I like to party... Everybody does...

I can't believe Christmas has come and gone... with everything else that was going on, I had absolutely no time to do Christmassy things like sing carols and since I finished all my bloody shopping in Australia, there was no real urgency except of course to wrap all my presents at the last bloody minute as usual. Anyway, I got to sing carols in church and went home and had cake and wine and then went off party hopping at some 3 in the morning to go wish all my friends who were partying the night away!! There was also annual drinks and dinner bash at my house on Christmas night and much wine was drunk by all and much fun was had by all...



I can't believe Madras... It's like I never left. Last year when I visited, I knew no one whenever I went out except for the people I was with... This year, I'm amazed at all the old faces I'm seeing again... the same old faces who used to be at every party and every disco on every Friday and Saturday night when I lived and partied in Madras. Friday night was a very random getting wasted night where I met like some 100 people I hadn't met in years in the one crowded pub and the next day I was still remembering more and more people I'd met or seen... Madras is quite uncanny!

I can't believe I've been functioning on less than 10 hours of sleep every night in spite of being out until all hours every night. Tonight has been the first night I forced myself to stay home so I could recuperate slightly before leaving to Goa tomorrow. Last night was a very wild bachelorette party for a friend and it was a full on 70s theme and her sister and Rat's sister just did a very brilliant job with the decorations... Just like the brilliant job Rat's sister did for Sista T's baby shower... Good job good job ;) And please don't miss my cool pink 70s sunnies on the bar table...





I can't believe how much fun I'm having... I really don't want it to end...

Hey, who's this handsome motherfucker... I just love him to death!



And here's my dear little Chocolate... so old and tired and slow... I really fear she's going to drop dead any second...



So hope you all had a Merry Christmas and I'll see you all in 2006... I could reflect on the year that's been and what not, but fuck that... Happy New Year!!

I'm so love in love with you...whatever you want to do is alright with me...Coz you make me feel so brand new...And I want to spend my life with you

So after all that anticipation, I’m finally here and haven’t had even a single moment to really take it all in with everything going in. It’s been brilliant so far. We started partying as soon as we got off the plane and I think I must’ve slept for about 15 hours in total from the night before I left until Sunday night. Of course now I am making up for many months of insufficient slumber and it’s incredibly peaceful.

What have I done in five days and six nights apart from drink and smoke… I’ve hung out with all my favourite girls and boys and I’ve just laughed and laughed. Some things will never change… (and thank god for those people). I’ve bonded with parents and sister and dog Chocolate met the new dog in my family Rusty… he is sooooo handsome… and such a sweetie… when we first met, he went a bit psycho, but now he’s used to me and is such a darling…



Madras is the same and so different at the same time. So many new places and buildings but instinctively I still know my way around and if I were to close my eyes on a drive and open them five minutes later, I’d still know where I was… She has taken me back so willingly in spite of me ditching her all these years…

Driving here again has been a real trip as always… the way even the slowest autorickshaw will refuse to move out of the right lane and you have no choice but to overtake rather recklessly from the left… Love it… And the noise and the traffic and the potholes and the smells… it’s just all so very real… so very home…

The rain of course has been crazy. I love it and all but it was promising to be a real dampener on the trip. Now I understand all those depressive Bay of Bengal statements… she’s been good today though so there’s hope yet.

And the absolute best part is that S is here with me and its been three years since we’ve been back together… back to where we started and where we had the absolute best time of our lives… Since we've been together, loving you forever is what I need... let me, be the one you come running to... I'll never be untrue

Anyhoo, don’t know when and where I’ll have the time to blog again. But the thing is I want to write as much as I can so I can read it three months from now and remember how awesome it was. So we’ll see…

Cheers to Rat, Sista T, Lavi, Snoop and all my other non-blogger buddies like N, S and all the boys… please continue to entertain me in the same fashion for the next four weeks… Woohoo!

Life I love you… all is groovy…

But I Still (haven't) Found What I Was Looking For…

If you're reading this, then Rat has very kindly put up the post for me. I'm trying not to publish anything to the web at the moment from work and so that's why I haven't been commenting either, but I have been doing my regular reading rounds. Anyway, this is only for another week and then I go home so I can pick up from where I left off.

Right, so the biggest news on my horizon is that I managed to buy tickets to watch U2 live in March after continuously clicking my mouse button for an hour. It was an incredibly nail biting experience… finally I managed it and of course it was sold out soon after, but I think they're doing an additional show now. Anyway, I'm really quite excited because there are such few people I really would like to watch live in concert and U2 is one such band. Now just four months of waiting to go…

Everything is just flashing by damn fast and I don't have even a single moment to just sit back and relax until I get to Madras and even then its going to be Party Central. Friday night was my work Christmas party and it was crazy fun. Every single one of us got unbelievably wasted and kept getting told off for smoking indoors or taking our glasses outside when smoking outdoors. We had a small after-party at our house and I think I managed to sleep about five hours that night before I was rudely woken up on Saturday morning by friends trying to pick up their cars from my basement.

I spent the entire weekend shopping. My room is like a disaster zone with the number of bags lying around. I have NO CLUE how I'm going to fit everything very neatly into one little suitcase that should only weigh 20 kilos. And speaking of gifts, its just getting harder and harder each year. I've bought my parents some real nonsense because I've totally run out of ideas. I'm hoping to finish my shopping inMadras only.

Oh, and apparently Goa for New Years is definitely on so this holiday is really set. Time in Madras and a mad trip to Goa.

Yuletide Tales Episode 2

I read something on JR's blog about how she didn't know that Christmas trees in India were all fake!! Well yes, they were (mostly) and feeling similarly excited at the thought of being able to buy a real tree, two Christmases ago, I decided to get a real tree. First off, it was a real bitch fitting it into the car and I'm not really sure how we managed to carry it up from the basement to the apartment. All I know is, there was a nice trail of pine needles the whole way and we cleaned it all up out of consideration for everyone else in the building. I don't know why we bothered… a few days later someone else brought a real tree home and didn't bother cleaning up.

But anyway, the tree refused to stand up straight. It had a very stubborn list no matter what we tried. Once the decorations were up, they kept slipping off… every day I'd have to rearrange the ones that had fallen off and vacuum the area around the tree because of the constant pine needle debris. But still, we put our many gifts under the tree and went to Midnight Mass (this time I was dead sober) and opened all our presents and had a small party beside the tree on Christmas Day.

Christmas passed and New Years passed. We considered how to get rid of the tree. We couldn't just dump it out front with the garbage cans, we had to go dump it at a garbage tip. We searched and searched online and couldn't find a single tip anywhere even on the Melbourne Council websites – we were quite obviously looking for the wrong thing! Finally one day in early February we decided we absolutely had to get rid of it and planned a dump and run strategy. First we stripped the tree of all its branches and put them into many shopping bags and then S tried cutting the trunk into smaller pieces with our kitchen knife. The knife actually broke or got chipped and poor S got hurt quite badly by a stray branch… he still has the scar. Somehow we managed it and packed it into the car and set off to dump the tree.

The first instalment of bags we dumped near our DVD library because we went there to return DVDs. After we did it though though, we noticed a surveillance camera exactly over thestuff we'd just dumped. Ah well, we didn't get into trouble. The second instalment we dumped near the garbage cans of some apartment building near ours. And the final instalment, wewent to a shopping centre that day and the car park was nearly empty when we left, so we dumped the remaining bags in a shopping trolley and dashed off.

We tried to do the right thing but well, the tip was almost impossible to find. I still don't know where it is. So last year, we went to Kmart and bought a very beautiful faketree that stood straight and didn't leave behind a trail of pine needles and held onto the decorations firmly and very nicely fit into a small box at the end of the season withminimal manual labour. I'm all for real over fake but when it comes to Christmas trees, its definitely more trouble than its worth. And that's all I have to say about that!

Christmas is coming… all the bells are ringing…

Starting December 16, 2005...

...I will sleep for at least ten hours every night
...I will not to do a single household chore
...I will feast on chicken and fish and cutlets and prawns and the best part is, none of it will have to be made by me
...I will enjoy the luxury of actually wearing ironed clothes for a change (I stopped ironing about six months ago… its amazing how you can get by without it)
...I will have dogs in my life again however briefly
...I will get high everyday and get drunk every other day
...I will bring Christmas cheer to all and sundry by singing Christmas carols incessantly (oh boy, are my friends in trouble when I’m drunk)
...I will soak in the heat of my beloved Madras and not worry about how many layers to wear everyday
...I will rest, laze, play, read, blog, catch up with my near and dear ones, exercise a little (maybe), party, talk, dance, laugh, sing…

It’s going to be so good. I’m always worried that a holiday will never turn out as anticipated but this time I just feel its going to be perfect. And its almost like my holiday has started already starting from last Wednesday night… my housemate’s sister is visiting from India and we’ve been smoking like mad and drinking almost every day. This week we did Tuesday night (what a raging wine hangover I had the next morning) and last night and tonight is my work Christmas party so more drinking. And the pace isn’t going to slow down until I leave. If I didn’t have so much to occupy my time, I’d probably be sitting at home and staring at my calendar counting down the days.

Speaking of counting down the days, 24 days till Christmas… I can hardly wait. You saw how excited I was about my birthday… Christmas is that ten times over… the excitement, the anticipation, the homemade wine, the food, the presents, the Christmas tree, the parties, the family, the friends, the shopping, the gift wrapping, the carols, the red and green, the candles, the Mass, the Secret Santas, the red nosed reindeer, the stockings, the holly, the baby Jesus…

So I’m going to start writing a little collection of Christmas memories from now until Christmas in every post. I figure I’ll start with last year since it was most recent…

Yuletide Tales Episode 1

Last Christmas was really quite rocking. It was my second Christmas away from home and depression was bound to set in at some point so I made an effort to party extra hard and not feel too sad. The lead up to Christmas was filled with Christmas parties, boat cruises, lots and lots of Bacardi Limon, lots and lots of carol singing, shopping, Christmas tree decorating, etc. etc. Here’s a picture of my Christmas tree from last year… since we only have each other to buy presents for, we go all out and its not even S and T’s festival but I kinda force them to celebrate it with me… they’re very sweetly adjusting that way… and anyway, who’s not up for presents and parties…

So Christmas Eve dawned bright and clear and we chilled out that day at work and blared carols and Pink Floyd (what a combination) from our speakers and had a couple of drinks when work let off about 2pm. Then I went home and there was a full bottle of Limon to finish and we did just that. By about 6pm I was wasted but it was a very good wasted… People dropped in bearing gifts and drank and smoked with us. In the midst of all this, some random person called me and poor fellow got abused because I thought someone was playing the fool and then I called my Mom a few times… why why do I keep doing this, I don’t know… and all I did was laugh and tell her she sounded different… she thought I was mad… I was just smashed. At about 10pm, I started watching Carols by Candlelight on TV and of course the tears almost came out in my drunkenness and I absolutely insisted we go to church for Midnight Mass because I’ve always gone every year. So I dragged S and my friend from work and three extremely smashed people sat through the whole thing and I even sang along to all the carols very joyfully… I like to think that it wasn’t too sinful what I did… I did sober down during the Mass…

After church we went home and continued drinking and ripped open all our presents… it was such madness and so much fun… I got some cool presents like a mobile phone and an LP player and lots of other random stuff. I don’t even remember when we finally went to bed… but we woke up again on Christmas Day after only a few hours sleep because my friend had invited us to her house for lunch… so we drunkenly drove to her farm about 2 hours away and had a very pleasant time on the farm.

She had cooked up a storm so we ate nicely… she got me a tequila roulette thingie as a present so we all had a few shots of tequila in spite of the hangover and then headed back home. There were phone calls from family the whole day which is always a highlight and when my Mom spoke to me she asked me if she still sounded different… I said No, but I sure sounded different from the night before. We ended the night watching Shrek 2 again which was one of my Christmas presents… god, how I love Donkey and Puss in Boots.

It was a very lovely Christmas in 2004 and I can’t wait to see what happens this year…

That's just the way it is... Things'll never be the same

Isn’t it just the irony of life that when I had no wish to stop blogging, when I had so many exciting things coming up like Christmas, trip home, weddings, babies, bachelorette parties, etc. to blog about circumstances forced me to take a break…

Update: Everyone scared me slightly about how much detail I put up so I have taken down most of the bitching. Here is a gist for anyone who missed out ;)

My boss was fired. Him getting fired set off a crazy chain of events… No one did any work for two weeks… everyone just stared blankly at their monitors, most people took 2 hour lunches everyday and at least thrice a week there was alcohol involved at these sessions, people fucked off whenever they felt like it and took it in turns to call in sick, people picked up fights with people they believed had been involved in getting him fired, people threatened to quit, people did quit, and of course every Friday night was a major regroup and re-strategise campaign at the pub …

I had a little work drama of my own in all this… but now that has been sorted too and the person I was really pissed off at got exactly what he deserved!

So now we’re trying to pick up the pieces and move on from everything that happened in the last three weeks. People will be missed, like my ex-boss and a couple of other friends who also left… I think that we all had a really good time in the last two years and now the party is really over! Well, nothing lasts forever…

Also on that note, my friend from Madras who came to Australia the same time I did and who shared my first apartment with me and S and who washed and ironed his own clothes and cooked his own meals for the first time ever at the same time as me, is returning to Madras for good in a couple of days. I will miss him… his turn of phrase is really quite like no one else’s… we could publish a book on all the funny things he has said in the crudest manner possible… The three of us lived together for 1.5 years and it seems like such a hazy dream now… None of us had lived away from home before, we were all spoiled rotten with never having done chores before, we missed our friends (and family) terribly and tried to recreate our alcoholic party Madras lifestyle in Melbourne and realised it wasn’t quite the same…

But we had our fun and games and wild nights on the town and quiet, reflective nights in. We also had our share of fighting and hating each other, there were car troubles and university troubles and financial difficulties and struggling to make ends meet. Everything was so new and strange… like smoking in our apartment, whenever we wanted, wherever we wanted (I’m so glad we stopped that dirty habit)… That whole first experience of living away from home is really quite something and its impossible not to form this incredible bond with the people you shared it with. And its also impossible not to pick up some embarrassing stories about each other along the way… I’ll hold my tongue though, don’t want embarrassing stories about me to get out!! So anyway, we hung out this weekend one last time in Australia and it was good. The cool thing is he’ll be there in Madras when we visit and he’ll be as jobless as us so we have someone to hang out with during the day like we used to…

I’ll come around and visit everyone real soon, ok? Must get back to work now!

How much is that doggie in the window? I do hope that doggie’s for sale…

Yay… I have been tagged at just the right time when I wasn’t sure what I felt like writing about. So here goes…

Seven Things I Plan To Do:

1. Skydive
2. Learn how to play guitar
3. Get fit
4. Tour Europe
5. Get a dog
6. Buy a convertible
7. Design my own house

Seven Things I Can Do:

1. Sing sing sing
2. Survive quite happily on a diet of rice and curds and fried fish/chicken/mince/prawns/potato
3. Sleep for 12 hours at a stretch
4. Drink like a fish
5. Shine academically
6. Smoke like a hippie
7. Make people laugh

Seven Things I Can't Do:

1. Eat anything that has long slices of onion in it (or even any other kind of vegetable)
2. Get out of bed without snoozing
3. Drink gin
4. Play particularly well at any sport
5. Spend another Christmas without my family
6. Spend my life without a furry four-legged companion of the canine variety
7. Stop eating chocolate

Seven Things I Say Most Often:

1. Fuckin’ hell
2. Chooth (Hindi)
3. Ey Watha (Tamil! I have no idea how the second word is spelt)
4. As if
5. Whatever
6. Yeah right
7. That only

I’m not tagging anyone but everyone is free to do it if they want… it’s a lot harder than it seems!

So then I analysed my things I plan to do list to see if I was close to any of them and I believe I am to some of them.

Skydive – just waiting for the right time or a trip to New Zealand

Learn how to play guitar – I can play notes E and F now. A friend gave me his old guitar which was very kind of him and he would’ve taught me more if everyone else present didn’t prefer him playing the guitar to me learning it. But I shall persevere…

Get fit – Been at the gym for almost two months now. Rather scared to check my weight and measure my waist because what if there hasn’t been any improvement?! Still I do feel slightly better so here’s hoping…

Tour Europe – Ideally, this will happen next year or the year after. But its just so expensive and I can see my entire life savings being blown away on the one trip to Europe. But I think it will be worth it… and its time I stopped spending every holiday of mine in India.

Get a dog – This one kills me the most. Right now I don’t have the house and backyard but more than that I keep wondering what the poor thing will do when I’m out of the house 50 hours a week! The dogs in Madras always had someone for company and when we returned from a holiday they’d let us know exactly how lonely they’d been by barking up a frenzy. Hey… that’s what my next post is going to be about… the story of all my darling dogs (and there were a few)

Buy a convertible – I really want to do this next year but there are many obstacles along the way like getting an Australian drivers licence (I’m quite certain I will fail the test – everyone does at least once) and of course, the big one – money! I could just buy any old car for less money but I think that since I don’t really need a car, it’d be fun to buy a cool car now at the age when I can do cool stuff and not want these things later in life when I am bogged down by shopping bags and car seats!

Design my own house – This seems the furthest away. In fact, I don’t think it’ll happen in this country in this lifetime (I’ll be lucky to even afford an average house off the block) unless I win the lottery… but since I don’t even play… I guess I can hope that I get a super high-paying job in India that will allow me to fulfil this plan…

So there you have it! Let's hope I make them all happen...

Living life the easy way... And sippin’ on Bacardi Rum

Oh joy… summer is almost here. We’re on Daylight Savings Time and that always puts me in a holiday mood since the sun doesn’t set until 9 pm or thereabouts and as a result I always feel like I have some few more hours in a day and take things much easier. We have also had two gloriously hot 30 degree plus days this week and it was simply blissful… especially since the first one was Tuesday and a holiday for the Melbourne Cup of all things (public holiday so we can all sit back and watch the horse races is something else, but I’m not complaining… its our first public holiday since JUNE), and the second one was yesterday and I just couldn’t wake up in the morning so took a sickie… Have I ever mentioned that I love to sleep and once I’m asleep I really really hate waking up but falling asleep is a big big problem for me these days… Ah well, we can talk about my insomnia another time. Lets get back to talking about alcohol instead…

So with spirits we also have the whiskeys and the bourbons and it seems that as people get older they’re drinking more of these but this is one kind of spirit I just can’t stand… not that I haven’t drunk this also when really desperate but its not something I particularly enjoy. I remember that when I first came to Australia I drank a lot of Jim Beam because S and my housemate at the time preferred it and we were poor students so we couldn’t always choose what we drank so I just went along with it and drank it and the thing about it is that it doesn’t really get me happy high… it just gets me into that mode where I know I’ve drunk a lot but can’t really feel the fun effects of it… like when you smoke too much and reach a kind of zone… So anyway, one night in particular stands out when we the three of us drank Jim Beam the whole night and then S passed out and my housemate and I continued and suddenly it was 7:00 in the morning so I thought, “oh, what the hell, let me just go for my 9:00 am class now instead of missing it’. So I went… hahaha… what fun it all was. And it wasn’t my fault my stupid course had a class EVERY Saturday… did they not take into account that people like to get smashed on a Friday night!! But yeah, the whiskeys and the bourbons are so not my thing…

So is Tequila my thing? I think not… although I have always had shitloads of fun every time I went the Tequila route. But its not something I would be up for every weekend… its more a once every four months experience. At the last one, three of us slammed almost two bottles over a few hours and I yelled at everyone at the party and told them they better come to my birthday party the following weekend and on the way home I used up all my credit calling Rat and Sista T and apparently all I kept saying was “Yeah maaan, I’m coming next month maaan… yeah maan” and then just kept laughing hysterically of course. Good times good times… :)

So before we get to the grand finale of my favourite type of alcohol ever (and which you should’ve guessed by now if you know me even a little or if you have been following the alcohol posts closely ;)) lets talk about sweet tasting and some not so sweet tasting liquors and such. I’ve always been a Baileys on the rocks fan for just a quiet dinner and night in type thing and I’m very attached to Kahlua for sentimental you me and you reasons. So guess what… it is also possible to get extremely fucking high on this deadly combo particularly if you are slamming them both together… So one sunny AFTERNOON, four people slammed a bottle of Baileys and Kahlua and guess what me and my friend slammed next… we finished a whole disgusting bottle of Sambucha… oh my god, that stuff tastes GROSS… but we slammed it… and I was very very high, I kid you not. We also went clubbing that night after all this and I had a good time dancing for a while and then went stumbling to find a bathroom and instead I went into some employee area and literally stumbled down a few steps and twisted my ankle and just lay there in a heap for some unknown period of time. I really have no clue how anyone found me or helped me out of there… the next thing I know I’m in the lounge next to the ladies bathroom and there’s an ice pack around my ankle and all the ladies who came in kept asking me if I was alright and if I wanted anything… so I bummed a couple of cigarettes and lay back on the couch with my leg lifted and smoked away until S found me (and I don’t really know how he found me… I was rather out of it to realise that people would be wondering where I was)… That was such a fun night… even the whole ankle experience… at the end of it all on the way home, in extreme drunkenness I started crying for my Mommy and its so funny that I started crying for my Mommy because my Mommy is not the ‘oh you poor thing, how did it happen’ kind of Mommy… she’s more the ‘serves you right… this is what you get for going out at all hours and drinking and what not’ kind of Mommy.

So this of course brings us to the end… the best kind of alcohol ever… (drum roll, please)… RUM… sweet smelling, molasses fermented rum… rowdy, ass-kicking, rum… Ah rum, how I love it. I’m very glad that I got off the vodka in the early days and switched to rum… what a whole new world it was… I’m at a loss for words right now… I should probably be under the influence of some rum to write more eloquently about it … my favourites are Old Monk (I hate Old Cask for some reason) and Bacardi Lemon (affectionately called lime juice)… but I also like plain ol’ Bacardi Superior and Bacardi Oro and Reserva… I’ve had some lethal Jamaican Coruba rum and I think after Old Monk, my favourite Indian rum is good ol’ Kodais (I don’t even know how its spelt… I am referring to the Bangalore one)… But has anyone tried Bacardi 151… I think its 60% alcohol or something and I almost threw up slamming half a shot and couldn’t even drink it when it was mixed with coke.

But I’ve drunk rum at the oddest of times and the oddest of places and it has always delivered a good time… I’ve drunk rum with coke and orange juice and sprite and pineapple juice and I’ve even drunk it with fucking water whenever we’ve run out of coke at a slumber parties at my house… Old Monk & water is just fucking foul by the way… we’ve finished a whole bottle of Bacardi at 5 am as we watched the sun rise and the train glide into Londha station one hazy December morning… … we’ve drunk it in paper cups in backseats of cars with no ice and warm coke and we’ve sipped it in style sitting in beach house gazebos… we’ve mixed it in 500ml bottles of coke to quickly slam on the road on the way to a party (the ever present “ready mix”) and we’ve drunk it in Pina Coladas and Mai Tais… I’ve finished a quart of rum in my room one night by myself and sneaked down and stole some of my Dad’s to keep the buzz going one jobless night.

Under the influence, I have professed my love and undying friendship to many a rowdy rum compatriot… I have danced till the cows came home and sung till I couldn’t sing another note… I have pretended to be sober with family and how many times have I driven home in such a state… I have puked my guts out and laughed my ass off… I have cried like the world was ending and I have eaten like there was no tomorrow… I have yelled at anyone who would listen (including my boss) about my current depressing work situation (this actually happened last Friday in a marathon Bacardi session – I think I had at least 12 drinks in total) and I have karaoke-d like it was going out of style… all in all, I really do love that little drink called rum. Remember that Bacardi ad with all the people chilling and drinking in the tropical island type place and on a yacht and such and singing this song…

Be what you want to be
Taking things the way they come
Living life the easy way
And sippin’ on Bacardi Rum

I used to love that ad before I started drinking and I’d actually forgotten all about it until now. There may not have been yachts or a tropical islands but we have had some very good times sippin’ on all sorts of rum… May the good times roll on… Cheers!

Well, show me the way to the next whiskey bar... Oh, don’t ask why…

By the way, I was extremely wasted when I wrote that last entry. I’m not sure if anyone picked up on that… skilful that I am at hiding my highness. Haha, as if… you can always tell if I’m high from a mile away. But anyway, I was high on wine so I myself was not fully aware of the extent of my highness. Wine is so strange that way… two glasses pretty much get you to the “I’m so happy” stage and after that it can go either way really quickly for me… feel really sleepy, head starts hurting, bad mood, stomach contents start heading north, etc. etc. OR drink a few glasses more, everything is fine as wine as far as stomach contents go, head buzzes quite happily, and anything goes in terms of dancing, singing, eating, etc. etc. But still at the end of this nice side of wine also my head eventually starts hurting and sleep beckons and all and the next morning always feels like a professional football team spent the whole night practicing in my head. And I know what you’re thinking… ah, it must be all the cheap wine, but no, my wine hangovers do not discriminate. Once, my visiting uncle took us to an incredible fancy Italian restaurant/wine bar and we tried at least three different types of fucking expensive wine and it was the same old saga the next morning. So why do I drink wine you ask? I’m not entirely sure… sometimes there’s nothing else on offer, sometimes my stomach is too full to handle anything heavy like spirits and Coke, sometimes I think “Oh yes, two glasses of wine to get a nice buzz and no more drinking because I don’t want to get drunk”… that plan always fails of course because I can never halt at that nice buzz stage… I prefer to not drink at all or just get totally wasted… There’s nothing worse than running out of booze when you’re halfway there… its really like taking you to the top of the mountain and showing you what you can’t have.

Well anyway, we have established that wine and me are not best friends. Having said that though, I absolutely adore homemade wine and Christmas in Madras is always a bumper season of slamming bottles of homemade wine. Every time I’ve had a wine party at my house on Christmas night, everyone pretty much has a bottle for themselves. Much fun. Must remind Mom to start stocking bottles for this year, now only.

Wine’s close compatriot is beer of course. Mmm… Beer… Come to think of it, beer is possibly the first taste of alcohol I ever had because my Dad was in the habit of giving me tiny sips now and then when I was a kid because I used to think it looked absolutely wonderful… the golden colour and the white froth and all. How funny, I was just typing this and thinking about my Dad and he calls unexpectedly. There are forces at work a lot of the time I tell you. Anyway, I never really enjoyed beer until I came to Australia. And by the way Fosters is a really shit Australian beer and no one here drinks it… how they bloody promote it in India like it’s as synonymous with Australia as Waltzing Matilda.

But there’s a time and a place for beer and again I am limited to what conditions I can drink it in. For example, if I’m starting my drinking on a Friday evening and plan to be out until the wee hours, beer is a big No No because my stomach just feels really full and all the gas builds up and I just feel like I’m going to explode. But if I’m just hanging out on a warm Sunday afternoon in the park playing cards and Dumb Charades and have no deeds to do before I sleep, I’m quite happy to drink three beers and go to bed with a smile on my face and a lovely beer buzz in my head. Its also quite pleasing to sip a cold beer when everyone and everything is winding down after a huge night of partying and all we can afford is a Rs.100 bottle of Kingfisher compared to the relatively expensive Rs.150 for an Old Monk & Coke… I’m just randomly quoting figures by the way, I can’t really remember the prices. But I think that when it comes to taste, there is no other alcohol that is quite as exciting as beer because there is just so much freaking variety. I’ve tried many different beers from different countries and some of my personal favourites are Australia’s own Beez Neez, Belgium’s Stella Artois, Australia’s James Boags, Mexico’s Corona (without the lemon though), and quite recently I was introduced to a very delicious German beer called Hansa Pils. Mmm… Beer…

Moving on to my favourite alcohol genre… Spirits… in all shapes and sizes… well, actually not… I’m quite fussy here also. Let’s talk vodka. Most people I know first started drinking with vodka. I don’t why this was but when I think about that horrible Romanov vodka we used to drink for lack of better options I seriously wonder how it did not just kill us… that too, we used to only take shots when we first started… The only picture this presents in my head is one of acid corroding our insides. But anyway, it was all good fun to get SMASHED on two shots of vodka… so much cheaper and nicer on the waistline also because of no added Coke calories… Since those heady “get smashed on two drinks” days, quality of vodka has improved steadily. All the Absolut and Smirnoff varieties available these days make for nary a dull moment. And has anyone tried Stolichnaya vodka? I’m not sure if its very good or not but I have had a couple of fun nights on this vodka. But still, vodka is still not what really gets my juices flowing. I’ll drink it if there’s nothing else but wouldn’t really go out and buy some for myself… although, there is a very nice ad on TV these days for something called Absolut Cut and the ad is incredibly tempting, so we’ll see. And how about the rumour that vodka causes impotence in men… don’t know how true it is but I do share this tip with any boy I know who drinks vodka. And then there’s that whole “oh, but vodka doesn’t smell so its perfect to avoid letting your parents what you’ve really been up to” but that is such bull crap… all forms of alcohol smell and it doesn’t matter if you take two shots or two sips… anyone with a keen sense of smell (like me) will immediately be able to tell if you’ve been naughty or nice

It seems there is a lot more to cover than I originally thought so looks like this will have to be continued. But in the meantime, do share your views on wine, beer and vodka. White or red? Best beer ever? Drank vodka the very first time you drank? And if you’re a teetotaller, I’d like to hear from you too… and hang on, don’t call AA yet… I only drink once a week except for holidays and special occasions…

To be continued…

Well it's too late, tonight, to drag the past out into the light

It’s been so long since I’ve written that suddenly this whole weekend the words have been tumbling out in my head and sometimes I really wish I had a Dictaphone or something so I could record these things I want to say as they come up in my head. Fuck, that was one hell of a long sentence.

So anyway, lots to tell. Work is really crap and I really want to get out of here but for now I’m just going to chill here because I’m going on holiday and what not. But like seriously, work is SOOOOO crap its not funny. Its just too complicated to get into right now so I’m just going to pretend that everything is hunky dory. And you know what, in my head, everything is really hunky dory because all I can think of is India… Madras… my home… my family… my friends… my dogs… it’s so close I can almost reach out and touch it. But of course I can’t… because there’s still a month and a half or so to get through… But then I think about it again and it’s like, what the fuck is 1.5 months in the greater scheme of things… because in my head, I’ve already planned the whole holiday… and in my head, everything is as it should be, as it used to be…

Last night I went to a friend’s house for a birthday party… and it was at his house, in his backyard… I can’t even remember how long it’s been since I’ve sat around in someone’s backyard… Backyards fucking ROCK! It was just so nice to sit there in someone’s honest to goodness house… normally it’s someone’s shitty rented apartment… Backyards remind me of house parties in Madras… how many have there been… my own house and its “front yard”… what tales it could tell… my terrace too… well if it came down to it, what tales my dogs could tell also… they’ve been there throughout… and I remember people trying to get my dogs stoned… poor babies… as if I hadn’t tried that already when I used to smoke in my bathroom before going to bed… they were just not into it… smart doggies!!

Today I went to a Cuban Jazz festival at a winery in Melbourne’s famous Yarra Valley… it was much fun, I say… there was dancing and bottles and bottles of wine… there were Salsa lessons that nobody followed really, and there were more bottles of wine… and there were grey skies and blue skies and raindrops on my face and the sun shining brightly… it was surreal... you know, that wine kinda lazy high...

It’s been a weekend of U2 and James Blunt… re-listening to U2 classics like “One” and “With or Without You” and discovering new songs like “Goodbye, My Lover” and “Tears and Rain”…

Well its too late, tonight, to drag the past out into the light… Its really quite something else to be going home again… its like a warm glow you can’t get away from really… Oh shit, working 10 hour days… oh wait, going home in a month and a half… its all OK…

You say goodbye, and I say Hello...

This is to announce the early retirement of this blog. My heart is just not in it anymore and I think I'd like to stop now before I lose the urge to write completely... because that would just be not right. So anyway, I am taking a break and I have to say it was a really fun trip. When my professor introduced us to Blogger in 2003 and went on about blogging being the next big 'community-building' tool, we kinda dismissed it all as geek speak. But he was right and I think he would be terribly impressed with the online community that I felt such a part of in the last few months.

I'm sure I'll be back soon. And I'll be sure to look you all up... Don't go anywhere, you hear ;)

Anyway, don't want to get too senti or anything... For now, its so long, and thanks for all the fish :)

Last night I had the strangest dream. I sailed away to China, on a little rowboat to find ya…

Very lazy to blog about anything original so I will give you some random recycled rambling excerpts from the rubbish I wrote three years ago and that I recently rediscovered thanks to recovered hard disk. Wow… that must be a personal best record of number of words beginning with R in the same sentence! I must warn you… a lot of it is really random and makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking back then!

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Sometimes you think about life back home and you wonder what you miss the most, apart from the people and dogs of course. It would be easy to say it was the food and the car and the entertainment, but I think it goes beyond that. It’s the smells… I step out on my balcony here (when it’s warm enough) and I only smell the city – dust, fumes, noise (yes, I can smell noise)! At home I’d often wake up to smells of people cooking… rich, spicy aromas. Sometimes I’d wake up to the wonderful smell of rain. And when I enter my house, it’s the smell of food and dogs… And my room, just the right amount of perfume in the air… it was perfectly balanced. If I smoked, the balance was destroyed and I worked painstakingly to restore it. It never failed to bring a smile to my face whenever I entered my room and caught a whiff of that familiarity…. like an old friend. And my parents’ room, so comforting… And my Dad’s aftershave… every single day I’d smell it in the living room, on the phone and in the car. And strangely enough the smells change as the seasons change. Summer has such a distinctive smell… it reminds me of something musty and old. Christmas leaves the smell of wine and cake in the air. When I first got here I imagined singing “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams”. But now I will be home for Christmas and I can hardly wait.

Last night I had a strange dream… it was me arriving for the first time in a foreign country. However the trams were strangely elevated and you had to take an escalator to get to the tracks. Something or someone informed me it was San Francisco… There were strange people in the dream… people I once knew but didn’t seem to know anymore. There were strange happenings in the dream… things I can’t remember in the harsh daylight of reality, but I do know that everything happened on that strange elevated tram. I wonder if I even bought a ticket!

Saturday, 7 December 2002

Editorial Note: I remember now that I was very very drunk when I wrote this!

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My goodness, I can’t wait to see Holly’s adorable face and Chocolate’s adoring face!! I try so hard to be cosmopolitan and everything but it never really works… when you think about it! Let us be lovers – we’ll marry our fortunes together. It’s so strange sometimes, actually living with people! I am homeward bound and I can’t hardly believe it… everyone looks at being homeward bound as a bad thing. Sometimes it might as well have been the 70’s or 60’s in San Francisco… people are still the same. People are strange but they’re still a part of the 60’s and the 70’s and you don’t get much stranger than that!!

I mean, tonight I was watching Dawson’s Creek and I certainly didn’t have any part to play in any freaking creek – why is high school such an issue? It’s supposed to be the best years of your life but somehow or the other reality gets a grip and you have no choice but to follow the signs… Man, the days I live in are completely awesome.

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My life is flashing before my eyes… I didn’t have the high school years of Dawson’s Creek or the Wonder Year’s for that matter, but I still feel a part of something… strangely enough!!! I love you life… honestly!!

Tuesday, 8 April 2003

Sometimes I wonder about the things I write… Is it really normal for a 21 year old to have such a pessimistic outlook on life? And the constant reminiscing… isn’t that more in keeping with a 65 year old? Or have I already passed through the best years of my life? Life was a lazy race in the sun… How on earth did I get so jaded? There is one thing that’s improved over the years, and that’s my newly straightened hair… Well, not so new anymore but it still gives me such pleasure to look at it in the mirror that I’m convinced it’s going to be taken away from me.

My dreams haunt me terribly… Lately they’re very real and based on people in my life and sometimes I don’t like to wake up. And sometimes I wake up with a smile only to realise it was just a dream. Isn’t life cruel enough without giving us the option of fantasising other versions of it? Some days the lines between fantasy and reality are so blurred, I worry about myself!

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Its understandable why half the population in the world has experimented with drugs at some point in their lives… it’s the easiest form of escapism. Even now, just remembering it all has done enough for me. I am fine… I will be fine!

Friday, 25 April 2003

I think this is the first time I’ve woken up with the urge to write. It’s the dreams I tell you… I can’t escape them no matter how hard I try. I used to think myself lucky that I could actually remember my dreams every time I woke up, but now I wonder about that… The other urge I had this morning was to listen to ‘Wish You Were Here’… We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl… Have we found the same old fears? Wish you were here… Wish they were here. Maybe I should stop dwelling on all that is gone and focus more on what is to come! But, it just seems so bleak. Hmmmm, I wonder if I was so melancholy before I met Pink Floyd… I think I was… I think I was born this way. Maybe she’s born with it, maybe its Maybelline.

Editorial Note: That last line was an ad for Maybelline. I can’t remember if India had the same ad.

We are the girls of a noble school, whose glorious past has made our rule... To its traditions we'll be true

To some tagging business from Rat first...

The instructions for this meme (am I the only one who has no idea what a meme is??) are as follows:

1. Delve into your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five people to do the same.

My 23rd post was written on June 29, 2005 and it was all about the time I spent in sunny California in May this year. I actually had a song at the beginning so the fifth line of that was

Nothing's gonna stop us now

The 5th line in the actual post itself was

So time to write about California and Los Angeles and my dear friend J...

I just read it again now and boy, did we have a blast for those couple of days. I wanna go on holiday again :( Ok, I'll stop complaining... my next holiday is coming up in 2.5 months. Yippee...

Right, so what else? I had a rather alcoholic weekend... Remember all that leftover booze from my party? Let's just say, it's been taken care of... And the thing was that I had planned to save myself for Saturday night because I had a birthday party to go to and being as old as I am now, drinking really does take its toll on me... gone are the days of drinking for 4 days non-stop and sleeping for 4 hours in between... now I limit myself to one night of bingeing and at least 10 hours of sleep to escape a hangover. But anyway, it seems once we started we couldn't stop on Friday night.

But I put in a good effort for Saturday night as well... I started at about 8 pm at a friend's dinner to meet his parents who were visiting and who I hadn't met in many years. Then we went to this really cool bar called The Long Room... apparently it literally has the longest bar in Melbourne and it stretches from one end of the "long" room to the other. It also has this really cool tapas area that looks like its been set up for an old-fashioned seven course meal type banquet and there were little alcoves that could be curtained for privacy and there were animal heads all over the place and polished wood tables and it was all rather trippy and Hotel California-ish. From here we went to the birthday party at Bambu bar and I proceeded to get very drunk and my two old school friends and I sat and laughed about all the strange girls we had ever studied with. It was so funny to remember some of them... some of them I'd even forgotten existed. All girl Catholic convent schools have to get the award for putting the most bizarre mix of girls together ever! It's amazing we all just didn't claw each other to death along the way!

My night did not end with the party. We met up with a couple of other people and had a drink at Cookie and there was this Aboriginal AFL player (or so he claimed, I must go investigate if it was really him) who was feeling very partial towards Indian looking people because of the number of racial slurs he's had to put up with with people calling him Indian/Paki... not that his own poor race isn't equally discriminated against! Anyway, then everyone came over to our place and we smoked many joints and I passed out at 5 am from excessive levels of alcohol and weed in my system! But hey, I did manage to make it to work today.

Finally I will leave you with a poem S wrote for me. Suddenly he has discovered some latent talent to rhyme and has been sending me poems left, right and centre. His next plan is to add some bad language and turn it into Hip Hop...

This morning I had to switch off the alarm
And for that, I had to stretch my arm

Then I saw the face I would miss
Couldn’t help but give it a kiss

Looking forward to seeing you tonight
Only then will I feel alright

Seven years has gone so fast, wake me up when September ends

One final entry and then the birthday chapter can be closed for a year. September is really quite a crazy month with all the birthdays of people I know and it seems everywhere I go in blogworld, I am greeted with more birthday tales. And another friend from school is also turning 24 on the 30th so still one more September birthday party left for me!

So, the party was mad. I wish I could give you some highlights but I really don’t remember anything. Not in the ‘I was so wasted and can’t remember a thing’ way but it was all just a blur and there were so many people and conversations happening at the same time that by the end of the night I had no clue what had happened. I was just very drunk as was everyone else and I can chalk it up as another wild night to my ever-so-long list of wild nights. I did some quick mental math also (ok I lied, I had to use my fingers and also some pen and paper) and there were 26 people in total including my household and only 2 people didn’t drink (one was driving and the other is a teetotaller) and everyone brought shitloads of alcohol… and I mean, shitloads… and this was hard alcohol… whisky, bourbon, vodka, rum… no baby stuff for us… it was about 15 bottles in total… the next morning I looked and there was 1 bottle of Smirnoff left, half a bottle of Bacardi, half a bottle of Malibu and some dreadful UDL (disgusting vodka pre-mixes) cans, some of which have been there since last New Years. So basically 24 people polished off about 12 bottles of alcohol… that is so wrong and so right at the same time.

And speaking of alcohol, a couple of friends from work bought a whopping 1125ml bottle of Bacardi to bring to my party (because they are all aware of my rum obsession) and they hid it in the office and forgot to bring it along that night and now it is sitting here on my desk taunting me in its full alcoholic glory. I think I am going to put it back into hiding because it is frightening me a little.

One of my friends also did a quick drug run in between and brought us some stuff to smoke from his house. And we smoked it in the cutest little pipe… it was so small and shiny and cute.

All of the pictures are of drunk faces… I was too busy getting drunk to worry about blog-worthy photos. Anyway, I have blurred a couple for your viewing pleasure.

Here are some people taking vodka shots… I did not participate for the sake of my health and well-being



Here are the beautiful helium balloons that my friends from work got me. They are so bright and colourful and happy and I got immense pleasure from looking at them



Say Hello to Scooby Dooby Doo… the most popular guest at the party. One of my friends from work brought him along and I was rather concerned Scooby was going to poop all over the carpet and add to the general alcohol and food stains. But Scooby was very well-behaved and everyone lavished much attention on him and didn’t want him to leave. Poor little Scooby was originally a farm dog (he belonged to my friend’s husband, the farmer who gave me those shot glasses and liquor bottles) but he was never cut out to be a farm dog and I think the cows terrified him no end and he was basically very traumatised and they gave him to this guy G at work and he’s like this single, middle-aged guy and they basically love each other to death now and it was the start of a very beautiful relationship. So that’s the story of Scooby.



I received some nice presents from friends who came to the party also. Firstly my four work friends who sit around me at work wrote the most random, rambling convoluted tale about me and my dog Holly based on all the nonsense I’ve ever said to them over 1.5 years. I would share it with you, only you’d think they or me (or both) were on crack! It was very sweet, all the same. They also got me Lazy Shit from the Turd family. We got another friend Dumb Shit a while back and slowly we must build the whole family.

I also received:



a Beatles Abbey Road LP

a Beatles ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ DVD

a beautiful chain

a beautiful bracelet

a funky MNG top

a really cool lantern type thing with candle

some yummy Ferrero Rochers (which have been attacked already)

some flowers and a bottle of wine

Birthdays I tell you… how I love them!

And what a lovely surprise I received in the mail yesterday… this year, I only received ONE greeting card by post from my grandparents and am very surprised I didn’t get a few from my parents and sister. So anyway, yesterday, I received this beautiful handwritten letter from my favourite girls in the whole world, Rat and Sista T.



It is as beautiful as some of the stuff we made when we were 11 and discovered glitter pens and things for the first time – even the handwriting is the same. Isn’t it funny how their handwriting hasn’t changed all that much since we were 11 and yet here we are at 24 (and 23 for baby Sista T) and one is a successful blogger operating out of Madras and another is an expectant mother waiting for baby in Delhi and the third is a smoker looking to escape corporate life in Melbourne. How the world turns and pulls us along.

Ok, that was my philosophy for my 24th year. I will leave you now. Wake me up when November ends because that’s when the next love-attention-party-drugs-alcohol-presents fest of Christmas begins!!

Once there was this girl who wouldn't go and change with the girls in the change room

The infamous Rat has also hit the big 24 today. Most of you already read her blog and let me just confirm that she is as sweet and genuine and funny and sincere in real life as she is on her blog. Sometimes it’s difficult to say the things we really feel about the people we really love because then you run the risk of becoming all corny and sugary but hey, it’s not like I haven’t done any of this already so here goes…

Once there was a girl called Rat and a girl called Penny Lane and they attended kindergarten and junior school together but weren’t really friends or anything. For one thing, we had our respective best friends already and for another thing, Rat’s Mom and her best friend’s Mom were teachers in our junior school and so all the other teachers used to be very nice to these two little Rats (we’ll call them both that for convenience) and they were always left in charge of the class when the teachers had a meeting and so quite naturally they used to be very smug about all this and the rest of us used to bitch about them nicely. Anyway, I started inviting them to my birthday party from the fourth standard onwards and so we sort of started getting along and then in the fifth standard, Rat, Sista T and me were school captains and we ditched class to take care of some younger class in the sports field (I don’t know why we thought we’d get away with that) and boy, was our teacher mad. But it was like our first escapade together and the start of a beautiful (and highly mad) relationship.

In high school, Rat lost all her position of power as a teacher’s daughter :p and was integrated into our larger school gang that had been together since junior school… there were like about 12 of us I think and we had many good times together but we also fought and bitched a lot and by age 13, everyone broke up into smaller groups and it was Rat, Sista T and another girl and me and that was really the beginning of you me and you. I’m not going to get into the story of you me and you again… there are just too many stories and too many memories.

Let it just be known that you couldn’t find a sweeter, more fun individual anywhere… she’s thoughtful and kind and is loved by everyone who knows her. In fact, she’s probably the only one who’s still in touch with every single friend of hers from any point in her life including most of her ex-lovers. And as for me and her, its just one big laugh fest when we’re together and a huge part of that laughing is because of the crazy questions she keeps asking. At one point, we called her Rat Question Mark because she didn’t talk and only asked seemingly irrelevant questions. Anyway, I could go on and on about the madness of Rat but if you’re not lucky enough to know it for yourself, well then, all the more bad luck to you!

Thank you dear Rat for being the best friend a girl could ask for and thank you for keeping me entertained all these years… I know you wanted a poem but it seems I must save something for Christmas and I hope this was satisfactory for now. Have a Happy Happy Birthday and I hope your party rocked. And let's keep working on getting you to Melbourne so we can live happily ever after together ;)

P.S. The title song lyrics have nothing to do with Rat... it was just one of the songs we used to laugh our asses off at when we were younger!

I need you more than anyone darling, you know that I have from the start

So much to tell… so little time… Birthday has been a total blast thus far. Actually it started last weekend itself – I am a strong believer in the birthday week concept… why celebrate just one day when you can celebrate a whole week ;) Anyway, last weekend involved much drinking and smoking and singing and it was a very tired me that started the working week on Monday.

Wednesday night, we drank some beers at home and stared at the clock from 10:30 pm willing it to go faster because I was so sleepy and tired. But I did perk up considerably when it neared 12:00 and then there was much hugging and kissing before I demanded my presents. S bought me some kick ass stuff and he even wrote me a cute poem in my card (what a year for poems this has been) and it was all very sweet and thoughtful. So presenting my hoard:



One funky iPod Nano – how tiny and sleek and sexy does it look. And don’t miss the packaging… it all fits into that double CD type box

One DKNY watch – very nice. My old watch I’ve been wearing for about 5 years and as if it knew its time was up, the battery stopped the other day and I hadn’t replaced it because I had a feeling I was getting a new one ;)

A Bob Dylan DVD which I shall watch this weekend

A photo frame because he wants all my photos to be consolidated in the one place and not displayed all over the room as they are currently

And perhaps the sweetest gift of them all, a DVD with all my old music and photos and documents that I felt were lost for good when my old PC packed up and which he recovered for me.

And he also bought me flowers last night and I have forgotten to take a picture of them. Damn!

My housemate T also bought me a very cool gift. He bought the poster and did much artwork himself to mount it and frame it, etc. Check it out hanging proudly in the living room…



I went to work rather late last morning and was greeted with the following beautiful things…



A bouquet with little notes from most of my friends

A pair of earrings that my friend actually made. Talent, I say…

A card and a beautiful shell pendant from two of my other friends

Two shot glasses and six tiny liquor bottles from the husband of one of my friends who remembers my last birthday quite vividly because the week before I went to their house for a party and got absolutely wasted on tequila shots (two friends and I finished 1.5 bottles between us) and very vocally insisted he come to my party the following week (he’s this 6 foot 5 inch well-built farmer man). I haven’t given such loud performances in a while. Maybe tonight…

I made bludging at work an art form yesterday… I did absolutely nothing except talk to people and answer phone calls. There were so many phone calls also… much fun it was. Parents, grandparents, Rat, JR, Sista T, Snoop (whose call I missed :( ), aunts, uncles, cousins, friends here and lots of emails too.

Lunch was a very lazy affair at TGIF. I shouted a round of drinks (we only had one round since we had to go back to work)… Check out my Ultimate Long Island Iced Tea… its not that lame Long Island Iced Tea your grandma sips… this is the Ultimate one. Look at the size of the bloody glass… Anyway, it didn’t really do much except make me very sleepy at work that afternoon (not that I was doing anything except transferring music to my iPod).



Finally last night, I took S and T out for dinner to Blue Train. Had a couple of Cosmopolitans (I’m actually a rum and coke chick but its nice to drink colourful drinks on your birthday even if they don’t get you high) and then we finished off at P.J. O’ Brian’s with two rounds of Pink Pussy shots!



With about half an hour left of my birthday I got to speak to my sister. Her friends had thrown her a surprise party at home about then and I was treated to a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday to me from all her friends. Madam was more interested in hanging out with her boys and girls than talking to me so I let her go after telling her to check her email because I emailed her the poem but I don’t think she’s had the time and today she’s off on an interstate class trip. Ah well, that’s 16 year olds for you…

Ended the night by listening to tons of my old music on my brand new iPod Nano for about two hours and very sleepy at work now. Damn… have to party my ass off tonight also!

S has been awesome throughout… pandering to my every whim. I wish it was my birthday every day. I suppose I’ll have to settle for the week.

And where was I before the day, that I first saw your lovely face

Tomorrow is my baby sister’s birthday. Well she’s not really a baby anymore but since she was born when I was 8 years old, I’ll always think of her as my baby sister. So, tomorrow is also my birthday. And I’ve already heard all the jokes like ‘Wow, what planning’ and ‘Mallu family wanted to save on two birthday parties’… just for the record, we have always had two birthday parties (sometimes even a third for family) except for her 1st birthday and my 9th. That was a funny birthday party. It was at the Gymkhana club and there was a merry-go-round that I kept stopping every 5 seconds to go greet everyone who arrived and there was a puppet show that was damn stupid, or was it a magic show? But since so many people were invited for her 1st birthday party, I know I got TONS of presents!

Anyway, I still remember the day my father told me I was going to have a little brother or sister. For as long as I could remember before then, every time I prayed in Church or wished for something at Christmas, there was always a ‘Dear God, please give me a baby sister’. And He actually delivered on September 22, 1989. She was really due on the 25th but decided to come out early. That night, I remember I spent the night in my parents room as a treat (I was going to be 8 after all and it was time I got used to sleeping alone) and halfway through the night, I was woken up and sent off to sleep in my room and the next morning by the time I got all dressed up (how exciting was it to not wear a uniform for one day) and armed myself with the traditional birthday sweets to distribute at school, Her Highness had arrived. After a terribly exciting day at school (it was an exam day, so I couldn’t have taken the day off) talking about my new baby sister, I rushed to the hospital to see her for the first time. And she was everything I had always imagined she would be… a cute and soft and pretty and talcum powder smelling overall adorable bundle!

She was my babe, and she still is. I constantly told her she was the best birthday present I’d ever received. I was fascinated by her when she was a baby. I had my own real life doll to play with (although my Mom never let me cut her hair). And as a toddler, she was absolutely adorable, always saying the most outrageous things. And what a freaking temper she had… she’d throw the loudest of tantrums and yell she wanted things “now only” and when she was pissed off, she had this hilarious pout and I’d call her Miss Piggy (from the Muppet Show) and that would just make her madder than before…. Once, she got so mad, she just grabbed the glasses off my face and snapped them in two… I wanted to fucking kill her. But she was always incredibly apologetic later… she’d tear the posters on my room door in anger and later she’d slip a little note saying Sorry and beautifully decorated with flowers and all that childish jazz and Rs. 50 to buy new ones (she always had shitloads of cash also)!

So she was all very sweet and lovable for a long time and then from about age 8 to 14, she became the most insufferable Miss “I want to know it all and think I know it all” for miles around. She made it her life mission to find out exactly what I was up to, which boys I had a crush on, what I was spending my money own, etc. etc. She was really something else… she pissed me off on an almost continuous basis. We had very rare moments of bonding… like when we played with our dogs or watched Friends on TV every weeknight at 8 pm… and she still ran to my room some nights and made me hug her till she fell asleep if my parents had a fight, and she still slipped me little notes of apology when we fought. But mostly it was yelling and screaming or pretending she didn’t exist or telling her without fail that she was the worst birthday present I’d ever received.

Then I left to Australia and I’ve hung out with her thrice since. Last year, I was in India for two weeks and barely got to see her or talk to her but already I could tell that she was becoming a sweet young girl and wasn’t a silly kid anymore. And of course, she somehow managed to pop a sweet note saying she loved me into a suitcase that I took to Delhi for the wedding. This year, I really got to hang out with her day and night in Virginia for two weeks and it was just incredible getting to know her like that without the distraction of friends and parties and school and Madras in general. I found out again that she was really funny and sweet and really a cool chick… and did I mention, she’s become such a hottie… watch out world, here comes my sister, da bomb! The past couple of years I don’t know if it was just all the teenage angst or what, but she went totally grunge and wore all these horrid shapeless pants and loose t-shirts… then for this trip, she told me to buy her strappy tops and party tops and I was so excited she was over that phase I went out and bought her at least 15 funky items of clothing and boy, did she look hot in them!

Anyway, there’s something about baby sisters… they get a pretty bum deal sometimes… they become the slaves of older siblings, they are the proud recipients of hand-me-downs quite often and everything they ever do is compared to what their older sibling did at that age… but also, and they may not realise this, the need to protect and defend and nurture and pamper is so strong, its almost maternal… when I go shopping before heading home for a visit, I buy stuff for everyone, but at the top of my list and at every shop I go to, its always her I want to buy the world for in an attempt to make up for not being around in the last couple of years. And I know she adores me as I adore her and secretly she wants to be just like me (and she’s actually getting there, family get confused about who’s talking and who’s wearing what) and maybe she even misses me a little in the midst of her active high school life… I know that I miss her a lot these days and I can’t wait to see her again in December. I’ve written her a poem (this is the first poem I have ever written in my entire life, so the rhyming is pretty sad and basic) and I haven’t decided if I’m going to give it to her yet.

And as for me, I’m turning 24 tomorrow. I feel old old old! I know its not really old in the grander scheme of things, but I can’t help feeling my youth just happily slipping away from me. Anyway, I am expecting many cool presents and fun lunches and dinners and phone calls from all and sundry (oooh, now I get to get birthday wishes from bloggers too, what fun) and of course big birthday bash on Friday night! I’m still feeling old but I have the rest of the year to worry about that… the next few days is all about celebrating the fact that I was born ;)

The Looking Glass

I remember the day you were born
It stands clearly in my mind
From the minute I saw your tiny face
I never wanted to leave your side

You grew older and more cheeky
You were my favourite clown
Your antics always made me smile
If ever I was down

There were times I may have shouted
There were times you pissed me off
It was all a part of growing up
I regret I didn’t show more love

Now I look at you all grown up
And I feel so very proud
That my baby sister
Is adored by such a crowd

Today you turn sweet sixteen
And I turn twenty four
You are the perfect sister
I couldn’t have asked for more

We could be identical twins
Except we’re eight years apart
This is the lamest poem ever
Except its straight from the heart

They say we look alike
At times they get confused
The ears, the nose, the eyes
Our smiles when we’re amused

Sometimes the resemblance is uncanny
For example, when we frown
But there are differences too
Where my hair is black yours is dark brown

You have a dimple in your chin
And more than a single piercing in your ears
I have a dot on my nose
To see you cry fills my eyes with tears

We are forever tied
By the bond of birthdays and blood
With our best friends Chocolate and Holly (wish I had space to name them all)
We have frolicked in the mud

Before we can meet again
A lot of time may pass
But whenever you want to see me
Take a look in the looking glass

Welcome To My Life

Sit back and relax folks… we have a hell of a lot to cover. I was tagged by The Lil’ Le Poutski and then Rat went and exposed her whole work area so I’ve decided to combine everything and expose it all.

Let’s begin with my bag… that storage device that I cant seem to get away from. I am a creature of habit and can’t be bothered moving all my stuff from bag to bag so I pretty much use the same bag for the working work and it’s an enormous pain in the ass to move stuff to my smaller bags on the weekends. Such trials, I tell you…



Anyway, the bag itself was one of the items one of my aunts bought me in May when I was in the US (as an aside, its great meeting up with aunts/grandparents who try to make up for years of no birthday and Christmas presents in two weeks). I really like the bag and the design reminds me of decorative icing on a cake.

In my bag, I carry (sounds like one of those memory games)…

A cell phone carry case that my Mom brought me from India. I keep my cell phone in it while its in the bag so it doesn’t get scratched. I don’t care that much about my cell phone, but have to use the cell phone carry case no?

My camera in its carry case. Damn, why does everything have a freaking case? I bought a really cool 7.2 mega pixel Sony Cybershot in May and I carry it with me everyday for no real reason. Digital cameras are not that bad, I guess. I stuck on to my 10 year old film camera for so long because nothing beats holding photos in your hand. So now I’ll just spend shitloads of money on printing my digital ones.

One Nine West wallet

The book I am currently reading because otherwise I would go mad with boredom on my 10 minutes to and from work on the tram. Its Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Its really quite funny and magical and I am enjoying it immensely – not as dark and intense as his other ones.

One pack of Wrigley’s Wild Berry Extra drops. Did you know that after eating, the pH level in your mouth drops considerably and allows cavity causing bacteria to attack? Wrigley’s Extra drops helps to restore the pH balance in your mouth so you can have strong teeth and healthy gums (fyi – straight from the pack). They are really yum and I am quite addicted!

My way cool CK sunnies (and their case;)) which S bought me last December. Before that I had a pair of Ray Bans for about 3 years and they were horribly disfigured towards the end.

Free sample of some vague perfume that I keep for fun

Lipstick and eye pencil for touch ups that I never touch up

Parker pen

One work security pass

One apartment building security pass (what a secure nation I live in)

House keys (2 nos., I told you they were dead serious about this security stuff) and a spare work key if the security pass doesn’t work for whatever absurd reason

Pack of tissues and some vague medicine

Some earrings that I’ve forgotten to take out of the bag at some point

A picture of Jesus Christ with a prayer on the back. I have one of these in every single bag I own because they’re always distributing them in front of Church or the railway station and I feel very bad to throw them away.

One electronic key that has my gym program on it, but more on new gym and peripherals later.

One compact little umbrella (in matching case) that came with the bag and for that I am very grateful because my other umbrella is this big-ass-cover-5-people kind of BMW Williams umbrella that S bought me at Formula 1 time last year when I loooved BMW Williams for Montoya and Ralf. This year I am not supporting any team, its been more of an anti-Ferrari thing and its working also. But more on Formula 1 at the end of the season.

And that concludes the tour of my beautiful earth-toned cavernous bag. Moving on to my wallet…



I have a grand total of $37 and 70 cents. Normally I only have 70 cents but for some reason I’m carrying quite a bit of liquid cash this week. Did you know that Australian notes are plastic and can’t really be torn unless you are fully determined to tear them? And yes, that is England’s Queen Elizabeth on the $5 note… Australia might as well still be a colony of England… we have a public holiday for Her Highness’s birthday and all (not that I’m complaining).

3 ANZ ATM cards… I’m only meant to have 2 and another is in the mail… the bank has been totally screwing with my life for the past month or so.

Artfully covering the ATM cards is my Sub Club Appreciation card. Two more stickers and I get a FREE 12 inch sub from Subway – the Fresh Food People. How fucking cool am I?

My National Bank credit card (which I never use) and my Virgin credit card (which I use too much).

Artfully covering the credit cards is my bloody expensive monthly Metcard.

Some other miscellaneous cards are my Indian driver’s licence which is actually my only form of ID since I don’t carry my passport around the place. I really need to get an Australian one.

We also have my 2003 student card which I am unable to let go of, my government sponsored Medicare health insurance card, a Rent Card if I wanted to pay my rent at the post office, a brand spanking new Port Phillip library card (what was I thinking spending hundreds of dollars on books every couple of months), and an Essential Beauty Club card which makes me an exclusive member of the place I get my eyebrows done at and quite frankly I had forgotten I even had such a card till I looked at it yesterday.

A Bar Secrets card of a bar called Cherry. Bar Secrets is those pack of card type things with a different bar on each card and the bloody things cannot be used as playing cards which I find slightly ridiculous. Anyway, this was in my wallet for a long time because one drunken night I think we meant to go here but eventually didn’t.

Some miscellaneous business cards and notes on my bank a/c details, tax file no., etc.

One bill (I don’t keep receipts unless there is a chance I might need to return something) and one company Cab charge. Again I had forgotten I had this cab charge, so one company sponsored ride home coming up.

One American dollar bill which I keep for sentimental reasons. I only started using this wallet a few months ago and before that I was using a wallet sent by my grandmother a few years ago and she sent the $1 bill in it and I’m still holding on to it.

And finally, a couple of photographs… my family portrait taken six years ago… this is the first thing I see when I open it and if I change wallets, my new one will also need a space for me to keep this photo. Behind the family one, I have two passport photos of S and one of Rat (yes, she’s the red one). When I left India, I asked people to give me their passport pix so I could keep in my wallet and I think she was the only one who had one.

So that’s that. Now a quick view of what I see as soon as I open my eyes every morning…



My bookcase is a total mess and slightly overflowing and I’ve resorted to piling them up beside my bed. I really need a new one.

My slightly large perfume collection – I was obsessed with perfume some years ago and collected them like mad.

My beautiful ancient TV that keeps me entertained when I’m too lazy to sit outside. Please do not miss the measures we’ve resorted to with the equally ancient and broken antenna. Neighbours is currently playing on TV if anyone cares.

My trusty heater that is never far from my side and my trusty alarm clock that never gives me (or anyone else who lives with me) a moment of peace in the mornings.

The Ferrari flag hanging on the wall is NOT mine. I don’t know why I tolerate it.

I like to surround myself with photographs of the people (and dogs) I love and there are quite a few more in other parts of the room/house.

And finally, my space at work… the place I spend most of my waking hours at… hours that would be infinitely more pleasurable spent sleeping, reading or smoking up…



My LCD monitor with my beloved dogs as the wallpaper. Well, dear Holly is no more of course but dear Chocolate is still alive and kicking. I have a post-it note with my name stuck to my monitor because my dear friend M gets kicks out of writing our names beautifully on post-it notes.

Precariously sitting on the top of my monitor is a family of Russian dolls. These are those cool dolls that fit inside the other – so you open the father and pop the mother in and you should’ve already popped all the kids inside the mother. I get immense amounts of amusement from these Russian dolls that I stole from my friend Sh who sits across from me. Also sitting there is a taxi. Everyone in the company got a different type of Matchbox car at some ‘Where are we going as a company’ type meeting. I can’t really remember what the car signified so you can tell I am a highly inspired employee.

You can also see my (well ok, the company’s) IBM T-41 laptop in its my docking station and my (these are really mine) TDK headphones that I listen to my beloved iTunes with, and my (the company’s again) cool Cisco Voice over IP phone.

My cell phone (Nokia 6610i) sits on an ugly dolphin cell phone stand that my friend Sh stole from some Christmas hamper and gave to me.

Many folders and papers and files to make it seem I work very hard and various mugs and stationery items and tissue paper.

Finally, just behind the Cisco phone, you can see a cheery Christmas stuffed dog that Sh gave me as a Christmas present last year. On that same day, we had our department Christmas party and went on this boat cruise and had the traditional Kris Kringle exchange and my Kris Kringle also gave me an identical cheery Christmas stuffed dog and so this second dog got a bit high on the boat cruise and accompanied us to a pub after the cruise and was pictured taking sips of people’s beer. So basically we decided they were twins and while Sober works hard all day in the office, Shitfaced leads a party life in my house (they were named after a set of shot glasses I have… the four stages of drinking… Sober, Drunk, Pissed and Shitfaced)!

With those pearls of wisdom I will leave you. This was really fun by the way and I’m sorry it was so long… there’s just so much to tell!

The day the music died...

Another weekend gone by and only 10 days left until the big day. The big day refers to my birthday, of course. I’m not one of those people who pretend they don’t care about their birthday and who say things like ‘oh, its no big deal’. I’m one of those people who loves birthdays, especially my own and says things like ‘oh, its my birthday, so drop everything you’re doing and come party with me’. I mean, come on, birthdays are meant to be celebrated and I’ve celebrated every single one of them like they were going out of style. Anyway, we’ll see what happens this year…

On Friday I went to the housewarming party of someone who lives on the ground floor of my apartment building. He had invited everyone in the building and since we’ve never really met any of our neighbours, we dropped in. It was mostly middle-aged to older people and a couple of young people. Shantaram became a topic of conversation as it is prone to become when a white person meets an Indian for the first time and looks for some common ground. I don’t mind… I think its great that so many of them enjoyed the book. They won’t be so biased or culture shocked if they ever visit.

At one point, the host asks me "How do you take that life-altering decision of leaving family and friends and everything familiar behind and starting out fresh in a whole new country and culture"? Fuck, good question! For me, it was never a conscious decision… it was just an undercurrent in everything I dreamed my life would be when I grew up. And when I did grow up, I couldn’t really take it all back… But when I grew up, I realised that I really loved my life in Madras and didn’t think anything could ever compare with it.

Nothing has, so far.

I remember writing something when I left three years ago, something like:

But this is everything I’ve dreamed of since age 7. So why do I wish I was 7 again and this day was still 14 years away?

So these are the choices that we make and we have to stand behind them or we would be left with nothing, no direction, no mistakes to learn from, no right to say ‘I did it’. And there are still choices, there is hope yet! I didn’t mean to get all melancholy like this. Its not that my life is shit or anything but its soooo very different to my previous life in Madras.

There I was a part of a social fabric… there was always someone to call, someone to visit, someone to smoke a cigarette with, someone to smoke a joint with, someone to have a drink in the afternoon with… there were competing priorities… education, family, partying, dogs… rushing off from a family dinner to the night’s drinking gathering… rushing off from Sunday afternoon smokes (in full stoned glory) to catch at least the latter half of Mass (and more importantly, making sure my parents saw me)… rushing off from college to give my sister a lift home, take the dog to the vet, drop the dog back home (sometimes spastically sedated, poor baby) and rush off for the day’s entertainment. Anyway, my point is, it was really quite a happening, never-a-boring-moment kind of existence and then I played the cruel joke upon myself of leaving all that behind to study here.

Now I’m sure lots of people have some really fun times in university here but it just so happened that mine was the only course on the planet that people actually did for the sake of the course itself and not for the sake of getting a stupid degree. The average age was 35 and the most scintillating conversation was about which website was more usable and which website was more community building oriented. There were some fun moments and a couple of smashed moments but mostly it was coursework, coursework and more coursework.

Work at least has been much better… I’m part of a band of merry boys and girls (average age of 23 which is just right) and we get each other through the monotony and drudgery that is corporate life by talking shit all day. And sometimes we hang out on a Friday evening but it’s pretty much a work life/personal life separation thing!

So outside of these two social avenues, there have been the people you meet somehow or the other and some of them are fun and some of them are not and some of them are fun only when drunk and some of them talk too much or don't talk at all. Well obviously, I am extremely choosy… how can I not be when my friends from school and college and Madras and even Bangalore are just some of the coolest people around! I’ve been spoiled with good company and now no one seems to meet those standards.

And as for family, well really, don’t knock ‘em. Its only when they’re not around, you realise how entertaining even they can be. And as for dogs, well I don’t want to start sobbing my heart out now, so I’ll save my dog tales for another day.

So the best thing out of all this is that S and I are as close as two people can be and have had to entertain each other for three years and we aren’t bored yet.

And I really believe that everything happens for a reason and my happening life will come back to me sometime soon.

It seems I’ve forgotten what I even started writing about. The host also asked if I felt that Australia had accepted me and I think I’ll save that can of worms for another day! Got really wasted that night with some people who came over. It was fun. Had a really lazy Saturday, got a haircut, shopped for miscellaneous items, oooh S bought me a pre-birthday gift – a pair of Levis, watched The Interpreter and Hostage on DVD – the first one was shit and the second one was ok! Yesterday I just slept and slept and slept and read a bit in between. Today I have my first gym session in about an hour and I’m really excited about it – you will be hearing much about my fitness regime in the days to come.

For me, the day I left Madras was like the day the music died. Because like American Pie was a semi-autobiographical journey from innocence to adulthood for Don Mclean, so was my life in Madras my journey from innocence into adulthood and one day it ended as all eras tend to and that was the day the music died.

A long long time ago
I can still remember how that music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance that I could make those people dance
And maybe they’d be happy for a while

Invariably, the music that makes me smile always leads back to Madras. They have that saying ‘All roads lead to Rome’ because in those BC days, all roads did literally lead to Rome since they were the only ones building them. For me, all roads lead to Madras… what a name, what a place, what an era!