Sense and Senility

Now that I’m back to my senses after a week’s holiday in Goa, maybe I can actually write a post for a change. One week of doing little but eating, drinking, making merry and learning how to say, “Do you do it doggy-doggy?” in thirteen languages. In other words, quite a fun time. Especially if you happen to be a [cunni] lingual enthusiast.

I returned by the overnight bus. Like most guys, when traveling single, I always hope that I am seated next to a pretty, young female. Well, as it turned out, I WAS seated next to a pretty female, it’s just that I got there about six decades too late! She looked about a gazillion years old, and moved like it too.

A lot is said about the horrors of sitting next to an overweight person on a flight/bus. But I think sitting next to an overaged person is almost as bad. (You get a 320-pound octogenarian next to you on a 6+ hour flight, and I wouldn’t even bet a potato on your chances of surviving it.)

To start off with, old people don’t trust young people very much. This lady looked at me as if I were a serial-killing rapist with a degrees in pickpocketing and thuggery. I could almost hear her say, “Oh dear God! Why did they have to put me next to this frightful piece of half-man half-monster?” I know for a fact that she kept one of her bags on her lap the entire night and used two more to build a fort-like wall between us, which kept falling on me all the time. If her plan was to suffocate me to death, it nearly worked. More than an asphyxiated demise though, what I was really scared of was that she might lose a shoe or something and that I’d get lynched for it.

Old people also don’t like to move too much. I’m the type who needs to stretch my legs when I get a chance. So every time the bus stops, I need to hop off. This meant a regular routine of first bringing down the fort wall, then seven minutes for her to stand up and then by the time I was off the bus, it was already time to get back in again. I’d crawl back into the corner and the ramparts would be slowly reconstructed once more.

And what if she just happened to pop it during the night? She’s old; old people die. I’m sure there was a non-zero chance of her passing away in that bus. I spent half the night with my ear pressed up against the wall of luggage to see if I could hear her breathing. I did NOT want to wake up in the morning with a dead body beside me!

Okay, okay! Don’t get all mad at me for saying such bad things about dear old ladies. I like old people, okay. Just not in the seat next to mine!

(Still, it was better than this.)

Bush and the Queen

Queen Elizabeth visiting the United States was always going to be the perfect set up for a comedy show on T.V. I’m surprised no one’s decided to come up with one as yet. Of course, being President, George Bush felt he had to take the initiative.

His ‘tongue of slip’ on Monday is funny on so many levels that you struggle to figure out which part’s the best! Let’s see. First, he started to say “1776” and just about managed to stop and correct himself on the edge of the precipice. Now, ordinarily this wouldn’t be too funny. We all slip up during speeches sometimes and it’s okay. But remember, the woman he was referring to looks old enough to be Mick Jagger’s great-grand-mother’s nanny. Women don’t like people making fun of their age. George Bush almost added 200 years to hers. Funny.

After correcting himself, the wisest thing you’d think would be to -- uhm, I don’t know -- CARRY ON WITH HIS SPEECH? But of course, you and I are not two-time reigning champions of that elite competition -- The Presidency of the USA. These President types tend to think slightly differently. So what does Bush do? He stops, turns, gives the Queen a John Wayne like look and a WINK! Funny, funny, funny! And stupid.

The Queen then says something in the background. The microphones caught it but not very clearly. I couldn’t make out whether it was “Oh, dear!”, “Oh, yea!” or “Oh, Blighty! How frightfully daft can this bally Texan get?”, but it really could’ve been any one.

And that isn’t even the end. He turns back from the wink, grins impishly at the audience and says, “She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child.” Whoopsie. Is he trying to say she’s like his Mom? So he finally DID manage to insult her age. Well done! I bet she wanted to turn him over on her knee right then and give his little ass a nice spanking.

A lot people were fretting about getting the “protocol” right for the Queen’s visit. I’m not a big fan of protocol myself, except in cases where it makes things simpler for both parties. For example, I’d always stand in favor of a protocol for tipping. Figuring out how much I need to tip someone is just too darned hard otherwise. However, I can live without rules for how to pass someone the hookah pipe or how many times a minute I can breathe when I’m in the presence of royalty. That’s just stupid.

I’d like to see the Queen visit India. It would be even more fun. I bet some government official would do ALL of the following before shaking her hand.

1. Scratch his crotch.
2. Sneeze into his hands.
3. Pick his nose.

Anyone putting money on which who the lucky guy would be?

Traffic Rants

I hate traffic. We all do. It’s one of those universally hated things -- like a smelly fart, terrorism or Sanjaya Malakar. The thought of going to work everyday scares me more for the commute and for the job, and when you realize what my job really is like, you’ll know just how bad the traffic must be.

What makes the traffic worse, carrying it from the regions of “quite terrible” into the realms of “unbearably horrendous” is the heat and dust that one must do battle with when on the street. Okay, so a few of you reading this probably drive around (or get driven around by a driver) in air-conditioned luxury cars and are snickering at my woes. But let me tell you, even a 15-minute ride on a motorcycle in this heat and dust will leave you, well for the want of better adjectives, quite heated and dusty. The problem with combating these two evils is that their solutions are mutually exclusive. To fight the heat I want to wear as little as possible; to save myself from the dust, I need to do the opposite. Attack one, and the other rears up from behind you and smites you hard in the back.

Then there are traffic signals. Every Indian driver makes it his personal goal to remind you about 15 seconds before the light turns green. The means of communication, of course, is his or her vehicle’s horn. These people are quite skilled you know. The other day, the guy in the car behind me, started playing the national anthem on his car horn. I was impressed.

And I haven’t even gotten to the pollution factor yet. Try getting stuck next to a PMT bus at a traffic light. There’s the smoke and the heat from the bus’ exhaust, and before you know it someone’s spit on you from the bus window! You’d be lucky if it’s only saliva, too. Phlegm or paan are not uncommon either. I don’t blame the person spitting out for being so callous. It’s often hard to notice the person below in the cloud of exhaust.

Sometimes, I’m just pleasantly surprised to reach work at all.

(Note to self: Do not hug everyone in sight when you are pleasantly surprised to get to work. More importantly, do NOT tell them you were spit on after you’ve hugged them.)

Me on the Dance Floor

I’m not a great dancer. Some people can Belly Dance; I can BARELY dance. I can’t move my ass to Punjabi Hip Hop or jive without stamping on the feet of not just my partner but everyone else within a three-foot radius. (I call that my Deadly Dance Circle of Death.) The less said about my other fancy-schmancy dances, the better.

This fact might have troubled me since I’m normally not too pleased by things I can’t do well. But my only cause for consolation is that I’ve noticed MOST people aren’t great dancers. About 5% of the crowd on the dance floor at any party or disco will be good dancers. Another 10% will be so terrible, that they’ll look like they’re trying to swat a pesky mosquito sitting on their back while rotating an imaginary hula hoop around their waists. The remaining 85% are just about average, run-of-the-mill, you-wouldn’t-notice-them-unless-you-looked-twice types. And I’m one of them.

When I’m dancing I like to follow an algorithm of sorts. Move B comes after Move A, and is then followed by Move C. Something like that. Improvising is dangerous, for the simple reason that I’m bad at it! When I try to get too creative on the dance floor I’m likely to spill someone’s drink or gouge someone’s eye out. After you do that a few times, people kind of stop letting you into parties anymore.

In the beginning of the party, I like to sit near one corner of the dance floor and observe for a while. I then pick someone who’s pulling what looks -- to my amateur eyes, at least -- like a few “groovy moves” and mentally rehearse them until I feel I’m confident. (I normally select the guy getting the most attention from the prettiest ladies.) Sometimes I’ll also lock myself in the washroom for a while so I can practice them for real. I then saunter over to the other end of the dance floor, where I “introduce” my “new” cool moves. Pretty soon everyone around me is copying them and I’m the hero.

That’s when I grab myself a drink and go console the person who’s nursing that eye I poked.

Working Out

I’ve never “worked out” in my life. I mean I haven’t spent more than a few seconds in a gym, I’ve never owned a set of weights and the most exercise I’ve indulged in at a stretch (forgive the pun) would be reaching for the TV-remote from under the couch. Somehow, this would always surprise people who knew me -- or at least thought they did.

“You?” they’d say, incredulity writ large upon their disbelieving countenances, while quietly sucking in their over-flowing bellies. “You’ve NEVER worked out?”

The cause for wonderment lies mainly in the fact that I’m as thin as a rake. I have a body-fat figure that’s well below the national average and I’m about 8 kilos under the weight range for my height. Besides, I have -- and I say this will all the modesty in the world -- a fairly decent upper body. Okay, so there aren’t muscles overflowing in all directions, but I think that just looks plain ugly. But for a skinny guy, it’s pretty damned neat.

Cut to last week. I decided to join the gym at work. These were the some of the side-advantages I saw:

1. It’s free.
2. It would force me to stop work at a fixed time everyday.
3. There are some cute chicks there.

I’m a big fan of side-advantages and so it seemed like a good deal to me.

This morning I had my “check up”. I enter the gym and there’s only a single instructor on duty. She hands me a sheaf of forms to fill in. The first page seems okay -- name, employee number, phone number, etc. The second page asks me about my medical history. Apparently, they want to know whether I’m liable to drop dead on the treadmill or collapse under a set of dumbbells. I answer “no” to everything. Wouldn’t be wise to let this chica think I’m a weakling of some sort.

After the forms, she takes my pulse and blood pressure.

“Hmmm,” she notices. “They’re a little higher than they should be. Not too much, but slightly on the higher side.”

“Yup,” I mutter to myself. “They’d probably be okay if you weren’t holding my hand while measuring them.”

She asks me to remove my shoes. I’m a bit surprised but I figure, “Yea. Okay.” She does a little height and weight check with this fancy machine of hers and informs me that my fat percentage is too low as is my BMI. Yea! Like I didn’t know. Thanks for rubbing it in.

She then asks me to lift up my shirt. “Uh, uh. I can see where this is heading. First my shoes, now my shirt.” I raise it a little, tentatively. “Higher,” she says. “I need to be able to see your navel.”

“Huh?” It’s just a normal navel, I want to tell her. I raise my shirt. She does a little more measuring with a tape. My hips, waist, etc. Scribbles down some figures and tells me she’s done.

She carefully studies all the stuff she’s written down and lets me know that I need three days of weights and one day of cardio per week.

I start tomorrow.

Season Three

I’m back.

Many people have asked me why I haven’t posted for so long. Two reasons, really.

1. It’s good to give up something during Lent, and
2. I’m terribly lazy.

Let’s face it. Writing’s hard. Writing stuff that people are interested in reading is even harder. Writing stuff that people are interested in reading and doing so regularly, when you have nothing to say and you know that all that your laboring has brought you is the occasional smidgen of appreciation from a chimney sweep in Minsk (Hey, Gustav!) is about as downright difficult as, well -- I’ve forgotten how to analogize cleverly.

But nevertheless, at the cost of repeating myself, I’m back.

How has my life been over the past few weeks? Nothing exciting really. Just the odd late-night, rave party bust up, followed by a harried police interrogation, some third degree, a quick appearance in court and then back home for chai and biscuits in the evening. In other words, boring. (That’s just one word, actually.)

I don’t see this post going any place in a hurry, so I’ll just wind it up. For the final time, in case you didn’t catch it before, I’m back.


PS: Genuine appreciation can be manifested in the following ways:

1. Cash, if you can meet me.
2. Checks, if you can’t, but know my postal address.
3. Proposals via e-mail for a hot, steamy one night stand, if you know nothing about me but are a relatively good-looking female.
4. If none of the above are possible, just a leaving a comment will be fine.

Thank You.

LIHABF

Everyone likes winning arguments with good, sparkly-clean logic. Like a beautiful Paul Morphy chess game, it’s something that pleases you not only as you execute the victory, but also brings a smile to your face every time you think about it later. Indeed, there’s nothing like a fine logical victory. Nothing, that is, except for one other thing -- an fine ILLOGICAL victory!

“Trust me”, fighting logic with illogic is the funnest thing in the world! You can watch the other person try to reason, convince, argue, yank-hair-out-in-frustration, beat-head-against-wall, and then finally gnaw-arm-off-and-club-self-to-death-with-it, while you sputter forth one illogical riposte after another. And then you experience a warm feeling of tingly pleasure spreading all over your body, because you’ve not only won, but you’ve won by knockout! (A recently conducted survey concluded that 96.43% of the people who love to argue using illogic are also sadists.)

Of course, you can’t just throw in any illogic. It has to be good quality, exasperatingly frustrating, mind-fugging illogic. For that you have to be an illogical expert. You need plenty of experience in this field. You need to hone your skills and master your craft for many years, until you can finally make your opponents try to suffocate themselves to death in exasperation.

To help all you folks get started, I shall present here some gems of illogic that I’ve been blessed to hear about in the past year. No doubt, the purveyor of each of them is an expert in the art -- a veritable pundit, if you may. We can only bow down to such brilliance and try to pick up a few pointers for ourselves.

So without further ado:-

CLASSIC STATEMENTS OF ILLOGIC FOR 2006

1. “Who's to say that one month is a short time and 10 years is a long
time? Who's to say?? Who's to say???”

2. “I choose not to tell you!”

3. “Things change, people change, I changed...”

4. “Why take the first step when the tenth step is not desirable?”

5. “Everything doesn’t have a reason.”

6. “You can’t argue some things with logic.”


Okay, fine. The last one actually makes sense. A LOT of sense.

(The post above is filled with in-jokes and probably didn’t make any sense to you. If you even understand any of it, you have my utmost sympathies. The list was compiled by a friend. I take no credit in its making. [Ir]Regular blogging will resume from tomorrow. Thank you and good night!)

Lenten Abstinences

Apparently, yesterday was Ash Wednesday. I say “apparently” because I’m not even very sure about whether it was or wasn’t, and I’m really too lazy to check. In other words, we’re currently in the season of Lent. (In case you didn’t know, it comes from the Old English word for “length”, because it was felt that it just SO darned long!)

Now, I’m fairly nonreligious. I’d call myself an atheist, but frankly I’m too lazy to bother. No points for guessing that I don’t go to church, and I don’t plan to indulge myself in any pious acts of abstinence either over the coming few weeks. Good reasons for giving up something I like, for a month, might include the following:

1. I get paid handsomely to do it
2. I get smothered to death by a REALLY fat lady sitting on me if I don’t do it
3. The cool kids around the block are already doing it.

I do not rank “some guy with a beard in the sky, who may or may not exist, will be pleased” as sufficient reason for abstinence from something that I derive pleasure out of. Neither does “the Bible says so” count. The thought of going to hell for not following such stuff scared me for a while until I realized that hell can’t be much worse than driving home from work in the evening traffic. And I’ve managed to survive that thus far.

I guess there are two things you need to keep in mind when you’re selecting something to abstain from. Firstly, it needs to be something you like doing. Promising to abstain from doing the dishes isn’t going to win you brownie points with any God, I’d tend to believe. Secondly, it’s got to be something that you do fairly regularly during the rest of the year. Thus, saying “I’m going to abstain from having sex with all blonde, West Indian females named Fufou” would be equally useless.

I think Lenten abstinences are actually quite like New Year’s resolutions only the term’s shorter. Forty days instead of the rest of your life. Unless you’re a diabetic octagenarian, with a weak heart and cancer of the lungs, or a civilian in Baghdad, in either which case “the rest of your life” can probably be measured in minutes, forty days is probably the shorter period. In fact, I’m pretty sure most New Year’s resolutions are already broken by the time Lent comes around, and are then just recycled as Lenten abstinences. It saves people the trouble of having to think of a new “resolution” to break.

What are you going to staying away from this Lent?

Customary Annual Rant

Happy Valentwhine’s Day.

Con Jobs That Are Good For You

I’ve always been a big fan of fooling people for their own good. Deciding exactly what is “good” for someone is a tricky issue at best. I might think eating snails for breakfast everyday is good for you. You might disagree. And I’m pretty sure the World Committee for the Welfare of Snails would mind too, but it’d probably take them a couple of years to decide.

Ultimately, most people like making their decisions themselves. Most of the time I think this is a good idea. There are times, though, when I feel more can be achieved by fooling people. For example, like this. Here’s another idea.

You know how they have battery indicators on electronic devices? My cell phone, for example, has a line of bars on the side of the screen. When it’s completely charged there are six bars, and as it discharges, the bars keep disappearing. Zero bars left means that the battery’s done. IPods and other devices have similar indicators.

Now I’ve noticed that I tend to ignore charging the phone if there are at least three bars left. If there are two bars present, I tend to look for a socket somewhere. If there’s one bar remaining, I’d probably shove the damned cord up a passer-by’s ass and hope for a miracle. In other words, I only think about charging the phone when the battery’s on its last legs.

My point is that the indicator should not reduce linearly. The first four bars to vanish on my phone should represent less than four-sixths of the battery life. About 50% seems like a good figure. By assigning roughly half the battery life to the last two bars, the chances of my phone going dead when I don’t expect it are considerably reduced.

A similar job could be done on the fuel indicators in cars. I suppose I could just force myself to fill my motor-cycle tank before the needle actually hits “E”, but I know I’m not going to. I sometimes need people to con me for my own good.

I’m fairly certain this is already being done, at least with charging devices. The only reason it’s kept a secret is so that it actually works!