Mumbai: Maximum Shitty.

Dream city : The oxymoron used for the worlds largest sewage system. I mean come on, how can anyone call a place where the majority lives in matchboxes, a dream city? And no, by that I do not refer to the matchbox like apartments in which majority of the human population of Mumbai s human populace lives in. I meant that the mice are the majority stakeholders of this city. It is no wonder then that filth seems to form an integral part of the social fabric here. Which is why when a broker( now apparently called Consultants – I cannot decide if Mckinzey employees should be sad or happy about that) calls a house earth-shatteringly good, you can expect a hellhole with an asbestos sheet for a roof, built sometime in the Mughal era and last cleaned before the British left India.
Let us not dwell on filth, let us turn instead to rain. For filth brings us invariably to rains. Or at least in Mumbai it does. Trudging through all the filth of Mumbai, conveniently dissolved in rainwater so that the absorption by your skin and clothes is facilitated, is the richest experience this city can boast of. What can be more fun than getting stuck in office, because you do not feel like stepping into diluted imported dog shit, and playing antakshari with your Boss? Also, just FYI- it rains horizontally here. So just crossing a road with an umbrella in hand meant that I was soaked from shoe sole to spectacle frames. And by now that has happened so many times that I fully expect to find fish living in my shoes. So when in the city in Monsoon season, be sure to look up the Met predictions before you leave for anywhere( And I mean anywhere. Even that panwalas place next door) If it says Heavy to very Heavy( Oh how I miss the “Habby” pronunciation of Calcutta(No, not really)), you are safe. All trace of moisture will be wiped out by the sun. But if the prediction says Sunny climate expected, it will rain enough to bring the trains of the city and hence the city itself to a standstill.
Everything in the nightmare realm called Mumbai is 5 minutes away. Stand somewhere near Colaba( the southern most tip of Mumbai) and ask how to far off Borivali(the northern most tip) is, the average friendly Mumabikar will tell you,” Borivali? Bas 5 minutes. Walking.”(You’ve got to get the tone right.) OK so I am exaggerating. But seriously, if someone in Mumbai tells you that you have to walk 5 minutes to get somewhere, TAKE A CAB. Otherwise you will walk for half an hour and spot the building where they asked you to make the first of 5 left and 3 right turns.
But then you convince yourself that this is only because the people here walk fast. Really fast. Infact they seem to scramble like ants. And essentially, Mumbai is a city of worker ants. For I doubt the travel leaves much time for anything except work. This shouldn’t really bother me since I don’t really have a life, but what troubles me is that now I don’t even have a chance to have a life.

Khadi Khichdi

I know that a blog has been due here for quite sometime. So here I am. I was wondering what could be a nice topic for this post and finally settled upon the wonderful topic of elections. To be frank, it has more masala than a vijay movie (he is a tam hero - both of which is a shame to Tamilnadu) so boredom shouldnt be a worry here.

People call it the greatest exercise of democracy. I really don't understand why we emphasize so much on the d-word and feel proud of it. In a sense it is not really an achievement to be a democracy. To me democracy or no democracy makes no difference when you do not know the value of it. You miss being a democracy only when you lose it and there is some helpless person at the top. There are people who feel that parties should not be in the control of a particular family. But if for years you have been a doormat and can't see yourself rising beyond it or willing to take up bigger responsibilities, it is fair that someone who has been a prince all his life and knows the pressures take over. Moreover the other members only seem too willing.

In a democracy where a huge chunk of the voters are aged between 18 and 36, this election ought to be eexciting. But are all of them going to vote? A sad no. There are quite a few reasons. The foremost one is that most of them are displaced. There are not living in the area of their voter registration. When people (read as software engineers) find it difficult to go to the doctor for their ailments, it's only fair enough that they skip elections for that important project. Another reason is lack of choice, which according to me is the most stupid reason for not voting. You are dying of thirst, you hate colas and you are offered a pepsi or a coke. Would you die of thirst rather? There is no such thing as the best choice. It is only the best available choice. We look up online dictionaries a million times to formulate an email for a client a dozen thousand miles away which probably begets only a cursory glance, but we would not even find out who are the choices available for our constituency.

Here again, I am not generalising and am definitely not saying that this apathy is intentional. It is just the way we have been conditioned. We have all those movies that wouldn't have run for a single day without showing the politicians in a bad light. And even if there was a good politician , he wouldn't survive a day without the hero. What are we making of a nation that is blessed with everything under the sun? Or the neighboring nation that has our brothers suffering from the lack of that we are blessed with in abundance? What are we doing of our children who ought to have a good chance at improving things? What do we teach them? Hate? Apathy? Greed?

We teach our children not to fight with their friends. Do we tell them to give a chance for their enemies? We teach our children that we should not beg but we praise them when they get things free on purchase. Apathy is not punished in our country, it is celebrated as a sign of intellect. Rarely do we realise that politics and government is a part of our being. It is a super employer that employs all of us.

Way beyond the Ordinar-E

So I promised to write more frequently. Did anyone really expect it?

This Oscar season brings a lot of debate and a lot of people going out of their way to hate Slumdog Millionaire (which I thought was a decent movie). There are a lot of people saying that it is not a true representation of our country, poverty porn and what not. Well everyone is entitled to their opinion. BUT where I lose my temper is when a Priyadarshan or a Shilpa Shetty or any other dumbass related to Bollywood says that this industry makes movies which represent India better. Hell no. They make movies about 2 % of the population (not even those are accurate) and thrust it down everyone’s throats and then come up with this shit? Hell No.

Anyway, coming to the point. I did not think Slumdog was the best movie this year. The best one was not even nominated in the Oscar best picture category. And no I am not talking about The Dark Knight. I am talking about Pixar’s WALL-E.

If I had to describe the movie in one word, I would say -Art. Sheer poetry in motion. Now don’t get me wrong. It is also immensely enjoyable. The movie has trademark animation/Pixar characters. Adorable. And this is not just the lead characters, but even the side ones (MO!!) What is wonderful about this movie is the way it establishes WALL-E and EVE in the first half an hour of the movie without using dialogues. And anyway most of the dialogues in the movie are “Eve?” and Wall-e?” with different expressions and stresses.

The story is your basic love story. Between robots , of course.What makes the movie so marvelous is how EVE and WALL-E are so different and yet so perfect for each other. Now most movies try to do this and fail miserably. The animation and graphics are of course brilliant. And how can I not mention that ethereal dance scene in the space. Ah, perfection!

I don’t care if it was preachy or if it didn’t seem real enough to some people. No major movie stars, minimal dialogue, a story about robots( I absolutely HATE sci-fi.) But I still found the movie stupendous. And if years of Bollywood haven’t killed the soul inside you/ haven’t turned you into a cynic, so will you.

PS: Oh and I also thought Kung –fu Panda was cute. One of Dreamwork’s best, in fact. But who could have guessed Pixar would outdo themselves.

28th Dec 2008 - 3rd Jan 2009

Pardon the late post; this has been quite a busy week for me (seriously.) And looking back at it, I just remember a daze. But I know I have to come up with some details, otherwise there will be snide, witless remarks about short term memory loss (I can’t understand why people liked Gajani. Memento was much better.) So here goes.

The thing I remember most about last week was digging into box loads of crap trying to find something that could be reused. Now things like ropes, pins etc. which can be useful were missing (how could anything be made easy for me?) Instead I found dried up paint, biscuit packets from last year (don’t worry, they were appropriately disposed off ) and something with fungus. After that I must have washed my hands enough number of times to give Lady Macbeth a serious run for her money, in an effort to get rid of the stench (I realize I might be coming off as an obsessive compulsive, but I assure you, I am more normal than I sound.)After that I decided that the only way to combat this mortal enemy was to have a bath. At 7 in the evening. Winter. And the hot water had run out.

Which reminds me, I brought in this New Year with an ice cream. As soon as I saw that quality walls cart in the mess that evening, I could feel my throat go scratchy. And then I just had to have it. Well all I can say is that you can expect me to complain about a cold next week.

Anyway, the work I did last week was for this event. So it has been a week full of nagging people well past midnight, making excessive use of smiley’s in chats to make myself sound nicer than I really am and other such interesting exercises. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I had the best deal either. When you go to invite people for an event, you expect them to say “Sure I’ll come” with a fake smile or show you the proverbial middle finger. What you don’t expect is that they will make you sit down and give you an elaborate list of their personal problems.

Come D-day and I found myself on the front desk. So I spent majority of my weekend answering inane questions and trying to look interested in answering these questions. So much so for my New Year resolution. Not cursing. Didn’t even survive a week. But fear not, all is not lost. Not yet anyway. The weekend ended on a bright note, with a trip to KFC. And however much I do crib, it really was fun.

And talking about New Year resolutions, one of my friends to me her New Year resolution was to be happy. Now I would at any given time admit that I am quite dense, but I am sure that a lot of people had difficulty in swallowing this one. So you just order yourself to be happy? But hey, when you really think about it, it’s not that difficult. Now I can almost see everyone’s eyes dance with joy at the mere thought of me running myself into circles, so I shall be brief on this. One can be happy to escape diarrhea ridden birds. One can be happy just to feel winter sunshine on ones skin every morning. There is also happiness in being so exhausted at the end of the day, that you don’t even remember when your head touched the pillow( or your laptop, when you fall asleep in front of it as the case may be.) I can wax eloquent about the so called ‘parabola of joy,’ but then the question remains, why are so many people unhappy? Now since my other new year resolution is to remain useless throughout the year, perhaps this question will be addressed by the more intelligent and expressive( or so she thinks) Flotsam.