World was on fire, no one could save me but you

* (A little note before I begin, about a blog I discovered recently: Hooray For Bollywood. I'm a big fan of Television Without Pity, so when I saw the Bollywood recaps on this blog, I was reeled right in. An excerpt, from Kal Ho Naa Ho: Naina says that Sweetu’s two problems are the weight that she never loses and the fact that she doesn’t care. I think that Sweetu’s main problem is the fact that her best friend is a judgmental bitch.

And from Koi Mil Gaya: Rekha sits outside her house and knits. I'm pretty sure she's pregnant, but I'm not going to assume anything. Because if it turns out she's just carrying a few extra pounds? Awk. Ward. Meanwhile, Rakesh Roshan plays upstairs with his Fisher Price Activity Center. He presses some of the red buttons, and the machine plays a goofy “Booop Booop BOOOOP BOOOOP!!” tune. He leaves the room for a split second, during which time the screen flashes mysteriously, and the enormous satellite dishes send out huge bolts of electricity. I hope Rakesh Roshan remembered to use a surge protector. As he comes back in again, he hears the “Booop Booop BOOOOP BOOOOP!!” tune being echoed back to him. He plays the tune again on the Activity Center, and the sound is repeated. Then he plays it faster, and the faster pattern is repeated back to him. Excited, he calls his wife, Rekha/Sonia, upstairs, and explains that someone is finally responding to his groovy musical stylings. She asks him what the sounds are, and he explains that he used his “octopad” and his PET computer to convert the word “Om” into musical notes. So apparently The Musical Embodiment of All That Has Been Created sounds kind of like a prog rock version of “Hot Cross Buns.” Rakesh Roshan tells her that he’s achieved a breakthrough, and that he must inform the Space Centre immediately!

Brilliant. Why isn't this blog getting more attention? And why hasn't the owner updated since 2005? Go out there and pester her, good people, or just read the recaps she has done. (Actually, I'm not sure why I'm assuming this blogger is a woman. She could very well be a he. The username is androgynous. Hmmm.)

Oh, but. There's a second blog, updated more frequently here. Why, ads, do you not have a Blogger profile? Profiles are good things, it helps other people figure out whether you're male or female and how to email you and tell you how fabulous you are. That's why I have a profile. Not because it looks so pretty or anything.) (So, if you have a bracket within a bracket, you're supposed to have a square bracket outside right?)




* The number of people who have told me about bomb blasts in Eygpt: Um, seven? Ten?
The number of people who have emailed me about bomb blasts in Eygpt: Three
The number of people who have asked me whether i'm still going: Either ten or thirteen.
The answer I have given to them all: Hell, yeah.


* Subtle product placement time in big bold letters while one is still left wondering why the companies aren't paying me. Turquoise Cottage, Boots, Lakme, Funky Monkey and Dove, you'll be getting my bill shortly. Dove (aha! AHA! Again! Now you totally have to pay me) has this new green soap, I've forgotten the name, but it has the goodness of aloe vera and cucumber and it smells yummy, even though it's not miraculously transforming me into this shiny skinned, gleaming haired chick, it makes me smell pretty for five entire minutes after I hit the big bad hot outdoors. Oh wait, found it. It's called the Cool Moisture bar and it EXFOLIATES. Exfoliates is such a pretty word. It's like abracadabra.

* Went to Aqua last weekend with two friends from work. Aqua is well, meh, not that great. It has possibilities to be great, what with the fact that it's poolside and all, but the crowd there was either over forty or under twenty. We got ourselves a little cabana thing and I had this great cocktail called Mexican Wave with tequila and contreau (Ya, I know that's not how you spell it but I don't feel like looking it up). Consequently got a little buzzed. I love tequila.

* Ooh and I saw Ice Age 2 on Friday. Good movie. Some bits are a little done, but it kept me giggling for a while after that. It won't stay in my heart like Madagascar (I like to move it, move it, you like to... MOVE IT!) but the mammoths are so sweet. There was this one bit where the mammoths vanish into the grove together and this dude behind me goes, "Oye, yeh toh Discovery Channel ban gaya!" Sadly, no mammoth humping. None at all. No any kind of humping for that matter. Humping is no longer done in movies, it seems.

* I have been meeting with very many Young Writers this past month, youths with shining eyes who talk about "creative integrity" and how passion should rule life, no matter whether you have to as a consequence, starve in an attic. Nothing like Young Writers (mostly boys, age 19 to 22) to make you feel ancient and crabbed and jaded. I felt almost guilty for caring about how much money I make, when really, it should all be about the Love For Writing Itself. When they speak, like that girl in the fairy tale, who spoke diamonds and pearls, I see italics and capital letters. I used to be one of those people, but what annoys me, is that everyone's just getting younger dude. Oh, twenty four is an old and wise age, but it makes you feel sad also, because, as I sung to Small the other day when she asked me why on earth I would boil milk in a steel box, "Every hour of every day, I'm learning more, the more I learn, the less I know about before, the less I know the more I want to look around, digging deep for blues on higher ground." Small's the kind of person who, if you even suggest a song to her, she starts obsessively singing it, so Higher Ground was all I heard for the next couple of hours.

Episodes From Patpargunj

We moved to Patpargunj, my mother and I, from Trivandrum. We were waiting for my father's posting to be finalised, so we could all move to a nice, big house in Central Delhi, but till then we cooled our heels at our newly built flat in the newly built apartment complex. Patpargunj lies over the Yamuna River (hence the name, Pat= bridge, par= over, ganj=locality) and now there are three ways to get there--over the snazzy toll-road via Noida, over the Nizamuddin bridge which has three lanes on each side and over the ITO bridge, only one lane and not advisable if any of the other two bridges are closer by. In those days, the ITO bridge was the only one that existed, but it didn't matter so much, because traffic was light, because not many people lived there. The cars you saw? Were all old Fiats or Ambassadors or at best, Maruti 800s. (Now, of course, there's almost always a traffic jam when I visit my mother and the cars in the jam are Pajeros and Mercs and even, once or twice, Beamers.)

It didn't matter very much though, to me then. I was still only ten, too young to think about snob values or how much they mattered. There were other kids in the complex we moved into--which was a lot more than could be said about our relatively bigger, but sadly isolated bungalow in Trivandrum.

But the kids were, well, not very much like me, no matter how much I tried to mould myself to their personalities. I think this was about the time I learned, really learned about typical Indian middle class families and their values.

***

There were two sets of sisters who served as the ring leaders for our small gang. One set was called Abhilasha and Akansha and the other set was called Neha and Puja. Neha and Puja had a younger baby sister as well, called Gudiya, but they had just about moved in, that family, and Abhilasha--who was a plump chubby girl--still ruled the roost.

One day Abhilasha and Akansha told us gravely, during a game of Mother May I that their mother had just had a baby. "And everyone was very upset," said Akansha, who even though she was the younger, was very much the more wordly of the two. "Why?" I asked, amazed. "I don't know," said Akansha, "I just know everyone was crying a lot, even my mother."

Abhilasha interrupted this, to ask whether I wanted to see the baby and led me inside to a room full of relatives and her mother lay on the bed, with such a very tiny, red baby next to her. "Ohhh, she's so small!" I said, and the grown ups laughed, grown-uppishly, before talking over our heads.

Later, rumour, or I think it was Neha, murmured to us that the family had been in uproar because they had another girl. I didn't see, then, why having a girl should be such an issue, and I asked my mother why everyone was crying. "Welll, some people don't like girls," she said, and I think she tried to go into Indian history and tradition and dowries and so on, but having a shortish attention span, I ran off somewhere, feeling pretty glad that my family didn't have an issue with my gender. Quite the opposite actually, because I was fairly spoilt.

Many years later, when I was about 17, I think, a new family moved in beneath us, with three daughters--two older ones and one baby, who the mother carried around everywhere. And again, I heard, through the general apartment grapevine, that the baby girl was actually the granddaughter. The oldest daughter had "killed herself", in her in-laws kitchen, with kerosene and fire and left the caretaking of her baby to her mother. No one talked about it though.

***

Besides conventional games like Statue or Kabbaddi, we did quite a few other things for recreation also. Once a year, the bigger girls would organise a little programme for the adults, where we did stuff like dance to a Hindi song and do a skit and stuff like that. One year, I remember, they made me the announcer (because I can't dance to save my life, and a skit in Hindi would be beyond my linguistic capabilities at the time), and also I remember, one of the dances that year was to Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You. We called all our parents, proudly, sat them on the terrace, captive for two hours and made them watch things. Then we passed around a little bag of toffees, for them to award prizes. I didn't get one, sadly, being the announcer, but I was much applauded.

Occassionally, I would have birthday parties, ala Enid Blyton for my dolls, where I invited a few girls, served Roohafza and biscuits and they brought one of their dolls as well. One time, at the birthday party of Baby Michael (what? don't laugh), one of the girls brought me a little baby cradle she made herself, out of a shoebox and pretty curtain remnants.

Another girl was a kleptomaniac. She'd come over and after she left, I'd find a whole lot of stuff missing. I only managed to put two and two together after I found a figurine of a white seal that I loved and called Kotik, in her room three months later. I stopped letting her come into my room after that.

***

Again, inspired by Enid Blyton one time, I decided to make some extra money by doing odd jobs around the colony. I could be quite persuasive at the time, being the fortunate possessor of an active imagination and a very glib tongue, so I rounded up a gang of three other kids and took them from door to door. Most people laughed at us, and sent us away, but one house let us rinse their plates, mop the floor and water their plants and gave us two rupees. Once we got out, gleefully with the money, the other girls started to have pangs of what-have-we-done, so we translated the cash into orange bars at the ice cream cart and went merrily on our ways.

Word got out, though, as it tends to do, and naturally, the other girls planted all the blame squarely on me. Their mothers landed up at our house, in a furious Greek chorus, going, "Do you know what your daughter has done?" "Yes and I think she's quite cool actually," said my mother, exhaling a long plume of cigarette smoke.

But the worst part was going to school, because a nasty little boy in my colony came on the same bus and he yelled, every time I passed, "Jhaadu-poncha waali!" (Which translates into broom-mop-person, which doesn't sound so bad, but in Hindi it was a taunt). I had my revenge, by growing up hot though, and now he stares after me and I put a little extra sashay into my walk going ahahahahaha, who's a jhaadu-poncha-waali now, eh?

Move along, move along, there's nothing to see here (really, don't say I didn't warn you)

Today, since I have nothing to write about, we're going to talk of poetry. No, no, don't go, this'll be fun, I promise.

Erm, right. If all my readers have abandoned me, I'm just going to talk to myself then.

This morning I was listening to Little Plastic Castle by Ani DiFranco, one of my all-time favourite poems. There's this whole debate about musicians versus poets, but I think the best kind is when the two mingle, and when you have beautiful, beautiful poetry, sung very well. Take this line for instance, the one that always resonates most deeply within me is "They say goldfish have no memory, I guess their lives are much like mine, the little plastic castle, is a surprise every time". Hello, Ani, you read my mind. Each time, a new love and new situation and a new person, and I think, this time, I know it all and yet, I have forgotten the little things. And my plastic castle-- a held hand for instance, or just someone wanting to spend time with you--always a surprise. And then they break up with you and you're back to being a goldfish. Also, I'd like someone to sing to me the words that she sings to her lover in this song. "From the shape of your shaved head, I recognized your silhoutte, As you walked out of the sun and sat down and the sight of your sleepy smile eclipsed all the other people, as they paused to sneer at the two girls from out of town. And I said "Look at you this morning, you are by far the cutest."


Love poetry's okay if you're in a certain sort of mood, but for angsty-ness, no one beats Wendy Cope. These are two of my personal favourites.

Bloody Men

Bloody men are like bloody buses,
You wait for about a year,
And as soon as one approaches your stop,
Two or three others appear.
You look at them flashing their indicators,
Offering you a ride.
You're trying to read the destinations,
You haven't much time to decide.
If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.
Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze,
While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by,
And the minutes, the hours, the days.

I Worry

I worry about you--
So long since we spoke.
Love, are you downhearted,
Dispirited, broke?
I worry about you.
I can't sleep at night.
Are you sad? Are you lonely?
Or are you all right?
They say that men suffer,
As badly, as long.
I worry, I worry,
In case they are wrong.


I like rhyming poetry a lot. I think there's a certain rhythm there, an expression that makes it more easy to understand than blank verse. Blank verse is a lot like abstract art, it could mean anything, but rhymes, now, those take talent. The only blank verse poem I love and I can recite off by heart is Neruda's Tonight I Can Write. I so want to be the girl with the infinite eyes. I no longer love him, but how I loved him. I wish I had written that first.

But when I was in Class 9 and we used Interact With English which was our series of English textbooks, we had this one poem to illustrate alliteration and all of us learnt it off by heart, it was so easy and yelled at each other, "Over the cobbles he clattered and clanged in the dark inn yard!" That's the only bit I still remember, but here is the poem--a little long, I know, but such fun if you're reading aloud.

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

Part One
I
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding-
Riding-riding-
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
II
He'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;
They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.
III
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
IV
And dark in the old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's red-lipped daughter,
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say-
V
"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;
Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."
VI
He rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;
And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,
(Oh, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)
Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.
Part Two
I
He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;
And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,
When the road was a gipsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,
A red-coat troop came marching-
Marching-marching-
King George's men came marching, up to the old inn-door.
II
They said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!
There was death at every window;
And hell at one dark window;
For Bess could see, through the casement, the road that he would ride.
III
They had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;
They bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
"Now keep good watch!" and they kissed her.
She heard the dead man say-
Look for me by moonlight;
Watch for me by moonlight;
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!
IV
She twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till here fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like
years,
Till, now, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold, on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!
V
The tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!
Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,
She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;
For the road lay bare in the moonlight;
Blank and bare in the moonlight;
And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain.
VI
Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hoofs
ringing clear;
Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot, in the distance? Were they deaf that they did
not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding!
The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up strait and still!
VII
Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night
!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him-with her death.
VIII
He turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!
Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.
IX
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,
When they shot him down on the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.
* * * * * *
X
And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding-
Riding-riding-
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.
XI
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard,
And he taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

One kiss my bonny sweethearts, and I'll be off! :) I also want a highwayman

In which I totally pimp my blog

The weekend was hectic, thank you for asking. Party at my dear friends, Mr and Mrs Poet's house, for a housewarming they were throwing. (She's not a poet, but he is, and Mr and Mrs Poet has such a great ring to it, don't you think? Mr Poet and Mrs Editor doesn't sound quite the same. Mr and Mrs Poet-Editor? Editor-Poet? Honey, we're having dinner at the Editor-Poets' tonight, look out your black tie. Okay, I can work with that.) Anyhoo, so we brought wine and drank all the available alcohol in the house, with every single available mixer--dark rum and Sprite DO NOT go well together, for future reference, and the evening wound up with me sitting in the living room (my heels by this time were killing me, so I just plonked myself on the floor, barefoot) and swigging straight from a bottle of Sula Rose, which was delectable at this stage, seeing as I had just gotten over the hiccups.

I also got from another guest, a fantastic cure for the hiccups, much better than the old drink a lot of water theory, because it cured me. Anyway, this involves drinking water too, but with your free arm up in the air, and counting to ten as you drink. Then you drop your arm and breathe normally and voila! No more ze heecups.

Cookie, my dog, has by the way, produced three puppies. They are ADORABLE. And very young--only a week old. And looking for good homes. My dog is part spaniel, but she's mated with some strange dog, so the puppies will be, um, one-fourth spaniel? No matter, they're still really really cute, with the teeniest petal-pink paws, and little pink noses and they fit into the palm of my hand. Can you say aw? All together now--- awwwwwwwww. So the upshot is, if you would like a Cookie-puppy (TM) or a mini-biscuit (heh), email me. They should be ready to be adopted in another six weeks.

Also now is a good time to share that I'm leaving y'all for about 10 days this May. I'm taking a holiday with my mom and Small and her parents to *hold your breath* Egypt! Think of me in Cairo with a sola topee and a whip going, "Damn'd natives, bloody climate they have here, what?" Think of me on the Nile, pretending to be Cleopatra, and waving a langurous arm around at my attendant. Think of me, as a belly dancer for a Pharoah, shaking my booty. Are you jealous yet? Are you? Are you? :)

By the way, I don't think I have any visitors from Egypt, but if any of you know some little out of the way type thingies I should be doing, I'd appreciate any tips. Please, and thank you.


And week before last (oops, sorry, JANUARY. I'm behind on my net surfing, clearly) was De-Lurking Week, which I totally missed, but I'm declaring it here on this blog, so if you've been lurking and un-commenting, then come out of hiding already and say hello. And I think if you have a blog, you should spread the word on it as well. Why should the Americans have all the fun?

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

I yearn, as the weather gets increasingly arid, for the perfect glass of chilled water. Chilled as oppossed to cold. Chilled, so that the glass stays frosty with no condensation droplets. So that as you drink it, there's a sharp cold headache reaching your head, so it's almost painful to keep drinking, but you do anyway, because the coldness extends its tendrils throughout your veins and your thirst is quenched for a while.

No one does chilled water anymore. At restaurants, I have learned to ask for 'ice water', but instead of being what I had imagined, water from melted ice cubes, so cold, so perfectly cold and exquisite in your throat, it's water a little cooler than room temperature with a few ice cubes in it, that look sad and sorry, and explode on your tongue when you encounter them, chilling your molars briefly, but not your drink.

It's surprising to me that no one drinks chilled water anymore. Freezing cold Coke you get, or beer or whatever, but they have a taste and though they'll quench your thirst, they don't have the flavour that water does, the H20ness that whooshes over your palate, sprinkles itself around the corners of your mouth, makes you wipe your face and say, "Ah." When was the last time you said 'ah' with a glass of water? For me, it was at TC, as I entered, straight from breathing the humid, un-windy night air to breathing smoke, and I asked for a glass of water, which the bartender poured me--lukewarm, but with a little ice in it--but I downed it, in three gulps, my throat aching and I felt so much better. No sticky residue, no sweetness. Just.. there.

At home, I've learned to get chilled water by sticking the bottle in my room in the freezer when I get home. But the problem is, in the middle of the night, when I roll over, t-shirt sticking to my body, sheet half off the bed from where I've kicked it, and reach for the bottle of water, it's warm by then, so not chilled, and I drink a little, and it tastes like spit and I go back to tossing and turning and dreaming about coldness and icicles and rain and algid, arctic, below freezing, below zero, benumbed, biting, bitter, blasting, bleak, boreal, brisk, brumal, chill, chilled, cool, crisp, cutting, freezing, frigid, frore, frosty, frozen, gelid, glacial, hiemal, hyperborean, icebox, iced, icy, inclement, intense, keen, nipping, nippy, numbed, numbing, one-dog night, penetrating, piercing, polar, raw, rimy, severe, sharp, shivery, sleety, snappy, snowy, stinging, wintry water.

In defense of my job

Features reporting is not the hectic fast-paced journalism you'll see on television. As a features journo, I can, more often than not, take my time about things. I don't have to charge up to some brandishing a dictaphone, because the people I meet want to talk to the media and if I miss something, they'll repeat it, so I can take notes in my little notebook. I can sit down once I've gotten my quotes, perhaps get something to eat or drink. When I'm interviewing someone, I can chat for a good couple of hours while they give me information and I get coffee. Hell, the longer I talk to them, the better my interview is.

Okay, so it may not be reporting just after the tsunami, with homeless people and the high stress of dealing with a population that has lost everything. It's not war reporting either, when you know your own life is in danger as well. It's not political reporting, figuring out the coups and the shifts of day-to-day politics, or being present at a George Bush press con. That's what my job is NOT. What it is is entertainment. I entertain. Think of a newspaper office like a kings court, beginning with the most important stuff, then filtering in the inside pages news about the citizens, then finally the news about the immediate kingdom, what's going on there and then there is us, the features reporter, with our authority to play around with words--to make our copies look fabulous, to have good-looking well laid out pages with fancy punny headlines. We're the ones who tell you whether you should be wearing brocade this season, or whether that new restaurant is a good place to eat, or what the latest gossip is with that movie star and her on-again off-again boyfriend. Since we're still talking metaphors, think of us as the popular girls (or boys, but I really haven't met that many male features journalists. It seems to be a predominantly female domain) in a classroom, the ones who never ran, but strolled gently, the ones who weren't the prefects or anything, but always looked good and spoke well. We weren't the prefects, but we were the dramatic society, and when someone important visited, we were the ones who did the flower arrangements and hung the fancy posters.

I happen to enjoy my job. Oh sure, every now and then I have pangs about how I'm not doing anything meaningful and how the world will not collapse if no one knows that Aamir Khan was in town or whatever, but for the most part I enjoy it. What's not to like? I'm generally a people person, so interviews and profiles are my strong point, as opposed to a more people quote story. When I'm doing a one-on-one, I usually meet them at a coffee shop, or sometimes, in their homes, where we sit and I begin the careful process of being their new best friend. It's an art, really, when you can make the person sitting with you so comfortable, they forget to say, "Off the record" as they tell you everything and you smile, occasionally scribble and then leave, armed with a perfect story.

Anyway, the point is, that a lot of people, especially the ones in the media field themselves, give us condescending smiles when they learn what we do. Sometimes, us, the people in my department are called on to file the story the same day as the event, so we come into office around tennish, by which time most of the people in our department have gone home, but there's still bustling activity as the news reporters file their day's work. That's a moment that always makes me pause as I enter the room. The only noise comes from the clicking of several fingers on several keyboards, and no one looks up as I enter, sidle to my computer and file my story quickly, before either going home to Small or joining friends on a night out. It's not life changing, the event that I'm reporting, but its an event nonetheless. I may not be talking about "Three dead in a bus accident near Jamshedpur" but I will be speaking of a book launch perhaps, who was there and what they did and said, which, c'mon is waaaaaaay more interesting than the bus accident, not that I'm trivialising that either, before you jump down my throat!

Comments like "Oh you're like that chick in Page 3" is something I have taken into my stride by now. I've been a journalist for, oh, going on three years now. And I've met new people, and sometimes the same people, for those three years. I can't tell you about onion prices and the stock market, but I can tell you who those people are, sitting at the next table, being photographed. And what their story is. Chances are, I can also introduce you to them, tell you a little bit about their lives, what they did to be photographed in the first place and even fish out their cellphone numbers, if you needed them. I can tell you what wine goes with what food, where the newest nightclub is and what the cover charges there are, what advance the writer of that book you're looking at got and how it's doing in the market and all sorts of information like that. Which is still information. No mean feat that, eh?