Nishkaam
September 1, 2011 
It’s that time of the year when friends and members of my diverse, multi-religious family are either fasting or discreetly feasting. Our house emanates the earthy smell that only wheat and gur being sauted in ghee and can create. The plump little elephant god is hardly fussy (as I understand it, he will eat anything made with love and some amount of sugar) but his worshippers are a more demanding lot. So there are the steamed modaks of Maharashtra, decadent churma ladoos from Gujarat and for the South, a bowl of chana spiced up with mango, mustard and curry leaf.
I wonder what kind of dinner-table conversations the laddoo loving, happy-go-lucky Ganesh had with his more austere father. Shiva is pleased with the simplest things – raw milk, flowers and leaves. Motu must have exasperated him with his penchant for sweets like modaks which require a high degree of patience and kitchenskillery to make. Not to mention the cholesterol counts and the enlarged lipid profiles?
B and I are the presiding pandits and are innocently making a royal hash of it. We aren’t helped at all by people like the Fraud, who loudly asks for divine help in finding out who transferred the songs of Speedy Singh to his Ipod.
We mix up the order.
The modaks are not perfect.
CI forgets to formally ask if we will “pass exam”.
And yet, it’s really quite okay. Either way.
Our plate is full. And I hope yours is too.
Eh Eh What Else Can I Say
There’s this peculiar bug always floating around at every graduation ceremony of the beloved a.m. and it finds its way into the system of every brand new alum. To be fair, some students already have it, some are getting there and a very miniscule minority valiantly fight it as much as they can. But even they succumb at this penultimate stage.
The bug causes WayTooMuchVerbalitis or a tendency to give gyaan in whatever mental frame of mind we might be in, in whatever circumstance we might be in and however murderous the other person might be feeling. Basically we become nonsensically eloquent the minute we get our impressive diplomas (and in some cases, much before). After that you can expect an opinion on everything from blood glucose levels to the most obscure matters of public policy.
The Maghreb? OF COURSE I can talk about the Maghreb. Mines in Mongolia? This is how you buy a mine in Mongolia. No mines left? Dude, I know a really good guy in Africa.
Some of it is truly useful. But some of the time, speech becomes the pure unequivocal sound of full on gas.
Thankfully, this state of affairs doesn’t need to last, especially if you have blunt, loving friends like I do. After two years of being vibrant, chatty and a little too talkative, I am slowly returning to good health and intelligent silence.
Ok, relative silence (Stop guffawing, Fats). But in keeping with the flow, the next couple of posts will be written by another, a guest blogger while I head out to watch Kung Fu Shifu. My buddy writes emails which are never more than three lines long, so I doubt much verbal rambling will happen, if at all, but you never know! I’ll be around anyway for double entertainment 
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So much for the mob mentality
So the epic semi final is over. The problem with these kind of matches is that everyone gets so breathless and fully charged about every minute of our neighborly encounters that anything that comes afterward just feels so stale and ordinary. Even if Obama were to announce he wanted to pad up and have a go on Saturday, I doubt we would show as much enthusiasm as we did when Ramiz Raja suddenly went quiet in the commentators box. The best part of the match for me though, was the return of the Nehra. I got countless BBM jokes about the poor boy, and Dhoni’s lunacy up until the second innings. Friends on Facebook were fuming, and Mr.Sidhu expectedly had a lot to say before he begun.
Every language has its own version of the saying that you can never judge a book by its cover, yes? Our boy came through yesterday, and how. 10-0-33-2-3.30! One of my favorite scenes from the match was his calm crinkly half-smile as he took the Gulwicket. So why are we so quick to vilify? It’s so much better to be on the other side!
The food of love
For the last two weeks the news networks have gone insane. Incomprehensible natural calamities, uprisings,tension in more than one country, killings, radioactive horrors. And there are way too many astrologers on TV talking about what a dangerous period we are currently in, and how we must do nothing and hide under our blankets till May.
But in the overload of disasters and doomsday prophecies, there occurred one very happy event.
The Fraud married my elegant Mishu a couple of weeks ago (the first time I have broken precedent on this blog and named someone. But the occasion merits it!). It was an event that truly stumped the jyotish brigade and delighted the rest of us tremendously.
The Fraud did not fail to disappoint and even tried to deliver some gems from the wedding mandap till he was shushed by the only person who everyone is truly in awe of – Dadi. Ba is kind, beautiful and can see through an iron wall in less than an instant. We mortals don’t stand a chance. She just looked at me for a second, stopped me mid-pranaam and ordered my hovering brothers to get us a bowl of her rabdi immediately.
My best memory of the wedding has to be sitting with her watching over the pheras with an eagle eye, and watching over me with another. What would we do without grandmothers!
Everyone needs a PT
Arre but how do you do it?
My hostess places an appreciative arm around my waist. I’m back in town after a couple of months and she thinks I’m looking terrific.
I smile affectionately back at her. It’s a happy lunch party. Everyone is tucking into salad, kababs and a really well made basket of laccha parathas. One of the girls joins our conversation. Tell us your secret, T!
I am just about to earnestly begin (Discipline! Hard work! Anushaasan! ) when she turns away and signals to the waiter for another Tandoori Aloo. That moment is lost forever.
“Babe, I really want to lose weight.” She’s back. ” Tell me who your PT is na.”
What on earth is a PT?
She tosses her hair incredulously at me. “Personal Trainer.”, she explains very patiently. “You couldn’t have done this without a PT. How else do you stay motivated ya?”
If the Fraud were here, he would have exploded. I went running with the Fraud early one morning, when I was feeling utterly dejected. I had two injuries which would not stop haunting me, a horrible week – all I really wanted was a hug and a warm croissant. Instead, I had to keep up with a fit-as-a-fiddle and very unemotional Fraud. Halfway through, I was almost in tears. “I can’t do this.” I told him. I said it over and over again in varying sentences. He kept running. After ten more minutes, I almost screamed at him. “Fraud, please be sensitive. There is no way I can..” He stopped abruptly and looked at me.
“But you’re still running.”
The Fraud had pointed out, with childlike simplicity, the complete disconnect between what I was saying and what I was doing.
He explained to me later that he would have still stopped only if I did. I just stared at him. I could have been dehydrated. I could have had monster cramps. I could have dropped down and died. He was steadfast in his judgment. Say what you want, but you wouldn’t have given up, kiddo. I’ve only known him for a few months, but his shrewd Vaniya brain can read me inside out.
I started training a few days after I left Mumbai, and I think the one reason I stayed on for so long is this memory. A part of me cannot forget what the Fraud quietly told me that day – at the gym, on the beach and in life.
Dil toh baccha hai ji
So a few little tykes have been surreptitiously writing to me, asking why I don’t have more posts on ISB. I did, but in the process of shifting blog addresses, I lost them to some labyrinthine word press archive that I couldn’t seem to navigate too well. Don’t ask.
Anyway, so you can’t see my alternately frenzied and alternately amused posts while I was away at school. (yet). But the next best thing is to read a nice new post that I’ll write specially for you hopefuls who start school in a month, as requested.
For the moment though, full attention to the circus unfolding in front of me – big fat shaadi coming up in the next kilometre. Time to put on the lehenga and dance my heart out to a thumping Mohit Chavan remix with a bunch of tipsy Mehtas and Mittals. Hiteet!
Equanimity
The Fraud Buddha gets into an astonishing amount of scrapes and still remains bright eyed and bushy tailed.
He volunteered to give us a ride to the airport, and decided to give us some unsolicited advice on the way.
Lectures, Fraud Buddha style, very quickly degenerate into completely nonsensical discussions. I can’t really say they are arguments, even though each person in the party not only has an opinion but very clearly thinks the other is a complete idiot. In spite of all the devil’s advocates, everyone in the group remains friendly and peaceful and happily convinced of their own supremacy. I once told the Fraud Buddha that was his biggest achievement – there’s democracy, there’s discussion, but even if it’s heated, everyone still walks out arm-in-arm afterward. He blinked and said, only half jokingly. “But my aim was actually full domination.”.
Satori, said M, in complete, dreamy seriousness.
B and I looked at each other and guffawed simultaneously.
The Fraud sternly looked into the rear view mirror at our winking reflections.
Jokers – concentrate.
Suddenly there was a pseudo explosion. We ducked and screamed.
The Fraud had, in complete mindfulness, driven the sturdy SUV over a sharp, crackly steel pole. We rushed out.
I still don’t know how, but he managed to kill both front tyres. Regardless of the fact that Tyre Left went over the pole, Tyre Right could not escape the effects of the Fraud’s driving efforts and succumbed.
We were stranded – with five pieces of luggage, four Just-in-Time-But-Now-Really-Late passengers and standing on the pavement of a cab-less city.
Everyone started speaking loudly. M bellowed that the driver of this car had established beyond doubt that he possessed zero brain cells, I kept telling M to calm down and get into the car, B was interrogating the only sensible person around – the super efficient P, who was quietly trying to figure out the logistics of fixing two flats with equipment for one half.
The Fraud disappeared.
He came back in a few minutes and stood next to us. We had quietened down a bit by then, and were mostly smiling, and ribbing the Buddha. O enlightened, klutzy one, please guide us.
He smiled back and said nothing. We were alternating between brainstorming and Fraud Buddha bashing, when a sleek black SUV suddenly whizzed to our side.
The Fraud had managed reinforcements. In ten three quarter minutes, and with one of the fastest, most famous drivers in the city who went on to get us to the airport in twenty two minutes flat.
How does he do it? Our Fraud is not your typical saint – he gets annoyed, he sulks, he is stubborn.
And yet he manages to live life in effortless style. Sun Tzu would have been baffled. There’s more enlightenment to the Fraud than we know.
This is how we do it
What do you do when you have to make a decision that is nowhere close to being unambiguous?
When your gut says one thing and everybody and everything else says another.
Or when your gut says nothing, and all the MBA gyaan, the undergrad philosophy classes and the 4 am conversations with sozzled friends come swirling back to a muddled mind.
Is it just wishful thinking? Cognitive dissonance? Pure idiocy?
The easiest thing (weigh pros weigh cons! make a spreadsheet! analyze! MBA!) is also the worst thing to do.
The most difficult thing is to just be. Patient.
As GD would have said to us : Sit down. Shut up. Don’t move.
Read the signs – one
The farthest I will go
The next couple of posts are for those of my lovable batchmates who have demonstrated that despite busy choc-a-bloc consultant/banker/other top perches in the corporate jungle schedules, they are still vella enough to visit my blog.
The good-hearted Kato who made consistent, dignified enquiries about my blogger’s block to which I made promise after airy promise that things would soon be up and running.
Big Bearded Figure who crossed his arms and mock sneered, as I was making yet another breezy proclamation in the Atrium this past weekend.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
The lovely Ruch, who has been so prolific with her blogging, as to goad me into picking up my own rusty pen.
And more.
Oh, and I am also trying to put up all the blog posts which I took down in a fit of god knows what earlier this year. The elitist Egyptian bonanza will have a counterpart soon as I head to the rainforest. Stay put, dear readers. All six and a half of you.
Much love,
Aditi
