And I happen to be the ball boy. This is the kind of situation I usually find myself in totally out of place. It happened that sometime back I attended a family wedding where I met this person who happens to be a 2nd cousin. We met nearly after 10 years or so. The first thing that she said was ‘Oh my god , you have totally changed .You look like your mother now. Initially you were looking like your dad’. It is in these kind if situations that I don’t know how to react to people. Do I have to tell ‘Blame it on the genes’ or something like ‘You still remember how I looked 10 years ago ? I never knew that you existed’ which actually happens to be true. Then she changed the topic to how bad the traffic was and how it took her an hour or so to travel 8kms. I just nod my head totally clueless about what to say when topics change suddenly from genes to traffic and all the while the only thing I am thinking of is food. I feel that there must be a protocol of sorts , like a 15 minute warm up session or something where usual questions like ‘how are you’ , ‘how’s your work’ , ‘how are your parents doing’ where answers can range from simple ‘good, alright , nice’ or a nod and smile will be accepted . Once this basic course of getting acclimatized is over then the timer should go 3..2…1 and a DJ guy in the background should shout ‘It’s now time for paradoxes’ and people can ask all the strange things that they want to . Some people just know what to speak at the right time . A couple of weeks back or so the anniversary of Rakesh Sharma landing in space was celebrated. Indira Gandhi at that time had asked him ‘Upar se bharath kaise diktha hai?’ . He had replied ‘Saare Jahan se Acha’ . Watta reply!!! It must have given goose bumps to the lakhs of people viewing this live telecast on DD 1many years ago. Sometimes I wonder if the whole Rakesh Sharma , Indira Gandhi thing was scripted .DD1 otherwise was a very depressing channel to watch . It was the only channel I had watched for till I was 6 or 7 . Some random orangish curves would go around wriggling here and there and then they would take a definitive shape with creepy music playing in the background and the letters ’DD1’ would sit somewhere in between those curves. They would play a movie every Saturday and the only ads were that of Vico Vajradanthi and Ujala . Ads nowadays have changed so much. Watched the recent episode of StoryBoard .According to some experts by looking at the face , the casting director decides which role one can play in an ad. A girl with a very sober and homely face a story get s developed like -à she’s been born and brought up in Kerala , welcoming the monsoon every year ,has enjoyed the harvest festival with an extended family and whose nose would feel like a cube of ice on a cold winter morning. She would make it in to ad about jewellery . A skeptical urban person with a confused look on his face would probably go and play the role of a worried man in a life insurance ad or something like that. Sheer awesomeness , one of the best shows I’ve watched.
In yet another interesting conversation with a friend we were deciding as to what time we meet . He said 13:00 hours or 1 pm . I said ‘make it 13:17, will make us feel like we value every minute , 13 and 17 are prime and the number as a whole is divisible by 3’ . I am totally obsessed with numbers and especially those which are divisible by 3. He then said ‘why not 13:02’ and I recognize that my momentary feeling of ingeniousness has been washed away. To comfort myself and feel self important I try to walk in a rhythmic motion , hands and legs totally in sync trying to imagine that I’m attending some blade meetings and signing some assorted papers and shaking hands with random people and shouting ‘deal done’. Makes you feel like a mixture of a corporate CEO and a mafia don!!!
