Giving back to the internet

About over a year ago, Krishna Kumar or KK randomly lamented that we Indians are a very ungrateful and selfish digital people. He says we consume the internet, devour it day and night for hours on end. We see pictures and videos and emote accordingly. We read blogs and content sites like voyeurs. We are voyeurs because we always partake, never participate. KK says we have never been a giving kind of people. Even if it is something that the internet deeply helped you in – a class project that you needed help with, a dish that we desperately needed to know how to cook, anything…we ask and we get and we are happy. No one thinks of going back to the place and thanking the person, the site that helped you out.

I think I had that in my head all this while and it suddenly popped up when I decided to write to the person who inspired the craft of paper art in me. Six-eight months ago, I spotted a zebra that was made entirely out of black and white paper. Black paper was hand-torn into strips and pasted onto a white sheet of paper. It struck me as the easiest and simplest thing to do so I set about mimicking it with old, dusty pieces of paper I could find around office. My boss , an artist herself, was only happy to see rubble go.

So I made myself my very own paper zebra. Here’s a pic.

Ever since then, I love cutting and pasting paper. I play with newspapers too, upcycling is something that’s always been dear to me. However, the sheer charm of spotless black and white paper is just irresistible. Paperwalla was born.

I got into an exhibition too. The Bliss Quirk Festival in Versova earlier this month was a sort of coming together of quirky designers with a unique quirk sense. I did not know what to expect and did not expect anything and that’s probably why I was the happiest person there when people liked and bought three of the six pieces I had specially created for the exhibition. Cloud 9 anyone? :D

So I thought I should write to the artist who inspired me. I just found Tina Tarnoff’s email address online and wrote to her, thanking her for inspiring me and asking her not to sue me because I hadn’t intended on copying her design, I was merely an excited student!

Hope she will reply with warmth and not with an attorney’s message. :-S

Poem by Kadambari Sen
Art by Jasjyot Singh Hans

My mom read this poem this morning.
She read it attentively and smiled as her eyes reached the end.
She then looked at me and saw me watch her read.
She smiled.
I smiled back, wondering what she was thinking.
Was she thinking of how her own son had gone away?
Did she think of my Sindhi girlfriend when she read ‘Now you are stuck to someone else...’?
She held the two pages out to show my dad and said, “Look, isn’t this Hari from his childhood days?”
How did the poetess Kadambari Sen know what my mom was thinking?
How did the artist Jasjyot Singh Hans know what I looked like in my childhood?
Kadambari Sen has never met my mother.
Jasjyot Singh hasn’t probably even heard of me.
In fact, even Kadambari Sen and Jasjyot Singh Hans haven’t met each other yet!
Such is the beauty of KaviKala.
People coming together to add a bit of themselves to each other.
Every piece of art in KaviKala is a bread crumb from someone’s memory.
Each poem in it tugs at a different string in you.
KaviKala. Sigh.

My little bundle of joy!

No I haven’t become a father. (Consider this, if I actually had become a father, I wouldn’t have time to write this note. I would be too busy catching up on naps and changing nappies.)

My little bundle of joy is Madness Mandali’s book of visual poetry KaviKala. Holding the book in my hand, leafing gingerly through each page and taking in eyefuls of art and poetry gives me joy like nothing else before.

I had always longed to make a book of fun – something that would make me feel positive when I was down in the dumps. KaviKala does that to me. All I have to do is to read the poems and enjoy the art along with it and I am automatically elevated to a happier zone. So much so that I often catch myself smiling randomly. Mad, eh? This is not Madness. This is KaviKala. As the cover suggests, 33 artists + poets = 1 maha mashup!

Each poem in Kavikala is penned by a different poet. The artwork accompanying each poem too is custom-made by a different artist based on his/her perception of each poem. The book thus becomes one of the few attempts at creating visual poetry – poetry that you can see not just in front of your mind’s eye but also the real ones.

Being in the advertising industry, my kind is always on the look out for interesting things, things that are not the usual and things that compell you to react. I did not know the meaning of the phrase ‘jaw-dropping’ until I was asked to proof-read the manuscript of the book. My jaw dropped and stayed on the floor till I finished proof-reading. My four eyes had never seen anything this enchanting in art. My brain found it difficult to comprehend that art in black and white could look as gorgeous as it is in the book.

Self-published and arranged so as to facilitate print-on-order’ KaviKala reeks of the need to encourage young creative brains.

I won’t ask you to buy a copy but this I will definitely tell you, if you haven’t read KaviKala yet, you just missed a few hundred trains to la la land.

P.S: Dear poets and artists inside KaviKala, I am in love with your work. Thank you for letting me be a part of this awesome compilation. Hope to meet all of you in person some day.

Useless
Incompetent
Limp
Lost
Wasted
I feel.

Thoughts on customer service

It will soon be a year since I moved to Lower Parel to be closer to my place of work. Since cooking is neither a hobby nor an option, I’ve fluidly fluctuated between a tiffin service and the nearby hotels. Saturation of both tastes would often lead me to a stall near Lower Parel railway station that vends the most awesomest aloo parathas I have ever had in my life. Made right in front of you, these hot parathas scald your fingers as you try to break a piece of it. Accompanying the two parathas in a plate are a splash of the best thecha ever and a side-dish of the day’s special sabzi that ranges between aloo-mutter and chana with soya nuggets.

It wasn’t too long ago that the guy at the stall let loose a smile and a nod at my sight. He recognized me from the dozens of previous visits. That evening onwards, each time I showed up with my face, he would smile and promptly ask his minions to set a plate for me.

Cut to today. I reach, he smiles and nods and the intern at his stall sets a plate for me. I finish my customary number of four parathas and wash it down with lassi from his neighbour. That’s precisely the moment when it began to pour and the timing was perfect because you know…Murphy was so right!

I stood there, under a thin sheet of plastic, clutching the Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok Banker and more worried about the gift horse Corby in my front pocket, a wallet in my back pocket and a borrowed 8-GB pen drive in yet another pocket. “Did I want to wet the book? Is there a Samsung service centre nearby? Does a soaked pen-drive still work? I know it does after mine came out of the washing machine numerous number of times but then this was a borrowed drive!” My train of thought would have continued in this vein if the paratha walla hadn’t called out to me waving a plastic bag. He was offering it to me for my book. I think I gave him one of my stupid grins and too loud a thank you.

He knows how to keep his customer happy. He knows how to keep his customer happy without oral sex. He knew one tiny act of helpfulness will ensure that the customer would keep coming back to eat off his hands. I bet he hasn’t gone to college to earn a MBA degree or even touched books on entrepreneurship. He just knew what to do. That is good customer service.

That is where you come in, Mr. Pacenet Broadband ‘Service’. You need to intern at the paratha walla’s stall to learn a few things. My family opted for a 3-month unlimited internet package. More than two months of reminding your ‘helpline’ (which is actually some lady's personal phone) multiple times in a day, you sent people to fix the data cable. I wonder how a company like Pacenet can afford to act as cheap as to make lame excuses over the phone.

You gave my family a harrowing experience, you fuckall internet service providing douchebag company!

Do something with your life!

I have a theory. Let’s call it the theory of my life. Theories of lives, by the way, are like chicken pox. You can only get it once…and you can only make one ‘theory of your life’. If someone insists to know if there is something that I strongly believe in, I’ll give them the theory of my life.

The core statement of my theory is – ‘Do something with your life’.

See, everyone goes to school, then college, gets a job, screws around for a while, gets married, settles down, has children, watches them go to school, then college and so on. It only depends on his lifeline then if he sticks around to watch his kids screw around, get married and produce tiny beings that look like them. All of this does not take any effort. This keeps happening like a cycle. Even if you decide not to move a finger, people around will push you and put you through all of this.

But at the end of life, when you can see the people digging up the pit for your coffin to go in while you lie swathed in the undertaker’s homemade perfume, wouldn’t you for even one second ponder what you did in your entire life that sets you apart from all the buggers lying in the nearby graves?
What good would you have done in your entire life? Would people remember you for anything other than vile words, actions? What difference would you have made to the world between the time you were born and the time you croak? Taking a tangent and borrowing a phrase…if you cannot clean a place, at least don’t leave it dirtier. If you did nothing to give back or pay forward all the favours that you are showered with…all you did in your life span was to leave a huge carbon footprint!

My point is, everyone goes through that cycle called life. Default. To complain that this cycle tires you out and leaves no time to do anything else is just lame. The fact remains that you just will not make an effort to do anyone any good because if you really want to make time for something that you believe needs to be done – you will.

What’s there to be done anyway? Look around you. What do you think needs to be changed? The system? Right, one person cannot do it. Talk to people, find out what they think about it. May be they’ll laugh, because people like stand-up comedy and are scared of whistleblowers. But the important part there is that you have waken up and are making an effort to wake others up as well.

What else? The forests and animal reserves need help. Various conservation groups need volunteers.
Street dogs need aid. Ragged children need assistance. Open your eyes and look and there are a million things you could do.

The Nature Baba campaign is something that I am proud of. It is something I’ll beam about when I talk about it to kids the same age as my grandchildren (Yeah, I’m going to live longer and try more to make this place more than just habitable!). I am glad I’m making efforts to talk to people around in my tiny town about the drastic change in climate lately and what we could all do to make our world more beautiful.

I’m sure I’ll cherish my photo album titled ‘My trip to Planet Earth’ published by Heaven Inc.

A bedbug in my asshole

It wriggles. It tickles.

The annual social media plan for the entire year for a brand of phenyl is being worked out in front of me. The boss stands at the white board explaining the different kinds of things that needs to be done for the brand. It is a Friday, which means people who usually wear boring formal clothes can relax and wear t-shirts and jeans. A client servicing person looks attentively at the white board wondering where he could pipe in and add value to what the boss is saying. The boss, as he talks, looks at everyone seated inside the conference room one by one. He looks at the client servicing person next to me and then turns his eyes towards me. It wriggles.
For the last few days, I feel a few pairs of tiny feet amble up and down the hairy terrains of my thighs. How do I know it’s an insect? You know that feeling when a drop of sweat finds a way from your armpit to the waist? This is the same feeling, only upwards. I know it is a bedbug for sure because where I come from, there are plenty. Get where I am coming from? As I sleep at night, I feel a family of bedbugs faithfully perched on each of my limbs. It is after much deliberation that I have arrived at the conclusion that it is one of them that has found its way up my asshole, making it a temporary abode. It wriggles every now and then tickling the folds that cover the orifice.
How did they come home? They came home in an old sleeping bag that one of my roommates brought along with him. Apparently he hadn’t opened the bag for five years. It had also been given to him by his grandmother who had no use for it either.
It’s funny when I spank myself in the middle of the road. It’s a desperate way to say, “Shut the fuck up!” in the bedbug language. It seems to understand for soon enough, I feel it on the expressway between my buttocks and my knee. It is all the more funny when I am on my bike. To motorists passing by, I seem to be rubbing my thigh relentlessly. The worst of my fears is that the policemen patrolling near the Haji Ali dargah would see my actions as suspicious and open fire at me. My thighs are its playgrounds.
When at my desk in the office, I sit stiffly with a pained expression on my face. I learnt it from George on the Seinfeld show. He says, “If you want to seem busy, always look hassled.” But my stiffness had more to do with the fact that I was hosting another living creature. When the bedbug senses that my body doesn’t seem to be making much movement, it gingerly ventures out of its enclosure, its movements reminding me of how, in the olden ages, young men would venture out of their homes to faraway countries hoping to make their fortune. It takes a fast train from wherever it is to the front, only to get entangled in the much denser foliage.
I would only be too happy to play Noah and host as many creatures as possible, if only their movement didn’t cause me that itch.
Cut to the conference room where I am at the white board with the black marker in my hand when it moves across one of the most sensitive parts of the human body. The brain calls for an itch. With 12 eyeballs watching you with rapt attention and not even blinking, there is not much you can do other than what Sachin Tendulkar does before he settles down at the crease. The rest of what I talk is a blur. I write myself a mental note. Pull undies down tonight and check.
I reach home. Turn on all the lights, disrobe and bend down. I could imagine the way I looked from behind. Little Johhny once told a friend that he thought of a sun rising over two hills when he saw his father bend down to pick up a bar of soap on the bathroom floor. Over thirty minutes of careful, bent-over scrutiny revealed that I must deforest the region if I had to teach the encroacher a lesson.
My girlfriend is coming home this weekend. I must ask the visitor to kindly get out before that. I don’t want her to be interrupted in anything important by a pair of complex eyes staring at her, you see? It would be alright if she screams but it won’t be too pleasant if she bites down hard.

Grim, eh?

Atithi tum kab jaoge?