Chic-lit or Chic-shit

There have been very few times that I have really got worked up over a book. This is one.
A few days ago, I picked up this book called, "Imaginary Men" by this lady called "Anjali Banerjee". The blurb told me that it falls in a genre called "chic-lit" (Literature for those cuddly things in frilly skirts you find in malls).

I thought the story would go the usual way: Girl very lonely, pressure from family, girl with broken heart, in walks a prince, censored love scene, everyone lives happily ever after.
After reading too much of The Battle of Stalingrad and getting bad dreams about the Mumbai Underworld, I thought this would be a nice change.

Guess what?

The story DID turn out to be exactly like I mentioned above. But with a twist.
Look at how the book starts:
The heroine Lina begins:
"I'm allergic to India
I snort and sniff through my sister Durga's wedding, my eyes watering from Kolkata pollution, not because Durga is marrying the Bengali version of Johnny Depp. Not because I am the eldest sister, twenty-nine and still single.
Sweat seeps through my choli shirt, in this bright turqoise sari, I feel like a giant blueberry.... A few bachelors prowl in ill-fitting suits, hair slicked back, cell phones plastered to their ears. I keep my gaze averted. I won't talk to any of these geeks."

And this is how the story goes all through this book. India is like this. Indians are like that. I land up in India, I suffer from the traffic, the pollution, the nosy relatives, the house-hold astrologer, the T.V. which runs shows which are rip-offs of the "Brady Bunch". I have no privacy, there are so many mosquitoes, I don't want to do the house-hold chores...... The litany is simply endless.

I turned back to the end-paper to read the profile of this lady and it says that she was born in Kolkata but went to the U.S. as an infant and grew up in Canada and California. She simply has not lived in India!!! Her idea of India is as quaint as it is unreal. She calls her characters Lina, Durga and Kali. The handsome guys in this book are quaintly called Raja Prasad and Dev Prasad (Have you EVER run into anyone with names like these). They also go into jungles to hunt on an elephant and have an army of servants in tow to keep the mosquitoes away. According to her Hindu marriages ceremonies finish with the bride and the groom taking "Seven STEPS" (as opposed to seven pheras).

I don't think this lady is qualified to write about India. She is simply milking her Indian name to come across as an authority on something she does not know. She wants to give an exotic setting to her romantic comedy.
These are the sort of people who perpetuate the myth of our country as the land of snake-charmers, Sadhus, cholera and dysentery.

Besides I don't think she has a very good notion of her own country (now I mean the US). According to her, if your sister is in need of a shoulder to cry on, the only thing you can do is to drive across the state and have an emergency jogging session in the Golden-Gate bridge park!!!!

Now comes the funniest part.

The heroine Lina is a match-maker by profession. She has an interview with this Bengali financial analyst. According to him (Lina says),

"I am active runner (sic). I enjoy sports, meditation, golf, travel and gardening. I like the outdoors in general..... I want to settle down with attractive and motivated woman(sic again..), a professional girl, beautiful inside and out, with similar family background who can complement and enhance my family.
My father is a well-reputed family physician. Retired, of course. My grandmother is an intelligent and pious lady. My family prefers a girl of Brahmin roots."
(Here Lina writes, "Stuffy upper crust")
"I prefer woman nineteen to twenty-fourish, no older."
("In other words, his personal flight attendant").
"I am a hard-working professional, building my career in the finance industry pursuing CPF course.... I have a Master's Degree..."
"Your annual income?"
His face reddens. "Fifty thousand to Seventy-five thousand"

Now we come to the lady Lina herself.
She is a wheatish complexioned, twenty-nine year old matchmaker. She has a scrawny build. And she works for a company called Lakshmi Matchmakers (And therefore earns nothing worth shit). I do not know much about how she looks but she used to have a boy-friend (another quaint name here) called Nathu who died in a car-crash. She has a gay guy called Harry as a friend. And nothing in this book makes me think that she is in anyway intelligent and well-read. In fact she comes across as a rather shallow and dogmatic creature.

And look at the guy who ends up finally pursuing her:

This guy called Raja Prasad. He is a tall, dark and handsome prince (are'nt they all). He has muscles all over his body (probably in his head also if he is chasing a girl like Lina and not some princess). He is (of course) rich. He runs a granite factory, three orphanages and sundry other charitable institutions in India. Plus he spouts sundry astronomical fundae five minutes after meeting Lina. To raise funds for the orphanages, he come to the US every now and then and while he does that, he stays in the best room of the Hilton and get chauffeured around in a Rolls. He has been engaged when he was a baby to this princess called Sayantoni. He has three palaces in India and they all simply crawl with servants.

After reading all this I could not help but laugh. The author seems to think that this is a match made in heaven! And look at how this all ends:
Lina cannot leave the US. Raja cannot leave India. So we are at a dead-lock. Raja finally gives in and moves to the US because he feels he needs to know her better.

In the end of course we have our Lady move to India. She lives in a palace, gets a retinue of servants and lives happily ever after.

Give me back my "History of the Battle of Stalingrad" Again!!!
And Madam...please please stop writing. Take matchmaking as a profession, but spare us this shit!

Bad Dreams

Have you ever had bad dreams???
A few days ago, early morning I had the most vivid and worst dream of my life.
As with most dreams, after a while you don't remember too much of it, but this much I remember:
An underworld gang is sitting down to a meeting. Someone says something and two guys start looking sheepish. Then they start running. One of them gets shot in the leg and collapses. The other chap (for some reason) stops and looks back.
Suddenly the scene changes and we are out in the open. The chap who had earlier stopped and looked back is herded on the footpath and then gets bludgeoned to death with a hammer.
I would not go into the vividness of that scene but let me just say that even recalling it now makes my skin crawl.
I woke up with a start.
For the next few days, I was scared of falling into deep sleep lest the same scene repeat before my eyes....

My God! I hope such dreams do not repeat themselves!!!

Diwali Reminiscences

I close my eyes and I am taken to my non-descript looking home in Ghaziabad.....

The door-bell rings. I run to open the door. There is another guest waiting to wish our family a happy Diwali. He has a big box of sweets. I let him in and get him seated on our worn sofa in the living room. While my mother engages him in conversation (my Dad is at work), I serve the gentleman tea and some snacks.

After taking a few sips of water, he glances at his watch and hurriedly wishes us goodbye and all the usual wishes of the season. I show him out. Just as his car purrs to life, I run back to the living room and get busy opening the box. Burfis are my favourtie....
Me and my Mum sit and make cotton "Diyas". After getting through making some hundred cotton wicks, I get tired. My mother then gives me and my elder brother the princely sum of fifty rupees and tells me to go and buy whatever crackers I want. We spend a blissful evening deciding which ones to buy. Its not easy. The good ones are costly. Quality v/s Quantity.....

Big day!

We all take a bath and get ready for the Puja. I put on my freshly cleaned shirt and trousers. We sit down in the small "Puja Room" while my Mum does the usual things. I wait impatiently for the ceremony to end. At the end of the ceremony, I get a "Pan" leaf, a few "batashas", one "burfi" (as many as I want actually but I have fallen sick after having too many of them already) and five rupees. I go and touch the feet of my Dad and he wishes me happiness in my life. We all sit down to light the "Diyas". My Dad is very punctilious with the wicks and the oil. He takes a lot of time to light them and after lighting them, he gives me very precise instructions on where to place them. I am only twelve. I need clear instructions.
Then me and my brother spend the next one hour burning the crackers. The neighbours come with more sweets and from my house-hold I am inevitably the one who has to go to every household to deliver sweets from our family. I don't mind. The next door neighbours have a beautiful looking daughter.

After finishing off the crackers, I go to the terrace and look at all the rockets lighting up the sky. Someday (I swear) I will grow up and have so much money that I will not run out of crackers to light up on Diwali! After the cracker-fest dies down in my neighbourhood, we have dinner. After that, my Dad sits down with his drink, my Mum sits down with her knitting and I go to buy a pack of Lay's chips with the five rupees Mum gave me during the Puja. (Masala flavour is my favourite).

Today when I open my eyes, I see myself in a room in a non-descript apartment in a foreign land. I want this festive season to be over soon so that I can get on with life. I have grown tired of Lay's chips and besides they are unhealthy. Crackers are banned here, but in either case I have lost the craze I used to have for them. My parents still get a lot of sweets but now the stack of boxes bewilder them. They mostly give the boxes away to the household help unopened. And for the life of me I cannot figure out why I used to count days to Diwali while I was at school....

I wish I could close my eyes and go back to my non-descript home in Ghaziabad again....