90 Seconds

       When the cab stopped at my gate this morning, I was all sulky. The thought of having to spend a beautiful Saturday at work did not appeal to me at all. As I got in, I rolled down the window and settled in my seat, determined to make the most of the morning drizzle! My mind immediately drifted off to think about how cozy and nice it would be to snuggle up under my giant comforter at home, with the windows open! Huh, that did not help my mood at ALL L it was just so unfair that I should be out and about on a weekend morning!

      We reached the main road. At 8 in the morning on a drizzly Saturday, the roads were a little less busy than on the normal days. The signal turned red ….my cab driver stopped and immediately got on his phone to let the transport guy at office know that we were on our way. A traffic policeman in his raincoat was muttering something under his breath. A transvestite, dressed in all her glory, complete in a red sari and chocolate brown lipstick, was moving from vehicle to vehicle, clapping her hands and demanding alms. A little street kid, lurking on the footpath, caught my attention. She was standing there, holding a loop, something that looked like a hoola-hoop. The minute all the vehicles had stopped at the signal, she put her loop on the pavement and moved a few feet away. She then did a somersault and landed INTO the loop on the ground. Within the next half minute or so, she twisted and turned her young body in a million ways, contorting herself into numerous shapes WITHIN the loop! It was still drizzling outside. But she went about her business, trying her best to entertain people stuck at the signal. And then she looked at the timer of the traffic signal. She still had another minute. Immediately, she ran from one vehicle to the other, collecting the coins that people gave her.

       The transvestite had completed her round by then and waited on the pavement watching the child collect her alms. My driver was getting impatient. The traffic policeman could not hold his mutter down anymore. He started raining curses on a biker who was trying to jump the signal. Within the next few seconds, all eyes were on the timer.

     The driver, wishing it would tick faster.

    The transvestite, wishing the vehicles would start moving slowly, so that she could collect her due from a newer batch of vehicles.

    The street child, wishing the signal would stay red a little longer so that she could collect coins from all the vehicles stuck at the signal.

    The traffic policeman, keeping a keen eye on the timer to ensure he gets his hand signals out at the right time.

    And I, indifferent to the changing colors of the traffic signal, completely lost in the beauty of this morning, watching the driver, the policeman, the transvestite and the child judging their next move based upon the changing traffic lights.

   The signal finally turned green, the drizzle was now increasing in intensity…the rain drops were getting bigger….the driver started the cab, the policeman blew his whistle and waved his hand, the transvestite was already walking towards the other side of the road…the side where the lights had now turned red. The little girl was holding on to her loop and running towards the red light lane, grinning as the rain drops lashed against her almost bare back.

    As my cab moved forward, I turned to my left to catch a last glimpse of the characters of my 90 seconds movie.

  The transvestite was  clapping her hands again. The child was getting ready to do a cart wheel. The policeman was screaming at yet another wayward driver……And my driver was turning the radio on…

It was no longer drizzling. It was raining. The policeman ran into his traffic island shelter, the transvestite put her sari over her head. The child….the child continued to twist herself into the metal loop. In the pouring rain…Grinning from ear to ear…While the rain lashed against her bare back.....

   My mind drifted off again to think about my warm bed and my cozy comforter….And I felt blessed! Working on a Saturday did not seem so bad at all…The 90 seconds movie had done it's job....I said a silent prayer and thanked Him for having given me a life that did not depend on the changing lights of a traffic signal….

Its strange where life’s lessons come from….

The Pup

        At the Shirdi Sai Baba temple today, some people were handing out photos of Shirdi Baba with some of his wise sayings printed alongside a picture of his statue. When I got back home, I sat on the couch with the prasadam and picked up a photo and started reading aloud the quote that was printed on it. Here it goes

“ Be compassionate towards others and never turn away anyone from your door, be it human or animal. Love your fellow man for it will teach you kindness and caring”.

       The minute I read this quote, the first thing that crossed my mind was the pup. I must tell you his story. This happened just few months back.

       One stormy night ( I am NOT making this up, it was indeed a stormy night :)), we stepped out after dinner to lock our front gate. Cuddled on a foot rug in the corner of our compound was a little pup. He had rolled himself into a ball to protect himself from the cold. My mother pulled out a gunny bag that was lying around and put it on the ground so that the pup could use it if he wanted to and we left in the safety of our covered compound.

       We found him there the next morning too. He was up and about, moving around the place and we noticed that he had a limp. He was an extremely shy pup and as soon as he saw us step out of the house, he slithered under the gate and ran out, limping.

       When I got back from work in the evening, I again found him resting on the foot rug and the moment he caught sight of me,he ran out again. This happened for two days or so. By then, the pup seemed to have understood he was in safe hands. He would see him walking into our compound,resting and wagging his tail when he saw us. We have no pets at home, but a little pup taking refuge in our compound did not bother us.

        Until we noticed his eating habits that is !! :)

        From day one, my mother would keep aside some food for the dog and leave it on a granite slab for him to eat. But for some strange reason, the dog was a very poor eater. He would take a bite or two and then leave it at that. At first, we thought he would slowly get used to eating normal home food. But he did not. He would starve for days at end and he could see that he was losing weight.

        One day we caught him digging through a dustbin at the corner of our street and eating unmentionable items from it ! He seemed to have acquired a taste for all the weird things in the dustbin….Crazy pup! That same night, he did not let any of us sleep. He was continuously barking away, howling and scratching on the metal surface of the gate. We even woke up at 2 in the night to check if he was doing ok. He looked all fine and would wag his tail when we saw him, but would get back to making noise within the next half hour.

He teamed up with the street dog community on our road and starting creating a ruckus every night. He would promptly pee on the foot rug, bite all our shoes, drag our bike’s leather mat to the floor, leave behind the food that we left out for him and make a mess of our compound and everything in our compound started smelling like the street pup :)

        We did not let this bother us. My mother would clean the mess and we would speak to the little guy whenever we saw him and would ask him to be a good boy , eat something and behave well. But he seemed to be in no mood to listen to us. One night, he stuck his head into the metal railings of our gate and had almost killed himself. My sister freed him up in time. He continued to eat the filth from the dustbin at the street’s end and refused to accept any food that we offered him.

Since he was feeding himself on scraps, my earlier worry of him starving to death, began to fade. However, it constantly became obvious that he would kill himself by getting stuck in the railings of our gate. We cannot afford to leave the gate open for security reasons. Hence, we had to take a tough decision of trying to block his entry through the gap in our gate.

       Since it was practically impossible to keep a watch on him throughout the day, we put up a wooden plank alongside the length of the gate to ensure that he does not try the stunt of squeezing in through the tiny gaps in the gate thereby strangling himself.

      He did try to knock off the plank with his head a few times, but he then seemed to have got the message. Next day, we saw him taking refuge in a cozy corner of a vacant site beside our home. We placed his gunny bag there. Over the next week, we left some food just outside his new home, but he still refused to eat. We finally gave up.

         He was around for a total of three weeks or so, starting from the first day we spotted him. His limp was gone within the first week. Over the next two weeks, he made a lot of new friends on the street and soon after he disappeared. We never caught sight of him again. I have a hunch that he must have moved to a new neighborhood in our area :)

         Reading the quote about not turning away any animal from your door, I could not help but think of the circumstances under which we had to turn this guy away.  Considering the fact that our lifestyles do not have enough space or time to accommodate a pet and the fact that the dog was all set to kill himself, we had no other choice....If only he could EAT!

The One-Upper Syndrome

     The moon rotates around the Earth and the Earth rotates around the Sun. That is the natural course of the Universe. If you have paid attention in your 6th grade geography class, the name Copernicus will ring a bell. This guy suggested a model of the Universe that was centred around the Sun. I kind of bought his story, until recently.

     Yeah. Nature has thrown me away from the natural course and put me in an orbit that runs around a certain person who is so full of herself, that 5 minutes with her and you will find yourself forcefully drawn into her world, which again, is full of herself. If you have had the good fortune ( use a pinch of sarcasm here) of bumping into someone who thinks the world about themselves and expects you to think so too, you will understand my plight by the time I end this post.

     Let us call her The Queen. Not because she is one, but because, if she ever stumbles across this mean blog, she will at least give me credit for giving her a fancy name :P Now Miss Queen is someone I HAVE to stumble into everyday. A typical conversation with her, as expected, begins with her and ends (if it ever does) with her.

    Even when we are stuck in a large group, she has what it takes to divert the conversation towards her. Sample this

Person 1: “ Bush kept talking about Osama bin Laden. And now all of a sudden, the guy is forgotten. No one talks about him anymore.Wonder what happened to that guy.”

     Before Person 2 can respond, Miss Queen almost gets hysterical trying to figure out what she can say to talk next without giving the other people a chance.There she goes!

Miss Queen : “ Oh Bin Laden. “I” hate that guy. “I” think he must have shaved his beard by now and wandered into the US again. Btw, you know what, “I” hate men with beards. Does’nt it itch ? Wonder how girls can stand them. “I” would dump a guy if he ever grew a beard.”
      And just like that Bin Laden vanishes into thin air and the conversation is lost in an overdose of HER opinion. Not that I would care. Because I generally turn a deaf ear to all that she says.But it does get to me sometimes. Especially when she gets into “one-upper” mode. If “one-upper” sounds new to you, here is how the urban dictionary describes it.

One-upper : An annoying person who responds to hearing someone else’s experience or problem by immediately telling a similar story about themselves with a much more fantastic (or terrible) outcome.

Picture this :

Girl 1 ( talking about her weekend getaway) : My husband and I drove down to County Resorts for the weekend. It’s such an amazing place. We had a great time there.

Miss Queen :  Oh County Resorts? My grand dad has a membership there. We get a free vacation there every 6 months. But we choose not to go. Such a cheap place.

      How mean is that? I have half the mind to punch her nasty nose and break it into two. If only I could get away with it!

     One week with that woman and I knew there was no stopping her. I did try to be politely tolerant of her antics. When that dint work, I resorted to plainly ignoring her. That’s the worst way to treat a person. Ignoring them. But such people just ask for it. And I give them what they ask for.

     Miss Queen is only a recent example. There are many such glowing examples of interesting one-upper personalities from the past who are freakshows of the first order ! The worst kind of one-uppers are the negative one-uppers. The ones who want to stand first. Even if it means standing first on the loser scale :p I mean seriously, what do you do with such people?

      If you tell them you got a cavity filled, they will jump and say that they got a root canal operation done. If you say your neighbour got a nose job, their neighbour would have got a nose job AND a boob job . If your friend downed 3 tequila shots at the party, their friend would have downed 6. And if you broke your ankle on your biking trip, they would have broken their ankle, their hip and their neck :-| There is simply no end to their bragging!
       How do you handle such jerks? Some of my friends try reverse-snobbing, which is aimed at making the one-upper feel guilty. If she brags about an expensive dinner, you talk about the hunger in Uganda. So basically you just burst her bubble right into her face. But again, that would mean stooping down to her level. And I am not too keen on doing that.

       But I must admit, it is quite challenging to just sit there and tolerate such freakshows. So on the most recent onset of her bragging session, I put a brake to her enthusiastic onslaught and told her I was having a bad headache. “Uh-ho” she said and stopped for a few seconds. I thought my trick had worked. Only until she blurted out “ I had a bad headache in the bus today. I felt like I would faint if it continued”. Inspite of it’s inappropriateness , I could not hide my grin. I simply picked my coffee up and walked away as I guffawed like a crazy cow. She is just beyond repair! So now instead of banging my head into the wall each time she does that, I simply try and find humour in her situation. I can choose to either get peeved or I can simply choose to chuckle over her mental illness. I choose to do the latter. And I see that I can stand her better now :P

       I am sure you would have come across one-uppers too. Trying to mend them or trying to beat them in their own game is an absolute waste of precious energy. It’s like rolling in the mud with a pig. Not only will you get dirty, the pig will actually enjoy doing it. Why give them the pleasure ;)

      Here’s a chuckle for you. And I take leave with that :)

There were three women sitting around the table, talking and bragging.

The first beautiful, dressed lady said "My husband bought me a new mink coat and a trip to Europe. "

“Oh !Thats nice!”.The second lady replied.

Trying to out do her and one up her , the third lady said "my husband bought me a 5 carat diamond AND that mansion up on the hill, Oh, and a Rolls".

" Oh !Thats nice!”. The second lady said again.

Noticing that the second lady was so quiet, the other two prodded her.

Finally she said, " My husband sent me to etiquette school" .

“Oh really? “ The other two women said. "What did they teach you there?"

"Well, instead of saying “f--- you”, they taught me to say “ Oh! That’s nice"

 The other two shut up :-D

Have a great week ahead ! :)