Caveat: a very self-indulgent post.
So, I have learnt a lot.
I have learnt that you got to be unapologetic about what you got/are
I have learnt that you need to be apologetic about what others haven’t got/aren’t
I have learnt that a person is never all bad, you are sure to find something good in him/her that you could use [but of course you don’t point it out to him/her, lest the bad takes over (no honestly)]
I have learnt to appreciate a relatively free day at work [they are too few and far in between]
I have learnt to appreciate a busy day [they are the reason I can buy those goodies]
I have learnt to not feel sorry for my over-worked colleagues, [they never do]
I have learnt that there’s no escaping paper work
I have learnt a way around escaping boring conversations
I have learnt to be bossy when required
I have learnt to be a sissy when required
I have learnt to be frugal
I have learnt to be generous
I have learnt to accept my dispensability
I have learnt to enjoy my worth [Tad trite? Hell yeah but that’s alright]
Mister Armani you have a typo on your very, very chic website. Yes you do. It’s about the usage of ‘a’ and ‘an’. Okay, so having saved you a blooper, can we now talk business? Will you kindly offer me a job in your esteemed organization as an anything? While creative consultant for Armani sounds really cool, I am okay with a proof-reader’s position too. Only if you could fit in the word creative somewhere, err a creative proof-reader maybe. Pretty please?
Just so you know I am not a stickler. It’s just that when you call your frames – frames of life [nice name at that], price it upwards of $150, and have a killer website, you are better off not having a silly typo.
Now, moving on to prettier things, things like luxury.
“Real luxury is just a state of mind that allows you to live each day in a unique and authentic way. “
I am not sure if these are the exact words from the man himself, or thoughts of an over zealous writer at Armani Co. Whatever it is, for anything Armani this definition of real luxury does not work. At best it sounds pretentious and patronizing. Does my bitter interpretation come from the realization that I won’t be able to afford an Armani anytime soon? Possibly.
Coming from a super-luxury brand, how am I supposed to believe this take on real luxury? Humor me please.
First, my sincere respects to a civilization that actually thought of having an expression as profound as this. Kia soo.
Kia soo is a Chinese expression that means the “Fear of missing out.” Fear of missing out on what someone else might have. Fear of missing out on what we have now. Fear of missing out on what others might get. So, one could safely say, Kia soo is what drives us to do what we do.
Does it make Kia soo a good thing? Not necessarily.
But we could make Kia Soo work for us. Finding out the things that we would want to miss out on and the ones that we would like to hold on to.
[This place looks like a typo-free zone to me.]
Believe you me, I tried to make a post of it right after it happened but just couldn’t. Typographical errors often do that to me. They numb me. They render me incapable of doing the only thing I know [or so I think] well.
On the first day of my job, my boss told me it would help me if I were paranoid. Which I was. But then as days go by, I forgot my lessons and the ignominy that follows.
This recent typo episode wasn’t even a typo. As in it wasn’t a spelling mistake nor was it a grammatical error. You could say it was trivial. But it was big enough for the client to call up the account executive and ask for an explanation. So, a typo it was. And I once again pledged to never walk that path again. To be afraid, very afraid.
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.
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.
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.
Caveat: a very self-indulgent post.
