The Great Indian Ant Problem

For the last few days I have had to share my living quarters with some uninvited houseguests. And though they are not as unsavoury as some of my relatives – who, when they are done staying at the place leave it in the same condition as a hurricane leaves a small village in Orissa – they are not entirely welcome either. Off late I have had the pleasure of playing host to a whole colony of ants.

It was quite a shock to me when I first saw them trooping around in my house, moving in their single file, toward a stray crumb of biscuit, looking like a string of the red rope lights that you see at shaadi’s. That was just the beginning. Very soon they were swarming all over the place. There was not one location in the entire house where you wouldn’t find the little critters. I’d open the cupboard and I’d find them scuttling about inside, I’d open the fridge only to find myself disturbing an ant conference around my chocolates, in fact am pretty sure I once opened the newspaper to find an ant reading the sports section.

I think the matter came to boil when they began infiltrating my clothes. As anyone who has ever had an ant in their pants will tell you, it is not the most pleasant experience. You suddenly begin squirming uncontrollably as the little bugger wriggles around in parts of your body which you never even knew existed. BONUS TIP FOR NON-DANCERS: The next time you’re called on the Dance Floor, slip in an ant or two into the clothing and wait for the moves to flow. This technique works well for doing the Disco, the Rumba and occasionally Ballet. Conditions apply.

Coming back to my predicament, the ants that had infested my house, I found were pretty big ones. In fact some of them were so big that they could have passed off as pet dogs to people who didn’t know better. Ok, maybe I exaggerated the last part, but they were pretty darn massive which made it all the more surprising when they would disappear for the short stretches of time when I took care not to leave food lying around. It was as if they materialized from thin air the moment a half eaten pastry was left unattended. I think our secret service officials have a lot to learn from the undercover tactics of ants.

Angry, frustrated and burned out by all the ant-induced dancing, I decided to call in   the pest control. The house was sprayed liberally by Santosh, the pest controller who quipped and I quote, “Consider you lucky. Your situation is so much better than the people who have cockroaches, bedbugs and locusts in their house.” I guess years of duty on the frontlines of the war against insects develop in a man such a morbid sense of humour.

Finally, at the end of the sordid affair I was left with only one question: Considering the amount of sweet they eat, why don’t ants get diabetes? Even Santosh the Pest Controller, couldn’t answer me that one.    

Putting the Idiot in 'Idiot Box'.

Last month something very strange happened to me. Something that I wasn’t expecting and least of all prepared for. No, I am not talking about puberty. Last month, I got a chance to be on TV.

I managed to scramble myself onto the little box of beaming images by doing a show for MTV. The show for the assured majority who haven’t seen it was called, “MyCam”. It was a show where I spoke about my life and the things that I do. To put it another way it was an excuse for me to be my normal self-centered self except this time I had a larger audience who couldn’t punch me in the face to make me shut up.

This sudden appearance of mine on national television had a profound impact on my life. For starters, I found that a lot of people who had up until then considered me fractionally more fascinating than a sea anemone, now wanted to speak to me. People I hadn’t spoken to in years were now eager to ‘reconnect’. Old friends seemed to come crawling out from under their rocks and stones and were enquiring guiltily about what I was doing. Relatives, who I didn’t know existed called and asked irritating questions like, “Can you recognise who’s calling? You’ve met me when you were very young. Don’t you remember your chacha’s mother’s third cousin? Anyway, you really have grown...” The fact that I was on television made them see me in new light and it made for some tremendously awkward conversations.

One of the classic phrases that you get exposed to a lot when your bloated face and high pitched voice find their way on television is, “Hey! I saw you on TV!”  It’s a phrase for which there is no appropriate answer. They’re not praising you, so you can’t thank them. It’s not an enquiry to which you could answer something simple like, “Am fine.” And it’s definitely not a shared sentiment so you can’t reply with the standard comeback you keep for things like festive greetings.

Person: Hey! I saw you on TV!

You: Same to you!

Person: uh...

I’ve realised that the only way to respond to such a statement is by smiling stupidly and saying, “I can’t believe you survived the horror.”

We seem to have a haloed fascination for people who make an appearance on TV. Even if the person is doing something ridiculous while ‘on air’, like, counting the number of grains there are in a sack of rice, we still consider it a feat worthy of respect. I don’t see why such intrigue is not hoisted onto people who do other, more exciting things in life. For example you’ll never see people saying, “Hey! I saw you save a puppy’s life while simultaneously balancing three china vases on your nose AND riding a horse.”, just because it isn’t on TV.

But overall being on TV was a fun experience. It was my 15 minutes of fame. The minor taste of celebrity was intoxicating for as long as it lasted and I was eternally grateful that my television debut didn’t happen, as I had long feared it would, on India TV. Or worse still, as a contestant on Bigg Boss.