The Return Of The King, And More Bad News

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

Plague : Brownistan :: Brownistan : Us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adieu!

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

-- The Diary, Date Unknown, Year Unknown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Man, One Name: A Battle Against Nominal Imperialism

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

-- The Diary, mid-April, 503 BC

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

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

But perhaps we should begin at the beginning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Classmate Naveen : Names :: Imelda Marcos : Shoes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yaaa?

Yaa.

Modernity, Ayn Rand And Michaelangelo's Aunty

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

The Diary, Besant Nagar Beach, January 491 BC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much for happiness in genius.

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

The Death Of An Ordinary Young Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The End of Irreference

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

-- The Diary, March 501 BC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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