Death of a Man

Let's call him Paris. Paris is a thin, insignificant looking fellow whose speech is without inflection or any particular emotion. Any emotion displayed seems but forced. With a little stretch of imagination, one can imagine him being dissatisfied with his lot in life, one can imagine his disappointing childhood and his unfulfilled dreams. Paris smiles a thin tentative smile when he sees you, and mumbles a hello in a low enough tone, so that your possible lack of response could be attributed to your not hearing him. Paris is the person everyone describes as 'steady' and 'dependable', and cannot think of anything else nice to say. Everyone knows a Paris, or can at least identify with him, for Paris is very human, the accumulation of one's worst fears and insecurities.

The objective is merely to present some sort of background for Paris, so what comes next would actually seem as a logical continuation of thought, rather than simply the output of a morbid sense of humour. How would you expect Paris to meet his (untimely) end?

Before outlining the possibilities, one may safely cross out certain possibilities. For instance, one would not expect Paris to go down fighting defending all that is precious to him. Neither would one expect him to get into a drunken brawl and get stabbed. For this is simply not his style.

For retaining the entertainment value of the blog, we will also eliminate mundane ways of kicking the bucket. So, Paris will not be killed in an air-crash or of heart failure (unless it is caused by shock). However, there could be a way he would die in a car accident...

One would imagine Paris to be a law abiding fellow, who lives by the rules. He would carefully drive his car, staying well below the speed limit, earning the curses of his fellow drivers who want him to get out of their way. He would pay his insurance on time, and never dream of running a red light. So, imagine Paris's consternation when he waits patiently for the light to turn green before he starts his engine (Paris is environmentally conscious and switches off his engine at traffic signals) and crosses the road, only to see a truck speeding towards him from the cross-road.

Paris has just a split-second to act. Only if he brakes immediately, or floors the accelerator can he hope to live! What does Paris do? He uses the split second to glance up at the traffic light ahead to ensure that it is green, and that he is not the driver at fault. The truck crashes into Paris' car (a second hand Maruti 800, lovingly cared for) and sends Paris to a better place, and the car to a junk-yard. Still, Paris dies happy, knowing that he lived by the rules, and died by them.

Paris is also the kind of person who would kill himself if he were to get into debt, not because he's afraid of going to jail, but because he's terrified of his wife and what she would say. While Paris' wife (a shrewd and cunning woman, who's older than him, wears a lot of make-up and is slightly chubby) would probably take out a life insurance policy on him, making herself the sole beneficiary, she would not get the spoils as Paris would be conscientious enough to wait for the policy to lapse before killing himself. His creditors wouldn't get any of their money either, and his death would be a disappointment to everyone concerned.

I believe that the scenarios outlined above are the expectations people have of Paris. It is quite possible that in his death, Paris would do what he would have dearly liked to do when he lived, surprise everyone by his actions. When people learn of how Paris throttled his nagging wife and was shot when attempting to escape to Nepal, they would ask themselves, 'Did we really know Paris?'

No one would have known. No one could have known. It's also quite possible that Paris' death would make people wonder and ponder if they really know anyone at all, and send them down a downward spiral, and at rock bottom, with not an ounce of self-confidence left in them, they would become the Paris they once knew.

Therefore, in his death, Paris spawns new Parises, and the vicious cycle continues until all of humanity is destroyed when a disgruntled Paris nukes everyone and everything.

Insights on Human Behaviour

Any person worth their salt has a quest in life. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the Monty Python troupe quested for the Holy Grail. Keen-eyed detectives of yore and the Powerpuff girls fight crime and the forces of evil. Most business school students have the slightly less high-minded, but nonetheless time-honoured quest of achieving footage while in college through means fair and foul, and making a lot of money after they graduate, again through means fair and foul.

After much consideration, I’ve decided that my immediate quest shall be that of finding out why humans behave the way they do. I will attempt to do this in a thoroughly rational manner, taking three situations that have occurred in my life recently and analyzing people’s responses to them. From this, I shall unreasonably draw conclusions about human behaviour and impose them upon the entire world population. I shall then achieve fame and fortune as a Master of Psychology, and my picture shall appear in the last but one page of Bangalore Times for a week, along with Deepika Padukone’s, as a part of a series of articles celebrating the achievements of Kannadigas everywhere.

Let us begin.

I study in IIM Bangalore. The academic commitments are rigorous and the competition gruelling. If you are a questioning sort of person, if there is a strong spirit of scientific enquiry within you, you will have no doubt questioned the relationship between the two. Are academic commitments rigorous on account of tough taskmasters that the barbed-wire chewing professors are? As a result of which there is intense competition? Or is it the other way round, the urge to go one-up on one’s fellow batchmates extreme enough to cause the entire hard-working spree management students tend to go on in the first place?

This question can be answered very simply. Are the professors at IIMB hard-faced, barbed-wire chewing, grim scholars renowned in their areas of expertise? Not really, atleast not all of them. This obviously leads to the conclusion that, to use a colloquial term popular amongst students everywhere, RG is the source of the rigorous academic commitments.

Drawing conclusions from this brilliant piece of analysis, we come to Lesson 1. The deep-seated desire in all humans to emerge triumphant, to rise above the morass we live in, is really why we live in the morass in the first place.

Allow that startling revelation to sink into your mind. We will move on to Experience number 2.

For the uninitiated, one reason why so many exchange students from numerous colleges, which no one in their right minds would have ever heard of, from France, Italy, Spain and other countries, come to IIM Bangalore, is to cop a feel of Indian Culture. While, most people are hazy about the whole culture thing, they may waver between yoga and kabaddi as true symbols of Indian culture, those at IIM Bangalore are a sight cleverer. They (the unnamed powers who run the institution), know that while the foreigners who come for a dose of India, don’t want too much of it. Just enough to tell their friends back home how wonderful it all is, and secretly vow never to come to India again. So, to relieve the monotony of traditional Indian life, L^2 (read L square) parties are organized at IIM Bangalore.

While this could be a Lesson in itself, my point is a different thing altogether. After long observations of the goings-on at the L^2 parties, one curious phenomenon that occurs is the ring system. Guys and girls form a ring and, to use the term loosely, dance. The life-span of a ring is proportional to the number of girls in the ring. If there are lots of girls, life is good. Once they start slipping away, what’s left is a bunch of guys jumping about together. Not cool at all. So, all that’s left to do is slink away shamefacedly, under the pretext of getting another drink. The ring thus breaks rapidly.

The important takeaway from the ring observations, which is in fact our Lesson number 2, is that humans are a gregarious species. They seek companionship rather desperately. Yet there is something within us, a sense of shyness perhaps, that prevents us from going after what we really want.

And the last, and most important (in my humble opinion) lesson.

Our placement season has just ended. Congratulations, you might say with a puzzled air, but isn’t it rather early for that? Yes, that is true, these are summer placements, for a two month internship next year.

I am not joking when I say that I’ve (had to, Lesson 1) put in more effort for the placements than for most courses. A significant amount of this effort has gone into eliminating white spaces on my resume. White spaces are those annoying things that are located after the end of a sentence. We were repeatedly taught that white spaces are a creation of the Devil, and good, respectable resumes had no place for Creatures of Evil. And hence the cry of war was heard resounding from block to block, and apart from a few exceptions, people took up the fight against white spaces with vigour.

Imagine our collective dismay, when we found that companies could not really care less about white spaces! There was very little one could do, can you imagine one going up to the company representatives and expressing his/her grievances about the company’s policy of indifference towards white spaces?

We had been spoon-fed what was, if not a lie, wasn’t really the truth either. And why did we believe it? Because it was something we wanted to hear, that we could actually do something to an unspectacular resume to make it look attractive. This brings us to Lesson number 3, humans are generally a gullible lot. We may laugh at the village simpleton, but most of us aren’t really much better.

And now my job is finished, the pearls have been scattered before the swine. All I have to wait for is recognition for the ground-breaking theories I have come up with, and my contribution to civilization is done. I shall then retire, happy, and hopefully rich, with a cut-out from a newspaper containing a picture of myself and Deepika as fond souvenir of my brief moment of fame.

My Valentine’s Day

One rainy day in the land of Saki, the Duchess asked Clovis to tell her a story that had enough truth in it to be interesting, but not so much as to make it tiresome. This is one such story.

I was impeccably dressed in a suit I had purchased the night before (my uncle had bullied me all the way into a Raymonds showroom, at my mother’s insistence. Its amazing how much influence she wields in my life from several hundred kilometers away). The blazer was hot and uncomfortable and I fidgeted quietly in a chair, reading the day’s paper. To add to my troubles, I was the only one suited up that day, and I was garnering strange looks from the rest of the candidates, imperfect creatures that they were, dressed merely in a shirt and tie. Or so I consoled myself.

I made the acquaintance of Red-Nose that day. He was sitting beside me, reading the Economic Times, when he turned to me with a ferociousness that startled me. Consequently, I missed his name. I murmured my own in reply, and there followed a strained silence that I did not wholly discourage, for my butterflies were acting up again. After a few moments, my companion saw fit to break the silence.

“Oil’s at forty dollars a barrel,” Red-Nose informed me intelligently.

“Ah… I see.”

“Gold’s fallen,” he shook his head dejectedly. “Bad for the rupee.”

“D’you really think they’ll ask you all this in the interview?”

Red-Nose beamed at me. “It never hurts to be prepared, is it?”

I decided that I disliked Red-Nose. I borrowed the crossword page from ET, and steadfastly refused to be drawn into conversation with him. Not that he minded, he continued to talk, casting financial pearls of wisdom before the proverbial swine.

They called us in.

*

We were seated in a circle, in an inner chamber of the Institute of Hotel Management. There was an air of expectancy all around, all that was left for us to do was hold hands and we wouldn’t have looked out of place in a séance. The two spirit mediums distributed papers and bade us to ponder over the topic for the group discussion. The door suddenly burst open and a wild-eyed girl entered, stammering out profuse apologies for being late. After some haggling, the two examiners let Wild-eye join the circle.

We had before us a summary of the first expedition to the South Pole, and the hardships they overcame and all that sort of stuff. There was apparently an Indian expedition to Antarctica in the coming month, and the leader of the expedition was desperately seeking advice from us. We were to discuss what advice to give him. As to why we were the best people to impart the aforementioned advice, the examiners did not deign to tell us.

The discussion went on like all discussions do, with longwinded arguments that were oft repeated and fairly boring overall. After five minutes, desiring to include a fresh direction, I started, “I think we should look at it from a leadership perspective…” I trailed off as someone else interrupted.

Wild-eye interrupted when the faceless person stuttered for a bit. “I think we should look at it from a leadership perspective…” she began. I stared at her in undisguised astonishment. She stared back at me shamelessly and continued on with her thoughts about leadership. I decided that I disliked Wild-eye as well, perhaps more than Red-Nose, who thankfully wasn’t in our group.

As the discussion went on, an aggressive Wild-eye interrupted people often and made herself unpopular. When she called for a consensus on the issue, everyone agreed that more discussion was needed. Petty as it was, I nonetheless shared a smile with a fellow candidate at our minor victory.

The high point of the discussion was at the very end, when someone was expounding the dangers of snow-blindness. “But that’s not a problem,” Wild-eye said confidently. She looked around, evidently pleased with the interest that the statement generated. “With all the global warming going on these days, there won’t be much snow left in Antarctica…”

What made this even worse was while some people were in a state of disbelief, others were nodding along, acknowledging her point! No doubt they were furiously berating themselves for not thinking of this earlier and thinking frantically about something to add to the global warming argument. Perhaps the examiners suspected so too, for they halted the discussion at that point.

*

We trooped outside to wait for the interview summons. I met a senior from college whom I hadn’t recognized earlier due to his haircut (he hadn’t recognized me because I was wearing my suit). As we caught up on old times, I noticed that Red-Nose had made Wild-eye’s acquaintance and they were happily discussing ITC’s market share in biscuits…

I was the first one called for the interview from my group. I stepped inside, carefully closing the door behind me and wishing the interviewers a good morning. From that point on, the details of the interview are slightly hazy. In the mists of my memory though, one thing stands visible. During the interview, I discovered that I had a voice in my head.

On hindsight, I realize this may have been a slightly worrisome thing to happen, but I didn’t really think about it then. And since then, the Presence has consequently muted itself, and I have never heard from it again. This in a way is a pity, because the Presence gave me excellent suggestions during the interview. The stranger and infinitely more ironic thing was that I did the exact things the voice told me not to…

“So why is it that you don’t want to pursue an MS degree abroad?”

Talk about how, while you like Electrical Engineering, you don’t see yourself doing it for the rest of your life, the voice suggested. And then you can talk about why you want to do an MBA instead.

“Well sir, it is difficult to get admission into the good universities in the US,” I replied. The voice voiced an expression of disgust.

The interviewer raised an eye-brow. “Despite graduating from IIT?”

“With my CPI, I won’t get admission into the best universities…” I trailed off, realizing what I was saying. Nice one, the voice glowered at me.

“Do you have a role model? Some public figure?”

I opened my mouth and closed it. “Abdul Kalam,” I invented. “His success story, from a fisherman’s son to the President of India is very inspiring. And he’s done a lot of work too, the Father of India’s nuclear programme…”

“Really?” the other interviewer drawled. “Are you sure you’re not referring to someone else?”

I did my fish imitation again. A name floated up from the murky depths of my mind. Homo Baba? Homi Baba? No definitely not Homo Baba, you fool! What was I thinking? I did not reply to his question.

“Tell me about any news item you’ve been following.”

I told them about the Indo-US nuclear deal, but unfortunately (predictably?), I was unable to give too many details. Did I have another? Well, I had something I’d followed in the newspaper every day…

Not that, the voice groaned.

I proceeded to tell them about Shilpa Shetty and the Big Brother fiasco.

And after I stumbled out shoulders drooped, I realized that I’d forgotten to give them my recommendation letters. I waited outside for five minutes, and handed it in when the interviewer opened the door. He smiled pityingly at me.

I think he genuinely felt sorry for me.

*

This is not a sad story. It is in fact, a story which strengthens one’s faith in a benevolent force up there in the heavens, smiling sunnily down at us humans scurrying forth busily here there everywhere. This is because, after a couple of months, I got a letter from IIM Bangalore informing me that if I were interested, I could join the MBA programme on June 25^th. I was, and here I am now. Miracles happen.

No, I haven’t seen Wild-eye or Red-nose around here…

My New Roommate

Whom did you ask

Before taking up residence with me?

Why do you stare at me so

With those malevolent dark beady eyes,

When I have done nothing

Except mind my own business?

You respect my space,

Very little baggage you have brought in with you.

You seem the strong silent type,

You have resisted all my attempts to get closer to you.

Holding yourself aloof...

Do you not yearn for human contact?

Have you perhaps suffered

Trauma at a very young impressionable age?

For there is a dullness in your eye,

Except, when you stalk your unwitting prey.

There is a sense of sadism in you,

Primal nature, brutality, a pleasure in the hunt.

I find vile and disgusting

That dreadful chomping, as your unlucky meal struggles down your throat.

Unasked you have come

And overstayed your welcome.

I beseech you earnestly - Leave

And take that wiggling tail that you seem to have dropped with you...

Spritual Experiences...

Today, I was unfortunate enough to miss the bus in the morning. To the gravely uninformed, I'm doing an internship at GE Healthcare, which has it's presence in Whitefield, Bangalore, and is an hour's drive from the city, two if the traffic is heavy, as it is on most days. Perhaps the intent of having an office so far from the city was to promote camaraderie among employees by cooping them up in a bus (albeit with rather comfortable seats) for three hours everyday. A pretty lousy idea, which doesn't seem to work, because these people just don't talk! Every single one sits on an empty seat if possible and simply stares out the window. Bunch of antisocial buggers... take it from me, because the scenery isn't all that impressive.

Which brings us to today morning, when I missed the ol' GE bus. Being of a rather niggardly disposition, I decided to take a public transport one instead. My new fellow passengers weren't averse to making their opinions heard, whether it concerned the weather, the India-West Indies cricket match or what they thought of the conductor who yelled at them to move to the back of the bus, when even a child could see that there wasn't any space left there...

Listening in on the interesting conversations is all well and good, if one could forget that each bump on the road resulted in a couple of elbows digging painfully into one's ribs. Those sardines have it easy! Getting a seat wasn't that easy though, after standing next to two men who showed no signs of getting up anytime soon, I yielded to the conductor's pressure and departed for the back of the bus. No sooner had I moved, one of them got up and the fellow who was standing behind me sank into the empty seat with a shameless smile on his face. Bastard...

I did get a seat in the end, right atop a wheel which was making rather disconcerting sounds. The bus grew slightly lopsided, an effect of all those people hanging out the door I supposed. When we stopped, people outside shouted out to the driver that the tyre was punctured, but for reasons best known to himself, the bus continued on. I don't know if you've noticed, but sitting on a punctured tyre in an alarmingly tilted bus makes you feel rather close to God. I prayed...

When I finally got down, it was with a deep sigh of relief and gratitude. Someone above was watching over me. I could almost imagine Him winking down and saying in the deep powerful voice that Gods have, "Not today boy..."

"Yeah," I'd reply fervently, "Yeah..."

An expert opinion on Modern Art…

Some ten years ago, I once saw a cartoon, called Top Cat, I think… where this particularly enterprising cat decides to make a lot of dough by selling modern art. Not much of an artist himself, he nevertheless manages to create a few masterpieces by tying a paintbrush to the tails of a few tortoises and letting them roam around on the canvas.

Now, for a very long time, (remember that I was young then…) I thought that this was how these paintings were painted. The better the paintings were, (the closer they resembled what they were supposed to resemble!) the better trained were the tortoises used, or so I thought…

It seems that I was incorrect. It turned out that people painted those… things… themselves. I’ve often wondered why modern art became popular all of a sudden. Perhaps art connoisseurs grew tired of paintings which appeared extremely realistic, and began encouraging deviations from reality. Slight distortions at first, I suppose, and slowly things began to get out of hand. Picasso and the Cubists were born… Eventually, artists became so bad… that they were considered to be good! And thus, modern art was born…

Well… it’s an interesting theory in any case, and I was leaning towards it when something else struck me… something that seemed more plausible…

There was this exhibition I went to in Bangalore the other day, where I was leafing through the catalogue, when I came across Exhibit 31: Lady in a Bathtub. Being the red-blooded teenager that I am, I hurried forth to inspect the work of art. However, modern art reared it’s ugly head…

I saw streaks of red and green, and hints of yellow in between… but there wasn’t a trace of a lady anywhere in that bizarre mix of colours. Neither was a bathtub for that matter… Deeply disappointed, I turned away. Nearby, there was this old geezer spouting his theories on art, so I joined the audience…

Modern Art, he informed us, was not a true representation of the object being portrayed. You bet it isn’t, I thought gloomily, my thoughts still on the unaccounted-for lady. One had to see underneath, he explained, to find what inspired the artist to draw… I was pretty sure of what inspired the artist, the tiny sticker at the top of the painting, proclaiming that (in the artist’s view at least) the painting was worth ten thousand rupees…

The tiny audience nodded along, though I did catch a look of bewilderment on a few of the faces… But evidently, this guy was an expert, and one just didn’t disagree with them.

Which brings us to this very interesting thought. What if the whole thing was a scam? What if some people started the whole thing as a joke, and gradually pulled the whole of the public in? Some big-shot proclaims Modern Art as a new genre of painting, and the whole herd follows. No one wants to look stupid, disagreeing with everyone else… And the thing ends up like the Emperor’s new clothes… on a much larger scale!

That’s it for now, I got a painting to finish and millions to make :)

My Family... Part 5

Others…

I haven’t been blessed with as many cousins as everyone seems to have (my mother was an only child.) Perhaps this is a blessing, as some of my relatives are definitely… odd is the kindest term I can use.

One of my favourite cousins, is unfortunately also one of the odd ones. He was pretty normal, a little violent perhaps (ask my sister, they were eternal enemies before I was born), but pretty normal nonetheless. Then one day, the fellow decides to become a vegetarian. We were all understandably confused, everyone in my family is a vegetarian after all, I sometimes eat an egg, but I’m the anomaly. On further enquiries as to his new-found intentions, we found that he had decided to go the whole hog (Unintentional pun!). He had decided to stop eating

a) Omelettes

b) Cakes (they contain egg)

c) Ice-creams (he had read somewhere that they use some part of a buffalo as a gelling agent)

At this, I politely enquired as to whether he was going to stop drinking milk as well, lest he deny some poor calf it’s rightful meal. At the earnest request of his mother, he conceded that he would, in fact, drink milk. My comments about his fondness for coffee were not appreciated…

My cousin also turned religious overnight. He frowns upon any Western influence in any of our lives. He visits a temple everyday, and goes to classes to learn the Vedic scriptures. It is the earnest wish of many of my female cousins that he end up marrying a woman who wears tight, low-rise jeans (or preferably a mini-skirt), wears liberal make-up, and is preferably of a different religion, or even better, an atheist…

Another on my list of unnatural relatives is a particular aunt of mine on my mother’s side. Perhaps I should call her a second aunt, for her son and daughter are my second cousins. Or perhaps she’s my aunt twice removed or something like that? Nah, that sounds stupid. Getting back to the subject at hand however, the woman bears a startling resemblance to a town crier. Perhaps she was one in her previous incarnation, I can just imagine her beating a drum shouting ‘Hear ye! Hear ye!’

Yep, she’s one brilliant rumour monger. If there’s any story you want to spread, such that it reaches the lowest of beggars on the street to the Prime Minister (Well, that’s a but difficult, but I’m sure she’d be able to reach a Cabinet minister), all you have to do is give her a call. She doesn’t like me too much, I’m afraid, for I’m a rather closed mouth chap, and she has to try really hard to pry any information off me. In fact most of our conversations (thankfully, not too many of them happen!) are one sided ones. She asks me questions with regard to those things she deems are absolutely vital for her to know, and gets pretty mad when I give mono-syllabic replies. For some reason, the rest of my family finds this rather funny…

Well, I could go on and on… but time’s running short, I could for instance talk about the wonderful blessings my grandmother’s brother gives (he’s jealous of my sister’s and my brilliant achievements!), which generally go on the lines of “Do try and pass your exams, dear children…” and we dutifully say, “Yes, uncle…” or an uncle who’s really fond of christening people with strange names, (a toothless wrinkled up old man was unfortunate enough to be named ‘Jumping Jango’) or even an uncle whose snores rattle the glass on the window… but I can’t. Time and tide wait for no man, y’know… and I'm a little bored of the topic already!

Here’s to hoping that anyone mentioned above who happens to be reading this takes it well… Cheers!

My Family, Part Four...

My bro-in Law…

Privately, I am of the opinion that he thinks the rest of his wife’s family are complete bonkers. To be fair, he’s not completely wrong. He doesn’t say anything about it (nice guy!) but the occasional odd glance he gives us says it all, so does the nervous laughter when my father cracks a joke.

He likes playing cricket and tennis, and cheats at card games…

How to get on his good side… I’m not really sure, have to ask my sister, she always manages to get him to do what she wants!

My dog…

Perhaps the least complicated members of the family and the very epitome of ‘Simple mind, simple pleasures.’ Embarrassingly friendly to strangers and other dogs, if anything were to stop a burglar from entering the house, it most certainly won’t be him…

How to get on his good side… Hmm, you don’t have to do anything actually. A pat on the head might help, but anything more than that and he’ll end up dogging your footsteps. Heh, sorry, do continue reading, no more puns…

My family, Part 3

My sister…

When we were small, it was her dearest wish that I call her ‘Akka’ which is a honorific used when addressing an elder sister (She is six years elder to me). Now, at this time, my sister and I were twelve and six respectively. Six years, as everybody knows, is a pre-adolescent age characterized by rebellion against authority and disregard for norms. Naturally, I refused to call her that. She was bitterly disappointed. As a consequence, our childhood was a long series of quarrels (which she usually won, I am ashamed to say, and in my defense I plead, ‘She was bigger than me then’…) interspersed with brief periods of peace when we were hungry or asleep. Despite the intense pressure, I am proud to say that I held out, and have never addressed her ‘akka’ to this day…

My sister has a wonderful imagination, as evidenced by her fondness for the game House-house (this was in the same time period as above), where she took care of kids (dolls), cleaned the house and cooked food (tiny balls of atta, artistically fashioned into small chappati discs.) However, even after she married, she likes to cook. That doesn’t mean we (my bro-in-law and I) like to eat her cooking though, for the food is often full of surprises... and not good ones either. Now that she has had a baby, we hope that she realizes the importance of my bro-in-law being alive and well, he is the bread earner of the family after all, and leaves the cooking to more capable hands…

My sister takes after my mother in terms of height. As a consequence, she is rather… vertically challenged. Her height is a sore point with her (she doesn’t like being referred to as ‘short’), but since she unfortunately takes after my father in terms of temper, it means one can’t tease her too much about it…

How to get on her good side… Shower the baby with praise, and criticize Priety Zinta’s dance in Salaam Namaste, something she says is impossible to do in the later stages of pregnancy.

My Family, Part 2

My mother…

A very sweet woman, a stay-at-home mom who takes care of the kids. (Although the little birdies have now flown the coop.) She is admittedly on the short side, the wedding photo of my parents is an inside joke among the rest of the family, including the extended one, for she just about comes to his chest when both stand at their full height. A terror to the local vegetable sellers, she drives such a hard bargain that it’s a miracle they keep coming back. I’ve seen impressionable young lads driven to tears after ten minutes of debate with my mother as to why exactly they ought to knock off the price. She occasionally feels sorry for them, and brings them inside for a glass of buttermilk, but manages to get them to stick to the price in any case…

My mother has this rather annoying fixation about long hair and beards. For that reason alone, I think she would be rather pleased if I were to join the army, where I would get a buzz cut, and the sergeant would reprimand me if my cheeks weren’t smooth. At least, that’s what I see them do in the movies…

Another hobby of my mother’s that I dislike intensely is watching TV soaps. I never really find any point to those things, they’re usually about families suffering one problem after another, bad guys try to destroy them financially, the younger son is a drug addict (the elder one’s in prison), the daughter suffers from a bad marriage, the father’s a drunkard and the protagonist (usually one of those modern working women with an iron will) tries to keep the family together… so, GIRL POWER! All in all, that’s fine, I’m a strong believer in the freedom of expression and the freedom to do-what-you-like-in-your-leisure-time, except that my mother gets so moved by the story that she gets into the aforementioned protagonist’s shoes and sometimes forgets to get out of them. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard her quoting lines from the soaps from time to time…

My mom’s also an excellent cook, and has a fondness for a game called Pallanguzhi, also known as Bantumi, a popular game often found on mobile phones.

How to get on her good side… Agree with what she says, with tactful comments inserted at pauses…

My Family, Part 1

There should be a book written about my family. Certainly, it would be rather short, for most of them live normal, boring lives, and it probably wouldn’t sell very well, but it would be a goodround characters ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other. (I personally don’t like the term, but my Literature professor insists that it’s the official term for characters that develop during the story, as opposed to a flat character) But I digress, let me start off with the head of the family, my father...
book, for it would contain all the elements of a good drama, a good plot, tragedy, humour, jealousy, betrayal, a dash of romance, and lots of

One of the tallest persons I know, he is an associate dean at a business and law school. A control freak if I ever saw one, his admittedly short temper doesn’t help him any in his job. It’s my personal belief that his employees are downright terrified of him, especially the secretaries who work there. I understand their perspective I suppose (most are rather short, perhaps five feet max), so he must look like a ten foot tall ogre, with an insatiable appetite for perfection. It does break my heart sometimes to see them scurry out of his way as he takes long strides down the corridors of power, but such behaviour does have it’s perks. My family and I get royal treatment whenever we visit him at the office, though it gets embarrassing after a while to keep refusing (or in my case, accepting) endless offers of drinks and biscuits…

He has an unusual fondness for video games however, especially one called Lunar Ball and another called Battle City (where he likes to be the yellow bot)

How to get on his good side, hmm… Nope, sorry… you can’t. So don’t even try.

More to come later...