Naan partha penn - I

I was talking to one of my friends about Blank Noise Project and how the young girls were stepping over other people's rights in their campaign. I was wondering how I would react if I met any one of those people. It seems they have special campaigns where, the beautifully dressed stand in crowded urban public places. Apparently, they are honeypots for perverts. Hmmm.... I wonder if I would look at them! correction... obviously I would look at them, a good exercise would be to know if they would brand me as a pervert. The catch here is... I might be one, but how can you tell ? he he he

(I don't want BlankNoiseProject cyber patrol to find my blog and start sermons)

So, yesterday when I was traveling in an autorickshaw I had an brilliant idea! Not that any of my ideas are less than brilliant, but this was quite special. I wanted to see a girl. I was not planning to arrange a bajji, sojji kinda familial meeting, so a quickie :) I was quite brave because you know I was in an autorickshaw :)

So, the plan was to pick a girl and look at her. That is all. There was a huge traffic jam near Pothy's in Usman road and I was fed up with the fumes and traffic, and I completely forgot about the plan. Just then the traffic cleared up and the auto neared the Usman Road bus stop. There was a girl in chudidhar, with nice earrings(I fall flat for girls wearing nice earrings ) and she was talking to some other girl and waiting for a bus. The girl was very pretty. Before I knew I was looking at her, straight at her face.

Then time slowed down, and the few seconds seemed like a few more seconds. Then she turned in slow motion to look at me. Here the reader should be informed about the rarity of the incident. In all my 25 years of looking at girls, they have only given me dirty or disgusting looks, if at all they deigned to look at me. So, this girl looks at me and stops talking to the other girl. It looked like she stopped mid sentence. Now, I am unfamiliar to this kind of attention and I did not know what to do. She did not smile, but neither did I. You know the kind, who look at each other and start loving at first sight?

We locked into each other's eyes, and were talking silently. Even though we never spoke, I think I told her that she was the most beautiful girl in that bus stop, and I like her. She seemed to reciprocate. After few seconds with her, the auto crossed the bus stop, and I lost sight of her.

What do you think the girl must have thought? What if she was a BlankNoiseProject girl? What if you were the girl?

Dial T for TamilNadu (Part III)

I love Tamil girls. I think they are the cutest of all. They are very sweet to talk to and are very smart. Not very funny though.

I find many Tamil girls going through a grueling, unnecessarily painful journey in their twenties. If you forsee your life become a tired cliche, it is time to sit down and have a nice chat.

I know why you are lonely: fear and confusion. Everybody is trying to hurt you : female infanticide, the perverts in public transportation, the gender biased parents. You hear about the sexual abuses in the news, the road-side rowdies gawping at your body. Fear got the better of you and in your panic you built barriers around you. Soon you felt safe in your isolation but your age and hormones screamed against such a self imposed exile from normal interaction. In this deluded comatose, you appreciate anyone who talks similarly against such a union of sexes, however irrelevant the context might be. You think "Sex and the city" speaks to you at a personal level, even when you know that the characters are neither your age nor have a healthy sexual life.

In your safe haven you get uncomfortably alone and in your desperation you check out the guys your parents recommend you to consider for marriage. In your search for a companion for your next half century, you try to understand the other gender over dinner with some guy.

It is time to realize that there is something terribly wrong with Tamil Nadu.

A gender which has been told to avoid during high school, seen only as a chauvenistic peer in your career and demonized enough to exocommunicate even the determined prince charming.
You have male friends, with whom you maintain passionate platonic diplomacy, who are very useful as entertainment pawns, but you are unable to comprehend a romantic "MAN". Your bubbly teenage years long gone, prime years wasting away in your impossible conundrum, you are in your late twenties, a decade after you were the most beautiful looking. You settle for a guy whom you think is not too weird, and marry him in a decision based on a world that slowly turning more mature and against you. In all your mature glory, you skip over the lovey-dovey movies in the rental store, because of its unfamiliarity in real life.

I love Tamil girls and I think they are the cutest of all. I do not want this for any girl and would like to know if it is not true in your case. Many years into your marriage if you do not want to keep imagining about a guy who was cute and had a crush on you, but you were too scared to give him a chance ? give me a call. I have a crush on all Tam girls.

Tell Tale 10

The princess

I write this blog with a faint prayer that she might read it. This is all there is now, this blog. I carefully choose my words, because she might read it. I don't lose context a bit for art's sake. Every word a carefully chosen pearl; the sentences forming beautiful pictures that I hope bobbles up in the ocean of blogs to tell tales. I don't even use the "f" word, "s" word or even the "x" word like I promised once.

I dont miss a single opportunity to quote her. She comes in most of my stories. My darling angel always keeps away from me, always keeps getting angry even if she is just a character in a Tell-Tale. It was supposed to be a joke; I did not mean to say that, OK?

Sometimes I dream about her browsing through my blog in a shiny white Apple-Mac, gasping at the million sparkling mentions of her. I even dream of her smiling at the stories, her huge eyes gleaming with pride, cheeks blushing and tempted ever so subtly to comment, at least anonymously. The dream haunts me; I wake up with a jolt and check my blog for some girly comment with a faint trace of acknowledgment, but never saw any. Irony as it appears, is not without a sense of beauty.

My blog layout is simple. It is wide enough to fill the full breadth of the screen, so that the lengthy stories are easy to read and the short ones fit in a few lines. My font size is big enough to not let my blog look like a swarm of bees buzzing on the monitor. My blog does not have a counter because I know that any http redirection takes extra time. No hit-counter, no fancy blinkies, no weather forecast, no international clocks, no pictures or even a background image. The page loads in the fastest time possible, optimized to run like a jaguar.

Like the 17 year old princess, all dressed up and waiting to be rescued. Only her prince never turns up.

Tell Tale 6

How do I tell her?

I wanted to say something to her. Nothing fancy, but just that I really liked her blog. Just that. But how do I say that without giving away my name ? There is nothing wrong in saying my name, is it? Why am I so shy ? There is no need to be shy. I can always leave an anonymous comment. Oh no! That would be washed away in the million other adulatory comments that she gets. I should be bold and tell her.

I want to leave a neat comment. It should be crisp and sharp. Something that should make her smile. How I wish to be the source of her few seconds of happiness? But, then that would attract everyone to my blog and she would see why I don't have any comments in my whole blog. What if she thinks I am just pimping my blog ? She is nice. She probably won't. But then I don't even have a counter. She will understand. I will hold my breath and say it in one go.

I really like your blog, Ammani. I just wanted to say that.

Tell Tale 4

A tough one too!

I was teasing and flirting with the girl online. I almost knew everything about her, including her eye and hair colour but never told her anything about me. To her I was a 50 year old woman, a veteran from the armed forces. My details looked dubious. For about 3 months I was teasing and flirting with her. Initially she had openly said that she did not care who I was. Then weeks of careful banter piqued her interest.

Then her curiosity overwhelmed her and asked me politely about my whereabouts. I was not about to give away my almost God like unassailable position because a girl was curious. Since her polite demands were not heeded, she abruptly decided to cut communication channels, even at the risk of losing an interesting person ever. If one does not want to be found, he will stay lost. But then again, wouldn't I deign to disrobe myself and stop abusing the niceness of a girl, stop trespassing her blog, humanize a weird character, just because a girl wanted me to? Yes.

Sadly, no one wants to know about the 50 year old woman.

Tell Tale 3

And the girl was not coy

The girl was beautiful. She writes very well. She writes with a feminist waft. It was the first date. I was nervous. Had to give her a gift. Something new. Something good. What would be her mood?

So, I thought. And then, I wrote. A story. Telltale 2. First the plot. Then the characters. Portrayed the protagonist. Layered the story. Played the narrator. Rebelled with some anti-feminism. With hesitation, some naughty erotism. A little flirtatious. Tuned the characters. Felt the tension. Some dangerously contained chaos. Nailed the ending. Reread it 4 times. Took me 2 hours.

She thought it was "different" and found a spelling mistake.

Tell Tale 2

I once knew a girl

The students were are paying rapt attention. Their heads swaying synchronously with the professor's walk left and right in front of the green coloured supposedly black board. The class was Anthropology 101. The topic the professor was teaching the last few weeks was about "Cultures of the World." The professor with unrestrained discomfort began the class with "Today we will talk about the Indian Subcontinent and the Hindu culture."

We all know that India is one of the fastest growing economies, stealing everybody's jobs. The culture itself is extremely hard to characterize. First, it is a country of contradictions. Most of you know the country as the birth place of "Kamasutra" or the land of the fastest growing population. Yes, It is all that.

Regarding the religion itself, it is one of the oldest. But there seems to be a bit of a confusion. It is the religion that wrote a book on sex, built a temple for it in Khajuraho. The country with the most erotic religion now considers looking at women as eve-teasing.

(The students too were finding the professor a little incoherent that day)

Every single women yearns to marry the man she will love, but invariably, in the end waits for her parents to find her the right man. Maybe this is the only sub-species where the offspring is nourshed to its mating. People have forgotten courtship and take pride in a maintaining a forced celibacy even to a determined prince charming. Why the hell do I care.

My darling angel doesn't know to flirt! And the professor promptly swoons.