Prose before hos

Things I managed to achieve in the last seven days. Also known as my first week of productivity in 2018.

1) Blocked three people on Whatsapp and Facebook combined.
2) Ate a whole pack of chips. 123 gms of processed carbs.
3) Spent 3.9 k on books, which I have no space to store or hoard.
4) Met people every day after work.
5) Ate three different kinds of goat meat in one night.
6) Wrote nothing. Edited enough content to make me shoot myself in the head.
7) Worked out on 4 days out of 7. Out of breath on 2 days out of 4.
8) Drank 3 litres water on 4 days out of 7.
9) Cancelled vacation and sulked about it.
10) Cancelled another vacation scheduled for March and sulked some more.
11) Wrote shit on social media.
12) Acted like shit to people I like.
13) Made my bed 6 days out of 7.

All in all, a very normal week.

Writing, like most notable arts, comes from the darkest corners of despair.

Also at this point, I would like to confess, I know not what other corners actually offer despair besides darkness. Bear with me, in all these years, this is by far the worst post I have written at the end of the year. My year end posts are legendary, so hilarious and thus, coming from a spot which is so dark that it could put coal matcha ice cream to shame.

It's kinda not the same this year. Well, just not as much as I would like.

I recall the last year's New Year's eve and my state of mind. I was fighting against all odds to keep a straight face, determined to make it through to the next, knowing that it would be a battle to weed out my insecurities.

My insecurities, you ask. What can be possibly wrong when you're young and virile and have a job and friends who like you and a house to live in with a stable WiFi connection.

My braces were in tact, I was covered in chicken pox marks and life was at an all time low. I was at least ten kilos fatter than what I used to weigh and look. This page was dead. I wasn't writing. I wasn't reading just as much as I would have liked myself to. I had no semblance of a life besides spending money on food takeaways tri-weekly. That was my source of entertainment.

I knew, this was the point when I had to stop feeling sorry for myself and get my shit together.

It took me year but I was able to tick a whole bunch of things off my Summer bucket list, by which time I had just started my "eating clean" regime. I was struggling to keep it all together. The only thing that truly helped was that my jaw looked fantastic. The braces had come off and I was writing twice a week.

In the last six months, I have done things that I never imagined I was capable of doing. Physically, mentally and emotionally- on all counts I have really stretched my patience thin and realized I am made of steel. I can give so much more and change just so much if I put determination to it.

Of course, there's that thing about luck as well. But things just as simple as putting a work out together requires little luck. This year was all about cutting luck out of life and working smartly, and puttin in hard work.

It sounds like a lot of gassing but if you're me, you're only going to have this sense of satisfaction.



I made out of 2017 alive, kicking and being even more sassy than ever. I have done a whole bunch of books which adorn the shelves at bookstores in India. I am working on making a better version of my body every single day, I write with an unabashed sense of freedom, one that I never experienced before this. I have people who take me seriously, who value my opinion and read my painful bi-weekly deadline reminder emails from me. I have been told I give real good head and I have managed to make myself look good in cropped sweaters. I have managed to stop eating chips and stop pegging my happiness on food.

This is as good as it gets. With one too many hiccups in this year,  I was able to pull off a whole lot.

Bring it on, 2018. I'm going to nail you down just as hard as Jaysus was nailed.

Ah-men.

Which ever one of you is digging posts from 2011, please go kill yourself.

I looked the stats up today-because what better plans than a reality check- only to be surprised by some motherfucker who's digging stuff from all the way back when I was in undergrad.

I tried reading some of the stuff I had written back then. Pretty sure I'm down with cancer. What's funny is that I had more readers then, than I have now, despite not putting a face to this page for a little over eight years. Sucks to be me, eh?

Earlier today when I was stuffing my face with protein enough to cure malnutrition in the remote districts of Telangana- a problem one "CTB" is trying to address in a mind numbing way to earn monies (partly encouraged by the work place and partly by me), when I got down to watching Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017, dir Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari).

I remember trying very hard to manage to catch a screening at a theatre but somehow doing books on a deadline was more of a priority in life. The only solace, however, was that my mother dissed the film left, right and center and that kind of helped me get over the fomo I had while trying to survive the work.

The film, by the by, is utter nonsense. Waste of time and digital bits, this film made me question (and answer the same questions) as to why publishing is doomed and how we all completely deserve a new plague.

The premise centers around this printing press owner/closet writer who self publishes a sob story on the life and times of his erstwhile love, who's now married to some dude who got no screentime to begin with.

To be honest, if you're that dude and your competition is a writer with a dimple, you deserve no screentime and no girl in the end. Guys with the dimples do it better.
However, this is a film and the screenplay writer decided to be fair so they offered the dimple-less dude that chick in the plot.

Where was I? The sob story writer yes.

Our tragic hero publishes his magnum opus and continues to drink himself to death.

Now, as a publisher, I can safely say the bigger tragedy was his book not doing well, in the absence of a well devised marketing plan but the softie in me disagrees. It's because the dude was in love, that's probably why his book was shit.

When you're in love, anything you do is shit. You write shit. You eat shit. You read shit. You create shit.

Everything is shit when you're in love.

I haven't seen a person with favourable kind of love, the one that works out well for them and they proceed to make good art.

Either you can make good art or love. In this case, the dude chose to be in love and wrote shit. What happened next, will blow your mind.
(no, I swear. It's incredibly dumb)

The girl, a spitting personality of the girl our tragic hero has written about, stumbles upon this book in an amazing set up of when she's attempting to run away from her house. She bargains with the bookseller and buys the paperback for under 100 bucks- perhaps the only real moment in the film.

She reads and discovers that the tragic hero has literally described her- because when I'm self-absorbed and I claim a dude has written a whole poem for me I'm being laughed at but when a film character says a failed pulp fiction is based on her then she's right, woohoo, let's do a whole film on that plot.

I digress, but coming back to the most amazing part of this film. The girl tries her level best to find the author. How she does it is the highlight of my day.

She goes to the bookseller, the guy on the railway platform and asks where she can find the author.

Unskilled couth, if only she had read some more books in her life she'd know the publisher's details are in the copyright page and on the cover and that she should have just contacted them without hesitation.

Then again, what happens next is just mind blowing.

Because this is a film, the seller happens to be publisher/author's friend and decides to tell the dude. The dude aka the tragic hero in turn stalks the girl slyly to find out that she's pretty young thing and he should have some fun for the lack of hobbies.



He decides to engage this girl in letter writing by pretending to know the author.

Now here's what. All this shit was okay, but it's not normal to engage with someone and not know it's them, if you claim to like/love their work.

If a dude helps me out of the way, for no fucking reason, reaching out to the man I'm crushing on and he ends up sounding just as similar as the author, the researcher in me would be alarmed.

Why is the dude helping me?

Why is the man so invested in my business?

Why does he sound awfully similar to a dude whose writing I'm fussing over on Saturday night?

I guess when they say I need pot to calm down, they're not wrong. I should get some because this fucking film has really pissed me off.

HOW DUMB IS EVERYONE TO NOT KNOW HOW TO REACH OUT TO AN AUTHOR? THAT IS LITERALLY THE DUMBEST THING EVER.

I guess some people get a dimpled, published author with a book dedicated to them in entirity while the others continue to be skeptical losers in their bedroom, writing about unbelievable fiction.

I returned from Pune, last week, to hear that Delhi was anticipating "Wettest July" in what seems (?) like a decade. Predicted by the met guys and having that conveyed by my mother only means alteration of some facts so if this seems dodgy to you, I'm passing the blame to my parental unit.

What's a fact checker and why does my blog need one?

Moving on, the misleading title is quite an opener to the problem of lack of getting any. In other words, 'Cobwebs on my Vagina', 'Drought in my Pussy', both contested and lost to the current opening title. I really need to look for a solution to problems such as, "Dude, we discussed weather so does that mean he's friend-zoned me?" but really, I am just so full of negativity, I thought let me pep up with some weather talk and what better than Monsoon to get the juices (gunk) flowing. (yuck)

I used to get dating. Much like I got the idea of taking a bus to school. There's a reason you indulge in camaraderie. You apparently save the environment from pollution by contributing to the noise when you shove 50 or more hyper kids in a bus and release 20 such buses in all directions to and from school every morning. If you care, I believe in home-schooling (also cause wow the fee structure is insane and I can possibly never afford to send my hypothetical child to school).

Now, I don't get that anymore. Or dating. Have the rules changed? Why do the kids travel in cars now? Why did my school stop sending buses to pick kids? Why do parents pay upward of a fucking lakh for their kids to learn colours and numbers? Somethings I will never understand. For everything else, there are rich fuckers paying their kids fee and making the rest of us question our subsidized convent education.

I digress, but my dear frenemy Mia Khalifa answers. Her version is almost rude.

"Darling, they all want your ass and you give them your hand. You're getting none back."

Bitch is probably PMSing and taking it out on me. I took the answer back home, as she drove me in her new shiny car, only to repeat that to SSA.

He had a better explanation (or maybe, I was just well fed), "You don't get a call back for second ones because you give out the complete package in the first."

"You know that makes total sense...the ones where I did follow up or like met the guy again are like the ones where there was so much awkward silence. Yeah, you're right...they weren't the kind of dates...you know...on acid.", I said while standing under the shade of a Peepal tree which did us no good in protecting from torrential downpour earlier today. In the last 48 hours, it's been humid and dry and no sign of the clouds. I step out of the house for an hour to meet SSA over a walk, and it rains on my parade.



When they said Wettest July, they certainly did mean having for it to rain on my actual fucking parade.

Is there a problem with placing your chips on the lopsided end? If so, then I missed the announcement cause I don't get this behaviour. If I put myself out on a date, I'm slutty and obviously "too into" the guy that I want "it" instantly with. If I don't, then I'm "prude" and how dare I have a "taste" for men. Have I not learnt enough from the idea of Tinder? Swipe, Sleep and Repeat.

But no. I want the wine, and for us to dine and the sixty-nine. So what if it takes awfully long time?

However, the rules have changed and clearly my manual was lost in the mail. To get some, you've to be aggressive, like a fighter. Destiny's Child didn't sing Survivor years ago for nothing. They forecasted a situation such as this to avoid dry spells of July.

I mean, it's half a fucking year and I've gotten NONE.

If you, like me, are having questions about me, may I publically announce that Mia Khalifa isn't getting any either. Despite a name like hers, she doesn't manage to go beyond cuddle.

"He says it's done and I'm like, 'Oh? Already? I didn't even feel it.' and then I never hear from him again...You know I should start like these classes on how to train people to have good sex. Like a whole school, how to initiate, how to take it forward and obviously how to have good sex. You should be my first customer."

Because yeah, the problem is me. To my face, I don't get any cause I have it tattooed on my forehead.

Which brings me to my fucking point, which I have been trying to find ways and means to convey. Men, women, everyone- BUCKLE THE FUCK UP!

You will climb mountains, trek to the fucking Himalayas, run a 20k marathon but when it comes to asking a person out, what the actual fuck happens? Does anyone ask you to give up your first born in exchange of sleeping with someone or going down on them? If so, please feel free to share. I'd be happy to empathise with your choices.

If not, then I don't understand. You'd do everything except for asking for some.

Because let's face it, dating as I know has become this- you text, you plan to meet, you ditch, you text some more, you forget, you text again, you feign excitement, you try to cancel, you meet, you have a good/great time, you never speak to them again.

WHY? Why would you waste good effort to do this nonsense? You're defying the laws of science because you're destroying energy...mmm good energy in this nonsense that you're putting the other person up for.

If you want to meet for "a" drink, say so. Tell the other person, "Hey, you know what, I have no intentions of following up cause I don't quite care. You still up for that one drink?"

Half the fucking time, I meet people out of politeness. At least, we can be politely honest with each other and say, "Hey, you know what I'm going to flake on you so let's end it right here. Let's save each other the energy and the process. Why don't we spend our respective time reading Camus and never talk to each other again?"

Trust me, that'd be romantic af.

But no, here I am, and here are your rules. I will be 'cool' and 'chill' and wait for the next person to nudge me to death to have some drinks, make conversation, waste energy and never hear from them again.

I wish I could eat and spend my energy digesting refined calories than writing this crap. If I tried, maybe even I could run for some 50k and do well, because dating for sure is harder than running a marathon.

There's an unsaid idea of work culture that is as old as the idea of "work culture" itself. Joining the masses at work is said to be advantageous. If they laugh, you laugh. If your boss cracks a daddy joke and expects you to give a reaction that you reserve for when you see Dhinchak Pooja memes, by all means, give them that. Like a dead fish, you ought to go with the flow.

1) Come over right now.

2) Oh you can't come over right now? Come at 2 then.

3) No, not 2:30 pm. At 2.

4) If you can't come at 2 then I won't meet you.

5) Hells ji.

6) Why did you use this picture? Couldn't you find a better one?

7) Acha, come by 7:30 pm.

8) I actually came to your office because I really like it.

9) Have you tried Sanadige? You must try Sanadige. It's amazing.

10) Why don't you burn my work instead of wood for a bonfire?

Bonus entry- Your voice is so sweet.


(Originally uttered by our clients. To us.)

There are few things in life which are as therapeutic as walking down an aisle full of products in a well-stocked store.

Disclaimer- I love burning money. I love to shop. If I have it, I've gotta spend it.

Which makes me for an interesting case study. Here I am, I love to spend. However, when I do go to 24/7, literally every day, and come back without buying anything, I sound like one of those pathological liars on Facebook- you know the kind with the fake boyfriend's fake account writing them sonnets in the forms of memes. That, in itself, is quite an amazing blog entry.

Anyway, where was I? That I love to shop.

My absolute favourite is alcohol shopping. Possibly Delhi's best-stocked liquor shop is at 5 minutes distance from my place and there's nothing ever that they don't have. The queues are insanely long and the assistants helping inside are as kind as Mirra Alfassa.

It's inside the alcohol store that I come alive. Which is strange because I wasn't exactly conditioned into buying alcohol as a child or anything. My closest association with buying alcohol is at the airport. Usually left with a decent wad of cash, I burn all my money (not leaving enough for the cab home) at the Duty-Free. It helps when it's my scholarship funds and not what I earn. If you're the agency that gives me the scholarship money then please stop, look at the pigeon coming right at your face from the East. Look!

Something bothers me about putting things online- say for example on this blog. Here am I, telling you something about myself. To what extent do you believe this something?

My alcohol story is kinda farcical. I love to shop, sure. I love burning money, yes. I also spend all the remaining cash at the Duty-Free but does that mean it's my favourite kind of shopping? Perhaps not.

I've trivialised a really simple thing which has been bugging me for a long, long time. How far do you, as audience/reader/consumer of the content on social media believe what goes online?



Let me simplify this.
There's this person on my list, who has my renewed interest. For maturity sake, let's call her "X". Miss "X" happens to have a thriving life, her social media appearances are very dramatic and touched up, almost as if it's a framed painting by Goya. She keeps a record of where ever she goes by doing a "check-in", which are interspersed with places where she "actually" goes and you know, hangs with her two and a half friends. Look, I'm not the one to have a problem with having few friends and no life. I advocate that shit. However, I will, never, for the life of me understand what makes people create fictitious Facebook accounts for fictitious characters in their lives. How do I know this? Well, the boyfriend has no appearance and none whatsoever for at least eight years.

Yeah, sure, he's not a Facebooker. But then, he's always the one person showing "love" react to all her posts, all her nonsense and continues to post things on her wall, all day, every day. He lives abroad and conveniently has no friends, no internet self and definitely yields no search results if you look him up. Why does that bother me? I think the girl needs therapy. But that's my opinion. As a concerned flanéur, I need her to understand it's not okay to have a fictitious life.

In the Summer of 2011, my friend KneePee and I had stumbled upon another one. This was amazing because she'd not only created a fake boyfriend but a whole fake family. There were family members, each with the profile picture of a different flower from a generic garden. There were 17 people in total that this particular woman, let's call her "Y", was interacting with. Why would "Y" do that? I wouldn't know. But our friend "Y" was amazing. Pure genius. At this point, I wasn't even trained in identifying scams and fake profiles (yeah, there's such a thing and yeah, I'm trained for it- whatever you may say).

So, coming back.

There's this man I was crushing on at 19-20, and sometime then, I remember a picture of him which popped up on my feed. It had a familiar face with a different name. That was "Y"'s supposed boyfriend standing next to my crush, with a name I wasn't familiar with. Now, as curious as I was, I clicked on his profile and what I saw next blew my mind.

"Y" had lifted images off from this guy's account, since all those pictures existed and as did the comments, but only given by people with same names and different surnames. After having given generic flower photographs to the family and the man, she'd proceeded to post his family and personal pictures on his account, in the various album(s). Incidentally, they were stolen from that man, who shared the same name but different surname as "Y"'s fictitious boyfriend.

Guess who was the mutual friend between that man and me?

Turns out, "Y" was absolutely obsessed with the guy, to the point she had claimed it was her in the pictures, next to the man (wherein it was actually his real girlfriend, a journalist/fashion enthusiast). Her face, completely different than the girlfriend's (you know, round, curly hair and stout whereas the girlfriend has poker straight hair on a long, oval face and was skinny and tall) and yet she went with the version, "Yaar this is me only I look different now" under the picture as a friend had proceeded to ask that it doesn't look like her.

Soon after we learnt about the real guy and his existence, KneePee and I weren't exactly mature about the whole thing. We put up a troll birthday album and a troll birthday video and proceeded to celebrate a whole day of celebrating their love (a video still exists somewhere on Facebook). We never got around to doing the same with "X", since it's rather tedious and more so, we have both lost interest in having 'fun' or whatever version we think it is that we are trying out.

This afternoon, Mumjane asked me if I thought X had a boyfriend she was faking. It was right then I knew I wouldn't be able to control this "cheap thrill". If only, I could have the balls to put out a front and a Facebook check in such as "feeling great while indulging in cheap thrills".


For all you know I might just.

I love lipsticks.
There's something so uniquely innocuous with wearing lipstick and shooting people with your choice of weapon. My favourite is usually a combination of death stare with Ruby Woo (despite Mac testing on animals-shit), and a dash of words which can put the fear of god in a man. For some others, it's a devastatingly sexy side smile and for the rest others, it's their teeth that gets the lipstick.

It's completely alright if you didn't catch a word of what I was trying to convey in the paragraph above. I'm swinging between enchantingly snooty and completely intolerable. What I'll be to you is entirely dependent on which side of the scale you view me from.

In the last month or so, I've given my piece of mind to quite a few people professionally. While I admit, it's not the best thing that I did, I also completely admit the reaction I've received from the recipients of my brashness was completely worth the trouble of indulging with them people.
I can almost imagine my Amazon product reviews to resemble this-

"WHAT A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING! I DO NOT THINK SHE DESERVES TO BE ON A PLATFORM LIKE THIS. DO NOT BUY."

"She thnks 2hyghly of herslf. Dun waste tym on her."

"One star only. She's shallow and offers nothing except for a well meaning insult from time to time. Horrible experience. I want my money back."

"WASTE OF TIME. Good lord does she think she's goddess or ethereal creature from the Northern Hemisphere? She bullies everyone and wants her work done on priority. She treats everyone horribly and always answers back. Her emails are so terribly composed that I wonder how did she ever manage employment. Oh wait, no wonder they hired her. Please do not indulge with this person. She's raging mad and is mostly always in a sour mood. She's acidic and totally capable of ruining your day."

It set me back on a great fucking memory. All within the frame of 5 seconds.

In the Fall of 2011, one of my dearest friends faced an awful rejection from the hands of a self conferred theatre aficionado. This said friend is a bundle of talent and was trying to land a role in theatre for a long, long time. 2011 being the last year for us at college; she gave it her best shot. To her surprise and ours, the director was shameless enough to reject my friend for acting but instead shamelessly offer Production role. As well intentions go, Sinner, Ude and I set forth to join our dear friend in helping her with Production. Each of us signed up for different roles for that play and began showing up at the rehearsals, almost half heartedly.

Now, when I think back, those rehearsals were probably the highlight of our time outside class, given we spent all our time in class (courtesy yours truly).

I digress but fast forwarding to our first performance, we were at this snooty liberal arts college in Delhi University. All of us racing against time to figure the best implementation of no-resource at the venue. The college's stray pooch accompanied and chilled with me in the sound room during the play. That's how great the theatre scene in colleges is in this city.

Ude, who was responsible for make-up, dressed one character up completely. The brief given to her included the words, "ditzy", "slutty", "blonde". I assure you, those words were not used in a way I could frame in a sentence and get out of slut shaming women. The character apparently called for it.

And so our friend Ude, dressed this girl up, as close as possible to the brief. She had to rush back before the play could start, so just when the character in full make up and outfit walked to the director, she shrieked.

"What the hell do you think you're looking like? Ude, please do her make up again. This is just not working out. Her lipstick looks terrible.", the director threw a hissy fit at Ude in the make up room.

In the most nonchalant fashion, Ude responded, "Atleast her lipstick's not as bad as yours."

Sinner, who was in the room witnessing this went red in the face. Probably as red as the character's lipstick. I do remember the director wearing golden lipstick (a favourite with women from a certain community, I can never understand the logic) and looking hideous. Sinner later told me, "If I were in the place of the director, I'd have slapped the other person." That coming from the most chilled out person I know means shit was serious.

The director looked unfazed. In the most pleasant way she answered back, "I don't have to go on the stage. But, she has to. Please remove her make-up and start over."

As far as I know, Ude left without changing the full thing and the director herself took the reigns. She slapped hideous makeup (equivalent of golden lipstick) on the poor character ensuring the "ditzy" went from fly to shitty in no time.

I panted as I walked uphill from the departmental store to work, knowing what Mia's said is probably true.

"No, I don't care. They're not the ones paying my salary. Their opinion does not matter.", I answered her, thinking about the director and her lipstick. I don't have to be the one going on stage either. I don't need me an entourage or groupies to care where I stand.

In more than one way, I love lipsticks. I do.