Aug 27, 2008

Arsenals of Truth, Beauty and Joy

How much do we know each other - K and MIMI combated.

K's side of the story:
TRUTH - Not me. Never me. I like to live a lie. A very happy lie. That is my truth.
BEAUTY - Monica Belluci, Paz Vega, et al. beauty is me on the vogue cover.
JOY - is having what i want, when i want it and the way i want it.

MIMI's quotes on K :
TRUTH: K is sick. been that way for a long time now. she's getting better but she's still sick. She laughs when she is depressed, she dresses the best when she's suicidal. It's either that or shes wearing uncomfortably fancy heels.
BEAUTY: Bottles and bottles of body lotions and lip balms - it's not a beauty tip - K has very dry skin.
JOY: She'd be happy if she knew how to be. K will either die of a broken heart, in an asylum - if she lets her true self take over ever, or will die the moment she is filled with joy. K is incapable of digesting happiness. Period.

MIMI side of the story:
TRUTH: I like life the way it unfolds. I'm very positive about it, the best deserve the best.
BEAUTY: the within reflects without. u could be everything and nothing to someones eye.
JOY: smile and let go - yesterday is gone, tomorrow i don't know and today is just as good.

K's quotes on MIMI:
TRUTH: Optimism is a Godot. MIMI likes to wait in inactive hopeful insurgency for what may or may not happen.
BEAUTY: Fat. Short. Inadequate. MIMI camouflages her paunch with long kurtas and is extremely insecure of her body.
JOY: MIMI is a sloth that lives on leftovers (material as well as abstract) of other people.

K and MIMI haven't spoken to each other since this little game. They are hurt by each other's honesty and ashamed by the fact that they know each other so well.

Aug 12, 2008

another embarrassing test - darnedest

Okie - this one is not my fav, but a nice person sent it to me and when i turned down the offer to shoot reply and post it up here; she (in her true blood) reminded me of a favor that i owe her.

*P, you shall not be forgiven for this.

Here it goes reluctantly:

10 MATERIAL THINGS (AND THEIR TRUE MEANING) ABOUT YOU THAT PEOPLE WOULDN'T OTHERWISE KNOW.

1) love solitaires. Seriously, want to epitomise everything a diamond stands for. (yes, yes... gold digger!! i have no scruples and no soul and would not marry 'a nice man' who can't afford them. what a shame, i know.)

(2) know more about 'heels' (the most important part of a shoe) than most professional fashionistas. (yes, i take pride in the most useless frivolities of life when there are millions who lack the opportunity to even choose footwear... and Saint Marie Antoinette says - eat cake!)

3) secretly smell a guy before deciding to go on a second date. (yes, me, bitch, me!)

4) collection of ganjee & shorts. black or white vests paired with pink floral ones, red soccer ball ones , etc... (i am juvenile, girly, silly.)

5) beauty: sunscreens, moisturisers, body lotions, hair gels, bath accessories, blah, blah, blah ( self indulgent). Make-up: Kajals, lipsticks and lip balms of six different types. secret wish is to wear cherry red lipstick in broad daylight without appearing tacky. (geisha's also got sex appeal!)

6) enjoy floral scents and musky nauseate me. (yes, i do not use them even if they were gifted.) P, ur hugo boss lies unopened - do not complain, u asked for it!

7) like wearing skirts (i'd wear them shorter if i didn't have a web of sliver stretch marks on my calves) and d classic white shirt and blue denims with a broad brown belt! (my ancestors were apes, i have no shame in admitting so!)

8) a hoarder of antique jewellery and traditional pieces. (hoarding everything that has resale value. apart from that i'd not have to buy anything for the next generation ... this 'passing on' will not be looked down upon. u see it has multiple benefits)

9) wealth - ghar, ghar ke aage balcony, balcony ke aage garden, garden ke aage samundar (sea), samundar main ek chotisi ship, ship par a chotasa helicopter, etc... (Fav cardinal sin - GREED)

10) with all my love for shoes (neatly stack in boxes and cloth bags), on any given day i'd prefer to wear running shoes or keds (if i do not have to look at my feet) no jokes, they protect and keep your feet in shape. I envy men for the same - they rarely have tanned feet!

Moral of the exercise: i am an honest person and I keep my word.

Aug 11, 2008

Desensitized

...me.

Being physically unwell - makes me needy, cranky and cold. Being mentally unwell - makes me... let's not bother.

scene
: morning, rain, me walking out of Mahim station. a horse.
K (aside): - a horse?. OMG, he's wounded, look at his legs, the blood's oozing out. Where is his owner? I should call SPCA. Is the lady standing there going to be of any help? Why are these people just looking at the horse - idiots. Hey his feet are getting wobbly, is he going to sit. Is he left to die?

What does K do?
She walks away. She does not turn around. Nope. Not even once. No voyeuristic pleasurez. Nope.

scene:
after reaching the crossing, K turns to look for vehicles that can blow her up. However , the road is empty.
K (aside): Let the horse die. I wish it dies, right now. How cruel could you be? You should call for rescue. How is the hospital going to be? Wet, unclean, dark, dingy, white walls or blue? terracotta or marble tiles? What will they do to him? What if it is in his fate to die lonely - on a humanly crowded, spit over, rainy street?

K enters the office building, follows a woman with long silky hair (whore) and enters the elevator with her. They smile, she reaches her floor, walks in through the glass doors - meets an annoying colleague (sipping lime tea in a large mug that can pass off as a soup bowl), who exclaims that she isn't drenched! (Oh what a wish he has, filthy scoundrel.) Moves to her seat - forgets to wish her colleague 'happy birthday' till his birthday card arrives and then hits WORK ONLY button. She spends her day over her long fulfilled deadlines = wastrel day = headache, terribly written Photokina piece, irritated over the ever-busy-designer and the zero-prompt-boss.

K, in more ways than one, hates herself but pretends that she is still her favorite person.
K is a fool.

Aug 7, 2008

Mumbai. City. Obsession. Catharsis.

.... and this dark secret love will thy life destroy.
- Blake

Traveling by train every single day makes you a sensitive and a selectively sanitized person. Once you've elbowed, pinched, stamped your way into the compartment; squeezed your butt on the fourth seat next to the corporately dressed lady (with tarty red lipstick), with immense sense of pride - you have duly become a Mumbikar (or a mumbling Bombayite).

A true Mumbaikar travels in trains, the class doesn't really matter. The daily commute is often claimed to be strenuous, suffocating, friendly etc., it can be all of the above and none. But what it can not not be is uneventful! Every single day, you will either witness a fight, a business deal, a lesbian kiss, a death, a swollen jaw, hickeys on necks/backs/ arms, frowns (multiples of them), people reading an array of books from regional literature to Russian porn, breakfast parties, sorry tales, consistent adjustment of breasts within the bra or the blouse, or women sleeping carefree with their mouth's wide open.

Mumbai, as it is a city of trains, it is a city of sewage or gutters as they are fondly called. Drama King often calls Mumbaikars as 'we are all in the gutters, mademoiselle; only some of us are staring at the sky and dreaming of the stars.' The city without much surprise has more than a dozen hundred gutters, most of them are rivulets from the largest river called Mithi (read: sweet, small). Once upon a time, in a fairy tale Byzantium, this lean water source was the only source of fresh flowing water. Now it is a stink line - the pulmonary vein amongst mineral water arteries. The living symbol of Mumbai's health.

The river is at the mercy of monsoon to wash away the clogged plastic, steel, and diffusers into the ever embracing Arabian sea. The citizenry is ruthless to these gutters and swamps: it has allowed too many people to survive suicides in them, too many have thrown away enemy carcasses or flowers offered to domesticated 4-inch gods. The gutters are malleable warriors fighting survival, squeezing through the clefts and the breeches left by builders who conspiring to sink the city. Gutters are like people who sit on the forth seat, grow iceberg lettuce using the same water, packaging them in polythene to sell in train compartments to seemingly rich women obsessed with health food.

Gutter's and gutter dwellers celebrate survival; of not allowing plastic or carbon mono oxide to choke their existence, or stop the steel fringe sculptures from the blown-up train compartments, from going to work the next day. Prima facie, Mumbai is a city of the young and bold, on the inside it's a body infested with over-working, multiplying carcinogenic cells ... the city is dying, gradually sighing out, wreaking and lying. Like a dying woman, it has become exotic, historical and wanting to gulp a cup of hot chai at a go - it is fighting against time, against death.

Mumbai's losing it's taste, it's mind was always a wanderer; now it's pulling-up the keel, raising the mast and girding to sail in an iceboat.

Aug 4, 2008

Random Conversation

Scene: Post walk to the juice center from the spa.

Him: K, you are expensive!
K : Don't blame your lack of ambition on me.