Sunday, November 20, 2011

The Great Rat Run

We’ve been a little laid back and complacent since World War II but don’t let that deflate the pride we should take in the recent spate of world-changing events we’ve triggered. Amongst others there’s the belated spring cleaning going on in the Arab world, the biggest fans of capitalism are turning against the smart practitioners, the anti-corruption drive is in full swing in India and terrorists are mysteriously dying during military operations instead of in public spaces with a bang. Drinks all around! And juice for our Muslim brothers and sisters.

Image credits


Thankfully our conveniently submissive conscience digests it when we, the top 40-60%, directly or indirectly exploit the bottom 60-40% otherwise we’d have spent all our lives protesting for something or the other. The advancement in technology at least allows us to accuse governments and corporations of not even lifting a finger with just a few mouse clicks and keystrokes. A few of us go beyond just that to put a funny one-liner on a placard and hang around during a non-violent protest. The more utilitarian ones who don’t care about appearing in the morning papers won’t much bother about the placard and can be found waiting for the non-violent protest to become violent so that they can go and loot stores. Getting all that stuff that Lindsay Lohan left behind soothes everyone’s wounds enough for the world to go on like earlier until the next tipping point is reached.

Image credits - staff , train
That’s just how we are. Despite all the evolving we’ve been up to if you trim out all the frills and vestigial organs you’ll find that there isn’t all that much to us. We essentially live in a cycle of either trying to make a lot of money soon and howsoever we want to or attaining some of the nobler human devices such as freedoms and rights and we can move mountains and courts to get them. Whatever might be hindering our pursuit must go and so what if we too have previously tried to escape challans, earned good corporate salaries, used credit to enjoy things beyond our means and availed the benefits of Qaddafi’s rule. Even divorces have become a profitable industry, job attrition rates are sky rocketing and landfills are filling up with all sorts of old yet usable stuff just like old age homes. A use and dispose mentality beautifully complements our instant coffee mentality.

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That is probably the main reason as to why even Occupy Wall Street will get to India much after its US release. India is still in the use phase of capitalism, most of us (or our fathers) are earning much more money than we (or they) deserve to, doing things the world can mostly do without. The prices are yet to go up enough for the purchasing power disparity, responsible for that big number on the paycheck, to get burnt up and everything seems all rosy. By the time they do we would have exhausted all our money on unnecessary gadgets, clothes, shoes, bags, cars and alcohol and then the voices will start rising. Our demands would include a government for the people, free health insurance, reservation for everyone in everything, better sex ratios and lower tax rates for the middle class and poor people, two dynamic socio-economic categories which together comprise of us and everyone else who can’t afford all the things we can. 

Image credits
And while we Indians are busy in our own bubble, the king of Saudi Arabia has bought out a revolt, American teenagers have started joining abstinence clubs, Iran and North Korea have continued to deliver nuke threats to anyone who dare wag a finger at them, Germany is still on track at owning the whole of Europe which somehow seems unable to wash Greece off its hands despite all the soap, Africans are still a couple of hundred years behind the developed world and have only started discovering the joys of the marine kind of piracy, the Chinese are renting wives, Australia still can’t decide whether it’s a country or a continent and all of humanity is either obese or below the poverty line. Average all this out, normalize to one and imagine seven billion such creatures taking the most important decisions for the whole planet and everything else on it.

Mother Earth image credits
One day our dormant unrest and erroneous judgment will take us to a point beyond repair and the ensuing chain of events will hopefully reset the world again to a more sustainable setting. All sorts of events could be part of this cascade and for all you know it’s begun already. For instance, it isn’t hard to conclude that Steve Jobs’ death could mark the end of innovation in the portable devices field, the last gasp of which might just be wireless braces. Subsequently New York will be reinstated as the bigger apple while on the other side of the globe millions of Chinese will be jobless again. After years of consuming edible food they will have no choice but to go back to eating anything that floats, hops or slithers. In retaliation, pissed marine animals will go around overturning fishing and whaling boats, the other wild animals will go around trampling on jeeps and rabbits and mice and guinea pigs will escape in the night to break all the test tubes of experimental conditioners and moisturizers and other cosmetics save the hare oil. The food chain could become a food cycle. The lack of meat will increase demand for crops but G20’s plan of exhausting the water tables and then falling back on the coffee tables will not quite work out. This will also force a rethink on the plan to counter the increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by making those molecules compete for space with all the noses in the air. Thirsty, breathless and sweaty children will then pour out in protest against our generations’ gluttony of natural resources and no amount of Justin Bieber will pacify them. Meanwhile the malnourished, dehydrated, dying African children will also stop helping people win photography prizes and will instead be found baiting fat tourists who can later be roasted on an open fire while the children dance around singing gibberish songs because they don’t have any homework. The kids from the developed nations will then attack the African children because they want to use the fat from the obese people to power their Wiis and Xboxes. This war will go on till there is enough fat to go around and it should reduce our numbers enough to allow the planet some much needed breathing space. Approximately fourteen billion feet must smell awful together. It's possible.

We’ll be lucky if that’s the sort of gentle, gradual build up we have to climax. A more violent ending could by catalysed by all the radicals and extremists and aliens, earthly and extra-terrestrial, nuclear weapons and natural disasters. This won’t be a restart but more like attaining a meta-equilibrium after which we can again take ever so many years for the frustration to pent up enough for such a cycle to start. Nothing will really change in the bigger picture, the smarter folks will still be working for the betterment of the stupid, the stupid will still be cribbing about not feeling good about themselves and the corporate world will somehow survive and some of the clever ones will even make money out of it.
I’ve often heard passionate oration about the greatness of humanity. Throw in a few shots of the earth against the universe or the oceans and mountains and you have a Youtube hit as well. Such speeches always make me feel like the coach of the World Cup winning Spanish football team. I’m hardly great, I’m not leading a revolution against injustice, I’m not even participating in one, I’m not discovering the cure to AIDS, I didn’t put man on the moon, I didn’t invent the steam engine, I didn't make beautiful works of art, didn’t sail far and wide to explore the planet, I didn’t build great temples and I didn’t invent the wheel nor discover fire. Did you? Probably not. We just share the same gene pool as the guys who did. If you average it out we’re mostly mediocre with the advantage of being ahead on the evolutionary curve and there are so many of us that we don’t really need to be anything more than just a cog in the wheel, a brick in the wall or a rat in the race. The Architect of the Matrix described hope as the quintessential human delusion; simultaneously the source of our greatest strength and our greatest weakness and I suspect we're hoping for something much smaller than what we should be aspiring for.

I'm afraid I must stop here. I have to go to work tomorrow before which I need to send a few emails and prepare a presentation and I really can't afford this luxury. Here's to the health of what would by now be something like the 6.94 billion or something like that.

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Other things you might like to read:

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Casablanca, Morocco

Click on any image to open the gallery.

This would have made for a great tongue cleaner ad

Shivanasamudra Falls, Karnataka, India

Click on any image to go to the gallery

The world is spherical

Waterfall. Mistrise.

I see dead fish

Beauty is only skin deep

Spidermonkey

Sunday, November 6, 2011

The Bitter Pill

I feel obliged to advise minors against viewing this post. If you're below eighteen then thanks for coming, feel free to check out one of the others. But if your parents don't care then go right ahead, it's not that bad.


If you mess with The One's libido then how will have little Ones? Morpheus had to fix the problem, come what may.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Less Exciting Band Names


Yesterday morning was unusually spent on Facebook. Two of my friends were having this long chain of comments triggered by this and they very graciously allowed me to intrude. The following are some of the ones I contributed:

The 5,6,7,8... uhm...shit...s: Formed by three second grade friends six years ago, they've now renamed themselves as The α, β, x, y, zs

John, Secretary to the Mayor: A famous percussion artist who uses innovative beats such as the phone ringing and typewriters

The Bee Gee Kay Em Dee El En Es Are Sees: Formed in the late 1800s by the whole Gibbs family, they now record as only The Bee Gees because of the passing away of most of the other members

Less Exciting Movie Names

And after we were done with this then Ruff had this idea to do it for movies and  this is what ensued. Sacred Cow was still around. He tells me that he doesn't agree with my selection of the titles and I tell him that it's my blog and that's that.

12 Angry Women (It's a silent movie, none of them are talking to each other)
Glad I Ate Her
Virginity, a Die Hard prequel
Found Nemo

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Mark Hitting

Advertisements border on the ridiculous. The day to day ridiculous ones involve ordinary men picking up women with a little help from their bikes, their shaving razors and their mobile phones and independent, smart women walking around with their heads held high because of sanitary napkins with stretchable padding. The once in a while ridiculous ones have been listed here. But occasionally there comes along this real corker of an ad which just makes you suddenly sit up and raise an eyebrow or two. If you survive that part (unlike poor Humpty D., god rest his yolk) then that advertisement will elicit a laugh out of you. After the laughter fit passes you will be doing some serious introspection about the ad, the product, your life and the world in general. What got me up and ranting this time was the ad released by Chevron quite some time back which was left behind by the one that Pakistan (PDF/JPEG) got on the WSJ recently.


Thursday, September 22, 2011

All in All You're Just Another Post on the Wall

For the purpose of this article I'm going to refer to a social network as FB unless mentioned otherwise, like it or report it. I would also like to thank those people who were my observations, you know which ones you are.

FB is like a mircocosm of sorts where a friend can refer to anyone between and including that hot chick you met once who is very obviously beyond you, complete strangers with whom you share a fair number of mutual friends, vaguely familiar people from the past and celebrities. For people from this part of the world, friends on FB could also refer to bittu, monu, sonu, tinu, mummy, papa, bhua, mausa, tauji, jethani and even the occasional dadaji. And then along comes Plus. No one plus ones anything. I plus oned one of my posts myself but then minus oned because plus oning something that one posted oneself is a little stupid. Nonplussing, this plus business.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Ask Uncle π

This article was written for The Fourth Estate a long time ago along with Tejas Sanjay Deshmukh. It popped out in some cleaning up and seemed worth a second print. This one is also the original without any of the cuts made by the Dean then.
The last two were written for the hostel creative writing competition and were added on the 12 of September when they came up in the cleaning up too..

Dear Uncle π, I am a freshie in one of the new hostels. Don't get me wrong - by no means am I wishing to convey a message that sounds like "I hate my hostel" - but I am faced with a rather unique problem. I have been allotted a room, on one of the higher floors, vertically above the entrance, and every time that I return after classes I have problems in reaching my room. In fact, I have spent only about 63% of the nights in my room. Anyway, not going into statistics, after I climb out of the lift I realize that I have already lost all sense of direction. Just to regain it I go all the way back to the ground floor to check out where the entrance is. After I climb out of the lift on the ground floor I find that I am at a loss so as to where the entrance was. But then life is not all roses, so I go search for it anyway and keep trying. This method fails often, approximately 37% of the times. Please help.
The Spanish follow the father of the ugly duckling, searching for the lost boy (6)

Monday, August 22, 2011

The Congress Can't Afford The Jan Lokpal

Dear Customer. Sincerely, Manager

I’ve never written about the corporate world before partly out of ignorance and mostly out of a lack of concern. The stock markets rise and fall all the time like a man in the ocean who’s going to drown eventually unless a helicopter rescues him. Guys attracted to the bobbing man, mistaking him to be a hot wet drowning damsel in distress no doubt, tie their fate to him and continue to float or sink. (I don’t know any women investors so yes, Women - 1: Men - 2360978) Companies take over other companies like funky microbes. People get fired and/or resign and/or defraud other people and/or spend their time running between the courts of golf and law. Dirty business, business.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

The Smiley Post

  • This post was born on the twenty second day of the twelfth month of the two thousand tenth year of the AD period
  • With severely constrained resources at home (or wherever I am right now) this is the best I can do.
  • I'll update this whenever I have sufficient a number of new ones to update it.
  • These are all characters on your keyboards. Nothing fancy. You can enter ASCII codes and get characters by holding down alt and pushing the ASCII code on your numpad
  • They are all text and not images so you can copy them and use them as you like.
  • If you use them a lot I'd like you to credit it to this blog. Isolated usage is okay but if someone asks you if you came up with it then be honest.
  • They vary from font to font.
  • Hopefully the HTML doesn't screw this up too much

Latest (29th Dec 2010):

Ç≈ - hot coffee

:>-< - a condom company logo

--/--Æ - flying plane

(-8ϞΞ - HP

 վ - Prabhu Deva
/o\

,O9P - Elephant
 ''''

:Þ the :P for those who aren’t retarded

Friday, June 10, 2011

If There is a God Then Nou Camp is His Pinball Table

I’m no expert but football tournament finals are usually really good exciting games with two really good teams and deserving finalists playing it out to win the title. The exceptions are when the game features the current best national team or club team in the world, Spain and Barcelona respectively, as the last editions of three of the world’s most exciting tournaments, Euro 2008, World Cup 2010 and the UEFA Champions League 2011 have had the grave misfortune of. Each of those three matches was more boring than a deep sea oil well. And just for my convenience, henceforth when I refer to one of the teams I shall mostly be referring to the other one as well.

This week’s contest - Find all the Barcelona fans in this picture and win hormone injections!

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Calling a Spud a Spade

Dear Shri Kapil Sibal,

In your efforts to make every engineering college in India an IIT I suggest you go a step further and declare Tihar Jail to be one too. The other option obviously is starting an ITI there but ITI Tihar, or ITIT, is something I would advise you against. It's just too much IT in one college for our country's self respect.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Children Were The Future, Now They're Pop Stars

Those were the days when Grandmaster Flash found out that all blacks couldn’t be jazz musicians or basketball players and decided to have fun by making it cool to wear your pants around your thighs and having funny dog names for yourself. Those were the days when there was no such thing as a makeover and Marilyn Manson didn’t really have another option. Those were the days when Britney Spears hit puberty forcing many men into pedophilia. Those were the days when Lincoln Park was just a tourist spot and a green day was good for the planet. Those were the days when the worst you had to listen to was Avril Lavigne’s cover of Fuel.

Michael Jackson still had his nose
And could legally like children, I suppose
He lay still, the Lizard King
And Sting continued to be Sting
As time went on he’d age into Stung
Death metal was still kinda young
People would still die of overdoses
Slash was still playing with Guns n Roses
Check! Huh!

Sunday, January 30, 2011

How To Write About India

This is a piece I wrote for IITM's cultural festival, Saarang.

I saw this essay by Binyavanga Wainaina. It was titled How to Write About Africa. I’m sure some such document exists about China as well and is very strictly enforced by their government. And you’ll understand when I say that I find it slightly demoralising to my patriotic spirit that no such instructions exist for India, the only country that can compete with the whole of Africa at exoticism, diversity and population. That, therefore, is exactly what I’m going to do today. Teach you how to write about India.