Monthly Archives: September 2008

FOREWORD

It was almost two years since I sat at the back of a share-auto. It had skipped my memory how hot my bums felt over the unrelenting rumbling engine below. As my ass grew numb over the hot engine, my ears bled due to a different drone. I regret going to the movie. My regret only partly attributed to the movie itself, as there were other cosmological forces engaged in conservation.

 

LESSON 1 OF 2: For the sexually discriminated female

The Anti*-MCP way of life:

Tenets

1. All men are bastards

2. Everything a man says makes him a bastard

3. Refute every word a man utters until death

4. Treat men like dirt since they treat women like dirt

5. All women have a traumatic childhood, a thankless marriage and a wasted old age; hence men are bastards

6. If rule 4 or 5 do not apply to you then fuck them and straight apply Rule 1 to 3

Examples

Ex 1: The food counter attendant does not serve you first; he is MCP

Ex 2: The auto driver who sings his favourite song which happens to be an item number; he is MCP

Ex 3: The entire creative team of the song; MCP

Ex 4: Fellow movie-goers who enjoy a movie by laughing loudly; MCP

Ex 5: Random man walking on the street; MCP

(* Pronounced Ant-tie; the American way. Gives it an empowering ring.)

END OF LESSON 1 OF 2

 

LESSON 2 OF 2: For the select few

It is one thing to stand up for rights, which I agree are not often served on a platter to the female sex in India, but another to be an egotist, mudheaded, snobby snoot. If you are so sympathetic to the cause of female rights, then be an activist; Give shelter to women who lie with unclothed breasts on the side lanes of a developed metropolitan after getting beaten by their drunken husbands. Get their husbands behind bars. Instead, you go yap yap yap because any and every form that you fill in your life has a sex column and you grudgingly fill F. Your actions exemplify your ineptitude and lowly intelligence which is sadly clouded by your own sense of womanly self. I urge you to put your vigourous thoughts, words and actions (in that order) in perspective and not be ever ready to kick a man in his balls (which you so foolishly think is the only way out). You have not lead a tormented life by even the most absurd scales of measurement but you behave as though every male has only and only the intentions of honestly ill-treating you. Your putrid Attitude, you think, is the only key to success against this oppression; so you throw it! Seriously, men are busier. You are not doing any good for yourself or for the larger, calmer and more pleasant female population. It’s the perfect anti-thesis; you lose respect when the whole point is to gain.

END OF LESSON 2 OF 2

 

EPILOGUE

As my friend would put it – life is a circle. What goes around comes around.

Save your attitude for the time when it comes around.

Ara: What exam tomorrow dya?

Ashwin: Eh? What??

Ara: What exam da?

Ashwin: What da?

Ara: Exam da…

Ashwin: Sorry. Can’t hear!

Ara: Ae.. Exam da?

Ashwin: …

Ara: Exam!

Ashwin: Oh… Exam aa? Got over on friday itself!

Ara: No more exams aa?

Ashwin: Don’t understand the word anymore!

Ara: hmmph.

I’m a sucker for footwear. Not for long have I known this or even been one. I currently have two and a half pairs with me which I own, and another pair shamelessly borrowed from a Chari who doesn’t know. (It will be back in your room and you won’t even know it was missing.) Yes; two and half. One slipper got dumped into a roadside ditch after it gave way when I was on my way to all-mart. I walked back all the way to my room with just one foot covered, trying best to hide the handicap and laughing like I were a passerby laughing at me.

I do that often; creating a tableau out of an embarrassing circumstance I put myself in, stepping out for an instant and laughing at myself. My embarrassing moments are terribly funny, and I give myself a moment or two to laugh at ‘Ashwin’, stepping aside and playing a third-party. Just because it happened to me, doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy what someone else around me would – My embarrassment.

So that accounts for half of the two and a half pairs. Another pair which I adored and worked like a donkey, suffered the same fate, only that I didn’t dump it, in hope to get it into working condition. Someday soon. Then there is this pair which I now wear, which I like not so much though, but i’m left with no options. I have two more pairs back home. I don’t like them. They are for emergency-only.

Coming back to me being a sucker for footwear; I don’t exactly have the most fashionable footwear, definitely not of the likes of many females I know and Laki; but I do ok. I try/want to change them once in three months, and that, well I call it necessity every time, but I’m really a sucker. And beat this; it’s not the big brands/bucks I buy. I pick and choose some obscure brand. I mean who wears Hush Puppies floaters! They just make awesome shoes.

And I feel the worst is when I’ve just stepped out of a store having bought a new pair. No it’s not conscience that eats me for giving into the urge every time, but that they stop looking nice the moment I’m out of the store and I feel I should have bought that other pair. Effeminate.

There – I’ve done it again.