Sunny’s sad sojourn in Switzerland

Geet and I met Sunny for the first time during our four day tour to Switzerland. He was a puny nine year old, wearing thick glasses with a constant expression of sad aloofness. Initially we took his stoicism as lethargy but that did not make any sense. We were visiting the country of the Alps, where Yash Chopra made Bollywood actresses dance in chiffon sarees in negative temperatures. Everyone in the tour bus was excited except for Sunny who had nothing but contempt in his eyes. Maybe he was too young for this tour.

His father Dr. Bhattacharya sat with him on the last seat of the bus, right behind me and Geet. His mother Mrs. Bhattacharya was busy clicking pictures of every cow, tractor and tree on the road as if the world was going to end soon and she was bestowed with the task of passing the relevant proof of the existence of  Homo Sapiens to the next dominant specie. She took rest from the clicking frenzy only to stuff her family with snacks that she had brought in kilos. The tour operator shared the history of Switzerland with us in the background.

A few hours into the bus and we understood the reason why Sunny was so stolid. The initial two days were Alps-less and we toured Zurich, Geneva, Schaffhausen, Lausanne, Lucerne, Interlaken and Bern. As our tour operator poured all his general knowledge on us, we realized that his words were molted lava dripping in Sunny’s ears.

“Sunny!!! Bhaat is the name of that large fountain in Geneva?” Dr. Bhattacharya asked his son.

“Jet something,” he replied.

“Think properly Shona!” Mrs. Bhattacharya said stuffing her son with cashew filled cookies.

“Jet d’Eau,” he said after a while. His parents clapped. Geet and I looked at each other.

“What does Bern means in Swiss?”

“Bear.”

“How many Cantons are there in Switzerland?”

“Twenty-sigh-six.”

“To commemorate whose memory was the carving of the dying lion created in Lucerne?”

“Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution. I wish I was with them.”

“Bhaat? Anyways, Chapel Bridge is situated across which river?”

“Reuss.”

And this went on and on. We were horrified at what the poor child was going through during this ultra educational tour. I was sure that when all this would be over, Sunny will be permanently scarred and a slight inclination by his future wife to visit this romantic destination will be answered by shrieks of madness.

I remember talking to Dr. Bhattacharya during the journey where he expressed his shock that he had to wear seat belt in the bus. I argued that it was commendable that Swiss laws valued human life. I do not remember much of what else we talked about, only that Sunny slept peacefully during that one hour. Geet hailed me as a hero.

After our two days journey through the cities, it was time to visit the Alps. As our bus lifted higher and higher above the sea level, the frenzy of walking on snow that had footprints of Bollywood stars imprinted on it reached an unnerving crescendo. The bus snaked through a thousand tunnels and we saw villages on the edge of lakes surrounded by picturesque blanket of greens. People were straining their necks to get a first peek of the peaks and if the suspense would have carried on for another half an hour, we would have ended up with a new mutated specie that would have been a cross between a human and a giraffe.

Mrs. Bhattacharya was holding her camera so close to her bosom that anyone would have thought that she had a third eye there. In addition, she was jumping in the aisle with enough glee to give me a heart attack. I held Geet’s hands and chanted Hanuman Chalisa. Then everything happened very quickly.

“Boooooooootiphool! There there! Alps!!” Mrs. Bhattacharya screamed seconds before the bus entered a tunnel.

“Bhere?” Dr. Bhattacharya screamed back staring disappointingly at the insides of the tunnel. Sunny shut his eyes tightly pretending that he was asleep.

Soon the tunnel ended and the scream repeated itself. I saw a pair of buttocks jumping up and down in my line of sight and quickly realized that my armrest was not in place. I pushed it down in the nick of time and seconds later Mrs. Bhattacharya tumbled on it instead of my lap.

“Sorry,” she chirruped.

“If I would have been one second late, we would have spent the rest of our life searching for sperm donors,” I whispered in Geet’s ear. She looked with disdain at Mrs. Bhattacharya.

“What is she? A horse with crackers tied to its tail?” she squeaked.

“Control your emotions. The Alps are here,” I said, rotating her head to the window.

We stayed at the village of Engelburg, surrounded by snow covered Alps and minutes away from Mount Titlis and an hour’s drive from Jungfrau. We saw sulking Sunny during dinner. One look at his face and you could tell that the educational tour was spreading like slow poison inside him. Thank God the food was Indian.

The next day we had to take a train to the highest railway station in Europe at 11,000 ft. The prospect was endearing and would have left anyone wide-eyed. As the train spiraled up the tunnel, I spotted Sunny through the gap between the seats, sleeping peacefully. His father was frantically trying to wake him up while his mother was talking pictures of the darkness outside. I poked Geet and made her conscious of the sight. And then both of us started laughing. We laughed till tears ran down our eyes, till our faces turned red with the effort to suppress our laughter. Everyone was staring at us. The tour operator gave us uneasy looks. Our unchecked spurts of laughter took a good fifteen minutes to subside.

Later, I felt nothing but pity for the child. In a bid to train their child to become a Superman, Mr. and Mrs. Bhattacharya had ruined his holiday. Wasn’t the kid supposed to enjoy this precious time with his parents? We bid Bhattacharya family goodbye at London airport and that was the last time I saw Sunny. I hope his relationship with his parents does not hit rock bottom, although the chances of this happening are slim.

It has been three years since I visited Switzerland but there are a few moments that are etched forever in my memory -

- Sunny’s lost gaze

- Geet and I laughing hysterically in a tilted train inside a mountain

- Geet and I sitting in the balcony of our room in Engelburg with a blanket draped on both of us, looking at the fog drifting over the mountains.

- Sabotage of Mrs. Bhattacharya’s attempt to cut my family tree.

 

[All the pictures are taken by me]

A house in the photographs

I believe that our home is like our mind. It turns overwhelming after a while. Maybe because of passage of time or because of the limited capability of our brain to run in a thousand different directions, we end up stacking a lot of memories in boxes and forget them. Ditto for our home.

But then sometimes, while staring at a drifting cloud or a bird going home, there are memories that rush back, memories that we had long forgotten, memories that surprise us because they are still unknowingly breathing inside us. It is a breathtaking moment when you wonder if a particular memory was actually a dream.

And you ask yourself – Did it actually happen?

I shifted home two years back. It was a painful experience. I had spent 25 years of my life in that house. The house has been a silent spectator of the emotions that everyone living in the house went through – bliss, heartache, gloom, love, togetherness, separation, marriage and death. The house was a member of the family; it was where everyone returned, where everyone found each other.

While I packed my life to move to a new (and bigger) shelter, I stumbled upon memories stacked away and forgotten. I opened boxes to have a look into the piece of the past they contained and was transported back. There were tears in my eyes when I fell upon a shoebox full of my collection of post-cards of Bollywood actors and actresses. Like every other teenager, I was madly in love with them. There was a shop that was a ten minutes walk from my home where a kind, obese uncle sat with his kind, obese son as I rummaged through the postcards for my picks.

My family was not rich. My father was barely able to meet ends and so the importance of money was etched in my mind from childhood. But then I had hobbies. So, I collected every single rupee that was given to me. Every coin added to my piggybank was yet another step towards acquiring a postcard, towards buying a second-hand novel from the Sunday Daryaganj market, towards getting that cassette recorded with the latest Bollywood songs from the local music corner, towards buying the latest comic book of my favorite superhero, towards buying Filmfare and reading all that our stars had to say. There were times when I had to wait for days to accumulate sufficient amount to buy a dream but the wait was always worth it.

My sister always wanted a Barbie – the new doll with wavy hair that had recently hit the market. She would look hungrily at the shiny dolls wearing glamorous clothes displayed in the windows of toy shops. Of course it was too expensive (Rs 100 a doll back then) and we could not afford it. The hair on her doll’s head was fewer in comparison and would come away after a few combs. I decided to make her happy. I took a nice, long needle and some spare wool (left from a hideous sweater that mom knitted for me) and started adding hair to her doll. I took off the head of the doll and pierced her head with the needle from inside. I then pulled it till the end of the wool and then snipped off the wool so that she now had a hair till her waist. I repeated it a hundred times and soon the doll had lush green woolen hair till her waist that my sister could comb to glory.

When my sister saw Aishwarya Rai become Miss India, she had a sudden urge to host a Miss World in our house. I again came to her rescue leaving my Hot Wheels cars and my plastic animals behind. I drew a lot of lovely women on paper wearing exquisite gowns and sashes of their countries. I then cut them and made them stand by pasting a thin cardboard strip near their legs. I made around 200 such drawings and gave them to my sister to play. She made all of them stand on a table and gave them a number and chose the next Miss World. Oh! How she loved it!

I found the lovely ladies in a box, lying on top of each other and smiling at me.

I found truckload of capacitors and resistors that my father used while repairing our old television. He had done a course in electronics and I would gawk at his notes with that immaculate writing and the complicated circuit diagrams. I found those notes.

I found Mom’s old black and white fairy photograph. When I came across the bag containing all the pictures, I desperately searched for her photo in which she was wearing a black pahari dress. As a child, I used to think that she was a fairy whenever I looked at that picture. I promised myself that I will get it framed. I found dad’s photograph in which he looked like Rakesh Roshan.

I found my old sketch book about which I blogged here.

I found a card with the picture of a village belle in the front and a sher written inside by my father. I found his wooden miniature airplane.

I found my kindergarten report card.

It was a beautiful day. The boxes that I had stacked away in my mind and completely forgotten were magically opened one by one. As the memories tumbled out, I thought that moving the house wasn’t a bad idea after all. It was refreshing. It took me to another era. It made me realize how much I have changed. It humbled me. But there was a nagging guilt that I was leaving the house behind. And then I felt as if my old house was smiling at me.

“You are not leaving me behind. I am in all of those pictures. I am the wall behind you. I am the floor on which you stand. I am coming with you,” it said.

Sometimes I pass that house and look at it from my car. Someone else is living there now. It is a part of another family.

Does it still remember me?

Forgotten Heroes – Tuffy and Pigeon

There were times when Tuffy could not believe that he was sleeping on the road, fighting with stray dogs over tiny morsels of food. He lived in a mansion once, where everyone sang and danced, where he was once made an umpire in a game about which he had no idea (all he knew was that one of the wooden boards had a bit of chicken tikka masala rubbed on it and whenever he picked it up, everyone screamed and pointed at the sky). Those were the good old days.

Pigeon sat on a wire, curiously studying the familiar dog that gnawed at a bone near one of the huge dustbins. Even though he was dirty and his shiny white mane was hardly visible, the pigeon could not whisk away the inkling that the face was too familiar. Pigeon did not have any friends. The fact that he was white gave him delusions of grandeur. This really pissed off the usual grey pigeons and they kept him at bay. As he saw the dog, the pigeon remembered the time when he was a pet and sighed. He missed how Suman rubbed his nipples while singing. Those were the good old days.

He flew towards the dog.

“I hope I am not disturbing you Sir but are you Tuffy?” the pigeon asked.

The dog looked up. It was days since anyone has talked to him.

“Yes, I am,” he said.

“It is a privilege to meet you sir! I am aware of your heroic deeds and how you helped Prem and Nisha in Hum Aapke Hain Kaun.”

“Wait! Are you Prem and Suman’s pigeon from Maine Pyar Kiya?”

“Yes, Sir. I am,” the pigeon said puffing his chest.

“You were quite heroic yourself. The way you helped Prem and Suman was commendable.”

“Thank you Sir. So what happened? Why are you here?” the pigeon asked. Tuffy sighed.

“Well! I got bored. It wasn’t as if I didn’t like the family but they were getting irritating,” Tuffy said.

“Tell me about it!” the pigeon said rolling his eyes.

“Their house was so bloody big and then everyone was calling my name all the time. I have had enough of running. And then they would sing like 20 songs in a day and made me dance on my hind legs. It wasn’t funny,” Tuffy said.

“I know what you mean. I loved the way Suman held me in her hands and rubbed my crotch but she would throw me in the air like 50 times in a day to send a message to Prem. They lived in the same bloody house!” Pigeon said.

“There was always a crowd in that house. It was as if a whole country was living there. And people will pull my hair, pick me up, toss me around, make me run. By the time I went to sleep at night, my muscles would be burning,” Tuffy said as a tear slip down his cheek.

“I must confess something. I hated my owner. She had this permanent begging expression on her face. And the way she said Prem almost killed me. I wanted to peck out her eyes. And she was a tube light. The poor guy took her to the balcony to have sex with her and she won’t let him. She made him sing and dance till he collapsed of exhaustion,” Pigeon said.

“Nisha and Prem were idiots too. She prepared food for him, wore here fancy pink dress and when they had all the time in the world, they danced! Can you fuc*ing believe that! And her sister who fell off the stairs was another idiot. Why did she have to dance all over the house to get into a room? No one in that stupid family knew how to walk. They even danced before going to the loo. I wonder how they reproduced,” Tuffy said in disgust.

The dam was broken. Old wounds were opening.

“Are you happy now?” Pigeon asked.

“Hell yeah!” Tuffy answered licking the bone he was holding in his paws, “Of course, I miss Nisha at times.”

“Why is that?” Pigeon asked in surprise.

“Nisha had a habit of touching me at inappropriate places.”

“Really? Suman also had that habit. She would run her hands all over me as if I was a Kashmiri shawl. Since I never had a girlfriend, this was the closest I came to having sex.”

“I don’t know. I was always aroused by Nisha. Once she wore a backless purple blouse and swayed her hips like melons tumbling off a cart. Heaven!”

“Oh! That was classic. Vagaries of the civilized world.”

“Tell me pigeon. Did you actually push that villain off the cliff?”

“I have never talked about this. Well no, I was not trying to kill him. I was trying to kill Prem. When Suman was thrown out of Prem’s house by his father, I had no idea that he would come after her. Oh! How I wanted to put my beak in his nose and pull out his brains when I saw him in the village. Even though I hated Suman’s shrivelled face, the physical pleasures she gave me were too much to sacrifice. I thought that if Prem died, she will be mine. But Alas, that idiot villain could not understand my intention. I was just trying to help him pull Prem down and he thought I was attacking him,” pigeon said with a sad expression.

“I would like to confess something too. When Nisha gave me that letter to give to Prem, I thought that giving it to his elder brother will create a ruckus and he will still marry her and make her life hell. And then she will be mine. She will always turn to me for comfort. But the fool made her marry Prem. I cried buckets that day,” Tuffy said.

As Tuffy and Pigeon were busy being nostalgic, no one noticed a tigress coming from behind. Before Pigeon could spread his wings, she landed her paw on his tail and closed her mouth over his head.

“NOoooo,” Tuffy shouted and jumped at the tigress. He did not see a blurred movement of her paw that slashed against his jaw, flinging him at a wall on his right. Tuffy slid down the wall like a dead fly.

Within seconds, the tigress was licking her claws as a few feathers slid off her mouth.

“Pathetic animals! I can’t believe someone took them as pets. Look at me! Now I am a majestic animal worthy of being a hero. I am elated that Himmatwala took me in. He is kinda sexy too. I love licking his shaved cheek,” the Tigress said fluttering her eyelashes. She then moaned and walked away to find Himmatwala.

The thought of another lick of the shaved cheek was too much to bear.

[Images from - 1,2,3,4, 5]

10 Disadvantages of being a Male

It is not easy being a man. Today when India is hit by a tsunami of Feminism, the men stand at crossroads. Should we jump in too and let go the flood of tears we have been holding since decades? We too have problems with the way the world and nature treats us. It is just that we bear our burdens in silence.

Here are the 10 biggest disadvantages of being a male.

No homemaking

There are times when we don’t feel like slogging. There are times when we are tired of wiping our boss’s spit from our face when he has finished shouting. We have to carry on the mundane task of being a cash machine. We are not even allowed to think about the alternative of letting our wives take that responsibility. How we wish to puff those pillows, dust those expensive showpiece, make dinner, raise our kids and be a perfect homemaker, but all those are distant dreams.

The Tennis Ball

Do you realize the kind of pressure we undergo when Momma and Mate pull us from both the ends? We are not allowed to sit and watch the tennis match between the two ladies because we are that ball. That ball, which is smacked violently and repeatedly in this never-ending match. We are supposed to take sides. Our eardrums hurt.

Road runner

There is always a war on the roads in India. A woman driver is given space and respect because everyone in her vicinity thinks that they will die otherwise. Men on the other hand have to jostle for each and every inch of a road amidst roaring honks and glaring swearwords. We are all Gladiators ready to beat the daylights out of each other.

Probably a rapist/child molester

We are at the end of our tethers trying to duck every woman and child out of our way. A slight brush of our hand on a woman’s skirt and we might be under a hailstorm of sandals. We might talk to a child with a smile and we might end up being pasted to the road by the his father’s SUV. Do you know how straining living like this is? We are a human bomb walking on needles. Of course there is the other end of the spectrum too, but they are more animals than men.

Shares. Stocks. Bonds. Budget.

Men are supposed to act smart. Even if we believe that shares are sung in a Mushaira and Bonds is the name given to all the girls who bonded with James Bond, we are supposed to act like Harshad Mehta. We should follow the rise and fall of the stock market like a Bollywood actress’s bosoms in a dance number. The latest budget should be on our tips if we want some respect.

Under a lens. Always.

Ever since we open our eyes, we are under constant scrutiny. Our parents burden us with all their unfulfilled dreams as if we are a cargo ship. Then we spend the rest of our lives dodging our wives as they suspiciously go through our shirts for a whiff of an affair, our bosses as they take a smelly dump on our career and our children who start treating us as losers the moment they develop sex organs. When we are old, the nurse treats us as an unwanted cockroach that she is too scared to crush under her feet. Ditto for our children.

Sports Journal

Even though the only sport we are good at is the in-the-night-no-control types, we are supposed to have passionate knowledge about a sport, preferably cricket. God forbid if we confess that we are not interested in it or do not remember the color of the underwear Sachin wore in an unforgettable 1993 series, we will be immediately shunned like a woman carrying an illegitimate child. Knowing about Soccer, Baseball and Rugby is an added advantage. It is not easy to be a walking encyclopedia on sports when all you really like is burgers and breasts.

The rise and fall of Junior

The problem with junior is that it is like an alien entity attached between our legs. Like the Ring of the dark Lord, it has a will of its own. It sometimes rises with the Sun and refuses to subside. It refuses to rise and shine when it is actually required to because of performance issues. It rises at the most inappropriate of places and thus has to be covered up with whatever props we can muster – a book, a lost puppy, a bowl snatched from a beggar. Compare this to women – they might be aroused even in a funeral and not a single soul will know. They could be walking on the street, sitting in a bus or sleeping in a room full of guests and no one will ever point at a hill between their legs and laugh. Oh! The pleasure of that freedom!

Facade

Since childhood we are brainwashed into being a real man who don’t cry, who does not take but give emotional support and who can break a jaw at the drop of a hat. Basically we should be robotic providers who do not go beyond a Hmmm when our children run towards us screaming that they have been selected in IIT. It is taxing. We feel desperately like crying at times, we sometimes wish we could treat our children as friends, sit with our wives and pour our heart out but we can’t. We feel unmanly with the mere thought of it. Instead we get drunk and scream swearwords at strangers on roads.

Dispensable. Always.

Yes! She could have saved him!

What boils our blood is that whenever a tragedy strikes or there is a war, we are the ones who are left to die. Women and children are the first ones to be saved. If time and situation permits, men are given a thought. Remember when the Titanic sank? Men were left on that sinking shit while women and children sat on lifeboats and saw the show. Rose had a whole goddamn wooden plank! Why are we always so dispensable? Just because we are in excess and selectively chosen over girls to live does not mean we don’t have a life and can be treated like a street dog.

So you see, it isn’t all that rosy for us men too. The world has been subjugating us in its own way. Nature have had it’s revenge too as we can’t even have pleasure at our own convenience. We are living in unbreakable molds like a Mummy and there is no escape.

[image from 1,2,3]

The boy who did not believe in love

Up was Down

On 16 Feb, 2013 Geet and I completed three years of our married life. Doesn’t sound like a big achievement, does it? After all there are couples who have spent 50 years together, where the last 10 years of their togetherness have been spent revisiting the potty training manuals, taking sagging body sponge baths via a nurse, exchanging dentures during dinner and spending half of the day getting up from the chair.

But these three years of togetherness are an achievement. Especially for a guy who never believed in love. I have seen too many marriages breaking apart around me, too many husbands beating up their wives, too many couples making compromises to believe otherwise. This notion was ingrained in me that no matter how high you are on the initial euphoria, the effect of the drug finally subsides in the morning. Your love life becomes a part of your routine and you get on with it like you get on with brushing your teeth.

I was almost 30 and Mom and Dad were panicking because they thought that their crossing-into-middle-age virgin son was going to die a virgin. It was the most terrifying year of my life when I had to finally make a decision. After all it involved another human being and I have to give up the freedom of farting noisily in my bedroom. Too much was on stake. My father created my profile in a matrimonial website and put up a really ugly picture of mine on display. On a scale of Sunil Shetty to 10, I looked like Tushar Kapoor. I went completely numb in the cold matrimonial waters, just like the survivors of Titanic. My virginity ship was about to sink and I watched helplessly as my feet grew cold.

M friends told me that it takes 2-3 years to find a bearable bride and given the fact that I looked like a cross between Mamta Banerjee and Prabhu Deva in my matrimonial photo, I extended the duration to 4-5 years and went in my crypt. But Gods had something else in mind. Within a month my parents sent me a girl’s picture (I was in Manchester then) and told me that she was perfect.

“Did she see my photo on the website?” I asked in a state of shock. The ship was sinking too fast.

“She did.”

“Are you sure she is not blind?”

I was told that there was a 33/36 match on our horoscopes and I have to stop being an idiot and talk to her. Now this was a turning point. Not that my parents had never called me an idiot but the horoscope match was too perfect. My ghosts of doubts were returning and whispering me to back out. They reminded me that I was incapable of falling in love. Now before you jump to conclusions, what the ghost meant was that I was emotionally incapable of carrying a relationship of such magnitude on my shoulders simple because I did not believe in that gesture. Secondly, what will my friends think? After all, I had distributed such pearls of wisdom like – How can two people stay together their entire lives? I will be bored to death! Ugh!

Anyways, I saw her photo and there was a sensation in certain parts of my body. Like near my heart. Let me clarify that it wasn’t lust that prompted me to talk to her. I know better than getting aroused over a photo of a fully dressed female. It was just instinct. We talked how two strangers will talk when they talk for the first time. I tried to be funny and failed and walked into a wall during our conversation. It was a good conversation.

Geet tells me that she had fallen for me during the one month we talked on the phone. I liked talking to her but nothing else happened. I don’t know why but I finally said yes.

The fact was that both of us were scared. When we moved to Manchester 15 days after we got married, I was taking deep breaths. But those were such incredible days. I rediscovered myself. I realized that my heart was capable of melting, that my eyes were capable of gleaming, that my legs were capable of going weak,  that I was capable of falling in love, that I would not die of poisonous gases if I don’t fart.

In college, Geet was the kind of girl who would stop talking to you if you ask her to be your girlfriend. She treated me like a lizard that has suddenly dropped in her lap from the ceiling when I tried to give her an innocent peck on the first day of our marriage. Like me, she too had her own battles to conquer. I waited patiently for her to come around. I worked on our friendship.

Now that I look back, I cannot imagine the last three years without her. I married a stranger and fell in love with a friend.  When I think of my marriage, I think of The Black Pearl, that was rocked upside down to be transported back into the land of the living at sunrise. Now wasn’t that lucky that ‘Up was Down’?

p.s. I am looking forward to exchanging my dentures with Geet. That way, if we are left with one chocolate and she eats it all, I can still after-taste it.

[image from here]

10 Syndromes to check before you decide to have a baby

We all know that India is going to overtake China in population in roughly the next 35 years. The country is already packed to the rafters and our nation might develop a gigantic crack any day from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and do a Sita on us. I completely acknowledge the commendable job our country is doing in reducing the population which includes hunger, accidents, suicides, murders, foeticides, price rise, riots, Rahul Gandhi and so on and so forth but clearly the measures will never be enough unless we move all the people below poverty line to the moon and cut off the oxygen supply.

But there is another way and hence Mashed Musings have come up with an incredible idea to dissuade couples from having babies and nipping the problem at the root. A lot of couples in our nation are anyways not worthy of becoming parents because they are so incredibly messed up and would have been immediately quarantined in another country. So, here is a list of dangerous syndromes commonly found in couples. Refrain from having a child if you have any of these and help to create a better India by ending your family tree.

The Loud Mouth Syndrome – If the frequency of your voice is very close to that of a bat but still in audible range, if you talk on a mobile as if radio waves are not yet discovered, If people pretend to be a wall-hanging the moment you enter a room, if someone faints in your presence because you have been yakking since the last 5 hours, if empty popcorn boxes fly towards you when you attend a call in a cinema hall, then you should not have a child. The child might end up as loud mouthed as you are or start pretending that he is dumb and deaf from the age of 5, similar to Mamta Banerjee, Rakhi Sawant and Manmohan Singh.

The No Rules Syndrome – Now there are times when you are the king of the roads honking to glory, there are times when you are spitting red liquid like Mount Etna, there are times when you cannot see the harsh red traffic light, there are times when you zigzag your car through traffic like a hungry anaconda. If you are a person who suffers from this syndrome, then you should not have a child because he might end up as irresponsible and worthless as you are.

The Leone Syndrome – If you are addicted to porn, you are making the biggest mistake of your life by making a baby for obvious reasons. Your child will become a liability and you have to discover Sunny Leone on mute.

The Long Nose Control Freak Syndrome – Your life revolves around what other people are doing. You use the gossips to forward your interests or to add some masala to your bland existence. You might go into combative mode just like the Indian Media as soon as the gossip is turned on you. A side effect is that you might have an immensely irritating laughter or a Dracula smile. You should not have a baby because she will shun you violently, commit suicide or end up like you.

The Special Job Syndrome – If you are a painter and usually do not remember when or where was the last time you emptied your bowels or had food, if you like to travel to places like Tanzania to eat a special delicacy of earthworms, if you are a page 3 celebrity who salivates on seeing young models (male/female no bar), if you are a TV actor who works/sleeps/bathe buried under 10 kilo of fake jewellery, if you are a news reporter who specializes in dancing with soldiers in war zones, then try not to have kids. They will anyways never know you.

The Take Care Of My Child Syndrome – You might be dreaming about how other people will take care of your child once you are done with providing the world with your labour of love. If you are about to burden people with your child on weddings, travelling, watching movies, shopping or elections, it will be better not to bring the gift in the world. We know that you derive sadistic pleasure from it but your child might refuse to recognise you as he grows up and might have disorders because of people shunning him all the time. He might end up like Tushar Kapoor.  

The Toy Syndrome – If you are going to handle your future child in any of the following ways, then you should not have the kid – Moving the baby from one room to another by holding him upside down with one leg, throwing the baby 10 feet up to pacify her, slapping/pinching the baby to make him stop crying, putting a strap in his neck and drag him while you shop, forgetting the baby in the car, allowing the dog to lick your baby clean instead of giving her a bath etc.

The My Child is Cool Syndrome – If you might be the kind of parent who thinks that his child will be the most special angel that will grace the Earth and everyone around you have to bow to your and your kid’s flights of inflated egotism, then better not bring the angel in the world. If you think it will be ok for your child to create ruckus by howling at public places, pull hair of aunties in cinema halls, break lines, create special Vadra queues, throw tantrums and your Vijay Mallya money while you wipe a proud tear off your puffed-with-pride face, then try not to grace the world with his existence.

The Bhatt Syndrome – If the habits of farting, belching, peeing in public and scratching your private parts in public is like a gold necklace passed through generations in your family, it will be probably a good idea to deprive yourself of a kid. He will anyways end up an animal just like you or die of poisonous gases and infections.

The Sexist Syndrome – This is the most dangerous syndrome of all. If you are a true blue sexist, then it will be a good idea to use that condom with Fevicol. You MUST NOT have a child. Your daughter will either run away, kill herself, get killed by you or end up as a vegetative cow. Your son might end up a molester, a rapist or a wife abuser. You are a hazardous factory that should be immediately locked.

If all the couples of this country who are suffering from any of these syndromes give up their plans to bring a baby in this world, the day will not be far away when India will have a population less than Lakshadweep.

p.s. We know Mahesh Bhatt does not fart, belch and pee on walls. The syndrome was named after him to honour the self-inflicted (please note) marks on his sexy body.

I can’t *scratch scratch* lift both hands but thanks for *scratch* naming the *scratch* syndrome after me. *scratch damn! scratch*

[images from 1,2,3]

Report Card of my Mistress

To tell you the truth, I was not expecting a readership when I came back after 2 years of blogging break. I bet a lot of you don’t know that this blog was dormant from Jan 2009 to Oct 2011. I wanted to finish my novel before it poisoned my brain. I had to throw the story out of my system. Yes, it is done and lying on its ass in my laptop since a month awaiting another important decision of my life. In layman’s terms, it is in queue. I have gone through the story so many times that it seems that all that exercise of throwing it out of my system was in vain. It is flowing in my blood now.

Anyways, another thing that happened in those two years of sabbatical was that I met Geet and we got married. We did it the old-fashioned way by not even meeting up before we said yes. Wait! Don’t faint. We had a webcam chat or two and a month of telephonic conversation. It feels surreal now that I write it. What if she had 4 legs? You surely can hide that in a webcam chat. And no it wasn’t a sex chat. So, we got married and moved to Manchester for a year and explored each other (Ahem!) and the beautiful Britain. I spent all my savings and we went to France and Switzerland and bought coats worth 10000 Rs. In short, we lived that year in a very expensive Yash Chopra movie.

While all this was happening, my blog was always calling me back. It was like a wailing, abandoned child whom I have left behind and felt guilty about it. So, when I returned back to India, dust, honks and heaps of people (read Delhi) in 2011, I thought of picking up the child again. It wasn’t easy. The readership was almost gone. My blogging friends of old had almost vanished. But once I started writing in Dec 2011, the joy knew no comments. The dam was broken. I found all of you, one by one over the course of last one year. Some old friends returned and were happy to see me back. It was all exhilarating.

Geet was shocked. She hasn’t seen me giving attention to anyone except her and here I was juggling her with a blog, a novel and a movie novels and watching movies (corrected the sentence after readers thought I was writing a movie script! ). It took her some time to stop calling MashedMusings my mistress and absorb the juggler in me. I told her that it was like preparing Rice, Rajma, Paneer Makhni, Chapati and Dahi Bhalle all in one go – like I did for her on Karwachauth in 2 hours flat. I bought her a diamond to pacify her.

So, thank you everyone for reading this blog and appreciating what I write. It means a lot to me because I do not think very highly of myself (I keep telling Geet that she must have been really blind to marry me. I say dialogues like – ‘what were you bloody thinking?!?!’ while she gives me a really scratch-head-confusing smile). So, all this appreciation is very humbling.

Now you must be wondering why I am in a self-critical mode today? Well, I accidentally read my Yearly Report Card on WordPress today and felt good and thought of thanking everyone which now that I read it, is more of a blabbering.

Cheers!

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 130,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Guest Post on Rachna’s Blog – The Invisible Wheelchair

When Rachna asked me to write a Guest Post on her blog, I went weak in the knees. She is one of the Legends of the Blogging world and the cold sweat was understandable. When I finally sent the mail to her, I almost chewed all my nails in anticipation of her reply and was deflated like a balloon when she replied that she liked the post.

I was very sure that I did not want to write something with my usual funny streak. I wanted to write from a very important experience from my own life. Something that has stayed with me for so long. I wanted to write about Rajeev and the important part he played in turning me the way I am.

And thus emerged this post – The Invisible Wheelchair

Do take out time to read the post. I hope you will like it.

It was not just the driver who raped her

It wasn’t just the driver and his accomplices. Such monsters are not raised in a day. It takes meticulous planning. The nation has chalked out plans for this incident for 60 years. The citizens have put intricate details in it which has led to this inevitable feat. We will keep planning. This is not the first time. This is not the end.

While they were raping her, India stood guard. We cheered them as we have cheered such psychopaths a hundred times before. We will cheer them in the future too. After all, we created them.  

Are you not finding it coherent? Let me indulge you.

Politicians

You are the real termites of this country. The fact that the country is completely hollow because of you does not deter you. You still prowl like a blood sucking vampire and won’t be satiated till you drink the last drop of blood of our motherland. You were given a task. You took an oath of nation building. You could have stopped what happened. Long time back. Had you looked away from your money mongering, your own chairs, you would have realised the pitiable state in which the women of this country live. You would have made laws to make their lives better. You would have enforced those laws. But then they were not your vote banks. They could not turn your chair over. And now you call a rape victim ‘Zinda Laash’ (alive corpse)? You are not helping here to make them feel normal and accepted. Stop using a raped woman to advance your political motives. Stop shedding crocodile tears. Sexual harassment law is lingering in the parliament since 2005. If there is an iota of shame in your soulless body, stop being a virus. You have done enough harm. Do we have to carry you like an albatross around our necks for the rest of our lives?

Law enforcers

Your job is not to scare citizens. Your job is not to harass a rape victim. Your job is not to pass comments on the morality of women when they come to you for help. You are no better than the politicians. The very people whom you should be protecting are scared to come to you. You think that the women who report rape eye monetary advancements out of it. You think they are of loose moral values. And sometimes you even rape an already raped woman who has come to you for help. It is because of law enforcers like you that we are in this state. It is because of you that these rapes happen unabated, because you lack the will to protect. Because you have no idea what your job entails. Because you treat your job as a money-making machine. That girl is fighting for her life in a hospital because of the shameful negligence with which you have carried out your responsibilities over the last 60 years.

Media

You have already pushed the news to page 4 after Narendra Modi’s win in Gujrat. It shows where your concern lie. A story is masala for a few days till a bigger one washes it away. You would have kept the candle burning. You would have encouraged the people to bring the outcry to a logical end. But like the law enforcers, you have sold yourself to the termites.

And Bollywood – Congratulations for providing the much-needed objectifying of a woman’s body through the media. Yes, that is exactly what this sexually oppressed nation wants for entertainment. With all your Chikni Chamelis and Halkat Jawanis, you have done the harm. So, do us a favour. Do not shed crocodile tears for that girl lying in the hospital because you are equally responsible for raising those monsters that night. You have been brainwashing this country since decades – propagating sexual harassment euphemistically as eve-teasing. You have so menacingly raised those street-side Romeos who then splash acid on a girl because they could not differentiate between reality and cinema. Knowing very well that this is a powerful media, you could have changed the course, taken up responsibility. But you too, like the rest, turned things to your advantage. You kicked an already regressive society into the pit of regression in the name of masala entertainment.

And stop portraying rape victims as unwanted and shunned by society. Grow up and snap out of that money-making brain of yours.

We, the Citizens

Yes, we are the worse offenders. The citizens of this nation. Every time we treat our mothers, sisters, daughters and wives as secondary, we contribute towards this choking patriarchal society which then acts as an umbilical chord that feed those monsters. Every time we tell our daughters that they are weaker than boys, we stomp their mind with self-doubts. Every time we stop the education of our daughters because our son has to study, we help those monsters grow manifold. Putting our daughter-in-laws in place, killing girls in the womb, putting restrictions on women, not allowing them to follow their dreams – all these acts have fuelled the events to culminate to the mess we are in right now. We even have the audacity to question the morals and circumstances of a victim since she is not related to us. We have turned into selfish creeps who stand and stare at acts of crime. We tsk tsk rape victims as if it was their fault.

We have been doing this from the last 60 years. Have we not raised these silent equivalent of terrorist camps in our own houses? We have been drawing a dividing line and now it is permanent, raising Frankensteins one after another. Why are we recoiling now? It was we who gave courage to that man to insert a rod in a woman’s vagina.

A society which comes to this does not deserve a second chance. How I wish the Mayans were right.

Mother India has been continuously raped since our independence – by politicians, by law enforcers, by media and by us. She is wounded with bruises filled with pus. And we are that pus. Feeding on her. Killing her slowly.  Her own children.

And that is her curse.

No, it wasn’t just the driver and his accomplices who raped the girl that night. And they are not the only one who should be hanged.

Hashtag and Tantreshwar

For someone who has a name as ubiquitous as a paan stained wall in India, it is impossibly difficult to understand the fact that people do have unique names. I have always hated my name. A.M.I.T. It ends even before it begins, just like premature ejaculation. It’s like a small blip of hope on a heart rate monitor in the otherwise death announcing straight line. It is like our paltry existence in the vast timeline of the universe.

When I was born, Amitabh Bachchan was at his peak taking bullets by a dozen, romancing girls who couldn’t even reach his chest (and marrying someone who barely reached his pelvis), dancing with lights blinking on his costume and dethroning Rajesh Khanna. He was called Amit ji by the planet and that unfortunately turned into a tragedy for me. My star struck parents christened me with the superstar’s name and thus started the painful story of my struggle. My Daak name (nickname) at home was Rishi, named after Rishi Kapoor who had just exploded in Bollywood with Bobby, Amar Akbar Anthony and Sargam, thus completing my choking and heart wrenching association with Bollywood.

If you are born in India with a name like mine, you will be pretty much used to the fact that screaming this name in a public place packed with people (like a bus, train or a cinema hall) will make 90% of the men turn around and stare at you. There were 4 Amits in my class in 12th which was stressful to the limit of insanity. Try searching me on Facebook and you will have to rummage through 38,49,237 humans with the same name. There are so many men with the said name in my office module that it takes a lot of effort to concentrate on your work instead of turning your head every time someone takes your name. The irony is that if you do not turn your head, it was actually you who were being addressed. Not a single day passes when I do not let 6-7 people know on my office communicator that I am not the one they are searching for to discuss the defect status. I have even modified my status on the communicator to ‘Wrong Amit’ but it is not working. There was this girl who pinged me a few days back and giggled (in written) that she saw my ‘wrong Amit’ status but still wanted to confirm. Maybe I should change my status to – I like slurping human intestines.

As I was growing up and struggling with my name, I noticed a change happening in the last two decades. There was a sudden jostle to give unique names to children. I think this was the only sensible decision taken by Indians in the last 20 years. And now that generation has grown up and suddenly the attendance registers in schools do not look like photocopies of each other. Amit, Rahul, Sunil, Raj and Sumit have been replaced by Aatmaj, Samyak, Hridayanshu, Saksham, Shivankur and Mantram. Priya, Ruchi, Pooja, Aarti and Smita have been replaced by Avni, Samvidha, Kaumudi, Matangi, Adveshi and Tarunima.

Having a unique name is not always a harbinger for peaceful existence. In the blind race to showcase their children as exceptional, parents usually forget that their children are global nomads of the future. A lot of them will visit foreign land and thus naming your child Ak-shit or Shit-ij might have disastrous results. When I read in the newspaper that an American mom has named her child Hashtag, I understood how far the unique name virus has spread. Imagine a school going Hashtag being bullied in school and crying in front of her mother.

“You are one of a kind my child! You make topics trend on Twitter. All those mad humans on Twitter cannot survive without you,” Hashtag’s mother will console her.

Poor Tantreshwar (this is a real name of a boy in Geet’s class) will have a hard life too. His parents must brace themselves for a lifetime of verbal abuses which their son will hurl at them for making him a laughing-stock. Also, his parents will have to find some girl named Chandalika to marry him because no normal girl will go beyond what-is-your-name with him before falling off her chair laughing. Looking at the brighter side, Tantreshwar and Chandalika’s wedding card will be a thing for museums.

Parents need to strike a fine balance while naming their children. Giving him a name as bland as Amit is as bad as naming him after a black magician who sacrifices babies and drinks their blood OR naming her after a special character whom boys will trend instead of date. You might say that changing your name will be a step in the right direction in such scenarios. No, it is not. I remember a boy called Pinkle in my school. After going through a lifetime of being a laughing-stock he changed his name to Prateek. He wasn’t as fortunate as Pi Patel. Everyone still called him Pinkle.

Shakespeare once said – What’s in a name? Well, he was mighty lucky that he did not say that in Hashtag’s, Tantreshwar’s or Pinkle’s presence. He would have ended up with a broken, bleeding nose.