Sunday 22 March 2015

Happiness Is Underrated

  • Happiness is heading home after a year of staying away.
  • Happiness is a sinful cheesy pizza with Coca Cola.
  • Happiness is a "Pass" in an exam you knew you hadn't studied for.
  • Happiness is a clean pile of clothes.
  • Happiness is reading and rereading the scene with Professor Snape's "Always"
  • Happiness is walking to work and knowing you don't have to slog out an extra hour at the gym.
  • Happiness is the drunk time spent doing stupid sh*t with friends.
  • Happiness is mass bunking in college.
  • Happiness is mass bunking in office and going on a day's road trip.
  • Happiness is Agra ka petha.
  • Happiness is the warmth of the shining sun on a cold winter morning.
  • Happiness is watching an older couple hold hands and giggle together.
  • Happiness is watching teenagers do stupid stuff and realizing your own naivete at their age.
  • Happiness is food prepared by Mommy.
  • Happiness is watching your maid take charge of her life and educating her children.
  • Happiness is a day at work when the boss is on leave!
  • Happiness is watching the "uneducated" ground staff at work gleaming with pride at the prospect of signing their signature on the register on payday.
  • Happiness is samosas.
  • Happiness is when your brother has a larger collection of cosmetics than you and lets you borrow some!
  • Happiness is catching the local train on time. That 08:09 ladies' local is a must!
  • Happiness is a steaming mug of strong filter coffee and a book.
  • Happiness is when Lord Voldemort gets defeated.
  • Happiness is when my phone does that miraculous thing- it works.
  • Happiness is the satisfaction of having completed a book and not getting over it for a few days.
  • Happiness is shoes a closet full of shoes.
  • Happiness is largely superficial.
  • Happiness is when I am home alone!
  • Happiness is buying street children treats every once in a while.
  • Happiness is Coca Cola, Old Monk with a lemon wedge.
  • Happiness is a good run with the satisfaction that a large chocolate slab is definitely deserved.
  • True happiness is the state during childhood when you knew no hardships and lived a carefree life.
  • Happiness is a movie ticket for Rs.60.
  • Happiness is people sticking to feminism in its true form and not perceiving it to be man hating.
  • Happiness is equality in its true measure.
  • Happiness is getting your favourite songs on the radio one after the other.
  • Happiness is underrated.
Borrowed from A Borrowed Backpack:

1) Happiness is a break from cooking, when you cook for yourself three times a day.
2) Happiness is an awesome roommate.
3) Happiness is best-friend's wedding.
4) Happiness is just about manage to be served when the restaurant's kitchen is about to close.
5) Happiness is parents.
6) Happiness is siblings.
7) Happiness is food.
8) Happiness is the sound of rain-drops and a steaming mug of coffee/chai.
9) Happiness is 'salary/payment credited'.
10) Happiness is the pride in your teacher's eye, when you meet him/her after a decade.

Saturday 21 March 2015

Look Up- To Us

  • The rhythm of the local train, lulled me to blissful unawareness. I was half asleep when I heard loud squeals. As I came to, I noticed a child with her mother had boarded the train and were sitting right opposite me. As the child ripped open the packet of chips and stuffed her mouth with junk, she kept chattering. Once she was done, her dress, hands and mouth all messy, she folded up the empty packet, dusted herself clean and promptly deposited the piece of garbage into her mother's purse. There's hope afterall.
  • As I impatiently awaited my bus to show up at the bus stop, a long queue had snaked up to the end of nowhere. A bully next to me thought it of utmost importance to paint the concrete roads with his bright red beetle nut flavoured spit. Constantly, once, twice, thrice.. "Excuse me, why do you keep ruining our infrastructure? What pleasure do you derive from that?" I asked in Hindi. "How is it any of your business? How about you STFU and behave like a woman rather than questioning a man?" he responded in the most sexist, suggestive and offensive tone possible. All around, the young, the old and the middle aged gave him a piece of their mind, not raising their voice, letting their opinion out- ranging from cleanliness to respecting women to speaking respectfully to people to not ruining the country's image. There's hope afterall.
  • When I see women of all age groups being groped in crowded places and teased publicly, I feel sad that none of them are able to or even want to raise their voice against it. It fills me with pride when I see women standing up for themselves as soon as they have been humiliated by their attackers, not sparing a single thought to "What will people think of me if I create a scene despite the fact that I've been wronged?" There's hope afterall.
  • The week long apprehensions got the better of me. I couldn't think straight of what I was going to do, how I was going to bring up the subject and let it all out. I finally did it. I went up to my parents and said "I am joining kick boxing classes. It starts in two days." While my father gave me a "Good, it'll build your stamina!", my mother gave me a "Great! Good for your health and you learn some self defense. Have fun!" While I was left stunned at their response, my mind gave me a nudge toward There's hope afterall.
  • When my uncles and aunts, distant and close are all up in my business with questions ranging from "When are you getting married?", "Are your parents looking for someone?", "How many kids do you want?", When do you want to settle down?", my grandmother shushes them up with a "She can do whatever she wants, don't annoy her with marriage questions now. That is for her to decide!" There's hope afterall.
  • When I see the cleaning lady at my office everyday, toiling away so she can put her children through school, I feel proud. The feeling is inexplicable when at the end of every month, she comes to me with a shy smile and once I handover her pay cheque, her eyes shine at the prospect of signing her name on the register. There's hope afterall.
There's always hope- for a better life, for a better set of thoughts, for a better generation, for a better nation, for a better us, for a better person to look up to.

Sunday 15 March 2015

Together in Harmony, Maybe

Moving to a new city, starting a life on your own is fun, but hard. The only hope here is that you find tasks manageable than easy. Let's face it, if it is easy, it ain't right! When I found my house on Housing.com, having been raised in a chaotic environment, I found it to be eerily quiet. So, yours truly asked the kind (?) landlady for a roommate. I was hoping for a Monica, expecting a Rachel and was hoping against hope not to end up with a Joey!

The moment she walked in, tiny, petite, looking around curiously, my brain only produced a "Oh, shit, living with a stranger. Now what?"

Being the pessimistic cynic that I am, I noticed the cracks in this roommate-ship in the first few days. She had all the signs of my grandmother. Oh, the flooding memories of my childhood and teenage years! It all started when she opened her wardrobe door for the 16th time that hour, constantly rummaging for a pin or a comb or just to peer inside, I guess. It then extended to her taking her bucket out from under her bed, bathing and depositing the bucket back under her bed along with her toiletries. It then continued with her safely locking up her food in her cupboard and shrieking one day because the milk had spilled all over. All this alongside "Hey, could you please help me open this jar of jam?" to "Hey, could you please switch the gas stove on for me? I'm not able to do it." to "OH MY GOD! THAT DOG IS SO CLOSE TO US! HELP ME!" Need I say more?

Then again, it dawned on me- we are all here alone, trying to make the best of things because, let's face it, living alone is fun! Whether the nutty roommate is fun is a different question altogether.

It all started with me wishing her a highly enthusiastic "Happy Birthday!" Considering the high pitched tone was fooling no one and she had no plans on her birthday, I came back home from work with a hellish indulgence in the form of a dark chocolate pastry. Since I couldn't find birthday candles, I lit a matchstick as a makeshift candle and in the guffaws that followed, the matchstick burnt itself to the cake. This happened thrice. Once bitten, twice shy says who? Not bad for a anti-social creature (me, in case you were wondering) bonding with a fellow human being!

It only got better with me trying to burn the house down. I am not exaggerating. I had some left over Chinese food and we have a century-or-so-old microwave in the house that takes up to 30 minutes to boil a glass of water. So, I set the microwave for ten minutes to reheat my leftover Chinese in a plastic container and off I went to watch my TV show. The sound that startled me after five minutes was some loud clunking. When I went outside, I was shocked beyond wits to see the house filled with smoke, a deep burning smell in every nook and corner and the plastic container inside the microwave on fire. Literally on fire. As I yelled out to my roommate, I got no response, I switched off the microwave and poured water all over it. She walked down the stairs calling my name and asking me what happened. The mess, explaining and the stink was followed by about two hours of non-stop laughing, sitting outside the house for fresh air and finally closing the day with a round of drinks and a rerun of Horrible Bosses.

I am the stubborn, usually non-adjusting kind. The kind that stays in one corner of the room where people enjoy mingling around. I don't like meeting new people, I don't like socializing, I don't like being 'out there'. Then again, like I said, away from home we are all here trying to make this work, one way or the other. Maybe a good laugh and someone to laugh with makes it easier? Maybe people aren't so bad after all? I may not have a best friend forever, the ultimate roommate or friend turned to family, we do have good stories to tell. This is the one thing that keeps me going.

Just maybe, it is the company that matters. The power of being #together.

Wednesday 11 March 2015

Starting A New Life

Ever since the end of school,the one motive in life for me had been "to be on my own". No, I wasn't subject to tyranny at home, not at all! When eight years later the opportunity presented itself in the form of moving cities for a job opportunity, I jumped at the offer like the fox lunged at its sweet-looking-grapes on the tree!

Now, I have been moving since childhood considering my parents worked for the Government of India; so, in my head, having watched from the sidelines, looking at the way my parents handled everything with utmost efficiency, moving was easy! I was going to be proved wrong in so many different ways!

I moved to Bangalore from the hustle and bustle of Bombay. What I expected was a quaint little town, tucked away with amazing weather and fashionable tech-people-spotting everywhere. What I have realized since landing here is that Bangalore is not a quaint little town. On the other hand, it is a mega IT city which is bursting to its seams with all this overcrowding!

Who better to guide me in Bangalore as far as accommodation goes than Housing.com? Having scoured through a bunch of websites with no satisfactory results, yes, Facebook groups included, I landed on Housing.com and lo and behold, look at my options! The most positive side of things was that I could go through real estate listings that had been verified by the Housing.com team leaving me with just having to give a cursory glance at the property before shouting out a big yes!

I had an image of an evil landlord built in my head (I blame Bollywood movies)- you know, the ones that literally throw the tenants and their belongings out when they have defaulted in paying rent by a day. I was surprised to hear a decent, sweet sounding woman on the other end of the phone call. (So, Housing.com takes its verification seriously!) Lesson learned- don’t raise your kids on a diet of Bollywood movies.

Believe me when I say this, life is no F.R.I.E.N.D.S TV show when you live alone and start making friends in a new city. A Joey Tribbiani is not going to just move in next door and neither is your old school friend going to turn up and share a room with you. Real life is much more scary and plain and much less exciting. My bungalow is shared by four girls, yours truly included. We are indeed a motley crew! From the finicky, picky, petite girl from up North to the utterly messy, mature albeit fun girl from the East to a relatively regular girl from up North again to me- the girl who is always one step away from a disaster. Always. Lesson learned- don’t let your teenage self be fooled by watching American TV shows.

Living alone is not uber exciting or difficult. It is rather fun when you are expected to do all those things that you have only watched your family do from the sidelines. You discover yourself in ways you wouldn’t fathom while performing mundane tasks, you learn to take care of yourself and those around you, you learn to live and adjust with people who are so different from you that about 70% of the time, all you can think about is how nicely you’d prefer smacking them! But then all is good when chilled bottles of beer are clinked and worries are drowned away in the blissful fizz!

Thank you Housing.com, you helped me move one step closer to my dream! True story.

Let's watch you #StartANewLife

Still not convinced? Watch this:


 PS: Hey, Housing.com, I take my referral fees in cash only :D