Wedding Crashers

September 19th/20th, 2010

 Or : How Far Would You Go For a Free Lunch.

Plan B consisted chiefly just of finding a caterer and an alternative patch of beach to host the dinner gig at, but you have to understand we grew up coddled with Officers' Mess ka Khana. We like our chicken curried sweet and our spices mild and though every once in a while we might let go of our concerns for our tums and partake of the odd fiery red kokani sungtachi chatni, we steer clear of a goemkar style balchao like a cat avoids water. So if it was going to be Goan food at the wedding, we needed proof. Preferably of the pudding kind.

In a normal world, a caterer would've arranged the tasting at his kitchen or an office or some such inconsequential place. But normal is a subjective term. Our caterer, the effusive Mr Pinto, suggested we attend a silver wedding anniversary he was catering for that evening.

Repeated affirmations from yours truly that the location of Club Harmonia (Harmonica? Harmony? Harmonium?), where the wedding was to take place, had been noticed and duly noted the last time we’d passed it by on our now commonplace trips to Margao were met with skepticism by the flesh and blood. Perhaps the fact that I called it a different name each time I spoke of it didn't inspire a great deal of trust.

So there we were, standing outside Club H, half an hour before time, wearing the most ridiculous clothes one could ever expect to pass off at a wedding. Phonecalls to the caterer proved useless and I proposed we walk around to while time away. But in a neighbourhood where everyone except for our late night wedding revelers seemed to be tucked safely in bed at the stroke of nine thirty, this was easier said than done. I’m not sure if it was owing to it being the second of October or to the wedding party being related to the Goan Mafia, but there were black clad security guards as far as the eye could see. It took us a whole of ten minutes of skulking down the dank alleyways surrounding Club H to convince us that for all we knew, Mr P, our caterer, might just be conducive to us making our grand entrance in the middle of the wedding speech.

So in we sallied, to what fate held in store for us. Or, if I were to stick to the truth, in sallied papa, while mum and I decided to wait in the wings and let him recce the place and find us the elusive mister Pinto.
He returned in about ten minutes and we did the whole sallying bit again, buoyant this time, knowing that we must now have been invited in.

So we reach the empty dance floor, where two mildly suspicious singers peer at our salwar kameez clad, flip-flop shod selves from behind their microphones. Turns out papa hadn’t found the caterer at all. He had just thought we were probably getting bored standing outdoors.

The mortification! If ever I've wished for the earth to have opened up and swallowed me whole, the time spent huddled in the middle of the dance floor while the wedding party waded in is a sure qualifier.

That was when we finally saw the waiters! We leapt almost in unison and pounced upon the first man with a tray headed in our direction. I don’t think we could actually have said ‘Take us to your leader’, but for the world of me, that’s what I remember saying to him word for word.

And thus, we made our mangled way to the man who is to cater the food for our wedding.

Plan A

5th September 2010

Now a wedding by the pristine sands is all well and good. But when the said pristine sands are 112 kilometres away from the closest set of parents and only 1/8th of the planning party of 8 understands the local language, things can lean a bit to the hairy side.

So in flew the in-laws-to-be and the cousin in-laws-to-be. The flesh and blood were meeting them only for the second time. There was much to discuss and no clear sign of where to begin. Everything was on the table: guest lists, wedding ceremonies, which side had covered what expenses in weddings past.

We decided to begin at the basics. Wedding = people = food. And what better people to provide the food than the kindhearted hoteliers who seemed to be bending over backwards to help with the wedding!

So sunday morning found us all at The Hotel sipping the inexhaustible proffered glasses of freshly squeezed orange/guava/watermelon/whatelsehaveyougot juice in a porch cooled by a dozen men on their knees fanning us with silken hand fans while we nibbled on dainty pieces of sublimate-on-tongue.
Okay so I'm making up the kneeling men, but you get my point.

We girded up our creative loins, and with the help of the helpful Chef (who insisted on keeping his hat on the whole three hours) we came up with a menu which in our smug eyes was as tasteful in its restraint as it was lavish in its appeal. Chef nodded approvingly from under his sage toque blanche, which by now we knew meant he was a man of taste and stature. A good 12 extra inches of stature.

We were happy. Chef was happy. The manager looked suspiciously happy too. We really should’ve got it then.

In went the manager and while we were barely half way through patting each other on the back, back he sprang with the all important numbers. Our ‘much restrained’ menu amounted to the steeper side of a four-figure bill per person per meal. Water and drinks would be extra, as he was sure we understood.

The freshly squeezed orange juice in my hand didn’t taste quite as nice anymore. How could a meal for a person cost more than a room for two at the same place! It looked like our hotel was all set to fleece us for main course and serve up our innards for dessert.

We needed an urgent plan B.

Navvari and Flip-flops

S and I met at a lunch table in the doctors’ canteen. Unlike in all the brownpaper covered Mills and Boons I might or might not have read hiding under the covers as a teenager, we didn’t fall in love at first sight. Nor at the second or third, or the twentieth, if truth be told. We did fall in love though, and it is glorious. We even did the whole long distance thing for way longer than anyone in their right mind would admit to, and live to tell the tale.

The journey so far has been quite something, but it's small potatoes compared to what we're about to do next: Live with each other!

But before all that comes the wedding! I hope to blog about all the plans, the insanity and the excitement leading up to it.

Oh, what a life! We cannot wait
to be in arctic land
where we'll be masters of our fate
and lead a life that's grand!

So, as Calvin would say, Yukon ho!

What's in a name

"She wont be your family anymore. She'll be Mrs K.
Like Gingie, she has her own family, she's one of the B's now."

I imagine he might've wanted to say Not Just your family.
But the point is that he didnt.
A tight ball of pain rose up in my throat. I didnt know where to look or what to say.
Neha being Neha, said what I was thinking out loud for me :
No

New Shoes

When I was seven or eight, we read this poem at school, which to this day describes perfectly the bright eyed, lighthearted feeling I get when I'm in a shoe shop.

Choosing Shoes
by Frida Wolfe

New shoes, new shoes,
Red and pink and blue shoes.

Tell me, what would you choose,

If they'd let us buy?

Buckle shoes, bow shoes,
Pretty pointy-toe shoes,

Strappy, cappy low shoes;

Let's have some to try.

Bright shoes, white shoes,
Dandy-dance-by-night shoes,

Perhaps-a-little-tight shoes,

Like some? So would I.

BUT
Flat shoes, fat shoes,
Stump-along-like-that shoes,
Wipe-them-on-the-mat shoes,
That's the sort they'll buy.

I've always been a closet shoe fetishist and I daresay I imagined I had a good grip over (and atleast a couple pairs of ) whichever footwear fad was currently hitting the streets.

2004, for example, saw everyone in Pune from the girl/guy next door to the toffee-nosed crowd sporting Osho chappals. Which progressed to delicate thong slippers over the course of the year.
2005 was the year of pointy toed stiletto, spilling over into a good part of the next year.
2006 saw this trend morph to accommodate kitten heels, and you could almost hear a collective sigh of relief from thousands of tortured feet. 
Summer 2007 fleetingly brought out the latent Govinda in people and everywhere the eye could see there were feet shod in a shade of yellow blinding enough to justify wearing sunglasses indoors. That, thankfully, didnt last very long, as utterly adorable ballet flats soon took over and obviously enough,  had the longest reign of any of the shoe fads.
Late 2008 was plain weird, with all the hoopla about 'toe cleavage'. It all worked out for the best though, as the gorgeousness that was peep toes made an indiscriminate appearance on stilettos, kitten heels, wedges, flats and what have you.
Androgynous gladiator sandals and ankle cuffs were all the rage in 2009.

So far so good.

Then came 2010, which saw yours truly working for what can only be described as slave-drivers. The fourteen hours spent running from one patient to another every day made me glad my piggies were safely ensconced in the most Flat shoes, fat shoes, Stump-along-like-that shoes that I could lay my hands on.

After the six months of rigorous imprisonment at Jaslok, I'm out again trying to recover what scraps of social life I can lay claim to. And lo and behold! all I see all around me is atrocious beachwear paired with the most formal of clothes.
No-holds-barred rubber flipflops.
Gummy (admittedly cute) jelly rain shoes making their way well into winter.
And what veritably looks like a very slightly modified version of bathroom slippers. All with scarlet nail enamel piled on as if it had magical powers of undoing this crime against cordwainers.
Have I been away too long? 
What is going on here?

Back in black

Aaand we're back!

To say the past year has been eventful would be the understatement to end all understatements. It started with something of a bang, what with the end of internship, college and life as we know it. Then came six months of Living like a Hermit, studying for the USMLE Step 1; the monotony of which was scarcely disturbed by having been conferred my license to practice. ( oh joy. I can no longer kill and get away with it. )
Followed in order of occurrence by :
The Day of reckoning.
The cruel and unbearable three week wait for the results from said day.
The results!!! 254/99 on Step 1! and a serious case of the Smuggs (also referred to as : Smug-fever/the Gloats/gasconadeitis).

Realising that one need not cook le poulet just because one owns les épices.

Followed by six grueling months spent learning how to be a doctor and to not flail ones arms about in panic each time a patient arrests.

Which brings us to today. And to what we plan on doing with self. Lots of news to follow, because I have such a swirl of thoughts in my head, which I must share and try and make sense of in the process.

First things first though, must clean up all spam comments about gambling, interest-free loans, investing from home and gambling from the blog. Does anyone see a pattern here?

I was browsing through blogs and I found that this person I know had copied something I'd written on theirs.
They've totally ruined its form and humor. and copied without
understanding the flow. and substituted gender without realising how
jokes change according to it. no subtlety. no form. no understanding.
ohh i feel what a painter must feel when someone makes an horrid reproduction of their work. and the fact that they've copied it, too.
i'm pissed. so pissed. ooooh i'm pissed.

Falling in line with changing times and all

Watch this space for the why and the wherefore of the rather delayed move to the tarty new Blogger layout thingummybob

How I have felt that thing that's called 'to part',
and feel it still: a dark, invincible
cruel something by which what was joined so well
is once more shown, held out, and torn apart.

In what defenceless gaze at that I've stood,
which, as it, calling to me, let me go,
stayed there, as though it were all womanhood,
yet small and white and nothing more than, oh,

a waving, now already unrelated
to me, a slight, continuing wave, - scarce now
explainable: perhaps a plum-tree bough
some perching cuckoo's hastily vacated.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Parting

Sassoon, on a lazy sunday afternoon

Saturday, actually.


view album

And that is how it all began

Gaza

The tin roofs make it look like diamond dust from above. That and the density of population, in stark contrast to that just across the armistice line.

W.O.M.A.N.

GenderAnalyser determines there is a 99% chance that my blog is being written by a man!

(And here I thought it was too heavy on the pink..)

Maybe I need to sneak in poetry, kitchen-escapades and shoes more.
Plays in a bit to gender stereotypes, doesn't it. But what the heck, till the time it's in the spirit of good fun.
The other blog says there's a 66% chance I'm woman. Spot the differences, anyone?

Colds? nettles? bph?

My nose resembles a big shiny copper tap and I daresay, going by the pile of balled up tissues strategically placed within a tight ten inch radius of the tiny pretense of a wastebasket next to my table (yet not quite daring to venture inside the basket), my aim is a bit off today.

Oh for a tablet of cetirizine!
What wouldn’t I give just to roll it in my mouth.. To feel the molecules disperse and be absorbed and course through my bloodstream till they race to where I desperately need them and restore some semblance of sanity to the throbbing disarray inside my head..
Wait a bit.. lets not branch off on crack here..
Coming back to my glorious sneezes which would for once and all silence all those who shake their heads reprovingly and tell me that I sneeze like a lady and that that shall be the death of me (phffft! to you, Anupam); after having combed all medicine cabinets and dresser tops and peered behind shelves in search of a tablet in vain, I decided that there might be solace to be had in looking at their brand names on the internet (don’t even ask. I make no claims to sanity right now) and maybe I could find some foods with antihistaminergic properties. (Steam did provide some relief, but it was rather short lived and it felt much worse after)

I came across stinging nettles as a promising candidate antihistaminergic. The glaring ‘alternative medicine’ tag put me off a bit, but the old limerick about nettles (which seemed to point at it being histaminergic) from the storybook mum would read out to us had me hooked.
A few more searches, and this is what I came across.

Not what I came here looking for, but I am going to bed amused by the thought of how our surgery Profs would react if we were to quote these clinical trials at a viva:

Popa, G., et al. “Efficacy of a combined Sabal-urtica preparation in the symptomatic treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia. Results of a placebo-controlled double-blind study.” MMW Fortschr. Med. 2005 Oct; 147 Suppl 3:103-8.
Lopatkin, N., et al. “Long-term efficacy and safety of a combination of sabal and urtica extract for lower urinary tract symptoms--a placebo-controlled, double-blind, multicenter trial.” World J. Urol. 2005 Jun; 23(2): 139-46.
Durak I, et al. “Aqueous extract of Urtica dioica makes significant inhibition on adenosine deaminase activity in prostate tissue from patients with prostate cancer.” Cancer Biol. Ther. 2004; 3(9): 855-7.
Sokeland, J. “Combined sabal and urtica extract compared with finasteride in men with benign prostatic hyperplasia: analysis of prostate volume and therapeutic outcome.” B. J. U. Int. 2000; 86(4): 439-42

nettles as a cure for benign prostatic hypertrophy.. I knew I'd get to wear my peace necklace and earth-mother smock someday.

Maddison Gabriel - Mama's little girl

All hands in the air for Maddison Gabriel! The Australian model who is the new "face" of the Gold Coast Fashion Week. And who turned thirteen the 16th of last month.

Modeling, apparently, is all she’s wanted to do since she was six. And she managed to get her mother to agree! Now that’s heartening. Makes me wonder if my mum would’ve let me be an elephant trainer at the circus if I had persisted with the demand till I was the green old age of 12. Nanu could’ve been a monkey like she always wanted to. One must keep in mind though that strutting your stuff (?) on the runway must pay a lot more than what monkeys or elephant trainers or monkeys that train elephants earn (maybe not that last one. I bet they’d pay an elephant training monkey a lot more.. hmmm…).

“I believe that I can fit into women’s clothes. I can model women’s clothes, so I should be able to do it,” says Madison. Of course she can fit into women’s clothes; they’re all made so the only people who can wear them without being in grade III malnutrition are flat chested prepubescent 12 year olds with no butt.

Every little girl loves to parade around in new clothes and have people tell her how pretty she looks, so it shouldn’t come as a life altering surprise when one declares that she wants to be a model. But modeling isn’t about grace or poise (you are confusing it with ballet), it is about sexuality, plain and simple. There is nothing innocent or alright about putting a twelve year old in clothes meant for women and making her walk down a ramp looking nonchalant and flipping her hair ‘just so’. It is deeply disturbing that a mother would allow her child to be viewed as a sexual object instead of protecting her; and try to justify it too: “She says she wants to be a model”. Mummy dearest is just helping her daughter fulfill her dreams. And hopefully taking spelling lessons while she’s painting her daughter’s blindingly bright future for her (MaDDison? What was she thinking).

Little Maddison can legally do what her heart desires; unlike in the European Union where models under 16 have been banned from the runways, Australia has no laws preventing young teens from modeling and Maddison’s mother has demanded an apology from the Australian prime minister John Howard for having expressed his distaste about the matter. One wonders if this wouldn’t rightly come under the territory of child labour laws though.

Will it affect her overall growth as a person, assuming she can deal with the pressures of a real job and that she is blessed with enough brains to not lag behind at geography and PE? (Let’s not be so grandiose as to talk about math.) Brooke Shields survived, as did Kate Moss and as we all know they are both Very well adjusted adults, if you leave out the trips to the shrink, the clinical depression and the coke.

Will she be able to stand the pressures of the job? For starters she’ll surely have to resort to anorexia or at least to bulimia once puberty hits. And that nose! That had better be under the scalpel soon if she plans on getting any real work. Her chin looks something awful at the moment, but let’s give her the benefit of doubt, after all, can you really see her chin under all that puppy fat? One wonders what the judges at the Gold Coast fashion week were thinking. I’m going to go with ‘free publicity’, on a wild guess.

Oh, and, Love the hair!

' See, we don’t love like flowers,
with only one season behind us;
when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms. O girl,
it's like this: inside us we have loved
not just some one to come, but a fermenting tribe ; not just one
child, but fathers, cradled inside us like ruins
of mountains, the dry riverbeds
of those who were mothers, yes, and all that
soundless landscape under its clouded
or clear destiny - girl, all this came before you.'


Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino elegies, the third elegy.

The nanny named Fran!

Let me state at the outset that I’ve been watching television at nine in the morning only because clinics don’t begin till ten. really.

If you are home (and awake) at nine a.m. on a weekday by some weird turn of events, watch the 1990s sitcom The Nanny currently airing on Hallmark and you would see.. Janice (recall that one possibly just woke up at five to nine.)
The similarity between the lead character, played by the inimitable Fran Drescher, and Janice from Friends is way too obvious to miss. Granted , Fran Fine’s character is sweet, funny and endearing while Chandler's on again off again girlfriend Janice Litman Goralnik (née Hosenstein) is mostly plain insufferable,

but as far as appearances go the likeness is undeniable, be it the very.. individual dressing sense, the hair hitched up in a late fifties-ish bouffant or the trademark nasal voice. (and that they're both jewish.)
I wouldn’t call it a cut&paste job, but it is very much possible for Janice’s character to have been inspired from ‘the nanny named Fran’. The Nanny was originally broadcast from 1993 to 1999 on CBS while Maggie Wheeler first appeared as Janice on the fifth episode of season one of Friends (The One with the East German Laundry Detergent) which aired in 1994 on CBS. And one of the first few names that shows up in the credits to The Nanny is that of associate producer Janice Minsberg.
Coincidence? Just another one of those conspiracy theories?
Oh who knows.
I’ve been watching way too much television.

"Respect our hard work for uploading the media.
Do not use this media for your own site.
If you do, and we find out about it, we will take measurements."
- dbz-media.nl

Be a sweetheart and fry my perisylvian cortex with a blowtorch while you're at it, wontcha?

New template!! whee!

watch this space for a mind numbingly detailed account of the making of the new template. :D

update, oct 2007
google went behind my back and tarted up all the blog design tools right after i spent ages pouring over html and css and putting up the template. which means there are many simple things like rss feeds and new post pages which one can't get to easily. which sucks. shall fix it all once the univs are over. The pictures below were the chief contenders for the banner graphic. Jennifer Apple's brilliant photoshop tutorials were a great help. And in line with my fascination with frogs, do check out Ryo Takagi's Frog meets Dog art print.

rest in peace , Joe Barbera.

Schrödinger's cat

I was sitting around wondering whether sending someone a text msg at three in the night would constitute apalling egregiousness. And, well, i came to the conclusion that the situation is sorta like that of schrödinger's cat. I can't really be booked for being apallingly evil unless my msg does wake the person up. Right..?
Schrödinger's cat is not dead.
the 'not' in that line has blink tags. which IE no longer supports. woe is me.. :(

anyhow, do read the side-splittingly funny 'The story of Schroedinger's cat (an epic poem)' by Cecil Adams from The Straight Dope. It made my night.
How sad Is my life.. (to the sound of acerbic laughter)

n.b. : 'I don't hold with cruelty to cats.'

43

"I have a dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today."

Martin Luther King, Jr.,
August 28th, 1963,
On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., addressing more than 200,000 people attending the March on Washington.
In the year after the March on Washington, the American civil rights movement achieved two of its greatest successes: the ratification of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished the poll tax which was a barrier to poor African American voters; and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment and education and racial segregation in public facilities.

I'm jus saying..

Ask Onnie

Why is it that so many of us end up with a person who is completely wrong for us? Let’s dissect the problem scientifically. The guy seemed amazing enough when you started out, right? So what is it that now makes you want to sock him in the eye whenever he is within a 5 kilometer radius?

Oh I know, he was just sooo cute back when! His elbows would stick out at angles from the rest of him, his hair was always endearingly mussed up and he would whistle while he worked.
And now he is just so irritating! He whistles while he works, his elbows stick out at angles from the rest of him and his hair is always mussed up. Yetch!

A rational reason for this could be that we rush in headlong without grokking the situation. No, it’s not an old wives’ tale. Just imagine, you are all worked up and your sympathetic nervous system is on overdrive. Your pupils are perpetually dilated and you look at the world as if through a soft focus lens, with all the jagged edges blurred out. All capacity for rational thought goes right out the window. Is it any wonder then that the person you have a crush on seems most enchanting and perfectly perfect?

But how long can this precarious phase last?
A couple of months down the lane the endorphin induced high peters off and all the kinks you found so endearing in the person can now be seen for what they truly are. Six months and they begin to grate on your nerves. Throw in a couple of weeks and you are now wondering what in heaven’s name were you thinking!

A crush usually runs its course over four months (to a maximum of one year if you are the really soppy sort. Anything longer than that and you might want to consider making an appointment with your family psychiatrist to discuss obsessive compulsive disorder). This process of course, takes half the time if you strike up a relationship with the object of your infatuation. For the simple reason that that would involve being bright eyed about slave labour.
(unless you are one of the rare species that lend the girl their jacket, rate B&B and the OC over football; remember anniversaries and favorite ice cream flavors and buy thoughtful yet utterly useless presents out of habit) (You are?! Erm... are you straight? May I have your phone number?).

Now, this dude/dame you have a crush on could be a genuine A1 sweetheart with a heart of gold, an infinite improbability drive and the works, but you can’t really rule out the possibility of their being cold, calculating slave drivers who can’t tell people from disposable diapers.(you are incapable of rational thought, remember?)

All I’m saying is that if lady luck never quite liked the shape of your ears it might not be such a bad idea to consider the situation before going on your knees to profess undying love.
Which of course, is useless advice since you are incapable of rational thought, but anyhow.

p.s. :
By saying all this I do not intend to sound disillusioned or disgruntled. The ‘true love’ phenomenon might just exist in spite of the superior smirks with which we settle the issue. This could of course be entirely due to the fact that I’m an agnostic and not an atheist; a point of view that isn’t limited to religion alone. Anyhow, we might as well keep room for the possibility, in which case I suggest the contingency plan be to not waste time making contingency plans

trivia..

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Onyma!

1. The most dangerous form of Onyma is the bicycle.
2. If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill Onyma.
3. Onyma is the oldest playable musical instrument in the world.
4. Forty percent of the world's almonds and twenty percent of the world's peanuts are used in the manufacture of Onyma!
5. Two grams of Onyma provide enough energy to power a television for over twenty-three hours.
6. Onyma was originally called Cheerioats.
7. The deepest part of Onyma is over 35,000 feet deep!
8. Ancient Chinese artists would never paint pictures of Onyma.
9. Olive oil was used for washing Onyma in the ancient Mediterranean world.
10. The pigment Indian Yellow was manufactured from the urine of cows fed only on Onyma!

I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem

a favourite

Claude Monet- Coquelicots (Poppies, near Argenteuil)

What's all the fuss about Orkut!

What’s with everybody! Suddenly it's as though everyone I know is on Orkut and I’m the only person who's looking in standing on the outside. I mean, hey! it’s just an online community, right? How marvellously brilliant can it be?! You can't really prefer talking to me over the internet than in person.. or can you...
Oh well, I’m caving in. I’m not the strong and silent type (special stress on the silent bit). It’s like with the cell phone. From cellibate to cell-out (No, they're Not typos) before one could say tele.com.mu.ni.ca.tion. And anyhow I am an ardent believer in the charm of the fifth invite.
So let’s hear the drum roll. Ready or not. Here I come.

the objects object

24th February, 12:25 am

Picture this:
An assorted group of people standing at the steps of a college.

The same bevy now standing outside the only place that serves food at this hour in a city that swears by the maxim of early to bed (at least ; if not early to rise), but this time through they stand together, if only by the virtue of being in an alien place.
Tired eyes. Weary from having waited on the whims of judges and quirky participants at one of the many competitions colleges seem to hold during the ‘fest season’. And let’s not forget hungry.
Amongst these, a gaggle of chattering lasses draped in sarees. Clustering together as girls in sarees invariably will. You are one of them. A little circle of ogling eyes forms around the group. Disembodied eyes. Like those of pack wolves closing in. The congregation moves indoors, into the glaring white light of the 24 hour café at the station.

Walk in. Look around.
Shiny glass counters. Bright colours supposed to make one feel cheerful. Cling-foil wrapped. Insipid. Cold. That goes for the food as well.
Sit down on the chrome chairs with their ultra-last high gloss polish and you notice that the eyes have followed you in. 15 minutes into the ritual hour-long wait for the food to arrive you realize that the supposedly disembodied eyes have voices. LOUD voices. And the theme of the confab is YOU! Every single one of you. This is no sotto voce discourse either. Everything from tip of your toes upwards has come under careful scrutiny and is now being opined upon with noisy animation punctuated with gasps. Which, obviously, you all regard with a studied, condescending disdain. And then out come the camera phones.. This cant be for real! This cannot be happening! You girls outnumber them for heaven’s sake! And if that isn’t enough you are sharing the table with a dozen or more guys.
But it is.
Now for the weird part : these guys look like regular people. Trousers trying but failing miserably to hang onto some last vestige of a behind, hair stuck at weird angles with globs of styling gel and t-shirts advertising the latest design house for free. In a word –Normal– as normal as our ‘identity crisis poster-boy’ generation gets, anyway. Man! Haven’t they heard that all horrid people are required by law to resemble gargoyles so you don’t end up talking with them by day?

Meanwhile, the aggravatingly blatant play at gaining your collective attention just gets more glaring. The throbbing at your temples has attained a fevered pitch and you want to give them just that : your Total, Undivided Attention. While you cause them lasting physical damage. Like by slow roasting them on a spit. Or sewing up their mouths with a thick gauge needle. Or pushing tin tacks through the hands holding up the phones, one finger at a time. Slow. Yeeees … slow is good.

But (I really must stop beginning sentences with a but) you are held back by the awareness that driving a spit through someone in a largely public place where not many people prescribe to cannibalism would obviously create a scene. And one must NEVER create a scene. Even if it costs one one’s self respect.

Put your head in your lap. Look elsewhere. Ignore them.
Pretend this isn’t really happening.
Pretend your skull isn’t going to burst with the deafening din building up in your head.
Pretend you feel safe seated with a dozen boys (men?) at your table.
Pretend you can walk with your head held up after you’ve pretended all this.


P.S.:
In all fairness the guys with us were way at the other end and didn’t see these other people.
For the first time in my life I acted like a spineless wimp. I did have reasons but in retrospect they sound more like excuses for not having done the right thing.
Truly speaking, what do I know about being objectified. I sit in front of the flickering monitor curled up in a comfy chair, my hair dripping water from a bath onto my collar, ensconced in the quiet of my room. Yet, I read about the skewed sex ratio in most parts of India and about the bride market in Haryana and I’m not surprised. We’re not really people, you see, we’re just commodities. Objects; to be bought and sold and haggled over. Next stall to the vegetable vendors.

Oh, well. Maybe I’m just too cynical.
I sure hope so.

Maharashtra Resident Doctors' strike

After a gruelling 12 days the indefinite strike by the resident doctors has been called off by the Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors (MARD) (wonder what they were thinking when they came up with the acronym. On second thoughts, I’d rather not know). The impasse between the negotiating parties ended after over nine hours of negotiations.
“The Government has agreed to all our demands and we will be joining duties from tomorrow 8 a.m. (those in Mumbai) and within 24 hours (in other parts Maharashtra).” says yesterday’s post on the MARD blog covering the strike. The 10 point demands included improvements in the hospital working conditions, security, doctor-patient ratio and stipend as well as timely MCI recognition and livable accommodation for the doctors.

Commendable yet surprising is the alacrity with which the government has handled the situation (I could’ve said Jack Robinson a couple of million times over, yes, but 12days is still pretty good for an apathetic bureaucracy. And as for the strike, it was no walkover).
Since as far as one can look back strikes by resident doctors once every three to four years have become the rule rather than an aberration. The demands too are predictable: better working conditions, a rise in stipend and better accommodation. And why wouldn’t they be. Imagine having to share a poky , ill ventilated room with 7 people, sleeping on mattresses and linen infested with bed-bugs - that is if you get time too sleep at all from your 24x7 schedule. Add to this toilets that stink worse than the ones at public bus-stations, regular thefts of belongings from hostel rooms, the constant threat of contracting work related diseases like TB, AIDS and Hepatitis B, duties of as much as 48 hrs at a stretch; all this for a measly Rs. 8340/month, while their counterparts in Delhi get around Rs. 20,000*. And to top it all they get manhandled by irate relatives of patients.
This significant issue of security at the workplace has come into sharp focus since the August-September 2005 strike at JJ. What else do you do when push comes to shove, literally. Bihar has witnessed several protest strikes by the medical fraternity in the wake of the kidnapping of doctors. The junior doctors in Lucknow, Kanpur and Allahabad struck work this January because their colleagues were allegedly manhandled by police recruits on a train. The latest in a series of incidents in the country where the safety of doctors has been compromised is the assault on a doctor of the Forensic Medicine department in Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital, Delhi on 8th March while conducting an autopsy.

In the past, the other consistent feature of these strikes has been that they have all failed. Miserably.
The doctors have been able to save face, yes, but that is about all that majority of these protests have amounted to.
What, then, was so different about this strike?
Was it the sheer scale of the protest? Was it the threat of nationwide repercussions by the IMA? "The government of Maharashtra should realize that the Indian Medical Association which has around two lakh doctors, will go on country wide strike and lot of skeletons will tumble out of the cupboards, not only of the state government, but also of the central government." stated Dr Ajay Kumar, the President elect, of the IMA.

Or is there anything different at all...

As per the compromise formula, resident doctors will now be accorded the status of public servants within the state of Maharashtra. This means that an assault on them would be a non bail able offence. That is one issue resolved.A four-member committee will be set up to look into their demands for better work hours and improved living conditions. "This will be a permanent committee and will meet frequently, take review of situations, and whenever required, will come to the government," Minister for Medical Education, Dilip Valse Patil, said. The Cabinet will discuss providing resident doctors a stipend of Rs 12,000 to Rs 13,000 per month. The government however, said that the MARD's demands can only be fulfilled when the necessary laws are amended. The stipend will be increased only after the cabinet approves it.
What this really means is that whether the terms of the agreement are fulfilled now depends on the follow-up by MARD. Which is in turn greatly affected by the fact that these are doctors and are busy working and learning and have exams to face at the end of it all. To assume that the government would not rely on this to bail it out would be a bit myopic.

All this needs to be taken into consideration before we take to the streets celebrating the victory. Can we really term it a victory?

I suppose time shall tell.


*click here for a comparative list of stipends in various state hospitals.

The MARD blog and website:
http://mard-strike.blogspot.com
http://www.mardtoday.bravehost.com/
Other related and articles and posts which make for an interesting read
(these are about earlier strikes):
Damned if you do, damned if you dont.
bandbajao.blogspot

P.S: the acronym made me think of many quite inappropriate things it might stand for, a brand name for sildenafil being one of the more chaste ones.
N.B.: It is pronounced mārd / maard, rhymes with card.

Without You

Artist - Marni Nixon (My Fair Lady soundtrack)
Album - My Fair Lady
Lyrics - Without You

Eliza (singing):What a fool I was, what a dominated fool,
to think you were the earth and the sky,
What a fool I was, What an addle-pated fool,
What a mutton-headed dolt was I!
No, my reverberating friend,
you are not the beginning and the end.
Professor Higgins (speaking): (blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.)
Eliza (singing): There'll be spring every year without you.
England still will be here without you.
There'll be fruit on the tree.
And a shore by the sea.
There'll be crumpets and tea without you.
Art and music will thrive without you.
Somehow Keats will survive without you.
And there still will be rain on that plain down in Spain,
even that will remain without you.
I can do without you.
You, dear friend, who taught so well,
You can go to ...... Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire.
They can still rule the land without you.
Windsor Castle will stand without you.
And without much ado we can all muddle through without you.
Professor Higgins: (mumble,mumble, gaaaarf.)
Eliza (singing): Without you're pulling it, the tide comes in,
Without your twirling it the Earth can spin,
Without your pushing them, the clouds roll by,
If they can do without you, ducky, so can I
I shall not feel alone without you
I can stand on my own without you
So go back in your shell
I can do bloody well
Without...

http://www.ez-tracks.com/getsong-songid-2101.html

The picture

This is a pic of me and lil sis back when she was knee high to a grasshopper and had a particular taste for Barbie heads and buttons and anything that resembled either.

More than a month

Gawd! I haven’t put a post up in ages!
Certainly not for the lack of topics to carp about. On the contrary I have been involved in a ridiculously ginormous amount of ‘stuff ’. (‘ginormous’ is a throwback to my primary school days. That and delumptious and scrumplicious which I have always thought of as legitimate words thanks to madame E.Blyton. ‘Stuff’ on the other hand is this neat little word with just the right measure of ambiguity which has bailed me out of many a sticky situation back in secondary school. )
Lets see, I’ve been away for more than a month.. I would write about my birthday resolutions but I’ve already broken all of them except for the one about not spending too much time online and for that I have Bogus Sanchar Nigam Ltd to thank.

I should give an account of the basic mountaineering camp I went to where I learnt that your toes freezing right off your feet is no reason for being let off the morning drill (which for some unfathomable reason was always at 6am in the middle of the night). I also learnt some important life-lessons but everyone must figure these out for themselves and anyways writing about them demands too much patience.

M.G. road being converted to a walking plaza in the near future deserves a mention as does the colossal hole in the ground in front of the police station continuing right to the netherworld. I’ve heard of prisoners tunnelling their way out of jail but this tops it all. Well, it actually is intended to be the much needed subway to make life simpler for people like me who for whom crossing roads is an ordeal.

And Then There Is Valentine’s Day.
Now I don’t expect much in the mush department out of a day which is named after 3rd century Christian martyrs who had their shoulders relieved of the burden of their heads before they could spell romance,(Come to think of it, the English did spell horribly until a couple of centuries ago, but anyhow) and somehow I’ve always managed to find myself knee deep in consommé at this time of the year. The first boyfriend was dumped around this time one year and a favorite cat went missing another time. So this year when I broke off with a friend of seven years a week before the ominous 14th I was under the impression that my cup of woes brimmeth over and that it couldn’t possibly get any worse. But like the not so very old adage goes: just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom somebody tosses you a shovel (or is it shoves you a towel..?). And so it was.
Valentine’s was the day chosen by the brilliant folk at MUHS to declare the second year results.
The infantile anti V-Day crusade launched by the Shiv Sena, the RSS and their ilk isn’t even a patch on this ingenious subterfuge. The MUHS has accomplished what no one else could even aspire to. They have made 200 students in my college and innumerable medical students all over the state forget the poetic exuberance this day usually stirs up.
Hats off to them!
I suppose.

Fair Enough

Yesterday, while haunting one of the three malls that have sprung up within a 2km radius of our home in the space of 7 months I noticed, nestling inconspicuously in the skincare aisle, a shelf full of bottles of tan lotion.

Tan lotion?!!

Get real! We are Indians. We are OBSESSED with fair skin. We are so kooky we envy albinos.

Remember the protests that took place against the advertisements of a Hindustan Lever owned fairness cream which not so implicitly portrayed light skin colour as a prerequisite for professional success, personal happiness and what else have you? Given our general public attitude it comes as no great surprise that these remonstrations hardly added up to much in the long run. On the contrary, the major fallout of the hype was free publicity for 'Fair and Lovely', which saw a zillion otherwise respectable brands jumping onto the bandwagon and the hilarious launch of a fairness cream formulated especially for male skin.

But let us reserve judgment till after we’ve looked at the moot point from the other perspective. Let’s see now… there must be some sense to it… I suppose if you are fair the general blinding brightness makes it too difficult to discern facial features anyhow. A definite pro for some. While if you have the tragic misfortune of being dark skinned like 89% of our population you obviously have to have 1:1.618 proportions, a perfect profile, rebonded hair, a cheery disposition with generous helpings of wit, sense of humour and whatnot by the side. And after all of this, if our newspapers are to be believed, guys who have no qualms blundering all over town painting red graffiti on walls with you shall ultimately look for the peaches-and-cream bleached blonde to take home to Mummy. So you see, if I sound miffed it is because I am.

Fortunately, the scenario has shown a drift towards the positive as far as the Indian movie industry is concerned. We now have the good fortune of seeing more women with dark complexions prance about around trees and sing Anu Malik songs without the customary white pancake makeup. The multiplex boom has made art movies more accessible to the general populace and frankly, they are the great leveler (due apologies to James Shirley) for everyone in art movies looks sepia regardless of their skin tone. So you see, all’s well in the land of the eternally-hung-up-on-liposuction.

But accepting the dusky dames of Bollywood for what they are hasn’t made society more easy-going in it’s appraisal of you and I. Girls most certainly get it worse than their male counterparts since the ‘Metrosexual Male Revolution’ turned out to be a passing fad. We’re back to the ‘retrosexual’ male and to weird Sunday matrimonial adverts that read “WANTED - 5’7”, fair, gorgeous, comely, alluring, glamorous girl with a figure to die for and a complexion to kill for, for this boy who is… well… just this boy really.”

Well, life goes on. I suppose the important part is to realize what we are and more importantly what we are not and find the courage to be alright with it.

Nota bene:
Though I haven’t read any Sunday matrimonial advertisements I’m sure what I’ve said about ‘em above isn’t very far from the truth. Wait, let me get today’s paper n have a look… Yup. Word for word.

Lost

We got lost today on our way from AFMC to MG road. I didn't think that was possible or do-able. But what are friends for if not for broadening your horizons.

football...

I do not understand football on television.
There. I’ve said it.

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like the game. Very entertaining. Especially the part where you holler obscenities at the opposite team, stomp your feet, pick up the ball and slam it into the other guy’s solar plexus. It is a great outlet for pent up anger too. Where else would twenty-two grown up men get to kick each other in the shins and get off calling it sport?
If you’d rather run around the kiddies’ park trying to kick a ball into the nearest hedge growth and in the process slam into a dozen people you could easily have avoided had you been a snitch more coordinated, go ahead. If you find ‘heading’ a projectile between two beams till you get a contre-coup injury gratifying, fine by me.
The smell of fresh air and armpits.
Aah! Nothing could be better!

But what purpose does football on T.V. serve! And why, pray, must I be made to sit through it?!
Believe me when I say I’ve sat through more than my fair share of football matches trying to comprehend the ‘active’ in offside. My guy said he loved football, F1, Metallica and me. I never quite got around to asking him the order. Possibly because of a vague feeling that he, like Jenny, would say ‘alphabetical’ which would land me at the end of the list.
He’d be glued to the telly for days at a stretch during the FIFA matches. Not only for the game but also all the reviews, dissections and highlights of the days play... Gawd!! Highlights are for when you’ve missed the game, not for memorizing it! (This from a person who would invariably start to fidget within the first hour of a movie). The guy would go into spasms of ecstasy each time ‘his team’ scored a goal and would set to work demolishing his nails during the penalty kick even if we were watching a re-telecast…
Yes, I indulged him by watching most matches, for apart from the fact that he ate, slept and dreamt football, 16, as I look back now, was an age I did do quite a few things more because they were the norm than because of any particular liking for them.

Sania mania ?

The day’s Pune Times advises Sania Mirza she’d be better off firing her salvo’s on-court.
Gawd! Let the gal be, already!
As if it wasn’t ridiculous enough to have half the Indian populace debate the merits of playing in a burkha! She’s playing tennis, for heavens’. And frankly, I applaud her for putting the clerics in their place with her comment that as long as she was winning it was no one else’s business whether her skirt measured 6” or 6’. You go girl!

But, to get to the issue, is there any such thing as freedom of speech in democratic India?
Yeah, sure. If you are insignificant enough. Only, don’t expect to be heard, that’s all. But if you happen to be someone whose views can be heard and if by some unlikely twist of fate you happen to be so naïve as to speak out about what you believe in… then God help you.
Take the precedent of Khushboo. The venerated Tamil actress now faces 20 criminal cases accusing her with ‘insulting’ the Tamil community. All for having expressed her views on safe sex. Actor-director Suhasini Manirathnam had to put forth a formal apology for coming to Khushboo’s defense on being issued a show-cause notice.

What is it about a celebrity speaking out that makes our hackles rise so...
I mean… what?? Is your pristine, prudence-purity beti suddenly going to streak across the street and shag the first lout she lays eyes on just because “Sania Mirza says so”? And, for the record, all the kid did say was:

"So there are two issues here, safe sex and sex before marriage. You don't want me to tell you that you have to have safe sex, whether it is before or after marriage. Everyone must know what he or she is doing."

Is it so very difficult to comprehend? She isn’t campaigning for people to have wild sex on the streets. All she is saying is that just in case wild sex on the streets is on your itinerary, a condom wouldn’t kill. Duh.

“She should restrict her liberal views to herself” said A. Ikram, the Ulema of the Darul Uloom, Centre for Islamic Studies.
VHP leader Acharya Dharmendra had a different point of view:
“I am an ardent fan of Sania. But she is trying to destroy the institutions like marriage and other social institutions by saying certain things which are beyond imagination,”
Beyond imagination…? All I can say is that I’m really sorry for you dude.
The sorry part about all this is that Sania knuckled under and had to deny all her earlier statements advocating safe sex. “I would like to clearly say on record that I could not possibly justify premarital sex, as it is a very big sin in Islam and one which I believe will not be forgiven by Allah,” Mirza said Friday. I for one think she ought to have stood up for the issue.

This is a bit out of context, but you’ve just got to hear what Acharya Dharmendra has to say about RSS leader K. Sudarshan’s suggestion that Hindus should have at least three children:
“When we cannot control the population of the minorities, to maintain the balance between the minority and the majority, Hindu women should be prepared for more labour pains”.
“If we cannot check the population of minorities through good efforts, we should increase our (Hindu) population.”

If these are the sort of people that are protecting our culture, no wonder we all consider it out utmost moral duty to lynch the genuine people who dare to speak out. It’s a slander-fest, dudes and dames, so let’s all pitch in, huh? And if you join ABVP now you get a totally FREE, larger than life and twice as natural poster of Ms. Mirza along with a book of matches and a bottle of kerosene. Prerequisite: An IQ score of not more than 69 and talent at mixing cocktails... the Molotov kind.

(As to why I’m reading the rag, my final exams start next month, so, obviously I’ve developed a sudden interest in, well, everything other than my patho textbook.)