Saturday 22 June 2013

THE EYEBROWLESS EXISTENCE




I want to tell you guys something. I do not like people with good eyebrows. It hurts me and pinches me in the gut when I see perfectly shaped, bushy yet trimmed to perfection eyebrows resting like an open umbrella above the eye sockets of other people, with no inclination to a specific gender. While God gave me ample frizzy hair on my head and unwanted hair everywhere else resulting in monthly painful waxing sessions, he cleverly forgot to give me a decent pair of eyebrows. Or should I blame it on my mother? Actually I will. I will never forgive my mother.
  
I have eyebrows like Spock’s. If you don’t know who Spock is, prepare to die you Infidel!! Like I said, the blame rests on my mother for she, being a huge Star Trek fan, spent most of her pregnancy time watching back to back series of Star Trek and imagining herself as Mister Spock himself. Little did she know that her minor imaginative escapades would result in her baby being born with eyebrows that look like missiles resting in their launchers, waiting to be fired. I will never forgive her for this.

Throughout my school life my mother used to cleverly draw my eyebrows to perfection using Kohl Pencil, so that I wasn’t bullied by the kids in school for being a freak who looked surprised all the time.  During the rainy days, I always came back home with melting eyebrows and a smudged black face. Then came College and the concept of threading the eyebrows. A few strands removed here, a few strands removed there and a bit of makeup and voila, I looked normal again. But I will never forgive my mother.

 
YAKKU THE CULPRIT!!
My mother used to also love Yakku from the Hindi serial called Chandrakanta. Hell! Don’t ask me who Yakku was. I will kill you again you infidel!! She liked him so much that she decided to remove the ‘Y’ and name her Spock eyebrowed baby as ‘AKKU’. Mind you, Yakku was also famous for his thick bushy eyebrows. I guess my mother had a thing for weird eyebrows and I suffered the consequences. AKKU THE SPOCK CHILD! I will never forgive my mother.


But my father tells me to count my blessings and he is absolutely right. Thank God, my mother did not imagine herself to be Chewbacca from Star Wars. Don’t ask me who Chewbacca is, I will kill you yet one more time you infidel!!!  So now that I am not a hairy dog, I think I will forgive my mother. 
COZ AKKU IS LUCKY YO!!
 P.S- Akku has joined twitter. You can get your regular dose of her craziness HERE. She is getting bored talking to the wall.





Saturday 15 June 2013

EXCUSE ME, IS MY UMWELT SHOWING?



I remember my father once telling me “To understand the actions of others, look at the world through their eyes”. A clueless biologist shouted ‘UMWELT’ and there my vocabulary found a new word for the philosophy my father had tried to inject in me. Though it sounded poetic and incoherent at first, I did spend a fair stint of my childhood trying to comprehend as to why the world and its people acted in such mysterious ways.

Why does our Prime Minister never speak? Strong proof to the contrary has made us strike out the possibility that he is mute since birth. But Instead of throwing verbal stones at his self imposed handicap, let us seal our mouth with duct tape and look at the world through his beady eyes. Maybe he is exercising his Miranda Rights. Maybe for him the world is one messed up court room where everything he says would be taken against him, with Soniaji being his most trusted advocate. Who knows he might be suffering from Selective Muteness, much like our own Raj from the epic ‘Big Bang Theory’

Another tortured creature is S.Sreesanth and I still do not quite understand why we are so angry at him. MCOCA danced on the hard work of the Delhi Police and he is now out on  bail. But let us for now imagine Sree did what we assume he did. I am sure none of his match fixing gimmick would have actually contributed towards the outcome of the game. My heart weeps for him for he was not only pitiable in his bowling, but also lacked the intellect required to do spot fixing ingeniously. If only we could channel all the hatred that we hold against him to actually look at the whole issue through his innocent perspective. Picture him sitting alone in his locker room, counting the number of religious chains on his neck and wondering as to what went wrong in the field. Why and how did his fellow cricketers bag endorsement contracts for big brands while the few products he got to endorse was a South Indian Ayurvedic joint pain massager, or being a sidekick to Riya Sen in a jewellery ad, a split second of an appearance in the Kingfisher Campaign and a few other failed endorsements? Even his restaurant chain ‘The Bat & Ball Inn’ tasted dirt.  Much to his dismay, women too kept away from his attitude and the world was just too hard on him. Spot fixing might have been his secret getaway.

Kapil Sibbal chose the wrong career for the job of a movie or food critic suits him better. Through his eyes, the world looks like a giant deformed potato and everything associated to it is highly improper, thus requiring his constant criticism and brilliant modifications. The critic in him had to play with the education system and felt a massive need to improve the 12th standard score of the kids by allowing only the top 20% cream students to be eligible to write the prestigious IIT exams. When they had enough of him, they made him the law minister, much to the horror of the judiciary. Who knows he might promote the passing of a new act called the ‘Social Networking Inspection Act (SONIA)’. It’s not his fault, it’s his ‘UMWELT’.

We live in India, but each one of us looks at India through a radically different perspective. For a socialist, India is a huge party with gossips flowing from all four corners, while for a Politician, India is nothing but a game of chess where he has to either kill or be killed. For the ruling party, India is Utopia where everything is perfect and progress is a daily thing, while for the opposition, it is a paradise gone wrong where every living soul is denied his rights. For Pakistan, Kashmir is a treasure island, while for India, Kashmir is nothing but a bet it cannot afford to lose. Through all of this are the soldiers of both the countries sacrificing their lives for a cause unclear to them and the Kashmiris suffocated by the malice that has found its place in their divine land.

This makes me highly jealous of the animals, for they are all loyal to their species and look at the world through one shared perspective. The Gods must have been crazy indeed to have given us a luxurious personal bubble world i.e our umwelt, consisting of our individual dogmas, spiritual beliefs and values, while he cleverly forgot to give us a bit of humility to understand the varied tenets of others sharing the space with us. While the world is busy launching satellites to understand the possibility of life beyond our galaxy or trying to decipher the language of the dolphins with the help of fancy toys; the nations are busy throwing missiles at each other due to non compliance of agreements, and the leaders of different religions are busy warning the homosexuals about the little place that is reserved in hell just for them. If only we had the nerve to step out of our way of thinking and look through the perspective of those we claim are at fault.

Because there is nothing more tragicomic than trying to speak to the dolphins when you are unable to understand those who belong to your own genus.

P.S- This is an article I submitted for an Epic contest organized by 1 Hundred Works . I  beg want you all to show your generosity by liking and commenting on the link given below. I do require them !!!! If you do so, you are awesome. If you don't, my black magic awaits you!  

Saturday 1 June 2013

Coming out of the Closet.....




I just couldn’t take it anymore. The pressure of the studies, the presence of too much spice in life and the suffocation of being trapped at home right after a superb college life is unnerving in itself. To put a ribbon on all this frustration are my parents waiting for a nod from my side to get me a groom.  At one point I was so frustrated that I allowed them to do whatever they want, which in turn awarded me a paid profile in the Kerala Matrimony site. In a 3 mth membership in that horrendous site, I was bombarded with 72 proposals with half of it from divorcees, or as one called himself ‘a young innocent divorcee’. The rest remaining consisted of 45+ aged uncles and those of my age had moustaches which were either twisted upwards in a way that defied gravity or were long enough to be braided. Imagine a wife braiding the macho muccha of her hubby on their first night. Romantic? Ugh!

So ones the 3 mths paid membership was over, I set my foot down and said ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!’. I have a life after all, if not an epic one. I told my mother to pass on the message to my Iron man father, that his daughter wants no discussion on marriage till she bags the job she is studying for and has made enough bucks to demand a massive dowry from the boy. They were defensive at first but after looking at the success rate I got from the matrimonial site, they agreed to slow down a bit.

And the ‘slow down’ period remained in force for 6 mths after which my 23rd birthday was celebrated. The alarm on my mother’s head was triggered by some treacherous relatives, according to whom, a girl starts losing her freshness after a certain age and before that she has to be married off to a man with money, like religion, like caste and if possible a good character. I was a now a fruit decaying slowly and I needed a considerate buyer. FUCK THEM ALL!

I am a 23 yr old gorgeous woman! For me I am gorgeous, to hell with everyone who thinks otherwise. Actually, no one is supposed to think otherwise. I have a life to live, make money enough to be able to buy some Gucci shoes and I want to write a disastrous book that still makes it to the best seller list! 

But, a few days back my mother asked me to give her a nice photo of mine which could be pasted on the matrimonial site once it’s renewed yet again. What atrocity is this!!!! I just couldn’t go through the whole ‘HELLO I AM A YOUNG INNOCENT DIVORCEE. PLEASE MERRY ME’ stage.

So, I asked my mother to sit down and look me in my eyes. I held her gently and told her ‘Amma, this might come as a shock to you but I am not sure whether I like boys. I think I am into girls. I am a lesbian’.
EVEN THAT DINT WORK!!! GODDAMMIT!!!!!

P.S- I am straight as a scale. And No I can never imagine myself with a girl. Ughhh!! Not that I am against homosexuality. Hell I even had a lesbian friend once. Yes once. 

P.P.S- I guess this qualifies to be a rant.