Koh Samui – On the Go
This is God showing off...
Writing about a resort while you are there is a bit rigged: it is bound to be good, even if they spill a whole tray of assorted coloured tidbits on you. Not that this happened; just merely citing for sake of an exaggerated example.
The flowers are there to light up the runway path...aah!
This “rigging” starts at the airport itself which is itself more of a resort. The landing is akin to an
Even planes dream of coming here for a break
autumn leaf gently floating to the ground to find a resting place among the other leaves, in the shade. Think of it as a touchdown into nature – like a Willy Wonka airline with an Eco-quotient. Read more
Bangkok Quicktime
Here is an on-the-go scribble on Bangkok. I have to admit that the city has a way of growing on you. i enjoy it a lot more with each visit. Singapore, one of my favourite haunts, serves up everything exact and precise. You feel safe, almost inoculated. Bangkok, like a well-fed Sardarji,loves to flaunt its underbelly. It thrives on its eclectic mix, the good with the garish, the Egyptian cotton-lined to the remotely dangerous, the lemongrass scented to the Bird’s Eye implanted, the straight with the tut, the ladyboys, the straight cross-dressers, and the much simpler to understand, regular homosexuals. If you wish to enjoy Bangkok, you have to learn to let your sensibilities be a bit more fluid, more accommodating, for Bangkok will push them to the limits, from food to design to orientation, and in the end, it is how you bounce back, more learned or more disgusted, that will shape the experience to come. Read more
Shopping Should Be A Singular Activity
Men Don’t Take No For An Answer
Five Reasons to NOT fly Business
I recently flew with the renewed Swiss International Airlines and was fortunate enough to be on their very new Business Class.
4. Business class gives you meal options, something that is never good. The only option with food that my mom gave me was, take it or leave it, and if you took it and then left it, you always got scolded. With food choices I can never decide what I want yet I always end up munching. And when you have meals from Hiltl, that famous Swiss vegetarian paradise, (think of it as a really upmarket Udipi, or Shiv Sagar, or Rajdhani, but really seriously upmarket) few people can say no, or leave anything on the plate. This is when it dawned on me why business class seats are wider and bigger – because only fat people fly in them! The kind who order and finish their food every time. The more I fly then, the more I could risk my fitness and supple catlike nimble agilities.
The Humble Opinion
The most ridiculous inherent contradiction that was ever uttered by any sane (or at least under influence) human being was along the lines of this: In my humble opinion…
An opinion can’t be humble…just like an elephant can’t fit in the backseat of a Tata Nano, not even if he folds his legs. An opinion is your take on the world or the things in it, how then can it be humble. Sure it can be presented with humility but that too has the paradoxical putridity of how humble can a 100-carat diamond present be…
In short, opinions are sharp, big and defined…they may need refinement and could even lack precision but a good one should be as friendly as a nuclear missile. That’s how you tell a good opinion.
Sure you invite the tag opinionated but that’s not all a bad thing – you get used to living alone eventually.
My show has always been about an opinion. If you notice, the camera never goes off between the time the dish is brought and I take my first bite and comment. It is perhaps the only thing that manages to intrigue on the show.
Else, I have been accused of killing food twice – once when it is being prepared and once when I dead-pan comment on it. I could use more emotion I am told but, in my defence, I am not allowed to drink on the job. Waitaminute…aargh!!!
Back to the point, the intrigue of the show hangs on what comes out of my mouth once I bite into something – the intrigue of the immediate. Not what I will blurt post three bites, two takes and five make-up jobs later (although there are none, can’t you tell!?).
The idea was always to play on spontaneity and speedy suspense. Now I am opinionated. I am as opinionated as any Indian who likes his political drama interspersed with a few innings of cricket. I have a take on everything – from movies to the people who go to watch them, from food to drink to lack of them – I am so opinionated that I find myself judging my own self and I find it hard to be living with me all the time.
Trouble is, in spite of my opinions I hardly seem to improve…Thing is, like all of us, I have a vision of life, the world and everything in-between and when things appear different, it sparks an opinion. The chicken-egg here is how did I come to have that opinion in the first place?
Well, I sure wasn’t born with it, it evolved. Through my experiences and exposures, it came to be. And it is never complete, it is always evolving. And it is so for all of us, opinion grows and matures even when we refuse to.
So, if you ever have an opinion, splash it. The caveat is, bring it when you are asked for it: Free anything is worth what you pay for it, a free lunch costs even more. Through my blogs, I invite and solicit opinion.
I like to be told how I am faring, how I can improve. It is my way of bouncing a hundred tiny graphite balls off my blank canvas and hoping a meaningful sketch evolves from it. Usually, it does.
Recently someone left a comment on my previous blog, “Of Crime and…” and it made me think. I like my meat au bleu and unknowingly I seem to have pushed it upon others.
The idea wasn’t as much to thrust as to let people know what I feel and it could be the popular accepted opinion in certain parts of the world. But, I guess, in my zeal to outlaw over-cooked meats, I think I have irked a few.
In my defence, first, the science – the more you cook meat, the more the proteins coagulate, the juices escape and the meat becomes chewier, tougher. It is incorrect to think that raw meat is chewier.
Learning from the Outside
You know the guy who said, “Child is the Father of Man”, probably did so after a game of marbles. Not that William Wordsworth was any ace at the game but it must have been something so simple and yet so enormously humbling.
Less grammatically, Arun was a sheer delight. He was fun, he brought fun and he made it fun for everyone else.
A Life Well Wasted
My life is not exactly a tale to recount to grandchildren by the fireplace: the biggest thing I have done yet is to dream. More lately I have dreamt of amassing wealth beyond the dreams of avarice or at least my boastful circle of acquaintances and that fantasising in itself has kept me Prozac-like happy in my shell.
I don’t know whatever exactly happened to dreams of being a pilot and a fireman? Nobody really wants to be a money-making machine as a kid; oh no, our dreams are way more colourful as children.
That last one is not always good because it means that I have effectively smiled through earthquakes and minefields.
2010 Highlights
If this were a news magazine, or news anything, none of this would matter. But conversely, in my world, the G8 doesn’t matter. Not directly anyways. You have to be infinitesimally insignificant or immensely important to not be affected. I have my own visions of grandeur which announce me my own self-proclaimed ruler of all things Magan. Outside of that, nothing really exists. Which explains why nobody comments on my blog, or even visits it for that matter.
1.Fantastic Food: I visited private kitchens in Hong Kong, super restaurants in Singapore, and some great little joints in Tuscany, Turin, Bordeaux, Paris, and London. I think food worldwide is going back to basics. Simplicity is the new complex. How to make food with local ingredients, retain flavours and yet make it look sexy and chic, that was the stress at most of these places. Even in India, most restaurants are trying to look inwards to glorify lost cuisines and blurred recipes. The closing of El Buli will only further the idea that the anti-molecular people were trying to propagate: food must be filling and not decorative. Well, personally, I still lament the closing of an institution but I do look forward to making a precision landing at Noma sometime 2011.
2.Great Wines: Wines are always great and it was good to see India take its head out (from a certain part of its own archaic anatomy where it was long stuck) and make some wines that could actually stand their own on foreign soils. I wrote the chapter on Indian wines for a book called The Wine Opus and I promise you guys, dear readers, that I never felt queasy about saying what I have said in that book. I didn’t have to lie about the quality of the wines and I wrote with utter honesty. The fact that no Nashik farmers’ association is staging a protest outside my house and also the observation that I haven’t seen any cheap-mock papier-mâché effigies of my Adonis-like self being burnt anywhere, then, I think further highlights that they didn’t quite mind what I wrote. Outside of India, I drank some great wines from Bordeaux, Tuscany, and Piedmont. Once again, I stress the need for us to relearn the basics. There are no points for forgetting where we come from: snazzy styles of wines to suit the international palate were forgetful; classic wines that respect the local traditions and Terroir are the ones that stood out memorably.
3.Super Shopping: Singapore and Hong Kong are dangerous places, especially if you are the kind who thinks that one can never possess enough shoes, or that a hundred jackets are a hundred jackets too less, or that the only way to desist from shopping is to shop it all out of your system. In short, if you are anything like me, the kind who could, in one single outing, equal the defence budget of a modest land-locked non-neutral nation, then you better stay as far away from Singapore and Hong Kong as you can. I am sure airlines flying to-and-fro make a bundle on just the excess baggage charge. No wonder HK further simplifies check-ins by having city terminals so you don’t have to lug your planetary luggage too far. London is good too, but only in the post-NY sales. But then you better work-out for an entire month before to have the strength and stamina to endure a day or two of the urban jungle, to navigate piles and piles of palpitating paranoid people in order to reach the mountainous masses of marked-off market-goods.
4.Best virtue of 2010: Humility, and no small thanks to the recession. It was terrible! Nothing has had more humbling an experience on us hedonists than the ugly R-thing. We all had to learn to drink only one bottle of Champagne before breakfast, and not squirm if it happened to be a non-vintage. Some of the more unfortunate amongst us were so strained that they had to resort to drinking the poorer vintages of Bordeaux. Those who just couldn’t bear the thought of this kept decanting it into empty bottles of ’82 only if so to try and fool their own wiser selves ever so momentarily. We stored the Caviar from parties by collecting the leftover into little Tupperware. Parties were just not the same with a quintet downsized to a quartet. Oh the pallor of it all! I sure hope that we don’t have another such again. It was almost painful to see the high-flying people using their frequent flyer miles to upgrade themselves, trying to hide their faces as they slipped their coach class tickets across the counter along with their G2000 loyalty cards.
5.Second best virtue: Patience. The one thing that CWG taught us is sportsmanship. We are a lot cooler now when someone overtakes us, stops, bashes our windscreen in, and makes off with our belongings, missus and all. We are mildly perturbed at best. We have tolerance levels that the Ashoka the Great or the Lord Buddha himself would be impressed by. If we managed to stay in the city when it underwent the most extensive repairs since the Pandavas settled here first, if we can breathe more dust in a day than there is in all the mines of Chile, then we can take anything in our stride. Sure we still honk and flip the bird but that is just an innate need to have our patience acknowledged. Time may be relative but the 0.05 seconds between when a red light turns green and the people in the front move is an absolute eternity and it is acceptable in all galaxy systems for people pulled up behind them to wake them from nanosecond nap with horrendous honking to rattle even hell. Outside of that, we are fairly patient.
So what was the worst thing about 2010? I don’t know. I don’t know where to start either. Everything is horrible when it is happening, but nothing is that bad in retrospect. Not to me at least. I guess I am used to being the butt of most of God’s gags. If they are that. Else, I am the wrong punchline in a misplaced joke! This entry started sober but somewhere along my sensibilities were asphyxiated by the sheer lack of inner guiding reason and I went into a spiral of senselessness. I tried reading this from the top again but it made no sense to me. Have I actually grown dumber even as I wrote this? Or has smartness descended upon me to further spotlight my previous lack of intelligence. I don’t know. I will never know. That’s all I know. But aren’t you glad that the year, this piece, and my momentary broken-chain-of-thought is over…?
30+1 Learnings
So another year has gone by and I seem to have gotten nowhere in particular. The joy is there but distant, like the revelry of a passing procession in the distance. An odd sense of calm has replaced whatever occupied me earlier. More than any accolade, I now merely want to earn my wrinkles well. Something made me jot down a few observations. For over 10,000 days lived, I feel I haven’t taken enough notes or notice. For what they are worth, here they are. Read more
Aeroplane Antics
The Great Cabin Bag Rush: Since the 18th century Gold Rush, little of such widespread interest and intrigue has happened to keep people’s competitive spirit on the front-row edge. In fact, if Clint Eastwood were any younger, he would possibly do a great Spaghetti Western on the whole jig; or should that be Sambar Western?
Mobile phone asphyxiation: Asking a person to switch off his mobile phone is the new social equivalent of public euthanasia; you would sooner switch off the person’s pacemaker, dialysis bag, or life support systems.
The New Negative
This isn’t an article about batteries or charging points so tech geeks, put away that box of tissues and hand lotion. This is about negation. About how negative it is. And how something needs to be done about it.
Now don’t waste a second wondering why that would be a bugging thing in the first place. It was you society dearest that got the ball rolling on this issue. By shunning the very qualifier that existed for certain attributes and qualities in people and non-people, we were left with little but rather vague sounding terms and arm gests that took hours to describe what the previous terms accomplished in a matter of seconds.
Let me explain. The ambiguities of trying to describe a bald man as follicly challenged without using any allusion to the word hair or something that refers to it could quite understandably leave you gasping for words. Similar etiquette and social respect had to be accorded to other people. The result is that nobody can be defective or crazy anymore, they are all special. But how else do you effectively and quickly refer to a fat man sitting across the room without the word tub or lard-bucket. And what self-respecting homo-basher wouldn’t want to call the next limp-wristed queen exactly that!?
If you ask me – even though you aren’t, consider this rhetoric then – there is a certain sense of pride to be had from possessing such marks of obvious identification. Bald, bespectacled and with pierced ears works fine for me, even if so I would so like to suffix Adonis and God-like to that. I don’t need someone getting iffy because they called me bald. In case others hadn’t noticed, I am.
But that isn’t the issue. I am saying it’s OK. I am agreeing, for a change. Be politically correct, all you fucktards! In fact I will join you and add to the pool of already increasing confusions with something that I am surprised still hasn’t rocked the world of literature and language. But then, my contributions couldn’t afford to be any lesser.
I am talking about words that denote the negative: impossible, undoable, undone, unimpressive…you know the road – all of them. In the current context I think they are too negative. They should be toned down a shade to accommodate for some respite. Imagine the impression left on a young impressionable kid who is told that something is impossible. It almost blocks his imagination from ever walking down that road again in the near or even distant future. You’d sooner boot him in the cerebrum or drop him on his head and produce a lesser drastic growth retardation.
And here is my solution.I propose that we replace or prefix, as sounds sensible, the letters ‘um-‘ to connote the negative but with some leeway for free thinking.
So something umpossible would imply a really tough or a hard-to-believe thing, a thing that nobody has achieved or managed to prove till date, or even come close to it, till, one day, God, just to prove that he does exist and doesn’t really need toilet breaks except for that he enjoys the smell of pine products they use in the bathroom, sends us a sign in some form or another – the fastest 100m dash, the greatest medal-winning Olympian, the man who survives without eating – just so to prove that he does what love claims to allegedly do (make the world go round that is) and thereby, by virtue of one eventful showing, shifting the task in question out of the realm of the impossible and into the possible.
So, to keep from being proven wrong in the future by some super form of being, it might be a good idea to call something, simply, umpossible. That would mean it can’t be done so far but hey, who knows!
By that logic things could now be umsightly, umnerving, umcoherent, um-everything basically. Stating or implying the pessimistic and the sceptic but not without some reserve for a reason to root for the home team.
And this is not a tiny movement on a blog. Think of the bigger implications. No more malfunction lawsuits as six sigma becomes a thing of the past. Umtrained would automatically be more qualified to fly than an untrained pilot, thereby taking the numbers of Potential Pilots through the sky, pun intended, thereby leading to reduction of their rather overblown salaries, eventually leading to a reduction in ticket prices. If the plane lands safely somehow, you arrive richer by wealth and preserved in health.
But the biggest implication would be religious. Wait for this, Umbelieveable, in my opinion, could be the one word that unites Catholics and Protestants over the whole saga, right from Annunciation and down to Immaculate Conception and Resurrection.
Let all that sink in. Umconvinced still. Well it is a step up from unconvinced so I will take it as a compliment. Try using it and let me know the results. This is an honest effort at redefining language. I am not trying to be a smart-ass here. Yep, yet another first. Meanwhile, um outta here!
SOPs – Stupid Obviously, Perhaps…
There was a time when the Earth was a free place. There was a time when we were only restricted by our imaginations. I am talking way before PGA declared that nothing is impossible, or as was proven later, till you get caught. There was a even time when men roamed free and didn’t get bugged by a call to not forget to buy things. Obviously this was the era before mobile phones were invented but more pertinently, this was before the concoction of that institution-which-is-not-even-a-building called marriage.
approach: to look away and think the problem now ceases to exist. Training and delegating may be harder but isn’t that what is better.
Freedom of Speech but seem to have lost our Right to reason for ourselves.The Stupid Official Prose or SOPsThere was a time when the Earth was a free place. There was a time when we were only restricted by our imaginations. I am talking way before PGA declared that nothing is impossible, or as was proven later, till you get caught. There was a even time when men roamed free and didn’t get bugged by a call to not forget to buy things. Obviously this was the era before mobile phones were invented but more pertinently, this was before the concoction of that institution-which-is-not-even-a-building called marriage.But none of us really minded having all freedoms curtailed. In fact, today we accept bondage like we accept in-laws, which are two words for the same worry really. Life today is a caged version of its truly rampant raving self. One look at the houses of Bombay with their surrounding juxtaposed grills would make you wonder whether it’s an abode for really large birds or else if S&M is really an accepted weekend family pastime as many openly claim.And yet, all these grotesque visions fade, pale like a lemon that has just seen a lemon-squeezer, when you think of the one freedom that has truly and ever-so-softly been curtailed that you wouldn’t even realise till you read on.I am talking about the freedom to converse, like grown-ups, in complete sentences. Take a second to allow it to sink in; if it takes any longer, than you already have been methodologically maimed.I too was living, numb to this crime, till the other day I happened to be seated on the exit row. With enough fellows to annoy ahead of and behind me, I had a Doppler Effect of an experience of the hostess serving beverages. She said the exact same words each time to every guest. “Would you 
like some tea/coffee”. The affirmative were told to “Please place your cup on the tray”, followed by “Sugar and Creamer please” before the whole thing was repeated with the next desirous.Never once did she let fall forth from her lips any other possible permutation of words that could convey the same meaning with a matched level of respect and obeisance. There was just no “How about some coffee” or just simply, “Coffee?” It was as if in her mind was a printed algorithm that she was following and sticking to like the last leaf in an autumn gale. She didn’t miss one word ever and each time the intonation was perfectly blandly similar to the previous time. Kind of monotonous you’d think. Just the thing that makes the whole idea of joining a self-torturing clan sound way more invigorating. How could anyone, I wondered, manage to say the same thing each time, on every flight each and every day and not feel the happy-noose tightening? I would be the first in such case to pull the emergency latch and bungee out of the plane minus the cord!But these girls seemed quite at ease. They could have done this in any language and had the same amount of measured emotion, much akin to the industry of industrious sex on film. So much for making me feel ‘at home’.SOPs are an institutional way of dealing with discrepancies. I disagree. SOPs are only good when doing things technical. Machines need instructions like that. Humans are smarter. Or so I feel, or felt and thought till now. Sure all of us may not be as adept as grammar but SOPs are a convenient way of succumbing to our shortcomings. It is the classic Ostrich approach: to look away and think the problem now ceases to exist. Training and delegating may be harder but isn’t that what is better.And by then the world had changed, at least to me, or for me. Now I was noticing the ‘matrix’ so to say. Phone rang. “May I speak to Magandeep Singh?” “You Are speaking to him”, I replied. “So, are you Magandeep Singh?”, came the counter-question, leaving me fabulously flummoxed. Another similar one wanted to confirm if I was the man whose first and second name I claimed to go by. Short of a DNA test, I realised, I had no way of proving my, or whoever-I-was-perhaps-allegedly-posing-as’s, identity. The best bit, I was soon able to decipher that they were staring at some piece of (legal) paper that probably had a list of responses as to be exactly recorded so as to anoint them against any ensuing damage if they were liable for prosecution. Little do they know that the only damage that I and millions of others who feel similar ire would cause them would be with the business end of a very nasty gun that fires more rounds per minute than your average midwife. The whole conversation would and could only proceed if I said the magic words. They made me work through a series of ridiculous affirmatives and negatives without once guessing just how my mind was showering them with expletives.And more followed. Another wanted to know the last transaction on my debit card when I had called to ask for one I the first place. Without knowing my Telephone PIN a chap couldn’t proceed to help me apply for a new one. Similarly, I found, entire industries had been wiped clean of any sense of personality or creativity by replacing them with standardised phrases. This was Red Tape but only oral. From ordering food to a taxi, from paying utility bills to luxury hospitality products – all had been structured and set so that nobody would ever need to think again. Habit would soon take over and the person would be as efficient asleep as awake.
Robots could then be wheeled in and these catatonic cadavers be ejected from their slumped seats and we consumers would never know the difference. The corporate would because it is cheaper to oil a robot than it is to feed a family of four, or account for cigarette breaks.So many such self-negating illogical cyclic redundancies have seeped their way into our lives that we don’t even realise just how devoid of logic the world we live in is. Sad that we need someone to tell us what is correct or appropriate. Sad that of all the stupidities we could have trusted ourselves to commit, we went and outsourced everyday wisdom.Abroad this problem isn’t as ugly. Sure they have a few common identifying queries – foolproof ways to ensure that the right data is conveyed to the right person – but even then there is space for sentence construction and word-order that needn’t be the same every time. They are not scared to crack a joke, or say something that may be a little less corporate. They have the guts to attempt something a tad personally influenced. Sure they run the risk of offending someone, but don’t we all in our daily interactions. Whatever happened to intuition? Waitaminute, that’s a level detached, whatever happened to common sense!?We rhymed reasonably in Sonnets and held forth in Haiku. Prose aside, we even put a man in space. And then we found out, much to our collective shame of the species that we were only using a mere 10% of our brains all along. But with these SOPs we have unleashed a further reduction of the workload on the already limited usage of our brains thereby risking making us as useless as the 999,999 who couldn’t swim as fast. And sadly we are growing into a country of over a billion and a half with almost linear personalities. This here is my appeal to bring back the human element in service. Let’s resurrect common sense and personal intuition before it is too late. For now, it seems that we may have won our Freedom of Speech but seem to have lost our Right to reason for ourselves.
On Marriages Arranged
There is a reason behind the whole process of life and birth. Darwinism aside, it was basically designed with one main idea in mind: we should never be able to choose our parents. This is mostly so that you may hate them, even complain about them but you can’t change them. Law may provide complacent solace in some forms but like toothpaste out of a tube, there is no reversing the flow.
Marriage on the other hand provides no such comfortable convenience of pre-ordained decisions. If you believe in stupidities like “marriages are made in heaven” then I don’t really want to be the one to break it to you – just ask Santa in the next letter you send to the North Pole! Read more
How to do business in North & South India
Doing business is easy, but not in India. On the degree of being a difficult thing to do, business in India ranks right behind removing your own appendix without enough anaesthetic. Sure there may be government subsidies but that means dealing with government officials in the first place. Save having in-laws over for your honeymoon, nothing can be more unpleasant.
But fear not. I am experienced in the ways of at least this world. I have tackled numerous slimy officials, bribed many a clerk, sweet-talked an equal number of ‘babus’ and bought the wedding decorations for a few ministerial secretaries, and all that only before my morning tea today.
Read on then to your own fortunes. Here are things they don’t teach you at night school.
10 Things NOT to do in Singapore
I had heard a lot about this marvellous clinically clean city around the
continental corner and, as a good traveller looking for value-for-his-and-his-neighbours’-money, I logged on to a million sites to gather all I could about thing to do while there. I found a lot of information, much of which was put out as lists which mostly stated “10 things to do in Singapore”. I read so many ratings that it almost felt competitive to decide what to visit and what to leave out. Singapore is very impressive, don’t get me wrong but I was very confuddled how to put forth this plethora of information without creating further confusion in your already-softened minds. Hope this helps… Read more
Are You a Man or a Matador?
I have just come back from Spain, perhaps the most homophobic country in the world. Either that or they are all closet homosexuals with a deep-rooted insecurity and some sort of need to “fit in”.
Sounds rude right? Well it was all fine till I went for a bull fight, or, as they like to glamorously call it, a Corrida de Toro. I always knew the correlation between big cars and the penises of men who own them but this public drama of complex egos, this mayhem of the morons, this fiesta of fragile fools is something that could keep even Freud up and perplexed for a very long time. No other society in the world I can think of 
feels so desperate a need to prove their virility and power in a manner more degrading, self-degenerating, uncivilised and illogical. And all this under the blinding garb of tradition, honour and other such words that bullfighting enthusiasts obviously love to cite but have no clue to their meanings.
The term “Bull Fight” is only half true: that there is a bull involved. Outside of that, it isn’t much of a fight. Taking candy from a kid might be considered a stiffer challenge with higher betting odds, especially given how kids are nowadays, with cable TV and wrestling and what not. Bull-fighting, in comparison, is like driving with the seat belt not off but just a tad loose in a Styrofoam car. I think a mechanical bull ride could be more dangerous. This made even American football appear gruesome, forget ice hockey or rugby or worse yet, Aussie rules football. Read more
That Telephone Call…
Like a mild rash in the nether regions, we have all got it at one point or another. At all odd hours, odd situations – “Hello, Good evening sir/ma’am, would you like a credit card/loan/phone connection…they are like spam in your mailbox except that unlike spam they arrive at the most inauspicious of occasions.
I remember reading somewhere that the telephone was invented about three decades or so after the bath tub (don’t ask me where I find such stuff). I sure as hell doubt its authenticity but the point made was very relevant. It said that for about thirty years you could step into a warm comfortable bath without the telephone going off! Read more
Nightspots – What makes them tick?
The human species is possibly the best standing example of that eternal cycle of life and death. Nothing else showcases this chronological phenomenon better; well, nothing except nightclubs. They have a similar cycle but it moves much faster – like those fast forwarded clips they often show on Nature channels where the sun rises and sets in a matter of seconds (Time Lapse shots – for those who know and should now know that I too know).
I am not a celebrity so I can’t say that I am reporting first hand; more like an acquaintance of a friend who attended told me: but in this age of information and technology, such data can be treated as first-hand information, right? Or have I been inside my office far too long?
Say what you may, you can’t miss the splash on the pages. The prime minister shakes an opportune hand with the US and gets a massive cold; someone operated and saved the oldest Siamese twins, disjoint only on their political views…All humbug! A new night spot just opened and briefly seen were two actresses from upcoming films with lots of nudity (in the film that is) in hunky male company (at the club that is) – Carry on tabloid, we are all tuned in and listening… Read more
Chinese martial arts Vs. Porn
When I was in school, martial art films were the only thing Chinese on the market. Albeit dubbed, they also formed a clear majority of ‘English films’ that made it to the city in VHS format.
Many in my age group then had a major love for these films: the language was barely comprehensible, the action was great, the stunts real and one didn’t really have to bother with who was playing the main character.
Ten years on, teenage times, and the action on tape had turned a tad more carnal. Funnily though, and I only recently awakened to this odd similarity, these films of the flesh were not much unlike Chinese martial art films. Read more
