Useless
Incompetent
Limp
Lost
Wasted
I feel.

Thoughts on customer service

It will soon be a year since I moved to Lower Parel to be closer to my place of work. Since cooking is neither a hobby nor an option, I’ve fluidly fluctuated between a tiffin service and the nearby hotels. Saturation of both tastes would often lead me to a stall near Lower Parel railway station that vends the most awesomest aloo parathas I have ever had in my life. Made right in front of you, these hot parathas scald your fingers as you try to break a piece of it. Accompanying the two parathas in a plate are a splash of the best thecha ever and a side-dish of the day’s special sabzi that ranges between aloo-mutter and chana with soya nuggets.

It wasn’t too long ago that the guy at the stall let loose a smile and a nod at my sight. He recognized me from the dozens of previous visits. That evening onwards, each time I showed up with my face, he would smile and promptly ask his minions to set a plate for me.

Cut to today. I reach, he smiles and nods and the intern at his stall sets a plate for me. I finish my customary number of four parathas and wash it down with lassi from his neighbour. That’s precisely the moment when it began to pour and the timing was perfect because you know…Murphy was so right!

I stood there, under a thin sheet of plastic, clutching the Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok Banker and more worried about the gift horse Corby in my front pocket, a wallet in my back pocket and a borrowed 8-GB pen drive in yet another pocket. “Did I want to wet the book? Is there a Samsung service centre nearby? Does a soaked pen-drive still work? I know it does after mine came out of the washing machine numerous number of times but then this was a borrowed drive!” My train of thought would have continued in this vein if the paratha walla hadn’t called out to me waving a plastic bag. He was offering it to me for my book. I think I gave him one of my stupid grins and too loud a thank you.

He knows how to keep his customer happy. He knows how to keep his customer happy without oral sex. He knew one tiny act of helpfulness will ensure that the customer would keep coming back to eat off his hands. I bet he hasn’t gone to college to earn a MBA degree or even touched books on entrepreneurship. He just knew what to do. That is good customer service.

That is where you come in, Mr. Pacenet Broadband ‘Service’. You need to intern at the paratha walla’s stall to learn a few things. My family opted for a 3-month unlimited internet package. More than two months of reminding your ‘helpline’ (which is actually some lady's personal phone) multiple times in a day, you sent people to fix the data cable. I wonder how a company like Pacenet can afford to act as cheap as to make lame excuses over the phone.

You gave my family a harrowing experience, you fuckall internet service providing douchebag company!

Do something with your life!

I have a theory. Let’s call it the theory of my life. Theories of lives, by the way, are like chicken pox. You can only get it once…and you can only make one ‘theory of your life’. If someone insists to know if there is something that I strongly believe in, I’ll give them the theory of my life.

The core statement of my theory is – ‘Do something with your life’.

See, everyone goes to school, then college, gets a job, screws around for a while, gets married, settles down, has children, watches them go to school, then college and so on. It only depends on his lifeline then if he sticks around to watch his kids screw around, get married and produce tiny beings that look like them. All of this does not take any effort. This keeps happening like a cycle. Even if you decide not to move a finger, people around will push you and put you through all of this.

But at the end of life, when you can see the people digging up the pit for your coffin to go in while you lie swathed in the undertaker’s homemade perfume, wouldn’t you for even one second ponder what you did in your entire life that sets you apart from all the buggers lying in the nearby graves?
What good would you have done in your entire life? Would people remember you for anything other than vile words, actions? What difference would you have made to the world between the time you were born and the time you croak? Taking a tangent and borrowing a phrase…if you cannot clean a place, at least don’t leave it dirtier. If you did nothing to give back or pay forward all the favours that you are showered with…all you did in your life span was to leave a huge carbon footprint!

My point is, everyone goes through that cycle called life. Default. To complain that this cycle tires you out and leaves no time to do anything else is just lame. The fact remains that you just will not make an effort to do anyone any good because if you really want to make time for something that you believe needs to be done – you will.

What’s there to be done anyway? Look around you. What do you think needs to be changed? The system? Right, one person cannot do it. Talk to people, find out what they think about it. May be they’ll laugh, because people like stand-up comedy and are scared of whistleblowers. But the important part there is that you have waken up and are making an effort to wake others up as well.

What else? The forests and animal reserves need help. Various conservation groups need volunteers.
Street dogs need aid. Ragged children need assistance. Open your eyes and look and there are a million things you could do.

The Nature Baba campaign is something that I am proud of. It is something I’ll beam about when I talk about it to kids the same age as my grandchildren (Yeah, I’m going to live longer and try more to make this place more than just habitable!). I am glad I’m making efforts to talk to people around in my tiny town about the drastic change in climate lately and what we could all do to make our world more beautiful.

I’m sure I’ll cherish my photo album titled ‘My trip to Planet Earth’ published by Heaven Inc.

A bedbug in my asshole

It wriggles. It tickles.

The annual social media plan for the entire year for a brand of phenyl is being worked out in front of me. The boss stands at the white board explaining the different kinds of things that needs to be done for the brand. It is a Friday, which means people who usually wear boring formal clothes can relax and wear t-shirts and jeans. A client servicing person looks attentively at the white board wondering where he could pipe in and add value to what the boss is saying. The boss, as he talks, looks at everyone seated inside the conference room one by one. He looks at the client servicing person next to me and then turns his eyes towards me. It wriggles.
For the last few days, I feel a few pairs of tiny feet amble up and down the hairy terrains of my thighs. How do I know it’s an insect? You know that feeling when a drop of sweat finds a way from your armpit to the waist? This is the same feeling, only upwards. I know it is a bedbug for sure because where I come from, there are plenty. Get where I am coming from? As I sleep at night, I feel a family of bedbugs faithfully perched on each of my limbs. It is after much deliberation that I have arrived at the conclusion that it is one of them that has found its way up my asshole, making it a temporary abode. It wriggles every now and then tickling the folds that cover the orifice.
How did they come home? They came home in an old sleeping bag that one of my roommates brought along with him. Apparently he hadn’t opened the bag for five years. It had also been given to him by his grandmother who had no use for it either.
It’s funny when I spank myself in the middle of the road. It’s a desperate way to say, “Shut the fuck up!” in the bedbug language. It seems to understand for soon enough, I feel it on the expressway between my buttocks and my knee. It is all the more funny when I am on my bike. To motorists passing by, I seem to be rubbing my thigh relentlessly. The worst of my fears is that the policemen patrolling near the Haji Ali dargah would see my actions as suspicious and open fire at me. My thighs are its playgrounds.
When at my desk in the office, I sit stiffly with a pained expression on my face. I learnt it from George on the Seinfeld show. He says, “If you want to seem busy, always look hassled.” But my stiffness had more to do with the fact that I was hosting another living creature. When the bedbug senses that my body doesn’t seem to be making much movement, it gingerly ventures out of its enclosure, its movements reminding me of how, in the olden ages, young men would venture out of their homes to faraway countries hoping to make their fortune. It takes a fast train from wherever it is to the front, only to get entangled in the much denser foliage.
I would only be too happy to play Noah and host as many creatures as possible, if only their movement didn’t cause me that itch.
Cut to the conference room where I am at the white board with the black marker in my hand when it moves across one of the most sensitive parts of the human body. The brain calls for an itch. With 12 eyeballs watching you with rapt attention and not even blinking, there is not much you can do other than what Sachin Tendulkar does before he settles down at the crease. The rest of what I talk is a blur. I write myself a mental note. Pull undies down tonight and check.
I reach home. Turn on all the lights, disrobe and bend down. I could imagine the way I looked from behind. Little Johhny once told a friend that he thought of a sun rising over two hills when he saw his father bend down to pick up a bar of soap on the bathroom floor. Over thirty minutes of careful, bent-over scrutiny revealed that I must deforest the region if I had to teach the encroacher a lesson.
My girlfriend is coming home this weekend. I must ask the visitor to kindly get out before that. I don’t want her to be interrupted in anything important by a pair of complex eyes staring at her, you see? It would be alright if she screams but it won’t be too pleasant if she bites down hard.

Grim, eh?

Atithi tum kab jaoge?

Honk Car Why?


Scenario 1:

A middle class settlement anywhere in Mumbai. It’s about thirty minutes past ten in the morning. Middle-aged men with original Reegok bags slinging on their shoulders walk with a dejected look on their faces. Something about their expression tells you they are going to their place of work and are suddenly missing home. Their wives hang clothes onto the insulated wire cum clothes line tied outside their balcony. Behind most of them is a blue oil drum with a half cut lid that they use to store water in, backup, you see. They yell out customarily, occasionally either to their children or to the fish monger with the tiny sarees folds tucked between their buttocks. The women in the balcony want to know what fresh catch the fishy women can offer. This activity is an exercise for their vocal chords. Their hands work mechanically, dipping into the cracked plastic bucket, wringing the water onto the vehicle parked underneath, opening up the folds, jerking it out to send a soapy dew into the air that feels like the rose water they sprinkle on you when you enter a marriage hall. A few dogs laze around, dreamily looking at what doesn’t seem to concern them. Occasionally they bite their coats on the back, that perennial itch, hmph! Pause. Everything is about to change. Why? You’ll see.
Enter the bangarwalla. He is the hero. Not only because he facilitates recycling of recyclable objects but also because he brings about a drastic change to the perfect doggy dream sequence. So much so that the canines would’ve gone off to sleep if he had not arrived right then. They sprang to their feet, ready for some action. They exchange looks at each other making it look like an unbarken signal to gherao the suspicious stranger. They bare all their teeth while they bark, which works the same way as the intimidation techniques used by martial art enthusiasts. The bangarwalla surprisingly walks unperturbed. He is used to this kind of attention. He walks as if in a trance but has a tiny smile on his face. He bends down suddenly to pick up a stone, which explains the smile a few seconds ago. The dogs scoot a few feet away from their original positions but intensify their barks. A few girls with tightly-tied pony tails run from behind the distracted dogs with heavy schools bags but no uniforms. They must be running late for tuitions. Walking briskly, the bangarwalla vanishes into the building to fleece a few seemingly gullible women with his broken weighing scale. The dogs continue to bark for a few more minutes, like a parting gift, lest the bangarwalla has only gone into the building to protect himself from the dangerous creatures that they are in their vicious doggy minds!

Scenario 2:

It’s evening. There is considerable traffic on the roads. The men with dejected faces must now be at home or at least reaching home with a flat bottle wrapped in the previous week’s newspaper in their bag but mind you, not in the same compartment where they keep the prayer books and pictures of sai baba which also act as a calendar. Care is taken to keep considerable distance between God and sin. A constable in a white shirt and khaki pants waves at random people but the people simply ignore him and walk or drive on. He waves a flood of taxis to a halt. There are 6 taxis one after the other. The red signal must indeed feel powerful. A huge white car – the kind they don’t seem to make anymore, comes to a halt right behind the sixth taxi. A pizza delivery boy ekes out a little space between the white car and the sixth taxi. An impatient looking man with his wife and child on a scooter follow suit. Another taxi joins in. two tiny cars come to pause next to each other, both are being driven by women, their respective children secured to the next seat. Both of them have up to their wrists inside a cardboard box of popcorn – the kind they keep at the movies. The third taximan leans out of his window to check the signal. It’s still red. He spits out a jet of red liquid, wipes his lips on the maroon duster that hangs on his rear-view mirror and shakes his head. Suddenly there is activity. The huge white car hears four of the six taxis honking. The huge white car honks. The pizza delivery boy who doesn’t want to pay out of his own pockets beeps along with the man on the scooter. The two tiny cars honk. Everybody behind them honks. The signal is now green. The huge white car honks to remind the six taxis that they are drivers and must take the taxis forward. Each of the vehicles behind the white car has taken it upon himself to wake the one in front from a dreamy stupor that he may have fallen into by honking incessantly. It is their intimidation technique that wants to say, “You better take your vehicle ahead or else…” They continue honking till each of them reach the signal post and make sure that the ones in front of them are not sleepy but are in fact active and even faster than them. But we honked…you know…just in case…they don’t nod off again because these vehicles are very dangerous, vicious selves, well, at least in their own minds.