Loonville

Author’s note: No, the author isn’t a lecherous-good-for-nothing male who goes around plying his trade in crowded PTC buses.

It is after a long period of inner conflict that I decided to make this public. I could have chosen to let this remain in the closet with no soul any wiser (well, an evil acquaintance, a dozen strangers and a couple of waiters don’t actually count) but since I have never denied my readers a good laugh, here we go.

A fortnight back, I and a certain CAT cramming friend of mine spent a week traveling across Raj Thackray’s stronghold, pretending to be a bunch of nonchalant marathi youth with a propensity to foul language. The marathi act failed miserably. Atleast half a dozen people called Pachu ‘medrasi’, an honour that wasn’t bestowed upon me *shamefaced*.

“Macha seruppu enna pannurathu”

(what do we do with the shoes ? )

Pachu jarred my reverie. We were in a cramped hotel room, fifty feet and two minutes away from an over-crowded temple in Pune. It was darshan time. We decide to scurry along, given the rains and the muck on the road or even worse the over-friendly room boy who was eying my brand new phone.

Ten minutes of acrobatics later, we land up near the entrance of the temple and find that our footwear must go.

At this point, let us digress to look at the state of our very soiled “chappals”

SiDo – a six month old extremely comfortable FILA slip ons.

Pachu- brand new designer shoes he tells me.

We make a real quick decision. Rather, the irate security guard and a mob threatening to bite our heads off, make it for us. Leave it right at the entrance with another hundred odd pairs. It can’t be that bad. Or so we thought.

Three hours of queue-walking, harried darshan , trinket buying and a long tortuous journey back to the place where we left our precious footwear, what the readers had guessed five minutes earlier had happened. MY CHAPPALS GONE. Pachu slips on his shoes with a wry smile. Why would somebody want my worn-out footwear when shiny Pachu shoes were right next to it, in fact right on top of it? Half an hour of searching in the rain was to no avail. It was gone. I was tempted to flick a very cozy looking pair like the queer old man next to me did. But my conscience, okay, Pachu gave me this self-righteous glare which I would have most certainly given him; had the tables been turned. In a darkly lit street of a remote village in Maharashtra, I find a seedy shop where i buy a pair of regal looking chappals after much hilarity and haggling in broken marathi/hindi/tamil/mandarin. I strut around the next couple of days in Pune wearing my new, a tad uncomfortable chappals.

A week later, back in Tamil-land, with my three day ‘designer stubble’, unkempt clothes but regal chappals , I give an extremely sleepy Pachu a ride back to his place. The Fruit Shop looked inviting on the way back and in minutes I am comfortably plopped into my favorite corner with a glass of Spitfire. Uncharacteristically, there were a bunch of nubile young things on the next table. My swank phone is immediately out and I proceed to decimate the English language in what I believe is a Texan drawl. Ah, but the heads turn. I do a backflip ( in my imagination, of course) The tawdriness quotient increases exponentially. All was fine till Zaheera walked in.

“Hey babe”

” What the fuck? Why are you wearing ladies’ chappals? “

Laughter all around.

Quite regal I must say..

PS – If you run into me anytime now, please don’t look at my feet.

A flutter of papery wings… and a sudden swish. And before you know it, you’re covered with dust that’s so ancient it makes King Tut look like a preschooler. And if you’re still clueless about what I’m talking about, it is that age old ceremony that many a soul dreads and fears… the horrid but indispensable ritual of “cleaning the room”!

Now before you cringe and draw in your toes and scream, I must tell you, this ‘chore’ (though I call it ‘punishment’) is not as bad as it seems. And for those who are easily distracted by the silliest of things (sounds familiar ne?), this chore could turn out to be really fun! Almost like getting lost in Wonderland! (Alright…. that’s dragging it a tat bit too far… but please? Play along?)

It’s at times like these that you find interesting curios that you thought were long dead or missing. Little things like granny’s false teeth under the sofa, Grampa’s stamp collection behind the TV, Dad’s insurance papers on the window sill… you know… little things. But what really makes this cleaning business interesting is that you find a little part of you that you thought to be long dead and gone, slumbering like a little baby *sniffle* deep inside you!

And it is also a good time when you realize what a ditz you were when you come across old pictures with you staring at the guy below you, hopelessly in ‘love’ with him. This is also the time when you find old journals where you’ve written things you’d rather die with than let the world know about it!

And well… as I was going about the chores of cleanliness, I managed to stumble upon (quite literally) my old journal. And as I started to turn its yellowing pages, I came face-to-face with who I was… a few years ago…

*cue for dramatic violins*

Not many people know this…And well… it isn’t that shocking a fact actually, but back when I was in school (when I was still in braces and glasses thick enough to please Newton); I happened to have what normal people would refer to as a crush.

And for those who do not know much about me, I was (and still in many ways am) oblivious to the obvious – boys in this case and so, when my first (serious) crush made his way into my head, you can imagine what happened to my happily ignorant cerebrum!

For a whole year, all I could talk about was him! I would use his name at least twice in every sentence I spoke. And well… now that I think about it, it is surprising that none of my friends (read silent sufferers) actually gagged me with smelly socks and hung me upside down in some abandoned harbor!

And it sets me thinking…Why did I like him in the first place? And why did I get so obsessed about his every little actions? Why did I waste a fortune in driving past his house everyday when I could be saving my Dad’s petrol, the ecosystem of the world and the oil-wells in the middle East all at one go?

I would never know (not that knowing it would make any sense in the first place!).

But I do know that the said person is currently dating my neighbor and she sticks her nose ten feet higher into the atmosphere every time she sees me. Oh well… cest la vie!

And for those of you who were wondering what this blab about a silly crush had to do with cleaning my room, *sigh* you’ll never understand. And for those who do… Message me! I wanna hear all about it! *winkwink nudgenudge*

Ever your slightly deluded fellow inhabitor,
Asha Menon.

Since I have been lazy to post something even remotely coherent, i am having a few better gifted friends write here and save this space of the cyber universe. So, here comes the first Loony guest

Asha Menon – the resident wiki-’akka’, feels strongly about animal rights, die hard manga/anime fan, expert in anything japanese, shinto priestess in making (she tells me it is shinto no miko) and plays around with mathematical physics when she can’t sleep.

Higgsy Biggsy,what have you done,
you made a butterball of everyone,
you made a butterball of everyone.

Remember when you were a kid and wanted a monster truck demolition derby in the backyard Call your parents and show them what a bunch of older kids are doing with their toys. It is quite cool how much interest a stray particle or a blip on the LHC computing grid will generate over the next few months/years. The physicists’ day under the sun.

What if no Higgs Boson turns up or no magnetic monopole wanders into the particle detector ? What if SUSY partners are nothing but a figment of overactive imagination ? Gravity remains as mysterious as ever ? What if all this is one more waste of the tax-payers’ money ?

GREAT.

We’ll build bigger particle accelerators, come up with swankier theories and invent another 26 dimensions to get the math right. We may not yet know the nature of matter but I am certain that these are the things dreams are made of.

P.S. If you are worried about dying tonight, let me assure you no high energy collisions happen till the 21st of October