Thongful Intightment

I have always hated tights, not that I’ve worn them – I just despise the sight of them.

The last girl I dated was always in tights – ALWAYS. No denim, no dresses, no skirts, no nothing – just tights. Plain and simple – leggings.

Tights. They’re just so very… very… er… tight. So body hugging and so freaking tight. Why are they so clingy? Why do they need to eat up all your space in the nether lands? Why are they so bloody needy; almost insecure? Why is there no space?

Where is my space?

The thing is now I’m cold. This sham of a city, Chandigarh, is moving closer to the arctic circle with every bloody day, with every bloody globally warmed iceberg.

For crying out loud - we are supposed to be a tropical nation, not Eskimo zone dammit!

So it’s freezing and I realized that everything southwards of my waist – ass, feet, knees, vagina – are becoming colder than Russia. To prevent any further posterior frigidity, someone recommended Thermal Underwear – Thermal Long Johns to be precise.

My momma always said, “Life is like a box of knickers. If they look like tights, feel like tights, stretch like tights, then they’re not damned Long Johns you fool – they’re tights.”

But oh bloody God – they’re so, they’re so, so, soooooooh… comforting.

They’re so accommodating, all encompassing, and warm and do everything to make you feel so very secure.

They just give and give and give and give.

It’s like their second nature.

They’re like Mother Nature – there is so much give.

So kids, I don't know how I met your mother, but when in doubt - wear tights.

P.S. Superman, Hulk Hogan, Robin Hood – thank you!

Still fearing and loathing in Chandigarh

(This is the city I see)

The only reason I go to parties is to watch people.

I love to tell a story. Most of my conversations are punctuated with, ‘You know I met this guy last week…’ If you ever have a conversation with me, you will learn close to nothing of me. However, you will definitely hear of the retards I’ve met in the run up to meeting you.

Also, I would have watched you, and would have walked away with another story – you. Does that make me depraved? Some would say so. But would the chat bore you? I really doubt it. I’m not saying that I’m good at conversation. It’s just that I’m just slightly above average when it comes to running into idiots and then telling others about it later.

But in my defence, I don’t take names, ever.

So, parties.

Since moving to Chandigarh, I’ve been to a few parties and I’ve met a whole bunch of new and improved imbeciles. One such November party, that I’ve wanted to write about, stands out.

The thing is I am twenty-something. Most of my friends are twenty-something. The only people I know who aren’t twenty-something are acquaintances I have no choice over – family, colleagues and women I fall in love with (generally well into their thirties, married, with multiple kids and IMHO a bastard of a husband; I know I’m so very sorted). The point I’m trying to make is that when I’m invited for a party, I will most certainly assume that the average invitee age is twenty-something. Worst-case scenario – average age 29. Period.

Right?

Wrong!

A month back, a Chandigharite friend invited me for a party that could easily pass off as a Geriatrics Anonymous (Chandigarh Chapter) weekly session.

Everybody was so… so… so… old. There were only three in the entire party who had black hair and one was a Labrador. Most of them did not know their own age – having been born in a time when calendars were not yet invented and sun-dials were used to tell time. The only accurate way of telling their age was either sawing through their trunk to count the number of rings on them or carbon dating. Pseudo-motivational pep talk one liners like ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life’ have no bearing on these people.

Uncle, if you woke up this morning and were able to stand with absolutely no assistance, without having lost bladder control overnight, today might, in remote probability, be the first hour of the rest of your fleeting hours, but maybe the last also; I can guarantee nothing and you just might die. Also, you might not survive the next sneeze.

At one point in the party, I was introduced to a couple of people in this odd manner - “This is Sethi Uncle. He’s Simran’s (the hostess) granddad. He’s an octogenarian.” The stress on octogenarian was so intense that it might have convinced a Normal-English speaking person into thinking that he’s a doctor of some kind; perhaps a vet who treats octopuses.

Mommy, when I grow up, I want to be an astronaut; or at least a sexagenarian.

Speaking of Simran (Name unchanged as it doesn’t matter. They’re a dime a dozen in this part of the world. Simran is the north-Indian human nomenclature equivalent of naming your dog Tiger) – what we have in her is a thirty-ish woman, born, brought-up and bred in Chandigarh, with an accent that is a cross between that of the Queen of England and the Maharaja of Patiala – plain and utterly incomprehensible.

I don’t blame her actually – in any case half the Punjabis think Punjab (Summer Capital – Chandigarh, Winter Capital - Chandigarh) is an island just off the east coast of England (Summer Capital – Southall, Winter Capital - Toronto) and the other half think Punjab (Summer Capital – Southall, Winter Capital - Southall) is an island just off the east coast of England (Summer Capital – Southall, Winter Capital – Southall).

The woman took it upon herself to spend her entire evening explaining to me the ventilation details of her house. She stood in the centre of her hall, arms wide open and twirled a couple of hundred times. She then mimed a swimmer attempting a butterfly stroke with one arm and breast stroke with the other and said, “Do you see? On a good day, the winds are allowed free circulation in my home. Otherwise, do you see those windows? When the weather acts up, I use them to control the winds.”

There are billions of dollars being spent in keeping scientists afloat on the melting polar ice caps that threaten to submerge the world in 2012, when all that is really needed is a little wind-control from our indigenous gusty wind goddess Simran.

Also, the woman had clearly traveled all over the world and made no attempt to hide it. She’d been to London, Southall, Birmingham, Patiala, Bhatinda, Pathankot, Southall, Birmingham, Southall and Singapur. The city that she loved the most was (to quote her) ‘the quaintly exotic Singapur’. And when asked about her favorite place within Singapur, I learned that she was floored by ‘the fabulous Santosha Island’.

There was more to come.

An extremely murderous looking man then walked up to me, introduced himself and out of nowhere spent an entire hour trying to find out my family’s bank balance and medical history. He was awfully proud of the fact that his daughter was my age (you have not read this incorrectly; he was proud of it, almost thankful to my parents), and that she had received the finest engineering degree from Punjab University and was now working as a mechanic in Birmingham. She was a prize catch, apparently.

After the ‘my daughter is purrfect phor you son’ monologue, dodgy uncle was expecting something to happen – an epiphany, an orgasm or a proposal? I didn’t know what. But there was expectation.

I was so scared I have no recollection of what happened afterwards. I think I might be engaged to a car mechanic in Birmingham.

Oh dear God! Chandigarh - I still loathe you.

P.S. Refined is not sold here

Fear and Loathing in Chandigarh

Towns. Small cities. Tier-II-up-and-coming-metros-whose-‘you will see’-awe-inspiring-awesomeness-will-leave-me-in-awe-by-the-year-2031. Please bugger off.

I abhor you.

I am not being proud of my big city upbringing. Neither am I being presumptuous. I speak from experience for my work takes me places; small places to be precise. For the past two years, I’ve spent 2-3 months, at a time, living in shitholes like Kanpur, Hyderabad and Bhopal. Yes, shitholes. The kind that little boys from Dharavi are prepared to voluntarily dive into for the sake of an Amitabh Bachchan autograph (as vividly depicted in the factually correct, phenomenally logical and thoroughly Oscar deserving cinematic masterpiece Slumdawgg Millionaire. Err… sorry, Anil Kapoor uncle, was it Millannairre?).

Bhopal, especially Bhopal. It is a city so devoid of life, character and fun that the longer you live there, the more you die within. It is so monumentally boring that if you Google for ‘fun’ and ‘Bhopal’ you get 0 results. If you’re cheeky and you click on the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button instead – Google takes you to a page that says “No you’re not. It’s fuckin’ BHOPAL you idiot!”

I’m not kidding around, try it. Google; not Bhopal!

I detest these microscopic ink blots on the Indian map. Apparently they’re ‘quaint’.

Bollocks. They ain’t.

The point I’m trying to make is that when I was asked to move onto a project in Chandigarh for 4 months, I died. And rightly so. The city is bloody unlivable.

But I had to move.

Fortunately, I wasn’t going to move alone and wasn’t going to live (or die) alone. Or so I thought. As unfortunately, the said accomplice is a woman. So an unmarried, non-couple finding a house together, in a small city, was as easy as the Pope helping this guy out with his problem (click click).

So during the house hunt, we obviously expected a few raised eyebrows, ruffled feathers and tirades on morality from balding landlord uncles and their queerly hirsute and mustached wives. We got more.

Foxed by our ‘peculiar’ living arrangement a seventy year old retired army officer wondered – “So, you’re really not related?” No. She is Sharma and I am Gogol. Do we sound like we’re related? Are you retired or retarded? “But how will this work. A lady needs her space! You have to give a lady her space!” Dearest fake handlebar moustache uncle, after four back-to-back vodka shots, the said lady threw up all over me last Saturday. She is as lady as Gaga. You can’t read her,
can’t read her,
no you can’t read her poker face.

And the only bloody SPACE she needs is a brown paper bag with ‘Puke Here’ written on it.

Reluctantly, he proceeded to show us around the house. It looked perfect, or so I thought. The woman… sorry the lady, had issues – lavatorial issues. There were no attached bathrooms. The loos and the bedrooms were on either side of the hall. So? “Dude, I need my very own bathroom.” Yeah, okay. Pick one. Any one. “No dude. The thing is I have a habit of walking naked from the shower to the wardrobe. Absolutely no clothes on. It’s my thing. So I need an attached bathroom.”

This was TMI*; way too much information for the war-veteran to handle. I swear I could almost see his eyes well up. We left before he could die.

The next place we stopped at was being guarded by a man well into his afterlife, a Gollum like being. He did not care about our living ‘situation’. Clearly all he cared about was the rent which was to be paid in a mystical currency known only to him as ‘the monies’. “I need the monies on time.” “You give me the monies, and then do what you want.” “I want the monies in cash. I don’t keep the monies in the banks.” Obviously! How can you let go of my precioussss?

The house tour involved Gollum, the lady and me, each clenching 4 feet long wooden sticks to defend us from ‘the doggies’. “I have many doggies. The stick is for your protection if the doggies get naughty.” Gollum was honest. He did have many doggies. And they were being very naughty – but, to our relief, only with each other. The doggies were being naughty on the sunshade, on the rooftop, in the garden – in the middle of the day. It’s a doggie’s life after all.

The lady felt she would have teething problems with canines. She after all did not want the doggies invading her space. We moved on.

We then saw a house owned by an army-wife who had clearly assimilated the ‘defence’ culture into everyday parlance. She punctuated every sentence, filled every conversation gap and responded to every query with the same pair of verbal artillery – ‘Great Guns’! Is it okay if we have whores and meth-addicts over for sex de addiction therapy on the second Saturday of every month? “Great Guns!” Can the lady boisterously frolic around in bed with your sixteen year old once in a while? “Great Guns!” We urban yuppies say ‘Fuck’ during orgasm. What, aunty, is your choice of words during climax? “Great Guns Son! Great Guns!”

While the army-wife had a strangely elegant demeanor, there were a tad too many guns and rifles hanging on the walls for our comfort. Not so great after all, eh.

At the end of the day we were strongly considering a reply to this ad -


Chandigarh, I loathe you.

Note to self. When a ‘To Let’ newspaper advert says ‘suitably furnished in a safe locality’, it’s to be read as hospital beds, white ceramic tile floored hall, gentle electrocution sources and alcoholic Chucky Sr. standing guard.

*@SP – This is what aptly can be classified as TMI.

What Lonely Planet won't tell you

There are two ways to travel in a new country - as a tourist or as a backpacker. If you have the luxury of time and little money you backpack. If it's the other way around you're a tourist. Also, in all probability, you're a corporate whore. But I'll leave that for later. I've backpacked a bit and as a backpacker one is predisposed to despising tourists. They're loud, with kids (always plural; there is never only one kid) in tow and are always either searching for McDonald's or posing in front of McDonald's or, if Gujarati, are complaining that there are no veggies in that country's McDonald's.

So a couple of weeks back when a friend, ATG* recommended that we 'tour' Kuala Lumpur as opposed to a trek across the Malay countryside, I had my misgivings.

(ATG*: Desi, economist, feminist, Mallu-Maoist, armchair activist, Bombayite-Singaporean. Don't be overly impressed. This is snapshot of what these pseudo-intellectuals study - pic below. JB's kid's rhymes are more profound.)

Tourist? Who, me? Was she expecting me to use taxis, hunt down desi restaurants, ogle local women, drink Budweiser and wear denim during travel? Really? Did she even know the anal ego that she was dealing with here?

Despite our ideological differences we wanted to meet up. So we talked it out and a loose framework of ground rules to mollify any potential tourism-guilt was drawn. No butter chicken or meen moilee. No shopping. No phone calls. No wake-up calls. There is no such place as a crowded place. Drink till the first one drops. If we ogle, we ogle together. One is free to not believe in the lord but one must trust the trinity - Jack, Johnnie and Jameson. Cigars are injurious to Clinton's health, not ours. The amount of alcohol in one's system does not dictate one's sexuality. Darker the night, weaker the gaydar. Use zebra crossings.

With such pious, devout and upright principles, we were not surprised when our trip went from being weekend of tourism to weekend of debauchery.

This is how you do it.

1. Hotel Booking - Do not ask for the 'City View' or the 'Lake View' or even 'Petronas Twin Tower View' bedroom. Request for the 'Bathroom View'.

2. Dining - Begin your night in a shady back-alley with the 'Soup Torpedo' - a recommended local aphrodisiac; a devilish concoction of 11 spices, beef broth and bull's penis (hence the explosive euphemism). Follow it up with a cuppa of Tongkat Ali Coffee - essentially coffee spiked with local viagra - strictly for men. What that translates to in English is 'Not recommended for women'. So if as a lady, you choose to ignore the warning from the hawker, you have only yourself to blame when you find yourself doing something extremely unladylike with transvestites (always plural; there is never only one transvestite) in a club.

3. Sightseeing - Sufficiently satiated and appropriately aroused from the meal, head to the busiest whore pickup club. Take your seat at the bar. Do not order a drink. Why? As the only Indian couple at the bar, adorably horny, significantly sloshed and incredibly stupid Indian men on the prowl would be more than happy to send across bottles of whisky your way in an attempt to impress their ladies.

Warning: In a club, never let your wily albeit drunk friend out of sight. He/She would surreptitiously pay off a prostitute to come feel you up and freak the crap out of you. True fact!

4. Off the beaten track - In a state of ecstatic inebriation, have your future told by a Malay Oracle. Do not call her fat.

Personal digression: The oracle read the tarot cards and this is what she had to say about us -

Me - Women mess me up. I only know messed up women. (Even cards can tell now!)
I will find 'true love' only in my abroad living woman friend's firang friend in the month of Jan 2011. (I have only two close female friends living abroad. The both of you, please to introduce me to these firangs. Don't you think I deserve 'true love' and all?)
An interesting fact - I drew a set of cards 5 times in total for the oracle to read. Every single time the card below came up. I wonder if it was a sign from God or perhaps the trinity?

ATG - If she gets married before thirty, she will get divorced and will not marry again. If she waits till she turns thirty, the guy she marries will most certainly be a jackass. (Whoever said that there is no such thing as Sophie's Choice.)

She will never become a successful politician/economist. At best she can aspire to become a clerk. (I laughed so hard I had tears of joy in my eyes.)

The card below was recurrent in her draws. I'm guessing, I won?

Now you may call the oracle fat and leave.

5. Rounding-off the night - Head to the shadiest transexual club in town for a ringside view of the weirdest set of 'guy-who's-a-girl vs. girl-who's-a-guy' competitive sporting events known to man; rather not-known. I shan't divulge the details of these events on the blog for fear of losing my seven existing blog-readers. The participants, however, I'm sure wouldn't mind a little publicity.

Things that Lonely Planet might tell you -

(Clockwise from top left: Guinness Stout Beer in English/Chinese/Tamil, the most ridiculous soap ad - why is that kid being raunchy?, fresh coffee beans, Ramzan street-food market, multi-ethnic love, random cafes)

*****

My aunt has always said that a really good traveler does not need a camera.
I clicked twenty-odd photographs. That makes me strictly ok.

Atom Heart Mother

I come from a pseudo family – pseudo-Punjabi, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-classy, pseudo-Madrasi. We’re pseudo and for some unimaginable reason we’re unabashedly proud of it.

So say, for example, why do I think we’re pseudo-Punjabi?

Of the eighteen and a half in-house residents, a majority cannot speak a coherent sentence in Punjabi without emitting guttural noises that bear a strong resemblance to gagging. English and very suggestive signals are the chosen media of communication at home.

Punjabi is spoken only when abuses are being hurtled at one another. Well that’s only because - let’s admit it - the degree of sophistication and punch packed into a heart-warming ‘m@&@#c#od’ is conspicuously absent in a ‘mother-fucker’, right? As you can see, we’re a very religious, god-fearing, simple, wheatish complexion cultured family (why then, won’t you bitches read our dramatically correct classifieds ads and marry into us?)

For the six years that I’ve lived away from home I’ve missed this, the pseudo-ness – evolving, growing, and changing size and shape, like an amoeba. Every time I’m back visiting, I observe a new dimension that has been added to my family’s pseudo-persnalty. And I have never been scared by any new-found idiosyncrasy than this time upon realizing that my folks are now pseudo-conservative.

My typical weekend lunch was brought to a jaw-dropping halt when my father smirked at something he read off his phone, passed it to his wife and said, “This is hilarious. You think I should re-tweet this?”

Tweet? No no, re-tweet! Re-FUCKING-tweet!

For those who don’t know me personally - apart from my heartfelt congratulations - a fun-fact, I’m not what you twits and tweeters would call socially-networked, online or otherwise. I have an email account that I religiously check once in four days. I now know that the deposed King of Nigeria is a conniving bastard who despite all his convincing e-mails will not give me his gold in return for an online transfer of a meager $250. I am completely aware that facebook is not an online database of human mugshots. (FYI – my colleague’s dog has a facebook account and is apparently very active. I don’t blame the mutt; he has his own bloody personalized wall and all. What more could a dog want?)

The point I’m trying to make is that, I now know my folks are more active online than their own son. It’s a precarious situation. It’s the Indian Kid version of the biggest Indian Parent fear – realizing that your kid is sexually active. I now know that my parents are social-networkingly active.

They’ve lost their virginity and that too online! Two fifty year olds. Going at it. On their keyboards and keypads. In full online-view.

Have they no morals? Could they have not learnt from their own son – the significance of social-networking abstinence? And the justification they give me is – “Not our fault son. It was all the peer-to-peer pressure? We gave in.”

Who do they think I am – some naïve fucking n00b!

I’m ashamed. The unethical bastards have let my proud family name down. They’ve hacked my trust.

Come to think of it, it’s my fault only. I knew that introducing them to broadband and wi-fi would do them no good. I should’ve monitored their activities; at the very least curbed their freedom… err… bandwidth.

Twits!

Pseudo-conservative twits.

The women in my household have always been, to put it mildly, mental. The news of the presence of a ‘new woman’ in my life would always warrant an insane interrogation, the sort that would put the Spanish Inquisition to shame. Where did you meet? Is her father the only proven sodomite in the family? Does she re-use syringes for her heroin shots? On a scale of one to ten – if one is ‘a typical daughter of our household’ and ten is ‘roadside Tamilian nympho-by-day-whore-by-night slut’ – how horny is she? Is her mother a witch? Does she respect her elders? The sorts.

So I expected a modest burning at the stake when I expressed my intention of taking up an apartment with a woman. A woman - who was not a fellow man, did the dishes and did not have a penis. However, the only bloody question that came my way was – “Can she cook?”

Can she cook?

That’s it? No witch-hunt? No inquiry? No ‘we’re a god-fearing, religious family’ monologues?

Can she fucking cook? That’s it?

I was bloody offended.

Of course she can cook – that’s the only reason I’m prepared to share an apartment with her in the first place. But they didn’t know that. Why would they assume that I had no intentions to take advantage of her lack of male genitalia? Why would they assume that I would have no interest in her skills that are not culinary in nature? Why?

Pseudo-progressive bastards.

FYI – my mother, who for fifty years of her earthbound existence, was referred to as Pammi, a fairly common Punjabi name, now chooses to go by the name - Pam.

P-A-M!?!

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaave you met Pam?

She’s Punjabi, progressive, pseudo and my mom. If she is Pam then I am bloody scared.

Save the tiger na baba

Save him.
Save him so that once in a while, twenty something boys get to be twenty something boys.

Excuse the trembling hand. I was not being big wuss in front of big puss. It was just a tad breezy okay. I know the tiger, tiger was burning bright and all. But believe you me, it was breezy ... err... windy okay. Very windy!

Newshance Makars Will Be Vekatad This Blog

Poster in a Bhopali cafe

Click to enlarge lest I Spit On Your Grave

AB, to your pulp-art taste I'm sure :P