FRIDAY
We sit on our haunches (Srihari, Bala and Jaideep included) and decide what to do in City Reporter this week. In fifteen minutes flat, I have enough work to keep me busy through the week. In the evening, I am in the midst of a dozen couples on a runaway bus. The driver is supposed to drive round and round until all the couples are through with their stories of how they found their love and then take us to a dine and dance at the Taj Residency. One Cupid-struck says how he fell for a girl with attitude and chased her for over six months and finally landed her. Never seen so much pride on a Nobel prize winner.
SATURDAY
The India-Australia match swamps everything else being done in the office. I clappity-clap on the computer keyboard, unhindered, since I lost interest in cricket after match fixing reared its unsporting head). When India loses, the morale of the team at explocity is down. I feel bad, too. Atleast, they should have fixed the match and won.
SUNDAY
I am the laziest on this day. But not today, I tell myself and accompany my parents to the site where our house is being built. On the way, I visit Master’s Art Gallery and feel much blessed. Never had I seen 24×36 paintings so vivid and so full of life; something I have never felt for photographs. At home, I SMS friends and ask them what they are up to. One person says, he is catching up with wholesome humanism and sleeping. Another says, SMSing is a good distraction, but can she please study? One advertising head says, she is busy channel surfing.
MONDAY
Hectic day at work. Meet a classical dancer to ask about her eating habits. She says, dancers are highly emotional people and food is important to them. Then I meet a theatreperson, who stinks. That doesn’t stop me from smiling my best smile and asking him about his eating habits (wanted to ask about his reading habits for a change; but he didn’t read any). Meet a representative from Paramount Pictures releasing Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. I ask him, if I can interview Spielberg and ask him about his reading habits. “Not a problem,” he says, and gives me the email ID of he lady who will act as conduit. Get a mail from a girl, who says: “I know that most of you think that this kind of thing is crap…so do I!!! But, hey that didn’t stop me from sending it to you.” I am hooked. I choose Sprite, drums, fish, blue and Hawaii. And that meant, according to some psychoanalysis, I was wacky, wild, boring, romantic and more romantic, in that order. At home, I drink some fruit juice. My younger brother later informs me that I drank something that had run out of its expiry date.
TUESDAY
Laid up in bed all day… the runs and all. Realised it was the juice doing the dirty trick. Listen to Radio City for a while and switch it off when it’s no longer soothing. Fever ensured I was in bed through the day; woke up to backache. At 9.30 pm, there is some semblance of peristaltic peace… start sms-ing friends and asking them about the status of my earlier query: found any Muslim gal that met my specifications? They all echo: not yet, but not giving up. I drift into the land of nod.
WEDNESDAY
Peristalsis back to normal. Feeling sunny, sunshine through the window and the balcony door, as Wodehouse would say. I listen to any kind of music and still feel fine. Go to the office and play some more chirpy music. The Oberoi sends me a flyer saying, “What’s jamming maan!!?” I like the idea and put it up on my message board. Speak to Dattani who tells me why he changed his film Mango Souffle’s catchline from ‘A Metrosexual love story’ to ‘A not so straight movie.’ He says, the distributors giggled more to the second title and that ticked.
THURSDAY
I am in a good mood, I tell a friend of mine. And she coos, “Thought only women have PMS… ummm.” I don’t stop at that and ask her what’s been her experience with PMS. And she coos: “Sometimes I am madly in love with anyone I set my eyes on… at other times, I just want to be left alone, really, really, alone. Anyways, I guess that is why chocolate was invented.”
(First published in City Reporter, 2003)