Tag: Humour

P.A.League

I already had a tentative membership into the P.A League, but this week-end my membership was confirmed. Yoohoo! Can you all cheer with me?

The P.A.League confirms membership when the following conditions have been achieved
1) Look dashed silly (in public of course) There isn’t much point in being silly with only the walls as an audience.
2) Do things that sane men and women scowl upon in real life, but would perfectly enjoy on reel.
3) Have a bunch of folks point their fingers at you, and make little effort to hide their glee.

I must tell you achieving the third is the roughest. If you think having a couple of folks who barely know how to eat out of their own plates jeer at you is easy, I’d have to suggest some classes for you. I suspect it would be harder for a stiff upper lip kind of person I assure you.

I realise I have gone on just needling your interest in the P.A. League, and you brain is now aching to know what it is. Is it the Personal Assistants Club, or the Polymath Agrarian League?

I’ll feel cruel if I withhold any longer. So here goes. It is called the Prized Asses League. To feel like  a prized ass, you can either do things like this:

https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/2006/01/24/a-new-genre-in-the-footwear-industry/

Or, take up the daunting task of engaging children at the Kitchen Khiladi fest. I cannot say the whole event was like this. I wasn’t feeling like a P.A member for 90% of the activities I indulged in with the children, but towards the very end, I was running out of options, and started a freeze dance program. In hindsight, that did not seem like such a good idea. For one, I went in with the assumption that all I had to do was stand in the sidelines and start and stop the music. This game is a sophisticated one where children are supposed to dance when the music is on and freeze when it stops. I obviously thought that they would dance and they would freeze. Turns out, I had to lead them. I am not sure how Goliath felt when he was swinging in with the Davids, but I felt close. At one point, I froze in a funny posture to induce some fun and giggling into the proceedings, and two of them pointed at me and started howling (with laughter thankfully, I can’t tell you how bad it would have been if the children cried on seeing me dance)

Every once in a while, letting my inhibitions go with children is refreshing. It teaches me the importance of having a sense of humor and taking life lightly. I am thinking that would immensely help these folks too.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100519/ap_on_hi_te/as_pakistan_facebook

Limbo between Roti Land, Poori Land and Parotta Land

I tend to agree with Vasundhara Chauhan. Who is Vasundhara Chauhan? Why would I agree with her? These are valid questions and deserve to be addressed. V.Chauhan penned this article in the Hindu where she deplores the flood of standard dal makhani, butter chicken, and naan wherever one looks for good indian food.

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2010/04/25/stories/2010042550280700.htm

Imagine my surprise therefore when I stepped into an Indian restaurant, and they asked me whether I wanted Naan or Chappati to go with dal makhani and mutter panneer. I went in for the Chappati – the old jaws need a break sometimes and soft chappatis would fit the bill nicely. The chappatis arrived, and if anything, they were worse for the jaws than a bunch of sugarcane chunks.

The chappatis did not stop me from taking a mental trip down the Cauvery river, however. Yes, the chappatis were a sturdy breed that is the hallmark of the South Indian Chappati Making Foundation. You see the folks of the S.I.C-M-Foundation have a process:

1) You first sit on the floor with a huge bowl of flour, and one leg outstretched from beneath the saree.
2) You tip a generous serving of oil in the flour.
3) You knead it to a rubbery consistency that is bordering on hard. Sort of like those mock cork balls.
4)  You take up approx 323 sq ft with spread out magazines, and flour and generally shoo the crows and children wanting to play with the flour away.
5) Then, you proceed to roll out triangular chappatis that have a tendency to shine with oil
6) Once this arduous process is done, you can proceed to the actual task of putting them on the tava. Oil should be used again and poor triangular blighters have to be flipped back and forth till you have a coloration that tells you not to expect something soft.

The SICMF does not like to see soft chapatis without oil. The chaps have to be mid way into being poories, stop short and decide in the last minute to become parottas, and stay in the limbo between Roti Land, Poori Land and Parotta Land.

The process takes a brisk 58 minutes for 15 chappatis, and is usually served with ‘Gurma’.

For the records, I was not scarred excessively with the chappati-poori-parotta treatment, since my mother broke her ties with SICMF early in her career, and we had fantastic, soft rotis instead of chappatis.

Daffodils and AT&T

Every once in a while, I am in the middle of an eloquent sentence, and just letting the poetic slide from my tongue.You know how it is.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,

Silence. I realise there is no reciprocation. It’s as if the other person isn’t there. Okay, I agree that wasn’t me it was old Wordsworth with his silly daffodils, but it could have been me with the ripe troubles of life, like the vast canvas poem I once wrote.

Why? That can’t be right. I mean, that thing that I just said was pretty hot stuff, and the folks I am talking to aren’t that insensitive to my needs of dialogue. I reach for my handkerchief, to wipe away the tears, when I find my call failed.

Call Failed. Try again? The phone looks at me with a touch of innocence.

Well, I can try again, but you should know that hot stuff like daffodils don’t just roll off the same way again. What comes out is a dull, and slightly drooping daffodil, just wilting by the window in the sun. Just imagine what humanity would have lost if Wordsworth had tried calling in the poem to his fiancee to write down immediately before he forgets, and AT&T dropped the call? (One could argue of course that the vast canvas poem was worth being dropped, but that is entirely a matter of perception. )

I have an iphone that I love for all of its features except its signal quality. I thought it was just me till Jon Stewart endorsed my view on his daily show. I have to say that I totally love his jab at AT&T and Apple.
http://www.dailytech.com/Jon+Stewart+Goes+After+Steve+Jobs+Apple+ATT+and+Appholes/article18263.htm
Excerpt:
I mean, if you wanna break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone! I mean, seriously! How do you drop four calls in a one-mile stretch of the West Side Highway! There’re no buildings around! What, does the open space confuse AT&T’s signal?!

Today, I was sitting and minding my own business when AT&T calls and badgers me about some random thing like plan changes or something, and AT&T drops their own call. HA! And HA! again.

Justice.

Warm milk

Any coffee lover seeing me order a coffee prefers to shrivel up and die a slow decaffeinated death. I find a size that isn’t even on the charts on the board, and order one smaller than that. As if this embarrassment were not enough, I would stress on the extra milk and 1/2 shot of coffee.

“There ISN’T even a half shot of coffee available!” the husband would say looking embarrassed, and shuffling his feet. Clearly, for a macho coffee lover, it is uncool to be seen in public with a coffee douche. In fact the general consensus on the male coffee lovers club seems to be that bad enough the spouse is a coffee-douche, but is shamelessly admitting it? It could be a blow to any male’s ego.

I now know how a peacock must feel. Going around strutting with all those colorful feathers and generally trumping up the importance of color in life. Even the far off rainbow seems impressed. Then, the female of the species comes along, in a stunning white, and still looks graceful as hell without any of the colors. That must have ticked off the peacock a good deal.

What I am getting at is…The male is proud of taste buds, yada yada yada, female blah-blah.

A few months ago, I decided to make matters worse and cut coffee. ‘I’ll go for Tea’ I announced high-handedly. It wasn’t like I was making a sacrifice. In fact it is documented fact that my brain reacts to tea like a camel spotting an oasis. The welcoming cup in the morning springs on the new day, and the whole day just goes on, basking in the warmth of the morning tea.
 
When the oracles of stress relief pounced on my ounce of tea in the morning, I decided to let go. “Caffeine is the worst!”, they proclaimed. Reading about caffeine one day, I decided to cut the miserable loner of a cup of tea in the morning and rough it out. I bunged in the Philosophical line “What is life without a few sacrifices?”, and had a warm glass of milk in the morning instead.

I might as well have popped a few sleeping pills. Not one of these folks told me the effects of warm milk on sleepy brain cells. The cells went into a kind of a stupor. I was snoring with my eyes open, and at one point might even have been drooling.

That wouldn’t do. I mean I still have to make a living and snoring droolers don’t make a living. I think I’ll stick to the cuppa tea in the morning and battle the effects of caffeine. Or I may switch to decaffeinated tea and see how that goes.

Mystery of the Missing Heel in the Universe

Recently, the brain has been quite busy wrapping itself around the book ‘Life, The Universe and Everything’ by Douglas Adams. When I say wrapping itself around, that is a loose word, since the bulk of my reading is conducted in sporadic bursts in the noisiest of places with thousands of people milling around, gently prodding me in the ribs to move on, while somebody looks apologetically as they squeeze their shoes on my feet.

“Sorrreeee!” they smile as they park the foot on mine.

“It’s okaaayyyy!” I respond with a smile struggling through the grimace of pain, and hang on with great resolve in the crowded public transit.

Douglas Adam’s SEP doctrine is interesting. SEP is Somebody Else’s Problem, and we being the self centered goons that we are, anything that is somebody else’s problem we safely ignore, so long as it does not provide one with fodder for thought or comment. We simply go on believing it does not exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else’s_Problem

However, today I can proclaim : Thine eyes have seen the glory of SEP. I was determined to see for myself, and when the mind is made up, it sees the SEP.

I was treated to a 180-pounder tender a shrill “Sorreee” as she pinned her pin-point apology on me in this morning. I was tottering along, after the onslaught, musing on masochistic footwear and how otherwise sunny people willingly jam their feet like sausages into the narrow confines of their footwear, when I was rewarded with a sight I would otherwise have missed.

There was a girl in front of me. She was walking as though no problem existed. Only a problem existed. Yes it did. I saw it. I spotted it. You see one of her shoes had heels like this

The other had heels like this.

Chipped. Broken. Gone. Yet, she artificially pumped her broken heel leg up so she could give the illusion of not having a broken heel. I know how hard it must be walking like that, given that I have solid years of practice to back me up in my claims. Credit: Those vast hours of our youth that we spent on noble pursuits (including walking like air-hostesses, which meant walking around on imaginary heels). I don’t know why in our girlish minds, air hostesses were credited with high heels always, but those were the days of the far away dreams of flight – the unattainable for the average middle class Indian. High heels being equally unattainable, the combination must have been the ultimate fodder for our imagination.

I had an inclination to tap the girl on her shoulder and helpfully tell her that her heel was broken. It would have been priceless to see the look on her face, like she did not know.  Start the ‘Mystery of the Missing Heel in the Universe’ series what?

Happy Women’s Day

Happy Women’s Day to all you wonderful women out there.

I have been getting lots of mails telling me people are proud of me because I cry when I am sad and laugh when something is funny. Also, my hugs are supposed to be fused with the magical healing touch. Bruises heal themselves. I wonder how I broke the cup the other day with all these abilities I possess. Maybe, I did not hug the shards of the broken cup hard enough.

Apparently, all this makes me a wonderful woman. I also eat when I am hungry – I suppose that makes me more human.

The mails I am receiving also tell me as a woman I don’t quite know my power or capacity – I agree. Once when I was around a decade old, my friend and I had a dosa eating competition to which my sister unwittingly offered to be the dosa maker. I did surprise myself, and lost by a small margin, but my dosa competitor was a year older than I was.  I don’t think the sister has learned to view the dosa tava with the same benevolence since. If I remember right, I groaned all evening clutching my stomach in a wonderful show of feminine bravery.

Which all brings me to the question, do Men have a day dedicated for them?

There is an International Men’s Day. It is celebrated on November 19th, and was started as recently as 1999 – almost a century after their Women counterparts started celebrating themselves.

Frivolous as the content of this post is, I do hope my female brethen are uplifted from the horrors of misogyny inflicted upon them by men and members of their own creed. I’d like to end this post on this note (Seneca)

Dum inter homines sumus, colamus humanitatem

As long as we are human, let us be humane

No Comic Task this

Well…well. It has been a while since I picked up a comic book. The guffawing over Tintin much to the chagrin of the mother who was trying to get a quiet afternoon rattling with the noisy Singer machine, while the rain pounded at the window and the wind whooshed menacingly, is tucked away in the recesses of a past.

Tintins were great. The Thompson and Thomson, Professor Calculus and of course the Captain (“BLISTERING BARNACLES” – I’ve forgotten his name, Harold ? Haddock! Yes!). The point is, I haven’t lost myself in the comic book world for a long time. A friend of mine lent me his book “Persepolis” and I must thank him for it.

The complexity of generations of bumbling in Iranian history, so well presented through the endearing voice of Marjane Satrapi had me lost in the book.

If one is looking to get a glimpse of Iranian culture, this isn’t the book. But to get a perspective of turmoil and how human beings find a way of adapting – this is a good book. Stark contrasting images, the humour and of course the appalling mystery of what humans perpertrate on one another in the name of ruling are etched into my memory.

The book had my eyes stinging in the final page (Caution: my tear ducts are very loosely controlled. I cried for Finding Nemo and Shrek!) But I loved Persepolis and am waiting to read her remaining works.

The beauty of questioning

I spend a lot of time vacillating between an agnostic secular person and a religious person, who doesn’t believe 80% of what my religion has become over the ages. Suffice it to say that the days I spend in my former state far outnumber the days I spend in the latter.

Here is my problem: I like to believe in the power of hope and if belief is what brings hope, I am all for it. On the other hand, over the ages, I can categorically state that religion has done more damage to mankind than good. The moment religion ceases to be a personal experience, I can see it wreaking havoc.

I quite like the idea of finding yourself. Easily, that is the path taken by all the “founders” of religion – be it Buddha or the Sufi saints of Islam or the Bhagavad Gita. But how does one explain “finding oneself” to the masses? That is where the problem begins. So, the explanation became finding one’s moral conscience – still good. But a few centuries later, moral conscience evolves into a set of rules written by the elitist community of the religion. Slowly, the congregation becomes more of a unifying force, one to forge your identity with, than to use as a tool to better yourself.

At my wedding, the priest was a person who was my grandfather’s friend. My grandfather was a kind-hearted, generous, loving, able teacher, caring husband/father and he was a pious man. But somehow, whenever people described him, they put his piety ahead of his other virtues. This priest came to my wedding and said he would do all it takes in his power to make sure that great man’s grand-daughter lived a fantastic life, and put us through the most grueling wedding ceremony in recent times. I didn’t understand more than a few words of what was said – there was no need for me to elongate the proceedings by asking for clarifications in between on a hot day in front of the fire, with no food in my stomach. The ceremony lasted a good 9 hours of listening to things I didn’t understand. Everyone who came to congratulate me, said the priest was excellent, he hadn’t missed a single thing – who would understand how my intestines were reacting at the time? Which religion?

What I am trying to say is, some people are ritualistic by nature – to them, rituals become religion – this isn’t orthodoxy, this is just an interpretation of their own religion. It is also show-case worthy.

I have spent my growing years chanting some prayers that my mother taught me on the way to the school in the morning, as we ran for the train. That is all I know today, and probably that is all I will ever know – who knows? Every now and then, I think that just because I am part-agnostic, I should not deny the experience of a religion to my daughter. So, I take her to the local temple. She asks a million questions along the way as usual. We are in the temple, and she looks at the statues and asks – “If Ummachi (God) made everything and gave us everything, how come he isn’t even moving?”

I savoured the question – the beauty of questioning always delights me. I am sorry that when it comes to religion so few people still have the power of questioning left in them.

A Condensed Version Please!

I would hereby like to thank James Band and the Nadaswaram party for the sore throat they have gifted me with – One that reminds me of the thumping music at the wedding every waking moment. Any attempts at ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ sound like ‘Bray Bray Black ..’ almost a month after the proceedings.

The wedding hall was filled with people – small talk filled the halls, and James Band and the nadaswaram were playing at full pitch whenever they got the opportunity to perform. People had to shout to make themselves heard to the person sitting right next to them. One would have thought that the effort would have kept people quiet. But it takes sterner stuff to get South Indians to keep quiet. As the sound of the talk increased, the nadaswaram crew made the band sound louder. Apparently, the duty of the band was to drown out the cacophony or any unceremonious sound.

Fact: The band itself may be construed for cacophony was evidently not thought about when the tradition was “made”.

I have already mentioned about how the south indian wedding is high on the ritual factor – read, boring. Essentially, the average guest is left with the option of staring open mouthed at the wedding proceedings in Sanskrit, while the sastrigal & groom pound at the rituals. The groom mostly looks ready to flee given the slightest chance, while the priest is holding him back with an almost sadistic pleasure and gloats over the power he exercises over the couple.
It goes like this:

Om . blah blah blah blah blah blah-yae namaha
Om . blah blah blah blah blah blah-yae namaha
*Pour ghee into fire*
Om . blah blah blah blah blah blah-yae namaha
Om . blah blah blah blah blah blah-yae namaha
*Wash your fingers*
Om . blah blah blah blah blah blah-yae namaha
Om . blah blah blah blah blah blah-yae namaha
*Pour ghee into fire*
For 6 hours.
Not to mention the fierce fire we have going, in front of which the bride and groom sit. No fans are allowed for obvious reasons near the fire. Probably, that is the reason the groom sits with his chest bared and his transparent dhoti. But it beats me why the bride is seated near the same fire with the stuffiest of silks. These traditions had no mean point I tell you – either it was a bare-all or a wrap-all.

Malai Maatral
Description:The groom and bride, in those early days, were barely teenagers when they got married. The couple were carried by the maternal uncles to exchange garlands at one point. This was a chance for people to know who the maternal uncles were and the children probably enjoyed the break by throwing garlands at each other perched on their uncles shoulders.
Fact: This should probably be done away with, considering the couple is now in the prime of their youth, with glowing muscles and a couple of hours each day at the gym/dining table as the case may be, and the uncles are complaining more often about arthritis and moaning muscles themselves.

Kannoonjal
Description:The laddoo throwing is another part of the proceeedings that could be done away with. The purpose was originally intended to introduce the important lady-folk of the family. With 20 directly-related aunts and 35 indirectly-related aunts and 45 indirectly-direct-related aunts and 55 directly-indirect-related aunts, it was important to show who was who.
Fact: Now, this is no more than a laddoo squishing, bad bowling experience, not to mention the mess created by stamping one of the infernal things and spreading the joy.

Bullock-cart symbolism:
Sometime in the 6 hours on stage, one encounters a point when something like a stick is placed over the groom’s head and the bride’s head. What this symbolizes is this: just like a bullock cart can only be pulled when both the animals contribute equally, so too is marriage. Both the groom and the bride must shoulder their reponsibilities to carry on a smooth life.

The point being this: There are so many rituals, and non-stop chanting, that the symbolic ones, or the ones that bear meaning are either missed or glossed over. The “getti melam” could be used to identify the significant ones, if they didn’t keep asking for a getti melam every 2 minutes.

Kattu Saadam:
Those days, restaurants were rare and almost non-existent between villages, and carrying food for the journey was important.
Fact: No offense to the food really – but this tradition is an absolute must to be done away with. Who wants to eat dried up idlis when you can stop at Saravana Bhavan for a steaming meal instead?! Why can’t we wrap up the proceedings the previous day and get back to our lives?
Interesting aside:
We stopped for eating at a restaurant (since we needed to drink coffee and use the restrooms anyway!), and the younger generation was absolutely thrilled to find that in the melee of leaving, we had left the idlis & the rice behind – yippee! The fathers were privately happy too, but refrained from saying anything inappropriate, lest the mothers construed it as an offense to their own cooking! The looks thrown by the mothers to the children was clearly not one to mess with.

“What is wrong with idlis?” they demanded.
We chuckled saying – “Nothing, just glad they aren’t here!”

We tucked into naan, paneer curry and 8 different types of Dosas at a suave restaurant, and left quite happily.

After so many weddings, there wasn’t one person who was able to cogently explain the symbolism and meaning behind all the rituals. The ones who did attempt invariably love their voices too much and refuse to stop explaining! Soon, one’s curiosity to understand the proceedings is fast overtaken by an urge to strangle the person “explaining”. Finally, my mother told me to look it up on the Internet – which I did, and found a whole world of satirical writings on the South Indian Wedding. (But this link gave a brief explanation) http://www.sawnet.org/weddings/tamil_vedic.html

Since, each tradition has morphed into a status symbol, the unnecessary expenditure has increased manifold. If we were to tabulate the necessary vs unnecessary expenditure, the unnecessary far outweighs the necessary. 3 day weddings are the norm – even though it is not a village where the families use this as a chance to make merry for a week.

By the way, what do we say to the colleague who asked: “So, you guys exchange vows is it?!”

Happy New Year!