How to woo a Punjabi Girl 101

I have called its people and parties retarded, its architecture daft and its drivers mental. But Chandigarh really cannot be as fucked up as I make it out to be. Can it? As I leave this city, I try to find a semblance of normalcy here – in its lyrics.

I was recently gifted a collection of Punjabi poems by Amrita Pritam. In one of her pieces Main Tenu Fir Milaangi (I will meet you yet again) she says

“Main tenu fir milaangi.
Kithey, kis tarah? Pata nai.
Shaayad terey takhayul di chinag ban ke, terey canvas tey utrangi.
Ya khowrey terey canvas dey utey, ik rahasmayi lakeer ban ke,
Khamosh tenu tak di rawaangi”

“I will meet you yet again
Where, how? I know not.
I might become a figment of your imagination and fall on your canvas.
Or perhaps, spreading myself as a mysterious line on your canvas,
In silence, I will keep gazing at you.”

I am very dense when it comes to poetry or for that matter love as well. They both have a time tested methodology involved, yet almost contradictorily they’re supposed to express spontaneity (God forbid if you don’t – the bitch will skin you alive).

Both poetry and love have their lines.

There is always a line.

One that you absolutely should not cross - the iambic (short for iambecomingsick) pentameter. Or a line that you’re measured against, aptly called (?), the sexameter.

It’s not like the ‘modern’, free-er version of love or poetry is something that I can understand either.

What in God’s bloody name is free verse?

Have you heard of the ‘modern poet’ e.e. cummings? If you’ve not, let me tell you – he is a turd. Anyone who deliberately writes his name in lowercase is a bloody retard. Sample this. His “poem” titled ‘!blac…’. DO NOT adjust your browser. It is the title of his poem – ‘Exclamation point-b-l-a-c-Ellipsis’. Fancy the rest of it? Again, do not adjust your browser or your eyes -

“!blac
k
agains
t

(whi)

te sky
?t
rees whic
h fr

om droppe

d
,”

This is not free fucking verse. This is not fucking poetry. It is a deranged man with a botched up typewriter and in all likelihood he’s suffering from acute Parkinson’s.

One must never date someone who writes poems to live (not for a living; to live). You will be told that in today’s world, Love is like free verse. I never got it, I still don’t.

No rules. No boundaries. And what about line breaks? As you please.

I am told, one is supposed to feel the verse.

Not.

You just end up feeling worse.

!the re is;

ju st

to o-mu
ch

t(s)ex(t)ual
¿tension
;
¡

So I was saying, I do not get poetry.

But when Amrita Pritam wants to take the form of a line spreading across a canvas just so that she can gaze at her lover – I cannot help but think that this is where the Punjabis, and in essence Chandigarh, might have got something right – their lyrical expression of love.

Not.

For the last nine months I have never been to a club or party without cringing at the utter inanity of Punjabi song lyrics.

Take for instance the pop number Amplifier (Translation - Amplifier).

The song has the basic boy-trying-to-ask-girl-out theme. It has the usual ‘heartbeat-stoppage upon damsel sighting’ references in measured dosage; followed by boy trying to up the lyrical ante when he does not get a favorable response. And how he does!

Does he call her his moon? Nah – too mundane. How about his rose? Nope, very B-grade Bollywood. How about woofer? Perfect.

“Darling, you are my woofer and I,

am your amplifier.”

Why bother with bringing the girl massive lunar objects when audio equipment metaphors will do the job just fine.

In one of the break-up monologues I sat through in college, I was called an unromantic twerp. If she only knew my true feelings for her - I was her Dolby and she was me Bose.

While the Amplifier craze phased out, it gave way to an equally inane movie track – Dil Waali Kothi (Translation - The heart’s bungalow).

The song revolves around a man begging a woman to appoint him as the watchman of the bungalow that her heart is. Why the protection? He fears that the poor damsel, being fair-skinned and possessing precisely 40 whims and 84 fancies, might have her heart stolen.

This Punjabi obsession with numbers can even be found in the current ‘chartbuster’ and the most preposterous wooing song in recent times – Lakk 28 Kudi Da (Translation – The Girl’s Waist is 28 inches).

The song is written as an ode to the girl whose waist is 28 inches and weight is 47 kilos. It even has a refrain to that effect – “Waist is 28, and 47 weight”. We are given to believe that this muse is a ‘modern’ Punjabi girl for she sports a Lady Gaga tattoo on her white chest, wears ‘fit-dresses’ (versus two sizes too big?) and has a white i-Phone with a ringtone from LA on it. If you’re wondering how the said muse is so bloody white and is in general very ‘milky-milky’ and ‘silky-silky’ - the secret’s in copious amounts of body butter cream.

And lest we forget, we’re reminded in all 14 times that her waist is twenty eight and forty seven weight.

The Jehadis are promised 72 nubile virgins in paradise as a reward for martyrdom. According to the Quran, the virgins would have eyes like pearls and ‘large, round breasts that are not inclined to sag’. They would be eternally young, transparent to the marrow of their bones, sans unwanted-hair and have no bowel movements whatsoever. They would be chaste, albeit perennially nude, and restrain their glances. In general – they’d be splendid, pure and child free.

How bloody prissily precise.

And all we Punjabis could come up with is milky - silky - 28” - 47 kgs?

Recluse Driving

I don’t know if there are people like me around but I don’t like to drive. The thing is I do not enjoy any sort of multitasking.

I think I’m just not capable of driving. It involves just too many things all at once - looking at the road, flipping radio stations (which, by the way, Chandigarh has aplenty – TWO, that play only the latest Punjabi music of Harbhajan Mann, Babbu Mann, Gurdas Mann, Whatte Mann – surprising, no?), or honking at who are inevitably women drivers (for reasons which involve both lacking common sense and merely asking the good-lookin, wats-cookin?).

At times I’m left wondering about profound vehicular/motoring issues (in which century would a Bond movie need to be made for the Maruti-800 to be considered Bond-car material or was the designer thinking of a box or a garbage bin when drawing up the Wagon-R?) or trying to remember what my father, uncle, cousin, driver, teacher#1 and teacher#2 hollered into my head about the A-B-Cs of driving (A-B-C Accelerator-Brake-Clutch, right to left; no, left to right; no, right to left?).

If none of these, then I’m constantly reminding myself that it is not okay to run over cows that refuse to budge (what are these stupid creatures looking for on the roads – greener grass on the other side of the human-cow divide and why don’t they ever move? Observe the bastards, they never ever move. I could give you bovine facilitated directions to my house – drive past the Sector 33 signal, turn left at the fourth black buffalo, yank the tail of the third brown calf and run over the holy white cow blocking my house’s gate. People, we need to eat more steak in this country!)

So I don’t think I can multitask and, apparently, a ‘sure-shot’ way to tell if you are a good ‘multitasker’ is to see if you can rub your belly with one hand and pat your head with the other – at the same time. I’m not so sure about multitasking, but you’ll most certainly look like a bloody idiot if you did that.

So I was saying – yes, driving. I hate it and avoid it.

But there is the slight problem of roads. They stand between me and work, me and good food, me and my beer – which is a problem. Which is why I have someone to bridge the gap – Jasbir, my driver.

Jasbir, as it turns out, is mental.

His singular focus, objective, motto and aim in life is – ‘To reach fifth gear’. Period. Jasbir, slow down - there’s traffic ahead. I don’t care, fifth gear. Jasbir, there’s a guy dead on the road, right ahead. Like I care, oops… speed bump, fifth gear. Whoa, look at the fog Jasbir. Don’t drive above forty. Screw the fog. Look at me you fool. Look at my face. Do I look like someone who is bothered about some fucking fog coming between me and my fifth fucking gear? Fog it seems.

Jasbir, as it turns out, is tone deaf.

His taste in music (exhaustively) includes ‘Unheard of Bhangra Folk Music’ and ‘Unmelodic high-pitch rapid howling sounds’. He is clearly responsible for feeding over a hundred endangered rural artists in Punjab’s hinterland for he is the sole buyer of their music.

The only civilized song I’ve ever heard him play is a recent Bollywood pseudo-Punjabi number ‘Challa’. The problem is, as mentioned in a previous post, my understanding of Punjabi is akin to my understanding of what happens inside a woman’s mind, abysmal. However, the other day when the song and its seven different remixed versions were played in loop over and over again, I realized that it’s a song about living the Punjabi dream –

Punjabi boy wanted to be white collar
Said, ‘Fuck it! Let me just earn my dollar’
In Amrika I will drive taxi
Sleep with stripper girl Maxi
Blimey! If I am ever gonna call her!

Jasbir, as it turns out, has a brother.

His brother doubles up as the back-up driver and tags along with Jasbir when I need to travel for work to a remote nondescript town or village in the middle of Punjab’s nowhere (How very exciting! Don’t I just love my job). Problem is the both of them don’t get along very much and spend most of the time abusing one another. Their colorful insults include carnal intentions with one another’s slutty sister and forced fornication with the other’s mother. What they never seem to realize is that they share the same mother and the aforementioned lecherous sister; and acts that they ascribed to one another would most certainly amount to incest in most countries. (Before you get Dr. Skeptic on me, I’ve checked – they aren’t cousins. They are indeed brothas from the same motha!)

I have had a fair share of being driven around by loons but darling Jasbir is in a whole different league. Have you ever had a hangover two days after the binge? Not ‘FOR two days’ after the binge; binge – sleep – wakeupinthemorning – normalday – sleep –wakeupinthemorning – hangover! Have you ever run over a wild boar in a tribal area, made friends with the tribals and then gone on to cook it with them? Are you capable of driving a car looking just out of the passenger window?

Well, as it turns out, you’re no Jasbir.

P.S. (Bad date? Who better to help you with 'repairing' a bad date or petting a loved one than your local Maruti mechanic.)

Still fearing and loathing in Chandigarh

(This is the city I see)

The only reason I go to parties is to watch people.

I love to tell a story. Most of my conversations are punctuated with, ‘You know I met this guy last week…’ If you ever have a conversation with me, you will learn close to nothing of me. However, you will definitely hear of the retards I’ve met in the run up to meeting you.

Also, I would have watched you, and would have walked away with another story – you. Does that make me depraved? Some would say so. But would the chat bore you? I really doubt it. I’m not saying that I’m good at conversation. It’s just that I’m just slightly above average when it comes to running into idiots and then telling others about it later.

But in my defence, I don’t take names, ever.

So, parties.

Since moving to Chandigarh, I’ve been to a few parties and I’ve met a whole bunch of new and improved imbeciles. One such November party, that I’ve wanted to write about, stands out.

The thing is I am twenty-something. Most of my friends are twenty-something. The only people I know who aren’t twenty-something are acquaintances I have no choice over – family, colleagues and women I fall in love with (generally well into their thirties, married, with multiple kids and IMHO a bastard of a husband; I know I’m so very sorted). The point I’m trying to make is that when I’m invited for a party, I will most certainly assume that the average invitee age is twenty-something. Worst-case scenario – average age 29. Period.

Right?

Wrong!

A month back, a Chandigharite friend invited me for a party that could easily pass off as a Geriatrics Anonymous (Chandigarh Chapter) weekly session.

Everybody was so… so… so… old. There were only three in the entire party who had black hair and one was a Labrador. Most of them did not know their own age – having been born in a time when calendars were not yet invented and sun-dials were used to tell time. The only accurate way of telling their age was either sawing through their trunk to count the number of rings on them or carbon dating. Pseudo-motivational pep talk one liners like ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life’ have no bearing on these people.

Uncle, if you woke up this morning and were able to stand with absolutely no assistance, without having lost bladder control overnight, today might, in remote probability, be the first hour of the rest of your fleeting hours, but maybe the last also; I can guarantee nothing and you just might die. Also, you might not survive the next sneeze.

At one point in the party, I was introduced to a couple of people in this odd manner - “This is Sethi Uncle. He’s Simran’s (the hostess) granddad. He’s an octogenarian.” The stress on octogenarian was so intense that it might have convinced a Normal-English speaking person into thinking that he’s a doctor of some kind; perhaps a vet who treats octopuses.

Mommy, when I grow up, I want to be an astronaut; or at least a sexagenarian.

Speaking of Simran (Name unchanged as it doesn’t matter. They’re a dime a dozen in this part of the world. Simran is the north-Indian human nomenclature equivalent of naming your dog Tiger) – what we have in her is a thirty-ish woman, born, brought-up and bred in Chandigarh, with an accent that is a cross between that of the Queen of England and the Maharaja of Patiala – plain and utterly incomprehensible.

I don’t blame her actually – in any case half the Punjabis think Punjab (Summer Capital – Chandigarh, Winter Capital - Chandigarh) is an island just off the east coast of England (Summer Capital – Southall, Winter Capital - Toronto) and the other half think Punjab (Summer Capital – Southall, Winter Capital - Southall) is an island just off the east coast of England (Summer Capital – Southall, Winter Capital – Southall).

The woman took it upon herself to spend her entire evening explaining to me the ventilation details of her house. She stood in the centre of her hall, arms wide open and twirled a couple of hundred times. She then mimed a swimmer attempting a butterfly stroke with one arm and breast stroke with the other and said, “Do you see? On a good day, the winds are allowed free circulation in my home. Otherwise, do you see those windows? When the weather acts up, I use them to control the winds.”

There are billions of dollars being spent in keeping scientists afloat on the melting polar ice caps that threaten to submerge the world in 2012, when all that is really needed is a little wind-control from our indigenous gusty wind goddess Simran.

Also, the woman had clearly traveled all over the world and made no attempt to hide it. She’d been to London, Southall, Birmingham, Patiala, Bhatinda, Pathankot, Southall, Birmingham, Southall and Singapur. The city that she loved the most was (to quote her) ‘the quaintly exotic Singapur’. And when asked about her favorite place within Singapur, I learned that she was floored by ‘the fabulous Santosha Island’.

There was more to come.

An extremely murderous looking man then walked up to me, introduced himself and out of nowhere spent an entire hour trying to find out my family’s bank balance and medical history. He was awfully proud of the fact that his daughter was my age (you have not read this incorrectly; he was proud of it, almost thankful to my parents), and that she had received the finest engineering degree from Punjab University and was now working as a mechanic in Birmingham. She was a prize catch, apparently.

After the ‘my daughter is purrfect phor you son’ monologue, dodgy uncle was expecting something to happen – an epiphany, an orgasm or a proposal? I didn’t know what. But there was expectation.

I was so scared I have no recollection of what happened afterwards. I think I might be engaged to a car mechanic in Birmingham.

Oh dear God! Chandigarh - I still loathe you.

P.S. Refined is not sold here

Fear and Loathing in Chandigarh

Towns. Small cities. Tier-II-up-and-coming-metros-whose-‘you will see’-awe-inspiring-awesomeness-will-leave-me-in-awe-by-the-year-2031. Please bugger off.

I abhor you.

I am not being proud of my big city upbringing. Neither am I being presumptuous. I speak from experience for my work takes me places; small places to be precise. For the past two years, I’ve spent 2-3 months, at a time, living in shitholes like Kanpur, Hyderabad and Bhopal. Yes, shitholes. The kind that little boys from Dharavi are prepared to voluntarily dive into for the sake of an Amitabh Bachchan autograph (as vividly depicted in the factually correct, phenomenally logical and thoroughly Oscar deserving cinematic masterpiece Slumdawgg Millionaire. Err… sorry, Anil Kapoor uncle, was it Millannairre?).

Bhopal, especially Bhopal. It is a city so devoid of life, character and fun that the longer you live there, the more you die within. It is so monumentally boring that if you Google for ‘fun’ and ‘Bhopal’ you get 0 results. If you’re cheeky and you click on the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button instead – Google takes you to a page that says “No you’re not. It’s fuckin’ BHOPAL you idiot!”

I’m not kidding around, try it. Google; not Bhopal!

I detest these microscopic ink blots on the Indian map. Apparently they’re ‘quaint’.

Bollocks. They ain’t.

The point I’m trying to make is that when I was asked to move onto a project in Chandigarh for 4 months, I died. And rightly so. The city is bloody unlivable.

But I had to move.

Fortunately, I wasn’t going to move alone and wasn’t going to live (or die) alone. Or so I thought. As unfortunately, the said accomplice is a woman. So an unmarried, non-couple finding a house together, in a small city, was as easy as the Pope helping this guy out with his problem (click click).

So during the house hunt, we obviously expected a few raised eyebrows, ruffled feathers and tirades on morality from balding landlord uncles and their queerly hirsute and mustached wives. We got more.

Foxed by our ‘peculiar’ living arrangement a seventy year old retired army officer wondered – “So, you’re really not related?” No. She is Sharma and I am Gogol. Do we sound like we’re related? Are you retired or retarded? “But how will this work. A lady needs her space! You have to give a lady her space!” Dearest fake handlebar moustache uncle, after four back-to-back vodka shots, the said lady threw up all over me last Saturday. She is as lady as Gaga. You can’t read her,
can’t read her,
no you can’t read her poker face.

And the only bloody SPACE she needs is a brown paper bag with ‘Puke Here’ written on it.

Reluctantly, he proceeded to show us around the house. It looked perfect, or so I thought. The woman… sorry the lady, had issues – lavatorial issues. There were no attached bathrooms. The loos and the bedrooms were on either side of the hall. So? “Dude, I need my very own bathroom.” Yeah, okay. Pick one. Any one. “No dude. The thing is I have a habit of walking naked from the shower to the wardrobe. Absolutely no clothes on. It’s my thing. So I need an attached bathroom.”

This was TMI*; way too much information for the war-veteran to handle. I swear I could almost see his eyes well up. We left before he could die.

The next place we stopped at was being guarded by a man well into his afterlife, a Gollum like being. He did not care about our living ‘situation’. Clearly all he cared about was the rent which was to be paid in a mystical currency known only to him as ‘the monies’. “I need the monies on time.” “You give me the monies, and then do what you want.” “I want the monies in cash. I don’t keep the monies in the banks.” Obviously! How can you let go of my precioussss?

The house tour involved Gollum, the lady and me, each clenching 4 feet long wooden sticks to defend us from ‘the doggies’. “I have many doggies. The stick is for your protection if the doggies get naughty.” Gollum was honest. He did have many doggies. And they were being very naughty – but, to our relief, only with each other. The doggies were being naughty on the sunshade, on the rooftop, in the garden – in the middle of the day. It’s a doggie’s life after all.

The lady felt she would have teething problems with canines. She after all did not want the doggies invading her space. We moved on.

We then saw a house owned by an army-wife who had clearly assimilated the ‘defence’ culture into everyday parlance. She punctuated every sentence, filled every conversation gap and responded to every query with the same pair of verbal artillery – ‘Great Guns’! Is it okay if we have whores and meth-addicts over for sex de addiction therapy on the second Saturday of every month? “Great Guns!” Can the lady boisterously frolic around in bed with your sixteen year old once in a while? “Great Guns!” We urban yuppies say ‘Fuck’ during orgasm. What, aunty, is your choice of words during climax? “Great Guns Son! Great Guns!”

While the army-wife had a strangely elegant demeanor, there were a tad too many guns and rifles hanging on the walls for our comfort. Not so great after all, eh.

At the end of the day we were strongly considering a reply to this ad -


Chandigarh, I loathe you.

Note to self. When a ‘To Let’ newspaper advert says ‘suitably furnished in a safe locality’, it’s to be read as hospital beds, white ceramic tile floored hall, gentle electrocution sources and alcoholic Chucky Sr. standing guard.

*@SP – This is what aptly can be classified as TMI.

I don't care that it's 47 degrees C and I have to hold an umbrella. I'm getting married today. So fuck you!

Who the hell do you think you are?

Dearest Hawtt dudie,

If you ever see this video, please know that I was very late for work because your entire family's favourite pastime is gallivanting to bhojpuri music on a National Highway in the middle of the day, in the middle of summer.

Also, while I was waiting for your highness and HMS* Equestrian Ass to pull over, I could think of but three rational reasons why you must get married in sweltering Madhya Frigging Pradesh on a Wednesday afternoon in May -

You get to sport these really sexy glares/cooling glass/goaggles while there is a horse between your legs
You can have the audacity to look like a clown who's really really so desperate to get married despite all weather-beaten odds that you're prepared too hold an umbrella over your head while there is a bloody horse between your legs
You get to lead the most gaudy and retarded entourage that decides to block traffic on NH-12 for over an hour just because you have a bloody horse between your friggin legs

Please know that I am pissed. Very Pissed.

Love,
Your biggest fan

*HMS - Haggard Motherf*****g Steed

Slower, Lamer, Vancouver

Conspiracy theories. They’re so unbelievably preposterous, one cannot help but find them entertaining.

‘Elvis is alive’. No, he isn’t. Elvis has left this and every other building. In case you were wondering, that is actually Vivek Oberoi waggling his crotch in the trailer of Prince, it’s not the King.

‘The Wingdings font predicted the fall of the two towers’. How did you not know that? Even Nostradamnhim… erm us… Nostradamnus ‘prophesized’ that. Have you never received the e-mail forward that succinctly captures the brilliance of this scientific theory? If not, you’re lucky. You either have very intelligent friends, very few friends or a mom who cannot use e-mail. It is the most well-researched hypothesis after the Liberated Tiger of non-Tamil Elin (aka LTTE) theory - ‘The reason we have only 1411 tigers left is that there is this one tiger in the woods screwing up… erm around… screwing around for the whole bunch of us. He leaves behind nothing for us to do and quite literally so’.

As I had said, these theories are ridiculous but good fun.

During her weeklong break in Bombay, Nilo (the tripod hugger from the previous post) did precisely three things – slept, messed up my already disorderly house and watched the Winter Olympics telecast. She theorizes (and I now agree) that the Winter Olympics are a hoax. Why?

The Winter Olympics are but a mélange of the most nonsensical human activities in the guise of sport. If you did not know, here is a fun-fact - the Winter Olympics was born as the Canadians were pissed. Not at their own sheer stupidity for choosing French over English as their national language. They were miffed to constantly find themselves languishing at the bottom of the medal’s tally along with Kyrgyzstan and Moldova at the Normal People’s Olympics. Leap year after leap year, the board read Canada - zero Gold, zero Silver, zero Bronze, one Maple Leaf.

So they conveniently invented the Winter Olympics and the motley of absurd sports that are showcased in it. In the interest of time and average attention span of the blog reader, I make but three ludicrous cases in point – Curling, Biathlon and the Skeleton.

Curling - The objective of the game is to slide a granite blob (imaginatively named ‘stone’) on a floor of ice in the hope that it goes somewhere. Where? That has not been established as yet. But someone needs to ensure that the blob has a smooth slide while going anywhere, right? Hence, there is a group of humans who L-I-T-E-R-A-L-L-Y ‘sweeps’ the ice with a broom as the blob slides. Why? So that the blob doesn’t have a rough ride.

Bollocks!

Please watch the video below, with sound (Slow connection? Go have a cuppa, but come back and watch the video). Please do observe two things – how the rabid howling generates sound waves so intense that the blob pushes itself further and watch closely as blonde, bob cut aunty throws her broom in ecstasy at the end of the shot.



I have as much respect for the ‘sport’ as I do for the brides on Rahul Ka Swayamvar. For things to start looking up, you curlers first need to respect yourselves. Rehash the sporting nomenclature - please do not call your sporting instruments ‘brooms’ and ‘stones’. You are not out witch-hunting!

And why are we Indians not participating in this event? There must be at least one stone pelting Shiv Sena boy married to sweeper Gangu bai, right? I’d wager that their offspring is our next and only Olympic medal hope.

Biathlon - As the Canadian Winter Olympic Committee was running out of creative steam while coming up with events, they figured that it would not be completely unethical to ‘borrow’ a few from the Normal People’s Olympics. After long hours of absolutely no reflection, they zeroed in on the triathlon (swimming, cycling and running, in that order). Consequently, the Winter Olympic Triathlon took shape – swimming in a glacier followed by cycling and running on ice.

However, after thirty nine athletes succumbed to hypothermia during the ‘swimming in the glacier’ phase of the first ever Winter Triathlon in 1924, the sport was replaced by the less arduous and more bizarre biathlon – an amalgamation of cross country skiing and rifle shooting. Why? But why? At least the Normal Olympics’ triathlon can be thought of as a training ground for prisoners contemplating an escape from Alcatraz or Guantanamo. What conceivable human purpose can the biathlon serve? Competing athletes can now lug a rifle all the way up to the Arctic Circle and shoot a Polar Bear? Or perhaps, we could have a biathlon chase sequence in the next Bond flick – For Your Ice Only?

Bollocks!

From top (clockwise) - Curling, Bobsled, The Skeleton, Biathlon

The Skeleton – Apart from possessing a single-digit IQ, the dunderheads who are retarded enough to take part in a sport with a name like the Skeleton, are expected to slide down a frozen track, face first, on a sled thinner than an anorexic cockroach. The objective of the sport, which has its humble beginnings as a genocidal experiment in Nazi Concentration Camps, is to see how long you can hang on for dear life. If you come out alive, you win!

The same icy-track used for the Skeleton is also used for a sport called Bobsled. Watch the video below.



However, the critical difference between the two is that with the Bobsled at least there’s a questionably shaped sled. In the Skeleton there’s no sled; it’s just Bob!

One needs to be monumentally sloshed or a mental Canadian or both to either devise these events or take part in them. But the icing on the cake, the biggest joke of them all is not the Winter Olympics; it’s the Winter Paralympics - Winter Olympics for the paralyzed. What was the Olympic committee thinking? Were they even thinking? This Bob can’t walk on normal ground let alone ice. This Bob most definitely doesn’t need a freaking sled. He needs a wheelchair.

Will you please return the wheelchair to Bob?

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.”