Wednesday, October 14, 2009

When i am in a whole day of street cricket followed by lemon juice kind of mood...

I am feeling good about life. For the moment. Two hours of stand up comedy on youtube can do wonders to your outlook of life. A 32 year old comic tells you about the need to design cars specifically for the 'making out' segment, a segment that is comfortable making out, but can't handle the seriousness of a room or a relationship or sex. And i look forward to the tomorrows with a renewed and unreasonable lightness. No correlation whatsoever. The mind is so fucking fickle. It helps that the 32 year old happens to be Janeane Garofalo from 14 years ago. But the thing is, if you feel good about life, you don't sit around and cross examine it. You just revel in it, and wait for shit to happen. After coffee the next day. Also fucking and fickle seemed to rhyme in a weird way. Which is why i wanted to put them next to each other. Honestly. I am 31 years old and no longer find it fashionable to throw the f word around. I used to find it very fashionable and novel when i had just joined college in 1995. I saw peers using it to sound exasperated in a very cool way. I had tried to imitate, but my attempts felt artificial and affected. So i gave up and stuck to the native tongue. I see a lot of my kid cousins throw the word 'Whatever' around a lot. Is that a fashionable word among college kids of today?

My mom is in town. And i am getting frequent doses of Rice and Sambhar. I am not a foodie. I could live on rice and sambhar all my life, without ever knowing if Penne is tubular or if Fusilli looks like dead butterflies made of maida. Sambhar is a gooey thing made from dal and water and chilli powder and turmeric and tamarind and vegetables. And add salt to taste. Dal is a pulse. I've seen a japanese man cry and sweat and fret over some benign Sambhar a few years ago. I've seen the same Japanese man suck in an Octopus tentacle with a straight face. His name was Hanawa. We called him Hanawa-san. He told me that 'baakha' was fuck in japanese. He taught me wrong. I still don't know the right word. In Jap movies, people keep saying 'waatha shiva' or something like that. I don't know what it means. But we told Hanawa-san what 'waatha' means in Tamil. And he giggled over it. Serious japanese men don't giggle often. He wasn't a serious japanese man. He took us to Uno park where we saw families sitting under sakura blooms and drinking sake. I remember being extremely happy seeing all those blooms and all those half drunk and not so drunk families. Sakura is cherry blossom in Japan, and the bloom lasts for all of 15 days. But, for those 15 days, they are very pretty. Humans should've also been designed to be like sakura.

I am most probably visiting home in November. For a month or so. I think i'll decide on the immediate direction for the next few years then. Buddha has promised to come down and leave a sign at that point. He refuses to come down right now. Says he is not in the mood. I think he has visa issues. I think 2010 is going to be a very good year for me. If i keep repeating this some 2.5 million times, it will actually happen. I read this in an excerpt of a self help book titled Sweet corn soup for the fool or something.

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Sometimes, strangers are better than fiction...

There'll be no angst in this post. No alcohol either. I came here to record an unexpectedly pleasant saturday evening. A time i usually spend with fictional characters. Or a high level programming language. This time, it was the company of a stranger. A stranger i've known, for 3 days in all. Who i'll meet again, in 3 years maybe, or a little later. A polite hello. A curt handshake. A cup of coffee each. One with sugar, one without. And then a drive, supposedly to Palo Alto. A signal jump, a wrong turn, and a pretty road that took us to a destination we weren't headed for. An unmarked space with two parked cars. A trail. A real heavy breeze, that made us need the sight of speech, as much as the sound of it, to make sense of the spoken word. A bird whose name we did not know, whose flight we still hung on and followed. The just risen moon, inside which, she saw a rabbit, i saw a squid, and she spoke of a friend, who always saw a mother and a child. I've never looked for forms inside the moon. I call them craters and leave them at it. Bata chappals, wind chill, the setting sun and the growing hunger, made us head back to the car. Eventually, Palo Alto was reached. Dishes whose names i can't remember, to save my life, were consumed. And good byes and good lucks exchanged. Strangely, the evening seemed whole in it's own right. Random. No context. No obligatory future or direction. Just it. Like watching, possibly, the only show of a feel good movie, seeing the credits roll, walking out, smiling and satisfied.

I think back of Kodachaadri. Another geography. Another whole set of events. But a very similar after taste. I'll keep it for another time.