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 !
