Sid-O-Scope

Every year has its own share of trouble with it. Some years face dictators, others face earthquakes or tsunami. But once in a while a year comes that has to face revolts, hurricanes, political turmoil, liberation, protest and imminent threat of apocalypse. And only few years in entire history were able to pull through all this Gangnam Style. If 2012 blames 2011 for its share of troubles, it won't be entirely wrong. 2011 gave everyone a year taste of true utopia  People across the globe came out for their rights. In fact even before 2012 assumed seat in office, it had a mild heart attack.

They say the purpose of a writer in this world is to keep civilization from destroying each other. That may be true but for a writer surviving in this little world is as difficult as swimming peacefully in a popular holiday swimming pool. "So you are writing a book?" she asked, nice way to start a conversation. "Oh yes, my first ambitious novel," I beamed, "After writing so many short stories, I decided to go for the big novel." "Nice. You know I also plan to write a book, but when I retire and have more time." Crash and burn. Straight face smiley. :|

The following entry is written for indifiction workshop Shameless, toothless and spineless. That sums most of the people I work with, yep it does. I could as well skinny dip in a pool of piranhas, that would be easier than what I do now. I am a politician, I can see you cringe on hearing that. Think about it, even a janitor is respected when he tells what job he does, but not me. Tell people you are a politician and they will tell you how you personally ruined their life and their entire families. How do you expect a person to do a clean job when he is surrounded 24x7 by a bunch of tics who are keen on sucking your blood and your soul. Walking down into the constituency and begging for votes, even that does not make one feel any better. Even a beggar is proud of his job, not me.

For last ten minutes they were stuck at this signal. Few minutes ago there was a loud uproar about bandh and there was a lot of confusion. One taxi was broken in the middle of the street, causing frustration to increase. The humid heat of Mumbai was also not helping. At the signal Ramesh was waiting patiently for the taxi to start. He had picked a passenger at the previous signal and was happy how the day started. His daughter’s birthday was next week. If only he could take two more long distance fare, he would buy her the cartoon shaped cake he had seen before. But his taxi had broken down all of the sudden in the middle of the signal. Rakesh had just gotten into the cab, worried sick. This was the 7th job interview in last 2 weeks. He was rejected in the first six interviews. Today job interview was taken by a north indian. What chance did a poor Marathi boy who studied in Marathi medium have against those from fluent speaking convent educated outsiders? They should never have s...

There are two types of festival, one is social media festival where you receive a flood of social media messages and SMS with a awkward silence. 17 email forward with 70 people in reply to all, 5 SMS (because they are charged extra), 144 friends posted on Facebook about the festival. No tweets thankfully or maybe tweets get buried under other tweets (no complaints there). Social media festivals are secular and geographically diverse. People sitting in Bangalore will freely wish their friends in India a "happy Halloween" without fail. There will be a flood of 'Happy Id' and 'Happy Duserra' posts from all the people irrespective of religious background.

This Saturday when I woke up to a very lazy morning, two things came to my mind. First, no new tweets were requiring my attention and second the phone was beeping softly trying to get my attention that battery level was critical 26%. The second thing was easily fixable, not the first time when I left my phone unattented. If there is a late night Twitter revolution (lying on the bed in heating conversation on twitter) it is a tiresome task to put the phone on charging.

Life is like a lift sometimes you get inside to go up, sometimes you use it to come down. And sometimes when you are waiting in the lobby for the lift to arrive to take you upwards to your desired floor, some bum comes from behind presses the button to go down and proudly announces to his wife, "You see the lift if up so if you want to bring it down, press down..." the wife looks at her all-knowing husband proudly as if he is the sole survivor of the battle that eradicated the entire hemisphere.