Wokay!

As I mentioned in the previous Fillet, after an interesting, instructive and engaging night spent not sleeping, my brother took me to the gym in the morning.

This was the first time I had ever been to a gym.

The trainer out there made us do stretching exercises to warm up. Then he put us on the treadmills for fifteen minutes each. And then he made us do aerobics for fifteen minutes.

Practically three minutes into the aerobics, which started off with skipping, I was gasping for air. The last time I had done any jogging was just before college, three years ago, when I used to go to Kreeda Sthal with Ishaan and Rishi. The intervening years of neglect had taken their toll.

I took a break for about five or ten minutes, and then went back into the fray. By this time, the trainer was making us perform jumping jacks, hopping exercises, and neck stretching- stuff that was more my speed, but still exhausting.

I capped off with forty-five rounds each on two machines- one where you sit and push a plate metal linked to sixty kilos of weights with your feet, and one where you push a metal cylinder, also linked to weights, with the back of your knee.

On these two particular machines, I fared much better, mostly because the college layout is such that I have to walk almost five kilometres a day, and my legs are the only bits of me that get any exercise. However, much to my chagrin, Tarun informed me later that day that a beginner should not go on these machines on any account.

I found out how right Tarun was the next morning, when I woke up to a dull throbbing in both my legs. It was fully twenty-four hours before I could sit or climb stairs without wincing.

In spite of all this, I’m ready to go back. Only I haven’t woken up early enough since then, and I’m always otherwise occupied in the evenings.

I should definitely sleep early tonight and make another visit tomorrow. Otherwise, as Baldy put it, I will confirm myself as a vussie.

I feel hypocritical. I send mails to other people asking them when they’re going to reply, all while myself being late with the Fillets. I don’t have an excuse, either. Sonali v0.2 has been up and running for two days now.

Anyway, on with the Fillet.

There’s been a long weekend. Of course, while Delhiites are blessed with a <i>really</i> long weekend- Friday to Tuesday, I’m making do with Friday to Monday. Don’t I sound lazy when I say that?

Well, anyway. I came home on Thursday by bus, reaching home around 8 pm, just in time for dinner. After dinner, I did something I hadn’t done for three months- had coffee at Barista. That is possibly one of the primary causes for my sleeplessness that night.

I slept at about half past eleven, after reading Dune for about half an hour. Four hours later, I was forced awake when a squadron of homicidal mosquitoes carried out shock-and-awe tactics on my person. This, coupled with disturbing dreams of Fremen and Muad’dib up to that point did nothing to improve my mood.

I decided to respond to the incessant attacks with chemical warfare, and padded out of my room in search of All Out. All Out lived up to it’s name when I found that we were all out of it. However, I did find Odomos, and applied it liberally to all my exposed skin.

Fortified by my aura of Odomos, I exacted my revenge. The bed was soon littered with mosquito corpses. But, as usual, life behaved like a movie, and I found that vengeance, especially against mosquitos, just leaves you feeling empty. It was four in the morning and I couldn’t get back to sleep.

So I continued to read Dune- not a very wise thing to do, but what the heck. Soon, I grew oppressed by Dune, and went off to check my mail. Sadly, there were no new messages.

At about five, I went back to my room, turned out the light, and lay down again. And in about half an hour, just when I was almost ready to start sleeping again, birds outside my window broke into song.

I gave up. If birds were waking up, it would be inappropriate to go back to sleep. Instead, I went out for a walk.

Safdarjung Enclave at half past five in the morning is not exactly beautiful, but it’s much better than at half past five in the evening. A cool breeze plays upon your face. The sky, which is almost purple to start with, changes to a light greyish-bluish tint- a good approximation is the www.aadisht.net background colour- in a period of less than fifteen minutes. Watching this happen is very wonderful.

I walked all the way to Hauz Khas District Park- the one with the Queen’s bathing tank. The first creature I saw out there was a stray dog.

At half past five in the morning, even the mangiest of strays possesses an air of dignity. This one wasn’t a Hound of the Baskervilles, but it was no slouch either. It’s tail was up, and so were it’s ears. It stared at me with an almost regal air. Such are the wonders that dawn works.

After this, I walked through the park, and smelt the dew evaporating off the grass. And then I climbed up to the roof of the tomb and listened to all the different birds. And I wished that I had carried a Walkman with me, so I could listen to Beautiful Day.

That, in essence, is what this particular Fillet is about. There’s war in Iraq, people lose their loved ones on what amounts to a daily basis, most people are bastitches, but what the heck, dawn makes up for almost all of that.

At about six, I walked back home to prevent my parents from panicking when they woke up and found that they were locked in and I was missing. My general feeling of benevolent lovingkindness towards the world also inspired me to make myself breakfast- scrambled eggs with mustard and cheese, and a Virgin Mary.

About ten minutes after breakfast I discovered that my entire family, due to one reason or the other, had also been awake since at least four in the morning. How richly bizarre.

I had another breakfast shortly after that- cereal and strawberry flavoured dahi.

And then my brother invited me to come to the gym with him, thus capping off a highly interesting early morning. But more about the gym later.

Nobody can call me a fashion plate. I am less bothered about my clothes being colour co-ordinated than Dubya is by world opinion. My method of choosing clothes to wear is simple- I open the cupboard, and take whichever item is at top of the respective stack.

But I do like plain T-shirts, which you can paint your own messages on to.

Not only are T-shirt messages the distilled wisdom of the world, they also provide advertising. The prospect of increasing hits to my site by walking around with www.aadisht.net across my chest is one that appeals to me. So, getting fresh T-shirts, fabric paints and brushes is a priority right now.

There’s a permanent seconds and export rejects sale on near college, and I visited it yesterday to see if they had anything in the way of plain T-shirts. They didn’t.

What they did have were lots and lots of preprinted T-shirts. Very cheap, but alas, providing no reasonable scope for customisation. Sad, but true.

However, they also had a grey T-shirt and bermuda combo for 125 rupees. While I wasn’t really planning to buy bermudas- let’s face it, they are never unwelcome.

So, once I reach home for the long Baisakhi weekend it’s time to go to the Sarojini Nagar market and comparison shop. I will investigate the relative prices of T-shirts (with or without attached bermudas) in Delhi and in Patiala, and obtain instructions from my mum on how to analyse their quality. And then I’ll buy them wherever they are cheaper and better.

Anybody who wants to suggest T-shirt messages other than www.aadisht.net, do mail them or post as a comment.

The reason there’s been an absence of Fillets lately is that I’ve had midsem tests going on, and surprisingly, I’ve been studying instead of composing Fillets. Thus, this news is a bit dated- almost a week old. Anyway, to continue.

Cosmic justice moves in mysterious ways.

Me, Sarker and Vaibhav Anand aka Kanchha were returning from dinner outside about two weeks ago, when Kanchha decided to make a phones call to one of his girlfriends (he has two). He popped into a nearby PCO and asked us to wait.

Not an altogether unreasonable request, you might think, but Kanchha went on to exceed all bounds of propriety by conducting a 2956 seconds (almost 50 minutes) long phone conversation. In the meantime, Sarker and me, who were suffering from chronic sharifapa that night, hung about and muttered imprecations instead of abandoning Kanhchha.

One could claim that 2956 seconds in not really all that long a time. There are people, some of whom receive the W-Fillets in their inboxen, who have performed continuous GK for periods three times as long. That, too, while concurrently solving VMC back exercises and doing a real-time analysis of the GK over ICQ with other Dubyaphiles. And one would be right- it’s not all that long a time to talk to a girlfriend. It is, however, an obscene amount of time to keep your friends waiting.

The midsems intervened, so vengeance had to wait, but I planned to exact is sooner rather than later. But I needn’t have bothered. The Universe proceeded to show Kanchha the error of his ways the very next time we went out.

A promotional stall for a new brand of fizzy jal jeera had been set up in front of Mauji Grocers. We went to investigate, and found that it was handing out free samples. We tried the jal jeera, and found that it was good. Good enough for Kanchha to bend his head down and examine the other flavours on offer in minute detail.

Having finished his examination, Kanchha raised his head. In doing so, he brought it in contact with the little incandescent light cylinder that was providing illumination to the stall. The results were no less spectacular than the exploding gas cylinder I saw recently (See <a href=”http://www.wokay.in/2003/02/28/coffee-bars/”>W-Fillet #9: Wedding Bells III</a>).

What started off as a mere sizzling noise became vastly more entertaining. The first hairs to come in contact flew off Kanchha’s head, smoking as they did so. The hair that did not fly off formed curls that would be the envy of Little Miss Muffet. A few more patches of hair in the close vicinity welded to each other, releasing a foul odour in the process. This odour than lingered about Kanchha’s person for the next twenty four hours, much in the manner of the albatross that haunted the Ancient Mariner.

Kanchha is unabashed, and refuses to see any element of divine retribution in this incident. Of course, me, Sarker and Khera know otherwise.

I don’t know if I’ve ever told you about Gopal’s before. Gopal Sweets is about two or three kilometres down the road from college. It’s a cross between Nirula’s and Evergreen- it’s a sweet and chaat shop on the ground floor, and a (vegetarian) fast food place on the first. For the benefit of my non-Delhi readers, Evergreen is a sweet shop (Indian sweets, that is- for the benefit of my international readers), and Nirula’s is a local fast food chain renowned more for its ice cream than for anything else.

That dispenses with the introduction. Moving along.

Gopal’s first floor is manned mostly by Nepalians, but during lunchtime, a lady handles the cash register. When paying for lunch at Gopal’s I call tis lady aunty, meaning, of course, nothing more than to show respect for someone so obviously more aged than me.

But today she called me uncleji.

I’m a bit flabbergasted. My father was called uncle by a twenty year old when he was twenty-five, and this sparked off a chain of circumstances that eventually led to him getting married- the most important outcome of which, of course, was that I was born, and you are now reading the W-Fillets. I’m twenty, and I’ve been called uncleji by a woman in her thirties. I cannot even imagine the eventual outcome of this.

Then again, this incident could be completely meaningless.

Placements for our batch kicked off today, when Nagarro Software came to pick up pre-final year people from MCA and BE(CSE).

The CGPA cutoff was 7.77. Mine is a lowly 6.00.

Practically everyone from my batch who was above the cutoff submitted their CVs. About ten people attended the PPT (pre-placement talk, that is), and only four didn’t get frustrated through the process and gave both the logical reasoning and the technical written tests. After this, two were called for interviews- Amandeep Batra and Ravinder Kaur.

After discussing the tests with the people who took them, I once again regretted my low CGPA. These blokes, despite having CGPAs in stratospheric regions, knew practically nothing in the test. I, on the other hand, seemed to know the answers to the questions that particularly frustrated them.

This came out even more after the interviews- Batra forgot all about virtual functions and virtual classes and flubbed a question on semaphores while giving his interview, and Ravinder Kaur couldn’t remember that the 8-Queens problem is solved by backtracking and neither BFS nor DFS; or what friend functions are for.

In the meantime, I was hanging around the interview hall, coaching a bunch of people on interprocess communication and object oriented programming- people whose CGPAs are much superior to mine.

That’s the bad news. I don’t study, so I never make it pass the first hurdle – CGPA- for campus placement. Then I wind up coaching people who know much less than me, but have much higher CGPAs. And the most frustrating thing is that CGPA is the only thing making life difficult for me. I’m pretty sure I can top all the written tests and interviews, and put up a fair bit of fight in group discussions.

And now here’s the good news.

The best companies- Infosys, TCS, Maruti (though of course Maruti only takes Mech Engineers)- that come to TIET for placements don’t care for CGPA. They don’t put a minimum CGPA criterion at all. They take their own qualifying test. So, getting placed even in Infosys shouldn’t be too difficult for me- provided, that is, that Infosys comes to campus next year.

But, of course, there’s a more important issue to be addressed- should I go for placement at all? It’s all very confusing.

Those of you who are fortunate or unfortunate enough not to be Punjabi by either birth or by nature wouldn’t know about Mirza.

Mirza and Sahiba, along with Heer and Ranjha, are the Punjabi equivalent of Romeo and Juliet. Circa 1500 AD, Mirza loved Sahiba, and for doing so, was pursued on horseback by about two thousand of her outraged relatives, who then proceeded to beat him to death with hockey sticks.

I’m not too sure how they got hockey sticks in 1200 AD, but I’m recounting the tale as best I can. I have heard various disparate versions from various disparate sources, and legends do tend to get a little embellished over time. It is quite possible that the incident took place later than 1200 AD, and that something more basic than hockey sticks were utilised, and that the number was closer twenty than two thousand. However, I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure.

However, one thing all the versions do agree upon is that Sahiba was a full-fledged, genuine Punjabi peasant girl.

The average Punjabi believes that the full-fledged, genuine Punjabi peasant girl is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. In this matter I find myself in disagreement with the average Punjabi. The full-fledged, genuine Punjabi peasant girl, after a lifetime of tucking into “two numbers aloo paranthas” and very often even more for breakfast, is the possessor of several cubic metres of backside, and usually has more facial hair than the average Punjabi peasant boy. For this reason, I find the whole Mirza-Sahiba affair even more tragic. If Mirza had been beaten up by two thousand people for falling in love with, say, Meg Ryan, or Preity Zinta, there would at least have been some point to the whole contretemps.

But anyway. Returning to the present moment.

The reason I bring Mirza up is that, as I recently told PP the Ironman, I am currently obsessed with the song Mirza from the American Desi soundtrack. It is one of those few songs- much in the manner of Mitwa from Lagaan- that makes you want to break out in dance immediately, whether you are on stage, in a car, on in front of your PC. It has an uncomplicated beat, and is full of joie de vivre. I plug it without reservation (and, no, I don’t get money for doing so).

Punjabi MC vs. Surinder Shinda- (American Desi)- Mirza. Get your hands on it.

(I’m not too sure when this was actually posted, because a bug in my CMS reset the post time to the time of the last comment. I’ve set the post date to 24 March 2003 to keep it in sequence.)

Disaster has befallen. My bua wants us to move to Sainik Farms.

Those of you who were subscribed to the W-Files about eight months ago would remember that I had discussed the terrible shape my current house’s plumbing is in- the pipes leak about 4000 litres of water a day (which fortunately, flows back into the ground- but it’s wastage anyway). I also mentioned that my family was keen to knock down the house, and rebuild it from scratch, and that Ishaan hoped that this task would be performed using vast quantities of high explosive.

What eventually emerged was that the house wouldn’t be knocked down and rebuilt from scratch, but merely have it’s insides knocked out and have the construction redone- no new foundation, or basement, or some such. In the interim period between the good old house and the new improved house, we would have been living in a rented house nearby- an ideal solution, in my opinion.

But, alas, not in my bua’s opinion.

I should mention that since as long as I can remember- and very probably since her early childhood- my bua has been obsessed with having a huge house with a huge garden. While she does not exactly aspire to live in Rashtrapati Bhavan one day- she will settle for nothing less than 2000 square yards. Her proclaimed idea of a good time is to sit in a garden and do nothing. I have some doubts as to the sincerity of this claim. She very rarely sits in a garden and does nothing- what she actually does is go to work early in the morning, come back in the evening and eat, and then watch soap operas on Star Plus while the rest of the family has dinner. But I digress.

Anyway, since reconstructing a house is stressful, and we can’t afford to expand the garden size there, my bua is now interested in moving to Sainik Farms.

Those of you not in Delhi should know a little bit of background about Sainik Farms. It’s a bunch of illegal farmhouses without farms. All these houses are huge, and most have huge gardens. They’re tailormade to my bua’s requirements. Also, since the whole place is unauthorised- the houses were just built without any sort of authorisation- they are cheap. 20 Megarupees for a 2000-2400square yard house built over two floors.

Unfortunately, Sainik Farms isn’t just in the middle of nowhere. It is nowhere.

Sainik Farms is just miles upon miles of huge houses behind ten-foot walls. The walls, by the way, are straight out of Pink Floyd’s The Wall– high, menacing, and forbidding, with shards of broken glass sticking out. The effect of surrounding a huge garden with such walls is to put you in mind of a lunatic asylum- lots of nice open space for the inmates to walk around in, but just you try to get out.

The roads are half-lane lightly tarred dirt tracks. Since it is illegal, there are no electricity or water connections, you have to pump out your own water and dump it back into the ground, and as for electricity, you buy it from a generator pool at almost ten rupees a unit. There are no markets, one can easily get lost on the way to one’s own home, and half the people living there are smugglers.

It’s not that I’m very attached to my current house (I am, but we’ll discuss that later), but I can state with no small amount of emphasis that I do not want to move to Sainik Farms. It takes a minimum of twenty minutes- in a car- just to get from your gate to the main road. By contrast, here at my current home in Safdarjung Enclave, I can be at Ishaan or Rishi’s house in three minutes on foot, the local market in ten minutes, and a bigger market- Green Park- in half an hour- or ten minutes if driving. From my house, I can hear, on a good day, three rock bands practicing in the neighbourhood. If you ever hear anything in Sainik Farms other than the Sounds of Silence, it’s the noise of generator sets. Behind my house, there is a small park where the neighbourhood kids play badminton and goggle at me in stunned stupefecation as I pass them by. As I have already mentioned, in Sainik Farms at least half your neighbours are smugglers who wouldn’t think twice about mowing you down with their Jaguars or BMWs.

And as far as greenery and gardens are concerned- my house is ten minutes away from both Deer Park and Nehru Park- several square kilometres of foliage stretching to the horizon, and you don’t even have to bother about the upkeep- the Municipal Committee does that for you.

Fortunately, my father would rather buy a house in Sainik Farms, if at all, as an intermediary, and move about five years later to some place like Friends Colony. That’s better than Sainik Farms, but even there, in deference to my Bua’s wishes, the house will be on at least one thousand six hundred square yards, with lots of garden.

It seems that I am fated, as I move through life, to move to larger and larger houses, and smaller and smaller communities. At the tender age of two, my nuclear family became a joint family when my parents moved out of Azad Apartments to the family house in Safdarjung Enclave. The resultant deprivation of stimulating people that I faced is the probable reason that my social skills were set back ten years- it was not until as recently as six years ago that I started to look people in the eye when I talked to them.

Now, just when I had adapted to my circumstances, and come up with the brilliantly pro-social concept of the W-Fillets, I am to move to a place where my chances of interaction with other people reduce even further, sacrificed to a garden. Instead of friends and family, I will be surrounded by flowers. When I want stimulating discussion, I will have to hold conversations with vegetables instead of gabbing with iCow until three in the morning. It makes me sick.

Ishaan has been asking me for some time to collect photos of his farewell from whomsoever might be in Delhi, scan them and let me have them for his site..

Rishi provided about four photos, and Zubin provided none, claiming he didn’t have any of passable quality. Sabina and Naomi provided not only photos, but also their slambooks this week.

Yesterday, I leafed through their slambooks and basked in a warm glow of nostalgia. Then I felt like a bit of a bastitch for doing so.

I don’t know aobut other people here, but I take memory very seriously. I guess Sabina and Naomi don’t find their slambooks all that private if they lent them out unasked for in the first place, but personally, it felt like a violation of other people’s private memories to go through them. After all, what’s written in a slambook has been written specifically towards the posessor thereof. I do enjoy sharing my meories, but only at times places, and with people of my choosing. If I had a slambook, I’d have a few reservations of just putting it in an envelope and giving it somebody for him to form his own memories.

Then again, maybe it’s just three years of objectt oriented programming taking over and insisting that everything be classified into public, private and protected. A blog is public, but a slambook is private.

And counterpoint again- if a slambook is actually as private as I think it is- it’s gratifying that people have enough faith in me to trust me with their private memories.

But still, I am very glad that I only leafed through and didn’t actually read any of the entries full blast.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.- Goethe

The gods gave man fire and he invented fire engines.  They gave him love and he invented marriage.- Anonymous

Insanity is considered a ground for divorce, though by the very same token it is the shortest detour to marriage.- Wilson Mizner

Marriage is for insecure people. (Chapati or Chips, by Nisha Minhas)

Marriage is just a way of getting out of an embarrassing pause in conversation. (Four Weddings and a Funeral)

What with Vishal’s wedding, and the wholehearted disappointment among Dubyaphiles that he wasn’t marrying the airportgirl, I have been pondering the whole concept of marriage.

Concerning the four people who got married while I was in Class X and XI- one marriage has already ended, another is in dire straits, and two are sailing along with no indication of trouble. That’s only a 50% success rate.

After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that marriages, and for that matter, all interpersonal relationships of all sorts fail due to mental laziness- not using your imagination enough.

To start with, most people I’ve seen- especially in Punjab- don’t give any thought to marriage. They just do it, without considering why they’re doing it. Practically everyone in my batch out here in Patiala plans to get married within five years of graduating. Why? Because it’s the expected thing. So far, so good. As long as you’re just doing the expected thing and conforming to stereotype, there aren’t many chances of things going wrong. But, alas, Murphy’s Law has to be factored in.

While getting married because that’s the way it’s always been done may have worked fifty, twenty, or even ten years ago, it won’t work any longer. The primary reason for this is cheap, ubiquitious and constant cable television, and the Internet.

A hundred years ago, the only way to stimulate your imagination was to read books. Fifty years ago, you could also go to the movies. But you can’t go to the movies everyday, and very few people take the time to read. But now there’s cable television- which, unlike both movies and books, pushes content right to you, and does it all the time. And after ten or fifteen years of low-grade mental stimulation, even the most unimaginative person is going to want adventure and excitement and really wild things from his or her life. And when he or she finds that he’s not getting it from his or her marriage, trouble will start brewing.

And the entire tragedy is that then thing which started problems- imagination- is also the only thing that can fix it. You need imagination to appreciate adventure and excitement and really wild things when they aren’t there, but- and here’s the important thing- you also need imagination to create adventure and excitement and really wild things. Once you’ve crossed the very important threshold of wanting to make your life wonderful and interesting, all you need is imagination and a little initiative to actually do so. But instead of taking the next step and coming up with a solution to the problems, people get scared. They’ve found that imagination has opened up a Pandora’s Box, so they don’t use it anymore. And that’s a bad thing, because then the problems just stay and simmer.

Every youth survey published in the past few years has stated that a majority of people claim that they want their parents or extended families to arrange their marriages for them because they’re so busy concentrating on their careers that they have no time for romance in their life. The inference- that they want romance, but they aren’t willing to go out and make it, but want it handed to them on a plate- is very scary. Even more so, when you consider that in India most people take the jobs and career paths they get- not the ones they’re most suited for or passionate about. If you’ve got- for lack of a better word- romance in your job, you’ll probably be able to create it in your marriage too. But if all you’ve got is a vacuum, something’s got to collapse inwards soon, and chances are it’ll be you or your marriage.

So, what do we have until now? Oh yes. First, people get married because getting married is a family tradition- everyone’s been doing it for thousands of years, so why rock the boat. But, due to excessive cable TV and other cultural stimulants, they think they’re doing it because they’re in love, or so that they can infuse their lives with romance and wonder and excitement. However, due to mental laziness, very few people actually use their imaginations and work towards the actual infusion. The net result is that they become disillusioned and the marriage enters dire straits. Then they become miserable, their kids become miserable, and everybody around them becomes miserable.

So you can remedy the situation in three ways. Firstly, don’t get married. More and more people are doing this, and more power to them. You don’t need marriage for companionship when you have your friends, it’s economic benefits are pretty irrelevant in this day and age, and as far as sex is concerned, hatheli zindabad! Marriage is one of the most unimaginative things you can do. It’ll lock any relationship you might have with a person into a set pattern, and prevent true innovation.

Alternately, lose any illusion that marriage is romantic. What it is, is an agrarian age economic institution designed to prevent wealth from leaking away. You can make it romantic if you want to, but you can make anything romantic if you want to. Witness the W-Fillets- they make a drab and dreary existence living among the Punjabis seem interesting. Get married if you feel societal pressure or familial pressure to do so, but don’t expect your marriage to provide you with adventure and excitement and really wild things. Those are totally dependent on you.

Or finally, use your illusion, and go all out and bring on the excitement and adventure and really wild things yourself. Since this is easier said than done- people can’t even do it with their day to day lives- I would not recommend this at all to most of the readers of these Fillets. Not unless you’re already passionate about life and whatever you do.

Everybody else, just don’t get married. Your marriage will just become a wall between you and everyone else. It’ll become a meaningless substitute for any genuine achievement you’re capable of accomplishing. Don’t go there. It’s not worth it.