What Then Must We Do?

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

Murder on Christmas Eve

Imitiation, Bhikku, will not get you salvation. But sometimes, it is fun. And that should count for something.

-- The Diary, December 24th, 505 BC

The clock had just struck eleven when I heard the knock. It was an odd hour for a visit, but I was an odd man to visit. My mother calls me Donny, but to everyone else, I am d'Onald, Super Sleuth. I am a paid hound. Sometimes I track down criminals for people. Some other times, I track down people for criminals. Always, I do it for cash: fifty greenbacks per hour. Travel, food and Jack Daniels are extra. That's for the tracking down. Violence costs more: 250 per small bone, 300 for medium and 350 for large. Death is a coupla grand. Regular body disposal is five grand, premium is ten. Silence is free. In my line of business, you talk today, you sleep with the fish tomorrow. It's a tough life, but I'm a tough man.

The caller entered. He was thin. That was the first thing you noticed about him. The second thing was that he was stupid. Very, stupid. His age was difficult to tell: it was 34 years and anywhere from 21 and 24 weeks. He wore an English bowler hat (black), a waistcoat (lavender) and brown pants in the baggy style. The belt was was half a slot too loose, ditto the Rolex. The watch and the horn-rimmed monocle spelt R-I-C-H-D-A-D-D-Y. So did the smell of expensive wine. Funny folk, these rich people. They drink their stuff after first letting the horse piss in it. You might wonder why. I don't. In my line of business, you get paid to ask only the right questions. It's a curious life, but I'm not a curious man. This stupid rich man had probably lost a puppy, a gift from his aunt last Christmas. I prepared for a dog-hunt. Business had been dull, and the blonde was high-maintenance. It is a dog's life.

"What-ho, old bean! Are you the sniffer, or are you the sidekick?"

The voice was surprisingly gruff. I pictured Dick Cheney dressed up for Gay Pride day. This was going to be difficult, doing business with this imbecile. I eyed him coldly. The trick was to unbreak the ice. In my line of business, you make friends today, you make the obituary column tomorrow. It is a loner job, but I am a loner man.

"I am Detective d'Onald, Private Eye. Can I help you?"
"You can do better, my lad. You can save my life."
"Yeah?"
"Postively"
"Oh yeah?"
"Scout's honor, old man. May the pants come loose at the Annual Ball if I speak aught but the truth."
"Listen, bud! What say you cut out the lingo and cut to the chase? What duyya want?"
"Ah! The American spirit. Onward, ho, to business. Shoulder to the wheel. Eye on the ball." I growled. "Well, as you say. Business it is. Quite. You see, my man, I've lost my brother on these strange shores. The lad's gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Evaporated. Poof."

This nut's brother? This was going to be much worse than the gift puppy. I winced. Inwardly, of course. The face was a mask. In my line of business, you show emotion today, tomorrow they'll be scraping your small intestine off Canal Street.

"When didya last see him, this brother of yors?"
"Ah, the facts. The background. The pieces of the puzzle. The clues. You are a lark that knows its tune. Capital, old boy! Wait till I tell the blokes at the club."
"I said, when didya last see yo' brother?"
"It must have been last summer. I was at the races and the chap was cooing to Maggie. The lad was in love. Dangerous stuff, love, particularly if you are in the habit of writing poetry, as the flesh-and-blood was. Made a right nuisance of himself. Why, that day, he was saying Maggie's eyes cleft his soul in twain. Some rot about he was unable to decide whether they looked like olives from Eden lying on virgin Swiss snow, or black diamonds smouldering afloat the river of her soul's white fire. A lot of rot, if you ask me. If Maggie's eyes looked like anything at all, they looked like a dung-beetle thrashing about in a cube of rotting cheese. But try telling that to the lad. Do not get me wrong. I'm second to none when it comes to fraternal feeling and blood-thicker-than-water and all that, but I draw the line at sunsets. Sunsets ought to remind a chap of dinner. But put the cove within half a mile of a sunset, and he would spout rot about the colors of the bridesmaid's dress at an angel's wedding, after the best man had unwittingly spilled Pinot Rouge on the her clothes--the bridesmaid's, you see, not the bride's--while they were dancing to Chopin after an apple pie. Details, he used to say. That's what poetry is about. Anyhow, the lasses always right fell for it. Keep encouraging him to coo his ghastly stuff into their ears. Why, some even ask him to repeat the rot about dew and cherubim's tears.

Ah, but I digress. To the point, of course. L'espirit Americain! Quite. As I was saying, the lad was cooing to Maggie at the races. Was blocking my view, as a matter of fact. Didn't matter, of course. My mare was walking backwards. Would have finished third in the previous race. Say! What an idea. Might get ten bob for that one. Free association, my man. That's the word. The steaming ideas of the unconscious breaking out in wild waves of free association and what-not, just like an underground sewer suddenly flooding all of Picadilly. What-ho, for the Joyce of the stream of consciousness! Got that? Joyce of the stream of consciousness. Ha, ha! That's a killer."

"You mean," and here I was screaming. Second time in my career. The first time was when Black Jack Big Mac had his dog lick my ears for two hours to find out who wanted his real name so bad. I didn't sing, if you're wondering. In my line of business, you sing today, tomorrow a friendly jackknife might ask for an encore from your vocal chords. It's not a musical life, but I'm not a musical man. "You mean he has been lost for a year?"

"Why, you're an odd bird. A foul fowl, in fact. You think I'd wait one year before seeking trained help? The lad's only been lost three hours. We were both dipping into the same trough at seven just this evening, as a matter of fact."

"I thawt you said you haven't seen him since last summer?"

"Of course I haven't. Not the sort of chap you want to see very often. The beauty quota of our family ran out with yours truly. The cove's an eyesore. I try to look the other way. Feel like I've seen him too much already. I'm too much i'the sun, as Shakeaspeare would put it. You read Shakespeare? Capital chap. Full of beans. How was that again? Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt and all that. Splendid bloke. Nothing quite like him to build the apetite. Particularly if your Butler is serving Bacon for dinner. Ha,ha! You got that? Butler serving Bacon for dinner. Old Gussie's crack. Capital chap, that Gussie. Bit sad about his cook. He eloped with the housekeeper, you know. Gussie sort of fancied her. Say, old boy, think you can find them too? I'll throw in five bob extra."

"Get out"

"I say, you have all you need, eh? What-ho! The scent's on the deer's tail, and the wolf's on the deer's trail. Let me say, my man, that I have the utmost admiration for your methods. The psychology of the individual. The missing link. The inconsistent detail. The dog that did not bark. The wrong color of tie. The snot in summer. The boils in winter. The nukes in Baghdad. Gaze not upon me with such astonishment, you old duffer. Not spring's brightest flower am I, but I am the Gardner at many Holmes. I may lack your spark, you sharp kettle of fish, but let no man say old B is slow to catch on. Why, it wasn't a .."

Abruptly, my trusty 0.38 Wesson let out a cough, and the sweet sound of silence filled the room. Business was still dull and the blonde still wanted a gift for Christmas. Some would have said this was not the season for killing clients. But there are times when a man has got to do what a man to do. Even if there's no cash in it. Christmas is mostly about internet shopping, but there is something in the program about Good Samaritan acts.

The night was cold, the fish were hungry, and the body was still warm. Did I tell you that down in the Hudson, they think of me as Robin Hood? I like to see the fish rush in when the body breaks the surface. Sometimes, I cut the limbs apart before throwing it in. Makes it easy for the fish to bite chunks off. Avoids competition and violence. It is a sentimental thing to do, but I'm a sentimental man.