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Spin A Yarn – A wild shaadi

Shifa Maitra scripted the story of a girl who gets exactly what she wants – the fun and the prize.

Shifa Maitra’s Twitter bio reads: ‘Part time writer, full time television professional. Friends, films, books, family, music, food, travel, theatre….people, life. Am on a high!’ She won a Special Mention for her effort.

Shifa’s yarn went like this: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….

My best friend was getting married and her husband was my ex lover.

He was hot and she was stupid, i decided to rekindle the affair just for fun, the holiday season and i needed some excitement.

December in Delhi, I was the pretty saali and nobody suspected a thing, though my friend’s mom was pretty sharp.

Felt a little guilty that I wasnt around with the nervous bride, I was busy getting to know the groom better.

Friend’s mother told me I was giggling too much…she would not have been amused if she heard what her son-in-law had just told me.

Got bored in two days, almost got caught on more than one occassion, his friend from Japan was also looking suspicious.

Japanese man with strange accent became my new target, told him our customs demanded that he must dance with me.

Separating man from his camera was tough, he thought he was psy from the gangam video…sigh.

Japanese man wanted indian wife, the bride’s best friend….panic, he asked the groom to talk to me.

In walked the handsome movie star, the groom’s cousin….guess what happened next.

We got along and the vibe was there for all to see, groom and Jap friend were shell shocked, the bride kept smiling stupidly.

Movie star and I left together…the couple never spoke to me again, Japanese man is a huge star back home…sings only sad songs.”

(Picture courtesy details.com)

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‘Spin A Yarn on Twitter’ winners

Our first ‘Spin A Yarn on Twitter’ got a great response yesterday. We feature the two winners and their stories.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

It started at 4 pm exactly. And later at 7 pm. Both went off so well, we were still grinning after it was over – which also had something to do with the fact that #SpinAYarn was the Number 1 trending topic in Mumbai yesterday.

We thank those who participated in our first ‘Spin A Yarn on Twitter’ contest and gave us 30 minutes of frantic fun, twice a day. We just gave participants an opening line; the rest of the story was built by the contestants. Ankita Chemburkar and Salil Jayakar won the contest.

Ankita Chemburkar, who works with Grey Worldwide as a content writer and social media copywriter, won for her hilarious poem on a girl who is on Twitter. Ankita (22) is a Lower Parel resident, who says this was the first Twitter contest she’s ever won. “The best thing about the contest was this it allowed complete creative freedom – something that rarely happens, even in the world of advertising. So I guess the awesome part of it all was being able to go completely ballistic with my imagination and my writing, even if they were in the forms of bad puns and rhymes,” she said.

“Usually, I love to write sarcastic and pun-filled stuff. I like to fabricate stories and the only emo bit of me comes out in my poems,” she says, adding that her secret dream is to “doodle on a historical monument. Like ALL over it. And no one would know it were me, making it the biggest graffiti vandalism there ever was.”

This is Ankita’s yarn, which started with the opening line, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ and went like this:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Entertaining & annoying ‘coz the woman loved her rhymes.

She found a place where she could rhyme away to glory. Little did we know the end to this tale would be so gory.

Shunned by Facebook friends, she was distraught and bitter. Then she found out she could rant away on Twitter.

She tweeted and tweeted; she punned & punned away. Thinking no one will hate her online presence from this day.

Her tweets were funny and cute, she tweeted on food. ‘I should’ve done this before, for it is so good!’

She put her puns in cute little doodles. Ignoring the “i-will-kill-you” expressions from her boss, @mooodles

Little did she know that this was where terror lurked. But she kept on punning, as long as she wasn’t shirked.

She gained popularity, her jokes were being retweeted. The frequency of her tweeting became quite heated(?) 😛

No more “U want to mek fraandsheep wit me” no more stalkers! No more “You’re hot care to show me your knockers?”

She was happy in her own place, tweeting as much as 80 times a day. After all, what was anyone else going to say?

Then came a day where it all came crashing down. She was being Unfollowed; her smile turned to a frown.

The numbers dwindled down, she wish she did paid Ads. Then she remembered it was Twitter & she became quite mad.

Everyone ridiculed her desperate attempts to be funny. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t been so… ‘punny’.

No one ‘#ff-ed’ her anymore, she became distraught. ‘But this is Twitter! How can this be?!’ she thought.

From a rising star to a loser, she did convert. Getting followed by creepy uncles and the occasional pervert.

Her life was caught in a whirlwind of tweets and follows. But her life and heart were truly empty & hollow.

She became quite demented, last time we heard. Even a simple chirp reminded her of the blue Twitter bird.

No one took notice as she stopped logging in online. Everyone went tweeting as usual as though all was fine.

That story is told till date about the girl obsessed with Twitter. The almost-celeb who then became a quitter.

Her defeat was in desperation, the downfall in wit. And that’s the story of a tweeter who became… just a twit.”

—————————————

Salil Jayakar was our other winner, and he won for his dreamy, nostalgic take on a boy who’s musing on the last two years of his life. He said, “The best thing about the contest was trying to pick up from where you started and make sense  of it in such a short time!” Salil is 31, and describes himself as a “Bandra boy, a Bombay boy who works as a communications professional…I’m just another less ordinary guy with extraordinary dreams.”

He adds, “I don’t write much lately. Earlier, it was mostly features. These days I blog every once in a while on whatever takes my fancy.” He counts travelling as one of his passions, which allows him to meet new people and soak in as many cultures as possible. “I’m also on a continued quest to go from #fat2fit.”

Salil’s yarn started with our opening line, ‘It hadn’t always been like this. Well, at least for the last two years,’ and went like this:

“He lived another life in another city, another place where he was but a stranger in a strange place.

He was the Bandra Boy, the Bombay Boy who became the London lad oh so easily.

A city he loved to call home. Because as they say, home is where the heart is. Oh yes, he was a romantic.

And Bombay? Where he was born? Where he loved and where he lost… he lost it all.

Looking back at those 2 years he realised how much he’d changed. How much he’d let go…

And letting go is never easy. Is it? Family. Friends. Lovers. Leaving is easy, letting go so difficult…

But that’s all done and dusted. London still beckoned but there were new borders to cross.

He worked hard, partied even harder. He had bills to pay, promises to keep and many miles to go, still…

He looked fwd to it now. His next holiday! Where would it take him? Who’d come along? Or go solo?

He didn’t care for fancy hotels and 5 stars, a mixed dorm in a decent hostel would do just fine!

Memories of last solo trip come flooding back… saudades as they say, that love and longing…

The incessant honking wakes him up. He’s #inthebus, alomost home. Time to get off. He’ll #SpinAYarn again, some other time.”

Look out for stories from our Special Mentions tomorrow.

 

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Of chemistry and flashbulbs

It’s not enough to change your FB status to ‘Engaged’; you need a perfect photo. Pre-wedding shoots are the answer.
by Ritika Bhandari

Part I of the Shaadi Mubarak series

As the cool November air brings with it the whiff of an upcoming wedding season, you will see the shaadi shenanigans begin in every household of your building society. Open the newspaper, and the pink-and-yellow advertisements scream Shaadi Utsav 2012. Everyone seems to be in a hurry to marry, and once the preparations for the final wedding day begin, there is little room left for the blissfully-engaged couple to enjoy a few quiet moments.

As photographer Raphael Das says, “A pre-wedding shoot gives the couple a collection of pictures, which they may not be able to capture at a later date. After the wedding, life gets busier. As time passes on, their first anniversary approaches and the couple realises that it doesn’t have a collection of its own pictures.  So people prefer to do a small shoot of very personal pictures.” Based in Malad, Das has done quite a few pre-wedding shoots already. He feels that a couple of hours spent together can become moments which shall be cherished for a long time.

While photographer Deepa Netto believes, “It’s (a pre-wedding shoot) the perfect chance to get some amazing casual portraits and the perfect excuse to get away from the wedding preparation chaos.”

The concept of pre-wedding shoots has its roots in the West, where couples send wedding invitation cards with a picturesque photograph of the soon to-be married duo. The colourful frames aim to reveal the chemistry in a jovial, tender and candid style. With locations that epitomise special moments, the idea of a pre-wedding shoot is now trending in Mumbai.

When 28-year old Dipshika Das, a software professional, decided to take the plunge with her lover Novin Vathipatikkal, she wanted him to feel special. “After five years of being together, I wanted the shoot to be something which was ‘not normal stuff’. So with nothing pre-decided, we took Deepa to Kharghar and got a collection of personal moments clicked,” says the happily-married Das.

Be it a couple living in our concrete jungle or another whose head-over-heels love story started with a glance at the Mumbai airport, the shoot not only ushers in a sense of hushed intimacy, but also prepares the bride and groom to face the arc lights at their wedding. Das reveals, “The shoot even works as an icebreaker with the photographer, and increases the comfort level of the individuals in front of the camera.”

Deepa, a Navi Mumbai resident, says that themes for the shoot are usually dependent on client ideas. “What I really look forward to is capturing the couple’s story with a fun element. Sometimes they can be absolutely goofy, while others tend to be romantic,” she says.

So where do our Starbucks-loving, new generation couples wish to be clicked? “It is mostly out of Mumbai, they like to drive down to Karjat. The Vasai fort and the Madh Island beach are also popular,” says Raphael, who refrains from pushing any themes for the shoot. He believes that the comfort level of the couple matters the most.

Deepa’s shoots have taken her to South Mumbai locales like the Gateway of India, Flora Fountain, Marine Drive, Colaba, Worli Seaface as also the Manori beaches and the rocky, quaint areas of National Park, Aarey Colony and Kanheri Caves.

For Ian Gallyot, the shoot with Raphael at Silver Beach in Juhu captured the spirit and essence of getting engaged to his wife, Melissa. He says, “We used his brilliant and wonderful snaps to make a coffee table book. Also, we designed our wedding invitations with our favourite photograph of us walking on the beach.”

So if you are bitten by the social media chromosome, share your chemistry with a pre-wedding shoot.  Or use your creativity to make a wedding website to invite your nearest and dearest.

After all, it is the photographer’s helpful remedy to the pre-wedding jitters of the flashbulb.

(Pictures courtesy Raphael Das, Chasing Dreams Photography)

Shaadi Mubarak is a series that captures the essence of weddings in Mumbai. Watch out for Part II.

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Of 10 million invisible children

Unknown to mainstream society, an entire generation of construction workers’ children is growing up without an education or familial support.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

Part III of the ‘Little People’ series

‘By 2025, more than half of India will be urbanised. Our fast growing cities are built by millions of poor migrant labourers who live on construction sites with their families and enjoy hardly any of the benefits of India’s growth. Since both parents work, very young children are placed in the care of older siblings, or left to fend for themselves in the midst of the hazards of building sites. More than 10 million children live this way.’

– from a booklet by Mumbai Mobile Creches

We know there are children in slums. We know that our domestic help has enrolled her children in a municipal school. We see the little servant kid in the next building every morning as she walks a grumpy child, not much younger than her, walk her ward to the bus stop. There are others who loll about outside shops, drinking in the sights and smells of the city and scarpering off when asked a lot of questions.

Some children are truly invisible. Like the ones that are born on construction sites. They get left behind in a quickly-built shanty a mere walk away from cement mixers that do their thing, and these little ones’ parents put in a day’s work loading and unloading trucks, or carrying bricks up several flights of just-hewn stairs. What do these children do? Do they go to school? Have they ever been inside one? Is there life an endless blur of play?

Far from the eyes of the city, in the several hundred construction sites dotting Mumbai, the children of construction workers grow up in shanties, grappling daily with abject poverty and the many illnesses that come with dire living conditions. Rootless, shifting from place to place with their parents as one site closes and another one starts, these children receive no formal education and often start working at a very young age.

Colaba-based NGO Mumbai Mobile Creches (MMC) is probably the only organisation currently working for this invisible class of children, giving them an education and the upbringing that can help absorb them in mainstream society. The NGO runs day-care centres on sites that have at least 25 children on the site, and these conduct training programmes for early childhood development. “At any point of time, we have 25 centres operational. Last year, we reached 4,000 children,” says Anita Veermani, Manager, Grants and Communications, MMC.

At each centre, children are provided with basic lessons and three meals a day, six days a week. “Our nutrition programme is comprehensive – we provide medicines, multivitamins, calcium supplements and we have regular doctors visits also,” Anita says, adding that unhygienic living conditions and no access to proper medical care results in the children having skin and eye infections, and a lot of them have lice. “The children are often malnourished, they have worms, they have cough and fever and also a host of injuries,” Anita says.

A staggering fact is that construction workers come to Mumbai from 17 Indian states and two other countries, and most of them stay on for a period of about five years. “We try our best to reach as many children as we can,” Anita says. “But it is more important to get the mothers involved, and a bigger challenge is getting teachers. About 40 per cent of our teachers are women from construction sites who signed up to teach the children,” she adds.

“It is not always possible for each child to enrol in a BMC school, though we have had success on that front as well. Some of our children have grown up and come back to associate with us. Others have taken up site-related skills, like painting.

These children are not exposed to mainstream society, so they remain excluded from the benefits that other children receive. These families keep moving about so much, that even after we have trained the child and brought him up to a certain grade, he may not be able to join a full time school. Our endeavour is to see that they move up the chain, that there is some stability in their lives,” Anita says.

What MMC has done so far:

4,785 children reached

92 PAN cards obtained for the community

6 bank accounts opened for the community

6,233 incidences of illness identified

5,871 vaccinations facilitated

Diaries is a weekly series of stories on one issue. ‘Little People’ is a series of three stories on the education of underprivileged children in Mumbai. 

 

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Where playing indoors is fun

The Children Toy Foundation houses over 700 games in a Matunga school. Students love their play time and their teachers.
by Vrushali Lad | vrushali@themetrognome.in

Part I of the ‘Little People’ series

“I practice boxing because it helps me hit hard during fights,” a sturdy little boy answers when I ask him what he plays outside school. The class explodes with laughter. The children, a mix of class four boys and girls, have just settled down after a hectic round of impromptu dancing in their play hour. Vandana Sonawane, presiding with other teachers (all of them associated with the Children Toy Foundation) over the class at the City of Los Angeles School, Matunga Road, claps a hand to her forehead. “See how they talk. But we are glad when we see their confidence, because they speak like this only when they’re happy and relaxed.”

The class says they like playing in the play room and not on the ground outside. “If my clothes get dirty, my mother shouts at me,” another boy says with a twinkle, and there is much nodding of heads at this statement. “Another reason why they love playing here is that they get access to the kind of games they’ve never seen before, and cannot find outside the school. Most of the games we have, especially the strategy games for older age groups, are priced upwards of Rs 1,000. But let me tell you, not a single child, in the 10 years that we’ve operated in this school, has broken a single toy or stolen anything.”

She smiles, then yells out a long, “AYYYYEEEEEEE!” that shakes the ceiling. The fidgety class stills at once, though several faces are working furiously, trying not to laugh. “These children come from poor families, and because their parents insist on enrolling their children in the English medium of the school, the class is a mix of communities. There are Muslims, Tamilians, Maharashtrians, Gujaratis. But we speak to mixed classes in Hindi,” Vandana says.

Vandana is the overall coordinator of the Foundation’s work in this centre and another municipal school in the city, apart from supervising other works like their mobile toy van that goes to slum areas and the Sunday visits to hospitals in the city. Started in 1982 in Mumbai, the CTF is the only NGO of its kind to help set up 279 toy and games libraries in India till date.

But it clearly doesn’t matter what language the children are spoken to, because play hour is the best hour of the day for them, and the CTF’s toys and games class in this school is a source of much enjoyment and learning. Teachers, one to a group of six or seven children, hand each group a board game and play begins in earnest. “The CTF first trains the teachers, then the teachers teach the children in class. Once they understand the rules, they are very quick in mastering the game,” Vandana beams.

She shows me a curious little strategy game, where two players’ green and orange blocks must cut each other’s retreat around the board using short and long bridges in the respective colours. “It requires a lot of thinking and strategising. But class five students have already defeated me,” she laughs.

The next play hour belongs to the tiniest assortment of class one students I have ever seen. They trail in, some of the little girls’ pinafores hanging off their frail shoulders, but their eyes are already scanning the room for potential planned activity. But today, the teachers engage them in a group singing, after which they answer my questions and recite poetry in cute, high-pitched voices.

“The girls are normally a bit shy. When they’re at home, some of them do household chores and look after their siblings, so they grow up pretty quickly. But because we are kind to them, and because our common interests are games and toys, they bond with us very quickly. Many of the older girls have already told us about the problems between their parents and other such issues. The boys are very bindaas, but they don’t discuss their home situations too much,” Vandana says.

Diaries is a weekly series of stories on one issue. ‘Little People’ is a series of three stories on the education of underprivileged children in Mumbai. Look out for Part II tomorrow.

 

 

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‘There’s lust. And there are Chennai men’

Aditya Kshirsagar (24), really hates Chennai, and he’s taking the first flight home the moment he completes his media course.
Part I of the ‘Away from home’ Diaries.

I stay at Malad, near Inorbit Mall. I have been living there for the last five years. I left Mumbai on August 4 this year to pursue my masters in Journalism. I will specialise in Online Media. I still haven’t decided what I’m doing next, but I’m taking the first flight back home after completion of my course.

I had a very definite moment of parting with the city. That moment, when I stared at the Mumbai Airport board, did it for me. I knew one thing was certain – I would be returning very soon and for good. I got my admissions in the college at Chennai, post-that I was travelling back and forth because I needed to find an apartment in Chennai. Luckily, I found a good place in a central area of Chennai, Nungambakkam.

My first day, indeed my first week here were eased by the presence of many friends and well-wishers. One of them is a lady who is very special to me, and she basically took care of everything for me. My stay here has been made quite easy by her. So, there were no homesick moments or anything of the sort.

My typical day here? Let’s see – get up early, before the water goes away, bathe, skip breakfast, collect lunch, go to college by 0930 hours and stay there till 1800 hours. Come back home, contemplate dinner, no wants to cook, end up eating at a cheap eatery most of the nights. The place is called ‘Garage.’ This is what my week looks like, with a change on Sundays and public holidays. So yeah, it is less than exciting.

The list of what I don’t like about Chennai is a long one. I’ll just put it in points:

1) The way people in Chennai drive is horrible. Especially the MTC bus drivers, I swear there are times I have thought I would be crushed under one. I got my bike here and have not yet installed my mirrors, because it’s just a scary proposition to see that thing behind you.

2) Being called a North Indian. I don’t mind the word ‘North’ and I don’t have any geographical affiliations or likes or dislikes. But what hurts the most is the arrogance that people here display while saying the word. There was an instance where I was stopped by a senior police inspector and accused of being a thief, ‘like all other North Indians’.

3) The lack of a drainage system that leads to instant flooding of the roads.

4) Due to a lack of facilities, people here drink bottled water every day. Poor people here are dying of cholera, dengue, malaria and so on. They have a Cholera Hospital here. 

5) The way men stare at women. There is lust and then there are Chennai men; it’s beyond disgusting for women.

6) Rickshawwallahs. They charge Rs 200 or more for a distance of Borivali to Goregaon.

What I miss the most about Mumbai are its rickshawwallahs, its vada pav, varan bhat with toop and thecha, disciplined traffic, helpful people and cops, all the night eateries, and the safety for women and personal property. Yes, like several Mumbaikars I have also felt that I would leave the city for good some day, on several occasions. But home is where the smug is. I will go around, see the world or whatever, but my final resting place hopefully would be that bitch of a city.

The fast-paced life with a heterogenous crowd is very contagious. It’s not about the Mumbai spirit and hypothetical things like that. It is a place that you might physically leave, but somewhere that virus of being a Mumbaikar never leaves you.

Ah, Mumbai.

Diaries is a weekly series of stories on a single issue. The ‘Away from home’ diaries are stories of Mumbaikars who have left the city for a space of time.

 

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