The Story of Every Long Weekend Ever

Every group of friends has that one guy who keeps track of every single calendar (including the Hindu, Umma, Chinese, Attic, Mayan, etc) and unleashes havoc with the three most dangerous words in holiday history: “Let’s plan something!”

“Let’s plan something!” opens a Pandora’s box that could mean anything from a night out to a stressful four-day trip to Ladakh in the middle of October where the temperature drops (on a good day) to -1 degree. One can tell how excited someone is in the group based on how quickly they reply to the message, “Let’s plan something, bros.” The person who replies first is the only one really looking forward to it, while the rest just don’t want to be spoilsports and play their role in passive agreement. The occasional “Awesome” and “Let’s do it” need to be dropped to indicate you are game but may later back out due to unavoidable excuses.

Planning always begins big because planning doesn’t factor in reality. “Why don’t we all just take a holiday on Friday as well? That way, we have Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off!” quickly goes to “Let’s take an off on Tuesday as well, maybe we can go to Bangkok.”

Eventually, like Rome, all roads lead to good old Goa. The Goa trip has now become the vanilla ice cream of getaways. It’s the default word that gets registered in the brain the moment someone says vacay. If there is a four-day break and you haven’t planned anything, your car begins driving itself toward Goa. The brainstorming on the logistics begins. “How much will it cost? Will we go by flight? Or train? Where will we shack up?”

As soon as the conversation starts to get serious and the recommendations start pouring in, one braveheart announces that he will not be able to make it. Apparently, he has a “family function” to attend. This is secretly the moment a couple of others have also been waiting for. The guy has taken one for the team and the floodgates have opened. Suddenly everyone starts finding flaws in the plan and why it is a not the best idea to execute right now.

If it’s just the three of us, then there’s obviously no point going ahead with the plan, everyone wisely concludes. Plan A has failed and it’s time to now move on to the next one, a slightly more realistic idea. One hiking enthusiast will invoke the idea of a trek and everyone will start celebrating once again. A day’s trek makes infinitely more sense because the first thing that comes to mind is “Sleep!.” You need to go out for just a day and have an entire day to laze before you resume with your hectic office routine. This, allow me to warn you, is the first sign of aging. The day you stop planning trips that have you landing early morning and then rushing to work, it’s time to read an eulogy to your youth. From here on, your whole life will be centred around the idea of sufficient rest.

Once the destination for the trek has been decided, the next round of 897 Whatsapp messages begins: The debate over the meeting point. You argue furiously to make sure that the meeting point is closest to your house. After all, who wants that additional stress of travelling to the meeting point and then travelling to an even further destination. It is very important to define the radius of how far you are willing to travel from home in terms of kilometres during the holiday. Once you have won the battle, you may retreat back into silence.

As you get closer to the day, the only person looking forward to it, posts the dreaded message: “What time are we meeting tomorrow guys?” Every single person reads the message instantly, but there will be complete silence for the next six hours. This is the time for the smart one to emerge. The guy who makes a last-minute excuse to ping the planner privately and tell him about his “emergency” (the cat got stuck in a tree). Now even the enthusiast has reached his limit. He rattles off a series of abuses and leaves the group.

Everyone who didn’t want to be a part of this plan heaves a huge sigh of relief. No one wants to admit it, but secretly they’re glad he’s gone.

In your head you now start to calculate all the things you are going to do at home with three full days of free time, most of which will be spent between three-hour naps and telling yourself you deserve them. On Day 2, you will finally leave your bed after guilting yourself into at least watching a movie or reading a book, and you will do this keeping in mind that you have another day to nap. This day now seems like the dream sequence from La La Land.

The final day of your much-touted weekend is a horror show — you realise that the three days got over faster than the stock at Big Bazaar on “sabse saste teen din”. Anxiety takes over.

Just thinking about the fact that you’ll have to go to office the next day stresses you out. You know that with every new email that loads, there will be inexplicable sadness in your life.

This is the reality of every long weekend. And when it is all over, you desperately look up the calendar for the next one, promising yourself to make the most out of it. But there isn’t a long weekend or even a public holiday in sight for the next couple of months.

Which, upon reflection, turns out to be a good thing. It turns out that a couple of months (or more) are exactly what are needed for the scars of the long weekend to heal. That’s enough time for your WhatsApp group to slowly convalesce from the twists, swerves, and heartbreak of planning the last weekend. It also takes that much time for you to decide that the avalanche of emails and to-do lists the Monday after is a worthy tradeoff for the daily drudgery that is the work week. And so, after enough time has passed, we give ourselves a case of voluntary amnesia and start making plans for the next epic getaway.

Goa, anyone?

“Hey Ram, My Son’s Nastik!”

Iwas watching Harry Potter on a lazy Sunday afternoon when my dad said, “This is so stupid, no one flies on a broom.” Now, I’m no Potterhead to take offence, but I felt like I just couldn’t let it go. “Well, it’s fiction. I know it’s not real.” I then paused for a moment and with a lower tone let this zinger fly: “I’m not the one who believes that a monkey flew with a mountain in his hand.” My dad stared me down until he exited the room.

Born in a Gujarati family, I was raised Hindu, but I went to a convent school and lived in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. My upbringing was so secular that if I were in politics, the Congress party would have already offered me a ticket by now. My mum must have done some “paaps in her previous life” (her words, not mine) that I turned out to be nastik.

Being an atheist in India can be confusing. There are multiple religions, hundreds of prayers, crores of gods, and millions of controversies surrounding us. I know only the Gayatri Mantra and it’s what I whisper in my head when I have to pretend to pray, regardless of whether it’s a temple, mosque, church, or gurudwara. As a nastik, you are not invested in any of the rituals and traditions, but you sure as hell are interested in public holidays. Nothing breaks your heart like finding out that Bhai Dooj will fall on a Saturday this year. Holidays know no religion.

Another thing that does not know religion is dance and food. Whether it is the ghaati dance during Ganpati, feasting on delicious food during Durga Pujo, kite-flying during Makar Sankranti, or playing with gulal during Holi, the celebration is hard to resist, even if you’re nastik. One has to be a sadist to not notice how beautifully the streets are lit up during Diwali and Christmas, but one has to be careful about making these observations. You don’t want to goad mum into asking, “Are festivals just about having fun for you?” This is a rhetorical question. Obviously, she doesn’t really want an honest response from me.

Over the years, I have mastered the classic Indian trait of adjusting my belief system as per my convenience. I visit the Ganesh temple near my house because I really love the kheer they distribute as prasad. I would accompany my Catholic classmates to church just so that I could bunk lectures, and on Diwali, I keep touching the feet of the elders in the family because each bow is rewarded with a cash-filled envelope. To be honest, I’m not different from religious leaders. Like them, I too exploit customs for my personal benefit.

This attitude, while profound, does cause a bit of tension at home. Diwali for instance, is fraught with arguments. My mum looks forward to waking up early, bathing, dressing up in all her finery, and performing puja, while I look forward to getting up in the afternoon, doing nothing all day, feasting on farsan, and scamming relatives for fat envelopes. Patakhas may be banned in parts of India, but fireworks are guaranteed at home.

The stress of waking up early and getting dressed is followed by the expectation of participating in the house puja with enthusiasm. One has to wear a clean kurta and stand with folded hands at least for two minutes when mum is around. What’s the point of praying if mum’s not taking notes? Over the years, I’ve mastered yet another trick. During the Diwali aarti, I indulge in such furious clapping that I could give a seal from Antarctica a run for its money.

While my parents have now gradually come to terms with me being nastik, they try to keep it under wraps when interacting with relatives. Courtesy, India’s classic “log kya kahenge” syndrome. Most of our relatives aren’t as casual about faith as my parents. As Gujaratis, they are very passionate about two things: God and Narendra Modi. If they find out about my religious orientation, they’d go into a state of shock and give me look you’d reserve for someone who’d just called NASA’s Diwali picture fake. They’ll then move on to condole with my parents: “You’ve not done a shoddy job of raising him, it’s this whole generation that has no values.”

Perhaps, it is indeed is a generation thing. With more people refusing to believe in any sort of god than ever before. My mum’s biggest worry right now is that my “shameless attitude” will rub off on my younger sister and she might also grow up to be nastik. In her worldview, that could be the new plague, a world full of people who don’t believe in god but still enjoy all the free food and booze that comes with celebrations of him.

Being nastik in a religiously charged country like India, where you have faith on steroids, can mean that there are seven different kinds of hell that you can go to, all in one lifetime. Until that moment, dare I say, “God bless you!”

When You Know You Just Can’t Garba

Being born in a family where your parents are ace garba dancers and your sister is a trained classical dancer, it was just assumed that I would keep the healthy family tradition alive. All geared up in ethnic kediyu as a little boy of ten, I accompanied my parents to the building garba function with great expectations. The enthusiasm dried up pretty quickly after they saw me move to the beats with the grace of a plucked chicken. Ten minutes later, my parents whisked me away. I was tasked with playing garba around the jhula in our house and that’s where I have remained.

If you’re born Gujarati, there are many things you could have done to let your family down — you could have failed an accounts exam or kissed a girl who eats meat, but according to them, you would have truly let your rich, Gujarati culture down if you turned out to be the person who has two left feet and can’t dance during Navratri. It’s an equivalent of sticking to your Vodafone connection in the times of Jio.

Declaring yourself a non-dancer, is the Gujarati version of coming out of the closet. As a man brave enough to come out of the closet, I have been trying to redeem myself in the eyes of my family and friends in many ways. I have become, for one, the guy who arranges passes for the entire group and leaves no stone unturned in my quest. Whether it involves posting fervent requests for passes in multiple Whatsapp groups, making tons of desperate calls, or bartering Sunburn tickets for Falguni Pathak. Don’t judge me, it’s my only chance during the nine-day festival to prove my worth, my Gujju-ness.

Once the passes are arranged and you arrive at the venue with friends, the nightmare begins. In front of you is a sea of people, dressed to the nines, flawlessly dancing the garba. That’s when performance anxiety hits you, and you start feeling the pressure to get into action. You automatically volunteer to take care of everyone’s chappals and belongings, as you get ready to dance. Suddenly, a few more dancers take notice of you and approach you to take care of their stuff too. And then a few more come to you with the same request. I’d give any security guard a run for his money, only if I had tokens to hand over. And once in a while when someone takes a break from the hectic swirling and twirling, you offer them water or even some “snakes”. If nothing else you at least have an alternate career now, you can host a paani puri stall at any Indian shaadi.

Being a non-dancer during Navratri involves a lot of just standing alone awkwardly and watching other people. The silver lining to this rather dull activity is that you get to gaze at all the pretty girls in the crowd, dressed in their flamboyant best, dancing away to classic Gujarati songs. Now gazing at girls while standing by yourself is fun, but it can be done for only so much time before it gets creepy. Even if girls actively avoid a non-dancer, you have no choice but to continue staring. If you appear bored, someone will pity the fact that you’re standing alone and drag you to the dance floor. “Chal na, ek-do step,” they’ll say. This is the one single moment I dread the most. To join in and try to dance in sync with the rest of the group. But then you put on your game face and just do it.

As you are getting the hang of the step everyone’s dancing to and gain a bit of confidence, some asshole decides to change to a different step. And so, the struggle begins once again. This is the reason “Sanedo” is one of my favourite garba songs. The sheer simplicity of the dance steps ensures that there is inclusiveness and everyone can garba. After a few rounds, you try to quietly sneak away and get back to watchman duty.

Garba is followed by the dandiya session, where I only have two goals — not to injure someone, and not get injured myself. Dandiya is comparatively easier to grasp because you just have to stick to the same routine regardless of the song. It’s like the economics exam in school, no matter what the question is, “population” could always be cited as the reason why India is struggling with development.

Just like every Indian function, garba too transitions from the traditional “Pankhida” to Bollywood’s “Nagada Sang Dhol” to Yo Yo Honey Singh and eventually Coldplay. The good thing about Bollywood songs is that you can just mindlessly jump to the beats and nobody gives a fuck. Or do as the DJ at Kora Kendra tells you to: “Put your hands up in the air!”

One of the toughest things to do on a garba night is to move from point A to point B without stepping on the toes of the other dancers. The brain has to constantly re-navigate because you have people dancing all around you. You get pushed and heckled, as you try to make your way. It’s what a drunk Google Maps would look like if it were a person.

As the clock is about to strike 10 pm, you start bitching to your friends about shitty deadline restrictions, but you’re really glad that you’ve put one more Navratri night behind you. All that remains to be done is to pose for a few pictures, where you put on your best fake grin like you’ve had the time of your life. Upload the pictures on Instagram with #BestNightEva and it’s a job well done.

Tomorrow will be another day with another group, at a different location, in a different kurta, but the struggle will be all the same.

Wanted: People for Ethical Treatment of Skinny Folks

Iam 5 feet 10 inches and weigh 46 kilos. If you are having trouble visualising that image, let me help you. When I apply a Prisma filter on my picture, the result I get is a tree or a pole. I’m so skinny that my girlfriend calls me Half Boyfriend.

Every time I log in to Facebook and read the millionth status update that month on fat-shaming, I have only one thought in mind: What about me? Or am I so skinny that you couldn’t even see me? Girls have been regularly shutting down fat-shaming bullies by posting photos in swimsuits and rightly getting a lot of support. But I once wore skinny jeans in 2007 and I still haven’t heard the end of it. Research after research backs the idea that schools should stop fat-shaming overweight children as it causes major psychological harm. Where were these folks when I was being labelled “patla papad”, “haddi”, and “sukda” during my school days!

Here is an average day in my life: I am hanging out with a bunch of friends at one of the most magnificent and picturesque places in Mumbai, Marine Drive. The month is August and there is a high tide warning by Mumbai Police. While we stroll on the walking path, there is a huge gust of wind. My fear, ingrained since childhood, comes back to haunt me. I know what is coming. A friend catches hold of me tightly and shouts “Arré yaar, koi pakdo isko varna yeh hawa se udd jayega!” Once we went to a restaurant and didn’t carry a selfie stick so friends lifted me horizontally and I clicked the picture. Okay, I’ll admit that was funny.

And that’s just my friends. When the tailor notes down my measurements, he declares an outfit – any outfit – is not “realistically possible”. Neighbours from three buildings down come to me with suggestions of how I can gain weight, right from “eat four bananas daily” to “protein supplements le yaar”. And relationships? They’re tough, when as a guy, you’re the one asking with eagerness in your voice, “Do I look fat in this dress?” With “toothpick” metaphors for my penis to a vivid trivialisation of my sexual life, my dating game has the confidence of a Rahul Gandhi before an election result.

If it wasn’t bad that I’m skinny, I also happen to be a Gujarati. The pressure is immense. If I don’t grow a belly and die of diabetes, I would have let our heritage down. Every time the Endura Mass advertisement plays on TV, I have to shamefully leave the room. The accusing looks are hard on me.

For all of this humiliation, I’ve decided that society at large doesn’t deserve our contribution. Am I not going to get any credit for automatically being the guy who will climb to the top of the pyramid during Janmashtami just on account of being skinny and light? For years, we have put our body on the line and fallen from 25-40 feet, so you can listen to “Govinda Aala Re” one more time. When I enter the second class of a Mumbai local, four of us can comfortably sit on one seat. It’s the little things that matter.

While Bollywood has shamed everyone from gay and lesbian people to women to fat people, I’m a bit offended by how they’ve left us out. It’s like we are not even worth their prejudice and bigotry. When am I going to see people take to the streets and raise slogans for us? I’m pretty sure our collective demography is greater than Raj Thackeray’s vote bank.

Vogue and Cosmopolitan can claim to have made huge strides by having plus-sized models on their magazine covers. But I am not going to be convinced about the Body Positive Movement until I see Patrakar Popatlal from Tarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashma on the cover of Vanity Fair.