Are you what you are?

I have always thought I am a wonderful person, a philanthropist, an altruist, an awesome singer, an okay-ly cute girl with an adorable character. These are not stuff I have explicitly heard from all the people I encounter – some people I know have probably told some of these. But majorly, these are my own conclusions based on what I feel about myself. 

...I walk into a room and find a lot of creased foreheads and frowned lips, muttering under the breaths – probably cursing their bosses – and  I say some random stuff to someone and manage to crack up a couple of guys there. I walk out of the room feeling I am the best stress buster in the whole wide world, oh! Those cigarettes can go hang themselves in shame. 

...I look at a very old beggar, all shrivelled and shivering. I walk to the nearest hotel, buy him something for dinner and give it to him. He looks up at me gratefully and I smile at him and walk away feeling like someone pumped a lot of helium into me. 

...I remember a very difficult note from a Thyagaraja krithi and I hum it. Someone across the desk looks up at me in awe and says I am the best, second only to Sudha Ragunathan.  

...I wear kajal to work one day and someone says I look very pretty. I flash my teeth at her, thank her and quietly revel in the note of appreciation. I think, I know I can be a doll!

I do realise that the couple of guys I thought I made happy with my witty comments could’ve actually been laughing at my hair sticking up in wrong directions; that in my elation of having helped that one beggar, I ignored many more on the way; that the co-worker who appraised me for my musical talent was probably scoffing at me; and that the girl who called me pretty was perhaps, being satirical. But I choose not to wonder if what people tell me on my face is pretentious or if what I feel about myself is, in fact, what everyone feels about me too. I am not proud or vain. I am simply a person who chooses to be happy – with myself primarily. 

If someone looks at me down the length of his nose, I marvel at the length of his nose and don't get queasy at the dirty look he is shooting my way. I hop to my seat at work when I have had a happy morning (I don’t hop all the way, of course!); and if it bothers that one austere girl at my work-bay, I don’t really have to alleviate my expression of joy to appease her. (But this, in no way means, every time I feel light-headed I would scream my joy out and disrupt the sober, diligent work-environment that is expected out of a company like mine.)

I am what I think I am. I am most certainly not obdurate in my ways of living. But I am not going to let someone’s comment on my cartoon tattoo perturb my day.

All of us innately seek approval and appreciation from everyone around us, and sometimes from even those we have never known in our lifetimes. But isn’t it unfair to let that define you? We are meant to live in harmony with the world. And that does require making lives around us happier. But to satiate oneself only after everyone has declared he is happy with you is too taxing to even survive. I mean, there is just one ‘you’ in this planet. Shouldn’t you be the one defining what you are?  And if it means having to earn some unpleasant remarks along the way, so what!?

P.S: If you think I am too full of myself and if you are not someone I would be hurt to hear such a thing from, I would be privileged to politely ignore you. ‘Demarcation’, they call it.  

Triska-blah-blah...

Triskaidekaphobia – I like the sound of this word and I was going to name this article just that. However, due to its longish and multi-syllabled attribute, I chose to name this piece of writing “Triska-blah-blah”. This may also be interpreted as my humble endeavour to ameliorate the effort a reader will have to put in to correctly pronounce the title and in turn, to endear and impress my on-the-verge-of-being-termed-Extinct readers (Being in a Sales and Marketing domain does have certain profound unseemly effects on your head)

The multi-syllabled and complex word this post is based on means this: – “Extreme superstition regarding the number Thirteen”. Now though, I pray not to be looked down upon as a girl who holds the back of her palm to her mouth to suppress a scream when a black cat crosses the road. I am also not that girl who carries a horse-shoe in her purse for the want of good luck (there could be other reasons unapparent to the superstitious eyes for which I may carry a horse shoe with me. Escaping from a mob in a darkened alley, after having hit the robber with the horse shoe in my purse could be one of those obscure reasons) I am however, an unfortunate and consistent victim of the comrade of such superstitious enthusiasts. 

A passable narrator that I am, allow me to recount some such tales of my predicaments.

Incident 1: Come lunch break, we are at the canteen.  I take a spoon full of rice that was served and I shove it into my mouth. I chew. I recoil. The rice in my mouth reminds me of when, as a kid, I once tried to chew our carpet. Only, this was like a shredded carpet wet with yellow liquid, devoid of salt. I choke it down my throat and look around for the table where the little salt shaker is housed. It is on the table next to mine. I pat the shoulder of that table’s occupant, outstretch my hand and ask her to pass me the salt. Her eyes widen, her mouth turns into a humongous “o” and she inhales audibly for about 5 seconds. I only asked her to pass on the salt to me. I did not ask her to gorge her friend’s eyes  out with her fork. I look around me; shocked stares everywhere (wow I just rhymed!). I am at loss of words or apprehension before someone whispers into my ears and tells me, it is not okay to ask someone to pass the salt by hand, unless I want her to become my deadliest enemy. This one simple act of assistance, apparently, tends to jeopardize, stamp on and expunge anything that might be left of the relationship between the giver and taker of the broken crystals of Sodium Chloride.

The same, I was educated later, also applies to tamarind, chilli powder and oil. So next time, be warned before you ask someone for such a monumentally callous favour. 

Incident 2: It is 6.00 pm, and I have less than twenty minutes before the end of my office hours. I am running all around the place, looking for a colleague of mine. He is not a very close friend and people mostly consider him slightly demented. But I have to get some very important piece of information from him before he leaves from work. I finally locate him in a meeting room. Just as I enter, he is hurriedly leaving the place, off to elsewhere. I ask him “Hey! Wait. Where are you going?” The guy screeches to a surprisingly abrupt halt and looks up at me with his eyes ablaze and nostrils fuming. I, for a second, wonder if I cursed him, his family, his close friends, his neighbours, his neighbour’s parents and his puppy in that one innocuous question of mine. He says “How could you do this to me? I was going to ask my boss if I could get a week off for a vacation with my wife!” Meanwhile, I am still

gawking at him. He shakes an unsteady index finger and says “Oh don’t you dare pretend you don’t know! You knew that if you ask someone where he is going, just as he is leaving to do some work, he will fail miserably. Now I know for sure my boss is not going to permit me for that vacation. And if my wife breaks up with me because of this, it is all your fault!” I am still staring at him, my jaw half open as he storms out of the room. It is possible for one to be stark raving bonkers. He is. 

Note: That he subsequently did get permitted for a week-long vacation did not, unsurprisingly, persuade him to apologise to me any time after that. And, to this day, I smell a slightly charred odour when he glares at me. 

But this incident has not failed to incite in me, a sense of warning before I ask someone where he is going. So these days, I go around asking people the list of places, where they might decide to go to all through the day so that I won’t have to ask them just as they are leaving. And it has earned me some cool names like Aish-Wacko and Ms. Goofy (though I fancy only the latter).

Further encounters with people who reckon it is very unlucky to sneeze when someone is talking, who also find it lucky if the person sneezed twice under the very same circumstance, who stumble on a stone on the road and say they can’t move for another minute to enervate the bad luck generated by their stumbling, who won’t wear a black dress on a Friday or to a family festival, and other ludicrous cuckoos, have rendered me sceptical, or maybe even indifferent. I think someone from the world of science should take this up for study, as a basis for their thesis (I did it again! I rhymed without meaning to!! ) and find out how bizarrely futile people could be.

On a conspicuously noteworthy contrary, Triskaidekaphobia leaves me a tad vacillatory. With the onset of the year 2013, my “writing” took a serious blow. It coiled, shuddered into tumultuous seizures and fell unconscious. It woke up groggily only after it was very sure that the year 2013 was well gone. Even now, my “writing” has a serious medical case of Triskaidekaphobia. It still shakes uncontrollably and does bewildered gestures when I talk about the year 2013. 

Nonetheless, the word Triskaidekaphobia still appeals to me. It sounds like I am conducting a mini orchestra with my tongue, upper palette and lips when I utter that word. Triskaidekaphobia, triskaidekaphobia, triskaidekaphobia...

P.S: The clip arts I flick from Google search never let me down! Thanks to those sites that let me  download water-marked copies of their images!

Drops of Jupiter

“Oops! Sorry”, I told and turned around simpering. I’d plugged in my earphones deep into my ears. It was my favorite song and I made sure that what I was singing wouldn’t be audible to the people around me. This is not the first time this had happened to me; only, this time it got a bit too audible that people 4 cabins from mine actually stood up and peered in my direction to find the source of that grotesque squeal. It was a high note and I had tried real hard to keep my voice low that ultimately what had escaped my lips happened to sound strangely like a fat mouse being strangled by a debilitated cat. Quite immune to such humiliations, that I am, I went back to my work. But the thought refused to leave my mind. ‘EAR PHONES, EAR PHONES, EAR PHONES…’ maybe I should let the haunting thought leak out of the neocortex of my brain, through my finger tips via the keyboard onto Microsoft Word.

Ear-phones have become the newest inclusion in our list of ‘Oh-I-can-never-live-without-it-you-know’ gadgets. Earlier they used to come as feeble metal arcs supporting a pair of flimsy sponged circular disc large enough to cover the external auditory meatus and an awkward part of your pinna. (Ah! Come now! I really couldn’t find another term to call them). Later they started getting bigger as well as smaller at the same time. The huge ones began serving the pilots while the smaller ones went to the cool dudes. Well, some to hot ones too. Ever since, there has been too much talk about it. Or maybe not!

I happened to hear from one of my friend’s friend’s friend that people have started turning into zombies- not the flesh tearing, berserk, havoc creating type, but the prosaic, listless, inanimate sort. I mean, they don’t smile at each other or form gangs or trip the solitary geek zombies and watch them fall flat on their faces and laugh. Well, you know what I am talking about. Now getting back, I was quoting one of my friend’s friend’s friend. She claims that people have become more like zombies, each with a pair of ear phones- not to mention, they imperceptibly happen to get stuck with the wax in the earlobes. She was upset, people hardly spoke to one another, or smiled. To be annoyingly redundant; maybe that is why she called them zombies. Apparently it took a lot of consoling and cajoling from my friend helping her ameliorate from her bewilderingly dismal discovery. Two weeks later I saw her in a bus station; waiting for a bus obviously. But that was not all. She didn’t smile at me. She dint wave back a ‘hi’ when I did. She had ear phones plugged in. Ah! The irony of it!

In addition to being the source of perturbation for a few of my friends, the ear phones have also caused some evil aberration in some. The other day I happened to over hear from one of my other friends that he always wore ear phones when in a crowded party. He claimed that, this way, in addition to being able to pose himself as one of the cool dudes, the smaller ear phones landed with, he was less necessitated to indulge himself in the ultimately stupid conversation a group can head to. He also says that one major advantage of being in a crowd with an ear phones is that people tend to consider you momentarily deaf and you might even get to hear stuff that you shouldn’t be or at times wouldn’t. He was all glee that one such incident did happen, when he overheard his classmate tell one of her primetime-gossiper friends what about my friend annoys her the most. From then on, he has been royally picking on her. Tut tut... Very unhealthy.

Despite this common characteristic- ‘zombieism’, the ‘ear-phoners’ as I would like to call them can be categorized into two spectra:

First are the ones that seldom care about their ears and let the music blare out so loud that sitting ten feet away from them, you would still be able to hear the music as loud as if you were in a rock concert. I wouldn’t be so much concerned about their ears if the cacophony from their screeching ear phones had not bothered me. It just rendered me curious. And what annoys me the most is that, in case they happen to break out of the trance, and wish to communicate, these absolute morons tend to holler at you as if you were diagnosed with an ear cancer and had been stone deaf all your life.

The second category consists of those that are too very concerned about their ears. Incidentally, they drop their volumes to such levels that all they manage to ear are occasional THUMPs and THUDs and at times even a few raw squawks that amount to being the highest pitch attainable by a violin. Plugging in their ear phones is a ritual. Music is optional. Would I put myself down if I admitted I fall under this category?

P.S: Now if you happen to be wondering what on earth ‘Drops of Jupiter’ has got to do with this article, nothing actually. It was the song I was listening to when I wrote this. I ignored one of my colleagues telling a ‘hi’ to me and didn’t smile at her, because I had my earphones plugged in.

To Bemoan and to Absolve

“Shut up, okay? I’m never gonna talk to you again. Get lost.” I banged on the phone, fuming. In the past one week we had hung up on each other more than what we had done in our 18 years of friendship. She is my best friend. She was in a new place and was finding it extremely difficult to accommodate herself to the new environment. She had chosen me to vent out her frustration. Not that I complaint of it, but she was not letting me help ease things for her. This is all I could stand. “If she doesn’t even try to pay heed to me, why should I even give a darn to what happens to her!”, I thought angrily. My brother’s mobile was playing Nelly Furtado’s  ‘All good things come to an end’. I thought miserably, our friendship was no exception too.

That evening my mood was so bad that I skipped my supper and went straight to bed. My sleep was very disturbed. It was late in the dusk. We both were sitting on our favorite bridge and talking happily just like good old times. As usual, she sat there squeezing my fingers just to see how much pain I could withstand. And I sat pretending it dint hurt one bit. I woke up from my sleep realizing it was all a dream. And I realized I was crying. I shouldn’t have done that. Not when she needed me the most by her side. I looked at the clock; it was just past 1.00 am. I called her up. I didn’t mind waking her up. All I wanted was her to know that I regretted having shouted at her and not having understood what she is going through. To my surprise, she picked up the phone in the first ring. She said “I knew you’d call Aishu. I’m really sorry. I should’ve been more understanding. I’m gonna try and listen to what you say. After all, you are my best friend.” She left me speechless. She had told all that I had intended to tell her. It felt great. We both spoke for another 40 minutes or so. And when I went back to bed, I was grinning recollecting all that we had spoken.

How many of us have gone through similar situations? How many times have we cried with that crunching feeling in our stomachs?  I bet everyone of us. When such a crisis rises, we pray for some miracle to alleviate our malady. But why is it that we flounder so much when it comes to apologizing? Why don’t we realize that before we conclude things about others, we should try and walk in their shoes? What obstinance stops us from forgiving?

It certainly is not very difficult to make new friends. But to retain them is paramount. To hold onto them throughout is profound. It is not every day that we find someone who accepts and loves us for what we are. After all, to err is human. It is these imperfections that make life beautiful.

Call up that friend who you had stopped talking to ages ago because of some silly misunderstanding. Browse through your mobile contact list. Make a surprise call to your schoolmate who was once your best friend but who you grew distant from cos you made new friends. To be the cause of someone’s smile is blissful. Make your presence felt. Make someone happy and feel special. Lets exile from within our shells of ego, and regret and make amends for all of our iniquities. After all, losing to a friend is not as bad as losing a friend. Is it?

What happens in a classroom..

Who calls classroom boring?? Certainly, I don’t. Please don’t consider me a ‘Padipist’ who is ever-allured to the foreign symbols embellished equations and has a high affinity to anything scribbled on the black board (I never understood why people call it a black board even when it is green). Since I find it extremely difficult to snooze with a source continuously producing an irregular discourse of noise, I prefer to look around and find what everybody else is doing.

Being a first bencher, I have an upper hand in creating a ‘Sincere student’ impression to the teachers in addition to being able to copy notes from the actual ‘Padipists’. When I look back, the teachers are not annoyed at me. Because they tend to think I am sharing my notes with them. Good thing. I get to take a sneak peek at the whole class.

The first benchers are mostly adjusting their spectacles, scratching their noses with the back of their pens and sometimes even staining ink on it, scribbling away furiously and making a detailed document that would go down the history. There could also be alienated species on the first row. They are waiting for the perfect time after the attendance has been taken, for the teacher to turn around so that they would get to sneak out of the classroom. Don’t raise your eye brows at this point. I know a couple of aliens who infested my class.

The second benchers are those who are either desperately craning over to look at the notes of the first benchers or stifling their yawns. There could be two prime reasons why a person can end up in the second rows. One: they couldn’t find a place on the first row. Two: they were late for the class and their last seat was gone. Scenario 1 is most likely when the class is filled with big time nerds and they would give away anything, even a chocolate cornetto (blimey!), just so that they would get to sit in the first row. There is no much of explanation required for people yearning for the last seat. But at this point, one might wonder, why the unfortunate would end up in the second row but not the first. I would argue that he’d rather prefer losing attendance to being stuck to the first row.

Next, we’ll concentrate on the central spectrum of the geographical entity. These are the people torn between eternal pen scratchers and the blissful sleep walkers. They are in their own world. One should not be surprised to see someone taking notes occasionally. There may also be a couple or more of gadget-freaks who are showing off their brand new mobile phones to their green bench mates. The majority of them are however the most essential parts of the grapevine. They make best use of their resources at this particular location and time.

The super-heroes of the class are mostly concentrated in the last rows. The entertainers of the class are often found in this sphere. They are seen in class regularly towards the fag end of the year because they are in the brink of the attendance lag. Another reason may be that they wouldn’t get to spend time with their day scholar counterparts if it were not for the class. They put their Photography-in-Concealment skills to test. At times, you might’ve wondered from where that delicious smell comes intruding the class hours exactly when your stomach is already grumbling away to glory. Put the blame on them. They know the secret of munching with their jaw set perfectly still. Sitting in the last row is an art in itself!

The next time you feel the class is very boring, try and look around. May be you would find stuff that I haven’t. Discover them and enlighten those fellow classmates of yours who complaint the next time.