ode to a raincoat

O pink thing

all-plastic lining,

inside deep

i wail and weep

at the loss of you

my shield most true.

The skies so bleak

do seem to speak

"the thing so pink

is gone we think.

t'was so gay

and did so sashay"

O lining so true, I will miss you.

What once was pink, is now all blue.

sangria in the sun

so here it is, random porn-sound-inducing pictures from my trip around europe.

for the fastidious:

- we started in barcelona (where we'd gone on work)

- flew 5 nights later to seville for 2 nights

- did a day trip to a small town called ronda

- got back to seville and flew out on the second morning to amsterdam

- 2 nights in amsterdam

- then train-ed it to a town in the rhine valley called koblenz

- at koblenz, we boarded a boat for a slow-cruise down the rhine river and got off at a pretty (but sleepy) town called bingen

- some hours of sleep, and we boarded a series of trains for the prettiest town ever in the black forest area

- schilltach, half a day

- on to triberg by train, home to the recipe of the black forest cake and germany's highest waterfall

- from triberg, we train-ed our way right through the night (slept some hours in strasbourg station) and woke up in paris!

- 3 nights in paris

- flew to istanbul on the fourth morning

- 5 nights in istanbul

- turkey turkey you are beautiful!

- back to BOM!

turkey, turkey, you are beautiful

phew! back from a 2 week-long holiday across europe. excellent, to say the least. pics and details to follow. for now, it's good to be back!

to all you kiddies out there: please do not become this person

i have a peeve, i just re-stumbled over it.

catching up with people you haven't spoken to/seen in a long while, only to have them not ask you ANYTHING about how you're doing.

you know, i'm off the mark running and asking away questions relevant to the other person, and not a peep in return, not even to the effect of "so, what's happening with you?"

and that's a bullshit question, by the way- 'what's happening with you?'

it's like you can't be bothered to cast your mind back to even one salient fact about the other person, and frame a more relevant/interesting question. like, what the hell?

this does not apply to close friends and acquaintances. a casually-tossed 'wassup?!' is just fine with them. 'wassup' covers the events in a person's life over the last x hours, or maybe few days.

but get this, i'm ping/call/meet a long-lost friend (or worse still, THEY ping/call/meet ME) and while i'm framing questions related to our last time together/what i remember of them, they're either piling on more and more trivia about themselves, completely ignoring me; or just randomly tossing a miserly "so, what's happening with you?" at the end of it all.

i ask you, how does one begin to answer that? bah!

social experiment

the last post about visiting dance bars didn't go down too well with my friends, who were like:

assorted friends: "wtf!?! we have to find about this from your blog??"
and i'm like: "well, you should make the effort to see me more often!" (imagine this said with a little smug toss of the head and maddening smug-face)

jokes aside, it didn't seem like a massively big deal, i was only mildly tickled by the whole thing (now, if it had been the good old days, and i could have witnessed some genuine debauchery, i would have been ALL OVER THE PLACE with it)

anyhooo...

a certain frequent commenter on this blog believes from these rants, that i lead an interesting life. oh hoo ha ha ha ha! you could not be more wrong. on days like the one i'm posting this on, i am Sloth personified. now sloth through the day is alright; but by evening, i will be moronic, and either suicidal or murderous (it depends on what's been on TV all day)

so think twice (!pause for effect here!) before you ask me to post more often. because you may just end up with useless shit like this! MWUHAHAHAHA!

one dance-bar-visit does not a pevert make; a.k.a. grant road chi rani

i'll cut to the chase, i visited a watered-down, now inexplicably un-glorious, dance-bar tonight (technically, i visited 2, but 'carnival' will not allow people of the woman-persuasion in, so that was a flop)

anyhoo, i visited Topaz, which, my 2 male-persuasion companions, and our driver assured me, was a one-time, super-smoking dance-dance bar in the best mumbai tradition. now, it's just sad, and wierd, kind of.

the singing was still lusty, and the women still capable of smokin' hotness, it's just that the license was gone. and for the life of me, i couldn't figure out why.

the only people who could have been affected by dance bars were the women (a.k.a. wives) and children whose men/fathers were blowing up livelihoods within those walls... did they really amount to enough numbers/votes to warrant a clampdown on the seedy loveliness/liveliness that it all was?

or, like one of my group said, was it that, a couple of years back, someone took the call; and now no-one had the balls to reverse it? (every vote counts for more today, i suppose)

in any case, i went to Topaz tonight. and being one of the female persuasion, i merited as much attention as 'fly-on'wall'/'random freak of angrez-education'/'emancipated vagina-card-carrier, but closet-lesbian'- their pick.

all this woo-hoo'ness, was at the behest of my 2 male companions; who remembered the place from its glory days, and our driver who once used to live in the area (again, a glory-day wallower)

supposedly, as urban legend has it, a raid at Topaz once yielded 8 crore rupees (our driver led me to believe all of it was SWEPT up off the floor! like AS IF!! like, really??)

in any case. there were a bunch of nostalgia-giddy losers there when i went (i was spared a few glances and dismissed immediately)

they were flinging notes of twenties at the (VERY disinterested) 3 faux-straight haired lovelies in sequin-spangled-sarees that were standing about- "show me some gandhi-notes bitches! and i MAY deign to wiggle some jelly atcha!"

there was LIVE music, mostly kumar-sanu'esque ballads sung by 2 chaps and a (once-glorious, satin-gown-wearing) older chick.

the younger of the chaps had a truly good voice, and would have won my vote (if i'd watched him) in any reality music show today. the other chap? ho-kumarsanu-hum.

the older chick? well now... interesting... she was an obvious hottie in her heyday, had a nice body (bit frayed around the edges), and a FAR better voice than either of the mangeshkar sisters' in their a.r.rehman/bala/kanika/faux-patriot, for-theatres-in-maharashtra-only, national-anthem renditions today.

we stuck around for one drink, slipped some hundreds for form's sake, and left; tried to enter the afore-mentioned Carnival in Worli, lucked-out, and returned to our respective homes.

end-note: as things panned out in Topaz; in spite of my obvious appreciation of the young (half-decent-looking) CHAP-singer; in my friend's enthusiasm that i reward SOMEONE, i ended up slipping the ex-hottie, woman-singer a 100-rupee note with a smile and sincerely-paid compliment.

summation: i should have either been a nostalgia-drunk, lonely male-person, or a lesbian; the universe had ordained either one or the other; i just missed both those lightning-bolts is all. sigh.

lalbaug cha rani

one the house hunt front- i finally gave up and renewed the lease on my existing 1rk.

so, no neighbourhood shift, no cleaning out of ratty nonsense that a house-change would have necessitated, and the same rusty window that refuses to open or close =(

however, cheap rent, perfectly-sized for one person, and super access to south mumbai or suburbs.

3rd year in a row,
a proper chinchpoklian now.
with a kaam-chalao loo,
neither yaay, nor boo.

something to be thankful for

uff! i was stupid enough to board the second class compartment for men on a borivili slow last night. OMG! i had to get down at goregaon, but the crush was just SO bad, i just stayed on the train till the last station.

on getting down, the crush continued. all the way down the platform, till the exit, and i found myself in a thick crowd of men after a really long time.

and glory be! no one pawed, no one grabbed! if this had happened in cochin, I'd have been too depressed for words today (no, it's unlikely I would have turned around, and kicked/screamed/punched the first random male behind me- and besides, even if I had, I'd still be depressed today)

anyhoo, back to ystdy. I don't praise this city much, or often. mostly I think the praise heaped on it is unjustified, silly and usually misses the truth by miles. a lot of stuff really sucks about mumbai. but, when it comes to being a lone woman needing to travel at pretty much any time of day- i can't praise it enough.

no songs on my mind this morning, there usually is some random, usually bawdy/bad tune i wake up with. been listening to some songs by Foals and CSS, like is in the air.

the peeflex is a lonely child

came up with a new word in the shower some days back.

Peeflex
–adjective
1. Physiology. noting or pertaining to involuntary urinary response to a stimulus.
–noun
1. Physiology.
a. Also called Peeflex act, urination caused by a reflex response.

In the words of Charlie Brown- "Good Grief!"

I just forgot I was one of a two! Lol.

I was just speaking with my boyfriend about what he was upto today. He said he had meeting 1, then meeting 2, and then wanted to meet his girlfriend. And for 3 seconds I was like, "Oh, ok. he's got other plans."

Oh Lord, save me from me!

P.S: question: when does one use ' and when does one use "?