Cantaloupe Sunset

The recession has hit my workplace hard…so an otherwise semi-blue Tuesday seems like a butter yellow Friday…minus the cheer and the thrilled anticipation of a gorgeous weekend…minus the Chinese dinner, minus the DVDs from a movie rental service, minus the pedicure in lukewarm shampooed water, minus the booze, minus the sea-side drive.
Now it brings me to the million-dollar question…When will this God-forsaken economy recover? I don’t understand deficit-spending, I don’t understand the inverted yield curve, I don’t understand petro-politics, I don’t understand Laissez –faire, and I definitely don’t understand the so-called magic that an African-American middle-aged man is about to weave, somewhere in the Western Hemisphere.
However, I do understand a no-appraisal mail from my boss, I understand why I buy Britannia cheese for breakfast, instead of a box of Kraft Classic Melts, I understand why I commute by the local passenger train instead of a cab, and I understand why we drink Kalyani Black Label instead of Budweiser.
Perhaps I sound a bit like Paris Hilton, but I wish I had the latitude to think about Chevrolet’s latest shade and Mediterranean food, instead of appraisals. I wish I had the dough to buy Evanovich’s Plum Spooky, the celadon skirt from Biba’s spring collection, hire Rujuta Diwekar to help me fit into the skirt, and not worry about credit card bills. Yawn…I am surely a Hilton in the making! How detestable!
Materialistic dreams notwithstanding, times couldn’t be worse. As a lay corporate nearing thirty, I wish I had sound understanding of world economic affairs. But sadly, I don’t. All I understand is my job, my family, my need to be independent, a bit of Shakespeare and Tagore, and my need to dream. And this dream lets me hope that someday, and someday soon, we will walk towards a happy sunset…make that a happy cantaloupe sunset…Dare to dream!

Rumbling Thunder Hiding Buffalo

However inconsequential this may sound, I am on a ‘diet’…code for being galactically stupid…for the umpteenth time in my life.
The idea originates from a feeling within me that says I look like the ‘before’ part, of a ‘before and after’ advertisement. This is a perennial feeling. So ‘diet’ reigns.
I thrive on diet supplements (yes, I have fallen prey to a blatant advertising gimmick), blanched peanuts (mildly tolerable), apples, (never been the love of my life), broccoli cooked in olive oil (bourgeois and bland), and a boiled potato with a pat of butter (my only high point of the day).
The visible results of this near-impossible gastronomical routine are dark circles, mood swings, irrelevant tiffs with my husband, and fatigue.
However, I am completely adamant on shedding the extra baggage…even if a Qutub leans like a Pisa, even if Pakistan declares that Kasab is from Neptune, even if Ramalinga Raju gets the Padma Shree, even if Rahul Gandhi becomes the Premier…you get the drift and the desperation! No amount of dark circles and mood swings can stop me from aiming to be the ‘after’ part in the advertisement.
This self-inflicted lent against cheese, beer, chicken chettinad, hamburgers, rabdi and other such ambrosia had started to take its toll though, when this week began. The usual Monday-blue bug had bitten me early, and the depression became quite unmanageable after lunch (just an apple). To give my spirits the much-needed lift, I decided to saunter over to the nearest Higginbotham’s bookstore.
To give you a better picture, the store is quiet, with a mildly humming air conditioning system, no music, occasional good-looking corporates (there were a couple on Monday), and mute floor attendants. Sub-zero disturbance. Good place to be.
Now the bad part of any diet (no matter what Rujuta ‘Kareena’ Diwekar says) is that you end up feeing hungry most of the times. The fifteen odd minutes that I was at Higginbotham’s was no different. I was holding a copy of The Namesake, but the pat of butter for dinner was all that was on my mind…hunks notwithstanding.
It is some evil cosmic design though that made the next few minutes at the bookstore possible. The hunks decided to give me some attention (I don’t know why, and I don’t care why). Just then, my ever-hungry stomach rumbled like a pair Dolby speakers. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that a plane had hit the building. The hunks looked confused. Probably in their chauvinistic scheme of things, it’s uncouth for a lady to let her stomach rumble. The guy at the till flashed a grin…May horrendously difficult things happen to grinning men at cash counters. The worst part of the whole rumbling affair was that it went on for half a minute (sounds incredible, but true) at different pitches. By then the hunks realized the source of the rumble. I heard stifling laughter behind me. All that was left for me to do was to rush out of the store at the earliest…hiding myself in my water-buffalo fat.
The moral of the story is…don’t visit quiet places on a near-empty stomach. 'Diet' reigns though.