… and let the world go by!
The morning started with a 2.45 am call from Shirish. I had SMSed him around 11.45 p.m to call me if he was awake. He received the SMS at 2.45 and called me promptly. Both of us are on the orange network. So when Orange tells you that where ever you are, your network follows – it doesn’t tell you that it follows you 3 hours later! When the phone rang at 2.45, the sense of disorientation was quite something. I can see why the KGB or the Nazis arrested people in the wee hours of the morning. I honestly thought that someone was dead! It took me well over an hour to get back to normalcy and sleep.

Back to normal waking time, I had a meeting in town with the show producers – all the way to Parel – on contractual issues. Reading a contract or drafting one on the best of days gives me a migrane. And today was not the best of days. All the save arse clauses all sides try to put into a contract somehow destroys the goodwill, camaraderie and understanding that one has built in the course of a professional relationship. Everything becomes clinical. But, it is one of those things that we all have to get into. It will truly be a great day when we can dispense with paperwork and work on trust. But, that will be living in cloud cuckooland.

Drove back home, drafted objections to clauses (ugh!) and then went back to Worli for a meeting with Anand with another channel on proposed shows. The meeting was fairly decent. By this time my head was pounding. There were two rival armies fighting for a strip of my brain and it was a stalemate by all accounts.

Got back home from Worli, when a new bouncer hit. A leading media portal had spoken to Shishir sometime yesterday and gotten a quote. They got our credit wrong as producer(instead of executive producer) . Which meant that there was an irate producer to placate. He was angry and rightly so. I would have been livid, in his place. Empathising with this is fine. But, acting on it with a full blown migrane was soemthing else. Furthermore, the ultimate client has a no talking to the press without vetting policy. So there were more fences to be mended. The migrane was now like having a earthmover inside myhead.

Then came the film city bit. Drove down there, but decided not to get into the studio. I would have ended up hyperventilating.So i sat outside and took in fresh air. Practised my pranayanam . And the head felt better. Everything seemed to be going smooth – until the last ten minutes. The generator packed up. Now generators have a 99% uptime. They don’t normally stop functioning. In 12 years in the industry this has only been the second time that i have seen a generator go down. The last was 12 years ago. What do you do when something that is supposed to be 99% reliable fails?

I finally got home at around midnight. And i wanted to record this for later on. If ever i get an inkling that I am going to have another day like this, i am going to stay under my blanket the whole damn day!