Joy

This blog began a few years back with an intro to Joy. Joy the photographer now covers the party scene for his new-age newspaper. He roams around the streets of Madras, looking for any life at night which can be fit into captions like “DJ Sunny and two pretty faces”. I've always wondered if the pretty faces were happy or pissed to be called thus. He used to ride a ‘readied’ Yamaha RX100, with a quick throttle and no head lamp. Joy can write a book titled Priorities and make a lot of money. But he’s the closest any postgrad has come to illiteracy. Books are Joy’s preferred sleeping pills.

When Joy was a kid, he had a teacher come home to drill hindi through his resistant skull. Joy and his brothers had enough love to dig a trap-pit meant for baby elephants outside their home and wait for the teacher. Much to their disappointment, the teacher didn't turn up that day. Before we admire how fate saved the teacher, Joy heard news that the Hindi teacher, just before she left to drill Joy's head, slipped and fell in her bathroom and died.

Joy has been to Thailand once last year, for 4 days, after tricking the clicking community in madras into one of Joy's patented deals, where the other person gets screwed and feels thrilled about it. When gopal and gang planned a trip to Singapore and Cambodia, they put in a couple of days at Thailand. Joy would have none of it. He stubbornly refuses to believe that there exists anything left unseen in that country. He feels that he's seen every foot of Bangkok and Pataya. So he plans to visit me in Vietnam and sells it like it’s made of love.

In Saigon, he doesn't want to waste time... brushing aside night life as what he covers for the next morning's bread and butter. He wants to go to a conflict zone - or create one if none exists nearby - preferably ethnic in nature, where you can get one mongoloid and one of something else in the same frame. He also makes me feel bad, like it’s my mistake that he's coming here on the first three days of a working week. Like I made the week start on Monday. Besides his Pulitzer-driven interest in ethnic conflicts, he also wants to meet tribal people, see the countryside and study rural life in all of 3 days.

Joy eventually decided not to drop by! Presently he’s in Singapore (for the first and last time), admiring the internet speed at home, while the other boys are out for the night.

taxi

i think, on an average, indians believe that if somebody is paid lesser than them, then their time becomes automatically less valuable. in singapore, chintu called a taxi early in the morning and like india, expected him to fall asleep and wait. perhaps he called him a little early (just to be safe, like in India), but the taxi driver kept calling every 2 minutes from below, and chintu was getting agitated, at his lack of respect and impatience. not once did it occur to chintu that maybe it's a professional transaction, like any other. it's eye-opening to see what it is like to be reminded every day that your time is worth lesser than mine.

while we're on taxis, sometimes i call one of the vietnamese taxi companies to send one home.

"can you give me your address?"

"188 Bee-Dee 7... B for Boy, D for Doctor"

"B for baby?"

selling game

17 Sep 2008

tomorrow, i shall play a selling game. for a change, i won't be selling myself, but a thought. how i sell will affect the next two years.

there are so many arguments floating in front of my eyes. also floating are thin narrow-eyed women with lovely hair and black women from the movies.