Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Friday, May 02, 2014
FYI, dilli!
I ping Dilli: i got a heatstroke, da :-(
Dilli: heatstroke in b’lore, la?
Me: it’s unbearably tawa-HOT, pa!
Silence. I know he’s googling. He’s always googling to set his record straight and mine askew.
Dilli: heatstroke in b’lore, la?
Me: it’s unbearably tawa-HOT, pa!
Silence. I know he’s googling. He’s always googling to set his record straight and mine askew.
Dilli: OMG!! it’s 32 degrees!
Me: Po da! (go away!)
Dilli: Po di!
The one thing I can’t drill into his dilli-mind is that la/pa/da = yaar and you can’t say ‘po di’ just as you won't call a woman ‘yaari’ !!
Me: green bile rising.
Dilli: is it any other colour down south?
Me: offo!
He’s getting away with very little empathy.
Me: been up all night.
Dilli: :-( :-(
Duh!
The only reason I tell him everything is because he’s a man of principles. Just like he does not take work home, he doesn’t take me out of the chat window, ever. Window closed, me out of his slightly-bald head.
The closing line is usually mine: Go die!
If I linger, I see his: Hahahahaha!
Me (un-priding myself): Ravan! Don’t you do any other impersonations?
Perhaps, I’m being uncharitable here about his not caring. For if I’m not online for 2 days, he does text: whatup? Or if I come online on day 3 and after turning on my light green and waiting for an hour, I say a ‘hi’ (cold, exclaimationless), he says, doodie!! (all exclamation like he’s been counting seconds of my absence).
If I linger, I see his: Hahahahaha!
Me (un-priding myself): Ravan! Don’t you do any other impersonations?
Perhaps, I’m being uncharitable here about his not caring. For if I’m not online for 2 days, he does text: whatup? Or if I come online on day 3 and after turning on my light green and waiting for an hour, I say a ‘hi’ (cold, exclaimationless), he says, doodie!! (all exclamation like he’s been counting seconds of my absence).
Me: dude, you know like, kind of, 10 years from now...
Dilli: you mean when you’re dead? Sorry to disappoint, 10 years from now and for a long time after that till you lose your head to dementia at 90, you’d still be punching swear words at me.
He knows Hamlet by heart but remembers nothing about me till I remind. I’m thankful he knows my birthday falls sometime in March. Maybe also, sometime March end. So I can expect his call on any of the 3 days preceding it, with all the enthu of a cutlet: doodie!
We have met only twice in 15 years since I left Delhi - an after-lunch walk around my sister’s house after I’d had too much wine; and once when I was going from Delhi to Manesar on a May afternoon when the heavens were entertaining us being fire-throwers, I texted him. Let’s meet, he replied. Okay! But he can’t help being himself, can he? Let’s meet at the toll naka!! Dilli takes precisely 15 minutes off work, 5 to walk up to toll-naka, 5 back. So we have a picture of us in an awkward half-embrace, the towering toll gate forming a very avoidable backdrop, everything around us melting in the sun, including the cabbie who takes the out-of-focus picture, hazed over by vehicle fumes.
I ping him later.
Me: hey, you’ve not turned as bald and paunchy as you said.
Dilli: and you’re developing a sense of humour in your old age.
Me: GO DIE!
But seriously, I had a heatstroke. And was advised to stay indoors, drink fluids, a concoction of roast jeera, eat methi leaves – practically turn into a pre-historic specimen – those that did not get heat stroke from sleeping naked on sun-baked stones under the sun.
Day 3 of heatstroke was Labour Day holiday and I made the yummiest coconut chutney for breakfast (on good days we have something to go with it). The bulging pack of dosa batter sat on the kitchen counter waiting release. But I got the chills. Big chills that had me flipping off the bed like a hot dosa. The husband and girl sat holding me down rubbing my palms and feet and imploring me to let them take me to hospital. They didn’t say ‘this is serious’ because it simply does not cut ice with me. When the chills subsided, I had dosas in bed. The girl kept calling out to the help, ‘Aunty, one more for mummy’. And as she carried the third to me, the look on the help’s face was mix of empathy, worry and a warning she was dying to mouth.
Eated, I was ready to be rushed to emergency. It was so hot, I worried that the sweat would blotch the minute black S the receptionist had drawn on her forehead. The dandy paediatrician was leaving and said to her, ‘You also go home, Gayatri’. Eh, like I, the patient should be left to die because it was a Labour Day Holiday? Gayatri blushed and even gave me a smile.
The doctors said I had a massive infection. Blood and other fluids were drawn and antibiotics, painkillers and paracetamol pumped in. Thus endorsed, I contentedly turned into a moaning patient. Like lights in a discotheque, my body turned hot and cold. I held the husband and child in each hand swearing if they leave me for a second, I would die.
The quickest shut-eye and I see the girl disappeared and the husband snoring beside me. I tell him I’m burning, could he sponge? He sponges delicately, like nothing he’s ever done. So I snatch the towels from him and do it myself. The girl comes in groggily, ‘What’s happening?’ ‘I have never ever been sponged with water without cologne before,’ I wail and she runs to get the cologne. But of course, they don’t know where cologne is. How difficult is it to guess? Dresser? The tallest blue bottle? I decide to complain to my sisters. At least they will send me shiny new bottles of cologne.
By night, I’m worried for the morning. You two are not going to work tomorrow, I declare. I don’t want to die in an empty house. Don’t worry, no one’s going anywhere. And most importantly, you’ve just got a viral infection and no one died of it. Just! That’s what they say to dying people.
I’ve been tucked into bed for no longer than 2 seconds and the whisper in the hall becomes the daughter’s sweet voice, ‘Tomorrow, I will stay back with you. Papa can go. Then, Saturday, Papa will stay with you because I absolutely have to go.’ They stuck a deal over my fever-thrashed body!
I wake up moaning when there’s no light outside and husband is already dabbing aftershave, his yoga mat rolled under his arm. Yoga or me, decide now! Yoga, he wants to say but aware of the consequences that mean a definite yoga-miss, he says, ‘Did you sleep well? Let’s take your temperature’. Sticking the thermometer into my mouth, he makes good his escape.
I’m sitting here quinine-mouthed, my tummy feeling like a cardboard has been tied around it, my body creaking with every breath. Hukka-bar is playing loudly on the radio in the lobby between our rooms. The girl’s in hers, calling out at precisely-timed intervals (she must have put reminders on her phone) ‘Mamma, you okay?’
Dilli hasn’t asked. Let him read this. I’m not coming online in 10 days! :P
The doctors said I had a massive infection. Blood and other fluids were drawn and antibiotics, painkillers and paracetamol pumped in. Thus endorsed, I contentedly turned into a moaning patient. Like lights in a discotheque, my body turned hot and cold. I held the husband and child in each hand swearing if they leave me for a second, I would die.
The quickest shut-eye and I see the girl disappeared and the husband snoring beside me. I tell him I’m burning, could he sponge? He sponges delicately, like nothing he’s ever done. So I snatch the towels from him and do it myself. The girl comes in groggily, ‘What’s happening?’ ‘I have never ever been sponged with water without cologne before,’ I wail and she runs to get the cologne. But of course, they don’t know where cologne is. How difficult is it to guess? Dresser? The tallest blue bottle? I decide to complain to my sisters. At least they will send me shiny new bottles of cologne.
By night, I’m worried for the morning. You two are not going to work tomorrow, I declare. I don’t want to die in an empty house. Don’t worry, no one’s going anywhere. And most importantly, you’ve just got a viral infection and no one died of it. Just! That’s what they say to dying people.
I’ve been tucked into bed for no longer than 2 seconds and the whisper in the hall becomes the daughter’s sweet voice, ‘Tomorrow, I will stay back with you. Papa can go. Then, Saturday, Papa will stay with you because I absolutely have to go.’ They stuck a deal over my fever-thrashed body!
I wake up moaning when there’s no light outside and husband is already dabbing aftershave, his yoga mat rolled under his arm. Yoga or me, decide now! Yoga, he wants to say but aware of the consequences that mean a definite yoga-miss, he says, ‘Did you sleep well? Let’s take your temperature’. Sticking the thermometer into my mouth, he makes good his escape.
I’m sitting here quinine-mouthed, my tummy feeling like a cardboard has been tied around it, my body creaking with every breath. Hukka-bar is playing loudly on the radio in the lobby between our rooms. The girl’s in hers, calling out at precisely-timed intervals (she must have put reminders on her phone) ‘Mamma, you okay?’
Dilli hasn’t asked. Let him read this. I’m not coming online in 10 days! :P
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Price of democracy
Shefali
Tripathi Mehta, April 13, 2014, DHNS
When the three women in the house sit down for a cup of tea and chitchat, I broach the topic of the upcoming elections. I ask if they have decided who they will vote for. We are each other’s confidantes.
Unhesitatingly they tell me. Both these women, my house-help, have studied only up to middle school and have since early marriage, worked to supplement their family incomes, mainly so their kids may study in English medium private schools. They are committed money savers and enthusiastic Mahila Sabha participants.
I
am surprised by how clear, how plain their choices are, unaffected by issues
that do not concern them directly. The one who votes for the hand has done so
all her life. Her loyalties will never change, she tells me. The other shares
the anxiety of the majority today — rising prices, lack of basic amenities like
roads, water and electricity. Hers is clearly the anti-incumbency vote.
And I, presumably the most well-educated and informed among us three, am sadly dithering. Mine is the dilemma of the urban, Indian voter who has witnessed the drama of Indian politics and followed the steady decline of a nation that was on the verge of being a global power. Mine is the dilemma of the informed voter — that, we perhaps know too much.
Information glut
Is information then my bane? In the run-up to this crucial mandate, the 24x7 media has chucked all news that would have had them frothing at the mouth in favour of surveys, debates, report cards and analysis of candidates, constituencies and political parties.
Most of us have keenly followed every antic and slip of the would-be members of our 16th Lok Sabha. Some politicians have landed themselves into controversy by opening their mouths and others for refusing to do so; someone got a head start by crying on camera while another was chastised for thinking with his heart.
Like unwilling horses to water, we have been led to opinions by shouting-hoarse TV anchors and alerted by the bold red tickers flashing news of deserters; of shifting allegiances; of politicians not getting tickets from their chosen seats; and of those that are being sent to their political kala pani.
Their undersides have been on show as much as their clean kurtas. We have let the chapati on our dinner plates go cold as we flipped channels for the hottest political development of the day. We have gulped down brazen statements — one leader saying people living in refugee camps cannot vote; another asking his party men to vote twice. We have seen politicians straddling the fence and being pulled in from one side or the other — falling on their faces into unbelievable alliances. We have tut-tut-ed over ticket tizzies and missing manifestos.
Winds of change
In the midst of all this surfaced the story of how we, the people, are being bamboozled by the media; that ‘paid news’ is a reality; that candidates pay money to media for favourable coverage and that stakeholders in the elections have high stakes in media companies. Who do we trust?
Eight hundred million voters cast their mandate in these elections, of these a 100 million are new voters. Most agree that the key election issues this time are price rise, corruption, development and communalism. But what most want to know is far from this — Modi’s wife, Rahul’s girlfriend, Kejriwal’s children are presumably the most googled searches. The news only feeds us what we ask for.
That freedom and democracy came to us after a long and arduous struggle is now a matter of history. We have always had these and take these for granted. In 1977, when the Janta Party got a landslide victory and India elected its first non-Congress government, Morarji Desai became prime minister. The political developments of the day had not left me, not yet 10, untouched and a family joke has since hounded me. It so happened that one evening, father pointed at a rainbow to me and said, ‘Look Indra-dhanush!’ Confused, I asked him if it isn’t called a ‘Morar-dhanush’ now.
Back then, when every person considered it their sacred duty to vote, Election Day was not another chutti to sleep in. There was immense nationalistic pride in going to vote. It was a national festival when women wore their crispiest cotton saris and there were jalebis for breakfast. Even watching the ink on parents’ fingernail slowly move up and disappear was significant.
But somewhere along the years, as politics acquired the prefix ‘dirty’, disillusioned urban Indian voters began to distance themselves from it. For a long time we have been accused of being apathetic towards our right to vote. But we know that in these elections there is no voter apathy.
This change was brought about largely by the anti-corruption movement that began in 2010 when India Against Corruption unravelled the Commonwealth Games Scam and burst open a deluge of corruption scams.
On April 5, 2011, when anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare began a hunger strike at the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, people of this country, tired of corruption and lack of development, saw hope. Because the movement was non-violent and non-partisan, the cynics kept their voices low. From political corruption to bringing back the country’s black money stowed away in Swiss banks, the issues it asserted struck a chord with millions of countrymen who lent support to the movement unhesitatingly, wholeheartedly. This movement became the ferment of the awakening of the urban Indian voter.
In 1974 too, a similar impassioned movement had gripped India when Jayaprakash Narayan called for a peaceful ‘Total Revolution’ against hunger, oppression, corruption and injustice, and the Lok Nayak had roused the people of the country with his vehement opposition of Emergency the following year.
Choice to choose
In the younger days of the democracy, loyalty to a political party was sacrosanct. My mother did not speak with my father for one whole day because angry with ‘their own’ party’s inefficiency, he had for the first time, voted for another. We did not judge our neighbours or family friends on any other grounds except if they were supporters of a different party. As a young girl, I had once held a miniature tricolour and stood along the road to watch Mrs Indira Gandhi in her open cavalcade.
As she passed us by, as was customary, Mrs Gandhi threw garlands at the public and a neighbourhood auntie had jumped with joy when one landed right into her hands. Auntie’s excitement had seemed brazen to me because she was a Janta Party supporter.
Today, most people have no such political affiliations. So I ask everyone I can, on what basis would they choose the candidate to vote for? An astounding majority is undecided because they are unhappy with the choices they have. But since they do not want to forfeit their right, they will choose, they said, the ‘lesser evil’. All parties seem to have been tainted by the same brush — having given tickets to candidates with questionable credentials.
Very few voters have a clear decision to vote-in a particular party or candidate; most are working backwards by elimination. Where are the good men that were promised? Political parties that have gone back on their word even before elections, can we trust them to do any better, after? Isn’t that how the cliché goes, the more things change the more they remain the same? This election is significant though for the electoral reforms introduced. The first was the ruling that an MP or MLA would be disqualified immediately after being convicted in a serious offence and sentenced to two or more years in prison.
The other was to allow casting a negative vote ‘none of the above’ (NOTA) to let the political parties know that candidates fielded by them are not worthy of our vote. But NOTA, in effect, is merely not choosing a candidate and does not register a rejection of the candidates. I ask a friend who says he might choose NOTA and he says that though he does realise that it is a vote ‘wasted’, but enough of NOTA choices will sooner or later send a strong message across to political parties.
So the churning has only just begun. If making of a democracy was hard work, keeping it isn’t easier. Four phases of elections are already over. Karnataka goes to poll on April 17. There is no denying the fact that we are at the threshold of a historic mandate. Each one of us is a participant and “true victory is the victory for democracy and pluralism”.
Exercise your franchise because, “At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into a little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper — no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of the point.” (Winston Churchill)
And I, presumably the most well-educated and informed among us three, am sadly dithering. Mine is the dilemma of the urban, Indian voter who has witnessed the drama of Indian politics and followed the steady decline of a nation that was on the verge of being a global power. Mine is the dilemma of the informed voter — that, we perhaps know too much.
Information glut
Is information then my bane? In the run-up to this crucial mandate, the 24x7 media has chucked all news that would have had them frothing at the mouth in favour of surveys, debates, report cards and analysis of candidates, constituencies and political parties.
Most of us have keenly followed every antic and slip of the would-be members of our 16th Lok Sabha. Some politicians have landed themselves into controversy by opening their mouths and others for refusing to do so; someone got a head start by crying on camera while another was chastised for thinking with his heart.
Like unwilling horses to water, we have been led to opinions by shouting-hoarse TV anchors and alerted by the bold red tickers flashing news of deserters; of shifting allegiances; of politicians not getting tickets from their chosen seats; and of those that are being sent to their political kala pani.
Their undersides have been on show as much as their clean kurtas. We have let the chapati on our dinner plates go cold as we flipped channels for the hottest political development of the day. We have gulped down brazen statements — one leader saying people living in refugee camps cannot vote; another asking his party men to vote twice. We have seen politicians straddling the fence and being pulled in from one side or the other — falling on their faces into unbelievable alliances. We have tut-tut-ed over ticket tizzies and missing manifestos.
Winds of change
In the midst of all this surfaced the story of how we, the people, are being bamboozled by the media; that ‘paid news’ is a reality; that candidates pay money to media for favourable coverage and that stakeholders in the elections have high stakes in media companies. Who do we trust?
Eight hundred million voters cast their mandate in these elections, of these a 100 million are new voters. Most agree that the key election issues this time are price rise, corruption, development and communalism. But what most want to know is far from this — Modi’s wife, Rahul’s girlfriend, Kejriwal’s children are presumably the most googled searches. The news only feeds us what we ask for.
That freedom and democracy came to us after a long and arduous struggle is now a matter of history. We have always had these and take these for granted. In 1977, when the Janta Party got a landslide victory and India elected its first non-Congress government, Morarji Desai became prime minister. The political developments of the day had not left me, not yet 10, untouched and a family joke has since hounded me. It so happened that one evening, father pointed at a rainbow to me and said, ‘Look Indra-dhanush!’ Confused, I asked him if it isn’t called a ‘Morar-dhanush’ now.
Back then, when every person considered it their sacred duty to vote, Election Day was not another chutti to sleep in. There was immense nationalistic pride in going to vote. It was a national festival when women wore their crispiest cotton saris and there were jalebis for breakfast. Even watching the ink on parents’ fingernail slowly move up and disappear was significant.
But somewhere along the years, as politics acquired the prefix ‘dirty’, disillusioned urban Indian voters began to distance themselves from it. For a long time we have been accused of being apathetic towards our right to vote. But we know that in these elections there is no voter apathy.
This change was brought about largely by the anti-corruption movement that began in 2010 when India Against Corruption unravelled the Commonwealth Games Scam and burst open a deluge of corruption scams.
On April 5, 2011, when anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare began a hunger strike at the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, people of this country, tired of corruption and lack of development, saw hope. Because the movement was non-violent and non-partisan, the cynics kept their voices low. From political corruption to bringing back the country’s black money stowed away in Swiss banks, the issues it asserted struck a chord with millions of countrymen who lent support to the movement unhesitatingly, wholeheartedly. This movement became the ferment of the awakening of the urban Indian voter.
In 1974 too, a similar impassioned movement had gripped India when Jayaprakash Narayan called for a peaceful ‘Total Revolution’ against hunger, oppression, corruption and injustice, and the Lok Nayak had roused the people of the country with his vehement opposition of Emergency the following year.
Choice to choose
In the younger days of the democracy, loyalty to a political party was sacrosanct. My mother did not speak with my father for one whole day because angry with ‘their own’ party’s inefficiency, he had for the first time, voted for another. We did not judge our neighbours or family friends on any other grounds except if they were supporters of a different party. As a young girl, I had once held a miniature tricolour and stood along the road to watch Mrs Indira Gandhi in her open cavalcade.
As she passed us by, as was customary, Mrs Gandhi threw garlands at the public and a neighbourhood auntie had jumped with joy when one landed right into her hands. Auntie’s excitement had seemed brazen to me because she was a Janta Party supporter.
Today, most people have no such political affiliations. So I ask everyone I can, on what basis would they choose the candidate to vote for? An astounding majority is undecided because they are unhappy with the choices they have. But since they do not want to forfeit their right, they will choose, they said, the ‘lesser evil’. All parties seem to have been tainted by the same brush — having given tickets to candidates with questionable credentials.
Very few voters have a clear decision to vote-in a particular party or candidate; most are working backwards by elimination. Where are the good men that were promised? Political parties that have gone back on their word even before elections, can we trust them to do any better, after? Isn’t that how the cliché goes, the more things change the more they remain the same? This election is significant though for the electoral reforms introduced. The first was the ruling that an MP or MLA would be disqualified immediately after being convicted in a serious offence and sentenced to two or more years in prison.
The other was to allow casting a negative vote ‘none of the above’ (NOTA) to let the political parties know that candidates fielded by them are not worthy of our vote. But NOTA, in effect, is merely not choosing a candidate and does not register a rejection of the candidates. I ask a friend who says he might choose NOTA and he says that though he does realise that it is a vote ‘wasted’, but enough of NOTA choices will sooner or later send a strong message across to political parties.
So the churning has only just begun. If making of a democracy was hard work, keeping it isn’t easier. Four phases of elections are already over. Karnataka goes to poll on April 17. There is no denying the fact that we are at the threshold of a historic mandate. Each one of us is a participant and “true victory is the victory for democracy and pluralism”.
Exercise your franchise because, “At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into a little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper — no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of the point.” (Winston Churchill)
Monday, March 17, 2014
Seriously, not funny!
What bumps our funny bone (which literally is not pleasant — the sharp tingling down the elbow) is some Santa-Banta, some English idiom translated literally into our local languages, over-the-top impersonations and signboards that are funny only because they were not meant to be. C’est tout! We have a woolly, shifting Lakshman rekha in our heads which we decide to draw where and when we like, much as a confused teacher laughing with the class suddenly goes prim and reprimands the giggling students.
You can read the piece here. Thanks!
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