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Murali : Coffee ??? Manasa : mmm… not now Murali : OK … maybe by 4.30 Manasa : OK …  Murali @ 4.30 : Coffee Manasa : mmm…coming Murali : Hey...take the stairs … OK Manasa : No way … I will take the elevator. Murali and Manasa worked on the same team and shared the same cab everyday to work.  Long hours of commute and a sedentary desk job was taking a toll on their health like scores of so many other young people. As a part of new year resolution Murali and Manasa incorporated a few fitness goals. To keep a friendly check on each other’s exercise regimes and calorie  intake was a part of their agreement.       As young fresh graduates who migrated to the big city for a job, Murali and Manasa  lived carefree lives as singletons, working hard and then partying hard along with their co-workers.   While Manasa shared an apartment with three other girls, Murali lived in another apartment...

UNUSUAL OCCUPATIONS – The Pilot   From my very early exposure to mills and boons days, I believed that   nurses always fell in love with doctors,   simple girls were swept off their feet by the stinking rich businessmen and the Air hostesses married the Pilots and lived happily ever after. I took to Mills and boons in my early teens, but much earlier than that, when I was a little girl, we had a neighbor called Kashyap aunty. At home we called her the boff-cut aunty, but never mentioned that in public.   Boff-cut aunty had short hair that barely fell upto her shoulders and was always neatly brushed. For a girl with two pigtails plaited and doubled up with ribbons, Kashyap aunty's hair style was the last word on fashion. Actually it was not  just her hair style,  It was Kashyap aunty’s cherry red lipstick shade that made her a fashion icon in the eyes of me and my sister. Between the two of us, she was referred as the lipstick a...

Those were the most exciting of days, those were the most boring of days.   Doordarshan was synonymous with television as was Akashwani with Radio. Remote control was still a luxury and multiple channels were unheard of except from those who knew and spoke about the amazing technological advancements that happened in of U S of A. Those were the days when news readers enjoyed celebrity status and every girl or boy blessed with a good diction, prepared and read out the abridged version of newspaper headlines in the school assembly and secretly aspired to be a Rini Simon, Neethi Ravindran or Tejinder Singh. Never mind if Doordarshan’s news telecast was meant for the propoganda of the then ruling party, a mouthpiece for talking about government schemes that never yielded results. Most of the  inconsequential and stale news that made it to the television was primarily controlled by the state. Things have not changed much 20-25 years hence. Except that news is more...

Having watched Radhika Apte at a Girish Karnad play 'Une Purey Shahar Ek' at Rangashankara a couple of weeks ago, I am in awe of her.  There was something about her acting, that makes you take note of her. She is an actress to watch out for.  It takes much more of spontaneity to perform on stage that over the reels. When I was still lingering in awe of her looks and her acting skills, here I was, stumbling upon another short film where she was starring again. This is a  short film by Anurag Kashyap, that I came across a few days after I wrote this post .  Radhika Apte has the power to speak with her eyes.  That Girl-next-door looks also enhances her near to perfection portrayal of a lower middle class urban woman that she has played so well in this short film.  There is  not a dialogue she speaks in the first 5-10 minutes of this short film.  It is her eyes that speak a thousand lines. Brillian...

                                       The maddening traffic, Non-sense chatter over the FM...  Non-stop deluge of emails… Endless meetings… Mindless presentations … Meaningless social networking … Die-hard liars … Desperate but illegitimate lovers … Suicidal co-worker … Stressed out super mom … Senseless client calls … Soul stinking ass lickers … Sweat shops and slave drivers … There was only so much I could take during the course of a day at work. Mentally exhausted, I decided to call it a day. Little did I realize, all day I had left my mobile phone in the car. 38 missed calls in a span of 10 minutes … god … I wondered what was going on … How can I be so forgetful? My bad, I should not be so careless...  I dialled my sister’s mobile n...

A few years ago, I was flying Air-India and my co-passenger was a 72 year old retired Doctor from Chicago. He was visiting Ahmedabad where his ancestors came from and his relatives still lived there. He had emigrated from India in the late 60’s.   We boarded the flight at Heathrow for Mumbai.  It would be about 8 hours of journey time. I had the aisle seat and he had the window. We wanted it the other way round. Both of us sought the air hostess’s intervention for a problem that we could have solved mutually. She solved it for us with a very sweet smile. Anyway, that is how we got talking. He waxed eloquent about America. From what he knew, it was the land of milk and honey , of opportunities and freedom.  Europe was old, crowded, steeped in orthodoxy. Worse was India. It was corrupt, dirty and full of mosquitoes. I do not know why, but he was repeatedly agonizing about the mosquitoes that would swarm us when we land at the Mumbai airport. But he was...

This Diwali I am dreading the onslaught of sweets from the friendly neighours and not so distant friends, colleagues, vendors and aspiring vendors :(   I am a Social sweeter ( I know this word is not yet part of oxford English dictionary like 'tweeter' and 'unfriend', but what the heck, there is a first time for everything, including the coining of this word.)  Let me explain and clarify what and who of a Social Sweeter .  A Social drinker as you know is someone   who 'drinks' ( alcoholic drinks)  because he does not want to be a spoil sport and joins in a gang of drinkers for the sake of acceptance. He drinks out of peer pressure or because it is considered cool to drink. He secretly wonders why people make such a big fuss out of that horribly bitter beer or scotch, but does not quite think it necessary to voice his opinion.  Somewhere deep down he is secretly ashamed of his traditional and conservative ...