View from the loo

My office is located in one of those decaying mills, which have been turned into huge commercial complexes. However hard they might try to obliterate the face of this decadent, once-flourishing textile mills, somewhere remains a bit of it that speak about the life it lived, once upon a time.

The place where I work is located amidst a cluster of such defunct mills. Walking up to it is no pleasant sight for the eyes. The place itself is nothing to brag about, at least not for its look and feel. Just another media house, amidst a huddle of other media houses and commercial buildings. But the backside of the building, to which you have no access (or so my non-investigative mind believes), is a pond. A mossy green pond. To one side of it is our building and the rest of it is surrounded by trees….big and small…creepers….big long winding and definitely spooky looking. In the middle of the day, it stirs a feeling of eeriness that only being lost in the woods, looking for THE Blair witch is capable of. This, in the heart of a bustling city.

Beyond the pond and the trees and creepers, you can see the dilapidated structures of the redundant mills…the parts which the architecture of the commercial complex decided to keep alive. Or dead.

Now and then you can spot a bat or two flying aimlessly away from their herd, closely huddled together on the trees around. Now and then a crow or a pigeon would go skinny dipping. Very normal, considering they have not much of an option but go Skinny dipping. Unless of course they are the pets of the Barbie’s in flesh and blood. Then, clearly the birds will have their own wardrobe too.

I am not sure if it is the marble like greenery of the pond or the dry, dark green of the creepers or even better, the Gothic castle like effect that the archaic bits of the mills create, but it sure makes my heart beat faster, and eyes just get hooked on to the sight.

Colleagues think I have bladder issues.

Neon blue bags, best friends, water-bottles and shades of pista green

Last night when I lay on my bed, in between all the unwarranted tossing and turning, I thought of the many firsts of my life.

They accuse me of an exceptional memory. I just bend my knees and do a lady-like bow, honoured by the accusation. Although, I must admit, my memory mostly sticks to things of irrefutable triviality. That’s, obviously*, besides the point.

I remember the colour of my first bag, a neon blue with black piping. They’ve stopped making fun colours like that, any more. All you find is a dull grey or a boring beige. No wonder, kids detest going to school these days. If I was made to go to school in beige/black/brown/grey, I would have surely put up a fight. Of course, parents always have the upper hand, at least till you believe in Santa Claus and tooth fairies.

I remember the first time my mom had solid proof of my anti-social behaviour to show to my dad, who thought I was his, very own chubby, bundle of innocence. I remember throwing the bags and water bottles of all my classmates out of the second floor window, only because my first best friend didn’t share a secret with me. How did I know it was a secret? Well, I saw her whispering something into some other not-so-best-friend’s ears. Hell hath no fury like a four year old scorned. But I guess, the other four-year-olds were not to know this and they went ahead and in their ignorance of the gravity defying fact, chose to piss me, me, a co-four-year-old, off (melodramatic nodding of the head).

I remember the long list of best friends I’ve had since.

I remember the first day in all the four-schools I went to. No, I wasn’t thrown out. I had to move owing to my mother’s transferable job don’t you go around raising your brows missy, I am not lying. It’s a weekday, don’t ya see?

I remember pouring the glass of milk into a big steel container and then calling my brother with an astonished look on my 7-year old face, “Cheta, see see…the water turned white….like that only…. :O”. The first thing he did was tell me how my happiness is royally screwed for the day, for as soon as mum came, he was going to tell her. I thought he knew magic, else how would he know what’ I’d done to my glass of milk.

Nowadays, what irritates my close ones is the painful detailing I get into while describing a shade of green, that particular shade of green, not grass green, but frosted pista green. Most of the times, I pretend to ignore the rolling pair of eyes. Divya, child / woman/ monster**, it’s ok if you do not remember the exact height of the pup you saw, now that we know the exact shade of it’s eyes and the number of times it wags it’s tail in 1 minute.

I’m sure they are just jealous. I’m sure they secretly wish that they’d also remember stuff….utterly worthless load of scrap (er, it wouldn’t be called scrap otherwise, eh?!), still!

*For the simple reason that, being the protagonist, nothing I do/did can be trivial.

** Depends on the heights of irritability that they’ve reached.

Of sour grapes and sweet limes…

Mum is desperately trying to get me married. The more desperate she gets, the more reasons I find to remain single. It's not an illogical effort on staying single. It's a genuine concern on my end, as to not seeing a point in the institution, per se. Show me a valid, logical reason and I might give it a thought.

She says I was hard to please since childhood and I've just grown up to be a difficult person, always demanding for the extraordinary.

Hard to please? Well, show me someone who was pleased by something / someone, above or below his/her capabilities. Show me someone who didn't mind settling for a nincompoop? Show me someone who didn't mind attitude issues in people, didn't mind people who thought they were His/Her gift to mankind?

Demanding? Well, I do demand that the person be down to earth, humane, independent and ambitious. Asking for a good sense of irony and sarcasm might be pulling it too far. That demands a level of intelligence, and sue me but I want my guy to be intelligent, who understands my sarcasms…who understands me…or at least tries to understand me and on failing doesn't just throw his hands up in the air, calling ME 'difficult'.

And to top it all up, you hear awful stories of infidelity (not claiming that it is a-sex-specific), physical/mental harassment, dowry demands and tales with other hackneyed but depressingly true and astonishingly possible themes.

If one still needs reasons to be ‘difficult’ and ‘demanding’, just to be that wee bit careful*, then I’d say that YOU are being difficult and demanding.

If that means I’ll remain single, so be it. As long as I don't get married to a narcissistic, conservative fashionista, who thinks that ten people wearing a suffocating hideous pink choker makes it trendy, who thinks my life is his business, who wants me to do things because it is in vogue, not because it makes me happy, I'd rather be single.

And it's not about sour grapes being out of reach. It's about waiting for the sweet lime.

*Again, haven’t we heard of the utmost careful people, in spite of their cautious approach, being a part of a messy, marriage? At least, he/she tried his/her best to avoid a mishap. Now if the mishap was fascinated by him/her, tough luck!

Being weird is the latest style statement...or so said my weird pal

"You are an odd girl", said my colleague. I didn't react to it. Mostly because I didn't know what to say. Normally, a person would have shrugged in that unaffected manner, waiting to rush to the wash room, and blush all shades of red. Isn't it cool to be odd? Just the other day, I came across a person, a friend to be precise, not just any other person I bumped into without choice in the first class compartment of a local train, but a friend who, I assumed, had a better, less flashy view of things. Now this person was talking about one of her acquaintances who behaved in a rather 'weird' manner. "D, she was soooo weird. And once upon a time I used to like the fact that I was weird…sigh!" I was walking besides her till a second before she said that. I was slightly disheartened, slightly miffed, slightly shocked to hear that from somebody who claimed to be non-judgmental. Anyways, that is not what irked the Queen of England (me, me….look at me), is this fascination of people towards being labeled ‘weird’?

What irritates me is the double standards people sub-consciously garner in them.

If you stare into the void, it is being lost in deep thought. If you find someone else looking blank, he is just trying to look detached and thereby feign self-importance.

If you put on an accent, it comes naturally to you…all the angrezi television I watch, you say (mostly you won’t say it, for that is admitting the presence of an accent). If somebody else slurs more than necessary on an ‘r’, he is ‘such a fake, baba’.

If somebody else makes a blunt statement, he is being rude and obviously, ‘it’s not his business'. Ofcourse, it’s your official business to speak your minds. It falls under your moral, social responsibility area in the KBA chart.

If somebody copies a particular style of dressing/talking/ thinking/…, it’s downright infringement of somebody else's originality. It goes without saying that you were just ‘learning’ from the best.

Wonder, why we underestimate others intelligence.

And then they ask me why I am so cynical in life…because I am the only intelligent being on earth, after my dog of course.

A random day with a random tear on a random cheek

It's pouring…you have a steaming cup of tea, with the slightest whiff of ginger in the air…somewhere you can smell the wet earth…somewhere you can hear the twittering of the sparrows, upset that they didn't get no caveat before the downpour…somewhere you can see a herd of impish 3-footers, escaping the hold of their grand mother /parent/ elder sibling/ any unfortunate caretaker, after a brief session of arm wrenching…somewhere you know you are feeling blissful…but somewhere it also hurts…beauty hurts…perfection hurts…kindness hurts…the hurt similar to the tear rolling down the puffed cheeks of a mother at the first glimpse of her new born.

Beauty of nature is such that it makes me cry. A silent cry, ofcourse. Not the agonising, ear splitting, eyebrow knitting cry of a werewolf. but a silent cry...

...and they say women whine!

Relationships bug the crap out of men. Most men. Most men I have known...and most men I have not known directly, but I still do get a whiff of the fact that they are all bloody spineless, dickheads who shudder at the quintessential, 'Where are we going with this RELATIONSHIP?'. If relationships bug the crap out of men, then why the fuck do they get into one? The other day I read a typical man ranting on about how his life is screwed AGAIN because of a woman. Then he goes around making statements like 'i didn't even realise how she got me to a point where i couldn't manage to shrug my way out of the big R word'. I wonder why ? is it because all the while that she was talking to you, trying to fucking understand, where the fuck was this fucking journey with a dickhead like you , going, you were busy staring at her non-existent cleavage? Were you busy trying to picture how it would look? when you said yes to her, 'do you love me poochie?', were you actually saying yes to the afore mentioned, mollycoddling , mostly a rhetoric question or were you saying yes to the delusional horny pass she made at you?
And then you wonder where you went wrong? Poochie boy, you deserve worse. You deserve to be tied a rope around your snout that wiggles everytime your mind takes a delusional turn, hyposthesising the different postures, as your techie girlfriend is busy discussing decoding, coding and encoding.
Did I generalise? Oh. it was only my way of feeling a little better about, most often than not, generalised statements made on women. Again, I am not a 'I-want-reservation-for-women-in-the-unisex-loo' feminist. I am just a regular woman, who loses her mind at the painfully predictable and mostly cockeyed and preposterous statements made by the 'poochie's' of the world.

PS: And for all the men who do not fall in this category, i guess you are sane enough not to send me stinkers.

PPS: Not that i have an issue with stinkers...so on 23rd thots, you might as well...