The bitch is back

After endless rolls of stream-of-consciousness style blog-writing in my head, I finally decided to hit the gnarled and rusted 'New Post' button on the Blogger dashboard.

All it took was this: a deranged late night session of reading a manical-laughter-inducing Bill Bryson book in a deathly quiet, zonkily stadium-like-lit-up library, only to be periodically accosted by deadly glares from a neighbouring group of brain-wracking B-school boys (husband included), for committing the crime of having so much unfettered fun that has nothing to do with superior stats-marketing-accounting skills/ future placements/ leadership potential and other expensive jargon. Such moments give you that feeling of watching yourself in third person - like I'm reading a book based on the surreal and utterly chucklingly bizarre life of me.

So why not write it, says a little voice in my head. Am sure all Bill Bryson books are secretly equipped with techniques of implanting this little voice in its readers' minds; I imagine the ensuing comedy of thousands of people the world over clicking 'New Post' buttons thinking, 'if he can write such funny travel books without faffy adjectives or picaresque meandering sentences, or hell, anything really happening to him at all, why can't I, with my earthshattering daily sked of bathing, working and lunching with people so regular they must be aliens?' Bill Bryson, you'd better not be reading this and manically laughing yourself, I say.

Right, so with my delusions displayed prominently on my sleeve, ears plugged with ishuffle on DevD to drown the drone, and brain on happy chemicals halfway through the laughter marathon otherwise known as Neither Here Nor There, am gonna start barking rightaway. Since I find myself in the most vela week of my life since pre-cable Doordarshan summer holidays, I think I will publish my daily dincharya until it begins to seem like an epiphany. So I find myself labelled 'spouse' on a B-school campus in Hyderabad. Which essentially means that you make yourself available to routine interrogation whereby every student must ask you what you do all day. On supplying the honest watch-tv-vegetate-sleep answer, you let yourself be graced by killer glares and 101 reasons why you're SO very hated, envied, cursed for enjoying all the facilities they're paying for and have no time to avail. This will be on repeat until all 570 people who paid 18 lakhs each to get themselves a year of high-quality third degree torture have been able to vent their choicest frustrations on you.

But you move on, smiling breezily and being a charming bitch cuz damn rite, you are living the paid vacation life. And I really mean it. There is so much time, so much on offer, so free (as in no money involved), and so bloody well-organised and tick-tock efficient, I'm almost hyperventilating, Obama-campaign-like, muttering breathless 'Yes I Can's to any mad thing that flits across the empty swathe of my brain. Watercolour painting? Yes I can. Tae-bo? Yes I Can. Joyce's Ulysses? Yes I Can. Hell, I even finished that massive tome of a book called Sacred Games, in unbelievable 12-hour stints where I'd be reading as I ate with my left hand because I needed the right hand to keep the book open as a train rattled the brains out of me while trundling on its ancient tracks. So imagine my dismay, when on a near-orgasmic rush of turning the final 947th page or whatever, I see reams of pages of reviews - so many darn people had already completed the feat I was just beginning to gloat over. It was heartbreaking. Like climbing a mountain in crazy solitude, thinking you're the only person to ever make a dent into its maddeningly steep but exciting slopes, and then find a little palace - complete with its own little civilisation that is perfectly modern, mobile, wi-fi enabled - on the summit.

More about Sacred Games in a New Post maybe, and more about the initiation week of velagiri, but I publish this so I can jog my memory at leisure and stop proofing what I've written. All this, just to tell you, that me and my mad ramble is back.