made me feel like the thangachi in thangachi paasam movies. People only didn’t stand around me in a circle and sing ‘Azhagaana chinna devadhai’ while patting my head and pinching my cheeks affectionately. Everything else was done. Relatives came visiting every evening in hordes and we had to get chairs from the reception to accommodate everyone. P who usually doesn’t lift a finger at home stayed with me during the nights and was running around with water basins and medicine prescriptions. Dad had become my competitor for the hospital bed by the end of the second day and had to take medicines as well. In fact I wasn’t even dying or had some six-months-to-die kind of sickness. Just the good ol’ routine typhoid which has already struck me some four times and something the entire family is very nonchalant about.  Now I may talk cheeky but I didn’t hate it one bit when it was all happening. I was basking as much as possible under all the hospital light glory. Go away typhoid and stay away, any other sickness! It isn’t time for me to play harps in heaven already. Too many people love me here.

Watched two movies, one of which should go into history as among the best made in the country and the other should never have been made. 40 crores, Mexico, superhero, kokarako dance, pichumani, shriya… there was no end in sight to the miseries that Kanthasamy unleashed on me. I walked into the cinema hall, a full 40 minutes after the movie started wondering if it was really worthwhile going to watch a movie after missing out so much of it. I usually get the kick of having watched a film only if I watch it from the opening credits to the vanakkam at the end. But after the Kanthasamy ordeal I thanked God Almighty and Chennai traffic for having made me miss out on most of the first half. At the end of it, I was left gaping at the screen with a lot of how-could-they questions and a WTH feeling. How I wish they had made a true Superhero film minus all that fake masala! Sigh! And then there was the other one.  Kaminey. What a fantabulous movie! A true blue gangster caper that is raw, edgy, intelligent, dramatic and funny all at once. Jaw dropping screenplay, on-the-streets cinematography, mind blowing music, brilliant is the word. Ok, I’ve run out of adjectives. Vishal Bhardwaj is a rarity in the world of Indian cinema that has come to become melodrama, mindless action and songs in foreign locations. A truly well made movie pulls you into its web. It makes you relate to its characters, laugh with them, cry with them and run with them. That’s what Kaminey made me do. I’m not against the slow paced arty kind of films but give me a completely commercial but rocking Kaminey over them any day. I hate feel good happy endings but this one time I was left praying that neither Guddu nor Charlie (for all his ultra grey shades) should die. And Kanthasamy, well it made me long for the superhero to die or atleast get caught as soon as possible. Mudiyala da samy!

Caught up with a lot of pending reading. The other day I was at Odyssey when I came across a book titled ‘The 50 most influential books in the world’ It seemed to span all genres from fiction to nonfiction to history to science. Bible was on it and so was The theory of Relativity by Einstein. What caught my eye was The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. Having seen this book on almost all ‘best books list’, I decided to find out just what was so influential about it, only to realise after reading that I was now too old to be influenced by it. The book is a slice out of a teenager’s life, how he gets chucked out of a fancy prep school, what he does enroute to going home after being dismissed, his face offs with people whose kinds he isn’t accustomed to coming across in life so far, his love for his sister, and the inherent child inside every human being irrespective of age. Teenage is that period in life when you are so vulnerable but put up a brave front to hide and mask all the bewilderment. From that point of view, this book is a teenager’s bible and it’s written in an abstract disjointed way, much like Holden Caulfield, our teenager in question is actually sitting across the table from you and having a conversation. But at the end of it, I was left wondering, ‘Now how does this INFLUENCE people in any way’. Then the ever nagging inner voice said, ‘Girl, it doesn’t influence people your age. You are way too old for this. Should have read it 6 years back. Too bad you were busy being influenced by Ayn Rand back then’ So there, Catcher in the Rye was another reminder that I was getting too old – for even some serious teenage literature.

Now I’ve reached this stage where to even ramble any more I have to start thinking, which I’m not really inclined to do (unless forced, as always). So I’ll stop here and get back when I really have something to say. Might take real long, who knows!

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H.O.M.E

(Planning to migrate a few posts here, from my older blog(which i had to close down due to ‘edhir katchigalin thittamitta sadhi :P’). These are the ones I think are worth migrating, atleast so that I can read them whenever I want to without logging in, giving passwords, etc. This post was written exactly a year back. Happy anniversary HOME!! :))

A paint peeling, concrete arch proclaiming the name of the street. A narrow tar road dug up in a few dozen places. The tiny grocery shop at the corner. A primary school. Pullaiyar Kovil. Methodist Church. A few hundred houses. And another few hundred hearts. This is the constitution of the place that I’ve been calling ‘home’ for the past 10 years. Whenever I think home, it’s never a single building. It’s always a parcel of the street, friends, neighbours, roadside cricket, the huge neem tree next door and occasional squabbles. The picture is incomplete without all these.

When my parents decided to buy a plot and build a house where it is sitting pretty right now, they almost drowned in the discouragement that followed. The place is good for nothing. It is nothing but a breeding ground of pigs and stray dogs. It is thief infested. There are only two other houses in the entire locality. It is a low lying area and will not survive the first monsoon of the season. And the worst part was that each of this was true. Even my mom was half sceptical of the idea. She always wanted her dream house in a posh locality. Anna Nagar was top on her list, not some nameless hole in the by lanes, a region between the heart of the city and its suburbs. But dad was adamant. So in six months, the parents and 12 year old me shifted to our first own house, all eager and joyful. It was a modest one bedroom house. A very modest beginning. The house was ridiculously small when compared to the one ground of empty space that lay sprawling in front of it. But in less than a month again, the empty space had transformed into a lovely garden. Marigolds and Chrysanthemums framed either side of the pathway leading from the gate to the main door. Coconut trees were planted dotting the compound wall. The rest of the space was a mini farm growing ladies finger, brinjal, tomatoes, green peas, pumpkins, snake gourds and herbs. The garden became the pride of the neighbourhood (which consisted of five houses now), and they contributed seeds and saplings zealously. It was like living in a separate planet away from the pollution and noise of the city. The early morning Bharatnatyam practice surrounded by the scent of blooming jasmine flowers and roses, badminton sessions in our very own farm-cum-playground, hide and seek with the chameleons and frogs, all stamped in memory, fresh now as ever.

Slowly I graduated to high school and the street graduated to a few more houses and tar roads. Globalisation reached as far as our private planet and dad thought we needed a bigger home. The flowers vanished, vegetable patches were pulled out and we got a majestic gleaming new home in return. Now new houses mushroomed, one here and another there at a rapid rate and we suddenly had neighbours smiling at us through window sills and bringing home sweets for Diwali. There was Sundari aunty in the opposite flat who waited with piping hot coffee every evening when I came back from school. Now I didn’t have to stand waiting on the road till mom came home if I forgot to take the house key. I could take my pick from Teacher aunty’s rolls and buns or Shobha Akka’s idli vadas and keep munching to my heart’s content till mom was back. Street cricket with Sathish was a daily affair till his dad got transferred toBangalore. Even after moving to college and hostel subsequently, Friday evenings back home were never complete without snacks at Vaishu’s place. If animosity existed, it was fought out at Margazhi kolam competitions and diwali crackers. Pullaiyar and Jesus sat smug and contended, a stone’s throw away from each other. Even during the first few weeks in hostel, when I was home sick, I missed my neighbours as much as I missed my parents. Only then did I realise how the entire neighbourhood had become an integral part of what I called my ‘home’.

Things seem to have become a wee bit different these days though. All the kids have grown up. Some are doctors, some engineers and IT professionals, some settled abroad. The youngsters are too busy to notice neighbours and the grown ups are too old to socialise like before. Their occasional window sill conversations have shifted from sweet making and sarees to diabetes and arthritis. The warmth and love exists but it is more restrained and even a bit wary sometimes. The owners of a couple of high rising apartments that the street can boast of now, hardly ever open their doors or windows and sneak in and out of their own houses like burglars. I realise now that it has been more than six months since I dropped into any of my neighbour’s home for some hot coffee and hotter gossip. I make a mental note to do it this weekend. It takes a wedding, a birthday or an occasional power cut to bring everybody together and relive the old gold days again. People seem to be afraid that if they stop to talk to each other or care, life may whiz past by. I wish we could rewind back to the time when all that life meant was to stop, talk and care.

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All in a day’s work…

When I worked for an IT major, I always thought my manager had it easy. We were 42 people under him in 5 different teams. As far as I knew, all he had to do was

1)    Take up weekly status calls with the client who’d ask a million questions (none of which would be answerable unless you are either God or the Solaris box on which the product is running) and get insulted in the most polished polite manner possible.

2)    Call for team status meetings and transfer some of the scalding he got to the team. If the team didn’t take him seriously enough (which is almost always), start using menacing terms like ‘mitigation’. ‘productive competence’, ‘recessive trends’etc.

3)    Make up elaborate AI’s and ETA’s which never, repeat NEVER, are met on time.

4)    Make up excuses as to why the AI’s and ETA’s are never met on time.

5)    Draw up totally incomprehensible bar charts and pie charts in Excel and make PowerPoint presentations with notes copy pasted from Word. Yes, the three technologies my manager had totally mastered were Excel, PowerPoint and Word. Nobody could ever beat him at it.

6)    Take the Client out for coffee and discuss world politics and oil price in Kazakhstan with him for hours so that he’d be too confused and distracted to notice that the latest build we released has a thousand bugs which would never, repeat NEVER, be fixed up.

7)    Take the Client out for lunch to Mainland China and feed him up to his throat. Don’t forget to bill him for the food. Don’t forget to keep all project review meetings ONLY after the massive lunch every day.

8)    Make you work like crazy for 6 months sweet talking about ‘Outstanding’ appraisals and then give you a ‘Meets Expectation’ stating ‘wrong attitude towards work’ and ‘does not gel with the team ’

9)    Join the gang for lunch (reconfirming the belief that God never really listens to sinners’ prayers) and talking nonstop for 45 minutes about all that we despise in the world (stock markets, railway budgets, SEZ, yawn!!!). At the end of lunch we are usually left with neck sprains from all the heavy duty nodding.

10)   Power nap on in the cubicle leaving the rest of us yearning for some sleep but forcing eyes to continue staring at the monitor however bleary it may get.

Now after having such horrid notions about managers (which are almost always true), imagine my consternation when P told me that I’ll be working mostly in a ‘managerial’ capacity when I joined his company!!! An alien work place and culture, a field I was totally unfamiliar with and on top of that a job I know nothing about. I’m constantly interacting with people within the business and outside of it, making decisions, telling people what to do what not to (!!) and now I painfully acknowledge it’s not as easy as I thought it was. It was a zillion times easier working with that piece of overused machinery (read computer) than working with people because

1)    The machine doesn’t talk back. You ask what 2+2 is and it says 4. It doesn’t say nonchalantly  “Depends on where both the 2’s came from” or  whisper conspiratorily “Ummm.. don’t believe 2. It isn’t what it seems to be”. It simply treats facts as facts and doesn’t attach human elements to everything unlike human beings.

2)    The machine does not point fingers at others. Again in the 2+2 scenario, it doesn’t say, “Hell, I’m not the accountant. That’s not my job.” It just does what it’s told to do.

3)    The machine most importantly does not play work place politics which I find is on par with what is played by Mayawati, Mamata and the others at the national level.  You ask the machine what 2+2 is and it doesn’t say, “I always told you that 2 was more attached to 3. If you put 2 with another 2 they’ll start bitching about each other and you can never total it up. What about 3 and 6 instead. They’re very sweet” Or it doesn’t whine, “Why am I always asked to do all this difficult addition and she gets all the easy subtraction. This is not fair.” Or it doesn’t retort, “I can’t work with 2. I HATE it” It doesn’t cry to you saying 3 treats it badly or it needs more pay to sum up to 4. The machine simply adds the two numbers. People do everything else but that. By the end you finish dealing with all the politics and dynamics of who has to what job, who can work/can’t work with who, who can be/can’t be trusted with the job, you end up forgetting what the job was. Like I always do.

4)    The machine does not give you a you-are-out-to-make-my-life-miserable-look every time you look at it.

5)    The machine doesn’t smile sweetly at you and pass nasty comments once you are out of sight. In short, the machine doesn’t bitch.

And the machine doesn’t do a million other unnecessary things that people do. It only does its job. Probably this is exactly how my previous manager felt too but even now I feel managers in the IT field have it a bit easier when it comes to dealing with employees since in IT, there is at least no public cat fighting or open bitching. People at least pretend to like and be nice to each other. Any animosity is not taken up to the managerial levels and is just left to cool off by itself. When asked what 2+2 is, they do all the fighting and bitching among themselves and only tell the manager that it is 4. He is spared of the means! The rest of the world isn’t so hunky-dory and I face new challenges and pressures every day. It’s been a great experience to be fair and I’m NOT hating it. I love playing the ‘Naataamai’ and love discovering new aspects about my work and the people each day. All I want is to hang around and see if that wonderful day when 2+2=4, without any other strings attached, will ever arrive. Hoping it does. SOON!!

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Shirley…

(A very long personal post ahead. Not for light reading.)

Shirley weds Antony.

I saw the simple, elegant wedding card lying on the sitting room table, half of it peeping out of the white cover. My mind drew a blank for a fraction of a second before registering that Shirley was actually getting married and I got to knew about it only accidentally. From a card lying on a table. Dad was watching some news broadcast on TV as if his life depended on what happened in the Parliament meeting for the day.

“Shirley’s getting married?”

“Ummm… hmmmm” He grunted, eyes fixed on the TV still. Clearly, my question didn’t even sink in.

“DAD!!!”

“Ok, What???”

“Shirley’s getting married?? Nobody even told me!! She didn’t even call me to tell…” My tone grew more accusatory by the minute.

Dad cut me off rudely.

“When was the last time you called her? Did you invite her personally for your wedding? You only get back what you give” His eyes were cold and he went back to his television news not even giving me a further glance.

I opened my mouth to protest only to close it again not knowing what to protest about. What dad had said was true. When was the last time I called Shirley? So long ago that I don’t even remember when. I couldn’t let myself argue saying she never made the effort to keep in touch as well. I knew she wouldn’t. Not after all that she had been through.

I met Shirley for the first time while we both were in tenth grade. Our mothers were old friends, who had got in touch after a decade or so when Shirley’s family shifted to the same neighbourhood as ours. As the two women caught up with the details of the years gone by, they left their two shy daughters to get acquainted with each other. Both Shirley and I were painfully shy kids back then and I remember how we used to sit in the same room for 45 minutes a day without saying a word to each other, merely looking at the walls and ceilings, not wanting to catch each other’s eye. It took a while for me to open up to the lanky bunny toothed soft spoken girl with whom I spent a lot of time more out of compulsion than by choice. We were put in the same school, travelled in the same school van and were in adjacent classes studying the same subjects. So talk we finally did. We had to. A few words at first. A hi in the morning while getting into the van, a smile when we came across each other in between classes. Later sitting next to each other we would talk for a couple of minutes about zoology lectures and maths problems. Then we would start ‘catching places’ next to each other in the school van so that we could talk all the way home. And then we started dialling each other’s number first thing after getting home. As with all girls, once we hit off, there was no stopping us.

Shirley was shy. She was funny. She was an introvert. She had loads of wit. She spoke softly. Each word was laced with slapstick and sarcasm. She was frail. She was a tough nut to crack. Oh, duh! She was a bundle of contradictions. One minute she’s almost be in tears that it’s been years since she saw her dad in person (he left to work abroad when she was really young and visited very rarely) and the next moment she’ll be smiling through her tears and singing a song, flitting across the room. We loved each other’s company. But what Shirley loved most in the world was her mother. Since the father was away, Shirley’s mom doted on her boundlessly. Her entire being revolved around making life comfortable and hassle free for her daughter. I’d even noticed that most of her conversations with my mother started with the words “my Shirley…”  Shirley had the perfect confidante, friend and guide in her mother. I even remember envying the kind of pampering her mom showered on Shirley. She was a blessed child.

We grew up together for 2 years. When we were in high school, every weekend we used to go for entrance exam coaching to join medical college. We did everything other than getting coached there. We bunked classes and roamed the streets, cola in hand. We licked ice cream cones and chased kids on bicycles. We shared and confided in each other our dreams, hopes and ambitions. And the deepest secrets and darkest fears too. I knew what Shirley feared the most was losing people she loved. She yearned to be with her father and fought to him over the phone almost every day to come back home so that they could live together as a family again. Her father always promised he would but never kept his word. And Shirley was determined not to let go.One day, she seemed hyper excited and started whispering excitedly as soon as she got into the van. “I did it!!! Dad’s coming back!!!! It’s final. Only the paper work remains!! In a week!!” The words came out in gasps coated with joy and excitement. I was happy that the only piece of jigsaw missing from her life was finally falling into place. I prayed along with her for next week to come sooner.

Next week came. It was the morning her father was arriving. I was busy rushing for school when the call came.

“Hello?”

“Shirley here”

“Hey!!!! Dad came??? What did he…”

“My mother passed away. Heart attack.”

I was left standing with my mind numb and the click of the phone echoing in my ears.

The house was crowded. I had never seen her father before but I knew him from the way he was weeping inconsolably, sitting at his dead wife’s feet. Relatives were scattered all around the place like chaff. I scanned the room for Shirley. She was not near her mother. She was not sitting in any corner weeping. I asked a stranger and he pointed me to the kitchen. I went in. She was sitting on the floor by the door, hands around her folded knees, staring at the kitchen sink. I sat next to her.

She spoke softly as usual. “Remember she used to stand there making coffee.”

“Shirley…”

“She was so particular about the sugar. It had to be just right. She used to pour some coffee separately and taste it before serving guests” She turned to me. “Remember??” I couldn’t stop myself anymore. I broke down and started sobbing loudly. She continued staring at the sink. A relative came rushing near us. “She’s been sitting like this from the morning ma. Not a single drop of tear from her eyes. We’re all scared. Tell her to cry and let it out ma… Ask her to give vent. Tell her please…”I couldn’t say a word. All I could do was sit next to her and sob until her mother was taken away to be cremated. She didn’t come out to see her mother being carried out for the last time. She didn’t budge.

That was the last time I went inside Shirley’s house. Her days after her mother’s death became hell. It was more hell because she wouldn’t let the hurt penetrate and show through her. She came back to school in 3 days as if nothing happened. She spoke of the changes that the death caused as if they had nothing to do with her.

“I plaited my hair myself for the first time today”

“Do you know where I can get a good mop? The old one is worn out”

“I made sambhar today. It was burnt up.”

She only made matter-of-fact statements but I knew how hard it was for her to lose her mother at an age she needed her most. The girl who didn’t even know to turn on the stove or hold a broom was cooking for the family, doing the washing, cleaning and trying to cope up with the loss of the most precious thing to her, all at once. I sometimes felt like shaking her up and screaming at her to let it out. To cry and get it over with. To scream and yell that life was unfair. But I knew she wouldn’t. And I knew I couldn’t do anything to make things easy. We joined different colleges and kept in touch occasionally. She got used to the life she was thrown into or so I presumed. She never invited me home or came if I did. She was topping her department in college and called up every semester to compare scores. I always scored lower and started dreading her calls. Sometimes I wouldn’t even pick her calls especially if they came close after semester results. I was home from hostel for a particular weekend when dad asked me over coffee one evening, if I’ve been in touch with Shirley. Not recently, I said. Six months since we spoke or longer. Why?

“Her father has stomach cancer. Incurable stage. The poor child is running from hospital to hospital but no hope. He only has a few months to live. Give her a call”

I didn’t give her that call. And I regret it till date. When I look back and think about what held me back from reaching out to her during those dark days, I have no answer. I could have been there with her, holding hands and speaking comforting words. But I didn’t. I knew it was because deep down I didn’t have the mental strength to comfort her. I couldn’t hold back tears like she did. I couldn’t pretend to be strong and brave seeing her worst fears coming true. I might have rushed to her side if I knew that she’ll come running into my arms crying out for help as soon as she sees me. If I knew she would sob her heart out pouring out all the mental agony and get soothed by my gentle pats and tears. I knew she wouldn’t. She’ll probably show me hospital reports and discuss the prospects. I was simply not strong enough for that. I did not make that call. I was afraid of her grief. And I did not go to visit when her father passed away a couple of months later. I thought I don’t have what it took to be with her in her toughest times. What would I say? What could I possibly do to ease her pain? Even trying to comfort would seem meaningless, I reasoned. I didn’t realise that I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to talk. Didn’t have to hug or hold hands. I only had to be there. And I wasn’t.

I always used round about means to enquire how she was doing. Mutual friends, distant relatives, her classmates in college, her neighbours who I met in supermarkets… Once when I asked a mutual friend about Shirley, she shot back, “Why don’t you ask her yourself? She always tells me you used to be her best friend but stopped being in touch all of a sudden.” But I didn’t call her once. We used to bump into each other sometimes in Church. I had a thousand things to talk about. A ton of unanswered questions. But all I could manage was the usual how are you and how’s work. She smiled, answered and left hurriedly. I knew she thought I betrayed her. It wasn’t her fault. I was the only one who could have bridged the gap and I never did.

The wedding card still lay on the table. I would go for the wedding even if I was not invited. I didn’t want to go up the stage and tell her how happy I was or ask her to forgive me for not being there when things were tough. But I would still be there, sitting in a corner, seeing her smile. But before everything else, before it’s too late, I would first make that one little phone call.

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As random as ramblings get…

A post after long. Assuming that the 750 pages of nonsense I’ve written for my exams won’t go in vain and I’ll clear all of them in style(which  of course would be on-the-border), I’m probably done with exam writing in my life. No more hall tickets, pen pouches, identity cards and question papers. Yayyyyy!!!

I read more Coelho in the past one week than I read Security Analysis and Financial Derivatives for exams. I’ve never been a big fan of Coelho. The Alchemist went way above my head and Eleven Minutes went errr…way below it. But after reading The Winner Stands Alone, I understood that with Coelho it’s never about believable plots or storylines. It’s more about the human psyche and its exploration. The Winner Stands Alone, I believe is the least complicated of his books. There’s not much of ‘the search for hidden meaning’ or counting sheep but still Coelho writes with a great deal of heart and sincerity that it made me wonder of I’d been unnecessarily prejudiced against him. The basic premise of TWSA is almost laughable. *SPOILERS* <Igor, a Russian business tycoon goes to Cannes during the time of the famous Film Festival to win back his wife who has left him for another man, a famous haute couturier. And he chooses to do that by ‘destroying whole worlds’ as he calls them, which in simpler terms means that he goes on a serial killing spree murdering people for no reason and sending text messages to his wife after each killing. There is no real justification for Igor’s action except possibly one – that he is a homicidal psychopath. But the book hardly projects him as one. He is suave, sophisticated, rich, intelligent and yet there’s this bloody murderous streak hidden deep within him. As with every other human being in this world. Some of us manage to keep the psycho within us buried deep inside and the not-so-unfortunate ones unleash themselves upon the world, like Igor. There are various other sub plots too, dealing with the lives of the filthy rich and the dirty famous, their success, their insecurities and the agony behind the botoxed faces and Armani suits.> Coelho peels layer after layer of masks from the faces of his characters until they are all left standing stark naked, blinded by the hidden truths of their own lives. Aha!! After all it is a Paulo Coelho book. There has to be a ‘hidden truth’ somewhere  🙂

Saw Life in a Metro yesterday. Wouldn’t say I was bowled away by it but it was a sensible film which could have had some better writing. The initial portions were really good with the way the characters seemed to be interlinked with each other being brought out beautifully along the narrative. But towards the end the film was utterly predictable and the last portions extremely bollywood-ish. The film simply doesn’t end as well as it started. But what blew me away was one man’s delightful performance. Irrfan Khan. The man is nothing short of an acting superlative and he’s going places now. He’s nuanced his role so finely that I couldn’t possibly put my finger on one thing and say, “There! That’s why this is such a great piece of acting.” It is a great piece of acting only because he doesn’t seem to be acting at any point of time. And the revelation of the movie is Shilpa Shetty whom I thought couldn’t act for nuts. She has given the next best performance after Irrfan as a mentally battered and suppressed housewife with a dominating chauvinistic husband. Konkana was good too but she usually is good and I’ve sort of got used to good acting from her. A superior ensemble cast, sensible storyline and fine performances balance the negative aspects of this film. A better watch!!

For the past few weeks, I’ve been having this desire to do something nice for my parents. Feel like taking mom out for shopping and buy her all that she wants, take her to lunch in fancy restaurants, take dad for a master health check up, spend some quality time with them watching movies, laugh, cry, fight, joke or just be in their presence. I wonder what I was doing all these 23 years when I was in the same house with them day after day, year after year. Probably I was busy reading Ayn Rand or listening to U2 and Linkin Park shut up inside my room. Or I was fighting with them to extend my curfew time or cribbing about how they still treat me like a kid. Or was on the phone or in front of the TV. Guilt and shame eat me up as I write this. It was not like I totally ignored them or didn’t care but I wasn’t too bothered either. I just took it for granted that my parents were there and they would always be. Only when they are away now do I realise how much time I had let go, not being with them when I had the chance. Well, all’s not lost. I hope to make up for the lost time. At least now before it’s too late. Waiting for those precious one or two days I get with them in a month now almost seems like a penace. How things change with life!!

‘Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.’ said some wise man. In my case, make it two. Miss you Amma, Appa…

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Split!!!

I think I have a split personality. No, wait, I think I AM a split personality. Not really. I think I have a multiple personality disorder. But whoever said having a multiple personality is a disorder? There! Four of my many personalities are already out in the four lines I’ve managed to write till now. It worries me that I’m not the same person with everyone I meet. With best friends and family, I’m a chatterbox who can’t stop talking or giggling at any cost. With strangers I’m the Ice Princess. With acquaintances I’m tongue tied and reserved to the extent of being called snobbish or arrogant. With people whom I don’t get along with, I’m just plain indifferent. I’m amazed at people who can start a conversation with anybody and everybody, even with people they’ve just met, and hold the fort talking and talking until the other person gets tired of the conversation. I can hardly get past the ‘hi’ stage if I’m talking to someone for the first time, even if the person happens to be genuinely nice to me. And if there are people around who I know can talk non stop, I’d rather stay quiet and choose to put a couple of words here and there when absolutely necessary. But another diametrically opposite alter ego seems to surface when I’m with people close to me. With them, it’s always a talk-laugh-giggle-fest.

Sample what happens when a close friend calls me up suddenly.

She : Hey!!! What’s up dog? What have you been doing?

Me : *giggle* *giggle* Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!

She : *giggle* So how’s the work going? How’s the studying going? And how’s the project going???

Me : *giggling for 5 minutes* Going on maaaannnn… I hardly have time for anything but work. (This part is not fictitious. It is TRUE. All of you, stop smirking 😐 ) Remember all those days from college when we never had weekdays and each day was an extended weekend?? It’s just the opposite now. I hardly have a proper weekend.

Now I kept talking and pouring out my woeful busy schedule till she couldn’t take my sob story anymore and interrupted to say that her neighbour’s dog has given birth to a litter.

Me : *giggling starts again* oooohhhhh!! How many?? What colour are they??? Must be cute na… You know when Tommy….. (I talk about how Tommy once broke the curfew to ummmm… befriend a mongrel and got pregnant and made a litter of babies and how we got her neutered and… )

She : Hey I’ve to get down here. My stop’s come. Will call you later.

Me : Oh! It’s already an hour. But we hardly ever spoke…

She : I hardly ever spoke. Not you.

Me : *giggle* Right! Byeeeee!!!

With friends I can laugh like a nut for the worst of the worst PJ’s, talk with gay abandon for hours together and find new topics to talk about every minute. But with acquaintances it’s a totally different story altogether. Now my definition of an acquaintance is someone with whom I can’t talk nonsense. And I can’t talk if I can’t talk nonsense. Now these are people with whom I’m supposed to be prim and proper, to whom I’m supposed to say all the right and politically correct things, the only problem being I don’t know what is right and politically correct most of the time. So I end up either saying all the wrong things or not talking at all.

For example, I was caught with a relative, an old lady who was related to me in some unknown distant ways. We were seated next to each other in a family function and the conversation was something like this:

Unknown Aunty : Aren’t you ABC’s chithappa’s elder sister’s brother’s daughter??

I had no clue who ABC, chithappa, his sister and her brother were.

Me : Ummm… I’m XYZ’s daughter.

UA : That’s what I also told. You’ve grown up so much. What are you doing now?

Me : Working Aunty.

She : Where?

I gave her the name in a mono sylaable.

She : Oh! my maternal grandmother’s brother’s son’s son is working there. The same company. Do you know him? His name is Arun.

I could’ve giggled at this point and told her there are hundreds of Aruns working in my company. Maybe I could have said something to break the ice. I could have enquired more about Arun. But “No” was the only word that came out of my mouth. After an awkward silence she began again.

UA : So how is everyone at home? Amma, Appa… Long time since I saw them… Should ask them to come home one day…

Now as usual I wanted to end it with a ‘Fine’ but it sounded too blunt. Wasn’t it polite and correct to enquire back about her family??

Me : Fine Aunty. What about you? How’s Uncle doing?

She looked frozen for a moment and after giving me a steely stare turned the other side to talk to the silk sari clad lady on the other side. Only later did I get to know that the ‘Uncle’ I had enquired so fondly about, had passed away almost two years back. 😦

So there! My ultimate dilemma is that I can’t socialize for the sake of socializing. I’d rather be alone than be in uncomfortable company. I come out as anti-social with all the people who expect me to be amiable and I come out as extremely amiable with all those people who know me inside out and don’t care whether I’m sociable or not. Most of my relatives know me as a tongue tied, reserved, shy girl, whereas most of my friends know me as a talkative, bold, extroverted person. Now all I’m left with, is an identity crisis. Who is the real Me?? Huh!!

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The Food Bond

The other day I was at Ratna Café, a quaint little restaurant with a formidable reputation for the best idli-sambhar in all of Chennai. I’ve never been there before and as I entered the waft of fragrant sambhar hit me hard. Taking a corner seat, I looked around to see about 30 people eating there and all of them eating only idli-sambhar! I mean, I’ve heard of staple food and all that but 30 people gobbling up idlis drowning in a sea of sambhar as if it was elixir was a bit of a shock for me. Not a single person had dared to order for any other dish. I asked the waiter for a menu card and he gave me a have-you-just-landed-from-Mars look and pointed to a blackboard with some five items scribbled on it. Topmost on it written in bold was IDLI-SAMBHAR. Fine.

“I’ll have…”

He cut me short. “Idli Sambhar? Ok. Anything else?”

“But I never asked for idli-sambhar”

He repeated the ‘mars’ look mentioned above with some added dosage of incredulity and asked slowly as if trying to let the fact sink in.

“So you don’t want to eat idli-sambhar”

So it was some sort of hideous crime to go to Ratna Café and not eat idli-sambhar, I understood.

I gave up. “Ok, idli-sambhar. And a plate of sambhar vada. And coffee” Now he gave me a ‘are-you-going-to-eat-all-this-yourself’ look. Oh please, can’t a girl have a ‘healthy appetite??’ I gave a stare and he slunk away uneasily.

Two minutes ticked away. Our waiter arrived with a plate of fluffy white idlis and placed it before me. He had a large jug in his hand and I adjusted the water tumbler so that he could pour some water for me. Only thing the jug happened to contain sambhar and not water. He emptied the sambhar on top of the idlis. Now I had two large, soft, fluffy idlis swimming tantalizingly in a jug full of sambhar before my eyes. I broke off a piece and out it into my mouth. My eyes closed automatically and the mouth went hmmmmmmmm… Divine is the word to describe the feeling. It’s the closest I’ve been to Moksha. The sambhar drenched spongy idlis just melted in my mouth and I couldn’t stop myself from a second helping. And a third. Err and then there was the vada which was another heavenly experience. And the filter coffee made with the right mix of freshly ground coffee beans and milk with sugar was the perfect way to round it all off

I was still in a trance when I walked out of Ratna Café. I had this immediate urge to sit somewhere and write about food. Good food can do so much to the soul. And being a true foodie, I have a lot of memories associated with food. A lot of interesting, funny or plain day to day bonding over good food, bad food, ok food….

My first brush with bad food was during college hostel days. Having been pampered all along with mom’s cooking, hostel food was a VERY rude shock.

Breakfast: Stony idlis or pathetic dosas with muddy brown sambhar. Those dishes where an insult to the original idla-dosa-sambhar but we had no go. Else we had bread that seemed to have been made during the stone age and a small coin sized amount of a butter look-alike to go with it. And the milk/tea/coffee was primarily hot water with a drop of the actual milk/tea/coffee to provide an illusion of having drunk the thing. My guess is that they made one small cup of tea everyday and added enough water to serve 80 people

Lunch: Rice with assorted insects falling from the mess roof, leftover muddy brown sambhar from morning, greenish algae like concoction which formed the vegetable component and sour curd.

Dinner: don’t remember since I hardly ever remember having dinner in the mess. It always used to be biscuits or cheap tapioca chips or cup noodles. It was later that I understood why the hostel canteen is called a mess. Simply because it is a MESS.

But the bad food always gave us, the gang of friends, so much to bond over. We spent hours in the college stores each night, talking over tapioca chips and soft drinks (paupers that we were back then we hardly had money for anything better), afraid to set foot into the mess for dinner. And when one of us was really famished and starts showing signs of cannibalism we rushed off to the ‘city’ (my college was some 50 kms on the outskirts of a city!) for some real food. Hot Chips (the baby corn crispy chilly fry was our favorite!) or MarryBrown or Pizza Hut – it all depended on the budgetary constraints. Sometimes we used to get ready for college half-heartedly and suddenly change our minds about actually going to college, take a bus to the city to do some window shopping and eat chocolate cake at Nilgiris or if we were high on money, lunch at Wang’s. Later after we all started making our own money, Barista and Coffee day were within reach but still nothing could beat gossip over maanga and molagapodi at besi beach and dinner at MIK. By the way, MIK isn’t some fancy Italian eatery, its our dear old Murugan Idli Kadai 😛 Still remember how some five or seven of us used to yell “butter onion uthappam” all at once at a shell shocked waiter and look at the butter coated uttappam reverently once it arrived. Back home me and dad had this weekend tradition of ending an evening walk with bajjis and piping hot tea at a roadside tea shop. How I used to look forward to those chai sessions which were filled with loads of leg-pulling, teasing and discussions on politics, sports and current affairs!! The joy of laughter, chatter and harmless gossip with family and friends over some good food is something that can never be substituted. Atleast for hard core foodies like me.

The irony now is that everyone has the money to afford luxurious dining but the luxury of spending time together is not there. But bonding over food with near and dear still tops the list of my most favorite to-do things. After all, who can resist the pleasure of biting into a juicy burger or tearing of a piece of butter dripping uthappam when it comes along with the warmth and company of loved ones? Nah!! Not me!!!! 🙂

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Work or no work??

I’m amazed at the superficiality of the IT industry in India. I can only talk about India since I’m not sure if this is the same way things work elsewhere in the world also. There is a primeval hierarchy for survival. The Presidents above the Vice Presidents above the Technology Group Heads above the Technology Managers above the Team Managers above the Team Leaders above the Engineers. Phew! It’s more a stylized jungle with people at each others throats and vying for each others positions constantly. The money is good and more the money greater the ego, attitude, self importance etc. There’s so much professionalism around that you’d almost drown in polite words and Thanks-and-Regards mail threads. Hushed whispers, code reviews, bug fixes, unending meetings, to-do lists, calendar schedules, everything is done to clock work precision. But I realized the futility of the entire thing about a week back. My entire team was working in break neck speed for a release, fixing and coding and meeting and the whole circus, receiving polite butter-coated threats from the animals higher up in the ladder every other second when we got this meeting invite which was scheduled in half an hour. A round of murmuring went around that meetings were the last things we needed on the packed schedule right now. But the Manager drove us off (with a polite ‘you will be required there’) to it and then the Raymonds suited man (the head of our tech group) cleared up his throat and started talking. None of us were paying attention in the beginning. He started with recession, down time, focus on goals, long tem planning, needless expenditure cuts and then when he came to project wind-ups across the world and lay-offs all of us jerked up as if electrified and sat staring at him numbly. With one hand inside his expensive suit pocket, he showed us some parabolic graphs (the parabola stopped growing somewhere around 2008 end and stood tentative hovering dangerously close to the X axis) and said very smoothly, “As you can see, the interface for a venture capital like project with focus on sustainability and development rather than scope for immediate growth is not a viable business option in the current scenario which requires rapid growth and revenue generation.” English please, our minds screamed in red alert. And then, “The ABC project would thus be integrated with all its current features and latest revisions with the earlier XYZ project which in effect would put a permanent and lasting end to the viability of the ABC project in terms of customer perspective options.”

English translation: The project for which we had been working nonstop for days together has been dumped/dropped/killed without notice. By the time we had even translated his funda into English and registered it in our minds he was off with a wave and ‘Good Luck.’

All our work of two years, the hundreds of thousands of lines of code, the endless code reviews, testing, politely vicious mail threads everything down the drain in precisely five minutes. Without a foreword, without a warning. It took just five minutes for us to go all the way down, from well-placed-software-engineers-drawing-hefty-salaries to no-project-do-I-still-have-a-job-here nervous wrecks. It was then that I realized how futile ad artificial the entire workplace had been. All along we had knowingly fallen into a false sense of security. People who were in the thick of work were benched suddenly without reason. Each second is spent worrying if we would still be employed the next day. Each day is a fight for survival when the sole bread winners are employed in IT industry. I know government offices with crumbling buildings and moth eating paper work filling the tables but they do not have to butter talk to each other to save their jobs or be sent home suddenly without sense, without reason. They have a job and they have it. Period. No wonder Government jobs and Civil Services are in demand once again.

As for me I’m technically in a project but with no real task assigned its as good as being benched. Gone are the days of coffees on the run and hurried lunches to meet the End of Day deadlines. Now I have all the time in the world for a one hour coffee break, the entire afternoon for lunch if I wanted and cricket matches in the cafeteria. I know most of the articles in the Outlook, The Week and India Today by heart. What fun, I thought at the beginning. But I’ve just discovered that being useless and jobless is the most boring thing in the world. It is mind-numbingly BORING. Sigh! Will somebody give me some work please???

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Small Things, Big Things

I’ve been looping a song over and over again while at work for the past few weeks. Not that it’s a brilliant number or has top notch music. In fact it has a terrible chorus at the end of each paragraph which goes ‘va va va va va’. Sukhwinder Singh chews and spits out Thamizh mercilessly as usual, but the opening lyrics of the song totally floored me.

புன்னகைக்கு நேரம் ஒதுக்கு

பூப்பறிக்க நேரம் ஒதுக்கு

நிலவுக்கு நேரம் ஒதுக்கு

தினம் நிம்மதிக்கு நேரம் ஒதுக்கு

மழைத் தண்ணீரோடு ஓடும் குமிழி போல்

வாழ்க்கை இருக்கு

பொழுதோடு காதல் வலு காணாமல்

வாழ்க்கை எதற்கு?

which roughly translates to

Set aside time for a smile

Set aside time to pick flowers

Set aside time for the moon

Set aside  time for some peace.

Like a bubble with rain water, Life is washed away

What is Life, without Love getting stronger everyday?

If you have already excused the terrible translation, thank you, let’s move on. I make it a point to listen to these lyrics everyday morning just to remind myself that there are certain things to life other than ambition, money, career, fame, power. That there are Small Things that make a Big difference to what life means to you at the end of a lifetime. The world now is fast food and cut throat. It is considered a heinous crime if you stop by at the office cafeteria to smile at a colleague. “You could have fixed two bugs and got a pat on your shoulder instead of wasting time smiling at strangers”, Ambition sniggers. “Soap up the manager. Don’t you want a raise this time?” Career jeers. “You don’t have to know people. Let people know you”, hisses Fame. Amidst all these Big Things, the smaller players lose out. They are crushed, forgotten and battered. We are all busy scheming and plotting to pull each other down and Love lies tossed aside, unwanted and unattended. We remain caged in glass cubicles, staring at computer screens not knowing who sits next to us. Friendly Banter lies gagged, hushed up and stuffed into the cubicle locker. We travel in luxury cocoons, irritated at a drop of rain on our faces or a ray of sunlight on our eyes. Nature lies ignored and unsought. The mobile phone mints money and makes business across continents. Family lies uncared for next door. We exchange Rainbows for Mirages and remain content. Only when the Big Things are all there, we realize that we still aren’t happy with Life. We are still restless, sad, disappointed and hopeless. We realize that we’ve locked up Happiness, Love, Kindness, Peace of Mind and lost the key somewhere along the way in the mad rush for Bigger Things.

Do we have the time for a cup of coffee while looking at the sun rise over the horizon? Do we have a few minutes to share secrets with the moon at night? Do we still have time for Love, Joy, Peace and Happiness? The Small Things are all there. Waiting for us. Do we have the time?

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FRIENDS. Part -1

Life chooses a lot of things for you. Things that you never had any say in. It sure wasn’t you who decided that you were the tiny egg destined to be placed in your mother’s womb. And it wasn’t you who decided what you were going to be called for the rest of your life. You had no say in deciding when its time for you to finish up living either (unless you take the short cut and kill yourself, of course). But there are some things that you choose for yourself in life. With a free mind, own will, understanding. And you’ll never want to let go of these things in life, come what may. Passions, hobbies, vocations, attitudes, habits and above all Friends. I always used to wonder what it is that makes friends so special in life. What it is that binds us together through thick and thin. And then I realized that it’s the fact that friends are not thrust on us. You are not forced by anybody to be friends. You MAKE friends. It’s your choice and your decision. Some of us make the right choices and some don’t. Some of us make the right choices sometimes and fail at other times. I for one, have either very good in choosing my friends or just plain lucky. I’m blessed with a bunch of people who have been through it all with me, unflinching, faithful, loyal and just there when I need them. I can only write about them in return. Starting with this is a series of posts on friends, the ones I’ve picked and chosen over the years, the ones who chose me for reasons I still cant understand and the ones who I know will be with me forever.

I saw Kavitha for the first time in a jam packed training room filled with computers, small tables and just-placed apprehensive freshers. She was in the row before, just in front of me. I could hardly see her head over the monitor in front. Our eyes used to meet briefly when she turned to hand me the attendance sheet. She neither smiled nor made an effort to talk. Neither did I. but I could see she was as bored, detached and disinterested in the trainings and the people there as I was, from the look on her face which just seemed to say “Oh please, leave me alone will you??” She kept playing minesweeper all day long so much so that I picked up the game in no time just watching her play. So there we were, two strangers silently playing minesweeper in back to back desks, lonely as hell in a room filled with a sea of people. Then one day as I was settling down in a corner of the room, book in a hand, back pack in the other, she turned around and asked tentatively, “You are Amilie right? Akila’s friend?” Akila was a dog (read best friend/room mate/ victim-of-sad-jokes/girl-with-the-worst-handwriting) I know from college. Then it struck me that this was the Kavitha Akila always used to talk about. Her best friend from school who was placed in the same company as me. I had heard so much about this girl but hadn’t known her for a full week after being in the same room, ten hours a day. Then we got talking. Slowly, a word here and a sentence there. Both of us were not people who fall into an incessant chatter with people they just got to know. Initially the talks were centered around Akila. Later we included books, music, life, family and then we couldn’t stop talking. I found that me and Kavitha had a lot in common. Both of us loved reading. Both of us loved our dads. And both of us loved being alone rather than in being in the company of a lot of people with whom we couldn’t connect. When we couldn’t talk during the training sessions we were passing notes and discussing the books we were reading under the desks. During the lunch breaks we were looking out of the window into the wastelands nearby and pulling each others legs.A week or so later, the training batches were separated and Kavitha was put in a different batch. That was the first and only time I cried for parting from someone I hardly knew for a week now. I felt like someone who had been rudely snatched off a treasure chest before even I could open it to see what it contained. But the separation did nothing to daunt us. We spent every second of the free time together. I had never believed that I can open up to somebody so soon. I simply wasn’t that type. But with kavitha all the pre conceived norms and patterns of behavior were broken. The evenings spent with her at the bus stand or the tiny cake shop round the corner discussing the training sessions, family, friends and each others problems were the only things I looked forward to, each exhaustive day after day.

As I got to know her better I understood that the mind inside Kavi’s petite frame was much more complex than what it seemed to the average outsider. She was super mature at times and a child at other. She loved and valued her friends and parents above anything else in the world. Her whole world centered around their happiness. She fought a lot of very painful battles on the health front and went through very difficult periods when all I could do was just shed tears and pray to God for mercy. But she pulled through with a lot of poise, dignity and sheer conviction.

The friendship me and Kavi share is unique in its own way. We hardly call each other talk for hours but we try and make it a point to meet up at least once a week. Even without meeting, we can still sense what’s going on in each others lives. When either of us is feeling down in the dumps all it takes is a “hey inga variya” message for us to be siting across each other, laughing over sob stories, sharing and forgetting the pain in the process. She has her own group of close knit friends and so do I. But when it comes to the two of us, well, it’s only the two of us. Nothing comes in between. Petty fights, ego clashes, possessiveness, nothing. My days are hardly complete with a ‘dog’ or ‘seruppu’ from her over the Office communicator. And I know I’ll never have to worry about it all ending. I don’t ever have to worry about parting or separation. Simply because I know it wont happen.

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