Too perfect

It doesn’t get much more perfect than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Good looking beyond average, full-time parents, fiercely private about their kids, involved in humanitarian work and both find time to act in films and win Oscar nominations.
I don’t blame Pitt for dumping Jennifer Anniston. It must have felt like living in a constant rerun of series seven of Friends.
Generally, Hollywood marriages don’t seem to last. But these guys here seem to have the real thing going. Of course, I thought that about Madonna and Guy Ritchie too, and now see what has happened to them.

Dress sense

There’s formal work dressing and then there is overdoing the work dressing more than a wee bit.
In Dubai, especially the women, come dressed to work trying their best to look as sexy as is possible. And believe me, they pull out all the stops. In India, the professional attire scenario is different. I doubt I will ever see knee-high boots and a silk jacket hiding a low-cut blouse in corporate India. Not that I’m complaining, or being a prude, but it leaves me wondering, what do they wear to the disco, or an evening formal do?

Facebooked

I find myself being poked into submission, backed up against the wall, scribbles and all. Against the very fabric of my being, I am forced to operate my Facebook account.
God knows, I have poked more people than is good for me and my scribbling I do here. Yet, it’s a strange demograph that is forcing me to Facebook. A bunch of close friends who are all over the age of 40. These guys are clearly not of the online age and should be anti-online-socialising, like me. Yet, they seem inexplicably drawn to the concept. Dragging me with them.

French kissed Down Under

You might miss it, given all the Slumdog-Obama hypermania. But, a nation that adjectivised the kiss for erotic eternity, has three of its men in round four of the Australian Open Tennis Championship.
I remember guys like Henri Leconte and Yannick Noah existing to provide the pretty-boy quotient and quarter-final fodder for the aces in the 1980s.
Since then, the closest France have come to being taken seriously in the men’s game is in the form of Amelie Mauresmo.
Look out now for Jo-Wilifred Tsonga, Gilles Simon and Gaels Monfils. These Frenchies are ripped and ready to rip.

Where are you when shit happens

As a journalist and self-appointed commentator on, and prophet for, humanity, being “there” when epoch-defining events happen is a must. Yet strangely, I seem to miss out on them. When 9/11 happened, it was my day off at work. When Babri Masjid happened I was on holiday in Goa. Now, when the USA’s first Black President is sworn in, I am away from the newsroom (and from TV) because of a death in the family.
I soothe the frayed edges of my journalistic instinct with the hope that detachment will offer me the chance of a different perspective. Sigh!

Death, confusion

And just like that, I find myself in Pune. This time death brought me home. In fact, this is the first death I have experienced where the person in question was truly close to me. The first funeral where the burial of the person, and the vacuum thereafter, was truly tangible.
Only clichés swim around in my mind right now. That’s because they are all true, I guess. I tried to pinpoint the moment someone’s death sinks in – the call that comes to inform, the moments after, the grave being filled…
Death does this for sure – it confuses everything.

I remember when...

I was schooled in the art of housekeeping – call it urban husbandry actually. Going to the market, butcher, post-office, all require a certain ‘nous’ in a small city; especially if this is to be accomplished on a specific budget with no compromise on quality.
Now I find I can pretty much conduct my entire life via the internet. Though essential shopping online is nothing new, it has only recently entered the realm of my existence and therefore, bought into play the nostalgia of cycling around Poona getting home jobs done.
Online for convenience, but real time for experience.