Oh! The Audacity!

To Park or not to Park

I drive in circles around Panaji at least four times to find a parking spot close to my bank but all to no avail. So I park the car near the old GMC building and hoof it through the light drizzle for twenty minutes and get to the bank just in time; before they close for lunch.
Walking out the door I bump into a couple of guys I know, I think metrosexuals, and we're standing there talking about women and the weather.

That's when a lone parking spot right opposite the bank opens up and an elderly gentleman pulls into it. A white woman in a bandana with cut-off jeans runs up to him.

"That's my space!", she scolds him,"Honestly! I was about to park my car in there! I always have that space! Ask anybody, you have to move!"

"Now that is unmitigated freaking gall," I say.

"I'll bet he gives in," Bosco says.

"C'mon, nobody's that much of a moron," says Santan.

The old man shrugs and grins sheepishly,backs his car out and drives away. Bandana grins and rushes victorious to her car.

"She'll never get that monster SUV in there, he had a Maruti 800!" I say.

"She'll beg and cajole and get everyone to move their cars, you just watch," says Bosco.

And that's exactly what she does.

"Wow," says Santan, "if there was a Nobel prize for manipulation, she'd definitely win."

I walked back in the driving rain, passing the elderly gent who decided to do as i did. Except he was carrying his umbrella.

Bikini Blues

The "eyes" of the beholder

The rains have arrived and you know what that means:

For us men the supreme satisfaction of being able to hunker down with a beer in front of the TV and watch the UEFA Euro 2008 AND the Wimbledon unhindered, because thanks to the rain nobody wants to “hit the beaches” anymore.
That same reason makes kids and teenagers hunch over their Playstations and Xboxes blissfully unaware of their spades, buckets and beach balls left outside floating away down the storm water drains.

So ladies I just know what you’re thinking: This leaves you with enough time to get in shape for the next season and show off that swimsuit! So get in there and start that diet and exercise programme you’ve been looking forward to all of last season, and shed those 5 kilos.

Remember the confidence with which you put on that new swimsuit you got from Rio the last time? How you ripped it off and spent the rest of the weekend in your closet, crying and eating chocolate chip ice cream straight from the container??

Well you’re not going to let that happen again. You’re going to become that supermodel or top Bollywood star by whose standards no woman is supposed to weigh more than her nail polish.

You’re saying that that you read somewhere that they do not want thin models in the industry any more. Femina also had models who were normal humans in a recent fashion spread!

You lamebrain! Don’t you know this is a ploy by the clothing designers to get millions of normal-sized women to go to the chic boutiques, trying to buy the clothes they saw in Femina and finding out that designers manufacture those clothes only for mutant aliens who wear size zero or lower. The 20 kilo salesgirl who comes in and leaves the boutique through the air-vent will haughtily tell you that they don’t have your size and maybe you should try across the road, at Maternity Dresses for Whales.

But let’s be practical, 5 kilos is not going to be the answer to getting you looking like these celebrities who are so impossibly slim. You will need a personal trainer as well. Someone to advise you on nutrition, give you pep talks, and haul you back on your leash whenever you try to weakly crawl to that 200 gram tin of soya nuggets that is the only food supply for the month in your fridge. Someone who will remind you, that the biggest meal of the day for those supermodels is toothpaste.

But you can’t afford a personal trainer, in which case you need willpower. Oops! You don’t have will power either, because you’re sitting there like a blob, allowing gazillions of cellulite particles to mate furiously in your thighs, spawning whole new colonies, and you’re reading this asinine article, instead of jogging to the gym.

So ladies! What CAN you do? Well, take the cue from us men, and learn the secret of OUR success.

Why are we so secure about our bodies that we do absolutely nothing, even given the fact that we go parading about the beaches in our underwear letting our bellies prove that we can create a whole other person from the spare tissue?

It’s simple really: We have no idea what we look like.

This is how a man’s mind works. Before stepping out on the sand, a 300 kilo, bow-legged, 5 foot guy with one eyebrow and more body hair than King Kong will put on a thong, look in the mirror, and with a smirk say, “Oh! Yeeeaaah!”

Notice the man looks at himself head-on in the mirror. We men never look at anything else but the front-view which is the most flattering.

But you women check your body from all angles. Front, Side and Back. Then you convince yourselves that the last two views consist almost entirely of a stomach and a butt. That’s where depression begins to manifest itself.

So study this technique ladies, and remember it. Never look sideways at yourself in the mirror. And when retreating, don’t turn around ... walk backwards.

The Times They Are A-Changing

PRINTERS DEVILS ARE PEOPLE TOO !

Now that the Times of India is being printed right here in Goa, on behalf of the Old English Language Newspaper Industry, namely "O Heraldo" and "The Navhind Times" ( mottos “ All the news that’s unfit to print with bad grammar and worse spelling) I am announcing some changes they need to make to serve you better.

When I say ''serve you better,'' I mean ''increase their profits.'' Newspapers are very big on profits these days. They’re a business, just like any other business, except that they employ journalists who’ve studied English as a third language. To help you better understand the current situation; let's review the history of newspaper finances:

The earliest known newspaper, mentioned in the Holy Bible was called The Ten Commandments, (literally, the Almighty Orders). The first issue offered coverage of Hebrew politics (''Moses sets fire to bush arrested for arson”); science news (''Woman created from rib of Adam); and an early episode of the comic strip ''Dennis the Menace,'' in which Mr.Wilson tries to avoid paying admission to the Greek Games at the Parthenon by climbing over the wall, and lands on his coccyx.

Unfortunately, The Ten Commandments was not profitable, because every copy had to be entirely hand- chiselled on stone tablets by slaves (called ''scribes''); if a big story broke, a huge, beefy man (the ``Pharisee'') would yell, ''Stop the chisels!'' and whack them with his whip.

The Italians are credited for the idea of newspapers which they called gazzetas derived from gazzera, meaning a magpie or chatterer – the Italians were great gossips.Then in the 1400’s Johannes Gutenberg (literally, '' Ol’ Black Joe since he was covered in printer’s ink '') invented the printing press, which made it possible for a newspaper to cheaply and accurately reproduce every single error thousands of times.

Then came modern newspaper advertising but for which “Surf Excel” and “Fair & Lovely” would not have been household names today. Then came television and the internet with news updates by the minute and ruined the thrill of reading the morning paper while sitting in the john.

Before The Times reared it’s head in Goa, luring innocent Goans with pics of “scantily-clad” females, and the local dailies became poo-slinging monkeys, virtually every village had a locally owned newspaper with a name like The Gomantak Times ,Goa Times, The Daily-Pig-Sticker, which kept the community abreast of local politics (''MLA Attacked by pet rabbit'') as well as national and international issues (''Elvis Presley Alive and Well '').

These were family operations run by people, not concerned about making large profits but more worried about informing the general public about births, deaths and wishing local politicos on their birthdays.

The Times of India however, is owned by a large corporation, which in turn is owned by a larger corporation, and so on, so that today the entire newspaper industry is being controlled by a giant media conglomerate owned by The Times Group, which frankly does not care what your MLA did. What The Times Group cares about is profits. Here at the newspaper offices in Goa, they get hourly phone calls from The Times Group Headquarters.
''Send more profits!'' Headquarters shouts, and slams down the phone.

So the “bottom line” for O Heraldo, The Navhind Times and the others is that they need to cut costs or The Times of India would take away all their readership and they would starve to death, because, except for having learnt English as a 3rd language, they have no other useful skills.

Here are some of the ways of doing this:
RECYCLE STORIES: To avoid the expense of writing a new story, rerunning earlier ones. For example, every day for the next 3 years, run the same story on genocide in Africa (''Africa Genocide Repeats'').

DOWNSIZE: The typical newspaper staff should be reduced to one editor, one managing editor, 12 assistant editors, 36 deputy assistant editors, and one reporter. The editors should spend their days holding meetings to think of new ways to cut costs, while the reporter (who, for budgetary reasons, should not be not allowed to leave the building) looks out the window, in case news occurs in the parking lot.

SPONSORED PRODUCT PLACEMENT: There should be more sentences like this one, from a recent front-page story in "The Goan Rastafarian": ''We are seriously considering the use of nuclear weapons against Pakistan,' stated President Pratibha Patil, who then took a long sip from a refreshing, ice-cold Thums Up.''

FEWER WORDS: Don’t use adjectives, adverbs. Nouns, verbs can communicate storyline. (''Africa Genocide.'' )

FIND ALTERNATIVES: Outsource columns and editing to China.

AND LASTLY CROSS-SELL: Plug the added benefit of how the pages make great bird-cage lining.