For better or for worse

My stay in Chennai is getting more interesting with every passing day.

I came here in August last year, quite by choice and my ongoing stint at Frost and Sullivan (www.frost.com; these guys are good) is keeping things where they should be.

Some of my friends might know this – I spent the first six months living in a room so small that calling it a ‘match box’ would be an overstatement. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this previously in my blog, but I was forced to skip certain positions in my morning yoga because the walls wouldn’t permit. I hope you get the picture.

Almost as a New Year resolution (to live in less claustrophobic places), I moved in with the Logica boys into an apartment in Srinagar Colony. I’m better off here in most ways: I have the best of roomies in the entire eastern hemisphere. Kashe and Nire are the guys you want to live around to get an appreciation of little things- like the importance of having a minimum of three eggs a day, or waking up early; or snoring at night.

But as we collectively acknowledge, our move into this house has proved worse off on two grounds. And these are like the national problems of Chennai: water and mosquitoes. Brushing every morning and night gives me a feeling that I’m taking water straight from the Bay of Bengal into my mouth. Gosh, the amount of salt can put Captain Cook to shame. And those sonovabitch mosquitoes. Every night is a fight for survival. We tried everything: Mortein, Good Knight, Palm Oil, Agarbathis. But these f!@#$%^ keeps coming back. A blood donation camp would have been richer by a couple of units of blood by now.

Last night, Nire came up with the mother of all solutions – a mosquito net. I’m talking about those netted screens that insulate your bed from the blood suckers. We had a hard time getting the net up on to the hooks. But once it went up, I tell you with no shame that we had a night like few others can ever imagine.

Here’s the fun thing about the mosquito net: you get to see the little bastards valiantly trying to get in. But you know that there’s not a chance in hell that can happen. All the fun lies in counting them from inside using your torch; there’s no better way to tease them. It’s truly the joy of laughing at the misery of these guys that makes it all the more worth it. Here’s the sad part: these guys ain’t gonna spare you when you walk out of bed in the morning. They’ll prick you and pound you until you wish you had lived in a blood donation camp.

Everyone must get a mosquito net. I’m convinced about that.