Thanks.

Vishy,

Thanks.

As always, you grab my hand, just when I am about to slip into the muck.

Children of a Divorce

Narayanan and I are getting divorced.

I would be moving out this Saturday. Moving out from Narayanan and moving in with Palash, my lovely little elf.

Narayanan and I have spent the last month like a long-married couple. We slept in the same bed without sex crossing our minds once. We fought for bathroom rights every morning, before work. I would often stay up late reading a book while he dozed off. We wrote down all the expenditures of the day before going to sleep. And I snored.

We are not gay.
We are worse.
We are bachelors working in the corporate city of Mumbai.
Gays are brought together by love – in varying degrees.
Bachelors in Mumbai are brought together by cold necessity.

When you are an MBA working in Mumbai, you feel the smell of puke hitting your insides everytime you read those business magazines shrieking about the exorbitant salaries that companies are paying at the “top institutes”. For all those “exorbitant” salaries, no MBA in Mumbai can afford not to share his room and life with a guy he hardly knows. It is a lot like arranged marriage. You allow a complete stranger to become a part of your life and intrude all corners of it. And like arranged marriage, it works great most of the times.

Narayanan is one of those genuinely good people who are neither naïve nor harmless. Most “good” fellas are essentially confrontation-avoiders. They are nice because they don’t want to pick fights. Narayanan doesn’t shy away from slang-fests. He calls a spade a spade, and will also tell it how dirty, old and bent it is. He can be angry, harsh, make you feel like an idiot, scold you like you are an idiot, and worse, prove it that you are an idiot. But I have never once seen him lose the respect for an individual’s dignity even in the smallest of ways. He genuinely cares for you, but won’t spoon feed you. He will help you out and expects you to appreciate his help, but doesn’t like you to express your gratitude.

I know him from my engineering days. We were together at Delhi College of Engineering, studying to be Mechanical Engineers. He is one of the twin reasons – the other one being Shantanu, that philosophical bean bag – for making me finish my engineering in 4 years. We were a group of 5 friends in D.C.E. And it was a funny group. There was me - a fraud gult, born in Andhra and brought up in Delhi; Narayanan – as core and orthodox an Iyengar Tam Brahmin as you could find; Shantanu – the Baniya of Baniyas; Navjeet Singh Soni – the ever excitable Sardar and Rishabh Sinha – the psuedest Bihari I have ever known (and being an engg. Grad I have know quite a few).
If it had not been for Narayanan and Shantanu I would have become a Studying Super Senior at D.C.E. (It’s a rare species in engineering – the Studying Super Seniors, but let me briefly say here that it describes all those people who keep coming to college for more than 4 years because they couldn’t finish their degrees in time. I shall elaborate on this later in another post. Just remember to remind me).

The lives and times of Swami (aka Narayanan) at D.C.E. are chronicled in “Swami and Friends”.

After engineering he went on to work at Tata Motors, and I joined IIMB. 2 years later he joined IIFT and I went off to Africa. 2 months back he post-graduated and was offered a position with SBI Caps, and I left Zimbabwe to join Asian Paints.

We joined our jobs within a space of 10 days. Both in Mumbai. And both wanted to stay together. I wanted to stay with him because I knew he would do the worrying and organizing while I could focus on the freaking. And he, probably because he has this strong desire to reform hardened freaks.

Well, both of us did succeed, to a certain extent, in our motives for staying together. He does the accounts every night. He bought the iron-box and the ear-buds, and the shoe polish and the brush. And I keep rushing him to movies in all parts of Mumbai straight from the office. There is the organizing and freaking part I wanted.

I brush my teeth every night (also) now, and cut my nasal hair every week.
I move to a distant seat, if available, whenever I fart during the movies.
There is the reform part that Narayanan wanted.

He sits down after his bath every morning, says his prayers, changes into his office wear and then leaves for work.
Rushing from my bath, stuffing my shirt into the hungry open mouth of my trousers, I say the first half of my prayers which essentially mean “God, please help me”. The other half I say in the local, and they mostly consist of “God, please forgive me”.

At office, we pretend to work.

Around 180 degrees past six, I give him a call asking him what time he shall be leaving office, and cook up dinner plans. Then we meet at home, or some restaurant, stuff ourselves and then head for home in the sweaty clothes of corporate toil – he a project financier and me a purchase manager.

Once home,
he does the accounts.
Then watches the night’s half-hour quota of his current movie, and dozes off.
I read while he is sleeping.
Then I switch off the light, lie down next to him. And I snore.

Now it is to be all over.
Both of us have to move out.
No we didn’t have a fight.
The Mumbai that brought us together is now doing us part. I am moving to Vashi and he to Andheri.
I shall be moving out this Saturday and he a couple of days after that.

Starting day before yesterday, we have 6 days together.
And in these 6 days I have decided that I will take him to as many movies as possible. And I shall review those movies, for him.
I have never written reviews before. I hate doing that.
But these reviews I know I shall cherish for long.
They are the children conceived in our divorce.

So far we have done Shivaji, Cheeni Kum and Life in a Metro.

Just a few thoughts on them here. Detailed reviews to follow later, hopefully.

Cheeni Kum
When I first heard about Cheenie Cum I thought it was one of those cheap, Chinese porn flicks.

Life in a Metro
Konkana Sen has very quickly carved a niche for herself in the industry – as the leading lady opposite gay men. She did it in page 3, she does it here again.

Shivaji
When you spend 200 bucks on a movie you feel like you own a part of it. You come out, and criticize or critique the story, the cast’s performances, the stunts, the comedy (in most Indian movies it is still comedy, only a few like Cheeni Kum and Pyaar ke Side Effects have achieved humor). You can say, with no hesitation, that the heroine has gone fat, she looks wooden, or just as easily declare “paisa vasool” for the smooch-shots.
Shivaji doesn’t let you feel like that.

You don’t own this movie – not any small part of it.
You can’t critique this movie; you can’t call it good or bad – it is beyond that, it is above you.

P.S. I am not a Rajni fan. This is the first Rajni movie I have seen for more than 5 minutes.

Mumbai ki Baarish...

Dil tha mera kala samandar sa,
Sannata tha isme bhayankar sa..
Lekin aaj is samandar se ubharta
attahaas ka tufaan nazar aata hai..
seene ke kisi kone me chhupa lun
itna chhota....aasman nazar aata hai

Aaj subah se ek khushi bewajah hai,
Ek chanchal bechaini naache hriday ke satah pe
Uchhalti, Khelti....Taaron se jhoolti, Sheeshon pe fisalti
boondon me natkhat muskaan nazar aata hai
seene ke kisi kone me chhupa lun
itna chhota....aasman nazar aata hai

Ye chhaaton ko katoriyan banati purzor hawa,
Pyaari si ladkiyon ke baalon me ulajhti munh-zor hawa..
Rahgeeron ke beech daudti,
chhedti,
Hawa nahin, ek bauna shaitaan nazar aata hai
seene ke kisi kone me chhupa lun
itna chhota...aasman nazar aata hai

Yeh geeli barsaati subah
Yeh meethi khushi bewajah
Yeh Khelti boondein natkhat
Yeh daudti hawa sarpat
Mumbai ki barish ka rutba
alishaan nazar aata hai
Yeh faila seena, yeh chhota asman,
kisi ka....ehsaan nazar aata hai

Mumbai is a straight-line city,
where the people keep moving in spirals and circles - dizzingly upward spirals of immense opulence and downward spirals of crushing, dehumanizing poverty....or just circles of survival.

It is a city that will make you run very hard just to stay in the same place.

It is a city that works on a huge amount of grime and human grease.
It is life accelerated.

Mumbai sometimes scares me. But what scares me even more is when people say, "Three months in Mumbai, and then you can't live anywhere else. This city grows on you."

I always beleived that there is no city in the world that I can totally hate.
Do I hate Mumbai?

No, I am still struggling to come to terms with its intensity. With its accelereated densities.
How can I bring myself to hug this giant when its immensity and rawness still awe me?

I am suddenly, brutally shocked - like hitting the cold water of a pool flat with your chest - into the realization that there is no other city like Mumbai. There is nothing you can point to and say, "this is a bit like mumbai, with perhaps this and that changed, intensified, decreased, enlarged" No.....you can't compare Mumbai with anything. It is a concept in itself.

Perhaps, I need three months.

Till that time I shall continue to impress these pages with whatever Mumbai hits me with.
If these small images turn out to be the footprints of my reluctant love story with Mumbai then let it be so.

Integration (of the Calculus kind) is a show of great music and fireworks on a lakeside.


It has all that beauty, wonder and majesty.

"Virginity is not dignity...not security....nor a sign of purity.
Its the lack of opportunity."
- William SexFear

(contributed by my dear elvish friend Palash)

Just as V.Good is short for Very Good
S.hit could be short for Super Hit!

I wish I could be as satisfied as him

"I wish I could be as satisfied as him",
he said, in the same calm, measured slow manner in which he had been spooling out his words for the last half hour. He was an old man, past fifty. The few remaining grey, oiled strands of his hair lay down lazily across his head like the arms of a palm tree. Just as you can see the moon through its leaves you could see his bald, oiled pate shining through this last, long hair.

He had contentment about him - a sense of never being in a hurry. He spoke slowly, as if measuring out the words that left him. A small chest and a hanging paunch. If RK Laxman's common man had a paunch, this would be him.
If the ancient, wise monkey of Lion King had a few hair, this would be him.

Languorously, with hazaar ancient anecodtes, he took us through the problems of working with contract manufacturers - sometimes with touching sympathy and sometimes with prickly cynicism. A twinkling, impish humor kept background score for his soft recital. It was then, as a part of that tapestry of many colourful stories, he told us about this immensely laid back, content contract manufacturer who refused to expand his plant to take on more work.
"Saab, jitna milta hai usme khush hain", was his mild rebuke to compelling economic logic. It was then that our gentle old Aesop remarked,

"I wish I could be as satisfied as him."

I wish I could have told him then....that,

Being happily satisfied is not a choice that we make.
It is a choice we choose not to make.

This un-choice is what makes successful men. And unhappy men.

This un-choice is the stuff from which dreams spring.
And inhuman, brutal greed.

This un-choice makes conquerors and barbarians.

It is a strange force this. It makes us. It destroys us. But it never completes us.
No ambitious man has ever died "satisfied".

Mumbai, wet and dirty, sucks.

Not in the way that makes you want to come.