The Cornerstone of a Nutritious Tambrahm Lunch

Singularity

Our society is quite cruel to the single people, they may not raise any furor over Kasab living of off their taxes, but they CAN NOT see a single person living his/her life to the fullest. They would go to the extent of personally tightening the noose made of a wedding garland over his neck. Little do they know that behind every individual’s decision to stay single there is a wounded heart, a heart that once dreamt of living the typical Indian dream of buying an apartment near a tech park and paying the EMI for it every month while dreaming of their children becoming all that they could not become. In short, we too wanted to be like our parents.

It’s even tougher to venture out in family gatherings, there is always a fear of being thrown into the center of a conversation without any warning– what with the innumerable peripas and perimas, chitapas, chittis, who try to play Cupid lurking around in the background, enough foreplay is performed as the elders of the family beat around the bush about various trivial gossip before the crosshairs are aimed at you. It is only inevitable that you fall into their neatly laid trap. Our relatives have the uncanny ability of connecting two vastly different topics with your current relationship status.

Sample this:

“Did you watch the kirket match yesterday?” Ambi mama asks.

“Yes mama, I did”

“This Dhoni romba nanna captaining pannan da yesterday” he comments.

You breathe easy thinking this topic is way off the radar and has no chance of coming back to bite you in the ass.

“Yeah, his field placements were good, correcta he shuffled his bowlers also, he never let Pietersen settle.” You quip some comments you read on Cricinfo.

“World Cup win pannan, IPL also he win pannan, after marriage his stars have completely changed da” he slowly comes to the topic.

“Uh-oh” you realize that it’s too late to avoid his bouncer.

“So kanna, when are you going to get married? Kalyanam saapadu saaptu romba naal aachu da”  (loosely translates to: “It’s been a long time since there has been a reason to celebrate in the family”)

You duck the bouncer, only to realize that you’ve been yorked. Your middle stump is sent back cart-wheeling.
         
                                                        * * * * * * *
The topic of matrimony is centered on any individual who is in their mid-twenties, earning, single, and virile - names of long distant relatives who have daughters who are nubile, or in the words of Borat Sagdiyev -"can be ploughed" are rattled off as a suitable match. They cite the example of their elder son who is settled in America with his wife and child, heading a major project, and is leading a happily married life as they cradle their grandson from their daughter to sleep in their arms. Your parents longingly look at the sleeping child wondering when would they ever get a grandson of their own, an organism that was born as a result of your orgasm, someone whom they could pamper, whose poop and piss they would teach you how to clean. Their eyes sparkle with a hope that asks in capital letters "WHEN WILL OUR TIME COME?” You try to avoid their gaze and take out your mobile as you log into Facebook whilst your peripa murmurs in your ear:

"Kanna it is better to marry by the age of twenty-seven maximum. Nobody gives girls to guys who are beyond twenty-eight or twenty-nine, you will lose all your hair by then, its better you schedule an appointment with Dr. Batra". You silently nod your head, biting your tongue from asking where from do they get these facts.

As you log into Facebook you see:

“Rahul is married to Anjali” that has a 29 likes from people he hadn’t invited to the wedding.

You wished Facebook came with an added message: “….as a result Rahul’s life is screwed.”
You heave a sigh of despair. You logout.

Peripa continues buzzing in your ears “Buy a home in Velachery near your office, your office will be closer to home and you can also go for lunch.”

“If at all you are marrying a working girl, marry a teacher, not much pressure also and she doesn’t have to stay back for extra work also” paati throws in her hat into the ring.
You nod along wondering what to order next from Flipkart.

“Why don’t you create a profile for Raju at shaadi.com?” suggests Perima to your parents.
Now you are reduced to that commodity that you planned to order from Flipkart.

                                                 * * * * * *

You realize family may be tougher to hang out with, but you have no clue of how socially stunted your friends might make you feel. Especially when people around you are getting married or are in the process of becoming a parent, or are having thoughts of throwing in the towel and getting into a relationship, it becomes tougher to even log into Facebook when all you can see is them hanging out with their better halves in the beaches and parks and in the malls as they do all the cheesy stuff that lovers do. And to top it all, they share a snap of them eating out of a single cotton candy as the profile picture.

What you may not know is that the average duration of your profile picture of you and your better half lasts only till the first two months of your relationship after which you guys would put on weight due to lack of sex and excess of outside food and remove it as your profile picture.

The singulars when amidst their committed friends realize that they are in the presence of people who have reached a different level in life, it’s a mature stage of life where they are no more plagued by all those little things that used to plague us in our school/college days. They take this meet as a chance to make us realize of our hollowed existence and superficial pursuits and trivial achievements. All that the singulars have achieved amounts to nothing, for the committed men and women have embarked on a journey in the sea of life on their swanky cruise ship, while the single guy is pedaling the oar of his lifeboat that seems to be busted out of air and is gasping for its own life.

They boast of their vacation they had in Mauritius.

The singular boasts of how he completed a 900-page book, a vacation that lasted three months.

They boast of their new car that they have bought.

The singular boasts of the new version of Need for Speed that he has bought for his PS3.

They boast of how their kid had started to walk without the need of a pram.

The singular boast of how he has watched six episodes of Dexter back-to-back…. In a 17-inch computer screen…… WITHOUT SUBTITLES! 

* * * * * *

As the clock keeps ticking by and those glances of judging passersby in a crowded mall pierces through you for sitting all by yourself on the bench, you need to give up the dreams of bumping into the Chosen One in a coffee shop. You need to realize that you are not living in a Sitcom set in New York. We all can’t be Ted Mosby, for all those who can’t be…. there is Bharatmatrimony.com. But as of now it’s okay to keep dreaming.

An Awkward Farewell

There are friendships that begin with an awkward "hello", as you take measured steps towards knowing the other person, with the passage of time you build a bond with the bricks of moments that are shared, that are cemented stronger by bearing witness to each other's various emotions. And before we know it the measured steps become an instinctive jog with every passing day as we take those steps towards each others worlds whilst we lay bare our fears, joys, guilt and anger, those secrets that we have locked deep within to each other. Last night on a crowded street, I bid adieu to a close friend of our gang as we took our last snap - by stopping a passer-by and posing in front of a building with onlookers giving us weird looks during rush hour. At that moment none of the looks nor what others thought mattered, for that could probably be the last snap we might take for a long time. On a Friday evening we wished my friend the best for his new endeavor in a new land and parted our own ways, knowing that he will be missed in our weekend hangouts at the multiplex where we ogle at the girlfriends of other guys. 

When the evening began, we were stuck amidst the Friday rush hour with no proper schedule planned and short of a farewell gift, and short of money in our wallets, more the reason to recruit a woman in the group to bring order among chaos. Moreover, ordering an exotic mint tea that could have made Listerine taste like the elixir from Fountain of Youth did not help the cause. Due to lack of a proper ambience we shifted to Coffee Day, where we spent more time gossiping about our colleagues at work and yanking each other's chain all in good humor, while we spent lesser time in deciding on what we wanted to eat. I feel our complete lack of regard towards our expanding paunches played a vital part in speeding up our decision down to the most fattening yet drool-worthy drink they had to offer. (Mental Note: Must wake up at 5 a.m 6 a.m 7 a.m on Sunday for a long 3 kilometer jog  short fifteen minute walk). We were thankful that there were no girls involved in our evening, not that we are spoilt for choices when it comes to women, but still - the ones who wanted to be a part of our evening thankfully turned it down as it dawned on them that they had better things to do than to hang out with a bunch of guys who pay their bills at Coffee Day through Sodexho coupons (Divine intervention exists!). Amidst women, our evenings might have been well-planned and controlled, what with them in charge and calling the shots, yet our topics would have been limited to the more articulate stuff like Ra.One, Harry Potter, Justin Bieber and the job opportunities that the companies would offer for my friend who is off to do higher studies abroad, instead of the "job" offers he could avail from the women in his campus. And thankfully, we did discuss a bit on the latter topic (kidding, we discussed a lot on the latter option).

With no proper gift to buy him we ended up taking our friend to Landmark as we shopped for something proper to gift him, as one of us diverted him by taking him towards the most expensive goods section and humored him with loose talk of how tempting the products seem, I and another friend fled to other section, thus quashing all his hopes of getting a costly gift (yeah, we are smart and classy like that). With a book titled "101 ways to get girls" not having published yet, and my idea of buying him a wind chime labelled as "something girly" we decided to stick with gifting him something manly. No, not a Swiss army knife. As the last few minutes of us being together neared, I realized that friends do not need a dimly lit, air-conditioned ambience where you have someone at your beck and call to take your orders on the overpriced stuff that you want to eat. All that you need to have a good time is a couch, a cup of coffee and your close friends who accept you for the way you are. As for the topic, who needs one when you are with friends?

Honey, he shrunk the world!

There have been very few brands worldwide that command a loyal fan base like Apple, for Apple a fruit that was considered to be forbidden, as a brand is today synonymous with innovation, and is regarded as a pioneer in its market, we all have rested under the shade of the Brand Apple tree and have been enamored by its global fan following. It’s been ages since the world had witnessed an innovator with the caliber of Steve Jobs–ours is a generation that never lived during the times of the invention of T.V or the telephone or the computer and we have only read about the brilliance of Graham Bell and Edison, and I doubt if there are were videos of them speaking in business/school/college conventions. So when we witnessed a gadget that redefined the way in which we listened to music, and communicated with people it left us wide-eyed and envious of those who possessed it. In Steve Jobs we had the digital era’s Messiah, a man who invented and reinvented as he rose the bar challenging his competitors to come up with anything that could match the gadgets that Apple manufactured chip for chip. From accessing music  in a gadget that boasts of a hard drive of more than a hundred GB to watching videos and getting in touch with your loved ones on a portable tablet, Steve Jobs’ Apple had brought the world closer. In the corporate world he was the boss everyone wanted to be, a man who was looked up to by everyone from a college student to a company CEO, he was the mentor everyone dreamt of having a tete`-a-tete´with.

I by no means am a techno geek, I have no idea how many GB RAM my system has nor do I know the name of the graphic card that supports the games I play. And when it comes to discussing the nitty gritties of a gadget, I am as clueless as a deer caught in the headlights. But I am a consumer of the modern day inventions who is thankful for the way life simplifies with the push of a button. I am thankful for the internet that had reduced everything from stalking my high school crush on Facebook to gathering information on the Renaissance period to just the click of a button. I am thankful for the electric trimmer that with the push of a button shaves off the hair from my head with a calculated precision, I am thankful for the mobile phone that has brought us closer to our loved ones and to those who owe money to us. But of all my few prized gadgets the Ipod tops the list­–having lived in a time when storing 3000 songs in a music player was unheard of, the Ipod captured our imagination, it dared us to dream, it not just changed what we listened to but also how we listened to it.

There are many a cheap doppelgangers that are available in the chor bazaars, yet the product with the half-bitten apple as its emblem is the real deal. There were other top players in the market who competed with Apple from PCs to mobile phones, to music players to tablets–yet brandishing an Apple product in public grabbed eyeballs and was the owner’s pride. Never has an innovator/industry captain’s loss evoked such pathos from the different stratum of society, from two-page eulogies read out by nation heads to a tribute of a hundred and forty characters tweeted by tech geeks and Apple owners, news channels and social networks alike paid their respects to one of the i-Cons of the Digital Age. Steve Jobs was to brand Apple, what a quarterback is to his football team, he was its face, its heart and all that he stood for. All those humane factors that Steve Jobs personified, be it his simplicity, his large-heartedness, or his creativity was replicated in his brainchild. In one of his most poignant speeches made at Stanford, Jobs shared his rags-to-riches stories as he philosophized about life, love and death. He highlighted his code for living life - to stay hungry and to stay foolish. Hungry enough to strive to achieve what we want, and foolish enough to make mistakes, for how could we improve if we made no mistakes?

Be it the iTunes installed in our system, or the iPads and iPhones which are the playmates of the techno-savvy, we all have had a bite of the Apple and owe a bit of gratitude to the gardener who planted a seed and watched it grow into a tree, he shared his garden of dreams with us inviting us to have a larger bite of what he had so fondly grown.  He amazed us with all that he offered, he teased our imagination, and he brought the world closer. For if it weren’t for this gardener the world would never have known to dream bigger.

Image Courtesy: http://fernexpress.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/

Of Enema and Anesthesia

There is not much of a difference between cooking a chicken and getting a patient ready for an operation.

While you skin the feathers off of a chicken, they skin the hair off of a patient, you marinate the chicken in juices that are a concoction of spicy flavors, whereas they inject medicines and drips of various levels into the patient’s veins. The chicken is laid on a plate and sent into the microwave while the patient is laid on a stretcher and sent into the operation hall.

Now, I may not sound much of a competitor for Masterchef, but I sure have come under the surgeon’s scissors and knives more than once to know what a chicken might feel like when it is being stuffed and cooked. And needless to say, it feels horrible and painful and embarrassing in the same way when a straight man bends over to pick up a fallen bar of soap from a public bathroom in prison.

Undergoing an operation is more like driving towards a destination - the destination being the Operation Theater, the roads to which are filled with potholes, what I am trying to say with my fake Tibetan philosophy is that the roads will be bumpy, there will be hitchhikers (read compounders) who will rob you off your chest hairs and the hairs that is grown elsewhere, you will be given liquids with needles that pierce through your veins - that definitely does not sound like something that raises your spirits. But the journey is made bearable when you got a co-passenger with you who keeps assuring you that you will reach your destination safe and sound. In this case it was my father who stayed with me throughout comforting me and keeping my mind off of the operation and the pain I would have to bear once the effects of the anesthesia wear down. Due credit should be given to my mother who spent a day beside me correcting her answer papers whilst giving subtle hints that after I get treated and become accepted in the society as a normal and healthy human being, the next logical thing to do would be to open an account at shaadi.com.


When we hear someone say “I had a surgery” we feel sorry for the person because the first image that comes to their mind is s/he lying on a stretcher whilst the doctor is poking them with scissors and knives with varying degrees of sharpness. That actually is the easiest part.  The real harrowing experience lies when you are being prepared for the operation, a procedure that would freak even Maximus Decimus Meridius. Who wouldn't freak out when your testicles are in the grasp of a man who holds a razor in his right hand and inspects them like he is going to paint the Sistine Chapel? After having lost half of my libido by the loss of my chest hair and reduced to a mere mortal, I was poked, not in the facebook sense with needles and tubes in every opening that is present in the human body, except the ears. Before you enter the operation theater a patient is filled with enema, a liquid that is injected into your body so that it flushes your bowels and makes it spic-and-span with a thoroughness that would put even your kaamwali bai to shame. And by injected I mean that it is forcibly stuffed through your rectum via a tube that makes sure that everything you had for breakfast and lunch and dinner today and the day before comes out whilst you conduct your symphony in the loo. At the end of it all you are anally violated and left with an empty stomach.

My operation lasted for hardly half-an-hour, fifteen minutes of which were spent in changing my attire to a loosely fitting patient’s dress after which I was lifted up from my hospital bed and deposited on the stretcher. As I was wheeled towards the operation theatre, I couldn’t help but think of myself as an astronaut in a Jerry Bruckheimer production who was preparing for a launch into outer space. All that was needed was the theme music from “Apollo-13” to be played in the background, I duly gave my dad a thumbs-up sign as if I were being launched into space to prevent asteroids from hitting earth and might never see him again. The truth is when you enter an operation theater you cannot help but think of all that could go wrong.

We live in a world where quirky headlines catch our eye than real serious issues. And sometimes even real serious issues are presented with a quirky headline. We have read in newspapers and have seen in televisions where simple surgeries have gone wrong, sometimes your records might get interchanged with another patient’s and you might end up getting circumcised while actually your problem was with your nose. What would happen if the lights went out in the operation theatre? Do they have back up power supply? A UPS atleast? What if the doctors sew their cellphones up my butt? The last thing I would need is my ass to start singing “Maa da ladla bigad gaya” while someone makes a call. All my fears were dissolved once I received the first shot of anesthesia. I am someone who had never gotten high, I have no clue how weed feels like and always wondered what’s the big deal about grass that made songwriters drown themselves in its fumes for inspiration. Having anesthesia flowing within my nerves was the closest I could come to getting high as it left me numb, senseless and pain-free as the doctors went about their business in the area of concern. And that’s what being high is all about right? Being numb, senseless and pain-free?

A three week leave sanctioned from my office sure raised some eyebrows, as I was tight-lipped over my reason for the leave, shots in the dark were taken–theories were thrown that ranged from a probable change of job to scary ones like me getting married. And if people reading this at work right now are envying me over my mini-vacation please don’t because-

a.   It’s not a vacation. Lying on the bed with a heavily band-aided “area of concern” is not considered a vacation.

2.  It’s not a vacation where you venture out to meet the doctor who pokes your “area of concern” with a scissor applying a piece of cotton swabbed with ointment whilst he advises you to relax. Somebody should stick a knife up his ass and see if he puckers his asshole up or relaxes them.

iii. It’s definitely not a vacation when there is a powercut between 2 p.m to 6 p.m – a time invented by man for siestas. Damn Third World problems!

I for some strange reason have been missing work, it’s got nothing to do with the job that I do, it’s not the office coffee, neither is it the office gossip but yeah a little bit may be about the female colleagues, but only a little bit. But what I miss the most is that I am doing nothing concrete at home apart from taking my medications, it’s as bad as being unemployed.  Even this blog has been written over a period of one week–a paragraph a day.  All that I had planned to do, from having finished watching a season of House M.D and Dexter to finishing “Life of Pi” and Uncharted 2 on the PS3 have been put on the backburner. Because when you are at home in the midst of books, games, porn, internet, video-games, T.V, Ipod… and have I mentioned porn? You end up being spoilt for choice that you do none of your planned things completely. Whereas in office you have nothing else to do other than work. And speaking of work, the ones who borrowed my Sodexho coupons liberally please be prepared to be seriously haunted if and when my time comes. Not a text, nor a call asking how I am doing. Urrgggh you guys are gonna pay for this!