You know you are a fauji brat when..

Okay I had to share this one!!!

• You were born in a MH- possibly with Pop not being around on the big day due to being required to go suddenly 'on duty' at short notice !
• Half your toddler years were spent with Dad being away!
• You went to school either on Bhaiya's cycle or in a Shaktiman
• You know what a Shaktiman is! ( No! it isnt the TV serial about half man and half machine starring AB look alike)
• Jeeps & Jongas don't excite you - they were your regular mode of transport!
• Your entire family (including the inevitable pet dog !)could survive in one room temporary accommodation with 25 trunks/wooden crates, the shell-based table lamps, lovely artistic drift-wood, a centre table, few 'peg' tables and of course-two bhaiyas flitting/hovering around.
• The smell of Brasso & shoe polish was regular morning staple.
• Mess was not what you created in your room, it was where you went every Friday for the free movie and the Sunday south Indian breakfast or Biryani/Chole- Bhature lunch.
• Baccha party is not a party dedicated to you, but yes it’s the clan name you earn as you learn to belong to the regimental parties with the rest of the “just as lost” kids sit together, whiling away time, while our parents conveniently join the main “party”.
• The "English Movie" was very often a western and you couldn't follow a word! Sometimes you just went for the samosas and the local drink that they insisted was Cola.
• At the end of the month your dad had to pay for many pink slips showing how many samosas and local drinks (that they insisted was Cola) you had consumed. They never missed any!!!
• You attended many many May / Navy Queen Balls before you knew what Miss India was.
• Your mother regularly got dressed, perfumed and disappeared for the Ladies Club.
• You knew towns like Mhow, Wellington , Fazilka, Pallawala, Twang and Bomdilla etc, which are generally extremely difficult to locate on any standard map of India.
• You weren't a millionaire but hey you had access to Olympic style Swimming, Horse Riding, Squash, Tennis, Flood- light lit Badminton courts and boy oh boy, Golf !!
• You can still take one quick look at the epaulets and figure out the rank.
• You can still recall the special & particular smell of the CSD canteen! A special prize for the correct concoction - mine is - it was a mix of Hamam Soap, Ponds Dreamflower Talc & Surf I think. In some corners it had overtures of Brooke Bond red Label as well.
• You remember the fun you used to have in the grilled 3-ton vehicle that was your regular school-BUS for years together.
• You know the full form of words like 'OG', "OLQs", 'CO' etc and that the meaning of "field' is not what is as given in the dictionary.

My bestest friend

Best friend - a term that has been long in use and will continue to be so for decades, perhaps even centuries to come, that is if this stupid race of humans manage to last that long.

Who or what is a best friend? Ask a kid that and he will tell you that it is the person you share all your secrets with. Ask an elder that and chances are that he will tell you the same thing. Of course, they recognize the other aspects of the relationship but at the end of the day it boils down to that one simple fact: the freedom to be yourself with that person, the comfort level that allows you to share everything from that stupid flirtation you had with the guy next door to the fact that you have flunked your exams and they know it before anyone else in the world does (not even parents....man! they are always the last ones to know everything)

My earliest memory of a best friend dates back to class 3. She was a sweet kid from whatever little I can remember now. Of course it goes without saying that I was a sweet kid too!! Ok so I bullied people perhaps a wee bit too much and should have paid more attention in the maths class instead of sucking on the end of my pencil like a moron, but chalta hai....I mean a woman is allowed some liberties in life, right!

When it was time for us to move (fauji kids! we stay in a place just long enough to unpack and then it is time to pack things and move again. Weird! but that's life), I wondered if I should cry for leaving Neha. I still remember screwing up my eyes and trying reaaallllllly hard to squeeze a tear out. My little bro offered to box me, said it would make the task easier. I declined and finally did not cry.

We promised to keep in touch and did so for a few years. I kept hearing about Neha from "uncles and aunties" who had been posted with Neha's dad. Many years later, I came to know that her mother passed away. I wished I could have been by her side to console her.

Then suddenly out of the blue, NB now Mrs. NS contacted me through www.batchmates.com. It was a huge surprise when she told she would be in Bangalore next month and looked forward to seeing me. I am so looking forward to meeting her too! After 18 long years!

Separated at birth

I don't know what it is about me but most people I meet for the first time tell me that have seen / met me earlier. Like today, I accompanied Sharo for her photo shoot, a male model there tells me, “Haven’t we met before?” No, it was not a pick-up line, he genuinely meant it. In reply, I say, “Wish I had met you before” :) *Eddie Murphish smile*

The other day at a restaurant, a guy (with a killer smile) exclaims (in hindi), “Aap yahan kaise? I thought you were in Cal”. Sorry! I haven't been to Calcutta in the last 16 years. He mistook me to be his friend's sis.

And then one morning at the gym, this lady comes up to me and asks, “Are you Deepali?" I say, "Not that I am aware of... I definitely remember my folks christening me S." The lady gave me some very suspicious looks like I was pretending not to be Deepali.

And yes how could I forget, a very very dear friend, has met not one but two women who look like me. Incidentally, one of the them even shares my name. According to my friend, she is "exactly" like me. Same ideas, same style of talking, same jumpy self etc.

Well, I couldn’t help wondering then, was I separated at birth? And how many times? I mean how many births?

Get-A-Fix

My mobile beeped in the middle of the night. Cussing the sender, I reluctantly climbed out of bed to pick up my mobile. It turns out be a sms from GetAfix, "Sona!!! Want 2 share wit u... 1 of my dreams is gng 2 cme tru nw.. m gng 2 own a Multiplex in Calcutta. thxs 4 praying 4 me." Whoo!!! I was ecstatic. This couldn't have happened to a better person.

Prashant is one of my fav people and reminds me to "GetAFix" - the (somewhat grumpy!) druid character in Asterix comics. When faced with problematic issues, GetAFix always takes them head-on (with his sickle!) instead of hiding behind half-assed excuses. Prashant is my T3 help line and I always run to him for any emotional support. He is like my dairy and I tell him everything (usually through sms. sometimes we sms talk for 5-6 hours till our fingers hurt).

Congrats GetAfix!! I know what this means to you. You have worked so hard for this. Wish you luck and dont get so busy that you don't have time to listen to my probs. (Yes I am the selfish sort! :o)

Happy Birthday to my little bro

He ..
- has this uncanny ability of making me laugh even when I’m in the worst of the moods
- loves to irritate me
- best brings out my protective side
- has the naughtest eyes
- gets bossed over
- bosses over
- has an impish grin
- makes me do all his work
- at times, pisses me off
- is crazy about cars and bikes

- hates it when I call him by his pet name in front of his friends
- cooks better than I do
- practices his karate on me

- never puts on weight despite eating 3 times as much as me
- is a year older today..

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANU!! Life wouldn’t have been the same without u bhai..

Go Goa!

Oh boy! Its Friday, finally! I thought it would never come....

We have been planning and waiting for this Goa trip for eternity now. Leaving tonight. JT has offered us his "kholi" to stay in which is on the beach. Open the front door and you are on the beach. Its gonna be 5 days of sun, sand and feni. And will be back in the New Years...

Wish all of you a Happy New Year. Hope all your dreams come true!!

Lousy Lyrics!

Today while driving to work, I switched on Radio City and heard a Hindi song that had a line like this: "Joo banke tere baalon mein bhatakte." Transalted into English, it means "I'd become a lice and wander in your hair".

Eeeks! Accepted that we (Indians) celebrate mediocrity. How would you rate this particular one? There's pathetic, there's abysmal... I guess the scale can extend indefinitely. Well! God save Indian film music!

To compensate, I downloaded some great MP3s. There's a song called "Be Mine" by David Gray, album "A New Day At Midnight" that's really good. Couldn't upload it to my Yahoo! briefcase because it's more than 5 MB. But make sure you lay your hands on it, coz it sure is great!

Rail Quibbles

I am in Mumbai with my little bro, who was a bit unwell and needed to be pampered. So GG was packed off on a "get well soon" mission to mumbai. Anyhow, he is much better and has been showing me around.. in the Mumbai trains. The experience while travelling in the suburban trains has been extremely interesting to say the very least. I have witnessed innumerable fights and altercations. No, I don’t mean to say the Bombayya is a violent creature, just that the volatile mixture of zero air, crushed feet, stinking neighbours and stalled train can make for a potent cauldron where emotions are liable to flare up and explode at seemingly trivial stimuli. It usually starts with an unexpected push/shove/jolt/jar.

Once one gentleman accused a co-passenger of calling him an animal. Co-passenger stoutly denied that he had called him any such thing. Gentleman said he did too. Co-passenger denied, as stoutly. People around intervened to ask details of altercation. It seems the gentleman had flown into the train in the usual fashion at the last station, at the head of the incoming horde, and crash-landed into co-passenger. Co-passenger had twisted back in pain and exhorted gentleman to behave like a human being. By extension, co-passenger didn’t consider gentleman to be a human. Ergo, co-passenger had called him an animal. Co-passenger must apologise.
I assure you, the above is completely true.

What is even truer, is the voice from inside the compartment about 2 minutes after things had calmed down. “SO, WHO WON??”

This other time, the man sitting in the window seat burst out at a chap standing beside him, “What business is it of yours where I’m going to get up??? I have a ticket, I have paid in full for it, I will go wherever I want, who are you to ask????”

The standee looked a little chagrined, told others around him (including those who had been rudely awakened by the windowseater) that he had simply asked the man if he was travelling far, so he could figure out whether there was any use of standing there waiting for a seat. He had not meant any offence. It was an innocent query.

Innocent, my foot, fumed the windowseater, what business is it of his, I ask you, these young people today, they have no manners whatsoever, gallivanting around all day and then they want a seat as soon as they enter the train, I tell you, this country’s going to the dogs if this is how our next generation is going to behave. Look at him, literally salivating at the prospect of getting a seat.

The standee was a little taken aback by this vehemence and gave vent to his feelings. He talked at length about older people who think they can do anything because they have a few grey hair, heck, look at the woman with him, she is too young to be his wife and too old to be his daughter, god knows what they have got going between them and he just wants to impress the woman by picking on innocent passengers even when they have done no harm, a simple question was asked and if he wanted he could have refused to answer, why did he have to consign the nation to the dogs, and if the nation was in such a state it was because of dirty old men like him.

The scene suddenly changed from a simple, albeit stupid, argument to one where feminine honour was involved. Needless to say, whenever women are involved, this argument also developed into fisticuffs. The two guys traded blows, people around them either rushed in to separate the two or shrank back to avoid ill-aimed shots. A general melee followed with commensurate uproar.

A station was fast approaching and the people desirous of alighting were collecting their bags from the overhead racks and pushing their way towards the doors. One such man had his umbrella stowed away in the rack where the fighting was going on. He stretched above the melee, retrieved his umbrella, thwacked the fighting duo four times on the heads with it and pushed his way out of the train.

Cheers to ake mumbai trains!

Oops! I did it again..

I'm not in the habit of quoting Britany Spears. (I'm not even sure if that's how you spell her name and perfectionist that I am, I'm not even bothering to look it up.) In any event, I did do it again, I bought another book. Here I was accompanying TK to Landmark to buy a "I love you" card when I passed Vikram Seth's An Equal Music sitting pretty on the showcase. Now RM has been talking about this book for ages. Needless to say, it was rushed over to the billing counter and ended up in my book collection. I started reading the book that night... without really understanding a thing.

Before I learned to read, I used to sit in my dad's rocking chair with my favorite Noddy and his friends book, which I could recite from memory as I turned the pages. When I thought somebody was listening, I'd shout "I'm reading, I'm reading." Nothing has changed since then, only now I'm shouting, "I'm comprehending, I'm comprehending."

I can no longer read with patience or with any critical faculty; in fact, I can no longer read a book from cover to cover. I continue checking out books because I like the titles, and I continue racing home with them, fanning through the pages and waiting for wisdom to poke me in the eye. I read a book pacing the floor or eating a meal, seizing on an zippy quotation to transcribe into this notebook, somehow convinced that if I write it down, I not only understand it but came up with it myself

This is taken from Instant Karma a novel by Mark Swartz. Good stuff...it's written as the diary of an anarchist bibliophile who is plotting to blow up the Harold Washington Library Center, in Chicago. "Burning the books will liberate them", he believes. Footnotes and references abound. More excerpts later if I feel like it!!!

Disgusted!!

Either I'm a very bad communicator or there are just too many morons floating around. Why do people try to read between the lines, and why do they just base their assumptions on a few random words? Words that don't make any sense when taken out of context. And why, just why the hell does any tiny, inane remark have to be blown out of proportion and presumed to be your motto, your goddamn creed? Is it just me, or does anyone else have the same problem, or even just understand what I'm talking about? I'm just going to have to figure that one out myself. And for the sake of my own sanity, I'm going to think of myself as poor communicator till then. If nothing else, the thought might just propel me towards self-improvement.

Pettiness runs rife all around you and not even in this impersonal, desensitised, sanitised environment are you spared of it. Pettiness never surprised me before but now when I see the extent to which some people will go, it just amazes me. Don't know how to make yourself look better? Steal someone else's sunshine. Don't have anything to say? Take an if, but, and, or from somewhere else, fill in the blanks and blow it out of proportion. It saddens me the way people always assume you're talking about them.

Carly Simon said it so well, You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you, don't you... I actually feel sorry for their pathetic souls. They hear unsaid things over static, read unwritten things on clean white backgrounds, feel unemitted vibes in bright, clear sunshine and think every observation, recommendation or accusation is about them. And no, they don't even see the difference. I just have one thing to say, if the shoe fits pal, yeah please wear it. Sometimes you just have to spell it out.