Sunday, December 4, 2011

Don’t Marry The Girl You Love



Don’t marry the girl you love. Leave HER. Just to prove that you can get someone better. Pick someone from the pretty photos your mom showed you. Choose her from you dad’s matched horoscopes. Date her from the single colleagues in your office. Get a fancy marriage. Take her to Mauritius. Remark on the natural beauty. Keep silent about hers. Don’t be alarmed when you feel a deep lingering regret. Be alarmed when you don’t feel anything. Ignore the eagerness of a new bride. Talk a lot when you can’t. But nothing of significance. Shut up if she does. Try to say trite romantic lines. Stop when you witness that they don’t stir her any more than they stirred you. Try to make love to her. Fail. Fuck her anyway.

Get back. Get yourself a career and not a job. Lay down ground rules. Send her anniversary gifts and spa treatments from office. See her late every night. Don’t see her every night. Take office people to lunch on your birthday. Build a moat and retreat into your bastion every time she asks what’s wrong. Brood. Become too jaded to brood. Ponder over how dreary your life has become. Get an ostentatious car to prove to yourself that it hasn’t. Hit the bottle when you realize that the car doesn’t help.  That nothing helps. Keep hitting the bottle. Hit her when you are overdone with the bottle. Weep silently at what you have become.

Try to work even harder to earn more money. Get a kid. Get two to forget their mother. Invite people over to pageant your successful life. Let it crumble as soon as they leave. Say bitter words. Become too bitter to care about words. Let years go unnoticed. Notice that. Descend into ennui. Take trips to foreign lands when someone points that out. Smile for the photos. Return to your blackberry an instant later. Look up to catch a fleeting glimpse of HER face disappearing into the crowd. Try not to think about HER. Have a sleepless night when you can’t. Abstain from telling her that she will always be the second woman in your life. Abstain from telling her anything.

Gather up your youth’s savings. Grieve that your youth’s savings is only money. Buy a big house from it. Ask her to decorate it as she pleases. Fight over the color of the table when she does. Recognize that this is just stuff; horded over to cover up the emptiness between you two. Recognize the emptiness between you two. Recognize the emptiness inside you. Accept it. Burn the bridges and build the walls. Turn a blind eye to her tears. Shed a few when her eyes are closed.

Get a heart disease. Hire expensive doctors to prolong you pitiable life. Start taking walks on your doctor’s advice. Don’t feel like returning home at the end of them. Start earning more money for your kids. Realize that it was never money that they wanted. Realize that it’s too late. Realize that it always had been. Die fretting over the debacle you made of your inconsequential life. And let the last sane idea to pass through your head be that the better girl you picked never made your heart beat with even the iota of passion it did for HER.

Don’t worry about HER, she will die too one day, thinking of … What if?

P.S. - Inspired by a post in the Thought Catalog
 

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Hiatus


Not that I have a lot many regular readers but I thought I would do this anyways, I owe to my blog if not anything else.

I have  hit a dead end as far as writing is considered. I have two Ideas with me to write on, but I'm unable to give them shape in words. Whatever I forced myself to write was trite, dull and soporific to say the least. The fountain of or rather the small ephemeral stream of words inside me has dried up.

This morning while searching for a Gtalk Status Message I couldn't think of anything relevant as I'm currently neither brooding or longing for a drink; and I can't think of anything clever to say either. I am currently content and happy. No wonder there is a vacuum in my vacuous verbiage. I feel like a Happy Hulk or I should say Bruce Banner, who is lets just face it is just another intelligent guy.

So I'm going to take a hiatus, till I find my grip on my pen again or rather the slick on the keyboard and find something worth returning for. I'm gonna read more, drink more, brood more and make myself unhappy again till I get to the place again where words come from.

P.S. - I just watched 'Pyar ka punchama' and am feeling bitter towards the whole world again. I think it's helping already.


Saturday, October 22, 2011

Taking over an IT company and other bad ideas




I am an honest, god fearing, true to my word, sincere in my work terrorist. I love my wives and children, I help old women cross the road and I spare some change for the beggar on the street. I am telling you all this so that you take my advice seriously and realize that I only have your best interest in my mind.

I have done some stupid things in my life, my third son from my second wife (she was not my wife then) is right on top of the list; I have watched Tashan first day, first show; have bought a Macbook Pro and have tried to race a Haryana Roadways bus (that’s why I limp and my Wagon R is no more). But all these don’t even come close to my biggest blunder in life; taking over an IT company and holding its employees hostage.

It was a Friday afternoon when after months of planning, recruiting people, arranging the weapons, getting an approval from the agency, services and our high command we finally decided that today is the day. I had spent months on researching the potential target and I had realized that Rashtrapati Bhavan was too difficult, no one actually came to the campus of BHU, crowded markets in Bombay and Delhi were done to death, and that it was an IT company that was the perfect target. Being an IT savvy terrorist myself I had done my research on them; tens of thousands of people came to them every day, they were mostly located outside the city, generated a lot of foreign currency so were the darling of the government and were full of meek IT geeks. They had a strenuous security procedure though, people were frisked, the luggage was scanned, and the cars were checked so it had the right mix of ease and difficulty. But most of all I wanted to be different, no one had done it before and I wanted to get noticed and rise up the ranks.

We loaded the guns, bombs, walkie-talkies and ourselves into two Qualis (stolen from some company which provided cabs to that IT company only) and stormed the campus. After firing a few rounds in the air, pushing the employees in the buildings and rounding up the security guards we were all set. The so called security guards were so terrified after seeing guns that they nearly crapped in their pants, only one of had seen a gun before that too in the Indo Pak war after which he had retired, the rest of the boys had only been trained to lookout for missing ID cards and pen drives. In fact all this seemed easier than writing a novel these days (the thin, big font, 100 bucks a piece ones I mean, ‘metro reads’ I read somewhere; they are called).

But then the gloom started setting in. Even after a quick glance I had realized that there were a lot of people un-accounted for, at least 5000 less than our estimate after we counted. “It is Friday and most people have left for their home towns after lunch” said the man in charge of the campus after I slapped him twice and demanded an explanation. Now it was only 2 o’ clock and not even the Sarkari Babus go home this early, this was beginning to look bad. Then came the first distress call of the day from one of my colleague who was sent to manage some hostages in a building. 

He was a newbie and already seemed to be in tears. Over sobs he told me that the people in his building are not terrorized, in fact some of them have not even realized that they were hostages. I quickly rushed to his building, the last thing we needed was somebody playing John McClane. But the situation was something else, I realized, after entering the lobby, people were not rebellious, they were just sleeping and too morose to care for anything else. After shouting terrorist, you are taken over, bomb, I will shoot you, hands up at the top of my voice I finally resorted to firing in the air, after the deafening sound of bullets was through the most it did was one guy opened his one eye, looked at us, then looked at his watch, asked the guy next to him that “do we have a call now?” and went back to sleep. This was embarrassing to say the least. I have successfully blown up buildings, armed force’s jeeps and tortured a traitor to death but this scenario looked very bleak. Admitting defeat I asked my colleague to lock this building and leave them to themselves.

As soon I was exiting the building I heard gun shots coming from the neighboring building. While I am all for teaching people’s manners, shooting a lot of people wasn’t in my to-do list for today. It reduces your ability to negotiate with the police. As I rushed to that building I saw another colleague of mine shooting a mass of people sitting on their chairs, unarmed. After I snatched the gun from his hands and reprimanded him in the harshest words he said, he saw them making some move, as if their trying to draw some weapon. After the screaming and hysteria had subsided I also noticed the same thing, their hands twitched every 5 minutes as if they are trying to draw a knife or something. After frisking and finding nothing on 9 people, I leveled with the 10th guy and asked him what it was. He said it was an involuntary habit of moving the mouse every 5 minutes to stay ‘Green’ on the office communicator and all they are doing is mentally clicking a mouse. I was further alarmed when somebody suggested bringing a cake for their recently dead team-mates. This was looking worse than my village cage where they kept all the crazies locked.

I had finally come back to the main building and was thinking of how to negotiate with the police when one lady approached me and asked for my email id, she said she was an HR manager and wanted to mail me a list of demands from the employees. When I asked them to state them verbally to me she asked one young guy to come with a notepad and asked him to note the minutes of the meeting. Firstly she asked that they few of the employees wanted to be tied to more comfortable chairs. Second one stray bullet had shattered a glass and AC cooling was going to waste, this building was losing points in the ‘go green’ challenge. Thirdly the restroom was running low on liquid soap and wanted that to be refilled. Fourthly if the hostage situation continued till tomorrow they wanted a written approval from their managers for a ‘comp off’. Fifth, the coffee machine was not working so they either wanted to be moved to a floor where it worked or wanted a working coffee machine brought here And lastly and most importantly she thought that employee morale was running low so she should be allowed to send a mail with some quotes and a 'face painting' contest with a chance to win a pack of 8 crayons. I think the last point that kid wrote down was “If you don’t shut up and sit down I am going to shoot you and the guy left to you, just for the heck of it”. This was getting intolerable.

As I just sat down I head another SOS from my colleague. What I witnessed as I hastened to his post was absolute pandemonium. People were running amok; trying to login to their machines, checking their Blackberrys and even the threat of shooting them down was doing nothing. Finally I caught one guy running like crazy and I could get only two words out of him - ‘Client Escalation’. They looked more scared than my suicide bombing instructor who realized we had switched his demo kit with a real explosives belt as an April 1st prank. One engineer came up to me and clearly told me that he would prefer getting shot in the head than risking another client escalation, especially now when the annual appraisal was due. Frantically I searched for his project manager who he mentioned had the name  Sathya and even after going through the name on ID cards of the entire floor I was unable to find him. Finally I mixed my yell with a few bullets in the air and demanded Sathya to come forward. Three people came forward but only one of them looked old enough to be a manager. His name was Sathyadhiran Srinivasulu Mucherla Laxman, no wonder I was not able to find him! I asked him to tell all his sub –ordinates to get off from their computers, go to one corner of the building and be in total silence. He responded by saying that he wanted an requirement document detailing which corner of the building he was supposed to go to, what was the SLA of total silence and number of man hours given to him for the job. I was too flabbergasted to say anything and sheepishly excused myself out of the situation.

I went back to the center building again. The police had come by this time and wanted to negotiate. I said ‘Hello’ in my most terrorizing voice to the inspector. ‘Cheppandi Anna’ came the reply. I repeated in Hindi. ‘Enti ‘ was the reply this time. I tried 3 other languages but no avail. I needed a translator. I caught hold of a Reddy from the crowd and asked him to translate. “Talk-a?” he asked, “to the police-a” while moving his hand with his thumb out which meant ‘fuck’ in my part of the world. He then flat out refused after I said yes; he said it was the onsite people’s job to talk to the client and translate the requirements, he always the got the final document. Also, this was not a part of his current allocation and hence would require the approval of his team lead, Project manager, Development track lead and Offshore Delivery head. When I insisted that this is not required he suggested me to log my demands in a tracker and mail it to the police while keeping my manager in CC, he even volunteered to give me the latest template for the tracker. This was pathetic. Not only was I feeling like a ring master, trying to juggle 5 balls on a unicycle. But I was also not able to tell the police that I wanted my three colleagues freed, 1 Crore rupees and a chopper brought to me. This day was getting worse than when my iPod had crashed, that too before a 10 day hike from Kabul to Waziristan.

But the straw or rather the pillar that broke my back was when I thought I would check in with my team till they mulled the issue over outside. Alpha 1, who was in charge of the recreational center was not replying. Fearing the worst, that Indian government has finally learned its lesson and has sent the cavalry in, I rushed to his post. But what I saw were beyond my wildest dreams. Abdullah the 6’6” Pathan from Kabul was found merrying in the Jacuzzi, his 2nd in command was taking a Sauna, while the rest of his unit was either in the pool or playing foosball. To the people who had seen nothing donkey turds and each other for months at a stretch it seemed like someone had torn open the gates of heaven. One of his guys was even making a deal with an employee, in exchange for referring him he would tell him how to get into US without a H1 – B.

At this point I broke down and started sobbing. I had taken the sandstorms of Afghanistan, the blizzards of Siachen, torture of US Marines and nagging of Kherunissa (my 1st wife) but this was beyond all that. As all my dreams of a promotion, Interpol red corner notice, Al-Jazeera exclusive videos , hot virgins in heaven and finally be able to afford an iPad2 came crashing down as I realized couldn’t go any further and I walked out and surrendered myself. Anything would be better than this.

Now I as pass my days in an Indian prison and enjoy the VIP treatment alongside that new kid Kasab, I have nothing to do but ponder over my past actions and I always reach the same conclusion. Don’t take over an IT company!

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Love and other drugs



Yesterday I felt I was eighteen again. My heart fluttered, I jumped around the bed restlessly, looked at my phone every 5 minutes and to shake my head every 10 minutes to break up the imaginary conversations in my head.

My heart wants this day to be an epoch, my head says it was just good three hours spent. I don't know what It'll be, as I keep as my fingers crossed as a teenager. Now life might play out as usual or it might change but I wanted to write this feeling down. I want to remind myself that I can still feel and despite my growing cynicism I can still connect with another person, with the the romantic in me, and the 18 year happy - go - lucky kid in me, that once was.

Now after reaching for my phone as soon as I woke up, I will listen to the song I have been listening to over 50 times since yesterday morning. I am alcohol free for 15 days and I am still high.

Monday, October 3, 2011

In my dreams




“The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment, when you are between asleep and awake, when you don't know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened.” - Anonymous


Prologue – 

What follows next is the recollection of the dream I had a few days back. I see no reason why anybody would be interested in my dream and its significance, if any. However this was the most significant dream that I have had in the recent years that I could recollect in my waking life. And therefore I feel compelled to write it on my blog and publish the link everywhere, maybe just for the heck of it or maybe it’s a momentary lapse of season. Following the waking up from the dream my first reaction was to note down the happenings of my dream as good as I could before it fades from my memory, as everything does. I couldn’t sleep that night post this dream, as I lay tossing and turning in my bed, churning this dream in my head thinking of the significance of it. But mostly I just reveled in the beauty of it even with its untimely and tragic ending.

I won’t unload any unnecessary esoteric trivia, like dreaming of being in snow was because I was feeling cold (it is cold in Curepipe this time of the year, especially at night) or what could be the interpretation of the proceedings. I know that it doesn’t make much sense nor has continuity, but then it is not supposed to, it is a dream. However two things I want to clear before I begin. First there is no prelude the events I describe, I was smack in the middle of it as dreams often begin. Also there are no reasons to things I deduced, they were just in my notes. Secondly, I wanted to tell what a lucid dream is, as this was, at least at the end. A lucid dream is a dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming. In a lucid dream, the dreamer can actively participate in and manipulate imaginary experiences in the dream environment. A lucid dream can begin in one of two ways. A dream-initiated lucid dream (DILD) starts as a normal dream, and the dreamer eventually concludes it is a dream, while a wake-initiated lucid dream (WILD) occurs when the dreamer goes from a normal waking state directly into a dream state, with no apparent lapse in consciousness. Mine was the former.

The Dream –

It’s daytime. I am in a car, driving. Most probably it is my car, that I drive in the waking life, as it looks and feels the same from the inside. In the front seat is a girl, beautiful, smiling, chirpy, with hair flowing in the wind. There are other people in the car too, two of my younger cousins and one friend from school. I don’t pay much heed to them, I am engrossed in the driving and perhaps my own thoughts. The girl is warm and friendly but there is sadness in her eyes, she also had her heart broken, but she doesn’t behave that way. Like me I mean, I am quiet, a bit aloof and cynical. We get to her house and she invites me inside. She lives with her family. She is a Christian (I don’t how I figured this out). She leaves me alone with her grandparents, as she goes about the house, dancing, twirling and playing with the curtains. Her grandparents start talking to me, they seem to like me. They tell me it was nice of me to give her a lift. I seem to be a responsible person to them and they tell me it would be good of me drop her back home whenever she gets drunk. I deduce that she is a trouble maker when she gets drunk. After a while I say the pleasantries and take leave from them. When I get back to the car my cousins start teasing me while my friend takes me to the side and asks me to be careful with the girl’s heart. And not to pursue this matter any further if I am not serious.  I shrug it off and get back in the car. Cousins keep teasing me all the way in the car.

Scenery has now changed around me. I am still in a car, but this is not my car, nor am I driving it. It is snow all around me, looks like I am on top of some mountain. Car seems fairly bulky but powerful and secured. We start going down the slope.  Gradually I see riots breaking out and people fighting and rioting around me.

The next scene I see that I broke through the front windscreen of the car, due to some collision. As I am flying out of the glass, time slows down and I feel the darkness coming from the edges. I feel this is some premonition of the things to happen and I can save myself from dying. Then I realize that the only reason I saw this is because in some universe this has already happened and it is inevitable. Then I make peace with it. I see it happening, we are going down fast, trying to lose the rioters, someone has thrown something at the windscreen, the glass cracks and it is not possible to see through. The car crashes into something and I am thrown out of the car by the impact through the windscreen. I feel the darkness coming in again, but this time I do not fear it, if death is just the blackness I came back from then there is no reason to fear death. And then, as they say my life flashes before my eyes. Only that my whole life doesn’t flash before me.

The only and the last thought which goes through my head is of that girl and how I won’t get to be with her. I regret not reciprocating the love and her warmth when I had the chance. As I lay dying I feel my heart beat receding and the feeling that it will come to a halt eventually. But now suddenly I want to live, to be with her, I try to fight it, my failing heart beat that is. My dream has become lucid as this point. But I realize that this is in vain as my heart beat becomes fainter and fainter each time and finally is no more. I realize that this is how probably dying would feel like. The dream stops and I wake up at this point.


Sunday, September 18, 2011

The day that Kotler failed



So it was a bright and sunny Saturday morning. Actually it was little too bright, a little too sunny and I was hungover and tired and sleepy. My phone was conked and the alarm which was supposed to wake me up at 5; never did wake me up at 5. So I woke up at 6:45 panicked and looked at my phone, it was switched off. I switched it on and called the person I was supposed to pick up at 7. It was my friend’s friend, or as my friend (Ashutosh) said; his business partner. So I was supposed to pick her up from K.P.H.B and drop her to ISB where she was going to have her first exhibition for newly founded brand Inky. She was the designer (She is a pass out from NIFT and has been working on designing for years) and my friend, Ashustosh was supposed to take care of ‘The Marketing’. And they were supposed to sell apparel, accessories, jewelry and the whole works. Online for starters I think, they have a portal and all too (See it here, even if just for the hot model).  Anyways I couldn’t care less about all this that morning, every part of my body screamed that it wanted more sleep, except the throat maybe which wanted something to drink. But then I remembered the days when I did used to sleep and Ashu used to give the proxies for me and the Sundays when we were supposed to go to coaching and I used to ask him to go alone and get me bottle of Limca instead. So my mind told me that I needed to do this.

So I got up and called her, her bus was a little late and she would take a little time, and I guessed since Saturday in an off day, there won’t be much traffic on the roads. What I didn’t realize that time a little late was only a little late and she reached 20 mins after calling me, and Saturday is only an off for IT people and there would be plenty of traffic in KPHB. So I got ready in a frenzied state and drove with the intensity of The Transporter on crack. And I was only one and a half hour late. So I picked her up and drove up to ISB. You see ISB has an entrepreneurship course (PEV I suppose it is called) and part of that course the students are supposed to bring an entrepreneur to campus, help them etc. etc… And the team who made the highest profit wins. Again I was least bothered about all that. We went in, met her friend in ISB and set up for the day.

She had brought up Kurtas, Stoles, Potli bags (don’t ask what or what for they are, I didn’t have the slightest clue), Jewelry (which was the highest selling and is what the ‘The Female Purchase Decision Making Model’ is based on) and a few other things. So we set up and got to work. And what followed was something akin to the Great Revelation of Saint John. I realized that my girlfriends had been merciful on me and never subjected me to the full torture which can shopping with girls be.
I was taught in my Marketing class that any purchase decision making model had five steps. One after the other and leading to some conclusion.


However what transpired next was an education is itself. Only a little, if at all, of what Kotler Baba told us was followed when a bunch of people from Venus (read women) descended upon us for buying an ear ring worth 50 bucks. And this is what I named ‘The Female Purchase Decision Making Model’. Which is of course, over simplified and based on the little understanding of these byzantine creatures that we mere mortals (read men) have. Comprehend it if you can -

Click on the file to see the full size


P.S. - Another revelation of the day was, ISB has a lot of hot girls.



Saturday, September 17, 2011

Open letter to ... Umm... I don't know ( What the hell is an open letter anyway?)




So the blogosphere is rife with open letters, some Madrasan girl wrote an open letter to a Delhi boy, read it here, full of rants, overkill and absolute crass. Another Madrasan girl wrote a much more classier reply , here  and one Delhi boy wrote a self-apologetic reply which was very Un-Delhi like, not only it did not contain any references to Black label and Chicken Tikka, but also was subtle, a word I think unknown in that  region.

But nothing succeeds like a direct, blatant and obtuse hate letter. 2357 comments till last night and counting, it has actually become news material. I couldn’t sleep the whole night post reading the open letters, not that I was worried about the National Integration or why my blogs never get so many comments, I can swear I am more imaginative that Texas Chain Massacring someone’s face !!? 

My motives are more altruistic and grandiose.I was worried about my beloved Rajasthan, once more it’s been left out of the debate and publicity generating, mudslinging, thriving-on-stereotype pen wars. While the Madrasnas and Punjus are fighting and Bongs are either silently observing and not downgrading themselves by commenting on literature much below Rabindra Nath Tagore’s or maybe they are too strung out, and of course the Gujju Bhaai and Banes are too damn busy minting money sitting comfortably in ‘A-mae-reeca’, we poor Rajasthanis (literally and figuratively) are feeling left out as usual. It’s like seeing your neighbor having a party, music pumping, girls splashing in the pool, booze flowing but not getting an invite because you are so un-cool.

So being a true blue (blue blooded too mind you, nearly all Rajputs descended from Kings, doesn’t matter even if king of an one square kilometer village) Rajasthani I had to do something about it, even if nothing more than cry hoarse and wallow in self-pity.

First of all we don't have any cool nicknames for us like Punjus and Bongs and Madrasis. Ok maybe all people club us as Marwaris but that is more detestable than being a non-Punjabi Delhite and being called Punju and being a Kannadiga and being called Madrasi, blah blah blah ….. And for the record I have stayed 4 years in Bangalore and 1 in Hyderabad and can differentiate between Telegu, Tamilians, Kannadigas, Malayalis, can or rather could speak some atrocious Kannada. Have stayed 2 years in Delhi, again could understand leaving the most ‘theth’ Punjabi. Half a year in Calcutta, can understand a bit of Bengali. And in nearly most cases can tell which part of India a person is, after talking to him/her for an hour.  Now back to being Marwari, when I  was in Bangalore, my first out of Rajasthan time, I was always assumed to be being from Delhi, as much as they cry foul that all North Indians call them Madrasis and don’t understand the difference between the 4 states they are no better either, they assume all North Indians are from Delhi, all things North Indians as Punjabi and the likes. I had a tough time explaining that I was not from Delhi, Kadi is not a Punjabi Dish and people dancing in the baraat with their arms in the air happened in Rajashtan as well. In Calcutta when told I’m from Rajasthan next question with a crinkled nose was that if I’m a Marwari? Then I had to ask that did they mean the caste Marwari (the basket in which they place all Baniyas), the place Marwar (the belt containg the places Jodhpur, Pali etc) or what. And in Delhi, let’s just say that they either assumed I’m from some Gujjar –Meena highway blockade party or totally ignored me completely coz’ I neither had a car, a huge built nor the statement ‘Oye tu jaanta nahi main kaun huun, main yahan ke <insert any random high ranking bureaucrat here> ko jaanta huun”.

But this is not what saddens me. While they there are fighting over the superiority of Dosa and Butter chicken our Daal Baati and Gatte and Rabori are thought of nicknames in some alien language by others. While they have M.S Subbulakshmi and Jasbir Jassi to grow up on, best we could manage was Ila Arun, of ‘Choli ke peeche kya hai’ fame, whose mere mention in my house raised my mother’s eyebrows. Girls here never heard of Vogue leave alone Fendi and how severely Jimmy Choo can get distorted here in Rajasthan I can only imagine. 

Bharatnatyam and Bhangra have shot to national fame while Kalbeliya (yes the name is funny enough and yes it’s a type of folk dance) remains confined to shots of women dancing it to the background of the desert signifying the scene is from Rajasthan. They are fighting over who looks better Priyanka Chopra or Aishwarya Rai while we had to import Shilpa Shetty (a Bunt) as our team’s face in IPL . Delhi people start conversing in Hindi or Hinglish (You know this top looks very good peeche se but you know, it would look much better if it had a little red and a little peela color in this) if they are the upper class which they think is the default language of all Indians, South Indian people will talk two sentences in English and then two more amongst themselves in their local language and the Bengalis will coalesce into Bengali and ignoring outsiders completely after the second drink or the first joint. We on the other hand don’t even know proper Marwari, Hadoti, Mewari and other sub-dialects of Rajasthan.  We are sending truckloads of people into IIT and IIMs either directly (proper Rajasthanis) or indirectly (from the Kota coaching center network) and there is no mention of us being intelligent or intellectual anywhere, zero, zilch . We are deprived of Huge Statures and white complexion too (I am fair though, in case you are wondering, you can ask my good friend Ankur to confirm) and let’s just admit it that  bigger is better, always and in India fairness (of the skin) is valued much more than any other kind of fairness. There are not so many Mercedes in our whole cities as would pass me in South Delhi while trying to cross the road. We want Flashy SUVs, Ed Hardy t-shirts (fake or otherwise), Gadgets imported from the US and the Gulf, houses in NYC. We are not getting any action in this department, and in THE department, Rajasthan seems to be most sexually repressed state of whole India, UP people and Haryana people at least get to rape women across the state border.

So while Bengali people are having endless cups of tea over fish cutlets post 5 o’ clock and discussing politics, Madrasis are either working in US or Gulf in that time, or working for US and Gulf in that time and harboring money and dreams of wives dipping in gold , Punjabis are taking out their amplifier fired SUVS playing ‘Amplifier’ and pouring black labels and thinking which area to molest girls in today. We on the other hand are wondering why are hell are we here, saving up pennies and getting monikered ‘Kanjoos Marwaris”. Delhi has it’s cleavage showing female side of the population, Bangalore has them tattoo sporting, Calcutta has them parading their pierced belly buttons while here they are covered from head to toe to save themselves from the sun. It’s like never using your iPod as you never remove  the wrapping. And in Bangalore they are fighting for the discs to go beyond 11:30 while here they shut down liquor shops at 8! As Abhay Deol says in ‘Manorama: Six feet Under’ (a must watch film and has true feel of Rajasthan) “Is mardood raet ke jungle mae mae apni  choti-moti pareshaniyon ke saath, apni choti moti see gumnam zindagi jee raha huun”.

P.S. – Of all the REPLIES to the open letter I liked G.Khamba’s the best – Here

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