La Tragedie aux Coupe du Monde de Cricket 2007 or "Off With Their Heads"( Pardon my French)

Here Lies Indian World Cup Cricket next to Indian World Cup Hockey.

It’s been a tragic world cup so far – and it makes me both angry and sad:

“Sluggish Trout” Pakistan were out of the World Cup at the outset losing to “Minnows” Ireland.

Poor Bob Woolmer (May he Rest in Peace & enter the Gates of Cricket Valhalla) was “allegedly” murdered by a bookie or bookies unknown.

“Fatted Whales” India next to be ousted lost out to “Sharks (formerly Minnows)” Sri Lanka not long after their humiliating defeat by “Minnows” Bangla Desh.

Vandals crawled out of their petty-crime gutters, (the Indian Press calls them “Cricket Fans”) to loot and bespoil Cricketers houses. You ladies competing in future Miss World and Miss Universe Competitions – Beware the Indian Miss World and Miss Universe “Fans” back home in your neighbourhood.

True-blue Indian cricket fans died of heart attacks

Ash and Abhishek announced the probable date for their wedding

And Brangelina adopted a Vietnamese orphan - NO WAIT! That’s a good thing!

I’m calling on genuine cricket fans to send e mails to the Indian Minister for Sports urging him to appoint a committee and make up a bulky report for an enquiry commission on the proliferation of “Minnows” in World Cup Cricket and make a representation to the United Nations along with an appeal to ban drug-testing for Indian Sportsmen, and introduce a “reservation” system for 3rd world nations so that we can level the playing field with casteism and steroids.

Sports writers can now put this World Cup behind them once and for all and go back to writing about the topic that really should be on the sports pages: drugs & betting.

Drug testing is very big in sports, no less in cricket. This is because cricket players are role models for young people.

All you young males out there want to grow up and wear diamond ear studs, with unshaven chins. The cricket association does not want you to associate the sport in any way with drugs. They want you to associate it with alcohol.

During televised games remember famous cricketers urging you not to take drugs, and famous ex-cricketers urging you to drink alcohol and party- only on Indian television they called it Kingfisher Club soda, and Bacardi Blast Cassettes & CD’s, ”nudge, nudge, winkety, wink.” Cheers!
(* See actual ad above, Vat 69 - Published: The Navhind Times, Goa. Dated 25th March, 2007)

As for betting, what the Government needs is an innovative new concept for getting money from people, and we can all be grateful that such concepts appear to be oozing over the fiscal horizon at this very moment: Playwin & KBC.

First pass stricter laws that say it is totally illegal for Private Enterprise to operate Games of Chance, Matka and even Bingo or Housie, because they encourage the poor and the stupid to gamble away their money against ludicrously bad odds. Privateers operating such gambling will be thrown in jail.

Next nationalize the Essel Group and Star TV and introduce a Cricket Lottery in Playwin and Kaun Banega Crorepati with even more ludicrous odds. Give them perky names like “Blue Billion Cricketwin”, and “KBC- Jo Phonekarega Woh Jeetaga,” and run cheerful upbeat ads on TV strongly suggesting that the poor and the stupid could make no wiser investment than spending their children’s school fees on Playwin Tickets or Phone Calls to KBC.

A nice touch would be to say that these proceeds will be used to fund humanitarian programmes that have been budgeted for anyway, such as printing Ration Cards and the Railway Time-Table.

Then have one of our Cricketers or BCCI officials dragged in front of the camera to perform the ritual televised daily drawing of the ticket number on Playwin, or to answer the question on KBC as to which team in his opinion will win the 2007 World Cup.

The clear implication is that if viewers do not purchase tickets or make phone calls the Cricketer/Official will be thrown headfirst into the nearest zoos’ lion cage.

Now for the Cricket World Cup 2007 season, I speak for all Indians when I say: Guys give it up and get some women in. To name a few:

Mamta Bannerjee, (opening batsman)
Jayalalitha, (wicket keeper)
Rabri Devi, (spin bowler)
Uma Bharti, (mid- wicket fielder)
And for Captain none other than the versatile Soniaji from the House of Gandhi

Introduce a cheerleading squad with item girls Shilpa Shetty, Mallika Sherawat, Malaika Arora Khan, Yana Gupta, Urmila Matondkar and Shah Rukh Khan to distract the opposing teams and the umpires and there you have it, the perfect recipe for a winning world cup team.

We haven’t won a World Cup since 1983 – and this one’s gone the same way, but take heart, “it’s more important how you play the game- NOT the winning or the losing.” YEAH! RIGHT!

It’s was also about:
Losing 2.4 million dollars.
and most importantly.......
Keeping Ash and Abhishek out of the limelight for more than a whole month.

Now let’s see what kind of action we can expect as a logical aftermath further down this road:

As in previous years we will find that professional cricketers will be paid, win or lose. So it’s “no skin off their noses” an old man phrase which means “WHATEVER! BIG WOP!”.

Sachin takes his “magic bat” and gets on with being a comic-book superhero.

The rest of the team applies for jobs with Anchor Switches.

TATASKY is despondent about not being able to sell as many DTH TV units, but the focus now is on Village Kabaddi Teams for rural access.

Pepsi plans to launch another asinine “Pepsi Blue” in a “Gold Billion” Campaign for the Indian Commonwealth Games Team.

Mandira Bedi sits next to her phone waiting for the call to host the after game show – in Bangla Desh.

Siddhu has put his euphemisms back into cold storage.

TV networks are looking to ex-players and umpires, preferably white with an unidentifiable accent, to provide helpful expert analysis utilizing technological wizardry like the “electronic chalkboard” to make simple runs seem like nuclear physics, to discover where the Indian team went wrong.

Losing to Bangla Desh!! Don’t forget to wear your silk burkhas before you get on the flight home with your duty-free purchases.
(**see Authors Artistic Impression above of returning Cricket Squad)

Well so much for my Review of the Willow. Call me insecure if you wish, but I am deeply troubled that we may have to import those burkhas from Bangla Desh.

Cricketesterone

Batsmen, Bowlers & the Bedis

Dating back to the Neanderthal era when primitive man took a rock tossed it into the air and whacked his club on the sloping head of his opponent; mankind is still nuts about sports.

What inner spark made that primitive athlete AND the the team of Lagaan seek out such sport…. You guess is as good as mine, maybe your guess is better since you haven’t drunk as many beers as I have.

As Sunil Gavaskar, not the most likeable person in the world but certainly one of the most obnoxious puts it: “As for Mankind and sports, bla bla bla bla bla and when I played in 1983….”

Both Sunil and I used the word “Mankind” since Womankind does not really seem to be into sports in the same way. Sports hasn’t changed too much in ages and was considered unfeminine when I was in high school, when most of the girls hockey squad stayed on the sidelines, claiming it was “that time of the month”.

Ok, chill! I realize that today you have major league athletes like Sania Mirza, Anju Bobby George and Monica Bedi (www.india-station.com/monica/ for you pervs out there) who can run like antelope and look good at the same time. But by way of being totally and brutally frank; as a whole, women have light years to go before they achieve the levels of dedication and intensity for cricket that allows men to be such incredible jerks about it.

Women know this, which is why you almost never hear them mention the 1976 use of Vaseline by bowler John Lever (no he was not gay, this is related to coating the balls – CRICKET BALLS you cretin!), whereas you take any male over 40 and even if he can’t remember which of his children is asthmatic, he can remember how India’s ace batsman Bishan Singh Bedi (not related to Monica) with his zest and passion for the game, strongly objected to such slippery tactics.

See that! Right there, all you women just read through those last lines nodding vaguely, some dreamily reminiscing about Kiran Bedi the actor, but you men jumped up, spilling your beer, shouting: “Bishen Singh Bedi was not a BATSMAN! He was a SPIN BOWLER!”

Every Indian male has a major portion of his brain dedicated to information like this. We can’t help it, we just have no perspective. Although to make a case in silly point; what has fielding a slip through a gully and two fine legs got to do with Cricket?

E-volution Or Z = (X1,...,Xn)

WARNING:Contains infantile terminology - For mature computer-literates only

Before the ancient Egyptians there were no numbers, so by using mathematics to add and subtract it became possible, for the first time to build the pyramids as well as to keep score on Cleopatra’s illegitimate children and Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands.

Then King Tutankhamen went and lost the “zero” and they turned to the Indians to find it for them and help figure out algebraic equations where a + b = 10 % of the restaurant tip, which gave birth to Binary Fission, although I think THAT has something to do with mating amoeba….

Around the same time (3.30 pm) the Chinese invented a wooden frame with coloured beads on string which the Greek philosopher Platypus named the abacus – which is Greek for “Computing machine Invented by the Chinese.”

In the first practical use of this new technology, a Chinese merchant totaled up a sale of 10 trillion Yuan for the sale of a kilo of rice.

Two key data-processing expressions which emerged from this invention are still commonly used by business processes today:-

1. “We still have a few bugs to work out.”
2. “Can you come back later, our abacus is being upgraded.”

In 1941 Luhn took his “peekaboo” guide for mixed drinks, applied the objective function
Z = (x1,…,xn) to the OR in the Linear programming mode and joined IBM. Lo! and behold, around my birthday in 1952 the IBM701 & IBM 650 were born. This led to the 13 tonne UNIVAC becoming redundant and fit only for playing Solitaire.

Of course I’m kidding here… one could also play Pong and Pac-Man.

The brilliant software genius, Bill Gates, who thus far, had absolutely no knowledge of what was happening in the computing world, since he hadn’t been born yet, then set about using the knowledge he learned in his mothers womb, and developed an operating system called “MS-DOS” The MS of course stood for “Microsoft”, named after one of his body parts, and the DOS for “Doubtful Operating System” which is how said body part worked.

Bill then went on to become one of the richest men in the world. After all MS-DOS was the single unified standard operating system which nobody could learn. One of the many mysteries of MS-DOS was when people would turn on their computers stare at the computer screen which would say:

A :>

That’s all it did, why not some other letter? Or even a word? And what was that little pointy “>” beak for? We will never know the answer.
And then no matter what you typed in after “A :>” it would respond:

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

Without further explanation it would then go right back to A :>

Then Microsoft came out with Version 1.1 and you can imagine how everyone got really, really excited.
In addition to doing this “A :>” it also gave us a whole new letter by sometimes doing this:

“C :>”

of course we still got “BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME” but there was hope; because with newer versions came :

ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?

INVALID SWITCH

PATH NOT FOUND

And my personal favourite:

WARNING! ALL DATA WILL BE LOST!

A:> F*** YOU

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME hee hee hee hee ...

I swear I could hear it sniggering.

Of course it never dawned on Microgeeks world wide that the real secret behind Bill Gates owning 150 airplanes and 75 power yachts was just one word : “versions”

Notice it is all about “versions” when you take a look at:Today as in, right now

Windows Vista or “Vindows Wista” as the man says.
Windows XP
The dreaded Windows Me
Windows 2000
Windows '98
Travel further back in time to:

Windows '95, and remember the exhilaration of the first:

Windows “Version” 1.0 which did nothing except put a coloured windows logo on the screen with the awesome message:

OUT OF MEMORY

Southern Spice Vs.Western Decadence

Episode 1 -Southern Spice

No matter what you say Goans are very polite.

Politeness is something ingrained in the Goan psyche, something you learn not to automatically expect in other parts of India especially in Chennai.

You learn, for example, that when you go to the movies in Chennai, you'll inevitably be sitting near people who are making important cell-phone calls, or who, to judge from their noise level, are imitating the mating calls of wild gorillas.

You learn never to go to the beach to watch the sunrise, because you will inevitably end up watching fishermen at their morning open-air ablutions mooning you all along the shoreline.

You learn that, when you're in a store, in Ranganathan Street, and you attempt to make a purchase, the salesperson will often react in an irritated manner, as though this is a highly irregular breach of store procedure. "How am I supposed to get anything done," the salesperson is clearly thinking, "if I have to keep waiting on people?"

You learn that wherever you live and wherever you go, especially if you are close to a temple during one of the numerous festivals, you'll be able to enjoy the musical tastes of some thoughtful person nearby with self-inflicted ear damage and an A.R.Rehman Model sound system cranked up to shatter the sound barrier.

You learn that if you're waiting in line for something, you'll begin to question your own existence because of the number of people who barge in front of you; or, if they're stuck behind you, as in the Nilgiris Supermarket, they'll push their shopping carts into your rear-end, helpfully nudging you along, over and over, nudge nudge nudge NUDGE NUDGE until your brain fills with rage and you want to whirl around and crush their skulls with your frozen Broiler Chicken but you don't dare, for the same reason that you don't dare flip the finger at morons in traffic any more, because you never know when somebody down there might be carrying an AK-47 on loan from the LTTE.

Also because your knowledge of Tamil sucks so badly you can’t tell whether the other person is apologizing or abusing you, since both are done at the same high decibel levels.

Yes, there is definitely some hostility down there in Chennai. Sometimes you can actually feel it hovering and festering in the air. Maybe the local TV channel should include a Hostility Level in their weather forecast ("Tomorrow will be continued hot, with 100 percent humidity, 200 percent pollution and a 90 percent chance of somebody getting fatally shot over what will turn out to be losing a season bus pass").

Of course a certain amount of tension is inevitable in a place where you have 75 per cent reservation,( proving that 3 out of 4 people are either illiterate, uneducated or backward) combined with a whole influx of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka -- with new ones washing ashore every hour -- all attempting to co-exist in a relatively small, confined area in Parry’s Corner, that is also extremely popular with mosquitoes.

Each of these communities has its own cherished customs and beliefs, with the MOST cherished belief being that everybody ELSE's culture is wrong.

Scientists with state of the art research facilities have been unable to find a single issue on which all of Chennai’s communities agree, including the issue of whether auto-drivers should be trained for the Indy 500 or lined up and shot.

(to be continued…….in episode 2)

Episode 2 - Western Decadence

These are just a few of the things that run through my mind when people ask me how I like Goa vis-à-vis the “Land of Divine Tamil Culture” - Chennai. And I always say: "I like it a LOT." And this is the absolute truth. I'm not saying it to be polite. I really like Goa. Sometimes I love Goa. But it's not easy to explain why. Oh, sure, there are the obvious reasons, the official tourism-industry reasons.

I like the water.

I like the weather (Dehliwallas can have their change of seasons; for me, the change of seasons always wound up involving a runny nose, chilblains and a freezing toilet seat).

I like the sky; we get more great sunsets in a month here than I saw in 20 years in Chennai…… Duh!

I like being 45 minutes from the Airport.

I like the Goan skyline at night, even though I imagine that as a taxpayer I'm now helping to pay for illuminating the Secretariat Boob Tower.

I like hardly ever having to wear a tie to restaurants or even necessarily funerals.

I like watching the Mandovi cruise boats go out, loaded with happy Mumbai people, and I like it when they come back and the passengers have to be unloaded via cranes because they're flopping about with motion sickness, and their arms and legs have turned into small useless appendages.

I like Anjuna and Baga and Miramar at two in the morning, which is what time it always is in Miramar, even on Monday afternoon.

I like the Film Festival and the Carnival Transvestite Parade and of course the King Momo Strut, a wondrously demented event that each year proves the important and reassuring scientific law that there is no direct correlation between age and maturity.

I even like the Red & Black Dance after a certain amount of feni.

I like corn on the cob.

I like being represented by the baddest-ass watersports team in the nation. (Do we have one?)

I like being at a Cricket game when the crowd is going nuts because we're down by only 4 wickets going into the ninth over and if the team plays really hard there's an outside chance that we can lose by just 25 runs by the end of the game.

I like Calangute beach on a Saturday night when the bars are busy and the bands are playing and the Beautiful People are strolling past beautiful yet somehow comical architecture and the world-famous Arabian Sea is right there.

I like all these things, and many more. But they're not what makes me sometimes love Goa.

What makes me sometimes love Goa is this:

It's weird.

For Pratima - Who got my Cyberfeet wet.

Terraflops Continue to Enrich our Lives

I am writing this on my PC which has the extremely popular Windows XP operating system; clone of the first–born to the humongously rich Bill and Melinda Gates.

My computer repairman ( God Bless his Gigabytes) tells me that "Windows Vista", the new version has just been launched – only he pronounces it like the TV guy with the falsetto baritone who goes “ The following programme has been sponsored by Vindows Wista & Wideocon Vashing Machines”

Windows Vista is said to revolutionise the software world once again thanks to its capability of accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of making Bill Gates even richer than he already was.

I confess I am hooked on technology especially computers and keep buying magazines like Chip and Datanerd just to go to the centrefold and ogle at:
EXPLICIT HI-DEFINITION COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF GIGANTIC MOTHERBOARDS!

And to read articles like:
WAX YOUR HARD DRIVE FOR IMPROVED SPEED!

My PC also has the powerful studliness of the AMD Athlon 64-bit processor which combined with the multi-tasking capability of XP allows me to run several programmes at the same time, which means I can waste time faster than ever before.

It also helps me get on the Internet and make contact with thousands of jobless humans whom I would otherwise never have had anything to do with voluntary.

But even without a computer – other amazing technological devices are there to play an important role in our lives, especially the alarm on your cell phone which you punch out every morning at 7 am to make it shut up. Think about it, inside that cell phone is a miniature computer, no larger than the reproductive organs of an ant, capable of understanding not only basic commands like ON, OFF and ALARM, but also advanced concepts like SNOOZE.

And someday computers will develop highly functional capabilities. Which means your cell phone could eventually turn so smart that it will figure out that you REALLY do not want to wake up, it will then tip-toe out of the room, and will silently dial up your boss to inform him that you’re quitting.

It’s not an implausible scenario when you consider all the benefits we derive today from computers in almost every area of our lives.

TRANSPORTATION
Consider the fact that flying in an airliner at 30,000 feet above sea level at almost the speed of sound, not one passenger has paid the same airfare as another. This is because the airlines have very powerful and extremely imaginative fare-inventing computers, so that one day in the near future, when Lalloo becomes the Aviation Minister, a villager from Bhumihaar in Bihar will only be required to pay two chickens and a goat.( Any cancellations / changes will require one cow as penalty)

COMMUNICATIONS
When we urgently need to reach a person anywhere in the world today we press a few buttons on the phone, and in microseconds, thanks to satellite communications and voice mail, a machine informs us that the person is not available.

GOVERNMENT
Today’s government uses computers to spew out a couple of documents every day and about 5000 new forms to be filled without regard to content, so that former pen-pushing employees can be freed up for more important responsibilities, such as not answering their phones and taking extended tea breaks.
My daughter while still a graduate student received a notice from the Department of Income Tax that she owed them five rupees education cess – I guess this was the way the programme worked: The Finance Minister fired off an e-letter to all departments stating that “Fiscal Jurisprudence” should be taught at the grassroots, in schools and colleges, and the smart computer in the Income Tax Office thought to itself “What better way to teach unemployed college grads this, than to make them fill out the requisite forms requiring them to find out why they should not be taxed in the first place.”

Just hope that the Income Tax computers don’t start talking to the Airline–Fare computers and we start getting tax notices to remit 2 chickens with a kilo of onions as penalty.

MEDICINE
A heart–warming story about a man who suddenly starts having severe chest pains and is rushed to the nearest private multi-specialty hospital with state-of-the-art diagnostic machines.
His PAN number is fed into the giant medical database computer which instantaneously informs doctors that the patient has no medical insurance, and has missed his last credit card payment.
The computer then – without having to be asked - disconnects his house electricity and phone lines and transfers his case papers to the Government Hospital 50 kilometers away.

EDUCATION
Your 14-year old son has a book report to do tomorrow morning on the Quit India Movement. No problem! 14-year olds these days are so cyber savvy, he immediately logs on to the “Internet & Revolutionary Information Highway”- and in a matter of minutes is exchanging naked pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton with other teenagers all over the sub-continent.

These and many more areas of our lives are affected, nay benefited by the computer revolution, I wonder if I can get my PC to fix me another Martini?

Demo(n)cratic Elections

Standing or Seated

With elections round the corner, the average Goan, depending on his religious upbringing, decides to vote for a “standing” candidate or a “seated” one.

For the Hindu, Mrs. Bhandekar, “Mr. Kamath electionak bosla” (Mr.Kamath is sitting for the elections) and for the Catholic,Miss Fonseca, “Mr. Robeiro electionak ubo ravla” (Mr.Robeiro is standing for the elections). Be that as it may, once elected all the chosen candidates religiously go into hibernation (Soglo Nidlya) till the next electoral cycle, and the electorate goes back to its humdrum life of fleecing the tourist.

Fortunately Goa is blessed with many courageous political leaders who refuse to succumb to lethargy, petty underhanded methods of horse-trading and buying voters; who are fearless & willing to speak up for fairness and reason and work untiringly to better the lives of the common citizenry, even though this might hurt their re-election chances.
Ha Ha! I am of course making a hilarious joke here.

In line with the Indian ethos, Goa’s political leaders too hold all kinds of national bullshitting records. Many of them would need major surgery to have their lips removed from their constituencies' butts.

Some of them try to take on several constituencies simultaneously; and these leaders remind you of those bumper cars you find at Essel World and other amusement parks, that rush around randomly, changing direction whenever they hit another car or a wall.
BOINK they hit the Goenkar car, so they change direction and bounce until BOINK they hit the Maratha car, which sends them careening off into BOINK the Christian car, which is not to be confused with BOINK the Hindu car, which sends them ricocheting into BOINK the Migrant Labour wall, and so on.

This kind of bold leadership has needless to say created a tremendous sense of fellowship, as was demonstrated during the recent IFFI 2006 / Regional Plan 2011 meetings / Carnival / Red & Black Dance(choose any one), when the various ethnic communities displayed a generous spirit of mutual trust and understanding rarely seen outside of Iraq.

So what do the elections seek to address this time around. Like all other elections so far here is what we’ve got: (Sing to the tune of "Who could ask for anything more! ")
We’ve got crime.
We’ve got Violence.
We've got Citizens Suffering in Silence.
We’ve got rampant, rude, frantic IQ – impaired motorists who don’t obey the laws of physics.
Have we left anything out?
The garbage?
The crowding and overdevelopment and continued aggressive uglification of the landscape?
The endless highway deconstruction?
The water shortage?
The corruption?
The stray dogs getting dangerous enough to be registered for road transport licence plates?
The invertebrate political leadership, tip-toeing nervously round a caste-and-creed-ridden ethnic minefield of their own creation.
We've got music ,we've got rhythm, and who could ask for anything more !

We nevertheless will continue to exercise our franchise fearlessly, things are going to change soon - or NOT.

Love Thy Neighbour

Last week sipping a beer at the bar of a small restaurant on Calangute Beach, a man recognized me from the last time I worked here in Dona Paula.

This is how our conversation went :

Guy:Didn’t I meet you a long time ago? Didn’t you used to work here? What are you writing in that notebook? (all in the same breath)

Me:Yes. Oh! Just trying to write something humourous.

Guy: You should write about Kathmandu! A lot of humour there! You ever been to Kathmandu? That King Gyanendra is really funny.

Me: No.

Guy: Well! I keep visiting there. Let me be honest. I’m a drug dealer.

That REALLY IS what he said. There were two cops 3 tables away, and he said "I’m a drug dealer" in the same open, friendly voice you might use to say "I’m an insurance agent." I half expected him to give me a price list along with his visiting card.

Of course this does not happen to everybody. Most visitors spend their entire vacations here without once being exposed to criminal activity. But most of us who live here are definitely aware of crime, if only because of the endless electronic yapping of dogs, the Official Night Noise of Goa.
Some of us can't sleep without it; when it's too quiet, we have to throw rocks through our neighbor's windows. Sometimes it seems as if crime is the only thing we all have in common.

We’ve lived next door to a family for six months now without ever seeing them, until finally the woman dropped by to tell us their house had been broken into. We had a real nice chat.

I bet a lot of Goan socializing occurs this way. ("Hi! We're the Sequeiras! We've lived next door for 10 years! Somebody just stole all our major appliances!" "Nice to meet you! We're the Kamaths! Amit here was recently run over by a getaway drug dealer!")

That was the only time we ever talked to that particular neighbor, because of course the family moved, as people are constantly doing down here, to the point where pretty soon you're going to see homes built with permanent flip- signs out front, so you'll be able to simply flip a board around to change your sign from "OCCUPIED" to "FOR SALE."

We haven't met our new neighbors yet, and we probably never will. They'll never have a burglary, because they have three angry Rajapalayams the size of SUV’s. Everybody has dogs in our neighborhood, except us. My neighbours wife, after their burglary, recently put a typically friendly Goan-style welcome sign on their gate that said: "WARNING DANGEROUS DOG! (Khabardaar! Khatarnaak Kuttha ) (Their new dog, who was really not dangerous, just stupid, sometimes sniffed the sign curiously, as if thinking, "Khatarnaak?")

Our previous Chennai neighborhood had a house occupied by drug dealers. At least that's what we all thought, based on the fact that it was an expensive house occupied by a constantly changing group of highly secretive people with no apparent means of support other than doing their own laundry. After a while we thought of it as just another neighborhood landmark -- the Raman’s house, the Kumar’s house, the Drug Dealer's house, etc. Our daughter would ask us if she could ride her bike, and we, being responsible parents, would say, "OK, but don't go beyond the Drug Dealer's House!"
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