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!
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
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?
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?
Friday, July 2, 2010
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”!
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”!
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
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!”
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!”
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Lalit Modi Presents “Eden Garden Nights” A three way love story between two long legs and a slip.
When you are almost dying of suffocation in a crowded bus in Kolkata, on your daily commute to school you tend to ask yourself philosophical questions like “Why I am going to school?” and look for answers. A simple answer like “My Dad will beat the hell out of me if I miss school” is not satisfying enough. You wanted some dream answers that justified the torture and my answer was “One day I will be as rich as Rajesh’s dad”.
Rajesh was the rich kid in our block. His house had more marbles than Marble Palace. Every room, including the kitchen, had an AC. I used to think that the white cylindrical thing in his bathroom was also an AC (it was actually a water heater). His house had a lawn which was bigger than Vivekananda Park. In front of their house was parked a white Mercedes. Next to the car, stood a chauffeur in white uniform. He looked like he had come out of the latest Surf advertisement.
My friends and I took turns distributing our inheritance from Rajesh’s dad. His earthly possession became a line item in our list of dreams. Subir wanted a million dollar home like his. Partha wanted to own a Mercedes (he later upgraded his dream to a Ferrari when he realized that the top of the line Merc cost a paltry $ 100K). I was never into big houses or fast cars or fast women (I know it’s totally irrelevant but I threw that in as a freebie). When my turn came to select my inheritance, I opted for an experience instead of durables.
When we were growing up, Eden Gardens, unlike now, was an obvious choice for the extinct game of cricket called Test Match. While we watched the game on our black and white TV, Rajesh watched it from the Club House. After the game he would show off his collection of autographs: Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Brian Lara and even Chandi Charan Ganguly (extra credit if you know who he is). The only thing that he didn’t do was to say “Na na nana!!” That day, I decided my life would be incomplete until I got to see a cricket game from the club house.
When Pradeep, a business acquaintance from US, called me to check on the availability of IPL tickets I immediately went to the Ticketgenie site to check for club house tickets. They were Rs 4000 each (Sharukh Khan not included).
“They are Rs 8000 a piece. Are you interested?” I asked.
Before passing judgment on my action, here is a piece of information. Pradeep hires out my employees in the US at $50 per hour and pays me $10 an hour. By doing this he made it to the list of “Michigan Top 40 Entrepreneurs under 40”. So, I don’t deserve the title “Most likely to head Faud Abraham’s Petty theft division” for my action here!
“Sure.” He said. To an NRI, the fact that you have seen an IPL game live has more ego points than dating Angelina Jolie.
I bought 3 tickets for the KKR match. Why three? Well when you are married it is a criminal offence to have any kind of fun without your wife. If I have to commit such an offense it has to be with someone who is far better looking than Pradeep! I paid with my credit card and the transaction was very smooth. Within minutes I got a text message from my credit card company that I had been charged Rs. 12060.
You get a high when you know you are deceiving someone. You get ten times more depressed when you realize that you are the one who is getting duped. I kept waiting for my tickets but they never came. Four days, Five days… Ten days passed. I ended up knowing all the Blue Dart employees on first name basis. The reply I got from the one contact number of TicketGenie was “All routes to this number are busy”. However I have to admit the female voice was really sexy. I even tried calling the number at midnight hoping that this woman would be sleeping and I would reach someone who could give me some information on my tickets, but I failed to get through. I sent two thousand and nine emails to their help desk, but they, like other Desi companies, believed in the fact that emails were meant to be received and not to be replied back.
I resorted to my omniscient friend Google. He told me that the only way out was to go to the Mohd. Sporting ground to see whether I could get a ticket based on the print out of my order. Based on the glitz of the IPL, I was hoping that the ticket redemption counter would be like a Vodafone office with pretty girls wearing bow-ties manning the Booth. To my disappointment I found 200 people standing in front of a hole through which Jerry from Tom and Jerry wouldn’t have been able to pass. These were people like me who had thought that a painless way of buying an IPL ticket was through the internet. “If only Lalit Modi bought one less ugly tie and used that money for a better ticket delivery process we would not have to suffer like this,’” I thought. After spending two hours in the line and cursing the deodorant maker Axe for false advertising claims, my turn came.
“I need to see the ID you have used to purchase the ticket?” the guy said.
“But I was told to keep the ID at home for the Blue Dart delivery person,” I said.
“No tickets for you,” he said like the soup Nazi from the Seinfeld show.
I realized that the best way to cure one’s low pressure problem was to try to talk logically to morons. Unfortunately I did not suffer from low pressure, so I had no choice but to go home to get the ID.
When there is no hope you bank on miracles. No, the Hooghly River did not part and the tickets did not come out from the river! I did something that I haven’t done in years. I checked my snail mail box. (None of my high school girl friends went into a twenty year coma like Rip Van Winkle. The odds of receiving a love letter by mail were as high as India winning the World Cup Hockey championship). Inside the mailbox were three club house tickets for the IPL game!
I forgot all the trouble I had to go through once I reached Eden Gardens. I also have to accept that the seats that had been randomly assigned by TicketGenie were great. (Thanks to these seats SRK could recognize me. He even waved at me.)
The KKR team, accompanied by three burkha clad women, wiggling their waist, took the field amidst the cheering crowd. Apparently the moral police had suggested to SRK that he replaced these women with party cadets who were willing to show their hairy legs. The KKR management team compromised: by covering the cheer leaders instead of covering the pitch. (Otherwise they had to go undercover from the investors)
The game was going great for KKR till the first fifteen overs. Then ‘The Dhoni massacre’ happened and Kolkata true to its history produced eleven more martyrs. It’s a strange feeling to cheer for Owais Shah and Shane Bond and jeer for Dhoni and Raina. I guess I did not jeer enough for Dhoni and thanks to that I could at least see a couple of sixers. KKR could not play any worse. It appeared Dada and others were in charge of the class “A Beginners Guide to Catching” making sure that the ball fell within a foot of the fielder at an optimal height. The local paara champion, another KKR (Kanchrapara Kool Rockers) would have played better.
I left the ground with a heavy heart. Not because KKR got their ass kicked but it dawned on me that there was nothing to dream about anymore. The worse thing than not having one’s dreams fulfilled was to not have anything to dream about. No wonder Partha had upgraded his dream. I now need to have a new dream. It had to be achievable, not something that would remain unfulfilled until my death. Hmmm… what could it be?
How about ‘Koffee with Kareena’?
Rajesh was the rich kid in our block. His house had more marbles than Marble Palace. Every room, including the kitchen, had an AC. I used to think that the white cylindrical thing in his bathroom was also an AC (it was actually a water heater). His house had a lawn which was bigger than Vivekananda Park. In front of their house was parked a white Mercedes. Next to the car, stood a chauffeur in white uniform. He looked like he had come out of the latest Surf advertisement.
My friends and I took turns distributing our inheritance from Rajesh’s dad. His earthly possession became a line item in our list of dreams. Subir wanted a million dollar home like his. Partha wanted to own a Mercedes (he later upgraded his dream to a Ferrari when he realized that the top of the line Merc cost a paltry $ 100K). I was never into big houses or fast cars or fast women (I know it’s totally irrelevant but I threw that in as a freebie). When my turn came to select my inheritance, I opted for an experience instead of durables.
When we were growing up, Eden Gardens, unlike now, was an obvious choice for the extinct game of cricket called Test Match. While we watched the game on our black and white TV, Rajesh watched it from the Club House. After the game he would show off his collection of autographs: Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Brian Lara and even Chandi Charan Ganguly (extra credit if you know who he is). The only thing that he didn’t do was to say “Na na nana!!” That day, I decided my life would be incomplete until I got to see a cricket game from the club house.
When Pradeep, a business acquaintance from US, called me to check on the availability of IPL tickets I immediately went to the Ticketgenie site to check for club house tickets. They were Rs 4000 each (Sharukh Khan not included).
“They are Rs 8000 a piece. Are you interested?” I asked.
Before passing judgment on my action, here is a piece of information. Pradeep hires out my employees in the US at $50 per hour and pays me $10 an hour. By doing this he made it to the list of “Michigan Top 40 Entrepreneurs under 40”. So, I don’t deserve the title “Most likely to head Faud Abraham’s Petty theft division” for my action here!
“Sure.” He said. To an NRI, the fact that you have seen an IPL game live has more ego points than dating Angelina Jolie.
I bought 3 tickets for the KKR match. Why three? Well when you are married it is a criminal offence to have any kind of fun without your wife. If I have to commit such an offense it has to be with someone who is far better looking than Pradeep! I paid with my credit card and the transaction was very smooth. Within minutes I got a text message from my credit card company that I had been charged Rs. 12060.
You get a high when you know you are deceiving someone. You get ten times more depressed when you realize that you are the one who is getting duped. I kept waiting for my tickets but they never came. Four days, Five days… Ten days passed. I ended up knowing all the Blue Dart employees on first name basis. The reply I got from the one contact number of TicketGenie was “All routes to this number are busy”. However I have to admit the female voice was really sexy. I even tried calling the number at midnight hoping that this woman would be sleeping and I would reach someone who could give me some information on my tickets, but I failed to get through. I sent two thousand and nine emails to their help desk, but they, like other Desi companies, believed in the fact that emails were meant to be received and not to be replied back.
I resorted to my omniscient friend Google. He told me that the only way out was to go to the Mohd. Sporting ground to see whether I could get a ticket based on the print out of my order. Based on the glitz of the IPL, I was hoping that the ticket redemption counter would be like a Vodafone office with pretty girls wearing bow-ties manning the Booth. To my disappointment I found 200 people standing in front of a hole through which Jerry from Tom and Jerry wouldn’t have been able to pass. These were people like me who had thought that a painless way of buying an IPL ticket was through the internet. “If only Lalit Modi bought one less ugly tie and used that money for a better ticket delivery process we would not have to suffer like this,’” I thought. After spending two hours in the line and cursing the deodorant maker Axe for false advertising claims, my turn came.
“I need to see the ID you have used to purchase the ticket?” the guy said.
“But I was told to keep the ID at home for the Blue Dart delivery person,” I said.
“No tickets for you,” he said like the soup Nazi from the Seinfeld show.
I realized that the best way to cure one’s low pressure problem was to try to talk logically to morons. Unfortunately I did not suffer from low pressure, so I had no choice but to go home to get the ID.
When there is no hope you bank on miracles. No, the Hooghly River did not part and the tickets did not come out from the river! I did something that I haven’t done in years. I checked my snail mail box. (None of my high school girl friends went into a twenty year coma like Rip Van Winkle. The odds of receiving a love letter by mail were as high as India winning the World Cup Hockey championship). Inside the mailbox were three club house tickets for the IPL game!
I forgot all the trouble I had to go through once I reached Eden Gardens. I also have to accept that the seats that had been randomly assigned by TicketGenie were great. (Thanks to these seats SRK could recognize me. He even waved at me.)
The KKR team, accompanied by three burkha clad women, wiggling their waist, took the field amidst the cheering crowd. Apparently the moral police had suggested to SRK that he replaced these women with party cadets who were willing to show their hairy legs. The KKR management team compromised: by covering the cheer leaders instead of covering the pitch. (Otherwise they had to go undercover from the investors)
The game was going great for KKR till the first fifteen overs. Then ‘The Dhoni massacre’ happened and Kolkata true to its history produced eleven more martyrs. It’s a strange feeling to cheer for Owais Shah and Shane Bond and jeer for Dhoni and Raina. I guess I did not jeer enough for Dhoni and thanks to that I could at least see a couple of sixers. KKR could not play any worse. It appeared Dada and others were in charge of the class “A Beginners Guide to Catching” making sure that the ball fell within a foot of the fielder at an optimal height. The local paara champion, another KKR (Kanchrapara Kool Rockers) would have played better.
I left the ground with a heavy heart. Not because KKR got their ass kicked but it dawned on me that there was nothing to dream about anymore. The worse thing than not having one’s dreams fulfilled was to not have anything to dream about. No wonder Partha had upgraded his dream. I now need to have a new dream. It had to be achievable, not something that would remain unfulfilled until my death. Hmmm… what could it be?
How about ‘Koffee with Kareena’?
Monday, February 15, 2010
My name is Arindam and I am not ....
I love Karan Johar movies. Not just because he is a great director but I kind of grew up (or grew old) with his movies. When Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was released I could relate it to my then romantic condition. I identified with Sharukh Khan in that movie and I laughed with him and cried (because the pain of being estranged from my wife was hurting me like crazy cause she was sitting 3 seats behind and also because the guy next to me was stinking of alcohol and coconut oil). Then came K3G where I saw AB in me (okay okay myself in AB ji). We had just adopted our son and the other one was on its way. Also at 18 months, my son’s best friend was our nanny Angelica’s daughter Karen. And .. I was almost as rich as AB (The fact that internet stocks have crashed and my concepts on fractions and percentages were so clear that I could have topped any IIT exam is just a small factual error that can be ignored). That was one movie where I generated enough teardrops to cause a mini flood. Then came Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. At that point the ball game of my life had changed and I was trying to figure out whether I was reaching mid-life or it was just another crisis. I could identify with all the four main characters of the movie. I was Priety Zinta because no one appreciated the fact that at the end of the month I would bring in Rs. 18,245.45 which would put food on the table and also with Shahrukh Khan because I was angry from moving from the US to a country called India. I was Rani Mukherjee because I was having a major identity crisis and also Abhishek Bachchan for being sex deprived. I spent A few months after seeing the movie sitting on benches in a park close to a wedding location hoping that soon the bride would run away from the wedding and sit next to me. That did not happen !!!...but I almost got hit by a rickshaw like SRK and got mugged and received a proposition from a female professional who said for Rs 10 she could do wonders.
So… I wanted to see My Name is Khan. Not just because it was another Karan Johar movie and I wanted to see where I fit in it but also because of the hype it had created. Finally IIM marketing graduates have realized that they can make ten times the money by coming up with real life marketing gimmicks for Bollywood as opposed to selling soaps and ketchup door to door. I went with a whole bunch of like minded people to the nearest multiplex to plop a day’s salary for an evening of entertainment and thus reinforce the ego which says, “We don’t do regular movie halls!!”
It took me a while to realize that I was not watching the Hindi version of RainMan. It took Karan three years to research for a movie and he did not find out the difference between Asperger syndrome and Autism? Most probably his original idea was to make SRK an autistic than an Asperger patient but some high flying lawyer must have told him that the movie would be too close to RainMan. Plus, Autism is too easy to pronounce while Asperger can sure compete with Progeria. And what about the 6:05 stance of Sharukh Khan (If you have no clue of what I am saying, stare at the clock hands when the time is 6:05) .Did SRK finally get trained by Dev Anand or what? What a difference from the SRK of Chak De India. Instead of running all over USA like Forest Gump he should have mailed a MPEG file of his Chak De India speech to the president. President Bush would have come crawling to him. Not because of the fact that he wants to play hockey with cute Indian women but to use the same speech to cheer up the US Army before attacking Australia. ( According to him Australia is one of the leading terrorist states in the world because during his last visit someone asked him,”President Bush, You have come here TO-DIE?”)
The marketing genius might have done a good job with the hype but the MBA who was in charge of product management failed miserably. The timing of this movie was two years too late. I agree that the formula was different. Boy Meets Girl, Bomb Blast Happens, Boy Loses Girl, Terrorist is Traced, Boy Finds Girl is a very good variation from the standard formula. However New York and Kurban capitalized on it. Unless you are a Microsoft, it is pretty difficult to be successful by reissuing the same formula.
But… I have never been through a Karan Johar movie without saline secretions from optical glands, as Chatur would put it. That moment came when they started singing “We shall overcome or Hum Hoyengey Kamiyab”. This was the only time the main message of the movie was clear … that there are only two types of People in the world Good People and Bad People ( A classification the Bengalis already knew but to them its Bengalis and Non Bengalis), irrespective of race, color, religion, etc. Sometimes we easily understand complex stuff like supporting the Pakistani cricketer makes us traitors or that our country needs to be divided into two thousand states based on the permutation combination of dialects, religion and caste. A simple concept like that only makes sense to autistic persons, I guess.
I again cried when the poor replica of Obama showed up. It brought back memories of Jan 2009, the inauguration ceremony. I cried that day along with at least 100 million other people. Not because it was a major statistical moment but it marked the beginning of an era of hope. During the last eight years the blue chip brand equity of the United States of America has become like a penny stock. What we do in India pales in comparison with what George did. India has the cop who takes 50p from the truck driver, the politicians who can steal thousands from the state coffer, but we have yet to have a prime minister who got elected by making a farce of the electoral system - by altering the result of a whole state because the chief minister of that state is his brother!!
Through President Obama we can dream again.
I came back home, kind of sad. Not because that I wasted my money on a much hyped movie but because my magical connection with Karan Johar’s movie was gone. Couple of days later when I entered my house I saw something. Lying on my table was a rejection letter from a leading newspaper. A friend of mine suggested that I write the movie review and send it to this newspaper. I smiled and said to myself, “My name is Arindam and I am not on Karan Johar’s payroll”
Monday, February 8, 2010
Mine is Red What's Yours?
Last week something unique happened in Facebook. Suddenly women started giving their status updates in color. Which was not a big deal to begin with because you can leave it to a woman to sum up their status in a color; but soon it started multiplying. To all the 150 million men in Facebook and the 3 women who had no clue what’s happening, here’s the secret. Someone from Detroit came up with the idea for Breast Cancer Awareness asking women to write the color of their bra as status update and keep us men guessing and eventually make us realize that the most thought about topic in our mind can cause death to a woman if not treated at the right time.
I think it was a big milestone for electronic media, because this was the first time someone realized the power of chain mail, the most hated technical word. So instead of sending chain mail about Bill Gates giving out free money, or some person dying of some disease, this person used it effectively. To me, it was a moment of humility and realizing that learning never ends. I thought I have maxed out on learning on one subject: Bras and there is nothing else I can learn. I thought I got a masters on that subject based on my research during my college days and I obtained the phd after learning from Frank Kastanza the different cup sizes and the straps in Seinfeld. But I was WRONG!
One thing I did not know was that bras come in so many colors and prints! White, Black and the revolutionary Pink, what else can it be? I did not know that it now comes in colors like Electric Blue, Aquamarine Green, Bloodstained Red, Sweaty Yellow, Mountain Breeze Purple, Deep Valley Green, Silicon Orange and other colors. Also I did not know it comes in so many different prints like yellow and purple stripes, different combinations of faded blue and can also have Bob Marley’s picture imprinted on it. Out of few thousand updates I saw (some updated their status multiple times), the best update went to a friend of mine who said Colorless. Actually I almost gave the award to someone who said Nude, but to my utter dismay I found out that’s another color available for Asset management.
I then had an Edison moment. Why not create another original campaign by copying the idea? Microsoft has successfully done that and so have all the Bollywood music directors, so why can’t I? How about asking all men to write something as their status update to raise Awareness for Prostate Cancer? Here’s some idea on which I want people to vote and then I will select the one that gets the maximum vote. Also, just to emphasize the fact the all literary work would have been ten times better if it was written in a powerpoint mode, here are some suggested status updates for men in itemized format:
1. Number of times you thought about sex in a day, rounded off to the nearest million.
2. Time it takes to cancel the above idea because your wife or girlfriend might think that’s the number of your past girlfriend.
3. Number of days before your death when you realize that number is actually the number of boyfriends your wife had.
4. Time in minutes when you thought that you closely resemble Aamir Khan in the movie 3 Idiots.
5. Time in minutes when you realized that Karena Kapoor was just a poster in your room.
6. The first thing you look at when you see a woman.
7. Breast don’t qualify as an answer to the above.
8. Number of holes of golf you would like to play if given an opportunity.
9. Number of holes of golf Tiger Woods has played.
10. Number of times you got screamed at for not putting down the toilet seat.
11. The color of your underwear, sorry no peeking.
12. The color of the underwear of that girl in your high school.
13. What will be your score when you reach ND Tiwari’s age?
14. How many times has your girl friend asked you about what you were thinking?
15. How many times you have lied to the above question?
16. How many times you have told your wife that you remember seeing her wearing the sari or jewellery at XYZ’s party?
17. How many times another woman has done the same to your wife at XYZ’s party?
18. How many times your spouse has asked you the question “You are not going to wear that to the party?”
19. How many times you wished you have answered “No dear, I just wore it to take an inventory of my wardrobe”?
20. Number of TV channels you scan per day but not watch.
Copyright: AGR Inc, however feel free to copy and circulate. Just wanted to make sure that my name appears in the starting credits when the movie is made!
I think it was a big milestone for electronic media, because this was the first time someone realized the power of chain mail, the most hated technical word. So instead of sending chain mail about Bill Gates giving out free money, or some person dying of some disease, this person used it effectively. To me, it was a moment of humility and realizing that learning never ends. I thought I have maxed out on learning on one subject: Bras and there is nothing else I can learn. I thought I got a masters on that subject based on my research during my college days and I obtained the phd after learning from Frank Kastanza the different cup sizes and the straps in Seinfeld. But I was WRONG!
One thing I did not know was that bras come in so many colors and prints! White, Black and the revolutionary Pink, what else can it be? I did not know that it now comes in colors like Electric Blue, Aquamarine Green, Bloodstained Red, Sweaty Yellow, Mountain Breeze Purple, Deep Valley Green, Silicon Orange and other colors. Also I did not know it comes in so many different prints like yellow and purple stripes, different combinations of faded blue and can also have Bob Marley’s picture imprinted on it. Out of few thousand updates I saw (some updated their status multiple times), the best update went to a friend of mine who said Colorless. Actually I almost gave the award to someone who said Nude, but to my utter dismay I found out that’s another color available for Asset management.
I then had an Edison moment. Why not create another original campaign by copying the idea? Microsoft has successfully done that and so have all the Bollywood music directors, so why can’t I? How about asking all men to write something as their status update to raise Awareness for Prostate Cancer? Here’s some idea on which I want people to vote and then I will select the one that gets the maximum vote. Also, just to emphasize the fact the all literary work would have been ten times better if it was written in a powerpoint mode, here are some suggested status updates for men in itemized format:
1. Number of times you thought about sex in a day, rounded off to the nearest million.
2. Time it takes to cancel the above idea because your wife or girlfriend might think that’s the number of your past girlfriend.
3. Number of days before your death when you realize that number is actually the number of boyfriends your wife had.
4. Time in minutes when you thought that you closely resemble Aamir Khan in the movie 3 Idiots.
5. Time in minutes when you realized that Karena Kapoor was just a poster in your room.
6. The first thing you look at when you see a woman.
7. Breast don’t qualify as an answer to the above.
8. Number of holes of golf you would like to play if given an opportunity.
9. Number of holes of golf Tiger Woods has played.
10. Number of times you got screamed at for not putting down the toilet seat.
11. The color of your underwear, sorry no peeking.
12. The color of the underwear of that girl in your high school.
13. What will be your score when you reach ND Tiwari’s age?
14. How many times has your girl friend asked you about what you were thinking?
15. How many times you have lied to the above question?
16. How many times you have told your wife that you remember seeing her wearing the sari or jewellery at XYZ’s party?
17. How many times another woman has done the same to your wife at XYZ’s party?
18. How many times your spouse has asked you the question “You are not going to wear that to the party?”
19. How many times you wished you have answered “No dear, I just wore it to take an inventory of my wardrobe”?
20. Number of TV channels you scan per day but not watch.
Copyright: AGR Inc, however feel free to copy and circulate. Just wanted to make sure that my name appears in the starting credits when the movie is made!
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