I feel like a model

And as I write this heading above, the chicklit writer in me can’t resist adding: Which means fabulous. Okay so I also feel exhausted from too much exercise, faint from too little food, asphyxiated from too many cigarettes…but I’m thin. As the wise Kate Moss said, articulating what women worldwide know to be the gospel truth, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

However, that is not what this post is about. Earlier this week I felt that that Piggies’ publicity needed another push. So I logged into Gmail, opened the chat window and wrote to my PR person (henceforth known as AT).

I began the conversation with my usual, I’m not feeling the love. Which I think it’s a cute opening salvo. AT, however, complains, saying she feels I’m doing diva act. The whole I’m-throwing-a-tantrum-because-I’m feeling-ignored which, frankly, is as far from the truth as John Abraham is from making it to the A list.

I am not a diva. I don’t demand round the clock attendance. Okay, so she can call me once a day and affirm to me that my books are selling like hot cakes and that I’m the best there is. And occasionally, just occasionally, like once a day, she can send me a compilation of press clippings also affirming the same.

Oh dear. In my defence, I said I’m not a diva. I didn’t say I’m not a neurotic writer.

Anyway, coming back to the Piggies publicity push, I mean it was topping all bestseller lists and everything but that’s precisely why I felt we needed to prod it along NOW. “Stoke the fire while it’s burning and all that, old girl,” I said.

I was taken aback when she agreed. “Quelle surprise,” I said, jumping across the English channels, if only linguistically.

She said that she had already contacted numerous publications and arranged for me to comment on a host of issues for various publications. Then she logged out of chat and called me on my cell. “Hold on,” she said. “D just called me. She’s on the other line. I’ll conference you.”

“Hey, D,” she said after a while. “So as I was saying why don’t you get Smita’s views on Handy Investment Tips for Housewives?”

Now AT had either forgotten to tell D she had conferenced me, or she’d told her, but had also encouraged her to be free with her opinion about me. Fire the gun from someone else’s shoulder and all that. I’m leaning towards the latter.

“Smita Jain? But she’s a…chicklit writer!” The way D said the last sentence, with a pause after a as though she was looking for the right word, and a kind of squealy emphasis on the word chicklit, left me in no doubt that she didn’t exactly mean it was like asking Einstein to comment on high school physics.

Derision. From a journo who’d just last week written that the French Open final was played between Rafael Nadal and Roland Garros! This was almost too much to bear.

I was left fuming. As Kasthuri says in Chapter One, “if (s)he thought (s)he was dealing with a brainless twit (s)he had another think coming. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him(her)  about my excellent, eighty-percent-plus-all-the-way academic record, and multiple degrees in economics and finance just to drive home the point.”

But of course I didn’t. I didn’t want to upset D. I didn’t want her writing Smita Jain’s latest novel Piggies on the Railway is based on a popular nursery rhyme, did I?

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The Comedy Store Comes to Bombay

I wrote about The Comedy Store sometime ago. At the time they had flown down three comedians for a limited number of shows held at different venues. This event was a forerunner to the launch of the Indian Edition of The Comedy Store.

 Well, it finally happened. The Comedy Store has opened in Palladium, High Street Phoenix. As a part of their opening ceremony celebrations last week they were giving away free passes to the show. I got them, courtesy a friend who’s an investment banker.

“So how did you get the passes?” I asked.

“Oh well, I’m in business with them,” he answered suitably vaguely.

“Oh so you’re extorting money from them?” I quipped.

He wasn’t amused. “I’ve got equity in the club.”

Seeing a show my earlier quip fell flat, I resisted the urge to say, Same diff. Extortion *squealed in high soprano*. “Since when do private equity guys invest in comedy clubs?” I asked instead. “Don’t you have a more serious internet business model with no foreseeable revenue stream to finance?”

“Just because internet business models have a long gestation period doesn’t mean they are not viable business,” he said.

Have I illustrated the point several times already or what? Then again, you don’t have to have a huge appetite to invest in a restaurant.

Anyway, I went in with high expectations and it is with regret that I have to say that I was kinda disappointed. For one, the first comic and the emcee, Paul Tomkinson (?) repeated many jokes from his earlier performance at the Grand Maratha Sheraton. I hadn’t taken to his brand of comedy even then, and to have it repeated almost verbatim was, well, intolerable.

The second comic was even more insipid. And to illustrate the point I can’t remember a single joke he cracked. The third comic was a Canadian who was obsessed with Indians carving nude female statues on temples. I laughed at his jokes but only because he had the look of a madman and scared me little bit.

Afterwards, I remember feeling grouchy. That was royal waste of time and money. Okay, the passes were free but the cab cost me a whopping three hundred each way. And the three Margaritas I downed weren’t on the house either.  

I tried to analyse why I wasn’t tickled. I’m easy to please. I still laugh at fart jokes. And I had gone there ready to laugh. Did I mention the Margaritas? If that’s not priming for laughter, I don’t know what is.

And then it occurred to me like a blinding flash on a dark night. The problem was with the material. Observational humour about the Indian accent and Indians scratching their bellies and-slash-or crossing the road at whim, boring *also in high soprano*. Hack attack. Done to death in films and TV shows. (oh, come on, these days? When one Indian character is mandatory?)

However, but club should take heart from the fact that the rest of the people were, to use internet speak, ROTFLTAO. I looked around to see if it was just me who was left cold. Nope, my friends were too. My conclusion: People who’ve seen a fair amount of stand-up comedy will find it considerably short of awesome.  

PS: The Comedy Store is having an open mic night this coming Saturday. People who are interested in forging a career in stand-up comedy can contact The Comedy Store.

PPS: No, I don’t have their numbers. Get off your ass and look it up yourself.

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Bird Attack

I am a die-hard Alfred Hitchcock fan. But even so, I always thought of Birds as kind of lame-assed. A town being terrorized by killer birds! And they were not even the eagle type predatory birds. I mean it was as bad as being terrorized by a renegade car! However, I’ve changed my mind. I now fully endorse Mr Hitchcock’s views that normally gentle aerial creatures can be killers too.

It happened yesterday when I went running. I went to the park and after performing a few perfunctory stretches, took to the dirt track at a leisurely pace. Suddenly, I felt a swoosh down the back of my neck, like a bird flying past awfully close. I turned around to see it was a crow. Now crows are kind of intrepid, but even for a crow that was a bit too aggressive. Strange as it was, I shrugged it off as a freak occurrence. But then it happened again. And again. I look around to check whether others at the park were similarly troubled. Nope. It was just me. And then the lone terrorist was joined by two compatriots, then another two. Soon there were a gazillion of them circling overhead.

Great. So now the crows have got a vendetta against me. Why, for God’s sake? I’m nice to birds. Actually, I’m nice to all animals, but I’m especially nice to birds. I feed them bread crumbs and morsels of roti and regularly put out water in the summer months. I sometimes even put out a feast for them comprising leftover pizza or biryani. A hospitality that mostly crows avail of, I might add. So why then the ingratitude? Unless…it had something to do with the leftover dosa I’d laid out for them one day recently. I remember feeling very…well, philanthropic, thinking I was doing a good deed, treating them to a new flavour. But perhaps it had caused them food poisoning? I had, after all, forgotten to put it in the fridge last night before. Omigod, what if someone had died? Their chief perhaps? Perhaps they were exacting revenge, patiently biding their time, looking for a chance to attack me? Were crows vengeful? I thought not. But then I also thought one didn’t need injections in the stomach anymore following a dog bite. A notion that I’ve had to revise painfully in the recent times.

While one part of me was, to put it eloquently, crapping in my pants with fear, another part of me couldn’t quite get over how cool it all would be if this bizarre behaviour was because of some unexplained phenomena. The most obvious one that occurred to me was that the crows were devil’s minions. The universe was being taken over by Satan and I was the only threat to an otherwise assured takeover bid by the horned one. The less obvious, and more X-filesy, was that the crows were a part of a primitive, alien civilisation.

While I was loath to abort my run, continuing down the path was fraught with peril. Just as images from The Omen and Birds assailed my mind, one of them swooped down, pecked viciously at the top of my head and flew off. And then he did it again. He was followed by another and another. I swear the last flew off with a chunk of my hair. That was it! The crows flying away with bits of my flesh and bone I can live with. But hair, no sir, I wasn’t ready to lose my hair just yet.

Thoroughly spooked, I flailed my reams above my head and ran to the track keeper screaming, “Help!” I belatedly remembered the advice that if you’re ever in any danger, screaming “fire” is likely to elicit more facilitatory action than screaming “help” is going to. But with trees felled to clear the field for the track, and the fledgling grass green from the pre-monsoon showers, there was no way the threat of fire was going to rouse anyone, least of all, a snoozing track keeper into action.

Then the weirdest thing happened. The track keeper jumped up and charged down the track. Only, instead of scaring the birds away, he shooed me! “Get off the track from there.” And, as though that wasn’t enough to convince me that the world had gone mad, he shouted, “Are you blind?”

What the fuck? I felt hysteria bubble inside me. “Not yet, but soon if the birds continue like this.”

He pointed to a black thing in the middle of the track. “Can’t you see that thing?”

“Yeah, it’s a little rock. So?”

“It’s a wounded hatchling.”

I peered closer at the furry ball “That’s a live thing?!”

For God’s sake, not only did it not look alive, it didn’t even look like a crow. It looked like a…a mynah. And what was with the whole crow kingdom protecting it? What was it, little orphan Annie? Or some kind of a messiah?

He looked at me with me like he would at a suspected paedophile – with a mixture of disgust and suspicion. “Yeah. The crows are just trying to protect it from predators.”

“But I’m not…I”

“Look just keep off the track on this side and you should be fine.” Although it made sense, I wasn’t about to risk my well-being on the track keeper’s less then precise *you should be fine* assurances. Not even for a scintillating blog post. So I left. And that was the major excitement in my life last week. And here you didn’t believe writers led dull lives.

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What Women Want – III

I’ve received such interesting commenst and views on what women want that it reminded me of a popular fable I’d heard some time ago. It goes like this:

King Arthur was one captured by a neighbouring king who agreed to spare the former’s life if he could answer one question, What do women want?

Since King Arthur didn’t know the answer, he sent his messengers all over his kingdom looking for anyone who did. In the course of their travels, the messengers came across an ugly, wizened witch who claimed she knew the answer. She would, however, only reveal it if Lancelot agreed to marry her. Knowing the gravity of the situation Lancelot acquiesced, whence the witch answered, “What a woman really wants is to be able to be in charge of her own life.”

As soon as they heard it, everyone, including the neighbouring king, knew that truer words had never been spoken. And so the wedding between Lancelot and the witch was solemnised. On their wedding night, the witch announced that she had the ability to be beautiful half the time. She asked Lancelot to choose: either she could be beautiful during the day or at night.

Unable to make up his mind, Lancelot said that he would let her choose. Upon hearing this, she announced that she would be beautiful all the time, because he had respected her and had let her be in charge of her own life.

The moral of this story? It doesn’t matter if your woman is pretty or ugly, smart or dumb. Underneath it all, she’s still a witch. And if you try to control her life, if you don’t let her have her way, things will get ugly!

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