Baba , Baby and Manny

Baba and Baby

In a world ruled by insanity
In his name, he had found symmetry
He called himself ‘Baba’
Baba -- simple, sober and spiritual
One day a girl came and asked him
‘Can I run away to the forests,
Pick up wild berries,
Lead a life like the hippies?’
She called herself ‘Baby’
Baba replied
‘You are here to stay,
You bring with yourself a distinct flavor
You are here for your dimples
The scars are yours
Just breath slowly and deeply
Why run away from this?’
The second time when ‘Baby’ said
‘I can’t think of anything beyond food, sleep and sex’
Baba asked her to write poetry
She did so by breaking her prose to many parts
Every sentence became a new line
Wrote a few new lines and adjusted tense
Yet , nothing seemed to make sense
‘Can I go mad, just stark raving mad’ she shouted
Baba stood there , knowing not what to reply
Baby sighed
‘Oh , you man in crimson red
Have you been cheating me all this while?’

Manny

When every other boy in town
would have liked to be called Bob and dude
He thought ‘Manny’ was cool
Like ‘Man’ with extra Es
One could curve their lips and say it with a glee
He had the best of both worlds -- Baba’s and Baby’s
At least he assumed so
He presumed that he was suave and benign
macho and mature
sensible and sensitive
He was all this and arrogant
Looking down on Baba he said
‘In you I see no zeal or zest
Just vague answers and aimlessness’
And belittled Baby
‘With a name and thoughts so juvenile
You assumed you could write poetry erudite?’
‘Can I laugh my ass off looking at the two of you?’
Baba replied ‘Are you doubting your own ability’?
‘May I laugh my ass off?’ Manny reframed
‘You don’t need our permission for that’ Baba said

Now it was time for Baby’s repartee
‘Manny puts his head down in shame
For the question he asked was just too lame
Now Baba, give me a high five
I just made a few sentences that rhyme’
Baba smiled , Baby stood stunned , Manny cried and the story died

Now you decide for yourselves , do you want to be Baba , Baby or Manny?

Revolution begins

Conversation between me and Hungry Gorilla (HG)

Me : Hi wassup?

HG : Hi , nothing much . You tell

Me : Bored , I want to do something different . Fly like the birds, from here to Siberia and come back, build nests, go in between the clouds. As of now I lead a pretty mundane life

HG: So then?

Me: So then, nothing . 50 over cricket is passé , Noodles are instant , Oats is catching up quickly , Shiva is overrated

HG : Shiva is overrated?

Me : I feel like that , he looks powerful but I suppose he was confused in between being a family man and building this god mafia . He wanted to be a leader. He was only good in histrionics and too much drama and stuff like drinking the poison and dancing (tandav nritya ) is too down market.

HG : Let’s leave it to him . He’s too busy to react to critics like you. Let’s stop blaming and criticizing people and do something different.

Me : Exactly , the big city is bad . Let’s go away to the forests and scream to our heart’s content . Eat the wild berries and the leaves , swim in the streams and ….

HG : After finishing all this when we return back to the city , we’ll have no jobs and we’ll go bankrupt. This idea is hopeless

Me : Is there any part of the country where there are a lot of hills?

HG: Uttarakhand

Me: Brilliant then , we’ll go to Uttarakhand and do animal husbandry . We’ll buy cows and sell milk

HG: How much will that cost?

Me: Google tells me that the price of a cow = no. of liters of milk the cow gives * 1000 . Meaning a cow that gives 25 liters of milk costs 25 thousand . So we can buy 4 cows for a lakh and then get 100 liters of milk. For every liter we can charge Rs 20 , we can make 2k per day , 60 k per month. With an initial investment of 2.5 -3 lakh for fodder and vaccination for the cows and getting a rented house in Uttarakhand ,we can break even in 7 or 8 months

HG : Brilliant idea , we will give some milk to the poor for free and ask them for grass and farm waste.

Me: Exactly , and then from our profits we can buy a few more cows

HG : We can also start a small processing unit where we can make butter and cheese

Me : Though that idea may seem a little far fledged i, we will at least have the satisfaction that we started something on our own and we are doing something for the poor

HG : That’s right . What will be do with so much money?

Me : We can buy crystal glasses and sell tea like how Paulo Cohelo had written in the Alchemist , people from the city will love the idea of drinking tea in the hills in crystal glasses . They’ll flock our shop and we can double it up as a bakery selling some homemade cookies and pastries. Rich people from the cities of facebook descent are easily gullible.

HG : and then??

Me : And then we’ll marry an innocent girl in the hills and stay in a happy cottage in the hills , we’ll sing along and celebrate . The girls in the city are arrogant and are fake.

HG : and then??

Me : We will think of expansion . We will buy goats and buffaloes and nice shelters for them . We will have that cheese and butter making unit . Later we can move to another hill and continue the same thing

HG : same story? Same 4 cows to start off with and after two or three years marry another innocent girl?

Me : To hell with your stupid jokes . Anyway when do we start off? When do we leave for Uttarakhand?

HG : You go dude, I’ll give all the moral support possible . I’ll visit you once in a while .

Me : Fuck you

HG : Get lost , bye

When all the world’s a stage and all men and women merely players

And I happen to be the ball boy. This is the kind of situation I usually find myself in totally out of place. It happened that sometime back I attended a family wedding where I met this person who happens to be a 2^nd cousin. We met nearly after 10 years or so. The first thing that she said was ‘Oh my god , you have totally changed .You look like your mother now. Initially you were looking like your dad’. It is in these kind if situations that I don’t know how to react to people. Do I have to tell ‘Blame it on the genes’ or something like ‘You still remember how I looked 10 years ago ? I never knew that you existed’ which actually happens to be true. Then she changed the topic to how bad the traffic was and how it took her an hour or so to travel 8kms. I just nod my head totally clueless about what to say when topics change suddenly from genes to traffic and all the while the only thing I am thinking of is food. I feel that there must be a protocol of sorts , like a 15 minute warm up session or something where usual questions like ‘how are you’ , ‘how’s your work’ , ‘how are your parents doing’ where answers can range from simple ‘good, alright , nice’ or a nod and smile will be accepted . Once this basic course of getting acclimatized is over then the timer should go 3..2…1 and a DJ guy in the background should shout ‘It’s now time for paradoxes’ and people can ask all the strange things that they want to . Some people just know what to speak at the right time . A couple of weeks back or so the anniversary of Rakesh Sharma landing in space was celebrated. Indira Gandhi at that time had asked him ‘Upar se bharath kaise diktha hai?’ . He had replied ‘Saare Jahan se Acha’ . Watta reply!!! It must have given goose bumps to the lakhs of people viewing this live telecast on DD 1many years ago. Sometimes I wonder if the whole Rakesh Sharma , Indira Gandhi thing was scripted .DD1 otherwise was a very depressing channel to watch . It was the only channel I had watched for till I was 6 or 7 . Some random orangish curves would go around wriggling here and there and then they would take a definitive shape with creepy music playing in the background and the letters ’DD1’ would sit somewhere in between those curves. They would play a movie every Saturday and the only ads were that of Vico Vajradanthi and Ujala . Ads nowadays have changed so much. Watched the recent episode of StoryBoard .According to some experts by looking at the face , the casting director decides which role one can play in an ad. A girl with a very sober and homely face a story get s developed like -à she’s been born and brought up in Kerala , welcoming the monsoon every year ,has enjoyed the harvest festival with an extended family and whose nose would feel like a cube of ice on a cold winter morning. She would make it in to ad about jewellery . A skeptical urban person with a confused look on his face would probably go and play the role of a worried man in a life insurance ad or something like that. Sheer awesomeness , one of the best shows I’ve watched.

In yet another interesting conversation with a friend we were deciding as to what time we meet . He said 13:00 hours or 1 pm . I said ‘make it 13:17, will make us feel like we value every minute , 13 and 17 are prime and the number as a whole is divisible by 3’ . I am totally obsessed with numbers and especially those which are divisible by 3. He then said ‘why not 13:02’ and I recognize that my momentary feeling of ingeniousness has been washed away. To comfort myself and feel self important I try to walk in a rhythmic motion , hands and legs totally in sync trying to imagine that I’m attending some blade meetings and signing some assorted papers and shaking hands with random people and shouting ‘deal done’. Makes you feel like a mixture of a corporate CEO and a mafia don!!!