Preparing To Leave

is far more intense than leaving itself (which latter involves walking out the door, hugging rosy, letting the liftman handle your luggage, turning the music in the car way up, and not looking back).

this time around it has brought dinners, lunches, endless cab and bus rides, gmail chat and facebook and email ad infinitum, coffees, last-minute errands like new glasses and backing up data, switching phone lines in advance so that you're wired when you get there, constant to-do-listing, inevitable phone tag with people you want to talk to, a cough and cold of the deflating/debilitating sort you haven't had in years, not much reading, not much family time, not much rest. the constant checking of your ticket to make sure you're flying when you think you are. also: distancing yourself from the right people, and the unsettling feeling that whatever you're doing right now you're doing for the last time in a while.

in the more immediate sense, it means realizing you have way too much jewellery (and how the heck did you fit it all in when you came back last september?) because it takes 25 minutes to pack it all, and hunting frantically for the chess set you got for your birthday last year that sat on a shelf for months, boxed and waiting to be lovingly stared at again one day in good company, and now suddenly cannot be found.

i'll only sleep well on the plane now.

*ah-chhhhooo!!*

Behold The Great Indian Male Double Standard

(GIMDS for short. i would try for a more attractive short form, an acronym, even, but this is the best way to put it.)

warning: contains spoilers. do not read this post if you want to watch the movie it's about.

anurag basu's life in a... metro (which btw should win an award for the most poorly-named film of the year) is another indian director's attempt at a love actually-esque ensemble romance. this time, though, it's set in bombay rather than london or new york, and is supposed to be dark rather than k-jo-variety-cheesy. (oooh.)

ok, so you have to give the man credit for the requisite couple of genius moments -- the phone chain that erupts from rahul's trying to organize evenings at his (literally) pimpin' pad, the overhead of neha's slow but clearly disgusted retraction of her foot while ranjit is on the phone with his wife getting out of attending his own anniversary party, monty telling shruti ("shoottee") to let it all out on the roof, then her realization that she should "take the car out of the garage"...

most of the rest was, well, shallow and/or unreal. traffic jams galore i can understand. but not so much the obvious brokeback mountain reference to hidden homosexuality. a high-speed horse-taxi-auto chase ("rahooooooooooooooooooool!"). a large number of songs featuring middle-aged rockers standing on street corners/at elevations with guitars as pedestrians pass by, un-curious. tearful mulakaats at crowded train stations. motorbike rides around powai (that's not the real city, kthxbye.) dharmendra coyly biting his lip. cheesy dialogue about "pyaar ki khushboo" and glass-elevation-aided "mere baap ne yeh ghar banane ka sapna dekha tha lekin uska dum ghut gaya". slutbag red lights at some guy niruddh's house.

and why is everyone so close-knit? the sister-in-law lives with phenyl-glugging girlfriend who's having the affair with the dude who's married to the sister. dude who's in love with girlfriend who's having an affair with other dude happens to work for said other dude, and as a drum-it-in consequence misplaced cell phones cannot possibly be returned discreetly. uhhm, yeah, bombay is a village, but these were pretty blatantly elaborately-arranged coincidences.

what i really couldn't stand, though (and here we get to the point of this post, parenthetical basu-bashing done) was the feeble state of post-millennial women's lib. when flowy-skirt-wearing shikha brandishes the emasculatory facts at her husband in no uncertain terms -- that she gave up her career for her marriage, and that if she were to start working again, she would make more money than he currently did, and that he dare not ever talk to her like that again -- i thought: "yowzah. go, you." when she starts seeing this aakash guy, i raised an eyebrow at her waffling and hesitation. after all, as he says, she is a person -- and a person with an exquisite dress sense and perfectly-coiffed hair, plus no pit stains despite frequent train travel (also, no apparent childcare duties) plus a cheating, lying husband, to boot! she deserves happiness, too! of course she should... but no, there's the whole bharatiya nari guilt-trip "i have a family, main unke naam ka sindoor pehenti hoon" complex to deal with, so rather than collect her purse on her way out, she jumps out the window and hops in a cab to versova, skimpy sari blouse and all, never to see him again.

then comes the beyond-tragic climax: ranjit's paranoia about being tattled on by shruti (and a well-timed whine about "mummy kabse ro rahi hai" from their apparently-entirely-dispensable child) leads him to confess to shikha that he has been having an affair with neha for the last two years. he says it was a mistake, that it's in the past. he asks her if she will forgive him. she walks to the kitchen, her back to him. no response. then she tells him that shruti hadn't said anything. (i almost expected the asshole to say, "well, in that case, i was kidding! i didn't really have an affair with a girl with a lopsided smile and a giant pock mark on her face! hahahaha!" but that would have been too fantastic, even for a far-fetched hindi movie.)

then she confesses, for her part, in tears already, that she wasn't at the movies with shruti the other day. that she has been seeing this guy for 4-5 weeks now. that nothing happened. she collapses into his arms.

he says, "it's ok."

(i was surprised.)

and then, a 180: "tum uske saath soyi ho?"
"did he use my bedroom?"
"bacchi to meri hai?"
dishes are smashed to the floor. (ahh, there's the asshole that we knew lay underneath this calm front!)

more tears. guess which of the two is supposed to feel guilty for having committed adultery.

(she did, after all, say that she feels like a slut...)

[is this art imitating life, or life imitating art?]

next thing we know, ranjit has moved out and is ready to take up with neha. shikha keeps the apartment and the child. aakash writes to her to tell her that he is leaving the country and wants her to go with him (he therefore wants her to meet him at their usual spot at the railway station). shikha tells her ever-obedient daughter to do her homework, and is just headed out the door, purse in hand (ostensibly to make a happier life for herself, offspring be damned, the catholic maid's there, na?), when... there stands ranjit, who has been ditched at the last minute by his young assistant/nymphet, and has decided to crawl back home injured and pathetic.

too-young-to-get-that-her-father-is-pond-scum daughter shrieks, "papa!" or "day-deee!" or some such.

at that moment, it was game over. i already knew the contents of shikha's tearful "farewell forever, i have a dead marriage to continue" speech to aakash.

be it known to all the men in my future love life: i may be from bombay, but if you cheat on me, i am not so going to do a shilpa shetty.

Ummmmmmmmmmmmm

i don't know if any other unfortunate souls fall into the same unsuspecting demographic as i, but our airtel landline regularly subjects us to spam -- automated phone calls that cause you to say hello at least twice before the stupid canned music kicks in with some sort of unnecessary marketing message right after.

usually it's something to do with buy something and win something else. i never stick around long enough to find out. but at least the message will start with a fairly normal greeting, like, "hum aapko ek naye offer ke baare mein bataana chahte hain..." (i'm discounting the long-drawn-out, mis-emphasized and highly enthusiastic "hell-looo!" that is usually the first warning sign of do-not-call-ignoring misery to come.)

but, wait for it,

this time the message was, "hello! kya aap in garmiyon main feel kar rahe hain hot, hot?"

(i kid you not, this is verbatim, including the comma which indicates a pregnant pause of just the right length.)

now i wish i had waited to hear more. only the prospect of permanent brain damage scared me enough to click the "end" button on the phone.

airtel clearly needs a life.

Medical/Tourism

i am headed out of town again tomorrow -- the 5th time i've packed and left bombay in 2007. i'm super excited, especially about dharamshala and the solitude.

after my last ridiculous 6-cities-in-15-days tour, though, my back isn't in the best of shape (sciatica, schmiatica), so i went to get x-rayed this evening, and will have pictures of my lumbar-sacral region in my possession in a few hours so i can figure out whether i'm ok to travel or not. that is indeed cutting it close, but i don't seem to have enough time for anything these days.

more impressively, though: where else in my known world could i have gotten 3 x-rays for the princely sum of ~$15 (which included an ugly purple kaftan to wear during, and a sweet maharashtrian girl to gently adjust me on the x-ray table)? nowhere. compare this to having to pay over $100 to see a doctor in manhattan for all of 11 minutes.

no wonder the government asks on landing cards whether you are coming in on a medical visa. this is incredible india's least-yammered-about big draw. who wants the beaches of goa and the dunes of rajasthan and the rhinos of kaziranga when you can have the smell of antiseptic for this cheap!? :P

(yes, i'm being facetious. i'll take the stupas of mcleodganj for the weekend, please.)

Slackerface

i'm not going to apply for that last fellowship (yeah, the prestigious one that's sat on the to-do list and mocked me every time i looked at it for the last 3 months.) bite me.

for one thing, the deadline is feb 1 and i've been super late getting on the ball (although i have noone to blame but myself). secondly, the fact that i don't have to apply is a huge relief (almost all the programs i've applied to will offer me full financial support for 5+ years if i'm admitted and choose to attend). thirdly, the financial aid forms total 18 pages, and require extensive sets of USD figures i don't have. fourth, and corollary to the first and third points, dad -- whose expert skills i need to help me fill half the stuff out -- will shoot me if i tell him i need to start working on this now for submission by next week.

but as if all this wasn't enough to deter my erstwhile good intentions, the actual application totals 11 pages, and contains topic after essay topic (beyond the usual why do you want to pursue this graduate degree, what exactly do you want to study, and why have you picked x university in which to do so) that i don't particularly want to write about:
"what motivates you? how and why?"
"describe a time you were under pressure to make a critical decision. how did you respond? what was the impact of your decisions? faced with the same situation today, would you do anything differently?"
"discuss a piece, or pieces, of art, literature, music, or film which you created or in which you have participated. why is it meaningful to you? what have you learned?"
"comment on the following quote: "when admissions officers gather to create a freshman class, there is a large elephant in the room," wrote jennifer delahunty britz, in the new york times last week [march 23, 2006]: "the desire to minimize gender imbalance in their classes." britz, the admissions dean at kenyon college, wrote that her institution gets far more applications from women than from men and that, as a result, men are "more valued applicants." – chronicle of higher education; march 27, 2006"
and worst of all:
"what are your long-term career plans?"

(there's also a narrative autobiography, but we won't even go there.)

if you find yourself dying to work on questions like these, please go get your head checked. asapkthxbye.

yes, it's a lot of money, but frankly, at this stage, all i really want to do in life is watch salaam-e-ishq, go to goa next month, and take naps when i'm not randomly counting from 1-100 or conjugating simple verbs for french class. or eating blueberry cheesecake at moshe's.

mmmm, cheesecake. far more interesting than fellowship applications. non?

I Just Dream Ran!

(well, i for one dream walked, but i'll let that slide.)

<http://mumbaimarathon.indiatimes.com/>

6 km in a little over an hour ain't bad when you've spent the last few months being completely lazy and inert. and bombay is so awesome that when slowpokes like you finish, sweating and pink in the face, you are surrounded by thousands of other people all around you who are shouting and cheering and clapping and dancing and singing and waving pom-poms and sparking off little bursts of confetti and celebrating the spirit du jour rather than dissecting such trivial things as timings.

pick@flick[r]: <http://flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/365718310/>

good times, right from the newfound bounce in my skechers to the post-race tottering off to the bombay gym for pineapple juice.

Barbie Girl

of course, noone can ever match aishwarya rai in dhoom:2, but i feel like, for me, i'm coming pretty close. guys get to just shower, shave, throw on some clothes, spritz on some cologne, and leave, but it's unbelievable all the stuff women go put themselves through before they step out for the evening, come november-december.

- pick out clothes, jewellery, shoes and accessories well in advance (and discuss them endlessly with worried mother)
- go shopping, find nothing satisfactory
- go shopping again
- return first-round purchases in deference to secound-round purchases
- call tailor, send outfit out to get stitched (embroidery, badla-work, etc sold separately)
- haggle over outfit delivery date ("nahin, nahin, raju bhai, aise kaise kaam chalega, pehenneka hai, humko parsonh hi mangta hai!")
- briefly wonder why all tailors seem to be called raju, chhotu, or the entirely-ambiguous "master-ji"
- pedicure
- manicure (although i confess that i'm saved from that fate, because i have no nails to speak of)
- facial
- wax arms, legs, underarms, and assorted parts of face and body as necessary
- pluck/thread eyebrows
- thread upper lip
- cry from pain of threading
- bleach face, stomach, back for the purposes of photogenic-ness and small purple/blue/pink choli du jour
- call the tailor to say it's T-3 and where the hell does he think he is?
- pensive 20-minute shower
- wash, dry, and straighten hair
- try on outfit that has finally arrived, huff in dismay that "this was bound to happen", give back to tailor who sits in poor light near kitchen and makes last-minute adjustments to outfit, inevitably muttering under his breath that he should have stayed in the gaav
- use assorted gels, lotions, creams, during and after bath for smooth skin and glowing face
- struggle into clothes, stare at mirror critically, wonder where that extra weight suddenly came from
- apply makeup
- stare at mirror haplessly, tell family to wait, more prep time is needed
- hack at eyebrows which have somehow grown asymmetrical in the last 8.5 hours
- make sure earrings have backs well-attached to prevent slippage
- change outfit choices at last minute (if out of town, wish desperately for items that cannot possibly be delivered before the function begins, even by hanuman) and repeat as many of the steps above as are necessary
- stare at mirror disconsolately
- viciously jab at forehead with bindi
- totter out the door in heels
- run back up to collect forgotten item (cell phone, watch, house keys, or similar) while liftman waits, inevitably muttering under his breath that he should have stayed in the gaav
- plaster fake smile on face for camera
- repeat through february

My, Do People Talk!

i don't even know how it got out there.

(that i'm engaged, that is.)

the "mashi net" works in mysterious ways.

Ugh

i just got a facebook message from this random guy from IIT roorkee.

the message said "hello simi how are you?"
(which made me grimace)

then i looked at the guy's profile picture.

entirely undesirable pick@flick[r]: <http://flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/255519190/>

pretty grim, huh?

that's just half the ridiculousness.. there is also the following proud statement:
The Favourite Music goes as per the mood i can never stick to some or the other type of music regularly most of the time you can find Enigma being played in my room...!!! Early in the morning ofcourse very few times i could get to see the sunrise....then it would be definitely Vocal or Carnatic.....after some time it would be Devotional Songs for few minutes...at all other times it could be any thing like, MLTR, Bryan Adams, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, Avril Lavigne, Linkin Park etc......else it can be some telugu and hindi music like A.R.R, Jagjeet, Special titles by Mukesh, Rafi.....etc....

this is not to mention that dexter's laboratory comes first on the list of favourite TV shows of an adult with a phd in physics... and that the chap is single and looking for relationships (big surprise, there).

tsk, tsk. if this is the kind of man i'm going to be subjected to through the india network....

(i am currently so repulsed that i am contemplating the possibility of a little craigslist-experiment-esque exercise, with one simple rule: if you harass me online, i'm going to expose you on this blog. but for my own sake i'm hoping the crazies and fuglies just stay in their own corners of the internetosphere, so that my blog will be saved the trauma and my hope of finding men worth my attentions does not get permanently extinguished.)

Ghar Ki Murgi (Dal Barabar)

my days, of late, seem to consist of noonish awakenings, lounging around in pyjamas, the consumption of plenty of (healthy but super-yummy) food, hours and hours spent reading trashy novels i borrow from the bombay gym library, gabbing on the phone, writing emails to friends and reading blog entries by the dozen, daydreams about vacations in random exotic locations (london to lakshadweep in .06 seconds -- a world record!), and exhaustion at the mere contemplation of some form of constructive activity (which when defined as shopping, going out drinking with friends, or going to work at my super-chill part-time job, can't really be called constructive at all!)

all in all, it's quite the good life.

i keep telling myself that this sort of thing is just what i wanted when i decided to come back, because in a year i'll be in grad school slaving my butt off and then i'll wish i had had even more time off, yadda yadda. thus, you gotta love it.

that said, i'm crazy -- because i'm not so sure i do. i don't know if i can sit still very much longer. i can foresee being totally rusty a year from now (i feel like i am already -- forgetting names, slower at brainstorming, unmotivated to solve the sudoku). and that's scary. so the various freelance job opportunities i'm entertaining (none of which i seriously solicited in the least, previous blog post aside!) sound like good ways to capitalize on my mad [insert field here] skillz and keep me busy.

other extracurricular activities for the next few months will inevitably include: explaining to people why i don't particularly want to get married/have kids/give up on the phd even before i begin, filling out application after online application proffering intimate details about my parents' degrees/income and my home/office addresses and my most profound academic goals, helping with wedding planning, pestering my parents to take me to goa/kashid/australia, and the mere (exhausting!) contemplation of more constructive forms of activity (such as swimming, working out, and daily walks at BPT... hah, fat chance).

for now: off to bed. another lazy day ahead. to misuse the phrase, i'm a ghar ki murgi...

I Have A Job

and it involved
-- no grovelling of any kind
-- a complete lack of obsession over cover letter wording and length
-- a short commute to the interview (although a bit of a wait before i was seen)
-- no ridiculous interview questions about where i see myself in five years
-- no sinking feelings about H-1 visas and associated travails
-- an immediate offer!

i don't even have a complete job description yet, but i must say that i already feel quite justified doing a little happy dance about it :)

JFK-LHR-BOM

From			To		Distance		Time
	JFK (40°38'23"N 73°46'44"W)		LHR (51°28'39"N 00°27'41"W)		5554 km		7:30
	LHR (51°28'39"N 00°27'41"W)		BOM (19°05'19"N 72°52'05"E)		7221 km		9:45

2 segment path: 12775 km
17 hours, 15 minutes

plus the almost-month of lagtime in between.

[pick@flick(r): <http://www.flickr.com/photos/girlfish1303/210248347/>]

thank goodness for, at long long last, knowing.

***

update, thursday, august 17, 2006:
flying business class. through delhi. it'll take an hour longer, but hopefully it'll be mildly more comfortable.

thank god for frequent flyer miles (kilometres?)

CityLurve: Bombay

home.

i just heard about the bomb blasts from an hour or so ago... i'm too far away to have heard the news live, or to have had my phone line jammed, or to have worried intensely and immediately about my friends who live in the burbs (which, fyi, are not the affluent, isolated clapboard-house constructs of metro america but the teeming, still-urban hearts of any indian city -- just further up on the rail map).

no tribute that i could write to bombay city would be eloquent enough at this point, when i am not around to witness the chaos and the comfort -- or to do the more regular things, smell the cologne and the day's catch, hear the human buzz and the hurtling buses, sit by the sea and think... so here's suketu "maximum city" mehta to do it for me (via a WSJ op-ed).

Hard to Digest

NEW YORK -- In a recent survey of global courtesy, Readers Digest found Bombay -- now officially called Mumbai -- to be the rudest city on earth. As a person brought up in Bombay, I might have been offended, if the same survey hadn't proclaimed the politest city in the world to be . . . New York. In the immortal words of Rudy Giuliani, when he was informed of the verdict of etiquette experts in 2001 that his was the nation's politest city, "What were they smoking?"

I checked to see if the survey was another one of the stately Digest's joke sections. But no, it's meant to be taken seriously and confirm the Digest's core mission: in 60 countries, in 21 languages, to reassure Americans about their superiority to the rest of the planet.

What was the Digest's evidence for dissing Bombay? People in the Indian megapolis flunk the survey's three tests of politeness: They don't say "Thank you," don't open doors for others, and don't help strangers pick up dropped papers.

Has anyone told the folks in Pleasantville that most people in India don't say "Thank you" after a transaction? They nod or wag their heads in acknowledgment. Nobody considers it discourteous. And in Bombay, professional doormen are paid to hold open doors in the kind of public buildings the survey was carried out; customers neither open doors for others nor expect others to hold them open for them. As for dropped paper, there's so much litter and so few garbage cans in Bombay that if a person drops a piece of paper in front of you, you would be justified in assuming it's because they want to get rid of it.

In quest of its exquisitely well-mannered New Yorkers, the magazine conducted its research entirely in what it quaintly considers a quintessential New York institution: Starbucks coffee shops. Not bodegas, or delis, or fried chicken outlets, where the results might arguably have been very different. It's not that people who like to pay three bucks for a cup of coffee at Starbucks are more polite -- only differently polite. In the less chi-chi parts of the city I call home now, they might not hold the door open for you, but they're more likely to help you out in finding a job or an apartment. The Digest concluded that the rich are more courteous than the scruffy. "It was prosperous cities that were at the top of our rankings." It is no wonder that, out of the 35 cities surveyed, eight out of nine Asian cities finished in the bottom 11.

I suggest that the Digest conduct a second survey, using my own measures of civic courtesy: If four people are seated on a commuter train bench designed for three, will they accommodate a fifth person? Will people smile brightly at a stranger's little kid in a restaurant, stopping by to say "How sweet!" -- even when the child is being noisy? And if people are eating in a train compartment, will they share their food with you? I bet Bombay would come out tops.

Though most Bombayites would consider the Digest's findings about as painful as a mosquito bite, an article accompanying might cause them to choke on their chapatis. In it, a Bombayite is quoted as saying, "In Mumbai, they'll step over a person who has fallen in the street." I'd like to think that the dear old Digest, which I grew up reading in India, doesn't really believe this grotesque view of the city, for in 1997 they published an excerpt from an article I'd written about the everyday courtesies of the Bombay trains:

"If you are late for work in Mumbai and reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, don't despair. You can run up to the packed compartments and find many hands unfolding like petals to pull you on board. And while you will probably have to hang on to the door frame with your fingertips, you are still grateful for the empathy of your fellow passengers, already packed tighter than cattle, their shirts drenched with sweat in the badly ventilated compartment. They know that your boss might yell at you or cut your pay if you miss this train. And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or a Muslim or a Christian or a Brahmin or an Untouchable. Come on board, they say. We'll adjust."

Now that's called opening doors for others.