Sri Rama Sen(e)ile vs. Mangalore

Suprising, shocking- Talibanisation of Mangalore – the media screamed from all rooftops. For someone who gets to know about the “news” as it breaks, this one got to me a little late but as most Mangaloreans I was outraged by the whole incident.

Just recently I was bragging about how Mangalore was slowly changing from when I was there and how Mangalore had the best hangouts etc. I spoke too soon!

But is this really a shocker to you all? We have a history of putting up with things, we let it grow to this.. We are to blame and some of us even sympathise with them; we did not say anything when they started to tell us what to wear in colleges and who it was appropriate to talk to, in the name of modesty and tradition they were forcing their Taliban regime on young minds. I was asked to let it go by friends and family. I felt betrayed then when I felt that no one cared enough they told me just do what they tell you to do, you go to college to study and not for a fashion show- I was just 16 then and it changed something in me. I felt smothered and I chose to run away, I was 16 I did not have what it took to fight the system. I knew such an atmosphere would not let me grow.

It has gone on for years and no one has cared to raise their voice against it. Many of you were sympathetic towards their cause and believed that the majority needed to be represented/ protected. There were kinds of theories in the air about how Muslim boys seduced young Hindu girls and eloped with them- so we were told don’t go to Saibeen, stay away from Muslims etc. we always sympathized with them! The so called protectors of culture and tradition!

Get my facts right you’ll say- well sure the Sri Ram Sene is a break away faction of the Bajrang Dal. But this is how it started we let them thrive and spread like a disease through our city. Shame on you Mangalore for not doing anything earlier!

Politicians at play

The BJP and the Congress are pointing fingers at each other and trying to gain political mileage from the incident. At this time what they need to do is stop grabbing the lime light from the actual cause! We want our Mangalore back! Arrest the culprits and make sure that something like this never happens again – the BJP and the Bajrang dal were quick to distance themselves from the whole issue. It’s a given that they are not from your party but they think on similar lines – just that intensity and the methods differ. You really need to re-think your hindutva and your take on tradition and culture. You seem to be upholding the very foreign values that you seem to want to protect your culture against this whole issue of a woman’s modesty and being fully covered up comes from what the mughals brought along. The purdah system if you may! It also has a very corseted Victorian tinge to it… our times and what you want to make of it, is similar and these are one of the things that the British left behind and you called it as your own. So is this really Indian culture that you are upholding?

And the congress do something more constructive than wondering how to gain political mileage out of this one- you have been in power too when all this was happening what did you do about it? Zilch! Do something better than bad mouthing the BJP, you have done squat in the many years that you have fucked our country royally. You dividing people on class lines are what’s lead to the other forces gaining power and exploiting the people who felt threatened by your vote bank politics.

No one gets to walk away from this – we demand action; squash these pseudo-culture protecting vermin once and for all.

The Media circus

This incident was ignored by the print media and was ushered into the spotlight only after the sensation hungry broadcast media saw some potential in it for higher TRPs. What ever the reasons behind it I am glad it got picked and I am glad people are angry.

But am compelled to question the footage of attack that I saw- how were the people who caught it on film aware of such an act transpiring? Were they informed about it? If so why did they not go to the Police first? What lengths can the media go for an exclusive? To all the people who say bravo to the people who caught it on film please consider this.

Us and them

All of us have condemned the violence against women. These kind of men who expect women to be “traditional” just want them to be dolls gift wrapped in saris, ones who are barefoot and pregnant and confined to the kitchen someone please sponsor a time machine for these men! The once who think beating up women is a tradition or a part of our culture – no time line would accept such vermin.

It could have been any of us, we could have been those girls!

The aftermath of these attacks will be that no girls will be allowed to frequent the pubs and discs in Mangalore. We will be scared and be forced into our shells, fearing another attack from the Sri Ram Sene. My advice to all women is – Please go to pubs and go on as business as usual; we can’t let them win. By being scared we will do exactly what they wanted – pubs will be male only and the women will be expected to sit pretty at home.

And if they do attack the pub that you are in let them have it – I know there is anger within all of you – use it right, use it in self defence. Break a glass bottle on their heads, pick up a chair and smash it into their spines! That is exactly what I will do if I come across them! Impractical as it may sound this is what I will do! I will not let this ruffians scare me! We will show them exactly how “traditional” we can get when they push us to such limits.

So are you again going to sit at home and say that this doesn’t really concern me? Or that staying out of trouble is the best option? Or that such issues and politics and the likes are for jerks? Then you probably deserve to put up with it – then don’t complain when these ruffians wreck havoc and hold your city to ransom.

It could have been any of us in that pub that day, we could have been those girls!

Its our Mangalore – lets get it back and lets show these vermin that they have no place in a town like ours!

(copy will be edited tomorrow and will be made more coherent)

Screw the real

I thought that if I did not have a happy thought to pen down, I would not write at all. But the misery has been over flowing lately. I keep to myself (or I think I do so, at least. Ok, I try real hard to) and see that the blue virus doesn’t get the ones around me too.
Last few days I’ve seen people raise my expectations about things and then just take it away from me. Nothing hurts more than wanting and then being told you can’t have it because you are not one of us. However hard I may try, I am not one of them.
I don’t belong anywhere and now since life is work and I don’t really have a life beyond that, I have to socialize with people I work with but somehow I am not one of them. My jokes and pop culture references are lost on all of them. So many witty jokes have died silent deaths because I had to explain them! I guess I expect too much of people, I will never have people who will get me. I feel all alone and I don’t like it one bit.
Maybe, I am being too much of a snob; but I know I don’t have too much in common with people I work with, you work with them you don’t have to be friends with them.
I still crave for company, it’s a real bad to be going through a needy phase. I just wish it would be like earlier, me, my books, my music (basic stuff, nothing interesting) and me all holed up in a room and transcending to my many imaginary yet more happier worlds. Screw reality, if this is the real world – I don’t want any of it.
I chose my option B, the alternate route; I wonder where I would have been had I chosen option A and the ways things are unfolding and me being neck deep in the depths of depression, I wonder if I made the wrong choice. It’s apparent that I would have found people who are like me there.
The people I work with now are nice. Nice, that’s it; it doesn’t cut it for me. I think I need to go out meet new people but that’s easier said than done. Now, it’s surprising that I am actually looking forward to a trip to the quaint little coastal town that I belong to; I am actually looking forward to seeing my family. Who would have thought I would get like this?
All relationships come with expiry dates; I have always believed that and maybe that’s why my pool of friends is dwindling. I don’t like to pretend and keep things going just because we were good friends ages ago and had the time of our lives. Close friends fade into “just” friends and then they drift further away to being acquaintances and then they are someone you know and you avoid them when they “hey, what you upto?” on gtalk because small talk is just one of the pretenses that ex-friends keep up with to tell themselves that we are still friends.

Goodbye, Sunshine. Ignorance is bliss.
… gee whiz I am dreaming my life away…

Die(t) another Day

Whoever said all good things in life are immoral, illegal or fattening knew his onions, cheese and chips! When thin is in and you find yourself on the wrong side of the weighing scale, you know its time for you to give up all those fattening good things this world has to offer. It’s not nice to wake up one morning only to find that your favourite pair of jeans refusing to go all around your waist! It was decided then and there that I needed to lose weight, I could not go up another size!

But my busy-lazy life leaves with no room for exercise (but plenty for this excuse), so I wonder what could be done to lose weight and lose it fast, without hurting my peace-loving limbs too much? So I thought I’d go for one of these fad diets everybody and his fat uncle keep talking about. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures. So I did a massive research (Google is God!) and while the green board in my room was full of diet dos and don’ts the next day, I imagined my depleting kitchen shelf frowning at the crowded piece of wood with envy.

So I went in for the seven-day diet or as it is popularly know the GM diet. As the name suggests it lasts for seven days and you have a different diet plan for all the different days – you eat only fruits the first day, vegetables the next and from then on you follow different combinations of foods that are allowed. You might think this is a diet equivalent of binging, but mind you, a lot many things are forbidden. And getting through this diet will need a lot of will power especially if all your friends insist on having a potato chips and vada pav theme party every weekend.

You are advised to have 8 whole glasses of water or more. I ate watermelons and oranges and had a lot of water with them. Suddenly, the ‘most desired’ place in my house was the loo. Also, it gave me a bad cold. Into day one and I was already looking for excuses to get out. The next day was vegetables – boiled and raw. I got through it just fine but I never knew vegetables actually taste like that in their original form. Thank God for all the spices and curries!

I stuck to the diet nonetheless with my cold in tow. The next two days where you were allowed to eat all the vegetables and fruits was fine because I’d got used to eating ghass-phoos by now. The next day required me to have several glasses of milk and eat up to 5-6 bananas. I don’t know why, but this infantine diet reminded me of my childhood and I kept calling my mom every two hours that day.

The fifth day was the hardest – the American version of it includes red meat but the Indian version asks you to eat a bowl full of rice and tomatoes the whole day! So my tastebuds had to unwillingly lift their many years-long ban on tomatoes. But after 5-6 of them, my tongue revolted violently like a young brat who’s let loose after being tied up for too long. I began to binge on whatever I could get my hands on and the diet ended. While I did manage to pull off a couple of kilos in the 5 day ordeal but the binging and celebrating made me gain back all I had lost in no time!

One fad diet down, I was not ready to give up. Next up on my list was the famous Atkins diet, the book was written in the seventies but the diet gained popularity recently with several Hollywood celebrities endorsing it. Like most fad diets this one requires you to give up a particular food group and now carbohydrates were made enemy number one. I liked the fact that I could eat all the paneer and all the meat that I wanted, as long as I don’t have carbohydrates - that meant avoiding bread, cereals, pasta and potato - the deal sounded good enough. So I feasted on paneer and meat – chicken, eggs, steaks, mutton kebabs. A few days into the diet and I did not notice any considerable weight loss but my body sure did respond to the over – indulgence by breaking out in boils. I had a harvest of pimples on my face. For it to clear up I had to refrain from eating meat for several weeks!

I lost all hope and almost gave up trying fad diets when I came across the chocolate diet. The name got me and I was sold, later I was delighted to find that it included pasta and popcorn. This sounded like the tastiest diet ever! But when I took a closer look, I found out that you could eat only a limited amount of chocolate, pasta and popcorn and that it did not let me have any coffee at all! Me without coffee would be a nightmare for both me and the people around me. So in spite of looking promising, I gave up trying this.

I even came across a few liquid diets that included drinking a particular version of chicken soup and cabbage soup all day? I’m sure it lands you in a soup! There were other diets like the Hollywood diet where you have to buy an expensive bottle of juice that is made up of various ingredients and you have to keep consuming it all day. I am sure it’s very light on the tummy but very heavy on your pocket! So I’m not going to try it. Another diet expected me to live off aloe-vera juice. But it’s a plant, not even a fruit! So there’s another one crossed out!

Then there are other curious looking diets like the instant noodles diet where you consume just that. I wonder if you lose weight here by getting sick by consuming too much maida! The other diets include the grape fruit diet which I am not going to bother trying (I wish they had a fermented grape diet instead, if you know what I mean).

Now that I’ve tried and failed at many of these diets I decided to consult a few nutritionists. Dr Anjali Mukherjee who said “people who are on fad diets for a long time need different kinds of diets to correct their eating patterns. Fad diets do not offer permanent solutions. They generally encourage people to go off one particular food group. This will be harmful in the long run and a person’s body can get overtly toxic. Mono-diets can even lead to many deficiencies and when stopped can even lead to weight gain. The only way to lose weight would be to understand your body chemistry, address all the deficiencies and taking the right amounts of vitamins and minerals that are needed for your body.” Oh man, I wish I’d visited her before I experimented with these fads! I’m worried my body is a bag of toxins by now. De-toxification diet, anyone?

For Nerdorina...

She’s a kurta clad, jhola swinging socialist who ridicules the selfish tendencies of bourgeoisie like me; she gets high on her ideals, philosophy and some other stuff (occasionally). She is tech-challenged and I’m the net savvy smart wit who writes detailed posts on my blog making fun of her goof ups.
Our conversations are not very friendly either. They are usually debates, which morph into fights by the end of the day. And people always ask for an encore. Our fights are laced with witticisms and profanities but are entertaining nonetheless to the onlooker, who might think we’re sworn enemies by the end of it all. We actually used to draw a small but dedicated crowd, which eagerly awaited our fights at Savera, a small restaurant near our college.
We’re like chalk and cheese. But curiously, chalk and cheese sometimes do get along like a house on fire, like we figured. And in the process are generated some crackling noises, bright sparks and unlikely moments of epiphany! If they made a movie about us they should call it when psycho met crazy.
Some relationships stretch longer than their designated expiry dates, I guess. We don’t call each other much, we don’t tell each other everything but find out everything about each other. She hugs everyone but I don’t let her hug me and run away the minute she threatens to hug me.
We piss each other off most of the time but we still look forward to meeting each other and having a whine fest with some fun thrown in. She sings, I croak along and that’s “rock and roll” for us. The music always played on as we talked about life and philosophy and grew up together. Without our conscious efforts and knowledge, these moments kept stringing themselves together to form an intriguing yet memorable chain of experiences, that people call friendship.
Our unconventional relationship is like a rock song that is sung out of tune but lingers on like smoke that hangs down heavily on the room. We have been the best of friends and the worst of friends. It’s now that we are in the danger of drifting apart, as we hit the fork in the road, that I realise how in spite of all it’s eccentricities, our bonding was special.
I wonder if the expiry date is finally here. Nothing lasts forever. There is no ‘forever’. She and I could be just a cherished memory that will silently fade away. But then, we do have the here and now today, so let the music play!
(Edited by Renu, the woman has a magic touch, she turned something depressing into something hopeful)

Remember the Snow Queen?

When its one in the morning and you cry for something as silly as not getting your daily fix of chocolates, you know that there is something terribly wrong with you. You wonder when things got so complex that you can’t really pin-point what’s bothering you. When did you get so fucked up? Or better still, how not to be fucked-up? How do you be happy like the people around you, people with their juicy snippets of gossip or their witty (or so they think) attempts at small talk, how do they do it?

The world seems different when you’re in your twenties; you see the world as it is; what’s real and what’s not suddenly dawns on you. Your dreams seem unrealistic; you abandon hope; and stop believing and you are stripped of all romantic notions that kept you going, not so long ago.

The rose-tinted glasses blow up in your face and a shard of it gets into your eye; its acts as an anti-body to all thoughts romantic; all hope; all faith. Remember the Snow Queen? At least the boy had someone who saved him; all he had to do was - feel and cry. That released the glass from the prison of his eye. That’s a fairy tale, in reality, no amount of crying gets that metaphoric glass out; nor does any alcohol or anything stronger if you like.

Maybe, the glass that seems so alien was always a part of us.

Notes about "it" (creature)

Our first meeting was in a hospital in Mangalore. I was introduced to this pink looking creature that was cocooned in a white bundle; they insisted that it was my little sister. I don’t recall what I felt then; but the pictures show me sulking; I was clearly was not happy. Maybe I had senses at a tender age of two that life would never be the same again.I was no longer the center of attention; I was no more the baby.

As she grew up and crawled all over the place she made a bee-line for my toys and everything that was mine; this continues to this day and I kindly return the favour by borrowing her things too. As we grew older we realized that we were polar opposites and we didn’t even look alike. This gave me a brilliant idea I told her she was adopted for she didn’t resemble anyone in the immediate family, I also added that she was a monkey my parents found hanging on the trees and they chopped her tail off and decided to raise her as a human. I guess she still holds this against me and we never got along. We did have a few rare moments where we bonded like the time when we dumped most of mom’s make –up into a bucket to make a witches brew or uniting against a common enemy; but they were rare.

Then came the challenging teenage years; the territorial battles continued and manifested themselves into fights that were both physical and verbal. She accused me of stretching her top; I blamed her for running my shoe; I raided her secret stash of chocolates and ate them all and she got mad and got her revenge by some way or the other but silly things like these turned our home into a battlefield and chairs tables and glasses were used as weapons. It was usually a kick, bite, scratch, pinch, punch and pull hair routine that we followed till we were tired or till some one gave up. This continued till I moved out; not having to look at each other everyday changed our relationship and I did miss my fight buddy a lot. No could hold a candle to her when it came to fighting.

I like the relationship that we share at present; we are not the best of friends but we are not enemies either. It’s more of a live and let live kind of an arrangement. We do talk and I think we are getting close to being friends; we may not share all our secrets but we do care about each other. Being the older one I take it on myself to guide and protect her and she does come to me for advice when she needs it. We still do enjoy a playful repartee and I sometimes refer to her as “it” or “creature” affectionately.

When I was younger I told my parents that they didn’t need to have her when they had me. But life wouldn’t have been the same without my sister.

(I wrote this for renu she asked me to write about a special relationship for sakaal times and this is what I wrote, this is the un-cut, unedited and flawed version)

This is for you,you and not YOU

Here I am on a Saturday morning wondering if am a princess or a bull or an ululus. I know am over-the-top paranoid today and the smallest of things upset me and I shouldn’t really care about what people say; If you’re reading, (I highly doubt it) know your not perfect nor am I ; I know am not smart enough or cool enough to be your friend anymore; people drift away, it happens. I had a very cheap, funny poem about you; it was a product of all my nastiness combined but I didn’t post it and doubt I’ll ever do such a thing. Goodbye, former friends and if me or some other people being miserable makes your day, go ahead and enjoy!

P.S.: we always saw right through your pseudo- intellectual airs. You’re fooling no one; you do have some talent hope you put it to good use. Adieu to you, all my fair weather friends, if our path do cross and you ignore my existence; know that I will smile for I know what you truly are…

I don’t know what your problem is lady; I don’t care about what you make for breakfast, dinner or lunch. I can very well survive without eating a meal or two and you don’t have to fuss over me skipping a meal. Don’t tell me my room is not neat enough- cleanliness is not exactly a virtue in my book. You can’t change me, so please give up. You can fix up all the matches in the world – but please spare me, getting married or having kids is not one of my lives goals and it will never be so. I still do love you but please don’t push me away. I am sure you have you can find better things to do than finds faults in me- it does not encourage but discourage. You will never get that. Will you?

You’re a saint; but I don’t want to be you. Girls dread turning into their mothers and that’s the stuff my nightmares are made of; that and the assorted bag of calamities that paranoid me makes up. You can do sudoku all day but please don’t ask me to pray or believe that is not how things work. If you’d read this you would say there’s too much negativity and that I should refrain from writing things like this. You’ve been my fan, my critic and my support but I’ve changed a lot and you don’t know me anymore, you don’t want to know me anymore. This bird flew out of the nest a long time ago.

I am not your little girl anymore. I have done a lot of things that little girls are not supposed to do; things that am not particularly proud of’. I chose not to be another frog in the well; and that’s when you realized that I existed and noticed me; I was gone before you knew it; that was five years ago. I admire you I look up to you – you will always be my hero but this is my life you can’t protect me forever. I love you and I’ll always be your little girl; nothing can change that but you have to let go. I may not do all the things you want me to do but I still want to make you proud, but I am lost right now and I have to find my way on my own. I will still ask for your advice when I think I need it. You just have to let this wild flower flourish by itself. I just hope you get to know the real me someday and I get to know you…

… I am just having one of those days!

The universe is out to get me today!