You've got to be kidding me...

A gem from our politicians.. Can't see why the buggers keep lowering their standards year by year in spite of all the talk about young blood and khadi fashion and other such nonsense.. If only we were more obsessed with what comes out of their mouths than what they wear... The young politicians are no different from the ones here... This is what they ll grow up with and this is what they will become... Marital rape already is justified.. God save the country.. Or is it the country's fault just like it is the girl's fault here?

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/goa-politicians-hold-rape-victims-guilty/107174-3.html?from=tn

The Tale of the Orb

Before you brush it off as yet another Harry Potter-esque write-up, let me introduce the object of our current interest – the “few extra pounds”, which we will henceforth refer to as the Orb. Being a very touchy topic, (to give an idea of the magnitude of its touchiness, it is like shouting “Long Live LTTE” when Mr. Rajapakse is at Tirupati giving his thanks to one Mr.Balaji, aided by situational factors like a few gazillions of people crushing the Orb out of you or the sea of perfect round bald scalps while you were the neighbourhood Rapunzel with auburn highlights. Snipers?), our Orb can be described as a ubiquitous (we are talking of the i-banker circles here), self-censored, mild mannered, football-sized dumpling that can be dressed (disguised) either to kill or to spill. I would say that our Orb has been one of the most wronged beings in history. Now who would you say won the World War II – the young, dashing, Greek-god-like RAF pilots, or our jolly good old bloke Churchill who had a massive “few-extra-pounds” and overcame his stuttering to give Britain the ray of hope it needed at its darkest hour? But when you say World War II, who are you reminded of? The young hounds perfectly packaged by Hollywood of course. Brando gave his finest performance as a fat guy with thin hair who couldn’t do more exercise than open his mouth a half millimetre while talking. The symbol of leadership and unbridled talent is often nudged to the background by the sex symbols of both-my-mom-and-dad-are-thin and i-am-too-drunk-to-go-get-something-to-eat. You could say that the fore mentioned “icons” acquired their Orbs in their late 40’s, but back then, so was the rule for PhD. We guys with the Orbs are hungry (!) for faster professional growth. We do not let a night of booze and pumpkin-jelly-dancing take away our beacon of enlightenment (it certainly leads our way). We fuel it by having maggi at 3 o clock in the morning and a cup smoodles at 12 between classes. We eat a double cheese burger with extra cheese at 11 in the night and follow it up with good old beer at a party, invited to which by that guy who you saw in the mess and he was talking to someone about how something had happened to the niece of his third aunt on his dad’s side. We march on undaunted by mere truths like having given up painting your toenails which you can’t see anyway, having got that new bike just because you can’t climb the steps to the classroom, that special wonder of the opposite sex having left you to hang around with someone who looks too good to be intelligent, the list is endless. We d rather set the orkut profile data to few extra pounds, take a nice long shower using a long handled brush to clean our feet, think of the Nutty Professor, get the inspiration to find more proof for the law that goes something like “Intelligence and sincerity are inversely proportional to beauty”, celebrate with more beer and then wet the pillow with tears. After all, excellence begins with an XL.

Itja Simblle Name...

It all started on a rainy Saturday afternoon when I was going downhill (I always am, but this time, altitudinally as well), when I saw this lorry parked near the football field. While its latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates are of little concern to the reader, much less its chromatic or ownership analysis, what I would like to lay emphasis upon is its nomenclature. I wonder who Dhul is and if he/she had the faintest idea of the million bucks the petitioner could have easily got on suing the owner of this beast of our wondrous attention, cos you see the beast was named ‘Dhulfucker’. I don’t swear in my posts, so you can see that this is 100% real. As real as Rio being chosen over Chicago in spite of the latter’s illustrious adopted son. On sighting this Shrek of the nomenclature world, the author’s eyes did two complete rotations vertically, such that the attic and its layers of grey dust could be seen with a high def resolution. I knew the lorry’s aesthetics did not demand a name like Miss World or Sweetheart, but this? And why Dhul? Who is Dhul? What did he/she do? One (un)intelligent guess is that when some cuts the lorry off on the highway, the driver doesn’t need to raise his hands nor an eyebrow. The name says it all on the rear-view mirror, even with the footnote “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear to be”. You wouldn’t want the bed mate of Dhul breathing down on your neck, would you? Considering Dhul could be the auto driver who is sleeping peacefully with a sign above him that says “A true Christian, I was a virgin till I died.”

Another instance of an insane mallu name – Mambillies. It was the name of a shop on the way from Calicut to Mahe. Mambo and Ill? Maybe founded by a Cuban dancer who was taken ill with swine flu after the Bay of Pigs invasion? Or mamba and Billy? Did Bill, the snake catcher from Africa, found it? We wouldn’t know. And we would never find out cos the All India Malayalee Individual Single Shop Owners Association, MambiliPuzha village, Calicut district, might take offence and order a nationwide (vllagewide) hartal thereby holding up traffic for 2 hours. (Found an approximately 6 km long queue today waiting to receive some Red. Wonder what the issue was. Definitely not the state of highways since the children were positioned to align with potholes so that all you would see from a car is a continuous stream of faces at a particular coordinate in your window)

But the icing on the cake has to be the winner from near Palayam Bus stand. What do you call a chit fund that needs people to put in trust and money? Intelligent Brothers? Safe Hands? No. The mallu passion doesn’t die easy. He names it “Hillarious”. See the play of words? Not Hilarious, but Hillarious, possibly cos the place is surrounded by mountains where people can spend hard earned money(of others) in building a villa, name it “Happy Hilla” and disappear from public view forever. And they run an institute named “Hillarious Institute of Economic Studies”. You pay your admission fees imagining a fat, round, jocund professor who winks when you pass and winks otherwise also, cos his other physical movements have been restrained by a 5 inch layer of blubber lining. The fun starts when he ends up looking like Tantri the Mantri, and you see him only once in stationary, while collecting fees, and the next time waving at you from the back of a white Ambassador (Austerity in swindling is Mallu principle) while you look through teary eyes and exclaim the last name of a particularly familiar lorry. But you have to admit, the mallus are changing. They have taken up this issue seriously and have decided through the All India Kerala Baby Name Book Publisher Union that henceforth all names should sound proper. So now, make way for the new generation - Filcyrani, Amblikumar and Byjukuttikanthan. Namaskaram!

The drudgeries of the darkies...

If there is one thing that has been going on in my mind through the ages with the frequency of calls from Vodafone and the unpleasantness of a happy mallu song greeting you while on roaming from the same source (you have to feel it to understand it.. You are on roaming and pinching for money and the last thing you want is "thaangalkayi avatharipikkunnu.." Ente theivame!!!) it is the question of why I am dark while my brother is fair. Before you say "oh come on!" with the ceremonial rolling of the eyes, think why actresses spend millions of rupees every year to get that "purrrfect" complexion. And am not considering Bipasha Basu. I havent seen her without makeup, and if it is as I think, she would be classified under "Interesting, but at your own risk of social ostracism" category. Indians are racist. Period. Look at the amount of money generated by fairness products. The typical day of a girl would be.. get up, do ablutions, put fairness cream and massage the cream deeply into your skin, go to work, wash your face and massage the cream deeply into your skin at lunch, continue with work, come back home, wash your face and massage the cream deeply into your skin, go to sleep. And the happy part now is that now guys also have to do it, cos the once sensible girls are also into the fairness quotient of their mate. And so the guys also repeat the above algo albeit am not sure of the ablutions part..

And God, being the true benign being that He is, He made the people living above this totally arbit, imaginary, geographical line fair and those below, dark. And by dark, I mean charcoal dark. Not dusky-bong-beauty-dark. So if you happen to have a name like Mylai Mundakaneeswari or Chekkancheri Chakkochan or Rayalseema Renganna, chances are you will be the opposite of fair. No wonder there is so much of tension in the country. You don't realise how much this destroys the chances of Chakkochan hooking up with Hardeep or Mundakaneeswari with Kshitij. As an aside, look at the names that will come up if they indeed get married.. (shudder) So to help all the poor souls, including yours truly, I request you the reader to do the following algo everyday.

If you are dark {

1) Get up in the morning

2) Pray to God for a miracle

3) Watch the early sunlight turn your skin into the color of orange, rather burnt orange

4) Use a good quality scrub everyday during bath to see your skin turn burnt red (No matter what color you aim for, it is going to be burnt, like the dishes in Vim ad)

5) Wear dark clothes, so you can see you are a burnt brown (may pass off as a tan)

6) a) You wont have much of a life beyond this point, so eat, work and go to sleep, but not before a generous dose of fair and lovely. Yeah, you are right, a burnt white. (Dark people are intelligent, are n't we?)

b) This way you can fool yourself into believing you are some color other than what you are, give fancy names to it, pump your dark fists into the air before crying yourself to sleep.

}

else {

1) Get up in the morning

2) If you are a guy, pray that Mundakaneeswari turns fair, or if you are a girl, pray for Chackochan.

3) You would be having a great night life, so chances are you miss the early morning sun. You are missing out a lot in life, you know.. (sigh, I wish that was true...)

4) No need to take a bath. Your aesthetic quotient does not need cleanliness.

5) Do I need to say this? You fairskins are dumb. You can wear anything. Even Ramarajan-meets-chennai superkings yellow.

6) Once a month, take a dark skinned person (decision based on logic in no.2 IF you are straight, our lives are pretty screwed up already) out on a date. And do not look at opposite sex of fairer complexion while doing so. This helps a lot for our self esteem. You are welcome to look at the darker types - it comforts us. Do not talk about movies, politics or religion as these abound with examples of vanilla being preferred over chocolate. Bring him/her back safely home and then you can go and mingle with your kind while he/she repeats 6b.

}

Inshallah, with this algo, all we darkies will together collectively get a lifetime of dates with a fairy. ;-) (You have got the better complexion, so we get the better name)

The snake

Raindrops, I hear thy song,

The song of old and pain.

Blood, I smell thy scent,

Mixed with smoke and rain.

The soldier lay wounded,

His finger still bore the ring.

The death knell sounded,

To my deaf ears, it did sing.

I squatted outside, prayed,

God, feed my child once.

The youth lays there torn,

No dreams for him hence.

My presence, did he know?

My presence, does he call for?

Hands stretched, he groaned.

I waited, a snake, that hour.

Lost in the game, i was.

Strength in the mind, nought.

Toil in the fields aplenty,

To have slogged it, i ought.

The clouds had dried up now,

As empty as his veins.

I go in to get the prize,

Get my undeserved gains.

War had found its face,

As the moon shed its ray,

From these parts, no doubt

Forgive me brother, I pray.

His soul, the Battle took it,

His band, my battle took it.

Then the parchment did come,

A confession, a will, was it?

“For our dear comrade,

For his gallantry, a ring

Lives plenty he has saved,

We wish joy, it will bring.”

The snake, it still struck,

like the other on my child, did.

The ring sold, life was bought,

Life was sold, to the devil he bid.

I am still there for you...

Since AFM's classes are over, thought I would write a poem for those wonderful classes. Thank you sir!

We struggle below in the nether,

The lance in my hand, raised,

Demons, powerful, untethered,

I shall fight them, make no haste.

Caste, creed, race, gender,

Kindred waiting to slay you.

I will be there for you, brother,

I will be there for you.

When the laughter, tis wiped away,

The bassinet grows small, fast,

When family, love hold no sway,

Ghouls, we fight, of times gone past.

When dreams, respite, they bring over,

The world, incapable, it calls you,

I want to be there for you, brother,

I want to be there for you.

Our head stands alone, weakened,

The arms now, we have repulsed.

The coiffure casts off nails blackened

Hurt, unknowing, when avulsed.

Meads waiting for us, aflower,

souls, yearning for freedom true.

I am still there for you brother,

I am still there for you.

Random Rumblings

Have had a whirl of a week. A few close calls with regard to project submission and a couple of as-usual-goofed-up papers and quizzes. Have a general feeling that the things are not going quite well up in the clocktower, due to which bells are not ringing at the right time. So pardon me if the post sounds quite drab. Am trying hard not to make this my personal diary, but every badger needs his badgerette to badger. (wtf?!) Have the Finance Summit Arthanomics starting tomorrow... Or today... Aw! Doesn't matter... At least for the ones who stay up all night watching movies or writing soap stories on blogs. Finance... A cleverly disguised term to encapsulate everything that involves numbers so that the ones actually good with numbers are turned off by the sight of ManAc.

Anyways, the prime purpose of this post is to discuss some of the brilliant movies shown by our beloved prof, Mathew sir. The most recent was Le Chiavi de Casa (The keys to the house - yes it is chiavi in both tamil and italian!) This particular movie is about a young father seeing his differentially abled son for the first time and the journey of how they grow close to each other. At one point in the film, another parent who has looked after her similarly abled daughter with so much care for twenty years, declares "Sometimes I wish she would die". This tells of two things - one, love is not about keeping someone alive and making them better; it is sometimes better to let go and save them from a cruel world that offers them no help and two, achievements are not measured by winning prizes but hearts - we often have cinema showing differentially abled children competing with the so called normal ones on an equal footing and yet winning. Though it is possible, it is not always that way. So many lives come and go that have not achieved anything worthy of a certificate, yet to someone they are always special.

Another movie that affected me deeply was 'The Grave of the Fireflies' - a Japanese animation movie. Maybe it was because both the films involved children, but it doesnt matter because if we are not sensitive to children, in no way, are we going to be sensitive to adults. This particular film takes place during the fag end of World War II with the children losing their mother and the elder brother taking care of his younger sister. The interesting thing here is the way the director handles death. Which is worse - a violent death or a peaceful one? How do you quantify tragedy? Do watch these movies. Highly recommended.

...And we still tread on...

Hear nothing but the silence,

Silence of the strangest sort 'tis...

Sand, God-strewn, miles aplenty long,

white, sun white, vast all along.

Comes the wind, whistling as it does,

the mournful sadness of times past.

We tread on, on to nowhere, we do.

Hairless, colorless, clothless we are.

Thirsty, tired, desperate we are.

Journey unknown, we plod on...

Destination unknown, we egg on...

Life not in the blood, nor in the spirit,

Struggling on, kindred souls we are,

Wronged in life, deceived in death.

Eyes could open, then we closed;

Eyes could not, then long we did,

To see love, color, happiness, life.

Nothing to hold to, nothing to let go,

Never too happy to be reminded.

Souls march on, onwards to heaven,

Ignorance, for once, makes them glad.

Time was always cruel, short in gaiety,

But long and punishing in Loneliness.

We still tread on, on to nowhere, we do.

MisHappy... UnHaps...

Long time since we met.. no? Been a month since I came to IIMK... Midterms got over today. Hope I ll scrape through. Someone had promised Mathew sir's movie. No luck... Somewhere someone promised my friends a booze party but that got cancelled as well. Ever since I landed here it's these two words that I constantly keep hearing - 'daaroo' and 'sutta', hindi for 'thanni' and 'dhum'. Consumed apparently for numbing you and taking out your frustrations. I dunno, but I got numb after a look at my ManAc paper. The MC paper was great for taking out whatever frustrations you ve ever had while communicating - whether to the opposite sex or to your boss with a proposal. It's all the same when you get hit in the back of the neck with a stilletto or a size ten shoe in either case.

The next week promises to be fairly easy on the nerves with time allowed for taking a stroll in these salubrious climes. Of course, you have your regular work like case studies, assignements and all but as i said the mind numbs. The best manager is one who can think of what to wear to the evening date, sitting in a board room meeting, solving sudoku puzzles while pretending to read mail (tweets) on her blackberry. Thats what multitasking is about. Btw, that reminds me, this is for all you MBAs and MBA aspirants. The ManAc paper had this gem of a situation:

"They wanted to have some performing animals. However they were told that the environmentalists may object to their plan. ... They remembered two MBAs ... highly impressed with them as 'performers' ... Bongiram thought up an idea. He had a lion and a chimpanzee suit ... agreed they will be given a designation of VP (Primate division) and VP (Forest King division)"

(wince)

Apparently, he holds contempt for us. Which is fair considering the sort of input a few give in the class. I seriously like people who just sleep oblivious to the jungle (wince) out there. This has pretty much been the gist of my stay till now. Lets see what the next day brings...

PS : Expect literature in my next post...

A small story...

Standing at the gate, Sandhya was getting restless. It was Diwali day and she was all decked up in her new dress and jewels. She had tried to stay up all night sorting out all the crackers but somehow had fallen asleep. She had never known when the sandman had come. She had to wake up early for the d-day, but had somehow overslept. All through her sleep, she had dreamt of swirling chakras, crackling 1000-walas, blooming flowerpots and zooming rockets. And now she had got up late much against the standard protocol of waking up at 5. Now, she was all ready to have a go at the fireworks. Her father had gone inside to get the long agarbathi for the rockets. She knew that the rockets would not be a great phenomenon in broad daylight, yet she wanted to get it done and over with them because as much as she loved the colors, she didn't like lighting them. Her father had told her that he wouldn't do it and it had to be her. So she had decided to finish them off in daylight when she could see the wick clearly. Her father came and they set the rocket up in an old ketchup bottle. She took the agarbathi close to the wick and quickly withdrew. But the wick hadn't been lit. She was having the jitters. "Sandhya! Go on", egged her father. She tried again, this time holding her skirt in one hand so as to make way for a quick getaway if things got a trifle too unexpected. The agarbathi went close to the wick. She was a picture of concentration with her lower lip firmly between her teeth. A stray drop of sweat fell from her brow onto the ground. Now the agarbathi had made contact with the wick. A silent moment and then came the red sparks. Away! she ran screaming "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah". The wick in the meanwhile had shortened. Three... Two... One... And whooosh! the bottle fell down and the rocket zoomed, merrily along the ground. It went like a snake, into the sewage gutter nearby and fizzed out. And that my dear folks, is the story of how my first quiz in K in organizational behaviour went today!

The Wicker Basket

The palm trees stood so tall,

The road stretched so far,

The unforgiving sun burned down,

The heels now stuck to tar.

The head was held so high,

And cloth was padded soft,

The Wicker Basket lay on it,

As It did oft.

Holes had now grown bigger,

The knots had given out,

Bore, It did, the smelly onions,

so, It did, without a shout.

Roses had been easier,

The puffed rice was the best,

Mint, you could do without,

you wanted to fray, unless.

The market was the finest,

Some sights and sounds it had,

Yet it was Madras, on beholding,

that the basket would be glad.

The onions did now reek,

Strain, they did, on the veins,

The wickerbasket held its own,

fought it did against the pains.

Come then, the flood, it did,

it tore the straw apart,

Onions came tumbling down,

A new curse now on Its heart.

The trees still stood tall,

And the road did stretch far,

But the Basket still lay down,

Laid down, no need to go far.

Today -> :-)

OK Sancho. Yesterday was a pretty bad day... All the morosity of life piled up into one song. But today, the Don is much happier. Saved a few lives, rescued a few ladies, helped a few lads. To explain, didn't eat fish, dumped all my clothes in one pile instead of smaller ones, and didn't ask any question in class.. Didn't get any felicitations though.

Ta da...

Am starting this blog on a rather melancholous note.. No flyers, No banners, No bedecked elephants, nope. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. For those who don't know me, am a clown who makes jokes so others can laugh. My soliloquy is intended to create happiness for others. As the revered PGW says,

"As a writer of light fiction, I have always till now been handicapped by the fact that my disposition was cheerful, my heart intact, and my life unsoured. Handicapped, I say, because the public likes to feel that a writer of farcical stories is piquantly miserable in his private life, and that, if he turns out anything amusing, he does it simply in order to obtain relief from the almost insupportable weight of an existence which he has long since realized to be a wash-out. Well, today I am just like that."

I can understand what he went through cos I feel the same way now as well..