Depressed. Mildly.

Face it. There is nothing grand about it. No grand escapades, no great adventures, no grand encounters, not even great and grand tragedies. There are only two grand things in your life - overwhelming hypocrisy and your own repugnant mediocrity.

We have grand conversations, where poor excuses for an adventure are flimsily stitched together into a grand tale worth sharing. Worth sharing with a grand congregation of equally pathetic fools, grandly called a fuckin party, a misplaced hope that a ton of mediocrity at one place would somehow magically exceed its own limits and turn into something grand.

A hope that meaninglessly flailing arms and twitching legs to the nauseating beats of an idiot aiming to describe life, love and the entire universe in half a dozen words would add meaning to existence.

A hope that a drunken sermon, a pastiche of pop philosophy, cheap self help books and stylish movies, delivered by an all too obvious pseudo intellectual nescient idiot would suddenly show you something profound.

A hope that exchanged snippets of conversation about shared interests in deliberately chosen vague areas of art and sport would suddenly lead us out of this quagmire and show us the light. Exaggerated laughters, pointless screams, ad-campaign slogans - almost meant to shut out the din of a quaint voice deep within.

A fleeting moment of introspection, curiosity and the tiniest spark of intellectual activity doused out by an overwhelming desire to stop, show and tell. It is only strange how we all, with a heart rending straight face, admit how difficult the questions are and yet how easily we dispense with answers.

The Approval Junkie is well and alive.

Mother

I love my mother. So does everyone, but I am in love with a certain kind of mother, now sadly a dieing dying breed. These are mothers from a time when India was still maintaining a surreptitious distance from an impending economic boom, much like a diwali enthused child would maintain from a firecracker she has just lit.

Back in the 80's, for the mums born in the extensive and extensively referred villages of India (which would be most of the mothers, as India back then, still quite comfortably lived in her villages) women empowerment was a parochial concept, and something that was earned gratefully and was not worth taking morchas out for. Modernity was still clad in the Sarees of Indira Gandhi and Sarojini Naidu, whose off colored Sarees they found rather distasteful anyway. Their achievements, while being whole heartedly commendable were still strictly inimitable, like the feats of a Jumbo circus ring master.

So as my mom, walked into the big blinding lights of the city plagued by incessant power cuts, she decided to stick with doing what she did best to cope with darkness like in the villages from whence she had come. Lighting candles.

She took gingerly to the modern gadgetry of the city kitchen, which in those days meant no more than a mixer grinder and a noisy Kelvinator and was only too happy to see the sliding door television box throw out government regulated images. Long before DD started churning out messages with young women stomping around vigorously in the name of girl child empowerment and equality, the desire to watch, weigh and imbibe these messages was replaced by a maternal concern.

Twenty years later, little has changed. This desire to feed and fend for her children is an instinct so strangely prolific, that in an instant you are at home when you visit your good friend's mother you have never seen before. It is an implicit code of honour, a unifying trait that perhaps most womens groups wishing for equality with men wish for. It is a profound statement for the discerning, which ,very wrongly, is seen as an acceptance of defeat by the fighting feminists.

Because, for my mom, it was never a fight and was merely an unintentionally profound statement to make - that without her, life would not be possible.

Thank you Amma.