Life, Laughter and Everything Else

Having temporarily being resettled in Houston, where pedestrian paths are either absent or empty enough to make you wonder why you are walking, I have had no choice but to hop on a car rental program. Interestingly, the program requires that the car be returned every month for a new one, a practise while seemingly troublesome, is a joy in experimentation, with every car bringing with her, her own unique character. Here are their stories... Mitsubishi Lancer The very first one. She eased me into the American life, their left handed habits and showed me the freedom of America's big highways. Rarely demanding and quietly efficient, I had no complaints, except one.  She came with a smell.  I tried what I could. Perfumes, air fresheners, all, but the smell wouldn't go. At first uncomfortable, I got used to it after a while, but every time one of my friends met her, they would ask, "Oh, whats that smell?" or "Waah! The smell still there?" and ...

Couple of days back, I was in the lift with a couple of friends, on our way to lunch. On reaching the ground floor, the doors opened and one of them remarked. "Have you ever tried to move something with your mind? Like you stared real hard at it and hoped it would move?" I had. So had the other guy. And perhaps so have everyone else.  Not that we knew that it would move.  But what if it did?

"Lettuce, tomatoes, onions and spinach", I pointed out to the lady wearing the apron behind the counter. She looked at me questioningly. "LET-USE, TOE-MAT-OH, OH-NION, SPEA-NATCH", I repeated with better enunciation. She looked back down at the the multiple compartments of colourful mix of vegetables, leaves and fruits and methodically grabbed some from each, while repeating the names of the ones she grabbed. "Let-us, Toe-mado, Ah-nion, Spee-Nuch", she clarified. I shrank a bit in embarrassment. With every passing day in the country, my belief that the English education that I received in a former British Colony, that set high and rarely achieved standards in English for its students, was of substandard quality, strengthens. In a well intentioned effort to assimilate, I have over the past couple of months tried to mimic the pronunciation of the Texans. "Howz'it goin man?" "Ye'no"   "Can I ha...

You walk into the hall. Inside, the sermon has started. The rows of dark brown wooden benches with a thick bible looking book tucked behind a craftily made shelf announces that you have entered a church. The moment you walk in, the pastor, dressed in a suit and standing on the elevated stage in front, points the crowd to turn to hymn 108. Everyone rises while you locate yourself strategically in the corner of the last row. The choir erupts in a christian like melody and you suspect if you have entered the wrong room. It was supposed to be middle eastern music. The crowd was primarily white, middle class and retired, accentuating your belief that you had arrived in a church. But there is no cross in front, nor a statue of Jesus, just rows of blocks of wood pressed against the wall like a incomprehensible, abstract contemporary art. The music is soothing, peaceful and when it ends, everyone takes their seat. The pastor then narrates something and the crowd chant a phrase in unison. You...

This is about a girl. The one who sat on the couch, lost in the digital world of her Mac. She caught my eye, partly because no one else did and partly because her black coat and scarf exuded a certain sense of style in contrast to the homeliness of the hostel. When Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment bored me, I stole the occasional glance at her, for nothing awakens the mind like physical beauty. She would still be intently staring at the screen, but that sight was enough, to satisfy and not to excite. Between then and the dinner, I only recall once when she sat the the table next to mine and munched through her lunch, though this time, at close proximity, I dared not turn my face in her direction and be caught stealing glances at her. "The chicken is too big for me." she stated, poking the roasted chicken thigh under the aluminium foil. I used the forceps to lift it and affirm her observation, though devoid of any solution, I helped myself to it. I grabbed a healthy...

The world we live in is not the most fertile of grounds for optimism. If the day to day problems were not bad enough, the media has done an excellent job at painting a picture of dystopia and then promoting the very practises of materialism and self-consciousness that has propelled our journey to it. Along the way, certain acts of unexpected generosity (and some 9gag videos) restores our faith in humanity, albeit temporarily, for for every good man, there are 9 idiots, and for every neurone joint we allocate in our brain for remembering the good stuff, we allocate 9 for the bad stuff.   And in the middle of all this, we go by our daily lives, where problems pile up one after the other and the end is as hard to see as someone looking contented on the MRT. We scroll through the list of holiday destinations we can go next to escape from the stale, unchanging present and we loathe every moment when we make our way back home from a refreshing holiday. Next thing to look for...

6 months of non-stop, arduous work. A total absence of any social life. Pressure to deliver results from the start. Weekends burned. As each sentence exited her one by one, I struggled to grasp with the fact that I had got myself into something I had always stood against. Like everyone else, I had wanted to do something I loved, but at the end of the day, work and fun were meant to be mutually exclusive. The purpose of work was to shift dependance away from one's parents to oneself, to be a accepted member of society and most importantly, to subsist. At the end of work, there had to be time for friends, family and Facebook. In the middle of this distress appeared another notion, the notion to be an expert, a professional in my field of work. This meant hard work, the 10 000 hour rule, end to unproductive times and perhaps even work life balance. Though something about this really appealed to me, the idea of simple being really good at what one does. Facebook, Youtube, week...