The Cat Race

I wrote this one long time ago. There is something I am miserable at - my personal and official relationships with people. I'm an emotional, over indulgent fool. The following was an article written for a reputed magazine - I've held on to it, only to re-read and remind myself that if I bloody well know all of this, then why can't I F*ing follow it? Then again...

The Dos and Don't's for the Have and Have-Nots' in a growing competitive work environment.

Every crisply dressed working woman will tell you that corporate competition is not only about delivering more than you promise, or beating your deadlines or maintaining a perfect code of conduct. All of the above is mandatory, and be sure your competitor is already doing all this and more. Here are some brisk pointers to your way on top.  

# Be professional. Professionals are honest to the act (work) and not the person behind the act. Do not confuse people with their decisions. To achieve that – build your own level of clarity within your personality.

# Do not judge. Use the oldest and the wisest trick in the book – ‘Watch and learn’. You’ll go farther than you desire.

# Do not forgive nastiness from any point. Do not encourage others to do what you would think twice about. Do not make scapegoats of others. You won’t climb higher if you are habituated to pulling people down.

# Do not compare and contrast. You may take longer initially to rise, but use the time to build the ladder. Identify people who can influence decisions in the company. Identify their and your areas of interests and strengths. Work on them!

# Reserve your opinions and suggestions for friends and family. Everyone seeks an alternative opinion – only to reconfirm theirs. However do not ignore a genuine need.

# Appeal to the mind and not just the heart, ‘a bad decision made for a good cause is still a bad decision’. Logic goes a long way.

# Do not shoulder responsibilities or a colleague’s crisis. Listen and pat the back – do not empathize. Do not let their ‘words’ color your mind and outlook.  

 

# Colleagues can be friends, and friends can become foes. Start by treating your colleagues with silent respect. Let time decide your friendship.

# Stay away from a gossiping colleague. And farther away from a ‘friendly’ colleague who warns you against others. And farthest from ‘the teams’ at your place of work.    

# Irrespective of how you feel towards the organization – put your interests forth. Personal growth fosters professional growth. If you go disillusioned to work, your skill will suffer, and you may never deliver your best.

# Switch Off post work. Treat it like a part of your life. Not your life. This works as a deadline – it will help you effectively manage time.

# Set realistic goals, and leave a margin for mistakes. Remember you are only human! Do not let anyone else forget that either.  

# Do not push people, and do not let people push you. Deadlines are excellent to out-perform other colleagues but they are catalysts in burning you out.   

# Inspire your colleagues, do not belittle or under play their efforts in a joint project.

# Appreciate every person for the good qualities they have. Harness those and build your work related to them. Your colleagues will not only respond to you as a person on priority but also their overall performance will be better. 

# Restrict criticism, instead start ‘critically appreciating’ your and others work.

# Know your job well, but also the periphery. Multitasking is the key today, but do not let it be your habit. This will tempt you to interfere in your colleague's task, also you will become a bait for all the work someone else did not turn-up to do! Have the knowledge, apply it only during crises. 

 

# Choose and decide your ‘character’ when at work and stick to it! If the ‘silent, demure kind’ works better for you than the ‘friendly, chirpy kind’ then work at ameliorating it. Often a fluctuating persona confuse people, retain honesty in your role.    

# God is definitely in the details, but never compromise on the bigger picture for the details. No one appreciates the skill of a knit picker – Not even you! It affects in the long run – do not be persnickety.   

#  Finally, assess your goals like the company asses the KRA. Are you heading in the right direction? If not, return, revisit your challenges and restructure your approach.

# Your aim should always be you, then the firm and then the clients and then the work force. That way, you will always be in the ‘game’.

The first thing to do starting now is to create a table of ‘retain, remove, resolve’

Retain the qualities you have.

Remove the one that you believe may hamper your growth.

Resolve to incorporate the ones you aspire.

See the list every day and figure where you are at the end of every week!       

 Btw... this shit works wonders! I have tried it.... time to try it again!

Men are dumb. Women are dreamy

It is an undisputed fact. Said by many, experienced by millions.

here some of it goes :

"Woman: Why didn't you do 'xyzee'? 
Man: I forgot.
Woman: How can you forget?
Man: Because I am dumb.
Woman: You have never forgotten to do 'abcee' ever, and you forgot the only thing i asked you to do! You are a very cunning, twisted man."

"Woman1: (sobbing) My life sucks.
Woman2: What? No. what happened?
Woman1: He popped the question.
Woman2: (screeches) WOW, Finally (now jumps all over the place) I'm so happy for you. Congratulations!
Woman1: No, it feels shitty. No ring, no candle light dinner, no music, no flowers, no romance, no getting down n his knees, no making me feel that the world has stopped. [no, it did feel that the world has stopped, and I'm doomed.] Is this too much to expect... what do i ask for anyway? (sobbing, profusely)
Woman2: Crappy, what a numb skull! He should have at least gotten a bottle of wine! Am so sorry babes, but look at the bright side... He finally had the balls to propose marriage to you! I know he's been rehearsing for a while.
Woman1: (sarcastic) Oh, ya, you know what he said?, 'So when can we have dinner with my parents?' He was rehearsing to say this, then seriously, I am the dumbest woman on this planet to fall in love with a guy with an EQ of -10! What am I going to tell my kids, when they ask, 'how did dad propose to you?, 'I'd say he said let's eat with your to-be-in-laws!' How unromantic and crappy and crass is that?
Woman2: Ya, but you know... we could make him re-do the whole thing!"


 

Conversation

Antiques Trader : I am most afraid of you intelligent people. You all become so unproductive so soon. Like going on a strike. I'm offering you a job, it maybe mundane, but show some kind of respect to that offer. You respond with 'I don't do charity!'
K: You are right. We are on strike, in a more self-destructive, 'I shall deprive you the pleasure of making me suffer' way. Most of the work is not what we seek, and we are now refusing to take out someone's trash. I'd rather not do anything, than write empty letters...

The politics of Writing

I received many emails from a new set of blog-readers. Some were nice, some curt, some sexist, some thought my writing was thought provoking, some thought it was mundane dross - what most of the mails did not skip was : 'that I was K, a single woman, looking for a man, with a seriously contorted sense of love, and someone who unabashedly writes about her affections for the 'pen-named' people in her life' (I shall visit this point again). That apart one interesting email, spoke of two different posts regarding 'my parents' (I shall visit this one, too), and the e-mailer's response to my flow of emotions, was I would say, aaaah.... touchy  

A flurry of thoughts passed my head .... with much zapping of electricity. Surprisingly, it was not out of anger but out of a deep understanding. Like finding something very precious when, randomly cleaning your wardrobe. I found it - I found what fellow blog readers wanted me to be - they wanted me to write my life, my identity as a single, as a woman, as a worker, as a blogger.

It was like a funny thing, I studied in geometry - circles intersecting circles - and there is often that one circle that nearly overlaps all of them...

It is time to bust the myth of writing, mine, in the least.

I believe that I come from the tradition of story tellers. Not writers, per say. I come from a long lineage of myth makers and liars and experience thieves.

{I am that child in your school who, made up stories about her damaged ligament because she was too bored to do Karate, or the one that coughed up and pretended to have a heart congestion, only because the Hindi period was too boring to suffer. I was that kid.}


A Mixed Bag is not about anything, least of all, me. It is about a zapping mind, it is about feelings collected and vomited, it is about making love happen, and the wrath of loss. It is a MIXED BAG for heaven sakes, and it is a not the, like thousand other mixed bags with timeless treasures.

There is little solace, and much danger in believing that you can write only about yourself, or from your experiences... It is a myth maker's duty to create, to build on, to go beyond - to make tress walk, and frogs talk, and Ogres weep... And it is a story teller's duty to never over adorn the fabric of the story, to never let the essence (read: fragrance) over power the essential.

Finally, every post is a story, it is a stand alone. It may have a part of 'me', but that is only because, it is comes from me. It is not me. I am not A Mixed Bag. As the ancients say, "it is a liar's first trick; 'Never lie, but never tell the whole truth'."

Now, I visit them!
~ I have left out a lot of intimate sexual detail, that somewhere lies on a word file called 'junk mind'. The dammed thing is so good, it elates me to know that some one's going to jack off/flick the bean on it!
~ The parental posts may not be about my parents, may not be about me, at all. Just in case, my parents read it, they may not know what the hell I am talking about!

Think, dear reader, think... all is not what it seems; there are many holes punched in, many may's to combat. The uncertainty of distinguishing, makes for the magic; and the magic is provided by the Muse. I take no credit for it.

Code decode

There is something overbearing about writing in ALL CAPS. Something very boisterous, like a Siberian Husky before a street dog.

That said, there is something insignificant about  writing in small non hyphenated words. Something very timid, like a street dog before a Siberian Husky.

If you look close enough, you will be amazed at how, the way you write, can convey the way you want your writing to be read.

Just like that...

Barbad Hone Ke liye bhi awkat lagti hai...

You need to have a certain caliber, even to be destroyed.

Polish your Silver

A talent is a gift. Albeit, you must brush it up regularly.
[This one is more a reminder to me, than anyone else.]

To Flee or to Fly is the Question.

Yanna Maria, help me, please help me. By now, you know, I'm not the begging sort. Nope, Nah, Nalla, Nicht, Naahi! As Oyster Seeker puts it - I have an ego, a huge one; reflecting his, of course. For the earthly realm and mere mortals, I agree. Acceptance is the first stage to blahblahshit...

But then, read again....now between the lines, in the curves of every word, the beat of every post...

There are some people who only serve the Gods/the Muses/the Gurus/the soul/the cosmos.... from Tansen to Sunshine to K; we are trivial, timid, obliging, servile, obedient, docile, obsequious, live-in laborers to that force. I, for heaven sakes, am a pitiful servant, who is dying to sign-up for a lifetime of slavery! 

However, fortitude is fortuitous in nature.

For a king, it was a spider; for a blind man, it was a vision. What will it be for me? Kay Sera Sera...

religions and ways of living

Christianity, Zoroastrian and Islam are religions amongst others. Hinduism like the Greek mythological chronicles is not a religion. It is an account of many thinkers' philosophies; a guide to ways of living and understanding what life is all about. Be it a daily task of whether to bathe before eating or after; to weather we have a soul or a consciousness.

Stop making Hinduism hindutva, it is a humble request.

Aazaadi

Jab yaar ki soach ek tarfi hoya ye,
toh use yaar nahi rakhte;
kyunki soach ka koi illaj nahi hota.

When your lover's vision is jaundiced,
you must let go off that lover;
because you can not cure a man of his thoughts.

Am I screwed in the head?

I am currently reading Milan Kundera's the Unbearable Lightness of Being. I'm partially in love with Kundera coz he echoes my mind on the unstructured expressions of spiritualism (My ex-boss would call this description 'spiritualism my arse, k', and would have asked me to rewrite it in a way that would not annoy sane people.) Digressions apart, I asked the Best man, from his collection, to get me Steven Pressfield's The Virtues of War, which I hear is a brilliant account on Alexander.

His reaction was, "Kya, since when did you start reading stuff like this? Were you not reading Kundera? Kundera and Pressfield do not go in the same sentence! Tera dimag hai ki Sybil Isabel Dorsett ki aatma? 


Seriously, what is so incorrect about reading Kundera and Pressfield, Swift and  de Beauvoir, Dawkins and Coelho, Sheldon and Shakespeare simulteneously or subsequently? Can't Archie and Camus earn equal respect on my bookshelf?

gyaan

A night of partying, with the R, Best Man and Mini Me in tow, K realized that it is harder to be kind than to be smart. Come backs and comical punches are easier to throw, than the warmth of pat-on-the-back of someone on whom the joke has not dawned, after the moment has passed. 

(That said, K believes that sarcasm requires high levels of IQ; a quicker and nastier comeback, higher levels of IQ.) R and K have always excelled at being bitchy. And as they say, Bitches are like chillies, they give the edge to an otherwise bland palette.

Harbor line thought - 
maybe, just maybe, that is one reason why we know so many brilliant/skilled/able people have no character/manners/goodness at all.

writing

Jab tak ek kahani khatam nahi hoti,
tab tak doosri ki manzil tay karna jalbaazi hoti hai....

( Until one story has ended,
It is hasty to conclude the ending of the second one.)

I hate men, do I?

With multiple posts stating my 'low' opinion of men, in general. I found many of my blog readers acknowledge that I sound like a man eater/man hater. It all started when '2 weeks of freedom' (a post on him will follow soon), said MG sounded like a dike blog. Now, that was an insult beyond comprehension for someone who studied sexuality. My only rescue was I DON'T .

After a chat with Sunshine, I introspected, then realized that I do write my mind, and my mind has some really strong opinions. The second conclusion is that people who read my blog do not read it properly, either the glance through the words or they dissect it syllable by syllable.

Another aspect is from the first point of contention - I'm surrounded by men, they have been a vital part of my life they are my dad, brothers, brothers-in-law, friends, the loves of my life and et al. My women friends are my soul, but when women meet, they talk about the most vital aspects of their life - which are MEN.

Coming back to do I hate men. I don't think so... here's something that I like about men :
~ They have the innate ability to come to your rescue at any hour, any situation.
~ They can hold a decent conversation about almost anything - from technology to movies.
~ Their levels of patience and determination are enviable. Be it a pet project or a woman; they simply go for it.
~ Most of my friends can be gender neutral and courteous at the same time.
~ They do not have deadlines and will drop you at any hour any where you want.
~ They listen.
~ They have solutions.... which is a big PLUS.
~ If they are your friends, they will not be your enemies.
~ They are great at bitching, pulling leg, and cutting friends to size without being remotely offensive.
~ They are amazing shopping companions. They help you focus, and save time.
~ They are the best beer pals to have.
~ They are very sporty and very accommodating bowling partners.
~ They don't care if you are dressed for the occasion, they are just happy that you turned up!   

The Metrosexual man carries a Lip balm, a Nail file and a hand sanitizer with him all the time; mind you he is stick straight, and looks like a stuffed baboon. He is, by far, the cleanest man I know.

The Best man and I scout for interesting food joints across the city. And he's willing to sit at an Irani joint in his business clothes.

The Drama King is a my best escort into anything, be it a long chats, a drive, be it wine, be it dinner, be it gymning. He's had me screaming at him, clawing him into getting my way and being very accommodating with his - 'Mademoiselle, we should go there, we should do this....' Btw, the man is a walking gift store; and ranks high amongst the most generous men in my life.

The Oyster Seeker is a phenomenal friend, and an ever evolving man. With 'men don't shave' machismo, the man has gone on to get this torso and arms waxed - only to acknowledge; K, it feels great! He also has the finest table manners, I seek for in a man.


The Capricorn Rook is also amongst the 3 men I know, apart from hajaar women who, check the Loo of the place, before taking it up.

The Chameleon who is a lost puppy in a Mall or a salon. He's most vulnerable during a clean-up, and most confident during a fight.   

Do I hate men, I do, parts of them, and their conditioning of masculinity. But there is so much I love about them too.

The Weekend Marriage

With most of my married friends now balancing their lives simultaneously by being professional thisandthat and professional husband and wife. I unsurfaced a new kind of marriage (apart from the long distance one) - the weekend one! I found it incredibly fascinating - so here is a brief account for some weekend hubby-wifey.

Pudgy Fingers and his wife are both high fliers; about three years into their marriage they decided to take weekends off, irrespective of a world crises. So they fly, travel, party, work 16 hours a day for 5 days a week, and bond over the 48 hours that the weekend gives them. As Pudgy Fingers puts it, " It's our out time. We are free to gravely insult each other or passionately work-out together or just drive out of the city or laze in bed for two whole days. We set the rules that we'd be ourselves for the weekend and weekend alone. This gives me a week with myself and my life, with her on the periphery! There are too many plus points to not having your partner in your face."


Childmom claims that she clearly does not do any kind of bonding with her lesser half through out the week." It's not possible to talk to each other without landing into an argument or harboring an ill feeling. We both are strained with our work and our over-achiever attitudes. We fell in love because that was the driving force of our togetherness, now it's going to swallow us. We realized it soon and stopped playing the 'my tush is redder than your tush game' game. So we are our bosses from Monday to Friday with schedules stuck on the pin board, come Saturday and we yearn to be with each other. Now even a grocery shopping is an experience, not a chore. Also the weekend schedule allows us to be more accommodating and sharing, and it's great for our marriage." 

R who had the most out-of-the-box wedding is now shuttling between the city of work and the city her husband works. However, it does not infuriate her in the least, " He is a lazy bum, I knew that way before we got married. I like to unwind by dancing my head off and he likes to be a couch potato with the TV remote as an attached limb. I moved continents for him, and then he moved cities for better prospects. I get that, it's freaking annoying but i get it. It is better that we spend the weekend together than 5 days a week cribbing about why we are not spending quality time together, why he is not dining with my friends or why I'm not watching the movie with him. So, I travel Friday night or Saturday spend a good day with him and return Sunday afternoon. I get my time, he gets his, and we have our time. Its a win-win situation."

Mini me has a more pragmatic tale of love with her beau working in the same industry as they are extremely competitive (enough to get each other sacked). "We both are very rude professionals, we have at many points cut each other short for our gain; but that was before we fell in love. With marriage, we became worse, we'd get the work home and take the home to work. So we both decided to be flat-mates for week and husband-wife for the weekend. Many of our new colleagues do not know that we are married, we are that professional. The weekly rules are clear, he does everything for himself, by himself and at his schedule. I do not touch any of his gadgets and vice verse. The weekend comes with its rules too, we do not discuss work or any thing related to it. If we are out and are spotted by our colleagues, we ignore them. The weekend is for us, and us alone, through the week we make time for our dinners and hang outs - weekends are for close friends, family, and our future plans, and over time, we have become very thrifty with that space."

I like and sound of it, the functioning seems a little crass but hey, if that saves your marriage from being a cliche one, its worth a shot.

An Island of Verse - Kamala Das (1934-2009)

Poems are not people, maybe about a poet, but not people. A verse can never totally be intravenously linked to the person who wrote it; if you do, it'd be your folly. A person must be free of his/her poetry to conduct his/ her own life.

Who are you to tell me how I should write? How I should live? Which ideology I must conform to?
I have a mind, I don't need to borrow yours.
~ Kamala Das/ Madhavikutty/ Amy/ Kamala Suraiya taught me this.

(It took me sometime to write this post. It felt odd to write about someone inspiring, now that they were physically dead. Although, I do not think her life mattered to me as much as her work.)

I started reading Kamala during college, like everyone else. My initial reactions were to hide away the anthology, lest someone read it and judged me for reading it. Reading it aloud felt like hot tarmac on my tongue. The very next year, I wrote an essay on her, was thankful that her work was a part of my study. She definitely was an intriguing, unconventional and a bold poet to study. Her unafraid expression of love, lust and loathing for social norms was very welcome.

For someone who read rhythmical, meter structured Frost, Tagore, Naidu, Brooks, Wordsworth, Browning - it was absurdly refreshing to read a woman who wrote about the follies of her heart, the desires of her body, and the not the Bazaars, or the lilies or the rainbow or the dammed nightingale. Kamala was human, alive, brutally honest and confidant as a woman poet. She lived like a woman, cooked like a woman, bore children like a woman.... then went on to become more than just a woman. Her work embodies it all - the chores, the duty, the loathing, the optimism, the need... all of it!

By the midst of my essay, I read that she was re-married to a man who followed Islam and would settle in the silence of a pardah. I was not surprised, some part of my mind, by then, was asking for a drastic decision; more professional though, like writing bhajans! Nevertheless, here she was, the wayward child of Indian English poetry, quitting the brashness of her 'writing of the body' and moving backstage, rejecting the furors from her fan clubs.

I read her verse off and on, only because it reminds me of my mind, it makes me shameless and subsequently fearless. She should be read, because, she brought Indian women writers out of their closet - had the same impact that French women had on women writers globally. 

I often like to remember Kamala by what expresses her mind the best - the very same that introduced her to the poetry circles within the country.


An Introduction
Kamala Das

I don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with Nehru.
I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar,
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.
Don’t write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queerness
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, half-Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre.

I was child, and later they
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
 When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
Then … I wore a shirt and my
Brother’s trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreler with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. Don’t play pretending games.
Don’t play at schizophrenia or be a
Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when
Jilted in love …
I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans’ tireless
Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone,
The answer is, it is I. Anywhere and,
Everywhere, I see the one who calls himself I
In this world, he is tightly packed like the
Sword in its sheath. It is I who drink lonely
Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,
It is I who laugh, it is I who make love
And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying
With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,
I am saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches which are not yours.I too call myself I.

Now some of my favorites - 

The Maggots (from The Descendants)
At sunset, on the river bank, Krishna
Loved her for the last time and left...
That night in her husband's arms, Radha felt
So dead that he asked, What is wrong,
Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said,
No, not at all, but thought, What is
It to the corpse if the maggots nip?

Love (From Summer in Calcutta)
Until I found you,
I wrote verse, drew pictures,
And, went out with friends
For walks…
Now that I love you,
Curled like an old mongrel
My life lies, content,
In you….

The Looking Glass

Getting a man to love you is easy

Only be honest about your wants as

Woman. Stand nude before the glass with him

So that he sees himself the stronger one

And believes it so, and you so much more

Softer, younger, lovelier. Admit your

Admiration. Notice the perfection

Of his limbs, his eyes reddening under

The shower, the shy walk across the bathroom floor,

Dropping towels, and the jerky way he

Urinates. All the fond details that make

Him male and your only man. Gift him all,

Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of

Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,

The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your

Endless female hungers. Oh yes, getting

A man to love is easy, but living

Without him afterwards may have to be

Faced. A living without life when you move

Around, meeting strangers, with your eyes that

Gave up their search, with ears that hear only

His last voice calling out your name and your

Body which once under his touch had gleamed

Like burnished brass, now drab and destitute.

   
The Stone Age (from The Old Playhouse and Other Poems)
Fond husband, ancient settler in the mind,
Old fat spider, weaving webs of bewilderment,
Be kind. You turn me into a bird of stone, a granite
Dove, you build round me a shabby room,
And stroke my pitted face absent-mindedly while
You read. With loud talk you bruise my pre-morning sleep,
You stick a finger into my dreaming eye. And
Yet, on daydreams, strong men cast their shadows, they sink
Like white suns in the swell of my Dravidian blood,
Secretly flow the drains beneath sacred cities.
When you leave, I drive my blue battered car
Along the bluer sea. I run up the forty
Noisy steps to knock at another's door.
Though peep-holes, the neighbours watch,
they watch me come
And go like rain. Ask me, everybody, ask me
What he sees in me, ask me why he is called a lion,
A libertine, ask me why his hand sways like a hooded snake
Before it clasps my pubis. Ask me why like
A great tree, felled, he slumps against my breasts,
And sleeps. Ask me why life is short and love is
Shorter still, ask me what is bliss and what its price....