Dark Chocolate and Lots of Candy

And fudge brownies topped with walnut bits, and covering my walls with black-and-white photographs.

If it’s one word that’s defined this past week, it’s been Chickflicks.

It all started with stumbling on Gul Panag’s Turning 30 on Youtube. Actually, I’ve been a little curious about Bollywood chickflicks ever since I fell in love with the clothes and music of Aisha. Turning 30 is no Aisha (which IMO is the gold standard for what an Indian chickflick should feel like), but it does manage to leave you with a feel-good ending, in spite of the zillion cliches and plot points that have a probability of 1/132342 of happening in real life. Or maybe because; I don’t know. But when I see someone’s random rantings on her laptop get published as a book by pure chance, I feel like throwing myself off a cliff…. maybe because some of us try and try and can’t quite get there. But that’s beside the point.

And then I went on to watch Never Been Kissed. And then Moonstruck, which frankly I didn’t like much. I really liked Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, in large part due to Lisa Kudrow’s airheady role. Followed by The Wedding Planner. I liked J.Lo in this much better than in Maid in Manhattan, though seriously, they could have picked a better-looking leading man.

Can you believe I’d never watched You’ve Got Mail before this past week? I finally did. The online anonymity and stuff seems so quaint now!

Then I went through The Princess Diaries 1 and 2. Julie Andrews is awesome, but by the time you’re fifteen minutes into the second film, you cringe at every single reference to Mia’s klutziness.I got so sick of the second movie, I checked the plotline on Wiki just to see if it’s worth enduring this torture for. It wasn’t, but it seemed like Meg Cabot’ Princess series were much more enjoyable.

Expectedly, I began looking for them. I instead found Meg Cabot’s Airhead series, and quickly read it. Nice while reading, but you want to just be done with it and throw it into the trashcan as soon as possible.

Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic series is better, and more gripping and more fun. But I don’t know what it is about chicklit, they don’t feel as good as the movies! You can’t identify with many incidents described there, the thin plots irk you and dragging them across 200 pages chafe on your nerves. And what’s more, the writing isn’t good enough to compensate. And even if it is good, the style seems pretty consistent over books and authors and it begins to feel boring and repetitive.

One thing that really struck me was how obsessed American pop culture is about highschool. And proms and hierarchies and cheerleaders and jocks. And the ones set in college are all about sororities, fraternities and cheerleaders and jocks. Something tells me that’s quite a distortion of reality. Right?

And as a natural consequence, reunions are a big deal, where you hit back at the jerks who tormented you all through high school. Those sort of plots for movies would be fun, if only they hadn’t been done a zillion times already.

By contrast, Indian movies seem to be more about the time after college, when real life hits. Teenybopper romances seem to be pretty much a joke in Bollywood, with the notable exception of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, but heck, most of that movie happened when the hero had an eight-year-old daughter. (On an aside, I’m pretty surprised Kajol managed to remain single for nearly ten years after college. I mean, how come the Yavag Maduve, Ma? aunties didn’t get to her? Plus, if you lose interest in romance after one failed non-attempt, you have serious issues, girlfriend).

Movies like Ishq Vishq Pyaar Vyaar or Mera Pehla Pehla Pyaar aren’t exactly hitting paydirt in the public consciousness, from what I’ve seen. I haven’t watched Indian television of late, but when I last did, teenybopper stuff was still a joke. And I guess that reflects reality too. For the past ten years at the very least, any Rahul and Tina who might have hooked up in 11th and 12th would rather put off things till they crack JEE.

One thing I’d like to see in the Indian context though, is a remake of Legally Blonde. Now that I’d say is a good underdog story. I found it inspirational in the very least. Maybe ‘coz I’ve come to feeling strongly about girls losing out to boys on the career front inspite of having equal or better ability simply because we lack confidence in our own abilities that we find it harder to be more assertive, and that society at large does little to alleviate this, in fact does everything to aggravate it, giving us everything from Impostor syndrome to the opposite of Impostor syndrome when we move closer to success.

I’ve hardly scratched the surface of must-watch chickflicks yet. Until this mood wanes, I have to hunt and watch movies from this excellent list of chickflicks. So um, I’ll abruptly end this post right here.

PS: Apart from chickflicks, I also watched Tamizh Padam. If you have been watching Tamil films for the past 10-15 years, you’ll enjoy this one supremely. My favourite bit of that movie was when this bunch of policemen are trying to figure out where to find a murderer, and a guy dressed like Kamal in Vettaiyadu Vilayadu says “My instinct says, sir, the murderer would be in the US”, to which his superior says “We all know about your instinct, Mr. Ragahavan, you’ve gone to the US a dozen times due to your instinct already”.

Sweetcorny soup

And once again my head is full of stuff I just cannot write about here. For various reasons – personal, professional, tooBoring. Usually, I deal with it by distracting myself by writing a whole bunch of unrelated minutiae about things happening with me that simply don’t matter, and call it Minestrone Soup. This time, though, I think I’ll just face up to the fact that some things need patience while other things need action and since I know which is which now, I should just get on with things. And spare the rest of the world those long rambling posts after writing which I still feel like I’ve left a lot unsaid.

I guess one of the reasons I’m so meticulously censoring myself online is because I’ve seen how anything put online can be used to distress the one who said it. A little of it has been maddening personal experience. And a lot of it is probably paranoia, but at its root lies real-life tales.

I’m yet again about to step into the ‘state of flux’ I was a couple of years ago. Expect more posts where I’m grunting and griping and not exactly saying why I’m whiny. And possibly indulging in obsessive, compulsive behaviour.

And, I’ll repeat this for the zillionth time… I hate uncertainty. Ambiguity, I can deal with, but uncertainty just drives me crazy. And don’t even get me started on monotony.

I’ve typed out and erased two dozen sentences here. I doubt there’s any point in trying to write this post anymore, so I’ll just wind up. And maybe stand on one leg and meditate.

In the midst of all this, I’m extremely glad for family. They are the ones who keep me rooted, grounded, and all that.

In another life, I’d've tried to get my mojo back by signing off with some nice video or funny link or whatever, but right now I feel they’ll just distract me from facing my demons. So um, I’ll leave you whining and griping. I’m not having fun being all antsy, why should anyone else?

The longest bus ride evah

This happened in that moonshiney period between 11th and 12th. You can say it happened in the holidays after the 1st PU exams, but then given that I was going for JEE coaching, there was a holiday to all my holidays.

So I used to go to this PU college which was a good distance from where I lived, solely because this bunch of JEE-coachers would conduct classes on campus. That was a novelty back in the day, and the only other alternative was to go to a PU college closer home, and then do the commute to BASE which was a much longer way off.Plus, I wasn’t so keen on BASE back then.

I wasn’t the only one doing this. There were plenty of others too. And there were a few of us in my JEE class who shared part of the route back home. More so when we commuted by BMTC. It was a pretty messy route – college to Banashankari, where a few people would split, Banashankari to Checkpost (via the famous 201 series), and then we’d all go our own route.

So one morning, we all turned up as usual to class at 7:30 am. (Hard to believe I was that person).  We were supposed to have classes till a little past noon. Wonderment, it turned out that day that two of the three classes we were supposed to have that day stood cancelled. Which would mean we’d be off at 9 am, given that it was still breaktime, and we didn’t have college classes.

So at 9 am, we began walking to the BMTC stop. ‘We’ were five of us – me, and folks who I’ll blur names of thanks to privacy concerns – three other girls S, L and V. And there was this guy, who I’ll simply call The Guy, because there’s very little else about him that’s relevant.

L and I lived close to each other. Our mothers were friends. S would split at Banashankari, and The Guy would split at Checkpost. And V? She lived way off. So um, what was she doing with us? Well, she had a massive crush on The Guy and had taken to haunting him like a spectre. I think it was because he saved her life during a trek or something, I’m not too sure. The memory is hazy. I found it mildly amusing while also thinking she’s being stupid about it, and L found the whole deal supremely funny, while S would pass sarcastic comments every once in a while. And The Guy? He had no clue.

V tried to hang on to us for longer, but it soon became imminent that the route we’d take would be too round-about for her, and so she left in a rick, asking The Guy if he wanted a ride halfway to his place till the last minute. He kept saying no, so she gave us those secret smiles and glances and left.

So, um, the task was upon us. To find out if he was single. To find out if he had any old flames from school. And also, I think it involved finding out his phone number, being as this was in the pre-cellphone era.  It also involved finding out what his likes and dislikes were, given that this was also the pre-Orkut/Facebook era. It sounds pretty straightforward now, but back then, it felt like the most daunting task in the history of man, cracking JEE included. And none of us really knew the guy.

And all this was supposed to be accomplished in the half-an-hour-fortyfive-minutes between now and Checkpost.

While waiting for the bus to Banashankari, we tried making the usual small talk, which involved whining about class, making fun of our instructors and saying how horrible the chemistry paper was (even though I really liked chemistry back then, I had to nod in agreement when he whined about chemistry).

Soon we found out which school he was from, which was not in South Bangalore, so it destroyed any chance of us knowing anyone from there to ask about him. And then it was about movies and music and all that random stuff. I was taking the long route here, not making it too obvious that we wanted to dig up stuff about him. So far, it was all of no use, and the only positive fallout of the whole conversation until then was that I heard about Gloria Estefan.

Soon, three buses had passed us, and the only reason we’d not got on was because the buses were too crowded. I didn’t know back then that was the default state of buses going from the outer edges of the city to the center during peak hours. And then when we finally did realize what was happening, we got into the next available bus.

Only after getting in did we realize it doesn’t go to Banashankari. And that apart, there were gropers at work there, taking advantage of the general crowding… and The Guy being a scrawny sixteen-year-old, couldn’t manage to ‘protect’ us all. So we got off at the very next stop. ‘We can always find a bus to Banashankari from here’, we thought.

But nope, we couldn’t. And we couldn’t even make conversation. Finally, The Guy said ‘Let’s go to Monotype’. Now this was a whole new universe for me and L. The Guy reassured us that he knew the routes from Monotype to Banashankari well. Impressed by his chivalry already, we agreed.

Short ride to Monotype, with gropers again, but this time we were well-prepared with dirty looks that surprisingly worked. And then I don’t know what happened clearly, but all I remember is a long, long walk from Monotype to Banashankari, while wearing a salwar-kameez with an unruly dupatta, and carrying a heavy JEE Math book – Gupta&Gupta, I think.

Now L took over. She was sick of my namby-pamby attempts at conversation, and took a slightly more direct route. Which meant she began pulling my leg about random fellas, as schoolgirls in pigtails are wont to do. And I played along, pulling hers, and then finally we ganged up on The Guy, and asked ‘So how ’bout you, who do they tease you with?’. And by the time we’d arrived at Banashankari, L had managed to elicit from him his entire romantic history (or lack thereof). And then we found a 201, and then The Guy impressed us with his giving-up-seat-for-us routine, and we finally took back our Gupta&Guptas which he had so sweetly carried for us during our long walk.

By now it was 11:30, and L and I weren’t expected home until 1 at the very least, so we were expecting to give our mothers a pleasant ‘class got over early! yay!’ sort of a surprise. When I reached home, Amma was on the phone, and was giving me glances as she was talking. I didn’t realize who or what, and didn’t much pay attention.

And then she finally got off the phone and I said “We didn’t have Maths and Chemistry today!’, and instead of ‘Oh what a relief it must be for you, you poor thing’, I got a ‘So where were you from 9?’. Least expected.

Then she proceeded to say V had called up at 9:30 (presumably in anticipation of hearing what dirt we had on The Guy), first L and then me, startling both my mother and L’s mother.

Oh, and it gets better. V even mentioned that L and I were with The Guy, who had hitherto been unheard of. And back then, your daughter-at-impressionable-age hanging out with unheard-of-guy-also-at-impressionable-age could mean a variety of things, all of which were worst-case scenarios if you were a parent. And L’s mom and mine had gotten talking on the phone, compounding each others’ worstcase scenarios with every passing minute.

I stood my ground, put the blame all solely on BMTC and gropers and rush hour, and said I’m off to rest now because my body’s aching from all the walking I’d done. And I guess L did the same. And when V called us both up later in the day, we pretended to have nothing to talk about other than this week’s homework and Coke [V] Popstars despite her best tries to get us talking. And we gave her a sound shelling the next morning and threatened to call her folks up and say awkward things.

There. Feels good to get it off my chest now.

Epilogue: It took V a long while to get over her massive crush on The Guy, who said no to her repeatedly, and went on to have a string of girlfriends. I have since vowed to never try hooking people up, for reason not connected with this incident. L on the other hand would get a kick out of it for as long as I knew her; we haven’t been in touch for years now. I also became slightly more regular in calling home and informing them I’ll be late, before any jerk would call home and mess things up for me. And most importantly, when I’m travelling by BMTC during rush hour, I make sure to avoid the middle of the bus and stick to the front end, and in general turning extremely violent when faced with gropers on the bus.