It’s the changing seasons I imagine, that’s what made me get the cold, it invaded my whole being, turning me into a quivering blob of snot and phlegm accompanied by 2000 kmph sneeze winds and a fever that turned my musculature to jelly.
There are three kinds of cold victims: the blowers, the snifflers and the nose-blowing-hawking-phlegm-spitters. I found myself among the snifflers, with extra sneeze velocity.
However for overall capacity to make you cringe and the ability to make you walk out of the movie theatre I’d have to give props to the phlegm spitters. And they are everywhere. Indians think nothing of spitting. They encourage it in their young. In kindergarten my gym coach once spent a whole day trying to teach us how to spit. He never had a girlfriend.
So I say we petition the Supreme Court to give the pharmaceutical companies another four months to cure the common cold, and if they don’t we turn the problem over to a more competent outfit, like Facebook.
What are these pharmaceutical companies doing anyway? They get bundles of cash for research, to buy furniture, and laboratories, and white coats and rubber gloves and other laboratory devices, and it seems all they want to do is invent obscure new medications for diseases nobody, you or I, know, or ever heard about.
MORENABAD- A team of research scientists from the Neva Neva Research Laboratories here has successfully implanted a sows ear in a fifteen year old elephant. “We really don’t know why we did it. We just had this sows ear and this fifteen year old elephant, so we figured why not see if we can develop a growth hormone. Next week we will place a lithium battery in a dead chicken and attempt to revive its brain function so that we can develop a vaccine for the clucking virus*.
[clucking virus n. an infection found commonly in henpecked husbands.]
In the meantime crores of people out there are contracting the common cold and generally making the world a messier place to live in. Isn’t it bad enough having to live with wall-to-wall garbage, packs of stray dogs on every corner and rampant corruption?
It seems to me that the only organizations trying to do anything about the common cold are those home remedy organizations that advertise on TV.
In a typical TV commercial:( the scene opens where the mother walks in and speaks to her child who is lying on the floor in his pyjamas.)
MOTHER: Beta, are you ready to go for Grandpas 105th birthday party at the Old Age Home?
SON: I don’t think I can Ma. It’s this awful cold. My temperature is 150 degrees and my ingrown toenail is turning blue.
MOTHER: Here, drink this Balgam-Dur-Karo
SON: Balgam-Dur-Karo?
MOTHER: Balgam-Dur-Karo
(The scene shifts to a white room where an elderly actor wearing a white coat, steel-rimmed glasses and holding a test tube of fluorescent liquid is standing behind a desk. If the camera got closer you would see that the actor is not wearing pants.)
ACTOR: Our research has shown that Balgam-Dur-Karo, an infusion of ocean extracts and ancient organic herbs from the Mohenjo-daro civilization is an extremely effective cure for colds, cough, nervous disorders, stuttering, ED and gout. Take Balgam-Dur-Karo for health and vitality.
(Cut to Old Age Home)
SON: Wow, you know Grandpa, that Balgam-Dur-Karo, an infusion of ocean extracts and ancient organic herbs, is wonderful. I am fit and fine now and only have a slight memory loss!
MOTHER: I’m beginning to feel a sneeze coming on.
GRANDPA: Your Grandmother seems to think the way to avoid colds is to consume ten thousand milligrams a day of vitamin C, she's forever gulping down vitamin C pills the size of bricks. But she still catches a cold. Me, I drink large quantities of beer and it works like a charm. So far I haven’t had one cold that I can remember clearly.
SON: And how are you feeling today, Grandma? ….Grandma?.... Grandma?... Uhoh!
……
As for me, I have a guardian angel up above (actually living on the floor above me) and her name is Dolly. In my fevered state I saw an apparition; Dolly in her diaphanous salwar kameez, serenely floating down the staircase on a cloud, bringing with her a vial of healing mystic ayurvedic potion. And before you could say “Phlegm be gone!’ or “Vasakadyarishtam” it was over. I was free of the dreaded cold that incarcerated and wasted me for four days, and am now back to my insouciant ways.
