LIVE from Mumbai VIII

4th March 4, 2011
Nariman Point
Mumbai


I know I know. I haven’t written in a long time. After the last time I wrote, nothing great happened. I wasn’t inspired enough to write and I didn’t want to write a post simply for the sake of writing, and waste my time and your’s (if you’ve been reading, that is).

Yesterday I wanted to write because I’d had a good day. But then I got too busy. Which I loved, by the way. The past week, I didn’t have much to do. All I was doing was collecting story ideas from things around me. Reading the papers, looking for stuff on the internet as to what all is new in the entertainment line, updating the listings page (that’s the event calendar in the city supplement) etc. All that wasn’t fun at all. I wasn’t even sent on any more press conferences so I could write about new places and about the people I met.

My boss says that in journalism, it’s more important to generate ideas and get them approved than writing a story. Writing anyone can do (I so wanted to disagree with him, partly because not Everyone can write, and I’m the writer, that’s all I am. I got nothing else but my writing skills). But I didn’t argue. I nodded along. He says that I shouldn’t wait for story ideas to be approved. I should just keep looking for more and more ideas and think of how I can make them work in a way that’ll add new light and perspective to it. I’m not saying that all that isn’t important. It’s just that talking to people and finally getting down to writing is what’s better for me. So the past week wasn’t all that interesting.

But yesterday I finally got to work the way I know it and love it. I started working on 3 stories. I won’t tell you yet what they are about. Maybe if and when they’re out in print.

I called up a dozen people with regards to the stories, got good responses from a few, not so needed responses from the rest. But one story turned out to be particularly interesting because when I’d started out, I had just one name. Then it went up to 10, and then to four. I’m hoping that by the time the stories done, I have atleast three if not more.

I then called this sportsperson whose kids I’m interviewing. He was really nice to me. Spoke politely and frankly about what he feels and I really liked him. Not everyone speaks to us journalists properly. I’m not sure why though. Or maybe I do.

For the third story I had to call the secretary first, then the main guy who’s out of town so the interview will be done via email. Like many others. Sometimes that’s just so convenient.

After a fulfilling day at work I left office feeling really happy. I’d left early to accompany my friend who broke her two day fast last evening. So we’d decided we’ll go for dinner to some nice place rather than our regular one.

In the middle of that, our ‘phone woes’ (phrase stolen from my friend’s ‘chappal woes’) continued. After finally getting a local number from Uninor, we discovered that the network was utterly horrible. You had to stand in one corner of the room on one leg and in some weird physically impossible position to get coverage. After being thoroughly fed up with that, we got an Idea number. The coverage was great and call-rates and things worked out fine. And then yesterday, what should happen but our connection getting barred for not submitting some required documents. Our idea lines not in use, we switched to the much hated Uninor number only to find that that number too was blocked. Great. We couldn’t get in touch with anyone. We eventually switched to our Baroda numbers and have been using that right now. Hoping that our troubles will be over soon. This is just too much.

So anyway, we set out for dinner at about 9pm and one of my friend’s dad suggested a good restaurant a little further off from where we were staying.

Let me tell you that by that time we three were 3/4th of crazy lunatics. My insane pangs of hunger, my friend’s unbelievable day of boredom and the other friend’s extremely tiring day at work had left us suffering from partial dementia. I had a mad look on my face when I suggested that I want to eat laddoos, the bored friend walked from one mattress to the other to show me what she did all day at home and the other was ready to kill people. We were at our irritable best and snapped at everyone. But then we also had sudden burst of laughter for no apparent reason.

So there we were, hunting for food. And I say that in a literal sense. We didn’t find the place we were looking for and we were somewhere in Malad west/ Goregaon looking for a non-vegetarian restaurant. After walking back and forth for around half an hour, we finally settled on this one place that looked kind of expensive. But by that time we were so starved that we were willing to pay anything for food (and my bored friend was eating up her words by then).

We ordered for butter chicken and egg curry and once our order was placed, we began staring at our neighbour’s plate of chicken lollipops. Oh what a sight they were.

When our dinner came it was heavenly. And not because we were crazily hungry, but because the food really was good. We ate like cave people and didn’t care about anyone else. Boy was that an amazing dinner. After that we had ice-cream because we felt our meal was incomplete.

We then caught a rick and went home at about 11.

Decided to watch The Social Network before falling off to sleep, but like the past week or so, I fell asleep after just 15 minutes of the film making the total number of films I’ve watched in Mumbai so far to….wait for it…ZERO. I simply can’t stay up at night. A huge huge change from my condition in Baroda. An incredible change.

Right now I’m at work. I just finished an interview with one designer and now waiting for the rest of the people to respond. Will be meeting my friends for lunch at Colaba. Looking forward to that if there’s not too much work load by then.

Well that’s all for now. Will try and be a little more updated on my blog the next time.

Tada!