Inside her mind

This morning as I was moving up and down the slider in my Pilates class, I winced in pain. The image of my fingers getting horribly crushed in the machine had just flashed in my mind and I was trying to imagine life without fingers. I let out an involuntary shudder before lifting my toes to the ceiling like an inverted ballerina.

People give wings to their imagination, mine is in an out of control spacecraft.

There is no way I can pass a manhole, without picturing myself inside it. What if the lid is not strong enough and I fall in its abysmal depths never to come out again! Crying, shouting for help before collapsing in a cesspool of human refuse….Will anyone miss me? Will my husband marry again? What happens to Tee! How will she manage life without me? What if she’s actually happy that she’s finally managed to get rid of me? Was I not a good enough mother to her! Does anyone really love me! I stop only after I collide into a gentleman, profusely apologize and head home with a heavy heart.

I discovered my true worth after I fell inside a manhole.

When we were just married, I used to start crying every time he left town for an official tour. In fact, I cried for three days non-stop when he left for the first time to Houston for two months. The women reading this post will understand why! We excel at imagining the worst. If he’s not picking up the phone, he must have been kidnapped by the Al Qaeda! If he hasn’t called up ten minutes after landing, his aircraft must have skidded off the runway.

Women are born worriers. Not just content with worrying about our loved ones, we worry on behalf of our neighbours, their dog, the nation and the universe. We nurture our fears like little puppies, despite knowing that only 0.009% of them will come true. We just can’t help it! We pursue our fears with single minded passion and wallow in misery.

We are willing prisoners of our paranoia’s.

If she’s watching news clips of flood ravaged Uttarakhand, or the horror unleashed by a tornado or tsunami, chances are she’s imagining herself there, alone, injured looking for her missing family. She doesn’t stop there. She blinks back tears as she thinks of the countless lives lost, the misery of those who survived and how life will never be the same again for them.

The accursed generation

Seldom do you meet a man who's as humble and unassuming as Suresh Chandrasekaran, One of the best that blogosphere has to offer, his language is graceful, humour understated and he always has something substantive to say. There's no way you can skip through a C.Suresh post. Such is his grasp of the language and subject that he holds your attention till the last sentence. An IIM graduate, he gave up the lure of the corporate world, to pursue his heart's calling, a path very few will dare to tread. His many fans rightly believe that it was Life is LIke this that deserved to win Indian Blogger Award for the best blog in the humour category.

In this post, Suresh talks about his encounters with the exotic PC and prays for an escape button for a generation enslaved to this digital monster.

A-P-P-L-E --- Apple; B-O-Y --- Boy……

“Yes, Teacher”

There we were sitting deferentially at the feet – metaphorically or literally depending on your school – of the teacher, who was the repository of knowledge that you did not possess. Faintly at the back of your mind is a glimmer of hope that, someday, you would be the font of knowledge from whom those younger than you would drink even if you did not choose the teaching profession.

Now that you have been through the education mill with straight “A’s (All Right already! Mainly “C”s and a smattering of “B”s if you want to be THAT literal about it) and come into the ripeness of years, you will at last occupy the seat of wisdom – or so you think.

H-V --- Have; G-R-8 --- Great ……

Uhoh! Every generation up to now has reached a time when it teaches after having been taught. I belong to, probably, the only one that started off learning from the old and now has to be a student of the young. Great …umm.. I mean gr8. Sorry, Teacher!

I blame it all on that thing that we used to call the computer. I still cannot bring myself to call it with all those pet names that the young use for it – as though it were a friend, boon companion or alter ego. The scars of my early run-ins with that thing are still fresh in my mind.
 

I Have Some Good News

When Indiblogger, India's largest, most popular network of Indian blogs and bloggers announces its first ever Indian Blogging awards #IBA2013, you nominate your blog in haste and repent in leisure. One look at the sheer number of blogs competing for the top spots and the stalwarts in your category, you start preparing yourself for heartbreak. You look at the illustrious panel of jurors and mumble - No way will they even care to look at my blog! It makes it worse that so many of your friends and supporters have high hopes from you and you don't want to let them down.

So, you try to make yourself and others believe that everything is Maya and we are mere pawns in the chessboard of fate. You pray for amnesia for you and your friends so that they don't try to drown you with their waves of sympathy after the results are announced.

The D-Day is 15th August and you come to know that the awards will be announced at 6.PM IST. Even though it's past your bedtime in Australia, you wait with baited breath. You realize you're shaking. Then you see so many of your friends Rachna Parmar, Alka Gurha, Bhartiya Grihanee, Rekha Kakkar, Ranjana Shankar, Saru Singhal, Deepa Sunil, Vidya Sury walk away with top honours and you erupt with joy. Now you're tired and since you honestly don't expect to win, you try to get some sleep. But that little flame of hope refuses to die and flip open your iPad.

My Experiments With Mallu Porn

Google Images

Since Porn is what men watch and women frown at, I thought, what better way to rattle your senses than get a good, Indian girl to write about her encounters with the unmentioned kind. Well, Red Handed is no ordinary girl. She's sassy, witty and authors the incredibly funny blog by the same name. Her humour is the no-holds-barred kind and it's tough to keep a straight face while reading her posts.

In this post she talks about the much loved Mallu Porn....


In the words of the celebrated writer Ruskin Rushdie “Mallu Porn is like Fashion, a national self induced epidemic”. Recently an acclaimed Hollywood director M.Night Spielberg was caught watching Mallu porn in his iPad during the international premier of his ‘Love in the time of Size Zero’. TMZ tried to get his comments on the subject but could only reach one of his assistants who on the promise of anonymity told “Not everyone is into Jenna Jameson or Tory Black. Even in the west, men are craving for bootylicious sistas from the Deep South, but are instead rewarded with sticks with makeup on.”

Mallu porn is a rage you cannot escape. It is like the closet from Narnia that has to be entered into to understand a world that is on the other side. It is like Hitler’s moustache. You wouldn’t find it pleasing but you also wouldn’t want to tamper with it. It is a religion, a secret society, of which you unwittingly become a sworn member.

I had committed the cardinal sin of remaining untouched by ‘THE’ Mallu porn for what seemed to be my 23 years of existence. Blasphemy doesn’t give you a free pass just because you are a woman, especially if you happen to belong to the land that started it all. It’s like living in Paris and never visiting the Eiffel Tower. I just had to dip my toes in the vast pool that was Mallu porn to know whether it would give me shudders or warm yet sensational goose bumps that would revitalize my views on porn. Now don’t be shocked when you hear about a woman watching porn, for in the words of the famous Meryl Moanro “Women have as many prurient interests as men. We just keep those interests a secret.” It starts with a bite of the bug called curiosity and then turns into an educational tryst because unlike men, women don’t get high on porn but merely find it amusing. If you ask me, I would choose porn over televised sports any day!

Google Images

India sends Mahawati to Broker Peace Talks with Pakistan

This post was also published on The Unreal Times, dated 9th August

Tired of condemning, not tolerating and still trying to frame a fitting reply to dastardly attacks by Pakistan, India finally decided that it has to move beyond severing cricket ties, to teach Pakistan a lesson. No more Aman and Asha and trying to buy their neighbour’s affections with Sallu and SRK movies. It’s time we showed them who the Big Boss is! After 55 adjournments and 56 walkouts in the Parliament, it was decided that the only way to deal with the world’s favourite headache and enfant terrible, Pakistan, was sending over a strict Nanny.

So, the hunt began for a woman with a towering personality capable of turning decorated officers into her personal shoe-shine boys. With shoulders strong enough to bear the weight of Anaconda garlands. A heavy-weight personality who could make grown-up feel like errant kids with a mere lashing of her tongue!

And guess whose name our esteemed Parliamentarians came up with? Who else but Kumari Mahawati, Uttar Pradesh’s very own Statue of Liberty!

Forbes ex most powerful, India’s Prime Minister in waiting, she’s also the only woman to feature in Thumka Book of Records for the record number of memorials she has built to honour herself. Sister to all Dalits and blister to the Yadavs and their henchmen, Behenjee also happens to be the only human alive to wear garlands heavier than Bappi Lahiri’s gold chains.

Who better than UP’s ex CM, to give a fitting reply to Pakistan’s ex minster of external affairs, Hina Rabbani Khar! What’s a few Birkins compared to Mahawati’s mammoth collection of handbags!

May You Rest In Peace

 

Courtesy - CartoonStock.com

I am not afraid of dying. I mean what’s the big deal in dying? You are too dead to care if the Rupee will rise again, if you’ll fit into those jeans again, if Rahul Gandhi becomes our PM, why everyone is so concerned that you invest in a flat in Noida’s Sector 3456….

In fact, it’s your friends and family you leave behind, who have to deal with grief or relief depending on what a good/bad job you did of not annoying / annoying them.

Unfortunately for all of us, death is an inevitable that we cannot escape. The final must-do in our bucket list. Besides giving up on the tax refund you claimed in 2002.

For someone who loves writing and opining, words fail me when it comes to expressing my condolences. I guess it stems from the knowledge that whatever I say to express my regret and sympathy will sound hollow when compared with what s/he is going through. And the last thing a person in grief wants is sympathy.

Some of us are so tongue-tied that when a friend or acquaintance shares the news of demise of their beloved Dadajee on Facebook, we simply click the “like” button. I mean that’s what Facebook is, a communion of like-minded individuals who spend 80% of their online time complimenting each other, sharing motivational quotes and feeling relieved that there is a “like” icon when there is nothing to say.

Dadajee could have been 90, miserly, cranky and a chronic bed-wetter and you’re sure that his family and especially his wife cum tea maker cum cook cum temper absorber cum diaper changer of 70 years are secretly rejoicing. Why, you even saw them bursting crackers last Diwali!