Saas, Bahu and Machchar!

The wind is rustling violently through the trees, the heavens lightening up repeatedly accompanied every time by a very familiar sounding thunder. A distant, incessant ringing of a bell fills the air already leaden with gloom. Half-eaten chapattis and sabzi watch idly from the sidelines, as the family is huddled closely together, rapt in attention. I take a look at the clock and yawn, rather helplessly. 10 more minutes!

Sitting in a remote town, in one of the more underdeveloped parts of the world, I bring you the single-most unifying thread in the history of India – The Great Indian Joint Family Saga. The saga that plays itself in every abode – from a shack in a village to a duplex in posh city locale, enveloping us all in their world, making their woes and joys ours and our money and time, theirs .

Ekta kapoor has unknowingly stumbled upon an untouched nerve of Indian household. Even though the only joint families remaining in India are found on primetime, their day-to-day struggles with surprisingly dedicated vamps and terminal diseases have really touched a chord with women all over India. And it really warms my heart when I see an executive and his driver, both bitching about their wives’ fixation with Tulsi, Parvati and Mihir, as it goes on to show how saas-bahu soaps have formed a bridge across castes, religion and class barriers and even nations. My father, on a recent visit to China, watched Kyunki… dubbed in Mandarin. Though I don’t know even an iota of Chinese, it would be so cool to watch Baa squeaking, in a high-pitched voice - "Tulsi zong shì fú cóng le zhè ge fáng zi guī zé"(“Tulsi ne humesha iss ghar ki maryaada ka paalan kiya hai”)

When the place I am currently located at, Khatima, Uttarakhand, was elevated to a sub-district or something like that, one of the first demands on the citizen charter was to ensure uninterrupted power supply during 8-11 P.M (any guesses why). Moreover, when Mihir passed away in an accident (the first time), the women of the colony held a funeral to mourn his death. I reckon, when you are riding the simplest of vehicles, even a slight bump can unsettle your bum.

Talking of bumps, quite a few have shown up on my arms and face. Come dusk and the country-side air, supposed to be good for health, is filled with a ubiquitous buzz of mosquitoes. They are so many in number that they have to take turns at having a go at you, while giving the All-Out a royal ignore. Here I came across a new contraption quite popular in Khatima to fight the mosquito menace - Battery-powered electric racquets. They deliver mild electric shocks, just about managing to knock out the mosquitoes for a solitary minute before they rise again to resume their pursuits, sometimes with a hint of vengeance. So it is essential for us to create mosquito-shaped, often permanent, stains on the floor, in order to make a dent in their ranks. Hence, at night you can see the young children in every single house practicing the same maneuver - smash and step. The future of Indian Badminton has never looked so rosy.

"dàn shì wo réng rán shè fa huò dé yī xiē lè qù" (“But I am still managing to have some fun!!”)

There and Back again...

Once upon a time, there was a chicken who lived in a dusty little pen with his family. The chicken was very inquisitive by nature and, though he was very proud of his pen, he always wanted to take flight and reach beyond the fence, to see the entire farm with his eyes.

One day, the chicken woke up to find all the birds and animals gathered in the field. On going closer, he saw a duck called "Professor", quacking to everyone around him about his pond. The chicken was really impressed by the duck and the way he quacked and asked him if he could accompany him to explore his place. The duck agreed and together they left for the west.

On reaching the pond, the little chicken couldn't believe what he saw. The ducks had pushed back the waters to make some land where they could bathe in sun. Everything was so neat, clean and green. The ducks were really nice to him and so were the other birds. The females, called the "chicks", were so much prettier too. He made loads of friends and discovered many wonderful things.

"Professor" asked the chicken to make an "Ultra Low-Power Cardiac Sense Amplifier", to which the chicken gladly agreed. He was having a lot of fun, doing his work on weekdays and "birdwatching" on the weekends. Every now and then, his friends took him to the brewery and slurped the liquid they called "high-without-fly". They also showed him some kind of grass, which made them act like cuckoos!

Everything was going great till the time chicken realised he had to fly back to his pen. He finished the amplifier, bid farewell to everyone and left for his trip back. Though he felt guilty about it, he wished he could stay there forever. Last three months were the best three months of his entire tiny life, and he felt a little sad going back to his noisy little bird-cage, in a pen littered with bull-faeces.

Though settling down in a foreign land was tough, this journey back from the unknown to known has been a lot harder than I ever expected.

The Salsa Story

Its 2 o clock in the night, and I am up writing this stupid post for a group of vella people to enjoy it the next morning. But I can't help it. A bloody mosquito has been buzzing his ass off, making short work of my sleep. A sudden thought: if I was granted a magical wish, I'd wish for this mosquito to be larger, so that I could snap its beak or whatever and stick it into its ass. But then I thought, it wasn't really a bright idea. Firstly, I'd have to dispose its body after fulfilling my sadistic fetish(s). And it might not be that easy after all, snapping its beak or whatever and sticking it into its ass. And imagine having one magical wish and spending it on mosquito enlargement. How crazy would that be!


So I am sitting here, now hoping for a magical wish, in any case and muttering curses to that noisy bastard. In the meanwhile, I decide to write something about my last few days, which have been a bit more than interesting -


A month into my intership, and life takes an interesting turn!

I was coming back from the cafeteria after having some bad self-cooked lunch on a monday morning. So obviously I wasn't in the best of moods and started cribbing about my nearly non-existent social life, in what I was told "The Land of Actual Opportunities", to Vaibhav, a skinny PhD guy who is growing a beard in order to look like Tom Cruise, I dont have a clue how (though apart from that, he is a pretty cool guy). We are walking towards the EWI building and and I spotted a poster. It had some gibberish in Dutch, but what caught my eye were two words-Party and Gratis. Gratis means Free and it was one of the first words I learnt here. You can all guess why.

Well I dont know how it works for other people, but a sudden surge of hope always makes me do the "John Travolta Walk on Staying Alive". And thats what I did, much to the consternation of the nearby people.

Anyways, I made it to my lab without creating any furore. And there I checked out what it was really about. SoSalsa, a society for salsa enthusiasts, was organizing a week of salsa parties. It sounded perfect. But there was one small glitch - I just dint know how to do salsa.

To be continued...

Joining the herd!

For reasons unknown, i resisted starting a blog for quite some time. And for reasons unknown, I finally gave in...

Everybody around me started posting their day-to-day musing & millings online and felt very smug about it. I wondered why?? I wondered what needs of a human being, tangible or intangible, were being satiated by a thread-bare, public online journal. And when I couldnt come with any "un-indecent" reasons, I decided to test the waters myself.

To be frank, my life hasnt been interesting enough, before this point of time, to be worthy of a blog. I havent been to many cool places. I have neither seen any UFOs nor been visited by any gross aliens. I havent grown up in a war-torn country (all mine manages to get is "bilateral diplomatic dialogue", no action stuff). I dont work as a life guard in a red chaddi with a red surfboat in one hand and a hot chick I just saved, in the other! And the most disappointing fact- I havent seen any pret, chudail, khoon ki pyaasi aatma, etc which seemingly reside in every nook and corner of this country.

No GFs. All I could manage was a rumour and the gurl asked people to consider linking her to someone else, to protect her honour and dignity.

To sum up, all i have to show for my first 21 yrs on this planet is a hint of a paunch, an Engg degree, and a few random thoughts. C- !!

This is when i decided to take things in my own hands...