Awkward conversation in the washroom

This is going to be a socially inappropriate post. Maybe even NSFW. But the irony is that the post is about a conversation that I had with a colleague in the washroom at work. Those who don't want to read any further, this is a good time to click out.

So, this evening, around 7 pm, I went to the washroom to pee. My colleague, a smart young man, also happened to need to pee at the same time. So we both stood adjacent to each other at the two urinal stalls. We were talking about a TV show and we carried on, while proceeding with the act of micturition. Everything seems fine, until my friend asks me:

Kris, what are you doing?

What do you mean what?

I mean how are you doing that?

What do you mean?

You are not holding it!

Holding what? Oh, yeah, I don't need to hold it. Why would you need to?

Doesn't it spray all over the place?

No, it doesn't. Even at this age, I'm pretty darned good at it.

[After an awkward smile/grin/laugh, he says]

This is surely an awkward conversation that we shouldn't be having.

I guess!

And I walked out of the washroom and back into the office and everyone lived happily ever after.

(PS: I wasn't aware that men are supposed to do it. Several of my friends apparently use the technique my colleague was suggesting. I still don't see the need.)

Imran Khan's vs. homophobia - thanks to NH7.in

Thanks to Upworthy for this article, and NH7.in and Imran Khan for this project.

A Demotivating Motivational

Demotivating things in my life, in no particular order:

• The battery lives of most electronic devices.
• Your average littering, spitting, loud Indian, who is not conscious about others in public spaces.
• Expense-income imbalance.
• Miley Cyrus.
• MTV India.
• The treatment received by Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning.
• Indian politicians.
• Random people fighting, shouting at each other, especially on the internet.
• Apartment hunting in Bandra.
• Work-life imbalance
• Indian television.
• Justin Bieber's manager's refuting stories about Bieber not retiring.
• Indian asinitude in communication.
• Commute time in Mumbai.
• My atrocious slap-pop bass technique.
• Infrastructure in India, i.e., the lack of.
• The Sharmas, Ishant in particular
• Religion and its consequences.
• My 3-year-old Android phone.
• Bureaucracy in India, for things such as passport renewal
• Mumbai traffic.
• International politics.
• Lists such as this.
• Corruption.
• Reality television.
• The lack of broadness of broadband internet.
• Andheri East.
• My mirror/webcam image.
• Inability to maintain my blog.
• Lack of collective conscience about the Earth as a planet, keeping in mind that it's just a tiny speck of dust in space.
• The Indian bowling attack.
• Communication breakdown between intelligent people who love each other.
• Edge/2G.

Social media updates and work

Read this first.

So, people get fired if they state something negative about their work environment. Workplaces are also penning in clauses in the contract to avoid defamation by their employees. But doesn’t this go both ways?

What if an employee wants to say something good about the employer? If that can be allowed, then the opposite should also be allowed.

In my own case, I use humor and sarcasm in every aspect of my social life. Once, I was warned to not repeat some clever sarcastic wordplay because my ‘then’ manager thought that it was inappropriate.

So, I’m confused.

Nominal idiosyncrasies

Well, this term probably doesn’t exist. Hence, I’ll define it for you.

Nominal idiosyncrasy (n): The phenomenon of an idiosyncrasy getting attached to a particular name of a person so much that it is hard to think of anyone else with the same name. Because of this phenomenon, ordinary proper nouns become adjectives.

I can think of a few. If you can think of more please add them as comments.

Arindam – someone who is a jerk, sycophantic, and is an attention-mongering whiner; a person with a stupid face, glasses, and a pony tail; a person who is certified number one in legal exposure.

Arnab – someone who is a jerk, who would never let anybody else complete a sentence, who never lets anybody else’s opinion seemingly matter; self-obsessed prick.

Anthony – someone who is a politician who will send out semi-obscene messages to young women with attached pictures of himself in his underwear; someone who has just an average penis but thinks that it is bigger than that.

Bill – someone who is a politician whose wife is also a politician; someone who has oral sex with his secretary (such secretaries are called Monica irrespective of their sex); someone who is obsessed with sex.

Need For Humor

How much does humor have a role in your life? In my life, I would say almost 90%. I can’t live without humor. I can’t hang around people who can’t appreciate it. Those who don’t get my jokes go to the chopping block.

One of the first persons on this list was my sister. She stopped getting my jokes awhile back and our relationship has deteriorated since. Although my mother is a little dense, she still gets some of my jokes. My father, whose sense of humor is more developed than my mother’s or sister’s, still is weird. Only in actual physical conversations would I get him to appreciate my jokes.

Anyway, why am I on a rant? Because I have to go out with two people in the near future – one, who doesn’t seem to get my humor and another one who’s the jack of all kinds of humor. I’m sorry but I’m already having a bias toward the second one. The first one better be interesting, failing which he’ll have to be axed.

The Rock's back

This weekend, I spent most of my time watching sport and sports entertainment of television. My excuse was that I was recovering from a brutal week which reminded me of my days during internship and residency. I still remember a 108-hour shift that I had taken during my internship - I was so tired that I fell asleep by the side of patient of snake poisoning! My present non-medical life lacks stories of such superhuman effort. :-(

The highlight of the weekend, hence, was the coming back to WWE of the one and only Rock (Dwayne Johnson). It seemed that WWE was running out of ideas to come up with interesting stories and personalities. All the 'faces' were too juvenile (John Cena and Rey Mysterio for example) and all the 'heels' were incredibly annoying (The Miz and Cody Rhodes).

Vince McMahon, I think, did a careful analysis of the present scene. There were no 'faces' who were brash, arrogant, charismatic like to good old days featuring Stone Cold Steve Austin and the DX. He must have looked back at the roster to see if anything could bring him back the audience which love blatant cockiness that such superstars bring to the table. He must have found the Rock, the one guy which combines all of those missing elements and adds an amazing mic-presence and sense of humor to them.

I'm not going into a cliché here, but Rock did arrive and conquer the WWE universe in all but a 15-minute presence in the ring where he narrated everything that was going wrong with the WWE and how he's going to change them come Wrestlemania XXVII. This has reignited my interest in watching professional wrestling again - if the stories/plots aren't good enough, at least you can hear one of most flamboyant superstars make fun of everything under the sun!

On behalf of all fans of professional wrestling, welcome back Rock! We missed you!

Laughter and Jokes

How wonderful is to make you laugh
To see you gush, to see you blush
How wonderful is to make your life
To see you smile, to see you blush

How wonderful is to make you laugh
To see you forget, the pain in your life
How wonderful is to grace your life
To see you open wide and wide

Laughter and jokes aside
What’s there left of life?
Laughter and jokes aside
What’s there to live for?

Social clowning

It's a known fact that I like humor. I like clowning around and like to make a joke out of myself. But even more interesting are instances when I feel the urge to involve a total stranger into my web of humor. It usually happens with waiters and waitresses.

So, yesterday evening, at the gay party, I met this wonderful Kiwi guy. During our conversation, a particular waiter, who brought us a vegetable salad with a dip, interrupted us every 10 minutes or so. He was rather portly and had a sly smile on his face. On the fifth time, I asked this waiter:

Do you like this guy?

The waiter laughed and was visibly embarrassed and never returned to interrupt us again. I don't think I hurt his sentiments or anything, but I at least made him laugh.

Today evening, on my date with the same Kiwi guy, we went to a Café Coffee day. The waitress came up to us with the menu card. As we were trying to decide what we should order, she started advertising some merchandise (mugs and other items) that Café Coffee day is offering for the Valentine's day. I couldn't resist it. I asked her:

Do you think we two are dating?

She was surprised and started blushing and smiling profusely. I couldn't wait to come back in again.

In fact, we actually are. You have a good eye!

She smiled even wider - if indeed that was possible - and didn't know what to say. We consoled her saying that we'll decide on the items and let her know later. She went back to the counter and turned back at us and smiled. She did that at least three times.

I think I have gotten this habit from Vinokur. I still remember Vinokur's sister Cis saying to him that the words that he chooses to use during such occasions might be too heavy and harsh on his prey. I guess that holds the same for me true.

For those who aren't into Twitter -- yet!

This is going to be a really small blog post. Something that would keep up with the spirit of Twitter. A few months back, I really caught on to Twitter -- like a house on fire. There were many reasons. But the main reason was the need to employ impromptu, ingenious ways to frame concise text messages to pull in contexts from anything ranging from pop-culture to mathematics. This is amply demonstrated in this link to a Twitter search page which gives you the results for the hashtag #cgawkerissoedgy.

Now, you will need to understand a little bit of the background:

• cgawker, or @cgawker in Twitter, is a funny guy on Twitter with an edgy sense of humor
• Hashtags (#) are used to refer to a particular topic on Twitter. A hashtag is a way to unite global Tweets around some particular topic. Basically, these are tags that that help those who seek similar content discover your Tweets. Read more about it here, here, and here.
• #cgawkerissoedgy was a hashtag invented by his followers on Twitter to refer to his humor. It reads "cgawker is so edgy."
  

Go through the list of entries in there. Decide for yourself. Isn't Twitter the coolest? More importantly, aren't @cgawker and his friends the coolest?

My chances of surviving after making love to BigFoot

Created by Oatmeal

Why teenagers should be quarantined until middle age

So, yesterday I was at a posh club downtown to watch my friend's band Airport' perform - (I was at Zenzi Mills for all you bitchy Mumbai-ites). They were supposed to start at 9.30 pm. I, like a turd of bullcrap, thought that they would start on time. I mean, which band starts on time anyway - excepting Shoonyas perhaps, but we play at cheapass pubs which have strict time regulations etc.

As I walk in 15 minutes early, I meet my friends (aka the members of the performing band) who are just coming back from their apartment wearing nice fashionable clothes, with gelled hair and the just-got-out-of-the-shower look. Mind you, I'm wearing out-of-fashion boring cheap jeans and a Levi's faded black tee shirt, and slippers, and I look as tired as an old hooker. I exchange my pleasantries with my friends and we all walk in the pub.

We reach the first tier - the place where the gig will happen - and my friends start tuning their guitars and stuff. I look around and I see a group adolescents looking at me expectantly. WTF? How the fuck does a relatively new and upcoming, albeit talented, band have such a desirable fan base - a bunch of idiotic teenage wannabes who groove to silly disco music, wasting their parents' hard-earned blood turned into testicular sweat/intermammary cleft sweat money!

Then, my friends leave for the outside to catch up with their pre-requisite body nicotine levels while I, like a fool, stay back to play with my PDA. And then I realize - there's a fucking b'day party going on! The teenagers are doing mindless shit - like having a competition to decide who falls down to the floor while all of them start spinning around like tops! Jesus Fucking Christ! Give me a break!

I can't fucking believe my loser-of-the-millenium luck man. What am I?

Women = whine. Men = wine

The average young man looks average. The average young woman looks above average. But as the years catch up with both these sets of the human demographic, there is something starkly disparate. Men age better. Much better. Women age similar to how a pig rolls in a dump.

As I look out through the BEST bus window, while the summer sun's light shines on the right side of my face, I see a worthwhile example of what I stated above. I see a family of three - dad, mom, and daughter - riding on a scooter with a side attachment, which houses the unfortunate sight called the mother.

The dad, with near-perfect posture, is riding the scooter. Very little of his shapelessness is visible. He's freshly shaven with a neatly trimmed moustache, and has a face which could easily fetch him a role in a movie or two. He's fair and his shirt has just been ironed, and he's wearing lovely dress shoes that go with his elegant trousers.

The mom is slouch-slumping all over the extension wearing a wrinkled kurta pajama. Her expression is of contended flatulence and dyspepsia and she has a blank look on her face. The daughter has neatly inherited the ugliness gene from her mom in the homozygous dominant form. Her love handles ripple at every thrust of the scooter motor, and she has an excessive layer of lard, which would have saved her from the wrath of an ice age or two.

The dad turns to look at the rest of the traffic, probably trying to avoid the ugliness he's schlepping around. I can clearly make out from his nose and jawline that he had once been the quintessential 'attractive' young man. I lower my gaze ever so slightly to focus on his cargo - two of the reasons why God must feel deeply sad for having created a yoni. I sigh deeply.

Walking through the jungle

So you are walking toward your destination in a hurry. A guitar and a backpack strapped to your shoulder and back, respectively, and you are trying to make good time. You're late by ten minutes already and are on the brink of drowning in shame and guilt. And you see these kinds of people walking in front of you:

• Middle-aged women who walk slowly as if their uteruses would fall off if their perinei were stretched any further during the locomotive act - same reason why their husbands and spouses get more than adequate sleep in the night and grow obese.
• Obese men walking slowly as if they are ambulating in their parallel universe where the gullies (and phalluses) are as wide as their waist size, but in reality their shrunken organs can't penetrate the pubic bush-crown of the abovementioned class of women - the same reason why this unfortunate couple stopped making kids.
• Their kids act as if they grew on a land called Imbecilia. Sometimes they pair up and walk slowly as if they want to beat their moms and dads in cuntitude.
• And then there are hawkers, peddlers, and similar beings who forgot to scratch their balls/butt before leaving home.

All of them together create this spectacular series of pedestrian bottlenecks. The Mumbai Municipal Road Development Authority is in liaison with all of them, I think. How else could we explain the strategically placed barricades and dugouts which confuse the shit out of cunning canines and felines attempting to traverse the stretch?

This is when you feel a tad abusive and whiny. You also feel the world is being unreasonably unreasonable to you and your diabolical plans to save yourself from humiliation due to hypochronomodulation.

Long-distance cross pollination

What's the most important quality that I have? Not a difficult question for me - the ability to make people laugh/smile/feel good about themselves. Vinokur has helped me hone my skills in this department. Humor comes naturally to him too. His brand of humor, which revolves around the skill to surprise people with audacity and innuendos, has seemingly seeped into me as well!

Not just humor - almost the entire psyche, including the positives and negatives, (positives way way more, of course) and negatives, appears to have somehow been injected into me. We think alike, we love alike, we fear alike, and we analyze alike. We complete each others sentences, know each others triggers, are aware of each others sensitivities, and can see and feel the other's mind. Our common friends say that we 'sound' alike in the way we present our thoughts - I guess lexicon transfer is also involved.

I wonder if such 'psychic' transference commonly occurs in intimate emotional relationships. If yes, is it good enough to be seeking - and if not, is this craziness?

For those unaware, such similarities have grown despite a tumultuous long-distance relationship! I wonder what would have happened had I and Vinokur been living together? Would the similarities have been even more evident? Would our omeletees taste the same? Or would we have had lesser cross-pollination of ideation and behavior?

The Update List v 2.0

More updates!

• Mar 11th - 'Holi'day relapse ^[new!]
  
• Mar 10th - Scooter's gone ^[new!]
  
• Mar 9th - First day at work ^[new!]
  
• Mar 8th - A new job, a new beginning ^[new!]
  
• Mar 7th - 'Straight' out of nowhere
• ...
• ...
  
• Mar 1st - Aarohi '09 Experience
• ...
• ...
  
• Feb 25th - Daddy's WindSong Wednesdays gig
• Feb 23rd - Radio One interview/performance
• ...
• ...
• Feb 7th - Procrastination ^[new!]
• Feb 6th - The postponement of the job ^[new!]
  
• Feb 5th - Mobile Internet craze ^[new!]
  
• Feb 4th - Daddy's WindSong Wednesday's experience
  
• Feb 3rd - Gora for a dinner-movie combo
• Feb 2nd - The shoe-lace incident ^[new!]
  
• Feb 1st - A gig with the new band ^[new!]
  
• Jan 31st - Let's analyze my future ^[new!]
  
• Jan 30th - 'Anjor-Kaaya' - the musical
• Jan 29th - Airport date ^[new!]
  
• Jan 28th - Social Outcasts?
  
• Jan 27th - Yet another band?
• Jan 26th - Something Relevant
  
• Jan 25th - The certificate saga
  
• Jan 24th - A tryst with art in Mumbai - Part 2
  
• Jan 23rd - A tryst with art in Mumbai - Part 1
• Jan 22nd - Not Just Bad, By the Way!
  
• Jan 21st - Random Updates: 21st of Jan
  
• Jan 20th - The terrorist inside me
• Jan 19th - The Great Indian Train Journey
• Jan 19th - The Date at the Railway Station
• Jan 18th - The Erstwhile-rs : College mates, friends and the rest
• Jan 17th - The Erstwhile-rs : Cousins
• Jan 16th - Coming out to my Father
  
• Jan 15th - Coming out to my Mom

A few days back, Kris had typed in...

So I have been acting crazy and not updating the blog. To my faithful readers, I apologize for my abstinence. Other people have said sarcastically 'Finally, it's nice that you shut up. I was getting tired of Engayging bull shit!' to stuff like 'Did you grow a brain or something and get back to studying?'

The answers to those comments are this - It's MAH blog and I'd blog as much as I wish to whenever I possibly can. Just that I have been so friggin' busy. Check out the updates to find out why. Oh and my studying is over and done with - I got my Masters!

About a month back, Kris had typed

The last time I had not blogged after a life-changing event, I decided to muster up all my courage and try to re-create the pain and suffering in words. I started out pretty well, but I stumbled and fell hard on my face. Hence the jagged teeth and the weird face. Here I am facing the similar situation. The point is that it is not same.

My life has been beautiful but exhausting in the last few days. And despite feelling like an adolsecent chimpanzee checking his thoracic cavities resonance, Momma time (did I confuse the gender again?) has been unkind to me.

Since I have been blessed with rebelliousness since childhood, especially with parents, I have now taken the first steps to putting a few strokes of colour on the portait of my life. In the coming days, you will see updates springing up like blossoms in the spring, like stars in the dusk and like notifications and 'pokes' on your Facebook profiles.

I will add them all under this post as links. Looking forward to insightful comments and suggestions and more to calm the bellowing chimpanzee inside me.

Yours,

Kris Bass, M. D.

The shoe-lace incident

I don’t know how I forgot to mention it in the post about the play. But I’m glad that I did. I can elaborate now. And I think it needs elaboration. It happened during the interval of the play. I was out at the cafeteria with my a group of my friends sipping coffee. My left shoe’s laces were undone.

I don’t remember exactly how they were undone but the point is that they were. I was perfectly aware of the state of my laces and didn’t want to tie them up before I had my coffee and snacks because I wasn’t sure of finding a place where I could wash my hands. I think that is a sufficient explanation for not tying the laces.

A distinguished looking, middle aged woman in an elegant saree walked up to us and said with an attitude of arrogance and superiority.

‘Excuse me BOY, perhaps you have failed to notice that your shoelaces are undone. I suggest that perhaps you should learn to tie them which will help you avoid falling on your face.’

Enraged by her attitude and tone, without missing a beat, I replied with a smirk

‘Ma’am, I’m a fully-grown adult man and during my 29 years of age I have learnt enough to avoid such mishaps. I appreciate you pointing it out, but really, I CAN take care of myself. Thank you.’

She didn’t like it one bit and left to join her group of friends. My friends were offended by my tone and sarcasm. They thought that she was being ‘kind’ and ‘nice’ and I was being ‘rude’ and ‘offensive’. Give me a fucken break! What do you think? Had you been in her place, would you come up to me and say what she said in the way she did? I think I was perfectly right in returning the sarcasm to her without giving her age or gender a consideration.

On second thought, I think my friends weren’t used to the kind of sarcasm that I’m familiar with. I watch a lot of ‘Will & Grace’ where sarcasm bounces off the pachydermic characters like a tennis ball off a racket. Am I too much into sitcoms?

The terrorist inside me

It's incredible really. I'm talking about the suburban railway system in Mumbai. After getting down at the Lok Manya Tilak terminus in Kurla, I had to switch three trains and then hop on to a bus to reach my home. The point-to-point distance between Kurla and Andheri (W) where I live would be approximately 15 kilometers. To traverse that, 3 trains and a bus is astounding. Remember that I had to lug a rather heavy bag inside all these public transportation facilities.

What kept me sort of happy and non-complaining was the fact that I had some charge left on my mobile phone for some browsing and music. As soon as I got into the Western Railway train which would take me to Andheri from Dadar, I kept my bag by the door and started listening to some 'Live' (the album Throwing Copper, which has definitely shaped my life) while poking back whomeever who had poked me on Facebook.

The music was loud and I was quite oblivious as to what was happening in the outside world – something, I advise you to not try, especially if you are looking a little haggard, have wild, long hair and a beard-stubble. Apparently, one of the passengers in the train had noticed this bag lying 'unattended' to and had asked co-passengers about it's owner. Obviously, people started talking and panicking and in a minute the entire compartment was convinced that my bag had explosives.

I noticed that people were simply getting up from their seats in a neat orderly manner. But the thing that alerted me about the confusion was that everyone was surreptitiously avoiding my bag. As soon as I realised this, I took out my ear plugs and asked someone what was happening. When someone said that the bag was the 'root of all evil', I officially claimed the bag. Everyone was staring right into me. They were pissed of course.

I apologized that I was listening to the music and hence was unaware of the confusion. I couldn't have said that I was 'poking back' someone who I have not even met on the Internet while the entire compartment was preparing for an explosion. One of the passengers was very upset and started questioning me. He eventually asked me to open the bag up to confirm that it indeed had my clothes and stuff. Perverted, I know, but still true.

In the last five minutes of this ride, I was very glad of the fact that I didn't have to pull out the rest of the contents of the bag which included a bag full of cables (connectivity cables), chargers, headphones and an mp3 player – easily would have looked like the components of an amateur bomb in the making. I also sheepishly acknowledged how different, chaotic and weird Mumbai really is and it still remains the Mumbai that I love!

The darker side of me

This is shocking. I didn't expect such a response from you guys. I knew that the poem was a little too much to comprehend. But still, I expected a few guesses at least. Just one out of my 15.34 readers per week have tried to guess. What about the 14 others? I'll give you another day to get back to me about this. If I don't see any responses until then, I think I should stop writing poetry altogether.

Talking about the poem, I managed to compose a melody for it. It was one extremely difficult task to write something for it because I find the lines too hard to fit into one melodic scheme. The final result is as weird as the poem itself. The recording went okay as urges to kill myself after hearing myself sing the verses were quickly driven under. Okay, okay. I sing bad. I know. But I still try. Why must all the Olympians, and just them, get away with glory for trying?

Talking about trying, I tried to be a serious academician writer and wrote my first ever post for Mutiny.in. When I re-read it back after a series of edits by my editor (Professor X), I myself was surprised at the result. It looked so serious and unlike my regular rants that I now know for sure there is an evil spirit in my body. You can check out the post here and give your comments there or here.

Talking about comments, Vinokur was shocked to read the article. He says that the Kris that he knows has vanished and was replaced by another one of those zillion academicians out there. But it was heartening to know that he still loved me despite hearing me sing this new song. There is still a lot of hope left in this world after all!

Mosquitoes, ceiling fans and sweating

Some of you, okay at least one of you (yes, you know who it is) has wondered what a delight it would be to be my boyfriend. In the various adulatory comments that I have received over a few years, I have found qualities in me which even I haven’t realized I had. My self-esteem has been on the rise because of these and sometimes even I am quite sure that I would be able to give my partners a good time being just myself.

No, I’m not getting carried away slapping my own bass guitar. If you are wondering what that silly phrase means, don’t worry. I just coined it. It’s a neo-phrase adapted from ‘blowing your own trumpet’ – just in my case that I don’t play trumpet. I play the bass guitar. One more thing, ‘slap’ is not the same thing that you see in S&M movies. It’s a form of bass playing which is very cool. I must also add that I’m pretty average in slapping. Back to me – but my negative side. Here’s why you wouldn’t like living with me anymore.

Like every living person on Earth, who trudge on their feet miserably towards whatever sorry thing that they are doing, I too have my own ‘peculiarities’. Some call them ‘the extra spice’. Some call them ‘OCDs’. Some might even call them ‘things that make one person different from others’. Actually, I would like to rephrase this term to ‘annoyances found in a person that you would like to see eliminated; so much so that you wouldn’t mind killing that person itself’.

I have a ‘thang’ for avoiding unnatural noises while sleeping and listening to music; especially, when you do both together. Yes, I sleep while listening to some kind of music or the other because I believe that you are able to find time for listening that you can’t otherwise, courtesy your busy schedule. Besides, it’s a cool thing to wake up to a song which you really like.

Because the ceiling fans create a whole lot of noise (almost all of them do, and the one in m apartment is the worst of them), I hate to put it on. What happens in that case is that, those unimaginably resilient mosquitoes swarm and buzz around me and prick me to agony. Seriously, these are one of the very few ‘pricks’ that I don’t like. I do my best to cover me with a bed-sheet. Sometimes that works. Most of the times, it doesn’t. I was getting tired of this predicament and I decided to do something about it. If you are wondering if I weren’t using any repellents, I was actually using ‘All Out pluggy’ which doesn’t work at all.

Yesterday, when I went to the supermarket, I bought Mortein mosquito coils. I was happy hoping that Mortein would provide me with the same clinical efficiency that it did with its rat poison. Talking about rats, you must have an idea as to how irritating it was for me when that stupid rat was running amok in my apartment. That was the worst kind of noise. I had to turn up the ceiling fan and music just to eliminate that!

So, in the evening, I light this mosquito coil and was happy that the fumes even smelled okay. Since, I had closed my windows of my amazingly cute (read claustrophobic) studio apartment, the fumes were getting to my eyes. By the time I was ready to sleep, I my eyes were as red as a baboon’s sass and I was lacrymating profusely. But I still felt happy. I could listen to music without the stupid ceiling fan and doze off, which I managed to at about 2 am. 

At 5 am, I was awakened by the soothingly warm buzzing of our dear friends, mosquitoes! Fuck, I was so pissed that I thought ‘Dammit, I’ll turn on the ceiling fan!’ I did just that and went back to sleep. I woke up to the knocks on the door by the ‘garbage wallah’ at 8 am. I picked up my garbage bag and gave it to him and returned back to bed. My radio was playing ‘Machinehead’ by Bush (the band, not the chimp) and I felt like smashing that ceiling fan into pieces because it was drowning clarity of the music.

I switched it off, and thought of dozing for a few more minutes. The only problem, I dozed for a few more minutes than I hoped. I woke up at 11 am all sweaty and muggy. I felt like cursing myself to death. I had just wasted an entire morning by just sleeping.

Incidentally, earlier in the night, Vinokur and I were discussing about finding an apartment or hotel room in Mumbai for him to stay when he would visit me next. For a long time, I kept on wondering why he wouldn’t stay in my cozy (read miniscule) apartment. That way, I thought, we could save a lot of money. I even felt angry at him when he suggested that Jews needed certain ‘luxuries’ and ‘comforts’ to live in – like air-conditioning etc.

Thankfully, the night just cleared up the smoke in my head. The only problem is to find a place for the Jew god to stay.