Grandmother and her TV

I’ve been home in Bombay less than 24 hours. Of these, I was sleeping for 8 and out of the house for 6. And in the remaining time that I have been in the house, I’ve managed to get majorly cheesed off at the grandmother and her TV. The woman (no disrespect to her and all that) watches all the crap there is on TV. She starts as soon as dad leaves for work (which is around 9am) and stops only for an afternoon siesta which lasts about an hour – and this nap is perfectly timed so that she wakes up for round two of bad TV shows. And you know what is worse than her watching her saas-bahu shows all day? She watches the same episode every time it airs. Which means, at least 3 times. Is it any wonder that she is always watching TV?

And for someone who hates physical activity of any sort, her fingers move rather quickly when she is changing channels, jumping from one to the other, avoiding commercial breaks and keeping track of some 5 story lines at the same time. It’s amazing how she manages it. Of course, to give her credit, she doesn’t discriminate. So she watches comedy shows as happily as she watches the sob stories, and does so across all the various hindi language channels, not seeming to favour any one. And if we (her grandchildren or her son) do manage to bully her into giving up the remote control to us, she doesn’t grumble or complain or sulk. She stopped doing that several years back when she realised we weren’t going to give in to her pretend sniffs. Now all she does is struggle to her feet and go into the bedroom to continue watching her soaps. Making sure she locks the door behind her.

Boys Will Be Boys

(Day 36 of 112)

A friend of mine has been trying to get me to watch ‘Coupling’ for years now. I haven’t till date. To be fair to me, I did get the entire series on a trip to Bangkok but a cousin took them and lend them to his friend and I haven’t seen the back of my DVDs since then.

Having had no luck with me, my friend then tried to convert the Fellow. Luckily for him the Fellow loves downloading stuff of the internet and so over several days got the entire series (since my friend is supremely lazy about burning DVDs and giving them to friends who repeatedly beg him to do so).

Now, since the Fellow was very busy with preparing for his course and would sit all day in front of his computer with weird maps and complicated drawings on the screen, the fact that we had ‘Coupling’ on the hard drive escaped both of us. Of course the Fellow didn’t even have the time to watch it, but I did and now I’m sorry I didn’t at least copy it to my external hard drive.

But I digress.

For the last couple of days, the Fellow has been a tad bit relaxed (which is totally shocking him and me both). Apparently the instructors at this course of his are also totally laid back and non-crazy suddenly which brings to mind the use of illegal products. And so, celebrating this sudden break from the usual stress and drama, the Fellow has been watching the movies he has on his computer.

Then in the evening today, he called me and wouldn’t stop laughing. Before I could start panicking about possible brain damage, I heard what seemed like English words. Apparently the Fellow discovered the downloaded copy of ‘Coupling’ and after watching the first episode felt he just had to call me and give me a line by line narration, interspersed with loud, uncontrollable laughter. Now I’m an indulgent wife and all that. But listening to ‘Coupling’ jokes on the phone really didn’t make me laugh as much as the Fellow would have liked me to. I’m sure I would totally appreciate them if I watched the show myself.

And so I told him to take a deep breath, control himself and call the aforementioned friend of mine. After all it did seem like a guy moment and who better to share it with than another ‘Coupling’ devotee?

A few minutes back I knew he had made the call because as soon as I pinged this friend on gtalk, his first words were a ‘Coupling’ joke followed by “ask the Fellow, he’ll know what I’m talking about”, followed by laughter.

Sigh. Boys will be Boys.

Ps: I will watch ‘Coupling’ eventually and I already know I will love it. For now I’m overdosing on How I Met Your Mother.