Analytics

As if blogging wasn't already dorky enough, now i gots charts...

Two axis: horizontal for time and vertical for fun/happiness/good luck/health/etc so that the line heads up on the graph when you are smiley and down when you’re down. The extreme top area of the chart would represent moments of giggly happy-go-lucky bliss and extreme bottom would represent steam coming out of the ears. My graph of the last month, compared to the rest of my life is bonkers, zigzagged with super ups and sharp downs.



Is it Karma? Is there something going on under the surface in this place that I am just now becoming privy to? I dont know whats going on but lots of really really good things and really really annoying things have been happening over the past few.

Luck this good and luck this bad doesn’t happen back home. One minute I will be having the time of my life with some fun new thing, winning something, things just working out really well or whatever. The next minute Nine Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine little bad things will all happen at once.

Last Sunday morning, ten days ago now, through a very strange turn of events in the previous night, I was driving around town, alone, in a Mercedes sedan that had been lent to me (!!!). I was completely lost as soon as I left my neighborhood, but it didn’t matter because this was the middle of a karmic upswing. I hadn’t driven in a long time and plus this was a benz. i was happy as can be. All sorts of good convenient coincidences had just happened in the past 48 hours. Among those happy little things, was getting the news that our whole office was going to be staying here on Friday night and here on Saturday night. Amazing, right?

By that Sunday night something had just switched. Its very hard to explain to be honest. Its just that everything I needed to do that night went wrong. The furniture that was supposed to arrive that afternoon didn’t show up until 1130 pm and by then, my waiting for the furniture had caused 100 other bad things to happen – I missed a delicious dinner at a friend’s place, I really pissed my landlord off, I had to run and get a taxi to pick up some stuff that the furniture guy was going to do for me. But I didn’t have the right change for the taxi. The taxi driver didn’t have change. The atm we went to didn’t work. the next atm only could give large bills. Missed an important phone call. Caller ID gave me an incomplete callback number. Just 1000 more things that you don’t want to hear about but would amount to the worst day ever in my former life.

Here, going with the flow sometimes involves major whitewater.

shout out to Demos

Everyone should check out Demosnews.com...great site and they came up with this brilliant graphic.

Cheers to Dilli

I think that if I could find a tent large enough to pitch over this entire city, people would pay admission to see the show. The Delhi theater brings all the deepest, silliest, stupidest, hardest, funniest and most grinding parts of the human condition to the stage.

Saturday a pigeon got trapped in the service porch (open air laundry room) of my apartment. I had a party on Saturday night and the pigeon was a hell of a guest. We ended up catching it in the box that my microwave came in. This was no easy breezy pigeon hunt – with animals over here one never knows if its going to be a normal, fun-lovin’, waddling pigeon of peace or a wiley, dilli-breed, radioactive attack-pigeon.

Anyway, after everyone had their turn peering into the microwave box, we set it free from the front terrace in a triumphant moment of liberation. Cheers to free birds.

...

This morning a man chased two street children away from my taxi window with a sword. A sword. This guy was just walking around town chasing children with a sword. Cheers to child-chasing swordsmen.

People here live like terrible, fucked up things aren’t happening all around them all the time. That same denial is encroaching on my thoughts and observations too -- and I know its because there are no other good ways of dealing with so much affliction on display. And I am not just talking about poor people in the street. Life here, for rich and for poor, is all about self-interest. So far, every attempt I make to counter that with civic-minded golden rule type actions, I open up a Pandora's box of problems, frustrations and other good reasons to stop doing what is right.

India has so much optimistic energy about its future, and rightfully so. But without a serious self-examination of values at the personal and societal level, that bright future will always be tainted.

Some times you gotta tell it like it is and thats not happening here.