Grey

There is no morning. There is no evening. Only grey.
No sunrise, no sunset.
Shades of grey.
Time doesn't make sense any more, everything looks the same.

Breeze.
"It's so lovely."
"Let's drink some chai."
"Old Monk and Coke!"
What wonderful weather. Make excuses for the lack of blue. No colour. No...light.
Cross your fingers and hope the sky doesn't fall on your head.

It rains.
For hours. Days. Weeks. The calendar is drenched. The clock has stopped. There's water in the gears.
Wake up arbitrarily. Go out. Work. Come back. Drenched. Like a wet cat. Have you ever seen a happy cat in the rain?
No.

The day the blue skies and the breeze are back is the day we'll stop shaking our fists at the universe.

Rage against Machines.

Power on.

A screen lights up.

Why get out of the house, or even her bed, when she has the world on her lap?
Good Morning.

Outside is inclement weather, traffic, stress. A hundred people with a hundred different demands. Outside: Bad. Inside: Good. In here, she can sit in her soft bed, with the A/C on, with a mug of coffee by her side, and watch the world unfold.

Windows popping up. MSN, oovoo, Facebook, Twitter.

Friends? They're all here, all of them. Who else does she need? She can talk to you, typing is talking, isn't it?
What? You want to hear her voice? Fine, then, she'll switch on the webcam, plug in the mic. Video conferencing is a wonder, isn't it?

Outside is limited. Stepping out of the house, she can only see so much. Just one city, just the rain, the trains, the same people everyday. The same language, same college, same routes. After a while, it gets old, doesn't it?
The world's on her lap, she's connected to everywhere and everyone, it's magical and wonderful and she doesn't have to move an inch. A few words typed in, a tap of the Enter key, and she can see geisha from Kyoto, and Valentino's fall line. Read newspapers from New York and London side by side. Watch movies that released internationally months ago, but still haven't come to her city. With a little patience, she can have her favourite TV shows without having to hunt for the remote.

So connected. She can access everyone, and everyone can access her. Even more, maybe, than if she actually went out. Isn't this so much better? So much less effort? Twitter, FourSquare, Facebook. What wonder. She knows what everyone's doing, even if they're a continent away. She has them tracked.

She hasn't been out of the bed in a week, there's a pile of dirty dishes on the floor and a pack of cookies by her side. She's gained 10 kilos in a month. She's smiling, the glow from the 13 inch screen illuminating her face. Her eyes ache....
She will power off only to sleep at night.

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A rather disturbing half-piece that came to me just before I woke up. (Yes, the dreams HAVE gone, for now. Joy.) It seemed much better then, as always, I should just have written it down.

I finally got a new laptop battery, and it doesn't seem to be working. The laptop doesn't boot, and when it does, it takes aaaaaaaaaages. It works just fine with the old battery, though. I'm a little disturbed that I liken this whole situation to a transplant, where the patient doesn't accept the transplanted organ, or something like that. Likening my laptop, in effect a machine, to a sentient being. Who can maybe hear me mentally, and sometimes loudly, curse and plead at it.

That's how the above bit came out, in a fit of anger today, I was grumbling at this generation's almost-dependance on...well, I suppose computers is a given, I guess...Facebook. The internet. Connectivity. I hear last week, many celebrated Quit Facebook day...though I don't think anyone I know actually did it. We're too scared of losing out, aren't we? Especially people like me, and so many others I know who've shifted cities and leave old friends behind...we live our lives, but FB's a boon to us, isn't it? We keep up, kind of.

It's rather sad, actually. And the most we'll do is deactivate our accounts for a while, and then get back on.

It's really quite tragic.

------------------------

Now Re-reading: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Now Feeling: Tired. I should sleep less. And write more. Like, physically. With pen and paper.

A story about ethics, or something like that.

The characters: Tiger, Failboat, Spinach, Nikon. And, to some extent, the Man. You know, the proverbial Man who puts us all down? Also known as the System. The actual Man is an Assistant Vice Principal.

The setting: A fictional high school in a fictional multiverse. Note: Tiger is Head Boy of this school.

The background: Last October, after a party to which absolutely everyone was invited, these four split. After a bit of a discussion, they decide to not go home at all, and just...go where the fates and the winds and the cabs take them. So off they went, to normally crowded spots on the beach that were now so quiet, and then, bored and hungry, they went to the airport, post midnight. Everything else was closed. They ate, they chilled, and then they came back to the beach to watch the sunrise. All very cool, and if I belonged to that multiverse, I'd have been jealous.
Now here's the cinch. Still way back in October, one of them published a note about it. On Facebook. Referred to as Nomadic Night.
That was in October 2009. Since then, Nikon has left the school.

The Story:
It's happened a couple of times, the principal telling Tiger that he's received 'disturbing reports', and alluding to Facebook. I did wonder about the jurisdiction of a school over our cyber-lives. I mean, everyone's heard that with times and tech changing, we must too. Everyone's heard that applicants for prestigious jobs are thoroughly googled. I even read an article where college applicants changed their Facebook names so that they couldn't be found. But this isn't a job. This isn't a college application, this is school. And this...is somewhat out of the blue.
So, one fine day in April 2010, the vice principal called Tiger into his office to tell him that someone had seen the note about Nomadic Night, and lodged a complaint. I may need to add here, that there were photos in the note. And the first of those photos was taken at a home bar, with one of them holding up a bottle. Tiger told the Vice Principal that no one drank that night, and that even though they did stay out all night, the bar and the bottle was just a gag.
The Man was not happy about this note, as it gave a 'bad impression' or something like that.
On a bright and early Saturday in April, Tiger was called to the Vice Principal's office in the presence of all the AVPs, and was told that the School Committee had decided to ask him to resign his post as Head Boy. After Tiger's parents met all the authorities concerned, and Tiger submitted an apology letter, the decision was reconsidered at a meeting of the committee. Tiger submitted a resignation yesterday.

My point here is this. The person who put up the note has pretty tight privacy settings. How then, did anyone find it? And also, my main issue here. This is school. The characters in my story are barely 17. On Nomadic Night, no one was near the school, no one FROM the school was hurt, they did nothing related to the school in any manner.
Why then, is the school looking into something so unrelated? It's all...a not-so-thin line about privacy, and how much of ourselves we put online. A party isn't a party till it's on facebook, haven't I heard that before? Facebook is...the public's Page 3. Or something like that. I think I'm losing my point.

Opinions about the incident appreciated.

Another reason for me not to like politics.

Baba Ramdev.

"We clean up our bodies, then we clean up democracy!"

He announced last month that he would found a political party that would field candidates for each of the 543 parliamentary seats in India’s next general election in 2014.

Here is the link to the NYTimes Article.

The man infuriates me. Because in an age of globalisation, where the world is shrinking, he's just going backwards. I shudder to think of what would happen if he was in power.

I shudder.

BoredWorkText

There's not too much to do at work on Sundays, because that's when the issue goes to print and everyone's busy finishing their own work. So I'm given nothing.
Facebook and Twitter are blocked at the office, so I end up doing all that online reading that I never do at home. The New York Times (I HATE the movie reviewers there, more on that in a bit), the New Yorker, and today, I'm reading a bunch of short stories by Neil Gaiman. For those interested, here's The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds, and here's something strange called How to Talk to Girls at Parties. Also, some essays. Over at the New York Times, this article made me toy briefly with the idea of going platinum blonde. However, that idea was one of the few I've ever had to which mom said "See if I let you into my house..."
Sigh. Maybe someday, but not now. I'm over hair colouring for a bit, anyway. I always get tremendously irritated when it starts to fade.
Also from that article, I found out about Tavi Gevinson, the 13 year old fashion blogger.
Oh yes, I've been reading. Random humor pieces and cartoons at the New Yorker (Geoff Sarkins is using Twitter! is hilarious.), articles on how gossip blogging is becoming a career option, reviews of the iPad. Many, MANY photography slideshows, the latest being some by Annie Leibowitz. I absolutely LOVE her work. For the rest of the day, I moaned about how I wanted to be Annie Leibowitz.
I also checked out photos from a photo-book called Love Me. Forgot who it's by, but you should all check it out.
And, of course, I've been reading celeb gossip from when I need to compile the Hollywood pages, and many movie reviews. One thing I've realised? I do NOT like A.O.Scott.
A.O.Scott does movie reviews for the New York Times, and GENUINELY cannot seem to bring himself to LIKE anything, even in the best movies. While it is sadly true that I can't analyse for nuts (I tend to take books and movies at face value the first time round, trying to learn to change that. Case in point, Kafka's Metamorphosis. And I'm pursuing a Lit degree, IRONIC.) this guy...HUNTS for things to put down.
On Friday, I watched Date Night, I was supposed to review it. While it may not have been the best movie I've seen, I really did like it (the company helped, as did Mark Walhberg, shirtless). I wrote a happy review about how much I liked it, and THEN I read this. ARGH. Of course, I felt young and dumb. Maybe he's just past the age where he can enjoy movies like that...who knows, who knows.
I quite want to watch Kickass, by the way, I wonder when it releases.
The movies on my HDD are languishing, so far I've only watched Nick and Norah's Ultimate Playlist. Such a sweet movie.
Mom should be here in a bit to pick me up (The offices work till 6, I'm here till 2 or 3 at the latest) and I have...many browser tabs left to go through...so, toodles.

I might not have mentioned, but I'm interning for a local weekly newspaper in Muscat for a while. It's a pretty good job, so far we (that is, Lucky, Katz and I. Chikki was with us before she left for the UAE) have just been doing the music and movie pages.

Gossip, trivia, all that. Currently, we're trying to do a feature story, but this isn't about that.

Today, before we got down to making calls for the feature story, Katz and I sat down to quickly finish with the Hollywood and music pages. A little trivia, the song charts, and a few gossip stories.

"Dude!" Katz was staring at the screen of the iMac when I went over. "Ricky Martin's gay!" And there it was, on the TMZ website, in all its glory.

No surprise, really, but the man finally came out, in a post of his official website.

Of course I grabbed full rights to this piece, and spent some time compiling a 200 word story on it, with a huge smile on my face and my fingers crossed. Once done with that, I finished the rest of the music page and submitted it to our supervisor.

Later, in between being irritated by receprionists who answered the phone and sent me to extentions where no one picked up, I went over to our supervisor to check if our music page was fine.

"Yeah, but the Ricky Martin thing..." she said, dryly, "You know we can't run that."

"Ah well, I was trying my luck." I replied. "Didn't think it'd work."

"Yeah...Don't you know there are no gay people in Oman?" she mocked as I returned to the desk I work at.

That tells you everything you need to know.

A change of subject

The acid test is the stupid exam.

From spending nights on end with a stack of foolscap, scribbling, solving, deriving and tossing, to perusing short stories, Animal Farm, excerpts from the Mahabharata and *shudder* Sindabad the Sailor (at BA level. REALLY.)

This is the stuff I have to write 3, maybe 5 page answers about.

Why do I get the feeling that MOST of this is gonna be on the spot bullshitting?

Diwali is OVER.

STOP BURSTING YOUR LEFTOVER FIRECRACKERS ALREADY DAMMIT!

Twinkly lights all over

Aah, back to the buzz that is Bombay. I didn't get my big fat noisy Indian Diwali after all. I didn't even light a single firecracker. But my TV-addict cousin got his first bhaiduj from me, and I got a bit rich.

On my way home from my grandmom's, the sun had set and every window glittered with twinkly lights of every size and colour, beautiful paper lanterns swaying in the breeze. Even the slummier areas had something, a huge lantern over the highway, a haphazard sprinkling of bulbs. The chawls overlooking the highway were uniform, the same bright paper lantern in every balcony. Three chawls in a row, each lit in a different colour.

The last day of Diwali was rather quiet. Occasionally you'd hear a bang, and then a shiny green pustule would streak into the sky and explode in a shower of sparks.

Not so much after I got back to Matunga. My head throbbed as I unpacked and ate. Outside my window, down the lane, the noise was continuous. And hellishly irritating.

Furious, I fell asleep. Today morning as I walked down that same lane, so silent now, a thousand little bits of paper were the only evidence of last night's pyrotechnical play.

Thin girls hate mirrors too

A skinny girl in a department store will sigh

"Everything's too large, nothing in my size"

To the kids section maybe they must go

But to the innocence there, they'll say no.

Fat girls will look into mirrors

With mind, chiselling away flabby horrors

Thin girls sigh at the angles

At stick arms that can't even support bangles

Clothes as tight as can be

Padded bras to show there's something to see

Anything to stimulate a hint of curves

Yes, our skinniness gets on our nerves

Everyone knows them guys like curvy girls

36-24-36 is what we aspire to be

To gain weight we chomp on cheese curls

Oh screw the guys, lets love me for me

-Skinny Chick.

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A stupid little something I wrote during the seminar on Saturday. I like the idea behind it, even though the poesie itself is crap.

Lost

I've lost my phone. In a cab, I believe.

I'll get a duplicate SIM soon, but I must be stuck with an old phone belonging to my aunt till December. :(

Yes, my contacts are all gone, now starts the slow process of getting them all back......

She's back.

Yes, I'm back in Bombay.

In a startling display of je ne sais pas quoi, I've lost my Bombay sim card, and the beautiful number that was mine. I had to rush around today getting a new number, which pisses me off. I hate changing numbers, or phones.

And all my contacts were on that sim. Grrrrrr.....

Anyhoo, I've got a lot of them back.

College is supposed to start tomorrow or the day after that, so i'm gonna have to go check it out tomorrow.

let's just hope.

One week later, the situation is the same. The strike situation, that is. The theatre workshops in college? Those are over too. So now I'm praying even harder for college to start, and FAST.

I've been a bit lethargic and melancholy...I guess a fever-cum-cold-cum infected month-old peircing does that to you....

Mom dragged me to a doctor last week, who sternly told me I was 15 kgs underweight. Pumped me up with all kinda of supplement pills I'm supposed to be taking. This blows. Plus I LOST 4 kgs after I got to Bombay.

So now, I'm quite literally fed up.

C'est la vie, mais ce n'est pas bonne.

Nothing.

I'm tired, and I have nothing to say for now.

The stupid strike is still on, I think my classes SHOULD restart on Thursday though.....

8 am rant about the rain

Yes, I know everyone's been on about late monsoons and all. I know people who're nauseating in their love for the rain.

Not me.

I can manage a drizzle, yes. Those ten minutes between drizzle and I-need-shelter-now rain, I can manage.
What I detest is the kind of rain that gets EVERYWHERE. In your shoes and in your clothes. Through windows and doors. Into your very being.

I do enjoy this rain, when I'm indoors. When I can cuddle up with a mocha and a blanket and rum. And a movie.

But that's when I genuinely have nothing to do.

This rain is crippling me. It's crippling everyone on the Western Line (I take the train from Dadar) It started the minute I woke up. I had to brush my teeth to the sounds of my aunt making frantic phone calls to see if trains were running.

"Won't be on till evening, you have to stay here"

My house, everyone has disaster mentality, I tell you.

So here I am, my first lecture starts in 5 minutes (didn't want to attend that one anyway) and I'm stuck in a home that is not my own. With no mocha and definitely no rum. And no good company (or a means of gathering good company).

Grumpiness abounds. I need out.

The stress of moving to a new city had been getting to her.

She needed an outlet.

"Maybe it would help if I started smoking," she mused aloud, "But I shouldn't."

"Really?", asked her best friend. He moved his half-smoked cigarette towards her mouth temptingly.

"Screw devil's advocate, call me...Satan"

She looked doubtfully at the stub in his fingers

As the smoke blew out of her mouth, she could have sworn she saw his eyes glint red...

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ReLAX. I haven't started smoking. Not happening anytime soon. But the devil's advocate line was pulled on me. By Satan, hah.

Frankie says RELAX

Lessons learnt over the past three days fron life, Zaiu, mom and Jai Hind college:

Yours truly cannot survive this city if she doesn't learn how to RELAX.

And no, relax doesn't mean sleep 16 hours a day.

Currently I'm like a coiled spring, waiting, planning, what to do next, where to go next. I FEEL tense. So yes. I need to relax.

I need to run, too.

Today, I suppose, was the final straw. But it's normal Bombay too. I had to wait 3 hours at Jai Hind for the BMM merit list.

In those three hours, I drank a red bull, I paced irritatedly up and down A-road. I sat at marine drive for 10 minutes. I paced some more. I read. I listened to music. I paced.

I grumbled to myself.

Yeah, that's gotta stop.

I finally sat down with someone, I was greeted with the words "Are you all right? You look like you're gonna throw up."

Sigh.

Tomorrow. I start running.

PS. I got BA at Jai Hind, not BMM though. St Xavier's list is out tomorrow.

And so the End Begins

With a hall. Yeha, they held the exam in the hall this time, the same hall where we've sat (slept) through countless assemblies, the same hall where, just two weeks ago, we were all bejewelled and sari clad to celebrate our grand exit from ISM.
Lemme tell you, it was goddamned irritating.....
First, you freeze by the time three hours are up. Second, my seat's almost right in front. Literally front and center. Sighhhh.
The paper, well, it wasn't as easy as I'd hoped for, but it was quite good. And oh my GAAWWWWD it is such a relief to get chem over with!!
Forever!!!!!
Now it's physics on friday, which I'm pretty much ok with. So after a 'short nap' it's back to the books for me.
Sigh.


No chem.
Ever.
Again.


wow.

Pub problems? drink em away!

Need I even be enraged about the whole mangalore pub thing? will it make a difference?
It definitely did not make my day, seeing Pramod Muthalik's constipated face staring at me from yesterdays BT, neither did reading the article improve my mood.
Sigh. Politicians, hear me. you are no one to dictate what we eat, what we drink, what we do in rickshaws, who we hold hands with, who we hug, where we go, and what we do in our bedrooms.
Trying to be all 'traditional' and all isn't gonna help your party-image.
If all this pisses you off..........go get a drink, man, who knows, you might like it....

unprofessionalism thy name is...........

This is Shit.
at least, it is now.
yesterday was great, we took an air arabia flight to sharjah, then by road to Dubai.....
Dubai's quite nice really, at least, Deira is. The last time i was there, I didn't have much time to roam or anything, so i got the feeling we'd be really claustrophobic and cramped, but no, it's all quite open, and there's a Haagen Daz and a Dunkin Donuts right nest to the hotel :)
Went to DCC (Deira City Centre) yesterday and met Ady, my closest friend from grades 1 to 5, and she still seems the same. She's doin humanities and she'll probably get into Xaviers.......
And I met HER friend Ria, who i instantly clicked with.....wow man....I love her.....I actually found myself telling ehr my whole life-story......woww.
Bought a beautiful navy hoodie sweatshirt that says POWER TO THE PEOPLE........
And now I'm kinda sick.
We were supposed to be shooting for this quiz thing today, a preliminary round where we select 2 teams from each country. Bahrain, Oman and Qatar were supposed to finish today.
On schedule: shoot 6 episodes of this quiz series.
we've been here for 7 hours. so far it's just been bahrain, and they just finished shooting their first episode.
i HATE unprofessionalism
and i HATE the standard of questions...
"where would you find arboreal animals" it seems.
huh.