alice's peephole

  “A white blank page, and a swelling rage.” You, you and you, out there! You need rehab! I do too!  A little box that casts a spell over your mind, you are always obsessed with it. Waiting for it to make a little beep, blare out your favourite tune this week or to wink at you. Your main objective throughout your waking and non-waking hours is to keep it dry, warm, charged and safe. So that you may ignore your family and friends to chase trains and hack fruits. So that you may pay 10 times your monthly rent just to hold it in your greedy paws. The bigger, the better. Slimmer is finer. Anything works, as long as it is outrageously ‘cool’.  I’m scared for my children. Things like pollution and the earth running out of resources don’t worry me as much. Far though the day is, when it comes, I wonder who my kids will ‘play’with? I definitely will throw them out of the house every evening to go outside and play. No wii, tv or whatever gadget has been invente...

This Diwali, spurred on by ueber expensive travel tickets back home, and I decided to stay uh.. home in Namma Bengaluru and get some ‘me-time’.   I decided enough is enough, I need to figure out my life, and a 4 day break is just perfect to find all the answers. Like ever. So I told everyone who bothered to ask proudly about my plans, that I’d downloaded some good movies,   bought 3 books and 1 ‘Akashkandil’ and stocked up on beer. (My new mantra - beer for creativity & coffee for execution)I ignored the piteous looks that this inspired, and grinned broadly. Me time! Cause I’m such amazing company! And maybe also a little because I’ve been feeling terribly scattered lately. The feeling of always fretting that you’re forgetting something, even after making 3 lists a day. And distracted, I can’t even pay full attention to the rubbish I’m penning down right now. I’ve lost my mojo. I wanted to collect my thoughts and all that. I swore off FB and went off whatsapp. If an...

It seems to be quite shameful/embarrassing/uncool or somehow a taboo to express unhappiness. We seem to shy away from honesty, because who wants to be talked about for putting up a facebook status admitting you are lonely or afraid or something? That’s like giving people the license to judge you for not having friends or being carefree and oh-so-chic: checking in at bars & putting up annoying ‘selfies’. All in the attempt to be ‘cool’. Recently a very good friend called me cool. I asked him what he meant, because I really am not sure what that means, and I’m not sure I want to be ‘cool’. It seems to be such an effort – to dress up, to fit in, to do what everyone else thinks is cool, to do it in just the right amount. I know for sure I don’t fit that description of cool, and I’m hoping I will know what he meant soon. For now, I’m going to be quite uncool and talk about uncool things. These days I am filled with anger. Not at everything in general, I can be quite apathetic ...

“Are you a hill girl or a beach girl”, my friend asked me. I briefly considered, comparing my vacation in Goa to Bhutan. I am definitely a hill girl! Aside from a bothersome sun allergy and a tiresome shellfish allergy, beaches just don’t seem to – talk to me. I had coaxed my friends into this trip to Chikmaglur, a rushed plan interspersed with liberal amounts of emotional blackmail. Until Thursday, when my chief local tour guide informed me about the leeches to be found in abundance in the area, I gracefully told them to go ahead without me. After quite a few hours of entertainment at my expense, all parties realized I was seriously terrified of these blood-sucking monsters and assured me that there wouldn’t be any inside the house.   To calm my hysteria I was also helpfully informed that they were smaller than the ones ‘up-north’, that the ‘little fellows fell off on their own once they were done’ and how a cigarette burn or some salt will cut short their feast. Chikmag...