Winters are not dead, they are just dead cold! If you know what I mean, enough of complaining that winters have become notional, its just one day when its dead cold and then its back to summers, does good to the country for you don’t have states overdrawing power or outage in the morning hours when you want your daily dose of hot water shower and splash. But this year either I have been lucky not to face power outage or for some reason I have been feeling really cold and chilly. Winter has become suddenly very persistent and so has been electricity so perseverant. Lucky us!
So will tomorrow we get to see 0 degrees temperature as soothsaid by BBC Weather forecast, did you notice we no longer quote our dear Met department either coz it doesn’t give out weekly forecast or we want to invite competition to who gives out the most (in) correct forecasts. Whatever it be, the weather has been really enjoying ;for once I haven’t felt depressed during winters and maybe because I have seen how little sun light you get elsewhere like in UK and co where it is sun rise at 8am and sun set at 4pm or maybe I have really been enjoying my existence. Cheers to you!
Have you noticed that the readymade tea is the cause of acidity or it is just me, I mean we get Coffee day "vended" teas and coffee and these days I cant take more than a sip before I become pukish and so I walk 200 meters in the dusty roadside to have the ginger, milk-heavy "cooked" tea, a term which I coined to explain to my expat boss what do we do when we let it boil and boil and boil for minutes on the gas. That milk heavy cooked tea hasn’t ever let me feel pukish and I enjoy it every time that I pay 4 rupees for it as against having it for free in the office. I remember people telling me that you KILL the tea if you put milk in it and its nothing less than a non potent poison if you make it milk heavy and worst if you COOK it.
So let me get it straight on your face, why do I feel pukish when I have a non-cooked, non milk heavy tea in the office for that as per the sanctum definition is the real refreshing harmless tea?
And is it about showoff when you see someone happily having a glass full of vodka or rum (I am ignorant about the nomenclature and definition of the alcohol) in one hand with window glasses fully rolled down, sipping it, at a traffic junction waiting for the light to turn green. I mean is it not openly flaunting the traffic laws and worst is it not acting yamraj on the street or is this the new method of getting a road dedicated to your car when you are out on it, much better and effective than having a red beacon light flashing and asking for space so that you move ahead out of the traffic cluster?
DL3C AS0282 at Qutub T-junction with someone in a Scorpio and having a turban on his head happily inviting that attention at 10 pm on 29th Jan. I am sure this is too common to be even bothered about. And was something like this to blame in a car which was lying flat on the roof, turned turtle on the sohna road in the median, meters ahead of UniTech Cyber Towers in Sec39 Ggn? Human life is not worth it or else why would someone be able to hit on the head of another man in the broad day light and almost kill him instantly with an iron rod inspite of 100 of men around.
And then you have a Labrador made to sit happily in an Omni Taxi being taken for a city ride, just the dog and the taxi driver. We human may be compassionate, intelligent but mind you we, all of us are so very eccentric in our own big way!
Dare to disagree and I will be happy! Ciao and Goodbye January 2008!
Labels: Tea and Driving, Winter
Alrite its close to 2 years and what a sabbatical or what a nonsense return to a mundane lifeless formless intangible addiction. Bravo you alive to be able to return and bravo to withstand withdrawal after effects.
Or hello it wasn't anything of that sort maybe it was just another of me-can and then I lost interest. Well I don't even remember why I quit, or even if I quit, or even if I had started blogging ever, but what the butter chicken! here I am.. what if its cathartic symbiosis of reality interlaced with memories.
A lot has continued to change, I have continued to think to quit radio, but like a shameless winding tail of a street dog, I continue to park myself every weekend in the lifeless studio; which assumingly and amusingly rocks thousands of lives out there, or so we are happy to believe, but then, who is out there daring enough to rock us out of this delirium; Nobody!. When you slip, darn its you! who is moving away and you blame the world, for having left you alone to free fall, what an irony!
I have in the past 2 years moved out of radio for good 6 months , killed a beautiful show called Hasto Ke Ghar Baste and thank you listeners for giving me an identity out of that show; which took birth out of sheer frustration, when me and Naren use to sit in the studios, with Naren playing non stop tracks in his second hour and I waiting for my Dilli Mail, to kiss the mike couple of hours later. Dr Ritu the darling that she is,equally pricey in giving her attention, well it will be hard for the Channel to get any other Boss, who with her limited, precious, eagerly awaited and remarkably popular on-air presence would outsmart majority of her regular Radio Jocks. She was daring and was ably assisted in her mental and creative faculties, beating her age, she sure is past the exuberant fledgelings youth that todays RJs are made of, but her ability to think on her feet and ability to compose thoughts in hard hitting soft compositions would make any one worth his salt fall for her charms, and with her fashionable straight in the eye demurring presence she would knock out a lot of young wannabes. We miss her, us lesser mortals especially for she picked me up as RJ, only because I being muslim was taken for granted to be good with Urdru (which reality is that I don't know how to read or write) and being North Indian, was not to have any issues with Hindi(reality was that having lived 10 years in south I would mix up genders as if there has to be a perfect marriage of opposites in nouns and supporting verbs) and English was good enough to not worry of, for I had done English Radio for good 5 years at Bangalore. She soon woke upto the reality of having taken on-board a RJ, experienced enough to not learn and fallible enough to be taken back to basics. So she corrected my Hindi and became my Hindi tutor, to an extent, where I could cover up my faux-pas, not so much if you happen to listen to my top of the hour news bulletins.
Anyway so it was a lot of threatening, reasoning, blackmailing, emotional manipulation, buttering and cunning smartness to get her to understand that its a waste to let someone like Naren, play non stop music and why not I, learn some on air humour with him and do a show together without any extra renumeration.
Thats how Hasto Ke Ghar 2 hour show was born and how did it come to an end .. well the reason to bring it down is yours truly. It sure hurts but then there is a nasty satisfaction that the creator managed to be the destructor and what a peace, if there was someone else, God have mercy on him! for we loved the show so much that we could have even have killed that person had it been anyone but me.
Radio has lost its charm, its not easy to work with new bosses and so I have been trying to enjoy my full time job. Our gang of few stupid and mentally challenging and emotionally weak RJs also hit its The End with one getting married, the other moving to a private Station, another first teaming up locally with a private station and then, now moved out of city (as if staying in the same city was getting criminal ,huh?)and me and Naren having parted thanks to the collapse of the show.
So we were talking about how punctual the change had been and how fool we had been to believe, that Changes are only for good, forgetting that good is a comparison and the moment you get few good in your life; it slides down the scale to become average! and then you start moving further up!. Its a futile exercise to find GOOD in your life, Man if you were intelligently foolish enough to believe me, you sure would throw a smile on that.
But hold on, you cant throw a smile on the Toll Plaza on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, I sure have suddenly got a hanfull collection of clocks which have seconds running slower than the minutes, for none of my watches clock the whole journey to be of 20 minutes of zip. The first problem is, we attempted to beat the basic Indian belief that staying on the right side will lead us to the Right turn and so you have a chaos on the RTR Flyover where traffic towards Gurgaon wants to stay on the left(need to go sraight) and Traffic for Dwarka/Domestic Airport wants to stay on the right(as they need to take a right turn) which is not what the Flyover designers thought of providing, they wanted to surprise our logic and why not! for its a long 27 km journey which will be so boring if there be no surprises like this. So the first day there was massive jams, second day the vehicles were being driven in reverse gear, in spite of Traffic Marshalls holding the respective placards, aptly forgetting that while driving, we would like to focus at the wheel, our phone and cigarettes :) and we men would go to hell ,to have sinned! if we dared to read signs, and worst if we tried to understand them.
Well this is not just the only beating the logic on this expressway, when you hit the toll plaza you clearly find the indications for lanes marked for TAGs and the for TOLL and they were initially placed alternatively. But reading we do in libraries or offices, but never on the road, its dangerous after all :), so there was chaos and on every lane we had folks who wanted to pay toll and move on, blocking passage for TAGged vehicles. And then next day you had another beating the logic game, this time there was just ONE TAG lane, the most extreme right one and the rest all were meant for TOLL, after all only handful of them had bought TAGs rest of us believed in living the complete experience of paying and getting receipt and then moving on. But here was another beating the logic, now someone forgot that we LOVE to jump the lanes, and get really ecstatic singing hallelujah :) , when we get to CREATE our own lanes! and so when the wide road converges into 16 lanes ,there is a lot of space in between those lanes and so few of us get that ethereal experience of creating our OWN lanes adding to the chaos and then visibly playing - pehle aap pehle aap! (aap actually means ME, if you thought it otherwise).
So 2 days of living with my slow clock, I reverted back to Good Old MG road, simple for I don't have to pay to burn extra gas, ruin the environment and get a nasty look on my face with bosses thinking that here I am coming late after yet another interview for another job; and since I have returned, without yet a resignation letter to him, it means I am no good for another job and therefore shouldnt be considered good inspite of really delivering good work day in and day out and hence he can deny me all the benefits of a hard and leal worker!
More on life tomorrow, till then you can welcome me back ! :)
