Over the weekend...

I quite enjoy going to Geoffrey’s (Marine Plaza) for catching up with friends for a drink and shaking a little leg to the music there. We always manage to hog the inside room where they have enough space for 4-5 people to dance. I especially love this quote outside G’s – ‘Jack Daniel was no saint but he did start something of a religion’. G’s it was, on Friday and I ended up sleeping at 5 on Saturday morning, but was the happiest because there still were two holidays coming up. The food at G’s is quite horrible except for the sauteed mushrooms but they mix some mean drinks. I had this new drink coz I had a bad cold – hot toddy with mint and it was quite weird though it opened all the flu-assailed pores in my head.

Movies

Movies over the weekend : ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ (TDWP) and ‘Pyar Ke Side Effects’ (PKSE).

For TDWP, reviewers had been raving on and on about how the movie was much better than the book for the first time ever. I found the movie just about average – just another chick-flick.

There were two young ladies sitting next to me who found the whole thing extremely hilarious – so much so that we had to shift a few chairs away from them to get the dialogues over the delirious laughter. I didn’t find any sequence funny enough to laugh out loud in the flick. That said, Meryl Streep fit her role of a hard-as-nails boss to the last ‘t’, but was not evil enough as in the book. Anne Hathway was just lovely (looking). Special mention – her lips…very grrrrworthy!! Move over, Ms Jolie!

The story was very very average. It was, though, kind of interesting to see how Andrea (Anne) developes a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for her demanding boss – I guess we all do it at a level to justify whatever we’re doing. And Northwestern University seems to be doing its bit of media planning through movies and TV channels! I saw a couple of TV serials too, with protagonists (prominently) from NWU. An inane movie that seems to be overhyped.

PKSE – I had been warned off it on an internet board but with nothing to do at 4pm on a Sunday and Regal at jogging distance away, I found myself watching PKSE alone (friends busy watching Bas Ek Pal which I was’nt too keen on).

Newspapers had been raving about an improbable pairing of the lead actors (Rahul Bose and Mallika Sherawat) but I find nothing improbable about it. They were actually pretty good together and Mallika does play the pissed off, confused role pretty well. Ok, she was NOT overly attractive and with all her clothes on she looked like any 5th woman from Haryana. Pliss to be catching Ms Sherawat say No, No, No, No two times in the movie. The No’s were very unEnglish and remind me of my German boss who has a heavily accented English – but that’s beyond the point.

The first half rocked – it was good fun and I think most of the males there could really identify with Rahul Bose going through guy-issues. The Mad-o-Wot hairdresser Sapna Bhavnani also had a small cameo in the movie and heck she looks prettier than in the hideous pics I’ve seen of her in the Mumbai Mirror column she writes for. Of course she can’t act and hence spent most of the time hiding her face from the camera. Her tattoos look pretty good and again not as bad as they look in the still pics. The second half of the movie was a bit contrived as if the Director had run out of steam, though it did have its bright moments at points in time. The item girl (Sophie Choudhary) in the movie is NOT hot at all (unless you find horsy faces hot)and the item numbers were stupid and a time-waste. All in all, a decent pic.

I just finished watching this show on CNBC – The Job Show, hosted by Naukri.com. So a company (Mindshare, in this case – a media planning company) has a vacancy and they interview 3 potential candidates on Tv, putting them through 3 rounds of questions and situations. Great idea, you’d think. Yeah, great idea for sure! But they had to spoil it by getting 3 idiots as contestants! Sample the following questions and answers:

Mindshare: Approximately how many satellite and cable enabled homes are there in India?

Contestant 1 – ehhh…ummm…in India? (at this point you expect an answer closest to the third decimal) eehhhh…ummmm..184 (wha…??? The answer is more like closer to 30 million!).

Mindhshare: Do you think the cola-pesticide issue has become political now?
Contestant 2: ummm…aaa…ya..ya…the MNC should not be under pressure for feeding pesticides..aa…even municipal corporation..umm..you know..should be closed because they also serve the dirty water to drink (good point, actually but lost in the tangled web of English she wove skilfully around us)

Mindshare: If your company employs a person as your colleague based on how she looks and not on the basis of skills, what would you do?

Contestant 3: Good, no?? (Camera pans to a speechless HR head of Mindshare).
Anchor of the show: So that means you like having eye-candy in office around you
Contestant 3: yaya (Flashes huge smile, salivating at the prospect)

Mindshare: If you are having a family problem because of which you cant come to work and you’re subsequently fired, what would you do?

Contestant 1: I come from a Sindhi family (whoa, I sit up, expecting to hear about either how Sindhi families do NOT have family problems or about how professional Sindhis are) and I had a tough time convincing my family that I could work even though I was a girl so I will definitely be able to convince them that I can attend office (bleahh: what if the family problem means that your dad has had an accident? And how about answering the question asked?)

Mindshare had sent 2 high powered interviewers to the show and I could feel them squirming in their seats (ok, if they were’nt, I seriously doubt them as a good company to work for) because now they were supposed to pick an employee on the basis of these questions and answers. I did’nt envy them at all!

Yaawn. It’s a Monday tomorrow but am looking forward to it. It was a good,restful weekend. I've been resisting temptation and not trying to look at the Confiserie Sprüngli chocolates I got from Switz and HAVE to remember to courier them to nephew-niece tomorrow - cant hold on for much longer!

Ps: Mindshare picked the eye-candy fella (but cautioned him against having an unnecessary sense of humour all the time lest he get into trouble). I’d have dropped all three.

Disjointed peeves

So many things happen that I want to blog about and they are often just lost, so I’ve started writing small paragraphs as and when they happen. So while I still work on the Swiss travelogue, here’s some things that caught my attention over the last week:

Professor Sabharwal’s son – Himanshu Sabharwal appearing gleefully on every News Channel giving soundbytes on things not even remotely connected to his fathers murder. He recently played a big part in a debate on NDTV on whether teachers are underpaid or not. Should’nt he be at home in Ujjain, with his grieving mother, or something? He seems to be jetting between Ujjain and New Delhi – I wont be surprised if he joins some political party or a student union. I’m not against activism – more power to activists who get increased bandwidth because of channels, but this sounds like opportunism! Well the guy sure speaks well to his credit. So anyway, what he does is his own business.

House of Flying Daggers – the house got only about 10 minutes of screen time. The movie was more about how 2 guys loved a girl who loved each of them in turns. To start with, the VERY Indian sounding English dubbing quite put me off – I mean when you hear Chinese speaking English, you’d expect them to be accented – mind you, a CHINESE accent, not Indian!! So this movie started and expectedly it had many groups of kids – whose parents probably thought this was some good Harry Potter-kinda movie. I saw many parents who had accompanied their kids getting uncomfortable whenever some intimate scene came on screen. The unaccompanied kids were probably very happy – hehe, we caught some 12-13 yr old guys giving hi-fives to each other during the interval.

After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Chinese seem to have suddenly mastered the art of flying through Air/Bamboo Forests/anything high. The climax rests on a swordfight which…ahem…starts in summer and continues through winter when it starts snowing (one of the combatants had a knife in his back – again, since summer). The heroine – fatally stabbed with a knife in the heart in summer, suddenly wakes up in winter to still find her lovers fighting – am sure she wanted to go back to feigning sleep again and wake up in spring. But then the movie had to end soon enough.

Dress Code in Amity – the reasoning given by the Amity professors is that recruiters won’t see you seriously if you wear tees and jeans through 2 years in college. What bull?? Recruiters are not looking for waiters or security guards. In a TV interview, Mr Amity (someone) says this is about making a more responsible future generation – so does that mean that all who didn’t so far wear business suits to college have turned out irresponsible adults?

The mid-week holiday

Yesterday was the final day of Ganapati Visarjan and it was a day off – the office being closed because every road and train is choc-a-bloc full of people taking their idols for immersion in any available stretch of sea.

The Plan

The mood was totally festive ever since Tuesday evening when the holiday was announced and I made all elaborate plans with a friend for going on an early morning walk/jog followed by a 10am show at Inox (they retail at Rs89 for the morning shows as opposed to Rs200 for any other show!). Shifting to a bigger flat and arranging everything has taken its toll and of course, I did not get up in the morning. And when I did, saw that there were innumerable messages and missed calls from the friend starting at 6am (jeez!) and then finally petering out at 8am (note: I woke at 1030am). Quickly browsed through the papers and found to my utter horror that I had seen ALL the movies there were to see (except the ‘Aap Ki Khatir’ – I cant stand Akshaye Khanna with hair or ‘Sandwich’, which we didn’t want to see anyway). Well begun is half done – my plans hadn’t even begun and they were squashed!

Oxford Bookstore, Churchgate

Sauntered over to Oxford, got an armful of books to read and then over to Cha bar to ruminate over them with a tea and sandwich – but that was the second let down of the day – Cha Bar now prohibits people from bringing books to the tables to browse!!!!! Fat amount of business they must be getting now – who’d want to come to a café deep inside a bookstore to drink tea and talk to people!! I mean Oxford bookstore is looking for different shapes and sizes of axes to jump on and cut itself.

First they happily go and arrange all books by the author’s last name – so you have a Jackie Collins sharing space with Vikram Chandra and so on! This has to be the most asinine way of arranging books ever! If I want to see whats on in Indian Fiction, it means I have to check each and every bookshelf to see an Indian-sounding author. And then suddenly you come across bookshelves where all management/travel/cooking books are arranged by genre. I can’t still figure out the way Oxford arranges its books – why the heck cant it class ALL books by genre? Half of the time even the staff cannot find most of the books – this salesgirl took me around for 15 minutes looking for Freakonomics before I finally spotted it on a table.

So anyway, enough ranting – Oxford will remain the worst bookstore ever but the one I frequent the most because its so damn close to my house. Picked up three books and settled on a not-so-comfortable rocking chair in the bookstore – Freakonomics, Banganga and People Watching (Desmond Morris). Banganga is this amazing book on the history of Walkeshwar/Malabar Hills area and is replete with all legends associated with the Banganga tank. I didn’t, for example, know that there’s this ‘yoni’ shaped rock called ‘Shri Gundi’ and its supposed to cleanse one of all their sins if you manage to struggle through it. Of course, noone of my stanch-Mumbaikar friends knew about it either, so I wasn’t feeling too bad about it:-D. Apparently from the map they gave, this Shri Gundi is below the Governor’s residence so access now is not possible – the book did not dwell much on its whereabouts now – so am still looking for any clues as to where exactly it is – maybe I’ll just go and chat up the priests at Walkeshwar. The Banganga book captured my attention and I went through it cover to cover and walked out feeling all groggy.

Ganesh Visarjan

I’ve been in Bombay for 2 years now and haven’t ever been to a Ganesh Visarjan – which is kind of shameful, so decided to make amends and tied up with 2 friends to go there in the evening. We took a train to Charni Road and decided to walk down Lamington road, join the processions and then back on Marine Drive. It was AWESOME! The entire atmosphere was super charged – the roads full of people and trucks and myriad kinds of idol of the God. Ganapati is one Indian god who seems to be an artist’s delight – the number of different shapes of idols we saw was mind-boggling. Elaborately decked up with a benign countenance, a happy look in his eyes and followed by millions of people to his resting place, it was quite easy to imagine all these people getting so attached to him. So the crowds were quite scary in their multitude and all dancing gaily all the way – some of the idol processions start at 11am and reach the Visarjan Sthala at like 12 in the night – which means about 13 hours of continuous dancing (Red Bull, you guys should open some promotion counters on the way!).

So we walked as a part of different processions down to the beach, where it was much more subdued. People were slowly taking down their Ganapatis and taking him deep into the water – thankfully no one drowned – the arrangements were pretty great with many boats also patrolling around.

I wish I had some pictures but the cam has been jinxed ever since sand got into it at Kihim in January and its in for repairs yet again. Guess I’ll buy a new cam now. Millions of people were thronging the Girgaum Chowpatty and it was quite ummm…reassuring to be one in the huge crush of humanity watching all those idols floating away. I guess the downside of all this being that the sea does get extremely polluted with all the chemical colours used.

Pic courtesy Amit Kulkarni's website - www.amitkulkarni.info. Thanks, buddy!

So on the whole it was a great mid-week holiday and am back to work – but then yayy, tomorrow is Friday again…damn..they should have a holiday every Wedneseday!

Marriage Registration

haha, not ours, but ours looks as lovely - after all the sweat and tears we put into getting one.

The marriage over, and having come back on solid ground to make preparations for the honeymoon and Shikha's departure, it was imperative that we get our marriage registered. Any visas after you’re married, will be issued only on production of a marriage certificate – ie, if you state that you’re married – which you will, of course. So this is a word of advice to any married person – DO get your marriage registered (if you have’nt already) with the court lest your visa etc be held up at the last moment! The process wont appear as stressful as it really was, since I've ommitted some of the things we had to do to get the marriage registered:)

It was a very filmy registration of our marriage in Bombay – we were running all around the country and came to Bombay for a teeny interval. Three people were supposed to witness the registration and they’re supposed to have all their identity proof documents with them.

So we quickly called 3 people close to us, and, more importantly, close to the office of the Registrar of marriages..:-D I cannot describe the hurry we were in – we reached Bombay on a Friday afternoon, called up friends and asked them to reach the courts. I was standing outside, waiting to shepherd each friend inside the court. (For all the ppl who want to register their marriage, the registrar of marriages is next to the Asiatic Library).

With friends coming in one after one and me ushering them in and rushing out to get photocopies or getting into frantic confabulations with the clerks to speed things up, it almost felt as if we were eloping. The offices close for the weekend at 445pm and everyone was thankfully in by 430pm. After much cajoling and requesting we got into the office before closing, got all the documents verified and got the stamp of approval! The registrar of marriages does pretty much of a tough and good job when it comes to verification of identities from the documents provided.

The certificate of marriage comes through pretty quickly if you know the right people or takes the usual time of about 8 -10 days if you don’t know anyone there.

Of course, the embassies turn up their noses at a plain-Jane marriage certificate too – so they want the Home ministry to legalise it. Thankfully South Bombay has everything within 10 minutes of each other. So you rush to the High court, get a notary to notarise the document (the notaries sit outside the court – our notary conducted his business from a Maruti 800 car and charged about 150 bucks for notarizing the document – the significance of notarizing is lost on me – it just looks like gainful employment creation). Then you THINK that the home ministry is housed in the Mantralaya and stand for an hour in the queue to get in. You spend another hour inside the labyrinthine Mantralaya, searching for the Home Ministry and the department that legalizes certificates. And you discover that the concerned department is not in Mantralaya, but the building across the road!! And the department has a fixed closing time! Yikes! So you run across to the building across the road, go up the 9th floor, stand in line for what seems like an hour and get a lady to sign on the red notarized mark on the marriage certificate. And voila! You are officially declared married!!

We walked out with our heads held high and carefully holding on to the precious marriage certificate. The entire process was extremely rushed for us since we had to apply for Swiss visas and fly out within the next 3 days. On the whole, we found the bureaucratic processes slow but the individual actors within the bureaucracy quite reasonable, quick to respond and decently helpful. The Mantralaya is a great building from the inside and am looking for some other excuse to go inside and explore. The Swiss embassy employs all Indians for the front end who’re quite pig-headed and think they’re smarter than the rest of us ordinary folks on the other side of the mirror. Unfortunately or fortunately, that isn’t the case. And of course, the guard outside the embassy asks for Baksheesh in true Indian chowkidaar style, after you’ve gotten your visa.

Good fun on the whole, when I look back at it, but there were many moments when we were on the verge of canceling our Swiss tickets because we never thought we’d be able to do it all in 3 days! And yeah - theres more to come - I still shudder when I retrace all the things we did to prepare for the departure!!