Electrify your Cat.

It’s raining so hard, the electricity department can’t keep pace and the electricity keeps shutting off arbitrarily and weird things start to happen.

For instance I’ve noticed my neighbours’ cat has a fluorescent tail.

It’s weird really because when there’s no electricity (which happens most of the time here even during a light shower) this glow-in-the-dark-tail seem to  float eerily through the bushes followed by a trail of fireflies much like a midget bishop’s sceptre leading a candlelight procession of the faithful.

Don’t you just hate it when there’s no electricity? I mean I’m having a hot shower, I drop the soap and voila! The lights go out. Or I’m watching Mallika Sherawat about to disrobe and step into a bubble bath and the TV just shuts down.

I mean what is it with the electricity department and bathing?? And where does all that electricity go after they turn off the tap?

Modern humans tend to take our hot baths, electric lights, fans, televisions, etc. for granted, but thousands of years ago, long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from electric fish, but had no electric appliances. This was just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Also the fish wouldn't keep still and kept flopping about.

Then along came Benjamin Franklin who proved, by flying a kite in a thunderstorm, that lightning was powered by the same force as the fish. This also damaged Franklin’s brain and he started speaking only in incomprehensible proverbs, such as, “Fish and visitors stink in three days.” Finally he was given a job running the post office.

   

So the question to ponder is: What in the world is electricity and how does it really work?

Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important lesson about electricity: On a cool dry day, rub your hands vigorously on a cat’s fur then reach over with the other hand a touch a girl’s metal piercing.

Did you notice how she twitched violently and then slapped your face really hard?  This teaches one that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important lesson about self-preservation.

It also illustrates how an electrical circuit works.  When you rubbed the cats fur, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects that cats manufacturer in their fur so that they will repel dirt. These electrons travel through the conductive cells in your skin and collect under your fingernails, where they form a spark that leaps to the girl’s metal piercing, then travel down to her palm and back onto your face, thus completing the circuit.

AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you rubbed the cat’s fur for a really long time without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your fingernail would explode!  But there's nothing to worry about unless you have a really patient cat.

After Franklin came a guy called Galvani (an Italian) who attached two different kinds of metal to a dead frog’s unattached leg, and it twitched! I know of another Italian, a lady who can seemingly make a dead political party appear as though it's running a country.

  

Galvani's experiments led to enormous discoveries in human biology. Today skilled surgeons can take a number of human body parts, embed pieces of metal into its muscles, and voila!  Wolverine and Iron Man!

Then came Sir Thomas Edison... of course he was knighted for the simple fact that he concocted a simple electrical circuit :- the electricity department, which sends electricity through a wire to our homes, then immediately gets it back through another wire, then sends it right back to us again. Now, since very few of us have the time to examine our electricity, the electricity department can sell us the same batch of electricity over and over again and never get caught.

In fact I checked, the last time any new electricity was generated in India was in 1963 when the Bhakra-Nangal dams were completed.

So today we give thanks to Galvani’s frog and Edison and Franklin for our electricity which allows us to take instant hot baths and watch bleeped-out audio and endless anti-smoking messages on our mindless television programmes.

Gotta go now, have to try out this new electric toenail-cutter,… uh oh! There go the lights. Sob!! 

Prepping for the Ballot

Camp Goa -- I don’t know why anybody thought it was a good idea to hold the BJP Prime Ministerial nominating convention in Goa. This state has a terrible track record with politics. Does anybody remember 1990? That was the year when Goa had 3 Chief Ministers and President’s rule all in the same year; when the electorate were deeply confused about whether to tick or cross off their candidates’ symbol on the ballot paper. This is not surprising: Voters in India are also deeply confused about what lane they’re driving in, or what, specifically they’re supposed to do when the traffic light changes colour.

So this is the last place where anybody should attempt to nominate somebody for Prime minister. Nevertheless, Goa became the site of a massive convention gathering featuring hundreds of delegates, party leaders, media people, protesters, hookers, random lunatics and another guy with the initials PM of the “We- get- our- kicks- beating- up- girls- in- Mangalore-in- the- name- of- Indian- culture” party.

Until the weekend, the “PM-in- waiting-forever” Lau Purushji had also been planning to come; apparently he was unaware that this is the BJP convention. He changed his mind after a meeting with his top aides that may or may not have involved wearing adult diapers. So, tragically, LKA was not  here.

But there was still a lot of excitement in the air, as well as wind gusts upwards of 50 km per hour, as the monsoon made its way up the west coast, posing a serious threat to the estimated 7 Drishti lifeguards standing on the beach in matching rain slickers warning everybody to stay the hell off the shoreline.

The monsoon rains had already affected the convention: On Friday night, instead of the planned schedule, the BJP thought to hold a very brief session, at which they would nominate NaMo and/or Sushmaji. Then they would declare the convention over, and everybody would go home so as not to miss watching their favourite "Saas, Biwi aur Gulaam" TV serial.

No, that would have been WAY too sane. Instead there were  three more days of speeches by every major NDA figure and newscaster in the nation, living or dead, including the likes of Baba Ramdev. The goal was to demonstrate to a politically aware nationwide convention-viewing TV audience — an estimated 9 people — that NaMo is a regular non-holographic human just like you who feels pain the same way any normal person does when one of his bulletproof cars needs repair.

The BJP also tried to show that Manohar P. is a nice young man who does not, as the Congress and Mr Alimony have been suggesting, want to legalize betting in cricket and prostitution. This is especially important here in Goa, because this is a crucial  state whose voters could decide the election, assuming they can figure out where their polling booths are, which, as I noted earlier, is not a certainty, and depends on how close the nearest bar is situated.

While all this was going on inside the convention, there was plenty of action outside Advani’s house in the streets of Delhi, where a handful of protesters attempted to exercise their constitutional right to annoy pretty much everybody who is not one of them.

On top of all that, there was the relentless approach of the monsoon, which could have major impact on the economy, because Goa is home to an estimated 60 percent of the nation’s strategic reserve of dance bars serving feni.

I am not suggesting for one second that Goa is some kind of cultural backwater. Goa is a major state boasting a wide array of things, as evidenced by this list of List of Five Fascinating Facts about Goa:

1. Goa boasts the world’s largest number of Casino boats that can fit in the smallest stretch of  river.

2. Charles Sobhraj was arrested here in 1986.

3. 13 years later the Saga of the “River Princess” lumbers on.

Fixing a Scandal

I’ll get to those boring Right to Education and National Food Security Bills in a moment. They sound much the same as the earlier political election slogans, “Roti, Kapda aur Makaan”. And it looks as though we’re regressing right back to an earlier era.

 I mean just think about it ……Murthy is back heading up Infosys, Sanjay Dutt is back in jail, Madhuri is back in Bollywood, Nawaz Sharif is back as the Pakistan PM, the GDP is back to 5% and Dalmiya is back in the BCCI. OMG !! It’s the 90’s!!!

But first and foremost (in the interests of increasing the television TRP’s of all the Indian news channels) everyone and their mothers need to know about the IPL fixing and gambling scandal.
I found out about this while walking in Candolim one evening, when I passed a bungalow called “BannersBroker.” Through the window I could see men shouting passionately at a TV screen, which was showing a horse race. Right away I suspected that these men were bookies, because :-
 (a) only bookies believe that race horses on television can hear them, and...
 (b) most of them had large briefcases and sported the latest smart phones. One or two of them were missing key teeth (the men, I mean).

 I decided, as a concerned citizen, that I needed to investigate. So I went inside "BannersBroker", and sure enough, it was a bookie operation, operating openly. Then I saw it: A sign that said “BET ON ANY IPL EVENT.”
 I was stunned !! Indian Cricket is not supposed to be about money. Indian Cricket is supposed to be about sportsmanship, about national pride, about the untainted beauty of pure competition and love for the "Gentleman’s Game"!! So you can imagine how excited I was when I found out I could bet on it.

I put ₹100 on whether or not anyone would be slapped, hugged or called a “monkey” by Bhajji of the Mumbai Indians, who were in the semi-finals.

Then I scurried on back home to watch Maria Sharapova play her singles match in the French Open. The match live-streamed on the Internet.
They have the Internet streaming over here in Goa, although most times it goes in the opposite direction.
Maria Sharapova was playing the Chinese Su-Wei Hsieh, who – if you know anything about international competition at this level – were two women in short skirts, wearing matching underwear.

It was a tense match. Never before have I watched women’s single tennis with so much interest in the actual score. But in the end, Maria won, which meant that she moved on to the next round, and – more important for Indian Cricket – I won ₹200.

My point is, there is Cricket gambling going on here, and I for one am shocked. Rest assured that I will investigate further.

Speaking of scandals involving sport: It turns out that athletes pee in the Olympic swimming pool. Seriously. Swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte revealed this to the Wall Street Journal.
And in an interview with famous personality Sunny Leone, Ryan said, “I think there’s just something about getting into chlorinated water that makes you just automatically go.”
Then Sherlyn Chopra, Hugh Hefner’s play-mate revealed that she sometimes peed in the Playboy Mansion pool. Not to be outdone, another athlete Abhinav Bindra, revealed that he, too, peed in the Olympic pool in Beijing. This was especially disturbing, because Bindra is an air-rifle shooter and we all know what that means.
No, that last one was a joke, and I hope China does not take offense, because their swimmers are trained in martial arts as well and could crush Abhinav’s skull like a grape using only a thumb and forefinger.

But all kidding aside, there apparently is an epidemic of peeing going on in swimming pools, and it took Shilpa Shetty to raise the troubling question: Why, exactly, is Sunny Leone a famous personality? To which Sreesanth replied: That's because she does not need a towel, considering she has nothing to hide.