satori

Bracing myself for another boring day at office, I got down from the shared auto and handed him a ten rupee note. Travelling from Dwarka to Noida is a project in itself when using public transport especially in peak summer. In fact my best time remains 2 hours and fifteen minutes till date and best fare Rs. 36.10 (when dropped by mom to metro station, used the metro card and chose to walk the last leg to office apart from good weather).


Jumping over the fence to cross the green stretch of divider, I reached the other side of the road. There was no hurry to reach the office early as I was on bench. So I began to stalk the sporadic shades on street avoiding the families that survived alongside. But that was impossible unless I walked heads up. Sooner or later a toddler would roll down your way, wailing because he had been fooled in the game he was playing with his older siblings. And my eyes hypnotically follow them to their abode.


On an unused land (used as a makeshift dumping  ground) just next to India’s top software consultancy company where these daily wage laborers have managed to find a dry patch of land bordering the standing pool of water, plastic sheets hung on logs of wood used only to house whatever little belongings they possessed. They are not meant to spend the day in.Days are spent below the trees on a plastic cot, where the whole family gathers for siesta after devouring their share of porridge. The little ones play around. 


I noticed two such children playing with their elder brother. He would hold them one by one and turn them around and finally drop them on ground. They fought among themselves to get more of such rides. I could hear their crackling laughter as I passed by them, but then I stopped in disgust. The ground they were playing was literally black from the stagnant water that had seeped through.


Closer enough, it must be smelling too, not to mention the germs it was infested with. But they continued to pull and drag each other over it playfully. ‘Eh! How could someone play in that filth?’, I wondered. ‘Every bit of them must be smelling horribly. How can their parents be so careless?’ And then the clichéd thought ‘Is India really an economic or whatever power? Yes! Which way is our economics going then and for how long?’


It seems our economics has taught us to purposefully side-line this section inventing ingenious parameters to declare ourselves sound. What kind of education system do we have where we are fed constantly on how great our country is and further going to be and taught to walk with heads up and without a trace of remorse? We forget what stirred us and continue to vote for the handful of people eager to realize their selfish ambitions through us. Why has it become so difficult to eliminate poverty? ...


My satori was put to an end by the sweat running down from my forehead and like everyone else and every other day I walked past them. After all I am also a by-product of the current system!

where there is a will .. there is embarrassment :O

Where there’s a will there is a way. One of the earliest phrases we learnt in school. But over the last few years and more than few experiences, I’ve come to realize that where there is will, there is embarrassment and a lot of it, trust me!

In 2007, a single, young independent woman living in Mumbai with her friends decided to learn salsa. No prizes for guessing, that woman is standing right here. Now salsa as per Wikipedia is a syncretic dance form with origins from Cuba as a major original American meeting point of European and African cultures….. thank God 

I didn’t know such an explanation existed or I might have never given it a shot.

The word salsa actually draws up images of a ‘close-up’ dance that’s stylish, swift & sensual, though not necessarily in the same order. But all such myths gets shattered within a week of your class. Soon you will realize that more than anything thing salsa is about mouth wash, deos & perfumes. And people like me who are blessed with sensitive olfactory nerves are always in search of that perfect smell or should I say ‘no smell’.

Of course in between we catch a few words. Like I heard my female instructor, once giving an invaluable piece of advice ‘ladies, remember the five seconds rule; when the music stops, you have five seconds to thank your partner and run back to your seat. If you're too slow, the music will start again and you'll be stuck with him for another dance.’ Interesting, I thought.

Next, after practicing the individual moves, we were asked to find partners for ourselves. And once done, the guys would get the girls hand in his. But the moment my partner took my hand, “BREAKING NEWS” Mumbai had an earthquake of magnitude 5.6 on richter scale. He was literally trembling with fear. I looked at the girl next to me and she smiled in acknowledgement. Apparently she had felt the earth quake too. I was confounded. Did I look like a DON to him? Was he petrified of me? I remember when I was telling my team member about my decision to learn salsa, he had quipped with a sly guys smile ‘salsa for guysss is an amazing activity. You can go up to a gorgeous woman that you've never met before, spend three minutes close to her spinning and dropping her the way you want, and she thanks you for it afterwards!’ My partner definitely belonged to the other category.

Nervertheess, Undeterred by such small irritants, I continued with my classes, giving glossy descriptions to my room-mates about the hand some guys, the ‘oh! so cute’ instructor along with few demos of the moves I’d learnt.’ While they turned green, I was on cloud nine. 

But it was short lived. Soon I had to step down a few clouds. And it happened the day we were asked to focus on the eyes. More specifically - your partners’ eyes. ‘Students, from today onwards, we will move, turn, drop and do everything else looking into our partners eyes. Let’s begin.’

We stared at each other for sometime, but soon gave up. I couldn't think of one reason to gawk at him tenderly. Using some common sense, I tried focus on the chin, on the forehead on the nose but it didn’t seem to work. So we went back to our original routine of me counting the marbles tiles below and he staring at the ceiling fan.;

Next class, I saw him comes in floaters once with his toe secured with a band aid. I had bruised his ego earlier, when he commented that I was leading him. I had politely replied saying 'someone has to do it.’ Now it seemed I had bruised his toe with my heels, so I thought it safe not to mess around by asking how it happened.

The only good thing about the whole mess was that in the beginning, I had a company of 29 salsa enthusiasts, and by the time we moved from beginner’s batch to the intermediate batch the number had reduced to 21, which meant more of breathing space & a lot less of bumping around.

And then it happened on that fateful day. It was supposed to be the last class of our beginners batch. But it wasn't a class, it was a stage show. A roaring success if applause was any measure of it. And more than that, it was the dance that had successfully cast its spell on me. I was walking talking and dreaming salsa. And while I was getting down the stage. I remembered an old Japanese proverb that said, ‘We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.’