The ‘Tapori’ In Me?

I’ve been searching for some romantic lines for my girl, and after searching throughout the night, I found it. Ask her, and she’ll tell you that I’m as much a Tapori as the pair of socks you’re wearing.

Not after reading this, she won’t.

Need I say more? The Love Guru returns, baby! With a vengeance!

Poem Courtesy: Someone named Vinay over at Funtoosh.com

You Can’t Ring & Ruin My Life!

Remember those days of carefree indulgence back in college or school or even the womb? You could do whatever you wished without anyone bothering you or asking you irritating questions. Life was so beautiful, with little misery to discover and a lot of fun to explore. Then, some jackass went and invented the mobile phone.

It’s bad enough to have one phone, but when you try to adhere to statistics (India has almost a 200% cell-phone penetration), you get stuck with two phones and a very short fuse. Constantly trying to please every one of the 900-odd contacts on both phones, most of whom just give you a missed call hoping you consider them important enough for you to call back, can be quite a challenge if you’re not taking anger management classes. Since my anger management involves some highly charged romantic moments with my girlfriend, whom I shall diplomatically call a bombshell, and since I can’t meet her as often as I would like to these days (due to our respective careers and not anything else), I am almost always one phone call away from losing my cool.

This morning, I had the (mis)fortune of running out of balance on my prepaid number and reach the end of the month’s grace period on my postpaid one, and at 9 in the morning, I was ‘temporarily disconnected’ from the entire world. It was such a beautiful feeling – I became nostalgic and went up on the terrace, placed both my phones in front of me and danced around in my underwear singing ‘It’s My Life’ and screaming,

“You can’t ring and ruin my life!
You can’t ring and ruin my life!
I control you, fuckers!
Tra-la-la-laaa….
You can’t ring… You can’t ruin my life…”

Just as the chorus built up a bit and I became more and more animated, one of the phones beeped. I stopped mid-sentence, “I control you fu-” and stared at the pair of life-ruiners in front of me. One of them definitely had beeped. Was I dreaming? I went closer, slowly, hesitantly, and saw that my Motorola phone was flashing “I New Message”.

How could this be? I knew for a fact that there was no balance in either of the phones. I couldn’t receive messages! This was not possible! Then, it struck me that if this phone could receive messages, then what’s stopping it from ringing! I let out a guttural scream of pain, grabbed both the phones and ran inside. When I flipped the phone open, the message was from a client of mine and it read, “Nikhil, can’t reach you. Please call.”

I felt like a piece of shit as I stood in line, trying to recharge both the phones, a few hours later.

Image Courtesy: Slate.com

The Road To Havana?

It’s been quite a busy day so far, and I’ve been in and out of meetings so much that I crave for a bit of peace and solitude. No, I don’t watch porn.

Funny thing happened on my way back and made me wonder about my ineptitude when it comes to being politically correct. Fresh out of a very fruitful meeting, I hailed an auto in the middle of a busy thoroughfare and sat in, thankful that I didn’t have to wait for more than I did. Then, as I was about to tell the driver where to go, I noticed that he was a midget.

I am not kidding. He was 4 feet tall, maybe a bit taller, and he came up to my chest, maybe a bit lower. His head reminded me of the shrunken heads of the Arumbaya tribe – it was so tiny that my bunched-up fist was bigger. I think the funniest thing was that he was wearing a cap on top of the head, which made me think of a flagpole, for some reason.

Without thinking, I asked him why his head was so small, to which he asked, with some dignity, why my mouth was so big. I guess I needed that rebuttal. I kept my mouth shut all the way and paid him an extra ten bucks, which he accepted without gratitude.

Time to crack open a cold beer and dream of the days when I’ll have my own car and a box of Havana cigars at my disposal.

Four Months Later :)

Not to steal any copyrighted material from Jamie Uys, but I really feel that The One Above must be totally and utterly out of his goddamn mind. What a way to start a post after abandoning my blog for nearly 4 months. Come to think of it, it’s almost exactly 4 months – I’m three days short. Damn, I’ve missed this!

Where do I begin? Okay, here’s the deal. I’ll bear all and you have to promise me that you’ll consider me nothing short of a raving lunatic who’s lost his mind. Deal? Great! Here goes!

I moved from Bangalore to Delhi in April. Yeah, I’ve written about that. I worked for a PR agency in Delhi for exactly a month and a half, after which, I jumped full-time into something called Darkwater Digital. It’s a company I started some time ago, doing social media marketing and online public relations. So, entrepreneurship took up quite a bit of my time, and between beer, work and the sexy woman in my life, I had time for little else.

I’ve been traveling quite a bit and came to Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai in the past few months, met quite a few people and got an unbelievable number of lectures on starting my blog again. I think what finally pushed me over the edge and made me write is the fact that I passed a breathalyzer test on the roads of Bangalore, while driving a car at 2 in the morning after 4 hours of drinking beer and whiskey. That was when I decided that God must be truly stupid.

Incidents like these are so rare that I can’t help but write about them. Forcing me to come out of retirement wasn’t a good thing. I won’t concentrate much on anything else in life right now. Maybe that’s a good thing. Let’s see how and where I go from here.

To all the faithful few who have been visiting my blog regularly, I think a round of beer is in order. Don’t hesitate to ask.

Jesus Christ! It feels so good to be back and in action again!

Deletion?

Thinking of deleting MirrorCracked. Need some inspiration. Can’t go on. Rather delete than let it rot. What say?

Dental Plaque And The Sugar Doughnut

I’m sure this has happened to everyone. There no point pretending that I’m the only person in the whole wide world this sort of incident has happened to.

There I was, innocently biting into my (tenth) gulab jamun while watching Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen on my laptop, when a shooting pain in my teeth forced me to drop the bowl of thick sugar syrup all over my bare legs. Nothing fell on my the laptop (which is in perfect working condition Apar, don’t worry) thankfully, and I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the room and myself. Only later did I realize that my teeth need checked my a dentist.

So, that evening, I walked over to a nearby clinic and got an appointment for later the same evening. Ignoring the bad sentence construction, I walked in at the appointed hour and sat on a plush couch, reading a copy of the latest Outlook and getting rapidly bored.

I must have dozed off because the receptionist shook me vigorously and told me that the doctor was ready for me. In my groggy state, I yawned and mumbled, “Finally. Thank you,” when she slapped me hard. I was stunned. I held my cheek where she’s slapped me and said, “What did you say??”

Now, a normal human being would’ve asked this before slapping someone, but she was, I guessed correctly, a rare find.

“I said ‘Finally, thank you’ ” I told her angrily, still clutching my face.

“Oh!” she said, eyes widened in shock and apology. “I thought you said ‘Fuck you’. You mumbled so I couldn’t hear properly! I’m sorry! I’m really sorry!”

Leaving her in the subservient state, I walked into the dentist’s room. He was sitting in the center of the room on a stool, placed in front of a horrifying dentist’s chair, which had all the evil accouterments one usually associates with the murderous, villainous doctors in horror movies – gleaming silver instruments that were sharp enough to rip someone’s brains out through their noses. I gulped and stood there.

He saw me clutching my face and said, “Hurts, does it?”

“What?” I said, confused, and realized that I was still holding my face. I quickly put my hand down and said, “No no, your receptionist slapped me just now.”

He didn’t seem surprised. “Third one today,” he said resignedly. “I ought to fire her. Anyway, take a seat, please,” he said pointing to the torture chair. I looked strangely at him and sat down. He said, “Okay, let me see…” and shined a flashlight into my mouth and peered around. I could see the bright overhead light and the dentist’s masked silhouette as he assessed my dental strength.

“There’s some plaque,” he said. “I’ll get my associate to do something about it,” and he walked out, leaving me in the chair, mouth open, with a torture device sticking out of it. I twirled my thumb and waited until a short, stocky woman came in and started poking around in my mouth with a metal device that hurt like hell.

Five minutes later, it was all over and she announced, “We’ve removed the plaque. That’ll be 1200 bucks.”

So, I paid up and walked out and I couldn’t help but feel that I’d been cheated out of something. As soon as I stepped out, I saw the brilliance of the dentist’s business plan – his clinic was right next to a bakery! I could see breads and cakes and doughnuts calling out to me from within and cursing my weak will, I went in and bought a fresh sugar doughnut and bit into it. Just as I was about to wipe the sugar crumbs off my face, the short, stocky woman dentist walked into the same bakery, bought some sweets and gave me a knowing smile and walked out.

“Bastards,” I said to myself as I walked back home, enjoying my doughnut.

PS: For updates on Simran’s sales and how I’m handling my mini rise to fame, please click here.

Simran Ebook Available For Download!!

IT’S TIME!

Simran is now available for download! Please download it and read it and let me know how good or bad it is! Damn, I am so frikkin excited!!

Click the nice little “Add To Cart” button below and you can use Paypal to buy the book. Oh, by the way, a lot of people told me that $10 was too steep, so in the spirit of goodness, the price has been reduced to $5.00 only for the readers of MirrorCracked (with a substantial cut to my royalties, of course!)

So, what are you waiting for? Click, buy, read, review!

This is awesome! Yay!!

Okay, so two books down. I wonder how many more… I’m off to have beer..!! Yay!

6 Hours To Go! :)

This is it! The big day! At 4:00 pm this afternoon, Simran will be released, available for download, right here on MirrorCracked!

The countdown begins! God, I’m so excited!

Watch this space!

Exclusive Excerpts From Simran :)

First of all, I’d like to thank all of you for your wishes and congratulations for the launch of my second book and first novel, Simran. It’s an amazing feeling and I have to tell you, I’ve been writing for a long time now and this story was perhaps the most satisfying to narrate. There are aspects to the story that have been influenced by real-life events, which makes it that much closer to my heart.

And now, as I had promised, I’m proud to give you a few select excerpts from the book, exclusively for the readers of MirrorCracked. I hope you like it, and if you do, please be sure to spread the word. It’s in the PDF format and you would need Adobe Reader to view it.

(Right Click, Save As...)

Just to remind you folks, the e-book is releasing on the 20th of July, 10 days from now and will be available on Amazon.com for $18.90. But if the book is downloaded on MirrorCracked, it’s available at $10.00, for the first two months.

Please read through the opening chapters of the book in the excerpt above and let me know your views. Bouquets and brickbats are welcome.

PS: Spread the word.

PPS: Please buy it once its released!

Simran: Second Book, First Novel :)

Okay, it’s about time I come out of my hibernation and reveal what I’ve been up to. No, I’m not dead. I’ve been holed up finishing my second book (my first novel), after being repeatedly hit over the head with a hockey stick by everyone I know and forcing me to complete the book. There it is – my novel is done! Phew!

No one knew what I was working on. A very few people guessed it, but most others thought I had gone into hiding after publicly humiliating myself in Delhi. Unfortunately, all those rumors are untrue (except perhaps the humiliation bit).

So, what’s the book all about, you ask? Well, I’m kind of proud of it myself. The book’s called ‘Simran’, and I’ve been told by my editors and reviewers that it appeals to almost every age group. It’s a book about love, strength, betrayal and the power of memories. It’s a book about miracles and how easy it is for us to overlook them. It’s a book that doesn’t tell you a moral, for the moral lies hidden within each of us. It’s a story that was worth telling. I’m glad I did. Here’s a sneak peek at the cover:

The book will be available for download on the 20th of July, that’s 11 days from now. Now, here’s the exciting part – you guys have stuck with me for this past one year through all my rants and misfortunes and laughed with/at me and my misadventures. To show my gratitude and appreciation, my publishers and I have agreed to make the book available for download right here, on MirrorCracked, at an unbelievable price, for a limited period.

The book is stated to be priced at $18.90, being available on Amazon. But if the book is downloaded on MirrorCracked, it’s available at $10.00, for the first two months. The book is also scheduled to be printed in December  by Waters Publishing House in New Delhi, and will be available in bookstores in India, US, UK and Canada early January.

I am quite excited to have come this far. When my first book was published, I was over the moon and never quite thought I’d experience it again.

I’d really appreciate it if you could spread the word about ‘Simran’. Over the next few days leading up to the launch, I’ll be sharing excerpts from the book, exclusive background research material and of course, my latest Delhi Disaster posts. Yay!!