The Last King of Kerala

Statutory warning: Unless you’ve watched The Last King of Scotland, you’re not going to make head or tail of this post. I suggest you watch it. Nae, I order you to watch it. I had a dream that says so.

I had just graduated from one of the million substandard engineering colleges that dot the Indian landscape.

We had a celebratory dinner at home.

My father tried to appear to be happy. As we sat down at the table to eat, he spoke solemnly.

‘My son, you have decided to follow a very noble profession chosen by very few… er… make that a few million. Nonetheless, I would like to congratulate you by raising this glass of orange juice to our collective lips. A toast to your pitiful degree in engineering.’

Oh, did I mention it? Mum’s into anti-temperance and all that kind of thing.

He continued, after I had downed the orange juice into my stomach where it soon met the half-litre of vodka that sloshed around in the vicinity (relics of a livelier graduation party with a few mates).

‘You shall soon be joining the thousands of mindless drones who slave away at the software company I work at. I can think of no better profession for you, considering you seem to have no other interests save porn, women and alcohol.’

I balked inside. The software company seemed horrendously unappealing.

I went into my room, settled on my bed, and stared at the Sachin Tendulkar poster on the ceiling. The thought that a chap who had failed his O-levels could make a lot more money than me caused me to seethe within.

I turned the television on, and was greeted by Jade Goody. That did it!! I screamed out loud. I had to make something of my life, just like Arundhati Roy, Shilpa Shetty, Mandira Bedi, and legions of other talentless goofs had.

I had to get away from it all. I had to find myself – even if I knew full well that the search was unlikely to yield any more than a search for free, genuine nude pictures of Aishwarya Rai on google.

I took the globe in hand and spun it around, muttering away, ‘First place my finger stops at, I go there.’, rather like the talentless shmuck I was.

When the globe stopped spinning, my finger rested on the United States of America.

George W. Bush. Condoleeza Rice. Tyrannical visa regulations. The patriot’s act. Tom Cruise. F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

Goddammit, spin the globe around again.

Uganda, this time around.

Africa. Topless tribal women. Erotic fertility rituals.

It took me just two minutes to decide that I would much rather prefer to sleep with topless tribal women than with Condi Rice.

A few days later, I was on a rickety old bus, travelling down one of the few roads in the world that made the Indian highways look like British motorways. I was going to teach little kids in some village in Uganda how to hate Bill Gates and use Ubuntu Linux. After all, didn’t Ubuntu rhyme with Uganda?

I soon met the chap who ran it all – an old Indian uncle, aunty in tow. I went up to yonder uncle, who was running around getting all the snotty-nosed African kids to take their shoes off before they entered the compute room. As every Indian who’s ever taken a computer class knows, wearing footwear into a computer room will cause the computer to choke to death.

‘Hello, uncle. Where are the PCs? I would like to check my email. And how many PCs do we have?’

‘What’s email? Well, we’ve got the BBC Microcomputer (circa 1982). And I notice you’ve brought a motherboard along with you. That makes it two computers… well, kind of.’

The old coot had been up to the age-old baniya practice of hawking all the computers that stupid Europeans sent along after seeing ‘Kinder hilfe’ ads in Koeln Hauptbahnhof at the local black market.

I soon met aunty as well.

I had imagined an Indian version of Stifler’s mom. Beautiful, undersexed, and completely sick of uncle’s persistent flaccidity (Oh did I mention? What with all the AIDS going around in Africa, the last thing they want around there is Viagra!). What I got was a rotund Kantaben with a large bindi plastered over her forehead. Ah well, I’d at least get good khichdi.

Before I could speak, aunty asked me, ‘So, beta, are you married?’

‘Er…well…’

‘Ah, all you youngsters. In my time, we would not let 23 year olds run around the world unmarried. What you need is a good wife to cook for you and look after you.’

Why is it that none of these aunties want to talk of the good stuff about marriage – I mean, the action! It’s not like we Indians don’t do it at all. If you’re not sure, ask the chaps who conduct the decennial census. But before I could object, aunty went on to speak of how her son was working in a good software company in America and was married to a good girl from his own caste – no nonsense with all these goris and kallis.

It was a few days later that Idi Amin came to our village, and my life changed forever.

I was wearing my Kerala: God’s Own Country t-shirt (which contained no information whatsoever of the communists, the labour unions, and the sex crimes in God’s Own Country) when I went to attend Amin’s rally.

The first thing I espied was that the bloke was huge. And that he loved to shout ‘Are you awrite????’ out to the crowd every five minutes. And every five minutes, the crowd answered with a resounding, ‘Shoooooure’.

A few minutes on, I found myself actively screaming ‘Shoooure’ with the crowd. Blending in with the crowd, as it were. Amin then broke out into a kind of tribal jig, which reminded me of the dances in Telugu movies – you know, the kind of thing where the bloke goes into a kind of trance and begins to jiggle his pelvis around like nobody’s business; most people call it exorcism, but Rajkumar and Chiranjeevi call it disco dance.

It was then that I decided to leave. I had seen enough Kannada and Telugu movies to positively detest that kind of thing. As I drove away in my battered landcruiser (everybody who’s anybody in Africa has a 4X4), a military autorickshaw chased me down, and a couple of the local yokels dressed in army fatigues hopped out.

‘Da president, he has a problem with his computer. We need a Computer Scientist. Very urgently.’, said they.

‘I’m a Computer Scientist.’, said I, rather pompously.

‘You come with us.’, they commanded.

Never being one to argue with the business end of an AK-47, I followed them meekly to where the President was, with his laptop on his lap, clapping his ears in pain.

Windows had hung, and Windows Media Player was looping an African song, which sounded suspiciously like the kind of song Rajnikant would love to woo his heroine by.

Idi Amin stared at me and said, ‘You tell me what to do, and I do.’

‘Oh, one of those numbskulls who wouldn’t let tech support do it for them, but wanted to do it for themselves even if they couldn’t power a computer on by themselves.’, I thought to myself.

‘Er..well, Mr. President. Please hold the Ctrl, Alt, and Del keys down.’.

His excellency proceeded to get his fingers in a twist trying to press the ‘C’, ‘O’, ‘N’, ‘T’, ‘R’, ‘O’, and ‘L’ keys on the keyboard down, all at the same time.

I spent five minutes trying to counsel him on how to do it right, at the end of which I lost my patience, grabbed the laptop from Idi Amin, pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del, and killed the Windows Media Player process, screaming, ‘I’ve got to put this thing out of its misery’.

All the flunkies around Amin cocked their carbines. Amin looked menacingly at me, and raised himself to his full height.

‘You touched MY keyboard. You are Indian, aren’t you?’, he said, glowering.

‘Uh…yes, but no, I’m from South India, aye. Kerala.’, and pointed to my Kerala t-shirt.

Amin laughed.

‘Ah, Kerala! Why didn’t you say so? I love Kerala. If I weren’t born a Ugandan, I would have been a Malayalee. There is no other part of the world where people are as horny, and have as funny names as us Ugandans do.’

I smiled; the chap was quite a charmer. I find my name amusing myself, and am unquestionably horny and sex starved.

He went on, ‘I want that t-shirt. I have a son named Baby Lijo Aju Samuel Aby Verghese. He would love it.’

I stared flummoxed. I had doubts about his sanity when he said he wished he was Indian (Anybody who has tried to pick a woman up at a club with a strong Indian accent would agree with me*). The request for the t-shirt convinced me entirely.

He took my confusion to indicate hesitation, and immediately ripped his bemedalled shirt off, and offered it in exchange. Rudyard Kipling wasn’t kidding when he said the barter system still existed in deepest Africa.

He then went on to say, ‘You, you become my personal Computer Scientist. You come here to serve Uganda. You can serve Uganda by protecting the computer of its head of state from viruses unleashed by my political opponents.’

I gaped, open-mouthed. Could I consent to go along with this madman? I looked back to the village. Visions of the aunty marrying me off to some lass who would not meet her husband’s eyes, and would be even worse in bed than me, flashed across my eyes.

I said, ‘Yes…’

I was going to Kampala!

To be continued….

*Yes, I know Russell Peters said that. I give him full credit, but it is a truism, for christ’s sake!

A Lament for my motherland

Everyday, I see in the Indian newspapers stories of India’s incredible surge. Not a single day passes without my reading about how we are fighting for a permanent seat in the UNSC. I hear my friends back home talk of salaries with enough zeroes in them to be beyond the comprehension of an impecunious graduate student like self. I hear of Tata acquiring Corus, and of the rising Indian middle class.

In the midst of all this hype, we hardly have any time for the Pandians of the world anymore. Pandian is the antithesis of what we want to think of India and Indians at the present moment – he is hardly educated, he speaks broken English, and is part of the urban poor. No thanks, we’d rather read of Ratan Tata flying an F-16 or of Lakshmi Nivas Mittal being richer than the Queen. Or rather, no poverty, please, we’re the educated, anglicised Indian middle class.

Pandian was a vegetable vendor, the owner of a corner shop in our middle-class locality. Wheelchair-bound, he did a pretty good job of it – he even handled the haggling maamis* with finesse. He was not a rich man, but earned enough to send not just his own children, but even his nephew, to school.

It was in 2001 that disaster struck, as far as Pandian was concerned at least.

Because it was in 2001 that a supermarket opened up about half a mile from where Pandian had set up shop. The supermarket had fresher vegetables that were shrink-wrapped, courteous sales staff, air conditioning, and managed to sell it cheaper than Pandian could ever hope to.

Pandian had probably never heard of words like ‘Brand Loyalty’, but I have no doubts whatsoever that he probably hoped that his customers would continue to support him, after his service to the community for years. But then, we’ve all watched You’ve Got Mail, and know exactly what happened next.

No, Pandian did not have shut shop like Meg Ryan. A few people continued to buy their vegetables from him, even if it meant having to bear the ignominy of carrying vegetables that weren’t shrink-wrapped in a bag that didn’t carry the supermarket’s oh-so-upmarket label. He survived; and still managed to send the kids to school. However, they also had to deliver vegetables to customer’s homes after school.

So, I still remember collecting vegetables from Azhagarsaami, a strapping young lad in his early teens almost every other night. I also remember that Azhagarsaami tried his best to practice his English. I never got particularly friendly with him, partly because I studied at this snobbish college full of rich kids who looked down on the proletariat and people who couldn’t speak English well.

But this story is not a tear-jerker about how my views on the dignity of the labour were changed by speaking to some poor kid**. This story is about Pandian.

The years rolled by, and I left the shores of my motherland. I actually perceived poverty for the first time in my life; it’s hard to miss when everything else around looks so prosperous. And then, a short while back, I was speaking to my mother.

‘Do you remember Pandian?’, she asked me.

I grunted in assent, for I could not understand why his name had cropped up in the middle of an infernally expensive international call.

‘Well, he’s lost his shop!’

I was shocked. ‘What? Why??’, I asked.

The corporation was running a city beautification drive, and as many residents of the snooty colony I call home would probably agree in private, Pandian’s corner store was an eyesore.

Your IT consultant wouldn’t like to have Pandian outside his condo. Neither would the manager.

For the Pandians are a wretched reminder of the other India. Memories that have to be cleansed. Roads that have to be beautified.

Pandian had been served a legal notice, of course. We are a democracy – and a socialist democracy at that – and his shop was on the property of the Government of India.

We wouldn’t do something as wretched as dispossessing a poor man of his only means of livelihood. We would do something as wretched as that only after serving a legal notice. Vox Populi, vox dei, and all that kind of thing.

My mother found him during her evening walk – forlorn and weeping, perched on his wheelchair next to the ruins of what used to be his shop. My mother did not say a word – there was nothing to say…

I know not of what has happened of Pandian today. But he is not alone. There are many Gafurs, Kamals and Thomases who have fallen by the wayside in India’s mad rush to becoming a superpower in the 21st century.

They are the unseen poor whom we, the English speaking middle class, detest. We tell our kids, ‘These people never studied well enough when in school. That’s why they and their children are begging for money on the street’. We look at them and sneer at their lack of culture.

But I wonder how many of us can look at a poor, crippled man crying on the footpath, and blame him for it…

This post is dedicated to Vanaja’s husband – whose small scale business was wiped out in 1996; to Kamal – who, at 22, has spent the last 14 years of his life collecting clothes to press; to Ramakrishnan –who dropped out of my school at the age of 10 to help his father whitewash walls; to Pappamma – who lost her all to the government in the name of the progress; and to all the rest for whom liberalisation, S&P credit ratings, and permanent seats in the UN Security Council mean nothing.

*maami: literal translation: aunt, actually (in this case): just an old harridan with outdated views on the caste system and the dignity of labour, who would rather die than pay a penny more for that tomato)

** I am, after all, a typically insensitive chap from the Indian middle classes – I don’t see India’s poor even when they wave their begrimed hands right in front of my face.

And a Casanova I ain't

Those who have long memories may remember a promise I had made in my previous post – to talk of the harrowing experience that had taught me that I was not to be a Don Juan. I am not usually the kind of chap who keeps promises of this kind (or of any kind, if we must nitpick). But, since I am currently waiting for a huge download to complete, and can find nothing better to do with my time than to write about a thousand words of tripe, here goes…

The story goes back several years. So many years that, I must, in fact, force my way through the mists of time to get there. The year was 2001, and I was an impressionable young lad of 17.

Those familiar with my first crush will also be quite aware of the finesse with which I hit on women I had a soft spot for. I very strongly doubt if Casanova would have attempted to woo the chickadee of his dreams by talking of his Unit Test marks. The Capulet family wouldn’t have had to bother with the vexing conundrum of where to dispose Romeo’s body if his courtship had followed the lines of mine.

Siddhu circa 2001 was not much different. All I knew of romance I had gleaned from trashy Tamil and Bollywood movies, and the occasional Mills and Boon. Any further romantic interests I may have had in the intervening years never happened because I was held up by that bane of every Indian teenager’s life – the Board exams (the equivalents of the O- and A- levels, to the uninitiated). Having partaken of no form of physical exercise for more than three years, I resembled a bowling pin more than anything else. If an egg were to point me out to a bean, the bean would probably have said, “Goddamn! That’s a bleedin’ geek!’

But it was in 2001 that I finally finished school and entered the hallowed portals of college. The college I entered, or the coridoors therein, weren’t particularly hallow, but there you are. I felt liberated – after twelve years spent mucking about wearing an ugly school uniform, I could now wear what I wanted, and do what I wanted.

Liberated in this fashion, I noticed her. She was a moderately pretty girl, but I would not have considered her particularly special. If it weren’t for a certain other blogger (you know who you are, you bastard – assuming you’re reading this, of course! ;) ) deciding to kid my pants off about her, I would have given her nary a second glance.

But that was not to be. “The Warrior” was supposed to have a crush on Maya (name changed), and that was that as far as the aforementioned blogger was concerned. I had, of course, watched too many Bollywood movies for my own good. That, and the fact that my hormones had been suppressed in favour of Physics, Chemistry and Maths between the ages of 14 and 17, resulted in me having a huge crush on her.

I began to behave in ways that were completely alien to me (and most right-thinking men). I started wearing XXL tee shirts so that my paunch wouldn’t show (as much), actually started combing my hair so that traces of my simian ancestry were less pronounced, and began to *ugh* listen to Backstreet Boys.

Using the devious wiles that are the hallmark of the Warrier clan, I managed to worm her phone number out of her, and placed a call.

‘Hello.’, said she.

‘Hi…’, said I, rather effusively.

A silence that one would call pregnant ensued.

‘Who is this?’, she asked, finally, and rather suspiciously.

‘It’s me, Siddhu. That guy in your class, y’know.’

‘Oh, you – that guy who’s always in the first row! Hi…’

Today, I would probably known – unless I were hitting on a geek with thick glasses – that this did not bode well. But at that point in time, I believed strongly in the magnetic aura around the first-row geek.

‘Yeah, that’s me, alright! You’ve got that one right!!’

She grunted in assent, and followed it up with one of those pregnant silences that are the bane of the clumsy lover.

After about ten seconds, I managed to stutter,

‘Uh well, have you done the Engineering Math assignment? I had a doubt in question 2.’

…

About two months later, I strongly believed that being a first bencher had its advantages. After all, did she not call me almost every day? I studiously ignored the fact that:

1. Most of the calls were to ask me something about some course or the other, or were merely because I had called her earlier.


2. If we were not talking about some math problem or the other, I was doing all the talking – I had told her about how I had prepared for my board examinations, how I had delivered a hard hitting speech as a member of the opposition in the National youth parliament, and how I had found calculus fascinating when in school. (The last one was a particularly huge blunder; because it was also a lie!!)


3. She was friendlier to at least a dozen other chaps than she was to me, and often shrunk away from carrying a conversation out with me when those blighters were around.

I also considered it significant that she:

1. Thought I was a nice guy. Her exact words were more along the lines of ‘I like you. You’re a nice kid.’, but nevermind.


2. Thought my bright yellow tee shirt (my all-time favourite) made me look like a fireman. Her exact words were, ‘The glare from that shirt’s so terrible you look like an emergency worker. You should burn it!’, but nevermind.


3. Found my plans to buy a motorbike when I turned 18 highly amusing. Her exact words were, ‘You’ll look so hilarious on a motorbike. You’re so not a motorbike person!’ – but ah well, I had read on one of those self-help websites that getting a girl to laugh was important.


4. She actually said ‘Hi’ whenever she saw me. This was particularly comforting for one who had been studiously ignored by the opposite sex for all of seventeen years.

It was as I sat in my room with the Backstreet Boys crooning away on my computer that the idea began to grow on me. It was a mere nebulous thought when ‘Larger than Life’ was playing. It began to take shape when the Backstreet Boys had told me that they wanted it that way. By the time Nick Carter asked me to show him the meaning of being lonely, I had made the decision.

I would ask her out.

But now, the question arose as to how I would go about doing it. I had just dismissed the idea of getting down on my knees with a rose on my teeth as a tad theatrical and was contemplating as to which Bollywood movie would give me the best ideas when the phone rang.

‘Hello,’, I said, some inane Backstreet Boys song still playing away in the background.

‘Hi…’

It was her. To say that my heart leapt would sound a shade like Erich Segal, but that was how it was (call me a douche if you will).

‘Hi, Maya. What’s up?’

‘Well… I got this problem with understanding how Flemish joints work…’

We spent the next fifteen minutes discussing Flemish joints and other similarly weird creatures that crop up if one is ever unfortunate enough to study Civil Engineering.

After that, she seemed to be in a hurry to leave and was about to hang up, when I spoke,

‘Hey, Maya, got to tell you something…’

‘What? I really got to go and meet this guy in about twenty minutes.’

‘Uh…well… I really don’t know how I’m supposed to say this…I really like you.’

This was supposed to be the moment when a bouquet of flowers enveloped the screen, and we cut to a song in the Swiss alps, with Maya running down a slope towards me. But it was not to be…

‘What!??’

‘I mean, I really like you. I’d like to, you know, like, er…you know, ask you out…’,. This was not going as planned, and the last few words were spoken in a hushed whisper.

‘YOU?? You want to ask me out? So what do we do if I do say yes…?’

Now that was a toughie. I racked my brains. Having never really been the kind of chap who steps out of home if he can help it, I had no idea as to what couples did, once they became couples. After deciding that saying ‘We’d make out’ would be a trifle premature, I said,

‘Er… we could go to the cinema, y’know…?’

For the next two minutes, all I could hear was a hyenaesque laughter from the other end.

After she had presumably finished wiping tears of mirth off her face, she spoke.

‘Siddhu, you’re a really sweet chap’ – heart leap time – ‘ but I really…uh well…let me think about it; I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

It should have been clearly apparent to me that these were famous last words, but I persisted.

‘Er…okay, I’ll wait for your call.’

The days passed me by. My phone remained silent.
And then it rang.

‘Hello …?’, said I, eagerly.

‘Hello yourself’, said the voice at the other end.

It was not Maya. It was another friend of mine. And before I could say anything, she spoke.

‘Okay, now who the fuck is this Maya?’

‘What!!??’

‘I hear you’ve been making a complete pest of yourself with her.’

‘What do you mean??’

‘Well, I heard from Aakaanksha that you’ve been this total ‘hyper case’ with Maya, and been coming on terribly strong. Don’t you have any common sense? Is that how you ask a girl out?’

‘B..but how do you know? And who on earth is Aakaanksha’

‘Oh Aakaanksha is Tripti’s friend. And Tripti knows Sandhya. Sandhya, Divya and Shyamala had met up with Maya, who told them about how you keep pestering her with phone calls, and behaved completely hyper with me and begged her to go out with you.’

‘But..’

‘Shut up! I don’t care if you’ve made a fool of yourself. You’ve made a fool of me too! They asked me if I knew you, and I was stupid enough to admit you were my friend. And then they laughed and asked me if you were a rotund little fuck who insisted on making a fool of himself by pestering a girl to the point of irritation.’

A pregnant silence followed, this time of my own making.

Now that I look back upon this sordid episode, it was not entirely a loss. It inspired me to work on getting rid of that paunch, at the very least. And it has also cured me permanently from asking women out.

The author realizes that this story of his ineptitude in matters of the heart (or to be more honest and explicit, something a little further down) may ensure that he shall never get laid again. At least not until he decides to ask his mother to find him the suitable girl from somewhere in the middle of Kerala. Therefore, he takes this opportunity to beg pretty women to prevent the aforementioned horror from ever happening. As always, age no bar/caste no bar/race no bar/religion no bar/height no bar (as long as you don’t mind midgets)

When the Hunter became the Hunted

Over the years, I’d become used to the idea of being the one engaged in a perpetually bootless pursuit of tail. That I was not to be one of the Don Juans of the world was driven into me when I was about seventeen, and the first girl I’d ever tried to ask out gave me the raspberry (a story that merits a post of its own, surely). She spoke in no uncertain terms of what she thought of me, and went on to elaborate on the defects in my demeanour, outer crust and general appearance to all and sundry.

Therefore, if an egg (or for that matter, a bean or a crumpet) had walked up to me a couple of years ago and asked me if anybody had ever bothered to try and pick me up from a pub, I would have laughed at him. I would have asked if he were trying to mock me, and warned him with the cautionary tale of what happened to the little children who mocked the Prophet Eliza (they were eaten by bears, in case the reader was wondering).

But then, nobody ever told me there are girls, and there are girls. It’s the latter that I shall talk of today – the women who turned the hunter into the hunted.

Cut to: Northern Ireland, March 2006.

Almost a year ago, a few friends and I decided to pop in and pay Gerry Adams and his drinking mates in the IRA a short visit. After three exhausting days spent photographing IRA graffiti in Derry, Ballycastle, Giant’s causeway and Belfast, we decide to partake of the blushed hippocrene at one of the numerous taverns that dot every British (and Irish) city.

The Irish, I must hasten to add, are among the friendliest people that a chap can hope to meet. It is nigh impossible to go anywhere in Ireland without being drawn into a conversation with the locals – whether one likes it or not. So, we were not surprised when the three middle-aged people at the other end of our table began to ask us what we were doing in Belfast.

It was as one of the chaps decided that the best way to regale my German friend would be to show him pictures he’d taken of the holocaust memorial in Berlin that the lady with them began to talk with me.

She was probably in her forties, and as unlike Stifler’s mom as was humanly possible. After disposing of the preliminaries, she began to tell me about how she worked for the Revenue Service, and how her life was often very lonely and boring. I assented mutely, thinking nothing of it whatsoever. When she began to talk of how rarely she managed to get out and meet nice people, I began to grow slightly uncomfortable. A few minutes from then, I felt a hand grab my arm ever so slightly.

If life were a Shakespearean play, I would probably written, ‘Exit Hurriedly, followed by bear’ and that would have been that. But it was not, and I began to signal to my friends that now may be a good time to check some other pub out. They apparently found my discomfort highly amusing. But, thankfully, my German friend’s patience was running thin in the face of the other chappie’s almost inexhaustible pictures from Berlin, and the exit I had been fervently wishing for was executed with great finesse.

Cut to: England, September 2006.

Ryanair, as I have had cause to mention earlier in these dispatches, has this distressing habit of flying out of airports in the middle of nowhere. It was while staying the night waiting for one of these flights in a nondescript little place called Bishop’s Strotford (Ryanair called it London) that I decided to grab an ounce or two of a restorer at this quiet, little pub.

I walked into the pub, a Harry Potter held close to my chest. After asking the bartender to dispense a pint of the needful, I settled down in a cosy nook and began to read of what would indeed happen to the horcruxes. It was as I was getting to the particularly exciting bit about Ron snogging Lavender (yes, I’m an adolescent, and found parts of Harry Potter 6 to be the very best erotica I’d ever read) that I heard a voice pipe down towards me from the next table.

I turned around to espy a plump Englishwoman in her early thirties.

‘Is that a nice book?’, said she.

‘Oh, I say, yeah, rather!’, said I, trying to hide the cover of the book. I was not able to find the adult cover to HP 6, y’see.

She smiled, and relapsed into silence.

And I went back to the book. I had just begun to contemplate how generally awesome it would have been if I’d studied at a school like Hogwarts where one could snog Emma Watson in the common room for all it was worth when the voice piped up again.

‘It’s considered anti-social in this country to read books at a pub’

‘Er… I’m sorry…it’s like, I was here alone, and so I thought I’d kinda catch up with my reading. There, I’ve closed it.’, I said, rather flustered at having apparently committed a faux pas in the land of the stiff upper lip.

She continued unabated, ‘So where are you from? My name's *^^(‘

After we’d exchanged names, and I’d told her I was from India, she told me that she’d always wanted to visit India, and that it was so very mystical.

I grinned non-committaly.

‘You know, the Kama Sutra and stuff, it’s really cool’, said she.

I hummed and hawed, for the Kama Sutra and I had never been formally introduced. My Kama Sutra education was limited to a few clips of Indira Verma watched surreptitiously on a mate's mobile phone.

It was then that she spoke again.

‘So do you want to see the sea? I could take you’

‘Er…I’ve lived in coastal cities all my life, so I’ve seen more of the sea than the average beach bum. Besides, British beaches are rather chilly at this time of night, I believe’, I said. The terrible memories of Belfast had begun to rear its ugly head again.

‘Ah ok…’, she said, ‘so, where are you staying at?’

‘Er… me? I’m at this B&B called the Phoenix Lodge, right down the street.’

‘Oh… you don’t have to stay there tonight, you know.’

I couldn’t help but notice the maniacal glint in her eyes, and I must admit it scared me some.

I gulped down my drink, looked at my watch and said, ‘Oh my god! Look at the time, its almost midnight. I’ve got a really early flight on the morrow. I better rush to bed now.’

Cut to: Germany, last week

I was at one of Germany’s prettiest cities last week, enjoying the hospitality of a friend who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the best night-spots in town. It was at one of these places – which, the connoisseur may wish to note, offers the cheapest alcohol outside of Goa – that we were having a tipple. We had just ended an extremely interesting conversation with an Irish chap who seemed to have taken it upon himself to tell us his life story. It was then that we noticed this middle-aged woman who bore more than a passing resemblance to Chyna walking towards us. I observed that she was sporting a bindi.

She walked up towards me, and folded her hands in a Namaste.

Being a well-bred, young Indian boy, I folded my hands and wished her a cheery namaste. Now that I think of it, Messrs. Guinness and Jaegermeister may have been responsible for the namaste being a tad more effusive than planned.

She immediately sat down next to me, and began stroking my cheek. To say I was terrified would be an understatement. Though I was aware that a man always holds the trump card in encounters of this nature, I was also aware of the muscles that rippled within her t-shirt. I could not bring myself to contemplate what would ensue if I pushed the woman away, and therefore contented myself with little shoves accompanied by ‘Please… what’s happening?’.

She then began to sidle closer to me, and was pretty much all over me – which felt rather like having a sackful of coals thrown right at your face.

At this point, my friend decided to intervene.

‘Listen, why don’t you just go away?’, said my friend.

‘You don’t know anything about his culture. Don’t shove your oar in here; fuck off!’, said the well-muscled one.

I made a mental note to murder whichever Indian gave her the idea that it was in our culture to appreciate the act of ugly, unknown women thrusting themselves upon us.

It took about two minutes, a lot of pleading, and something I did not follow, before the woman walked away looking particularly malevolent.

Note: Pretty women are urged to note that ugly is the operative word here. I do not mind, nay, I would welcome pretty women – unknown or otherwise – who decide to feel me up, or otherwise hit on me. For some reason unbeknownst to me, the only women who seem to be even remotely interested in a piece of the Warrier are either middle-aged, ugly, or both. Hint hint!!

The author has been single since he can remember. Pretty women (age no bar, caste no bar, race no bar, height no bar as long as you don’t mind midgets) are encouraged to consider the exciting possibilities that this unfortunate concatenation of circumstances present them with.

A Police Story

This story is from a milieu long past, and from a place I left almost a year and a half ago – a not-so-fair city on the banks of a beautifully grey river called (somewhat aptly) the Cooum; a city that was once called Madras.

This most riveting anecdote had almost slipped my mind - consigned to my long-term memory and apparently lost to humanity forever. My readers would never have known of it if it were not for the fact that I stumbled upon this little titbit on the web – the muppets at the Chennai Police have been gifted Hyundai Accents, with revolving lights and wireless communication devices to boot.

This, of course, does not make much of a difference to the life of the average Chennaiite. The average mama will continue to actively solicit contributions to the ‘Chennai Police Tea/Coffee/Whisky fund’ from law-abiding citizens. But now, the aforementioned mama can do it while ensconced in an air-conditioned vehicle a grad student like me can merely dream of. And what’s more, he can do so while letting the pretty revolving lights revolve and saying cryptic codewords like, ‘Code 4392 in Gandhinagar. Scramble scramble!’ (translation: I’m fleecing this hapless engineering student here. I can buy all of y’all a peg at Kandan Wines later in the evening) into his spanking new wireless.

I can hear the eggs, beans and crumpets reading this post – the same chaps who seem to take such strong exception whenever I digress – clamouring for me to get to the story I was about to unravel. Since I do not wish to be remembered in posterity as the chap who denied eggs and beans (and even the odd crumpet) their heart’s desire, I shall now delve deep into the mists of time – to more than a year and a half ago. To August 2005.

I was late. But that was nothing new. I am forever late, being a strong proponent of Indian Stretchable Time (IST). However, the British Deputy High Commission, I knew, was obstinate in its refusal to partake in traditional Indian rituals. As I glanced at my watch, awareness stole upon me that they would not keep their portals upon for a minute longer than two in the afternoon.

I wanted to hurry, but my mother’s Scooty Pep, while admirable in several other respects, was not built for speed (or for getting women to drool all over one; but that’s another story altogether). I gunned the engine, and was setting the road ablaze at 40 kmph (25 mph) when I came to a traffic signal (the traffic signal near Sathyam Theatre, for those in the know).

This traffic signal was, rather interestingly, switched off. After having expended considerable amounts of my grey cells on this perplexing problem, I decided that the police department probably wished that I use my own discretion before doing anything foolhardy. Following their wishes, I looked right, left, straight ahead, behind me, and above my head (which is what one does as a matter of course at any Indian traffic intersection) and turned left.

I had hardly moved hundred metres when I saw a huge, jiggling belly make its way to the middle of the road. Huge, jiggling bellies on the middle of the road do not often perturb me, but this huge, jiggling belly happened to be clad in the uniform of the Chennai City Traffic Police (Official Motto: To Serve and Protect*). And what was worse, the hand attached to the belly seemed to be signalling to me to pull over.

Since I was on a 60cc moped, I decided that gunning the engine and racing away, while screaming ‘Eat my dust, mama’ was out of the sphere of practical politics. Besides, I was a law-abiding citizen.

I watched interestedly as the policeman waddled towards me.

‘This is a one-way, and you’re going the wrong way!’, said the policeman, peremptorily.

I was nonplussed. I had plied this very route a hundred times before, and had never espied a No Entry sign. I articulated the same to the policeman.

‘Yes, I know there’s no sign. That’s why I switched the traffic lights off!’

‘But…’

‘Okay, driving the wrong way on a one-way street is a cognisable offence under Section 230 of the IPC. You’ve got to pay a fine of Rs. 1000’

Under normal circumstances, I would probably have asked the policeman to produce a receipt, and then take me to a mobile court or a police station (this usually takes the wind out of the average mama). But, as I had reason to mention earlier, I was in a tearing hurry.

Which is when I made my first mistake.

‘Sir, I am in a real hurry. Couldn’t we not argue about this later?’

The policeman looked more curious than anything else.

‘Where do you have to go?’, he asked.

‘I’ve got to get to the British Deputy High Commission’, said I, in a pleading note that I hoped would melt the hardest copper’s heart.

‘Are you a British citizen?’

This was when I made my second mistake.

‘Er…no…I’m an Indian citizen.’

‘Ah!! If you were a British citizen, I would have let you go. But you’re an Indian citizen, pay the fine.’

I had heard of xenophobic authorities around the world mistreating foreigners. But this was the first experience I have had of foreigners receiving preferential treatment over the heads of locals!

Still reeling from the shock of the policeman’s decidedly anti-India bent (his father was probably one of the worst of the angrezon ke zamane ke jailers), I asked him what the fine was.

Note: Though both the policeman and I were still euphemistically discussing fines, we were both aware that what I was going to pay him was a bribe, and not a fine.

The policeman was a forthright chappie. A ‘fine’, like a trinket at Burma Bazaar, was something that could be haggled over.

‘How much do you have?’

This is when I made my third (and costliest) mistake.

I took my wallet out, and began counting the notes and coins.

‘Er… three hundred and fifty three rupees and fifty paise’

The crook in khaki appeared to think long and hard.

Then, in the manner of a Persian potentate doing a supplicant a signal favour,

‘Well, that’s what the fine is.’

‘Please, Sir,’, implored I, ‘I need this cash to pay the processing fee at the high commission.’

He decided to hand me a concession, and magnanimously said, ‘Okay, fine. Just pay me three hundred and fifty rupees. You can keep the three rupees and fifty paise.’

I know people who could have, by begging, pleading and making ominous references to powerful contacts, brought the fine down to a hundred rupees. But I was not one of them. I went back home, broke and cursing the policeman and his immediate family in the choicest words possible. (I still have no regrets at all – if any of my terrible curses did come true, it merely vindicates my belief in a supreme being. If none of them did, it merely vindicates my equally strong belief in atheism.)

Well, in another twelve days, I shall meet the Chennai police again. At least, this time, I have the opportunity to get fleeced by a pot-bellied crook in Khaki who is driving a neat car. Maybe he’ll let me take a short spin in one of them wondrous machines too! (

P.S: Before anybody starts abusing me for being anti-Indian Police, anti-Chennai and anti-India, let me pre-empt them by saying that I love the Chennai Police. At least, they don’t shoot me seven times in the head at tube stations, or beat my skull in at parking lots. If that’s something to be grateful for, that is.

Dysfunctionville

I'm doing this course in Human-Computer Interaction (don't ask me why, it's a long story) this semester. It is an interesting course, but not interesting enough by a long shot.

Just this week, I was assigned the task of designing a remote control that would allow you to control a TV, a DVD player, an MP3 player, a video surveillance unit, an organiser, and America's nuclear arsenal and space shuttles.

Before we actually got down to designing this system, we were supposed to sketch profiles of people who may actually end up using the system. Maybe there is something wrong with me, every profile I wrote seemed to indicate psychosis, neurosis, or plain stupidity.

Yes, I did end up submitting this. It remains to be seen, however, if the TA extracts as much joy out of reading them as I did out of writing them.

So without further ado, allow me to introduce y'all to these social misfits that I dreamed up.


Lois Lane, Reporter, The Daily Planet

Lois Lane is the typical career woman who works irrgular hours and shows a strong proclivity for multitasking. Preparing a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette, writing an article, and bullying her photographer around, all at the same time are second nature to her. She nurtures an almost obsessive interest in a fictional alien who wears his underwear over his trousers, and is therefore constantly procuppied. At home, she is additionally distracted by her ugly little brat of undetermined parentage (father at least) who often displays unnatural strength beyond his years.

Her medical records indicate slightly delusionary behaviour, having confidently asserted that she had slept with the aforementioned alien with the terrible dress sense, and that he was the father of her child. She also has trouble with her spelling, indicating an extremely mild form of dyslexia. However, this could merely indicate that she is underqualified for the job, and her recruitment involved some under-the-table agreement.

Victoria Beckham

Victoria Beckham is the typical upper-class housewife. She has a steady private income, coupled with that of her celebrity husband’s (whose income is a result of his metrosexuality and (negligible) sporting talent).

She has no career to speak of anymore, save for a few public appearance towing behind her husband. Her interests lie primarily along the lines of watching Reality TV, Desperate Housewives and almost every sitcom on TV. She has a strong affinity towards pop music, particularly of the manufactured boy/girl band variety. She has plenty of time to indulge in these, thanks to the fact that she hires a personal secretary, a beautician, a trainer, a cleaning lady, and two nannies who take care of her three children.

Though she appears to suffer from anorexia nervosa, and a debilitating mental illness that impels her to give her children names which ensure them a life of ridicule, none of these appear to have an impact on her reading and motor skills. However, she professes to be rather a technophobe, and finds a large number of buttons intimidating.

Bridget Jones, executive

Bridget is a university-educated, highly successful professional woman in a middle-level executive position in a publishing concern. She multi-tasks ruthlessly, and has the ability to do ten completely unrelated things at the same time without being in the least confused. She can smoke a cigarette, flirt with her boss, do her nails, weigh herself, count the number of calories she's consumed since February 1st, 2002, and record all of this down in her diary.

She loves the telly as much as any thirty-something ``singleton’’ with a terrible social life possibly can. However, she is constantly distracted by phone calls from her friends - equally needy singletons in dysfunctional relationships, burning microwaveable dinners, constant nagging by her parents and relations to settle down with a decent chap, and an compulsive desire to confide in her diary.

Bridget is obsessed with control, and is given to meticulously recording her weight and the calories consumed in the last day. She has a problem with her spelling, which seems to indicate mild dyslexia. Heavy smoking over the years has resulted in her finding it difficult to keep her hand steady, particularly to handle large number of small buttons stacked together.

Her control obsession and her general disorganisation lead her to rely heavily on automated reminders. In addition to being a movie junkie, she has an eclectic taste in music, ranging from a post-coital craving for heavy rock to an equally strong post-break-up craving for soul, country and R&B. She’s also paranoid about security, especially after her creepy neighbour began skulking around her front door and stealing her mail.

Traveller's blues

To the fine folk who visit my blog regularly:

This may be the last post I'll be writing in a while. I'm in a bit of a blue funk right now, and find myself incapable of thinking cheery thoughts - or thoughts, even. Ah well, here goes, then... Hope I get out of this here funk sooner rather than later!

Living in a country without speaking the lingua franca is never the most pleasant experience. Travelling can be even tougher, when one has to figure directions out. It gets even worse when you happen to be me. The Warriers have never been, since the dawn of time, a race capable of sniffing directions out like one of those bloodhounds you always hear of (assuming bloodhounds sniff directions). Philosophers, yes. Saints, quite possibly. But intrepid adventurers we never have been and never will be.

When I first flew in to Germany, I decided to save the ten quid that I would have to shell out to get a Berlitz German phrasebook - an act of parsimony I shall forever regret. But I never regretted it more than when I was to fly to Glasgow from Duesseldorf.

My RyanAir ticket - curse their black hearts - informed me that I was expected to be among those present for the ritual sniffing of one's genitals by the Alsatians from the Bomb squad at an airport called the Duesseldorf Weeze Flughafen. Flughafen, I assumed, was the operative term. All I had to do prior to boarding the airplane, I assumed, would be to go to this airport in Duesseldorf called Flughafen - a task within the reach of even one as inept as me.

In fact, I observed that the authorities had been kind enough to draw a (rather ugly) facsimile of an aeroplane to indicate the direction to this Flughafen airport. It was, therefore, with a song on my lips, that I alighted at the railway station conveniently attached to this airport that was called Flughafen.

Five minutes into the airport, however, I began to smell a rotten fish - an aroma that made me hark back to the Shastri Nagar fish market. (I didn't actually smell a rotten fish, except metaphorically). It was a confused self that walked towards the helpdesk.

I decided to try my pidgin German out.

'Hallo, ich bin Ryanair flight FR8789.'

The chap at the counter could not repress a laugh.

'What? You're a Ryanair flight? (Oh so that's what it meant)!'

'Er...no, I...want.. to... get... Ryanair...flight...to...Glasgow!'

I spoke in loud, slow and ringing tones - accompanied by feverish movements of every appendage of my body. Though I have never understood how this would make things any better, and why people do it - but I can't help myself doing it.

The chap at the other end of the table, watched me do the cha-cha-cha with thinly veiled amusement, and spoke,

'Well, you're at the wrong airport, mate. Ryanair flights use the Duesseldorf Weeze Flughafen'

'Another airport named Flughafen?', asked I, shocked that they could do something like this in one city.

'No, Flughafen is the word from airport'. said the bloke, rather like a chap measuring a lunatic for a straitjacket would.

It was then that a line I read long ago in the Lonely Planet came back to hit me - 'In German, it is not just the proper nouns that are capitalised.'

I asked the chap, reaching a state of panic, 'So, where is this other Flughafen?'

'Just about a hundred kilometres from here'

'What!!?? Then why do they call it Duesseldorf?'

'Well, the question you should ask yourself is why you choose to fly RyanAir?'

'Er..because its cheap!'

'Well, now you know WHY its cheap!'

And all this while, I thought it was cheap because they used slave labour to fly the airplanes. (Later, sources assured me that this was also the case).

It was thus a chastened self - cursing my parsimony for not having got that Berlitz phrase-book - that travelled to Berlin.

P.S: Attempts to confirm that this was a deep-dyed conspiracy hatched by George W Bush, Tony Blair, and Ahmed Chalabi expressly to discomfit me have now come to nought.

Guess who's back - with a political testament to boot!

I know it has been a long time since I last updated my blog, but I have not had access to the Internet at home for the last month and a half. It also did not help that I was kept busy; doing more work in the last month than I ever have in any month before (and hopefully since). But thankfully, it has not been all work, as I have spent a fair bit of my time acquainting myself with the forbidden pleasures of the sweet hippocrene, dancing (a more appropriate phrase would be 'trying to dance'), and having long political arguments.

However, the two days since I have moved to Germany have not offered much in the form of excitement, excepting when my camera was stolen and I thought I'd lost my student ID (and spent the next ten minutes running around like a headless chicken, trying to find it while muttering 'F*ck it' almost without pausing for breath). I have also begun to get the sinking suspicion that a week from now, I would no longer be able to speak English any more fluently than Lalloo Prasad Yadav, and that the most profound thought I could possibly write down would be something George W thought of when in the fifth grade.

And therefore, before the rot sets in, I decided to codify my political views, as of the 19th of October 2006, into a political testament as it were. (I can hear readers screaming for mercy and possibly thinking to themselves that a certified clown like the author should never be allowed to express his opinion on topics any weightier than whether a chap would prefer a lassie with big tits, or one that can cook and clean. However, I must warn the aforementioned philistines that they scoff at the risk of serving as a main course for bears, like the children who mocked the Prophet Elisha).

If a chappie like Churchill, Nehru or Nasser were to write a political testament, bearded blokes in Political Science departments around the world would probably pay close attention and write PhD theses on them. The same would be true even if the author of such a testament were a rank liar and genocidal maniac like George W or Tony Bliar (oops, did I type Bliar, I meant Blair of course). However, when a person like me whose first (and last) successs in electoral politics was in the 8th grade (when I was voted class representative) sits down and writes a political testament, the very same chaps are likely to decide to use the document as toilet paper. But public resentment has never deterred me; if it did, I would have joined a suicide cult about fifteen years ago - right after the kids in Cochin told me they didn't want to associate with a 'Otta Kappallil vaana Sayip' who couldn't play cricket to save his life (wannabe honky fresh of a ship that no self respecting rat would infest).

My political views have always swung between the two extremes; thinking like a fascist pig whenever I read about the growing immigration (or infiltration, if you would prefer that) from Bangladesh, and like a leftist pseudointellectual - the ilk that protests at every G8 summit and tries to get convicted terrorists off the gallows - when I read about Israel's brazen assault on the Lebanese people or America's scant regard for international law and national soveriegnity. In what follows (if anybody does go on to read any further), I've expressed my opinion on a few things I have spent time thinking about.

British Imperalism in India: I have never completely subscribed to the standard Indian textbook theory that the British were completely cruel, merciless and unfair during their time in India, and had no redeeming features whatsoever. They were definitely no angels, and I can't imagine ever doing a Nirad Chaudhury and screaming 'Civis Britannicus Sum' from rooftops as the aforementioned anachronism was wont to. But, in my opinion, in early modern India, the choice was between milked by British fat cats in a politically unified nation or by decadent aristocrats in several different nations. The Marathas, the Sikhs, and all the other little dynasties that dotted India at that time had no concept whatsoever of an Indian nation state - that being an entirely European notion at that point in time. The British may have treated us as second class subjects of the Empress, and plundered our national wealth; but they did imbue in our blood something that will turn the rest trivial in a hundred years from now - the spirit of democratic debate (I bet you thought I was going to say English or the railways). Our constitution was written by people who, though Indian, were more British than the average coal miner in Newcastle, and they did (in theory at least) write one of the most liberal constitutions the world had ever seen at that time. That we would have otherwise evolved into as true and vibrant a democracy as we are today in such a short period is inconceivable. For christ's sake, the British had the Magna Carta in 1215, and look at when they introduced the concept of universal adult suffrage!!

My Political views, if judged on this alone: Filthy apologist of imperialism, possibly extremely right wing, likely to be a supporter of Bush's evangelical crusade to deliver democracy to the world (read: shoulder the White Man's Burden - Kipling doth live!)

Gandhi: No, I refuse to affix the Mahatma to his name. I am sure he would never have wished that. Neither would he have wished that we have statues of him all over the place, nor that we remember him as the guy who smiles out to us from a rupee note when we go to grab some chicken wings from the neighbourhood KFC. The whole concept of an omnipotent Mahatma (whose teachings nobody really listens to for the most part; not that I blame them, some of them were wildly impractical) was part of a creation of a personality cult by Nehru (and his worthless progeny). A good analogy would, in my opinion, be the embalming and deification of Lenin in the former USSR. And no, I refuse to agree that Gandhi had anything to do to the creation of an independent India. India became independent because of two reasons - one, maintaining a British presence in India was untenable after the hiding good ol' Adolf had given 'em limeys, and two, the British could no longer rely on the support of the Indian armed forces after the Royal Indian Navy mutiny circa 1946. Churchill was wrong when he said in the House of Commons that the British Empire was bowing down to a country with no army and no ammunition. The British Empire was bowing down to the Royal Indian Army where nationalist fervour in the aftermath of the trial of the Indian National
Army was at an all-time high - a battle-hardened army with experience in several fronts during World War II.

If anything, Gandhi was partly responsible for the partition of the subcontinent. Gandhi marginalised every single politician who could possibly emerge as a potential rival to Gandhi's protege, Nehru (and thus, by extension, pose a threat to his own control of the Congress and the country) - this started with Jinnah, and the list also includes Subhash Chandra Bose. Gandhi sounded the death knell for a undivided and independent India when he categorically refused to support the last pan-religious movement on undivided Indian soil - the RIN mutiny of 1946. (Interestingly enough, our history books are mum on this).

As for his economic ideology, how many of you professed 'Gandhians' are willing to dump their shiny Fords and Hondas, and go back to the village, spin a wheel to weave your own shirt, and travel in a bullock cart? How many of you believe that India does truly live in its villages, and we should therefore go back to the pre-Industrial revolution age? Bah!

My political views, if judged on this alone: "Look, there's a Mahatma Gandhi baiter. He's a bleedin' Godse!! In the name of ahimsa and everything Mahatma Gandhi stood for, let's get hold of this communal bastard and burn him at the stake/hang him/stone him/charge him under sedition laws (circa 1925 or something)."

(To be continued)

Quote of the day (and possibly year): 'I'm sorry, Sir, but we don't have any Che Guevara t-shirts. However, we do have Rammstein, Metallica and Iron Maiden t-shirts.'

Homo ITconsultantus: The Hard Life of an IT consultant

According to my philosopher and guide, Mr. Jorge Cham (the lunatic who sketches PhD Comics), grad school is the last refuge of the kind of chappie who wishes to postpone his entry into the real world (indefinitely, if possible).

I do not deny that I am inspired by the idea of avoiding any contact with people in the real world.

I am satisfied with the little all that grad school funding provides me, and do not direct envious glances at other blokes my age who earn packets working in IT consultancies. I do not begrudge them their Ford Fiestas and Renault Laguna. I wave cheerily at them as they pass me by as I ride my BSA SLR to the shopping centre. At no time do I curse my luck when I try to haggle with the blighter at the desi store to allow me to add another two quid to my tab.

Ah, who am I kidding? I’d like the money, but I’d rather remain poor than live the hard life of an IT consultant. For instance, look at NS’ terribly tough life. Well, you can’t do that, considering you don’t know NS, and have not had the opportunity to hob-nob with the aforementioned luminary. And therefore, may I present to you the hero of this little story, NS.

NS is a good friend of mine who currently stays in our kitchen – or on the bedroom floor if the wafting aroma of curry, Chinese sauce and African god-knows-what gets a trifle too strong for him. He is, as I have had reason to mention earlier, a cog in the wheel of commerce. He is the lynchpin upon whom the fortunes of a major IT consultancy rest, if lynchpin is the word I want.

As I write this, NS’ day has just begun. As the sun sets on a grad student’s night, the white-collar worker’s sun begins to rise. That NS is awake is made abundantly clear by the fact that the stench of his eau-de-cologne has spread across most of the flat.

The first major trial he faces is that he has to shave. Unlike unkempt grad students, IT consultants cannot look like something the cat dragged in. Not for him the week-old scraggy stubble that adorns this grad student’s visage. After having shaved, he has to rush to work at 6:54 in the morning.

What he does inside the corridors of the consulting company is a sealed book to me. I would assume it involves plenty of veiled women smelling of Chanel 5 pinching trade secrets. After eight hours spent writing reports and keeping the aforementioned veiled women at bay, NS drives to the kebab shop.

NS does not like the kebabs he gets there. He avers that it tastes like sandpaper, and this chronicler can, from first-hand experience, attest to the veracity of his opinion.
Not many kebab shops can butcher a kebab as well as this shop does. But then, not many kebab shops have Polish shop assistants who look as good as the one at this shop does.

If NS were a mere graduate student, he would decide to find another kebab shop and let the Polish chick vanish out of his life. But them IT consultants can take the rough with the smooth, not to mention tolerate the presence of large quantities of sandpaper in the intestinal linings. Besides, he has to practise his Polish!

After that trial by food, NS arrives home to more work.

He starts off by yawning loudly, preparatory to a hard night that will be spent in the company of Gantt charts (or whichever other weird creature of a lesser God that the world’s workers deal with on a daily basis).

He then announces that he plans to take a short nap for fifteen minutes in order to recharge his batteries. In order to ensure that he sticks to his grueling schedule, he sets an alarm on his mobile phone.

NS subscribes to the Snooze school of productivity enhancement. In order to test the efficacy of mobile phone snooze buttons, he decides to use it once.

NS at 2045 hours

And twice…

And a third time, just to make sure there are no bugs in the mobile phone’s implementation of the snooze function…

And maybe a fourth time…

Ad nauseum, ad infinitum…

NS at 2145 hours

However, this intensive testing schedule is interrupted by his better half who calls after he has used the snooze button approximately twenty times.

NS then speaks with his better half. The contents of the conversation are unfortunately unclear to the raconteur as the language spoken is Great Britain’s new lingua franca, Polish. However, NS soon manages to convince his girlfriend that work, that cruel taskmaster, calls out to him. He switches the alarm on again – so that he can recover from the conversation.

NS in converstation with his girlfriend

After about half an hour, NS arises and decides that enough work has been done for the evening, and decides to call it a night.

NS at 2230 hours, after an evening spent hard at work. Note: The subject can be identified by following the direction of the index finger, and must not be confused with the other inanimate objects in the room.

After having spent the last couple of months monitoring the hard life of an IT consultant, this author has decided that his considerable talents shall be directed towards the furthering of scientific research.

P.S:




Besides, I’m virtually unemployable as no company would be particularly interested in hiring a chap who spends all evening monitoring the working/sleeping habits of the Homo ITConsultantus, and then spends the rest of the night writing a report on it.

This, on the other hand, shows that I have the perfect temperament to be a procrastinating grad student adept at writing nonsensical reports to please his supervisor.

P.P.S:

If I could maybe add a graph or two to this piece, I could maybe submit this as my weekly progress report to my supervisor.

P.P.P.S:

If I could add a few citations to this, I may soon have a publication in an IEEE journal.

Disclaimer:

The identity of the Homo ITConsultantus has been withheld for security reasons (read: to protect author’s life and limb).

There's something about Nisha - Part II

I had been planning to write Part II for quite some time now, but work – that infernal thing – had its ugly tentacles wrapped all around me. At least when I wasn’t playing cricket or gallivanting across Scotland, that is. And thus, I never got down to completing this saga of undying love…

We were a few months into the eighth standard when Amit decided that what he felt for Nisha was the real thing – lowe. By that time, however, there were scores of people in the ranks of her admirers. There was this chap who used a blade to carve her name out on his forearm, and the three or four chaps who would suddenly become as violent as Zinedine Zidane when Nisha happened to walk past an informal football match. As for me, all I did was glance surreptitiously at her – something I reckon she never noticed (at least I think she didn’t. I’m very subtle).

But Amit was in a class all by himself. He would walk into class about a minute after Nisha did, and keep his head tilted at ninety degrees to the teacher throughout the day. Repeated admonitions (and a few strokes of a wooden scale) from the teachers did nothing to diminish his passion. After about two months of this rather obvious display of his lowe, Amit decided to take the great leap forward.

He walked upto Nisha during the lunch break. Nisha was eating her lunch with that (decidedly plain and fat) girl who stuck closer to her than her shadow.

Digression: The author has never understood this female trait by virtue of which every hot chick has a plain chick hanging around her all the time. This is a truly global phenomenon, and the author has seen white women and Oriental women do the same too. Explanations to this interesting phenomenon will be greatly welcome.

He spoke loudly, like the aan singham he was (and probably still is),

‘Hi, Nisha, eppidi irukke?’ (Hi, Nisha, how’re you?)

This must have been rather perplexing for Nisha, considering the chap had never bothered to do anything but stare at her all day.

‘Er…yeah, well, I’m fine.’

If Amit were one of those smooth Don Juans, he would probably have waxed eloquent on the beauty of the bees, the birds and the smelly brown liquid that was provided us in the name of drinking water. But no, none of that for Amit! He believed in getting to the nub as soon as he could.

And thus, the third sentence that Amit ever said to Nisha was,

‘Aey, naan unnai lowe pannaraendee’ (Hey, I’m lowing you—forgive me, there’s no exact translation of this immortal phrase into English)

As I sat three benches away, trying not to look, I felt as if someone had just driven a road roller over the rolls of fat on my stomach. I visibly winced. Being unaware then of the success rates that porikis enjoyed in the game of lowe, and having watched too many Tamil movies than was good for me, I expected Nisha to break into a demure smile, giggle and run away.

At which point the hundred extras would arrive from Kodambakkam and begin dancing to a tune.

At which point the passion that burnt deep (two layers of fat beneath) within me would be extinguished faster than Bush’s hopes of victory in Iraq.

So, nothing could have prepared me for what happened. Nisha directed at him a stony glare from those green eyes of hers.

‘But I don’t love you, okay?! I’m sick of you staring at me. So kindly desist from making a fool of yourself.’

Upon this, she flounced away, followed closely by her chamcha.

Most people would have taken this most emphatic crushing of their crush to be final. But Amit was not one to give up so easily. He reasoned, with undeniably warped logic, that the problem was the competition.

And he reasoned that the best way to deal with the competition would be to eliminate it.

The guy who took a blade to his forearm was threatened with a fist bigger than his blade if he tried anything in the nature of funny business again. The violent football players soon saw that Amit could be considerably more violent than them.

It was then that I took that ill-fated path of striking a conversation with Nisha.

It was as I was trying to worm her phone number out of her (after having spent 5 minutes discussing the character flaws of our English teacher, and how I had, in spite of his hating me, scored 33 on 35 in the last test*) when a friend asked me to step outside.

It was not a very happy self that waddled out of the classroom. I was about to expostulate on good manners to my friend when he told me that Amit wanted to see me at the playground.

Fear chilled me to the marrow. Amit was sure to threaten me with physical violence, or worse still carry it out. I told my friend to tell him that I had suddenly taken ill, and had therefore decided to go home. I began to run away as fast as I could when I heard quick footsteps following me.

I was not much of a runner. My last sporting achievement of note was winning the frog jump when in UKG, unless one counts the silver plate I won for coming second in the three-legged race in my third standard.

However, I felt that I was running like the wind. But by some freak of nature, Amit jogged past my quivering double chin, and placed a hand across my chest to stop me.

As I bent over double trying to regain my breath, Amit spoke to me (translated version presented for convenience),

‘Dai, I thought I’d told everybody to keep off my girl.’

‘Amit, honestly, I was merely asking her for her notes.’

‘Who are you trying to fool, you lavdae ka baal (pubic hair)! I know you were trying to get her phone number.’

Some bastard was spying on me! I condemned his black soul to the depths of hell (if he’s reading this today, whoever he may be, he may note that the curse still holds).

I tried a last, desperate gamble.

‘Macha, I was trying to get her phone number for you!’

‘Dai, evantaedaa velayaadarae? (Who do you think you’re fooling?) I have her phone number, and I know where she lives.’

That was interesting. I turned to him and asked him interestedly, ‘Where?’

‘Now why do you want to know, you mayir pudungi (means about the same as the swear word above)? You’re trying to steal my girl from me, aren’t you?’

‘But…Amit, she’s not your girl.’

‘Dai, what the fuck do you mean? She’s mine for all eternity.’

Maybe, I thought, I could reason with him,

‘But machcha, she told me that she’s not your girlfiend, and never wants to talk to you in this life or the next.’

If I were a wee bit smarter, I would have known that this was not the most tactful line to take. A lesson lies here for all young boys starting out in life – do not try to convince a poriki of the futility of his lowe. Violence will indubitably follow.

Amit spoke slowly and quietly, through clenched teeth,

‘Oh really? And do you lowe her?’

‘Er..yeah, I kinda like her.’

‘You fat piece of first bencher shit! That was your game all along!’, he screamed.

What followed for the next ten minutes was the most macabre and painful exhibition of violent behaviour I have ever experienced in this short life of mine.

It also crushed my crush forever.

Epilogue:

Amit continued to moon over Nisha. He spent most weekends hanging about the vicinity of her house in the army colony. It was on one such weekend that the good Colonel, home on leave after a frustrating few months spent consorting with the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, became aware of Amit’s presence outside. The good Colonel tolerated porikis just a little more than he tolerated Kashmiri militants.

A reportedly painful lesson at the hands of an Army jawan quickly extinguished any lowe that still burnt in Amit’s bosom. All I could think of when I heard of this diverting anecdote was, ‘Jai Jawan!’.

*Yes, I know. I was (and still am) unbelievably pathetic when it comes to chatting a member of the opposite sex up.