The Healer of my Spirit, the Butcher of my Soul

Of all the people in the world one should always be wary of their closest friends, for they are the ones who know our dirty secrets. Your best friend is the most dangerous enemy you could make, they know what ticks you off. There are times when they use your own weakness just to take a dig at your old scars, you tell them sternly no to do it. Some are mature enough to know they are wrong, and some are arrogant enough to pay no heed to your words. They scratch at it, they poke at it, they add salt to it and then they watch you writhe in pain.

Maybe they do it just to teach you to embrace your fears, they try to force the truth down your throat so that you could digest it and crap it out of your system. You want to call them a bastard and spit on their face and make it even worse, or you could do damage control by calling them a bastard and walking away hoping they would realize their folly and apologize. You realize the damage a tongue can do and you keep it on a tight leash as you refrain from saying something that would only make things worse. Within you seethes a rage that could make you bitch slap him to put him in his place, instead you bite your tongue, lick your wounds and walk away.

You wonder how fragile the castle of friendship you built with your friends over the years is that it could be broken by a few words spoken at the heat of the moment, you have after all built it with bricks of trust and cemented it with a silent promise that you won't let this castle crumble come what may. And when you see cracks in the wall you wonder if the castle was made of bricks or of sand. 

I wonder what made my friend do what he did, to say what he said, on a Monday morning at that, when all I wanted to do was to bury myself with work so that my mind never wandered off to thoughts about her. It was not like my work involved painting the Sistine Chapel but that is all I had to keep myself from scratching the itch. Maybe because he had a good life going on for him, a high paying job and marriage proposals flying around him that gave him the obnoxious right to mock my hidden secret that was only known to him.

"I bumped into her profile, she is looking hot on her Facebook page so I thought of simply giving you a call!" 

I reply with a cold silence.

"She has over 200 subscribers" he goes on.

I punctuate the cold silence by gritting my teeth audible enough for him to hear over the other end.

"Man she has some 600 friends, almost a 200 likes on that hot pic of hers, mostly by guys." he sneers.

"Behenchod, behen ke laude, you cocksucker stop talking about her, I've told you enough times already." I spew venom only to realize that I was coming across as a sea of filth to the girl sitting next to me who uncomfortably shifts away from me in the office cab.

He guffaws to his heart's content making me look like a circus clown who had stripped butt naked for his amusement. 

Naked is what you become when you share your fears, your dreams and desires to that friend. Your best friends are of a strange breed, they see through your scars and they count your wounds. They heal your spirit with their words, but sometimes they butcher your soul with their malevolent intent. It is up to us whether we embrace the healer or slap the butcher.

Bitter Chocolates and Stinking Roses

Valentine’s Day is like that hurricane predicted by the Met department which lives up to the devastation it promises, fondly known as the “Left Hand, Right Hand Day” among single people, Valentine’s Day could either sweep you off your feet or blow you away into oblivion, such events are expertly covered by news channels and news papers with much sensationalism and with the presence of Suhel Seth in their expert panel. It is a tough day to survive if you are single, from walking in the street what with being blinded by garish colors of people’s clothes that symbolize their relationship status to surfing Facebook where people tag you in pictures that has quotes from Erich Segal’s Love Story, to being asked “So you got anything planned for the evening?” –the tone for which begins inquisitively and ends up being condescending when answered in the negative. Thankfully, I am not the only one who has to go through this ordeal.  Even Google decided to rub salt into my wounds by making a doodle that gave the message of love in the most wonderful way possible, yet having shut the doors down on anything that had to do with mush I promptly switched to Yahoo! for a day.

In a nation where the opinion for Valentine’s Day shifts between two extremes, here are a list of events that happen on and around Valentine’s day that are covered by *cough* esteemed media houses *cough* like TOI, Deccan Chronicle, India TV, Aaj Tak :

1.               1. Increase in sales of chocolates, soft toys, roses and greeting cards that end up being used.

2.       2. Increase in sales of condoms that generally go unused.

.            3. Increase in sales of firearms: Mostly purchased by jilted lovers who believe in the adage that if you love something truly set it free, and then hunt it down and kill it.

.            4. Increase in porn downloads by single men, also prick your ears up a little bit while going to bed at night and within a 2-km radius you are sure to hear the muted sobs or that of some animal whimpering. Do not be alarmed for it is the single man who is crying himself to sleep thinking about “the one that got away”.

.             5. There will be a sudden increase in marriage between boys and girls who had exchanged their numbers over the weekend. You might wonder whatever happened to the commitment phobic men and career oriented women, well, when you have a goon from Ram Sene pointing a gun at your forehead threatening you to tie the knot and respect the sanctity of marriage else have your brains splattered all over the place, your thoughts of building a career goes for a toss and your commitment phobia gets pissed down your pants.

6.      6. This is the time of the year when couples are taken for punching bags by the Shiv Sena, Ram Sene, Bajrang Dal and VHP.  You can run, you can hide but you definitely can’t escape their love when they catch you sharing your love in public. Boys are beaten up, women molested, just another day in India. It has been noted that an occasional punch also comes from that single guy whose crush you are canoodling with.

.         7. A day which has been made just to make single people feel like crap, it is only the nature of law that a wounded beast bite the hand that grabs its crotch and says “♫ You are not gonna get any action tonight but I sure will, lah-di-da! ♫” as a result the occasional Archie’s and Hallmark showroom gets stoned and burgled, sometimes even Landmark pays the price for almost the same name that they share with Hallmark.

.        8. There is an increase in demand for corner seat bookings on this day. Since there are many who don’t get to do the deed at the comfort of their homes or do not have too much money to book a hotel room, they might as well get to second base under dim lighting and comfy push back seats at the far end of the hall hidden from prying eyes.

.       9. There will be an increase in security at beaches, malls and parks not with the presence of police but with that of the middle aged uncles and aunties who go by the name of “moral police”, To Protect and To Serve may not be their motto, but they will stay vigilant and scrutinize through their wizened eyes any boy and girl who hold their hands and walk around with gay abandon. Experts at raising a crowd and blessed with powers to shadow unsuspecting lovers they come out of nowhere and bombard you with questions pertaining to the purity of your relationship. You may try to steer them away by saying that your date is actually your sister, but to take light of their keen Attention to Detail skills would only come back to bite you in the arse when they counter attack by saying that only in Greek tragedies does a brother walk around in a crowded mall with his hands around his sister’s butt.

    10. It is only around this time of the year that men feel that they are actually thinking with their hearts what with realizing the power of love and the warmth they get in making their special someone smile, but guys come on, whom are we kidding? Come February 15^th and we will start thinking with our dicks all over again.

Technology's Bitch

Now that I have gotten your attention with such a crude title let me make my point: Technology is overrated, why do you have to keep bettering what is already good I ask? People are happy with what they have, why give them anything better? Why don’t these multinational companies think like our government for a change? There were the brick sized phones, then they became a bit smaller in size, then apart from making calls they put the FM Radio in it so that you could let your lover know the song you requested for them in radio stations, then there was the MP3 player, then a 1.3 MP camera, and now there are phones with such high resolution cameras that people take them to the theatre to record movies illegally. The Nokias and the Blackberrys should have stopped there but no, Man is a creature who loves to brag, so they made an operating system for the mobile phones. The new age mobile phone does everything, from finding a place to dine nearby to uploading snaps of what you ordered there on Facebook, to posting videos of how you eat with a fork and a spoon on Youtube­, the modern day phone does everything. And since pressing a button has become such a chore they have now simplified it to just a slight touch with your fingers, and voila! They light up like a Kollywood heroine whose belly Vijaykanth has just caressed. Our mobile phones have morphed into computers, they don’t “switch off” anymore they just “shut down”. 

As a result of which they have made me ignore the computer, when the world is in my fingertips then why would I need to switch on the PC and wait for it to reboot? When it is in my fingertips I don’t even have to get out of my home and explore. The worst part of owning a phone that keeps you constantly connected is that you get no proper reasons to come up with for not “liking” that status update, or tagging that photo of your friends, or sharing that really deep and meaningful fact of life tweeted by your friend that could even make Voltaire say “Whoa dude! That was deep!”

“Like my status, you have FB on your phone no?”

“Come online on G-talk, you have it on your phone no?”

“Help me out with my study on how to make the workplace more fun, you have Google on your phone no?”

My phone also has a voice command, I speak out loud and it does what I say accordingly. It opens the application, types my tweets and messages, sets the alarm, washes my underwear. It’s my own Alfred Pennyworth except that it does not wash my underwear.

The only glitch is that it does not read an Indian accent. So every time I say a sentence it interprets my Indian accent and converts it into American, which completely changes the meaning of what I say.

Sample:

 “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning” becomes “I know the smell of my palm in the morning”

“I don’t have porn” becomes “I don’t have phone”

“This city needs a better class of criminals and I am going to give it to them” becomes “Visiting into because of commitments and I’m going to do with them.”

It is also smart enough to make vulgar words appear with asterisks, it’s as if my mother were on the other side of the speaker monitoring what I was saying into the phone, as a result you get t*** and p**** and c***

Not that those could be words where I actually meant 

“Did you see that tent?” 

“Did you get any penny last night?” 

“You stupid coat”

Now since using a voice command was not feasible unless I got into an accent training class, I started using the touch keys which were too small for my fat fingers to adjust to. So when I tried texting a friend saying that “I am busy, will call you soon” with the only intent of getting him off my back it ended up calling him instead, cancelling the call proved futile as I furiously pressed the keys, it was too late when the very surprised friend attended the call. What followed was one of the most awkward phonecalls I had to participate in.

“Hey how come you called” he asked.

“Oh, you sent a message so I thought I would just catch up with you.” I lied.

“Yeah, but I sent you a goodnight message three days back…”

“Yeah, I was kind of busy ..”

“Hmm..”

“Yeahh..” 

If innovating the way we communicated was not enough technology has now changed the way we read books. Probably the only habit that I was proud of was that of reading books, a habit that has been dying a slow death. It is kind of tough to live with geekish looks when you actually know that you are anything but a geek.  There is a world of expectations on your shoulders, you are labeled a “voracious reader” by your friends and colleagues because they see you reading biographies of movie stars on wiki pages, and websites like “cracked” and “how stuff works” or a one-page article in TOI, the headline for which was probably thought up by a heavy metal listening, ear pierced college-goer who was probably high at that time.

The last time I had completed a book was almost a year back, in between then and now I have only been reading shortened URLs from twitter. Sure with all these tablets and portable e-book readers on our mobile phones the reading experience is enhanced but they do not have the persona a book has. Tablets are nothing but dull metallic objects, a book on the other hand is not an object no matter what you learnt while differentiating between objects and living beings in elementary school.  A book has a smell, the taste in pages of different books differ, the characters in a book are alive–they live and they breathe and the bond we make with the characters only grow stronger with every page being turned over, a book ages like any living person, the freshly printed pages over the years slowly get crumpled, the pages start to fade in color like our hair. When you read a book you remain focused on the book, you do not have the option of browsing through the web updating your opinion on the book. Its uni-dimensional character makes your life simple as we know it - You open, you read and you close.

Every book that you finish is an experience in itself, you hold a book with both your hands like you would hold a loved one, you take in every word that is said, you listen to every sentence that is spoken, you envision the lives of the characters unfolding in front of your eyes. Whilst in a tablet you are so busy bragging about the book you read on Facebook and twitter that you forget forging a relationship that every book demands. It is ironic that technology offers us so much to choose from that it becomes tough to decide on whether to play Angry Birds, or to browse through Youtube or to read through our pocket reader or just use it for its most primeval purpose – to make a phone call.

P. S: "Like" and share this post, you have FB on your phone no?

P. P. S : Statistics from the internet have shown that promoting your blog on a Monday morning increases readership among office goers because people check their Facebook accounts first and the office e-mail later. It has got to be true since the Internet is never wrong. So like and share this on a Monday morning preferably, you have internet on your office computer no?


Yours Truly,

Technology's Bitch