Still missing 'em

My kids are not due from their vacation for another 4 days. I'm missing them terribly, especially the noise that keeps reverberating all around the house, them playing football, Sheela yelling at them to study, my mom asking them if they've prayed. Our house usually resembles a suburban railway station at rush hour. These days its a bit like Parliament debating a motion to increase MP's pay. Not a peep. Rummaging around in my computer, I found this piece I had written a year or so ago. I love my blog. It never raises its eyebrows and says what is this muck you've written. It unquestioningly hosts it.



Kids can be so difficult to answer. Especially when they are eleven and nine respectively. We saw this movie "Salaam Namaste" The plot broadly is a man and a woman have a great live-in relationship and then she gets pregnant. The man doesn't want the child, the woman cant bear to lose it. Lot of soul searching and then the happy ending. It was laid back, cool and funny, we had heard, and took the kids along. They laughed at all the jokes and thoroughly enjoyed the movie. We had dinner at a restaurant and came home. Great evening out. And then the questions started.

Gautham is the major inquisitor. Vyaas is a little close to puberty and is fast acquiring the teenage penchant for maintaining long periods of silence when parents are around. Gautham, however, has an analytical mind and answers to his questions usually beget more questions. The first one was what they call a fast in-swinging yorker.

"How did they get a baby if they're not married?"

"If grown ups sleep together, they get babies". Sheela.

"Dad and you sleep together. How come you dont get babies?"

Sheela is stumped. I'm trying hard to keep a straight face. Then she finds a reply.( I didn't marry her for nothing.)

"People get babies only if they sleep without clothes on." I'm suffering from a great fit of coughing.

"How does that happen? Do they have to remove ALL their clothes?"

This is getting too close for comfort so Sheela decides to go on the offensive. She is a bit of a disciplinarian so the kids are afraid of her. Much more than me, whom they consider a sort of fifth rate world power fit enough to speak only in the UN assembly.

"If you boys would see more of National Geographic and less of Cartoon Network, you wouldn't have to ask these questions. Whenever I see the TV, its always switched on to Cartoon Network. I'm going to call the cable guy and disconnect it once and for all. "

A tense silence indicated that the threat had found its mark and everyone was quiet for a couple of days on this topic at least.

A couple of days later, Sheela stepped into the living room. As it happened, the TV was switched on and the channel was Cartoon Network. Gautham quickly changed it to National geographic.

Sheela sat down to read the paper. Gautham found his voice " See that bunch of monkeys, Amma?" There was a program about chimpanzees on National Geographic. Sheela said "Yes?"

" I've been watching them for days. They still haven't had any kids."

Distinct sounds of a father asphyxiating himself.

And so it goes on. Mercifully the questions are never directed at me because I'm known to be a person of insubstantial intellect. Whatever my childrens' faults may be, no one can say they are not great judges of people.

We have a haircut

Today I accompanied Sheela to a hairdresser's in our local mall. The kids are away on vacation, you see, and we're trying to figure out what to do with all this "space" we've got all of a sudden.

Well, the hairdresser's is a trendy place called "Something Illegible Unisex Salon". I am unable to understand the Something Illegible of course - the font looks like WingDings- but I've figured out why they call it a Unisex Salon. All the hairdressers male and female look like they belong to the same sex, which is an entirely different sex from the rest of us.

We entered in and were greeted by The Nice Lady With The Smile. She told us to take a seat while she looked up the appointment diary. She gave us a Smile and told us that we could have an appointment right away. Considering that there were a grand total of zero customers in the shop, this came as no surprise, but these things are part of etiquette.

Presently a bright young person of uncertain gender appeared and delivered a Smile. "Hi! I'm John", said the Smile. "How are we this morning?" I felt a little hot under the collar because all this Smiling was being directed at me and John was pouting a good deal, to boot. I hadn't the courage to turn and look at Sheela but I was sure she was laughing at me silently, collecting ammunition for her idle amusement, the next time she was bored.

I somehow managed to stutter that the patient was this here lady. The Pout turned the requisite degrees and directed itself at Sheela. Unlike me, Sheela has no problems facing Pouts. They chattered away about step cuts and shampoos and which hair color is better and soon I realized that I was a bit like the bride's mother at the honeymoon. Unwanted, if you know what I mean.

I was grateful, of course. I have participated in these sessions since childhood, when I had to escort my sisters to the local hairdresser's. My general attitude in these situations is to agree and keep agreeing with everything and with everybody.

"I think we'll cut it short, like this". Hair dresser.

"What do you think, Naren?" My sister.

"Perfect, perfect". Me, with my reassuring smile.

And after we got home, my sisters would weep bitterly, my mother would join in and all of them would then turn and start frying me. You said it looks nice. Couldn't you see. You should have told me. You were just ogling at that girl in the pink t-shirt. Which pink t-shirt, I would say, feigning ignorance. The tight pink t-shirt. O, you're completely useless. O how will I go to college looking like this and so on.

But somehow, I would get away with it. My relations with my sisters were like Musharraf's with the US. The US keeps telling Musharraf don't do this, don't do that and so on. Musharraf says yes and then goes ahead and does precisely that. The US gets very upset with him and tells him not to do it again. (He's just declared emergency in Pakistan and the White House told him they would consider cutting off aid. And these are the guys who invaded Saddam because President Bush thought it would be a good Christmas present for daddy. Aaarghhh!)

My sisters were like that. I would get away with not turning off the taps, burning the milk because I was watching TV, backing the car into the gate, and they would always support me in front of my parents. Privately I would be told sternly that I must not do this again.

Musharraf will always have the support of the US, because, I think, the US is his sister. He could blow up the White House and the US Government would tell him not to do it again or we will stop the aid. But they won't actually stop the aid because they are Musharraf's sister, so there!

Coming back to the story, I took the opportunity to make myself scarce for the next hour or so, lest I be subpoenaed. I went walk about in the mall, which houses a rather nice food court on the second floor. Here I pottered around and did my bit to kick start the economy by increasing the national spending on food and food products.

About an hour later, I returned to the Salon and found that ma'am was ready and waiting for me. It took her 15 seconds to figure out what I had been up to and I had to listen to a small but acerbic monologue on how foolish it is to stuff oneself when one is not going to the gym and one hasn't had one's cholesterol checked in the last year. Then I told her that the haircut was terrific and that she looked like Rani Mukherjee and she blushed a bit and dropped a few degrees in temperature.

Flattery, dear children, flattery. It will get you everywhere.

Market's on a roll!

There are not many things in this world I understand, though I suspect this revelation is not exactly earth shattering to you. I daresay you, with your customary perceptiveness, had divined as much early into our acquaintance. One doffs one's hat.

But of the things I understand the least, the pride of place goes to the stock market. It's not that I understand the theory of relativity any better, or the theory of which color goes with what. Its just that everybody seems to understand the stock market and I haven't a clue.

Hasmukhbhai is a recent acquaintance. A robust personality (his belts are custom made - the hide comes from extra large buffaloes) he is a walking encyclopaedia on the stock market. He has never said it in so many words but one suspects that even the Ambani brothers consult him from time to time. He knows Everything. Nominally he trades in industrial hardware (which is how I know him - we buy things from him from time to time) but it is easy to see that he runs this business purely for sentimental reasons. His real calling lies elsewhere.

The good thing about Hasmukhbhai is that he willingly gives advice and he is never embarrassed to show you what a doofus you are. "Frank" and "forthright" are adjectives that spring to mind.

The other day, I told him I had sold a few shares of Larsen & Toubro that we owned, because we wanted to buy some real estate.

"Sold it? SOLD IT!! What have you done?" was his first reaction.

After that he expounded on how it would triple in value in the next three months because the Institutions were buying it like crazy. I said, with unbecoming levity that I thought that wasn't much of a recommendation. Institutions are where people are committed, aren't they, after they are, you know, ga ga. What if some of the inmates had taken over the institution and started playing havoc?

This piece of buffoonery brought harsh rebuke.

"Financial Institutions, you fool! Don't you know anything?" Hasmukhbhai reprimanded me.

"What business is Larsen and Toubro in, that their stock is on such a roll?" I asked. This resulted in a longish monologue of which all I could gather was that they made every thing, the earth, the trees, the oceans, the deserts, the sky above and so on, all of which had a lot of export demand. And I had sold these shares! And something called Reliance Natural Resources Ltd. which saw its share price jump 15 times in the last two months without seeming to indulge in any kind of activity.

"Fool!", observed Hasmukhbhai.

"And what do THEY make?" I asked.

" They make natural resources, what else?" he replied, wearily shrugging his shoulders at the imbecility that abounds in this world.

So there things stand. Every morning I open the newspaper to check if the market has crashed and find that it has gone up a few hundred points. There are a lot of Hasmukhbhais in the papers, explaining how Institutions (presumably the ones that specialize in Finance rather than mental afflictions) are pumping money into Emerging Markets. I wonder if the markets aren't emerging merely because people are pumping money into it. But these are deeper waters than someone of my meagre mental abilities is permitted to swim in.

"Get out of the deep end!" shout the Hasmukhbhais of the world, "and let the experts do their thing".

Windows Vista R in a circle

Computers and I used to get along very well in the 80s and part of the 90s. We understood each other very well. I, for example, could clearly visualize how the stuff that I typed tunneled its way through the little wire that connects the keyboard to the big box, on to the main processor which would chew on it carefully, digest its meaning and then spew out its reactions.

On some days - and don't we all have those - it would be in a foul mood and just say "BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME" but most of the time it would just burst into a spreadsheet or word processor and all would be well. I would then type those "Dear Sir, Pursuant to our telephonic conversation of the 18th instant, I beg to draw your attention to..." kind of letters so popular those days.

If you wanted to spell check it, you'd have to select whatever text you wanted to spellcheck and then press "Ctrl" plus a few alphabets. Only then would any misspelled words be highlighted . It would not show any daft suggestions like now. "Narendra" would not automatically become "Clarendon" or "Kendra's" and "Shenoy" would most certainly not become "Phenotype", as it does now. Phenotype! I ask you! I have no idea what a phenotype is. Sounds like some kind of a psycho to me. "Psst! don't look now, but that guy with the shaggy hair is a raving phenotype!" We haven't had a phenotype in the Shenoy family for 57 generations!

As I was saying, I could understand the computer pretty well and the computer on its part understood me perfectly. It understood, for instance, that I was the proud kind of guy who would never beg anything of any body, leave alone the attention of some low-life whose telephonic conversations I had to pursue. The computer knew that it was just a matter of form. And if the computer guessed that I was an idiot, it maintained a dignified silence. It did not produce an "assistant" who rolled its eyes and behaved like a patronizing know-it-all.

Ironically, and this is where I put my most original observation that there is no justice in this world, the less people understood the computer, the richer Bill Gates and the software clan got. After a succession of bug-fests called Windows this and that, we now have a magic wand called Windows Vista R in a circle which, according to Bill Gates and his henchmen will make your business succeed like billy-o. The customers will walk in, according to these guys, and as soon as they realise you have purchased Windows Vista R in a circle, they will emit howls of joy and give you lots of business. Really! They must think we customers have water on our brains! (In my case, they're probably right but discerning people like yourself? No way!) Get more out of your Windows Vista R in a circle, urges Bill. Yeah sure! You know how Bill gets more out of Windows Vista R in a circle? HE SELLS IT TO IDIOTS LIKE YOU.

P.S. It has just been brought to my notice that Windows Vista R in a circle is actually not Windows Vista R in a circle but Windows Vista TM. Perhaps Bill thinks this makes it look less stupid.

Deep thoughts

My kids are off to Mysore tomorrow on their own. All of 13 years and 10 years of age respectively. They're growing up, I know, but they're still such babies! Who will take care of them on the flight? Not that anyone needs to, nowadays. My kids are smarter than I was at that age (indeed, they are of the opinion that they are smarter than I am NOW) but they are disarmingly innocent in certain matters. They were lobbying me to buy a plasma TV, which I felt was too expensive (it costs about 100,000 rupees) and anyway, television is so stupid. And we already have a big fat TV. Why do we need a big thin TV? But they wanted it. When I used the economic argument, Vyaas brushed it aside telling me that money was no problem because his granny had given him Rs. 500 and I could use it to buy the TV.

And they are still little boys, for all their man talk. The other night we saw a Hindi movie named Bhool Bhullaiya. The plot is a bit sinister but there is a lot of comic relief in the movie and consequently rated "U/A", a bit like PG in the US, I guess. A good movie, by the way, especially considering that it comes from Priyadarshan who has made some of the more disgusting movies of recent times, for example an abomination called "Garam Masala". As I was saying, the plot is a little scary though not really creepy. But at night, both of them climbed into our bed, on the grounds that there were mosquitoes in their room. Both steadfastly refused to accept that they were even the slightest bit scared. Typical guy behaviour.

Some of the things they like do distress me, of course. The chief among them is gangsta rap. We do almost all our listening to music in the car because at home they're either studying, playing football or watching TV. Or reading the newspaper (I'm not kidding. Both these guys read the dailies with great interest, especially the sports pages and the comics, more typical guy behaviour). So if we go for a long drive (in Mumbai, thanks to our traffic situation, any drive is a long drive), the lads begin the Great Battle for the Car Stereo Remote. The U.N. (in the form of their mom) intervenes from time to time, threatening to impose sanctions which involve chucking the remote out of the window and assuming totalitarian control over the stereo. Peace is then signed and the only music they both like is rap.

I don't know if you've heard much of what Dr. Dre or Snoop Dog have to say but it is almost entirely comprised of the f and allied words. Sheela, god bless her soul, is completely unfamiliar with this kind of stuff, especially when intoned by African Americans, otherwise the lads would certainly be missing a few teeth. As it is, the three men in the family understand the lyrics perfectly, two of them delighting in the discomfiture of the third. Consider my predicament. No father can accept such language in front of kids who, contrary to their own view, are mere toddlers. But if I put the topic under discussion, the crown princes will surely get their butts whipped and their father the king will receive a substantial earful. So I have to deliver a lot of circular threats and artful bribes and get them to switch to something less offensive. Gautham calls Dr. Dre "the American Shakespeare". He'll say things like "Dad, can we listen to the American Shakespeare?" to which Sheela raises an eyebrow and inquires as to who this might be. Luckily, she has not pursued this line of inquiry too far till now. There are some things a woman can never understand.

And these half men-half children will be traveling in a plane unrestrained by the wisdom of their parents. I fear for the stewardesses. On the other hand, serves them right for raising their eyebrows and telling me to fasten my seatbelt.

The Greatest Movie Line Ever

Here, without doubt, is the greatest movie line ever. If you fall out of your chair laughing and fracture your hip, you can sue the estate of Bob Hope.

A cultural weekend in Mumbai

I often explain to Sheela that if I'm spending hours in front of the computer that is because I am carefully compiling the story of my life in the form of e-mails and blog posts. I think she has figured out by now that while it is not exactly a lie, it is substantially the opposite of the truth.

Most of my time seems to be spent reading extremely important e-mails from African gentlemen on miraculous bequeaths of millions of dollars which can be all mine if I could only fund the expenses required for their release. And of course, mail from concerned people offering pharmaceutical products of a very personal nature.

Let me therefore assuage my conscience by writing about the weekend just gone by. The Times of India sponsored a Sufi music program at the Bandra Fort in Mumbai. Yes, 'where the hell is that?' is what I thought too, when Shrinath told me to lug my musical ass to the venue. It's at Band Stand, next to the Taj Lands End Hotel. Opposite Sea Rock, for old timers. My mom wanted to come along too. She has recently taken a liking to Sufi Qawwalis after hearing Abida Parveen on World Space Radio.(The said Parveen is built on the lines of a battleship but sings most mellifluously and hypnotically. She was not performing, though). Sheela and the kids decided they would have more fun at Akhil's house.

As usual, I landed up late, thanks to the beautiful evening traffic which was moving at a speed that made glaciers look fast paced. True to form, everyone was honking, some to express their dissatisfaction and some just because they had a horn. I thought of writing a ballad to the brave honkaneros of Mumbai. ("Oh! Young Popatlal is come out of the west, Through all of Andheri his horn was the loudest" that sort of thing). Thanks to my mom's pacifist views and strong objections to anything in the nature of interpersonal conflict, I was more honked against than honking.

I thus reached the venue in a ruffled state of mind. If I was President of the United States and the generals had asked me for permission to obliterate Moscow, I believe I would have given in right away. Angry, or as they say in scientific terminology, seriously pissed.

Luckily for me, Shrinath had his chauffeur on standby and I was spared the ordeal of hunting for a parking spot. Shrinath of course looked fresh as a daisy owing to living almost next door. The three of us, Shrinath, mom and I entered the concert to find, alas, that all the best seats were taken and there was standing room only in the nose-bleed section, high up on the hill.

By the time we settled down on a rough concrete wall, the singer who was performing had finished and the stage was taken over by two Wadali brothers. These guys are Hindus from Punjab, but are considered doyens of the Sufi tradition. They sang of Allah and Eid being the season of love and things like that, with such feeling and sincerity that all of us were spellbound.
I thought it spoke tremendously for the spirit of Indianness that binds our often silly but entirely lovable people across religious divides. The ordinary people on the street, that is. There are of course the psychos and the bigots and the downright corrupt but by and large, we are a nation of one billion docile (except in bed - look at those population numbers) people.

After the concert, we repaired to Akhil's house for a sumptuous dinner of pasta in some really yummy cream sauce and I ate away as if I was a pig who had just been released from a starvation diet. Which I pretty much am, actually. In a desperate bid to get rid of my pot belly I have given up rice entirely and cut back on food in general. The pot belly is showing signs of going away but so is my mind. Every now and then I lose it completely and indulge in binge eating which gets the pot belly right back in to championship contention.n Alas!

On the morrow was part II of the concert. This time I went alone as mom had some social visiting to do. Sheela and the kids were busy with mid-term exams. I slunk off as soon as possible, lest I be drafted for teacher duty. This happens from time to time when Sheela suffers a nervous breakdown and the baton is handed over to yours truly. As is well known, I command as much authority as a Buddhist monk in Myanmar, resulting in the kids thumbing their noses at me and playing cricket. Sheela returns after her unwinding or whatever and holds her head in despair. Then she throws me out of the room and gets to work. And I'm back on the computer, catching up on the latest from the African gentlemen.

Oops, digressed. As I was saying, part II of the concert was patriotic songs by Shubha Mudgal. This is one fine singer, let me tell you, the finest I've heard in a long time. Her voice is sort of contralto and her singing is extremely vivacious. She had dug out poems from India's independence struggle and set them to music. Very moving.

Shrinath and I were a bit speechless. After all that patriotism, getting sloshed didn't quite seem right. We decided to stroll down to a nearby eatery (being the lazy devils that we are, we did the strolling in Shrinath's car) and decided to tank up on some carbohydrates. This time, I am happy to report, instead of eating like a greedy pig, I ate like a polite and well brought up pig. We parted after a few satisfied burps and decided to get on with the business of life, Shrinath with his banking, I with my African gentlemen.

Heyy Baby

Last night it was my honor and privilege to witness the enactment of the worst script in movie history in any language, any country, ever. The movie is called "Heyy Baby" I knew instinctively that this was seriously injurious stuff because I could hear my brain cells popping one by one. My wife and kids of course laughed their respective asses off.

Dying to hear the plot? Okay, fasten your seat belts and hang on to your barf bags, here goes.

Akshay Khanna, aka Aroosh is a restaurant manager.
Ritesh Deshmukh aka Tanmay is a teddy bear (!)
Fardeen Khan aka Al is (I think) a cricket gambler.

All three of them are, how shall I put it delicately, keenly interested in exchanging genetic material with members of the opposite sex without participating in the creation of long term social institutions like marriage. Our kind director gives us a song to illustrate this, comprising of a dozen or so current Bollywood heroines cavorting with the aforementioned worthies in nightclubs of a swankiness that would put Ibiza to shame.

The three of them live in a place that looks like it belongs to the Sultan of Brunei. "Inconsistent with declared income" as the tax people like to put it. One morning, when these three are in bed with their respective flavors of the previous evening, the bell rings. One of them opens the door to find an infant girl in a basket, with a note saying "kutte, kameene, apni beti ko samhalo". Apparently one of them is the girl's father and no one knows which one. They feel compelled to look after her, even though none of them wants to. Significantly, none of them thinks of reporting this to the cops, though subsequently in the movie, cops willingly butt in on things that shouldn't concern them at all.

Toilet humor time, decides the director, and we are treated to the reactions of these guys to baby poop. The piece de resistance of this sequence of incomparable hilarity, judging from the reactions of my sons, is when the poop filled nappy lands poop side first on Akshay Kumar's face. The director's immortal contributions to the world of comedy continue in a similar vein for the next ten or fifteen minutes.

Then someone gets the bright idea of leaving the child at the door of a church. After they've left her there, it rains and the baby contracts pneumonia. They take her to a hospital where the doctor tells them she's going to die. Suddenly, everyone is weeping buckets like in a Rajendra Kumar movie. (Rajendra Kumar was a famous actor of my parents' generation. Rajendra Kumar could weep for three hours at a stretch. Some sort of a record, I believe.)

Well, the infant survives. She's luckier than me. I'm falling asleep here at the keyboard just recounting it. To cut a long story short, the plot meanders through completely improbable situations which I wouldn't be able to recollect unless I ingest prodigious quantities of beer, and probably not even then.

The questions here for serious students of cinema are as follows:
Has there ever been a stupider plot in movie history, including "Pati Parmeshwar" and "Justice Chaudhary"?(In Justice Chaudhary, the protagonist, who is the Chief Justice of India, played by The Great Jeetendra, stands up on the desk in the Supreme Court and sings a song. This is part of the court proceedings, by the way)
If it were proved that the plot was written by a human, and not randomly computer generated, as has been suggested, is that sufficient grounds to commit the script writer to a mental institution?
The producer spent Rs. 40 Cr. on this movie. What has he been smoking?
The movie is a hit in India. What have Indians been smoking?

For those of you who are not serious students of cinema, I suggest less painful avenues of entertainment such as dancing on a bed of nails, going over the Niagara falls in a barrel or, god bless my soul, even watching "Kyun ki Saas Bhi kabhi Bahu Thi"

Threemany.com

Hi everyone. I would like all you discriminating and erudite folk to check out this website threemany.com

What does a doofus like me have to do with a Silicon Valley start-up? Plenty! The man behind it is my old college mate and room mate, Hrishi Kamat who has frequently, though not recently, performed the yeoman task of scooping up yours truly whenever I inadvertently ingested those few drops of alcohol that disengage the control of the brain from the operation of the lower limbs. Hrishi himself was the most sober and upright of us all. His only weakness was - and is- food, of which he is a connoisseur.

Hrishi has now launched this website, which is an interesting concept. It is a message board - he calls it 'the wall' - where you can post text messages, photo albums and video messages (via a web cam). Only your friends, that is people approved by you, can view this wall.

It is an ideal place to put family and personal stuff. Vacation photos, perhaps. Or plans for a get-to-gether. And the webcam video messaging lends a very personal touch to your message.

So join in now and get into the scene. Its definitely the next big thing! And do include me as your friend.

Sheela dances the Salsa

Isn't this dance form graceful? Sheela's a natural at it. I wish I could say the same about myself. I resemble a cat on a hot tin roof when I attempt to execute the same steps, but I'm learning....