Sleeping with the frenemy

(Published on February 6, 2016 in Business Standard)

You know what they say about friends: Lock up the good booze before they come over. Or maybe it’s “Don’t work with them”, but locking up the good booze is not a bad idea either—unless one of your friends is turning a greyish shade of fifty. In that case you pack all the best booze you can muster, and take her out of town for a few days.

But first you start a Whatsapp group conversation three weeks beforehand, to figure out how to mark the occasion. One of five of us was in a different country, and we all had differing budgets, available time, and activity preferences. Whatsapp is really helpful in a situation like that, when you need to cheaply and efficiently communicate old internet jokes, non sequiturs, pictures of lunch, and potty quality updates for nineteen days before someone realises there’s still no holiday plan, at which point there is international panic, and the birthday girl threatens to fly off to freaking Goa or something by her freaking self, since we can’t get our freaking act together for her freaking milestone birthday. A lot of emoticons are necessary. Whatsapp rocks.

Anyway we managed to cobble together a road trip to Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve with—let’s call them—Mooey, birthday girl Fanny, and myself. We were going to leave at 6am, because it’s traditional to be unrealistic about everything. At 5.30am Mooey dropped out with a personal crisis, and since he owned the transport, Fanny and I went back to sleep. At 9am the personal crisis was resolved. At 11.15 we rolled up at Fanny’s, where we all briefly discussed an attractive alternative plan to just unload the car and spend the weekend right there, watching movies in our pyjamas and exchanging Whatsapp emoticons. At 12.02pm we were finally on the road. At 12.32 we were on exactly the same road, in the gridlock just outside her house.

When traffic began to flow, we fondly remembered all the things we had forgotten: sunglasses, the other vodka, the Scrabble board, the binoculars, the hat with a brim. The sun got hotter, the traffic was dense, nobody had slept much. Fanny shouted at Mooey for not letting her bring her coffee press. I shouted at Fanny for not being packed on time. We both shouted at Mooey for having a non-functional car CD player. They both shouted at me for picking up the wrong stack of CDs. I muttered that I had had it with them, given them the best years of my life, and I was taking the children and moving to my mother’s. We all muttered darkly that it was going to be a long four days.

And it was—long and delightful, despite the fact that we all shared one room and one bathroom. Despite Mooey’s traumatic habit of waking like a jack-in-the-box before dawn and yelling tender good mornings in our ears. Despite Fanny keeping up a constant rumble of complaint about the quality of the coffee. Despite my conversation being one hundred per cent about the state of my potty.

But that’s what travelling with friends is all about: loving them despite their compulsive behaviours. It’s exactly like being married, but without the monogamy, children, and joint bank account. There’s the one who rubs one foot against the other all night. The one who picks goop out of her eyes. The neat freak. The one who’s grumpy in the morning; the one who’s grumpy at night. The glutton, the exercise freak, the clotheshorse, the cigarette bummer. The Bollywood music addict.

If you survive travelling with them, it’s true love.

The porn star and the TV w…anchor

You know it’s been a difficult January when the epitome of Indian manliness, the Prime Minister, discovers that his much-vaunted 56-inch chest has shrunk to 50 inches. The reduced perimeter is probably easier for Ajit Doval to safeguard, but it’s also probably less impressive-looking from the Indo-Pak border.

Speaking of unimpressive Indian men, CNN-IBN interviewed actress Sunny Leone. Everyone has talked about it for three days already, but I won’t sleep easy until I’ve deposited my two bits.

The last time I noticed anchor Bhupendra Chaubey, he was knocking it out of the park during the Bihar elections while NDTV was circling the drain, so if anything I was predisposed to like him—or at worst, to be neutral. But Chaubey struck dissonant notes before he even got to the set, setting up Sunny Leone as “completely antithetical to what we perceive is the idea of an Indian woman”. That smug generalisation set the tone for the rest of this train wreck.

The interview itself was a one-note samba centring on his own inability to believe that a former porn star could possibly go about her life without being, at all times, hyperaware that she used to be a porn star, and cling-wrapped in shame about it. This is because he obviously cannot stop being hyperaware that she used to be a porn star.

Aided by twitching eyebrows and smirks, he tried his damndest to get her to admit that Sunny the porn star was a tragic mistake made by Karanjit the beautiful family girl, going astray; but Sunny didn’t think so. In reply to a question about her biggest regret, she said she couldn’t get home fast enough when her mother passed away. When she said “I’ve made mistakes”, he begged for specifics, and she said that Bollywood was like culture shock because it’s really chaotic.

In other words, she wasn’t playing shameball with him.

He loaded and reloaded the same question multiple times, in vain. He framed Sunny Leone as a scarlet woman who, though she is now in Bollywood, won’t get to work with big names like Aamir Khan, on account of her “past”, which “haunts” her and “holds [her] back”. He made a big point of the fact that people say nasty things about her.

Sunny uncooperatively pointed out that she didn’t feel in the least bit either haunted or held back, and that people are entitled to their opinions. Chaubey gave her 7,431 chances to take back that twaddle and admit, already, that it’s her own fault that now he can’t stop visualising her lady parts, which somehow makes her disreputable. (I’m paraphrasing to include his tone.) She said that if the clock were turned back, she would do it all again. Chaubey let her know that she has been accused of corrupting Indian morality; but Sunny cleaves to the free speech, live-and-let-live end of things, which can be summed up as “So?”

In the single question about her upcoming film, Chaubey asked if it was about love, or sex and lust. He sneeringly asked if she thought of herself as an actor, and whether it was her body—raking said body with his eyes—that would take her to whatever low, commercial places his tone implied her career may reach.

Really, you should watch it yourself. Never mind undeserved TRPs: it is an object lesson in how even the most progressive men can see an openly sexual woman as shameful—and think she should see herself that way too.

And it’s an object lesson in what a sorry figure such a man cuts.

“Pathankot: A short tragic play”

(Published today in Business Standard)


Pak handler to Terrorist: Look boys, this airbase area is so thick with Indian Army and Air Force moustaches that you’ll have to cut your way through with barbers’ shears, and the Indians know you’re coming. But don’t worry—the lights don’t work, the fence is holier than our book, the guards are retired and unfit, they don’t have the budget to patrol at night, and we’re already using their infrastructure.

Police SP, offstage: They took my car and phone! I have escaped and reported this to my colleagues after a suspicious three-hour gap.

Terrorist on phone: Mummy, I’ve sneaked into India, either through a border tunnel or from J&K, to bang a bunch of virg—become a martyr.

Mummy: Okay, eat something before you croak. Hello? I think we have a cross-connection with the Punjab Police, the Indian Air Force, and Indian Intelligence.

Pathankot airbase: We have hours and hours to defend this base. Who needs thousands of army personnel nearby to help lock it down? Everyone hang at the main gate, that’s where they’ll come from.

Nobody: How do we know that?

[Hours and hours later: Loud bangs, dead people]

PM Modi: On June 21 more than a million people in 192 countries came together to celebrate the first International Day of Yoga.

Indian press: Here are some Pakistani panelists to explain the terrorist attack on Pathankot airbase, while we keep looking for some Indian panelists who can explain it.

[More loud bangs]

Some of the Army: Which genius brought in the National Security Guard when we’re right here?

National Security Advisor Ajit Doval: I like the NSG. Why is everyone looking at me?

Delhi Police: Delhi is on red alert for terrorists visiting from Pathankot.

Delhi: Hey, you in the hijacked car, with the grenades. Here are some flowers and an awareness-raising pamphlet about odd-even. Next time it’ll be Rs 2,000.

[VVIP phone rings]

Pakistan PM Nawaz Shareef to PM Modi: When we were holding hands, was it as good for you as it was for me? Cos I think about it all the time.

PM Modi: Across the world there are moving stories of transformed lives and rekindled hopes due to Yoga.

[48 hours later]

Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance minister Arun Jaitly: It’s all over. We salute our martyrs who made the supreme sacrifice to annihilate the dastardly enemy.

Part of the Indian press: Doval, Doval, Doval!

Air Force officer: Hello, it’s totally not over.

The rest of the Indian press: Sources say nobody knows their elbow from their ass.

[Loud bangs]

BJP: Criticising the operations at Pathankot is anti-national.

India: Yawn.

PM Modi: Seriously, guys? Yoga is really very good for you.

Army General: All nonsense. Brilliant synergy between the army and the NSG, couldn’t have been better, got on like a house on fire.

Indian press: Er, that actually is a house on fire.

India: How come our super-duper airbase is so thick with Indian Army and Air Force moustaches that you have to cut your way through with barbers’ shears, and we knew they were coming, and six guys have still had the place upside down for longer than a French working week?

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar: A lot of this was bad luck.

[80 hours later]

BJP government: Please, can we never talk about this again?

World: ROTFL. Oops, live mike. We stand firmly by India in her fight against terrorism.

Terrorist on phone: Mummy, they’ve asked me to sneak into India and bang a bunch of virg—become a martyr. Yes, yes, I’ve eaten—a piece of cake.

Ending 2015 on a good note

(Published on December 26, 2015 in Business Standard)

I’m usually thrilled to watch the taillights of a year disappear into the dustbin of history. But I’m smiling fondly at 2015, because of all the music.

I cannot live without music, and I wouldn’t want to. If it’s not playing around me, it’s playing in my head. I sing constantly, either out loud—a sound like a bee trapped behind a window, or an animal losing the will to live—or in my head, and I can put up with any amount of annoyance, inconvenience, or delay, as long as I can listen to music through it. Learning to play the guitar seemed like an obvious move.

But let’s face it: I’m an old dog, and playing music is an altogether new trick. It is deeply humbling to start from scratch, and have to learn to walk and speak all over again, in the early afternoon of your life when you’re supposed to be master of your ship, snoozing in the first class cabin while minions do the grunt work. But while one’s synapses are frayed, and one’s fingers clumsy, one can make slow, unsteady progress, even without a teacher. I really should have gotten a teacher.

I did at one point hire a random curly-haired youth who, in four lessons, made me realise that I was spending precious booze money on a chap whose musical ability was vastly outweighed by his ability to make me feel as old as the pyramids. I made a tough budgetary cut, and went back to learning from random curly-haired youths on the internet, who also make me feel as old as the pyramids, but for free. The result is that I haven’t gotten beyond the basic chord strum, nor been able to resist looking up chords rather than figuring them out by ear. I have written a bunch of horrible little dirges—which I have to be completely drunk to sing, and you need to be completely drunk to hear—and one fake-happy song. All in all, after three years of enthusiastic guitar playing, I still suck.

But I’m also still having the most fun I’ve had in my life. My guitar may well be a version of the midlife little red sports car, but my god, does it put a spring in my step and roses in my cheeks. Or maybe the roses come out of a bottle—whatever. The point is, it makes me feel the best a person can feel.

This last year I’ve also spent massive amounts of time sitting in bars listening to live music, and if there’s one thing I’ve discovered, it is that this city is filled with the most insanely gifted musicians. It’s a source of constant amazement to me that they walk amongst us, like normal people, without large signs around them declaring that they have magical powers in their fingers and lungs.

Also, and this is critical, musicians are the best people. Hanging around them can be exhilarating or exasperating, but it’s never boring. They’re all totally bonkers. My theory is that the bits of brain that allow people to make music are cannibalised from those bits of brain that allow people to match their socks. Some musicians you experience as a warm bath, some as a drive-by shooting, but they’re all mad fun.

So to all the people that I’ve been privileged to listen to, and to the hapless few with whom I play regularly, thank you for the music, you’re the best. Now I will sing a song for you. Wait, where’s everyone going?