The Circle of Five

When India won the world cup last year I was reminiscing about the 1983 World Cup when Kapil and his men surprised us by beating the mighty West Indies. We were glued to our EC Black and White TV to witness the heroics of Kapil Dev, Mohinder Amarnath, Sandip Patil, Gavaskar and the rest. (I actually do remember the names of the entire Indian team including the second wicket keeper Bharat Reddy). The eighteen year old who had just gulped down half a bottle of vodka after Dhoni hit the ball out of the ground gave me a look which didn’t need any explanation. As if, I was just talking about my pet dinosaur. At that point I decided that I better live in the present than go back to the past.

So why is the sudden walk down the memory lane? Well, I can proudly say like the eighteen year old that I have no recollection of the fact when India won a gold medal at the Olympics. The cliché “Participation is more important than Winning” was our slogan as far as the Olympics are concerned. Just to set the record straight, I am not Rip Van Winkle who woke up after thirty five years. I clearly remember the sound of the final whistle on my Murphy radio indicating India’s victory in the Hockey final in 1980. Winning hockey gold when half the world had boycotted the Olympics wasn’t that great. In the universal language of love, I mean Cricket it’s like winning the Asia Cup. Yes it was great but it wasn’t a big deal. I do not want to undermine Abhinav Bindra’s gold medal in the last Olympics. He truly made us proud by winning the first individual gold for the country, but it was unexpected. It was like drinking Blue Label when you are not thirsty. However nothing beats the taste of chilled beer when you are dying of thirst. In 2008 there wasn’t any expectation.

This time it is different. This time one billion Indians will shift their focus from Cricket to the Five Circles of Life. (The rest two hundred millions will still concentrate on Cricket). This time we were hoping that we are going to win not just one gold medal but at least a few. We are hoping that our shooters and archers hit the bull’s eye and our boxers the human nose. We will use the phrase ‘Love game” only in the context of the opponent’s score in Tennis and Badminton. There is a tremendous amount of anticipation this time.

I really wish that we win some medals this year. The other sports desperately need the brand equity that will attract the Pepsis and the Cokes of the world. The birth of new India: where the Mary Koms and Bindras are equally sought after as the Dhonis and Sachins. A sport can only survive when the corporate world takes interest in it, government funding only goes to Kalamadi. (I can’t believe that he is going to the Olympics on tax payer’s money).

These two weeks will determine the fate of Non-Cricket sports. (Well there are only two sports in India, Cricket and Non Cricket). I am praying that our hope does not turn into just hype. Let’s all wish the Indian Olympic team the best of luck. Let’s hope that in the alphabet of the Indian Olympians the letter ‘y’ does not come after the letter ‘o’.

I am not an a**hole, I am just trying hard to be one

Last year I wrote about a very innovative effort for breast cancer awareness: women updating their status messages on Facebook with the color of their bra, something that kept us men making wild guesses. I was intrigued by the ability of women in this case to convert spam into something fun and altruistic. Well, I guess I spoke too soon.

Nowadays, I am bombarded with status messages which are nothing but spam, people cutting and pasting a spam message from their friend. The excitement in me, generated by these messages, can only compete with the feeling I get when I am, occasionally, informed by a Good Samaritan Nigerian that he is willing to share a few million dollars of his fortune just because I am a good person.

Let me just remind you folks that the box says, “What’s on your mind?”, and contrary to popular belief Mark Zuckerman did not name it “What can you cut and paste today?” If he did then Sean Parker would have told him “Rename it to ‘What’s on your mind, its cleaner’!”

We all know that cancer is a killer disease and we should all go for a regular check up, especially people who are wrapping a 50 over one day match and are hoping to last through a five day test. But, I really doubt whether the Harvard research assistant will rush to his lab after reading your status message about the urgent need for a cure for cancer! If it was so simple, then the American Cancer Society wouldn’t be spending $90 million on medical research and programs.

Another message that is doing the rounds is about how great your mother is. I know she is the only person in the world who really cares about you, but the probability of her reading your status is 1 in a few thousands. There is a high chance she is not on Facebook, and even if she is, you want to tell me you have your mother as a friend in Facebook? “Dude! You need a life!” Also, this is not the right forum to express your unconditional love for your mother. It’s like Baba Ramdev giving the keynote speech for the American Heart Association: if we spend 5 minutes practicing Kapalbhati then we will not require Angioplasty! Instead of updating your status, just call her and read the message to her. Believe me, it will cause wonders. In fact I exactly did that and now I know what the word inheritance means.

But my favorite status update is the one that was endorsed by Narcissus that says “I am the best looking woman on Facebook. If you think you are the best looking woman please cut and paste this message as your status message”. My problem here is not with your expression of modesty but the fact that you are diluting the meaning of the word “best”. If overzealous parents realize that there are 250 million best looking women on Facebook, then they will stop breathing down their child’s neck asking her to be the best in the class! A typical classroom will be the socialistic utopia where every child is best!

So here’s my plea to the Facebook community. Limit your so called awareness status updates to lingerie. If you run out color, talk about texture, material, size and type. You can go really go wild until your friends get a visual picture that’s better than the security cameras at the US airports.

But on second thoughts I doubt whether people will listen to me. So, my motto is if you can’t beat them, join them. So, please cut and paste the following messages on your status:

“I am not an a**hole. I am just trying hard to be one”. If you suffer from delusional disorder and think you are Mark Zuckerman please cut and paste this message.

Make sure that at least 100 people cut and paste the message from THIS BLOG! Otherwise your Facebook account will be deleted. Hey, I own Facebook, I can do that!

Happy Independence Day

Happy Independence Day! By saying this I am not referring to the population who got rid of a nagging wife, abusive husband or even a mother-in-law trained in Bin Laden’s guerrilla camp. I will write about them next time. This time I want to write about the country called India.

It was 63 years ago when we were ruled by the guys who could naturally speak Hindi with a western accent and didn’t need a convent education to learn that. They ruled us for 200 years and would have ruled us even now if they didn’t lose a cricket match to a bunch of villagers who played the game wearing dhotis and kurtas. The ignominy of losing a game that they invented was too much for them. Their rule ended in the same way it started. It took a betrayer named Mir Jafar for them to start ruling India. It was poetic justice that they lost the game because of a betrayer within their fold. The lady who sat through an entire Hindi song with lusty eyes for the village Idiot.

When we were in school, Independence Day meant the arrival of the peon carrying a big ledger book that had the notice about Independence Day. The teacher would read out, “Students are supposed to come to the school for the flag hoisting ceremony in their natural dress”. She would turn red in embarrassment and curse Gobindo Babu, the clerk, who wrote the notice. Gobindo Babu, who wore dhoti to work everyday, thought wearing a dhoti should come naturally to everyone and hence he used to think that the right word was “natural” and not “national”.

We wanted to hide from the public eye when we went to school on Independence Day wearing the national dress. We were scared that the national anthem Nazi would catch us, the same guy who made sure people walked away when the national anthem was played in movie halls. The only consolation was the food packet which we used to get: kachori, bhajis and sweets. For us, Independence Day was synonymous with this food packet in the same way that eating a Turkey Dinner on Thanks Giving is for the American population.

One such independence day, I was witness to a debate between my grandfather and his friend. According to my grand-father the most tragic thing that ever happened to India was the departure of the English folks. There was discipline and peace when they were here and “Now the country has gone to the dogs” he would say. His friend would sing the virtues of an independent India. “Now we manufacture everything from a needle to an airplane,” he would say.

Needless to say that my grand-father was wrong but his friend was wrong too. Instead of creating a market economy we created a socialistic economy and embraced the public sector companies. We put an embargo on almost all possible imports: from clothes to cars. Employment in the public sector was like a tenure track position at the US universities. What we lacked was the “publish or perish” concept that is prevalent in the US universities, which eventually leads to a tenureship. In the public sector companies, the concept was “procrastinate or perish”. A nation that got its independence on the same day as us a year later: South Korea (actually it was 13th Aug, but Independence Day is celebrated on the 15th) left us far behind in the race called GDP. The reason: they embraced a market economy.

Actually not everything was bad about having a closed economy. Thanks to the license raj, smugglers were regarded as demi-gods. We wouldn’t have heard the dialog “Kal raat mera das crore ka hira ah raha hai” otherwise. Or the classic dialogue – “Mujhko Mona aur Sona chahiye”. Those were the golden days when the mafia Don could sleep at night with a clear conscience. There is nothing immoral about increasing the gold reserve of the country. Supplying the raw material for the Hash Bash day was not on their priority list.

It was the time when it was very easy to demonstrate that you were rich. It only took a pair of Levis jeans or a pair of Nike shoes (then pronounced like Bike!) for you to belong to the “Haves” and not to the “Have Nots”. A friend of mine who had an extremely reddish complexion would classify the Haves as the population who could afford to have butter with a piece of bread. Something that I could happily afford in those days but can’t afford now (thanks to my friendship with Mr. Cholesterol and my enmity with Miss. Insulin).

Now, on the eve of the 63rd Independence Day, I see a major contrast to those days. For starters, everyone stands up when the national anthem is played at Fame Cinema Halls. The same National Anthem was played at an Olympics Game after 28 years! We are represented well in awards like the Grammies and the Oscars, and the west is represented well as “extras” in the item songs in awards like Filmfare and IIFA. Thanks to cable and satellite television, we can learn the frat culture of Phi Beta Kappa at the Tennessee Institute of Technology while the US media investigates the enigma of the IITs.

The majority of the public sectors had been divested. India has the fourth largest GDP in terms of purchasing power and the eleventh largest nominal GDP. India’s foreign exchange reserve is about 300 Billion USD (thanks to the gold smugglers!). We have beggars who now program their mobile phones to call people and ask for donation in USD, an indicator of India’s software export figure of $40 billion dollar along with the tremendous growth of mobile subscribers (650 million and growing). The most important thing is that there is a feeling that says that we are proud to be Indians.

I keep wondering what we should write on the birthday cake for India. How about, “You have come a long way baby.” The slogan for an US cigarette company can be aptly applied to the smoking hot progress of India. So let’s raise our glass while we take a byte from the birthday cake for our country and wish that she becomes a world leader in 2020: and this time the reference is not to the stupid game!

U.N.F.R.I.E.N.D.S

When we were young we clearly knew who our friends were. If I ask my daughter who her good friends are, she would give me a list of at least 5 friends in the descending order of likeness. I think the clear-cut demarcation between friends and acquaintances lasts till you graduate from college. I can clearly list my friends and enemies from college. I was with them at every social and cultural event. We would walk with our arms around each other or a hand on a shoulder, an action that only meant we were Homo Sapiens and nothing else. But as we grew older, the definition of friend and acquaintance become grey. Anyone whom we met became our friend. Colleagues from work, the next door neighbor, the dentist, son’s classmates’ moms and even the cute girl at the corner grocery store were all friends. They might not invite you to their New Year’s Eve party or their own wedding but they were still friends. Friends always remain friends unless they do something really bad like stealing your boyfriend or puking in your bathroom and using your new Ralph Lauren towel to wipe it.

The dynamics of friendship have remained the same from the days of Adam till the end of the twentieth century. There were minor changes here and there. Here’s an example: In the early times it was your prized fig leaf whose desecration by a fellow friend caused you to declare him as someone who wasn’t a friend as opposed to the towel custom in the twentieth century. When you liked a girl you would ask her for her cave number, pigeon number or phone number based on the century of your existence.

With the arrival of the Internet, people thought about toying with the idea of friendship but none were bold enough to add the F word to their software. During the IRC days, you could follow someone (the same concept now used by Twitter), so that if that person was online, you were notified. Yahoo called it Contacts, a definition which screamed out the words “No emotions please!”. It took a maverick like Google to start calling contacts as friends. Still, the implications were very limited. Based on the census of 2002, only .5% of potential daters exchanged gmail ids, the rest opted for phone numbers.

With the advent of Facebook we went back to the kindergarten days, of clearly defining who our friends are. Thanks to some innovative programs we can also classify them based on their date worthiness, sexiness, wealth and appetite. It was a way to tell the world, “Look how many friends I have, you little anti-socialite!” It only took a few clicks (and sometimes major convincing) to add friends, but along with that came the new word in the English dictionary “Unfriend” (a word that Office 2007 still thinks is spelt incorrectly). You can Unfriend someone with just one click. The list of friends became evidence that can be submitted to the court of law. You are an accomplice to a bank heist? Just prove that you unfriended the mastermind before the robbery happened and go scot free. An overzealous husband has put a gun to your head for sleeping with his wife? Don’t worry just show him that you unfriended her 5 days before the day he saw you coming out of his bedroom. Who will make love to a person who Unfriended you? Even Othello would understand that.

The problem with the digital definition of “Friends” was that people would unfriend you for trivial reasons. The paperwork involved in unfriending someone in the pre-Facebook era was daunting enough for someone not to go through it. But now it is instant and easy. People unfriend their friends for trivial reasons. Don’t like the color of the shirt he is wearing? Unfriend him. Her grammar sucks? Unfriend her. She is a feminist? Unfriend her. He is a MCP? Unfriend him.

I had my fair share of being unfriended by ex-friends. One ex friend did not like my comment “You are looking beautiful in this picture”. She thought it was too demeaning. How can you judge beauty? The strange part is when asked why she unfriended me, she refused to divulge the reason. The first answer was, “It’s not you but it’s me”. Then she said, “Actually I was arranging my friends in alphabetical order and did not know where to put you!” I think she thought I was a rockstar and my name might be just a symbol like the “artist who was formerly called Prince”. (I am sure this is the reason why Prince changed his name back to Prince). I had to pay a private investigator a huge fortune to find out the real reason.

I suffer from OCD as far as accepting or rejecting friends. If I don’t accept or reject someone within five minutes of the request, I start gasping for oxygen, my skin dries up, I get a terrible headache along with other symptoms that are best left undocumented. Once my wife left her Facebook session open with the screen that had the dialog box open regarding a friend request. I accepted it. Someone on my friend list did not like it. It seemed my wife’s new friend had bought the same sari as my ex-friend. I was unaware of the rule that you can only have friends with mutually exclusive choice of saris.

I wanted to write this article to wish all my friends a happy friendship day. As a protest against Hallmark I want to celebrate it on a day not designated by Hallmark. (An act that will result in being unfriended by all the Hallmark employees on my list). So here it is….

“Wishing you a happy fri………….”! Hey! Wait a minute. How come I have one friend less today than I did yesterday?

Dont Cry For Me Argentina

Why do Bengalis feel sad when Brazil loses a football match? The country is on the other side of the world and speaks a language called Portuguese, which is not even taught in Max Muller Bhavan or Ramakrishna Mission. The moral police of the government would ban people from supporting Brazil if they knew about the things that take place during Mardi Gras. The only possible reason is that they have players whose names resemble our near and dear ones like Dida, Kaka and mama (will play in the next World Cup).

World Cup is the only time when it seems that Football is our national game and Cricket an unknown game like Baseball. Messi scoring a goal becomes front page news replacing the Asia cup winners. Winning a test series in West Indies after 35 years gets overshadowed by the loss of the Brazilian team.

Tonight is another night when the sale of Prozac will shoot through the roof because every Bengali will miss his Kaka. But this time the situation is not so bad. We don’t mind cheering for Spain, and the other Latin American teams, whose names resemble the Bengali’s obsession with their second most important thing in their life, a successful trip to the bathroom in the morning. And there is Argentina with our own Maradona. Let’s hope we get back our smiles tomorrow instead of listening to the song “Don’t cry for me Argentina”!

Phuket

IdIoT

According to almost all the doctors that I know who could afford to go and see the movie, the most unrealistic part of 3 Idiots was the child-birth scene. Needless to say affordability was more temporal than financial. I for once thought that was perfectly okay. Every second day you read about child birth stories on a table tennis board at a major engineering college. The part that appeared most unrealistic to me was the fact that someone could not be traced for six years in these days of internet connectivity. These guys had to just open a Facebook account and the next day Facebook would have suggested, “Your friend Rancho is living happily in Ladakh. Do you want his phone number?” Then I thought of Misti….

If you are thinking that I was fortunate enough to come within 6 inches of the fairer sex in IIT – Thank you for thinking so highly of me! Unfortunately Misti was a guy. In spite of his name the only happy and gay quality he had was his ability to enter other students’ rooms from the back door in order to reconfigure the geography of their room, an act whose technical name was ‘CG change’ in IIT lingo.
After getting into IIT the worst thing to do was not to get a failing grade in fluid mechanics but to be branded as a guy who was “Vague”. Vagueness is a virtue in the real word especially for married men and women and software salesmen. When are you coming home honey? - Around Five-ish; How much does your software cost? - Anywhere between a hundred thousand dollars and a million. You are never wrong when you are vague. But in IIT being vague was more ignominious than being a non virgin in a nun’s convention.

I was neither good at sports nor good at soc & cult. I was scared that soon someone would come with a big rubber stamp that said “100% Pure Vague” and stamp that on me. I needed a strategy to get out of the doldrums.

“You should hang around with guys like Supratim Gupta,” said a senior. That was the only time when someone called Misti by his actual name. The next day he got baptized as Misti by a senior based on his cuteness factor.

I realized that hanging out with people like Misti was my escape route from the world of Vagueness. He was the combination of Michael Jordon and Jhumpa Lahiri. (Not physically! That’s an eerie picture). He was the basketball hall captain in the second year and was the governor of Alankar, the IIT magazine in his third year. Everyone in the hall knew him and they knew me because I was always in the radar screen along with him. At that time I did not realize that I could have had a potential TV career by being Ed MacMohan in the Johny Carson Show or the other guy who used to suck up to Conan in Late Night With Conan.

Misti, to quote Scar from The Lion King was “at the shallow end of the gene pool” or the funda (knowledge) pool. He studied Agricultural Engineering, the department that was lovingly called ‘Ghasi’ (the closest translation would be ‘someone who cuts grass’). Based on Misti’s technical knowledge I was sure that the only thing they studied was how to cut grass with different types of sickles. Calculus to him was a character from Tintin. We developed a symbiotic relationship. I helped him with his math while I got my “fifteen minutes of fame” by moving around the campus in Misti’s official IIT track suit and from the acknowledgement I received in Alankar for carrying loads of paper from one end of the campus to the other end.

My room was next to his for three consecutive years and we became very good friends, in fact best friends. We never told this to each other. I think it’s easier to say, “I love you” to a girl than to say, “You are my best friend” to a guy. Misti did consider me his best friend, something that took me years to realize, because he trusted me with his secrets.

Over the years I have made a lot of acquaintances. Some stayed at that level, some turned into friendship and a handful of them became great friends. It is just a random coincidence that all my ‘great friends’ are women. I guess when you grow old it’s easier to tell a woman that she is your best friend than to tell her anything else. There was one common trait in these friendships. They all trusted me with their secrets. Secrets about their ex boyfriends; present boyfriends; family concerns; their likes and dislikes. (Accepting me as a true friend might have been their way of telling me that I shouldn’t even dream about seeing them sans clothes!). Like all my great friends, Misti trusted me with his secrets.
It was not about what he did with his girlfriend. When you are a teenager you announce your acrobatics with a female over the loudspeaker. He trusted me with something terribly embarrassing for a teenager: letters from his mom.

In those days when there was no cell phone and internet, the only communication we had with our parents was through hand written letters. Misti had one problem. He could not read Bengali and his mom did not know how to express herself in a foreign language. Misti’s mom would write to him about embarrassing topics like he should not do drugs, how she wanted him to stay with them after he graduated instead of settling in the US; he should make sure that he didn’t catch a cold and he shouldn’t skip breakfast. (She didn’t talk about safe sex because AIDS still meant scholarship from universities. Current generation Misti-moms should definitely add that to their list.) I would read him her letters and watch the somber expression on his face, a fact that I hid from him. Otherwise he would have killed me.

Misti broke all the commandments imposed by his mother, including the one about not going to the US. One day he called me in the US to celebrate the fact that he had lost something. I was extremely jealous. In spite of the fact that all odds were against me I was hoping to beat him in this department. It was heartbreaking to lose to him by a few seconds (157,680,000 seconds to be precise). That was the last time I heard from him!

I kept wondering what happened to him. I could only speculate. Almost every IIT-ian had an upbringing where we were supposed to meet expectations and excel in all areas. This thought stayed in hibernation but resurfaced as soon as you graduated. You were supposed to be the Perfect son, the Perfect husband, the Perfect dad, the Perfect neighbor, the Perfect employee and even the Perfect kisser. I failed in all these subjects except the last one. If I have to guess what made him a recluse I would think it was his inability to meet one of these expectations.

I have seen the movie 3 Idiots thrice. And every time my mind has wandered off to a scene where I was out searching for a friend; Misti in this case. The only difference was that I was driving a BMW X5 with a few crates of Corona in the trunk and a new song composed by Shantanu Moitra being played in the background (a song where the word ‘Ma’ appeared at least 3.5 times).

I would eventually find him, not in the Ladakh valley but in San Francisco, working for Farmville (Hey! He was an agricultural engineer). Instead of giving him the salute by taking off my pants, I would end up telling him the following:
“You moron! You still suck in Math. In Life, you may get failing grades in almost all subjects but when you add them up the sum is greater than the parts. Because in this case, you make the rules!”