Adieu!

Speech is silver, Bhikku. But silence is Peanut Butter.

-- The Diary, Date Unknown, Year Unknown.

Oscar Wilde, it is said, could charm people's headaches away simply by talking to them. We are not quite old Oscar. For one thing, we aren't Irish. For another, we have stayed well clear of both Reading and jail. But like Oscar, gentle reader, we have always endeavoured to entertain. We hope that in our small way, we have charmed something away from you. At least your girlfriend, if not your headache.

But things run their course, for it is the way of all flesh. Even Brian Charles Lara, that greatest of modern Test batsmen, the Shane Warne of batting, has had to bow to Time. Who, then, are we to outlast the tide? Nay, 'tis time now to part with you.

In short, after much consideration, a few coin tosses and some serious gazing at navels, we have decided to bid adieu to these pages. They will not be updated anymore, unless we have some really dirty dirt to spill about someone.

To most readers, this isn't really goodbye, because they are old friends, i.e., they are old and they are friendly, because they owe us cash. And since we have foolishly given them our e-mail id, we won't be rid of them that easily, sons of bachelors that they are.

But there are, we suspect, a few readers whom we do not personally. To these, we bid tearful adieu. We give them profuse thanks, for they have tolerated us without mercenary motives. If these noble children of the Great Spirit ever come to Dallas, they can count on us for upto three hours of company and entertainment. All they have to do is leave a comment here with their e-mail id and credit card number; and with joyous heart and light purse, with a spring in our step and a song on our lips, we will get in touch with them.

Oh, but let us not stretch out this farewell, and make it mushy. Let us just say goodbye, gentle reader, till life throws us together again. Behave yourself, brush your teeth regularly, and control your lust. You will be alright.

One Man, One Name: A Battle Against Nominal Imperialism

Men do not sin, Bhikku. Society makes them sin. If you teach a North Indian some English, he will of course want to write poetry.

-- The Diary, mid-April, 503 BC

Some people have all the luck. Bill Shakespeare, for example, is famous, homo and dead. All three are highly desirable qualities, and we, alas, have none of them. Bill, it would seem, has us completely beat.

Not so. As it turns out, we do have our advantages over old Bill. As anyone who reads these pages knows, we speak aught but the profoundest wisdom. Bill S., on the other hand, often spouted the battiest rot. Make no mistake. Bill was a sharp cove. The problem with him is that he was not much of a reader. Note, for example, that Bill famously made that most idiotic statement--"What's in a name?" If only Bill read this blog, he would have realized that there is, in fact, a lot in a name.

But perhaps we should begin at the beginning.

The last post on these pages contained a subtle question. One reader, Naveen by name, answered it correctly. At which point, we unfortunately mistook reader Naveen for another lad of the same name that we know, a classmate of ours. It was, we admit, a rather gross error. Reader Naveen, clearly, is as perceptive as he is wise. His taste in movies is second only to his taste in blogs. Verily, Reader Naveen is a prince among men.

Our classmate Naveen, on the other hand, is a man whom Allah did not equip with taste, or any other good stuff for that matter. Aye! Classmate Naveen is a philistine, a committed cannibal. His barbarism is exceeded only by his perversity. The man can write like good old P. G. Wodehouse. Indeed, if there were a Wodehouse imitation competition, Wodehouse would probably lose to Classmate Naveen. And yet, in what Classmate Naveen calls his blog, he writes ghastly rot. What's more, he supplements it with close-up pictures and in-depth analysis. Of his car, no less. What's even more, the man's an arsonist and exhibitionist. He sets fire to his laptop, takes photos as it burns, and puts them up on his blog. What's most, Classmate Naveen watches Hindi movies regularly and reviews them on his blog.

At this point, gentle reader, you ask: But doesn't this prove Bill is right? If two blokes, both called Naveen, can turn out to be such dramatically disparate examples of virtue and depravity, doesn't it show that the name got nothing to do with nothing?

As always, gentle reader, you are completely wrong, because you do not know the whole story.

It is easy enough to see why Reader Naveen is such a lovely person and Classmate Naveen is a bloodthirsty he-vixen. The seed of Classmate Naveen's evil lies not in his perfectly harmless first name, but in his villainous last name. I refuse to put it down on these pages, because I respect Classmate Naveen's privacy and the moral standing of this blog. A last name such as Classmate Naveen's is not a last name that ought to be indiscriminately written on one's blog. Suffice it to say that Classmate Naveen's last name has spawned his nom de guerre--Gogo CrimeMaster, whence Classmate Naveen is also sometimes called Gogo or Gogi. In fact, while we are at it, we might as well give you a list of Classmate Naveen's names:

1. Naveen,
2. Chakra,
3. Chakri,
4. Chokes,
5. Gogo,
6. Gogi,
7. Gogo Crimemaster, and
8. Dearchap

No doubt there are more. Fortunately, these are the only ones we know of. As our high school teacher would be have put it,

Classmate Naveen : Names :: Imelda Marcos : Shoes.

In short, Classmate Naveen is a philanomist, a name-collector.

"So what?" old Bill Shakespeare might have said. "It's just names. What's in them? Give Classmate Naveen a few more and let's get on with it." Bill Shakespeare, alas, would be wrong. His overly liberal attitude towards names is based on his ignorance of human nature. To be precise, Bill S. misses the fact that abundance breeds greed in men, not contentment.

In Bill S.'s idealistic world, a nominally well-endowed man like Classmate Naveen would be glad to lend a name to the deserving poor, like Reader Naveen for example. In real life, alas, a man with lots of names only becomes more and more territorial about each one of them. Indeed, immediately after the case of mistaken identity was cleared up, we got an e-mail from Classmate Naveen. Its subject line read Cease and Desist. It went to say, and I quote: "And you will delete the comment that contains my name in it. I don't know which rotter stooped to using my honourable name but it shouldn't be there."

Let the reader first note the tone of the e-mail. It is one that Louis XIV regularly took. But Louis XIV spoke in French, so nobody understood what he said. Classmate Naveen, on the other hand, takes the Louis XIV tone, in English. Secondly, let the reader marvel at the singular narrow-mindedness of the e-mail. Classmate Naveen is a man who gets a new name every day. Yet, he can't share the one he got for his first birthday. Thirdly, his name-lust has led him to call Reader Naveen--a most noble individual as observed earlier--a rotter. And so on, and so forth.

But let us not be harsh on Classmate Naveen. He cannot help his churlishness. His aggression is understandable. Classmate Naveen is a deeply conflicted individual; a brown man who studied in a high-class English-medium school; a Gult who speaks Tamil with a Shrewsbury accent; a man who looks like Chiranjeevi's sidekick and talks like George Bernard Shaw. In short, Classmate Naveen has the soul of Queen Elizabeth in the body of Superstar Rajnikanth. Give a man like that a cone of vanilla icecream, and he will start nuclear war. Give him eight nicknames, and he will behave like Louis XIV.

Comprendre, c'est pardonner. If Comrade Naveen sins, the blame lies with our society, which has made him a name-grabbing appelomaniac. Let us understand Classmate Naveen, and thence forgive him his cheap marwadi behaviour.

But let's not forgive Bill S., who used seduction and skulduggery to become famous in spite of being a jackass. "What's in a name?" indeed! The Third World War, that's what.

Yaaa?

Yaa.

Modernity, Ayn Rand And Michaelangelo's Aunty

Ah, Bhikku! I love the smell of modernity in the morning.

The Diary, Besant Nagar Beach, January 491 BC

As you sow, so shall you reap. Or as Chow Yun Fat might say to that yubbbba figure Zhang Ziyi, "Screeching Bat, You shave with sharp blade, It cut you. I was fighter. Now I die." Chow Yun Fat is right, as you would expect from a man who has acted as Walking Wind and Passing Gas in countless martial arts movies. Yes, indeed. Flying Charlie is spot on--What goes around, comes around, for Allah keeps the score. You give shit, and sooner or later, you'll get it right back.

The problem, of course, is that there is no real way of knowing beforehand what one is sowing. One can only guess. Uncle Sam thinks he is giving bearded foreigners some high-quality liberty and democracy; and instead of being grateful, they blow up his white ass into tiny bits. You think you are building a deep relationship with this cute new girl; and come August, she unfailingly hands you a rakhi.

Which just goes to show, once again, why Indian Tradition is a great thing. Back in my lovely motherland of Brownistan, we know exactly what we are sowing, because we have been sowing the same thing for centuries. We do as our fathers have done, and with any luck, our doings bring us a son. Some might argue that our lives are boring, but at least we avoid unpleasant surprises, like the one this young lady from Richmond had.

You see, like all truly liberated people, our Richmond heroine broke up with her boyfriend. Alas, the lad wasn't quite right up there, so he didn't just thank Allah and move on the next babe, as any normal man would. Nope. As Reuters reports, he distributed DVDs of them having sex to everyone in the neighbourhood. Thankfully, this is Gaad-Bless-Amaizhica where anthrax is in the mail and baddies in the jail. Aye, the offending boyfriend has been locked up for disturbing the peace, as well he should be. Lots of very conservative South Indians in the neighbourhood saw the video, discovered they had been doing it wrong all along, and rudely realized that their children were the boon of Gopala the milkman and not Gopala the Lord, as they had hitherto believed.

It could all have been avoided so easily. If only the said young lady had been a good traditional brown girl, she would never had her sex videos distributed in public. There would have been no sex videos, because there would have been no sex. And even if there had been, the lights would have been off, because it is the Brown Way. Tradition, that great security blanket, saves brown women from indecent exposure to boyfriends past and present. (Some might point to last year's MMS row in Delhi, but the city types are not really Brownistanis, and at any rate, Delhi is, de facto, East Pakistan.)

But I digress. The moral of the story is simple--Novelty, as a rule, bites one right on one's arse. In Conformity lies Happiness.

There! I have said it. And if I am still alive, it is only because noone really reads this blog. If they did, they would all howl in protest and issue fatwas against me. They would do so, because Individualism is the New Faith. Noone wants to be like anyone else. Everyone wants to achieve his or her own "individual potential" by "daring to be different". I shudder to think they'll succeed, for I know the limit of their potential. Most people I know can multiply, but not add. They can breed, but not read. They will try out new things of course, and get screwed in a different way each time.

But let me not lose heart yet. I am Tradition's last Messiah, and I shall sing in its defense, though my voice be lonesome. If I can win back but one prodigal, I'd have done fair by my forlorn Goddess, Conformity.

There are, in general, three kinds of people who oppose Tradition and embrace modernity.

Against the first, I speak no word. Even if I did, they wouldn't understand. These are the Hindi-speaking masses of the Great Cow Belt, and I cannot parley in their tongue, nor they in any of mine. At any rate, they are not foes of Tradition. Their idea of modernity is that they can make Hindi movies without songs and marry outside their caste. They do not think Tradition is particularly wrong, because they do not think. They are children of Kudrat, and they heed the Call of the Wild, or at least the portions of it that come with Hindi subtitles. If Tradition becomes fashionable, I'm sure they will mazey-ke-liye follow it. Their Time will come.

The second priests of modernity are Ayn Rand types. They are usually contemptuous of one's weakness, because one has not yet raped anyeone. And if one thinks one can avoid their contempt merely by raping someone, one would be wrong. They have contempt also for poverty, money, pity, sentimentality, cricket, politics, julabulajungs and all other facets of average human behaviour. They do not like man, because they admire Man. They believe that Man is fundamentally and essentially great. By Man, they are usually referring to their boyfriends, for most Ayn Rand types are teenage girls.

As one might expect, Ayn Rand types are decidedly down on Tradition. They believe that each Man must find his own true calling, which cannot be the same as anyone else's. Having found his goal, Man must achieve it, and in the process, cause death, diarrhoea and bloodsheed, or at the very least a little discomfort to others. For Man, following the beaten path is a strict no-no.

I would, of course, like to enlighten the Ayn Rand types. But to get them to listen to me, I must first rape somebody. Nay. I will let the Ayn Rand types be. Soon enough, they will get married to Man, and then even they will find it difficult to admire him.

The third, and most dangerous, opponents of Tradition are the intellectual types. They sometimes talk like the Ayn Rand types, but they are quite easy to identify because unlike the A. R. types, they are literate, and very ugly. Genius, these intellectual types argue, must needs break the rules. If Galileo had towed the line, would he have achieved lasting fame? If Michaelangelo had indulged in dikilona with little boys, would he be admired by the millions that throng the Sistine chapel? And even if these great men didn't care for fame, can there be greater happiness than the pursuit of perfection? And so saying the intellectual types look satisfied, stroke their beards and wag their tails, believing that they have said something irrefutably profound.

It is all rot, of course. Glance through the histories of the world's most famous, and you'll see that they were a bunch of miserable, run-down sods. It is hardly surprising. Each work of genius, by definition, rises above the norms of its times. For it to be recognized as a work of genius, it must first be understood by people. Now people are people, and if they have to understand something, it had better be bloody simple. And if something is really that bloody simple, it probably is not a work of genius. QED.

Aye! It is no coincidence that all these genius types are generally dead by the time you and I hear about them. My friend B~ used to come up with a Unified Field Theory every two weeks. We all thought he was mental, and it turns out we were right. But the point is that he could quite easily have been a real genius. None of us would have known a Unified Field Theory if it came and bit us on our arse.

It is clear as day. The intellectual types are wrong, because they mistake achievement for happiness. The two are anything but equivalent. Everyone knows that Michaelangelo Buonaratti, that Great Master, locked himself up in the Sistine Chapel and painted the vault all alone, Creation of Man and all. The intellectual types say that he must have felt the highest human happiness when he finished it. They are wrong, because they don't know that when Mikey finished the Sistine Chapel, he went and met his aunty:

M~: Zia Mia, I have returned.
Zia : Michaelangelo Mio, I see you have. But enough about you. Let's talk about my son Lodvico.
M~: But Zia Mia, you must hear my news. I have finished the greatest fresco on earth. Here's a sketch of it--God creating Adam.
Zia: Yes, yes, nice. Don't show it to your grandmother though. She is still old-fashioned.
M~: Why? What do you mean?
Zia: All these naked men. I understand you, Michaelangelo Mio. You were an unhappy child. Now you are a Happy Man. But your grandmother, she will be heartbroken.
M~: But, Zia Mia, this painting celebrates the Glory of Man!
Zia: Yes, it is indeed very glorious. All the same, you could have covered up the glory just a wee little bit by painting some clothing on it, just for your family's honour.
M~: But...
Zia: Enough, Michaelangelo mio! If only you had married like my Lodvico, you wouldn't be hanging like a bat on ceilings and drawing dirty pictures. But I'll always be your Zia. Come and eat something. You look starved. It is all that improper lust eating away at you.

So much for happiness in genius.

Conformity, O Sweet Goddess! When shall your Kingdom be upon us again?