Funny

Post Number 56 : Not so home, away from home

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

Before coming to the US, on multiple occasions my family had reminded me not to try replicate my life in India here. I hadn’t really paid much attention to them at the time. It seemed so silly. Of course, I wouldn’t. Between my classes and keeping myself alive everyday, I doubt I would ever have the time to replicate my old home in my soon to be new home. Yes, I was scared of living alone for the first time. I was decidedly not looking forward to cooking because I wasn’t sure if I would survive my cooking. However, the idea of living alone, like an adult and having independent adventures over shone any of those worries. 

Read More

Post Number 38 : Dilliwali Diwali

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

Ooh that beautiful smoke in the air. Smoke that’s so potent that all the bling on people’s clothes look just like…. Nothing. They would mean something if you could actually see a meter in front of you but since you can’t, you wait for the next day when people post their FABULOUS Diwali pictures on Facebook and Instagram.

Image result for crackers diwali delhi

Courtesy – The Financial Express

Read More

Post Number 35 : Surviving the FIFA World Cup –The 411

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

Q: Did you hear that Chelsea doesn’t have a website?

A: They can’t string three “Ws” together. 

 
Q: What does a fine wine and Liverpool have in common?

A: They both spend a lot of time in the cellar, cost too much and are only enjoyed on select occasions. 

If these jokes went past your head like Engineering went past mine, then we’re in the same boat. Fret not if you can’t recall 10 footballers’ names if a gun was pointed to your head. If you too, like me, find football a S-pain in the ass, then Ronaldo-n’t worry, I am here to get you out of this Messi situation. I helped you survive Cricket World Cup season a couple of years ago and now I am back with my totally unneeded, entirely pointless brand of social assistance by using the opportunity of the World Cup to Russi(a)n and Putin as many puns and tasteless jokes as I possibly can.

Read More

Post Number 34 – The Whole Damn Bouquet : Part Deux

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

Candid Wallflowers came into existence during one clammy summer evening, when the two writers, in midst of their gossip sessions, thought to share their infinitely wise observations of the people around them. With the utmost humility, of course.  The very first article was an attempt at decoding the kind of people we are mostly surrounded with in college. You can read it here. With time, the old groupings have disbanded just as people keep shedding old habits and come into new ones.

Read More

Post Number 32: Holi – in the days of Social Media

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

There used to be a time when Holi meant you wore your rattiest clothes because who’s even going to care what colour and print your clothes are? Nothing survives the onslaught of permanent colours and water. Is it supposed to be a Chikankari kurta? More like a kurta with chicken curry splashed on it. And who even cares if there’s that extra stitch around the waist or near the shoulder to give your clothes the perfect shape? They’re going to stick to your body like a second skin anyway. You might as well wear that old night suit that you’re planning to convert into a pochha (aka desi name for a house cleaning rag).

But lately, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp statuses have ruined that for me too. Now as soon as I go on WhatsApp, I am flooded with pictures of my friends wearing the classiest clothes. It’s like they’re straight out of the video of “Do me a favour, let’s play Holi!” where they are the impeccably dressed backup dancers for Priyanka Chopra. Their clothes look as if they were gently caressed by a naughty breeze with a little splash of colour.

courtesy – IBTimes India

In between their fabulous Holi celebrations, people make sure to take pictures of these said fabulous Holi celebrations. After all, your Holi isn’t fabulous enough if you don’t have a hundred pictures to prove its fabulousness. Add a dose of carefully choreographed pictures and videos where they are just randomly throwing gulaal into the air and bathing in its disintegrated form. Why couldn’t they just ask someone to smash some colour onto their faces is beyond me. Who even plays Holi like that? Can you imagine me alone on the street and blowing gulaal into the air and dancing around in it? Let’s just agree that my neighbours would preferably stay away from me in the future.

And what is it with people going out to play with seemingly perfectly blow-dried hair? Aren’t we supposed to drown our hair in oil before Holi? You know, so our hair can look perfect once again the next day, saved from the devastating effects of irresponsibly sourced gulaal? Looking at Instagram it’s clear that I am the only champu in Delhi (a goofball), who is glazed with oil all over her body just so it’s easier to get rid of all that colour later. Forgive me if I don’t want to look like “Jaadu” the day after Holi.

Related image

courtesy – memecrunch.com

What I feel the most sympathy for, is my 500 rupee, extra-power, extra volume pichkari or water gun that I bought a few years earlier and still worth its weight. Now, that’s something that deserves to be clicked from every angle. I can just imagine the caption that would go with those pictures, “A nozzle to bamboozle the crap out of anybody in a 50 m radius!” or “Is that sweat I see on your face? ‘Cuz there’s fear written All.Over.It!” But in a neighbourhood full of Instagram models, my dorky water gun is no longer a participant.

 

Post Number 28 : The Eternal Exhaustion of the Overstimulated Mind

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

As the constant buzzing of the phone jolts you up from your slumber, you flail randomly to press the snooze button. You’ve overslept. Last night, you were up till 3, working. Sort of working. You started with the intended task but clicks and scrolls later, temptation led you to YouTube and that was that.

Before you prepare yourself for the world, your phone is already prepared to bring the world to you. As you leave your bed, your phone is your loyal sidekick, informing you via its eccentric art of storytelling – who went to what party, who got inexplicably drunk, who’s ‘feeling awesome’ with 15 others, who has a factually incorrect political rant today, amidst other notifications of you being tagged in jokes and posts that are ‘OMG! So you! You can’t even!’. And that’s just Facebook. You’ve still got to go through Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. It used to be a chore. Now it’s so organic. You’ve mastered the art of skimming through this daily information. You even pride yourself at being able to absorb the most relevant of this daily diligence that you pay to the overlords of social media.

Read More

Post Number 22 : Handling Hypocrisy

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

I recently wrote an article condemning the spate of memes that targeted people of a certain colour, body shape and race in the name of humour. I was heartened to know that a lot of people shared my opinion. In the coming days, I got absorbed in other events and soon put this issue on the backburner. One fine day, I was enjoying an old video of one of my all-time favourite comedians – the Late Ms. Joan Rivers. For those of you who aren’t aware of her comedic credentials, she was the first female to ever host a late night network television talk show and was awarded an Emmy for another of her talk shows. Her standard style involved her razor-sharp and acerbic wit and her ‘take no prisoners’ approach to comedy was undoubtedly controversial. There was nothing that was off-limits as long as it was funny and she was equally harsh on herself, often poking fun at her numerous plastic surgeries and her relationship with her daughter, Melissa Rivers. For those who got her humour, she was the funniest woman. For those who didn’t, she was an insensitive and callous person with absolute disregard for others.

Joan

Credits : buzzfeed.com

Read More

Post Number 7: A Beginner’s Guide to Wasting Holidays

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

The following program has been crafted and perfected by an experienced individual with an extensive knowledge of whiling away time and accomplishing little of actual relevance in daily life. If you are a homo-sapien predisposed towards utilizing every second out of the 86400 given in a day, then this program is not recommended at all. It may lead to bouts of restlessness and hopelessness, followed by pangs of guilt and a feeling of inadequacy and I at no point encourage such emotions in the process of whiling away time.

Read More

Post Number 6: The 7 Commandments of Surviving Cricket World Cup Season in India

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

It’s tough being a cricket fan in India. There are so many talented players to keep track of. Obviously, there are a few that you aren’t so fond of. But dare you vocalize that sentiment! There will be ardent supporters of that person at your throat quicker than Hannibal Lector can say ‘Fava beans and Chianti’.

You know what’s tougher though? NOT being a cricket fan. AT ALL. Not even ‘walk past a TV, watch an over and leave’ type viewer. To all those out there, here are some words of wisdom from someone who has no credentials to offer advice. But when has that ever stopped anyone, right?

RULE 1: Thou must be mentally prepared.

You must brace yourself for the storm that’s about to hit you. Read More

Post Number 4: Unresolved Resolves

Posted on by Candid Wallflowers

Post Number 4: Unresolved Resolves

At midnight, on 31st December, as the minute hand went past 12, indicating the onset of the year of the Monkey, my Facebook wall was inundated with an annoying amount of “New Year, New Me”  posts and people behaving as if the increment from 2015 to 2016 was nothing short of the New World Order with Inspirational quotes to an extent that would give even Oprah Winfrey a complex. And amidst all this chaos of creating an occasion out of something that should seem ordinary, the passing of time, the common theme in almost every declaration of attention seeking (a.k.a  XYZ is celebrating the new year with his/her profile friends, their pets, the entire city, Superman, Batman, E.T., the creatures from Avatar and 50 others) all of them mentioned one particular thing, Resolutions!

01.jpg

AH! Resolutions. A wonderful yearly reminder to oneself of one’s uselessness and lack of ambition and dedication. How among everything else, we fail at pursuing the most mundane of things, that too decided by us only! Now, who doesn’t like that? To be nudged not-so gently periodically and be told “You know that thing you wanted to do and should have done WAY ago, yeah you should ‘try’ doing that again.”

I got off my laptop without posting ANY DAMN New Year nonsense (where’s my medal for courage in face of social expectations?) and scavenged through my unkempt bookshelf to find what I wanted to, my dust laden, slightly cobwebby (I should really clean more….maybe I could make that a resolution?….LOL who am I kidding?) ‘Resolution Diary’ . And as theatrically as I could manage, I blew off the dust and opened it with a dreamy nostalgic look on my face. Now it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I hadn’t managed to accomplish most of my resolutions- most of which involved physical exertion(SHOCKING!!). But there was a saving grace- I had managed to fulfill one task, that involved reading around 20+ books in the year. I was ecstatic. 2015 hadn’t been THAT useless after all. I did ultimately pull off one resolution, although the rest peered back at me like sad, neglected children that had been overlooked for their more loved sibling. Why couldn’t I manage to do any other task? If I had managed one, theoretically I could have managed the others as well? *emphasis on theoretically* Why wasn’t I as motivated for the rest of the resolutions ? Why didn’t I end up in better physical shape by the end of the year? Why hadn’t a reunion for F.R.I.E.N.D.S released exactly 10 years after the last episode? Why hadn’t ‘Fetch’ become a genuine English word? QUESTIONS! QUESTIONS!

New-Year-Resolution

As much as I wanted to analyze the psychology behind my actions and inaction, I had other urgently important stuff to do such as judging people by their social media antics and commenting witty one liners on their posts to hoard likes ,so I found myself a new pen and neatly scribbled 2016 RESOLUTIONS in fancy cursive writing and very cleverly extended arrows from the 2015 page to the 2016 page ( Genius I know!) . With a grin on my face, I kept the diary back on the bookshelf, slighlty hidden because I didn’t want anyone else to see it and have a good  chuckle on my account.

I was glad to have taken the initiative to resolve the unresolved resolutions. And so I have decided and I’ll let you all know, that in 2016, I will learn a new language, lose weight, start exercising, eat better yada yada ………….. starting next Monday!

regina