You Imposter!! Shame on You...

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 degree. 

"Nah, I don't have one" I replied smugly, expecting awe and praise. 

"Not even a Diploma" he exclaimed!! "Then how come they print you?" 

From that moment, I became a blasphemy to his world-view and whenever we bumped into each other he looked the other way and never spoke to me again.

Complementing the learned professor in his ignorance was a distant uncle whose  daughter was as fair-skinned, pretty and  glamorous as he was ugly and condescending. 

"So what are you up to?" He once asked me in a manner which belied that he already knew that it was nothing good. So I told him that I was freelancing and  listed the names of  newspapers and magazines where I was regularly printed.

"Oh, so you still haven't got a job" he snorted. My daughter passed out of Delhi School of Economics (a blatant lie) and she earns about a lakh a month (no clue if it was true and wouldn't care less).

I still face similar situations, especially in technical meetings and hear, "how come you are so immersed in the subject, you are not even an engineer." 

I really want to tell them about young engineers who I shooed out of my room for being ignorant about the basic tenants of engineering or mechanics, or those Yi-Yi-Yi-Ts and Yi-Yi-Yi-YMs graduates I came across peddling fast-food for MNC corporations or even better, as vice-President Logistics of a Pizza franchise.

Only now, a bit more restrained and mature, I just reply…"yeah strange isn't it !" 

Cherchez Le Femme

The Russians love to use the French phrase "Cherchez La Femme," popularized by Hugo, which implies that most trouble, directly or indirectly, is caused by women. Their women use it with equal fervor, because beneath the facade of female solidarity, they actually all hate each other.

In my case, these words should be embossed on my walls, mirrors, and coffee mugs.

Most of the women I’ve met as an adult over the past 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 blowjobs, others the whack jobs—no prizes for guessing where I belong..."

Misogyny? Sour grapes? Trapped by unwanted pregnancy and bamboozled by child support payments? Did the ex-wife take it all? False rape accusations?

Nooo.....Sir! It’s far more insidious!

I could, of course, rant for hours about a recurring theme with women in my life: "I rejected you earlier to sleep with/marry someone else, but now, please feel sorry for me." Some turned up the next morning, others after 10, the latest, after 30 years.

Not my skeletons, nor my closet—I was just opening the front door. So why me?!

A more benign, though no less infuriating, episode took place when I first relocated to Delhi. Some friends of mine—a couple—introduced me to one of their friends, a runty little woman with a large, pumpkin-like head and small beady eyes. Despite of having the sex appeal of a female Mr.Bean, she seemed intelligent, friendly, and was quite witty. A few drinks here and there, a walk in a mall, and we all ended up at her place.

At some point, she asked me aside to help her replace a burned-out bathroom lightbulb. The new one burned out instantly. She then gave me a damsel-in-distress routine (which I didn't yet know was her speciality) about having to leave for work early, getting back late, dealing with uncouth electricians, and living alone.

Tipsy and gallant, I offered to help her out if she couldn’t find anyone to check the wiring.

The next day, I gave her a quick call to ask if she managed to fix it—no more than 30 seconds. To my relief, she told me not to worry about it.

Before I knew it, my friend's wife was accusing me of harassing (sexually, of course) a poor married woman under the guise of helping with the lightbulb, no, thanks to copious inputs from the latter. This was the cause of a big fight between her and her husband earlier, before she decided to hold her own trial for my misdoings. While I was somewhat dazed by the accusation, I was more pissed off by the friend's wife than Madam Pumkinhead, who was and remained a complete stranger as far as I was concerned. There you go, I told myself, once again trying to help people out! After all, no good deed goes unpunished!

Later, my friend claimed he got revenge on my behalf by posting a photo of her ( Madam Pumpkinhead)on Facebook, sitting on someone’s lap at a party,  for her husband—who lived in another town—to see.

As for his wife… well, let’s just say we stopped being friends. And for various unconnected reasons ceased to be his wife.

 

 

P.S.: With my karma demon(whose existence I vehemently deny) working overtime, a few years went by before Madam Pumpkinhead, her husband, and a bunch of party people were all arrested in a high profile case by the narcotics police in their hometown with a huge stash of drugs. Their names and photographs were plastered all over the local newspapers and TV, effectively ending her banking career. Though I heard about it much later, I still unashamedly savoured the news with unabashed schadenfreude!

Loan Defaulters, Debt Collectors and those caught In-Between...

 

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. I believe the firm's name was Lakshmi Debt Recovery Agency, unfortunately, I deleted a bunch of emails which included the one where I mentioned their full name and address in my complaint to the job portal, which incidentally didn't even elicit an automated response! It was only when I threatened them back with much more abusive language naming their agency and address did the calls stop. 

Next, it was some tailor who gave a bank my landline number as his, or maybe the phone company just allocate me a disused number. It took the cooling power of an industrial refrigerator to keep my blood pressure down as I patiently explained to the utterly obnoxious woman on the phone that my sewing skills extend to darning my underwear or sewing a button. That I have absolutely no clue as to who their elusive tailor was. Yes, I even invited her for a cup to tea to my place to see for herself, mentioning that I lived alone... The creep factor always works with women, and she backed off.

 Most recently, I got a call about an ex-colleague, an out-and-out conman who in his latest series of unpaid loans, defaulted on a  personal bank loan taken out on his wife's name. I bluntly told them what I thought of him but asked them back how I was concerned? 

"Well, you were a director in that company," they replied lamely. 

" I was just an employee", I clarified "but even if I was the owner, in what way am I liable ??" 

They cut the line.