Life, Laughter and Everything Else

Disclaimer : I have never been in a relationship before, so there is a pretty good chance that once you have read the post below, you will come to the conclusion I have no bloody idea what I am talking about, in which case, I honestly couldn't give a fuck. "She was the artsy kind. Very quiet. She liked to go to museums and read. She asked me if I read. Lols!" Lols? Before whatsapp, facebook, TV and whatnot, we all kind of used to do that, though it seems that it has fallen out of fashion with the majority, unless it was Harry Potter (which I have no issues with), Twilight (which I have issues with) or 50 Shades of Grey (which proves I am the one with issues). When reading fell out so fashion, so did readers, like her, with whom he fell he had little in common with. To use the more romanticist term, there was no 'compatibility'.  What was this thing with this type of compatibility, when a potential partner had to be interested and doing the same things...

It was a sight to behold. One of the most respected and acclaimed actors in India cinema having a meltdown on national television. I stood transfixed on the spot as he railed against the host, his show and the media for sensationalising the issue and driving partisan politics. Once he had vented his anger, there was quiet. Arnab knew he had won. This was what his show was about and the ratings would go through the roof. All he had to do was stay calm, stay firm and so effortlessly use the outburst of the senile old man as irrational and worse, unpatriotic, in a time of fervent patriotism. I was angered, because he had won yet again, to the delight of my father who never failed to catch the show first thing in the morning before he left for work. It was called a debate, but it was anything but a civilised debate. It was geared towards invoking passion, creating divide, making the panelists lose their temper (and meltdown) and it was all too brilliantly conducted by Arnab with his cons...

 Twenty one percent. A dismal figure. Assuming, usually correctly, that the bulk of the respondents thought too highly of themselves, chances are that the actual figure was even lower than that. Nevertheless, to think that this was the marriageable acceptance rating for Indians among the majority Chinese population, the figure was damning in the options that I had considered myself to have. Of late, in the conversations with friends, more often that not the question is posed to me if I am open to the option of marrying someone from outside my race. I have to simply state 'friends' for with close friends, its not a question, but an accusation that I have always preferred Chinese girls. I do very candidly admit my guilt to that charge, though in my defence, that was primarily due to one factor; availability. I have to go back to Primary School to last find an Indian girl who studied in the same class as me.  It was my sisters who would give me a lesson in the book o...

I believe it was George W. Bush (of all people), who once said, that an accountability system without a consequence is not an accountability system. Not that I would profess to be a fan of his, but as Trump replied on when asked if he wanted to be associated with a fascist because he quoted Mussolini, 'No I do not want to be associated with Mussolini but I wanted to be associated with interesting quotes". Though before I get off topic as I regularly do of late, I felt it was worth sharing a type of technique that I had tried out to achieve a couple of my long due goals and maybe explore the psychology behind why it worked. I cannot recall how the idea came into my mind (perhaps during one of the long wannabe-meditative walks that ends up with a well crafted story of how I was actually a secret superhero about to wreak vengeance on all the bad guys in the world). The method was simple. Get a group of friends and every friend in the group had to set a goal, that was to be appr...

Sundays are when it makes its appearance, for weekdays are taken up by work and weekends by matters out of work that could not be done on the weekday. What triggers it I cannot pin point. Perhaps its the large swathes of idle time on a Sunday afternoon, or the lack of any human presence in close proximity, or just being at home in my room all quiet, all alone or my refusal to excite my senses with music, videos or any other form of novelty. I wish I could describe it, but you have to feel it to best know it. It is like a void inside, as if something big that had lodged in your heart for the rest of the week decided to suddenly get up and leave. It is overwhelming but not to the point of breakdown. It fills me with gloom but not without reason. Insecurities rear up their ugly head from moment to moment. Where am I heading in life? Where are the so called friends that I was surrounded by? Am I getting too comfortable with life? Isn't that a bad thing?  I reach for my phone. ...

"Morvillil Valsakumar Unnikrishnan." To say it was a mouthful, like a foot long subway sandwich, was an understatement. Just like the sandwich, you had to chew through the sparsely filled outer crust, in this case my family and my father, before you got to me, little boy Krishnan, the literal translation of the name. It was my grandmother's idea, the little boy, and my parents always swore off any involvement in its creation, a crafty move considering the creator no longer existed to give me an explanation. Not that it mattered then. In India, I was the 2nd Unnikrishnan in the class and the 3rd Unnikrishnan in the neighbourhood, living in a society devoid of imagination and filled with grandmothers who could not bear to see their grandsons grow up. The first signs of trouble arose when all packed up and ready to move to a new country that I had earlier great difficulty finding on the map, I ran out of boxes to write my full name on the immigration card.  He...

The first guy handled the machine, which was one of those bulky yet somewhat cool contraptions you saw cleaners in shopping centres use to sweep and mop the floor. He held the two handles by the side while it rotated in small circular motions on the marble floor without stop, making it a shade shinier with each rotation. The second guy, well, he held the door open while the first one completed the task, which was interesting because I had before seen lift doors held open by slotting a thick folded paper strategically between the doors. But for some reason, that did not seem applicable for this lift. Then there was the last guy, obviously the supervisor, given his skin tone was a lot lighter than the other two, who kept barking out instructions. Three guys, just to polish a marble floor about 2 metres by 2 metres. This was the sight that greeted me when I came back home after a year long stay in the US, which involved a project to do more work with less people ie productivity improvem...