Chez Moi

“Are you, Desigirl?”

“Um, yes..”

“Oooh, I thought as much. I read your blog frequently!” *camera flash*

“Oh look, it is that blogger, Desigirl. I read your blog..” *more camera flash*

“So do I…” *you get the pic*

“… me too!”

(Really? How come my blog stats don’t reflect this massive fanbase?)

Anyways, this isn’t my major fantasy come to life. It was what happened to me this Saturday. Ok, ok, so I exaggerated a bit (give me a break, I am a blogger after all!) but it was heady when someone actually came up to me and asked me if I was the blogger who masquerades under a strange name. Well, as it was a group I had found thanks to couple of fellow bloggers, I shouldn’t be too surprised but can you blame me for my surprise / shock ? After all, I am not one of those A-list bloggers we keep hearing about. Heck, I can list my five readers in a flash.

And now, it seems like I have a multitude reading my blog.

So I query again, what the hell are you doing Blog Stats? Why aren’t they registering? Is this a conspiracy you hatched with AdSense?

S and I generally steer clear of desi groups and get-togethers. Regular readers of my blog (yes, you five) know my feelings regarding such do’s. But when I learnt that about a 100+ of them were going to gather under one roof, I was more than a bit intrigued. When further enquiries suggested most of them might even be from the same neck of the woods as me, it was the work of a moment to send a ‘yeah, count me in’ e-mail to the mahanubhavs who were organising the shindig.

Further e-mails detailing party events mixed tamarind in my tummy. Parties with themes of ‘Voluntary participation is mandatory’ scare the jeebies out of me. After a major part of my teen years spent making an ass of myself on stage, I have a healthy aversion to giving a repeat performance in front of random folk. ‘Don’t worry, it is a group thing’ was NOT the words that put balm on my soul. Still, I was desperate to give an airing to one of my newly acquired saris, if only to justify its presence.

So, off to H Hempstead we went. The adulation started off almost straightaway.

“Are you so-and-so?” queried the lady at the front desk.

“Can we have little P on the stage please?” shouted another over the PA system.

Boy have we arrived or what?!

Apart from random niggles like an unpalatable lunch (par for the course where HSB, London is concerned!) and a failure to win the Snacks competition (match fixing, sez I!), much fun was had by all. Though we hardly had time to do any major networking, S and I managed to make friends with a lovely family, meet the better half of a long-lost mate from the hometown and in S’s case, corner the only other golt bloke in the whole gathering. Not a bad result, I say.

Maybe the next time the party bandwagon can roll into our corner of Essex. Maybe THEN my kesari will win!

Did anyone see the blurb about the near-farce that took place amidst the Princess Diana inquest? When the jurors and other related judiciary were walking around the Ritz area in Paris, trying to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the Royal’s death when there was an entirely unrelated commotion, thanks to the presence of one Victoria Beckham. Apparently, she exited front row centre and proceeded to calmly get on with her busy life. Tabloids the next day sported ridiculous headlines such as this: Victoria Beckham upstages Diana - I mean, how idiotic can one get to formulate a sentence like that?

Now, I do not think this was a woman going about her business and was just there by accident. Even someone as thick as a ‘Spice Girl’ would know that something serious is going on in the Ritz area and if this woman chose to show her mug there, then it was nothing but design. After all, what better way to get a few vital column inches than show up at a place where you know for sure the press would be about? Isn’t that the very reason behind her living?

I will admit to not being a Spice girl fan. They made me gag then - and now, to see grown women of whatever age parading under the name ‘Baby’ and ‘Scary’ and ‘Ginger’, shouting ‘ha-see-kha’ or whatever nonsense they are going to spout this time around, is scaling new heights of ridiculousness. I mean, none of them could hold a tune in a bucket. Least of all Victoria, who was always given the least lines to sing and just hung about in the background, wafting in the breeze. They took ‘manufactured’ to a new level. And girl power, my ass! They single-handedly (okay - five-handedly) brought feminism down and all it stood for to a cheap and cheesy level.

And now, they are coming back!

Why does it bother me this much? Why should I care if a bunch of plastic non-hags are going to be making millions for themselves and everyone else in their marketing circle? Well, unless I choose to retreat to a little known cave halfway up the Himalayas for the next decade, I will not be able to miss the oncoming invasion and the thought of being subject to pukey songs like ‘Wannabe’ and ‘Mama’ (blech!) is more than my little heart can bear. It was bad enough to watch Vic’s beaky face sticking out of every stray photo and TV shot; no one cheered louder when her hubby won the deal with L.A.Galaxy - at least she would be on the other side of the pond, I thought so naively. Now, she’s back - along with the rest of them!

Help.

Everything about them sets my teeth on an edge. If I hate the whole Spice Girls band and all their airheadedness, then compared to what I feel for Victoria Beckham, then the rest are my bosom buddies and my life would not be complete without being at their feet all day, every day. There is something about the permanently pouted mouth and the reedy body and above all, the insatiable desire to be ‘famous’ that puts me off her. Why can’t people like her, Jade Goody etc get off their backsides and actually do proper work, instead of making a career out of being a ‘celebrity’? What has the society come to when we have ‘professional celebrities’ such as these? I still remember Jade bleating to a tabloid, post Celebrity Big Brother race row: “I don’t want to keep appearing on the front cover of magazines, but I’ve got to keep a roof over my head”. Well, you and the rest of humanity! Only, we actually try to work for it, rather than relying on being tabloid fodder to bring in the moolah.

As a mere mortal, I cannot understand what would make people *want* to be famous; famous and nothing else. But apparently, it is the drug that keeps such people going. I found this article by Wendy on SnarkyGossip highly amusing. ’Posh’ is going to have her own show in America. Even we weren’t subjected to that! Good luck to them poor souls, I say.

Anyone has any ideas on how to get kooks like her off public eye for good? Send her to Mars? Too close. Expedition to Jurassic Park? Nah, Maneka Gandhi would protest - cruelty to dinosaurs and all that. How about singing lessons? Maybe that will nix her proper! Oh and while we are at it, can we chuck the other four ninnies along as well - I’ll even throw Jade Goody as a freebie. Just lock them all up and melt the key.

Some time back, I volunteered for a couple of hours at P’s school. Being a typical under-funded organization, the school normally asks the parents for any sort of help they can give to assist in the smooth running of it. Parents are regularly urged to devote some of their free time in counting vouchers or peeling carrots or do any one of its zillion jobs. Feeling quite self-righteous, I rolled up the driveway earlier that morning and presented myself for an hour and half worth of odd jobs. I was promptly given a form that will help me undergo CRB clearance - the UK’s standard check for anyone working with children or confidential data. Not only were they looking at a gift horse in the mouth, they were making sure the vet got a good look at it before they let it in!

Quite right, too.

As always, things of this sort make me wonder about the state of affairs at the homeland. Earlier this summer, whilst enjoying the parents’ hospitality in the maternal home, I was shocked to hear about the girl who got assaulted at school. This grim incident happened at the Kendriya Vidyalaya school, Ashok Nagar, Chennai. Apparently, a seven-year old girl had been sexually assaulted in the school premises by one of the school’s laboratory technicians. What’s more, it was alleged that one of the teachers played a role in luring this child to her molester. As if this wasn’t enough, it was rumoured that the parents of this child were cautioned not to approach the police in this regard or else. When other parents came to know of this, they apparently blew the whilstle on the matter and called in the cops.

Of course the school denied every single thing and the investigation was still going on when I returned from my trip. But everyone I spoke to on this subject stated that the rapist will get away with a minor sentence and will shrug it off soon enough. What a disgrace if that happened! If that is the maximum punishment for a heinous crime such as this, then it is no wonder it is not enough of a deterrant to others thinking of doing the same thing!

A child of seven, I ask you! My son is five and I can only recoil in horror at the implications of this. We trust our children to be safe and sound when we send them to schools and as such, have every right to believe the school would make sure our children can come to know harm. So why is it that news of this incident doesn’t seem to surprise most parents? Isn’t it a truly dreadful state of affairs when nothing shocks us anymore?

So what is to be done to ensure the safety of our children? And more importantly, why is it that they don’t merit more stringent measures to keep them safe? Don’t our young don’t warrant any serious protection? Or is it a case of ‘there’s plenty more of them so let’s not fret too much’?

As published in Desicritics.org

When I was getting P dressed for school on Wednesday, he told me a story. When he finished, all I could think was: ‘aw, my son, the spinner of stories! He is going to be a great story teller, a fantastic writer. J K Rowling, watch out!!” Before I tell you all the story, a bit of background about P - he hates bathing. Baths, showers, quick ones in a bucket, well he hates the lot. Everytime it is a merry dance to lead him to the tub and make him clean his grubby self.

He kept this up in Madras heat and grime too - that should tell you what a determined monkey he is! More than bathing, he hates washing his face. Every time he shouts ‘I’m finished’, I’ll always find his body sopping wet but there will be nary a drop on his mug. Asking him why will get comments like he dry cleaned his face or some such thing. Hard to believe that when he was a newborn, he *loved* getting his face washed. The outrageous squawk he’d let out to find himself facing yet another bath would be silenced when my gran washed his face.

Now, for his story:

Once upon a time, there was a little boy who took baths every day. He loved washing his face. His face was very, very clean.
Then, one day, he thought to himself that it is too clean and he wouldn’t wash it. But he forgot.
Then one day, when his face got too, too clean, his eyes fell off. Then his nose came off. Then his ears. Then his mouth.
His mum walked around and found them. Then she took out some glue and stuck them all back on his face.
The End.

Do you think he needs therapy?

I had picked up P from school last evening and we were both walking slowly down the roads. When we neared the station, an older boy on a cycle and a girl on foot rushed past us. That was when I saw her. The girl. And what she was wearing.

Well, it was one of those ‘blink and you miss it’ type outfits. As it was kind of warm out, she had taken her jacket off and as a result, all I could see of her from behind were here black and white candy-striped, bum hugging jeans topped with something that looked vaguely like a tatty piece of cloth. There was her black bra, displayed in all its glory and parallel to it were two strips of black t-shirt material, knotted Shakuntala style. That was it.

When she turned into the station, I could vaguely make out the front part of it. There wasn’t much more material that had miraculously materialised and attached itself to her front. All the available material did was to cover the bra.

I was thanking my stars P was 1. too young to decipher that outfit 2. too tired to ask me any embarassing questions.

I wanted to know what that girl’s mum was thinking, letting her loose on the streets, barely dressed so. That garment, laughingly called a ‘top’, is obscene for any age. If she is old enough or ‘developed’ enough to need the services of a bra, then she needs more material to cover herself. When I think of all the poor folks we bump into in India, who wear tattered garments cos they can’t afford any proper ones and then I see idiots like this, traipsing about half naked in the name of fashion.

Kali yug?