Twilight Fairy

It’s been quite some time since I have been staying alone now. When I shifted out 3-4 months back, I was practically spending 75% time with my parents and 25% time in my own house. On every festival I would be back with them. In case of every slight (and major) ailment I would be back in Delhi. But for now the balance has shifted. At least now since 1-2 months the %age of time that I spend at Delhi has come down. But then even after so many months I am still “settling down”. I still feel like a vagabond, living out of plastic packets (not even suitcases). There are ‘n’ number of unfinished jobs pending. Lots of things have changed in the meantime. I have my own emotional battles to conquer. Some new decisions have been taken and some really old ones are finally being implemented. It’s yet to be seen whether they were good or bad. I still need to come to terms with some of my decisions. I am at that point in my life when I know that destiny is playing a game with me and I can do nothing except flow with it. Life is but a combination of choices and if I made the wrong ones, I am doomed. It scares me to no end.

Anyhow the “home alone” stint has been quite full of things. The typical reactions that I would get from ppl when I informed them that I am shifting to my own house (and leaving my “nest” at that) would be:
1. “Are you crazy?” – No, I very well know what I am doing. Just because you never dared to do it doesnt mean it has to be crazy.
2. “But why are u shifting? What will you do?” – Huh? Dont ppl live independently anyway when they are working away from home? There’re ‘n’ number of things that one does with ones life, and those are what I’ll also do!
3. “Get married.”/”It’s time you got married.” – GOD help all those overzealous (read poke ur nose in my private affair) souls around me. Thanks but no thanks. I already know it’s time I got married. Doesnt mean I get married just so that I dont have to stay “alone”. Or are you just plainly green with “grass is always greener on the other side” syndrome and hence want to drag me into your side of the pasture?
4. “Is it safe for a female to be staying alone?” – well what’s safe in today’s date? Nothing.
5. “Won’t you be scared?” – No.

and some very atypical reactions would be
6. “Wow! that’s cool!” – gee, thanks, at last someone identifies with me!
7. “Hey let me in on this real estate stuff too” – ok, I charge one month rent as brokerage for that.

After I did shift and spent some time at home, most ppl who said points 1-5 treated me like I am off my rocker and kept to themselves. Some would ask me what I “do” (as if I had suddenly developed some alien receptacles on my head which prohibited normal mundane activities) especially since I didnt even have a cable connection or a proper music system at home. Well to be honest I didnt watch TV for 2-3 months and I just didnt feel as if I missed *anything*. I read a whole lot (nothing technical though I had plans). I listened to a lot of radio (on my walkman). I attended my piano/guitar classes. I cooked. I indulged in gardening. I drove between Gurgaon and Delhi. I contemplated. And did they forget that I work for a living? Anyhow running a house independently is no mean feat. And neither is staying alone. Especially if all the houses above yours, behind yours, across yours are empty too.

So far I think it was good to shift out. There have been myriad experiences all of which I wouldn’t care to write. But some notable things are:

1. From no cooking (omlet/maggi/sandwiches don’t count), I have graduated to good cooking. And surprisingly I even enjoy it. I have made various dishes now including pasta and “love filled” rotis. No, I am not inviting you all for a meal.
2. There were some thefts around the colony. Some ppl lost precious stuff whilst some lost the gutter lids in their premises. I lost all the gutter lids in my premises one after another (10 in all). It may sound funny to those who haven’t experienced but it just isnt funny when someone trespasses through your area, climbs through walls/locked gates and steals gutter lids even when you are *inside* the house. The next thing as you know could be anything.
3. I have had the pleasure of calling the police at the spot of the “crime” twice. Haryana police or rather anywhere is full of useless bastards especially if you dont know anyone in the upper echelons. All that they can do is tell you that they wont go search the umpteen jhuggi/jhompdi clusters right across your house, because some poor “mazdoor” couple might be copulating! HA!
4. I am an employer now apart from being an employee. It’s not as if there were no maids working at home earlier, but then the employer was my mom and not me. I have already changed 3 maids so far. The first one would keep cribbing to no one in particular even when I wasnt around. Within 10 days she asked me for a raise even though I was paying her full pay after having spent 75% time at Delhi. The second one would keep telling me to get married (she should be employed at the places of those ppl who uttered these responses earlier). When it came to work, she would shy off from most of it. “It’s dirty/It smells” she would say. Does she have this choice if she’s chosen to be a maid? She wasn’t even clear about her scope of work, forget objectives. But she was very clear that she wanted “baksheesh” on Holi etc. The third one is just fine. She isnt gossipy/doesn’t crib. She’s proactive and does things on her own. She doesn’t require close supervision. In fact now I have started taking the liberty of promptly going back to sleep after letting her in at 6:45 am till the time she has to leave. So far so good.

As I wrote, staying alone is no mean feat. It sure gets to you when you have to unlock a fortress every morning and lock yourself inside a fortress every night. One of the standing instructions from my parents is to keep mirchi powder or some chaaku at hand. Egad! They should know, I don’t take kindly to unwanted visitors. Anyone daring to step past my doorstep without my permission suffers the consequences. I already have blood on my hands after having killed some 450+ mosquitoes so far in a span of maybe a month. Some ppl actually changed their stand and now tell me “you are very brave to be staying alone”. Yeah well right, now if only I would get a plaque for it too. May be I can cover up some gutter with it.

Come one, come all for YADBM (That’s Yet Another DBM). Please confirm your attendance at the site itself.

Please say a little prayer for Preeti.

Sometime back I went through my site statistics and discovered yet another time that someone had searched for “twilight fairy” or “twilight fairy blog” or “twilght_fairy” (old blog URL) and landed on my blog. Since I hadn’t really seen what results are shown when one searches for “twilight fairy blog”, I went to the link too. The same usual stuff came up – blogs linking me, sites where I had left comments etc and some other random links with “twilight” in them. But there was one new link that was referring to my blog and this had never popped up before. Out of curiosity I went there and realised that it was my blogs details on a site which I had never visited so far – blogshares.com. I didn’t know what it was all about and why my site was there, but I guess it was because of web spiders that I was indexed there. This site had a lot of statistical stuff like incoming links (blogs which link to me etc), my blogshare (a share price for my blogs’ shares!), graphs showing how the number of incoming links trend has been and the share price trend (surprisingly it’s at an all time high right now!) and lots of other abbreviations & jargon which looked very close to stock market jargon. I guessed that this was just a timepass stockmarket kind of place, where ppl traded and hence the name – blogshares.

I am generally averse to stock markets and all stuff to do with finance, shares, trading etc. It intimidates me so much that I just don’t have the inclination to even try and understand how it works even though I hold several stock options of my current employer. So I tried glancing through the FAQ to see what blogshares is all about and then gave up by default, until I saw that there was a section on my page listing “recent buys/sells” where some strangers with even stranger names had bought and even sold my “blog shares”! What the heck! It seemed at the first look that these guys were making money out of *my* blog or its “quality” in terms of incoming links which in turn decides a share price! All is fine if it’s a silly game, but if it had anything to do with REAL money then I was sure to have felt pretty much conned.

I decided to “glance” one more time through the FAQ as long as I found it bearable. I didnt. Gave it up one more time but I did see a “premium member” option on the page and wondered if premium members got to trade with REAL stuff. There were a lot of bloggers whose blogshare pages were mentioned on my page itself. In fact most of the bloggers I have read are listed on this site. Simply because so many of them are there already, I have safely and (I think) correctly concluded that this is a silly share market game with no money involved. But I am still wondering why anyone would be so vela to spend their time trading with blogs! Can anyone explain what this is all about?

Performance objective of my subordinate : ‘I want to have congenital relationships with my seniors and peers.’

My comments : ‘Needs to improve communication skills’

Long long ago, when I was a kid… (now that I have started with that dramatic bestseller line, I can continue). Long long ago, when I was a kid, I saw an ad on TV for a soft drink. That ad was for Pepsi (Yeh dil maange more – AHA days). It starred some new faces and some not so new. The new faces attained great heights. It won’t be an exaggeration to state that the great heights were achieved *because* of the ad. It starred raging heartthrob Aamir Khan, along with upcoming models Aishwarya Rai and Mahima Chaudhry. While Mahima was shown as a common girl next door (she definitely had potential for looking much more than the plain jane that she did), Aishwarya Rai was shown as this sizzling siren who asked “weak in the knees and heart going flip flop” Aamir for a Pepsi, right when he had risked limb and life for a bottle of the soft drink. That ad catapulted Aishwarya Rai into the top of the charts and even before the Miss India title she had a major fan following who believed that she would win the crown that year. This ad also found a lot of mention as a landmark of sorts in the ad world. All that was then.

Lots of years later, when I was not a kid anymore, I saw another ad on TV. Again, it was for a soft drink but a rival one – Coke. And it was being endorsed by this very couple mentioned in the previous ad – Aamir Khan and Aishwarya Rai. When I saw that ad for the first time, I saw it from somewhere in the middle. I saw that both Ash and Aamir were looking for each other with a bottle of coke in their hands and when they did meet, they looked at the soft drink bottles and at each other like longlost friends. It all gave me the impression that it’s a sequel of the landmark pepsi ad and somehow after having bumped into each other so many years later, both realised that their tastes still match and that they both prefer a “better” drink now. I found that idea pretty interesting and thought that it was pretty innovative for the agency to have made use of the fact that they were endorsing a rival product earlier (though I was not very sure if they can legally do that). But to my dismay my bubble soon burst and I realised that the ad was an insult on the name of creativity as it just showed that Ash/Aamir were chatting on some website and choose a bottle of coke as their means of recognising each other. Utterly dumb.

But this isn’t all. For some reason, soft drink ads, instead of outdoing each other in terms of creativity are outdoing each other in the “create the worst ad” department. I simply abhor the ad where Amitabh Bachhan plays a rustic boatman. It just doesn’t appeal to my senses. But then all AB ads are getting quite irritating. Just taken the sheen off him. Then there are these new ads that have recently started being aired. One has Shah Rukh Khan drinking what else but Pepsi. But the sickening part is that the ad has some horrible animation which shows the bellybutton of some females as lips (ugh) with the lips singing some stupid song which goes ‘oye hoye bubbly’. The idea is that all objects around the soft drink somehow become ‘animated’ and start hitting on bubbly – the soft drink! These myriad objects include the burger that SRK is about to gobble, SRK’s shirt pocket etc. and the idea is that ‘bubbly’ is depicted like a female with all ‘objects’ in the universe trying to flirt with it! For heaven’s sake, I wouldn’t want to drink a soft drink like that – pesticides or no pesticides! Then Aamir Khan has gone one step ahead and become Manno Bhabhi! This ad of his has a double role with him playing a dumb NRI and also Manno Bhabhi at the same time. Manno Bhabhi sets the NRI’s nakhras right with some silly desi cookery dialogues like ‘tadka lagana’ and ‘chhaunkh lagana’ etc. Though Manno Bhabhi doesn’t look very bad to look at (much better than the concept of ‘bubbly’), it fails to promote a soft drink and promotes Manno Bhabhi instead. Sadly endorsing a product is no longer equivalent to vouching for it. It’s just become equivalent to making a fool of oneself on national TV.