tameshru

My Youth
(Apr 21, 1981 – Apr 20, 2011)

I should’ve seen it coming, but didn’t spot the obvious signs.

I was driving to work one day and heard the Jockey go, “It’s Retro Hour on Radio Indigo”, and I thought to myself, “Ahh, been a while since I heard the likes of the Beatles”. They played Everything I do and Lemon Tree in that segment - songs that I thought were contemporary. I came to office and checked to see if I didn’t know the meaning of retro. Wiki said – “It generally implies a vintage of at least 15 or 20 years”. Yeah, it said vintage.

It didn’t matter how nuanced the user interface of Kindle was. I could never replace my books with their e-counterparts. I just love the touch and feel and smell and colour of books, especially the sepia-tinted, dog-eared, leather-bound classics from a bygone era. Only, the bygone era is the decade in which I was born.

Nothing turns me on like a well-punctuated paragraph. My cell phone refuses to send messages across because it isn’t used to seeing capital letters and doesn’t understand words like “because”, “are”, “for” and “you”. Apparently, neither do young adults.

I told someone I thought Justin Bieber wasn’t hip, and looked and sang like a girl. That someone had to wait for a good five minutes before she swore never to talk to me again. She spent the five minutes rolling on the floor because she hadn’t heard the word “hip” being used in common parlance in her lifetime.

I see a bright light. It’s time for the old to make way for the new. Toodle-oo, my young ones!

Characters:

Mr. Santu Lak – Formerly known as Red-nosed Rudolf from the circus, this guy can do a mean balancing act – holding cell phone in one hand and riding a bike using just the other. The centroid of the imaginary triangle formed by his body and the road definitely lies outside of his body, yet miraculously, he stays afloat*.

Mr. Galat Marg - A leftist by birth, this gentleman only overtakes from the left, especially when you’re making a left turn and take your eyes off the rear view mirror for a second.

Ms. Sam Skriti – If you woke this woman up in the middle of the night, I am sure that not a single strand of hair would be out of place. The quintessential style diva, this lady will make most use of red lights by fixing her hair, applying lipstick, why mascara even!

Ms. Jor Dar – This lady is a psychiatrist. She silences the noise in people’s head by numbing them with her honking.

Mr. Bhru Kuti – Give this man an inch of space, and he will fit a blue whale in it. This guy is responsible for 80% of traffic jams and 90% of road rages in India.

Mr. Chidd Chidda – If you so much as overtake this man, he is sure to land a few blows at you. And shoot you with a gun if you’re in Delhi.

Mr. Nek Naami – If anyone is seen driving badly on the road, this gentleman will immediately come to the conclusion that the driver has to be a woman. The ladies owe this gentleman their reputation.

Ms. Durga T. – This is the lady that Mr. Nek Naami complains about. She cannot tell left from right, doesn’t know how to utilise her rear view mirror, and can’t tell the accelerator from the brake.

Mr. Mand Budhhi - This guy is the physics enthusiast. He creates sine waves on the road after being 4 drinks down.  I hope this guy overtakes Mr. Chidd Chidda. In Delhi.

What’s troubling Ms. Jor Dar, I wonder? Oops, the light just turned green. Need to start my car. Goodbye!

* appropriate adverb, considering how inundated our roads get during the monsoon

The title of this blog entry might falsely lead you to believe that this post is about songs from the Stone Age. Let me set the record (or should I say iPod?) straight – this is about cool games from the Holocene** era.

Angry Birds - Now you’d think that as a staunch vegetarian, I’d derive very little pleasure in seeing a bloodbath, let alone aid in sending innocent little pigs straight under a cloche of a very hungry child. But this is the game that brought me back from the era of oh-I’m-so-grown-up-and-don’t-play-silly-games-anymore to the let’s-send-the-pig-hidden-behind-the-glass-to-the-cloche-with-a-twenty-degree-angle-on-the-blue-birdies phase. This is a game that must be played with the sound on – guaranteed to interest grandmas and babies alike.

Harbour Master – If you think you have a hard job, and envy the guy who sits near the shore and does nothing all day except dock ships, it’s time you tried this game. Then you’re going to envy him even more! A game which checks how quick-fingered you are, this mindless game is sure to give you hours of endless fun, a blister on your forefinger and dreams involving Leo and Kate singing the song “My  ship will get dooooccckkkeeddd” (It’s an earworm – the only song that’s been playing in my head the last 4 weeks)

NinJump – My mom wondered whether I was composing music Rahman-style, during the many nights I spent tap-tap-tapping on my iPad. Like the site mentions, it’s a brilliant tap-tap slice of tap-tap-tap freebie fun woohoo!

Fruit Ninja – This is our game (my dear husband who introduces me to these games is going to be embarrassed – wait a second, he’s still singing “My ship will get dooooccckkkeeddd”, so no worries). Guaranteed to put the spark back in a couple’s life – the spark that makes you want to slice up 5 fruits at one shot, so you’re one point ahead of him – equivalent to a 1000 roses, I tell you!

Paper Toss – This game needs you to know your Physics – angular velocity (yup, you become a pseudovector when you’re playing this game), friction (you wonder how much longer you can play this game before she gives you the silent treatment), and kinematics (the displacement of your body can be fully explained by how long you’ve been playing, where you started playing this game, and the constant velocity with which you say “on no”) -  which explains why I fare terribly at this game.

Why are you still reading this when you could’ve beaten your high score at all of these games? Meanwhile, I’ve got to see a doctor about these blisters.

*For kids born after 2BC, these are actual lyrics from an era when songs were melodious, and had lyrics – lyrics that I could understand, even without my hearing aid

**Also a song, far less melodious than the one mentioned previously

My mental maturity notwithstanding, I’ve grown up. And I’ve become a mom. So it was time for me to display all the coolness I’d promised the 12 year old Shruthi. But alas, I’d been bitten by the centuries-old MoaningOverMostthingsMykiddYdoes bug, which, from now on, I’ll be referring to as MOMMY.

Here are a few classic symptoms of MOMMY –

Symptom 1 - The thing that gives most pleasure to someone who is MOMMY positive (the order in which these 2 words are placed is crucial) is when her (I don’t mean to be political correct by using this particular pronoun-the bug only seems to bite the female of the species) child eats as much as she thinks she should eat. Case in example – If Advika eats anything less than 1 chapati for dinner, even if it is a tiny morsel that even an ant would ignore, I will fret about it all night. Whereas, on days she does eat an entire chapati, I am sure to sleep at night with no nightmares involving a giant chapati scolding me for being a negligent mom.

Symptom 2 – A MOMMY positive person tries very hard to hide the fact that she’s got the bug, lest she be ostracised by the other MOMMY-positive-but-pretending-we’re-cool lady friends. So when my darling little daughter plays with mud in the park, I compete with her to see who can fling mud the farthest. I do this even as I plan the 10- step cleaning approach which will thoroughly eliminate those millions of little bugs crawling all over her tiny hand. I manage to fling the mud almost a hundred meters away, much to the pleasure of my daughter, when other MOMMY positive women are looking at us.

Symptom 3 – Statistics is a MOMMY positive patient’s favourite subject. These are some samples I heard at the same park - “Do you know that 80% of all 19 month olds can speak about 70 words? But I think our <insert baby’s name> knows only 65 words”. Or, “<A different baby’s name> started crawling only when she was 10 months old whereas 90% of all babies do it by 9”.

Symptom 4 – MOMMY positive women are never broke. They always carry along a coin, one side of which has “worry” etched on it, while the other has the word “gloat” inscribed. Any non-conformance to the abovementioned statistics makes us either worry or gloat, depending on which side the non-conformance has occurred.

So if you spot any of these symptoms in women you know, please call the 24X7 helpline THE-CURE-IS-BECOMING-DADDY. And you can call me Rohith, by the way.

*Please don’t think in caps

My romance with short hair is not like the cool summer showers - invigorating, yet short-lived; neither is it like the teenage romance – exciting but faltering in its passion; it is like a seasoned marriage – steadfast and companionable, yet with its own share of ups and downs.

Every time the mass of hair (I looked for an appropriate collective noun for hair, but the suggestions I got were lock and braid – both of which made me picture a Rapunzel-like creature with long, flowing, poker-straight hair – which looked nothing like what’s on my head, so I settled for mass) grows longer than 13.7 inches (I have a spot that I measure it against, but I’m obviously not going to share the details) my left eye starts twitching for 274 seconds (I kid you not) and then I spend the next 2 days surfing the net to find the style that I want – only to be told by the coiffeur (something’s got be stylish – the word, if not the hair) that my hair is not suited to the particular style. It doesn’t matter what style I choose, I always get the same response.

So eventually, I pick the same “style” – 6 inches off the current length, varying as it may be. I always picture myself looking like Medusa before Athena cursed her. And I always end up looking like the cursed-by-Athena Medusa – the one with serpents on her head.

I love my short hair the day I get it cut, because the stylish-name-for-the-guy-who-cuts-my-hair takes a lot of trouble, and I mean a lot, to make it look nice. I don’t wash my hair for 2 days after that, just so that it stays that way. And then reality hits, in the form of a brush with a tuft of hair stuck to it. I then hate my hair, curse my ill luck and decide not to look at it for an entire week. Then it grows on me. I think I look as nice or as bad as I did before Edward Scissorhands did his job on me. And then I get this feeling – “Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t look like Demi Moore’s hair in Ghost, it’s my hair and I love it. I think it complements my square face. It isn’t high on maintenance; it doesn’t need long hours in front of the mirror. It becomes me. It is part of me. It is family”.
So like marriage, isn’t it?

I’ve always wanted to get a crew cut, but have never mustered the courage to do it. Maybe when I turn 80, and am comfortable enough to sit on a swing and not talk to my hair, and yet be at peace, that’s when I’ll get that cut. Until then, looks like my bushy hair and me are meant to be!

During the 90’s, I used to be an ardent fan of tennis, and my absolute favourites were Graf and Sampras. Now like any think-I-am-balanced-but-am-completely-crazy sports fan, (If you can’t think of any other examples in this category, think of Günter Parche*) I hated Agassi by virtue of being a mature, level-headed fan of Sampras’.

Now when I heard that Steffi was dating Agassi, I first went into a state of cold shock (I didn’t eat my favourite bar of Twix for an entire hour), then into a stage of denial (I looked at a host of astrology sites just to confirm the stars weren’t part of some grand galactic conspiracy), then there was anger (I broke of a lot of glass souvenirs that I hated anyway), then bargaining (God, I promise to drink my glass of milk, but please, please let them break up soon), then depression (my mom had to bring the best-in-class bug busters to ‘clean’ up my room when I finally emerged out of it a year later), then into a stage of testing (maybe if I broke a 100 coconuts at the Ganesha temple, he’d let Sampras beat Agassi, and Graf would be his trophy) and finally, into the stage of acceptance (Justin Henin idolises Graf, she plays well, maybe she’s the one I should be cheering for).

So when I read ‘Open’, Agassi’s pseudo** auto biography a couple of decades later, it made me wonder whether I had actually moved on, or whether I had been living in denial all these years. I promised myself that I’d approach the book with an open mind (befitting the title after all), but it was impossible to do that.

Here’s a brief, but accurate summary of his book –

Do {

           Blame my father;

           I hate tennis;

If someone else plays well, it’s because something in the universe helped him do so;

Blame my father;

I hate tennis;

Do anything to stand out - Grow my hair; sport an earring; do crystal meth and then lie about it;

Blame my father;

I hate tennis;

Take cheap pot shots at fellow players and at other women I’ve dated;

I worked so hard to get this win – despite the terribly hard life I’ve had;

Blame my father;

I hate tennis;

} while (<you haven’t reached the 400^th page yet> and <there is still some hair remaining on your head>)

He redeems himself a bit - mind you, only a bit, towards the end when he talks of the Andre Agassi Charitable Foundation.

The thought that came to mind when I put this book down was, “How could you, Steffi?”

*Bet you googled to find out who it was. If you didn’t, you’re one of those think-I-am-balanced-but-am-completely-crazy sports fans yourself

**I kept telling Rohith, “but this guy writes well”, only to find out in the end that it was ghost written by the Pulitzer prize winner, J.R. Moehringer! Autobiography indeed!

A friend once remarked that I was the most ambitious person he knew. I didn’t think ambitious would ever be an adjective used to describe me, so it got me thinking (and asking a lot of questions). He claimed that I wanted it all – a good job and a good personal life, while most others would only want a great job on campus - which got me thinking even more. (All this thinking can’t be good for my health, do you say? I couldn’t agree more  :) )

I’ve been working for a retailer for close to 3 years now, and can’t help but draw parallels to the beautiful world of retailing. A retailer spends a lot of time analysing the basket of his customer –  what she normally buys, how much she spends on an average, does the basket vary depending on the day of the week/ month of the year, what her favourite items are and so on.

So too with life. I think we all come into this world with empty baskets and add “items” to our “basket” as we journey along – hobbies, relationship with family and friends, work, spirituality, health. Baskets vary from person to person and change depending on the stage of life we’re in.

We all want to maximise our basket. We subconsciously assign weights to each item and then make choices depending on the composition of the basket. My basket, at the time my friend made that comment, consisted of 2 items – my personal life with Rohith and my parents, and my career. His, and most others’ (by virtue of being much younger than yours truly) basket had one big item – career, and therefore our choices were so starkly different.

Which brings me to the point (it took so long for me to get to the point, I know) that I was no more ambitious than my dear friend or anybody else.