What A Pizza Can Do

Yesterday, Jo (my boss who looks like Steve Jobs and Don Corleone had a love child who uses ‘fucking’ before every verb and noun) and Ni (who looks like she has walked straight out of a Tim Burton movie) were going through the ‘spaces’ for X pizza brand.

“So basically they’ve got this offer with all this stuff and at a very low price, lower than the competition’s. So they want to get people who’d usually have street food because it’s cheaper, into X pizza restaurant.” I explained.

“Can I go first?” Ni asked me, her body already in the mode to throw the words out and my ‘sure’ was just a formality. She jumped in and shot off her spaces which were sad to say the least. But she defended them with the vigour of a mama bear protecting her ugly bear cubs. Jo looked a little like a cat in the rain in front of her vehemence. And I wondered for the umpteenth time what had I been employed into.

“So anyway, we can totally talk about choice as the main thing here,” she concluded firmly, allowing no objections. Jo was quiet and then she said, unsurely, her eyes and lips straining, “Or you don’t think so?”

What kind of dynamic was this?!

Jo went into his explanation of things to Ni, “It’s just that choice is a bit generic but you can surely go ahead and brief the creative team on it. But I was thinking, can we do something around being broke since it’s about value for money?” he was silent for a few seconds, “What is broke in Hindi? Kadka right?”

“Yea, kadka,” Ni concurred.

I’d have to take their word for it, is what I said, since I didn’t know the Hindi word for broke.

“So can it be something like ‘Kadka? Then have X pizza ka tadka,’ Jo suggested.

I wanted to weep. My own simple suggestion, though not stellar was better than what either of them had suggested. A VP and the CSO.

Instead of telling him that his idea sucks, I said, “But I think it cues Indian cooking with ‘tadka’.”

“Does it?” Jo turned to Ni who nodded. “What is Tadka anyway?”

He googled it and informed us that it was tempering in Indian food.

“It sounds like it would be an Indianised pizza,” I reiterated.

“You’re right,” he said. A phrase he often ended up saying to me because he ended up being so wrong, so often and I’m just two weeks in the organisation. Help. Me.

At that moment his cabin door was opened by one of the account management VPs. A fellow who had thrown the phrase tent pole campaign at me in an email that had nothing to do with tent pole marketing at all. He was always laughing, crisp in how he spoke, a veteran advertising guy and like everyone in this agency, full to the brim with gas.

“Hey, AD, if I say to you ‘Kadka? Lagao X ka tadka’ (Broke? Put the tempering of X), what does it sound like to you?” Jo asked him.

“Oh my god Jo!” AD mock ran out of the cabin and then swerved around, “Oh my god! What are you even saying to me!”

All of us looked at him confused as did all the people outside the cabin.

“It means horny right?!”

All of us burst into laughter.

“Fucker! I said Kadka,” Jo called out amidst all the mirth.

“What is kadka?” AD asked, “It’s that only? No? What is it?”

“It means broke,” Ni chipped in with a laugh.

Kadka at best is close to Kadak which means hard in Hindi and from there AD had taken many leaps and bounds of imagination to understand that Jo was asking him that if he was horny he just needed X pizza’s tempering.

When we stepped out, a servicing person told me that it isn’t Kadka, it is Kadki. Good God, blind leading the blind in this office. On the bright side, my sister loves these office stories of utter frustration and finds them hilarious. At least my struggle is stand up comedy for someone.

Sexy Times

“Listen, on ABC laminates,” Lady Teeny begins, her face pinched with stress, “I saw the deck and it’s not really what NJ is looking for. And the guy you guys presented to, his minion, is useless. He has no idea what NJ wants and is going to set us down the garden path.”

My new boss, Jo and I stared at this hurricane of well-contained panic, the CEO of the agency sitting at the glass-top round table in Jo’s cabin. I was sitting next to her and Jo was facing her.

“NJ wants some sort of comm strat,” she continued, “He will jerk off to that.”

I suppressed the internal recoil, reminding myself that this is just agency speak.

“Comm strat?” Jo questioned.

“See those spaces are very advertising,” I embodied a question mark as she said it, “We don’t need to have creative spaces right now, we can just talk about the research’s triggers and barriers. And then have a comm strat flow and talk about the examples.”

“This is what NJ wants, he wants scripts,” Jo said.

“Yes, so we can take some kind of scripts stemming from the barriers and triggers, but in the form of a comm strat because that’s what he’ll jerk off to.”

“See, Teeny, that’s why we’d added the whole challenger bit at the start, mainly so he can masturbate over that, it’s the NJ-proofing we’ve done.”

At this point it was hard not to feel like we were at Sex Workers Inc.

“Listen, I’ve just come from a meeting and the creative got it totally wrong,” her eyes were sharp in that she wanted something, they were muddled in that they had no clue what they wanted. “Do you know what Arijit is doing?” she looked at me.

“Uh, no,” I said in no small part because I had no clue who Arijit was, being all of two weeks in the organisation aligned to a space cadet of a VP.

“He will go so far from this thought,” she looked at me as if I was secretly encouraging this Arijit to run amok and ruin the scripts. “We need to be authentic.”

This buzz word was the new ‘aspirational’ even as aspirational became a staple.

“Look we need to get in those examples, build a comm strat and take something that are like scripts but not scripts, stemming from triggers and barriers,” I swear to God I was at the centre of a spinning black and white spiral by this point. I just wanted to shout, “What the fuck do you actually want? Just tell us the problem not what you think is the solution.”

“I think we’re unnecessarily complicating it,” Jo was being nice but he clearly felt her anxious energy stinking up the cabin. “We should keep it as is.”

“At least let’s put in our earlier stuff,” she said, slightly exasperated, “Because then he’ll at least jerk off to that,” she cast me a glance and said, “Sorry about that.”

Ideally I’d like to not be a part of a conversation that has even one jerk off or a masturbate, but here I’d been hit with gibberish and three jerk offs and one masturbate. I’d already tried to make sense of this conversation and asked her certain questions, but she had launched into another rambling journey. Once she left, Jo translated what she’d said for me. Truly as of now, my new job is all about writing down my feelings with complicated words sown in.

Mount Everest-ing

My mother believes that for life to have meaning Mount Everest should exist. 

And if Mount Everest exists, which it must, one must forever, at any point of time, whether one is wailing having just been born or a teenager biting her nails over typing… or a young adult fixing his hair before an interview or a middle-aged woman deciding to ‘fuck that shit’ and take her anti-anxiety pills or a sixty year old man just realising that Instagram isn’t the enemy, whatever one identifies with (absurd concept!), one must be willing and able to climb Mount Everest. 

What’s more, it is essential that Mount Everest exist in every aspect of life: health, friendships, love, cooking, dancing, laughing, crying, sports, homes etc. If one is unable to climb Mount Everest for paltry reasons like illness or death, one can be labeled ‘weak’, ‘lazy’, ‘spoilt’, ‘indisciplined’ or ‘selfish’. The last one because you as a representation of your mother are hurting her by not hurting yourself enough to be meaningful.

If your fingers are soft are you worth anything? my mother grapples with this question daily. Then she weighs herself and puts on a face pack. Because there is no excuse not to look good should the need to traverse Mount Everest arise without notice.

There is no such thing as a not-Mount-Everest, that is a myth propagated by Arvind Kejriwal, the man whose only contribution to society so far has been free tickets in buses for women who want to pay for them and who desperately want to trade this unasked for privilege with not getting raped. Mother knows that there are things like sunbathing and laughing and staying still on a rug but those are things that keep your fingers soft. 

One would be tempted to wonder about how Mount Everest came to loom, a gargantuan shadow, upon my mother’s vision. Perhaps it was something she learnt as a child watching her own mother’s back arched, squatting close to the earth, planting a piece of herself each day into the soil. Especially on the days she had no pieces left to give. Perhaps survival was a gold medal that if you won once, you needed to win again and again. There was no surety on the myth of when someone planted Mount Everest into her soil and how it grew to be as monolithic as it did, as inviting as it did to her with its inhospitable streaks and blankets of white. Its very trait of being insurmountable giving the zenith the power to bestow worth upon someone. Who taught Mother that her worth, along with mine and all others, lives outside of us, on top of Mount Everest? What blade of grass or mound of snow in her remote, mountainous village spoke such stories into her soft ears which are now hardened like her meaningful fingers? 

“Everybody finds it difficult. There are no levels of difficulty. There is no such thing as feeling, there is only indolence and infirmity and free time for people to indulge them.” 

Since mother has given birth to me and has had a myriad of experiences in her time on Earth, she has had all experiences that can be had. She knows exactly what ails me and it is nothing that I think or feel it is. It is simply a satanic resistance to climbing Mount Everest. 

“Why should I climb it?” I ask often.

“Do you want to be useless all your life?” she counter-questions. 

I have no answer to that because I wasn’t mulling over whether I have a use or not up until she declared that I didn’t. Now it worries me that this state of being useful is something that only people climbing up Mount Everest possess. It can’t even be a Kanchenjunga, that would be a two-word horror story: second place. 

I have tried to think of spots that could be housing my self-worth, perhaps it lies in the middle of a book about heroes who on the daily do at least one villainous thing and villains who daily get a lot of love letters from women like me seeking their self-worth in reforming them. 

Maybe on a hammock under palm trees with sunlight glinting through? It is the only place that was outdoors that I remember sleeping off in without a worry about how useful I was being in the world. 

Maybe at the end of a tongue that was drinking whiskey with me, talking about our own insignificant hills instead of mountains, wondering where the next dopamine hit will come from while halfway through the present one.

Maybe in my mother saying while holding me, “You are enough. I love you. I accept you just as you are.”

It would be more realistic to climb Everest.

Advertising, Makeup and T cells

My sister is keeping a fast without food or water.

Apparently Harvard told her that it helps regenerate T cells and those cells are a bad ass kind of lymphocytes made by the bone marrow. They don’t just attack any antigen, they hunt for a specific antigen to attack. So, definitely the para commandos or navy seals of the immune system. In the context of the fast, it also happens to be Ekadashi. On this day, Hindus fast, with or without water, to rejuvenate the body, swipe aside planetary evil eyes and gain the right frame of mind for meditation.

While my sister is creating an elite cell force in her body by torturing herself, I am buying lipsticks and really, truly organic lip balms, the ones that smell bad to prove how organic they are. I am also induced into buying some extra eyeliners because then I’d get a makeup brush set worth INR 1600 that I’ll never ever use, for free. It’s…free.

How does one know if they have the right amount of makeup on? I ask myself.

The she that is me replies: only when you look like a Kardashian do you have the right amount of makeup on.

I have been watching too many makeup reels set to trending music where everyone’s aim indeed is to look like one or the other Kardashian sister through aggressive contouring and applying at least ten different products to different strips of the face. I settle for my lipsticks and coloured liners.

Heathen, mutters the problematic, shallow me.

At work, in the washroom, I am in a competition with a girl who has walked in, and is standing in front of the full-length mirror, attacking her hair. I wash my hands deliberately. Surely she’ll leave first so I can expand and claim the washroom as mine? But she continues some fierce dance that involves her fingers running through her hair. I take my time snatching the paper napkin from the dispenser and then soak the fine water droplets on the muscles joining my fingers. Never has anyone dried their hands with so much precision, efficiency and leisure. I cast glances at this girl in all black, to let her know that the appropriate period for her to be standing in front of the full-length mirror is over and she must concede defeat in this battle.

She hears my eyes and then with a dramatic sigh and a lift and fall of her arms turns to the mirrors in front of the basin, but addresses me, “There’s no saving my hair is there?”

Oh so that’s what she was doing.

I look at her hair which was what the magazines and commercials, like passive-aggressive bullies pretending to be her friends while growing up, had told her were ugly and wrong. Hair like mine, frizzy, neither curly nor straight, hair in constant vexation of the life they lived. Somewhere a hair product marketer was salivating at this encounter, whipping his ad agency to make an ad with the insight that “90% women don’t like their hair, and so we will tell them that they should like their hair just as it is, after applying our shampoo. And conditioner, of course.”

“Why do you want to save it? It’s fine,” I try to tell her against the chorus on megaphone inside her made by the ad guy and commercials and movies.

She waves at me dismissively as she walks out.

There is no universe in which what I told her could be true. But in my head, I thought about her hair, unruly and tangled and imagined a world where she was on the cover of Vogue, with that hair. Everyone claiming that the indistinct, untextured mess was the new expression of authenticity. Models scrambling to bring this rebellion to magazine shoots and pap shots, to be the first to start the trend. It was all authentic. Another ad woman somewhere lets out a moan, reserved only for when someone says the words, “Buzz”, “Viral”, “Aspirational”, and now of course, “Authentic.”

Every marketer is chasing authentic these days. By increasing their logo size more than they’d ever asked for before, by shunning brand personality for discounts because no one has ever thought of discounts before. Ad agency guys go for a smoke every fifteen minutes and call this marketer a ‘chutiya’ (pussy) because of course the lowest thing a man can be is a woman or worse, a woman’s vagina. And when one calls a woman, a woman, it’s clearly a double insult.

“Motherfucker,” the ad agency woman exhales smoke out, and her boss nods, “wants to keep saying 50% discount as though all of the competition isn’t saying the same thing. ‘Oh but we have 10 things on discount, competition has 9.’ Chutiya.”

Then the both of them go up and try to convince their creative team about how the client has an exciting brief because the client pays the bills and their salaries. The creative team calls the client more expletives centred around hating women and move onto doing the job that gives them the jaded edge to fuel their creativity.

Meanwhile, strategy is a retrofitting superpower. Here we write ‘spaces’ and throw brick like words of jargon at anyone within earshot.

“Continuum of vectors that have rounded off into the collective psyche of the consumers as a brand we must ignite brand love by being a challenger brand and the tenets of those brands decree that the simulacrum of the venn diagram and…”

The aim is to get the client so dazed, their eyes so glazed, that when the colourful creative pieces hit their eyes, the resulting instability of mind and body results in a resounding, “We love it!” so they can fund our 144 pixel office spa days. Later, at night, they often wonder about the fugue that was this moment but it is too late. It would be entirely inauthentic to back out now.

The Gentle Doctor

We entered the old building and glanced at the narrow elevator.

“Which floor is it?” I asked my mother.

“First.”

“Great, let’s take the stairs.”

The stairs in question were dingy, the walls around in desperate need of painting. Flashbacks of a similar trip in another city: dimly lit stairs, a sick dog’s vomit at the base, climbing upto an office that was kindling for a fire with no windows and a garish wall paper, a few people, suffocation wrapped up in a ribbon, came trundling down the memory tunnel. We had been visiting a therapist for my panic attacks. Mom and sister were the ones who’d found this therapist on some app. I’d begged mom to leave then and pretty much figured out some ways to deal with anxiety on my own. We joked about how that therapist had ‘cured’ me.

“The stairs are dingy,” I said with dread, “I’ll bet there’s a suffocating office at the end of them.”

Mom didn’t say anything probably wondering if her booking this appointment was to end in a similar fate as that time. We continued past the false floor onto the floor where there were two glass doors side by side. One door’s signage told us that it was our destination. Inside, there was light and space, a doorman checked our temperature and told us to take the stairs leading further up. We ended up in the reception of an office, light and airy. A shot in the arm. The receptionist informed the doctor that we’d arrived and in a minute or two she sent for us.

I steeled myself for yet another medical practitioner telling me off about my weight and ordering me to make lifestyle changes as though I was willingly being irresponsible and subversive.

“If she starts talking about my weight, I swear to God,” I had warned mom.

“She will have to,” mom said exasperated, “If it’s there it’s there.”

“Yes, but doctors are always judgementally myopic about weight, which is just a risk factor and not always the primary cause of some issues. It makes them blame everything on weight and not do the investigation properly.”

One would think my mother would understand this well considering her own cholesterol levels were high even though she was not only fit, but also eating healthy and staying active. But no dice. Fatphobia runs deep in my mother’s veins, as most of the world’s. Fat people could die in an accident or be shot, and people will blame it on their BMI.

Inside was another spacious office, to the right of which was a huge frosted glass window that scattered light into the room. The doctor was wearing a mask but she had large, pretty eyes above it and her hair were up in a messy clutch grasp. She confirmed my name in a bright, confident voice and told me to sit on the round top chair next to her. Mom sat on a sofa built collateral to the wall facing the doctor.

“So tell me,” she said.

“Actually, we’ve gotten some tests done,” I hesitated. “We wanted to show you and get your opinion on them. But, the reason for this visit right now is because of what happened a couple of days ago. We’d gone to Manali and when we came back I had an issue…I felt weak, there was a tingling sensation in my palms and, and we went to the doctor and he said it was exhaustion…”

Again, a slight pause to bolster myself, “I have anxiety and I have had a panic attack, but usually they’re always associated with breathing. This was presenting itself as tingling in my limbs and a crushing weakness. I mean sleep and food cycles were disrupted during the travel and I was anxious about driving in the hills a lot. So we figured we’d come and talk to you. I’m sure you get this a lot, but I don’t want to ideally take any medicines for anxiety.”

“Everyone says that,” she said, “No one wants the medicine. We shall only do sweet talk.”

I smiled a little coldly I suppose because she sensed a shift and brushed past it.

“So this tingling stopped then?”

“Yes, once I slept,” I said. “Would you like to see the reports?”

“No,” she said, “Not yet. That is fifteen percent of my job. Most of my job is with you, my patient.”

She asked me a few more questions about my anxiety and my work etc. Mom and I also discussed the blood pressure and heart rate that had gone up at that time.

“That’s to be expected, it’s the fight or flight mode,” she said and brought out her own blood pressure machine and set it upon her desk.

“It’s normal,” she said after the reading was done.

She then asked for the reports and went through them.

“Your tests are normal, this is fine, don’t even bother about this, nothing here.”

“Wait,” Mom and I exchanged looks, “Even the uric acid?”

“There is no issue here unless you have gout,” she said. “Avoid red meats but in general avoid those anyway.”

We were stunned because other doctors had made a big deal about this.

“This is not serious,” she repeated, “Don’t worry about it.”

She then flipped to the page with my cholesterol report and said, “Now this, this is your body telling you something. This is borderline.”

She then proceeded to ask my mom if the family had history of cholesterol. We did.

“Right,” she said, “See, I’m sure you’re making the lifestyle changes, and you have the opportunity to reverse this. You have to run, I mean metaphorically, to put distance between you and your family’s medical history. And there is no reason it should catch up to you even till seventy. Without any judgement, we can figure how to do this.”

I was stunned because no one had ever said ‘without any judgement’ and actually acted it, especially doctors, to me or to my sister. Ever.

“As for your anxiety, I don’t think you need to go on medication. You are managing it well, you’re aware of it. If down the line you feel like you need medication we can discuss that or if you need something as an sos, I can prescribe that too.”

“I think,” I glanced at mom, “an sos pill would be great, not just to actually take it but even to have it with me would ease my mind.”

She nodded and told me the name of the pill.

“It’s an MD pill, mouth dissolving because you may or may not have water around at the time so it’ll dissolve. And let me tell you, because although I suggest don’t google, but you will,” both of us laughed, “So yes, it is benzodiazapene, it does have addictive properties but taken as an sos pill it is alright and won’t cause issues and it is the best available solution for this.”

“Wow, you basically answered all of my questions for it,” I said. She shrugged with a smile.

“Let’s check your BMI,” she suggested, turning to her laptop screen.

“I know it’s above the right amount,” I said, unwilling to really go down this route.

“There’s no harm in seeing the numbers,” she said assuringly. “Luckily for you, you’re tall so the weight distributes well that way. Let’s just see where we are at right now.”

Reluctantly I told her my numbers and she fed it in. The chart was like a speedometer and mine was in the red zone at the start.

“Right,” she said, “So let’s try to get this to the yellow zone, let’s keep realistic goals.”

She fed in a number and told me that this would help.

I nodded, realising that I’d nearly reached that number last time.

“Do you think I need to get some tests done to see if I have some issues?” I said.

“No,” she was vehement about it.

“But like if I have mental disorder or…?” I was thinking bipolar or depression.

“No, you already know you have anxiety, there’s no need to test such stuff out and no test as such is accurate,” she said.

“See,” I hesitated because this was the first time I was verbalising something that moved like a deep current within me. Something that manifested itself as a symptom that caused my mother to often call me ‘greedy’, ‘weak-willed’ and ‘indisciplined’. “I don’t think my…I think I have an eating disorder. I binge eat. I eat when I’m unhappy…” I couldn’t bring myself to say more. Apparently my courage extended only to the edge of those words.

“I know,” she said, nodding her head, in a voice that was achingly gentle, “This is seldom a physical issue and there are factors…”

I swear to God I did not hear a word she said for the next few sentences. I stuck my tongue to the roof of my mouth. I imagined boobs. But I had to look at her face, her eyes mellow, compassionate and all the effort I was taking to stop my eyes from smarting went in vain.

I burst into tears. In the doctor’s office.

“It’s okay, it’s okay to cry,” she said as I spluttered apologies. She handed me a tissue. “You’re fine, you’re good. There is nothing to worry about, you have your age, your sex on your side, there is nothing that will hold you back.”

I removed my mask and used the tissue and apologised again. Mom told me not to apologise, her own eyes wet.

I heard the doctor out then and she reiterated that with counselling along with some lifestyle changes things would absolutely be better for me. I nodded, believing her.

I am grateful to mom because no matter how harsh she is, unwittingly, like a bull in a china shop, like the people around her were to her, she was the one who took the initiative to find this doctor and to take me there. She could see that I was suffering even through the usual day and decided to act on it because that’s the only way she knew how to care for me.

But that doctor, I’ll never forget her. I intend to see her again of course, but even if for some unfathomable reason I don’t, there is no way that I will ever be able to let go of this encounter where a doctor treated me with compassion instead of scolding me for my flaws.