Mirror, mirror on the wall..

Spending two hours and a disproportionately large amount of money in a salon to make one look adequately put together for a cousin's wedding, one encounters a lot of strange people.

The girl who bites her nails on account of nervousness and then comes to get artificial nails made of protein gel no less so she can hide her habit.

The middle-aged lowest-rung-politician who dyes his hair black so he doesn't look absolutely ridiculous standing next to his twenty-nine year old wife.

The young woman with two children who decides to get her hair permed becoz her husband prefers curly hair and asks me for advice on how to get a liposuction done (also becoz husband prefers slim waists, it seems) when she learns I work in a hospital.

The grand-dad who accompanies his grandkid becoz the said seven year old demands a 'Taare-Zameen-Par' wala haircut on his birthday.

The teenage college boy who frets over his pimples and wonders if those 'fairness creams-only for men' will actually work if he bought and used them.

After these two hours spent in trying to reassure people, and quite frankly, after attempting to jolt them back to some semblance of reality, one does realize that vanity is, hands down, the most pointless of the seven deadly sins. And also, by far the saddest.

Pokerface

Every time I'm tempted to make a mental filing cabinet to fit in all the people I know, so I can slot them into neat, organised little categories to make things simpler for me, every time I'm almost convinced that I've finally got a 'handle' on my piece of humanity's pie, people surprise me. And in a most fascinating, anthropologically stimulating way.

Either I'm extremely poor at judging people or extremely good at looking past surfaces. Or maybe its just that these people I know are absolutely resistant to banal slotting. :)

Strawberry Swing

Everyday you think the world can be predicted. That human nature is constant and unchanging. That if you've seen enuff of humanity, you will know with certainty how a person will think, feel, and react.

Just when you despair of this regularity, this uniformity, this sameness that characterises the human condition, you will find someone who will turn around and surprise you.

And for that, I think humanity, for all our faults, can still redeem itself. That there are good people out there. And their collective goodness or our abiding good luck is probably why the world hasnt fallen to pieces yet.

Enuff of us are cynical enuff to scorn inspirational emails or quotes as clichéd or pointless, but today I was surprised to see kids from a school, inspired by an email one of them read out in class, marching thru our colony planting saplings and seeds of fast-growing plants, to grow into trees that are the lungs of our planet.

I stopped one of them to ask what they were doing, when she replied that they were creating the "sustainable forests of the future" becoz an email one of them received warned them that there wud be no forests left by the time the 22nd century arrives.

She said, she was saving the planet for future generations. I went up to their teacher, Mrs. Bharuch who was their Environment Science teacher and asked what they were planting. Neem and eucalyptus, she said, 'to purify the air.'

She gave me a packet of seeds to plant in our building compound. She said if I planted them now, I'd have to water them for a month before the rains begin.

So now I know what I'm doing every morning for the next month. The kids are taking time off from their summer vacation to water the seeds and saplings they planted.

I was very moved by the whole thing. I remembered when I was eight or nine and Environment Science or EVS as we called it was all about making posters and decorating notebooks and writing a year-end exam. I'm glad these kids are doing so much better.

And I'm glad that I was so pleasantly surprised today. They say, cynics are never surprised. So I guess, there's hope for me yet. :)