A life less lived...

Life seemed peaceful. The days were sunny, birds chirped lightly, and all the whifflewaffle seemed rather content to be whiffling and waffling harmoniously. It all seemed too good to be true, and oddly enough, it turned out to be one of those times when the forces-that-be condescend to lend some truth to these paranoid phrases.

Even now i recall the sheer tranquility of that time - made, as it was, to lend truth to usually rancid claim of being the lull before the buggering thunderstorm. It all started with my favourite pair of trousers, or to be more specific, the pocket of my trousers, or to be simply idiotic in being this specific, my right-hand trouser pocket.

It started innocently enough, with my discovering the odd dime in my sock and the occasional slice of toast stuck to my shin. Pondering longish over these unconnected pieces of evidence, I landed, with a fair thud i might add, at the conclusion of the presence of a hole existing peacefully at the wily vortex where the lining of my pockets met.

Oh.. a mere trifle, you might say, and right you would be too if you were one of those content to experience life from the comfortable depths of your armchair. Me, as my nanny will no doubt attest, I was always one to take life head-on, and given this predilection for gory battle, i do tend to get in the way of life's blind jabs, and this one, i must admit, got me fairly square on the sniffer.

Coming to an- as it turns out - ill-advised conclusion that this was a matter to be dealt with at leisure, I walked on, on the merry path called life. It was not long after that i began to contemplate suicide.

All of a sudden, my life seemed to be full of little objects that could fit into my pocket, seemingly with the sole purpose of falling out of it. They not only seemed to able to choose the trouser pocket they went into, but also the opportune moment they slid out of it.

I cannot forget the day when - in the middle of an impassioned intellectual debate with the Chairman at the Tway's club when i thumped my foot rather loudly on the wooden floor – (we were talking about M'Lady Betsy's form at the summer derby - a filly i had my heart and quite a few quid on ) and my trouser hem discharged out seven coins of varying denomination, a briar pipe and a pair of nose-hair clippers, the aforementioned not an inch away from the venerable chairman's gleaming brogues.

I won't even go into the agony of the Awagean ball that i attended, and my ill-fated waltz with the pretty daughter of the owner of the "Wailing Ale". (Suffice to say, my line of credit at the Wailer was withdrawn indefinitely.) Or recount the horrifying coincidence of my teaching the seventh graders at Chilton High when Gerald got the flu, my five-year old niece's birthday and my carrying a roll of rather pink satin ribbon for her birthday party in my pocket.

Haggard, jumpy and well wary of even the hint of a habit of stuffing life's essentials into my pockets, I had begun to seriously consider the prospect of spending the rest of the summer in roomy polka-dotted PJ's tending to my tomatoes at the farm, far away from all civil company when my tailor rushed back to town. Clucking with sympathy, he swiftly proceeded to deposit the offending pair into the dark recesses of his shop, offered me a cup of weakish tea, promising to sew in reinforced steel linigs on the pockets of all my trousers and sent me on my way.

After a month long diet consisting mainly of carrots and brandy, i approached something close to my good cheer - while not being reckless enough to venture into society yet, but well enough to look forward to contemplate what tomorrow might bring with not an unduly heavy heart.

A sordid tale I know, but one that had to be told.

A lot of clay to build in my bricks...

It’s interesting how people take my views rather too seriously… and if I were not wiser by the virtue of my follies, I’d probably do the same. Well.. here I was gloating like an egg that had found its bull’s eye .. nestling cheerfully in the yolky satisfaction of my, even if I do say so myself, well-expounded “white trouser” theory.

Until of course, I got pronged, rather rudely I might add, by a few bristling women. “I wear white trousers, don’t you know” as if by the very fact that they did, they completely turned the fact that they were, in fact, exactly the kind of women I was talking about, on its head.

Well… I was jolted, I must admit, by the fury of these hustling bustling women but it does incite me to cast further light on this much-argued about theory of mine. Let me first bung in a disclaimer. Like all theories worth their yolk, “The White Trouser Theory” does the usual thing – rustle up a conclusion first and then build a complicated routine around it. In the face of counter-arguments, cold logic and even hard evidence, the WTT like all theories will simply build natty little corollaries which will, to all intents and purposes, render the theory gloriously impotent, but will not let it relinquish the sensational glory that surrounded its introduction.

And now to business ... Oh yes I agree –– there’s nothing elaborate about white trousers anymore, white trousers have lost their elitist halo, and now every woman worth her waistline has a pair to boot. While this does take away from the trifling detail of relevance from my theory, it does go rather a long way in proving its original premise. After all, where does a woman get her hankering for a new couch .. an antique for the hallway.. and oh before I forget.. a new piece of apparel such as .. hmm.. let’s see now.. a white trouser from? From the happy coincidence of seeing it owned by, with or on another woman, of course! And who are these women next door craving to be like? The quintessential “white trouser” woman.. thus spreading the elitism thinner.. and thinner.. until of course the next “white trouser” comes along .. ridiculously hard to get ... prohibitively expensive .. thoroughly impractical.. and positively leaking style at its seams. And the entire cycle starts over.

And all this while, us enlightened species watch for these tell-tale signs.. and stay well clear of these moody women.

Beer, anyone?

About spewnotes....

I am at a loss to understand why, but i am compelled to defend what i blog at spewnotes. Well, i suppose the reason is i have been reading some damn good blogs..

One thing that struck me about all these blogs, is the sheer entertainment value through the quality of writing and (to use TJ's lovely phrasing: tacking on one more objective to the sentence, being too lazy to actually work the sentence in) the sheer purposefulness of it all.

Well. lets get one thing clear.

Spewnotes, in no way, intends to educate, inform, propagandize or entertain and aims (using the term loosely and thereby implying much less work), at best, to be something approaching a rambling read.

More about women...in white trousers.

Its a Thursday evening, and i am a content man. Monday class is far away. Assignments look humanly possible. I am still reveling in the afterglow of Mclaren's maiden win this year at the Spanish GP. Kimi Raikkonen appears with a halo in my dreams these days.


Reclining lazily on the soft cushions of this peaceable picture, I set my mind to weightier matters - and for this post it is the pleasurable task of detailing my much-applauded (mainly by me) White Trouser Theory.


Or to be more specific. White trousers wearin' women.


I first started on this theory on the airport express from Hong Kong airport to Central. An hour long journey in an air conditioned train (i use the term loosely. To my untrained heart, it ran faster than the plane i had landed in.) That was when i spotted this British woman. Tall. Full. and wearin white trousers. Her long flowing gait, sunglasses perched fashionably on lovely auburn hair, she looked gorgeous. But something bothered me. I couldn't put my finger on it.


My next vision of a white trousered woman was in Bombay. Funnily enough, a similar looking woman, stepping of a sleek black Merc with, almost inevitably, Louis Vuitton shopping bags in her hand.


And then, on that trip in Bombay, I kept running into this succession of white trousers and women in them. Something kept nagging at me right through, and over paani-puri and chicken frankies on Linking road, it hit me. There was a common thread (no pun intended) running through all these women.


And it had to do with white trousers. And unattainability.


What kind of woman wears white trousers? Remember women and their finickiness about appearances? So what kind of woman puts herself up voluntarily to that acid test?


If it hasn't struck you yet - and i don't blame you - it took me long enough - it really is the kind of woman who is supremely confident about what her day is going to dish out to her. The kind of woman who has a handle on almost every factor in her life.


More specifically, it is the kind of woman who knows that her home isn't that kind that springs nasty surprises in the form of an un-vaccumed portion of the sofa. The kind of woman who knows her bags aren't made of the cheap leather that could streak your trouser leg as your bag swishes against it as she walks. The kind of woman who organizes her belongings in such a way that not a single thing need go into her trouser pocket.


Picture, if you will, a white trousered woman's day.


She steps out of a dustless home, into a gleaming elevator that swooshes down to the floor like a molecule beam. She spends all of seven seconds in the sun as she walks to a vacuumed, de-odorized car whose chauffeur has the air-conditioning humming at twenty-two degrees while the tarmac melts on the road he is about to drive her on. Her palms are dry and cool and she smells exactly the way she intended to.


I jerk out of my reverie as the puri disintegrates soggily in my hand, and splooshed down on the pavement, splattering my sneakers. I realized then that this was exactly the kind of woman who a bloke didn't want in his life. The kind of woman, who a man instinctively shies away from making passes at. And I relaxed, as I looked at the another white-trousered tower of feminine intimidation, for a brief moment gleaming whitely in the morning sun, as she glided back into the cool, dark interiors of her car. She may gleam and shine, I am never going to want her to be mine.


Solving life's little puzzles gives me an almost obscenely, disproportionate sense of satisfaction.

About "bein cool"

As i love sayin, Let me explain. Coolness is an abstract concept and carries much more weight than its frivolous wording indicates. It doesn't, as folks tend to infer, hinge upon good looks or a drawl. It could, but that's not the kinda coolness we'll worry about. That's as passe as a local train. It hinges, rather crucially in my opinion, upon two not unrelated things: first, presence of substance, and second, a tenacious ability to cling to your identity.

The first is easy to explain. But before i do that, let me bung in the fundamental characteristic of "cool" here. Its anything that is different from what most blokes do/know/have and yet care about. It'll get clearer as we move on.

Getting back to substance, we need to understand that most folk know a little bit about everything . When people are cool, is when they know a little about everything, but also, in addition to this common denominator, know a hell of a lot about something. Like music. Like sport. Like motorcycles. Like tobacco. Like coffee. Like books. The list is not nearly as endless as i am leading you to think but really it is a very generous criterion.

Identity. This here is a crucial one. It basically flows from our "substance" theory but not in what you would call an obvious manner. Its like this. Picture your self as a flower child hangover from the seventies. You wear sunglasses four inches across, you wear brown corduroy, and dual color sneakers. You dont mind polka dotted shirts with collars that look that could easily be mistaken for a small plane's wings. You wear your hair long and shave once in a week. You smoke three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day, have an ambidextrous talent for rolling joints and eat three cheese rich burgers a day. You listen to Dream theatre and Rush, think nDJ stands for Desk Job and you haven't a clue about Trance.

And you are in B-school.

(Granted this is a nasty picture i draw, but then the greatest breakthoughs could have never come without experiments that refrained from animal testing, right? )

So this here is an uncool situation. (or have i tipped my hand by being too obvious?). Anyway, my point is this. If you cling on to even this time-warp identity for a fair amount of time, you'll be cool. Any step towards modernity, in the face of relentless social cold shouldering, would send you hurtling rather inevitably into the dark abyss of social outcastism.

Why? Like i said, coolness is about being acceptably different. And if you have the second, the first will follow. In due course. The trick here is to cling onto what ever germ of an identity you have, and just wait it out.

Simple enough, eh?

about social life at B-school

Its strange how life chooses the strangest moments to turn you inside out, churn you around and return you to almost the same molecular arrangement that you were in before. This "almost" of a difference could result in either a an improved version or not but its the transition itself that is unnerving.

I am a 28 year old bloke..an age where you are "just right"..neither confused nor abstract. Its a calm unflappable period of time where you are young enough to be cool, and old enough to have the right to look smug occasionally. Like i said, a good age to be. Like i didn't say, its an age that doesn't handle change too well.

B-school is a lot of things and one of the things it also is (like most things which involve more than one human being above the age 14) is a social drama, where you need to have your role and your identity clearly etched out. Its about "bein cool".

And at the crux of this is the "Positioning" issue. Posish is an important deal, if you aint cool. Either you identify with the cool hip crowd or with the riff-raff. Either way, you need a clean posish for a stress-free B-life. In simpler words, you need to find the right crowd to hang out with so the masses can have an ID to match your face to. Its an "Ours" or "Their's" thing.

And here i am. Talking about this, when i am 28. Grief.

It is always a sign of something seriously wrong, when you are at odds with what you are doing and what you are ..well..are.

As you have no doubt discerned from my blog, i am a seriously skewed personality, and now i am in that epitome of conventionality - B-school.

Its quite a strange place this. A sort of accelerated society race, where everyone is trying to fit in a matter of minutes by using terms like "knowledge aggregation" - a beauty i heard over dinner tonight - in casual conversation. In here, everyone are all alike in their desire to be drastically different, and yet they share the same driving forces, similar dream destinations and similarly different ideas about life.

Strangely enough, i like it. And that's what's worrying me. Karen, my cute friend in the ad world, sent me off with a cautious pat on the back, that seemed to say "good job, mate but are you going to turn into a "suit"?

I am going to think some more about these wise words.