I had been planning to write Part II for quite some time now, but work – that infernal thing – had its ugly tentacles wrapped all around me. At least when I wasn’t playing cricket or gallivanting across Scotland, that is. And thus, I never got down to completing this saga of undying love…
We were a few months into the eighth standard when Amit decided that what he felt for Nisha was the real thing – lowe. By that time, however, there were scores of people in the ranks of her admirers. There was this chap who used a blade to carve her name out on his forearm, and the three or four chaps who would suddenly become as violent as Zinedine Zidane when Nisha happened to walk past an informal football match. As for me, all I did was glance surreptitiously at her – something I reckon she never noticed (at least I think she didn’t. I’m very subtle).
But Amit was in a class all by himself. He would walk into class about a minute after Nisha did, and keep his head tilted at ninety degrees to the teacher throughout the day. Repeated admonitions (and a few strokes of a wooden scale) from the teachers did nothing to diminish his passion. After about two months of this rather obvious display of his lowe, Amit decided to take the great leap forward.
He walked upto Nisha during the lunch break. Nisha was eating her lunch with that (decidedly plain and fat) girl who stuck closer to her than her shadow.
Digression: The author has never understood this female trait by virtue of which every hot chick has a plain chick hanging around her all the time. This is a truly global phenomenon, and the author has seen white women and Oriental women do the same too. Explanations to this interesting phenomenon will be greatly welcome.
He spoke loudly, like the aan singham he was (and probably still is),
‘Hi, Nisha, eppidi irukke?’ (Hi, Nisha, how’re you?)
This must have been rather perplexing for Nisha, considering the chap had never bothered to do anything but stare at her all day.
‘Er…yeah, well, I’m fine.’
If Amit were one of those smooth Don Juans, he would probably have waxed eloquent on the beauty of the bees, the birds and the smelly brown liquid that was provided us in the name of drinking water. But no, none of that for Amit! He believed in getting to the nub as soon as he could.
And thus, the third sentence that Amit ever said to Nisha was,
‘Aey, naan unnai lowe pannaraendee’ (Hey, I’m lowing you—forgive me, there’s no exact translation of this immortal phrase into English)
As I sat three benches away, trying not to look, I felt as if someone had just driven a road roller over the rolls of fat on my stomach. I visibly winced. Being unaware then of the success rates that porikis enjoyed in the game of lowe, and having watched too many Tamil movies than was good for me, I expected Nisha to break into a demure smile, giggle and run away.
At which point the hundred extras would arrive from Kodambakkam and begin dancing to a tune.
At which point the passion that burnt deep (two layers of fat beneath) within me would be extinguished faster than Bush’s hopes of victory in Iraq.
So, nothing could have prepared me for what happened. Nisha directed at him a stony glare from those green eyes of hers.
‘But I don’t love you, okay?! I’m sick of you staring at me. So kindly desist from making a fool of yourself.’
Upon this, she flounced away, followed closely by her chamcha.
Most people would have taken this most emphatic crushing of their crush to be final. But Amit was not one to give up so easily. He reasoned, with undeniably warped logic, that the problem was the competition.
And he reasoned that the best way to deal with the competition would be to eliminate it.
The guy who took a blade to his forearm was threatened with a fist bigger than his blade if he tried anything in the nature of funny business again. The violent football players soon saw that Amit could be considerably more violent than them.
It was then that I took that ill-fated path of striking a conversation with Nisha.
It was as I was trying to worm her phone number out of her (after having spent 5 minutes discussing the character flaws of our English teacher, and how I had, in spite of his hating me, scored 33 on 35 in the last test*) when a friend asked me to step outside.
It was not a very happy self that waddled out of the classroom. I was about to expostulate on good manners to my friend when he told me that Amit wanted to see me at the playground.
Fear chilled me to the marrow. Amit was sure to threaten me with physical violence, or worse still carry it out. I told my friend to tell him that I had suddenly taken ill, and had therefore decided to go home. I began to run away as fast as I could when I heard quick footsteps following me.
I was not much of a runner. My last sporting achievement of note was winning the frog jump when in UKG, unless one counts the silver plate I won for coming second in the three-legged race in my third standard.
However, I felt that I was running like the wind. But by some freak of nature, Amit jogged past my quivering double chin, and placed a hand across my chest to stop me.
As I bent over double trying to regain my breath, Amit spoke to me (translated version presented for convenience),
‘Dai, I thought I’d told everybody to keep off my girl.’
‘Amit, honestly, I was merely asking her for her notes.’
‘Who are you trying to fool, you lavdae ka baal (pubic hair)! I know you were trying to get her phone number.’
Some bastard was spying on me! I condemned his black soul to the depths of hell (if he’s reading this today, whoever he may be, he may note that the curse still holds).
I tried a last, desperate gamble.
‘Macha, I was trying to get her phone number for you!’
‘Dai, evantaedaa velayaadarae? (Who do you think you’re fooling?) I have her phone number, and I know where she lives.’
That was interesting. I turned to him and asked him interestedly, ‘Where?’
‘Now why do you want to know, you mayir pudungi (means about the same as the swear word above)? You’re trying to steal my girl from me, aren’t you?’
‘But…Amit, she’s not your girl.’
‘Dai, what the fuck do you mean? She’s mine for all eternity.’
Maybe, I thought, I could reason with him,
‘But machcha, she told me that she’s not your girlfiend, and never wants to talk to you in this life or the next.’
If I were a wee bit smarter, I would have known that this was not the most tactful line to take. A lesson lies here for all young boys starting out in life – do not try to convince a poriki of the futility of his lowe. Violence will indubitably follow.
Amit spoke slowly and quietly, through clenched teeth,
‘Oh really? And do you lowe her?’
‘Er..yeah, I kinda like her.’
‘You fat piece of first bencher shit! That was your game all along!’, he screamed.
What followed for the next ten minutes was the most macabre and painful exhibition of violent behaviour I have ever experienced in this short life of mine.
It also crushed my crush forever.
Epilogue:
Amit continued to moon over Nisha. He spent most weekends hanging about the vicinity of her house in the army colony. It was on one such weekend that the good Colonel, home on leave after a frustrating few months spent consorting with the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, became aware of Amit’s presence outside. The good Colonel tolerated porikis just a little more than he tolerated Kashmiri militants.
A reportedly painful lesson at the hands of an Army jawan quickly extinguished any lowe that still burnt in Amit’s bosom. All I could think of when I heard of this diverting anecdote was, ‘Jai Jawan!’.
*Yes, I know. I was (and still am) unbelievably pathetic when it comes to chatting a member of the opposite sex up.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Thursday, July 13, 2006
There's something about Nisha - Part I
I’ve never watched There’s something about Mary, but I presume it’s one of those corny romantic comedies about this girl who manages to turn pretty much every single person on. If you’re one of those hard-headed men of business who do not believe in the existence of such women, you are likely to scoff.
And I would have, too. If it weren’t for the fact that I am one of those poor prunes who would make a loss selling ice cream in Riyadh. And more importantly, if I had never met Nisha.
Nisha walked into our classroom in the seventh standard, a time when men were men and hated all women without exception. And therefore, nobody in particular took much notice of Nisha, except to perfunctorily note that she had spent the last three years of her life rotting in that armpit we once called Kashmir.
The only conversation I had with her that year amounted to:
‘Hi, you’re from Kashmir, aren’t you?’
‘No, I’m originally from the French territory of the Afars and the Isas. But I lived in a bunker in Kargil with Barkha Dutt for the last three years.’
‘Ah!! That explains your stupidity, and why you scream ‘I’m calling from a bunkkkker’ in the middle of classes. But that aside, have you ever met a militant?’
‘Oh yes, I have. They are all dressed in black, look like Hrithik Roshan, and walk down high street, a couple of tones of RDX strapped to their vitals.’
‘Ah that’s nice. Your father (a Colonel in the Indian Army) must not have liked them much.’
‘No, not at all. The militants refused to partake of whisky in his company, and did not attend any of the dinner parties he threw.’
After agreeing that militants were the most infernally rude people either of us had ever met, we parted ways. Not exactly the kind of stuff an Indian culture hawk would have frowned at, in any case.
-----------------------------------
Amit had also joined our class when I was in the seventh grade. Amit was not from Kashmir or Chechnya. He had spent all his life in my school. But he got through the years at a very leisurely pace. He believed that he had to spend two years for every year that less-academically-inclined students spent in a particular grade. This resulted in him being 14 when the rest of us were still eleven.
Cut to: The next year
It was sometime the next year that it happened. It was as I waddled along to school that I noticed a bit of a hullabaloo. Never one to avoid any incident that could potentially turn violent, I rushed forth. It was then that I saw it.
Nisha had begun to wear spectacles!
When some people wear spectacles, they look like Stephen Hawking. Which is all very well if all one wants to do is to be considered an intellectual giant who writes unreadable books that everyone buys anyway. But when some others wear spectacles, they get adolescent hearts to go all a-quiver. Nisha squarely fell into the latter category.
I opened my mouth, goggled, and shut it again. Nisha noticed my imitation of a halibut, and flashed a smile at me. I goggled even more. If I had a goggled a little more, I would have borne an uncanny resemblance to my principal.
I tried to speak to her about the militants in Kashmir, regarding whose social graces we had shared such similar opinions till then. But I could not get myself to speak a single word. I merely uttered a wordless goodbye and tottered away, my double chin quivering rather like Amar Singh’s*.
Though I did not know it at that time, she was, in fact, my first real crush.
If I were the kind of chap who could walk up to a lady and turn her head around with a few well-chosen words, and a cuppa at some expensive coffee pub, it would have been the work of an instant for me to profess my undying love. If, on the other hand, I were the kind of chap who could with consummate ease begin singing ‘Vennilave Vennilave, vinnai thaandi varuvaaya…’ to the object of my affection while standing slouched in a corner, it would have been the work of an instant for me to end up in the principal’s office facing charges of eve teasing.
But I was a gormless wreck who did neither, but instead tried to impress her by scoring high marks in the forthcoming Unit Tests – an endeavour which did not in any way bear fruit. She cared but little for the plump nerd who thought the way to a woman’s heart was through his Unit Test marks.
However, if the status quo had been maintained, I would have been able to resume speaking to Nisha about militants with RDX wrapped around their genitals in a few months. From there to actually getting to know her would not have taken too long.
But it was not to be. For dark clouds had begun to gather over the horizon. Dark clouds that looked suspiciously like Amit…
*Until I discovered what a gymnasium could do to one, I was rather on the corpulent side. If I hadn’t discovered a gymnasium, people would have probably noticed a distinct resemblance to Adnan Sami.
And I would have, too. If it weren’t for the fact that I am one of those poor prunes who would make a loss selling ice cream in Riyadh. And more importantly, if I had never met Nisha.
Nisha walked into our classroom in the seventh standard, a time when men were men and hated all women without exception. And therefore, nobody in particular took much notice of Nisha, except to perfunctorily note that she had spent the last three years of her life rotting in that armpit we once called Kashmir.
The only conversation I had with her that year amounted to:
‘Hi, you’re from Kashmir, aren’t you?’
‘No, I’m originally from the French territory of the Afars and the Isas. But I lived in a bunker in Kargil with Barkha Dutt for the last three years.’
‘Ah!! That explains your stupidity, and why you scream ‘I’m calling from a bunkkkker’ in the middle of classes. But that aside, have you ever met a militant?’
‘Oh yes, I have. They are all dressed in black, look like Hrithik Roshan, and walk down high street, a couple of tones of RDX strapped to their vitals.’
‘Ah that’s nice. Your father (a Colonel in the Indian Army) must not have liked them much.’
‘No, not at all. The militants refused to partake of whisky in his company, and did not attend any of the dinner parties he threw.’
After agreeing that militants were the most infernally rude people either of us had ever met, we parted ways. Not exactly the kind of stuff an Indian culture hawk would have frowned at, in any case.
-----------------------------------
Amit had also joined our class when I was in the seventh grade. Amit was not from Kashmir or Chechnya. He had spent all his life in my school. But he got through the years at a very leisurely pace. He believed that he had to spend two years for every year that less-academically-inclined students spent in a particular grade. This resulted in him being 14 when the rest of us were still eleven.
Cut to: The next year
It was sometime the next year that it happened. It was as I waddled along to school that I noticed a bit of a hullabaloo. Never one to avoid any incident that could potentially turn violent, I rushed forth. It was then that I saw it.
Nisha had begun to wear spectacles!
When some people wear spectacles, they look like Stephen Hawking. Which is all very well if all one wants to do is to be considered an intellectual giant who writes unreadable books that everyone buys anyway. But when some others wear spectacles, they get adolescent hearts to go all a-quiver. Nisha squarely fell into the latter category.
I opened my mouth, goggled, and shut it again. Nisha noticed my imitation of a halibut, and flashed a smile at me. I goggled even more. If I had a goggled a little more, I would have borne an uncanny resemblance to my principal.
I tried to speak to her about the militants in Kashmir, regarding whose social graces we had shared such similar opinions till then. But I could not get myself to speak a single word. I merely uttered a wordless goodbye and tottered away, my double chin quivering rather like Amar Singh’s*.
Though I did not know it at that time, she was, in fact, my first real crush.
If I were the kind of chap who could walk up to a lady and turn her head around with a few well-chosen words, and a cuppa at some expensive coffee pub, it would have been the work of an instant for me to profess my undying love. If, on the other hand, I were the kind of chap who could with consummate ease begin singing ‘Vennilave Vennilave, vinnai thaandi varuvaaya…’ to the object of my affection while standing slouched in a corner, it would have been the work of an instant for me to end up in the principal’s office facing charges of eve teasing.
But I was a gormless wreck who did neither, but instead tried to impress her by scoring high marks in the forthcoming Unit Tests – an endeavour which did not in any way bear fruit. She cared but little for the plump nerd who thought the way to a woman’s heart was through his Unit Test marks.
However, if the status quo had been maintained, I would have been able to resume speaking to Nisha about militants with RDX wrapped around their genitals in a few months. From there to actually getting to know her would not have taken too long.
But it was not to be. For dark clouds had begun to gather over the horizon. Dark clouds that looked suspiciously like Amit…
*Until I discovered what a gymnasium could do to one, I was rather on the corpulent side. If I hadn’t discovered a gymnasium, people would have probably noticed a distinct resemblance to Adnan Sami.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
On Terrible Tuesday...
I do feel helpless very often.
I remember most distinctly that I felt helpless when:
(a) In my second grade, a burly son of a navy sepoy named Sunil ground a seven year old self to the dust on my first day in a new school.
(b) A equally burly sixteen-year-old classmate of mine (a veteran of several failures, in his 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th grades respectively) slapped me accross the face, and threatened me with even more greivous harm if I ever talked to his 'girlfriend', ever again. My repeated attempts to point out to him that his supposed girlfriend had never spoken to him, and had at several occassions in the past, asseverated that she did not wish to ever speak to him, merely seemed to enrage him more (and impel him towards ever escalating threats, culminating in a loudly vociferated threat to murder me, and bury the pieces under the cricket pitch).
But all this is beside the point. I am merely being the flippant, vapid and irreflective flippertygibbet that several people hold me out to be. I can notice that the attention of my normally attentive readers is drifting away.
I can imagine an egg, remarking irritably to the crumpet at the next screen,
'Siddhu is such an arsehole. He never seems to be able to come to the point.'
The crumpet would, then, give a loud snort of assent, and say, 'Yeah, the idiot's trying to be flippant on terrible Tuesday. For the love of Zsa Zsa Gabor, I thought he had something important to say about the catastrophic events in Mumbai.'
The egg would probably go on to make some uncharitable remark along the lines of how he wouldn't be particularly surprised if I had thought that Terrible Tuesday was the name of a lesbian romantic comedy starring Kiera Knightley and Jennifer Aniston (Come to think of it, a movie of this nature could be just what the doctor ordered for blokes with erectile dysfunction. Though the pharmaceutical firm that manufactures Viagra would not be amused on contemplating their sales charts afterward.).
But I know exactly what Terrible Tuesday is. It was as I expended a balmy Edinburgh afternoon on vapidness and irreflectivity that my phone rang. It was my friend asking me if I'd heard of what had happened in Mumbai. The poor chap had been unable to get through to his parents.
I felt like a coolie would have, if when taking his mid-afternoon walk through the rainforest he happened to chance upon a tiger who had definitive ideas of using him for a seven-course lunch. I immediately hung up, and began to try getting through to my uncle who lives in Mumbai.
I could not get through. A call home revealed that neither my parents nor my grandmother were having any luck either. With each successive try, my desperation grew. In order to figure out what exactly was happening, I tottered into a pub, and asked the bartender brokenly to switch to BBC news.
But they were all watching the news already - mouths wide open. As I kept trying, a sympathetic-looking man next to me asked me a stupid question; so stupid, in fact, that I would not have been surprised if he were an American in disguise.
'Who on earth could have done this in India of all places, mate?'
Since I wasn't feeling particularly sunny, and did not feel at all like humouring this retard with a detailed explanation of India's geopolitical climate, I merely told him that it was an incredibly stupid question.
For a second, he was taken aback. And then he spoke, almost in a whisper, 'Do you mean...it's Al Qaeda?'
I thought of contradicting him, and telling him of the Lashkar-e-Toiba. But I could not get myself to. I merely nodded my head.
Little did I know that the man was in reality absolutely correct. It was Al Goddamn Qaeda alright!
Cut to: A few hours on
After having finally got through to my uncle and having reassured myself, I watched NDTV in a state of complete shock. I felt more helpless than I ever had in my entire life - sitting 10,000 miles away as my country burned!
As I browsed around, I stumbled upon http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com, a blog created by a bunch of intrepid young lads in Mumbai, expressly for the purpose of assisting Mumbaikars.
It was there that I found a certain person desperately trying to get through to his father. The chap had requested for assistance from others who could try. I decided to abandon my feeling of helplessness, and do what little I could, ensconsced in a comfortable chair in Edinburgh.
And I managed to get through to the chap's da.
The feeling of having contributed to helping my country when it was in distress is a joyous feeling indeed. I feel proud that, today, of all days, I chose to wear the tee shirt with the national anthem emblazoned on it.
I felt even more proud that there were so many stepping forward to help their fellow beings in this hour of need. So without attempting to sound ridiculously corny, I would like to leave whatever readers have stuck with me to this point with a few words spoken by Winston Churchill more than sixty years ago to Britons during the Second World War.
'...we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our land, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!'
Jai Hind!
I remember most distinctly that I felt helpless when:
(a) In my second grade, a burly son of a navy sepoy named Sunil ground a seven year old self to the dust on my first day in a new school.
(b) A equally burly sixteen-year-old classmate of mine (a veteran of several failures, in his 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th grades respectively) slapped me accross the face, and threatened me with even more greivous harm if I ever talked to his 'girlfriend', ever again. My repeated attempts to point out to him that his supposed girlfriend had never spoken to him, and had at several occassions in the past, asseverated that she did not wish to ever speak to him, merely seemed to enrage him more (and impel him towards ever escalating threats, culminating in a loudly vociferated threat to murder me, and bury the pieces under the cricket pitch).
But all this is beside the point. I am merely being the flippant, vapid and irreflective flippertygibbet that several people hold me out to be. I can notice that the attention of my normally attentive readers is drifting away.
I can imagine an egg, remarking irritably to the crumpet at the next screen,
'Siddhu is such an arsehole. He never seems to be able to come to the point.'
The crumpet would, then, give a loud snort of assent, and say, 'Yeah, the idiot's trying to be flippant on terrible Tuesday. For the love of Zsa Zsa Gabor, I thought he had something important to say about the catastrophic events in Mumbai.'
The egg would probably go on to make some uncharitable remark along the lines of how he wouldn't be particularly surprised if I had thought that Terrible Tuesday was the name of a lesbian romantic comedy starring Kiera Knightley and Jennifer Aniston (Come to think of it, a movie of this nature could be just what the doctor ordered for blokes with erectile dysfunction. Though the pharmaceutical firm that manufactures Viagra would not be amused on contemplating their sales charts afterward.).
But I know exactly what Terrible Tuesday is. It was as I expended a balmy Edinburgh afternoon on vapidness and irreflectivity that my phone rang. It was my friend asking me if I'd heard of what had happened in Mumbai. The poor chap had been unable to get through to his parents.
I felt like a coolie would have, if when taking his mid-afternoon walk through the rainforest he happened to chance upon a tiger who had definitive ideas of using him for a seven-course lunch. I immediately hung up, and began to try getting through to my uncle who lives in Mumbai.
I could not get through. A call home revealed that neither my parents nor my grandmother were having any luck either. With each successive try, my desperation grew. In order to figure out what exactly was happening, I tottered into a pub, and asked the bartender brokenly to switch to BBC news.
But they were all watching the news already - mouths wide open. As I kept trying, a sympathetic-looking man next to me asked me a stupid question; so stupid, in fact, that I would not have been surprised if he were an American in disguise.
'Who on earth could have done this in India of all places, mate?'
Since I wasn't feeling particularly sunny, and did not feel at all like humouring this retard with a detailed explanation of India's geopolitical climate, I merely told him that it was an incredibly stupid question.
For a second, he was taken aback. And then he spoke, almost in a whisper, 'Do you mean...it's Al Qaeda?'
I thought of contradicting him, and telling him of the Lashkar-e-Toiba. But I could not get myself to. I merely nodded my head.
Little did I know that the man was in reality absolutely correct. It was Al Goddamn Qaeda alright!
Cut to: A few hours on
After having finally got through to my uncle and having reassured myself, I watched NDTV in a state of complete shock. I felt more helpless than I ever had in my entire life - sitting 10,000 miles away as my country burned!
As I browsed around, I stumbled upon http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com, a blog created by a bunch of intrepid young lads in Mumbai, expressly for the purpose of assisting Mumbaikars.
It was there that I found a certain person desperately trying to get through to his father. The chap had requested for assistance from others who could try. I decided to abandon my feeling of helplessness, and do what little I could, ensconsced in a comfortable chair in Edinburgh.
And I managed to get through to the chap's da.
The feeling of having contributed to helping my country when it was in distress is a joyous feeling indeed. I feel proud that, today, of all days, I chose to wear the tee shirt with the national anthem emblazoned on it.
I felt even more proud that there were so many stepping forward to help their fellow beings in this hour of need. So without attempting to sound ridiculously corny, I would like to leave whatever readers have stuck with me to this point with a few words spoken by Winston Churchill more than sixty years ago to Britons during the Second World War.
'...we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our land, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!'
Jai Hind!
Monday, June 26, 2006
Hate Criminal/South Indian separatist? Not me!
I was looking through my comment space, and found a comment - which, though it raised several valid issues - which said that I was attempt to create animosity between the North and the South of my country.
I would just like to clarify a bit on that. (Digression: I just realized my blog seems to be on its way to becoming a complete drag. It's time that I begin to lighten up once again. I guess I will, immediately after this post!)
I am not in favour of another partition of India, or anything of that sort. But to deny that no animosity exists is also equally ridiculous. Human beings are divisive in nature - one just has to live awhile in the UK to see the number of divisions in this tiny little island.
I had made the previous post only after great deliberation, and after extreme provocation over a period of time. And I did so because it was the first time I had seen anything of this sort.
I studied in a Kendriya Vidyalaya, and count among my friends people from every part of India. I am fluent in four Indian languages, and if I choose not to tell, there is no way anybody IN India could say which part of it I am from. So what I had written had nothing to do with general divisions, but just a particular person. Erasing the boundary - which exists - can be done not by denying it, but by accepting it and trying to change attitudes.
As for the whole arranged/love marriage concept, I have nothing against the former. I am a product of an arranged marriage, for chrissake! But what I do have a problem with is the refusal to view women as equal, or try to view them as inferior partners - which is often the case when it comes to an arranged marriage. I also cannot agree with subordinating your own wishes or desires in order to make anybody else happy. Though if anybody chooses to do it, it is their choice. And finally, I do not agree with the concept of choosing a woman from the same caste!! I detest casteism!!
Anyway, I hope it's all done with, and I can get back to being the clown I am.
Oh, and Dhaval, I don't like Arundhati Roy because she's a raging hippie without a cause...er...welll....might as well be honest!! Because she's so successful and I'll never be as successful!!!!;)
I would just like to clarify a bit on that. (Digression: I just realized my blog seems to be on its way to becoming a complete drag. It's time that I begin to lighten up once again. I guess I will, immediately after this post!)
I am not in favour of another partition of India, or anything of that sort. But to deny that no animosity exists is also equally ridiculous. Human beings are divisive in nature - one just has to live awhile in the UK to see the number of divisions in this tiny little island.
I had made the previous post only after great deliberation, and after extreme provocation over a period of time. And I did so because it was the first time I had seen anything of this sort.
I studied in a Kendriya Vidyalaya, and count among my friends people from every part of India. I am fluent in four Indian languages, and if I choose not to tell, there is no way anybody IN India could say which part of it I am from. So what I had written had nothing to do with general divisions, but just a particular person. Erasing the boundary - which exists - can be done not by denying it, but by accepting it and trying to change attitudes.
As for the whole arranged/love marriage concept, I have nothing against the former. I am a product of an arranged marriage, for chrissake! But what I do have a problem with is the refusal to view women as equal, or try to view them as inferior partners - which is often the case when it comes to an arranged marriage. I also cannot agree with subordinating your own wishes or desires in order to make anybody else happy. Though if anybody chooses to do it, it is their choice. And finally, I do not agree with the concept of choosing a woman from the same caste!! I detest casteism!!
Anyway, I hope it's all done with, and I can get back to being the clown I am.
Oh, and Dhaval, I don't like Arundhati Roy because she's a raging hippie without a cause...er...welll....might as well be honest!! Because she's so successful and I'll never be as successful!!!!;)
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Intolerance
I was sitting down in the kitchen with a couple of friends of mine, and having an intellectual discussion, as is my wont.
It was then that my moral flatmate (regular readers may remember my allusion to him during the post on 'moral Indian girls' -- too lazy to search for the link) decided to walk in, equipped with his voice like a foghorn, and his radical Indian (read Hindu) concepts.
Some idiot was unfortunately stupid enough to start the topic of Mr. Modi's pogrom in Gujarat. My moral flatmate could no longer resist. In a voice that would have put a racecourse bookie to shame, he began to wax eloquent on the evil that Muslims represent, and how the liquidation of Muslims would be a perfectly logical thing to do.
I listened to him, though trying to cover my ears (I could have heard him perfectly clearly a mile away), wax eloquent on joint families, how cheating the Indian government of its taxes was completely legitimate, how arranged marriages where the girl was chosen by the chappie from a list was perfectly legitimate, and how Muslims were the scum of the earth. I was tempted on ten different occassions to interrupt him for I found the following unacceptable:
a) His treatment (both in speech and real life) of women as commodities.
b) His belief that Muslims, who are as Indian as me or you, were in some way subhuman. In fact if he were white and anti-semitic instead, Hitler would have embraced him with a jolly Seig Heil for his intolerance.
c) How he felt bilking the Indian government by not even bothering to pay his taxes was perfectly legitimate. As an Indian, I found that bleedin' disgusting. It's the progeny of rich, uneducated, brown trash businessmen, like him (who have no qualms in griping about the state of indian roads - which are built out of taxes that these arseholes don't pay) that have got India to where it is today.
d) His murder of the English language. For chrissake, English is a National Language, and as an educated Indian (in the UK, for heaven's sake), one would expect him to have a rudimentary grasp. Messrs Wren and Martin would have turned in their respective graves at some of his sentences - 'The government are slapeing me in the faace. I am not tax payment.'
e) His belief (though not expressed at the moment; expressed several times in the past) that South Indians were black, ugly, subhuman, unintelligent, and incapable of speaking in Hindi.
f) His equally uneducated, ignorant and bigoted belief that South India = Madras (mispronounced), Idly, Sambar (mispronounced) and useless.
About an hour later into his monologue (which probably kept half the building awake), when he was by implication damning my 'disgustingly Western liberal' parents, and their 'filthy western' concept of a nuclear family (and their willingness to allow me to choose my bride), I could take it no more.
Primarily because his voice, never pleasant, had begun to grate on me, and secondarily because his bigotry was unbearable.
I said, 'Dude, arranged marriage is like a VB application with radio buttons. Select the girl you want - only one selection allowed - and click OK. The girl's wishes be damned. She's a girl after all.'. In Hindi - so that he could understand it as well.
He then glared at me, and began a prolonged attack on my family values - and the immorality of a family that had brought me up to actually respect a woman's choice as much as a man's. The filth of a family that actually told me that it was okay to decide for myself whom I would spend the rest of my life with. Citing specific examples of what he thought my near and dear were like, with the caveat that he was not attempting to offend me. While he was doing so all along.
But I did not react. I had become quite used to the bigoted attacks of him and his acolytes.
Over the past one year, I have had my friends back home called black and ugly because they're South Indian. I've had my mother tongue ridiculed and made fun of. I have listened to several jokes the butt of which was the colour of South Indian skin. I have had everything that I value and hold close to my heart made the butt of a tasteless, racist 'joke'.
He continued, this time on Muslims.
I have Muslim friends. They are Indians. In fact, they are more Indian than this racist bigot. They are my friends. They have never ridiculed me. I do not wish to see them slaughtered by people of my flatmate's ilk.
Everytime he starts off on his (perfectly rationally and calmly spoken) ideas of a pogrom against Indian muslims, I think of Sam. I think of Imran. I think of Shadab who carved 'India' on his forearm with his blood! I think of my President, who is much more of a man, and much much more of an Indian than him! I think of every Indian who just happens to be Muslim, and who has to face people of this kind in their country just because of their religious beliefs!!!
At some point, something snapped within me. I asked him how he would feel if after 9/11 the Americans decided that every brown person was a terrorist, and began to slaughter his beloved Patels.
He glared at me and started screaming,
'Shut up! You are offending me!! It is my caste (sic)! Take it back'
He said it three times - the last time he said, Tony Blair probably woke up with a start at 10 Downing, wondering what on earth the racket was!
I screamed an 'Ok fine, I'm sorry. Happy now?'
He picked up this pint glass full of water, and glared menacingly at me. For a minute, I expected him to throw it at me. He could, with one stone (or glass, in this case) disfigure a subhuman, black South Indian, a person who considered women equal (!!), and a creature who thought Muslims were Indian.
A part of me wishes he had thrown it at me. I may have bled, but then he would have seen that Great Britain is not India (where his rich father could get him off the hook after having assaulted a fellow citizen). He may hve understood that you do not go about preaching hate and assaulting people who disagree with you.
But he did not. He threw the glass onto the ground, smashing it into a million pieces. And he stormed out of the room, screaming, 'YOU DO NOT INSULT PATELS!'
The chap probably knew too little English to understand that I had not in any way insulted his Pateldom. Patels are as Indian as me. A Patel, to a rational mind, is no different from a Warrier, an Iyer, or an Asghar Ali. But, ah well!
I just had to blog about this.
When I stepped into Europe, I was scared. I was scared of racism. I was scared of white people throwing stones at me and beating me up because I was a brown Paki.
But in the one year I have stayed here, I have never once been insulted by a white man or woman. They have always treated me as their social and intellectual equals. I have never once been called a 'Paki' by a white man. I have never once been called a 'Darkie' or any other racist slur by a white man.
But I have been called a 'Kaala Madrasi' several times by my own countrymen. I have had to tolerate them teaching a foreign woman the word (without telling her the meaning).
I have had my fellow countrymen look at photos of my family and friends back home, only to comment on how black and ugly they look. I have heard them speak of how filthy a Tamilian (read South Indian) is. I cannot take this anymore. I have never felt so racially discriminated against as I have in the past one year. I spent an entire semester hanging out outside my flat - with white people (!!!!) - to avoid the racial slurs and discrimination. I spent an entire semester eating outside as I could not digest the insults and humiliation I have had to face for my ethnicity and my opinions whenever I entered our common kitchen. I have had to listen to humiliating innuendos being made about the relationship between a good female friend of mine and myself!
There must be something wrong if my own countrymen treat me the worst.
P.S: I spoke to a Tamilian friend of mine -- an extremely intelligent and erudite economist -- the other day. I asked him, 'Where have you faced greater racism? Here in the UK, or in Gujarat where you lived?'
His answer was immediate, 'Gujarat!'
It was then that my moral flatmate (regular readers may remember my allusion to him during the post on 'moral Indian girls' -- too lazy to search for the link) decided to walk in, equipped with his voice like a foghorn, and his radical Indian (read Hindu) concepts.
Some idiot was unfortunately stupid enough to start the topic of Mr. Modi's pogrom in Gujarat. My moral flatmate could no longer resist. In a voice that would have put a racecourse bookie to shame, he began to wax eloquent on the evil that Muslims represent, and how the liquidation of Muslims would be a perfectly logical thing to do.
I listened to him, though trying to cover my ears (I could have heard him perfectly clearly a mile away), wax eloquent on joint families, how cheating the Indian government of its taxes was completely legitimate, how arranged marriages where the girl was chosen by the chappie from a list was perfectly legitimate, and how Muslims were the scum of the earth. I was tempted on ten different occassions to interrupt him for I found the following unacceptable:
a) His treatment (both in speech and real life) of women as commodities.
b) His belief that Muslims, who are as Indian as me or you, were in some way subhuman. In fact if he were white and anti-semitic instead, Hitler would have embraced him with a jolly Seig Heil for his intolerance.
c) How he felt bilking the Indian government by not even bothering to pay his taxes was perfectly legitimate. As an Indian, I found that bleedin' disgusting. It's the progeny of rich, uneducated, brown trash businessmen, like him (who have no qualms in griping about the state of indian roads - which are built out of taxes that these arseholes don't pay) that have got India to where it is today.
d) His murder of the English language. For chrissake, English is a National Language, and as an educated Indian (in the UK, for heaven's sake), one would expect him to have a rudimentary grasp. Messrs Wren and Martin would have turned in their respective graves at some of his sentences - 'The government are slapeing me in the faace. I am not tax payment.'
e) His belief (though not expressed at the moment; expressed several times in the past) that South Indians were black, ugly, subhuman, unintelligent, and incapable of speaking in Hindi.
f) His equally uneducated, ignorant and bigoted belief that South India = Madras (mispronounced), Idly, Sambar (mispronounced) and useless.
About an hour later into his monologue (which probably kept half the building awake), when he was by implication damning my 'disgustingly Western liberal' parents, and their 'filthy western' concept of a nuclear family (and their willingness to allow me to choose my bride), I could take it no more.
Primarily because his voice, never pleasant, had begun to grate on me, and secondarily because his bigotry was unbearable.
I said, 'Dude, arranged marriage is like a VB application with radio buttons. Select the girl you want - only one selection allowed - and click OK. The girl's wishes be damned. She's a girl after all.'. In Hindi - so that he could understand it as well.
He then glared at me, and began a prolonged attack on my family values - and the immorality of a family that had brought me up to actually respect a woman's choice as much as a man's. The filth of a family that actually told me that it was okay to decide for myself whom I would spend the rest of my life with. Citing specific examples of what he thought my near and dear were like, with the caveat that he was not attempting to offend me. While he was doing so all along.
But I did not react. I had become quite used to the bigoted attacks of him and his acolytes.
Over the past one year, I have had my friends back home called black and ugly because they're South Indian. I've had my mother tongue ridiculed and made fun of. I have listened to several jokes the butt of which was the colour of South Indian skin. I have had everything that I value and hold close to my heart made the butt of a tasteless, racist 'joke'.
He continued, this time on Muslims.
I have Muslim friends. They are Indians. In fact, they are more Indian than this racist bigot. They are my friends. They have never ridiculed me. I do not wish to see them slaughtered by people of my flatmate's ilk.
Everytime he starts off on his (perfectly rationally and calmly spoken) ideas of a pogrom against Indian muslims, I think of Sam. I think of Imran. I think of Shadab who carved 'India' on his forearm with his blood! I think of my President, who is much more of a man, and much much more of an Indian than him! I think of every Indian who just happens to be Muslim, and who has to face people of this kind in their country just because of their religious beliefs!!!
At some point, something snapped within me. I asked him how he would feel if after 9/11 the Americans decided that every brown person was a terrorist, and began to slaughter his beloved Patels.
He glared at me and started screaming,
'Shut up! You are offending me!! It is my caste (sic)! Take it back'
He said it three times - the last time he said, Tony Blair probably woke up with a start at 10 Downing, wondering what on earth the racket was!
I screamed an 'Ok fine, I'm sorry. Happy now?'
He picked up this pint glass full of water, and glared menacingly at me. For a minute, I expected him to throw it at me. He could, with one stone (or glass, in this case) disfigure a subhuman, black South Indian, a person who considered women equal (!!), and a creature who thought Muslims were Indian.
A part of me wishes he had thrown it at me. I may have bled, but then he would have seen that Great Britain is not India (where his rich father could get him off the hook after having assaulted a fellow citizen). He may hve understood that you do not go about preaching hate and assaulting people who disagree with you.
But he did not. He threw the glass onto the ground, smashing it into a million pieces. And he stormed out of the room, screaming, 'YOU DO NOT INSULT PATELS!'
The chap probably knew too little English to understand that I had not in any way insulted his Pateldom. Patels are as Indian as me. A Patel, to a rational mind, is no different from a Warrier, an Iyer, or an Asghar Ali. But, ah well!
I just had to blog about this.
When I stepped into Europe, I was scared. I was scared of racism. I was scared of white people throwing stones at me and beating me up because I was a brown Paki.
But in the one year I have stayed here, I have never once been insulted by a white man or woman. They have always treated me as their social and intellectual equals. I have never once been called a 'Paki' by a white man. I have never once been called a 'Darkie' or any other racist slur by a white man.
But I have been called a 'Kaala Madrasi' several times by my own countrymen. I have had to tolerate them teaching a foreign woman the word (without telling her the meaning).
I have had my fellow countrymen look at photos of my family and friends back home, only to comment on how black and ugly they look. I have heard them speak of how filthy a Tamilian (read South Indian) is. I cannot take this anymore. I have never felt so racially discriminated against as I have in the past one year. I spent an entire semester hanging out outside my flat - with white people (!!!!) - to avoid the racial slurs and discrimination. I spent an entire semester eating outside as I could not digest the insults and humiliation I have had to face for my ethnicity and my opinions whenever I entered our common kitchen. I have had to listen to humiliating innuendos being made about the relationship between a good female friend of mine and myself!
There must be something wrong if my own countrymen treat me the worst.
P.S: I spoke to a Tamilian friend of mine -- an extremely intelligent and erudite economist -- the other day. I asked him, 'Where have you faced greater racism? Here in the UK, or in Gujarat where you lived?'
His answer was immediate, 'Gujarat!'
Friday, June 16, 2006
Eurotrip -Part I
As I have tirelessly reminded my (pitifully few) readers over the past few weeks or so, I am just back from what I euphemistically call a Eurotrip. However, if any one of you has watched that timeless classic, it was absolutely nothing like the movie. Though I did rather loudly claim that my Aryan ancestors left the Caucasus because they could not stand the sexual licentiousness of those of my ancestors who ultimately moved to Europe, I did not do anything to reclaim as my right some crazy European sex. However, I did buy a book titled ‘The A-Z of being Single’ – not that it has anything to do with crazy European sex. (If you didn’t get a word of what I just said, watch Eurotrip!)
In any case, it was a bright, pleasant Glaswegian morning when I got onto the BA Connect flight to Paris. I was expecting a large, spacious airbus with young, pretty hostesses to take me to the city of romance. But what the (&&(*&*( at British Airways gave me was a small tinderbox of a plane that was once used in World War II by paratroopers – which additionally stopped at a place called Birmingham where they charge you 4.5 pounds for a single burger. Oh well, it’s cheaper than the exorbitant rates charged inflight.
Two more uncomfortable hours later, I was in Paris – the sex, romance and tramp capital of the world (er…make that the sex and romance capital of the world. Calcutta is still the tramp capital of the world). A few minutes later, I learnt three things:
a) The French don’t speak English.
b) The French don’t like speaking English.
c) The French in the Lonely Planet Guide was insufficient to get me to the toilet, let alone a place called Porte de Bagniolet somewhere in the middle of Paris.
However, sign language was to be my saviour all the while I was in France. That, ‘Pardon, Monseuir. Parle vous Anglais, sil vous plait?’, ‘Merci’ (if the answer to the above was yes), and ‘Nik ta mer’ (if the answer to the first question was no…I’m kidding!!!)
I went up to the ticket counter and signaled – using complex movements of my head, arms and legs – that I wished to get a train to someplace where I’d find the famed Paris metro. It worked, and the woman skinned me for 8 euros before giving me a ticket.
Where one arrives when one gets off the train which starts at Charles de Gaulle airport (pronounced nothing like how a normal person would read it) is another station called Gare du Nord (which I think means station of the north, assuming they misspelled North).
The French make one concession to those of us who are stupid enough to not have learned a word of French. They coloured the metro lines – and red, blue and green are presumably the same everywhere in the world.
However my requests for where I could find the ‘dirty green’ line were met with puzzled stares.
In any case, we managed to find our way to the Youth hostel, stopping to ask for directions only sixteen times along the way. The Youth hostel, we learnt, was located just outside the Peripherique, which is a kind of ring road around Paris. The significance of this seemingly trivial fact is that the law outside the Peripherique bears several similarities to the law of the jungle. I realized that as soon as I saw some African bruddas drinking their beer noisily on the footpath, all the while directing strange looks at the two foreigners who’d stepped off onto the streets.
!Digression!
An interesting observation I made about my bruddas in Paris was that they dressed exactly like my bruddas down on 8 mile road. I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if one of them began to rap freestyle and scream, ‘De 811, nigga, and the 313, nigga – dis is de free world, muddafucka’ while brandishing his gat. International black subculture, I guess – they all look so bloody cool! Being cool seems to come as naturally to Africans in the West as saying ‘Where is the party yaarrr? This pub is jhakaasss, b***c***!’ louldly, and dancing like hippopotami come to us Indians (those of us from down south being particularly proficient at the last).
And we wonder why we don’t get any!
!End digression!
Since it was just about six in the evening, and because France wasn’t Britain (where everything except places to get drunk in and stab your neighbour close down at half past five), we decided to go to the Eiffel Tower.
The Eiffel Tower
If I were the chappie that ran the Eiffel tower (in a manner of speaking, of course, as the Eiffel Tower generally prefers to stay put), I would have called it the Eiffel queue. A few minutes after I had got the mandatory snap of me in front of the tower, I had managed to squeeze myself into the queue, in between a Romanian family having a family row (unfortunately in Romanian – nothing is more entertaining than a family row in a language you can understand) and an Indian family that was trying to break the queue and squeeze along to where their parents-in-law had ‘caught a place for them’.
The Indian family managed to achieve the impossible, leaving me all aglow at the thought that wherever in the world one was, nobody is as adept at breaking simple, easy-to-follow rules as an Indian.
After about thirty minutes of waiting, I managed to get out of the queue waiting to buy tickets to enter the Eiffel Tower and into the queue of people waiting to enter the Eiffel Tower after having bought the tickets. Another thirty minutes later, I had managed to progress onto the queue of people waiting to enter the lift to get to the first level.
We spent a moment contemplating the price tags on the garishly lit (and overpriced) ‘official’ souvenirs of the Eiffel Tower – which cost merely twice as much as the equally garish unofficial souvenirs sold by the Indians, Algerians and Africans outside the Eiffel Tower. That and a few more photographs later, we joined the queue to get on to the lift to the second level.
A few (more breathtaking) photographs at the second level later, I decided to go upto the top level, asking my cousin (who has vertigo) to wait for me here for a few minutes. I spent thirty minutes waiting to get onto the lift to the third level. As soon as I reached the head of the queue, I realized that this was, in fact, the queue to get down to the first level and the queue to get on to the third level was the mass of human beings at the other end of the tower. But never let it be said that the Warrier soul is one that admits defeat. For I stood in the ‘real’ queue for three-quarters of an hour, arguing with an American chappie about which one of us could take the cold better.
American: ‘I’m telling yaa, in Arizona where I come from, the temperature goes all the way down to the twenties and thirties.’
Me: (scoffs) ‘Ha! In India where I come from, the temperature never goes above the forties – and the nights are often in the twenties. In fact, in Edinburgh where I live now, the temperature sometimes drops below zero.’
The American stared at me incredulously.
‘Edinburgh warn’t that cold, y’know!’
‘Ha, that’s cuz you went in the summer. In the winter, it was -5 degrees Celsius.’, I retorted, and thought for a minute if I should add a bit about how I felt my most private parts turning into ice.
‘Whassat?’
‘-5 degrees Celsius. 5 degrees below freezing!’, said I, proudly.
‘5 below freezing? That’s 27 degrees, dude!’
I realized he was talking in the Fahrenheit scale!
Bah, Americans!!!
I ultimately managed to get all the way to the top and was happily snapping photographs of the river Seine, when I observed this young Indian couple on a honeymoon lovingly carving their names, ‘Divya and Devasahayam’ on the railing. I could not help but think, ‘Ah, now all you’ve got to do is piss on the railing, mate – and you’ve recreated Fatehpur Sikri in Paris, thank you very much!’. But I did not bother to intervene till I saw the idiots begin to carve ‘INDIA’ in big letters across the railing.
That was too bloody much – the fecking philistines! (as an Irishman would have said it – assuming the aforementioned Irishman knew the word philistines)
‘Excuse me, you may wish to consign your names to infamy, but can you please spare our country the ignominy?’
‘What?’, said the man belligerently.
‘Stop carving MY country’s name on the Eiffel Tower. I don’t want them to think that all Indians are mindless idiots who deface monuments.’
‘None of your business’, said the man.
‘I’m calling that chap over there who’s supposed to be looking after the monitor. Enjoy yourself with the French gendarmerie. They are about as gentle as the Indian police.’
The man immediately apologized and disappeared, probably thinking deep dark thoughts. I wonder if he wrote ‘India’ at the other end of the Eiffel Tower, as the arsejackers in the picture here have.
An hour and two queues later, I joined my cousin at the second level and we began our walk down the Eiffel Tower, sick as we were of waiting in queues for lifts. After this, we decided to eat at an elegant little Parisian bistro where I ordered some godawesome steak and learnt the nuances of French pronunciation from a decidedly insane waiter who spent 60% of his time smoking cigarettes and the other 40% dancing about the tables – I would have protested, but what with strikes being as much the mood of the moment in France as it has always been in Kerala, I didn’t – though I almost missed the last metro of the day thanks to fifty minutes spent waiting for the bill (or the check, as my cousin seems to call it! :P )
To be continued, if junta don't find this stupefyingly boring
In any case, it was a bright, pleasant Glaswegian morning when I got onto the BA Connect flight to Paris. I was expecting a large, spacious airbus with young, pretty hostesses to take me to the city of romance. But what the (&&(*&*( at British Airways gave me was a small tinderbox of a plane that was once used in World War II by paratroopers – which additionally stopped at a place called Birmingham where they charge you 4.5 pounds for a single burger. Oh well, it’s cheaper than the exorbitant rates charged inflight.
Two more uncomfortable hours later, I was in Paris – the sex, romance and tramp capital of the world (er…make that the sex and romance capital of the world. Calcutta is still the tramp capital of the world). A few minutes later, I learnt three things:
a) The French don’t speak English.
b) The French don’t like speaking English.
c) The French in the Lonely Planet Guide was insufficient to get me to the toilet, let alone a place called Porte de Bagniolet somewhere in the middle of Paris.
However, sign language was to be my saviour all the while I was in France. That, ‘Pardon, Monseuir. Parle vous Anglais, sil vous plait?’, ‘Merci’ (if the answer to the above was yes), and ‘Nik ta mer’ (if the answer to the first question was no…I’m kidding!!!)
I went up to the ticket counter and signaled – using complex movements of my head, arms and legs – that I wished to get a train to someplace where I’d find the famed Paris metro. It worked, and the woman skinned me for 8 euros before giving me a ticket.
Where one arrives when one gets off the train which starts at Charles de Gaulle airport (pronounced nothing like how a normal person would read it) is another station called Gare du Nord (which I think means station of the north, assuming they misspelled North).
The French make one concession to those of us who are stupid enough to not have learned a word of French. They coloured the metro lines – and red, blue and green are presumably the same everywhere in the world.
However my requests for where I could find the ‘dirty green’ line were met with puzzled stares.
In any case, we managed to find our way to the Youth hostel, stopping to ask for directions only sixteen times along the way. The Youth hostel, we learnt, was located just outside the Peripherique, which is a kind of ring road around Paris. The significance of this seemingly trivial fact is that the law outside the Peripherique bears several similarities to the law of the jungle. I realized that as soon as I saw some African bruddas drinking their beer noisily on the footpath, all the while directing strange looks at the two foreigners who’d stepped off onto the streets.
!Digression!
An interesting observation I made about my bruddas in Paris was that they dressed exactly like my bruddas down on 8 mile road. I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if one of them began to rap freestyle and scream, ‘De 811, nigga, and the 313, nigga – dis is de free world, muddafucka’ while brandishing his gat. International black subculture, I guess – they all look so bloody cool! Being cool seems to come as naturally to Africans in the West as saying ‘Where is the party yaarrr? This pub is jhakaasss, b***c***!’ louldly, and dancing like hippopotami come to us Indians (those of us from down south being particularly proficient at the last).
And we wonder why we don’t get any!
!End digression!
Since it was just about six in the evening, and because France wasn’t Britain (where everything except places to get drunk in and stab your neighbour close down at half past five), we decided to go to the Eiffel Tower.
The Eiffel Tower
If I were the chappie that ran the Eiffel tower (in a manner of speaking, of course, as the Eiffel Tower generally prefers to stay put), I would have called it the Eiffel queue. A few minutes after I had got the mandatory snap of me in front of the tower, I had managed to squeeze myself into the queue, in between a Romanian family having a family row (unfortunately in Romanian – nothing is more entertaining than a family row in a language you can understand) and an Indian family that was trying to break the queue and squeeze along to where their parents-in-law had ‘caught a place for them’.
The Indian family managed to achieve the impossible, leaving me all aglow at the thought that wherever in the world one was, nobody is as adept at breaking simple, easy-to-follow rules as an Indian.
After about thirty minutes of waiting, I managed to get out of the queue waiting to buy tickets to enter the Eiffel Tower and into the queue of people waiting to enter the Eiffel Tower after having bought the tickets. Another thirty minutes later, I had managed to progress onto the queue of people waiting to enter the lift to get to the first level.
We spent a moment contemplating the price tags on the garishly lit (and overpriced) ‘official’ souvenirs of the Eiffel Tower – which cost merely twice as much as the equally garish unofficial souvenirs sold by the Indians, Algerians and Africans outside the Eiffel Tower. That and a few more photographs later, we joined the queue to get on to the lift to the second level.
A few (more breathtaking) photographs at the second level later, I decided to go upto the top level, asking my cousin (who has vertigo) to wait for me here for a few minutes. I spent thirty minutes waiting to get onto the lift to the third level. As soon as I reached the head of the queue, I realized that this was, in fact, the queue to get down to the first level and the queue to get on to the third level was the mass of human beings at the other end of the tower. But never let it be said that the Warrier soul is one that admits defeat. For I stood in the ‘real’ queue for three-quarters of an hour, arguing with an American chappie about which one of us could take the cold better.
American: ‘I’m telling yaa, in Arizona where I come from, the temperature goes all the way down to the twenties and thirties.’
Me: (scoffs) ‘Ha! In India where I come from, the temperature never goes above the forties – and the nights are often in the twenties. In fact, in Edinburgh where I live now, the temperature sometimes drops below zero.’
The American stared at me incredulously.
‘Edinburgh warn’t that cold, y’know!’
‘Ha, that’s cuz you went in the summer. In the winter, it was -5 degrees Celsius.’, I retorted, and thought for a minute if I should add a bit about how I felt my most private parts turning into ice.
‘Whassat?’
‘-5 degrees Celsius. 5 degrees below freezing!’, said I, proudly.
‘5 below freezing? That’s 27 degrees, dude!’
I realized he was talking in the Fahrenheit scale!
Bah, Americans!!!
I ultimately managed to get all the way to the top and was happily snapping photographs of the river Seine, when I observed this young Indian couple on a honeymoon lovingly carving their names, ‘Divya and Devasahayam’ on the railing. I could not help but think, ‘Ah, now all you’ve got to do is piss on the railing, mate – and you’ve recreated Fatehpur Sikri in Paris, thank you very much!’. But I did not bother to intervene till I saw the idiots begin to carve ‘INDIA’ in big letters across the railing.
That was too bloody much – the fecking philistines! (as an Irishman would have said it – assuming the aforementioned Irishman knew the word philistines)
‘Excuse me, you may wish to consign your names to infamy, but can you please spare our country the ignominy?’
‘What?’, said the man belligerently.
‘Stop carving MY country’s name on the Eiffel Tower. I don’t want them to think that all Indians are mindless idiots who deface monuments.’
‘None of your business’, said the man.
‘I’m calling that chap over there who’s supposed to be looking after the monitor. Enjoy yourself with the French gendarmerie. They are about as gentle as the Indian police.’
The man immediately apologized and disappeared, probably thinking deep dark thoughts. I wonder if he wrote ‘India’ at the other end of the Eiffel Tower, as the arsejackers in the picture here have.
An hour and two queues later, I joined my cousin at the second level and we began our walk down the Eiffel Tower, sick as we were of waiting in queues for lifts. After this, we decided to eat at an elegant little Parisian bistro where I ordered some godawesome steak and learnt the nuances of French pronunciation from a decidedly insane waiter who spent 60% of his time smoking cigarettes and the other 40% dancing about the tables – I would have protested, but what with strikes being as much the mood of the moment in France as it has always been in Kerala, I didn’t – though I almost missed the last metro of the day thanks to fifty minutes spent waiting for the bill (or the check, as my cousin seems to call it! :P )
To be continued, if junta don't find this stupefyingly boring
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
A Close Encounter with the Rowdy Kind - Part II
For the first week of what Mrs. Peters had referred to as my close association with Kaveri, things moved smoothly. I managed to speak less than a trappist monk normally would, and if I did at any time have to speak to her, I managed to keep my gaze affixed on some convenient wall in the middle distance. Kaveri had, after three days of my company, probably decided that I was either
The day of the open house dawned. Those of us who were unfortunate enough to have been press-ganged into presenting research (which in my case consisted of a collection of posters which included weak anagrams, and a few words I had stolen out of the Word Power section of a Readers Digest issue from the 1950s) to children with water in the brain woke up early in the morning and made the arduous journey to college through pot-holed roads. Others who had avoided their lecturers’ eyes got away with two days spent lazing around, flicking through the television channels hoping to stumble upon some Mallu porn. There were still others, mostly of the porikki kind, who saw this as an opportunity to stagger drunk (even more than usual) into campus and ogle any schoolgirls who happened to stray their way.
It was about two in the afternoon when my worst nightmare began to unfold. I had hoped that Amar and co, tired after having consumed a full three-quarters of Kandan wines’ stock, had gone home to dream sweet dreams of dancing in the rain with Simran. But they had merely been invigorated by the best that Mr. Kandan had to offer.
Of Mr. Kandan the man, little is known. He may or may not have consorted with the prostitutes in Kodambakkam, contributed to the coffers of the DMK, or been kind to children. But of Mr. Kandan, the purveyor of alcohol, paens have been sung by engineering college students over the years. He may not have been willing to extend credit to even the most regular of his customers, but the alcohol he supplied definitely did pack a punch.
It was with a full litre of organic compounds sloshing about within them that Amar stepped into the room allotted the English department. I muttered a quick prayer, commended my soul to God and hoped I’d been following the right religion all along when I suddenly realized Amar paid me no more attention than a dog would a bone when offered a rump steak instead. He and his goons marched towards Kaveri and spoke,
‘Aey! We wanttt to see…this ejjibishun.’
Kaveri merely glowered.
‘Aena dee summa vaekapaddarae…kaami dee!!’ (Why are you pretending to be shy? Just show it to me!)
The acolytes guffawed at the double entendre.
Kaveri took them to the first poster and began to explain what an anagram was. Robert Langdon would have possibly done a better job, but given the circumstances, Professor Langdon would have been hard-pressed to keep the attention of the current audience from wavering. Kaveri, on the other hand, faced no such problem. Amar and his friends were very attentive – their eyes never strayed from her breasts even for a moment.
After about the third poster, something snapped within Kaveri. If at this moment she had taken it upon herself to kick Amar in the solar plexus, nothing would have ensued except severe embarrassment for the same (though he may possibly have gone out and ridden his Splendor over a few dozen arms and legs in revenge). But what she did was completely inexplicable.
She turned to me and said loudly,
‘Siddhu, why are these fellows troubling me? DO Something!’
Those who have seen me know I am no He-man. Us Warriers have always been cerebral people – I would probably have worsted Amar in a debate on American policy in Afghanistan, but a fistfight was another story altogether.
I squirmed, and wished I had left earlier when I had had the chance. For now, all the porikis turned towards me.
‘Dai Peterae!! Watha ingae vaada, ommallae!!’ (Yo Englishman! Fucking come here you motherfucker)
All I could mutter was a ‘Anna, enna aachu?’ (Big brother, what’s wrong?)
Amar decided at that moment to walk towards me. He placed a very firm hand on my collar.
I tried to smile one of my winning smiles. But Amar did not seem to be in the mood for winning smiles.
‘Enna da illikirae, tevidiya paiyya!!???’ (Untranslatable really, but I’m sure non-Tamil speakers get my drift)
I had always imagined that it was only in the movies that a single hand gripping the collar of a shirt could left an entire human being up. I realized at that moment that the movies weren’t lying. I squirmed as I tried to get my feet back on terra firma.
‘Annaa…’, I bleated.
‘Unnakku aval koodai enna paechu? Watha Englishillae avaltae kadala podariyaada?’ (Why are you speaking to her? Are you flirting with her in ENGLISH????)
‘Illae Anna – enakku avalae theriyaadu.’ (No, big brother, I do not even know her)
‘Honestly, I haven’t done anything. I’m not interested in her!’, I almost screamed, as my neck had begun to hurt and I was worried my shirt would be torn in two ere long.
‘DAIIIII!!! ENGLISSILAE PAESEE BAYAMPUDATARIYAA…?’ (Are you trying to scare me with your English?)
I realized that all I could do was take what was coming to me, and silently cursed all womankind in the unkindest of words. It was then that my guardian angel came through.
Robin was a porikki alright, but with me he had been a genial old soul ever since the day in the first year I gifted him a packet of cigarettes and spoke to him in Malayalam.
He walked towards Amar and said,
‘Machi, freeyavidu! Ivan namma paiyyan da.’ (Dude, leave him alone! He’s part of our gang!’ – to translate loosely. Though this is not exactly what it means. A namma paiyyan is actually a chap – usually far removed from the gang – to whom a gang member feels a patronizing affection towards. To be a namma paiyyan is quite useful, especially in situations like these.)
Amar reluctantly put me down and warned me not to even lay an eye upon her. I wondered idly, as I straightened my collar, if this disallowed me from tearing Kaveri apart into little pieces, and the little pieces into littler pieces, while laughing a maniacal laugh all the time. I decided that asking this of Amar would be imprudent. He wanted to sing Vaadi en manmatha raasa to an undivided Kaveri; not one that had been disemboweled.
I disappeared from the room and the campus as quickly as I could, and did not return till the next day whereupon I had to listen to Mrs. Peters talk for an hour of how devotion to the cause among India’s youth had been steadily diminishing since the Battle of Plassey in 1757 (where she purportedly carried the wounded off the battlefield).
But I was merely thankful that my ordeal had ended without a Hero Honda Splendor running over my forearm, and smiled beatifically as she berated me.
This story clearly explains to every pretty woman who’s ever wondered why I didn’t ask her or anyone else out. I may be free, single and good-looking, ladies, but not necessarily of my own volition. A slightly built ‘Peter’ has to make sacrifices to survive on Chennai’s mean streets.
Siddhu Warrier now lives 10,000 kilometres from Chennai, and has not seen a single poriki singing a lowe song in the last 10 months. Additionally, he has not been called Peter once during the same period. However, he is still single and cannot understand it. Pretty women are invited to rectify this sad situation by sending him an e-mail at ineedlowe@adultfriendfinder.com. He additionally guarantees that he no longer lives under the delusion that the navel is where a woman’s G-spot is, and knows all about sex from watching Discovery Channel everyday.
P.S: In case you were wondering if you were safe from porikidom after you’re going steady with a woman, think twice. A friend of mine was once approached by a poriki with a request (or more precisely, an order) to supply his girlfriend for a period of six months so that he (the poriki) could have a bit of fun for himself. The poriki, being a particularly nice poriki, promised to return her clean, (possibly a little tired), and definitely-not-pregnant at the end of the stipulated period of exchange.
And no, I’m not making this up!
P.P.S: I’ve been writing a travelogue of my trip across Western Europe. I was wondering if the readers (if any) would prefer me posting it here, or creating a new travel blog for it.
- homosexual,
- incapable of speaking to the opposite sex, or
- possessed by one of those women who call themselves girlfriends, but would have been referred to as keepers in a less politically correct world.
The day of the open house dawned. Those of us who were unfortunate enough to have been press-ganged into presenting research (which in my case consisted of a collection of posters which included weak anagrams, and a few words I had stolen out of the Word Power section of a Readers Digest issue from the 1950s) to children with water in the brain woke up early in the morning and made the arduous journey to college through pot-holed roads. Others who had avoided their lecturers’ eyes got away with two days spent lazing around, flicking through the television channels hoping to stumble upon some Mallu porn. There were still others, mostly of the porikki kind, who saw this as an opportunity to stagger drunk (even more than usual) into campus and ogle any schoolgirls who happened to stray their way.
It was about two in the afternoon when my worst nightmare began to unfold. I had hoped that Amar and co, tired after having consumed a full three-quarters of Kandan wines’ stock, had gone home to dream sweet dreams of dancing in the rain with Simran. But they had merely been invigorated by the best that Mr. Kandan had to offer.
Of Mr. Kandan the man, little is known. He may or may not have consorted with the prostitutes in Kodambakkam, contributed to the coffers of the DMK, or been kind to children. But of Mr. Kandan, the purveyor of alcohol, paens have been sung by engineering college students over the years. He may not have been willing to extend credit to even the most regular of his customers, but the alcohol he supplied definitely did pack a punch.
It was with a full litre of organic compounds sloshing about within them that Amar stepped into the room allotted the English department. I muttered a quick prayer, commended my soul to God and hoped I’d been following the right religion all along when I suddenly realized Amar paid me no more attention than a dog would a bone when offered a rump steak instead. He and his goons marched towards Kaveri and spoke,
‘Aey! We wanttt to see…this ejjibishun.’
Kaveri merely glowered.
‘Aena dee summa vaekapaddarae…kaami dee!!’ (Why are you pretending to be shy? Just show it to me!)
The acolytes guffawed at the double entendre.
Kaveri took them to the first poster and began to explain what an anagram was. Robert Langdon would have possibly done a better job, but given the circumstances, Professor Langdon would have been hard-pressed to keep the attention of the current audience from wavering. Kaveri, on the other hand, faced no such problem. Amar and his friends were very attentive – their eyes never strayed from her breasts even for a moment.
After about the third poster, something snapped within Kaveri. If at this moment she had taken it upon herself to kick Amar in the solar plexus, nothing would have ensued except severe embarrassment for the same (though he may possibly have gone out and ridden his Splendor over a few dozen arms and legs in revenge). But what she did was completely inexplicable.
She turned to me and said loudly,
‘Siddhu, why are these fellows troubling me? DO Something!’
Those who have seen me know I am no He-man. Us Warriers have always been cerebral people – I would probably have worsted Amar in a debate on American policy in Afghanistan, but a fistfight was another story altogether.
I squirmed, and wished I had left earlier when I had had the chance. For now, all the porikis turned towards me.
‘Dai Peterae!! Watha ingae vaada, ommallae!!’ (Yo Englishman! Fucking come here you motherfucker)
All I could mutter was a ‘Anna, enna aachu?’ (Big brother, what’s wrong?)
Amar decided at that moment to walk towards me. He placed a very firm hand on my collar.
I tried to smile one of my winning smiles. But Amar did not seem to be in the mood for winning smiles.
‘Enna da illikirae, tevidiya paiyya!!???’ (Untranslatable really, but I’m sure non-Tamil speakers get my drift)
I had always imagined that it was only in the movies that a single hand gripping the collar of a shirt could left an entire human being up. I realized at that moment that the movies weren’t lying. I squirmed as I tried to get my feet back on terra firma.
‘Annaa…’, I bleated.
‘Unnakku aval koodai enna paechu? Watha Englishillae avaltae kadala podariyaada?’ (Why are you speaking to her? Are you flirting with her in ENGLISH????)
‘Illae Anna – enakku avalae theriyaadu.’ (No, big brother, I do not even know her)
‘Honestly, I haven’t done anything. I’m not interested in her!’, I almost screamed, as my neck had begun to hurt and I was worried my shirt would be torn in two ere long.
‘DAIIIII!!! ENGLISSILAE PAESEE BAYAMPUDATARIYAA…?’ (Are you trying to scare me with your English?)
I realized that all I could do was take what was coming to me, and silently cursed all womankind in the unkindest of words. It was then that my guardian angel came through.
Robin was a porikki alright, but with me he had been a genial old soul ever since the day in the first year I gifted him a packet of cigarettes and spoke to him in Malayalam.
He walked towards Amar and said,
‘Machi, freeyavidu! Ivan namma paiyyan da.’ (Dude, leave him alone! He’s part of our gang!’ – to translate loosely. Though this is not exactly what it means. A namma paiyyan is actually a chap – usually far removed from the gang – to whom a gang member feels a patronizing affection towards. To be a namma paiyyan is quite useful, especially in situations like these.)
Amar reluctantly put me down and warned me not to even lay an eye upon her. I wondered idly, as I straightened my collar, if this disallowed me from tearing Kaveri apart into little pieces, and the little pieces into littler pieces, while laughing a maniacal laugh all the time. I decided that asking this of Amar would be imprudent. He wanted to sing Vaadi en manmatha raasa to an undivided Kaveri; not one that had been disemboweled.
I disappeared from the room and the campus as quickly as I could, and did not return till the next day whereupon I had to listen to Mrs. Peters talk for an hour of how devotion to the cause among India’s youth had been steadily diminishing since the Battle of Plassey in 1757 (where she purportedly carried the wounded off the battlefield).
But I was merely thankful that my ordeal had ended without a Hero Honda Splendor running over my forearm, and smiled beatifically as she berated me.
This story clearly explains to every pretty woman who’s ever wondered why I didn’t ask her or anyone else out. I may be free, single and good-looking, ladies, but not necessarily of my own volition. A slightly built ‘Peter’ has to make sacrifices to survive on Chennai’s mean streets.
Siddhu Warrier now lives 10,000 kilometres from Chennai, and has not seen a single poriki singing a lowe song in the last 10 months. Additionally, he has not been called Peter once during the same period. However, he is still single and cannot understand it. Pretty women are invited to rectify this sad situation by sending him an e-mail at ineedlowe@adultfriendfinder.com. He additionally guarantees that he no longer lives under the delusion that the navel is where a woman’s G-spot is, and knows all about sex from watching Discovery Channel everyday.
P.S: In case you were wondering if you were safe from porikidom after you’re going steady with a woman, think twice. A friend of mine was once approached by a poriki with a request (or more precisely, an order) to supply his girlfriend for a period of six months so that he (the poriki) could have a bit of fun for himself. The poriki, being a particularly nice poriki, promised to return her clean, (possibly a little tired), and definitely-not-pregnant at the end of the stipulated period of exchange.
And no, I’m not making this up!
P.P.S: I’ve been writing a travelogue of my trip across Western Europe. I was wondering if the readers (if any) would prefer me posting it here, or creating a new travel blog for it.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Je vais en République Française
I realize that I have left the story of my close encounters with the rowdy kind incomplete. But I am currently in the midst of a hectic trip accross Europe on a shoestring budget.
I was away the last few days pinching pennies and admiring the natural pulchritude (not of the two legged female variety, you perverts) in the Scottish Highlands, and hope to write a travelogue down before I forget it all. I visited castles, lochs and bridges. I drove accross scenic beauty spots. More interestingly, I walked accross a very drunk Inverness at one in the morning, searching for toothpaste, during the course of which:
(a) I was mistaken by some poor drunk souls for Ali Baba - at least I think I was, as I quite distinctly heard them referring to Ali Baba as they expressed an ardent desire to speak with me. Though I could have set things right by telling them that I was actually thief #39 in the story, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
(b) I had a long conversation at the taxi rank with another drunk soul, who could not stop thanking me for having defeated England in the one-day series. Though I could have set him right by telling him that it was actually eleven completely unrelated chaps who performed the deed, I thought he was happier assuming I was directly responsible for England's well-deserved humiliation.
(c) I had another long conversation with two Englishmen from London at a pub, during which we discussed Kashmir and Northern Ireland, and how they wished they were not English and could actually visit Northern Ireland without being shot at and murdered.
Upon returning to Edinburgh, I spent a night experiencing (after a long hiatus) the Edinburgh nightlife yesterday, during the course of which:
(a) I watched an Arab do a pole dance. Thank you, Mohammed - I am still trying to erase the unsavoury memories from my head.
(b) I watched as a group of overweight Fijians at the next table magically transformed into rugby players from New Zealand as they tried to - unsuccessfully, if I may add - hit on a friend.
(c) I paid £3.60 in a parking ticket machine, only to realize that parking was free after ten in the night.
So it is a rather sleep-deprived young Warrier that shall attempt to wake up in less than four hours in order to catch a flight to Paris.
I have spent half an hour thinking of how I could describe my feelings at going to arguably the most beautiful city in the world. My grandiloquence has, however, failed me. The verbosity that so characterizes me has deserted me like a fickle mistress. All I can say is - YAYYYYYYYY!!!
Assuming anybody is interested in my travel plans (though I doubt if anybody is - however, since when have I NOT bored people with things they would rather not know), I'm travelling to Versailles, Strasbourg and Heidelberg, before returning home.
After which I set out another short trip to set fire to the birthplace of my old tormentor (from my schooldays), William Shakespeare.
After which I plan to expose to the world the gruesome details of the treatment I received at the hands of a poriki.
After which I face the ire of my supervisor.
Phew!
So, as they say in Deutschland, Fick Deine Mutt... er... I mean, Guten Nacht!
I was away the last few days pinching pennies and admiring the natural pulchritude (not of the two legged female variety, you perverts) in the Scottish Highlands, and hope to write a travelogue down before I forget it all. I visited castles, lochs and bridges. I drove accross scenic beauty spots. More interestingly, I walked accross a very drunk Inverness at one in the morning, searching for toothpaste, during the course of which:
(a) I was mistaken by some poor drunk souls for Ali Baba - at least I think I was, as I quite distinctly heard them referring to Ali Baba as they expressed an ardent desire to speak with me. Though I could have set things right by telling them that I was actually thief #39 in the story, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
(b) I had a long conversation at the taxi rank with another drunk soul, who could not stop thanking me for having defeated England in the one-day series. Though I could have set him right by telling him that it was actually eleven completely unrelated chaps who performed the deed, I thought he was happier assuming I was directly responsible for England's well-deserved humiliation.
(c) I had another long conversation with two Englishmen from London at a pub, during which we discussed Kashmir and Northern Ireland, and how they wished they were not English and could actually visit Northern Ireland without being shot at and murdered.
Upon returning to Edinburgh, I spent a night experiencing (after a long hiatus) the Edinburgh nightlife yesterday, during the course of which:
(a) I watched an Arab do a pole dance. Thank you, Mohammed - I am still trying to erase the unsavoury memories from my head.
(b) I watched as a group of overweight Fijians at the next table magically transformed into rugby players from New Zealand as they tried to - unsuccessfully, if I may add - hit on a friend.
(c) I paid £3.60 in a parking ticket machine, only to realize that parking was free after ten in the night.
So it is a rather sleep-deprived young Warrier that shall attempt to wake up in less than four hours in order to catch a flight to Paris.
I have spent half an hour thinking of how I could describe my feelings at going to arguably the most beautiful city in the world. My grandiloquence has, however, failed me. The verbosity that so characterizes me has deserted me like a fickle mistress. All I can say is - YAYYYYYYYY!!!
Assuming anybody is interested in my travel plans (though I doubt if anybody is - however, since when have I NOT bored people with things they would rather not know), I'm travelling to Versailles, Strasbourg and Heidelberg, before returning home.
After which I set out another short trip to set fire to the birthplace of my old tormentor (from my schooldays), William Shakespeare.
After which I plan to expose to the world the gruesome details of the treatment I received at the hands of a poriki.
After which I face the ire of my supervisor.
Phew!
So, as they say in Deutschland, Fick Deine Mutt... er... I mean, Guten Nacht!
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
A Close Encounter with the Rowdy Kind - Part I
Posterity will have it that I have always been the blameless kind. I never drove a Bajaj Pulsar down a patchy 100 foot Indian road like one would a Hayabusa down the Autobahn. (In fact, I never owned a Bajaj Pulsar, but even if I did, it is unlikely that I would have constituted a risk to traffic) I never did wheelies to get the attention of the ‘figuru’ walking down the other side of the road. My friends never called me an ‘Aan singham’ (Lion) as I serenaded a passing figuru with a rendition of ‘Kann pesum varthaigal’ (The things that my eyes say) while sitting on a footpath with the airs of a Persian potentate. And if I ever referred to a girl I had never spoken to as ‘aen aalu’ (my girl), I was more likely to be met with hoots of derision than a hushed reverential silence followed by loud ‘Machchi, Siddhu weight party da’ (untranslatable from Madras lingo).
On the other hand, I have been, more often than not, a target of the unwashed Peter bashers that abound in Chennai’s college campuses. I had, over the course of the years, learned to turn a blind eye to comments of the ‘Dai peterae…antha figurae wokkariyaa da?’ (Yo, Englishman! Are you fucking that chick?) kind.
But I had, till my nineteenth year, emerged relatively unscathed from my brushes with rowdykind. This is because I kept a studious distance from any (usually pretty) girl who was unfortunate enough to be the recipient of a poriki’s1 lowe.
For those not in the know, the typical engineering college porikki owes his presence in an institution of higher education to the tireless efforts of Arjun Singh, V.P. Singh and others of their ilk. After having got in, they quickly realize that engineering education in India is unfortunately imparted in English, a language that they had studiously ignored for seventeen years. They also find that working as the right hand man of the local neta would have offered them much better career prospects than attempting (bootlessly) to wrest an engineering degree from the powers-that-be. And finally, they find that the girls do not, after all, want to talk to them, in spite of their wide knowledge of every lowe song ever written in the Tamil language. Life is not, they realize to their chagrin, a Tamil movie.
So, in a couple of months, they discover the joy of consuming large amounts of alcohol, and indulging in a genial punch-up with a rival gang after having consumed liberal amounts of the same. Also, they soon gather around themselves a bunch of other porikis.
The time of the year that the average engineering poriki looks forward to with great anticipation is the time when the first years first walk through the portals of the engineering college. Each poriki chooses a pretty girl, and gets off by fantasizing about running around trees with the girl (who will, almost without exception, be clad in a wet saree) – both of them climaxing when he kisses her navel (don’t look at me that way; if one were to believe Tamil movies, a woman’s G-spot is right where her bellybutton is!).
But, into each life some rain must fall. The poriki has, of course, in the name of ragging, called the girl over to the tree where he holds court and had the following highly-romantic conversation with her (while still under the influence of the best of Kandan Wines’ stock).
‘Aey, enna di…Aishwariya Rai mathiri irruke? Won Paer enna?’
(Hey, what’s all this? You look like Aishwariya Rai! What’s your name?)
To which the girl responds with her name. Her considerable irritation and discomfort is a good sign, murmur all of the poriki’s followers. After all, didn’t Asin feel the same way when Vijay spoke to her first in the movie Sivakasi?
‘Seri, naalekku ingae ithae timeukku vaa. Ippo, kalambu, po po!’
(Alright, come along here this time tomorrow. Now, scoot, vamoose!)
The Alpha Male’s performance is met with a raucous round of whistling by the apostles. The general perception is that he has ‘connected’ the chick for sure. In another two weeks, he will be, they say, running around trees with her. In three, he’ll actually be kissing her navel.
But, the engineering poriki is not stupid. He may not understand Digital Systems, and may find Computer Architecture unpronounceable, but he knows that the campus abounds with Peters – Peters whose sole purpose is to steal all the figurus away from him.
Cut to: October 2002
Kaveri was one of those unfortunate young women who had had incredibly romantic conversations with a poriki under the shade of a tree. For Amar – that illustrious stalwart who had driven his Hero Honda Splendor over the arm of a chap who had disagreed with him - was lowing her. Amar was sure Kaveri lowed her too. For had she not quickened her pace and had a tortured expression on her countenance when he serenaded her with that cult classic ‘Vaadi vaadi aen manmatha raasa’.
When a bloke of Amar’s stature falls in lowe, it does not take long for most of the campus to hear of it. In just a couple of days, most of the other guys on campus began to keep a safe distance from Kaveri.
To be on the safe side, I had decided that I would keep a safe distance from not just Kaveri, but any other girl in the first year who did not actually look like a hippopotamus. However, a capricious fate had different plans.
It was a fine day as I was called over by the head of the English department.
Ms. Peters (no relation to the Tamil word Peter) was a wizened old woman who attained puberty the year Queen Victoria ascended to the throne of Great Britain. She had known Gandhi when he was a mere slip of a boy, and Nehru had called her ‘Aunty’. The reader may wonder why the author wishes to make this known, but the author knows not why himself.
And she said, in the familiar, quivering, Convent-accented tremolo, ‘Siddhoooo, we shall be having an open house in a couple of days.’
I wished to interject at this juncture to find out why she wished to throw her home open to visitors, and why she wished to confide in me. But she waved me down imperiously.
‘Schoolchildren from around the city will be coming along on campus to take a look at the research we’re doing.’
‘But we’re not doing any research within a ten kilometer radius of campus, Ma’am’, I objected conscientiously.
‘Ah, don’t cavil, young man! In any case, the English Department plans to have a display, and it is your responsibility to show the children around.’
Though I could not see what research the English Department could be doing in an engineering college where no research is carried out in any engineering field, I did not say anything. I was happy enough to stick around – I probably would get fed for free.
‘Oh, and Kaveri will assist you. You will be working closely with her over the next one week.’
Though Wodehouse has repeatedly affirmed in his books that the human heart does not actually stop, if someone asked me at that moment, ‘Siddhu, the heart never stops beating.’, I would have cast a very dirty look upon that someone and assured him that mine had stopped beating a few seconds ago.
My working closely with Kaveri would definitely come to Amar’s notice, and the results, I knew, would not be pretty.
I resolved to remain cool and distant, and keep a distance of a metre and a half between the two of us. Even Amar, I thought, could not blame me for what was clearly an act of God. But as events transpired, I realized that I had thought wrong…very wrong!
To be continued…
Glossary:
1. Poriki (n)(Po-ri-key): the lowest of the lowest level flirts. Their daily occupation involves standing under trees and acting shady (pun intended) with anything female that walks past, being aware of the latest lowe songs and being able to say lowe. He is also one who perpetually has an imaginary girlfriend – credit for this definition goes to Ketaki.
On the other hand, I have been, more often than not, a target of the unwashed Peter bashers that abound in Chennai’s college campuses. I had, over the course of the years, learned to turn a blind eye to comments of the ‘Dai peterae…antha figurae wokkariyaa da?’ (Yo, Englishman! Are you fucking that chick?) kind.
But I had, till my nineteenth year, emerged relatively unscathed from my brushes with rowdykind. This is because I kept a studious distance from any (usually pretty) girl who was unfortunate enough to be the recipient of a poriki’s1 lowe.
For those not in the know, the typical engineering college porikki owes his presence in an institution of higher education to the tireless efforts of Arjun Singh, V.P. Singh and others of their ilk. After having got in, they quickly realize that engineering education in India is unfortunately imparted in English, a language that they had studiously ignored for seventeen years. They also find that working as the right hand man of the local neta would have offered them much better career prospects than attempting (bootlessly) to wrest an engineering degree from the powers-that-be. And finally, they find that the girls do not, after all, want to talk to them, in spite of their wide knowledge of every lowe song ever written in the Tamil language. Life is not, they realize to their chagrin, a Tamil movie.
So, in a couple of months, they discover the joy of consuming large amounts of alcohol, and indulging in a genial punch-up with a rival gang after having consumed liberal amounts of the same. Also, they soon gather around themselves a bunch of other porikis.
The time of the year that the average engineering poriki looks forward to with great anticipation is the time when the first years first walk through the portals of the engineering college. Each poriki chooses a pretty girl, and gets off by fantasizing about running around trees with the girl (who will, almost without exception, be clad in a wet saree) – both of them climaxing when he kisses her navel (don’t look at me that way; if one were to believe Tamil movies, a woman’s G-spot is right where her bellybutton is!).
But, into each life some rain must fall. The poriki has, of course, in the name of ragging, called the girl over to the tree where he holds court and had the following highly-romantic conversation with her (while still under the influence of the best of Kandan Wines’ stock).
‘Aey, enna di…Aishwariya Rai mathiri irruke? Won Paer enna?’
(Hey, what’s all this? You look like Aishwariya Rai! What’s your name?)
To which the girl responds with her name. Her considerable irritation and discomfort is a good sign, murmur all of the poriki’s followers. After all, didn’t Asin feel the same way when Vijay spoke to her first in the movie Sivakasi?
‘Seri, naalekku ingae ithae timeukku vaa. Ippo, kalambu, po po!’
(Alright, come along here this time tomorrow. Now, scoot, vamoose!)
The Alpha Male’s performance is met with a raucous round of whistling by the apostles. The general perception is that he has ‘connected’ the chick for sure. In another two weeks, he will be, they say, running around trees with her. In three, he’ll actually be kissing her navel.
But, the engineering poriki is not stupid. He may not understand Digital Systems, and may find Computer Architecture unpronounceable, but he knows that the campus abounds with Peters – Peters whose sole purpose is to steal all the figurus away from him.
Cut to: October 2002
Kaveri was one of those unfortunate young women who had had incredibly romantic conversations with a poriki under the shade of a tree. For Amar – that illustrious stalwart who had driven his Hero Honda Splendor over the arm of a chap who had disagreed with him - was lowing her. Amar was sure Kaveri lowed her too. For had she not quickened her pace and had a tortured expression on her countenance when he serenaded her with that cult classic ‘Vaadi vaadi aen manmatha raasa’.
When a bloke of Amar’s stature falls in lowe, it does not take long for most of the campus to hear of it. In just a couple of days, most of the other guys on campus began to keep a safe distance from Kaveri.
To be on the safe side, I had decided that I would keep a safe distance from not just Kaveri, but any other girl in the first year who did not actually look like a hippopotamus. However, a capricious fate had different plans.
It was a fine day as I was called over by the head of the English department.
Ms. Peters (no relation to the Tamil word Peter) was a wizened old woman who attained puberty the year Queen Victoria ascended to the throne of Great Britain. She had known Gandhi when he was a mere slip of a boy, and Nehru had called her ‘Aunty’. The reader may wonder why the author wishes to make this known, but the author knows not why himself.
And she said, in the familiar, quivering, Convent-accented tremolo, ‘Siddhoooo, we shall be having an open house in a couple of days.’
I wished to interject at this juncture to find out why she wished to throw her home open to visitors, and why she wished to confide in me. But she waved me down imperiously.
‘Schoolchildren from around the city will be coming along on campus to take a look at the research we’re doing.’
‘But we’re not doing any research within a ten kilometer radius of campus, Ma’am’, I objected conscientiously.
‘Ah, don’t cavil, young man! In any case, the English Department plans to have a display, and it is your responsibility to show the children around.’
Though I could not see what research the English Department could be doing in an engineering college where no research is carried out in any engineering field, I did not say anything. I was happy enough to stick around – I probably would get fed for free.
‘Oh, and Kaveri will assist you. You will be working closely with her over the next one week.’
Though Wodehouse has repeatedly affirmed in his books that the human heart does not actually stop, if someone asked me at that moment, ‘Siddhu, the heart never stops beating.’, I would have cast a very dirty look upon that someone and assured him that mine had stopped beating a few seconds ago.
My working closely with Kaveri would definitely come to Amar’s notice, and the results, I knew, would not be pretty.
I resolved to remain cool and distant, and keep a distance of a metre and a half between the two of us. Even Amar, I thought, could not blame me for what was clearly an act of God. But as events transpired, I realized that I had thought wrong…very wrong!
To be continued…
Glossary:
1. Poriki (n)(Po-ri-key): the lowest of the lowest level flirts. Their daily occupation involves standing under trees and acting shady (pun intended) with anything female that walks past, being aware of the latest lowe songs and being able to say lowe. He is also one who perpetually has an imaginary girlfriend – credit for this definition goes to Ketaki.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Siddhu 2025
The other day, I was having an extremely profound conversation with a friend. Or rather, if one were to be more accurate, my friend was attempting to have an extremely profound conversation with me, while I was contributing very little. I often find it difficult to make a dint in profound conversations, possibly because of my vapidness and irreflectivity.
Be that as it may, my friend was asking me if I planned to take a year off after my Masters' to broaden my horizons by travelling around the world. I spent a few minutes explaining to her that us citizens of the so-called Third World (or as we like to call ourselves these days in India, Second World citizens) have not the option of spending a year in the sticks, hunting for iguanas in Nepal and polar bears in Papua New Guinea (or even the other way around for that matter).
The primary problem would be money, and equeally importantly, I would not relish the thought of a job interview after a year possibly spent consorting with Bangkok's comfort women. It was then that she decided that I was a terribly materialistic person - materialistic enough, in fact, to be an American.
Which I do not deny. My creature comforts I relish. However, she started within me a series of deep thoughts as to where it would all lead me to. I began to tell her how I saw my life at the age of 40.
By the age of forty, I realized that I would desire to be saddled with a home with a two-car garage, a beautiful (and hence, vacuous*) wife, one or two snotty nosed little kids, a nice little SUV, a sports bike, and a credit card that would allow me to buy something more than second-hand underwear without overrunning the limit. Maybe a Play Station XVI that I wouldn't let my children touch for good measure.
At which point, I pointed out to her, when life was looking all rosy, I could afford to make the hike to Machchu Pichchu.
As my cogitations continued, I soon realized that the life of an SUV, sports bike and home owner married to a hot woman would not be as wonderful as it seemed to be at first sight, because:
(a) I would be too tired, overweight and careworn to hike to Machchu Pichchu. Besides, my dyspepsia and my diabetes wouldn't allow me to step out of home.
(b) In order to have earned enough to buy myself these little dainties, I would have had to spend most of my youth hunched in front of an LCD screen, leaving no time to hunt for a beautiful wife. Besides, which beautiful woman would want to go out with a geek with thick glasses who incidentally has a paunch bigger than her breasts.
So, I would have to rely on the age-old method that every Indian engineer ultimately falls back upon when he realizes he's not going to get any by virtue of his wit, good looks or charm - ask mum to tap the family network to find that perfect girl.
The 'perfect girl' whom I would find thus would be (a) A Warrier, and (b) Either a hill-billy whom I wouldn't have spoken to under less desperate circumstances, or somebody who would have considered herself too cool to talk to me if we were at uni together, and would have preferred the company of a sociable Rahul Singhania in his dad's air conditioned Tata Safari to the company of a Siddhu Warrier with minimal social skills and a ten year old hand-me-down Kawasaki 4S Champion.
(c) So, by the time I'm 40, I would be too overweight to ride my sportsbike, prefer to have a chauffeur drive my SUV, and have two spoilt brats begotten by a wife whom i can't stand.
(d) And then, to forget about it all, I'd enter into a relationship (if one can call it that) with an 18 year old hooker, and try to kill myself with an overdose of sleeping pills when she runs away with my credit card and buys the Democratic Republic of Congo and two other African republics with it.
(e) But just before I died of an overdose of sleeping pills, my wife would e-mail me to tell me that she had been sleeping with the milkman all along, and that all the hours in front of the computer screen had pretty much sapped whatever little virility I had to start with.
(f) So I'd end up in a funeral pyre at 40, in spite of possessing a house, two of the milkman's children, a sports bike, an SUV, and three African republics.
Cheerful little view of the future, ain't it?
Epilogue:
Considering my visage, my minimal social skills, and the fact that I had actually been stupid enough to tell a pretty woman what I thought of other pretty women, my friend didn't disagree with my prognostications at all, except on one count.
She thought that my future wife was more likely to beget the plumber's progeny than the milkman's...
*I expect to be pilloried at the stake by most women for the correlation I drew between beautiful women and their IQs. And therefore, before any pretty woman I know decides to carve my insides up, may I put my hand up to loudly protest that this whole post was just a joke.
Be that as it may, my friend was asking me if I planned to take a year off after my Masters' to broaden my horizons by travelling around the world. I spent a few minutes explaining to her that us citizens of the so-called Third World (or as we like to call ourselves these days in India, Second World citizens) have not the option of spending a year in the sticks, hunting for iguanas in Nepal and polar bears in Papua New Guinea (or even the other way around for that matter).
The primary problem would be money, and equeally importantly, I would not relish the thought of a job interview after a year possibly spent consorting with Bangkok's comfort women. It was then that she decided that I was a terribly materialistic person - materialistic enough, in fact, to be an American.
Which I do not deny. My creature comforts I relish. However, she started within me a series of deep thoughts as to where it would all lead me to. I began to tell her how I saw my life at the age of 40.
By the age of forty, I realized that I would desire to be saddled with a home with a two-car garage, a beautiful (and hence, vacuous*) wife, one or two snotty nosed little kids, a nice little SUV, a sports bike, and a credit card that would allow me to buy something more than second-hand underwear without overrunning the limit. Maybe a Play Station XVI that I wouldn't let my children touch for good measure.
At which point, I pointed out to her, when life was looking all rosy, I could afford to make the hike to Machchu Pichchu.
As my cogitations continued, I soon realized that the life of an SUV, sports bike and home owner married to a hot woman would not be as wonderful as it seemed to be at first sight, because:
(a) I would be too tired, overweight and careworn to hike to Machchu Pichchu. Besides, my dyspepsia and my diabetes wouldn't allow me to step out of home.
(b) In order to have earned enough to buy myself these little dainties, I would have had to spend most of my youth hunched in front of an LCD screen, leaving no time to hunt for a beautiful wife. Besides, which beautiful woman would want to go out with a geek with thick glasses who incidentally has a paunch bigger than her breasts.
So, I would have to rely on the age-old method that every Indian engineer ultimately falls back upon when he realizes he's not going to get any by virtue of his wit, good looks or charm - ask mum to tap the family network to find that perfect girl.
The 'perfect girl' whom I would find thus would be (a) A Warrier, and (b) Either a hill-billy whom I wouldn't have spoken to under less desperate circumstances, or somebody who would have considered herself too cool to talk to me if we were at uni together, and would have preferred the company of a sociable Rahul Singhania in his dad's air conditioned Tata Safari to the company of a Siddhu Warrier with minimal social skills and a ten year old hand-me-down Kawasaki 4S Champion.
(c) So, by the time I'm 40, I would be too overweight to ride my sportsbike, prefer to have a chauffeur drive my SUV, and have two spoilt brats begotten by a wife whom i can't stand.
(d) And then, to forget about it all, I'd enter into a relationship (if one can call it that) with an 18 year old hooker, and try to kill myself with an overdose of sleeping pills when she runs away with my credit card and buys the Democratic Republic of Congo and two other African republics with it.
(e) But just before I died of an overdose of sleeping pills, my wife would e-mail me to tell me that she had been sleeping with the milkman all along, and that all the hours in front of the computer screen had pretty much sapped whatever little virility I had to start with.
(f) So I'd end up in a funeral pyre at 40, in spite of possessing a house, two of the milkman's children, a sports bike, an SUV, and three African republics.
Cheerful little view of the future, ain't it?
Epilogue:
Considering my visage, my minimal social skills, and the fact that I had actually been stupid enough to tell a pretty woman what I thought of other pretty women, my friend didn't disagree with my prognostications at all, except on one count.
She thought that my future wife was more likely to beget the plumber's progeny than the milkman's...
*I expect to be pilloried at the stake by most women for the correlation I drew between beautiful women and their IQs. And therefore, before any pretty woman I know decides to carve my insides up, may I put my hand up to loudly protest that this whole post was just a joke.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Hiatus
Exams have reared their ugly head again. They have arrived again to blight my life, and blot the sun out. The worst thing about being a post-graduate student is that you suddenly realize you're writing exams all over again, though you'd taken a solemn vow over that hot cup of coffee in the neighbourhood tea stall never to write an exam again after you manage to scrape through a Bachelor's degree. And after having taken that vow repeatedly - after the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh semesters, to be precise.
In any case, since I have five exams which determine the fate of (a) my scholarship, (b) my continued status as a student, and (c) my hope of becoming anything other than the right hand man of the local DMK goonda back home, I shall maintain a (hopefully) studious silence until the 29th of April at the very least.
I have a post that I cannot wait to scribble down though (sounds like a cheap advertisement, don't it?). It's called 'Siddhu 2025', keeping in line with the predictions for the future I have been making lately. I hope it stays in mind, and that the big bad world of Quality of Service, UNI, NNI, IPv6 and IPv4 doesn't drive it out of my meagre mind.
&*(^&^&*()! It's 10 26! So, as they say down here in these here parts, Cheers, mates (and matesses - if the word exists)
In any case, since I have five exams which determine the fate of (a) my scholarship, (b) my continued status as a student, and (c) my hope of becoming anything other than the right hand man of the local DMK goonda back home, I shall maintain a (hopefully) studious silence until the 29th of April at the very least.
I have a post that I cannot wait to scribble down though (sounds like a cheap advertisement, don't it?). It's called 'Siddhu 2025', keeping in line with the predictions for the future I have been making lately. I hope it stays in mind, and that the big bad world of Quality of Service, UNI, NNI, IPv6 and IPv4 doesn't drive it out of my meagre mind.
&*(^&^&*()! It's 10 26! So, as they say down here in these here parts, Cheers, mates (and matesses - if the word exists)
Monday, April 10, 2006
India 2020
If all the pseudo-secularists were to have their way, one can expect an ordnance of this kind to grace India in 2020.
People belonging to (hitherto) Forward Castes are hereby ordered to wear big yellow bands on their arms to identify themselves.
Additionally, all Hindus are, by immediate effect, ordered to return their passports to the nearest passport office, as stipulated by the Promotion of Secularism by Minority Appeasement (POSMA) Act, 2019.
Hindus are also hereby ordered - in the name of stamping out communalism, promoting brotherhood, making the minorities feel safer, and erasing any vestiges of self-respect they may still retain - to drop their head and stare fixatedly at their big toes when:
(a) Greeting one of our brethren belonging to a minority community.
(b) Walking past a place of worship of the minorities.
Anyone found in violation of the above will be punished to the severest extent possible under the regulations of the Anti-BJP Act, 2015.
The first category of people are henceforth allowed only to work as (a) sweepers, (b) scavengers, or (c) unemployed wastrels. However, the number of FC sweepers, scavengers or unemployed must not exceed 10% - as the remaining is reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC)/Scheduled Tribes (ST)/Backward Castes (ST)/Other Backward Castes (OBC)/Most Backward Castes (MBC)/Forgotten Backward Castes (FBC)/Somewhat Retarded Classes (SRC)/Slightly Backward Castes (SBC)/members of religious minorities/Communists/Assorted Hippies. Those unable to find work within the restrictions imposed by the quotas in the name of secularism and social justice are required to report to the nearest Police Station for rehabilation at the friendly neighbourhood concentration camp.
Exceptions will be granted on a case-by-case basis upon receipt of a written application to the office of the Secularism Service (SS). The application, accompanied by all your worldly belongings and your first born, should be addressed to the head of the SS, Smt. Edda Gandhi nee Mussolini, or to the Deputy Prime Minister Shri Ottavio Quattrochi (Bharat Ratna).
Please refer Annexure A for a complete list of places where entry of the (erstwhile) Forward Castes is forbidden, and a subset of the same which applies to all Hindus.
Annexure B contains information on the basic rules of servile deportment to be followed by the majority community to promote communal amity.
- By Order of the Government of the Is...oops...Secular Republic of India
This was quite obviously an exaggeration, as Edda Mussolini is definitely not a Gandhi.
Upon reading this, the cry would ring out around the country, "Somebody call the comrades! Communalist on the loose".
In seemingly unrelated news, a minister in an Indian state would issue a fatwa offering a reward of 51 rupees for whoever serves a plate of crispy, fried Siddhu noodles at his breakfast table.
The comrades would come running, can of the purest sunflower oil on the ready to set the intolerant communalist alight.
Comrade Tamaraikannan Khruschev would exclaim to Arundhati Roy/Teesta Setalvad/random upper-class armchair secularist with an unbearably shrill voice,
"A good toasting would teach (whatever remains of) him the meaning of secularism. The vermin!",
"Oh yes, oh yes!! What fun! I haven't burnt a communalist alive in so long. All in the name of secularism, Gandhianism and ahimsma, of course", the armchair secularist would squeal (possibly to the NDTV cameraman running by her side, covering this latest action by the patriotic secular brigade to keep the nation safe for Bangladeshi immigrants and Pakistani terrorists).
And with a sprightly, cheerful "Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai", they would set this intrepid writer on fire (and collect the 51 rupees the next morning).
Epilogue:
April 12, 2006: Two temples are set ablaze in Saudi Arabia. When asked why, Mullah Ahmed bin Laden, minister for promotion of vice and prevention of virtue, said, "Siddhu fatwa fatwa jihad jihad kafir jihad" (Translation: Oh nothing, really! We are just celebrating the death of a communalist and the resurgence of Wahabi...I mean, secularism)
April 15, 2006: The Opposition stages a walkout amid stormy scenes in Parliament demanding the setting up of an inquiry commission headed by a retired Justice to probe into the death.
June 15, 2006: The inquiry commission's report concludes, "It is hence clear that, in spite of 2,500 people being witness to the secularist and the communist setting the worthless creature named Siddhu Warrier ablaze, that the creature caught fire due to a gas cylinder explosion. In any case, he was a communal person from the majority community and his death doesn't matter."
June 16, 2006: The Opposition stages a walkout amid stormy scenes in Parliament regarding the tabling of the commission's report.
July 16, 2006: The Opposition walks out of parliament demanding that Lalloo Prasad trim the three long strands of hair sprouting out of his ears. But that's not part of this enchanting little story, is it?
Legal Disclaimer: This post is intended as a satirical work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person or persons - living, dead, or being burnt to death in a second class train compartment in Godhra - is completely coincidental and unintentional. The views expressed by the author here are not even his own, and he seeks refuge in Article 19 of the Constitution of the Republic of India, the Bill of Rights issued by the parliament of the United Kingdom in 1689, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Additionally, this article is not meant to offend any living or dead person, nor incite anger or hatred against people of a particular religious or ethnic community. The author believes in the equality of all men and does not believe in discrimnation against, or promotion of discrimination against any particular community. Discrimination in the author's view includes favours, including but not restricted to policies of affirmative action meant to favour one community over another. Thus, the crux of this article is a peaceful, non-seditious request to the government of the Republic of India to treat all of its citizens, irrespective of caste, creed, religion or place of birth, equally.
If none of the above works, can somebody please tell me where I can get an air ticket to Cuba?
People belonging to (hitherto) Forward Castes are hereby ordered to wear big yellow bands on their arms to identify themselves.
Additionally, all Hindus are, by immediate effect, ordered to return their passports to the nearest passport office, as stipulated by the Promotion of Secularism by Minority Appeasement (POSMA) Act, 2019.
Hindus are also hereby ordered - in the name of stamping out communalism, promoting brotherhood, making the minorities feel safer, and erasing any vestiges of self-respect they may still retain - to drop their head and stare fixatedly at their big toes when:
(a) Greeting one of our brethren belonging to a minority community.
(b) Walking past a place of worship of the minorities.
Anyone found in violation of the above will be punished to the severest extent possible under the regulations of the Anti-BJP Act, 2015.
The first category of people are henceforth allowed only to work as (a) sweepers, (b) scavengers, or (c) unemployed wastrels. However, the number of FC sweepers, scavengers or unemployed must not exceed 10% - as the remaining is reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC)/Scheduled Tribes (ST)/Backward Castes (ST)/Other Backward Castes (OBC)/Most Backward Castes (MBC)/Forgotten Backward Castes (FBC)/Somewhat Retarded Classes (SRC)/Slightly Backward Castes (SBC)/members of religious minorities/Communists/Assorted Hippies. Those unable to find work within the restrictions imposed by the quotas in the name of secularism and social justice are required to report to the nearest Police Station for rehabilation at the friendly neighbourhood concentration camp.
Exceptions will be granted on a case-by-case basis upon receipt of a written application to the office of the Secularism Service (SS). The application, accompanied by all your worldly belongings and your first born, should be addressed to the head of the SS, Smt. Edda Gandhi nee Mussolini, or to the Deputy Prime Minister Shri Ottavio Quattrochi (Bharat Ratna).
Please refer Annexure A for a complete list of places where entry of the (erstwhile) Forward Castes is forbidden, and a subset of the same which applies to all Hindus.
Annexure B contains information on the basic rules of servile deportment to be followed by the majority community to promote communal amity.
- By Order of the Government of the Is...oops...Secular Republic of India
The Communal harmony armband. Any resemblance to the Yellow armbands the Nazis asked the Jews to wear is completely coincidental, unless one takes into account the fact that all we did was paint over the old Nazi armbands.
The Secularism Service - a public service organization dedicated to educating the majority about secularism, tolerance and non-violence by the use of gratituous amounts of violence. (Image courtesy Herr Heinrich Himmler)
This was quite obviously an exaggeration, as Edda Mussolini is definitely not a Gandhi.
Upon reading this, the cry would ring out around the country, "Somebody call the comrades! Communalist on the loose".
In seemingly unrelated news, a minister in an Indian state would issue a fatwa offering a reward of 51 rupees for whoever serves a plate of crispy, fried Siddhu noodles at his breakfast table.
The comrades would come running, can of the purest sunflower oil on the ready to set the intolerant communalist alight.
Comrade Tamaraikannan Khruschev would exclaim to Arundhati Roy/Teesta Setalvad/random upper-class armchair secularist with an unbearably shrill voice,
"A good toasting would teach (whatever remains of) him the meaning of secularism. The vermin!",
"Oh yes, oh yes!! What fun! I haven't burnt a communalist alive in so long. All in the name of secularism, Gandhianism and ahimsma, of course", the armchair secularist would squeal (possibly to the NDTV cameraman running by her side, covering this latest action by the patriotic secular brigade to keep the nation safe for Bangladeshi immigrants and Pakistani terrorists).
And with a sprightly, cheerful "Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai", they would set this intrepid writer on fire (and collect the 51 rupees the next morning).
Epilogue:
April 12, 2006: Two temples are set ablaze in Saudi Arabia. When asked why, Mullah Ahmed bin Laden, minister for promotion of vice and prevention of virtue, said, "Siddhu fatwa fatwa jihad jihad kafir jihad" (Translation: Oh nothing, really! We are just celebrating the death of a communalist and the resurgence of Wahabi...I mean, secularism)
April 15, 2006: The Opposition stages a walkout amid stormy scenes in Parliament demanding the setting up of an inquiry commission headed by a retired Justice to probe into the death.
June 15, 2006: The inquiry commission's report concludes, "It is hence clear that, in spite of 2,500 people being witness to the secularist and the communist setting the worthless creature named Siddhu Warrier ablaze, that the creature caught fire due to a gas cylinder explosion. In any case, he was a communal person from the majority community and his death doesn't matter."
June 16, 2006: The Opposition stages a walkout amid stormy scenes in Parliament regarding the tabling of the commission's report.
July 16, 2006: The Opposition walks out of parliament demanding that Lalloo Prasad trim the three long strands of hair sprouting out of his ears. But that's not part of this enchanting little story, is it?
Legal Disclaimer: This post is intended as a satirical work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person or persons - living, dead, or being burnt to death in a second class train compartment in Godhra - is completely coincidental and unintentional. The views expressed by the author here are not even his own, and he seeks refuge in Article 19 of the Constitution of the Republic of India, the Bill of Rights issued by the parliament of the United Kingdom in 1689, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Additionally, this article is not meant to offend any living or dead person, nor incite anger or hatred against people of a particular religious or ethnic community. The author believes in the equality of all men and does not believe in discrimnation against, or promotion of discrimination against any particular community. Discrimination in the author's view includes favours, including but not restricted to policies of affirmative action meant to favour one community over another. Thus, the crux of this article is a peaceful, non-seditious request to the government of the Republic of India to treat all of its citizens, irrespective of caste, creed, religion or place of birth, equally.
If none of the above works, can somebody please tell me where I can get an air ticket to Cuba?
Monday, March 13, 2006
Of Prudes, Ashok Singhals, that idiot Bangladeshi imam and other such despicable creatures
Something’s been the matter with me the last few days. I’ve actually been rather serious – a lot more serious than is my wont. Instead of spouting unadulterated bilge that is supposed to elicit guffaws of mirth, I have been spouting unadulterated bilge that is supposed to shock and provoke introspection (though it seems to provoke hasty mouse movements towards the right hand corner of the screen in order to click on that nice, big, red X).
I was racking my brain, trying to think of some inanity that I could wax eloquent on. It was as I was putting my brain through exercise that it was unaccustomed to that I stumbled upon this post by another blogger. (Note: I don’t have her permission to derive inspiration from what she has written, but I hope she approves, and that the judge will not give me more than twenty years of penal servitude for copyright infringement.)
The post was all about a holier-than-thou moral policeman chastising the author for being ‘chalu’ (though honestly, I cannot figure out for the life of me how chalu fits in in this context), for having violated every norm of Indian culture by doing everything that a good bharatiya naari (that’s Indian woman) should never do – cuss, drink alcohol, raise her eyes when faced with an Indian man, show her cleavage and then dare to expect that the Indian man will not grope her… the list goes on.
I spent around an hour laughing at the chap and his rather archaic view of women. After I had finished laughing, I realized that this chap is probably not alone. Hell, as an Indian guy, I have encountered many of these standard bearers of (what they define as) Indian culture.
Though I have thankfully never been groped (though I am perfectly amenable to a pretty woman doing so if she so desires – caste no bar), or had roadside Romeos display their wares to me on the street, I have met enough Ashok Singhals and other apologists of roadside romeos and their ilk to write a post about. These are a few of the theories that I have found of great interest.
Theory # 1: The Slut Theory
The Slut Theory is one of the most interesting theories that I have heard one of our home-grown fundamentalists propose.
By this theory, “Any woman who has violated the 2500 year-old tenets of ‘Indian culture’ by wearing tight clothes (display of cleavage is not necessary, but can hasten classification into the depraved slut category), talking to more than one man, laughing when a man cracks a (often terrible) joke, or consuming alcohol was a slut, is a slut, and will forever remain a slut.’
Corollaries to this theory include: If a girl has been classified as a slut according to the above theory, then it is perfectly okay to call her a public toilet or a corporation playground – as all three of them are free.
It is perfectly alright to grope a girl who fulfils anyone of the aforementioned criteria. She likes it, y’see!
To be perfectly honest, when I was younger, I did partly believe in this theory. Though, honestly, not in the third corollary. In any case, I apologize to the whole of India for that.
Theory # 2: Pure and virginal Indian girl theory
The day is somewhere in the year 2005. The age of enlightenment and reason.
The place: Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom - one of the few countries in the world where freedom of speech still exists.
An Indian popsy drops in for dinner. During the course of the dinner, a fellow desi spills a bit of curry on my jeans. None too pleased, I utter a ‘b****c***’. Harsh, I know, but I do have conscientious objections to decorating my trousers with curry – particularly because I have similarly conscientious objections to washing them (the jeans, not the curry).
I was fully prepared to receive a ‘b****c****’ or a ‘M****c***’ from the chap I had just insulted, considering he is one of those blokes who wakes up in the morning with a cheery ‘b****c***’ playing on his lips, and is never found searching for the right abusive term to use.
But what he said shocked me.
‘Shut up, you idiot!’, he hissed into my ear.
Calling me a Ba*^!@#!@ would have been perfectly acceptable. In fact, I would probably have expected a m*^(*&(&*( or a co&**()&)(*() as well, and brushed it aside.
But idiot!? I would not have been surprised if he called me a ‘terrible person’ or ‘you evil blackguard’ next.
‘What the f*ck do you mean - idiot? You f*cking spilled a whole dollop of f*cking smelly curry on my f*cking jeans, and you f*cking expect me to f*cking shut the f*ck up? And yeah, please refrain from using such puerile insults as idiot – they jar on a man of refined sensibilities like myself.’ said I.
He merely glared, as did the others, leaving me to finish the meal completely perplexed. When I attempted to ask one of the chaps how he was getting along with his hangover, I was shot down equally unceremoniously.
After I had retired to my room to chew on a meditative stick of gum, the aforementioned chap stepped in.
‘Dude! That was an Indian girl you were talking to.’
‘No, I was not talking to her. In fact, you know that I’d rather climb Mount Everest naked than talk to her about anything, inclusive of the situation in Papua new Guinea.’, said I, rather wittily.
‘F*ck that, you m&*(*^(*^()&^*!’
This was interesting! For a person who had glared at one for far milder language (okay, not far milder, but still…) just a few minutes ago, he seemed to have made good progress.
He continued in a rich vein that turned the surrounding air blue with its refreshing candour, ‘There was an Indian girl present when you used the F word, not to mention b****c***! And then you spoke about alcohol!! She must have felt terrible.’
To say that I was surprised would be understating it. ‘But I did not use the F word on her, and neither did I call her a B****c***. I was not even looking at her. In fact, I was referring to your monumental ineptitude.’
‘Now you listen to me! I do not think you have ever lived in the real India. You have no respect for Indian culture. You do not understand that Indian women are not like the morally corrupt and loose European women that you see here. A ‘pure’ Indian girl like Priya is not brought up in the kind of filthy environment your female friends were probably brought up in. She does not even understand the kind of words you used.’
Ignoring my question as to how a word that she did not understand could hurt her, he then continued a long diatribe about how Priya was not the kind of modern (contempt-intended) jeans-clad girl who would laugh lightly at profanity, indulge in using profanity herself, refuse to cook and clean for her husband and *gasp* ask to be allowed to work after marriage.
He concluded with a plea to me to attempt to respect Indian culture (around other women – an Indian male is allowed to be as prurient as he wishes when the right kind of woman is not around), however I wished to behave with my future wife.
As is clear from the aforementioned prude’s stated ideals, a good Indian woman is pure as the driven snow, has never heard a swear word, and is most definitely a virgin. In fact, I would not be too surprised if he plans to physically assault his future wife if she actually knows that babies are not produced by kissing.
To him and other torch-bearers of Indian culture, all I have to say is that I do not care if a woman is pure, virginal or both. I will not use profanities against one who prefers not to hear them, but I reserve my right to freedom of speech in the privacy of my kitchen.
Besides, nobody – irrespective of sex – is so pure as to be completely shocked by people who think and act differently from them. If they are,
I was racking my brain, trying to think of some inanity that I could wax eloquent on. It was as I was putting my brain through exercise that it was unaccustomed to that I stumbled upon this post by another blogger. (Note: I don’t have her permission to derive inspiration from what she has written, but I hope she approves, and that the judge will not give me more than twenty years of penal servitude for copyright infringement.)
The post was all about a holier-than-thou moral policeman chastising the author for being ‘chalu’ (though honestly, I cannot figure out for the life of me how chalu fits in in this context), for having violated every norm of Indian culture by doing everything that a good bharatiya naari (that’s Indian woman) should never do – cuss, drink alcohol, raise her eyes when faced with an Indian man, show her cleavage and then dare to expect that the Indian man will not grope her… the list goes on.
I spent around an hour laughing at the chap and his rather archaic view of women. After I had finished laughing, I realized that this chap is probably not alone. Hell, as an Indian guy, I have encountered many of these standard bearers of (what they define as) Indian culture.
Though I have thankfully never been groped (though I am perfectly amenable to a pretty woman doing so if she so desires – caste no bar), or had roadside Romeos display their wares to me on the street, I have met enough Ashok Singhals and other apologists of roadside romeos and their ilk to write a post about. These are a few of the theories that I have found of great interest.
Theory # 1: The Slut Theory
The Slut Theory is one of the most interesting theories that I have heard one of our home-grown fundamentalists propose.
By this theory, “Any woman who has violated the 2500 year-old tenets of ‘Indian culture’ by wearing tight clothes (display of cleavage is not necessary, but can hasten classification into the depraved slut category), talking to more than one man, laughing when a man cracks a (often terrible) joke, or consuming alcohol was a slut, is a slut, and will forever remain a slut.’
Corollaries to this theory include: If a girl has been classified as a slut according to the above theory, then it is perfectly okay to call her a public toilet or a corporation playground – as all three of them are free.
It is perfectly alright to grope a girl who fulfils anyone of the aforementioned criteria. She likes it, y’see!
To be perfectly honest, when I was younger, I did partly believe in this theory. Though, honestly, not in the third corollary. In any case, I apologize to the whole of India for that.
Theory # 2: Pure and virginal Indian girl theory
The day is somewhere in the year 2005. The age of enlightenment and reason.
The place: Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom - one of the few countries in the world where freedom of speech still exists.
An Indian popsy drops in for dinner. During the course of the dinner, a fellow desi spills a bit of curry on my jeans. None too pleased, I utter a ‘b****c***’. Harsh, I know, but I do have conscientious objections to decorating my trousers with curry – particularly because I have similarly conscientious objections to washing them (the jeans, not the curry).
I was fully prepared to receive a ‘b****c****’ or a ‘M****c***’ from the chap I had just insulted, considering he is one of those blokes who wakes up in the morning with a cheery ‘b****c***’ playing on his lips, and is never found searching for the right abusive term to use.
But what he said shocked me.
‘Shut up, you idiot!’, he hissed into my ear.
Calling me a Ba*^!@#!@ would have been perfectly acceptable. In fact, I would probably have expected a m*^(*&(&*( or a co&**()&)(*() as well, and brushed it aside.
But idiot!? I would not have been surprised if he called me a ‘terrible person’ or ‘you evil blackguard’ next.
‘What the f*ck do you mean - idiot? You f*cking spilled a whole dollop of f*cking smelly curry on my f*cking jeans, and you f*cking expect me to f*cking shut the f*ck up? And yeah, please refrain from using such puerile insults as idiot – they jar on a man of refined sensibilities like myself.’ said I.
He merely glared, as did the others, leaving me to finish the meal completely perplexed. When I attempted to ask one of the chaps how he was getting along with his hangover, I was shot down equally unceremoniously.
After I had retired to my room to chew on a meditative stick of gum, the aforementioned chap stepped in.
‘Dude! That was an Indian girl you were talking to.’
‘No, I was not talking to her. In fact, you know that I’d rather climb Mount Everest naked than talk to her about anything, inclusive of the situation in Papua new Guinea.’, said I, rather wittily.
‘F*ck that, you m&*(*^(*^()&^*!’
This was interesting! For a person who had glared at one for far milder language (okay, not far milder, but still…) just a few minutes ago, he seemed to have made good progress.
He continued in a rich vein that turned the surrounding air blue with its refreshing candour, ‘There was an Indian girl present when you used the F word, not to mention b****c***! And then you spoke about alcohol!! She must have felt terrible.’
To say that I was surprised would be understating it. ‘But I did not use the F word on her, and neither did I call her a B****c***. I was not even looking at her. In fact, I was referring to your monumental ineptitude.’
‘Now you listen to me! I do not think you have ever lived in the real India. You have no respect for Indian culture. You do not understand that Indian women are not like the morally corrupt and loose European women that you see here. A ‘pure’ Indian girl like Priya is not brought up in the kind of filthy environment your female friends were probably brought up in. She does not even understand the kind of words you used.’
Ignoring my question as to how a word that she did not understand could hurt her, he then continued a long diatribe about how Priya was not the kind of modern (contempt-intended) jeans-clad girl who would laugh lightly at profanity, indulge in using profanity herself, refuse to cook and clean for her husband and *gasp* ask to be allowed to work after marriage.
He concluded with a plea to me to attempt to respect Indian culture (around other women – an Indian male is allowed to be as prurient as he wishes when the right kind of woman is not around), however I wished to behave with my future wife.
As is clear from the aforementioned prude’s stated ideals, a good Indian woman is pure as the driven snow, has never heard a swear word, and is most definitely a virgin. In fact, I would not be too surprised if he plans to physically assault his future wife if she actually knows that babies are not produced by kissing.
To him and other torch-bearers of Indian culture, all I have to say is that I do not care if a woman is pure, virginal or both. I will not use profanities against one who prefers not to hear them, but I reserve my right to freedom of speech in the privacy of my kitchen.
Besides, nobody – irrespective of sex – is so pure as to be completely shocked by people who think and act differently from them. If they are,
- They need to grow up.
- They need to realize they are perfectly capable of handling the situation themselves. They do not need self-proclaimed male guardians to protect their virtue.
- Alcohol is not forbidden/prohibited by Hinduism. If anybody thinks it is (and can prove it), they’re welcome to take the bottle of Russian-made vodka that I hide in my cupboard. I’ll buy another bottle, but you better start drinking unless you are capable of thinking for yourself and do not drink as a personal choice. What a wise man said five thousand years ago cannot dictate your life. He would be disappointed if you are incapable of arriving at a decision for yourself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)