When the year begins with a Dhoom!

The year began with a dhoom. I usually visit Prof Lokesh for getting my haircut done. However this new guy inside the shop told me that professor was off on his annual vacation. Just as I began to turn back he shouted ‘Basoo, even I cut hair equally well!’  . I wasn’t ready to buy his argument.  Lokesh calls himself professor because he studied Haircutology or whatever the art is called in some place in Mumbai. He also happened to be the assistant of a guy who cut Farhan Akhtar’s hair. Lokesh and I share this unsigned memorandum of mutual understanding where I just go and sit on the hot seat and say ‘Short’ and let his hands do the magic.

The new guy wasn’t ready to let me go. He shouted again ‘Basoo, give me a chance and you won’t regret ‘. In order to encourage this newbie, I went and sat on the hot seat. He asked me what I do for a living. I said that I was doing a postgraduate program in management (MBA is too mainstream). He questioned what sort of course it was.  Well, we study how Star Sports makes money by airing blade shows like Outstanding Ohja and Master Class Manjrekar. Quickly he asked ‘Basoo, have you watched Dhoom3?’. I said that I hadn’t watched it though I actually had, fearing where I would have to become Rajeev Masand for Mr Barber. Mr Barber said that I ought to watch it . By the way, Basoo or Bosuuu  are derived from the root word Boss and translate as ‘hey bloke’ or ‘wassup bro’ . Anyway,  Mr Barber wanted to give me Aamir Khan’s Dhoom 3 haircut. He promised me that it would transform me from a downmarket duckling in to a Cinderella. 10 minutes in to the cut, he had trimmed the sides neatly and was working on the middle portion and left it like a bunch of coriander leaves.  He removed the white robe on me and went on to sip water from a bottle. He said ‘Basoo, you are now ready to go’ . I was looking like one of those balloon sellers outside Palace Grounds. I raised my hands in protest , was reluctant to go and asked him quickly get in to disaster management mode.

Mr Barber then showed me a chart that was pasted on his wall. It looked exactly like the ‘Animals’ &‘Plants’ charts that school going kids use for their assignments. 4 rows by 4 columns i.e. 16 expressionless guys sporting tacky hairstyles. He said that the only possible way by which we could avert disaster would be to make modifications to the Dhoom cut and make me look like the guy on the (3,2) grid. This haircut was like Bhindi Bazaar meets Time square types. With no option left, I said ‘Ok,  go ahead’ . Finally, after 15 minutes normalcy resumed. Picasso was disappointed as there were no takers for his art.

In other news, Jai Ho released this weekend.  Dear Salamn khan, thank you for making us believe that even people with low IQ can make money and become successful . May your movie collections cross the combined GDP of Togo, Mali, Uganda and Burkina Faso. 

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!!!

History repeats itself

Yes that’s right. Famous quiz master Abhilash B R said that he’ll be completing the question that he had left halfway through in a quiz competition 5 years ago in South America .When Abhilash was about to ask the tie breaker question , the transformer burst , the lights went off and 2 teams were declared as joint winners.

After hearing that Abhilash is going to complete his question in an upcoming quiz show , news channels across India have become very excited . All day long they have been airing the last 20 seconds of the South American quiz show where Abhilash takes a deep breath and his ribs and belly move about in simple harmonic motion , there’s a Latin American girl in the audience who keeps pushing her hair that has fallen on the cheek behind her ears , a boy wearing a shirt with the line “when I’m not asking questions , I’m answering them” printed on it leans forward to hear the tie breaker question. Abhilash then asks ‘Who is…’ and then there’s the blast , power failure and technical snag that follow.

Talking about the unfortunate incident that happened 5 years ago a person said ‘Jab kismat ho gaandu toh kya karega pandu’. The quizzing fraternity is ecstatic about the latest news and said that there are a plethora of things that may follow ‘Who is..’ like ‘Who is Dawood Ibrahim’s right hand man?” , ‘Who is Bappi Lahri’s jeweler?’or some common question like ‘Who is X , X owns Y a billion dollar company, X started his company in a small garage in some part of the world’ and this X usually happens to be either Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or the owner of Rolls Royce or some other random famous person. Spot fixers have been quick to cash in on the situation and are betting on topics like if the person in the question is a man or a woman and if the person happens to be an Indian or a foreigner.

However philosopher , thinker , day dreamer and Abhilash’s good friend Ananth said ‘Having known him for the past so many years I think he was trying to cool things off in the heated environment with some funny question like ‘Who’s your daddy??’ to some girl in the audience before proceeding to the final question. He is a very witty person you see’ Ananth added that ‘I suppose the origin of the phrase – who’s your daddy goes back in time to one of those parent teacher meetings in school where the teacher would have probably asked a student who his/her dad was in the sea of daddies ‘

When the reporters approached Abhilash and asked him as to why he would want to complete a question that wasn’t completed 5 years ago , Abhilash digging in to his 5^th vada pav with garlic sauce said ‘For the same reason that Vinod Kambli can rake in a match fixing issue that’s 15 years old . I have nothing else to say’ . When asked more questions the humorous quiz master said ‘I’m in a hurry ,I’ll have to rush now. Don’t you dare to nick name me Rasheed , buhahahahaha’

Bench warming

This is what I’ve been doing for the last 10 days or so. It’s like one big patience test where every day you have to sit from 9 to 6 in one place and wait for a project to come or keep hitting the refresh button on your facebook page hoping that something miraculous will happen. It’s bad to be at the bottom of the hierarchy where people are not bothered if you are there or not .It’s also bad to be at the top where there’s hell a lot of responsibility. I wish I was like the alphabet ‘O’ . It’s there right in between the list of alphabets at number 15 . It’s not there at unlucky position 13. It looks round and so full of life. As far as the other freshers around me are concerned , they either text or speak to their boyfriends/girlfriends over phone. In my opinion ‘lovers’ are pretty aimless people who spoil monuments and hillocks by drawing a heart with an arrow that cuts across it at 45 degrees and scribble their names at either end of the arrow but the urban elite prefer to differ and spend hours gazing at each other with a flickering candle placed in between them thereby promoting eco-friendliness all around.

I wonder how the clouds would be leading their lives. There would be a leader of the pack who would begin a mission starting June every year , beginning from Kerala and continuing up to Himachal. The younger clouds would be totally excited to shed out all the moisture. The older ones would be like ‘Oh , it’s just one more new season’. The younger ones would want to change the course of their journey and explore newer areas and water the drought hit areas or shed moisture over the entire Thar desert and do crazy stuff like that only to be cynically mocked by their superiors ( the kind of thing that happens when you tell your parents that you want to become a wildlife photographer or a marine biologist or a social anthropologist).These groups of rebellion clouds would join other likeminded clouds and start venturing far and wild. In case their attempts turned out futile these frustrated souls would wash out cricket matches or cause a “depression”. Whatever be it , these clouds indeed have a far more interesting life than mine.

In other major acts of douchebagry , I went to this area called Sunkadakatte (katte in Kannada means bench).True is the saying ‘when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve’. When I used to travel back home from college by bus , Sunkadakatte would be the last stop and I would get down 3 or 4 stops before. I would wonder , how this area would look like. Sometimes , I wished that I would oversleep by mistake and get down in that stop. The previous sentence is just a digression and is absolutely rubbish. Anyway , this area is pretty chaotic , the roads are narrow. Teenagers wear glittery shirts with ‘Om Shanti Om’ written in a gaudy silver or golden colors.3 of them sit on an old bike and start wheeling in the middle of traffic. There are a lot of hawkers to occupy half the road and get in to a verbal tussle where they exchange a hell lot of swear words and create new ones on the spot. This place looks like a breeding place for the local goons. There was a Kannada Rajyotsava (Karnataka formation day) celebrations happening where they were playing Ravichandran songs. This guy has written plenty of songs praising the navel , hips and the midriff of women. His movies just fall short of being categorized as ‘soft porn’. His wife would have probably told him ‘Go screw half the horny women in the state and come back and make me proud’. Poor souls as us have no such luck. The only time I can think of when women have wanted to hump me are these online dating sites . When you are navigating through them , suddenly a pop up appears wherein a blonde women says that she lives in Bangalore , 23 years old . The next thing that she says is that her husband or boyfriend is out of town and she was looking for someone to spend the night with. You just type in the chat box ‘Oh! , sounds like a pretty brilliant idea’. Then a link appears clicking which you are directed to this website called adult friend finder you have to pay 50$ to 100$ for some stupid platinum , gold and silver memberships to get in touch with these blonde and Latin American women who apparently stay only 2-3 kms away from your place and are waiting to have a jolly good time. Absolutely rubbish these sites are!! Oh my god , get me out of this bench before I venture in to something crazy like this

GoD DamN It!!

A few days back , some of us were discussing as to whether we pray and believe in the concept of God and other such things and surprisingly most of us agreed that there’s someone above who controls the whole world and take care of all of us

So the next question was à whom do we pray to regularly? As in who did we consider as our favorite god . One guy started off by being very diplomatic and said that all the gods were the same and every holy book basically taught the same thing . Considering the fact that learned and sane guys like him do not fit in this world of idiosyncrasy, we curbed the freedom of expression of this guy

Another person said that during his childhood days his parents had told him about Lord Shiva and all his amazing powers . From that day onwards he prayed to Lord Shiva more than anyone else since even he wished to become very strong and powerful. As this boy became a little more older he got to know that Lord Ganesha was the one who was in charge of the ministry of Education .Since Shiva and Ganesha belonged to the same clan and birds of the same feather flock together this came in as a combo offer to the boy. Whenever he would dive in front of Shiva , he would also give another complementary dive to Ganesha also so that he would get the best of both worlds , brain and brawn . As this boy grew up he realized that there’s Laxmi for wealth , Saraswathi who handles higher education and Shani who brings in the glitches. So he had to take care of all these important gods and it wouldn’t be enough if he were contented with the double whammy which he had received earlier

He said that if you pray to one the other will be disappointed and you must be smart enough to please everyone. Very true , no wonder temples these days look like a multiplex for gods. Go to a single temple and in all those portioned cubicles you can find almost all the gods . Say ‘Howdy’ to all of them and come back. This is a very prudent solution by the temples to satisfy the needs of the people and rake in the moolah !

Now it was my turn . In my opinion , my favorite god is Shirdi Sai Baba . There are plenty of reasons as to why I feel so . First of all this god has a separate temple all for himself, like he doesn’t live in one of those partitioned cubicles . He is like an autonomous body , clean and pristine, far away from all the internal politics of the other gods . Both Hindus and Muslims pray to Shirdi Sai Baba. In that way he is secular. In spite of the face that there are more than a million gods to compete with he holds the record for the 2^nd highest gross collections after Tirupathi . He’s simple and clad in white , the people who come to pray don’t push or shove around and behave in a very dignified manner. The temples that are built usually have halls made of marble stone and it’s very nice inside . This god isn’t very demanding aor fussy unlike his counterparts who are have hedonistic tastes and want ghee , milk to smeared around their bodies or want people to fast all day long. The girls who come to pray are prettier than those in the other temples , the prasdam served is nice. In short Shirdi Sai Baba is like the Salman Khan of Godspace (or whatever it is called) .Whatever he does is a hit and it appeals to both the mass as well as the elite .

Whatever be your belief , we should all be good to one another , be kind, well mannered , friendly and good to others. I’ll give you an example . Once a guy was travelling in an auto with his friends .When the auto stopped at a traffic signal an eunuch came and demanded money . This guy said he had no change . Still the eunuch did not leave this guy and came close to a lip lock with him . He could have handed over Rs10 and closed it over there but didn’t do so. Later the eunuch held his crotch to which he simply sat expressionless. Finally the signal turned green and the auto moved ahead.On asking as to why he didn’t resist when the eunuch held his crotch , he said ‘Nature has been unkind with the poor soul .The eunuch feels that neither do men want her nor women. So I gave some momentary happiness and proved that at least someone is there to accept you. This is the epitome of empathy. It takes courage to be so good .I hope this tale of empathy will inspire you to do good to others and instead of putting the blame on god for every bad thing that has happened in the world , you be the change that you want to see.