Feelin' extra Indian

I always did love those patriotic/ country-lovin' type of ads, and the latest Maruti ads are no different. Which is ironic, considering the majority stake in that company is no longer Indian.






These remind me of the Hamara Bajaj ads that used to come some time back, which I'd put up here if I wasn't worried about how long a post with three videos will take to load.

One of the things that makes Ranbaxy's sell-out to Daiichi that bit sadder is that Ranbaxy was one of those companies which really was an Indian multinational company that we as Indians could be proud of. Now, it's just another subsidiary of another Japanese company. I met someone this week who said that not only was this not an unexpected happening, but that eventually, all the big Indian companies will sell out. Now, I'm usually quite clueless about anything to do with the financial markets or the corporate world, but isn't this an extremely bleak view to take? I mean, do you really see the Tatas or the Birlas selling out anytime soon? Or at least in the next decade or so?

I'm just feeling extra Indian tonight. It must be the cold.

Ice!

So the person using Bloglines came back to my blog after my last post, but didn't reveal his/her identity. And in case you're back again, whoever you are, please understand that this is a very blatant appeal for comments. I need more commenters. Just the Zig is simply not enough. And that goes for the person from down South who visits every few days too.

I was going through my unpublished drafts last night, and came across the following one. Seems like an interesting mix of thoughts, so figured I'll put it up. I'm just trying to remember what on earth I was up to in October 2006 that didn't let me sleep at night. And exactly which bus incident I'm referring to here. There've been too many of 'em for my liking.

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If you live in Delhi, and have never heard of Kake da Hotel, you're an ignorant fool, in my very humble opinion. So there.
My family has patronised that place for more than twenty years now, and it's amazing how unchanged it's stayed over the years. It's still in that dingy little corner shop opposite Nirula's in Connaught Place, with the same hustle bustle. And it's not just the food which draws you there (although that is scrumptious anyway), it's the ambience of the place.
Everyone's in a rush there, the refills keep coming without you even asking, everyone keeps chattering at the top of their voices despite their full mouths... It's brilliant! It's fascinating how people from all walks of life will share a table with utter strangers without batting an eyelid. I have seen the most snobbish of people walk in there and walk out completely satisfied. Ah... Kake! There's just something about that place.

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I love filling ice trays. There's something utterly mesmerising about watching how you can let the water fall constantly in just one spot, and then see how it flows from cubicle to cubicle to cubicle. Not the most interesting of things for y'all perhaps, but mundane things things like this are fascinating at times, if you just care to look around you.

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It's amazing how a normal night's sleep can completely rejuvenate you.

For the past three weeks or so, I have been surviving on an average of four to five hours of sleep a night, with maybe an hour in the afternoon if I'm lucky. I hit my all-time low since my class 10 Boards when I caught only three and a half hours the other night. My sadistic family (what can I say - it runs in the family) derived great pleasure from watching my bleary-eyed efforts the next morning to get from one room to another without bumping into something.

That night, I decided enough was enough, and made sure I got around six and a half hours of sleep (which is my usual average anyway) and voilà! I was absolutely fit and fine and raring to face the world the next morning!

Of course, since then, I've been averaging about five hours a night again, so I think I'm heading for another breakdown soon.

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So I had a rather unnerving experience the other day. No, I won't go into the details, but I would like to say this: I hate the buses of Delhi. More specifically, I hate the men who travel by these buses. I think they're frustrated perverts, who should all be hung, drawn and quartered.

A useless lil' vent

Now who on earth uses Bloglines to subscribe to my blog?!?

Bloglines is funny, you know. One, I don't think I'll use it that often anyway, because why should I sign in there separately to read my feeds (is that what they're called? I'm little clueless about all this terminology) when I have Google Reader doing a very nice job for me, and two, for some reason they won't let me claim my blog. And believe you me, I've been trying every six months for nearly two years now - mainly because I forget all about it for the rest of the time. I suspect it's because of the whole old Blogger-new Blogger problem, because they basically don't accept my Gmail ID as my freakin' Blogger Username!

I have a cold. Because I got wet in the rain. The rain which apparently indicates that the monsoons have hit Delhi two week earlier than expected for the first time in 108 years. Which doesn't make sense to me at all, because as far as I'm concerned, there was no summer this year. It's been raining for months!

I had planned to vent about something else as well, and it's completely slipped my mind now.

I hate colds. They make me all miserable and lousy-feeling and drained of energy and even venting doesn't make me feel better. Sheesh.

A matter of perspective

This post sure gets to the heart of things, dunnit?

This is home.

I swear to you, Bengalis are the only community I know of who, on being asked how they are, actually tell you how they are. Seriously.

Mamma and I spent a week in Kolkata last month, and it is just incredible how asking a person how he/she is will get you very comprehensive details of each illness/ailment suffered in the past week by not only the person you're speaking to, but by every member of his/her family as well. The trip was incredible though. This was the first time I actually went around the city on my own, and the first time we did more than just visiting various relatives. Most importantly, after years of looking for it, my mother and I finally found the shop in New Market she used to frequent in her college days for the purpose of buying silver jewelry. Apparently, I forgot the meaning of the word stinginess while there, because by the time I exited that shop, all the gift money I had saved for the past two years had been spent.

We also discovered, for the first time perhaps, just how exasperating and unprofessional doctors in Kolkata are. Doctors in the NCR may be mad and annoying, but at least they're in their chambers during their scheduled hours and at least they pick up the damn phone when there's an emergency! I still love Kolkata, but if I had to live there, I think I'd go quite mad.

The family also spent a week or so in Mumbai and it's nearby hill stations recently. Quite a lovely trip; the father took us around to his college, hostel, and haunts from college days. I also found the perfect bag while shopping in Linking Road; it is huge and everything I ever need to carry with me (which, as some of you may know, is quite a bit) and still have space left over. And those are just a few of the highlights of the trip.

We're now back home. Things are happening at home. Life is back to normal, or as normal as it ever gets with my clan. I'm back to disliking shopping with a fervour (although I do need to visit Fab India fairly soon). The princess of the house is getting used to having the whole family with her most of the time, and is throughly enjoying being taken for walks by the brother every morning (as much as I am enjoying the extra half an hour of sleep since that particular morning duty is taken care of for the next four months at any rate).

I have also come to realize the truth of something I have been trying to deny for the past nearly fourteen years - this city is my home. The NCR is where I feel most comfortable. Oh, I love traveling and visiting other cities. The people here are ridiculous, the weather is crazy, and the transport system is capable of driving me to suicide. I've got my whole life ahead of me and there's no saying where I'll end up eventually. But for now, this is home.

A few notes on the IPL

The Rajasthan Royals just won the first tournament of the DLF Indian Premier League - and I mean that both in terms of time and how it happened. I'm rather disappointed, because RR has been my least favourite team all through the tournament - primarily because I'm a sucker for underdogs, and I don't like teams that win everything they play. But then, I wasn't supporting Chennai either, because I'm not too fond of Dhoni.

Actually, once it got to the semi-final stage, I wasn't really fond of any of the teams. I thought I'd support the Delhi Daredevils, but when you think of the way they just gave in to the RRs, there's just no point. But I never thought Punjab's King's XI wouldn't make it to the finals, and I really thought they were the only team who would be able to beat Rajasthan, but that didn't happen either.

For a while today, I really did think Chennai would make it, but the last two balls of the match changed everything around. I was hoping for a bowl-out when they needed just one run off the last ball, but Sohail Tanveer managed to pull it off on the last ball.

Come to think of it, nothing in this tournament went the way I wanted it to go. I supported the Kolkata Knight Riders, and had very high hopes of their success in the first match when Brandan McCellum hit his 158 and the Bangalore Royal Challengers just didn't know what to do. But I am extremely glad I didn't get tickets for their match against the Mumbai Indians when I was in Bombay on the 16th of May, because the way KKR played was just ridiculous. I still think they could have made it through to the semis if that damn rain hadn't washed out the match in Delhi, but who knows?

The other teams I liked which didn't make it through were the Mumbai Indians and, well, the Deccan Chargers of Hyderabad. MI totally deserved to not make it through to the semis consideruing the way they fielded in their last few games. And that Dilhara character who gave a wide in that last over against God knows which team now, and following it up with dropping a catch on the last ball, is just a fool of the first order.

The thing with the Deccan Chargers is that you can't really figure out why they lost everything they played. They have two people in the top ten scoring batsmen list, R P Singh was one of the leading wicket takers, they made decent scores in quite a few matches, but then... something would just go wrong. They just couldn't close any of their matches on a winning note. I really admired VVS Laxman for giving up his icon status so their team could use the money to get more players, but that team... just didn't click when it mattered.

But at the end of the day, you've got to give credit to Shane Warne for bringing the Royals together the way he has, more so since half the players in the team probably don't speak English. Like them or not, the team completely deserved to win the IPL.

It's been a very exciting 40 days (which started during my exams) of cricket every single day. But at least I'll be allowed to watch my shows which come during matches. And I really really hope ravi Shastri didn't mean his statement about Makhaya Ntini "bringing a lot of colour to the tournament" the way I suspect he did.

The Queen's Necklace

Many years ago, I read the following passage in Mary Higgins Clark's book Moonlight Becomes You, and the lines have stayed with me ever since for some reason:

Manhattan stretched before him, ablaze with lights. He looked at the East River bridges and remembered that when he had told Maggie his office was on the forty-second floor of the World Trade Center, she had told him about the first time she had gone for a cocktail at Windows on the World atop the center. “It was just becoming dusk. The lights of the bridges went on, and then all the building and streetlights started glowing. It was like watching a highborn Victorian lady put on her jewelry—necklace, bracelets, rings, even a tiara.”

We were driving along Marine Drive in Mumbai today evening, and the lights both on the road we were approaching and across the harbour were absolutely brilliant to watch. My father mentioned how the road used to be called a "Queen's Necklace" because of the lights lining the road, which immediately brought back this passage to mind.

Missing her already...

The family's off on a week-long vacation tomorrow, and the mother and I went to drop Kyra (the golden retriever) off at her usual boarding place today. I swear to you, there is no bigger heart-breaking sight in the world than Her Highness looking back at me oh-so-reproachfully as she's led away by the doctors there.

My mum was busy with the formalities when Kyra was taken away, so missed the departure. I told her not to go in and see Kyra one more time, but she insisted on doing so. Kyra, of course, seeing Mamma, bounded up to her, thinking it's time to go home already. Net result, Kyra was even more mournful when Mamma walked away, and Mamma was more upset than before.

I usually try to avoid dropping Kyra off when we go on vacation, because I inevitably break down. I couldn't get out of it today, but managed not to break down completely. The mother, on the other hand, has never ever dropped Kyra off before. I think she now knows why I try to avoid it.

*Sniff*

I'm fine...

I don't have a particularly high opinion of Rahul Bose as an actor. Nonetheless, what little I've seen and read of him in interviews et al., I do think he's a fairly intelligent and sane person. (Some people will catch onto what I mean by sane here; most won't. It's the former minority which is impertinent enough to call me neurotic.)

Coming back to Rahul Bose, his directorial debut Everybody says I'm fine! is one of the most brilliant movies I have come across. Unfortunately, it's also made my life that bit more complicated. I swear to you, ever since I've seen that movie, I have not been able to sit through one hair cut or head massage without wondering if the person behind can hear my thoughts.

I had my annual hair cut today, and as usual, the second it started, I started wondering if the fellow could hear my thoughts. Then I started wondering what I was thinking about anyway. Then I started wondering what I shouldn't think about in case he can hear me. Then I tried to think of acceptable thoughts which wouldn't matter if they were heard. And then I thought about how gorgeous my hair.

*sigh* It happens every time. [Why is every time not one word?!?]

And in case you're wondering, I only got my hair trimmed; I like it long, but in this heat, it's impossible to handle.

Also, this post has been in the making for nearly six months, so I'm not too sure what exactly I meant by the first paragraph, but I'm letting it go. It seems right to me, although I'm pretty sure I'm taking it the same way I originally meant it.

Of celebrities and their blogs...

*sigh* Just when you think the Bachchan family cannot get more in your face then it already is, you get proven wrong.

Amitabh Bachchan has started blogging. Now, a) he doesn't write particularly well, and b) his blog is in one of those irritating formats where not only does the whole entry not show up in Google Reader, but it doesn't even show up on the home page of the damn blog! You have to do the whole clicking on a link to read the rest of the entry bit to read every entry which is really annoying. And honestly, the man is just full of himself! If you're a "superstar" in India, the media is going to hound you. And if you're going to react to every single thing the media says about you, then we've had it! And, even if I choose not to read his blog, I can't get away from it, because both HT City or Delhi Times are bound by compulsion for some obscure reasons to quote his entries on a daily basis.

Don't get me wrong; I think the Bachchan family is tremendously talented. Jaya Bachchan has always been one of my favourite actresses. Amitabh Bachchan is above and beyond almost everyone else in the industry; you just have to look at Hrishikesh Mukherjee's movies, Sholay, and Black to realise that, to name just a few. Aishwarya Rai can act quite decently if she has the right movie and the right director, and Abhishek Bachchan, of course, I had a huge crush on till the whole family started getting on my nerves. I mean, not only are they doing utterly ridiculous movies most of the time (just look at Jhoom Barabar Jhoom), but they're freaking everywhere!

Incidentally, can anyone tell me why Aamir Khan's blog doesn't have a feed to which I can subscribe to on Google Reader?