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 !