The Chasing iamb

1. These bloody children are getting a better education than you ever did.

2. American teachers need to be told everything! Don't they just know everything, throw pieces of chalk at you and ask you, "You forgot your homework? Did you forget your lunch?"

3. You miss your toys. Building blocks, slinkies, plasticine, cheap Chinese imitations of Barbie and especially a thin mattress which was simultaneously portable fortress, desert island, the arctic, raft, lifeboat and palace.

4. Howstuffworks has a section on how women work.

5. If your gmail status says 'toys and tools' it arouses everyone's worst instincts.

And I thought Kate Bush was crazy. Here is a French ad for Orangina that L led me to

AND THEN THIS!

Do you religiously read the blogs of people you dislike, whom you would run away from at a social occasion? I am convinced there ought to be a word for this strange reading habit. Its a bit like reading the Times of India but worse. At least the Times of India has movie timings

A while ago I met one woman at a party...well exchanged glances with...and had a flash of ESP. I knew that second that she had to be the author of a blog I found as repulsive and as compelling as a train wreck. Having seen her I now read the blog even more regularly, I snigger, I laugh, I gape in horror but boy do i read it.

A few months after this, it occurred to me that the blog and the general appallingness of the woman was an identical match for a woman I used to hang out with and her blog. I mean, the same preoccupations and the same adolescent way of thinking through things and the same sparkly sense of humour unfortunately mired in self-pity. Even the same occasional bursts of faux intellectualism. IDENTICAL to the last whine. They were even the same age and did roughly the same kind  of work. And even looked a bit like each other. Only both women lived in different cities and as far as I know, have never met. I began spouting theories of 'Blogs seperated at birth' and raving about a blog kumbh mela.

Today I read a not so recent post in one twin's blog. The post contains contemptuous criticism of  the second woman's blog! At least one is now acquainted with the other's blog.

The deliciousness lies in (for me at least, you folks have better things to do) that her vague irritation at the other woman's opinions is phrased in the same semi-arch manner that her twin would have phrased it.

Right, so Bangalore has new massively ugly hideous passport office in Koramangala. I drag Bent and trudge there and complain about feeling sick every step of the way just in case he felt being companion to an invalid was an easy job. (Can you tell that I just finished reading five Georgette Heyers and Claire Tomalin's gorgeous biography of Jane Austen?)

I am astonished by the hideousness for a few minutes. Then we walk into the building and of course we are stopped by large cop with a turn for irony. He says, "What am I sitting here for? You cant just wander in." So I squint at him and ask him for passport application forms and he says that no the application forms are not available in the massive hideous building. For the forms we need to go to the wooden shack at the back of the compound which is the TEA SHOP. mmmm.

Everything is changing all over again. Suddenly I can't finish my current stack of books because I don't have the time! I didnt send an article to an anthology because I couldnt think! And I actually found clothes and shoes I like after a year of feeling like regurgitated owl food.  And it seems that I now have full-time employment. How did this happen? And all before I could watch the 22 Hitchcocks my generous demon master, the Internet, has showered on my squeaking head.

I want a song and I feel very let down by the lyrics of Bookshop Casanova. False hopes raised in my spinster heart, thou shall repine, thou Brit pop band.

Writing's still around. It has not left overnight as I keep thinking it will. Wrote 1000 odd words of new story on the way to see the Princess of Bela-Rus. Some of it was managed balancing on a fence, which made me feel particularly good.

I was disastrously lost at midnight on the way back home but the evening with the Princess was completely worth it. She is as funny and as replete with arcanae and anecdote as she used to be. We first met as interns in Delhi six years ago. The office was full of rats and fascinating women who threw hissy fits every half hour. On Day 2 we went to the terrace and stared glumly at the stars and the Qutb Minar. Half an hour later, we found out that each of us were in the first big relationship of our lives, were about to end said big relationship and that the boys in question were best friends. If we had needed any glue that coincidence would have been it. As it turned out, neither five years apart nor the absence of verbose, Wilde-eyed men in our lives has affected our ability to entertain each other.

The best story that the Princess told me on Sunday night had to be this one. I asked her about a common acquaintance we had had in Delhi. The common acquaintance was roughly our age, 22 or 23. She was incompetent and unable to hide it so got yelled at all the time. She was just back from a posh education in a notoriously demanding university abroad so her gormlessness was astonishing. I asked the Princess whether she knew where Gormless Girl was these days. She said that Gormless had also moved from Delhi to London. She was now married to the only boy she ever had a scene with and working in a due diligence firm. I said (this was the stage of the conversation when I was intoxicated by bitching) that I would never have associated the word 'diligence' with Gormless. I had to also admit that I did not know what due diligence meant. The Princess glossed it thus: 'She checks out stuff for people.' I doubted this seriously but the Princess was reminded of a good story about Gormless, back when both she and the Princess were colleagues in Delhi.

"You know, when she was still in Delhi working with me, her boyfriend came down from England. They wanted to exchange bodily fluids and she lived with family so he booked a room in the Taj. I get a call from her at 2 am. In those days I had a life so I was actually awake though uninterested in what she had to say. She says, 'It's going really, really badly.' "

The Princess who has higher standards of etiquette than Emily Post was horrified by the direction of the conversation but her response must have been adequately encouraging. Gormless continued: "It's really, really bad. He...can't find my hole." The Princess was now past horror and suggested, "Why don't you show him where it is?" "But, " Gormless moaned, "I can't find it either!"

So my question is this. Whatever due diligence actually is, what kind of checking is Gormless doing for that firm and how good could she be at it?

Because they give me, a known felon, things like this to edit.

"When the session began, the first question was raised by a facilitator on the manner of greeting i.e. “Ram Ram”. It was suggested that since this is biased with respect to religion maybe one should consider using some other form of greeting amongst the group e.g. “bahut pyaar”.  It wasn’t promptly accepted and only one woman from the group repeated this greeting."

 

This just in from ResoluteReader who is spitting mad and not falling about laughing like I am . Apparently on Friday after the Big Brother controversy, London Paper, one of the free newspapers circulated in Central London did a helpful double page spread to explain to the goras who Shilpa Shetty is. And here is RR reporting live.

RR: And to help their readers they helpfully gave them their names, and the names of the Hollywood actress they are most like! Betraying ignorance on many levels but firstly -forgetting that a significant proporation of their readership is from the Indian region and probably knows the actresses very well and secondly, thinking that the rest of us care. Do you know what the most important factor about these actresses was, according to the feature? How much they are paid per film. We are expected to gasp at the fact that someone earns £200,000 per film but nothing was made of the fact that the "similar" Hollywood actress would have added a zero to the figure.

So according to the paper, Shilpa Shetty is Sandra Bullock, Kajol is Julia Roberts,  Rani Mukherjee is Nicole Kidman. Preity Zinta is Renee Zellweger, Priyanka Chopra is Cameron Diaz. Kareena Kapoor is Drew Barrymore. 

Sample these nuggets of info: "Priyanka Chopa, 24, a model turned actress who has the power to make any man go weak at the knees - she is the Cameron Diaz of the group. More renowned for her stunning looks than her acting ability, Priyanka like Diaz, has landed a number of plum roles in big films because of her beauty."  "A Bollywood pedigree (the Kapoors are one of the biggest acting famillies in India), she's been in the biz from a young age - a Drew Barrymore without the druggie years. But baffingly, the busty beauty regularly gets flooded with offers despite being inconsistent at the box office."  And so it goes on. It's like we're discussing race horses or dogs, fumed RR.

RR wants me to make it very clear that his attitude is one of lip curled cynicism as it befits a good socialist. He does not want his reputation tarnished by the idea that he spend his tube journeys looking at pictures of attractive asian actresses.

Note: I can at least bear witness to his ignorance and general disinterest in anyone but a certain hot socialist.

Flaneur is too grand a word for it. I am throughly enjoying my village bumpkin-ness in the Rajdhani.

The metro covers 30 kilometres from my little Russia to Connaught Place in sterilised organised comfort in one hour. It has smart-cards and tokens and security checks and disability access. I think its best feature is the whoosh sound it makes when it leaves each station letting you imagine that you are headed to Mars and not to Rameshnagar.

At Nehru Park, on a green hillock couples make out in stylised poses silhouetted against the sky. MP and I giggled thinking of the happy lemmings huddling on the wet rocks of Bandstand.

The Capital should be jaded by the abbondanza of Things-to-Hear-See-Do.But they are not because luckily they arrive late and leave early. Even for Kishori Amonkar.

MP and I craned our necks each time we saw double strings of pearls and silk kurtas bowing and scraping. Mani Shankar Aiyar, Ambika Soni, Sudhir Dhar. Was that Vinod Mehta? Mark Tully for sure. Don't point, MP admonished. My inner bumpkin grinned.

A man leaped up from the posh-er seats in front of us for a hatchet-faced couple. He had been warming their seats for them so they could make an appearance at the Kishori Amonkar concert but not suffer any musical affrontery from the small fry who preceded her. The dismissed flunkey ran away after several bows and listening to some sharply hissed instructions.

The pudgy silk-sareed MC was afflicted by near-orgasmic professional huskiness as she read from a hilarious script with enough hot air to power a Richard Branson ascent. After she 'facilitated' the flashy sarod player Parthosarothy whom she coyly called Partho she introduced Kishori Amonkar creating small Mexican waves of winces. "Kishoriji was a doyenne, a Saraswati, she dives into vast oceans of musical notes, she is part of a deep spiritual realm, she needs silence, she is a...."

Kishori Amonkar took a good long time to appear. Which was sensible because Parthosarathy's jamming was ringing in our ears for ages after he left. Also Kishori is a true fire-breathing tempermental diva. One who has in the past stopped mid-note and said to a chattering woman in the audience, "Either you leave or I do." Who a week back in Patna walked off the stage 20 minutes into the performance because of a noisy audience.

At Nehru Park she was brisk and polite to the bhaiyyas doing the heavy work on stage but barked at the organisers to switch off all the lights glaring in her face. When listening to her even musical donkeys such as I could see what they mean when they say "Its not in the voice its in the gayaki." MP says if Kishori deigns to sing you go down on bended knees and thank your good fortune. But this is the Capital where 74 year old divas who frowns at organisers and bark at video cameras are not too popular. After a bit the taunting claps began.

And this potential storm in a swarmandal was handled in the most foolhardy, so foolhardy that its almost adorable, manner by the MC who chattered into the night air. Because of course silence would be unbearable. She talks about the importance of silence for artistes for some time longer in the manner of a bunch of men I once saw entering the Bahai temple and exclaiming, "Kitna silent hai."

She goes away briefly and reappears bright as a magpie. "Please wait for a few more minutes as Kishoriji needed to go the bathroom." Rows of bhakts jumped in outrage. The princess pee? Terrible. Terrible. I had images of the diva hearing about this and the MC facing a wall at dawn. MP wondered aloud where they had got this dunderhead. But the Punjabi aunty next to MP chose that minute to tell her husband in admiring tones "Bolti bhi achchi hai. Angrezi bhi achi hai." Ah innocence, I cackled to myself.

In the sabzi mandi last night I reverted to halli-gugu. I was trying to remember what the Hindi word for garlic is. A scrubbed, trimmed, moustachioed flower of Indian manhood appears next to me with an anal retentive gleam in his eye and a green army camouflage (!) shopping bag. I thought I had imagined what happened next but Spellcheck says that he heard it too. The Man-flower tells the skinny, tired hawker, "I am from the SPG. What is the price of the gajar?" I goggled but the vendor ignored him and his increasingly shrill demands.