My laughter is burnt to a crisp

Are you familiar with the little fruit that are are known by the somewhat lewd moniker of sucking mangoes? You tear a little hole in the top and use that to suck out all the juices? If you are, then you know how tragic one of these mangoes look after you have extracted all the interesting bits. Wrinkled, sucked up, dry and somewhat pathetic. Thats what this scorching summer is doing to me and my sense of humour. I spend my time feeling irritable and nary a comic phrase flits across my sweltering mind. Every time a thought forms, it is swept away in a deluge of sweat. I have a pet grump the size of an obese elephant and the two of us share the room resentfully and think dark thoughts about the sun.

That time of the year

Its that time of the year again. The time when what went around comes around. The time when my Managers sit in scornful judgment of my pitiful collection of achievements. This is a stressful time of the year for me. It started with Mr. Manager sending out a warning email to the group informing us that the hour of reckoning drew nigh. Like sinners who stand before the pearly gates, we are expected to have a list of our good deeds close at hand. The two weeks meted out to us to put our houses in order flew by. There was so much else to do. Then, just like that, it was the night before. I stared at my screen blankly. What in the world did I do this last year? I felt as if I had had a good time. I distinctly remembered occasions when I looked forward to getting to work. I am rather sure that I enjoyed putting my nose to the grindstone a handful of times. I could not however remember a single concrete good deed to record. Sweat broke out on my forehead. How in the world was I going to persuade my manager that it was of the utmost importance that my salary be increased in leaps and bounds? I had the biggest writers block that this world has ever seen. Hillary and Tenzing would have been straining at the bit to take a shot at it. I could have leased it out to Switzerland for them to open a world class ski resort on its slopes. With trembling hand I reached for the wine bottle. Much later, I had a list. I felt rather proud of myself. I put myself to bed. The next morning, as I staggered around the house nursing a headache that was larger than my writers block ever was, I decided that it would be prudent to review my list of accomplishments before sending them out to He Who Must Give Me More Money. Minutes later, I stared bug-eyed at the screen. Here was the list that caused my eyes to behave all ugly
1. Fixed some bugs in the code
2. Wrote some code
3. Did some interviews
4. Gave some presentations
What? What kind of retard would make up a list like that? And where did all those 'somes' escape from and why oh why had they chosen my feedback form to settle down and procreate busily? Perhaps my manager would give himself a hernia laughing at the list. That is my only hope.

My unglamorous disease

I haven't blogged for a while. I have a good excuse though. A boil in my nose. This is a terrible ailment to suffer from, and having suffered for a week, I am the resident expert. It starts with a pain where you've never had a pain before. Slowly, but surely, the pain escalates. Of course, at no stage of this disease can you actually see whats going on. How big is the boil? Is it reproducing? Is it filling with pus? Is your nose going to turn gangrenous and fall off? You have no choice but to wait and watch, and of course, suffer increasingly. You will be at work, looking at the world through a mist of pain, unable to breathe a word of the agony or your courage to a soul. Let's face it. You can sing the saga of a fracture. Or an appendectomy. You simply cannot discuss something as disgusting as a nose boil. Its like talking about an STD. So, you're forced to suffer in silence - and trust me, that has to be the most difficult way to suffer. And now, your pet boil will betray you. Though it is safely ensconced deep within your nose, it will cause your nose to swell. If that is not ridiculous enough, the area will also turn an alarming shade of red. Since my boil was near the tip of my nose, I spent a few days looking like Rudolph's cousin. And for that duration, I noticed that people talked more to my nose than to me. It is very hard to be taken seriously when you look like an inebriated deer. Anyway, I'm all better now and very busy counting my blessings, namely
a. I don't have syphilis
b. I can put away my smile of patient suffering
c. My nose is no longer large enough to give Pluto competition
Cheers!

Silver shoes

Oh perfect pair of silver shoes
I seek thy holy grail
I walk and walk and shop and shop
And day by day I fail

I am alarmed to report that there appears to be a drought in the availability of silver shoes in the market. As you can see, this shortage of said item is filling me with despair and corny verse in equal measure.
My quest for shiny footwear has been ongoing for a period of weeks now. Like an intrepid explorer of yore I have set out in all weathers (well mostly sunshine and a spot or two of rain). I have entered shops where I would need to sell all my earthly possessions to own a buckle, I have trudged down narrow alleyways where I had to hold my breath to fit in sideways. All to no avail. I have found pairs that are so over the top in shininess that you need to wear protective eye gear to behold them in all their glory. I have seen shoes with strange buttons where no buttons should be. If the front is perfect, the heel makes you want to kill yourself. If the pair is aesthetic, it makes an attempt to strangle your foot to death. The perfect pair of silver shoes needs to go onto the endangered species list before it is too late.
My material resources diminish because though the object of my search eludes me, I do tend to pick up consolation prizes along the way, just to keep my spirits up. Poverty and starvation raise their ugly twin heads. Suffering is definitely the mother of all creative art. I feel another verse bubbling up inside me....

The beauty of thy perfect strap
The arch of matchless heel
Thou steals my sleep, oh silver shoe
I seeketh you with zeal

The watering hole

At my office I have long noticed that there seems to be a dearth of women in the cafeteria. I make the pilgrimage to our cafeteria several times a day, whenever I feel that my caffeine twitch is going out of control and scaring innocent bystanders. As I find myself disinclined to be charged with wasting my time I have endeavored to make these trips educational. I do this by making anthropological observations on the social nature of the cafeteria. As part of my research, I astutely observed that there weren't ever as many women in the cafeteria as there should be. The male of the species could be found drinking, or staring open mouthed at the television, crowding the foosball and TT tables or sitting around in groups shooting the breeze. The women however, were seldom seen.
The mystery was compelling. As a good scientist should, I gathered and sifted through the evidence. What did I have to go on? One perfectly serviceable cafeteria. Many men. Not enough women. The time had come to formulate a hypothesis. So I did. Was it possible that women were more diligent workers and ethically frowned upon whiling their time away at the cafeteria? I decided to reject this explanation forthwith, mostly because it made me look bad. I cast my mind about for a more self serving explanation. If these women were not in the cafeteria, where were they? I started to keep my eyes peeled. For the record, this is extremely painful and makes your eyes water copiously. They were not congregating on the balconies. They were not lurking in corridors. Where were they? I am a naturally curious person, and this abiding enigma was not good my general state of well being.
As luck would have it, in a parallel universe, I was strongly advised by those who hold my happiness dear, to start to drink more water forthwith. All that caffeine and not enough hydration would very quickly result in gigantic kidney boulders, so sayeth the Oracle also known as my mother. Being of a natively obedient disposition, I complied. Where is this story going? Have I completely lost the thread of the plot? Patience, dear reader. With the skill of a master weaver I will soon show you a pattern emerging from these seemingly disconnected threads. Right then, where was I? Ah yes, I was at that junction in my life where I was filled with curiousity and also with water.
Anybody who has lived a little will tell you that when you imbibe quantities of water, there can be only one result. I started to frequent the restroom more often than the cafeteria. And the mystery resolved itself. The women of my workplace congregate in the toilet. There they stand in groups, laughing and talking. While I am one of those who rapidly scurries in and out and worries about unseemly noises reaching beyond my locked door, I am distinctly in the minority. Apparently ridding your body of waste material is just a side effect of going to the loo. You actually go there to congregate. To retell the joke you heard last evening. To hold forth on world issues. I watched mouth agape (no doubt doing an excellent impersonation of a person of less than average intelligence) as a woman walked in with her mobile ringing, answered the call, and promptly walked out again, the call of nature seemingly ignored.
Thus was the mystery solved, my kidney stones averted and I discovered that I am a social retard. Now please excuse me, my phone is ringing and the restroom is a long way off.

That beast called a car

Few things in my life have afforded me as much misery as that beast called a car. There are a great many cars. There are cars of every colour in nations of every description. There are also a great many drivers. So many of them, in fact, that they simply crawl out of the woodwork. So either I was just a driving moron or there was a global conspiracy on and everyone else went out naked in the moonlight to the top of a hill to dance around a fire and sign a pact using the blood of a goat, swearing to never let me know how hard a skill this is to muster.
As soon as I turned eighteen, my father volunteered to educate me in this rudimentary skill. We piled into our little brown van and veered down the road. Twenty metres and two popped blood vessels later (neither of them in my body) the lesson terminated. I was handed over to my father's friend, known far and wide for his patience and skill at instructing those certified as unteachable. The two of us drove down the mostly deserted roads of our military cantonment and all was peace and beauty. Sure, I still looked at the gear stick when I had to change the gear, yes, I stalled practically every time I entered or left the first gear and I knew the third and forth gears were still strangers to me. I could not reverse or park yet, but hells bells (I've always wanted to use this expression) I was driving. A few classes later it was decided that I should be enrolled into a professional driving school and seek the holy grail of a driving license for an LMV (Light Motor Vehicle). This was motivated in no small measure by the fact that if you were to venture into an RTO office in India unbacked by a driving school, you would be venturing for a very long time. So off I went, and at the end of the first class I was the darling of the instructor. Thanks to my father's friend I shone like Venus on the firmament. At the end of the second class I was still the pet. At the end of a month I was just as good as I was on the second day. I got my license, proving the efficacy of the driving school and not my driving.
For years and years I remained as good as I was on day two. I did not enjoy it for a minute, nay not even a second. It made me tense, it made me unhappy. It was not one of life's myriad pleasures. People who were babes in arms the day I first got into a car were driving circles and other complicated geometric figures around me. I sat, a satisfied, smug cat, in passenger seats and got driven around, secretly and sometimes, not so secretly, sniggering at folks who had not discovered the joys of always and forever calling shotgun.
Into every life must come some rain, and the day finally dawned when my life was bereft of drivers. Surprising as it may seem they moved on to bigger, better things in life and so one sad, grey day I stood before my father's old car. A baby first learning to walk could not have been more hesitant. The campers in the Blair Witch project could not have been more scared. Slowly and painfully, I mastered the art. I drove around the lake in the night. I learned to reverse. I drove to my office. I could not put the AC on for fear of stalling, so I simply perspired a modest waterfall. I stalled quite enough as it was without the AC. I dreaded traffic signals, speeding cars, slow cycles, all other vehicles in sight, reversing and parking slots. I explored new depths of hate for roads that sloped upwards and for gravity acting on unsuspecting cars and their undeserving drivers when faced with such horrid, uncaring, unfeeling, insurmountable slopes. I could tolerate turning left but I held strong views about turning right.
Gradually, over a period of what felt like a few decades, it got better. A few thousand scratches later I was fairly confident. Scratches, I explained patiently to my father, should be viewed from the correct perspective. A thousand scratches were infinitely superior to two dead bodies. He grunted and seemed strangely unconvinced. I now drove twelve kilometers a day. This is not so bad, I said to myself. I am one of them. Finally, I 've arrived.
Then it started to happen. I nearly bumped a bike that thought it wise to overtake me from the left and then cut into my path. I cursed a bus that veered unthinking into my lane. I had no patience with cars that were of the opinion that two kilometers per hour was an acceptable speed for the fast lane. My blood boiled at the mention of an autorickshaw. I realized that I knew words that I was ashamed to say I knew. I aged a couple of years every time I drove, soft music and deep breathing non-withstanding.
Thats when it came to me. The car is a vehicle of misery. I hated it when it was my master and the sound of the engine revving was the stuff of nightmares. I hate it now, when I can drive and it appears that everyone else around me cannot. I bet the day I said 'Yes, I can!' the rest of you went naked in the moonlight up a hill, danced like the pagans that you are, killed another innocent goat and swore to forget all the driving that you once knew.

The pearl anniversary cometh

My parents thirtieth wedding anniversary is looming. I should be filled with pride and joy. Instead, I find that I am mostly filled with a nameless dread. Heres the thing. My parents both come from large families. Vocal families. Musically talented families. And therein lies the rub. My parents both swear with straight faces that neither my sister nor I are adopted. I even questioned them separately. I've leapt out from behind the fridge and popped the question suddenly. I've woken them up at two in the morning with this most pertinent question. No luck. They've stuck to the story and at two in the morning my very grumpy mother can describe her painful labour and subsequent cesarean in long and gory detail. Yet, miraculously enough, amongst the host of musical cousins my sister and I stand out in all our tone deaf glory. We cannot sing. We are unable to play an instrument. What is the relevance of this to the anniversary? I am glad you asked. As various aunts and uncles have trouped passed various milestones of wedded bliss, appropriate cousins have burst into tuneful song. They amass friends and family and then, at the drop of a hat, burst into touching, tear-jerking melody. 'You are the wind beneath my wings', 'You raise me up', you get the gist. As the last moving notes linger in the air there is not a dry eye in the house.
During our wonder years if either my sister or I bemoaned our lack of talent to our mother or aunts, we were reminded that we were the smart ones in the family. At school we got our grades with seeming ease. We were held up as shining examples to the teeming masses of cousins. I now have a job that requires regular use of the old grey matter, and my sister is acquiring her doctorate and is required to cut up mice at an alarming rate towards this noble end. I completely fail to see how this is supposed to help with the anniversary. I can hear the cousins snicker. Perhaps I could read at the audience. Or do a demo of getting a good test score. My sister could try to tear folks up by bopping a rodent on its head and proceeding to extract its tissues.
The date draws ever closer, the pressure mounts. The family looms on the horizon. Excuse me, but I have to check my rat traps.