Weddings and Funerals

What with the advent of dire situations mere mortals would call bird flu and a weather which freezes your fingers to the keyboard, the situation at the home front is something Edgar Allan Poe would, frankly, revel in. Not that Poe would ever envisage a plot line in a city which has lavish weddings even in such morbid conditions. Hardly the kind of misery one looks forward to during the month which hosts something as horribly empty as Valentine's Day.

Weddings fascinate me. They provide lost souls with fish fries. On a less brighter note, they also include relatives and other people who all claim to have met you when you were a more socially adept toddler. One grins and bears it with Spartan composure. But then one wonders. Could one be a changeling? Why is surprise the first expression registered in the erstwhile acquaintances' faces? Why should it be mentioned again and again that one looks like her father. One would assume it to be a cause for concern if one did not look like one of her parents. And why is this said over and over again (I know its a cliche, but this does happen to everyone, and it remains the most tiring of all questions)

Unidentified relative (UR) :My dear, how you have grown!!!!
Fish Fry enamoured invitee (FFEI) (deprecatingly) : Oh, just the heels.
UR (flustered) : OH, well, you still have grown.
FFEI (with burgeoning suspicion): Do you mean, grown fat?
UR (alarmed) : Oh, no, no, dear, no. Of course not. Certainly not.
FFEI (in verge of tears) : Of course you mean fat.
UR: Oh no, I never..Oh dear..I...
FFEI(the sense of dramatics in full force) : You can not blame me for putting on a few extra kilos. Its the most harmless addiction I could find. You do not know what I have seen. You do not know what I have faced. I have fought drugs and fags and booze and sex and politics and studies. Would you deny me the extra morsel of food? Would you, I ask you?
UR(leaves whimpering piteously)

Attended a sorrowful funeral a few days back. Buried my shoes amidst fond farewell scenes and tears, for they had been not unknown amongst friends and acquaintances. Its sad demise, which had been as gory as the death scenes in Saving Private Ryan, resulted in a hunt for new shoes while walking barefoot along the learned footpaths of college street. But that is a story for more cheerful times. This tale is about the sheer pain of loss.

It all started when buses started making seats for pygmies with, hopefully, both legs amputated. Fulfilling neither of the qualifications, I twisted around a narrow seat, with one leg curved viciously against the other. Needless to say, having longer legs than bus designers expect the average women to have, I got stuck the minute I had to get up and leave. After extricating myself out of it for a struggle of around ten minutes, my feet greeted the college steps, shoeless and forlorn. My beloved shoes remained stuffed inside my bag, now split into two. We finally buried them in the famous Presi drains, a fitting renowned graveyard for a pair of loyal shoes. They have stood with me through thick and thin, withstanding rains and summers and snow, have been trampled on, dragged, stomped and walked with. I wore them on my first day to college, they were a part of my attire the day I took my first steps to my library, they adorned my feet the day I my HOD declared I had 32% attendance and about to be listed as non-collegiate. Yet, they gave way under the pressure of narrow bus space where legs cannot be crammed inside.

This post remains dedicated to its memory.


[To people like me who seem to think they will never ever get to celebrate Valentine's Day, just tell people you refuse to do so, as it would be an insult to the memory of P.G. Wodehouse, who died on that day (May God bless his soul)]

Read more...

Mostly About Bellybuttons

Disclaimer: If any reader actually thinks this entry will be perverted, explicit and a joy to an entire section of male population, I am afraid I will have to disillusion you. Not only is it only partly about bellybuttons, it mostly talks about male bellybuttons. There, you have been warned. Now proceed at your own risk.


A Saturday night is usually a very evil way of ending a week when you have

1. no life
2. no chance of midnight revelries
3. a broken down computer, mainly because you repeatedly curse at it

After weeks of slogging for *mumble mumble mumble*, I finally had a morning when I could sleep for as long as I liked, for I have been blessed with parents who actually think I need as much sleep as I can get (They live in la-la land). Which obviously meant that I had an entire night to myself to do anything I liked without parental control or sunlight (I personally am not very fond of sunlight. Its way too over rated anyway). Hence I gave up some of my most precious, treasured, cherished and rare to find free hours to channel surfing.

After wandering around aimlessly at a few Bachchan movies, I finally reached Star World where they were showing Kyle XY which is about some boy who is different from everyone else. Why? He has no belly button. Oh, granted he has this really super memory and he completed reading every section of some encyclopedia in just an afternoon, and, oh, he has these amazing reflexes, but I mean, come on, no belly button? How cool is that? Spiderman did that reflexes thingy and androids or whatever he is supposed to be have huge memory reserves. Everybody knows that. But absence of belly buttons is the most unique Superhero trait ever. They might actually call him the NO BELLYBUTTON MAN, for he would roam around masked but topless, the bellybutton-less, washboard flat stomach being his stock-in-trade. It also helped that the robot or whatever the lead character is supposed to be playing is gorgeously cute which held my interest wonderfully. But his bellybutton-less existence had me spell bound and I spent a major part of an hour wondering what would life be like without a bellybutton. Other than the fact that if one did not have a bellybutton, there would be just one lesser body part to pierce, nothing really came to my mind. Does that make the belly button a vestigial organ?

The next batch of channel surfing led to a not-so-obscure movie called Dil Vil Pyar Vyar which is basically a meaningless movie with too much of sentiment, something I abhor, but has a few songs by Hariharan. I realize Mukesh loyalists cringe at the thought of his classics rehashed, but personally, any song sung in Hariharan's mellifluous voice is magical and an entire experience in itself. Hence, I steeled myself to watch a movie I would probably whimper for the rest of my life at the memory of. Unsurprisingly for a movie with 14 songs, one soon came along with a skimpily clad Hrishita Bhatt and a horror called Jimmy Shergill who actually had the gumption to wear an orange floral shirt with white trousers and a white jacket. Mercifully, the camera did not concentrate much on him. It was too busy following Bhatt's bellybutton in and around the railway station the song was shot at. It was then I made an observation that Kyle XY would not be much good as an actress over in India.
Because he has no bellybutton.

It was over an hour when realization finally struck me. I mercifully went to sleep.

Read more...