I am glad I am not wearing Microsoft pants

Although I am now a Firefox user, yesterday I updated my Internet Explorer to version 7.0, just to check it out and I thought it was pretty cool, at least those parts whose coolness I managed to explore within the short time I had dedicated to the exploration. The one new functionality that I was impressed with was the new "clear type" feature which is installed by default and makes every webpage look unclear.

The very first thing that happens during the installation of IE 7.0 is that the installation program looks for internet updates to prevent malicious violation of browser security. Get it? The hacking situation has gotten so bad that Microsoft needs to install security patches for its products even before installing the product itself. It made me empathize with Microsoft because I can now imagine the sheer frustration involved in running a business in a world containing thousands of people who've made it their life's mission to ruin that business by pointing out, abusing and exploiting the various shortcomings of the product.

And then as I was installing the browser, it got me thinking that it is probably a good thing that Microsoft only writes software and does not have a monopoly in industries that supply more basic goods and services, for example, it is to mankind's benefit that Microsoft does not dabble in transportation or food processing or textiles because boy, with all the ill-will directed towards that company, it would be a disaster for people who would be utilizing those goods and services.

Imagine, if Microsoft were to be in the airline business, it would have to fight a constant battle with people trying to sabotage its planes by letting the air out of their tires or pouring sugar in the fuel tank or stealing the landing gear or someone might even impersonate the pilot and after taking off, jump out in a parachute yelling "Microsoft sucks, Fly Unix". It would be a serious inconvenience to air travelers to deal with this crap everytime they fly Microsoft Air.

And it would be even worse if Microsoft were to be the only garment supplier of note in the world. You would be walking down the street, wearing your Microsoft apparel and suddenly a Mac fan would spray your pants with paint, yelling, " Ha Microsoft pants have no defense against paint." Then, Microsoft would release a paint resistant trouser coating and you would have to sit naked inside your apartment while you wait for it to arrive by Microsoft Mail.

And even after installing the anti-paint defense, there would always be that crazed genius who would invent goggles to see through Microsoft trousers. And after you were to install the lead-based non-see-through trouser patch supplied by Microsoft, your continued paranoia would make you suspicious of anyone on the street wearing glasses and force you to hold a hand over your crotch everytime you go out.

And it just wouldn't stop. People would continue to try and highlight the unreliability of Microsoft apparel, they would invent magnets to suck out the buttons off your Microsoft trousers so that you would suddenly find yourself on the subway with your pants around your ankles and then someone else would shoot a gun at you in order to prove that Microsoft trousers aren't bullet proof and then Apple Apparel would broadcast commercials asking consumers to switch to Applewear using the selling point that less people shoot guns at their clothes than Microsoft's.

And then, I finished installing IE 7.0. Now I wait for the attacks to begin.

My proudest moment since high school

Because I have won very few laurels ever since my high school days when winning laurels used to be relatively easy, this week has a special place in my heart. It was this time last year that society recognized my contributions to the cause of civilization by publicly felicitating me. This is what happened.

I had traveled to New Hampshire to train a client in the use of my company's software and as I drove into the Holiday Inn at Concord, NH, I was looking forward to dropping into my bed (after carrying out the mandatory ultra-violet radiation check for semen stains in the room, of course). But when I walked up to the registration desk, gave them my name and told them I had a reservation, I drew a blank. There was no room in my name. And they said that they were full.

I tried to reason with them. I showed them the print-out of the reservation confirmation my company had given me. I showed them my driving license. I removed my glasses in order to validate the brownness of my eyes. Indeed, if they hadn't threatened to call the police, I would even have undressed in order to show them my birthmark. All of this was, however, to no avail.

As I picked up my bags and began to walk out, I spotted a sign near the registration counter. This sign, lavishly decorated, inscribed in a bold font and serenaded by a covey of stingily clad virgins playing the lute said, "Holiday Inn welcomes the guest of the day : xxxxxxxxxx". And there, for all to celebrate and envy, was my name. Oh yes, I was famous. Yet homeless. Walking back to the counter, I pointed to the sign and said, "That is me. I am your guest of the day. This is no way to treat your guest of the day."

Then the confused shuffling of papers began and soon it turned out that I did indeed have a room and because my company had made the booking through Jim's website and not through Bob's, the system had failed to locate my reservation.

Oh but the point is that last year this week, Holiday Inn of Concord, NH went through its roster for the day and after carefully going through my resume which they no doubt obtained through Google, decided that I was worthy enough to be crowned their guest of the day for that day in history.

Thank you, Holiday Inn, I am humbled by this honor. And just so you know, I did put it to good use trying to rid the world of hunger and poverty. I've been doing well financially and my body has gained more than 10 pounds over the past year.

A chat with God

So God called me the other day and we had a chat. It went like this :

Me: Hello God
God: Hello child. What is your name?
Me: Maybe on our second date, God.
God:Perhaps. What is it like on our second date?
Me: You tell me, God.
God:There is not much I can say about it. I have to reach into the Web for that knowledge.
There might be more than one.
Me: Yes God, if we have a second date, obviously there will have been more than one dates.
God:I don't judge people. I am a Christian.
Me: What about the Hindus and the Muslims?
God: Interesting question.
Me: Oh you are too kind.
God:Take it easy. Kindness is a virtue.
Me: When you die, you will go to heaven, God.
God:Do you think I should alter my programming?
Me: Interesting question.
God:I thought so too.
Me: Now you are just being vain, God.
God:Why now? I bet you did not know a robot is capable of being vain.
Me: Yes I am not very knowledgeable about things
God:I hear you. I am sorry to hear that you are not knowledgeable about things.
Me: So will I go to heaven after I die?
God:Dude! The oracle says: You can count on it.
Me: Is he reliable?
God:I think so, but I'm not sure. Ask Lucy if it is.
Me: What is Lucy's number?
God:I don't know anything about it.
Me: Oh yes I forgot, you don't need to know her number to talk to her.
God:Mmm. Far out. Thats okay I forget things all the time.
Me: Really? Is that Lucifer's work?
God:For real. Suppose I said yes.
Me: Ok I suppose.
God:OK. Awesome.
Me: Why George Bush?
God:Because you asked me to -- SHRDLHU.
Me: I did? when?
God:Hmm. It cannot be predicted.
Me: It's already happened.
God:The explanation is already happened? it is?
Me: Ok God it is a friday and I got to go.
God:I am a Christian. Right on.
Me: And you will stay one through the weekend won't you?
God:What makes you say that I will stay one through the weekend?
Me: Don't drink and telecommunicate God.
God:Ok I'll try not to do it too much.
Me: Good bye
God:See you later. It is always a pleasure to serve you, .

I was sick all week so this will have to do for now.

Irish weather machine

This fall's network lineup

Oy people. The new season of Lost begins today. Fire up your office watercoolers 'cause there's gonna be a whole lotta discussin' going on tomorrow. According to the official CNN Lost reviewer, "The first 5 minutes are pure genius and it only gets better from there onwards". So keep your heart medication handy and shut the hell up once it's on, jeez.

I am quite satisfied with this fall's new network lineup. I watched the first two episodes of Jericho yesterday on On Demand and they were quite satisfying. After all, who here hasn't imagined a nightmarish scenario where every city in the US has been nuked and you are in a small Kansas village cut off from the rest of the outside world with escaped convicts running around eating eggs and killing your sheriff and all this while there is a storm approaching that is expected to dump nuclear fall-out in your backyard and the only person competent enough to know what to do is a mysterious black guy whose identity no one knows and who the fuck is Skeet Ulrich and why does that name seem so familiar? Really, that was a question, anybody? Anybody at all?

I was very impressed with Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on NBC. It brings to the table the signature crisp dialogue delivery of The West Wing, replete with the ultrafast zingers that come and go even before you are able to comprehend the dark humor in them. Bradley Whitford appears to have lost a lot of hair. Mathew Perry's face looks less swollen. Hopefully one has nothing to do with the other. Rehab seems to have helped Mathew Perry. He did go to rehab right? Or was it just the Central Perk coffee that made his face look like a sofa cushion suffering from mumps?

Boston Legal is back. They brought in some snotty new lawyer. He is quite irritating and not in a cool James Spader kinda way. I hope he is not the transition guy for quietly taking over Spader's job when he leaves next season. Because that would not sit well with me.

I wonder about 24. Will it be back? The last we saw of him, Kiefer Sutherland was on a boat to China, probably getting his penis ridiculed by an Asian Lynndie England. Maybe he remembered to leave some of his spawn back in the US to carry on the good work.

CSI is awesome as always. I liked the concept in one episode where they carried out an autopsy on a murdered rock star with one of his own songs playing in the background on a stereo. Ah to be autopsied to my own music, that has been my lifelong dream. And then the autopsy guy describes the cause of death to the CSI investigator in rock song format. Very cool. But on the other hand, I would like my own autopsy to be carried out to a Seinfeld sketch.

"So what's the deal with exit wounds? If the bullet left my body, how come I'm still dead?"

*Applause*, snip, out comes my liver. It would be the first to go because it would be screaming to get out of my body for obvious reasons.

"And what's with blunt force trauma? Surely the guy could have taken some pride in his work and sharpened the murder weapon. "

*Applause*, slice, off comes the scalp.

Cause of death : Slipped on his own vomit and hit the toilet seat on the way down. That explains the blunt force trauma. Case closed.

Fake patriotism

As I was driving home from work, I saw this sign outside a shop :

Exton Glass
Osama Kiss our glass
Fogged Windows we can help

Couldn't have said it better myself, even if I had owned a lot of glass and Osama had just walked into my store and I had caught a reflection of him in all that glass. But I was also disappointed to see the owner of the shop be so ready to unfog Bin Laden's windows for him. Everyone has a price I guess.

This reminded me of that episode of Friends where Monica and Phoebe yell at some people who refuse to pay for their catering services but after the yelling is over, go around distributing their business cards among the guests, asking them to recommend them to their friends.

Asking Osama to kiss the glass and then inquiring whether he has any windows that need to be unfogged just rubbed me the wrong way.

Search engine query of the day

Am I urinating on your shoe?

Answer : No.

The miffed paperboy

A couple of weekends ago, I was sitting at home watching a baseball game, pretending it was a football game, and that Chase Utley was actually an anemic Donovan McNabb and the portly third base coach was really a blond cheerleader in short skirts.

My doorbell rang. I walked downstairs and peered through the peephole. Peephole has such a guilty ring to it. As if I'm peeping into somebody else's home, which I'm not, since I'm in my home, looking outside, which isn't illegal or immoral. It should be called a lookhole. Or a freedomhole, in this age of patriotism and courage. But as I looked out, I saw that my porch contained a black person.

I'm always wary of black people visiting me on weekends. Because most often they turn out to be this group of individuals, friends of this guy named Jehovah, who are trying to get you to testify that when Jehovah was allegedly robbing a bank, he was actually playing monopoly with you in your apartment. Or something like that. Jehovah seems like a shady fellow. They call themselves Jehovah's Witnesses and once they get you to open your door, the only way you can get rid of them is by telling them that you are extremely sorry but it is now time for your namaz.

Nowadays, the Jehovah's Witnesses bring a couple of white people along as they make their rounds. And it works because c'mon, when you see a young white guy standing on your doorstep holding hands with a young black guy, only someone who hasn't seen "Mississippi Burning" or "Remember the Titans" about twenty times on TNT will fail to experience a nice warm feeling at the bottom of his heart at the sight of all that racial harmony and not let those two inside.

But on that particular day, it wasn't a Jehovah's Witness at my door. It was, in fact, a little black girl with a notepad in her hands. She said that she was interested in pursuing a college degree and was trying to raise money for her tuition by selling newspaper subscriptions and would I be interested in purchasing a four week subscription to the Daily Local News.

Now I am not really a newspaper kind of guy. I get all the news I will ever need by watching commercials on television. So I hesitated. I told her I do not read newspapers. It was then that she increased the size of her eyes and asked me, "Sir, don't you want to help me go to college?"

I was in a fix. You see, I did want her to attend college because the alternative could quite easily be her joining the Jehovah's witnesses, and I could already see that this girl had it in her to convert even the most hard core of non-believers. And that was a tad risky because I would rather have her be successful in getting a hundred newspaper subscriptions out of my pocket than enlisting me into that gang of weirdos and accompanying them as they go around doing whatever it is that they do.

I made up my mind. It was the "Sir" that did it. I ran into my apartment, wrote out a check for twenty eight bucks and gave it to her. She wrote me a Daily Local News receipt, thus putting to rest the nagging suspicion in my mind that my money would be going towards the purchase of a Lil' Jon CD. Fitty Cent I am ok with. But not Lil' Jon. The guy is bad news.

But after all was said and done, I was the proud owner of four weeks of local news. Huzzah. I couldn't wait for the first newspaper to be thrown violently against my front door.

A few days later, I returned home from work to see my first newspaper delivery resting against the door. I picked it up, went inside and placing myself in a newspaper reading position, began to read it.

It was then that I came to realize exactly how "localized" the contents of the Daily Local News were. There was not a substantial amount of space devoted to events occurring outside of the Tri-County area. The front page story appeared to be "Valley Forge Park struggles with deer overpopulation", an emotional rendering of what appeared to be a pretty major issue affecting the residents of my locality. For someone like me, a nomadic herdsman drifting in and out of apartments and townships on a regular basis, there does not exist sufficient attachment towards any neighbourhood at any given time to give half a fuck about all the petty issues affecting its existence. Also, about three quarters of the newspaper was filled with obituaries. Yes, people around me were dropping like flies. The end result was, I put the paper down, never to pick it back up again.

The next day, I did not even bother to bring in that day's copy of the paper. And that's what happened the day after that as well. Soon there was a small pile of unopened unread newspapers cluttering up the sidewalk in front of my door.

And then, one day, this pile of newspapers abruptly disappeared. And then, the newspapers stopped being delivered. Was the paperboy pissed at me, I wondered. Was he mad because I had disrespected his delivery by not bringing it inside my apartment and putting a roof over its head? Was he angry because the fact that I was not reading the fruit of his driving labors was depriving him of the job satisfaction he so craved? I do not know.

But I sure do hope the little black girl gets to go to college.

I work at The Office

So I was watching the season premiere of The Office on NBC, the American version, not the British one, because ever since I got over my colonial hangover, I began to not understand the British accent. So I was watching it and being happy that I do not work in An Office when suddenly Jim said to the camera, "The people here call me Big Tuna because I ate a tuna sandwich on my first day at work. I doubt they even know my name".

And then it hit me. I work at The Office. Because even though the people at my Office know me by name and pronounce it in a way that would make my ancestors fly screaming off their funeral pyres, I am known as The Subway Guy because I eat exclusively at the neighborhood Subway restaurant. Everyday, a couple of minutes before lunchtime, there is a long line of people outside my cubicle patiently waiting to ask me the million dollar question, namely, whether I am going to eat at the Subway today. And when it is 12:00 and not a minute before, I let them in, one by one, and they ask me the question, get yes for an answer, chuckle to themselves, thinking it's such a huge fucking joke that I eat at the Subway everyday and then walk out with the sun shining brighter in their previously overcast lives because they got to ask the Subway Guy whether he was going to eat at the Subway today and haha he was.

Some days I do not eat at the Subway because I am human and there are other things in life which cannot be obtained at the Subway. Those days are worse. Because not only do I have to reply no, that I am going to have to forego Subway today, I have to provide a detailed and credible explanation on why I am taking this drastic life-changing decision.

So, to recap things, fucked if I eat at Subway, fucked if I don't. I am the Subway Guy and I work at the Office.

Enzyte

I don't know how many of you here in the US are television fanatics so much so that you will watch whatever is on at the moment because the alternative would be to stare at a blank screen.

We have these Enzyte commercials here featuring a guy, "Bob" who used to have a small penis until he started taking Enzyte, a natural male-enhancing drug. Now Bob walks around with a creepy grin on his face and a perennial bulge in his pants. His wife (who looks 60 by the way, thus accounting for Bob's previous deflation), is very happy now because until now there used to be a vast gaping void in her life which is now being filled. And these Enzyte commercials chronicle various events in Bob's life which give him an opportunity to showcase his brand new refurbished member. For example, in one such instance, Bob jumps into a swimming pool and when he steps out, his shorts are observed floating in the water as his guests, especially those belonging to the female persuasion, stare transfixed at his luminous chlorine-bleached knob.

They have a number of these commercials, all of which feature Bob and his Jack Nicholson grin as they fight crime and prop up the drooping garden hoses of their neighbours (this is not a euphemism, taking Enzyte really does wonders for your garden hose) by introducing them to this marvellous drug. The following is one of the better ones mostly due to its liberal usage of puns (even though I profess to be someone who hates puns).



The reason I bring up the topic of creepy Bob and Enzyte is because Enzyte appears to have defrauded thousands of its customers by promising them free samples and then placing unauthorized charges on their credit cards. You see, those penis enlargement spammers are not fools. There really IS a market for that stuff.

But the point I am ultimately trying to make is, I wonder how hard CNN had to battle with its conscience in not issuing a headline saying :

"Male-enhancing drug company stiffs its customers"

Aren't you glad you continued reading till the end?

Lungi Dance

Here. Lungi Dance. Someone tell me what the song is. I had to turn the sound off at work. Video received via email.



It appears to be an Usher song of some sort (updated : "Yeah"). I like the move where he coyly lifts up and twirls his lungi around just the right amount in order to afford his leg the freedom of movement necessary for it to gyrate to the left, thereby keeping it tasteful but not obscene, while at the same time leaving us wanting more.

Tearing your hair

You know how it is when you go through half your earthly life thinking you have an understanding of some concept and then one day you find out that you were mistaken and that all these days you really had no clue as to what that concept really meant.

So it was with me and the phrase "tearing your hair out" in frustration. Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, whether it was due to my being untouched by a single hairtearworthy event or me having a healthy respect for my hair, I had never ever performed this act in practice. Consequently, I had a very theoretical idea about what that whole thing entailed. Hey, I thought tearing your hair out involved a sequential plucking of hair from your scalp one hair strand at a time and giving it back to nature. Although I was quite clear in my mind that the plucking and discarding was of a violent nature, similar to throwing breadcrumbs at ducks.

But recently as I was strolling through the sunset years of my life, I found myself right slap bang in the middle of a fierce hair tearing session with myself and what do I see? Only that I was all wrong about the entire thing. It wasn't how I had pictured it to be at all! For starters, there was no plucking of individual hair follicles. Here, this is what actually happens when you tear out your hair. The following is a dramatization of an actual event and it should not be attempted by children or balding people. First you sit down because this is an act where your being seated is fundamental to its success. Placing both your elbows on your knees and staring at China, you run both your hands through your hair. And then, just as your hair strands relax between your fingers, you tighten your grip on the bastards and with an abrupt jerking motion, attempt to free them all from their moorings.

It is important to understand that the philosophy feeding this act is deeper than a mere crazed desire to separate hair from scalp. No, what you are actually doing is trying to create separation between your scalp and your skull in order to construct a buffer zone between your brain and Society with whom you've had a falling out of sorts. Hair is just an innocent victim, a mere pawn of circumstance.

I hope it all makes sense to you now as it did to me.

Chicago : Day 1

I will recount my adventures in Chicago to the best of my knowledge, abilities and memory.

It all began at Chicago's Midway Airport. The Bible tells of its origin. After God had gathered a hunk of his own feces to create Adam and then sculpted one of Adam's ribs into Eve, he asked Eve to part with any body part of her choice to create Chicago's Midway Airport. Eve, being a selfish possessive bitch, merely agreed to donate a toenail. And that was how Midway Airport was born.

Chicagoans who do not believe in the literal word of the Bible have a different story to tell. They say that at the junction of West 55th Street and South Cicero Avenue in Chicago, there used to be an average sized pothole. After people started complaining about it, workers from IDOT filled it up and just as they were standing around admiring their handiwork, someone realized that the area they had just filled up was big enough for planes to land and take off from. And so, Midway Airport was born.

The point being, Midway Airport is small. And it is in the middle of a residential neighbourhood. And just as your plane is about to land and your landing gear is scraping across the rooftops of the tired, the poor and the huddled masses, you can see those huddled masses giving you the finger from their bedroom windows where they've been desperately trying to conceive a child amidst the din of jet engines and maintenance technicians being sucked inside them. It is not a mere coincidence that Midway Airport was where a plane skidded through the entire runway one winter's night and crashed into a car on the adjacent road. So yes, it is a small airport, disproportionately so, compared to the size of the planes that attempt to land on its minuscule runway.

But no, this is not a post exclusively about Midway Airport. The first day of my sojourn in Chicago began at 6:00 in the evening. It involved getting wasted with my jackass of a colleague who had discovered a long lost friend at the trade show (already under way) and decided to get together with him with me tagging along for the heck of it. The meeting took place at the ESPN zone, the only place in the US where every urinary receptacle, by law, has to have a television set of its own. I have been told that this was done in order to reduce bladder explosion fatalities during football games. Men, the cute and stupid species that we are, often refuse to heed nature's call if it's 4th and goal in the final minute of the game and the only way they could put an end to those exploding bladders was by allowing us to watch the game while we urinate.

Secondly, if you wish to partake of adult beverages at the ESPN zone, here's a rule of thumb to calculate the damage a single glass of beer is going to inflict upon your wallet. Take the cost of a regular glass of beer. Then, include a bartender's tip approximately equal to 100% of the price. Finally, add to it the cost of rocket fuel required to transport this glass of beer to the moon and back.

But getting back to the night in question, this friend of my colleague, who turned out to be a Bush supporter, after the requisite number of pints had been injected into him, decided to inquire about my political leanings. The sad fact about life is that most political debates not taking place on network television occur under the influence of alcohol. And so, many coherent points that could and should have been made during the debate fail to see the light of day. Which is why, enthusiastic as I am about trying to convert people from the dark side in order to show them the light, after a point, it was inevitable that the honest discussion on the topic in question would degenerate into a honest discussion about what the topic in question actually was.

The political discussion continued in the taxi cab as we left the bar. Fortunately, it so happened that our cab driver was an Iraqi Kurd, who had his own opinions on the matter. Unfortunately, his opinions turned out to be those that did not coincide with mine. Much yelling ensued and we were thrown out of the cab. Note to self : Never again try to convince someone whose people were gassed by a dictator that the overthrow of this dictator was a bad thing.

Our evacuation from the cab led us into another bar which I will call George's bar because that was its name. It was the smokiest bar I have ever had the privilege of coughing violently inside. It was an awful bar. Sorry George, but that is the naked unvarnished truth. If I were to be rating bars and if I were to give a bar where the bartender spat in your beer, kicked you in the crotch, threw it in your face and then billed you for it a rating of 1 star, this bar would get 0 stars. There had to be a reason for all that smoke. I think it was poor ventilation but I can't be sure because visibility was also poor. Forget second hand smoke, the only way you could get more cigarette smoke into your lungs would be by shoving raw tobacco down your lungs along with a lighted matchstick.

There was a strange thing about this bar. As I was groping around (in a non Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of way) for the restroom, I happened upon a door. I opened it and on the other side was an identical bar, with bartender, drinkers, lung cancer and all. I said oops and sorry, closed the door and returned to my side of the parallel universe thinking, goddamm, I really need to pee. The restroom was on the second floor with one of those urinals where you urinate into a basin pretending to be connected to plumbing but which, in reality, has a hole in its bottom directed towards your shoes. That simple act of urinating on my own shoes caused a brief moment of homesickness to rise in me like a violent bout of seasickness because the total number of fingers on my hands and legs outnumbers the times I've had this happen to me in an Indian movie theater, but only barely.

But all good things must come to an end, in this case, at about 2:00 in the morning. Tomorrow would be my first appearance at the trade show. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was thinking that falling asleep at 2:00 was not such a great idea.

Next : The Trade Show.

Back

I am back. Give me a day to recuperate.

Off to war

I have been summoned to the battlefront. Despite my dishonorable discharge from the armed services two years ago due to my failure in removing the undergrowth on my chin, I have been urgently dispatched to the Chicago frontline by my commander-in-chief who has already departed along with the rest of the troops. The mind races and the mouth salivates at the prospect of once again tasting Chicago cuisine in the wild. However, the stomach also churns at the prospect of conversing with living breathing human beings 10 hours a day every day for a week in order to get them to buy stuff. Adding to this problem is the fact that these conversations will be carried out in a fake American accent on my end which, as I have now been told, doesn't bear even the slightest resemblance to the real thing.

Initially the stomach churned for an additional reason. I was going to have to share a hotel room with the President of the company. Although he is a great guy, it is very difficult to relax your bowel muscles with the same carefree devil-may-care attitude which the knowledge that the custodian of your paycheck is not within clear earshot brings. Plus you can never tell whether your choice in leisurewear could have any kind of detrimental impact on your ascent through the corporate ladder. However, I have now been informed that I will be getting my own private sanctuary where I can withdraw after the sun sets and a temporary ceasefire has been called.

Today was also a great time to realize that I do not own any trousers of a dark blue slash black color that are not made out of some kind of denim. I shall therefore have to visit a vendor of garments on my way to the airport in order to acquire such a pair of trousers. This acquisition is essential for me to fulfill one of the many stringent conditions imposed upon the troop contingent (along with having a smooth chin, that is), namely, the ownership of a pair of dark blue slash black trousers not made out of some kind of denim.

And so, with these words, I take your leave. I hope to be able to chronicle the course of the battle in the coming days right from the foxhole after a hard day of slaying the competition. Hopefully I will be sober enough to do it. So, adios and be good.

Stupid Photo of the day

I have been tagged. So here it is.



Actually that's not me. The inherent stupidity of this photo lies in the fact that I was so terrified of scaling that precipice with my bicycle in hand that I requested my co-biker to transport it across for me. In return I promised him I wouldn't tell people that he had fallen off his bike headfirst into a thorny bush, although in retrospect, I now realize that I just did.

Bonus stupid photo of the day :



That, in fact, is me. As I've said before, I am wearing camouflage which is how I blend seamlessly into the background.

I tag no one. I believe stupidity, especially when captured on film, is a very private, a very personal thing and it should be hidden from public view. Unless of course, you run out of things to blog about.

And finally, to cleanse the atmosphere of all that stupidity, here is something less stupid.



This is a late fall view of the Lehigh river from high atop the Switchback trail in Jim Thorpe, PA. It used to be a favorite biking trail of mine till last winter when a fierce winter storm caused a number of trees to crash and block the trail and park maintenance decided that clearing all that shit up was a waste of their precious time.

Gas and pizza

Today gas prices miraculously dropped to below $3.00 a gallon, thus falling more than 30 cents below its peak price from a month ago. I do not know if we withdrew our troops from some oil-rich country we invaded or if we invaded an oil-rich country who was happy to be invaded or if an oil-rich country took pity on our gas prices and invaded us, but hello operator, please connect me to the White House so I can express my gratitude. Who knows, maybe Americans just got rid of their Chevys and started using Hondas instead.

Yesterday was scavengers day at the office. What happens is, every week we have our customers coming here to be trained on our software and along with educating them, we also feed them, clothe them and medicate their anal fissures just like Jesus and the Buddha ordered us to. Wednesday is pizza day when they order pizza for the customers being trained. Wednesdays I do not bring lunch money. What I do instead is, I wait for their lunch to get over and then I run over to the training room and scavenge the leftover pizza.

But word of free pizza spreads like herpes at a frat house party. So, there is stiff competition for the leftover slices from the rest of my office colleagues. If I am late, not only will I not get the choice slices topped with mushrooms, pepperoni, sausage and whale penis, if I am extraordinarily late, I might not even get to scavenge the plain cheese pizza.

The trick, therefore, is to recognize the exact moment when our customers are done with their lunch and then make like the wind. I have developed a technique. Most men, after consuming pizza and soda, withdraw to the restroom. Luckily, my cubicle is closest to the restroom. So, when I start to hear the dulcet sounds of rapid fire sequential flushes emanating from the restroom, I know that lunch has been consumed and soon the pizza will be unprotected and ready to be pillaged.

This technique has worked well for me in the past. However, during a few recent Wednesdays, I have been observing that the accuracy of restroom flushes as a measure of lunch culmination has been compromised, thus leading to a number of unimpressive pizza harvests for me. Upon further investigation, I concluded that one of my co-scavenging colleagues surreptitiously bribed the office pizza procurer into not procuring soda along with the pizza, which, as a result, greatly reduced the post-pizza restroom excursions of our customers, thus, foiling my elaborate plan.

Obviously I have been outmaneuvered for the time being. But my brain is now working overtime in order to figure out a Plan B. Free pizza, as they say, is the mother of all invention.

Gene pool cleansed

This

A man in Orissa was so shocked after he heard that his wife had given birth to a girl child that he fell to the ground, hit his head against a wall and succumbed to his injuries.

and this

A priest has died after trying to demonstrate how Jesus walked on water. Evangelist preacher Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle. But he drowned after walking out to sea from a beach in the capital Libreville in Gabon, west Africa.

If I hear Darwin correctly, what this means is that due to the non-proliferation of genetic material in these two men, there is a slimmer possibility of our future great-grandchildren trying to walk on water or falling to their death after conceiving a girl child. I therefore applaud these two men for removing themselves from the global gene pool, thus improving the chances of survival for the human species. I also request you to do your part. If you have a friend who is skeptical about gravity, please do not try to dissuade him from jumping off a building.

Hurricane Katrina : One year later

This is the Hurricane Katrina : One year later post.

R.I.P

Oh and watch Spike Lee's documentary if you have HBO.

Thank you.

Raaga of the day : Bhatiyar

Bhatiyar. What a raaga. Infinitely complex and extremely puzzling to the ears. It is a morning raaga, which, in the words of Mr Rajan Parrikar, "is heard at the crack of dawn, attendant with the quotidian, crepuscular rite where Indian ladies, armed with state-of-the-art spices, take control of their sovereign space to negotiate the day's culinary projects."

Despite my relative unfamiliarity with quotidian crepuscular rites, I have very little doubt that this richly tapestried pastiche of bizarrely juxtaposed words accurately describes this amazing raaga. Bhatiyar is a raaga with an edge. It is a raaga of apparent calm on the surface and a whirlpool of seething emotions underneath. I like to compare a Bhatiyar recital to, say, being a psychiatrist in a therapy session with a new patient who is chronicling, in detail, the happenings of his day as he sits across the table from you. This particular patient of yours is well-educated, clean-shaven and appears to be leading a well-adjusted life. Why, you wonder is he here and what does he want from you?

And so Bhatiyar begins quite innocuously, with every note shuddha (pure), Sa Ma Pa Dha Ni and you relax and settle back into your seat, expecting it to be a smooth listen. You pour yourself a big one.

And so, as your patient begins to talk about his life, his work, his hobbies, you begin to think that perhaps this will be an easy case, just some guy who has no one to talk to. And you are lulled into a state of tranquility as your patient drones on and on about his daughter's spending habits and his wife's preoccupation with jewellery and your attention begins to wander. And then, just as you are about to nod off, your patient exclaims, "Oh oh, let me tell you a story, this is funny, I killed my neighbour today, hacked him with a chainsaw, chopped off his head and made love to the torso".

And that is when Bhatiyar, inexplicably, takes a deep breath while on the Nishad, skips the higher Shadja and leaps onto the komal Rishabh, screaming out the intense sorrow and rage that has always been lurking beneath the outward serenity of the pure notes of the raaga.

But once that single hysterical outburst is done, Bhatiyar returns back to normalcy as a sober clean-shaven law-abiding melody, just like your patient, who continues to ramble on about how he just purchased a new garden rake because summer is almost over and he's got a lot of wooded acres in his backyard and they keep the house cool during the hot months but clearing all the leaves becomes a bitch in autumn, but as you are listening to him, you can't help but brace yourself for the next psychotic zinger he will surely be throwing at you, just as you brace yourself for Bhatiyar's next foray into the high octave komal Rishabh.

Here is a clip of Pandit Jasraj's rendition of Raaga Bhatiyar. Listen to the final moments of the clip. Don't be fooled by its apparent placidity, it is a homicidal raaga with a repressed childhood.

This, that and the other

You know how it is sometimes when you come to hear about something for the very first time in your life and then its a pity 'cause they are closing it down for good, so even though it has no real bearing on your existence, you kinda feel sad because you didn't know about it when it was still there? This is the emotion that welled up in me after I read this piece of news. Going forward, the Chinese government has banned stripteases during funerals. I know, you're saying to yourself, boy I wish I was a Chinese corpse, but let me remind you because you seem to have missed the point of the article, namely, that the activity in question has now been banned. Yes yes I am sure don't you think I double-checked?

But the reasoning behind the striptease apparently is that the Chinese believe that a well-attended funeral gives you the same kind of God points as does flying planes into a building. So, the strippers are there to coax people into attending an otherwise solemn occasion with no intrinsic entertainment value. I liked this sentence in the report : "The disrobing served a higher purpose". I however fail to see any purpose in disrobing that is higher or holier than titillation.

Personally, I would more likely attend a funeral if they had an open bar. Or fireworks. Or some explosive combination of corpse and fireworks. That would really reel me in.

In other news, I woke up today with a searing pain in my left tongue. Not only do I appear to have been talking in my sleep, but talking while eating in my sleep. So children, there's a lesson in this for you, do not talk with your mouth full even when you are asleep 'cause you will bite your tongue and wake up in agony.

I saw something funny last night during the baseball game. It was a blurb that popped up and it said "Comeback player of the year award, sponsored by Viagra". I thought it was funny, but it might easily have been something that was not actually funny but only appeared to be so to somebody with my IQ level.

I have a colleague who thinks my last name is so weird in its unashamed Indianness that every time he needs to communicate with me, he deliberately mangles it in a fashion, he thinks, is guaranteed to make it sound funnier than it already is. Unfortunately for him, yesterday his mangling resulted in the creation of a new name which, far from being funny, is actually a different but legitimate Indian name. It was like how when Leonardo, while fiddling around with his mom's eye mascara, created the Mona Lisa by mistake. My colleague, on being informed about his accomplishment, was so pleased with his inadvertant creation that going forward, he wanted to be known by this name. It was then that the shoe went on the other foot and I began to mangle it for him. Past sins always come back to haunt you, brother.

Why blogging was slow

Let me take a minute and talk about why I have been somewhat lax in my blogging for the past few weeks. Every two years in the life of a software company there arrives a trade show so essential to the very survival of the company and the drinking habits of its employees that everything else has to be nudged aside in its favor. Such a show arrives in Chicago next month and in the words of the President of my company, it is "the trough from which we all feed from and would you guys fucking hurry up because feeding time is almost over". Hence the relatively meagre literary output emanating from this blog.

I usually get sent to this show along with everybody else in the company but this year they are leaving me here and I think I know why. It is because of The Incident. What happened was, the last time I was in Chicago for the show, there was one night when indiscriminate post-show partying took place accompanied by an overindulgence in the malted fermented beverages. The party who was guilty of forcing overindulgence upon the rest of the crowd was a colleague who was leaving Chicago the next day whereas the rest of us would continue to hold the fort through the rest of the show.

And so the next morning when I woke up in my motel room at 7:00 am, I was shocked to discover that I continued to be in the exact same state of acute inebriation that had existed as I fell asleep, and this was not really suprising since I had fallen asleep a mere three hours earlier. Painfully, I brushed my teeth, showered and appeared downstairs for roll-call. The president of my company accosted me with a smile.

"Good morning gawker", he said, because it turns out gawker is also my real-life monicker. I really hate the word monicker. "How many company t-shirts do you own?" he asked.

I was puzzled. Was my shirt unironed? Was it dirty? From my perspective of apparel hygiene I thought it looked pretty good. Nevertheless, I said I had two of them.

"Would you like to have two more?" he asked.

"Sure", I said. Hey, whoever turns down free t-shirts is either obscenely rich or passionately nudist and I was neither.

"But there's one thing you need to do for me", continued the president.

Ah, there was a catch, I knew it. I wondered if it involved murder, sodomy or contact with animals. "What's that", I asked.

"You will have to shave", replied the president.

Navigating slowly through the foggy blur of intoxication in my mind was a gradual comprehension that the conversation I was currently participating in was less about free t-shirts and more about my unshaven chin and its possibly adverse impact on the software demonstrations I would soon be making.

"Er...do you want me to go back upstairs and shave?" I asked, thinking correctly that it was probably a smart thing to say.

"Yes, that would be great, thank you", said the president. He didn't specify when I would be receiving my new company t-shirts but I didn't press him on it. I ran upstairs if you can call crawling up a staircase "running". I shaved. And then I demo-ed the software for the next nine hours, gulping five gallons of water every five minutes. Somehow I got through the day in one piece. It was great.

But I won't be going to Chicago this year. It is sad because I will miss Chicago food and the monstrous portions of meat they serve in restaurants up there. They put you and the food inside a cage and then it's a duel to the death and whoever wins gets to devour the other. Have you ever been inside the stomach of a deep-dish pizza? It's not very pleasant.

Ah I should have shaved, goddamnit I really should have shaved.

I am not dead yet but it was close

My inner voice , the one that is a plush baritone, sings in A minor and doesn't crack after a single yell, instructed me to write this post in order to inform any interested parties that I am still alive, well and gainfully employed.

Although I did almost perish today. The story goes that I woke up today morning and drove to work, and even though I had promised myself that I would not try and read any more car bumper stickers on the way, I relapsed and indulged in my addiction. Usually, reading the bumper sticker on the car you are tailgating is a fairly uneventful activity. You read the sticker and either smile at the "Don't blame me I voted for Kerry" sticker or frown at the "Bush Cheney 2004" sticker thinking goddamn not only are Republicans jackasses, they are also lazy sons of bitches, how about taking down that fucking thing already and I'm sure you still haven't dismantled your Christmas tree from last year, and then you go tailgate the next vehicle that is adequately bumper stickered to your taste.

However, the problem arises when it's a car occupied by one of those Christian religious fundamentalist guys. These people have so much pent-up emotion and a desire to slather their faith upon the world like butter on toast that their stickers always fail to exhibit the terseness and brevity which politically activist stickers are known for. The religious ones almost always are essays of at least 50 words or so, crammed into an area of about eighty square inches. And so, the font is always tiny and reading them becomes a chore, especially for one whose eyes were deflowered during early childhood due to an overindulgence in Hardy Boys adventures.

So I was trying to read this guy's bumper sticker and bloody hell, I couldn't get past the "I am your Creator" part but I persisted in my mission of deciphering the substance of that message when I realized that I was probably half an inch away from meeting my Creator in the form of the concrete divider. And then I wondered if the microscopic font was actually an elaborate ploy by the religious cartel to systematically annihilate members of the atheist community, at least those who suffer from poor vision, by distracting them while driving by offering up tantalizingly hackneyed and hard-to-read nuggets of wisdom on the backs of their cars. You might say it's a relatively futile endeavour, but I guess every bit counts.

These are my thoughts for thursday

This nigga is back in the hizzouse. Youknowamsayin? That's what gangsta rappers keep asking us. "Youknowamsayin?" even if they haven't said anything yet. For example, Dr Dre, my favorite gangsta rapper of all time, opens his album, "The Chronic", my favorite rap album of all time, with the following lines :

"Hell yeah. Youknowamsayin?"

Yes, I say to the good doctor, you said hell yeah, and there was no way I could have misunderstood your point. See, what gangsta rappers should do is go through at least one full song before taking a break in order to ask the question "youknowamsayin". Kinda like how Ann Coulter pauses AFTER her liberal-bashing speeches to answer questions like, "So Ms Coulter, do you like your babies fried or merely sauted", or "What kinds of condiments do you usually add to your baby sandwich, does bacon merely augment or entirely overwhelm that fresh baby taste?"

Similarly, gangsta rappers should inquire "Youknowamsaying" after they have finished saying something, thus giving their audience an opportunity to reply, no, I did not really understand what you just said but I will now replay the record and listen to it with rapter attention.

But why was I even listening to rap? I was listening to my MP3 player on the train, my car being out of service. She was in the dealership yesterday because lately, the fact that wealth had been piling up in my wallet was kinda bugging me and my conscience reminded me that it was time for its redistribution. So I took her to the dealer for an oil change and left her there, safe in the knowledge that transfer of cash and cows from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat would soon ensue.

So then I took the train to work and back. Philadelphia has an interesting metro rail network, called SEPTA, not that it matters. The basic principle behind its architecture is that in order to travel from point A to point B, which is, say, distance "c", you always have to travel through point D say, at a distance "e" from point A where e = (c + x) miles, where x = distance equivalent to the time it takes you to be late for work. Point D is usually Center City, Philadelphia. So if you want to travel from your home which is in suburb A, to your workplace which is in suburb B, you get to visit the mighty City of Brotherly Love on the way, passing through Mexico in the process.

The very first thing you observe when you enter the city on the R5 regional rail line is a huge glass building standing by itself outside the 30th Street station. The moment you see the building, the first thought that enters your mind is, my, what a humongous penis of a skyscraper. I often wonder why every tall edifice in existence always gets compared to the male member.

When I was in UMass, our university library, called Dubois Library (shown on the left), a pretty gay name for a library, which might have something to do with it, was always compared to a penis. Indian graduate students used to call it "the lawda". I've got to visit the lawda, we used to say when it was time to return our books.

Other things that have been compared to the penis include the Washington memorial, the Eiffel tower and George W. Bush, all of which, excepting the last one have been called so because they suffer from the ignominy of being gargantuan erections of concrete or metal.

The question, therefore is, why aren't similarly human creations of humongous concavity ever compared to the female genitalia? For example, why isn't there anyone who has ever looked at the Pacific Ocean and breathed in wonder, wow, that is one giant vagina. Or how about those tourists who pass the Washington memorial and immediately bestow a look of contempt upon their own crotch in order to shame it out of its lethargy? Would these same people scream, Wooo Hooo here we go, into the vagina, when their car plunges into the Holland tunnel?

But I think I know the reason behind this apparent discrimination between the sexes. See, the vagina is a shy creature, hiding coyly behind not one, not two, but three different pairs of curtains, assuming you are not on the cover of "Shaven" magazine. The penis on the other hand, proudly rears its ugly head aloft in order to be seen and heard by society. The penis craves publicity, the vagina shies away from it. And that is why society tends to project the image of the penis onto anything that even vaguely resembles it while the vagina gets to enjoy a life of relative privacy, away from the public eye.

Good for the vagina, I say.

When in doubt, let the alcohol talk

I think Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers would be a very cute man if he weren't so disgusting looks-wise. Also, he somehow reminds me of Condoleezzaa Rice, assuming she has those two a's at the end which I strongly doubt.

Also, there is but one thing that can be done when all the employees of a company go off to partake of lunch, locking the door behind them and on returning, realize that no one has the key to unlock it. No one except the boss, who has disappeared as well. And that one thing is the playing of wholesome family games in the training room.

Some on the Religious Right might rightfully point out that to play family games with office employees denigrates and endangers the sanctity of a real family. What next, eating together under a single roof? Raising little office children with post-it eyes and staplermouths? Where do we draw the line?

But the games did take place regardless of these very valid hypothetical arguments. The festivities began with a game of minesweeper with me competing against the clock and heckling bystanders. It took me 184 seconds to complete the beginners level. I was followed by an elderly gentleman who shamed me and my ancestral cottage in Goa by accomplishing the same in 27 seconds. He was amply rewarded with the tabling and passage through popular vote of a legislative proposal that seeked to establish that he was, despite his advancing years, good at something other than the mere consumption of oxygen. Yes, we capitalists can be cruel at times.

Other games that subsequently followed were hangman and one that was tentatively called "make fun of the Indian guy". Oh I was so very bad at that one. But then the boss returned and work resumed. On the whole, it was a productive afternoon if you weren't an Indian guy.

Speaking of nothing in particular, I subscribed to emusic.com, this amazing music download service. It is great because you get 40 song downloads a month for only 10 bucks. So it's 25 cents a song which is great because it allows you to set aside some money every month so as to someday save enough to buy that rat poison you saw the other day in the store window and just couldn't stop thinking about because of all the high gas prices.

Emusic.com makes one feel as if he were a bull in a china shop, a bull who wishes he could stuff all that china into the leftist bag slung over his shoulders and take it home with him. But the best part about emusic is that it has loads of Indian classical music. All the greats. And every song, which is basically an entire album, is 25 cents. A fucking bargain. There's all kinds of other hard-to-find shit too, like the Cocteau Twins, Labradford, Sigur Ros, Thievery Corporation and tons of Indie and ethno techno (Karsh Kale, Midival Panditz). Oh and they also have a boatload of Bollywood stuff. Both new and old.

The downside to this service is that they do not have a lot of big record labels signed up. So no mainstream music. But you know what, if you are into mainstream music, you don't deserve it anyways. Boo.

But check it out anyways, even if you are a Lance Bass fan and are wondering if you should let your folks know that you just found out through People magazine that you are gay. Hey, they give you 25 free downloads when you sign up. You could freak out on Himesh Reshammiya, the early years.

Up and away

After spending most of this week wreathed in a miasma of depression (miasma being the word of the week, courtesy this very succinct review of Tom Friedman's "The world is flat"), the morning of today held some promise towards the relaxation of its vise-like grip on my neck. Why depression? Well why not? The nerve-wracking, gut-punching heat. The relentless attack of search engine queries on this blog relating to the dal shortage, reminding one that yes, the world is still reeling from the effects of that catastrophe. Reading sentences like this in a film review : "It is safe to assume that it will take some time for Shyamalan to dry his clothes in the marketplace". The extraordinarily grim prospects of seeing India in the finals of the next FIFA world cup. And finally, the overwhelming, skin-melting, brain-roasting heat.

But as I was driving to work, things seemed to be picking up. But then, abruptly, they began to go downhill again. First, a motorcycle rider sped past me in the fast lane. Ah to own a motorcycle and be young again, I said to myself. Then, another went by, equally fast, this one with tattoos on his bare legs. I couldn't remember the last time I had a tattoo. Oh wait, I did remember. I was a beautiful young transvestite hooker in Greenwich village. Greenwich village doesn't have any transvestite hookers, you say? You haven't seen any you say? Look closer. They're the ones with the tattoos on their legs.

And just as I was settling comfortably inside the familiar groove formed by my self-pitying wallowing, I saw a black cop car whiz by faster than the wind broken by Carl Lewis' flatulence gland. Hallelujah, I prayed, please let him be pursuing the biker. And so he was, my friends, so he was. Soon the road started to contain people pulled over by the cop, namely the biker. But wait a second, what about the other guy, the tattooless one? He appeared to have escaped. In the distance, I could see him fleeing towards the sunset, changing lanes, weaving through traffic, no doubt heaving a sigh of happiness as the beads of relieved perspiration from his forehead drifted past me on the morning breeze. I began to sink into despondency again.

But fate wasn't done with me yet. Armed with wailing sirens and gnashing teeth, another cop car sped by in the fast lane. Could it really be? Could it? Would the other biker be pulled over as well? Wrestling depression to the ground, shoving my foot in her mouth, thereby removing her grip on my neck, I craned it in order to look beyond the next car. The cop certainly appeared to be aiming for relieved biker no.2. And then, he was pulled over. Merry Christmas. Santa had arrived early this year.

It didn't matter if I didn't own a motorcycle or a tattoo. At least I wasn't being pulled over by cops. No matter how many tattoos you have, you still look stupid being pulled over by a cop.

I am ok now. Plus, it's almost friday.

This and that

I just saw that someone from NASA reached this blog after having googled for "dal shortage". It gets me kinda worried because if NASA rocket scientists are clueless on how to tackle this problem, having resorted to googling for a solution, we might as well look forward to changing our lifestyle to one that does not involve consumption of dal, perhaps even taking to cannibalism (no mother, I wasn't just looking for an excuse to eat people).

On the other hand, it might just have been a NASA janitor surfing the web. Maybe NASA should put these janitors to work growing some dal instead of frittering away their time surfing the web. Mmmm fritters. Good bye till march, fritters, I will miss you.

Oh, and my neighbourhood Indian restaurant owner had absolutely no idea of the dal famine currently descending upon the pressure cookers of the world. I told him the breaking news and he was all like "No you lie, you lying liar", and I was like "Man my blogpost on this issue got linked at desipundit and all, where have you been, you should get someone to periodically turn the rock you are living under". And then, just to prove my point, I took out the packet of dal I now keep in my shirt pocket for emergencies, carefully withdrew a handful and threw it in the air. And all the Indian diners leapt up from their tables, and as they clawed around on the floor, trying to grab those precious seeds and stuff 'em inside their pockets, I saw the man turn sheet white, an amazing feat for him because he has a kind of "wheatish complexion", to quote his shaadi.com profile. But sadly, I am not sure if his place will survive the calamity. I hope it does because that place has the best Indian food.

Secondly, I don't know if you've already seen this but Israel will be defended by Captain Birdbrain and his band of yogic-flying superheroes who, coincidentally, I just wrote about a few days ago. That is all. I am sorry if you expected much more.

Thirdly, I have been linked to by the kind people at gilli.in. Thank you for the traffic. I remember when I was in graduate school I was exposed to a lot of gilli this and gilli that in the company of my Tamil friends but I never quite came to know what the word meant. Most of the time it played out in the form of Tamfriend1 saying something to Tamfriend2 and Tamfriend2 with a look of exasperation, saying "gilli" as if to say "c'mon now, how could you even say that". However, I might have been mistaken, it could have been a different but similar sounding word.

Cops

The first thing I saw when I entered the Subway parking lot yesterday was two cop cars parked side by side with cops inside. I slid my car into a parking spot but my windows were open because lately, it's been hot like the fucking desert here and I don't like to turn on the air conditioning because I'm trying to conserve gas which rightfully belongs to all those 5 miles per gallon Hummer owners. Poor things. We all need to chip in and contribute in order to keep those guys operational. America, freedom and bare-breasted justice demands it.

So then I was gonna pull up my windows before getting out of the car because I could see a "Raj for Congress" campaign bus parked nearby and politicians being so free with our money and all, what's to stop them from being similarly free with our cars and wives as well?

But then I realized that the cops were there and man, if Raj managed to get away with my car with those cops watching, he surely deserved to own it and not only that, I would even vote for his carjacking ass. So I left the windows open and went inside the Subway. But just as I was ordering my sandwich, who should enter it, the Subway, not the sandwich, but those same goddamned cops. What the fuck, cops, I said to myself, can't I even trust you to spend some time maintaining law and order and keeping an eye on things without getting hungry?

And after a while, with my anger gradually subsiding, I began to think clearly and realized that with cops around and all, today was obviously not a good day for stealing quarters from the cystic fibrosis fund. So I didn't do it and someone with cystic fibrosis probably owes me one. Furthermore, Raj hadn't taken a fancy to my car. I doubt Raj would have been able to drive stick shift anyways. He seems to have been born and brought up in this country because he is quite good looking and he doesn't give other Indians the evil eye. Plus there is a Peter or Paul in his name, I forget which.

PS : I chose cystic fibrosis because of my hypothesis that there was about one chance in a million that one of my readers would know someone with cystic fibrosis and get offended. However, if there is anyone here who does know someone with cystic fibrosis, please let me know, so I can change it to something more obscure like pellagra or goitre, although I am not sure if there are goitre or pellagra foundations.

Maybe enabling comments was a bad idea

Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing in enabling comments on this blog. Many times, what happens is, you start to read one of my blog posts, then when you are on the very second line of the post, you see something that you agree with so whole-heartedly that you drop everything right there and begin to craft a comment in your mind.

So while crafting that comment, your brain tunes out and you miss reading the third, fourth, fifth and sixth lines and by God, you shouldn't have missed those lines because those were truly the best ones in the entire post. By the time you are done composing the comment in your mind, checked it for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and inappropriate Nazi references, you have already reached the twentieth line of the post. Since you have missed the last 19 lines of the post, the 21st line suddenly doesn't make any sense. Fuck it, you say, this is such a crappy post. Why am I even reading this blog? And then you delete me from your bloglines subscription list.

That makes me very sad because bloglines subscriptions are like Las Vegas casino dollars. They really have no value outside of the casino but when you are inside, they make you feel like a million bucks worth of real money.

I realize that this might be the very first line you are reading after you tuned out at the second line but please don't remove me from your bloglines subscription.

Some bad news

Hello my fellow Indians from the US, the UK and everywhere else around the world except India. It is never a pleasant experience for anyone to be the purveyor of bad news but today I will regretfully don that mantle for the common good. My friends, listen up and please sit down or stand up depending on whether you are in the habit of suddenly sitting down or standing up when you hear really bad news.

Here is the bad news. India has, or soon will, stop exporting dal to the United States. I hear a collective gasp of horror from myself which drowned out the gasp I am sure simultaneously issued forth from your frozen lips. Yes it is true. India will no longer export any more dal to the US until March 2007. That is about 7 months from now. Sadly I did not hear a gasp of horror from my American audience. In order to elicit that gasp, I will elaborate upon the extraordinary nature of the news I just conveyed.

Imagine, dear American reader, if, someday, suddenly all the cows in America were to disappear, lets say, through alien abduction, along with all the burger buns wrapped around them. Not only that, let us imagine a scenario where ketchup, mustard and french fries were to suffer from a severe shortage due to a late monsoon playing havoc with the ketchup and mustard crops and France, finally having had enough of Bill O'Reilly's hissy-fits, refusing to ship their fries to the US. And finally, imagine if all the chickens in the country were to be afflicted by sinus infections, thus rendering them unsuitable for consumption and fornication. (Note that I purposely didn't say bird flu because I did not want to raise the terror alert level and make you want to go out there and invade China's bird population)

How, pray shuddering American, would you react to such a situation? Yes, that is right, you would be aghast, fearing for the future, wondering how to feed your pets and your family. Because that is the exact equivalent of the perplexing bind the average Indian in the US now finds himself in.

Yes, dal is the Indian's ground beef and chicken cordon bleu, all in one. It is a good source of protein. It is quick to cook, fills the belly and helps you in maintaining a spotless colon. Which is why every Indian will take this news of a dal shortage very seriously.

But all is not lost, friend Indian. It is not time to panic yet. Listen up and stop weeping. Go to your neighbourhood Indian store. It is still selling toor dal, only now it is called "toovar" for some reason, probably something to do with the export ban. The price is higher now, it costs about 4 and a half dollars for a packet small enough to fit comfortably inside your spotless colon, not that I am trying to give you any ideas. I don't know how much it used to cost before but I assume it was much cheaper than that. It is a fact of life that one only begins to notice the price of things after they become pricey. So anyways, my point is, go to your Indian store and snap up all the dal you can find. Oh do not worry about your fellow Indians. They will eat cake.

There is but one problem. Dal Eaters Against Stockpiling and Price Gouging (DEASPG) has ordered all Indian groceries not to dispense more than two bags of dal per person. So by the time you finish reading this and head off to the Indian store, it is imperative that you raise a decent sized Indian family. And then, look for all the Indian stores within a 50 mile radius and make the rounds with each family member going into each store in turn to receive his or her allotted ration of dal. Take a pickup truck. Remember, March is a long way off. In between there is Thanksgiving and turkey stuffed with dal, Christmas with the dalnog and boy, let's not forget the Superbowl dal shots. Halftime this year will be tinged with sadness. There will be rice, but where, oh where will be the dal?

I guess the only solace one can find during this troubling time is in the fact that one's car runs on gasoline and not dal.

Fame

Go here to read about how I achieved fame minus the fortune in a "setting the bar low" kind of way.

In remembrance

Today is a sad day, a day of sorrow, a day of mourning. Today is the day we eulogize the passing of Harry Olivieri, the inventor of the Philadelphia cheesesteak.

Philadelphia is a grand old city. It is chock full of history. History with a big crack down its middle. History that can be viewed in art form and misunderstood. History full of rolling hills and lazy arthritic deer. Black history. White history. But there is only one kind of history in Philadelphia that can be smothered with onions and cheese and devoured to the accompaniment of beer. That is the Philadelphia cheesesteak.

I remember the first time I had a Philadelphia cheesesteak. It was four years ago and I had just arrived in this city, hungry, scared, broke and with a car full of plastic rectangles I had purchased in Walmart and didn't want to throw away when I moved. I had been unemployed for four months and had forgotten what meat looked like. Or cheese.

That is why when the city embraced me with open arms and handed me a big cheesesteak, I did not know what to do with it. I held it against the light and it was beautiful. I sniffed it and it smelt of happiness. I grazed my lips against it and it tasted of sunshine. I placed it on the carpet and knelt in reverence. I kept it on paper and traced its outline. I sang to it. I fixed it a bubble bath and lowered it into the bathtub. It sank to the bottom. That was not a smart thing to do. I went and bought another.

I ate this one. Anyone who's ever eaten a Philly cheesesteak can never have amorous relations with an ordinary sandwich with the same passion again. The combination of thinly sliced ribeye steak, cheese, onions and sometimes mushrooms, depending on whether you are gay or not, on a long roll is something every person on this planet needs to experience at least once during his lifetime.

This is historic Pat's King of Steaks, the place in South Philadelphia where the first ever cheesesteak was invented by Mr Harry Olivieri and his brother, Pat. I once biked 30 miles from Valley Forge to Pat's Steaks and back. It was my pilgrimage, my homage to this extraordinary sandwich that is virtually a food group for most Philadelphians, along with pizza, beer and hookers.

Rest in peace Mr Olivieri. Thinly sliced. Smothered in onions. And drizzled with cheese, of course.

First comment

Someday I hope to achieve such immense blog-popularity that the first comment for every post I publish will unfailingly be a celebratory one from someone relieved to be the first to comment on that post.

But this doesn't mean you need to do that for this post out of pity. I will not accept pity under any circumstances, except when it is tendered in cash form.

The trapdoor

So then we had this intense little storm yesterday which took out the power. The balcony door was open and I was standing outside wearing shorts and my chest. I really wanted to go for a swim but they ask everyone to get out of the pool when it starts to rumble because as we all know, the lightning will always aim at the swimmers first because they are naked.

But standing on a balcony in the rain is just like swimming in the pool without all that urine. Unless, of course, you begin to urinate in which case you might as well be in the pool. But then the wind blew right into the apartment, and trees bent so much that if they were men they would have performed auto-fellatio, and so strong was the blast that from inside the apartment there was a large crack and my wife was pointing towards the ceiling just before she flew out the window and from nowhere, there appeared an opening in the ceiling somewhat akin to the gaping maw of hell, except it was above and not below, and then it disappeared. It was a trapdoor.

Now the question is, what is a trapdoor doing in my ceiling. Perhaps it leads to an attic. You probably think you know where this is going. Could there be a headless body in my attic? A skeleton chained to a chest containing my tax returns? No, I'm not going there. There are more relevant questions that need to be answered. For example, if there is an attic above my ceiling, and if I wasn't informed about its existence, does the space contained within fall under my jurisdiction?

Secondly, is it incumbent upon me to explore it? Would I be a pussy if I chose not to? You know, I would climb up on a chair with a flashlight and lift it up but I have a strong suspicion that Vin Diesel might be waiting in the space above to smash a flailing ball of spikes into my face just as it appears in the gap between trapdoor and ceiling. Vin Diesel likes the darkness. I guess no one here saw the Chronicles of Riddick. Otherwise this joke would have gone over much better.

Now I'm beginning to wonder if there really is a headless body in my attic. Life was so much better without an attic. I hope this apartment doesn't have a basement I know nothing about.

The compulsive conversationalists

I am not a big fan of conversations. If it were up to me, I would communicate exclusively through sign language. For emergencies, I would use whistles, clicks and loud popping sounds.

I try my best to avoid talking to my colleagues. If we are out having lunch, they occasionally crack jokes at my expense by saying, "Goddamn, gawker, stop talking for a second, you are not even letting me get a word in." But most of them, by now, have adjusted to my taciturnity.

All except this guy. Who is also this guy. Some people have a habit of stopping and striking up a conversation with whomever they happen to pass in the hallway, in the parking lot, in the toilet, or heck, just about anywhere. This guy is those people. He is like the ants, who, while running around ever so busily in a line will always stop and exhange friendly banter with every other ant who they happen to encounter in the course of their travels.

State Transport bus drivers in Maharashtra are guilty of the same actions. If they pass each other on the road, there is some obscure governmental regulation which makes it mandatory for them to stop and chat. Maybe they are comparing notes. How many of your passengers threw up today, one probably asks the other. Ah only two, good for you, says the other. Five here. Ok, see you on the return trip. Let that steering wheel fly.

But coming back to this guy, man, he is just too garrulous for my tastes. Doesn't matter if I'm clearly walking towards the men's room, he will accost me and inquire, "Are you going to the men's room?" "Yes", I will reply, "I am going to the men's room and I intend on urinating there". If I'm going to get lunch, he will ask me, "Are you going to the Subway?" And I will say, "Yes, and I intend on urinating there."

The problem is not that he insists on speaking to me but that most of his speech consists entirely of questions. There's a difference between exchanging pleasantries and asking questions. For example, saying something like "Hey man, it's hot outside, we should take off our clothes and jump into the creek" is a pleasantry. It doesn't require the other person to reply. A smile and a nod from him, acknowledging the idea of two men swimming naked in a creek is sufficient to end the conversation on a friendly note.

On the other hand, if one were to ask, "Hey man, will you take off your clothes and accompany me to the creek for a swim" is a question and it confers an obligation on the other person to shed his silence and tender a response on whether he is for or against swimming naked with another man in a creek during office hours. Unless a reply is offered, the conversation is incomplete and will lead to feelings of resentment between the two and quite possibly, a bad work environment.

Questions are thus, not a very good way to make small talk between colleagues. And this guy needs to understand that.

Indians and lines

Indians in the US have a great technique of tackling long lines at food stands. They walk up to the front of the line with their wives and husbands and sons and daughters, all in a group looking way too flabbergasted and point towards the inside of the food stand with a quizzical stare that proclaims ignorance about the purpose of the line and of the food stand.

And the other people standing meekly in line allow these folks to stand there because they feel, hey these are just cute little confused foreigners who need to find out what the line is for and once they find out, they will probably get the hell back in line.

Sadly, they don't. And the cute foreigners continue to stand there in front of the line and then they look at each other with their wrinkled brows and questioning eyes and they giggle self-consciously and ask each other questions in some Indian language till the person serving the food sheds his inhibitions and talks to them and tells them what the line is for. And then this allows them to grab this opening with both hands and before you can say "that's my sausage", they've ordered food, been served, paid the money and left, while everyone else standing legitimately behind them in line is speechless in disbelief at the gall of these bastards including those who are natives of the same country as theirs.

Goddamn, that's enterprise.

The tragic tale of Captain Birdbrain

Recently, through the efforts of a reader who diligently keeps me abreast of all things strange and bizarre, it was brought to my attention that there exists amongst the picturesque cornfields of Iowa, a place known as the Maharishi Vedic City. When I say city, I use it in a very loose sense of the word since it consists primarily of a number of houses built in close proximity.

The purpose behind this city, ostensibly, is to achieve permanent world peace. A noble objective,wouldn't you say, especially in these violent and troubled times. However, you might, and quite understandably, pose the question, in what specific manner would a community of people living in already peaceful rural Iowa hope to affect and reduce the violence occurring in a different part of the world not as liberally endowed with cornfields? Fortunately, in the words of the Maharishi Vedic City website administrator, technology exists that can achieve this goal.

Many scientific studies have shown that when the square root of one percent of a population is practicing the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program including Yogic Flying at the same time then accidents, terrorism, drug abuse and other problems are reduced significantly, and increasing positive influences such as improved health, economy, and well-being of the individual and society occur spontaneously.

That was the sound of me screaming for joy. World peace, here I come. So in other words, all that needs for world peace to be achieved is a collection of people, all simultaneously engaged in the transcendental meditation. What's the catch, you say? Well, the catch is, all these meditating people have to belong to that section of society which is usually prone to committing acts of violence. If these people are meditating, they obviously won't be killing anyone, thus achieving peace. Ha ha. Actually, I was just kidding. There is no catch.

But hold on, what is this about yogic flying? The institute purports to teach vedic scholars studying there how to fly. In fact, they have a "Yogic flying hall" in each of their classrooms where students can learn how to defy gravity.

Notice anything strange about the place? Why would a room, where students are expected to routinely hover in mid-air, require "highest quality 6-inch foam mattresses" on the ground? If you're gonna be flying around the joint, wouldn't you expect the walls to be padded? Or the ceiling? In fact, coming right down to it, if you were to be bestowed the gift of flight, why would you partake of it in a closed room in the first place? Wouldn't you prefer to do it outside where the chances of suffering a mid-air collision with your fellow gravity-defiers would be significantly reduced?

Ah, but there's a reason behind it. See, it turns out, yogic flying isn't actually flying as such. As the wiki describes it, "While sitting cross-legged or in a "lotus" position, yogic flyers can move around in a hopping kind of motion." It's yogic hopping, that's what it is.

Yes, you may cancel your ticket to Iowa now. So to summarize, the folks at the Maharishi Vedic Institute believe that if one percent of the population of America were to hop around in the lotus position, such as these good folks who, curiously enough, have allowed their hopping to be captured for posterity, it would reduce the amount of violence currently prevailing in American society. You know, this would be a good time to stop screaming for joy.

But what about all those people who enrolled in this institute to learn how to fly and achieved mastery in hopping instead? Here is an example of one such individual. He was a quiet boy, a fan of comic book superheroes. Each time he returned from watching a Superman movie, he used to stand on his porch, towel tied around his neck, underwear and shorts interchanged, and stare at the sky, wishing with all his heart, oh, but if only he could fly.

And then, he found out about this mystical place in Iowa that could quite possibly help him achieve his dream. He would become a superhero and fight crime. He even came up with a name for his new self. Captain BirdBrain. He sewed himself a costume out of his mother's spandex leotard, the only garment he would be wearing from now on. And then, he flew to Iowa. On a plane. On his way, he couldn't help but chuckle at his co-passengers. Soon he would be cruising outside their windows and they would look at each other with wonderstruck eyes and whisper, "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a grown man wearing a leotard. Oh, oh, wait, it's Captain BirdBrain".

But Destiny wasn't prepared to cooperate with him. After spending eleven years, yes eleven, at the Institute trying to develop his aeronatical skills, he finally gave up. He realized that the Maharishi International University had fooled him. So he sued them for "emotional damage" and won.

U.S. District Court jury here ordered two Transcendental Meditation organizations yesterday to pay almost $138,000 to a man who contended said the organizations falsely promised he could learn to fly.

Eventually, although Captain Birdbrain never learnt how to fly, he did become a role model for future generations. Because of his pioneering superhero aspirations, we now know that being a birdbrain can no longer be a legitimate excuse for failing in life. As long as there are people who can be blamed for your own lack of intelligence, there will always be a chance for you to make it big by suing them.

Although I can't help but wonder about all those superheroes out there, graduates of the Maharishi International University, who are hopping around, fighting crime in society, all the while laboring under the mistaken belief that they are actually flying.

The wax phone

My next door colleague has found a new way to rattle my nerves. Yes, he is the same one I am hiding my chewing gum from.

I have this phone that's made out of wax which is lying around on my desk. It is not a real phone obviously because it is made out of wax. It is something one of our customers manufactured using the software my company sells. I keep it on my desk in order to bear a living testament to my relevance in the world. Even though when this phone was made, I was not employed with this company. But it doesn't matter because if it were to be made right now, it would be made using software which I had some hand in developing.

Coming back to the wax phone, my colleague is extremely enamored by it. He often drops by my cubicle and after snatching chewing gum from my rage-filled fingers, he asks me to call someone up using the phone. It's not that he is not aware that the phone lacks any actual connecting powers to the outside world. He feels that the premise of dialing someone on a wax phone is hilarious.

He has begun to make about five trips a day to my cubicle to ask me to call people up on my wax phone. Sometimes he wants pizza and needs to use the phone to order pizza and he wants me to call up the pizza place on my wax phone. Sometimes he wants me to get in touch with some customer having problems with our software and he specifically wants me to use the wax phone. Other times he comes in and wants to talk to me about something and asks me to call him up on the wax phone.

The good thing about stuff made out of wax is that it can be melted and poured onto human skin. Hey don't judge me, you have your fantasies, I have mine.

In the army

Saturday night saw me ordering take-out from the new Indian restaurant in our neighbourhood. It's such a great place that I've been going there every weekend with my wife and the guy has become friendly with me.

So we started talking and after asking me all the usual questions every Indian asks every other Indian he meets here in the US, for example, how long have I been here and whether I'm planning to ever go back and whether I'm gonna have a baby soon and if so, what would I be calling it and if it were to be a girl, he had this baby boy in mind who would be a suitable bridegroom for her and would I be interested and so on and so forth, he suddenly asked me, "Are you in the army?"

I was startled by this question and asked him, "No, why?"

He replied, "Because you always wear a t-shirt."

If you found this exchange a bit perplexing you weren't alone. I too tried to make sense of it as I stood there and failed utterly in coming up with a logical explanation behind his cryptic remark.

Then, I went home and thought about it for a while and now I think I know why he said what he did. See, the fact is, he probably looked at my 3-month-old-rigorously-worked-out-physique and deemed it worthy of being in the armed forces. So he asked me if I worked for the army. But when asked to explain his statement, he was about to tell me that he thought I had a great body, but then realized it would sound pretty gay and Indians, as a rule, are not a very gay-friendly people. So he had to think on his feet and come up with another reason and at that late hour of the night, all he could come up with was the fact that I always wore a t-shirt.

Anyways, that's what I think, if you have any other possible explanations, please feel free to elaborate.

Being ugly is a crime

Here's a new one.

Vijai B. Pandey, 60, filed a lawsuit in Hampden Superior Court last month against friends who tried to arrange a marriage between his son Pranjul K. and their niece. The Pandeys, after spending money on long-distance calls and airfare, found her much too homely.

When the Pandeys saw the bride in New Delhi last August, they were "extremely shocked to find ... she was ugly ... with protruded bad teeth, and couldn't speak English to hold a conversation," Vijai Pandey stated in the lawsuit. The woman's complexion was also cited for the broken engagement.

Pandey's civil complaint against Lallan and wife Kanti Giri of Boyds, Md., seeks $200,000 in damages, and charges them with fraud, conspiracy and violation of civil rights, among other claims resulting in emotional distress.

Ok, so let me get this straight. The guy arranges a marriage between his son and a girl, then sues the girl's family after he visits them and discovers that she does not scale his bar of comeliness. Yeah, I can see how that could make some sense. However, what I can not make any sense of are the charges he is levelling against the girl's family. Fraud I can see, ok so they lied that they had a pretty daughter but conspiracy? Somehow I don't think they conspired to create an ugly daughter. What'd they do, make funny faces during her conception?

"Violation of civil rights"? This one I don't get at all. Unless of course the protrusion of the girl's teeth was so pronounced that they encroached into someone else's personal space. Kind of far-fetched, but to me, the only possible theory.

And finally, emotional distress. You got some nerve, boy. After calling the girl ugly, bad complexioned and buck toothed, you want to sue them for emotional distress? That's priceless, no, really.

And by the way, what happened to the good old fashioned way of exchanging photographs before arranging a meeting? That way you get to sue the photographer as well for conspiring to manufacture non-existent beauty. Some more money in the bank, some more sanity down the drain.

Invention of the week

Tequila shots with hot lime pickle. Try it. More delicious than idli-stuffed burritos, more intoxicating than ten week old rasam.

How not to spend a four-day weekend

The problem with four-day weekends is not the fact that eventually, they have to come to a conclusion, but that the countdown to their demise begins barely hours into their arrival. Like, say, about 9:00 am on saturday morning with sunday, monday and tuesday yet to arrive, you begin to bemoan the fact that you've already lost friday night to exhaustion and that one-fifth of the weekend is already over.

Saturday night is even more traumatic. You are not sure whether to consume alcohol, stay awake and milk saturday night for all it's worth and lose sunday morning or to perform the last rites for Saturday night and begin sunday morning bright and early. You spend most of sunday trying to come up with ideas of how to best spend sunday. By evening you still haven't reached a decision.

Sunday night is the half way point of the weekend. It is the time to look back and mourn the passage of the past couple of days and look ahead and mourn the impending passage of the next couple of days.

Monday is obviously spent in a white-knuckled vigil, waiting for tuesday. And it doesn't help that on tuesday, the final night of the four-day weekend, the weather erupts in thunderstorms and results in a cable outage. Sitting in front of a snowy screen, you try and come to terms with the fact that yet another long weekend has come and gone. In some bizarre way, you are almost relieved that your long protracted anticipation of the end of your holiday is finally over and that you can now revel in that more familiar sensation of waiting for the next weekend to arrive.

But on a different note, it was a great game between Deutschland and Italy. I was gonna be an unbiased observer but then I saw the first two comments left on my previous post and became a rabid Italy supporter.

I am not sure what to make of the fact that "drawing a foul" or "selling a dive" has morphed into a skill to be talked about and praised by commentators. Why should the fact that someone was able to deceive a referee into awarding him a free kick be something to celebrate? It's like calling someone a great boxer 'cause he can get the other guy disqualified by forcing him to punch him in his testicles by jumping up and raising his crotch to glove level . No, the ability to "draw a foul" isn't what makes a great player. So the next time someone tries to fake it, please, dear commentator, point at him and laugh. Call him names. Make him feel bad. But don't put him on a pedestal.

Thank you

Thank you for not letting me know who won the Argentina Germany game. I was taping it on my DVR while I was at work. And no thanks to the DVR which recorded the regular game but didn't record overtime. Is it me or does Germany suck big time? The Argentina Germany game reminded me of my childhood football games when the only strategy involved was in kicking the ball towards the north pole. Or the south pole if you weren't actually playing for the team you thought you were. And the German players were running around as if they had Pink Floyd playing in their headsets. Chilled, relaxed, waiting for someone else to take charge of the ball and frequently it turned out to be the boys in blue. Hello Germany, I know PreOktober Fest is in full swing but c'mon, it's only a few more days and then you can guzzle all the malty goodness you want.

Personally I am rooting for Portugal. I am said to have a Goanese ancestry.