I Grow Old, OR, Why I Hate Quizzing.

It creates normal, unassuming human beings into egomaniacs on stage who have to get the better of the question marks. It promotes superciliousness, smugness and all other forms of general asshole-ness. It does not come with a warning sign that says “Addictive”. It got me Student Council posts in school that I didn’t want. It also gets me worked up.

Today the MP Birla Smarak Kosh Quiz took place. I have attended it for the past five years and it keeps getting better. The quizmaster, CP, always asks kindred questions (kindred questions being, of course, the ones we can answer) and Annesha and I were in the fourth row, two boisterous girls squirming in our seats at the terrible guesses being made onstage. We notched up our own points and won it in the audience, laughed more than we used to laugh onstage, and cursed the fact that we never got to participate in SK. And somewhere between it all I felt strange, because I’d never be at a quiz in my school uniform again.

Long ago before we became the cool kids who went festing, and long before people found out that all we did at the fests was quiz (and then we weren’t cool anymore), I was your average vegetable. Then someone sent me for a quiz with two people I absolutely detested. We bickered through the first quiz, guessed through the next, and then started winning. And then my teammates became my best friends. Then we realized we weren’t really quizzers. We knew nothing. We were there for the food packets.

We guessed, wildly. We laughed at our own guesses even more wildly. We thumped each others’ backs and created minor stage accidents with mineral water bottles and microphones when we found out the guesses were correct. And then our school, which had just woken up to the fact that a quiz club existed, decided that most of the good quizzes simply weren’t worth going to. So the metamorphosis happened – we became quiz spectators. We went to quizzes to watch them, and we yelled out answers from the audience, and grinned inanely when chocolates were thrown at us. As if they were roses. Encore. We applauded ourselves. Above all, we enjoyed ourselves more than when we were onstage.

But today I felt like Prufrock. There they were, kids in class ten and eleven, taller than me by almost two feet, and they got to be onstage. And here I was, five three or thereabouts, getting all excited because I knew that Oprah could recite Bible verses as a kid. Quizzing is the one thing I had to prove that my irrelevance mattered. I might not have been a good student, but my vagueness paid off. I could connect answers. I could identify paintings. It was the only place I got to be a know-it-all, and now I’ve passed out and can’t be superior when I’m afraid of getting ragged in college. School quizzes are fun and sporting. Open quizzing is ruthless, cold, and the only thing I have left, apart from college quizzing, which scares me now because, well, will the teammates laugh on stage if we make a stupid mistake? Will I get on a team at all?

And then we shuffled out amidst some patriotic programme outside Madhusudan Mancha where grotesquely costumed people were waving flags manically to "I love my India". Didn't improve my mood. To make it worse, I had to pass by my old para to collect some wayward mail, and the buildings were all newly painted in colours I couldn’t recognize. And then the old phuchkawala (he’s told me everything but his name) informed me that his son’s off to Amreeka. To be a phuchkawala there. And that made me feel terrible in the everyone’s-growing-up kind of way, and I walked into my house muttering darkly “Do you know what Dustin Hoffman’s mother called him when he was a kid?”

“No”, my mother said.

“Tootsie” I growled, and then started laughing hysterically. For a whole five minutes. Quizzing has been my bane and my crusade, and I never could figure out why I ran around school trying to get the team invited to quizzes when the organisers had no idea our school even existed. No one in school cared. We didn’t even win all that many. And I hate it. I hate it because it’s the closest I can get to being passionate about a sport. As a spectator and an ex-player.

Oh, and to top it all it seems I can no longer sit on the swings in the play area because there’s a sign there that says “Kebol Shishuder Jonno”

Excuse me while I go hit my head against the wall.

A Farewell Post Gone Awry

I leave for Kerala in two hours. The reason I’m typing this out now is because the past one week I have been subjected to, in no particular order, a lot of shopping (which I detest), a lot of eating (which isn’t too bad), a lot of dancing (which I didn’t know I was capable of), a lot of socialising and goodbyes to people who are leaving (I malfunction in such situations), and the crowning glory – an underaged hulk of a boy throwing up all over my bathroom.

I cannot explain any of the above, I’m simply not in the mood. I’ve had to pack like a maniac, scamper all over the city and clean a smelly toilet, and now, finally, I get to run away for three weeks. On a train. It’s unhealthy the amount I like trains – not the cold, sleek Japanese variety, but the smokey grey kind, heavy with dust and passengers. I love the feeling of sitting on a swaying berth by a window, reading a book that will eventually drop into my lap, overshadowed by something outside – a field, a river, a long line of half-built houses. I love the fact that Kolkata to Chennai Central is a two-day journey in the belly of a giant centipede that crawls its way along, without realizing that inside it things are being shared. Food. Business cards. Stories. Memories.

When I was a kid, all I ever wanted was one of those large toy train tracks that you could assemble in your living room and watch a model train go round and round. Instead, I got jigsaw puzzles and Barbies and other fluffy things, with the result that I still visit sites dedicated to model trains. I drool over expensive Lionel train sets. I know they cost well over $1700 but I still dream of sitting in the middle of a big room, a huge remote control with shiny knobs in my hand, laughing insanely as a beautiful little train runs up and down sinous little tracks. I do not usually blow up the train at the end of the dream, so maybe I’m not that big a megalomaniac, or whatever the term is. I just want a train. And I love little Bertie Pollock in Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series – he’s such a brilliantly written character. And he loves trains too.

I set out to write a post about Kerala, but somewhere along the trains came in and now they won’t leave. Did I mention railway tracks? They are the most beautiful things on the planet. Imagine yourself walking along one, slowly and aimlessly, right into the horizon where they converge. There is a mad precision to their symmetry. There is a purpose to their angles and lines. There is imperfection and ugliness in trains – they lurch, the bellow, they creak, they throw out nuts and bolts and other bric-a-brac, but they still manage to stay together. They’re a mad scientist’s dream. I can’t wait to get on one of them.

I know I’ve gushed all over this post, and am very unapologetic about it. My posts never turn out the way they should. Comfort yourself with the fact that I shall soon be in Kerala, being laughed at for my hideously colloquial Malayalam, the same Malayalam which in Calcutta makes my friends’ mouths fall open in a beautifully synchronized motion every time my mother calls. Here in Calcutta I’m a Southie. There in Kerala I’m a Southie betrayer because I speak better Bengali than Malayalam. So I don’t really belong anywhere in particular, except on trains. There you’re just another traveller, and that suits me perfectly.

And the last

I've written two posts already and I'm typing again, and my glasses are hanging askew, and I don't know what has come over me. Ignore these, ignore everything. I need dinner right about now.

I'm changing my blogger password to something I won't remember. But how is that possible, is it possible to type something in while you're consciously trying to forget it? There, I've started again. I was feeling silly at first, and then I felt angry, and now I really, really wish I had something better to do than type this. But I don't. I'm feeling a little hysterical.

I need to go take a walk.

And,

I hate it that I can't go to the king of my country and say, "Give me a fleet of ships and a horde of sailors, and I will sail to new lands and bring you back rubies and dried flowers." It is disheartening when you come from the country that was the hotbed of the spices and the rubies and the elephants and everything else. What can I bring back from the west, a burger? But we have that here too. I hate it that I can type "Spain" into Wikipedia and get a whole page about it, nothing is new and nothing is there to be discovered. No, I don't mean that, there is loads to be discovered but it has already been seen and commented on before, and you are in danger of hacking through undergrowth and coming across a little clearing populated by bearded loons who say they wanted to run away from the world too.

It isn't dangerous and you aren't pioneering anything by doing it, travel is now just a matter of taking breaks from work and doing things like family bonding, and you will never be sanctioned to go explore as much as possible - take my ships, bring me new ideas. If the sailors die, what of it, they were explorers. I hate it that there are no emperors today, just too many boundaries and too many permits, and airfares. Always the airfares.

The Mind Wanders When Dinner Is Late.

I know looking fresh-flower beautiful is a prerequisite, but one can overlook that at times, can't one. I wish I was a Rajput princess married to a Mughal Emperor who tamed elephants. And that is not Jodhaa Akbar talking, I really think it would be nice. You aren't expected to give exams or have a career or handle life with a mobile phone where everyone's a call away. You need to communicate through scrolls. You are only expected to train as a warrior and look beautiful and wear iridescent clothes. Then you can get married off, Mughal emperor or not - no worries about never finding a man who will like you. And you can be a part of a harem where you'll be left alone if you make sure you're aloof and disdainful, and then you can pet bunnies in luxurious gardens for days on end. That would suit me, right about now.

And even if you don't train in the martial arts you can carry a catapult around and let fly that knoblike tikli thing on your head right into your opponent's eye.

I don't even know why I'm writing this.

How Time Flies.

I've had three baths already and my skin still has a greenish tinge. I'm hoping the world will assume that my body cells have started producing copious amounts of chlorophyll, but you know the world. It is gleefully malicious, and that is why most people will think I'm just nauseous. Or decomposing. Serves me right for liking the colour green so much.

Holi delights me. I don't have to spend on expensive firecrackers, I don't have to spend dreary hours shopping for a jewelled horror that passes of as a notun jaama, I don't have to pray. I just have to get out of my house and look like I'm terrified of colour (yes, I smirked at that. Terrified, hah.) and every little kid in the vicinity who has a pichkaari appears magically. I then have to pretend to run, and I know water balloons will come zooming in from all directions, landing here, there and everywhere with woeful plops that are most unimpressive for what are supposed to be lethal weapons. I finally act like a damsel in distress and say something equivalent to "Look at what you've done, you little twerps." and poof, I'm a part of the chameleon clique. I will be offered sympathies and free bottles of permanent colour, and I can spend the rest of the day stalking and attacking victims.

Crime was never this easy.

Which reminds me. One of my earliest posts was also about Holi, which means that my blog is about a year old. Did you ever think it possible. And the dashboard tells me I've managed about 55 posts. Did you ever think that possible. And since I can't be bothered finding out how old my blog actually is, I have decided that it is in tribute to the family tradition we have of being unsure about our birthdays. My grandparents never could figure out the Gregorian calendar, my father was registered as having two different birthdates on two different certificates (but then he grew up in Bihar and that is another story), and my mother - well, she was told that she was born on the day that she was born, and you know how gullible children are. As for me, I can't read a thing on my birth certificate (which, again, is sure to be a conspiracy of sorts. I can't be eighteen already). And most importantly, my zodiac still confuses me. It is befitting, therefore, that my blog not know when it was born.

But this means that my blog's now the equivalent of a one-year-old baby, and every parent knows that the period after this is when you regret ever having thought of the opposite sex. I, of course, don't have that luxury either, being the sole begetter of this creature. Which means I garner no sympathy whatsoever. I am a single mother who has fallen prey to artificial insemination without realising that there will be no father to blame everything on. And, consequently, no alimony either.

Frankenstein seems a more lovable book all of a sudden. Aaah! It's alive! It's alive! Oh God, it's alive! Yes.

And since I seem to have run out of things to write about - witness the fact that I wrote this post about birthdays and monsters - I'll go back to doing something more worthwhile, like staring at the ceiling. Happy Birthday, blog, and Happy Holi to the rest.

The Mother of All Tags.

I can't help cursing Ad Libber, just a little, for tagging me with this. I'm terrible at introspection, and about as deep as a pencil-shaving, but I'll take a shot at this anyway. And I also don't know whom to tag, so if you want to rise from your seat after one trying hour, pale-faced and quivering-lipped, try this. You might want to supply yourself with a stimulant first.

Life Ten Years Ago:

Consisted of parents who went to work and grandparents who brought me up and teachers who made us colour things in class. Winters were the best part of the year, spent in cold grey Jamshedpur with the other set of grandparents, the paternal ones, in a sunny house with a kitchen garden and a jackfruit tree.

In school my friends and I spent much time trying to gain control of the merry-go-round, which was usually occupied by very mean seniors. We came up with a rulebook for merry-go-round occupation, which didn’t get us onto it anyway, so we moved to the big tree at the center of the playground. We pretended it was an ancient murder site and wove wonderful whodunnits around it. Chewed-up chicken bones appeared regularly near the tree-roots, which we of course held to be the grisly remains of some long-dead soul. Neither forensic science nor our understanding of the universe was much advanced then, with the result that murders were more exciting.

Life Five Years Ago:

My mother decided to retire and become a homemaker, which was a disaster. I could no longer get away with a lot of things because suddenly she was all-pervasive, like God. Maybe that is when I started going off religion. I also had to deal with two very good friends moving away, which of course contributed more to my misery. If emo bands had existed then I would have used up half the city’s supply of kohl and black nail enamel.

Life Tomorrow:

Is life tomorrow. I may laze around all day, or discover a parallel universe, or clean my room finally, or set something on fire. The possibilities are what make it fun.

Five Locations I Would Love To Run Away To:

Oh no. Oh no. You do not ask me questions like this. All I've ever wanted to do is travel. But my top five more or less remains the same:

1) Iceland, with the geysers and the moon-landscape.

2) The Amazon, with the macaws and the spider monkeys.

3) Ladakh, because it’s Ladakh. Also Kailash-Mansarovar. Also the North-East. Anywhere in the Himalayas, basically.

4) The Silk Route: Samarkand. Istanbul. Merv. Zaytun. The Levant. What names.

5) Prince Edward Island. One can’t read Montgomery without hungering to see it.

Five Bad Habits I Have:

1) I procrastinate. More about this later.

2) I am very contradictory. I cannot possibly explain this, but I am.

3) I tend to stare at people a lot. I also laugh at inappropriate situations. Which is a roundabout way of saying I do not have very good manners.

4) I am also very distractible. I tend to get interested in too many different things at the same time, and always forget to do essential things like pack a bag or carry a wallet. I have also been known to get onto the wrong buses and end up in strange parts of the city, all because I was dreaming about something irrelevant.

5) I talk to myself. In public. All the time.

Five Things I Will Never Wear:

1) Nighties/Maxies/those things that look like maternity gowns.

2) Anything pink. Baby pink especially. Also fakely floral things.

3) Plastic hair clips.

4) Any garment that requires me to show off a bright bra strap. I find it a terrible turn-off and it’s very pointless anyway, you might as well not wear the top. Fashionable things are very ridiculous sometimes.

5) Roman tie-up sandals.

Five Biggest Joys At This Moment:

Nothing specific, I’m just in a phase where I’m feeling at peace with the universe because I don’t have another exam till the 25^th, and there are some good movies and good books lying around, and dinner due in some time.

Something to Achieve By Next Year:

Must decide on whether tea or coffee is to be my major addiction. Since I do not live in Benaras I have ruled out paan.

Something that Impacted Me Last Year:

Getting my camera, my lovely sexy camera that makes the world look fabulous and glossy, after two years of cursing my earlier camera for conking out prematurely.

What I Will Miss About 2007

The last year of craziness with a bunch of idiots who have given me more than anyone else could. These guys got me through school and a lot of other things, and I will miss them without end and reason.

Five Things I Want To Do Before I Die

If I had my way, a company would employ me to travel and take photographs and write about the places I saw. It would pay me so much that I would retire at forty and write a book. It wouldn’t be a bestseller but would give me enough to build a tiny house in the mountains with an old-fashioned library. I’d then live there in peace with a great shaggy dog and listen to all the good music in the world. Also, somewhere along the way I’d fall in love. With a male human being, I mean. And then I’d die. I am very unambitious that way.