I will be out of station for the next ten days, and will be away from blogsville. :-(. But I will be driving along South India's expansive highways. :-D. Anyway, till then, adios. Hope this post reads good - I wrote this as well a while back. (Btw, I will try to sneak in a post or two from Trivandrum, where I shall be ;-))
Becoming a classroom cartoonist is one of the best ways, according to Carnegie Mellon University, to win friends and influence people. If you are a short, pimply bloke like me whom the girls never bother to say hi to, you can always woo them with your pictures of the Hindi teacher in a toga sipping on moonshine in a western saloon.
However, classroom cartoonists have several problems related to suppression of their artistic freedom. They face some of the same perils that Commie dissidents who attempt to tell the General Secretary that the people prefer bread to cake and Cuban cartoonists who depict Ol’ Fidel dancing the tango in his underwear.
It is however a highly worthy pastime as the following account of my own experiences as a classroom cartoonist clearly illustrates.
How ennui almost made me the next R.K.Laxman (1998)
(and the brutal story of the suppression of artistic freedom that followed)
This happened when I was an untried, untested young lad of 14. I was in my ninth standard and as penance for a misspent young life, I was sitting in the first bench, writing notes and actually listening to the teachers in class.
But even human endurance, even if toughened by the rigours of penance, has its limits. My endurance met its limits in the History class. I found myself utterly incapable of staying awake in the class.
But the History teacher was unfortunately blessed with the eyes of a hawk as well. She would notice every tear of boredom (and there were a lot of them) that streamed down my cheek and bless upon me that sardonic smile that was the precursor to expulsion from the classroom (and a subsequent, rather unpleasant meeting with the vice-principal).
Our teacher discussed Hammurabi’s code at a pace that would have appeared to be slow even to an acclaimed retard like George W Bush. It was therefore scientifically impossible to stay awake in her class and actually concentrate. I had even attempted to count the number of leaves on the tree outside my class.
I therefore developed a scintillating new technique of passing the time which I was sure would escape the notice of her eagle eye. I began to devote every moment to concentrating upon splitting her image into two. I could see two of her, two black boards, two lecterns and two of everything else including my nose. In spite of the fact that staring at four stout forearms wielding chalkpieces was worse than staring at just two, this occupation seemed to be safe yet fun.
But, when I was into my third day and attempting to discern whether one of her was actually smaller than the other, I realized that she (both of her) was looking at me rather intently whenever she turned away from the blackboard. At the end of the class, she asked me, with a highly concentrated version of her sardonic smile, to visit her in the staffroom.
The invite was definitely not for a cup of tea over which we would discuss world politics, I concluded (though I fervently it would be something along those lines). When I went into the staff room, I was filled with a nameless dread.
She asked me, rather sweetly, ‘Siddhu, do you have a squint?’
I had to reply, rather perplexed, that I didn’t. The last thing I expected her to ask me was this. I would have been less surprised if she had asked me whether I was harbouring Osama at my house.
[Sardonic smile switched on like a 60 watt bulb.]
‘Then why, pray tell, are you squinting in my class? You do that once more, no, I will take you to VP, ok?’
And then, she launched into a long-winded lecture about how she was the epitome of virtue when she was herself a student (rumoured to be sometime in the decade before the First War of Indian Independence).
The question of why I saw two of my nose had been worrying me all the while. The answer now struck me like a tight slap across the face.
That was the end of my career as an image splitter.
And that marked the beginning of my cartooning career – the boredom beating technique that this blog is all about.
I thought India was a free, democratic country. After all, had not Keshav walked free after consistently representing Narasimha Rao with a zipper for a mouth? With such illustrious predecessors behind me, I felt no qualms as I set about creating my own set of cartoon characters from a bunch of eccentrics I met everyday – my schoolteachers.
This, I was sure, was by far the safest and most entertaining technique of scoring one over ennui. Even hawk-eye, my old nemesis, would not be able to discern that I was drawing her in battle dress fighting Hamid Karzai in a ring. She would definitely, I reasoned, assume that I was copying her ugly drawings of the map of Upper Mongolia (circa 1560).
Once again, my master strategy succeeded initially. In fact, in order to maintain continuity in the strips I was illustrating, I dispensed of every notebook except one which became the only one I carried to school every day. Until that fateful day…
It happened to Napoleon at Waterloo. To Hitler at Stalingrad. To Alexander the Great in the Gangetic plains. And to yours truly in the History class.
Buouyed by the fact that not a single teacher had yet suspected me of adding their mug shots to my notebook, I grew bolder and bolder. I was so involved in crafting the AK-47 that Ahmed Shah Masood was to shoot Musharaff dead with that I did not notice the sniggers of the class. I did not notice the slight shadow that had formed over the notebook. I did not notice the dangerously sardonic smile until a familiar hand whisked the book from underneath my pen.
It was, as that intellectual giant of our times, Arnold, would have put it, Asta La Vista, as far as I was concerned.
What followed was just another reason for the reformation of the school education system in India. The suppression of my artistic freedom would have put even Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein to shame.
Instead of appreciating my artistic creativity at such a young age and having a hearty laugh over how I had portrayed the G.K teacher in a Superman suit (among others), the P.T sir hit me with the branch broken from a convenient tree, my history teacher did not let me inside her class for the rest of the year, my science teacher told me that she would fervently pray that I flunked my board exams and to top it all off, my parents took a rather unfair and uncharitable view of the whole incident.
However, thanks to this, I did not suffer from boredom at all, for a very long time…
Friday, May 20, 2005
Monday, May 16, 2005
The Horny Mallu and the Indecent Proposal - Part II
The sound of a female voice to Bharat was like sex to a nympho. He just couldn’t have enough of it. Every second hour, he’d message asking me if he could hear my sweet, mellifluous voice again.
The voyeur in me had a field day for the next week or so. Bharat had grown bolder with every passing day. Life, as far as Bharat was concerned, was exactly like the erotic stories he’d devoured from the age of ten. His conversations with Maya had begun to progress along the lines described below–
Bharat: (drooling all over the phone, while his spare hand probably attended to urgent business downstairs) Vot you wearing?
Maya: (who barely tolerated these questions) Oh, a Salwar
Bharat: Ohhhhh… salwaaarrr! (Yeah baby! Salwar is probably girl-speak for a G-string)
After six days, Maya turned to me,
‘I’m ****ing sick of this guy. How many more ****ing days am I going to ****ing tolerate this ****ing b******, you bi**h? I can’t ****ing talk to that ****ing retarded b****** every ****ing day!!! Next thing you know, god knows what he’ll want to ask!!’
Maya always believed in expressing herself with a refreshing candour that turned the surrounding air a deep shade of blue.
(Note: Going by the contents of the above conversation, I was left with little doubt as to what he’d want to know next. Your predictions are welcome on the comment board)
I echoed her sentiments as well. I was getting tired of replying to messages which read,
‘Wat are u doing?’
‘I have never seen cute nice girl like you.’
‘ur voice is so sweet I am loving u now.’
Ad nauseum
Ad infinitum…
We called Bharat up that evening.
Bharat: (amorously – didn’t I tell you he was one fast worker?) Oh hello, &^&^*. How r u my honey? I am feeling so nice to hearing to your voice.
Maya: Listen, Bharat, my boyfriend saw one of your messages. He’s a very possessive guy. He’s got so angry that he’s just gone out to uproot a coupla trees and punch the plaster off the wall.
Bharat: Vot??
Maya: Yeah, he finds punching the plaster off the wall always has a calming effect on him. He always does that before his boxing matches.
Bharat: Why?
The usually loquacious Bharat was, for once, less interested in what ‘I’ was wearing, and more in what people would be wearing to his funeral.
Maya_: He is like that only…aaaaaaoooww..no!
At this point, Maya let out a realistic squeal that almost scared me shitless. And then she pushed the phone into my hands.
I was then suffering from the same ailment of the thorax that had vexed me so at my MICA interview. But on this day, sounding like Don Vito Corleone was just what the doctor had ordered.
‘How on earth can you talk to my girl? Who the hell are you? I’ll bloody stake you out, kill you and dance on the remains with hob-nailed boots. ‘, I shouted menacingly.
‘I have hob-nailed boots at home, and the hobs have big nails on them.’, I added rather cleverly.
I carried on in this vein for a few minutes, after which I ran out of breath and expletives.
When I paused, I half-expected him to confront me and fight me for me.
(He thought I was the female me, and not the male me that I actually was. Get it? Probably not!)
But what he ultimately said was something that I could have never have expected.
‘Vot is yuver name?’
I was nonplussed. Bharat had outmarshalled me. I was about to say something when he piped in yet again, ‘I did not understand anyding.’
I decided to slip into the vernacular, and told him in a few choice words that he would be placing his life and limb in grave risk of dismemberment if he dared call my girl again, who in this case was me myself. Well, that’s a moot point.
It was a chastened stalker that hung up.
Epilogue:
A few days later, when I recounted this story to my mother, she expressed a desire to instruct Bharat on a few home truths…
In spite of my protestations, she placed the call.
Bharat, contrary to my expectations, picked the phone up.
After my mother apprised him of how he had been bamboozled by her 20 year old son and his friend and that every woman in the Reliance directory wasn’t a lissome 18 year old nymphomaniac, Bharat had but one thing to say,
‘Vot is the number of the girl I spoke to, then?’
My mother hung up.
Bharat had won… The stalker always wins, goddammit.
Next time, I do the stalking.
P.S: Dai anybody has any good figuru number? Dai, then I can connect superbly no?
The voyeur in me had a field day for the next week or so. Bharat had grown bolder with every passing day. Life, as far as Bharat was concerned, was exactly like the erotic stories he’d devoured from the age of ten. His conversations with Maya had begun to progress along the lines described below–
Bharat: (drooling all over the phone, while his spare hand probably attended to urgent business downstairs) Vot you wearing?
Maya: (who barely tolerated these questions) Oh, a Salwar
Bharat:
After six days, Maya turned to me,
‘I’m ****ing sick of this guy. How many more ****ing days am I going to ****ing tolerate this ****ing b******, you bi**h? I can’t ****ing talk to that ****ing retarded b****** every ****ing day!!! Next thing you know, god knows what he’ll want to ask!!’
Maya always believed in expressing herself with a refreshing candour that turned the surrounding air a deep shade of blue.
(Note: Going by the contents of the above conversation, I was left with little doubt as to what he’d want to know next. Your predictions are welcome on the comment board)
I echoed her sentiments as well. I was getting tired of replying to messages which read,
‘Wat are u doing?’
‘I have never seen cute nice girl like you.’
‘ur voice is so sweet I am loving u now.’
Ad nauseum
Ad infinitum…
We called Bharat up that evening.
Bharat: (amorously – didn’t I tell you he was one fast worker?) Oh hello, &^&^*. How r u my honey? I am feeling so nice to hearing to your voice.
Maya: Listen, Bharat, my boyfriend saw one of your messages. He’s a very possessive guy. He’s got so angry that he’s just gone out to uproot a coupla trees and punch the plaster off the wall.
Bharat: Vot??
Maya: Yeah, he finds punching the plaster off the wall always has a calming effect on him. He always does that before his boxing matches.
Bharat: Why?
The usually loquacious Bharat was, for once, less interested in what ‘I’ was wearing, and more in what people would be wearing to his funeral.
Maya_: He is like that only…aaaaaaoooww..no!
At this point, Maya let out a realistic squeal that almost scared me shitless. And then she pushed the phone into my hands.
I was then suffering from the same ailment of the thorax that had vexed me so at my MICA interview. But on this day, sounding like Don Vito Corleone was just what the doctor had ordered.
‘How on earth can you talk to my girl? Who the hell are you? I’ll bloody stake you out, kill you and dance on the remains with hob-nailed boots. ‘, I shouted menacingly.
‘I have hob-nailed boots at home, and the hobs have big nails on them.’, I added rather cleverly.
I carried on in this vein for a few minutes, after which I ran out of breath and expletives.
When I paused, I half-expected him to confront me and fight me for me.
(He thought I was the female me, and not the male me that I actually was. Get it? Probably not!)
But what he ultimately said was something that I could have never have expected.
‘Vot is yuver name?’
I was nonplussed. Bharat had outmarshalled me. I was about to say something when he piped in yet again, ‘I did not understand anyding.’
I decided to slip into the vernacular, and told him in a few choice words that he would be placing his life and limb in grave risk of dismemberment if he dared call my girl again, who in this case was me myself. Well, that’s a moot point.
It was a chastened stalker that hung up.
Epilogue:
A few days later, when I recounted this story to my mother, she expressed a desire to instruct Bharat on a few home truths…
In spite of my protestations, she placed the call.
Bharat, contrary to my expectations, picked the phone up.
After my mother apprised him of how he had been bamboozled by her 20 year old son and his friend and that every woman in the Reliance directory wasn’t a lissome 18 year old nymphomaniac, Bharat had but one thing to say,
‘Vot is the number of the girl I spoke to, then?’
My mother hung up.
Bharat had won… The stalker always wins, goddammit.
Next time, I do the stalking.
P.S: Dai anybody has any good figuru number? Dai, then I can connect superbly no?
The Horny Mallu and the indecent proposal – Part I
Since the 2nd of May, I’ve been examinationless, and blissfully so. Unfortunately, the bliss that had settled over me was unsettled somewhat because I was struck down by a severe case of writer’s block (yet again!). It was then that I stumbled upon http://ketaki666.blogspot.com/2005/04/stalk-statement.html. This reminded me of the yarn of
The Horny Mallu and the indecent proposal – Part I
It was as I was travelling to college on a rickety old bus that I received the first such message from some number I had never seen before.
‘Hello… can we be friendship?’
It was the work of a moment for me to figure out that this was some horny bloke, to whom a girl had last spoken to in 1990, who was the mastermind behind this message.
Resisting the temptation to request him to stop assassinating the English language, I ignored his message, hoping he’d go away like some of those bad dreams I’ve had, where my vice-principal chases me with an AK 47 in one hand and a Chemistry text book in the other.
But the stalker was more tenacious than my vice-principal. (who usually gave up the chase and lets me wake up after he’s taught me a couple of units in Engineering chemistry)
Message #2 popped up, a mere 5 minutes later.
‘Why no replying?’
This chap was not just persistent but mentally deficient as well, I concluded.
‘ Do I know you?’ , I typed tersely.
Since I had not the misfortune of being stalked ever before, I found it rather ridiculous that the same chap would send me two messages at once.
‘No, but we will know each other. I am Warrier too.’
He knew I was a Warrier?!! A sudden dread filled me. Could this blighter be homosexual, and looking to commit his sodomy for the day? Like a Boy Scout making life miserable for all and sundry trying to perform his good deed for the day? Like Shakti Kapoor out to cast his couch for the day?
It was then that it dawned upon me that this connection was in the name of my mother, &^&%^. And that the idiots at reliance thought that posting mobile numbers on R World was a altruistic gesture. Besides, the Reliance Directory contained nothing to indicate that &^&^&^ was the mother of a 21 year old. Mr. Stalker doubtless had a 21 year old chick in mind.
I was about to inform him of the sad truth when a terribly devilish idea; an idea of Machiavellian – nay, Sistoian ;-) - proportions struck me.
I typed in furiously like a man possessed.
‘Oh that is so nice. Hello’
The next message took a while coming. I began to wonder whether the friendly neighbourhood stalker had been taken aback by what was probably the first decent reply he received from a ‘woman’ in the space of the last 500 SMSes.
Then, ten minutes later, I received a message that removed all the fears I had of Mr. Wonderful’s sexual orientation. I also realized that he was not merely straight and desperate, but was also in a hurry.
‘O I m bharat frm kochi.u v sweet.i kno ur name is &^&%^.sweet name.i wnt 2 tlk u hear ur voice.pl tell wen I can cal den I wil cal please ’
I could well imagine him slobbering over the phone as he typed it in. But a work of art it was not.
Shakespeare, if he had seen the SMS, would have probably shaken his spear at it.
Don Juan would have told Casanova,
‘Romeo, this chap is not!’, and Casanova would have shaken his head wisely in agreement.
The wanting to hear my voice bit was something I had not expected. At least, not so soon. When I was about to counsel him on patience and on the wonders that a little foreplay could do, devilish idea #2 dawned upon me. It was almost as if the spirit of Machiavelli had taken possession of me.
‘Maya*, come here a minute, if you may…’, I hollered to a friend of mine when I reached college.
As she walked over, I told her about the amorous advances I’d been the recipient of. I informed her about how this bloke wished to hear sweet nothings from my ruby red lips.
My crisp baritone, though admirably potent when put to use on the female of the species, would not pass muster here.
‘And since I don’t anyone with a sweet voice, I guess you’ll have to do.’, said I.
Maya ignored the slur, primarily because I offered her quite a few doubloons from the Warrier chest. The fiscal strain on the coffers would be tremendous, but us Warriers can take the rough with the smooth.
I messaged the boor,
‘Hey, you can call me whenever you are free.’
I had hardly pressed the ‘Send’ Button when the phone began to ring. I handed it to Maya.
Maya: Hello, I’m &^&%^. Ohh..you must be Bharat. (ridiculous falsetto that would have aroused suspicions in anybody else.)
Bharat: Er…hello I am bharad. I simbly colled to make friendship.
Maya: Oh that is like choooo sweet of you. What do you do, Bharat? (sounding like a VJ from a music channel who bears a strong resemblance to a buffalo)
As the conversation progressed, it got more and more inane. Bharat’s heart-strings had been set a-flutter by the warmth with which Maya’s voice was so liberally suffused.
But a week later, I realized that letting Bharat speak to a female voice was a Himalayan Blunder, as Jyoti Basu is so fond of putting it.
To be continued
* The name of the girl who did the dirty work is changed to protect author’s life and limb. And I’m particularly safe because I don’t know no Maya. :-D
The Horny Mallu and the indecent proposal – Part I
It was as I was travelling to college on a rickety old bus that I received the first such message from some number I had never seen before.
‘Hello… can we be friendship?’
It was the work of a moment for me to figure out that this was some horny bloke, to whom a girl had last spoken to in 1990, who was the mastermind behind this message.
Resisting the temptation to request him to stop assassinating the English language, I ignored his message, hoping he’d go away like some of those bad dreams I’ve had, where my vice-principal chases me with an AK 47 in one hand and a Chemistry text book in the other.
But the stalker was more tenacious than my vice-principal. (who usually gave up the chase and lets me wake up after he’s taught me a couple of units in Engineering chemistry)
Message #2 popped up, a mere 5 minutes later.
‘Why no replying?’
This chap was not just persistent but mentally deficient as well, I concluded.
‘ Do I know you?’ , I typed tersely.
Since I had not the misfortune of being stalked ever before, I found it rather ridiculous that the same chap would send me two messages at once.
‘No, but we will know each other. I am Warrier too.’
He knew I was a Warrier?!! A sudden dread filled me. Could this blighter be homosexual, and looking to commit his sodomy for the day? Like a Boy Scout making life miserable for all and sundry trying to perform his good deed for the day? Like Shakti Kapoor out to cast his couch for the day?
It was then that it dawned upon me that this connection was in the name of my mother, &^&%^. And that the idiots at reliance thought that posting mobile numbers on R World was a altruistic gesture. Besides, the Reliance Directory contained nothing to indicate that &^&^&^ was the mother of a 21 year old. Mr. Stalker doubtless had a 21 year old chick in mind.
I was about to inform him of the sad truth when a terribly devilish idea; an idea of Machiavellian – nay, Sistoian ;-) - proportions struck me.
I typed in furiously like a man possessed.
‘Oh that is so nice. Hello’
The next message took a while coming. I began to wonder whether the friendly neighbourhood stalker had been taken aback by what was probably the first decent reply he received from a ‘woman’ in the space of the last 500 SMSes.
Then, ten minutes later, I received a message that removed all the fears I had of Mr. Wonderful’s sexual orientation. I also realized that he was not merely straight and desperate, but was also in a hurry.
‘O I m bharat frm kochi.u v sweet.i kno ur name is &^&%^.sweet name.i wnt 2 tlk u hear ur voice.pl tell wen I can cal den I wil cal please ’
I could well imagine him slobbering over the phone as he typed it in. But a work of art it was not.
Shakespeare, if he had seen the SMS, would have probably shaken his spear at it.
Don Juan would have told Casanova,
‘Romeo, this chap is not!’, and Casanova would have shaken his head wisely in agreement.
The wanting to hear my voice bit was something I had not expected. At least, not so soon. When I was about to counsel him on patience and on the wonders that a little foreplay could do, devilish idea #2 dawned upon me. It was almost as if the spirit of Machiavelli had taken possession of me.
‘Maya*, come here a minute, if you may…’, I hollered to a friend of mine when I reached college.
As she walked over, I told her about the amorous advances I’d been the recipient of. I informed her about how this bloke wished to hear sweet nothings from my ruby red lips.
My crisp baritone, though admirably potent when put to use on the female of the species, would not pass muster here.
‘And since I don’t anyone with a sweet voice, I guess you’ll have to do.’, said I.
Maya ignored the slur, primarily because I offered her quite a few doubloons from the Warrier chest. The fiscal strain on the coffers would be tremendous, but us Warriers can take the rough with the smooth.
I messaged the boor,
‘Hey, you can call me whenever you are free.’
I had hardly pressed the ‘Send’ Button when the phone began to ring. I handed it to Maya.
Maya: Hello, I’m &^&%^. Ohh..you must be Bharat. (ridiculous falsetto that would have aroused suspicions in anybody else.)
Bharat: Er…hello I am bharad. I simbly colled to make friendship.
Maya: Oh that is like choooo sweet of you. What do you do, Bharat? (sounding like a VJ from a music channel who bears a strong resemblance to a buffalo)
As the conversation progressed, it got more and more inane. Bharat’s heart-strings had been set a-flutter by the warmth with which Maya’s voice was so liberally suffused.
But a week later, I realized that letting Bharat speak to a female voice was a Himalayan Blunder, as Jyoti Basu is so fond of putting it.
To be continued
* The name of the girl who did the dirty work is changed to protect author’s life and limb. And I’m particularly safe because I don’t know no Maya. :-D
Friday, May 13, 2005
To quit or not to quit...
From childhood on, I’ve been something of a quitter.
It all started when at the age of five I decided I wanted to learn to swim. I saw myself swimming away to Olympic glory, circumnavigating the world with my bare hands and having as many pretty, adoring female fans as Ian Thorpe.
My poor, unsuspecting uncle took me all the way to a swimming pool and told me to go take a shower and put my trunks on. I looked at the water, and saw that it was uncomfortably deep, not to mention uncomfortably cold. The shower capped it – there was no way I was going to take a bath! So I decided to quit.
I told him sagely that there were lots of girls around, and the sight of my dashing self in trunks would probably cause a riot (as they scrambled over each other to get out of the pool).
And thus did I quit…
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Then, at the age of seven – the guiltiest secret of my life. Yes, I had been sent to carnatic music classes for a month. And my voice was just as bad then as it is today.
I decided to quit. But then, that wasn’t exactly my fault. My music teacher unceremoniously ejected me after tolerating a month of cacophony.
‘Maybe he has other talents, but a Yesudas he is not’, said my embarrassed music teacher to my mother, a day after she requested me not to darken her doorstep again.
And thus did I quit…
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Then when I was thirteen, I met the Sensei. The Sensei was looking for a big challenge. But big challenges are hard to come by after you’ve jumped through hoops of fire, painted the chief minister’s portrait with your blood and had people break huge blocks of stone on your chest.
He took one look at me – fat, languid and unbearably loquacious.
He turned to my mother and expressed to her his fond desire to teach me the ancient art of self-defence that the Japanese had used to great effect.
Ever since the time when Meee Schream Loudawa (85-50 BC) tried to kick a dino who’d strayed into his cave, missed the dino completely, landed on a rather sensitive part of the anatomy and screamed out a loud ‘Kyaaaiii’. (The dinosaur ran out of the cave with a ruptured eardrum, and thus was born the ancient art of Karate.)
It was a skeptical mother who told him to try and see if he could.
I could do fifty push-ups on my knuckles with a light laugh. Twisting my body into ridiculous contortions while mouthing Japanese obscenities bothered me a bit– especially when my paunch got in the way – but I could do it all right (the creaks and snaps notwithstanding).
But what really got my goat was the pernicious habit two of my friends developed of standing outside the gate of the house where I learnt karate and passing lewd comments about my robes, my katas and the general inflexibility of my body. I wanted to sock it to them there wise guys.
But the Sensei had told me that no proponent of Karate ever used his hands (which, in case you didn’t know, are lethal weapons) to hurt even the smallest mosquito. More importantly, both the smart alecs were considerably bigger and stronger than me. As they laughed, I’d noticed muscles like iron bands rippling underneath their shirts.
So I decided to quit instead. I told the Sensei that I’d read ‘My Experiments with Truth’ and had been convinced that ahimsa was the only way. I’d outmarshalled the two amateur commentators. Besides, those darned mosquitoes were really getting to me.
(stage resounds to a loud slap as I sadistically annihilate a family consisting of papa mosquito, mama mosquito and two baby mosquitoes)
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Cut to: 1999. A young, still plump and languid 15 year old about to walk into the big bad world of a science education in India smiles at you.
That ugly kid who’s grinning at you is me. It was in ’99 that I got the bright idea that I could make it into one of the Indian Institutes of Technology. All it required, reasoned I, was buying a huge sack of books and joining classes where balding old men on the threshold of losing their sanity taught you the fundamentals of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.
What I had failed to take into account was that one also needed the ability to sleep four hours a day and still remain fresh as the proverbial daisy, work a hundred problems out in an hour, and have an IQ of at least 100.
I, on the other hand, found it difficult to stay awake during the two hours of JEE coaching class unless I tried to count the number of hairs on the professor’s dome.
I could solve a hundred problems in an hour if they were of the ‘Rama has three apples and he gave Shyama two of them, being the kind of selfless retard you read about only in Mathematics books. So how many apples does Rama have now?’ kind. But problems in the JEE were a little more complex than this.
As for the third count, well, I’m no Forrest Gump – Forrest’s a lot smarter.
So, the logical step out was to quit. And quit I did. My father still has plenty to say on the loss of several thousand rupees he incurred, especially when he
espies pile upon pile of material – still pristine in their plastic packaging.
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I had turned an avid fan of the ‘Body Beautiful’ philosophy a couple of years ago. I spent hours at a gymnasium, sweating away in the 45 degree heat, trying my best to haul weights that weighed more than me. Ignoring aches, cramps and creaking joints, I religiously walked the hundred meters to the gym. I even ate healthy. I continued thus, until I looked a bit of a steroid junkie, especially around the arms. But then, because of changing priorities and a growing belief in the fact that having big biceps didn’t mean that people who viewed you as Little Lord Fauntleroy earlier would begin treating you with the respect due a Tarzan, I decided that gym wasn’t such a big deal after all. And I quit!
A month later, I welcomed my paunch back. And a few days ago, the beginnings of my erstwhile second chin began to peek out of the fat on a much rounder face.
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But today, I have blogged for almost five months. I have persisted – even when I was receiving around two visitors a day and one of them was me, not to mention the time I had to take off several politically incorrect posts. I am surprised I continued. I had a niggling feeling in the back of my mind when I’d started that I’d quit by the middle of February. But I didn’t. And today, I’ve received 2000 hits!
Have I changed? Have I learnt from the old go-getter maxim which went ‘Losers never quit, and quitters never lose’? Have I got the aforementioned maxim wrong? Well, I don’t know…
But one thing I do know, if it weren’t for all y’all wonderful people. I’d like to right now thank my vacuum cleaner, television remote, dog, the mongoose who lives on the tree next door, the three sparrows who shit on my clothes every day…Waitaminit, this was the speech I’d prepared for when I win my Oscar*.
Anyway, the fact remains that I do owe the fact that I remain a blogger to you. So, thank you, and comment allez vous, mesdames et messieurs
* For those who came in late, I expect an Oscar any day now for my performance in front of my math lecturer when she caught me drawing caricatures of the vice principal dancing the waltz with Hamid Karzai.
It went something like this, (tears in eyes, loudly bawling when not speaking)
’Ma’am, Siddhu was a good boy, Ma’am. Peyi erriduthe (translated: A ghost possessed him). He will exorcise the ghost and get back to being the sweet chap I … I mean… he was, Ma’am.’
It all started when at the age of five I decided I wanted to learn to swim. I saw myself swimming away to Olympic glory, circumnavigating the world with my bare hands and having as many pretty, adoring female fans as Ian Thorpe.
My poor, unsuspecting uncle took me all the way to a swimming pool and told me to go take a shower and put my trunks on. I looked at the water, and saw that it was uncomfortably deep, not to mention uncomfortably cold. The shower capped it – there was no way I was going to take a bath! So I decided to quit.
I told him sagely that there were lots of girls around, and the sight of my dashing self in trunks would probably cause a riot (as they scrambled over each other to get out of the pool).
And thus did I quit…
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Then, at the age of seven – the guiltiest secret of my life. Yes, I had been sent to carnatic music classes for a month. And my voice was just as bad then as it is today.
I decided to quit. But then, that wasn’t exactly my fault. My music teacher unceremoniously ejected me after tolerating a month of cacophony.
‘Maybe he has other talents, but a Yesudas he is not’, said my embarrassed music teacher to my mother, a day after she requested me not to darken her doorstep again.
And thus did I quit…
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Then when I was thirteen, I met the Sensei. The Sensei was looking for a big challenge. But big challenges are hard to come by after you’ve jumped through hoops of fire, painted the chief minister’s portrait with your blood and had people break huge blocks of stone on your chest.
He took one look at me – fat, languid and unbearably loquacious.
He turned to my mother and expressed to her his fond desire to teach me the ancient art of self-defence that the Japanese had used to great effect.
Ever since the time when Meee Schream Loudawa (85-50 BC) tried to kick a dino who’d strayed into his cave, missed the dino completely, landed on a rather sensitive part of the anatomy and screamed out a loud ‘Kyaaaiii’. (The dinosaur ran out of the cave with a ruptured eardrum, and thus was born the ancient art of Karate.)
It was a skeptical mother who told him to try and see if he could.
I could do fifty push-ups on my knuckles with a light laugh. Twisting my body into ridiculous contortions while mouthing Japanese obscenities bothered me a bit– especially when my paunch got in the way – but I could do it all right (the creaks and snaps notwithstanding).
But what really got my goat was the pernicious habit two of my friends developed of standing outside the gate of the house where I learnt karate and passing lewd comments about my robes, my katas and the general inflexibility of my body. I wanted to sock it to them there wise guys.
But the Sensei had told me that no proponent of Karate ever used his hands (which, in case you didn’t know, are lethal weapons) to hurt even the smallest mosquito. More importantly, both the smart alecs were considerably bigger and stronger than me. As they laughed, I’d noticed muscles like iron bands rippling underneath their shirts.
So I decided to quit instead. I told the Sensei that I’d read ‘My Experiments with Truth’ and had been convinced that ahimsa was the only way. I’d outmarshalled the two amateur commentators. Besides, those darned mosquitoes were really getting to me.
(stage resounds to a loud slap as I sadistically annihilate a family consisting of papa mosquito, mama mosquito and two baby mosquitoes)
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Cut to: 1999. A young, still plump and languid 15 year old about to walk into the big bad world of a science education in India smiles at you.
That ugly kid who’s grinning at you is me. It was in ’99 that I got the bright idea that I could make it into one of the Indian Institutes of Technology. All it required, reasoned I, was buying a huge sack of books and joining classes where balding old men on the threshold of losing their sanity taught you the fundamentals of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.
What I had failed to take into account was that one also needed the ability to sleep four hours a day and still remain fresh as the proverbial daisy, work a hundred problems out in an hour, and have an IQ of at least 100.
I, on the other hand, found it difficult to stay awake during the two hours of JEE coaching class unless I tried to count the number of hairs on the professor’s dome.
I could solve a hundred problems in an hour if they were of the ‘Rama has three apples and he gave Shyama two of them, being the kind of selfless retard you read about only in Mathematics books. So how many apples does Rama have now?’ kind. But problems in the JEE were a little more complex than this.
As for the third count, well, I’m no Forrest Gump – Forrest’s a lot smarter.
So, the logical step out was to quit. And quit I did. My father still has plenty to say on the loss of several thousand rupees he incurred, especially when he
espies pile upon pile of material – still pristine in their plastic packaging.
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I had turned an avid fan of the ‘Body Beautiful’ philosophy a couple of years ago. I spent hours at a gymnasium, sweating away in the 45 degree heat, trying my best to haul weights that weighed more than me. Ignoring aches, cramps and creaking joints, I religiously walked the hundred meters to the gym. I even ate healthy. I continued thus, until I looked a bit of a steroid junkie, especially around the arms. But then, because of changing priorities and a growing belief in the fact that having big biceps didn’t mean that people who viewed you as Little Lord Fauntleroy earlier would begin treating you with the respect due a Tarzan, I decided that gym wasn’t such a big deal after all. And I quit!
A month later, I welcomed my paunch back. And a few days ago, the beginnings of my erstwhile second chin began to peek out of the fat on a much rounder face.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But today, I have blogged for almost five months. I have persisted – even when I was receiving around two visitors a day and one of them was me, not to mention the time I had to take off several politically incorrect posts. I am surprised I continued. I had a niggling feeling in the back of my mind when I’d started that I’d quit by the middle of February. But I didn’t. And today, I’ve received 2000 hits!
Have I changed? Have I learnt from the old go-getter maxim which went ‘Losers never quit, and quitters never lose’? Have I got the aforementioned maxim wrong? Well, I don’t know…
But one thing I do know, if it weren’t for all y’all wonderful people. I’d like to right now thank my vacuum cleaner, television remote, dog, the mongoose who lives on the tree next door, the three sparrows who shit on my clothes every day…Waitaminit, this was the speech I’d prepared for when I win my Oscar*.
Anyway, the fact remains that I do owe the fact that I remain a blogger to you. So, thank you, and comment allez vous, mesdames et messieurs
* For those who came in late, I expect an Oscar any day now for my performance in front of my math lecturer when she caught me drawing caricatures of the vice principal dancing the waltz with Hamid Karzai.
It went something like this, (tears in eyes, loudly bawling when not speaking)
’Ma’am, Siddhu was a good boy, Ma’am. Peyi erriduthe (translated: A ghost possessed him). He will exorcise the ghost and get back to being the sweet chap I … I mean… he was, Ma’am.’
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Gandhi and the Prank SMS Industry - Part II
At 12:30, our professor decided that we had learnt enough about the life cycle and mating season of the PNP transistor and left the classroom.
The chap arose from his seat, still fiddling continuously with his Reliance. As he walked towards the canteen, I regaled him with cheerful prattle about R World. Not because I found R World or its applications particularly interesting, but because that seemed the only topic that could presently hold his attention for more than a few seconds. And I desperately wanted to be around when _______ called him up. (I had noticed her looking terribly worked up and preparing herself for an explosive outburst)
Gandhi was lurking in the background as well, and still had that ugly smile affixed on his face. The more I saw the smile, the more I felt he looked like a vile medieval villain. But I, once again, did not devote much thought to Gandhi’s facial expressions. I was too busy thinking of new Reliance IndiaMobile features to keep ***** at his seat in the canteen.
12:45 – almost like clockwork, the cell rang. Sadly, _____ was in the classroom. She was probably too flustered to come down to the canteen. So we were not blessed with the opportunity to hear both ends of the conversation.
‘Hello...Good Afternoon...’, said the chap, in a cheerful tone, which was rather inappropriate considering what she had called for.
There was a pause for 30 seconds and the omnipresent cheeky grin on *****’s face went into hiding behind his lips for the first time in living memory.
‘Why, this is ***** here... Wha....?’
There was a much longer pause and we could distinct hear a shrill female voice screaming incessantly over the phone for around two minutes. Gandhi and I watched with barely concealed glee as the expression on the bloke’s face became graver and graver with every passing second.
‘Listen...what am I to do if you’re on drugs or some mo***&* blackmails you about it...’, shouted he. By then, he had begun to appear distinctly haggard and frustrated.
Gandhi was bent over double as he bit his jeans to muffle his laughter.
‘You’ve got psychological problems. You’re hallucinating...’
Gandhi moved a safe distance away and began to laugh like a particularly boorish hyena.
‘I DON’T HAVE YOUR NUMBER... I DIDN’t MESSAGE YOU AND I DON’T WANT TO!!! WILL YOU CUT THE F***ING LINE!!!?’
*****’s angry voice resonated across the canteen. Everybody fell silent. Eggs, beans and crumpets (to borrow a phrase from Wodehouse) all around the canteen turned their heads around to take a dekko at *****. ***** suddenly realized he was the cynosure of all eyes. All eyes except one, to be precise. Gandhi had placed his hand smack on top of somebody’s fried rice (much to the diner’s dismay and consternation) and continued to express amusement to a degree that was almost unholy.
Embarassed, he hung up rather tamely with a muted and rather unnecessary ‘Bye...’
I began to ask him wide-eyed questions as to the identity of the mystery caller. He started telling me about ____’s apparent mental imbalance. It was as he was propounding a (highly implausible) theory that ______ had a crush on him and how her crush had made her act irrationally that Gandhi turned up, looking rather a vulture out on a hunt for juicy caracasses.
‘Hi *****... , what da machcha, _____ called you up, ah?’
I was stunned. After comparing Gandhi to Machiavelli, the last thing I expected from him was to make a blunder which even the Beagle Boys wouldn’t.
***** looked up suddenly from his phone which he was fondling like a long-lost brother,
‘How the hell do you know?’
‘Hmmmm... Siddhu may not like me telling you this, but I think the joke went a little too far and since I feel it may cause irrepairable harm to your friendship with ________, I think it is best that I tell you...’
Gandhi had that wretched smile of his plastered all over his face. I should have known, I thought to myself, Machiavelli always liked to be the last man standing!!
I thought of the possible courses of action that lay open to me –
A) Attempt to smother Gandhi with blows until he confessed to having planned and executed it himself
B) To attempt to run to the bike stand and disappear from college for 10 days
I arrived upon Option (B) as the more workable among the two after taking one look at Gandhi - who did not resemble the Mahatma (either physically or in the purity of his mind).
But I could not exercise either option as ****** gripped my wrist firmly. Under such circumstances, people like Jack the Ripper and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have broken free. But even a cursory inspection of my physique would reveal that I was neither. So I stayed put.
Gandhi, that turncoat whose treachery would have done Benedict Arnold and Mir Jaffer proud, continued to reveal a fabric of terrible lies and slander all of which was unfortunately true.
I slumped into a chair –defeated, a shadow of my former self.
To cut a long story short, the events that followed were not pleasant in the least. ***** swore to use my cell for even more nefarious purposes, I was forced (after being arm twisted (yeah, literally) into compliance) to apologise to _____, ______ blasted me in turn and almost pushed her cell’s gargantuan antenna up my nostril, ______’s friend blasted me just for the pleasure of blasting me(and later cornered me and asked me if I had a crush on ____ (please, for heaven’s sake, not that!!, I thought) and whether this whole incident was calculated to portray a potential rival (!!?) in bad light) and Gandhi laughed his way to a free Coke, courtesy ******.
Sadly, my dear readers, like most incidents in my life, this ended in sorrow. Therefore, it ain’t too shocking that I end up writing tragic stories like these which would put any Greek epic to shame. Don’t blame me, dear readers, for not being a cheery soul. Don’t blame me, my countrymen, for not writing cheerful stories. Blame it all on the machinations of a cruel fate...
The chap arose from his seat, still fiddling continuously with his Reliance. As he walked towards the canteen, I regaled him with cheerful prattle about R World. Not because I found R World or its applications particularly interesting, but because that seemed the only topic that could presently hold his attention for more than a few seconds. And I desperately wanted to be around when _______ called him up. (I had noticed her looking terribly worked up and preparing herself for an explosive outburst)
Gandhi was lurking in the background as well, and still had that ugly smile affixed on his face. The more I saw the smile, the more I felt he looked like a vile medieval villain. But I, once again, did not devote much thought to Gandhi’s facial expressions. I was too busy thinking of new Reliance IndiaMobile features to keep ***** at his seat in the canteen.
12:45 – almost like clockwork, the cell rang. Sadly, _____ was in the classroom. She was probably too flustered to come down to the canteen. So we were not blessed with the opportunity to hear both ends of the conversation.
‘Hello...Good Afternoon...’, said the chap, in a cheerful tone, which was rather inappropriate considering what she had called for.
There was a pause for 30 seconds and the omnipresent cheeky grin on *****’s face went into hiding behind his lips for the first time in living memory.
‘Why, this is ***** here... Wha....?’
There was a much longer pause and we could distinct hear a shrill female voice screaming incessantly over the phone for around two minutes. Gandhi and I watched with barely concealed glee as the expression on the bloke’s face became graver and graver with every passing second.
‘Listen...what am I to do if you’re on drugs or some mo***&* blackmails you about it...’, shouted he. By then, he had begun to appear distinctly haggard and frustrated.
Gandhi was bent over double as he bit his jeans to muffle his laughter.
‘You’ve got psychological problems. You’re hallucinating...’
Gandhi moved a safe distance away and began to laugh like a particularly boorish hyena.
‘I DON’T HAVE YOUR NUMBER... I DIDN’t MESSAGE YOU AND I DON’T WANT TO!!! WILL YOU CUT THE F***ING LINE!!!?’
*****’s angry voice resonated across the canteen. Everybody fell silent. Eggs, beans and crumpets (to borrow a phrase from Wodehouse) all around the canteen turned their heads around to take a dekko at *****. ***** suddenly realized he was the cynosure of all eyes. All eyes except one, to be precise. Gandhi had placed his hand smack on top of somebody’s fried rice (much to the diner’s dismay and consternation) and continued to express amusement to a degree that was almost unholy.
Embarassed, he hung up rather tamely with a muted and rather unnecessary ‘Bye...’
I began to ask him wide-eyed questions as to the identity of the mystery caller. He started telling me about ____’s apparent mental imbalance. It was as he was propounding a (highly implausible) theory that ______ had a crush on him and how her crush had made her act irrationally that Gandhi turned up, looking rather a vulture out on a hunt for juicy caracasses.
‘Hi *****... , what da machcha, _____ called you up, ah?’
I was stunned. After comparing Gandhi to Machiavelli, the last thing I expected from him was to make a blunder which even the Beagle Boys wouldn’t.
***** looked up suddenly from his phone which he was fondling like a long-lost brother,
‘How the hell do you know?’
‘Hmmmm... Siddhu may not like me telling you this, but I think the joke went a little too far and since I feel it may cause irrepairable harm to your friendship with ________, I think it is best that I tell you...’
Gandhi had that wretched smile of his plastered all over his face. I should have known, I thought to myself, Machiavelli always liked to be the last man standing!!
I thought of the possible courses of action that lay open to me –
A) Attempt to smother Gandhi with blows until he confessed to having planned and executed it himself
B) To attempt to run to the bike stand and disappear from college for 10 days
I arrived upon Option (B) as the more workable among the two after taking one look at Gandhi - who did not resemble the Mahatma (either physically or in the purity of his mind).
But I could not exercise either option as ****** gripped my wrist firmly. Under such circumstances, people like Jack the Ripper and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have broken free. But even a cursory inspection of my physique would reveal that I was neither. So I stayed put.
Gandhi, that turncoat whose treachery would have done Benedict Arnold and Mir Jaffer proud, continued to reveal a fabric of terrible lies and slander all of which was unfortunately true.
I slumped into a chair –defeated, a shadow of my former self.
To cut a long story short, the events that followed were not pleasant in the least. ***** swore to use my cell for even more nefarious purposes, I was forced (after being arm twisted (yeah, literally) into compliance) to apologise to _____, ______ blasted me in turn and almost pushed her cell’s gargantuan antenna up my nostril, ______’s friend blasted me just for the pleasure of blasting me(and later cornered me and asked me if I had a crush on ____ (please, for heaven’s sake, not that!!, I thought) and whether this whole incident was calculated to portray a potential rival (!!?) in bad light) and Gandhi laughed his way to a free Coke, courtesy ******.
Sadly, my dear readers, like most incidents in my life, this ended in sorrow. Therefore, it ain’t too shocking that I end up writing tragic stories like these which would put any Greek epic to shame. Don’t blame me, dear readers, for not being a cheery soul. Don’t blame me, my countrymen, for not writing cheerful stories. Blame it all on the machinations of a cruel fate...
Monday, May 09, 2005
Gandhi and the Prank SMS Industry - Part I
Sending prank SMSes from others’ cells (and getting caught doing so) is the best way to do unto death whatever little social life you may presently have.
But then, what’s life without a little risk? And if you, like yours truly, will never win a congeniality contest, the only risks that you take by sending prank SMSes is that of being physically assaulted.
Note: The receiver HAS to be a she – detailed studies have proven that except under exceptional circumstances, guys never react as interestingly and entertainingly as females do, when bombarded with prank SMSes.
Prank SMSes can be on a variety of topics, from the morbid to the simply ridiculous. But for best results, try the following tried & tested prank SMS series– tested under stringent conditions at Dr. Siddhu’s ISO 666 certified laboratory at the National Institute of Technology and Science.
‘Help me, I need a fix – and HOW!!!’
It was during an exceptionally tortuous stretch of extreme boredom that this idea struck me.
I was thinking deep thoughts about the fly that I had found in my curry at the canteen yesterday when I noticed one of my classmates fiddling away furiously with his new Reliance IndiaMobile, while another stared at her ancient mobile, probably waiting for it to reveal to her the secrets of the universe. (The mobile was ancient enough to have been around during the creation of the universe)
My mind, indelibly perverted by a lifetime of sitting through boring lectures, raced at the possibilities of sending her interesting (to say the least) messages from his cell. And considering the fact that she was one of the most hyperactive and short tempered girls in class, an explosive reaction would almost definitely result.
I shared the idea with my neighbour – a bloke named Gandhi who wasn’t impeded by any of the scruples that his illustrious namesake was so unfortunately saddled with. He assured me it was a pippin.
I turned to the chap who was still immersed in the wonders of his new Reliance and requested him to show me the piece for a bit.
The bloke, whose name I decline to reveal for obvious reasons, hesitated. But after I’d praised the looks of the phone (though it looked ugly enough to be the property of the neighbourhood scavenger – and in fact, lots of scavengers did possess them) and compared it with the ancient phone which the aforementioned female was fiddling around with, he gave in. The all-important cell changed hands. Gandhi and I got to work almost immediately.
Hi ____, I knw u vry wll. I m ur clssmte. I knw u r on drugs. I cn say by lukin at ur face.
The message was received a few seconds later by ____, who was still thinking of how useful Babur had probably found her cell during the first battle of Panipat.
She saw the phone light up with the message. Her face lit up just like the phone’s screen, the only difference between the two being the absence of the green backlight on her face.
But after reading the message, her expression changed entirely to one of total shock. Gandhi and I suddenly began to suspect whether we had actually hit the nail on the head when we decided to talk about her drug addiction.
She began to type feverishly into her cell. We could almost hear the keys, aged veterans of a million SMSes, creak in agony and protest as she typed it in.
Who are you?
It was the Reliance’s turn to light up in all its glory.
I knw u knw who I am. I dnt wnna play arnd. All I need is a lil dope. I knw u knw whr to get it- pls meet me at ‘Coffee’ wt the stuff in evening 7 30.wil pay u thr.
She looked really flustered and began fingering her dupatta which she’d tightly wound around her neck by then. She got into a deep discussion with her neighbour who seemed to favour the ISI conspiracy angle from the look on her face. After frenetic consultations, she messaged me –
I dnt knw who u r or wht u r tlkin abt.
Gandhi’s face lit up with ill-concealed malice. He told me how we could facilitate an admirably violent twist in the kahaani.
Till that date, I had underestimated Gandhi’s flair for villainy. He came up with a masterstroke – an idea so clever that I concluded that if there ever was anyone who could write a sequel to Machiavelli’s The Prince, here stood he. It was truly exceptional that anybody who so resembled Magilla the Gorilla could possess such a wonderfully devious mind. But so it was.
All I could say was, ‘Gandhi, my boy… I’m proud of u…!’
He punched in -
Call me at 12:45 durin lunch brk.I wil tlk to u n tll u abt the cash 4 the dope. Stop playing dumb wit me or I wil tel ur parents u do drugs.
‘At 12:45, guess who’s gonna be carrying this mobile?’, said he, with a straight face.
I giggled.
‘Stop giggling,’ , said he, rather sternly and offered me the chance to type in ____’s number and press the send button - ostensibly to give me an opportunity to participate in this momentous event. I gleefully accepted the warm, generous offer.
There was, quite predictably, no reply to this message. All we could see was that she was frantically consulting her neighbour.
We handed the phone back to the chap who went back to fiddling with it. Gandhi and I got on with our favourite task of composing lewd couplets about our professor who was waxing eloquent about the vagaries of the varactor diode.
We waited for the golden moment. A couple of times, I noticed a flicker of a wicked smile play on Gandhi’s lips as he talked to me. I didn’t like the smile. But I dismissed the thought from my mind – I decided it would be unfair to blame Gandhi for not having a winsome smile.
‘It isn’t his fault that he’s got a mug like the lower class of mafia don’, I rationalized…
To be continued...
But then, what’s life without a little risk? And if you, like yours truly, will never win a congeniality contest, the only risks that you take by sending prank SMSes is that of being physically assaulted.
Note: The receiver HAS to be a she – detailed studies have proven that except under exceptional circumstances, guys never react as interestingly and entertainingly as females do, when bombarded with prank SMSes.
Prank SMSes can be on a variety of topics, from the morbid to the simply ridiculous. But for best results, try the following tried & tested prank SMS series– tested under stringent conditions at Dr. Siddhu’s ISO 666 certified laboratory at the National Institute of Technology and Science.
‘Help me, I need a fix – and HOW!!!’
It was during an exceptionally tortuous stretch of extreme boredom that this idea struck me.
I was thinking deep thoughts about the fly that I had found in my curry at the canteen yesterday when I noticed one of my classmates fiddling away furiously with his new Reliance IndiaMobile, while another stared at her ancient mobile, probably waiting for it to reveal to her the secrets of the universe. (The mobile was ancient enough to have been around during the creation of the universe)
My mind, indelibly perverted by a lifetime of sitting through boring lectures, raced at the possibilities of sending her interesting (to say the least) messages from his cell. And considering the fact that she was one of the most hyperactive and short tempered girls in class, an explosive reaction would almost definitely result.
I shared the idea with my neighbour – a bloke named Gandhi who wasn’t impeded by any of the scruples that his illustrious namesake was so unfortunately saddled with. He assured me it was a pippin.
I turned to the chap who was still immersed in the wonders of his new Reliance and requested him to show me the piece for a bit.
The bloke, whose name I decline to reveal for obvious reasons, hesitated. But after I’d praised the looks of the phone (though it looked ugly enough to be the property of the neighbourhood scavenger – and in fact, lots of scavengers did possess them) and compared it with the ancient phone which the aforementioned female was fiddling around with, he gave in. The all-important cell changed hands. Gandhi and I got to work almost immediately.
Hi ____, I knw u vry wll. I m ur clssmte. I knw u r on drugs. I cn say by lukin at ur face.
The message was received a few seconds later by ____, who was still thinking of how useful Babur had probably found her cell during the first battle of Panipat.
She saw the phone light up with the message. Her face lit up just like the phone’s screen, the only difference between the two being the absence of the green backlight on her face.
But after reading the message, her expression changed entirely to one of total shock. Gandhi and I suddenly began to suspect whether we had actually hit the nail on the head when we decided to talk about her drug addiction.
She began to type feverishly into her cell. We could almost hear the keys, aged veterans of a million SMSes, creak in agony and protest as she typed it in.
Who are you?
It was the Reliance’s turn to light up in all its glory.
I knw u knw who I am. I dnt wnna play arnd. All I need is a lil dope. I knw u knw whr to get it- pls meet me at ‘Coffee’ wt the stuff in evening 7 30.wil pay u thr.
She looked really flustered and began fingering her dupatta which she’d tightly wound around her neck by then. She got into a deep discussion with her neighbour who seemed to favour the ISI conspiracy angle from the look on her face. After frenetic consultations, she messaged me –
I dnt knw who u r or wht u r tlkin abt.
Gandhi’s face lit up with ill-concealed malice. He told me how we could facilitate an admirably violent twist in the kahaani.
Till that date, I had underestimated Gandhi’s flair for villainy. He came up with a masterstroke – an idea so clever that I concluded that if there ever was anyone who could write a sequel to Machiavelli’s The Prince, here stood he. It was truly exceptional that anybody who so resembled Magilla the Gorilla could possess such a wonderfully devious mind. But so it was.
All I could say was, ‘Gandhi, my boy… I’m proud of u…!’
He punched in -
Call me at 12:45 durin lunch brk.I wil tlk to u n tll u abt the cash 4 the dope. Stop playing dumb wit me or I wil tel ur parents u do drugs.
‘At 12:45, guess who’s gonna be carrying this mobile?’, said he, with a straight face.
I giggled.
‘Stop giggling,’ , said he, rather sternly and offered me the chance to type in ____’s number and press the send button - ostensibly to give me an opportunity to participate in this momentous event. I gleefully accepted the warm, generous offer.
There was, quite predictably, no reply to this message. All we could see was that she was frantically consulting her neighbour.
We handed the phone back to the chap who went back to fiddling with it. Gandhi and I got on with our favourite task of composing lewd couplets about our professor who was waxing eloquent about the vagaries of the varactor diode.
We waited for the golden moment. A couple of times, I noticed a flicker of a wicked smile play on Gandhi’s lips as he talked to me. I didn’t like the smile. But I dismissed the thought from my mind – I decided it would be unfair to blame Gandhi for not having a winsome smile.
‘It isn’t his fault that he’s got a mug like the lower class of mafia don’, I rationalized…
To be continued...
Friday, April 29, 2005
Nurture young love - the concluding part
I continue today on what I had begun a few days ago– assisting young love on its way (while at the same time taking generous leaps along the road to perdition myself). To recap, yesterday we had left a love struck swain who was game to follow his true love to the ends of the earth (provided somebody else paid the air fare) waiting with bated breath for the reply to a letter ghost written (deliberately badly) by yours truly...
There was silence for a week. I grew curiouser and curiouser with every passing day. It was a week later that &*^ approached me, looking tired, careworn and worried.
‘Eda...she’s not replied to me, da’
‘She probably was so moonstruck by your letter that she couldn’t possibly have walked all the way to the lab and composed her reply. Let me tell you something – that letter was so good that if you’d given that letter to the queen of Sheba she’d have accepted you into her harem of husbands with not a second thought!!’, I said, lying brazenly through my teeth.
He dismissed these illuminating thoughts with a careless wave of his hand.
'Don't talk bullshit, you bastard!', said he. He was one of those chaps whose frankness in speech bordered on the obscenely insulting, the blighter!
‘So what do you want me to do now? Write another letter?’, I asked, adopting that sarcastic manner which had failed to penetrate his hide in the least when I used it last.
Once again, it bounced off him like bullets bounce off Superman.
‘Actually, yeah’, he said shamelessly. He did not even attempt to look embarrassed at the thought of imposing on my time.
‘It ‘ll cost you if you want me to do it the second time. The first time, being a freeware demo, came for free. 99 rupees and 95 paise – I’ve brought my rates down...’, said I, attempting to sound like a technical czar talking about the NTFS kernel (assuming such a creature exists).
Talk of money changing hands (only when he was at the wrong end of the transaction) always had a peculiar effect on &*^. He began to rapidly rethink on a strategy that had seemed so imperative just a few minutes ago. After concluding his customary disparaging remarks - comparing my methods of embezzlement to Mr. Ambani’s (to my benefit) - he begged me to reconsider or at least ask her of the outcome of the outpourings of his heart.
I agreed – more out of curiosity and unrestrained boredom which had returned to haunt me once again than anything else. I was very uncomfortable with the whole idea. The thought of approaching a girl I had spoken to probably once in my life and asking her for her verdict on &*^’s undying love did not appear to me as fun. I walked towards her feeling a trepidation that was almost definitely shameful, considering the fact that she was a mere first year and I was a second year student.
‘Er...#######, &*^ asked me to ask you this...’
‘What...?’, she said, in her customary tone of voice, which lay somewhere in between a deferential whisper and the ramblings of a chap with laryngitis.
But us Warriers are made of stern stuff. I continued…
‘He wants to know if you received the letter and how you react to his proposition of undying love, y’know...’, I stuttered.
‘I don’t see any reason to have any opinion about it...’, she said, her voice rising well above her usual deferential whisper.
‘But why...?’, I asked. I began to realize that asking her out in the middle of Mount road while standing on my hands was a considerably less onerous task.
‘I know you wrote it – it was too ridiculous to have been thought of by &^*. In fact, too poetic to have been thought of by anybody who didn’t possess three copies of Roget’s. Besides, he’s yet to have discovered the joys of constructing an English sentence. Anyway, I never did like him and would be greatly pleased if he didn’t call me this weekend... Can I go now, sir? I still have three psalms left out of my day’s quota of 45!’
Her ‘sir’ was loaded with a sarcasm that bites (quite unlike the ‘sir’s we, as seniors, expect out of our juniors as a matter of course).
But I did not attempt to take her to task. I could see that the scales had fallen before her eyes. I slunk away into the darkness quietly, leaving her to her psalms.......
There was silence for a week. I grew curiouser and curiouser with every passing day. It was a week later that &*^ approached me, looking tired, careworn and worried.
‘Eda...she’s not replied to me, da’
‘She probably was so moonstruck by your letter that she couldn’t possibly have walked all the way to the lab and composed her reply. Let me tell you something – that letter was so good that if you’d given that letter to the queen of Sheba she’d have accepted you into her harem of husbands with not a second thought!!’, I said, lying brazenly through my teeth.
He dismissed these illuminating thoughts with a careless wave of his hand.
'Don't talk bullshit, you bastard!', said he. He was one of those chaps whose frankness in speech bordered on the obscenely insulting, the blighter!
‘So what do you want me to do now? Write another letter?’, I asked, adopting that sarcastic manner which had failed to penetrate his hide in the least when I used it last.
Once again, it bounced off him like bullets bounce off Superman.
‘Actually, yeah’, he said shamelessly. He did not even attempt to look embarrassed at the thought of imposing on my time.
‘It ‘ll cost you if you want me to do it the second time. The first time, being a freeware demo, came for free. 99 rupees and 95 paise – I’ve brought my rates down...’, said I, attempting to sound like a technical czar talking about the NTFS kernel (assuming such a creature exists).
Talk of money changing hands (only when he was at the wrong end of the transaction) always had a peculiar effect on &*^. He began to rapidly rethink on a strategy that had seemed so imperative just a few minutes ago. After concluding his customary disparaging remarks - comparing my methods of embezzlement to Mr. Ambani’s (to my benefit) - he begged me to reconsider or at least ask her of the outcome of the outpourings of his heart.
I agreed – more out of curiosity and unrestrained boredom which had returned to haunt me once again than anything else. I was very uncomfortable with the whole idea. The thought of approaching a girl I had spoken to probably once in my life and asking her for her verdict on &*^’s undying love did not appear to me as fun. I walked towards her feeling a trepidation that was almost definitely shameful, considering the fact that she was a mere first year and I was a second year student.
‘Er...#######, &*^ asked me to ask you this...’
‘What...?’, she said, in her customary tone of voice, which lay somewhere in between a deferential whisper and the ramblings of a chap with laryngitis.
But us Warriers are made of stern stuff. I continued…
‘He wants to know if you received the letter and how you react to his proposition of undying love, y’know...’, I stuttered.
‘I don’t see any reason to have any opinion about it...’, she said, her voice rising well above her usual deferential whisper.
‘But why...?’, I asked. I began to realize that asking her out in the middle of Mount road while standing on my hands was a considerably less onerous task.
‘I know you wrote it – it was too ridiculous to have been thought of by &^*. In fact, too poetic to have been thought of by anybody who didn’t possess three copies of Roget’s. Besides, he’s yet to have discovered the joys of constructing an English sentence. Anyway, I never did like him and would be greatly pleased if he didn’t call me this weekend... Can I go now, sir? I still have three psalms left out of my day’s quota of 45!’
Her ‘sir’ was loaded with a sarcasm that bites (quite unlike the ‘sir’s we, as seniors, expect out of our juniors as a matter of course).
But I did not attempt to take her to task. I could see that the scales had fallen before her eyes. I slunk away into the darkness quietly, leaving her to her psalms.......
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Beat Boredom - turn cupid and nurture young love
I'd written this post a couple of years ago, but thanks to exams, I don't have time to write anything new. So something's better than nothing, I guess.
If you have copious quantities of water in your brain (like most poets who've written reams on love and romance), go fall in love. If you're just bored, well.... just play cupid!
Playing cupid is a highly entertaining and highly risky endeavour as well. If one manages to succeed in the onerous task of bringing two young hearts together, one reaps the rewards which come in the form of being known to all your classmates as ‘mama’ (which means little more than ‘pimp’) If one fails, however, one runs the risk of being accused of messing everything up because of one’s own romantic interests.
But, nothing fun is not risky. Or to put it another way, taking risks is half the fun.
My first attempt at playing cupid came upon me by chance. A male friend of mine requested me to help him with a love letter he was composing to a junior who’d just joined our college.
The junior was a religious Malayalee fresh out of some oilfield in Saudi Arabia and hadn’t seen a male (discounting her father, of course) for the first seventeen years of her life, having spent all of it under a burkha. But her prolonged stay at a nunnery like this had done nothing to diminish her feminine charms, which were considerable. My friend fell for her like fifty cycles in a cycle stand. Not particularly surprising becuase he is one of those fellows who is capable of falling in love even with a rhino dressed in drag.
My friend, however, had a problem. He was far from confident of his ability to compose paeans in her honour using the Queen’s language – and the girl was rather marked in her inability to read even a single sentence in Malayalam.
At that particular point of time, I was terribly bored and even more terribly broke. So I proffered my services as a ghost writer to my friend just as he was lamenting his utter inability to express his love for her in words.
‘Hey, thanks da...you’re a true friend...’, said he.
‘But there’s a catch...’, I said
He spent the next five minutes telling me how I had earned his eternal and everlasting gratitude by my act of mercy and how he was ready to hit anybody in the college who had been foolhardy enough to trouble a person as sweet, loving, caring and personable as me.
I did not interrupt him. I enjoyed every moment of it.
‘I was thinking more in terms of monetary remuneration, y’know...’ I said, broaching the subject of money in a gentlemanly way.
After a couple of minutes of bargaining, I realized that this chap was incapable of thinking of sums greater than 10 rupees if left to his own devices. So I suggested the nice round figure of 100 rupees.
‘One hundred bucks!!? Are you jokin’???’, he screamed incredulously and launched into another long monologue of how people had forgotten the value of friendship and how St.Peter would send me to the gates of Hell for attempting to fleece money off a man in perpetual penury.
I was about to tell him that the deal was off. It was then, on the spur of the moment that one of my devilish ideas struck me.
‘Okay, da... I don’t want to do anything. I have seen the light following your remarks. I am a changed man! I will help my friend with his true love!’
Oh yes, I shall, you stingy bastard, I thought to myself. I resolved to consult two thesauruses, three dictionaries and the Barron’s word lists and write a love letter so abstruse that even I wouldn’t be able to make sense of it the second time around. I also resolved to make it cornier than three of Bollywood’s mushiest romances.
I sat up all night, composing the labour of ‘love’ in the spirit of malice. When I displayed the finished product, my friend had five words to say –
‘Perfect da, Its so romantic...’
He seemed to have made his judgement based on the number of syllables in each word more than anything else. You can decide how romantic it was by reading it for yourself.
dearest ######, heart of my hearts
How are you? I guess you are sleeping, dreaming sweet dreams, as i type this... nay, write this letter with my lifeblood… after i had that enchanting talk with u. Words fail me when I try to describe the upheavals that shook my inner being as I conversed with you. I never thought you would talk to me this long. Though I feel, in my heart of hearts, you fail to realize the seriousness with which my heart palpitates at the sight of you, at the sound of your oh-so-sweet voice, and the wonderfully romantic way that your name rolls over my tongue.
I wish $%#* stayed inside her room( she interferes too goddamn much)...no, wait a sec, i have this niggling doubt, this iota of fear within a portion of my fervid lovestruck mind...was it a ploy you employed to disconnect the phone? Please say it wasn't so...
Hope you had as good a time at Pizza hut as your little heart could ever have wished for. May I call u the same time next week? I can't take no for an answer, for such a devastating verdict from your sweet lips could mean utter desperation, sorrow, pain, anguish, and heart rending distress to this lovesick swain. So, I take the answer to be yes. Please please wait for my call. I await the wonderful minutes that I shall fruitfully expend listening to your sugary voice.
Please, ######,. do not by any chance of fate, reveal what transpired in the mellifluous conversations that I have had with you to anybody, not even to &^$(*, or any of my other batchmates.
######, ( I love writing your name), when u go to kerala, brightening up by your lustrous presence any train that you may take, please get me the things that I so abjectly desire to receive from your dainty little hands. Anyway, I forgot to ask you, when shall Madras be deprived of your beauteous presence? The days that you are not in our college will be extremely dark ones for me...
Love
the one who adores you to the ends of the earth and beyond,
your lovesick swain,
&*^
*Names hidden to protect privacy (and author’s life and limb)
To be contd...
WHAT FOLLOWS ON THIS BLOG –
- What path will young love take after the receipt of the letter? Find out tomorrow...
- And more techniques which still remain too secret to reveal
IMPORTANT NOTE: THE LETTER IS ABSOLUTELY REAL, AND HAS ACTUALLY BEEN USED, iN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING!!
***********************************************************************
If you have copious quantities of water in your brain (like most poets who've written reams on love and romance), go fall in love. If you're just bored, well.... just play cupid!
Playing cupid is a highly entertaining and highly risky endeavour as well. If one manages to succeed in the onerous task of bringing two young hearts together, one reaps the rewards which come in the form of being known to all your classmates as ‘mama’ (which means little more than ‘pimp’) If one fails, however, one runs the risk of being accused of messing everything up because of one’s own romantic interests.
But, nothing fun is not risky. Or to put it another way, taking risks is half the fun.
My first attempt at playing cupid came upon me by chance. A male friend of mine requested me to help him with a love letter he was composing to a junior who’d just joined our college.
The junior was a religious Malayalee fresh out of some oilfield in Saudi Arabia and hadn’t seen a male (discounting her father, of course) for the first seventeen years of her life, having spent all of it under a burkha. But her prolonged stay at a nunnery like this had done nothing to diminish her feminine charms, which were considerable. My friend fell for her like fifty cycles in a cycle stand. Not particularly surprising becuase he is one of those fellows who is capable of falling in love even with a rhino dressed in drag.
My friend, however, had a problem. He was far from confident of his ability to compose paeans in her honour using the Queen’s language – and the girl was rather marked in her inability to read even a single sentence in Malayalam.
At that particular point of time, I was terribly bored and even more terribly broke. So I proffered my services as a ghost writer to my friend just as he was lamenting his utter inability to express his love for her in words.
‘Hey, thanks da...you’re a true friend...’, said he.
‘But there’s a catch...’, I said
He spent the next five minutes telling me how I had earned his eternal and everlasting gratitude by my act of mercy and how he was ready to hit anybody in the college who had been foolhardy enough to trouble a person as sweet, loving, caring and personable as me.
I did not interrupt him. I enjoyed every moment of it.
‘I was thinking more in terms of monetary remuneration, y’know...’ I said, broaching the subject of money in a gentlemanly way.
After a couple of minutes of bargaining, I realized that this chap was incapable of thinking of sums greater than 10 rupees if left to his own devices. So I suggested the nice round figure of 100 rupees.
‘One hundred bucks!!? Are you jokin’???’, he screamed incredulously and launched into another long monologue of how people had forgotten the value of friendship and how St.Peter would send me to the gates of Hell for attempting to fleece money off a man in perpetual penury.
I was about to tell him that the deal was off. It was then, on the spur of the moment that one of my devilish ideas struck me.
‘Okay, da... I don’t want to do anything. I have seen the light following your remarks. I am a changed man! I will help my friend with his true love!’
Oh yes, I shall, you stingy bastard, I thought to myself. I resolved to consult two thesauruses, three dictionaries and the Barron’s word lists and write a love letter so abstruse that even I wouldn’t be able to make sense of it the second time around. I also resolved to make it cornier than three of Bollywood’s mushiest romances.
I sat up all night, composing the labour of ‘love’ in the spirit of malice. When I displayed the finished product, my friend had five words to say –
‘Perfect da, Its so romantic...’
He seemed to have made his judgement based on the number of syllables in each word more than anything else. You can decide how romantic it was by reading it for yourself.
dearest ######, heart of my hearts
How are you? I guess you are sleeping, dreaming sweet dreams, as i type this... nay, write this letter with my lifeblood… after i had that enchanting talk with u. Words fail me when I try to describe the upheavals that shook my inner being as I conversed with you. I never thought you would talk to me this long. Though I feel, in my heart of hearts, you fail to realize the seriousness with which my heart palpitates at the sight of you, at the sound of your oh-so-sweet voice, and the wonderfully romantic way that your name rolls over my tongue.
I wish $%#* stayed inside her room( she interferes too goddamn much)...no, wait a sec, i have this niggling doubt, this iota of fear within a portion of my fervid lovestruck mind...was it a ploy you employed to disconnect the phone? Please say it wasn't so...
Hope you had as good a time at Pizza hut as your little heart could ever have wished for. May I call u the same time next week? I can't take no for an answer, for such a devastating verdict from your sweet lips could mean utter desperation, sorrow, pain, anguish, and heart rending distress to this lovesick swain. So, I take the answer to be yes. Please please wait for my call. I await the wonderful minutes that I shall fruitfully expend listening to your sugary voice.
Please, ######,. do not by any chance of fate, reveal what transpired in the mellifluous conversations that I have had with you to anybody, not even to &^$(*, or any of my other batchmates.
######, ( I love writing your name), when u go to kerala, brightening up by your lustrous presence any train that you may take, please get me the things that I so abjectly desire to receive from your dainty little hands. Anyway, I forgot to ask you, when shall Madras be deprived of your beauteous presence? The days that you are not in our college will be extremely dark ones for me...
Love
the one who adores you to the ends of the earth and beyond,
your lovesick swain,
&*^
*Names hidden to protect privacy (and author’s life and limb)
To be contd...
WHAT FOLLOWS ON THIS BLOG –
- What path will young love take after the receipt of the letter? Find out tomorrow...
- And more techniques which still remain too secret to reveal
IMPORTANT NOTE: THE LETTER IS ABSOLUTELY REAL, AND HAS ACTUALLY BEEN USED, iN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING!!
***********************************************************************
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Good news resting on the horns of a dilemma
Over the last few days, life has treated me well. It was on March 28th that the first bit of good news trickled in. After a series of B-School disasters of the MICA kind, I was rather chafed as I sat contemplating a long, bleak future coding away at a nameless terminal in a nameless software company, surrounded by other nameless engineers.
It was then that I received an admit into the Singapore MIT Alliance, with the SMA Grad Scholarship to boot. The thought of 1500 Sgd a month and a paid trip to MIT led to my life turning into a veritable orgy of celebration.
And then, on April 16, rested in my junk mail folder the following letter.
Dear Siddhu Warrier,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected for
participation to the European Master in Informatics (EuMI).
Furthermore, your name has been proposed to the European Commission
for an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. You will receive a grant of 21000 EUR per year.
Please confirm your interest in participating to EuMi. Thank you.
Best regards,
Marco Pistore
(Coordinator of EuMI)
And now, I know what it means to be on the horns of a dilemma. Any opinions, anyone? Most academics I know recommend this – the course being at University of Edinburgh and RWTH Aachen University in Germany. But then, the SMA deal seems sweet.
However, I must say the last few days have made up for my ridiculously pathetic performance in Class XII, and I just can’t stop jumping about in joy.
It was then that I received an admit into the Singapore MIT Alliance, with the SMA Grad Scholarship to boot. The thought of 1500 Sgd a month and a paid trip to MIT led to my life turning into a veritable orgy of celebration.
And then, on April 16, rested in my junk mail folder the following letter.
Dear Siddhu Warrier,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected for
participation to the European Master in Informatics (EuMI).
Furthermore, your name has been proposed to the European Commission
for an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. You will receive a grant of 21000 EUR per year.
Please confirm your interest in participating to EuMi. Thank you.
Best regards,
Marco Pistore
(Coordinator of EuMI)
And now, I know what it means to be on the horns of a dilemma. Any opinions, anyone? Most academics I know recommend this – the course being at University of Edinburgh and RWTH Aachen University in Germany. But then, the SMA deal seems sweet.
However, I must say the last few days have made up for my ridiculously pathetic performance in Class XII, and I just can’t stop jumping about in joy.
Friday, April 15, 2005
Twinkle Twinkle Superstar
Though I had mentioned in my earlier post that I do not readily subject myself to two to three hours of visual and auditory torture, I seem to have been doing a lot of that for the last week or so. A case in point is today, when I watched not one movie but two – one after the other, sitting alone in a theatre.
For those of you who may be mystified by my inexplicable behaviour, let me hasten to explain – April 14 saw the release of three films, and I get paid for reviewing them. And there’s nothing I love to do more than collect papers with Mahatma Gandhi’s picture on their face. It was this thought that steeled me for three hours of watching the superstar, sitting alongside hordes of fanatical fans.
I’d watched the Malayalam original, Manichitrataazhu in 1993 as a nine year old – not once but several times. I fell in love with the movie, and was scared shitless by Shobhana’s national award winning performance. In fact, Shobhana signed me an autograph which said ‘Nagavalli’ after my mother told her how scared I’d become. So, as far as Chandramukhi was concerned, I expected something much worse. But P. Vasu surpassed my lowest expectations by making a frame-by-frame retake that was infinitely worse than the original.
In the original, Mohanlal, playing an erudite psychiatrist, walks in to the movie just before the intermission. But we can’t have that with superstar, can we? So we see our America educated psychiatrist knocking people around like they were feathers in the first scene – wearing the same white trainers he wore when he was an auto-driver in Baasha.
It was then that I saw the fanaticism that defines a true Rajni fan. Rajni mouthed an inanity after the fight was done - an inanity so inane that it would have made anyone with half a mind barf. But then, to my surprise, this young chap behind me screamed out a reverent ‘Thalaivaah’!
As to what they called ‘comedy’ in the movie, the less said the better. Vadivelu’s comedy belongs to pantomimes staged for the benefit of three year old retards. But, alas, his comedy is foisted upon an audience comprised of several adults. (The fact that they seem to love it casts a shadow over my own sanity, though!)
I mean, I love a good laugh as much as the next man (and the man next to him as well). But I find it difficult to laugh when, say, trucks splash mud on Vadivelu’s face. The only thing I find funny about the completely contrived situation is how Vadivelu looks so much better when his visage is covered by a layer of mud.
As the movie progresses, the story becomes more and more like Manichitrataazhu, except for a mindless stunt sequence where Rajni proves he can fly too. But the hitch is – this makes the movie worse. I shed tears of sorrow as Jyothika tried to roll her eyes and scare the world, Prabhu tried to cry and got the theatre rocking with laughter instead, and Rajni stuck a French beard on and screamed ‘Lakalakalakalaka…’ with his tongue out!
Talking of Jyotika, she has just enough acting talent to comfortably fit into a teaspoon. In addition, my classical dancing skills are just a little better than hers.
When she dances next to Vineeth, a trained classical dancer (and just about the only person in the whole movie who actually acts), she seems about as nimble as an obese Punjabi truck driver. But I’ll hand her this – she’s as adept at raising her eyebrows and looking stoned as the DPS girl is at mouthing funny dialogues as she chokes on whatever she was choking on.
In the theatre, the superstar fan club began to grow eerily silent with the passage of time.
After having started very enthusiastically with the devout call to their thalaivar, the blokes began to quiet down a bit. By the time the intermission was on, they began to make risqué remarks about the ads playing. By the time the movie neared its exciting denouement, the aforementioned luminaries decided it would be more fun to make fun of the hero’s English pronounciation – which they did, calling to hand resources of ingenuity I never expected them to possess.
It was a tired and drained self that walked out of Mayajaal to grab a bite to eat before Mumbai Xpress began to play. As I walked back in, I espied the exceedingly vocal blokes lounging by the entrance.
One of them looked at me in surprise and asked me, ‘Hey, weren’t you with us for Chandramukhi?’
‘Yeah!’, said I, trying hard to bring an expression of joy onto my face.
‘Have you come to watch it again?’, he asked me, his eyes almost popping out of his sockets.
‘Yes…SUUUPPEERRRSTAARR rocks!’
I shouted this out loud enough to cause a couple of seedy looking chaps to turn around and give me a gentle smile of approval.
He looked puzzled as he bade me his goodbye. I wondered why.
It was then that I realized I’d forgotten to don my green shirt, red cargos, pearly white sneakers and twenty buck sunglasses.
P.S: I forgot all about Nayanthara. She’s there as eye candy. Her role lacks substance, but she doesn’t, not by a long shot – hoo boy! =P~
For those of you who may be mystified by my inexplicable behaviour, let me hasten to explain – April 14 saw the release of three films, and I get paid for reviewing them. And there’s nothing I love to do more than collect papers with Mahatma Gandhi’s picture on their face. It was this thought that steeled me for three hours of watching the superstar, sitting alongside hordes of fanatical fans.
I’d watched the Malayalam original, Manichitrataazhu in 1993 as a nine year old – not once but several times. I fell in love with the movie, and was scared shitless by Shobhana’s national award winning performance. In fact, Shobhana signed me an autograph which said ‘Nagavalli’ after my mother told her how scared I’d become. So, as far as Chandramukhi was concerned, I expected something much worse. But P. Vasu surpassed my lowest expectations by making a frame-by-frame retake that was infinitely worse than the original.
In the original, Mohanlal, playing an erudite psychiatrist, walks in to the movie just before the intermission. But we can’t have that with superstar, can we? So we see our America educated psychiatrist knocking people around like they were feathers in the first scene – wearing the same white trainers he wore when he was an auto-driver in Baasha.
It was then that I saw the fanaticism that defines a true Rajni fan. Rajni mouthed an inanity after the fight was done - an inanity so inane that it would have made anyone with half a mind barf. But then, to my surprise, this young chap behind me screamed out a reverent ‘Thalaivaah’!
As to what they called ‘comedy’ in the movie, the less said the better. Vadivelu’s comedy belongs to pantomimes staged for the benefit of three year old retards. But, alas, his comedy is foisted upon an audience comprised of several adults. (The fact that they seem to love it casts a shadow over my own sanity, though!)
I mean, I love a good laugh as much as the next man (and the man next to him as well). But I find it difficult to laugh when, say, trucks splash mud on Vadivelu’s face. The only thing I find funny about the completely contrived situation is how Vadivelu looks so much better when his visage is covered by a layer of mud.
As the movie progresses, the story becomes more and more like Manichitrataazhu, except for a mindless stunt sequence where Rajni proves he can fly too. But the hitch is – this makes the movie worse. I shed tears of sorrow as Jyothika tried to roll her eyes and scare the world, Prabhu tried to cry and got the theatre rocking with laughter instead, and Rajni stuck a French beard on and screamed ‘Lakalakalakalaka…’ with his tongue out!
Talking of Jyotika, she has just enough acting talent to comfortably fit into a teaspoon. In addition, my classical dancing skills are just a little better than hers.
When she dances next to Vineeth, a trained classical dancer (and just about the only person in the whole movie who actually acts), she seems about as nimble as an obese Punjabi truck driver. But I’ll hand her this – she’s as adept at raising her eyebrows and looking stoned as the DPS girl is at mouthing funny dialogues as she chokes on whatever she was choking on.
In the theatre, the superstar fan club began to grow eerily silent with the passage of time.
After having started very enthusiastically with the devout call to their thalaivar, the blokes began to quiet down a bit. By the time the intermission was on, they began to make risqué remarks about the ads playing. By the time the movie neared its exciting denouement, the aforementioned luminaries decided it would be more fun to make fun of the hero’s English pronounciation – which they did, calling to hand resources of ingenuity I never expected them to possess.
It was a tired and drained self that walked out of Mayajaal to grab a bite to eat before Mumbai Xpress began to play. As I walked back in, I espied the exceedingly vocal blokes lounging by the entrance.
One of them looked at me in surprise and asked me, ‘Hey, weren’t you with us for Chandramukhi?’
‘Yeah!’, said I, trying hard to bring an expression of joy onto my face.
‘Have you come to watch it again?’, he asked me, his eyes almost popping out of his sockets.
‘Yes…SUUUPPEERRRSTAARR rocks!’
I shouted this out loud enough to cause a couple of seedy looking chaps to turn around and give me a gentle smile of approval.
He looked puzzled as he bade me his goodbye. I wondered why.
It was then that I realized I’d forgotten to don my green shirt, red cargos, pearly white sneakers and twenty buck sunglasses.
P.S: I forgot all about Nayanthara. She’s there as eye candy. Her role lacks substance, but she doesn’t, not by a long shot – hoo boy! =P~
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
The Motorcycle Diaries
I’m not the kind who readily subjects himself to two hours of visual and auditory torture in a dark room. In fact, given a choice, I’d avoid setting foot in the theater as much as I can. Devdas, which brought tears to the eyes of a few I know, brought tears to my eyes as well – only they were tears of boredom. Ocean’s Eleven – I fell asleep halfway through the first thirty minutes. I wished to crack James Bond’s skull with a blackjack (though my name isn’t Warrierovsky). But there are a few movies I’ve enjoyed watching greatly – movies that have left their indelible marks on my self.
One such movie is The Motorcycle Diaries. Though the movie was released in 2004, I never got down to seeing it till yesterday – blame it on my monumental laziness. Directed by Walter Sallers, this movie is nothing less than a masterpiece.
The New York Times (curse the dad-blasted, soul-less Yankees) had the gall and the immortal rind to describe the movie as the Best Road Movie Ever. ‘Road Movie?’, well these Yankees are just plain stupid! Considering the CIA thought Che was ‘fairly intellectual for a Latino’, it isn’t surprising at all.
The movie was a lot more than that. It showed the transformation of a young privileged upper middle class boy traveling – a boy who reminded me of myself and so many others I know – into a man the whole world knew and respected.
The trip starts off on a lark, with the proposed objective being to fuck in every country in Latin America (preferably every town). But as their old bike fails and they hit the road, one begins to witness glimmers of the transformation that lead to the death of Ernesto Guevara, and the emergence from his ashes of ‘Che’ Guevara.
As the movie wound to an end, I began to contemplate upon life, and the sheer meaninglessness of mine.
I realized that I was blind.
The poverty and the injustice perpetrated by the capitalists which affected young Ernesto such a lot are visible in much greater numbers in my country. But I am inured to it.
We may be called an economic miracle by Western trained economists who marvel at our rate of growth, but can we forget the millions we have displaced or rendered jobless in the name of development? But no, I’m too busy munching on my Cadbury’s to notice.
Western Multinationals like Pepsi, brought into the country to bring about jobs and employment, have polluted ground water supplies in Kerala. They have deprived entire villages of a drop to drink. Oh, excuse me, that Mirinda tastes oh-so-succulent.
This is one movie which, as the trailer says, will alter the way you look at the world. One movie you just shouldn’t miss taking a dekko at, though it’s completely in Spanish (with English sub-titles).
By the way, anyone have a copy of Che’s biography or better still, The Motorcycle Diaries, lying around somewhere?
"Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man" – Che Guevara, 1967.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Bye bye bat
I'm down with writer's block again. But then, as Ashwin suggested months back, I'm going to post a few stories and other miscellany I've written over the years. This one was published on rediff.com on the 12th of May, 2003. Do tell me what you think.
Prologue
We moved to Ernakulam when I was all of six years, and three-and-a-half feet tall.
The move was without my approval. And so it was a screaming, shrieking, sulking six-year-old who left the clean streets of Bangalore to arrive in Ernakulam two days later.
The school there was not exactly what one would term pleasant and welcoming. I soon realised around 60 per cent of my classmates owned fathers in the armed forces, especially the Navy. I was unable to converse in Hindi, the lingua franca of the aforementioned species. So I ended up in the group of Malayalis, or rather the 'Malayalams' as we were wont to call ourselves -- as opposed to the north Indians, who called themselves the 'Hindis'!
When I was in Bangalore, there was not a single boy my age where I lived. My playmates were all females and the games they played, I discovered to my dismay, were not exactly the games my new friends liked to play. 'House-house', 'Hide-and-seek' and such namby-pamby games, thus, suddenly became unmentionable. I did not know cricket from Adam -- or Eve, for that matter.
So I was accepted merely as a fringe member. Our leader was a blighter named George. I did not like him, for the simple reason other members respected him and not me. But I wasn't exactly 'leadership material', due in no small measure to my negligible skills at cricket.
George's second-in-command was Harris, a chap who was only about as big as me but possessed a better grasp of the power politik we played in primary school. As for me, I was among the small fry, the minnows in the sea of II B.
The other minnows of the set were Elvis Gonzales, a shrimp who made me feel big, and Alwyn, a tall, gangling child who was slightly slow.
I soon found the key to the door that stopped me from becoming a valued and trusted member of the group -- my cricket bat.
Nobody in our class had a cricket bat. I was fortunate enough to have received one on my third birthday. Having seen none of its oh-so-obvious qualities at that time, it lay in a corner, neglected, for three years.
Until Ernakulam. That was where it found its true place in the sun.
The next day, after a wee bit of pestering and some tantrums, my parents permitted me to carry it to school.
The kids were delighted. George, that great soul, condescended to talk to me. He congratulated me on my acquisition. They were delighted to throw away the tree branch they called bat.
It was then I slipped in the million-dollar question.
"Uh, George...?"
"Hmmph?" replied George, with the imperiousness of a Julius Caesar.
"Can I play today?"
He made an indistinct noise, which I took as assent. I felt as happy as a lark.
At playtime, we trooped to the ground. As they formed teams, I realised my name was conspicuously not among those called.
I asked George. He looked at me like I was some insignificant insect trying to climb up his trouser legs.
"You don't know to play... go away."
"It's my bat, George!" I squealed, close to tears.
They had a council of war -- George, Harris, the star batsman Rottu, and Pradeep. They informed me I would be allowed to play in the next match.
But I was an arrogant brat who had been spoiled by the girls in Bangalore. They were a couple of years older than me, and they had pampered me rotten. The power of my tears could move them into accepting any suggestion of mine.
I burst into tears, as was my custom, snatched the bat from George (an unimaginable thing, which I am sure caused looks of surprise among his underlings), and gave him an ultimatum: you let me play or the bat goes.
George contemplated the situation at hand.
A mere underling, a minnow, an associate member, hell, he is Elvis ilk, for Christ's sake! And he's trying to lay down the rules! Those were probably the thoughts that ran through George's mind.
There was a hushed silence. Everybody was waiting for the monarch of II B to pronounce his judgement.
"Bye-bye, bat," George said.
He picked up the branch that was in vogue till then, and went in to bat. His team always batted first, and he and Harris were always the openers. And they were allowed five and three chances, respectively, whenever they batted.
I stood there forlorn, clutching the bat, as everybody -- including Alwyn, for God's sake -- set about ignoring me. I realised I was not in the league of seasoned politicians like George and Harris.
After about 10 minutes of sulking, I asked him if he would let me play, pleeease, if I gave him the bat?
Like all monarchs, George was generous when he felt like it. He pardoned me my blasphemy. He snatched the bat.
I was actually allowed to bat in the last position. Not that it mattered. I was bowled first ball. But what the heck, I was at least on the team.
I was in! I was part of the group!
Epilogue
Life went on, as it always does.
George left my school the next year, leaving Harris in command. But Harris had none of the charisma that made George the monarch. A general mutiny of the ranks destroyed the hierarchy that had prevailed for so long.
I became a better cricket player -- at least, I think I did.
Soon it was time for my family to leave for Chennai. Again, it was a move that did not have my approval. And it was a screaming, shrieking, sulking nine-year-old who left the beautiful by-lanes of Ernakulam behind him forever.
But memories remain an alluring rose pressed between the pages of my life.
Of what became of Harris, Rottu, George and the rest, I know nothing. I sometimes wonder what they would be doing. Whether they too sometimes sit back and think of the things we shared during those wonderful years we played, laughed and cried together.
Prologue
We moved to Ernakulam when I was all of six years, and three-and-a-half feet tall.
The move was without my approval. And so it was a screaming, shrieking, sulking six-year-old who left the clean streets of Bangalore to arrive in Ernakulam two days later.
The school there was not exactly what one would term pleasant and welcoming. I soon realised around 60 per cent of my classmates owned fathers in the armed forces, especially the Navy. I was unable to converse in Hindi, the lingua franca of the aforementioned species. So I ended up in the group of Malayalis, or rather the 'Malayalams' as we were wont to call ourselves -- as opposed to the north Indians, who called themselves the 'Hindis'!
When I was in Bangalore, there was not a single boy my age where I lived. My playmates were all females and the games they played, I discovered to my dismay, were not exactly the games my new friends liked to play. 'House-house', 'Hide-and-seek' and such namby-pamby games, thus, suddenly became unmentionable. I did not know cricket from Adam -- or Eve, for that matter.
So I was accepted merely as a fringe member. Our leader was a blighter named George. I did not like him, for the simple reason other members respected him and not me. But I wasn't exactly 'leadership material', due in no small measure to my negligible skills at cricket.
George's second-in-command was Harris, a chap who was only about as big as me but possessed a better grasp of the power politik we played in primary school. As for me, I was among the small fry, the minnows in the sea of II B.
The other minnows of the set were Elvis Gonzales, a shrimp who made me feel big, and Alwyn, a tall, gangling child who was slightly slow.
I soon found the key to the door that stopped me from becoming a valued and trusted member of the group -- my cricket bat.
Nobody in our class had a cricket bat. I was fortunate enough to have received one on my third birthday. Having seen none of its oh-so-obvious qualities at that time, it lay in a corner, neglected, for three years.
Until Ernakulam. That was where it found its true place in the sun.
The next day, after a wee bit of pestering and some tantrums, my parents permitted me to carry it to school.
The kids were delighted. George, that great soul, condescended to talk to me. He congratulated me on my acquisition. They were delighted to throw away the tree branch they called bat.
It was then I slipped in the million-dollar question.
"Uh, George...?"
"Hmmph?" replied George, with the imperiousness of a Julius Caesar.
"Can I play today?"
He made an indistinct noise, which I took as assent. I felt as happy as a lark.
At playtime, we trooped to the ground. As they formed teams, I realised my name was conspicuously not among those called.
I asked George. He looked at me like I was some insignificant insect trying to climb up his trouser legs.
"You don't know to play... go away."
"It's my bat, George!" I squealed, close to tears.
They had a council of war -- George, Harris, the star batsman Rottu, and Pradeep. They informed me I would be allowed to play in the next match.
But I was an arrogant brat who had been spoiled by the girls in Bangalore. They were a couple of years older than me, and they had pampered me rotten. The power of my tears could move them into accepting any suggestion of mine.
I burst into tears, as was my custom, snatched the bat from George (an unimaginable thing, which I am sure caused looks of surprise among his underlings), and gave him an ultimatum: you let me play or the bat goes.
George contemplated the situation at hand.
A mere underling, a minnow, an associate member, hell, he is Elvis ilk, for Christ's sake! And he's trying to lay down the rules! Those were probably the thoughts that ran through George's mind.
There was a hushed silence. Everybody was waiting for the monarch of II B to pronounce his judgement.
"Bye-bye, bat," George said.
He picked up the branch that was in vogue till then, and went in to bat. His team always batted first, and he and Harris were always the openers. And they were allowed five and three chances, respectively, whenever they batted.
I stood there forlorn, clutching the bat, as everybody -- including Alwyn, for God's sake -- set about ignoring me. I realised I was not in the league of seasoned politicians like George and Harris.
After about 10 minutes of sulking, I asked him if he would let me play, pleeease, if I gave him the bat?
Like all monarchs, George was generous when he felt like it. He pardoned me my blasphemy. He snatched the bat.
I was actually allowed to bat in the last position. Not that it mattered. I was bowled first ball. But what the heck, I was at least on the team.
I was in! I was part of the group!
Epilogue
Life went on, as it always does.
George left my school the next year, leaving Harris in command. But Harris had none of the charisma that made George the monarch. A general mutiny of the ranks destroyed the hierarchy that had prevailed for so long.
I became a better cricket player -- at least, I think I did.
Soon it was time for my family to leave for Chennai. Again, it was a move that did not have my approval. And it was a screaming, shrieking, sulking nine-year-old who left the beautiful by-lanes of Ernakulam behind him forever.
But memories remain an alluring rose pressed between the pages of my life.
Of what became of Harris, Rottu, George and the rest, I know nothing. I sometimes wonder what they would be doing. Whether they too sometimes sit back and think of the things we shared during those wonderful years we played, laughed and cried together.
Saturday, March 19, 2005
The Oldest Patron and the Lost Wodehouse - final concluding part
(Please read Parts I and II before you read this.)
The Oldest Patron paused again, and cadged another cigarette from a reluctant Arjun in the interregnum.
The whole tea shop came to a standstill as they waited for the Oldest Patron to light up and continue. Smoke from a hundred half-smoked cigarettes filled the air. The non-smokers held their cups in a vice-like grip, unable to take the next sip till the old man spoke again.
‘Well…it was then that it happened. Was it the day before her birthday? Or the day before that?’, he screwed his eyes shut as he tried to recollect memories from a past long gone.
‘Whichever day it was, she called me that night. I was writing on the first page of the book exactly the kind of soppy stuff my friend said would bring a blush to her damask cheek (and puke to my mouth) when the phone rang.’
The thought of the Oldest Patron - with his grey locks and long white mane - writing odes to love on the front page of a book brought upon me waves of laughter I could not suppress. Worse still, I thought, the PYT he was talking about would probably be a grandmother today!
‘You may find it funny, my ugly young man. But when I penned those lines, my hair was of a darker hue and I didn’t have a beard.
‘Anyway, coming back to the point, I picked up the phone and hollered a cheery What-ho to her over the line. Her what-ho was considerably subdued, and she didn’t sound her usual, cheery self. I soon realized why when she told me we wouldn’t ever eat the strawberries and cream at Wimbledon together again (not that we ever did, for that matter – I was speaking metaphorically, you retard!). She spoke of how the spark had died down. My suggestion that we try cleaning the spark plugs was shot down unceremoniously.
She had just given me the raspberry, I realized.
‘The world reeled about me. The words P.G. Wodehouse and the sum I had spent on it, seemed to form a hammer and strike me between the eyes. It took me a minute before I could compose myself enough to speak.
‘Er… the money, I mean, the books…?’, sputtered I, for I was not at my most articulate when faced with a terrible financial…oops, I mean, personal… loss.
‘’You cheap bastard! You want those books you gave me last semester back!! You can take it…’, screamed she in language which brought the blush to my damask cheek (if I ever had one).
‘I tried to tell her once again that I’d actually bought a book for her, spending my father’s hard-earned mone.
‘I tried to tell her that my father would see the bill. I tried to tell her that I had taken such a great risk for her alone.
‘But all I actually said was,
‘‘The bills…my father will see them… how do I send the message across to …’
‘I was cut off again, and had to listen to another two minutes about how she half expected me to even ask for money back for all that I’d ever spent on her. She went on to suggest that I get the bills attested by a Chartered Accountant and send it along to her. She even offered me interest on the amount.
‘Though I thought the idea was capital, I knew it was neither the time nor place to bring up the issue. My inarticulateness had created a barrier as high as the Eiffel Tower between us.
‘I told her I was sorry that it had to end this way, to which she said something about how she said something I cannot remember – so fogged are these memories by the mists of time.
‘She then expressed a fond desire to dance over my remains at my funeral. I almost asked her to pay for that as well. But I was cut off as she decided to return the phone to its receiver.
‘I looked down at the book – and saw within it an opportunity to redeem my mangled pride. I rose from the desk and walked towards the nearest trash bin with a purposeful stride that rather became me. I threw the Wodehouse into the trash bin and smiled at the sight of it on top of a mound of garbage.
‘Around two hours later, realization dawned upon me that:
• I’d never read the book, which was among my intentions in the first place
• I’d never be able to sell it to the second hand dealer
• I could always tear page 1 where I’d penned the romantic message and feed the vultures with it
‘I ran towards the trash bin, only to see that the blokes at the Corporation had chosen that day to make their once-a-year-garbage pick-up.
‘It was the end of the road for that book.
‘It was the end of the road for my money…
‘Today, somewhere, someplace, under ten tones of rubbish, lies a Wodehouse, forlorn and neglected. A Wodehouse,’, said the Oldest Patron, getting almost lyrical at this point,’ that bore her name on it.’
Then his voice rose. It sounded shaky.
‘A Wodehouse on which I’d spent valuable money.’’
The Oldest Patron’s voice dropped down to a whisper,
‘And I never got to read that book. Till date...’
The silence that followed the Oldest Patron’s last statement was broken but by the clattering of glasses of tea long neglected, and the sharp intakes of breath which indicated that Arjun and his compatriots had begun to get back to work with their cigarettes again.
Epilog:
The Oldest Patron passed away last week, having lived long enough for everyone to have lost count of his age.
He never did get to read that book. The rest of us lesser patrons purchased the book and placed it on his funeral pyre.
The girl never turned up to dance on his remains at the funeral. Good thing she didn’t. She’d have found the pyre an awfully warm place to execute a buckwing dance. Besides, it was unlikely that the arthritis she probably has would have allowed her to dance as freely as she would have wished to.
Besides, she probably doesn’t even remember the Oldest Patron…
The Oldest Patron paused again, and cadged another cigarette from a reluctant Arjun in the interregnum.
The whole tea shop came to a standstill as they waited for the Oldest Patron to light up and continue. Smoke from a hundred half-smoked cigarettes filled the air. The non-smokers held their cups in a vice-like grip, unable to take the next sip till the old man spoke again.
‘Well…it was then that it happened. Was it the day before her birthday? Or the day before that?’, he screwed his eyes shut as he tried to recollect memories from a past long gone.
‘Whichever day it was, she called me that night. I was writing on the first page of the book exactly the kind of soppy stuff my friend said would bring a blush to her damask cheek (and puke to my mouth) when the phone rang.’
The thought of the Oldest Patron - with his grey locks and long white mane - writing odes to love on the front page of a book brought upon me waves of laughter I could not suppress. Worse still, I thought, the PYT he was talking about would probably be a grandmother today!
‘You may find it funny, my ugly young man. But when I penned those lines, my hair was of a darker hue and I didn’t have a beard.
‘Anyway, coming back to the point, I picked up the phone and hollered a cheery What-ho to her over the line. Her what-ho was considerably subdued, and she didn’t sound her usual, cheery self. I soon realized why when she told me we wouldn’t ever eat the strawberries and cream at Wimbledon together again (not that we ever did, for that matter – I was speaking metaphorically, you retard!). She spoke of how the spark had died down. My suggestion that we try cleaning the spark plugs was shot down unceremoniously.
She had just given me the raspberry, I realized.
‘The world reeled about me. The words P.G. Wodehouse and the sum I had spent on it, seemed to form a hammer and strike me between the eyes. It took me a minute before I could compose myself enough to speak.
‘Er… the money, I mean, the books…?’, sputtered I, for I was not at my most articulate when faced with a terrible financial…oops, I mean, personal… loss.
‘’You cheap bastard! You want those books you gave me last semester back!! You can take it…’, screamed she in language which brought the blush to my damask cheek (if I ever had one).
‘I tried to tell her once again that I’d actually bought a book for her, spending my father’s hard-earned mone.
‘I tried to tell her that my father would see the bill. I tried to tell her that I had taken such a great risk for her alone.
‘But all I actually said was,
‘‘The bills…my father will see them… how do I send the message across to …’
‘I was cut off again, and had to listen to another two minutes about how she half expected me to even ask for money back for all that I’d ever spent on her. She went on to suggest that I get the bills attested by a Chartered Accountant and send it along to her. She even offered me interest on the amount.
‘Though I thought the idea was capital, I knew it was neither the time nor place to bring up the issue. My inarticulateness had created a barrier as high as the Eiffel Tower between us.
‘I told her I was sorry that it had to end this way, to which she said something about how she said something I cannot remember – so fogged are these memories by the mists of time.
‘She then expressed a fond desire to dance over my remains at my funeral. I almost asked her to pay for that as well. But I was cut off as she decided to return the phone to its receiver.
‘I looked down at the book – and saw within it an opportunity to redeem my mangled pride. I rose from the desk and walked towards the nearest trash bin with a purposeful stride that rather became me. I threw the Wodehouse into the trash bin and smiled at the sight of it on top of a mound of garbage.
‘Around two hours later, realization dawned upon me that:
• I’d never read the book, which was among my intentions in the first place
• I’d never be able to sell it to the second hand dealer
• I could always tear page 1 where I’d penned the romantic message and feed the vultures with it
‘I ran towards the trash bin, only to see that the blokes at the Corporation had chosen that day to make their once-a-year-garbage pick-up.
‘It was the end of the road for that book.
‘It was the end of the road for my money…
‘Today, somewhere, someplace, under ten tones of rubbish, lies a Wodehouse, forlorn and neglected. A Wodehouse,’, said the Oldest Patron, getting almost lyrical at this point,’ that bore her name on it.’
Then his voice rose. It sounded shaky.
‘A Wodehouse on which I’d spent valuable money.’’
The Oldest Patron’s voice dropped down to a whisper,
‘And I never got to read that book. Till date...’
The silence that followed the Oldest Patron’s last statement was broken but by the clattering of glasses of tea long neglected, and the sharp intakes of breath which indicated that Arjun and his compatriots had begun to get back to work with their cigarettes again.
Epilog:
The Oldest Patron passed away last week, having lived long enough for everyone to have lost count of his age.
He never did get to read that book. The rest of us lesser patrons purchased the book and placed it on his funeral pyre.
The girl never turned up to dance on his remains at the funeral. Good thing she didn’t. She’d have found the pyre an awfully warm place to execute a buckwing dance. Besides, it was unlikely that the arthritis she probably has would have allowed her to dance as freely as she would have wished to.
Besides, she probably doesn’t even remember the Oldest Patron…
The Oldest Patron and the lost Wodehouse - Part II
‘A Wodehouse?’, sputtered Arjun.
‘A Wodehouse?’, sputtered I.
An egg, a bean and a few crumpets looked up from their glasses to ask the same question.
A philistine asked, ‘What’s a Wodehouse?’, and was promptly cut to size by the rest of us in attendance.
The Oldest Patron turned to Arjun and cadged a cigarette from him. (The Oldest Patron never believed for paying for anything himself. Where others saw a man, he saw a sponge to be squeezed – though many referred to him unkindly as a sponge).
With the satisfied smirk of one who knows his words have had the desired effect, the Oldest Patron leaned back onto his chair.
He lighted the cigarette deliberately, took a long drag on it and exhaled the smoke slowly. The pause was long enough to have been made by Vajpayee.
Then he spoke…
‘Yes, indeed, my friends, a Wodehouse. Supposed to be one of ol’ Penhalm Granville’s best. May the good man rest in peace…’, said he, a reverent look clouding his eyes over.
After another long pause during which the tea shop’s owner walked over with our glasses of tea, the Oldest Patron continued,
‘It was long time ago, like I said. And I was but a sprightly young man, pursuing a degree in Engineering like you fine, upstanding lads here.
Being a chap full of the blood that makes us men men, I was forever interested in women. The hitch was, women weren’t interested in me, as is often the case. I was blessed with a face ugly enough to stop ten clocks… in fact, I looked a little like you, though not half as bad’, said he, pointing helpfully at me.
Ignoring my irate protests, he continued,
‘But then, as it often happens, there was this girl…’, a faraway look entered his eyes as his mind harked back to a flame that had long spent itself, ‘….this girl, who liked talking to me…’
‘Must have been ugly as sin…’, muttered a cynical bean.
‘Au contraire, monsieur. Though no Madhubala or Heidi Lamarr, she was a pretty little thing to behold. And besides,’, he said, a naughty smile playing on the corners of this mouth, ‘I don’t think she could see very well either. Anyway, to cut a long story short, something of the kind that you young people today call a relationship – we called it an understanding back then – grew between the two of us as the months passed.
‘I was a very proud and vainglorious blighter those few months. I was sure that anyone who would see the two of us together would wonder how anyone as ugly as me could manage to get himself seen with anyone better than a transverstite. That filled me up with pride. Things looked very rosy, indeed.
‘But things weren’t all as rosy as I pictured them to be in the beginning. Girls aren’t forever satisfied with 10 pice chocolates and 1 rupee paneer sodas. They thirst for more. This wench wished that I spend more on her than the four annas that I usually did. I was indeed a trifle cheap and stingy when an impecunious young man…’
The innkeeper, who at this point happened to be walking by, stopped and told the Oldest Patron that he was still a lot more than a trifle cheap and stingy, asked him if he ever planned to pay up for last month’s tea, and walked away resignedly.
‘Then, the day approached. The day I dreaded the most – her birthday. She had made it very clear – with a subtlety that became her well - that she expected a gift from me. I just HAD to buy her a gift! And I knew intuitively that I couldn’t possibly get her the 4 anna chocolate I would have preferred to.
‘It was then that the brainstorm struck me. If I were naked, I would have run around Madras screaming Eureka at the top of my voice. Being a Wodehouse aficionado, I realized I could purchase her a book by the master himself. She had liked the few I’d suggested she read a few months ago. Besides, I could buy the new Wodehouse I hadn’t read yet. And I could cadge it from her later. And I could possibly sell it to a second hand dealer after I’d kept it with me sufficiently long for her to forget about it.
‘I did not have the cash to purchase a Wodehouse book – it was so beastly expensive. I had to smoke bidis for a whole week to save up the amount.', his voice shook at the thought of the terrible sacrifice.
An impressed Arjun looked at his visage with a renewed admiration.
‘Love conquers all’, said my romantic half.
‘Hell hath no fury like a woman whose birthday you get nothing for’, said my fiscally prudent side.
I had the Wodehouse at hand as I awaited her birthday…’
‘A Wodehouse?’, sputtered I.
An egg, a bean and a few crumpets looked up from their glasses to ask the same question.
A philistine asked, ‘What’s a Wodehouse?’, and was promptly cut to size by the rest of us in attendance.
The Oldest Patron turned to Arjun and cadged a cigarette from him. (The Oldest Patron never believed for paying for anything himself. Where others saw a man, he saw a sponge to be squeezed – though many referred to him unkindly as a sponge).
With the satisfied smirk of one who knows his words have had the desired effect, the Oldest Patron leaned back onto his chair.
He lighted the cigarette deliberately, took a long drag on it and exhaled the smoke slowly. The pause was long enough to have been made by Vajpayee.
Then he spoke…
‘Yes, indeed, my friends, a Wodehouse. Supposed to be one of ol’ Penhalm Granville’s best. May the good man rest in peace…’, said he, a reverent look clouding his eyes over.
After another long pause during which the tea shop’s owner walked over with our glasses of tea, the Oldest Patron continued,
‘It was long time ago, like I said. And I was but a sprightly young man, pursuing a degree in Engineering like you fine, upstanding lads here.
Being a chap full of the blood that makes us men men, I was forever interested in women. The hitch was, women weren’t interested in me, as is often the case. I was blessed with a face ugly enough to stop ten clocks… in fact, I looked a little like you, though not half as bad’, said he, pointing helpfully at me.
Ignoring my irate protests, he continued,
‘But then, as it often happens, there was this girl…’, a faraway look entered his eyes as his mind harked back to a flame that had long spent itself, ‘….this girl, who liked talking to me…’
‘Must have been ugly as sin…’, muttered a cynical bean.
‘Au contraire, monsieur. Though no Madhubala or Heidi Lamarr, she was a pretty little thing to behold. And besides,’, he said, a naughty smile playing on the corners of this mouth, ‘I don’t think she could see very well either. Anyway, to cut a long story short, something of the kind that you young people today call a relationship – we called it an understanding back then – grew between the two of us as the months passed.
‘I was a very proud and vainglorious blighter those few months. I was sure that anyone who would see the two of us together would wonder how anyone as ugly as me could manage to get himself seen with anyone better than a transverstite. That filled me up with pride. Things looked very rosy, indeed.
‘But things weren’t all as rosy as I pictured them to be in the beginning. Girls aren’t forever satisfied with 10 pice chocolates and 1 rupee paneer sodas. They thirst for more. This wench wished that I spend more on her than the four annas that I usually did. I was indeed a trifle cheap and stingy when an impecunious young man…’
The innkeeper, who at this point happened to be walking by, stopped and told the Oldest Patron that he was still a lot more than a trifle cheap and stingy, asked him if he ever planned to pay up for last month’s tea, and walked away resignedly.
‘Then, the day approached. The day I dreaded the most – her birthday. She had made it very clear – with a subtlety that became her well - that she expected a gift from me. I just HAD to buy her a gift! And I knew intuitively that I couldn’t possibly get her the 4 anna chocolate I would have preferred to.
‘It was then that the brainstorm struck me. If I were naked, I would have run around Madras screaming Eureka at the top of my voice. Being a Wodehouse aficionado, I realized I could purchase her a book by the master himself. She had liked the few I’d suggested she read a few months ago. Besides, I could buy the new Wodehouse I hadn’t read yet. And I could cadge it from her later. And I could possibly sell it to a second hand dealer after I’d kept it with me sufficiently long for her to forget about it.
‘I did not have the cash to purchase a Wodehouse book – it was so beastly expensive. I had to smoke bidis for a whole week to save up the amount.', his voice shook at the thought of the terrible sacrifice.
An impressed Arjun looked at his visage with a renewed admiration.
‘Love conquers all’, said my romantic half.
‘Hell hath no fury like a woman whose birthday you get nothing for’, said my fiscally prudent side.
I had the Wodehouse at hand as I awaited her birthday…’
The Oldest Patron and the Lost Wodehouse
Note:
The author must take this opportunity to thank P.G. Wodehouse for providing him with so potent a story telling technique as Mr. Mulliner. Many people have narrated fables, starting from Aesop down. But none has done it as Wodehouse has. I bow down to thee, maitre.
The Oldest Patron had been a fixture at the tea shop ever since anybody could remember. Some say that he was there, at the very same seat, when Mangal Pandey stormed
The Oldest Patron was a gifted story-teller. He had a story for every moment – stories which ranged from the sublime to the crass. He had a story to tell everyone – whether they wanted to hear it or not. This story is a story about one of his stories.
It was I who broke the silence.
‘Do you know that ass Shankar?’
‘Yeah…who doesn’t? He’s so weighed down by the moolah he can hardly walk’, said Arjun.
‘Well, he just got himself a new bike.’
Arjun was not too surprised. It was just the kind of thing one would expect Shankar to do.
‘Oh well…’, said he, in the resigned tone of a man who dodged tickets in PTC buses everyday.
‘That’s not what’s stunning and mind-numbing!’, interrupted I, ‘ The egg-head could have sold his old steed for a cool 40,000 rupees. But he chose to dispose of it…’
Arjun jumped up with a start.
‘Payment deferred. Pay when you want…’
END OF PART 1
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Close Encounters with the Third Kind
After the MICA interview, I had the leisure to mull over several existential questions while sitting on a filthy berth on a train to Bombay– primary among which was how on earth Bangalore is such a babe factory.
It fills me (and most other males in Chennai) that just 350 kilometers from where I live, there exists a place which bears a strong resemblance to the land of the Amazons. (I’m thinking more on the lines of Wonder Woman here, and not Xena, in case you were wondering!) After arriving upon the conclusion that it must be something to do with the weather or some magic depilatory (or whatever else they call it) available only in the city, I dozed off. I was woken up with a start when someone placed a rough hand on my head.
In my half asleep stupor, I wondered whether it were some pretty Bangalorean girl who’d come to thank me for my flattering views on her oomph factor. I turned my face upward and opened my eyes. And promptly wished I hadn’t. It was ‘Close Encounter with the Third Kind’ time again.
The aforementioned creature clapped it’s hands loudly on my face, and told me how it would be better for my health if I complied quickly with the demands of the 6 foot tall, well muscled extortionists that had surrounded me. A quick dip into my purse later, they left, but not before conferring me with blessings for a bright future. (Oh yeah! Now watch me. Armed with their blessings, there’s no question that I’m going to be the next occupant of Race Course Road)
I was understandably miffed at having my purse lightened by the matter of around thirty rupees by the end of the journey. But upon arriving in Bombay, I got to listen to the Sisto horror story. Apart from shelling out lots more, Sisto also had the honour of being squeezed in the wrong place by the same characters - an experience which, according to him, not even the most gay among us, would have enjoyed.
I seriously think that this pestilence has tormented us long enough. I understand that these people are offered no alternative avenues of employment, and they do this to survive. I understand. Completely. But can you please keep your grubby paws off my &(_*& please?
It fills me (and most other males in Chennai) that just 350 kilometers from where I live, there exists a place which bears a strong resemblance to the land of the Amazons. (I’m thinking more on the lines of Wonder Woman here, and not Xena, in case you were wondering!) After arriving upon the conclusion that it must be something to do with the weather or some magic depilatory (or whatever else they call it) available only in the city, I dozed off. I was woken up with a start when someone placed a rough hand on my head.
In my half asleep stupor, I wondered whether it were some pretty Bangalorean girl who’d come to thank me for my flattering views on her oomph factor. I turned my face upward and opened my eyes. And promptly wished I hadn’t. It was ‘Close Encounter with the Third Kind’ time again.
The aforementioned creature clapped it’s hands loudly on my face, and told me how it would be better for my health if I complied quickly with the demands of the 6 foot tall, well muscled extortionists that had surrounded me. A quick dip into my purse later, they left, but not before conferring me with blessings for a bright future. (Oh yeah! Now watch me. Armed with their blessings, there’s no question that I’m going to be the next occupant of Race Course Road)
I was understandably miffed at having my purse lightened by the matter of around thirty rupees by the end of the journey. But upon arriving in Bombay, I got to listen to the Sisto horror story. Apart from shelling out lots more, Sisto also had the honour of being squeezed in the wrong place by the same characters - an experience which, according to him, not even the most gay among us, would have enjoyed.
I seriously think that this pestilence has tormented us long enough. I understand that these people are offered no alternative avenues of employment, and they do this to survive. I understand. Completely. But can you please keep your grubby paws off my &(_*& please?
Sunday, March 06, 2005
I continue today what I had started a couple of days ago, when I had recounted my brush with pseudokind.
I walked into the room where the MICA interview panel sat awaiting my arrival, sharpening their knives, cutlasses and other instruments of torture. The panel was populated with three individuals, two male and one female.
Starting off with a bit of gas about myself, the panelists descended to asking me to convince them why I didn’t want to become a career journalist. Ten minutes on, when all of us realized that the conversation seemed to resemble a circle more than anything else, they moved on to ask me about one brand I admired.
I spoke eloquently on Hutch, and how Hutch’s advertisements and their services were so superior as to be a lifestyle product. After around two minutes of Hutchsell on my part, an interview panelist pounced on me and asked me out of the blue,
‘What’s the connection you have?’
I was taken aback, and could not lie at such short notice. I informed him that my connection was a Reliance connection. I had walked right into the most shark-infested zone in the Pacific. We descended into nitpicking about why I couldn’t convince my parents to give me a Hutch connection, and how on earth I was going to sell packaged human excreta to millions of people if I couldn’t sell a cell phone connection to my parents. After telling them that my parents represented a value-conscious segment of the market that Hutch did not target at all in the first place, and that I wasn’t aware of a cell phone being purchased for me in the first place (lie detectors would have gone bleep! at this point. ), I managed to extricate myself out of the hole I had so assiduously dug for myself.
Then, the panelists expressed concern about my sore voice, and asked me which peak on the Himalayas my thorax had gone to scale. After telling them about how my voice was the quintessential prodigal who listened not to the diktats of my mind, and, like a rebellious soul, went where it pleased whenever it felt like doing so, I told them that it would make a full return shortly (because most of it had already made a comeback).
Surprise number 2 hit me then.
‘Tell me why we should let you in?’
That was a question that demanded a lot of thought. I told them that I spoke well, clearly and persuasively, with a smile on my face – trying to look like some demagogue on the Patrice Lumumba line.
‘Clearly? Hah!’, exploded the short-haired lady on the panel (who reminded me strongly of the chatterati – y’know, the kind who gather around Delhi’s press club, drink in hand, and discuss arcane solutions to arcane problems like Guatemala’s capitalist oppressors and wax eloquent on how 10 people holding placards in front of Bush’s office could turn the world around)
‘Well, Ma’am, at least when my throat isn’t sore…’
After some more desultory chatter, I left the room with a grin on my face. I was concentrating so much on the grinning part that I left my bag in the room. As a result of this, I spent another extended period with Ms. Pseudo and her compatriots – a time exceedingly well spent ogling the espieglerie and ignoring the conversation - until the panel left the room (and I could sidle in)
As I walked out of IIM Bangalore, it was a confused self. I felt like the rubber rat that cats amuse themselves with, utterly decimated… On the other hand, even if I didn’t make it, I’d be spared two years of association with pseudodom, wouldn’t I? (But, I’d also miss two years of ogling at the same pseudodom, dammit!)
I walked into the room where the MICA interview panel sat awaiting my arrival, sharpening their knives, cutlasses and other instruments of torture. The panel was populated with three individuals, two male and one female.
Starting off with a bit of gas about myself, the panelists descended to asking me to convince them why I didn’t want to become a career journalist. Ten minutes on, when all of us realized that the conversation seemed to resemble a circle more than anything else, they moved on to ask me about one brand I admired.
I spoke eloquently on Hutch, and how Hutch’s advertisements and their services were so superior as to be a lifestyle product. After around two minutes of Hutchsell on my part, an interview panelist pounced on me and asked me out of the blue,
‘What’s the connection you have?’
I was taken aback, and could not lie at such short notice. I informed him that my connection was a Reliance connection. I had walked right into the most shark-infested zone in the Pacific. We descended into nitpicking about why I couldn’t convince my parents to give me a Hutch connection, and how on earth I was going to sell packaged human excreta to millions of people if I couldn’t sell a cell phone connection to my parents. After telling them that my parents represented a value-conscious segment of the market that Hutch did not target at all in the first place, and that I wasn’t aware of a cell phone being purchased for me in the first place (lie detectors would have gone bleep! at this point. ), I managed to extricate myself out of the hole I had so assiduously dug for myself.
Then, the panelists expressed concern about my sore voice, and asked me which peak on the Himalayas my thorax had gone to scale. After telling them about how my voice was the quintessential prodigal who listened not to the diktats of my mind, and, like a rebellious soul, went where it pleased whenever it felt like doing so, I told them that it would make a full return shortly (because most of it had already made a comeback).
Surprise number 2 hit me then.
‘Tell me why we should let you in?’
That was a question that demanded a lot of thought. I told them that I spoke well, clearly and persuasively, with a smile on my face – trying to look like some demagogue on the Patrice Lumumba line.
‘Clearly? Hah!’, exploded the short-haired lady on the panel (who reminded me strongly of the chatterati – y’know, the kind who gather around Delhi’s press club, drink in hand, and discuss arcane solutions to arcane problems like Guatemala’s capitalist oppressors and wax eloquent on how 10 people holding placards in front of Bush’s office could turn the world around)
‘Well, Ma’am, at least when my throat isn’t sore…’
After some more desultory chatter, I left the room with a grin on my face. I was concentrating so much on the grinning part that I left my bag in the room. As a result of this, I spent another extended period with Ms. Pseudo and her compatriots – a time exceedingly well spent ogling the espieglerie and ignoring the conversation - until the panel left the room (and I could sidle in)
As I walked out of IIM Bangalore, it was a confused self. I felt like the rubber rat that cats amuse themselves with, utterly decimated… On the other hand, even if I didn’t make it, I’d be spared two years of association with pseudodom, wouldn’t I? (But, I’d also miss two years of ogling at the same pseudodom, dammit!)
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
If I were to be brought in front of a court or tribunal today, I know what the charges would be. They would, without a shadow of doubt, would be charges indicting me for gross dereliction of blogging duty.
But then, before it gets to an actual trial and the like, I’d better update my blog.
The last few weeks have not by any means been bereft of incident. They have been the most hectic, tiring, and in a perverse way, enjoyable, coupla weeks of my life. I visited Pune, Bangalore and Bombay, attended five GD/PIs, have already been thrown out of SIBM Pune and done lots of other things.
The Pune trip is old hat, so I guess I’ll probably write about the long trip that I had undertaken this last week.
25/02/2005
MICA was holding its interview at IIM Bangalore, which was thankfully a stone’s throw from where I stayed. Dressed up nattily in a pressed formal shirt (that I’d purchased recently, deciding that Camel Shirts and T-shirts which went ‘Save Milk Drink Beer’ wouldn’t pass muster with the prudes who conduct these interviews), formal pants and (choke) tie.
IIM Bangalore’s campus is big enough to accommodate three B-schools, and I had half a mind to invoke the urban land ceiling act on them. After walking around three hundred metres, one takes a dekko at an entrance that leaves one rather awestruck.
After walking another three kilometers, I arrived at the tail of a huge queue. What struck me – apart from the irritation I feel whenever I witness evidence of India’s overpopulation – was that people were dressed in t-shirts, jeans and kurtas.
I began to feel rather the fool, dressed up more like a traveling salesman than anything else on earth. I decided to ask the chap ahead of me the reason for his rather unusual attire.
It was then that I realized that my voice, which was conspicuous by its absence early in the morning, was still on strike. I opened my mouth to speak and all that would come out were squeaks and growls. The rather inconsiderate bloke dressed in jeans began to laugh – his voice strong and clear as a bell.
My voice began to return to work, much like how our government servants walk in to work every morning – one at a time, starting at 10 am. By the time it was 11 30, it was clear enough to be heard by the person next to me.
After registering with a professor wearing a t-shirt and sporting a pony-tail, I walked in to write the MICA entrance test.
Talking of the MICA entrance test, its one of the weirdest exams concocted by the mind of man. Its full of questions I couldn’t understand the purpose of. There were questions where I had to rate (on a scale of 1-15) the kind of qualities I’d like to see in a prospective wife. I’d like to know what the psychoanalysts at MICA would possibly figure out by knowing that I’d prefer ‘a highly educated, high achieving middle class woman’ to ‘a rich woman, who distributes herself evenly among lots of others’. (DAMN! There were no options which read ‘Big tits’. X-()
The GD was what I would term strictly okay, mainly because I could hardly make myself heard after having started the GD. That was primarily thanks to my voice, which chose the wrong day to go sightseeing in the Himalayas. It was an interesting case study. A tall bloke with glasses appointed himself moderator and did a pretty decent job of it. He however had the feeling that he was also the boss, and leaned back on his seat, one leg over another (and kept shaking his legs incessantly, something that got on to my nerves like nothing on earth) and had encouraging, uplifting and patronizing remarks like ‘Wonderful!’, ‘That’s good!’ and ‘yeah, good, I guess you can go with that’ for every one of the remarks the rest of us made.
As for me, I managed to put in a few points whenever there was a lull, and hardly anything at every other point in the GD.
Then started the long wait for the PI, a wait that lasted several hours. However, it was a wait made interesting by the fact that I got the opportunity to converse with a candidate working at O&M. He gave me great insights into the ad industry, and was definitely among the more erudite people I’ve seen.
The gaggle of aspiring MICANs also had more than its fair share of pseudos. By pseudos, I refer to girls who stretch their fingers full, drop their hands daintily, giggle, smile fake, lip-stick stained smiles, talk with an accent that gives me the heebie jeebies, think they speak the best English on earth and that every guy on earth is just waiting for an opportunity to sleep with them (not too far off the mark there, I wager LOL), and yeah, most unbearably stink of perfume. One can, of course, not forget the male pseudo who may be classified as a species who hang around female pseudos with grins plastered on their faces, speak in heavily accented English in equally fake deep voices, and laugh softly at things a normal human being would never find funny.
Note: if you think you can turn into a male pseudo, please note that the most important criterion for joining the club is to have a very deep wallet
Talking for five minutes to one of them who was drenched in enough perfume to drown China was rather an interesting experience.
Ms. Pseudo: Heyyy…. You’re goin’ in nexttt?
Me: Uh…what? Oh, yeah, I guess I’m next.
Ms. Pseudo: Ohh…I’m sooo scaaareed, y’know, its just noootttt happenin’, y’know, if they’re, like, gonna stress me out, y’know. I’d just diee!
Me: Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that. Its pretty cool here, from what I’ve seen so far
Ms. Pseudo:Oh, I hope so, y’know. Anyway, where are you from?
Me: I’m a Malayali, but I’m from Chennai. So depending on what exactly the question meant, you can choose the answer you desire.
Ms. Pseudo: Ohhhh!! I’m also a Malyalee (fake anglicized accent here, please. I can’t possibly dare think she speaks an Indian language), but I’m not exaaaaaactly a Malyalee, y’know. I was in Kerala only for 18 years. I spent three years in Bangalore, y’know!
Me:(Oh wow! You’re like soooo cool babe! You lived in BANGALORE! Why are you talking to a villager like moi, who actually is exactly a Malayali?!) Er... that’s rather interesting. Er..anyway, I’ve got to go right now, I’d like to grab a bite to eat before my PI (read: I wanna barf, the perfume’s suffocating me, goddammit!).
Ms. Pseudo: Tah-tah. By the way, my name’s (*^*&Y. And you…?
Me:
************************************************************************************
Now the reader will probably ask me, “You hated her, you couldn’t stand how pseudo she was! You found her perfume appalling, and her attitude too oojah-cum-spiff. And you think she thinks half the world wants to sleep with her, which disgusts you! So would you want to do it yourself?’
Me: Hmm…good question, young man/lady. Very good question. Er…hmmm… oh hell, who am I kidding!? Obviously, yeah! ;-)
P.S: Its a different matter altogether that I’d probably get a chance in 3000 AD, but that’s beside the point anyway, ain’t it?
P.P.S: I’ll tell you about the PI some other time. This seemed more interesting.
But then, before it gets to an actual trial and the like, I’d better update my blog.
The last few weeks have not by any means been bereft of incident. They have been the most hectic, tiring, and in a perverse way, enjoyable, coupla weeks of my life. I visited Pune, Bangalore and Bombay, attended five GD/PIs, have already been thrown out of SIBM Pune and done lots of other things.
The Pune trip is old hat, so I guess I’ll probably write about the long trip that I had undertaken this last week.
25/02/2005
MICA was holding its interview at IIM Bangalore, which was thankfully a stone’s throw from where I stayed. Dressed up nattily in a pressed formal shirt (that I’d purchased recently, deciding that Camel Shirts and T-shirts which went ‘Save Milk Drink Beer’ wouldn’t pass muster with the prudes who conduct these interviews), formal pants and (choke) tie.
IIM Bangalore’s campus is big enough to accommodate three B-schools, and I had half a mind to invoke the urban land ceiling act on them. After walking around three hundred metres, one takes a dekko at an entrance that leaves one rather awestruck.
After walking another three kilometers, I arrived at the tail of a huge queue. What struck me – apart from the irritation I feel whenever I witness evidence of India’s overpopulation – was that people were dressed in t-shirts, jeans and kurtas.
I began to feel rather the fool, dressed up more like a traveling salesman than anything else on earth. I decided to ask the chap ahead of me the reason for his rather unusual attire.
It was then that I realized that my voice, which was conspicuous by its absence early in the morning, was still on strike. I opened my mouth to speak and all that would come out were squeaks and growls. The rather inconsiderate bloke dressed in jeans began to laugh – his voice strong and clear as a bell.
My voice began to return to work, much like how our government servants walk in to work every morning – one at a time, starting at 10 am. By the time it was 11 30, it was clear enough to be heard by the person next to me.
After registering with a professor wearing a t-shirt and sporting a pony-tail, I walked in to write the MICA entrance test.
Talking of the MICA entrance test, its one of the weirdest exams concocted by the mind of man. Its full of questions I couldn’t understand the purpose of. There were questions where I had to rate (on a scale of 1-15) the kind of qualities I’d like to see in a prospective wife. I’d like to know what the psychoanalysts at MICA would possibly figure out by knowing that I’d prefer ‘a highly educated, high achieving middle class woman’ to ‘a rich woman, who distributes herself evenly among lots of others’. (DAMN! There were no options which read ‘Big tits’. X-()
The GD was what I would term strictly okay, mainly because I could hardly make myself heard after having started the GD. That was primarily thanks to my voice, which chose the wrong day to go sightseeing in the Himalayas. It was an interesting case study. A tall bloke with glasses appointed himself moderator and did a pretty decent job of it. He however had the feeling that he was also the boss, and leaned back on his seat, one leg over another (and kept shaking his legs incessantly, something that got on to my nerves like nothing on earth) and had encouraging, uplifting and patronizing remarks like ‘Wonderful!’, ‘That’s good!’ and ‘yeah, good, I guess you can go with that’ for every one of the remarks the rest of us made.
As for me, I managed to put in a few points whenever there was a lull, and hardly anything at every other point in the GD.
Then started the long wait for the PI, a wait that lasted several hours. However, it was a wait made interesting by the fact that I got the opportunity to converse with a candidate working at O&M. He gave me great insights into the ad industry, and was definitely among the more erudite people I’ve seen.
The gaggle of aspiring MICANs also had more than its fair share of pseudos. By pseudos, I refer to girls who stretch their fingers full, drop their hands daintily, giggle, smile fake, lip-stick stained smiles, talk with an accent that gives me the heebie jeebies, think they speak the best English on earth and that every guy on earth is just waiting for an opportunity to sleep with them (not too far off the mark there, I wager LOL), and yeah, most unbearably stink of perfume. One can, of course, not forget the male pseudo who may be classified as a species who hang around female pseudos with grins plastered on their faces, speak in heavily accented English in equally fake deep voices, and laugh softly at things a normal human being would never find funny.
Note: if you think you can turn into a male pseudo, please note that the most important criterion for joining the club is to have a very deep wallet
Talking for five minutes to one of them who was drenched in enough perfume to drown China was rather an interesting experience.
Ms. Pseudo: Heyyy…. You’re goin’ in nexttt?
Me: Uh…what? Oh, yeah, I guess I’m next.
Ms. Pseudo: Ohh…I’m sooo scaaareed, y’know
Me: Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that. Its pretty cool here, from what I’ve seen so far
Ms. Pseudo:
Me: I’m a Malayali, but I’m from Chennai. So depending on what exactly the question meant, you can choose the answer you desire.
Ms. Pseudo: Ohhhh!!
Me:(Oh wow! You’re like soooo cool babe! You lived in BANGALORE! Why are you talking to a villager like moi, who actually is exactly a Malayali?!) Er... that’s rather interesting. Er..anyway, I’ve got to go right now, I’d like to grab a bite to eat before my PI (read: I wanna barf, the perfume’s suffocating me, goddammit!).
Ms. Pseudo: Tah-tah. By the way, my name’s (*^*&Y. And you…?
Me:
************************************************************************************
Now the reader will probably ask me, “You hated her, you couldn’t stand how pseudo she was! You found her perfume appalling, and her attitude too oojah-cum-spiff. And you think she thinks half the world wants to sleep with her, which disgusts you! So would you want to do it yourself?’
Me: Hmm…good question, young man/lady. Very good question. Er…hmmm… oh hell, who am I kidding!? Obviously, yeah! ;-)
P.S: Its a different matter altogether that I’d probably get a chance in 3000 AD, but that’s beside the point anyway, ain’t it?
P.P.S: I’ll tell you about the PI some other time. This seemed more interesting.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
The great Cricket Match - Finale
N.Ra defended the first ball, though no coaching manual would call it that. Murugan seized the opportunity as he ran towards the other end. But Murugan ultimately outsmarted himself by turning towards Jalandhar and trying to force him to fall. But Jalandhar was not known as the mountain man for nothing. The force of the collision hardly perturbed him but put Murugan off balance. Murugan tripped, and Jalandhar used the opportunity to run him out.
Surendra Babu began to hop in fury, reminding me of a particularly grotesque pagan ritual. Mahendran was the next batsman to walk in. The two following him were present on the team only because there was no one else to take their place. We considered ourselves lucky that they knew which side of the bat was up.
Half the team was ready to assassinate Mahendran and had decided to do so upon losing – which, even to the most pessimistic among us, was a mere seven balls away.
Surendra Babu sat down on the corner of the ground, and began ranting away in a brand of Tamil so chaste that it put Sanjay Anand’s earlier effort (refer previous chapter) to shame.
Mahendran managed to prod the ball for a single off the last ball. Though Mahendran was not our best hope for scoring those last few runs, he was better than N.Ra.
The next over was bowled by a spinner named Pranav. He vexed Mahendran thoroughly with his first two deliveries, especially because he turned the ball even less than Kumble. The third delivery, like 90% of Pranav’s delieveries, was outside the off-stump, of good length and did not turn an inch. Mahendran desperately swung at it trying to hit the ball through the gap between deep point and cover. But, all he managed to do was edge the ball to the right of the keeper. But the keeper, still hobbling after the incident with the stumps in the last over (he wasn’t smart enough to wear pads like yours truly was) could not get to the ball in time and the ball predictably ‘raced to the fence like a rabbit on rollerskates’, to grab a leaf from the pages of my illustrious namesake.
We had won! And had done so thanks to Mahendran. We began to look forward to the wonderful prospect of getting the money that came our way for winning the match.
The 9th B players were sullenly filing over towards us after having lynched Sanjay Anand and taken all his money (which was a considerable amount). After a few arguments, we all made off with fifty rupees with the exception of Mahendran who was given terse instructions to take a walk to the nearest liquor store to get Amit his share.
Mahendran began to implore everyone that his good name would be sullied forever if he stepped into a liquor store. He also complained that a bottle of beer would cost eighty rupees, and that he couldn’t afford it without contributions from the rest of us. But one good look at Surendra Babu’s calloused knuckles at close quarters convinced him that perpetual penury and ignominy were preferable to being maimed by those knuckles. He began his long walk towards the liquor store (or ‘wine shaap’ as Amit preferred to call it), a drooling Amit in tow.
I walked home with a song in my heart and watched as a rather battered Sanjay Anand cycled home. I wondered what he was thinking of before breaking off to look at a hilarious accident involving an unfortunate cyclist and a foul mouthed old woman. Life moved on…
Surendra Babu began to hop in fury, reminding me of a particularly grotesque pagan ritual. Mahendran was the next batsman to walk in. The two following him were present on the team only because there was no one else to take their place. We considered ourselves lucky that they knew which side of the bat was up.
Half the team was ready to assassinate Mahendran and had decided to do so upon losing – which, even to the most pessimistic among us, was a mere seven balls away.
Surendra Babu sat down on the corner of the ground, and began ranting away in a brand of Tamil so chaste that it put Sanjay Anand’s earlier effort (refer previous chapter) to shame.
Mahendran managed to prod the ball for a single off the last ball. Though Mahendran was not our best hope for scoring those last few runs, he was better than N.Ra.
The next over was bowled by a spinner named Pranav. He vexed Mahendran thoroughly with his first two deliveries, especially because he turned the ball even less than Kumble. The third delivery, like 90% of Pranav’s delieveries, was outside the off-stump, of good length and did not turn an inch. Mahendran desperately swung at it trying to hit the ball through the gap between deep point and cover. But, all he managed to do was edge the ball to the right of the keeper. But the keeper, still hobbling after the incident with the stumps in the last over (he wasn’t smart enough to wear pads like yours truly was) could not get to the ball in time and the ball predictably ‘raced to the fence like a rabbit on rollerskates’, to grab a leaf from the pages of my illustrious namesake.
We had won! And had done so thanks to Mahendran. We began to look forward to the wonderful prospect of getting the money that came our way for winning the match.
The 9th B players were sullenly filing over towards us after having lynched Sanjay Anand and taken all his money (which was a considerable amount). After a few arguments, we all made off with fifty rupees with the exception of Mahendran who was given terse instructions to take a walk to the nearest liquor store to get Amit his share.
Mahendran began to implore everyone that his good name would be sullied forever if he stepped into a liquor store. He also complained that a bottle of beer would cost eighty rupees, and that he couldn’t afford it without contributions from the rest of us. But one good look at Surendra Babu’s calloused knuckles at close quarters convinced him that perpetual penury and ignominy were preferable to being maimed by those knuckles. He began his long walk towards the liquor store (or ‘wine shaap’ as Amit preferred to call it), a drooling Amit in tow.
I walked home with a song in my heart and watched as a rather battered Sanjay Anand cycled home. I wondered what he was thinking of before breaking off to look at a hilarious accident involving an unfortunate cyclist and a foul mouthed old woman. Life moved on…
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