10 things that aren’t cool any longer!

Few years back, I might have called these “10 ways of looking cool” but like public phone booths and internet cafes, even this list has become completely dated. One could say that time and Amir Khan have made me preachy over the years but then again, I am a grand uncle now and it’s time I start behaving like one. So, in no particular order,


1. Wearing Che Guevara T-shirts

Yes, they are terribly out of fashion. Especially after kids started donning these thinking Guevara to be a cult rock-star. The ‘in-thing’ now is actually knowing who this bearded chap was. ‘The Motor-Cycle Diaries’ is a good place to start with but only introduces the subject. You may like to read some more on the internet.

2. Taking pride in your mess.

Unfortunately enough, living in a pigsty has become terribly obsolete too. It’s not just about being organized. It’s about staying away from skin diseases that can come in the way of getting laid. And getting laid, any given day, any generation, any culture, IS cool.

Also, I read somewhere on the net that mosquitoes have been evolving for 30 million years. During this time they've built an impressive array of sensory receptors. They possess chemical, visual, and heat sensors, all designed to zero in on a blood source. Moreover there are 150+ varieties of mosquitoes in the world. Not really being fond of these bloodsucking motherfuckers, I would like them to be in clear sight in my room so that I could use my million years of evolution to show them who’s the daddy. More the mess, more avenues for them to hide! Not cool!


3. Getting wasted and listening to Pink Floyd.

Though not the best, Pink Floyd is an amazing band. But claiming that you need dope to appreciate their music just proves it time and again that you are dumbfart. Each of these is a wonderful thing on its own and can be perfectly appreciated in isolation. Trying to make a “buy a Colgate toothpaste, get a toothbrush free” out of them is an insult to both.

4. Stunts on your motorcycle or car.

These were definitely cool few years back when powerful vehicles were not so popular in India. But now almost every dickhead has mustered some trick or the other and they have ceased to impress altogether. Also, to use a cliché, it’s not just your fucking life you are putting at risk but also of that old drunkard who may pop up in front of your vehicle any time in what seems like a valiant suicide attempt.

5. Losing count of beer cans.

It’s time you realize that people give a fuck to the damage you are causing your liver. But they care when they need to take responsibility of dragging you the washroom and pouring water over your head. They care when they need to clear your vomit from their carpet or answer your irritating girlfriend’s call on your behalf. They care when you start narrating your shitty tragedies with no regard for their patience. Beer is cool. But if your idea of a high is drinking till the walls start spinning around you, might as well play ring-a-ring-o-roses at breakneck speed. It’ll give you the same effect for free!

6. Playing Casanova

Bragging about multiple girlfriends is passé. This is the era of social networking where gossips spread faster than conjunctivitis. Hump all you want but shut the fuck up. You wouldn’t want your partner finding out about your sexual antics. And I wouldn’t want to know the places your dick has been to.

And on a personal note, I think the key difference between a horny rabbit and a horny human is the ability to masturbate. It’s evolution’s greatest gift to us and comes without Herpes. If you smell a contradiction here, I still state that getting laid, any given day, any generation, any culture, is cool. But at the same time, my shaft has not exactly been set up from the hard earned money of tax payers. So I can be choosy about when and where to use it.

7. Excessive use of abbreviations.

Picture this. You are trying to court this hot chick and you are messaging her from your phone. You use excessive abbreviations like “n8, f9, gr8” etc. What do you think would be her first impression? That you care more about saving ten paisa by shortening your texts than talking to her. And there goes your chances of being laid! And if you remember, Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life. Sorry, I mean getting laid, any given day, any generation, any culture, is cool.

8. Using too many verbose phrases













The first time someone rolled a joint in front of me and said “let’s boom”, I ran out of the room shouting ‘Al Qaeda’. First time I heard someone mention “choking the turkey”, I started visualizing them, ah, choking a turkey by the windpipe. Not very creative, I know. But that’s the whole problem. Most of us are not creative enough to understand what these cryptic phrases mean and the entire conversation gets lost. So stop being a pompous wannabe and save your vocabulary for acing the TOEFL.

9. A British accent with no regard for grammar.

I didn’t invent English. I have not studied it after high school. And thus I am bound to make grammatical errors now and then. But the way I can make it sound less stupid is by not forcing an accent. Wrong grammar with a strong western accent sticks out like a sore thumb and makes you look like the jackass from the neighbourhood call centre. Either go back to your high school grammar books or start talking like a native. If you don’t like making choices, do both. Even if it means pronouncing ‘fish’ as ‘phis’!


10. ‘I am what I am’ profiles on social networking sites.

When Reebok came up with this slogan, they meant to identify with the youth that is fiercely independent and undeterred by established norms. But they did not mean to highlight a nation of people with an utter lack of originality and inability to describe themselves in a sentence.

Also, “I am cool” profiles do nothing but prove otherwise. If you want to be considered genuinely cool, go ahead and give a fuck to (or fuck) everything else but just try to be original at the end of the day. Humping while standing on a hammock has already been done though. You have to try harder than that!

I don't like..

It’s been ages I felt like a real human. It’s been ages I have been genuinely happy. Something’s wrong. Something doesn’t fit in somewhere. Scored better in CAT than I realistically hoped for, got into an institute of my own choice, got back with my girl, had a lot of beer, smoked up some really neat stuff, played a lot of scrabble after ages, got a nice new place, wasted a lot of money that I never earned at the first place and did almost everything I would ideally put on my list of things-I-would-like-to-do.

But something still doesn’t feel right. Something feels too streamlined and rigid for my liking. I am turning into someone I have despised all my unconscious years. And who that is, I have no clue. And the worst part was, the choice had always been mine. And I always made the right one. But I don’t like being right. I don’t like sitting in a classroom and trying to genuinely make sense out of whatever ‘mr.phd+5 other degrees’ is trying to preach. I don’t like drinking beer with a nice group of people who have a very good idea about their direction in life or would at least like to. I don’t like smoking up in a group of people who like smoking up and listening to Pink Floyd. I don’t like me smoking and I don’t like the idea of quitting because I-care-for-my-lungs. Given a chance, I would actually like to quit these habits. And honestly, the reason wouldn’t be anything other than my health. But I just need a better reason for quitting. And I don’t like either looking for it or not finding it. I don’t like nodding my head in HR classes instead of screaming my lungs out that I don’t fucking care about employee satisfaction, self motivation and personality types. The human mind is far more complex than an irritating HR model and I don’t like it when people don’t realize it.

But worse, I don’t like not knowing what I like. May be I would just like to have a brewing cup of coffee with an old friend I haven’t met in ages and whom I never really liked much back then. Or i would like to actually have the time to watch all the mindfuck movies I have downloaded recently and keep trying to make sense out of them. I would even like going away to some old European village and live on bakery food for the rest of life. That’s a little too fat fetched I guess. But I would definitely like to stay up all night looking at the ceiling and sleeping through the day. I would like to make myself a plate of dry & over- boiled magi noodles and eat it with my bare hands. That one is not too tough but the problem is that the idea never seems appetizing enough when I actually enter the kitchen.

Also, I would like not feeling nostalgic about the past. I would like time to undo whatever it has done to us in the last 10-12 years. And that would include humming and dancing to ‘Tu cheez badi hai mast mast’, being awed by The Terminator, cheering to cricketers like Mark Waugh, Chris Cairns, Nathan Astle, Murray Goodwin, Andy Campbell, Ajay Jadeja, Saeed Anwar, Sourav Ganguly, Neil Johnson etc. It may seem like an odd choice of names but these were actually the players I adored back then. Nathan Astle, the most. And I would like ipods being replaced with walkmans, play-stations with those TV videogames that had Mario, Contra, Bomberman and Pacman in them. I would like CD’s being replaced with audio cassettes and I would like airfares to go up again. I would like to play a four player carom game on my own and pretend it’s a ‘house competition’ and I am the star player from my house. And of course my house would lose few of those occasional insignificant matches because the contest needs to seem fair and realistic. I would like to persuade my mom to buy me a TinTin comic and finally be content borrowing it from someone else because it’s too costly for a comic. And I would like reading anything written by Enid Blyton with a speed and concentration I could never muster for anything else and then scribble her signature in the last page of every notebook I have. I would want my younger cousins to know the kind of fun we had back at their age but I would never want to sound like a preachy grandpa complaining about changing times and rising prices. Mostly because preachy grandpas have betel nut juices dripping out their lips and it has never been a pretty sight.

Given none of this, I would just settle for a bottle of beer and a relaxing weekend. And may be some time to try and write something creative and may be mildly humorous. Not this, Definitely not this.

The solitary sucker (with nothing better to do than ruin old poems)

Behold her, naked in the field
Yon sexy highland lass
Touching and fingering herself
Stop here, or gently pass.
Alone she soughs and moans again
Intermingling in pleasure and pain
O listen! for even the hound
is ejaculating to the sound!

No prostitute did ever chaunt
more welcome notes to perverted men.
No model did ever flaunt
For free, breasts bigger than a ben.
A body so thrilling ne'er was seen
Amongst beauty pageants and queens
If you so wish, come and linger,
Jerk from a distance, or insert a finger.

Will no one tell me why she sucks
Every cock that comes her way,
And charges not a single buck
For all the wild sex and foreplay?
Or is that, through her vertical chasm
Is the highway to eternal orgasm?
For it cannot be just in vain
That all she does is fuck, and fuck again!

Whate’er the reason, the maiden bangs
All men, who tread upon her field
Within my heart and soul, still hangs
The joys of treachery, that she revealed.
I walked back home, wasted and tired
But content with all that transpired
Her beauty, in my heart I bore
Oh, was she an angel or a whore?

(Parody of WIlliam Bugger Wordsworth's 'The Solitary Reaper')

Resurrection

It’s difficult
not to miss
the vividness of the dahlias
and the soft dew underneath
your bare foot
in the magical patch
that comes alive
every morning.

It’s difficult
not to be immersed
in the fairytales
from the spirit of your grandmother
in her cloudy attire
and of course the starry sparkles
when she is too tired
to be there for you.

Wouldn’t say the same
about the monotonous humming
of the ceiling fan
and the paranoia
that follows the end of the universe
and your perennial existence.

But it’s difficult
not to miss
the dancing smoke
that erotically evolves
into the lady muse
in the middle of
lonely nights.

In a world
of artificial intelligence
and artificial flavors,
of artificial insemination
and artificial smiles,
it’s difficult
not to miss
artificial bliss.

Spinning into
a higher consciousness
where Neruda and Kubrick
swiftly start making
much more sense
it’s difficult
not to miss
contemplating over
the allegories of life
and metaphysics.

But moon-walking
in the esoteric realms
of surrealism
lady muse took
a curiously human shape
the other day
and it was much more difficult
to neglect her words
when she refused
to be made of smoke any longer
and promised to explore with me
the radiance of the universe
and its unreachable heights
without any of the usual
artificiality.

And that is exactly
what she did.

The Funnier side of the blasts!

I don't know why I'm writing this. Usually I'd try to look at the funnier side of the more serious things in life but I don't think even Woodie Allen or Roberto Benigni could make a fine comedy out a tragedy like this.

More than 2 days have passed since the bomb blasts in Guwahati. And like every other coward I've fled away to safety. But the gory images refuse to let go of my mind. Every minute of 30th October 2008 was like living a nightmare, not merely living in one as usual. Strewn bodies dangle and dance in front of me just as soon as I close my eyes. Even a thousand miles away now I can't spot anything remotely funny in that fear. But I'm not one to give up so soon. It may be next to impossible when you consider the common and spread out destruction but on a personal front I'll now try to tell you how hilarious those events were.

# 1 : Okay, there's this new stupid mall in Guwahati called Pantaloons which has the distinction of being the first and only establishment in the state to have an escalator (big deal, yes!) and hundreds of people still untouched by the era of consumerism visit that mall only to experience the thrill of climbing up and down an escalator. Till two days back I used to make fun of that mall at every single opportunity but that fateful day it was this stupid mall that saved my life. If for some stupid reason (still very much arcane to me) I wouldn't have insisted my mom to pull over at the mall and spent some ten minutes looking and frowning at all the unnecessary things on earth I would have been buying 'bhoot jolokia' (The famous naga chilli which is considered the hottest on earth) at the Ganeshguri market place. And even basic probability would prove it mathematically that the chance of my mom and I turning into a 'bhoot' ourselves would be just a little shy of a 100%. I could have been amongst the hundreds of casualties bleeding to death in few of the most inept and unequipped hospitals in the country but I still went unscathed due to a silly whim...... funny isn't it?

#2: I'd refused to go home during my Diwali vacations on the pretext of preparing for CAT 2008. The real motive, though, was only to get stoned and drunk every night. But funds started running low lately and one day I suddenly called up my mom to announce that I'm coming home! And now, had I not been home for that short span of six days my mom would have been working in the court bang opposite the D.C court which experienced another deafening blast. I couldn't possibly comment on the possibilities of my mom being physically affected but it is for sure that our car would have been nothing but a piece of charred wreck and our driver a pulp of unrecognizable mass. With dozens of fatal casualties and dozens of vehicles being rendered worthless within a span of few seconds, my mom, our car and our driver (in that order of priority) are totally safe. All due to my inability to fund my own alcohol in Nagpur during diwali! Come on, that's a reason valid enough to get drunk tonight!

#3: The Jehadi forces along with the local ULFA are suspected to be behind the blasts. I've never been much of a pro-fundamentalist but there was a time probably when I'd have uttered kinder words for the ULFA. Yes, it's kind of amusing when I think of it now but there was a time I almost believed in the ideologies of the ULFA. Assam is separated from the rest of India not merely by the chicken's neck called Siliguri but also by the supreme ignorance and indifference in the minds of almost every individual in the rest of India. People ask me if it requires a passport to go to Assam. People ask me tigers roam freely in Assam and walk on the streets. They ask me if people in Assam still roam around in leaves with a spear in their hands. There are people who assume that ULFA is not a terrorist clan but the name for the descendants of Assam. I mean, this is the level of ignorance! So it didn't take me much time to get carried away when the ULFA leaders spoke of an independent nation with a redeemed self-respect and self-identity. I could almost visualize their "Asom', free from violence, intolerance and corruption where people would live happily and grow as one. Even if it meant having tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And riding on one-horned rhinos. And dressing up in silk for every occasion. I never doubted the concern and affection of the ULFA for its own people. But wow, how wrong was I!!! I don't know if it is the feeling of insecurity or power, but their revolution is long-lost. And my faith too has gone for quite a toss! Can it really get any funnier??

#4: Oh yes, it can. I was lucky enough to have fled away from Guwahati to Nagpur within those three hours that the curfew was lifted (an aggravated mob's procession led to the re-installation of the curfew an hour after I boarded my flight). And just as soon as I reached my flat here, my friend announced that intelligence has detected that the serial blasts all over India is not a haphazard one but follows a very planned and coherent sequence called the BADMAN sequence. B for Bangalore, A for Ahmedabad, D for Delhi, M for Malegaon, A for Assam and it has been presumed that the final N is for, yes, Nagpur. So having narrowly escaped the blasts in Guwahati and fled away to Nagpur, am I really finally safe now? Well, my guess is as good as yours!


And if you actually laughed at any of this, your mind is just as sick as mine!

I AM WOODY ALLEN (Or all you need to know about being in a relationship)

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."

It all started with the starting of Annie Hall. Love had seen us through one year. But now, on this lazy Sunday afternoon, all the silent sufferings and hidden grudges were starting to vent out.

She blamed men.

I blamed periods.

Oh that nerd, whoever he is, is so much like you.

Hmmmn, that’s the best compliment I’ve ever got. I mean, seriously, Woody Allen is like God. He’s the funniest and wittiest guy ever!

MCPs, that’s what you all are!

Members of the corny parliament?

Ha! Male chauvinist pigs! You, that spooky nerd, all of you. Indifferent, reckless, careless, insensitive, jealous and in worse cases even sexists!

Wow, did you just mention sex?

Don’t try to act funny. I’ve been trying to figure out for quite a while now why’s the charm fading away. I thought maybe it’s just me. I’m going through a phase. But now I know. Even Annie went through the same phase. Courtesy your God, Goodie Allen or whatever.

Right! What a wonderful deduction! It was just a movie damn it. Get over it now!

But don’t movies portray reality?

Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone surely did!

At least I could relate to whatever Annie went through.

It’s only two characters you’re talking about honey. Let me tell you, Woody Allen is very happily married in real life. To his stepdaughter.

Oh great! What a lovely man. No doubt you worship him. I’m sure, given a chance all guys would do!

I’m bored. And hungry too!

That’s what I’m here for honey, isn’t it? To cater to all your needs and pamper you! To cook for you, to clean for you and….. what not!

Chill dear, I’ll cook. I just mentioned I’m hungry. So tell me lady, what do you wanna have for lunch? Garlic and pepper chicken? Sphagetti and meat balls? Just name it madame, and it shall be served to to you in a platter!

Oh, thank you so much but I’d rather not. You make a big mess in the kitchen whenever you enter there.

I promise to clean up too.

I don’t trust you.

Try me once.

No. I don’t feel like.

We order then, what say?

Do whatever you want to.

What do you wanna have?

I don’t know.

Is that a dish?

*Raised eyebrows*

Sorry, bad joke! Seriously what do you want to have?

Why do you care? Just order for yourself.

Aren’t cha hungry?

I don’t know.

Wow, I give up. I am your sinner. Tell me how do you want to punish me? Just don’t answer indifference. Shall I fetch a whip Madame?

Would you stop bugging me?

*sigh* what is it sweetheart? Why are you angry on me?

Did I say I’m angry? Infact even I don’t know what it is. You please order for yourself. I don’t feel like.

Are you having your periods by any chance?

Don’t copy that bastard’s jokes now. So not funny!

No, seriously? I wasn’t kidding! I swear I wasn’t!

I think it was just last week that I was down. So now you don’t even remember that?

Was I supposed to? I’m sorry I forgot. Then what is it? Why are you behaving so erratic?

I don’t feel the need to answer any of your questions.

Just tell me what have I done? And what do you expect out of me now?

Nothing. Honestly nothing. I have already expected a lot. And I’ve been royally disappointed. Now I don’t have the courage to expect anything more.

Don’t do that to me now. I know I have been careless and insensitive at times. But you know what, you haven’t been to my family. You must meet my brother, once atleast. This problem runs in the genes, And I believe, I’m the least affected one.

Only the male genes I’m sure. That’s where the problem lies. Everything in this world is just a joke for you. Your life, your career, my life, my career, our relationship…everything. And it has all ceased to be funny now.

A joke is only intended to ease all the prevailing tension. I bet we could all do with some extra laughs.

Well, not always. And the problem is not with you trying to be funny. The problem is that you keep creating problems and when I try to tell you how it affects me, you simply make a joke out of it too. And now, if you still pretend not to understand the problem, it’s your problem.

Too many problems to keep track. I’m tired. Just answer me one simple question. Do you still love me?

Yes, I love you. But love is not always everything in life. Right now it’s interfering with the priorities in my life. It’s taking a toll upon me. Honestly I’m tired of losing sleep over these issues.

What are you getting at? You need a break?

I think we’ve already wasted enough time. We need to move on.

Yeah, sure! The bicycle thief or Citizen Kane? You choose!

…………………………………THE END…………………………………………