Why you should stop celebrating your birthday and a few takeaways from my Vanvaas

If you are here it means the thumbnail worked. Stay for five more minutes, it will not change your sorry ass life but you’ll like it.
I don’t write too often. In fact, for the past seven months, I did not touch my keyboard. It is sad because I thought writing is what kept me alive so far. Obviously, I didn’t know what a couple of beers could do. I started writing here because I had some really good stories to tell, stories with moral values and other random shit. I’ve written about politics, friendship, reviewed movies and throughout this I’d realized making people smile with a little humor and stuffs that people find relatable like sexual deprivation is the most fun part of writing blogs. This one is not gonna have any of those because it is a rant. It is a rant against the man who single-handedly destroyed everything that I wanted to achieve before I turn 23. It is my birthday and I’m angry about it. I hate this man. He thinks it is okay to wake up at 11 am and order food online everyday. He doesn’t value money and time. He is averse to hard work and wastes most of his time watching pointless shit over the internet. He hates people in general but thinks there is nothing wrong with stalking a girl on facebook and spamming her inbox. He is okay with drinking at cheap bars on Saturdays. He is a menace. The trouble is, he is inside my head and he controls my life.

I believe your birthday is the aptest day to mourn and grieve for the increasing human population that has wrecked this planet up. Unless you have done something productive like writing a nice book, composing some good music or creating weapons of mass destruction, you don’t deserve a birthday celebration.

Seven months back I had to quit my job, drop all the work I was doing in the middle and leave for my hometown overnight. Seven months at home doing absolutely nothing productive, nothing that you love or give a damn about makes you very frustrated and leads to depression. This unproductive asshole in my head fed on the frustration and grew stronger and I got seriously depressed. No mom ‘Subah uthke walk pe jaao’ was not helping.

The past seven months of my life that got wasted, there is no point talking about it. But it has endowed me with many great life lessons. Take your seats, the preaching begins here. The most important, the one thing that I wanted to tell my readers, the main reason behind writing this blog is mental health and the sickening attitude of us Indians towards mental health. Depression is not just ‘in your head’ it is very much real. Mental health is urgent, far more urgent than you envisage. If you too suffer chronic anxiety or depression, acknowledge it and do not be afraid to seek help. Drugs are not the solution, no not even grass. Don’t be damn serious about life, you are not gonna escape it alive anyway. Making mistakes is okay, stop blaming and move on. And yes fuck D.B Weiss and David Benioff for ruining my favorite TV series. Fuck them.

I came back to Delhi in pehli fursat, got my friends, my room, my old stinky bed, unlimited wifi back and it is definitely helping.

PS- No I don’t have ‘Aparichit’ wala disease.

A friend with weed is a friend indeed…

Confession needs to be made that I’ve rolled only three-four times in my life, I’ve my friends for this crucial task. My first few weeks in college went into recruiting people and on the very first day, I met him, the master of the art of rolling. BHANDari is every stoner in the world, he is skinny, by which I mean his pointy shoulders are hanging by the support of collar bones of the shape of chopsticks, his Adam’s Apple at the verge of jumping out of his throat along with long hairs, a pair of ever bloodshot eyes and completely blank deadpan face.
In a group of stoners, you can freely be yourself, nobody is going to judge you. Stoners are nothing but free thinking liberal pacifist people who believe in making joints, not war. People fighting after getting drunk; very common, people killing each other after sniffing cocaine; happens every day, Meth heads running car over people; happens very often but have you ever heard of a pot smokers raising his voice at another smoker? The worst he can do is to eat all your nachos and not laugh at your joke.
So grab your pot, ignite the tail and take a shot and enlighten yourself why pot heads make amazing friends:

1. The Warm Welcome:  Ever since my seniors got to know that I am one of them, every once in a while some guy just appears out of nowhere while I’m walking through the corridor and asks me ‘Bruh, you want some?’
   You are a newborn to the community and needs to be fed well, so they babysit you,

   they take care of all your needs
   and teach you how to remove seeds
   or how to identify the unadulterated of em’ all
   as well as how to crush the weed
   and make sure to update your playlist with Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin,
   so you listen to it until your ear bleeds
   yes, they are the true-blue allies indeed.
   (still a better rap than yo yo who-dafaq Singh)

   

2. Equality: The pot head community is the most accepting one. No matter who you are, from which class, color, caste, religion, creed, species or planet you belong to, if you smoke, they are there for you, always ready to give you a hand in wrapping up 40-45 minutes of visa into a world of amplified sound and distorted vision in a four-inch of Odet Cascadec Ballore (OCB). They enlighten you about the holiness of the sacred grass that is crushed and smoked, the pilgrimages they have done to Manali and Himachal for it, the medicinal benefits and so on, so that you also start to believe that world can’t run without two things; oxygen and weed.
3. Innovative: The world of stoners is ever-evolving, long ago Indian Sadhus used to chill in the Himalayas with a Chillum filled with hash, tobacco and of course cannabis. What Red Wine is to Catholics, as what Chillum is to our savage Sadhus. This holy tradition passed on to the younger generations and soon we had a paper entirely dedicated to roll up and smoke, but that was never enough for our parched lungs. Our innovation transcending all the human-made limits that said ‘used coke bottles are of no reuse’ and led to the invention of the most sophisticated of all, the abode of ecstasy, Bong, which looks like a chemistry lab equipment. Made with just an empty bottle, an empty pen tube, a Chillum holder and lots of happiness, Bong is the epitome of innovation and recycling. And my rolling buddies took their innovation and Eco-friendliness a little too far and created history. Never before in the history of robberies a bunch of people broke-in an ATM not for cash, but for cash receipts that ATMs spits out after every transaction. Never before in the history of addiction a bunch of high-spirited guys broke-in a closed ATM at midnight because apparently the ATM slips are thin enough and perfectly shaped.
4. Emotionally Available: Some people say that lovers holding hands and walking towards the sunset with broad smiles that says ‘and they lived happily ever after’ is the most heart-touching thing, I say ‘Bullshit!!! Have you ever seen a stoner telling his stoner buddy who is having a BT ‘Sab theek ho jayeega bhaai, acha acha soch!’? That’s the most heart-warming thing man because we men are terrible at expressing ourselves. It is when our lungs are filled with smoke and our mind flooded with triggered dopamine, we behave the most emotionally.

   If you want a marry a guy;
   ask him when he is high.
   (here we go, again a better rap line)

My first official date and how I effed it up

A fine Saturday Summer morning and all I wanted was some food and cold beer, but the almighty Cupid was planning something more for me. This is what I did and what millions of other people do all across the globe every day when they wake up, I woke up, I felt sad for waking up, I unlocked my phone and checked my messages and that’s when the fine Saturday morning took a dramatic turn. I saw her messages ‘Hey there, u free today?’…and those who can read between the lines will understand that this can mean anything, from come to my place and let’s make out to go to China and bring me some Hakka Noodles. Unaware of the threat, I replied ‘Yes I am.’ with optimism and one smiley.
‘We have been texting for very long, I want to see you’ she said.
And my nervous system freaked out and started to bombard my brain with multiple questions, genuine questions regarding her message like “Is this a date, is this a joke, is this a prank or is she trying to kidnap me?”
A gorgeous fresh designer graduate ….asking me out for a date in a country with the sex ratio of 944 girls per 1000 boys is an achievement in itself.
So as I mentioned, it was summer, she decided the best time to meet would be 3 pm so that we could go out and come back with third-degree burns.
Punctuality is a concept we Indians can never understand, we fix a time so that both the parties could come sufficiently late with stupid excuses like my dog peed on my shoes or Russian Mafia kidnapped me. Seriously why are we always late? Except for the only event where timing matters, we Indian men come early (pun intended).
Anyway, I knew she will not come on time, so I’d brought everything to entertain myself with in the meanwhile. I rotated my fidget spinner, updated status on Facebook, clicked dozens of selfies, went on a word tour, killed Kim Jong-un and came back and then she called me.
“I’m so sorry, I’ll be a little late”
WTF woman!! What is taking you so long? I told you to take the metro, not a bullock cart.
Finally, she arrived after 45 minutes, exactly 10 minutes after I was done with all the crucial work that was keeping me engaged, like updating all the apps from Google play store, counting the stairs and watching strangers watch me watching them coming inside and outside of the metro station.
We took an auto for our evening Delhi tour. I skipped elaborating the part of our awkward meeting when I extended my sweaty hands with a creepy smile and she just looked at me with a scandalized expression.
We exchanged hellos and the usual conversation started and I asked her how is work going?
Till then I didn’t know that you can answer this simple question with a nine page long essay, she told me everything, everything from how her college was, how her internship went, how her new job is going, how she is planning to open an NGO, how skinny pants are different from tapered trousers…fucking EVERYTHING. For the last twenty years, till then, my knowledge about the designing field was confined to what Bollywood has shown us, that the designing industry is full of drug addicts and horny gay people trying to fuck each other, but in that twenty minutes I realized that designing industry is much more than that, it also includes crazy designers with OCDs who cannot stop talking.
Somehow we reached the Ugrasen ki Baoli where I took her down to the well and showed her hundreds of bats hanging from the ceiling and she screamed and I thought something would happen like it happens in Bollywood movies, girl falls, the guy catches her in his arms, violins start playing in the background but Alas! Nothing happened.
Then we went to the Red Fort, the ugly red building where Mughals used to play snooker.

I showed her the big open fields where Akbar used to take Jodha Begum on a horse ride and they used to have their little tickle time behind the trees. I thought this might trigger some love hormones inside her, but nothing happened. And deep inside I was hoping that in the end, she doesn’t reveal that she likes women because then my inner self will be like “I told you so”. All these efforts of making a girl fall in love with me were tiresome and I was hungry, and my ears were bleeding after listening to the stories from her Kerala Trip fifth time since we met. So we went to the only cafe in the Red Fort campus, where everything is overpriced and tastes like shit and I ordered a couple of Burgers stuffed with some fried yellow shit and some red and green shit on the top with coke. Wandering was done, eating was done, the only thing that was left undone was my charm to work on her. She still showed no sign of interest in me. We sat down on the freshly cut grass and started talking about Random things, from our school life to movies to her life, her future plans and her list of favorite places. We were having a serious discussion over movies when she said something, something so irrational and fallacious that it still leaves me offended when I try to recall that horrific moment. My hands are shaking, my heart is thumping hard and I’m covered in my own puke while I’m writing this unbelievably ridiculous comment of hers. She actually said that the Harry Potter movies are better than the books. This is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard. “Go back to the cave where you’ve come from you brainless duck-face” I wanted to say this but I remained silent and waited for the evening to end. She kept on saying some other stupid things but I remained silent. She looked uncomfortable because of my sudden silence, but I remained silent. Nobody talks shit about Harry Potter and then expects me to talk back. Before that, I was thinking of booking an Uber and dropping her but hell no, I changed my mind, I will take an auto and you go hop on the bullock cart you’d arrived by.
I went back home and decided to never go on a date again on Saturday. But the next morning I was feeling bad about it. I want to go on another date because now my right-hand hurts,
.

.

.

 

by constantly swiping right on Tinder.

Life Sucks? Get a Roommate!

 

I’m talking about the guy who uses up all your hot water and puts his dirty clothes on your side of the cupboard. I live 700 miles away from my home with a guy who happily uses my soap, my towel and sometimes my boxers and vice versa. Four years ago I moved to Delhi for usual kind of stuff, perfecting the art of rolling joints while completing my college and getting a job. In the process, I had to share my place with many different third world people of different choice of TV series and IQ.
My history of sharing a house with other Homo sapiens goes back to my early childhood when I was forced to share my small room with a smaller human whom they labeled as my sister. I spent most of the time convincing that small round and loud human with a rampant excretory system that she is from another world and my parents have just picked her up from a dustbin on the roadside, or building a spaceship to send her back to the planet of small and round wailing heads, where she belonged, especially when she got all the attention from my parents just by making a noisy howl like a puppy run over by a lawn mower.
Then after more than a decade, I moved to the cosmopolitan jungle of Delhi and for survival, I had to live with people, many times complete strangers, strangers with a possible career background in serial killing or cannibalism. But I rose above my fear of unfamiliar faces and their different taste of music.
I have lived with a guy who had once screwed the maid, and then with a guy who showered once in a week, then with a homo and then in a PG with a bunch of desperate weirdos who used to work all night, sleep all day and plan Goa trips every other weekend.
I have done enough jumping from apartment to apartment (8 apartments) in the last four years. Although I love to live alone so that I don’t have to alter my bathroom schedule because of somebody else’s, neither I have to stay dressed when I’m home, however, a 1 BHK flat in South Delhi is still an amenity for a struggling writer.
Despite his extreme obsession with big-eyed and pointy head Japanese cartoons they like to call ‘अनिमे’, I’m pleasantly surprised that we get along very well. From making morning tea to cooking the most exquisite chicken dishes, he is the ideal roommate in all the aspects of roommat-ing except that he doesn’t roll. He has actually made me realize that having someone by your side to talk about random shit or watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory late night or sleeping until late afternoon is not such a bad idea.
Here are three reasons, why having roommate is better than living alone and fapping all day:

1. Hammered: Apart from the obvious reason that your rent and food bill split into two, there are several other reasons helpful enough to make you get a room partner. It’s a Saturday evening and you’re already hammered, who is gonna stop you from jumping off the rooftop, or drunk dialing your ex? Although this does not happen with me, I’m quite good at controlling myself, and you can’t just tell by looking at me that I’m under the influence until I open my mouth and speak, because when I do, random words come out that does not make any sense. I then need someone to answer my calls before my mom starts thinking that somebody has either kidnapped or killed me and call the police, after three consecutive calls I miss. He never volunteered for this job but yeah, we don’t have an option.
2. Bitch-ing Please: We are men and we bitch, yes we do. Gals, it’s not only yours extracurricular, we also sometimes talk crap about our girlfriends, their friends, our friends, teachers, government, Jon Snow, etceteras. We need an equally fed up guy who will reply you with equally shitty statements, and besides talking crap, we are always in a need of a second opinion on our work, on our outfit, on whether or not India will win the match and just about everything. He is the extra Grey Matter I sometimes need.                                                                   
3. Killing fucking Spiders: Spiders are creepy little hideous creatures with eight long sting-like disgusting legs and every once in a while these repulsive little creatures crawl out of nowhere inside my washroom to kill me with its exceptionally grotesque appearance. The only thing that I abhor so intensely from my heart is a freaking spider and I am not capable of killing them because of one of my strange fears that the spider might jump on me and crawl inside my nose. So this herculean task of annihilating a freaking resilient spider belongs to my roommate.