A train journey

I have not been inside a railway station since May 2005 (when I first landed in Mumbai)... and finally I get to take a train from Chennai to Katpadi tomorrow afternoon.
I am going to be spending the weekend at Sonia's place and while I am sure we are going to be chattering away to the dozen, I have also picked up a few DVDs that I have been wanting to watch for sometime now.
When I think about the travelling I have done for the past two years, just airports come to mind, those clinical places each of which look the same, somehow they are not as alive as railway stations are (esp early mornings, I sort of missed the Chai Chai part).
Now my parents are convinced that I have no idea how to travel by trains, so my dad decided to try and get me prepared:
Dad: " You booked a second class ticket?"
Me: "Yes, nothing else was available".
Mum: "But how will you manage?"
Me: "Its second class, not unreserved.."
Dad: "There will be all kinds of people"
Me: "I know, I used to travel by trains before, remember?"
Dad: "Do you know you have to find the platform before boarding your train, its not like the airport, where you find your boarding gate so easily.."
Mum: "The kingfisher people will not be there to take your luggage and help you through even if you are late. You cannot be late for the train.."
And so on and on...
Now I am slightly flustered, I have started writing down notes that I can refer to once I enter the station -
a) Check my tickets are safe
b) Check which platform the train starts from
c) Check where my coach is
d) Double check with the passenger list stuck on the coach
e) Call Sonia, mum at her office, dad at home, call my colleagues who are laughing their heads off betting that I would lose my way...
f) Remember not to drink the water they serve on the train
g) Remember not to take anything offered by other passengers (courtesy lecture provided by my colleagues)
h) If after all this, I can settle down and enjoy my journey, then try and do that

Really, sometimes people seem to think that just because a person seems to be er.. a "spoilt brat" (which I am not!!), she would not be able to find her way through a railway station
And I have two glorious nights that I get to spend at Vellore, poor Sumit, he must be planning to stay at the hospital instead (that is if Sonia has really really warned him about our tendencies to yak away non-stop!!!)
And its still the train journey that excites me the most....

Rants for the day

Dear Friendly Guy at the gym,
I am really grateful to you for having rescued my mobile when it fell off from the top of the treadmill. You were really sweet then, but talking to me when I am jogging at a speed of 8 kph is not a smart thing to do.
You see, all I can do at that time is make a series of grunts, each of which needs to be interpreted by an expert linguist who understands the language of Piggywiggyland of which I happen to be the President. So please do not ask me to repeat myself just because you thought you heard gibberish.
And do not, I repeat, do not ever complain of how you are able to maintain a constant pace of 10 kph only for ten minutes. With my average holding time of one minute at a speed of 8 kph, the last thing I need to know is how badly you are doing and yet are a million times better than me. I tackle the treadmill dreaming that I am an athelete under training, and for you to so rudely awaken me from that blissful state is nothing short of murder.
The next time you see me running in one place, please do not stop to ask me which college I am studying in/where I am from/if I know Hindi/if I like to party!!
I am in the midst of rediscovering my true self (having started to read increasingly inspiring books such as Mills and Boon which take up my entire spare time and my reducing brain power) and do not have the time to answer questions that ask me about myself.
But please do continue the good work, you can catch my mobile phone anytime it falls down, as I said, you still have my gratitude for that, and that is a commodity that is right now well established with many such good samartians!!

Of trips to doctors

I had to accompany my mother to a doctor today so that she could have a quick check-up.
Unfortunately the doctor happened to be a pediatrist too and the place was pretty crowded. Since we stay way out of the city, there are no entertainment avenues available here. I can just imagine a family finishing their tea and saying,"There seems nothing good on TV. Let's go to the doc. It's cheaper than going into the city. Costs us just 50 bucks and junior here can get his shot on time!"
So the entire family dresses in their best, the mother and father, two sisters and junior (who is about 6 months old) and then, they call their neighbours with kids, and decide to go together.
Once they are at the doctor's, they start to catch up on gossip, and start screaming, trying to drown out the voices of their bawling kids! And all those babies are surely training to be sopranos, I heard no bases in those squeals!
After we waited for about one and a half-hours, we finally got to see the doc and left, no more pediatricians, better stick to the general practioners unless you have no choice.

Theatre Nisha - my first experience of a play in Chennai

I finally got to see a play directed and staged by Theatre Nisha at the Alliance de Francaise.
The programme was actually a rendition of four short stories, unfortunately, I missed the first one and seated myself just in time for the start of the second one.
This story dealt with lesbians and how the society is responsible for some of them becoming so. It was a daring theme to be played to a Chennai audience no doubt, and though the acting for this story was way below par, they did make us sit on the edge of our seats, because of the brilliant screenplay. The story was told through the eyes of a small girl sent to live with one of her aunts and the rest unfolds from there.
What struck me most was the use of language to display emotion, the rythmical lines were written to strike a chord in the audience, but it was a discordant chord for me, I do not want to hear words such as "languishing eyes and alabastor skin not-withstanding, she was spurned in favour of gossamer shirts..." from a character who is supposed to be thirteen years old.
So while I appreciated the subject as well as the screenplay over-all, the language came across as forced and the actors seemed uncomfortable with the play overall. But kudos to the director to have selected this topic!
The next story was about a painter and his fifteen-year muse, the actor was superb here and when he began to sing, did capture the audience's attention with his melodies.
The last story was the best of the lot, it was about the musings of a woman on courtesans, in particular her neighbours. This was a monologue and unless the actor is skilled, the audience can easily lose their attention, but the actress playing this was experienced and her use of tone and modulation(ah, that long lost skill) alongwith a witty and at-times catty dialogue held us suspended in the theatre, straining to listen to her, laughing at some of her atrocious statements "Did she think that I had done an M.Ed to teach her daughter on what to wear for whom, pyjamas for the Punjabis, lenghas for the Gujaratis??" ending with the statement,"Oh, it must be another apartment!", the typical Indian way of explaining away blunders in society when one marks on a well-known person's behaviour was par comparison.
Definitely a troupe to watch out for - Theatre Nisha.

Quotes - Jerry Seinfeld

Seinfeld is a show that I have enjoyed watching, including the number of re-runs of each show, none of which I missed if I could help it.
Some quotes that I love from this show:
1) ...I once had a leather jacket that got ruined in the rain. Why does moisture ruin leather? Aren't cows outside a lot of the time? When it's raining, do cows go up to the farmhouse, "Let us in! We're all wearing leather! Open the door! We're going to ruin the whole outfit here!"
2) I was the best man at the wedding. If I'm the best man, why is she marrying him?
3) ...I was in front of an ambulance the other day, and I noticed that the word "ambulance" was spelled in reverse print on the hood of the ambulance. And I thought, "Well, isn't that clever." I look in the rear-view mirror, I can read the word "ambulance" behind me. Of course while you're reading, you don't see where you're going, you crash, you need an ambulance. I think they're trying to drum up some business on the way back from lunch.
4) Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason
5) "I actually owe it to society to do something about this. I can't sit by and allow this to go on. It's a moral issue is what it is."
"You can't compromise your principles."
"How am I going to live with myself?"
"Can't live."
"I'm not religious but I certainly know where to draw the line."
"This country needs more people like you."
"Don't sell yourself short saying 'God bless you' to every Tom, Dick and Harry at great personal risk."
"I believe strongly in that as you know."
"There should be more people like us."
"That's why the world's in the shape that it's in."
6) "She's got a big crush on David Letterman, I mean a big crush. She talks about him all the time. Suppose I go up to David Letterman. He works at NBC, I work at NBC. I explain my situation. He agrees to meet her. They go out. They fall madly in love. And she dumps me for David Letterman!"
"This is your plan?"
"No, no, I'm just thinking."
"I don't think you are."
7) "I don't even drink wine. I drink Pepsi."
"You can't bring Pepsi."
"Why not?"
"Because we're adults."
"You're telling me that wine is better than Pepsi? No way wine is better than Pepsi."
"I'll tell ya, George, I don't think we want to walk in there and put a big plastic jug of Pepsi in the middle of the table."
"I just don't like the idea that any time there's a dinner invitation, there's this annoying little chore that goes along with it."
"You know, you're getting to be an annoying little chore yourself."
8) "I don't like to carry my wallet. My osteopath says that it's bad for my spine. Throws my hips off kilter."
9) "So, attractive one day, not attractive the next."
"Have you come across this?"
"Yes, I am familiar with this syndrome. She's a two-face."
"Like the Batman villain?"
"If that helps you."
"So if I ask her out again, I don't know who's showing up -- the good, the bad, or the ugly."
10) "Are you going to tell your parents you're still alive?"
"No. They could use the break."
11) "A relationship is an organism. You created this thing and then you starved it, so it turned against you. Same thing happened to the Blob."
12) "Women go after doctors like men go after models. They want someone with knowledge of the body. We just want the body."
13) "Now listen, let's keep an eye on each other tonight. In case one of us gets in a bad conversation, we should have a signal that you're in trouble so the other one can get us out of it."
"How old are you?"
14) "So what do you do?"
"I'm a comedian."
"Are you? Let me ask you something. Where do you get your material?"
"I hear a voice."
"What kind of voice?"
"A man's voice, but he speaks in German so I have to get a translator."
"How come you keep tapping your head?"
"It's a nervous tic. I'm on L-Dopa."
15) "Did you find out who stabbed him?"
"Yeah, it turns out it was his ex-girlfriend."
"Well, you're not going near this hooligan anymore."
"Well, I don't know. I mean, think about it, Jerry. There must be something exciting about this guy if he can arouse that kind of passion. I mean, to be stab-worthy. You know, it's kind of a compliment."
"Yeah, too bad he didn't get shot. He could have been the one."
16) "Isosceles. You know, I love the name Isosceles. If I had a kid, I would name him Isosceles. Isosceles Kramer."
17) "Artistic integrity. Where did you come up with that? You're not artistic and you have no integrity."
18) "Rock paper scissors match."
"Alright! Rock beats paper!"
"I thought paper covered rock."
"Nah, rock flys right through paper."
"Well, what beats rock?"
"Nothing beats rock."

The Art of Drinking and Indian Males

Dinner with a colleague who got married recently tonight opened my eyes to one fascinating aspect of the Indian male - they drink at a speed which is incomprehensible.
I have always believed in having a drink, making conversation,sipping and enjoying the different concotions that a bartender can serve up, unfortunately, the tendency of the males seems to be in guzzling down one drink after another, with no attention to what is being thrown back like that
I have had drinks with a total of about 300 guys (including dinner parties etc), and have never seen more than 2% of them actually paying attention to their drink, in short, drinking as an art form is not recognised here
Drinking is meant to get drunk, not an activity to enjoy or use as a means to catch up with friends anymore
Its really a pity when you think of that....
On the other hand, the friends of mine who are non-Indian seem to have got this concept and actually enjoy drinking, can the difference be that drinking is still taboo in India and so, when allowed to drink, there is excessive compulsive drinking rather than the enjoyable aperitif it should be treated as...
And at the rates the drinks are sold at here, you would have thought people would try to make the most of them!!!

Of Nitwits, Lackwits and the In-betweens

Through the past month, I have realised that there are three types of men:
a) Nitwits
b) Lackwits
c) In-betweens
The Nitwits are the idiots who think that they can behave like ninnies and sissies, they have no brains and do not realise that a major portion of their anatomy is missing!
The Lackwits have no sense of humour, look askance at people who know how to laugh and do not realise that they are missing a chunk of their soul
The in-betweens are those who have a bit of humour and brains and unfortunately do not know how to use either one!!!