May 31, 2006
May 27, 2006
REM
9:03 am. Your maid wakes you when your last dream has just reached its climax. You were standing on a wet staircase made of unpolished black stone. There is no banister. The staircase leads you out of a house, into the rain. You don’t want to know who lives inside. You lived with him once. But still, stand rooted to the wet stone floor, unwilling to move, resisting the echoes of a voice asking you where the detergent is.
You open your eyes and the weather changes instantly. Your feet are no longer wet and a beam of sunlight is tickling your neck. For an eternal moment, your mind is utterly empty. A nano-second later, millions of impatient thoughts, raring to fill up the void, flow into your mind at a speed that is inconceivable. They jostle. They fight. They scratch each other. Each wanting its share of prominence.
You stretch and yawn. The thoughts don’t matter. Not today. You sit up and stare unabashedly into the sunlight. Then you shut your eyelids and the world turns into orange. Slowly, shapes appear and start floating randomly in the orange universe. The shapes twist, turn and distort over and over again. It reminds you of a kaleidoscope. The only difference is, these shapes don’t have the imposed symmetry of a kaleidoscope.
You start humming a song. It’s the same song that changed your life last night. And the night before that. And the first time you ever heard it years ago. You just can’t get it out of your head. It makes you do things. And you wilfully surrender. You remember. You forget. You abandon. You choose. You achieve. You let go.
And then you write.
May 16, 2006
The Emancipation Of Mimi
"Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff."
- Mariah Carey.
May 15, 2006
Warm up.
When you work in an advertising agency, there are some horrors you have to be prepared for – your creative ideas getting stolen, insecure cohorts, reporting to people with an intellect slightly less than that of a prawn, ‘I-want-this-yesterday’ deadlines, clients who want to put a child in every ad, microscopic increments and overly effective air-conditioners.
Ok, it’s like the plague. The air conditioner in the agency I work for has successfully managed to abolish human productivity. It’s a 40 ton central-cooling monster that is no doubt well distributed, but someone forgot to attach a freaking thermostat to it! It starts humming at 9 every morning and doesn’t stop unless you p-p-p-plead with th-th-the office boy to ttturn it offff. No really, the air conditioner was invented by man to rid him of excessive heat, not to find out the temperature at which blood freezes.
The devastation this contraption has caused is not just frightfully bad ads. (How can you think of great ideas when your brain is waiting to thaw?) Its worse. The loos are always engaged. People’s wardrobes have changed. Coffee has replaced water. The cumulative sick leave of employees has increased. And if you don’t have constant goose flesh, you are abnormal.
The next time you laugh, cry, get indigestion or don’t get syphilis on seeing a hoarding, press ad or TV commercial, you know the brutal conditions under which it was conceived.
Technology and its various manifestations have been the hallmark of our generation. But technology has an alter-ego. It is that part of technology that man hasn’t been able to conquer. It is what happens when technology solves a problem but creates another as a by-product. The alter-ego of technology embodies the risks of technology. It is when your ipod suddenly refuses to come on. It is when you can chat with your boyfriend who’s 2000 kms away, at the same time sending him a virus. It is when you cannot switch on your mobile phone in a flying aircraft…
Ok I’m philosophising. Didn’t mean to. I do that when my fingers get frozen.
May 09, 2006
Five-second food rule fails microbiology test
(Source: CBC News)
CHICAGO - A high school senior in the U.S. has dealt a blow to the gastronomic principle known as the five-second rule.
The rule states if food falls on the floor and remains there for five seconds or less then it's fine to pick it up and polish it off.
Jillian Clarke of Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences put the rule to the test.
Clarke says the rule was started by Genghis Khan. He apparently considered food safe to eat so long as it had been on the floor for 20 hours or less.
As part of her seven-week internship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she tested the five-second rule around campus.
The researchers tested how many microorganisms transferred onto food from rough and smooth tiles. Gummy bears and fudge-type cookies were tested – the two-most commonly dropped and eaten snacks.
The campus floors were actually quite clean. They found fewer than 20 so-called colony-forming units of E. coli on the floors. The lower limit for detecting the microbes is 25 colony-forming units.
When the researchers purposely inoculated food with bacteria, they found it doesn't take long for the bugs to contaminate a morsel.
"People think if it made contact for only five seconds then it is OK to eat but it's false because if you do drop anything full of microorganisms such as E.coli, it will transfer and transfer immediately," Clarke told CBC Radio's As It Happens.
The texture of the food and floor tiles also made a difference, she found. Microbes transfer faster on smooth foods like gummy bears falling on smooth tiles compared to rough tiles or fudgey cookies.
May 07, 2006
The tea seller
The tea seller around the corner is an old man. He sits at a shack with an aluminum kettle and a cold stove for company, waiting, for people with caffeine withdrawal symptoms. And if someone comes up, he lights up a stubborn stove with his wrinkled fingers, blackened with soot, to heat the tea he made in the morning.His favourite T shirt is faded pink and has an embossed logo of an Italian clothes manufacturing brand. Below the T shirt is a pair of thin, eager legs, wrapped in a short skirt made from an old table cloth. A prominent pair of bifocals competes for your attention with an equally prominent pair of incisors.
The flavour of every installment he brews is characteristically erratic, with the quantity of milk, tea leaves, water and ginger having varying degrees of randomness. The only thing constant is an unfailing overdose of sugar.
The tea might be inconsistent, it's cost isn't. Rs. 2 per glass on a pleasant day. Rs. 2 per glass on a humid day. Rs. 2 per glass when he’s happy or even when his young son didn’t come back home for weeks. Rs. 2 for every quantum of brewed imperfection.
I do not see him everyday. But whenever I’m at the paan-shop near his shack buying the odd strip of gum, he walks up and offers me an unsolicited glass of cutting chai: an act of voluntary generosity that makes up for the tea that is deficient in all that it’s supposed to be.
Its been this way for over two years now. And in the last two years, all I’ve always said to him is “ek chai” or “kaise ho?” Wonder what his story is. Somehow, I’m afraid to ask.
April 21, 2006
Copywriter’s Block (in not so Iambic Pentameter)
When unfamiliar laughter was reason enough to kill
When the world looked the same upside down
When hunger pangs butchered the atheist in me
And tea cups were big enough to drown…
When genius simmered in a shallow pot
When The Ego reached the finish line before ID
When the pen refused to follow my command
And music was consumed with greed…
When paper smelt the same as Russians
When batteries died out sooner than rage
When perfumes made me feel miserable
And I was still on the same page…
When the keyboard was overworked
When the rain was hot and the sun was cold
When statutory warnings were shown the finger
And the body grew another fold…
When characters in my head attended their own funerals
When fun began on a lost highway
When ideas froze like a Friday-evening-climax
And started from there the following Monday…
I took a coffee-break.
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