san sharma

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For a self-proclaimed (and obsessed) geek, it came as something of a blow when those vanguards of vanity, Google, announced that I’d reached my peak in 2004. If ‘Googling’ yourself is considered an ego stroke, then analysing your name via new service, Google Insights, is like checking into a Thai massage parlour. Except, in my case, without the ‘happy ending’. The service reported that I was most popular in the United States, followed by India and then the UK. (It seems I’d failed to make an impression on Canada.) It also generated a graph of ‘Interest over time’ that sloped steadily downwards from 2004 when I was first started blogging, to the present day, as I write to you now, following a four month hiatus.

So, why the silent treatment?

Well, since I last wrote, back in April, I seem to have found myself in love’s death-grip. I was already struggling to update the blog when I met Brooky Wook and then embarked on a relationship completely at odds with the legacy of this website: healthy, functional, romantic. For what is essentially a catalogue of my dating failures, is being lucky in love the final nail in what was already the dusty coffin of my personal blog?

Don’t worry, dear readers, there’s room for one more in this coffin made for two. I won’t be cracking open its lid anytime soon and clambering six feet up to a spring meadow of bunny rabbits and love hearts. Being in a relationship brings with it a whole new set of social faux pas, one of which I’m reminded this week, as Brooky Wook prepares to meet my family for the first time.

I was in a similar position last weekend, having been invited to her grandad’s 87th birthday lunch in Canterbury. Her dad picked us up from the train station and drove us to the Wook household, where I nervously approached the front door, opened quite suddenly by a man waving what appeared to be a walking stick in the air. This did not calm my nerves. Instead, they rattled with the bag of gifts that Brooky Wook and I had bought her grandad. I pushed them towards the man’s free hand like I was popping a flower in the nose of a gun. I smiled, wished him a Happy Birthday and watched as both stick and face dropped.

“It’s not my birthday,” he said. “I’m [Brooky Wook's] uncle.”
“Ah,” I said, taking a closer look at the man I’d mistaken for an 87 year old grandfather - tall, fortysomething, with only a hint of grey in his full head of hair. “I know that! …But it was your birthday recently, right?”
“Yes. In January.”
“Well,” I said, easing the gifts back from his hand. “Happy… belated birthday!”

I stepped inside and saw Grandfather Wook, behind thick, bottle-top glasses, being helped from his rocking chair by two grandchildren and a walking stick more traditional than that held in his son’s hand. Uncle Wook, I learned, had just returned from Kenya, and the stick was a cattle herding staff, used by the Maasai tribe. I imagine he’d thought of using it for a different purpose that day.

But as I left with Brooky-Wook I realised that I hadn’t buried social faux pas when I found love. It may be a many splendored thing, lift us up where we belong, be all that we need, but it doesn’t free us from the awkwardness that has been the legacy of this blog since 2004. If anything, it makes it worse.

I didn’t have an excuse. But believe me, I wracked my brains. I wanted nothing less than to go to an interactive comedy night, an hour and a half away in Stoke Newington. But I’m dating again and have fallen into a routine of taking turns to “host”. ‘Captain Dude and the Dude Patrol‘, at Ryan’s Bar on the Stoke Newington High Street, fell on her day (’her’ henceforth referred to as ‘my Brooky Wook’).

Accepting Brooky Wook’s invitation, I thought, might make my turn - inviting her to my ex-girlfriend’s house for dinner - a little easier (on me, I imagine, not so much on her). So I said, ‘yes,’ and rode that Overground, somewhat reluctantly, to the scary, north-east corner of zone 2.

Call me an old curmudgeon, but the idea of painting, of making things, dressing up in old, jumble-sale clothes and competing for prizes, all of which was promised by its Facebook event description, made me want to stay home, wash my hair, catch up on my junk mail correspondence - anything to avoid the kind of interaction with strangers that sounded about as fun as being mugged.

I saw a guy at a comedy night, right here in West Hampstead, whose entire set consisted of a conversation with an audience member, about as engaging as being collared by a high street charity collector. By the end of it, he looked about ready to hand over his Direct Debit details, just so that he could go on with his life.

“The comedy’s not amazing,” Brooky Wook said, as we took our seats. “But the atmosphere’s great.” The atmosphere was pretty tense, from where I was sitting. I was terrified of being picked by the compère, Tom Bell, whose sprightly androgyny reminded me of a theme park animal trainer, who once plucked me from a crowd of otherwise happy holiday makers to perform with what wasn’t the real Lassie but what looked good enough to pass.

I was 10 years old, and arrived with my family just before show time, managing to squeeze onto the front row of the ‘Animal Actors on Location’ attraction at Universal Studios Florida. I was aware that because of my proximity to the stage and the ease with which I could get there and back with minimum interruption to the crowd, I had the highest chance of being picked by the animal trainer. I was as terrified of him as I was of the dog, so I did my best to catch neither pair of eyes. But I guess they both smelled my fear and, before I knew it, I was on the stage, shaking Lassie’s paw to my obvious embarrassment. (Why can’t dogs smell that?)

But here, in the basement of Ryan’s Bar, the front row was the only row. I took it with a big swig of my drink and finally relaxed into my seat. If Universal Studios wasn’t such a ‘dry’ theme park, I might have had a better experience. But last night, at ‘Captain Dude and the Dude Patrol’, I had a surprisingly good time.

Bell made for an excellent compère, as comfortable on stage as he was in the massive “sleeping bag-come-coat” he picked out for himself from the jumble-sale. His comedy partner, Ed Weeks, was late, but no less funny. His punishment from Bell was the accusation of racism, eliciting a chorus of boos from the crowd, triggered by a hand signal designed by Bell in Weeks’ absence.

Pippa Evans put in a good turn, acting alongside Bell in episode two of ‘Plaice Invaders’, the completely improvised soap opera set in a fish & chip shop in space. All of this, set to a soundtrack of the worst charity shop vinyl Bell could find and all the laughter we, in our crowd of 15, could muster.

“If you like finding furniture on the street,” the Facebook event description went on, “you’ll love Dude Patrol.” I do and I did. But unlike stumbling across a broken wicker chair or a discarded coffee table, there was nothing wooden about these dudes. It’s a comedy night worth checking out, if you live in the area. I might just make that one and and a half hour journey back out there, next month.

My sister, Suman, is late to the party that is social networking. At 29, she graduated before Facebook became the big man on campus it is today and left high school while MySpace was still a twinkle in Tom Anderson’s eye.

In the last month, she’s joined both networks, muddled them up in her head and failed in her attempts to stay relevant by referring to each as MyFace. (I had to stop her from inviting friends to meet there. It was a conversation I never wanted to have with my sister.)

Just as Suman’s getting to know Facebook (and her friends in a more intimate way than she imagined), I’m trying to distance myself from the social network that’s costing UK business over £130m a day and 233 million hours of ‘lost time’ every month.

I’ll be running for the hills when it rolls out its new instant messaging feature in the next couple of weeks. It’s hitting some networks and the reviews are pretty good, but Facebook’s already given me a second inbox to battle, not to mention another Wall to climb, and I’m terrified that I’ll never keep up with friends, nor will I want to know that they’re getting a sandwich, packing for their holidays or being surprised at the result of a football match, reality TV show or STD test.

It’s hard enough trying to sneak onto Facebook without someone noticing that you haven’t replied to their message (”oh, I haven’t checked,” doesn’t really work). Now its new chat features promise to bring back into fashion a certain keyboard shortcut dance I used to perform when avoiding friends on instant messengers. (If I log on and then off immediately, you’ll know what just happened…)

It’s not too late for my sister, Suman - she’s not yet hooked. However, by making Facebook a more real time experience, its developers are hoping session length will go through the roof. But it might just be the poke that pushes users, like me, over the edge.

I entertain by picking brains
Sell my soul by dropping names
I don’t like those, my god, what’s that?
Oh, it’s full of nasty habits when the bitch gets back

‘The Bitch Is Back’, Elton John

I’m back on the blogosphere, guys, riding it all the way to your web browser, like an excited child on a space hopper. And what better way to return - out of breath - than with an Elton John lyric. (That should put to bed those ‘gay’ rumours.) Expect more brain-picking, name-dropping, gender-bending nastiness soon.

If, like Elton John suggests, there are bad habits, one might be going AWOL. I do apologise for that. And now that I’m back from my little sabbatical, let me explain.

I’ve been going through a period of change. Yes readers, puberty has hit me like a tonne of hairy bricks. Not only that, but after three years of working as Creative Director of Redbrick Enterprises Ltd., and on it’s flagship product, Enterprise Nation, I’ve left to go freelance. The decision came about after a series of escalating threats led to my departure.

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to leave!”
“Leave then,” said managing director, Emma Jones.
“Okay, I’m leaving.”
“Go!”
“I’m going.” This went on for some time.
“On the count of three,” I think I might have said. “1… 2… 2 and a half… 2 and three quarters…” Until, all of a sudden, I’d gone!

I’m still doing some work for Enterprise Nation - and everything’s fine! - but I’m designing, writing and presenting for other companies too. You should expect this blog to change somewhat as well. Its focus is going to shift to pop culture, technology and business. But don’t be surprised to find sprinklings of the old personal stuff. Inappropriate stuff, if anything.

Old habits, as they say, die hard. Nasty habits reincarnate.

So, welcome back to my blog, if you’ve been here before. If it’s your first time, subscribe to my RSS feed, so you don’t miss my updates, which I’m going to try and make more often. In the meantime, enjoy this video from the original “bitch”. It’s Elton John, with a pole-dancing Pamela Anderson, and a performance that I think really captures the essence of this blog: the roaring crowd, the sex appeal, the fat guy at the keyboard…

The Bitch Is Back, Elton John

While other mums worry about their sons turning to drugs, getting their girlfriends pregnant or joining some sort of gang, mine is concerned with matters more spiritual. (Besides, I don’t have a girlfriend, I’m a responsible member of an online community and I just turned down a line of coke because I had a “terrible blocked nose”.) The way my mum sees it, the only road I’m heading down is the one clearly marked, ‘Identity Crisis’.

“Coconut boy,” she calls me. “Brown on the outside, white on the inside.”

While there might, at least, be parts of me that resemble a coconut - brown, covered in hair and full of a white, milky fluid - at this time of the year, when my colour fades, it’s quite easy to ‘lose my roots’ when they’re not so etched onto my face in hues of burnt sienna, sepia and mahogany. I’m invited to fewer dinner parties, considered less effective as a token person of colour, and stopped far less by police men.

It takes just a two hour journey up north and one weekend with my family to bring that muddy colour back to my sweet cheeks and to remind me that my roots don’t stop in Shropshire, but in a land far, far away, to which ex-pat relatives still squint and admire what remains of a changing culture.

I found out this morning that my cousin, a graduate from Kings College London, is in India to get married.
“That’s crazy!” I said. “Has he even met her before?”
“Oh yeah,” my mum replied, nonchalantly. “At the engagement party, I think.”

He’s my second cousin in as many years to go east to find the perfect Indian bride. Some send for the brides to come over to the UK. Others, like my cousin, get married in India with a view to bring their brides home once ‘the paperwork’ is ready.

On the one hand, I think it sort of represents a failure, as if the groom-to-be was no match made in heaven for the British Indian girls he would have seen on the arranged marriage circuit (which I like to imagine is like the selection process of American Idol; Simon Cowell as busty bride-to-be).

On the other hand, it’s like the son or, more often, his parents, look to India for the ‘old fashioned decency’ quickly escaping British Indian girls. (It’s being replaced by ambition, I’m pleased to report.)

What they don’t know - or fail to see - is that the kind of girl that insists on a wedding register at the UK Border & Immigration Agency, is probably pretty ambitious. And that India is going through it’s own (belated) sexual revolution (after ironically triggering western ‘free love’ movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with the rediscovery of its ancient culture of sexual liberalism).

The pursuit and purchase of the ‘perfect Indian bride’ might be more a case for Trading Standards than Border and Immigration control. Ambition and sexual liberalism is completely at odds with the requirements of my cousin, his parents and other British Indians who look to India for ‘old fashioned decency’, as impossible to attain as the ‘impaling on a stake’ position of one of its most old-fashioned texts, the Kama Sutra.

Nevertheless, I wish them luck. If I’m like a coconut, and life a box of chocolates, an arranged marriage is like a curry. It’s hot, it’s exotic, you can pick it up or have it delivered, but soon enough that shit’s going to really hurt.

“You’re like the coolest person I’ve ever met,” Ellen Page says to a knobbly knee’d Michael Cera at the climax of Juno. “And you don’t even have to try, you know.”
“I try really hard, actually.”

Juno was Fox Searchlight’s sleeper hit of 2007, grossing over $85 million in the US (after a modest budget of only $7.5 million). It comes out in the UK on February 8th and I was there at its VIP screening at the Soho Hotel in London last week.

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I’m back home with my parents for the holidays, where keeping up with the Jones’ has escalated to a point where my family is no longer honouring its own religion, but instead joining the neighbours for midnight mass at the local Catholic church.

It’s not typical behaviour for a Hindu family, but then mine has never been a typical Hindu family. Neither has it shied from Catholicism: My sisters and I went to the Catholic school opposite our house. (We got Christ and convenience - it was a 2 for 1 deal.)

As such, we knew what to expect from the service - lots of lengthy Bible passages, lots of time to ‘reflect’, lots of standing up and sitting down.

I didn’t, however, expect there to be quite so many apologies. Soon after we arrived we joined the congregation in one massive plea for forgiveness.

It was a funny way to start, I thought. “Let’s get this party started,” I imagined the Father saying. “With a big fat, ‘I’m sorry’.” I wasn’t sure why we were apologising (we weren’t even late), but I joined in all the same.

It wasn’t long, however, until my complicity turned into awkward silence. I was the only member of the congregation not saying ‘amen,’ ‘thanks be to God,’ or ‘Kyrie Eleison’ (I didn’t even know what the last one meant, but I liked to think it was Jamaican patois); I was probably the only one censoring parts of Christmas carols, by refusing to sing them.

I wondered how the rest of my family could, not least because the church insisted on performing songs impossible to pick up. New ones, in an attempt to be relevant, employed all sorts of strange ‘blue’ notes, unpredictable key changes and song structures that eschewed the tried and tested verse/chorus formula of the last hundred or so years.

But then, I thought, that’s not unlike my family at all: blue, unpredictable, unusual; also, unlike new hymns, relevant, at least to me. And, in a weird way, honouring its own religion.

“You don’t want a girlfriend,” I was recently reminded. “You want an audience.” And despite her best efforts to, er, buck the trend, I went home alone that night and showed her that, in fact, I wanted neither. Oh, I showed her alright…

But waking up alone, again, I wondered whether there was any truth in her observation. I kind of wish I’d stuck around for its attempted deconstruction. But in all honesty, it’s a fact that’s been pointed out to me before.

I met her on a blind date, we’d e-mailed each other before the first meeting and she’d had the foresight to Google me in advance. Perhaps to check that I wasn’t a suspected terrorist, a registered sex offender or a Tory.

But what she didn’t expect was three pages of results, the first of which led her to this blog. “I have a lot less sex than people imagine,” were the first words she must have read. And the dates that followed proved that I can, in fact, have even less sex than that.

But I appreciated her honesty in admitting her research, more so than her awkward first date questions. “Who is the real San Sharma?” She asked. “The man or the domain?”

I didn’t expect questions any more soul searching than ‘what’s your favourite colour?’ from a first date, but hers got me thinking.

Is being single intrinsic to my personality? Or to my persona, as a “single, metrosexual, twentysomething, British Indian male”, as per the blurb above?

“What I’m asking is,” she continued. “Can you have a girlfriend and an audience?” I didn’t think that was an invitation to tape us having sex, so I told her that, at this time, I didn’t think the two were possible. And walked home, with no-one watching me.

It’s the age old dilemma: the secular world versus the spiritual; the things you can’t touch and the things you can’t stop touching. And this Friday, the conundrum continues, when Apple’s long awaited iPhone lands in the UK - on Diwali.

I’d booked the day off work, picked out a traditional outfit, planned my route to the temple (casual shirt, hipster jeans, Central Line to the Regent Street Apple Store). I was all set to get in line and get an iPhone (at 6:02pm - its official launch time, inspired by Apple’s O2 partnership), when my mum called.

“Don’t forget Diwali on Friday,” she said.

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Apple has its own ‘Get ready for iPhone‘ guide, with advice on how to prepare your contacts, calendar, music and videos. In anticipation of tonight’s UK launch, I’ve prepared my own pre-purchase to-do list.

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