The ethereal beauty of Audrey Hepburn is aptly matched by the vulnerability, confidence, compassion and true lack of judgment she projects. I don't know how she was in real life, but Roman Holiday did it for me. If I were the director, I would have cast her in Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and Mary Poppins. Oh wait, she was already cast in My Fair Lady (much to the chagrin of Julie Andrews, who did the stage version) which is awesome already. I have huge respect for Julie Andrews, and she is a complete package (Audrey lip-synched to someone else's voice in My Fair Lady. Julie is a fantastic singer). Julie Andrews somehow doesn't project vulnerability very well - you would almost think she was admonishing you from across the screen for thinking about Audrey and not taking your medicine because a spoonful of sugar always makes the medicine go down. Now you are thinking - 'get to the point!'. But this blog is intended to meander at its own pace - the tennis player Meander Pace would attest, probably! There's an absurdity...
There is a song in Mary Poppins that goes 'I love to laugh'. It very accurately captures what I and my band of dear friends feel when I get together to poke fun at life's oddities, pull seemingly random connections out of the sky to create a roaringly funny point of view, and build quickly upon the concepts of each other to redefine life itself in highly comical vignettes. There's pure joy in that moment, which is totally untethered, is not created to meet any objective except the enjoyment of that moment itself, and serves to create the much-needed condiments we need to add taste to the dish called bland, mundane life! The laughter that results in that moment is soul-uplifting, as if we are rising through the air towards the sky for union with a cosmic consciousness that is constantly laughing at it's own creation. That rise and float feeling is beautifully captured in the 'I love to laugh' song:
Mary Poppins - I Love to Laugh
I remember exactly when me and my friends stumbled upon this remarkable phenomenon. My friend with the last name Menon used to live in Ranchi in a colony called MECON (Metallurgical and Engineering Consultants). We were talking about Menon and MECON when someone asked MECON (mai kaun)? The answer - Mai Nun! That's where this started and I would say that our dexterity has reached the point of being able to create skits in real-time! And it's infectious, because more and more friends around our core group are discovering the joys of it, including kids. Even though people might deny it at face value sometimes and consider this whole exercise childish, it's important to consider that we might just be trying to regain the sense of wonder that we felt growing up, and absurdity is a vehicle to that end!
I will close with 4 brilliant observations from my dearest friends (and myself ;-)), or phattas as they have come to be known:
1. A man says after vasectomy - 'Condom or no condom, vas the deferens?'
2. After discussing an advertisement about Erectile Dysfunction which shows drooping plants followed by an, ahem, upright cactus after treatment which begs the question 'why a cactus' - 'it's a cactus because it represents thorny, t silent'
3. After discussing my interest in getting an elliptical, learning that a friend has it and on his offer to give it to me - 'you can just ride the elliptical to NJ. At the end of it, you will have had so much exercise that you might not even need it!'
4. "The fas ting I do in the morning is break fasting!"
There is a song in Mary Poppins that goes 'I love to laugh'. It very accurately captures what I and my band of dear friends feel when I get together to poke fun at life's oddities, pull seemingly random connections out of the sky to create a roaringly funny point of view, and build quickly upon the concepts of each other to redefine life itself in highly comical vignettes. There's pure joy in that moment, which is totally untethered, is not created to meet any objective except the enjoyment of that moment itself, and serves to create the much-needed condiments we need to add taste to the dish called bland, mundane life! The laughter that results in that moment is soul-uplifting, as if we are rising through the air towards the sky for union with a cosmic consciousness that is constantly laughing at it's own creation. That rise and float feeling is beautifully captured in the 'I love to laugh' song:
Mary Poppins - I Love to Laugh
I remember exactly when me and my friends stumbled upon this remarkable phenomenon. My friend with the last name Menon used to live in Ranchi in a colony called MECON (Metallurgical and Engineering Consultants). We were talking about Menon and MECON when someone asked MECON (mai kaun)? The answer - Mai Nun! That's where this started and I would say that our dexterity has reached the point of being able to create skits in real-time! And it's infectious, because more and more friends around our core group are discovering the joys of it, including kids. Even though people might deny it at face value sometimes and consider this whole exercise childish, it's important to consider that we might just be trying to regain the sense of wonder that we felt growing up, and absurdity is a vehicle to that end!
I will close with 4 brilliant observations from my dearest friends (and myself ;-)), or phattas as they have come to be known:
1. A man says after vasectomy - 'Condom or no condom, vas the deferens?'
2. After discussing an advertisement about Erectile Dysfunction which shows drooping plants followed by an, ahem, upright cactus after treatment which begs the question 'why a cactus' - 'it's a cactus because it represents thorny, t silent'
3. After discussing my interest in getting an elliptical, learning that a friend has it and on his offer to give it to me - 'you can just ride the elliptical to NJ. At the end of it, you will have had so much exercise that you might not even need it!'
4. "The fas ting I do in the morning is break fasting!"
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