name: that girl in pink
location: Somewhere, India
my complete profile

• My review of the movie Game (without having actual...
• Update
• Sat, Sept 26 2009...
• Model Week
• I think a change would do you good
• Back after the break
• The defence would like to make it's case
• Better late than never?
• Here we go again
• Guilty Pleasures

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• September 2009
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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Update

The first three days of Model Week have been an illustration of why Model Week had to be instated in the first place. They represent everything that is far from model about the participant's life.

Model Week has been deemed the stupidest idea discussed on this blog so far and we wish to apologise to our reader for wasting her time and raising her hopes of seeing some action.

Please note: As of Sept 30th 2009, life is officially being reverted to un-model. We wish to wish everybody all the best in their future endeavours. You may return to this space from tomorrow for the usual serving of nonsense you're used to.

Thanks and regards,
Secretary and Treasurer.

Posted by that girl in pink  | 5:55 pm  |  7 comments  

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Sat, Sept 26 2009...

Posted by that girl in pink  | 5:09 pm  |  5 comments  

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Model Week

I hate people who use the internet as an online journal. People who feel compelled to broadcast their every thought, action and feeling.

'Blah Blah had her second mojito and is feelin gr8.'
10 minutes ago.

'Blah Blah just ordered another mojito. OMG! It's going 2 B a crazzzzzy night! :)'
7 minutes ago.

'Blah Blah is having such a blast time with her friends. I luv u guyzzzz!!!!!!!!'
3 minutes ago.

'Blah Blah thinks there's nothing like the company of good friends and a cocktail on a warm evening. but i'm going to be soooo hungover tom!'
20 seconds ago.

Oh Blah Blah, please! For your real and virtual friends' sake and your mojito's sake and your thumb's sake, put down that blackberry and try actually just living the moment, and not typing it out for the world to read.
(And if you absolutely insist on telecasting every minute of your existence, I implore you, for the sake of my eyes and survival of my brain cells, use FULL words. If you can put 37 Zs at the end of a word that should ideally not contain even one, I'm sure you don't need to save space by writing 'gr8' instead of 'great' (that's a saving of 2 characters) or 'luv' instead of 'love'. For the love (not luv) of everything that's right with this world, USE ORIGINAL SPELLINGS! You and your generation have taken it upon themselves to massacre the English language and I can't, simply cannot, abide by it anymore!!)

Phew! OK, had a little mini meltdown there. Deep breaths. I'm feeling better now. It's not a big deal but it had to be said. Feeling much better. Much better.

So like I was saying, I hate people who use the internet as an online journal. I mean, come on, people have better things to do than to read every excruciating detail of someone's day. And unless you're a spy with a double oh status or someone really important and special, like say George Clooney, nobody really cares if your boss is a prick or a dick. Everybody's boss is a dick or a prick, your own subordinates think you're one or the other, so stop yammering about it online.

And that's why I feel a little sheepish about what I'm about to do. It's a new venture of mine that I'm calling 'Model Week'. Truth be told, it's really nothing but an online journal. For a week. And no no, it does not involve models or anything glamorous like that, so if that's your scene, now would be a good time to stop reading any further.

Let me expand on the concept of Model Week. It's a whole week during which I will be at my best or model behaviour. It's a week of...yeah, that's pretty much the entire expansion. What constitutes model behaviour? you may ask. OK, starting Saturday, September 26, for a whole week, I shall:

1. Stick to my diet with a maniacal passion.
   
   • I shall not pop in little bits of chocolate when no one's looking and pretend it doesn't count.
     
   • When I want to indulge in a "handful" of peanuts as a healthy snack, the reference hand will be of average human proportions and not the size of baseball glove.
2. Go to the gym for at least 6 of the 7 days that make up the week. I shall also remember that simply turning up at the gym and standing in front of a mirror whilst looking disgustedly at my body does not qualify as a workout. I shall follow the exercise regimen created by the instructor and push myself to becoming leaner and stronger.
3. Write something everyday. Even if I don't post it, I have to HAVE TO get back to writing.
4. Trim the number of hours I waste on the internet. Watching How I Met Your Mother, reading Mad Men episode reviews and playing Scrabble on Facebook is NOT productive work.
   
5. Curb my addiction to Archie comics. Admonishing lecture to self: The guy at the lending library thinks you're a freak. You're a 30 year old woman who slathers sunblock on her face in order to walk to the market to in the middle of the afternoon because you have to have a Betty & Veronica Double Digest. It's inexplicable. And it must be stopped!
   For the coming week, I shall not get more than 3 Archies. (But 3 double digests, the single ones are ridiculously thin.)
   
6. Sleep on my back. Apparently sleeping on your side can cause wrinkles!! I'm not making this up. Now I don't mean to promote excessive vanity or any such vice, but I don't want wrinkles just yet either.
7. Stop making life miserable for my poor husband. I will be the epitome of patience and goodness. After this week, I will most likely explode, but such are the demands of model week.
8. Sleep on time (before the sun comes up) and wake up on time (in the AM).
9. Not bitch about how it's-almost-October-and-still-so-fucking-hot more than once a day.
10. Generally be a happy, positive, Mother Teresa-esque character for the next 7 days.

I shall monitor my progress and update it on my blog so my two readers can share my model week with me. Everyday I will describe in excruciating detail my activities, my victories (if any), my failures (that's the section to watch out for) and my general mental health. Yup, I am becoming my most despised personality type - the online journal keeper. Why? I don't quite know.
Additional point # 11. I shall think about why I'm doing this and come up with an answer by the end of the week.

For now, I shall say toodles and catch up on the antics of Barney and Gang. After that, Model Week, here I come!!!!

Posted by that girl in pink  | 2:08 am  |  5 comments  

Monday, September 21, 2009

I think a change would do you good

That time of the year

It starts with your mom banning you from eating eggs and non-vegetarian food for the upcoming week or so. You protest loudly - how will not eating meat for 9 days make any difference to any God? and what about your protein requirements?? - but your mom is rigid and you finally just roll your eyes and give up. If there's one thing you've learnt in your thirty years on this planet, it's to know how to pick your battles.

Having lost your right to choose what you put in your mouth (ha ha!), you despondently switch on the television, hoping there's something on besides Friends. There is! Two young sardar boys are yammering on about what they did last year. Turns out, they don't remember a thing. Tch tch, early onset of Alzheimer's, you mutter sympathetically. All of a sudden, Coca Cola appears on screen and tells you that by having Coke this festive season, you'll remember every minute detail of your activities in the future. You frown to try and figure out a connection between memory loss and Coke. By now, the ad break is over and sigh, Friends has come on. That reminds you, stop frowning! You don't want permanent lines on your forehead just yet.

As you exercise your right thumb on the channel change button, you stop at a news channel showing a guy dressed in gaudy satin robes, a gold paper crown and a fake moustache. He looks like he could be part of some street play, you think. Wait a second, he is! This gentleman with the lopsided moustache and gold crown with matching earrings is playing the role Ram in a local Ram Leela. Cool!

Soon you lose interest in the woefully unimpressive Ram and consider going to the market to get something to read. It's still too warm during the days. But the evenings, you find, are becoming almost bearable. Could summer really be getting to ready to beat a retreat? Do you dare hope?

The market is buzzing a little more than usual. You find a huge crowd at the corner halwai's who's doing brisk business selling special Navratra thalis. A beauty salon close by flashes special festive packages. A little further, a hoarding featuring colourfully packed boxes of biscuits and chocolates invites you to celebrate the season with them. You overhear a teenage girl complain to her friend about her parents who're dragging her for a family vacation during the Dussehra break.

Yup, it is that time of the year. It's in the markets, in the streets, in the air and even on TV. The weather is changing and you feel a little thrill at the exciting promises of the upcoming season - festivals, weddings, big movie releases, card parties, sweets, winter clothes and then the New Year. It may have been a rough year, but change is right around the corner. You can feel it in the air.
On another note

So I was surfing through internet aimlessly as is my usual practice when I came across this.

Posted by that girl in pink  | 11:12 am  |  6 comments  

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Back after the break

It was a day like any other. I was aimlessly surfing the net, looking for something interesting to catch my eye while the TV was on in the background. With my attention neither here nor there, my mind was in a semi-sleep and was only sporadically picking up the various words and sounds coming out of the television. I thought I heard the word "groin" a couple of times (which was unusual for NDTV) and that made me look up - yup, poor Gautam Gambhir had apparently injured himself in his groin and was coming back home. "Big blow for India", the newsreader said. "What an unfortunate part of the body to hurt yourself in", I thought.

Since my interest in cricket, Gambhir or any of his injuries ranged between nil to none, I promptly went back to the Internet to amuse me. Alas, the world wide web was not in a giving mood that afternoon and I was back to my uncommitted state of keeping one eye on the computer and one ear on the TV.

It was in this state of listlessness that I heard something that made me look up. It was an ad. For some sort of cream - probably a fairness cream, since absolutely no other kind is required or sold in our country. But it wasn't the various miracles the ad was promising that made me look up. It was a word they used. A word that's been used for every skin product every sold here before, but this is the first time I'd had this epiphany. The word was twacha. And my aha-moment thought was, "Who the hell in the real word ever uses that word?"

Now I'm as Hindi speaking as the next Punjabi girl partially raised in Delhi. I speak Hinglish with a flourish and with pride. I watch Hindi movies, argue in Hindi with anyone who wants to argue in Hindi with me and go to a neighbourhood beauty parlour where they do my thraiding and paddy-cure, all the while chatting in Hindi. But never, has the pushy beauty parlour girl asked me to get a facial because it'll be good for my twacha. Her usual pitch is "skin saaf ho jaayega aur aapka tan uttar jayega." (Despite my multiple attempts to explain to her that that "tan" is my actual skin colour, she persists in selling the facial to me and on some occasions I've even relented.)

But coming back to the point. Twacha, the Hindi word for skin is only amongst us today because a 100 years ago some copywriter in some advertising agency looked up an English-Hindi dictionary and decided that forever more every skin product in India would use it.

By now, I had completely abandoned my computer and started concentrating on the ads on TV. The more ads I saw, the more I realised what a repository for never-used-in-real-life-words they were. Here's a sprinkling of the words I picked up in just a few commercial breaks:

1. Prayojak: The desi version of "brought to you by", prayojak is a word that may just have been created by Doordarshan for this very purpose. Think about it. When in real life, would we ever use the word prayojak? Why would the word even exist in the Hindi dictionary? In the days of the Maharajas, were shows by popular nautch girls "brought to you by" someone? And how come, they found one neat little word that means exactly what a four-letter phrase in English means? Mind boggling questions? I would say so!

2. Kitaanoo: Or bacteria. This favourite of soap and toothpaste companies is thrown at us so many times a day that we may have started to believe that it's a perfectly ordianry word. They even have little kids talking about kitaanoo to their other kid friends. Give me a break! Unless you're a pure Hindi speaking biology professor who studies bacteria for a living, there's no way this word will ever utter a normal person's everyday parlance.

3. Sadan and masoode: While we're on the topic of toothpaste, how can i leave out sadan (which I guess means tooth decay) and masoode (a fancy word for gums)? Combine all these words together and what do you get? Use X toothpaste to avoid sadan paida karne wale kitanoo and make strong masoode.

4. Kudrati poshan: Yup, I can just remember my days as a little girl, getting ready to go to school in the morning and my mom asking me to eat some almonds. "Kyu mama?" (Why mama?) I might have inquired of her and she probably smiled beatifically at me and replied, "kyuki ismein hai kudrati poshan" (Because it has natural nourishment). At this point my entire family got up off the table, sang a jingle together and danced around our giant open kitchen with yellow curtains and sunset streaming in just right. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.

5. Chiknaayi: Ugh! I hate this word and I can only guess it's meaning - grease. That's because I've heard this word used a lot in dishwashing soap commercials (stop using so much oil in your cooking people! It's worse for you than it is for your dishes.) I've also heard the term used while selling creams that save your face from being oily. I don't know, it's all just too murky and for some reason really gives me the creeps.

6. Which brings us to keel muhase. This is the Hindi word for pimples, which is fine. My question is why do we use two words when clearly only one can do? I could agree that there might be some teenage girl out there complaining about her annoying muhase to her friend, but keel muhase? Really?

7. Nivarak: Oh, this is a good one! Nobody knows what it means and yet we've all said it (or at least sung it) sometime in our lives. Remember the jingle for Moov? Moov lagaiye Moov, dard nivarak Moov. It's a catchy jingle and an effective product. But I bet, if you asked 10 random people what that word meant without giving it a context, nobody would know the answer.

There are many, many such gems in our local advertising - words that were included into the advertising jargon years ago and have now found their permanent and only home there. Masoode! Ha!

Posted by that girl in pink  | 11:23 pm  |  10 comments  

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

The defence would like to make it's case

The fact is that the world is made up of whiny complainers. And I’ve just about had it with the lot of them! You know that saying – “you can’t make all of the people happy all of the time”? Apparently what you can do is make all of the people unhappy all of the time. These days nothing is without it’s critics and praise is like the honest Indian politician – rare and even when you get it, it’s never a 100%. Magazines, papers and of course, the headquarters of the negativity movement – blogs, are full of people dissing on this, that and the other.

It’s like that game I used to play as a kid “spot the differences”. Only nowadays, we seem to be brought up on it’s evil twin, “spot the flaw and bitch about it”. Taj Mahal – too ostentatious. Mother Teresa – converter! Money – root of all evil. Austerity – too severe. North Indians – that nasty accent. South Indians – that ridiculous accent. Kareena – too thin. Ash – too fat. It’s an awful, frankly dangerous attitude to have and like I said, I’ve just about had it!

(Of course, this particular post is really pandering to the same negative outlook I have a problem with, but sometimes you need evil to deal with evil. And besides, it’s my blog and I’ll deride if I want to.)

Recently, it was a particular series of incidents that really got me so nettled about the whole “let’s bitch this thing out” take on things. New York Times did this article about people leaving Facebook. As luck would have it, around the same time someone sent me a link to another article about annoying personality types of Facebook (this one was pretty funny actually). Soon a friend announced that she was leaving Facebook. “It’s just too intrusive!” she declared. Suddenly, everywhere you looked, there were articles and posts complaining about Facebook and how it was the anti-Christ. I think even Oprah did a show about the general dangers lurking on the Internet and of course Facebook was on the list of major offenders.

Now listen. I’m not asking anyone to stay or not stay on Facebook. It’s your choice completely. I just think this Facebook bashing has gone a bit too far. The fact is that Facebook is simply a social networking site that allows you to create a network of friends and acquaintances and stay in touch with them. It can also be very helpful to put out a message to a group of people and to indulge in some virtual conversation. Most importantly, it is a very customisable tool that allows you to decide just how much information you want to put out and to whom.

Plus it has great games!

So today, in the spirit of being constructive and not simply finding problems, I have decided to address some common Facebook gripes.

1. I don’t want to share my shit with every Tom, Dick and Harry. Then don’t! Facebook has some really great security settings that allow you to decide just whom you want to share your information with. Create lists of friends/others and control who sees, reads and comments on what. That creepily quiet chappie from your first job you added to your list out of politeness does not need to know anything about you.
   Also, you’re the one adding information about yourself. If you don’t want people to see that picture with your boobs hanging out, don’t put it up!

2. I hate adding people I don’t really know. Again, just don’t do it. If you ignore or block a friend, that person will never be notified. Just get over you need to please everyone and learn to bloody say no already!

3. I hate those never-ending feeds from that girl who takes quizzes all day. It’s a one click solution. Just hide her.

4. I’m sick of receiving feeds about my friend who puts up every picture of every moment in her life. I hear you. Hide hide hide!

5. I’m not comfortable knowing that anyone can put my picture up on the web. This is a serious issue. The thing is that even if you get off Facebook, people can still put your pictures up. The only thing you could do is untag yourself and request your friend to remove your picture. Other than that, I really think it’s more of a the-times-we-live-in sort of problem and not just restricted to Facebook.

6. My ex boss is not my friend and I don’t fancy calling him that. Let’s make our peace with it. “Friends” on Facebook does not mean what we usually take it to mean. It’s just a convenient heading they came up with for a list of people. What would you rather they called the list? “People I have known in some capacity or the other in my personal, professional and or academic life” might be a mouthful.

7. That status message box taunts me to write something witty everyday. Just plagiarise. Go to a quotations website and copy and paste.

8. I waste too much time on it. Hmmm… that might be true. You could stop by this blog instead. Or maybe you could see this as an opportunity to build up resistance to temptation?

9. Big brother is watching me. This might be a valid concern that I need to look a little more deeply into. Personally, I think I’m too much of a small fry for big brother to take an interest in me, but then you never know! And again, it may be more a function of the electronic age we live in. We must all be alert!

You see? Every problem has a solution. It’s just a matter of asking. And if you still want to get off Facebook ‘cause you’re bored of it/you’ve found all the friends you wanted to find/you just don’t like its layout, by all means, do it. Just quit bitching about it!

Posted by that girl in pink  | 2:14 am  |  9 comments