Whenever we visit other people, I’m amazed by the sheer lack of geegaw in their homes. What gives? We have a copious supply of baubles, decorative & otherwise. Objet d’Art are strewn in every room, including the bathrooms. There aren’t enough walls to hang our paintings – half of them are stacked in a cup-board. And I’m still coveting a few Art Deco prints of Tamara de Lempicka. We had to convert a bedroom into a library for our books, CDs, DVDs & vintage Cassettes. Since we buy at least 1 book every week, our bookshelves are packed like a can of sardines.

I’m a compulsive collector. Our home is my museum. Sometimes I wonder what Freud would make of me. According to him, avid collectors are compulsive neurotics who are very anal retentive. As if we need a dead guy to proclaim that I’m neurotic and anal. Its too obvious! So let’s ignore the tedious Sigmund.

Life would be a tiresome bitch were it not for our hobbies. For George W, its war mongering. Miley Cyrus poses for racy pictures (some of them with her obliging dad). Michael Jackson holds sleep-overs with kids (pardon my pun). And Kim Kardashian makes home videos (har har). Like I said, we all need our pastimes.

When we were kids, my brother joined the local Numismatics club. And I tailed along. How excited we were when we got our 1st (& lamentably last) US $1 bill! We entrusted it to our mother for safe-keeping – and she reverently placed it next to her diamond ear-rings. In those days, inertia & a poor economy made Indians sedentary – very few people ventured out of our shores. So after enthusiastically collecting a few slotted pennies, we had to sit around & twiddle our toes. Numismatics, Shumismatics. A hobby is interesting only when there’s some Indiana Jones kind of action going. So I dropped out after the 1st month & left my brother in a lurch.

Next up was Philately. Stamp collecting sounded cool. Our father bought us a Stamp Album from the erst-while Moor Market in Chennai. For a few weeks, no letter or package was safe from our ransacking & pillaging. We accosted – almost attacked – the beleaguered postman every day, in our quest for stamps.

After having our fill of Indian stamps, we grew sullen & withdrawn. “What’s the matter with them? Cat got their tongues?” wondered our uncle. “Which would be a blessing, considering their non-stop prattle” our dear dad jibed. “Don’t you have any friends living abroad? Do we lead such wretched lives that no one from America, Africa or Europe care to communicate with us?” we asked plaintively. Not that we craved human contact with other cultures, we just wanted their stamps. “I do have a pen-pal in Germany” mused our dad. “And I have friends who have family in other countries” said our aunt. “Then what are you waiting for?” we goaded them thanklessly.

We were crest-fallen when their toils yielded puny results. “I know a company that sells foreign stamps” our wise mother said. Somehow, buying stamps to fuel a hobby didn’t sound cricket to me. One needs to sweat it out. But, my lazy brother eagerly acquiesced. We learned a lot from the stamps our mother bought – and our lingo changed overnight. We referred to countries by their postal names. Ceskoslovensko, Magyar Posta, Deutsche Bundespost, Helvetia, Polska, Tanganyika & Sverige figured prominently in our conversations.

After the initial excitement, stamp collection became a drag. Its the hunting, not the possessing, that’s exciting. Possessing makes you smug, not that we minded the bragging rights that came with it. Hunting makes the fruit that much sweeter – and I longed for it. Soon, I renounced Philately as a high-brow hobby, labeled my brother an “Elitist” & chased unusual hobbies of my own making.

I read recently that compulsive hoarders (AKA pack-rats) have a lesion in their right frontal lobe. Said lesion removes all restraint & makes people less discerning in determining the worth of an item. I must have a golf-ball sized hole. For though I’m not a pack-rat & I choose collectibles ostensibly for their value, I happily bounce from 1 hobby to another.

More on that on my next post.

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I’m talking about houseflies, of course. And their larger, more annoying cousins – face flies. Resistance is futile. They sneak in thru the balcony – which we are forced to keep open. It serves as our baby’s play pen & she emits unearthly howls if we so much as dream of closing it. She invites the flies in with shouts of glee & they saunter in happily, under the guise of her friends. One of these days, they’ll nod their fugly heads & ask me – “Howzit Hanging, Ms R?”.

Countries with an economic boom create more trash. Rotting piles of garbage adorn every street – major, minor, semi-major, demi-minor & everything in between. India is now a very dirty, smelly country – that makes Wall Street (& Dalal Street!) happy & the denizens of every other street miserable. Add to this squalor a dash of blubbering cretins masquerading as administrators. Et voila! – you get an incendiary dung-heap – prime real estate to breed flies.

So, all I can do now is gnash my teeth impotently & shriek – I’ll get you, you gecko-feed!

While flies & bugs are vomit-worthy, some of the beetles are uber-cool. Many people don’t know the difference – which is kind of sad. Beetles are awesome. I should know – I kept several of them as pets.

Once, a Regal Jewel Beetle owned me. My brother presented it to me during that year’s Summer holidays. “Hey, bat barf – happy birthday” he said lazily & tipped the beetle on my head. The beetle crawled over my forehead, slipped on my eye-glasses & fell on my largish nose. It had a lovely iridescent body & chocolate colored wings. It twirled its antennae & tickled my cheeks.

I eyed my brother with deep suspicion. Elder brothers don’t do random acts of kindness. That, and my birthday wasn’t till November. I turned the beetle over gingerly – ACK! PTBH! It looked like a roach! My brother made a face at me & said “I found it in the orchard, monkey-face! I thought of dropping it in your knickers when you sleep – but it will be a harrowing experience for the poor beetle”.

The beetle was totally adorable. It soon had its own digs – a palm-leaf box. It was used as a receptacle for dried mango – which we irreverently dumped in the garbage. Which event was set to the back-ground score of our grandma cursing us – “Urchins! Rogues!”. We lined the box with our dad’s best hand kerchief & an old tie. We laid the beetle in its abode with great respect.

Assiduous research on our part – as in, I did all the reading while my brother showered dried leaves on my hair singing “Its Raining Men”, not what I’d call an even division of labor – revealed that this particular beetle was partial to Jujuba leaves (Indian Ber Tree). We kept the beetle ensconced in comfort & Jujuba leaves – which we harvested from our back-yard.

All good things must come to an end. Our beloved beetle died during child-birth. To be precise, egg-birth. What can we say, labor is fraught with perils for females of all species. We were devastated. Our father consoled us by saying, “Now why don’t we give your beetle a proper funeral?”.

We dug a shallow grave near a rose bush & laid our sweet beetle to rest there. That’s when we hit a snag. We hadn’t given our pet a name. But, tombstones needed a name. So, we named her “Hot Water” – don’t ask me why. “Here lies Hot Water, Beloved Pet of Priya & Ravi”. My friend Sudha solemnly filled a small glass bottle with Hot Water & laid it beside the beetle. We sobbed uncontrollably & quaked with grief when the grave was closed with a mound of sand. We laid button-roses (since normal roses were too big) on Hot Water’s tombstone.

Even now, I feel a tug in my heart when I remember Hot Water.

As I said, beetles are thigh-slapping wonderful. The other day, my niece Roshni espied a Rhinoceros beetle & ran screaming “Bugs! Bugs!”. The beetle’s little feelings must have been hurt by the pandemonium – for he marched resolutely towards the door. “That’s a beetle, Roshni” I said dully. “They are all the same” she said mulishly. “Do me a favor” I begged. “Promise me you won’t consider a career in Zoology”. “Whatever” she shrugged “but please throw that ugly bug down the garbage chute”.

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Here’s my gnarly adage – “Stop lying dog, or I’ll sock it to ya!”. An obstinate person might construe that my cerebral department didn’t exactly work overtime to coin that. But what else do you expect from a woman that collects screw drivers? The Theory of Everything??

Now seriously. I hardly ever lie. Not because of my impending sainthood, but because I’m bone-lazy. It takes too much effort to lie – but, all it takes is a feeble brain to blurt out the truth. I mean, some lies are so complex & convoluted that you need a story-board to keep the facts straight. What can the inept do? Truth is the only recourse, their only succor.

Lying is a difficult terrain to navigate. Added to that is our moral Sturm und Drang. So, most of us emit unconscious signals thru our tone, body language & choice of words that shriek “I’m a frigging LIAR!”. When we lie, our eye-balls drift to the right – the creative part of our brain – which is furiously cranking out a fib. Or so I heard from no less authority than Samuel L Jackson in “The Negotiator” Since I’m too asinine to lie, I’m not cool when others are successful at it. So cut a sister some slack & stick to the truth.

I’ve reached that point of time in my life where I ruminate long & hard over the question – What shall I bequeath to this world? What will be my legacy? What would be my piece de resistance? The answer hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ll put together a Compendium of Liars! Why didn’t this occur to me earlier?

Many years back, I took my aunt to a snooty & scandalously expensive restaurant in Chennai. The ambience was good, the food was mediocre, service was par-excellence, there was live troop playing soporific music, the room was full of snobs and the bill gave me a thrombosis. You know – the typical five-star hotel mise en scene. My aunt was agog with excitement & she had on her string of pearls for that grand occasion.

On our way back, she told me conspiratorially – “If anyone asks me where I went, I’ll tell them we went to the New Woodlands restaurant”. I was totally at sea – Why would she lie? We had been to a wickedly conceited place, 10 times as expensive as “New Woodlands”. What’s the matter, she couldn’t see the brag value? “To ward off the Evil Eye!” she nodded her head knowingly. Most people she spoke to called her long distance over the phone, for crying out loud. “You think the Evil Eye tele-commutes over the phone lines?” I asked mercilessly. No one can accuse me of clemency. She smiled sweetly, but stuck to her guns. So, that’s the 1st kind for you – the Exorcists. They are forever sparring with evil eyes & other malfeasance.

Next up are the Myth Makers – They can’t leave well enough alone. They keep embellishing an event, that after a while you’ll be hard put to separate fact from fiction. Once, my aunt misplaced her expensive emerald ear-rings. I was asked to find it. With my psychotic levels of patience & neurotic adherence to method, I usually find what I’m hunting for.  I inspected my aunt’s steel armoire. Since she had moved to a new house recently, I thought the jewels might have fallen into the crevices. And that’s exactly where I found the ear-rings – along with a powder compact & 3 picture post-cards of the Miami beach that my cousins had stolen from me. It was a shocking discovery for all concerned.

My grandma cottoned on to this – and started narrating my “prowess”. With bells & whistles added to her palaver, of course. “She saw something glittering” – she said to her wide-eyed audience. “What the…I never saw anything, you old coot!” I interjected. But no one paid me any attention. Subsequent versions had me using a Sniffer Dog & a Magnifying glass a la Sherlock Holmes. And pouncing on the “miscreant”. I hope to be canonized soon. Priya Raju, the Matron Saint of Lost Items.

Some people feel obligated to lie. Truth is so blah. We need colorful, artful, decorative lies – or the planet might kick the bucket out of sheer boredom. The trouble with them is, they don’t know where to stop. Their imagination fires up & they just get carried away. “I was late because I was stopped. By an armored vehicle. Er, make that a UFO. And out popped little green men”. Or, they contradict themselves, trip over the mess they’ve created & fall face-down with a “Splat”. The “Elvis Presley, Entertainer” liars – No one takes them seriously, not even themselves.

And then there’s the kind that’s allergic to the truth. Take my baby-sitter (please – take her). She abhors truth. “Why do you need 5 days off?” “Because Madam, I have to attend my sister’s wedding”. “But, you don’t have a sister!”. At which point, she’ll start sulking & the atmosphere becomes inimical to a conversation.

Some lies are not lies at all. For e.g, the Brazil nuts that you bump into on the “E” train who insist that they are St John the Baptist in flesh. Technically, they are not lying – poor things, they firmly believe what they say. They are probably waiting for Salome, as we speak. “Necessary” lies don’t count either. After a couple of brewskis, a guy I knew once asked me – “So how much money do you have in the bank? Huh? Scads of cash?”. “I have none, my dear. I go around with a begging bowl” I told him with a straight face.

Have you encountered other types of liars? Be a pal & tell me – And help me finish my Magnum Opus. Take some leeway to be offensive, I say. We need our entertainment.

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Actually, I boarded a flight to the US.

After many years, we returned to India. From a “Non Aligned” nation – euphemism for aligning with the Russians really – India is now in bed with the US. Sound bites on the “Free Market” and “Foreign Direct Investment” impinge on your ear drums every nano-second. But, has Customer Experience improved at all? Here are my highly arbitrary findings, for those of you that have nothing better to do.

Man can live by bread alone. Woman can’t. To cover the delta, she shops. If she doesn’t, that’s only because she’s either stone broke or was run over by a truck (on her way to the mall). I love shopping – my undying ardor is reserved for Plumbing! Concealed Diverters! Granite Slabs! Wooden Planks! Hardware! When I grow up & become a big girl, I’ll treat myself to a Power Drill & a Chain Saw. No, I’m not sharing that with you.

All that is now. Back when I was 21 – flush with money from my 1st job, I went crazy over clothes. Forgive my lunacy, Oh Lord. I was just a greenhorn. Young, Inexperienced. And Slim. I remember going once – and never again – to “Flora”, a Clothing Store.

The Shop Girl was a waspish woman. Her baleful eyes viewed me with deep suspicion. Flora’s Management probably rated “Irritability” as a highly desirable factor in their staff. And this one cleared that test in flying colors. I tried a dress on & opened the fitting room door – And I thought I heard thunder, but it was only Miss Congeniality’s Clarion call for war. “Where do you think you are going?” she snapped.  “You haven’t paid for the dress. You can’t traipse all over the store wearing it!!” she boomed. I was furious – “I’m still in the fitting room! What did I do – put one toe over some magical line visible only to you??” I threw the dress on her face – I wasn’t wearing it then – and marched out of the store.

Fast Forward to the present. I recently went to “Health & Glow”, a leading Cosmetic chain in Chennai. The place was swarming – with Sales Men & Women. They outnumbered the customers 3 to 1. They were all smiling, flashing their pearly whites. And my, were the staff helpful? They were altogether too helpful. I had to rudely shove a few of them out of my way to get near a bottle of conditioner. “Would you like to try some Apricot Scrub, Madam?” tooted a voice near my right ear. “What about bath beads, Madam?” – this was my left ear. “Some alcohol-free astringent is the very thing for your oily face, Madam” – said a disembodied voice somewhere near my scalp. Jeepers Creepers!! They just wouldn’t leave me alone. Don’t go there when you feel emotionally fragile, OK?

Customers hate high-pressure sales tactics. Nobody wants to walk a gauntlet of touts, just to buy after-shave.

I’m an indifferent dresser. Purely out of inertia, I shop at neighborhood stores – like the ubiquitous “Naidu Hall”. If you ever plan to visit Chennai, watch closely when you are about to enter the store. Not that any effort is required – its not a subtle, nuanced point. We don’t do subtlety in my motherland. Anyhoo, there are 2 people who stand by the door – One of each gender. Ostensibly, the guy is the doorman and the lady is the usher. Both of them will pounce on you like eager Labrador puppies. “Madam, How can I help you?”. Jeez! Its a small shop – probably 2000 square feet in all! And has a grand total of 4 sections – Kids, Under Garments, Indian & “Western” gear (as in West of India: Pants, Shirts & Skirts – not Western as in Buffalo Bill). One would think the possibility of the customer getting hopelessly lost in such a small shop is slim. But, the “Naidu Hall” Management isn’t taking any chances.

I’m glad that Sales People are friendly & helpful these days. But, I wish they’ll keep their distance. Many Indians don’t have a concept of Personal Space. Living with 1.2 Billion people probably has something to do with that. In “Naidu Hall” for e.g. – a Sales Woman will follow you closely. Very closely. You don’t have to look helpless or touristy – they’ll instinctively imprint on you & follow you around, like baby ducks trotting after their mothers. I get very stressed out when someone stands so close to me that they can smell my armpit. When that happens, I just want to leave – to hell with shopping. One day I’d had enough – I swerved around abruptly & addressed my dogged pursuer: “Tell me, do I bear a striking resemblance to a known shop-lifter? If not, could you please detach yourself from my backside?” I heard a scared squeak & the woman scurried away. Peace, at last!

Why do shops in India have so many employees?? Do they get these people in some Discount Barn for employees – “Hire 2, Get 20 Free!!!” – Is that what’s going on? Most businesses apply skewed logic: They think following people around like bloodhounds is Customer Service. I think Book Shops have hit the right balance. There are people around, should you need help. Otherwise, they leave you alone. I wish other businesses would borrow a leaf & follow suit.

Don’t get me wrong. I do think shopping experience in India has vastly improved in the past 15 years. There’s more variety, competitive prices, attractive displays, well-appointed stores and better customer service . The Summum Bonum would be a peaceful, pleasurable shopping experience. People would really appreciate that. Till that happens, stores can keep brown paper-bags handy for stressed out, hyper-ventillating customers.

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Reading my posts, you might wrongly conclude that I have not a serious thought in my mind. At this very moment, let me assure you, that I’m thinking long & hard about spittle. This is how it all came about.

Ok, close your eyes & think about India’s performance in any sport in the world arena. For every Viswanathan Anand, Shiny Wilson and Leander Paes, we have exactly 99,952,789 talent-free zombies who think they are sports-persons. My husband, a patriot, is deeply distressed by all this. So I decided to fix this once & for all.

Sure, we were doing great in Hockey, Cricket & a few other games. As long as 2.14 other countries were playing it. In such a scenario, a medal or a cup is inevitable. It was almost enough for us to show up on time.

But soon, trouble started. The Chinese, the Koreans, the Americans, the Ukrainians (and the 190 other countries in the world) started playing all these games. Better than us. Totally inconsiderate of them, I daresay. Why, tomorrow upstarts like Vanuatu & Tonga Islands may start playing hockey & beat us pants-down.

Clearly, we need a strategy here. We should go after a sport where we have the natural inclination. No tired old shtick – we need a new game. A game where traits like team-work and discipline are not needed – we mutated & lost those traits ages ago.

We need a new game: a game where – why be humble – we Indians may be the greatest in this planet. I give you (drum-roll, please)……The Great Millenial Spitathon! Exactly what is a Spitathon? Why, the great Indian sport of spitting on the streets, of course.

You think spitting is not a sport? You narrow-minded varmint. You’ve clearly not seen a master in action. The trajectory of the spit, the speed at which it is delivered, the distance traveled – why, the possibilities boggle my mind. Not to mention the spitting mouth action – veritable gymnastics, that will give Nadia Comaneci a complex.

And the sound effects, the acoustics that go with it – I can imagine an indoor Olympic event near the wash-stand. And there is so much regional variety in spitting. Some states use paan heavily, some chew tobacco, some neither – sort of unity in diversity.

Think of all the other advantages. We don’t need special playing facilities. Any road will do for a practice session, as long as there are other people on whom one can practice. No new-fangled turf, pitch, spiked shoes or hapless coaches to blame our failures on. And there will be so much competition & skill in the country, that the selection committee will be over-whelmed.

You ask me what we should do if the French and the Brazilians latch on to Spitathon quickly & beat us? True, we must be prepared for every eventuality. Never fear, I have that covered – we can nurture 2 other games on the sly. Games where we may have total monopoly in the world: Snotathon & Peeathon.

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