Trainspotting

It's 9:15 am, on a Monday morning. While the corporate world has once again resumed it's pursuit of dreams & happiness, I am sitting here, at my office desk with almost Zen like serenity, totally oblivious of the on going rat race (& also oblivious of the huge pile of "outstanding tasks" sitting prettily on my desk) .

I have picked up keyboard after exactly 7 weeks 3 days & 14 hours to write something other than a 4GL code. I've been keeping tab on each & every painful hour, painful day, painful week that has elapsed since I wrote my last blog (which incidentally, was more of a rant than a blog). For someone who (once) had aspirations of becoming a newspaper columnist this exercise in blogging serves as a huge sobering experience. It kinda makes you realize just how hollow your aspirations are without the backing of any genuine talent. Reality bites, yes it does.

I grew up reading Mid-Day. It is a tabloid format newspaper which hits the Mumbai newspaper stands in afternoon. It was an era before the world-wide-web revolution. While your regular Times Of India, Indian Express gave you the stale news stories on what happened the previous day, Mid-Day gave you the latest stories which happened in the previous evening or night or sometimes even updates on what happened that very morning. A tabloid with all the latest & juiciest news bits & gossip.

Wait, who am I kidding here ?

Nobody read Mid-Day for news-stories. For most people (like me) Mid-Day was a paper which served your daily dose of soft porn. Just turn to page 3, and you were greeted by a fresh & sultry "Mid-Day Mate" - a hot young female in various stages of undress. There was once a phase when the mates got even hotter & went topless for couple of months. Before you wonder what the big fuss is about, let me remind you, we are talking about the 1980s & early 90s here. Topless was huge thing back then, plus I was about 15/16 years old.

I guess I digressed a lot by talking about Mid-Day mates. I actually wanted to talk about Shobha De. It was Shobha De (no she didn't appear topless in Mid-day) who sowed the seeds of my dream of becoming a celebrity writer. She use to write weekly column in Sunday-Mid-Day. Most of my Sundays would start by reading Shobha De's column while still lazing in bed. Reading about the parties she attended, the celebrities she rubbed shoulders with. This is where I found who is sleeping with whom, amongst the Crème De La Crème junta staying in Malabar Hill , Napean Sea Road, Cuffe Parade , Juhu , Bandra etc. I read about their "beautiful & fashionable lives" while lying in my 2 room apartment in the distant unfashionable suburb of Mulund (that would make me an escapist, i guess). I was fascinated by the fact that, this lady could just drop some big names, write stuff which she most likely overheard in some parties, add few witty jibes of her own and Voila! she had a newspaper column of her own. A whole page just for her, with her pretty mug shot & a byline to boot.

I thought, now that's a cushy job right there. I can do that. I can write couple of funny lines, pass few acerbic remarks, pass judgment on movies & movie stars. For all i know I could be a male equivalent of Shobha De. But there was just one minor hitch. I was not a celebrity. I was not married to a celebrity either. Nobody invited me to any high society parties or movie premieres and the worst part was, I was staying in Mulund. For those who aren't aware of Mumbai's topography, Mulund is where the suburban limit of Mumbai ends towards the eastern side. For all you know Mulund is the north pole of Mumbai ( though people staying in Virar might argue against that claim). So although I was legally a resident of Mumbai, I could as well have been staying in Bhatinda or Jhumri-Tallaiya.

As luck would have it (or rather predictably), I grew up to be a 'code coolie'. (And) somewhere down the line came the phenomenon of blogging. When I started blogging I realized just how hard it is to write something week-in and week-out. It doesn't help not having any interesting "life" so to speak of. Just the drab 9am to 6pm job & the usual stay-at-home weekends routine. For becoming a socialite one needs to be "social", at the least. There in lies the crux of the matter.

Any ways, this post was not meant to harp (yet again, as my loyal readers would say) on my non-existent social life. When I picked up keyboard this morning I didn't intend to write about Mid-Day mates & Shobha De. I wanted to write about something more earth shattering. This morning while commuting on MRT to work, I saw something which could (or rather most definitely would) affect humanity in BIG way.

I've got good news for parents, who are losing sleep over which career to choose for their kids. Twenty years from now people working in the field of "Otology" are going to rake in the moolah. So drop everything that you are doing and start preparing your kid to become an Otologist. What makes me so sure that this is gonna happen ? Well next time when you hop onto a train or bus, look around. Look around closely and count the number of persons happily lost listening to some music while being wired to an iPod or a Cell phone or other such gadgets. I did an impromptu counting this morning : 1... 2... 3... 4... 5... 6...

By the time i finished a quick 180 degree scan, that count had gone up to 13 ! And at each station the count only went up & up & up. What was even more frightening, every 3rd person on that list had the volume levels so loud that I could make out what song they were playing even whilst standing a good 10 feet away from them. Just multiply the insane decibel levels by the number of play hours per day & multiply that by 20 years and you would arrive at a whole generation of stone deaf 40/50 year olds, in not so distant future.

Twenty years from now you can comeback and thank me for this little piece of breaking news. Hope my advice doesn't fall on deaf ears.