Sympathy for the devil

I went through another one of those 10-ways-to-improve-your-habits web-page today. It's amazing how cheap advices can get. As children, you got it from every other grown up whose midriff you had just bumped into, and they performed it with quite an amount of dutiful alacrity too... To hold you in her/his lap and shower you with tips on a wide variety of topics ranging from how to keep your bookshelf clean to stop peeing in your knickers. And If I had known the fact there wont be any distinguishable fall in the rate of advices I get as a grown-up nowadays per week, contrary to my belief, I'd have quit growing up right then. They come in every form and every color every hour. From the good-will-forward-mail I was talking about at the start of this paragraph to stupid video jockeys trying to fake some alien creature incapable of uttering normal human parlance.

The best thing about those advices is, they are never timed properly. They never appeal to your senses when they should. I did not have to ransack my grey cells trying to understand why "cigarette smoking is injurious to health" when I was a kid. And now, after all these years, it is quite plain why romancing my classmate secretly while in 3rd standard wasn't such a bright idea. The very fact that something should be the way it should be, says that it isn't. Period. Simple. If everything was, what a dull place this would be? That's my advocacy towards the little vices and sins of life. I am not quite sure the hell, as they has been tempting the human race with for ages where you get dirt cheap wine and unbounded sex(without having to worry for AIDS) exists anymore. That's my excuse.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Many many happy returns of the day? Maybe not!

Thus, Bejoy Babu enters into the thirtieth year of his  great struggle for existence against the elements of this planet last week. Like his very first year, he did it again in a hospital room. Talk about the ironies of life. Back then, he had a young and energetic father, who had sat hours on end admiring the red little thingy in a white wrapper (am hoping he did, most newly promoted fathers do, don't they? At least Ross Gellar of Friends did when Ben was born!). And now, 29 years later, his father was lying down weak, with tubes attached to his body, while he sat hours on end looking at him. Not admiring, but worried when his father will become alright, he will be able to go back, whether his leaves would affect his job, how the great plans of a first birthday together with his wife was spoilt etc etc. Oh 'cmon, there's no use being pretentious about it. Nobody enjoys this particular disposition. He didn't do it either, and he managed to kill time with 2 activities. 1
Read more

Puttum Kadalayum

"Puttum Kadalayum" doesn't really sound like something big enough to hinge one's career decisions upon. But it is. It was meant to be nothing more than a casual remark when Ch asked me yesterday, "Bangalore-ilo Pune -ilo poyal pinne puttum kadalem evidunnu kazhikkum??" But I know it, and he knows it too, that the Qn was a fatal setback to my plans to switch the current job for a better(?) one. I was crouching low down, ready to lift myself off, but this very innocuous sounding Qn made me sit back, and rethink. So what is it about Puttum Kadalayum? Apart from being my favourite breakfast...(I am no glutton, but this combo, with pappadam as the kinky sidekick, brings me to my knees, literally.) it represents everything good about working in TVM. There is a certain noisy chord inside me which is still chanting I should run to a metro. The fatter paychecks, the late-night discos, the cosmopolitan crowd, the rock concerts... hmm. Have you ever stuck yourself into
Read more

The price of development

Image
There used to be a strecth of road on my way to work, which had an enormous(by Trivandrum standards) paddy field on one side. From the Terrace of Bhavani, it looked beautiful, the light green patch among the otherwise darker green canopy. And it was green all year round. I don't know what was peculiar about that particular crop, for I have seen such paddy fields change color with seasons. In the evenings the place would be swarming with small flying insects, which hit our faces like missiles when we rode through the stretch. On friday nights, while returning from the routine carouse sessions, we used to stop by the place, releive ourselves, talk and watch the stars, before getting convinced ourselves that the ground is not moving beneath our feet, and the bed back home would be a much cozier place to spend the night. The whole place is red now. No, paddy fields can't change color. But the land is getting filled. We can see Tipper lorries bearing "Emergency: Technopark work
Read more