Blood on my face!

The sound of an alarm going off is something I hate to listen to. It is placed right next to ‘talking to an HR manager’ in my hate list. Sometime back I found a way to avoid listening to an alarm, by simply not setting the alarm. Recently I have gone one step further. I threw my alarm out of the window and never bothered to buy a new one. Thus these days I wake up on my own. The routine after waking up has become very much robotic these days... Things I do are pre defined like the steps of an algorithm.

I wake up, go straight to the front door doing a sleep-walk, pick up the newspaper. When I say newspaper, I mean ‘The Hindu’. I consider it to be the only one which can be called a news paper. I pick up the news paper and head straight to the toilet. Having an infotainment intake while doing a biological dump is absolutely necessary for me. (In case the newspaper guy forgets to put the paper, I look for a book or magazine.) The sheet that is taken in is decided based on the day of the year and the things happening worldwide. If there was an Indian cricket match or balls were send across a lawn tennis court on the previous day, I take the sports page(s) in. If on the other hand, the news paper is filled with trash like Palestine-Chechnya issues and Manmohan Singh vouching for Natwar Singh’s chastity (or whatever), I prefer to take the supplement Metro Plus in. A strip of Calvin and Hobbes is any day preferred.

After a lot of cost benefits analysis conducted over a number of days, bath has been assigned a slot immediately following the above described ‘action’. One advantage of having a toilet bathroom combination is that you save one opening and closing of doors. The next in line in my above mentioned algorithm is brushing my teeth. Then comes the most difficult task of of the morning, ie deciding whether or not to shave. It’s a pain to shave everyday, and if I can convince myself that my stubbles give me a ruf-n-tuf look, I happily skip shaving for the day. I miss that lady who used to force me to come with clean cheeks by reminding me almost daily that ‘gentlemen shave’ .

Today morning, I finished all the tasks up to shaving as usual. I started the complex to-shave-or-not-to-shave debate with myself. It was then that I remembered that I have an appraisal meeting today, and decided in favor of the act of shaving. My Mach3 in action. When I was doing some masterful strokes across my jaw line, I started thinking about accidental cuts during shaving. Usually you get a cut when you are in a hurry, when you are shaving before an important meeting or before a date with your dream girl, and you end up going to the great occasion with a band-aid plastered across your face. It was ages since I had my last cut, as these days, I don’t get tensed no matter what the situation is, and on top of that I was not in a hurry as I had all the time in the world at my disposal. My thoughts reached thus far, and the next instant I see blood on my face :_) Dunno how it happened, but I managed to cut my lower lip. The wound was not deep, but since Mach3 is damn sharp, bleeding doesn’t stop easily. I looked in the mirror and saw a red dot enlarging on my lower lip, like the one Carrie Anne Moss had on hers in Memento ;_).

It was then that another thought flashed in my mind. A number of Bollywood scenes in which 'a hero cuts his fingers and the heroine carefully sucks the blood with all the tenderness in the world' came rushing to my mind. I missed having a dear darling who would have done that exact same thing with my lips ;_). Kudos to Chetan Bhagat who wrote somewhere - men become romantic in the most unexpected situations and for the weirdest of reasons. :_D. There I was, with a Mach3 in my arm, a cut and a red blood spot on my lower lip, and looking for my sweet heart who would wipe it away in a romantic manner.

“buddy you are a young man...

you got blood on ya face

you big disgrace...”