Umm Yaa You Know...

The dainty young lassie gives an affected wave with her skinny hands, exhales a mini-sigh of uber-chicness and in the poshest of posh accents, says, 'It's like, you know, such a drag!'

She regales me with cache of stories about the latest art 'do' making waves in London and the best caterer of petits-fours the haute Paris-returned Mumbai divas are serving for their coffee get-togethers.

'Where did you study?' I ask, thinking Sorbonne or Warwick or Wesleyan.

'Jai Hind', she replies, smiling pertly and prettily.

'Then you went overseas?' I rally on, intrigued by the airy accent and throaty hesitations, this constant reference to London and Paris and New York.

'Summer program at LSE, you know. Just to get a feel for it!' She gives a shrug, her bony shoulders forming inverted Vs in the air briefly, then falling back to their lackadaisical stance.

Huh? I goggle.

'I got picked up by this investment bank after my summer program, you see.'

What? Move over brainista, move in fashionista. All it takes to woo high net worth lads to entrust their hard earned millions to an i-bank is a breathy, airy, babe-licious relationship manager.

'Overseas?' I ask, clearly flummoxed, trying not to show it.

'Oh here, in Mumbai', she trilled.

'My boss was so impressed with my work, I moved into the hedge fund side within the year. The hedge fund was based out of New York, of course.'

Oh, it gets better. No need to spend a lifetime of excellence preparing to get to Harvard or Wharton either.

'So you went to New York?' I ask, now needing to understand the genesis of this faux-phoren style.

'Oh no, I was in Mumbai, working with the team in the US. I am such a South Mumbai gal! I like it here.'

OK!

Blame the accent on pappa-sponsored summer holidays to London and DC, then! Or may be the gaggle of SoBo girls-school buddies.

'I did really well, got promoted within the year. But discovered I really liked marketing.'

Clearly, no one could ace the lass in self-marketing.

Who needs a two year grind at IIMA? What does Kotler teach, anyway, other than a load of bisecting and dissecting segments.

The real art of marketing, presenting this sublime vision, articulating with such affectation, clearly does not need PPPP mumbo jumbo.

She flashed perfect white teeth. 'So, umm yaa, here I am, you know.'

No, I don't know!!!

Spidering in SoBo style

Just a delicate weave of the web, darlings, the connectedness and interconnectedness of folks, just an everyday moment of linking people, muttering through the who's who lists, mapping the dots and dashes...

Spidering... Tara mused

Forking out that scrap of white, that slip of heavy gsm, giving with one hand, receiving with another... mapping, jotting, chatting, sipping, flitting, flocking... Ah, another Mumbai day (or night)

Spidering... such a desi thing, darlings

Trotting out your wife's uncle's nephew's name or figuring out Mrs. Who's Who's friend's boss's ex-girlfriend and striking up chitter-chatter

Spidering... such an endless spate of it, babe

The automatic teller machines, the quick card Murugans, the weilders of imagined power, the flippers of the business card

Spidering

Blues Clues

The clue's in the color... from corporate czars to media honchos, everyone's seeking the success mantra in those that don blue. Valiant attempts at linking run getting to deadline management, avid fielding to stopping outflows from corporate coffers, and on and on... from starry eyed giggles of the gals to the fusty hot air squiggles by the lads. That's where all the clues lie, in the color blue.

National Obsession du jour

Move over Edward Cullen, the Mumbai diva and her tots have found a new heartthrob... move over the Khans, major or minor, and the one too many six-pack brats... the man of the moment, the new LSD of the nation, not the love-sex-dhoka variety, but that wonder chemical inspiring obsession... from giggly college girls to starry eyed office girls to oomphalicious glam girls, cup "sakshi" hai, everyone's bitten by the madly-devastating D bug... the dhania makkhan, as the Amul ad says!

Munchkin Travelers

The South Asians have arrived, claims Pico Iyer, exemplifying Little Zara, who at ten months old had traversed the world and travelled to some ten countries, seen oceans and mountains and cricket matches and soccer finales.

Very true. Nowadays, the intrepid traveler is not likely to be the loud mouthed, pink faced, mild brained American expressing curious disdain for anything different. Rather its likely to be bhuuja-munching, thepla carrying, Munni-listening desibhai and family, loudly muttering kemchos and kinda sohna ji, carrying Chintu and Pinky and leaving a trail of wrapping papers and salty trail mix of puffed rice and peanuts in their wake. Ayahs, bulters, cooks, et al follow in the cattle class, minding Chintu and Pinky for the duration of the flight. From Anchorage to Johannesburg, desis can be found, with entire clans, enjoying the scenery if not the food. No doubt then that little Zara (or for that matter baby Chintu and Pinky) tend to be well travelled, coke guzzling, video on demand watching brats.

Seekers and evaders...

Oh, they say Facebook is out... the cool thing, of course, is to commit facebook harakiri. There are sites that will help you commit online suicide, sever all your connections and send them to all your friends and contacts...

Totally agree. It's fun for a while connecting with friends old and new...

Then it becomes a game of seekers and evaders... You get invites from people you don't know at all, whom you ignore, or you sent invites to people you barely know yet want to know, who ignore you... All in all an unpleasant experience.

Some wise sociologist (no, not the one who trilled about the six degrees of separation) once calculated that the optimal number of friends and acquaintances a normal person can maintain is 147.8!

Proposed by Britishanthropologist Robin Dunbar, it measures the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". Dunbar theorizes that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortexsize, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained."

Now what's 0.8 of a friend, who knows... But most of us reached that number on Facebook a while back. Now we're inching beyond our cognitive limits. Time to re-coop and cosset the few!

6 is to 1

Well, that's about how many people I need to instruct for one task.

Heaven help me, if domestic help decide to interact.

Or do they? Just not in the way I want. They collude instead, shirking responsibility, claiming the other one knew or was supposed to do something, and in the process, my work does not get done!

of course, which cyberista will claim she spends any nano-seconds on domestic drudgery worries? Not me... But secretly, sigh... it does make life stop!