A nose out of joint

‘Ahhh’

With a sigh of satisfaction, I drained the last drop off my glass of excellent scotch, and waved to the steward for the check.

‘You take it, JD’, said RN.

I made a gesture of exaggerated surprise. This was the first time RN had not offered to take a check. Something must be terribly off.

‘What’s wrong, RN? The nose-hair-trimmer business is running down?’

‘Very droll, JD. But seriously, yes, considering I might be shutting up shop soon, you might want to take that check.’

That called for another drink. I did the needful.

Now just for background, RN is the scion of one the foremost of India’s business families in that his business caters to a unique need. Story goes, his father was one who loved to play with words, and one day, as he lowered his not inconsiderable bulk into a barber’s chair and asked to have his hair trimmed, his mind went off on a tangent with the word ‘trim’ and somehow, it arrived on the phrase ‘trim your nosehair, on the run’. The rest, as they say, is history, and today RN (nickname, which obvious acronym, of course, came from years spent with us in school, and sticks to this day, like, you know what), inherited a fortune in snot. 

‘Go on.’

‘It’s all over the papers.’

‘I am sorry; I am rather behind the news.’

‘Ahh well, the double murder in Mumbai.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well…the murder weapon was one of my company’s nose-hair trimmers. And now people are calling for a ban on my ‘On-the-run’ nose hair trimmers.’

‘But that is stupid. People get their heads shoved in by bricks. No one demands we stop living in houses and start living in thatch huts.’

‘It is not that simple. It seems there is a culture based debate going on.’

‘Culture?’

‘Sort of. About the kind of people who trim their nose-hair. A big political party leader has claimed that if people did not trim nose hair, there would be no nose hair trimmers, and hence those murders would not have happened. And, it seems, we lost our culture when we began trimming our nose hair.’

‘Ha! So, it is less about culture, than agriculture. I like it…the agronomy of snot. Could make a fine play one day.’

‘The hell’

‘Ok, seriously. Ignore the guy. The media will find a new topic of outrage in a few days, and life will go on as normal.’

‘Oh, if only it were only as simple. Another political party took offense at his words. And *their* leader made another speech decrying nose hair, citing them as a sign of barbarism and uncouthness. It seems they conducted a survey on convicted felons, and found that most were not nose-hair trimmer users. And based on that, they are claiming that nose-hair trimming is what separates the civilized from the uncivilized. And they are exhorting me vigorously promote my product, for civilization.’

‘But that is wonderful news! Think of all the publicity you are getting!’

‘It would be. Except that the goons of the first party attacked one of my offices yesterday. Few employees were lucky enough to get away without hurt.’

‘Well…that is sad.’

And we buried our heads into our fresh drinks, trying to find a solution to RN’s problem. But if was unfindable…almost as if the bottom of the glass were an abyss we were bound to spend our lives trying to find the bottom of, while wearing lifejackets- there seemed to be only two choices- either drop the lifejacket and plummet to the bottom, or to float upwards. I made my choice.

‘RN, I think I have a solution.’

‘Yes?’

‘First thing you do tomorrow, arrange to provide hefty donations to both parties campaign funds. Just get them to keep this in the news for as long as possible. Cut all your advertising budgets. Send your staff on leave for a fortnight. Double the security on all your installations. I think that should crack it.’

RN blinked in confusion, and then, slowly, smiled.

‘Yes, JD, I do think that should crack it.’ He waved the steward over, ‘Why, I think I shall be taking the check, after all.’

Driving Mad

Given a choice of which vehicle I would want to drive the most, ten times out of ten, I would pick the truck. And no, I would not go for the itsy-bitsy Tata Ace kinds or the sorry-ass soapboxish SUV like things the Americans call trucks or even those pathetic 9-ton lorry things. NO SIR, you can have your ‘last mile connectivity’ and roll weed in it and dip it rabbit’s urine and pray that smoking it will grant you the sagacity of Our Dear Leader. Not for me any of this pansy nonsense.  When I say truck, I mean TRUCK. I want a large 20 ton truck or one of those mammoth container transports or, even better, one of those car transport things.

My reasons are simple. The romance of lugging a mammoth beast thousands of kilometers around the country, night after night, going smoothly on well laid highways watching the beautiful rolling vistas of our hinterland rollingly vist by me in the pale moonlight of the night; hearing nothing but the roar of the engine and swish of tyre on asphalt; and the glorious joy of the lilting voices of Bhojpuri and Haryanvi singers wanting to explore delicately the tender parts of their beloved and seeking to burn themselves in the fires of love emanating from her short skirt; and the occasional friendly exploration of the genealogy of a colleague over a wrong-sided overtake…No, not really.

I think it is time to let it out now. I do not drive. I mean that in the sense I cannot tell that of those three pedal-like things on the driving side floor of the car, which one makes the car go faster, which one slows it down, and which one makes it go out of its mind like a Nana Patekar dancing with Malaika Arora Khan. In addition, I am very very scared of the possibility of damaging my car in the way that I am afraid of being the one careless owner of the car Douglas Adams said had three very careful owners and one recklessly careless one. And last, but not the least, I am patently terrified by the utter irrationality of driving a car in face of the fact that given the speeds people drive at there is a very good chance that a lot of cars could, at any given point in time, be occupying the same geographical and temporal space. As that is rationally impossible, and yet, seems to happen with an alarming frequency, I choose not to drive. Also, I do not drive sounds a hell of a lot better than I do not know how to drive when you are thirty years old. All of which should probably explain a lot about why I want to drive a truck and not some itsy bitsy thing.

There are other reasons. Truck drivers do not have to worry about other people breaking traffic rules around them. In fact, you will find that drivers of pesky little vehicles like cars and SUVs, who are normally as arrogant as Shahrukh Khan at a Wankhede Stadium, suddenly hide their tails between their legs and keep at their best behavior whenever a truck is around, much like a truant student around the headmaster.

Another thing about traffic laws and rules and etiquettes. The Indian populace accords the same importance to traffic laws and etiquette that it does to intellectual property rights. That is, we as a people do not acknowledge the existence of such things. But let us see you misbehave or overtake a truck from the wrong side, you!

Another reason- how you drive when a truck is around in the lane next to you is a measure of the kind of man you are. I mean I am not particularly a coward, but let me tell you this: I once had the good fortune of being driven on the Mumbai-Pune expressway by a colleague, and we did a stretch where we drove for almost a kilometer with a truck on either side. I am telling you boss, my balls were trying to seek asylum somewhere in the vicinity of my liver. I would happily choose an evening with Kareena Kapoor over a repeat of that experience, anyday. Imagine, OTOH, had I been one of the truck drivers at that particular moment. Just the very thought makes a warm glow go through my insides.

 And I see a kind of romance in truck accidents. Let us take a trailor which has jack-knifed on the expressway. Goodluck trying to find your way out of that jam. I call it a way of getting back at the world- my day is ruined, why should yours' be any better? You call it a damn nuisance, boss. I call it poetic justice!

Which is why I say: Let us all drive trucks.

Just Another Weekend

It is Saturday. You know, your typical, run-of-the-mill weekend morning where you wake up at eight in the morning, squeeze shaving cream onto your toothbrush, enter the bathroom and fall in the tub.  Well, you maybe. I do not do such things. 

In fact, for me it was a, you know, typical, run-of-the-mill weekend morning where everyone’s favorite cricketer had retired yesterday, and the internet was full of fawning posts, everyone having forgotten the abuses heaped on him thirty days ago, and I was kept awake till late in the night sobbing with happy memories of the times I had watched the man on TV and cursed and cursed till ad breaks saved me. I swear that was what I did all night, and nothing else.

Now, normally, I would not recommend waking up at eight am on a Saturday. In fact, I would not recommend waking up at eight am any day, but it seems some idiot had set the alarm for seven, and there is only a certain number of times you can press snooze before irritation gets the better of sleep. So I woke up at eight, for some strange reason, feeling very hungry despite not having eaten dinner yesternight. All very strange, I tell you.

 So I went to look in the fridge, and found a can of beer, and above the fridge, a pack of Oreo cookies and a pack of Goodday biscuits. From now on, it is very easy to guess what I did. I took out the beer can, wiped the moisture off it, placed it back, and did not give a second glance to the cookies. No, not even I drink at 8AM. 8:30, may be, but definitely not eight.

So I came back and checked the time on the computer, just to be sure, and it told me it was Saturday, and not Friday and that I did not have to go to work. I cursed my bad decision with the beer, but let it pass, logged on to twitter and expressed the wish for a burger. No one picked my call. That was when I realized that the McDonald’s at Infinity does not open till 11am. But, of course, the Bikaji Food Junxon next to it is, and that was where I found myself a few minutes later, having passed a few Honda Citys who seemed to have played Holi with other Honda Citys, and whose owners, for some strange reason, seemed to think that green Holi colour streaks on their cars seemed to go quite well with their dust-covered white exteriors.

Anyway, so there I found myself with a plate of Chhole Bature and a plate of Puri Bhazi, staring in the eyes of a beautiful girl who was two tables cross from me just about to tuck in a plate of pao-bhaji when the sight of my breakfast seemed to disturb her. I gave her the evil eye and tucked into my breakfast, and she returned to her butter soaked, unhealthy, too-heavy-for-so-early-in-the-morning-god-knows-how-such-people-live thing. Fifteen minutes later, I looked up and fell in love with her.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, she was reading. With her breakfast! I was immediately transported into a dreamland where I was already on the fourth of fifth date with her, pictures of she and I sitting in a corner table in Oh Calcutta, deferring service for a few hours while we sipped our beers, absorbed into our novels, not speaking a word to each other, already flashing in my mind. And then she decided to lift the book up from her thigh and prop it on the table, and I saw it was Immortals of Meluha, a monstrosity it had taken me some seven months from purchase to completion. Heartbroken, I finished my breakfast and left.

If any youngsters are reading this post, remember, this is why you should not wake up early on Saturday mornings. The office does not serve breakfast.

Strategies to Make Weekends Pass Quickly

Weekends, let us accept it, are boring. I am speaking, of course, from the point of view of young people of a certain age, and a particular disposition to which I belong. That certain age being anywhere in the early twenties to late fifties, and by disposition I mean those who find any form of physical exertion and social contact abhorrent. This, of course, leaves us with the internet and cat photos and twitter, and that is precisely not the point. Besides, that is what we do for the rest of the week, anyway.

So, what the smart young man needs is to make the weekend go by relatively quickly so that he can get back to his normal lifestyle of cursing Mondays and crunching ever-exciting data in excel sheets with a million rows, and making powerpoint presentations with animations where two fingers fork apart slowly in a v-sign in imitation of a pornstar in a anatomically taxing role. But that too is beside the point. Before we come to that, we must tackle the weekend first.

Now there are several strategies for making weekends vanish fast without any undue physical exertion- books, movies, music, surfing the web etc etc. Books offer you the advantage of sounding well read on twitter, without actually being, in fact, umm… well read. I am essentially referring to the fine art of being able to drop book names without getting drawn far enough into any conversation where you actually have to say anything substantial about the book. Believe me, this is a very delicate thing to manage (I know from personal experience), and offers the considerable hazard of being found out, and subjected to censure and ridicule. Or as they call it on twitter, being trolled.

Coming to the other things now. I have, from considerable research done over the years for the purely academic purposes of writing this article, found out that alcohol is an amazing thing when it comes to making weekends pass quicker. It enhances the experience of everything-movies, music, cricket and your girlfriends’ cooking (if you have one). The drink of choice for me is beer, of course. But you are free to choose your own poison. Remember though, the brand of poison you are killing time with is not important, but the brand you profess to liking is very important. It defines what kind of taste you have in life, how cultivated you are, and what are your chances of earning a date with Manisha Koirala.

Another strange thing I have seen about alcohol is that its behavior is very atypical, i.e. there is no linear relationship between the amounts of alcohol you have consumed and how inebriated you are. So, the initial relationship is a sine curve, which very quickly pleatues out. In essence, what I mean to say is that once you are piss-drunk, that seventh beer will probably not add any more value. Strange, but true.

Now, as mentioned earlier, alcohol enhances the experience of movies and music, and has magical qualities which makes indifferent cooking seem great. But it is the case of movies which deserves special mention. If it were not for generations of drunk engineering and MBA students, this epic would forever have languished in the dark pits of anonymity. I have the hypothesis that it was the heightened conscious states fueled by alcohol which actually let us to realize the genius of Kanti Shah, and made us aware of the brilliance of Prabhu ji. But do not let me put too much scene about this, see for yourself.

This weekend, get drunk and watch Gunda with your friends.

Of Haircuts

A little background first. Yesterday was Diwali, and I spent my day at a relative’s place. Now relatives are people who have only two functions- they stuff you with good food (mostly) till you begin feeling uncomfortable; and they ask uncomfortable questions or make uncomfortable remarks till you begin feeling stuffed. Now, it had been almost a month since I last got a haircut, and the old mop did have the general look of a bird's nest. The uncle chose to remark on it while I was having lunch, and after drinking sufficient quantities of water, I politely informed him that I was aware of the problem, and planned to have a haircut today.

Now today, after having been unfortunately woken up around 8 by the insistent doorbell ringing of the garbage man who seems to have sworn to make my house trash and sleep free, I decided that it looked like a good day for doing chores. So I went out and bought eggs. For lunch, not for my hair.

Anyway, I go this saloon then, and the guy straps me in in a chair, lest I run away, and in walks this kid. You know the kind of hair which originally came in fashion when polecats were crossbred with headbangers? Yes, the kind which cannot seem to make up its mind about where it is growing, and to what purpose. Still don’t recognize it? Well, the kind of hair that would have gotten you many a thwack on the bottom from the father had you tried to pull it off as a kid. So, this kid walks in with the kind of hair which probably should be getting him spanked from his parents, earphones, a loud voice, and a whole general attitude which probably does get him slapped everyday, though probably not by his parents.

Well, this kid asks for a hair straightening, and while the barber looks a bit perplexed w.r.t how much money to make from him, the owner walks in. ‘Which one do you want?,’ said gentleman asks, ‘ek mahine waala ya poore saal waala?’

‘Kitne ka hai?’

‘Ek mahine waala chhe sau.’

Kid begins to look majorly crestfallen. I begin to listen intently. This is vital information for any person who is old enough to fall within a stone’s throw of the venerable and horrific institutions of marriage, and subsequent parenthood.

‘Das barah din waala nahi hota? Mera dost kara ke gaya tha.’

’Wohi hota hai ek mahine waala. Six hundred ka hota hai.’ Mr. Saloon Owner is definitely a hard bargainer. Kid now looking to go into a major depression. In a barely audible voice, he says ‘but who to pachas-saath rupaye bolta tha.’

Mr. Saloon Owner stifles a chuckle. Not the best business practice to laugh in your customer’s face. ‘Itne mein to haircut hota hai.’ Glaring at barber, ‘Hair cut kar do inka.’

And so kid also gets strapped down, and I feel warmth flooding in at this enforced discipline wrought if not by parents then by hardselling saloon-owners. The barber begins reading his combs and clacking his scissors. Then the gentleman goes on a tirade about how the barber should be serving customers better and asking them what they want and how they want their hair done etc etc which stops the barber in his scissor-clicking tracks and ends with the owner asking the barber to ask the kid if he wanted his hair done in spikes. Duly asked in a small voice. Kid begins to look a bit perkier- his day can still be salvaged. Spikes, he says. Barber proceeds.

What of my haircut, meanwhile, you ask? Well, I ask the barber catering to my hair to cut them short at the sides and back of the head, and leave the rest pretty much untouched. This worthy proceeds to shear my head more closely than a greedy shepherd shearing sheep. Well, not that close but it is a damn sight close run thing. Having taken considerable pains to grow my hair a bit long after a lifetime of very short hair, I am fairly disconsolate about this transgression, and muster up the courage to ask him why he did it. It did take a fair bit of courage, I must explain, because by then, only the scissors part of the haircut was over; the razor was yet to come out.

‘Dhyan nahi raha, sir. Next time jaisa kaata tha, waisa hi kaat diya.’

I handed him his sixty bucks and fled.