The Taxman Cometh - II

Clause (ii) of sub-section (2) of section 2007

And whether you're an honest man, or whether you're a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief. - Benjamin Franklin.

NEWS YOU CAN USE : The income tax department has gone “e”.

Now one can file tax returns sooooo conveniently just by downloading the appropriate form ( if you can figure out which ones pertain to you) and use the return preparation software.

Then when you are all confused about how to use the software, or if you have any questions about a particular tax loophole, you may call the toll-free tax helpline number closest to you and listen to the engaged tone until you feel you have a clearer understanding of how helpless you really are and need to now contact a chartered accountant.

There are not many changes in the new tax form, only about 957 significant disallowed expenses. But the good news is :

1. Santa Singh is still the commissioner of income tax.

2. The P.A. to the Assistant Undersecretary of Poverty relief is changing the upholstery in his new office, which costs more than your annual salary, and the government now finding itself in serious debt, also exhorts you to send in “voluntary contributions”.

You are not required to send in more money than what you actually owe.

You can also send in gold, jewellery, clothing or accessories. Santa Singhs’ shoe size is an 8.

When filling in your tax return form this year please remember to avoid the following errors:

When writing up fictitious numbers please use figures that sound plausible such as Rs. 9847.45 instead of the more obviously telltale amount of Rs.10000.00.

Remember that tax officials scrutinise returns even more closely when taxpayers names sound like Dawood Abraham, Harshad Mehta or Rakhee Sawant.

Now for some tax case studies and how they should be handled under the latest tax laws, regardless that it states that this is referred to as the INCOME TAX ACT 1961*.

CASE NUMBER 1 : MLA Shri Sachananda Bihari Jha established a trust for his 9 children where each of them when they turn 18 will receive a Mercedes Benz and 5 villages.

When beating up his bonded labourers 12 year old son one day he vaguely recollects having bought some contraband cattle fodder.

QUESTION: What should Shri Jha do?

ANSWER: He should immediately summon his party workers and his press secretary to place ice-packs on his forehead and soothe him until he can be named to replace Ronen Sen as ambassador to the US.

CASE NUMBER 2 : Shri and Shrimati Bholaram are a working couple with 2 dependant school going children and a gross total annual income of Rs.2,30,000.00.

During the first financial quarter they received a tax notification that according to the e-governance income tax computer they owed Rs. 10 Crores as taxes.

Laughing at the huge blunder the income tax Department had obviously made and how they would be interviewed by NDTV as victims of typical government lassitude they show this to their friends and neighbors.

QUESTION: Can the Bholarams deduct the cost of the orphanage where they admitted their children while they were interred in debtors prison for four years?
ANSWER: They may deduct 33 percent of the amount spent on food for the period after adjustment to allow for the inflatable index, up to but not greater than Rs.2580.00, provided they maintained accurate records.

CASE NUMBER 3 : Shrimati Ulaganathan, 71 years old, living on her railway pension with no other income, receives a phone call while asleep one night where she discovers she might have an illegitimate son. Shocked, she dies of a heart attack.

QUESTION: Does Shrimati Ulaganathan still have to file a tax return?
ANSWER: Yes. Don’t be stupid. She should use Form ITR-12 Individual and Deceased Person, which can be obtained from the Income Tax Customer Relations Centre on any working day between 9am and 12 noon.

Finally and sadly, I have received word of the deaths of my chartered accountant at the tender age of 46, and 48 hours later my foster dad who was ailing also passed away.

It is hard, at such a time of tragedy to find words to express my feelings, but I speak for all of us when I quote Benjamin Franklin once again who said “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.”

On a more upbeat note he also said, “I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.” We can't say the same for taxes, that's for sure!

The Taxman Cometh - I

Clause (i) of sub-section (1) of section 2007

It’s past that time of year, time for all you procrastinators to get sent notices for failing to file your tax returns.

Which prompts me to ask when are we going to get some tax reform ?

We’ve been trying to get tax reform for over a hundred years when someone named Aamir Khan of “Lagaan” fame tried to figure out why they called cricket a “Gentleman’s Game” and discovered that the taxman, British or otherwise, was born without a soul.

And so today my tax return has not been filed and I am being notified, which means one of two things :

1) I’ve hit the big time.YEAAAAA ! Or …..

2) They’ve found out where I hide my booze for those dry days come election time. Bummer!

The problems methinx with the taxation system today is this:

@ The poor pay nothing.

@ The rich pay even less.

@ The large corporations get tax holidays.

@ The Government spends whatever little there is on hare-brained nuclear schemes.

@ No one else pays anything except you, me and ten people where you work.

@ The Commissioner of Income Tax is a guy named Santa Singh.

I propose therefore a tax reform in three phases which would be as follows:

1) We pay only One Hundred Rupees as tax.

2) Falsification of your tax return would be allowed.

3) Anyone who cuts you off in traffic would be thrown in jail (this is not really related, but folks, I've touted this idea to a number of persons and they tend to agree that it should be included.)

Manmohanji made tax reform the platform of his election speeches, just like he made tax reduction the platform of his budget presentations when he was Finance Minister.

He then went on to draw up a mysterious graph on Soniajis’sari pallu to show how the economics of supply and demand would be implemented by a three-pronged strategy of :

1) Importing wheat at exhorbitant prices.

2) Striking an Indo-US nuclear deal and….

3) Holding joint war games with them in the Bay of Bengal.

This is known as the Bakwaas Graph which allegedly shows that when you hold said sari in a certain light the government would make more money and the budget deficit would be reduced.

It wasn’t until recently that economists realized Soniaji had been holding her sari pallu sideways and then a wonderful thing happened. The opposition and the left front, a group of persons who have large pockets for the convenience of MNC’s wishing to make large contributions at midnight, developed a rare courage.

They look a hard look at facts and said: “Are we a bunch of pimps selling out the nation by taking large sums of foreign aid and giving them what they want? No! Let’s take large sums of foreign aid and NOT give them what they want!”

It is a brave step by these courageous men and women, a step that will take them beyond brokering into the realm of international faud.

It is to be hailed as a positive step in the annals of Indian fiscal jurisprudence.

And this is how we will achieve tax reform.

You ask how tax reform will affect you, the common man. The answer is that it will change your lives exponentially.

Let’s assume you are a middle-class family with two children and both parents are working. You also have occasional electrical problems where voltage fluctuations short-circuit your appliances two days after the warranty expires.

With the new system, you will get about a dozen unintelligible forms from the government to fill up, and with your electrical problems taking priority you will put off doing anything about these forms till the very last day, then you will be confused by the directions and will realise that you have spent your tax money on bribing the electricity department and have not kept receipts for the generator and the petrol.

Then you will worry about being notified.

Other than that things will not change and Santa Singh will still be the Commissioner.

Shizzle & Fudge

Dirty Word Scrabble anyone ?

Stumbled out of bed this morning……looked at the clock, I had overslept, this in spite of my alarm going off every 5 minutes after I hit the snooze button. Stubbed my toe on the bed post and in the space of 30 seconds, for the second time this a.m. mouthed a popular dirty word which begins with the letter “S”.For all future references this “S” word shall be referred to as “shizzle”.

I am definitely not a morning person. But I have to reach the airport by 6 a.m. today. Why is that you ask?

Well today’s the day Nandini and Aparna are coming to visit, and to make you guys green with envy, I have to tell you; these babes are hotttt , positively sizzling! and they’re coming to visit ME, so suck on that!

Although I can almost hear Aparna sound off with the F-word if I don’t get to the airport on time to pick them up. For all future references the F-word will be referred to as “fudge”.

I always get grumpy at the fact that, after I have hit the snooze button and turned back to sleep, the clock continues to run.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, after we’ve hit the snooze button, time just stands still, so that a couple of hours later, when we actually get out of bed, via a natural process of yawning, flatulence and scratching it is still the time we set the alarm for.

But the system doesn’t work that way, and that ol’ clock just keeps moving along, making me say “shizzle” at times like these.

I remember saying it right into the ear of my daughter Lekha, at the tender age of four. Lekha would sometimes crawl into our bed in the middle of the night because of nightmares. I’m guessing it’s because she slept with a Pacman printed blanket, that looked like a beheaded chicken chasing black tar-babies.

I immediately regretted opening my morning-breath mouth, but she was pretty cool. She matter of factly said, “Baba, you should not say shizzle.” Only she did not say “shizzle”, she actually said shizzle, you understand.

And she said it so maturely so as to indicate that she was merely trying to discipline me, and got no joy from it whatsoever.How do kids get to be this way.

Isn’t it strange that when I said”shizzle” I was neither referring to the actual substance, nor attempting to represent it.

What I was doing was vocalizing my frustration and anger at being late, and instead of saying, “I feel agonized, frustrated and angry at my tardiness this morning” for the sake of brevity I said”shizzle” and was corrected in no uncertain terms, and this from a child who consistently wore her shoes on the wrong feet.

It’s ironical that through the ages famous writers like Arthur Conan Doyle have penned dirty words that now is considered literature.

In Sherlock Holmes for example the following appears in Act I Scene III , Row IV and Seats VII & VIII :

Holmes : What the fudge do you deduct Mr Watson ?

Watson : That there are a shizzle-load of stars in the sky Mr.Holmes.

Holmes : No, think again Mr.Watson.

Watson : Oh! Someone has stolen our fudging tent!

Holmes : Fudging elementary my dear Watson.

Today fudge is also used in major motion pictures, and when someone cuts us off in traffic.

But when you consider what the word describes and listen to psychoanalysts going on ad nauseum about the relationship between sex and hostility, you just know they’re full of shizzle.

We tend to use fudge in lieu of a nasty comeback as a very witty insult.

Unlike the great sage Birbal, when the Emperor Akbar asked him stupid questions at parties, most of us don’t think of good comebacks until a month afterwards when in the loo, so we tend to go for fudge as a substitute.

I disprove of fudge, since it generally tends to lead to violence and sometimes stabbings. So when we anger each other with a fender bender in traffic, we should exchange phone numbers and call up the other person when we have had the time to think of a really witty insult.

But I think shizzle should be made should be made an acceptable expression for despicable alarms and tyres that go flat in the middle of nowhere.

Aparna used it extensively when she deleted all the Goa visit pics from her camera.

I dread to think what will happen when she gets a cell phone with a camera. Instead of receiving an sms, we can instead expect multiple pictures of her nose!!

Shizzle was also used when dropping the ladies off at the airport, because, guess what? Time kept moving after the morning alarm, again!

Signs of Our Times

Running With The Bulls

Dropping the talented, beautiful and versatile Professor Nalini to the airport was cutting it close, but I was not too worried since most of the distance to the airport is covered via the NH17(1).

I figured that except for the odd stray dog that would attempt to chew my tyres we would arrive in good time for Nalini to catch her flight.

What I did not figure on is this habit that people have of driving on the right side or the fast lane, despite the fact that they are going at less than 40 kmph.

This is true of a few contaminated cities like Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai, populated with aliens and multinationals, where it is customary for people to drive according to their planet of origin.

But I think like bird flu, it’s contagious, now you see it everywhere.

The right lane, (for those of you who got their licences by bribing the RTO), is the fast or “passing” lane. It is not meant for people -who have never passed anyone in their lives- to keep squatting there, like cholesterol globules, clogging up the transit lifelines of this great nation. We have Morchas(2) and Rasta Rokos(3) organized by out-of-work politicians for that sort of thing.

I now generally pass these people from the left, and glare at them. But since this doesn’t seem to be working, because for some reason they seem to be wearing baseball caps backwards and looking intently at the road ahead instead of allowing you to catch their eye, I propose a military option. I propose we mount rocket launchers on the front bumpers of cars of which mine would be among the forerunners.

When coming across a right lane blockage, I would first flash my lights, then I would blow my horn until the driver in front looked in his rear-view mirror to see me making hand signals for him to move over, and if he wanted to drive at 40kmph he should do it in say, a government department, where it would be more appropriate. If that did not work I would sound the specially installed siren, and only if ALL these failed to deter him I would resort to vaporizing him with his car.


What!?? Too harsh !! Shut up or I’ll punch you in the jaw. Oh! I’m sorry, I will admit that I am a little stressed-out from driving behind these persons.

But something needs to be done, word should get around to the slow-drivers-in-the-fast-lane community, wherever they congregate- methinx baseball cap shops- that they have a choice of moving left or becoming fertiliser(4): most would choose the former.

But then again maybe it’s not their fault. Possibly the reason is those road signs on the NH17 that say SPEED LIMIT 40. These signs could possibly create the impression that the speed limit IS indeed 40. This is definitely not the case, as well informed drivers will tell you.

All Indian citizens know this is the “pretend” speed limit, in the same way as call centre employees are always pretending they want their customers to “have a nice day”, but it certainly is not the real speed limit, since nobody, including the police, actually drive that slowly, except bullock carts and people wearing baseball caps backward in the right lane.

On the other hand, when you see cars with red lights and police outriders, sirens blaring, barreling past you at supersonic speeds you wonder, how fast are you really allowed to drive?

But here’s the kicker: Nobody will tell you.


India is the only democracy where the speed limits seems to be a secret.

I asked a cop whom I was friendly with, to tell me the real speed limit, and he told me, but only after I swore on my forefathers not to reveal his name or his state or the speed limit itself.

Unbelievable! Here in India, home of the Taj Mahal and the recently touted “RIGHT TO INFORMATION ACT”, we have a police officer, an officer sworn to uphold the law, afraid he could lose his job, or worse, his share of the matka(5) hafta(6), for revealing the speed limit.

When things are this secretive, then I figure we must be dealing with National Security.

Specifically we must be dealing with the Minister of Transport at the Centre who is in charge of enforcing the national “pretend” speed limit.

The Transport Minister has learned, through NDTV that drivers in a lot of states who are driving faster than 40 kmph, could be terrorists, or worse Members of the Opposition, and has threatened to cut off these states from World Bank Highway Development payoffs.

Therefore to keep the Transport Minister happy, the police pretend to enforce the speed limit and put up all these signs. The police in fact also think it’s stupid, and will not challan(7) you unless you exceed the real speed limit or unless there is a “collection drive”(8). This varies from state to state and even from day to day, but the police don’t dare talk about it for fear of upsetting the Transport Minister.

I told my friend the cop, that not knowing how fast we are allowed to go creates frustration in the average motorist. He said the cops like the idea because apart from police brutality, screwing with peoples heads by changing the speed limits from time to time, is the only other real fun they have.

I think we need to make a better system than this. I say the states should supplement their road revenues by “leaking” the daily speed limits at all the Playwin(9) booths - so for 50 rupees you can stop your car at one of these booths and a road transport employee whispers the daily speed limit in your ear. Don’t you agree?

Of course if the Transport Minister hears about this he could get angry, but then again why should we care when he gets chauffeured around in a Government car with a red light, which is immune to traffic rules - although I do think it would be vulnerable to rocket launchers.

Nalini caught her flight with an hour to spare. Her flight take off was delayed due to “technical difficulties(10)”


GLOSSARY OF TERMS
------------------------


1.NH17 - A National Highway in Goa, part of the Golden Quadrangle that was supposed to connect all major cities (a dream project of former Prime Minister Vajpayee) slowly becoming a nightmare, but thankfully still motorable in parts, namely from my house to Dabolim, Goa’s airport.

2.Morcha - A “front” as in “Mahila Mazdoor Evam Laghu Kisan Morcha” (MMELKM), meaning Women, Labour and Small Farmers’ Front. This particular front was launched as a convenient tax shelter for rich landlords to hide behind.


3.Rasta Roko - A phrase used to block the roads by unscrupulous politicians by gathering a whole bunch of Fronts or Morchas making absurd demands such as reducing the speed limit further to allow for bullock carts to be able to travel in the right lane.

4.Fertiliser - What bullock carts are adept at producing…. So do most politicians.

5.Matka - A form of indigent gambling, “allegedly” frowned on by the establishment because gambling should only be done in “authorized” casinos who have paid a lot of money both below and above board to avail of these licences.

6.Hafta - The graft a policeman gets for “looking the other way” This varies depending on how large the establishment is, (push-cart or 5-star), and does not apply to those owned by politicians and high-ranking officials.

7.Challan - Basically a written demand or a fine-cum-receipt for money, most motorists are expected to pay this on the spot, this is because there is the distinct possibility that the road transport challan form may be uncovered as a fake if presented at a pay- in counter later.

8.Collection Drive - The amount of money a Minister or Senior official designates to lower cadres to collect as fines, so he can send his offspring to finishing school at Oxford or Cambridge. This varies from semester to semester.

9.Playwin - Another form of legit gambling, devised for the masses, like the lottery, which encourages the poor and the stupid to gamble away their newborn’s milk money against ludicrously bad odds.

10.Technical Difficulties - Phrase used by airlines when they find the plane is only half full and they wait for walk-in passengers, or they cancel the flight altogether so that their “partner” airline can fill up, another word for “profit-sharing.”

Ship Ahoy!

It's a little boat, just 23 stories high,with a displacement of 104,000 tonnes, 1092 feet long and 252 feet wide; a speck in the vast Indian Ocean. It has enough weaponry to turn the Coast of Tamil Nadu to charcoal. Nicknamed "Old Salt", the "USS Nimitz"came to party ,and the party-poopers turned out in droves.

If The Asian Age of 6th July ‘07 is to be believed, the Prime Minister played safe, denying awareness of the visit …just in case someone accused an American sailor of kissing a South Indian actress …and to quote:-
[[‘I didn’t know Nimitz was to visit India’By Seema Mustafa
New Delhi, July 5: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did not know that the USS Nimitz would be docking at Chennai port. "It was just an ordinary development, I was not even aware of it until I read about it in the newspapers. Too much should not be read into it," he said. US ambassador to India David C. Mulford had said that the USS Nimitz had come to Chennai for rest and recreation on the invitation of the Government of India, but the Prime Minister made it clear that he was not in the loop.]] End quote.

So what does it take to make the PM of this country aware that the biggest, and meanest warship in the world is wagging it's tail at his country’s doorstep?

What if the Captain of the Nimitz pooped out one teeny tiny missile in his direction?

PM: Huh! Wha…. Where did THAT come from?

AIDE: The USS Nimitz Sir

PM: Tell them not to disturb us, Soniaji and I are busy.

AIDE: The Captain says he is on a goodwill visit and requests an audience Sir.

PM: Well delay him, try to organise some protest or the other to see that the ship does not dock.

AIDE: How shall I do that Sir?

PM: Use your imagination, Soniaji and I cannot think of everything.

AIDE: How long should we delay the docking Sir?

PM: See that I am not distracted, this affair of selection of a new President elect is a very delicate matter.

AIDE: Ms. Jayalalithaa says her party can organise a protest, something to do with nuclear contamination from the ship Sir.

PM: Good woman that! Wasn’t she the one who got rid of that forest brigand Veerapan?

AIDE: Yes Sir.

PM: And wasn’t she also responsible for sacking all those Government employees who went on strike and made them write unconditional apology letters before reinstating them? A first for any administration in this country.

AIDE: Yes Sir.

PM: And didn’t she also arrest the Kanchi Acharya for abetting a murder - another first for this country if I recall?

AIDE: Yes Sir. She’s the one

PM: Then I guess SHE is the only one with the "cajones" who can stop this ship? Extend all co-operation and remind me to present her with the Ashoka Award for bravery and valour.

AIDE: But Sir, she is in the opposition!

PM: Oh! Darn! Well I need the time to sort out this Prathiba Patil fiasco, and I have also to word a letter to the PM of Britain about labelling terrorists by nationality or religion especially when they are from India.

AIDE: But Sir, you did not state this when our own media labelled Islamic terrorists coming from Pakistan or Britain. And should we take credit for the likes of Kalpana Chawla, Sunita Williams, Deepak Chopra and Sanjaya Malakar who are actually US citizens?
PM: Arre! You will not understand "realpolitik". Now what about that ship? Tell the Tamil Nadu Government not to try to stop the protests, ask the Left factions also to join in, and stir up those environmental activists, that should take away some of the limelight from Jayalalithaa, and should also give me some time.

AIDE: Yes Sir.

Two hours later.........

AIDE: Excuse me, Sir.

PM: What is it now ?

AIDE: The ship’s Captain says he has a letter of invitation from our government for the visit.

PM: Oh! Dammit!

AIDE: But the good news is that the ship cannot come into Chennai port but has to anchor two nautical miles offshore, and due to bad weather the Captain cannot leave his ship.He sends his regards and regrets that he cannot call on you personally.

PM: Very good. But why so far out?

AIDE: The ship’s doctors have warned about contamination to the ship’s superstructure from the pollution of the air and waters of the Cooum and Adyar rivers and the Buckingham canal sewage mixing with the water in the vicinity of Chennai Port.
PM: Excellent. Send a congratulatory note to the municipal authorities of Chennai for their initiative. Oh! And inform the auto drivers unions that they should charge the sailors fares on par with New York cab drivers. Let’s make the most of this puppy.

AIDE: Yes Sir.

PM: And clean out that missile mess on my doorstep, blame some kashmiri or ULFA terrorist. Now back to the issue of the President Elect, reminds me, I will also have to ask Madam to think about the Vice-Presidency, I wonder if Rabri Devi is free!

.......USS Nimitz, after much hullaballoo, left Indian shores and sailed out after a lot of bilious water had passed under its bridge.

Our scientists determined that they could not distinguish nuclear contamination from polluted waste of the Chennai port and its accompanying sewage. They wondered how they would ever be able to tell if there was a leakage from the Kalpakkam Atomic Power Plant next door.

JAYALALITHAA: We have an atomic power plant in Chennai? Why didn't someone inform me?

The ships doctors however were busy treating sailors suffering from malaria and intestinal disorders, and the ships janitors were concerned at the garbage and scum of pollution sticking to the ships hull, and entangled in the ships propellors.

At the time of writing the ship is in quarantine, and the Captain of the USS Nimitz is dining with the Sultan of Brunei, and egad! and gadzooks!;Pratibha Patil has become the new President of India.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of Rum!

Bright Lights & Celluloid Blues

Take II

Not that she had been born yet, but I had already named her, so she figured, “What the heck, I may as well be born a Lekha.”

So you see, I just KNEW she had talent waaaaayy back then. Even before she discovered, at a very tender age, and all on her own, the scientific principle; that warm wet tongues get stuck to cold freezer trays, and, the berry from the tree doesn’t travel very far into the ear canal.

A score and four years later, after her major creative scholastic achievements of discovering how to score pot at dorm parties, the interesting patterns of alcoholic puke, and the designs that guys have on women, – she graduated, quite honourably as expected, top of her class .

Then came the turning point. She gave in to the concept of becoming an actor, when she allowed them to put foundation cream on her face and styling mousse in her hair.

Don’t we marvel at screen actors whose hair all goes in the same direction and looks as though it is full-bodied and soft, and who have such flawless skin, but which in fact are mostly covered in hardened petrochemical substances to the point where they can deflect poison darts.

I suspect that these substances have leached into the skulls of some of these screen personalities and attacked their brain cells. Why else would Larry King think that the concept of a major journalistic achievement would be to interview ex-jailbird Paris Hilton.

Now how did Lekha go about becoming a screen personality.

A while back a public-television channel asked her to be the host of a new television show for young brain-dead adults who had no life, and I remember her saying to me, “ Sounds like fun.”

And so she became an artiste. That’s what people call you when you go in front of the camera: an artiste. They call you that to your face, the screen tabloids call you “the new talented artiste.”
Only after a while, you get down from your high, and realize they don’t really mean that you have any artistry or talent. Looking at it closely it is a calculated insult.

In the celluloid world “artiste” does not mean the cameraman, the lighting or sound engineers or even the person who handles the props, (all of whom do exactly what they are supposed to do every single time), but the dolt with the pancake makeup who makes everyone spend another four hours in the studio because she can’t remember to say, “ The four partridges in the pear tree” and keeps on substituting the “P” with the “F”.

The way they say “artiste” is reminiscent of how hoteliers use the word “guest” which to them means “idiot”.

When you are a screen artiste you are the store dummy. Studio personnel smear stuff on your face and keep brushing lint off your costume, and talk to you in the third person saying things like: ‘ What if we made her sit on the couch instead of the floor?” and “Can we make her eyes look lighter with contacts?” or “Do you think there is some way we can hide her pot belly ?”

Finally your hair contains two barrels of styling gel, and you dare not laugh or cosmetic flakes will fall of your cheek bones.

You pictured going into the studio, ambling upto the camera and saying, “Hello and welcome to our show. I am your host, and we present tonight a leading dentist cum child psychologist, to explain to you why your child likes to put cats into washing machines and microwave ovens.” Then you would sit back and listen to the expert, you would nod your head knowingly and frown with concern every now and then. And sometimes you would say something really spontaneous and witty.

The way it turns out, nothing spontaneous happens in the studio. There’s several hours of prepping the studio, where the light guys shine bright lights at different angles, and then stand around frowning with varying facial expressions, then they dust the studio with special powders to cut down the glare from those bright lights. They then decide to move to a completely different location - usually Switzerland, where they start over.

Once they decide that the lights are just right – as bright and hot as possible, then it becomes time for the artiste to come in and take over- WRONG! That happens AFTER the sound check and the camera placements which take another few hours, and involve a few kilometres of cabling snaking all over the floor and dangling from the ceiling. Then the directors chair gets dusted.

NOW you, the artiste gets called in to make a fool of yourself. You come in, walk up and casually seat yourself on the chaise lounge, lean smiling into the camera, make a witty remark, turn to your left and make more witty remarks to another camera, get up gracefully and walk out. Sounds cool and easy right?

Here’s what actually goes on; while you are giving your performance, the director, the producer, the managing director, all the assistant producers and the tea boy are in the control room out of your hearing, discussing what you’ve been doing wrong.

Now you can take criticism. Your father has always been very direct with you, “Lekha, this is crap” he says by way of criticism, and you can handle it. But studio folk never talk to you like that. They’ll talk to you like you are emotionally retarded – and treat you like a little kid. They go to great pains not to hurt your feelings. Their first sentence is ALWAYS very positive.

“That was great, Lekha. Verrrrry nice. Now, we’re going to try this again but be a little more pro-active, OK? When you walk in, try not to stoop, OK? When you sit down cross your right leg over your left, OK? Also when you look at the camera try not to lick your lips, OK? And when you turn left do it slower without flicking you hair, otherwise it looks odd, OK? Also remember to say F-our P-artridges, don’t mix it up, OK? So try to be natural, and let’s have fun, OK? Let’s put a teeny bit more energy into it, OK? We think we almost have the scene.”

So you repeat everything again and again many times over, and of course all your witty remarks now sound so flat from the repetition to the stupid cameraman, who had not got them even the first time around. But you keep at it, over and over until finally, after you have lost count of the many repeats, comes the voice: “That was perfect, Lekha. Let’s try it again with a little more pizzazz. And this time say your name, OK?

…… and the Oscar for best new female artiste interviewing a dentist goes to……..

Intestinal Homicide

Statutory Warning: The frozen processed-meat produce sections of all stores contain cryogenically frozen animals that have been stored there to be revived by some future generation that would have evolved a cure for their disease.

D-DAY………
....nestled in their polythene packing “Costas Sausages” looked endearingly up at me through the glass door of the ‘Farmers Choice’ freezer. They wiggled their fat, glistening, perfectly-shaped little cocktail fingers at me, ‘Take me home,’ they said, “We’ll show you such a good time!”

I took them home!

I HAVE NOW EXPERIENCED THE BARF OF DEATH. THIS IS NO ORDINARY EXPERIENCE : not the kind that feels so good the morning after you’ve tied one on with the guys at the local Pink Pussycat Pub, when you head feels like a balloon, and your cell phone when it rings, sounds like Big Ben doing cartwheels inside your skull.

No, this particular strain must have an official name, something like “Shock & Awe” or “Terminal Velocity”.

The main symptom of food-poisoning is that your insides turn out and your lungs collapse,(well they don’t really collapse, you just run out of breathable air from all that retching.)

Another symptom is that your mouth tastes like a sewer.(I’ve never actually tasted a sewer, but if I had, I’m sure that’s the taste I would have got). So you start to brush your teeth, but your muscles don’t respond and you just have to lie down on the bathroom floor while toothpaste foam dribbles out of the side of your mouth, which hardens into an adhesive paste and bonds your ears to the floor tiles, which is where the coroner may eventually find you.

Then you get a fever and you spend a lot of time lying still and thinking morbid thoughts. One scientific fact is clear though: air is definitely made up of billions of atomic particles. I discover this since I can feel each and everyone of them striking my skin like homing bullets, at supersonic speeds, especially my eyeballs. And when I try to escape by covering my head with the sheet, they attack my, by-now, equally sensitive hair follicles.

That rumpled bed- sheet that has lain on the bed now for the last few days and appears motionless except that it makes the occasional effort to reach for a tissue - do not attempt to prod it, because if it does turn out to be me, and I were alive, and you prodded me, it would kill me.

THREE DAYS LATER......
……I am now trying to lead a more active lifestyle. I attempt to crawl to the bathroom three or four times a day. The bathroom is all of 12 feet away, with a great barrage of atomic air particles en route, and at the halfway point I try to curl up and hope for lightning to strike me, instead I meet up with Buffy, also on all fours. Buffy is the cat. She instantly senses that something is wrong, and guided by that timeless and unerring feline instinct that all cats have, gives me a haughty look reminding me that cats have nine lives.

The day just flies by. Soon it is 7.30 pm, time for sustenance in the form of soft boiled lentils and rice, or what Nadia terms “Barf Kichidi”.Then its time to crawl back, past the haughty Buffy, through the air particles to the bedroom, and call it a night.

DAY FIVE....
……“Aah!”, says the policeman when they find me lying on the bathroom floor, “Barf Kichidi!”

On Yuppyness.

Jimmy Choos or Bata , Crocs or Gumboots !

Disclaimer : This is a work of fiction, if you resemble any of the characters here living or dead….. TOUGH COOKIES!!

If you have been following the tabloids you will know that “yuppies” or in long, “young urban professionals,” are the new breed of serious, clean-cut, ambitious, career-oriented youth that probably resulted from all those underground nuclear tests.( The errata version that disturbingly comes from Punjab are called “puppies”)

Two really beautiful people and my dear friends: Nishant and Jyotsna (names changed to protect their notoriety) are yuppies in the true sense of the word, and DINK’s too! ( Double Income No Kids)

Lets take Nishant :
Nishant is a “consultant” yuppy with an international business house, wears natural-fibre, businesslike clothing even when he knows there is no client-presentation or funeral. In college he majored in Business Administration, and to meet certain academic criteria which required he take an arts course, chose e-Business Music and Lyrics.

In short he’s just another of these yuppies running around behaving as if they’re real grown-ups, and being politically correct, and he’s doing it where, at his age, I and others of my generation, whom I shall not name here, were playing Rolling Stones records backwards by candlelight, and experimenting with finding out what happens when you drink a whole bottle of Coke mixed with crushed Aspirin.

NOTE TO MY FANS : Nothing happens, you just puke your insides out and, for about 10 hours, develop this intense interest in floor tile designs up close and personal.

As for Jyotsna:

The lovely Jyotsna is a designer with a chic (also international) lifestyle magazine. She is currently redecorating their home.

My friend Sohail and his wife Nabeela are unhappy with their current décor, especially since they have four small kids, the result being that all of their original furniture and upholstery, whatever the original colour scheme , is now the colour of mud.

I do know a great deal about home décor (doesn’t everyone!!) Ever since college, when I shared my room with four other guys, I have done my own decorating ,without any assistance professionally or otherwise.

Our bedroom décor theme was “functionality” which consisted of two dozen underwear each on the bed or covering the floor where we could find them in an hurry.

For the living room we opted for a very basic, practical, functional decorating concept called “ girlie centrespreads stuck on the wall” which in addition to providing colour and overcoming the primordial ooze of grey hostel paint, served to lighten our bachelor moods especially on those rainy afternoons when it was wet.

We highlighted this with a textural effect when we had a party, threw red and green crepe streamers soaked in beer up onto the ceiling, left it there for a month to harden and then tried to scrape it off with the hardcover of our course journals. Sukhbir Singh tried to scrape it off while the ceiling fan was still on and left an interesting splatter effect when a fan blade got in the way of his turbanned skull.

But our pride and joy was a two-piece set consisting of :

a) A flashing rotating red light that we nicked from a police jeep.
b) The front grill of an Ambassador with the headlights intact mounted on the window.

You can imagine the impressive overall effect created by these design elements, especially when we had women friends over and we really cut loose.

We would arrange the empty cigarette packets and beer bottles in the corner, and then would create a romantic atmosphere by spraying a bottle of Aqua deodorant on the underwear stacks.

Trust me it was so cool seeing the look on the ladies’ face when they entered our “suite” for the first time and, experiencing the awesome visual effects created by the flashing red cop light and the blue headlights of the Ambassador, realized what suave, macho college guys they were going out with.

Okay, okay enough about my qualifications, we were talking about Jyotsna and her yuppy Lifestyle Magazine.

Clearly you need new furniture along with all those beautiful wall hangings, and curios that complement them. To select exactly what you want, you need to have a lot of creative decorating ideas.

This is made possible by going out and purchasing Rs.5000 worth of a whole skew of glossy magazines with names like Unaffordable Décor, and Elle (French for sucker) Interieur.

Inside each of these magazines you will find exquisite colour pics of beautiful, well lit, perfectly co-ordinated, wondrously clean, rooms, where even the molecules of light filtering in through a window are arranged in attractive patterns.

You wonder how rooms can look so perfect. Where are the maids hand smudges, the dishrag on the chair, the cats’ hair on the sofa, especially the kids stain on the carpet after swallowing that bottle of mouthwash, and where are all the people who litter the house?

The secret: Jyotsna reveals to me is that these rooms are only 6 inches high. The magazines use highly skilled model-makers solely for the purpose of making your home look like a garbage dump.
Occasionally the magazine will print a “blooper” and you will see , through the window of the featured Bachchans gorgeous living room what appears to be a 500 kilogram fingernail.

Now, assuming you have all your creative juices flowing with decorating ideas, get a sheet of graph paper, make a CAD scale-drawing of your floor plan and mark off spaces where you would put all your nice new furniture,- if you were a drug-dealer or politician and could afford new furniture. Unfortunately the furniture you CAN afford is made out of cardboard and used matchboxes.

The best you can do then would be to spread all those glossy magazines around to create an ambience. Bummer!

So what do these yuppies really achieve other than creating fantasy ? What happened to the natural order ? The natural order being that youth start out being wild-eyed radicals and over time develop haemorrhoids and settle down as public spirited citizens.

What bothers me about these yuppies, is that their accelerated maturity is destroying the natural social order, and that represents a threat to society, and we need to do something about them.
One possibility would be to simply wait till their next vacation takes them to Switzerland and they reproduce. They’ll give their children the finest clothing , toys and designer educations.

Then these kids will ultimately grow up and hate everything their parents stood for: will rebel and become dirty, unkempt, riotous drug-addicts, and violently anti-establishment and society will eventually return to normal. And they will ban the phrase, “In Pursuit of Excellence.”

The problem however is that yuppies have a very low birth rate, and this could take a while.

What we really need to do then is draft them and make them serve for 2 years in Pointless Basic Training where they engage in non-productive activities such as eating Thali meals and watching Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi.

Then they would be given jobs to do with absolutely no opportunity for career advancement such as:
.Train Compartment Passenger List sticker.
.Construction Brick and Sand carrier.
.Government School bell ringer.Road White Line Painter.
.Temple Chappal Caretaker.
And they would do all this wearing old t-shirts, shorts, with a hanky tied over their head.

Would the “u” in yuppy classify Astronaut Sunita Williams as “upwardly mobile” too? – ahh, but SHE would look good in shorts and an old t-shirt !

Thank Bachhus !

"Cultivating Ambrosia"

Whew! The Goa elections are over, along with all those “dry days” and restaurants losing their bar licences for “violations” so let’s sit back and raise a toast to the winners!

Now after all that excitement, I began to feel this void in my stomach, even after meals, so I said to myself, ”All you’ll ever do now till the next round of politicking is sit around and drink beer”

So I decided to take affirmative action and get a hobby that will bring meaning and true fulfillment into my life. I am making wine.

I haven’t the slightest interest in traditional hobbies like coin collecting, religion and matchbox labels. My banker friend Ajay collects coins. He just sort of rushes to the Reserve Bank counters the moment they open to issue limited edition coins or notes, and then takes them home and just keeps them. A real action sequence happens when he discovers a coin that has been minted with a head on both sides, you should see the way he gets excited and just about wets his polyester pants.

For many years I did not have a hobby. Of course when I put down “drugs” in questionnaires where they asked what my hobbies were I was only joking.

Then one day I met Joe and Maureen from Kodaikanal, and Joe introduced me to a potent bottle of wine made on his farm, right in his own garage. It seems Joe needed a hobby too, and soon became a self-taught home wine-maker or “vintner” as they say in the pretentious wine phrase-making thesaurus.

Joe took me to a store where they have wine-making equipment, where a person named Maharaj told me how wine-making contributed to his artistic development and kept giving me free samples till I handed over my credit card.

I’m glad I got into wine-making, because the wine sold here is watery and sweet and tasteless and the sappiest, wussiest wine in the world. All the other wine-making countries are drinking Don Bradman wine, and we are drinking Mandira Bedi.

At first I was reluctant to make my own wine. I had heard stories about how difficult it was to make, about it being illegal, and making you go blind. My neighbour, the beautiful Avril, has given me her personal wine-making recipe and reassured me that these were tall stories, especially the myth of how it makes you go gmpph drrk, glpph@$&*$*

The truth is home-made wine, is perfectly safe, unless you shake the bottle and it explodes. And it is completely legal to make home-made wine. I read up on the updated Government Bulletin on wine-making and it says, that if you make your own wine you can get a rebate in income tax under Section 800 DD, provided you claim you spent it on agricultural research.

It’s simple making your own wine: You take any old fruit and crush them between your toes in the bathtub, and then quickly walk away. (Traditional wine makers fill empty swimming pools with grapes and stomp on them till their bunions, corns and toenails drop off – this makes for a sweeter wine with a more earthy flavour.)

Your main ingredients are (1) a bottle of wine ingredients that you can get from Avril or Joe or an equivalent person, and (2) sexually active wheat. This little organism has only one cell in its plant-like body but has figured out how to convert sugar to alcohol – this is a far greater accomplishment than we can attribute to complex multi-cellular gigantic organisms such as the Indian World Cup 2007 Cricket Team. (Traditional wine makers use yeast - an animal that can take on the whole Australian Cricket Team)

After the tiny wheat grains finish converting your fruit to wine they suffocate and die in their millions, but you should not feel bad about this, because, like the great expanding population of India, there’s plenty more where they came from, on those huge wheat farms in Punjab.

Next your job is to siphon out the wine into bottles. This is the tricky part, because while you’re doing this, the phone rings and you get involved in a lengthy conversation with your builder, while your little visiting grandchild Adwait, gets hold of the tube and spews new wine and pulp all over the garage, on the car upholstery and on himself. And you become the target of his parents wrath when they accuse you of being a bad influence on their offspring.

But that is the only negative I have found. The wine looks and tastes smooth and delicious, except at times when the bottle tends to explode. There’s also another advantage – next elections when those “dry days” come around you no longer need to worry about running dry. Hic!

Let's Get The "Party" Started.

India Rising


In sync with the 21st Century

Calling all Scoundrels

Yeaaaaaaa !! It’s that time for Goans once again, and time for all politicians, to open that termite–ridden cupboard, pull out and brush off that list of lies and false promises, and then ride out to hoodwink the great unwashed, and illiterate public once again.

Time to form new alliances with old enemies, or to pretend not to, time to make tall claims of progress for one’s party, and to rubbish the opposition.

Yes the Great Electoral Circus has come to town once again, along with all the Political Celebrities and some Bollywood ones – dancing and prancing, with oodles of promises of gifts that would put Santa to shame.

I asked MLA Jos Fernandes, and a dear friend of mine, ”Jos, what is the best thing about being a politician?”
He always answered, ”The best thing is that I can help others and make the world a better place.”
Then everybody had a hearty laugh because of course Jos lied. In fact that’s one of the great things about being a politician: You can lie! You get rewarded when you lie! What other profession can say that?
OK, lawyers, but they have to have gone to college to learn how to lie first. Whereas politicians need never have seen the inside of a classroom. Politicians never need to even wear a uniform, they can wear whatever they want. They can show up (or not ) for work in a giant chicken costume and their bosses would not question it. They might even be impressed and remark on it positively in their annual Performance Appraisals. (“Shows initiative and drive. Met his constituents in chicken costume.”)

When you are a politician, people allow you a lot of freedom.

As a politician you can call for a press meeting any hour, even at midnight ,and have a swarm of reporters hanging on every word when you make a sweeping statement that: ”Shilpa Shetty being publically kissed by Richard Gere encourages the spread of terrorism in the country.”

As a politician you can state categorically that unaccounted money found in your hotel room are “party funds”.

As a politician you can fake chest pains when issued an arrest warrant and be lodged in a five-star hospitals' private suite instead of a jail cell.

As a politician you can be involved in numerous financial scams, default on bank loans upwards of 20 crores of rupees in a sugar mill mismanagement and a bank, and go on to become Governor of a State and then President elect for the entire country.

.. and much, much more. And guess what? Nobody thinks it’s odd that you do or say these things. Because it’s not odd. These are all part of the job of being a professional politician. And as for mischievous information on any ill-gotten gains, scams, bribes or kickbacks, news of which is being flashed on NDTV via spycam – that’s preposterous!: you obtained every rupee in the course of doing your job as a politician. They are the Tools of Your Trade!

My point is that politicians have a wonderful job. It’s way better than other so-called “elite” jobs, such as Cardiologist, or Secretary to the United Nations.

Don’t believe me? Apart from not requiring any minimum age, experience or educational qualifications, let’s then compare the three vocations with specifics :

A. Okay to wear chicken costume to work ?
Cardiologist - No
Secretary to the U.N. – Only at special functions dealing with “Bird Flu”.
Politician – Yes

B. Hardest part of job ?
Cardiologist – Cutting into chest of live human
Secretary to the U.N. – Maintaining delicate balance of world peace
Politician – Working Shilpa Shetty’s name into speech at Spastics Society

C. Worst that can happen ?
Cardiologist – Heart bounces off your shoes.
Secretary to the U.N. – World War III commences.
Politician – “Shilpa” speech fails to appear in newspaper column.

D. Ultimate benefit ?
Cardiologist – Can save a life.
Secretary to the U.N. – Can truly make the world a better place for millions.
Politician – Can wear pyjamas to television talk show.

So it’s crystal clear folks: any way you look at it, there is no better job than politician. That is why so many people want this job. It looks so easy! In fact as you read this you may find yourself thinking: “Hey, I could do this. Any "bad word" person could do this!”

But that is where you would be wrong! It takes a very special kind of "bad word" person to be a politician. Every election year, thousands of people try their hands at this demanding job. After the results are announced, almost all of them have given up and gone back to petty theft and extortion.

Do you think you could do this job? Do you have what it takes to be a truly thick-skinned politician? Then answer the following multiple choice questions:

TEST FOR POLITICAL APTITUDE

1. You give a speech speaking ill of a certain minority community, that is so insensitive and vicious that thousands of people from all walks of life take out processions and condemn you and your speech. You should:
a. Apologize to them in public
b. Apologize to them on television
c. Threaten to send goons to their houses.

2. If you were given the opportunity to ask one question of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose what would the appropriate question be?
a. “What did you hope would be your legacy to future generations?”
b. “What is the greatest moral threat facing India and Indians today?”
c. “Can I wear your hat?”

3. As a politician, you should always watch the daily television news because it enables you to:
a. Accurately keep in touch with current affairs and affairs of state.
b. Gauge the mood of the electorate at large.
c. Watch FTV models in their underwear.

4. The part of the newspaper you first turn to is:
a. The headlines
b. The editorial
c. The page which keeps track of your investments.

5. The main purpose of a newspaper, in your opinion, is to :
a. Inform it’s readers about all aspects of important issues.
b. Convince readers by presenting the pros and cons of an argument
c. Print the Railway and Airline Schedules, and Forecast the Weather.

6. The best resource for confirming a fact is:
a. The Discovery Channel
b. Google the Internet
c. All facts will have to be investigated by an appointed commission.

If you answered “c” to all these questions , you might have the potential to be a politician. But I warn you: There is a lot of skullduggery involved.

For example you will have to gain access to bootleg liquor to numb your constituents into a stupor and enable them to carry out their odious election duty (namely vote for you) during the dry days leading upto election day and the announcements of the results, especially if you win.

Next you will have to visit and spend two weeks in Madrid (preferably with a pretty young thing travelling on your wife's passport) conducting tax-deductible research at various bullring cantinas, so you can educate your constituents about issues, such as exactly where Madrid is (not in Portugal, as it turns out) and what the Spaniards are thinking ( they’re thinking we’re morons).

Me? I’m going to curl up with a good book in the rains.

Inquilab Zindabad !

Taking Matters to Heart

Chewing the Fat

I turned 55. I don’t think that’s old, a lot of really famous people accomplished great things after 55. For example, Mr.Morarji Desai discovered the secrets of urine therapy and went on to become Prime Minister of India. And it was ex-Prime Minister Deve Gowda who discovered that sleeping in the opposition benches in Parliament produced enormous amounts of drool.

When I turned 50 (5 years ago if memory serves me) my Doctor Uday, who is a pretty decent guy ordinarily, made me promise to get a complete physical every year. He called me into his clinic, put on a scary rubber glove and made sudden lunges at my personal regions, all the while asking me to cough. I have decided therefore to space out my physicals only to those times when I actually experience physical pain, or my hair falls out, whichever is the latter.

Also Uday has a lady nurse who works with him – a charming young thing – but one who belongs to the Transylvanian Vampirical Society (Motto: Do not let patients leave the clinic with any of their blood) She distracts you with charming conversation, subtly sticks a needle, with a large tube attached, into your arm, and the next thing you hear before you pass out, is a gurgling sound from said tube that leads to a huge overhead tank with the word BLOOD stencilled on the side.

I thought I had come through my physical in great shape. However I hadn’t counted on Uday’s adherence to the medical code which states:

“I swear by my Mercedes Benz, that I will find something medically wrong with any person who steps into my clinic, even the postman.”

The precedent to this of course is the Hippocratic oath, named after the famous Greek Philosopher Aristotle who became known as the Father of Modern Medicine after he invented the following phrases :

- you may experience some pain
- we have to run some tests first
- the tests were not very clear
- we are going to have to carry out some more tests
- does your company reimburse your medicals or do you have medical insurance?

As one can see, without those phrases, modern medicine would be impossible.

And so Uday, realizing he would probably have his Medical Association Gymkhana Pass revoked if he declared me medically fit, called me to say that my blood cholesterol was on the higher side. I told him to check with his nurse, since all my blood had been suctioned out by her anyway, but Uday insisted I needed a change in my food habits.

Uday also sent me an informative animation CD for the layperson, explaining what bad blood is. Cholesterol looks like a little Spongebob-shaped guy with bushbaby eyes, running around in a small tunnel, which represents your blood vessel going to your heart, which is a little smiley face in the background. Sometimes Spongebob gets stuck between boulders which appear in the tunnel, and this causes him to become blue in the face, and your blood vessel starts to look like Mumbai Central Station at rush hour. When a whole lot of cholesterols get stuck, your heart gets a sad face, and a doctor with a face mask (to hide his identity) comes in with a Bob-the-Builder mechanical shovel.

To prevent this from happening you have to be conscious about foods which you can or cannot eat, they are :

BAD FOOD GROUPS: Meat, milk, cheese, butter, desserts, fried foods, pizza, foods cooked by grandma, snacks, breakfast, lunch, dinner, munchies, beer, birthday, wedding and Christmas cakes.

GOOD FOOD GROUPS: Low fat grass, non-aerated water, rice husk and wood shavings.

Following this diet has been really, really hard for me. The worst part has been giving up steak. I love steak. I’m the kind of person who can gnaw through a whole chunk of tenderloin the size of Adnan Sami. But methinx today, thanks to all that sacrifice, I have developed blood again and that my cholesterol is a lot lower. Uday asked me to come back and have it checked, but his nurse will never take me alive.

On turning 55 ?? – oh! I decided I would keep it quiet, don’t want that pretty thing next door, hugging me and saying,” Happy Birthday UNCLEJI !”

WARNING:Contains the "B" word

A Pair of ...what?


Guys! Drop whatever you’re doing right now (unless it’s a baby) and check out the new Enamor ad doing the television rounds, involving man’s favourite subject “brassieres & bosoms”.
Every few seconds you hear the slogan, “I feel so beautiful inside” conjuring up all kinds of imagery of the male hormonal kind. Although it does feel nice to use the words “brassiere and bosoms” in the same sentence.

I hear tell that the Chinese are designing a special “Combat Bra” for it’s People’s Liberation Army and that our Ministry of Defense is “looking into it”
I recommend we write to our local MP or MLA to take up this issue in Parliament and undertake a large wasteful military research program to match China’s military programs.
We must always, “support our troops” and “keep abreast of our enemy”, and I am sure that our political arm will take a personal interest in its’ development, so much so that we can surge ahead of China by developing the Tactical Field Stealth Uni-Thong,(one size fits all)

Which reminds me of an “investigative” report in one woman’s magazine headed, “ARE YOU WEARING THE WRONG BRA SIZE??”
One would think that women were dropping like flies in the street from wearing wrong sized brassieres. I am therefore, genuinely interested in this problem, despite the fact that I do not even wear a brassiere except on very special occasions involving more than four bottles of beer.
I would also like to know why we say “a pair of shorts” or “a pair of trousers” but NOT “a pair of brassieres”?
My friend Milind, who has a keen interest in these issues, read the complete magazine report and informed me that it focuses on the tragic habit of “women who wear brassieres that are five sizes too small for their bosoms which leaves said bosoms with no choice but to spill out into the camera lens, a la Janet Jackson.”

This I then suspect must be the reason why one of our concerned legislators brought up the subject of the “menace” of topless sunbathers on Goan beaches.

Nadia,( remember her?, my beautiful ABCD co-conspirer!) who is from Los Angeles also tells me that they have a bosom problem there, but the California Tourist Bureau claims that most of the L.A. ones are artificial.

First of all, let me state on behalf of all the citizens of Goa and Goan Beaches that although there ARE topless women sunbathers in Goa, by no stretch of the imagination is this a “menace” and they are not “everywhere.”
If it were “infested” with topless women I would have definitely noticed, and it would have also featured on Voyager TV and the local weather report: “Reporter: The forecast for today is to look out for warmer temperatures and a proliferation of naked bosoms everywhere, so the public are advised to stay indoors with paper bags over their heads.”

Most of our topless sunbathers are European tourists. Europeans are of course immoral; they think nothing of toplessness or drinking warm beer.
For instance you can hardly walk around Europe without seeing topless marble Greek and Roman statues the size of elephants stating the classic concept: “I cannot find a marble brassiere or fig leaf in my size?”
So European women and men sunbathe topless, often with nothing covering their Euros either.

On my research trips to Goan beaches I’ve noticed that Europeans do not seem to notice that they are almost naked. But the Indians definitely notice THEM.
Indian women are subtle about it; they have the ability to notice a man’s Euro region with a Stealth Glance, so you can never actually tell what they are looking at.

Indian men, on the other hand are about as subtle as wild boar rooting in horse manure looking for truffles.
When an Indian male catches sight of a bosom, his head locks on to it, his eyeballs click and zoom in and you can almost hear an alarm-like siren in his head go, “BOSOM! BOSOM! BOSOM!”
As long as the said bosom is within range (about 10 kilometers) he has to look! He will not be able to think of anything else, will remain psychologically incapable of ignoring it, and physically his head will remain pointed towards it; this is the cause of the freighter River Princess running aground on Candolim beach.

I am therefore constrained to issue this following warning to tourists: IF YOU COME TO GOA AND GO TO THE BEACH THE RED BLOB MELTING ON THE SAND MAY BE A TOPLESS EUROPEAN SUNBATHER.

Three Flights and a Wedding

Safe Landings (either way)

I haven’t attended a wedding for over a year:

Missed the Pam Anderson wedding – but got the consummation video off the internet.

Missed the Nicole Kidman / Keith Urban wedding

Missed the Katie Holmes / Tom Cruise wedding

Got thrown out of the Liz Hurley / Arun Nayar wedding

Slept through the Aishwarya / Abhishek Bacchan wedding

Did not make it to the Rahul / Shweta wedding.

But darned if I was going to miss the Anupama / Rohit wedding at Cochin.

The other alumni of the 24 GNC brat-pack, Amit, Ronni, Nandini, Rahul and his wife also planned to be there. How could this pervert resist not being there to check out Rahul’s new bride!

Getting to Cochin was an entirely different kettle of fish.

For those of you planning to travel by air, here are some interesting statistics about the Indian airline industry.

This year, Indian carriers will fly a record of 700 million passengers, 23 million frequent-flyer kilometres, each person will sit in an aircraft on the tarmac for an average of 3 hours, and every one of them will pay a different fare.

Airline fares are calculated by the airlines random fare generator, Polly the Fare Parrot, after determining passenger loads, the distance from City A to City B and whether City B has a landing strip, whether the pilot drinks 12-year old scotch or plain beer and the cups of re-useable yoghurt leftover from previous flights.

Nobody eats the yoghurt, my guess is there are airline yoghurt containers still circulating dating back to pre world-war Dakota flights.

Yes, Indian carriers are cutting back on food service as well, but their record of safety is among the highest in the world; the only country with a better flight safety record is Tibet, which has only the one plane and has yet to figure out how to start it.

In accordance with airline procedures,you should always arrive 2 hours before the scheduled departure time so that you can then stand around, visit the loo at least thrice, and be among the first ones to know that your flight has been delayed due to mechanical problems (usually pilot-hangover).

You pass your baggage through the X-ray machine so the guys sitting at the monitor can laugh at the holes in your underwear.

Laptops are allowed on board as cabin baggage, but have to be turned on, to prove it is not a terrorist bomb. Hah! Any eighth grader can tell you that a terrorist can program a bomb-loaded laptop to turn on.

You are also forbidden, on pain of imprisonment, to carry a nail clipper, it can be used as a skyjack weapon.

Of course those stainless steel forks and knives which accompany your tasteless food tray on board Jet Airways do not count – any self respecting terrorist would not be seen dead trying to use THOSE as hijack weapons if he can smuggle a nail clipper on board.

The flight was scheduled to go from Goa to Bangalore and then on to Cochin, but in Bangalore the situation deteriorated further, we sat on the plane for 2 hours before takeoff – they didn’t let us off the plane for fear that we would run away. So we sat listening to our stomachs rumble.
One woman broke down and drank her baby’s formula. Another asked if they had any leftover yoghurt.

We took off, the flight now had to be re-routed via Mangalore to drop off some spares for another grounded flight,(the “official” reason for our delay) our pilot “Captain Kangaroo”, suffering from alcohol withdrawal pangs, banged us down on the runway and I swear the plane bounced… twice. We landed, took off again and landed an hour later in Cochin, where we dropped to our knees and gratefully licked the terminal floor.

Then an hours drive to discover dinner was almost over, but I got to meet the groom Rohit, the gang, and Anu’s Mom and Dad before they went to bed.

Need I mention that both mother and daughter are breathtakingly beautiful, and looked absolutely ethereal & stunning in their gold bordered white saris at the wedding ceremony.

I also met Shreya, the lovely Nandini’s gorgeous school mate.

NO, I’m not going to tell you how handsome and macho I thought Anu’s dad and the groom looked, it was a wedding not Brokeback Mountain.

Play-gere-ism

The copycat phenomenon

Congratulations Chief Judicial Magistrate Dinesh Gupta of the Jaipur High court, Poonam Chand Bhandari and Pawan Surana for the launch of Bade Bhai, the Indian version of Big Brother.

The object of THIS new serial is basically the same: Get Shilpa Shetty into a confined space (read prison) with no contact with the outside world and humiliate her, but in her OWN country, why should the Brits have fun at the expense of Indian women when we are perfectly capable of doing it ourselves!

I’m sure Bade Bhai will upstage the Bacchan post-wedding bacchanalia, and detract from the pain of the Great Indian World Cup 2007 Disaster.

Wonder whether the Honourable Dineshji, Poonam and Pawan know about the erotica of the Konark Sun Temple and Vatsayana’s Kama Sutra.( Maybe they can start a book-burning club and launch an agitation to bring down the temple “Ayodhya-style”.)

But, case in point - we have no originality.

I went back in time ( about 12.30 pm) to see if I could find more examples of Indian plagiarism and I hit a mother lode…….

Plagiarists 8 – The VHP and the Shiv Sena - feeble attempts to ape the Afghan Taliban with their versions of Indian History & Culture and its defense. (Oops! now THEY know about Konark and the Kama Sutra. Darn!)

Plagiarism 7 – Indian Contemporary Pop Music and dance ( American Rap, Hip Hop and Disco right down to the “Yo Mon”, “Wassup Dude” and the hi-five hand slap)

Plagiarism 6 – Bollywood, Tollywood & Kollywood ( D-uh): wonder if Dineshji watches all those item girls in Hindi movies.

Plagiarist 5 – Bappi Lahiri – The original plagiarist.

Plagiarism 4 – Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who wants to be a millionaire)

Plagiarist 3 – Kaavya Viswanathan, Harvard Sophomore who has now switched names on her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild & Got a Life to How Shilpa Shetty Got Kissed, Was Summoned & Became World Famous soon to be a major Bollywood motion picture starring Dev Anand as Richard Gere.

Plagiarism 2 - Dhoom 1 and 2 (The Fast and The Furious meet The Matrix), and Krrish (Superman, Batman and other Comic Book Heroes – shaken not stirred)

And at the top of the list:

Plagiarist 1 - Rahul G. proclaiming his family the best AND so strong as to have divided Pakistan – Hah! Jokes on you Rahul. My family is better, and guess who divided India, and Korea and Germany and….

Future Plagiarism : Indian Idol with Host Govinda

Copycats: Call Centre employees with their fake American accents and names

Decaying Leftovers from the Raj:

Bad English accents ,worse grammar: ”But Saar, vee are like this wonly!”

Men in Three Piece Business Suits with Necktie nooses for formal occasions (Indian womanhood I hail & salute you for retaining the graceful Sari AND for improving on its originality)

Red Tape, Bureaucracy & Corruption (Dating right back to the Rig(ged) Vedas)

Khushwant Singh

Gotta run ,there’s the James Laine book –burning I just HAVE to attend. How dare a British Author pre-empt one of ours by claiming to know more about our own dead heroes indiscretions.

The Wrath of Grapes ( with apologies to John Steinbeck)

...of Birthdays and Beer

Beautiful Avril celebrated a birthday recently. I like to think that maybe we qualify as good neighbours since she invited us to dinner.

Like all birthdays there was great company, nice music, good food and wine, and of course Bonny ( Avril’s macho hubby) made sure beer was on hand.

I’ve never been a wine drinker, I am a beer man. The great thing about beer is that you basically drink it, then you pop open another one.

Beer drinkers are nonchalant, laid back, friendly, down-to-earth folk who enjoy talking football or the importance of spin bowling, much like the Hobbits of the Shire.

Snobs who fancy wine however tend to be insufferable in that they sniff at the cork, swirl it around the glass, and go on and on about it while holding it up to candle light, unlike us beer drinkers, who just guzzle it down.

I know I am generalizing here, but I don’t care.

A while ago I decided to see what all the brouhaha was about wine. I rented a three-piece suit and bow-tie and went on to attend the Annual Sommelier Meet held in the humid confines of the French Consulate in Pondicherry.

For the benefit of you rotgut drinkers a “sommelier” is that dignified-looking wine steward with the starched shirt, who looks down his nose at you in expensive 5-star hotel restaurants, hands you the “Wine List”, and when you point to the French writing that actually means,” Taxes and Surcharge Extra” says “Excellent Choice Sir,” then struts off and brings you the iodine-tasting house wine.

A lot of the Pondicherry “elite” who consider themselves wine aficionados were on hand for the Sommelier Meet.

We were served champagne in the lawns and introductions were bartered in the foyer.

We then went in to dinner and to watch the presentation of new wines.

After a few glasses of champagne this takes on an ethereal, immensely entertaining quality, because some of the local Pondicherry Ashramites spoke (I figured they practiced for days in their meditation chambers) with cultivated French accents which were highly comical,.(Sroo-out eestory zee hrole of zee whine mhakar eez to zeelect zee grape zat epeetomizes zee flavore of zee reegeeawn)

Also as an invitee I got to drink a lot of wine, just like beer I would down my glass of wine and look around for more.

Not so the wine-drinkers at my table who swirled their glasses around, sniffed, and instead of drinking the wine, mostly gargled with it, then with studious faces would make remarks like they were selecting applicants for Big Brother ( “I find it particularly intriguing if a trifle facetious.” Or : “It’s cultivated but just a little too puritanical for rhetoric”)

I asked Brigitte, a French lady sitting next to me if the French went on about wine in the same snotty way. “No,” she said, “we just drink it, because that’s why we make it ,no?”

Then came the sommelier competition.

A bunch of them from around the country were quizzed on questions like; which regions with a “B” apart from Bordeaux, Beaujolais, and Baloney produce Pinot Noire wines ( I’m joking about Baloney –that’s where they produce fertiliser)

There was a blind-tasting where we invitees also got to sample a wine introduced from the Golconda region of Hyderabad.

It was rusty brown in colour and everyone at the table agreed it was lousy. “A trifle earthy,” said one lady. “Too efficacious for a Cabernet.” said another. “Like cow pee” I volunteered. The others felt I was being too strong in my opinion, but I was the only one who finished my glass.

Next we got a French wine which was awesome and which I gulped down hastily, but a reporter from the Wine Weekly was upset that instead of it being from the Loire Region as mentioned in the program this wine was from the Alsace region. “They are both haute couture wines but there is such a difference in their personalities.” I was the only one who laughed, although I suspect Brigitte wanted to as well.

For the finale the sommeliers had to match wines with menu selections.

The menus had food disguised with French-sounding names like “ Poisson Marquis de Sade aux Frappe de Merde “ and “ Boeuf avec Coeur de Bastille.”

Each sommelier had to state reasons why he chose a particular wine.

Statements poured forth such as: ”I felt the Chablis ‘69 would have the enhanced bouquet to compliment the Pate’” and “ In my opinion when marrying red herring with melba, the wine has to be allowed to breathe in advance and ….”

It turned out hilarious and entertaining for me, but my table mates were appalled that I had been invited.

In the end the winning sommelier was Alfred Gomes from Goa.

He won the Crystal Carafe’ and an all-expenses-paid trip to France and had this to say: “When I see Turkey on the menu I am reminded of a quote…….”

I say! Capital my man! Now who can argue with a man who is reminded of a quote by turkeys!

Avril’s birthday dinner turned out to be a smashing success, since most of us stuck to drinking beer, ergo there were no controversial issues – except for my references to Divinity and Bacchus in the same breath….

Oh ! and Joe flirted with death on the roof while recovering a ring… but that’s another story.

DIY Mishaps

Tech- Supports R Us

I have spent large portions of daylight in the past few days trying to solve a problem that involves (tantantaratara-background music) two different companies.To protect their identities, the company names are changed and I will call them "Pewlett Hackard" and "Z-Link."

I believe I have talked to all the employees including the janitors at both companies at least twice.

Each time I get to a new person, I explain my problem, and each time the person I'm talking to -- who really, really wants to help me with my problem -- decides, after much review and conferring while I remain on hold, that I need to talk to another person.

This has become my latest pastime. I wake up,brush my teeth, & drink my coffee while calling my new friends at Pewlett and at Link. I am sooooo pathetic! Waaah!

OK, for the benefit of those computer geeks who are looking for details, here is my problem.

If you are searching for entertainment however, do not read further.

I am trying to activate a Z-Link broadband modem on a Pewlett Hackard notebook computer (the Gimpaq Senario X1000), which is a beautiful laptop that I really like) (except for this problem) (and yes, Apple people, I know that Apples are perfect and NEVER have any technical problems; I actually own an Apple,(i Pod) which I liked a lot at first, but for different things, but you're kidding yourself, Apples have problems too, especially your stupid i Pods. And I discovered a worm in the fruit as well!

The thing is, when I bought the notebook, I assumed it came with the broadband modem installed. But apparently it did not.

So I bought the modem (it's the BLT905K model) which according to Z-link is plug and play and can be (tantantaratara) installed by the customer.

I installed it. But I cannot make it work.

I spent a genoooooooorrrrmous amount of time on the phone with Z-link, and they are absolutely positively certain that they have my POP3, SMTP, IP address and Subnet Mask Numbers correct in their system. (No, I don't know what all those numbers are, but you need them, and I have them, and by golly it is correct.)

I also spent a major amount of time on the phone with Pewlett Hackard, particularly a very nice and profoundly patient tech-support lass named Pratima whose soft, langorous voice I have fallen in love with, who ran some kind of remote diagnostic program that enabled her to actually send pretty pictures to my screen, which was awesome, but that did not really help.

Pratima, after trying many things, believes my modem is working properly (even though I installed it) and so far she is stumped if she can figure out why the dam thing will not connect to the network.

So I am going to try moving my notebook to the loo, to see if maybe it's just not getting the signal (which I doubt is the problem, because my old PC worked fine in the same spot with a Z-link broadband modem) (but you never know).

If that doesn't work, I will have to go to another Gimpaq department, “FAQ’s R Us”.

But Pratima gave me all her contact info, and promises that if I need more help, she will be there for me. Maybe I’ll ask her out on a date.

I warned you not to read that. But you wouldn't listen.......

FINALLY: It’s fixed! The problem was -- why I am not surprised? -- me. I did a crappy job of installing the modem, and specifically attaching the ADSL cable to the teeny little line-out connector.

What did you expect? I’m no rocket scientist!

The solution was suggested by Ronny the Banking.com guy, at whose feet I prostrate in gratitude.
With the help of my neighbours 7-year old son, who, unlike me, can see small things, I took the connectors off and reattached them, and for now it seems to be working.
I am much relieved, though I will miss all my tech-support friends.

I also thank all the janitorial staff and persons who came forward with helpful suggestions, even the ones who are clearly mentally challenged.