Stan waited for the office bus at the place were he regularly waited. The junction where the narrow road leading to the too low subway joined the highway. It was dusty and hot as usual. The construction of a flyover to counter the hour-long traffic jams had begun and Stan had crossed the road with difficulty because he had to negotiate the tin sheet dividers and the now shallow pit they had dug in the middle of the road. A motorcycle had almost him and he had exchanged profanities with the motorcyclist and had withdrawn from the quarrel on the brink of a physical fight. Stan decided he was going to have a bad day and mustered an appropriate facial ex-pression. He decided that everyone else was going to be against him today as they are on most days and decided to give the cold shoulder to anyone who he met that day. He looked inside himself and channeled his anger to the memories of being insulted and treated like vermin in the earlier days of his life and was slowly starting to slip into self pity. It was for this reason that he did not notice the girl who was standing beside him.

She was wearing a red tee-shirt and blue jeans and was slightly plump and looked happy for no particular reason. She was the type who could be happy for no particular reason. But being happy most of the time did not stop her from being bored and anxious at times. It was the first day of her first real job. She was told the office bus will pick her up at 830 in the morning. She had reached the junction at 820. She had been standing there for 40 minutes and it was nine now and there was still no sign of the bus. The only distraction she had in 40 minutes of boredom was a quarrel between the man who was standing near her and a motorcyclist. The quarrel was funny because the motorcyclist wanted to stop it and go to wherever he was going, but the woman who was with him egged him onto fighting. She was even yelling Maro salei ko. The other man looked hurt and angry at the same time and now looked rather sorrowful. He had come and stood near her and had not even looked in her direction, not even a sly glance. She thought that this was very unusual for a man as most men x-rayed her with side-way glances and she was slightly proud of it although it was at times irritating.

“Excuse me; are you waiting for the Tectonica bus?”

Stan was comparing himself to a spine-less comic character in the movie he saw last weekend. His only purpose in the movie was to be a slapping pad for the hero and later for the villain. Stan had stopped identifying with the heroes long back and now watched movies only to see the side-kicks and find satisfaction that side-kicks are also a part of life. But sometimes side-kickifying oneself had unhealthy side-effects and one of them was self-pity as deep as the Arabian sea.

Stan did not comprehend the question first and turned his face towards the source of the voice and let out an “Eh…. ?”

“Are you waiting for the Tectonica bus?”

“Yes, I am.”

Stan stared at her as if she was a green alien with antennae on top of her head and compensated at a very high rate of compound interest for not looking at her earlier.

“I was told it will reach here at 830 and now it is 9.”

She said that after covering her usual ex-pression of happiness with an I-know-you-are-staring-at-me-and-take-the-compound-interest-back ex-pression.  

Stan stopped staring and tried to bring on to his face the I-am-civilized-and-not-overwhelmed-by-you ex-pression.

“Oh, well. It usually comes at 915. Gets stuck at the junction before this one before getting stuck here. Never seen you waiting for bus here.”

A bit disappointed by the ‘time-less-ness’ of the bus and relieved that the bus is finally going to come she replied to him with a slight smile because she had become a little more happy than her usual happiness.

“I am joining today.”

 “Oh, that is good. Where were you working before?”

“Oh, this is my first job.” She replied cheerily.

“Oh, that is good. I am Stan.”

She offered him a hand and he took it looking a bit unsure of himself which was the way he usually looked.

“I am Tamanna.”

“Tamanna, nice name. There is a movie by Mahesh Bhatt that has the same name, right?” Stan mentally patted himself on the back and became a bit surprised of conversation coming easily to him.

“But I am not like the Tamanna in the movie.” She gave him what he thought was a slightly naughty smile.

It was then that Stan noticed the office bus that had idly stopped near them. The driver was looking at them both and was getting a bit envious of the loser in crumpled jeans and tee-shirt.

Tamanna got into the bus and the bus tried to take off without Stan but was able to move only half a metre of the 10 metres it was about to move in the next five minutes. Stan did not notice it and got in the bus after Tamanna who immediately went to the back of the bus as if she did it everyday. She got hardly a look from her new colleagues as they all seemed to be in some sort of suspended animation aided by liquid nitrogen. Silence hung like a wet carpet in the bus. Tamanna thought it stank a little as she settled on to the right window seat at the back of the bus. She later thought the stink might have been from Stan’s socks that had been colonized by a very rare form of anaerobic bacteria. He had come and sat near her maintaining the respectable five inches distance to be maintained when there was enough space to maintain it.

“Which department do you work for?”

Stan was plotting how to continue the conversation and did not hear Tamanna properly.

“Err… what?” He asked, turning his face to her.

“Which department do you work for? And what do you do?”

“Oh… I am a content developer. Naturally, works in the content department.”

He said with a smile that he hoped will make him look witty. Then he remembered he should be asking her about what she is going to join as.

“What are you going join as?”

“I am going to be a code fish.”

“What?”

“A software developer… a coder, software engineer, cyber carpet weaver, whatever you choose to call it.”

Stan remained silent for a moment and then reminded himself to laugh.

“You do not seem to love it much,” he said after finishing the laugh.

“No, I don’t love it at all,” she said fixing her eyes on a couple kissing inside an autorickshaw that had stopped near the bus. She wondered if Stan noticed it.

“I was very excited on the first day of my first job,” said Stan while male-gazing a girl in semi-transparent white trousers who always sat in the second seat from the back of the bus. He wondered if Tamanna noticed it.

“I wanted to be an actor.”

“Oh, even I wanted to be an actor. I thought I looked like Sharukh Khan when I was a teenager and used to mutter Tu ha kar ya na kar too hei mera kiran at girls from a safe distance. I even styled my hair like him.”

Tamanna laughed and her laughter ricocheted of the wet mat of silence that hung in the bus and caused a few drops of laughter to fall on the zombies suspended in liquid nitrogen, which made them notice Tamanna laughing. Stan thought their ex-pression matched that of the hostages getting shot in Counterstrike. He remembered with a tinge of disappointment that he has never been able to save any of the hostages in the game he started playing two weeks back.

“I don’t want to be an actor in movies,” she turned to look at him. Her eyes were still laughing and Stan felt her persistent happiness invading him a bit and he liked it.

“Then?”

“I wanted to be an actor in a play, no not a play, plays.”

“Then why didn’t you become an actor in a play, sorry plays?”

“There is no money in it. I am not rich enough to be an actor in a play.”

Stan sensed a streak of unhappiness in her and he thought a streak of unhappiness is like salt is to porridge to a mind full of happiness.

“Even I wanted to be an actor,” said Stan after some moments of silence. “But I did not know that till recently.”

“Happens with most people.” Tamanna said with a lovely seriousness, but laughed with her eyes. “I knew it all along, right from the time I was in the first grade.”

They sat in silence for a while. The bus was now nearing their office.

“Acting always used to escape from me. I was the one chosen for the comedian’s role in every school play. And for weeks afterwards others used to laugh whenever they saw me. So, I guess I gave a good performance every time I was given an opportunity… no, when forced to act.”

“From your performance in the morning, I must admit you make a fine comedian,” She laughed and made the wet curtain of silence wobble.

Stan did not laugh, but pretended he was looking at the water hyacinth that covered the lake to the left of the road. Tamanna stopped laughing and said.

“I was just kidding. You can be a serious actor as well. Only a very good actor can play a comic role and make people laugh. You must have been really good.”

“I once won a mono-act competition after just one rehearsal and I had not even written the script down.” Stan stopped to give the sentence what he thought was the required emphasis. “And I enjoyed it immensely. That is when I realized I could act and it was something I enjoyed.”

The bus stopped in front of the entrance to the building with huge roman columns and housed their office. The zombies suddenly woke up and scrambled to the front of the bus to get down as if the back of the bus was in fire. Tamanna stood up and tried to follow the zombies but Stan remained seated.

“No one is distributing sweets outside nor we are going to Disneyland,” he said.

Tamanna looked at him and started laughing. This time the zombies took no notice as they were busy pushing and shoving each other to get out of the bus.

Tamanna stopped laughing when they reached the lifts that took them to the reception where they parted. Stan gave her his extension number and told her to call if she needed any help.

“I will call even if I don’t need any help.”

“Anyways, I won’t be of much help.”

Tamanna laughed and went away.

There was not much for work for Stan that day. He did what he usually did. He checked his blog to see if there were any new comments, found there was none. Then opened Wikipedia and went on a reading spree. He clicked on all the links that interested him and read about Australian aborigines, Papua New Guinea, The Matrix, and artificial intelligence. He was reading about the wall of sand in Morocco when his phone rang. He picked it up absent mindedly and said ‘hello’ in his usual lethargic, unenthusiastic way.

“Did they fire you?”

Tamanna’s voice shook him up, created a heavy sand storm in the wall of sand and he came crashing down to the real world.

“Why, why did you think so?”

“You sounded as if you had just fallen into a pit filled with Mumbai garbage.”

“Oh, everyone says so. How is your first day going?”

“Will tell you in the evening.”

Just then Stan saw his project manager coming at him. He wondered what was so different with her. Then he noticed what she was carrying. A meat cleaver, which looked just like the one wielded by the criminal in Grand Theft Auto. She swung it heavily at him. He ducked and his head hit the side of his desk. The world blacked out in front of him.

“Stan, get up. We have reached.”

Stan opened his eyes. All the other members of the theatre troupe had got down from the bus.

“What happened? Why are you looking at me like this?”

Tamanna was puzzled to see Stan staring at her like that. They had to get ready for the play and everyone must be waiting for Stan and her.

“Nothing, just a weird dream.” 

Suddenly a thought touched me. I found I was not able to write. No words came to me. I seem to be stuck at a writer’s dead end. It could be because I no longer write and the lethargy of it is having me in its chains. I don’t even write mails these days. What have I become? And without writing I feel useless, worthless, and in general good for nothing. When writing is the hope that it is one skill that will take to me success is the one thing that propels me through life, how can I be so irresponsible? I should keep writing. I should keep my writing gears well-oiled.

Where are the stories that used to come to me? It seems they have left me realizing that me, the outlet to the world for them, has closed. I should renew the membership in that library. I have been planning to do that for a long time. After moving to New Mumbai, I go to South Mumbai very rarely. Partly it is because I no longer try to escape from the room. I stay in the room and lay around all the time doing particularly nothing.

Right now I read the story of a woman who went for a cosmetic surgery and ended up with serious health complications and a bad face (http://luciacovelli.rediffiland.com/). I felt low as a result.

When am I going to write the stories I want to write? When am I going to write that first novel? I am acting as if that novel will appear out of thin air and present itself to me. And in which language will I write? I am not very sure about my mother tongue. I was not very good at writing it to begin with and I have not written any significantly long pieces using it for a long time. Well, I don’t even get to speak that language for most of the day. I have to make do with my not so good spoken English and rude Hindi; rude because I learned to speak Hindi among a race of rude people.

It seems I am just rambling along. I am doing it just because I want to get back to the habit of writing. Writing has become painful. It is like taking a plaster off a wound. The plaster has stuck to the hair around the wound and you have to pull very slowly or do it in a one fast pull, so that it does not hurt much. I am doing it in the former way, writing a paragraph at a time and then going somewhere else and come back and look at what I have written and then again write something.

This is a post from http://www.twisted-dna.com/. I found this interesting. And you may visit that blog as well. It is hilariously funny.

Craptastic!

Published August 17th, 2006

When software engineers in California are not dreaming about going skinny dipping with Angelina Jolie, they are dreaming about making millions of dollars by starting a software company. I do too. I mean the latter part.

I have an idea for this wonderful software. I don’t know how to make the software yet, but a like a true day dreamer, I prepared the packing and the feature list for the software. Let me share my idea with you.

What is Craptastic?
Craptastic is an amazing new software that reads a Bollywood (or other Indian movie) DVD and makes it into a movie that is actually watchable. All you have to do is pop the DVD into your computer, run the software, burn a DVD and watch it! You will never have to hurt your fingers again by holding the “2x” button for one and half hours.

Feature list:

• Using modern and complex algorithms, this software makes Aishwarya Roy look like she is almost acting
• Searches each frame and digitally puts a shirt on Salman Khan’s disgusting bare body
• Since most songs are rip off of English songs, those songs will be replaced by original English songs
• Using digital pattern recognition mechanism, this software makes dying characters die as soon as they say, “I am dying” sparing the viewer the 10 minute monologue
• By a patented new technology called ChildAgeCorrect, this software adds realism to movies by making children look at least as old as the dialogs they are spewing out. Warning: Most kids in movies will look 18
• Coat color correction: Rich people in the movie will wear normal gray, blue or black suits instead of orange, green or lavender.
• We all know how distracting those protean sweat patches under the armpits of heroes and heroines that are changing in every frame. This softwake make them look exactly the same in every frame
• (Only for Tamil movies) Applies strategic pixallation in fight scenes where the hero is wearing a lungi.
• And many more features!

Bonus software included:
MovieExperience is a great fun software that comes free with Craptastic. Applying MovieExperience will enhance the sound track so that your movie watching experience is closer to watching in a theater. Some features include:

• Adds the voice of the annoying guy talking in the back row
• Adds crying babies (up to
• Adds the voice of that 12 year old girl who already saw the movie and providing a preview of the upcoming scene
• Adds whistles and hoots when the heroine’s pallu drops
• After the movie ends, it adds instant reviews in real voices like, “What a load of crap,” “I want my money back” etc.

Order now!

He stops traffic for the school children to cross the road

He raises his hand, juts out his behind like a Bharatanatyam dancer

And as the Skoda’s bumper comes to stop millimeters away from his groin

Waves his hand in one fluid motion resembling the flight of a fat crow

For the children to come to his side

Then he sees the Best giant late to reach Vasanth Rao Naik Chowk

Roaring through the fast lane, expecting all obstacles to be scared away

He runs like a frightened duck, makes a quacking sound, flutters his hands

The giant’s brain sees the duck with ten metres to spare

He floors the brake and the gentleman who had taken his hand off the hook

Is flung towards the front of the bus, hits the six and half foot woman

Rests on the ample cushion for a second and was suddenly reminded of his mother

The traffic stopper ignores the curses of the driver and the bark like honks

And extracts his shirt sleeve from the teeth of the giant

All the children have crossed now

He flutters his wings again with a smile in his face

The traffic moves again and the gentleman extracts himself from giant cushion

And the giant mother gives him a maternal smile and everything is normal

I think there are days when you are accident prone. Today was one of those days for me. As usual I woke up later than I have to in the morning and got ready for office in a hurry. I reached the bus stop and as I was in a hurry I tried to get onto the first bus I saw but I kept asking if that bus goes to the Vashi bus stand. Nobody replied and that was something very strange. And I was holding onto the bus by a window, and then, the guy who was sitting near that window pulled it down and I narrowly escaped getting my fingers broken. The bus left without me.

Then I thought I will take a rickshaw. The first rickshaw’s driver refused me because I was going to the bus stand. I was about to take a decision never to take a rickshaw again when another rickshaw stopped near me and invited me, ready to take me to anywhere in the world. So I hopped in and the rickshaw stopped at the bus stand and while I was getting down, my hand, which for some reason lagged behind, hit the side of rickshaw and I heard something crack and saw that the panel which covered the side had broken. Luckily, the driver didn’t see that. Surprisingly, my hand was not hurt and I wondered if all those mosquito bites have mutated me into a mosquito man or something (Are all vampires mosquito men? They drink blood, they can fly, and they are active in the night).

I went to the bus stand and then the bus came and there was the usual jostling to get in. I had misjudged where the bus would stop, so I had to run a bit to make sure I was in front of the crowd. Then something like a thread wrapped around my shoulder, but I ignored it. As I reached the door of the bus and was about to get in, I heard a shout behind me and I realized that there was a man at the end of the thread and that the thread was not a thread, but a mobile phone’s ear phone cord. The earphone had developed some affinity towards my tee shirt and had got stuck in it. The owner, a rather bulky man, who was under the impression that someone was stealing his phone had kept pace with me and with some difficulty, extracted the earphone from my tee shirt, all the while expressing sincere doubts about my eye sight in the choicest of Hindi words. It seems the man was talking on his phone when I ran to catch the bus in my hand-flailing-all-around-borrowed-from- swimming style. I hope he was not explaining to his wife the reason behind the lip shaped red stain on his shirt.

It is afternoon now. I hope the ‘accident quota’ for today is over and the commute back home will be incident free. Also I am planning to swim in the evening. I hope you won’t read about a shark attack in a swimming pool tomorrow. 

I have been growing hair for the past few months. I was under the impression that I have started looking like a hunk and ignored bad hair days and the fight against and dandruff and the cost of various hair gels and oils. Then the summer reached its peak and as 80 percent of body heat escapes through the head and the hair effectively blocks heat escaping, I was suffering like an unsheared sheep in a beach resort. Yet I ignored suggestions from my roommates and friends to get a hair cut. I thought they were jealous of my dense mane because one of them, whose bald plate shines like an oversized black pearl in the sun, was particularly persistent.

But after a series of sleepless nights I decided I should at least trim or cut through the growth for ventilation. I went to my usual barber shop which I used to frequent when I was conditioned to believe that a haircut is a sign of cleanliness. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The shop had shut shop! May be there were many like me among their customers. I walked back and decided to procrastinate the haircut when I spotted a ‘Men’s beauty parlor’. I decided to give it a shot and entered it. It was empty except for a thin man with betel juice stained teeth. He would have looked appropriate as a vagrant barber, but somehow was a misfit in a ‘beauty parlor’ strictly in terms of beauty.

I entrusted my heavy fur to his scissors and comb and tried to explain to him in my patchy Hindi that ventilation was my goal and not deforestation. He seemed to have understood me and proceeded to clear the undergrowth leaving the canopy behind. He first secured the canopy safely to one side of the head using a comb. Then he proceeded to clear the undergrowth with the apparent skills an Indian mali has in shearing a Newfoundland sheep. This I understood because he lacked all sense of proportion and symmetry and soon I had an asymmetrical head rather dangerously leaning to the left. He stopped cutting hair and took stock of the situation and asked me if he could shorten my hair. Since I did not want to start a new trend in hairstyling, which could be called the left-not so liberal-style, I agreed. That dude was apparently a grass cutter in an Indian cricket pitch as he did a good job and I soon gazed at a much younger and cleaner me in the mirror. I liked what I saw. I was looking like a college kid and some sort of innocence had returned to my face. I felt cooler (literally) than I had felt in months.

Now the babes in the new office have started noticing my presence and I am liking it. Now I have an explanation for me being girl friend-less for so long. It was my hair. And yesterday my roommate told me that it is only now he realized how shabby I used to look with all that hair. So, all the potential girl friends out there, you have a neat, dandruff-free, non-smelly me to choose.

And last two nights, I slept well.  

My roommate has Malaria. It seems many others in the area also have Malaria. Mumbai is a Malarial city. But there is nothing mentioned in the newspapers or television about Malaria in Mumbai.

Or is it that it is not serious? Can any fellow Mumbaiker shed light on this? Does anyone you know has Malaria?

Have you been truly loved? Is there something called true love? Is there something called love? Or is it just lust? While in college, we conducted a survey. We asked two questions to the participants. Is there lust in love? And is there love in lust? Most people said there is no love in lust. A friend of mine came up with a different opinion. He said, “There is no love between a man and woman. There is only lust.” At that time, I opposed him.

But now I am coming to the conclusion that there is no love. There is only lust. May be love is lust in a comfort zone.

Just think about it. It is all about lust in the end. Everything else is an excuse. Lust is the bonding factor.

I think humans don’t have the capacity to love. It is all comfort zones for us. The comfort zone to talk, the comfort zone to bully, the comfort zone to dig your nose, the comfort zone to have sex, and the comfort zone to babble about things that are considered inconsequential by the popular line of thought.

Have you ever thought how good it is to be young? To feel how good it is to feel full, to feel your strong lungs expanding inside you, to walk through a crowd with your strong legs with your head held up high, to climb hills and not lose breath, to take the risk of trying to flirt with the stern faced babe in the cafeteria, to be able to leave everything and start a new beginning. To value being young, one has to feel how being old is like.

One hot day, towards the evening I felt weak. My body did not obey my commands. Going back home seemed to be a Herculean task. I felt like lying down on the side walk and dying. I reached home and collapsed. While climbing the stairs to the bedroom, the very stairs I had not given any thought till then, I had struggled through each step and my legs had threatened to collapse.

What is the punishment for laziness? There may be many in the long term, but the immediate one is boredom. Visualize this, a friend has told you about an art exhibition in town and asked you if you would like to join. You are supposed to meet your friend, say at 3.30 in the afternoon.

You have had a heavy lunch. It is 2, and you decide to take a short nap, planning to wake up at 230 and go and meet the friend. You don’t wake up at 230, you don’t wake up at 330, you wake up at 5 and drearily look at the watch and realize you will never be able to meet your friend at 330.

You call up the friend and apologize, the friend tells you it is not a problem, other friends had joined him and they are going for a drink and if you want to, you may join. But you know it is too late, that if you start now, you will be in time only to see them off. So, you sit down, switch on the TV, watch Independence Day for the 100^th time, sulk, and think about how pointless life is, and steal an apple from your roommate who is suffering from Malaria.

Darkness falls and you become desperate. You go to the nearest liquor shop (We used to call them temples of peace, while in college), buy the strongest beer and buy a suspicious looking fried fish from the street. Come back, forcibly keep the Malarial roommate off the beer and fish because you don’t want to deal with ambulances, hospitals, mortuary, postmortems etc now. Drink the beer, eat the fish, watch a chic movie and shed a few tears. Try to eat the half-cooked potatoes and elastic roties that bai has made for dinner. Watch a science fiction movie about time traveling and stuff like that make you wish you could go back to the time when you were 15 and had just miserably failed the Maths test in board exams and was about to become a failed case. Feel how minuscule your place is in the world and how purposeless the existence is and switch off the lights and trudge up the stair case hoping to meet the ghost who some of the guests to the flat had seen (you suspect the ghost was your roommate because the guests who saw the ghost had overstayed their welcome and some more).

Check if the Malarial roommate is still alive and settle down uncomfortably on your bed because you can’t simply rest your body on the bed because the part of the body that is in touch with the bed gets heated up and has to be cooled by exposing it to the fan and this process is cyclical and is not very sleep inducing. Get up, go to the balcony and check if your girl next door is strolling on her courtyard again. She is not and you stand and watch the sky for a while and notice the stars and wonder when was the last time you saw them. Get back to bed, and decide that a suitable suicide plan has to be made tomorrow and drift off to temporary death.