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?