DJ comes back!

Much more disastrous than India getting ousted from the Cricket World Cup 2007 without even getting to see a glimpse of the Super 8 was the fact that DJ returned to Bangalore from London after two whole months. For the lesser informed in life DJ is the psuedo name of one of my flatmates who was a batchmate at IMT during my MBA days. Alas during the whole of two years of the MBA drill I only remember talkin to him in numbers that could be happily counted in one finger. And mind it these talks were not heart to heart talks but more of talks that lasted as long as Robin Uthappa innings in the World Cup. DJ as he had been named for his innane ability of DJing and making us listen to songs that seemed to be played by Satan himself in college parties. By a sudden twist of fate, it so happened that we landed up jobs in the same city in companies that consolidated their balance sheet into one. And hence it was presumed that he was a brethren. After all we all were called infoscions collectively making him my brethren of sorts. Once I was transferred to Bangalore, the really frustrating job of finding an accomodation haunted me. At the same point of time DJ was also in a house hunting exercise and by another sudden turn of fate we became flatmates along with a third unsuspecting guy called Yadav. And thus started the eighth wonder of the world...me and DJ sharing flats. It was quite a news for our batchmates at IMT and last June my number saw quite a many inquisitve calls asking me if I had turned insane after I joined my job to share a flat with DJ. I guess he also got similar number of phone calls asking him about his insanity status considering that I was his flatmate. And thus the misadventures continued.

Living with DJ has its own unpredictabilities associated with it. So one has to be prepared to be woken up at the obscene hour of 3 o clock at night with his Creative speakers blaring out unfathomable music, or for that matter watching him sleep for 18 hours in a row once he gets high. Getting high is something that has kind of mutated his genes to such a drastic extent that if you convinced him that drinking saline water can numb his senses and get him high, he would be off to the nearest sea shore to drink down gallons of it. And thus anything that can make his sense numb for a while are on the top of his all time favourite list. Once high, it is best to feign that you are on the verge of dying so that he does not get motivated enough to start off long drawn conversations with you. If incidentally you show some interest at the onset you are in for some real doomsday. The deep rooted philosophy keeps flowing on and on with every second line being some kind of a narcissist comment about his own good self. At the 20th minute of such kind of a conversation you would feel bored, at the 40th minute you would feel depressed and by the 60th minute you would be happy contemplating committing suicide or better a homicide to get away from the torture.

So Mr. DJ (I always thought it meant Disastrous Jerk rather than Disk Jockey) after giving me immense bliss by deciding to shift bases to London came back to India this weekend. And immediately the decibel meter of the house could be seen overflowing and reaching disastrous levels. I drifted off to sleep sad over the fact that the 2 months of honeymoon period had drastically come to an end. I woke up on Sunday morning to find the great flatmate of mine had drifted off to sleep with the speakers blasting off to the music of a band called "Infected Mushrooms"and he had kept every possible light on in his room which included a tube, a bulb, a night lamp and even the bulb of the attached bathroom. No doubt we get electricity bills that run into thousands of rupees just because of this kind of insanities. This was nothing considering the fact that he has left the gyser and the microwave running in a number of ocassions often for hours thankfully not burning down the house. The next day it was the taps of his bathroom that he left open for the water to leak and god knows how many gallons of water he choked the drains with considering that parts of Bangalore have serious water problems. I have no idea how his ears dont seem to respond at the sound of flowing water. So life is moving fine with me having to hear to Infected Mushrooms and praying to god that the house does not blow up thanks to one of his insanities.

The 2Ws of this weekend: Washing & Water

I dread weekends for a phobia that has still now not been documented by the etymologists of the modern day world but I guess the phobia that I am talking about is as wide spread across the world as Sardarjis in a jokes book. The phobia can be termed as Washophobia that can be defined as an irritational persistent fear of doing the laundry every weekend. I would be happy enough to do the mopping and cleaning and the utensil washing but washing clothes is the last torture that I can ever subject myself to. The laundry problem has haunted me since I left the confines of the sweet little heavan called home and landed up in a hostel of a B-school some 1500kms away from home. At IMT the dhobi became my best friend to get me out of the torture of washing clothes, a person who had almost single handedly taken up the entire responsibility of washing away the dirty linen of an enitre ecosystem of B-school hostel dwellers. No doubt his face features well in any kind of documentary the Alumni committee of IMT makes for the Alumni Meets to make us feel nostalgic about those two years at Ghaziabad. But even the dhobi of IMT had his own reservations when it came to washing up more UP, CLOSE to the body & PERSONAL stuffs (read undies and ganjees) and I had to really motivate myself to clean these items of daily usage often running into crisis with improper demand estimation for these stuffs. Though my cleaning phobia failed to vanish it was much of a solace for me to see that people shared the same phobia as me and paid a heavy price for it. To cite an example Mr. Manish Bindra previously menitioned 2 blog entries down was one such person who had almost forgotten the fact, I guess intentionally that he had once upon a time soaked his three shirts and two pants in soap water to wash them in the near future. Alas the near future came almost 14 days later when he finally realised that they had rotten away in their own glory emitting as stinky and disgusting a smell as a goat's pen.

The washing woes were accentuated when I landed up in Bangalore as I studied the economics of the washing scene in and around the place I stay. Unbeilivably the price for washing any piece of attire was almost double the amount our dear old dhobi at IMT charged. The first few experience of laundry proved to be disastrous. The shirts as well as trousers though well washed and well ironed seemed to be losing one button every time it went to the washerman's torturous hands. The buttons always seemed to be smittered into pieces and what remained were small pieces suspended from the strings used to fasten it to the piece of clothing. Considering the fact that the torture was becoming a bit too much for every piece of decent clothing I ever owned I decided to pass on the noble responsibility of washing my clothes to the bai who did not understand even a single word that I spoke. Thanks to her I became good in using all kinds of sign languages to make my thoughts be known. A person whose attendance record was much worser than the attendance record of MPs from Chhapra at the Parliament of India, she takes pleasure in bunking work almost half the month. But at least she did turn up on the weekends and she never did complain when I would put the heap of clothes which almost looked like a mini K2. But alas this weekend she decided to land me in a whole bucket of filthy tomato soup by again bunking on Saturday and Sunday. Monday being a holiday for a lesser known festival called Ugadi in Karnataka (imagine not giving even one single day off in Durga Puja even when so many Bengalis work in our office) I started praying that she shows up to wish me a Happy Ugadi and wash my clothes. I knew that if she ditched me that day I would surely have to endure the nightmare of washing a bucket full of clothes. And finally she did show up and I was as thrilled as Mr Ganguly and with great difficulty restrained myself from doing the jersey dance.

Weekend was also about catching up with Akshara and seeing her splurging money on girly stuffs. Books, clothes, electronics as well as pieces of make up which just looked the same color as a Cafe Coffee Day's Cool blue granita, she was buying it all. And finally it was also about getting a last minute ticket for the Oscar nominated Indian entry called Water which considering that it was Ugadi is as improbable a feat as seeing a capless Himesh or imagining Hitler without his toothbrush bristle moostache. So there was Akshara and me making a dash to get the last few seats left and by a stroke of luck we were able to get relatively decent seats and we did not have to twist and turn and fracture our necks by sitting in the front few rows. Water was about the evils society had created in the name of spirituality. And yah society has come a long way since the 1939 portrayed there with women competing in every field and often surpassing them to acheive rare distinctions. It was also about John Abraham looking cute in dhotis and kurtas and acheiving some much needed points on the acting index. It finally did not look that superficial. And finally it was about the Laddu, synonymous with fulfilling every dream and desire of heart before u die because kise pata Kal ho na Ho....

Me, myself, Kolkata & Irene

And before I am publicly hanged for not acknowledging contributions to my blog from the selected few people who visit and read my blog and digest the insanities I write without even having second thoughts about suffering from literary indigestion (last heard this group consisted of as few people as hair on Anupam Kher's ever shining head), here is a sincere thank you to Akshara for providing me with the photo of Manish and me in the post Livin la Vida Loca. Considering the fact that me and Manish were sworn enemies at IMT and were in a habit of showing our immense love for each other by painting each other's doors with obscenities and locking each other up, the civilized photo is very hard to beleive.

Coming back to more mundane things happening in life, I have sworn not to take such long breaks from work and go back home because the work load that welcomes you back to office looks like a mini Mount Everst that has to be climbed in a record time without the necessary supply of oxygen. So for the last two days I have been tackling issue after issue at my workplace till late at night to get things back on track. Sadly, the Kolkata chromosomes have again been buried under the more dominant Bangalore chromosomes for the moment, but 10 days in the "City of Joy" was worth every bit of it. The crusade started with the cab driver honking his horn 20 minutes earlier than the scheduled time he had been asked to come at to drop me off at the airport somewhere in between the hours of 0430 and 0500 on the 1st of march. For a change Air Deccan's flight took off at the right time for Kolkata though it is a seperate story that their reservation systems software had failed and they were being forced to issue hand written boarding passes, and secondly they never seemed to have any cabin baggage tags of their own and were distributing Jet's and Kingfisher's baggage tags for the CISF to stamp its approval of not carrying a bomb on. I slept through the journey fretting about the fact that I had again been unlucky enough not to have a beauty queen sitting on the seat beside me, though it also gave me the opportunity to stretch myself onto the seat beside me which had remained empty and not crib about leg space. Kolkata was in its full glory welcoming me with the ever so predictable depression caused by some low pressure over Bay of Bengal which saw me and Kolkata both getting dranged but spirits still lighted up. But later on even the weather decided to become cheerful and leave me nothing to complaint about.

So there I was on an overdrive meeting up long lost and new friends over cups of coffee and granita at either of Barista and CCD shelling out money that I am sure is going to show up in the revenue-expense statements of these companies as an abberation for the first 15 days of March. It also saw me watching 4 movies in a matter of 10 days. The Bangalore way of living has somehow made me accustomed to the fact that any movie of any length on any day at any hall would make your pocket lighter by a minimum of Rs.150. It felt really odd shelling out only Rs.40 in the decent non-multiplex kind of cinema halls of Kolkata. And there was mom who was in every mood to triple my calorie intake on the pretext that I would not get good Bengali food once I land up in Paris in April. Taking cue from her other relatives also got into the overdrive thinking it to be their moral responsiblity to stuff my stomach with Ilish Mach, Kosha Mangsho, Polao and Roshogolla. Needless to say that my stomach was in every mood to revolt against the onslaught of food items the same way as the BSF reacts when it sees Bangladeshi's crossing the border. A lot of Pudin Haras and Diegenes saw me not falling prey to the hands of the stomach devil and survive.

And finally Kolkata was also about meeting Irene, a pretty woman who seemed to be in every mood to file a chargesheet against me in the Dum Dum police station when I forgot to wish her "Happy Women's Day". In reports coming straight from the horse's mouth meeting me was one of the craziest things she had done in a long long time because of the fact that we had been acquainted through the orkut platform. So I guess I must also be thankful to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and all the Silicon Valley VCs who invested in orkut and had faith about its potential of reaching out to people. And she wore earrings that looked much like the Olympic rings and were big enough for a mouse to leap through them but jokes apart it was a fun time that we had that evening discussing how the Eco Times gets its form (a magazine the sight of which at one point of time irritated me before the MBA days), about books and the significance of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nation in her life and coffee in general.

I guess my Kolkata chromosomes had mutated way too much and that is what had my mom and sister talking about bundling me back to Bangalore again considering the insanities I was showing. But I finally was able to get the computer fixed after repeated reminders from mom which finally had turned into threats. It was tough considering that the guy who was supposed to give a rebirth to the dead as a dodo PC seemed more busy than the PM of the country. And finally the 10 days of ecstacy drifted to an end with me feeling a bit low about getting back to Bangalore and start off the drill again, but guess what?? I got lucky this time through. Finally lady luck smiled on me as for the first time in my life I had a cute thing sitting down right beside me on the Air Deccan flight back to Bangalore. And as usual the Bangalore autowalas gave a warm welcome by ripping me off a lot of money for the journey back to the rented place which I call home.