I’ll call it the Straightened Hair Theory

I have what you will call unruly hair; I’ll skip the part that tells you in detail about what I mean when I say unruly. Let’s just say, I have bad hair day, 6 days a week.
Okay, so last week I had this little party to go to, for which I neither had the right dress nor the attitude, so I decided to at least have the right hair. I went to the nearest saloon. 35 minutes of hot ironing and loads of Chinese chatter later, I emerged with poker straight hair, hair that shines, hair that you’d love to touch, hair that sways when you say a Yes or a No. Yeah with that hair I went to the party where my reply to every compliment was,”thanks but only till the next wash.” And then as I headed home it struck me maybe, just maybe I should get my hair permanently straightened.

The next morning, I woke up with hair that needed no brushing and a strong resolve to get a permanent fix. Yeah I had found my salvation. My world was about to change.

So I went about my day, writing and checking copy. Then sometime little after noon, out of nowhere, for reasons far too dull to go into, I started hating my hair. The straightness, the silkiness, the shine, I hated everything. It all of a sudden felt limp, scanty and phony. I wanted to get home, wash my hair and greet the unruliness back.

Just so you know, this post is not part of Dove’s real celebrities campaign, or some you are beautiful the way you are initiative. This hair episode is here because it had a little lesson for me. A life lesson if I may call it so. So, here goes – there could be many things that you would want to change in your life, important and trivial. And quite often the change that we had sought and worked so hard for turns out to be a huge downer. Unfortunately unlike straightened hair, which wears off in 6-8 months, this alteration could be a little more damaging. Well, so what’s the deal you ask, would one never do new things, would one never try to change? Of course one would. And this is where my Straightened Hair Theory comes to play. What this theory tells you to do is sample the change. Before you go for a complete overhaul. Say for instance, if you want to switch cities. Instead of going all lock, stock and barrel, take off and be in that city for a fortnight. Stay away from all touristy things, do the regular stuff. Ideally take a cab to and fro to your possible place of work, once daily for 5 days. Preferably during the peak hours. And on your way back try doing the groceries too. And while you are at it, collect the laundry from the presswala across the street. By the end of your trial stay, does the city still hold its charm?

And, this, ladies and gentlemen, is my STRAIGHTENED HAIR THEORY.

Why telling someone he is normal, is possibly the worst thing you could do.

The smarts, they say always have that streak of madness in them. Being in Advertising and being a writer, one could almost fail as a writer if one isn’t a little crazy. And I do grudgingly accept that the best writers I have met were all a tad eccentric.
Someone very dear to me, who is also quite a gym fanatic thinks normal people can never be regular at the gym. “They aren’t insecure, they don’t have a reason to slog it out in the gym, why would they“, he says.

All my life I have been told I was normal. And all my life I was happy with it. Because I always associated normal with sanity, zero fuss, ease and simplicity. Which were all nice things, I assumed.

Now when someone calls me normal, I ask if I am normal to the point of being boring, ambitionless, uncreative and stupid. Answers often vary.

While that’s not being fair on the normal tribe, but there’s indeed a point here. Normal means you aren’t weird. Normal means you are kind of okay with yourself. And there lies the problem. When you aren’t troubled, you are happy and when you are happy, you wouldn’t want to change anything, and when you don’t want to change a thing, you would most certainly not work like a maniac. And when you don’t work that way, you would stay where you are, and not do anything great with your life. And which makes normal a not very pleasant thing.

So to sum it up, calling someone normal means he/she is not good at his/her desk job, is not capable of doing any better, is boring and is not in shape.

Weird is what I aspire to be.

Poetry versus Prada

He was 21, she was 15. They had just become man and wife. He was away working in a city. She was with his family in village faraway going about her wifely duties. And those were the times when distance actually made the heart grow fonder. When poetries were written for the woman you loved. He wrote her a poem. It talked of gratitude, pride, longing and the love that he felt for her. It talked of how she was everything he had hoped she would be. It talked of how she was the perfect daughter-in-law to his parents and will be the perfect mother to their then unborn kids.
They were together for 66 years and had 9 kids.

She is 88 now and he is gone. But the memory of the poem written 73 years ago brings a smile to her now frail face. First she refused to recite it to us, said she was shy. And then when she did, she remembered every single word, and I could tell she read it just the way he had then. She paused in between the lines; I wondered what she might be thinking. Whatever it was, it was lovely, I am sure.


Have I ever had someone write poetry for me? No I did not. Neither did my friends or their friends. Because somehow a holiday in Prague or a boot from Prada made more sense.

Would I want to tradeoff my 3 promised gifts for 200 words of tenderness? I guess not.

It is the best of times; it is the worst of times.

And yeah it was the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness. What does the season of SALE do to you? It gets the worst out in me. The evil, nasty, selfish, rude and wily self, the one that I keep under wraps, most months of the year. Case in point - I race with fragile strangers to reach that lone M shirt. I push the kids away en route to the 50% off section. And yeah as I stand in the 50m long queue outside the trial room I swear. That’s not all, the possessed me also screams at sales girls [which is swear I never do] when my alternations aren’t done, or when a promised shoe in my size isn’t found. Yes, it gets ugly. And at the end of the whole SALE season I feel very sorry for myself and whosoever crossed my path. My loot makes me happy but it leaves me with such a bitter feeling.

These are also the times when I get incredibly stupid, the times when I lose the sense of balance. And the memory of a depleted bank account suddenly vanishes. I buy a certain t-shirt in 4 different colours, do you ask, why? Because I like t-shirts. Because I like colours. Because it’s on sale. I buy a bag. Then I buy another, and then maybe another one, as I see 50 percent drop to 70 per cent. I do so because I like bags. Because I have a thing for bags. Because I have many things to keep in those bags. And because I am getting them cheap. Yes, moments of ‘oh it’s a steal!’ leave me happy and satiated but it also leaves me disoriented.

It could be momentary lapse of reason. Could be good ol’ greed. Or most probably in my case, could be a seasonal loss of memory, reasoning, intelligence and graciousness. Yes, the season of light, the season of darkness is upon us.

A case of blogger’s block

In the past few months not only have I not been able to write anything of interest, I haven’t had any interesting thoughts either. Yeah, scary stuff. No, it isn’t a case of being stuck or being bored contrarily there have been too many changes. A new job, a new home, new locality, new restaurants, new gym, the works; so it is not a case of the stale routine. And so, it must be what I frequently experience at work. A block. A big, big block. The writer's block. [ooh la la the word writer has a such a nice feel to it, doesn't it? that explains the peanutish moolah in advertising]

Back to the block, yeah I did attempt to write on a few occasions though, wow see the word attempt, c’mon an attempt to blog? How sad is that? So, after rounds of navel gazing, I decided to wait, wait until the words came flowing, such a robust flow, that no deadline, no lazy mind can stop.

Well, that was not to be. So I wrote. See the post below, says something doesn’t it, it was so forced? This time round, I am going to wait a little longer, yeah there’s a risk involved, that I never start again. That the ominous block refuses to go. Tough times. Sigh.

And on that note, I leave you with a question… just how seriously should a blogger take her blog?

When the tough refuses to get going…

There are times, when no matter how hard you try, how much ever, things just don’t change. For better. And then there are things you could do about it, sulk or to not sulk. Yeah of course you would keep trying to change things [I wouldn’t venture there in this blog, cause that will be little self-helpish, and I don’t want that.] Cut to the chase, times have been such that more often than not, I seek things that comfort me, things that tell me life isn’t a monster that there’s so much more to my day than the sore thing(s), which I will refrain from discussing here.

I talk to a friend, not the one who has 37 solutions to my problem, no not her. I speak to the one who cracks me up, oblivious to my troubles. This works.

Food. Of course. Trans fats be damned.

Newer goals [sounds dangerously self-help]. Goals not remotely connected with the pain point.

Television. 5 hours of it. It’s mind numbing, which in the given circumstances, is a good thing.

Books yes. Again like that friend, nothing too deep. Jeffrey Archer heals like no one else. So does Theroux, as he takes you through rainy afternoons in London and romantic evenings in Honolulu.

And yeah, there's nothing that a lot of chocolate can't fix.

Care but not that much.

And never have more important words been spoken. I wish I had heard it sooner. Sooner



on an aside: But, because I care about this blog, and because I like to write, I am going to blog again. Soon enough. As soon as I get my chutzpah back.