RED EYES

Have you ever seen smoke dance to a squealing guitar? Have you ever seen a flash of light so bright, it almost blinds your faith in wonders? And then when you turn around to look, it’s a single stick with a sulfur tip that’s putting the end of a white stick of paper filled with a ‘deceiver’ on fire. Raging hands shaking high above numerous heads. Droopy eyes. Heads reaching for the floor to enhance the effect of the ‘hit’. Bear hugs and love expressions. Crying teary eyes, cribbing, bitching about the bitch. Lyrics pronounced in religious dedication. Unbeaten concentration on the playing of a non-existent guitar in the hands of many. Sluggish feet making their way to the rest room. Some to the smoke vender. Couples cuddling to prove no point of consequence. Loud laughs. High fives. Muffled words. Slurry sounds of unborn thoughts that die in the mind. Dead hopes, dead desire, dead smiles. A violent crisscross of base sounds and drummers beating their lives onto dead skins till they feel they can tear it. Mind numbing jokes. Beer. Cold drafts of air from the A/c over head. Lack of sensation. Lack of control. Lack of logic in finding meaning to what or why one really really BELONGS here. More beer. Nostalgia. Déjà vu. Visions. All three of the above in the same flash of a split second. Reluctance to go home. Compulsion of having to go home. The fight between the two antagonistic sensations. Suspended animation. Some more Beer. Red flames glowing like stars from a different universe. One, more personal than the one you are living in. and of course, more and more beer!

God I love Tavern.

And Jal is an amazing band... since van is a big jal fan, went to see 'woh lamhe' and 'adat' (performing live in bandra) but couldnt get in.... actually did'nt need to. after that was tavern. great fun.

I had written this article a while back when I had just gone through with my t.y.b.com exams and I really like it. i am also publishing this in the annual magazine this year (of Sydenham) but I thought of putting it up here none the less. Ok… I admit… confession if you will… don’t have any inspiration to write lately so…

TEXT BLUES

I was surrounded by zombies. They feared something, something strange and silent. i knew the shaping hand of providence was closing in on my future and the magical touch was just a silent acquiesce away.

They sat silently. They had a motive to achieve as they stared at black letters on white sheets, smelling fresh with the chemical used for photocopying. It is strange how one person who was possibly sleepy while he was listening to this lady (who does not know what or why she is speaking) is scribbling the letters dropping out of her mouth onto a piece of paper, which suddenly becomes a bible for those masses who never went to 'church' all year. What were they trying to achieve by being atheists for 11 months and suddenly having their sins catching up with them? It is commendable though, these zombies pull it off to say the least.

Those few weeks before the exams may be the glorious festivity of a hated event called “studies”. And the venue, as hated as it may be, is the otherwise haunted, library. The cult gathers at 8 am sharp and the prayers begin with a consistent chant... 'Oh fuck, I’m so screwed!!’. A few discussions with fellow 'believers' rekindle their faith. They open the untouched holy books of unknown subject with fear and spite on an equal balance. The reading begins and the next ten minutes are filled with a religious dedication towards the commitment they have made to this religion for the past 20 years or so. But as I said, ten minutes; then comes along Satan with his overpowering charm. Every one of the seven sins put together in the words that drop out like gospel hymns for these zombies to follow as their new bible… actually they simply revert to their atheism when they here him say “come on guys lets go for Chai!”. The “holy bibles” go for a fantastic toss and the “harrowed” individuals want to go for tea breaks.

It’s not too long (just about two hours) before the pangs of guilt strangle the necks of our refreshed students and they decide to head back to the Mecca. The books open themselves as if it was a favour to mankind to have been read by the youth of our country. Eyes wander on chapters and the “out of touch” memories of the kids can support no data other than the page numbers and chapter headings. Now the fine play of food aftermaths kick in. Drooping eyes and divided concentration make fine excuses for going no farther then where they have stopped (which again is a page and a half). Soporific chants lull them off for a 2 hour knock out and the fearful laughter of friends and screams of the disgusted parents jolt them up in frenzy. Heavy amounts of water and large quantities of mint and chocolates are consumed before faces are washed and we resume. Books spring to life and pages turn like an unprecedented dance of fright and random motions of the hand over letters flow through minds of young bloods. They push to remember as much as they can. Bullet points, paraphrases and highlighted headings are inter woven with thoughts of failing and irritations about why the girlfriend slept off without saying good night to the lover, the night before.

The crows mark the forthcoming of a regretful evening of a wasted day. The realization of not having grasped even 10% of the amount perused is a wake-up call but we decide to press the ‘snooze’ button and get home unperturbed by materialistic thoughts of taking exams to get a degree for getting a job and earning large pays. Sometimes, thoughts of this sort are like reality checks. Questions like ‘Where am I going?’, ‘What am I looking for?’, ‘What’s my future in this field?’; ‘Do I even belong here?’… start making sudden and irrational sense. The questions remain unanswered and the night passes off like a kink in the flow of time. the dawn of a new day of stress, toil, turmoil and pain and friends, food and tea breaks; the ratio being 2 hours is to 8 hours. The same old guilt, the same additional 10% and the same deep, philosophical questions end the day’s disgust.

Every day is a deja vu and the guilt goes to a penultimate tightening before the grip breaks your back bone and you have no option but to reverse the 2 to 8 ratio and make the 10% to 100% absorption. You ignore your girlfriend and the thought of failing is sinful. Eyes water and dare not droop. Food is kept to bare minimum of rice and veggies. Page numbers matter no more and photocopies are handled with perfect honesty. No Satanic interventions and no more distractions to feast your tired eyes on. The nearing of judgment day is time to wash out your sins and bathe in the holy waters of knowledge. The exams are a revelation of a toiling farmer ready to harvest (in this case the farmers decided to use hybrid variety that matures in a month). They (exams) arrive in chariots of fire and you are ready and armed. The soot of the midnight oil is the artillery you posses. Pens raging on the battle field. Printed questions thrown ruthlessly at you by your adversary. The bell sounds like the war horn and the raging bulls attack. Every bit stuffed is regurgitated with utmost precision and the battle culminates with the defendants left in doubt of their victory.

This is the story of a normal student… a story about a young mind fixed in a matrix called education and a small protective world known as a college. The concepts that bind the mind are a matter of legible volumes of unwanted information jammed into the system for a small rapid fire round and then forgotten for the rest of their lives.

Well, I’m through, I’m tired and I’m glad. The legacy is thus passed on to the next batch of degree aspirants… for me; the hunt was more interesting than the kill.

VALENTINO BLUES

“Nothing in our lives is ever going to come easy man!”

This is a quote from my close buddy in fear and sorrow, Valentino AKA Van. Let me give you a quick history of the man. Van is a Chinese born and brought up in India. Did his schooling from a convent and passed B.Com from Sydenham. But most importantly… he was born in 1982… like me and other ill-lucked, jinxed souls like me. This year is defined and tagged as “the darkest year” in the history of mankind. This is the theory we hold: nothing will ever go our way and nothing has ever gone our way in the past. (I have reconfirmed this from all 82’s and they concur). Van started working in the stock markets and for the two odd years he was there…. well, nothing went his way. Now he has finally given up and that too because he has ‘no more money to lose’. By the way, all that I put under quotes are his words. We met today (like we usually do) at the famous Muchhad Panwala, now termed as “Nainas” after the boutique that stands there. This was also Van’s idea so that when we say “nine ‘o’ clock, Nainas”, it sounds a little better than “Nine ‘o’ clock Muchhad Panwala”. Anyway, we met and discussed our run down lives and the daily issues and minor glimpses of the rather usual bad lucks. But today was exceptional. We laughed over these things like there was no tomorrow. No cribbing. Just laughing it all off. Then Van starts with his theory.

“God hates me. He keeps telling me, nothing is going to come to you. You want it, earn it. Never buy a lottery ticket. No use. I mean, we’ve all heard of ‘work hard, party harder’ but for us… ‘wanna party? Work harder, bitch! Wanna party hard? Don’t push it!’”. He went on with his screw up for the day when I asked him what happened. “My aunt is coming down from Taiwan. So I asked her to get me a graphic card. What do you know; they ran out of stock that day only. Had to settle for something lower. What the hell man”. Lots of laughing. “I’m sure they have a surveillance team in place up there man. Every time Van asks for something, make sure he gets none. Imagine, a place like Taiwan, a demand like a normal simple graphic card…. But no. ‘Empty stocks quick, clear clear clear’…. Van demands, shop keeper says ‘Sorry, no stocks’… phew, mission accomplished… high fives”. I died laughing. So did he. And this is not where he decides to stop. “Even the stock exchange has a Screw Van Squad in place. Picture this: small room, few computers few men. Sitting, cracking jokes, lighting cigarettes, all going fine. Van hits a deal on his machine… finished. Red alert alarms go off, battle stations…. Sell sell sell till the price drops to a 50% and let him square it off…. Van shouts SHIT…. Mission accomplished”. It was unbelievable, the way he was just laughing about these things. And no exaggerations, this is how bad it was. The market is sky rocketing till he punches a deal. Boom! Kaput. And to top it all, they others even joke about it saying ’82 kahi ka!’

“Screw that”, he continued while I regained balance and some breath. “I go to a lounge bar at Bandra with some friends and I see this Chinese sitting in the corner staring at me. I think it was Henry Tham and he knows my pop quite well. So even after six months, he’ll bring it up and well, the rest as they say is history”. Sure enough, at that very instant some dogs started howling like wolves on a full-moon night. Van comments, “Yeah, weep and the world (you belong to) weeps with you”. There was no stopping this guy tonight. Then some other friends joined in and topics shifted base. It still circled around bad luck and jinx… simply because the other two were also 82’s.

“the Chinese believe”, he spoke with words as profound as sermons but facial lines far from the concept of seriousness, “that there is harmony created when the good and bad, darkness and light and other such opposites are in a balance. The forces of the universe are in perfect equilibrium….”. he stopped for a drag and let smoke out of his mouth like a cloud of thoughts and continued, “Bloody hell! The only reason why anything good is happening in this world is because I balance everything out single handedly!”. A crazy roar of laghter filled the place up and woke this poor bawa family on the first floor of the building that had Nainas on the ground floor. “no seriously, the week when I was finally making some money in the markets, the tsunami killed millions… co-incidence you think?… no way. The yin yen never fails my friend”. We were now on the verge of getting a little serious and probably had stood enough to make our legs tired. But all that was happening was not feeling fine any more. I guess hee took the vibe in account and simply said “f@#! it…. some day God shall take a break and we’ll have our days in place... may be next year”. We had the last laugh and shook hands while each parted though I was still with Van because he was dropping me home. We took ice-cream and went to our humble abodes to retire in contemplation of all that went on in our minds… simultaneously.

The real reason for the post is, this kind of a conversation actually redefined the word ‘catharsis’ for me. It was quite a serious issue. All of us have been going through this phase of thrashed fate. I don’t want to discuss the issues in depth but know you this, they are no laughing matter. I guess this is a better way to talk things out with some friends and not have them run away. I know how it feels when you always have had a calm approach until you can hold back your angst no more and you want to talk. The slightest notice of an outpour in the offing and the other ‘friend’ starts hunting for obvious exits. Don’t know if I should and can blame someone for doing so, but I have never done it. Can’t turn a deaf ear. Even if I can’t help someone out, I still listen patiently, indifferently also (need be). Catharsis is no excuse for comfort but a deterrent to say the least. Anyway, its times and people like these that really show you a different perspective of life. Nothing comes easy to anyone but as our friend Albert says, “I don’t care how big your problems are, mine are bigger”. Here’s to the man who chooses to see fate as something having a good sense of humor unlike most who say it has bad sense of timing. Here’s to Van. Pleasure to have a smiley in flesh man. J. Floyd concludes:

Where were you… when I was burnt and broken?
While the days slipped by from my window, watching.
And where were you… while I was hurt and I was helpless?
For all the things you say and the things you do surround me.
While you were hanging yourself on someone else’s words,
Dying to believe what you heard…..
I WAS STARING STRIGHT INTO THE SHINING SUN!

Cheers!

Shifting Sands!

“So what does happiness mean to you?”, she asked me. Her face showed interest like none I had seen. She really wanted to know, which is a welcome break from the usual pseudo-isms, what I thought of happiness.

I had seen profoundness coming. 8.30 pm walks on the empty beaches can do that. It was unbelievable. We (Priyanka and I) started walking from my place at Juhu and came across the craziest noise pollution. Walked on as she fiddled with her phone and I with my thoughts. Something was on her mind or so I felt but only to realize it was a message conversation she was having with her friend bout some party they were to go for that night. Anyway, the sweet thing was she kept biting her tongue as she looked outside the small world of her own called the cell phone. Incessant apologies followed. Then we took that detour to the left of the main road that lead to the almost uninhabited shoreline. It stretched from infinity to infinity. The moon was small but bright, the stars almost looked like LED lamps… yes you read it right, we saw starS (the capital for stress) in Mumbai. I love the sound of the sea. It’s so peaceful. It’s quite a paradox/irony/funny thing (call it what you may). The sea itself is restless, the waves are mad and hence they create the world’s most soothing sounds. That is what started us both off on the insightful interview session. Happiness was the topic at hand. Can it be quantified? Can one say when one is the happiest? Can one know if this is as happy as it gets? The questions and thoughts flowed and so did wind. And so did time. We stood there for what looked like an era but it was really not more than 45 odd minutes. She kept defining happiness and I kept soliciting my idea of not conceptualizing or binding any such abstract feeling as happiness. Reasons, 1. It is abstract. 2. It is a feeling. 3. It is relative. I always feel happiness, sadness, anger, pleasure, satisfaction, attraction, prejudice; all these things are what we’ve trained our minds to think what they are. I was telling Priyanka, how a job that pays well is clubbed as satisfaction right now, then it might be clubbed under routine but happy, then maybe mundane and unhappy, then piss off and at that time the family that you dread having right now (getting married etc.) is actually your saving grace and that’s what you start clubbing under happy. It’s all relative. Shifting sands. The silence on the beach was broken only once in a while by a plane that would zoom by. I looked up at one of them, that was flying quite low and so did Priyanka. Suddenly her one hand caught my shoulder and the other pointed a finger at the plane that had crossed the bright moon. “Nature is dying while man takes no heed of how beautiful it is to be amidst it” she said. Went on to add, “God, these quiet walks can really make one think tangentially. I haven’t been like this for weeks now maybe. Work work work…” And quite on cue, her cell phone rings. “Oops! Boss calling…” she said and took the call. I figured it would take her a while so I picked her up by the arm and guided her through the traffic, got her into an auto, and already started off. By the time she hung up, she had no recollection of what happened back there. When did we get up, get out, got where we were…. Nothing. All I had to do was smile at her and she understood that it was this very instance that we had been talking about all evening. 45 minutes, just that much to break away into a world not yours and 45 seconds to bring you right back into it. You can’t stay too long where you know you don’t belong.

Usual Musings of an Unusual Day

I met a friend today after a year… after she came back from Dubai… she has done her course of MBA from S.P. Jain there.

It was the most unexpectedly fabulous moment, the minute I saw her. I couldn’t even imagine that it was a YEAR ago that I had seen her last. The warmth, the truth of having been there with each other through a lot of heavy and light things…. Just having stuck around with each other for more than six years now… amazing. I’m just short of words to express myself for the first time (probably!).

We caught up more on new times than old. What I was pondering over was, how there is a marked paradigm shift in our conversations sometimes. I mean, here there is this girl who I spoke to in the junior college years. The topics included ‘boy friend, family issues, discs’ and suchlikes. Now its ‘placements, pay, future plans, family issues…. Then, maybe boyfriends’. Funny I tell you. We grow up so fast but all at the same time. We need so many things but all our needs are quite similar. We see different aspects of life and they are quite common to all of the peers that we have. We use different words and form a jargon. All in all, what we think of ‘vast’ is not quite so. Perceptions, I might say. Clichéd piece of a write up, I know, but was really taken back by the thought. ‘VAST but still so small…. Vast Iota’. Yeah, that’s what life looks like sometimes.

And the evening closed with a fabulous Udpi dinner with an extraordinary company. When I see both these females, (and not to mention my mentor and friend Ma Sanju) the lines that come to my mind are:
“The time has come”,
The walrus said, “To talk of many things,
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax,
Of cabbages and kings.
And why the sea is boiling hot?
And whether pigs have wings”

Loved my evening. Thank you both. Karishma and Khyati. Its amazing how we talk no end and still make sense of it all. Amazing!

Life In A Moment

I stood there, staring at the red and orange colored sun as it quietly collapsed into its cozy bed with a sense of dense satisfaction… a sense of “I did what I had to do; but I do it every day anyway, still I do it and feel good” kind of a thing you know-dense satisfaction.

Well, on the exterior it all looked calm, the scene, the sky and the posture I assumed as I stood with hands behind my back and neck raised but relaxed. But on the inside it was a storm like no sea had ever witnessed. It rose with a violent “so what do you think you are going to do now?” thought-wave and moved to ferocious levels with the realization of not being able to direction the course of my life… the feeling of being scattered even torn if you will. Following the pears always seems to be a security blanket when you are really not aware of what you want to do. The “herd mentality”. A guru once said, “I am ready to accept your claim that humans are intelligent, provided you believe me when I tell you that when a human is amongst others, he is not”. Holds good for me and pretty much for all of us. Then there were the crisscrosses of statements that I had heard during a mind game that I was playing with my eldest uncle in my third cousins wedding… “Beta try doing a (some course I don’t remember the name of), it will be great for your business”. When a lady who has never seen the world or thought of it any more than a kitty party interrupts him. Says the lady, “No no, Shalini’s eldest son tried doing it but failed at it miserably. Instead, why don’t you do your…” And the words started blurring out and fading into the oblivion, as if I was drunk and some one was calling out my name as I try to figure out the voice, not the words… all just a muffled lip movement and sounds. These things that I detested then all started surfacing as I stood there.

I let thoughts pass without “thinking” them on deliberation. It is like standing on a railway platform, during peak hours and without the intention of boarding a train. You are there just to watch the “market” bustle. Then somehow the chaos is no more a cause of irritation but a stimulus to inspiration. That’s exactly what it feels like when you observe a noise in your brain, without being a part of it.

There were voices of my parents, teachers, friends… even people who I didn’t know. People rambling suggestions and some more suggestions. It occurred to me then that there was something waiting out there to come at me. Not in a bad way, in a manner to help me. There was an answer waiting to leap out and scream. But the noise was persistent; the intuition equally prominent. I was lost. And I wanted to be found. My brain felt like a radio, with numerous channels but all playing at the same time.

What happened at this juncture was remarkable. I stopped looking. I quit the idea of trying to battle life. I thought of a word called “wait”. It had to be around. It had to come blaring out if I stopped looking too hard for it. A sudden calm whizzed past and killed the riot for good. It filled the air with a deafening silence. I started to hear myself breath. Until this moment I had no idea how different it was to think and feel. If I closed my eyes then, the world felt strangely alien. I did not belong there. I was a part of a system that was there to revolutionize existence as mankind knew it. I lied down on my back and stared at the sky as it ebbed away. I felt it within me as much as it was on the outside of me. I felt one with the openness and its very nature to be abysmal. All of a sudden my existence started having a form and definition. The thin line between life and living was erased. The whole idea of birth and reality leaped beyond the words defining them and broke every barrier of empty concepts that were built by us. I could feel myself smile. The feelings bred every successive thought and the thought brought in a feeling. A beautiful balance between logic and emotion played on like a symphony in my mind, or maybe my heart, I am not quite sure where. I lay there for eternity. Either time stood still or it raced ahead so fast that I was, by now, only a reverie to nature.

“Lets go, I found the phone!” It took her touch to bring me back. “I left it at the tea stall, nice man that chai wala, he returned it promptly”. I smiled and said, ”Great, you ok now?” “Ya, but what happened to you? I left you waiting only for three minutes and your mood seems to have changed polarity. Guess I should have left you alone earlier huh?” “Rubbish! Those were the three longest minutes of my life”, I replied.

TRIPPING

He was crossing the street with a mind that ambled far more then his feet did. He knew not why he was walking, to where was he heading or for what was he aiming. He was not even wondering why he was walking like a vagabond; probably it was a deliberate attempt because he wanted to see the beauty that lies in not thinking. The peace of mind is only a concept to most of us, maybe all of us and he wanted to experience this concept first hand. He smiled with a mild satisfaction of achieving the goal he set himself but the worry on his mind was the fact that it was still a “goal” to be “achieved” when he set out to relieve his mind of noise… of goals and their achievements. A paradox, some would say. He called it irony.

The sky hung over his head in the pale gray of his mood. The streetlights painted a dull picture on the empty tarmac, almost as yellow as an aging manuscript lying in a lonely museum cabin. There was a violent crisscross of lights and a riot of sounds all around him that faded as fast as they had made an appearance. He chose not to listen to them but only to hear them and let them pass. As he walked on he wished not to make sense of what he saw, and so he just saw everything without any relation. For a while it seemed like an attempt but then after a few minutes or hours or some such feeble measure of time, he realized it took no effort to detach himself from the goings on.

The people around him seemed to have a reason attached to every move they made. He saw the gamut of reactions that ran from a child crying for a balloon to the couple that stood on the sidewalk and screamed their lungs out at each other. The stranded bus that had suffered an engine failure, the people in the bus and the people outside the bus, they all had a motive. The ice cream seller, the pizza delivery boy, the man who dropped a coin and the lady who could not walk due to overweight, were all cribbing about misfortune… he couldn’t hear the thoughts in their minds but the faces said it all. He was still holding on to his smile, to feel the security of not being a part of this confusion that people like to call life. He proved to himself that he had a different definition of the concept. At one point he even considered it a heinous sin to conceptualize “life”.

Hands in his pockets, he trotted on and jumped pebbles and missed people walking at a pace faster then their legs could handle… only because they were pressed for time. Ipso facto, they chose to be subjugated by the mortal parameters developed to check and guide the self from running astray… the parameter of measuring ones activities in units.

The sea was never ending. The crowds shifted in a wide range of colors. The sky did the same as the evening grew to a close. The streetlights brightened the faces faded into sulky weariness. Some sensing a satisfaction of getting the day’s job done and most others worrying about the next thing they had to do. His quest for peace had broken the barrier of self-contentment and was now entering the zone of pity for the mortals who wasted away their energy to fulfill a never-ending demand, to satiate a desire that would grow on the feed. It was a strong moment of enlightenment, one packed with emotional “whys” which pricked his mind no end. The futility of life was the very essence of its rejuvenation. What a city-dweller on a normal day would call “wasting time” (evidently the act of sitting and doing nothing) was a way to understand that to direction life was never a priority as compared to “moving on”.

His euphoria was groveling in the lowly dust of reality by now. His thought of achieving peace within, simply by observing life was starting to look like a utopia, never to be reached. He glanced and stared on, gained pace and moved with more effort. His senses grew strangely sharper, his mind raced to answer the unanswerable, his body flung out in rage when he realized the quest was a dead end, and he felt his nerves shudder with fear and anxiety. He could not understand the depression that was mixed with the innocence of a child who does not understand something and asks daddy for an explanation, only, here there was no one he could ask. “Why study, what good is money, what is the use of a marriage, what do you mean when you say ‘happy life’”? These and innumerable questions of a similar degree bantered his roots, his foundations that were laid by his education and by his parents and teachers and he realized the insignificance of it all.

Sweat dripped in cold successions from his forehead and he began to run, as if trying to get as far away as he could from these questions. The zombies would not give up. The last scream of help would have been vocalized, if it were not for a strange vibration and a familiar one, which tickled his thighs.

His leg trembled and his hand reached into his pocket for answering the ringing cell phone. It was time for dinner… he had to return home… thank god.

Train the menace

It’s quite a piss off being a part of this idiotic and abashing community at times. GUJJU, the proud businessman sans manners.

I was made to go to this function hosted by a rather decent family. I mean, the host was my father’s school friend and his daughter has been engaged so there was the much required show of the occasion (as it is in all communities I guess). That was normal. The party was humble with few family and few friends (now that is unusual for the khakhra-munching clan). This was a welcome thing. For once there was good food which again is a break from the usual extra ghee highly oily excuses for a paratha or nan or roti. But the dhokla lovers had to make their presence felt. I was irritating with the kind of noise the women made while the poor singer (who had an amazing voice) was trying really hard to come close to kishore kumars voice and he damn well did… but it all got drowned in the vacant conversations about the diamond necklace and the pretty black salwaar. Pissing off to say the least man. As if the shoes and lipstick oriented small talks weren’t enough, the snazzy cell phones went off in the middle of a wonderful mukesh number (chodhvi ka chaand ho). The disgust of the orchestra playing was far more evident than my loath that remained hidden under the plastic smile I wore while I spoke to the never-seen-before, never-want-to-see-again bunch of ladies that claim to have seen me when I was like 2 feet in height or something. Then the other obvious irritation that I dread made its manifestation as expected… “so son, you finished graduation right?” and I could (try as I may to miss it) see the gleaming iris of their eyes saying ‘when is the next party announcing your engagement young man?’. UGGGHHHH!!! Get off it. At one point, I nodded at the question and promptly asked the 45-something-trying-to-look-like-30-nothing aunty, “So has your daughter, hasn’t she?” and tried replicating the same glare in my eyes. What do you know? It bloody hell worked like a charm. A quick turn of the heel and a smooth get away to the pasta counter… yeah, that’s more like it, I thought. Not to mention the other irritants like noisy mouths, smashing forks and spoons, ultrasonic high decibel laughter and the absolutely pathetic ‘leave used plates anywhere you like’ syndrome. Shit! I wanted to run so hard, it’s not funny.

Not quite surprisingly Mickey called and asked me if I would like to catch a movie. 9.30 show. There is a God. This is the same guy who I had written about… the fellow who is always around to get me out of anywhere when I want out. Without me even starting to think about asking for help, he shows up with an escape route. So I sigh and say “yes, I would love to” in a tone that reminds me of the time I first got asked out by a girl for lunch. Quick goodbyes and off we were to the darkness of delight, the movie hall. Man, I tell you, the entire community should be given scholarships to join finishing school and a crash course on ethics and manners. There, I wish in hell again but I mean it… honestly.

Otherwise, all is good fun. Office is not exciting but quite interesting. Went for a day to Lonavala with a bunch of new friends and their respective siblings. Good fun there. I’ve always enjoyed making and maintaining new contacts. Especially if they are non-gujjus. I don’t have anything against those who share the same view about the clan as I do (and there are quite a few). So I enjoyed the hectic but fun day there. Pretty chilled out public so guess I’ll be around with them for quite some time now.

Oh! Almost forgot. Saurav Palit (engineering days’ friend and rhythm guitarist of our band) and assorted friends (of his) have decided to cut an album of our very own originals. Awesome! The way I see it, it’s the highest form of respect for music. Everybody listens to music, a lot of them listen to good, quality music, quite a few have a wonderful collection, even lesser than that are those who appreciate it and the absolutely few of them who dare make their own music for others to listen to. Now think about it, the kind of honor that I should be feeling in being a part of this handful. Our songs are turning out fine. The lyrics seem in place. The arrangement requires some tweaking. And recording has to be done. It’s unbelievably exciting. Frankly, I’m out of words to try and express how elated I am at this point. BREAK DUST makes a come back in style I suppose. Our bassy has exams so we miss him. But what the hell, BRAK DUST is back.