Why do i have to give a Title to Everything ???

This is the summary of a philosophical (I take this term very loosely) discussion that I had witha friend whom i lovingly call, 'Mamooli Man'

So who are we? Twenty Five something plus "youngsters" (please let me touch the lines of being presumptuous). Almost 99% of all my peers pretty much do the same thing(s) - some of us study, some of us work, some of us study and work simultaneously, some companies pay a little more, some companies make you work a little more, some companies hire, some companies fire ... we don't stand out. There's no glamour. There's no clear case of braggadocio. No one peer of mine has done anything that makes him a clear champion. So in such a case it becomes extremely difficult to boast and brag.

"You know X bought a Honda Civic"

"No, no. He leased it. Even I can do it if I want - it's just that I want to save some money ..."

"You know Y got a job in Company Z."

"Yeah. But then I chose to work in this small company. I get to learn sooo much more and we get free pizzas for lunch. Plus his company fired 1/5th of its employees last month."

"Z have N billion publications."

"Yeah! Sure. But no one cares for them in the industry."

However, the attempts are always there. We all try to stand out and prove a false sense of achievement. New jobs, New Cars, foreign postings, foreign admissions - we mention them aplenty. Sometimes we evoke temporal awe, sometimes we don't, but the desire and attempt to prove to people around us that we have "arrived" remains.

So we discussed whether we'll do the same thing ten years down the line and figured that by then we would have realized that whatever we do hardly affects anyone. So we'll take the competition to the next level - our children.

"X's son just placed third in the Zonal Chess Championship."

"Ya! But you should see how much X makes his son study. I have told my daughter - do whatever you want."

"My daughter just got admission in University Z with a fellowship."

"My son can do High School Mathematics in KG."

"My daughter can sing in five languages."

Whatever we are doing now will fade to be important in ten years. My mom barely mentions what my dad does/did at work. Neither does our neighbor. To them it's far more important now to see which of their daughters get a better groom. Having figured this, Mamooli and I thought that it'll be best then to get a head start. If we become the earliest in our batch to have kids then we can blame all our present failures by saying, "See, once you have a kid you realize that there's sooo much more than a petty salary hike". And finally, when the competition would indeed reach the kid-zone ten years from now, all our peers would think, "boy, we are worrying abt getting our kid's to Kindergarten and look at Abhi. His son is already in fifth standard. He took such a good decision by starting early."

So the key to produce awe is to produce now. Peace!

What's in a Name ???

Call a rose by any name ... it'll still cost you money to buy and a girl to gift.

I have seen Indian parents monitor what their daughter wears outside the house. In spite of flaunting a so-called modern liberal attitude, the occasional "No, that dress is too short" or the "You can only wear that top if you wear a jacket on top of that" does the rounds of various households. A common phrase that often pops up in these monitored moments is "Don't forget that you are representing the Rai household." I was talking to a friend and figured that this is indeed a very common Indian technique, where Indian parents glamorize their family name and attach a huge amount of importance to it. "What? You failed in class. No member of the Chowdhurys has ever received a red mark on their report card", "You can't date her. After all you are a Ranganathan. What will people say", "Don't forget that when you walk out of that door, you are representing every Kumar of our family", yada, yada, yada ... we've all heard some variant of these (including the emphatic Hindi version - "bhoolna mat, tum Kapoor khandan ke bahu ho ...".

Don't you think that we assign way too much importance to our family names? Coz it's very likely that nobody even knows them. This entire post happened coz I had this hilarious visual in my mind of people actually wearing name tags in public places so that they can be held accountable. Imagine walking to a restaurant and seeing this hot dame in a skirt so short that when she puts the napkin on her thigh, her dress size doubles. You walk up to her and check out the badge she's wearing. "Aha! You are a Dutta I see. I should have guessed. Duttas are notorious folks," you say and walk off. The next morning the newspaper screams out "Duttas embarrassed again. This time in a restaurant." Now that would be truly bringing your family name down. People will then be really careful. Clubs will have hoardings saying, "No Kamats allowed" and people of the Kamat family would have to use frauduent schemes to get badges bearing the highly revered "Arora" tag :)) When the girl with the shoulderless dress gets down from the car after a night of wild partying, one of the two old neighbors would say, "Is she a Lal? Look at her dress." To this, the all knowing second man would say, "No way. Look at her badge. She is a Lalwani. The Lal's wouldn't dare to wear clothes like this. Not after their rating went down so much last year!"

Bottomline - most people don't know us. People who pass fleeting judgements abt us don't even know who their pointed fingers are aiming at. And yet we go through hours of scrutiny to uphold a tag which doesn't even exist. Why?

Return of the King ( for his Queen )

Women have stopped talking to me thinking it was me who brain-washed their men. Men have stopped talking to me thinking I've betrayed their trust by letting out their secrets. Animals give me dirty looks because that's what animals always do. And still I write this post as my habit to write on men-women relationships. Yes! ladies, gentleman and little Buzo - it's time to touch upon the all important topic of gifts.

Gifts are very very important in the "guy abroad and girl in India" romance. Gifts are the key to all the reservations she has in her mind against you. ( Especially in a case like mine, when the first year of courtship with my to-be wifey was with me in Pardes & she in Des) So play this card carefully. You have to keep in mind that you are trying to woo someone who hangs out with a lot of people whose boyfriends stay just next to them (sometimes even on top of them). So while these gal pals boast abt how "my guy surprised me with a bunch of roses last night" or "my guy is the most amazing kisser", your lady love has little to show off abt her long distance wooer. She tried mentioning your Designation once or maybe she mentioned the salary you draw in your job but the moment her best friend's bike riding boyfriend got all her friends tickets for the latest Shahrukh Khan movie, everyone forgot abt you. Some day the thought will pop in her head - "it'll be so nice if my guy is here too". Bingo! That's when the gift helps.

The first gift is very important! You screw up with the first gift and you might not get a second chance. Don't start with flowers - if sent from Phoren, they'll wither and if sent from some company back home, it wont impress her that much. Please don't send her a dress either; coz if you get the size wrong, you are dead - nothing hurts a girl as much as a beautiful dress she can't wear. Send her something that you still don't get in India OR something that is very expensive in India. Perfumes are as good as it gets. You make her smell good and she'll remember you everytime she smells that scent. Don't be cheap - go for one of the brands - nothing less than a Chanel or CK please. Play the first card well and thereafter you can be cheap and give her local brands and say "It's a new one that just came out and all the women in my office are raving abt it." But no compromises with the first one please.

The iPod Shuffle can be a great first gift too. A tad bit expensive mind you but a lot cheaper than what it is in India. Not only will the iPod speak for itself, it'll speak for you too. The next time her friends talk abt how their boyfriends did blah and bluh, all she'll have to do is plug the ear phones in her ear. All eyes will open and all mouths will shut. Yeah baby! If the Shuffle is too expensive for you - buy her a Palm Pilot. If that's expensive too OR if you are really cheap - settle for the best alternative - exotic chocolates. Mind you - the term is Exotic. Don't send her Nestle bars coz she can get that in India too. Go for Godiva. If you are really reallllly cheap - even a truck load of Ferrero Rochers can help. Coz these are chocolates that are still considered to be exotic in India and are much cheaper when bought here. So remember - the first gift should reinforce the notion that "my guy is a catch"!!

But the first gift is a double edged sword. A very expensive first gift increases expectations for a second one. And it's just a matter of time before her birthday comes and you can't blame her for expecting a big ring then (maybe even with a woman's best friend sitting in the middle). So the trick is to send one of those "cho chueeeet follow up gifts" just after you send the first gift. Say a big soft toy or flowers from India. This gift, if sent soon enough, will ease out her expectations, while keeping the first gift fresh in her memory. Thereafter you can send her three small gifts and a big one for every two months and she'll be happy.

Wooof! Am I glad that this topic is over !!!

Guest Appearance !!!

It was 11 o clock on a Sunday morning . I was watching TV and wifey was browsing through the morning paper. There was a knock on the front door. Brought a stranger trying to sell magazines to our house. Brought delightful memories of childhood to my mind.

These are stories from a loooong looong time back. Many of you reading this blog might not even identify with the premise of this post. I must have been in the third or fourth standard then. Not too many people had telephones and the internet - duh! Yanyway! Those days everytime the door bell rang it would be a new found excitement for me and my sister. Especially in the evenings. Coz then we knew it wasn't the maid, or the milkman, or any those innumerable ladies trying to get old clothes in exchange for shiny cutlery. A knock or bell in the evening meant surprise guests ... and that spelt FUN. There was phenomenal anticipation associated with it. Was it any of the close uncles and aunts? A door knock instead of a door bell meant even more fun coz then it was probably a cousin who couldn't reach the bell. He would have ran up before his parents. Neha and I would rush to the door and there was always excitement while opening it. Everybody had their own way of ringing the bell. Some pressed it for too long. Others played their own tunes. Mom would often play a little guessing game as Neha and I ran to find out who the winner was.

I remember the time when we put one of those safety chains to the door. It was literally like a surprise gift. As Mom opened the door partially, the face of the guest would get revealed. Our expressions would change accordingly. A relative or family friend with kids meant that we wouldn't have to study any more that evening. That brought a glee to our faces. Occasionally it would be a false call. Given the rectangular layout of our building, we often had lost folks trying to reach the other side. Oh, we hated them. But whatever it was, a knock on the door or a ring of the door bell was always fun.

Times have changed so much. Nobody is excited by these petty joys anymore. Everybody is super busy. Everybody has a cell phone. Surprise visits don't surprise no more. They scare us. Nobody wants to put in that much effort. It's so much safer to make the customary cell phone call before dropping in. At least then the food will be good :-)

Even in Bangalore things are different. I can't remember getting a surprise visit in ages. Why would anybody do it? People plan meetings three weeks in advance. "Hey, man. We haven't met in like ages. What say we go out for dinner next weekend?" "Sorry, dude! I have a working next weekend . What say the weekend after that?"

Times have changed. We have changed. Memories remain.

Under Where ???

I'm confused again. This time the topic of confusion is "underwear and the media". Yup! Moi is totally confounded by the way underwear is advertised, and it's time to speak up.

It all started when I read the line "she is a Victoria Secret model" in an article. Accompanying the article was the picture of an oooh la la woman, dressed in ... aah ... hmmm ... well, lessay she came with almost no strings attached. Yanyway! This visual made me think of all the undergarment ads that I've ever seen and I realized that the media probably got it all wrong. And it's not just female models that I'm talking abt. I've seen women drool over all those Jockey hunks. Those guys don't have six packs - they have more like fifteen. Chiseled jaws, pecked chests, sinewy torsos and nothing but a skimpy underwear on. Standing all wet with an unshaven look. Women going "whoaaaaa, just look at him."

Sadly, it's not women who buy men's underwear, but men who do so and (the same logic holds true for women's lingerie). And what do you think the average man is thinking when he sees this ad - he's like "Hmmm! Even with that pair of undies I'm not going to get those whistles. For all you know it'll just make those women realize just how different I am from these men."

Yup! The average man is likely to get terribly intimidated by six packed underwear models. Hunky bare chested men don't appeal to us (or at least most of us). Naaaaa! We want to see some flab. Give us six packs but fill those packs with some butter and cheese man. Show a balding guy with a tattoo gone wrong, standing with his red pair of boxers on ... with the line "Didn't the red take your eyes off his belly?" Now that's what I call a killer ad. You show me that ad and you have a red underwear customer in me and I'm no exception mind you.

The same logic holds true for women too. Isn't it ironic that they always use models for promoting lingerie that men would rather have naked in the first place. Why do that? I can see people screaming "Oh! Men want their girl friends to look like that and buying those skimpies will accomplish that!" Yeah sure! If I were to believe that some girl dating me will turn into a Gisele Bundchen if I spent Rs 1000 on her ... well, it doesn't speak volumes abt my intelligence - does it? So really - keep it real.

P.S. And what's this with men & women nowadays flaunting the elastic of their underwear? The day is not too far when all that these people will care abt their underwear will be the elastics and trust me - that wont be a pretty sight :)

A friend when not in need........

Visit any of the popular social networking sites - Orkut, Big adda, Face book, blah blah! There's a huuuuuge number of jobless men who are scavenging around these sites with the noble intentions of "making friends". I often look at these people and feel proud of my generation. We must have done something right to produce such a "friendly" lot of people. Yess! Now that I think about it, it does make complete sense. Why wouldn't a hot woman sitting in Boston not want a friend in Balampur India, who can't even spell the word friend right. I'm pretty darn sure that it has indeed been a long standing fantasy of hers to "make frendsip" with random strangers in Indian townships. I salute all ye friendly ones, without which we would not feel so comfortable in this planet.

But then don't categorize all these friends into one big group. These friends, though having a common philanthropic underlying goal, all have different styles. The other day I was categorizing the various "friends" to a friend and it might be worthwhile to mention some of them here:

* The dude: This breed makes extensive use of the modern day SMS lingo. They are super busy. They can't complete their words. "Hi thr, wuz doing rnd browsing. u r cute. wanna b frnds?" That's them. And then there'll be the customary winks and fellow smileys. I don't blame these people for their terse sentences though. They are understandably super busy. After all they are the ones who want to be friends with hundreds of thousands of people. Maintaining so many friends sure takes effort - so pardon their haste kind ones.

* The resume dude: This variety has a lot more time in their hands. Given a chance, they'll leave an entire resume as an initial note. "Hi, I was your neighbor during your three day stay in Ranchi. I am currently doing a computer course in NPTTCS. I saw you like Tom Hanks. I am a fan of him too. I liked him a lot in Titanic. Titanic is my favorite movie. Will you be my friend?" You can fall asleep while reading their messages. You can grow old while reading them. For all you know, you can even finish watching Tom Hanks's Titanic before you can read through the entire message. But there's something that is very earnest abt this variety of friends - they seem to make a sincere effort and I honor them for that.

* The lame complimenting guy (aka the Reproducer): This guy doesn't believing in knocking the door of your heart. He breaks it open. That too with a bang. "Hey cute pic. Nice smile. You are really beautiful. You have nice hair. Wanna make friendship?" If you are feeling low and need a morale booster, just put your best snap in one of these sites and before you hit the upload button you'll get these meaningful praisers responding to your photograph. Click on their profiles and visit some of their "other friends" and you'll get shocked to see the exact same lines with the exact same spelling mistakes reproduced. Clearly these sincere men do not want to differentiate between any of their friends and thinks of them all with an equal amount of love and honesty. Aaaaah!

Three simple points before I end this post. (i) You cannot MAKE friendship. If you pour the right amount of chocolate sauce and flour, you might bake it; for the right kind of gifts you can fake it; but puhleeeeeeeeeze - you cannot freakin make IT. (ii) Why don't we have friendship making women? How come I see absolutely no female counterpart of any of the aforementioned species? Why? (iii) And finally, please read an earlier post of mine in this blog which is very similar in content and much better written. Sadly, I wrote this post a while back and couldn't resist the temptation of posting it - despite the similarities in content.

I have my Reservations !!!

OK, so I had to write this. The few kind regular readers that I have, expect, what they kindly refer to as, funny material from this blog. But I am a human being too and I too have emotions, opinions and in rare cases like this one, rather emotional opinions. Hmmmm! Yes, after much deliberation, I've decided to touch upon the issue that's making every Indian squirm these days - RESERVATIONS! And if you care to read through this entire post, I think I might just have the solution to the problem.

Many years ago I innocently walked up to my dad and asked him what my caste was. My dad explained it to me brilliantly. "You are an ALMOST SC my son," he said with what I believe was an almost drop of tear in his eyes. "You are effectively screwed!", he had then added, though maybe not in those exact words. This was followed by a very long and probably boring explanation, the summary of which was the following - my dad's side of the family just missed being SCs... all because they were not born in India. My grand parents along with my parents & their siblings came to India from Pakistan during the Great Divide of 1947 ( or was it 1948 ??). Thus, as dad explained, we were the true downtrodden of the Indian caste system. Actual SCs and STs laugh at us because we do not qualify for any reservations. So, as dad had suggested, we get screwed from every angle and by every one. How very entertaining.

And it is this lack of concern for the middle tier that worries me. People who are neither here nor there. The proud members of the middle zone of societal apathy. The ones that nobody care for. These people were born with an average bag of talents and somehow we assumed that they are happy being where they are. Everyday TV channels have a "brilliant kid" deriding the quota system and advocating a meritocracy. His interview is immediately followed by a heart wrenching tale of "Dinu from the village" who has never seen electricty but dreams to be an engineer. The camera then zooms into the anchors face who then says "Aap kis ke saath hai?" And then he adds that you can "call in and leave your opinion or SMS it at Re 2.5 and that the lucky vijeta ko milega humarey aur se ..." And who do you think is being fed all this media hyped baloney? Yes!!!! Our very own middle tier. Somehow our policy makers have assumed that the middle tier is happy being in the middle and hence all our policies are aimed at either keeping the rich rich or at making the poor rich.

So this is what I propose. A seemingly ludicrous idea, that I feel, if implemented, will make everyone happy. I say we continue with our entrance-exam-based-system for 50% of the students (as the current plan suggests) and for the remaining 50% seats - let's have a freakin LOTTERY!!! Seriously, that'll make EVERYBODY happy. Top tier, middle tier, bottom tier - every freakin one. Coz everybody will then have an equal chance of making it to these colleges. And let's not just make it any lottery - let's make it the flavour of the season - A freakin REALITY SHOW. Let India vote who it wants as an engineer. Let Indians SMS their opinions for "Agla Lawyer Kaun?" After all we are a democracy, right? What can be more democratic than choosing our very own doctors and engineers and lawyers and chartered accountants?

Seriously, you might think that I'm joking, but a lottery won't be much worse than the present system. Given that India has more poor people than rich ones, by simple probability more poor people will make it to the colleges using a lottery - so the govt will be happy as they'll serve their claimed purpose of improving things for the poor. And the remaining population will be happy too coz they'll know that they too stand an outside chance of making it. Thus, they can no longer raise a voice against anyone or accuse the system of being partial.

And these quotas should not just be applicable for academics. I think this way the quota system itself discriminates against several arenas of social life. We should have quotas for everything. Cricket, movies, affected Ms. India participants - everything. Seriously, I think it's high time we have an OBC quota for our beauty paegents. Why do we assume that the backward castes can have aspirations to study engineering but not one to be Ms. Indias. And look at the good that'll come out of this. If someone from Pachandapur village actually gets up on the stage and says that she'll do something for the poor and downtrodden when she wins - no one will even doubt her.

To sum it up - quotas aint bad. We need more quotas. We need quotas for everything. We need quotas for everyone. And we need Mandira Bedi conducting a lottery show based on quotas.

It's all peace then :-))

No Kid-ding !!!

Everybody says they want to be a kid again. The reasons are manifold - some like the sheer joy of being pampered while others long to relive those moments when every decision was taken for us by others, making things so much simpler. I would love to be a kid for all these reasons but there is an added incentive as well - a kid can get away with the most obnoxious statements without a single tarnish on his/her reputation. Your three year old cousin can call your fifty three year old aunt "fat" and everybody in the family will laugh it away. "He is so innocent na?" the fat neighbor would exclaim. Your cousin's mom would exhibit a fake round of reprimanding, "Cheeh! Jojo, don't call anyone fat." "It's ok baba!" the fat aunt herself would defend, "As if he knows what fat is." What???

Just imagine your girl friend asking you how she looks in her new dress and you replying "slutty". She doesn't bring the house done but starts laughing and her friends tell her "Isn't he soooooo sweeet. Poor chap, he doesn't even know what a slut is." NO!!! That NEVER happens. For that matter, I even get blamed for stuff I genuinely don't mean. Every now and then my wife used to ask me abt her selection of clothes. Ignorant with the nuances of fashion I would sincerely say, "It looks nice." "No seriously," she would shout back, "Tell me what is actually going on in your mind." See now that never happens with a kid.

Enuff. Time to go and get some diapers.

Love, Fate & the Choices we make !!!

A trip was made to my hometown - Mumbai. The first thing I noticed about Mumbai, on that lovely February evening, was the smell of the different air. I could smell it before I saw or heard anything of what was happening on the other side of the airport terminal. I was excited and delighted by it, in that first Mumbai minute, escaped from work and back to my home town, but I didn't and couldn't recognise it. I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilisations in resurrection and decay. It's the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. I could call it the worst good smell in the world. But now i realise this that whenever I return to Mumbai, now, it's my first sense of the city-that smell, above all things-that welcomes me and tells me I've come home.

The next thing I noticed was the heat. I stood in the check-in baggage queue, not five minutes from the conditioned air of the plane, and my clothes clung to sudden sweat. My heart thumped under the command of the new climate. Each breath was an angry little victory. I came to know that it never stops, the jungle sweat, because the heat that makes it, night and day, is a wet heat. The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Mumbai, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.

I made a choice a few years ago & the price i paid for this choice was to bid adieu to this urban hyper active roller coaster land of Mumbai. Now when i reflect back, i weigh once again the gravity of my choice to the sacrifices i made. But then, i still have a long time to live & most of the world to see before i can learn what needs to be known about love, fate & the choices we make.

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The thoughts & subject matter in this post are not exclusively my own. While i did experience what i wrote above, a well known author has helped me put my thoughts to words on paper ( or should i say a web page :-)). I hold him in the highest regard for this guidance.