Champion Kickah

Things That Caught My Eye In 2009

2010-01-04T13:59:00.020+08:00

Jason Crombie Interviews
Credit to Crombie for elevating a boring magazine cliche into an art form.

Fred Butler Fashion Accessories

Luke Sullivan's talk at the Miami ad school

TED may be the dope right now but there's something vaguely off-putting about shit that has account directors spamming people on a daily basis. TED reminds of that eco-bleater Al Gore and his persistent whining that was the toast of 2008. Sullivan's talk won't save the planet but it had me watching it thrice in a day. Warning: Those who aren't in the advertising industry might wonder what he's going on about. Plus, it's really long.

Volkswagen Touareg commercial by DDB Amsterdam

Don't think it won any awards but I liked this ad for its simplicity and wit. Luke Sullivan would agree.

Shit My Dad Says On Twitter (Despite the fact that I hate Twitter)

“"I just want silence. Jesus, it doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means right now, I like silence more.”

The Love Distance Project

Very Jap. Very popular. A little too sappy for my taste but an original idea nevertheless.

Photographs by Ryan McGinley

Disturbing, beautiful.

The Tucker Max Sushi Pants Story

Maddox will still remain king of bloggers but this Tucker Max blog, although tainted by the commercial hand of MTV, was still was worthy of mention.

The Patiala Craft Mela by Lotus Design

Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, but this was the coolest thing from India this year.

Volkswagen Golf Cheetah ad by Ogilvy Cape Town

What can I say, I've been researching a lot of car commercials this year and I happened to stumble across this one which I liked very much. Astoundingly brilliant idea, seeing the fastest creature on earth, tragically crippled, never felt the wind in its hair but somwhow in its genetic make-up knows that it ought to. I like that they didn't spell it out and just leave it for us to infer when we see that last frame of the cheetah with its head out the window.

Malcolm Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker on late bloomers

There's hope for us all, so Gladwell says. Also, it reminded me to look up 'The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock' again.

Happy New Year everyone!

15 minutes with Bala

2009-10-01T10:41:00.003+08:00

What is the lowest you ever scored at maths?
78 percent.

Shocking.
(Laughs). It was a black day in my life.

Is there any one branch of mathematics you would view as a weakness?
Statistical method. I find it unnecessarily academic.

Were your parents very strict? Cause I’ve heard Tam-Brahm parents can be very strict.
In certain respects, yes, and in certain respects, no. My father was a Burmese national and by nature a very chilled out type. My mother… she was very orthodox. They were very strict when it came to Vedic studies but I suppose, as a male child, I always got preferential treatment. You know, sons are always treated better in Tam-Brahm families so it wasn’t so bad.

You have a sister?
Yes

She had it bad?
She wasn’t really oppressed or anything, but yeah, when compared to how I was treated, she probably had to take more shit than I had to…

Like…
Like domestic chores and household duties. But she was actually better at maths than I was.

Do you think MJ had it coming?
I don’t think I am qualified to answer that. I am not a follower. I don’t know anything about his music or his personal life, so, no comment.

What time do you wake up in the morning?
4.30 am

Do you pray every day?
Yes. From 6.45 AM to 7.30 AM.

Who is your favourite artist?
Picasso. I also like this singer called Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan. I love the architecture of Frank Gehry. I like his use of fluid spaces. There’s also this Central Asian architect called Zaha Hadid, whose style I admire very much.

And what is that?
Very open, spherical brick structures. Utilitarian. Harnessing nature’s resources.

What do you think is the coolest advertising campaign ever?
There is this Bajaj bulbs ad which I used to like from the 80’s. ‘Jab mein chotta bachha tha…’ (sings the entire jingle). Among the newer stuff, I like the Vodafone ads and also this Airtel ad where a kid phones his Dad on a toy phone.

Do you think advertising is necessary for commerce?
See, advertising is a factor of consumerism. It has a sociological and economic impact. I believe that informative advertising is good. As in, advertising that tells you about the various benefits of products in the marketplace, but if it is something that depicts luxuries as needs, then I feel it is wasteful.

What about conspicuous consumerism?
It is a fall-out of the capitalist economy. It is unfortunate, but there’s no getting away from it. For example, if you have a 32 GB iPod, then there is no real need for you to go out and get a 160 GB iPod with a phone and software that helps you make a flash movie. You don’t need it. It just generates e-waste. But the lines between necessities and luxuries are very blurred. Till 20 years ago, there were people who didn’t need soap, but now it is a necessity.

So, if I buy a 160 GB iPod which may not be a necessity but provides employment to 5 poor workers in China, is it really evil?
One has to consider long-term implications when talking about short-term gains. The production of that iPod may require 50 gms of aluminium which displaces 50 metres of land and one tribal family, not to mention the wildlife. So, while China gains, say, $9000 from manufacturing 100 iPods and benefits 5 poor workers, as you say, in the long term they will harm 50 poor citizens and it will cost them $900,000 to repair the harm done to their natural resources.

You recently published a book. What was that about?
Macro-Economics in a Politicalised Environment. It is about fiscal responsibility and budgetary management, also known as FRBM.

In layperson speak?
Well, it has to do with the essential nature of democracy and the division of powers between executive, legislative and judiciary and bout how, in India, the executive basically steals the show. The idea of democracy in our country is a fraud. It’s about the things that the government should be doing to bring down fiscal deficit.

Like..
One of the ideas I’ve talked about is the abolishment of Income Tax.

Brilliant
Ha Ha. What a lot of people don’t know is that Income Tax, even in England, was established as a 1-year measure to prevent civil war. Even today it is a temporary law, which is re-instituted every year. I think they should abolish it altogether and instead have a Consumption Tax.

Ah.
So, the guy who buys a Mercedes pays more than the guy who buys a Maruti and pays more road tax since he uses more of the road.

Isn’t that already the case?
But what I propose is more pronounced.

Sounds pretty harsh.
But only then will the equity of taxes be realised. Because, merely increasing income tax to decrease fiscal deficit doesn’t work in the long run. It is also more fair. Someone who doesn’t consume, doesn’t pay.

Very clever and surprisingly simple, once you understand it. Now, this book of yours, is it in Financespeak or can regular people figure what’s going on?
It’s not too difficult to understand, but yes, one needs to have a basic understanding of the laws of economics and political science.

So, the people who can actually understand this would be people who already know about this stuff.
Broadly, yes.

Wouldn’t that be a question of preaching to the clergy?
(Laughs). Yes. It is, I’m afraid. It’s a shame but that’s how it is. Maybe we should find a way to get regular people to understand…

Hmmm…a financial viral on youtube. That certainly is a challenge. But you never know, more and more youth today are discussing state policy as the Obama campaign showed us, so maybe we should take a crack at it.
Ok let’s move on to another favourite topic. Let’s talk about vegetarianism.

Yes (bracing himself for meat-eater jokes)

Now, if everyone were become vegetarian overnight, that would be the ecological equivalent of winning the lottery; it would release vast resources of land, water and energy. But that would also be the case if we were to all give up our cars and started walking, so it’s a puerile argument. So let’s disregard that bit shall we?
Cool.

So, the economic and ecological implications apart, what would be your case for vegetarianism?
I am vegetarian by faith and by disposition. In the first instance, I happened to be born into a vegetarian household, so I didn’t have any say in the matter. However, choice is a matter of free will, and in this regard, I think my best reason, other than the obvious economic and ecological implications, is compassion. I am a non-violent person. I cannot stand the idea of any of God’s creatures slaughtered. It is a sickening sight. You only have to go someplace where they kill animals to be put off it forever.

Do you think plants can feel pain?
I think so. Maybe.

So, what if it was proven beyond doubt, scientifically, that plants can feel pain? Would you say, fuck it, if I’m causing pain, may as well eat some sausages?
It’s a question of degree. Living is an extremely violent act. We cannot get away from it. The very act of sitting here in this room, using electricity, drinking coffee, using this pen to write on this sheet of paper is a result of a violent acts on Mother Nature. So, we are already sinning, in a sense.

So, it’s all a question of degree.
Yeah. It’s like having a choice between committing a murder and picking someone’s pocket. We’re all criminals, but I’d like to be a lesser criminal.

Are you a dog or cat person?
I love dogs. But my wife doesn’t. Maintenance is also a problem.

If someone made you king for a day, what would you do?
(Looks completely befuddled). I’m not sure I can answer that. It is too complicated. I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll do anything. Maybe I’ll just spend the day with my children.

You’d do nothing? What about all your rage against the machine?
Mostly, I think of things that are sustainable in the long run. Just being king for the day is no use. Somebody will come along and fuck it up the next day.

Do you think it is fair that Hindi is the national language?
No.

What should it be?
English should be the national language. At least everyone can understand it.

There’s another thing I’ve never understood. Maybe you can help me understand. Why do you think all the pictures of Hindu gods look fair and tall? We’re a country of dark-skinned people. How come they don’t have a Ram who is dark with curly hair?
You see, it is just artistic interpretation. That’s all. And I’ll have you know that the pictures also have Krishna and Bheem depicted as dark-skinned.

Bheem was dark-skinned?
Yes. Bheem was a Rakshas. He was also born at night. In the Vedas, people born at night are said to possess nocturnal powers.

Could you elaborate?
According to the scriptures, we are all beings who possess various Gunas. Rajo Gunas, Sato Gunas and Tamo Gunas. Rajas and Tamas are elevated at night. Bheem was born at night, so he had more Tamo Guna. Arjun was born in the evening so he has more Rajo Guna, which is why he is more worldly and Yudhisthir was born during the day, so he has more Sato Guna.

And the rest is artistic interpretation.
Gods and mythology were attuned towards a certain moral teaching. The Gods were larger-than-life, heroic depictions of men. So they had to be exaggerated to a certain extent. So if the writer wanted the reader to like the God and be like him, he had to make him handsome and appealing and make demons ugly and menacing.

But who decides what is beautiful?
Beauty is a cultural construct. The Soundarya Lahiri by Shankracharya does not say fair-skin or dark-skin is beautiful. Beauty is compared to nature. And natural comparisons favour the Aryan depiction.

I see. So, it’s more poetic to say, her lips were ‘like rose petals’ rather than ‘like a lump of coal’…
Exactly. The scriptures do not go into the too much detail over aspects of appearance. The aura, the character, the personality of the person created the character. You could give the same verses to an artist in Nigeria and he would perhaps draw a different Rama or a different Arjun.

What was your last purchase?
Vegetables for home on the way back from work last evening.

Which ones?
Potatoes, onions and … bottle gourd, I think.

What is your proudest moment?
The birth of my son.

Tell us about someone you miss right now.
My mother. She passed away 4 years ago. I think of her a lot.

Thank you for your time Bala.

V Balasubramaniam, or Bala, as he likes to be called, is the Finance Director at W+K.

Interview by Nirmal Pulickal for wkdelhiblog.com

When men were men

2009-09-08T14:43:00.002+08:00

Full-sleeved plaid shirts

2009-08-30T07:46:00.002+08:00

There’s this guy I used to work with. He wore plaid full-sleeved shirts, chinos and white keds. Every day. I worked with him for two years and the whole time I never saw him wear anything but plaid full-sleeved shirts, chinos and white keds. How about that? And he was an art director. A good one, at that. He directed fashion shoots, meticulously planning wardrobes for models to portray aspirational lifestyles to sell stereos, cars and herbal remedies.

At the time, I didn’t give it much thought. There were hundreds like him, after all. Nearly every guy you saw coming out of an office building those days in Bangalore wore plaid shirts and chinos. Maybe he doesn’t give a fuck. Or maybe he’s just trying to look normal when everyone around him is… choose your own phrase a) trying break out of the mould b) march to their own beat c) not be one among the herd.

It took me nearly seven years to realize this, but that guy was one of the coolest people I’ve ever known. Because his deliberate lack of style was his style. His startling ordinariness was unpretentious, not self-conscious, rebellious and utterly, simply cool.

I came to this realization as I was pouring through some brochures for some new real estate. You know, the kind that has artist’s impressions of the buildings with little red and blue cars drawn into the parking bays. For good measure, they also throw in some drawings of people walking around. And one of the men sketched by the artist was the spitting image of my old friend, the plaid shirt guy.

So I got thinking. Is ordinariness that bad that everyone has to veer away from it? Sure, it’s boring and it brings to mind images of that Amish family in Witness. But is that such a bad thing? Now I don’t really know too much of the Amish and their exact code, but I’ll tell you something, given a choice between waking up at 4 to feed the cows and waking up at 9 to think of the next engaging ‘big idea’ for a brand of consumer durables (ideally something that my peers in the industry wish they’d thought of), I’d set the alarm for 4 any day. Not that I particularly like cows. They’re the dumbest looking things I’ve ever seen, after chickens. What on earth do you need four stomachs for?

But, of late, I find myself thinking about the Amish way a lot.

I work deep in the cosy recesses of consumer culture. In fact, as I write this on my MacBook Pro, there are 7 files for various clients in various stages of completion cluttering my desktop. There’s a Wallpaper magazine on my table which showcases some of the coolest, best designed objects in the world. Me and the other subscribers to Wallpaper no doubt get a kick out of the fact that we, this brotherhood of aesthetes, have taste. We probably watch Fellini movies, own Smeg fridges and covet Bang & Olufsen radios. If we use a computer, it’ll never be something as common and ugly as a PC. Shudder shudder.

Cool has so many layers of meaning. But cool is an opinion, not fact. And it is my considered opinion that cool stands for not giving a fuck. It’s about rebellion, not being self-conscious, pretentious. Going by that definition, the Amish are cool. Way cooler than that designer on the cover of Wallpaper. Than skanks who carry small dogs and wear oversized sunglasses. Way cooler than Elbow or Bat For Lashes or whoever has the number one video on the MTV charts today.

Now even if I were to wake up at 4 tomorrow I don’t have any cows to milk. And sadly, there are no Amish settlements in the NCR region. So I’m going to do the next best thing, I’m going to buy a full-sleeved plaid shirt.

Blonde. Left of screen. Black top.

2009-08-12T09:13:00.005+08:00

‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Viacon meeting in five.’

Viacon’s our client, a major mobile phone manufacturer whose latest project meant hawking entry-level phones to the poorest people on the planet. Of course, they wouldn’t say ‘poorest people on the planet’ on the brief. It was always ‘Entry level consumer’ or ‘Base of the pyramid audience’ or something like that. It’s fascinating how they come up with these marketing euphemisms. This is what million dollar marketing men do when they hit the consulting circuit, presumably. I bet there’s a guy out there somewhere who’s living in a castle because he invented the term ‘killer-app’. And I bet he’s American.

But I don’t mind Viacon. As a brand, that is. The only thing going against them is that they’re a bit boring. And their phones are about as trendy as oatmeal. But you can throw a Viacon against a brick wall and it’ll still keep working, know what I mean? I’ve actually seen this shit on youtube. You can do what you like to these little fuckers but they just keep going. But Viacon’s never going to come out and claim that, are they? Run our phones over with a lorry and see.
I don’t think there’s any industry that watches as many youtube videos as ad people. It’s all out there… real people putting up trillions of gigabytes of their own creativity up in a virtual world, giving you a telling insight into what they they think, feel and get off on. A lot of it is absolute shit, of course. But that’s because a lot of the people in the world who know how to work a computer and upload videos are cretins. The larger sub-set of any group of people are cretins, that’s what I believe. You can go into the deepest reaches of Papua New Guinea and find a tribe of cannibals there. Do a survey and you’ll find the assholes to regular guys ratio will always be skewed in favour of the assholes.

In the marketing world, as you’d expect, this ratio is a lot higher. I’ve always wondered what makes a guy enter a profession like marketing. More often than not, it’s because he didn’t have the grades at MBA school to get into something more lucrative, like Investment Banking. I know a guy from way back who’s in this racket. We went to school together. Regular fellow. Never an entertainer but a conscientious, sincere sort of species. Always scored in the high eighties, if not nineties. Went to engineering college and to an IIM (which makes him an alpha male in the arranged marriage market, coincidentally) and because his grades were good, fell into banking.

Five years later, he’s quit banking for a job at Turone, peddling coconut oil in B-towns, because it was more ‘exciting’. Exciting? Lingerie models with breathy voices are exciting. Car chases are exciting. Even stock market speculation is exciting. Marketing? What the fuck?
Anyway so this guy gets into Turone, attends all his dipstick sessions, rural immersions, focus groups and sales talks and he’s hooked. Seriously, he’s hooked. That’s what he tells me. His job takes him to different hole-in-the-wall stores along the highway and see if they’re stocking his coconut oil, talk to the traders and customers and submit his assessment. Ditchwater is stupendously more exciting, if you ask me. Crazy bastard. But you never know. He could be immortalized once he hits the consulting circuit.

The Viacon session is in progress. There’s a slide explaining what first time consumers are. Not the teenager in London whose Mum gets her a first phone on her fourteenth birthday. It’s financially constrained consumers in developing markets. There’s an image of a Guatemalan farmer carrying a bunch of bananas. It’s a nice photograph. It’s not cheesy, in a stock image way. But, because an amateur took it, shows no deliberate framing, or filters or a faux-realitsic dramatic moment. Just a man carrying a bunch of bananas, broadly grinning at the camera, like he was told to. Very family album. Right, so he’s the man we’re talking to. We pore through an interminably dull succession of slides detailing in several neat bullet points, targets and objectives.

The meeting is a three-way video conference call, with London, Shanghai and Finland staring each other to talk shit. Sorry, that’s four-way. We’re looking at the people in the London office. They look bored shitless but being Brits, put on a brave one and adjust themselves from time to time and pretend to look enthralled. I try to amuse myself by focusing on the hottest one in the screen. A skinny blonde. Stylish. Nice legs. Her skirt kept riding up. Text from Imran, a junior art director. ‘Blonde. Left of screen. Black top’, I give him an ‘I know' smile. Imran’s a horn-dog. He has an unbelievable stash of porn on his hard drive. She’s nice, in a neat sort of way. She also looks like she wears kinky knickers. Or maybe I watch too much porn. This fucking meeting. When will it end?

I catch sight of Hugh. He’s an Australian who joined us two months ago. Batshit crazy. Take my word for it. But all the same, he made life interesting, so it was always fun to have him around. Among other things, Hugh always carries a black marker on his person. He uses this to draw on himself. Sometimes it’s a ring of thorns, or a silly star. Otherwise it’s notes and ‘ideas’ that strike him unexpectedly. And it’s weird, because, if you actually read the notes he’s made on himself, it’s the most pointless stuff. Like, in the meeting, if they said ‘We’d like to sell jars of oyster jam as an aphrodisiac to the native people of Nagaland using a funnel-down marketing approach’, he’d write ‘funnel-down’ on his fore-arm. He’d pick the most irrelevant, stupid part of the discussion and inscribe it on skin. Like I said, batshit crazy.

I looked at Hugh. I gestured at the account man talking and rolled my eyes towards Hugh, like I was dying. Hugh makes a vigourous wank gesture with his hand. In the London office, an elderly planner catches sight of this on camera and smiles. Nobody pays any attention. Now, they’re playing a video. Somebody in the office went to South America and lived in a ghetto for like, a month or something, to research the consumer. I’m impressed. Camera shows us the shantytown and its people. It’s pretty deplorable standards of living, even seen through Indian eyes. Makes you sick to think that we’re trying to make money off these people. I point that out to the assembly.
There’s a grave silence. People look sombre. Some angry that I brought it up. Others merely chewing on that. Finally someone speaks up.

‘It’s not like we’re trying to sell them an XBOX, are we?’ Darren says. That’s true. It’s a phone, not Kalashnikovs for crying out loud. Jeez, when did I become such an activist? I am ashamed of myself. I vacillate between unashamed capitalism and occasional tree-hugging.

Everybody’s woken up now and there’s a lot of insights and personal experiences on the table. I’ve prolonged the meeting. Imran and a couple of others are eyeballing me. Sorry, I was just trying to stay awake.

Meanwhile Hugh’s at it with the marker. He’s sketched a dotted line across his throat to show he’d dead bored and has now commenced work on a line of black tears coming out of the corner of his left eye. I hope that shit washes off.

At first we thought the eccentricity was an act. See, the thing about advertising, the thing that ties all of us together, is that, at some point of time, almost all of us have considered ourselves failed artists. Or as whores who’ve sold our souls. Some of us who aren’t actually mad, like to fake it from time to time, to show we’re wrestling with our demons. There was this one Creative Director I knew, who made it a point to turn almost every social situation into a hostile situation. The thing is, deep down, he was a regular, harmless sort of chap but somewhere along the line, he decided to mould himself into a maverick.

And here’s the rub. It worked.

People actually gave him a wide berth, attributed it to his creative genius. There was this one story of him yelling his head off at some poor suit in the hallway because he had the temerity to address him by his first name. But those of us who knew him, knew it was a façade.

Hugh wasn’t putting on an act, as far as anyone could see. The poor bastard really was bonkers. He once asked me for directions to the dentist. I draw out a map for him on a piece of paper. Fairly simple. It was left, left, right and left. 5 hours later he comes back to the office.

‘Woah man I saw the planes take off from this close… it was awesome’

‘How did the dentist thing go?’

‘Didn’t go. Couldn’t find it’

‘Dude it was simple …left, left, right and left… where’d you go wrong?’

‘Well, at the first turn, instead of left, I took a right’

‘By mistake?’

‘No. Right just looked more interesting’

He sat through this one pitch meeting selecting ringtones on his phone. It was fucking hilarious. Sadly, he was asked to leave shortly. For a fortnight after that, everybody in office was real nervous whether Hugh would get his hands on a gun and pull a Columbine on us. He didn’t. So on second thoughts, it may have been an act.

Juno MacGuff and Ferris Bueller

2009-07-11T12:42:00.005+08:00

I was watching a re-run of Juno on the television last week when I realized that Juno, apart from being a well-written screenplay, can claim another of the hallmarks of great writing. The naming of characters. Juno MacGuff hits the bullseye. You know, when you hear the name, that you’re onto something. Now I don’t have a degree in Advanced Phonetics, but what does it for me is not the associated meaning of the name, rather than the sound of the name. How it reverberates in your skull. Some names just have a ring to them. Dickens has his detractors but nobody can deny that he was simply a genius when it came to character names. Consider Uriah Heep, Pip, Samuel Pickett, Fagin, Oliver Twist – each one etches itself into history. Call him what you will but Dickens was the Master of Nomenclature. While at it, I decided to, compile a list of my favourite character names. Character names, not to be confused with characters.

In no particular order

Juno MacGuff, from Juno
Scout/ Boo Radley/ Atticus Finch, from To Kill A Mockingbird
Holly Golightly, from Breakfast at Tiffanys
Holden Caulfield, from Catcher in The Rye
Milo Minderbinder/ Major Major/ John Yossarian from Catch 22
Lennie Small, from Of Mice And Men
Ferris Bueller, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Captain Jack Sparrow, from Pirates Of The Caribbean
Lemony Snickets, from A Series of Unfortunate Events
Optimus Prime, from The Transformers
Uriah Heep, from David Copperfield
Bill Sikes, from Oliver Twist
Buzz Meeks, from The Big Nowhere
James Bond, from Casino Royale
Samuel Pickwick, from Pickwick Papers
Pip (Phillip Pirrip), from Great Expectations
Oliver Twist, from Oliver Twist
Phillip Marlowe, from The Big Sleep
Shylock, from Merchant Of Venice
Huckleberry Finn, from Huckleberry Finn
Jay Gatsby, from The Great Gatsby
John Constantine, from the Hellblazer comics
Jimmy The Saint/ Critical Bill from Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead
Anakin Skywalker, from Star Wars
Morticia/ Uncle Fester/ Gomez/ Wednesday/ Thing from Addams Family
Caliban, from Tempest
Howard Roark, from Fountainhead
Jack Carter, from Get Carter
Sancho Panza, from Don Quixote
Ponyboy, from the Outsiders
Hawkeye, from Last Of The Mohicans
Bertram Wilburforce Wooster, from the Jeeves stories
Mufasa, from Lion King
Santiago from Old Man And The Sea
Marcellus Wallace, from Pulp Fiction
Cap Rountree, from The Daybreakers
Jubal Sackett, from Jubal Sackett

The Masochist’s Guide To The Himalayas

2009-06-09T20:36:00.017+08:00

There are some things you can never get used to, no matter how many times you go through them. Hernia tests and enemas leap to mind immediately. Being body searched by security guards at hotels, airports and malls would also figure. But the Delhi summer takes the cake.

So, when I planned a weekend trip out I wanted to go to the coldest place possible in the minimum possible time. Kasauli was my first choice, seeing as I also had a secondary agenda of doing a spot of birding. However, my favourite hotel was booked up (they only have 8 rooms) and it just seemed a pity to stay elsewhere. So I decided to stray from the trodden path and try someplace new. Chail was suggested. They have a palace (the Maharaja of Patiala’s) which was recently converted by the government into a hotel. Sweet.

Of course, being Govt run, they took every step to ensure that it was impossible to make a booking. They have a marketing office in Delhi, some drunken attendant informed me. It was in goddamn Janpath and there was no way I was going all the way to CP to book a room. Then they tell me they offer internet booking, but turns out you need to have a credit card from some moth-eaten bank like Vijaya Bank or something like that.

By now, I found a fellow traveler in George, an old mate of mine (who’s into birding as well) who was only too eager to get out of Delhi. George is one of those guys who lets life happen to him, so making bookings was out of the question anyway.

‘Worse case, we’ll sleep in the car’.

With those reassuring words, we set out to Chail. By road. Because going by air to Shimla would be too wimpy. I was ok with wimpy, to tell you the truth, but masochism runs deep in George Koshy. What the hell, I figured, let’s take the car. Let’s just get out of this fucking place.

We set out at high noon because that’s what 'The Masochist’s Guide To The Himalayas’ recommended. Sun beating down, we floored the accelerator and went past Pragati Maidan, past Murthal, past Karnal headed for the blue hills in the distance. Somewhere along the way we came across this shithole called Zirakpur. I have to tell you about Zirakpur. See, I think Zirakpur is the original blueprint on which they built Vasant Kunj. It is the one spot along the highway when one must keep sharp objects out of sight because you just might be overwhelmed by a desire to kill yourself. It’s like someone took a grey canvas, rubbed some dirt on it and designed various 3 dimensional shapes that suggested that you should immediately consider suicide. That’s Zirakpur. Boggles the mind.

Doing good time, we went past Chandigarh and made it to a decrepit town called Kalka at sunset. Great, we were in the hills and I felt better already. The first sign that you’re in Himachal are the vendors on the side who sell meat pickle. We came across a string of these with colourful signs advertising small hotels and their assortment of vinegar-soaked bottles. Bakra, Murga, Mushroom and there was even a Chana version.

We reached Chail late. Around 10, I think. I tried to keep optimistic even as I counted like, a hundred resorts along the way. This reminded me of Ooty, which, as anyone from Bangalore will tell you is only enjoyable after irresponsible use of drugs. We followed the signs to the Maharajah’s Palace. There’s an interesting story behind it. Maharajah Bhupinder Singh was a monarch who followed the long-instituted tradition of rabid horniness, and as myth would have it, would nail just about anything in a skirt. One of the contents of the skirt in question, happened to be Lord Kitchener’s daughter. Kitchener was the commander-in-chief of the British Army at the time. One thing lead to another and Bhupinder Singh found himself banished from Shimla for life. His ego bruised, he decided to build a summer palace atop an adjoining hill which was even better than Shimla. And that’s how Chail got started.

Sorry sir, we're all booked up. Do you know what time it is? Well, we do have one room…

The Princess fuckin Suite!

They had all this ornate filigree and embroidery stuff going and the place was practically draped in velvet. Anything that could be upholstered in velvet was and there was enough chintz to fill two godowns.

Were they serious? Once we stitched our split sides back together, I said ‘No.’ and asked him to point the way to the bar. If I was going to sleep in the car, may as well get shitfaced first.

The bar’s alright. In an old Victorian kind of way. They probably had tiger heads mounted on the wall before some greedy IAS officer got his grubby hands on them. There’s an old chap with a classic soup-strainer moustache who bows in a dignified manner. He’s the bartender. He was almost too respectable looking. But once we get a step closer, we see he’s not so dignified after all. The old goat was as pickled as the bakra on the highway. That’ll be two rums, please. And fix us another two as a repeat while you’re at it. A half hour later, the two of us walk into the restaurant well braced to find we’re just in time for the last order. There was some kind of meat preparation. And biryani too, I think. A decidedly forgettable experience.

We escape from the Palace around half past midnight. Now we need to get a place to sleep. Down the road, just a couple of hundred yards down, there’s a couple of hotels. Lucky us. We bang the door of the first. No response. The other one is just down the road. It’s called Cedaar. That’s not a typo. It has two a’s in it. The man lets us in. He has some rooms. 1200 a night. We get our bags and its lights out.

4.30 in the a.m., I’m up. Thunder. It’s raining like a bastard outside. I take a look around the room for the first time. Oh boy. I’m saving my exaggeration for later because I’ve got pictures of this place. You take a look and decide for yourself.

They had these ludicrous pictures of little children dressed like church-going old people giving each other the glad eye. The sort you see in dentist’s waiting rooms. I popped two Alka-Seltzers and woke George up. Dude you got to see this place we’ve gone and booked.

The velvet blanket itself deserved a place in the Kitsch Hall Of Fame. What is it with this place and velvet?

Let’s go back to the Palace, they’ve probably got breakfast there. I mean, it’s a hotel. But the Palace is closed until 8 am, a bored government guy tells us. Fuck this. Fuck Chail. Let’s just keep driving and maybe we’ll come across some other town where they’re not crazy for velvet. We head for Kufri, which is even higher up in the mountains. It’s going to be colder, for one thing.

There was the smell of pine in the air and the drive was something else. We kept going for a couple of hours till we hit Kufri. Another place done in by the tourist trade. There was rubbish all around and the whole place smelled like a stable. More horses than people. Not like Cowboys and Indians kind of horses. Just raggedy looking ponies used to take fat Punjabi tourists around the hill and show them pockets of snow. Yes, it snows in Kufri. In the winter. Screw this. Let’s keep driving man. We’d heard there was an Oberoi property around here somewhere. But we were delusional. By this time, I was crazy hungry. I had eaten hardly anything the night before and barely a few hours sleep. I kept having visions of clean cutlery and fried bacon strips beside a bed of sunny-side ups.

Then, out of the blue, it emerged. Wildflower Hall. I swear I heard the Carmina Burana play in my head. It appeared like a hallucination. A Disneyesque faux-Scottish manor with spires and meticulously maintained lawns. You may call it corny but not from where we were sitting.

I think they might have bacon here, I tell George.

Ten minutes later, we’re looking at a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, marmalade.

Thank you Jesus.

They are not accustomed to walk-ins but they’ll see what they can do for us. Do you have a hiking trails? Yes. Mountain bikes? Yes. We even have archery, Sir. That did it. The hell with roughing it. I’m not leaving this place and its nice people and its nice bacon.

Anybody who’s reading this, just go to the hills. You don’t have to drive down and see Zirakpur en route. Take a flight to Shimla. Get a cab. And go to Wildflower Hall. You will be happy. You will be poorer. But you will be happy.

Their hiking trails aren’t really infested with bears and snow leopards. More of a pleasant walk through pine forests through a picket fence gate and fallen acorns.
With gourmet pizza from the restaurant packed for the trail. We spotted several birds. Well, just two, to tell you the truth. Three, if you count that ugly-ass Egyptian Vulture we saw circling above the lawn.

Just before I dropped George off, he suggested we do Ladakh next. I wonder if they have a Taj there.

A critique of IPL team insignia

2009-04-29T15:48:00.014+08:00

Now that the IPL has everyone in India in thrall and the league is officially considered the holy grail of Indian television, it's near impossible to avoid seeing one of these emblems during the course of your day. Either as a web banner or out in the street or on tv. Overall, I think they appear to be bad knock-offs of NBA logos with even sillier names. Chennai Super Kings? Who was on that brainstorming session? An autorickshaw driver and a 6-year old? Kolkata Knight Riders brings to mind images of David Hasselhoff in leather. Which is not a good thing. Here's my first impressions on the IPL logos.

What is this? A brand of cement?

You know those weird Israeli backpackers you meet at places like Dharamshala who seem like a walking conservatory for lice and bedbugs? Ever ask them what they do for a living? 9 out of 10 will tell you they're into graphic design. Which explains all those vomity looking orange, marijuana leaf t-shirts in Goa flea markets. And this.

Mallya. That says it all. The King Of Trashy. It says nothing about sport, nothing about Bangalore. All it says is that the team is owned by a bootlegger who wants to peddle his vile brand of lowest-common-denominator whiskey.

Dumbest name of them all. Corny patriotism. And a logo that looks like a jalebi set on fire.

Oooh look, they have a shield. And check out the lions' expressions. They look like somebody's giving them a boiling hot-oil enema. Crude, but in a strange way it represents the Punjabi attitude perfectly.

Gay bar sign. Or a symbol for a man-whore bordello. Everything about this team is a laugh. From the gallery of bimbos in large sunglasses to the multiple-captain policy.
Have you heard that one? They have a toss captain, apparently. He's captain of the team for 5 minutes when he has to say either 'Heads' or 'Tails'. Massive responsibility on his shoulders. I bet he gets a lot of respect in the dressing room. Shut up everyone, the Toss Captain's here. You there, look sharp! Crap team with the crap name. The only name that's more apt is 'Kolkata Knob Jockeys'

Not offensive, but boring nevertheless.

Over to you, Shah Rukh.

2009-04-05T14:05:00.006+08:00

Aspirational. Being in advertising, I come across this word about 17 million times a day. Marketing analysis usually begins with the target audience. If the target audience is SEC B or below (marketing jargon for ‘poor people’) as a marketing man you can almost never go wrong with the ‘aspirational’ tag.

It’s a bunch of horseshit, really. All human beings are aspirational. That’s why we don’t forage for food or live in mud huts anymore. From the tuxedo wearing duke to the humblest peasant in Bihar, we are all aspirational. We just have different aspirations, that’s all.

There was a time, way back, when along with the basic aspiration towards well-being and material goods, aspiration also meant refinement, culture. Moving up in life meant appreciating better things in life. All Kings and Emperors will bear testimony to that. The more advanced the civilization, the more advanced their poetry, music and the arts.

India has made its contribution towards world culture and the arts. Architecture, paintings, handicraft, poetry, cuisines, textiles, fine embroidery, dance forms, music.

But consumerism came and changed all that.

Refinement made way for crass materialism. Look at the richest homes in Delhi and Bombay and you’ll see fat men in Charagh Din shirts eating pan, getting drunk, picking fights and screwing Uzbek hookers. It’s a caricature, but if you’ve lived in any of these cities long enough, you’ll know it’s not too far from the truth.

This is what pisses me off about India. Where has the refinement gone?

A couple of weeks back, I had to pay a village visit to somewhere near Rewari, a ‘rural immersion’ as they call it in the trade, to better understand the class of consumer we were hawking cheap phones to.

We went there along with a bunch of visitors from abroad, who, like most foreigners, were gushing over the ‘simplicity’ and the ‘warmth’ of the villagers even as their digital cameras were being yanked and a collection of yokels tried to cop a feel of the ‘gori’. “They’re so happy” “It’s beautiful”.

For the most part, I sat in my car and read Salim Ali’s Book Of Birds.

The place made me angry. Call me cynical, but here’s what I saw. A squalid shithole with a collection of half-literate, inbred losers who spat and slapped and shat in the streets. They stared at women like they’d never seen them in their lives (which was probably the case). There was a stream of raw, untreated sewage flowing through the centre of the village. There was rubbish everywhere – used condoms, sanitary pads among them. There was a school in an open courtyard where rows of small children baked in the sun, their hair faded golden through photon-induced chemical damage. The next generation of spitting, grabbing sexually frustrated yokels being raised.

What’s so fucking beautiful?

Is it just me? Or is it really this halcyon, idyllic hamlet where rainbows appear from nowhere and butterflies sit on your shoulder?

It’s easy to dismiss me as a crusty cynic. But I think it’s a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Us cynics can see that the emperor’s really a nudist.

It’s nothing to do with the government. It’s to do with the people.

To cite an example, villages in Kerala aren’t shitholes. And their government is filled with the most number of assholes south of the Vindhyas.

I have never, ever seen a person shit on the road in Kerala.

Everyone, even the poorest of the poor are clean.

So why is it that the villagers in Kerala are clean and civilized and those in U.P. are so crappy?

I think it’s down to role models. Again, it's about aspiration. You aspire towards what you idolize. Kerala, historically, has known relative peace. It allowed the arts and culture to prosper. Great strides were made in refinement. With the King being the ultimate aspirational figure, the people mould themselves in their form. Just like the people of Britain mould themselves in the form of the Royal family.

What happened in the North then? They had kings and culture here too. What went wrong? I’m not too sure really. I’m just attempting armchair anthropology here but I think it has something to do with the feudal system.

Sure, Kerala was feudal as well but vassals were respected and treated as allies. In the North, the zamindars were a particularly cruel lot. They treated landless peasants worse than cattle. And the peasants, intimidated and defeated, considered it their lot. It’s all karma. They didn’t rebel. They accepted it. They accepted the fact that they were cattle.

Aravind Adiga, author of Booker-Prize winning White Tiger, speaks out his mind why he wrote the novel: “… I wanted to challenge this idea that India is the world’s greatest democracy. It may be so in an objective sense, but on the ground, the poor have such little power… I wanted something that would provoke and annoy people …The servant-master system implies two things: One is that the servants are far poorer than the rich—a servant has no possibility of ever catching up to the master. And secondly, he has access to the master—the master’s money, the master’s physical person. Yet crime rates in India are very low… What is stopping a poor man from taking to the crime that occurs in Venezuela or South Africa? You need two things [for crime to occur]—a divide and a conscious ideology of resentment. We don’t have resentment in India. The poor just assume that the rich are a fact of life. For them, getting angry at the rich is like getting angry at the heat…But I think we’re seeing what I believe is a class-based resentment for the first time…”

This is my hypothesis. Master slaps landless peasant, puts him in his place, tells him he is scum, his children are scum, his entire family are scum. Instead of rebellion, he accepts the fact that he is scum.

What happened in ancient Northern India is barbaric. Fuck Lagaan. Fuck the romanticised versions we see in films of village beauties carrying pots of water. The village system in the North is a sub-human existence, robbing people of their dignity and based on schadenfreude.

This lack of refinement is not just in the villages. It permeates through all levels of society in India. Just flick through the channels on Indian tv and you'll see what I mean.

What's the solution?

Apart from the obvious solution of better government and policy making, I think we also need better role models.

Their parents, who ought to be their role models, have failed.

The big men about town are pan-eating Bania businessmen.

The politicians? Don't make me laugh.

So what’s it down to?

You're not going to believe this, but it's

show biz.

What else is there?

(Read Marina Hyde's story on celebrities in the Guardian for further elaboration).

The film stars and cricketers, whom the public idolize, need to fill that role, that parents and leaders and village elders cannot fill. In today’s scenario, the world is putty in their hands. They have the power to shape world culture.

And that’s the sad truth.

Brick, please

2009-02-10T22:04:00.003+08:00

Valentine’s Day is a disease that afflicts stupid, unimaginative people who can think up no other means of expressing emotion than to purchase mass-produced cards and stuffed toys. And don’t even bring up the age thing here. I was a teenager once, you know. But I wasn’t braindead. Just thinking of how much press and money this stupid festival generates every year makes me want to vomit. I’m not really with the Fascists who throw stones at shops but if there’s anyone out there looking for a brick to hurl through an Archies Store window, I’ll only be too happy to hand it to him. What is it? Maybe it’s some sort of strange reverse-Darwinian phenomena to ensure weaker, dumber gene pool degenerates. What surprises me is that there’s so many of them. I’ve seen grown men buy overpriced bouquets and stuffed toys like their lives depended on it. People take leave for Valentine’s Day. Fuck me, what sort of manager accepts that leave application? And I’ve noticed the further out into the hinterland you go, the greater the obsession is. I had to sign some papers at my CA’s office today and it happened to be in some godforsaken wasteland called Sohna Road. The malls en route seemed to be decked with this pink effluence. I think it’s some weird bhenji/ vern fixation. It’s the Bhenji’s first step towards ‘English sophistication’, so to speak. She’s already got the fake Adidas jacket and the Hello Kitty backpack. She probably watches Roadies on MTV (one of the most tasteless and annoying TV reality shows ever invented). So Feb 14 is natural progression. Not to get classist or anything. I mean Bhenji is probably too broad a term and I apologise to any intelligent Bhenjis I may have included. But you know what I mean. I merely use the term Bhenji because ‘thick, socially challenged cretins’ was a bit of a mouthful. So if you see any Raj Thackaray or Sri Ram Nene hoodlums trashing lovers with stuffed hearts, please don’t report it. Walk away. They deserve it.

I wonder if the city supplement pages of other cities are as funny as this

2009-02-09T16:59:00.002+08:00

I had to kill some time at the office foyer today so I picked up the only papers available there, the city supplements of TOI and HT. I think I’ve tapped into a rich vein of satire eclipsed only by the back issues of Bean-O and The Straits Times. Here are some excerpts:

In today’s HT

The Hairdresser’s Association of Mumbai is miffed with the usage of the word ‘barber’ in the title of the Shah Rukh Khan’s film ‘Billu Barber’. The president of the association, Uday Takke has sent a letter to the press saying, “Barber ki jagah Hairdresser hona chahiye. Ye humari beizzatti hai”

They have a column where people write in to Anupam Kher with their personal problems seeking advice. Anupam Kher.

Delhi Times

Front page story:
Bebo says she cannot be with Saif on Valentine’s Day.

Under the headline: ALL OF DELHI IS TALKING ABOUT
Why do Delhi men go to parties alone? The secret is out!

Starlet Asin says she has no time for boys because she reads books. “I used to have a huge library at home. Even today I just can’t do without a book”

Asif Adil, MD of Diageo India said at the launch of his new brand “It’s a pleasure to be able to nurture Delhi’s blossoming love affair with all things luxurious”

Boom de ya da Boom de ya da

2009-01-07T07:34:00.002+08:00

It's just a stupid montage + jingle. The oldest trick in the book, some would say, but it's got my vote for the best commercial of 2008.

Hindu Nationalist New Year Cards

2008-12-19T14:54:00.004+08:00

(via tasveerghar)

Vikram Aditya New Year Greeting Card (painted by Chitrapal), 1990s (The text on top left says "Vikrami Samvat - nav varsh - abhinandan" (Greetings for the New Vikrami Samvat Year)

The Ideal Devotee. New Year Card, Delhi, 1992

Ram as leader of a revolutionary people’s awakening movement. (1990s)

A New Year greeting card depicting Mother India and a devout son of the soil worshipping her. 1990s (Hindi text at bottom: Jeevan pushp chadhane nikley - offering one's flower-like life...).

Have a nuclear Diwali. Diwali Greeting Card for the year 1998/99, depicting the Hindu pride in India's nuclear tests.

This card shows (from top left to right, bottom left to the right): King Rana Pratap from Rajasthan, Subhas Chandra Bose, Marathi king Shivaji, Bhagat Singh, RSS founder KB Hedgewar and Chandrashekar Azad. A sticker of the proposed Ram Temple at Ayodhya, promoting the Ram Janmabhoomi Hindu March for Unity organised by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad is added at the bottom right.

Saraswati, the goddess of learning and arts, leads the caravan of Nationalist icons, including recent luminaries such as Gandhi, Swami Vivekanand, and even Bhagat Singh!

"Arise, let’s confront the challenge" announces this card, urging the people to fight against foreign elements such as Muslims, Christians, MNCs, corruption, cow-slaughter and so on. Issued by Lok Jagran Abhiyan, Uttar Pradesh.

Mother India calling her sons to fight against capitalism, Islam and Christian missionary activities. (early 1990s) Check out the symbols on the snakes the lion is trampling upon.

I’m not a big fan of Arundhati Roy’s. Her public persona can be best described as ‘finger-waving raving psychotic’. Nevertheless, her recent article in the Guardian does raise a few interesting points. Her main point is that our problems are our own doing. While we berate the Pakis to shut down LeT, corporate India embraces Modi, one of the main perpetrators of the genocide in Gujarat. The RSS, a Hindu-supremacist organization, has 45,000 branches and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India.

Don’t you wish all these religious nuts would get a room and fight it out among themselves? Unfortunately, they have and that room happens to be my country. Dear Blogger.com people, if you’re reading this, I know I’ve blocked pop-ups and banners on this blog, but just this once, if you like, you can insert an ad for a sleazy Canada Immigration lawyer here. Throw in a couple of pop-ups as well.

Movie review: Burn After Reading

2008-12-12T10:51:00.004+08:00

Not my favourite Clooney film. Nor for that matter one of my favourite Coen brothers’ projects, but Burn After Reading is, by my rating, thoroughly watchable. A satire baed on the CIA and spy flicks, Burn After Reading features an impressive cast and the usual magical visual touch that the Coens bring with them. The humour is sophisticated, sadistic. Brad Pitt plays another memorable cameo as a half-witted gym rat while Malkovich dazzles as an alcoholic ex-CIA man. It's a wry, roller-coaster of plot, with a string of coincidences and laugh-out loud sketches. My favourite is the one where Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt walk into the Russian embassy and ask to see their main man. As a philandering Treasury agent, Clooney plays a grinning, buffoon version of his otherwise suave self. It’s almost as if the Coen’s decided to make a film with Pitt and Clooney and sat and worked out what part of their real-life personalities is worth ripping into. As a result, their characters, caricatures as they are, are so believable that you find yourself musing ‘If they weren’t million dollar actors, they could be these guys, couldn’t they?’ As a son of a Kentucky politician, a compulsive charmer and laugh riot, I can easily see Clooney in real life as the adulterous Treasury agent. Same goes for Brad Pitt. Minus a few lucky breaks, Brad Pitt could very well be the empty-headed gym instructor, the Coens portray him to be. Pure genius. Go watch it, if you can. If you live in Delhi or Gurgaon, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding tickets. In the multiplex I went to watch it, there couldn’t have been more than 20 filled seats. 10 of whom were there probably because they didn’t get tickets to Dostana. And this was an opening weekend. Speaks volumes for the kind of crowd multiplexes in Gurgaon attract. If it was Bangalore, I found myself boasting to the wife, I’m willing to bet, there would been just a few seats to spare. Perhaps I’m being overly nostalgic and optimistic about Bangalore. The Kannadigas would probably have picketed the theatre because the parking lot signs in Kannada weren’t as big as the English ones.

Andre

2008-12-09T17:03:00.004+08:00

Haven't heard psychobabble in a while. Not since I escaped from that playwriting workshop anyway. So when somebody sent me this clip from arthouse favourite 'My Dinner With Andre' it took me back to a time when I used to hang with people who thought Jonathan Livingstone Seagull was cool.

Simplicity doesn't mean crappy

2008-12-05T19:49:00.019+08:00

I came across this beautiful bronze 1 anna coin today. Dated 1944, Designed by the British.
Contrast this to the crappy looking 1 rupee coin in my pocket. Dated 2008, Designed by famed design school NID, I'm told. Granted, the design of those days was far more decorative and thus tend to appear more aesthetic when compared to modern coins which are more functional. But modern doesn't necessarily have to mean soulless, as this new 5 Euro coin shows us.

Army recruitment in India

2008-12-03T10:42:00.003+08:00

An image grab from the Indian Army site. Apparently, being set on fire is a great recruitment tool for the army.

Tea parties and candle-light vigils

2008-11-29T12:10:00.001+08:00

It’ll never be mentioned in the papers but I’m guessing the unspoken sentiment in the majority of Indian minds now is ‘Kill all Muslims. Let’s vote BJP.’ That includes our literate and illiterate population. The BJP, meanwhile have shown how low-down and pathetic they can get by planting front page solus ads in all major dailies trying to work this tragedy to their advantage. Just for that, I am never going to vote for the fucking BJP. And what the hell are all the editors up to? As everybody in advertising knows, there are very strict rules that ban liquor advertising and racy images and fuck knows what else. You cannot use rude language and you cannot make unsubstantiated claims. Remember the stupid storm in the tea cup over the dumb Milind Soman- Madhu Sapre Tuff shoes ads? People writing angry letters, protest grous, mahila mandals over a side view of a pair of shiny buttocks. How about this? Have you no conscience? I lost a friend in the shooting you bastard. Cheap, greedy, spineless fucks.

If I had the task of shaping public opinion in any way, my first task would be to diffuse this ‘Kill all Muslims. Vote for Modi’ garbage. It’s not a religion thing. It’s about the psychos within the religion.
I am also not inclined towards sitting down and holding a conference to find a solution to the issue, as all the world leaders seem to suggest. I am way too angry for that. These are radical people and they must be met with strong, bold and swift measures. Not some pansy-ass tea party.
It may be premature but there have been reports from reliable sources to indicate that these attacks have an Islamabad connection. If it is proved beyond doubt that this is sponsored by the Pakis, we should declare war. Move in quick, secure the nukes and raze the fucking country to the ground. Leave a huge smoking crater where it used to be. Target all military sectors. If a few innocent civilians have to perish, so be it. Bury the lot. It will save a million lives in the future. And if the Arabs have a problem with that, then come get some, Sheikh.

Next, take a page out of Lee Kuan Yew’s book. Probably the most underrated political leader the world has seen. A lot of Singaporeans resent his methods but they don’t realize what a visionary the man is. Singapore is a micro-version of India, of Europe, of the Middle East. Many religions, many cultures, some radical, and a lot of dumb people – a veritable powder keg. But no gunfights, no bomb blasts, no madmen running the streets with AK-47s. Why? Because in Singapore, at the first indication of any radical behaviour, you’d be hung upside down in jail drinking water through a straw in your nose. It’s not found favour with human rights activists and the hippies, but it works. We’d have no 9/11 or 7/7 or 28/11 if old man Lee were running the world. He’d catch every Bible preaching redneck zealot, every saffron robed Bajrang Dal leader and every psychotic bearded Mullah and have them drawn and quartered. Protestors can go sing John Lennon songs and drink tea. Or hold hands and maintain a candle-light vigil through the night so you can get your face on the television.

Boring is fascinating

2008-11-12T09:21:00.002+08:00

It’s 6.20 in the morning and the first thing I do waking up is to check the scores on the United V QPR game. 1-0. The Guardian report called it a “soporific” game with second string United players and a QPR team that had ten men behind the ball. The only goal of the game came from a Tevez penalty. And I’m downloading the torrent while I write this. Without question, the most boring sporting spectacle that occurred in the last week and there’s a guy in India who has an otherwise low tolerance for tedium spending hours downloading the game on an unreliable Airtel connection. Am I onto something here? Is there a sweet spot in our brain that actually likes being bored? It’s not the first time, you know. I watched Steve McQueen’s 1967 war film ‘Sand Pebbles’ recently whose pacing could be best described as ‘close to stagnant’. I loved it. I might even watch it again. And there’s a whole bunch of us out there, who like Sand Pebbles and Thomas Hardy novels and watch 5-day test matches between West Indies and South Africa.

When someone asked Andy Warhol one time for an opinion of one of Edward Albee's many lesser works, he replied that he found it long and boring but that was all right with him because "I like long, boring things."

I know what he means.

Book review> White Tiger

2008-10-20T16:00:00.006+08:00

Read a couple of books over the last week. One was Jim Corbett’s ‘My India/ Jungle Lore/ Tree Tops’ omnibus. The other was the Booker Prize winning ‘White Tiger’ by Aravind Adiga. By a strange coincidence both of them spin their tales around the Gangetic plain – of simple village folk from UP and Bihar and the stories that surround them. One, a book by a white man writing about India. Another, a brown man writing about India.

Let me begin with Adiga’s White Tiger. It is a compelling read from start to finish. It spins the tale of a boy born into poverty, then kicked around, he’s facing a life of destitution. His helplessness gives us an idea of the helplessness of every person who’s had the misfortune to be born into the lawless black hole that is Bihar/ UP. Most of the characters are painted to be cruel, selfish, greedy, crafty and dumb and victims of the scenario into which they are born. Being marginally cleverer than the rest of the yokels, this lad dreams of getting out. He lands a job as a driver, is ridiculed, sexually frustrated and disillusioned with his master. Ultimately, he is driven to murder him and in doing so, cause his family of 17 to be slaughtered back in the village. He sees this as the only way to get ahead in life. And he gets away with it to lead a prosperous life as a taxi entrepreneur in Bangalore. End of story. A fascinating glimpse into a twisted mind and a superficial look at the life that the savagery of extreme poverty forces you to lead. It’s a good read. It is troubling. Balram’s moral dilemma is not too difficult to comprehend because there isn’t too much of a dilemma to start with. He is remorseless and did what he had to, to get ahead. It leaves a lot to ponder. Where does Darwinian instinct for survival end and morally reprehensible crime begin? As tempting as it is to pick out flaws, such as the contrived ‘letter to the PM of China’ device, I would recommend this book as a good read. It’s a great achievement, considering it’s his first novel and I’m looking forward to his next. About the other book, the Corbett omnibus, I cannot be too objective. Corbett is one of my favourite people/ writers. I discovered Corbett in boyhood and I think every boy should read Corbett. A combination of old-school manners, giant heart, courage and simplicity. His greatest feat was to present his anecdotes, astonishing acts of bravery, kindness and human strength without any gloss or exaggeration. He merely chronicles them, explaining events patiently to you, in a matter-of-fact manner. He is an astute judge of human nature and his insights into the life of peasants and hill-folk around Kalladhungie and Nainital make you see things their way. The accounts of India by Corbett make you love India, make you wistful for how things were. It is not inaccurate but Corbett chooses simply to speak well about the people he meets. It’s not a deliberate attempt at manipulation. It’s just how Corbett is. It was the code of the gentlemen of that era. It was bad form to speak ill of people you know.

White Tiger differs from this because it offers you a view of India that makes you shudder. Go and buy it. It’s money well spent. Or you can always borrow mine. I don’t think I’ll re-read this. Jim Corbett, like all my PG Wodehouses, will remain on my bookshelf forever.

Movie Review> (I can't bring myself to say the name of the movie)

2008-10-11T14:36:00.002+08:00

It would be fair to say that a movie titled ‘Rock On’ was sufficient warning by itself. Anyone with a modicum of taste would know that. However, the world is a cruel place and sometimes men who ought to know better get dragged into fetid Gurgaon malls by their wives, to watch colourless, annoying, dull fare for 300 bucks a pop. Let me say this again, I never wanted to watch this flick. It smelled of shit a mile away. I walk into the hall, watch 10 minutes and it only reaffirmed my initial instinct that Farhan Akhtar, the auteur of Hindi cinema is a hack and possibly a homo. Where do I start? The plot? What plot? Here’s the story. A couple of college kids hang out in an artistically grungy (read F,A,K,E) basement and slap each others backs and sing pathetic songs that sound exactly like what they are – translations of Hindi poetry written by a 60 year old with Americanised inflections (like laundry stub) to make it more ‘rock n’ roll. If it was plain bad I wouldn’t have bothered to write about it, but it was so bad it was making me angry. These scenes are shown as a contrived flashback using clichéd devices like old photographs. All the four losers have some job now where they seem constipated and dramatically unfulfilled. Constantly looking into the horizon, sad, wistful. Jesus, we get it. And all through, the feeling you get is, that this Farhan guy is nothing more than a clothes-horse. A preening show-pony who just dreamed this ‘movie’ up as an excuse to wear a bandanna and well-cut business suits. The suits are nice, mind you. But that’s about it. There are guitar riffs in the background when he’s in his clichéd workplace (key in ‘finance + office’ on Getty Images and take a look at the first 10 results) with clichéd office workers. The guitar riffs bring back jump cuts of subconscious memory back when he used to high-five and embrace muscular male models in basements. This is the essential plot. A band reunion. And that took kick-ass director Farhan Akhtar some 45 minutes to get to. Throw in a dolled-up soap-opera star as his wife. And a really, really sad fake moustache for Arjun Rampal. Plus an in-your face plug for Channel [V]. After the interval, it gets even more dull and annoying. Remember those long painfully boring bits of dialogue in The Gladiator between Joaquin Phoenix, his sister and the Senator that made us a little restless to get back to the ass-kicking? This is like that, with even more boring dialogue, and no ass-kicking scenes to look forward to. Just to make his movie a little ‘deep’ Akhtar makes a cheap grab at our emotions by giving the keyboardist a brain tumour. And he only has a few days left to live. This is his last chance at fulfillment. Boo hoo. At this point, I was rocking back and forth in my chair, for the popcorn was over, and had my head buried in my hands. I blocked my ears so I didn’t have to listen to the dialogue. I would have happily watched Doordarshan’s enlightening Krishi Darshan fourteen times over in a loop than spend another half hour watching this drivel. That’s when, wedding vows all forgotten, I walked out, leaving the wife alone in her chair, saying I would watch Gurgaon shoppers trying on sweaters at the Benetton store for the next half hour. She joined me five minutes later. I guess I’ll have to buy her something big soon. My rating – well, all Hindi movies begin at Zero. And if they do something to redeem themselves they get a couple of points. Like ‘Wednesday’ did, recently. Or the very entertaining 'Khosla Ka Ghosla’ did in the recent past. ‘Rock On’, according to me is a minus 45. And I’m being kind.

Book Review > In Spite Of The Gods

2008-10-03T17:42:00.005+08:00

There are two kinds of people who could profit from reading Edward Luce’s ‘In Spite Of The Gods’. Those who don't know the first thing about India. And those who think they know pretty much every thing they need to know about the country. Those of us who fall somewhere in between, and possess a penchant for readable and reliable non-fiction would also find it a rivetting read.

Edward Luce worked in Delhi as the South-Asia bureau chief for the reputed Financial Times between 2001 and 2005. Apart from the nature of his job, Luce has an Indian wife and this allowed him a unique perspective into the culture of the country. The book in question, is a comprehensive account of India - its people, its economy, its failings and its way into the future. Think of it as a Wikipedia entry on drugs.
There are times when you find Luce's style a bit too dry and matter-of-fact but you need to constantly remind yourself that Luce is a trained financial correspondent and not a travel writer or a columnist. He's played to his strengths. When he states a fact, it seems to come with unquestionable authority. His telling observations and opinions lend an essential humanity without leaving us wondering whether we're just weighing someone's snap-judgements against truth. His affection and exasperation for the country is evident and within a few pages we know we’re not dealing with arrogant dismissal like Naipaul or cynical diatribes like Patrick French’s portraits of India.
Luce begins with an armchair conversation on the Indian economy. From the Nehruvian Socialist-Secular model to modern day dollar economics.

"Hindsight makes it easy to dismiss as hopelessly optimistic Nehru's belief that devoting most of India's scarce financial resources to grand projects would propel the country to industrial status within a generation. Yet even at the time there were sceptical voices who questioned whether higher education should receive the same budgetary allocation as elementary education in a country where 84 percent of the people were illiterate?" Within a few pages he paints an accurate picture of the swadeshi model, its spin-offs (we wouldn't perhaps be the cerebral knowledge economy we were today if Nehru hadn't had the vision to set up the IIT's), the ruthless stupidity of his daughter Indira, the downward spiral that lead to the devaluation of the rupee in 1967 and later in 1991 after the Gulf War.

He then launches into the stranglehold the Civil Service has on the country illustrating it with examples ranging from the success of the ISRO to the failures of the several poverty alleviation programmes. Like pouring water into a can with a hole in it, the Indian government puts in billions into these programmes which end up almost inevitably in the wrong hands. “Hypocrisy is too mild a word to describe those who defend this system in the name of the poor. It has been described by some as ‘friendly fire’ when soldiers accidentally shoot their own men. Under this policy, the government buys wheat and rice from farmers at a higher price than the market would pay in order to increase their incomes. This ‘minimum support system’ sounds reasonable in theory. But in practise, it is a ‘maximum support system’. A small proportion of wealthy farmers in well-irrigated states like Punjab and Haryana collect almost all the subsidy, because they produce much higher surpluses of grain than those in other states and because they operate a ruthlessly effective lobbying system in New Delhi. The government’s intervention sharply raises the purchasing price of food, which inflates its selling price. Higher food prices hit everybody, but they hit the poorest hardest, since they spend almost all their incomes on food.”

The next glimpse offers us an overview of caste-politics. A razor’s-edge piece of reporting on the Mayawatis, Laloos, Mulayam Singhs and their constituents. It is a subject that naturally moves into an understanding of the two main religions in India – Hinduism and Islam and its nation-shaping influence. Nehru and Gandhi had a key role to play in establishing India as a secular democracy. But I was pleasantly surprised to learn of Ambedkar’s contribution. If Luce is to be believed, Ambedkar is quite possibly the most forward-thinking of them all. It was he who advised Nehru, even before independence that the most important decision he would have to make is the one that turns the village around from being a failed economic model into a profitable enterprise. It is the one question that has dogged every government since independence. Ambedkar’s solution was to invest heavily in rapid urbanization. He said this was the only solution and the sooner we went about doing it, the better. We still haven’t begun a whole-scale programme along these lines. Successive governments have tried and failed to bring prosperity to the villages. And this is the reason why scores of people prefer living in squalor in desperate shantytowns in Mumbai, Calcutta and Delhi rather than return to destitution in the village.

The threat posed by rabid Hindu nationalists is frightening, to say the least. What is especially scary is the fact that had Vajpayee not committed a few far-reaching politic blunders (like reaching out for the Muslim vote) our country would be in the hands of Hindu fascists. Luce has an engaging interview with the head of the RSS in Ahmedabad, followed by a visit to a factory that makes cancer-curing medicines made of cow piss. He also shows the other side – the challenges faced by Muslims and their own Talibanisation of working class Islam. Luce uses this knowledge as a base to sketch a model of the intricacies of the US-China-India relationship and its impact on the shaping of the modern world. Praise for the Luce’s efforts come from many quarters, most notably from Amartya Sen who calls the book ‘a deeply insightful account of modern India’. It would be difficult to disagree.

Evil’s onset hold in defiance

2008-09-15T14:58:00.004+08:00

It’s been a crazy few weeks. The Priyanka Chopra shoot is finally over. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. There’s been bombs in Delhi. School re-unions. Liverpool finally beat United and Amitabh Bachhan is doing Shakespeare, just to give you an idea of the zeitgeist. The bombers – the mujahiddeen or some pissed off fundamentalist outfit say they’re mad at the Hindutva nuts who were responsible for the carnage in Gujarat. I get that. What I don’t get is how it makes sense to bomb some poor aunties out shopping in Karol Bagh. Bomb the BJP HQ. Bump off Advani or Vajpayee or Modi. That’s the logical thing to do.
I attended the SJBHS sesquicentennial, that’s Latin for 150 years. It was a bittersweet experience. There was a huge turnout and it brought back a lot of memories. Met some old mates whom I last saw as gangling teenagers with bulging Adam’s apples. There was a reunion on Friday. Basically a lot of old fogies droning on about the school. You’d think they’d have learned basic oratory skills in 150 years. It was fucking painful. Arjun Rao didn’t turn up so Manu and I had to sit and heckle all by ourselves. Manu is now Mannnnu or something now, by the way. Some astrology thing. But other than that nothing much changed. Nandan sat stoic and dignified and clapped at all the right places. Thomas gave him company. The function on the whole was really quite sad. They had these spastic looking drawings of cherubs holding torches pinned onto Styrofoam and cellotaped to the walls. The backdrop to the stage looked like it was made for a Zilla Panchayat meeting and of course, the star of the evening, Rahul Dravid was there with his hair neatly combed and parted. The only guy who makes more boring post-match comments than Azhar and we had to get him as our celeb guest. Brrddhiuh Brrrrrhhhwwhn Berrrhiufhdui… thank you. Several old OBA guys spent a lot of time in obsequious fawning of Dravid and one in particular, some Jimmy Anklewhatever, made a plaintive speech about how he would go on his ‘hands and knees’ to raise funds for the OBA. I’ve been subsequently told that Jimmy does a lot of good for the OBA and help raise funds for old teachers and attenders. So I take back what I said. Good on you Jimmy. Thomas, Mannnnu and I went and got a drink at the nearby Tavern on Museum Road where we scrapped plans to attend the Blue & White ‘Bash’ solely on account of the stupid name. A bash? What the fuck? What am I, eight? Kuncheria had a Bangalore style ‘house party’ the next day after he and Merril put their baby to sleep. It was great. He had some strong sangria and brilliant food. And I banged my Dad’s car in the fuckin rain. Sunday was the big OBA breakfast and group photograph. I went there fully expecting it to blow. But it wasn’t half-bad, to be honest. I’d gotten beyond being judgemental about the aesthetics of the building, the signage, the t-shirts and was actually enjoying renewing 15 year old ties. There were a lot of guys from the batch. Govardhan, Karna Patil, Blackout Rajiv, Srinivas ‘Rags’ Ramanujam, Vishal Kumar, Tashi Luke, Nandan, Grenold, Thomas, Mannnnnu and self. Attended mass. Sang the school song. And … ok I’ll admit it, the rising chorus gave me a lump in the throat. Even though I still can’t figure what ‘Evil’s onset hold in defiance’ means. Then for the next hour, it was like being in 9C, 10C again. The Pavillion. Abu’s canteen. (Hersha Pomai still owes him 740 rupees). The new building, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, is a pile of shit. Nandan says we’re needlessly romanticizing the past and the old rooms were dungeons. Said the education scene isn’t the same anymore and SJBHS had to make these improvements to keep up with the Jains. Paying the teachers more would be a start. Allright, allright. To me, however, what made Joseph’s great was its heritage and the quality of its teaching staff. The heritage, they’ve pissed all over with this new Philomena’s Hospital for a school. Fucking Sabeer Bhatia wing! Could our dotcom billionaire be a little less Punjabi about it? No. And the teaching staff, there still remains some of the old guard. Committed teachers like Gowri Mirlay have stuck on. But I wonder how many of the new teachers match up to that calibre. With 15k- 20k p.m. salaries, it’s little wonder. There are carpenters who get paid more than that! I’m all for the corporate world taking over schools. It’ll inflate school fees but that’s the price you have to pay for good education. My verdict on the education system in India is that great schools like SJBHS are, sadly past their prime. They will never measure up to the quality of their glory years. And this is not just nostalgia speaking. The future will be a Harrow/ Eton franchise that makes education a money-spinning industry and hopefully result in some decent schools we can send our kids to. It may not be immediate and it will take a lot more than mere faith and toil.

Karelin

2008-08-08T11:04:00.002+08:00

I’ve decided to give the Olympics another chance. After all, there’s more to the Olympics than the 100m back-stroke or the great equestrian dressage. It’s also because I recently came across the story of possibly the meanest bastard who ever stepped on a podium. Alexandr Karelin, a 140kg beast of a wrestler from Siberia, who was so super-humanly strong that he could throw his genuinely terrified superheavyweight opponents through the air and on to their backs - something thought impossible in the heavy weight categories. His opponents called him 'The Experiment' because of his unreal proportions - no trace of a fat, just a physique that looked like it was drawn in a comic. Lat muscles that literally came out of his waist at a 45 degree angle. Apparently he used to carry fridges up 10 flights of stairs. Anyway after once losing a Soviet championship bought as a teenager in the 1980s he never lost a single bout until the Sydney Olympics in 2000, when he lost in the final 1-0 in the biggest shock of the Games, to an American who scored a lucky point and then basically ran away from him for the rest of the bout. Indeed it was the first point he had even conceded in something like 10 years. He retired with 3 consecutive Olympic golds and a silver. If there isn’t anyone worth rooting for from the Indian contingent (is there?) I’m backing Russia. The land of Tolstoy, the circus and the Kalshnikov. I bet, somewhere in the afterlife, Nehru can’t stop beaming.

Cantona Moves Knight To p4

2008-07-10T10:16:00.005+08:00

Last week, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer played what was described later in the press as ‘the final of finals’. It was breathtaking game, seesawing back and forth 6-4, 6-4, 7-6, 7-6, 9-7 until Nadal finally won. I slept through it. Skimmed the back pages the next day, ran my eye over the score, raised an eyebrow and turned the page. Tennis bores me. It’s not the sport as such but the players. The last time I remember watching tennis was when Gustavo ‘Guga’ Kuerten won the French Open. Before that, Ivanisevic’s unforgettable run at Wimbledon. In the late eighties through to the early nineties I used to watch tennis till my eyes glued shut. Who can forget Becker winning Wimbledon at 17? Or the epic Edberg/Becker/Lendl clashes of that era. The rot set in, I think, with the drab, soulless robot Jim Courier. The tennis was great. Great athlete and everything. But where’s the charisma?

"Collar turned up, back straight, chest stuck out, he glided into the arena as if he owned the fucking place. Any arena, but nowhere more effectively than Old Trafford. This was his stage. He loved it, the crowd loved him" (Roy Keane, Cantona's successor as Manchester United captain.)

Charisma, according to one definition, is described as ‘the ability to influence without reason’. That is why people were so engrossed in Mourinho’s boring-boring Chelsea past two seasons. Why people watch Clint Eastwood’s braindead westerns. I’d rather watch Eric Cantona playing chess than Peter Crouch playing in a scintillating 4-3 comeback in a Champions League final. That is the malaise that’s gripped the sport of tennis now. Who the hell wants to pay money to see that annoying pumped-up freak Nadal execute a technically perfect cross-court volley? We didn’t come here for the science of the game. We came to be entertained. Not to be bored into submission by some overhyped mindrot. While on the subject, is there anything more overrated and overhyped than the Olympics? Would you want to watch Men’s 200 metres breaststroke on pay-per-view? Equestrian? Wrestling? Protestors are crying for the Olympics to be banned for a variety of reasons. From human rights atrocities to 28 inch chicken breasts. I’m with them. The Olympics is dead boring. Ban the fucking thing. It’s a human rights violation if there ever was one.

Art Movie Of The Year

2008-06-23T16:36:00.002+08:00

Lucknow Returned

2008-06-05T09:00:00.000+08:00

Considering I spent most of my time on the highway to Faizabad, it might be unfair to deliver a damning verdict on Lucknow. After all, one hopes there's more to Lucknow than a shitty airport and a medieval highway. Be that as it may, I'd still like to maintain my earlier position of cautious dread towards the city and its inhabitants. From what I could see, Mayawati has taken her megalomania to new extremes. The infrastructure is a shambles. The crime rate is sickening. Yet her bovine face is hard to miss anywhere in Lucknow. Statues, billboards, banners and handbills. Imagine Nero, after the conflageration in Rome, got a bust made to commemmorate the occasion. As for the famed Awadhi cuisine, seriously overrated. It's like the head cook of the palace (sometime in the 16th century or whenever they concocted Awadhi cuisine) sat down, scratched his head and tried to come up with something that delicately balances flavours and best brings out the nuances of the food he was cooking, failed and then just decided, 'Fuck it. Let me just go buy the most expensive things in the market, put them in a pot and hope they go for it'. Before question marks are raised about the authenticity of the food, I'll have you know that the Oudhayana, at the Taj Residency is considered a torch bearer of the Awadhi cuisine. I tried their famed Galawati and Kakori kebabs. It's an overbearing spice explosion of saffron, nutmeg, clove and million other flavours. The meat is almost an afterthought. Oh well. To each their own. After all there are people who eat corrugated iron and like it.
(http://championkickah.blogspot.com/2006/09/warning-may-contain-trace-elements-of.html)

Lucknow Bound

2008-06-03T10:07:00.001+08:00

It’s not often that I visit the idyllic paradise that is Uttar Pradesh. The most profitable activity there nowadays being kidnapping, second only to raping and pillaging coming a close third. So it is with a mixture of dread and anticipation that I set foot on the aircraft to Lucknow today. Some people (read as American tourists) like to think of small-town India as ‘quaint’ and ‘sleepy’ and ‘picturesque’. Me, I beg to differ. Small towns I can handle. Mercara, Hassan, Cochin. As for small towns in the North, however, I would recommend large scale obliteration. I’ve been to the likes of Jaipur and Agra. Never again, will be too soon for me. To make things worse, my journey doesn’t end at Lucknow. I travel 3 hours out to some twin city, called Faizabad. Don’t even ask. Apparently it’s just a 45 min distance but the road being what it is, takes 3 fuckin hours. Bliss. If there ever was an advertisement for mind-numbing drugs, this is it. The only upshot to it is I might get some good photographs out there. If my camera isn’t stolen, that is.

Blue Collar Dreams

2008-01-27T06:12:00.000+08:00

Spending the better part of the day with a gang of six packers and movers I found myself musing how different life would have been, had I fallen on the other side of the fence and ended up part of the blue collar fraternity. I mean, advertising's fun and all, but you can't deny that there is a certain primordial satisfaction living by the sweat of one's brow.

While I was standing supervising the movers, on more than one occasion, I felt compelled to lend a hand with their efforts in loading and crating, more out of boredom than anything else. I'm telling you, standing around doing nothing is the most tiring thing I can imagine. It's ironical, but it's true. I don't know how security guards and people in similar professions do it. Give me a good day's worth of hard manual labour and I'll choose that over security guard work any day. These guys (the movers) were a happy lot. Whistling. Playing heavy metal on their small hi-fi. Stealing short breaks to smoke these crazy strong Turkish cigarettes. And there's the free workout. See, I've always felt a little stupid over paying someone money to join a gym so I can expend vast amounts of energy fruitlessly. True, I get to build my pecs. But it still is energy that is, in a sense, wasted.

Man's body is a machine. Perfected over eons, with opposable thumbs and agile limbs so he lift and strain and change the shape of the world he lives in. After a point, society evolves to divide labour into different tasks. Some require the use of his dexterity, some his strength, some his brain, to varying degrees. Mine, currently, at least during my last job, required me to utilise about 0.00001% of my brain. What about the rest then? Barring occasional bouts of frenetic activity, it just goes to seed.

Perhaps I am being a little naive over the notion of the blue-collar world. I'm sure there's more to it than heaving and smoking Turkish cigarettes. I'm sure there's a lot of hardships they have to face. But just for a day, though, or maybe a week, it'll be fun to live their lives. Ride a Honda motorcycle. Grow a mullet. Eat beef jerky and salted fish. Wear flannel. Gamble, get drunk and punch someone's lights out.

Let the good times roll.

The Surgeon General Has Just Been Owned

2008-01-04T12:57:00.001+08:00

This should come as a surprise to all those who’re gnawing their nails while staring blankly at walls after making the resolution to quit smoking. Go buy yourself a brand new carton of Marlboros. Cigarette smoking prevents Parkinson’s disease. And it’s not just me talking shit. Big-heap scientists with lab coats and bad haircuts have come to this conclusion after months of research and late nights.

Stifling a hacking cough, Professor Hernan tells us that “…the protective effect is large according to the pooled data, current smokers have a 60% reduction in risk compared with those who have never smoked and consistent between studies in different settings”

After the experiment, RSPCA activists freed some 600 lab mice who promptly attacked local vermin with their acute halitosis. They were also perceived to be more rebellious by their cousins in the field and as a result, small groups of enterprising mice have been making tiny mice-motorcycles and mice-leather-jackets to spawn an entire new industry among the rodents. Also, skinny supermodel mice (you’ve got to check out those incisors) have been spotted ravaging tobacco plantations to suppress their appetite for yummy human refuse.

I used to smoke regularly. I quit several years ago but do enjoy an occasional drag now and then. So it wasn’t really cold turkey. More like room temperature turkey. Cancer paranoia aside, I quit mainly because I didn’t like yellowed teeth. It disgusts me. It wasn’t that hard, really. I just told myself that if I really, really wanted a smoke, I’d just go out and buy a pack, smoke a stick or two and chuck it away. In the three years since I’ve quit, I’ve done this on maybe two-three occasions. Not many have been blessed with this gift. There are, for example, those who live in Bombay, where the simple life-sustaining act of inhalation is tantamount to smoking. Look at the bright side, no Parkinson’s. Although Bombay residents should know that an obsessive pav-bhaji habit has been known to cause mental retardation.

Nobody Pushes Product Like Jesus

2007-11-27T15:32:00.000+08:00

In ancient times, religion was the one thing that held the very fabric of society together. It brought you together as a community. It helped you marry your kids off. It oiled the wheels of day-to-day social and business interaction. It was also probably the earliest form of counselling and therapy. No wonder our grandparents and parents take religion so seriously. Well, mine do, to an extent. They don’t, like, wear crucifixes and carry pocket bibles or anything but they’d glare if I made any cracks about The Man. As a child I found this image really intriguing.

It’s like He got His picture painted in the middle of a really twisted open-heart surgery procedure. I was a bright kid, I was. I understood metaphors easily. So the significance of the dove and lamb and the Eucharist were quite easy to comprehend. But a saintly man blissfully smiling while his internal organs were exposed and pierced with painful thorns seemed a bit screwy to me. But every Catholic family those days had one of the Open-Heart-Surgery Images. It was a big thing for them. It was what bound them together.

My generation has religion too. It’s called consumerism. It doesn’t change too many things, though. Christmas is still a big thing for us. We’re going to get loads of stuff, aren’t we? We get holidays so we can travel and spend more money. And the real Christmas begins after the 25th of December when all the post-Christmas Sales begin.

When I catch the first strains of “..the weather outside is frightful..” I’m not thinking cheery carollers I’m thinking plush foyers of glitzy malls. Baby Jesus, angels, the three kings of Orient – instant association is shop window displays.

Marketing has both ruined Christmas with all the hype and at the same time you’ve got to admit it’s nice to feel a bit of that ‘festive spirit’ in the air even though you know it’s just evil corporations who’re trying to snatch your money and make you buy stuff you don’t need.

You think Beckham sells product? Baby, nobody pushes product like Jesus can.

With each generation, religion gets more and more diluted. There is truth in Gore Vidal’s cutting observation when he describes the Bible as “the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe as reinterpreted by a group of world-weary Greeks in the first centuries of the last millenium”. You’d like to poke a hole in it. But you can’t, can you?

Some, like me, like to hang on to some bits of the ceremony of religion. Cribs, plum cake, adeste fieles, midnight mass, confession. I’m not religious. Just a sentimental fool sometimes. You know what I don't like though? Santa Claus. Always seemed a bit creepy to me. But if he gets me a PS3 this Christmas I promise I'll be nice.

Own a wristwatch? You fairy.

2007-11-01T16:15:00.000+08:00

I own a wristwatch. I use it to tell the time. That’s why they invented the watch. So you don’t need to look at the sun or rely on your bowel movements to tell you that you were late for work. Then somebody invented the cell-phone. And soon everyone owned one. Just like a watch. But has it ever occurred to you that the clever little fucker who invented the cellphone also put in a little digital clock into it? It’s right there on your opening screen. Screaming out 3:06 PM blink 3:06 PM blink 3:06 PM blink 3:07 PM blink.

So, what’s with the watch then? Is it there just because it’s pretty? Do we wear it just as an accessory? We do, don’t we? There’s no difference between us and that shit-for-brains MTV deejay (forgot his name) with 5 rings on his fingers.

We’re wearing something expensive with no practical purpose except in the sartorial sense.

We’re wearing jewellery. We’re fags.

Now that the world has moved on from debating metrosexuals and simply accepted them (along with retrosexuals and the seemingly more ancient transsexuals, bisexuals and homosexuals) the question has to be asked: What the hell was all the furore about?

Men have always taken pride in their appearance. It wasn’t a turn of the century thing. Shakespeare wore bloomers. During Samuel Johnson’s time it was common for men to wear a wig. Men carried pocket-watches and silver canes. Pocket squares, anyone? That little carnation in the breast pocket. How faggy is that? Then there was Brylcreem and moustache wax and whatever else. Then David Beckham comes along and wears a sarong. But wait a minute. David is a footballer. He is not gay. He has a tarty wife too. That kicked off all the hullabaloo about metro-whatsits. Two years back, a fellow wears sunglasses and people were quick to pin the metro label on him.

What the fuck are you on about? Almost every man is a metro. One way or the other. Look at that guy with the gleaming white teeth. He brushes his teeth, the faggot. Oooh look at me…me so pwetty…me got gleaming teeths. It’s just a load of crap, this metro talk. The only men who don’t give a shit about their appearance are those who’re too ugly to care.

I know I’m about five years too late with this post now that we're in a different era, culturally speaking, but at least nobody will accuse me of being trendy.

Is Adventure Overrated?

2007-10-10T18:20:00.000+08:00

Or more importantly, is it uncool?

There was a time not too long ago when all youth marketers wanted to do was associate themselves with supposedly wild adventure-sport enthusiasts. Mountain Dew anyone? Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s become decidedly uncool to climb mountains or go white-water rafting now. Maybe it has something to do with plaid becoming uncool because of the hillbilly association now that every man and his dog wants too portray themselves as tree-hugging liberals.

It’s not that I don’t like adventure. I’ve re-read Treasure Island more times than I can remember and even own the Spitting Image version. So I can sign on the parchment with my blood if you like. But it’s the determined pursuit of adventure as a hobby that somehow rings false. Thor Heyerdahl took the Kon-Tiki voyage to prove a point. And he did it in a courageous, ballsy way. If he did it simply because he wanted to endure the elements, its pure masochism. Or is there more to it?

There are some people on this earth for whom wildness is a predisposition. Hemingway famously explained his ways in the opening lines of The Snows Of Kilimanjaro.

“Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai "Ngaje Ngai," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”

A biologist would have a plausible explanation, no doubt. Maybe it was driven out of its natural habitat by some threat and was injured before it could make its way to safety. Maybe some tribesmen killed it and dragged it there as a talisman.

To suppose it was driven there by wanderlust or curiosity is to imply that the leopard is either an aberration or that there is an instinct for curiosity within animals to seek newer territory or whatever.

Hemingway was evidently one that identified with the latter explanation. But there’s a difference between Hemingway and the spandex-clad Finnish lice-head who climbs Kanchenjunga for the 13th time. One is driven by his own unrest, his wild spirit and natural curiosity. The other is an adrenaline-junkie. One is unquestionably cool. The other’s coolness is what I question.

Fortunately, the world of fashion and marketing has come to realise this and we won’t be subjected to X-Sports in ads for the time being. Or until Lindsay Lohan wears plaid knickers. What? She did that already? God help us.

Abstract Figures Doing Vaguely Athletic Things

2007-10-09T17:09:00.000+08:00

Here’s an old wives’ tale. It is alleged that on the completion of the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan ordered the right hand of the Chief Mason to be cut off so that the masterpiece could never be recreated.

Whether that is true or not I cannot verify but I’m not wholly against the de-limbing of artists especially if they’re like this

“Everybody wants something. and we're no exception. But as a twenty-something couple living in New York City, we need a little extra help getting what we want. Which is why we're putting our wants up for sale with these paintings.”

The unnamed 20-something couple paints a harmless, pop-art painting of what they want - buffalo wings, an iPhone, a check for a million dollars, and then they sell it for whatever that particular item costs.

At what point does a stupid idea cross the line and become one that is frighteningly original? The rise of the Sex Pistols divided rock n’ roll forever. It was a watershed moment. At the time, however, it took a very insightful mind to see it for what it was, as a moment of genius, rather than the tuneless stringing together of profanities it appeared to be. If it weren’t for them, and the emergence of punk, we wouldn’t have Nirvana, Oasis, Guns ‘N’ Roses and Green Day.

But sometimes, however, one has to really take stock and wonder. We have reached one such time, with the creation of the London Olympics logo, which has polarised opinion in the design world. Take a look.

A. Is it a piece of crap?
B. Is it an act of genius?

I’m in Category A. I’m sickened to the point of nausea by it and won’t be swayed by love or money to think otherwise.

Some reactions: (Courtesy: Creative Review magazine)

Pros

It’s original and brave.

It contains none of the following: Big Ben, bulldogs, crowns and assorted other royal paraphernalia, the Union Jack, cross of St George, Pearly Kings and Queens, abstract figures doing vaguely athletic things.

It will work across a range of media, which will be vital in 2012 when coverage of the Games will break over a range of formats – eg mobile phones, PCs.

Children will probably like it and, like Whitney, we believe that they are the future…

Cons

You can’t read it very easily.

It already seems outdated – New Rave may be very On Trend with the fashion world this season but this still has five years of life to live out.

It’s inelegant and brash (unlike the restrained beauty of, say, Aicher’s work for Munich in 1972) - and what does that say about London?

It looks a bit like something Neil Buchanan might have put together on Art Attack. And, as a result, graphic design will receive another pasting in the popular press. “How much? My kid could have done better…”

If you stare at it long enough, some dirty-minded bloggers have been saying, it kind of looks like Lisa Simpson giving someone a blow job.

If I were the Art Dictator Of The World and my say mattered, I’d say, if something draws this much debate, let it be, let it play out. If the history of art and design has taught us anything, it is that you can’t police art. The London Olympics is five years from now. Who knows what design will be in five years? If its crap, its crap. Fuck it, it’s only design. Nobody dies.

Music Sans Lyrics

2007-10-08T11:25:00.000+08:00

Still researching the same shoot. The pre-pro's next week so things have kicked into overdrive. I’m looking for a subtle string composition for the background score. The brief required something a bit subdued but ‘inspiring’ nonetheless. The client had some 437 other parameters but I’ll spare you the details. I went through a five foot tower of music cds comprising library music, OSTs and varied forms of Classical Music and came away with one distinct feeling.

Most classical music, without the sweeping grandeur of helicopter-view camera pans or moving black-and-white slo-mo scenes, sound like elevator music.

Maybe I’m a boor. Maybe I don’t have a tuning fork in my ear. Maybe I’m part of the generation spoiled by movies. But I just can’t seem to be moved by classical compositions without visual imagery to assist me.

Mozart (–) Visuals = Kenny G

I think the movies have a large part to play in making our senses lazy. Another huge influencer is the cheese factor.

My first association, when I hear a pastoral Mozart tune is not picturesque meadows in spring, it’s being put on hold by the Citibank operator. Hotel lobbies. Restaurants. Subways. Muzak has had a profound influence in fencing away that part of the brain that appreciates the magic of music. That, and Yanni.
The hirsute Michael Bolton of classical music may be old news in the music industry but in Asia he’s accorded a place alongside other immortals like Richard Clayderman, Enigma, Paul Mauriat and other aficionados of “Music To The People”

While I’m on the subject, can somebody tell me why wedding video guys have a fascination with the instrumental version of Europe’s ‘Final Countdown’? Invariably, it’s played during the part when the guests serve themselves from the buffet table. It’s hugely popular at awards functions as well.

EXCERPT FROM AWARDS CEREMONY SCRIPT

Skank Female Presenter: “Laydeees and gennelmen, please gif a roun’ of applause to the winnah for ‘Best Salesman Of The Year – North Division’ …..Atul KHANNA!”

Music cue: Final Countdown played as a beaming Atul Khanna takes the steps. Atul Khanna’s wife has a tear in her eye.

As a member of the audience who has been exposed to Eighties music, I’m half expecting to see a big-haired, spandex-wearing man with a painted face leap on to the stage. Instead, all I see is a pot-bellied salesman.

But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

How To Pack A Suitcase

2007-10-02T12:07:00.000+08:00

Apparently it takes more than just rolling all your clothes into tight balls and stuffing them into corners. While researching a shoot I came across this book called 'Gentleman' by Bernhard Roetzel. It tells you all sorts of irrelevant, foppish things. How to choose a hat. What to wear while out shooting ducks. (Tweed or Houndstooth). Where to get an umbrella. A Dandy Bible. There was also this bit about packing a suitcase which I think deserves to be recorded for future generations. You're welcome.

Dancing With The Green Robed Maniac

2007-08-30T11:05:00.000+08:00

I haven’t watched cricket in months. A situation which, for any Indian male, would only be brought upon by long-term hospitalisation or imprisonment. Surprisingly, I continue to breathe and managed to plug that nosebleed with a little sterilised cotton-wool. I don’t hate cricket, although having collaborated to mass-produce a t-shirt that said ‘Fuck Cricket’ (sold like crazy too) I suppose I am guilty of double standards. I’d do anything for a good laugh. That, and it’s also nice to piss people off. I used to watch a lot of cricket in the old days. What else was there to watch? I can read a scorecard. I know what the Duckworth-Lewis method means and could explain LBW to you if you wanted me to. But all those years of watching cricket, instead of making me a more patriotic person and paint the tricolour on my face, made me a less patriotic one and paradoxically, turned me into a huge fan of the Pakistani cricket team. Two words – Wasim, Waqar. If there is a more terrifying new ball pair in the history of cricket, I’d like to know. Indian batsmen are to Pakistani bowlers what Vivien Leigh is to Vivian Richards. I still have the image of that clueless midget Chetan Sharma being slammed for six over mid-on off the last ball by Javed Miandad. And Manoj Prabhakar being savaged by tail-order batsmen. I have memories of Inzy lazily lifting a hapless Kumble over the boundary line. When Indian batsman did get some fight into them, more often than not, it looked laboured. There have been exceptions. Azhar was a classy batsman but sadly would’ve sold his mother for thirty silver pieces, or even twenty-eight, depending on the prevailing rate. Then there’s Tendulkar. Boy prodigy. Master Blaster. Little Runt. Doubtless, the boy-man/ man-boy has been touched with the magic wand. Superhuman hand-eye coordination and reflexes, textbook perfection. Possibly the most talented batsman ever since Bradman and Viv Richards. And what does he do with his gifts? Nine times out of ten, he chooses to play ‘safe’. Here’s a guy who is blessed with the kind of accurate timing that can cut field settings to ribbons and drive bowlers to drink. It’s not about his achievements, Tendulkar fans. It is the manner of his achievements. He’s a genius. But he’s also a fucking pussy. Steve Waugh had a mere fraction of his brother Mark’s ability (who, at any rate was second-rate compared to Tendulkar) and yet managed to tally impressive scores by playing safe, playing ‘in the V’ and hanging in there. On rare occasion Tendulkar has cut loose, but rarely against first-class opposition or in important matches. It’s like Francis Jeffers scoring 5 goals against Millwall F.C. in a League Cup encounter. Pakistan has its failings, its murky politics and its Aquib Javeds but has produced a greater line of cricketing personalities than we have. The resolute Miandad, the iron-willed Imran Khan, the frightening Waqar and the sublime Wasim Akram. No generation of cricket players from any country can boast of that. Who other than a Pakistani batsman will volley a pace bowler for six? This really happened. I swear. It was a preposterous shot to play. The batsman was Ijaz Ahmed. More ogre than man. With a face to curdle milk. The bowler, I don’t remember. Doesn’t matter anyway. It was a chest-high intended in-swinger. Ijaz, an otherwise clumsy batsman, was on this day in imperious form. He was on a 110 or something and playing like he was off his rocker. He leaned on the back foot and played a tennis-stroke, something like a cross-court return volley with such force that ball screamed into the stands, the flattest six I’ve ever seen. Who plays a shot like that? By contrast, our Vengsarkars or Gavaskars who are evidently more gifted batsmen than Ijaz would probably just run themselves out at 110, because their flabby bodies didn’t have the energy to carry on. At the time I thought maybe it had something to do with their diets. A natural assumption, considering the fact that the Indian team eats some watered down mixture of lentils and vegetables and the Pakistani cricketers eat rusty nails dipped in dragon blood. So the only thing left for me is to wait for Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaaf to win the general election, or launch a coup against Musharraff, take over the management of the team and restore it to its former glory. I’ll be the one on TV dancing with that green-robed, bearded maniac who you see at all the cricket matches.

Movie Review: The Transformers

2007-07-03T17:40:00.000+08:00

In the Eighties, when the Transformers toys were a big deal, I was one of the hordes of kids fascinated with them. I didn’t have one but 8-year old rules meant that if I had a friend who had one in his toy cupboard it was tantamount to me owning one. He could have my wicket-keepers gloves if he wanted, that was the deal. It was a blue sports car that turned into a blue robot and in my mind there were various complex storylines and plots involving a blue car that turned into a blue robot. He outwitted stupid Tonka trucks and then smashed into piles of Lego bricks. He cheerfully trod on whole parking lots of dinkie cars. He went on daring missions to save the shoe-box which served as his base camp. Somehow, all those 8-year old scenarios dreamed up on boring days sitting on the couch seem better than Michael Bay’s overhyped Transformers movie. I know knocking a toy-inspired digital effects film seems like a soft target, but…come on. You have a megaquazillion dollars on you, at least start with a story. ‘Toy Story’ did it. ‘Incredibles’ wasn’t too bad. So was ‘Over The Hedge’. ‘Transformers’ was so boring that after the first six car-into-robot switches I had to struggle to stay focused on the movie.

Here’s the story. Typical Dysfunctional American Family Dad takes Typical, Nerdy But Likeable Michael J Fox Mould American Teen to get him his first car from a caricature Used Car Salesman played by Bernie Mac. Meanwhile, or was it earlier, shit happens in Qatar when an American base is annihilated by a helicopter turned robot. With me so far? After that string of clichés, there’s a whole eleventeen hours of such clichés (The Dumb Jock, The Hot Girl Who’s Dating Him, The President Who Trusts The Lowly Intern Over Superqualified Experts, The Soldier’s Emotional Blonde Wife, The Soldier’s Emotional Blonde Baby) which is painful to say the least, mercifully interrupted from time to time by cool transformations from car to robot. But what the hell, it’s just a toy movie.

Pet Names

2007-06-18T18:57:00.000+08:00

Don’t ask me why, but I recently stumbled upon the typos-strewn Official Kapoor Family Homepage on the internet - a shabby, crude creation with laughable artwork and primitive navigation. A prominently displayed icon told me it was “made with a Mac” and thus I suppose exempt from all aesthetic judgement.

Still, old man Shammi, the creator of the site, is a committed alky, who, if reports are to be believed is never short of reason to be soaked. So let’s give the guy some credit. I have a soft spot for drunks on account of having read too many Tintin comics as a child.

Anyway, Shamshirraj Kapoor puts these old pictures up on the internet, with links back to the soon-to-be-hideously-obese Kapoor spawn. Click on Rishi and it takes you to a pixelated image of Rishi Kapoor and his family, circa 1980 with the caption, “Rishi Kapoor, pet named Chintu, second son of Raj Kapoor, with his wife, Neetu, and children, Ridhima and Ranbir” in 16 points Times New Roman Bold.

Chintu. The word rolls off your tongue like it ought to be scrubbed off with carbolic soap and steel wool. For those who are intimate with the family, there’s also Lolo, Bobo, Bunty, Hobo, Spot and Skip. Ok I made the last few up but you get the drift.

It’s not just the Kapoors who have been inflicted with ‘pet-names’. As research among my friends indicates, no one has been spared. I have one too but that’s going with me to the grave.

In the North, and by North I allude to anything north of the Vindhyas as one homogenous mass, the following are popular ‘pet-names’:

Vicky, Babloo, Bunty, Sonu (one of the most popular I believe), Monu, Goldie, Honey, Queenie (these three applicable to heterosexual males as well). Did I mention Bunty? There are scores more I’m sure but I can’t think of any at present.

South India has its own range of embarrassments – from the ubiquitous Raju, Babu, Sanju, Manju in Karnataka to the supreme pinnacle of social embarrassment that is the Malayalee pet-name (which sometimes even doubles up as the legal name). Biju, Jiju, Siju were quite common given names in the seventies. I once heard of a chap cruelly named Brojo by his parents. I bet he hid in dark corners a lot.

One thing anybody who’s been to school in Bangalore knows is that there’s always a guy called Sandy which is short for Sandeep. Hey Sandy! High five! The equivalent in the North is Harry, short for Harvinder.

I am not even going to begin to dwell on this need for the alter-ego at present. I am not getting into that. I did consider it but I got so many possible angles to it that I just gave up. For all you know Professor Surendranath Rao from the Institute has already done his thesis on ‘Repression In Society And The Segregation Of Personal Identity From Inter-Personal Relationships In Nuclear Families.’ He has all the thoughts I’m supposed to have already typed out and spiral-bound to boot. Thank you, Sunny.

An inebriated George K once told me was going give his son the first name ‘Sir’. That way he’d be knighted at birth. No need to strive and slave and accomplish jack to earn knighthood. Here’s my knighthood. Where’s my castle? He also said it would be a good idea to consume food-colouring pills and alcohol and then take a ride on the Ferris Wheel. That way our puke would come out all interesting looking.

He’s obviously a genius.

Love And Harmony In Singapore

2007-06-07T19:40:00.000+08:00

This macabre ad was run by the Government of Singapore to promote family love among its citizens. I can't wait for the next ad in the campaign.

Somebody Mentions Jordan

2007-04-12T13:04:00.001+08:00

The airport bookstore has always had a strange coming-of-age sort of significance for me. Maybe it has something to do with nifty hand baggage. Or because there always seems to be a lot of pinstripes and brogues around. It makes you want to feel very grown-up and make your features align into what you hope is the unreadable steel mask you see in movies where tuxedo-clad cardplayers squint around saying ‘I see your 50, and I raise you 2000’.

This is why I always seem to end up buying magazines like The Economist at airports. It makes me want to be a better man, to quote another well-flogged line from the movies. I’ll spend four or five hours in-flight relentlessly plodding through the 7.5 point type devouring erudite prose about equity margins in Yokohama.

Every Economist has one article which is more or less like the ‘middle’ in newspaper editorials. The odd article of general human interest. About gay monkeys in Uganda. Or how embroidery is really catching on among Miami millionaires. Thaaaaaank you Mr Editor. Two hours later, after I’ve read through how multinationals will fare with globalization in Basra, about how suphur is gaining ground as a commodity and the historical aspect of Japan-China trade, my patience wears thin. The Economist back in the baggage, I reward myself watching The Benny Hill show on the little screen in front of me.

All that information is now sloshing in my head. I find myself chewing on it sometimes, trying to make sense of it. I fantasise sitting across the table from a big-shot businessman like Ratan Tata saying things like “…Bush’s Treasury Department, for example, has so far refused to label China a currency manipulator even though both congressional and public sentiment currently favour doing so. It’s bloody absurd! …” and take a bite out of a bran bagel with a sip of black coffee (hold the sugar, please).

While I haven’t got the inclination towards the world of finance I’ve been blessed with an intellect that can break information down into bite-sized chunks that makes for easier processing. I could read Nietzsche and give you the gist of his existential beliefs. Which is, ‘Everybody hates you. You hate everybody.’ in case you wanted to know. So I twist and turn the facts in my mind until it becomes little-bitty bits of floating trivia, quotes, comments and wry observations, just waiting to germinate and bear fruit.

“… you seen Rocky Balboa?”

“… how could I resist? oh…urm…talking of Italians, did you hear about Prodi?”

“What, there's a sale?”

"Romano Prodi, the head of the coalition government in Italy"

"Oh yeah...of course..."

"He's there to stay I think"

"... especially since the approval of the 2007 budget and the better than expected revenue growth have improved Prodi's chances of staying in office until the end of 2008 and beyond, possibly until the end of his five-year parliamentary term."

There’s an ad for The Economist released last year in the UK. The headline says: “Somebody mentions Jordan, you think of a country with a 3.3% growth rate." This is amusing to a Briton, where the busty supermodel who shares a name with the Middle Eastern country is rarely out of the news. Thing is, I’m not even British but if somebody mentioned Jordan, the first thing I’d think of is a busty British supermodel and not a Middle-Eastern country with a 3.3% growth rate.

So it’s Hello! magazine for me, then.

Rumbling Esscitement In The Room

2007-04-10T11:44:00.000+08:00

Know what would be a great idea? Ever seen construction sites before they put in the concrete piles? When its just rubble and there’s heavy earth-moving equipment clearing the place. I was just passing by one such place the other day when it struck me – this would be fun. Why don’t they let in the general public to use their big machines on sites under construction? I’ll bet there are others like me who’d just love to try it on the weekends, or maybe right after work. They have to make no further investment, for one. Just let other people have fun too, while their proper drivers are having a breather.

I know there are some holes in my proposal. Safety concerns, for one. But it can’t be that difficult to learn how to operate one of those machines. I mean, come on, it’s not like it’s an aircraft carrier or anything. There’s just meters and basic levers. Half an hour with the instructions manual should do it. Hell, even Christopher Moltisanti drove one after Tony’d taught him. This after he’d injected himself with a near-fatal dose of heroin.

In related news, the Singapore Government is spending S$ 2 billion on proposed tourism projects this year. Taking a big chunk of that budget is a giant Ferris Wheel, shamelessly copying their erstwhile colonial masters. It’s imaginatively called The Singapore Flyer. The moment you sit in it, its going to take 45 minutes to take you to the top and another 45 to bring you back down. Can you feel that bone-jarring adrenaline rush?

A Conversation at Singapore Govt HQ

Official 1: Wau lah… that Malaysia very high-class one you don't know meh? Always put ad in Manchester game lor.

Official 2: We are doomed…then go and kill ourselves. Aiyoh, damn chik ak

Official 3: Aiyoh don’ say like dat lah

Official 1: Then how?

Official 2: We fight…we also build ah… wha you say?

Everybody: Can!

Official 3: How about anudder mall?

Official 1: Canno make it leh…we got mall orreddy…tourists all very hard to please, one. They all ai pee, ai chee, ai tua liap nee*.

Official 2: Then how?

Official 1: I know… a Ferris Wheel…wau just like Engrand… I wen once that ride was too essciting for me oreddy…

(Rumbling esscitement in the room)

Everybody: Can! Makaan oreddy?

Official 1: Where you wan’ go? French fry and hambugger at Macnoner, can?

* * * *

(*Beautiful Teochew saying which literally translates as ' Want cheap, want pretty, want big breasts!' It is used to describe someone who wants the earth.)

The Ring Pillow

2007-02-12T13:42:00.000+08:00

For those who aren’t familiar with the world of bridal accoutrements, this is a little 8” X 8” pillow, whose form is generally dictated by the theme colours of the wedding. It is frequently known to sport a substantial quantity of lace, satin and depending upon the creator, a bow or tassles. In short, it is the exact opposite of well-worn leather saddle. It’s use, as the name suggests, is to carry wedding rings to the ceremony. Something a well-worn leather saddle will find difficult to pull off.

Ring pillows are curious things. If you’re getting one of those, it goes without saying that there needs to be a small frilly drawstring bridal pouch for the bride to keep things. Then there’s the frilly box for envelopes stuffed with cash. There is no doubt, a frilly lace mobile case, a frilly lace thumb-drive and a frilly lace steering guard to complete the look. What, no frilly lace steering guard? Get out of here.

Now I can understand to some extent why a bride would want lacy frilly things around her, but one thing I just don’t get is why a priest would need them. Have you ever attended a Roman Catholic wedding? The bride is dressed in bridal white. The groom wears his black suit or tuxedo. The priest wears Holy Purple Satin Robes and an elaborate Holy Golden Sash draped down his neck. What’s the idea here? I am a 60 year old celibate who’s here to bless this ceremony and whether you like it or not, I’m going be the most eye-catching person around here. True, I may not be much to look at but who needs that when you got purple robes? Non-conformist couples who decides to dress more flash, take care. Choose a pink gown instead of the mandatory white and that’s when they bring out the Holy Neon Groin Cups. You’ve got to watch out for those.

A Good King

2007-01-05T16:14:00.000+08:00

I wake up to the New Year and switch on the telly to catch a string of reports of extreme barbarism and irresponsible government. While some may be justifiable, like Saddam’s lynching, others like the grisly pit discovered in Noida makes you want to throw up. So it is with some regret that I found myself musing, with a sense of irony that what this world needs is less sadism, and on the other hand, brute authority to enforce laws and push reforms.

Do sadism and authoritarian rule go hand in hand? Mostly, yes. In fact, I would be hard-pressed to come up with an example of a kindly tyrant. (Yes, I realize it’s an oxymoron). A good king. Someone who doesn’t need to pass 20000 bills to set up a subway station in town. Someone who doesn’t need to lobby several powerful groups to get his way. Someone who isn’t driven by greed, caste or religion. Someone who can have Abhishek Bachhan thrown to the lions. The iron fist in the iron glove.

Russia needed Stalin to move from a primarily agrarian economy to a world superpower. He was psycho, and he sent millions to starve and die in the gulags, but you’re missing the point. He laid the foundations of a powerful economy. He made socialism work, to a certain extent. What we need is a Stalin minus all the crap Socialist agenda and a predilection towards mass murder.

Maybe we ought to put out an ad in the leading dailies of the world.

TYRANT WANTED

A prominent third-world country is looking for a dependable, trustworthy tyrant. The ideal candidate should be well-versed with State Management, Economics, Military Studies and above all Sports. Candidate must have a presentable personality, a sense of ethics and good man management skills. While an all-round sense of order and discipline goes without saying. No history of mental illness, sexual deviation or homicidal tendency. Mansion, limousine provided. Please send in your resume within 7 days to Rasthrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, India 110001.

Come to think of it, before we had democracy, there were bits in the past when kingdoms were prosperous and people could roam free and things were generally not too fucked up. Were they run by parliaments? No. Did they ask their illiterate, halfwit population to cast votes? No. They were just ruled well. Ashoka, Chandra Gupta Maurya and Akbar were all good kings/ emperors (or kindly tyrants) if my Std 8 The Glimpses Of Indian History textbook is anything to go by. Good Kings are far better rulers of countries where more than 95% of the population are stupid, as is the case with India. Down with democracy, I say. Since the five or six readers of my blog will not be able to lead a coup, I vote we all fervently close our eyes and make a wish for a nice tyrant the next time we see a shooting star.

Kevin Energy

2006-10-11T13:48:00.000+08:00

Ever notice how hard-core DJ’s have the dumbest names in the world?

Vibes
Sharkey
UFO
X-Clusive
Stompy
Wotsee (aka...Mush, Kev, Trev, or Mushty...)
Kevin Energy

I thought long and hard, and I couldn’t think of shitter name than Kevin Energy. How on earth did he come up with that? And how come all DJ names are so shit? This can’t be an accident. There must be some sort of DJ vocabulary out there which I’m not aware of. Something that defines coolness, sorry coolnezz in their world.

So I look this up some on the net and I come across this

A DJ name generator. Something which is immensely entertaining for about 30 seconds. A whole day if you are stoned.

Then I go, wait a minute, this is pure gold. So I went looking for the motherlode. I’m telling you, anytime you want to kill time, visit a site for DJ’s. It’ll blow your mind. Seinfeld is a gas but he’s not a patch on these guys. Here’s one excerpt:

* * * * *

Me proper name is Carl Embley not much of ring to it eh. I have been using MDMA for a long time and someone local has started using it aswell. Plus venue owners look at me funny when I say MDMA but its meant to come across as the purest ecstasy is music. I have been resident at Generate (Doncaster) for about a year. I want a name that has meaning to it. I have let me promoter no I am changing but the flyers go out next month. I have also aimed a hard dance night toward 13-17 yr olds as I work with the youth service and dont like explaining to them what it means. Me brain is fried can anyone suggest some ideas. This youth event is on 22nd December and I can’t really put MDMA on the posters

arite ppl how about dj storm???

Man, im tellin you from a first hand Dj. DONT USE STORM!!! Its waaaaay to corny. All your names you guys have are wacker than wayne brady! Get something unique, Dj Slick? Man, i bet theres about 1000 people out there who said that. And all those names “Dj Phat god” Your anything but phat, and your a god of gay names. And that dictionary bullshit is weak. Im not sayin that i can think of better ones, but think of something catchy. Dj-Kaskade, I just thought of 1 i was gonna give my friend yesterday, Dj-FunKaDeliK, named after the band, the funkadelics. So be wise! Be Logical! Be smooooooooooth.

i need a Dj name, something catchy, with a bit of funk, i jus got sum decks off ebay, so, help me out! please? whoever gets me the best name will win a prize!!

* * * * *

And here’s the part that really blows. DJ’s, the dumber they are, the more successful they get. And they all have super-hot girlfriends. Who do you think dates all the hot 16-year old Slavic models and pink-haired Goth chicks?

Kevin Fucking Energy.

Him and his equally doped-out-of-their-brains chums in fashion photography have cornered that market. Fashion designers could easily carve out a bit of action for themselves, if they all weren’t so predictably gay. This could well be because 16-year old Slavic models and pink-haired Goth chicks are just as dumb as Kevin Energy, but that’s not the point is it? Somebody called Kevin Energy should NOT be allowed to create more Kevins. It’s Darwin’s law. But they've re-written that already. I'm always the last to know.

Chimp-Pong

2006-09-28T18:14:00.000+08:00

I don’t get people who get bullfighting.

Hemingway saw bullfighting as "the only art in which the artist is in danger of death." He spoke of "the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet draped on a stick. When the stick pierces the animal's body, and the red blood runs into the sand or grass, the aesthetic process deepens; the blood is beauty and the beauty is blood.”

I still don’t get it.

What’s so brave about fighting an animal that is so dumb it doesn’t know the difference between a piece of cloth and a human being? Whose reflexes are only duller than its intelligence? It’s not a fair fight to me.

I’m inventing a new sport. It’s called Chimp-Pong. It’s where man shows his supremacy over a monkey at ping-pong. Look at me! Look how I can beat this sucker. And I’m playing with my left hand! Hurrah! Hurrah for me! I’m so agile. I’m so nimble. I am such a super-hero because I can defeat an animal with half my brain and half my dexterity.

The brutality is an altogether different aspect.

A bullfight proceeds in three stages, or tercios, designed to weaken, torture, torment and kill the bull. In the tercio de varas, the matador's assistants chase the bull with capes in order to provoke and tire him. Once the bull is sufficiently exhausted, two picadores ride in on horseback and plunge lances into the bull's upper body. The tercio de banderillas begins when three banderilleros individually chase the bull in order to spear him in the neck with two banderillas (colorfully decorated wooden harpoons). Finally, when six banderillas are lodged in the bull's neck, blood pouring down his back and spewing out of his nose and mouth, the tercio de muleta commences and the brave matador enters for the "ballet of death." With his sword and red cape, he makes several stylized passes at the bull before he attempts to deliver the estocade, the death blow designed to plunge the sword through the bull's neck or into his heart. The matador has ten minutes to kill the bull, but quite often, he fails to make a clean kill and has to stab the bull repeatedly. A team member then severs the bull's spinal cord as he lies paralyzed and dying.*

Talk about a fair fight.

I need to revise the Chimp-Pong rules.

First I get to drug the chimp. Then I get four of my mates to burn patches of its skin at regular intervals and then I make it wear Gore-tex boots and tie its shoelaces. Then I take its ping-pong racket away. Watch and gape in wonder as I stylishly produce beautiful spin-serves that completely destroys the chimp’s game. The grace, the supreme finesse of it all. I win. I rule. I own your ass, monkey.

Now if only I could do it wearing fairy pants and a big billowing cape, I could develop it into a major sport in Latin countries.

The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be

2006-09-21T14:40:00.000+08:00

When I was growing up, I was under the impression that come 2000, we’d have flying cars, jetpacks and entire cities floating above the ground. The visionary authors of Buck Rogers and the Jetsons told us we could look forward to a world of food capsules and clothing that was either something resembling the Roman toga or silver jumpsuits. Whatever happened to that future? Did some scientist trip and fall and lose his memory? How come people still drive their piece of shit Subarus and why haven’t they built an interplanetary highway between the Earth and Mars? I was looking forward to that.

What we were expecting.

What we get.

My sentiment is shared by countless others, I found, as I scoured the far-reaches of the internet in my quest for this vision. Lot of pissed-off kids out there.

I work on a telecom account and we were recently briefed by our client to launch his new offering as ‘next wave’. Startlingly original thought for a telecom company, that. This guy’s fixed on creating the world of the future (at least that’s what he wants to do on television). In previous decades, creatives had no problem visualizing that. Bring on the hovercrafts, the jumpsuits and ray-guns. Now we can’t paint that picture. It’s the retro-future. The future that never was. A kitschy utopia created by the minds of artists brought up on Carl Sagan and the Space Race. What’s it going to be like, I wonder? Judging from the present, we seem to be headed for an Eighties revival in culture. Tommy Hilfiger’s selling bomber jackets. Miami Vice is back.

The futuristic world of 2010

I have a 6 pm deadline and I’m still not even halfway close to nailing the future.
An added twist: Nothing apolcaplyptic, please. The ______brand is founded on love and family values. Great, I have to visualize a future without global warming, a catastrophic war or hordes of screaming jihadis. Not to mention fuel and water shortages and mass poverty. I have to create a visionary Prozac world where the hills are alive with the sound of music and butterflies flit over holograms of flowers. I have a back-up plan, however. Here’s how the presentation will go if all else fails. “Have any of you seen a movie called the Minority Report……..?”

Where Would We Be Without Justin Timberlake?

2006-09-19T18:48:00.000+08:00

Justin Timberlake says he is “..bringing sexy back”. Whew! I’m so relieved. We don’t have to live in an unsexy world anymore. What would we do without philanthropists like Mr. Timberlake?

I imagine, years from now, some well-meaning soul might chronicle this selfless act thus:

“It was a bleak September that year in 2006. It had been a few decades since the world had anything that could be qualified as a ‘sexy’ experience. The streets were empty except for one lone figure. Justin huddled into his torn chocolate colored overcoat and kept walking into the bitter cold wind. His light brown hair was shining. He had pawned his parents’ DVD player a few hours ago and had been looking for a dealer to supply him with a pair of shiny black pants. His hands shook and he kept wringing them and cracking his knuckles, trying anything to keep them busy. Justin didn’t notice though, he was barely aware of his own body. So out of it he’d forgotten he hadn’t eaten in three days. He was a pariah. A dangerous fugitive. A man who wanted to bring sexy back. The police hunted him down. Able-bodied men organized witchhunts. His gut twisted and protested, but he ignored it. The only thing on his mind was his message, his mission.

The wind suddenly died and the dog’s howls faded with it. Tendrils of mist were creeping out of alleys and slowly filling the streets. Justin Timberlake swallowed hard, images from all the horror movies he’d seen flashing into his head. He tried to shake off his fear but failed. The thickening fog quickly hid the black top; he could feel it pushing against his skin through his shiny black pants. It was even colder than the winter air around him, making goose-bumps form all over his body.

That’s when he decided, he had to do it. It was just him left. What would happen to the hapless destitutes in the porn industry? The forlorn creatures who sold massage oils and whips? What about poor Mr.Hefner?

He grabbed that microphone, and announced to the world at large on that fateful September day, that he was back baby. And he ain’t comin empty-handed. Watch out world.

Ev’ry Line On Mr. D’Arcy’s Face

2006-09-18T18:07:00.000+08:00

So I’m at Borders the other day and I find a book I’ve been looking for, for what is it... five years? I’m scared of people stealing my credit card details so I don’t use amazon.com. What can I say? I’m a dinosaur with a neurosis. Anyway, it was this book by Elmore Leonard, ‘Mr.Paradise’ and I'm flabbergasted to find it comes in a purple and gold cover that is so sickening it's like one of those cheapie romance novels. Shame shame Elmore.

So here’s an idea for bookstores.

Why can’t we choose our own book covers? Go back a few decades, when books didn’t have covers designed for them. They were all distinguished only by the title on the cover and the quality of the leather or the embossing. Now, I’m not asking for Encyclopaedia quality leather-binding. Just a simple plain cover with a solid colour background with the title in a simple Goudy Book 14 pts. And customers get to choose their own color for the book in question. Or if that’s too complicated, screw it. Just give us the option of a plain cover.

Some publishers have caught on to the appeal of stark simplicity. In fact, imagine my chagrin when a few aisles down I see a section of ‘Borders Classics’ where they were hawking hard-bound editions of dust-gatherers like Dicken’s ‘Hard Times’ and ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’, in the exact manner that I described. Although they used a more modern Mrs Eaves style typeface instead. Still, it was a serif. And to give credit where it’s due, it was better than Goudy.

Now, I’m not a big fan of Charles Dickens. His writing is a bit too sentimental for my liking but I found myself buying the ‘Borders Classics’ version of ‘Christmas Carol’ just because I thought the cover was pretty. How shallow is that? I may as well convert and become a Bengali art director*.

But how about it? Wouldn’t it be cooler to have old-style book covers with no shit outside? Think of the money publishers would save. Think of how many more hits the book review sites of the Guardian and the NY Times would get now that people cannot judge a book by its cover. You browse on the net, read the reviews and buy at the bookstore. Amazon would argue that you could do all three on the net but I’m persisting with my Jurassic principles.

And just to prove I’m not all talk, I’m walking the talk. Just to let the Borders store people know that I’m with them in their lofty new ideal, I purchased not one, not two, but six of their simply designed masterpieces. It may be a while before I read ‘Pickwick Papers’ again, but I’ve sworn to not buy any books until I’ve finished all my Borders Classics.

That’s right. I am going to re-read every arcane piece of literature that the University of Poona’s dons of Literature haven’t already coerced me into reading. They had us read ‘Jane Eyre’ in second year, can you believe that? The only reason I know of ‘ev’ry line on Mr. D’Arcy’s face’ is because somebody thought ‘Pride and Prejudice’ would make scholars out of us.

And now look at me. Denied my chance to partake of Mr. Leonard’s excellent prose, I seek refuge in the shelter provided by ‘Borders Classics’.

Hark! I must return to my task and lest I lose a minute, nay, a second, I bring this record of my thoughts to a premature end.

*True story. This Bengali art director I know had the entire works of Charles Dickens at home, leatherbound. And he could barely speak English! It would have taken him an hour to read his own name. When asked if Dickens was his favourite author, he said no, Dickens was ok, but he preferred O. Henry!

Make Your Daddy Proud, Son.

2006-09-12T12:16:00.000+08:00

I don’t remember where I read this but it’s a popular maxim widely advocated in advice books and Readers’ Digest back-issues. “People see you as you see yourself “. Whatever. Some kind of eighties mantra, I suppose. Up there with “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”. But for some reason the thought popped into my head today. Not really “People see you as you see yourself “ but its corollary “What if you become the guy people expect you to be?”

Say for example, there’s this guy. He’s a currency trader, or investment banker. There’s a certain perception of an investment banker. It’s pinstripes, a cold demeanour and cut-throat principles. Whether you like it or not, the minute you introduce yourself to someone as an investment banker, these thoughts are going to enter their head.

(Just as being an advertising man somehow makes you out to be a hippie schmoozer).

What I realized is, that for every banker who resists these stereotypes, there are ten who embrace them. I’m telling you the vast majority of bankers aren’t really cold-hearted Gordon Geckos but aspire towards that ideal. In other words, they want to become what people expect them to be. I suppose that’s because, in their minds, these are positive stereotypes. It’s like the stereotype of black men being well-hung. Why do I hear no brothers out there proh-testin’?

Stereotypes are important because people need to put a label to things. (For further information on this, visit youtube.com and type ‘Russell Peters’ in the search box). Sure there are negative stereotypes as well (just ask the Aussies) but on the whole I think we Indians have come out with the better end of the stick. Let’s see how we’ve benefited from narrow-minded thinking over the ages.

PRE-WW2

Hello, I am Babbooo, hypnotist Maharajah from India. I sleep on a bed of nails and I ride an elephant to work. I can levitate and do the rope trick. I have rubies as big as coconuts, an extensive harem and peacocks in my back-garden. You want to see my python, memsahib?

POST-WW2

Hello, I am Dina Ram, a self-righteous, indignant, skinny native who wears a dhoti and carries a stick. There are millions of people like me and we all ride on the roofs of train compartments. I demand to be treated good. And I don’t want your Marie biscuit. Just a little respect, thank you.

SEVENTIES

Hay-llooo, I yam Ramprasad Govind Gopichand Badrinath Choudary. I yam vayry pleased to be meeting you. I yam scientist at the NASA. My yenger brether is ahlso theeyer in the Yoo Yes. He yees a dahctar in Maryland. If I have caused you any inconvenience, a thousand apologies.

EIGHTIES-NINETIES

Hullo. I am Apu. I own a supermarket.

PRESENT

Good morning sir, this is Tara from Citibank, don’t let my American accent fool you, I work out of a call-centre in Hyderabad, and I have stolen a job that may have belonged to your community, but you can’t do shit about it, because the moment you breathe a word, I’ll be screaming ‘Xenophobe!’ so hard, you won’t know even realize how soon I’ll have the hippies picketing outside your door. Now, how may I help you?

To tell you the truth, I liked the Babboo era better. Wouldn’t you? Which is why I have no issues with the films of Peter Sellers gaining cult-status, Indiana Jones and the temple of doom and images of Indians on elephants.

A friend of mine who was recently blessed with a child told me he was planning a return to traditional trades for his son. Said he was going to train his son to be a hypnotist. Needless to say, I applaud his worthy ambition and I wish him well. That’s what India needs. Not bloody engineers and slave coders. We need more snake charmers, magicians. Look at David Blaine and David Copperfield. That’s our turf you’re standing on. Scram, shitbird. Make way for the next generation of Indians.

Warning: May contain trace elements of hard-boiled eggs.

2006-09-04T16:45:00.000+08:00

Michel Lotito (aka Monsieur Mangetout) from Grenoble, France, has been eating metal and glass since 1959. Gastroenterologists have described his ability to consume 900g (2 lb) of metal per day as "unique". Mangetout - Michel's nickname - literally translates as "eats everything". Michel says bananas and hard-boiled eggs make him sick. [Source: Guinness Book Of World Records]

How does one decide to do stuff like this? How does somebody like Monsieur Mangetout end up polishing off the hub-cabs on his car? Was he sitting around at home one day with a bowl of Doritos, and bored out of his skull thought ‘Wait a minute, should I try eating my key-chain?’ and then having consumed it in one satisfying gulp, figured he ought to have ball-bearings for breakfast every day. Even if you do have the unique ability (and the teeth) to chew through metal, you do it a couple of times to maybe impress a friend (although one must question what kind of friend gets impressed by this) and if you’re famous enough for this, you get to perform it on tv. For money. That’s a total of ten-twenty times. This guy eats from the scrap yard every day! 2 pounds a day. He’s doing it because he likes it. Am I alone in questioning God’s judgement when creating Mangetout? More importantly, is he alone out there? Are there more like him? Is there a secret society of belt-buckle fanatics in your neighbourhood? I won’t be surprised considering there are people who like ritual beatings and David Hasselhoff’s music. And in these days of niche marketing, they might even have a bi-weekly magazine and special airline advertising targeting them. (Would you like your on-flight meal tray to be steel or aluminium?) There’d be special websites…

Monsieur Mangetout’s Restaurant Reviews

Lebanese Lounge
51, Rue de Chevaix, Grenoble, France

Ambience **
Service **
Starters ***
Main Course ***
Dessert **
Cutlery **********************

…special food categories…

Warning: This product may contain trace elements of hard-boiled eggs. Consume at your own risk.

…special clothes…

Introducing new Levi’s, with detachable zippers. 'Cause you never know when hunger strikes.

Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t denounce Mangetout. Or The Guinness Book Of World Records. There are some real whackos out there. At least, to you and me, they would seem so. But are they really the freakshows we make them out to be?

It’s like in Scandinavia, they have a lot of salt with their food. If I ate their food, I’d throw up, because I’m not accustomed to the salt content. But that doesn’t mean Scandinavians are freaks. They are an aberration from my set of fixed notions about food. Or take hippies for example. In the 40’s, if they saw an unwashed bearded man wearing beads, smoking pot, they’d jail him for vagrancy. In the 60’s he was a cultural icon.

Decade by decade, the world is more open to diverse sets of communities. The handicapped, the vertically-challenged, the gay have now found acceptance. People don’t think them freaks anymore. And the world is richer by it. Going by the same rule, with the advancement of civilization, I think the next decade should bring in greater openness to diversity. With certain caveats to keep the criminal element out, we are going to have to accept some serious whackos in the future. For all you know, your kid could be eating refrigerator magnets in between meals tomorrow. And there’s bugger-all you can do about it. Except find out if there’s an online community and a special section in the supermarket.

Pimp My Kundalini

2006-08-24T17:04:00.000+08:00

I have this theory that most new age healing rackets (I-Ching, Tarot, Numerology, Reiki, Dreams, ESP, Karma) are fronts for gigolos.

I lay the facts before you.

Who are the people who visit these places? Mostly affluent women in the 35-55 age bracket. The Tupperware audience, to be precise.

What is the one thing they have to offer? Looks? At that age, after a couple of kids and a decade of gluten-rich snacking? I think not. Money? Oh yesss….they’re loaded, these cows.

What is the one thing they need? It’s not more clothes. It’s not little ceramic dogs or Little Bo Peep figurines. (For some reason, they love ceramic Little Bo Peep fugurines. And it cuts across cultures. Chinese, Indian, Arab women, they all love them. Fuck knows what that is about.) And it’s certainly not karmic healing. The only healing them girls needs is the kind Marvin Gaye spoke of.

Having established these facts, I shall proceed to further astound you with my razor-sharp logic.

Ok, so now we have a rich, middle-aged woman who’s in heat. Where does she go for jungle love? Would she go to a place with so brazen a front as ‘Miguel’s Massage Heaven’? Good heaven, no. Even though they aren’t, their own perception of themselves as classy dames would prevent them from entering Miguel’s neon-lit premises. Besides, they might just run into their husbands there.

Women would just not go for stuff like that. That’s why the back section of Cosmo and Vogue aren’t filled with little 20 cc ads for ‘Love Chatlines’ and ‘Erotic saunas’ like those of GQ and Esquire.

Women need euphemisms.

Hence, all this tarot-reiki-feng shui stuff. Of course it doesn’t work. You think women didn't know that? They’re heaps more intelligent than men anyway. Don't let all the blonde jokes fool you, they're very clever. I know that's a very broad statement. But I'll just let it lie for now. It'll just be a matter of time before another Richard Gere film grosses 20 mill and they'll go and prove me wrong.

Straits Times Collectibles 2

2006-08-16T15:47:00.000+08:00

Funny isn’t funny enough, news isn’t newsworthy enough until you’ve read Singapore’s finest national newspaper…Singapore’s only national newspaper…give it up, ladies and gentlemen for the incomparable, irrepressible…Straits Times!

Tuesday, Aug 15
Chee put on trial for speaking in public without a permit.

Thursday, July 27
Burial of 300kg man: Undertaker says its his biggest job ever.

Wednesday, July 26
NDP website to be kept error-free

Tuesday, July 25
Cellphone thefts fall for the first time in three years

Tuesday, July 25
Thai worker allegedly killed pimp from forest brothel

The Eccentricities Of A Genus

2006-08-15T18:43:00.000+08:00

Think of pointless creatures and a great many will probably spring to mind – the sloth, the meerkat, Paula Abdul. Of the innumerable possible candidates to review, (I can only choose a few) here are some who have made it to this worthy selection.

1. THE WOODPECKER

What can one say about a creature that devotes its life to head-butting trees? Come on, there’s plenty of food out there. Nature isn’t such a parsimonious provider that you have to hammer your way through hard wood to find ticks and bugs. Apart from this silly and annoying obsession, they’re also blighted with some of the most ridiculous plumage in the arboreal world. After nature does its worst, humans have to give it a name that consists of two words which are both slang for a man’s private parts.

2. THE ELEPHANT SEAL

Nature at its ridiculous best. If this is a result of evolution, I want to see what it ‘evolved’ from. Usually found in great herds, these giant pneumatic lumps actually deliver four tons of meat to anyone looking to stock up their larders. I can’t think of any creature in history that is easier to hunt. Their sole defense mechanism involves wriggling their proboscis and furiously paddling with their stumpy flippers. Look at it. Just look at it. Looks like a fallen motorcycle seat with a knob on it. Now you know how our primitive ancestors with the lemon-sized brains managed to survive the Ice Age with a pair of fur-pants and a rock tied to a stick.

3. THE DUCK-BILLED PLATYPUS

You can always count on the Australian continent to provide the world with guffaws. Their inclination towards naming places ‘Coolawumba’ and ‘Joombatuffaburra’ and their laughable indigenous cuisine and accent notwithstanding, they have some biological freaks there that would make Ripley drop his jaw in disbelief. Animals that hop. Goggly-eyed tree-huggers. And the piece de resistance – a dog-like creature with flippers and a whopping great duck’s bill for a mouth. If I wasn’t better informed I’d credit a great Photoshop artist rather than God with creating this masterpiece of buffoonery. And get this, it is the only mammal in the world to lay eggs. To protect it from predators who overcome fits of laughter to attack it, it has been provided with a venomous right claw. Because, as everyone knows, in the Australian animal kingdom, rules forbid predators to attack from the left.

So Bad It’s Good

2006-07-26T18:22:00.000+08:00

The man who invented the pink flamingo garden ornament is a millionaire.
So is the man behind ‘pet rocks’. There is a lesson to be learnt here. If you go into business and your product is crap, you fail. But if it’s really, really, really crap then you become a millionaire.

The surging popularity of kitsch has made millionaires out of DC Comics and Desperate Housewives. Kitsch (or ‘camp’, if you prefer) is a get-rich quick scheme that has been around for ages. It’s potential is vastly underrated. Insight - people like a laugh. Let me rephrase that, people are suckers for a laugh. That’s why so many people forward
dumb e-mails around.

A few years back, I was involved in this sort of artist-community project with my art director, Jiten and another writer George Koshy. One drunken night, we’re telling each other crude puns that make use of harmless English words that sound like obscenities in the vernacular. The kind that Dada Kondke made popular. (Eg: ‘Bank ki lorry’, which on the face of it means, the lorry from the bank. Read another way, it sounds like ‘sister’s arse’).
Check out www.bosedkdesigns.com to see them. T-shirts we made out of these subsequently sold for Rs. 1500 each at an art gallery and were sold out on the first day! Just to give you a sense of scale, the standard rate for a Levi’s or Benetton t-shirt in India rarely goes beyond Rs. 250. Jiten has since moved on from kitsch and makes loads more money making real art (depends how you look at it really) but it’s the corny Dada Kondke joke t-shirts that he is still best known for in design circles.

My armchair entrepreneur brain now goes into overdrive. If we take ‘making crap really, really crap’ as an idea, then surely the Americans haven’t cornered the market. Every country’s got tons of crap. Asia’s already got one winner in karaoke. How about other stuff?

The Ice Kachang has possibilities. But they need to do something that makes it worse. Maybe sprinkle some prawn crackers on it. (If they don’t do that already). Marketed well, India’s tooth powder and beedies can be a hit surely. Prestige pressure cookers will soon be in people’s living rooms with their Phillipe Starck chairs. And if only they up the ante on the cheese factor a little bit more, people will be bidding for Rupa underwear and banians on e-Bay. Everybody’s tried kitsch at one point or the other, with varying degrees of success. MTV’s benefited the most with its Quick Gun Murugan and Banjo-Macho spots. Some time back, a Delhi restaurant called Khaaja Chowk made a few bucks too. There’s no denying there’s money in cheesy stuff. The trick is in deciding the degree of corniness.

I’ve decided to try and get my hands on some of Y&R’s original SingTel and Citibank prints from the 90s. Who knows, it might be worth a buck or two someday.

Snorkelling At Sentosa

2006-07-25T17:35:00.002+08:00

I’ve got to stop whining about Singapore. For one thing, everyone does it. The expats do it, the PRs do it, the Singaporeans themselves do it. And it’s always the same thing. The lack of personal freedom. The ban on chewing gum. It’s so small. There’s nothing to do.

I’m an expat. I’m from a country where you have personal freedom, you can bring in as much chewing gum as you like, is huge and there’s a lot to do. Nevertheless I wouldn’t trade a day of living in Bombay for one in Singapore.

Let’s imagine that day. Let’s say I was a working professional in Bombay. I’d have a decrepit flat in Bandra. (For which I’d have to pay a prohibitive 12-months security deposit). I wake up in the morning to muggy weather and open the curtains to let in the fresh smell of exhaust and sea-breeze. I make myself a cup of third-world Nescafe. Which tastes crap. (Just because the label says Nescafe, it doesn’t mean it’s the same as the Nescafe in the first world. There’s a world of difference. Go to an imported goods store anywhere in India and you’ll see that imported versions of the same brand are marked up.) Then I rush to work, skipping breakfast, because it takes upwards of an hour to get there. I pay 20 bucks and sit in a smelly cab that smells faintly of urine, listen to the unwashed Bihari cab driver pass lewd comments about schoolgirls crossing the road. An armless beggar passes by while I see stray dogs baying at each other in their frequent territorial wars. I get off at Bandra station. This is beggar-fest. Anyone with an ounce of compassion is bound to be disturbed by scenes of human beings wasting away to skin and bone, scavenging among blackened piles of garbage. It’s gut-wrenching to watch. People in Bombay are blind to this. It’s not that they’re cruel. Just conditioning I guess. A sweaty crowd bundles you into your train. Inside the train I can smell coconut oil, Pond’s Dreamflower talcum powder, armpits and invariably, Vicks Vaporub. After half an hour of doing a slow grind with an old man next to me, I get off. My expensive aftershave now smells different. My face is oily and I feel a bit sticky so I feel an enormous sense of relief when I step into the air-conditioned office. We’re supposed to go to the client’s office for a presentation at noon which means I have to see if studio’s got my stuff ready. What stuff? The artists are out having a fag. A nervous one hour passes. I plead and make piss-ant threats (which I won’t act upon) and finally get the work out. I spend 45 minutes in the taxi explaining my ads to the suit who keeps interrupting the conversation by talking loudly into his cell-phone headset to his wife, son and some irate supplier who hasn’t received his money. We reach the client’s tacky, faux-gothic, depressing, granite monstrosity of an office building. The waiting area has far too many fluorescent lamps which makes you feel like you’re waiting for post-mortem results. The meeting was at 12.30. We’re kept waiting for 45 minutes. I’m hungry. I haven’t had breakfast. I’m irritable as hell. Jabba the Hut then joins us. He tells us he was just getting a bite to eat. I still look pissed off because I don’t like being made to wait. The slimy account man, however, is at his servile best, talking nonsense strategy which Jabba nods to, without understanding. ‘Chalo, kaam dekhte hain’. I go through the motions, the rehearsed speech. He tells me it should be more ‘youth-oriented’. He wants me to use words like ‘funda’ and ‘gyaan’ to put more ‘masti’ into it. I’m thinking, who the fuck uses words like that? Mentally-challenged Kirori Mal College crowd or irritating Delhi kids. I’m too hungry and annoyed to argue. I say ‘yes’ to everything. Saying ‘no’ just means I have to do an extra round of work and my boss comes down next week and says ‘yes’ to whatever the client wants. Fuck him, the bastard. I lunch at some greasy place around the corner where there is a lot of clanging going on. I’ve got a headache. On the way back I see some 500,000 ugly billboards telling me to drink coke at 5 rupees, watch Kkusum on Star Plus, wear Dollar underwear and how Garnier Fructis’ colour-lock helps me look like a natural redhead. I try not to read but you can’t miss it. You look out and it’s screaming at you. At the office I meet various forms of the scum-of-the-earth. Somebody’s playing music which is a decade too late on their iPod and singing along. I suppress the urge to snip the wire off. “Do you think this should be one sentence or two sentences?” Two? I psyche myself up to having an argument with my boss. If there’s one thing I will never do, it’s fucking Hinglish. You can write in Hindi. Or write in English. How can you mutilate two separate languages which have their own syntax and rhythm by cobbling them together? There’s no beauty, no grace in it. They should leave fusion to semi-perveous rocks in the earth’s sub-strata. The CD takes the job off me and gives it to someone who is willing and able to write Hinglish. I’ll go far in this place. I have the cigarette I swore this morning I wouldn’t smoke. Lukewarm tea to go with it. But at least the samosas are good. I waste the rest of the day googling stupid shit on the internet and catching up on football news. Suit tells me we have to work over the weekend. I tell him to fuck off. Half an hour later my boss tells me the same thing. I whine for a bit but concede. What am I going to do on a weekend in Bombay anyway? Sure there’s a lot to do in India as compared to Singapore. You can scale the Himalayas. You can go snorkelling in Goa and enjoy Rajput hospitality at Pushkar. How many people actually get to live that life on weekends? The most they do is watch movies at some plasticky Multiplex and eat Subway sandwiches.

And you can chew all the goddamn chewing gum you want.

Amsterdam, or Rio de Janeiro, or Zanzibar may be different. Maybe you can go snorkelling on the weekends in Rio, if that’s what you want. But if you were the snorkelling sort, you’d figure some way to get your fix of adventure no matter which country you are in, wouldn’t you?

Even if it is on a fake tropical beach on Sentosa with radio monitors and CCTV attached to the pier.

Straits Times Collectibles

2006-07-24T10:45:00.000+08:00

Cleverer than Tattoo-Monthly!
Sleazier than Readers Digest!
Funnier than Mein Kampf!

Just read the sunny Straits Times to keep updated on compelling stories like this:

Friday 21 July 2006
Rochor Road Beancurd Seller’s New Rival Is His Own Brother!

Friday July 21 2006
Woman Jailed For Stealing Mum’s Credit Card

Sun 23 July 2006
Unemployed Taxi Driver Apologises For Punching MP
(His apology letter printed in full, taking up half the page)

Monday July 10, 2006
Zidane Ought To Be Ashamed Of Himself
“… ought to be imprisoned for his violent conduct and fined his
entire year’s earning and strongly urged to seek anger management therapy”