MY SPAM STORY

I'm at home on this long weekend combining Holi, Good Friday , Sat Sn, and have no life. I'm so bored that I've cleaned my whole home (clothes cupboards included), and before I proceed to Plan B i.e. operating on my own kidneys, I figured I'd take a shot at something else. I'm so bored, that I want to see if its possible to construct an entire story using only the subject lines of spam-email. So, yeah... here goes...

Spam Story

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A BIG FAT INDIAN WEDDING

Marriages are synonymous to the Indian culture, age old saying suggests that a father's success is measured by the Yash Chopraishness of his ward's  wedding. The recent wedding I attended and involved was of my close friend based in Hyderabad.

But seriously, before I say anything that might've construed as a criticism of the vast and constantly expanding wedding-industrial complex which currently accounts  for 38% of the India's GDP, let me state for the record that I loved my friend's wedding. He found a wonderful bride in Nivedita-a smart, beautiful, warm, talented, and funny women who is absolutely perfect for him. They had the best wedding in the human history, and I am not saying this solely because I had many sweets and was introduced to approximately twenty-seven single girls.

So I have no complaints about the wedding. I must say, however, that the planning of wedding was a tad stressful for his father, as planning a modern wedding is comparable in scope to constructing a nuclear power plant, although the wedding is more complex because, to pick just one of the many examples- a nuclear power plant does not require floral installations. These used called "flowers" , but that was before florists-excuse me, I mean the floral installation artists- realised that "floral installations" is more professional, as measured by how much you can charge for installing them.

Which brings us to budgeting. Here's his father's advice for parents who are going to be planning a wedding: At the very beginning, decide exactly how much money is the absolute maximum you are willing to spend. Write this number down on a piece of paper and keep it up with you all the times. That way, when the wedding is over, you can pull it out, look at the number, and laugh until a streamer of drool reaches all the way down your feet, which will be bare in as much as you can no longer afford shoes.

Here's the problem. The Indian films which depend for their existence on wedding melo-dramas, have for decades been hammering home the three core principles of the modern Indian wedding

FIRST PRINCIPLE: Your wedding is the most important day in your life, so you want it to be perfect.

SECOND PRINCIPLE: However, it does not have to cost a lot of money.

THIRD PRINCIPLE: However, if it doesn't, it will suck.

These principles resonate powerfully with your modern bride-t-be, because ever since she was a little girl, she has been fantasizing about her wedding day. This is not true of our modern groom to be. When he was a little boy, he was-I state this with authority-conducting experiments to see what happens when you set fire to He-Man action figures.

But  the bride has been dreaming for years about having a fairy-tale wedding, patterned after the wedding scene in the Suraj R Barjatya's VIVAH. Wherein Cinderella and Prince charming ride off into the sunset in the horse-drawn carriage, while the cute little girl wave good-bye. What they don't show you in this film is parents in bare feet paying the bills for the carriage rental, the horse supplier, the little girl's costume, the sunset installation professional, etc. Because all of these things cost money. And if you hold a wedding in Hyderabad, as they did , all of these things will cost extra money, because you will be paying for unionized floral installation artists.

True Story: I inquired, at the hotel where marriage is being held, about the cost of renting a projector and screen the family rented so they could show pictures of Pradeep and Nivedita as guests arrived. The hotel said, counting the fee for the two workers-required to set the equipment up, it would cost  a sum, I calculated would be enough to buy a projector and screen as well as a used car to drive them home in.

My point is that putting in a modern wedding is an expensive and complicated undertaking, which is why many people, including Pradeep's father, these days hire a professional wedding planner, whose function is to make it even more expensive and complicated. The planner works closely with the bride, as well as the only other really essential person in the wedding, by which I of course mean the bride's mother.

At this point the groom is pretty much out of the picture, If the wedding were a solar system, the bride would be the sun; her mom would be another, slightly smaller nearby sun; the wedding planner would be the third sun; the caterer, floral installation professional, photographer, videographer , ...etc would be the planets orbiting these suns; and the groom would be an asteroid the size of a tennis ball 73 trillion light years away. Sometimes the groom gets so far out of the wedding-planning loop that the planner forget to invite him to the actual wedding and bride, at the last minute, has to marry a member of the catering staff.( That didn't of course, happened in this marriage).

MOMENTS OF NOSTALGIA

So i came all the way to receive my bestest school buddy Karthik reddy, who is coming all the way from Sweden...not for me, but to "see " his prospective bride(Notice , how people never say they're going to "meet a girl", but merely to "see her" . as if she were a Qutab Minar). I am super excited to see him, as it reminds me of my school days. It is our first reunion since we passed out of school in 2001.

 Yes, 2001. I am in fact so old, that I went to school in a whole other millennium (and I had to walk six miles to get there and back, both ways uphill.) If I’d tried to write this blog in during my school days , my computer would have taken a year to type each word out, and when I hit “Save”, I’d have to dive behind a table and hide just in case it exploded from the hernia-inducing effort of it all. We were all very afraid of Y2K back then, a bug that was supposed to destroy every computer on Earth (except Chacha Chaudhary) when the year 2000 came. Turns out that the programmer who came up with that theory was Mayan, so never mind.

Meeting school-friends after 14 years brings back a flood of memories, some of things that seemed insurmountably terrifying then, but seem trivial now. Why was I so afraid of Algebra papers? Why was it so difficult to remember where India’s largest coal reserves were? (Answer: Talcher, Neyveli, and Gangs of Wasseypur) And why the hell did we spend six years calling my friend Surendra “Pakodi”?

We both were bullied by Suresh on a semi-regular basis, but it all seems so silly now, there’s no way I could hold a grudge. So if Suresh reading this, Bro (name changed to protect privacy), I promise you, again, that I wasn’t the one who slashed your tyres. And no, that petrol-soaked kerchief you found sticking out of your tank wasn’t mine. I don’t care if it says “Property of Vamsi Krishna” on it.

There are things about school in the 90s that I miss terribly. Things that I long for them and mourn for in a way that makes my heart hurt; like the fact that Tennis ball for cricket was just Rs nine. There were four of us, so we carried two bucks each. And then fought about whose turn it was to pay the extra one rupee, because then that person couldn’t afford to buy “Pepsi-Cola” that day during the match.

Pepsi-cola, for the uninitiated, had nothing to do with Pepsi. Or cola. It was a polythene tube filled with a delicious combination of flavoured ice and the promise of jaundice. If you read jaundice and thought of it as a bad thing, remind yourself that this is school we’re talking about; the two weeks off would have been the greatest thing on Earth.

Pepsi-cola tasted like an angel’s kiss, cost a princely 50 paise, and created the most excellent post-school pastime; sticking your orange or cola coloured tongue out at the one idiot kid who’d gotten the colourless lime flavour.

My favourite part of school though, was summer vacations. Summer meant endless hours of cricket, zero homework, and most importantly, in the days of pre-cable Doordarshan, summer meant Tom and Jerry and Gaint Robot. Giant Robot was a show about (big twist coming up) a Giant Robot. And he was controlled by this little Japanese child named Johnny Sokko. And together they fought the Gargoyle Gang and the evil emperor Guillotine, who came from an ancient alien race of underpaid actors who laughed in villainous fashion while wearing the world’s fugliest papier-mâché octopus mask. For reasons that were never addressed, even though he was Japanese, Giant Robot looked like the Sphinx during gay-pride week, and the show had the worst visual effects work this side of Rakhi Sawants last face-lift. But it was, to my ten year-old brain, the greatest thing ever committed to screen.

I know every generation ever says this about their time, but being a kid in the 90s was the greatest thing ever. Kids today don’t know how to do it. You really haven’t lived until you’ve grabbed your bat and gone home just because you got out on the first ball.

But I feel sorry for those prospective brides of him as , Karthik ( appeared from his Facebook DP, look like a cross between Baitullah Mehsud and a young Shibu Soren from his long hair and goatie) .Women become familiar with the concept of marriage at a young age, as evidenced by their toys such as Princess Barbie, Bridal Barbie, Gold-Digger Barbie, Alimony Barbie and so on. Guys, however, reach their 20s and then slowly start becoming aware that marriage could happen to them one day (so could a hijack, not that I’m drawing parallels)

I was reminded of this when a friend – let’s call him ‘Ravi’ because that’s his name – narrated the story of how he had recently gone to “see a girl”.

This elaborate process of Bridal Tourism kicked off with the girl’s family showing Ravi that they had enough mithai to last them through at least two nuclear winters. Half of those mithai reserves were then forced down the poor guy’s throat, even as he sat around being scrutinised by the girl’s parents, brothers, uncles, aunts, nephews, cousins, plumbers, carpenters etc. As dictated by Indian tradition, there was also a middleman who had set up the whole thing. (Ravi kept referring to him as “my contact”, because it would’ve been inappropriate to say “p#$^”.)

After what felt like an eternity, the girl walked in, carrying a tray. Now Ravi may be a cynical, smug man-beast, but once he laid his eyes upon her, he felt something he hadn’t felt in ages. The blood rushed to his head as he realised, in abject terror, that she’d brought him yet more food.

The couple were then ushered into a separate room where Ravi tried to collect his thoughts. This didn’t work because he had visions of the girl walking around a fire, trampling his manhood underfoot as she did so.

Also, it didn’t help when, fifteen minutes later, the girl’s sentimental grandmother showed up, and went all Nirmalamma on my friend, telling him she thought he was “the one”, which was also what Morpheus told Neo before stuffing his face with a laddoo.

Following this, Ravi proceeded to get out so quick he put Indian Cricket Team to shame. I don’t think he’s getting married anytime soon, which means that his Local Grocery store will continue to remain profitable.

ALL I CAN SAY ON IT

I don’t know what to say about the Delhi tragedy that hasn’t been said already. I can’t offer any magic solutions, and it will not change the country you and I live in. It reeks of helplessness, and of a young woman whose nightmarish experience were seared into national consciousness, destroying the notion of Indian propriety that we’d been cuddling with all these years. Then again, neither does anyone else in the media and social media. That’s because incidents like this generate a series of reactions that are as predictable as a Rohit Shetty movie (Step 1. Be obnoxious. Step 2. “Look, flying Scorpio!” Step 3. Someone please introduce Ajay Devgn to a toothbrush.) The pattern in this case played out as follows:

1. A Medical student gets horrifically assaulted on the streets of Delhi after she boarded an private bus. A news channel airs the news, and soon enough, the news goes viral, displacing last week’s viral star, Rakhi Sawant’s divorced husband.

2. Talking heads start asking the right questions: Why was the girl on the road with a boy ? Was she drunk? Why are people asking us for opinions when it is clear that we have the brains of goat poop? The PCC president of Andhra Pradesh even said that “Getting freedom at midnight doesn’t mean to roam around roads at midnight”( the incident happened at 9:30 PM). Yes Sir, and your mom’s legs should have stayed shut on your parents’ honeymoon.

3. Then it was time for a BJP to jump into the fray, who did so with all the grace of a tightrope walker splattering against the ground. According to the official spokesperson of the party, Western culture promotes hooliganism and lust, while holy places are centres of peace and virtue. I’m sure devdasis, altar boys and people in Ayodhya would agree.

It is incidents like these that inspire a slew of “I’m ashamed to be an Indian” reactions. (Not that national pride is a great benchmark to begin with. Saying you’re proud of being Indian is like saying you’re proud of being 70% water. You had nothing to do with it.)

Having said that, many things – Delhi, Bombay, Gurgaon, religion, the caste system, dowry, Dahod – do make you want to move to someplace more sane, like Saudi Arabia. And according to a recent survey of the G20 nations, India is actually the worst place to be a woman, ahead of Saudi Arabia.  It takes real talent to fall behind Saudi, a country where a woman could get whipped for showing too much eyelash. Then again, in India you could apparently get raped for not dressing in a bed sheet.

Another example of idiocy was seen in Haryana, wherein a Panchayat outlawed love marriages, cellphones and common sense. It also banned women under 40 from going out unescorted, thus teaching perverts a lesson by forcing them to harass only old women. I think the only way for women to be safe is to not be born here. See, the Haryanvis were right all along.

It’s the kind of week that makes you wonder what would happen if we just relinquished governance to women. All of it. Everything, just run by women. Sure, I anticipate a sudden glut of inventions such as handbags that can hold smaller handbags, and there would be ambulances on hold to deal with bad hair days” and creams would promise to get rid of all Daddy issues in “just seven days!”, but all that aside, it might just work. Women can work wonders if we just let them be. Just look at Sherlyn Chopra and Poonam Pandey

WAZZUP THESE NEW YEAR EVE BRO

Christmas and December are fast approaching, while the actual date is a month away, I already started getting texts from friends saying things like “What scenes bro?” Apparently, the correct answer to this question is not “The Solozzo hit from The Godfather, and Faisal’s revenge in Wasseypur II.” (yes, it is a horrendous joke) You may also find yourself part of several Facebook groups, like ‘NEW YEAR AT MINEZ!’ and ‘DJ PUMPY LIVE AT THE PINK TOAD!’ etc etc ,But this time it is going to be different It is the collective sound of the world going “Whew, we didn’t end”.so i decided to party hard this new year eve . Unless the Mayans were right, and the world ends, in which case, this entire planning of parties would be futile. Except you’re dead, so ha. Unless you were on the International Space Station when it happened, in which case, go forth and procreate, and tell every alien you meet that the Mayans were a****les.
There are three main kinds of New Year’s Eve parties; bad ones, horrid ones, and ‘Makes the holocaust look like Coachella’ ones. The third one usually involves a crowded public-space, like a hotel or nightclub The third one usually involves a crowded public-space, like a hotel, nightclub, or in one hilarious instance some years ago for me in Goa, a ‘cruise-liner with two decks and an artificial beach’ that never showed up, and was replaced by an Rajahmundry ferry with two feet of space, and a forlorn looking lump of sand in one corner. Passes to that party cost “Did Steve Jobs price this?” rupees and irate party-goers who realised they’d been duped started wrecking the ferry and lobbing pieces of the sound-system overboard. The major irritation of these parties are drunkards who features performances by whoever had a hit item song that year, so I assume this year, the biggest one will feature Ajay Devgn’s Jiggly Pectorals™ from son of sardar. The alcohol finishes at 12:01 am, and the night finishes at 1:37 am, when Montu slaps Prakash for glancing at the door to the women’s loo, because Montu’s girlfriend is also a woman. So this time i am not attending that ceremony.

So the next option is the “Let’s get together at somebody’s house” party, because this way, I can invite my friends located close to me. Some of them will show up, you’ll never hear of the other again because they’ll reach Mozambique by searching for Dahod in Apple Maps
And my personal favourite involves getting out of town the day before, and holing up in a place where the weather’s better (aka anywhere past Dahod), and the food and Music are great. You get no traffic, you get to choose the music, and you can sleep as per your will and wish and come back two days later. And that’s what I’m going to do this year. Unless the Mayans were right, and the world ends.
 

MY NAME IS VAMSI KRISHNA AND I AM NON-VEGETARIAN

My name is Vamsi Krishna Reddy and I’m non-vegetarian. I’m not slightly non-vegetarian, in that odd Indian way that draws the line at chicken and egg. I’m all in, with both my feet. I eat any and all poultry, seafood, and, if you can manage to cook them right in a delicate honey-mustard glaze, both my feet. I considered going vegetarian once for an year recently, but luckily the LSD wore off before I could jump off that cliff.
Recently I made chicken Biryani and posted it on Facebook and Vegetarians started to ask me strange questions like “Will you stop eating meat?” or “Why not go vegetarian?” and “Want to go for Jab Tak Hai Jaan?” The answer to all three questions is of course “No. Katrina Kaif’s lips scare me.” The truth of the matter is more complicated; I respect hard work. And it took us millions of years of hard work to fight our way to the top of the food-chain. So to not eat the meat that our ancestors worked so hard to dominate would be to fail them and the ideals that they strived, spit and roasted for.

Except, it’s hard being non-vegetarian in Gujarat where I am living right now. Aside from the reproachful looks of judgment you get from the ‘ethical’ vegetarians, you have to deal with groups who judge you on grounds deemed religious and moral. You’re told that if you eat beef, the Hindu god will spank you. Do Indian vegetarians imagine a command-center up in the sky, where a giant red light goes off every time I eat meat? That would be cool:

Man at computer: Sir, we’re picking up chatter about some horrible goings-on in India.
God: Is it the UPA again? We’ve already cursed them with Digvijay Singh, I’m out of punishment ideas really.
Man: No sir. It’s much worse. A man just ordered a special mixed-meat grill.
God: May God have mercy on us all.
Man: Ugh, I hate people who refer to themselves in the third-person.
God: Stop fooling around. That man just ate crab-meat. Cancel my appointments on world hunger, infectious diseases, and genocide. Dear God this is serious.
Man: No seriously Prakash, stop with the third person.
I’d be okay defending my non-vegetarianism if it were something I had to do as a part of dinner-table debate, but it isn’t. We live in a country where what you eat can mean the difference between being offered or denied an actual life-choice.

And now, a school-textbook for kids in the sixth standard has been found, that says the following about us non-vegetarians: “They easily cheat, tell lies, they forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes.”
When I was in the sixth standard, you could have written “The world is triangular and made of chicken nuggets” and I would have believed it. Because I was conditioned to believe that textbooks contain academic certainties and facts, not the illiterate opinion of some loathsome uber-vegetarian. And this is what the kids reading these books are going to believe.

But let’s examine the arguments that statement makes; Apparently non-vegetarians “easily cheat, tell lies,” and are dishonest. It’s safe to assume that whoever wrote that book is vegetarian, so clearly lying, cheating and dishonesty aren’t concerns that are exclusive to non-vegetarians. Non-vegetarians are also accused of fighting and turning to violence, which is weird because Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler were vegetarian. Narendra Modi still is. (So is Shahid Kapur, but his crimes against humanity deserve a Blog of their own). And the final accusation in that line is that non-vegetarians “commit sex-crimes.” I challenge any vegetarian out there to be able to even think about sex after a great steak and pie dinner.
I’ve never worn my non-vegetarianism on my sleeve, because I didn’t ever think I had to. But now, as an act of defiance, I will. My non-vegetarianism is awesome. It protects me. From the sanctimonious idiots who believe anything. From housing-societies that thrive on intolerance and ghettoization. And most importantly, from Shahid Kapur.

DIWALI AWAY FROM HOME

I got to know the arrival of Diwali as the photo-tagging frenzy on Face book has begun, with me being in tagged in a million pictures of things that symbolise Diwali, such as diyas, crackers, light-bulbs, burn victims, the superiority of the Aryan race and so on. In an attempt to escape people's sympathies showering on me for not going to home, which is a fucking 40 hours journey from here , I've planned this holiday at Baroda. But I seriously missed my earlier  diwalis I celebrated back at home. Diwali is that once-a-year chance to catch up with neighbours and relatives, so that you can remind yourself why you only meet these people once a year.

 In Baroda I am left with little options left other than watching movies. With Telugu film "Damarukam" not releasing , I ve left with Bollywood films capturing homicidal urges and vapid consumerism, with its annual Diwali Box Office Showdown, which, in this case, is ‘Son of Sardaar’ vs. ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’. JTHJ is the story of SRK falling in love with Katrina and Anushka, because all the other ladies he used to romance are, in Bollywood terms, deceased. Meanwhile, Son of Sardaar stars Ajay Devgn, a man best known for brushing his teeth with dirt. I wondered which one to watch, flipped a coin and before it landed, decided to watch the new Bond movie. It’s called Skyfall and it was pretty great, because for once, 007 relies on his wits and charm, instead of a watch that turns into an invisible plane with great breasts and X-Ray vision so powerful, it can see through Nitin Gadkari’s financial assets. Skyfall is one of those films that you have to watch in theatres, because no Bond film experience is complete without jaw-dropping action, heart-stopping chase sequences, and one Gujarati man in theatre behind you explaining “Jo havve Gems Bond aavse” to his wife, every time things get tense.

I love watching movies in theatres, because the experience has evolved (and because it saves me some download space). Single-screen theatres are being replaced by the multiplex, which comes from the latin word ‘multi’ meaning ‘many’ and ‘plex’ which means ‘everything sounds cooler when it ends in x’. Multiplexes have more screens, so instead of settling for one terrible Akshay Kumar movie, you can now choose between three horrid Akshay Kumar movies, an even worse Jacky Bhagnani one, or a critically-lauded Malayalee film about a man having a six-hour long existential crisis about where the ‘a’ went from Ajay Devgn’s last name.
The arrival of the multiplex has changed the Indian movie going experience. Time was when if you wanted to buy tickets, you called the theatre and asked if they had any, and then took your chances waiting in a long queue, following which you paid Seenu Anna(who seemed to live in a bush outside the theatre) 200 bucks a ticket. This time though, I just booked tickets online, and then waited in an even longer queue to collect them, following which I paid the theatre 200 bucks a ticket and wondered when they made Seenu Anna general manager.

Following this I made my way to the ‘Candy bar’, a snack-stand that does not in fact sell any candy. But that’s okay, because unlike earlier, when all you got was six-day-old popcorn and a bottle of cola whose mouth looked like it had sex with a rusted iron rod, you now have a whole range of options. I know this for a fact because the guy standing in front of me spent a reasonable amount of time choosing from his. He couldn’t tell whether he wanted the cheese-salted-caramel popcorn, or the caramel-salted-cheese popcorn, but two days later he made up his mind and bought a samosa instead.
But then I sat down in that theatre, and waited for the movie to begin, so I could forget all my troubles. But first, we were warned that we must turn our cell phones off before the film, a warning that was obeyed by everyone but the guy sitting next to me. Then, we were warned that we must also not talk during the film. The warning at our theatre said that one must refrain from “talking generally”. Luckily, the guy sitting next to me obeyed that bit of advice. So he turned to his friend and only talked specifically about this queer rash he had in an odd place.

And then the lights went down and I got excited and settled into my seat, only to be told that I must now stand for the national anthem. Now I love our national anthem, but this idea of playing it before every single film to boost patriotism is roughly as sensible as a Kingfisher Airlines business decision. And honestly ,I HATE doing this drama
Because this is what happens in everyone’s head as the anthem ends; “I love India. This is such a beautiful anthem. I really should be more patriotic and pay attention to this great counOOOHHH LOOK IT’S JAMES BOND SLAPPING SOME BADDIE ON TOP OF A REALLY FAST TRAIN”
But Skyfall really is an excellent film, and for all the hoop-jumping theatres make you do, I’d recommend that you watch it in theatres. It has the best plot a Bond film has had in years; Bond goes to SMOKING IS INJURIOUS TO HEALTH where he fights a CIGARETTES KILL and then he meets this beautiful CANCER CANCER DEATH CANCER, and in the end it is revealed that SMOKING CAUSES AIDS IN KITTENS SO DON’T SMOKE.