sumukhi

White walls. Glass doors. Ergonomically unfit chairs.Pioneers of the food industry. A steaming cup of coffee. The perfect meeting.

My imagination runs wild and I see a mosquito in my minds eye fluttering towards the coffee cup. Hungry eyes (I think) and salivating tongue (I think they have one), it speeds towards the Amberish-Brown drink….. Amberish- Brown drink?? It sits on the rim and flies away before I bat an eyelid. With a look of disgust he mouthed ‘bloody man made’.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached a stage where man made food is considered a blunder by parasites who thrive on our blood! A stage where I am reading a mosquitoes thought on the plight of our coffee.
As I snap out of my imagination and back to the meeting, I am listening to 2 individuals breaking their heads on how to feed frozen food and bad coffee to a customer. They are coming up with ideas on how to sell frozen food in the best possible way so that the consumer doesn’t know about its otherwise pitiable plight. I am sitting in a meeting that is discussing on how to fool a customer in the best possible manner.

Has fast food become so popular that people don’t care about what they eat anymore, I wonder? Are the Indian customers considered nincompoops for the ‘food creators’ to come up with better ideas to dupe them, I wonder? Will we (including me) always be mediocre, I dread? Has coffee and conversations become so cheap, I shudder to think?

Jaago Nagrik Jaago… Alas! If only we showed more respect to Doordarshan advertisements…!

It all began during world Cup (03), with burning of effi-jies (pardon me for the spelling) of Dada’s boys after loosing their first match against the Aussies. That is when I got acquainted to the word effigies (pardon me for the waver ). Even the disastrous 07 world cup is done but I was still just spotting the word in papers and not the live demo (god did I just call it that). Soon enough for the first time, I saw one burning right away. Not that it is an exhibit, but I couldn’t help gaping at it. In the middle of FREAKING Shankar nagar square (that’s in Nagpur by the way) with the police having the usual cutting and chalaan session, I saw people walking to the middle of the square and burning effigies like a fire cracker. And I wondered what the hell were the cops doing when there is an orange blaze around! That guy had petrol in a plastic bottle, not a matchstick but a complete log of wood and fire and hold on isn’t it illegal to carry petrol in a bottle?? At least catch him for that, for isn’t that illegal!

And then I wondered, what the hell I was doing staring at those people and thinking of various ways to blame other people around me! I don’t have the balls to walk up to those people, let alone raise my voice! I was just gaping and blaming….. I am just writing this piece as a futile way to feel less guilty, ain’t i?! For all my opinions on youth and democracy and love for Kalaam’s 2020 vision, I do fall into the “chalta hai” “hamare saath tho nahi hua na” “f*c* it” category. So why blame the hawaldar who is at least pretending to protect me. I am sure I have hands of readers raised saying “at least we are honest about being near- spineless”. That is an elixir isn’t it…. like that’s not being a coward….