WTF

You have kids all over the place.
One stuck in tuitions. One practicing lawn tennis. One playing with the neighbour’s Rottweiler. And one threatening to walk out of your womb any moment.

You’ve had a long day.

You clean, do the laundry, fold clothes, talk over the phone, play counselor to your husband’s sister, call the neighbor, shop, wash and clean some more on repeat mode.

You enter the kitchen and get started on making a complicated recipe. 

You toil and toil from gas burner to gas burner with 4 not-so-perfect batches of Navratna Korma.

The husband comes home and the aromas seem to be an effective mood-lifter. 

You're relieved that the 5^th batch wont see the insides of the trash can.

He takes a spoonful. Pauses. Smiles. You’ve nailed his mom’s recipe (Epic moment! After years of marriage and the 4th child on its way, you finally got him to agree to that one?!)

…And you give credit to the mirchi powder you used?

Bollocks!

Sometimes, I hate advertisements.

Rickshaw Ride

When your motor skills are slightly challenged and you have trouble with hand-eye coordination, you should instantly understand that - Driving is not for you.

But people sometimes behave like I love being called an imbecile or something. "Come on, now! How hard can that be? Driving is the easiest thing on the planet."

That's as good as yelling at a dyslexic kid about the difference between bar and bra. (He's probably too young for both in any case!)

Besides, if you have an internal GPS as warped as Moses in the desert, there's absolutely no incentive in overcoming this handicap of being a wuss behind the wheel. With a stroke of luck, if you've figured how to change gears while you foxtrot on the accelerator and clutch, you've probably forgotten where you wanted to get to in the first place.

To add to the mix, if your direction sense sucks, the last person you want clarifications from is someone from Mumbai city. My people are cool and all, but if there's one thing that I just don't understand, it's the fact that when it comes to directions, they can NEVER get themselves to saying "I don't know."

In fact, I think when Christopher Columbus was asking people to guide him to India, it probably was that lone Mumbaikar on his boat who jumped to the occasion and grabbed the role of playing navigator. ("Let's go straight," I believe were his last words.)

But I don't blame that guy alone. Clearly he's been raised in a city where official signposts beam at you with the profound confidence of a broken compass. Imagine my horror when I spot a bottle-green signboard in Khar West that reads Go Straight for Mantralay with no distance indicators. That's as good as telling me, keep going straight and you'll reach Bangalore... well, eventually.

Let's see, so here I am with all the permutations and combinations of reaching WhereTheFuckAmI land.

I promise to meet this friend for rehearsals on a Wednesday afternoon. "It's the second bungalow on Chapel Road, Bandra West. 2:00 pm. Don't be late!" she warns, knowingly.

I hop into a rickshaw and mumble the necessary keywords to get me to my destination, and continue to multitask with a sandwich, the cellphone and a book in tow.

We maze through millions of cars, buses, 2-wheelers, 3-wheelers, and dodge over the little hindrances in our obstacle race including THE divider, a bicyclist (who are they anyway?) and a cow's oblivious tail.

Through this chaos, I sit there beaming, cause it's 1:45pm, and for the first time in a very long time, I'm going to be there, On Time. Phew!

We reach Hill Road and I'm mean't to direct the driver behind the Indian 3-seater from there.
"Bhaiyya Chapel Road likha hai." He looks like he's going to call my bluff, and presumes I'm not from the city. He's lived in Khar-Danda all his life apparently and is convinced that I've got the address all wrong.

He defies me into asking someone on the street.
"Chapel Road?" "Chap-pill Road" I scream from the other side of the street, when a soft-drink stall owner points straight ahead towards a forked path.

A couple rights, lefts, u-turns, lefts, straights and zig-zags around the corner, someone suggests that I'm not even in the right part of the city. "It's probably in Malad," a passerby assures, again pointing straight ahead, towards Mantralay. Grah!

I look at the rickshaw guy through the rear-view mirror and charade my way by saying:
"Arre bhaiya, wahaan par sab bungley hai. Address mein Bungla #2 likha hai"

He parks the rick on the side and asks me to show him the address with the air of a veteran detective. Something dawns on him, and he looks mightily pissed with me. Grumbling through the traffic he takes me via a by-lane and points at a dilapidated signboard with 'Chapel Road' in clear letters.

"Kya Madam. Kaayko shtyle maarta hai? Chappal Gali bolneka na, seedha seedha," he says, waving his slipper in his hand.

I wasn't quite sure if he was still in the mood for playing charades there.

And I didn't wait long enough to find out.





Photo Credit: CNN

Soap Saga

This one isn't so much about telling a short/shot story as much as it is about commenting on one. 

And so I digress...

Indian television serials make for mass devolution (which is actually putting it very lightly. When, in fact, what I actually want to say is that making, acting or watching any of these shows is the quickest way of becoming a neanderthal). 

Agreed, this isn't a 'eureka' moment of sorts. Even a monkey with half a brain and no patience would know that it would be worth his while to count the grains of sand trickling down an hour glass instead of trying to follow a non-existent plot on prime-time. 

But then again, I confess, I fell for the old-boy charm of a popular yester-years baddy, MB. So going against my grain, I decided to watch the show. (I mean, how bad can it get, right? Worst case scenario, I could just drivel all over tall-dark-and-handsome and then wipe off the spittle).

Neanderthal Alert!! 

Fancy-pants-80's-bad-guy-who-shot-white-pigeons-for-a-hobby now plays a shy 45 year old virgin doctor who, I'm guessing, doesn't even strip while in the shower. 

And to make a predictable antithesis on 'opposites attract,' is a hyperactive, size 10, glossy haired, I-never-wanted-to-go-to-med-school-cause-I'm-so-cool twenty-something intern whose main purpose on the show is to make the virgin slash voyeur realize that he also needs to jerk off every once in a while!

The pace of the plot is a whole other thing. In the time that it takes the impatient, half-brained, Indian-soap-watching monkeys to evolve into human beings; our virgin doctor might have mustered enough courage to tell his lady love that he is now ready to see her lady parts from afar.

MB, we actually liked you in your bad-boy roles. Not because you were like the guy my mom warned me about. But more cause back in the day, you came up with the most memorable one-liners that set it in stone that a guy and girl could never be 'just friends.'

Now you're just old and creepy, and trying too hard. If you want to justify being a virgin at 45, you've got to take acting lessons from Steve Carell. 

Note to MB: This has been the toughest half-celebrity picture search EVER!!. I have an impression to maintain here. It's not easy when I call you drool-worthy and find every other image that looks like you'd fit well under the 'beware of absconding rapist' tag. Please Google yourself and see!  

The Voiceover

From washing gravity-challenged curls in cold water and stepping out in the blazing sun, to applying curds on the scalp and sitting under the air conditioner. From eating unbranded hand packed sickeningly sweet fluorescent candy, to gorging on 4 germ laden ice shaved golas on Juhu beach. I'd done it all!

This wasn't an I-will-test-my-immunity (or stupidity??) contest that I was trying to win, or a suicide diet to look pretty at death. Nor was I getting paid to conduct research on popular ways of contracting pneumonia.

In my defense this was, in all earnestness, an attempt to retain a 'husky' voice.

As retarded as it sounds, do you have any idea what it means to get complimented on a borrowed voice tone? Especially when 'normal' means that the inherited vocal chords vibrate only within the soprano range, and being 'excited' means emitting ultrasonic sounds that can only be appreciated by cats, dogs, and screeching bats?!

Thanks to common cold, phlegm, and the entire army of waterworks, there was hope. Let alone the fact that I now looked like Rudolf on Prozac, carried three packs of Kleenex in my bag, and couldn’t tell the difference between nutri-wheat-crackers and cardboard - I sounded perfect!

The cell-phone was ringing. The hottie-with-the-long-sideburns had his name flashing across the touchscreen. Dashing for another Kleenex I went through a quick round of the sniff-snort-cough-cough routine. Stomach tucked in, chest pushed out, I looked like someone in dire need of the Heimlich maneuver.
But the hottie couldn't see all of that now, could he?

The phone was answered in under five seconds.

'Huh lo-oh...' I teased. The femme fatale had just walked into the voice box.

I breathed out a wry smile, and continued to look like death. But it didn't matter.

Cause Jessica Rabbit had finally agreed to do a little dubbing for Ms. Swan.