Ugh, I hate the end of Deathly Hallows

This week I got into a passionate discussion with a friend about how much I hated the epilogue of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. First: it's very unlikely that you fall in love and marry and pop out three kids with your high school sweetheart, I mean, okay, maybe not UNLIKELY, but definitely a little icky, right? Secondly, none of those couples had anything in common with each other. I'm not a Harry/Hermione shipper, but Harry told everyone more than he told Ginny. Mostly, his adventures were confined to co-adventurers Ron and Hermione, with no room for anyone else, even the girl he supposedly loved. And before that, he turned to a zillion people for advice: Dumbledore, Sirius, Remus, Hagrid, even LUNA, but he never seemed to do that much with Ginny except grab her and passionately make out in corners and rooms and whatnot. Out of this you're telling me that they should get married? Please.
Secondly, even Joanne HERSELF admitted that putting Ron and Hermione together was a mistake. What does whip smart Hermione have in common with an open mouthed, slightly bumbling fool? Ron is great, don't get me wrong, but he's really.. thick, and most of the adventures have Harry and Hermione doing all the work while Ron follows along behind, bleating. Now, I get that Hermione had this huge crush on him, so yeah, kiss him. Have sex with him even. Just don't MARRY him and have his babies.
Thirdly, who calls their child Albus Severus if they don't want their child to be bullied mercilessly?
Fourthly, I refuse to acknowledge the hot mess that is The Cursed Child. So there.
That's my HP Rant, just for you. For those of you who have never "got" Harry Potter, I suggest reading as a sociological experiment. Like, book one is a bit too childish, I agree, but he was eleven. It's a truth universally acknowledged that book three is the best of the books.
(My friend actually has a soft spot for Ron, but then she also supports Mr Bhaer for Jo, so what does she know, really?)

Newsletter: Two Year Anniversary Edition

(Missed a week, but do you want to never miss a week again? Sign up here!)

Can you believe it has been TWO years of this email in your inbox every week, give or take? CUR-AZEEE! That is 104 emails, which doesn't sound like a lot now that I look at it, but still, you know me one hundred times more than you normally would. Um. I'm hoping that's a bonus.

You, waiting for a new newsletter from me

Now, if I was an organised sort of person, I'd have tied up with some brands, gotten you some discounts, but alas, I am me, and I have nothing for you, except my Zomato Gold referral code? You get 20% off the total, I get an extra month, SO, win win for everyone, if you want Zomato Gold that is. I was resistant, but then I went with two friends to Arriba last night, and because two of us had Zomato Gold, we got four free drinks (2+2 on alcohol) which is pretty good. I calculated that for 800 rupees (which is how much it cost for a 3 month membership) I would be getting MORE value for money than if I just paid normally. The referral code is MEEN6056 anyway if you want to use it. (I was not paid by Zomato for this product placement, I promise.) (I wish!)

Arriba was really good though, they must have hired a new chef or improved upon the original, because while I remember the food being nice, it was never "oh my god let me put it all into my mouth immediately" which is what happened yesterday. Plus their margaritas! I regret them today as I am snoozy at 7 pm, but so worth it.

But happy anniversary to us, my darlings! Here is a link to last year's first anniversary edition and the very first newsletter I sent out. How we've evolved since then.

This week in self indulgences: I know, I know, cold brew coffee is a bit of a scam, especially when they sell it to you at fancy coffee shops and charge you like 250 bucks for it, and we fall for it every time! Because it just sounds so nice: coldddd brewwww. Decadent. Like something rich and caramel-y to roll around your mouth, and god, now I just want an Alpenliebe. (Huh. Just figured out why they called it an Alpenliebe as well. Love for the mountains! Because those weird caramel sweets were supposed to be from the Alps? Fun fact: the same company also makes Chupa Chups and Mentos. Fun fact two: The Mentos company also owns Babol gum.) What was I saying? Oh yes, cold brew. Now the science to cold brew is easy but time consuming: you put about five tablespoons of coffee in 750 ml of water and let it soak overnight, the next morning you strain into a bottle, pop into the fridge, and ta-dah, cold brew. I love it personally, but the measuring the coffee was just one extra thing I did not want to do, so I went ahead and bought cold brew bags, which are basically tea bags with coffee in them from Devan's. Devan's is fantastic for coffee by the way, and they home deliver.  I could, I could in theory just make my own cold brew WITHOUT a tea bag, but it's so much NICER the way Devan's has done it so yes, it's not cheap, but it's cheaper than a coffee shop.

I also bought myself a bulletin board for my study. I don't know what I was imagining: lists of words and invitations to parties and postcards from friends and other exciting things? But I have no paper things any more! And one can't very well pin a Whatsapp message to one's board, so I am left with: two cards from our wedding, both very beautiful, one postcard from the Reina Sofia (Picasso's The Three Dancers resonated with me more deeply than the Guernica, picture below) and an invitation to the book launch of You Are Here, August 22nd, 2008 back in the day when a book party was a Brand New Thing. (More on You Are Here in a future edition of this newsletter.)

This week in Delhi is essentially the beating heart of me: A friend is moving to a new house and we went out for lunch nearby and then sat in the empty apartment for a bit, the way you do before furniture moves in and it becomes a proper house again. That empty apartment feeling: even though we're all in our thirties and have done this for a decade or more, it still feels like you're getting away with something, you know? Like you have a clubhouse, away from the grown ups. It's a house before it becomes your home, but you're already feeling a little possessive about it, you're thinking, "This is where I'll put my coffee table and that's what colour the curtains will be" but everything is like a new page. I remember sitting in our current house just before it was broken down and renovated, just to check it out one last time, and we sat on the floor and planned what walls would come down, and talked about the neighbourhood, soon to be ours, but then still so alien. As much as I love coming home to a space that has fit so comfortably around us, I also like that new jeans feeling of a new house, particularly the first morning you wake up, the smell of new paint still in your nose, wondering where you are for a second before you realise, "Oh, I'm home."

And then driving home, I told my friend that I probably had memories littered all over Delhi. It's true, I could probably give you an association with most places. Here's where we drank test tube shots that one night and this guy came up to us and said hi, and would you believe he is still in our life almost twenty years later? Here's where we adopted Bruno and Olga, here's where I learned how to drive properly, here's where my car broke down that one time in the middle of traffic and this cop helped me push it to the side of the road and then waited with me till the mechanic came. Oh Delhi, you polluted, sentimental, tree lined BEAST.

This week in AND THEN THERE ARE THE DELHIITES: ARGH WHY ARE PEOPLE LIKE THIS ABOUT THEIR PARKING SPOTS? Is the world going to end, my good chap, if another car is in your spot for five minutes? Okay, I admit, I have drunk the Kool Aid, I too am all beating my chest and Hulk-like about protecting my parking space, but my reasons are more laziness than protectiveness beCAUSE if someone is in my spot and then I park in someone else's space then I will have to climb up and down four flights of stairs AGAIN to repark once whoever it is has gone. But if there's someone in our spot and then there's also a space next to it, I just go into that space. IT IS THAT SIMPLE, DELHI! Okay, all this because this friend came over to play Catan (expansion pack! Great fun and I also won which means it was even more great fun. The greatest) and he parked in the neighbour's spot and so the neighbours, instead of moving one down, as is a normal human reaction, decided to park in front of his car, so when this guy had to leave, he couldn't, so he had to call a cab and come back the next day and it was all very pointless.

New favourite gif

At least we are only passive aggressive in this area. Other parts of Delhi are worse, here are recent examples: 1) a WHOLE METRO LINE was held up because two people got into a fight over parking. 2) One brother refuses to move his Audi, everyone stabbed.

Let's just agree everyone is crazy especially about where they put their cars and move on.



This week in stuff I loved on the internet (only two links because slow news week):

Rag dolls are adorable cats, but SO INBRED. Adopt don't shop etc.

Excerpt: What makes the Ragdoll cat different from other cats is a matter of temperament. Stripped of a desire for hunting, the Ragdoll has a languid, friendly personality. It is large and less agile than other cats, and has a regal feline elegance: its fur is silky, and long; it has piercing, ocean-blue eyes; and its personality could be called dog-like. This is a cat that greets you at the door and follows you from room to room, providing something like unconditional love.

The best con story you'll read this year. I had linked to another story about Anna Delvey before, how she took this journalist for a ride, and here is a deep dive into the woman. Basically, if you distract people with enough hard cash, they won't look too closely at how you're paying for stuff.

Excerpt: Soon, Anna was everywhere too. “She managed to be in all the sort of right places,” recalled one acquaintance who met Anna in 2015 at a party thrown by a start-up mogul in Berlin. “She was wearing really fancy clothing” — Balenciaga, or maybe Alaïa — “and someone mentioned that she flew in on a private jet.” It was unclear where exactly Anna came from — she told people she was from Cologne, but her German wasn’t very good — or what the source of her wealth was. But that wasn’t unusual. “There are so many trust-fund kids running around,” said Saleh. “Everyone is your best friend, and you don’t know a thing about anyone.”

Ugh, why can't I just buy face cream already without being hit with a patriarchal burden?

(This appeared in  February 2016)

Today I tried to buy a face cream. (Yes, I know, I know, they're mostly a rip-off, and there's no science that says regular body lotion can't be used on your face, but I'm a woman and susceptible to these things.) I say “tried” because no matter how many search results I saw online—and I waded through loads—all of them offered me “whiteness improving night cream” or “fair and bright day cream.” Nothing was just plain old face cream, as far as I could tell, until I landed on one simple one, not at all as nicely packaged as the others, but a face cream that was just that: cream for your face, without any added transformative effects.

The page refreshes to show items that are “based on your order” after you buy something. Here's what I got for the cream I had so painstakingly purchased because it didn't offer me a two-for-one fairness deal: Whitening Day Cream and Whitening Face Wash. The website seemed to be taunting me: oh, you didn't get the fairness cream? Why not add it now? It reminded me eerily of going to a beauty parlour and having my eyebrows done when I was younger with the beautician asking if I didn't want a “detanning facial” or a scrub. When I'd say no, I was quite happy with my tan, she'd make a face and say, “Well, your eyebrows are very weird.” (I stopped threading my eyebrows into oblivion after it was made quite clear that no one actually noticed my eyebrows even though that whole operation is extremely painful.)

White facing like a boss

I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised that fairness has become the default for beauty. From people having a choice to aspire to be fair, bringing about brands such as Fair And Lovely (and its male counterpart, Fair And Handsome), it's become something companies think you want so much that they don't seem to make any other options.

My first reaction was to blame the companies. I mean, if Olay or Garnier or Lakme weren't pretending these were the only ways women could keep their skin beautiful then we wouldn't buy into it. But then it's probably also the customer's fault. Sadly we've been conditioned to think that our skin needs to be pink and white to be beautiful—something that's almost impossible for most of the country. If you think of India itself by its skin colour, it varies so much that yes, some of us are fair—but there's milky fair which becomes bluish or yellowish fair, moving into a reddish tinge and then there are all the browns: from golden skin to light brown to dark brown to very very dark brown. We have them all—and the funny thing is that no beauty company has found a way to market to that. I, with my coffee-coloured skin, would enjoy a cream made for my complexion, as would someone who was perfectly fine with the amount of “white” they were and just wanted to stay that way and not get any paler.

The most ironic thing is that they don't actually work. Nothing can make you fairer if you have melanin in your skin. It's something that you know and I know, but people all over the country are buying into this myth, and therefore buying into the companies. Week after week they slather these snake oils on their skin and when they don't as the ads say “grow many shades lighter” they're deeply disappointed. The consumer court made Emami Limited, a skin care product company known for their brand Fair And Handsome, pay a 15 lakh fine for misrepresenting costumers. The complainant was a man called Nikhil Jain from Mumbai who said he didn't see any difference in his face after 3 weeks, even though he had been using the cream.

[I find it interesting that a man brought in this case, because I'm sure there are thousands, if not millions of women in India who have thought the same thing and haven't had the courage to admit they wanted to be more beautiful. Interesting also that according to a sales trend report done by Snapdeal recently, more men than women are buying fairness creams and grooming products.)

I would like options. We'd all like options. And I'd like people to be more careful about what they promise in advertising. Is this an utopian ideal? Perhaps. But if enough of us want it—like enough of us want fairness creams—maybe it'll happen.

No, YOU fucking leave the country

This week Aamir Khan said a thing and the whole country went mad. Coming just shortly on the heels of the terrorist attacks in Paris—a time when you think citizens stick together and huddle up in cozy corners to fight against the madness that is the rest of the world—the whole Aamir thing was nothing short of several dogs at a single fight, all trying to pick at the one single bone.

I couldn't see what the brouhaha was myself. As I saw the story unfold it seemed like all the actor was accused of doing was making a statement about his wife and how she mused that maybe they should move abroad following day after day of terrible headlines. Can you blame her? Just off the top of my head: a Dalit family burned to death for not following Hindu caste politics, a Muslim man beaten to death under suspicion of having beef in his fridge, the crazy fringe right wingers becoming more and more centre each day as their absurd statements in the press got picked up and waved about. Like, “see this is what's going to happen to our country and you can't do anything about it.” I mean, we're tempted on a daily basis to leave, and we would flee if we had the money and resources, which Khan is not lacking.

But wait. And abandon our country to the crazies? I think not. That's just what they want—but remember, they can't make the rules for us. They threaten us with violence? We do what we did when the Brits were here and refuse to cooperate. Stop giving them a voice in the press. Block them immediately on Twitter when they start buzzing by your ears. Without a voice, what can they do but implode from muteness?

Instead of them sending us away, let's send them away. Far. Somewhere where they can establish this perfect idea of Hinduism they seem to be clinging on to. (Even in the Mahabharata, there was pre-marital sex, so I don't know what era these guys are longing for.) Better yet, they can all live in communities with other super orthodox religious types—Muslim, Christian, Jewish—and with all their perfect godly ways, I'm sure they'll have the country they're dreaming of right now. I don't see why the majority of (normal) people have to live by the rules of the (abnormal) minority.

Threatening to beat someone up for their views is the opinion of three-year-olds. If these mouth-frothers are going to act like babies, we should treat them like they are. Give them the occasional lollipop. Pat them on the head. Punish them by withdrawing our love and smacking them on the wrist. Put up big notices that say: SHARING IS CARING or NO HITTING.

Jokes apart though. Here's where the picture is messed up. We keep saying how they're getting stronger, but we are partly to blame for this. We are giving them a voice! We're making them stronger by looking the other way when they misbehave. The system needs to crack down on people like this: we need to punish them, and when that doesn't work, punish them harder. They need to know that we live in 21^st century India and not whatever-century-it-was Kings Landing. We do not stone people, or punish adulteresses with rape, we do not cut off hands of theives, we have a long history of democracy and a law and order system that—when it creaks into place—can astound you with the way it works, and people doing amazing things every day, and all sorts living shoulder to jowl and villages from back in the day and cities that have seen dynasties rise and fall and languages that bind you together and food that you always miss if you're away from it too long.

Why should we leave because we want to speak our minds? They have a problem? Get out, get out, stop polluting our amazing shared history of tolerance and peace with your terrible, regressive words. 

(A version of this appeared as my column on mydigitalfc)

Why fasting for ANYone or ANYthing is really stupid

It happened to be Karva Chauth this weekend. Normally, this Punjabi festival totally misses my radar—or at least it should be dismissed for the nonsense it is, just one more blow from patriarchy—only since I’ve lived in North India my whole life, it gets hammered home from more places than one.

When I was in school, Karva Chauth mornings would see teachers coming to school with henna’d hands and maybe wearing a new salwar kameez. Even the sternest of my teachers, I remember her well, a woman with a no-nonsense attitude and a startling sense of humour that allowed her to keep her cool in a room full of teenagers, even she arrived in school with a sappy smile on her face, her eyes a little dreamy as she took our classes. (Of course, that could also be hunger.)

While fasting in general is sort of silly—seriously, do you think your god cares if you’re hungry?—I think the whole conceit of Karva Chauth is that it’s a superiority thing. Wives fast for the long lives of their husbands, therefore if your wife doesn’t fast for you, she probably doesn’t love you as much as the neighbour’s wife loves him.

PLOTTING YOUR MURDER

So, why did a little Punjabi festival—brought over from the villages to the city—gain so much popularity across the country? The answer is Bollywood. From the first Hindi movie to show the heroine (faint with hunger, no doubt, on account of being such a delicate creature) gazing up at the moon through a sieve before allowing herself a bite of the feast she’s had to cook all day (all the while starving.) And the look of adoration on her husband’s face! Who wouldn’t want that? It’s like some sort of sadomasochistic Valentine’s Day.

It is sort of romantic, if you consider it from a child’s point of view. You are young, unformed, and callow and you’re learning about marriage, love and life just by looking around you. There’s your mother telling you with every gesture, how to be a good wife. You see how your father looks at your mother as well, such an expression of smug pride. Then you go to school and even your teachers are doe-eyed and giggly. In the movies, your favourite film star is dressed in her best clothes, maybe the hero is singing a song about how lovely she is. No one actually talks about how hungry they are. [If it were me, I’d be complaining the whole time, but then I’m the person the word “hangry” (a combination of hungry + angry) was invented for.]

There’s a Karwa Chauth story I read a while ago. A new bride is keeping her first fast—that slightly awkward phrasing is how it works, you “keep” a fast, like a vow—and she’s very weak and about to pass out with hunger. Her brothers are worried about her, so they pretend the moon is out already, and she eats something. In a distant town, her husband drops dead. It’s a pretty powerful piece of brainwashing. Eventually, she has to do a lot of running around and he gets restored to life, but not without a whole moral lesson being inserted in there about how women who don’t fast are the worst wives in the world, and basically murderers.

This morning, my young maid asked me whether I was fasting. “Uh, no,” I said, “I don’t believe in that stuff.” She smiled and looked down at the floor, and that would have been the end of the discussion, but I really felt the need to make my point.

“I see no point in fasting,” I told her, “In fact, it should be the men who fast, just to show their appreciation of us, don’t you think?”

Her head lifted and she began to perk up a little. I could tell this had never occurred to her before.

“I mean, we do all the work at home,” I said, choosing to ignore the irony of saying this to someone I hired to basically do all the work at home.

“Yes!” she said, “I mean, why should we do all the cooking and cleaning and go hungry as well?”

And so a young feminist was born, where she might have seen romance in the custom before, now she’s thinking of it in a wholly different way. At least, I’ve done my bit. Now in honour of all the women who don’t have a choice about whether or not to go hungry today, I’m going to eat some cake with my partner, and toast to our long and healthy lives. 

Everything changes, and everything stays the same

It’s almost the end of October with Diwali fast nipping at our heels and for those of us in the North, a distinct tang of winter in the air. Which means that another year is almost over. This isn’t a year-end column though—even though Dusshera and its burning of all evils should be a good place to start—but a way of examining my feelings about the news lately. Which is a great weary feeling that nothing has changed, nothing at all, and we’re still stuck in the same place, outraging about the same things. Here’s a list I made of the more “evergreen” news stories as it were. (Warning: it’s very depressing.)

1)   I guess we’re still talking about beef? It all began with a ban(g), when the sale of beef was stopped in Maharashtra. This actually had a personal impact on me, because we were travelling in Goa at the time, and one night all of us had a great steak craving. There was none to be had for love or money, the owner of the restaurant we picked said. I think that was the first time it struck home for us that a ban on a certain kind of meat could actually happen. But, naively, I assumed it would blow over. Blow over? Hardly. Over the next six months, beef became such a hot button topic that people are dying all over the place and trucks are being burnt and people are being told to go back to Pakistan if they like beef so much, that argument so loved by the uneducated.

2)   Caste shouldn’t be a thing anymore in 2015, should it? But it is. This is the year that saw huge injustices against Dalits. I’m thinking of just a few days ago, the story of two small children killed in a fire set to their house while they slept because of some pride thing the upper castes of their village had. Or a headline that said, “In Jodhpur, a family lives in fear after boy touches non-Dalit’s plate.” Or the several lower caste women who are sexually assaulted in villages across India, unable to get justice because the system is so heavily biased towards the upper castes, their rapists.

3)   Dengue! Again, I’m going to marvel that the year that Marty McFly chose to travel to is the year where we still haven’t managed to come up with a way to keep away an illness which is basically caused by a mosquito bite. I get that it’s mostly a question of a social situation: crowded areas with more stagnant water get dengue mosquitoes, but instead of panic and fear, just get everyone to slap on a cheaper version of Odomos (or Odomos itself, since that’s the only thing that seems to work against the mosquitos in my house). It would be truly ironic if I got dengue after writing this though. Ironic, and yet, proving my point.

4)   Murder most foul and our not-so-great justice system. Ugh, the cops and investigators tumbled from one bad story to another. If it wasn’t the whole Aarushi case resurfacing, it was the very weird Sheena Bora one or the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq (where the cops very usefully performed a post-mortem not on the body but on the meat in the fridge.) Here’s a fun fact I unearthed when researching this: “India has earned the dubious distinction of securing a spot for the eighth year in a row on a global index which ranks the countries around the world where journalists are murdered and their killers go unpunished.” Yup.

5)   Finally, this last thing is less of a news story and more of a way people react to a news story: people have got to stop responding to a rant about one thing by saying, “Oh, why didn’t you rant about this other terrible thing? Did you not care then? Therefore you do not care now! QED!” (You know who you are!) That’s just stupid. An argument can be made that increasing exposure to bad news can make you feel worse and worse about it till it all comes spilling out, and so you didn’t make a passionate speech about it then, but you will now. An argument can also be made that by derailing an entire discussion and turning it to who-said-what-when you’re kind of killing the point and that’s not doing any good to anyone. Think about that one, internet people. Think hard. 

(A version of this appeared as my column in mydigitalfc.com)

(My new book is out and you should totally buy it. LINK.)

Why I think we as writers should be demanding answers

This is a moment of crisis for our country. It may not seem like it: perhaps, you expected something different from the word “crisis.” Perhaps, the images you were expecting were bleak and dystopian bombshell ravaged, starving children, you, yourself hiding for your life. That’s a different kind of crisis though, I mean, at this point I could point out that all of the above mentioned things are already happening, even if they aren’t happening to you, but that would be a longer digression and I have a point to make here. (Stay with me.)

We’re at a moment of crisis because freedom of speech is being threatened, with every single writer who dares to voice something that goes against the grain are in danger for their lives. We are at a moment of crisis, because never before in the history of our country has religious intolerance been so easy, so casual, a matter of pride almost.

The citizens of this country are being urged to be politically incorrect and no one is stopping them. You’re handing angry people weapons and you’re whispering in their ears about why they should kill, slaughter and maim. And meanwhile, the headlines hold a photo of a dotcom millionaire beaming at our prime minister and he’s so happy, and we’re so happy, look we made it, we’re acknowledged by the west! And back home, in the country he seems so desperate to flee, we talk about good diets and bad diets, only they’re not just “bad” diets, they’re a crime.

We’re regressing almost as fast as our representative makes his way around the world and no one seems to care, as long as we have jobs, as long as private companies seem poised to enter, as long as vast amounts of money might possibly one day come in, who cares that “secular” is now, apparently, an insult?

 As a writer, the tools of my trade are words. This is how I build an opinion for you to see, this is how I hope to convince you. I want you to think about words right now, words not spoken, words that are buried in people’s throats, when a life is less important than a vote bank. My fellow writers have been returning their Sahitya Akademi awards as a way of telling the system that they refuse to be silenced by sots, and as a wave of protest, it seems to be growing.

You might have even rolled your eyes at the news, but you can’t deny it is news. Words are the one thing politicians and writers share and while a skilled orator may use his words to weave you a pretty dream of a future where India is global and modern and all the things you’ve always wanted it to be, he also has to not use some words, lest you think he’s slipping up. A comment can be misrepresented, a no comment can be put down to general busyness.

A writer’s job is then to step in and remove the paper off the cracks, show you what they’re not saying.

They’re not saying religious intolerance is a bad thing.

They’re not saying they have a policy in place to deal with further rumblings.

 They’re not saying they will stand by anyone who makes a well reasoned argument and make sure that that person is not in danger.

I, and many of my other colleagues in the writing world, am a commercial writer. I write novels that deal with urban India, stuff like religion or violence rarely comes up, except as a plot point. But we have an audience hey, maybe even you, who is reading this right now! And our audience should know how we feel about these things. This is how I feel, guys. And I think it’s my responsibility as a writer to let you know.

(a version of this appeared as my column.) 

When you keep me waiting, you keep me hating

It struck me just how much the government sees people as little insects—numbers on a file, to be pushed around and stamped and signed, but not actually like people, when I was asked to be witness to my friend’s court wedding. I went along full of great optimism, they only released 10 appointment slots a week, my friend said, so she had to sit up at midnight and book a coveted space. After that, she said it would be a four minute process, sign, stamp, sealed, married!

We arrived at ten to ten, because our appointment was at ten, and we wanted to make sure we had everything before we went in. The door to the sub-magistrate’s office was still closed and bolted, but we assumed he’d get there in ten minutes. After some signing, filling out a form (a different form, my friend tells me, from the one they had her fill out online, thereby adding one extra step to the red tape), we sat on the hard chairs outside, swinging our legs and waiting for the man in charge.

We waited.

And waited.

GAH I HATE EVERYONE

And waited.

Until it was quarter to eleven, and no sign of this man. We went back inside to enquire how long he’d be. “Oh,” said the man with the papers, with absolutely no expression of guilt on his face, “He’s on a site visit. He’ll be back sometime between noon and four.”

This, disregarding the several people who were waiting there—not enough chairs meant a lot of people were standing, and the fact that they had everyone’s cell numbers on record when they took their appointment, so a simple message to the three or four people (out of ten!) who were waiting, would not have been that much extra work for any of the paunchy men standing outside, looking bored and disinterested in life.

The problem with this country is that no one places any value on your time as an asset. Delivery men call at all hours and say, “Oh are you home today?” as if your entire day is dependent on them and not the other way round. You then spend a day you could be running errands or stepping out of the house, just waiting. Waiting for the broadband man to come and fix your wiring, four hours after he promised. Waiting for a government service you’re paying for, because the people in charge have decided making you wait is a way of them showing off their power.

Of course it is about power, mostly. The more you can make someone wait, the more you can indicate your senior position compared to them. It’s a common business trick, but is the man sitting on the other side of the desk, picking his teeth and drinking another cup of tea going to pay you the two rupees or five rupees or unquantifiable amount your time is worth? He is not. So, by waiting, you’re wasting massive amounts of money as well, if you consider your productive hours and how much you get paid and how much work you’d be doing for those extra four hours you have to sit around at someone else’s whim.

In the end, we went out and got a bite to eat, and returned when we were called at noon, but then the waiting began again. We waited and waited and waited, and finally my friend had enough. She kicked up a fuss asking the men who worked there why no one was willing to give her an answer, why they thought it was okay to make everyone sit around for so long. The people gathered around to watch her, mouths agape. It was the most exciting thing that had happened all day. Furiously, my friend, her new husband, and the two of us witnesses, following fascinated in her wake, barged into a meeting where she made the same points again, and wouldn’t you know it, by kicking up a fuss, the sub magistrate decided he was ready to stamp some papers after all right that moment. Great message to send society. Sit quietly and nothing will happen. Shout at people and doors open.

Maybe it’s because “people like us” are more entitled, and more aware of our time that we decide it’s our right to storm into offices and demand to be seen. Certainly no one else there was doing anything, though their waiting faces took on a hint of desperation. My friends are both lawyers, so it’s unlikely that anyone could have threatened them with bad paperwork as a result of their rocking the boat, but not everyone is so fortunate. We met a woman as we were walking out of the office finally, and she turned to my friend and said, “Thank you for saying that. I did that last time, and my matter got even more delayed.” It turned out they had been seeking a resolution for the same case since 1958. 

(A version of this appeared as my column in mydigitalfc.com)

(I made up the title myself, and now I think it should become a common proverb)