I realized that I mentioned board games in my last post but never ended up getting to it, so a quick followup was in order. I have always had an unhealthy obsession with board games. Having grown up learning chess at a very early age from my grandmother (She called the Rook “Elefend” and the Queen “Kyoon”), I soon developed a taste for turn based dice games, after realizing that cheating at chess, what with “Elefends” taking liberties with the straightness of their movements and bishops deviating slightly from their diagonals, just to win against my grandmother wasn’t really fun anymore, especially when I realized that she was letting me cheat and get away with it.

The first really sophisticated and downright addictive turn based game I was introduced to was a relic from the 1940s called Wembley. It was a full fledged simulation of the FA cup from that era. You managed teams, bought star players and calculated probabilities with a unique set of 6 loaded dice (3 favourable ones for home games, and 3 unfavourable ones for away games) to coax one of your teams to victory in the grand final at Wembley. This game kept us thoroughly engrossed through Chennai summers, sometimes to the point where we would get through about 4 or 5 games in a single day.

Having the bar set this high rather early, we found the Indian board game market rather disappointing. The very best games hardly ever made it here, and Wembley was starting to get a little repetitive. That was when we decided to design our own board games. Actually, “design” would be a rather specious thing to say. We mostly “adapted” good board games and set them in a local context. For instance, we created a Ranji Trophy version of Wembley, although the notion of buying and selling cricketers was unheard of in the late 80s.

I have always wondered what were the rules of the dice game the Pandavas played with the Kauravas. The original texts are rather obscure on this particular point. I mean, it couldn’t be a simple “Let-both-players-roll-and-the-highest-number-wins” sort of yawn-inducing game right? Surely, that cannot be spectator friendly. After all, we are told that the entire court was watching. So surely, there was some underlying board involved? What was it? Snakes and Ladders? Ha! Son of Dharma, your 3 leads you into the Snake infested forest while my 4 leads me to the Ladder to Draupadi. Was it some early form of Monopoly? Did Yudhisthira lose Draupadi at the Hotel on Hastinapura Avenue or the 4 houses on Indraprastha Place? Did Shakuni win the 400 gold coin Bank error in his favour? Did Yudi get assessed  for  “Street Repairs” on Chance after he built 3 houses on Dwarka Street? I don’t know.

On the subject of Monopoly, yet another game that I spent many an hour on, I quickly realized that playing by the official rule book made the game rather one-sided pretty quickly, sort of like how Tamil audiences in the 90s could predict, to the accurate nanosecond, when Goundamani was going to beat Senthil. Monopoly gets too predictable too quickly.

Perhaps I overestimate the number of board game geeks in this city, but should there not be a Madras edition of Monopoly? At least this gentleman and me seem to think so.  Perhaps it should be named Saravana Stores, after the nearest synonym for the original name. But I’d like to introduce some serious changes in the game play, to make it more Madras specific and in general more competitive.

First off, Free Parking has got to go. TANSTAFP (There aint no such thing….) . That dysfunctional location will be replaced with a Chance like set of cards that deal with various Chennai traffic motifs such as:

• Pay Rs 200 towards end of month collection drive bribe to constable
• Pay Rs 100 fine for having wrong kind of license plate.
• Music system stolen from car. Rs 200
• Miss a turn – Stay stuck here because the CM’s motorcade has blocked all roads

Those 4 boring railroads will be replaced by

• MRTS
• MTC
• Madras Autos
• Call Taxis

And each of them will have their own set of rules. Opponents landing on “Madras autos”,  for instance, will pay an “over-the-meter” rent, in other words, 25 multipled by whatever they rolled on their die + 1 (if one is playing during day time) and + 4 (if one is playing at night). If you land at the MRTS square, you need to pay rent only if there is a blue moon visible through the window. Yes, the train frequency is pretty rare, after all.

Chance cards will include Madras staples such as

• Pay Rs 400 for whitewashing P James Magic Show graffiti from your wall
• Rs 100 – Medical expenses incurred due to questionable fish fry at Elliots beach
• Pay 200 for post-deepavali garbage cleaning operations

Water works and Electric company will be replaced with Saravanan Thanni Lorry Inc and TNEB. Owning the Thanni lorry, you can strategically deprive certain areas of water and lower their rents. People landing on TNEB will miss one turn in addition to paying the rent because hey,have you ever stood in a TNEB queue?

The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a daze, with time spent mostly in airports, cars, board games and killing zombies with Gatling pea shooters. Since the number of things that transpired far exceed my threshold for the composition of a sensible narrative, I have decided to dispense with trivialities such as time, space and vibrating strings. The following is a pseudo-fake account of the last couple of weeks.

Chennai to Toronto

It started with a suit, or to be precise, the lack of one. I walked up with my usual practised smile to the check-in counter, after carefully selecting the right check-in clerk. Personally the method I use involves picking the clerk who has neither just arrived at the counter nor has spent hours dealing with passengers insisting on checking in the questionably packed 45 kg cardboard box containing a brand new Sumeet mixie. The key is to pick up some one who has dealt with 3-5 customers prior to yourself. Why this elaborate process, you might ask. Maximizing probability of free upgrade to business class, I might answer.

You see, when Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved temporary airborne-ness at the turn of the century, little did they know that a few generations later, Deep Vein Thrombosis (or Economy Class Syndrome) would be the primary concern of frequent flyers. But I digress. Where were we? Yes, in the Etihad airways check-in counter at Anna International Airport. I walked up confidently, with my small check-in baggage, telling the girl at the counter that I “just” had one bag to check-in, to subtly hint that I deeply care for her daily struggle with Sumeet mixies and Lalitha Wet Grinders bound for Chicago and Toronto. I then nonchalantly handed over my 3-booklet passport and asked if a free upgrade was well.. on the cards. I added a smile that prematurely announced my immense gratitude at her yet-to-be-displayed generosity.

She fell for it. Well, she almost did. If this was the social equivalent of a bear trap, she seemed to have the keys to wriggle free. She said – “Sir, I am willing to upgrade you but we have a strict formals only dress code at Etihad.” Apparently, my Wrangler jeans and fake Lacoste t-shirt from Tirupur did not cut it as far as Etihad was concerned.

So I spent the next 18 hours as a node in a hexagonal close packing lattice structure frequently making ways for nodes that wished to visit the restroom .

But as is usually the case, I had interesting neighbours. When not watching award winning German art movies on the personal entertainment system, I was watching the heated exchange between my Modi-supporting, Tambram-pride showing, Congress-hating, Vegetarian terrorist neighbour and the foul-mouthed, Syrian flight attendant, sorry..Stewardess. No wait, was it supposed to be the other way around?

My neighbour, let’s call him (since I do not recall his name) Sikkil Ramavaidyanathan for simplicity’s sake. He had some extreme views on where this country was headed and why drastic intervention (generally involving forced exodus of muslims) was required. As the Alfredo pasta and White wine settled in, I wasn’t actually listening to him, but mostly imagining what he said. I imagined that he was Neobram, part of a futuristic cult movement that sought to take Tambrams who had gone soft, back to their superior Aryan roots. I imagined Swastika tattoos, Mass veda chanting, Meditation (and concentration) camps, Skinheads (with kudumi of couse) and self-flagellation, in the form of Poonals made from Maanja kayaru and glass pieces. Sieg Heil Ramavaidyanathan.  But as soon as the wine wore off, I chastised myself on entertaining such unfair metaphors.

But anyway, back to the moment, he was demanding vegetarian food, and the flight attendant counter-offered vegetarian animals, such as hens and cows, as food. Apparently, the management at Etihad had the habit of answering the question – “Are you vegetarian?” with “Yes, We only eat vegetarians, as that conforms to the definition of Halal meat”, and therefore were generally unwilling to believe that people could starve themselves of animal protein and still live to pick fights with flight attendants. As offers and counter-offers flew, my neighbour eventually settled for a salad. It had cucumbers, pinapples, olives, parsley and to top it all off, a fillet of smoked cod. Vaidya muttered a curse that would have mostly been an extended beep on American daytime television.

We then started speaking about general gilma like democracy, and somehow that  led to Suu-kyi and that led to Myanmar, and eventually, the subject, for some strange reason, turned to the immoral vendors in Burma bazaar. Our man felt that the vile flith being hawked by the (obviously non-Hindu) smugglers there was spoiling our youth. He was referring to ubiquitous “Sir. Do you want Matter?” offers for videos that featured men and women generally attempting to follow the Biblical diktat to “be fruitful and multiply”. Matter-videos are the basest of evil, he declared. After all, what can be worse than arming a 17 year old with knowledge he should only learn as a crash course a few minutes before his wedding’s first-night?

I then suggested a counter-business model that could balance this wholesale destruction of our city’s youth. If matter videos spoil, wouldn’t anti-matter videos enrich? My idea was to mass produce devotional (anti-matter) DVDs and make them available for an even lower price. Surely, the rich, textured world of myth, lore and bhakthi will pwn matter of all kind. He looked at me quizzically to check if I was being sarcastic, but then I usually save my most earnest expressions for making the most ridiculous of suggestions.

Toronto

I reached Toronto, and spent a boring couple of days mostly cooped up inside my hotel room playing Plants and Zombies and once in a while, trying out various transitions (Wipe left, Blinds down, Spiral etc) for the presentation I had to make to a customer. Nothing exciting, except that I did visit Hotel Saravanaa Bhavan this time, at Mississauga (pronounced Mrs. Ogre) and for $7.50, confirmed that the sambar there tastes the same as the one in KK Nagar. There is Six Sigma, and then there is the Six Saravana (a.k.a Aaru Mugam) methodology, that ensures Sambar similarity at the molecular level. I was impressed. When I walked into the Pearson International Airport to catch my flight back, I was dressed in a suit, as I did not intend on sparing any effort to have my free upgrade. I got my upgrade, and soon enough, I was sipping on Champagne, munching on Mushroom kebab and playing around with the seat controls to see if I could get myself a full-body massage.

Chennai

The return trip was mostly uneventful. At Abu Dhabi, we were all tested for Swine Flu. I noticed a smirk on most of the Arabs’ faces, almost as if to say that their casual curse “These Dirty Pigs from the West..” had suddenly taken on a rather literal meaning. For the first time in the world, Asian countries were screening people coming from First world countries like Canada and the US. They did a pretty good job though. There was this big scanner that produced an IR image of all passengers filing through the arrival gate, and anyone with a reddish throat or chest area was held for further analysis (or something to that effect).

Chennai airport, on the other hand, used an even more powerful scanning method. The Form. We were all given one that we had to fill, and the questions on that form would have certainly shaken the strands of DNA in the H1N1 virus with the deepest of fears.

1. Have you visited countries that are infected with H1N1?
2. Do you have fever or cold now?
3. Have you had fever or cold in the last 10 days?
4. Have you interacted with people who have had fever or cold in the last 10 days?
5. Have you had symptoms of flu?
6. If yes, is it H1N1?

Question 6 essentially sealed the deal for me.

I answered no to everything except 1 and handed it to the doctor in charge, who had temporarily assigned IR-scanning responsibilities to his eyes. He eyed me for a few seconds, rubber stamped me swine-flu free, and let me go.

One way of describing my profession would be – I leverage core competencies to build synergies in a co-creative environment and articulate value propositions for key stakeholders and deliver transformational change by positioning comprehensive, end-to-end, verticalized, out-of-the-box solutions for productivity improvements.

But I noticed that execubabblers seem to have forgotten our epics, so for their own good, I had to do this:

Please do the needful and revert back with any concerns.

ps: Thanks to http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

I took one last drag from my cigar and rang my receptionist and asked her to send in the first patient of the day. I walked over to the record player and put on “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”. Mozart always had this effect of putting my patients at ease, and got them talking not long after they had settled down on the couch. I had tried Stravinsky in the past, but that did not go too well. It tended to make the patients a tad…cartoonish.

The first patient knocked on the door and I asked him to come in. He…rolled in and made himself comfortable on the couch.

I feel slothful, doctor.

Hmm. Tell me more about it. Do you feel tired? Physically?

No. Not physical at all. As a member of the Solanum Tuberosum community, we are pretty healthy. Starchy in fact. I think the problem’s in my brain.

Why do you think so?

I seem to spend all of my days sitting in front my computer monitor watching videos online.

Hmm. So you are an youtuber. A couch human.

Yes. I don’t want to die a vegetable. Well, yes, I am one, but you know what I mean.

I do. When did you start watching videos online

I wanted to use the web to learn how to be more useful to my customers, the humans

But you are rather versatile, the most popular vegetable in the world, are you not?

Yes, but I feel like a can of pepsi. Popular, yet mostly harmful. What do I get made into? French fries, laden with cholesterol. Baked potato, filled with cheese. Streetside Aloo Tikki, filled with Bacteria. Nothing uplifting. I don’t feel special.

But you provide nourishment to a very large part of the world.

But it is not enough just to fill people’s stomachs. I want them to experience joy. And that is why I was searching for recipe videos online, on creative, gourmet recipes involving me

And did you find any?

No. All the good recipes never involve me. It’s almost as if I am commonplace food, some one who does not belong on the gourmet’s table. A peasant’s calorie provider. Yes my absence has known to cause famines, yet my presence has never caused joy.

But it is your ubiquity that is special. What other vegetable can lay claim to that? Being an expensive gourmet item like asparagus is socially not very productive.

I still feel miserable.

Hm. Tell me about your relationship with your father

Oh well. My roots are in Shimla. I had a very protected childhood in a very simple family. A very down to earth existence, in fact. I want to break out of my banal existence.

Interesting. I’d like to explore your childhood a little bit more next time. Tuesday evening?

Ok doctor. In the meanwhile, do you know any gourmet potato recipes?

Oh yes. I recommend the Scarborough Curry. Potato, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.

Thank you doctor. I’ll see you on Tuesday.

I rang Helga, and asked her to send the next one in.The knock this time was soft, hesitant, indicative of a lack of self confidence. I asked the patient to come in. He rolled in with the grace of a deflated football and settled himself on the couch.

I am dark.

The colour of your skin is immaterial.

Look at the potato. He is so fair skinned. I want skin like him.

Why Mr Beet? You are a nutritious vegetable of the healthiest kind. Why do you want to turn into a fair skinned amit_123 vegetable like potato?

You will not understand doctor. There is a subliminal bias towards fair skin in this country. They get better jobs, and better spouses.

So did you try any treatments?

Of course I did. I tried steaming. It made me soft, but didn’t make any difference to my colour. My cousin tried the more dangerous Fungal treatment. He exposed himself to some spores and hoped that the white furry growth will add to his fairness. It did not. He died a horrible death as the fungus ate him from the outside.

Tragic. But it would fair (I’m sorry) to say that in nature, darker colours are generally healthier. Lighter, pastel shades are often associated with a lack of health, would it not?

All that is fine doctor. You will not understand my position. You are Caucasian. You will not feel the pain I do when I see the matrimonials in the newspaper, the ones that say – “Wanted fair, wheatish grain for pollination”. It makes me feel unwanted.

Hm. I believe that you must turn the energy of your depression into the strains of lugubrious, yet powerful music. Sing the song of your sadness and uplift the masses.

I will sing the Reddishpurples. Thank you doctor.

That wasn’t too difficult. Helga, last one for the day please.

The patient walked in, but I wasn’t too sure. Several brown lumps ambled in and assembled themselves on the couch and once they did that, a doleful face manifested itself.

Doctor, I feel like a eunuch

I cannot quite conceive…Sorry..that was “my” slip (ha ha). Why do you say so?

My pumped up “seeded” cousins call me a eunuch. They laugh at my inability to reproduce

Why should that matter? Reproduction is not such a lofty goal

But what other goal might I have in life?

Perhaps the goal of being part of the greatest milkshake in the world, the legendary “Sharjah Oman” of Trivandrum?

Oh well, perhaps, but I need something loftier

Ok. How about you being a metaphor for AIDS prevention?

Eh? How does a seedless date become a metaphor for AIDS prevention?

There! You said it. The answer’s right there. If dates are seedless, AIDS can be prevented

Oh. Like that ah. But doctor, I detect a flaw in your logic

Hm. Boole-iye (ha ha)

If less people have casual sex, there will be more AIDS.

Really? And how is that?

Consider the following two kinds of people- promiscuous, risky, potential HIV carriers and sexually conservative people who do not have much casual sex. It is safe to assume that there are more of the second kind. So it follows that if more socially conservative people have more casual sex, it reduces the chances of promiscuous, risky people passing the disease around.

Oh I see. How do you feel now?

Actually, better. Pwning your logic gives me self confidence. Thank you doctor

(To Helga ) Please make a note. No more economists or people who read economics books allowed as patients.

Note:

1. No vegetables were harmed during this experiment. Markers using vegetable dyes were used, and Mr Beet’s eyes are cotton + red toothpaste

2. The Seedless date session has references to Steve Landsburg highly enjoyable book – “More sex is safer sex”

3. The origami brontosaurus

4. The painting on the wall is by MC Escher.

This is a sequel to Sigh Figh Chen Igh, in terms of it being set in the same fictional universe. It’s also rather Madras centric, so for those not from this city, migrate here if you wish to make sense of this post. On an unrelated note, somebody saw it fit to interview me.

The laboratory had a laid-back look, contrary to the popular cliche that busy, messy labs are the ones at the cutting edge of science. But do not mistake the Extraordinary Gilma Lab for one of those stereotypical R&D joints where bureaucrats test the tensile strength of scarlet coloured tape. The EGL was the pride of Silken Valley, a sprawling high tech strip of research institutions that stretched from the Mandaveli Hyperbusport to the Hovercraft port on the banks of the Adyar river. Ever since RMK Viswanathan,XVII discovered (in 3673 A.D) that the pallu of extraordinarily intricate Kancheepuram sarees could perform advanced computations at an exponentially higher speed than the now obsolete silicon based semiconductors, the Silken revolution had altered life as we knew it in Sambaria. The new elite in Madras society were the weavers of logic, aptly titled Silk Smithers.

Guna was sitting at his terminal, unable to bring his mind to concentrate on the task at hand. He was still smarting from his weekend experience at the TTK Virtual Academy for Interactive Music For Elite Masses on Radhakrishnan-Cathedral-Hyperavenue. He had decided to try out one of those much vaunted interactive Carnatic concerts where one could virtually “become” the artiste, say “Besh Besh” at the right moments and also confuse the mridangist by messing up the Misra Chapu tala, among other things. But what he did not expect was the white virtual veshtied gang, the Carnatic Clucks Clan, to hound him as he attempted to virtually perform the Bilahari alapana as the violinist. They had infiltrated the virtual audience and had loudly passed comments such as “Is this Bilahari? Or Mohanam with indigestion?”. Hailing from the southern spacepolis of Pondicherry, he was caught totally by surprise, being unaware of the strongly parochial tendencies of the crowd that patronized the Virtual Academy.

He took his Pansolaric Coffeeblaster in a big gulp, hoping that the unique concoction of caffeine, milk and bubbles would provide him the necessary kick start to his endeavour. Having studied to be a pseudomicrobiologist, his particular skills had suddenly became useful in the world of Silken computing, as scientists now played with the Silkworm’s DNA to produce custom threads for use in the construction of modern day Processing ALgorithmic Logic Units (PALLUs). Guna was engaged in testing and fine tuning a revolutionary new computational knowledge engine, code named Wolfram Omicron. While knowledge engines had been around for the better part of the last millennium, Omicron was special. It was designed to be the first machine to pass the GM Test (short for the Goundamani Quantum Hypothetical Modified Turing Test). No machine had ever passed that test, and Guna was on the threshold of achieving what was universally considered to be impossible.

The Coffeeblaster took longer than usual to reboot his brain. He made a mental note to order the more potent Kumbakonam Degreeblaster from tomorrow. He could not afford to waste any more time. He made a few last minute code changes and brought up the Omicron interface for the big moment. He took a deep breath, looked at his Cesium powered high precision Rahu Kalam determination unit, and typed the Goundamani Quantum Hypothetical Modified Turing Question.

He then waited, as the millions of PALLUs crunched quadrillions of bits (perhaps “crunch” is not quite an appropriate verb to describe the inner workings of the Silken processor. Swished and Sashayed, perhaps) in its attempt to crack the GM test. It finally spit out the answer.

He had done it.

No coputer has been able to crack the GM test to date. This was the greatest achievement in machine intelligence since the Advanced Language Engine of 2896 that finally deciphered the Malayalam mumblings in the song “Jiya Jale”. He looked at Omicron and silently whispered “Thank you”.

To be continued……

Glossary (This is an extension of the earlier glossary at the end of the earlier part)

Virtual Veshti -Invented in 2870 by Lord Ram Raj XVII, a few years after the last man who knew how to tie a veshti (dhoti) passed away. The invention was a huge hit, and caused a resurgence of veshti-pride. The device was essentially a modulated, high-definition 3D laser surface generator in the shape of a waistband, and allowed the wearer to simulate an authentic looking veshti of ones choice by the click of a button. A “Thooki-kattu” (Lift, fold and tie) mode was also available. The older models were prone to failure, especially in the “Thooki-kattu” mode. A rounding error in the Intel Ombodhium processor of those times that powered the device often caused a miscalculation of the height at which a veshti must be thooki-kattufied. Battery life was also a concern, as the Microsoft Embedded Windows OS that powered the device had the nasty habit of claiming “20% battery life left”, and then suddenly next moment, inexplicably dropping to 2%. Subsequent versions improved reliability considerably, especially when Ramraj decided to dump Windows and adopt Ubuntu (the Valiant Veshti edition).

Going  open source eventually created an ecosystem that allowed the community to develop custom plugins for the Virtual Veshti. Kabali Design Enterprises (KDE) announced in 3124 that a lungi mode was now available, with further options to choose between  “Subdued Erode”, “Singapore Silky” and “Hallucinogenic Tirunelveli”.

Interactive Carnatic Concert – A virtual reality event where the audience could put themselves in the place of the artistes and engage in all of the shenanigans they usually indulge in

Carnatic Clucks Clan – A terrorist organization founded by a retired SBI employee/rasika dedicated to keeping Carnatic music pure and devoid of any external influences. This group’s trademark appearance involved spotless white virtual veshtis and hoods made from Angavastrams.

As I was Titan watching the DLF IPL, It Ford Pickup struck me as CBS Dan Rather unfortunate that Bharti Indian cricket commentary had Parryware Kitchen sunk to Aavin appalling depths where commentators have to Anchor plug brand names into every sentence they Pillsbury utter. MDH Masala seasoned campaigners like MTR Ravi Dosa Shastri are now tongue Park Avenue tied as their regular cliches need to be Escorts Hospital surgically inserted with ads.

“We are in for a Parle cracker of a WIMCO match”, practices Ravi. “That Arun Ball icecream was four from the Dairy Milk moment it left the BDM bat. It has gone the BSNL long distance. Gilette Razor edged, and taken. This match, one feels, will go down to the Havell’s wire”

What next? Branded player nicknames? Like Swiss Beef Chuck Malinga? Or Samsung Split A/c Cool Gayle? Last year, I wrote about the annoying proliferation of ads in the telecast, but this year has seen a recession driven paranoia towards squeezing money out of every pore, so apart from “commentading”, we now have “Strategy Timeouts”. Legend has it that the marketing maven who proposed this idea called it, in a rare moment of candour, “7.5 more minutes of adjaculation”, but was unfortunately overruled. The same genius must have also come up with the idea of in-game player interviews with the “Logo Biriyani” backdrops. I am told that the IPL invested heavily in some Limelite Salon cutting Gilette Razor edge research on technology that would have enabled the logos in the backdrop to light up and get animated when the interviewer or interviewee mentions keywords of interest to a particular advertiser (called AdNonSense technology). So when Robin Jackman asks Anil Kumble about the “resurgence” of “spin”, perhaps the BJP’s “LK Advani for PM” ad could light up, do a little dance and then give way to the Durex logo as it activates itself when Kumble utters the word “performance”. The possibilities are endless. But apparently the technology wasn’t ready for prime time yet. So I am looking forward to it next year.

But I sometimes fear what will happen when Homo Sapiens evolves the ability to tune out ads, TiVo style. What will advertisers do then? I know. They will make us “GoBuy Manchurian Candidates”. Kids will be primed and conditioned from kindergarten to respond to specific brand name keywords. So during the “Strategy Timeouts”, advertisers will unleash magic words, like “Phosphoric Acid”, which for instance, will cause all of us to stand up and walk like zombies to the nearest store and buy a 4-litre Pepsi.

Don’t mistake me. I enjoy the IPL. Men enjoy masturbation once in a while. While I often crave for the classiness of a romantic, candle-lit test match, the pleasure of listening to legendary ex-cricketer commentators announcing with breathless excitement, the first DLF Maximum in any game with the fervour of a teenager at a Nickelback concert screaming at each one of their ridiculously homogenous songs copy-paste jobs, is too much to resist.

And last but not the least, on April 18th, the day when the DLF IPL started, I was wondering about the artificiality of it all. In fact, “Fake IPL” sounded like a nice moniker for this annual gajabujalsa of masala cricket. So I thought that starting a “fake” blog might be a good idea. Yes, the “Fake Fake IPL Player Blog”. But then it was too easy. Making fun of a celebrity driven, short-staffed, dysfunctional team with multiple captains and a poor playing record is no different from making fun of a handicapped kid trying to sing opera at the school annual day. It’s failure voyeurism. But us desis enjoy nothing more than a fictional anonymous insider tv-soap-style-badmouthing the big bad institution that’s muzzling his talent. Korbo, Lorbo, Whinebo. Blog on this, as they say.

By the way, the Chennai Super Kings also have an insider blog.

I felt a little nostalgic a few days back and watched Michael Holding torment Geoffrey Boycott

Or Viv toying with the bowler

I cant help feeling that compared to that, the IPL is, to paraphrase their own brand name infested catchphrase, a shitty moment of epic fail

Good stories are memes. They tend to spread, not merely by faithful reproduction, but despite purposeful remixing over the years. The Mahabharatha is no exception. The story grew in its telling and it is now embedded firmly in the Indian psyche. But I do not think we are doing enough to remix the fundamental themes in this epic. Thanks to BR Chopra and his garish, un-nuanced and heavily sanitized version that played over several years on Doordarshan, we now seem to have a stultified view of the epic. Gone are the gratuitous references to violence, the overall original darkness of the plotline, gore and the downright weird (by modern day standards) social practices and mores, as our collective idea of this epic has been reduced to overdramatic acting, fake jewellery and arrows duking it out amidst questionable looking fireworks. And let’s not even get started on the background score.

But to be fair to the Doordarshan version, a literally faithful take of this epic would have probably bought the Pandava Sene to the fore, demanding that such vile and Un-Indian representations of the epic be banned, and all of us sipping on our gin in Irony bar would have chuckled.

So after this impassioned plea to release our epics from the cruel stranglehold of Desi Television, you must be expecting a profoundly new vision for Mahabharatha 2.0, a bold, contemporary and yet very Indian take on the epic, and I am happy to inform you that it will not be the case. What I present to you instead is more on the lines of a stunningly inane attempt at blending the best (?) of the Internets with some of the key events in the epic and hoping that all your bases are belong to my cheezburger which can has madness as well as Sparta to which you might ask “O Rly?” and my response would be “Ya Rly!”

(Original image credits: Thailand Culture)

(Original image credits: Ashok Dongre)

(Original image credits: Ashok Dongre)

(Original Image credits: here)

(Original Image credits: From Amar Chitra Katha)

Perhaps we should create a Lolcat version of the epic after all.

]]> http://krishashok.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/meme-uvaacha/feed/ 48 krishashok yo-dawg-mahabharatha all-your-base-mahabharatha epic-fail-mahabharatha1 orly-mahabharatha this-is-partha-mahabharatha http://krishashok.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/meme-uvaacha/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DoingJalsaAndShowingJilpa/~3/I6hnLd8e3kw/ http://krishashok.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/left-right-and-centre/#comments Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:28:07 +0000 krishashok http://krishashok.wordpress.com/?p=943 ]]>

Everyday morning in Africa India, a gazelle wakes up and heads over to a nearby pond, opens up a bottle of Maanpaal Palpodi and washes his teeth. At that very moment, a lion wakes up and heads over to the same pond and after some stretches and mane scratching, gargles. The gazelle, who really should be running for his life at this point, says instead “Wassup Simba?”. The lion then ambles towards the gazelle, at a velocity distinctly lower than the slowest gazelle in the herd and clears his throat. For those of you who have not heard an adult male lion clear its throat, it is, as the expression goes, a “sound to behear”. Imagine 2 tectonic plates sliding over one another, making love, and climaxing.

“Goin’ ok”, Simba said. He wanted to add “My dear”, but did not because he had higher standards for puns.

“Herd there’s going to be an election in India”. The Gazelle, on the other hand, did not have very high standards for humour.

Yeah.

So who do you think is the front runner?

Cant say anything right now. The BJP particularly are leaving no stone unturned. LKA has gone full tilt Web 2.0

You mean he has resorted to Large fonts, Slowly loading pages, Tag clouds, fluff and hot air to spread his message?

No. He now has a blog. As does Murli Manohar Joshi, who apparently “reeks of decency when he speaks his high-brow mind

Isn’t high-brow a slightly negative word?

Yes. So is “reeks”. Perhaps he was going for the double negative there. Their party also tweets now.

Wow, so how many followers do they have?

Right after the first tweet, they had 400 thanks to this lovely trick. LKA also has banner ads that appear everywhere, even on Pirate Bay, right along side the Caucasian looking 23-year old who for some reason, claims that she resides in Chepauk.

So what’s their electoral strategy this year?

Hmm. Nothing new actually. Right wing politics has a pretty standard format world over. Here is the guide to being an Indian rightwinger. The formula is simple

1. There is a complex reality
2. Take that and make a dangerous oversimplification
3. When presented with a potential rebuttal,
4. Dismiss it using either historical revisionism or bullheaded stubbornness. If you are not good at revising history or do not possess bovine willpower, don’t worry. Dismiss the rebuttal as “pseudo-secularistic minority appeasement”

You can apply this to pretty much anything. Here’s an example

1. With globalization, the influence of other cultures, both good and bad, is a reality we have to face with maturity
2. Pub culture is western and against Indian values
3. But western culture has given us technology and engineering as well
4. No. India had nuclear power in 2000 BC. Ravana’s son Indrajit launched depleted Uranium shells at Lakshmana who had radiation sickness. The Sanjeevani herbs were actually boosters of the immune system which helped him recover. Then Rama went on to use a thermonuclear Brahmastra against Ravana

Here is another one

1. India is a melting pot of many religions, cultures and art forms
2. Ghazals are Islamic and therefore against Indian culture
3. But muslims have been an integral part of Indian culture. What about Khayal, Qawwali etc?
4. No. Hindu culture was much superior before it was debased and destroyed by Islamic invasion.

Actually, here is a useful, printable chart for quick reference. I’m surprised that the right wing establishment in India does not circulate this.

So what about the Congress? They are more of a centrist party right?

Um. Not really. The Congress are perceivably centrist thanks to some simple statistics.

How so?

You take the rabid, frothing at the mouth types who will riot, maim and kill innocents (especially those wearing turbans) all in the name of the party leader and add to that, those who still swear by license raj and divide by 2, you get what in statistics is known as a “mean” (and also an adjective that has negative connotations), and that is how the Congress is “centrist”. They have been giving the country “the hand”, literally and figuratively for the better part of India’s existence.

So you are saying that there is really not much of a difference between the BJP and Congress.

Yeah. I would go so much as to suggest that the BJP could be called “The Congress of the Cow”

But what about the Congress track record of economic development?

You mean, the development of Urban Metropolitan Middle Class India?

Um yes. Which then brings us to the Left.

You mean the leftovers.

Ah yes. The CPI (Moshaibabus) and CP (Menons). The ones who believe e.e.cummings was the ultimate communist because he abhorred the capital.

Ah yes, the Third front. With so many leaders who wish to be PM that if they do get to power, we will only have PMs and no cabinet whatsoever.

And then there is the Yadavs’ Fourth front.

Yes. Like a trilogy in 4 parts. A marriage live-in-relationship one-night-stand slam n’scram of convenience.

Indian politics is so paradoxical, is it not?

Of course it is. Is that a problem?

Um. Aren’t paradoxes problematic?

Of course not. Indian politics is not about ideologies, or about political positions. It is about the paradox. In fact, it is the paradox. Clarity is the enemy of the  collective political psyche in India. The Congress is religiously secular. They love the Sikhs while still doing many bad things to them. The BJP hates minorities while still loving them. They love Hindi while still getting into bed with the Hindi-hating Dravidian parties. The Communists embrace Marx while still continuing to stab him repeatedly in the back with the knife of capitalism. The AIADMK and DMK are sworn enemies and yet have absolutely no ideological differences. The Shiv Sena supremo loves everything Marathi, except of course his own anglicized surname “Thackeray”. India is both shining and dimming at the same time. And finally, the fourth front is back.

There is a Zen koan that reads – “Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said that the flag moves. The other said that the wind moves. They argued back and forth and could not agree. Hui-Neng, the sixth patriarch, settled the issue. He declared that it is neither the wind nor the flag that moves. It is the mind that moves”. Now, where do you think Hui-Neng learned his wisdom?

So let’s stop worrying about Varun Gandhi, Vaiko, Lalu and their ilk. Feroze Varun Gandhi loves Muslims, even if he wants to indulge in some hand amputations. Vaiko loves a bloodbath, but only because of the water shortage in Tamil Nadu and Lalu wants to crush Varun with both a roller and a bear hug of paternal love. We love our paradoxes. Elsewhere in the world, a pro-choice, liberal, gay Taliban commander might sound odd, but in India, the real question would be – is he an independent? Can he be bought?

At that very moment, the rising sun came up and a horde of elephants on bicycles waving lotuses and hands came charging towards them, campaigning for votes, and right then, it doesn’t matter whether you were a lion or a gazelle, you’d better be running.

I cannot resist Graphjam so here we are. Indian Film song lyrics explained with simple graphs. I promise, this will be the second last time I will be “inspired” (like Anu Malik) to remix a popular Internet meme for desi purposes.

First we explore the Hindi Film Industry, or as Cineblitz chooses to acronymize, HiFI

UPDATE: My 90 minute drive back home from office resulted in these

Priyank gives us a lesson in the geographic origins of day to day items

And Narendra ponders on Mr Singh’s route to kingship

And now, we look at Tamil songs

Update:

Ramsu shares with us, the Foot Presents Theory of Pessimism

Arvind Suresh psychoanalyzes thieves’ desires

As usual, this does not end here. Please email me your creations and I’ll feature the best ones here.

Dear Spiritually Enlightened Person on TV in the mornings (and late nights),

I must first thank you for sharing your wisdom and understanding of the human condition with the masses. In the frenetic rat race we call urban life, your skillfully presented nuggets of common sense, wrapped in insightful readings of mythology and scripture, provide a small yet valuable window of time for people to introspect.

But I have problem when you pontificate on the impact of modern science and technology on the masses. So far, every one of you seems to belong to the camp that has declared technology to be the bane of our contemporary lives. You declare modern medicine to be a sham and urge people to value spiritual truth over scientific veracity, as if both of these were mutually exclusive entities. So I am afraid I am going to be a little blunt here.

By perpetrating the falsehood that scientifically verifiable truths are somehow inferior and trivial, you are being disingenuous. Science is a method, and technology, one of the tangible outcomes of applying that method. Like any subject of knowledge, there is nothing inherently good or evil about science. It’s what you do with it. Nuclear Bombs or mobile phone induced attention deficit disorder, it’s human choice, a behavioral flaw that you, with your insight into human nature, can effectively help address. But instead, what I find is this half-baked dismissal of science and technology on the whole, continual urgings to believe in mysteries and sadly, repeated warnings to not question certain religious truths. Every time an elderly relative of mine tells me with glee “Can your science explain this?” and point to some random occurrence of nature, I cringe and can’t help wonder how much your daily morning preaching on TV contributed to his cyclically reaffirming faith in the mysterious.

The other fallacy you often perpetrate is this whole “In those days…” nostaliga thing. While it’s important to appreciate the contribution of the past, our collective tendency, happily cheered on by you, to somehow believe that our glorious past was this paradise of peace, knowledge and pushpaka vimaanas serving gourmet meals in economy class, sweeps under the bed the harder to digest lessons of female infanticide, women’s rights, caste bigotry and gratuitous violence. Give credit where it’s due, but please do send the collection agents to defaulters once in a while.

So in a sense, you reinforce the average person’s convenient misconceptions (and ignorance) about the laws of nature. By dismissing scientists as being vain characters who have not come anywhere close to deciphering the mysteries of the cosmos, you are revealing a stunning ignorance of the advancement of human knowledge from a geocentric universe to dark matter, Quasars and Supernovas. By dismissing modern medicine, you conveniently ignore the shots of polio vaccine you likely received as a child that probably kept you from belonging to the infant mortality column, a rather common occurrence in those days incidentally. Life expectancy has gone up by almost 20 years (at least in Urban India) primarily because of better neo-natal care and advances in geriatrics.

Last but not the least, sitting in front of a television camera, a technological marvel that began its journey with Anton Van Leeuwhenhoek’s use of lenses for microscopy onwards to Galileo’s telescope, to John Logie Baird’s contraption to capture moving images, and speaking into a microphone, where vibrations from your voice causes a capacitor to generate an electric current proportional to the nuances in your voice, to transmit it across a wire that, along with the video signal, is amplitude and frequency modulated and beamed up to a satellite that was launched with a deep, mathematically precise understanding of escape velocities and embedded with gadgetry that takes your message and beams it to the world, your dismissal of science and technology causes me, and anyone with even a smidgeon of understanding of science to say – “WTF?”

Or, as Lollu Cat would say in such situtations,

photo © James Jones for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

Pray, this is not arrogance speaking. Scientists question each other openly without fear of religion style recrimination, and also continuously build on each others knowledge. Your knowledge of human nature comes to you from your own keen observations and the abstraction of such knowledge over history by philosophers who used symbolism in the form of mythologies to embed such key observations. The symbols in our epics are memes, much like Lolcat is. In an era when we need a all-round understanding of both the scientific method and the spiritual truths about human nature that are so beautifully woven into the fabric of our mythology, you are doing, rather literally, a half-baked job. So if you are going to pass judgement on science, please do so after first understanding what it is. As the professor of calculus once said – “If you can’t differentiate, don’t integrate”. You are all extremely intelligent people. Not misrepresenting the scientific method is not that hard. Till then, apples and oranges please.

Actually, I am not asking you to just consider science and spirituality as apples and oranges. I’m really saying that I prefer Panchaamrutham. At the moment, you are discarding perfectly healthy oranges.