I have often wished I were the author of a comic strip. Sadly, I can’t draw for peanuts. Actually, I can draw for peanuts (one would have to be terribly incompetent to be unable to draw for peanuts). However, peanuts are pretty much all I can draw for.

Charles Schulz, the man who drew the world famous comic strip Peanuts wasn’t that great with the pencil himself. But he somehow managed to be worthy of much more than peanuts.

I, on the other hand, can only lay claim to the Golu Tales. And I haven’t been worthy of peanuts myself.

The past week saw me getting into murkier depths of Mumbaiite life. It’s house hunting time again. Also, kind of homesick. Plus, out of comic books to read. Add to that the fact that going to movies alone sucks. So we never reach a consensus as to what to watch twice. So far, I’ve seen Capote, Pride and Prejudice, Crash, Walk the Line, and Brokeback Mountain (twice).

Things that I have been wanting to get my hands on, are Earth X, Civil War, Infinite Crisis Files and good comics of a generally groovy nature. Of course I understand some of that will have to wait till I get things in the actual life to settle down a bit.

Subs (sub-editors, deskfolk) are sworn servants to the style sheet. A style sheet is what dictates the eventual look of any newspaper or magazine. It contains details regarding type face, font size, column widths etc. It also specifies what way certain words are to be spelt wherever they appear. Style sheets tell you that ‘here’ is a no-no. You must always spell out the name of the place. Style sheets wouldn’t let you get away with acronyms. Style sheets, in short, screw the way a sub looks at anything he is reading.

I wrote this piece for Digantik.com in 2005.

Neither at the reasonably comfortable hotel room at Parvatipuram, nor when I am at the base camp of the team that takes a periodic trip to the hilly villages with the Mandal Revenue Officer some 18 kilometres from the town, does the realization of where we are going dawn on me. It is only when the jeeps can no longer cross the ditches and our path started getting ever more vertical that ‘the walk’ started. Our luggage, mostly containing edibles and filming equipment, was unloaded and the officials who we were travelling with led the way to what was to be the destination of our lifetime.

Well, its that time of the year again. Time when we wonder if there is anything to Friday the Thirteenth at all. That we do it on the damn day itself, says a lot about the supposedly ‘above-these-things’ ones amongst us. Having been incredibly lucky all my life (see? I don’t even touch anything remotely wooden looking!), I dare say I am in a rather commentor worthy position here.

Evan as far back as when I was in school, I never ever got down on my knees wishing for luck. Not that I don’t believe in luck but that I have always felt it around me. I am confident that a competent enough psychic would even see some kind of protective halo around me if he/she passed me by.

No really. Doesn’t the traditional way of doing it have something to do with chewing and swallowing? Who on Mars cares how you get to that stage? Personally, I have never been one of the masters of soo-aaa-vve. Forget about clean and mess-free handling of the spoon, fork, chopsticks, knives (and god knows what else they put next to the food to see what you can manage with your hands), getting those oversized burgers to fit in my mouth without slurping and splattering their ill-packed innards all over my civilized company is challenge enough.