Yen Dee Tea We

I used to hate news. Or rather, The News. I wasn’t exactly proud about this apathy, but there wasn’t much I could do either. At home, they were just channels to get past, while stabbing madly at the Program+ remote button and quickly, cursing under my breath all those members of the family who chose to include just about every news channel in the Top20 list, before I reached my zone. Movies, music, television, and that included everything except “events from around the globe”!

But Man!, how things change! Now, five time zones west of India, I can claim to know more about what’s happening in the country than most guys or girls my age.

Dirty politics (almost everyday). Neat politics (a couple of days). Corrupt godmen. Angry crowds. A cricket-desperate country. Kabul Express. Dadagiri. Tainted ministries. An even more tainted opposition. Agrarian crises. Heroes being born. Heroes being convicted. Market corrections. Reservation shit. Goan Al-Qaeda. Orkut in trouble. Golden globe nominations. Tata factor. Responsible media (almost everday). Irresponsible media (a couple of days). Navjot Sidhu. Mamta Banerji. Laloo Yadav. Manmohan Singh. General Musharaff. John Abraham. Saurav Ganguly. Sania Mirza. Barkha Dutt. Srinivasan Jain. Monideepa Banerji. Arunachalam Vaidyanathan. Sunethra Chaudary. Vikram Chandra. Rahul Srivastav. Vir Sanghvi. Prannoy Roy.

So I happened to mention this to one of my friends a week ago. It’s been a while since I’d talked to him. About how news channels were making my life seem “complete and occupied”. He listened patiently. Too patiently, actually. Five minutes of my blah-blah later, he spoke for the first time:

“So, you living alone, huh?”
“Yup! Hey, how did you guess?”
“Oh, I was just asking.”

Two minutes after we hung up, I could swear I heard him say “Gotcha, sucker!”

Damn, I should get a life.

We

How far we’ve come is for the world to see.
How much we share is for us to know.
How long we’ll last is for time to tell.

But if we could decide, we’d say forever.