Dear Procrastination, I will deal with you later...

For today’s man-in-his-late-twenties, procrastination is not a negative virtue earned through constant effort (or the lack of it), but a habit. As for me, I postponed reading my Moral Science lessons in Std. VII, at school. The lag so cultivated still persists. For, this article was supposed to be written a month back.

Every deadline has a penultimate day, and so does the penultimate. Hence, the last two days would suffice for any task to be done, from ore to metal. Or so I thought, since the above postponed lessons. The results? We go through the life-changing ones below.

Postponed adhesive: Being part of a joint family then, mother and aunt and grandfather and dad were busy decking me up for a youth festival fancy dress event. “Lord Ganesha” was the chosen theme. A fancy dress all well-planned turned into a catastrophe-in-execution, all because of the delayed application of a couple of drops of glue that could hold together the mask of the Lord against my face. First-hand proof that the Almighty wouldn’t help in identity-masking, quite literally, in this case. The consequence here being that I went on stage, heard a couple of threads snap at either end, and realized that Ganesha had given up. Hoots and more followed; no hurls, thankfully. The adhesive was cursed for not drying in time, despite having given it TEN SOLID MINUTES and all the ambient air during my journey from home to school (this was the pre quick-adhesive era).

Duh, the name: Filling the application forms for those (fiercely) competitive entrance exams (to attempt becoming a Bachelor first and a Master then, of some art/science) was never done on time. Being the owner of a 42-letter-long name (45 with spaces counted, says MS Word!), it required an ounce more than just consistency to get it right every time. Seven forms were spread across the table, with six of them having only 30 boxes each for the name. The instruction booklet was quick to checkmate, saying “All initials are to be expanded. Failing to do so will result in immediate disqualification of candidature.” Praying to the above Ganesha, I pleaded for his support, for this time, the allegation quite wasn’t identity masking. Rather, it was identity revelation in its fullest.

Some wise man once quoted, though so beautifully, that “the problem with hurry is that it takes longer”. Two days prior to the forms’ “reaching the administrative office by 5pm on the 31st”, my name-on-the-form went as horizontal as it could, and then did a crossword-like-vertical, slithering down the right margin of each application form. Divinely armed I was with eight weapons and more, including the vintage “Wilkinson Sword” blade, an ink-eraser, its pencil counterpart, the whitener liquid, its diluter, the black variants of the pencil and the pen, and a blue version of the latter. All application forms, in totality, showed names that were written, erased, over-written, whitened, scratched (forgot the Wilkinson, did you?!) and written again, in multi-colour. For the icing, there was always the covering letter – “profusely apologising” for having let Wilkinson’s Sword pierce through the paper, cellophane holding together either part of my first name. “Yours faithfully” was always preceded by a plea to “overlook the inadvertent error and consider the application for processing.”

The study and the sport: Studies was of paramount importance at school, more so after that highly qualified uncle dropped in home for tea. The house would always quote his having studied in moonlit and street-lit lights, and then point fingers at me, saying: “but look at you, in spite of all comforts…” Yeah, you know it better!

Hence, the sport in me was postponed. The study however, got its due only after a game of sport, and hence was delayed further.

Reading: I own the largest number of bookmarks ever. One within each book, all placed in the first ten pages.

Philosophy: The Gita still stands bookmarked at “Arjuna’s grief”.

Writing: I often write articles on humour, like I just now did. But, I always ensure that I complet...

Managers, mails and metaphors - an overview of the overused

Apologies for not writing for the last five months. There was a serious dearth of topics to write on. I had half-a-dozen unfinished articles conveniently hibernating in my laptop, waiting for some trojan/virus to devour them, for none of them qualified enough to see the light of the day. To add to the pack were two social issues that were to be sent to the papers. The government beat me to it, by resolving them!

This major hiatus was on, till the above thought struck. Three years of corporate life, beyond all learning, leaves you with assaulted words and/or phrases. By assault, I mean their overuse. I have handpicked the oft used and hence the top ten. The aim is to convey to my readers, that the overused phrases are but metaphors that mostly imply the opposite of their innocent, obvious selves.

1) Keeping you “in the loop” – “In the noose” would have been a more apt term, for all this phrase does is signal the arrival of a distant storm. Someone elsewhere blew the conch for the battle, and the battalion is fast approaching you. The noose will soon tighten around you. Choose to fight, flee or laugh...

2) Deep dive – In all probability, you are positioned to dive into a bottomless abyss. Whenever a new idea demands a deep-dive, “not doable” is the writing on the wall.

3) Process rationalization – The process is anything but useless, and your task is to convert it to “non-useless”, in the least. Your job description, though, will assume a rationalized process even before you sign your offer letter.

4) In the same page – Keep others in the “same page” at your own risk. Your supervisor’s being in the “same page” can only result in a “torn book”. This usage implies “monitoring you beyond what’s at tolerable levels”.

5) Sacrosanct – Adjective – Often confused with “too important or valuable to be interfered with”. Business intent – non-negotiable, beyond human possibility, non-achievable, "not in my hands"...

6) Huddle – Often ends up being a “muddle”, for there are ten people, ten suggestions, ten negative reactions to the same, and all attendees convincing themselves and others, that there was a lot of learning involved.

7) Innovate – Often follows the above muddle. The challenge here is to find out the acceptable eleventh idea, beyond the ten rejected above.

8) Out-of-the-box – Can someone tell me more about the box and what’s within it, so that I can figure out what’s without?!

9) Hygiene variable – The big brother of “sacrosanct”. The business intent resembles that of the latter, only higher in degree/severity.

10) Brainstorming – It almost always doesn’t need the brain, and the storm goes only thus far as to suggest the mood in the conference room. A successor of “chronic shortage of ideas”, this term is a disguise for “finding out the last straw to hang on”!

School was when...

1. The time that mattered was between classes and during intervals. The rest of the day was but breaks between intervals.

2. Home was second home.

3. The ‘lunch break’ was an hour of play and a minute of lunch. For, dumping lunch never took time.

4. Matters of grave worry were to lose out on a game of wrestlers’ trump cards, or to have a ‘Games Hour’ washed out by rain.

5. If your neighbour scores more than you, change... the neighbour!

6. The topper in class was not quite extra-curricular. And the all-rounder of the class wasn’t as much studious. You placed yourself in a complacent, convenient and content mid-point. And then conveyed the message in its entirety to your parents.

7. Waiting for ‘other school buses’ to arrive was to take attendance of teachers before they took ours, so that the Class Leader may be prodded to place a request for an extra Games Hour.

8. There never was a greater hero than the Class Leader, when the above request was approved. Three-scores of students rushed out to the grounds in sheer joy, all praises for their Leader!

9. Rs. 10 (Canteen allowance - once in a term, thrice in a year, rather) could buy:

· A cream bun, with a more-than-generous filling of sweetened cream

· Ice-cream soda, chilled.

· A vegetable puff.

· A vintage Cadbury’s lollypop.

· One more of it.

· Rs. 1.50 (you would be chock full by now, to spend this on more food)

o This is when your classmate observed from the distance, and ran over to remind you as to how he saved your ass in the Science Class by sharing his textbook.

o And in another instance, by donating his set of sketch pens.

o Spent...

10. Stolen waters were sweet and bread eaten in secret was pleasant.

11. Facebook was then known as the "school bus". That's where we "added friends", "poked", "liked" and played better games than building virtual farms or fighting virtual mafia.

Cupid goes online...

Just as I had written about love and its colleagues being butchered by grammar, Cupid rushed to establish himself online. My friend had sent a link to one of those dating sites on the Net, whose Home Page had a Live Feed on the latest one-liners posted by people asking for a partner. The point in his forwarding it and hence of this article, is to bring to spotlight the inventive, innovative and supposedly wacky introductory statements that people use to “break the i.”, if that’s the aim. Most of them are true ROTFL material, more so when they are read with a tinge of interpretation from the reader’s end. The best specimens have been isolated for the below analysis.

1) “Does writing her that you need a girl, ever work, i doubt it.”

Paradoxical, for if the person who wrote this meant it, he wouldn’t have wasted time posting it in a dating site. Second, he has answered himself that “he doubts it”, which made the purpose of the post all the more redundant. Realistically, the only reply our pal received was from an Online Merchandise store, which said “we accept Paypal too”!

2) “I am travelling to Kolkata and Bareilly next week. Will be in Bareilly in the second week of March. The place is new to me and I need company for two weeks”

He does Toyota proud, going about “Just-In-Time” with relationships. Hell with the partner in the fourth week of March, for the Bareilly precondition then stands violated.

3) This is mumbai (location noted, next?), all females and males are very busy taking care of their job or housework (Poor them!). At the same time, we need to have some friends (oh, the pitch) so that as and when we have little time to spare, we can chat, meet to discuss various issues (the politburo of every party sure is waiting for this to get over) or may like to have some advise, and to have good time outing for a short while (please note the time period, it’s for a while).

4) “Hai im 27yrs from mumbai...” – Hmmm, nice alphanumeric name you’ve got!

5) Now for the winner. The second is but second by a long, long way. Please, please note - what follows is long poetry, and hence requires running commentary. What’s written below in parentheses is mine own, and the rest belongs to him who wants to date.

“First of all let me tell you clear this is not any relationship issue or Just for Men or Just for Women and certainly not a Dating tip issue (To sum up, this is not an issue at all! The aim is to make it sound out of the ordinary. He assures you that what follows is anything but cliched). I just wanted to start something HutKe (kahaan ke?!) from regular topic. Second who feel themself as moderators and just brag and complain saying that this topic does not belong to this group please hold on (Yeah, moderators. Beware. The topic does not belong here, but act as if you weren’t aware). This just to have some thoughts and views of other people. (the point, please!). Now, coming to the issue (finally). If you make a MOVIE based on true story and that true story is YOUR LIFE what will be the title of the movie (huh?! Moderators, behold!). The movie can be in any language (people from all over India can apply). I would appreciate if it is not English please give the title in your language and also meaning of it (...but why?). I also appreciate if you keep some high level English words please give meaning. If I make a movie the title will be "WALKING ALONE...” Now there! The moderators, the would-be partners and readers are all stunned. This was a valiant attempt at dramatising the request for a partner! And the killer title for his autobiography demands an encore, applause, whistles, bells and more... And yeah, a partner!

More specimens were left out keeping in view the “greater good of mankind”...

The Woes and Ease of Facebook Chat

The time on the Desktop clock when I start to type this article: 11:45pm

I was chatting with a friend on Facebook, when I got to reflect on just how difficult the interface for the same is, on Zuckerberg's Social Net(doesn't always)work. The defects, faced by all, is summarized as below:

1) Enter, the Dragon: Zucker's team might have forgotten to programme respect for the ENTER key. Worse still, they would have set a counter which recognizes the ENTER key only the seventh time somebody presses it.

2) The exclamations of life aren't given their place, on FB. For, this is how "what you mean" gets typed on FB chat:

Oh! - oh1

LOL! - lol1

Haha!!!! - haha111

The most required SHIFT is never given its due, hence...

3) Phase-book: This would have been a better name for the network, for it displays what you have typed in phases. It stops mid-way, hell with your speed and ability to type fast, and moves on to the next phase only after a couple of swears form your side, and a call and a message to the person at the other end if not a face-to-face meeting, to convey how FB chat sucks.

4) Space-jam: Self-explanatory, foryouwouldneverwantwhatyoutypetobeclusteredtogetherlikethis.

5) Loading the Chat option... sometimes takes forever.

6) Back to FB chat... Was taking a break when I had pressed Enter there.

Time on desktop clock now: 11:57pm - My fastest blog to-date. :) This is when the keyboard works the way you want it to!

Reflections of a past decade (1991-2000)

Five years of blogging. Half my audience would never believe its eyes about this statistic, for I myself skipped a heart-beat or two when I realized that the Den of Drums and Dreams was half a decade old! Now, that’s a total of 27 posts, including the one I have been typing just as yet.

The blog started with an article that meant nothing to anyone, including me, whoever-read-it and Jerome K Jerome (who finds a mention in the first post). It was initially aimed at daily posts summarizing the day that flew by, but then I understood that my having a blocked nose is of no remote significance to any reader or to Jerome K Jerome, who is no more now and very much so then!

Humour has been at the core and crux of all blogs, though a couple of posts had a contemplative / opinionative shade to them. It always reigned, for more than three-quarters of the blog were about incidents involving me, or in the least had my playing the role of the prompter-behind-the-curtain. And plots where I was involved undoubtedly had “sympathetically resonant (yeah, I remember my physics. Alternatively, this was typed to make me look and sound so.) laughter” in them, not due to my ability to read, re-read and reproduce satire in writing, but because I always used to be stationed at the receiving end. The only reason then, that my blogs have less of “I” and “me” was because I generalized the anecdotes as applicable to the present world / generation per se, and wanted to consciously reduce the first-person element termed as ego. Which is why you would find more of the third person here, and the passive voice with the subject deleted, as taught by Wren and Martin!!

Five years saw me do 3 months of a B Tech, two years of work, another couple of years of an MBA, and seven months of the next job. This meant relocating through five cities in “three states” (that’s one more than Chetan Bhagat’s!)… As I retrospect, I wonder at how science and technology have first comforted and then intruded into our PESTEL (!!) fabric. Further, half-a-dozen classmates had summarized their past decade (2001-10) on Facebook, while ushering in a new set of 120 months. This is when I thought of life a decade further back (1991-00 (Y2K!)), and was surprised to see the change that has come through. Whether it is welcome or not is an endless abyss of a debate and best not ventured into, for we risk losing out on content due to high levels of subjectivity in thought and (in)action. The reflections, by the way, are based on the academic year (June to May), very much different from the “financial year” we have been forcefully made to understand.

Come April, and it was time to see the result of the FINAL exam of the previous class. I had written my first Standard exam then, and felt the triumph of having cleared the Civil Services, for I could spell G-O-O-D-S T-R-A-I-N and also knew what the vehicle did. A tense dad and a very, very, cool son marched past the school gates. Plenty of anxious parents had crowded around the one tiny notice board (of which my name was an even smaller speck), all equally anxious of the numeric equivalent out of 100 their sons had secured, which would prove whether their respective sons have mastered the “Zen of the Goods Train”.

My target (oh yeah, Sales started from birth. You made pitches to your parents, impromptu, without any PPT / infra-red remote controls. No blazers, no formals, but you were far more serious and meant more business than now with all accessories on!) was an 80%. It was a breeze, for:

• The fact that “we should not spit on the road” took care of my Social Studies
• 10 + 21 = 31 ensured a centum in Maths
• The Goods Train ensured that my General Knowledge marks chugged along
• I knew the Malayalam equivalents of a cat, rat and a mat.
• The sun was a huge ball of fire, and my science teacher was more than happy with that.
• The Radiant Reader had to be read out loud in English, and I screamed so loud that it sounded like the Major’s order, and the marks were jotted down halfway through the third sentence. I had practised the lesson “Nancy’s picnic” a million times at home!

Six subjects were all they had to it. Physical Training was never a subject, and “Games” was not compulsory.
The results almost always carried a bribe with them. I had promised dad an 80%, in lieu for an electric train (engine and one-and-a-half coaches) with plastic tracks, battery-operated. I had achieved an 85%, so that meant it would be a train plus an-extra-gift-for-over-achieving! That was about RESULTS and APPRAISALS.
Come the month of May, and Loyola School used to reopen a fortnight earlier than others in the city. Now, this meant:

• Brand new bags
• Squeaking new shoes, with lights, without them, with sounds, etc. (Action Rockers – do imagine the futility of having lights at the back of your shoe, and that too a red one.)
  o Sub-bullet point – Action Silencer – Kapil Dev’s shoes that used to have Suction, Compression and Ventilation. I noticed three years later that the air-hole in the shoe was but a farce! ROTFL!
• Uniforms – The tailor round the corner was tenser than I was, in having the uniforms stitched.
• Books – The stationery-shop owner’s Chotu used to run around the neighbourhood, collecting the new books for school, to get them bound. The smell of Fevicol in newly bound books had an infinite nostalgia tagged to it!
  o Book labels – Every children’s magazine used to have a centre-spread of adhesive book labels. We kids used to buy two additional magazines over and above the one we subscribed to, only for the labels. The rest of the magazine was scrap equivalent.

Pranks at school are quite another subject altogether, and will be pondered about in the subsequent post.

The "Road of Life" - Lessons from "Life on Road" - Part 1

Three-and-a-half months since my last post. I look more like a firm nowadays, posting quarterly. Without much ado, here goes blog Q3 – unaudited (unedited?!)

This time, it’s about lessons learnt on the roads of Chennai. Traffic in this city has its unique share of humour. Not to forget / mention the larger chunk of irritation, anger and a host of emotions spewed through the exhaust of every vehicle. Narrations below, therefore, refer to anecdotes involving the self and the traffic system. Mostly dominated by the latter, the former is a helpless witness to the extent that he could but blog about it. The irony, though, is about how we could attempt to promote a Greener world when everyone on road (vehicle included) is Red in the face!

The Chennai auto-driver:

The Chennai auto-driver, to say the least, is the most powerful economic indicator that every above-average and over-gray-haired economist has failed to observe and track. He is powerful enough to usher in a sub-prime on a local basis. The ‘taxiing rate’ he quotes could create a bearish clone of the strongest bull any fund market has ever seen. Salaried professionals would incur a negative balance on their Salary a/c in a jiffy, and businessmen could file Chapter 11 (of any book!) within the bat of an eyelid. Bargaining, in such a situation, is hardly possible. Except when you use humour – precise and pointed, only to save a dozen and a half of INR.

I spend a total of twenty minutes daily, only talking to auto-drivers to convince them for lower ‘taxi quotes’. Excerpts from a couple of conversations are given below:

“AUTO! Mount Road??”

“Why not, sir? Where in Mount Road?”

“Spencer Plaza...?”

He then acts ignorant. Someone who has not heard of Spencers Plaza, being in Chennai for more than three months, is better not described any further. On second thoughts, he could, at best, be branded as ‘a blot on the landscape’, to borrow from Sir P G Wodehouse.

The acting reaches its Oscar zenith soon.

“Spencer Plaza?! In Mount Road?! You mean behind Cathedral Road?!”

“No, you just have to go straight-as-an-arrow from here. Cathedral Road doesn’t even come in the way!”

The guy then acts as if he just finished installing Google Maps in himself, by doing a vigorous headbang to denote cognizance (now understanding that you do have a sense of routes around here). “Ohhhh! OUR Spencer Plaza?! (Mark that usage. Spencer Plaza is OURS now!!!)) I was thinking about something else! Hop on!”

“Before I do, how much?”

“Hundred bucks, sir.”

“For four-kilometres-and-a-half?!!! Hope you in your senses?!!”

“Sir, it’s a one-way ahead. Petrol charges have increased. So has the price of food-grains. But only for you, sir, 60 bucks is what I shall charge, and no more.”

“Forty it is, a buck no more...”

And then I walk ahead, to attempt the same to the next sapien they call an auto-driver.

Phase II is callback. When the above Jack Nicholson screams at you, claps twice, and calls you back. “Clap-and-another! Sirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!”

“Now what?!”

“You can’t fathom the traffic going forward, sir. It’s too tough to drive... 50 bucks, sir. No less...”

“Oh, I suppose you didn’t know you would be part of this phenomenon called traffic, when you started three-wheeling?! FORTY!!!!”

“Sir, please sir, spare a tenner if you would, sir.”

“Who would give me an extra tenner, like I do now to you?”

“The Almighty will, sir. I will ask Him to do so.”

“O.k, here goes. I give you my 40 now; the other tenner that the Almighty owes me will be re-assigned to you in my morrow’s prayers. Now shall we do the honours?!”

Jack Nicholson now does a LOL, and says, “Must say you talk funny, sir! Give me 45!”

To which the reply was, “I talk funnier, if humour doth discount! Forty...”

And phew, the journey only starts...

Cupid meets Wren and Martin

Wedlock of the God of Love with the Gods of Grammar. An affair between two diametrically opposite personae. One God is mythological and the other(s), real. One makes you fall in love that is blind, the other makes you gape at English Grammar with eyes wide open. The God of love uses his arrows to ensnare people into love, while “the key to Wren & Martin” is possibly the only way out of the others’ Grammar Puzzles.

Rewind to a week back. This was when I reestablished contact with some of my once close friends. Once close, for time and space prevented us from keeping in touch for quite a while. We met after long, and hence were trading lessons learnt, anecdotes experienced, organizations switched, qualifications obtained and habits formed. Not to forget love stories – the ones that had happened, had not, are happening and may happen. Which is when the above wedlock happened.

For, the striking commonality in all love stories (successful or otherwise), was the grammar involved during or around the time of “the proposal”. (“Successful or otherwise” is a phrase of caution inserted intentionally to prove that success in love is relative. ‘Walking out of an affair’ has suddenly become a measure of success!) The efforts of the male partner, in setting up an ambience conducive to proposing, simply gush down the drain the moment the heroine starts her grammatical extempore –verbal game-play where even the tense used may be a “turning point”. What follows is the best of such extempores. One-liner proposals that would force any guy to put pen to paper, underline the critical parts (like we did at school: “picking out” the main clause and the subordinate ones!), and try and make sense of the jugglery. A big thanks to all my friends who were co-operative enough to share the “grammatical rewards” they were bestowed with.

· I wanted to be in love with you. – This implies that you aren’t half as good as the new bargain she has recently acquried. Further, this is a tacit admission of the fact that only half your calls will be picked up, and your messages (unless already blocked) will be deemed as important as the ones that announce “For sale! Green rabbit at half the market price! Hurry!”

· I would have been in love with you – This is the inverse corollary of the first statement. The meaning is that you would have been the “new acquistion” had matters not been so settled with our anti-hero, her present boyfriend. The conclusion? She is committed. You don’t gain anything, save an experience certificate that may provide incremental confidence on your next venture.

· I might be in love with you – No instance or incident can be quoted as evidence of the girl’s love, for the matter is still under contemplation. It’s window-shopping at its peak! ;) After all, the market has a wide variety of options. All you can do is to wait. And, at the end of the waiting period, precedents suggest that you will most probably get to hear the first or the second proposals drafted above. At the end of the story, during the “happily ever after” part, you still wouldn’t have got a girl.

· I was in love with you – Idiot, you let it go. You didn’t sense it coming. She tried her best to convey it, but then you never did your Wren and Martin properly. Continue the relationship at your own peril. Iterations will only result in one of the above three scenarios.

· To conclude, the killer proposal. This would challenge any post-graduate in English Literature to think twice before uttering a single syllable in English. Craftily framed, well delivered, to the extent that Cupid himself ran for cover!

“In the event that I fall in love with you, I will give you a call tonight.”

Speechless! So was our dude. Was he to wait for the event?! Well, he did. The event never happened. The call never came. The moment I heard this from the victim (one of my friends), I ROTBAFOL (Rolled On The Bed And Fell Off Laughing, if you want to adapt it into your chat lingo!!). The proposal reminded me of exception messages that a C program threw up whenever a geek forgot to #include (people without a programming background can safely ignore this and move on); with the exception that the latter seemed a bit more subtle and diplomatic when it mattered.

Action plan? Guys, please work on your Grammar. To the extent that, for such “legally correct” proposals as the above, we could atleast give a befitting reply. Which, for the killer proposal, would have been (!!): “In the event that I answer the call, it would mean I mightn’t be as much in love!” Confused? Leave it to the gals to figure out. We have done too much thus far...

Reality shows... Or does it?

There are few posts in this blog where the author decides to sacrifice humour, and opinionates, cribs rather, on the topic in question. This is one of them.

Habit has taught us people to use the idiot box as the first medium of exercising entertainment. Sadly though, content on television has degraded. Degraded to the extent of naming a reality show “Truth, Love, Cash”, where the first two words are far from virtues and the last sounds like a reward for arm-twisting the former.

This post is a look of remorse at the present generation. A feel of pity, at the rapid blind westernization that’s come into vogue. Of children loving to “move out” of home once they are in their teens. Of an India that has forgotten its roots. Of a country which once had, mark had, taken pride in its tradition and legacy. Such a country now gapes helplessly at the disturbing content being aired through televisions. Content which can be termed voluntary self-molestation at best, and corporal mortification at worst.

Children who are into their early adulthood are now inclined to a life of adventure. Leaping beyond wooden hindrances twice the height of a person does sound athletic. Driving into hinterlands on bikes in the sweltering heat does go a long way in establishing physical endurance and grit. This is the theme reality shows harped on. But, as competition gobbled up ideas, shows needed to raise the bar. TV Ratings dwindled as content looked and felt routine. Viewership got divided between the various channels that telecast reality shows. Programs needed to get back, and get back strong. The only way they could make this possible was to make adventurous acts look and feel gory. “Physical vulgarity” was the obvious solution.

Readers might wonder as to why my writing is a tad too acerbic. Take my word for this. Do read what follows, and what was written above will only seem inadequate and lacking in expression.
A particular episode of Truth Love Cash (TLC), a reality show aired on Channel [V], had six guys barely into adulthood crouching on their knees, a la dogs. Six heavily built men standing behind them were ready to spank their rears with thick sticks, the hitting end of which had spikes of some material, making it look like a mace. The host of the show demanded “the HIT” once in close to forty seconds, in what was a twenty minute exercise. The participants cried, some choked, others felt nauseated after bearing the pain of each hit through growls, screams, swears and grit-and-ground teeth.

Add to this, the opposite sex of the same age group. There was one male participant who couldn’t bear being spanked, and gave up at the twentieth minute, for he was choking and in want of air-to-breathe. His partner-girl in the competition had this to say: “I know it’s tough, but I was disappointed with him. He could have done better. I never thought he would give up so easily.”

Further, the censor board demands that objectionable words be censored (read BEEPED) out. Trust me; the show had only beeps for the entire half hour. To add to the gore, the channel promises more. UNCENSORED videos on the net.

If that was the physical extreme, reality shows have treaded to the emotional extreme too. Response to eroticism is now monitored in terms of change in the pace of heart-beat. The participant with the least change wins. The contestants, in this case, were made to watch a belly dance, alone and live.

Food for thought, now that the narration is past. What’s telecast in the name of entertainment and reality offers neither. What’s gory is never entertaining and voluntary self-molestation, by the farthest figment of imagination, comes nowhere near reality. Living daily life in front of the lens is not reality. Allowing one’s rear to be spanked by a mace is adventurous perversion, and measuring body reactions in response to stimuli of eroticism is best left unsaid.

Should this mean that song and dance competitions in the name of reality shows are healthy? Far from it. Tender six year olds are made to do multiple rounds of singing and dancing, to the extent of forgoing their primary education. Only to get eliminated mid-way. The poor things cry, sob and weep on stage. So do their parents, and the uncle and aunt who were also packaged into the show. Myriad displays of emotion get compensated by a grand prize. One measly DVD player.

Which brings us to the title of the post. Reality shows... Or does it?

TwixT The TweeT and The TainT

To begin with, two-and-a-half weeks into officially being declared an MBA, I am now a “degree” older. Next, I know that I had, in the past, administered ministerial oaths to the effect that I would be henceforth regular in my blogs. But, lack of topics to write on caused my literary skills to strike their abysmal low, and indeed kept the oaths ministerial. They have bottomed out now (or so I hope). The so-called green shoots seem visible from the distance, but the erstwhile crispness of writing may not be yet evident. I guess it would take another ‘learning curve’ before I achieve scale in my blogs. (Management perspectives, yes.)

Two years in Mumbai blazed past at the same pace that the recent two weeks in Trivandrum did. Idleness and boredom are bullish in a city in Trivandrum, for they grow by the day. Hence, entertainment gets confined to business and news channels on TV.
Last month, news channels had an overload of words starting with the letter “T”. An indicative list? Of course. Here goes (in order of appearance):

Tharoor, Twitter, Twenty Twenty, Tunanda Tushkar (I wanted to force-fit this. The typo may be ignored), Thukral, and Tata Tea’s Tion (wildcard entry).

As reads the title of this post, there was many an incident “Twixt the Tweet and the Taint”. A flipside view of the entire episode would be the following:

1) “Right to Tweet” must become a fundamental right.

2) Years down the lane, the author of this blog predicts that “Twitter” and its associated words will find themselves etched in The Oxford and the Websters’ dictionaries (as part of regular English language usage), to indicate “public defamation” of varying nature and intensity. Examples follow:

1) Tweet – verb.
Etymology: 20-20 controversies of 2010. (Ref: Modi, Tharoor, et al.).
Meaning: Speak when not warranted to; defame people by making confidential discussions public, preferably online, mostly in the context of money and auctions.
Contextual usage: Anand wanted the matter to be a secret, but his boss tweeted it out in front of the office members.

2) Twitter – noun.
Etymology: Tharoor.
Meaning: A person who cannot keep a secret, to the extent that he blurts it out on a public platform, real or virtual.
Contextual usage: Please don’t divulge the details to Amit, for the man’s a twitter by birth.

3) Tweeticide – noun.
Etymology: Indian history – Year 2010.
Meaning: Killing one’s career by divulging confidential details on a public platform, either in the real or the virtual world.
Contextual usage: An unnecessary tweeticide it was for his career, the way he exposed his boss through a scrap on Orkut.

4) Tweetomania – noun.
Etymology: Excessive obsession to Twitter.
Meaning: The patient forgets to ask “how do you do?” Rather, immediately after greeting, the question would be “What are you doing now?”
Contextual usage: As the case may be...

Tweet’s all, folks! (P.S: An epilogue follows!)

Epilogue: Tata Tea’s Tion. One of the other words that began with the letter “T”, and did the news rounds this month. The product is Tata Tea’s pilot launch in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, in the non-carbonated beverages category. Taste-wise, I am yet to get a hang of it. The product has been doing its pilot since an year now. The sales for the brand have been one-fourth that of Nimbooz for its 250ml variant, but the 400ml variant has been dismal. Flavoured ice-tea is what Tata Tea claims the product is. But, what baffled me even more was the pronunciation of the word. A leading bakery in Trivandrum, which had its entire front elevation draped by posters of Tion, lured me in.

I asked for “Tea-ion” first.
The shopkeeper stared at me with a poker-face.
Wrong way to pronounce the name? Damn.

I tried Tion as in Sion (Read Tayan.)
Poker-face again.

Third, I tried the "Teon" way of saying "tion".

His stare grew stranger, as he raised an eyebrow.

Last, I wanted to try Tion as in superstiTION, or redempTION, but then I gave up!
I went out of the shop and pointed to the scores of TION posters, and exclaimed out loud: “This??!!”

The reply was: “That’s only the posters. The product is yet to reach us.”
“Slice?”
“Tweny five bucks…”
“Thank you…”

A day in the hostel life of an MBA... Part I

5:30am: Good morning to the world, and good night to me.

5:45am: One of the mosquitoes sang part of Alizee’s “Moi Lolita”, in my ear. Five seconds later, it completed the rest of the song. It was one lone bloodsucker that managed to sneak in to the mosquito net I had so creatively tied around me (four ropes were made by tearing apart a pillow cover into four vertical strips – done out of pure frustration when a gang of them did a group rendition of “Emosional Attyachar” - looped half a dozen times, when I was asleep).

5:50am: Thirsty. I got up and out of bed, and reached out for a bottle of water. I heard the drone of a score of helicopters. Looking back, the mosquitoes were all neatly tucked inside the net, and I was outside. Quite not the intended configuration!

6:30am: Partly asleep. I managed to do a mass-murder, revenge to the above Spartan attack, and most of them were dead. There was peace all around. The mosquitoes had turned Sumo wrestlers and me, anaemic!

7:30am: CLASS AT NINE! CASE-STUDY TO BE READ! RANDOM COLD-CALLING IN CLASS! HAVE TO SPEAK FOR CLASS PARTICIPATION MARKS! NOT READ A WORD! I began searching for the case binder on my table. What came out was a crumpled version of the previous day’s Bombay Times (for everyone read it), and a neat stack of the Economic Times, seven of them, all untouched by hand! I finally found the binder, measured the case in terms of “number of pages of written material” and “number of exhibits”. 15 pages and 15 were the measures. Consensus measure worked out...

8:10am: Woke up again. The consensus measure was that I sleep more and read less of the case.

9:00am: In class: Sticky hands due to the breakfast eaten while travelling in an auto. Lost half of the sandwich in transit, and spilled the tea on to the Starbucks case material! Read 5 pages and 0 exhibits, out of the measures cited earlier. My point in class was nowhere related to what was read, but I saw the pen making a mark against my name in the “class register”, and was happy at the stimulus package having worked out for the better.

2:00pm: End of class for the day. Bakar followed. We had our share of swearing at faculty who made life miserable for us. Swears exhausted, we were hungry.

3:00pm: Lunchtime! Charlie and I were at the hostel mess, trying to sort out the confusion in eating. The thali was for Rs. 30. We paid up, and got the tokens. The guy behind the counter took our tokens, and said: “Aloo Ki Sabji khatam, Chana thoda bacha hai, Jeera rice das minute pehle khatam ho gaya, green salad aaj banaaya nahi...”

3:10pm: Our plates resembled the Thar desert – acres of emptiness with rare occurrences of scattered oases.

3:30pm: Back to our room, hunger half-satisfied. Four of us made a mad rush for the day’s Bombay Times. We fought. I got Priyanka Chopra’s face, Charlie got half-an-advertisement of Royal Cha... (Abhimanyu got the “...llenge” part of it!), and Bharadwaj gave up and decided to settle for the Economic Times. I had managed to kick the wall of Room. No 47, while fighting. Somebody at Room. No. 43 felt the seismic tremors, and asked us to tone it down. Talk about structural strength of buildings!

4:00pm: We had finished debating about why filmstars were upto what they were. Time to sleep...

Second composition...

Some free time during Christmas vacations resulted in this second composition, based in Raga Hamsadwani. Apologies again, to music at large, for not having done a professional arranging and recording of this music piece. Lack of MIDI resources and MIDI interface resulted in a crude line-in recording again, on a Yamaha PSR-450. Criticisms, as mentioned before, are always welcome.

Get this widget | Track details | eSnips Social DNA

For the want of a fitting title...

It’s been a long time since I entered the Den of Drums and Dreams, but for occasional peeks to ensure that my blog counter kept ticking. But then, it seemed like it’s mine own visits which dragged forth the counter. It looks like the algorithm for the blog counter read something like asunder:

If(IP of machine is different from the IP captured on the blog)
{
Increase blog counter by one
}
If(IP is the same)
{
Dekh le yaar. Lag raha hai banda thoda feel ho raha hai. Kabhi kabhi increment kar de...
}

Algorithms apart, readership is not a variable I keep a tag on, for the fact remains that it is tough to read blogs. More so for my blog, for the extra parables placed per post!

As for the topic of this post, it’s the art of flirting. And no, it’s not that the author has turned candid enough to discuss ways and means of flooring gals, for he thinks that such a phase in life is either way ahead of him, or way behind. Neither paradigm suggests any better an alternative.

People often accuse me of the lack of “an ability to express myself”. Synonyms of this accusation would mean not being able to keep up the conversation with a girl, or not being able to exchange pleasantries with a girl for more than half an hour. (Thirty minutes, my!) Further blemishes include not being able to “show off” (‘Showing Off for Dummies’ is yet to hit the stands. I promise to buy a copy as soon as it does.) These allegations get hurled at me left, right and centre, day in and day out. Further, I always owed an explanation to those who advised me round the clock, on this topic. That’s exactly what this post does. It delves into details of selected, nay, hand-picked instances when I tried “expressing” or “communicating” to girls, and their reactions to the same. The latter would explain why I even stopped making attempts, thereafter.

Disclaimer: The dumb reactions given below are those of certain girls that I felt like “communicating to”. This is never an attack on the gender as a whole. I agree that guys could be equally dumb, if not more equally. Oh yes, go ahead and include me too...

Scenario I:
First-girl-to-whom-I-felt-like-communicating: “So, what are your hobbies?”
Me: “I am the drummer of our band, at college.”
Girl-to-her-dad: “Dad, you knew this? He plays the band!! I love it when people play the band for Ganpati and for weddings, in Mumbai!”
My instant reaction (non-verbally communicated), amidst a couple (and more) of clenched fists – Lady, I play the drums, and not ‘the band’! Second, it’s not what they do at Ganpati and/or weddings. It’s what they do as part of a ‘rock band’.
I corrected her, describing that my drum-kit ain’t the portable type, and about its being a five-piece kit assembled around the drummer. I went on a step further, wandering into the stretched limits of futility, to describe the amount of left-right brain co-ordination required to bring together all four limbs. The wannabe Avril that she was, she beamed: “Oh, so you play the jazz?!” There she went again, till I told her about jazz being a genre of music, and not the name of a percussion instrument.
Girl-trying-to-move-closer-to-being-Avril: “Oh! What songs do you drum for?! Boyzone?!”
Yeah, right. If there was an Oscar for “the best musical ear”, this would have been reason enough for my contacting them to stop giving the award annually. Such people are beyond awards, believe me. Imagine my drumming to Boyzone’s “Words”! Ain’t it too awesome?! And if this does not suffice, I drum for Altaf Raja too, damn it!

Scenario II:
Second-girl-to-be-communicated-to called me up. She wanted a couple of songs for which she supposedly searched the entire Internet, and even “Google Search” did not return any results (PageRanking presumes common-sense, yes). I had asked her for her search keywords, typed it on to Google, and it’s the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that gave me the required songs!! But the songs were in the Real Media format, and it used to be part of e-mail etiquette, to send an indirect apology, if a song was sent in Real format. I sent her this message:
“Hey. Sent you the song. It’s in Real format. I couldn’t get hold of any other.”
Quarter of a minute past, my mobile buzzed. Her reply read, “I am not particular about the song being real. I could give it a try even it were the duplicate version.”
I wondered about how she, and possibly the Flintstones, survived their era, if at all they did.

Scenario III
My granddad, being an astrologer, believes in selecting auspicious dates for routine tasks like leaving hometown for studies, etc. He had told me that the 19th of June would be a good date for me to leave hometown for the city I would do my MBA in. I messaged the girl in Scenario II, that 19th was the date suggested by granddad. Her reply, quarter of a minute later, read:
“Oh! Did he predict it??”
Yes, he did. Now the astrologer, by definition, is a travel agent plus a magician. An astrologer, who tells you that you will leave home by the 19th, while simultaneously using Godsend-ERP systems to block tickets for you on the same date. IRCTC would have done better then, to recruit astrologers!!

Quick conclusion – (case-study like!)
As Subramonia Sarma sat staring into his laptop, he could not but help noting that the clock on the taskbar read 2am. He had a couple of exams in line, a day later. Will he be able to finish the portions? Will he even collect the course material? The library had only limited copies of course material, and this was an added impediment. On the other hand, would he meet girls to write a “Scenario IV”? If so, when? If not, why? He sighed, before closing his laptop, post publishing his latest blog.

Forwards and (the) future!

“Here’s wishing you, your family, your neighbour, his family and the stranger across the street a Very Happy and Prosperous Diwali. May this new year bring the best of blessings from the Almighty.” - 195 characters

“Hr’s wshng u, ur fly, ur nghbr, hs fly n d strngr acrs d strt a Vry Hpy n Prsprs Dwli. My dis nw yr brng d bst of blssngs frm d Almghty” - 135 characters

I get the first of the above two messages. Then I get the second, from another source, two minutes later. The first message had 195 characters, whereas the second, devoid of vowels, added up to 135 characters. The analysis follows:

1) The world now survives on gadgets. It’s upto binary 0s and 1s to work through electronic circuits and remind someone about his / her duty to wish his near-and-dear-ones on their birthday or on auspicious occasions.

2) The number of characters was counted for a purpose. Anything above 160 characters becomes a second message, which increases the cost of sending the message. A wholehearted wish ain’t all that wholehearted, on further analysis. The vowels are mercilessly chopped to cut costs. And to then send an encrypted message that would have had John Conway rethink his Game of Life.

3) The ‘stranger across the street’ was not added to make the nonsensical message look more pathetic. It is to state the fact that people don’t bother to edit out irrelevant portions of the message when re-forwarding it. Which is why you get messages with the prefix “to all employees of Bharat Fertilisers”, even if you don’t have the slightest notion of what a plant looks like, or for that matter, how you spell the word LEAF!

4) People may note that even the Almighty wasn’t spared in the encrypted message!

All in all, we have a gadget which sends trimmed messages to a whole bunch of other gadgets, through radiations transmitted from one end and received at the other. And if you blame me of taking the emotions away from such a transaction, I will have to assert that there wasn’t any.

This provides further insights on two types of mobile users, and in fact, two kinds of people at large. The first consists of those who ‘wish to wish’ and bother not about the monetary spend involved. The second consists of those who ‘wish not to wish’, but compulsion and reasons-known-only-to-them force them to forward a digital representation. The latter category deserves a word of thanks, for it is they who stimulate our creative juices. They cause us to think. We put pen to paper, write down their message the encoded way, and call other friends to decrypt it. When someone wishes “your fly” a Happy Diwali, you do need a bit of analysis to set things right. And a word like wshng needs to be stared at for minutes together, pre-Eureka-moment. You could very well have five such friends / relatives texting you daily for a month, and get your IQ boosted to the level of joining the MNSA H-IQ SCTY (sorry, The Mensa High-IQ Society, I mean!).

An SMS may stand for a Short Messaging Service, but people make it so short that a few days hence, the Almighty may end up saying something to the effect of “Lt thr b lght!” And lght thr wl b!!