Back!

For the less than zero followers of this blog, there is good news: I am back and I shall start posting regularly again. I have been busy trying to make something of my life, but I have realized I won't be getting anywhere. So, I guessed, it is better that I tell you something everyday. My mother is in the intensive care at the hospital after a hematoma operation. But things seemed to have gone badly and she is hanging between life and death. And it has occurred to me that intensive care requires compassion and a great deal of understanding about the need for dignity in life and the option to die at the right time, as Nietszche said. Death is better than tubes and injections, especially if you have been a schizophrenic all your life and have sustained your waking hours with various kinds of drugs and an infinite number of sedatives. Let me see how my mum's stay at the ICU goes. At this moment, I can't but ask the God of death to be merciful and come early. Sometimes what we need is not more life wrapped in a hospital manual. A good death is often a luxury. Anyway, I will keep you posted.

Signing in after a long time

While going through the new video of the Radiohead song Lotus Flower (where Thom Yorke does that crazy dance) from the King of Limbs album on Youtube, I came across an interesting comment that says: My laptop asked me to watch this video, so I said O K Computer.

(Didn't get it dummies? Well, O K Computer is Radiohead's most successful album)

During a walk with Dr Vijay Bhatkar one morning...

How the light turns an ordinary, dry hill of Pune into something ethereal. I never thought the colours would look so right when I clicked this. I actually clicked this for my pa-in-law, Dr Bhatkar

A million questions

How are you going to use the word web 2.0?

These are weird times. I want to buy a platypus to feel old-fashioned. Yeah, that extinct animal which looks like a cross between an ordinary duck and a meerkat. My friend Daboo, who has seen the world in Europe, tells me ebay is a great place to source extinct animals. He told me he bought a white elephant on ebay and rides the big fella in Thailand. He calls the jumbo ‘Kid 2.0’. He goes to Bangkok whenever he misses foot massages, monasteries and funny English accents – where ‘la’ sounds like ‘na’. It isn’t hard to find young Thai girls telling dollar-carrying tourists how much they ‘nove’ them. By the way, Daboo is a huge old friend of mine. When I saw him this time I could see he had upgraded himself even more by downing beers and meat. He is now Daboo 2.0.

These are weird times. After all, how many words do you have in the English language that has a whole number in it. The millionth word - Web 2.0 - is here in this complicated world. Soon, people are going to flip to the ‘w’ section in dictionaries to find out what web 2.0 means. ‘W’ was, till now, a less often turned to section. Very few people use words like ‘wamble’ and ‘wank’. But ‘web 2.0’ is, apparently, used every 15 minutes now, especially by web junkies who have a fondness for Facebook quizzes, some of which seek to answer stupid questions like ‘what drug are you?’. The answer to that is simple: if you are an addictive personality, it depends on the accessibility of the drug. A miserable, unemployed under-matriculate would not write to Carlos Castenada or Aldous Huxley, asking them for peyote or mescaline. In truth, the most addictive substances are money, power and women. Ask Berlusconi and the Czech president, who claimed his nude photo (we didn’t carry the pic because the ‘G’ force was too high, and by ‘G’ I mean ‘gross’) had been enhanced. But he didn’t specify who had enhanced it: tabloid photographers or his East European testosterone.

Anyway, getting back to the millionth English word, web 2.0, I wonder how would people misspell it. The hallmark of a good word lies in the kind of bloopers it can produce. For instance, there are copy editors who dread words like ‘public’ and ‘message’ because they easily become ‘pubic’ and ‘massage’. Would web 2.0 be misspelt as wob 2.1 or wed 0.2, or, in the worst case scenario, would it be web 2.01010101? Come to think of it, can this word even accommodate errors?

I wonder how lovers would use it. Possibly like this: ‘When I first met you dear, you looked like your web 2.0 version. What happened now?’. Realistic fellows like me would say, "My love for you was web 0.0 in the beginning, now it is 1.0 and if you don’t nag it might reach 2.0 or at least 1.95, if not anything else’. Would it be used thus: ‘She left me because she didn’t see any web 2.0 in the relationship. I agree, there was no future for us’. Or, is this a possible usage: ‘Now she is fat and ugly, but she will soon achieve her web 2.0ness because she is jogging and eating slow food’. (Slow food’ is another new word. It’s the opposite of McDonald’s... I mean fast food).

How would web 2.0 be used in the plural or in the continuous tense? Would it be ‘web 2.0s’ or would it simply be ‘web 2.0’, like ‘police’? Could it be: ‘She has vision. Since an early age she has been webbing 2.0’. How would it be as an adjective? ‘She is a web 2.0 cheater’. I hate to think how ‘web 2.0’ would sound as a verb. Would we say: ‘She webbed 2.0 to upgrade her character’. Or: ‘He web 2.0ed in on her because she would soon exist’.

I think ‘cuddies’ should have been the millionth word. Why? Because it has a good foundation. Two good foundations actually, especially in heavy-bottomed areas like Africa and southern India.

Sales carnama

I test drove many cars recently. The salesman in the backseat tried to sell me the car in various ways. The Ritz rambler said the car was made for traffic congestion, the i20 guy said Korean kappa was refreshing, the Fabia fellow said it was close to Laura, the Linea lad said I was driving style itself, the Honda Jazz Jack said the car had so much space I could ferry my great Dane comfortably. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was looking for an extinct platypus on ebay, and that it would fit in the glove compartment. The Indica guy said, "Be Indian buy Tata". The Mercedes/ BMW butlers didn’t say anything, while the GM monk wanted to borrow some money.

Slumdogs, Indians welcome

It is ironic that it took a firang to make a desi film that the world would take seriously

I am happy about the Golden Globe. I am patriotic. I am happy A R Rahman won and that he has a shot at the Oscars. But I have a problem. Would I be a good Indian if I didn’t have a problem?The other morning I overheard (eavesdropped, actually) two firangs talk about Slumdog Millionaire. They loved the movie. I was chomping on medu wadas at Vaishali and they were eating onion uttapas without green chillies quietly, when I heard how the film was set in ‘real’ India. They could not believe that Indian slums were so big and how the range of emotions even in a ‘junk township’ was volatile and ‘wide-spectrum like’. That’s when it struck me: next time first-worlders talk about India, they are going to talk about Slumdog Millionaire. And the first syllable they mouth while talking about our country will be ‘slum’. Sorry to say, but our greatest 21st century victory will have ‘slum’ written all over it. And the ‘dog’ is not helping either. ‘Oh slum, yeah that’s India. Oh Dog! ...I mean God, remember Slumdog Millionaire? What a great comment on India.... and the colour... yada yada’ — that’s going to be the standard conversation between white trash bartenders in Goa who come looking for cheap holidays. And yes, they are not going to watch Slumdog as an isolated event. It will be their Discovery of India.Before Slumdog, Aravind Adiga spoiled the show by winning the Booker and making us proud to be Indians (again... soon Booker wins will become routine). I stopped reading desi Booker books after Rushdie and Naipaul. I could manage only 70 per cent of Arundhati Roy’s book. I leafed through The White Tiger to appear in tune with the times. Adiga has hit where it hurts by showing us what’s happening in the ‘darkness’ — the India that contains no-hope towns. In The White Tiger, there is a murder by a quintessential third world guy with a loser name (Halwai). In the India I hang out in, there is nobody called ‘Halwai’. I would like to believe I am from the ‘Light’ India because I can get my chest hair waxed at a salon in a five star hotel. If you really think about it, Adiga is not right. It is all darkness in India. Just that some people can get their chest hair waxed in five star hotels.My roots are in one of India’s darkest corners — the Northeast. The people I knew there named their kids smartly. My dad gave my bro a great name: Prakritish. I have never met another Prakritish till date. We were middle class and the people who worked in our house were impoverished to their epidermis: the kind who seriously need Alladin’s lamp.Even a murder wouldn’t help. They would, in fact, prefer life in prison as it would be hunger-free. Anyway, the poorest girl I knew was from a refugee family with 18 kids. When these kids sat together, it looked like a conference of the rib-cages. She was called Meena, and that’s not bad. The worst names I heard as a kid were ‘Bhudai’ and ‘Genai’. Bhudai was from a rich landlord’s family, while Genai was my mother’s creation. It is funny that poor characters in ‘serious’ novels / films have names that matrimonial websites might refuse to entertain. I would have loved it if a movie on India had a title like ‘Quantum of Solace’ or something spiritual sounding like that. That would help our image. I would like to close the topic with a pat on the back for Danny Boyle. It is ironic that it took a firang to make a desi film the world would take seriously.Marry within my casteI was gossiping with a friend about another pal on Gtalk. Our subject was returning to India to meet his parents, who are devout Brahmins. He had fallen in love with an Anglo-Indian girl. Apparently, his dad had come to know about the blasphemous alliance and was scheming to have him engaged to a homely Brahmin girl. I asked my pal if not marrying a Brahmin was such a big deal in circa 2000. She told me she was a ‘Tam Bram’ and that only she knew what a cross-caste marriage meant, though they did not live in the ‘Darkness’, but in neon Singapore.This is how she put it:If I marry a:Non-Indian/Christian/ Muslim: there will be attempts by parents to commit suicideNon-Brahmin Hindu/ Sikh/ Jain: banished from homeBrahmin from other regional backgrounds: lose contact with family for two years (can extend to three)Iyer, Tamil: big fight but can come to terms with it, finallyIyengar: I’m the best daughter they ever had! (It does not matter if such a guy is a complete moron or a bastard or a psychotic homo)

PS: THIS COLUMN WAS WRITTEN BEFORE RAHMAN WON THE OSCARS.

Mistresses in distress: What the meltdown has done to side-affairs

<< Me (seated, in sunglasses) with my colleaugues (from left) Janice Nesamani, Veda Aggarwal and M Fahim at Fergusson College campus

One of the most interesting stories to emerge from the recession-hit world is about a kamikaze Chinese mistress. It was one of those tragedies that never fail to infect the newsroom with laughter. If the reader is kind enough to excuse us deskies, here is a confession: we are a bunch of heartless headline writers. We are always looking for a laugh. Stories that contain mammoth degrees of irrational sadness draw out peals of laughter. Not peals actually, barrage is more like it. We also have the ability to laugh at inane stuff.We are pretty good at not feeling guilty, as long as we get a great headline. For instance, the legendary editor of the British tabloid Sun, Kelvin Mackenzie, had this header ready if Father Desmond Tutu were to die: ‘Tata Tutu’. And one of Mirror’s own deskie Remuna gave this sub-header on a piece that described disgraced former Satyam honcho Ramalinga Raju: ‘Raju? Con Raju?’
Another headline by deskie Janice, about a fish which seemed to have the word ‘Allah’ inscribed on its body in Arabic, was ‘Khuda Ha-fish’ [we didn’t use it finally]. Another headline we didn’t use was about President Pratibha Patil coming to visit her daughter in Pune. It went thus: ‘The Mummy Returns’. There are many more, but I just can’t recall them now. For these reasons, an old father from my school I met recently said ‘Heaven help you boy’, when I told him what I did for a living. He probably thought I had booked my seat in hell. He was of the opinion that newspersons were glorified parasites.
I agreed because the human race is essentially a parasitic race. The priest has his God and the spiritual pride that follows, as Bob Dylan put it in his song Serve somebody.I take refuge in the fact that the whole newsroom would be there to give me company in hell and we’ll still be laughing at burning sinners. We would probably talk in headlines like ‘What the hell!’. However, I have to say this: we aren’t as bad as lawyers. I remember a piece of tee-shirt wisdom that students of a prominent city law college [ILS or Symbi?] had printed. I can’t remember the exact words, but there was a line which said, ‘Hell won’t take us’. That’s some ego going on, and that’s the only real competition we have. Another tee-shirt said, ‘Bye-bye, sue you soon’. I quite liked that one because it would make a great headline for a story about lawyers. Anyway, the story I am talking about involves a Chinese millionaire hit by recession. This person, who we could call Dai Ying, had five mistresses. He could not take good care of them as they were all high maintenance. To ease the crowd on his bed and the pressure on his wallet, he decided to have a beauty contest in a posh hotel to decide which mistress was worth keeping. He even got a high-profile judge to select his ultimate ‘Sinderella’. But he did not reveal this to his mistresses, leading them to believe that he was just killing some time, expensively.After the contest was over, the losers were carted out in their make-up. However, things did not go as planned. One of the mistresses who lost, we could call her Ki Ling, was so sore that she took the other mistresses on a stretch limo, along with the millionaire, and drove off a cliff! Dai Ying died. If only he had decided to keep Ki Ling! In Dai Ying’s dying declaration, he apparently gave sizeable parts of his ailing business to each of the mistresses, but Ki Ling had no idea about it. If she would have known, I don’t think she would have driven off a cliff. Ok Ok, I have carried this too far. I could not help but make up this story because it is so coolly corny and, as a bound-for-hell journo, I would have loved it if the story went the way I just described. Actually, the millionaire’s name is Fan and he is still alive. His sore mistress actually drove off a cliff with her former lover and three other women. The moral of this story is that recession hits the millionaire’s mistress hardest. On second thoughts, the moral of the story should be this: One should not hold a beauty contest to decide which mistress to keep. Most mistresses already feel like losers because they aren’t the wife. How can they take the fact that they are losing yet again? If you are a millionaire, you could get rid of your mistress by marrying her.

HK, from a Puneite's perspective

While on the subway metro train in Hong Kong, I felt bad for the ultra urban Hong Kongyan (also called a 'Honkie'). Life was good for this person. Little too good, from a practical viewpoint. This person can move from point A to point B without having to worry at all. All he needs is an octopus. In case you are thinking I am going into some fantastic J K Rowling type tale, I am sorry for the misunderstanding. The octopus is a digital pass you can use to travel in a metro train, bus, ferry, tram and can even use it to buy goods at departmental stores. All you have to do is beep it.
This octopus-carrying human being does not have to hang on trains and buses or wait or worry if the cabbie is going to cheat her/him off her/his life savings. Or charge half-return because she/he has to go to Disneyland at 9 pm, because that's way off from the central city.
For these simple reasons, I felt bad for the sneaker-freaks of Hong Kong. They can't do what we can.
Think of this. If this person is put in Pune and s/he has to take a bus to work or argue with a rickshawallah, s/he will be finished. In Hong Kong, there is no argument because the octopus decides everything. So, this person would never develop our kind of bargaining and verbal skills. This person would never be as emotionally intelligent as us because we have to bullshit our way into making an auto driver believe "bas idhar hi hai, do minute bas… thoda aage aur bas". And after you reach your destination two centuries later, the auto driver will tell you conned him and, therefore, he should not hand you the change back and you'll try your best to convince him that you had, in fact, told him about the last turn to your home ("maine toh bola tha!") and that it is only 10 pm. If the argument does not end, you'll threaten to report him. But it probably won't reach that because both parties are bullshitters.
What I am trying to say is, just see the amount of skill and intelligence required to live in such a chaotic, lawless system! It makes us edgy and always ready for battle. There is no one way out.
So, here is a humble request I make to the administration of Pune: please do not improve the terrible public transport system.
We should not become like the Hong Kongyan who worries only where he has kept his octopus. We need to worry about buses, time, stops, dogs, cows, cats etc. That keeps us smart and our tongues in working condition.

Logically speaking
Someone told me that because we have to channel ourselves through so much chaos and figure out the best way, it makes Indians good programmers. It could be true. I also read in the National Geographic that because Koreans use chopsticks made of steel, they are good at stem cell lab work.
On that logic, imagine the number of things we should be good at. We use our hands while eating so we should have been unbeatable at pottery and ceramics, but the chopstick-using Japanese are the true masters.
Since we adjust so much in the chaos, we should have had a great sense of humour. But where is that?
Or maybe, we have come to love our chaos because we have no easy way out of it. It is like our arranged marriages. Your mama gets you a bride and you fall in love with her though she digs her nose in public and gets out wondrous treasures.
Canadian-Indian comedian Russell Peters said that his mother gave him this piece of advice after choosing a bride for him: "She is a little big now, but you'll soon grow into her." He didn't marry.

By the way
I think the Hong Kong administration got it wrong. They should have called it 'octopass' and not octopus. Would have been cooler. Apparently, the octopus' British counterpart is called oyster. The day is not far when you'll hear a good ol' vegetarian Indian tourist go, "No thanks, but I don't eat seafood" at the metro station.

Beauty ideal
While walking the malls of Hong Kong, I saw many pretty Chinese girls. And I associated their beauty with an ideal, but just couldn't get the word. Last morning when I woke up, it finally hit me: Manga and Anime cartoon girls. That's the beauty ideal in the great metropolis. That's how weird the future is.

‘Nonscience’ observations: Personality depends on how you commit suicide

We live in psycho-babble-cal times (that could be another word!). There's always some silly research somewhere to prove something silly is true, the latest being Tintin is gay. Ten thousand blistering barnacles, what does that mean?! Tintin does not exist. Apparently, the nailing proof is that there are no women around Tintin, and Snowy is not a bitch. In the same tradition, I have put forth some 'nonscience' observations to show how personality type is connected to the way one commits suicide:
* Ones who make perfect double hangman's knots on their noose are meticulous and neat
* One who prefers to drown is conservative and flows with the current. Those that jump off bridges, like to burn their bridges
* Those who slash their wrist to bleed to death slowly are narcissistic and love to watch themselves
* Those that prefer a drug overdose like to sleep off their problems. They forget/ forgive easily
* If a person commits suicide in a way that leaves room for rescue, s/he is an incurable optimist
* Those that jump off skyscrapers are adventurous and romantic. They are hooked to adrenaline
* Those that jump off small buildings (two or three storey) are impulsive
* Those that shoot themselves in the head are conservative and stick to their decisions
* Those who swallow the barrel of the gun and shoot themselves in the roof of their mouth are experimental
* People who consume poison drink life to the last drop
* People who specifically take cyanide have short attention spans
* People who stand on rail tracks and wait for a train like to make an impact in life
* People who jump into zoo cages where tigers, lions and other predators live, like to be useful to the last crumb. However, those that jump into cages where gorillas live enjoy cheap thrills
* People who self-immolate are passionate, and often self-destructive
* People who suffocate themselves value the environment
* People who binge drink to death are existentialists and hate wastage. They live for today
* People who stab themselves have great faith in their abilities
* People who jump into important places like Niagara Falls or embrace the lava of a fresh volcano die to be remembered. Such people plan their suicide notes for months
* People who don't leave suicide notes like to keep the world guessing
* People who get into suicide pacts are extroverts. They make for lively company
* People who disappear on purpose before dying are mysterious
* Those that bury themselves alive are self-contained

So long, Bush: The man who created ‘misunderestimated’

I didn’t think a word that rhymes with Osama would floor America. Lip readers apparently saw Bush tell Obama during the swearing-in that he "was relieved". I'll miss Bush because whole comedy acts and talk shows survived on his bloopers. The classic one was 'misunderestimated', but it can be a valid word.
The world likes to blame Bush, but he alone isn't responsible for terrorism. Mankind's 10,000 years of known history is mostly about war. We are addicted to violence. Human beings create complex ethical positions, which lead to lot of non-instinctual violence. What I mean is, animals are violent too but it is an expression of their survival instinct. However, man has the unusual ability to justify violence that has no connection with the foodchain. For instance, Bush bombed Afghanistan to rubble to make the world a safer place. When it comes to violence, logic comes under severe attack. At one point I used to think Afghanistan is a dangerous place. Now I know, the US is no different. It is all about the guy who is on top, finally. Only a leader who loves to say ‘bombs away’ would sanction war in the name of peace. While this sounds idealistic, it explains why the US is the ‘world’s’ biggest target. Someone or the other wants to bomb the US. That is because the US likes to bomb the world as well. How long can you trample somebody’s dignity?
All said and done, I think Bush has, unwittingly, created an useful word. ‘Misunderestimated’ describes a complex event simply, that of underestimating someone mistakenly because of a misunderstanding. It is close to the quality of Chinese characters. One Chinese character can stand for, say, "Mao wear lipstick during autumn because his lip fade in cold". ‘Misunderestimated’ can be used to describe America’s fiasco in Vietnam. The war with ‘Nam proved how the US misunderstood itself (especially its youth) and underestimated Vietnamese guerrillas. A ‘Nam veteran can easily explain everything by simply saying: ‘Vietnam was misunderestimated'. It wouldn't be wrong to say that in world politics Gaza, Afghanistan and Iraq too have been misunderestimated.
I think this word will be America’s most important contribution to the English language soon. Only American word that comes close to it is ‘bobbitt’. Imagine a sentence that goes: "When Lorena bobitted her husband in 1994, she misunderestimated medical science and the police." It says everything that needs to be said about the Bobbitt affair: Jealous Lorena cut off her cheating hubby's willy and threw it in the garden. Little did she think the cops would find the appendage, put it in an icebox and hand it over to the doctors, who would then proceed to stitch it back. The operation would be a roaring success and Mr Bobbitt would go on to make porn flicks.
I am sure Lorena didn't expect to be immortalised by the dictionary makers. Anyway, I’m voting for ‘misunderestimate’. A word in hand is better than two with Bush (lame, no?).