Delhi Diaries Volume I

Observations, ideas, opinions and all that from my 3 month stay at delhi. Stayed in 4 different localities, excluding the office :) – moolchand, karol bagh, lajpatnagar and finally lodi colony….the days spent in lajpatnagar were lonely and therefore bitter ( and expensive – all the money spent on retail therapy !!). Happier times had to come, circumstances have never betrayed a person’s character. So presenting volume I of Dilli experiences, in no particular order…..

If there is one thing professional life has taught me, it is the ability to wade through hazy marshes blindfolded. Shooting in dark is no longer just a metaphor; it’s an everyday chore.

There was a time when I was a huge fan of Gandhi, now he is more like a curious historical figure who occasionally astonishes and frequently amuses me. One great thing I like about him is his courage in relating the most embarrassing incidents of his life. A most potent vaccine, makes one immune to ridicule. And gives one the license to trivialize almost anything and everything that is unreasonably sacred !

In his style, there is one confession I would like to make today. For the first time in more than three months after coming to Delhi I watched a movie in a theatre. And what a movie, not once during the movie I was tempted to come out of the theatre into the lobby and watch the India-New Zealand 20-20 match. Hockey truly scored over cricket this time !

E-mail conversations are far better than gtalk conversations, its time the software geeks find a way of putting display pics and all that jazz into emails. It sure will bring back the old man just like radio mirchi bought back f.m.

The easiest and surest test of whether your headphones are working properly is to play ‘Crimson and Clover’, and if you don’t have this one, any of the Beatles songs will do just fine.

Arvind came yesterday and among other things we shared music. Along came a bunch of Sufi songs. All of them untitled-so much like Arvind ! So browsing through the lot to see what all I got, I realised what a illusion people are living, they think “Yesterday” is the most covered single on earth. Cause they are so wrong. It is ‘lal meri pat’ a.k.a. ‘duma dum mast kalander’, a fact my dear old bhasad gang will readily testify to. For they had to bear with the more than dozen versions of the song, played back to back multiple times on the famed Bangalore-Tamilnadu-Kerala-Goa-Bangalore trip. The worst hit was Jas, his intolerance for my collection of Punjabi songs must have made him suspect even his fraud Surd status :)


On the fifteen minutes walk from my home to the office I pass by a Kendriya Vidyalaya and its such a pleasant feeling watching the children playing in the lawns just before the dull daily routine begins.

If I were to give a single sage like advice from my school life’s experience, it will be this. Never carry anything more than your lunch box in your school bag. If its not too much of a bother you may think of carrying a notebook or geometry box as well.

Today for the first time in life I made a list of all the people I would like to send to Antarctica (or probably a more depressingly inaccessible place than that, the hordes of adventurers have made it more crowded than Delhi’s markets after 9 in the night) if I have the means to. Like all great things that happened to humanity, this one began with a small step. It was, till a few moments back a single person list till I exerted my lazy brains to come up with an extended version with celebrities, cricketers, movie reviewers and others. The most illustrious one is Greg Chappell. Like him, I am quite positive the one person who inspired in me this great idea will also be on many other people’s similar lists.

Maybe she is not that bad, may be its only because she reminds me of my grandmother!!

Yesterday night consuming my customary six-pack of ‘The Simpsons’, in one of the usual unusually twisted episodes Bart has to invent a name to pull off a credit card fraud. And I realised he too like us (me and Keyser Söze) looks at his immediate surroundings to get inspirations of this kind. So I thought it’ll be a good idea to list all the passwords I can remember to see what all accidental inspirations I’ve got in the past couple of years.

Parkavenue (Dad’s shaving cream)
Casio (Digital diary)
Yellowstonefire (Cover story of the natgeo lying on the table)
Kingfisher (Headphones borrowed from Banno stolen from Kingfisher airlines flight reinmbursed from his summers company)
Paoloscali (Arvind’s wallet)
Adapter ( Laptop adapter)
Statistics ( Bulky quant book begging me to pick her up and read a few pages)
Northby,Northwest ( During the Alfred Hitchcock movie season)
Backspace ( Sitting in the computer centre with nothing more inspiring than the one key I use the most)
Cinemaparadiso ( Right after I watched the movie twice, back to back without the subtitles)
Imthewalrus, Walrusispaul (My first set of passwords after coming to Delhi, must have played the song /discussed the Paul is dead urban legend, moments before)

Btw, Bart signed himself as ‘Santa’s Little Helper’, his dog’s name who happened to be loitering in his room at that time !

Is it about the city or just a grand coincidence that everyone around me loves to argue, nitpick will be a better word I guess. But my chief complain is not the hair splitting analyses offered based on groundless assumptions, it is rather the avoidance of people to make a wager on their judgment. Now when I have to assert the superiority of my opinions I drive the other person to take a bet. That way I stand to gain at least something tangible, the bullcrap about ‘learning’ from discussions is just that, bullcrap !

In Delhi the evolution of homo sapiens has taken a different turn. There are not one but three unique species of animals resembling humans. The males, the younger females (a.k.a. homo cuteones) and older females (a.k.a. homo auntyjees). For the sake of maintaining reader interest levels the male species shall be conveniently ignored.

The relationship between cuteones and auntyjees is really intriguing since the cuteones eventually evolve into auntyjees themselves. Comparing this metamorphosis with the more popular one of caterpillars becoming a butterflies will be a blasphemy because the very sight of a cuteone with the auntyjee shudders the observer, it somehow makes you believe in fate !!

So about the relationship between the two species, the phenomenon – the auntyjee culture. The purest breeds of cuteones have never been sighted without the company of the auntyjees. The most popular explanation is that it’s an act of warding off the male species by making them aware of the coming transmutation. But the fundamental error in this approach is quite a no-brainer. In matters relating to cuteones, male time horizon limits to milliseconds.

Like in case of all complex natural phenomena there is an alternate school of thought which maintains that it’s a clear case of ‘Parasitical Psychological De evolution’, an attempt by the auntyjees relive the pre-auntyjee times by hanging around with cuteones !

Different things have different degrees of effectiveness in sending you down the memory lane. For me scents do the trick like no other stimulus. Next come songs, although they never remind you of specific incidents, places, people or moods. Too vague to move you !

Lajpatnagar it seems to me is the most severely sexually deprived locality of Delhi. Two observations to prove my point:
1. The really beautiful girls are never accompanied by their boyfriends, its either their brothers or their moms or both !!
2. Its not just the cycle rickshawalas or the auto rickshawalas checking out every other female…but, every and I repeat every girl checks out all the males their eyes can meet.

Heights of irony – singing out aloud ‘like a rolling stone’ dining alone at Nirula’s, teeming with families and stupid young couples !!