No Goals Achieved !!!

Conversation with a Phirangi Friend, in a Phirangi Land
"So do you follow soccer? Oh, wait. You guys call it football in India, right?"
"Yeah! It's kinda strange. Given that you hit a Ball with your ... err ... hmmm ... your Foot!!! the naming does sound a little strange!"
"Oh shuddup! No seriously, is soccer big in India?"
"It's bigger than big - it's BIIIIG!!"
"So how come you guys don't feature in the World Cup?"

Very true! How come we guys don't feature in the World Cup? We are a country of one billion people. Couldn't we find eleven people who kick a round piece of air filled leather blob the right way???? Come on now! What are the chances of that. Given our population and gusto for the game, we should send two teams for the World Cup. "In a thrilling semi final match, India A beat India B. We know that half a billion people are happy and rejoicing right now. What say Mike?" Now that's what we should be hearing on TV. But no - the reality is quite sad. So sad that we are all busy picking favorites from other countries. My dad is supporting Argentina. My sister is supporting "the team David Beckham plays for". My uncle likes to pick lesser known teams and support them - so it's gonna be Costa Rica for him. Blah blah!

And it's not just football. Basketball, wrestling, tennis, swimming ... you name it and we suck in that sport. Lemme repeat the point. WE ARE A COUNTRY OF ONE BILLION PEOPLE. We have snow, water, rain forests, everything. Combining these two statistics we should win gazillion gold medals in every freakin sporting event - Summer Olympics, Winter Olympics, Olympics for the people in moderate climate zones, Wimbledon - whatever! But No! The only games we seem to excel in are the ones that got surprisingly left out from every big sporting event - or which in common man's lingo means - GAMES THAT NOBODY CARES FOR.

It's like they had this auction going on for all the big games and the Indian dude representing us landed up really late. The auctioneer took a quick look at him and sighed.

"Too bad Appu! You are late. We have nothing left for you. The Americans came in early and took most of the good stuff - athletics, basketball, tennis, boxing, everything! The Chinese sent a lot of people too and they got a decent deal as well. We had the long distance races left for a while and we gave them of to the people from Africa. The South Americans sent in a big delegation for soccer alone. So that was theirs. Too bad Appu. We have nothing left for you."

So Appu becomes all dejected and whimpers.

"What abt snooker and billiards?" Appu asks, albeit in a subdued tone.

"Those are gone buddy. We have carrom left though. It's the same thing, just less interesting."

"Ok! I'll take that," Appu sighed.

The guy in charge of distribution felt sorry for Appu at this point. So he cut him a deal.

"What abt cricket?" he asks. "It's this game like baseball but the players have to be more dressed than a man attending a business meeting. It's like you are going for a luncheon but stopped midway to play some sport. Not too many people wanted it. Only the English and Aussies claimed it. And remember no women will ever get associated with it. Not even cheerleaders!"

So Appu becomes all excited hearing that the Brits play it. We were ruled by the Brits for centuries. The very mention of the word England gets us excited. So he readily agrees to taking cricket. He even agrees to share it with everybody else in the sub continent."

Just as he is about to leave, the auction master calls him again.

"Hey, do you want khoko and kabaddi as well?"

"What's that?" Appu asks.

"I dunno. No one else did either. I believe you have to hold your breath and repeat Kabaddi, Kabaddi, Kabaddi till you faint with breathlessness. Oh! And there will be a lot of dirt too. Want that?"

Now we know that as Indians we don't let go of anything. You can give us a free blue whale and we'll take it and put it in our living room and flaunt it to every relative. "My son got this blue whale FREEE! He did not have to pay a single penny for it." So Appu lapped up khoko and kabaddi as well.

Once again he was about to leave and the auctioneer called out again (how dramatic).

"Want this game called Chess? Well! To be perfectly honest, it's not exactly a game. It's more like an indoor thing. The Russians love it coz it's cold in Russia and they can play chess inside their rooms. We have some chess shares left. You care for some? But we believe that you need a high IQ and boredom tolerance to be a master in it and ..."

Appu was all ecstatic at this point. "A thinking game did you say? Oh we love thinking games. That way parents can fool their children into playing this game while what they are actually doing is preparing them for engineering school. My people will love it. Thank you. Thank you," he exclaimed.

And that is how we got it all. Hmmmmm!

Limit tending to engineering !!!

Flashback in hazy black and white - Years ago (I was around 4-6 years old/young then) they asked me in kindergarten what my dad did for a living. Now mom had taught me, along with my name, age, address, favorite color and nursery rhymes, the fact that my dad was a Mechanical Engineer. I believe I dint even think for a moment, looked at the highly overweight Mrs. Gabriel, and told her with a whiff of confidence that my dad was a "mechanic". I still remember that Mum was very disappointed/agitated/tense once I narrated this incident (probably expecting some kudos from her) to her, coz apparently a mechanic is different from a mechanical engineer.

The main story begins - every time anything stops working in the house (ranging from a toaster to the television) my mom expects Dad to fix it on his own. "What kind of an engineer are you?" she'll begin, "the shower is leaking and you can't even fix that." Dad would try to fix the shower, ensure that it drips even more and then call the plumber. "You are absolutely useless. I wonder how you cleared engineering," Mum would indulge in banter. Once in a while Dad tries to explain that he hadn't exactly taken Introduction to Plumbing 102 in college but Mum doesn't care much. Her logic is simple - "If you can't do her chore, you aint an engineer no more" :)

Now the same thing is coming back to haunt me. My mum asks me over the phone, "The computer is so slow. Why can't you make it fast?" she asks me earnestly. "Mom, that's coz we bought it in 1945 after the Quit India movement. You should be happy that the museum hasn't yet seized it. Why don't you buy a new computer?" I protest in vain. "You are just like your dad. Both of you are of no use to the house. What did you learn in ..." Suddenly we are interrupted by the sound of gushing water. Dad has failed to fix the shower again, making it worse in the process. "Now, I have to call the plumber again," Mum says, while running towards the bathroom, "I think I should have married a plumber."

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Wishful Thinking
How I wish that people were half as generous to me with their money as they are with their advice :)

Ringing all the way !!!

Does this happen with everybody or is it only me and yet another global conspiracy to give me hypertension before it is entirely necessary?

My phone will remain silent and dead to the world for ages and ages. Then, just as I am about to go and kill myself from boredom, it will mercifully ring. And then, before I have spent two seconds talking to the person who has called, I shall start getting those insistent beeps which mean someone else is trying to call me. Subsequently, as I hastily cut off the first conversation mid-way and launch into the next, those beeps will sound again meaning a third person has now joined the queue of those who would gladly chop their arms off into little little pieces without the aid of aneasthesia for a chance to talk to me RIGHT NOW.

Oh, and sometimes in the middle of all this my landline will also ring, meaning my mother has chosen this moment of all others to order me to send 5 SMSs to some TV program to help a girl from Jamshedpur I've never seen in my life win some crazy talent show.

And then when I have managed to juggle all the conversations and given Airtel the chance to rob me a bit more by calling back what feels like scores of people, my phone will fall silent and remain in that state for the next five hours.

Do tell me it's not something I have done to upset the universe?