I want to hide my face from Facebook

Mir, 2nd from left at the launch

[Wishing my friend Mir – a humble soul - many, many, many more books…and films and musicals and screenplays and theatre and…he never fails to surprise me. So let me play safe…Here’s wishing you all the best for all your dreams Mir!]

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Well, I was invited to speak at this event and I willing accepted to share Mir’s joy. It was fun. A wonderful evening spending time with some creative people…actors, singer and designers among them. Feel blessed. 

But, dear blog friends, knowing myself well, before retiring for the night, I did ask my trusted heart ‘how come I carried myself with such unadulterated élan?’

And lo! I woke up to chew my nails. 

I met this lovely lady and instantly took a liking to her. With her cheerful disposition she couldn’t be missed anyway. First I noticed her adjusting her stole as I hugged myself. After a while she repeated her act and we smiled at each other. Because I was now squeezing myself harder to keep my chilling bones warm. A merciless A/C also helps break the ice! I learnt.

Shortly thereafter I learnt she was my co-speaker. With rapt attention I listened to her. Her passionate call to embrace nature to create self-awareness was, I thought, a unique thought. My restless mind, however, wandered to phrase her thought thus – ‘Nature helps cover your nudity!’ [More on why I thought so later].

Well, after delivering our respective duties, we sat talking and sharing our interests. Some mutual and some distant. We exchanged a few numbers and ids and more camaraderie and bid goodbye with a promise of meeting up after a sumptuous spoon n fork-licking dinner.

This morning, my lady friend was smiling at me from my Facebook page. Idiotic me, I first smiled back. And then realized, how come she’s on my page. When did I add her on my friends' list? I shook my sleepy brains awake and asked the query several times over before my eyes did its job better. [Having four eyes do help. The first time in a month I’m happy to have sported glasses]. 

What my eyes discovered made me take my palms to lift my dropped jaw back in place. She’s been communicating with me for a few months now. I’ve cherished some of her comments on my blogposts, too. 

I sent her a sheepish message…and sat to write this to relieve myself of the shame!

PS: She sent me a few smileys in return!
 

How my boss taught me with a cigarette stick

I’ve learnt the least common denominator of a common normal human being is a good joke.  With the prefix ‘good’ being ‘yourself’.

So I pepper my speeches with an overdose of my fallacies and even those of my family’s and colleagues’. In fact, my local club is so familiar with the people whom I sit, eat, sleep and work with, that they guess my protagonist before I could even gesture.

Recalling one such incident

Here’s a pick from my first workplace that I’ve recounted several times over…

The first editor whom I worked with [am too modestly averse to use the cliché - ‘whom I had the privilege to work with…’]. And trust me, I don’t fool my readers. That’s  against my salt.

Well, he was a gentleman, nevertheless. Always marching in on polished black pointed shoes, thick rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose, wearing full-sleeved striped shirt and thigh-hugging trousers. Now, that’s something I’m in the process of understanding. Why do men flaunt their figures?  Check this space, I’m nearing the secret.

Okay, getting to the man, he wasn’t that gentle ‘cos his pet peeve was to teach me English grammar, with a pencil, cigarette stick and coffee cup.

I’ve lost the number of times he tapped the burning stick on my story to explain a compound adjective. The complexity of the term would be lost on me while I gaped at how his hooded eyes protected the pencil end from rupturing his eyeballs as he drained the silt off the cup onto his smoky teeth.

One day, he was his usual angry self. He wrote [I’m yet to see a man with such a beautiful handwriting, I admit] the sentence - ‘The truck driver had a near death experience’ and asked me, puffing in his stick, “Is there a mistake in this sentence?”

As I sat recollecting all the grammar I learnt and unlearnt, he was fast losing patience. I heard him, stern and coarse, “Did he die?”

And my mind raised in a totally different direction. “Need to check with the reporter.”

“You asking me to check….” He was glaring from across the table.

“No, I mean, I’ll do it.” I replied in all innocence.

“When did those **** write in English? And the light blinked inside me. Meanwhile, he had lost it completely. He began underlining the sentence. With each puff he scratched harder on the paper. For the life of me I couldn’t think of the answer as his actions were more gripping. He was tapping the cigarette end into the coffee cup after each puff as he held me with his burning gaze.

After a minute of scratching and tapping and staring, he barked, “How many times do I explain this”, and emptied the cup into his mouth.

His bushy ash-laden moustache, set above angrily quivering lips and those blazing eyes looking for cover was a sight to behold.  

Thanks to Mr Banerjee, I’ll never miss hyphenating a compound adjective.

Stop sensationalising rapes

This appeared in TFW on Sept 3

Has Nirbhaya’s death gone waste? Even while she was battling for life, there were girls being tortured in the same city. There were numerous cases [imagine the numbers that went unrecorded] in the rest of the country during those weeks, when the nation saw unprecedented uprising and angst.

Then slowly the candles blew out and the lenses zoomed on other issues, until the photo-journalist was attacked.

Isn’t something wrong somewhere? The first query that rushes to mind is which rape cases make news? Is it the place, the qualification of the victim, the modus operandi, the aftermath or the number of suspects involved? There was equal hoopla about Mumbai being tarnished alongside the actual unfortunate news of the girl who was out on her duty. Such barbaric acts happen in smaller towns, too. Aren’t their lives important to be documented and fought for? Or is it the case of more the merrier - only when gangs are involved are cases dissected? Or is the professions and education of those involved that matter?

A case needs one or more of the above to qualify as news. And when it meets the entire checklist it becomes breaking news!

We need to stop sensationalising rapes.

Courtesy: TFW

Hooding the suspects, parading them, meeting the families of the victim, then hiding their address, and yet giving away clues…absurd. Treat them like any other suspect. How has their minute details given out at precise intervals helped stop the menace? The law needs more sprucing up. Fast track further and make the punishment more stringent.

Why should a juvenile suspect be tried differently? If they can do it then they ought to face it. Period. Whom are we fooling? What human rights are we speaking of here? When they take away the rights of unsuspecting women in the most inhuman of ways, why should they be given any levy?

Cut the bureaucracy and protocol. Assign selective power to local police to deal with rape cases within their jurisdiction. Let them hear out both the parties, investigate and file a report and take the case to the local courts and execute the verdict. There should be no appealing verdicts in such cases. Only then will punishments be quicker and sick minds be reformed. Sounds autocratic. But in some cases, to preserve democracy, we need to be stern.

Media should be hauled up as well. In the age of social media, that’s a tough call. But nothing is impossible. TRP ratings should exclude rape coverage. Can media moguls stand up for this? If they sincerely believe in what they claim to passionately cover, they will. And that will be the beginning of de-sensationalising human sufferings.

My Om time!

I returned home from work on a Thursday afternoon. Walked into an empty home and plonked myself on the sofa, waiting for the SMS. It arrived 10 minutes earlier that I expected. ‘Landed. Cal u frm hme.’

And I got into action.

I slept, ate, read, wrote, ate, slept, read again and slept once again. That’s when I woke up to the thought that I actually had time to myself. So why not breathe in and out correctly. In the way it ought to be done.

I soon realised that that’s one herculean task for a shallow breather.

So I slept, ate, read, ate, slept, read again and slept once again.

The next day I tried with eyes open. Attempted several times and saw only my boobs rise and fall. The tummy was royally sprawled across my middle refusing to let me pump air into it.

What the heck, I’m more stubborn. At last, it succumbed.

Cheerfully, I closed my eyes and chanted the mantra ‘Oooom’ and my knees replied Oouuch!

So I slept, ate, read, ate, slept, read again and slept once again.

The following day, I told myself ego is not a virtue, and pulled up a chair and shifted my bottom on to it letting the knee live its life the way it desires. Gladly, I closed my eyes once again and chanted the mantra ‘Oooom’ and my back replied ‘Ahhhh!’

So I slept, ate, read, ate, slept, read again and slept once again.

The next day, I told myself giving up is foolishness and piled cushions behind and leaned back, allowing the spine live its life the way it desires.

 

Comfortably, I closed my eyes and chanted the mantra ‘Oooom’ and my stomach grumbled. I ignored the rumble and continued a couple of times more. Hunger is no solution to a healthy life, I told myself and got up to rummage the fridge.

That’s when I realised I haven’t been cooking nor replenishing supplies since the husband left.
Chopped some fruits, grabbed a book, put up my feet, telling myself, after eating I will meditate. An hour later, I returned to the workable position and chanted the mantra ‘Om!’

Soon, the events of the day began unfolding before my mind’s eye. ‘Let the thoughts come in. Don’t resist,’ I was taught. So I let them invade my private space. Right from the beginning, the moments played with 4D effect…I saw my computer at the workplace booting up as the creeps frantically crawled all over the place dripping glue to stick their arses around, to the traffic that freaked me out, and the cabbie who kept me waiting because he had no change, to the building security who changed the access code of the door, until the knocking knee, the rude back and the fruit bowl with chewed pomegranate seeds… I even heard my mom on the phone and, yes, some Google doodles also featured in my trance. That’s when I shook up in shock, ‘Gosh, what was I searching for? Which deadline was I working on? And I heard the screech…a familiar cry.

My morning 4am alarm to remind me to go to work!

These days I’m on a positive drive. No sulking. There’s always a next time, I told myself.

That evening, the husband arrived after four days and three nights of travel. “So what were you up to, all alone?”

“Meditating!”