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.
Indian Food and Wine: London Case Files
When Indians settled down in the UK in the late 50s, they unknowingly ended up planting something in their adopted land that was far stronger than their rich culture – a taste for richer spices. For a long time Indian food in the UK was synonymous with pub grub and after-dinner binge eating with chilli-slapped food that could burn a hole through space-age metal. Today, a lot has changed. Indian chefs who migrated Westwards, tired of the dichotomy that existed here between Indian and foreign cuisines served here in India have now come into their own and Read more
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
Disclaimer: The CYA Clause
The new corporate conglomerate is a very scared body. So traumatised are they by the very people that they try to 
serve and save that they don’t know anymore how to get up in the morning and breathe without pissing off some activist, a minority community, or an endangered species of a rare marsupial. What started as America’s favourite past time – suing someone over something they did or didn’t do, suing someone else who thought that this idea was silly to begin with and then going and suing the entire legal system just to keep things animated – has now definitely blown out of proportions. 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.
Toddy: God’s Own Brew
Sweet Sweet Yummy Yummy Toddy!
A clear light white drink; harvested early morning by slashing the bark of palm trees and collecting the sap overnight. The aromas are intriguing yet inviting. Soft and a bit reminiscent of fermenting coconut water (maybe because it isn’t too far from it). A little meaty too with lots of green bark character.
The taste is distinct and perhaps not the most given although it does grow on you and a couple of glasses later, you would be forgiven for thinking of it as weird cider. It is mostly semi-sweet at this point, with a hint of prickle on the tongue, somewhat nutty (although i don’t know if Date Palm Toddy would too exhibit this note; what i am trying is Coconut Palm Toddy.) and shows some nice lactic creaminess. The finish is definitely cider-like but minus all or any finesse whatsoever.
An Austrian Adventure
You know you have become a wine sissy when you refer to a series of tastings as an adventure. You then sadly realise that you will never be able to brave the outback alone or accompanied and a vineyard will be all the wilderness your faint heart can manage.
Pity, but on the flipside, you get to taste some fantastic wines. Here is a rant oops I mean list of some things I recently got to nose and tongue. Wherever there are breaks the grape variety or wine style may be changing. The key is:
PB – Pinot Blanc, SB – Sauvignon Blanc, PG – Pinot Grigio, WB – WeissBurgunder aka PB, GB – GraueBurgunder aka PG, RS – Residual Sugar
One more thing; an asterisk (*) denotes a personal favourite. Honestly, few wines were bad and turn-away-able. The brands mentioned here pretty much epitomise the highest echelons of winemaking in the (Southern) Styrian region or Austria. Read more
Wine Retail in India
L'Essential in Saint-Emilion
It is very deplorable the way our liquor vends are so ineffectively called “wine shops”. You would sooner call my hair style an afro rather than refer to these caged holes-in-the-wall establishments, wine shops. Walk into any one across the country (barring a few cities) and chances are you will find that wine occupies the least amount of shelf space and still manages to collect the maximum amount of dust!
The reasons for drinking wines are many, and as good as any – social consciousness, health concerns, curiosity – whatever the excuse, the fact remains that the market is growing at a stunning and stable 30% per annum. Read more
A Wild ‘Wild’ Rosé
Blauer Wildbacher (BW) (blo-er wield-baa-kher) is a very peculiar grape that is found only in the southern part of Austria called Styria. This happens to be the smallest wine region of Austria with 550Ha of vines. That is even lesser than the 700Ha vine region around the capital of Vienna, which incidentally, is the only capital in the world with an established (and successful, if I may add) wine business.
Back to Styria, of their 550Ha, almost 400+ Ha are planted with the BW. It gives a black grape but little red is made from it. When the wine is called BW on a list it is usually red; Schilcher (Shil-kher) refers to the pale rosé version.
Shiclcher, for the uninitiated can be quite a revolution of tastes. As I say, it is the rose with balls! Read more
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
Sipping Somethings Spanish – Fenavin 2009
Spain was a beautiful visit…so much to learn, more to unlearn, and so much forgotten already! I would love to put the blame on that lovely ham, that ode of culinary class – the famed Pata Negra (black footed or more correctly, hoofed).
I was in the region of Castilla LaMancha followed by a few days in Madrid and I can see why it would be considered the precursor to Ibiza but that is not what this post is about. (Mail me for more dope on that!) Meanwhile, here are a few things I tasted and am sharing. 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
Preparing for death – Ills beyond the will!
I have never had an ugly dream where I got up in the middle of the night sweating and palpitating. I would like to though, would make me feel like that guy in the “November Rain” video. Statistics have shown that most such people were having nightmares about being trapped, suffocation, arranged marriages, free-falling…mostly, deathly dreams without the ability to do anything about it except to get more scared till such time when they shocked themselves awake!
The good thing is that this made many swear off marriage. Almost all of them even managed to go back to sleep. I couldn’t. Reading about such stuff put one thing in my head – death, when it comes, comes without a warning. No save-the-date cards, no placemarkers – just pure stiffness and numbness all over all of a sudden. Read more
Technology Enhanced Festivals
There are very few things that can get me worked up to the point where I can break anything I strike, including my hand, and with each passing festival, I am finding it more and more difficult to buy health insurance!
There was a time – I wasn’t alive then; even my dad says he has only heard of that glorious era – when festivals and celebration were exactly as the dictionary defined them. People took time out from their daily rut to visit the near and dear ones: gifts were presented with much a personal touch and, more importantly, true affection. People stepped out of their houses to greet and welcome neighbours and friends into their homes and there was a true sense of warmth and enjoyment. Festivities lasted for almost a week around the day of the festival itself. Read more
Keeping Up With The Jains
Starting from the era of Adam & Eve right up till Armageddon cometh, we mortals pay for all we consume. I remember a time from a previous life when people were happy drinking whatever was classified as intoxicant; and if it could power some medieval form of transport, all the better!
Lately the scene has changed. More people are asking what exactly is in there glass; will it kill them or send them flying, and all this at what cost? It started with the more common whiskey and beer and gradually drained into wine. So much that even fellow Indians everywhere are up in arms and happy hours, inquiring apropos their evening elbow-exercise. Read more
