‘Coffee please?’

is the phrase Indian stewardesses use while teetering up the aisle hauling huge coffee-pots along….teeter-totter-teeter-bump-coffeeplease!*

[Image from transbuddha]

I’ve practising saying ‘coffee please’. In the seventh grade, I mocked a friend who said we all ought to be air-stewardesses. Five years of law school and a year at a multinational company have taught me what that thirteen year-old kid knew all along… that all we’ll ever really be is a bunch air-stewardesses, so we may as well polish up the aggressively sweet smiles and totter about saying ‘coffee please?’ (instead of bothering our fluffy little heads over the budget or our work or anything that seems remotely adult).

*They mean ‘would you like some coffee please?’

Captain Pugwash

Used to love this when I was little

A particularly vile Monday

Is one of those days when you want to fling your feet up on your desk, lean far back in your chair and say in a Lina Lamont voice “Everybody is a dope”. And so ends another bad day at work.

Fair and Lovely

is this perfectly odious cream that they sell in India. They’ve got this whole ad campaign which keeps telling women that if they’re not light-skinned, they’re worth nothing.

Watch this one, for instance, which is about this girl who was of no use to her old parents because she was hopelessly dark-skinned…and about how she used Fair and Lovely, got ‘beautiful’ and started earning enough to support them. Or this one about a girl who wants to be a cricket commentator, and managed to become one after she started using Fair and Lovely and became ‘beautiful’.

And see how ironic it it is, that a government that has permitted these advertisements to be screened in several languages for as long as I can remember, and people who believe that a dark-skinned girl is a useless girl, should create such a furore about Shilpa Shetty.

If Achilles were a girl

I’m scared of people who wear those long pointy lethal looking heeled shoes.

Whoever’s willing to grit their teeth (and tone their calf muscles) and put up with that kind of pain to pretend that they’re dainty, when in fact they are as strong as herd or oxen (or they’d never be able to take the pain), has to be very determined and at least a little dangerous.

After Brokeback

Public displays of homosexual affection remain taboo in the west. Everyone should move over to India - It easier for a man to slobber all over another man than to put an arm around a woman. It’s called ‘decency’ and ‘our culture’. And it’s got lots of zealous-to-the-point-of-violence advocates.

Zimmerman played in Bangalore yesterday. Classical guitar is lovely…listen to some flamenco and you’ll see.

Simply divine – Baileys Irish Cream

I had some last night…I could get used to this

Bandh

Two cities were fighting over a river. Arbiters were appointed. They read and talked and talked and read. Finally, one city won. The other city decided to close down in protest. They considerately postponed their rage to after this little air-circus that they had been planning for a bit. So today, I had to sit at home in a close-down city…with stale potato chips, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Pirates of the Carribean* in deference to their rage. Was a nice long weekend too. Except that I now have to work on Saturday – so my next break will be woefully brief.

*so good!

So easy

So easy to sit with your legs dangling on the arm of an armchair. To go to a nice restaurant and have a delectable ham and orange sauce meal with wine. To keep warm when it is cold and cool when it is warm. To kneel and scrub the kitchen floor. To drag a friend to a concert when you need cheering up. To get a job well above minimum wage. To breathe. To run. To be proud.

I wonder how long it lasts. How easy it is to fall on the other side – with a stabbing pain when I lift my leg, with not enough to eat. How it will be to struggle to breathe, to have to forget about pride and settle for whatever’s thrown my way. The idea is terrifying.