Take me to Squornshellous Zeta

(Published in Business Standard on August 25, 2012)

Every so often, when the world has a fortnight like the one just gone, I think about Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy of four books. If you haven’t read them, please put down that copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and start immediately. It is the most useful guide to life ever, after the instruction manual that comes with the average phone, which today looks much more like a NASA console than any NASA console ever did.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide chronicles the adventures of Arthur Dent, the last human to get off Earth before it was destroyed by Vogons to make way for an interstellar bypass. Arthur, along with his friend Ford Prefect from Betelgeuse, ricochets around space in the spaceship Heart of Gold with Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed President of the galaxy, who happens to be on the lam, and depressive Marvin the Paranoid Android, with a brain the size of a planet and pain all down the left side of his diodes. Marvin’s forty million years of being stranded on Squornshellous Zeta—the planet where all of the galaxy’s mattresses grow—has got to be the gold standard for patient resentment. (“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”)

Being a homeless person in space sometimes looks better than hanging around on earth. What can you even say about people who upload malicious morphed photographs and send out threatening texts, or an emasculated law and order mechanism that makes thousands of people run rather than risk relying on it? What can you say about the property dealer in Bangalore who, as the Hindustan Times reported, set a ten-year-old daughter on fire because her father dared to file a complaint against him for stealing Rs 10,000? What can you say about a government that can’t lift a finger because of the pong coming from its underarms? Or an opposition that prefers disruption to debate?

What can you say about a prehistoric American Senator who comes up with a whole new field of female biology (Shutthatwholethingdownology) to explain something he calls ‘legitimate rape’? What can you say about the Wikileaks founder, who came to prominence for journalistic integrity, but who now looks very much as if he’s hiding from charges of sexual misconduct? What can you say about the photos on the internet of the wildflower of British royalty, totally starkers, with his hands over some of the family jewels? (I’m not among those who think he shouldn’t have been playing strip poker, but I do think he should learn to pick his random Las Vegas girls better.)

Usually, when bad things happen, I get agitated/pissed off/sarcastic/outraged. At the moment, though, I am so defeated by the scale and variety of badness that I’m just sort of giggly. Everything seems to be falling apart with such gay abandon that getting on a spaceship, however rickety, seems like a really good idea. On the upside, Curiosity—the rover that Earth just sent to Mars—is leaving cute little tire tracks all over Mars in its quest to see whether it is the sort of planet that can support life as we know it, that is, the sort that takes over planets and then behaves like a retard until everything looks the way that Mars does.

I hope NASA scores enough funding to get to Squornshellous Zeta in my lifetime; right now I’d gladly pick being stranded there for forty million years.

Manta matinees

(Published in Business Standard on August 11, 2012)

So there I was, floating in a crystalline blue infinity pool, gazing out at the staggering aquamarine water that demarcates a reef, in the Maldives. Earlier in the day I’d been immersed in the gluey blue twilight of a lagoon, swimming side by side with manta rays. An aside: The nicest thing that can be said about a manta ray’s mouth is, Well, that’s certainly different. Please google it. Nobody should reach the end of life having never looked into the mouth of a feeding manta ray. It’s much like suddenly happening upon an ugly baby—it gives you a nasty turn, which if you weren’t wearing a snorkel would pop out of your mouth as a bark of alarm; and then you immediately feel guilty about it.

Anyway, I was sitting in this crystalline etc and gluey blue and so forth only the day before yesterday, and now I’m back in the sticky grey-brown smog of Delhi, which hammers home some poignant things about air travel and how all good things must end. Actually, to be honest, I’m still sitting in the Maldives, writing this thing that will appear on Saturday, but having to sound as if the Maldives is already in the past, when it’s not yet, which hammers home some poignant things about editorial deadlines and poetic licence. But anyway.

All of this somehow brings me to a point that I greatly enjoyed dwelling on while sipping a Dark Storm (Old Monk, ginger beer, lime) at the beach bar under a star-laden sky, earlier today/the day before yesterday. And that is: Sucks to you, college career counsellor! You wanted me to get another degree and work fourteen-hour days for someone else so that I could retire just in time to spend my life savings propping up the health I squandered doing so—or you would have if I’d come to see you in college.

But I didn’t come and see you, did I. I abandoned academia, fell into a deep depression about I forget what, drifted into freelance writing, and stayed there, mostly broke and desperate. In fact, I’d say some of the best decisions I ever didn’t take were of the college career counsellor variety. Go get a job, they told people, and I didn’t. Network, they urged, and I didn’t, and so on. Well, here’s a short sampling of what people say now when I update my status on Facebook: Let’s swap lives. (Good-humoured envy.) I hate you (Bad-humoured envy). I hope it rains. (Honest ill will.) Flaunt that bikini body, baby! (Just plain cruel.)

So what if I will never be able to afford a hip replacement? I’m sitting in the Maldives right this minute/day before yesterday for no logical reason, aren’t I? I’ve been trying to think about one single thing I would change about my life today, and it is this: I feel the towels could be just a tad fluffier.

No, of course not! I wouldn’t change one single thing.

Of course, now that I’ve allowed myself this disgusting bit of smugness, I’ll probably be struck down by whatever bit of the cosmos is in charge of keeping you in your insignificant little place. Cosmic justice can be full of so much, like, negativity.

I should probably go to bed; when I get on the seaplane tomorrow/yesterday, I must be alert enough to save the plane when it inevitably goes down. It seems quite easy—I watched carefully on the way in. And if nothing works, I’ll just end up underwater with the mantas again, and that’s a pretty amazing place to be. As long as your heart can take the sight of those mouths.

Programming Note:

Due to a small oversight, it appears that I haven't updated this blog in over two years.

Well, today is the day when all that changes.

Or maybe some of it changes today, and the rest, you know, some other time.

Tango crack

So last year, while many terribly important things were happening in the world, I began to learn the tango. Please do not ask how this happened, because it involves a love story that ends in Kleenex and vodka and generally reaffirms the mulish transience of the world.

Suffice it to say that, contrary to popular belief, learning Argentine tango is not about mooning around restaurants with Al Pacino while smelling nice. It’s more like months of gruelling practice with people who may or may not smell nice; besides, thinking about how they’re smelling--or, indeed, how you are smelling--comes a distant second to thinking about how not to step on them or get stepped on by them, how not to kick them, how the zarking fardwarks to get out of this move and into the next without going down in flames, and how ‘zarking fardwarks’ is an indispensible phrase in the learning of tango (thank you, Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame).

Anyway, at about the time that Japan was devastated by a horrible earthquake and tsunami, I had my first taste of tango at a class in Geneva. It was like suddenly discovering a little penchant for heroin. I know this because I spent the time between the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and hurricane Irene, which almost tore New York City in half, obsessing about where and when I might have another tango class.

I’m told that Osama Bin Laden got offed, that Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World fell apart, that space shuttle Atlantis made her last sortie, that Libya and Syria went up in smoke, and that Anna Hazare decided to fast unto death (so long as his doctors were satisfied that he was in no danger of actually dying). I was busy walking around in little circles, twitching.

At the end of August, I was finally in a position to attend a weekly class for eight weeks, which stint turned me into a raving and hopeless addict. The US observed the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Pakistan was devastated by floods, the Swiss bank UBS lost a couple of billion dollars in unauthorised trades, Steve Jobs kicked the bucket--all of this was piffle to me. The only thing that really mattered was when and where and how I placed my feet, and whether I was following the lead or jumping the gun.

Back in Delhi, armed with Kleenex and vodka, I emailed various online leads for classes, all of which turned out to be purely notional. Finally I found a class. I couldn’t really afford it, on account of having spent so much time jonesing for tango fixes rather than working. I resolved to steal the money--they could always print more. (Law enforcers: I’m probably joking.) Islamists won the Tunisian election. The world’s population hit seven billion. Americans got arrested en masse for Occupying various places. Kim Jong-Il died. Phooey. I lived from tango class to tango class, subsisting in a sort of wan, cryogenically preserved state in between.

Now I have three tango nights every week. I don’t make plans with family and friends on those nights. I have spent a lot of money I’m not sure how I came by, on trying to find the right dance shoes with a suede or leather sole, a stable heel, an ankle strap, and a bit of padding in the toes. (No luck yet--suggestions welcome.) When I travel on work, my first concern is how much the assignment interferes with my tango schedule. It’s a real problem.

I’m sure I’ll soon spend another column telling you what’s so great about tango; meanwhile I’ll be in class, mainlining.