Fueling Thoughts

About 24 years back, after motorcycling across India for 6 months as a voluntary mechanic with an international group (I will skip over the part covering loud rampant sex or riding dead stoned);  I was unable to sit in an office cubicle again.  So I took up on my ambition of becoming a journalist except that sans an MA degree in English or a Mass Communication diploma, I wasn't going to land a  gig in any local publication even if I had the writing skills of Harold Robbins.  So I started freelancing to build up a portfolio, which was writing 2000 words for  250 rupees and trying to cram it with at least 3 photographs as I was paid 100 per image. In a few months, my articles became a regular front-page feature on the supplements of the largest local English daily of the region.  One of my ardent fans was a  professor of Linguistics or was it Folklore, from Gauhati University who always complimented my pieces whenever he met me. One day he asked me from where I got my Mass Comm degre

The Russians love to use the French phrase "Cherchez Le Femme" made popular by Hugo, which implies that most trouble directly or indirectly is caused by women. Their ladies too use it with equal fervour, because beyond the facade of female solidarity they actually all hate each other.  In my case, these words should  be embossed on the walls, mirrors and my coffee mugs.  As  most of the women I had met as an adult in my last 28 years, collectively inspire me to write a Punk Rock version of the Rod Stewart classic - "Some Guys have all the Luck."  Only my punk anthem would start with "Some Dudes get Blow jobs, others get to deal with whack jobs, no prizes for guessing where I belong..." Misogynism, a case of sour grapes? Trapped by unwanted pregnancy and bamboozled by child support payments? Did ex-wife grab it all? False rape accusations… Nooo... Sirs!! it's far more insidious!! I could of course go on for hours ranting about a recurring theme with wom

  I recently read a story about lenders adopting intimidating techniques on loan defaulters, no thanks to the precarious economic condition in India for the last few years,  now conveniently explained away by the government as the fallout of the COVID-19 ScamDemic.  Well, despite not being a loan-taker, my car instalments being paid 10 years back, I still found myself on the receiving end of such harassment several times.  The first started when I added a friend's wife on Facebook, who had apparently defaulted on a car loan more than a decade back and fled town. The recovery agent followed her FB account as it had no privacy settings, next found my phone number from a job site where they were registered as an employment agency and unleashed 24-hour harassment via intimidating calls demanding her number and address. He even cited my home address, threatening to come over physically. It took me a day to discover that they got my contact details from the  India job site www.Naukri.com