Being Subodh...

I love Subodh, I admire him, I respect him and I look up to him. To some people, he might be the biggest loser to take birth on this planet earth; to others, he is a freak. Well you can call him anything, but that doesn't change the efficiency and effectiveness of a person like Subodh. He is not only a person, he is a cult. For a whole generation inspired by Dil Chahta Hai, 'Subodh' is the one thing that affects people the most. A man with an amazing memory. Thats all that you need, thats all I ever wanted to be. Believe it or not, women want their partners to be like Subodh. One who remembers everything, especially dates...

Lets see how many dates are we supposed to remember in a man's lifetime. Let's start with birthdays. From childhood, other than your birthday, you have to remember your parents and sibling's birthdays. In a joint family, you will have your uncles and aunts, cousins and dogs. It's unsocial, not remembering their birthdays. Once you start mingling outside your family, you definitely have to remember your friend's birthday (depending on who gives you better gift on your birthday). Then you grow up, you start getting attracted to the opposite sex. As a flirting tactic, remembering birthdays rate very high. So you have to remember her birthday too [most of the times it's more than one, hence more pressure to the brain]. Some girls respond to the flirting, some tie you rakhi instead. So unintentionally you get tied up into remembering some more numbers. Above all these you have those important dead people whose birthdays you forcefully remember in the quest of public holidays.

You go to college, where celebrating birthdays at cafes/restaurants/pubs with newly associated friends have pretty much been in fashion over the last decade. Now is the time when you start enjoying other people's birthdays. If you by chance remember these birthdays you get welcomed into the brotherhood, which wins you couple of beers, couple of colas , some fries and chips or at least a chicken mac-grill. Then you start working in any organization, remembering you boss's birthday acts wonderfully for your career, remembering the accountants birthday stabilizes your finances, remembering the workaholic colleagues birthday lets you reduce your work pressure and remembering your receptionists birthday, of course can give you some cheap thrills at the office loo, lift or at the parking lot.

Now there will be a time when you finally want to settle down in life with someone's birthday you already know. That saves you some grey cells. But if you decide to marry a new birthday , there will be a whole lot of newer birthdays which come as tag-along with it. Namely her cousins, her family, her friends, her colleagues (very rare), her doggy etc. Quite unexpectedly they expect you to remember these dates clearly. And the list goes on and on and on. It is very safe to say, in a facebook free life, men are bound to remember at least 50 birthdays. Thats when we first realise, how being a Subodh is a boon...

Well other than the birthdays, we have the anniversaries [ parents', friends', ex-girlfriends' and off course your own], we have the graduation days, school establishment days, we have the company annual days, annual holidays, dates of a well spent trip somewhere, blacklisted days in the history of the country, world, even universe. I mean the 15th Augusts and the 9/11s. It sometimes gets very confusing you know... No wonder Veena Malik screwed up between 26th January and 26th November. 

But Subodh is beyond this, he kind of remembers dates of first coffee, first kiss, first dialogues, first dates, first altercation, first movie watched, first ever music piece. And he never needs the help of facebook or any kind of social network to remind him of such events. You can safely call him a Human Timeline.

But why am I writing about Subodh? what is this whole blog all about? It's about a little worrying fact actually. It's about our dependence on social network, how we depend on a website to remind us of the birthdays of our close ones, how we have stopped maintaining a diary with the birthdays of people we care about, how we have started blaming facebook for something we should remember ourselves. Its about the lack of usage of a very interesting & intriguing body part called memory. Facebook is indeed a very good tool to remember the birthdays and other dates of all the other people you deal on a need to know basis. But your friends and family, they close ones, they don't deserve this. They dont want a belated wish from you simply because you forgot to check facebook on their birthdays...

In the whole line up of different characters in Dil Chahta hai, I would choose Subodh every time. You can make fun of him, but you can never underestimate his efficiency. In a social network driven generation, Subodh is the odd man who evens out the discrepancy between control and chaos. We need more Subodh's in our society to make relationships less virtual. Why am I so bothered? Lets go back to the first line. I love Subodh, I admire him, I respect him and I look up to him. He is me, I am him...

How Dexter has affected our (especially mine) eating habits...

Unbelievable, isn't it?

Dexter, arguably the best series on earth is coming to an end in a couple of months and I've been thinking a lot about it. About how it affected us over the last six years, about how it has become a part of my life in this time, about how I refer to Dexter at every small thing that happens in my cereal killer life...

Thousands of people across the globe have been affected and influenced by Dexter in many different ways. Some became serial killers, some started having conversations with their own selves, some even started believing that they dont have emotional connect with people after the first season and the same people returned to normalcy with Dexter connecting to different people in different seasons. But for me, Dexter influenced me into generating some weird eating habits over the years.

I never liked having coffee in a takeaway cup, it always spills. But after seeing Dexter having coffee like that in the morning, I had started doing that for some months and then one day it spilled really bad on my new pant. That went out of the window since then.

In one season Dexter ate a sandwich while driving his Ford. I drive a ford, and for the next few months, every morning I would pick up a sandwich from 'Birdy' and eat it while driving. Man... it was damn tough concentrating on both.

I hated french fries, but have you seen Dex and Deb munching on the delicious french fries on the double date in the first season. Gawd, I am still addicted to french fries since. 

Have i already mentioned Lundy's Ham and cucumber sandwich which I made a few times at home afterwards, always got fascinated by the different shaped donuts, the big-ass cheeseburgers that he hogs on at each date, the tomato spaghetti Dex makes, the mexican fast food Deb eats from the food truck, makes me hungry each time I watch the show

But nothing beats the beef steak that Dexter makes. It looks succulent, soft, juicy, well done  and whenever he eats it, I feel that it is melting inside my mouth. Like Deb says, 'it must be worth living for'.

So as this show is coming to an end, I feel that some part of my life would go missing from now on. Well being a foodie, it's normal for me. And why wouldnt it be? Dexter makes me more hungry than Gordon Ramsey does...



                                Unbelievable, isnt it ?
 

CONVERSATIONS: CANDID WITH AN AUTO DRIVER

Conversations are what makes life worth living...

I love conversing with people, people might call me talkative sometimes but I love to know more about people, especially common people. Their thoughts, their outlook, their ideologies mesmerize me sometimes. Whenever I have a long journey in an auto or in a cab, I try and talk to the driver, know what he knows, see what he sees and also to observe what he observes. It has always turned out to be completely different that what we assume about them.

Last Monday I got down at Mumbai domestic airport and headed towards the auto stand. When I reached there, two pimp-ish auto drivers tried to make me understand that the autos have also fallen under prepaid charges. So my destination which normally would attract a fare of Rs. 120, apparently it would charge me Rs. 350 now. On top of that, the auto driver said that if I dont take the pre-paid slip, he would only charge me Rs. 250. After 8 years in Mumbai, I have learned to play my cards well, so I denied and asked them "do you guys have any meter autos?"

At that time I noticed, on my right side there was a huge queue of auto rickshaws, who are looking at me with sad faces. Now the guy who was in front of the queue, rode forward," Saab, I will go". With stoned-jaw and burning eyes, the first autodriver said " Fine, then go with him, dont come back to me later about lost properties." I was stunned, what did he think of himself? Asked him 'you think you are their king? What's your name buddy?" He just walked out...

I, visibly pissed, sat into the meter auto. The driver said, " saab, was in the queue for over half n hour. If it's possible, please give me twenty bucks extra". That calmed me down immediately.  One one hand, there was this rude auto-bourgeois, who is trying to rob me even before he rendered any service, on the other hand, there is this guy who is asking for a few meager extra bucks, in the most polite way possible. 

Curiously I asked him what is the scene? And the story that he told me, revealed a big racquet, which is about to corrupt the Mumbai auto drivers. According to him, that first auto driver is the self-proclaimed leader of airport auto drivers. He always does this prepaid scam and asks for more money. If the passenger falls for it, he still doesnt go with them. He rather asks one of those meter drivers standing in the queue, to drop them at meter price and takes the extra money from him before they leave airport. So the meter driver looks like the cheat, and the leader-driver earns by standing at the airport and pimping the rides. Now some of the passengers have tried to contact the cops nearby, but apparently they get a cut too. For example, had I agreed on Rs. 350, the leader-driver would ask the meter driver to pay him Rs. 200 and take the passenger. With that Rs. 200 he pays Rs. 100 to the cops and keeps the rest to himself.

When I expressed my surprise at this story, he started giving me examples of what all happened to different passengers, how the leader-driver shoes the passengers away from the meter drivers, if they dont take his deal. I had always thought that nothing can beat Chennai and Bangalore auto drivers as far as cheating is concerned, but this was way beyond that if it's true.

As we cross the Jogeshwari flyover, I asked him why he goes to airport if he knows that there are so much of tension. What he told me was another shocker. Apparently other than the auto drivers in a certain auto-union led by a certain leader, no driver is happy with the base fare increasing from Rs.12 to Rs.15. With Rs. 12, they would make about Rs 700-800 per day in an average. But with Rs.15, rarely they can make more than Rs.500 a day. According to him " previously, passengers would queue up for one auto, now autos queue up to one passenger. Other than the 10,000 odd autos in the union, no other driver is happy in the city, and as a result, they are delving into the trap of these airport hoodlums."  With govt. sanctioning another 90,000 auto and cabs in the city, earning bread would be a great challenge for the existing drivers. 
  
I tried to make the situation light and asked him about his native place. He turned out to be from a small town near Varanasi, where I have shot once. He was excited to know that I know about his village. He has one son and one daughter. The daughter is studying to be a nurse and the son is in 2nd year engineering in a college in UP. I couldnt refrain myself from asking about his past, what brought him to Mumbai? He was in his first year, political science major in a Varanasi college, when his father passed away because of poisonous liquor, he had to take responsibility of the whole family of six. Mumbai seemed to be the only place where he could earn enough to support his family. But he kept his interest in politics intact. " Saab, i can discuss any political issue with you" he smiled and said. Well I indeed observed that, when I saw the folded newspaper on his rickshaw-dashboard, with the Durgashakti Nagpal case visible from where I was sitting. I was impressed...

When he dropped me, I gave him Rs.30 extra, he gave 10 bucks back. He said 'saab, I dont need pity, we had a great conversation and I enjoyed talking to you. If you are a man in some position, do something about the airport scam. I can still figure out other means to earn, but there are many others who can't. Bye" he left. I stood there with my blue trolley bag, thinking about the last one hour. He taught me so many important lessons in life, but I didnt even ask his name. Maybe that extra 10 bucks I tried to give was self pity, maybe it was guilt, maybe just a tip or maybe just for the amazing conversation I had. It undoubtedly made my day and gave me an unforgettable memory. A memory that's worth remembering throughout a lifetime...