Permutation and Commutation

The macabre consequences of not meeting a man standing with two tickets to a movie titled Piranha 3D is somewhere along the lines of spilling hot coffee down your trousers. I can think of even worse scenarios that may involve a can of beer, an opener and an umbrella, but let us for decent purposes, keep the content "U" rated.

It was a lovely twilight evening that found me waiting on OMR as a dark shape loomed in the distance on an otherwise empty road. As I continued squinting into the headlights of an oncoming lorry, a share auto whizzed to a stop in front of me. The bearded driver looked like he had been driving all the way from Tunisia and implored me with huge Puss-In-Boots eyes that bore the remains of a TASMAC-orgy aftermath. I felt sorry and jumped into the cess-pot. Small mistake; medium error; big consequences.

Your ability to commute in a share auto full of women of all ages is a feat that deserves an aluminum Olympic Medal at the least. Months of my bike refusing to exit the confines of an inefficient service centre had led me to analyze and effectively come up with an awesome strategy on how to travel in a share auto.

There are three geo-spatial locations within an auto, where you can sit and enjoy the scenery of other people's body parts while inhaling the fresh smell of a day's labor in the Chennai sun (Chennai's software companies' air -freshener, if your lady luck sleeps with you).

Position 1:

I call this the Titanic position. Before lewd inferences be made, I call it so simply because it is reserved for the women and children of the soil. Literally. They come armed with sickles, handbags, rakes, compacts and other items of physical torture. And they get preference over any male occupant. Sexist, I say.

Position 2:

This is the Marie Biscuit Position. Allow me to force you to participate in this experiment. You get into the auto and sit in this position for more than three minutes. Once done, get out and find a vehicle that has a good rear view mirror. And then, you are requested to kindly inspect your rear. It will, 7.89 times out of 9.81, resemble a biscuit. Flat and awful to taste. Warning: Never mix the hot coffee experiment with this one. 

Position 3:
The Tarzan position. You have a swinging view of the driver's vista which is pretty much like watching National Geographic from a RC helicopter. Except of course, if there is a hot female sitting behind you; in which case you tend to bend and flex your invisible muscles by straining against the usually, frail skeleton of the auto.

Which is where I found myself straining away to kingdom come, en route to Satyam one fine evening. The night was young and I could see with my peripheral vision that the young female behind me was taking more than just a peripheral interest as she sniffed loudly and disgustingly into a tissue. Encouraged, I strained even more at the already shredded tarpaulin that hung at the side of the auto and tore it. Suddenly, Vayu found the time and date, auspicious to take a leak. He promptly did.

Within seconds I was drenched to the bone. Fate had copulated me once more as the tarpaulin barely managed to keep a thimble of the rain away. My shirt exposed my misshapen torso and the image of a wrestler that I had so painstakingly built crumbled all around me like a masala papad in coke. In the words of the pointy-face - Ricky Ponting, "It was utter humiliation".

There is more. Right when my stop came, the rain stopped. I got off, walked to the middle of the road and yelled a few choice words to the heavens. The auto-driver empathized and came to stand next to me. He yelled a few more, better-formed choice words. At the end of the duet tirade, I understood and paid him the fare.

After a rather uneventful bus ride later with the only memorable event being me sitting and irrigating the bus, I found myself at the footsteps of the theater. My friend could not control his glee which made me sulk for some time. The moron that he was, he bought me a hot cup of coffee to cool me off, which I promptly and accidentally threw down his trousers. It was hilarious.

Two hours of visual torture later, we came out with our brains eaten alive by a director who had nothing to reveal than most actresses in the movie.

The next day I went to office in the selfsame auto; sniffing with a cold. I did not meet that girl until yesterday. She was still sniffing and was married.

A Moo(t) Point

TWO LEGGED VIEW

A great man once spoke, "The toughest thing to do every morning is getting up". Trust me, after having taken the wrong side in an argument that threatened to diss the libido of many a man the previous night, it really is. And on an unrelated note, there was one consensus that Namitha is no competition to Ajith Kumar when it comes to waistlines. Ah, that was real funny.

I woke up groggily and my vision was instantly impaired with a hairy thigh that lay across my torso. Disgusted, I pinched it. It slowly moved away as the owner turned swearing silently in his sleep. I intuitively knew I was late. I quickly got ready for office and waved goodbye to seven gentlemen who were busy in dreamland wooing the Tamilian Circes. Weirdly, one of them was still arguing about Nietzsche with great passion to nobody in particular.The situation was tempting and I yielded.

I stole my friend's only bike keys with the dexterity of an MRTS bus making a three-point turn. Dirty deed done, I scrambled downstairs to the bike and stood next to it, befuddled. At this juncture it is extremely important to note that my grandfather always used to tell me I never knew my own strength. I still did not. I wasted a couple of more minutes on ruminating that and absentmindedly straddled the pulsar. I did the easiest thing first - inserted the key. Once done, I huffed/puffed and whaled the bike off its stand, easing it right into the foliage next to the gate. After fighting off a dozen bees and an enraged mummy Cuckoo, I emerged none the wiser. This time flinging a prayer to Newton, I adjudicated maneuvering over balancing. I finally exited backwards out of the house onto the road. As I slid down the slope feeling like a bit like Felipe Massa driving a tractor, I felt a small bump.

The bump in itself was minor, the reason was not. As I turned to check, all my gallantry scooted. The huge creature stared at me like I had just jumped out of the Voyager in a golden bikini.

It was a cow - a massive specimen at that. She slowly ambled up with reddened eyes and mouth slurping nauseatingly. I screamed, weirdly in Spanish, "El Mojito al cabana intermilano, cow!" and tried to take to my heels and found my progress hindered by a Bajaj Pulsar between my legs. I started to wheel it away. I might as well have been pushing a bulldozer with a Singapore Shoppe hairpin. It moved inches, the cow moving metres.

I yelled for help and awoke the whole neighborhood including the landlord and his daughter/yet-to-be-my-wife. Help did not come, but panic did. I seemed to be missing something big as I threatened by brain with a nervous machete. Finally, the grey cells hit a home run. Mentally thanking the kinky engineers at Bajaj, I button-started the bike. The bike roared to life with the sound of the Tungabhadra dam developing a leak and figuratively threw me off my seat. I opened the throttle and escaped the area in a blur of smoke that could have easily and permanently blotted many a fair skin.

On the upside, it was exhilarating to know what a bullfighter feels like. Quote cow-fighter unquote. I congratulated thine-self and dreamed of the landlord's daughter shooing cows all over Mount Road on a pulsar.

FOUR LEGGED VIEW

A great bovine once spoke, "The toughest thing to do every morning is eating". Trust me, after having been adopted into a motley herd of a couple of malnourished goats, three bitching hens and two bulls it always is. Add to that a master who likes his drink hotter than his wife; life is not all just a river of milk - there is occasional dung thrown in for good measure. After a rather hectic morning of my drunken master milking me dry, I was famished. My not-so-better halves were better off dozing and I had to make good time quickly. I gave my master plan the green signal.

The genesis of The Plan is a great story. You could write an epic on it. But since, in all probability you are dull-headed if you are reading this, you wont. Following that rather brilliant logic, I will just highlight the well, highlights. A passing fly had mentioned on the fly, the presence of new juicy grass blades in the vicinity. After swatting the fly dead with my tail, I started thinking and came up with The Plan. The plan was complex, tough and required all my female cunning to pull off. That would be the genesis. The Exodus and Job come after it.

After following the directions that the fly had so bravely given in its dying moments, I came across an alley lined with derelict houses. I could smell the shrubbery. I kept walking, trying to convert the fire in my belly to hope. I walked and walked and walked and with every step, the gnawing thought that the fly might have consummated me, hypertrophied. After an hour of pursuit I gave up and flopped in front of a gate.

My pondering on the philosophical thoughts of Martin Udder was rudely interrupted by a sharp pain in my tail. As I stood up to unleash my wrath on whoever the jackass was, I saw a clump of the lovely grass stuck to the jackass' machine. There was a human sitting on it, who looked like he was shitting bricks. My eyes went green and I stumbled forward thanking Nandi for the fly's honesty. The human panicked and suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke. I swore and turned to the now ajar gate. My eyes fell on the foliage.

It was a feast I tell you. I congratulated thine-self and dreamed of Amsterdam with their wonderful grass.

Oh, it is a moo(t) point there.

Talking in Her Shoes

I scampered into the auto behind my friend, both of us covered in foul-smelling sweat like Sunanda Pushkar's stake. The auto sped away from Bandra station after it played a brief round of energetic Kho-Kho with a rabid policeman and away we were to do some shopping.

My friend (lets call him Mr. India for namesake) was on a mission. The mission was as lame as can be; actually not so much since it involved buying slippers for his fiancee.

I had, perchance, seem to have boasted of my ample shopping expertise with various women in and around my childhood neighbourhood. Mr. India usually hardly pays attention to my tattles and is more involved with the mosquito that has gone up his nose, the blue sky and other matters of cardinal significance. But as luck would have it, this fact fell on his ears, traveled up the cochineal fluid and built a 10-story apartment in his brain. What did not get any portion of the dukedom was the fact that by expertise, I meant standing around, drinking diluted Fanta and eyeballing other females purchasing sarees, slippers, handbags, jewelery and miscellaneous foibles.

Mr. India was in full gear for the mission. He had the exact pencil outline of his fiancee's foot, the sizes according to American, Rhodesian, Swedish and English conversion tables, an extra bulge to his rear suggesting a stuffed wallet and implicit confidence in me. He had a glint of will in his eyes akin to the egregious Mel Gibson beating the crap out of a dozen tribal species. And vice-versa.

Or not.

Mr India had no outline, no size, no money and there were butterflies happily laying eggs in his stomach lining. I was supposed to be his saviour. I felt overrated for the first time in my life. The auto flung its occupants out on Linking Road, Bandra. The road was strewed with shops that sold all sorts of female paraphernalia. We stood and gaped at the future outflows of our hard-earned salaries. After a couple of flies died their natural death inside our mouths, we moved to one end of the pavement and started a mini GD where we evaluated the various criteria to identify the right shop to target.

As all GDs go, we shouted till we were hoarse. But there was a consensus. We randomized and selected a shop that seemed to look exactly like one that a girl would be interested in - colorful, bouffant and did I mention colorful? As we bustled through the milling gang of squeaking college girls, the bearded shopkeeper quit sizing the girls and began sizing us up. It was uncanny.

"Kya chaahiye?", he asked in a voice that subtly underlined the fact that we were guys. We did feel like a couple of polar bears let loose on Mount Road in summer.

We opened our mouths and that is when the faeces hit the rotating electrical appliance.

A small flashback. Both our ancestors loved dosai. All the subsequent generations too loved it. With a dash of chutney and drop of spicy sambhar, it was Amrit. Not the girl; the food. Both my friend and I were no exceptions. The relevancy of this information rests on the inference that both of us were hard core Tams. There was no escaping it. Inevitably, Hindi was French to us. So French, that we refused to acknowledge it even existed. Thousands of Amits, Poojas, Nehas, Ranbirs and Shwetanks advised us the importance of learning it, being in Mumbai. They said the probability of survival is very low if we were bereft of the ability of speaking the language.

We discovered that it was not low - it was zero. As we gestured frantically in broken Hindi and Kaveri-an gymnastics, a small crowd gathered outside the shop to watch the camaraderie. It was not at all funny.

My friend proposed his interest to buy slippers for his fiancee. We never understood what the shopkeeper understood but he went in and returned with a pair of horseshoes. It was racist to say the least. I stepped in to play my part.

I pointed to my friend and said, "Same height, what size?". The man again disappeared into the bowels of his establishment and returned with a pair of slippers that would have fit a hippopotamus. I gulped as my friend exclaimed, "Nahin! Nahin! Kuch kuch hota. Chotta Shakeela!". The shopkeeper acted bewildered. To the tee.

By now the crowd was in complete splits. I swore in rapid Tamizh to my friend and told him that we might as well go to Nariman Point and throw pieces of Medu Vadai at the Taj Mahal Hotel. And then a wondrous thing happened.

The shopkeeper said in clear, spaced words - "You from Chennai?". It was in perfect Tamil.

We looked at him and we looked at each other. We then hugged and laughed for the first time that evening. Though the hug evoked a nettled babble among the crowd, it was obvious that the show was over.

Twenty minutes later we were 300 rupees poorer and we had a fantastic pair of slippers. At least to us. We were  joyous. We were least bothered about the size, the color and the design as we went by male intuition.

Anti Climax:

The slippers fit alright. It was the right color too. Just that Mr. India's fiancee already had a pair like that which she had bought for 100 bucks at Spencer Plaza. He got an earful. At that exact time, I was busy assisting my cousin shop for handbags. Male intuition? Bollocks.

Hairline Fracture

The other day I was standing at the Shampoo rack in Big Bazaar scratching my beard when I stumbled headlong into this rather poor joke. It was so poor that I felt inanely ashamed I possessed the indecency of such an intellect. It was, but, a mere reflection of my frustration and agony.

"What is the difference between a hunter and a day trader? Simple. One shoots at hares and the other hoots at shares."

This story of the aforementioned frustration is almost 23 years ago and actually runs for 23 years in chronology. It started with my Patti. My Patti is a hardcore homeopath - no pills attached. According to her Rapidex English-Tamil-English dictionary, Clinic translated to chemical which in turn translated to evil MNC fluid. She believes that the Earth is a single life-form where we exist symbiotically to preserve each other. This does seem similar to Cameron's blue film - Avatar; but I trust my patti more than than the guy who taught the world that pencil sketching was the way to get into anybody's pants. Her recipe for a hairwash was simple - a sticky, greenish brown and completely vegan sludge.

It can also spook the dickens out of a sloth bear. Twice weekly, I was subjected to a head bath where stinking, green goo irrigated my forehead. Somehow, my hair follicles loved it. They gorged on the green goo and reproduced like the Whores of Babylon. Soon enough, my head was covered with a dense, outgrowth of dark hair. I was happy, my Patti was happy and my friends were green.

And as all good things go, so did my hair. It began the day that my patti found out that she can control me no more. My hormones overran everything on its way including sincere advice and sly referrals to my Dad's pate. All fell on dead hairs. Going on a shampoo spree, I experimented wildly before zeroing in on Pantene since it was the most fragrant smelling and was proven to dispel, nay, eliminate dandruff.

Jeyamalini Shilpa Jetty might have played a minor role in the decision but that is irrelevant to the discussion. My Patti wept in angst as I went full monty and danced wildly in the living room, flinging froth all over the furniture like a gorilla flinging crap. Washing hair was no more a ritual; it was riotous pleasure.

By the time my Patti pointed out the obvious, quite condescendingly, most of my hair had dislodged themselves. I did not believe my Patti, simply because I could not see what she was saying. Only when my friends started pointing and jeering, did I know something was wrong. The very next day I went to an eye doctor. 

That I chose to believe I went myopic before I went bald, did me no good. I was still losing hair by the millions. Additionally, I also discovered that my follicles had hit a rough patch and stopped reproducing altogether. It was like China had suddenly discovered birth control. I had to do some damage control immediately. I turned to the only other person whom I knew would empathize. My dad.

He did not. He first proceeded to laugh at my insecurity, delivered a long sermon and finally put forth a juvenile recommendation which was further endorsed by many women of my time. ("juvenile" is not a pun; Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo was, is and always will be juvenile). Them women ooh-ed and aah-ed over the fact that I had started using baby shampoo. Probably, if I had tried I could have scored a few.

But I was more bothered about my hirsute than her suite. Sadly, the approach was effectively ineffective. Its impotence could be matched only by the presence of Badrinath in the CSK team. The amount of shampoo that I used was neither directly or indirectly proportional to anything that even remotely resembled a strand of hair.

I finally came full circle. I mean, my head resembled a full circle. There was nothing there that would encourage a barber to charge me more. There was only one other option that remained. I swallowed my pride and went and bought Meera Herbal Shampoo. It still smelled horrible and was more or less green goo. But at least, I did not go the way of Cho Ramaswamy.

My patti was ecstatic.

The Charge of the Light & Sound Brigade

My TV is a humongous idiot. Having stated the obvious, I will now sip my burnt coffee as I recount the epic (possibly #fail) story of a hero: a hero who in the face of adversity and trouble still managed to advocate ribald dumbness.

In the beginning there was light. Accompanied with sound. Quite a lot of both in fact. When my TV pirouetted with my remote, the whole apartment shook with the screams of football fans, skimpy heroines singing in foreign beaches about Jalsa and of course curve-less models parading to techno. I could make the TV jump through channelized hoops by the mere movement of a finger; it was an epistemological zenith. That sensation of playing God remains, until now, unparalleled, the closest one being the toilet flush knob. Everything was perfect, as my stingy neighbors suffered from occasional cardiac arrests, until the day the love story between my TV and remote ended in a Samsung-ian tragedy. It was, in the risk of repeating myself for no reason, really tragic.

My remote stopped working. The situation hit me harder than I thought. It eventually led me to start watching Desperate Housewives on my laptop. My  pseudo-shy friend found me three days later, wallowing in pink pillows and rotting apples. He failed to understand why I had that sitcom stored in my laptop in the first place. I explained to him that it was a mistake that arose out of a misnomer which currently I do not wish to elaborate (this is a family-known blog and they communicate in the Queen's English). He understood and promptly tweeted the news to almost all my friends who were alive. In 1 hour there were 24 new messages, most of which were concerned about my well-being with a small number of them, making fun of me. I tend to lie. All of them made fun of me.

Driven to absolute humiliation, I consulted a number of experts in the field of Remote Sensing before finding that they were as related to the situation, as Angelina Jolie and her adopted kids. Finally, I turned to my pseudo-dramatic friend who gave me a brilliant idea, an idea so brilliant that it made Google Buzz look like, well, Google Buzz.

He told me to buy either a couch or a bean bag. Now, giving me options is neither a brilliant nor a dramatic idea. You can't ask your son whether he wants to marry Padmanabhan or Balakrishnan and expect him to say 'Krithika' do you? Ok, bad metaphor. That was brilliant and dramatic. Must make a mental note to kick pseudo-dramatic friend for polluting my nuclei with Balaji Telefilms' taradiddles. Meanwhile, the conscious part of me uprooted all my hair out and almost touched the barriers of a drugged Britney-dom. Bald and TV-strung, I went back to my intelligent, pseudo-philosophic friend for advice. He started on a discourse on the anodes and cathodes of owning neither, that lasted three hours, during which 34,781 babies were born in India, some romantic trash called "Will you jump over the Sky?" got released and the Union Budget increased excise duty on unsold TV sets. At the end of it, I thought I was better off watching Trisha insipid women jumping in the sky. Or over it. Or around it. Whatever.

Having exhausted myself of any more grey-cell usage, I went in for the same decision that current Reliance cell-phone users took five years ago - go for the cheaper option. I bought a bean bag and immersed myself in Positional Dynamics of Particle Re-alignment For Effective Relative Positioning of Bean Bag to Idiot Box. I really spent time on it. It is not like deciding on a design where you save the world by wearing your underwear inside or outside or inside out. This was much more important for the simple reason that my TV was stuck at Udaya news and I don't speak jalebi. Especially with the Fourth Estate.

The selected version looked complicated enough to make me proud of my rotting Engineering Degree and no charges for guessing which one. I wasted a whole day in implementing it. Once it was all set, I armed myself with a King-size dosage of fluid donated by fishermen and sat down to watch "Metti Oli". My remote remained impotent.

I was beside myself with anger, and (as all people do when they are breaking up or when they are told that they have Herpes) I threw the remote. It bounced off the wall and lay on its backside, like an electrocuted frog. I stared at the pieces lying on the floor in a jigsaw puzzle and then it clicked.

Fifteen minutes later and 24 rupees poorer, I happily watched the season finale of Desperate Housewives on Star World.

There was an empty Duracell wrapper next to my bean bag.