Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls work at ad agencies.

Good girls become iBankers. Bad girls work for ad agencies. Good girls are the ambitious types.

Good girls become Chartered Accountants. Bad girls work for ad agencies. Good girls are the studious types.

Good girls become doctors. Bad girls work for ad agencies. Good girls are the respectable types.

Good girls get proposed 3 times in their life. Bad girls work for ad agencies. Good girls have a dearth of desperate men around them.

Good girls have a life. Bad girls work for agencies. Good girls have office timings on the lines of 9-5.

Good girls dress up. Bad girls work for agencies. Good girls have the time and motivation to dress up.

Good girls eat healthy food. Bad girls work for ad agencies. Good girls don't believe in alcoholism.

Good girls don't have bronchitis. Bad girls work for ad agencies. Good girls don't know how to light a cigarette.

Good girls sleep on time. Bad girls work for ad agencies. Good girls don't stay up all night for TVCs.

Good girls wear deodorant. Bad girls work for ad agencies. Good girls don't know how perfumes are different.

Good girls do the right things. Bad girls work for ad agencies. Good girls don't know how to live it up.

Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere ;-)

Random updates

I dont have much to write... its just that I feel like writing :P

Its been an okay day and a nice evening. Nothing special about it except that I went for a drink with a gay friend. She gave me some perspective on things and I could tell her in so many words how the movie Milk made me feel a little queasy. And we spoke of life and relationships in general. There was no work talk and there was no talk of my MBA. Yayy!

I am wayyyy behind deadlines - wrt to both short term and long term goals. My salary will be late this month and I am broke. I have a body ache which kinda tells me I will fall sick. I hate certain aspects of my job and yet I am so much at peace with my life. I think thats called finding comfort in discomfort/beauty in breakdown or whatever. Ok why dramatize the whole thing, just because its my blog? I am in an i-care-a-damn attitude today and might wake up after 7 hours thinking I have a terrible life :P

I catch this power-nap in the bus and I like feeling all Bombay-ish. Busy and hassled. I think the small town girl wants to feel all city-like. hehehe. My phone is out of charge and I dont want to hunt for the charger in my bag. Will let the battery die and will give the Biz Dev team a bad time tomorrow. I love playing the bitch :P Anyway some people dont have a cell phone for a few days so I can't even SMS them. :|

I cried all over public forums today that I am homesick. The bodyache is getting terrible. I am sitting on an 'easy-chair' which seems quite difficult. I want to sleep for 6 months. I think it is the sickness making me type such random stuff.

Thank you for putting up with this crap. Gnite peeps!! :D

Work hard, Die Hard.

Agencies do this to you.

You lose all track of time only to keep up with deadlines. They bring back old vices. They make you stay up all night.

You start tending to yourself in the midst of chaos. You are your own office boy and your own boss.

You cannot deliver and you cannot delegate. Yet you do both.

Your body aches nonstop and you don't know what to do. After all you cannot pop meds every single day!

You skip breakfast and you skip lunch. You do not eat dinner because the 90 cups of tea you've had have killed your appetite. And your sleep.

You sleep for 3 hours on weekdays and wake up because you know you missed your deadline. You stay up all weekend to come to terms with who you are. The day you sleep for 8 hours on a weekend, you wake up with a hangover of sorts. Your body doesn't recognize 8 hour sleep after all.

You do not know whether you are 18 or 50 years old. You don't know if this is what a learning curve is all about. You wonder if you've gone up the hierarchy or slipped down 2 places.

You think of people who matter to you and the ones to whom you've stopped mattering because you were so busy chasing time.

You try to relax on your way home. You plug your iPod and it seems like noise. You curse the music industry for 10 minutes in your head and agencies for another 40.

You summarize your day as 'fucked up.' When it is not that actually. But how do you even differentiate a good day from a bad one?

Probably the day you hear - Good job! from someone. Anyone. Even the guy who clears your desk of tea cups. And somewhere within you know the day will never come.

But you know you've done a great job. And you say this to yourself - "I work for a fancy agency. Professional hazards are probably what I experience everyday. Never mind, I am awesome!"

P.S. The title is grammatically incorrect just to keep it open to interpretation!

(Not) Just another day in my life...

Funny things happen to me all the time.

Last evening was particularly weird. I had a laughter bout with my colleagues for about 15 minutes and I was in the highest of spirits after a really long time. Just while I decided to pack up and leave with a few of them for a drink and a bite, I had a stupid argument with another colleague. Totally ticked off I decided to go gulp it and call it a night not before the clock struck 12.

Still to take an auto, I heard from a client and had some work piled on me at 8 in the evening. We decided to split at about 10 so we could all go home and work some more. (Agencies are a mean, ruthless place to work for. A post will probably follow soon! ) We went all over Bandra looking for an open bar only to hear from an auto driver that it was a dry-day!! We have dry-days in India exactly when half the town is desperate for a drink. :|

With no motivation to eat, I decided to head home. I have a rather long journey back home from work. Non-peak hours take me a little more than an hour to get home. I waited at the bus-stop for what seemed like eternity. After 25 minutes of standing, bored of the 8GB music on my iPod I couldn’t wait to sit in the bus and catch a quick nap so I could get to work as soon as I reached.

Just as I took a seat in the bus somebody sat next to me and asked 'coming back from work?' I was taken aback and realized it was a psycho. Some doped out idiot spoke to me incessantly until I reached my stop. I did not speak a single line but he was hilarious! He told me his name, age, profession (or the lack of it) marital status, hobbies, family and what not. He sang a song to me about strangers since I wasn't talking to him and how he thought I wasn't talking because my mom said - Do not talk to strangers! He told me how he thinks Bombay is such a lonely place and how he will soon go to Dehradun!

He soon sickened out since I wouldn't talk to him. He then spoke to the bus driver, gave him a shoulder massage and started singing songs with the radio that was playing in the background. All in all a harmless but idiotic co-passenger. I swear if I were not that pissed off, I would have spoken to him at length and have had a nice time :P

Anyhow, I got home only to hear some snide remarks from my brother about how I loaf around the place. How I wish that was true! Super-irritated I skipped dinner and crashed only to have a series of nightmares.

So glad it’s a new morning now!

Blah Blah Blah

There is this post I've been attempting to write since what seems like eternity. I edit it every single day and look for the right words - that never, just never come out. It's a good-bye post. It is to say goodbye to my lifeline for the last 8 years - as she takes off from India for good.

I can't ever express what she is to me and how Pune will never ever be the same for any of us 4. Though I will try and finish my draft post - it is unfair to write about her in the same post where I plan to rant about my life.

So ya 4 hrs of travel (standing, mind you) is not the thing I looked forward to in life. This 4 hour travel brings with it other restrictions like getting back by 10 in the night, zero social life and no time to spend the money I earn. The effort of traveling in locals is not worth the time and money I save. Stinking arm pits, women pushing/nudging/fighting, being thrown out of one train and into another etc is definitely not my thing.

Linking Rd looks beautiful since this is Diwali season.

I am eternally sleepy but I get not more than 5 - 6 hrs a day.

I need to buy a better phone which will let me type my posts etc on-the-go. Ive realized that moving buses with no place to stand tickle my blogger's streak.

The 'I-want-to-run-away' feeling is back. What sucks is I want some good (read: Psycho, mad) company to run away with. Sigh!

I hope I will have more and better stuff to write about soon. (I will, for the moment, skip bitching about a colleague I can't stand.)

Mumbai meri jaan

So here I am, in Bombay - after a 3 day vacation with the girls which cost me 1200 INR, all inclusive :)

A new job, a few new friends and just 1 expectation from the city, like I always have from every city I go to. I only expect the place to love me and give me a memorable time. And all places I've been to have given me more than I hoped. Bombay is going to be different.

People who know me, know that I am impulsive. I wake up at 2 in the night and make my friends visit me. I get out of office on a Tuesday afternoon and take the rest of the week off. I love mindlessly and I live mindlessly. I've always lived in my space which has quite literally been mine. Trying to tell me what I need to do is fruitless. I will do my own thing no matter what it takes. A free bird that you see on TV shows - was me for the last 9 years.

Now in a city like Bombay where you work hard and party harder, I stay in the other end of the town with my brother. I travel for 4 hours a day and I can't do late nights. I come back home to a noisy house with 2 kids. I have nothing against little children but they are just not my thing. I can't pack my bags and go to Hyd to see my best friend or even Poona for that matter to meet the girls. This 3-day weekend was one of the dullest I've had in years, with nowhere to go.

Don't ask me why I do not move out. Because I cannot. Cons of closely knit families. I feel guilty even as I type this post but it isnt my bad if I am way different from everybody else in my blood-ties. I can't live like this. But I am. That's life I guess.

(I had thought of a million other interesting things to write about but sometimes blogs get the worst of me... so this insipid personal-diary-ish stupid post. Excuse me if you were terribly bored or dozed off midway through.)