On falling sick after getting drenched!

I got drenched in rain a few days ago and quite liked it. The next day, I went around my routine sneezing and the day after, fell sick. I do understand that it would've been tough for the rainman to digest that a few guys were rejoicing when he was working his ass off, co-ordinating the clouds and wind and sending down batch after batch of rainwater. It is like when you have your holidays but your dearest play-mate has his exams going on. You are bored but you flaunt even your boredom to piss him off. And he considers the most rhetoric of flaunts to be the irresistible of tempting devils. This time likewise, the rainman seems to have taken it a bit too personally, my rejoicing seems to have been perceived as a taunt. As if telling me to behave, he seems to have sent a few drops of raindrops on me with some deadly bugs. I know what he was thinking then. 'You cockroach, you enjoy my shower alright and you go and put a post on your silly blog about it to rub salt in my wound? Eat this, then. Go influenza, corynebacterium and staphylococci!!!' Yeah. You've had it. I fell sick. You got me by the balls. You win. Wait till I taunt you next time with a raincoat on.

Getting up on time

'Time' is a cold and unforgiving taskmaster. It gives us that dreary chore of routine and lashes its twin whips of day and night with unfailing exactitude. Everyday the alarm goes off in the morning. The tone of it has become so familiar to me that just the beginning of the beep makes me curse and mutter involuntarily. Snooze. I recede into that dreamy borderline of sleepy bliss when the alarm sounds again. Snooze. Before I can stop my muttering this time and step into the dream world, my mom reminds me of the time and urges me not to be late. At least today, she says. So I get up, get ready and start off.

For the next half an hour the entire world appears to me cruel and heartless. All of it created by the cruelest of the lot - time. Can't it wait for five minutes? That's all I ask. 5 minutes of extra sleep. And then another 10 minutes. That is all. Extra minutes of sleep, with the number of minutes strictly in an arithmetic progression with a common difference of 5. What is it with time? It runs fast when we want it to stay and barely moves when we want it to fly by. It moves at the speed of light years per second when I watch good movies but treads at millimetres per millennium when my grandmother lectures me. I'll have my revenge on you some day or the other, time. I'll make you suffer like you make me. All in short time. Until then, I'm just biding my time for the right time to tackle your tricks, you time!

Over familiar through over use

The existing banality of it all is tiring. So there was this day out, when some of us went to watch a movie. And there was the familiar friends circle, a bunch of cool well-educated guys with that local stamp that makes their behaviour all so charming. I remember adoring these guys during my school days and some of my most memorable sporting days were with them. 9 hours a day of cricket during the summer, evening football games during high school, that 25 km cycle ride and a 3 hour soaking ritual in a swimming pool during weekends (yes, absolutely like buffaloes) and that glorious first day-first shows at the end of which we walked out like superheroes, cape and all.

So I met some of these guys after a long gap for a movie. Everyone was placed now and they came with their usual style, bella figuras with funky bikes, casual attitude and a walk like they own the place. We started our chatting and catching up and I realised that they still were the 'local machas' with that lovely stain of the streets of Madras on them. They were hooting and whistling and amusing people but to my surprise, there was an overdose of swearing. The gang was sans my usual close friends. If they'd come, it'd have been like that wonderful football game that Ayyampettai Arivudainambi Kaliyaperumal Chandran graces with his presence in Thillu Mullu (what with all of us having to lie to our bosses for getting off early to make it to the afternoon show).

But what started this way turned topsy-turvy in moments. The guys, I soon realised, were mouthing the same insults at each other and laughing for over-refrigerated and cold storage-d jokes. The laughter was indifferent and mirthless and was way too on-your-face. You say 'fuck' at the right moment once, it makes me smile. You say it 5 times, I shrug, you say it 10 times, it makes me feel uneasy, you keep saying it over and over, I just feel like walking away from your yammer and giving you the one-finger salute. And that's exactly how I felt amidst the group. Without my usual friends who jest at each other gracefully and stretch their imaginations miles apart to act out funny scenarios and creatively taunt the stronger guys in a way that makes the insulted, insulting and the spectators to laugh along and together, these guys were just foul-mouthing again and again putting on a loud exhibition of their shallowness and stupidity. And the situation slowly deteriorated from charming to boring to vulgar and to downright grotesque-ness. I was hanging around trying to conceal my frustration of having wasted a rare free afternoon and ruefully thinking of some blissful hours of sleep I could've caught up on. And then the movie started! Boy, was I relieved! And the movie, at least, turned out to be lovely. That was a real lifesaver. When we came out, the guys kept at it, relentless as they were, criticising the movie, the seats, the crowd. I edged away from the godforsaken group and got back home, deeply disillusioned. What a goddamn waste it is to be so living, as Sir Walter Scott puts it, to disappear into the vile dust whence they sprung; unwept, unhonoured and unsung!

Yelelo Ailasa - Hauling up the moottais!

Again, a post about what happens right around us. Why do construction workers in Chennai, and I presume also other parts of India, (especially women, often with no slippers) climb many many stories carrying loads and loads of bricks and sand in baands? (for those who don't know chaste urban thamizh, baand = a concave metallic carrier instrument used for transporting building materials like cement and sand).

Why can't they use a pulley (which is a primitive iron age tool) from the top of the building to pull these loads? Is it to generate employment and use the excess unskilled human capital that India has in abundance? Nope. Surely, the building contractors don't give two hoots about such stuff. Then is it that pulleys are costlier than manual labour in India? Negative, again. This certainly can't be the case. Has the thought not occurred to the construction guys till now? Nobelium, yet again! After employing all those limited probability skills at my disposal, taking into consideration 5000 years of India's civilisation, over 1.2 billion brains inhabiting it at present, this seems highly improbable.

What then is the reason, I wonder. I can't figure out the reason. May be I'm again being that ignorant superficial onlooker who doesn't really understand why things work the way they do. But I was relieved to see that such a machine (do forgive me for my lack of imagination in civil/mech. engineering terms), obviously more advanced than a pulley, was employed in the premises of the Anna Centenary Library. I managed to get a snap of it in operation, though it meant waiting for some minutes and enduring some awkward glances.

But what didn't change was this.

Ore Galeej baa!

Welcome to Chennai. Smellcome, rather! I'm a product of Chennai, totally. But of late, there are two things about this city that has been tickling my tolerance very much. So here are those tolerance ticklers (TTs), listed in descending order of their intensity and score in the tickle-o-meter.

No. 1. The horror of spit: (Tickle-o-meter scale - 8.3)



Ah, you see this in all varieties, kinds, colours and is often preceded or accompanied by a range of highly vocalised throat sounds. There are amateur and professional spitters. Professionals are somewhat tolerable, but the amateurs are real killers. They don't streamline their spit like the pros you see. Especially when you travel in a crowded suburban Chennai train, you find these sprayers come out before you in footboard and bless their fellow passengers with a liberal spray of half a litre of a maroon coloured concoction. They miss holi now and again, I guess. In the trains, autos, buses, lifts, stairs, malls, platforms, markets and roads, it is there. It is here, it is there, it is every-bloody-where. Why doesn't the Indian government do us Chennai-ites a favour and name this place the Spiti valley instead of giving the coveted name to that ugly place in the Himalayas? After all, we'd be proud to call ourselves the 'spitites'. If early English rhymers visited present day Chennai, they'd probably come up with a rhyme like this:

Old MacDomer had a Pan Parag,
Eee - I - eee - I - O
After that he had a beeda,
Eee - I - eee - I - O,
With a spit spit here, and a spit spit there,
here a spit, there a spit,
everywhere a spit spit.
Old MacDomer had a Pan Parag,
Eee - I - eee - I - O..........

No. 2. St. Autodriver: (Tickle-o-meter scale - 7.6)



These spiritual people wear khakhi instead of white or saffron and are a product of the Autostand monastery. They are probably the second best known saints in Chennai after St. Thomas. There are five unbreakable vows that the St. Autodirivers follow. These are:

1. Charge five times the actual amount.
2. Never ever run your meter.
3. Scold and ridicule other vehicle-users, in a vulgar way, if possible.
4. Follow Heisenberg's Auto Priciple: Never allow any other vehicle to use the same road at the same time conveniently, when you're driving your auto.
5. Fight for more money once you drop your passenger off.

In keeping with the proud tradition of the Spitites, they also spit at every possible traffic signal. When they follow these rules meticulously, they are raised in the Autostand Monastery's heirarchy as follows:

Autoteur - Beginner
Automoboil - Rising star
Maverickshaw - Top notch - pain in the right place - maverick of the auto stand.

I do strongly recommend these two totally heartening experiences for tourists who visit Chennai for the first time. Don't you dare miss them or mess with them!