MORON HAS THIS NEW PLACE

Finally! After months of suspense, I‘ve been transferred to a non-descript town called Gooty in ananthapur district of Andhra Pradesh from Dahod in Gujarat. It hardly makes any difference to me barring some existential issues. But this whole shifting thing is a sort of personal tragedy for me. I, personally never gave birth to a child, but I have seen it dramatized a number of times in movies, and I would say that in terms of pain, childbirth does not hold a candle to moving. For one thing child births do have a definite end to it. The baby comes out, and that is it. Whereas, the average move goes on forever. This is why my advice to people who are about to move for the time is always.

DON’T DO IT! SET FIRE TO YOUR HOUSEHOLD GOODS RIGHT NOW AND JUST WALK AWAY FROM THE WITHOUT SO MUCH AS A BACKWARD GLANCE! IT WILL BE EASIER, IN THE LONG RUN.

I couldn’t do this and I am already in my new home and started unpacking and I feel it will span over a period of several years, so that I can savor the joy of discovering the kinds of comical items I choose to pack.

Apart from the farewell emotional blues that I face whenever I leave any place, adjusting to this new place which falls in my own state is a tricky issue. For beginners, Ananthapur district in Andhra Pradesh is an arid desert devoid of much rainfall and less contact with civilization. As usually, my personal helps and peons are the first human contacts I had here. When u have flunkeys to take care of rotten household stuff, life can be a bliss. Everything is fine with me except the singer I had in my night watchman, I suspect his singing is that made this place a desert, or his singing which send him to this place as punishment. The man was unstoppable when it came to singing. With a gun-throat like that, I was hoping to unleash him on encroaching Chinese, use him as a sonic weapon, make him croon till they beg, plead, get down on their knees and give Tibet back to Tibetans.  For a thoroughbred, totally spoilt, party animal like me, to keep myself entertained in this place is going to be challenge. For initial 40 days for my experience here, I can say living life doesn’t cost you money, just needs a whole lot of attitude.

FUCK YOU !!!!MUKESH

I have to a strong reason to complain. Indian authorities have said a lot of stupid stuff but this stands out as genius. Before watching every film in Vadodara at PVR I have to face this 24 years young man called “Mukesh” who died of cancer because of smoking. This promo sucks the feel of the movie going experience out of me. I mean it should have some aesthetic value after all. I am not interested in spending 200 bucks to see this shit. This Mukesh is made as a sort of celebrity whose pics sprang around the city.

 Should someone explain to someone at some point, that in a movie, this stuff is not actually happening? I understand cigarette causes cancer as I would imagine most people that go to the cinema, do. Are 43 public service messages showing macabre images of our chest with some fool talking in a “you’re going to die” accent necessary? It’s Sunday, we’re out for a movie, take it easy. We get it. The people in the movie are smoking because the character does, it does not mean I leave PVR and jump into a sea of Marlboros. This is the 21^st century; we get what’s meant to be a story and what’s not. If they feel our citizens are so dumb that they can’t tell a film from life, why just end with cigarettes? Why not have massive disclaimers at the end of Zero Dark Thirty, which says, “Yes this film was about a terrorist. DO NOT go home and become a terrorist. Or like in this movie, you’ll be shot in the head.”

And do they think these kinds of censorship warnings actually help? Do they think Osama sat there thinking, “You know, yes the world knows me as a mass murdering terrorists but this movie affected me and now I’m thinking, maybe…pottery?”

People say stupid things. It’s what makes us people. After the horrible shooting in Newtown Connecticut in America where a teenager shot a bunch of 6-7 year olds, one Republican gun owner suggested that the massacre could have been avoided if the Kindergarten teachers were armed. Again, brilliant. A KG class where your teacher pulls out a gun if you don’t know what two times two is. Brilliant.

Here, however, the stupidity has hit a stratospheric level. The political party seems to have decided to overlook the idea, entirely, of “fiction”. That films involve, um, stories, that aren’t actually true. That reasonably tiny component that makes up cinema.

I don’t really know where to start. Perhaps explaining the idea of “imagination” something that they may have missed in their mugging up and spitting out education. Should we sit down and explain that there isn’t a man dressed as a bat defending a town called Gotham – and looking for this place on makemytrip.com might be disappointing. That the 3 Idiots aren’t actually enrolled at IIT. That Shah Rukh Khan doesn’t actually detonate bombs when love struck, and Nagarjuna cannot be romantic hero with all those dirty wrinkles and awkward attires in “greekuveerudu” That some people make it up in their heads and put it in a script and then go shoot it? Or might it be too advanced an idea for them to digest?

Whenever stuff like this pops up, (earlier this year with Kamal Hassan’s Vishwaroopam and some years earlier with Jodha Akbar, Komaram puli and many others), the argument in the media is always about censorship. One group objects. The media asks entertainers should there be censorship and entertainers naturally respond with no (who will say yes?). That’s essentially the wrong argument. The argument is not one of censorship – it’s one between literacy and illiteracy. People who object (leaving their 4 minutes of fame as their incentive aside), have a much more fundamental literacy problem. They actually believe the people in a scene are those people in life.

Granted it is a very small minority but a minority in a billion people is perhaps the size of Holland. People can be illiterate but you’d think if the government should take a side, it should be the literate one. That would be, um, the educated thing to do which you think (hope) our lawmakers are. We may not be a nation that values imagination and storytelling over say, money and power, fine, but isn’t that where our elected officials should step in and say, “Listen everyone, this is a story. It is different from your life. If you are dumb enough to think what’s happening on screen is happening, then we’re here to tell you, it is not. And if you protest, you are a moron. Relax, it is just a movie. Rhitik Roshan is not Emperor Akbar, because then he’d be 532 years old, and we’d be hard-pressed to explain why he moved from The Red Fort to Juhu and Rahul Bose is not a one-eyed terror mastermind villain chilling in New York plotting terror with pigeons (we hope). Go enjoy yourselves, eat some popcorn, watch the action, it’s fun, it’s all made-up. Forget about it.”

Instead our politicians say, “Muslims in Vishvaroopam? Hmmm. Maybe. May not be. Not sure. Let us investigate!”

If our politicians join the illiterate bandwagon, where does it end? Will they put up signs for tourists that say, “You are safe. Andhra Pradesh is a R Narayana murthy-free zone”. When the next Krrish franchise comes out will they tell the police, you can have the day off, we’ve seen what Krrish can do. Mr Rakesh Roshan will manage the city with his superhero from now on.

And what will they do to Hollywood movies? When the next King Kong comes out, would they issue a travel advisory to New York? Would a politician cancel a conference or delegation thing saying “Nope. Am fine right here. Not going to New York, what if King Kong grabs me and thrashes me around like he did to The Empire State Building”. Or “Indians! Don’t go to small towns in America. I’ve just watched ET. One minute you’ll be riding a cycle. Next minute, an alien is flying your cycle. Dangerous place, the US. Avoid.”

And imagine if people abroad started taking a cue from this and noticing how we portray white people in Bollywood movies. They’d say, “Right you can’t shoot here, you show all our people as incompetent policeman or prostitutes. Your billion audience thinks all New Yorkers are Eastern European back-up dancers. Please leave”.

Or if aliens saw how they were portrayed in big budget Hollywood and said, “Eh, we don’t look like that ok. And why do you always show us destroying the White House? We have nothing else to do or what? Now bus stop it. (I have no idea why an alien sounds like a 19 year-old Delhi college girl).

Old school film villains would often complain that when people met them, the most common comment was, “BUT he’s such a nice guy!”

In some parts of the world, human imagination is celebrated to an extent where they built entire theme parks around a movie or a character. You can go on a ride with pirates at Disneyworld or get scared by a mechanical Jaws at Universal Studios. Creative people in India are trying that, pushing boundaries and doing really cool stuff. Instead of helping them by telling the audience, “listen to him, he’s trying to tell you a story, get lost in it, they’ve dreamt up a whole world for you, how cool”, the first instinct of the authorities is to say, “Shut up. Just take your imagination and shut it”.

If Indian politics controlled our imagination, I can see the Indian movies of the future. A 2-and-a-half hour blank screen. No one would take offense. Nothing would happen. A perfect feel-good film for them. I can see some party saying “What a movie huh. Awesome no? No one was offended. Super. I can’t wait for the sequel. I hope they make the screen even blacker.”

PEPSI, DANCE AND A CHANCE

The road to mature adulthood is booby-trapped with a lot of questions. Almost on the wrong side of 25 now, I’ve managed to sidestep most of the dangerous question-traps, such as ‘What am I doing with my life? What is my purpose?’ etc.,
However, there are some questions I’m glad to have found answers to, such as ‘Will I be able to finish the large pizza by myself?’, ‘What happens if I move my finger a little to the left?’, and of course, the most pertinent and pressing question of them all, ‘What does the inside of a dance bar look like?’ the fact that I am moving out of Dahod very soon , and i will never be spending chillout weekends in Mumbai made solution for this question even more urgent,
Yes, that’s right. The deed is done. After years, yes, years, of being constrained by lack of will, dare  and testicular fortitude, I, Vamsi Krishna Reddy, straight A student in school, erstwhile Hope and Pride Of The Family, have finally been to a dance bar. While doing so, I looked thirty seven different kinds of stupid, but that’s something I’ll discuss a little later.
Now I understand if this dance-bar revelation makes you think of me as some sleazeball who can’t have a normal relationship with women because he keeps flicking money at their faces. However, that’s definitely not the case, for I have many female friends and as far as I can remember, I haven’t paid them a dime. Moreover, I respect women to the point of having made a supreme, gut-wrenching sacrifice for some of them – I’ve gone shoe-shopping. The defence rests, Your Honour.
DIGRESSION ENDS.
So yes, dance bars. For years, I’ve been fascinated by the subculture, and I don’t see how anyone can not be. After all, these are getaways from the real world, where the only thing louder than the music are the colours – pinks, yellows, neon – that shimmer and shine, as if to defy the darkness outside. These are palaces, no less, where money buys you queens, and where mere contact with the upholstery can give you herpes.
My imagination was fueled further by Suketu Mehta’s account of Monalisa, a famous bar dancer, in his book ‘Maximum City’. I imagined striding into those shady portals armed with investigative resolve, just like Mehta had done, and effortlessly picking out a muse named after a fat Italian of indeterminate gender.
Unfortunately, things did not quite go that way.
Let’s start from the beginning. My first attempt at entering a dance bar was about three months ago. A cocktail of extreme boredom and curiosity finally overpowered the wimp within, and my friends and I decided to hit the bar. We reached the area soon enough, directed on the phone by a friend who had made the pilgrimage once before. It’s not like we’d be lost without directions though – the bar sits on a busy main road, bang opposite a famous supermarket (thus adding new meaning to the phrase ‘bang opposite a famous supermarket’.)
This was it.
Being a teetoteller , it poses another problem for me , what to drink inside? coupled with problem of my vomiting when I smell any Beer or alchohol, so we had an understanding among ourselves that we will have only pepsi inside the dance bar.
Money, balls and body hair – we had what it took to get inside. Nothing was going to stop us now.
We could see nervous laughter on each other’s faces. We walked.
We could see ourselves entering the forbidden world of molls and gangsters. We walked.
We could see…some girls leaving in rickshaws?? We walked, now a bit confused.
“Arre sahib…bar band ho gaya hai. Time ho gaya na 9.30…” said a watchman, hurrying up to us. What do you mean the bar’s shut, we ask him. No women inside?
“Nahin sir, ladies service nahin milega. Gents service chalu hai,” he replied helpfully. (You won’t get ladies service. Gents service is available though.)
‘Gents service’. The phrase naturally conjured up images of men in shiny sarees, dancing to ‘Saat Samundar Paar’ with hair peeping out from where cleavage should be. I still get nightmares about it.
Of course, we had no idea that the rule was being enforced so strictly all over. The evening wasn’t a total loss though, for the watchman turned out to be quite the orator. Seeing that we were newbies, he let flow earthy wisdom gleaned from 19 years of experience as a dance-bar watchman. The essence of the Wise Watchman’s lengthy discourse is as follows:
1. Bar dancers are not dancers, not anymore than Bruce Willis is a ballerina. They are all whores. They will do it with anyone, including you. Yes, you.
2. The bar we were standing outside was a ‘decent bar’. Scum like “rickshawalle aur bhajiwaale” did not come there. They went to another bar in Vashi, owned by the same ‘decent bar’ owner.
3. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, attempt to pick up any women in and around the bar premises, including a short path leading up to the entrance. Giving them a lift in your car parked 5 metres away is ok though, because this is a ‘decent bar’.
4. If you misbehave inside the bar, the bouncers will rip you a new hole, stuff it with masala papad and charge you 250 bucks for it. Which brings us to the next point…
5. Dance bars are expensive. 250 bucks for beer, 100 for water, 170 for a soft drink. “Aur yeh toh kuch nahin hai sahab…log lakh lakh uda ke jaate hain. Yeh aisi jagah hai sahab, jahaan aadmi sirf deta hai…leke kuch nahin jaata,” added the Wise Watchman, following it up with an Gummadi-type sigh.
(This is nothing. People blow up hundreds of thousands of rupees in here. This is a place where a man only gives, and takes back nothing.)
He further implored us to not get addicted to the shindig, seeing as how we looked like “young students from decent families”. And yet, in the very next breath, he asked us to drop by in the evening sometime, “just to see what it’s like”. We told him we’d be there. Heck, if a guy outside the bar could be so entertaining, the bar itself was a seedy film begging to be watched.
Which brings us to next weekend.
Boredom caught up with us again, and this time we knew where we had to go. I headed over to my childhood friend Surendra’s house to pick him up. As I was waiting downstairs, all pumped up and ready to enter the Bootysphere, I saw something that absolutely skewered all hopes of a great evening.
It was Surendra. Wearing shorts.
Now I don’t have a problem with guys wearing shorts, even if they boast of a body hair cover that little children occasionally get lost in. But Surendra is the guy who was once stopped from entering a theatre showing ‘The Mummy’, because he didn’t look old enough to watch the A-rated comic adventure. And now, on our first trip to a place populated by tough, swarthy men – the kind who had probably knifed a few people and then used the same knife to scratch their balls – my friend had decided to turn up looking like a schoolboy. We told him that if he was turned away, he would be on his own. Just this once, we would have to break the (quite literal) ‘Bros before hos’ rule.
However, we made it past the watchman without a hitch. Off the main path, through an entrance on the right, up a flight of stairs and there it was – the door. Standing there, I realised what Columbus must have felt when, after months of scurvy and sailor sweat, he finally came upon the first Hooters. The doorman smiled at us, shook our hands and swung open the door.
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re naked in a ridiculously inappropriate place, like a wedding, and can feel a thousand eyes upon you, not just because you’re naked but also because you happen to be the groom? That’s what it felt like when I walked in and saw about 20 bar girls staring at me while mentally undressing my wallet. Not used to being objectified by ladies of the night, I turned towards my friends who, judging from their line-of-sight, had developed a sudden interest in the floor tile pattern.
At this instant, for some strange reason, the strains of Dostana’s ‘Maa da ladla bigad gaya‘ started playing in my head. Of course, it was drowned out by the eardrum-raping music that filled the bar in an attempt to either titillate the men or impact the earth’s rotation, I’m not sure which. This complete initial assault on our senses took about two seconds, after which we were shown to our table by about six hundred staff members, each of whom smiled and insisted on shaking hands. It was time to get down to business, and we would have done so if only we knew how.
Now at this point I should mention that the term ‘dance bar’ is a misnomer. The government has banned the women from dancing, so these places really should be called ‘Stand-around-and-occasionally-pout-at-the-customer Bar’, because that’s what they do in there.
Thankfully there were prettier specimens around, and we did what young, virile men do when given the opportunity to order women like items off a menu. we all three ordered PEPSI That’s right – we looked down at our glasses, then back at each other’s faces, then back and forth, glasses to face, face to glasses, clueless and embarrassed, like Tibetan monks at a bondage convention.
Meanwhile, the other customers continued with their routine, immune to novice afflictions like embarrassment. We watched as the man seated behind us got about a hundred rupees exchanged for a stack of tenners. He then passed a couple of notes to a waiter, pointed out a dancer and hey presto – she started a striptease on his table! Ok no, not really. What happened was, she came up to the guy, spoke to him for about 20 seconds and swished away back to her spot at the centre of the room, maybe to practice her pouting. There was NO touching involved, and the man seemed quite pleased with himself for having made a 20-second conversation with (gasp!) a woman.
By now, the traitors that I call friends had decided that they were quite content with staring at their Pespis, and were blushing a deep shade of red that probably matched their frilly panties. It was up to me to restore the manhood of the table. I had to take the next step. So naturally, I went to the loo.
With the pee break over, I had exhausted all possible means of procrastination. So I approached a bouncer, and yelled over the din into his ear, “Yahaan pe kyaa hai?” (What happens here?)
He looked at me as if I’d just asked how his third nipple was doing.
“Dance bar hai (It’s a dance bar),” he replied, slowly. Maybe the in-house music had killed all his brain cells.
I hollered again, asking him what was and was not allowed.
Big Moose was more helpful this time. “Paisa tumhaare upar hai, kitna bhi dene ka. Ladki ko direct paisa nahin dene ka. Waiter ko dene ka. Ladki aayegi, baat karegi, baithegi nahin tumhaare saath, khaali baat karegi,” he said.
(Pay whatever you want. Do not pay the girl directly. The waiter will pass on the money. The girl will only talk to you, she will not sit next to you.)
I walked back to the table, confident in the knowledge that come what may, I would end up leaving the bar looking like a douchebag. I explained to everyone the novel concept of paying a woman to talk to you. We agreed that it was a dumb and loser-like thing to do, and then forked out five hundred bucks to be exchanged for tenners.
After a few minutes of shyly casting glances at women who, technically, were supposed to be blatantly ogled at, Satish picked out one of the slightly better ones. He passed on about 20 bucks to a waiter and pointed to her. “The white one”, he said, as if she were a shade in a paint catalogue. The waiter gave her the money and she turned her heavily-lined eyes towards us.
Gulp.
“Call her here,” hissed my friends.
“What the fuck are we gonna say to her?” I hissed back.
“We’re not going to talk. You talk. You wanted to do this. Now call her.”
“Bastards”
All this while, the girl was staring at us from across the room, giving us the same look prom queens give nerds in teen movies. I looked in her direction, beckoning her with the classic raised-eyebrows-and-head-tilt gesture. At least I *think* I beckoned her. What she saw was a guy shyly raising his head, like a newlywed Indian bride from the 50s, doing something weird with his eyebrows and turning away again, all in a matter of milliseconds. Thankfully, she got the hint and started walking towards the table.
This was it – my first conversation with a being that until now had been almost mythical. As she leaned over, her tresses lingering over her face, now dangerously close to mine, the investigator  within woke up (And no, that is not a sexual metaphor). I had to say something deep and engaging, something that would make her stay a while and eventually lead to insights about women living on the dark fringes of society. I took a deep breath, letting her perfume fill my senses, and said, “What is your name?”
Yes, I’m quite the Don Juan.
Her response to the tepid question was better. She put a hand to her ear and shrieked, “Kya??” (WHAT??)
My use of English had sent my friends into a tizzy. Ignoring them, I repeated the question in Hindi, “Aap ka naam kya hai?”. “Sanjana,” came the dour reply. She was clearly uninterested and wanted to go back to normal customers who did not scare her with words like ‘aap’.
I tried again.
“Aap kab se yahaan pe kaam kar rahi ho?” (How long have you been working here?)
“Ek saal“, she mumbled. (One year.)
After a moment’s silence, she turned and walked back. By now, my friends had multiple hernias from holding in their laughter. I had paid to be snubbed by a bar dancer. It felt strange, almost dirty, and stupid. There was only one thing left to say, so I said it.
“Let’s call another one!”
In my defence, I understood the game better now, so now I wanted to play the game. My friends were perfectly fine with the idea, as long as I did all the talking (Have I used the word ‘traitors’ already?)
The next dancer was much prettier. She was petite, with full, maroon lips, straightened hair and a glittering sari that promised to fall off any second, if it weren’t for the shiny clip on her shoulder. When I first saw her, she was flirting with a man who looked like he was a member of the 1980s Bollywood Junior Artistes Association. I wondered if he was a regular high-roller who would stab me with a fork for looking at his girl. The ten rupees he was handing over though put the high-roller notion to rest.
I went through the whole routine again – call the waiter, point out girl, hand over money, tip the waiter extra for handing over money, signal for the girl to come over using the ‘shy-indian-bride-head-tilt-raised-eyebrow’ method, and try to think of something clever to say.
This one had a little trouble comprehending the signal. She couldn’t figure out if I was calling her over or practising Kathakali. A few twitchy eyebrows later, she mouthed the words ‘Aaoon kya’? (Should I come over?). I nodded meekly. So much for second attempts.
Determined to not look like a fool again, I opened my mouth, only to say ‘Aap ka naam kya hai‘? (What is your name?)
“Shama”, she replied. Yeah right. And my name is Studmeister Steelcock.
“So…Shama”, I ventured, “aap ke paas yahaan khade hone ke alawa aur koi bhi talents hain?“
(So Shama, do you have any other talents besides standing around?)
“Nahin,” she giggled shyly, her Maharashtrian accent coming to the fore, “mere ko aur kuch nahin aata.”
(No, I don’t know anything else.)
Her giggles were well-timed, rehearsed like part of a Bollywood script. She walked back, throwing us the occasional glance, as if to say that her looks did bring all the boys to the yard, but it wasn’t her fault that the boys were cheap virgins. It was a great act; one that brought out the ‘Shama’ in a girl whose real name was probably Savitri Bajirao Thorwade. It was the same with Sullen Sanjana, and every other woman in the bar. And yet, despite the pretences, the appeal of such places is obvious. It gives many men, brought up within the confines of a regressive social structure, a taste of lust, power and yes, even love, that evades them in the real world. Or simply put, dance bars help ugly people get the feeing of momentary pride. so I ve decided not to go to dance bar any more.
I wish I could tell you more – about the prize dancer with a heart of gold, and about the leper pimp who has the singing voice of an angel. But there was no time to explore all that. We’d had enough of being rejected by bar dancers and were itching to get back to the real world, where we could be rejected by regular women. We called for the bill and as we hurried out, I could feel the women still staring at us, quietly laughing at our problem of ‘premature evacuation.’

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