Of spinning and living

When I went to office on my first day of work, I thanked my stars for the salsa red of my workstation, the wide-screened magnanimity of my computer monitor, the endless opportunities, the golden smiles and my lovely blue chair that would spin at will. When I wrote my first ever article, it was with avaricious ambition that I played away on my keyboard, like a novice taking her first piano lesson, faltering and blithering, but finding a giggly joy even in raw dissonance. When I drove my own sweet car for the first time, I had the cheek to actually chuckle and swear back in Tamil at all the people who asked me ‘ootla-sollitiya’? Oh and when I first fell in love, it was with the wide-eyed naiveté of a new-born lamb that I entered a land of roses, where Elton John and Paul Anka songs played on loop. I baahed and booed and cantered about happily, my tinkly laugh announcing to the world that I was a lamb in love. Baaah!

Today, the red of my workspace could be a royal blue for all I care, the smiles could be a stale silver. The articles that I write lack inspiration and the sound of my typing reminds me of an old lady from the 80s attending to her government job, striking the keys of her type-writer slower than the rotating speed of the squeaky ceiling fan. The last time I drove my car, I merely bared my fangs at the kena-dog cyclist who dared cross my path. And when I fell out of love, it was with all the tinkling joie de vivre of a zombie that I trudged out.

Of my friends, I have always been the most immature, most prone to spawning ‘heated’ cold wars with best friends, most likely to take a leap without making sure there was a safety net waiting below, much given to laughing like a pig-hyena hybrid at inappropriate times, like when being scolded by a professor for sleeping in class. During my college excursion to Wayanad, along with four classmates, I teetered up a slippery rock path, to the part of the waterfall where many people quite simply slip and die. I refused to be one of the thirty other girls who were busy taking pictures of themselves, prettily dipping their toes in the cool waters. But then, life changes you, doesn’t it? You join work, assume an air of pseudo importance and stick your nose up in the air, convinced that you’re the best thing that happened since the creation of cheese. You kill the toddler in you and go all grown-up on yourself and the world. You enter a relationship as a baby, and while in it, morph into a scary aunty, haggling constantly in a migraine-inducing voice. After this comes a point where you stop caring, build a wall around yourself and get super-fat on a dose of ‘Don’t give a damn’. It is approximately at this juncture that life begins to sing to you in Steven Tyler’s voice ‘Yeah your so jaded, and I'm the one that jaded you’. And sadly, all you can think of as a counter is, ‘it’s ‘you’re’ not ‘your’’.

Thankfully, life, apart from performing tacky covers on Aerosmith, also gives you wake up calls, reminding you to kindly get your limbs to move it, move it; your bottoms to, shake it, shake it. Because, really, what’s life if you can’t dance like crazy cartoons or do a funky Hakuna Matata a la Timon and Pumbaa. What’s the point of getting used to things? What’s the point of not caring? What’s the point of being a zombie, just because you won’t get hurt? What’s the point of being impassive when you can rave and rant? What’s the point of saying ‘whatever’, when you can yell ‘what the hell are you thinking you dung-brained raccoon-face?!’ What’s the point of mumbling about your job when you’re the one sitting there- no one’s dying for you to stay, you know. What is the point of giving up on life when you can give it one tight slap and demand that it ‘say sorry’?

Life is all about getting hurt, pulling your hair out, bugging all your friends and making them laugh the next minute, typing nonsense and then saying ‘now that is called nonsense verse my children’, pulling your window down and shouting ‘daiiii **** **** ***’ at the next biker who acts smart with you. It is about growing angry with your partner but never bored, about doing crazy things because they make you happy, about crying for days on end when love is lost but then looking to the future with hope and a renewed partner-preference list.

Life is about being the lovely willow which bends to the wild tempest and escapes better than the strict oak which resists it. Life is about spinning in that pretty blue chair for five minutes every single day!

Love, victually

It is with much shame that I admit, my comrades, the dishonourable truth. The appalling reality.

I share a more meaningful relationship with food than I do with you.

So why is it that a deep dish of pesto pasta or a banana leaf of choice Iyengar delicacies or a smidgen of perfectly-textured mousse, or a bowl of creamy Thai curry, or a stack of bebinca…sigh….so, where I am getting is, why do all of these aforementioned items seem more enticing to me than a long, meaningful, cosy conversation with my friends and loved ones? I thought about it hard the other day, when this heart-breaking home truth exploded in my head in the first place, like a heady overdose of wasabi. It was one of those Anusha-in-murderous-mood kind of days, when everything was getting on my nerves. Friends offered their impatient sympathies through instant chat and I made plans to meet several of them later in the day. In the evening, however, as I was getting ready to head out, I changed my mind. I texted my friends asking them to please forgive me for ditching at the last minute, but something had come up. What had come up was my dear appetite. So what I did was, head out to the nearest restaurant and order a plate of mashed potatoes. I then devoured a main course of gnocchi. It was lovely. Not doughy like many stupid restaurants tend to make it these days. Next stop- the friendly neighbourhood coffee shop, where dark passion awaited me in the form of a tall-glassed mélange of chocolate ice cream, chocolate brownie, chocolate sauce and chocolate rolls. Half an hour later, Anusha went home and slept like a baby-on-Cerelac. The next day, everything was well with the world again. Since then, I’ve been taking mental notes…Food versus Home Sapiens. Here are some thoughts:

Food makes me cry, brings out the emotions in me:
Those who know me as a mere acquaintance, think I am granite- cold, heartless, emotionless. Those who know me better, however, will tell you I am The Tempest in human form. I rave, I rant, I growl, I grunt, I bite (telepathically), I jump… but I don’t cry, not that easily anyway. But I kid you not, the last time I was fortunate enough to come upon the perfect Thai curry, tears escaped involuntarily and unchecked, until I realized the curry wasn’t even that hot. I was crying tears of unhindered joy.
“Every woman is wrong until she cries, and then she is right - instantly.” ~ Thomas Chandler Haliburton)
Food makes me ‘right’.


Food doesn’t have crazy expectations and is not possessive:
It won’t mind if you don’t account for where you were last evening at 6.17 pm. It won’t give two hoots if you have a life-sized zit on your life-sized nose. It doesn’t even expect you to brush your teeth before you kiss it. And sure as hell, a jam tart isn’t going to demand an explanation when you decide to switch to burfi, one fine day. All food does, is dole out spaghetti-like spools of never-ending, comforting love.
“Expectations in your life just lead to giant disappointments.” Michael Landon
Pass me the giant bowl of popcorn, please. Mr Disappointment, be on your way now.

Food and I share a love-love relationship:
I love food and food loves me. It is that simple. Food shows its love for me by being yielding, fulfilling and filling, and I show my deep affection for it by polishing of every last morsel. Who cares about kama sutra, when you can have khana sutra?
“A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.” Stendhal

I hope my next meal is just as good as the last one.

Food has a universal language:

Yummy, mmm, ahh, ooooh la la... you don't need to know Spanish to tell a boat of tacos that you love it.

"Smiles are the language of love." David Hare
Oh that olan, oh that pulisheri.... :-)
Finally...

When all is down and the world is plotting against you...:

... Turn to a plate of thayir sadam and maanga oorga for comfort, instant relief and a quantum of solace. It is unlikely to tell you 'Sorry darling, am stuck in a meeting. We'll talk after three and a half hours.'

- FYI, here's a note to The Eagles: Love doesn’t keep you alive. I tried it once and after merely six hours, I suffered from symptoms of dehydration and started having severe hallucinations that involved being locked in a bottomless pit of despair. Try the food life sometime, guys.