T-shirt slogans #79

Must-have for when in India.
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* Personal = Private. Go away now.

* I'm here for food, not advice.

* That's MY paper.

* I drink, I smoke, I gamble, I sleep around - you still want to fix me up?

* Honk if you're a jackass.

Friday Fun: Food Fiesta

For Brinda (ok, and the rest of you as well). Because you had to know this one was coming.

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Guaranteed 100% no weight-gain India travel diet

Time Required:
The duration of your trip.

Do not keep ready:
Sitaphal ice-cream
Ghee medu vada
Cheese seeeeeeeeeeeendwich (Bombay ishtyle)
Ganne ka ras
Ragda payttis
Royal falooda
Dahi sev batata puri
Mango lassi
Jellababies
Aloo 65
And, of course, orange-flavoured hot chocolate.


Then:
Think about them, salivate, tell everybody how you're just waiting to get your hands on them - and then, for some reason quite unfathomable to yourself, make no attempt to partake of them*.


Why you should try this:
Everybody's allowed a temporary lapse of judgement.


* I'm still trying to figure out why I didn't.

Manual of Life - Alternative Definitions

Irony
n., Insisting that the water served to you in an Indian restaurant be bottled ("because you really can't trust this outside stuff - who knows where they filled it from"), but asking for loads and loads of ice in the fizzy drink of your choice.


See also:
Hepatitis A
Restaurant hygiene

Manual of Life - Things You Didn't Realise Till You Do #89

Nine out of every 10 mannequins in Indian shops are 'flesh-coloured' - Band-aid pink/peach/cream - and are either size zero (for women) for size studbuff (for men). The remainder are those unnerving silver/ebony robot-type ones.

Allowing for the proportion of fair-skinned Indians who even closely resemble that colour to be about a tenth of the entire population, and allowing for the proportion who are either super-skinny (by choice) or muscled up to be another tenth .......

this means that 80% of all the clothes displayed in Indian shops completely fail in their sole function - giving the buyer an idea of how they would look wearing them.



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A weekend post? Shocking no? Just to make up for all the non-posts.

The first thing that hits you when you land here is the smell.

It hangs heavy in the air, wrapping round you with every step you take further in. If it was a person, it would be a late-middle-aged man sitting by a beach, slumped in his unwashed and crumpled shorts, sweating out the cheap rum he's been investigating so intently. The little cooling machines that are planted around only help to make it swirl around even more, chasing you as you try to hurry your way through bored gazes and hustling chancers.

You might be tempted to think it's caused by a mixture of the carpets in this airport and the high humidity, or by the sprawling labyrinth that houses so many thousands nearby. But if you breathe in really deep and let it percolate through your little passageways, you will feel the undercurrent of brine, floating in from all the nearby edges of this little jut of land.

It all floats in - the everpresent threat of malaria from the marshy waters in the undeveloped open grounds, the decades of untreated toxicity from the creek that used to define where the suburbs began, the stupidity of drowning bodies in the shifting sandy beaches to the north-west, and even the smug satisfaction of the ever-powered promenades to the south.

This is not the smell of the city.

This is the smell of what it fought so hard with to become this city, and what it now woos so fervently in order to stay alive. This is the smell of patient and unavenged wrath, waiting to reverse the centuries of desecration and drown this impertinent invader under the weight of its own plastic and broken statues and shit. This smell is a reminder of all the years you were buoyed by all that it contains, and of how you can never escape it, run away though you might.

Welcome to Bombay.

'tis the spirit to be...

...helpful*, it seems.

As a cyclist, 4x4s - especially those driven in-city by blondes and tanned lads** - are the bane of my travel-life. As are trucks. And vans. And buses. Sportscars. Food-delivery scooters. Pedestrians. The bloody local council that won't add enough grit to the edge of the frikkin' hello-there's-been-frikkin'-ice-here-for-three-days-now road. Sportsbikes. Pigeons***.

But 4x4s in particular. I'd scrape my handlebars across the side of each and every one of them if it weren't for the fact that I was so bloody noticeable in my reflective gear and I trust them whole-heartedly to hunt me down and shunt me onto the pavement.

And just because they're occasionally useful **** doesn't mean I think any better of them. PR job, I say.



* For a moment there, you thought I was going to relent and go 'jolly' didn't you? As if.
** And yes, it's always blondes and tanned men. I'd know - I make sure I have a clear view before I start throwing rocks at them*****.
*** Fat, stupid birds. It's a wonder people haven't dropped turkey in favour of roast pigeon for Christmas dinner.
**** It's been snowing here a bit. Four inches and this country shuts down. It's like Bombay's Harbour line trains during October showers.
***** Not really (see above about being hunted), but fantasies are meant for being fantasised about.

Manual of Life - Alternative Definitions

Helplessness
n., Trying and utterly failing to soothe an old, blind, almost-deaf dog who spends the last few hours of his life yipping away because of you-dont-know-what (before he finally decides to chuck it all - softly, unnoticed - and head for that roomful of unguarded slippers* he dreams about).


See also:
Ruined weekend

Manual of Life - Things You Didn't Realise Till You Did #67

You don't get to see billiards* on TV much anymore. If at all.

When some kid looks blankly at you while you're talking about how fast-paced life has become, point that out. And if they start talking about pool and snooker, smack them with the cue-stick.


* Three-ball or English billiards.

Friday Fun: Fact/Fiction

There are days when I feel low about the state I find my life in. Whenever that happens, I tend to go read just one paragraph* to make me appreciate what I have.

"A lot of good things had happened that day. He hadn't been thrown in the hole. The gang hadn't been dragged off to Sotsgorodok. He'd swiped the extra gruel at dinnertime. The foreman had got a good rate for the job. He'd enjoyed working on the wall. He hadn't been caught with the blade at the search point. He'd earned a favour from Tsezar that evening. And he'd bought his tobacco.

The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell".

- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

* sure, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of excerpts from other books that could be said to be more potent, more evocative, and more graphic about human suffering. But the sheer simplicity and clarity of this one, and the way in which it brought down everything to a few simple, basic requirements hit my 15-year old cocky self like no Gogol or Dickens or anybody else ever had. And that initial impact has been hard to shake off.

A "really-should-stick-to-promises" post

So, backstory.

Firstly, Joyce. And that book.

This is an update of no update. And just to make it clear how much of a non-update it is, this post is a redraft of a draft that was first made six weeks ago.

I did not read an additional page since the last post on it. I blame the man, and I blame Suketu.

See, after two years of owning this book, and forgetting to pack it every time I went home (or choosing to, rather - because really, why would I be carrying more books back here?), I finally got round to getting hold of a copy from the local library. And I couldn't help but drop everything else to finish it off first. Not that it's perfect (nowhere close), but the book reinforced a lot of things I've grown to accept and be scared of. More on that later.

And when I returned to Joyce, after revisiting so much...reality, his book felt so....silly. Pretentious. All look-at-me-I'm-so-much-smarter-and-have-you-got-all-the-references smugly superior. And yes, I'm impressed by the dedication and imagination it took. And I'm sure I'd appreciate it more if it was taken apart bit by bit in a critical review class.

But that's the point. Books are meant to educate, enlighten, entertain, comfort, and challenge. By themselves. Not by having to be taught.

I'm quite willing to tackle difficult books, drive-you-crazy books (oh, Something Happened!, how you still haunt my dreams), books that take ages to get through because you have to re-read every page to absorb its meaning.

And while this was a challenge, with every page it felt more as if he did not really want you to win.

It was as if he was thinking - Well, first now that I've got this awesome underlying concept (which nobody would realise unless it was pointed out to them), let me throw in all these random religious and linguistic references just to make sure they sit with four other books to understand it. And then - oh boy - then let me write it so crazily that they'll call me a genius for fear of appearing stupid.

Which is all fine. But you know what? I don't have to put up with it. I'm not going to be implicitly sneered at just because they didn't teach Latin when I was at school and my arse wasn't walloped by fervent Catholic priests who hated the weather of the place they lived in.

So, if you were still interested, Chapter 3 was where it ended. I just got bored.

That said - 'likelily'. Such a lovely word. He's absolved for that.


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I use too many .... (just had a 30-second blankout trying to remember the word)...brackets. Apropos of nothing.

Friday Fun: Fact/Fiction

(Things you may choose to believe about me. Or not.)

I lose about two kilos in weight if I miss breakfast for three or four days in a stretch.

Obviously, I don't put on any if I eat regularly, more damned luck mine.


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Tsk. Hate mail is bad for you. Avoid.

Manual of Life - Things You Didn't Realise Were Weird Till You Did #43

That the reason you've developed a very slight head tilt to the right, caused by all the endless hours browsing (English-language) books in a store, is simply because the spines are printed left-to-right (when placed horizontally) so that you can read it normally when it's placed front-cover upwards.

Obvious, yes?

Except.

If you are already seeing the front cover, with the title and the photo and all the other little details - why would you be reading the spine?

So. Why don't more publishers just print the spine in a vertical top-to-bottom, so that when they're stacked as per normal, my neck doesn't need to get such a horrible crick every single time?

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For those of you interested in such esoteric information - and that's pretty much all of you - here's some book-spine naming and printing conventions.