I am a material girl

My love affair with electronics started back in 2006 when I was to get my second cellphone - the Nokia 3250. The "Ooh ah let the music play" phone, remember? The bottom half turned 270 degrees - 90 degrees to transform itself into what looked like a camcorder and 180 degrees into a music player. That TV ad had me enraptured like nothing else before. Also, convincing my parents to get me a phone worth 16k wasn't gonna be easy, so I spent hours and hours at the workplace going through the mobile forums. I did my homework. I infact took to my parents the print outs of the positive feedback I had read on the internet.

Now the thing about falling in love - with anyone or anything - is that once your heart is set on something, rationality can't do shit. I can tell you with certainty that I have contemplated more on what toothbrush to buy than the electronics I've purchased over the years. I saw a Macbook, I had to get it. End of discussion. (Not really, I asked tens of people thousands of questions) Did it cost 50k more than I wanted to spend on a new laptop? Yes, it did. Am I currently typing on it? Yes, I am.

One of the most emotional electronic purchases I ever made was in 2008 - my 4GB iPod Nano Video. After two very pine-filled years from the iPod's launch, I found a person at my office who was selling a brand new iPod for slightly cheaper than the market rate. Within 5 hours I gave myself my first expensive gift. 4 years later that thing still hasn't died on me. I can safely admit that I love that thin piece of hard drive more than I love most humans.

I saw my 2010-purchased MotoDroid for the first time at the Delhi Airport. I felt an instant connection with it, I kid you not! Apart from the fact that its looks appealed to me so greatly, I have this thing...I can't own what the mass population buys. So not buying a Blackberry was an easy decision. And how many people own a Motorola? Last year's piano was another super impulse purchase that I haven't regretted for a second. It justified its cost long long ago.

And as much as I love the joy of a new gadget for myself, what gives me greater happiness is gifting them to people I love most. Back in 2007 when my boyfriend hit CAT out of the park I decided, as a congratulatory gift, to fulfill his wish of many years - owning a chronograph. He barely remembered telling me that so the look on his face was priceless. Later when we broke up and he told me he had stopped wearing that watch, not to mention he had replaced it with a better chrono, a little piece of me wept for that hint of unconditional love I had managed to display.

The funniest was perhaps when I bought a mic for this vocalist junior of mine at MICA (as part of a senior-junior interaction) It wasn't so much out of any love for him, since I barely knew him, it was just that he resembled an asshole I was obsessed with. The jerk & I weren't talking, since he decided to pull a Jerk de Soleil on me, so I found an inexplicable comfort in gifting this junior the microphone, like somehow some sort of positive energy or the fact that I still cared would be communicated to the universe. You get?

Last year I was planning on gifting a Kindle to this guy I was seeing, since he reads extensively. I did my thorough research - reviews, total cost, shipment, gifting options & what not. Well, it didn't quite work out - the Kindle or the guy. I was sort of relieved, not because it would've been the most expensive thing I bought for anyone other than myself but because, for me, gifting electronics comes very close to some sort of a love confession. (Not love as in always romantic love but a very high level of adoration.) I would've been looking for a duvet to hide under had the Kindle not been reciprocated in a much less materialistic way.

Well, there have been other instances but this post has dragged on way too long. Not to mention my extremely heavy eyes. This Mac is so pweeetyyyyyy! =)

I put the Nut in Nutella

If you're human, you'd know that we all go through great lengths to protect our chocolate. Bought chocolate, shared chocolate, gifted chocolate, a hamper of chocolates, chocolate spread...it needs to be guarded with our lives. If you're eating a fruit, no one will ask you for a bite, but if you're having a chocolate, people shamelessly make puppy faces, hungry faces, you're-so-mean-you-won't-share-your-chocolate faces and I'm-so-low-on-blood-sugar faces. If you do share willingly, people love you instantly and if you don't...well, there will be consequences.

A thousand general questions make chocolate protection/attainment a highly exhausting activity:

• How many people saw me with the chocolate?
• If I share with those few people, will others see it too and demand some?
• Is it alright to not share with the people who spotted me but I don't like?
• Do I give the chocolate in public or should I call them, in whispers, to the conference room? Or do I drop an email?
• Can I pretend that I bought a much smaller chocolate than I have so I'd have to share lesser?
• Should I buy a Dairy Milk to my Lindt so they'd think that I'm being magnanimous, giving away my precious chocolate (but they don't actually know it was a failsafe/contingent chocolate)?
• If a person gifted me a chocolate, do I need to share it with them? And how much?
• In how many ways can I hide the chocolate from my chocolate-monster of a brother? (And how does he manage to stay so skinny?)
• What will I say in my defense when he says "You should be watching your weight. Come on, hand over that chocolate. This is for your own good. I'm saying this only because I care about you so much"? 
• Can I devise a way to protect my chocolates so he doesn't eat mine after he's done with his?/How can I emotionally blackmail him into not eating my share of the chocolate? (It's my birthday, can you please not take what's mine on this one day in a year? *crocodile tears*)
• WHERE EXACTLY HAS MY MOM HID THE DIWALI CHOCOLATE GIFT HAMPER?!?! (I already checked the freezer, the freezer of fridge 2, the snack drawer in the kitchen, her closet, her purse and her locker!)

You get the drift.

Back in 1997, we stayed at our relatives for a month in Indonesia. Suddenly a whole new world of products opened up for us - Flavored chips (chicken, fish, etc), exotic fried snacks, Sprite (!) and so many various brands and flavors of chocolate. (For the record, I gained 5kgs in that one month)

My masi ensured her fridge was stocked with chocolates at all time. And my brother, even at 5, made my chocolate consumption a living hell. He'd eat all of the ones I wanted to have. So I devised a plan. I had only recently studied about a certain Pyroligneous Acid in my 8th grade Science class. Since it sounded fancy enough and something he wouldn't be able to figure out at all, I told him that chocolates have Pyroligneous Acid and if you eat more than 1 a day, your stomach would burn and you'd die. It worked. I was ecstatic to get the ones I wanted and he was just happy to survive another day.

Don't worry, I did reveal the truth a couple of years later.

Then there are people who claim to not like chocolates. I have only one thing to say to y'all - I LOVE YOU!

Hope is cruel and has no conscience

Rose colored flesh is now a yellow pale
Her smile, a stencil
that once spread like ink in water
is no more ivory than Monalisa's
The eyes, oh! the eyes, with the warmth of a freshly baked cookie
are empty, gazing her feet
His fingers linger no more
they've turned to icicle spears
And her blood slushies
the burning of her heart leaves a stench of rotten muscle
Words leave her brain and escape from the mouth
but only in whispers that sound like the feeble late night breeze
or an old man's wheeze
in a frequency only dogs understand.

She quietly dissolves her faith in a couple of rosary beads
and a bottle that renews its contents every few hours
that consume her more than she consumes it
it's the only place where she can float
in the liquid visions of his face in her memories
and in an ocean of his choicest pheromones.

The very foundation of love is shook and hammered
and on the verge of extinction
and all she does is hope
that one day the spell is reversed
as it did for a second
when lisps were mistaken to be words.

Hope is cruel and has no conscience, someone said.
So she will hope against hope
that her walk on part in this sitcom extends
and a ghost is reborn.