Animals are beautiful people

I love butterflies though its painful catching them to pose for you. Here's some I got recently in Chennai and Lonavla.

Marriage matters - journey to the altar part 8

I was tensed. For one I could not face 'WHO'. After all a wedding with the groom and his brother alone was not my dream but what went through his mind hurt me more. 'WHO' had cancelled his parents' tickets to Kerala, fearing last minute tampering by them in our new plans. Parents are intuitive they must have sensed it some how because a day after his parents told him they are with him and to let them atleast attend the wedding. This wedding was getting to be the wedding of the millenium. People were already gossiping about the change of venues and that for second, tensed me more (Looking back now though I feel stupid for worrying what people thought) .

But people could not understand why a guy's family would agree for both ceremonies at girl's place; something sure was fishy. I started fretting over my relationship with my future in-laws . 'WHO' was nervous but assured me things would be fine and we both realised we shared the same temprament when it came to tackling crises. We realised there was no turning back and blaming each other for now this life was ours and everything that came along was part of this package called " Journey to the altar".

My sister kept me busy with beauty tips and visits to beautician. Finally we made it to the Wedding day after a lousy engagement where the groom's and bride's people sat apart with no interaction. From the dais it looked like a war to us and disturbed us in between our photo sessions. I did not wear my glasses but could sense the cold war from where we sat. We really enjoyed the pre marital course thereafter partially because we were happy looking at our rings and flaunting around to other couples who were not engaged yet. But maybe getting to talk to each other during the little intervals, without chaperones, made us very excited.

I don't remember much details about the wedding or my engagement. I am sure people who have been here and done this will agree. The mix of anxiety, excitement, pressure and with hundreds of people staring at you and add to that the solemnity of a malu wedding makes it an occassion which you just want to get done with. People told us the food was awesome but we could not eat to our heart's content posing for pics in between lunch. Not that we could have eaten otherwise because our hearts were in our mouths all the time. That's one thing I hate about weddings one never gets to enjoy food from one's own wedding (we are waiting to attend some wedding and enjoy the food).

My dad in law did have a tussle in front of the staging area asking us to pack up and stop photo sessions as he had to reach home at an auspicious time. This did panick my people and all the rituals were performed in fast forward motion.

But highlights of the day were that the people who dressed me forgot to tuck the starting tip of my saree and i kept stumbling on it. My mom saved me from being a laughing stock, standing there saree-less in front of the whole gathering.

But what I would never forget is vommitting in front of an Orthodox church where we were sent to light candles before entering my groom's place. ' WHO' promised to clean the mess which he didn't and next morning we saw someone had cleaned it by throwing some mud over it. They must have taken it for a drunkard rather a catholic travel sick bride and if they knew the truth lord save the next crusade.

And that's how we got married, it began with a mail and ended in vomit. Makes no sense huh? maybe you should read all the parts :)

Animals are beautiful people

Every worm that wriggles by... tells a fascinating news for those who dare to hope....

WHO is going crazy over animal pics . He captured this beautiful shot at Lonavla.

Happy Cockroach hunting

The ads on cockroach hunting for science project and Americas' funniest home video of a child swallowing a cockroach, brought back some memories from my childhood. My sis Asha was a show stealer. She always spoke or did stuff that drew mom's and everyone else's attention to her. I must at this point admit I was never too happy about it. I neglected her in every way possible and remained silent when I could warn her or mom from some danger Asha was in.

One beautiful day, for me, as I was lazing around figuring out what to play (I was 2 yrs old) Asha was crawling around trying to look cute so I would let her join me in play. I never fell for her charms so I kept ignoring her babbling, which sounded like 'chechi' (big sis). She fell silent after some time and I was mature enough a kid to know she had founded something new to amuse herself. I heard noises of her falling on and off and was happy to hear about her self harm games. But to cure my curiosity I decided to check on her, after all I could walk and the poor little soul crawled (Mom says I thought I walked from birth and considered Asha a dumbo for crawling). There I saw her crawling with the speed of a cheetah pouncing towards it prey. She had spotted a cockroach quite big for her and was chasing it like any kid of her age did seeing crawling bugs and beetles.

My database told me that mom forbid cockroaches and scared us that we would die if we put them in the mouth. Asha's courage irritated me but her foolishness made me happy. If she chose her death by a measly looking creature what could I do? But I never bothered calling mom. I erased that part of my mommy advice chips conveniently.

Asha looked like a puppy, scared of the cockroach yet trying to trap it with her dress when it moved and finally she caught it with her baby palms and pressed it tight .

I was having fun when mom came in, moms always have bad timing and nice intuitions, found us quiet and was curious to know what was happening. Now kids and dogs have something in common when they do something forbidden; they act reflexively in front of their masters. Asha perhaps knew mom would confiscate the cockroach so the moment Mom screamed looking at her she popped the cockroach into her mouth. I didn't know Chopin then but something similar must have played in my head in delight while I watched mom screaming NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

The next part of the tussle was mom trying to make Asha open her mouth, to spit the thing out and she stubbornly shutting it tight. But I felt cheated seeing her alive partially because I believed mom's story and never touched a cockroach and partly jealous at Asha's courage, even though out of ignorance, which meant she was ALIVE. Mom finally made Asha spit it out but the essence had reached her tummy.

Well years down I have killed as many cockroaches I could on my dissection table and rehearsed it many times at home to irritate Asha. Asha till date is aversive to cockroaches and I am still alive. As far as cockroaches are concerned, they have outlived the dinosaurs, hopefully will do humans too.

Animals are beautiful people

You would have only heard about mall rats but here we give you a mall cat. Ain't he cute, felt like calling him Tabby, from Thomas Gray's poem "On a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes"
He keeps a watchful eye on the mall rats and is not perturbed by the big bills you draw up.

Look into those wise eyes and you know that it has seen the world. And the only one who ate generous servings of multi grain cracker biscuits from Bhuji.

Rejection

I created a record of sorts this morning. I flagged down almost sixteen rickshaws and none of them would ferry me to my office, which is a good three to four kilometer away from home and should ideally fetch the guy a good bauni i.e. the first income of the day. My office is in a commercial hub and it’s not like these guys would end up stranded without their next passenger. Maybe there was an outbreak of swine flu in the area and these guys got wind of it. But that was the least of my troubles. Because my office was close by, by Mumbai standards, I never thought of keeping a ‘buffer time’ in a situation of getting late. Considering this I started walking towards my office and I met all these sixteen aforesaid good Samaritans on the way. But it was not long before I reached the half way mark and realized that I didn’t had enough energy left in me to do the remaining half and now with even lesser distance left to travel I was afraid to ask a rick driver lest getting ridiculed by one. So the only option left for me was to trek the remaining distance. And when the boss asked why I am showing up late I said there was a rick strike (is this not a strike or what?) and I had to come walking all the way. Look at all the brownie points I stand to collect as a model employee whose commitment and sincerity made him walk the length of the Great Wall of China to reach office. But this post is neither about how often I have to walk to office nor about how arrogant and ill-mannered the rickshaws drivers are (my brother would love if I could throw some mean words on this spineless tribe). Let’s isolate the rick drivers from the scene and focus on the one other thing that happened very prominently this morning, which is something I am sure you would have experienced in your life as well. Being “rejected”- does the word or feeling sound familiar? Yes sir, it does.

In the evening, after I reached home and yes I got a rick this time because surprisingly they had called off the strike, I thought that this was not the first time I got rejected or for that matter ‘we’, but yes in my case I did set a record of sixteen rejection in an hour and maybe that’s why I was so pissed off. There are other negative feelings that we often encounter: failure, deceit, hatred, disappointment, frustration, enemity, jealousy. So is the feeling of rejection grave enough to be put up on the wall of shame? The answer is both Yes and No. ‘YES’ because though rejection by itself is an effortless process the person who gets rejected stands motivated to do great harm to the others. And ‘NO’ because ‘No’ is the basic expression or tool to convey the decision of rejection. Sometimes this simple ‘No’ is accompanied with such contempt and disregard from the other person that one feels humiliated and is provoked to do harm. Like some of the rickshawallas who looked at me with disdain and reacted as if I was asking them to hand over the map of Eldorado.

If you look back in time you‘ll see a lot of instances of rejection in life, some outright funny and others painful. You wanted to go play with the kids in the colony but mom thinks you are better off sulking at home; rejected. You fancy a toy in the shop but dad won’t let it come any nearer than that; rejected. You want to take a piss but your teacher thinks your bladder can hold it right there until her class is over; rejected. You want to watch an English movie but your friends think you are a prude and you end up watching a Tamil one; rejected. You propose to a girl, she likes your courage but not you, rejected. The foreign university you applied to saw through the lies in your ‘statement of purpose’; rejected. You apply for jobs but none of the companies can spare a desk or even a chair for you; rejected. Your manager thinks you can’t get your own work done leave alone others, there goes the team lead position; rejected. The bank decides that you don’t earn enough to use their credit card to make merry and so is the case with the personal loan, rejected. The consulate is not convinced that you are going to return back from your so called ‘training assignment” in the US and stamps your passport as – REJECTED.

So why does it hurts to get rejected? As human beings we would be contented if we could get all things done by ourselves and in the way that suits our liking. But however healthy, strong and intelligent one might be it’s impossible to get all your needs fulfilled just by yourselves. Else we would have all created our own operating system and Bill Gates would be just another guy staring out of the windows. And this is the basic premise of living in a society. We are dependent on others to do certain things for us. This dependency creates a sense of insecurity because we are not sure if the other person can really understand our needs and whether he would be able to deliver it on time and according to our specification. This sense of diffidence is very strong and coupled with the fact that the other party has the freedom to say no to your request results in a very anxious and disturbed individual. And when the counterparty does say ‘No’, it’s the sense of shame, failure and deceit which makes the experience a bitter pill to swallow. But there is more to it. It also greatly depends on what value do you assign to the outcome or the proposition. For example getting an admission in a foreign university would mean more to you than being allowed by your teacher to go take a piss. A lot of times we unconsciously start dreaming and relishing the fruits that lie at the other side of the bargaining even before the coin has been tossed. We become so foolishly arrogant and naively overconfident in our daydreaming, forgetting that there are always two sides of a coin, and when fates calls our bluff our ego takes a fall into the gulf separating the real world and the dream.

So what should we do to not get rejected? Same as what you would do to not get killed today. Death is another form of rejection, from the powers above that you are not allowed to go about doing things in this world. First of all, and this is the most important one, stay away from places where there is certain rejection and no two way to it. So if there is something that is surely beyond your reach and a certainty that it would remain so then don’t stretch your hands for it. Just like you would stay away from a gun battle, provided you have got nothing to do with it, for not getting killed. The enlightened ones among us would say that this suggestion is a pessimistic one. One should always reach for the stars and beyond. That brings me to the second most important point, however easy an event might look or however well prepared you are to enter the contest, where the power to say Yes or No or to influence the final outcome rests with another individual there is always a possibility that after all is said and done you might have to settle for a No or a rejection. So go reach for the stars, maybe beyond, go for Krypton but then don’t think you are Superman. Always give due thought to the possibility of rejection and not the certainty of success. So you have realized that you are not Superman and that there is an equal probability that things might go wrong, what else can you do? Increase the number of mutually exclusive events. You apply to ten universities for admission rather than just one. If your father is not ready to buy you the toy then ask mom, if not her then there is granny. If you can’t become a Team Lead in this company go look for another job, another company. If this bank doesn’t issue you a credit card try it with another bank. If you can’t go to US try UK. As the chicken would say it - don’t put all my eggs in one basket.

Now some of you might say that you can do things or not do things to not get killed but what about a freak accident or getting run over, where you have little say in the proceeding. So it’s like somebody might reject you even before you could do something about it or to influence the judgment. Let’s face it then, if you are born then you have to die. So as much as you do, you will get rejected once in a while. So it might happen that tomorrow the very first rickshaw I ask will agree to ferry me to office, will save me the pain of walking and the humiliation of getting rejected, but once in office it might happen that my manager would tell me that he does not require my services anymore and yours truly gets laid-off. There is no escaping rejection. That’s why I am putting it up on the wall of shame. Sayonara.

Animals are beautiful people

The only guy who was kind enough to give us a dekho at Bychulla zoo. So we thought of paying back in kind by posting him here.