So Much To Do, So Little Time!

So it’s the long weekend. Some of you, I know, are thoughtful, organized people who can keep a Things-To-Do list, and what’s more, pull it off, striking each activity off with aplomb as you complete it. Well, if thats indeed you, then you have something planned for these three days.

As for me, well I’m home. I didn’t plan ahead.

I’ve dealt with Things-To-Do lists from the time I was in junior school. And I must say, as if you had no clue, I am a miserable flop at them.

Making time table for exam study and all that. Of course, that had other objectives built-in, like wasting time in order to delay as much as possible, the insurmountable trauma of opening a text book!! And since i touched on that, i must tell you this - I remember my dad mentioning on more than one occassion to mom or to an assortment of friends, relatives or visitors "if you really have to hide something from Sundar, simply slip it inside his text book".

A list of Things-To-Do.

Never worked for me. I could never recall anytime having ever gone past item one on the list. I’ve even tried beating this shortcoming by making the idea itself part of the idea :

Things-To-Do Today

1. Follow this list religiously.
2. Clear the Table and consolidate bills and bank statements.
3. Are you following 1 above?
4. Buy New Year greeting cards for People.
5. Make a list of People.
6. Be sure to do item 2 above.
7. Have you done item 5 yet?
8. No, item 5 can’t be before item 4.
9. Ok have you done item 4?
10. How can I do 4 before I know whom the cards have to be bought for?
11. Don’t give up yet.
12. Try jogging in the morning. It clears the head.
13. Need a clear head to wake up at 6 am.
14. Don’t defeat yourself by uselessly arguing. Deadline: 5 PM.
15. Do 18 Now.
16. Have you completed the 43 items from yesterday and the last weeks’ Things-To-Do?
17. Ok. Give Up if it’s too overwhelming.
18. Do 15 Now. Review list once more. Persevere.
19. Have you done ANYTHING today? Make a list of things you did today.
20. If you are at 20 just curious to see whats at 20, go back to 1.

Commmmmonnnnn!!! Just go swallow a Hippo! Thats not me! I have better things to do than things to do.

Yeah right.

Ok. Its that time now when you have to come face to face with facts and with your head down, face facts. All this, is in fact a DNA level feature. Just like TVs or Digicams or mobile phones have dozens of models – 804, 804E, 6600, 6600i(the i is in italics, mind you. We do pay prodigious attention to detail here!), 6600i+ with Bluetooth and so on, some models have certain features, some don’t. My DNA model didn’t have any such advanced features. I think my folks didn’t want to bother with such features.

“whats the use? Why does he ever need to plan anything? He’s never gonna do anything so important that he would need to plan. Ok give us the basic model with basic features please. We essentially want something that is low maintenance, fairly long life with good mileage, and can just manage on its own, even without the Advanced Planning implants. And minimum Memory and processing capability will do thank you.”

True. You don’t need a supercomputer if all you are going to do on your computer is use Notepad.

So anyway…the long and short of it, I am at home. Theres even no office to go to. Sitting here, watching a day pass by uselessly. No this to do. No that to do. Not putting the day to good use. Not even sleeping. Oh how could I sleep? If I do, I would catch up on much deprived sleep, become fresh and so on and that means the day would become useful! That certainly doesn’t augur well with my purpose of existence does it?

Well, at least I was of some use to you by being able to help you strike off “Read jvpathe.blogsport.com today”

Merry Christmas.

Meri maa Gir Gayi!

Oh I can tell this is going to be quite painful. Not to mention, emotional.

Oh yes. It is terrible to even write about it. It’s my mom. Meri Maa Gir Gayi!

Like most moms, she has this terrible, totally disagreeable tendency to get old. She was 10 years younger just about a decade ago and now, damn, where have the years gone? And trust me, for my part I have tried my best to keep up with her by growing old parallely. I just know it in my bones that I have grown older by at least a decennium in the same span. I believe I have been following her aging process steadily, chronologically, I must add, although not quite successful when it comes to closing the gap qualitatively, if you will spare me for phrasing it thus. Nevertheless, she seems to outperform me by being able to achieve a higher acceleration of growing older than I can manage, in the same duration in question. For the same 10 years, she has achieved more than I could muster up. Tell me, Does it happen with your mom too? I mean really tell me. Add a comment or something. Pathe back ok?

And now just when my head is consumed by such thoughts, my mom goes ahead and does something. Usne kya kya kiya – ye sunke aap ko bhi tension ho jayegi. Meri maa, Gir gayi!

Well before I actually tell you the sad, and rather disagreeable, I must admit, details, I should tell you first a little bit about the mental state that she prevailed in before the series of events that built up to the grand finale which, in fact, is the core subject of this discussion.

Well, she has been living with me for a few years now, putting up with, the poor lady, my crazy hours and what you might describe as an utterly, unholy demeanor with which I live my daily life. Especially those chapters of life that I live around her presence, my good ol’ mother. If you will permit me to read your mind, and, lets not pretend and ignore here, the extent of compulsion that you feel towards being nice to me influenced by the sense of obligation from being the good friend that you are, you are thinking, “Hey, you’re not THAT bad”. Indeed, you’re right. I am not THAT bad. I am actually worse. Don’t believe me? Call my mom. Go on. Speak to her.

Ever on the edge to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of my life, she slept to suit my hours, cooked to suit my hours, decided the menu to suit my fancies, decided her favorite TV serials around my movements and timings, and there’s more I could keep going on about.

At the back of my mind I knew it was not fair for her. She must take a break or something. Take a holiday. From me. A good long break that will free her from my oppressive demands and put the proverbial song back on her lips. Umm… that would be something from a black and white movie, perhaps Rafi. More likely a number by Lata than by Asha when she was a few centuries younger – btw when will she ever quit the scene? I don’t mind confessing into your ear that I am rather bored of the two. I mean they were great and all that and still are. But I can’t take more of them anymore. They should just build the flyover, 2 inches right above their oversized noses, get them angry and when they threaten to quit India, please lets all step aside, look distractedly at the civil engineers lunch boxes or the sky or the pigeons on the ledges, and whistle the tune of ‘sau saal pehle..”. Lets make the pact. We won’t stop them. Let them pack off in a huff and go to Reykjavík or someplace out of sight like that. They may leave their legacy of thousands of cassettes and CDs in Planet M – Golden Collections and Magical Moments and Everlasting Hits and the rest of them – I am sick of the whole bit to my ears and every time I go to Landmark or Crossword or Planet M, I become selectively blind to a section of the shelves displaying the treasure. In return, and for having captured our fancies with their crooning, we will continue to be loyal to their tunes and hum them from time to time. And on special occasions like the one my mom will have with the break away from me, which, I insist, is important to her.

And if that didn’t happen I knew I would be the one getting a break. Right here on my skull.

But it’s a very delicate issue if you want to know the truth. If you are ever in a similar situation, be mindful of the fact that suggesting a break for your mom from you is an extremely sensitive subject and you must exercise all caution while you broach it. “You want me to go? Am I getting in the way? Am I cramping your style? Am I becoming a burden? Am I being a nuisance?” these are some sample reactions you might expect.

And yet again, my mom surprised me. Apparently she didn’t think in the narrow way I probably do. I experienced none of those reactions from her. Nor did she jump at the suggestion either.

Those are the moments you subconsciously, candidly just smile within and thank the Lord for making you so lucky. Is jindagi mein aur kya chahiye?

Subah mein twist. Meri Maa Gir gayi. :(

Twist mein complication. Meena Bhi Gir Gayi!

My world crashed around me. It was worse than I thought. I just couldn’t handle it. Its one whole week since.

And today I am booking my tickets to Gir too.

Cutting-edge Pathe on Pathe

Thanks for coming back.

Either you like my Pathe, or this is your first visit. Or, if you’d let me take the liberty to hazard a guess, you have a morbid curiosity to the things I write. (No offence meant. In fact I love it that you have such a degree of morbid curiosity. Makes me feel warm beneath the rib-cage.)

Incidentally, Pathe is a Tam word. Oh it just dawned on me that I must explain the name of this Blog. JustPathe. JustPathe? I’m sure your wondering what the devil hit me on the head. Well, the truth, I am afraid, is boring. Nothing really did hit me on the head. The only last thing I can’t remember hitting on the head, (or was it the other way – my head hitting on something), was falling on the floor right around the time I turned about 4 days old. The mid-wife sneezed when she was transporting me from my aghast mom to my aghast dad. And they (all four parties involved, I’d imagine) heard a crunch – a sound very similar to the kind you hear when a 4 day old baby hits a Chennai floor with its head after traveling from 4 feet above sea level at a constant ‘g’ of 9.81 m/s. Awww so cute. (If only you’d seen the bump on the poor babys head. It zoooped up to become larger than the cute-till-that-moment baby. And I can prove it even today. I have MMS. The poor baby has had to go through life with an oversized head).

And so here I am sitting here with an ostentatious Tam head, keying in Pathe for your pleasure.

Oh, you aren’t Tam? Well then I must plunge deeper into what Pathe means after all. Firstly, its not pronounced ‘Pathay’ And it’s not short for Seethapathy or Ganapathy or Raghupathy. Or the pathi of some Tam girl with jasmine propped up and skillfully held up by oiled hair. Slippery-when-oily notwithstanding. It’s not pronounced ‘Pathee’ either. Its ‘pæthth’ and yeah, like I said, its Tam. Actually, a clipped version of the Tam word, Peththal. (Tam, incidentally, stands for ‘Tamil’ in Inglish, and Inglish, incidentally, stands for Indian English in English – just in case you didn’t know).

Well so, after years of thinking, years of fantasizing, years of enduring a constant itch to write, I found a beginning a few weeks ago. This Blog. And I wanted a name that can capture what I want to do with the Blog, what I do through it. What I do IN it. It wasn’t going to be just opinion. Not exclusively politics or Cricket or careers or jobs. Not education. Not travel. But yes everything. In fact anything. Amounting to nothing. Strictly.

In short, rambling, uttering, whining nonsense. Pathe!

There is no single word in English that can capture the essence of Pathe. Pathe essentially is a digressive, excursive, meandering, swanning, pointless ramble. And all you’ll see here is just Pathe. Ergo, JustPathe. And ergo jvpathe.

Pathe is a beautiful word. Not just for what it stands for, but for HOW it stands for what it stands for. For the simple reason that it conveys a very accurate description of a very broad category, yet singularly unique, style of speaking. And the interesting part is that its definition is not just limited to the style of speaking, but also embraces beyond that to include the nature of content of the said speech.

For those of us who spent mindless hours at Purus drinking teee teeee, having an occasional ‘barotta’, scooping up aafbaayil (for half boiled egg, actually a bull’s eye sunny side up and all that) up from a plate and dunking it entirely in the mouth, Pathe is an everyday word. It was Srini who classified it as Pathe. We went to Purus to ‘put Pathe’ And JustPathe, I must acknowledge here, is Srinis copyright.

So my objective was that if this blog was a person, then he (or she. Or not. Come to think of it, I really don’t care if they accuse me of being a sexist. My blog will be a guy if it was a person!) would identify with the word, totally and know Pathe was his true calling. And would have been with us at Purus, putting top of the line, cutting edge Pathe with the rest of us.

That’s what I want out of my Blog.

JustPathe.