Cute

The word 'cute' and I have crossed paths a lot more times in my life than I would've ideally preferred. As a kid, because I was chubby, and nicknamed "Bubbles", everybody assumed I had the Awww-Factor. But that was not to be. For one, I was grumpy, like, all the time. Second, I refused to be friends with anyone but my equally surly-looking gorilla stuffed toy. I shared a destructive relationship with everything pink, frock-like and Barbie. My parents could reconcile with the fact that I wasn't bouncy, chatty and laugh-y like the other kids but the one thing they couldn't get over was my intense hatred for hugs. "But Bubbles, what if Prince Charming wants to hug you one day," my mother asked me lovingly one day. I turned away from my Gorilla, stared at her and said grimly, "I will kill him."

That's the day I turned from cutesy, plumpy baby to the Omen child.

But "cute" never left me - just like my baby fat (and I guess, for that very reason). Instead it acquired new connotations. It followed me around as a 'fat girl' compliment. A rumour went around the pithoo fields, that the dictionary meaning of cute was 'ugly, but tolerable' or passable, or something equally as demeaning.

I tried to act cute once. For the stupidest and the most unfeminist reason - a boy.

"It's SO EASY to make guys fall in love with you," a girl told me once. "Just act dumb and cute. Make them look strong. Act cute."

So when I met 'him' I widened my eyes, leaned over unconsciously, said something stupid and giggled. For the first time in years, he gave me five minutes of his time.

I remember thinking it could've been longer if I'd had luscious hair and a great ass like my friend. 

She's cute, he later told a friend.

That's why I fucking hate that word.

I like the word asshole. A LOT. I like the hissy 'ssss' just as I spit out the word 'ass' and I love the gentle flow of wind from my mouth as I formulate the word 'hole'. I like how that one word has a wealth of imagery in it. I dare you to picture anything grosser than that this planet. I like how, when I yell it out at the top of my lungs at you, I can reduce you to a mere human anus.

Hence I use it a lot. I use it to describe the motorcyclist who overtook me from the left on the way to work, I use it describe Chris Brown. I also use it to describe inanimate objects like salads because that's funny. And also because salads are, like, the biggest assholes.

 

DinoCabraZilla

The Americans have Big Foot, the Irish have the Loch Ness monster, the Japanese have Godzilla. Indians? We have 'sex'. Or at least that's how things were when I was growing up. Sex wasn't just the elephant in the room it was a hybrid of a Dinosaur, chupacabra and the Loch Ness monster because as kids, we weren't really sure whether it was extinct or mythical, but we at least knew that it was dangerous. Why?

Well, for one we had parents who avoided the subject all together until they caught their daughter reading a Mills and Boons instead of solving Math problems like all good Indian children were supposed to. It was almost as if I could hear their brains self-destruct at that point from the sheer exhaustion of answering self-imposed questions like, How did she know..... about sex? Was it this book? Where did she get it from? OMG, has she had it? Will she fail math? So, all these years she was sitting there with her math book, she wasn't actually doing the math? What else did she lie about? Social Studies? Science????!!!!

Here's where I'd like to give them credit. My parents had done an impressive job of sex-proofing my childhood - by that, I don't just mean me "having" sex, but they made sure I never even "heard" the word, sex. They banned Star Movies right from the start. And then that evil, evil TV show Friends. Then, they told me all boys were 'rapists waiting to happen' so I never really wanted to be friends with one. Their twisted sociological experiment is now the root of several of my problems.

However, it wasn't just my parents who were doing this, thousands of middle-class Indian parents around the world were doing the exact same thing. The result was - that Sex became a DinoCabraZilla. We picked up Western literature, listened to the Backstreet Boys and watched the flowers mate in Bollywood films instead of the actors and actresses and thought, What the fuck is going on? My head was filled with all these weird theories, "Oh sex? It's that thing people do in the US. I think they might do it in Japan and China, definitely in Europe. Not so sure about Africa. Hmmm."

In 9th grade, one of our 'forward' friends told us about her first kiss. We were blown away. Indians kissed too? It was like a newsflash. We had presumed kissing wasn't in our destiny, unless we dated someone like Nick Carter or went to prom like that Nancy Drew chick. "I could never fall in love with an Indian guy." is something we told each other for this very reason.

 Love with an Indian boy would be like my love for Shah Rukh Khan. Which was weird, because well, I loved Shah Rukh in a weird, weird way. For starters, it began with a Stockholm syndrome-like attraction. I began to seriously dig SRK between the time I watched "Darr" and "Baazigar". He was a twisted stalker-killer in both. Not a bad boy, not a rebel - a full on psycho, borderline rapist freak. By the time he became the Yash Chopra poster-lover-boy, my dreams of SRK and me involved us running around a snow capped mountain. We never, ever kissed - because that would be so, SO gross.

 I don't think our generation is cool with people kissing in Bollywood movies, and we never will be. I can sit and watch Sex And The City with my mom but never Jism. The last time I had to watch an Indian couple kissing on screen, Aishwarya and Hrithik in Dhoom 3, my brain was manically yelling, WHERE ARE THE FLOWERS, SOMEBODY BRING IN THE GODDAMN FLOWERS.
 

You don't get to call me a ho

Can you like, for one second, stop pretending your life is a TV show?

-          A boy

I studied in an all-girls school, an all-girls college and now am, quite literally, working in an all girls workplace (damn you entertainment journalism). What I mean to say is that I do not understand the minds of men. At 24, I still adopt my black rapper alter ego when meeting a new male so they think “I am one of the dudes” (What do you mean, all men don’t say ‘yo shizzle my drizzle’?). I’m not one of the dudes. I’m a girl. A girl’s girl. A not so much, but totally girly girl. And so when a boy tells me to, “stop pretending my life’s a TV show”, my literal reaction is, “Yo (insert N-word), don’t be suppressing a ho’s dreams!”  

I have always lived my life like I was in a TV show. For eg: In a fit of depression yesterday, I spent the whole day listening to Anne Hathaway’s moving 2-minute rendition of “I dreamed a dream” on youtube – you know like background music to my misery. Sometimes, I wake and open the day with a monologue in my head like Meredith would in Grey’s Anatomy – using entertainment metaphors instead of medical. It’s what girls do. 

There is no group of girlfriends in existence who haven’t had “Which one of the Sex And The City girls are you?” discussion yet (I am Charlotte, if you really wanted to know). The minute you mention a TV show, one of the girls HAS to pipe up, “I am so Christina Yang. You’re totally like Calli.” It’s what we do, search for ourselves in TV shows and then try to follow their life patterns. I spent all my college years using Grey’s Anatomy as my relationship handbook. And now 30 Rock is supposed to help me guide me through my 20s. I, for one, love Tine Fey’s fucked up Liz Lemon. I want to BE her – which is basically me – except under better lighting and with better makeup.  

Why do we do it? I don’t know. Because we overthink? Men think about sex every seven seconds (Is it sexist, even if science says so?) –but we can’t do that... so that opens up a lot of clear spaces in our minds. We just do it to keep the voices from taking over. We do it because we need a prototype – a prettier, more hardcore version of us that we can aspire towards becoming. The women on screen live out our lives for us in fast forward – we watch them and learn from their mistakes, revel in their success (she can get a cute boy? – then so can I. She can get her life back on track? – So will I. She does Power Yoga every morning? – So will....fuck this, it’s just fiction) and when they are sad – we feel like their compatriots.

I remember a conversation with a female friend where she told me, “I need to keep thinking of my life as The Truman Show. There HAS to be someone on the other end watching otherwise... what’s the point?” She then sank into a puddle of depression right before me.

The possibility of no one watching was scarring.

We bitches be crazy y’all

Too many people are getting married

Too many people have been getting married lately, and back-to-back viewings of The Walking Dead along with late-night readings of the World War Z,  have somehow conglomerated the two happenings in my head. The result? I am seeing the sudden wave of marriages as a total full-blown Zombie Apocalypse. I am seeing my engaged friends as

...The Living Dead.

Don't get me wrong! I am happy for you guys, but this is about 'me', okay? Me and the rest of my unmarried and no-intention-of-getting-married-any-time-soon brethren. These are dark times for us. Day after day we bravely open our Facebook accounts to see another person wiped out by this plague. Day after day we see crushes, ex-boyfriends, school friends - even chaddi buddies - becoming one of them.

It's just you and me left, dawg


One of my closest friend's roka came as a shock. The celebratory dinner saw us sitting across from her with queasy smiles on our faces, telepathically asking each other - How much time does she have left before she turns into one? The sleepover that followed was more awkward still, with each one wondering, Is this contagious? and worse still, Who's next?

When the hypothetical Zombie World War broke out in Max Brooks' book, people lost their shit, fleeing to far away places where the dead couldn't find them, stocking up on supplies, using fellow human beings as baits in their escape plans. My fascination and deep love for Zombie fiction comes from my belief that only Zombies can reveal the true human nature. Only Zombies can test our emotional, physical and mental endurance the way no other adversity can. But marriage is coming pretty close to the zombies in all three areas right now.

Losing our shit doesn't even begin to describe what is happening to us. Coping mechanisms include everything, from violent fits of depression (Oven, meet head), to manic escape plans ("But mom, this Norway university's philosophy course is THE BEST) and the most popular yet... 'CARPE DI 'EM BOYS' (Which happens to be my Spanish translation of 'Sieze the boys!'). This is coupled with general distrust of those closest to us, Have you been bitten? Sorry you can't come with us! My journey from the day my mother first brought up marriage at the dinner table, closely resembles Andrew Lincoln's from when he rose alone in Zombie-infested hospital bed, only to find out that the world had come to this -

Family- Beta, check out this boy, he's an engineer!
Me: NOOOOOOOOO

Rambling, again

Is it too weird the movie, "Cocktail", upset me so much that I put a ban on all its songs in my car - effective immediately? Listening to "Angrezi Beat" made me feel as guilty as Diana Penty's character in the movie would have felt if she'd, God Forbid, had pre-marital sex with the douchy Saif character. I fought with my colleagues over this, reminding them of their Journalistic Responsibility - I mean, seriously, if there were to ever be a version of the "Hippocratic Oath" for entertainment journalists, feminism and defending fat people would be vital elements.

Even my MOTHER, had a WTF expression on her face when Saif went on and on about how he wanted a woman who would cook rotis for him.

More on that later.

Let's get skinny
I reconnected with an old, old friend after a long, long time - over Long Island Iced Teas, in a bar I fondly call my "Vodka Dungeon". She reminded me of a life where the only thing I aspired towards was becoming a rom-com heroine - quirky and beautiful in high heels and pencil skirts. Am I glad that phase is over? Is it bad that I was a little wistful when it came up?

We talked about that girl. You know, the girl who was "perfect" in that world and now she's somebody I only think about when listening to Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone.

We said, 'Let's get skinny', like we always do. And then ordered a plate of french fries, like we always do.

We spoke about growing up, growing apart, growing into each other. It didn't even come up, yet she made me feel okay about coming home. I've felt like a failure for far too long. I failed at adapting to Bombay's rain-drenched cobbled streets, to its people (an odd mixture of smug and friendly that I just couldn't stomach), the workplace which had too many free cups of coffee but barely anyone to talk to), to my apartment (where I could bear the mice, but not the depression) - if everybody made it, survived it and grew to love it, why couldn't I?

Coming home was even harder. Everybody had moved on, and oddly so had I. I spent days of self-loathing. Minus the school friends, college friends, colony friends, Bombay friends, Chennai friends - I had nobody to hang out with but me (and my mom). And I hated me, the familiarity - now that me and I were forced to interact in that pink-and-purple room alone - bred even more contempt. I could barely tolerate myself as a teen but at 24 - I hated everything about me. Not just my ass and my muffin top, my whole personality. Coward, Selfish, Unloveable, Talentless - I berated myself.

A lot of things happened. If I were to chronicalise briefly it would go somewhat like this - work laurels, work friends, new TV shows to watch, re:falling in love, zombie obsession. I am fine now. The pink and purple room is bearable, and so am I.

But still I keep finding lost parts of me. That's what I did sitting in the Vodka Dungeon that night.

The drunk me is less apologetic and more sharing when it comes to french fries. The drunk me giggles more, regrets less. The drunk me looks less at the watch, hardly worries about getting home, sleeping on time. The drunk me loves more, buries the hatchets in glasses of LITs.

I could grow to love me, after all.



 

My Prayer for my daughter

Fuck pathetic fallacy
(unless you want to count the city's raining spree
That has rendered the subway outside my office into a dark soul-less gutter)
But I have been praying for my child too
A child that will only come into existence after I am 42
Or maybe I will go to a third world country and adopt one
Just like Angelina Jolie and Madonna have done
But I have been praying HARD for my oven's future bun

Lord please make her like black-and-white still photography
And have a capacity that exceeds more than two glasses of whiskey
So she may go and make her mother proud
Let her like that band called Tool
For if she listens to Taylor Swift like me, she'll be labeled a fool
And may she be a pretentious bitch
Watch French cinema and read Russian lit
And have piercings and tattoos like the "Dragon tattoo" chick

Oh and I wish she dates a French artist and croissants are what he'll feed her
Or what 'she'll feed her' coz you know I am chill with either
I really don't want her crying for hours on the bathroom floor
Wondering why that ass didn't call
No way, she's the one who will make them beg and crawl
May she never consider "Sex And The City" to be her gospel
Because Manolo Blahnik and martinis be damned to hell
Or for that matter Gucci, and Prada and Chanel

May she be seriously successful and rolls in wads of money
Because in a rich woman's world it is always sunny
But before that part-time as a sexy bartender or a DJ
She could be a marine biologist, a poet, a stand up comedienne, pianist
Be opinionated, be bad-ass and a bra burning feminist
May she avoid all the cliche careers
I'd rather she be a talk show host like Oprah or pop star like Britney Spears
Than a doctor or an engineer

May she have self-control when faced with situations involving carbohydrates
Or better still may she be allergic to carbs to ensure a better fate
For once you enter the soft white-breaded paradise it is hard to return
Because soon those clothes will not fit you anymore
And you'll crumble when berated everyday by skinny whores
If these prayers of mine are never answered (God forbid)
And he still grants her my sucky genes instead
May she handle plumpness more gracefully than her mom did

Bell Jar revisited

I love bell jar. In fact I love reading anything written by crazy fantastic women. I just devoured Emma Forrest's Your Voice In My Head in one night and just when I thought I was going to go slightly insane - I picked up Plath's novel. And I realised that if I were to ever write my own Bell Jar, it would in all probabilities be called Hamster Cage since it would involve a lot of eating and then running round and round in the park later, and also on a deeper level - there is the cage I am trapped in - because sure, I can be deep too.

Europe

I was fifteen when I went to Europe with my mom and dad. Like any fifteen-year-old, I would sit at the backseat of the coach listening to songs of angst and woe. But my parents were delirious about being in Eu-whoop-a-doo-dee-rope and more than that they were insanely enthusiastic about "EXPOSING" me to culture. I italicised and capslocked that word - because that is exactly what my mother sounded like when saying it. "Bubbles we are EXPOSING you to the culture," she'd say, grabbing at my earplugs and pointing out of the window. Look snow-capped mountains. Look dense forests. LOOK paintings. KEEP LOOKING. God forbid you ever stop looking!!!!!

My parents were like two kids let loose in Disneyland. They wanted to eat everything, and try everything and (shudder) take pictures of every single thing. I tagged along like a brat, saying "Mooooooom" - and screaming "Stop you're embarraasssiiinnnggg me" to my dad every time he tried to get me to say something on his video camera. (My dad loves videotaping holidays. And my mom loves talking on camera. Like, trust me, the whole of Europe - After the tour guide was done explaining the monument's history and geography, my mother would quote it verbatim on tape, while posing next to the site. I still don't know how she memorised everything he said so quickly.)


So, while thinking about this trip today, I wondered if they did what they did on purpose? I mean, why else would any parent do that to their fifteen-year-old daughter?

They took me to Hooters.

It wasn't the fact that they took me to Hooters. Although sitting with your parents watching women walking around in their underwear is really really disconcerting. It was the fact that they sat their acting like fifteen-year-olds (Note The Irony) - giggling and nudging each other while stealing glances at the waitresses. When one of them came to ask for our order my dad said, "A coffee, thank you." Maybe it was the giggling or the nudging or the fact that a family of three was sitting their and ordering a single cup of coffee between them - the waitress gave us the dirtiest look.

"A coffee, dad, seriously? You got us all the way here for a coffee. You get coffee everywhere!!"
"Beta," my mom said. "We just wanted to show you Hooters. It is very famous.  How much time do you think it takes them to apply all that makeup? Bubbles LOOK!"

"Look at what ma!"

"Look at those big breasts!"


That coffee cost us quite a few euros, a situation my parents would have ideally cribbed about. But their was an odd glow to their faces. It was like a Mastercard ad in the making:

Tickets to Madam Tussauds : ..... euros
Cab ride from hotel to nearest KFC: ...... euros
Discussing Hooter waitress' boobs with 15-year-old daughter: priceless

The Uncool

I never really got to have the 'high school' experience back in my high school. I mean, I am not even sure if you could call it a school. It was a convent. With lots of nuns and ignorant girls. If we were Hogwarts, sex was our chamber of secrets. We heard about it, people vanished down that area to never return or returned and were never quite normal again and most of us tried to like... not think about it. (OMG the phallic possibilities of this metaphor! One must Never look a basilisk in the eye. Bwaahahaha).

So high school happened to me when I went to journalism school. When pitted against left-leaning liberal dudes and Chomsky quoting chicks, I felt my teeth sprout metaphorical braces and my skin break into a thousand prickly whitehead metaphorical pimples. This was high school. Those were the jocks and cheerleaders while I was on the bleachers wearing sneakers (as Taylor Swift would say). Suddenly, I was in a world where NOBODY cared that Angelina Jolie had adopted another kid.

Now, I know I am making myself sound stupid. I am not, stupid. It's just that... When intellectual people talk about guilty pleasure - I say, 'bullshit, why feel guilty?'. I am like the fat girl who eats junk food while the cheerleaders throw up in the loo. ( Yup, its still a high school metaphor tethering vaguely into reality. Fat girl-me, junk food-Taylor Swift, cheerleader-the intellectuals, throw up- their intellectual bullcrap).

I hope all the pretentious dickwads reading this can see that while this is thinly veiled satire of myself, it is also a reminder for you to stop taking yourself so goddamn seriously.

Ps- I still dislike people who NEVER liked "Titanic".
Can't trust those motherfuckers.

The Pessimist

I drive like an asshole. I inherited this from my mother - who, incidently, channels all of her feminism onto Delhi roads and saves all her sexism for Kate Winslet's character in "Titanic". You see, I have been reviewing my own downfall. I think somewhere around the time I turned 20, my own optimism exploded in my face. By that time I had already realised I was never going to be a detective/nun/duchess/Carrie-from- "Sex and the City". My existance was pointless. And all of a sudden, I was aware of things like Feminism. Because you can't ignore Feminism. It's right there. It slaps you in your repressed face.

And now I realise, the last time I was truly optimistic was back when I had no idea about all the possibilities...

Listening to: "It ain't me babe"

I love this song. I loved this song back when I heard "The Turtles" sing it. Maybe because it reminded me of that jerk at that overrated party who I was crushing on, while he callously stubbed his cigarette of indifference on the ashtray that was my heart. And I love this song so much more now, when Bob Dylan sings it on loop. Maybe because this is how I like my relationships, callousness topped up with a generous helping of one-sided paranoia. And maybe because if it were up to me, I would scream "It ain't me babe" at everyone. See? This song works on so many intricate levels. Sometimes I think that if it weren't for olives and hummus, and Bob Dylan fuelling my soul, I would surely die.

Sometimes I stare at Gwyneth Paltrow's glossy hair or think of as many "That's what she said" jokes as I can.

"I shampooed my hair," I tell him in the same seductive tone that one would adopt to describe the colour of their underwear. "No seriously, you don't understant the gravity of this - I washed my hair!"
He stares at me, wondering whether I am honouring or mocking him.
"If there was a tribe of Kritikas," I elaborate solemnly. "Washing our hair would be like our mating call."