Incontrovertible Facts of Life

As penned down on reams of Red Rooster napkins while waiting for the boarding call at Tullamarine. Including ruminations on the vacation in Melbourne. And in no logical order at all.

• Photographs, videos and words can never do adequate justice to magic.
• Relationship-wise, I am the human volleyball. Or the broken GI Joe figurine everyone wants to trade with their best friend’s weird-shaped-cornflakes collection.
• If you’re on time, everything else will be delayed.
• In this day of supersonics and console-games where everyone tries to bash each other over the head, in the game and out, pen and paper remain the best thing to have been invented.
• The best discovery? Coffee machines of course, and you cannot convince me that something so exquisitely sublime was invented by mere mortals. I know the hand of Mother Nature when I see it.
• Travelling is best with people who don’t mind driving down interesting looking dirt lanes to see where they end. Also who have no sense of private property.
• Food never cooks if you stand and watch. The minute you go to the loo, it burns and sticks to the pan. Scrub-the-pan time in such cases is always inversely proportional to the time left before class starts.
• Bill Bryson is the new Fa Hien.
• You don’t really know how to spell Fa Hien either.
• Everyone except Indians thinks 36 degrees is good weather. One can forgive this in the English… they build monuments to gherkins. What is everyone else’s excuse?
• Good friends never remind you of the belly dance you did in the pub when you were sodden drunk. They merely put the video up on You Tube.
• Dark skin is the new blonde.
• Gulal tastes awful.
• The best places are places where you end up unintended – usually as a loo-stop.
• Watching random flights taxi up the runway before take-off is exhilarating. Watching ditto taxi down ditto before landing isn’t. It’s one of the quirks of modern technology.
• If you have holi colour on your face, people in Melbourne stare.
• Broken noses are nicer. Not too broken you know. Just a wee bit.
• Hanging out in air-conditioned malls in summer is universal.
• Shoes for babies that make squeaky sounds with each step taken and occasionally light up when the mood strikes them are universal too.
• Haldirams’ ditto.
• Chaat is nicer if someone else makes it. And grubby hands do make for better chaat. There’s no need to go “ew” because you know it’s the truth.
• The bathroom is the messiest when it’s your turn to clean it.
• Most kids are obnoxious. And tantrumy. And they smell sumfing awful. And they talk too much. Thank gawd I was never like that. Except for the talking too much bit that is.
• We get up at 6 in the morning to go to school, college and to work so that we have enough money eventually to be able to sleep in till when we feel like. By the time, we wisen up and retire, we are either insomniacs or dead. Capitalism, like Marx said, is a bitch.
• With particular reference to Australia: The cutest animals have the sharpest teeth. Also, the tinier the creature, the more the venom. Which still leaves the sharks. It isn’t all one huge beach party. Not at all.
• If you remembered to bring along your charger, your mobile, adapter, ID cards, passport, credit cards, concession tickets, map of the region, handmade sketch of the transport system copied from the internet, extra pair of shoes, extra pair of jeans, your own special non-friz-type-hair-gel-thingy, a book to read, your glasses to read them with, a pair of scissors for just in case, a bottle of water and biscuits in case of nuclear fall-out, then in all probability you forgot your toothbrush. I did.
• Virtual people make for the best of friends. Once you actually meet them, you can’t be as mean to them anymore.
• Garfield had the purr-fect life.
• Meg Ryan is the goddess of candy-floss and happily ever-afters. Meg Ryan is a multi-billionaire. Meg Ryan is alone and probably spends Saturday nights watching re-runs of either Larry King Live or You’ve Got Mail. I think there is a pattern here. If I only knew what.
• I feel affronted if people don’t stare.
• Grocery shopping never finishes in one trip. One always forgets the bread.
• Inter-specie love is perfectly acceptable if between an average-looking girl and a koala called David. Just a thought in passing you know. Any resemblance to any such girls or Davids that exist is purely coincidental.
• When depressed, chick-lit does the same for the hormones as chocolate. But then, so does suicide.
• I miss Garfield.
• Words that sound luverly: stallion, Spain, dark chocolate, flamenco, Peugeot, penthouse, antiques, Piazza del Castillo, Irish folk, whimsy, French window, wee, fireplace, free pizzas, midget, ember, home, sparkle, musty, coffee and kitten.
• If you take out a pen and paper and pretend to write in lounge number 6 at Tullamarine, people stare. Reverently. Or at least that’s what I like to think.
• In the train, usually, Asians sleep, Australians read, Europeans stare in the distance or look out the window. And Koreans take pictures.
• Bed and food is best at home. For everything else there is MasterCard.
• Playing holi while listening to kajrare invokes the rain-gods.
• The more the cramped-er.
• Taking 26 photographs of oneself and deleting all save that one particularly nice one is not vain or self-obsessed. It’s merely practice for being on the cover of Time.
• Watching 5 year olds go boogie boarding when you can’t even swim puts all that education into perspective.

I can now throw the napkins away. Finally. But I think I’ll keep the ketchup.

Surf's Up

Almost everyone I know has yearly rituals of one sort or another: people visit their hometown once a year, people visit Vaishnodevi once a year, people throw a party once a year… in fact I know people who jog for five minutes once a year (I do it twice… smirk!). Also, I’m pretty sure I know people who brush once a year, only they don’t ‘fess up.
I, as always, am a class apart. So I, unlike mere mortals without an ounce of ingenuity and gumption, sprain my ankle once a year. I’ve been doing it pretty consistently now for… oh… the past four or five years at the very least. Big sprain, small sprain, swelling, redness, itchiness, come rain or shine or exams… I’ve been there, done that… over and over again. You might think that it is difficult to manage… but that is because it has already been established you lack ingenuity and gumption. To me, it comes naturally. I don’t have to do a thing… I smile, I put a foot forward, and sprain the other foot… it’s really that simple.
But this year, things are a trifle unique. This is the first time ever that I have sprained my foot in Brisbane. Maybe because this is the first time I’ve been in Brisbane… who knows? So anyway. Here I was. At the beach. Reading a book. Looking gorgeous (I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that my reminisces are always in sepia and hence, I always look better in retrospect… maybe I was Dadaistic art in my previous life). And then I take it into my mind to let a friend teach me how to surf. Tangle in my sarong (luverly… borrowed… sigh!) and trip before I reach inst. friend. Ta-da!

The upside is that I’ve finally mastered the Zen art of cooking… close your eyes, reach into your shelf of the fridge (the “your” bit is optional), take as much of what-not as you can, put all of the said what-not in a microwaveable dish, take things to their logical conclusion and microwave everything thus transferred into the microwaveable dish. Voila… el sumfing-meaning-yummy-co.

So… basically I’m lame and I cook… if I don’t go to a parlour for the coming two weeks and grow a moustache, my own mother wouldn’t know me from Sanjiv Kapoor. And that just about sums up the past three days. That and Butterworths’ Legal Studies Series edition of Indigenous People and the Law in Australia (1st edition, 1995). Of everything else in this post, it is only the last mentioned that is highly recommended. For the rest… ad astra per alia porci.

Siyaah Haashiye

Travel Tip: I am ashamed to confess that I never could distinguish who is from where just by looking at them… not even the Chinese… I keep thinking they are from Burma. Or, horror of horrors, via surnames… so no, I do not know where Mehras come from… or Sharmas… I just know the Iyers and Chatterjees and that I think is because mom used to tell me about them in her bedtime stories. Aside. If she told them to me, do they not then become my bedtime stories instead? Aside over. And yet here, I can always thump my chest with conviction and proclaim to all, sundry and Australians that awast there matey… behold there a damsel from India… yes, it is just the damsels… it’s not that I have anything against Indian men… on the contrary, I am purr-fectly fond of Chunnu-the-chaatwala… it’s just that the men don’t wear gendero-national-blah indicators in the form of kaajal… or insist on calling it kohl. In fact, in most cases inst. kaajal is also eminently indicative of age and/or ideological leanings of the particular specimen in hand… it is quite easy for the expert to tell apart a feminist from an anarchist from a deconstructionist from a bebopper from a librarian predicated solely on the quality, quantity and strokes of kaajal involved. So now you know… not that you wanted to… but Jeopardy worked in mysterious ways.


Flow of Reason: “The Shop Around the Corner” followed by “You’ve Got Mail”… that my freiend, is the flow of reason… and I am going to let that misspelling remain as much as it is against my firm convictions that the Giant was the first Chipko… because it is a statement… and I’m out of kaajal… and if you hadn’t guessed that by now, then you don’t exist.


P.S. In continuation of living with Mallus in Hyderabad and learning Malyalam, I am now living with Columbians and Germans and Slovenians and Japanese and learning Korean… I personally view this progression as highly typical of my life thus far. You might not… but you don’t exist anyway so what the hell.