PILIM PLAAAFFFF !!

Still cant believe i was the fastest sperm among the 10,000 odd swimmers!! wow!.

And if i was the best...you can imagine the quality of the rest!! lol

The beginnings...

Born in kalahasthi , a temple town (read that as boondocks, coz it was a one horse town then!my friends from there assure me nothing's changed, but i'm digressing!) which is near Tirupathi".I was born to a middle class family that had insanity firmly set in its genes. Father, M.S.Gopinath, almost 30 married Radha Devi who was at the ripe old age of 15 . The marriage was orchestrated by my father's sister Rajeshwari, who got widowed at the ripe old age of 14!..( Can you imagine when she got married? Avery eligible age of 9 !).Reason why my aunt got my dad married?? Supposedly my dad's roving eyes at his elder brother's marriage to my mom's elder sister!. So my aunt in her innate wisdom, decided then and there to ask for my mother's hand in marriage to my dad!.My grandfather,(mom's dad) gleefully accepted, realising he is sending out not one, but two daughters out of the house! Double whammy!!(And no dowry too!)

My grandfather, supposedly the master of the house had no say in the matter since he had been silenced (read that as verbally pulverized into submission) by my aunt who kept blaming my grandfather for her early marriage and widowhood!! And that too for around 20 years! if that kind of constant blaming and nagging doesn't quieten a man as it did my grandfather,nothing else will! I was always surprised why he didnt run away or kill himself !So in actual fact, my aunt became the master/mistress of the house which saw all the brothers run out as soon as they got married in fear of her iron handed rule and the sisters anyways had to leave to their husbands' houses (with great relief!) by the way, did i fail to mention that my grandfather had 11 children out of which 3 passed away in childbirth and by the time i was born, my grandmother had passed away (must have been relieved to pass away from the insanely maddening family of 11 ..9 children and two parents!).

So my dad married mom and a year later, on a fateful not so sunny day of august 26th 1964 a pale white,tiny, scrawny insect was born... Me! :)

The present...

45 years young man trying to find...himself, in this big bad, wierdly funny world!

Life is a battle..whoever said otherwise is bullshitting you..right now i am battling 10 extra kilos!! need of the hour is to banish them, preferably to the loo..but sadly, they will only go gram by gram in the gym!

Battling for money! whoever said, 'seek and you shall receive' is bullshitting you, again !

Seek and you will be called desperate!! you will earn painfully slowly when you work the hardest!

I have been pulverized into submission by fate into believing in....FATE ! :) when you are supposed to MAKE, you will, and when you are supposed to BREAK, you shall !

Fighting with myself to be happier...phew that doesn't make sense even to myself!! so we will skip that part ..for now !!

Oh and another thing..life believes in checks and balances! If you are blessed with something more or extra in 'one' of these three ( 1)money or 2)fame or 3)personal life-happiness,) be sure to know that you will have less of the other one or two ! have you seen a very rich man with a happy family life filled with love? have you seen a very very famous guy who is not battling personal demons with drugs and such?? have you seen a very loving family man that is not struggling for money?

And there are strange creatures walking around like me who have less of all three !! :))

So, moral of the story...nothing!!

Deal with the shit you got!!...It could be worse...Trust me !!

Why the heading 'pilim plaaff '?? there is an uneducated production manager who loved to declare a film as a failure the minute it got released! so we would take great joy in asking him how the film is faring in the box office and he would reply with gusto...ayyyye..pilim plafff ! (read that as film flop!) and we would roll over in laughter, holding our stomachs !!

Past revisited !!

Hospital...my father takes one look at the insect (me ) in his hands and wonders how i am so fair, since neither he, (my father) nor my mother are as fair as i was ?? He wonders if there are any white people in Kalahasthi ?? On careful and frantic pondering (If it is possible to mix the two!), he realizes that there is only one white person hanging around the Kalahasthi temples for 11 years (trying very hard to be a sadhu of sorts )and after 11 years no one in kalahasthi has been able to determine the gender of that white person...so he decides to banish the thought of adultery and owe it my mom's dad's pink fairness! (believe you me, he was frigging pink!, beyond fair where your skin would be so thin and reddish, you wonder if you are gonna see the insides of him if the sun was at the right angle??he was that pink!)..of course my mother was fairer than my dad and all attempts at humor by my dad about my color were quickly silenced by my Aunt who adored my color and christened me ' dora' ( which simply means a British,white person addressed as such by a subservient Indian!)

I was born quietly , but refused to be quiet after that! I took one look at the surrounding, decided they were not good enough for me and started to unleash hell (read that as constant crying and wailing!).My mother , at the ripe old age of 16 was definitely not equipped to handle a little insect that has turned into a sleep depriving, actually a sleep killing monster that would go on all day and all night.

She constantly fantasized about strangling me, throwing me in the well and leaving me in someone's door step far, far away! But under the strict supervision of my Aunt who for some strange reason doted on me, the little monster, my mom had to behave herself and be a nurturing, caring ,patient mother to someone she didn't understand the attachment nor relationship, because she was too young to be a wife to my dad..leave alone mother..to me! :)

My father took about a few days of my constant wailing and decided he needed to urgently join the film industry and be as far away as possible from me and my ruckus!!

So my father joined Devar Films in Chennai as an assistant director, who were making movies with all animals like tigers, lions,elephants and monkeys etc as the lead hero in their films! So in actual fact my father decided he was better off among dangerous animals than around me, the little wailing monster!

My mother, in one of her weaker moments, couldn't take the all day and all night wailing anymore and pushed the cradle too hard.(the cradle those days was a saree tied to the fan!!). The saree cradle that held me went flying along with crying me inside and hit the other side of the wall! I believe i passed out because the wall hit my head (or is the other way around?, anyways the damage is the same i guess and is there for all of you to see!! Insanity in the family and on top of that a head injury?No wonder i turned out so ...!) To make matters worse, my mother realized she was pregnant! She struggled with the thought of telling my Aunt, but knew that my aunt would force her to be a mother again. So my mother in her great wisdom stemmed from all her life experiences of 16 years, decides to abort the baby by eating some root prescribed by the friendly neighborhood foetus killer (read that as the town midwife!!) My father in his infrequent visits, heard from my mother about her pregnancy just before leaving to live among the animals in Devar Films and was content that he had 2 children and fearing a third which might come out like me, decided to get himself neutered! (read that as vasectomy, not actual dismembering of genitals!!)

So by fate, grand design or to the joy of my parents ( I wish!) I became the only child to carry the Mysore family name! (dont even get me started on the strangely, quixotic and maybe even idiotic family name now...i will save it for later!)