Hop on!

Using Public transport is a way of life in this city, and I absolutely love the time I spend in buses or trains. I also love my companions on the bus and would like to introduce them to you:

1. The Candy Crush Saga Survivor-Need I say more? I have unfailingly encountered them on any mode of transport, however short/long be the journey. Many of these were former Angry Bird players, but I guess they prefer some colourful jellybeans over grouchy flock.

2. The Cell Phone Addict-A slight variation from 1, he/she is usually hooked on to a chat app, a movie or some music. I love the chat app ones the best, especially if they are seated next to me. I shamelessly stare at their screens and enter into their worlds for a short time – fights with a mother over moving in with a girlfriend, discussions about Charles and Keith sales, romantic exchanges with two boyfriends simultaneously-I have seen it all.

2. The Kiasu king/queen- Kiasu is a South east Asian term that means “someone with a grasping/selfish attitude”.  These are the people who will start pushing around miles before their stop actually approaches, almost prompting you to say,” slow down grasshopper!”  In case it’s a Kiasu queen she will also destroy your toes with her heels in a bid to reach the exit way before the bus stops. And God forbid, if they don’t get a seat to sit, they will push and shove around like an angry bull that has been shown the brightest shade of red.

3. The Grumpy Granny/Grandpa- They are the moral police and are more effective than all the Stand up Sallies, Move over Mikes and Give up Glens (a marketing initiative to make people offer their seats to the elderly/the disabled). If you dare continue to sit in a seat while they are standing, their fiery gaze will turn you into ashes before too long.

4. The lost in lust couple-They are the ones that I typically avoid looking at out of sheer embarrassment. I have actually noticed parents cover their childrens’ eye sometimes when such couples are around.  But to be fair to them, they are so busy with one another that they never disturb anyone else.

5. The corporate honcho-I encounter them on some segments-guess they are too busy to accompany me daily. He/She can be identified due to ear blasting conversations which have the words “deal cracked”, “millions”, “commission” and “bonus” generously used.

6. The chatterbox-Again, I don’t encounter them on every single journey, but when I do, they make me glad that my ride is over. They want to know everything about you-job, marital status, address, nationality, parents, friends…and have words of wisdom to offer on each of these.

So the next time you take a bus/train ride, keep your cell phone in your pocket, your Ipad in your bag and look around- I am sure you will meet my companions too.  Until then, hasta la vista!

Piece by Piece, we build a masterpiece

As a child, I was fascinated by games which require one to put all the pieces together and create something. Jigsaws, legos, building blocks….you name it and I’ve played with it. It all started because I used to bite my nails a lot, so my parents wanted to give me something that could keep my hands occupied. My nails are still the nightmare of any manicurist, but this led to a love for puzzles and games.

I’ve spent many hours in my childhood building Lego worlds or working on Jigsaw puzzles. When I had a fight with my sister, my ultimate revenge was to hide  just one piece of the Jigsaw she would be working on and deprive her of the satisfaction of a complete Jigsaw puzzle (Yes I know, I can be mean!). As the years progressed, Newton’s laws of gravity, Pythagoras’ triangles and then, Manoharan’s interpretation of the Indian Income Tax took up so much of my time that I forgot about this interest. Until some time ago, when a Japanese colleague moved into my office.

When he was setting his desk up, he began to put up some figurines of famous monuments (The Eiffel tower, Tokyo Tower, Sydney Opera house). On examining them more closely, I realised they were actually made up of nano blocks. So I asked him and he told me he had got them as his DIY project. He would get the nano block sets for each one (similar to miniature legos) and make them himself. I was amazed and told him about my childhood lego and jigsaw fascination. So he gave me the Sagrada familia (A famous church in Spain) nano block set and offered to let me make it. I was thrilled!

That very weekend, I sat down and began to work on it with tremendous enthusiasm. I put on some music and opened the set. The blocks spilled open and uh oh…they were tiny. I should have realised…they arent called nano blocks for nothing. I picked them up and examined them closely. They looked alike at a distance, but they were actually different pieces. I looked at the instruction manual and it was in Japanese. I realised this wasn’t going to be as easy as I had originally thought. However, on turning the page, I saw some step by step illustrations. Ok…some start. And then I began.

It was incredibly tough. I had to dismantle my work five times at different stages and restart. My fingers were big and clumsy and the pieces kept slipping through. The hours went by. The playlist on my laptop had stopped a long time ago and I hadn’t even realised. I guess this must have been the longest time I have ever been away from my phone inspite of having full network connectivity. But I kept at it. Finally, seven hours later, I completed it. Was I proud or what.

The next day, I went and kept it on my colleague’s desk. “Great! How did it go?’, he asked. “Oh lord, it was exhausting but exhilarating.  I had to tear the Sagrada Familia down five times before I could finally complete it!” I chirped happily. To which of course, Top Cat commented in his usual dry fashion, “Oh wow, we have Godzilla in our midst. She can tear down monuments!”

I took a picture of that and look at it each time I have a task I don’t want to do or think I can't complete. I have realised that if we attack it, little by little, with all our heart, whatever be the task, we can do it and do it well. After all, even Rome wasn’t built in a day!

"Maid" in heaven

I recently caught up with an extremely close friend back home who has settled into marital bliss. Or so I thought, until I discovered, it isn’t that “blissful” after all. Nothing to do with her husband (he is THE nicest guy I know) but to do with her new maid. I couldn’t stop laughing. This friend ( I will write a whole post on her someday because I love her to bits) is the epitomy of cool.  She is incredibly smart, very  funny, really chilled out, and well, not exactly “domesticated”. Hence, I had never expected to have a discussion on domestic help with her. So, of course, I couldn’t stop pulling her leg about it.

On my way back home, I was still giggling over the conversation and I suddenly realised that this wasn’t the first time that I had had the maid discussion with people I least expected. I recall having a banker friend with whom I was trying to make a Saturday morning jog plan. He first agreed, but then later called me and said, “Sorry I just realised, Saturday morning OBVIOUSLY doesn’t work for me-can we move this to Sunday instead?” To which I nodded understandingly and replied, “Oh of course…you would be too hungover from Friday evening drinks”.  “No No”, he said. “My maid comes in on Saturday morning and that’s an appointment I won’t change for anything”.  It took me some time to get over my shock after which I burst into peals of laughter.  Another time, another male friend of mine was in a scarily bad mood. When I asked him the reason, he said, “My maid has just quit…she is the fourth in three months. Now how am I going to manage?” And of course, my smart alec comment about him being a closet Shiney Ahuja wasn’t much appreciated. I even have a male friend looking for brides, who has kept "must be a good maid manager" as one of the criteria he looks for in his bride!

Once I reached home, I took a look at my weekend to do list (I’m a big fan of to-do lists. The first item on my to-do list is “make to do list” which Top Cat finds highly amusing. In my defence, if you can strike off an item as soon as you write it, it motivates you to get through the others. To which Top Cat quips, “why don’t you keep, “strike off first item” as a to-do too? That way, you will have TWO items ticked off…even more motivation!”).  

My to do list went roughly like this:

1. Make to do list

2. Call maid to check weekend timing

3. Maid-clothes for ironing

4. Aircon services guy??????

I won’t bore you with the other items but essentially, I realised that I am no one to laugh at my friends given that I seem to have the same struggles as they do. Even my weekends seem to revolve around the maid, plumber, aircon maintenance guy and other handymen (or handywomen). Guess grown up life isn’t exactly “maid" in heaven!

Messedup Chef Singapore

Cooking had never been my cup of tea (pun unintended). When I stayed with family, I always got delicious home cooked food, garnished with “Ma ka pyaar”. So, I never took the effort to learn cooking. Then I left home for further studies and my mother tried to convince me to learn cooking but I shot her down, telling her that I had enough stresses to deal with, since I was leaving home for the first time.

I was fortunate that my campus had a nice Indian food place and throughout my student life, I was well fed without any effort. After I left campus, Subway, Ananda Bhawan, Greenwitch salad, Nutella and Kinara prospered tremendously due to my lack of culinary skills.  

My mother isn’t a quitter and used all the weapons in her arsenal to get me to the kitchen…ranging from the usual worried mother of an unmarried girl mode “however modern society gets, you will need to cook for your family” and the self-appointed Shehnaaz Hussain mode “when you cook a healthy meal your complexion will glow and the spots on your face will vanish” to the HDFC relationship manager mode “think how much you will save if you cook instead of eating outside”. I must confess, she did get me thinking at times, but the desire to cook was as short lived as the run of “Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag” at the box office.

When I moved into a new house, I did have the temptation to start cooking and invite friends home for dinner, but the mean jeers of a heckling flatmate when I so much as mentioned this were sufficient to kill my confidence. And then I had a fracture…which changed my life in big ways and small.

 I couldn’t get out anymore and had to order food home. The minimum order size and amount soon reflected on my bank balance and waist line, and I realised that this wasn’t a realistic solution for the entire healing period of my fracture. So, I decided to take the plunge and cook some basic food. Top Cat panicked and declared that he was going to gift me a fire extinguisher as my induction gift but I decided to go ahead anyway.

I have been cooking for a few weeks now and here are some of my key learnings:

1. We need to put water in the pressure cooker when we put in the rice…else we land up with a ton of burnt rice and a charred cooker.

2. We definitely lose weight when we cook-more because of the cleaning up that ensues(especially when you forget to cover the mixer while making a smoothie or open the pressure cooker before the steam has settled down).

3. Potatoes can be peeled even after they are boiled!!

Sneer away, all you Michellin starred chefs, but I have just started and the learning curve has been steep. So far, I have made dal, soup, khichdi and basic boiled vegetables.  And, I have lived to tell the tale, so obviously my food was edible.  

However, the biggest discovery in all of this was that I enjoy cooking! It isn’t a chore anymore and I have voluntarily started visiting cookery websites to find more recipes. Rest assured, my mom is a pleased lady and I suspect that the Siddhivinayak temple has benefited a lot from my cooking due to all the money she must have donated there to thank God for this miracle.

I am almost confident that I will get from Messed up Chef to Master Chef soon…and the ingredients for that, besides the obvious, are lots of burnt and broken cutlery, ruined aprons and mutilated kitchen ceilings! On that note, Bon Appetite!

Chitrahaar ka Chamatkaar

Saturdays are usually my chore days-the day I do all the tasks that I’ve put off until I absolutely HAVE to do them-laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping and paying bills.  And to incentivize myself, I typically choose some music that I love so that I can complete everything on my to-do list without getting bored. Today, tired to death of all the music I had been listening to recently, I chose a 90s Bollywood playlist. Turned out, it was not so much a playlist as a time machine that took me back into my childhood.

My parents didn’t encourage TV viewing as a child and so we didn’t have cable channels at home for most of my childhood. But I think they missed something there, because hindi music became as much a part of my diet as daal, rotli, shaak, kachumbar and dahi.

Dil is the first movie I can recall watching in a theatre and I fell into undying love with  hindi film music. My parents even have a recording of me singing “khambe jaisi khadi hai” with such a mish-mash of words that Sameer (the actual lyricist) would probably have sued me had the version ever reached him.

My sister and I behaved like absolute angels on nights that had Chayageet, Chitrahaar and Superhit Muqabla on Doordarshan so as to ensure that our TV privileges weren’t taken away. And during the entire one hour that those shows were on air, we were enthralled by the romance of “Tujhe dekha toh”, the seductiveness of “Dhak Dhak karne laga” and the sheer indianess of “Morni bagha maa”. It was almost as if the Ministry of Magic had introduced magic to muggles like myself for that short span of time.

We were delirious with joy every time my mom bought  an audio cassette for us and we would hear the entire tape again and again. If it was a Rangeela , Roja or 1942 a love story, then we could play it during meal times or car rides as well, since my parents loved AR Rahman and RD Burman as much as we did. I have had some major fights with my sister over which song to listen to and  ridiculous as it sounds now, even over which song to sing when it was my turn during antakshari.

Today I have absolute freedom to listen to whatever I want and watch whatever I want.  But there is something missing. . I don’t think the best Ipods or Spotifys can replace the triumphant moment when a radio was finally tuned to the right channel and the crackling had turned into Alka Yagnik or Kumar Sanu or the feeling of exhilaration when the reels of the cassette finally reached the song one had been waiting for. It’s not that there isn’t good music in Bollywood today-there are some amazing soundtracks and soulful lyrics. But I guess, my deepest love will always be the “chura ke dil mera”, “bahut pyaar karte hain tumko sanam” and “maiyin maiyin” of the world. Not just because they are awesome songs, but also because they have so many memories and associations.  And I am sure that every person who has grown up in the late eighties or early 90s would agree….. E…always a tricky one for Antakshari until “imli ka boota beri ka ber” came along!

Up in the air

Throughout my childhood and teens, I stayed near the airport. While most would consider this a nuisance, given the drone of an airplane taking off or landing every fifteen minutes (or whatever is permissible as per ATC regulations), I went on to love airplanes and everything associated with aviation. Each time a plane took off, I would go running to the window to see which one it was and conjure stories about the passengers aboard. If it was a particularly fancy one, i.e. an Alitalia/Air France/British Airways, I wished desperately that I could be on it too. 

I grew up and the fascination for airplanes faded (Kandahar and 9/11 to be blamed), or rather metamorphosed into a love for airports, one that lasts until this very day.

I absolutely love the thrill of anticipation I feel each time I go to an airport. The buzz of activity that goes on 24/7, the aroma of coffee (I am told the CCD at the Mumbai Airport brings in the most revenue from all the CCDs in India), the distinct feel of duty free shopping, the ever changing status boards of airlines…bliss. I remember standing in front of many of those status boards and day dreaming about where my next vacation/work trip would be…Cebu? Melbourne? Geneva? Not a single one has materialised, but the day dreamer in me loved the indulgence.

It’s also the place where I get the maximum thrills over silly things-bags showing up first on a baggage belt, not having to wait in serpentine security/boarding queues since I showed up with my foot in a cast, getting my name announced all over the airport since I was busy finding billabong chappals for a friend and completely forgot that I had a flight to board, doing a little jig with a Santa in his grotto before a Christmas flight, getting a free coffee voucher since my reservation was mistakenly cancelled..the list can go on and on.

But what I love most about airports is that they are the best place to see love exhibited in its purest and truest form. Children jumping up and down to meet the father returning from a business trip, A husband stowing away his laptop bag with reckless abandon as he rushes to meet his pregnant wife, A girl crying buckets as her best friend leaves for further studies…I have yet to come across another place where such unadulterated emotions are on display. It makes one believe that the power and beauty of love, friendship and family bonding still very much exist.

So the next time you feel down on the world, I urge you, unless you are aviophobic (I looked that up and it does exist), to go the nearest airport, take a coffee and sit down. Let the warmth of all the love you see around embrace you. Take a flight of fantasy (pun intended) to some exotic location. It will do you a world of good. Or so feels this self-proclaimed philosopher of the twenty first century.

Fractured foot, strengthened spirits

About two months back, I suddenly couldn't walk that easily. Every foot step made me wince with pain and after a battery of tests and tons of doctor visits, I got diagnosed with a foot fracture and screeeeeccccchhhhh…. went the breaks on my long impending bollywood dance classes, travel plans, gym routine…and on life. Overnight,  I was forced to go from being a duracel energiser bunny to a partial egyptian mummy with a bandaged leg.  The doctors prescribed the usual medication and rest, and I prescribed to myself a heavy dose of self-pity.

To be fair, it really wasn't easy to cope alone with an injured foot, manage doctor visits, work, food and just life in general. I had never had this degree of  severe illness while being away from home before, and more than ever, I came to appreciate and miss the love and attention that had been bestowed upon me during illnesses by family and friends back home. However, at some stage, I got too caught up in the frustration of partial immobility and incessant pain and almost felt like life would never return to normal again.

It was during this phase that I realised who my friends were, who cared and who didn’t.  The sheer indifference of some people that I  previously thought cared appalled me. At the same time, the warmth, concern and love of people that did care brought vast cheer into my life. It made me appreciate just how important it was to be there for friends during both good and bad times. I also felt blessed to have wonderful colleagues who tried their level best to distract me whenever they noticed that I was writhing with pain.  The kindness of complete strangers (from never having to stand in a bus to the patient MRI staff who dealt with my sudden case of nerves due to the 20,000 disclaimer forms that I had to fill in) made me have the epiphany that the world is still a very nice place after all.

Long hospital visits and sleepless nights gave me a lot of time for self introspection. Instead of running on the treadmill of routine day to day life as I had been doing thus far, I paused and started asking questions. Not the heavy duty “what is the purpose of life” type of questions..let’s leave that to the Deepak Chopras and Sri Sris of the world-but  more the usual, quarter life crisis type.  I suddenly realised that half of 2014 was already over without me having ticked off even a single item on my new year resolution list. The solitude helped me to take some really difficult, heart-breaking decisions to get my life back on track.

But what made the most difference was a visit from my father for a few days- There ain't no medicine even half as powerful as the love of one's family. That visit made all the difference and helped me get back on my feet (literally and otherwise).

A big thank you to all of those that cared and stood by me during this time- I can never appreciate enough how much strength it gave me. More than anything, it has hopefully made me a better friend and  a better person. And rest assured, the energiser bunny will soon be back into action…she has a whole list of items to tick off before 2014 ends and only five months to do so. She is raring to go now! So watch out world, it will be you that will knocked off your feet this time round!