A dog and sometimes a cow

Yesterday we three friends wanted to have something different in lunch and so ordered three small pizzas in the U.S Pizza counter in the cafeteria and found a table about 500 meters away from the counter and settled.

We were waiting patiently continuing with our usual chit-chat and occasional giggles. Suddenly a small amount of still-being-cooked pizza escaped the walls of that giant oven that I could see from my seat and entered into my nose. I immediately exclaimed "yey, our pizzas are almost ready, I can smell it"

My two friends looked at each other's face and looked confused and puzzled and said "we can't smell anything!"
Me: "Ohhh...never mind...my mother always says that I must have been a dog in my last birth as no fragrance skips my nose and I was a smell-tester in my house"

My two friends started laughing out loud and then one friend suddenly called out "hey, I can also smell it now!!!!!!"
Me: "See!! You must have been a dog two births back, so it came a little later to you" and we all split out in laughter.
The other girl was still looking confused as she still couldn't smell anything!
I told her, "don't worry. You must not have been a dog in last five births of yours!"

The cow part

At the entrance of my office, they have built a small barred-metallic-passage that stops cows and dogs from entering into the office premises. But whenever I enter the office I get so scared to walk on that passage that I take a small detour to enter the office. I often laugh at myself and tell my friends that I must have been dog and cow in my last births and I still have their characteristics in me that stops me from walking on that passage!

A Call

It was around 9 O’clock at night and there was a call at my mobile from an unknown number. I do not take calls from unknown numbers, thanks to my mobile service provider Docomo who calls incessantly everyday for I-don’t-know what all services. But this call was from a mobile number and I answered it.

 

Me: Hello

A male voice: Hi, is this Doell?

Me: Yes

A male voice: Hi Doell. This is Samit Basu. Happy Birthday!

Me (not being able to comprehend what I was listening to): WHAT???!!!!! Is this some kind of joke?

Samit Basu: I can’t really prove my identity over phone. But, I’m really Samit Basu.

Me: But how could you be Samit Basu? How could you get my phone number? How did you know it’s my birthday today?

Samit Basu: Well, your friend Priya had sent me a really sweet mail to call you and wish you on your birthday. She gave me your phone number.

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(I was as awestruck and as baffled as I could be and honestly speaking, I don't remember what I blabbered in that high spirited state of mine, so I am truncating rest of the conversation)

 

So, this was my gift from Priya on my birthday. She had actually mailed and asked my favourite author to call me and wish me on my birthday! And to add to this madness, HE HAD ACTUALLY ACCEPTED! How is that? I slightly remember that I had told Samit Basu about the mails I had written to him after reading Simoqin Prophecies, Manticore’s Secret and The Unwaba Revelation and that he had replied to two of my mails and he actually checked them right then mentioning that I had written him very nice mails! So, it was a proof that it was really Samit Basu who called and wished me on my birthday!

 

It’s almost a month since I had got that call and somehow, it still has not sunk in my mind! No prize for guessing how excited I was and that I was literally jumping around and laughing and screaming! Full marks to Priya for giving the most innovative gift anyone has ever given anyone!

This birthday was special for many other reasons also. This time my mother was here in Bangalore and my sister had come here from Mumbai. So, when we looked back and raked up all of our brains, we came to discover that the last time we all were together was in 2005 in Delhi when my father was alive.

 

This birthday was special for the amount of gifts I have received also. It seems the more I am getting older, the more gifts I am getting J…so I’m not complaining!!!! Here is the complete list of gifts I have got:

1. Casio keyboard (I gifted to myself)
2. Geetobitan (collection of Tagore songs) and a formal shirt (my brother and sister-in-law. My sister-in-law got Geetobitan couriered from Kolkata with help of her cousin!!!)
3. One Salwar piece (my cousin and his family)
4. Two cotton kurtas (my sister)
5. Two books – Switched by Amanda Hocking and Tea for Two and a Piece of Cake by Preeti Shenoy (Priya and Gayathri. Yes, this is the same Priya who had mailed Samit Basu to call me)
6. One purse (which I bought with the money that my mother gave me)
7. One thermal cup with my company name printed (the Birthday committee in my office)
8. One more gift yet to come from a friend who is determined not to give me book anymore and buy a wall clock for me!

 Can’t wait for the next birthday to come J

Random Thoughts

He is famous....he is loved by millions.....he is chased by his fans......he has a fame that spreads across country borders.....

But at the end of the day he is human, one human who started from the scratch and struggled hard from the zero to today's super-stardom.

So, during some special moments, the moments, which are special for him also, he behaves like anyone of us....

After all, all these years of struggle and success hasn't changed him to a machine from human.

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My reading hours have come down drastically from 2-3 hours per day to even 0 hours. All thanks to my laptop and the fact that I stay so close to office that I end up staying 14-15 hours at office on a regular day.

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My 15 years old days have come back!!!! Those songs have come back to my life again. Thanks Amith :) ...thanks for the Fingertips Fair Collection....as I said before...u're my backup plan...thanks a lot :)

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Are promises made to be broken? I had kept my first promise associated with this city...but the return promise was not kept....

Not Just another Day

As the cruel and cold hands of the clock took their positions, the shorter at 6 and the taller at 12, the clock shuddered with a squeak and started to shriek at the top of its voice. As if it was not enough to kill Siddhi’s innocent sleep; there was something more waiting for her that morning.

Still unable to open her eyes completely, and after successfully having taken the revenge on the clock by slipping it in the pit of silence—only until tomorrow morning, of course—Siddhi could realize that the day was not just like any other day. She could realize herself breathing out of her mouth and her nostrils were blocked and she was having an unbearable headache. She knew what lay ahead of her but was not really ready to face that.

Siddhi had shifted to Mumbai two months back. Getting selected for her dream job, fighting with her parents to relocate to Mumbai from Delhi and settling down comfortably in a PG in Andheri, just two kilometers away from her office, seems to be a distant dream to her now.

New city, new job and new accommodation kept Siddhi so busy, that she kept ignoring the fact that the pollution and tropical climate of Mumbai was causing trouble to her chronic sinusitis. But that day when she woke up with a stuffed nose, headache and fever, she knew that she couldn’t ignore it anymore and it was time for her to go to an ENT specialist.

‘Take a day off and go to a doctor,’ Siddhi told herself.

As she was getting ready to go to hospital, Siddhi suddenly felt very alone and she was upset for being so far away from her house. She missed her own room in her house, those cups of ginger-tea that her mother would prepare for her and her father taking her to doctor every time she suffered from such problems.

‘Grow up Siddhi! You are not a school girl anymore. Stop getting sentimental!’ she scolded herself hard and decided to cheer herself up by dressing up nicely.

‘Pamper yourself, dress up nicely and look good. You will always feel better,’ she remembered her mother’s golden words.

So here she was hunting for her favorite salwar-kameez, matching ear-rings and bangles in her still-unpacked duffle bag. And finally, Sidhhi wrapped herself in her favorite Pashmina shawl that she had got from Jammu on her last trip to Vaishno Devi.

‘Here you go pretty girl!’ she admired herself in the mirror and started feeling better.

As Siddhi was comforting her feverish body in the warmth of her beautiful Pashmina shawl, little did she know that the day still had some surprise in store for her!

Finding out the hospital was not difficult for Siddhi. Her PG mates had instructed her properly. With every passing day, she has started liking Mumbai. She laughed at herself that before coming to Mumbai, how she used think that every second person you bump on in Mumbai would be a filmstar or a gangster!

She got into the hospital and completed the registration process for the ENT specialist. The receptionist asked Siddhi to wait for half an hour, as the doctor was not in yet. She took a seat at the rear row of the sitting lounge and cast a lazy look at the patients and their friends and relatives scattered here and there in the lounge.

There was one more sitting area on the other side of the sitting lounge. There was something unusual there that caught Siddhi’s attention. She could see a very old man sitting in a wheel chair. There was a lady with him, ‘Might be his daughter,’ she thought.

‘He would be more than 90 years old,’ thought Siddhi.

Siddhi could see that the old man was shivering very badly as if he had Parkinson’s. The centralized air-conditioning of the hospital might have been hard on him. The old man seemed very sick and frail and the shivering attack was almost killing him. The lady next to him looked perplexed and helpless as she was rubbing the old man’s palms in a desperate attempt to give him some comfort!

‘The old man needs something warm to wrap himself in immediately.....may be a shawl…..what if he collapses now......I have a shawl..... I won’t die without it.......but it’s my favorite shawl.....what should I do?’—all these thoughts kept cluttering Siddhi’s mind.

She decided something in her mind. Siddhi slowly took off her shawl and started walking towards the old man.

‘Excuse me,’ she told the lady with the old man.

‘Yes?’ the lady replied with a question in her face.

‘Please take this shawl and wrap him up. He’s shivering badly,’ Siddhi told her. That lady took the shawl without any word and hurriedly wrapped the old man with it. The shawl was still warm with Siddhi’s body heat. The comfort that the old man felt was visible on his face. He smiled back at Siddhi.

The hospital reception was calling Siddhi’s name for the doctor visit. The doctor had just arrived. As Siddhi started walking toward the doctor’s chamber, she knew that the she wouldn’t get her shawl back but surprisingly, she didn’t feel bad. On the contrary, she was feeling very good!

Siddhi could feel her blocked nose opening up and her headache going down slowly. Surely, it was not just another day in her life.


Note: This is a true story with some exaggeration! The fist part of the story is my imagination and last part of the story is my sister's story. I had written this story to participate in a story-writing competition in my office.

View from my terrace at 6 o'clock in the morning

Story vs Story-telling

While watching a movie, ever felt like that the movie shouldn't end? I felt the same while watching Dhobi Ghat. I felt like watching some more days of those characters....reading some more pages of the Mumbai Diary...

But unfortunately most people go to see a movie to see the story.....many people don't understand that more than the story, the way of story telling is more important in a movie. So, when I was about to watch Dhobi Ghat, my room mate said that she and all her friends hated the movie and they didn't understand the story and she warned me not to watch it. But after I had finished watching the movie, when I said that I loved it, she was looking at me as if am an alien and told me 'I think you should get your brain checked'. So I told her that this movie is for a niche audience and I fall in that niche like many others who loved watching Dhobi Ghat like my brother and sister. She seemed a little pacified.

It's difficult for me to explain why I liked the movie, except for the technical aspects like editing and amazing sound engineering, but I liked the way the story was told here, since I believe that the way of story telling is more important than the story itself. And when the way of story telling is not dependent on the story itself, the movie watching becomes as delightful as this.

For example, the way of story telling in Dhobi Ghat is so unique and so much independent from it's story and the characters within, that you can actually fit ANY movie story in this format and present it. It's amazing, it's like a variable that can take the form of any value.

And more importantly, the story is also something which has no fixed beginning or fixed ending. The typical Yash Chopra, Karan Johar or Farah Khan pattern of story telling would have killed the story.

Few other movies that I can think of right now whose story-telling was unique and flexible enough to be treated as variable are - Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi, Jab we Met and Andaz apna Apna.

Beg Borrow Steal

All the three attributes listed above are bad attributes of people.

But we do beg for various things to our very near-ones like parents, siblings, spouse or best friends. But what about begging for extra starter items, which caterers bear all through the party venue, in a typical Delhi buffet party? How cheap is that?

But we do borrow things from our very closed ones when we need to attend some function and we realize that we don't have good clothes. But what if somebody borrows clothes for marriage....for his OWN marriage? How cheap is that?

But we do steal those cake pieces and sweets from the fridge when mom is not around. But what about stealing tissue paper rolls from the office toilet or stealing towels from the Rajdhani Express train? How cheap is that?

From the childhood our parents teach us about morality, honesty and other such qualities. I always used to think that all kids are being raised with the same teaching in their respective houses. But I am wrong. There are parents who teach their daughter how to keep her husband under her control like a pet, they teach their daughter how to tell lies swiftly to their in-laws so that she can fool them, there are parents who appreciate their son when he comes home with a stolen good from office or Rajdhani Express train, there are parents who teach their son how to be fraudulent to deceive someone. They teach their children how to be a fraud, a liar, a thief, a dishonest mother and a bad person. How cheap is that?