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.