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.
Courtesy – The Financial Express
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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!
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!
Post Number 1:The Whole Damn Bouquet
The potpourri of human personalities is an eclectic mix. The bouquet of mankind is adorned with the motley crew of flowers. As wallflowers, we are gravitated towards more of an observant role. However this particular trait of ours enables us to expertly identify the rest of the ‘flowers’ we are surrounded by at all times. Elaborating, in no particular order-
Candid Wallflowers 