HOME, LIFE AND LONLINESS

It's already four months since i came to Dahod, and I’m proud to announce that , I, for the first time ever, am living in my own house. King of the castle. Master of the domain. Walker in the nude. You get the idea.
I’m lucky because I got a big Government bungalow  in Dahod. My office is just down the road, which means I no longer have to spend hours in a local like those of metro cities, my nose buried in some stranger’s armpit (I prefer the armpits of people I know).

Certainly being in a remote rural place have its own advantages, metro lifestyle is not conducive to pursue any hobby. Well, duh. That’s like saying the Vatican isn’t conducive to abortions. A typical day in Metro involves braving a swarm of armpits in train compartments that even the Gestapo would’ve considered inhumane, with the rest of your time spent at a job that you hate from the bottom of your cholesterol-laden heart, but you dare not quit, because you need to pay the rent for an apartment the size of my friend's handbag. 

Apart from that i don't know anybody in Dahod, so i have to develop ‘My Network’. This is a common Bachelor thing, wherein you have a bunch of guys to do everything you’re too busy to do – finish the laundry, buy groceries, repair stuff, please your dog – everything. As of now, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows other guys, so it’s all going to be good.

This sudden availability of free time is most welcome, because as it turns out, living on your own involves a lot of work. Contrary to expectation, life is not like an episode of Friends. Or wait… it is like Friends, except that I’m Monica and I have to cook, clean, scrub, decorate, host and to make things worse, my domestic help looks nothing like Jennifer Aniston (although it would be creepy if he did)

Now there are many things in life that I’m good at, like writing, dancing,  performing, and having serious conversations with women about haircare. But cooking has never been my forte. However, I braved it out    (after being tormented by tasteless Gujarati cuisine) in the kitchen recently, learning to whip up tasty and healthy South Indian meals. Hah no, I’m kidding. My body composition is now 80% Chicken and 20% MTR Chicken Masala.

And there is a very good reason for my lack of real-world skills; it’s called The Indian Mother.
That’s right, because we Indian boys are the most mollycoddled and dependent species on the planet, possibly ahead of Norman Bates. In all my time at home, I never lifted a finger – not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t have to. Indian mothers will pamper their sons all the way into adulthood, resting only once they’ve made them Prime Minister.

On the upside, things like storage and decoration become a lot easier if you’re a man. For example, I don’t have a cupboard, but using only my masculine skills and bare hands, I’ve managed to create a fantastic garment-storage structure, technically known as ‘a pile of clothes’. Over time, this pile has evolved into an entire ecosystem and although I cannot be sure, I think some Bangladeshis have sneaked in and set up home there.
As far as decor goes, i’ve used a minimalistic theme for the drawing room, because I have no money  to buy extravagant furniture. It’s nearly bare, like a dinner table at the Hazare house. This emptiness inspires two very different reactions, described below.

Female Friends: Ooh, big empty room. We can decorate it with fairy lights, and new cushions and curtains and carpets and sofas and fabric – OHMYGOD I AM SO TURNED ON RIGHT NOW!

Guy Friends: Ooh, big empty room. We can play underarm cricket here. And this floor will be great for that spin thing I learnt in the 3^rd standard – OHMYGOD I AM SO TURNED ON RIGHT NOW!
. And if things get a bit too overwhelming, I’m calling Mommy.

My Ganesh Chaturdhi Celebrations

Amid  political uncertainty and price-hikes in the country, blessing in disguise is Ganesh chaturdi/ vinayaka chavithi. And i an celebrating it with my parents after a long time( in fact wthout them i couldn't have the fesitival food items). so i am happy . It’s easy to tell when Ganesh Chaturthi arrives. Giant mandaps come up in your neighbourhood overnight, office staff mysteriously calls in sick (‘Sir I have fever. For ten days.’) and most importantly, every single show on TV shoehorns in a plotline about Ganesha solving the entire family’s problems.
 

I love Ganesh Chaturthi. Actually, let me rephrase. I love lord Ganesha. He is, in my opinion, the coolest God we’ve ever had (sorry Shiva). He loves to eat, he has an elephant’s head, and he once broke off a tusk and threw it at the moon because it laughed at him. Anybody who is able to solve cosmological problems through amateur dentistry gets my vote. The next time your dentist tries to overcharge you, ask him if he’s ever been able to do that. If he says “no”, pay him one-tenth and leave in a huff.

We have several gods (one for every two Indians alive) in the Indian pantheon, but none of them have legends and stories as cool as Ganesha’s. My favourite Ganesha legend is the one in which he won his wife. His parents, who everyone knows are Krishnam raju  and Vanisri ( in the film vinayaka vijayam, which ETV telecasts on this day every year) , told him and his brother that whoever circles the world three times first would win the hand of a beautiful bride. His brother (manjulatha) set off on the task, dutifully circling the entire globe. Ganesha was smarter; he stayed home, finished watching all five seasons of Breaking Bad, and then walked around his parents thrice, claiming that they were his world. With this unique method, Lord Ganesha impressed his parents, won the maiden’s hand, and invented lateral-thinking and an IIM entrance-interview question, proving to everyone that he was Chuck Norris before Chuck Norris was Chuck Norris.
I love Ganesha because of all the gods in the Indian pantheon, he’s the only one whose intelligence is tempered by a wicked sense of humour. I have respected several gods over the ages, and I take away nothing from their wisdom, but with no offence to them, Lord Ganesha is the only one I’d consider adding on Facebook. In a typically over-reactive flash of bad Indian parenting, his own father cut his head off and replaced it with an elephant’s head, but Lord Ganesha just turned it into an advantage, and here we are today, celebrating him in a way nobody celebrates the gods with normal human heads.

I love Ganesha, but I wish I could say the same about his followers. Them, I’m not such a huge fan of. He is the remover of obstacles. The only obstacle his followers remove is the post-10 pm loudspeaker ban. His followers hire a truck the size of a house to immerse an idol the size of my fist. Not once do they pause to consider the irony of doing that for a god who, despite his prodigious size, happily chooses to ride a mouse. Ganesha is a patron of the sciences and the arts. The closest thing to art some of his followers have seen is Himesh Reshamiya’s last album. This is why they play it at 1,100 decibels all day at the pandals where they (ostensibly) celebrate him.
My point is simply this. You can love a god, any god, but that doesn’t mean you have to tolerate the nonsense his followers propagate in his name. And if they ever suggest to you that mocking them is tantamount to mocking the god himself, tell them that given that they worship the god of intelligence, it’d be good of them to get some.

DOMESTIC DISTURBANCE

I live alone now, in a Government bunglow. This means I am now in permanent charge of making a few thousand square-feet of the universe not burn-down, explode, collapse, or breed Ebola. I have responsibilities; I need to make sure bills are paid, I need to know when the garbagemen come, and I need to figure out why neighing sounds come out of my neighbour’s window at 3 am. Like any self-respecting single man, I will probably destroy everything in a six kilometre radius while trying to stay on top of things, if left to my own devices. So, like every government employee, I got lot of domestic helps, they themselves are paid government employees (their combined salary is three to four times my own salary).

One is a cleaner, two others are cooks. They’re both really sweet ladies, and they have a lot in common. They both get sick a lot, mostly on weekends. 1 is their favourite number, because it’s the one on the calendar that means ‘payday’. And they both have very large families. My cleaner alone has six grandmothers and twelve grandfathers. Heck, seven of them died this year, two within 48 hours of each other on Janmashtmi weekend. But still, it’s a pretty simple system. Government pays them both good money, and in exchange, they cook, they clean, and they intensely hate each other.

When you first get household help, you’re taught the first rule of household help club; no household help may be allowed to like any other household help. The last time I saw two people meet and fall in hate so quickly, Rahul Mahajan was getting married on TV. Their hatred for each other is more bizarre because their jobs only require them to be in the same room for two hours every day. For one twenty minutes every day, the cook cooks and the cleaner does the dishes. I’m not sure what point in that process is so complicated and stressful that it led to a two-hour brawl that ended in one of them saying “Sir yeh chudail peeche se g** khaati hai.”

I’ve learnt since that most fights between the household helps happen for one of three reasons:

1) One of them does too much work and thus threatens the other one, who is afraid she’ll get fired and replaced entirely by the first one.
2) Neither of the two does any work.
3 One tells the other how to do the work.

Reason number three is the most terrifying. Because one thing that pisses a woman off more than being told what to do by a guy, is being told what to do by another woman. And the only thing that pisses a woman off even more than that is when she’s told this in front of a man. The brawl they had this week began when the cleaner told the cook to use a spoon, and not her wet hands to take out aata.

When she heard this, a look passed over my cook’s face. It was a look that said “There was only one woman in the world who could tell me what to do, and I know for a fact that you’re not my mother-in-law, because four years ago, I killed her myself, so how dare you.” She countered this attack by throwing a tantrum about not being able to work in conditions like this, and about how her pride had been bruised by this affront. This was impressive only because it was the first time I have ever seen her exhibit any sort of chef-like behaviour. On most days she just stands around overcooking things in one of two flavours; tasteless, or Flamethrower Filled With The Burning Souls of Sex-Offenders.

My cleaner responded with a salvo about how the cook was a liar, a cheater, and a back-biting she-devil who she would never speak to again. I will never ever do any work with her or help her in any way, she swore. And if she talks to me, she said rather unnecessarily, I will slap her. I wanted to say something, but she was holding a knife, and takes the local passenger every day. So instead, I gave them duties that will now keep them separated, and wandered back into my living room, massaging my head as I sat down on the couch and wondered where I’d heard this relentless juvenile squabbling before. And then my hand hit the remote and MTV came on, and I just knew.

ORDEAL THAT IS CALLED ROADIES

 Yes ! it , the inevitable happended again , being jobless ( synonymus to a Public servant) , and being in a shitty place named Dahod some where in Tribal Gujarat, these days i am watching Saas bahu serials regularly , in betweeen , i again was subjected to agony of watching " The Roadies"- Chandigarh Edition .If the Earth is a petri dish and human-beings are bacteria, then Roadies is the point where the bacteria go rogue and become a terminal disease. Roadies is, to put it simply, an indefensibly awful show. I don't even know why they call it Roadies. They could just call it "Stupid People on TV: Chandigarh Edition".

This is a show where contestants are humiliated, beaten, sworn at, abused and screamed at by a pair of judges who look like a malnourished version of Right Said Fred. If contestants survive that onslaught, they get put on TV, where they are humiliated, beaten, sworn at, abused and screamed at by each other. All this because they "want to be a Roadies".

More entertaining is the fact that these kids almost seem to enjoy being put through the ordeal, like they think we're laughing with them. This may also have a lot to do with the fact that the average Roadies contestant has the IQ of oatmeal. I mean, you have to be reasonably stupid to take shit from two guys who thought being in Tees Maar Khan was a good idea. How stupid is the average Roadies contestant? Well, one confessed she'd attempted to once kill herself. When asked why, she said it was because a friend did black magic on her. Another, when asked a question he had no answer to, simply pointed at his sneakers and says "Look, I am cool. I have Skechers brand shoes. Just got from US. Not launched in India also." Unsurprisingly, he went far on the show.

And the point is… well, the point is what exactly? If they survive the ordeal, one guy gets a motorcycle, another becomes a VJ on MTV, the one that comes third celebrates by going on another reality show, and two others realize nobody watches MTV anymore, so they go off and make an MMS and become properly famous instead.

In the end though, I'm as guilty as anybody else. I love Roadies. I'm transfixed by it in the same way that I am by the sight of two dogs mating; it's horrible, and yet riveting. It's like watching common sense hang itself live on TV, and everybody loves a good hanging.

JISM 2 , SUNNY LEONE AND ME

Guys my book is in final shape, (it sounds like “bomb is ready”) of course, final shape means, it got rejected by two reputed publishers, and was awarded for having maximum number of typographical/grammatical errors. What surprised me was a comment by the third not so well known publisher that “The literary content of my book is on the higher side of sexuality” (my god, I must commend his pre natal sex determination capabilities). Im still figuring out what he exactly meant, but issue here is of hypocrisy. This is a country where everyone likes to pretend sex doesn't even exist. Even though, with a population of 1.2 billion people, we are the world's second-largest evidence of the fact that it does. The other day I made a comment on Sunny leone’s Jism 2, one of my friend’s reaction was, sheesh ! U saw Sunny leone’s porn also????  As a matter of fact, I am a man. And men watch porn. It's like peeing standing up. It's what we do. If that surprises you, you should probably get back in your ship and go back to whatever nebula it is that you came from.

People might have remembered three ministers in Karnataka were caught watching pornography on a cellphone in the Karnataka Assembly. The resultant scandal has been dubbed porngate (on a side-note, great name for a website), and has got me thinking; we need a new way of naming scams and scandals. We've used 'gate' for over 30 years now, and it's getting a bit stale. Also, what will we do when a water scam breaks? That one's already taken, and even though we live in an era of reboots, I reckon it'll all get a bit awkward. While it is embarrassing, porngate is also slightly impressive because it proves that unlike Kapil Sibal, these men know how to use technology. It takes some navigating to be able to download and sync videos onto your phone, and I didn't think politicians knew that the 21st century had been invented yet. Then again, I can't think of a better way to get men to learn technology than telling them that if they do, there's hardcore X-rated action to be found on the other side. It's how the entire 20th century was won, and why should things be any different now? Some reports pause to point out the irony that one of the men caught watching the video was (until porngate) the Women and Child Development Minister. The media seems surprised and outraged because just a month ago, he'd said women should dress conservatively to avoid sexual assault. I'd like to step in here and say that his statements (and position) are irrelevant to what happened. He could advocate that we ban women altogether, and it still wouldn't matter, because he is a man. Also, his statement only proves that he's a hypocrite, and if a hypocritical politician surprises you, you are alien to this earth. Three ministers were caught watching pornography in the Assembly. What I love about this country is that we're outraged at the first half of that sentence, not the second half. A lot of the outrage seems to stem from the fact that they watched porn at all, and not at the larger issue, which is that they watched it in the Assembly, i.e. at work. I'm going to stick my neck out here and say grow up, pornography isn't the problem. It is not an inherently bad thing. Pornography is, for many, their first introduction to the very concept of sex. Pornography powers the digital economy. Pornography practically keeps all of Eastern Europe employed. What is outrageous is that they watched it in the Assembly. Not because it is one of the highest institutions in the land, or because we should hold it sacred (look at who we elect, it's practically the opposite), but because, very simply, they weren't focusing on work. If I watched pornography at work, and didn't alt-Tab the browser window fast enough, I'd get fired just because I was wasting work-hours. And hadn't been nice enough to tell my colleagues how to bypass the office-firewall. Their defense has also been lamentable. Some MLA/MP of BJP belonging to Goa, leapt to their rescue with "They were only watching it. Not doing it." I will leave that sentence there for you to understand the full horror of its implications. The ministers themselves have said that they were watching the video for 'research' on violence against women, and they were highlighting the point by watching footage from a 'rave party' off the coast of Karnataka. This is the political equivalent of "those magazines are not mine, I'm just keeping them for a friend." The ministers also said that rave parties are bad, and responsible for a host of problems. If by 'rave parties' they mean the BJP and the Congress, I have to say, I agree.

ART OF COPYING

Eating India alive is its love of copying, from examination halls to office reports, from homework to thesis, from music to movies, from literature to art, from fashion statements to the love of blogging. In India so many things are being copied so fast that its becoming China. The only difference being that China does it with goods and not with human forms of art but since we are more democratic, we do it with everything especially art.

In India though, copying all forms of art is an art in itself. This art is called the art of inspiration, which is defined by the dictionary as - "the arousal of the mind to special unusual activity or creativity". For real artists the "unusual activity" will be a brainstorming session or watching the rainfall out of their window, for the surreal artist though, any good song in the market, which he/she fallaciously thinks no one else has heard, is good enough. Since this activity of the surreal artist requires no inspiration, its thus called inspiration as a mark of sarcasm, mocking the real artists as they require inspiration from within and things around them.

For the surreal artists, the word "copyright" is a term too literal and they someday would want to include "the right to copy" as a fundamental right of every Indian citizen as a mark of respect to . In fact they just might cite that our very own constitution is an amalgamation of various constitutions from countries around the world and since its so, its an act of "inspiration". (I reserve my comments on this)

But the capability of imagination of these surreal artists is commendable. They have the audacity of brilliance in them to imagine that even if they pick up a song that’s a rage world over, numb it down to their level and dumb it down to sound like what they want, the average person will not be able to recognize the original song from the "inspired" song.

An Indian director is now copying Juno, (the worst part is that these directors don’t even change the characterisation or theme) which very well could have an original Indian story only if people had the courage to get inspired from real life rather than from surreal world. An Indian music director is now being sued over by some bands from outside and who lodged the first complaint about this music director's latest lift? His fellow co-music director. 

Why stop there? Its not just music or movies but dressing motifs and (funnily enough) attitude problem (or the stylish perception of it) too is now considered the "in" thing and is thus copied merrily. Even Social Networking profiles too have taken a hit (including mine, which now has been copied hundred times over by people who have no idea what they are copying from every major social site). Australian board of education has now realised that most of Indian thesis' for M.sc and P.hd programs are copied from one source or the other. 

Its about time that we stopped dignifing copying and call stuff "inspired" or even "plagiarised" because even the word plagiarism is used so that the common man, who doesn't understand big words, don't get the real meaning. From now, let's call copying as copying :)

IDLE MAN"S BRAIN IS DEVILS'S WORLSHOP

Idle man’s brain is devils workshop. Yes! It is. Lemme explain how it works, I got holidays for continuous seven days at a stretch, some where around September first week because of Ramzan and Ganesh chaturdi and Saturday and Sunday (Being a Public servant in a secular country, I happen to get weekdays in between holidays) I was adamant to go to home as I returned form home just a fortnight before. All of my fellow musketeers went to home leaving me lonely in Pune. Then Devil started working …. The following list of dairy will tell u how effective that devil was!!

1. tasted Italy's finest Brunnells, for first time in my life,

2. Completed Bergman's SILENCE (which I had been trying to finish by watching it part by part for last 7 months)

3. Was told to behave when i entered in to ladies compartment in local train to Lonavala for desperation to buy time

4. Thrown out of disco at 2 am for not being with any gal.

8. Slept at a renowned hospital overnight on reception desk

9. Bought and lost a lottery ticket

10. Lost my wallet at a mall and recovered it after 5 hours

11. Went from Koregaon Park to Pimpri on my bike at 3am

12. Ate one large pizza all by myself.

13. Helped by a nice old lady at Lonavala station where I felt tired who gave me a lift to Guest house

14. Went from Pune to Lavasa in a taxi and accidentally broke the meter which I had to pay for as well

15. Almost fell out of local train.

16. Booked for a play and accidentally went to an art gallery show (which was being held in a hall above the theatre) at cant area which was lovely

17. Walked from Koregaon Park to Hadapsar at 1 am

18. 2 streteched nightouts and 1 separate within a week

19. Downloaded 19 movies, watched 4

20. Met an Italian girl at Osho ashram who liked Mahabharata