I like kids because they are cute. First of all. But the larger reason is that they are so upfront about most things. Comfortable with their vices.
Scenario I - Two kids playing with a ball. They will fight for it with all their heart. One will sit on the other till he/she relinquishes the object of objection. Scenario II - You playing with a kid. Making funny faces, trying to make it laugh. The kid does not think it funny. Will make no pretense. Will raise hell and high water if you don’t let it go when it wants to.
Children are endearingly selfish. They know what they want, are not afraid of taking action on it, no matter how silly the desire may be - candy floss or your attention. They are huge attention-seekers too.
They are miniature us with no-holds-barred. We love to see them go at each other with such unbridled enthusiasm. We figure let them have fun while they still can. But somewhere, children are endearing to us because we live our vicarious desires, especially the baser ones, through them.
On the other hand, some of the most annoying grown-ups I have met are the ones who have not outlived the child inside them. The ones who still think that their wishes should be uppermost on the minds of all around. The ones who will ruthlessly engineer events around them to get what they want because they actually believe they deserve it.
A child is all that we love with gusto. A ‘childish’ man we abhor.
I hope you guys are noticing some of the advertisements that Google has been throwing off-late at my blog.
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How promising. And what a brilliant piece of advertising. Beautifully laddered.
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My toes are curling at the thought.
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How cool is that.
The bigger question to ask here is why these ads are finding their way to my blog. An even bigger point of curiosity for me is, why aren’t any of you people clicking? I don’t see any hefty google pay-cheques in the mail.
Have we become so jaded as a society that even promises of meeting beautiful women, making an endless amount of money and finding the soul-mate, fail to excite?
What do we really want?
I, for one, want some dollars, courtesy Google. Please do click.
I am glad I got the chance to work with a woman. There is this notion one has about women bosses. They tend to go overboard in their zeal to appear efficient, no-nonsense. This one has the perfect balance. Yin and Yang. She is the most soft-spoken person I remember meeting in a long time, and she cuts to the chase too. Cultural barriers are inside people’s heads. This lady cottons on to my thoughts, before I utter them.
So, a lot of really great things happened yesterday.
Sun happened. Spring came to Shanghai and my happy feet contracted the delicious disease. I tapped my way to office. To the beats of everything from Atif to ABBA, Shanu to Simon. With jacket carelessly flung over arm.
Random people smiled at me. On the subway, in the supermarket. Here’s the thing about the Chinese, they don’t smile at you of their own accord. They maintain distance, protocol. The Great Wall of China. Although people here are always staring at me. As a Brazilian colleague, recently drawled - Yeaaah man, they are always staring at you, and they want to touch you and they want to take pictures with you and...it’s crazy.
My sympathies to him. I may not be quite the tourist attraction that he claims to be, but people definitely do stare. Only non-chink for miles, in the Yellow Sea. Imagine being Paris Hilton at a Nobel laureates' convention. Or Albert Einstein at a rave party. Well, on second thoughts, he would have been quite in the Einsteinium there. The point is, I look like a freak. And that these descendants of Confucius smiled at me, without provocation. It was like the aura of happiness surrounding me penetrated their reserve.
I succeeded in my mission of befriending a Chinese woman. I drafted a plan of action, did some ‘target-setting’, practiced a few ‘opening lines’. They worked. I am trying to seduce her into showing me places around during the weekend. Don’t judge me, it’s mainly for the conversation.
Past deeds bore fruit. I met an Indian in office, a senior guy. First of all, we spoke in Hindi. Bliss. Secondly, while talking I happened to mention that I was working in the Andheri office for some months last year, sitting in the adjacent cubicle to this person, who happens to be his boss. A look of awakening dawned on his face and he immediately started rummaging through his cell-phone. And came up with a picture he had taken of a ‘quote’. Written by blue felt pen on a bit of chart paper in terrible handwriting. You guessed it and if you didn’t, go do some syllogisms. That quote was one of the many I had put up in my cubicle; he, on one of his visits, thinking it was interesting, had taken a picture of it. Okay, okay, not quite the Slumdog saga, but it felt good. To see one of your whims having made this journey across the continent. With me in tag.
Sex and the city. While sex in this city is more or less off-the-charts, I did manage to find a DVD set of the series, seasons 1 to 7, for 20 Yuan. Quick calculation. INR 140. F*** me.
Too much stimuli is there. Coming soon is an account of the Chinese woman’s obsession with her skin, me being all too painfully aware of it since the unit I work for is called - Beauty Care. Along with some tid-bits regarding the way the Chinese government manages PR through its newspapers, and how, if things were left to it, the much touted India-China story would have the ‘India’ part determinedly scratched off.
Shanghai. It looked just like Gurgaon at first glance. The ride from the airport to downtown was marked by a feeling of deep satisfaction as all things fell into place.
It’s still early days. Been raining off-late. Cold winds. The works.
But I like it. The city is convenient. It didn’t take me any time to adjust to its beat. The beat itself is not distinctive. Shanghai is like one of those world-cities. Center of finance and business and what not. Or maybe I haven’t discovered the finer notes yet.
The Chinese are inscrutable. They look unapproachable. Serious people going about their business. Like they have the weight of the entire world’s manufacturing on their petite shoulders or something.
Ouch.
So anyway, although they look like Sir-when-I-ope-my-lips-let-no-dog-bark-Oracle, they actually are the sweetest people on earth. If you ever are in trouble and there’s a Chinese near, have no fear. Talk about the ‘State’ being different as different can be from the people it governs.
About those errant notes, by the way. I tried to discover them. I undertook a 2 hour walk, one way, to The Bund. Beautiful. In a surgical sort of way.
While I like the comforts of Shanghai, nay, I adore the comforts of Shanghai - where the streets have signs and no one knows my name, I do have a few questions. I wonder what brought those disfigured beggars at the Bund Tourist Canal to Shanghai? Was it the dream of a better life? Or are they native Shanghai-nese and have nowhere to go? How did they get disfigured? Is it similar to the racket that runs in Mumbai? How do the guys incessantly peddling their wares to exotic looking foreigners - from fake watches to portraits - make ends meet? Are they making enough money from all the people they dupe, o-so-sweetly? Which are the areas of Shanghai where the not so white-collar live? Have they lost their jobs yet? What do they have to say about China’s recent declaration on a news channel - China refuses to acknowledge the recession?
I want to see the underbelly of the city, any city. I don’t just want to go to the Bund, marvel at the array of retina-blinding-white-neon-golden-lit-branded-displays at People’s Square, restrict myself to traversing the criss-cross of super-super highways and architectural marvel that is Shanghai. I want to get into the brain, the heart, the soul of a city. Walk across its dirty gullies, be privy to the shameful secrets that it tries to hide so religiously.
Met an old friend today. It’s that time of the year when west-gone birds come home to roost - for a bit, what with Christmas vacations and all. Old friends have a way of bringing you face to face with a self that you barely recognize now. They remember things you used to say and do, things which you yourself have forgotten. They surprise you at times with their acute observations, their little windows into your soul.
Most of all what surprises you is how you used to be. Am I the same, slightly ditzy, seemingly carefree thing now that I was then? Life was that simple? Or is just the rose-tint of nostalgia that makes it seem so…so endearing?
So we got discussing about this and that. A girl we both know, me - on the fringes, as one of the most staid and conservative people ever, is getting married. She met the guy on a flight. She is a Southie - steeped-in-the-wool, he a Catholic. People never cease to amaze. Another woman, who met her now-husband through Orkut came up. She met him via a common birthday community.
Almost makes me feel conventional. One may question the almost bit. Engineer-IT-MBA. What’s not conventional? On the other hand, have come to believe that convention really does not exist. It is just a façade. Everybody has a funny, irregular, mould-breaking story to their lives, which is at most times hidden from public view. But yes, the eccentricities-oddities, well-hidden though they might be, definitely do exist. Perhaps just a scratch of a nail below the thin ice.
One thing has definitely changed about me. I used to revel in my oddness. I used to like being ditzy, irregular, forgetful, crazy, irrational at times, impulsive. Unapologetic. No longer. I have spent the last year ironing all of them out. Trying to get discipline and sense in. Caution. Responsibility. Look-before-you-leap kinda thing. It’s there in my writing even. The style, the content. Suddenly it’s a different set of attributes that seem desirable.
The face I saw in the mirror today, when I met him and the day I met those two, was somebody else’s. What is it? Growing-up? B-school? Life?
