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.

Yo’ur Welcome Hear?

Random really, but I love my class now because I get to walk past this piece of art everyday.
I am used to looking at signs that tell me remove my footwear outside where ever I go, but this was something different.

Not only have they capitalized Every Single Word, there I absolutely love the Yo’ur.
No arguing about your and you’re…there’s a new contender in the match…
And I think I’m fangirling over the question mark at the end.
Hear?

What is happening, Internet?

This post already had me very put-off about the internet. I’d expected it to be smart. And deleting all my liked pages and re-adding them didn’t solve the problem one bit. Stupid stumbleupon. And today, something else like that happened. I don’t know if it’s started happening now or if I’ve ignored it earlier, but the internet is getting stupider and stupider.

I was randomly checking my mail today, and saw that I had a mail from Facebook in my spam folder. Since it looked like someone had messaged me, I opened up the mail, to get this.

Umm… What?

… no, I really don’t want you to give me a massage or anything else. Thanks for the offer, I’m really flattered. It’s not you it’s me. I like it when I make the first move. I’m just not in a good place right now. Naruto’s ending and I’m caught up in that. I don’t think we’ll be compatible.I guess I opened the email too late and now I don’t think you’re interested anymore. Sorry Adriana, baby, in some other life, you and I will be together.

P.S. Thanks for calling me cute, but I have no idea who ateiluj01 is.

No, I didn’t actually reply. Frankly, I was too scared to even open the link to her “naughty pictures“. What I am curious about, however, is how that message appears to be from Facebook. Why is that? Since when did Facebook turn into Omegle or SnapChat or whatever? And why does this keep happening to me?

What is with these spambots? Does anyone actually fall for it? What sort of email id is that anyway?

Last month I discovered that I had a personal twitter account that I don’t remember creating. When I logged in, I saw that I actually was following hundreds of people, had around 25 people following me, and that I had apparently messaged a guy I knew…not a message that I would be able to type given my limited vocabulary about body parts. Thankfully, the girl whose name started with J (maybe it was Jessica? Jennifer?), had included her name and a questionable photo..all assets shown … so that meant I was in the clear. I promptly deleted the account, and have deleted a lot more accounts on websites that I was inactive on, just in case.

I’m almost beginning to see why my stumbleupon refuses to accept my posts as just humor..

Also, if anyone from stumbleupon is reading this and if you were expecting feminism, erotic literature and/or any other type of porn, I am very sorry to say there’s none to be found here.

And people who burst loud, hot, blindingly bright crackers ten feet away from dogs, go die in a ditch somewhere. Painfully.

What?!?!

So I was adding my new post to StumbleUpon because it’s one of the few sites I remotely understand…Or so I thought. 

Now if anyone ever so much as looks at this blog, they will know it is not about

1. SEO

So maybe it’s an example of bad SEO(?) (Which is a word I had to look up), because I ain’t good at that shit.

2.  Feminism

??? Why? I haven’t even used the word feminism in this place! I haven’t even thought it! I haven’t even thought about thinking it! Why is this happening to me?

3.  Erotic Literature

I don’t even… what? I haven’t even read 50 Shades, and that’s the only piece of erotic literature I know. WTF StumbleUpon? What are you smoking?

4.  Bestiality 

So I did write about gaur almost having sex in front of us, but that’s no reason to turn my poor blog into a kinky animal porn blog. Just no. 

I am now just unliking all of my posts because this is weird. And off putting. And kinda funny. So yeah. That’s about it. 🙂

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. 🙂