what i'm reading

“…when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.

The delicate balance between these factors helps explain why, for instance, the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect. It may not seem as though she should. The architect would appear to be more skilled (as the word is usually defined) and better educated (again, as usually defined). But little girls don’t grow up dreaming of becoming prostitutes, so the supply of potential prostitutes is relatively small. Their skills, while not necessarily “specialized”, are practiced in a very specialized context. The job is unpleasant and forbidding in at least two significant ways: the likelihood of violence and the lost opportunity of having a stable family life. As for demand? Let’s just say that an architect is more likely to hire a prostitute than vice versa.”

excerpted from ‘Freakonomics’. read the book. and thank me.

till yesterday...

i didn't know that unexplainable exists - in the dictionary, that is.

in the middle of the night

i'm home. it's raining. got back from dinner/seven rounds of alcohol from j's place. the khamptis have the best cuisine in the world. thank god for the girlfriends of boyfriends.

almost killed myself on my way back home as i skidded over a rock. i'm glad i'm alive and i don't have to explain my accidental death to parents. drinking and driving is not safe practice. even with a helmet on. dear goddess, i'm grateful for my incredible luck and the wonderful girls around me.

goodnight godbless.

tu nahi koi aur sahi, koi aur nahi, koi aur sahi

i had applied for some funds to do a pilot project on community-based microhydel rural electrification.

the funders responded thus
"xxxxx has a preference for supporting social organisations that are controlled by the poor and marginalized themselves, although this does not exclude the possibility of extending support to intermediary NGOs. Our sectoral policy thrust are in the areas of Human Rights and Democratisation, Gender, Women and Development, HIV/AIDS, Financial services and Enterprise Development, Sustainable Production, Culture and Arts, ICT, Media and Knowledge Sharing. In India, Hivos concentrates its supports in a limited number of states, i.e., Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharastra, Jharkand and New Delhi. In Kerala and Madhya Pradesh, we have a limited presence.

You will understand from the above, that currently we have no mandate to extend support to any organisation in Arunachal. We apologise to you for not being able to honour your request."

onto other funders now.

crouching tiger and the many colours of the oriental movie

this film festival is on in town. i have been wanting to watch 'good cinema' and also introduce baby sister to 'good things', so i proposed that we catch some movies. she responded with enthusiasm and said that she'd like to see some good chinese flick.

so yesterday, we got ourselves tickets for 'red rose, white rose'. it was about the sexual morality and love-longings of one mr. bao, and as all art movies are wont to, it had a liberal dosage of naked bodies intertwined in love, lust, disgust etc.

during one particularly intense lovemaking scene, my sister leaned towards me and whispered, "actually, i had wanted to watch a martial arts movie."

when it rains

at 1:45 pm, i left the house - grateful that the sky was overcast and that the heat was damping down.

near the tomb of safdarjang, i ran into the rain-smell, and saw the road darkened with the wetness of a passing rain, and my heart gladdened.

as i entered the aurangzeb road, i got caught in a terrible shower. stopping under a tree was futile. so i rode on.

on the india-gate circle, my life was endangered by the raindrops that refused to let go of my glasses because of some laws of physics.

when i exited the circle and rode into the tilak marg, it was as if i had stepped out of the shower back into a warm room.

as i parked my bike at the patiala house parking, i realized that everyone else around me was as snug as a bug, and that they had no idea that it was raining elsewhere in their city. eyes gleaming with curiosity, some smiled in amusement and some, sheepishly at being caught staring. i smiled back in reply.

inside, when i reached the counter to get my birth-certificate legalized, the man manning the counter asked me in genuine bewilderment, "yeh arunachal kaun se state mein hai?"

i didn't have an answer to that.

mavtsa safna

hebrew for - the teaspoon situation.

an evolved state of such helpless laughter that even a teaspoon held up in front of one's face can reduce one to more teary-eyed guffaws.

waiter, can i have a teaspoon with my coffee please?

p.s. politics of grief

for us city-indians, human tragedy is an everyday occurence. they stare at us out of the sixth page of the newspapers, at the traffic lights, outside the movie halls, from the valley of narmada. everywhere. however, we preserve our sanity by walking past them, looking past them without acknowledging the humanity of the victims. unless, of course, there's a bomb blast in one of the cities that reminds us that the violence may lie much closer home than we imagine.

i'm pissed off that the people of the cities and the media are out in droves commiserating over this 'national tragedy' only because this time, the trajectory of loss ran through their homes.

without being disrespectful to the grief of those who have lost their dear ones, i confess i have no tears to shed over mumbai and srinagar. of course i am very very sorry for them. no one deserves this. not the ones who died, not the ones who are left behind. had the events touched my life more closely, i might have said different things. still.

i don't know what the politics of the blast is. fingers are already being pointed at kashmiri/islamic terrorists. maybe true. maybe the violence was as mindless as a boy going berserk with a gun at his school, or maybe it's a desperate attempt of someone pushed against the wall, left with no other means of protest.

whatever the rationale or lack of it, how was this tragedy worse than any other human tragedy elsewhere in the country? is it because this was not sanctioned by the state, unlike the killing of protestors in orissa? or maybe the bloodshed makes for better footage than villages and ways of life being annihilated inch by inch by a rising river? or because there actually wasn't any profit to be made out of it, as opposed to the suicides of farmers consuming pesticides bought with borrowed money? on the other hand, shutdown of mumbai means a financial loss running into crores.

i just don't know what to think and what to feel. i feel disloyal for not weeping the way i wept over the beslan tragedy or when the two towers fell. i feel like a bad person for wanting the news channels to move onto the next byte now. two days of the same old footage is enough. or perhaps too much tragedy makes you immune to grief.

or maybe, for better judgement, i just have to wait for it to happen to me.

the politics of protest

on a night in september 2004, i had watched the beslan tragedy unfold in my living room. i cried in front of the t.v. with the parents who wept as the tiny limp bodies of their dead children were brought out of the school building. i prayed with them that their children may live.

none of the black widows involved in the seige survived that day. shamil basayev, the alleged mastermind of that beslan tragedy was killed this monday.

yesterday, we woke up to a morning that pronounced that terror in india was alive and kicking. a colleague of my father lost half his family in the srinagar bomb blast. they were from kolkata. they had been on their way to amarnath as part of a series of pilgrimages. before that, they had stopped by at amritsar and vaishno devi.

in mumbai, an activist, among 140 others, lost his life in the bomb blasts on the local trains. he had been on his way to a village in madhya pradesh for an action-plan meeting of his organization.

delhi is on high alert today.

no doubt, sooner or later, the alleged masterminds of yesterday's bomb-blasts would be hunted down too. and justice would be delivered.

on the 9th of july, the prime minister categorically stated that the work on the sardar sarovar dam won't stop. of course, the shunglu committee found that the relief and rehabilitation work is completely upto the mark.

the narmada bachao aandolan is a non-violent movement.

no cause is worth innocent lives. violence has never begotten peace. but oftentimes i wonder if non-violence is all that it is cracked up to be.

be careful what you wish for, for your wish

came true.

so, i went to a opticals shop today because i needed plain glasses with anti-glares so that i could ride more safely at night. i tell you the kamikaze flies that hit you in the eye in the middle of the ring road traffic are deadlier than the idiot driver coming from the other side with his high beam on.

on a whim, i asked for an eye-test. first, the guy made me rest my face on a snazzy contraption - chin on the chin-rest, forehead on the forehead-rest. he adjusted a bunch of knobs and we were ready.

i peered into the eyepiece and saw a happy white picket fence making its way to a happy white cottage. not great art, but i was expecting to be bombarded with brilliant light - hi-tech stuff you know. so, of course i was glad to meet the picture instead. the optometrist kept varying the focus, and i obediently kept rattling away about the clarity of the image at different points. until he told me that i could shut up because the machine was programmed to read my vision and did not require my verbal assistance. ah well.

so, it's official. i'm astigmatic. and by four tomorrow, i'll actually have compound eyes.

being a chashmish has always been my dearly-cherished desire. technically, i should have been on top of the world today.

7th degree of separation...

is when your object of desire and you watch the same game of football at the same time, but you go to a sleep of defeat like a post-midnight cinderella after the magic is gone, while he smiles over the win and watches the sun set behind the pines.

france lost in the finals. portugal lost the 3rd place match.

my life is stuck in a half-time and my cup is half-empty.

friends - seasoning optional

another dilli haat meal with friend, another friend who is ex-boyfriend, and another friend who likes ex-boyfriend.

life is turning out to be a regular-young-incestuous-urban soap story with, momos on the side.

so...

it may be that le bleus played a decent game while portugal just played dead.

or may be after all, i am a witch.

matchmaker, matchmaker

much is being written about zizou's phoenix-like blaze of glory, especially after the day of the brasilian vex.

but that's not enough. will he take down scolari's goons tonight? will it be the night of le bleus? will i be a true witch?

i am a victim

of increased hair-growth on my legs.

hello? i am a mongoloid. i am supposed to be fuzzfree. but obviously, my hair follicles are as ignorant as the average brat falling off his average tricycle in the average delhi colony who wants to know how come a chingpong like me speaks such good hindi. in the past few years, not only have a million follicles debuted, the bitches are even growing coarser and longer and darker. do they even care that i would appreciate it if they rather migrated to the top of my head where i am facing serious scarcity?

in another seemingly unrelated happening, my father made a cruel observation the other day about my transmogrification into an average dilli-waala, and how he would like to rid the planet of all dilliwaalas.

click!! and it all fell into place. it's not my fault. nothing is my fault - not my rudeness, not my increasing hirsutism. it's delhi. and his taxi-waalas and autowaalas and his psychosis called traffic, and the creeps that lurk by his brown-pee-stained walls. delhi is like a vampire. he drinks the blood of his victims. the victims turn into vampires. and the cycle of aggression continues.

so, that explains the new follicles. delhi has turned me into a testosterone-poisoned alpha-female.

vishva-kulhad gyaan

how do you seduce miroslav, the german striker?



tell him you want to get klose.

fickleheartlessbiantheredonethat

i have been in delhi for more than a month now.

and i am not missing itanagar.

looney rooney

is the reason why i want portugal to lose.

i have always fancied myself as a witch. let's see if my wish comes true.

guilt

it’s been about 50 years since the instruments of the empire were dismantled. we ex-colonies are bumbling-stumbling to reclaim identities, realign our selves, figure out 101 ways of decolonization - to great tragicomic effect. still bleeding – but this time, with self-inflicted wounds, doing unto ourselves what the other did to us. but bleeding under your own sun on your own earth is not a bad deal, eh?

where are the powers that drove the age and ambition of imperialism? the man of the moment is the trigger-happy cowboy. but on the periphery of the present, the white man still trudges along with his burden of memories. every once in a while, he mumbles apologies for past trangressions – sometimes to the transgressed, sometimes to no one in particular. new victors and new victims – fresh blood spilt everywhere, but like an obsessive-compulsive, he feverishly worries the dried crust of blood under his fingernails that only he notices anymore.

and somewhere in this karmic wheel of guilt and penance, a woman of indigenous origins, wanting to understand ‘development’, is offered the opportunity to do so on a substantial scholarship so that she need not sell her soul to the world bank.

forgiveness is on its way, white man. plus, prayers for a 2010 world cup victory.

...i'm getting married!!

since my cousin has been formally spoken for as of thursday, i have leapt from peripheral vision right into the center of the family frying pan. ignored - my 1) lack of a boyfriend, 2) lack of a suitable match (no, doctors aren't marriage material), 3) lack of any immediate interest, 4) lack of career and 5) my take on arranged marriage.

so i've hammered out a compromise. i've set the wedding date. love match or arranged, it's going to be on the 12th of december, 2012.

gives me 5 years to look for love, failing which, family gets one year to look for a suitable boy.