Ring-a-Roses, The Berlin Wall, Wall Street .....all fall down!

"Come September" means it's "FALL."

Were these Natalie Imbruglia lyrics prophetic or what ?
"Her bones will ache Her mouth will shake And as the passion dies
Her magic heart will break She'll fly to France.Cause there's no chance
No hope for Cinderella Come September."

Nevertheless I’m so grateful to US President George W. What’s-his-face who asked Congress for $ 700 billion to bail out failed US financial institutions by buying up their worthless mortgages and other bad debts. Even though it was rejected by the US House of Representatives it was a bold and innovative plan.
The federal government has already pledged more than $600 billion in the past year to bail out, or help bail out, some of the biggest names in American finance. That includes the rescue of investment bank Bear Stearns in March, the takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac earlier this month and the takeover of the world's largest insurance company, American International Group, just this week.

Why just yesterday Washington Mutual, America’s largest Savings and Loan and the 6th largest US bank has been seized and its assets sold to J.P Morgan.
I’m told that the severance package for WaMu CEO Fishman alone amounts to almost $13 mil. This will ensure that his lifestyle will remain unchanged, his kids will continue their education in Ivy League schools, and his Malibu Home with its heated swimming pool and his wife’s Porsche will not be repossessed. What fun!

I’m sure this bailout would have sufficed to straighten out the world economy.
Several other world leaders were also concerned as was evinced by the President of Brazil when asked about the crisis. He said, “What crisis? Go ask Bush.” He too is confident that George W. is fully capable of managing the present world economic crisis just as well as he is handling the crisis in the Middle East, namely Iraq.

Jon Stewart of the Daily Show elucidates this point very clearly in this clip
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=186052&title=clusterf#@k-to-the-poor-house.

I had been meaning to do something about it myself, but I cannot seem to find the time given that Goa has been having a lot of rain lately and my mother-in-law is visiting.

Anyway with such a load on my mind I cannot possibly deal with the world economic crisis, so I’m glad that the world leader in the entertainment industry, also considered bailing out American mismanaged private enterprise just to prove that it can abandon capitalism and embrace socialism when it so chooses.
I heard that this would have cost the average American Taxpayer an additional $7000.00 in taxes, but given American largesse as portrayed by CNN and Hollywood this, in Neil Armstrong’s words is, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” or “a small price to pay for saving the world and the American way.” or.... oh never mind, it’s a moot point now.

The Americans were also faced with having to deal with some very complex issues.
For example they had to decide which of the CEO’s of these failed institutions would get a Congressional Ticket and wide-ranging debates on whether they should have red wine or white with their lobster-dinner fund-raisers for starving third-world countries.

Interest rates too being very high, a lot of time was also been spent in discussion by Congress to arrive at a solution. After much deliberation they decided that, “Interest rates need to come down”. Such decision-making is what separates US Congressmen from us ordinary mortals. This too is a bold innovative plan, and it just might work.

What prompted this global meltdown from the American point of view is “unfair competition”. Unscrupulous rogue American companies (some of them funded by Al Queda) took overpaid jobs away from hardworking Americans and outsourced these services to 3rd world countries like India where employees work for peanuts thus making them wealthier and able to afford 3 square peanut butter sandwiches a day.
Although this made the US shareholders of these companies richer it also put a strain on the US agricultural industry and global oil prices, released additional methane into the atmosphere, increased global warming and subprime mortgages became unviable.

I guess I’ll just bring us all upto date with President Bush’s plan to save the world economy (namely Wall Street’s ass), so we can all get back to our daily humdrum lives or whatever it was we were doing.

The big problem is of course Wall Street which is in New York and conducts shady trafficking in animals like bulls and bears. They also carry on silly businesses, which work something like this:

Suppose a company wants money. It prints up a lot of pages called stocks and then goes to Wall Street looking to sell this paper to one of the traffickers called brokers.

The company asks these brokers,” How would you like to own these lovely bits of paper, look they are printed in so many colours with pretty graphs which show you how many homeless people without jobs or income, we will lend money to, at exhorbitant interest rates to buy houses with attached bathrooms – and this will make us very rich when they cannot pay up and then we can declare bankruptcy and Congress will then give us billions of more dollars of American taxpayers money.

The brokers hem and haw for sometime and then one of them sidles up and buys some stocks this leads to a stampede as all the other traffickers trample over each other for every bit of paper on offer.

Meanwhile the company has sold all its paper and sniggering, leaves hurriedly with a large sum of money, to buy diamonds or jewellery or vacations in the Bahamas.

It eventually dawns on the brokers that now, all they are left with are worthless scraps of paper unless they can get other people to buy it so they approach other brokers and all end up passing paper back and forth for more and more money till a small child says, “The Emperor has no clothes.” or words to that effect.

This makes them realize that they are participating in an enormous hoax, just like the WMD hoax of Iraq, and it could collapse at any moment. This causes them to panic. So today the financial section of the newspaper reads like this:

Markets hit by biggest US failure.

America’s Largest Savings and Loan Co seized. Assets sold…..

Pundits have pointed out that hurricanes Katrina and Andrew and 9/11 disasters are nothing compared to when investors reacted to the discovery that the planet Pluto was really an asteroid and Einstein actually propounded the theory of relative-titty after he married his big-bosomed cousin. E (Einstein ) = M ( marriage to) C (cousin) 2 (twice removed)

The good news is however, that today, one can buy a house in the US complete with indoor plumbing, for just Rs.75,000.00 , of course it’ll cost you an additional Rs.75,000.00 just to fly out there. But then you’d have to move from L.A. to Detroit, Cleveland or heaven forbid Jackson, Mi.

Bhagats make Baby in Bombay

Sounds Easy doesn’t it
Nishant and Jyotsna were never told by their parents where babies came from but they found out anyway. They’ve just become the proud parents of a bonny wee lass.

Babies are back in fashion today. Before the advent of the Internet couples would rather have played tennis. However, given that everything moves and changes so fast in this day and age, a game of tennis takes forever to finish.

So babies are back in fashion and the Bhagats decided to create a tiny human being capable of excreting stuff in large volumes from a lot of orifices simultaneously.

Uh oh no one said I had to be there !
Let me tell you it wasn’t easy for Nishant. Back in the days when their parents had kids there were a different set of rules – the woman went through labor in the delivery room; the man smoked and distributed mitthai.?”

Today in the spirit of involvement and playing a responsible role in the pregnancy both parents meet the doctor, attend pre-natal classes, and the male is supposed to provide moral support in appreciation of his mate carrying the child to full term, by giving up attending cricket matches and visits to the local pub.

At the end of the classes they showed a film to all the attending couples – of course Jyotsna had to drive them back home afterward.

When D-day arrived Jyotsna practiced breathing steadily, imagining she was floating in space to help her relax. Nishant, right there with her in the delivery room, ended up breathing shallowly, imagining he was lying on the floor, because he WAS on the floor.

Breast milk: The next big thing in cooking?
The best advice I can give the deliriously happy couple on raising this baby is … DO NOT LISTEN TO YOUR PARENTS, LOOK HOW YOU TURNED OUT!

Listen to me instead when I say that there is not very much to looking after a baby if you know about the 3 phases that they seem to get into i.e.
1) Crying
2) Stopped Crying and...
3) Pooping.


Your endeavour will always be to ensure that the baby is in phase 2 as often as possible. And be warned; although it seems easy at first, changing nappies becomes traumatic once nature decides to add odour to the baby’s poop.

You must know why babies tend to end up crying and the reason your baby cries is:
A) It is hungry
B) Dozens of other reasons.

If it is hungry I would suggest breast-feeding your baby. Why? Because this is good for the baby and because only the woman can do it so that the man need not get up in the middle of the night and can sleep soundly. HAH! Wrong. Don’t you men know the rules have changed? You better get up with her at all hours and provide the moral support or else….!

If you have fed your baby and it still cries there could be any number of reasons – you could try passing it back and forth from mother to father and ask the timeless question, “ I wonder what’s wrong?”
Or you can try making funny faces and unintelligible sounds at the baby; this will prove to the baby that its parents are deranged.
But if your baby could talk then it would tell you to “TURN THAT LOUD HEAVY METAL MUSIC DOWN!”

If all else fails then you will have to try discipline. Forget all that insane psychology about the delicate emotional needs of babies. Babies have only one need and that is to drool.

You will discover this about six days down the line after enormous amounts of baby drool has covered practically every inch of your clothes and the furniture.
Actually babies think that the sole function of you as parents is to provide objects for them to drool on.
Babies are actually weighed down by enormous drool glands that make up about 80% of their body weight right upto the time when they figure that they can also get stuff into their mouths.

And that’s when you go out and buy them meaningful educational plastic toys to play with.
You must buy several of these in different shapes and sizes; they help your baby acquire problem-solving techniques such as how to get as many pieces as possible into its mouth.

But beware beyond a certain age this is dangerous.
If you allow your baby to continue to put things into its mouth it could be detrimental later in its life.
Imagine your child going for a job interview with a Fortune 500 company and ending up putting the ashtrays and flower vases into its mouth. That makes for a really poor impression and your child could end up working for the Panjim Municipal Corporation on daily wage.

Whew I guess that’s over… haha just kidding !
It never ends.As a parent you need to discipline your child. When your child is older (about 3 months) you must turn to him/her firmly and say, “If you do not stop putting those things in your mouth I am going to take away your i-phone.”

If that does not work then you will have to occupy the child with more meaningful activities such as:
The Chicken Dance: Placing the kid on your shoulders hop around the room flapping your arms and clucking like a hen that just laid an egg.

The Airplane: Lie on your back holding the kid over you and make like it’s a big airplane about to land on your stomach while circling around up and down.
After you wipe off whatever the kid throws up on you with a wet towelette, go on to ….

The Hungry Dinosaur: Lay the kid on the floor and pretend to eat its toes then its legs then its stomach while going “Yum Yum Tasty Tasty” all the time. This will teach the kid a very important lesson, mainly that the world is full of idiots.

After the breast-feeding phase comes the solid food eating phase –
Your baby will give you clear signs when he's ready to move beyond liquid-only nourishment.

Cues to look for include:
• Head control. Your baby will stop bobbing its head about like Yoda in Star Wars; will look you straight in the eye and say, “I wanna pizza with fries.”
Babies hate the mush that passes for baby food. They would rather graduate straight to Pasta and Beer.
If you did this you can have a fully-grown productive baby in a matter of weeks.

• Losing the "extrusion reflex." To keep solid food in its mouth and then swallow it, your baby needs to stop using its tongue to push food out of its mouth. Since the baby usually has its mouth full of other objects like educational toys, babies tend to not eat solid foods with their mouths. They instead seem to absorb food through their chins. I highly recommend smearing food on babies’ chins and not trying to force-feed them through their mouths. This will save them the effort of trying to expel the food back onto their chins and will also make for less cranky and happier babies.

It will also save answering the time-worn question that parents ask each other later on in life, “Where did we go wrong?"