sutta na mila…

for all you smokers that are getting fucked by the smoking ban in public places all over India…

bhen chod…ma chod…sutta na mila..

Mumbai perfumes our stinking mountains of trash…a nation trapped in the anal phase…

I don’t know what to say! The adage “don’t shit where you eat” doesn’t seem to impress our govt. Nope. They just spray their own shit with cologne and keep on munching. Talk about a nation stuck in the anal phase! We’re so delighted with our economic development that we happily throw shit out of the window, knowing that some poor naked human at the bottom of the rubbish heap will find a use for our grotty old toothbrush not to mention our used tampons. That’s some disgusting trickle-down. No one feels the least bit of shame for leaving traces of their waste about like a snail trail. People spit on the walls, shit on the street, blow snot into the bushes. At least this stuff washes eventually down the drain. But what disturbs me is how this idea of “outside” the home is seen as one gigantic rubbish bin, while inside the home people fastidiously take off their shoes and take great care not to trash things.

But its typical of the Indian psyche to have a total lack of civic concern. People worry about their own family and what happens in their living vicinity. What happens down the road matters only in so far as it is something new to talk about. This is how it is possible for crowds of people to hang about with their hands in their pockets while watching someone being stabbed or raped. Once the corpse is dragged away by the police they will whip out a can of air freshener while a sweeper is called over to wipe up the “mess” of blood and ooze left behind. People simply do not grow up with a sense of accountability for shared spaces. Its every man for himself.

And our waste habits seem to exhibit some almost primitive urge to mark territory and assert dominance using our fecal waste mixed in with our other more high tech refuse. Of course we leave our tom cat piss in the areas where we can- in the places where only the weakest of the human pack reside…and if any of them came to shit on our doorstep we’d lock them up or worse?

No of course not. We’d just spray them with perfume and send them on their way.

Authorities in Mumbai have begun spraying the city’s two biggest rubbish dumps with perfume to lessen the increasingly foul smell. “We’ve had lots of infant death and there is a high incidence of respiratory infections,” said Dr Rane.

India has found itself ill-equipped to deal with the mountains of plastic bags, electronic waste and even food that have found their way into the nation’s rubbish bins as a result of two decades of economic growth.

In Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, the population produces close to 8,500 metric tonnes of rubbish a day, most of which makes its way to the two sites.

“Being a largely rural economy most of our waste used to be bio-degradable,” said Prashant Pastore, an expert on waste management at Toxics Link, an environmental advocacy organisation based in New Delhi.

“The problem is our consumption habits have changed but our dumping habits have not.”

story from thenational

120 Days of Boredom…

WEll ROTD is officially, mind-numbingly, batter my head against a brick wall bored…and don’t go giving me that “only boring people get bored crap” because from the minute before and after I’m in this insipid landscape the world is a kaleidoscopic tunnel of brilliant insanity…

such is office life. So here’s a random list of things to do if you’re in need of some distraction from the insufferable torture of having nothing to do and still being confined to the inside of a hellish box of capitalist tedium…the best options I could find while attempting to browse my boredom away…

Bored things to do list…best options off the web (hey I’m bored…too bored to come up with stuff myself)

1. Stack items in cabinets so that they fall out on people when opened.
2. Move specific items to specific places everyday. (I.e. move the boss’ favorite pen from his desk to the floor every day if asked about it blame it on ghosts.)
3. See how many bathrooms you can defile in one day.
4. Make blow darts out of the plastic tips of your shoelaces a straight pin and a Bic pen.
5. Search e-Bay for illegal substances
6.Work on coming up with really good scams or practical jokes.
7. Go through people’s desks to see if you can find liquor in any of them. (drink what you find)
8. Digitally edit photos of monkeys to hold knives/swords
9. Create a fictional background of said photos including names and upbringings of said monkeys.
10. Create large scale fantastic delusions of grandeur.
11. Check for porn in the internet cache of people who leave their systems logged in.
12. Take revenge against people who you don’t like. For instance, tape an anchovy (or bombay duck) under their desk. Their office will smell like ass.
13.Try to make the longest paperclip chain, or largest rubber band ball.
14. Put a bootable Linux CD in your boss’ drive and watch him freak out the next morning.
15. Leave random voicemails for random people.
16.Come up with a plan of world domination.
17. Shoot down your own plans of world domination.
18. Try to find someplace where you can take a nap
19. Stick a thumb tack into the eraser on a pencil stand it on your desk, attempt to shoot rubber bands off of the ceiling and down around the pencil.
20. Super glue random objects together, use your imagination.
21. Change the speed dial on other peoples phones
22. Think about how fucked up you are going to get tonight.
23.Write a ridiculously long list of things to do while bored at work and post it online.
24. take an inane online quiz
25. Plan an ideal suicide.
26. blog.

from ubersite.com

Desi Aunty Pissing…and Simi Garewal still makes me want to barf…

ok. all I want to know is this…why are so many people who land on my site searching the web for “Desi Pissing Aunties”. This phrase has come up hundreds of times as the search engine terms that led people here…I suspect the “Agony Aunty” section is what lures them…

image from link

now I’m not moralizing or anything…but I don’t get the whole “pee on me” fetish…but hey…to each his or her own…and I can certainly think of a few guys who wouldn’t exactly stop Angelina Jolie from taking on a leak on them if she asked them nicely…..and I think its cute that some guys have a thing for the desperate housewife “MILF” sort of thing but Indian aunties don’t exactly look like Bree or Gabrielle from “Desperate Housewives”…they look like Simi Garewal…and if there’s one thing that makes me want to vomit into my bowl of cornflakes…its the idea of Simi Garewal naked and peeing on anyone whomsoever….

if anyone can explain this strange cyber quest for “Desi Pissing Aunties” I would be most grateful. And in the mean time here’s a cringeworthy clip of Simi Garewal topless in the tastelessly pretentious 1972 flick “Siddhartha” where Shashi Kapoor seduces her by pointing at birds, praying to her, and pretending to french kiss her while striking temple sculpture poses as they attempt to disguise a very badly made soft porn sequence as some kind of aesthetic tribute to India’s “Rich” erotic cultural history….the only thing “rich” or “historical” about the clip is Simi Garewaal, who has managed to evolve from a dim witted Bollywood tartlet into an aging Anglophile troll, who insists on wearing white, singing her own talk show theme tune, and thinks that just because she has “propah” English diction and got some major personalities to shed tears on her show, they’ll forget she let Shashi Kapoor see her tits on camera. Now if he had PEED on her…perhaps we could have been spared the abomination that was her candles-and-flowers tribute to classist circle jerking….

I’ve been meaning to put these clips up for a while….so get out your barf bags…

Simi Garewal and Shashi Kapoor in 1972 “Siddartha”

Simi Garewal Singing her theme song to Rendezvous with Simi Garewal. “Speak to me so I can see (EAT) your Soul”

Minimal Techno and Sexual Tourists

Banana Brothers 2, Watercolour by Dileep Sharma

So I went to the closing party for an art exhibit in Bombay that was curated by a close friend of mine. The paintings had all been moved to the interior of a swanky night club, and the lighting was perfect…tables of stone floating between miniature rivers filled with rose petals…all the bohemians were out…flashing their butch hair cuts, their tribal hand bags, their 70’s beards, and the cameras flashed on cheshire-cat grins of hopeful artists and their cutting edge productions….in one painting there were some startling giant bananas painted with tiny dancing disembodied female legs….this was my favorite. It was priced way over my head but at least I got the brochure with mini photos inside. So all is going perfectly….wine is flowing….and so is the rather expensive beer…and its the right moment to grab someone who is a worse dancer than I am…and use them as a disguise while I jump around like a woman posessed…..hmmmm…..only one problem…..some idiotic fucker from France has been hired to play some gormet music….

it basically sounded like computers having surrepetitious abortions…only really really loudly. I said to the guy next to me…”how the hell am I supposed to dance to this music.” He raised an eyebrow. “Well its “minimal techno” darling” he tells me. I look at another Frenchman that seems like a nice guy. He’s absorbed by the sounds of the clunk clunk beep. I feel I must be getting old if this is really supposed to be the new “music.” Whatever. Enough beer and the computers sound like they are commiting suicide….another beer and I really don’t care…..me and my friends have resolved to jump up and down on the spot and another friend has gotten so drunk that he’s convinced he’s a Bolshevik and has been invented some kind of obsolete russian folk dance and is scaring all the nearby women away by clapping his hands at them and going “ahhhh”

I grab a gay friend of mine and twirl him around….all is well….all is good vibes….except….out of the corner of my eye I spy a little sleeeeaze…..He looks kind of like a wolf….only I actually like werewolves and this guy looks like the kind of werewolf that doesn’t want to bite anyone…he wants to hump everyone..more like a weasel……..his poofy 80’s haircut is bobbing up and down….I can’t tell if he is European or American…whoever he is…..he is looking around with an expression that worries me….because somehow the sound of computers having abortions has made him want to breed….

The evening draws to a close and I am, luckily not introduced to him….

The next day, bleary-eyed and hidden behind my shades I go to say goodbye to a friend who is leaving town…the one who curated the exhibit…Suddenly the weasel arrives… I am introduced to him…the weasel says in a swaggering voice “I never forget a pretty face.” I cross my fingers and display my wedding ring to its best advantage while he continues to ask me questions in that “DO YOU FANCY ME? WANNA FUCK?” sort of voice….ugh…soon he is asking me where to get a nice massage….I answer politely…but soon I gather that it isn’t “THAT KIND” of massage he is looking for. He is also considering visiting the Osho Ashram and has even called them up to enquire after their “orgies.” They told him they couldn’t promise anything. The evening progresses….he lingers in our little group….I am getting unnerved….I try not to be rude….he seems like he must be a kid….just out of his BA probably…. first time in India? ….yes…try to be nice to the little turd….. after a number of uncomfortable exchanges that are really too pathetic to mention, he caps off the evening by leaning over to my husband and asking him if “YOU HAVE ANY WOMEN FOR ME?”

He leaves, finally…..after trying to seduce me, enquire after orgies with Osho and places to get “massage” and of course inviting my husband to pimp some women for him. And the whole thing just left me with this irritated feeling that I had when I was in London studying and ran into some Indian lads, fresh off the boat for their degrees “abraaad”.

Anyway I know its completely typical but I find it really disgusting when horny little boys go travelling to foreign countries and treat all the native women like a garden of all-you-can-eat “I love you long time” desperate deep-throating tarts…

During my first week in London my husband (then fiance) had taken me to some university pot luck where he came accross another Punju who leaned over slyly, oggling all the white chicks, and spat “oye…gori patayi?” And when white boys come looking for a piece of ass in India they have the same expression. Testosterone poisoning turns boys into semen zombies…..I mean, what the hell is wrong with these guys? If they can’t get laid in their own countries (East and West) why do they think the female species is suddenly going to part their legs in a foreign country?

In the end, the fantasy of the exotic foreign punani is not what it appears to be. These guys aren’t really looking for women…they are trying desperately to reimagine themselves as potent sexual beings, which they obviously are not in their own countries. They are trying, in the sleaziest way possible, to “find” themselves, that is- to create a myth of debauchery and “hard core” experience for themselves. The real problem for these insects is that in their own countries there is social accountability, which, for all our post-feminist rhetoric, means that yes— there are men who will find it uncool in your own community if you start treating their women friends, sisters, girlfriends like sidewalk hookers. But hey— in other countries, among other ethnicities and even classes….women are fair game…this kind of attitude belies the fact that these are the kinds of men who respect women only through virtue of the fact that they are property of/ or protected by male social codes that deny random jerks access to them. In their own country a male gaze follows them, a gaze that censures, a gaze they accept as legitimate prohibition, a gaze that they imagine will not follow them to foreign locales.

THe moment they arrive in a foreign country their eyes grow wide and hungry….centuries of “rape and pillage” programing stirs in their cosmopolitan DNA….They go out and have brief, unsatisfying sexual encounters with women who they often do not even like very much….still…they have to….so that they can have that brief, even more satisfying, post-coital ciggarette and make a phone call “back home” to report….”hey bro……I just screwed a russian…” This is the moment where the hunt becomes worth while….where the young tribesman reports back to just one or two members of his clan that yes, he, has tasted the forbidden fruit, has marked himself a real man, and will safely be able to reconcile himself years later to a life of unhappy sexless marriage with the knowlege that one day, while sipping his scotch whisky, he might reminisce with his geriatric comrades about a foolhardy youth full of booze, prostitues, and minimal techno.

Here’s some minimal techno for ya. If you like it you are a sad little monkey. Ok it might sound good if Yoko ono were using it for some avante garde art installation involving albino bats and hanging forks but in a night club…its absurd. Besides if the French like it…well…you know the French… 🙂

Barso Re… Rain Rain go Away…one last rain dance with Aishwarya.

image from ladygator.com
well as the last trickle of rains falls down in Bombay, we are enjoying the annoying house guests of the season; mosquitos. Some people are coming down with Dengue fever…or “Dengu” as our cook back home likes to call it. I guess too much of a good thing can get a bit pissing off. Having missed out on the Bombay rains for two years I was completely taken in with the sound of the tides of water falling off the window shutters in this lumbering old house of ours. I would sit back and play classical music and get all misty-eyed and write bad poetry. But rain is, I guess, a lot like a favorite house guest. When they first arrive you can’t get enough of them. But after a while their irritating habits start getting to you…with rain…I guess its that contrary to what water should bring to mind…it brings forth tides of filth. Instead of wiping things clean it makes the sewers overflow and when you’re walking in the street your toenails get filled with the grime of mud mixed together in all probability with spit and piss and what have you….In most homes in the city water becomes a scarcity, a rare commodity and a thing to bicker about. So most showers I’ve been taking have been under a very narrow trickle of luke warm water, which just about manages to saturate my hair for long enough so that it gets out the shampoo. In the unlucky parts of the city, it makes it impossible for people living in slums to get clean drinking water and everyone comes down with serious illnesses. The humidity makes people more prone to skin infections and mold grows on all leather and organic materials overnight. Generally everyone comes down with disgusting flu viruses and then passes them around so that every other person is shivering through fever sweats and developing whooping cough. But it should be over soon.

Looking back at the soul-scorching summer heat that inspired some of my former posts on welcome monsoons, I thought I’d put up one last “Rain Dance” song, if for no other reason than just to annoy myself, watching Aishwarya Rai pretend to be an innocent village belle, gyrating her hips on a rural rock and singing “rain rain clouds clouds” with her irritatingly adorable expressions. She kind of reminds me of the “world’s cutest kitten”, Nermal, that Garfield is always trying to do away with…maybe its her great big eyes…or maybe its her fluffy tail…or maybe its that, like Nermal, I’d like to chain her to a scratching post, rub her belly and feed her sewer rats…anyway…here’s “Barso Re” from “Guru”.

The Worst Desi Pick up Line does One more Round…

So I’m walking to work today from the train station and it starts to rain. Of course I forgot my umbrella. So I put one hand over my eyes so that my mascara wont come dripping down my cheeks like Courtney Love. I’m walking along, by the side of the highway, muttering “whatever” to the raindrops accepting the fact that I’m going to look like Swamp Thing by the time I get to the office. Suddenly the raindrops stop. “Huh?” I look up and there’s an umbrella covering me. Apparently chivalry is not dead; this knight in shining armour, clean shaven with a gleaming smile in a clean tucked in white shirt has suddenly covered me with his big umbrella. I’m like “uh…hey, thanks”. I eye him suspiciously but he looks like a nice “up-standing” member of society. And it really was pouring down. I kept my distance but truthfully, when a guy does something old fashioned like offer you his umbrella during a rain storm, you almost want to believe there’s no hidden agenda. He’s being polite. Keeping a formal distance and I’m thinking to myself “maybe he’s not a complete creep.” In any case the rain is likely to stop any second. And its possible he’s just being a good Samaritan. I shouldn’t tell him to bugger off just yet.

So I quicken my pace and attempt to ignore him- but he’s not giving up- and he’s yammering on like a nervous kid, talking about his sister who’s in advertising and how he’s a manager for a telephone sales company and how he’s also an event manager and he’s just bumbling on an on, chasing me with this massive umbrella. Then with a sudden grin he extends his right hand in an attempt to shake mine and says the fateful words I have heard so many many many times before,“So? Can I make a FRIENDSHIP with you?” Ugh. I do not shake his hand. Goodness only knows what he’s been doing with it. This guy wants to make something and its definitely not a “friendship.” I mutter impatiently, “uh…” and I show him my wedding finger, “I’m married.” He’s asks “to who?” to which I rather sardonically retort, “to my husband.” And get this- he says with vocal inflection, “WHERE” is “HE?” I raise an eyebrow, thinking to myself “Nice one. Serves you right for hitching a ride under some random umbrella. Now ditch this guy before he tries to convince you to check into a sleazy motel on the pretext of introducing you to his “other sister,” the one who does circus tricks naked.

For a moment there I thought that I was experiencing some anachronistic gallantry. But I have to hand it to the guy; it took guts to use a line that’s been used more often than a shanghai masseuse- and using an umbrella as a prop. Nice touch. And you know, I have nothing against creativity. There’s a whole artform attached to good pick up lines. How about my classic favorite, “If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?” The ever tasteful, “Baby if you were a booger I’d have picked you first,” and “Fuck me if I’m wrong, but haven’t we met before?” I think I’d actually pay for some guy’s drink just to listen to a string of these classics. But if I hear the “be my friend?” line one more time…I’m going to…well, there’s no doubting I’m going to hear it again. Old is gold. And so is the creepy technique of disguising a come-on in a chivalrous gesture with pretences at brotherly sentiment.

He can tell I’m trying to get away from him so he says he only asked me to be his “friend” because he could be in some way “useful” in managing some kind of random P.R. event for me or something. He’s really casting about in desperation at this point, looking for something clever to say, having realized his “be my friend” line has failed. A light bulb flashes above his head. A stroke of genius. “Are you on orkut?” he asks me, with a worryingly excitable gleam in his eye, “ You can make lots of FRIENDS there.” The rain has stopped and his unfoldable umbrella wilts back to its usual size. I am beginning to walk away. He whines suddenly, “But don’t you want to make a friendship?” I’m feeling kind of sorry for him actually. “No.” I half smile, “ But thanks for the umbrella.” I walk off making a mental note to buy a new umbrella and possibly a rain jacket with the words “I’m not on orkut and I don’t want to be your friend.” printed on it.

Can I make friendship to u?

So ummm…of the many holidays that seem to creep up and sort of poke me on the side of the head, “Friendship Day” day (first Sunday of every August) is among them, and quite happily, I didn’t receive a single happy friendship day wish- which means two things 1) I have no creepy male friends on the internet who “want to make freeeendship” to me….

and 2) my friends know if they sent me one of these “our friendship is like box of chocolates” cards I’d probably vomit on it and send it back to them with the words added to the card saying “yeah. and these were the chocolates.”

But hey I guess it would probably be a really GOOD day to dump your boyfriend/girlfriend or file for divorce with flowers and a nice card. I leave you with Cake’s song “friend is a four letter word” a good soundtrack to another holiday designed and manufactured by greeting card and cell phone companies to earn money and clutter our lives with sentimental exctreta.

Babies are Evil

image from funnyjunk

Please tell me why does no one seem to notice this fact? They come out of a person’s stomach for god sakes! Two other things do that: 1)vomit 2) feces. They are little flesh monsters covered in slime that obviously have powers of mind control- hence all adults look at these tiny slobber demons and coo at them as if they are looking at a cute fuzzy kitten. But kittens are very different from babies. Kittens are fluffy and make cute mewing noises when they are sad and grow quickly into adult cats and then they clean up their own mess, are capable of foraging for food by themselves and do not require huge amounts of money to be spent on their college educations, weddings, divorces, and funerals. What people fail to seem to remember is that babies are babies for only a few years and then they become just as repulsive as the rest of the human race. Babies are just small adults who are plotting…waiting…waiting…biding their time till they can get their hands on a nice pick axe. Which makes them even more eerie…because they are unmanifested evil…evil in poopy diapers…and they wait and watch…

Evil Stewie…the baby from the Family Guy plotting his escape from the womb:

Evil Stewie plots revenge:

Some gratuitous dead baby jokes. (warning: in very poor taste):

Q: What is brown and keeps it’s juices in?
A: A baby in an oven bag.

Q: What is black, white, and red all over?
A: A zombie baby eating a nun.

Q: What is blue and knocks on glass?
A: A baby in a fishtank.

Q: How many dead babies does it take to make a bottle of baby oil?
A: It depends on how hard you squeeze them.

Q: What’s funnier than a dead baby?
A: A dead baby in a clown costume!

Q: How many babies does it take to paint a house?
A: Depends how hard you throw them.

Q: What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs hanging on your wall?
A: Art.

Q: What’s red, sits in the front of mirror, and gets smaller and smaller?
A: A baby combing it’s hair with a potato peeler.

Q: Why is it so groovy to be a test tube baby?
A: Because you get a womb with a view.

Q: How many dead babies does it take to change a light bulb?
A: As many as it takes to make a pile high enough to reach the light bulb with.

Q: How do you stop a baby from looking up at you with that cute little baby face and gurgling happily with that little baby mouth and waving at you with those little baby fingers and little baby toes?
A: Gouge its eyes out.

Q: What is worse than smoking pot with a baby?
A: Making a bong out of it.

Q: What is the difference between a dead baby and an onion.
A: You don’t cry when you chop up a dead baby.

Q: What do you get when you put a dead baby in a blender?
A: Hold on. I’ll tell you in a second.

jokes from jokehell

listen carefully to this brainwashed mother as she coos at this baby who laughs like satan. Can she NOT hear the dark lord within!?

lol. baby suit.

Blackle…Making Google the Man in Black…

Did you know that you can browse google without wasting as much energy and at the same time have a classy google web page that makes you feel sort of like an ecofriendly vampire?

Well you can. Just click blackle.com or earthle.com to check it out. And, incidentally, read why ROTD’s colour codes are also ecofriendly…

Some history on blackle.com from treehugger.com:

A few months ago, TreeHugger Mark Ontkush wrote a post on his blog EcoIron “titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year.” The post lays out the following train of thought. “An all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts.” Google, which has a white background and gets about “200 million queries a day” could reduce global energy use by 750 Megawatt-hours a year by simply changing the color of its homepage to black.

In response to this post a black version of Google emerged called Blackle.com. According to Blackle’s homepage at publication time, 4,408.917 Watt hours have been saved by. The site encourages users to “make a difference today [by] … Blackling “energy saving tips” or visit[ing] treehugger.com a great blog dedicated to environmental awareness.” Nice ideas. But how does the search measure up? Very well indeed. Give it a whirl yourself and start saving energy one search at a time. :: Blackle.com

Here’s the original Mark Ontkush post from ecoiron.com :

As noted, an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts. I thought I would do a little math and see what could be saved by moving a high volume site to the black format.

Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let’s assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the monitors in the world are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that’s $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes.

I admit that I chose dark colours for ROTD because I felt like it and not because I knew it was ecofriendly but I suppose its nice to discover you’re an accidental environmentalist in some minute way…I could use a little good karma. And on that note……I leave you with the immortal words of that Southern bard…Johny Cash on why its more ethical to wear black.
I give you “The Man in Black”:

which makes one wonder…on the subject of colour coding…if black is the colour of “good” environmentalism then I suppose white becomes “evil” extravagance…but that is so boring. Couldn’t we nominate a more interesting colour for evil? How about pink?


image from hyaena.com

I hate Mondays

Gutting through the last of one of those annoying Mondays? I am, anyway. Working towards a deadline and suddenly am very tired and with the rest of the week’s tasks ahead the finish line seems even further away. The weekend just seemed to slip through my fingers this time around, and I’m tired and cranky but still doing what needs to be done. Looked up Monday hatred on the net and found out that there’s a study that suggests a way to improve your crappy Mondays is to NOT sleep in on Saturday and Sunday. Apparently it screws up your body clock. RIIIIGHHT. Isn’t that just perfect. So you can either improve Mondays by not staying up late on weekends and sleeping in and enjoying a nice long dreamy sleep…or you can have nice weekends and have an awful start to the week. I’m still taking the latter. Studies like these are conducted by boring people to convince their friends that being boring is cool. I’m sticking with sleep deprivation and Monday angst. Hey- at least I have the weekend to look forward to. Here’s a cheesy little number by the Bangles about Monday hatred. Enjoy:

Manic Monday:

here’s that Monday scientific study thingy…

Scientists have discovered a cure for the dreaded Monday morning blues – stop sleeping in on weekends.A new study has found that lazy Saturday and Sunday lie-ins can disturb your body clock, leaving you fatigued at the start of the week.Flinders University sleep expert Leon Lack said people often used the weekend to catch up on sleep lost during the week.But he told the Australasian Sleep Association Conference in Perth that while this might help pay off a “sleep debt”, it came at a cost.

“We’ve discovered that these sleep-ins are actually putting your body out of whack enough to change your Sunday night bedtime and set you up for Monday blues,” Professor Lack told AAP.

His research team tested the theory by tracking 16 people over a weekend, asking them to go to bed a little later than they would on a weeknight but sleeping-in an extra two hours.By comparing saliva samples and hormone tests he found participants’ body clocks had been delayed by 45 minutes.”That might not sound like a lot but it means that you’re not quite as sleepy on Sunday night at the normal bedtime and you’ll be much sleepier the next day,” Prof Lack said.Questionnaires completed on Monday and Tuesday showed much higher levels of self-reported fatigue and tiredness compared with pre sleep in days.This was because the subjects’ circadian rhythms – which determine patterns of alertness and tiredness – had been disturbed, creating an effect similar to jet lag.By mid-week most people manage to get back on track but then they start staying up later, getting into “debt” once again and perpetuating the cycle.

“These days, we’re pushing ourselves a lot, particularly during the week and the weekend is our only refuge,” Prof Lack said.The problem, he says, is that this comes at a price.”It’s a bit like paying off a mortgage – you take out a big one and you’ll have a lot to pay off later on.”

from the age

yeah. whatever. anyway…

Desi Monkeys inspire Parkour; a sport that rages against the walls

image from grooveking

Hanuman is the guy you ask for help when you need to get out of an impossible situation. He’s an ideas man/monkey and he knows the fastest way between two points often involves a bit of swinging from branches and scaling up buildings. “What idiot invented stairs anyway?” he says, “ Must have been a bureaucrat.” Hanuman has always been one of my favorite Gods. He occupies the liminal space between man and monkey, and as such, manages to solve problems without many of the constraints that human’s face. He is innovative (can’t find the right herb to save Laxman’s life? Why not bring him the whole mountain), mischievous (set my tail on fire? I’ll set your city on fire suckers), and the best of friends (sure I’ll fly over and find your woman, calm her down and tell her you’re coming to get her). So it isn’t all that surprising to discover that he’s the one (or rather his descendants) who inspired David Belle, an French guy “finding himself” in India, to invent a revolutionary sport called parkour.

image from here

Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path—a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs. (I found a lot of references from the Great Ganesha. So check his site to read more)

It’s becoming a huge fad sport internationally, and has the appeal of being something that anyone, of any economic class can practice, given some patience and a good set of running shoes. A number of Indian kids are putting up clips on youtube and though some of their moves are a bit basic, they require a lot of strength to do and its cool that they’re starting out. A Desi Parkour group called “Team Mutants” has actually begun to master some more difficult moves and is worth checking out.

You can use trees, buildings, shopping mall interiors; basically any space you can get away with transforming into a gymnastic jungle. It appeals to me for reasons that and have to do with a crazy taxi cab driver I once knew in Pennsylvania, named Jimmy. Jimmy was actually a bit of a loon but like most loons he actually spoke a fair bit of sense if you could interpret his metaphors. He had become obsessed with traffic signals, signs, painted zebra crossings and codes of traffic conduct. He would say to me “You see that? See that? Its all about staying in the lines! The lines, man!” And for him, every u-turn, every highway, every instance on the road was a metaphor for how “the man” controls your movements through space.

image from road rage

Years later, standing in line at a multiplex cinema in Mumbai, I lean against a rail while waiting for a movie to start. A security guard swiftly approaches me waggling his finger “no. you aren’t allowed to lean on rails surrounding trees.” So I look for another perch; perhaps the cement space between two shop display windows. He chases me again “nope. Not allowed to lean there either.” Eventually I get so tired that I find a spot out of the way and squat on my haunches, like a good fisher-woman. “Nope!” comes the waggling finger. “You aren’t allowed to squat like a fisher-woman in upper middle class zones.” Hmmm…

Suddenly I’m feeling a bit less relaxed and a little more hostile towards the cinema. I pay good money to come to see a movie and yet not only do they expect my cash, fail to provide me with a place to sit and wait, but also hire this guy to chase me around in case I should happen to lean against their precious cement walls or rails. I feel kind of bad for the guard, in any case. It’s a job for him. And I can’t blame him for working for “the man.” I work for “the man” as well. And he must have to deal with a lot of irritated people every day, who always take out their anger on the messenger of the law.

But I digress. So I find something really appealing about the idea of a bunch of kids getting together to just jump over railings, do somersaults off of cement walls and scale multiplexes…because they can and because they’re fast enough to get away with it. It’s a sort of spatial revolt against the bureaucrat. It’s the body claiming space for itself and resisting becoming square shaped, like the little cement boxes that house us. Me likes.

Here’s an inspiring video of David Belle, the inventor of Parkour. He knows no gravity.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with David Belle-talking about monkey inspiration. The rest is here.

I asked David why he had gone to India, and he said that he had friends there.
“How did you pass the time?”
“I just kept training,” he said. “I was training in the trees.” Jeff handed me a scrapbook with a photograph of David leaping from the limb of one tree to another. He was stretched flat out, horizontal to the ground, like Superman.
“I was at a waterfall one day,” David went on, “and there were huge trees all around, and in the trees were monkeys. There were fences and barriers around them, so they couldn’t get out, but I went around the barriers and played with the monkeys. After that, I watched them all the time, learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys.”
He then showed us, on a computer, a documentary called “Warriors of the Monkey God.” It was about a tribe of monkeys who live on the rooftops of Jodhpur. The people regard the monkeys as holy. We watched them leaping from rooftop to rooftop and through the trees. The scene that made David smile was one in which numbers of them leaped onto, then off, a piece of corrugated tin that was loosely attached as a roof to some stakes. Their landings made the tin shake. Some of the monkeys were leaping from the ground, turning on their sides in the air, landing on the stakes and shoving off from them—a tic-tac.
Watching the movie, which was about forty-five minutes long, took only about fifteen minutes, because David kept advancing it to scenes of the monkeys in flight, looking exactly like traceurs. When it was finished, he said that after coming home he had just continued perfecting what he had learned from the monkeys. He had plans, he said, to make a movie with them.

image from accidentalblogger
I suppose what’s interesting is that the monkeys who live on rooftops in Jodhpur are respected as living incarnations of Hanuman, so perhaps they are given a little bit of space to swing their tails. In Delhi, although monkeys are the living gargoyles that populated old monuments and ruins, they are getting slowly chased out of parts of town where they used to hang from the trees and people used to drive by with bananas for them. I guess India “shining” doesn’t envisage a world with monkeys hanging about. We’ll have to dispose of the monkeys, the slums, the street vendors, etc., until one day we all wake up in glistening high rise buildings with glass exteriors and temperature controlled rooms filled with robot servants, pets, children and spouses. Ultimately humans will become a totally outdated phenomenon; a creature that was really far better suited to living in trees. Just a bunch of monkeys who forgot to jump, and who became inevitably outsourced by robots with better hygiene.

image of monkey toy robot from hasbro.com
But I really have nothing against robots, especially monkey robots, or robots that do kung fu or Parkour. Anyway, I’m probably completely romanticizing the whole phenomenon and its just like some kind of time pass that guys use to show off their skills to chicks. Or perhaps its the real deal. Either way, I like to daydream of small ruptures and revolts in monkey form.

image from air massive

Creatures of the Night…are you a night person?

image from carrolscorner

Its late some time on Friday night/Saturday morning and I’m not out guzzling beers with friends (save that for Saturday). My man has returned home after a long hard day’s work and after consuming sustenance has promptly collapsed into a deep sleep. “You couldn’t possibly understand this kind of tiredness” he says to me, and he’s right because the work I do is free lance which means I make my own hours most of the time. Thank god!
There used to be a time when both of us were vampires…our eyes unaccustomed to the sunlight, our body clocks ticking into the wee hours of the morning…getting much work done till four am, possibly watching early morning television before dissolving into slumber…and waking up just in time for a late lunch. Naturally, every other member of the working world, including our families, found this kind of behavior disgusting and irresponsible. “Its just not done” came the refrain…and “How will you hold a real job?” came another…and while what they were saying was not without a grain of truth it neglects the fact that there are some people for whom night time is the most creative and gorgeous time to be alive and doing things.

image from cinemastrikesback

A popular misconception is that people who stay up late are only doing so to party or pursue other leisure activities. Most day-time people get their work done in the first part of the day and when work is over, immediately flick a mental switch that means they are chilling till bedtime. On the contrary, while I’ve had many a night filled with wine and revelry…there have been tons of times since early on in highschool where I have stayed up most of the night completing assignments, working on visual art or generating new ideas for future projects. At a certain time past the witching hour of midnight…unexpectedly the mind begins to sparkle and a sudden clarity lands upon whatever it is I am doing. It often seems worth it to stay awake, even when I have an early start, just to catch hold of those few fleeting moments when life and whatever I’m focusing on at the moment- makes most sense. Why is this? I couldn’t tell you. Perhaps it is because when most of the world is asleep there are less distractions. Whenever I have been awake and walking outside at nocturnal hours the light the yellow street lamps cast on the tar and the shadows they create through the trees always makes me feel full of jazz and energy to just “do” something new.

photo by viveksawant

New characters come to mind, old songs, and words I have to capture and write down before they flutter away. I first got to know the tired husband sleeping next to me on one such a night when, while our friends were ready to pay the check and drive home, we wandered off chatting endlessly, walking on the naked streets of the early morning, searching for good breakfast menus and becoming ever more animated as the hours ticked on. It was twelve noon the next day when sleep suddenly hit us like a thunderbolt of vivid daylight. And since that time we’ve continued to do our best bouts of brainstorming on those rare allnighters that come our way. Unfortunately for him, he’s got a nine to five job which actually stretches to about seven, so his nocturnal tendencies have come to a sudden and unceremonious halt. I’m trying to whack the night owl out of my head but so far I’m still straining to be up as late as I can without ruining the next day. I think for most people with normal jobs in Bombay, a full night’s sleep is a rare luxury. Ironically, I’m one of the lucky few who could sleep the night through but doesn’t want to. Here are some Night People quotes from a website dedicated to our kind.

Common Misconceptions about Night People:

“We’re insomniacs.”

No way. We aren’t trying to get to sleep.

(I’m going to have to disagree there. I’m a night person who regularly tries to get to sleep and has difficulty. But I enjoy the struggle.)

“We’re unhappy.”

Only when we’re not allowed to follow our natural schedule.

(how true how true. The worst thing is when there have been times I’ve been living with morning people who get annoyed with you if you follow your own schedule and annoyed that you aren’t functioning properly if you try to follow theirs)

“We have a medical problem.”

We’re as healthy as most, and more than some. For instance, you won’t find us getting skin cancer from too much sunbathing.

(ahem. well. Its not a medical problem but it can lead to one if you don’t get ANY sunlight. You need that vitamin D to keep your skin looking well and also lack of sunlight can disrupt melatonin levels causing mood fluctuations. So we night creatures have to be careful to emerge from our coffins once in a while. At one point my skin was so pale that people started regularly asking me if I was ill. I had to say “nope…that’s me just being…erm…normal”)

We’re wierd.

Who’s calling who wierd?

(ahem. what’s wrong with being weird?)

The Bozo Boss Misconception: “We’re lazy, dishonest, and trying to fool everyone because we want credit for working at night but we don’t actually do it.”

This is an evil misconception. It doesn’t just show a lack of respect for our natural body rhythms, it says we’re liars, frauds… Employers always seem to feel this way, even when we’re doing the kind of work that can be measured somehow. All I can say to these people is: Have you ever observed a Night Person at work during his or her peak time? After you’ve sat up with one of us and seen how productive we are, say that again.

(completely. You’d have to be a night person to really get how annoying it is to be written off as a “LOAFER”. as an evil aunty I once knew used to say…”what u doing? Loafing?” My man finished writing his entire phd in a matter of just a few months by working his ass off at wee hours of the morning. I saw it. I bear testament to the powers of the 4:00 am workaholic.)

“We think we’re vampires or have some other kind of odd self image.”

Do you think you’re the sun god Amon-Ra just because you’re a Day Person?

(oye. you got a problem with weirdos and vampires? Don’t try to naturalize night people by taking digs at us monster types. I’m a reincarnation of vampira. )

“We’re criminals who use the excuse of staying up late to cover our crimes.”

Sure, and all the people who are up in the daytime are law-abiding citizens. Crimes are ONLY committed at night.

(thas right. I commit crimes round the clock. no fair.)

“We’re hooked on caffeine.”

It doesn’t take coffee and coke to keep US up!

(Nopes…I ain’t hooked on that there caffiene. SLURP. ZING!)

“The only reason we stay up late is to go to bars, cavort, and party.”

Sure, we like it as much as the next guy, but don’t blame us just because we’re always the last to leave!

(in vino veritas)

“We’re delinquents and degenerates.”

How do you know? Do you follow delinquents and degenerates around at night? If you do, what’s YOUR problem?

(again with the mud slinging. Leave the weirdos, vampires and degenerates out of this. They’re allowed to be night people too. And never you mind who I follow around all night. The restraining order said to keep 200 yards away but they never said anything about video surveillance. Freaking biggot!)

Night Quotes:

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe

“Night time is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.”
— Catherine O’Hara

“I’m kinda tired. I was up all night trying to round off infinity. Then I got bored and went out and painted passing lines on curved roads.”
— Stephen Wright

“Larks see owls as lazy; owls see larks as party poopers.”
— Richard Coleman, Wide Awake at 3 am

“What hath night to do with sleep?”
— John Milton

“I read, much of the night, and go south in winter.”
— T.S. Eliot

“12:35 P.M. — The phone rings. I am not amused. This is not my favorite way to wake up.”
— Fran Lebowitz

“The night draws stars and women in a better light.”
— George Gordon, Lord Byron

“I do believe in reincarnation, but I do not believe there is life before noon.”
— Florence King

Anyway it is time to sleep and I have Promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep.

image from haphazard

Piracy is a Crime? So are most things In Mumbai.

So I’m sorting through a stack of Mumbai’s finest pirated dvds that I’d looted from a hidden little shop that can only be found through word of mouth (you have to go in and around alley ways, through filthy corridors of an ancient building till you arrive at a sparkling little sanitized shop stuffed full of every latest release your criminal little heart could wish for). I pop one of the dvds into my laptop and once again I watch another anti-piracy trailer for the millionth time. I kind of feel bad for the guys who commissioned these adds because I don’t really see how helpful they’ve been in curbing the piracy problem. I mean the pirates who sold me this booty don’t even bother to delete the piracy advertisement at the beginning of each film. To top things off…some clever twit has gotten the idea of screening the preview of new films with parts of it randomly shown in black and white. When I first saw this while watching “The Fountain” I thought the film-maker was trying to use the “wizard of oz” technique of using both black and white and technicolour in the same film to communicate a dream sequence or something till I realized the irritating truth. While it was irritating it certainly did not deter me from watching the rest of the film. Haven’t these guys realized that we third-worlder types have been watching crappy, distorted, bad sound copies of pirated films with bizarre subtitles and with shadows of people’s heads coming in front of the camera since we could first stare at the tv? All they are doing is just managing to piss us off a little bit more. We’re still going to buy pirated stuff as long as it is sold. This is India for god sakes. “Piracy” is a crime. Yeah…well so are a lot of things…like peeing or spitting on public property, having late night parties, holding hands in public and getting a tattoo of the Indian flag on your butt. And pretty soon smoking in most bars is going to be a crime as well. As long as there are police and cheaper copies of movies…both shall be purchased. Well, actually, as broadband connections become more affordable and faster, even the pirates might be going out of business. I found it kind of funny that youtube has such a huge archive of anti-piracy advertisements uploaded. I guess films of the future are going to be either entirely free or else we’re going to have surveillance chips implanted in our eyeballs that electrocute us every time we look at something we haven’t “officially” purchased. Anyway, here’s a clip of “Piracy is a Crime”:

Passive Murder in Sin City, Mumbai

image from link

This isn’t the first time its happened…but it really disgusts me each time I see it happen in the media…there was this girl who got stabbed by her boyfriend because her family refused his proposal of marriage because had a drinking problem. So naturally the guy decides that if he can’t have her…no one can. (never mind that she was pregnant with his unborn child) He grabs a knife, and in front of about fifty people in a public area, he begins to stab her over and over again. The amazing thing is that no one bothered to stop him even as he continued stabbing her to death. There are photographs of him stabbing her with people watching the show and some dude with his hands in his pockets. And what about the guy who took the photographs? I would have done better to have used his camera to whack this psycho on the head. But no…he decides he’s doing society or his bank account some service by snapping pics instead. It makes me so mad when I see this kind of thing happen over and over again. When I was living here before a young girl was stabbed near Gateway in 2005 with tons of people taking photographs of her being killed and no one helping out…and a little before that time a spastic little girl gets molested on a train by some drunk guy and everyone just sits and watches and does nothing. Some journalist saw that one happen and wrote about it in the news, saying he went home afterwards and “cried.” Yeah well he deserved to cry that pathetic coward of an insect….I know in a situation with some psycho hurting a little spastic girl or someone getting stabbed…despite being a chick who does not regularly carry a weapon with her I would have done SOMETHING. And in fact only one woman attempted to help out with the stabbing…as you can see in the picture below…that’s the girl and her lover and the guys with their hands in their pockets watching the show.

Her father is devastated, and has called Mumbai a “city of eunuchs”…check out the story here: mumbai news