City Uncanned
Slices of life from the metropolis
Venue: Midnight Bar and Restaurant, Juhu (next to Love Bird Bar and Restaurant). Always the accidental tourist, I stumble on to an interior decorator's nightmare (concealed, garish lighting CDs pasted on walls) and before I know it, I am escorted by four girls to a table. Pale survivors of their own 9/11 that was the deputy CM's ordinance. One of them, Reshma, stands out, a digital composite of Anu Agarwal and Suchitra Pillai. She laughs the loudest, as if to underscore her attractiveness. The others run the gamut of emoti-cons, from moodily distant to fawning.
Me: You don't dance any more?
Reshma: No, we do ladies' service only. Opening beer bottles and pouring.
Me: And your other friends?
Reshma: I have none.
Me: What if you dance?
She crosses her arms: the international sign for a handcuffed citizen.
Four white collars next to me. One of them wants something badly from her but all he gets is a no, nyet, nada. Then he greases her palms. "I'll wait until midnight." Nadeem Shravan get off some more on something called aashiqui.
- Kartik Krishna
Man-talk on maids
Ever wonder what men talk about on a coffee break? A recent all-male smoking-in-the-stairwell session was busted by a group of curious women, only to find what had got our MBA-branded, foreign-returned, super salaries bunch in states of extreme agitation was that age-old women's problem - maids.
One's wife hadn't gone to work because the maid hadn't shown up and was due for a turn at the housework the next day. He was explaining about how the dish soap made his hands peel in this weather. The second explained how in their house they didn't have meat on Saturdays out of respect for the live-in domestic's fast. The third grumbled that he daren't complain of the inch-high dust on his music system, "At least she's regular, we put up with the rest."
The women…well they gave up in disbelief and went off to play a round of ping pong in the company foyer.
-Gayatri Jayaraman
Pavlovian mall rats
Even mall rats undergo the Pavlovian transformation. After spending unbearably long and pointless hours at the mall, they begin to push, bite and scratch their way through elevator doors and plush aisles, jostle determinedly in front of shop windows, slide the last few metres to beat you to the chic resting benches. The other day, I even got run over by a big, young man trying to overtake me in the escalator at InOrbit. The guy was running up in blur, unable to withstand the normal pace of the climbing machine.
Abroad, there is already intense popular concern about the rising number of muggings and happy-slapping incidents at the mall. We might soon see some action at places of hyper-shopping here. An overdose of make-believe is known to spawn strange traits.
-Abhijit Majumder
The last word
We were delighted to be invited to Festa Italiana's recent Ferre and Trussardi fashion show onboard the INS Vikrant. When we last visited, we saw a series of planes land on its deck with a fearful eeeeaaaanh roar. So it was quite amusing now to watch leggy things in fanciful togs walking as if they were "stabbing apples with their stilettos".
Climbing to the wind-swept deck, we said, "Wonder if the Eyeties have organised wind-proof dresses for the location."
"Oh no, I hope not," retorted a bon vivant from the Italian consulate. Touche.
-Meenakshi Shedde
Love's little box
Movietime Suburbia, one of Bandra's newer movie theatres, has a well-kept secret that only Mumbai's select lovers know of. The cinema hall offers 'box seats' - which it clearly advertises - for double the price of a normal movie ticket. Few know, however, that the 'box' consists of just two seats in the 250-plus capacity auditorium. What's more, it is situated next to the projection room on the upper level and has a private entry and exit point. What could have been a cosy place for actors seeking a private movie experience has become a popular spot for couples seeking privacy.
So if you're at the theatre and happen to be seated in the last row on the right, ignore the sounds coming from the open window above you. It's just another desperate couple making the most of an unexpected opportunity.
-Jamal Shaikh
The no-horn cabbie
At first you could mistake his taxi for the Ambassador car in which, at 60 km an hour, the only thing that does not make a sound is the horn. Even after 20 minutes since I sat in this cab at the airport, this wonder of a taxi-driver refused to put his palm on the horn. Flummoxed, I asked him the reason. His horn worked all right, and so did his common sense. "I have never pressed the horn in the last three years," he told me. "In a city that is so noisy, I do not want to make life more miserable for my passengers. They sit in my cab to enjoy a quiet journey. And I am going to give them just that." One down, guys, just 54,999 more taxis to go.
-Sachin Kalbag
(Compiled by Abhijit Majumder.
You can write in at dnacity@dnaindia.net)
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