How Much Do I Want Thee? Let Me Count The Ways...

I want you so much that I (too)
Can be a child again;
To colour the sky pink, faces green,
Trees yellow and place every house next to a lake.
To punctuate every sentence with a why
Believe in Santa and the little gifts
The ‘toothfairy’ leaves behind.

(Still counting...)

A Little Less Conversation

When I was little, I used to rehearse my lines for the obviously dumb questions coming my way each time I got a haircut. And that used to be every month.

Them: Cut your hair?
You: Nope, someone else did it for me!

Them: Cut your hair?
You: Nope, I washed it for the first time and it shrunk!

Is it just me..or…?? Why would someone who just learned that you’re a Kannadiga promptly ask if you know how to cook bisibele bhath? It’s like asking the next Bong you meet if he/she knows how to make rossogullas. Or like asking the Tambram sipping coffee and reading The Hindu if she does the bharatnatyam. Or worse, if she eats idlis everyday.
But you could attribute these anal questions to the lack of conversational material. After all, how long can you discuss the weather and the lack of rains each time you bump into that casual acquaintance of yours. I, myself must confess and plead guilty to such conversations.
It’s like the times when I visit some proud first-time parents and gently purr at their wrinkled, curled up (pro)creations and ask in all earnestness…”Does she wake you up often at nights?”. Or I have the other all-time favourite ...”Wow! who do you think she looks like?”. You can rest assured the next half hour will go by in an animated discussion of various theories propounded by each parent.
Or when I’m with a housewife, I casually drop the question about the maid (there has GOT to be one around somewhere!). Something as silly as “Does she come regularly?”And then it goes on and on.
But I guess I’ll take the anal banal any day.
Atleast it’s better than being drawn into a political debate about whether Belgaum must belong to Karnataka or Maharashtra. Or whether I like Bangalore better or Hyderabad (this would be material for another post in itself!). Or what my thoughts are on Karnataka refusing to share water with Andhra Pradesh (among a lot of other states!).

Rhyme is the reason...

(A short while ago, I read about this guy in The WEEK who's into managerial training of sorts and was in the process of publishing a book titled "Rhyme is the reason". I thought it was appropriate for this post 'coz I humour myself with rhymes...for no reason..or maybe that IS the reason!)


There was a young man in his (late) twenties
Whose wife, he thought, couldn’t pander to his fancies
She played along
but finally proved him wrong
By baking a cake full of lychees.

Music for dummies

Bathroom singing takes on a whole new meaning if you know where I’m coming from.
I always lose when we play the game where you hum a tune and the other one guesses which song it is. Fact is, I can’t even hum right! The closest I’ve come to singing is lip-syncing Silent Night, Holy Night in all earnestness in my school’s Christmas choir (and getting away with it too!). Maybe I’m just wired that way. Forget singing lullabies, I don’t even remember my mom humming to me, as a foetus.
If I trace my first ever introduction to music, it leads to this band called the Osibissa. And all I ever remember of that band is running around a table in circles to those beats, infront of an audience of appreciative parents! The language skills I gradually acquired came in handy when Boney M arrived in my life. Soon I was lustily singing Take the heat off me in all the innocence that only a 7-year-old can muster and waving daddy off to work to Bye bye daddy cool.
But surely noone can mention the music of the Awesome 80’s without the Bad, Thriller of Pop. In a generation that grew up on Michael Jackson (before the nose job), anyone who could moonwalk certainly ranked high on my list of favourites. Then followed Material Girl Madonna and her chartbusting Holiday and the La Isla Bonita. She lastest long as my True Blue pin-up…well long enough to psyche my folks each time I played Papa don’t preach…a little louder than usual!
Then, somewhere in high school, when the rest of the girls were going ga-ga over George Michael, I found Faith in the Beatles. Yesterday I was the queen of pop, and now Eight Days a Week, I was belting out Help! These were my own years of angst and rebellion. But just when I thought I was alone, Simon and Garfunkel appeared Like a bridge over troubled waters. Queen followed and so did Fleetwood Mac, as did the Police among others. Among the bits of popular pop around this time that I can still recollect is the Don’t wanna short **** man which used to petrify me since my mom has the habit of memorizing the lyrics of songs I listen to as well!
The next thing I knew was that hostel ‘happened’ to me. It was the best of times and the worst of times. We were one minute head-banging to Alanis and lamenting about meeting the man of our dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife, and the next minute wearing our dancing shoes and bogeying the night away Believing in life after love?! Thank God for Chicago too…Take me as I am… never made more sense!
After graduating, life took on a different meaning. It actually meant work…and outside of campus too! Music-wise, it was strange. There was Shaggy (thanks to a hip-hop crazy friend) and then there was all the music of the 60’s I had never listened to before. As if Elvis the Pelvis wasn’t enough, I was even Wishing You were Here. With that, I did the unimaginable….tried to break ground with the “kind of music that only geeks listen to”!!
With or Without you definitely wasn’t a question then. Tying the knot meant another first for me…instrumental music! I mean actually music without lyrics!! Classical music (Indian or Western) doesn’t figure on the agenda yet!
Today, I’m still tone deaf. Never knew the difference between bass and tenor or for that matter soprano either, and probably never will. But hey, atleast now you know where I’m coming from!

Wassup?!

Sometimes, all it takes is a simple “Wassup?” from someone you know to take a reality check and figure out what’s happening in your life. And it’s quite interesting to see how relative it really is. You could be starting your day with a jog in a nearby park, casually bumping into the CEO of a transnational company, who incidentally happens to know you, return home to find a builder illegally constructing a mammoth of a building right in your face, mentally make a note to file a public interest litigation before further damage gets done, find that the little experiment you conducted the night before was successful and you have wonderful breakfast waiting for you, leave for work, have drunk friends call you up from half way across the world just to say they love you, schedule a meeting with one of software’s favourite pin-up ‘boys’, organize a farewell party for an old colleague in office, hang out at a favourite pub till dawn with friends and have the DJ play a number that brings back memories of another day when you had your first kiss….all this and still call it an “uninteresting” day.
Or, you could climb out of bed with one helluva hangover, find you’ve run out of milk to fix your cuppa (waking up and smelling the coffee huh?!), get into an auto only to find it’s meter horribly rigged, give up arguing with the driver coz well…size does matter!, walk towards the office gate to find it cordoned off thanks to an official visit from an obscure dignitary from an equally obscure place in Africa, stand in blazing 40 deg centigrade outside the gates till it’s all clear, walk into a darkened office because of a severe power outage, discover new choco chip cookies in the pantry (yummmy!), fill out a template to say that A is not working or you’ve misplaced the password for B or that C needs to be relocated or that D needs an urgent approval from the manager or (worse) E has been approved but not been paid for yet (if all this is confusing..never mind!), rush to a “professional trainer” later in the day only to find that twice in the course of a 45-min session he makes you run up and down the 7 floors of the building, crawl back home, pick a fight, skip dinner, pretend to be chirpy when your folks call at night…all this, and still stand back and say.. Whoa! What a day!!

A gift for someone I love! ;)

Hope this will be a good forum for you to share your thoughts/writings ...

With love,
Hubby dearest!