As this is the first intrusion upon my privacy, into my scribbles in a punishingly personal diary, I owe you a brief introduction, to me. You can call me Charlie, if you like. Let’s face it nobody is a ‘nobody’. Certainly not me. I am not. In fact, I am more than just an ‘anybody’, I am somebody that has an insight; an inquisitive and incisive insight, into politics, moralities, styles, foods and Page 3, as you will slowly find out. That’s it.

I am a Celeb. It’s so non-‘U’ to use the longer form of the noun: ‘celebrity’ — it rolls off the tongue like English blancmange that is spat out as soon as it touches taste buds. And why must Parsees stuff jam into their poached eggs and eggs into everything else? I’ll turn to that page in due course.

So then who isn’t a celeb these days? Every pleb with property-deal bucks to splurge on Versace and in Souks at the Taj, from the bleached Bir*** to the cold-curled God*****, the sequinned Goe**** to the zari-embroidered Sipahi*******, we (aye, I count myself one among them), the haute coutured minority, are the ones who set ramps and aisles and loins on fire. It’s the only way to survive these days.

And ‘I’ is the key word. It’s in fashion. I matter. I live with my I-pod and my I-pad, haughtily depressed, drinking Scotches chosen for hues and downing oily single malts I am told I will grow to like one day. So you see, claiming to be an ‘anybody’ these days is tantamount to your demanding affirmative action, being a ‘nobody’, on the other hand, leaves you in ‘I’-solated peace. Alone. Most of the time. Even in company. Contemplatively content. All the while, socially evolving.

I must tell you I look fabulous in kurtis because they accentuate my grand derriere and make ogling pensioners dilate: oh, for heaven’s sake, that’s an obsolete word for my big bum, my wide ass. Nouns and adjectives today are more like…like…. So for all you really care, I could be Charlie’s Aunt. Or simply that prodigious Behenji next door who, dressed in a maxi, hangs up her dirt-rimmed lingerie and laundry behind rusted grills on the verandah, to let soapy water drip on dusty potted plants.

How old am I? My mother never told me and my father died mourning for her. I do have a tattoo on my lower right cheek that I shall discuss once we get a little more familiar, which will date me as well as place me in a geographical site that still shoots and sniffs, snorts and snuffs, with discriminate abandonment.

Speaking of which, look at the indiscriminate increase in fuel prices and moong dal. Wacko digression. But, compare it to the discriminate portrayal of flesh on the first page of this very paper a few days ago. Foxy Ronaldo’s balls and Siren Megan’s boobs is what this world is all about. Underwear. They sweat into Giorgio Armani while I breathe into a Swiss brand called Zimmerli that just isn’t stylishly V-fronted enough, but a darn side more comfortable. Who cares about Portugal’s jewels anyway, when Switzerland’s eleven strapped in Zimmerli unterwäsche sent the potential winners of this year’s World Cup, Spain, rummaging in their drawers for new jocks? And my Victoria Secrets peeping through Wendell’s cottons sets me up among high rollers who, like me, glide into IPL bashes with fellow snorters and waltz through Mallya’s pooterish cork-poppers with bottled genies on the F1 circuit.

Soccer is for European hooligans and South American slum dogs. I’ll find an appropriate description for the vuvuzela-tooting Africans once I have pulled my nose out from Shakira’s Waka Waka grind.

Curiously, in the same paper that flashed briefs, on Page 4 was a comic strip, B.C., with two lemmings apparelled in burrows like ground hogs making their celebrated springtime appearance. Says the whiskered male to the Maybelline lashed Mable, “I’d follow you to the ends of the Earth”. “You and a thousand other jerks”, batted Mable in reply. The punch line: “you never swoon over a lemming”.

I’ll be back with more strands of fanciful thought for you to untangle, if I survive this first leap over the cliff into a sea of unsuspecting listeners and readers, though, at least for the moment, I am held aloft by the convectional hot air of an imaginative mind and an unputdownable ego.

Wait for the mighty fall my dear countrypersons. It’ll be a splash.