water water everywhere….

Had a water fight today. Four in the morning. Actually thought the entire hostel was being burnt down. Came out to have prat greet me with a fresh bucket of yummy water and the everhelpful but inane “Welcome to MDI”. Every time I hear it, it means I have been doused with water, kerosene, set on fire, pocked with long pointed sticks or generally been very unkind to.

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Another day.

Went and stood near the girl’s hostel entreating them to come down, get the cold water and feel nice in life. They didn’t. Locked themselves up in their rooms. Other than a few sporty and happy individuals (2M, shre and a few of the sinnies), nobody came out. Trust girls to be incredibly unsportsmanlike and stuffy about all this.

P.S.:

It felt nice being able to douse people in water. Running around screaming, dreaming about lemmings and new worlds and explorers. Sorry guys. Just can’t be proffessional. Somewhere within me is still the brat.

Talking to sid. He can be quite a calming influence. And he is right.

Men want only one thing. Snifff……

June 30th, 2005 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 0 Comments

To fall in love again

It’s been an interesting week. Ever since I arrived in Delhi a week back, to begin what has been called by various people at various times as my: new direction in life; break; vacation; party and oh! my chance to get a girlfriend it’s been revealing, entertaining and certainlly funny.

I have laughed. By God! How I have laughed. If I introspect I suppose I would find out that tiredness, pressure and stress just bring out the farcical and deeply rebellious and subversive elements in me. I don’t buckle under pressure. I just laugh it off.

I had two hours of sleep over the last three days. Two hundred people. It didn’t matter. I found the experience liberating. Not having to sleep. Having to do something well into the night, to keep doing it. It’s fun.

I also achieved the zen like state of being there and not being there too. If you can alone see what that means.

Interesting bit.

We had a talk by Ishita Swarup. CEO. A company called Orion. We had had just three hours of sleep over the last two days. We had been falling of our chairs, sleep not just knit the sleeve, she bound us to her. We slept in doorways, standing up, anywhere. We had just slept through a lecture by the Dean.

Ishita Swarup walks through the door.

She’s petite. And bubbly. I can’t guess her age. Two hundered sleepy people. One woman.

She takes stage. She talks.

We don’t sleep. Forget sleep. We sat up. Sat straight in our chairs. Looked into her eyes, concentrated for an entire hour at her. Pin drop silence.

No shuffling, no scratchings. No body looks at their neighbour. We just look at her.

Listen to her bubbly enthusiasm for her slight eccentricity as she calls it.

What the combined efforts of fifty proffessors, each excellent in his own way, distinguished in academia, knowledgable and intelligent, and veritably bald and fat–if you are not tickled pink and refreshed from sleep by the sight of a fat pink bald man, exorting everybody to wake up you sir, don’t have any sense of humour at all–couldn’t accomplish, one young petite girl did.

With flair.

Which she had already done. But she did it again and again. As I think she will. Since she had done it again and again.

Provided she can do something which others can’t. With flair. Panache. A sense of humour and a smile.

As she bewitched us, inspired us, serenaded us with siren songs, as we fell in love with her (two hundred sleepy people with three hours of sleep in four days), we hope she’d do it.

Again and again.

As she will.

Again and again

June 29th, 2005 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 2 Comments

Barbers at the Bombay Gates

I don’t know why but most of the guys I saw in Mumbai seem to have had some kind of argument with their barbers. At least an argument when the barber was about to cut his crop. I say this because every one of them looked surly and had a haircut that could have only ensued if the barber had grown very angry and very distracted. I don’t know how these guys could have distracted the barber. Far from being able to distract somebody they looked singularly repulsive, the kind you’d rather ignore, so distraction was out of the question.

So why were their barbers so angry, that they chopped up their hair into so many tiny pieces? In the case of one specimen, it had been cut and dyed it into such an exquisite circus, that from far away, I couldn’t make out if the guy had an orange stuck on his head or whether he was just terribly sick. I secretly dubbed him ‘William of Orange’.

The guy ( and in general all the guys) himself looked terribly mean and upset, only as someone who has paid an outrageous fortune to look like he either had a face transplant with an orange or a rather serious scalp infection could look. He also looked terribly built up, with muscles bulging around in all directions. Some of his muscles also seemed in danger of leaving his shirt and leading an independent existence, roaming the city and joining one of the numerous gangs that no doubt abound the city, looking to beat up barbers.

I am terribly confused. Someone suggested that all the barbers are equally to blame, that they are nothing more than over glorified lawn mower men. I agree, that’s what they normally do to my hair. But to have all the barbers go about doing it? And to do it to someone as muscular as ‘King William’ seems to suggest a sense of reckless daring, audacity, suicidal insanity and a slow if painful death if buddy ‘William’ ever manages to brush back enough hair from his forehead to actually be able to see.

Meanwhile the barbers seem to be winning this war of the hair. Really. I said meet. Not argue.

June 10th, 2005 - Posted in Uncategorized | | 1 Comments