25 Random Things About Me

[Useless Warning: An obscenely long post. However, the fact that you’ve even come up to this web page shows that you enjoy reading utter rubbish. So it doesn’t really matter if I waste fifteen minutes of your time instead of five. :-P]

Hell. Nobody has ever tagged me. In fact, I don’t even know how one gets tagged and how does one even come to know when he gets tagged. Just that I’ve been reading this 25 Random Things post on so many blogs now that I am frustrated that nobody has asked me to write for the same.

Also, whenever I’ve read about tags, they’re about something, ahem, very specific. A few instances that I can recall: 7 aasanas of Yoga that hurt your groin real bad, 6 unforgettable cockroaches in your bathroom, 5 occasions when you’ve secretly scratched your crotch and nobody has noticed, 4 hair saloons in Himalayas where you’d like to have a Dalai Lama cut, 3 mistakes of your life (Does that also resemble the name of a book?) You get the point, don’t you?

So, seeing that this is a very easy writing assignment (since I have to write random rubbish and not specific shit) and, being the egomaniac that I am, I tag myself.

Obviously the post is going to be a pretty long one, for as far as digression, randomness and weirdness goes, I’m supremely kick-ass. :-D

1. I detest having baths. In a week, I bath for at most 4 times. My all-time record of not having a bath is 14 days; and I do not intend to break it. However, whenever I do have a bath, I scrub my body fiercely. I feel that scrubbing would make me fairer. I take at least 20 minutes to have a bath. I bathe with the intensity of Shah-Jahaan coming down from the heavens and cleaning the Taj Mahal.

2. I love walking – not only while chatting with my friends, even alone. Sometimes, I just walk down to my shop for the sake of it. Also I think that I think best while I walk. It is probably because I have a branch of my brain in my knees. Something like East-Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and Pakistan, you know.

3. I eat less than a bird. I rarely feel hungry. The only time I eat really well is when I'm with my friends. I skip meals whenever I don’t feel like eating. I still remember how, in one of the dark phases of my life, I spent days only on a glass of milk in the morning and half a chapaati (chewed with utter disgust for half an hour) for dinner at night. I don’t know if I enjoy starving, but I know that it has not made a better person out of me.

4. As soon as I enter my house, I go straight to my room and change my clothes. I feel restless till the time I do not change my clothes.

5. I vomit at least once a week. I actually enjoy it to an extent; I feel I deserve it, although I have no idea why I feel that way. Sometimes, after vomitting, when I look into the mirror with tears in my eyes, I feel like a little bit of everything in me has come out with that stinking mess.

6. I love typing through T9 on my cellphone. I have saved more than a thousand – yes, a thousand – Hindi and Urdu words in the T9. You speak a long, casual sentence in Hindi and chances are that you’d be able to write it down completely on my cellphone with T9.

7. Whenever I put something in the microwave oven to heat up, I keep staring at the food inside. I have this feeling that the oven would explode because … heck, I don’t know why! I just feel it’d explode and hence I switch off the microwave 10-15 seconds before time.

8. I have a nightmare every time I sleep – even if I sleep for an hour in the afternoon (Please note that I have not used the word ‘dream’). One of my friends says it is because I do not have a peaceful soul.

9. I write most of my poetry on my cell phone.

10. My biggest regret in life is pursuing the Chartered Accountancy course.

11. I hate LK Advani more than anybody else in this world – just for taking out that Rath Yatra. And sometimes I feel I would’ve hated him even more had I been a Hindu.

12. The person I hate second is Parthiv Patel. For dropping a simple catch of Simon Katich when India, in the final test-match, was killing Australia on their own turf, probably sometime in 2000. That retard dropped the catch and Katich saved the match – depriving India of its first test-series win against Australia in Australia.

13. I am an insomniac. It gets really ugly at nights, for not a single night passes without the thought of committing suicide. I need help, I know that, but I do not know how to ask for it and to whom.

14. I am a sheer pessimist. On a bad day, not only would I tell you that the glass is half fucking empty, but also that the part of the glass that is full is not water but a colourless, odourless deadly poison that’d make you vomit blood as soon as you finish drinking it.

15. I was very shy when I was a kid. I remember this incident even today. I was only in Class-I. A girl from my school, GB, had come up to my shop (it was in Apollo Towers then) and started talking to me. You would not believe it: I just started crying! I was petrified because I was talking to a girl in front of so many people including my Dad!

16. I hate attending marriage parties and other (dozens of) marriage-related functions. Everything about a lavish wedding makes me feel sick.

17. Once when I had gone to Hoshangabad on an audit assignment, I had a guest-room completely for myself. It was the first time I was given that much of privacy and freedom. Before and after having my bath, for four straight days, I had roamed around completely naked in the room, flinging my clothes and undergarments here and there – just for the sake of it.

18. I believe that film-making is the most creative, exciting, fulfilling job in the world.

19. I never crack vulgar, double-meaning jokes in a conversation – and I hate it when somebody else does, especially in front of women. I believe there are so many things in this world – including the most ordinary things, the most mundane situations – one can derive humour from.

20. I want to serve time in a jail, probably one or two years. Just for a kick.

21. I love dining at Irani hotels and dhabas (and I often get pissed off having a dinner at a 4-star / 5-star hotel). They serve great food and they serve it quick. The only problem they have is that you can’t take gals there. But then, I don’t have any gal that I can take out to dinner in any damn hotel, so what do I care.

22. My favourite book is Shantaram and the movie that I have watched the most number of times is Ghulam. You can call it adolescent love.

23. In my next birth, I really want to be born in a metropolitan city to a high-society, unconventional, filthy-rich, convent-educated family. And I want to be born as a girl: a flawlessly fair, stunningly beautiful hoor.

24. I want to spend a night with a prostitute in a cheap hotel and befriend her. I don’t know if I want to have sex with her or not, but I just want to do it. In fact, I'd love to be friends with a lot of prostitutes, if I get the opportunity, that is. And I seriously don't know why I feel that way!

25. I intensely dislike editing what all I write. And that is because I intensely dislike reading what I write. (There is a hint of satire too in this, by the way :-P)


I tag no one. Why should I tag anyone when no one had tagged me? On the contrary, I give myself a Life Time Tag, that'd give me the right to write on any tag that I come across on any of the blogs and find interesting.

In My Next Birth…

…I want to be born in a metropolitan city to a high-society, unconventional, filthy-rich, convent-educated family. And I want to be born as a girl: a flawlessly fair, stunningly beautiful hoor.

For they have a perfect face: the kind of face you could draw an axis in the middle of and find an exact mirror image on both sides; the kind that displays how faultless God can be when he desires to. They have moles at the right places – one on the upper lip, one below the lower lip, a couple on each cheek, one on the forehead, one on the neck – that look like rich embellishment on their glowing faces. They have the brightest pink lips with not the slightest tinge of a purple or a dull red. They have waist-length hair that are as soft as threads of silk and they could arrange and re-arrange, colour and re-colour as per their whims. They have feet that are more beautiful than most faces; they have nails that are no less than a piece of modern art.

For they have everything they want in their lives: without doing one bit of toil for any of it. They have it all: the most expensive of dresses, and the most sensuous of lingerie; the most cherished of leather bags and the most jeweled of footwear; the widest range of colours in glares, hairbands, hairpins, nail-polishes, lip-sticks, and the largest repository of ‘casual’ wear that the ordinary cannot afford to wear ‘casually’; the latest iPod and cell phone, and an infinite supply of cash and credit cards.

For they have guys drooling over them. Boyfriends? Get a new one and kick the older one out. Or, kick the older one out and get a new one – whichever arrangement suits the monthly mood. Their boyfriends are like the unkempt nail-polish on the nails of their beautiful feet: scrape away the loose ones with a pinch of fingernails, or use a chemical-remover for the sticky ones. Love and love-making is not winning an improbable game of chance; it is a matter of choice.

But all this materialistic gibberish is nothing when compared to the real thing.

When I – a filthy-rich, megalopolis-bred hoor that I want to be – stand naked in front of a body-length mirror (in a bathroom that’s nothing less than a ceramic Tajmahal) I want to see, through my pearl-like eyes, the most majestic form of art that God has ever created: A spotlessly fair skin flowing from my forehead to my foot; an impeccable outline of a body; the shapeliest of shoulders, breasts, hands, thighs, legs; and an erotic, slight fuzz between my legs. I cannot imagine the amount of glee this reflection of my immense beauty would give me – and also the amount of arrogance. I cannot, because years of ugliness clog one’s mind’s eye.

It is with this ecstasy, this pride and this arrogance that I want to live with in my next life. Whoever’s eyes I gaze into, whatever the world I step in, people look at me, and they gawk and gasp with amazement and appreciation and jealousy. And all I do is secretly smile in my heart – the secret evil smile of a hoor.

P.S. If I do not get to be reborn as a hoor, I want to be reborn as a stray dog or a stray pig. It's either that or this. Period.

Fireproof

A few days ago, I started reading this book, Fireproof, written by an Indian Express journalist, Raj Kamal Jha. I read the blurb of the book and found it quite interesting: the book was a work of fiction in the backdrop of the Gujarat riots narrated by a man who had lost his deformed baby – “Ithim” – while it/him was still a foetus inside his pregnant wife.

After a few pages into the book, I felt the writing was extremely (well, I don’t know if this is the right word) … fake. There was so much of faked up agony in the protagonist’s voice that I simply had to keep the book down – the loathsome things he wanted to say about the riots made me loathe his voice itself. Also, there's this particular chapter in the book that I opened up randomly: it described the protagonist cutting up the body parts of a young girl ("Good Girl") with a kitchen knife. Her crime was that she had mocked the bloody mass of "Ithim" and referred to it as a monkey. Although I wasn't able to force myself to read even half of the novel, I still felt there could've been a better (and perhaps less gory) way of describing the evil that the riots had surfaced in the protagonist's character.

Moreover, I felt the writer was somewhat trying to impress the reader with his craft: extremely short sentences packed in stacks, a lot of one-word sentences, and one-liners with a “punch” thrown up as a separate paragraph – and stuff like that. One probably gets recognized in the literary circle for all this, I believe, but it bogs down an ordinary reader at times – I swear.

I was wondering if writing in such a way depicts nothing but the writer’s conscious efforts (and not a natural, free-flowing ability) to affect the subconscious of the reader. I was wondering if everyone who learns the craft of writing at some point of time in his/her life ends up purposefully adding such embellishments (mostly, if not always, in an irritating way) to all their write-ups all their lives. Mind you, this guy’s a hotshot editor way up in Indian Express; he must’ve written some hundreds of incisive articles in un-experimented English. Yet, he’s come up with something like that – to highlight and get praised for the differences his writing-style has in fiction and non-fiction?

I can only guess.