New and crisp, only.

Burma never came up in too many conversations during my childhood. There was merely gossip of a sixty-year old cousin twice removed eloping with a hideous Burmese woman and spending the remainder of his life peddling bike spark plugs in Rangoon. It was an enterprising dream – traveling to an unknown land and trading in the comfort of a South Delhi bungalow for subjugation under a crippling military regime. But the dream was short-lived when after a minor scuffle between a military general and a man on a motorbike, the regime decided to outlaw motorbikes in Rangoon altogether.

So in my head, the Burmese picture postcard was the monochrome still of a wrinkly Punjabi man, in his tatty vest and jailbird striped pyjamas, sitting on a low stool in front of a rundown shophouse, sipping tea and staring at his mound of unsold bike spark plugs.

Myanmar (onetime Burma) was an odd place in my head. Sitting in a nameless tea shop on 21^st Street, Yangon (today’s Rangoon) I could tell little had changed.   

The last time someone pursed their lips together and sent a piercing air-smooch my way I was at an autorickshaw stand in Bombay. In Yangon an entire language has evolved from kissing thin air with a vocabulary ranging from come hither to how much is that doggie in the window? Pitch, tone, frequency, intonation – they all played their part. So it was mildly embarrassing at the local tea shop when instead of kissing for the bill, I smooched and summoned the little waiter boy to light my nonexistent cigarette. He stood there in his ‘OBurma for Burma’ propaganda vest, clicking the lighter before giving up, disappointed.

And I thought it ironical that a nation sporting a fully fledged kiss-lexicon, would place PDA only behind touching a monk’s head in its list of absolute no-nos.

I would have paid more attention to the offending cacophony but was distracted by the food at the table; or what seemed like food.

To say that Burmese cuisine is oily would be a lie. Waging wars over the minor oil deposit in the yellow plastic bowl with curry of suspect origin would be justified though. No No, our tour guide from Myanmar’s north-eastern province Shan, explained that since meals were cooked only once daily, a layer of fat was added to prevent contamination, spoilage and any general attempts at eating the curry. One could tell that eking out the solitary piece of lamb at the bottom of the bowl risked a tiny oil-spill. And if the curry wasn’t satisfying, there was the borrowed Indian Samoosa and an unconventional tea leaf salad – both of which reminded me of meals I did not want to be reminded of.

Which is why I have a fail-safe when traveling in Asia.  

A thumb rule for all Asian travel is that noodles, broth and meat in any permutation – the ice cold Naengmyeon with hand-made buckwheat noodles in a chilled beef broth with slices of boiled egg and beef, Ramen with wheat noodles served in a piping hot meat broth infused with miso or the staple Vietnamese Pho – constitute a good meal, at times with flavor worth killing kin for. The Burmese equivalent, Mohinga, vermicelli rice noodles in a fish soup with the occasional fritters, proved me wrong. It was a saffron yellow soup that resembled a turmeric concoction I was force-fed as a sick child, and it had the distinct flavor of nothing. All the herbs, spices and meat fused together to mother nothing.    

I was not disappointed that Mohinga on its best days is bland and with a slightly discernible texture; I was disappointed that if ever I’m not sure of what to eat in a foreign country, I do not have a fail-safe food option anymore.

No No in many ways reminded me of Suu Kyi – a calm woman with a stubborn will to persist and break those not prepared to listen. As we advanced into inner Myanmar fatigue, a condition alien to No No and presumably Suu Kyi, set in and any trip recommendations from her were met with obvious indifference. She tried hard to sell a day-trip to a weaving village where women spent over a year weaving a single shirt and a visit to a monastery famous for cats that at some indistinct moment in the past had jumped through hoops. She found it difficult to comprehend how the burning heat, foot sores or an afternoon beer could come between traveler and weaver.

No No resorted to hyperbole, “But if you miss weaving, you miss everything!”  

It seemed odd that she refused to take no for an answer. It was odd that I was still indifferent to the country. According to the biography of Myanmar that I read on my way to Yangon, the lack of a deep international understanding of Myanmar was due to a ‘singularly ahistorical’ view towards the nation. I was told that to understand its present, we needed to delve into its past. (The River of Lost Footsteps, Thant Myint U)

 

I delved. And the recurrent waves of conquest, war and colonization do offer a fair explanation to the palpable xenophobia and to perhaps - ‘Why are so many homes forted in by barbed wire?’ But to conquer and be conquered by Siam (present day Thailand) time and again and still not learn the importance of lemongrass in curry – I cannot understand. 

Which is why I cannot elope to Burma.

Move like rock, river flow around you

I was molested in Saigon last month. 

Mildly. 

I am not used to getting a massage, especially the ones I’m expected to pay for. Also, it’s been a while since I’ve seriously dated a girl long enough to say, “It’s been 15 dates. Can I have my free massage now, bitch? Please.”

To men, a relationship is like stamps on a loyalty card – one is entitled to a goody every third date. I hold your hand after the 3rd date, kiss you on the 6th, request to see your chest on the 9th, see it on the 12th and get my free massage on the 15th. If any of the dates involve the purchase of alcohol, I am entitled to a random bonus goody depending on how much rum is drunk. If you do not respect the rules of the loyalty card, I will be disloyal.    

The point is, my only spa experience before Saigon was a fully robed, zero skin-to-skin contact, significantly over priced massage from fairly ugly Thai woman in her early eighties.

So before a massage in Vietnam, when I was asked to undress and wear only a loin cloth, I was sufficiently shocked. For there is something about a grown man, naked but for a loin cloth, standing alone in a room with an 'Asian' girl that has dodgy porn video written all over it. 

The petite Asian ‘masseuse’ lays you belly-down on bed before dousing you with a gallon of oil. You are then rubbed gently from head to toe in a cyclical manner, with her hands choosing to take accidental detours around your waistline now and again. 

Dodgy porn video.

Just to be perfectly scientific about the dodginess – when a near naked heterosexual man, is put on a bed in a dark room and caressed piecemeal by a woman, there is bound to be natural response to dodgy stimuli. The sort of response that becomes evident when asked to turn over. The sort of response that causes tenting. 

Nether loin tenting. 

You turn over.

This moment - of a man turning over to face a masseuse - is possibly the period of maximum activity ever encountered by the human brain. In those three seconds, you first focus all cerebral energy to try and raze the tent. You fill your mind with as much disgust there is in the world, in the hope that since the mind is sufficiently distracted, the tent would collapse. Car pile-ups. Carcasses. Mick Jagger’s lips. A Camel on a treadmill. Dismemberment. Curb stomping. Michael Jackson. Rattlesnake. Rattlesnake. Rattlesnake. Ferret in a gunny bag. Industrial revolution.Michael Jackson’s carcass 

In the very good chance that it doesn’t, your mind then shifts gears while hurtling through a new set of questions – Can she see it? Well, I hope she can’t. Wouldn’t I feel really small if she can’t see it? She should be able to see it, right? I’m sure she’s seen this before? Of course she has. It’s her job, damn it! To turn men on? Why is she giggling? What did that mean in Vietnamese? Was that a giggle, or more like a snigger or a laugh? She wouldn’t laugh. What’s there to laugh about? A giggle – well sure. Not a laugh. Hah! Laugh it seems. What a hoot! Why is she talking through the walls to the other masseuse? Is she commenting? Judging? What did the other masseuse say? Why is she laughing again? What’s the joke? Share. Please. Share. Okay. Listen. I just happen to be a little more sensitive to foreign touch you know. I don’t mean foreign-foreign. Just anyone who is not me. Not anyone. I meant any woman. Any woman who is not me. But between the age of 18 and 40. Okay maybe 50. It’s the oil. And the music. Stop giggling you cheap masseuse whore. Stop!   

If you aren’t sufficiently mortified by now, she proceeds to straddle your lower body before beginning the rubbing cycles again. Only this time, she’s conveniently perched around the aforementioned loin cloth and I’ve become the pommel horse on which she performs her crude calisthenics. Given that she’s wearing a dress, not trousers, we have now graduated to generous amounts of thigh to thigh contact. My face has become the canvas which her hair strokes back and forth attempting to paint an abstract masterpiece.

She has me in a modestly uncomfortable position, I think. She has my clothes. She has my money. If she decides to run, I am a near naked, turned-on man, running down the streets of Saigon searching for a thieving massage girl.

I won’t look good. 

On my flight back to Singapore (which, my dear readers, is my new home) I’m left wondering what had I paid for. It didn’t look good. I had sex. Only I didn’t. I got a massage. Only I didn’t. 

30 dollars for dodgy foreplay and subtle molestation. 

Sounds just about right, I think. 

Same same but different

I am a fairly non-violent person. The only people I ever want to harm or, at the very least, maim are the vegetarians – the ‘by choice’ idiots, not the my-God-says-so ones. But after backpacking through Cambodia, I wanted to bludgeon every communist in the world to death.

In high school the only thing I made of communism was that all commies had hammers and sickles for hands, ate the same boiled oats, wore the same grey pinafores and jute bras fashioned from gunnysacks, were all named Lenin or Svetlana. They were convinced that man did not deserve the luxury of choice or opinion. Commies had sex only when they ran out of Lenins to work in the field. Chess was their only vice.  

There was this other brand of communism that I was unaware of, active in Cambodia in the late 70’s. It involved a retarded man deciding that everyone in his country should be marched to the countryside to dig holes. If you protested, and were lucky, you were shot immediately. If not, you were specimen B for some grim experiment at a concentration camp. You did not attempt to escape the country for you would be blown to bits by one of the ten million landmines that this communist genius dotted his own country with. 10 million mines for 7 million people. In four years of communist regime, the population of Phnom Penh fell from 850,000 to a mind-numbing seven (not thousand).

Not just the commies. A visit to Cambodia and you would want to personally decapitate Henry Kissinger, the most astute diplomat since the guy who tried to come up with a partition plan for India. At his behest, just under 3 million tons of bombs were sneakily dropped across southern Cambodia in an attempt to kill Vietnamese guerilla forces that might have taken shelter there. 3 million tons of artillery as a ‘just in case’ seems fair enough, right?

I am not a fan of the rest of America either. Especially the sixty year old, pot bellied, sun tanned, ignorant pricks who travel to Asia looking for true love in the form of an underage, Asian, budget prostitute. I say Asian and not Cambodian, Thai or Vietnamese, because to an American they’re all the same – Thai.

“If you're a previously unemployable ex-convenience store clerk from Leeds or Tulsa, a guy with no conscience and no chance of ever knowing the love of an un-intoxicated woman, then Cambodia can be a paradise.”

– A Cook’s Tour, Anthony Bourdain

This ‘paradise’ leaves you a depressed traveler. You’re not sure what to make of the bus load of Cambodians laughing away at an inane TV skit only a fraction as funny as the Teletubbies. How pained does one have to be to find even this funny? Or the swarms of kids who surround you asking for a dollar for every knickknack you relieve them of. Or the prostitute who promises to love you long time. You cannot help but wonder if it’s allegorical that the biggest club in Phnom Penh is called the Heart of Darkness?

In a country playing catch up with the rest of Asia, however, it’s of some consolation to meet Hak, the 23 year old backpacker lodge owner who will give you the best room in the world that 5 dollars can buy. Serai, the 20 year old hawker who takes your email-id ‘just in case’ she learns how to use a computer in the future or Seah, a twenty something waitress at a rundown shack who wants to learn English so she can be my tour guide the next time I visit Cambodia.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there will be a next time Seah.

Boundaries

To Punjaban. To everything platonic. To Plato. To gin and tonic. To fraud sardarni, Amrita Pritam and Grace Slick. To Jasbir.  

I've moved.

I am no longer a citizen of Chandigarh.

A striking impression I leave with is how the people here are like ostriches. They've dug a giant hole in the ground and stuck their heads into it, conveniently assuming that nobody can see them. Only, the hole is called Chandigarh and their version of the world is not the same as yours or mine.

This is their world.

Punjaban once asked if there was a song or verse that I thought could sum up the people here. I had to wait till boarding my last flight out before I could think of one.

Don't see what I do not want to see,

you don't hear what I don't say.

Won't be what I don't want to be,

I continue in my way. 

- A Song for Jeffrey, Jethro Tull

Surprisingly enough, I would not be completely opposed to the idea of a trip back. 

In a while. 

Give it say, ten years.

P.S. JA - thanks for converting my in-flight art into the sheer brilliance that is the map.

Prostate

“I have the most terrible problems with my sex life. It all boils down to the fact that I have no sex life. At least not with another person.” - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole

I have not had sex for 2 months and 77 days. 

When I was a child, I wasn’t allowed to eat chocolates. It was because I suffered from a medical condition called My Mother. At school, all the kids would molest bars of chocolates. Molten chocolate would trickle down the sides of their mouths. Cocoa droplets would gather around at the tip of their chins, coagulate and then nosedive onto their shirts. 

One day, I had visions of being marooned in a field of éclair shaped dogs. Later that day, I was caught sucking on my coffee colored dachshund’s neck. He was taken to the doctor and so was I. It wasn’t of much use. Every ink-blot shown during my sessions looked like a pair of cocoa encrusted lips to me. At any given time, I knew that everyone was devouring chocolate, but me.   

Twenty years on, my involuntary celibacy has me convinced that everyone is having hot, throbbing, casual, committed, dominating, submissive, masochistic, mattress trembling, eagle spreading, bed post unhinging, roof dropping, earth shattering, automobile rocking, neighborhood awakening, multi-orgasmic, vigorous sex. You are, aren’t you? You horny little bitch! While I, on the other hand – and quite literally so, am looking up synonyms for shake and vigor.

Discussing my sexual drought has become material for engrossing dinner table conversation. “What’s that new brand of rubber you’re using? Abstinen-what?” “Oh, leave him alone for God’s sake. The last time the poor fellow had sex, animal horns were still generally acceptable as condoms.” “You realize that traveling abroad on the ‘pretext’ of meeting your ex still qualifies as sex-tourism, right?” “Yo Mamma’s so ugly. Yet, surprisingly, she’s getting it on more than you are!”  

I see wicked people. 

I ran into some boys who’re studying at my alma mater. It’s been quite a while since I left college, but I wasn’t surprised to be recognized. I always knew that my rustic charm, vibrant spirit, stellar personality and raw magnetism are stuff legends are made of. 

I was wrong. 

Apparently they remembered me from a DIY manual I had written and that is still alive on campus – “How to make the perfect Bong”.

When you think me, think narcotics. Deftness with narcotics. 

Isn’t it preposterous that I have no control over my own infamy?

Soon enough I’ll be moving out of this lovely commode, Chandigarh, but I will not be forgotten. I will be remembered as The Virgin or perhaps, The Man Who Grew His Virginity Back.

I have only myself to blame. By the time I’ve composed an astute ‘Can you drink coffee?’ text, the woman is already knocked up with her second child from her third husband. If I was around when Roger Waters was composing Time, he’d probably have written – 

“Tired of stealing peeks up her hemline, you stay at home and wait in vain.

Then you think – “I’m young and life’s long, so what she’s not in bed today!”

And then one day you find, ten others have got behind her.

No one told you she was a nun, you missed a slutty one.”

Took too long. If otherwise, did not last very long anyway.

No soup for you!

A dinner date is always a pressure test for the man. Will I be getting into her pants tonight? It might look like I’m deeply interested in her story about spending a summer teaching Telugu to a bunch of homeless, dyslexic Chinese kids in Guatemala, but all I’m actually doing is wondering if I’ll be getting into her pants. And what heightens the pressure is that only she knows the answer to that question even before the date begins.

    

What makes the dinner date even more difficult is if the woman across the table was born with cutlery for arms, someone who can descale, devein and debone hilsa with a butter knife. And you, on the other hand, are the dining equivalent of a monkey trying to type out Macbeth*, someone who finds it difficult to digest any form of dining etiquette. 

Pressure of being deft with cutlery added to the conventional date stress. 

There is too much tension.

If you do not know a salad fork from a pitchfork and are trying hard to get it on with Edwardina Forkhands, you will only end up biting off more (foil) than you can chew. True story.

Really, why do chefs wrap the foot of a Tandoori Chicken in aluminium foil? Are they being humane by wanting to bandage, albeit in shiny foil, the amputated chicken leg? Really, why?

There is too much pretension. 

Last night I was served verbose literature for dinner at Punjab Grill. The level of pomposity and pretension in the menu made the Bible look like a marginally long Aesop fable.

What in God’s name is “Free Range” Chicken? 

“Sir, we set the chickens free to run about in a farm and be merry,” said the server. 

But still, magically, stripped of her freedom, she ends up on my plate, dead. 

“You’re absolutely right, sir!”

The management has clearly taken it upon itself to educate its patrons on trivial snippets of historical and geographical trifle. I’m finicky when I have to decide on an order, but thanks to the Cook Swap Treaty signed immediately after the Treaty of Mangalore I am no longer undecided. For now I have a piece of history on my side (plate?). After all who can resist a meal where one does not even have to so much as chew?

My travel agent once misunderstood my request for a ticket to Chandigarh. I had lazily abbreviated it as CDG and was almost booked on a flight to Paris (Charles de Gaulle). I hope she never dines in this restaurant. I do not want to be flown to Lahore because she learnt that it’s the Paris of the East and not the Abottabad of the South as I had taught her.

Even if I let the onion misspelling pass, I am neither comfortable with the usage of 'kid' in my meal nor with the suggestion that I must consider sharing my meal with a certain 'Ratanjot'. 

When the main course arrives, I have no idea which dish is which. All the dishes seem to be engaged in a competition of towering verticality. They've been arranged like they’re sections of a ridiculous architecture exhibition diorama. The lamb-chop is delicately balanced on end, ready to take a swan dive into its broth which I’m told originated on a dangerous hunting expedition involving Maharaja Ranjit Singh and some herbs. I am sure. 

My date for the night thinks that perhaps Punjabi Cuisine is moving towards minimalism – which is apparently meant to explain the lone towering structure in an otherwise vacant plate. “Just like the iPhone,” she says, “where less is more. It’s minimal and functional.” Just like your brain. Strange. 

The kitschiness had diseased my dessert as well. The kulfi was suggestively erect, swimming in a pool of corn flour ‘noodles’ and flecked with microscopic dollops of something pink. “Just like a piece of installation art that surprises you by being complex and simple at the same time.”

I have a headache. 

I need to lie down.

So that I can go here, where WYSIWYG.

*

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.”

Postcards from Africa

I cannot travel without a plan. I’m not anal about it. It’s just that I need to know what I can and what I cannot do when I go to a new place.

Like you absolutely cannot carry a camera in public in Japan – hypocritical considering how a camera seems to be the natural appendage of any Japanese tourist – but well, you cannot. It’s frowned upon. (Also, if your toilet seat has a number of buttons and you’re too drunk to read any of them, DO NOT PUSH ALL OF THEM AT ONCE. It will only result in involuntary self soiling. True fact!)

Or you cannot call Mao a faggot in China. ‘Where can I find water?’ or ‘Can I pee on THAT side of the great wall?’ carefully enunciated with finger-goes-into-mouth or point-to-crotch-and-trace-pee-trajectory gestures get you no response. But ‘Mao’s a fucking faggot’ apparently means the same in Mandarin as it does in English and has them Chinks seeing red.

Point being, I cannot travel without a plan and I’m not being anal about it.

So while reading up on Malawi it was of mild discomfort when I read that in I could go to jail for farting in public. This is hands down the most ridiculous thing I have ever come across – criminal public flatulence.

The law - “Any person who vitiates the atmosphere in any place so as to make it noxious shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”

If this was ever contested in a court, the trial would boil down to bloody kindergarten squabble.

It wasn’t me.

Denial Your Honour! Denial! And we all know that he who denied it, supplied it.

Or circumstantial evidence perhaps?

Beer, fries and baked beans for lunch me lord! We have a sinner!

This did not sound right. Also, when all your travel companions are Caucasians, reports of albinos being mutilated in Zanzibar by witch-doctors did not help either.

Nonetheless, pseudo-undeterred we took off from our respective homes.

From the moment we landed it was clear that Africa is not black. It’s red. Retards at Airtel had taken the bit about ‘painting the town red’ quite literally. So having spent its entire budget on red paint, there clearly wasn’t any left to put up signal towers. (My way of saying - all those calls missed, messages not responded to – not me fault, mostly.)

On the main highway, almost medieval sights (a welding shop with the welder in front over an open fire) mix with signs of our time. A nightclub owner had heard of current events but had maybe not quite understood – his establishment was called the Afghanistan Bar. A barber doubled as a place to charge your phone, which lead to the not entirely trust-inspiring sign ‘Barber – Foni Charges’. A classifieds advert had a young woman named Yammie inviting people to her bridal shower with the warm note ‘Let’s shower’.

If you have ever visited the far east, you will notice that nearly every one has an anglicized or a catholic name so that most of us who are not Asian-Asian don’t choke while saying QingXao. The rationale used when choosing the name is simple – ‘Hi I’m Fat. Because I am Fat’ or ‘Hi I’m Fish. Do you like seafood?’

Fair enough I think. Not very inventive but fair enough.

However, the folks in Africa have decided that it’s most convenient to instead use a literal translation of their names. So Simpiwe Mazibuko calls himself Gift Mazibuko. Consequently, we have Bless Me Nkhata, Been Well Gawa, Wisdom Tasosa and the sisters Wonderful and Graceful Mkina.

Clearly, there was a lot of sense being lost in translation. But the Africans weren’t the only ones at fault.

We ran into quite some trouble with the locals because an enthusiastic Frenchwoman Sev (retro-shades woman in the 4th pic) tried to speak only in the local language, Chichewa, despite clear signs that English would do just fine. Just to make it clear – I’m all for learning the local language before new travels (BB for instance – learning Spanish just so she can be pounded to pulp by tomatoes – what resolve and all etcetra!).

But what a Frenchwoman does not realize is that no matter what she says, how she says, in whichever language she says – it all sounds French. So Chombo (fish) sounded like Chomba (hashish) and Chombe (tea) sounded like Chomba as well. And none of us wanted the waiter to dish out narcotics – especially not in a nation where breaking wind could land you in prison beside Sodomizing Siwombo.

It did not help that her refrain whenever she botched up Chichewa was - ‘This is the best Chihuahua I can do you know’.

Apart from a fortnight of linguistic hurdles, traveling with a bus-driver preoccupied with singing haunting Malawian gospels ensured that we were oftentimes lost in transit as well. And if not for better judgement and border patrol – we might have been lost in Transvaal.

Not that I’m complaining.

Just saying.

Honest.

Williaminder weds Katepreet

If only Lizzie and family were Punjabi

P.S. Please to check out Prince Harry towards the end of the video.

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?

How to fuck up a city 101

For those who have not been here before (and you lurking Americans, Canadians and Herzegovinians), I have been living, rather trying hard not to commit suicide, in Chandigarh for the last five months. This and the last few blogposts are my way of asking this city to go fuck itself, royally.

Chandigarh, I’ve been told on more than one occasion, is a planned city. Will someone with even one-eighth of a brain please tell me HOW?

For starters, it is in the middle of nowhere. This is the proverbial No Man’s Land; at least not an intelligent man’s. We have the amiable Pakistanians a couple of hundred kilometers to the west and to the east we have Mr. Mao trying to pry open his eye-slits with chopsticks. So every time an Al-Qaeda junkie gets his panties in a bunch, I could be the first to die. How bloody convenient!

The airport’s not that great either.

I’ve traveled quite a bit to realize that a city’s essence can be gauged from its airport. Bombay – crowded, cosmopolitan, synchronized chaos. Singapore – organized, soulless sellout. Madras – functional. Abu Dhabi – concrete, kitschy, tailor made, man made.

How about Chandigarh?

Let’s see.

The airport in Chandigarh is only slightly smaller than the average Bihari cowshed (in case you were wondering, the flatulent, rotund policemen are rightful bovine replacements). The runway, all 200 centimeters of it, was once a cricket pitch for midgets. The last time I saw the conveyor belt operational, there were two moderately ginormous Punjabi women treating it like a personal treadmill. Agitated that their bags seemed lost, they were making their way to the hole in the wall that the baggage usually comes from. After all, if the mountain won’t come to Muhammed, then Mrs. Samarjeet Bhatia must go to her Samsonite, no?

A map of the city looks like this –


A Chessboard looks like this –


The retard, Le Corbusier, who was commissioned to ‘plan’ the city, looks like this –


Dear Mr. Le Corbusier,

Did you drop out of Architecture School after Lesson 1: Lines? Are you not aware of the existence of curves, arcs, bends, circles or loops? If we wanted you to draw a square, we would have asked you to draw a fucking square.

Also, Corbusier Uncle - if you are cocky enough to prefix a Le before your own name, why choose to be sedate when naming localities in the city? Numbered Sectors was the best you could come up with for naming neighborhoods; really? Sector 1, Sector 2 and so on.

And what is with the Mathematics you bastard? How does it help to know that you numbered the Sectors in a way that the sum of two adjoining Sectors is divisible by 13?

It’s Saturday night and I am monumentally sloshed. I’m on my way home and I cannot make out left from right because smartie pants Corbusier here decided to plan a city without landmarks, identity and character. I am lost somewhere between Sector 23 and 35 and I am majorly fucked. But lo and behold! All I need is the power of Math. In my state of alcohol induced incapacitation, I just have to figure out if 23+35 is divisible by 13 and I’m home. Right?

Why no imagination? Is it because you were Swiss and all you ever did was eat cheese and be intimate with cattle that you confused with your women?

And pray tell me what is this ‘monument’ that you have designed?


Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It is a hand? Is it something sticking out like a sore thumb?

You are lucky to be dead. For if you were alive, I would first kill you. I would then proceed to cut you up into teeny-tiny little numbered squares. And then I would feed you to 13 hungry, hand shaped birds.

Honest.

Regards,
Notgogol

P.S. I had specifically asked for stripes, not checks.

P.P.S. O wise one! Do not confuse this Chandigarh with the other hypothetical one existing in a parallel universe.

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.)

Thongful Intightment

I have always hated tights, not that I’ve worn them – I just despise the sight of them.

The last girl I dated was always in tights – ALWAYS. No denim, no dresses, no skirts, no nothing – just tights. Plain and simple – leggings.

Tights. They’re just so very… very… er… tight. So body hugging and so freaking tight. Why are they so clingy? Why do they need to eat up all your space in the nether lands? Why are they so bloody needy; almost insecure? Why is there no space?

Where is my space?

The thing is now I’m cold. This sham of a city, Chandigarh, is moving closer to the arctic circle with every bloody day, with every bloody globally warmed iceberg.

For crying out loud - we are supposed to be a tropical nation, not Eskimo zone dammit!

So it’s freezing and I realized that everything southwards of my waist – ass, feet, knees, vagina – are becoming colder than Russia. To prevent any further posterior frigidity, someone recommended Thermal Underwear – Thermal Long Johns to be precise.

My momma always said, “Life is like a box of knickers. If they look like tights, feel like tights, stretch like tights, then they’re not damned Long Johns you fool – they’re tights.”

But oh bloody God – they’re so, they’re so, so, soooooooh… comforting.

They’re so accommodating, all encompassing, and warm and do everything to make you feel so very secure.

They just give and give and give and give.

It’s like their second nature.

They’re like Mother Nature – there is so much give.

So kids, I don't know how I met your mother, but when in doubt - wear tights.

P.S. Superman, Hulk Hogan, Robin Hood – thank you!

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.