That title is not the name of a new flu or some exotic mandarin dancer in Vegas. Patience is a virtue peoples. Me will elucidate, wait.

For the one last time - One more email about whether the swine flu is the reason for my absence from the Internet, from anyone, and I will bawl and wail and thank you for the unconditional love and support you guys show. Let me not say unconditional since almost all emails to lafemmereva end with "We hope you get better and start blogging again".

Sifting through emails after an unintentional sabbatical I chanced upon what this person sent me. Now I had long stopped and made known that I will refrain from guest posts. Bah, too many requests - Hard to oblige all and spread the love.

But we Indian Junta are known for second chances. Ask Singh. We made him a King again. So read on what might well be the last guest post in this space in a loooong time to come. Lasts - How they come eventually. Prabhakaran would agree.

This is what Ramesh has to say, in response to the post : "It's raining Men - Hallelujah!"

DISCLAIMER: L/reva washes her hands off all of the words below and will be vacationing starting this weekend for a few days unable to accept the eggs or tomatoes that you might want to shower on her "poor self" for publishing this. All comments will be published promptly and responded to, though! But please take the time out to consider my preferences - I don't mind designer sandals being thrown at me. Gladiators are my fav model.

Piao liang de nu hai

Our lafemme needs a prod. So here’s a riposte to her “super post”, with a twist. And yes, its from a member of the male species.

Indian damsels – eat your heart out. You don’t stand a chance in front of the Chinese beauties I am privileged to live with – you see I live in the Middle Kingdom. Here are five reasons why

You have to redefine slimness when you see a Chinese lassie. They are uniformly pencil slim. Not an ounce of fat. And our own belles . Remarkably “healthy” . And after the baby comes – Eeeks.

You have to define youth too . The number of times I have mistaken a mother for a school girl is not funny (I am not making this up). Everybody looks sixteen and lovely.

Wow, they dress up. What outfits. And our own coder, Vlakshi. Gimme a break. I’ll run a mile. Surely the salwar kameez must be the worst outfit ever invented.

What lovely hair. There are three times more hair dressing salons in China than there are saree shops in India. In fact three every street corner. Impeccably groomed these Chinese girls are. And our own coder – my dear, washing your waist length hair once a month just won’t do.

But here’s the clincher. Chinese women love foreigners. The whiter you are the better, but brown will do too. They think we males (as long as we are not Chinese) are God’s gift to mankind. At long last somebody somewhere has got this universal truth. And our beauty wants us to talk to her mother. Ugh !

Just kidding. We desis love our lafemmes. Have to say that, don’t I. Actually the real reason why , is because there just isn’t a lafemmereva in the Middle Kingdom. There just can’t be.

But still, still, Oh man ! how gorgeous these Chinese damsels are.

Just in case you are wondering – the title means Beautiful Girls in Mandarin.

Part 1 is here.

Such wishful thinking occupied my thoughts until the cab came to a halt in my portico and I paid the cab driver the fare when he asked "Are you from India"?

"You are from India, right"?
L/r: (Making a intimidating gesture of taking the biryani back from the cabbie): Yes!
Cabbie: "Have you read Kamasutra?"

I stood there with horror, embarrassment, wrath and all the relatives in that family of words surfacing in me.

(I sported a look that I once saw on my dad's face when I asked him why it took him 7 years to make me after my sister was born. Of course I didn't ask him how they made me or her. Since we were both winter babies I know it must have been one of those hot, sweaty, summery afternoons).

Anyways, back to cabbie. In moments of such crisis we mallu women let actions speak louder than words. So I ran like he had ripped off a fart bomb. I never looked back once.

*************************************************************************************

Putting back the day behind me I decided to put my feet up and watch a sitcom. But my bedmate of several years Murphy is very clingy. He always has his way. Like when he calls his laws and decides to have a threesome when you do don't want to.

So his laws did come calling in the form of a girl friend who was in an earth shattering crisis:

Friend: Do you think XYZ's food blogs are good? I think she takes a pic of the dishes at the restaurant she goes to every week and puts it up.

XYZ is a genuinely fab cook and has kept my taste buds engaged for over a year now.

Now if you are a MAN and if you were to solve this crisis what would you do?

I'll tell you. You'll tell the friend that a work call came up and hang up, turn on the sports channel and watch women wrestle on WWF.

But me? I woman up and face the crisis and resolve it. So I say:

"Do you know Macy's has a half off sale" and the food blog never came up in the 45 minute call again.

Call done and the feet ache to rest and I think that my day couldn't have been as bad as my sister's who had to be a donkey , elephant and a kangaroo all in the same day depending on whether Straw( my nephew) wanted to go on fours or get on her back.

*************************************************************************************
And I close my eyes and imagine a white vast expanse of shell filled beach, a beach house and a warm cuppa coffee. Fellas, I have to ask ye wise minds. Is there some Get-rich-Quick scheme that makes me all Warren Buffety in no time so I can relinquish this paycheck to paycheck existence and hang up my heels once in for all?

Now before you go all Warren Buffety on me and say "Predicting the rain doesn't matter, building the ark does" let me tell you tweeples - I bought my lottery ticket on the way back home!!

Bah!!!

Related Posts: Who wants to be a a billionaire?

Part 1 is here

Part 2 is here

Teaser is here

Part 3 is here

Freedom from the colonial rule has been procured but it needs to be preserved. So does money. And so I was in our ex-ruler's territory. The land where people's shirts and lips are stiff and the ilk of tailors designers viz. Prada, Gucci, AX, YSL, Louis Vuitton divide and rule harmoniously and make something other than Gagra Cholis and Lehengas filled with chamkees .

L/reva reaches Heathrow (London Airport):

With the stomach staging a mutiny again the need of the hour was to guzzle the elixir of life, namely coffee, down the oesophagus. Only - The credit was found lacking. But nothing kept the indomitable mallu cinderella-y spirit of l/reva from her evil twin sisters - ricory and chicory.
Being a loyal S/Bucks member has its perks. Like you get a free drink on your Bday. My best birthday gift ever - Size Grande.

I ambled along to the nearest park-your-bottom facility to rest. And I heard two raccoons women screeching talking in the most high pitched yet impeccable Queen's English:

W#1: Do you know what happened to my hair dresser?
(Craning my neck to see the woman (W#1) I noticed that the only other thing thinner than her hairline would either be Mandira Bedi's noodle straps or Kate Moss's legs. A poodle was resting near the woman's feet. The pooch's luxurious hairdo prodded moi to wonder if the hairdresser was the pooch's or the lady's)
W#2: Oh No!!! Good heavens. Do tell me
(sipping a whole mug of english tea whose color I don't even want to explain here. Let's say some suspicious yellow that may have warranted the attention of some men like Moraji Desai)
W#1: Oh!! she left her boyfriend (M#1) for a new man (M#2). She eventually got married.
W#2: So she showed her b/f the middle finger so she could give her finger to another? for the ring
W#1: Not quite. She married someone else (M#3).
W#2: Wow!! That's a woman who had a plethora of options.
W#1: I'll say! Apparently her doting boyfriend (M#1) found her cheating on him with his brother (M#2). And their mother wanted nothing of the woman (hairdresser). So she (hairdresser) went ahead and married her childhood sweetheart (M#3) who apparently did not have any qualms despite knowing her flings.
W#2: And what happened of the men (M# 1 & 2)?
W#1: The older brother(M#1) was married with a family of his own even while seeing my hairdresser so he asked his wife to take him back and the younger brother (M#2) married my hairdresser's sister.

@#$%^&&&$#$#$

W#2 and her tea went cold and all the color drained from them.

Another impeccable voice speaking the Queen's English commanded L/reva's attention that had unfaithfully strayed to the Harrods, Boots and duty free goodies!

"You may now board the fight flight bound to Chennai"

A Tata Indica ad said “We love to carry our world with us" So does Lafemmereva. L/reva, her duty free purchases and her entourage of baggage made a beeline to the flight which was pregnant (Emphasis: Flight was pregnant!!) and hurting with the painful labor of harboring wailing babies, soiled diapers and multi lingual songs blaring from Ipod which evoked the diversity vibes of India.

I burrowed my way through to my seat like a refugee avoiding missile misses from overstuffed cabin baggage which were threatening to fall off like those slimy creatures from the walls in movies like Mummy, Harry Potter et al.

In my biased and compromising opinion of a non-beneficiary, reservation is a very unfair advantage to the beneficiary. This is not how I viewed it when I was a beneficiary of one third of the perks in the not-so-distant past w.r.t college admissions. When one is not a beneficiary one will equate the whole grape-tasting-sour experience to watching KKRs play in IPL. And when one is, one propagates it with as much verve, enthusiasm and gusto as one does the Fake IPL Blog.

Without further digression, the flight junta was "reserving" extra (read co-passenger’s luggage space) spaces for cabin luggage above the seated area. They told every unsuspecting traveler that came to rightfully secure their bags in their “allocated” space that it was meant for their aged parent’s/young child’s “saamanam” (Tamil for things), thus slyly making anyone that doesn’t comply seem as pariah-ic as someone that refuses to offer his/her seat to any woman with-a-large-tummy in a bus by giving her the benefit of the doubt of being pregnant. BTW that is by far the only advantage I see of a woman having a challenging waistline. Pregnant or not, the fruit of labor is atleast a free seat. So, after all it is not always a man’s world.

I politely asked my co-passenger to move his luggage from my “allocated” space when he retorted with affected complaisance that his “aged” mother’s coat needed a resting place in case she felt cold.
Like the air hostess would come and open the windows of the plane when in mid air for some ventilation! Bah!

Me? I always look to corroborate claims with evidence. I looked to see a pretty young 20 something of a wife seated next to him. I did not sight a woman beyond her twenties in 3 rows of seats before and after mine. Needless to say there was no mother. This wasn’t the time to curse myself for not having premature grey hair to pass off for a senior or wish that the emergency oxygen masks were non existent under the seats of stone aged men and their stoned looking wives with neither grey hair nor integrity nor civility such as these two.

Any rebuttal to such an ill-formed and fallacious plea from the stone age man would mark my death from the killer looks of every other genuine “senior” on board. This wasn’t a time for facts to be corrected or name-calling or hair-pulling with stone age man or his stoned looking wife.

So I did what every self respecting mallu woman who stands up for her rights would do. I put my cabin baggage in the space meant for the passenger in front and consoled the enraged wooly spirit of the Calvin Klein coat in my hand which went under my seat. There! That’s a non violent, cooperative, neighborly way of sorting out things. When in deep shit pass the buck.

As I was prepared to squat for what would be my last leg of journey I was overpowered by a brilliant aroma that tickles one's pheromones and puts every 365X24X7 deodorant's claim-to-fame to shame -
Sweat - The human juice that is every athlete's envy and deodorant/sportswear company's pride and permeates through every unchartered crevice of the learned society.

Coming soon......

Part 4 - Homecoming series#4 - In-Flight entertainment
Part 5 - Homecoming series#5 - Lafemmereva in the wonderland of Lungis, Appams and
Chechis
Part 6 - Homecoming series#6 – Season Finale - City of Destiny, Downing Street, Uncle Sam.

Bah!! I haven't started a party and all.

Since polls are the order of the day in India I shall also pander to my audience's fancy by offering them with one:

What pisses you off incurs your wrath more?

Option 1: Staring a vacation series and not taking it to closure?

Option 2: Writing an excuse for a post such as this to apologise for it?

I will not judge your orientation you based on your choice above.

Lafemmereva pleads guilty of clocking 12 hrs everyday doing what, don't ask! and sincerely vows to once in for all blog about the remainder of her vacation series, no later than the end of this week, to explicate herself from the heinous crime of not entertaining her readership.
Bah, Lafemmereva is feeling compunctious and all. Compunctious is not to be understood as being punctual about commas.

But in the meantime for those that don't have a clue what I am talking about please fall prey to this third rate tactic that we (bloggers) use to ensure our older babbles posts are trashed read.

So the homework for this day is to read the following:

Part 1 : Homecoming Series #1 - Fasten your seat belts

Part 2 : Homecoming Series #2 - Wheels in motion, Mission Half accomplished!

Part 3: Coming soon.....

By the blogger, for the blogger, of the blogger. Totally. No! Seriously not contesting elections.

Related Posts:
Homecoming Series #1 - Fasten your seat belts
Homecoming Series #2 - Wheels in motion, Mission Half accomplished!