How did BNP sir become a partisan to a global scare?

For long I had resisted the temptation to pen this but given the exuberant spate of tabloid spills about the topic, I just had to get it in black & white. But before I spell forth my rather irrelevant musing, I am reminded of that beloved old chap who taught us English back in my days of ironed uniforms, nervous dictations and Parachute oiled hairdos. (On an equally amusing side note: I still don’t get why a coconut hair oil brand would be labeled ‘Parachute’ when it has nothing to do with either the tree or the hair! Is the company telling us that this oil is the ‘life saver’ for hair like a parachute is for life? Or is it that the gaudy brilliance of the oil will ensure our hairdo remains intact even if we jump off a plane with a parachute on? I can’t help but think that if that indeed be the case, our hairstyle will be the last thing we would care about. Ah well, moving on.) We used to call him ‘BNP sir’ for as long as I can remember without realizing the man actually had a nice elongated name which I now forget. I am tempted to say probably BN Padmanabhan but well, I am sure I am miserably uncertain there as well.

Anyway, the only reason even today, after close to two decades, I still remember BNP is because of his colorfully verbose feedbacks to the versions of Caesar or Macbeth we used to religiously hand in on a regular basis. His devoted South Indian upbringing, while palpable with the prominent red exclamation mark on his forehead, had somehow made it impossible for him not to call a student everything he wouldn’t eat – monkey, dog, donkey, swine (this being his favorite!) etc. It was common knowledge that if someone got stuck with one of these titles, then it was obvious that BNP was close to ripping off the author’s head that had inadvertently unleashed such monstrosity upon the world of words. My years of elementary education of Shakespeare were thus spent understanding that the word ‘swine’ was possibly the worse thing one human being could call the other. Needless to say, life later on taught me otherwise. So, reader, this was about BNP for now. I will catch up with our old mate a little while later.

Now let us return from this minor detour on to how BNP became an unsuspecting partisan to a theory I have. For years now there has been a curious pattern I have noticed emerge every time we have disrespected prominent members of the animal, bird and insect world. Among them, primarily, is the mosquito. We not only are hell bent on wiping off its blood sucking race but also use the revered insect in songs that demean other members of our diversely personified species. Much like that B-City song which claimed that one such pest could make you a eunuch. Not the best metaphor in my books but nevertheless a rendition that caught our fancy temporarily. So, to make things equal, these little pests that had been murdered generously since the beginning of time got their vengeance in a dozen different ways. Malaria, dengue, yellow fever et al. Then we moved on and began smashing off Lord Ganesha’s much adored disciple – the mouse (do read up about Lord Kroncha to know why exactly the elephant headed one ended up with such an unlikely escort). Just the mere hint of one of these in our homes and we are standing on table tops poised to remove this troublemaker while acknowledging that the God he serves so humbly, according to our own admittance, is a trouble healer. This probably could classify as the height of divine irony. So, after a million unplanned deaths, the little fellows brought with them plague, rat bite fever, meningitis et al. Again, ailments that wiped off almost half of Europe! Our next target to ensure our superiority over the races continued was the meekly moving cow. We prayed to it, slaughtered it, decorated it, milked it till it fell off its feet, used it in verbal abuse for the feminine kind and even drank its liquid refuse in hopes to cleanse our sins. It returned with a vengeance to kill off its own kind as the mad cow disease and sent shivers down every cow eater’s arrogant spine. We were not done yet: we then targeted the next best thing to roasted beef – spicy chicken. Everything from labeling cowardice with its name to brazenly chomping on its delicious legs and devouring its unborn on our steaming omelettes took place (and continues to!) with unrelenting aplomb. But then how long could the scary-easy flightless creature take it? An equally delicious stab of avian flu peppered itself across the planet leaving millions of defenseless birds out of our kitchens for good. Again, disrespect reigned supreme as the arrogance of humans continued to loom large.

And then we come back to feedback friendly BNP. After this havoc of a decade, I am reminded of his one choice word that is now making front page news – ‘Swine’. His five years of (at least containing my blessed attendance) inexorable fuming with every kid who ever denied him the pleasure of appreciating the bard’s genius, seems to be hole punching the globe bit by bit each passing sun. ‘This is ridiculous work I say! Lazy old swine! How about paying more attention in the classroom!’ he would scream into our dumbfounded faces that shivered from under an intact mop of oily organization. And so, millions more like him I am sure, have forever disregarded and given this animal the least possible benefit in the history of mankind. For that, here it is now. Back with the complete weapon to demand retribution. With each newspaper reading I see the number of Swine Flu patients rising steadily in every part of the world. While the other members of the non human clan either attacked us directly or one another, the swine family has decided to let us get infected without their presence at all. Sort of like the ape origin based HIV that still continues to loom large on the planet.

Another carefully plotted revenge drama. Another redemption sought by means best left to rather drastic seeming theories like this one! Hence, the next time you call someone an ass, watch it. Who knows what sort of reprisal our silent slaves are planning! And also, don’t forget to blame folks like BNP for the subtle little role they played in disrespecting another life form without any provocation from it. Considering how we are always reminded to give guru dakshina, I am sure he can use a little consignment of our “thank you” notes in return to his contribution to this epidemic. Of course, if he is still alive, that is. Thanks a lot, BNP sir!

Phew. Alright, I am done.

The asexual tongue fight

As melancholic as this seems, I can’t help revisiting it ever so often. Maybe it is because I keep encountering that O so blessed crowd who keep lashing out their strained idioms peppered with the twists and twangs of words they learnt either sitting behind a desk somewhere or from another tongue that ethnically owns it. I am not quite certain. But nevertheless, its consistent recurrence in my multi layered life, which in the past has had me wondering in awe, now makes me guffaw in disbelief. Tch tch!

So here it is then without further ado: All those who think they can use a forged intonation and get away with it – you are miserably misguided. And the worst of them are that pristine clan I belong to – desis. But before I begin pointing out why this ill mannered barrage of attempts vexes my thinking muscles, let me identify the symptoms. So you have this O so à la mode desi gent or lady: Hip in the purest form of its usage implying a well honed sense of dressing and a very well trained eye to catch the faintest glimpse of anything alien. The moment you attempt to strike a conversation with them (and trust me, dear muse, it isn’t easy to get them started but O then it is impossible to get them to stop...) you usually get the cold shoulder. Reason? Your angrezi is still laced with the strong curry-like essence of your desi roots. Instance: Punjabis speak English like Punjabi. Bengalis speak English like Bengali…you get the drift. Given the brazen abundance of dialects our country has, it is little wonder then that mastering the language of our previous masters (yeah yeah, I had planned that one) comes with its authentic shade of home-grown exuberance too. These are the folks I admire the most. The yeest aar wayst butt maai Emgleesh eez daa besst! kind. People who are unafraid to belt out their well timed wunderrfull or staap or draamaa or whaat yaar and of course, the more popular camaan mann. No Sir. We are the kind who doesn’t care where your tongue is from but your ear has to record and decipher whatever sounds our tongues are spewing forth. Get busy! These are the people who have my eternal respect for their timeless adherence to their ancestry regardless of how many eons they might have spent away from it. Salaam!

But then there are the rebels. The laat sahibs without the necessary training. Their aggresive need to blend into the new culture is so fierce that they stick out like a sore thumb the moment they open their mouths. The ones I could call the so-glad-to-be-the-NRI-that-I-still-think-having-an-accent-makes-sense kind. The ones who will ensure that irrespective of their current destination, their English is always either A for American or B for British. Either they are mauling their tongues with their O my! That’s not so great now is it! Or ensuring that their r’s always have the prototypical rrrr drag that American English is unique for. This is not a problem. So far nothing here coaxes me to roll my eyes and say 'Give it up guys. I know you were not born here. Quit the act. It is just pathetic.'

What does get to me though is how they, accidentally or instinctively of course, stuff in classic desi sounding words into their sentences while speaking fast enough to avoid their audience from picking it up! Clever, eh! Like for instance: You know! It was the best cay-bin we could have wanted inside that cruise boat! Aha! Cay-bin? Not only is the sentence arguably askew in its grammar but what is with the random annunciation of the word cabin! Initially I used to always wonder about these bizarre seeming instances during my spring days overseas and during my colorful conversations with these since-I-have-been-overseas-for-two-years-hence-my-accent types. But with time I realized just how hopelessly clueless and eternally shallow these people really were. The façade of trying to tell me with their tongue that they ‘no longer could speak Indian English’ was over. Too old.

It was after such horrifying revelations, that I slowly walked away from such phony stereotypes who not only would make a mockery of their own good self but also of the clan they represented. I could almost hear the Caucasian natives giggling in solitude about the miscued attempt at the ‘accent exchange program’ these guys had going on. Recently I have, unfortunately, resumed my run-ins with this blessed crowd and so I had to find a way to tell them ‘Fine! I get it. You are still one of those moronic NRIs who will never master the local tongue that feeds you but will always Americanize your English punctuating it with cay-bins and marrrketts and that one word I loathe the most – my darling hubbeee. Yuck. Stop it please. I beg of you.

The only moment in memory I have of this rant of mine backfiring was when a Middle Eastern-American woman (meaning an immigrant who, wanting to get the hell out of her awful nation, somehow got hitched with a Yank and fled it years ago only to go back there from time to time to show off her borrowed accents and furrowed accessories) complimented me on my English with her own eerie version of the language. She thought I was educated in Britain thanks to my pronunciation while I, admittedly a tad flattered, confessed that India had indeed been the source of my wunderfull English.

Sigh. So much for the asexuality factor of this tongue fight. What say man? Sad no yaa?

Shock and 'Awwww...Archie...dude!'

‘What! Man oh man….’ was my first response when I heard about the hysteria that is now spreading faster than Swine Flu across the Internet with almost everyone, including present company, ranting about the illogicality of the whole thing. Yes, it seems to be true though. Archie is going to marry Veronica.

Now, for those of you who’d chuckle at this and nod your heads in hopelessness for people’s despair about something this … well, fictitious…here’s a thought. For blokes like me who had never even seen the map of America properly, Archie and many such comics (Tintin, Asterix et al) were the only major view to the world outside growing up in the 80s and 90s. Sure, there were movies and songs and what have you. But there was no Internet. There was no way to just ‘search for images of' or ‘view videos from’ that far flung land almost everyone alive seemed obsessed with at the time. And sure enough, I was one of them too. No shame in admitting it since it was actually cool being part of this kind of following. It allowed me to get a view, albeit a tad askew from the realism of it that came to me a decade later, of what a place like the US of A was like. Behind those clean roads and fresh snow, inside those white picket fenced barbeque lunches and generously peppered words like ‘Gotcha!’ and ‘Pizza’ and ‘Ahem…!’ and such. Behind every iconic word, image, action and square, ‘Archies’ transformed into something bigger than a comic. It became a metaphoric window that desis would look into and find wonderful things. Things that made them happy. Things that made them smile. Things that made them dream.

I followed Archie and the gang for as long as I could given my distributed attention to other majors like the home grown legends like Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle. But I never missed a chance to pick up an Archie comic regardless of my location. Sure, it was never in sequence and sure, I might have easily missed a lot of juicy double digests but hey, at least I knew what to look forward to from that land of opportunities.

Reality is a strange witch. Its spell affects you much, much later after it has been originally cast. Once I flew out for the first time missing US of A by about a couple of countries (I was in Venezuela for 7 years) things started getting a perspective. Damn – the one word I have always loathed given the levels of truth it carries. Sick. And then with this P word came another equally nasty one – reality. After having been to the US at least a dozen times now for various reasons – both personal and professional – somehow the context Archie and his gang had set became blurred. The teenagers I encountered were much louder, a tad more disrespectful in public, wore bizarre clothes with their underwear showing, listened to violent rap music about killing self and others, smoked in public with a shallow display of the tattoos and piercing they had acquired over time. Hmm – I thought. Somehow the friendly and affectionate bunch from the ‘A’ comics didn’t quite seem so American now. Riverdale seemed as fictitious as Superman or Phantom. Or for that matter Tantri the Mantri or Chamataka.

It was in this sense of reality that I began to re-read Archies again a few years ago. This time, it was different. I no longer wondered at the crisp settings or mouthed new words like ‘Watcha doin’ Arch?’ since I had heard it all before. I instead started to look more closely at the characters – their personality. And it was there I guess that I began feeling, for the first time, immensely sorry for Betty. Ah good old Betty. She represented the rare breed of girls I had met thus far – friendly, kind, genuinely helpful and absolutely down to earth. The kind of girl you could sit with for hours and talk at length without being judged or categorized. The kind of girl who would never be so self obsessed that she would stop caring about those who came with a heart filled with love and friendship. The rare kind indeed - the endangered kind. (And trust me - the 'Ronnie' type girls are a serious and surprising majority from what I have seen!) The kind of girl I actually found myself falling in love with a few months ago – my current fiancé Jaya. Maybe it was this image of Betty that surfaced in her and made me wish that Archie too, despite his illogical adherence to Veronica’s seriously annoying demands of him as a boyfriend, finds that one ounce of happiness that will take him the whole nine yards.

But alas! With the recent developments I am sure Archie might end up marrying Ronnie anyway. There is no denying that chances are that will happen whether I (we) like it or not. But what I also hope he realizes, is that in the long run, despite the differences between fact and fiction, values like Betty’s, as ‘boring and stereotypical’ as they may seem to those who have been force fed alien morals to begin with, are the ones that matter. Ronnie is OK for short term highs and thrills but if he wants someone to keep him high and thrilled forever – Betty is definitely the way to go. Plain Jane? Certainly. But sane terrain? You bet!

I know this now from experience. I hope Archie Andrews gets to realize that too. Until then, all I can say is – All the best to Archie and Ronnie. And as for Betty - well, to use an expression quite orthodox - 'Hang in there, Betts!'

..ShaKri..

What is worse than India's exit from World Cup?

Alright so it is now official that the ‘Men in Blue’ were in fact ‘Men without a clue’. Fine. Time to deal with it and move on!

But what is worse than India prematurely exiting the World Cup? The aftermath. Now by this I don’t mean the fate of Indian cricket or the future of the players and the coach. I could not care less about it for reasons best known to me. But what has started annoying me is the silly representations that are being made of these guys.

I received this email message sent by a friend of what he called ‘Future of the Indian cricket team’. We had a suave looking Saurav Ganguly cutting someone’s hair. We had Sachin Tendulkar selling paani-puri at a roadside mobile center and of course Rahul ‘The Wall’ Dravid literally painting a wall with signs.

First of all what is so funny about this? Comparing them to the common man who is actually doing an excellent job and going about his life with pride? Shading them in a color of honest hard work and proud labor? Please. Is this not a tad ironic since their real life experience of the players is anything but? Or was the creator of these ‘ideas’ so smart that he/she actually wanted to portray this irony? I doubt that very much based on the final product.

I know everyone who had hoped that illusive cup of the world would return home after more than 20 years is hurting. But sharing that pain using the image of a hard working common man will not achieve much either. If anything it will bring us more shame for having disrespected our own kind.

The honest kind.

..ShaKri..