Over an ingenuous cup of tea

There are times , when you write just to know if you can , then there are times, when you write because you're expected to . Finally, there are times when you write , not really knowing why. If I say I'm writing this just for the sake of it , in lieu of passing time ,while my usual ten 'o' clock tea gives off some off its heat to the environment , and makes itself a little more bearable for my tongue, then I'm saying , what is commonly referred to as the "truth". In short, this is going to be random gibberish , which I can assume , any sane soul would/should not only ignore but also ridicule.

I've already talked about the nose here , the nose part-I , if you might recall. Why the Nose Part-II never came by ? Well, I really don't want to tell this , but I guess I need to loyal to my audience :-P. Now , I'm already anticipating the usual " What does he think of himself ?".  I know the word "audience" irks you, doesn't it ? You'd be wondering at my audacity at an assumption of such humongous self vanity. Nowadays, I just can't help my humour going all cold , I think I've been sitting in the AC for too long . Bad one ! Agreed.

Coming back to the reason. Coincidentally , the very day I announced the nose to be an inevitable part of one's personality, I was gunned with a rather rude remark about my own nose , which I should confess, at the least forced me to check its validity in the mirror. With a sensation of sporadic disappointment, I consoled myself , sulked officially for two minutes and thirty seven seconds,  finally stood back in my chair , and wondered at the inevitability of other physical features detrimental in determining one's personality. Eventually, I zeroed upon the tongue.

Why the tongue? Because it expels me to my blissful yesteryears and brings to my memory a certain incidence. I must have been eight , when I was forcefully admitted to the "British School of Table Manners" . The name of the school was rather ironic. The very first day , I went to the school with an expectation of finding teachers only of English origin , and with this malicious desire of making fun of their hindi, if at all they tried their hand at it in front me. Disappointingly , I couldn't find a single Brit , hence the irony. I never really got what they were trying to convey , because then , I stood perpetually confused between right and left. So, no matter how much they tried, they could never convey their point across.   

to be cont..

It's simply different !

First of all things, I should confess to have been thinking of writing about this for over a year  , and now , on a Sunday , when I finally determine myself to push the envelope , I already feel a bit conscious of making public a few thoughts , which I thought were better to be kept clandestine not only from fellow humans , but also to an extent from my own conceivable self. 

As far as my memory buttresses my claim, the word "cliche" entered my vocabulary sometime in the first year of college. Earlier I thought of it as a subsidiary of the word "Touche". It's almost embarrassing to recall instances and conversation where I'd use cliche and touche almost irreplaceably. If only one can exert oneself to imagine , that one may understand how undermining  it would be to proclaim an act , though unintentionally, to be a "cliche" instead of a rightly deserved "touche". But as I am proud to acknowledge , this as a literary faux-pas is not even close to the worse I've been through in misinterpreting english language. My repertoire of misinterpretations has been so enormous that an occasional flip here and there , has been rather run of the mill. Not that anybody so far , has had either the energy or the will to denounce me for such hideous misuse of literal authority.

One may wonder why I seem to be so wordy sometimes , so complex, as it commonly conjectured . When I come to precipitate to an answer to that , I'm caught a bit coughed up. Not entirely because , I've always ostensibly maintained that I'm that "simple middle class guy" .To be honest, sometimes,  I think I'm not, I mean the contradiction is only with the "simple" part, as far as middle class goes, if you'd ever have the pleasure of skimming through my ATM accounts, you'd prefer placing me in a category much below  . But nevertheless, it's an extremely fashionable thing to say about yourself, isn't it ? Most diplomatically correct , as one may say.

It's this simple question I ask myself : Do I really want to be that simple a person ? The question rolls inside my intrepid brain like the little dice rolled over a board game , it rolls and rolls and finally unfolds a mystery of sorts. Well, the answer is: Not Really ! .

What "simple" has come to be interpreted today , goes hand in hand with a boring , cliched existence. The fact that a simple person is transparent, easy to influence and globally manipulatable, an image that ,in the minds of some ,may coincide with that of a glum sycophant. That's not what any guy would have in mind of becoming .

Yet, come to think of it, a complex guy who pretends to be simple has this divine authority to watch the worldly parody around him where people are more likely to assume that he's simple and confined within all the diminutive qualities of a simple person, that I've described above,  is actually,  in a much better position to manipulate things , for the world for him is transparent , people are puppets and their reactions cliche .It's just too simple . No pun intended.

If I'd prefer myself to be called simple? Well, I would rather leave that for myself to answer but not before another year.  

Just Another Something in Shimla

Perhaps, this is an anecdote I cannot but help blurting out. It has this intuitive charm to it , the kind that puts a sub conscious smile on my face every time I tend to recall it.

So, alongside the usual stroll that I had already started getting used to, here on mall road in Shimla, I thought of messaging my newly found female accomplice , just to know her whereabouts. A little apprehensive as I was, I decided to establish myself on a clean green bench on the side of the road, and think of something rather intriguing to write about.

As my mind dwindled between the usual Hi , Hey, Hello, Wassup to choose from , for the perfect start , a little something dawned on me , and eventually, I zeroed upon a cheeky but unconventional ''Oye girlfriend '' to start off, reminiscent of a little joke I shared with her a day before.

It was hardly perturbing , when a little boy, adorning that innocent glee and hair,well oiled and neatly combed, disrupted me for a second and asked me to shift a bit. As courteously as I could , I reduced myself to the paltry one fifth part of the bench , while the boy and his obnoxiously fat mother occupied the rest four-fifth. As the boy sat next to me , sipping his fountain coke with a spluttering sound, I , more by facial conjectures, expressed my dissatisfaction at such a distraction , but it didn't really restrain him from making that sound, perhaps he enjoyed the sound much more than the coke . I can say that because he kept making that sound even after the last drop of coke in his wrinkled plastic glass was exhausted.

As I strived to put in a few words, the little menace kept peeping into my phone screen . May be he's just curious about the apparatus, I assured myself and I let him be. Now, comes the funny part.

Having peeped into my message for a while , he shrugged a shoulder and whispered to his mother : '' Mummy ! Dekho yeh bhaiya hai naa, yeh apni girlfriend ko sms kar rhe hain. '' It was intended to be a whisper, but a good five people around us, including me, could hear it.

With immediate horror on her face, his mother realised the faux pas that her son had put us both in. Half embarrassed and almost apologetically she said to me:'' Bada naughty bachha hai yeh ! ''.

Unaware of social customs , the boy ventured once again to defend his statement , but before he could , his mother volunteered to literally shut his mouth up. As she raised a hand to do so , I replied : It's okay aunty, he's right, girlfriend ko hi sms kar rha hoon. ''

So, as and when I completed writing and sending the message, I moved ahead with my stroll on mall road, with that maniacal smile on my face , wondering how exciting it would be to put this incidence into words.

Whack-a-mole ! (Part II)

So, here I am , caught between crying babies in the Shatabdi , only to be compelled to further elaborate what I started last night.

After that entrenched feeling of being perpetually ignored, I zeroed upon returning back to my nest. Just to explain the metaphorization , the nest refers to my room back home, for it is commonly conjectured that I am seen outside it , only in the rarest of circumstances. In fact it's like our family joke ( the rule of the four Fs ) that only flood , fire , fury and food can force me outside my room.

But I guess I am always surrounded by ironies . As I checked my inbox once again , more with the intention of clearing off unwanted messages,than to find what I had been expecting, I finally got a reply. This is where it became a tad ironic. It's like the little games that life plays. While it may seem from an external perception to be something very regular, it is in fact something resembling to a volatile ECG graph of hope and despair , where hope is like a subconscious throttle to one's system and despair is like a sinking Titanic, immaculately dull and depressing.

Whack-a-mole ! ( Part -I )

When I woke up this morning , I never really realized that I'd mark this particular day under the category of " Historical Days of my Life". It's something that dawned on me when the day culminated with such an exhilarating sequence of events.

So, it was that random morning , like any other , that started off with my reluctance to get up. It's hard to recollect if it was a random thought in my head , or a slight whisper of my own alter ego, that propelled me to pick up that phone and take that first step. On one hand , I thanked airtel for providing me the benefit of messaging , on the other , I personally blamed Mr.Sunil Bharti Mittal , to not have sent me a delivery confirmation, which sort of threw open a certain leeway of ambiguity.

Unable to rest my own curiosity, I ventured out of the house like a hound without an owner. The uncertainty of it all had only began to thicken. The one part of my ingenuous ego, the subtle part, so to say , kept encouraging me to check my inbox , almost momentarily, and the other part , for that matter, mocked me for my own mindless spontaneity, something I'd been really proud of so far.

While I kept cursing all those useless messages that aroused a ray of hope , and that includes CL, Time , Test Funda , JP Infratech, ICICI bank , Airtel , to name a few , a kind of dullness had started to settle in.  I mean , the dullness could have been due to the weather , a heavy sand storm was already on the prowl and a dusty shower was only expected to follow. For the pessimist I am , I thought it was over. Earlier , I had kept my hopes alive convincing myself , that perhaps she hadn't woken up, but as the hour hand struck three in my watch , reality struck me a harder. I had already started planning to spend the rest of the day, in the canopy of a novel named " The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton. ( At that particular moment ,  I thought , to read such a title, would only be situationally appropriate)

to be cont....

The Eureka Song

So, it's that lazy Sunday morning when some part of you always compels you to hit the bed , no matter what time it is. I see mom and dad wondering at the audacity of their son to sleep so much on a bright sunny morning. They exclaim with a sigh of relief : " Accha hua medical mein nahi gaye. With this level of carelessness you couldn't have managed to clear the first prof." Instantly , I reply with an innocent glee on my face: " Achha hua aap engineer nahi bane.You guys just aren't cool enough ."

That sparks off my mom like a match stick would spark kitchen stove. I mean her agony is ignited for sure , but it's well within manageable limits  . So, after a brief spell of her " I-must-have-committed-some-serious-fallacy-in-my-previous-birth-to-have-such-an-ignorant-son " remarks, I'm forced to get up. Her pejorative persuasion is like a dialect of her own. In so far , I've learned to bear it in the best of spirits , with a silly smirk on my face and sometimes , with fingers plugged air tight in my ears.

Half unaware of all the activity around me , I somehow , manage to reach for my slippers , and all this while I'm still rubbing my eyes to get a hang of the bright sunlight. In this state of sullen irritation , suddenly, a guitar chord strikes my audible sense, the kind that makes your ears stand up in apprehension.

The sound is so soft , that I'm almost expelled to introspect whether at all it's an exogenous prick or a supernatural string grizzling inside me. I wait for a while . The confusion had not even ended , when the melody changed its course , it moved to a higher note.

The sounds overlapped in emphatic fashion. The merger seemed as transparent as a sugar solution : one could look through the texture and say there's something in it , but that something is literally indecipherable, and so were the overlapping chords.

As I was through with the first part of the melody , the aroma of the song , only seemed to have started spreading more obtrusively with the second. The lyrics started pouring in like a lava of hot chocolate on chilled vanilla ice-cream ; so hot yet so tempting.

Almost statuesque , with an expression of somebody caught in a cyclone, I listened to the song with closed eyes. All this while my mother kept staring at my stance , assuming it to be some sort of yoga .

Sometimes , I wonder , how a mix of bullish frequencies can be potent enough to give you a thrust beyond recognition. A song that gives you that adrenaline rush , a rush so stingy , that it makes the boldest of beauties feel ashamed of their own incapacitativeness (and I know this is really not a word) to induce such a sting in men. The kind of song, to which when I listen , I adorn , more unconsciously, that strictly native haryaanvi accent ( the one that I strive to hide so much), and tell every controversy on its face : " Aan De , aaj to baawda ho rakha hoon ! " ( it means " Let it come, I'm insane today." ) 

Overtime, I've come to call this class of songs : The Eureka Songs.

On the jukebox : Tum Bhi Chalo, Hum Bhi Chalein (Zameer) by Kishore Kumar.