so joji finally fell off the bike....i mean he was bound to..not that it's going to make an inch of a diff to his road sense...only manasi could handle those rides..i mean why would anyone in their right senses want to feel like a rodeo while riding a bike?

so finally did the story on the clubs..got a few hate calls from the club owners...life doesent get terribly different does it?

so generally having conversations with my mum about what i was like as a kid..she prefers to use the terms "calm, well mannered..." i say "boring".
damn!! i wish i were a more destructive kinda kid, i mean everybody has interesting tales about my brother and how he broke stuff, and bit people's noses and the works..but about me, they simply don't know what to say.. that's because i have been a boring kid with hardly any controversies to my credit...

finally managed to convince my building watchman that i 'am' a jouno!! the poor fellow now wishes me good morning everyday!! hahaha.

so my neighbours kid is competing with my mum in lighting diyas and making rangolis.

we south indians have such a distorted calnedar sense i tell you, we celebrate all our festivals one day before the rest of the world.

had a noisy diwali in the neighbourhood, but the rockets over Marine Drive are breath taking.

missing my old house and friends...i think as humans we get so used to spaces..abstract notions of comfort put together with inanimate objects and animate refrences.

so i finally found my perch in this new house of ours..it's on the study table right next to the huge window in my room. sit for endless hours there gazing into the city that it overlooks and the sea which sometimes disappears into the sky..it's all blurred at times and yet again it's all so crystal clear.

so read this brilliant article by Achin Vanaik on how foreign policies are discussed only on the basis of real politik. there are no moral issues about policies anymore. reminded me of the argument i had with ambarish in ACJ. he thought india should have supported the US invasion on Iraq, managed to convince Sam Rajappa as well. "Morals aren't for governments, governmes are only about national interest."

vanaik explains the facade behind the term "national interest" most articulately. so all arguments based on real politik, degrades the level of debate and erodes every trace of morality.

wonder why NR got him for Covering Dep...i am sure he was conned into it.

came home at 10:30 last night, the streets were all up in lights, marine drive was smoking with cracker fumes. this city doesent really need an excuse to go up in lights.

have discovered two new adjectives to describe myself..unresourceful and unprofessional. (i don't care if those words do not exist in the english dictionary, they do for me...now.)

discovered that i make a lousy fashion journo...hopeless at covering entertainment as well...

have discovered that a job is only meant to pay for your living. not meant to enjoy. to do things you enjoy or are passionate about, there are avenues outside your workplace.

discovered i am too different to fit in anywhere...too different to help.

that's far too many things to have dicovered for today. feeling low..maybe depressed...

so right now busy chasing the female version of Salman Khan, some chick who ran over three people at 2:30 in the morning. killed one, maimed one for life and broke a leg of another. driving drunk according to witnesses, miraculously clean in the med report. cooper hospital sucks!! i could fall ill just walking in. tried to contact the victims relatives. the staff wont let me.
got thrown out of the building when i tried to sneak in and interview the accused. haha. yelled back at the watchman, but at the end of it, those rich assholes in the building were looking at me as though i was the criminal. @#$%&.

so how do you live after you kill someone? so how do you sleep after ruining someone forever? so how do you live with yourself after all that?

anyways going by the way i am furioulsy typing out stories here, looks like i am going to hit the grave next week itself.

strangely, lotsa guys in office think i am a junkie or something. hehehe. keep offering me ciggies and there is this freelancer kid who keeps talking about dope parties.

so went blood donating for jerry pinto's (read well known eccentric) friend's father. shibbs nearly fainted looking at the needle. hehehe. then ate worm infested chocolates. slurrrrp!!


Humour
Q) What is worse than finding a worm in your chocolate?
A) Finding half a worm in your chocolate.


okay, as i see it i think i am going to die at 25 itself. these guys in office are some slave drivers, now instead of doing 6 stories each, my co reporter and i do 10 stories each..crap!! i am so beat.

so met up with two famous scamsters from ACJ. too much to handle for the day. one keeps talking about getting a mallu angle in his stories and the other keeps talking about how he continues to scam at his workplace. i mean some things never change do they... actually it's good that way, coz its comforting in a weird kinda way, i mean if suddenly you were to discover that people you know have drastically changed that would be more shocking than surprising.

so sexy anushka is in town.

missing xavier's. actually missing the phase where i was doing absolutely nothing.

covered a maori performance in bandra with shibbs yesterday. you know... the straw skirts that they were wearing, and they were pulling all these funny faces and yelling and singing. sounded like a war cry...call it strange or whatever, but it kinda reminded us of patnaik.hahahaha.

more importantly, i now have my own visiting cards!! quite excited and all!!shibbs even did a little jig as soon as she got her cards...

seniors from ACJ want to have a reunion...i thnk reunions are for people who are 30 years and up and are beginning to forget what their batchmates are doing and what they look like..at this stage if we have a reunion it's going to be more of a forum to brag about one's achievements, nothing less.

gimme a break...i mean i am barely out of ACJ, still reeling from the after effects in fact.

so now i have a new reporter to help me out..thank god!! now i won't have to die at 30!!
Shibbs is having the time of her life. takling to strange african men, getting chased by a village for pulling down an illegal shrine, hahahaha, life couldn't be more entertaining for me!!

i went for this awesome exhibition on indian handloom...nan describes it as a kid's day out or something. i mean my eyes popped out with all those fabrics and lampshades and handicraft articles. life couldn't get better for someone who has resolved to wear only handloom. haven't seen so much colour, so much cloth and so many varieties in all my life!!

on my way out, we saw this old man with his wife selling straw baskets, it was the most heart rending sight. it's strange but i cant get that man out of my head. he was really old. could hardly speak up, sitting all alone with his wife and selling baskets. holding them up for people to buy.

some people dont need to speak to make an impression. but they leave you with this overpowering feeling of guilt, by simply not speaking to you, by just being there, by just existing the way they do.

so, the dancing sardar (daler mehndi and not lada) screws up and i have to work overtime, only because his agent lives in lokhandwala. damn!! had to go all the way again to andheri, sweet talk the watchman of his building to give me some dope (on the story that is)..but every damn person had zipped their mouths shut about it. there was one kid willing to talk about it, but unfortunately he didnt know much.

making new friends at the police station. crime buster gogo still on the prowl...developing my local vocab. "katta" means revolver here in mumbai.

the stress levels are increasing...i think i will pop it by the time i am thirty!!

Geeks is going away. Canada calling.

got my first threatening call. my editor handled it with so much elan. told the guy he could sue us or could write a letter which we can publish. Rajendra at office thinks it's time for me to celebrate coz I have reached a mark with my first threat. he thinks that's one way of finding out if someone is reading my paper or no.

Shibbs is attacking illegal shirines now. haha. and of course no one can take away the beauty beat away from her. hahaha.

i want to go to ladakh, the north east, dharmashala, teach kids, read out stories to kids under a tree, write a book, go para gliding, bungee jumping, white water rafting.. too many things that i want to do. too many things that i have to do.

well, got my first ever pay. was thrilled to the skies!! but not so soon. my first 100 from my first ever pay got picked for the first ever time in my life. hate this. such an anti climax.

have to file a complaint now. i am hoping that the police contact i have knows the pickpocket gang so that he can retrieve my wallet. don't want the cash, but everything right from my debit card, to my digital diary to little bits of memorabilia which i had saved so earnestly right from school days must be languishing in some darkerned room of some boozard who must have already wiped the wallet clean. thankfully didn't have my press card.

doing another investigative now...busy on the trails of some hi profile clubs who have fleeced their members by luring them with parties and flowing booze..and now have scooted with their money. i say it's this chicken whiskey culture to blame. krishna ananth must be grinning. (in case you guys thought where he was all this time).

i am still mourning the loss of my wallet. but surprisingly my dad didn't say a word, maybe becasue this is the first time it has happened to me. i am sure teh pickpocket must be cursing me as well, i hardly carry any money despite repeated requests to do so by my parents. maybe this was my way of getting back at them.

so the zonkboard is there after all. :)

did 8 stories this week. some significant, some insignificant. you win some, you lose some.

more importantly i did this mini investigative story, took hidden camera shots and all. the things you have to be when you are a journo. detective, nosey parker, shrink, conwoman...

well, actually the BT had doen a story on a physio who was arrested after charges by a model. i went around snooping, also met the man's wife, the trainers in his gym, his clients and whopa had a good story. also spoke to the residents living close by and they swear by this guy. apparently the locality has stopped purchasing TOI after the BT report. by some strange stroke of luck,also knew the model who had filed the case..so got her version as well.

but more importantly, went for this australian food fest at The Hyatt with shibbs..awesome food. the cook was yummier. haha.
haven't tasted such exciting veg food ina long time. rainforest herb, wildfire dust, lemonaspen, alpine peppers..it was exotic.

before that we had to go to some other placefor dinner with Joy Sengupta. claims to be a left liberal. speaks a mighty lot...abotu cultural imperialism, naxalites, human rights, globalisation, etc. promotes Mc Donalds and Pepsi though. some comfortable left liberal he is. the food was good though. so i guess that made it up.

vijfart is planning to flee from Delhi. can't take the jats or the heat. haha.

Dussera was fun only in school days. loads of food. the works. once i even got driven by my neighbour's mum with the other kids to see ram leela. nowadays i spend dussera working overtime.

so geeks and i were discussing hobbies. he is into philately. when i was a kid, philately was like the most intellectual hobby to pursue. so once we had this relative coming from phoren and he brought us one or two stamps from there. i obiviously got pretty excited and declared loudly that i was going to take up stamp collecting seriously. that day marked the beginning and the end of my new hobby. coz we had no more relatives coming from abroad. and by the time my cousins went abroad the age of email had started. so no more stamps.

went to cover this durga pooja. all that i could smell was mustard oil and more mustard oil.
all those weird sounding dishes, begon bhaja, payosh...

so as i hear, my only medium of getting junta feedback and meeting long lost friends is going off this weekend. i mean the zonkboard. nothing in this world is free. and i thought this was the age fo free information. balls!!

well, so i was the only one working on Gandhi jayanti and will be the only one working on Dussera. someday i want to make a docu on Gandhi.

so this newspaper conducted a survey on how much our netas know about gandhi and nto so surprisingly noen of them did well in that test. but worst off all the congress rep didn't think it necessary to know about gandhi. shows how much of disparity there is between a party loyalist and the party ideolgy (or the supposed ideology)

about naidu, well, at least it brought to light that there is too much of internal strife to settle before we turn to pakistan. as for naidu, he is the same dude who was against the CPI serving ragi gruel to starving thousands in rural Andhra coz he thought it sullies his state's image. so i guess the attack says it all.

met modi's female counterpart on the train today. it's scary to see hwo people think sometimes.

so i am doing an interesting story on increasing commercialisation leading to the encroachment of public spaces. yeah yeah, i know i am making it sound cooler than it actually is. just a story about how a public park is being rented out for commercial purposes and is hence depriving the residents of a place to walk or jog in and the kids a place to play football.

good lookin' nan is back in town.

i am two beauty pageants old..and ready to die.