The much awaited listicle about Mumbaicle.

1. It takes one ride in the local to figure out Mumbai's geography.

By the power of train routes on your side, all you need is an explorers hat. if you lose your way just look around, your fellow passengers will go out of the way to guide you.

2. Mumbai is a melting pot of uncanny aspirations.

Whether you want to become an Amitabh Bachan or an Ambani, a sorcerer or a saxophonist-Mumbai backs all your eccentricities and how.

3. when in doubt, turn towards the sea. 

Whether it's Marine drive or Worli-Sea face, nothing calms the nerves better than the soothing sea breeze.

4. A place where money is the greatest religion, leaves little room for communal hostility.

Agreed, Mumbai has witnessed an unholy amount of sectarian violence in the past but each time, it has only come out stronger and braver open Batman style

5. It is most chivalrous to the fairer sex.

I don't know too many cities where I don't have to think twice before hopping into a cab at 2 am by myself. This by means turns Mumbai into a chill pill.

6. If you're not from here, you soon realize, you'll never have enough to indulge and never too little to starve in Mumbai.

This balance keeps you on your toes, with an adequate dose of  vada Pav and Misal Pavs

7. it's got no space but it has a giant heart.

It takes one trip to the suburbs to reckon with the saying, "Ghar bada nahi hai toh kya hua dil toh bada hai".

8. As soon as you leave home, you enroll yourself for a crash course in cultural studies.

6 months in Mumbai, and I saw myself soaked in the spirit of  Holi, Good Friday, Eid, and Gudi Pava in equal measures.

9. Mumbai has a desert culture that's unparalleled.

Find me a Theobroma, Oven Fresh, Candies or an Indigo in any other city pretty please!

10. the expansive roads and cobbled architecture of Colaba transports you to another time and place in history.

For every India Gate, there is Gateway. Along with Elephanta caves, Nariman Point and Queen's necklace.

11, Mumbai houses this cuddly race of human species called the Parsis.

This goes out to all the Rustomji, Bomanji,  Pestonji, Sorabjis of the world- you can't have as much fun anywhere else as you have here.

12. Liberal should be Mumbai's sirname.

Mumbaikars are the most accepting lot of Indians I've met. The cosmopolitan temperament of the city instantly makes you feel one among the many. 

13. 'Work hard, party harder', was probably coined exclusively for Mumbai.

Whether you leave work at 6pm or 11pm, you would never complain of being bored or jobless. Hop into a club in Bandra and see how rewarding work-life can get for you.

14. And on days when it the crowds, the sheer sights and sounds, the lack of space saps all energy out of you, you realize Mumbai like a disciplined parent has prepared you for life.

because anywhere else you go would be a cakewalk here on. 

Written for Scoop Whoop http://www.scoopwhoop.com/inothernews/amazing-mumbai/?ref=homepage&type=mainmast

Bombhi Week 1

Left Delhi airport on 30th morning in Black shoes, grey socks and Pink(floyd) jacket. Haven't seen them ever since I got here. Adjusting to the sudden change of temperature was only slightly less morose than being sandwiched between an over chatty quintessential Bengali aunty (henceforth called as Charulata) and an obese Maharashtrian uncle who spent two hours of the two and a half hour flight making excel-sheet type charts on an annual diary. He might have been a bookie who knows. To his credit, he kept to himself (presumably because of his weight) and left me happily with my book until 20 minutes into the blue sky, Charulataji spilled a can of Diet coke on me.

The next 120 odd minutes convinced me to never befriend/date/ adopt/acceptatissuepaper from anything Bengali. If you're anywhere in the radius of one, make sure you rush to the nearest exit door, call up your emergency number, pretend that it's 2009, and wearing a face mask is not just fashionable in a religious way but a state declared mandate to protect oneself against the deadly avian flu virus. Ofcourse, none of these help when you're sitting an elbow's distance away to a blabbermouth I mean a Bong wearing a pink jacket and a damsel-in-distress expression.

Charulata, as it appeared to me later was praying for the Diet coke to spill so that she could kill her boredom by killing me with her CJM -LSR-TISS graduate daughter's leftist leaning and feminists world-view while i mastered the art of sleeping with eyes wide open.

So yeah, arrived in Bombay feeling like a white trash backpacker with flushed cheeks, non-stop dripping sweat, and an incurable need to discard pants for the rest of my stay. did some house viewings which turned out to be an utter disappointment. Lugging all the heavy bags to Jughead's house left me with a sore back and a sore arm to keep me away from the proverbial B'bay night life. 

the next few days were mostly consumed in house viewing trips. running like a headless chicken in the middle of honking cars and Shiv Sena posters. Finding a dream house is possibly as hard as finding a dream job and a suitable boy. Have my heart set on one house, the details of which shall only be revealed after the registration and paper work is completed to avoid jinxing it. Till I have a place of my own, my days in Bombay just feel like an extended vacation. Living out of the suitcase, living on roadside Dabelis best served with sewage stink.

Okay okay don't cringe and run away feeling disgusted for you- dear (imagined) readers are in for some exciting details of the new work place and my stay at the dearly jughead's place in the Bombhi part 2 coming up shortly.

write more. eat less

Back after xyz months with an overwhelming sense of wordlessness. like a rust infested brain. I am trying my best to be able to write coherently, bear me dear imagined readers. Not that I have anything interesting to offer. the highlight of my sabbatical (from the blog):

madmen marathons. finally all geared up to heartily welcome season 6 which i have promised to start only once the entire season is out in order to avoid a deflection mid-way

Work has been devilish in the past. worked our ass off for toshiba. We better get it for i am in no mood to see enter a gloomy office which is as it is full of incompetent dick-suckers

sheero is not forging a fake battle against herself and me on the pretext of pseudo-pregnancy or judo-pregnancy as pronounced by the vet.

I think i have a new crush in the gym. keep guessing. im not divulging in any details till i rule out the possibilities of it turning into something meaningful.

falooda has been my only point of social contact apart form pal singh. All hail to self-forced incubation.

self is blonde

I'm ageing in multiples of 5 each year physically while mentally i haven't grown a day wiser. I don't know who to blame, so as you usual all fingers point towards you Ms. self. 

if growing up is all about thinking clear and being emotionally balanced I say it with humongous shame, that i haven't. In my head, I am always STRUGGLING to nail that right expression, to have clarity about things i pursue or half heartedly get interested in. To make rational decisions that wouldn't get me into the regret mode. to quit being a douchy slacker. to stop using douchy in my essays.

You get the drift right, the list is endless.

today is a classic example. I was suppose to present a script, my team and I believed in during a meeting with toughnuts of the agency. I was thrilled and ecstatic about getting to relish the 90 minute group discussion boardroom environment. Heck, after 20 minutes of meeting, I experienced a quick transformation of my hey-i-have-arrived-watch-out-for-me-world look to oh-lord-save-me- form being a joke of the meeting face.

i was rehearsing the script in my head minutes before my 30 second chance to make a statement. I was exploding with the feeling of nervousness and inferiority complex. it doesn't even matter how i deleievered the script, on hindsight you know. it's that raucous feeling of a grip on your guts at 24, after having gone through this feeling repetedly in the course of my life.

so here i am a perennial b-grade struggler talking to the blog till i can muster the courage to meet real people in the eye and say aloud what i really to wish to on occassions like this.

till then harr harr slacker, you have other losers to attend to.

Self shan't

Here I am back to how i was when I last updated this blog.
resigned, defeated and SINGLE
with a big realization that I need to write more than ever, to remind myself of things I am not meant for (insert relationship here)
breaking hearts comes naturally to me. It's consequences doesn't.

So here's a list of reasons why I must not commit the big mistake of leading someone one only to leave him troubled and helpless.
SELF SHAN'T
1. self gets attracted easily but self can't deal with the things that ensue after that.
2. self is too selfish to have the ability to give herself to someone completely. Mostly its a short term attachment which self mistakes for "the one"
3.self just ends up using people like fancy gizmos and once she's made most of it, she just abandons them
4. self should go for long distance dalliances if at all to avoid getting physically intimate with someone and then abandoning him
5. self should limit her thrills and kicks to inanimate things rahter than investing it with boys with puppy eyes and puppy intentions
6. self should be anally firm while explaining self's relationship handicappedness to the people she's even remotely interested in
7. self doesn't even like going physical all the way even if in the beginning it sounds appealing
8. self should have a better self control before leading on innocent victims she lures
9. self is too full of herself to invest in real emotions and feelings with people
10. self likes good-looking people to prolong the sparks. self's righteous mind that says "intelligence/humour is everything" can go fuck itself in the arse.
11. Self is scared of commitments because self is not a planner. Self won't plan your birthday party, or a trip with you next month forget about planning marriage and kids.

enough for now. time for self to memorise this skindeep and go resign to the awesomely unhappy world of singledom.

when rain steals your thunder

It rained today. Delhi is cold again. Only less cold than me. there's a reason for Delhi being cold unlike me. I guess I am just desperately searching for poetry in these words to compensate my inability to feel. Sad isn't it? does it even count as a feeling. In comparison to literary stalwarts who wrote about wars, droughts and poverty. Fighting the system, waging a war against norms and traditions. Driven by the need to change the system.
Me?
I am just infested with the Germanic instinct to kill everybody.

So here's what I wrote last night in another failed attempt to scavenge poetry out of the beagle bourgeois life and times of mine

The sound of the sky 
echoes the sound of my head
A thunderstruck moment of
purposelessness.
impaled by the need to break
the norms of well being
As i stand at the bend of the road
I'm daunted by the miles-
that lie ahead of me
To reach a place
where I don't wish to leave
To gather a momentum
that doesnt turn into inertia
because like a fallen raindrop
I lie homeless, in the handcuffs
of sanity. 

time travel 2012

Tuesday, January 1st 2013

Green big room

Another year passed by. rather quickly, as it appears to be. 

Being a reluctant traveler of the past, these recollections have happened with much difficulty. so, bear with me for disjointed observations that ensue in this post

January 2012: Met Laura, my German roomate and soon to become adult-talk friend. responsible for my kickass misadventures-sexual and otherwise. little did i know that living with her would become an enjoyable habit. there was a sense of unspoken familiarity between the two of us. without romanticizing further, she was a strong reason to believe that friendships can grow stronger even among roommates provided the two parties are on the same scale of  maturity and kink. :P

i also liked how she became my entry to expat circle and the  helped me realised that i feel hand in glove, among the white-skinned. 

March 2012

Breaking up with Bart became a driving force to pick up guitar. The urge was reported second time. fortunately it materilaised into something real this time. fingers hurt almost to the point of bleeding. Mastered basic chords. Em is still a favourite. Accolades go to P.A for putting up endlessly with my impatience. But like all things, the guitar disappeared in the the obscure lands of dust in the months to come.

May 2012

my tryst with one of the most revered ambitions came to end. JNU will always be a note-worthy chapter in biography of the self. I might not be tailor made for academics, but I discovered a strong desire to teach. to bequeath all that is valuable to me. to touch lives not in a philanthropic/NGOish way but to give back an inch of one's evolved brain to the humanity as a rightful reimbursement to the source of creation.  Even though this desire has been currently boxed into a shelf but someday, a wish wrapped in those boxes will hopefully see the light of the day.

Having already established a knack for instantly relating to the expat breed, the next big thing to happen was Falooda. how do i describe him. A jester, a ninja, a warlord of witchcraft. I was instantly taken into his world of fantasy. Nothing he said  ever made sense, but it made the unbearable weight of existence a little lighter, and a little too joyful. On a hind sight, he was a Neil Gaiman book that ended rather abruptly. I still can't  put fingers on what caused him to vanish. more to come on that

August 2012

The much awaited rendezvous with Grouchy-my grouchier second half. growing thinner and wiser by each passing day. Manipal-Gokarna-Goa was the perfect holiday I could've asked for. what should i say about Gokarna. It was an island straight from the pages of National Geographic magazine. Untamed rains, pounding on the flesh, releasing the baggage of the past. words can't do justice to the quiet trance of that place. the traditional duo of ours, saw a small participation of Falooda. And it didn't feel out of place at all. he was welcomed effortlessly. You know what? This part of the post is causing me the greatest trouble. recalling this time feels like trying hard to recall the fragrance of a much loved perfume. You know, you were addicted to it, and it made you smell in a fabulous way. A part of you still wants to smell that way, but sadly, the perfume is over and it isn't to be found again. all you have is a funny lingering sensation of what that perfume smelled like.

the spell of the dream holiday was quickly broken by the ruggedness of employability. The second stint in advertising happened in DDB Mudra. At first, it was rigorous and greatly exhausting and gave an adrenaline rush of a tenuous sport. But it soon faded into dejection, dispassion and listlessness of having to deal with a mediocre team and an acerbic boss. flu-face should be donated to world's best psychiatry ward as a case study in neurosis. i should shut up, because he's been such an intensively discussed subject of my blog. if i manage to become a novelist some day, I'll thank him in my head with equal passion of having cussed him in my writing. 

September 2012

i saw myself going on a downhill ride with Falooda. he was completely oblivious to it all. it was also the time when my hormones were going cuckoo from I-pills et all. i reported a major delay in chummies and grew freakish and paranoid about getting knocked up. all i remember was feeling utterly stupid and juvenile and helpless. i developed a strange subconscious aversion for sex. i began looking for reasons to break up with Falooda but i guess i couldn't summon the courage to do it then.

October 2012

Falooda had  taken a back seat by now. I was working towards a day free of work humiliation. i wasn't succeeding very much but I was religiously at it. Math announced his visit it to Delhi unexpectedly sometime mid october. the spirits went up delinquently. words rushed like tides on a rough sea. how do i put that night of walking in JNU? embalming, healing, therapeutic. i thought i had found myself an anchor that night. little did i know that, he was a storm in disguise. upturning my world, upturning my feelings for the mankind, unleashing a harsh journey of self-betterment. who would've thought an alcholic banter could evoke something so strikingly profoud.. real wars, he spoke breathing heavily, real wars are not fought with weopans and canons. real wars are waged in the hearts of all men against their very own nature..

I am still unaware of what he meant by those words, or where is he headed to in life. but when in doubt, i look upto him for strength of an unspeakable kind. 

November 2012

Sulking had become a habit at work by this time. flu-face was doing an excellent job of making me lose my nerves. i even remember succumbing to hormones one day and tearing up at work. Yuck, yuckety yuck. until, one fine day in a strange twist of events Boss called up and proposed the Dentsu offer. After much brain-storming accepting it seemed to be the right thing to do. I'm unsure if i can find a brilliantly talented writer like flu-face in future but i was sure i wasn't going anywhere with wilted spirits in Mudra either. The start of Dentsu kickstarted this blog, the rest is history as they say in famous speeches.

Family from U.S dropped by. Sandy storm and Dexter aged 3 and 7 (respectively) were a much needed delight from all the grown up madness at work. all i remember is being 2 kg lighter and infinitely heartier after they left.

End of November saw the end of a now dormant fling with Falooda. Breaking it to him was the hardest part of the story. coping with it was easy in comparison. doomed to singledom, invested all the time in watching Californication. followed by torrid fantasies of David Duchovony.

December 2012
I can safely vouch Dentsu to be the nicest agency i have worked with so far. ofcourse, i have the tendency to hastily judge things and situations and print a rosy picture in my head and ofcourse i overestimate the value of things i begin to like. having said that, Advertising i shall continue to embrace optimism for as long as i can and laugh at your jokes until i cry. okay, i just got carried away with that.
before i wrap up this bittersweet post of mine. i must mention the new people (Gaazar, the dog-loving kebab manufacturing poet, Jignes, the bong detesting, sardarni in my office and her gang) i met recently and pledge to stick around with them just like the activities i embarked on but never went on finishing.

Here's to sticking around and seeing you at the end of 2013-wiser, happier and greyer.