BRO'S YOUR DADDY

Ever a sucker for a good old-fashioned Bollywood romance, I was probably more thrilled than the newly-weds themselves when my childhood friend and his college girlfriend pulled off the star-crossed wedding of the century. Parents were threatened with suicide and fasts-unto-death and chronic spinsterhood, names were called, motives questioned, even a stray pistol or two fired in the air before the two would eventually immerse themselves in the masochist waters of holy matrimony. 

Since we moved to different cities- and later, countries- after school, I was unable to play my dream role of Friend & Facilitator (I never get to facilitate anything; stuff just happens to me) while all the drama was going down, but I always felt part of the proceedings, thanks in no small part to my friend's email updates at every stage of the relationship. But before last weekend, I'd waited some six years to finally meet this woman who had launched a thousand auto-rickshaws, and finally made an honest man of my brotha-from-'notha-motha. 

As we all know, the woman of your bro-from-'notha-maw (there should really be an abbreviation for that) is as off-limits as it gets. No matter how short a while you've known her, she's automatically a girl-bro: someone you can go shopping with and whine to about woman-trouble and generally just be one-of-the-girls with without actually going under the knife. And my bro sure picked a winner- I liked her immediately, and we all got along like a happy house on fire, sipping our brewskis and reminiscing about school days while Green Day moaned tepidly about tattoos and memories on a CD none of us would admit to having plopped on the stereo. Nineties kids, all. 

I'd never had a girl-bro before, so I was really excited to see how far I could push the boundaries of propriety. An off-colour joke here, an MD anecdote there, hell I even squeezed in a racist joke about Hindi People. She didn't seem to mind at all. I'd finally found my Gro. That's when my friend's parents dropped in, balked at me for a second as though experiencing a particularly nasty bout of deja vu, and quickly departed after dropping off his 2-year old son with us.      

The kid was a real people-pleaser, going round our circle handing out head massages like an overweight teenager with low self-esteem hosting her first house party. I was just settling into one-more-and-lunch? mode, when things took an unexpected turn. My friend, who had disappeared into the kitchen with the baby, reappeared wearing a distinctly dour expression I remembered –but couldn’t place- from our kindergarten days. “What’s wrong, buddy?” I asked. “Oh, nothing,” he muttered, and stole a glance at Wifey. Holy Miley, they were doing that weird transference thing couples do and in a couple of seconds she wore the exact same expression as him! Suddenly, looking at the two of them and their toddler who had just sauntered in naked, trailing a stray diaper and the definitive waft of poo behind him, I knew. Oh shit, this is what happens to people after they have babies. The words were out of my mouth before I knew it: “bro, did you just poop your pants?”

He hadn’t, of course. Turned out his son had a habit of swallowing assorted non-edible objects, and my friend had just found the key to his gym locker in the latest poop bouquet he had been presented with. Which in his shock and horror he had subsequently dropped in the pot of biryani that was supposed to be our lunch. “I’m sorry I accused you of hiding the key,” he said and gave Wifey a hug. “Why would you think she’d do that?” I asked, “and go boil your hand in acid or something.” I pricked my ears for the sound of water running as he went back inside. “Oh he’s got it into his head that I don’t let him have any alone-time out of some kind of new-mommy spite,” Wifey explained cheerfully, and patted her son’s bottom, “look, why don’t you go through the menu and we’ll order in some Chinese?” I wasn’t sure if I could eat for a couple of days yet. “Your problems are so different from mine,” I said, “AND WHO THE HELL CHANGES DIAPERS IN THE KITCHEN?” Wifey smiled patiently. “Relax, bro,” she said, “everything you’ve touched in this house has been pissed, pooped or puked on. Repeatedly. Now order some fucking Chinese before I make him swallow your balls.”     

Icy Highs's Video Recco: Justin Bieber vs. Slipknot - Psychosocial Baby

        

'Cough Syrup Surrealism' Book Launch & Party

So I've been threatening to publish my novel, Cough Syrup Surrealism, for a while now. I'm glad to tell you my baby's finally got a face, and a release date. And a Facebook page, because nothing screams AUTHENTIC more than a Facebook page, right? The cover's below, and here's the link to the page:

https://www.facebook.com/CoughSyrupSurrealism

The book is already available for pre-order on Flipkart and uRead, but the official launch (Translation: PARTY!) is on 10 June, Monday night at 7:30pm at The Den, Bandra in Bombay. It's a Nineties-themed night, with plenty of booze, books and banter, and of course a kickass 90s playlist. If you're in Bombay at the time, please drop in, say hello, help yourself to a few happy-making beverages and pick up a copy of the book.

Please check out the Facebook page and like/share/tweet/comment/mailmeyourpanties and show me some love, you guys! Launch party, and other details are all up on the page (because noone takes anything seriously unless Facebook tells them to), as well as some incredible artwork by resident aesthetician Igirit. 

I'm on @icyhighs if you'd like to drop me a line on Twitter. Thanks in advance, and fare thee well ye merry lot. Your support's meant the world to me, and will always do. I'll be back to blogging (and hopefully lose the writerly airs- yes, I KNOW how I sound!) in a couple of weeks. Hope to see you all at the launch! 

Why I Suck At Casual Sex

Before you snigger away, I'd like to make it clear that I don't mean the actual act, of course. I have it on good authority that I'm not any worse at casual sex than I am at relationship sex. How do I know? Because of the three serious relationships I've had, two of them started as casual enounters. 

I don't know if there's a general concensus as to what constitutes casual sex. My understanding of the term is: sex between strangers, or between acquaintances, sans any emotional involvement. When I approach a stranger in a bar or a club, I do so- as most decent people do- with this tenet lodged firmly in my mind.

I imagine scenarios where I climb out her bedroom window the next morning while she's still asleep, or trick her into stepping out of the car for some air and drive off into the sunrise. But these things never pan out in real life. I almost always end up staying for breakfast, or exchanging numbers or adding them on Facebook as soon as I get home.

 On one horrifying morning-after, I invited a girl who's name I couldn't remember to a weekend music festival with my mates. Not only did I spend the weekend extricating myself from situations where I may have had to say her name, I also conveniently forgot to mention the fact that she was with me to my mates who were promised a lads-only weekend.

This meant staging an elaborate ruse whereby I 'bumped' into her at the entrance in full view of my mates, and she ended up sort of hanging around in the background like a Casper mime. I spent my time alternating between telling my mates that the girl was certainly odd for following us around, and telling her that my mates were just too ill-mannered for a formal introduction.  

Both my 'serious' exes were casual encounters-turned-relationships through my propensity to text relentlessly. I can continue a conversation for hours and days, and sometimes, weeks, by text. Within three hours of having met me, women usually know everything about me from my favourite of the 4 Non Blondes  to why I resent my ex's goldfish. I'm a chatty man, and addicted to the sound of my own voice; for ever fascinated by the story of my own life. Sometimes, I wonder if I only have sex to trick women into feeling obliged to listen. 

As for the golden rule of casual sex- no emotional involvement- I'm even more ill-equipped for that one. I cried when I lost the pen I used to write my first short story. I have named household objects after women I've been with, and parts of girlfriends' bodies after sports teams. I'm incapable of emotional unattachment- to people, animals or things. If anything, I attach everything, and then superglue them together with emotion.    

I was once in the enviable position of being FWB with a rather attractive girl. We were neighbours in uni in Glasgow, and we had common friends back home, and she had a boyfriend. I was in a new country, and I was not looking to be tied down. It was perfect. She had a mouth like a salior, and a body that had never known failure. To top it all off, we detested each other on principle. There was nothing there but pure physical need.

It should have been a learning curve, a springboard to sexual greatness. We broke every rule in the book, plumbed new depths of depravity with every coupling for the first three months. I'll never forget the thrill of listening to her have phone sex with her boyfriend while we tried out a new position. Or the sickening aftertaste of lips that have just tasted my piss. But then winter came.

Winter somehow domesticated things; necessitated cuddling and partnered preparation of Christmas dinners. I put on a few pounds, she stopped waxing, and before we knew it, we were having relationship sex. We did assignments together, and went for walks. Luckily, our mutual hatred was just strong enough to never push us into a romance. My inability to walk away after a good innings meant we skipped romance and headed straight for long-and-bitter-marriage territory. She bit off a small piece of my ear on the last night we spent together.

I would like to apologize today to the women I’ve been with, whose welcome I subsequently overstayed. I wish I could blame the absence of a male role model in my childhood, but that would not be true. I remember when I first realized I had this condition. I was watching Cruel Intentions with my best friend, both of us excited and a little guilty about just how hot Sarah Michelle Gellar was. Remember how Sebastian had that scrapbook of all the women he had slept with? You’d think that’s what would stick in an impressionable teenager’s mind. Not in the case of yours truly. Do you know why? Frickin’ John Cusack, that’s why.

"Ïn your eyes" soundtracked many a childhood daydream.

Long before Cruel Intentions, long before pop music and Nick Hornby had infiltrated my soul, there was John Cusack. There he stood under women’s windows, clad in Nike high tops and that ridiculously cool coat, arms aloft holding a boombox over his head blaring Peter fucking Gabrielle. That was the beginning and the end. It was such a formative image, one that set in stone the notion and undying romance of the Grand Gesture. Every woman, every liaison in my life has been molded in expectation of that moment – the search for the woman who would finally give me the opportunity to make my Grand Gesture. It’s not that I’m unable to detach my emotions from sex, or even that I’m a romantic. I’m simply in search of a moment, and I can’t take the chance that I may lose out on it by not calling or emailing someone I’ve already slept with.   

To the bartender who woke up to find freshly-picked daffodils by the bed, the Russian student I moved in with briefly, the school teacher whose house I showed up at unannounced (you really should have told me you were married), to all the other women whose lives have been made poorer by my continued presence, by my audacity to stick around after and to remember birthdays and inquire about ailing moms, my inability to perceive you as objects of sexual gratification alone, I’m sorry. I’m terribly, sincerely sorry I suck out of bed.  

                            Icy Highs's Music Recco: "What's up" by 4 Non Blondes

How Virat Kohli can spare a few blushes, and (possibly) save the world

Time was when a nation was judged by it's heroes. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi all did just as much for national image as they did for their people. Then the navel-gazing, oil-paranoid Nineties happened, and most countries lost the right to claim any kind of heroism at all. The Noughties have somehow brought things full circle, and in these consumerist times, a country is often judged by the brands it's idols endorse. Just as brands are judged by the celebrities that endorse them. So for every retired punk rocker doing serious damage to his credibility by selling insurance on the telly, there's a Gillette or Nike distancing themselves from a philandering Tiger Woods. And just as national heroes once upon a time rebelled against injustice or stood up for those trampled upon, they now kick balls great distances, or compose angsty guitar lullabies. The times they are a-changing, indeed.

Whether or not heroism is a quality attributed too easily today is a debate for another day. I spent much of my day -as did at least a few million other Indians, I suspect- in front of the telly, watching the national cricket team pull off an astounding victory over sworn enemy and perpetual rival, Pakistan. The pace was set by a typically robust start from Sachin Tendulkar, a man who has long been elevated to the status of a cricketing God (is there any other kind?), and sustained marvelously by Virat Kohli, the most promising batsman India has produced since the Fab Four. The 23-year old Kohli is a bonafide youth icon, who has backed up the millions he earns in endorsements with stellar performances for his team(s) time and again.

As the Indian innings was approaching the final quarter, the commentator made an observation about young Kohli that would have made a great riff if he were comically inclined. Looking back on Kohli's celebration on scoring a century, the commentator remarked: "why does he look so angry?" His question sounded so genuine I nearly choked, laughing. It's true, the talented Mr. Kohli does have a fist-pumping, war-waging, thandav-evoking quality to his century celebration, and I have wondered on more than one occasion where he gets all that energy from after batting for so long. I've just never had the energy to contemplate it long enough to arrive at an answer.

The commentator delved a little deeper into Kohli's psyche, musing aloud that it was perhaps a means of staying focused on the team's goal after surpassing a considerable personal milestone, or indicative of the desire and hunger of the younger generation or some such psychobabble. Maybe his parents didn't love him enough, I don't care. I did notice he contrasted Kohli's celebrations to Tendulkar's, a man who has scaled practically every statistical peak that populates the game, and goes about it in muted, dignified fashion. I didn't think it was fair to compare two individuals on what is essentially a personal expression of joy, and I'm still not convinced his theory goes any deeper than "to each his own".

A few minutes after his comment however, an ad came on featuring the man of the moment, Mr. Kohli himself. It was for Fair and Lovely, a much-maligned and much-in-use cosmetic product that promises to lighten the complexion of one's skin. India has long debated the morality (or lack of it) in promoting ''fairness'' of skin   as a (key) determinant of beauty in a country where the majority of the population is dark-skinned. Questions have been raised about whether it is ethical for celebrities to endorse fairness products, and whether these products even work, but the cosmetic industry lobby has always teacupped such storms with a minimum of difficulty.

I wouldn't fault somebody for having a distinctive preference for a sexual partner of a particular complexion (it's as straightforward as preferring blonde to brunette, or tall women to midgets, whatever), but I do feel strongly against establishing one common standard of beauty for a billion people. If nine year olds today feel towards Kohli anything similar to the fanatic devotion I felt towards a then-20-year-old Tendulkar, they're investing a lot on this talented young man - hopes, dreams, aspirations, even life lessons. Tendulkar was the perfect role model - the Doogie Houser of cricket- with his prodigious talent, and his impeccable behavior on and off the field. And in almost twenty two years of professional cricket -and hundreds of advertisements- never have I seen him endorse a product of questionable character.

Tendulkar seems like one of those kids you wouldn't really want to hang out with in school simply because he was too determined and too focused to be fun company. (Would you really want to hang out with Doogie Houser?) Frankly, he's missed out on more than he will ever realize if his squeaky-clean image is entirely true. Kohli on the other hand has- or used to have- a bit of a reputation as a partying type, and I hope he gets his share. I'd never put pants on during off-season if I were him. I do hope however that he chooses wisely when he lends his name and his credibility to consumer goods. The current generation of adolescents don't have to wait for a game or concert to catch their heroes in action - they're constantly hanging on to their every word and action on social networks and cable TV. It'd be a shame if the only lesson a 9-year old fan takes away from someone as successful and driven as Virat Kohli is how far he or she is from the ideal colour spectrum.  Maybe Kohli could bottle his excess anger and offer the world an alternative source of energy instead.

Image sources: V. Kohli, S. R. Tendulkar

How the West was won and where it got us

"Honey, I SWEAR Fannie May is not another woman!"

Dear Leaders of the First World,

I spent the majority of the week just past reading blogs. Strangers' blogs, random blogs, blogs of pretty women. All in a  Sisyphusian effort to find a few like-minded individuals, people who write about stuff I'm interested in, who share the same disdain for lite beer and gainful employment.

Here's what I found: most bloggers are newly-mommied-up women who think no end of their toddlers. They put up myriad pictures of their infants in space suits and document their bowel movements online for no discernible reason other than abject apathy to the problem of overpopulation, and possibly, severely ignored  childhoods. 

The other sizable demographic comprises Jesus-freaks and conservatives. From my limited understanding, they limit all real life socializing to handing out Christian pamphlets at tea parties, and presumably, phoning in to Rush Limbaugh's talk show. All of which is perfectly reasonable behavior for two equally hormonally-oppressed groups of people. 

What gets my goat are the 'artists'. The writers, the poets, the painters, the designers, the photographers, the dancers. Not all of them, obviously. Just the younger ones who are following the dream, doing what they've always wanted to do with perfect calm and clarity of thought. 

A lot of them are university-educated, reasonable, articulate, entertaining, employable white people in their mid-20s, working in retail or in the hospitality industry while astutely typing away at their Macbooks, waiting for their big break. This pisses me off. Because they've only just gone and gentrified the third world. 

I'm Indian. My country is all of  64 years old. I should be the one toiling away at a thankless, demeaning Mcjob in a floundering economy. Instead, I'm stuck in an air-conditioned office all day here in Singapore, organizing international conferences for business leaders and management gurus from all over the world, picking and choosing speakers and subject experts for events I conceive, deliver and make a 400% return on. And all I want is to be a struggling, unpublished writer. 

Do you know how hard it is to struggle with a view of the magnificent Singapore Flyer from my bedroom window? Do you realize how difficult it is to feel hard-done-by and unappreciated when bank managers queue up to offer you platinum credit cards like bananas to some ridiculous monkey deity? Do you comprehend the tragedy of having to leave one's motherland just to be able to under-achieve? 

Thirty years ago, it would have been perfectly reasonable for young middle-class Indian men to live off the rent collected on their parents' multiple real estate investments. Of course, they didn't call it an 'investment' then; they were simply plots of inherited, ancestral  land. And rent at the time was nowhere near the mind-numbing 5-digit figure it is now - I could have leeched off my parents but only enough to survive. I may even have had to do some subsistence agriculture on the side.  

But in 1991, in the summer of my childhood, the whole world decided to throw us their lifelines, to anchor their economies on our shores. Result: by the time I grow up, there are jobs aplenty, salaries on offer that can feed small countries in Africa. And these alien jobs, these extra-terrestrial salaries, are all housed in the motherships of multinational corporations that are more than willing to spread a little monetary joy in the lives of the owners of the properties they operate from. So like any nouveau riche couple, it will simply not do for my parents for their offspring to be anything less than uber-successful.      

I had to flee to Britain in shame to pursue my higher education in development economics. How else would my parents explain such a terribly romantic field of study to their contemporaries? Whereas in Glasgow, I could soak my soul in whiskey and embrace writerly existential angst and temp my life away without the scrutiny of my self-appointed mentors back home. Alas, those still-colonial Brits only extend your visa if you're a doctor or an engineer, the 'technical' jobs the natives refuse to accept because they're too busy finding themselves on a beach in India! Here in Singapore, I do my best to not impress but they simply refuse to fire a man with a British degree. Unless a suitably qualified Brit comes along to take the job, of course. 

My request, Messrs Obama and Cameron, and Frau Merkel, is simple. Give me back my economic uncertainty, my lack of career prospects, my birthright to toil and suffer. I man the 7/11s, I drive your big yellow taxicabs, while you lot run banks, manufacture weapons and generally rule the world. That was our understanding, remember, before all this outsourcing nonsense? In the slightly modified words of some of your own salt-of-the-earth countrymen, stop coming to my country and giving us your jobs.  

Sincerely,

Renaissance Hippie           

P.S. Image courtesy here  

                              Losing my religion - REM

     

    

Honey, who shrunk the kids?

A friend of mine, well-intentioned as he always is, emailed me this song by a band called The Honey Trees. Even before I hear the first needy purr of the synthesizer, before the slickly produced video begins to roll, before the  bridge mellows out into the chorus, I know exactly what's coming. It's the same whineysweet tune you've heard a hundred times before, the harmless type that fades nicely into the background, that Volvo will probably feature in an ad sometime in the near-now. The girls all look and dress and laugh like Zooey  Deschanel, and the boys...well, the boys look like Zooey Deschanel too. How did this happen?

Have you bought a pair of jeans lately? Did you know they've completely done away with the old system of measurement? Its not enough to just look for a 32 waist any more. There's a skinny 32, an urban skinny 32, a slim 32, a slimmer-than-slim 32, a so-skinny-you're-probably-just-bones 32. And if you ask really nicely, the so-skinny-she's-an-alien shop assistant will fish out a comfortable 32 from the back of the establishment. If it's a busy day, they're yours for free. If it's not crowded, she'll direct you to a little room at the back where the fat people pay for their clothes. Rip off the label with a jackhammer, throw the garment in an anonymous, plain white bag and whisper: "just don't tell anyone you shop here, yeah?"

They're everywhere, these Slim Jims. At work, at the pub, at the cinema. I've even seen a couple at the local take-away or I'd be convinced they're all starving, morally-ambiguous vampires. Some of them are even known to sparkle. They are believed to breathe only through their eyelashes because their noses are in a constant state of being turned up in disgust at the Mainstream. But who or what is this Mainstream? I look around and all I see are clones and clones of clones and clones of skinny people. I see brogues and fedoras and waistcoats and teeshirts with pictures of bands that look and sound and laugh like other bands. I see The Great Depression, or a Truman Show-like screen at the end of the horizon that's actually a cleverly disguised vagina with an extended clitoris that's cleverly disguised to look like a conveyor belt, delivering row after row of Topshop-babies, one after the other, in an unending line.

I'm no more alone in my despair than they are in their indie-kinship of course. I've heard the odd grumble about these beautiful men looking like they're photoshopped, the odd celeb outcry against Size Zero. But these upholders of dignity of the horizontally challenged are all ridiculously fit themselves. Sure they can talk! As a 90s child, this whole thing scores heavily on my injustice-meter. Cable TV and sitcoms have let me down again. What happened to the lovable, overweight losers who get the cute girl? They're hung by their excess skin on a clothesline in Zooey Deschanel's garage, that's what. She's probably waiting for them to loosen up a little to make a holder for her folder full of quirky brain n' bean salad recipes.                

     

Where everybody knows your name

Singapore Diary # 2

The Lot, Stock and Barrel has quickly become a home-away-from-home of sorts. See, I grew up on 90s television. Which means I believe in having a 'local'. Central Perk for Friends, Monk's Cafe for Seinfeld, the pizza place for the folk from Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place. I've always wanted a regular joint where everybody knows your name, where the bartender slips you your drink before you order it.

This I suspect is a generational malady. I dare say I'm not alone in this particular craving for some sort of recognition, of gratitude and respect for your loyalty. In a way, it's a personal attempt at celebrity, no matter how small the scale. For those few minutes -while you wait for your beer while the newbies, the passers-by all queue up and enunciate the names of their fancy little cocktails hoping the bartender will get it right- for those few minutes, you are king. You can see it in their faces, the pangs of jealousy at the easy familiarity between you and the person behind the counter.

Of course, being a 90s child, and being very much of the grunge-and-flannel persuasion, it just wouldn't be right if things didn't go horribly wrong. I was conditioned -by years of TV and absentee parents- to believe that everything will go wrong, that life is basically shit. So even the seemingly harmless little pleasure of barface celebrity would not be as pleasing as it is if it was entirely welcoming. So while, I'm very much a regular (it's just across the road from work), I'm something of an unwanted regular, like that chronic-bachelor uncle who shows up at all the family weddings and funerals and baptisms, the one nobody likes.

And this is why I love Lot, Stock and Barrel. Pauline, the owner, told me that she used to be a hotshot lawyer before she bought the place. She didn't choose the name. I told her I thought the name was too obvious, too posturing-ish. She didn't take that very well. The usual bartenders -this nerdy/indie Malay girl with glasses, a Sri Lankan engineering student who wears teeshirts with fire and cheesy heavy metal insignia on them  and this other girl who climbs up on the counter and sings Valerie for me every night after closing time- they all fake the necessary camaraderie, but the one truly great thing about the place is that they let you know at all times that its all unreal. It's a commercial establishment. I drink, I pay, I puke, I make gross confessions, they listen, they don't care. Its modern community living. Where you have to pay for conversation, where you have to be inebriated to be capable of intimacy, of honesty. Its all very physical and metaphorical and metaphysical in one go.

Like all normal men, I've always wanted to own/run a bar. This is exactly the kind of bar I'd like to own/run. There's a projector for the big games, there's always footy on the telly, there's a very retro jukebox with lots of retro tunes, its dim and dark and depressing and moody, and you can order takeaway and have it delivered at the bar. And eat it there. Its the dream. And they'll never tell you to leave as long as you're still buying drinks. No matter how big a fool you're making of yourself. Doesn't matter if you ask the big fat sailor if his moustache is actually a furry rodent resting on his upper lip, or if you play If Only You Were Lonely twenty times on loop. All you gotta do is pay. Keep paying, keep playing, and everybody knows your name.

                Valerie - Amy Winehouse (RIP)

Small World + Big Data = Not So Great Second Date

So I was thinking (and thinking is never good): if the internet and the mobile phone and budget airlines have all made the world smaller, why is it so much more difficult now to connect?

I remember growing up in Trivandrum,   all those years ago. Those days, it seemed almost normal to make a new friend every other day. Not a friend for life admittedly, not a bro or a wingman or any of those sitcom-flavored forever-relationships. Just people, people who would calmly step into your life with a lightness of feet and clarity of purpose so transparent, you practically welcomed the intrusion. The Trivandrum Public Library was a great place to make new friends; playing cricket in the little lane we shared with the other three houses on our little residential colony was another. Strange kids would step up and ask you when you planned to return The Five Find-Outers mystery you were holding. The conversation would turn to other authors of interest or maybe a new movie, and for the rest of the summer we'd talk and eat ethakka appam in the old canteen and swap books. And every now and again, a new kid would show up with tennis ball and MRF-emblazoned bat and maybe a bottle of Pepsi and ask if he could play the next game; "I live right around the corner," he'd say," in Shanti Nagar, and I saw you guys playing yesterday and I thought I'd join in."  It seemed like the most natural thing -that somebody passing by would want to do that- and of course we'd let him, if a little proprietorially of the house rules. Because every group of children who've ever had to make do with a straight strip of cement instead of a grass-green cricket ground have their own rules - dispatching the ball into the unfriendly neighbor's house was out, you could only bowl under-arm, something or the other. But we made do. And they came knocking. And we went asking. And we played.

Its not much harder to meet people these days. But unlike then, you can't help googling (yes, it is a verb) a new acquaintance every time you make one. Inevitably, you're hit with a storm of information - confessions of bed-wetting on their blog, photographs of bad hair days on Facebook, shameless self-promotion on Linkedin- and you can't help thinking its all a little too much a little too soon. Of course its your fault for looking; but its also human nature isn't it? You don't clap a hand over your ear if you just happen to be sitting next to a loudly bickering couple at a boring conference. Why do people do this then? Why do we put ourselves on display for such intense inspection, why do we voluntarily make ourselves vulnerable to constant public character dissection? I know I'm as guilty as the next person, and the only reason I can think of is that its somehow gratifying to get a response, to be heard. And because a response -any response- is sometimes so much more gratifying than just being heard, we constantly create content that's guaranteed to do just that. Which also means a lot of those "OMG!!" moments never actually happened. Or that picture where you're "soooo drunk!" at "Pat's pad" was really just a picture you took off your own sleepy self after a boring movie marathon at Pat's pad. Or maybe Pat doesn't even exist. I don't know. It's just so frustrating when you meet someone and you meet them a second time loaded with all that detail from the internet, dying to talk all night about their passion for wildlife or a new band or cooking in the nude, only to find that it was all a carefully constructed branding exercise.

Whereas all those years ago, it was okay to find out the new kid with the great bowling arm has a disgusting habit of rubbing snot all over the ball because you've already known him for a good few weeks then. You've exchanged sweaty high-fives and smelled each other's farts and met his sociopath parents before the disturbing snot-revelation, and while its no less disgusting, it is eminently more forgivable. He had time on his side, we had something going already. Finding out on the second date that she really doesn't like the Screaming Trees all that much on the other hand is the deception of an almost-stranger. And that much more grave. It leaves her with no chance really. You already don't trust her, you already think she's a drunk or an exhibitionist or a wonk.

What's the solution then? I don't know. But if you're going to piss yourself every time you have a few mojitos, I'd rather find out after we've known each other a while. Or I could just not find out at all if that's possible; just go to the bathroom or don't get that drunk. Either way, don't let it show up on your Facebook page in the  form of a picture of a wet denim-clad crotch and a hundred thousand comments below it all touting the tune of "Oh no, not AGAIN, tee hee!". Really? We've known each other a total of three days. We've only spent three of those hours in each other's company. What am I supposed to do with that kind of information? What face do I put on tonight if you order a drink? You've only just gone and ruined my Saturday night. You silly little piss-pot.


  *Image courtesy Weheartit

    

Black Pudding for the Cynical Soul

Recession is a funny word, isn't it? Not LOL funny, obviously, but a sort of Woody Allen - evoked chuckle kind of funny? I mean, you hear it thrown around so much these days, it's  a wonder it still retains meaning. I wonder if half the recession mongers know what the term really signifies. I'm an Economics graduate and I certainly don't. But then, Ive always been what my mom likes to call practically challenged. To me, words mean what they sound or smell or are spelt like. And 'recession' to me is a tide ebbing away from the shore, some sort of pathetic attempt to hold on, a phantom withdrawal syndrome. Its Kerouac and his stream of consciousness.

Glasgow is in many ways the perfect measurement gauge of any meaningful socioeconomic phenomenon, be it the success of high street fashion retail chains or the degree of correlation of underachievement and football hooliganism. While you may find it ironic that it took Kate Moss to save rock and roll in a land that gave us Burns and Macintosh and Jesus Mary Chain, I think we should embrace it. If a supply chain of identical skin tight denims and badly gelled hair makes the kids pick up their parents guitars, good riddance to X factor rubbish. Atleast these kids have soul. And if they don't, I hear H and M stocks it in bulk.

You know when you know Tony Blair's governance made hardly a dent in the entertainment industry? When the same bouncers that refused you entry all through last year, say no this time round. They've held on to their jobs, and the club's still not desperate enough to let you in. Maybe it's your cardigan. But the economy is in good nick surely? And if it's not, we've still got Nice n Sleazy's. My girlfriend's on the phone from Dusseldorf. She thinks I should stop taking the piss, and beguile you with breezy summer tales of Ashton Lane.

I have this sepia tinged photograph, courtesy Leni's shiny Sony Ericsson w12345, of her and I, and her sister, all of us holding what must have been our seventh round of sambuccas, happy huggy threesome under the April skies, right outside the Nude. The sun was just beginning to set a little later into the evening, the tables outside the pub were getting more custom than in previous months, and there's that dreamy aura all around of good things to come. By any scale, that's one for the scrap books. But every time I see it on her Facebook album, all of us neatly tagged into names and identities, I like the future a little less. I can't help wishing it were a Polaroid, that it would reek a little less of posterity.

For the moment though, I feel daintier than Russel Brand. Culture vultures are predicting a plethora of great art to be inspired by all the depression hullabaloo. In ten years' time, they say, the streets will be flooded with beatniks and hipsters, poets and vandal art. Their tongues will drip irony, and their hands will speak foreign tongues. Maybe we'll even bring back typewriters. And I'll sip my Famous Grousse in contentment.

I've met someone

It's been a good few years since the last time eh? I know I promised I'd text/e-mail/whatever. We both know it wasn't quite working out. Though if you were interested then, you should still be interested now. Because as it turns out, not a lot has changed, really. I still listen to pretty much the same music, that gym membership never really paid off, I'm still trying to quit smoking. There's more : I'm still gainfully unemployed, I still alternately romanticize and internalize the plight of the struggling writer, I still have that recurring fantasy I borrowed from Generation X. The one about just floating belly-up in the Dead Sea, full of life and still as a corpse. That's probably also the best metaphor for these last few years. If I were the type to go to psychologists, and the one I went to happened to be the type who advises patients to ''go to their happy place'', mine would be a little town called 'Inertia'. And I'd love her back.