Dad, You’re Not the Only One!

My Dad, just like some of your dads I’m sure, is mindlessly challenged when it comes to using the Internet. Will not bring Ma into this discussion at all…she is just a sweet lady who whips up kick-ass recipes, and has taken to sending me everything from Bengali mustard paste to Fabindia Kutras through DHL. Does have a vague idea that Dad regularly goofs up when it comes to chatting with me over Skype. But generally does not feel that the computer is her domain at all. So does not interfere with Dad’s Internet-handling skills.

Coming back to Dad…he learnt the words ‘upload’ and ‘download’ in the late nineties, and till date uses these two words randomly…he quite snugly thinks, these two words are all that the over-hyped ‘World Wide Web’ is about. Dad’s discomfort with the net has become quite a joke in the family, and I think (thought...past tense really) he is well and truly unique.

I was jolted from my misconception last week, when I sat talking over the phone to a young doctor in a high-profile medical insurance firm.

Sample the conversation:

Doctor: So…what is it exactly?

Me: Nothing much doctor. Only the insurance fellow asked me to call you up and ask if I could claim my allotted sum by presenting the bills from the optician.

Doctor: No, you cannot. Bills from the optician are not covered in our policy.

Me: Oh (jaw-dropping…it was an 8K bill) But isn’t there something you can do about it?

Doctor: Ummm… (thinking hard…scratching body parts I’m sure)…maybe you can send me a mail with a formal request (unalloyed bullshit). I’ll see what I can do about it.

Me: Are you sure? (positively irritated) May I have your mail ID?

Doctor: It’s http://www.himavan@gmail.com/

Me: (Himavan??? His name is Himavan? A 2009 doctor called Himavan???) Errr…www? Are you sure there is a ‘www’?

Doctor: Oh definitely!

Me: But it can’t be…www is a website…it cannot be the beginning of an email ID!

Doctor: But I have ‘www’ written on my visiting card. Do something, you send it to both.

Me: #@&%#$@


Dad, you are really much better. At least you can differentiate between a ‘www’ and an ‘@’…errr…can’t you? Love you anyway.

I Dream of Vostok: A Mild Anti-Ode to Chennai Summer

For those of you zero-GK people who don’t know what or where Vostok is, well it’s a place in Antarctica…arguably the coldest place in the world at -128.6 F. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know where Antarctica was, leave alone Vostok ;) until a few minutes back, when I Googled. Okay…just to shut up folks who’d doubt my IQ again, I’m kidding. I just did a search on the Vostok bit.
Coming to the point, the distressing reality is, I am as far from Vostok as Bhatinda is from Banff. Does that make you empathetic? I really don’t care even if you role your eyes and laugh up your sleeve. For all my Bangalore friends…yep, you are having better days now, but Doomsday isn’t far. You all will soon sweat litres digging into a fish steak at 20 Feet High…SO BEST OF LUCK!
What unequaled sadism! I never imagined I was capable of such venom. But for that matter, I never realized so many things. I never realized life could go on at 104 F…I never realized power-cuts could happen regularly at 6 in the morning as a wake-up call…I never realized every time a religious procession passed, some cretin at the power station could switch off the entire power-supply, and when shouted at, would say ‘Ay yo Saami’…I never realized I had so many pores on my face that would ooze unending body fluid, until summer…a big thank you to Chennai for all this.
This post comes at a time when I should have been completely numb with the Chennai heat…after having suffered it for 3 years. But unfortunately for me and Chennai lovers, I still spend my days here foolishly hoping for beat-the-heat solutions like a huge barrel of Heineken and a larger-than life ice pack which I can use as a substitute for that uncomfortably warm mattress. And of course, I dream of Vostok…rolling in the snow, sharing my food with Adelie penguins.

The Woman I Could Never Be...

When I was in the second standard, an unreasonable relative, who was (unfortunately for me) interested in palmistry, told me, I’d take up ‘science’ as a line of study. I was just learning complex additions, water, gas, land breeze, sea breeze, and indoor plants in school, and doing reasonably well. Thus, my taking up science seemed quite a possibility.
As I grew up, I gradually realized that Math had the potential of making my life an unadulterated inferno. I conveyed this to the unreasonable relative. He had by then announced to all and sundry that I would be a doctor; this is because I had expressed keen interest in drawing nuclear cell diagrams all over my scrap book. After my confession that I hated Math, and I didn’t feel Biology was all that great either, the relative felt insulted. I had managed to make a complete mockery of his skills in palmistry. He stopped talking to my entire family, and till date, it’s status quo.

Have you’ll ever felt this way? I mean…dejected at not being able to be the person you dreamt you could be? Not that I wanted to be a doctor particularly. I knew I couldn’t ever make it there. But what about the other little aspirations? Aspirations like being a bespectacled professor in a cold New York apartment…having loads to do…getting at some theory on the influence of jazz on African American literature…occasionally having the time to look out of the window at a road full of dry fall leaves…living life off research money…getting interviewed by someone on History Channel…hiking across the Appalachian Trail…ever thought about such personal dreams?

Then there was this aspiration of living close to a lighthouse…close to moss-covered sinewy roads that would lead to a cornflower blue sea…close to a fisherman’s village in south India…close to a lonely mosque…close to all the Jonathan Livingstones in the world…

Then there was this mad dream about being a writer…living in an abandoned cottage in the Himalayas…Anita Desai made me think this way…Fire in the Mountains…awesome stuff!

Then there was this other thing I had about being single. No men, no love, no frills, no trouble...

Life of course, has turned out to be different. What pains sometimes, is my inability to live up to my own dreams…not the dreams of parents, not the dreams of friends, not the dreams of unreasonable relatives…

Maybe in the next life, I’d be that much dreamt of single woman writer, living in the mountains, relishing her privacy in a purple twilight, writing about lost worlds…

I Must be Brain-dead...Blame it on Food!

Right…I had a tough last week, a tougher weekend, and a completely lousy week still unfolding. Deadlines get more unreasonable, project managers get more Machiavellian, the Chennai pollution gets overloaded with unnecessary nitrogen, the tigers kill more deer in Lanka, Obama bullshits about Bangalore, and finally…my job sucks oh so completely.
So, as a responsible 28 year old, with more than a stable head on my fat shoulders, what do I do about it? I neither crib like you pathetic morons, nor do I get down to ground zero and do something about it. I eat. Couldn’t get simpler.

Sample the following:

1. Symptom:

I have a splitting migraine…I think I am dying.

Cure:

Get a black currant smoothie.

2. Symptom:

My manager just yelled at me…I need to put down my papers at the earliest.

Cure:

Grab a strawberry diet (!!! ???) yogurt.

3. Symptom:

I am so freaking tired…have to cook once back home…why can’t Amitava learn?

Cure:

Get a lemon honey cool (whatever the crap that is).

4. Symptom:

Am I bulimic? Should I see the doctor? Oh gawd!

Cure:

Cheer up…get a sweet and salt soda…best thing in this heat.

5. Symptom:

You know, Ma just called…she is missing me!

Cure:

Wipe off those pointless tears. Have a slice of Domino’s…you know how parents are.

6. Symptom:

Shit….the world is so full of swine flu! And I ate so many of those sausages last week, while watching KKR lose another of those matches!

Cure:

Get real…Mexico to Chennai is really too much of a distance…

7. Symptom:

I want to lose weight…the only truth of my life.

Cure:

Have the Spanish Veg salad…with a dollop of mayonnaise...it's just a dollop, why worry?

8. Symptom:

I can’t fit into the classic blue jeans anymore.

Cure:

Have a pack of French fries…what’s life without food? And yeah, get a size 38 classic blue.

And the list goes on…how could anyone with a socially respectable IQ get so alarmingly frivolous? How could anyone feel that the only way to get on with life is to indulge in binge eating? People who feel they can find a realistic cure to this, please get in touch with me at debanjana.dasgupta@gmail.com

To Celebrate the Absurdity of it...

Have any of you people ever written for the sake of absurdity? Sounds alien? Let me explain…
I have a wicked deadline…12 godforsaken files to develop by the end of day, today. Now don’t bother your Cs in the brain with what is it that I do for a living. It’s not the point.

The point rather is, if my manager sees me writing this piece of crap instead of some inane technicality on ‘Designing Business Intelligence Architecture in Microsoft SQL Server 2008’, I’ll be completely fired. (There is of course no such thing as getting completely or partially fired…I just love hyperboles…ignore it.)

But let’s not digress…It’s 5.30 in the evening…and in another painfully quick half an hour, it will be the end of a business day. But in spite of the sad inevitability, I’m having the cheek to scribble nonsense. Am I paid for this? Not in a million dreams. But what the pink panther! (I just got tired of saying ‘what the hell’…there is no such thing as a pink panther…kill me if I digress again).

Cool…this gives a semblance of hope to my living. I don’t live for those software geeks at Redmond. I don’t live for an ITES job that pays me mustards (I got tired of peanuts…KILL ME!!!). I don’t live for the pointless meetings in semi-lit (euphemism for sleepy) boardrooms. I don’t live for those immensely critical phone calls at 5.59pm with a colleague 2000 miles away. I live for moments like these, when I can scribble what ever comes to my mind with a gun pointed at my temple. And to tell you the truth…I’m loving it.