Monthly Archives: March 2009

You know your life sucks when…

Scenario 3

  • You have to make excuses like ‘I eat healthy!’ and ‘I despise junk food!’ when your colleagues are ordering from McDonald’s
  • You have to ask ‘What’s the cheapest thing on the menu?’ regularly
  • Your daily budget for food is so low that you have to skip meals to adhere to it
  • Your refrigerator promotes the growth of fungi food items
  • You avoid rickshaws even if you could save an hour in travel
  • You walk four kilometers at 12 midnight after a long day just to save 6 rupees
  • You plan to meet people during evenings on weekdays and every evening you ring people up to cancel plans
  • You haven’t watched Slumdog Millionaire 2 months after its release
  • You have 3 days of unread newspapers in your backpack

😦

In the last few days

  • I got busier and busier at work. I enjoyed almost all the ‘work’ that I did excepting the fact that I had to work on more than a single document because of the ‘reviewing’ process that my documents need to go through.
  • I understood that I thoroughly dislike being close to deadlines.
  • I read up a lot about astronomy and the solar system.
  • Because of my nature to try and finish as much of work that I can, and because I want to reach back and do as many things as I can, I end up NOT taking little breaks at work. This usually makes my brain exhausted, and thereby, my efforts rather unproductive.
  • I postponed essential stuff because of work and poverty.
  • I understood that the my dreams are so far away that they are unacheivable.
  • I realized that my life is in a total mess.
  • I missed being in touch with my friends because of busy schedule. I can’t forgive myself for that.
  • I realized that I’m going to be poor for a long, long time.
  • I realized that I tend to worry a lot more as compared to people of my age.

Working is fun

This is my first entry into this blog using Microsoft’s speech recognition system. I’m really not that tired after a long day at work, yet I feel lazy. I could have attempted to login and write something from my mobile phone when I was traveling back from work. But somehow I didn’t. I cannot explain why. Perhaps I wanted nothing to do with text after working at text all day in the office.

At the office though, it was fun working on an actual assignment. It was the first time that I had ever been given one! It really felt nice working on a scientific document rather than an exercise. I was intimidated by the set of guidelines that I was supposed to follow. It was almost as if the instructions were towering over me with phrases like ‘do not forget’ hovering like monsters.

But it was fun! I did not feel the hours fly past. I sat almost five hours at a stretch without even taking a break to go to the toilet. At the end of it all, I felt like I was over-editing the document. I guess I will learn from my mistakes. But I hope I don’t make a lot of them.

It’s easier this way

I could have blogged from either work or home yesterday using a computer. I didn’t choose to do it at work because of ethical and privacy issues – anyone could read what I type. I didn’t do it from home because I spent the entire evening worrying about how to pay my bills next month. I was bluesy enough that I didn’t ‘talk’/’reciprocate’ with Vinokur.

Well, at least until we learned some grammar theory from the internet and refreshed the concepts of the obliquity of the ecliptic, equinoxes, solstices, precession of the equinoxes etc. Astronomy is kick-ass and it felt really good to be doing things that I last did in College as a teenager.

Today morning, on my way to work, on the bus that I ride to reach work, I feel more relaxed to talk about the big issues that float in capitals in my vitreous. At least I don’t feel wrong about doing something unethical. And unlike my PC at home, the phone doesn’t crash!

So the big questions are – What do I do? Borrow? More?

The intimidating list

My computer crashed yesterday. It was just a ‘usual’ crash. It sent me into a panic. How am I going to fix it. How expensive and expeditious would the remedy be? Can I find time to fix it?

I managed to re-install windows on another partition and fix the internet and basic hardware issues yesterday night. But I slept at 3.30 am. I have the daunting task of fixing up the rest of the hardware now. Once done, I could hope to carry on for another month at most before another crash.

With the new job and frequent rehearsal and gigs, it’s going to be impossible to start doing away with my to-do/to-fix lists!

Fuck!

Misery

It seems that my life needed to give me a reality check to balance it first and then to counter-balance so that I feel bad. A year of poverty, despair and aimless wandering is not letting me forget its bitterness. I spent the entire afternoon and evening shuttling between traffic police chowkies, municipal garages and police stations trying to find my scooter. But it’s still missing. Nobody knows why it was taken.

The careless security guard at the apartment building says that it was my mistake not to remind him and the rest of the security guards that the scooter was mine. They said that people in the apartment building have been wondering whose vehicle it was because it was in such a shabby condition. Since no one had taken any responsibility for the vehicle, they had presumed that it was junk and had let the towing guys take it away.

I agree that I have not used it for the last 6 months or so. I didn’t have money to buy fuel. I didn’t have money to eat, remember! How could I waste money on expensive petrol? Because I was not using it, it grew dirty and obviously I didn’t bother to clean it and make it look owned. Fuck! I was planning to save some money up from a couple of months at work and then spend it on the scooter to get it back up and running.

I feel bad. I feel bad for letting this happen, for letting my life drift away, for letting poverty in, for being optimistic and ambitious to let myself do what I did.

This is fun

People associate work with anything but fun. I know that it is too early in my work-life to start arguing against this fact. But I am enjoying my life even more these days. It just seems like my life got structured. I have a routine to follow and I have a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day having finished a certain set of tasks that I am assigned to.

I have not started ‘working’ working at my job yet. The five days so far have been full of lessons and exercises in English grammar and literary styles of academic publishing with the occasional lesson about how to increase the efficacy of your work in Microsoft Word.  There has been an instance of a colleague giving me a scare stating ‘I hope you you have ‘fun’ even when you are doing ‘real’ work!’. But that’s not the point really. I’m talking about my life. Life has become more fun after work has started.

I get up everyday at around 8 am and listen to one of the news channels while sipping coffee. If my newspaper gets delivered – the delivery of newspapers in my building is anything but reliable – I get to read a bit of the Times of India  as well. After a shower, I dress up and go have breakfast at the roadside dosa-shack. The bus ride to the office is the time for me to start reading some Wiki article about a subject (Greek mythology, for example) that is interesting or relevant to what I and Vinokur had discussed the night before. By 10 am, I enter my office smelling nice and fresh and start my duties for the day.

Work starts with lessons, which are boring, and exercises, which are interesting. Whenever there are long lessons, I take a mini-break bychecking my e-mail or reading up an article in the New York Times or magazines like Nature, New Scientist etc. Such mini-breaks take just 2 minutes at a time and really help me feel a little fresher to tackle another block of material. I usually refrain from interacting with my colleagues when I want a break. Most often, they are busy with whatever they are doing. But I prefer things that are solely under my control. Reading an article in the NYT can be started and ended whenever I want. Talking to a colleague cannot be,  as it needs the agreement and co-operation of the other person.

Soon it is lunch time and I have my delicious meal at a vegetarian restaurant in the same building. That’s my big break. I come back in about half an hour refreshed and spend more time with grammar. Around 4 pm, I get a little bored and I need my coffee for rejuvenation. More work afterward and voila, it’s seven! Time to leave from work. On my way back, I usually follow up with more stuff from the Wiki article. Once I reach back home, I enter a clean home with freshly prepared food at the kitchen counter – thanks to my new maid. After my shower, I start finishing up my e-mail and FaceBook stuff and start a night’s discussion with Vinokur about something of common interest.

The result – a feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day. Maybe, I should have started working two months ago!

Coffee and the office

One of my expectations at the new workplace was the availability of good quality, machine-vended coffee. I don’t know why I thought that a good vending machine would be waiting to be serviced by me everyday. My first experience was at Xander’s office which is a part of the establishment which held the biggest newspaper in Mumbai and shared a common building with the offices of a very popular radio station in Mumbai. Coincidentally, I have had coffee at two other offices, both belonging to other radio stations. The coffee was consistently excellent everywhere and I was expecting the same.

My current workplace doesn’t have a vending machine. In the sub-office that I work from, there is the option of making your own coffee with the elements – boiling water (from an electric kettle), milk powder, sugar and coffee powder. Being the coffee-nossieur that I am, I was skeptical. Hesitantly, I made my first cup of improvisational coffee yesterday. It wasn’t as bad as I had expected. I made two more today and both of them were just as good. Or bad. I really wish I knew how to make the best possible coffee out of the resources that I have. If someone knows I would appreciate a helping hand.

Vinokur advises me to first pour a small amount of water in the cup at first. Then, you are supposed to add all the ‘powdery’ ingredients and make a paste. Finally you add the rest of the water. But I need to make something like a cappuccino. I mean I need the froth on top. You could even sprinkle some coffee powder on top to make it even more attractive. Please comment.

The Update List v 2.0

More updates!

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.

‘Holi’day relapse

I don’t know why I hate it so much. Actually it’s not an ‘it’. It’s more like a group of ‘it’s. All have the tags ‘festival’ and ‘religion’ attached to them. On top of of the charts is ‘Holi’ and close contenders are the ‘Diwali’ and ‘Ganesh’ festivals. I’m sure I have forgotten others but I choose not to remember them because I don’t want to have nightmares. I posted about this issue on my FaceBook status message in the morning and I got a prompt, sarcastic remark.

‘Kris, I can’t believe that you are saying this. You are, after all, part of a band which is called ‘NOISE’ market. Happy happy happy Holi!’

I really don’t see the correlation. Why? Is it because I’m part of a Hindi band? Is it because the band’s name consists of the transliterated ‘NOISE’ word? Is it because I’m gay (and so is this friend who commented) and by being what we are, we are predisposed to liking ‘color’ful, festive things? Or is it because my real name, the God that I am named after, used to play pranks on the gopis during this festival? What is it that makes it necessary for a person like me to like festivals naturally? I don’t see any reason.

Of course, most festivals in India are commemorative of the victory of good over evil, or of gods over demons, or right over wrong. That IS such a noble cause. But that’s just about it. They have been shaped into something really more demonic than holy. Yes, in India, a festival means – loudspeakers and blaring music irrespective of the time of the day (or night) or the location (hospitals eg.), traffic jams due to processions, drunken people dancing to the latest blasphemous Bollywood tune being played on trucks carrying deities. Diwali adds to the mess with people getting the ‘license’ to cause mini-explosions which are harmful to the ears and minds of humans and animals alike.

‘Holi’ takes it to another level – invasion of personal privacy! People throw colors at each other in the form of powder or fluids without permission or provocation. Each and everyone is supposed to LIKE that and be happy at the end of it all. Hello? Have you heard of something called personal rights? Would you go up to someone and tell them ‘Hey, I thought it would be really cool to use your car as a graffiti canvas. Happy ‘Car Graffiti Day!’ So why are people doing this? If they want to celebrate among themselves, why don’t they stop bothering those people who are not interested in this?

For the last four years since I chose Mumbai as my home, I have been scared and intimidated by this holiday. I’m frightened to go out and be splattered with paint-balls. I don’t think that it’s right. I don’t think it is right for people to do whatever they want to with the excuse a ‘religious festival’. I’m sure there are many more people like me who are just shutting up because they think that it’s immoral to admit they don’t like festivals. Don’t do that. Speak up!