We Discovered Later That Night…

That really taught us to check the price of chips before buying them! And also to wait for the bill to be made, for the price breakup, rather than assuming it’s all good and handing over whatever the meat-and-foreign-produce shopkeeper demands.

Overly pecuniary I’ve been called, but who would’ve thunk: 275 rupees* for a packet of chips? Who fucking eats these things?? (Other than suckers like us!)

 

** Usual price: 10 – 20 rupees

Desi Chapatti

This is a first-person view video of some dude crossing a road in Hyderabad.

I haven’t used these abbreviations in yeeaars, but LMFAO,D!

(If by chance you haven’t ever been to India, this video isn’t faked in any way.)

Trichol Equinox

I’ve long fantasized about having hair of equal thickness on the upper and lower portions of my skullface.

Another 3-6 days, I think!

I’m growing fond of this baby beard, even if it stubbornly refuses to show up in self-portraits thanks to male pattern baldness on my upper cheeks. It means less face to rub moisturiser on. The added weight of the hair stems pulls my facial skin down and thus reduces the bags under my eyes. When I’m bored I lick the ends of my moustache.

And most of all, it’s another excuse to spend minutes on end gazing in the mirror from various angles!

Worrying About Worrying is a Sign of Genius (and a Great Sex Drive)

You know, I think I might have a problem. And I think it may be much deeper than I imagined.

No, I’m not talking about alcohol again– I’m actually writing this sober, whee, and all I have to show for it is a throbbing headache and my yearly quota of meditation squeezed into 15 minutes beginning at 3 in the morning.

I could be wrong. All this self-diagnostics could be some subconscious effort to Spice Up My Life. Oh, the lazy fart imagines himself to be a tortured soul in search of relief. Tragedy has an appeal all its own. This is a very real worry in my little self-obsessed world (it’s called PerakathLand, don’t you know?)– that I make up my own problems because On Some Level I like the drama to continue. I think that would qualify as a fundamental flaw in this piece, you know, In My Image Creations?

For all you (and I) know, I’m actually perfectly normal, and I come up with all this shit just for the sake of Saale B. Lord knows I spend half my life thinking of new blog posts.

I’ll investigate this when I go home for my (final!) Christmas break. Better set a reminder on my (new!) phone to come back and read this post.

In the most unflippant and yet non – attention-seeking way that something as public as a blog post can be, I think I’m one of the least motivated people I’ve ever met.

 

(Look: I can’t even quit smoking– I merely justify it by calling it the hardest thing in the world.) (That was for me to re-read on Boxing Day– don’t want to be forgetting points now, do we?)

Yeesh, now I’m worrying whether this post comes across as a self-obsessed worrier’s. I’d better parenthesize the title.

Danny

Today’s Delhi Times carried a Page 3 feature on a party thrown by Rohit Bal (Guddu, they call him) to celebrate the end of the 3-day Chivas Fashion Tour, whatever the hell that was. (Whatever it was, it managed to once again spit in Health Minister Ramadoss’s face and get away with surrogate liquor advertising, and for that I salute it.)

I actually read these Page 3 stories. They have their own lingo: “Cocktails and snacks made the rounds at this fashionable do. A fun time was had by all.” Of course, I then scan the accompanying pictures for as much skin show as I can find.

Paragraph 3, completely irrelevantly-titled “ANY NEWS?”, featured some fucker called Ocean. Seashell boy “got a lot of attention for his newspaper-print jacket. When we asked him about his fashion statement, he said, ‘I am very fashion conscious and always try to experiment with my style of dressing.’”

Who the fuck is called Ocean?

Here, let me show you a pic:

(Photo by Ranjit Kumar for the Times of India, from the ToI epaper– wow, the first photo credit on SB.)

Ocean is on the left.

Who the fuck is this guy? Why is he called Ocean? Is that what his friends store him as on their cellphones? Why was he at that party? Why were any of those people? Why are they in the paper? Why aren’t I?

A girl once told me about this guy in her office who was hitting on her. “He thinks he’s the cat’s whiskers,” she said. “He says he slept with Nina Manuel.”

‘Wow’, I couldn’t help thinking. That does make him pretty cool in my book. If I’d slept with Nina Manuel, I’d be pretty proud of myself too.

I’ve been reading the Delhi Times since I first came to Delhi for my undergraduate admissions interview in June 2002. It was my first exposure to tabloid skinshows, and I was hooked. In first year I would cut out pics of all the models (Jesse Randhawa was my favourite) and make collages on black paper posters. I stuck four of these collages up on my walls, and not a senior came in to rag me who didn’t comment on them. They were a pretty good substitute for porn in those computer-less days, I must say. (I saved the collages when I moved rooms in second year, but I never put them up again. Eventually I trashed them.)

But these days I don’t really read DT for the titillation. Mostly I read it because I’m done with the main paper, or because I need something that I can quickly finish over a five-minute shit. Sometimes I just read it because it’s there.

It often gets me thinking. I know there’s this whole other life going on, in this same city where I get road rage and suffer through exams. Parties, nightclubs, sex among beautiful, rich people. What sort of conversations do they have at these parties, mingling with their Chivas and Cosmos? How much sex do they get with Delhi’s finest specimens (male and female)? What cars do they drive, how much money do they have, how awesome does spending it feel? Are they smarter than me? (I doubt it.) But they’ve done more right with themselves than I have, haven’t they? Why are these particular people in the paper, and not others? Is it something worth striving for?

Should I be a simple man, content to be just another lawyer among millions, not a very good one at that (let’s be honest here), bald father to a mediocre son/daughter, loving husband to a sexually-sated wife? (There are some things I’m alright at.)

Or should I burn with desire to be the best I can be, work like a dog bullock* towards being a man of repute, so that ‘Perakath’ becomes a household name, and my peers can say they went to college with me?

I think if it were going to happen, it would have happened by now, right?

And what of Ocean? Fuck, his name bugs me. Ocean. His face bugs me. His jacket bugs me. His chick bugs me.

… His success bugs me.

 

 

 

* When did you ever see a dog work?**
** Other than blind dogs and those rum-toting mountain rescuers?

Scales of Justice

On the plus side, I haven’t had a drop of alcohol since… last Saturday, which is quite something for me. My Old Monk bottle and Tiger beers finished, and despite driving past the tekas every so often, I haven’t replaced them.

On the other hand, I have fingers (haha). And I’ve studied not a word today.

Time for desperate measures. Tomorrow I hit the library. This is torturous, because everyone in there mugs for hours on end without ever taking a fag break, and I can’t last more than an hour at a time. And also because the last time I studied in the library, I could go home when it shut at 7 to a flat full of raucous 20-year-olds. These days I can come home to a large empty room.

But I think my laptop and broadband connection are the reason for my distraction, and our library doesn’t have wi-fi. (I could just turn off the computer, you say?)

Shirtless = Good

It’s been a while since I haven’t felt like a fraud when thinking of myself as still being a drummer, but it’s true: I am usually the first person in a room to take his top shirt off. (I call my [sports] uppers ‘[basketball] tops’, but apparently only women’s clothes are called that.) This isn’t only because I think my body is better than my fashion sense, either.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2008/nov/19/school-of-ruck-drum-solos (link via Han)

The writer’s music taste is so poor as to not mention Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy in the “lead drums” section, but still.

The population has revolted, and forced a rollback of Perakath Savings Time, by the way. I don’t blame them. I’ve struggled and tried, but I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the concept of daylight savings. It seems like a truly stupid idea, and from what I’ve read not everyone out there thinks it makes sense, either, so don’t call me a bhehnchod.

It rained last night, and it’s a glorious morning here. Cheer up!

The Defender of Lucknow

Sometimes it feels like my entire life is about Outram Lines, Gupta Stores, and driving/accidents/parking in Delhi.

My landlord has bought a new car. It’s a red Maruti A-Star, the brand-new (like, released today) competitor to the Hyundai i10 and Chevrolet Spark.

This is fabulous news, because it now brings 1945 Outram Lines on par with 1946– both houses have 5 cars each, between the various landlords and tenants. Each house has parking space for only 4, and in our case only 3, because one of the car spaces is filled with motorbikes and scooters (including mine, of course). 1942, a little up the road, has 5 too, but then they own 1948 as well, and that gives them an additional 3 spots. The other houses have between 2 and 4 cars each.

If you’ll do the admittedly complicated maths, you’ll see that we’re all now 3 parking spaces short. (We’ve been managing by double-parking and stealing the two vacant spots from 1948.)

I’d like you all to pray for my sanity over the next six months that I plan to live here (yes, I plan to blurt blog through 2009 as well), and also that the landlord sells one of his older cars.

There is, as ever, a simple solution. If everyone agreed to angle-park instead of parallel-park, we could fit all the cars in, just about. Alternatively, 1944 next door used to park one of their cars inside their gate, leaving a spot free in front of their house. Seeing as there was an empty spot in front of 1944, and being new to the parking customs in the city, I used to park there. That was completely unacceptable to them, of course (God forbid an empty space is used!) and since then they’ve been parking both cars outside just to spite me, and prevent me from using “their” place. If they reverted to parking one inside…

You don’t know how often I’ve wanted to scream, “Public road! Public road!! I can park anywhere I like!”

But then this is Delhi, where people routinely get shot or thrashed over parking disputes. I doubt very much our local police would agree with my ‘public road’ argument either. They’re only policemen, after all– can’t expect them to know the law, can we? I’m going to keep my South Indian mouth shut (.com) and live to park another day, far away from this Derbyshire relic.

WTF? Wednesdays

http://kidsinsandbox.net

NSFW = Not Suitable For Work! (or minors)

Really, Really Good

The show has its drawbacks. The characters aren’t always consistent, and, like the basketball angle, are brought in and thrown out to suit the requirements of the storyline, which in turn moves ever so slowly. There’s a little too much gyaan in every episode. The music angle tries to ape The OC, and doesn’t quite get there. The product placement is sometimes unbelievably glaring.

But the school shooting episode was near-flawless.

Click it to big it!

(I’m not a complete perv; I was searching for Nethra Raghuraman because she popped up in a friend’s Facebook album in a most unexpected place. Imagine Mika Hakkinen at your college graduation.)