T-shirts

April 8, 2003

Nobody can call me a fashion plate. I am less bothered about my clothes being colour co-ordinated than Dubya is by world opinion. My method of choosing clothes to wear is simple- I open the cupboard, and take whichever item is at top of the respective stack.

But I do like plain T-shirts, which you can paint your own messages on to.

Not only are T-shirt messages the distilled wisdom of the world, they also provide advertising. The prospect of increasing hits to my site by walking around with www.aadisht.net across my chest is one that appeals to me. So, getting fresh T-shirts, fabric paints and brushes is a priority right now.

There’s a permanent seconds and export rejects sale on near college, and I visited it yesterday to see if they had anything in the way of plain T-shirts. They didn’t.

What they did have were lots and lots of preprinted T-shirts. Very cheap, but alas, providing no reasonable scope for customisation. Sad, but true.

However, they also had a grey T-shirt and bermuda combo for 125 rupees. While I wasn’t really planning to buy bermudas- let’s face it, they are never unwelcome.

So, once I reach home for the long Baisakhi weekend it’s time to go to the Sarojini Nagar market and comparison shop. I will investigate the relative prices of T-shirts (with or without attached bermudas) in Delhi and in Patiala, and obtain instructions from my mum on how to analyse their quality. And then I’ll buy them wherever they are cheaper and better.

Anybody who wants to suggest T-shirt messages other than www.aadisht.net, do mail them or post as a comment.


2956

April 7, 2003

The reason there’s been an absence of Fillets lately is that I’ve had midsem tests going on, and surprisingly, I’ve been studying instead of composing Fillets. Thus, this news is a bit dated- almost a week old. Anyway, to continue.

Cosmic justice moves in mysterious ways.

Me, Sarker and Vaibhav Anand aka Kanchha were returning from dinner outside about two weeks ago, when Kanchha decided to make a phones call to one of his girlfriends (he has two). He popped into a nearby PCO and asked us to wait.

Not an altogether unreasonable request, you might think, but Kanchha went on to exceed all bounds of propriety by conducting a 2956 seconds (almost 50 minutes) long phone conversation. In the meantime, Sarker and me, who were suffering from chronic sharifapa that night, hung about and muttered imprecations instead of abandoning Kanhchha.

One could claim that 2956 seconds in not really all that long a time. There are people, some of whom receive the W-Fillets in their inboxen, who have performed continuous GK for periods three times as long. That, too, while concurrently solving VMC back exercises and doing a real-time analysis of the GK over ICQ with other Dubyaphiles. And one would be right- it’s not all that long a time to talk to a girlfriend. It is, however, an obscene amount of time to keep your friends waiting.

The midsems intervened, so vengeance had to wait, but I planned to exact is sooner rather than later. But I needn’t have bothered. The Universe proceeded to show Kanchha the error of his ways the very next time we went out.

A promotional stall for a new brand of fizzy jal jeera had been set up in front of Mauji Grocers. We went to investigate, and found that it was handing out free samples. We tried the jal jeera, and found that it was good. Good enough for Kanchha to bend his head down and examine the other flavours on offer in minute detail.

Having finished his examination, Kanchha raised his head. In doing so, he brought it in contact with the little incandescent light cylinder that was providing illumination to the stall. The results were no less spectacular than the exploding gas cylinder I saw recently (See <a href=”http://www.wokay.in/2003/02/28/coffee-bars/”>W-Fillet #9: Wedding Bells III</a>).

What started off as a mere sizzling noise became vastly more entertaining. The first hairs to come in contact flew off Kanchha’s head, smoking as they did so. The hair that did not fly off formed curls that would be the envy of Little Miss Muffet. A few more patches of hair in the close vicinity welded to each other, releasing a foul odour in the process. This odour than lingered about Kanchha’s person for the next twenty four hours, much in the manner of the albatross that haunted the Ancient Mariner.

Kanchha is unabashed, and refuses to see any element of divine retribution in this incident. Of course, me, Sarker and Khera know otherwise.


Auntys and Uncles

April 3, 2003

I don’t know if I’ve ever told you about Gopal’s before. Gopal Sweets is about two or three kilometres down the road from college. It’s a cross between Nirula’s and Evergreen- it’s a sweet and chaat shop on the ground floor, and a (vegetarian) fast food place on the first. For the benefit of my non-Delhi readers, Evergreen is a sweet shop (Indian sweets, that is- for the benefit of my international readers), and Nirula’s is a local fast food chain renowned more for its ice cream than for anything else.

That dispenses with the introduction. Moving along.

Gopal’s first floor is manned mostly by Nepalians, but during lunchtime, a lady handles the cash register. When paying for lunch at Gopal’s I call tis lady aunty, meaning, of course, nothing more than to show respect for someone so obviously more aged than me.

But today she called me uncleji.

I’m a bit flabbergasted. My father was called uncle by a twenty year old when he was twenty-five, and this sparked off a chain of circumstances that eventually led to him getting married- the most important outcome of which, of course, was that I was born, and you are now reading the W-Fillets. I’m twenty, and I’ve been called uncleji by a woman in her thirties. I cannot even imagine the eventual outcome of this.

Then again, this incident could be completely meaningless.