A Day in The Life Of

I’m going to keep a record of everything I do today, in sequence. Just to see where all the 2#@$^$^@$ time goes.

- Wake up (6:30 am)

- See text message from mom, “Wake up.”

- Send annoyed and testy reply, “I am up. Give me a break — missing the marathon wasn’t the end of the world.”

- Get reply, “Don’t react badly. I’m just telling you to wake up.”

- Put on laptop

- Turn on Last.fm radio

- Check Hotmail (no mail), Facebook (wall post from Anusha), this blog (comment from Nishita)

This is fun!

 - Open contract law assignment file, begin writing stupid answers to questions based on 19th-century English cases that are guaranteed to not repeat themselves this century.

- Check Facebook again (nothing new)

- Put on floaters and walk down to Gupta Stores for a packet of milk. It is chilly outside. I get a little conscious that my shorts are many years old, a little tight, and I’m not wearing underwear.

- I have post! A loyalty card from Big Apple, the best of all the bad new retail shops around.

- No sign of my fucking newspaper though (7:30 am)

- Eat a bowl of muesli in half a litre (the entire packet) of milk. No newspaper so I have to read my Sometimes Blogs while eating. Can’t simply eat and do nothing else at the same time– how boring.

- Mull over the fact that I didn’t clean my bathroom yesterday, thinking I’ll do it today. No time now — have to leave for class in one hour. (8:20 am)

- Go downstairs and retrieve my papers. Times of India and Economic Times. Turn off Last.fm and put on a Dream Theater album, Train of Thought.

- Read the first six pages of ToI while taking a shit.

- Brush my teeth, then stare at the mirror and obsess about whether or not to shave. Decide against it. (It really is a pain in the prick.)

- Spend ten minutes wondering whether or not to take a bath before class, seeing as I have only two (consecutive) hours of class today and going to class, coming back and cleaning my bathroom, and then bathing sounds like a plan.

- Go to class without bathing but wearing relatively clean tee and jocks that I wore for only a couple of hours last night. Have washed feet, underarms, and face, and wet hair and sprayed copious amounts of deo, so feel ok.

- Correctly answer what seems to me a straightforward question in Carriage Law class. The teacher is impressed (just how low are the standards at Law Fac?!). This teacher likes me, I can tell. I’ll cultivate the image, for recommendation letters later on.

- Spend Constitutional Law class wondering how I got this thorn in my right thumb; why it doesn’t hurt that I have a thorn in my right thumb; and thinking “I could teach this subject much better than this idiot lecturer.”

- Head to Stephen’s to get my floaters fixed. The cobbler (and his pal the tailor) are absconding and nowhere to be seen. I hop back on the bike and get the hell out of there.

- On the ride home, I ride at moderate speed (50/60 kmph) through a little stream on the road, coming from Metro construction works. Suddenly in front of me there is a dangerously large (and new, or else I’d know it was there) pothole in the road. I brake instinctively, which is always dangerous on a bike because the brakes lock much more easily than they do on a car. My rear brake locks and the wheel skids to the left– far more than it should. Evidently the water on the wheel affected it more than I thought.

- There is a moment of worry while the wheel is skidding left when the engine cuts out, and the pothole is coming ever closer. Luckily, I regain control, manage to start the engine again using the clutch and accelerator, and avoid the pothole.

- I feel stupid knowing that for a moment there I was riding skilfully but badly, and everyone else on the road knew it.

- On the rest of the way home the rear wheel seems to skid a lot and I worry obsessively because I am a bit of a Monica when it comes to my bike. I park at home and find nothing wrong with the tyre. It’s not even wet.

- Put on the laptop again, finish the entire packet of pistachios, drink almost all the Coke, eat chocolate (my dad was here on Saturday), and spend an hour reading The Compulsive Confessor (a very nice blog.) (Having, of course, first checked Hotmail and Facebook.)

- Wash hands and discover that the water will soon run out.

- Wonder whether to clean my goddamn bathroom or just chuck it, man….

- Remember about this post and update it from 8:20 until now (1:27 pm).

- Wonder whether to lie on my bed until lunch comes, do some work, or clean the bathroom. Decide to lie on the bed for a while, then clean the bathroom, then have a bath, then have lunch, then nap, then begin studying.

- Realise that this is how I have postponed studying for months on end.

- Lie down (for 5 minutes).

- Wake up an hour later and turn off the fan, piss, grumble that lunch hasn’t come, go back to bed.

- Turn on Dream Theater cd again and read the rest of ToI main paper while having tiffin lunch (2:50 pm)

- Read more of The Compulsive Confessor – a real good read.

- No water in the taps now (4 pm) so can’t clean bathroom. Sigh and open contract law assignment again.

 - Aneesh calls to say there’s lots of Placement Cell work to be done and he’s coming over soon. He lands up at 5:45.

- Head to the gym (7:45 pm). Today is my ‘chest’ day and I try my best to sculpt it (read: try valiantly but uselessly to reduce my man-boobs). Am pleased to find that I can now run 20 minutes on the treadmill barely breaking a sweat (compared to a few weeks ago, when I had to sit down immediately after finishing the run and drink copious amounts of H2O). Perhaps it’s the cold. Am asked for and give advice to a couple of juniors on technique, which pleases me. It’s astonishing the percentage of people in gyms who don’t know what they’re doing.

- Am the last person to leave the gym at 9 pm. Reach home and complete my cool down routine. Pop downstairs and ask the landlady’s maid if she’s turned on the motor this evening (there’s still no water in the taps). She totally checks out my arms and my temporary tattoo. Now I realise how girls know when guys are checking out their cleavage and not their face.

- Bathe with a bucket of stored water, and hop around like a fool throughout. The water’s chilly!

- Room neighbour shows up holding a glass of whisky and water as I’m applying moisturiser to… well, private areas. We have a reasonably interesting drinking session and enjoy my burgeoning collection of electronic dance music. Because I’m drinking, I get to smoke– which I’ve been dying to do all evening. DAMN! The urge to smoke is returning.

- Room neighbour leaves at 11. I write senti emails to a few friends (replies to their replies to the last senti email, which I sent them on Saturday night before sleeping and missing the marathon).

- The water’s back! Yay! I refill the blue bucket.

- Dinner. Dal, yummy. Plus it has protein. I’m a gym product after all, need my amino acids.

- I complete this post. Still to be done tonight: (1) Email a law firm on behalf of the placement cell (2) Email the rest of the placement cell (3) My contract law assignment (4) Applications for summer internships to law firms in London (5) Studies for December exams (6) My goddamn bathroom!

- I resolve that tomorrow morning the first thing I’ll do is clean that stupid bathroom and get it off my chest. (Manbreast?) Then I’ll send those emails.

- Debate whether to send my mother an email apologising for terse text message 16 hours earlier. Decide against it. She’ll call sooner or later.

- Plan to finish my DSP Black and Marlboro Light, then brush teeth and sleep. I’m neurotic about brushing teeth. Bit of a cleanliness freak actually, except that I’m usually quite dirty and so is my room.

Goodnight, world! (12:11 am)

Sigh

So if you’re wondering, I didn’t run the half marathon this morning.

Chandna was in town yesterday, and I spent a large portion of the day imbibing copious quantities of alcohol in an effort to empty Chandna’s bank account and get drunk along the way– something that finally happened only around 1 am, on a rooftop restaurant in Def Col where they very kindly didn’t throw us out exactly at midnight, when the place shut.

There was an accident on the Ring Road near the Red Fort on the way back (not involving me — a truck overturned) and by the time I retrieved my bike from the university metro station parking lot and got to my room, it was half past two. I set my alarm for 5:30, then ten minutes later changed it to 5 am. I spend a lot of time every morning sitting at my computer, sitting on my bed, staring into space, and basically doing nothing.

The next thing I knew, it was 7:25 am and I was still in bed. Now 7:30 would be considered a perfectly respectable time to awaken by millions of people around the world, but the marathon was starting in fifteen minutes. The earliest I could reach the venue was 8:45 (half an hour to get ready, half an hour to drive to the designated parking areas, and fifteen minutes to shuttle from there to the start line). Plus I was woozier than I expected from the previous night and from a conspicuous lack of water in my bloodstream.

I agonized for twenty minutes as to whether I should just go! or not, and by that time it was 8 am, and then it was really too late to go. The roads were held traffic-free only till 10:30, and I didn’t see myself running 21 km in an hour and a half.

Needless to say, I felt very bad that after months weeks days of anticipation, I didn’t run the thing– and for such a horrible reason. My parents were most unimpressed, heaping me with such lines as “Just shows your attitude”, “Your studies are probably the same way”, and “You have to pass all your papers this time around / you’ve had everything your way for far too long / we’ll come down on you like a ton of granite / etc etc.” Sometimes I wish they would just be supportive, and not echo my worst thoughts and feelings about myself.

I mean, what the fuck — I’m an adult. I decided only 4 days ago that I was going to run the thing after all. I slept late the previous day because Chandna was here from Norway, for heaven’s sake. So I put my friends before almost everything else, except my own happiness. I decided not to run it. Does that affect anyone else in the world?

But not that deep down, I agree wholeheartedly with my folks, and wish like hell I’d gone for it. I knew beforehand exactly the line my parents would take, and they took it. This was just another in a series of wasted opportunities.

Time to really get started on the portions for my December exams. Everything’s alright if you get good grades. Always.

Tee Hee

Check out this pic… hahahaha… I love it!

It’s my new facebook profile pic.

Edit: I’m getting high on 8 pm whisky and warm coke. I just read some of my archives and the comments there. A big thank you to Yohan for introducing me to blogging, and to Mandel’s Broth, Anusha, Ragu, Yohan, Nishita, Arindam, Vaibhav, N, T, Vachu, and all others who sometimes comment on my blog. And to all who slimily read but don’t comment. :D Happiness!

VDHM.Indiatimes.Com

This afternoon, I went for a totally useless meeting of SPIL (students for the promotion of international law: figure out the capitalization yourselves), where a bunch of self-effacing law students, all of whom were either younger or junior to me, spent an hour lecturing me on moot courts, internships, and other crap and how important such things are for my legal career. I could have said the same things in fifteen minutes. I dramatically sighed, tapped my feet, and stared at my watch at regular intervals, but no-one got the hint.

Having forsaken my boxed lunch for the greater good of being on time for the afternoon meeting (which, most interestingly, was held at the Freemason Society’s clubhouse on Janpath, but I couldn’t snoop around because I ended up being a bit late), I was feeling immoderately peckish and headed to the Janpath McDonald’s for lunch. It’s a sign of how much my appettite has decreased over the years that a Chicken McGrill and a Small Fries was able to satisfy me. Since I restarted gymming a couple of months ago, I’ve become quite health-conscious and try to avoid junk food, but I couldn’t resist the fries. I haven’t had them in months.

Anyhow, I had cunningly carried with me my Registration Confirmation Letter for the Vodafone Delhi Half Marathon, which I needed to exchange for my running bib (Haha! What a funny word!) and my ‘goody bag’ at the VDHM exhibition at the Ansal Plaza amphitheater. So I auto-ed it there and back, stopping only to flirt with a gaggle of girls in yellow tee shirts who almost convinced me to sign up for another indiatimes.com email id (adityaperakath1@indiatimes.com?) and to inventory the contents of this famed goody bag.

 Contents:

1 small packet of Quaker Oats (??)

1 small packet of Colgate Max Fresh Red toothpaste (wow)

3 sachets of Dove shampoo (they obviously haven’t seen my bald pate)

1 Harmony magazine bookmark (it’s an old-peoples’ mag)

1 Kingfisher squeezy water bottle (now we’re talking)

1 large Indiatimes.com wristband (I love wristbands!)

and a nice black draw-string backpack.

Not bad for a 200-buck registration fee.

Here’s the route:

I’m not sure if the fact that the route doubles back upon itself after 11 km will make it psychologically easier or harder to run.

The run begins at 7:45 on Sunday. Woo hoo! 

(To all wondering why I’m contemplating running 22 km: (1) I take solace in the fact that I must be fitter than the average douchebag on the road, what with all my gymming and basketball. Alcohol and smokes notwithstanding. (2) Aby did it, so can I. (3) Because it’s there.

That Brilliant Enclave on the West Coast

Snuck off to the Portuguese state for a long weekend, without telling the immediate ancestry. They’re usually cool with such things, but never enthusiastic about them. However I’ve just quit my after-class internship because I have so much to study for my exams, which begin on the 6th of December (and continue right until the 24th. Merry Christmas to you too!)

So how, then, did I have the time to waste getting wasted (and oh boy, that’s all I did there) on the Malabar?

Because while normally extremely stingy, I do believe there are things worth spending money on, and friends are one such. And what’s a few days of class lost– at least I’m spending it with people I love, instead of sleeping at home like I did all of last year!

And love them, I do. :) They’re all my juniors from college. I got to know them after circumstances that included a very messy breakup led to my finding a whole new group of friends in the middle of 3rd year. Then the next year I moved into a flat with 3 of them, and spent the whole year partying with all of them.

A selection of trip photos (there were a total of 288 photos clicked on Aby’s camera alone!) can be seen at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=10405&l=066cb&id=508832755

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=10406&l=64387&id=508832755

I got myself a temporary tattoo on Baga Beach. Actually, I was suckered into it by Shraddha and Oz, who wanted to see how good the tattoo artist was before committing. But I didn’t mind – I’ve always wanted a (real) tattoo, and I wanted to see whether it would show on my (dark) skin tone.

The guy turned out to be quite bad! And an annoyance, because midway through my tattoo painting, he stopped. We’d agreed on one of those designs that go all the way around your bicep and form a circle… you know, like all the porn stars have? But he said a full circle would be double rate. Ha! At least I got a free design on my arm.

Sorry about the terrible photo quality. Never buy a Nokia 6020 for its camera!

Oh — I rode a jetski and went parasailing! The jetski (technically ‘water scooter’, JetSki is a brand name — but I like it) is much more fun when the guy who comes along with you rides it– they’re far more skilled and can go much faster! Parasailing is when a boat pulls you along, and the wind lifts you up in your parachute. Not scary at all. Quite calming!

Annoying Room Neighbours, Part 2

How I wish I could throttle the pigeon family that lives in my bathroom ventilator hole (it’s too high up to qualify as a window.)

Why have all the bloggers died?

Dude

What the heck is this “I Can Has Cheezburger” crap??

Doubtless the stomping T Rex will trundle over to explain.

Everything Changes But You

Three nights of debauchery in a row. I do love being drunk!

Happily, I’ve managed to stay off cigarettes after returning to Delhi. I’ve been smoking only when I drink, not otherwise. Non-smokers might think ”big deal,” but it is actually a big deal. If I stop smoking regularly, I’ll save close to a thousand bucks a month. And I’ll save my lungs, arteries, and heart. I’m sure my bronchii got royally fucked by my recent chest infection, poor things.

If you pray, please include me and my non-smoking in your prayers tonight!

I wonder how many of my friends actually pray… these days I only pray when I’m sitting in an exam hall, having filled in my name and roll number on the answer booklet, and waiting for the question papers to be distributed.

Ever have so many thoughts fly through your head, so many reminders of things to do, with limited time to do them in, that you feel tense with worry?

Of course you have.

I don’t know how I manage to spend hours at a stretch at my computer and on the internet. What have I been doing??

I need to go to the gym today, or it’ll have been a full two weeks off and all my muscle will completely disappear. And there’s the threat of stretch marks. Yuck!

I’m dying to post on Zonuts, but it’ll have to wait until after the gym, I guess.

I have spent today recovering from last night.

I also spent an hour and some money (since when did 85 bucks become ‘nothing’ in my head?!) at the mechanics’, down the road. This guy is really good, and has been my buddy since a horrible episode in January when a ball bearing deep inside the engine cracked and my darling bike had to be almost completely dismantled to get to the affected bearing. Three thousand rupees, it cost me!! At that time I lived on the 2nd floor of the building at whose base the mechanics work, so I could look down at her and them. It really felt like a loved one was having a surgical operation done!

Anyway, today I stopped by to get them to fix my brake light switch. You know — when you apply the brakes the rear red lights brighten? There’s a cable running from the front brake lever assembly (on the right handlebar) to the electrical system which controls that. My cable was loose, despite having changed it just last month, so the brake light was glowing continuously, instead of only when the brake was pressed. Such things are not critical, but they annoy me.

The great mechanic superglued the cable fixture to the rest of the assembly. That should have done the job, but for some reason it didn’t. And now nothing could be done, because superglue is pretty darn strong! So I either had to cut the cable, and have no brake light at all, or I had to change the entire brake lever assembly. He told me it’d cost about 50 bucks for a new lever, assembly, and cable, which I thought was pretty cheap, so I told him to go ahead.

In essence, though, it was a waste of money. There’s no limit to the amount of money you can pour into your vehicle. You have to train yourself to do only the essential repairs. Most people, including the mechanic, wouldn’t spend money on something so menial as a brake light. The rear light glows when the headlights are on, so it’s not essential for the brake light to work. And anyway the foot brake lever’s connection to the brake light was working fine. But I feel safer knowing that the car behind me will know when I’m stopping. And it was annoying me! Aneesh says I treat my bike like a human being, which is quite true.

I met a lady in Vellore who has CA breast (breast cancer, but living among doctors one starts to speak like doctors), the poor thing. She’s 44 or so, and is the sister of a doctor who was 3 years junior to my parents in college, and now lives next door. She’s quite matter-of-fact and upbeat about it, and quite a sweet lady. Wanted to meet me, the son of her doctor (my dad’s a surgeon, not an oncologist, but he trained in breast cancer in England while my late grandmother was battling it). I found it quite strange that this lady’s husband didn’t travel down from Bangalore to be with her during her chemotherapy sessions. I don’t mean to judge — he probably has commitments, like looking after the kids — but wouldn’t you be with your wife during such an experience?

Delhi is getting chilly at night. Yay! I love the Delhi cold. You don’t sweat (a fabulous thing). It makes you think of winters in college, which were great fun. It makes you remember girlfriends in winter clothing, and the things you did to oppose the cold. It’s never soooo cold that it becomes seriously uncomfortable, like in England, where I had to cover my entire body in moisturiser immediately after bathing, before dressing, or I’d get chafed by my clothes!

Of course, it means taking a bath takes much longer — from 4 minutes in the shower in warm weather to 15 minutes per bucket of hot water (i.e. half an hour just to heat water when I’m planning to wash my hair!). I wish I had a geyser in my bathroom.

Quite a random post. But I’ve been feeling random the whole day. The title is a Take That song, which just popped into my head when I saw the ‘Title’ field.

Literary Critic

Being laid up with probably the worst chest infection I ever had, I don’t have much to do at home (as in, at home) except sleep the morning away (envy not – I don’t get sleep at night thanks to the coughing). Around lunchtime I watch a movie on a lovely 29″ TV that’s been installed in my room since I was last here. Cheers to the Village Person.

Today I watched the Michael Caine / Julie Walters film, Educating Rita. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a working-class hairdresser (Walters) who burns to acquire a real education in English literature, and a drunk professor of English (Caine) who tutors her.

(The rain in Spain falls gently on the plain.)

So towards the end of the film, Caine’s character makes a good point. He gives her some of his own poetry to read and analyse. She returns the next day, saying it’s terrific and he should never have stopped writing. He retorts by saying had he given her the same material to read at the beginning of the year, when she first joined him, she would have called it utter shit and tossed it across the room. She rebuts him, saying that at that time she couldn’t understand the allusions and the depth of his writing, and that’s why she would have done so. But now she can see that his writing is — (and she proceeds to heap literary praise on it.)

He replies that all that has changed since then and now is that she has learnt to recognise the hallmark of ‘literature.’

If you dwell on this for a while, as I did while brushing my teeth at 5 pm, you may come to the same question that I have. Namely–

Do I not like what is commonly considered literature because I do not, can not, understand it at my stage of experience and understanding? Or is it, in fact, utter tripe, and everyone who praises it is a pompous goofbag who is not exposed for what he is merely because there exist millions of similar pompous goofbags? 

This is actually true of my life. I read a lot (who doesn’t, eh?) but it’s mostly light stuff. Paperback, ‘airport’ novels. Thrillers. Asterix. Harry’s Potty. Harry’s Mad. (Has anyone read that? About a talking parrot?)

I have friends who read such literature as Conrad, and… oh, I can’t name any others. But literature. And philosophers. And have discussions on them.

In college, I used to snort and dismiss such people as PSEUDO. I still do, sometimes.

But sometimes I wonder whether if I really made an effort, studied it… would I like literature? Perhaps I’m not old enough yet. Or perhaps I will just never get around to reading any of it. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to. Perhaps the answer to my tooth-brushing dilemma is yes, to both!

PS I have read a couple of Conrad stories. I couldn’t finish Heart of Darkness. And I bleedin’ love the little Shakespeare I’ve read. What a stud.

PPS Here’s a link to some more Pondy photos.

Puducherry

The much-awaited road trip to the erstwhile Pondicherry finally happened!

I don’t feel like writing a “We went here, and then there, and then there” kind of post.

Pondy has quite a lot of things to do. With friends, one could easily spend more than three days there. The booze is not spectacularly cheap (a bottle of Bacardi is about 60 bucks cheaper than in Delhi) but the bars are (30 bucks a Bacardi Reserva shot? Great!) and you actually get this sort of alcohol, which is not available in Tamil Nadu. God only knows why Tamilians have to suffer through MGM Apple Vodka instead of being allowed to buy Smirnoff or even Romanov at a teka!

We drove quite a bit; it was nice to be mobile and not have to take public transportation. Pondy is terribly small, at least the tourist Pondy is. Gets over before you know it!

We stayed up one entire night drinking and talking and reminiscing. Nice. The next day I fell sick and haven’t recovered yet. Not so nice.

We took a lot of pictures on Varun’s digicam, which I will get transferred to my laptop this weekend when I stop over in Madras on my way back to Delhi again. I’ll then create my first photo album on Facebook, and link to it here!

How was your long weekend, all ye Indians?