Those Evil Ad People

Prrrrooobably not the kind of beauty Eleanor Roosevelt was talking about.

The Cleric's Worst Nightmare

The end of the world is upon us: people now get fatter during Ramadhan, and Kate Moss is the face of Harper's Bazaar Arabia's Ramadhan special (her naughty bits have been covered quite literally for Heaven's sake).

Star Parents

Watch the short film at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSMtNX-hXJ4

Capital Crimes

If my stint in Delhi were to be made into a movie...

Shot Ready Hai, Madamji

I only learned the basics of Photoshop a month ago, but look what I can do:


Left: untouched photo. Right: hey, that's how I (wished I) looked like 10 years ago!

 And that's not all...

I would say that I seem to be a natural at this, but somehow that sounds like an oxymoron.

Stephen King's Babysitter

"Eula-Beulah was prone to farts - the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. "Pow!" she'd cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marshgas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors."

- Stephen King, 'On Writing'

You can't make this stuff up

My diary entry from May 26, 1999, in Lucknow...

"This afternoon, a whole bunch of huge scary monkeys grouped into the bathroom for water and there were only us females at home. So we tried to yell and send them away. I found 3 inside and those were thrown out too. I was so scared. I had last gone to wash my face 15 minutes before. It was a dumb experience. Then all of them went to Fakhri mamoo's house and ate everything (the untouched lunch) in the kitchen. The ladies locked themselves up and sent for Baba to send the monkeys away (no males present at this time)."

Stay hungry, stay foolish

"In return, I want to offer you a few pieces of advice: try to keep it real. Stay true to what’s best in yourself and to the best of what you’ve experienced here at Vassar. Continue to expose yourself to new ideas. Trust your instincts and think for yourself. Make art, or at least value it. Look for the core of what makes each person human, appreciate the details that make them unique.

Find something that moves you or pisses you off, and do something about it. Put your self out there. Be brave. Be bold. Take action. You have a voice. Speak up, especially when something tries to keep you silent. Take a stand for what’s right. Raise a ruckus and make a change. You may not always be popular, but you’ll be part of something larger and bigger and greater that yourself. Besides, making history is extremely cool.

Hold our elected officials accountable. They work for you. Ask them anything you want. If you don’t, you’re giving up on democracy. Inez Milholland – Vassar class of 1909 – didn’t let people silence her and she didn’t let anyone stop her. She became one of the pivotal leaders of the suffragette movement. If you forget everything else I’ve said here today or if you choose to ignore it, remember Inez and remember to vote. It’s a radical act that’s still legal, and we need to keep it that way.

Speaking from my own experience, I also want to offer a warning: you will, undoubtedly, meet people who will try to shut you up or entice you to compromise your principles in any number of ways. They’ll try to seduce you and distract you with money, power, security and perhaps, most dangerously, a sense of belonging. Don’t let them; it’s just not worth it. One of the biggest threats to our world is the culture of silence and compromise—politicians who compromise their beliefs because they’re scared they’ll piss off their voters and won’t get re-elected, corporate executives who put profits above principles. You can have a conscience and still make money. You can have genuine values and still get elected. You can even make movies that do well at the box office without playing to the lowest common denominator.

And try not to let love silence you. And don’t let it kill you—always wear a condom, for god’s sake. Partner with someone who loves you and loves your voice, who loves the very core of who you are and believes in your dreams, not someone who is hell-bent on changing you."

- excerpt from Samuel L. Jackson's 2004 Vassar College commencement address

Bharat Mata ki Ek Beti

If I have ever been judgmental of gold-diggers or mail-order brides (and I have), then I'm sorry. It will never happen again. I now know how they feel, even in some small tiny laughable way.

I've now been living in India by myself for over a year, and it is solely to that fact that I can attribute my metamorphosis from a fiercely independent and principled pseudo-American career woman to a shrunken Indian version of said pseudo-American who's just waiting to be rescued by the capitalist man of her dreams. Rich socialist bhhi chalega. Do we have any takers?

Don't judge me, my own medicine tastes terrible. Everytime I almost fly off of the cycle rickshaw as the rickshawala decides to speed over a pothole, I miss the shock absorbers of the cars I've ridden in in America (and Canada. You too, Oman). I curse the elements everytime I have to devastate a good hair day by savagely pulling my do back in a behenji ponytail just because it's too damn hot/sticky/windy. Over the past year, I've only ever shopped off of the street because clothes, like people, just seem to fall apart faster in this part of the world. It would hurt too much to have that happen to anything I paid more than 100 rupees for (what is that, like 2 dollars?). I never seem to want to dress nice or comb my hair here anyway. I don't even wear makeup anymore. What's the point? Two minutes on the outside, and either the wind from the autorickshaw ride will ravage the curls that usually set beautifully on their own in a controlled environment, or the monsoon mud will artistically splatter itself all along my calves and precious toes. I now scowl or even fling a dirty look at every car that screams its neverending banshee of a horn into my poor ear. I wonder if the smog and traffic exhaust has formed a permanent layer of hopelessness on my once 20-something-year-old skin. I think of all these things and then fondly remember my vanilla-and-cinnamon-scented sparsely populated existence of the West. What's a pretty girl to do when the shadow of socialism falls upon her?

I'll tell you what she's to do. Visit the parlour regularly, dress the best she can in her budget wardrobe, flash a carnivorous smile or bat a virginal eyelash (both if she's talented), and pray to the gods of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll that Prince Charming (age never a bar) will whisk her away to a capitalist country far, far away. Or at least to the nearest suburb in a nice air-conditioned apartment and car and never let her pretty soles scrape the soil of the motherland again. Inhein zameen pe mat rakhhiyega, mailay ho jaaeinge.

Casa Mia

This is the last thing I see before I go to sleep, and the first thing I see when I wake up.


This is the ceiling of the room I rent as a paying guest in Delhi's Greater Kailash I. It's been a year since I first set eyes on this ceiling. It was upsetting, I remember. I had been struggling to remain optimistic about my newest adventure in India, but the sight of the matte orange and disco yellow ceiling was the straw that broke the dam that was soldiering my tear glands. The colour combination made me cry. It was atrocious, aesthetically outrageous, the most depressing thing I'd ever seen.

Moving to India, that too New Delhi, was highly disorienting, but I had heard that the GK1 area was posh. It wasn't. It had potholes like the rest of Delhi, untrimmed trees, and dogs, dogs everywhere, wandering about the colony, peeing and pooping all over the place, snarling and barking at you until you felt your insides vibrate. This was not posh. The dogs chained at the entrance of my PG urinated and defecated all over the entrance to the building, and we would all have to begin our day (and end it) by playing hopscotch around excrement. It was not fun. That made me want to cry, but I used to be fairly decent at hopscotch when I was a kid, so I was able to manage. But I could never forget that under all my shoes would now remain layers of animal excrement that I would be tracking along everywhere I went.

Over the past year, I have shared my room not just with my roommate, but with lizards, spiders, rats large enough to be teenage rabbits, and airborne cockroaches. There used to be a couple of roosters who'd crow all day and night long outside our window, but those were taken care of some time ago, hopefully with delicious sauces. Last week I screamed a purely instinctive scream when I encountered a rat scuttling up the bannister of the staircase I was descending. I am not a screamer, so I wondered about that experience. A few days earlier, a friend had screamed as another rat (or maybe the same one?) had fallen off of the clothes that were hanging on the clothesrack behind her door, just like that, like it was the most normal thing to do, like rats plop off of clothesracks all over the world all the time.

Sigh.

The Coolest Clique Ever

Random invites to strange chat rooms - I always wanted to be a part of DrunkGirlRoom! And by always, I mean never.

NDTV Journal: weeks 7-11

Dr. Prannoy Roy wasn’t always the man with the famous beard. Once upon a time he was 18 years old and working at a London grocery store. He admitted to my NDTV batch that he wasn’t very good at his job. He said that he knew, for example, where the can of mushrooms were, but whenever a customer would ask him for it, all the cans up on the shelves would start to look the same to him. His boss helped him out the first few times, but then fired him with the grand declaration that the young Roy would never amount to anything ever in his life. Dr. Roy acknowledged that, as an 18-year-old, he was crushed. I’m not sure but at that moment, I think I saw that 18-year-old resurface on the face of the 61-year-old man sitting across the desk in front of me, but that was for just a second.

Dr. Prannoy Roy is now my boss; he is the founder and Executive Chairperson of NDTV. Wikipedia calls him a ‘media baron’, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the whole of India probably knows who he is. That really means something in a country of over 1 billion people, a nation where approximately 1/6th of the world’s population resides. Dr. Roy’s got a whole lot of other complicated entries on his resume – Economics graduate from the University of London's Queen Mary College, PhD in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, Chartered Accountant, Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. He has also taught at the Delhi School of Economics and has served as Economic Advisor to the Government of India. He’s been involved in the media world since the early 80s and has made a name for himself as a journalist, election analyst, and anchorperson. He told me that he too had worked with Deloitte for a while but had got bored.

Back in school, an English teacher had once told me that I had terrible style and that I thought too much of myself on two separate occasions respectively. The latter comment was made in reference to a poem I had come up with in a moment of complete angst. It was called ‘I’ll Reach the Top’. I was 14 years old then.

One day I’ll be,
Up there, you’ll see,
I’ll be the best one day.
I’ll be so big,
That all you pigs,
Will have nothing left to say.
I will, just wait,
Be so, so great,
I’ll outshine all of you.
I’ll be the CREAM,
Just let me dream,
I’ll make my dreams come true.

As a college student in the United States, I dreaded one photo editor at the university newspaper where I worked as a writer and photographer. The guy was White American, younger than me, a journalism student, and not only was he the most hated person in the newsroom, but on one incident he insisted that an English word I said existed did not exist. I hated how he assumed that he had the final word on that for some vague predestined reason.

As a foreign IT professional in the United States, I was struggling to carve time for what I really wanted to do – have a book published. I was desperate. I had once promised myself that I would be published by 24, and here I was pushing 26. So I forsook my feeble social life for daily writing time and socializing with a local writing club which was mostly white and over 50. For the first year, most people there didn’t even know my name, but they eventually learned how to pronounce it and ended up teaching me many things about the writing business. A number of them were published many times over.

One year I attended a writer’s conference in Oklahoma City. I remember how when I told a Deloitte coworker about the conference, he raised his fingers in the shape of quotation marks and said, “you mean, “writer’s” conference”. He then laughed in my face.

At the conference, I was terrified. Here were more old white people from the Bible Belt of America. The angry black woman I was set up to room with at the hotel spent the weekend telling me how no one wanted to buy her tome of a novel because it was about a black woman. I had finished my first book by then and was looking for a publisher. I’d pitched it to an editor who was interested at first but politely declined a couple of months later over email. Another editor wasn’t so nice – he said my work was so boring that it put him to sleep in the first few pages, but that he’d try and fish out the rest of manuscript if he could ever muster the bother. Over the next few months I sent letters to about a hundred publishers across America, and only got back 25 rejections. The others never replied. There were a handful of publishers who were interested, but they too turned me down in time. That manuscript has since been put on the backburner.

While I retreated to lick my wounds, a random publisher from Delaware that I’d never heard of got wind of me somehow and asked me to write some books for them. I am now working on my 4th book, and I’m still not sure how the folks at Mitchell Lane Publishers got to know of me in the first place. I need to investigate that one of these days. Or maybe I’ll just let the mystery be for when someone makes a movie about me.

Dr. Roy did go back to find that grocery shop in London. He saw that it had shut down a long time ago.

I didn’t get a book published by 24, but by the time I turned 28, I had had two books published. The first one happened to be released one day after my birthday.

Chicken Little

I don't want to punch the rooster next door in the face anymore. I'm told that the little guy has problems - whenever he wakes up, he scuttles out of his coop (or wherever he lives, I've yet to meet him nose to beak) and crows his heart out with his eyes tightly shut. He never knows what time it is or even if the sun is out or not, he just keeps crowing out of some sense of pride, obligation, or maybe even confusion. Poor little man.

A Tale of Two Indias

The headlines on NDTV's website today...

Aishwarya Bledel?

Aishwarya Rai and Alexis Bledel - the real Gilmore girls? They often looked related to me...!

Ryan Kapoor?

Double takes with Ranbir Kapoor and Ryan Gosling.

Not Sonia Gandhi

For the last time, this is Reese Witherspoon. Even NDTV aired this picture thinking it was Sonia Gandhi...

Top of the Poll

These are the top trending topics on Twitter. David Cameron just got announced as the new Prime Minister of the UK, and poor Gordon Brown is already at the bottom of the list.


What's really sad is that even Justin Bieber is doing better than Gordon Brown.

Real improv

It was 1985 and I was in kindergarten. I was the youngest in my family, much younger than my two elder brothers, so I was usually left to my own devices to entertain myself. One such evening I was dancing about the house to the tune inside my head when I waltzed into my brothers' bedroom where my father and second brother, then 13, were sitting on the large bed, talking to each other. They seemed to be having a real grown-up talk and were laughing.

No one ever included me in real conversations or took me seriously, and I was used to hovering around outside other people's interactions, watching and invisible. So I strolled up to my father and my brother and watched them not notice me as I stood in front of them. They seemed to be taking turns to talk and then laugh together.

Without warning, they noticed me. My father said, "Khadija, now you tell us a joke!"

Woah.

I was stunned. I did not know how to handle this new feeling of being included in a conversation. I was mostly just talked about or at. Nobody ever really listened to what I had to say. I didn't even know what a joke was. I could talk in Urdu and in English, but what was a joke?

My father and brother, their faces relaxed from laughter and their eyes expectant of a joke (whatever that was) from me, looked at me, waiting. I had been caught unawares. But I was not going to let this chance go. And so I opened my mouth and said whatever came into my head:

"Once upon a time, you know, there was a clown. One day he went to this big building and he climbed up and up all the way to the top. Then he jumped off of the building and fell down and broke into hundreds of pieces."

Wishlist

I couldn't wait to grow up when I was a kid. I had three major issues with being so young:

1. I didn't like my face and was dying to see what I would look like as an adult. All the Hindi movies showed the knobbly-kneed female child growing up into the most glamorous woman ever, complete with a ruby pout and butterfly eyelashes. I often wondered, and with impatience as I spent hours primping and posing in front of the mirror, about which beautiful face I would have - Sridevi's, Kimi Katkar's, or Parveen Babi's?
2. Nothing mainstream was ever in my size. The walkman's headphones kept falling off of my head, the bathroom mirror was too high, and I always had to climb on a chair to check out if we had any ice cream in the freezer. I absolutely hated having to ask and wait on others to help me with things out of my reach. I envied the adults who lived in a world that was built for them. Heck, even my dolls had houses and furniture their size.
3. The grown-ups looked like they knew everything about everything. I hardly knew the names of more than 2 movie stars (Amitabh Bachchan and Sridevi) and Michael Jackson. The grown-ups knew what to do, where to go, how to talk and to whom - they never made any mistakes! Being the youngest of the family, no one ever took me seriously, and my frequent crashes after bouts of excitement had me erroneously labelled as the poor weak child who would never have any physical stamina. I existed on the edge of society. I was physically smaller than everyone else, and I always felt like I didn't know enough things - I still remember the day when a friend mentioned how she'd discovered the magical fact that you knew the movie was about to start right after the director's name showed up on the beginning credits. Even my much older siblings knew what they wanted to say. I couldn't wait for the day when I'd grow up and suddenly know how to do everything right.

That was 1985. In the time since then, Sridevi has had multiple nosejobs, I stopped growing after 5'2", and Michael Jackson...well, he died last year. The beautiful people took off their makeup and grew old, and I discovered the farce of adulthood.