Fart Jokes From The Buddha's Diary

The Return Of The King, And More Bad News

2010-02-27T00:52:00.015-07:00

We are back, gentle reader, but that is not the plague eating away at the soul of Brownistan. Indeed, on the whole, we are more browned against than browning. The plague, on the other hand, is as dangerous to Brownistan as Brownistan is dangerous to us. Or to recycle notation used earlier on these pages:

Plague : Brownistan :: Brownistan : Us.

But do not fret, dear reader. We have not forgotten that you have the brains of Lord Hanuman's illegetimate offspring. We will not just state the obvious. We will belabor it, just like old times.

Now, we were talking about the p. eating away at the s. of Brownistan. We are not referring to inflation, nor are we referring to the irrational bickering among virtually identical Hindi-speaking brown people in the name of Allah miya and Ram bhaiya. And before you mention it, while we do resent the Brownistanis' new-found riches and their bourgeois posturing and their tiresome jetsetting and stock-trading and gadget-flashing, it does not break our heart. We expected no better from a nation ruled by firenginis and their minion sardars. Nay, 'tis not the malls that galls, for at least, the malls are full of molls.

These are mere skin infections. The real plague, alas, is a festering gash, one so deep as to have reached the remote town of T~. T~ was once a bastion of Brownistan's hoary purity, and so too it seemed to us when we set foot on it this time. After all, the hireling posted outside the parental home still did bow to us. He was ancient and looked suitably poor and obsequious. We were pleased.

We settled in, and were just diving into the sambar trough, when in walked the neighbor. Like all Indians, she made small talk, enquiring about our salary, the cost of underwear in Gawd-bless-amaizhica, and whether little Johny was expected to bring forth results anytime soon. We were briefly flummoxed, but decided to answer inquisition with enquiry.

We bowled a loosener, asking about the lady's profession. We expected her to say she stayed at home, cooked, cleaned and made a few lakhs on the stock market every day. (Brownistani currency, we had noticed on arrival, was used by the natives as langot material, and as a means to identify and ridicule returning natives. The minion at the airport insisted on taking a photo with us on his cellphone after we offered him ten rupeees for tea. We had also learned, by cleverly mingling with the natives, that the stock market was the new ladies' club, and that the New Brown woman makes cash just as easily as she makes babies.)

"I'm a doctor", quoth she, causing us to frown. We decided to play along, asking her if it was true chickenguniya could spread by email. "I do not know," said she without irony, "I specialize in critical and terminal care. My husband and I run a 100-bed clinic, and we just opened up 30 more". At which point, she looked longingly at the pater and the mater, they having reached the age when white people get married, and brown people get hospitalized.

But we digress. It must be the shock, for you see, beloved reader, this nosy woman deep in the backwaters of Brownistan, had indeed used the words "critical and terminal care". The implications were not lost on our brilliant deductive mind., namely that (i) the Brownistani doctor was no longer just a severe-looking man who gave you malaria pills and prescribed rasam rice, and (ii) Brownistanis had contracted the silly Western habit of wrestling pootta case oldies from Yama for no reason at all,and were even paying cash to do so.

But we weren't to be put off by just one mortal blow. Nay, we are the Andy Roddick of everyday life, constantly uppity in the face of utter humiliation.

We persisted in our questioning. "And what does your husband specialize in?" we asked. "Malaria" was the right answer, but the shameless virago proudly proclaimed, "Test tube babies! T~ is the district capital in the procedure", This time, she looked acquisitively at us, our inability to deliver already having been discussed.

But by then, we were too shocked to feel insulted.

The horror! The horror! 'Tis ghastly, but true. A virile nation which once ridiculed white master's inability to multiply without technological props can no longer throw stones, for it breeds in glass houses. Aye, the new Brownistani may lord it over the world; he may amass his millions and drink two single teas a day, just because he can; he may buy touchscreen phones and flatscreen TVs; he may throw away money on his parents. He may even have girlfriends, but alas, he fires blanks at them.

What went wrong where? The brownistani supremacists claim that in keeping with Brownistan's superpower status, breeding has been outsourced to even poorer nations on some faraway planet. The brownistani doomsdayers see this as yet another failure of the domestic manufacturing sector. The local moralists say moolah necessarily brings with it impotence, even to the most fertile of people. Behavioral psychologists blame it on television and the internet, which have shown the Brownistanis that their mates are just nature's cruel joke on them. The pious point out that the Brownistani breeding has always depended on God's grace, and God just does not grace Brownistani julabulajungs any more. The scientific alarmists claim insecticides make Brownistani's eggs brittle and prevent them from hatching in their dozens.

We do not know the truth, gentle reader. All we know is a neighbor who hawks beds to our parents and babies to us.

Adieu!

2007-04-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-04-14T22:20:00.000-07:00

Yaa.

Modernity, Ayn Rand And Michaelangelo's Aunty

2007-04-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

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?

The Death Of An Ordinary Young Man

2007-03-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

At the precise moment of his death, Sridhar was not thinking of MSG, or Savithri, or Bapuji, or even his own death. He was thinking of Queen Victoria Primary School.

He was born in the corner house near the railway tracks, one furlong from the railway station. He had to cross the tracks every morning to go to the Queen Victoria Primary School. He would stop near the tracks, waiting to hear the distant gad-gad-gad of the 8:35 Mysore Express as it approached. He waited for the sound because he wanted to cross in front of the train. But even as the smoke from the train became barely visible, his heart would go thump-thump-thump and he would run across the tracks to the other side and wait-wait-wait for the train to cross, always resolving that he would cross a little later the next day, a little closer to the thundering train.

In his mind, Mysore was a place of great adventure. Everytime his grandmother told him stories about kings and princes, he always pictured them happening in Mysore, though he had never seen Mysore.

When he grew up, he went to Curzon Senior Secondary school, which was on the same side of the town, so he didnt' have to cross the tracks anymore. Slowly he forgot about the tracks and the 8:35 Mysore Express. But he felt a vague personal pride whenever somebody talked about Tipu Sultan, because Tipu had been ruler of Mysore, the citadel of his fantasies. Though he didn't know it, he liked Tipu more than Hyder Ali because Tipu looked a bit like his father, in the picture on the wall of Ghani stores. (The Bhai in Ghani stores was a nationalist who would secretly tell the children about the Congress and Gokhale. The picture was actually not that of Tipu. Bhai himself didn't know whose it was, but he always called it Tipu.)

The first time Sridhar saw Mysore, he felt betrayed and almost cried. He had taken the 8:35 Mysore Express, with a strange feeling as he saw it from the inside for the first time. He was going to join St. Johns Arts College. His father was travelling with him. They got off at the junction and took a tonga to the hostel. The tonga's seat was dark green and torn. The sponge showed below the seat cover, looking like pus oozing out of a sick wound. He would remember that seat for the rest of his life.

But he got over his initial disillusionment, and soon joined the buzz of life at St. Johns. He was one of the average boys, not popular but not obscure either. He did reasonably well in his classes, and played on the college cricket team. He batted at No. 5 and bowled leg spin. He was competent though not spectacular, except for one match when he scored 32 not out and took 3 wickets, two of them clean bowled. Before he realized it, two years were gone and his father was already talking to the Tasildar about getting him a clerk's job in the Municipality offce back home.

In the final year literature class, he met M.S. Gopala Iyer, or MSG as he was called. MSG was a legend in the college. He had passed the IAS exam, but refused to join the British administration. He lectured with authority born from confidence and practice. When he declaimed FriendsRomansCountrymen, you wanted to go kill Cassius and Brutus because Anthony was telling you do so--in spotless English, wearing a spotless turban and a spotless dhoti and a spotless full-sleeve shirt. That word summed up MSG: spotless. His patriotism was legendary. He had gone to jail every year for the last ten years. It was said that Bapuji knew him personally. Pandit Nehru had stayed with him when he came to Mysore.

Sridhar first went and talked to MSG because his half-yearly exam paper was misgraded. One question had not been graded at all. MSG looked at the paper, and said, "Well, young man, I don't think it will make a difference to your total." Sridhar blushed, mumbled something and was about to run outside. But he looked up and saw MSG smiling. He smiled back, looking a little stupid. MSG gave him two marks (out of six, I think), added it to the total and entered it in the register. Then he started talking. He talked about the Salt Satyagraha and Hind Swaraj and Bapuji and the Congress. Sridhar listened, open-mouthed. He went again next week. MSG took him along to the Congress meeting. He stood below the stage, listening.

It was his first love, though he didn't know it. He talked like MSG. He wore khadi, and stopped playing cricket. He no longer visited home every weekend. When he went, he bitterly quarreled with his parents. He stopped wearing leather and made it a point to walk through the untouchables' (Harijan's) colony when he had to go into town, though it was a slightly longer route. When Bapuji was passing Mysore by the train, he volunteered to manage the crowd. He courted arrest during a dharna, but was released because he was a college student. He even started saying waugh-tuh instead of vaatur as he had done earlier. He often went to MSG's house, and became the household favourite. MSG's mother would call him "paiya" and serve him idli with hot sambar.

Before he realized it, the annual exams had come and gone. He had done reasonably well, only so as to not disappoint MSG. He wanted to stay back and join the Congress movement, but MSG insisted that he should go home for the summer vacations. "You'll probably get married. But if you don't, come back. We have work for you," he said smiling. Sridhar frowned and shook his head vigorously.

He went back home and immediately visited the local Congress office. He was somewhat disappointed to find that the Congress Secretary was Kittanna, his mother's cousin who had always made him get "just two betel leaves and a little lime" from Ghani stores, without ever settling his account. But he tried to volunteer anyway. He was somewhat disappointed to find that they did not plan any dharnas. At any rate, the Mayor himself often visited Kittanna to play chess in the Congress office. He went to the Harijan's street to teach the children, but after two attempts, he realized that the parents would rather send the children to work, and they were tolerating his lessons only because he was a Brahmin. He gave up, and sat at home. He placed an order for a charkha, and waited for it to come from Mysore. He sat at home reading a Kannada translation of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.

His father soon broached the topic of the clerk's job at the Municipality office. Sridhar flared up, called his father a Quisling, and left the house in a huff when his mother started crying. He came back at night. His mother was still crying. "You talk so much about Bapuji. Does he not preach non-violence? How can you talk like that to your father and hurt him?" she said. He apologized to her and his father, but said he will not join the foreign government anyway. The scene repeated itself twice every week for a month.

One day his father asked him to get dressed, because they were visiting some relatives. They had fought the night before, so he quitely obeyed. They went to his Kittanna's house. He realized he was about to get engaged to Parvathi, Kittanna's 17 year-old daughter. He flew into a rage, and shouted at everyone and started to leave. As he was leaving, he saw in the side room a somewhat pretty girl looking at him with fear, her kaajal slowly running down her cheeks along with the tears. At that moment, his mother came to him and said, "Your own MSG would be ashamed of you, hurting a young girl's heart like that. Doesn't MSG himself have a wife, and does it hinder his deshbhakti? If you are a real patriot, you would do your duty anyway, wife or no wife." He frowned, and angrily mumbled, "Do whatever you want. I don't care. I am going now." Then he walked out. He heard that evening that he had gotten engaged in absentia. Strangely, he felt happy. He wrote a long letter to MSG about his plans for joining the Congress movement in August. He added a little postscript about his wedding, with some appropriately witty quote from Samuel Butler about marriage.

The marriage was held from July 18 to 21. The celebrations were grand, though he insisted on wearing a khadi dhoti instead of the traditional silk one. Two days after his marriage, the Shanti Muhurtam was set. That evening, he was talking to his father and Kittanna. He talked about leaving for Mysore the next week. His father smiled and said, "What's the hurry? Why don't you join the Municipality next week, work for a few months and then go? Your MSG will be happy if you get some clerical experience. You can manage the Congress better there." He flared up. Words were exchanged. Kittanna said something about his daughter being cheated. Sridhar's father almost sobbed. His mother cried openly.

Amidst all this, they sent him to a room where Parvati was waiting for him. He saw her, and felt an uncontrollable rage. "Do they think I will fall for this? I am not a cheap womanizer like your father. I have principles, and I will stand by them." She looked at him with her child-woman's eyes. Her eyes became moist, but she seemed too afraid to cry. He paced up and down the room for 15 minutes. He turned to look at her. She was sleeping, folded over like a child. He felt a stab of pity and remore, and went to cover her up with a blanket. She awoke as he approached, her face turned towards his. With a sudden lust, he kissed her, and had her. She seemed stunned, but quietly yielded. Maybe she would have got into it, but he was done before she could even stir. He lay on his back near her. After a while, she said, quietly, "Can I go now? Amma said to come see her afterwards."

He turned to her in rage. He had been fooled. They had taken him in after all. He was just an animal, no better than Kittannna. He looked at her, and noticed for the first time that she had her father's broad nose and big lower lip. With great fury, he slapped her and walked out of the room. As he left, he saw the blood on the sheets.

He walked straight towards the railway line. The night was muggy. In the distance, he saw the Municipality office lights. He walked, thinking of Bapuji and Satyagraha and how he could never more be a part of any of it. He walked faster. He heard a distant horn. It sounded like MSG's precise deep voice crying Vande Mataram. He was walking on the railway tracks. He saw a distant light. It seemed like MSG's half-moon monocle shining under the new light bulb in his house. He walked towards it. Gad-gad-gad. The lights were gettig bigger and bigger, like Parvathi's eyes. He walked towards them. Gad-gad-gad. Kittanna's widowed mother-in-law was grinding the betelnut for him. Gad-gad-gad. He thought of Queen Victoria Primary. That was the last thing he thought of.

The End of Irreference

2007-03-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

I did not want children, Bhikku, and I did not want to file tax returns. That left only two career options: I could become a philosopher or a monk. I took the less loony one.

-- The Diary, March 501 BC

All this instant blogging is not our style, but there are times when one cannot wait to break the news.

This is to inform all readers that Jean Baudrillard (pronounced Zhawn Bodhri-yard) is a pootta case. Poye pochi. Poyindi. Choligache. It's gone, maa.

He was one of the leading intellectuals of our age, or so everyone says, now that he is well and truly dead. According to him, a tree falling down in a forest makes no sound if there's noone around to hear it. Or as he himself would put it, "The irreference of the simulacrum to Objective reality undermines reality, not the simulacrum itself." We just cooked this up ourselves, but we challenge anyone to read Baudrillard and prove that he did not say it.

But as we were saying, the lad's gone and kicked the bucket.

We were going to offer a tearful tribute to him, but we realized that he himself was never sure that he was alive. At any rate, he would have maintained that our writing about his life would create his life. We are Rome's last Caesar, but one thing we shall not have said of us, that we created Baudrillard by writing blogs. So there! No tearful tribute. Let's get on with the program.

PS: Blokes are requested to show some respect to the possibly Dead and not snigger at the word Irreference. Irreference is a good word. It is the sort of word we would use ourselves if we were in a particularly naughty mood.

PPS: Actually, we rather like the chap. He was a good chap. It's a pity he is gone. The world will be more real and more depressing without him in it. If he really is dead, that is.

The Road To Sarnath

2007-02-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

The Buddha looked at the eastern sky, and nodded with the air of someone who didn't disapprove but had seen better. "How strange that sunrise must seem less beautiful than sunset, though man fears the night and seeks days' light?" he said. And then started walking at a frightening pace. Bharata, his disciple, followed him, trying to not pant and say something intelligent in reply. He succeeded partly. His "Hmm, yes!" came out quite smoothly. It was a bright spring morning. They were headed towards Sarnath.

DAY ONE
By and by, they met a gaunt-looking man. The Buddha slowed down and started talking to him. Or rather, he started listening. "This world, sir, is in darkness and Man is as a firefly. We are here but for a fleeting few nights; and it is our calling to throw some light, however feeble, in the surrounding gloom. Yes, the task of man is to be moral, and virtuous, and sacrifice himself for others. How can any moral man be content with his personal comfort, when all around him is suffering and injustice? The man that has a kind heart but does nothing for his fellow man, is a bigger sinner than the bloodiest murderer that ever lived." The Buddha nodded, but said nothing.

That evening, Bharata said to the Buddha in private: "Truly, that man is a saint, master. We are fortunate to have the company of one so virtuous". The Buddha merely said, "He is indeed virtuous, but I would like to rest awhile tomorrow. Let him go ahead." And so the man went ahead the next day, while the Buddha swam in a river all day and climbed up a hill to take in the view.

DAY THREE
They started again on the third morning. By and by, they met a tradesman who meant to purchase a good house in Sarnath. He had married recently. "Master," he said, "You are a noble saint. I can't be as detached as you. My life has no great meaning, but it is all I know." The Buddha smiled and said, "Oh, don't worry about it. It's just one's nature. Anyway, maybe you can explain to me how trade is organized. I have never understood it." And so the man explained the principles of supply and demand, and the planning of economies, and how governments worked. He soon talked about competition and human nature and social progress. "We are all struggling only for our immediate comfort, master; but I believe that this is the way towards universal progress. Man is not by nature rapacious. Once the rich find a basic level of comfort, they'll slowly become more generous. Anyway, only if the rich expand trade, can the poor find employment." The Buddha beamed and said, "I'm glad you think so. I don't understand this Business business, but I hope you're right about the nature of man. Anyway, enough of this. Tell me about your family." And then the man started talking shyly about his young wife, and how she had cried when he had to leave, and how sweetly she sang when the mood took her. His eyes were twinkling. The Buddha smiled with him.

That evening, Bharata said to the Buddha, "I can't understand this man. He thinks only of his own little life and trade. What difference, then, between men and beasts? But perhaps, master, that is the greatest wisdom of all. Perhaps man's highest Duty is to live by natural instinct. And yet, can any man truly find happiness in something that is so petty and personal? It is just as well we have a few more days to go. I want to understand this man." The Buddha smiled indulgently, patted Bharata on his shoulder and said, "Perhaps, my boy, you can understand him more by seeing him less. Aargh! Hear me sounding like a mysterious Sadhu. We will let this man go his own way, if you don't mind. We will take a detour. There is someone else I want you to meet."

DAY FOUR
The next morning, they walked to a nearby village and met an old man. He was one of those old people who make one want to grow old soon. He was still fit and strong, but one could see that he was weakening slowly. The hair and beard were sprinkled with white. The eyes smiled, the mouth did not. He greeted the Buddha warmly. "There you are, my boy. I take it you are wandering around as always." The Buddha, looking suddenly boyish, smiled and said, "Well, you know that monks do not stay anywhere for very long." The old man shook his head, looking grim. "You already know what I think of the matter. But perhaps your young friend here can yet be redeemed."

And then the old man turned to Bharata, and said, "Look, my child, your Master here is like a hummingbird. He wanders a thousand miles every year, and wherever he goes, he brings cheer and joy. But he is not just a beautiful bird. He is a man, and an uncommon one at that. His dharma, and that of every man gifted with a mind, is to strive for perfection. Before you say anything, I know that he told you that all life is equal or some such nonsense. Yes, it is perhaps true that if two living beings were drowning, you should save the one you have the best chance of saving. Actually, I don't agree with that either. But even I were to, it's besides the point. The point is not whether one life is more valuable than the other. The point is that each of these 'equal' lives might have its own unique purpose. And I say that the purpose of the thinking man is Thought itself. Oh, and he told you something about saving the world and showing the way and all that. Nonsense. A man who is not movings towards his own Goal cannot steer others towards theirs."

Having said all this calmly, he turned to the Buddha and said, "So what have you read recently?" The Buddha grinned and shrugged. "Nothing? I'm afraid for you, my boy. In trying to teach them, I'm afraid you'll become them. But anyway, while you're here, let us read something." And for the rest of the day, he sat reading to the Buddha, who listened calmly.

That evening, Bharata said, "Master! I am truly grateful you brought me here. Surely, this life is the Answer? There is much we will learn here." The Buddha 's eyes shone, "I am glad, my boy, that you like it here. But I plan to leave tomorrow for Sarnath. If you want, you can stay here. In fact, I'd rather like it if you did." Bharata said, his voice choking, "How could you think I'll leave you? I will come, of course, wherever you go. But tell me, O Master, what am I to make of the world when so many paths that seem right?"

"My child, I am not sure I know the answer to that. All I know is that my path goes to Sarnath."

So saying, the Buddha went into a deep dreamless sleep.

An Ode To Ourselves, And An Appeal To Allah

2007-02-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

For a monk, Bhikku, lust and hatred are a strict no-no. But disgust, now that's another matter altogether.

-- The Diary, Date Unknown.

Call Him Allah, or call him Khuda; call Him Rahman or call Him Rahim. Call Him what you will, gentle reader, but observe that God is a sharp cove. He protects, but does not pamper. He is kind, but not mushy. In short, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

To Chinese, Koreans and such-like cartoon characters, He giveth eternal youth; but from them, He taketh away all desire for sex. After all, as the old song goes,

Sook Yung, and Cho Chong, and Ming Lee, they
Look Young, and Live Long, but Singly!

To white men, God giveth heap-big-heap desire for sex; but from them He taketh away mojo and renders them homo.
To black men, He giveth libido and mojo; but before they can do anything, He taketh them away and puts them in jail.
To you, gentle reader, God giveth our delightful blog to read; but from you, He taketh away the taste to appreciate it.
To Us, He giveth the looks of Adonis, the valour of Achilles, the wit of Cato and the wisdom of Plato; but from Us, alas, He taketh away all intelligent readership.

There was once a time when this blog was read by many people, including some gumtalaka she-ple. But now, alas, that time is past. Today, we are reader-less. Noone comments on our posts.

Or so we wish.

In truth, some private comments on the last post were sent to us. As it turns out, this blog still does have its readers. Alas, they are the Aged and the Infirm, the Fossilized and the Mummified, the Hideous and the Grumpy. Their opinion is like our aunts' advice. We do not ask for it, but we get it anyway. Our writings, these readers declare, aren't good enough for them anymore. Our profile, they say, stinks. Our new layout looks so ugly, it makes us look pretty by comparison. Our blog, in short, needs a quick and decent burial.

These readers are the sort of blokes who buy second hand jattis, and have no control over their moocha. We could go on about their deviant sexual tendencies, but they would probably take it as a compliment anyway. Nay, we will not bad-mouth them, ungrateful sons-of-a-what-not that they are. The fault, gentle Reader, lies not in our underlings, but in our stars. We were born to suffer thusly. We do not wish to moan, but we are a most unlucky bastard. We were born in the babeless nation of South India, and all through our life, we have endured grave misfortunes. Indeed, nothing has gone our way. Ours is a tragedy fit for Homer. But we are a Real Man, and we can't quite get ourselves to trust a European man who calls himself Homer. At any rate, Homer, we're told, is dead.

Self-help, once again, is our only recourse.

We present here an Ode to Ourselves. Please read it. And comment only if you do not have facial hair. Thank you.

An Ode To Ourselves
(For the illiterate, and for the Meter-Nazi tailor types, audio link here)

BIRTH
It was a loverly morn,
Mama was on the john.
He held some roasted corn,
And a secret book of porn.

Mami she cried, "It's born!"
Her voice was like a horn.
Mama's ear was torn,
And so he heard, "It's porn!"

The foul mistaken sound!
He thought he had been found.
Stunned, he swallowed the corn,
And soon, alas, was gone!

Ere they broke the lock,
Mama had died of shock.
That's how we came to Earth,
Our birth it caused no mirth.

CHILDHOOD
But-oh, we won't be bitter,
Our life it did get better.
For soon we were a boy,
A cuddly mass of joy.

The ladies that beheld us,
So tenderly they held us.
A horde of hot young misses,
On us they planted kisses.

We were so appealing,
That they would start a-squealing
"Oh, what a little beauty,
I swear he is a cutie."

Alas we were a hermit,
Their kisses we didn't permit.
For though we were a nudist,
We also were a prudist.

As they kissed and petted,
Their skirts we slyly wetted,
On many a sultry missie,
We confess we got pissy.

YOUTH
The times they soon mended,
Our trials were then ended.
We roamed around in jatties,
Untroubled by kutties.

But when we started shaving,
We felt in us a craving,
And soon we were a-missing,
The hugging and the kissing.

It didn't make us queasy,
We thought the matter easy.
The thought of our pedigree,
It made us sure they'd agree,

To chicks we proposed smartly,
Alas, they opposed tartly.
Indeed, they seemed revolted.
Our confidence was jolted.

When WE had been a-suckling,
We were a cute duckling,
But now we weren't lucky,
We'd grown to be a ducky.

Our taste had refined vastly,
The looks had grown ghastly.
The truth alas was simple,
Our face was like a pimple.

TODAY
A-turning on the charm,
We knew would do us harm,
We sought to win their hearts,
By turning on the Arts.

Since babes no longer lusted,
In wit and grace we trusted.
Our looks didn't get us snogging,
But hope there was in blogging.

Our hopes they were cemented,
When many a fan commented.
Our fans we then befriended,
And soon our hopes they ended.

Our fans we learned are balled,
And most of them are bald.
We'd told our great adventures,
To fossils wearing dentures.

O Gods, Ye must be crazy,
Or deaf and dumb and lazy.
We asked for reading lasses,
Ye gave us reading glasses.

Allah, Ram and Jesus,
If you wish to please us,
Send us a sexy reader,
We really do need 'er.

A Manager's Diary

2007-02-03T17:58:00.000-07:00

Yes, Bhikku, you heard me right. That man asked me to describe Nirvana, and I said it is pink, soft and smells like cardamom. He is a manager. Anything more detailed than that will confuse him.

-- The Diary, Full Moon Day, April 515 BC

Mon, Jan 23 Close shave today. Bill called me in. I thought he was going to fire me, but he said I've been promoted to manager. I hope I didn't look too relieved. But this is great. Now I can really make a difference. I told him I have a vision for the group. I do. I'll show them. Note to self: be hands-on, but dont' micromanage.

Wed, Jan 25 Spoke to Charlie Wong today. I think he resented me being promoted over him. I assured him he he has a key role to play. That's the secret of good management. Always shoot straight and build good relationships. [Charlie Wong's diary for Wed, Jan 25: Sam is now very oily. He probably thinks I'm jealous. Jealous of him? Yeah, maybe I should be. My life would be uncomplicated too, if only I were an idiot like him. Can't believe he is manager now. It is all racism, of course. There's a glass ceiling for Asians.]

Tue, Late Feb. No time to update this diary anymore. Am getting stressed out. Too much to do. Chatted with Bill. He said I am doing just fine. Said Software is doing great under me. Poor chap, he must be stressed too. I manage Analog, not Software.

Thu, mid-April Bill called me in. Said we are losing customers. Wanted me to focus more on the job. I'm getting worried.

Third weekend of April The wife made me go to her Asian faith-healer. Weird fellow. He was looking at my horoscope. I told him I'd become manager, but things are going bad. He threw away the horoscope. Sat down and talked to me. Said my problem was that I was doing too much. Asked me to relax. Gave me some stress-fighting exercise. If I get stressed out, I should face north, kneel down, lift up my left palm and punch it hard thrice with the right fist, shouting "I can do it. I can do it. I can do it". Said I should call more meetings, and do less work by myself. A manager is like a general, he says. Generals don't fight. Foot soldiers do. Makes sense. I'll follow his advice.

Wednesday, 25th April Had five meetings today. Assigned lots of action items. I think we are making progress.

Thursday, 26th April This is great. I feel like a general now. The left palm hurts a little, though.

Monday, 1st May I have learned to devolve, so that I can concentrate on man-management and customer interaction. Asked Charlie to lead the design team. He'll lead Srinivas, Srinivasa and Srinivasan. Man, Indian names are very similar. But they say they are all from different parts of India, and speak different dialects. Yeah, no kidding! Charlie says every Chinese woman can identify her husband in a crowd. It's amazing, because all Chinese people look alike. I am understanding foreign cultures. Should put that in my resume, when I come up for promotion.

Tuesday, 1st May I am in Paris. Customer rep from X__ is here, too. He works in Boston. Says he has travelled here for the meeting. I told him I work in New York, so maybe we can meet in Boston itself. He says their conference center is in Paris, so it is better to meet there. I don't mind. Paris is nice, and I'm getting airline miles. But anyway, it seems a waste of company money.

Thursday, 3rd May Spoke to Bill about going to Boston instead of Paris. Thought he'd be impressed. He frowned and said he'll think about it.

Monday, 8th May Bill said he would have asked me to take over Digital too, except that it will involve travelling and I seem so reluctant to travel. I assured him that I have no problems travelling. Am going to Paris again Thursday.

Wed, 10th May
10 am Firefighting today. Srinivas said he also he wants to be a team lead. I made him Architecture Lead. Charlie leads design, so it should be OK.
2 pm Srinivasan complained too. Had to pacify him somehow. Made him Interface Lead.
5 pm Srinivasa is System Optimization Lead. I'm getting good at this.

Mon, 15th May, 11am Got a design win from the Boston company. This is great news. Charlie says our design is best in class. I haven't had a chance to go over the design document. Should do it soon. Maybe even ask for a demo. But now it's time to celebrate.

Wed, 17th May, 9 am I'm beginning to enjoy the job. It's good to be an individual contributor, but as manager, you can pursue your vision. It's a fine art. You need to get the best out of people without stressing them out too much. You need to understand the big picture, but also know the details. That's where my technical background helps. I understand the details. Anyway, travelling to Australia next week. X__ has moved their conference center there. This should be a good meeting. We need to iron out all the details. I'll get the exact system specs. Details. That's the key.

Fri, 26rd May, 9 am Meeting in Australia went great. We laid a good foundation and came up with a framework for further relation-building. I'm putting in place an infrastructure to monitor the information flow. All meeting minutes will be put in cross-referenced spreadsheets and uploaded to the company internal website, with password access for the customer. I should ask Linda to work on it.

Fri, 26rd May, 11 am Linda says the minutes have already been uploaded to the company website. The previous manager had the same idea. I never thought he was this smart. (Note to self: Linda is efficient, but she does not have the right vibes. I should get a new secretary. I think a redhead would have a more business-oriented, customer-friendly professional approach.)

Tue or Wed, 1th June,
9am Arranged a visit next week by the interface team in X___ to see our demo.
10am Big problem!! Charlie says demo won't be ready by next week. Said architecture isn't mature. Need to talk to Srinivas (or is it Srinivasa)
10:30 am Spoke to Srinivasa. He says the design isnt' complete. Asked Charlie for the design document.
11 am Charlie says the design isn't over, because he is waiting for interface specs from Srinivasan.
11:30 am Srinivasan says interface spec isn't complete. Didn't know whether power or area was important. Optimization requirements aren't in yet.
2 pm Optimization req. not set. S~ says he didn't get first-pass design document, so there was nothing to optimize.
3 pm Which way is north?
4 pm My palm hurts
5 pm Had some emergency meetings. We are making progress. Gave action items to everyone.
6 pm I'm proud of myself. Three months back, I'd have panicked. Now I'm cool.
11 pm Just realized something. If we didn't have the design, how did we get a design win from X__? Those guys are incompetent idiots. That's the problem with high-level management. Details. That's the key.

Tue, 7th June
Tomorrow is the big day. DEMO

Wed, 8th June
3 pm Demo has been a big success so far. We went to a Chinese place for lunch. My choice. The team from X__ just loved it. They are all Chinese. Maybe some are Korean. Who knows? They are meeting the group now.
5 pm They seem impressed with the group. The manager says he hopes to build a good working relationship based on interpersonal interactions. Asked us to come over to their conference center in Morocco for a brainstorming session next month.
5:30 pm They hadn't gone to the lab to see the demo. I suggested we do it. They seemed to like the idea.
6:00 pm The guys had left early. Noone to show the demo. I showed them some of Charlie's slides. They seemed happy.

Closer to Friday than Monday, Late June
Bill called me to the room. Said he was very impressed. X__ had said I was very hands on. He said I'll take over his job starting next month. I am now the VP of the entire Design Center. This is great. I was expecting it, though. Bill is retiring.

Monday, I think. July?
9 am Took over as VP. Should find someone to take my old job. I think Srinivas will be a good choice. I'll call him now.
5 pm Oops, I promoted Srinivasa instead of Srinivas. Man, how do I correct this one?
6 pm Naah! Figured it's OK. They are both idiots anyway. I'll have to do everything myself, as always.

L~T~, my boy, welcome to Corporate America.

Swami Sexananda, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Market

2007-01-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

I didn't believe it, Bhikku, but it is true. The child IS the father of man.

- The Diary, Spring Break 509 BC

Gentle Reader, we present today, for your entertainment, a musical in three acts. You can read the text, or listen to the lovely rendition by the Dallas PillHormonic Orchestra.We hope you likes it; and if you don't, you know where you can keep your opinion.

A Musical In Three Parts With Lots of Sex and Violence, and A Moral Too

Cast :
Lucifer, aka Satan    Lord and Master of Hell
Charon Boatman of Hell. His job is to ferry the dead across the river Styx, into Hell
BJ                    My neighbour's teenage daughter. She's a bit like the Earth. Nothing much happens at the top, but the middle portion rocks
Saint Peter          Keeper of the Pearly Gates, Chief Operations Officer of Heaven

Act 1: Text Audio
Scene : Hell, Friday morning
Cast: Lucifer, Charon
Tune: Twinkle, twinkle, little star

Act 2: Text Audio
Scene : A night club in Dallas, Friday night
Cast: Lucifer, BJ
Tune: I am sixteen, going on seventeen

Act 3: Text Audio
Scene : Pearly Gates to Heaven
Cast: Lucifer, Saint Peter
Tune: Twinkle, twinkle, little star

Ozymandias And The Madrasas Of Brownistan

2006-12-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

Me : Congratulations, Bhikkku! Your education is complete. You can now leave the Sangha.
Bhikku : [blushing] I am deeply grateful, O Noble Tathagata! But if I may say so, I fear I have not learned everything yet.
Me : Not learned everything? Oh, don't be modest, Bhikku. You have in fact learned nothing. That's why I'm so proud of you. Of all my disciples, you'll do the least harm.

- "A Conversation Today", Early Spring, 507 BC

Bertrand Russell, that great philosopher, mathematician and smart-ass, writes : "Most men form their convictions while playing at their mother's knees, and never change them afterwards." Indeed, he is right. By the time a man starts shaving, it's too late to teach him anything new. That's why religious instruction begins early all over the world. Catch them young, says the Koran, and program them well. The practice, devious as it seems to some, has for centuries transformed beastly brats into harmless adults, all over the world.

Most impressive of all, the propaganda of every religion or culture has been admirably tailored to local needs. In Buddhist sanghas, young boys are taught to not have sex and beg for food, which essentially sums up adult life in most Buddhist countries. In Christian convents, little boys are dressed up in flowing robes, taught to sing pious hymns in a thrilling contralto, and buggered violently. Some might object to the practice, but surely it prepares the young ones for life under George W. Bush, where they will be frequently fucked in the name of Jesus. And then there's the Real Deal, the nominate race among Madrasas. In these, the Moslem young are taught to grow beards and make bombs. Blessed are they, for they learn to serve Raheem the Merciful by blowing up kafirs into tiny bits.

What, then, about the Hindus? What do we teach our tender young, in our Madrasas? But wait! first of all, do we have Madrasas at all? If so, where are they? If not, why not? Have we gone soft? Have we lost the desire to slowly rip out the balls of the heathen, dip them in maida batter, and deep-fry on a low flame to make crisp bondas? What is wrong with us? Don't we have Hindu pride?

I thought about this, and I was worried. In fact, I was shit-scared. And to allay my doubts and fears, I scoured all of Brownistan in search of a Hindu madrasa. My quest took me to three states and four cities. Finally, I found an Agmark specimen in the obscure village of T__, 6 kilometers west of the coastal Tamil town of K__. Come with me, gentle reader, to T__; and we'll sip off the best of Hindu culture.

T__ is a small village consisting of three parallel streets. Technically, there are a few more streets, but they contain only parayans and pallis and tulukkans and such-like low-caste vermin, so they don't really count. The three main streets of T__ are each about 200 meters long, and run north-south. The central one, Sannidi Teru, is where all the action really is. At the northern end of the street sits the temple chariot. From there we walk south, passing a few houses and many many marriage halls. As we reach the end, the temple stands on our right, and a small hillock rises to our left. Let's go up the hillock first.

The hillock, called Aushadagiri, is about 75 meters high. It flattens out to a surprisingly broad plateau. We look down from there, and see the temple below. It's built like a fort. A tall outer wall surrounds the central temple building, with a space of about 30 yards between the two. At various places, there are smaller buildings within the fort, each housing a different divinity no doubt. The gopuram of the central building, rising majestically from the bottom, towers over the scene. Behind the temple complex, we see the Garuda nadi. I dimly recall playing in its waters, many many years ago. Right now, it is dry. In the fading November light, its bare sands slowly darken from white-hot to silver-cool. On the other side of the river-bed, there are lush groves of palm, coconut and plantain trees. Against the backdrop of the setting sun, the scene is rather strikingly pretty.

We go down the hillock, enter the temple complex, pass the tall gold-plated Dwajastambam, and head to the central building. Soon, we reach the sanctum of the primary deity, Lord Devanatha. Here, gentle reader, we part ways. You can't go in there, because you are a shudra, a mleccha, a low-caste worm. I, on the other hand, have free entry because I am related to God. Aye, Lord Narayana--the Protector of the Universe, He who is at the same time Krishna the Chick-Magnet and Mohini the Man-Magnet, that self-same sex-changing super-God--is my cousin. I enter the sanctum, and find the priest offering prayers to the Lord. His voice is shaky, his Sanskrit even more so. At one point he piously declares that Lord Narayana has an elegant arse, while he really means to say He has a slender waist. The Lord Himself seems to take the compliment in style. The dark granite statue, which somehow mixes masculine authority with feminine grace, looks at us with a serene half-smile.

And then, we hear the faint sound of the thavil beating a slow rhythm. We hurry out of the central building. There, to our left, in the open space within the temple complex, we see a small-ish procession. Two bronze statues, one a mini version of Lord Devanatha and the other depicting his lovely consort Hemambhujavalli, are being taken in procession inside the temple complex. The statues are borne on palanquins, carried by true-blood Brahmins of course. Two young lads, probably around 5 years old, carry old-style fans for the Lord. They seem rather pleased with themselves, and very keen to do their job right. The statues have been decorated with jewels and flowers and bright silk costumes, arranged expertly and with evident devotion. The nadaswaram joins the thavil. A rather showy Hindolam precedes a majestic Thodi. It's been a while since I heard live nadaswaram of such high quality. The temple must be rich, if it can afford this chap. Finally the nadaswaram strikes up a lilting Sriranjani. On cue, the palanquin-bearers add a little jump to their step. The statues now sway up and down as they move along. If you just kept your eyes on them, you'd think they were dancing.

The lady standing next to me seems to be moved. She raises her hands, probably to fold them together, but seems to forget half way. Her hands hang in mid-air, in the posture of the Muslim namaaz. I suddenly recall seeing her about ten years ago. She must have been in her twenties then. I remember thinking that she would have been pretty if it were not for the hint of facial hair. She has grown older now, and in the way of Indian women, become a little plump. Our eyes meet but she does not seem to recognize me.

A deep, somewhat harsh, sound rises up. We turn, and notice suddenly the long row of young boys behind the procession. There are about twenty of them. Some of them have cropped hair. Others have old-fashioned tufts. All of them are dressed in dhotis. They are chanting, led by a middle-aged, tufted, rather handsome man. The voices are loud and deep. The chanting is almost musical, but the harshness of the voices remains. The chanting switches from Sanskrit to Tamil. I recognize it vaguely. The thunderous, booming words come back to me from some deep abyss of memory. "..Vadivaar sodhi valatthurayum, sudarazhiyum pallandu.. " A strange joy fills me as I join in, softly muttering the arcane words, along with the booming chorus. The chanting ends after a while. The procession breaks up. My uncle (and guide) explains that the chanting boys belong to the local Vedic school. The school has an attached hostel. The boys live there, under the supervision of the middle-aged man, who apparently is a great Sanskit scholar. He teaches them the Vedas, the Divya Prabandam, and the holy ways of the noble Srivaishnavas.

We all head to the dining hall. The chanters walk in first. A few others also enter. A middle-aged, dark-skinned man, evidently not a local, tries to enter after them. A slightly old priest gently stops him, and asks him to wait outside. Then his eyes fall on me. I'm waiting alone, my uncle having gone off on some errand. He motions me in. I suppose I look unmistakably like one of the Chosen. I walk inside, feeling somewhat guilty. A curtain is drawn behind us. Prasadam is distributed. Before every course, there's some more chanting. I try to look small and pious and respectful. Our prasadam served, we walk out slowly.

The same old priest walks out with his prasadam. We are talking now. He seems to know my grandmother. He is telling me about my father's antics as a child. Abruptly, he stops. He has noticed a poor-looking woman with a child in her arms. Gently, he drops his prasadam in her hands, taking care to not touch her of course. We walk on. He continues the conversation, as if nothing had happened.

And suddenly, I understand.

In the madrasas of Brownistan, they teach Psychological Warfare. All those young chanting boys are learning a bit of this and a bit of that, but primarily, they are learning that they are Superior. In time, they'll grow up to be like the old priest I'm talking to now. They will pick up various bits of the vast impressive brocade of culture I'd seen that evening. The best of them will learn to love it, treasure it and delight in it. They'll be proud of it, for no other culture in my land has the same intellectual depth. They won't know, alas, that theirs is only one of countless cultures of the Mind across the world. Indeed, as cultures go, it's not even particularly deep. They won't realize that ultimately, a culture of the mind is no better than a culture of river Gods and snake demons; that Life is bigger than the mind. The worst of them will, of course, not even analyze any of this, but just continue to lord it over the non-Brahmins. They will disagree with each other, indulge in petty politics, gossip and play games. But they will all agree on just one thing: that they are Better than the Others. They will be occasionally benevolent, even kind and thoughful, to the Others, but they'll keep away from them, for as long as they can.

There was once a time when I hated and despised my people for it. Looking back, I was anxious to prove to myself that I'm not one of them. Now I know I'm not, and they don't bother me anymore. They are wrong, of course. But it doesn't matter much. A few centuries back, they had the power to do harm. Now all they can do is their silly discrimination, and even that matters less and less each passing day. Like the dictator in The Autumn of The Patriarch, they are dying away slowly, even pitiably.

Look at them, Gentle Reader, and learn to be humble. You and I are the New Priests. Our God is Technology, our Veda is the Free Market, and our Orthodoxy is Individual Liberty. We rule the Earth now, like they did once. We lord it over our dumb subjects, like they did once. But we are no better than them. Arguably, we are much worse. They didn't destroy the Earth because they couldn't. We can, and we do. And like their end, ours will come too. Some young puppy from the New Age will one day look at us in silent judgement. Worst of all, he'll walk away with pity instead of anger, contempt instead of protest.

Aye, we will fall too, for it's the way of all flesh. As they would say, Shanti! Shanti! Shanti!

Note: D~, this one's for you.

Tender Is The Night, And Here There's Some Light

2006-12-12T16:55:00.000-07:00

Civilization can't be such a bad thing, Bhikku. After all, it gave us lights.

-- The Diary, November, Year Unknown.

Across The Thames

View From Malaikkovil, Trichy

Karthigai Lights

A Love Story

2006-10-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

The sun was sinking slowly. The soft evening light fell slantingly upon the rich green meadow and the small pond in it. The scene was pretty but strangely depressing. She looked forward to the star-lit night, but felt that it would be pointless too, just like the day that was so theatrically bleeding to death on the western sky. Suddenly, the bitter screech of scores of geese filled the air. They swooped down from the southwest, the setting sun behind their backs. They dropped straight into the pond, noisily splashing about and drinking the water.

It was spring again. Every evening for the last week, a new gaggle had descended on the pond. They rested, ate the grass, swam around, and flew again the next morning. They were migrating north.

She looked at the new gaggle with a dull half-interest. They were Canada geese, just like herself. Except they were free. One would think she had gotten used to having her wings clipped, but sometimes she wished she could fly away with them. Not that she had ever flown. She was hatched in the farm, and her wings had never been allowed to grow fully. But every spring, she felt a restlessness in her bones. She felt that if only she could get off the ground, she could float in the air indefinitely. She would know where to go. Sometimes she wondered where these free birds were going. If only she had wings, she felt, she would see these strange places clearly, even without having to fly over them. How else could these birds find their way anyway? It must be in the wings.

She smiled drily. It was absurd to feel sad about the wings, knowing she'd never have them. At any rate, she had talked to some of the free birds, and their lives seemed no happier than hers. One keeps chasing this and that, thinking it will bring happiness. And happiness, like the horizon, keeps receding as one moves towards it. But then again, maybe it's better to fly towards a receding horizon than just sit and stare at an unmoving one.

Some of the younger birds walked towards the farm. They were on the other side of the fence, talking among themselves. Some looked up at her slyly. She was not a beauty, but she knew she cut a graceful figure. The keeper took good care of the farm's birds. Her neck and feathers had the lambent glow of youth. She was rather proud of her snow-white throat patch, and how it shone bright against the inky black head.

Suddenly, one of the young birds flew over the fence and landed in the farm. He was young, probably even younger than her. He had what they call a striking personality. He was rather handsome, but what one noticed was his jaunty air. He was clearly used to being liked. He was probably rather vain, but somehow, it didn't seem like such a bad thing in him. At any rate, he seemed good-natured. But today she didn't care for admirers, even the handsome ones. She turned away and started walking.

"Hey, hey! Wait. Don't be so pricey. I'm not stalking you, you know? Just being friendly"
"Oh, yeah? How come you chose me to be friendly with?"
"Because you are the prettiest one around, of course. Why else?"
"And you aren't ashamed to admit it?"
"Why should I be? I'm new here. All I know is what I see. Why wouldn't I go by looks?"
[shaking her neck] "Suit yourself. I have a headache. I am going."
"Oh, come on! Don't be so stern. I am good company, even if I say so myself."
"Maybe, but I'm not a flirt."
"Really? How sad! I suppose you are a very deep thoughtful sort."
"And I suppose you consider yourself fun-loving, and laugh at everything you don't understand."
"Of course I do. But I am only amused by your intelligence, while you are repelled by my frivolity. Which of us is narrow-minded, you think?"
"Hmm. You sure can talk."
"I told you so", and he chuckled.

She smiled, despite herself. She stayed. They got talking, and went on and on. I don't know what they talked about. It must have been something quite witty and very profound. Bright young things are almost always brilliant when they are with someone they fancy. The moon was out now. The night was bright and tender.

"Let's go swim in the pond," he said.
"I can't. I mean, it is too cold."
He smiled. "Don't be silly. I know you can't fly. I have been to other farms, you know? Just climb up the fence pole-by-pole. You can climb on my back." They went out. It was slow. She fell off every now and then. Everytime she fell, they giggled their heads off. They finally got to the pond, and swam quietly. Every now and then, they raced a few yards. He was the faster swimmer, of course. She was new to it. He made it a point to not slow down for her. Somehow, he knew she wouldn't like it. She had never looked more beautiful than she did that night, with the moonlight on her face, and the breeding frogs croaking madly all around them, and the scent of the spring night hanging in the air.

"I can't come with you tomorrow. I can't fly," she said, abruptly. He started to say, "Well, I haven't asked you yet, if you didn't notice." He checked himself. He couldn't get himself to joke about it. A sharp stab of pity for her ran through him, like a butcher's knife. He was silent for a while, and then he said drily, "Maybe I should go and sleep. We fly out early tomorrow." She nodded and started walking. With her new meekness, she followed him back to the farm. She whispered, "Good-night. I'm generally up early. Say good-bye before you go." He flew back to the gaggle without turning back. She stared in his direction for a while, and walked back.

It took her a while, but she slept that night. He swam around the pond all night. I don't know what he really thought, of course. But I'll bet it was something like this: "This could be it. True Love and all that. But there is, unfortunately, no way of knowing whether it is. The only way is to stay back and find out. It would seem so childish, of course. On the basis of just one evening. But what do I care for appearances? No, no. I am being too selfish. The right thing is to think of her. Now, she only thinks of me as a friend. If I stayed back, I'll give her hope. And if I get bored of it, I'll just fly off. What right do I have to mislead her and desert her? No, I should leave now, before it is too late. Wait. Maybe I'm just afraid of losing the security of my current life. Maybe this is all a cop-out. But I don't think so. There's no point blaming oneself just because one can. I'm not an impulsive sort, and that's the end of it. Some people can just live in the moment, whatever that means. I cannot. But why can't I? I mean, surely I care for love. Not just to mate with somebody out of instinct, merely for reproduction. But this is all silly. One can't convince oneself to be spontaneous. You either have it or you don't."

I don't know what he was thinking when it dawned. But at the crack of dawn, the birds got up and drank some water, and ate a little grass, and flew out. He flew with them.

She had woken up. In the morning light, she stood, looking at the birds flying away. The lurid bronze light of the morning shone off her white body.

An artist who was visiting the farm saw her looking at the receding birds. The scene touched him. His painting of it was displayed in the "Local Artists" section of the Denver museum of Art. Some people were quite moved by it, others thought it cheap and sensational. Most critics dismissed it.

"The age that went before ours," wrote one critic, "was the age of wars hot and Cold. It was an age of conflict, genocide and dictatorship. But it was, at the same time, an Age of Ideas. Communism, Fascism and post-colonial Nationalism vied with Capitalism and Democracy for global hegemony. And as ideologies clashed, they acquired intellectual depth, just to survive. In our age, free-market democracy has decisively triumped, arguably for the better of Mankind. Alas, we have bought this peace at the cost of intellectual depth. Where once Joyce spoke of a 'thought-tormented' age, what we have now is mere sentimentality masquerading as emotion. And nowhere is it more apparent than in our Art. Art holds the paradoxical position of being dependent on thought, while at the same time, seeking to transcend it. It is safe to say that the success of any work depends on how accurately it reflects that tension that lies at the very core of Art. On that count Born To Fly fails. In running away from thought, it has merely stumbled into vacuous sentimentality, like much else in our times."

You might have read the review. It is widely quoted.

Postscript: The hero of this story did not visit the farm again. Six years after the events described here, he was shot dead by a hunter during the fall migration, somewhere over Wisconsin. The heroine turned out to be a reliable egg-layer for the farmer. They never ate her, even when she was old. The farmer liked to joke that he wouldn't cut open the goose that lay the golden eggs. She died of old age one winter.

-------

Note: The story came from two striking shots in Winged Migration, a documentary I highly recommend to chaps who like nature and/or photography. Among other things, WM proves that the French rock. It also proves, alas, that the French can't speak English, and won't accept the fact.

Finally, if some readers of these pages will only stop giggling and listen for a second, Canada geese do eat grass. It is true that cows also eat grass. But if the geese themselves don't think it's a problem, I don't see why stupid, senile BITS-ians should.

The Happy Alien Cometh

2006-09-16T13:48:00.000-07:00

If you respect God, Bhikku, respect the Devil too. He must be good. He is, after all, running neck and neck with God.

-- A Summer Evening, Year Unknown.

Every morning, His Supreme Whiteness Shah-eh-Shah Dick Cheney, King of Kings, leads a prayer meeting. There the faithful gather and give thanks to Jesus. "Thank you, Jesus," they say, "for all you have given us. And please keep it up. We have a shit-load of cash. Give us some more. We have heap-big-heap moral values. Give us some more. We have drugs for heart disease and performance enhancement and bladder control. Give us some more. We have power over the world. Give us some more. And above all, Jesus! Protect us from You-know-what and You-know-what-else."

'Tis wondrous strange, but true. Hard as it is to believe, our White Rulers have their fears too. To be precise, they are terrified of two things--Their first fear is that their beloved homeland will be run over by grass-eating brown people, dog-eating yellow people, sinister bearded terrorists and all manner of sub-human foreigners who add numbers in their heads and breed like rabbits. Their second fear is that their beloved homeland will be run over by pink-clad, tight-shirted, homo gay faggots who will gain the legal right to marry and import mass-produced babies from abroad, and raise them to be p.-c, t.-s, homo gay faggots just like themselves.

Terrified as they are, our brave rulers manfully fight the coming Armageddon, under the stewardship of George W. Bush, that darling of the American masses. He mobilizes the mass of his slaves, exhorting them to fight the homos at home and the multiplying aliens abroad. To all appearances, he has been successful. King Cheney is pleased. He even smiles every now and then. Little does he realize, alas, that his much-trusted Jesus is going to desert him.

Aye! Dubya might hold off homos and aliens, as long as they are by themselves. But what, I ask, can he do about the rapidly growing army of Homo Aliens? Nothing, that's what.

Dubya's travails remind me of a charming story I read in school, which goes like this--There was a brave little boy in Netherlands, and he noticed that there was a hole in one of the dykes that kept the ocean out. With nary a thought, he put his finger in the hole in the dyke. (Yeah, I know! Who needs Playboy when you can get an NCERT textbook instead?) By resolutely keeping his finger there, the boy held off the ocean on the other side till help arrived, and thusly, saved the Netherlands. The story, admittedly, is scarcely credible. No real boy could have resisted the urge to do moocha with so much water on his mind.

What interests me, however, is not the story's accuracy, but its symbolism. That boy is Dubya. The waiting ocean is the teeming multitude of brown people. The dyke is the US laws regarding marriage. The hole is the proposal that gay people be allowed civil unions, i.e., they be allowed to exist legally as he-man and she-man. The symbolism, alas, stops there. Unlike the boy in the story, Dubya won't succeed. Hordes of homo foreigners, I'm afraid, will soon overrun the US.

You frown, reader. You think I'm just gassing, as usual. You know that poor people, wherever they are, are conservative. They won't go homo for love, not even for cash. You think I'm insulting the poor, by implying that they have no principles. You are wrong. I know, as well as you do, that people will bear all kinds of misery in the name of God and morality. But you underestimate the Brown Mind. Brown men know that a gay couple can :

1. file joint tax returns, claiming each other as destitute dependents,
2. get family discounts on all kinds of things,
3. take leave claiming that their teenage son went on a high-school shooting rampage again,

4. save on reusable items like DVDs, books, magazines, aranijaars, ul-banians, dinosaur-pattern jattis, etc.

Most importantly, they know that a gay couple

5. don't have to prove to anyone that they really are gay, and
6. can divorce whenever they want.

The possibilities are endless, and they are already coming to pass. Put your ear to the ground, and you will hear the distant rumble of Revolution. Aye! Even as Dubya vainly attempts to plug holes here and there, the Deluge is upon us. It began, as these things always begin, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. From that fabled cradle of Enterprise, a young lady has emigrated to join her beloved in Canada, where she "is free to express her sexuality". Future generations will hold her up as a Messiah. A misguided Messiah perhaps, but a Messiah all the same. What she has done for Life-Long Love, millions of brown people will soon do for short-term savings.

I can picture it, in my mind's eye. Rajasekhar Gogineni, father of Naveen Gogineni, will log on to www.jushtadjusht.com/. He will put in a search for a Pedda Kamma boy with clean habits, steady income, and no family commitments ("Chinna Kammas need not apply. We wish you good luck.") After many frustrations, he will find Ch. Venkata Subbaiah, alias Subbu. He will introduce Naveen to Subbu, and after two e-mail exchanges, they will be ready to "go ahead". Naveen, who has a romantic, slightly mischievous, nature, will write:

Cheskuntamu ra Pelli,
California-loki velli,
Vina ra, naa cheliya Subbu,
Save chestamu chala Dubbu.

Padakura nuvu emi baadha,
Promise chestanu nee meedha,
Nenu neekanna inka straight-u,
Jushtu three years-lu cheira wait-u.

Appudu tondaruga divorcu chesi,
Rondu manchi ammayilu choosi,
Pelli cheskuntamu ra iddaru,
Marriage brokeru ma fatheru.

which, roughly translated, goes as follows:

"Dear chap," Naveen said,
"Soon in Frisco, we'll wed.
The laws there are lax.
We won't have no tax.

Let our purses swell,
Then we'll say farewell.
And choose from all of AP,
Two babes to make us happy.

You really needn't fear,
For let me make it clear,
That I won't play no trick,
'Coz I too want a chick."

Touched, Subbu will agree. Together, they will come and study at the South Dakota Unitarian University, for there really is such a place. They will graduate and move to San Jose, and spend three beautiful years there, married and tax-free. Just like any other brown couple, they will watch movies in dollar theaters, buy lots of blank CDs on sale, and have no sex at all. In three years, it'll be time for them to settle down in life. They'll divorce each other, and get married to two lovely girls. They'll wed at the same time, because it is clearly cheaper that way. Two years later, Naveen will remember Subbu, even as his wife throws very expensive cutlery at him for no reason at all. Perhaps, he would think, they should have stayed married. But then he'll banish the blasphemous thought from his mind. After all, brown men will do anything for money, except other brown men. Aye! There is after all something called Hindu culture, and in the end, that's what matters.

Dick Cheney believes that everything that is not a White Christian Male is Satan. Maybe he is right, but he forgets that Satan comes in many forms. If gay Satan don't screw Cheney, brown Satan will. What's more, brown Satan will screw him in ways Cheney can't even begin to imagine. And there's not a thing poor Jesus can do about it.

Amen.

Notes From A Requiem

2006-09-01T20:56:00.000-07:00

The most important thing in life, Bhikku, is death. I wish I could tell you more about it, but that's all I know.

-- The Diary, Date Unknown, Year Unknown.

One thinks of the strangest things at the strangest times. There was no real reason why he should have thought of Chandru that day. He was playing racketball. It was an easy game. He was much better than the other guy. He was taking it easy, trying out different things. To one ball, he played a drop shot. The ball was just about a foot from the side wall and dropping neatly. Normally, he would have smashed it low down the line, but this time, he leaned back and rolled his wrists on it. He wanted the ball to just touch the rebound wall and drop dead, but he had hit it too softly. The ball dropped short.

That was when he thought of Chandru. Something about that shot's slyness reminded him of Chandru playing table tennis, back when they were in the hostel. Chandru had never been quick at TT. His reflexes were poor, and he couldn't hit powerfully and accurately like Barra or Yoko. But Chandru could put vicious spin on the ball. He would wait for the ball, bend back, and with a theatrical crack of the wrist, send the ball slowly sailing across the net, where it would touch the table and turn square. It was fun to watch him play the quicker guys, a bit like watching Ramesh Krishnan play against the big boys of world tennis. You knew Chandru, like Ramesh, would ultimately lose; but you felt vaguely happy every time he won a point.

He forgot about Chandru almost immediately. He finished his game, and had dinner with his racketball partner. They didn't know each other very well. It was one of those "hang-out" type acquaintances. They chatted about work, industry trends and such. The conversation went on longer than usual. After a while, they left. He started driving home, and lazily thought of Chandru again. The memories flooded back.

He had never really liked Chandru. They had been too similar--both of them bright, witty, aggressive, ultra-competitive. Obviously, there was a rivalry. He often compared himself against Chandru. He knew he was fat and clumsy and diffident, while Chandru was lean and smooth and confident. But he would tell himself that at least he was a nice guy, while Chandru was a bit of a cut-throat. Then he would blush at the absurdity of the comparison.

It was true, nevertheless. Chandru could be incredibly petty at times. Sometime in the first year, he had taken his roommate's notes and gone home for the weekend. There was a big exam on Monday morning. His roommate was livid. Of course, that was childish, and Chandru himself didn't do such things later on. However, it was part of a pattern. Chandru wasn't a cynic and he acknowledged the difference between right and wrong. Yet he had a streak of ruthlessness in him, which could override everything else. It kept getting refined with time, as it usually does among thoughtful, successful people. But it was there.

At the same time, there was a charm about Chandru. He would come to you after the exam, grin and say, "Enna King? Cracked it, huh? Picchi Gaawwwd". You knew that he was being all jaunty because he had done well himself. You knew that he would hate it if you scored more than him. And yet, you couldn't help letting out a warm smile. Chandru always set the group's slang. In the third year, everyone called everyone else "King". Chandru started it. If you wanted to say somebody was really good at something, you said he was "Dhair, dhair, dhair". Chandru had come up with the phrase.

Looking back, he thought, Chandru was a bit like one of the characters in War and Peace. He had forgotten the name, something beginning with D. Maybe Denisov. Denisov was a bastard, but he did the most heroic things. Everybody liked him, though they knew he would kill them if he had to. Suddenly, he realized that he was trying to understand a flesh-and-blood person he knew, by comparing him with a fictional character from a half-forgotten novel. "Nerd," he muttered to himself, smiling and shaking his head.

He thought again of Chandru. He couldn't remember the last time they had met. Must have been at the graduation, though he didn't remember it. They had talked a few times after that. But it had slowly fallen off.

News about Chandru came in every now and then. Peeku met him once in some restaurant, two years after they had graduated. Chandru was attending some conference. His research had hit a snag. He was morose. The next year, Yoko visited Chandru. His research was going great now. He was his old bubbly self. Yoko said Chandru had put on a little weight. He was now a "Tamil mama". Didn't like people swearing and stuff. He was also "big-time into artsy movies." The next year, Chandru graduated, the second in their batch to finish up. He got placed in some big company. Mandu, while announcing the news, had said, "King dhair-dhair-dhair nu uttu kattiruchu". He wanted to call Chandru or e-mail him, but he didn't. The next year, he himself was preparing to graduate. He was busy, so he couldn't respond to Chandru's engagement announcement. It was something along the usual lines--family friend, know each other well, she is also an engineer, common tastes, decided to tie the knot, etc, etc. The style seemed somehow subdued. Not quite Chandru's style, but then he had probably changed a lot.

Four months later, Yoko sent an e-mail on the e-group: Chandru was dead. He had been killed in a road accident. Hit-and-run. His wedding was supposed to have been a week later. The whole group was shocked. People talked to each other again.

"Can't believe it, man. He was on top of his game. Suddenly, this."
"Think of his parents, man. How proud they must have been. Dr. Chandru, working in a top company. About to be married. And then, one day, a phone call. It's over. I think he has a brother. Must be terrible for the family, man."
"I spoke to him just last month, babu. He was so buoyant. Came up with his usual jokes. We were discussing the old days. He was doing his classic Buttocks imitation." (Buttocks = Prof. Bhattacharya)
"I knew his fiance'. Nalla ponnu, da. She was looking forward to the wedding so much. This is cruel."
The more sentimental ones said, "Puts life in perspective, man. I mean, we are worrying about this or that. And then something like this comes along and you learn to treasure life itself."

After a while, life caught up with everyone. They moved on. Nobody talked about it much, but he was sure they all thought about Chandru every now and then. Out of the blue. Just like he was doing now.

He felt vaguely that there was something deep in it, something profound. If only he could sit down and think it through, it would all make sense. Here he was, alone and preoccupied in a world crowded with lonely preoccupied people. He wasn't unhappy, but he wasn't happy either. Life meanders along, as life usually does. Then suddenly something reminds one that there is death, too. The death of the old doesn't cut so deep. It doesn't bother the young, because the young don't really, deep down think they will grow old. Everyone knows they will age, of course. But it is like some famine in Africa. One might intellectually grieve for it and donate some money to the UNICEF, but one doesn't feel it, deep in one's bones. But the death of the young is a rude shock. It makes the whole thing more immediate. Or maybe, it is just that one feels strongly for the death of anyone with whom one can identify. Maybe the old feel the death of their own peers just as strongly.

Anyway, what did it all mean? Chandru and he, what were they to each other? Chance had thrown them together. Then they had gone their separate ways. And now as he thought of Chandru, all he had was an old image, like some childhood photograph. Chandru had probably changed completely since their college days. Why, he himself had changed completely. Or had he? Does one really change? Was there a thread running through his life, common to the insecure teenager he was, and the confident, somewhat unfeeling, man he had become? What was it? Was it the soul? Did it then stay unchanged through lives?

And what about Chandru's family? How did they take the blow? How often did they feel the loss? Was it with them always? Somehow, he felt, that was the key. Not to let death shake one up like a storm and pass by soon, but for it to be ever-present. If death were to truly stay with one, then one's life would be different. Each moment would take on some deep meaning, because one would be aware of the alternative, the terrible void.

He got home, showered and switched on the TV. Tennis. He started watching, with a vague heaviness inside him. After a while, he got into the game. FedEx was playing beautifully that night.

In Defense Of Browniyat

2006-08-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

"Be proud of your country, Bhikku. What else have you got to be proud of, anyway?"

-- The Diary, July 4, 503 BC

My friend A~ and I were at the gym the other day. We were about to play badminton.

A~: "Dei, let's start. Luvvaal"
B~: "Wait, wait. These cocks are bad. I'll go buy some from the front desk"
A~: "Chee, chee. Why do you want to waste money? I have more cocks, machi. They are in your dickie."
B~: "Maplai, the car is like 1 mile away, da. We didn't get paarrking, remember?"
A~: "Yeah, but the gym's cocks are 1 dollar each."
B~: "Really? Let's go to the car."

As we started walking towards the car, I noticed two white guys, giggling. As always, the sight filled me with a mixture of disgust and pity. Here they were, sniggering at us because we are cheap, we have funny accents and we say cock and dickie instead of birdie and boot. Alas! If only they could count! They would have realized that of the 25 people in the gym, 3 were white, and 22 were brown. If they had looked around a little more, they would also have realized that the gym was only a miniature of the new New World. Aye! The natives dont' realize it yet, but we have outbred them. We have won the Battle of the Baybee. We have colonized the West. New Jersey, Houston, Dallas and San Francisco, I am proud to say, are now part of Greater Tamil Nadu.

And yet, I am deeply consternated, if that's the word I'm looking for. I look below the glossy surface of our triumph, and I see that it is shallow. We rule over Whitey, but we do not behave like Kings. If a gora sahib in 19th century Brownistan wanted roast beef, he would have whipped our brown asses till we made it right. And now, when it's our turn, we merely stand in line and squeal, "Yexcuse me, could you pleeese change your gloves? I yam strict vegetarian. He, he. It is not religious, it is just cultural. Actually, hehe, I'm allergic to meat. Thank you verry much." Verily, I declare, that we are hyenas, not lions. We might have power, but we don't have pride. Indeed, when I look around myself, I see only two kinds of brown people:

1. those who want to be white, and
2. those who think they already are.

Between the two of them, these two groups have caused untold damage to our psyche. They have tarnished our image on the world stage. Brownistan is a crowded, caste-ridden hellhole, they say. It is a conveyor belt churning out an endless chain of software-writing neanderthals, they claim. Brownistan lacks justice and respect for human rights, they aver. Worst of all, they announce to everyone who would listen, that we eat with our fingers, and we do not use toilet paper.

I am a peacable man, but my blood boils at such vicious slander. I like Brownistan. Brownistan is like my neighbour's dog--it is very charming, from a distance. And now, with two oceans separating me from Brownistan, my patriotic fervor is virtually boundless. I am proud of Brownistan and I am proud of Browniyat, our beautiful way of life. The Whitey-worshipping gaddars are telling you, gentle reader, that brown skin is a thing of shame. Au contraire, brown skin is a blessing, a gift from the Gods, a passport to Jannat, as I shall conclusively prove now.

The good thing about being brown, of course, is that one can say whatever one wants. Firstly, firangis don't understand our accent, so they have no clue what we are saying about their parentage. Secondly, even if they do understand, they can't possibly take offense. Whatever it is we are accusing them of, we are probably doing it ourselves anyway. And finally, Whitey would rather kill himself than admit that a brown man looks down on him. So even if he were offended, he has to be polite. We don't. We have carte blanche, Whitey does not. He cannot even call a kettle black. He has to call it African American. We, on the other hand, can call a kettle a coolie, a nigger, an urgly black-ass modher, because we are all of the above.

If you still don't believe me, consider the tragic case of Dean Jones, the hero of that Chennai Test. Last week, he was heard on air, calling the South African cricketer Hashim Amla a terrorist. Let it be said that he had ample justification. If you take a photo of Amla, place it beside a photo of bin Laden, you'll see only one difference. bin Laden has a moustache, Amla does not. The difference is subtle. After all, a beard that size will probably hide nukular warheads, leave alone a teeny-weeny moustache. Little wonder then, that, Deano used the T-word. He deserved reassurance and a shot of Prozac. Instead, he was accused of racism and kicked out of his cush commentary job. Some people think it happened because Deano is a bigot. Some others think it happened because Deano is stupid. Bakwaas! Navjot Sidhu is both narrow-minded and stupid, but nobody ever fires him. The real difference is that Sidhu is brown, so nobody thinks he has any reason to feel superior to anyone.

There's more. Not only are we brownies free to say whatever we want, we are also completely free from fear. The white man has everything, so he is afraid he'll lose something. We brownies have nothing, so we are completely unafraid. We know life probably won't get worse than it is. When there is a bomb blast in Sri Lanka, the entire South African cricket team does susu in its nijaar and flies right back to the comforts of home. The Indian cricket team stays on, because as Rahul Dravid says, "Life isn't perfect." It is not that Dravid is braver. It is just that he doesn't even feel the need for bravery. The white man suspects his neighbour might be a terrorist and is afraid he might be killed. The brown man knows that his neighbour probably is a terrorist, but he also knows that the bomb probably won't go off. And so it is that knowledge sets us free.

To fearlessness, add stoicism. Bad things do happen to brown people; but when they do, we shrug and move on, for we know we're only paying off karma dues from previous janmas. When my white neighbour's dog stopped making poo-poo for one day, the entire family needed therapy. That same day, my friend S~'s wife eloped with a car mechanic. S~ just chuckled and said, "I must have been a bad-ass dude last time around, man. Heck, I must have kicked ass. That life was the life. This life is nothing."

The greatest thing about Browniyat, however, is not our freedom to talk, nor our fearlessness, not yet our sunny nature. Nay! The greatest thing is that (i) we can produce babies with almost no sex, just by pure will and the grace of the Lord, (ii) we know it, and (iii) we say so, in that most beautiful language, Hindi.

Three days back, United 943 took off from Washington DC, the capital of Gaad-Bless-Amezhica. Its mission was to transport a lot of free white people from DC to London, the capital of Amezhica's richest colony. One of its passengers was a 60 year-old white woman. She had been practising Kundalini yoga, and like all people who do so, she was determined to get in touch with her Inner Self, even if she had to kill half the world for it. As it turns out, she was claustrophobic, i.e., she was afraid of closed, crowded spaces. Naturally, she chose to overcome her fear by boarding a small, crowded plane. Her guru, after all, had told her to confront her fear. So she hopped into United 943, thinking it will take her to Nirvana.

It did not. It only made her afraid and nauseous. Like all white people suffering from nausea, she screamed, and threatened to douse her neighbour in nail polish. Like all white people threatened with nail polish, her neighbour thought he was going to die in the next five minutes, and squealed. Like all white people who hear other white people squealing, the passengers of United 943 thought they were being attacked by Muslim fanatics who hate their freedom to drink Diet Coke. Promptly, they called in the military. The military send in F16 fighter jets, which accompanied United 943 to the Boston Logan airport, where it landed.

The word got around to Brownistan, and caused great amusement. Reporters went out into the city to find out what people thought about the matter. One of them cornered Yendukulapatti Srinivasa Rao, known as YSR, who was travelling on a crowded Hyderabad bus. Right at that moment, YSR's privates were being crushed by a somewhat thick-set man who was being thrown into him every time the bus bumped into a pothole. But YSR did not feel claustrophic, or afraid of death, or concerned about the future. He knew that mere pressure will not take his system to production stop. He winced with pain, but overall, he was feeling good. Just then the reporter asked him about the United 943 incident. YSR smiled, "East or west, India is best. We are not afraid of yennything. We will be great nation." Both the reporter and YSR smiled. The moment was happy enough, but then, something happened which can only happen in a land that has an ancient culture, and can express its erudition in that most beautiful of languages, Hindi. YSR started singing. He sang, softly but firmly, in his slightly husky voice:

"Saare Jahaan se accha,
Banaate hain baccha.
Hum bulbulein hain uski,
Phat gayi Nirodh jiski..."

Everyone in the bus stood to attention. "Jai Hind," they cried.

Believe it, gentle reader. Whitey don't have nothing on us. We rule.

Chatty-Kutty Bang Bong, Almost!

2006-07-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

It is both fair and wise, Bhikku, to treat women the same as men. Avoid both.

-- The Diary, 19th May, 485 BC

Let me say, upfront, that I have nothing against women. Some of my best friends are married to women. Indeed, I am a great lover of women. I likes women, I admirers them, I respects them, I reveres them. And when that noor-e-Dallas S~ comes to the cafeteria in that tightish white shirt of hers, I speechlessly marvel at them, 'them' being women of course. But let me admit, painful as it is to me, that women are not without their faults.

The biggest problem with women is that deep down, they are men too. Women want to nuke countries for fun, just as much as we do. Hillary Clinton says so. They want to kick some liberal ass just as much as we do. Ann Coulter says so. They want to screw over the poor just as much as we do. Maggie Thatcher said so. They want to exterminate the damn Mussalmans just as much as we do. Uma Bharti says so. They want to drink some nice Hindu blood just as much as we do. Many women in Pakistan would say so, if only they were allowed to say so. To sum it up, women want to be absolute bastards just as much we do. Lots of incredibly hot and incredibly obnoxious babes on Fox News say so.

It's clear as day: women are no better than men. It's just that they haven't been themselves, because we have been oppressing them for centuries. Which is not to say we were / are right to oppress women. They should, of course, have exactly the same rights as us. The pity is that they are using those rights to do exactly what we are doing.

My highly intellectual friend, who has read far too many books for her own good, finds it natural that empowered women should behave like men. In her words, it is an integral part of the dialectic between institutional disenfranchisement and individual empowerment, leading the empowered individual to seek identification with the institutional Other. That is rot, of course. But since it is in English and one does not quite know what it means, one is not allowed to call it rot. One is supposed instead to take it seriously and debate it, if possible in public. And so I took it seriously, and started looking for a difference, any difference, between men and women. It took me a while, but I can now announce that I've hit paydirt.

Men understand the digital revolution, women do not.

Ask a woman a multiple-choice question, and she will always give you an essay type answer. Not that I'm complaining. There's nothing quite like feminine chatter in the background to help one's dinner settle. But alas, charming as it is, the eloquence of women regularly destroys lives, as illustrated by the great tragedy that befell my dear friend, that great son of Bengal, S~ D~.

In the summer of 2004, on July 13th to be precise, S~D~ walked into the lab, and spoke to me thus. Those who bother to listen to his words will realize that they are pretty strong ones. Another man might have gotten offended by them. But I am not another man. I am B~, one of the most understanding chaps I have ever known. And sure enough, like all understanding chaps, I understood immediately that on that fateful afternoon, S~D~ was not himself. His heart had been hurt, or as he himself would poot eet, his hurt had bin haart. At that very moment, his hearthrob O-vhilasa was with going to the mall with her brand-new boyfriend. That brand-new boyfriend could so easily have been S~D~, but it was not. And all this merely because he talked to a woman, and, by God, she had replied.

But perhaps I should tell you the entire story.

O-vhilasa would be known to most brown people as Abhilasha, but among the Bhadralok, she was firmly entrenched as O-vhilasa. O-vhilasa was like a pi-meson, i.e., she was highly unstable when left to herself. Brown boys were her anti-particle. As soon as she could find one, she paired with him, and destroyed his life forever. Brown boys being abundant on these shores, O-vhilasa was seldom unpaired. However, brown people are modern these days and they do break up every now and then, just for fun. And so it chanced that O-vhilasa was briefly single between 11:56 am and 1:04 pm on the 13th of July, 2004. What's more, it was on this very afternoon that O-vhilasa had arranged to meet S~D~, so that he could do her homework and pay for her lunch. Now, S~D~ has a clean track-record: Whenever he talks to a girl for more than 5 minutes, he always finishes up by proposing to her. Imagine then, this combination of unpaired O-vhilasa and unimpaired S~D~. It was a match just waiting just to catch.

Alas, it was not meant to be. S~D~ did not propose to O-vhilasa, because he did not meet her for lunch on the 13th of July, 2004. He did not meet her for lunch, because he was listening instead to Poulomi, which, I swear, is a real Bengali name, Godpromise- Motherpromise- Studiespromise. S~D~ was listening to Poulomi, because she was explaining to him why they should be jaast freynds. She was doing so because S~D~ had just proposed to her. He had proposed to her because he had reasoned as follows: "Poulo looooks maach preytier than O-vhi. I'll trai praapuseeng to Poulo on the way. If she aacseipts, goood. Eef naat, I'll go praapus to O-vhi. Naatheeng to luse." It was a miscalculation. Poulo refused S~D~, and spent two hours explaining why, in gruesome detail.

And so ended the romance of S~D~ with O-vhilasa, even before it began. In years to come, O-vhilasa will play in the beautiful gardens of Coalcotha with her lovely children Shudipthow, Showronyow, O-porno and Rowbindhrow. Shudipthow, the eldest, will be the first to tire. But he won't admit it, because he wants to be beeg and gronaap, just like his baba. Rowbindrow, the youngest, will be the first one to run to O-vhilasa. He will climb up her lap, and she will smile fondly at him. She will hug him, though it will soil her new saree, for such is a mother's love. She will think of Mrs. Mookkhopodhyay, whose car might be newer, but whose children were definitely not cute. She will shake her head, thinking, "Haaw seelly of me to kip kaampareeng with her," but anyway, she will hug Rowbindrow a little tighter, and tickle him, just to see him laugh. She will then remind herself that she must be firm with her children. She will call out to them, and even pretend to be angry with them. Slowly, they will come, and with triumph in her heart, O-vhilasa will herd her children back home. There they will wait for baba to caam home with swit Roashgullas. Alas! That Roashgulla-bearing baba will not be S~D~.

These days, S~D~ has taken heavily to drink. He blames his stupidity for his loss. As I keep telling him, it is not his fault. The problem is one of viewpoints. The way men see it, this whole proposal business should be a quickie. I propose to you. If you are saying no, I don't need to know why. I have things to do, other people to propose to. If you are saying yes, we have a whole lifetime to talk. What's the big tearing hurry? Alas, women see it differently. They imagine that refusal would hurt men, and that they can set it right by talking to them. In a way it does. It makes blokes realize that all they missed was some third-degree torture.

"She gave me a kela and started an explanation," said my friend C~ after one such conversation. "After an hour, it struck me that she had probably forgotten she had refused. I spent the next hour terrifed that she might accept in the end. She didn't, but if she had, I would have officially withdrawn my proposal. You can do that, right?"

Less patient men take more drastic measures. "It's not you, it's me," said R~'s old flame to him, and started explaining some more. "Yeah, that's what I thought," replied R~, "Maybe I should leave you alone to sort out your problems. Do take care." And with a gentle tap on her shoulder, he walked out. He is, unsurprisingly, still single.

We might as well face it. Equality is all very well, but men and women will never be the same.

"Man proposes, and Woman discourses,
And never the twain shall meet."

The Three Temptations Of Christ

2006-07-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

The Gospel says Jesus Christ was tempted thrice by Satan, and thrice he refused. The temptations in the gospel are, in effect, pride, greed and populism. One would assume a great man like Jesus was beyond the first two at least, though the third is perhaps subtler.

Here's a variation on that theme. It is long even by the standards of this blog. People who would rather not waste time on amateur literature are encouraged to read instead The Grand Inquisitor, from which the idea was ripped; or The Prophet, whose majestic cadences I've tried, but failed, to imitate. Such people might also want to try The Sermon on the Mount, which is not at all a bad thing to read, in a week of Lebanon, Palestine, Baghdad and Mumbai.

Departure

What Then Must We Do?

2006-06-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

What say we have a moral debate, Bhikku? I really need some mindless entertainment today.

-- The Diary, the summer of 500 BC

My dear female readers! O you choice grapes from the gardens of Jannat! O you jilukku jikkan takkar kuttis with many a taLuk and many a meLuk! I beg you to comprendre and pardonner. If I have often stalked you with unbridled lust, it is only because of the great sufferings of my childhood. Aye, I am a deeply scarred man--My formative years were spent in the gruesome concentration camps of Brownistan, where I was ruthlessly forced to learn Hindi. If I'm not a serial rapist today, it is but the triumph of will over adversity.

And yet, despite these painful memories, I miss Brownistan. Bad as Brownistan was, my current roosting place, known variously as Disneyland, Jesustan and Gaad-bless-Amaizhica, is even worse. True, Disneyland abounds in free porn and beeg dollaar, and that's what I came in search of. Even so, I recoil in distaste, because the natives of Disneyland, a tribe of savage pale-skinned Bushmen, are a most revolting lot. I do not exaggerate. Before every shit, the Bushmen consult Jesus; and afterwards, they refuse to wash up, content instead with a few ineffectual wipes. They eat when they are happy, and they eat when they are depressed. And since they eat anything that moves, they force their struggling prey down by drinking humongous quantities of fart-inducing beverages. They drive trucks as big as houses and live in houses as big as playgrounds, and yet they insist on having sex in public. Worst of all, the natives of Disneyland panic whenever they are asked to add two numbers, and immediately declare war on some remote Islamic country.

All of which, you will admit, would induce homesickness even in a phallus-worshipping techno-coolie from remote Brownistan. However, I'm a man endowed with great rationality and balls of steel. Even as the urge to escape grows, I pull myself together, and reflect that things aren't as bad as they seem. Indeed, for all their disgusting behaviour, there is but one flaw in the Bushmen: They have too many talk shows and nothing to talk about.

This might seem a facile explanation, one too kind to an infuriatingly idiotic people. But I insist that this one flaw is indeed the sole cause of the Bushmen's seemingly inexplicable stupidity. As an example, I recall here the mysterious saga of Bill Clinton and his internal affairs. The reader might remember the drama, the fuss and the brouhaha of those heady days, no pun intended. What he probably doesn't remember is that nothing really happened--Chelsea did not get a munna bhai, and Monica did not bring forth a brood of mutant Ninja turtles. Heck, there wasn't even a public wardrobe malfunction. Indeed, as King Clinton never tired of telling us, he "did not have sex with that woman". And yet, just because one has to talk something on talkshows, the Bushmen blew up a small thing into a big thing. (Oh, come on! Grow up.)

Back in my phlegmatic homeland, that great nation of South India, we scoff at such gratuitous displays of oral virtuosity, again no pun intended. Ours is the land where Emperor NTR, with his unique brand of universal love, founded three new species and fathered four regiments of the Hyderabad Rifles. Ours is the land where Shah-en-Shah MGR famously loved all life, even Begum Jeyalalitaa. And amidst all this action, what did we talk about on TV? Worm-induced diseases of ragi and solam, that's what.

But why expect the Bushman to match the noble Madrasi? The Madrasi is a hero, the North Indian is a Bihari, and the Bushman is a savage, because that's how the Gods ordained it. Nay, I am well content to let the Bushman be. Or at least I would be, if only his stupidity were not so appalling.

Aye, the Bushman is at again. Turn on the TV or open a newspaper, and all you'll notice is the Gay Rights debate. When I first saw the headlines, I was agog and rapt, because I mistakenly thought this had something to do with Ecstasy and marijuana. Now, these are things a man needs, and if a fight was afoot to secure my right to them, why I'll move heaven and earth to do my bit. But it turned out that the matter at hand wasn't one so pertinent. It was merely a difference of opinion, as my researches revealed.

Some Bushmen love their neighbour; some others love their neighbor's wife. Some Bushmen like madam; some others prefer Adam. Some Bushmen dig Eve; some others dig Steve. Bah! Pshaw! Ho hum! I hear you say. But hark! With this paltry raw material, the Bushmen have managed to keep their talk shows running for the last three years. The Senate of the land, no less, debates the matter every year. Elections are won and lost based on who takes what side. Indeed, Disneyland stands polarized today, and there are but two types of Bushmen left standing:

1. The Ecce Homo type: These worthies, who call themselves conservatives, fear that the obnoxiousness of she-Bushmen, combined with growing acceptance of homosexuality, will make the family obsolete. And if families go, so will children. And if children go, so will large scale misery and the need for Prozac. And if misery goes, so will the current popularity of churches. And if church attendance goes, so will moral values. And if moral values go, so will talk shows. And if talk shows go, what then must we do?

2. The Raj Kapoor type: These worthies are gay men, who go through life with a song on their lips. That song happens to be the old Raj Kapoor classic Aadmi hoon, aadmi se pyar karta hoon. But since they don't know Raj Kapoor, these people call themselves liberals. Their argument is simple: It is a free country, and they are rich, and their neighbour's wife is ugly, and so they will go homo. And since it is a free country, and they are rich, they should have the same rights as straight people, including the right to marry, and divorce, and buy some cheap children from Guatemala, and raise them to be punk-ass teenagers. Furthermore, since it is a free country, and they are rich, the liberals want to be baptized, and blessed, and assured of Heaven, just like straight people. After all, they ask, a man has got to do something, and we don't like doing women. What then must we do?

It doesn't strike the conservatives that God has better things to do than worry about human sexuality. I chatted with God yesterday and He assures me that as far as He is concerned, we humans can go screw ourselves, man-on-man, man-on-woman or in any other combo we find cool. It doesn't strike the liberals that liberalism is more about giving than taking, more about duties than rights. And so these two groups go on and on, talking right past each other.

But again, why blame the Bushmen? They are merely aping that old bastard Leo, as have so many others before them.

Nineteenth century Russia was a land of great poverty and great luxury alike, and since Leo knew squat about the trickle-down theory, he mistakenly thought misery was a problem. He moped and agonized over the issue, and in anguish, he wrote What Then Must We Do? (1886). Then he pottered around a fair bit and read all kinds of books, and finally concluded that we must do what Jesus did, i.e., lead a life of simplicity, love and self-sacrifice.

As you can see, the Bushmen are doing exactly the same thing. They look around and see the great inequity of our times. Being children of The Age of Viagra, they turn to the one cure they know for all ills: some steamy sex. But alas, this is also The Age of the Free Market, where the consumer has the right, nay duty, to choose. One can have steamy sex with a man, or a woman, or a child, or a beast, or a toy, or even Michael Jackson. Overwhelmed by so much choice, the Bushmen echo Leo's old lament: What Then Must We Do? What's more, just as Leo did, they have concluded that they must do exactly what Jesus did, and so they're trying to find out whether Jesus did Mary Magdalene or not. On that one question rests the peace of our times. I'm not sure one way or the other, but I am hopeful. Surely, like all other pressing matters of our age, this one will also be settled on Oprah tonight. With bated breath, I await the verdict. Watch this space for further updates, or just tune in to WFAA, Dallas.

Adieu.

Transcript Of An Unreserved Exchange

2006-05-27T15:18:00.000-07:00

Altruism, Bhikku, is mostly the ability to say "Poor Bastard" in times of strife.

- October 2, 489 BC

It was one of those days when one couldn't do anything, because there was just too much to do. I wanted to take a break, but felt too guilty to actually get up and leave. For the tenth time, I looked at my to-do list for the day.

"Want to get a coffee?". I turned. He stood, smiling. We walked to the vending machine. He got his coffee. "I don't know how you drink that stuff, man. It's ditch-water. Anyway, want to walk outside for a bit? It's nice outside. As nice as Dallas is going to get, anyway." "Sure." We stepped out into the blinding Texas sunlight. Near a nook just below the roof, a mockingbird was fighting a starling for nest space. In their strange way, they were charming without being beautiful. Suddenly, I felt light-headed.

"Hey, I meant to ask you this earlier. All this fuss about reservation, what do you think about it?"
He shrugged. "What's there, man? I'm neither rich nor old enough to be a right-winger."
"Not rich enough, sure. But not old enough? Dyooode." He grinned, and nodded his head in reverse--his head tilted upwards slowly and came down even slower. It was his equivalent of eye-rolling. I continued, "No, seriously. What do you think?"
"I haven't thought about it much, man. Obviously, all the players have an agenda. The numbers they are throwing out are all vague and probably cooked up. Plus it's not clear whether reservations at the higest level have worked so far."
"Naa, actually, I don't particularly care for the details. If they haven't worked, maybe we just haven't found how to make them work. I'm more interested in the principle of the thing. Is the idea itself fair?"
He grinned, his eyes twinkling. "There you go again. Do you ever consider details? And you call yourself an engineer."
I smiled. "Fuss with details if you want, mate. I'm headed towards top management. Big picture & vision, c'est moi."
He did his reverse nod again. "Whawdever. But anyway, what's your problem with the idea of reservation?". Quotes in the air while saying idea.
"For one thing, merit and quality will go poof if you put in some arbit constraint like caste or economic status or whatever."
"I could argue that exam scores don't reflect merit, and at any rate, this exam merit is kinda overrated. Look around. A well-trained monkey can do what most of us are doing. But anyway, let's say your exam merit is directly proportional to work quality. Even then, why obsess over merit, and make it some kind of God?"
"But, if you concede that, what else is there? "
"Equality, maybe. Justice, fairness, and all that. I guess we all implicitly agree that we want everyone to be equal. And obviously those guys got screwed."
"Then why not reservation only for schooling. Why reservation in higher education?"
"I'm just guessing here--I'm FC myself--but I'd think that atmosphere has a lot to do with how well we're doing. You and I are riding on a culture of education that goes back centuries. Those guys aren't. Money or high school education won't give that culture. People need to believe they can study and understand complicated things, and for that they need living examples.'
"A right winger would call that half-baked liberal bullshit. That kind of thing will only slow down the entire economy and hurt the BCs too. But anyway, isn't your culture of education stuff vague and intangible? How do you quantify it and make it public policy?"
"Dude, you were the one interested in the principle of the thing. And anyway, all your trickle-down macroeconomics is just as vague as my culture of education."
"Touche'. About the principle of the thing.."
"Just a minute. That's a pretty bird, the blue one. It's a woodpecker 'aan?"
"No, itsa bluejay. Not that many here, but I see quite a few near my house."
"Yaa, your area is nice. Very green. But anyway, you were saying something when I interrupted. Sorry."
"Thatsokay. I was saying, uhhh ...right, I was saying: Let's agree that those guys don't have a culture of education. Basically, my greatgrandfather screwed them over. So why should my son pay the price for that. I mean, given that he got the same education as another guy and scored higher, why should he suffer? What kind of fairness is that?"
"See, I agree it's not a win-win situation. There are only so many resources going around. If you've had an advantage at some point, you have got to take a hit at some point, right? If you really want equality, that is."
"Yaaa, but why would anyone want equality like that? You're talking about some turn the other cheek kind of stuff, right?"
"I don't know, man. Didn't white people kill other white people so that black people won't be slaves any more? And what about Gandhi? He was real, and popular too, in case you forgot."
"Yeah, but those are just bursts of, errr, altruism, right? What about Iraq today, or Darfur, or Afghanistan or Palestine, or Gujarat for that matter?"
"Actually, I like to think that we're slowly becoming more decent. Five centuries back, would there have been the same outcry about Iraq and Darfur here in the US?"
"So you're saying people are becoming more altruistic?"
"If you put it that way, it sounds kinda silly. But what I think is that when something is particularly wrong, some far-left loony makes a big noise about changing it. Initially, it sounds shrill and idiotic. But slowly, change becomes more acceptable and even inevitable. And only then society accepts it."
"Well, loonies make noises about lots of things. How many actually take off, and at any rate, why is now different from 1100 AD?"
"The way I see it, the average receptivity to liberal loonies is increasing. Not constantly, but in bursts. Everytime there's a Jesus or a Gandhi, it's a moral example. And I think that kind of thing has an inherent appeal to it. On the average, of course. There are always people who'll detest it, and there'll always be steps back into some particularly barbaric stuff."
"Well, the way I see it, even if people are more broad-minded today, it's only because they can afford to be. Life is more comfortable now, see?"
"Yeah, but it could well have gone the other way. More comfort could have led to more greed. Survival of the fittest and stuff like that."
"Actually, I meant to bring that up too. Isn't a population of altruists mathematically unstable, Darwinism, etcetra?"
[shrug] "Sure, if everyone else turns the other cheek, the guy who starts slapping will be king. But mostly, this altruism business doesn't take much. It's a question of realizing that some poor bastard needs something more than you do. And when you really think that its' unfair, you'll voluntarily give away stuff but you'll do it carefully, with minimum loss to you and maximum gain to him. But first, you have to concede that some sacrifices need to be made, not wait for Kancha Illiah and Arjun Singh to tell you what those changes are, and push their agenda."

We walked in silence for a while. We had finished our circuit of the building. Somehow, the idea of going back inside made me sad in a childish end-of-summer way. "Want to go one more round?"
"No, babu. Got work to do."
"What work?"
"Making some slides. Presentation to show ___'s architecture will increase complexity by 4x"
"Really?"
He grinned. "Sure. The front-end complexity does"
"Let me guess. The front end's not the really complex part."
"Well. Just remember that you didn't hear that from me".
"What about fairness and justice, comrade?"
"Fairness is all very well, my friend. But ___ is the Evil Empire and I'm fighting a just war."
"All you shady liberal types. Damn."

And we walked back, grinning.

Note 1 : As always, this was meant to be a story, not a statement. I freely admit I know next to nothing about reservations.
Note 2 : Some stories just happen to sound better in first person.

A Revelation, Some Moaning and Alvida

2006-05-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

You are *this* close to popularity, Bhikku. The public will surely admire you, if only they find out you exist.

-- The Diary, May 13, 506 BC.

In the past, gentle reader, I have often called you a Hindi-speaking imbecile, an immoral bootlegger and a villainous serial rapist. I regret it now. I shouldn't have stopped there. You are all that, and much more. Why else would you hand to S~, that Satan-worshipping son of a what-not, the greatest triumph of his pathetic life?

But perhaps I should explain, because you clearly aren't one to understand subtlety. If you had even a nanobrain in that airhole skull of yours, you would have recognized that the last post on this space was written not by me--Byron's backside and Updike's underwear that I am--but by someone with the writing skills of a komodo dragon. Aye, my gullible readers, the real perpetrator of the last post was my bosom acquaintance, that poultry-thieving, soymilk-drinking scumbag S~.

Let it be said that S~ is not without his virtues. In his own way, he is quite accomplished. He holds the all-American speed and scoring records for True Love. He has been in and out of True Love with every Bombay girl born between 1972 and 1984, and on one occasion he was writing ghastly love poems about a Patel girl whose name he had heard on the radio 3 minutes ago. His talents, moreover, extend beyond romance. S~ is also the only man I know of, whose spare-time hobby is a Ph.D. His computer skills are legendary. He once found my missing socks by searching on the internet. Give him a computer, and give him a car, and he will bring Osama bin Laden to you, provided you are a Bombay girl, of course.

There are, however, things that S~ is not good at. Subtraction is one of them. Another is writing articles on other people's blogs, and yet, that's exactly what he did last week. I now relate the tale of how that came about. All great stories begin with a phonecall. This one is no exception.

B: Hello. Yenna machan, wazzup?
S: Busy, babu. Just did G~'s groceries. Man, girls do groceries too often. Now I need to go drop off N~ at her boyfriend's place.
B: I note that your loserhood continually grows.
S: That's what you think, moron. N~ is going steady with this random Bong dude now, but who knows what'll happen later? They might break up, and I'll be ready for it. As my grandfather used to say, one should always be prepared.
B: I don't even want to know your loser theories any more.
S: Jackass, at least I'm regularly getting kelas from chicks. You are doing nothing. You are a bigger loser.
B: Ha! But I'm an artist. I'm writing a blog.
S: Oh, that stuff. Why don't you go off drugs for a while? Maybe you'll stop writing such long pointless crap.
B: You're just jealous, comrade. I have a fan following. Eight different people have left comments on that space so far. And I'm not even counting L~T~ as people, considering his doubtful mental condition.
S: Sure, mate. People are leaving comments on your blog, but are they reading it?
B: What do you mean? Of course they are.
S: Of course they aren't. No sensible person would.
B: Says you.
S: I'll prove it. Let me write a piece on your blog. Nobody will notice the difference.
B: Yes, they will. They'll appeal to the UN. They'll send you letter bombs.
S: No they won't.
B: Will too.
S: Will not.
B: Will too.
S: Wait, let's talk reasonably. We'll make it a bet. I write one piece. If nobody comments on the difference, I get to put line to P~'s new roommate. If not, you can put line to her.
B: That's so childish.
S: It is?
B: Of course it is. I haven't seen P~'s roommate. How do I know she's worth letting you spoil my blog?
S: My word of honour. Jilukku jikkan figure.
B: Wogay, I trust you. Write this stupid piece and send it to me.
S: Awright. You get lost. I'm getting late for N~'s ride.

And so he wrote this piece, and I put it up, confident of victory. After all, while mine is pointless crap, his is pointless crap with bad grammar. I expected at least three signed petitions decrying the verbal diarrhoea. None came. Those readers whom I know, I asked them gently if they liked it. I saw a glassy look and a sheepish smile. And then I heard high praise. Excellent, they said. You crack me up, they said. Wonderful stuff, my lad, they said. That casual remark about Azerbeijan, great touch, they said. Not a critical word. No complaining, no enquiries about my mental well-being, no suggested improvements, and absolutely no spitting on that vile piece of Llama-poop.

It's clear. Nobody really reads this stuff. I can write down Timbuktoo's national anthem here, and I'll get some irrelevant comment from my "intellectual" cousin. (Actually, this is fun. She's not really reading this. I can say anything I want about her, and she won't even go tell my mom. D~, you are a stinker. You are a moron. Shame shame puppy shame all the monkeys know your name. Hahahaha!)

These days, S~ calls me everyday.

S: Yullo, maplai! You really should update your blog more often. People are waiting to comment on it, I mean read it.
B: Yeah, OK man.
S: No, seriously. You're really witty and very profound.
B: Dei, stop it. You won. Now don't gloat.
S: No, I don't want to gloat. Honestly. But heh-heh-heh, loser, nanananaNaaaanaaa, chi chi cheetangol, drr-drr.

I can't take this anymore. Somebody please kill S~ and leave me a note with the good news. But remember that just killing S~ doesn't make up for what you did to me. I'm katti with you, forever and ever and ever. Disappear, and never show your ugly mug here again.

[still from Children of Heaven, 1999]

Beauty Is In The Nose Of The Beholder

2006-05-06T08:15:00.000-07:00

If you truly never found curd rice beautiful, Bhikku, then you have not loved. For what is love but an animal instinct.

In one of those rare moments when yours truly happened to be in the presence of a powered-on television device, he glimpsed at what can only be referred to as the ugliest African non-American couple on earth. At that moment, something hit me, like a bird hitting an airplane propeller. It was a revelation; a revelation of two deeply mysterious and appalling things- there are loads of ugly people in this world, and what's more, someone finds it in their heart to be with them. How did this come about? Did human evolution poke out Bwana's eye and make him lust for Tn (That's her name, you jackass, and not the state I'm from.)

This is not an everyday ablutionary introspective exploratory extrapolative audacious thought, but rather a hyperlink to the true meaning of beauty. Like all those with an incessant urge to click anything underlined in a window, I clicked on it and landed in a place of no return, a place where I find Subramaniyam handsome and Pankajam maami ravishing. What is this beauty? Or more importantly, what is not beauty? S~, please resist the temptation to look in a dictionary and just listen to the master, for it is I that is destined to show you the light.

Like all great people who start an answer with a question, let me throw one in - Have you seen any foul smelling person you thought was handsome or pretty? No, cries the mass. Why?, I ask. Beauty is just another smell. You do not see it. You cannot touch it. But you sense it. This is how you are wired, my boy. Barring Simon Tatham, humans have no escape from the aesthetically-challenged. And regretfully, there is no hope for the uninformed brown man, who shall always lose out the battle of luring the opposite sex (or whoever else you would want to lure). For he is considered a pariah if he steps out of the house without a dab of cow dung and its related products. Note here that insolent posterity will plagiarize my theory and add a Mallu name to this smell - pheromone. Of course, you, dear reader, may not be alive to see that.

Coming back to the pimples on the face of the Earth, I ponder why some appear beautiful to only one gender. Why oh why is Michael Douglas a hit only with the babes and Thalivar Rajinikanth a hit only with the men? (To the agnostic, may I point out that its always the men that buy posters of Rajinikanth, with a heart full of pride, I must add.) Some say that its "empathy". Some say that its "money". Well, I say its just popcorn transference. Everyone likes the smell of popcorn. Most normal people watch movies in theatres, which have the smell of popcorn. Most movies with the above mentioned actors (Note how I clearly avoid the subject of whether they can act or not. Loyal readers would've expected me to walk off on a tangent here and talk about what constitutes an actor, whether Hillary Swank should have been given the best actress/best actor award, can Donald Duck really act and so forth. But drrrr to all of you. No digressions this time!) play in theatres where normal people watch movies. Summing it up, I say the transference of odor is what leads to this impression of beauty. Cruel world! Fortunate men.

Au contraire, I don't really like to say au contraire.

What is not beauty? Definitely every female that your female "pal" considers beautiful. As with most complex concepts, women have the polarity reversed. Quasimodo cute. King Kong cute. Dobbie cute. Uma Thurman ugly. Penelope Cruz ugly. Aishwarya Rai ugly. That should've given you a hint, you moron! Well, a great philospher, who shall remain anonymous, once said that women generously compliment anyone not challenging their beauty. That greatly simplifies my job. To find things that are not beauty, just ask a woman what beauty is. These kind of things takes tact and I do not recommend for the unprepared.

In a world whose motto is "survival of the prettiest", one ought to grow past the inevitable (fact that you are not an object of beauté) and give a shot at salvaging what's left. Clearly, I want to make my remaining stay on this planet a tad pleasanter. Feel free to plagiarize from other communities, like lip plates from the African Mursai women, lip plugs from the Amazonian Zoes, brass rings from the Burmese, beer from the Irish. Or even other species, if you are more the adventurous type, like peacock shawl, Chiranjeevi costume. Copying is not a sin, sayeth Moses! I stop here and just call upon Allah to insure that I meet a prettier you or the prettier of you. Let’s leave the finer definitions of other terms foreign to Brownistan - like hot, cool, sexy, smart etc - for later.

Who Is The Prince Now? Who? Who? Hu! Hu!

2006-04-29T06:01:00.000-07:00

The same nightmare again last night. Dreamt we will rule the world. I'm scared. Poor world.

-- The Diary, May 14 496 BC

All of Brownistan is agog, or so The Hindu tells me. Of course, The Hindu does not use the word agog, because agog is, after all, my favourite word, not The Hindu's. The Hindu is a bunch of dead pinkos who probably don't even have a favourite word. I, on the other hand, am a regular dude, and I do have favourite words, and agog is one of them. Therefore I say agog whenever I can say agog because I like to say agog.

But I digress. As I was saying, all of Brownistan is agog. You might wonder why. I do not; because I have noticed that Brownistan has lately developed the tiresome habit of being constantly agog. A resident native tells me, by way of explanation, that Brownistanis are feeling more and more positive about the state of their nation. They feel that they are the wave of the future, the coming superpower. They believe that they will whip the white man's ass, slip past the Chinese, murder all the Mussalmans and establish Rama Rajya all over the world. Isn't it true, after all, that only 26.15% of Brownistan is now below the poverty line, a sharp drop from 26.17% as of last year? Out goes the cry in Jharkand: The Brown Man Cometh.

All of which only goes to show that the the brown man's stupidity is even greater than his megalomania. As all thinking men know, brown people lack the three qualities that any great people must have, namely

1. Short names,
2. The habit of photographing everything they see, and
3. A fixation on the question of who is allowed to have sex with what.

Walk down this list, gentle reader, and you'll see why slit-eyed, flat-nosed, yellow-faced people with funny accents are taking over the world.

Greatness Condition 1: Not so long ago, Brownistanis used to name themselves after their Gods. Better sense has since prevailed, and now they take their dogs' names instead. Thus, they have achieved considerable pith--I know brown people called Pimmy, Shiny and Happy. Alas, they still fall far short of the world's best. Take, for instance, the great Richard Cheney, de facto Emperor of the Universe. Rather than bear his longish original name, the man voluntarily lets everyone call him Dick. Yet, for all this heroic determination, the White Man is still not numero uno in the matter of nominal brevity. He only has a fetish for short names. The Yellow Man, on the other hand, has flair for them. For instance, my yellow friend Ho calls me Mr. Shanghai, not only because of my stunning good looks, but also because my first name has enough syllables in it to name everyone in the city of Shanghai. Indeed, as Che Lai sings in celebration of the Chinese Tao,

Pa Li's name is Fa Li,
And Ma Li is named Mi Li,
The brat is called Jo Li,
What a JoLi Fa-Mi-Li!

Note further that the Yellow Man's name is just a specific instance of his calculated suppression of information. Allah's bearded warriors can stop the US in its tracks by killing Emperor Dick, but they find themselves helpless against the cunning Yellow Man: As a recent world-wide survey found, only three people, all named Yi, could correctly answer the question : "Hu is the Chinese President?" (Hint: It is a trick question. The answer is yes.) Hu, I ask, can stand in the way of such a subtle race, full of strategems, treasons and micronames?

Greatness Condition 2: Brown people from Gujarat, it is true, go to far-flung places just to stand near sign posts and get their photos taken. While admirable, they are, alas, far from good enough, for they go only where the path is easy, and the reward sure. The White Man, on the other hand, values Art for Art's sake.

It is rumoured that Da Vinci's masterpice, The Mona Lisa hangs on a large wall in the Renaissance Hall of the Louvres. Nobody knows for sure, because the damn thing is always surrounded by giant white people, and it is impossible for a normal-sized man to get a dekko. One summer afternoon, I stood there, sulking with my fellow wimps, when a somewhat small giant approached the throng, missus in tow. He surveyed the scene, closed his eyes, and with an air of resolve lifted the missus and shoved her through the thicket. When she had gotten close to the painting, she turned to him and beamed. Evidently she had detected a family resemblance between La Giaconde and herself. He photographed her triumph, and he dragged her out. Then, as Hercules must have done after his third task, he shrugged. He wiped his brow, and resolutely elbowed his way toward l'objet d'art. He put his paw near it, exactly as if he were showing off a recently netted bass. He tittered. She clicked. He fought, he emerged, and they talked.

He : "What's the fuss anyway? The chicks in the other paintings are hotter."
She: "Honey! You know like nothing about art. The hot chicks are done by a guy called Tit Ian. He was like a specialist in chicks. This da Vinci dude was gay. He does naked men well. Anyway, we got a photo of this thing. It is, like, world famous." [beg pardon for obscure joke. please google 1. Titian, 2. Vitruvian man]

They walked away, and I stood shaken, for I had realized just how far Brownistan is from greatness. We brown people have snaps of ourselves in front of the Niagara Falls and the White House, and we guffaw in pride. Laa-dee-dah, says the White Man, for he has venied all over the world, and while he has no clue exactly what he has vidied, he has videos of himself vici-ing it nevertheless.

And yet the White Man is but a minor deity, a roadside Ayyanar. The One True God of pointless photography is not he, but the Yellow Man, as I realized on a rainy Friday afternoon in the Metropolitan Museum o' Fart, New York. The Met, as it is called, is basically an asylum for doodlings by poor half-wits from across the globe. One of its proud exhibits is a 6'1'' X 4'2'' oil on canvas named White Light. It looks like the piece of paper my niece once took from me, saying "Mama, Naa draw panren, nee watch pannu. Sariyaa?" She took it, and she scratched on it vigorously with all the colours she had, made two holes in the center, and put her eyes through them. Then she asked us to hide because "Naan baby illa. Naan big maamster, sariya?" I still have that piece of paper and I swear it looks exactly like White Light, except that it is smaller, and a little cleaner. My poor niece, alas, only got scolded by her mother for making a mess. The creator of White Light, I'm sure, made a few million.

Most importantly, since White Light was kept in a respected museum by respected people, it won, well, respect. My friend and I stood in front of it, looking upon it reverently. We shifted here and there to view it from different angles, hoping that something would cast some light on it, and make us view it in a different light. We were just discussing its Ethereal Irreference to SpatioTemporal Isness when up walked a Yellow Man. He glanced at it. He turned to us, asked us to move and took a photo of it. He then gave us the camera and asked to us take a photo of him with it. Then he took the camera and zoomed in on the title card and took a photo of it. Then he checked to see he had got all three photos, and he walked past us to repeat the routine with the next painting. Not a look at the painting, not a care for what it was, not a word of appreciation or criticism. Just click, click, click.

I salute him. He has understood Modern Art; I have not. His children will inherit the Earth and photograph themselves ruling it, and mine will write software and watch in open-mouthed awe.

The brown man might as well stop being agog and face the truth: The Yellow Man is Prince. He is not yet King, because he has not yet grappled with the all-important question alluded to above: Who can have sex with what? But he is getting there. It'll take a while, but he will catch up eventually. The White Man is King because he is a past master of that question. He revels and frolics in it, the way a pig might in a sewer. He has found some answers, but is still digging around for more. You are, I'm sure, eager to hear more about it. But gentle reader, there's only so long an intelligent man can talk to an unmitigated imbecile like you. Let me refresh myself. When I come back, I'll enlighten you, if you somehow manage to stay out of jail in the meantime.

An Argument

2006-04-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

Attachment, Bhikku, will necessarily bring pain with it. But sometimes, I wonder if it's worth it after all.

-- The Diary, Spring 511 BC

"I have been thinking about him a lot lately", she said. He was driving. He turned to glance at her sideways.
"Hmm."
"Relax. I'm over it now, completely. And don't try to be sensitive. You look like a dead fish."
"Yeah, whatever. So?"
"Don't so me. There's nothing really. Last week, I had gone camping with some friends. And I was thinking of the times we all used to go camp together. He was the one who started me up on it, you know? You remember the time he tried to build a fire to cook pasta, and got only smoke, but still soaked the pasta in water for half an hour and said it was cooked? And then, we were singing on this trip last week. I sang a song he used to like."
"Which one?"
"You won't know. You are an uncultured brute. OK, don't sulk. Suttum Vizhi chudar Thaan, it is a song by a guy called Bharatiyar. Everytime after I sang that, he would go quiet for a while, and keep looking at me longingly like some teenage Romeo. Makes a woman happy, you know?"
"Whatever. Some senti girl stuff."

"Anyway, things like that. It is almost like I'm reaching into a box full of my childhood toys. Everytime I come up with some such old relic, I feel like I'm living it again. That it will all happen again tomorrow. And yet I know that it was not all love-love and kiss-kiss. Through all this, there was also jealousy and possessiveness and impatience and mostly just routine nothing. Strangely, I don't think of those. Everytime I talk to him now, we are friendly and cheerful and nice and boring. And after every one of these calls, I could kill him for his breeziness. It feels like I'm reliving the highlights of the past, and he's just forgotten it all. I would have been happy even if he had at least remembered our quarrels, and been nasty."
"Well. It was as much your decision as his, remember?"
"Ouch! Maybe you should be sensitive after all."
"No, you fool. What I meant was that I'm sure you'll find your new box or whatever with someone else, and soon too."
"That's precisely what bothers me. I liked him as much as anyone liked anyone else. And I'm sure he did the same. But he has found the same liking for someone else, and I'm sure I will too. So what is this love stuff? Just that you like somebody because they like you, and you just go on finding greater and greater delights in some mutual idiosyncracies. I mean, that's just sentimentality, right? Looking back at our time together, all that I can come up with are some vague cute-sounding details, nothing that really has anything to do with me or him. Isn't there supposed to be some kind of deep intellectual connection or some such fancy thing?

"But...Basically...Well, see! It seems to me that those details are the beauty of the thing. If you take away the little details, what is left in life, or art, or music, or all the other high-sounding stuff you are talking about? It is not all linear, boring intellectual connection, is it?"

"Don't talk nonsense. I never said a couple should sit and discuss philosophy all the time. But how can it be that the details override everything else? It is almost as if it doesn't matter who the two people concerned are. They'll just drown each other in an orgy of mutual liking, which is really nothing more than animal instinct."

"But that's precisely my point, that the beauty of the thing is beyond individuality. This whole "mere animal instinct" that you are talking about is really life, or god, or whatever you want to call it. It is proof that life is bigger than you and your silly notions about how things should be. In fact, I'd say it's the highest, most creative, most universal instinct there is in humanity."

"Come on, that's just sentimental crap. If you can love everybody, then you really love nobody except yourself. And going by your logic, I should elevate nationalism, casteism, love of Allah and every other stupid self-loving sentimental bull to some kind of divine Life Force thing. If it is OK for me to love my man just because he happens to be my man, why isn't it OK for me to love my country just because it is my country? And yet don't you agree that this jingoism is repulsive and vulgar?"

"Well. I don't know about nationalism and moral behaviour and all that, and I don't care. I'm not talking about some faceless comman man, I'm talking about you. And I still say that what you call sentimentality is really the essence and the beauty of the thing. In fact, I'll say that without this so-called sentimentality, even your so-called intellectual compatibility will come to nothing. Take this converastion: there is nothing even remotely personal here, you and I are just talking about some vague ideas. Yet you cannot have this conversation with anyone except me. Though you know lots of people who are more intelligent than me. What is this then?"

"See, you have always been a goody-goody oh-so-popular boy. You're just projecting your own everybody-loves-everybody stuff onto others. What about real sentimentality and real pettiness? Are you just going to say they are part of your life force too?"

"I don't know. And if the fact that I've been fortunate makes me less typical, so what? Maybe being fortunate is the right way. Maybe all the rest of you are wrong, because you've had it bad."

They were silent for a while. They were both peeved, as people always are after an argument. But they went back a long way. They had sown trust and reaped the knack of hitting the right note at the right time. This time, she did it first.

"So you think I'm love with you and only you, huh?"
"Well, for your sake, I hope not. I want a 36-24-36 jhakkas maal, not an ugly chick like you."
"Which jhakkas maal will go for you? You'll come back to me begging, and I'll refuse."
"I won't come to you, and even if I do, you won't refuse. You can't."
"Is that a bet?"
"It is."

They shook hands. She turned on the CD player, and slowly drifted off to sleep. He glanced at her, and felt a sharp stab of tenderness. They were just right now, far enough apart that the winds of heaven could breeze between them, but close enough that it carried her voice to him. Some day they'll grow more distant and her words will be muffled by the distance. He wanted to store the tenderness of this moment to remember her by. But he knew he couldn't. His memory was slave to his moods, and this moment's beauty alone will not protect it from oblivion. But it will be in there somewhere, he thought. Better, it will spread out thinly over his entire being and make him kinder, nobler, gentler in ways he himself didn't know. And if that isn't reason enough to love and be loved, what is?

He switched off the CD player. Music was OK, but he preferred silence.

Nature, and Why I Watch It On Discovery Channel

2006-04-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

So, bhikku! I hear you want to be one with Nature. It's easy. Just go into the wild. Nature will take care of the rest.

-- The Diary, Winter 516 BC

Even a confirmed jackass like you, gentle reader, cannot help but notice that this urban life is a sordid mess. First, there is the noise and the pollution. Then there's the crowd: all through the day, one is plagued by vile reptiles from management and marketing. Worse, when these leave one alone, one has to deal with brown people, a most revolting bunch who spend all their time discussing the Aryan invasion theory and cheap telephone deals to Brownistan. Out in the country, one can at least feel like a Real Man by beating one's wife. But in the city, wife-beating is unfashionable, and one is forced to watch football instead.

It is, you will agree, a most unwholesome state of affairs. Of course, the poor don't have time to bother about all this, because being miserable is a full-time job. At any rate, the poor aren't educated and they know nothing about anything. But you and I, gentle reader, are enlightened types who read and write blogs. We go to Art of Living classes, and we've learned terms like Stress Management, All-round Personality Development and Quality Time. So we know that we need a break from our daily travails. And since we can afford it, we go off into Nature for reflection and renewal. We are children of a Brave New World, one that sees no reason to bow to season. If we want to vacation in winter, we will use snowbikes; and if they disturb wildlife, what of it? We want to be one with Nature, and it is but fair that we go some distance for it and make Nature travel the rest.

Which is all very well.

Except that Nature is always trying to bite, scratch, poison, piss on, cripple, torture, maim or murder those who seek to commune with her. It is nothing personal, mind you. It is just Nature's nature.

Having narrowly escaped Nature on many an occasion, I write here a lament and a warning. I will probably not survive my next camping trip; but I hope, gentle reader, that for a long time to come, these portentous words will protect Nature and you from from each other. Remember, the common man only enjoys other people's suffering. But the wise man also learns from it.

Adios.

Memories Of A Retreat

Corporate games I had played,
And ruthless cunning displayed.
I was master of free trade,
A huge stash o' cash I'd made.

But the city ate my soul,
It's a vile festering hole.
In each lane, 'neath ev'ry pole,
Lurks a foul stinkin' asshole.

For peace and quiet I pined,
To many a cove I whined.
One such cove, P of keen mind,
The way out wisely divined.

"My boy, we can't take the grind,
We are just way too refined.
So leys leave the mob behind.
Solace in Nature we'll find."

P's intellect is renowned.
Legends of his beans abound.
The answer he'd surely found,
So jungleward we were bound.

It was a loverly spring morn,
And before the crack of dawn,
Ere yet the day was full born,
To wilderness' heart we'd gone.

Cooed we in poetic delight,
"Do you smell that pink sunlight?"
"The roses, they sound just right"
"And yon crows' song feels so bright."

The musical crows then grouped,
Up they soared and down they swooped,
And on our heads they poooped.
Our spirits, they slightly drooped.

"Here's water. Wash up!", piped P.
"For wee pee, be not weepy.
Rolling stones, my man, let's be.
I'm told they gather no pee."

What a wonderful calm head!
Wiser words have not been said,
We had a long path to tread,
Aye, 'twas time to march ahead.

We'd walked awhile when I spied,
A lovely bird, Nature's pride.
"Ahoy! Bird ahead", I cried.
"Look, right there, by the trailside."

Before he could get a view,
Into the thicket it flew.
We scampered after it too,
As all real men would do.

"There, see it? It is a finch"
"No, a lark. It is a cinch."
"Oh! come on! don't be a grinch"
"That's you, not me. Hey, don't pinch"

Twasn't a pinch, but a sting.
A wasp, bee or some such thing.
Out we ran, like Milkha Singh,
Nay faster: we'd bugs chasing.

Then he spake, P, wise teacher,
"B., my boy! This is nature.
This bug's really a feature.
Remember! It's God's creature!"

Thusly went the entire day,
Oft we bled; our nerves did fray,
But we kept Nature at bay.
'Twas heroic, I must say.

'Neath fiery sun did we tramp,
And at dusk, we set up camp.
Then Nature sent rain (the vamp),
Leaving the tent rather damp.

Nature thought rain would nettle,
Ha! She knew us but little.
We are men of great mettle,
Strapping lads, in fine fettle.

Said we, "How hard Nature tries"
And smiling, we shut our eyes.
Then, Nature threw her last dice,
She'd tried heat, now she tried ice.

Dante, who's admired a lot,
Declares, "Hell is very hot"
If I may say so, that's rot.
I've camped in cold, he has not.

Better verse Dante may write,
But he's wrong, and I am right:
Fire is cool, and pain is trite,
The real deal's a cold night.

Though P has a ghastly mug,
Some chaps might, with a cool shrug,
Have given him a tight hug,
Just to be a bit more snug.

But I'm as straight as a log.
Anyway, after the day's slog,
The man stank like a damn bog.
I'd rather have snogged a hog.

We broke camp just before dawn,
It was a loverly spring morn,
Ere yet the day was full born,
Back into town we had gone.

It is true: Nature can thrill,
And the city's a dunghill,
But I'll take the city still,
At least, the city doesn't kill.

Nikkahs Are Made In New York

2006-03-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

It is true, Bhikku. Marriages ARE made in Heaven. It's only later that they come crashing down to earth.

-- The Diary, September 529 BC

When young men of a certain age meet, the conversation inevitably turns to marriage. And so it happened when comrades K, R1, R2 and S visited your humble correspondent last spring. The natural candidate to lead such a discussion would have been the extremely kadalacious Comrade S, who is constantly in touch with (oh, grow up. you know what I mean) thousands of Girls. However, he referred to some of them as "friends", and that automatically disqualified him on grounds of abnormality.

The mantle, then, fell to me. Admittedly, I am no Cassanova, but I do wish the receptionist "Good Morning" everyday. I don't like to brag, but she always responds. Little does she suspect that I am one to wish and tell. Naturally, comrades K, R1 and R2 considered me something of an expert on Marriage, Sex, Girls and Women. I manfully shouldered the burden, and proceeded to analyze each man's expectations.

It emerged that Comrade K wasn't yet sure whether he was a boy or a girl; and Comrade R1 was sure that he was neither. That left us with Comrade R2, a hormone-filled Hamlet if ever there was one, a deadly mixture of desire and doubt. We asked him what he wanted in a wife. "She and I should have similar tastes" quoth he. In general, this is a noble if silly expectation, but in this case it was particularly tragic, for Comrade R2 had never betrayed signs of any kind of taste. We tried to make him snap out of it and focus on specific realistic goals.

"How educated do you want your wife to be?"
"What do you mean? Oh, you mean she can read, write and all that? Hey, that'll be cool."
"Hmm! OK, what about money?"
"I don't want dowry, if that's what you mean. As long as she'll inherit a lot of cash after her father dies."
"Well, if she's that rich, she might be materialistic. Are you OK with that?"
"You mean she'll want to buy stuff? Well, electronics stuff is OK. I like electronics stuff."
"Dude! Exactly how independent do you want your wife to be?"
"Huh?"
"Meaning if she disagrees with you, how assertive do you want her to be?"
He seemed shocked. "What? She'll disagree with me?"

At this point, feminists and other Phoolan Devi types (meaning you, dear cousin D~) might scream in protest. They are missing the point. The point is not that Comrade R2 treats women badly. The point is that he treats them no differently from men. The nub of the matter is that comrade R2 just doesn't dodebates. If you are bigger than him, he will not disagree with you. If you are smaller than him, he will not let you disagree with him. Comrade R2, I've always said, would have been a great apostle of non-violence, if only Arnold Schwarzenegger, and not that wimp Gandhi, had advocated it. But I digress.

As leader, it was my task to guide this child of Nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw. I conjured up an image of the woman he wanted, and compared it with all my two female acquaintances. My spine turned cold. I had a problem, a *Very* *Big* *Problem*.

Like all pious men, I immediately turned to God. And soon enough, I came up against Free Will. The trouble, you see, is that God is a bit like Peanut Butter, which can be crunchy, extra crunchy, mildly cruncy, creamy or extra creamy. In short, there are myriad types of God, and one's never sure which type is good for one. Faced with such a dilemma, most people would have drowned their sorrows in either alcohol or Art of Living. Not I. I am, as I have remarked many a time, a man of Faith, Reason and Determination. I duly applied the Scientific Method. My aim was to get R2 married off, and I knew that marriages are made in Heaven. The thing to do was to find the God that goes with the best Heaven, and apply to Him for help.

Resolved thus, I surveyed anew the list of available Gods and matching religions.

First up were the foremost flowers of ancient Brownistan: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. I studied these. I found, for instance, that Hinduism's Deepest Truth is Tat Tvam Asi, which a knowledgable native translated as You Are That. I was discouraged. When the Deepest Truth of a religion sounds like one's five-year-old niece fighting with her sister, one suspects something is amiss. But I persevered. I learned that the foremost Hindu Gods, Rama and Krishna, lived in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat respectively. And I learned that they were just two among 330 million Hindu Gods. I blanched. As Bill would put it, my knotted and combined locks parted and each particular hair stood on end. Hindu Swarga, I realized, was just a fancy term for Bihar. Promptly, I crossed these religions off my list, and swore never more to break bread with Hindus, Buddhists and other kinds of cattle.

Disheartened, I turned to the West. It held more promise for my purpose. After all, Christianity started because Adam and Eve did it, in spite of God. Further, a culture that uses nudity to advertise pasta is a culture that knows the value of pleasure. (I jest not. Europe is full of such ads. A walk along the Champs Elysees is in itself a complete course in sex education.) I had hit paydirt, or so I foolishy thought. I was wrong. Firstly, there was the small matter that Christian Heaven is rather dull. From what I could gather, one just hangs around and sups with the virtuous on the right hand side of God, because of course, the left hand is corrupted by contact with chi-chi. Further, I realized that black people just will not settle for R2, because they think brown people aren't cool enough for them (and God-damn-it, they are right, the racist bastards.) That still left whites. Now white women, if they are not models, are hideous and huge. And if they are models, they are so much silicon that one might just as well love an IC instead. At any rate, white people have sex by the time they are potty-trained, and that just won't do. R2, like all brown men, insists on having produce fresh from the farm, if you get my drift.

And that brought me, finally, to brown people of the second kind: the children of Allah. Now I was in business. After all, the most alluring beauties that ever have fired up lust in the loins of a lascivious lad, have all invariably been members of the Ummah. And Islamic Heaven absolutely rocks, for it is written that in Jannat, each man shall have no less than seventy-eight, yup LXXVIII, hour-il-ein. (Hour-il-ein is the Urdu term for "Oh mamma" and connotes the ravishing virgins, note virgins, of Paradise.) Allah, I realized, was just the God for our man R2.

There was, however, a catch. Being a brown man of the first kind, R2 obviously couldn't court Mussalman (or any other) women himself, and his folks would rather murder him than marry him off to a mleccha, leave alone setting up such a wedding. The alternative was for R2 to go to Jannat, and for this I could find but two ways--penance and a life of kindness and virtue, or blowing oneself up in a crowded bus. I presented the options to R2. Penance, he said, was out of the q. because it would interfere with his evening workout. And while blowing people up sounded cool, it involved concealed plastics which were a definite turn-off.

We were stuck. I was disconsolate, R2 was shattered.

Till last week.

Because last week I discovered that the Messiah is at hand. Aye. As the New York Times proudly informs its readers, Sheik Reda Shata of Brooklyn, New York, has taken it upon himself to unite the faithful in holy wedlock. And the fact that R2 is currently a kafir is no problemo. Sheikh Shata prefers to set up truebloods, but he's not one to stand on birth. If R2 would only pronounce Allah-uh-Akbar, his kufr will be forgotten, and Inshallah, he will attain the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth. Admittedly, R2 will miss his 330 million Gods, but you'll agree it's a small price to pay for finding True Lust.

Bismilla-ar-Rahman-ar-Rahim.

PS: For the record, I made almost all of this up. R2 is a perfectly nice bloke. He's still single, but I daresay when his time comes, he'll give his wife all the love, respect and freedom she deserves. Provided she buys only "electronics stuff", of course.

Giri pai

2006-03-05T13:58:00.000-07:00

They say, Bhikku, that the Gods live on mountains. I highly doubt it. It is rather cold up there. But overall mountains aren't bad places to visit. They make one gentle. Unfortunately, they don't make one wise, but nor does anything else. At any rate, wisdom is a journey, not a destination.

-- The Diary, August 1st, 504 BC

It was a pika. At least that's what it most closely resembled, of the ten or so "common wildlife" pictures on the trail map. It was barely 15 feet from the trail. I switched on the camera as quietly as I could. It whirred on, sternly said LOW BATTERY and went to sleep again. I swore under my breath. Third wildlife sighting in camera range and second time this damn thing had to die. I cursed myself for not charging it daily. Why couldn't I be more organized?

Then I smiled at my own dissatisfaction, and looked at the pika. It now had its back to me. Slowly, it walked away. I decided to sit on a little rock by the trail. All around me were peaks rising up a few hundred feet. Well, they really were 8000 feet or more from ground level, but I was in a kind of high valley. The trail had been steep--nearly 1500 feet in barely 5 miles and then half-a-mile on this flatland surrounded by sharp high peaks. And so is life, I wistfully thought. In youth, the mind courts steep slopes, for it aims high. It strives and suffers, but marches on. But eventually the climb is too steep, the current too fast. The mind tires and compromises. It creates some comfortable niche, fills it with some Ism or the other, and fits in with the world. No wonder all these poetic birds go on and on about the glory of Youth.

I shrugged and looked around. The mountain air was keen, all around was quiet. This place was above the tree line. Only shrubs grew here, humble yet hardy foot-soldiers that could live through the fierce winter. But now it was summer, and the air was pleasantly warm. This little cup in the mountains brimmed over with the soft light of the evening sun. Touched by the sun's tender caress, the glacial ice on the mountain-tops shimmered happily, and a gold-edged cloud above looked down fondly on the scene. (More-puddle-than-)Lake Solitude lay before me. Her clear surface reflected the gently glowing peaks--she borrowed thier splendor and showed it off as her own. Around the lake, the dense shrubs simmered bright green. There were some wildflowers, not pretty in isolation, but achieving beauty through numbers. Swept by the muffled breeze, they swayed with slow grace, like drunken dancers dressed in bright silk.

"This is the amphitheater of the Gods," I said to myself, "and I am fortune's favourite child, camera or no camera; conviction or no conviction". I felt noble and generous and kind, as one can only feel when one is alone and happy. I'll go back from here to my old world, but live a new life. I was loved by those whom I loved, and while that's common enough, it's still a precious gift. But I had traded not only in love, but also in pettiness and hurt. I looked back and felt a tinge of regret. What do we all fight over? Aren't we a part of the same Life force that courses through this pika's wild veins; and keeps these shrubs alive through ice and wind and storm, to flower anew every spring? And what good is this human mind if it cannot step back and see itself a part of all this? We all know this, of course. But knowlege is not action, or as old JK would put it, ideation is not perception, whatever that means.

Yet now, that old combative, divisive narrow self was gone forever, for how can all this beauty and majesty fail to transform one? Surely, I had been touched somewhere deep down, below the turbulent surface of thought with its restless waves of words and principles and morals and judgement. I was now the world and the world was me. At that moment, I effortlessly forgave all who had wronged me. Better, I forgave also those whom I had wronged. I'll go back, and "hold brotherly speech, with those whose hearts I hadn't hoped to reach". I'll apologize. No, why should anyone apologize? I was no longer the man who had wronged them. That man was gone, and we, as friends, would laugh together at his folly.

And then I blushed, as the silliness and pompous sentimentality of it all struck me. "Forgiveness, meta-forgiveness, meta-meta-forgiveness. Wisdom, meta-wisdom, meta-meta-wisdom, and onward ad infinitum. All hail King B., Crown Prince of Amateur Philosophers and soupy teenage girls!". I gave myself a mock bow. I blushed, but I was more amused than embarassed. I started afresh on the trail.

And then I noticed the tall white guy walking up the trail. He was actually a bit fat, but in that strange way of middle-aged white people, he looked healthy for it. He flashed a broad grin at me. "Hi". I smiled back. "Hi". He stopped near me.

"Beautiful day for a hike, huh?"
"Yup. Great day. You planning to camp up here?"
"Yeah. Am doing the whole loop trail. 25 miles round trip. Should be done by tomorrow."
"Well. I should have backpacked too, but haven't done it before. Didn't want to take any risks alone."
"Yeah. That's always better. But you could have tried it here. There's always someone around."
"I realized that too late. Saw a guy with a couple of kids going up just now. You'll meet them soon. I'm heading back to the campground."
"You've got about one and a half hours of light. You'll get there."
"Hope so."

I was beginning to get worried about reaching back before dark. I was about to leave. But he just stood there. Looked like he wanted to talk.

"Where are you from?"
"Atlanta."
"No, before that."
"Oh, India"
"If I may ask, what religion do you follow?"
"I'm a, er, Hindu. You know? We worship in temples. There are some in the US too."
"Yeah, I know Hindooism. You worship Sheeva, don't you?"
"Yup, and a few others. We are polytheist"
"How long have you been in the US?"
"Five years now"
"Do you like it?"
"Love it."
"If I may ask, have you been exposed to Christianity?"
[Oh no, one of those. Damn!] "Well, a little. I've read a couple of books in the New Testament"
"What have you heard or read?"
"This and that. I've read the Sermon on the Mount. It is very beautiful. But otherwise, I haven't read much."
"Have you ever felt a calling to convert?"
"No. I'm not very religious, but I think I prefer Hinduism"
"Why?"
"Well. There's this business of the soul, only humans have it and stuff. Where I come from, we believe all creation is equal. Not really in practice, perhaps. But at least in theory."
"But how can you say that? The God our Lord gave you a soul. He loves you. He made all this, [looking around tenderly] the mountains, the animals, the lovely sunset for you. He wants you to save your soul by returning His love, and turning to Him."
"Yeah, that's what bothers us. This creation in seven days, and the human soul and free will and all that. Our theory is that this sunset, that mountain, that moose, everything, is God. And we don't have anything that they don't have. It kind of ties in with our notion of rebirth."
[anguished] "But, but, you can't really believe that. Saying you have no soul is like closing your door on God. He loves this Earth, but he loves you more. You are his child."
"Well, maybe. But anyway, that's what we believe. I guess I'll get going now."

"Just a minute. What's your name, brother?"
"B____"
"Pat-rick?"
"Yeah. Patrick".
"Well, Patrick! Can I pray for you?"
"Sure. That'll be nice."

He took my hands in his and closed his eyes and prayed. He wanted God to open my eyes and all that. I'm sure it was very touching--their prayers usually are--but I didn't really listen. I stood there, partly resentful, partly grateful, partly touched, but mostly worried about getting back. He was done. He opened his eyes.

"Thank you. That was very kind of you"
"Thank you, Patrick, for letting me pray for you. The Lord loves you. You will turn to Him. I can see that. You are deep down a believer."
"Let's hope so. Bye."
"See you. Head back quickly. It'll be dark soon. Do you want some water?"
"No, thanks. I have plenty left"
"Don't worry. Once you reach Jenny Lake, you'll see the campground lights anyway. God Bless you, Brother."

And then we each turned our way.

If it happened today, we'd both have felt contempt (or pity, which is really the same thing anyway)--I for his nosiness and ignorance, he for my stubborn lack of faith. (I'd definitely have said Dhoda, vanduchi paaru, moonja tookinu. Savugrakki.) Even that day, we both thought, knew, that the other was wrong. But it seemed natural that he should be what he is, and I what I am. I still looked down on him, but somehow it didn't matter. I like to think it didn't matter to him either. For that day, we were both too high up to bother with disagreements.

Mountains do that to people.

The Infamous Incident of Topless VR and the Peeping Professor

2006-02-22T19:10:00.000-07:00

God isn't watching you, Bhikku. But I am, because I have to. So please dress well.

-- The Diary, date unknown, the Fall of 498 BC

In September 1995, L~ was being ragged by his seniors. Now, L~ was a man with an eye on Big Things. He was always coming up with proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem using only addition and the number forty-three. In short, he wasn't the sort of man to bother about underlying details. So when asked to strip, he promptly shed the lungi, forgetting that he was unchaddied that day. A riot ensued. One of the seniors passed out. Another developed jaundice and missed his finals. The third squealed like a schoolgirl and ran out of the room.

Or so I'm told. I wouldn't know, because I wasn't there. Most of my life, interesting things have happened roughly 100 yards from where I was. Yet, in spite of missing all this action, I have not killed myself. And that is because I've had my moment too. Bow, gentle reader, to B., the only first-hand witness of The Infamous Incident of Topless VR and Prof. N~, alluded to earlier on this space. (Prof. N~'s real name is not N~, of course. I'm still not brave enough to face her wrath, should she find out about this.)

It was a hot Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1999. VR and I sat in the VLSI laboratory. VR was topless, while I was topped. Not that I have anything against toplessness, but my dimensions at the time were such that it was more prudent to bear the heat than bare the body. VR and I were both goofing off: I was checking the cricket score while he was chatting with what he thought was a girl, though it was only M~ posing as one.

And then Prof. N~ entered, or rather she peeped in from the door, as she always does. Now, Prof. N~ was VR's project advisor, and that of course, meant that she loathed VR with all her blessed heart and some more. And now, suddenly, she was faced with more of VR than had ever wanted to see. She saw him, even as he was trying to disappear into his computer monitor. Her face twisted a little, methinks. And then she saw me. Now, Prof. N~ generally did not like to see undergrads. She had her reasons. We undergrads were extremely lustful lads, and she was decidedly cute. But she saw me, and this time, her face twisted a little more. It must have been a Smile, though Prof. N~, as a rule, did not Smile. The strain showed.

"Have you seen C~ lately?"
"Yes, ma'am. I mean, no ma'am. I mean, I saw him yesterday, ma'am. He was looking for his cycle, ma'am. That's because he had his cycle key, ma'am. C~, his cycle and his cycle key are never in the same place, ma'am. Ha, ha, ha!"

Prof. N~ looked downcast. She turned away from me, but then she saw VR, now trying to bury himself under the table. With a steely look, turned back to me.

"If you see C~, can you please ask him to come and see me at my office."
"Yes, m'am"
"Yes what?"
"If I see C~, I'll ask him to come to your office, ma'am."

She seemed surprised at this unexpected show of intelligence. Anyway, she walked out. I went back to the cricket score. A few moments passed.

"Do you think she saw me?", screamed VR, making me jump.
"What? Oh that. Probably."
"Really?"
"Yup, you are hard to miss."
"Aargh! Well, what do I care? I don't care a damn. It's not a crime. Isn't it hot? Yes, it is very hot. Nobody would wear a shirt. Say, why are you wearing a shirt?"
This was dangerous ground. "Well, just because. I don't have to explain to you, you know?"
"Well, no need to get angry. I just asked."

I went back to the c. s. A few minutes passed.

"I can SEE you", bellowed VR. He was now standing at the door, roughly where Prof. N~ had been. I considered this information.
"Not fair! You didn't tell me you had started counting. That's against the rules, you know. Well, anyway, now you hide. I'll count to twenty."
VR seemed perplexed. Then, he said, "No, you moron. I can see you from here. That means she could see me."
"Brilliant, Holmes! Now can I get back to some real work?"
"No wait, wait, wait! You aren't sitting where I was. Go sit over there".

I groaned, but obliged. After all, friends shift for friends.
"Damn, I can still see you."
I shrugged, and returned to my nook. Further c.s.-checking had lasted barely five minutes, when the sound of thunder shook my ears.

"You are taller than me". Now it was VR standing right next to me, staring wide-eyed.
I blushed. "Oh, no! Not really!"
"No! You are MUCH taller than me. At least one foot!"

Low self-esteem, I had noticed, was rather common among those who knew yours truly. Encouragement was clearly called for. "Come now, my boy! What if I'm taller. I'm sure you have your strengths. Maybe you're handsomer, smarter, more charming, nicer." And then I looked at him, and pondered the issue. "Hmm, well, yeah! I know what you mean. We do have a problem. Let's see. Oh yes. Can you whistle?"
"Why, yes! I can"
"There! I can't whistle. See, I told you you have your strengths. What if I'm taller", and I reached out to pat him on the back.
"No, you moron", said VR. It was obviously a pet phrase. "I mean, you are taller. Maybe that's why I could see you. Maybe she didn't see me."
"Ah! Possible, I suppose. Good luck, my man. I hope that's the case."
"Oh, shut up. Now go to the door, and bend so that you are about the same height as her."

I groaned. But I moved to the door and stooped. Friends bend for friends.

"Can you see me?"
"Yes."
"Well, look right at me and tell me exactly you see."
The lad was obviously in love. Kindness was called for, once again. "VR, my boy, I'm sorry to say this. I don't think of you that way. It's not you. It's me. I drive on the other side of the road, if you get my drift. Let's just be friends. If I have ever done anything to give you hope, I beg pardon."
"No, you moron! I mean, if you just peeped in, would have noticed that I'm not wearing a shirt?"
"Ah! Why, yes! Of course, scienfically, I can only say that if you're wearing a shirt, it is no more than chest high."
"Damn! So she would have noticed. Well, what the hell. I don't care what she thinks. It's a free country. There's no uniform in this place. Anyway, this is Saturday. I can dress as I please. In fact, she has no business being here on Saturdays. She could lose her job if I complained to the Dean. Right?"
"Exactly. Couldn't agree more," I piped in, desparate to get back to the cricket score.

Roughly half an hour passed. The first innings was over. I realized I needed a leak pronto. I stepped out on to the corridor, and saw it was crowded. Prof. N~ was walking, talking to C~. VR was following them. I joined too, of course. Leaks could wait.

Prof. N~ asked C~ something. He immediately laughed, as always. And then he realized it wasn't a joke, and he answered. She asked some more. He laughed and answered some more. VR was following them, clearly waiting for C~ to finish. But Prof. N~ kept talking to C~ anyway. They climbed down the stairs, walked to the parking lot. C~ was perplexed. Nobody ever talked to him this much. Slowly, his answers were becoming completely idiotic. He was drawing from the well of his wisdom, and it was running dry. Now, he was describing his recurrent nightmare, something about bending under the sofa to find A~'s head there. He was about to get to the "What do you think it means?" phase, when N~ reached her car. She first let out a sigh of relief. Then she looked at C~ with a mixture of gratitude and pity. Then she turned to VR, with a killer look full of contempt and loathing. Her face twitched. She was Smiling, again. Triumphantly, she drove out into the sunset.

I slipped out unnoticed, and took a leak, and came back to the lab to wait for the second innings.

VR breezed in after 10 minutes. He looked happy, even jubilant. "I don't care, man. I'm not afraid of anything. What can she do? Nothing, that's what. I won't even consult her on my project. I'll just do it myself. What does she think? Ha!"

I nodded appreciatively. Five minutes passed.

"Say, do you think she's near-sighted? She does wear glasses, you know."

I walked out. I needed a quiet place just then. Friends don't laugh when friends are in trouble.

God: Heavenly Father or Big Brother?

2006-02-04T12:50:00.000-07:00

Relax, Bhikku. God isn't watching you. He has too little time and too much taste.

-- The Diary, date unknown, the summer of 498 BC

The trouble with the white man, I've always said, is that he never does anything with his own hands. He uses forks for input, toilet paper for output and outsources everything else to Brownistan. Since he has no hands-on experience, he knows nothing; and since he knows nothing, he's afraid of everything. He lives in constant terror of bird flu, anthrax, hurricanes, gas prices, differential calculus, and of course, death. He's scared of brown people with beards, and brown people without beards. He's afraid of black people's children, and he's afraid of his own.

The most peculiar of the white man's phobias, however, is his positive horror of the Lord. And nowhere is this more apparent than in his approach to the burning social issues of each era.

Take, for instance, the abortion debate in the US. From 1950 to around 1975, white people were liberal, meaning they had sex all the time. During this period (strangely called the Baby Boom instead of the Big Bang), the Supreme Court of the US legalized abortion. More precisely, Roe v. Wade ruled that it was illegal for states to pass laws which made abortion difficult. The fact that such an obscurely worded ruling is so well-known itself shows that the white man takes the law way too seriously. But at any rate, around 1980, lots of white people started suspecting that all this sex was way too much fun and God most certainly wouldn't approve. These people, strangely called conservatives instead of Inquisitors, soon took over the country. And now they're slowly, but surely rewriting the law. By the time they're done, they'd have made abortion, among other things, illegal. (And then they'll all probably have another wave of pseudo-liberalism again. Every time I reflect that my forefathers were ruled by these omadhouns, I hang my head in shame, may family pride be damned!)

Here's where God enters the picture. The reason conservatives are so pissed with abortion is not mere envy of cooler people, who get to have more sex. Their baadha, as the Gults put it, is that they think abortion is sin. And they think so because they believe that the foetus has a soul, and killing anything with a soul is a strict no-no. (Factoid: A soul is something like a Platinum membership, for which only Man among all of God's creations, is pre-selected.) The liberals, sheep that they are, meekly bleated that noone really knows exactly when a human baby gets its soul. And then all heaven broke loose. The Conservatives started pulling out lots of old books, which stated that a soul enters the picture

4. When the embryo quickens, i.e., when momma can feel it move. --St. Augustine
3. Forty days after conception for boys, and ninety days after conception for girls. --Aristotle
2. When the fertilized egg is implanted in the womb, about 1 week after fertilization.
1. Immediately after fertilization. -- St. Gregory something
0. Even before sex, so you shouldn't use the Pill -- St. Dubya Bush

The conservatives saw that there was too much inconsistency in the textbooks. So, just like engineers, they picked the worst case, namely case 0, and have been sticking to it these last fifteen years. Having chosen the most unreasonable interpretation available, they are convinced that God is on their side because He is after all beyond Reason. And with this smug superiority, they have been morally castigating the liberals ever since.

As a brown man, I find all this tamaasha laughable, for we brown people take an altogether different view of matters. We treat our babies like our bread. For our bread, we follow the five-second rule. If it has been on the floor for less than five seconds, it is not really dirty and you can pick it up and eat it. For our babies, we follow the two-day rule. If it has been alive for less than two days and if it is a girl, then it is not really human and you can kill it. We know that this is extremely unright, even disgusting. But we do it because we are either too poor or too barbaric, depending on how you look at it. In either case, we leave God out of it.

It is not that we Brownistanis are specifically bright. We are as stupid as anybody else, but we have the distinct advantage that our sacred texts were written in a language we don't remember anymore. At any rate, our religion is either vague or tolerant enough to permit almost anything. God is just not in our genes, at least in such matters.

Ultimately, it's a question of instinct.

In the spring of 1999, my friend VR and I worked in a lab whose keys were always with a rather religious TA. After the infamous incident of Topless VR and the Peeping Professor, the TA had been specifically instructed to not give the keys to depraved undergrads like us. However, like all brown people, we thumbed our nose at the law and went and asked for the keys one Sunday. The TA said she couldn't give them, because the professor wouldn't allow it. VR, sharp cove that he was, immediately pointed out that the Professor wouldn't really know she had given us the keys, if we all agreed to not tell her. He even generously volunteered to keep it is a secret till his dying day. To which the TA said, with horror, distaste and outrage in her voice, "What if Madam doesn't know? God does, doesn't He?" Even VR couldn't reply to that, so we left. We had cycled halfway back to the hostel, when VR turned to me and breathlessly croaked in anguish, "What has f***ing God got to do with it, man?" We cycled on in silence.

VR, being brown, instinctively saw the point. The white man, alas, does not.

A Confession, An Apology and An Opinion

2006-01-22T09:27:00.000-07:00

Do not, O Brother, give me your opinion. I have more than enough of my own. And please do not consider me intolerant. My opinions may not be those of a genius, but at least they aren't those of a fool. About yours, I'm not so sure; and I don't have the time to find out.

The Diary, August 4, 502 BC

Unlike everything else on these pages, this is not a rant. It is a confession.

I'm a man of few principles. To be precise, I'm a man of two principles: I never steal other people's underwear and I do not express opinions. The advantage of having just two principles is that one values them and abides by them, even in the face of grave provocation. Even so, I have broken one of my two precious principles. It is but little comfort to think that the more important one still stands. After all, I haven't filched another's chaddi; I've merely expressed an opinion. Nay, let me not add dishonesty to my already-greivous sins. I have expressed not opinion, but opinions, probably a few tens. And I've done it all in the course of the last month.

Let no man judge me harshly. I did not give in tamely. I fought the good fight, and I lost. Better men than me would have.

The trouble with an opinion is that it is a bit like susu (which is known to some cultures as pee-pee and to some others as one-bathroom). To hold it back is to sample the most gruesome tortures of Purgatory; to release it is to savor the foretaste of Jannat. And yet all these days, I turned the burden of my countenance unto myself, as old Bill would put it. Not a soul got wind of the storms that raged inside me. Many even suspected that I feel the irrational happiness that one usually associates with North Indians and small-sized dogs. But let it now be said that I wasn't a man at peace. I had, and have, opinions on almost everything, and manfully I held them back. I bottled them up inside me till I would meet the next Bombay Girl. And when I did, I spent hours talking to her, expressing as many of my opinions as I could. For I knew that a Bombay Girl is completely unaffected by opinions, mine or anyone else's. (N~, I am referring to you. And there isn't a thing you can do about it. I am bigger than you. Ha, ha, ha! Die, vile fiend!)

As everyone knows, Bombay Girls sleep in coffins and come out at nightfall. They are not easy to find, even when one is a luscious young lad in distress. Before I could find a Bombay Girl to unload my opinions on, they formed in their gazillions. But bravely I held out. I even thought foolishly I had won, that I would go to my grave never more having expressed an opinion. Oh! what fools we mortals be!

Like all good things, my resistance had to end. Over the last month, I have broken my rule on multiple occasions; guiltily at first, with morbid pleasure later, and soon with perverse abandon. I've been expressing opinions like there's no tomorrow; and I've been doing it on other people's blogs, not my own.

Of course, the first question is why one reads strangers' blogs at all. I cannot speak for you, gentle reader. For my own part, it must be all the sex that I did not have when I was an extremely erotic five-year old. Freud says so, and Freud must be right. Well, there's nothing for it but to accept that I was a severely under-sexed kid, ergo I am now a reader of strangers' blogs. There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will. But let me not explain everything away by pointing to the deprivations of my childhood, terrible though they were. Shit happens, but a man of character fights circumstance. And indeed so too did I. Before my Fall, I only left anonymous comments on people's blogs; and I did so only when I liked, or agreed with, the stuff that they said. After all, criticism and disagreements, like confidences, are for friends, not strangers.

And yet one day, without even realizing that this was the beginning of the end, I found myself leaving a comment on a bloke's blog asking him to read some rot to help him understand the deep significance of the Pale Parabola of Joy or some such rot. The next day, I left another comment telling a dudette that while her concerns were valid, they did not directly impact the Human Condition or some such fruity tripe. Yesterday, I shamelessly quoted Gandhi for no reason at all. These days, I am always spouting the vilest rot at the first available opportunity. I spout rot in e-mails, and I spout rot over the phone, and I spout rot in person, and I spout rot on blogs. I am now just a serial rot-spouter. I am pro-choice, anti-gun, anti-war, pro-conservation, anti-reservation, pro-tax, anti-WTO, pro-Palestine, anti-dam, pro-marijuana, anti-drilling, etc; and the whole world knows all this because I keep saying so.

The point is not that I no longer hold these opinions, or that I do so without conviction. The point is that there is absolutely no reason for me to go around saying what I think, even if it seems important and moral to me. An opinion is like the size of your jatti (known to some cultures as chaddi and to some others as undrawyer). It is entirely accurate information. It is extremely important for your well-being and indeed defines you as a person. But to the rest of the world, it is extremely irrelevant. The thing to do with an opinion is to keep it to yourself and at best to circulate it among friends. If you feel strongly enough about something, you will go do something about it, and then talk about it if you have the time. And if you don't feel strongly about it, why talk about it all?

I know this, but I cannot help but express my opinion. To acknowledge a problem is necessary, but not sufficient, to rectify it. Brown people know that they ought to use condoms for birth-control and not as baloons, but they don't. Black people know that they ought to treat their women at least as well as they treat their cattle, but they don't. White people know that they ought not to use brown and black people for target-practice, but they do. As it is with my fellow-men, so it is with me. The spirit is unwilling, but the flesh is too eager.

Since I cannot help sinning, let me at least abridge my sin with an open apology: Henceforth, if I sound like your aunt on a particularly preachy day, please note that the bad B. is to blame. The good B. (that's me) cannot rein in the bad B., but he apologizes for him, deeply, sincerely, profusely. Forgive him, my friends, for though he knows what he's doing, he perversely continues to do it.

And to all of you who read this, may I suggest that the next time you want to express an opinion on something you don't really care for to someone you don't really know, please go watch a Govinda movie instead. It is a far less stupid thing to do, in my opinion. There I go again.

The Importance of Being Bob

2006-01-12T00:27:00.000-07:00

What's in a name, they say. Balderdash! If I changed my name to Jignesh Patel, Bhikku, would you still be disciple?

-- The Diary, Date Unknown.

Through the heart of New Hampshire's White Mountains flows the Pemi. In some places, it is a wide roaring river. Elsewhere, it is but a fast-flowing stream, cutting its way through dense tree cover and solid rock. To follow its meandering course, noting the wondrous shapes it cuts in the rocks, is one of the delights of the New Hampshire summer ("summer" being the somewhat pompous term used by the locals to refer to the third week of July).

One of these expeditions lands the explorer near an information board, which says:

"This place once had Indians. Lots of them. Well, it still does, but the older variety did not all write software, so they were far less boring. Also, unlike the rather odious present bunch, the old Indians were kind of cute. For example, their name for this river was, believe-it-or-not, Pemigawasset, which is the Indian word for 'swift'. Everything considered, it is a little unfortunate that the old Indians were killed off by our noble ancestors, the Pilgrim Fathers. Not that we are complaining. The Pilgrim Fathers were perfect in every possible way, of course. But they could have been a little more perfect and spared a few of these Indians. It would have been fantastic for tourism."

The information board, like all information boards, gets one thinking. What were these native Indians like? How did they manage to live in so much harmony with so much Nature, without something or the other slowly slithering up their chaddis and causing extreme itchiness in the Netherlands? Above all, how did they get so thoroughly screwed by people who can't even eat with their own fingers?

I was there. I saw the board. I got thinking. I found some answers. They are here, for your enlightenment.

The Last of the Chiefs

All his mates had come to grief,
He was now the last living Chief,
So chances he no longer took,
The Wise Chief of the Pennacook. [Pennacook : Name of an Indian tribe]
He called forth his great family,
And gloomily gave this homily:
"Flee, all! Ride Pemigawasset! [Pemigawasset = "swift"]
Let us hide in yon Wachusset." [Wachusset = "mountain place"]

His lion-hearted little son,
Flat out refused to run,
Saying, "No, dear Father!
I would stay and fight rather!"

At this the Pater softly cried,
"Son, you fill me with pride.
But it must also be stated,
That courage is over-rated.
The clever and wily Cherokee, [Cherokee, Abnaki, Navajo : Indian tribes]
The able and brave Abnaki,
The proud unyielding Navajo.
Where, oh where, did they all go?
Wisely they should all have fled,
They didn't, and now they're dead.
True, the White Man has no skill,
But faith, very well does he kill.
So let's flee while we can,
For hark, I hear the White Man."

The White Riders weren't close,
But the Chief had a sharp nose.
And though he knew no science,
He could read Nature's signs. [read as sigh-ans, please. poetic license and all that. thanks, b.]
There wasn't time to waste,
So out he ran to advise haste.

"Nashashuk, Magaskawe, [Indian names]
Quick, they aren't far away.
Run, Guitonkagya, Hiawassee,
By God, don't be so damn lazy.
Hiawatha, Opechancanough,
You've dawdled long enough.
Oh! Saukamappe, Eyanosa,
Look, They're now close-ah"

Forsooth, his voice was strong,
But the names were way too long.
Soon, alas, the Chief lost his breath.
And the White Men rode in like Death.
The one who looked like he led,
Turned to his mates and said:
"Jack, Joe, Nick and Chris,
Fire and please don't miss.
Shoot! Jim, Bob and Bill,
We've got a tribe to kill."
And ere you could say Kissunguaq [Indian name]
They'd shot down the whole flock.

This isn't an unusual scene,
Ay, it's how it has always been.

The White Man has no brains,
The reason he still reigns,
Isn't that he's so damn big,
(Why he is just a fat pig!)
Nor is it his Science or Art,
(Why he is just an old fart).
No, he rules cos he's smart,
At making long names short.