Showing posts with label Learning to fly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Learning to fly. Show all posts

Friday, June 17, 2011

The thing about holes

(I’ve been playing Golf for a while now. For those of you who don’t know a lot about it, here’s Golf for dummies.
What it is – A joke. Not a sport. Not a game. A joke, and a very bad one at that.
What it is not - 500 white people following a black guy take a walk in the park.
Objective – To get a dimpled, white ball from a garden in Scotland, across the Dead Sea, into a hole in Yemen in less than a lifetime. Remember, the hole is always smaller than the ball. Always.
How – By using 14 wood and iron hockey stick shaped hockey sticks called clubs.)

Just so we’re clear - Golf is just wrong.

It just is.

When you play it, you’re like a boy who’s having sex for the first time.

You begin with your tee-off. But when you start, the position of the hole is pretty vague. You’re not sure where exactly it is. If you’re persistent enough you might get close to it, but a hole in one would be nothing short of a miracle. You’re not even sure if you’re using the right tool to get you there. Is your wood really the right choice? What if you land in the rough? Have you practiced your swing enough?

You then get into a position that is most unnatural – surprisingly unlike what you practiced at home. You swing. You miss.

You miss again.

Under watchful gaze, missing becomes a habit you cannot shirk off. When you finally do manage a semblance of contact, you’re not even sure if you got it right.

Yet at the end of it, you’re so bloody spent. And you’ve got a sore back because you tried to play in a position that is so out of your league.

Been there. Done that. True Fact!

Golf is just so very wrong. If a man’s sex life was a blob and you flattened it out to two-dimensions, it would look like a golf course.

Even if I miss the first hole, I always have the next one, right? After all there are 18 of them.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

The next hole is always like the slut you dump your girl for. She tantalizes you, draws you in, makes you forget about the last one. You know she means trouble but you can’t keep away from her. Before you know it, you’re hooked but the bitch never lives up to her promise.

And you miss, yet again.

A golfer always lies about his scores to a fellow golfer. Always.

The number of women a man tells you he has slept with, is always somewhere in-between the truth and wishful thinking. Ten means four and four means one and one means none. True Fact!

Ahem… Tiger! Those are my balls on the green.

You never touch another man’s balls – voluntarily, “accidentally” or sub-consciously, on the golf course or off it. I couldn’t care less that you were happy or confused or both. You just don’t.

Have you tried Golf?

Someone asking you to play Golf for the first time is like a woman suggesting, “Let’s be friends, with benefits?” It is masochism in disguise – you think it’s just a walk in the park, but you just end up hitting your foot with an iron stick, repeatedly. You’re in pain but you can’t stop.

Anything that is analogous to a man’s sex life cannot be right.

These are not the only things wrong with Golf.

I hate Koreans. (Actually, I don’t. Maybe Kim Jong Il, not the rest of them. They have the best food in Asia. So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume I do.) So yes, I hate Koreans. At any point of time if you counted the number of Koreans on all the golf courses in the world, it would be more than the population of Korea, both South and North. The biggest killer of Koreans after Lung Cancer and Kimchi Poisoning is Golf Course Lightning Strikes.







There is something about looking at 7 Hyundai cars parked in a line at the parking-lot of a golf course that makes me want to vandalize them with a golf club. Something, I’m not quite sure what though.

The other problem is that I was taught the game by a woman. She claims to be the 63rd best female golfer in India. I don’t think there are more than 6 female golfers in India but that’s beside the point. The problem is the innate inability of a man to follow someone else’s command, let alone that of a woman. It’s impossible for me to follow – “Stand 5 feet behind me and check out my swing” to the dot.

Let me make this absolutely clear – no heterosexual man is capable of standing behind a woman and checking out her 'swing'. Period.


Also, Golf gives women, the section of the human species incapable of deciding, the luxury of choice. Should I go for the 7-Iron or the 6 on this shot? I think it will roll off the green, don’t you think? I think the wind is blowing from the south-west and the north-east, don’t you think so?

The wind CANNOT blow from the south-west AND the north-east you woman! It is scientifically impossible for you to make a choice or the wind to blow in two different directions.

Never go golfing with your girlfriend. Most marriage proposals are bartered in return for a woman to decide on a shot in less than 2 hours.

True Fact!

P.S. A wise man on the course once told me – “You know why they call it Golf? Cos fuck was already taken.”

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Eats flies and leaves

Addendum 132 to the 'List of 5 inappropriate things to tell Paraglider'

1. No matter how drunk you are, never tell two Dutchmen that 'Belgish' beer tastes better than Dutch beer, especially if one of them is your flight instructor. Also, do not verbalize weird drunk analogies about the beer of a nation epitomizing the true nature of its women. Haywards - strong, unpredictable and can give an unforeseen kick. Heineken - characterless, bland and at best, its just something cold.

2. Never tell a Jolly Roger tattooed Swiss tennis fan, sans front teeth, that Roger Federer does not fancy women - "Why else would he marry a cow*?" Do not indulge in punning commentary about the movies Roger's wife could star in - Bridget Jones' dairy, Dude where's my cow, The lives of udders!

3. As a flyer is about to take off refrain from being a wise-ass - "Isn't this para-glider like a modern manifestation of an albatross around our necks? Oh sorry, what I meant is... safe flight!"

4. Mother nature 'urgently-called' is not an acceptable reason for me to return to the ground 5 minutes after take-off. "You amateurs do not respect the wind. You did not have to come down!" Exactly how peeing into the wind is sacrosanct, is a topic I chose not to broach; at least not when your life depended on Mr. Wind-Respecter's walky-talky directional directions. With my sense of direction (to call it below-average would be lying and abysmally embarrassing an understatement; if you can guess the probability of a deaf bat trying to find its way out of a box with a bat shaped hole in it, what you have are the chances of me finding my way from HRC to Shiro, sober) discretion this time, undoubtedly, was the better part of valour.

5. I'm bored. Let's play a game. Let's estimate the number of years of your life you've lost watching the weather forecast on TV?

(all photos by the only non-flyer, Popat-bhai. Ironic?)

(Click-on-pic. FYI, as I don't own a glider, I must rent it. And, when I rent a glider, I have no control over color. I did try my best to convince the Dutchmen that looking chic and NOT YELLOW was as aerodynamically critical as weight, chord, height and number of glider cells. To put it mildly, he was not amused - "Spring je eigen kont en sterven!")


Left - Icarus wannabe; Right - Eric von Whothefucken (on ground), Neil van Whathefucken (suspended)


Gliders of a polyester, never flock together [sic]?

* Mirka Bovine-ic

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Plane stupid

Substantial airline travel is a work hazard that has plagued my existence for the last ten months. Airplanes have become a third-home of sorts, after my 600 sq foot 1BHK bachelor sty and the Hard Rock Café. (HRC? Why, you ask? ‘Cos there are very few things I’m balefully finicky about. My butter chicken – tender, high on cholesterol, high on guilt; my kaamwaali bais – unrelentingly mute, perennially inodorous, categorically incurious – NOT “itna paisa main itna-ich milenga”; and lastly my Friday night Long Island Ice Teas – not too strong, not too light, just right! Goldicocks is my well-grounded second-middle name. The first being danger of course.)

You know you’re getting more than a lion’s share of airborne suspension when - you exhibit clear signs of Pavlovian conditioning by sticking your arm out vertically and groping for a button every time you feel hungry; you involuntarily dig out your mobile and feel your back pocket for a boarding pass whenever you pass through a doorway; you’re disappointed that your WC ‘twirls rapidly’ versus ‘suck swooshingly’; you expect your boss’ secretary to dance out the minutes of the meeting in synchrony with members of her secretary sisterhood placed at equidistant spots along the aisle that leads up to your workstation; you remember duty-free locations by their geo-coordinates (Bangkok Duty Free - 13° 55' 0" Latitude, 100° 37' 0" Longitude; Singapore Duty Free - 1° 21' 38" Latitude, 103° 54' 33" Longitude; Jakarta Duty Free - -6° 10' 27" Latitude, 106° 49' 45" Longitude) but lose your way while coming home from the airport.

Evident by now, airline travel brings out the worst in me (only second to restraining myself from gagging suburbanite yuppies selectively screeching only the chorus of ‘Roke’ anthems in a voice that is clearly the bastard produce of my hangover headache in coitus with a banshee. “The summer of 69 might have been the best days of your life, but I couldn’t care less that Jimmy quit, Jodi got married and left you a miserable sexually confused virgin.”). However, the said pale in comparison to the effect a few fellow airline travelers have had on my sanity.


Munna Mobile: “Please turn your mobile phones and other electronic devices off” should not be interpreted as “Please engross your pathetic self in jargon laced corporate phone-talk in a last-ditch attempt to impress the 55 year old tone-deaf vestal spinster, seated at the tail end of the craft. We are hired exclusively to put up with the façade that conceals a lonesome man whose wife has taken to chronic lesbianism, son has spent the equivalent of Sierra Leone’s GDP to take up Post-modern Hindi at Yale and daughter has taken leave of her sex. But look on the bright side; you do have your Blackberry with a 6 month won’t-fuck-you-when-you’re-down-and-out warranty! Should I perhaps, in the meantime, warm your seat for you?”


Jesus said to him, “There are fat things which may not fly among all the beasts that are on the earth”
- LEVITICUS 11:2

Protuberesh Motwani: There is a reasoned non-Darwinian rationale behind the Penguin’s inability to fly – the Bible. The Word of God forbids a beast with a well-rounded blubbery tush from flying. “Fatty, do you really want to risk antagonizing the Lord?” If your navel has the gravitational pull potent enough to send a mayfly into orbit around your paunch, completing but a single revolution in its entire lifetime, DRIVE! You are forewarned that your derrière trespassing on my seat will elicit counter-attack strategies like acupuncturesque butt-poking and puerile taunts like “Fatty! Fatty! Boombalatty!”


As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes and stewardesses."
- Letter from Abraham Lincoln to Joshua Speed, 1855
P.S. How about tonight? Please, my lil Speedo-dido. I’ll make it quick Speedy.

Wtf! Men? Stewardesses? Bitchin mate! Oh… and btw free the Niggers.
- (unconfirmed anon. paraphrase) Speed to Lincoln, 1855
P.S. Oh Abe, my babe! Only if you come dressed as a stewardess?


Chindi Rani (fraternal twin of Chanda Rani, a household name among pimps): Over a hundred and fifty years since, but we still betray the promise of our forefathers (Well, technically not OUR forefathers. More like, forefathers of the Americans and a few Anglo-Indians). We’ve miserably failed at liberating Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the international skies from the shackles of slavery. One moment you’re using a credit card you stole from a doodhwalla (not to be confused with the Dudewallas of Zoroastrian pedigree who dispense their time and modest intellect inbreeding and formulating hideous caveats against outbreeding lest their dhansak-fed, in-bred Cusrow Baug daughters elope with the butter chicken-fed, ill-bred Hiranandani author) to book a ticket with a base fare lower than Jayalalitha’s sex appeal on a scale of one to a million. The next moment you’re stepping down from a cycle-rickshaw, reasoning with the ground staff that your potli and potlam are perfectly permissible hand baggage and children smaller than either potlam or potli should, in all fairness, be issued only half-tickets. However, as you set your bata appareled foot in the craft, imperial history is rewritten in haste, royal genealogy trees stage an impromptu collapse and you’re transmuted into a regal, familial focal point sprouting branches to intercept the King of Jordan - Hussein, the Queen of England – Elizabeth and the Prince of Gay Pride – Prince.

You demand that the captain prostrates himself along the aisle in an expression of consecrated servitude, the cabin crew break into a well-machinated lawani jig to the sedate in-flight remix of Dil Main Baji Guitar and your fellow passengers kneel before your bainess in inviolable obeisance. Your fiddling potli-baba and potlam-baby are sanctioned uninterrupted what-does-thiiiiiis-button-do cockpit-time while the plane taxies down the runway. The plane takes off at the snap of your fingers. You are Rani! Chindi Rani! The Queen of Cheap Times.


Mrs. Chatrina Pa-Tale: Post a frenetic Friday in the rustic underbelly of the bovine plagued landscape of India (underbelly = anywhere that is not Bombay), the sole scheme of my existence is to get back to Bombay before the Cinderfella within me turns into a grouchy, irritable, ill-tempered pumpkin. While striving to consummate the intended undertaking, I pamper myself with a game of hide and seek – hide from anything human and seek a few prized in-flight winks. However, I forget that the only genetic trait (rabid, unrestrained, loud, violent, unrelenting and intolerantly savage support for the Indian cricket team aside) ingrained in every Indian stem cell is that of the instant conversationalist.

Now, with the advent of low-cost airlines, your standard off-the-shelf long-haul share-your-sob-story-in-twenty-hours railway berthmate has taken shape beside you in seat 3-D with the herculean task of recounting the abridged version of My Whole Life (pun un-unintended) in two odd hours -
Chapter 1: When I was a baby
Chapter 2: Pubehurty
Chapter 3: Then I was his baby
Chapter 3.5: Married cradle-snatching bastard!
Chapter 4: God, no more PMS!
Chapter 5: My Boss’ Dick
Chapter 6: My Boss is a Dick
Chapter 7: My Life’s whole now
Chapter 8: My Life’s a Hole now
Chapter 9: God, no more PMS?
Chapter 10: My Vagina’s Monologue

After many a stillborn attempt at repelling overly chatty armrest sharers - by feigning death/ epilepsy/ orgasm(s)/ sterility, mumbling verses from the Koran, flittering my tongue in a viciously lustful fashion, pretending to be a chauvinist/ feminist/ existentialist/ nihilist/ misogynist/ misandrist/ sadist/ masochist/ sadomasochist – I decided to enroll myself in the uber-exclusive F.L.I.G.H.T. Club (Fuck! Lady, I Give a Hog’s Testicle! Club). Prerogatives of the F.L.I.G.H.T. Club include uninterrupted sleep, unopposed abusing and access to the ‘Repulse button’. When annoyed, a push of this cleverly concealed special access under-seat button deploys a screen that drops down before the assaulter. The screen reads –

“The extremely miffed individual seated alongside you, besides being a blood relative of Bappi-da (paternal), Altaf Raja (maternal), George W. Bush (cerebral) and Batman (conceivable), is an esteemed member of the Elite (official usage obviously pending Mayawati’s approval) F.L.I.G.H.T. Club. The rules for treating members of the club a.k.a. the FLIGHTERS are as follows –

The 1st Rule of FLIGHT CLUB is: You do not talk to a member of FLIGHT CLUB.

The 2nd Rule of FLIGHT CLUB is: You DO NOT talk to a member of FLIGHT CLUB.

The 3rd Rule of FLIGHT CLUB: Someone yells stop, goes limp or taps out, you SHUT UP!

4th Rule: Only two warnings to a flight before you’re thrown off board.

5th Rule: One FLIGHTER at a time.

6th Rule: No gossip, no small talk.

7th Rule: Flights will go on as long as they have to, but if you’re seeing this message you SHUT UP!

And the 8th and final Rule: If this is your first time with a FLIGHTER, you HAVE to SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Violation of any of the above regulations will result in forced airborne deplaning faster than you can say “Look Ma! No wings.”