little bit of insanity

one needs a little insanity to be a genius. yesterday we discovered we do not qualify.

cyclical life and such

It is back to the routine. I successfully broke the rhythm for 3 glorious days. Now it is back to routine. Live before.

I guess there is no such thing as dreaming for myself. There is no such thing as me. Am part of some whole. Either work or family, there is no place that says there is me.

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No Smoking!

The film I like. The concept I do love, but then why did it have to be the director's personal take on so many thing!!! (what the fuck! Why am I saying this, after all when the script was written the first time, the movie was enacted in Kashyap's mind and there on it was his version. Each time someone saw it was reinterpreted)

To watch this movie you need to shut yourself up from everyone. It is a very personal film. Smoking is just a metaphor. It could be pot, hash, porn, women, money anything. You get addicted and play games with yourself. You go down down down down into the depths of wallow. So when K goes down into the depth of Mumbai he actually is visiting hell.

He gets into a lab and is a lab rat, the satan watches over him constantly. until he is reduced to being a shell - the soul goes missing. K becomes human, he will entrap another animal to gain back his fingers. he will not smoke.

Very very bibilical. Someone asked what was Kashyap smoking when he wrote this movie. I assume he was on grass. He would not have written this if he were normal.

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Now you sunil r nair have to promise not to do what you did in the last week. You will not cherish what is not yours and will not try to win battles you know you cannot. You will not act like a fool. There is enough of that in the past to prove that you are a fool, we can do without it again.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Monday mornings are the same everywhere.

rejection notes

i wrote,
in the earlier years
an escape
from utter hopelessness.

now
there is hope,

i think
i will discard
the words.

any more rejection notes
would just hurt my ego.

8/12/04

nextgen and musings

my next generation is here.

Over the weekend have driven some 300 odd kilometers one way to reach a temple built by the family that runs the Venky's brand of Chicken products. You have to drive down on the Pune - Mumbai highway cross Pune and go beyond for another 20 odd kilometers to reach a serene Balaji Temple.

I am not religious, for a large part of my life I thought I was a Protestant Christian. My grandfather, a preacher who never did do anything spectacular in life used to pray in a sing song way in the evening, while my dad a hard core Nair waited patiently. It was only when my sister reached her teens that my religion became an issue. Particularly when a family friend came to dad with an alliance for her - the prospective, unsolicited groom was a guy working with a small hotel as a bell hop, and the reason given for the kindness was that since my sister was a half breed she would never get a good boy! that did it for my dad. He became an overnight Hindu and did everything to ensure that a couple of years later he spent a bomb on getting sister married Hindu style. He must have slept easy. And we became a non secular Hindu family.

I got married hindu style, daughter's birth and naming was the same. I guess I want her to have some sort of an identity that she can stand by. Guess she will choose what she wants when she wants.

What I wanted to say here is that my next gen is here and how.

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Dual life will mean something - one here and one someplace else. One life here and one there. Multiple personality disorder.

foolish me!

I do not desire suffering;
yet fool I am,
I desire the cause of suffering!

(Shantideva)

twisted

twisted
rubber bands
with no shame
snapping when alls well!

days down the drain

it begins well. the day i mean... at 6 am i wake up, alert to the sound of the car being washed in the parking bay on the ground floor. me being on the first floor does not help. my feet feel sore and the muscles ache from inactivity. i have withered away over the years. The muscles from the legs and arms have slowly turned into blubber and a stretch of it has been resident around the tummy for years. 6 abs are meant for actors who at 40 live life they want to. I have emis to pay instead.

by 7 30 i am out of the gates of the complex, i have not felt the breeze or realised the mumbai is getting pleasant. its a rush to get ahead of the rush.

it still feels good. the day is still promising. By 8 15 am in the pokey office of 'the startup' i am a part of. 8 30 is breakfast of the same thing that i have eaten for the last 4 months, one idli, one wada, one bowl of oily upma. i try to be innovative with it, eat half the upma first, the an idli with chutney and then a wada. maybe i will try the wada with the chutney tomorrow. Maybe the day after I will eat the upma last and soaked in sambar. with 5 items the combinations are many and it can keep me mused for somedays.

The the chai, chai is good. its sweetened with some sugar free - some have said that i will die of sugar free poisoning - my take is that in Mumbai the average life cycle is anyways depending on your surname. and if u ever happen to have a life threatening situation you will die for sure at the same spot stuck in traffic. it does not need to be sugar free.

after that is chaos!

Days go down the drain when one expects things to happen. For calls to come and smses to your frantic messages. It is wrong to hope for impossible things. Wrong to hope that today the day will be better than yesterday. That the universe will collaborate instead of the usual demolition job it does.

Days are human I suppose.

loser me?

I am not an ICSE / CBSE school product - i passed out of SSC state board
I am not a stanford / yale / leeds / oxford / MIT / Sing U grad. I passed out of Pune Univ with barely enough marks to make grade for a post graduation in management
Am not from IIM or IIT or BITS - my post grad batch had all those guys who did not make grade to even the most prestigious mba program in Pune.

To make matters worse I never worked for Tatas, Infy, Wipro, Google, Microsoft or even Reliance. My career has been with startups and small sweat shops that never made it any place.

I have failed several times - sometimes because I was raw, sometimes because my dad did not inherit anything. Some of the most frustrating times has been working for people who tried to clip wings to suit their purposes. The best boss I ever had is a gentleman called Neeraj Roy, the worst is your guess. I never have managed a decent ref check ever from anyone significant

What I can do best is think innovation. I can put disparate things together and come up with ideas that work. I understand technology, marketing, funding and some bit of human intelligence.

I work hard.

Maybe thats why I try so hard. Why I do not relax. Why I am hyper sensitive to barbs.

Loser me is not true because I have not lost, I have abdicated and have come back stronger.

Am human.

think different

social networking hogwash

First there was ryze in India, then came myspace, then linkedin, then the latest kid on the block - orkut. now there is facebook. Ergo one now jumps between these networks trying to keep in touch with friends who also happen to be on all the networks at the same time. It seems like every new kid gets people to jump onto the bandwagon and loses the same people to someone else. I guess retention would be in the levels of about 4% - 4% of all people who come in at the initial surge will remain while the others will move away.

This was seen earlier in email systems. Everyone who was anybody had an hotmail account, then lycos, them aol and so on. Now people have a gmail account. The difference is that this gmail login and password is the universal kep to everything that google provides.

Facebook is interesting since it is a platform that allows others to plug in their applications. Inane applications that help you 'poke' people. There is an economy that is being suggested around facebook, we have to wait for sometime for anyone to see what that means.

In the meanwhile does anyone know what bigadda and gang are doing?

uh oh!

should it be this, should it that? in the past month my head has had so many things going on that it is impossible for me to remember to write about everything.

hence uh oh!

How about that piece about a classmate coming across my name in a mag and googling me to find that I am his neighbour? One wondered if it was wise to leave so many digital trails for people to find me.

Or the thought about the way things never change back home in Pune? About the comfort of familiarity and therefore the slumber of sameness. Of death of thought and the impossibilities of growth. Of times of childhood and of growing up and marriage and then leaving it all. Of rebirth. Of winning, of falling in love again with the same people. Of missing the world who make me me and of not missing them in the expanse of fast furious six lane traffic of the western expressway?

And reading relentlessly about Google and Microsoft and Linus and Ford and IBM and starbucks - trying to make sense of what to do with this 8 month venture that has grown so fast. And realising that it does not have any rules, That we will have to invent and invest in the new.

Sometimes of even the joy of reading out to my 15 month old girl. Of her wide eyed wonder and the Aeroplane ( annna ) that flies over her head in the evening. Of the crows and the pigeons and cats and missy doggies that inhabit her world. Of my ambition of writing a book of stories for her and her age friends.

Time - there is never time to do anything. When was the last time that we sat down and talked about nothing, about eloping from the hustle and bustle.

Time is not the only thing we do not have?

ponderous ways of the empty world

Some 8 months ago, three friends started out on a journey. One fell by the way side and the other two somehow managed to stay above the waters. The above graph says it all aloud. We are somehow as big or thereabouts with so many of the media companies that we fight with. They are well funded and are stable while we smile and work our way around prima donnas, clients who care less, skeptics and such.

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the great harry potter con game

a few weeks ago there was harry potter mania all around. people were standing in all night queues and fighting over the right to be able to buy the book first. People were supposed to have fought over things like who dies in the last edition and so on.

Here in Mumbai wife paid 750 bucks in advance five months ago to book a copy. She wanted to go out and pick up the book at 6 in the morning - gave up the idea thinking that she would have to wait for hours. Later that day at 6 pm she was surprised to find out that there were no queues, no fights, nothing. The books were not sold out and copies were available easily. To add to the insult the advance booked copies were dished out by disinterested salesmen in pathetic plastic bags. She could have walked in the day the sixth book was released and got the copy just like that. What an anti climax?!!!

It seems some 50000 copies were booked in advance in Mumbai. Thats 37.5 lakh rupees that the bookstores got in advance for 5 months interest free. Wow!

The same will get repeated using the media and advertising for iphone and for the next book thats deemed a world best seller.

Its a great con game and am a part of it.

boxed in thinking

sometimes one cannot think straight. it comes from having looked at a situation with the same eyes a thousand times. it becomes impossible to see the contours, the landscape with objectivity. the mind plays games. i call it being boxed in. here is what i do to solve the problem - take a deep breath and get up and go for a walk around the office block. read comics, mumbai mirror, anything else to help forget the problem. look at people, their faces, at couples making faces at each other, at strays sniffing at leaves, at centipedes trying to get under the grass or stones. It helps.

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mindgames,
with myself,
forgetting,
a pawn i become,
as the game goes on!

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Worli Seaface

(image courtesy Prax)

Dirty waters of a dirty sea,
unburdened emotion
of a million lives.

Collided with me last evening
Am recovering, one rain drop at a time.

Cadell Junction Thoughts

Once in a while I walk around the Shivaji Park. Past mayoral bungalow, past veer savarkar smarak, past penkar's gym right upto the petrol pump and crossword and then turn left into the tree lined avenue and walk around the historical ground made famous by sundry politicians.

Could not resist the urge for a murky coffee and indulged for a full 45 minutes - alone on a corner table with the Outlook for company. Bliss.

Took off when I realised that 45 minutes of bliss means nothing unless there is something to look forward to. Maybe it is time to find something to look forward to other than work and a few stray passions.

The Cadell Cafe junction is inviting, Mahim bay at one end with it burdened waters and Dadar at the other side. Try standing there at the signal waiting for an enternity for the red to turn to green. Fortunes go on four wheels. Some the size of my bed room!

pics speak more than words

my alterego!!



What do these eyes say?

barista musings

There used to be a time when one could sit at a Barista coffee shop and think. Nowadays the people around do the thinking for you. Gone are the days when the coffee shop was inviting and one could sit down with a laptop and write presentations. Now couples verbally make out there, others sit watching, more others it down and gulp muck.

barista

barista, barista of the old times where are you? These days one encounters kids on hormones, tired sales folk, jaded VCs and bored housewives in your cosy orange corners. Where are the days of solitude when one could sit and read and mull and write a few pages of unbridled copy.

Heck and to imagine that Chatroom Blues and Coffee shop Tango was written in Baristas in Pune and Mumbai.

It is sad.

old memories, old socks and other such little bits from the back of the mind

When ever I have been asked to introduce myself I have stumbled and tripped - often leading to unintended jokes and awesome regrets. Let me try this once again.

was born in pune, people at various educational institutions tried to make me learned. have done sundry jobs, been a writer (yesyes published), columnist (only male columnist in a woman's mag), behind the counter salesman, footstool, old furniture, durbaan, software marketer, serial failure, travel writer, tea estate guide, criminal at large, devil incarnate and so on till the city of mumbai finally gave me a small makeover. (it actually happened on the first day in Mumbai when I stood on the Kurla flyover and wondered which was west)

found refuge where most scoundrels find work - advertising and then learned to unlearn and work with chota mota companies till I wrote the business plan for nautanki.tv - thats an online TV channel and not India's youtube.

have a little daughter and a patient wife and one fish. 1200 books, four volumes of handwritten poetry and the hope that someday soon I would be able to retire to the nearest hillside and grow vegetables.

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Found an old friend who worked in a documentary with me. She had married early and vanished from the face of earth. Now she comes as a surprise, a placement / recruitment professional. But so much has changed in the years in between. 1994 was a different era - the IMRC canteen had so much character and there was promise. She has changed - a mom of a ten year old and a wife for 14! and I have changed - 'battle scars that show up in your words'. We knew each other, now we do not. there is a decade and a half of not knowing - and we are strangers from the same period of life that was.

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Found an online forum too - The Rosary School forum - inhabited by the net junkies of this generation. Posted a request for the 88ers to show themselves and no responses so far. That 19 years have gone by and memories have faded is apparent. Wonder what Sandeep Oswal is doing now?

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For some reason the past twenty years have been on my mind for some days now. Maybe it is the time for spring cleaning. To dump the old socks and file the yellowed pages away for eternity.

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For some reason the rains this year are different :)

Fish Bowl Life

everything is magnified
when u live in a fish bowl

morning images

In Mumbai even the raindrops have mega dreams. They imagine that they hold a bucket full of water. And they clog everything. Three years in a row Mumbai has been flooded, this year it seems like an usual chore to be done with.



Coffee shops have an unusual shimmer to them. The windows mist up, the humid air forms a layer of dreams on the surface and like tear drops float downwards. Hope rests, in anticipation of a hot cup of what pretends to be coffee.



And sometime later empty plates tell no lies. Crumbs betray.



Week begins with the right attitude. Rains be damned.

Alvida and da hooker!

Love this song:

chupake se kahin, dheeme paanv se
jaane kis taraf, kis ghadi
aage badh gaye hamse raahon mein
par tum toh abhi the yahin
kuchh bhi na suna, kab ka tha gila
kaise keh diya alvida

jinake darmiya gujri thi abhi
kal tak yeh meri zindagi
dono baahon ko, thandi chaanv ko
hum bhi kar chale alvida
alvida, alvida, meri raahein alvida
meri saansein kehati hai, alvida
alvida, alvida, abb kehna aur kya
jab tune keh diya, alvida

sunle bekhabar, yuun aankhein pher kar aaj tu chali ja
dhundegi nazar humko hi magar har jagah
aisi raaton mein leke karvate, yaad hamein karna
aur phir haar kar kehna kyun magar, keh diya alvida alvida
koi puchhe toh zara, kya socha aur kaha alvida
alvida, alvida, abb kehna aur kya
jab tune keh diya, alvida

??? dil chale, phir bhi dil kahe
kaash mere sang aaj hote tum agar, hoti har dagar gulsita
tumse hai khafa, hum naaraaz hai, dil hai pareshaan
socha na suna tune kyun bhala keh diya alvida alvida
koi puchhe toh zara, kya socha aur kaha alvida
alvida, alvida, abb kehna aur kya
jab tune keh diya, alvida

kyun socha aur kahan alvida
dono baahon ko, thandi chaanv ko
hum bhi kar chale alvida

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From the movie Metro - life in the city.

It reminds me of those hard rock numbers of late 90s. Kind of November Rain in Hindi. (sorry guys thats a personal comment and not a statement)

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And now presenting da hooker. Found this in the back lanes of Mahim. The Hooker is a cycle with the carrier converted to function like ... well a hook. Hence the Hooker. Normally milk delivery guys use the contraption.

Somethings Fishy

stink and soul free fish

When was the last time I went out to buy fish? Mumbai has a long and pretty much attractive coastline (if you ignore the plastic and filth). Some citizens have forced the government to kick the vandals on the beaches out and have claimed the beach for themselves. Juhu for example. But then where are the Koli Fishermen and Women? Some of them are seen around Mahim and Bandra and sometimes selling fish in versova. But largely the fish buying community seems to have been seduced by the stink free plastic environment of the super shops. Fishes here are all dressed up and ready to go. Pretty pinks and lady fishes and pomfrets and surmai, with some handsome lobsters and prawns thrown in.

Stink and soul free!

CP Surendran

dug out from the shivaji park crossword the sole copy of CP Surendran's Portraits of the spaces we occupy. It is a patchy collections when compared to Canaries... but I enjoyed it over mucky coffee sitting in the midst of Himesh's ministrations to some suroor and a dozen young couples with things other than coffee on their minds. I must have been a strange sight.

Here is something that clicked in the head:

Key

No lock was safe from me.

I could blow through a keyhole
In nine different ways, pick tumblers
With my breath.

A lock with a hundred levers,
And all I needed was a blade of grass.

I took the secrets of my trade to the grave.
Such wisdom was best kept under lock and key.

But nothing prepared me for the worms.

They opened my crossed hands, opened my shest
Opened my eyes, bored through my brains
Kept me opening as I listened

To levers giving in

Tumblers falling

Doors opening, opening

A lock picked without end

The shaping of space.

(from Portraits of the spaces we occupy)

Amazing stuff.

big sky and the first rains

Want to witness the big sky? and the first bit of rains, drive down to Kharghar - the upcoming planned bit of Navi Mumbai. Loved the chai from a thela. Here are the pics of the first bit of rains on an afternoon.

Chai time in a plastic cup



Rain Rain on the windscreen!



Wild streams

the sad story of the soggy croissant

It never fails. You are hungry and you walk into the Brio, Barista, CafeCoffeeDay, Qwiky's and order the simplest of things one can want. A croissant. And what you get is a soggy, nuked, tasteless mass of something so wrong that you want to kill the guys who served it.

Where are those lovely cream rolls with a little jam at the end, yes the red jam that you so greedily licked off first, or the small cakes of Santosh Bakery in Shivaji Nagar Pune? And the brun that dad got home while it was still hot and mom served it with greasy omlettes?

Last week just before a meeting we wanted to eat, which is not usual considering my partner in crime is a confirmed foodie. We walked into the humid confines of Stadium Bakery at Churchgate and ordered chai and bread toast with butter. Nothing fancy here, there are two crisp toasted bread slices with a thin layer of butter and some little sprinkle of sugar. Dip it into the chai and experience nirvana.

Anyone knows where to get the perfect croissants? And excuse me, I do not want to go to the BBC @ Marriot!

I became

random thoughts

Take a few random thoughts,
scatter them on the floor,
then try some meanings,
derive them,
dash them.

Then set them in a box,
and kill them.

of boxes and babies

Do you remember that famous Mastercard ad where everything else has a price but the best part of life - babies playing with an empty carton is free? I used to have a smile whenever I saw that ad and always wondered if babies are like that. Some 372 days ago my first born was handed over to me. A little dusky baby girl with fingers so thin that I was worried for days that if by chance someone pressed to hard they would crumble. It was divine intervention, everyone from moms and fathers to strangers were all convinced that it was going to be a baby boy and lo and behold we had a little girl, and I was the only one who always thought it was gonna be a girl (ok, we are getting cliched). Coming back to babies and boxes. This afternoon our girl finally discovered the box! she has chucked everything else and has been trying out this while cardboard box, she tried to crawl into it and then over it and last seen was trying to use it as a drum.

musings of all kinds

Coffee Cup Musings



On particularly bad days I begin by spending an half hour with my cup of coffee at the Shivaji Park Barista. Amidst two or three pairs of misty eyed couples, one guy who is always there and sodden baristas who make industrial waste type coffee, I get my bearings and my sense of balance. I need it since I have either driven down or have been driven from the western suburbs of Kandivali West on a road that resembles bombed out Iraq ( smoke from burning carcasses of black sooty tar drums, one ancient road roller, MSRDC bunk type trenches and another broken down Indica.

Try the coffee, if it does not cheer you it will atleast give you a sense of how lucky you are to survive after consuming the sludge. Mahim bay muck looks quite similar. Must make a note to ask the barista guys where they source their coffee beans from.

Elephant / Eliphipant musings



Trucks, cars, buses, bikes and an elephant on Mahim causeway!!! An elephant? well I thought after one lady elephant died a cruel death on the Pune highway they managed to chase all the guys with these gentle animals out of Mumbai.

It is nice to see this one lumber on in the morning traffic. Cheery too, like the time I took my daughter to the Ayyappa temple to show her the Elephipant there, she was eight months old then and I doubt she understood why her father insisted on her touching the elephant. Atleast she decided to oblige and give me a blank look later. Elephants are nice I told her, they never forget and I know you will never forget this one. She did.

Afternoon sun musings



Tried looking at the sun today, it stung like never before. Then captured it on the phone camera, locking the poor sod in pixels. Maybe one day we will let him out.