What's on your mind?

What’s on your mind?

Having recently been introduced to the world of Facebook and Twitter (oh, I know I’m a late entrant and the rest of you are almost ready to move on to the next happening thing in the e-world ) BTW, what comes after ‘tweeting’? Bleating? ………Meeting? (mind the vowels though), Dating?
Hmm…….. I’ll wait and watch.

Anyway, I digress. Coming to the ‘what’s on your mind’ feature on Facebook and Twitter ( I think they call it ‘what are you thinking right now?’ Or ‘what are you doing right now’?) : I’m equally intrigued and piqued. Why would someone want to know what’s on someone’s mind, every 5 minutes (that’s the frequency with which some of these addicts update their ‘status’ or view the status of their friends.)

Well ……………………… we did play a different version of this in our times : there would be the lazy Saturday afternoon when the hubby would be lying spread-eagled on the couch or burrowed in the bean bag with a vacant look on his face thinking the same 3 things that all guys think about, (don’t I know) and I’d side up to him and say ‘penny for your thoughts’. He’d shake himself out of his reverie and mumble something about wondering where to take me out for shopping. “Liar” I’d mutter under my breath, giving him my sweetest smile and then cozy up, to make sure it was someplace really nice and sinfully expensive.

‘What are you thinking’ I’d ask in more worried tones, when I saw the blank look again as he waited at the check-out counter. I went weak-kneed wondering if he’d left his wallet at home and was toying between escaping past the counter-clerk without paying or escaping my wrath if we returned home minus the half-dozen bags that lay at my feet crying for a home and a wardrobe.

‘What’s on your mind?’ I’d ask my daughter when she stared at her geometry book as if it was a work of art by a Monet or a Picasso. The blank face and the faraway look in the eyes spoke less about an art critic in the making and more about an impending encounter with the Maths teacher.

So, I’m quite curious to know how this question gets answered by millions of people world-wide. Talking of us Indians, while I can’t say I can speak for the billion of us, I do know that what’s on my mind every minute of the day, can’t be very different from what’s on all our minds as we struggle to survive in a nation that’s insanely chaotic, dysfunctional and falling to pieces on its best day….. I shudder to reminisce about its worst days : they’re best forgotten like a bad dream or, to be more specific, the holocaust.

6 am : blurry eyed, having spent a sleepless night as an unwilling member of a 1-woman audience (on the other side of the wall) for my neighbor’s all-night jamming session (“you wanted to live in a Complex with young people remember?” hubby unfeelingly pointed out the last time when I complained about having had to listen to a remix of Saigal and Usha Uthup till 2 am) , I open the front door. My day begins


Time
Activity
What’s on my mind?

6 am
Collect the milk packet left by the front door, looking rather like the One-eyed Jack . The other eye still has to wake up and hubby had better stop making these wise-cracks
I hope this milk isn’t adulterated. I pray that whoever in Govt. is responsible for checking this, is doing his job. I hope there is no further scam brewing. I hope they got their arrears per the 6th pay commission (or is it the 7th ? I’ve lost count) and aren’t looking to make a quick buck or two from milk adulteration. Remember that article in the Times of India some years back that talked about what a sophisticated industry it is ? Not the Dairy industry silly – the adulteration industry. Somewhat like the parallel organization that Ramalinga Raju created when he scripted the Satyam Saga. (‘Oh what a tangled org. structure we weave when we first practice to deceive’ I drolly parodied Shakespeare).

You do, of course, read about the small raids they conduct every now and then : more to fill some newspaper columns (when the journalist runs out of newsworthy events (can that ever happen in this great country) or has had his fill of murders, molestations, mishaps, mayhem (oooh…. That’s onomaetopic, My English teacher will be pleased) .

Since the objective is to fill column inches and not really cleanse the system of its ills and strepto cocci, they don’t go beyond arresting a couple of poor lads in ill-fitting pants who gleefully pose with a milk-packet in one hand and a syringe in another : only because they probably pay them for posing or it makes them instant celebrities in their little ‘basti’ or ‘chawl.’

And then there was this other mail that said milk feeds the dreaded C - cells that lie dormant in all our bodies. So may be we should switch to soya milk? Eeuuu …. That’s a yucky alternative though. Doesn’t it make more sense to innoculate the cow with some anti-cancer vaccine so that it can’t pass on anything other than healthy calcium to us?

6.05 am
I switch on the gas
I hope the gas cylinder doesn’t explode. I hope they don’t recycle the cylinders past their expiry date. Is there a Mumbai Mirror or an Aaj Tak expose waiting to be written about? Remember the email doing the rounds that tells you where and how to check for this???? I pushed it into the ‘junk folder’ – oh dear, how terribly stupid and irresponsible of me. My family trusts me to read all such mails diligently and act on them, and here I am creating auto-rules that rid me of my responsibilities without even the burden of guilt. I make a mental promise to retrieve it first thing on Monday morning and then check my cylinder.

Would piped gas be an alternative? Should I talk about this at the next Society meeting? But then, with the BMC, MTNL, Tata Sky, Reliance and the neighborhood dog constantly prospecting for oil reserves (or a non-existent bone, in case of the dog) , wouldn’t we run the risk of gas leaks every day? What if somebody swung his hammer real high and brought it down on a valve? I shuddered to think of gallons of gas spewing out while Society members argued about who would call the Mahanagar Gas guys only to find nobody had the number in the first place. And then, more gas leaking out while we compared it with the Bhopal Gas tragedy and tut-tutted at a Government that seems to have learnt no lessons.

I settle for the cylinder… (a) at least the gas quantity is finite so any damage will be limited and (b) I can ensure a greater degree of safety with my cylinder than I can with the pipeline under the street


6.11 am
The milk boils : the creamy yellow fat rises to the top
The mother in me goes into overdrive : I hope that is cream and not DDT or sodium monosulphate or potassium nitrate or whatever else it is they use to adulterate milk while retaining its visual properties. When I urge my child to drink her daily glassful, am I slowly poisoning her? Should I consider buying my own cow? In a 2-bedroom flat ? May be I could extend the balcony a little bit when no one’s looking? (after all, the Sharmas, the Gadiyars, the Wadhwas and even timid Mrs Krishnan, have all done it). But what about additional property tax? Could I sell some of the milk and make up?
I look to hubby for some guidance but the grim look on his face, as he digests the latest news of the stock market, tells me my cow must necessarily wait for a more opportune time, at least until after he’s done with the Bulls and Bears.

6.30 am
I settle down with my morning cuppa (my cup of poison.? .uh..uh…) and the newspapers in hand
I have the Times of India, Bombay Times, Economic Times and Mumbai Mirror : each more depressing than the other (ok – I’m a liar. ET is an exception most days when I can figure out what they’re saying).

If there is one thing in this world that can drive me to the depths of despair and tempt me to drop a cube of cocaine instead of sugar into my morning tea, it is the drivel that the Indian media shovels down my throat every morning. Or may be I’m shooting the messenger for the message. But when I’m done with the papers, most days, it makes me want to do one of the following (depending on the day of the week)

(a) jump down from my 4th floor window
(b) migrate to Nigeria or Ethiopia or better still some place where they haven’t discovered newspapers
(c) shoot everyone
(d) shoot myself (more practical than option ‘c’)
(e) stop reading the newspaper and listening to the news (definitely the most patriotic and ahimsaic option
(Gandhiji would be proud of me) – so would hubby – coz he wouldn’t have to share the newspaper with me or have me change channels when Ponting is getting ready to swing for a six

Ok – I digress – but that’s how my mind works…multi-threading, we call it in software parlance.

The wheels-within-wheels of Indian politics and the machinations of our elected representatives, is something that my frail, womanly sensibilities can neither fathom nor digest – at least not so early in the morning. Later in the day I can be quite clever but not at 6.30. Besides, I don’t look at newspaper reading as a test of IQ or a CAT examination.

I can’t figure out family relationships beyond my first cousins, so understanding the Sharad Pawar-Sonia Gandhi-Raj Thackery-Udhav Thackery-NCP-MNS-Congress nexus (with a BSP and an Amar Singh thrown in for good measure) is where I throw in the towel, the gauntlet – in the fact the entire contents of my washing machine.

And so, the first page gets the Playboy centre -spread treatment : a furtive look prompted by curiosity and then a hasty turning of the page out of sheer disgust or disinterest.

Scams : counter scams
Judge found with disproportionate assets.
CBI raids Income Tax officer’s house : 10 crores found in cash. Only 10 crores ? that’s just the household-spend-money for the missus, silly…. Check the drain pipe and the false ceiling ;: that’s where the other 90 is.
Politicians making and retracting statements so quickly that the clarification sometimes gets published before the quote ! They’re now thinking of instituting some kind of version control (again, QMS requirement in the software industry) on what politicians say so they can track their statements in logical sequence.

Bombay Times has me marveling and deploring the ridiculously tragic anomaly that exists in our country : society glams and page 3 wannabes jostle for space with multi-millionaires and play-boys as they talk about haute couture and trousseau shopping in London. Someone complains about the shortage of good watering holes while millions in their country – or perhaps in the slum right next door, struggle to shop for their daily bread and clean drinking water that isn’t mixed with sewage or that won’t kill them faster than cyanide.

Lunch
While I wolf down my bread, I’m simultaneously planning the lunch menu : if you ever want to learn about planning, organizing, directing, controlling, measuring, evaluating, implementing and monitoring –in short, everything they teach you at IIM, walk into my kitchen on a weekday morning.

So what’s for lunch?

Veggies : grown by the railway tracks ? Remember the tape worm in Leander Paes’ head that found its way into his brain through some vegetables? The gleaming brinjal takes me back to the article in the Mumbai Mirror that said vegetable vendors apply grease/diesel to make the brinjals shine (and to think my mother thought it was the goodness of the black soil of Maharashtra).

Is the green on the capsicum natural? I run my finger nail on it but of course, it only cuts into the skin.

I do make it a point never to buy the Rs.5 a bundle palak that is sold on the streets – I am sure it comes from Andheri /Bandra station, but what about the one I buy for double the price? Does it come from a farm or am I just paying a premium for clever marketing ploy?

I finally settle for curd rice in my lunch box : but what about the milk it came from ? and the cow that gave the milk ? oh drat it – we go back to the same line of thought. Is hubby free now to discuss the cow- in-the-balcony issue?

He’s mad because the Society has cut the water supply in the middle of his shaving : BMC has no water to meet the needs leave alone the greed, of all Mumbaikars. There is no tanker water as some Society members have not paid their dues ((but that’s another story for another day).

Do we need to approach the World Bank to pay for our tanker water? What happened to rain water harvesting? This is a new building so didn’t they insist on it as they claimed they were? But where’s the rain ? Probably some scam there too, but we’ll leave that for later.

Poor hubby : looks quite cute though : trying to look angry with a lathered face. Kind of like a white sunflower with a moustache.
I blow him a small kiss.

8 am
I pack the imp off to school
I hope she will reach safely : even though school is exactly 400 metres from home I fret like only a mother can and I worry about things that only a fellow Indian would understand.

I hope she will remember to carefully evade manhole # 3 (we have practised it 5 times) which has a missing cover (why would people systematically hammer at a concrete manhole cover until it caves in??) .

I hope there’s no new manhole whose cover has gone missing overnight. She knows that she has to watch the traffic till she reaches manhole # 3 and then look down to avoid falling into it while walking like a ballet dancer along the 9 inch space between the boundary wall and the edge of the manhole, spreading her arms to indicate to all drivers and sundry folks on the street that she can’t be expected to look down and look ahead simultaneously. Once she crosses the death-trap, she has to put her hands down and look ahead (not up to admire the crows, like Little-Johnny-Head-in-air) but into the eyes of every auto driver and 15-year-old-driving-his-father’s-stolen-car to indicate she is a pedestrian and has her rights.

I hope the drivers on the road have a licence that has been earned after 30 days in a driving school and not by greasing the palms of a lowly clerk in the RTO.

I hope the traffic signal works (most days it doesn’t and I haven’t figured out why It doesn’t work at 8 am in the morning most days when school children need it the most, but works with amazing precision at 11 in the night – must be some complex algorithm).

An exasperated hubby did suggest I send her by bus if I was so worried. But then I started fretting about the safety of the school bus, the driver’s credentials, his eye-sight, his reflex actions, the attendant’s age and whether he had a criminal background etc. etc.. I wanted to check whether they had a fire extinguisher on the bus and whether it had been checked and tested in the last 6 months.

The transporter suggested I start a bus service myself and take the driver’s seat and hubby, to my chagrin, agreed with him. To think that’s the loyalty I get for putting up with his nightly snoring for 15 years !

I reach work and step into my room – a few smart taps on my IBM Notepad signals the beginning of a 12-13 hour workday when as Head of Human Resources in a Multi-national, I manage to earn my bread. There are days when this helps preserve my sanity, and then there are days when it takes everything in my power to just hold on to it. But that can wait for another day and time.


11 pm : As I rest my wearied head on my pillow, it sags beneath the weight of all the thoughts in my mind. I doze off with Henry Louis Vivian Derozio echoing in my cerebellum :

To India – my native land

“My country , in thy day of glory past,
a beauteous halo circled round thy brow and
worshipped as a deity thou wast.
Where is that glory where that reverence now?
Thy eagle pinion is chained down at last
And groveling in the lowly dust art thou”
…………………………………………
………………………………………..



‘Be the change you want to see’ admonished the Mahatma wagging a bony finger at me. But how do I go about doing that? How does one go about transforming a nation? Should I stand for elections? “Will you vote for me?” I suddenly ask the figure by my side, gently falling into slumberland . ‘Huh?....zzzz…. yes, yes, whatever’. ‘So how many more votes do I need to win an election from Powai?’……a gentle snort greets my question - hubby has reached Mach 1 – and crossed the line between consciousness and the sublime peace that sleep brings to a wearied man.

I give him a peck : one down, how many more voters to woo?

The neighbours have chosen to watch ‘Sholay’ tonight. I sink further into the pillow to prepare myself for 3 hours of free, unsolicited entertainment and wonder if Mrs Menon would care to send me some pop corn….. .caramel, if you please.

3 am : good movie. Yaaaawn………..,my all -time favourite. They don’t …yaaaaaaawn…. make movies like that any more… yawn.

Zzzzzz……. What’s on my mind : a kaleidoscope of images : bridges falling, buildings caving in, trains running into each other, man holes sprouting up like giant craters on the moon, traffic signals with winking lights like a discotheque……I wake up in a cold sweat : a deep sigh emanating from the right tells me at least one person in the room is sleeping well.

6 am the next day : I drag myself to the bathroom and then sleep-walk to the front door. The packet of milk lies by the door way : the day starts and so do a zillion thoughts.

So what’s on your mind?