3 MONTH ANNIVERSARY!!! or PEOPLE HAVE ISSUES

So I was going to post this yesterday, which was actually the anniversary date-thing, but I forgot. I typed it out, and everything, and then logged in to WP and then just felt too lazy to copy-paste the whole thing here. I have no other excuse.

So today my blog complete 3 months of existence!!! I thought I should do something special for today, since I’ve completely ignored all other “birthdays” of this thing, but I suck at doing anything special, so I’m going to be pleased that I remembered this and move on.

Nope. But if you’re me, you should know that already.

People have issues (notice the amazingly smooth segue). Real issues.

Yesterday, I wanted an excuse to not be studying so I decided to take my dog out for a walk earlier than usual. By earlier, I mean it wasn’t completely dark outside so I could see what was going on around me quite clearly. Big mistake.

Just as I walked out the gate, I saw three people laughing so loudly that my big, brave dog decided they were planning to eat him and tried his best to run away from them. Or maybe he just needed to pee real bad and didn’t appreciate me taking my time to glare at the three random strangers who were actually within their rights to be laughing freely in a public space.

I finally conceded and followed him, and had gone no more than ten feet ahead when one of the three hyenas decided it would be hilarious to cycle extremely close to the footpath on which I was walking while ringing her bell constantly and laughing horribly loudly.

Ignoring her and trying my best to stop my dog from jumping on her cycle , I was walking ahead when suddenly, she overtook us, screamed while hysterically laughing, got down from her bicycle, picked it up, threw it back on the ground and ran back towards her “friends (?)”, still screaming and laughing. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. There was a bicycle lying there in the middle of the road, people were trying their best to not crush it beneath their cars, everybody was being inconvenienced by that stupid girl, and my dog was pulling at his leash because there was a hot female Labrador a few feet away from him staring at the scene as well.

I did my best to tell Mikey that inter-breed mating wouldn’t be allowed in my family, and he shouldn’t be able to want to do it since his “family jewels” have been mercilessly snipped off years ago because of my sister and her sadistic boyfriend, but he was in love and didn’t want to listen to me, so I decided to move and not have a law suit filed against my dog for indecent behavior by the snooty looking bitch (Get it? Because it was a female dog? I crack myself up).

An hour or so later, as I was returning (or being pulled by Mikey because he had apparently had enough of the walk already), the damned cycle was still fucking lying there, owner less. People were still honking and glaring at it as if it was suddenly going to turn into a sentient being and ride itself off the middle of the freaking road (Spoiler :It didn’t. Probably). I would’ve picked it up, really, but I was busy controlling my dog, so I couldn’t. Otherwise I would’ve totally done it. Yup.

But really, who does that? Who screams and throws things around in the middle of the road and leaves them there for hours? What is wrong with people?

Either her cycle got stolen later, or she finally got over whatever she was high on, because it wasn’t there after a couple of hours. I hope it got stolen though.

Now that I read this, I am thinking of never doing a “special” post again, I fail massively at it.

Staring match with wild lionesses

WordPress has changed again. Great. I had just barely gotten used to the last change and now it’s gone. This is so frustrating. But enough of my ranting about things that I can’t change, on to the post.

When I was in tenth grade, and all my classmates were studying their asses off for one of the most important exams of our lives, my family decided a trip to Gujrat was totally needed to relax from all of my not studying. I couldn’t agree more. So off we went to Ahmedabad and what not, and it was fun. A lot of fun. I got to para-glide (?), ride a camel, look at a whale’s skeleton, go to Gir, see Kutch, and almost get attacked by lionesses. Like I said, lots of fun.

Since this was the first time my family was going to see real wild lions, we were naturally very excited. So entering the sanctuary was almost like going on an adventure. It wasn’t like we’d imagined.

We stumbled across a group of lions (that was just too small to be actually called a pride) very soon. They had probably just eaten and were lazing around like they ruled the place (which I guess they did). That didn’t surprise us a lot, I mean, lions are pretty lazy creatures after all…but a man dozing off on an open tractor not ten metres away from the lions did somewhat astonish us. There he was, in a torn vest, on a rickety tractor, just laying down on it without a care in the world. As we stared at him, ignoring the lions for a while, we noticed another jeep parked a few feet away from us. A guy was sitting on the front seat, doors all open, busily scribbling something down on a notepad.

Now if the lions had wanted to go over to any of those two, they could have done so in a second. They were that close. The two brave (stupid?) people didn’t seem to care at all. When the scribbling guy saw us, he gave us a smile, walked over and chatted with the driver for a while before going back to his own jeep and resuming his scribbling. Needless to say, I was disappointed in the lions. We stared at them for a while longer, and they seemed to be enjoying rolling over on their stomachs, scratching their ears and behaving in a decidedly NOT regal way. Disillusioned by the kings of the forest, we went our own way.

I had given up on actually being awed by the lions by then, so when my dad got a call to go check out some new rest house being built some place by someone for some reason, we went with him. The rest house was on the top of a hill of some sort, and the hill was surrounded by grazing pastures (I have no idea what those grasslands where goats and sheep actually graze are called. Grazing pastures?). It was pretty, but not a particularly interesting place to be, so we decided to go back to our rest house.

On our way back, my father decided to check out the grass and see if something like that could be made near the forest he was in charge of at that time. Since that meant stomping around in long grass and getting thorns and burrs stuck to our jeans and getting them inside our shoes (which is a horrible feeling, by the way), my sister and I followed him and the couple of people that were with us. Then one guy spotted something moving.

It could have been a goat, or a sheep, or a dinosaur, but nope. It just had to be a lioness. We stared at her, she stared back. This continued for a while as we stood there, shell-shocked, few metres away from a huge carnivore obviously out for hunting, and another lioness joined her.

Now, we were not inside any sanctuary or wildlife park. Lions weren’t supposed to be there. WHAT THE HELL WERE TWO LIONESSES DOING HERE????
And then one person who was escorting us told us that earlier that afternoon five lionesses had been spotted nearby.

Oh joy.

He also told us that the other three lionesses were probably in a bush ten feet away from us.

Could it get any better?

And then he assured us that his tiny bamboo stick that wouldn’t intimidate my freaking guinea pig was enough to drive away five huge wild lionesses. For some reason, we weren’t very assured.

There were five lionesses a few metres away from us, we had only one tiny bamboo stick with us for “protection” and the jeep was quite a distance away. No, we weren’t scared. Staggered? Yes. Apprehensive? Yes. Wanting to run away as far as possible? Yes. But not scared. Because we were stupid knew that lionesses didn’t attack for no reason. And they had no reason to attack us other than having being startled by us and interrupted during what was probably a hunt. And since this was a grazing ground, we were safe. Mostly. I think I told myself that to stop from turning into pile of scared mush.

In those minutes, I took back all that I had thought about lions earlier that day. EVERY.SINGLE.THING.

It doesn’t matter how many times you go stare at an animal in a zoo…they cannot be compared to those same animals in the wild. It’s painfully obvious that in that moment, the one who decides what happens isn’t the human, mostly because the majority of humans are to busy having “accidents” in situations like these. Thankfully, the lionesses weren’t too hungry and moved away slowly, looking back over their shoulders at us every few seconds, and we went back to our jeep after they had disappeared.

The other three lionesses had probably walked away as well, because we didn’t see them. At that moment, we didn’t want to. But I did get another thing to brag about at school, so I wasn’t complaining. I mean, I almost got eaten by a lioness and then a few days later almost got blown up to bits. It was pretty cool.

Happy Diwali! And I hope you don’t die.

So in some places, people are putting on scary decorations and cobwebs and frightening (supposedly) costumes and asking other people for candy and stuff…isn’t that what you do? I dunno. I’ve only seen that stuff in movies and once in real life when I saw a slightly drunken Jack Sparrow with drunken girl pirates that looked a lot like girl pirates from One Piece. Anyway, I don’t celebrate Halloween because India doesn’t get Halloween.

Give away stuff with nothing in return?

Let strangers knock on your door without glaring them to death?

Wasting time in having fun when you could be studying medicine/engineering/architecture and moving out of the country?

It would be a nightmare for most people I’m sure. But we do celebrate a very important festival this month, and that’s Diwali.

Now there’s not a lot of festivals in India that don’t involve grown ups yelling at children to stay quiet and in a corner, there’s just Holi and Diwali that I can think of and that kite flying holiday, so I am very fond of this time of the year.

Yes I need to clean my room table, but that’s a small price to pay. I get so much food everywhere I go and everyone’s in a mostly good mood and everything’s bright and cheerful and I get soo much money.

It’s awesome. And as a kid, another exciting thing was the whole firecracker tradition. I never liked loud ones, but the fuljhadis and anars and chakras were really cool. It was one of the few times that I didn’t absolutely hate everyone outside of my family. For a few hours. The rockets are wonderful as well, but they’ve never worked for me, so we have a love hate relationship. I love them. They laugh at me as they fizzle out and fall down after halfheartedly going up a few feet. That might have something to do with me being a giant wimp and barely touching the wick with the agarbatti (does anybody use anything else to light these types of crackers?)

Obviously, I can no longer enjoy these simple pleasures. The past few years, every-time we had more than 3 days off, we used to go to some forest and live like hermits, away from cell phone and internet coverage, and away from the poisonous fumes of the crackers. Last year however, we were able to stay home for the festival, and we were very excited to finally be able to play with fire again after so long. So when we decided to crush our consciences and go firecracker shopping, light shopping, other stuff shopping and things people do before festivals. I found a few strange things

1. We didn’t know what crackers to buy. Indian firecracker (henceforth referred to as FC) companies have no knowledge of copyright or useless stuff like that, or photoshop for that matter. I saw several pictures of Emily Vancamp, Shakira, Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon and surprisingly enough, Betty White on boxes of FCs. Many of them had the © mark right there in front of the box, sitting there without a care in the world.

2. If a box says there’s going to be one type of FC in it, it doesn’t necessarily have that FC in it. I don’t understand this marketing strategy, but I guess they know better than to go for building trust and confidence in their customers.

3. Safety is never an issue. Because it doesn’t exist. One shop we went to (by shop I mean a shack hastily built up to last through the Diwali week) had nice, fiery lamps burning away happily next to a somber looking stack of uncovered FCs. Nobody saw any problem with that.

4. Customer is always wrong. This actually happened this year, today. My mom went out to buy a string of lights because our last year’s works perfectly fine and all of us are horrible at handling money. When she specifically asked for a plain string without flashy colors, the guy told her she didn’t understand and that it was Diwali and it would look stupid if she had a plain lighting arrangement. When my mom insisted on the plain lights, he gave her a look that plainly said he didn’t think she was too bright and told the shop boy to pick the multi-colored ones after showing mom how pressing a button makes them go all shiny and colorful, slowly.

5. So apparently, electrical connectors are classified as male and female. Quite ingenious actually, but imagine my surprise when I asked for a connector with ‘holes’ (because I had no idea what to call them) and she yelled at the shop boy to give me a female.

“I’m getting a girl? What?” I didn’t get a girl. Thankfully.

In general, people were very upset with my entire family because we were some of the most unenthusiastic, non–jumpy, single colored family apparently, to ever exist. I’m pretty sure I heard an old woman telling some other old woman about the youth of today and how we have no respect for traditions. Thanks old woman. I didn’t hear that at all.

But unfortunately, I realized that we can no longer enjoy polluting the environment with more smoke and dust and explosive powder. Because after I grew up, I developed something known as a HAC or Horribly Annoying Conscience and that HAC does not let me enjoy polluting stuff. At all. I feel guilty when people around me go around bursting FCs. And since I was never a fan of loud sounds (unless those sounds are coming from my headphones), I don’t think I’m missing out. The other and more effective reason is my dog.

See, if we’d just told people that we actually give a fuck about the environment, we would be laughed at, dragged to the center of the FC bursting group and forced to light the most polluting, loudest FC they could get their hands on to punish us for uttering such blasphemous words. Do we not know that bursting FC’s during Diwali has been going on since time immemorial (not true since FCs are a Chinese invention) and that by not increasing the possibility of burning the entire area to the ground, we are dishonoring our traditions? We wouldn’t have had much of a choice in that.

But now that we have a dog, we can in fact go around telling people to stop. It’s a genuine reason and that reason is that FCs hurt my ears like hell and everyone seems unanimous on the point that my senses have dulled to the point of non-existence due to the internet (it’s always the internet). If my dull ears hurt, my dog’s ears must be figuratively exploding. It’s horrible to watch him cuddle up against mom and force us all into one room so that he can keep an eye on all of us at once.

So I no longer use FCs and neither can people around me, and five years down the line when everyone’s gasping for oxygen and dying, the air around my house will still be pure and breathable.

And I hope that the air around your house or wherever you live will also be breathable. Firecrackers aren’t funny to dogs and cats, many of which die during Diwali because of the noise and smoke. Birds also have heart attacks and die. In general, a beautiful festival ends up with having to sweep the bodies of many creatures off the roads to make way for the next night’s victims.

Happy Diwali!!

And a smoke free one. 🙂

The post I forgot to think of a title for

So I haven’t posted in a while. I have been around, commenting and liking posts and stalking people but all of that has been done in the privacy of my bathroom because I wasn’t allowed to go ten feet near my phone for the past week, in front of people. It was like, I look at my poor lonely looking phone and everyone goes NO!!!!!

and then comes and takes my phone away. Nobody understood that I was just going to complete the daily missions in the hundred or so games that I play everyday to distract myself from the sad empty void that is my message box. Anyway, now I have to complete a week’s worth of challenges to get to the mystery box/chest/ball level now. Yup. The struggle is real.

And why did my usually (not) understanding family turn so evil? Because something even eviler had possessed them…eviler is a word! Would’ve thunk?  

EXAMS

So yes, I had my exams, and now I don’t. So I can get back to posting randomly while completely ignoring all the rules I’d set for myself when I started this thing. Yay.

Anyway, I have a bit of free time now with diwali and elections and mass bunks coming up, so I thought I’d go and replay a few old video games, or maybe reread a book, or get new songs, or anything that doesn’t involve

i) Cleaning my table, since I don’t have a room since my sister’s a jerk

ii) Bathing my dog because let’s face it, everyone likes dog smell

iii) Going to visit relatives because I am not interested in knowing that I have gained weight, gotten ill mannered because I said “HI” instead of “NAMASTE”

etc. Guess how well that worked out? Yup.

I am now supposed to be cleaning my room and have just dried my dog off, and I have to rush because my grandparents are expecting us this evening.

FML.

Rant over. For now.

So I went to dinner with my family yesterday, sans my phone, because it was my sister’s boyfriend’s birthday party because I gave him a great gift. But that made me realize that people act funny/bad/dumb outside.

i) There were two kids no more than 9 years old seriously discussing the pros and cons of “love” and “arranged” marriage. Their parents didn’t think it was strange and were very supportive of the “arranged” marriage supporter.

ii) There was a couple with their young kid sitting beside us. The kid wasn’t eating anything because he was too bust playing Temple Run. I did not want to wrench that phone away from him and take it for myself, really, because his parents were too busy feeling each other up publicly and I felt bad for him.

iii) There was a woman who was burping extremely loudly, drawing glares from the entire restaurant… the she decided to rest her feet on the table and had to be escorted outside.

 

iv) My father got bored after a while and wanted to take a stroll in the restaurant, much to my sister’s embarrassment. Thankfully, I was able to make him stay by demanding a pocket money rise if he did so. That will make him do anything.

v) It was my turn to be embarrassed afterwards because my sister and Mr.Boyfriend wanted romantic pictures outside the place. Very cute…but my father didn’t understand why he shouldn’t be in the photo, my mother was too busy laughing at that and I had to explain. Not cool. 

So yeah, it was pretty normal actually, but I am too tired to think of anything right now. I will get back to posting erratically soon enough.

P.S. It’s my blog’s one month anniversary!!! WOO!!!

DON’T INTERRUPT MATING OVER-SIZED CATTLE

So I’ve already said that I’ve spent a fair amount of time in forests. I haven’t exactly been raised by wolves, but I’m comfortable being surrounded by trees that are probably poisonous and animals that definitely want me dead.

This was one of the many views from our rest-house

With that comes a whole new set of experiences, most of which made me almost have an embarrassing accident at an age where those types of accidents aren’t supposed to happen. Thinking back on them, however, I now find them amusing.
I can almost hear 5 years earlier me choking out my disbelief at referring to all those near death moments as anything but mortifying. And know that I am not exaggerating when I say near death. If you are in a forest in the middle of the night in a rickety old jeep that shakes in a breeze, there’s around 45% chance of you not getting out of the place alive. Fact.

There are a couple of incidents that I am never going to forget, so I thought, why not bore others about them? I do that all the time IRL, why should the internet be spared? So yeah. There you go.
 *INSERT ANNOYING FEMALE NARRATOR’S VOICE*
The incident we are going to talk about today happened way back in 2010, when the writer of this blog was an itty-bitty baby in tenth grade. There were vacations for the Diwali festival, and instead of risk getting lung cancer because of all the cheap fireworks that everyone was having fun bursting all day long with nothing better to do, the writer’s family decided to go to the most happening place there was. A forest.

It gets around a 10000% times darker at night

As said writer’s father was in charge of the forest at the time, it was his sworn duty to go on nightly patrols in his ‘comfortable‘ ten year old jeep with torn ‘cushioning‘ and broken radio to check on the innocent, peacefully sleeping guards that had been positioned at intervals and roughly and mercilessly shake them to consciousness by dumping a bucket of wriggling, poisonous snakes on them. However, since snakes (specially the poisonous kind) were in short supply, the father had to make do with shaking the person awake instead.
Being of a naturally curious disposition, along with an insatiable thirst for wanting to show off to people afterwards, the writer pestered the father to be able to go with him. And because the writer’s sister was an unimaginative copycat, she also tagged along. The writer’s fearless mother was very much content to go to bed, but the thought of having to sit in the jeep with no one but their father and a driver for company for nearly 5 hours promised long hours of painful boredom, so the siblings dragged the poor lazy woman along as well.
After having being thoroughly amused at the disgruntled faces of the guards after being awoken and chuckling immaturely at the curses muttered under their breaths, the family was on their way back to the rest house quite soon. It wasn’t extremely late, just around 3 a.m., so the jeep’s occupants were excited with the possibility of seeing a tiger, or a leopard, or even a pack of hunting wolves, so their eyes were stuck to the tinted, dirty, cracked windows.
However, all they saw after a few minutes of driving was a female gaur, or, as they are mistakenly called far too many times for it to be funny, bison. After around a minute of observing the over-sized cow, the writer began to feel the familiar, irrational (until that night) fear of cattle beginning to sink in and started asking the driver to move on. But because the driver was a jerk who was having far too much fun laughing at the scared 15 year old in the backseat, he did not budge. And after another minute, a male gaur came onto the road.

Just chillin’

What had happened was, the poor, flimsy box of extremely weak metal had unknowingly been parked in the middle of two courting gaurs, neither of which were happy about the rude intrusion. Realizing this, the jeep made a move to drive away, only to be interrupted by a third gaur, also male, who had apparently misunderstood the situation and probably thought that there was an orgy planned that night, which the jeep was also a part of. However, to stop the shy jeep from leaving without having fun first, the poor, helpful animal planted itself right in the middle of the road, successfully blocking the jeep’s escape route.

Death cubed

Reverse was out of the question since the jeep stalled every time anyone put in that gear (it was a broken jeep alright), so the occupants of the jeep prepared themselves to be spectators of some live action animal porn. But the female apparently had second thoughts, as after a few moments grunting and pushing each other around, the female started to stare at the jeep. The first, bigger-than-the-jeep gaur probably thought he had some competition form the innocent, probably virgin automobile, and decided to challenge it to a staring contest.
Completely oblivious to his second (and favorite) child’s misery at being surrounded be three deaths, the father decided it was the perfect time to click a pixelated, blurred photo of the gaur threesome on this ancient phone (which, by the way, had a VGA camera). Without switching off the flash or the shutter sound.

It was akin to a gunshot in the silence of the cold forest night (in spite of the cold, there was not one person in the jeep that wasn’t perspiring). And the flash was blinding. The male bigger-than-the-jeep gaur was understandably upset at having his lover’s photo being clicked by some stranger in a metal box, so he bellowed out his displeasure. Loudly.
Finally, the father understood that he might be in some sort of danger from these overgrown buffaloes and decided to keep his ancient phone (if you could even call it that) inside. And as an added measure, he decided to check if the door on his side was properly closed. So he opened it, and slammed it shut. Loudly.

The writer, shedding all layers of bravado and toughness, curled up into mother’s side, whimpering pretty pathetically (not true plz).
Now you see cattle animals pawing at the ground in cartoons and think it’s funny all the time. It didn’t seem funny to the jeep dwellers at all. The bigger-than-the-jeep gaur had dug up a hole the size of a medium sized human head in the ground, and was probably preparing to fill it up soon. And at that instant, when the gaur was poised and ready to charge, the female decided she had had enough and disappeared into the trees with the third and obviously confused as-large-as-the-jeep gaur since BTTJ gaur was clearly more interested in proving his manliness.
Distraught over the betrayal of his lady-love-for-the-hour, BTTJ gaur also stomped away, snorting in disgust at the fickleness of females, vowing to never ever meet up with any of his future dates near a human frequented road.
The jeep dwellers heaved a sigh of relief, the father joking around and trying to appear completely unshaken by making fun of his second (and favorite) child who had been driven close to tears by the entire event (this is also not true).
After the driver had collected enough of his balls to start driving again, the occupants started to all relax but one, the writer would not rest till all the gaur in the world were as far away from them as possible. It would be something to dedicate their life for. It was a worthwhile, noble cause.
*END OF NARRATION*
So yeah, forests are beautiful, calm places, but they remind you on a regular basis about how puny humans with their loud, flimsy automobile barriers are only safe in their heads. If the gaur had been any angrier, we would not have escaped without a single scratch as we did.

Also, we did see a tiger that night afterwards. I might write about that too.

Hope you enjoyed reading about the time I nearly died because people around me don’t listen to my words of wisdom. 🙂

Note that only picture no. 1, 2 and the last one are ones I actually clicked, others are things I’ve stolen off the internet because we lost all our photos when we switched computers recently and id not have enough sense to back them up.

Figured I’d end with a pretty picture