The tale of two brothers

No this is not Deewar, but it is pretty similar.

There are two brothers who work in the same office that I do, here in Madrid. They both are about 50 years old. One is my client reporting manager, while the other is the one whom I eat lunch with and socialize after work.

One brother, the younger one, wears suits to office, drives a Mercedes M Class which costs around 50 lakhs in India, eats lunch in a fancy Italian restaurant every day and is like a VP here with direct reporting to the CIO.

He is also unmarried, lives alone, has a reputation of being too picky, has only travelled once outside of Spain to Germany, that too for work and makes a graceful but quick exit from office parties after one drink. He also looks more aged than his older brother and reportedly gets upset if you compare the two of them.

The older brother on the other hand drinks till everyone else is drinking and then urges them on some more, he taught me the Spanish toast before a shot (quite handy if you are travelling in any of the Spanish speaking countries or quite cool if you are not). He has been to India twice, once to Nepal, Egypt, China and pretty much all of Europe. Can speak a few words of Hindi, Swahili, Cantonese, Croatian and fluent German. Can sing ‘Pardesi pardesi jaana nahi’ and say ‘Mero Nepali naam Ram Bahadur ho’. He has a wife that works in the same office, a daughter; a dog named Kika, he sings in the local choir on weekdays and treks on the weekends.

By now you I think you would have pretty much made up your mind which brother that you want to be. But wait, there is more. The older brother is actually junior to the younger brother in the office hierarchy, though he has been working longer here. He drives an old Volkswagen hatchback full of dog hair, his trekking T shirts have holes in them and he brings lunch in a reused plastic container. His reportees skip him to discuss a severe problem in the software that he works on and directly go to the manager. While the younger brother has a cabin of his own the older one sits in a cubicle like me, with his headphones on, listening to western classical music. He said he has never been to Ibiza as it very expensive (it is).

I want to be rich and well liked and well-travelled and fluent in multiple languages and high up in the corporate ladder and have fancy lunches wearing fancy suits and to have time for my hobbies to which I want to go to in my expensive car. I really do like being married (except when I am made to clean a perfectly clean house or when Supermodels invite me to share a hot tub with them; although the former happens more frequently than the latter) and I want to be close to my family. But seeing these brothers I understand that some of these things are mutually exclusive. It’s like the ending of the two paths, which I keep wondering about, laid out in front of me. One of them is the future of the decisions that I take today. I sometimes do console myself saying that “Naah, I’ll walk the middle path, get the best of both worlds.” But I don’t know if there is a middle path? And does it entail the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds?

And to people who keep sharing posts like “If travelling is free you will never see me again” or “I'd rather have a passport full of stamps than a house full of stuff” I say bullshit. You can sell the stuff in your house and travel half the world. Hell, you can sell your phone and spend 5 days travelling Cambodia or buy a return flight to Europe or have a week exploring Rajasthan. But no you want that STUFF, you need that stuff. You want to hold a job which says Associate vice president or Product manager or some other fancy shit.  You want a fancy car. You want a big couch for days when you want to stay at home and don’t want to meet new people. You want to stay in a beach resort in Thailand with a staff that speaks fluent English and has a good Italian restaurant, while drinking a Dutch beer. More on this later perhaps.

Getting back to the two brothers, I really can’t say who has done better, who made the better choices, who is enjoying his life the most, whose compromise is worth it. It is like choosing between the Devil and deep blue sea, or rock and a hard place. When I think of it I feel that I am not choosing some things but rather letting go of some things. I mean will you let go of your brand new SUV  for a trip to the Moon? Will you give up an extra bedroom in your house for meeting your dad 15 more times before he dies. Will you like to have a best friend in office or would you like to get higher rating than your colleagues and rise above them. There was once a survey, can't find the exact link, but it went something like this. "Would you want a week in Paris or would you want a new wardrobe?" 75% people took the new wardrobe, they all said that the new wardrobe will last them years instead of the trip to Paris which they anyways plan to have. 90% of the people regretted their decision. And none of new wardrobe people took a trip to Paris in the next 3 years the survey tracked them.

We live in a society and everyone of us likes to get to a higher place in that society. Many of our decisions are influenced by what will others think of it. Getting a tattoo is only cool if others around you appreciate it, otherwise you are paying money to scar yourself. A Volkswagen Beetle's classic value of 22 Lakh is only derived from people who think it is a classic, drive that shit into a village in India and people would be laughing their asses off. So the point is that, between these two brothers can you even make a choice yourself or is the choice made for you by the society that you live in or our parents? Main Engineer / Doctor bana kyunki ye meri maa ka sapna tha. Aren't we all dancing on the strings held by the people who came before us, who were dancing on their forefather's strings? Acting how we do to live up to their expectations or do disprove their theories. I know quite a few people who did the shit that they did do just to piss their parents off and be established as a rebel. So all in all, do we even have a choice a chose a path? Or is nature or nurture? Or kismat as some of us call it? Or answer to the hundreds of prayers that people around us keep us chanting?

Poets die with an empty stomach but a full heart, materialistic people at least have a full belly even if their dreams are crushed. And from what I know hunger pangs hurt as much as hopelessness. No matter how I think about it I cannot make up my mind about which brother that I want to be. Can you?


Aaj mere paas building hai, property hai, bank balance hai, bungalow hai, gaari hai, kya hain
tumhare paas?
Mer paas Kika hai!
(Kyunki maa to dono ke pass nahi hai, wo Leon mae unke baap ke saath rehti hai)

My Favorite Beer Point

My favorite beer drinking place has been a bend in the Dehradun Mussourie road for around 8 years now. It is one of those innumerable Maggi points that dot that road, one of those places which offer tea, biscuits , their own recipe of maggi and a makeshift stone bench. But this one had a bench further down the level of the road and a clearing in front of it which gave a clear view of Dehradun from it.

And the view was outstanding. The place was calm, not much noise of the vehicles filtered through the trees, there was always a breeze blowing, thought it was freezing in January and the Maggi was good. I was pretty stressed about my MBA entrance exams and other shit but there for a few minutes I felt entirely at peace, I did not think of anything else except how it would feel to live here. No fancy job, no loads of money, no other fancy materialistic bullshit, just come here once in a while to drink a beer on a bike and eat a maggi. Total expense 150 Rupees per trip more or less. Less than the cost of pint in a pub in Bangalore. You can read about the whole Dehradun trip here. It is strange how the priorities of life can shift, I guess this is also a type of masaniya bairag. I will elaborate on the concept of masaniya bairag in a later blog post.

I do not have a photo of that place and sometimes I am glad of it, I can mentally mold the picture every time to the perfect place that I want to be in, in that moment of time. And everybody needs a beer point, even if they do not drink beer, it is a place of peace, their garden of Eden, a mental sanctuary.
But that place has now been replaced, by this.


This is near the castle (called Alcazar) of Segovia. Segovia is an old historic town near Madrid, it has an aqueduct from the Roman times, an impressive cathedral and this castle. It is said that this was the inspiration for Walt Disney for the sleeping beauty castle and the tower of Rapunzel.

 


I entered the castle from the regular entrance and the view was not impressive as the biggest tower facing had scaffolding on it, so after seeing the castle from inside I went out and was trying to get around it to see a different angle and came upon some narrow and steep stairs. The stairs are a recent addition, after the discovery of Cueva de la Zorra,

literally translates to the cave of the bitch, though I think it does not mean that. After I reached the bottom of the stairs I walked around I entered the woods near the foot of the rock the castle stands on. These woods called Dehesa in Spanish are typical of all Spanish royal residences, a break from then the hustle bustle of the castle. It also has a stream, which was probably a river surrounding the castle, cutting off approach of armies and has a small wooden bridge, now renovated, on it

While the place isn't really hidden, quite a few locals come here, but it is off the tourist track and thus very quiet.

As I walked in it I saw the leaves on the ground, the view of the castle and heard the sound of the small, gentle stream and I did not want to do anything but stand there, to stay there, to have a beer and think of nothing. And luckily I had a beer in my backpack; you see I was a Scout in school and you should know that their motto is "Be Prepared". So I stood on bridge with my one arm resting on the railing, legs crossed, looking up at the castle and sipped my beer. While the view was mesmerizing I was soon disturbed by a lot of elderly people who were walking their dogs. I thought public drinking would be OK in Spain, but I guess Botellon (Spanish for drinking in the street/park/beach) is now frowned upon and I had to move a little to the side to a stone bench.

And again I was lost from the my worries, like what to have for dinner and what number of bus leads back to the station, which I admit are the biggest worries of my life these days; and transported into a bubble where there was no past, no future, but only the present. I was looking up at the castle and seeing the myriad colors of the leaves, hearing minute changes in the sound of the stream and tasting the flavours in the beer which I hadn't noticed before.

But like all good things this had to come to an end as well, as I had to pee.

Even though I am no longer in that place, and this time I have a photo, but I will not look at it, for me it's my private paradise. So the next time I am stressed, when there is a P2 ticket or my in laws arrive and I need a place to retire to, to think of nothing and to feel relaxed, I will mentally arrive here. My new favorite beer point.

Lights, Camera, My Opinion

 Best Movie – V for Vendetta

 

Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate.' This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valourous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose.

That is the best example of alliteration that I have ever seen. There are 51 Vs in that sentence and that is just the introduction of the character. A character played by Hugo Weaving (the same who played Agent Smith in Matrix). The movie’s writers are Andy & Larry Wachowski. But its story is based on the comic by the same name by Alan Moore which in my opinion is the best comic writer. The movie does change the characters and some events from the comic book but at times it is completely faithful as well. Before this movie I thought movies were the ready-to-eat versions of books, but this is not the case here. A movie here combines the plot and narrative of a book, the visual beauty of a painting and the tension & passions of a song.

The visual allegories provided in movie are simply awe striking at times. The way V draws his knives in a V shape, the fireworks making a V in sky, the red V mark on the cell they had kept V in. Then Ewey finding herself in the rain like V had in the fire (the names V and Ewey, not a co-incidence). But the biggest and most complex is the dominos scene which symbolizes the chain reaction that he has set and the way things are stacked up, everything will fall. The domino fall ends with one piece left standing with one red and one black side, which means only thing remaining in the end will be him and Chancellor Sutler. And they both are two faces of the same coin. And it’s not just the visual treat and the dialogues and Shakespeare lines (they are quite a few from Macbeth and Richard III) but also the eerie similarity to real life when V says “The building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are given power by the people. Alone, a symbol is meaningless, but with enough people, blowing up a building can change the world.”

To me it is the best movie I have watched, it has a good story, excellent dialogues, deeper meanings, fantastic acting by the entire cast, breath taking cinematography. But the biggest is the message that one man can make a difference. V is no superhero, he had the time and patience and most importantly the drive to what he wanted. A definite must watch even if you don’t see all the layers at one time.

FREEDOM FOREVER !

Best Villain – Malcom McDowell as Alex Delarge from A Clockwork Orange

Malcom McDowell is scary, no let me rephrase MM is making-you-hold-your-breath-fearing- what-he-might-do-next scary. He doesn’t all these nasty things because he is forced to do it by the circumstances or because of his greed for money or he is because somebody killed his mommy in cold blood. He does them because he likes to do them. He is inclined to what the movie says – Ultra Violence. So he drives people off the road, seduces two underage girls, beats up his rival gangs and his own gang members, rapes a young woman and half kicks her husband to death and finally kills a woman with a giant porcelain dildo. But he does with so much panache and Beethoven music to the background that it feels like he’s a musician at a concert, he was born to do these things. And in a way he was.

And that is what the movie’s message is; that if you forcibly make a man to do good he’s not actually good, but also the flip side that he is not bad just because he does bad things as well. And there is the question about morality. Is there good or bad in the world without choice.Stanley Kubrick's one of the finest works.

We find him in the most adverse conditions after his treatment, he is left homeless, beaten up by the his own friends, tortured to the sound of his favorite music but still it is difficult to sympathize with him because in the words of someone from the movie “he is rotten to the core”. But he is just a teenager with no megalomania or plans to destroy the universe, no multi-million dollar evil empires, he looks just like an average guy. He is the villain next door, and maybe that makes him so scary.

That’s why, the sight of him sitting in the Korova milk bar trying to make up his ‘razoodock’ still gives me the chill. And that is why the simple song  ‘Singin in the rain’ makes hair stand on my back.

Best Love Story – American Pie Series.

Ya you read that right, and this is not sarcasm. While to most people it was about Jim humping an apple pie, the pact to get laid, lots of toilet humor and Finch fucking Stifler’s mom at the end of every movie but to me it was not. It was about Jim and Michelle’s love story.  To quote from the movie :

Michelle: How did a little perv like you, turn into such a great guy?

Jim: How did a little nympho like you, turn into such a great girl?

Michelle: I'm still a nympho.

Jim: Well, I'm still a perv.

Jim: You know Michelle. To quote someone that I’ve learnt quite a bit from. I think you and I are a perfectly natural normal thing. Perfectly natural.

And that’s what they are, a perfectly normal couple (well not really). Love to me is that only, it’s about accidentally saying “This one time at band camp” and realizing you are in love, to take a walk on the beach with her alone when things go wrong, to look all over for her and smile when you see her on the top of the stair case, raising your glass to your friends when you finally get the girl. It’s about getting the sex bible to keep your girl and it’s about leaving the Lacrosse game to finish the duet.

That is how love in the real world is, it’s not about writing letters from beyond the grave, it’s not drinking poison after your loved one is dead, it’s not about arriving and saying “No one puts baby in the corner”.  When you are in love you don’t see angels playing harps, people dancing with you on the street; it’s the small things that tell you, and it’s the small things that matter in life, always.

And the best part is the soundtrack, it consists of my favorite love songs. 1. Sway - Bic Runga. 2. Into the Mystic – The Wallflowers. 3.  Honey & the moon – Joseph Arthur. And also worth mentioning here is Laid – James.

And the last line - Love isn't just a feeling. Love is something you do. It's a dress, a visit to band camp. A special haircut. ;-)

Best Neo Noir – Manorama Six feet Under

Inspired from the now classic Chinatown this replaces the darkness and shadow games of the original black & white movie with the barren landscapes of Rajasthan and lots & lots of nothingness. The result is even more unsettling. Instead of the darkness of the original where you think what lies in the shadows here you know that nothing lies in the light, there are not witnesses to whatever is happening and you are cut off from the world. And to confuse you further Navdeep Singh directly puts Mirage in context with an image of Yana Gupta saying that what you see in the desert might actually not exist.

It’s not a rip off or a cheap copy, but a re-interpretation of the original. Director even pays homage to the original by showing the nose cutting scene  on the TV at Satyaveer’s house (Abhay Deol). Nothing is reliable in the movie; the wife of the Maharaja who soon turns out to be not the wife of the Maharaja the, his irritable and nagging wife Nimmi who advises him good but he never listens, his brother-in-law and best friend, Brij Mohan (Vinay Pathak) with uncertain loyalties who starts his sentences with “Jeeje”. Manorama’s roommate played by Sen who plays his almost love affair. Even his prying neighbor creeps you out.

 The narrator is Satyaveer Singh Randhawa (Abhay Deol), a down-on-his-luck public works engineer. He compares Lakhot – dry, desolate and despondent – to the general downturn in his own life. An aspiring writer whose only novel Manorama sank without a trace, grieves about how he had once wished to be famous but is now resigned to a banal and unremarkable existence. “Is mardood raet ke jungle ,ae chote mote commission lekar apni choti moti pareshaniyon ke saath ek choti moti gumnaam see zindagi jee raha huun”. The movie serves up twist after twist and keeps the suspense going till the end.

Unlike Chinatown this however ends on a happy note and breaks away from the noir genre and says the big fish doesn’t always win, sometimes the small fish gets away. Watch it if not for Abhay Deol’s restrained performace or Vinay Pathak’s over the top one, then for the eerie backdrop of the desert. Rajasthan as I have seen.

Most Misunderstood Movie – Hancock

The whole list till now has been unconventional but this one is right out there. Hancock currently hold a 40% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and isn’t a darling of the masses either. It could have been great but director made a mish-mash of the unique and the clichéd.

“A hard-living superhero who has fallen out of favor with the public enters into a questionable relationship with the wife of the public relations professional who's trying to repair his image.” This is its synopsis on imdb.com and it is far from the real issue.

Director Peter Berg tries to address the loneliness, lamentation and reluctance of a superhero who doesn’t want to be a Hero leave alone Super.  He rejects the public because they reject him, lives alone in a trailer on a barren hill; goes over the ticket of Frankenstein that he found in his pocket 80 years ago every morning, has amnesia and a drinking problem. The director could have explored this angle further and could have had gone to places where only Watchmen has gone before, that Superheroes are also normal people and have normal people’s needs, like the need to be loved, of company, of being appreciated, they are also embarrassed and afraid to open up in front of others.

But then the movie tries to get some comic relief in and quickly descends into banality. A goody two shoes PR guy comes in who is trying to make the world, has a quirky wife and a sweet kid. So then Will Smith puts on a spandex costume and tries to save a sexually attractive lady cop, things and cars blow up all around and you realize that this cannot recover from this abyss.

But still the movie has its moments, like the scene where Hancock wakes up alone passed out of his trailer and runs his hand the movie ticket, his sole connection to the past. Or when he makes drawings in his prison cell introspecting and the last and the most powerful when he walks away from a mortally wounded Charlize Theron knowing this is the only way she will survive.  All in all a great could have been movie.

James Bong - The Spy who Scrapped me

It was the summer of 03 when Jishnu banerjee aka JB first saw American Pie on his friend’s new PC . He had lied to his parents about going to Debashish’s house for studying. Debashish had lied to his parents about his stomach ache so as not to go on his parent’s trip to Digha. They were home alone and that only meant one thing, watching forbidden American movies. There were too afraid to ask the CD Rental guy for the real good stuff and no fun in Schwarzenegger movies now so they settled for the movie which would change his life, American Pie. While Debashish could only care about Shannon Elizabeth’s bare breasts JB saw the deeper meaning in the movie. It was not a teen – comedy, or love story or social commentary. It was but a Rallying cry for ‘every man who should be getting laid but isn’t’. It was a message for the involuntary celibates of the world to unite and fight for their right, that is sex. Of course it required some modifications for Indian Culture. Most kids around him didn’t even know what second base was, let alone been to it. Indian high schools were nothing like American high schools, there were no cheerleaders, everybody wore uniform, and only high point was when Mrs. Das looked down to correct the papers. But hope was around the corner. Across the corner lay short skirts, songs in the canteen, dances in basketball court, freedom or in other words College.

JB got into Jadavpur University, his dad’s dream or rather second dream, first was IIT Kharagpur. Though his dad was a little disappointed of him getting into Mechanical Engineering; according to him the real action lied in IT, he would soon realize that, but not in the sense his dad meant.

After 6 months of short hair, formals, dancing on ‘atariya pe lotan kaburtar’ and running around in his underwear finally he got to step into fabled hallows of the canteen. And it was nothing like he imagined, no girls in short skirts, no guys dancing on table tops, nobody sharing a cold drink with two straws. Instead there were girls with hairy arms, guys fighting over a piece of samosa and the fat canteen owner scratching his belly. This is not what he had hoped for, after finding out there was only 1 girl in all the 4 years of mechanical and she was a girl by a long stretch of imagination, all his hopes laid on the canteen and girls in the IT departments. All his dreams came crashing down, this seemed even worse than school, at least no one came to school in bathroom slippers. At that he moment he realized that there was no strip poker, no beer funnel, and no frat parties in store for him. And all the few girls that were there lay way out of his league and his social circles. Most of his time would be spent attending soporific lectures, drooling over Jenna Jameson and the company of his left hand. The world was a very dark place now.

But then came light in his dark world, the shining beacon in the place devoid of any hope, joy or coitus. Orkut. The story was that the guy created this site to meet his ex girl friend who was lost for 8 years. JB didn’t give a rat’s ass for whom and why, all he heard that there is where the hot girls of Calcutta were, posing in provocative poses and waiting for the right guy to seduce them. On Orkut you didn’t need a car, not even a bike to pick up a girl, money didn’t make your profile better and girls would never get to know if you stammer or spit when you talk. It was a level playing field; he was sure that god was out there somewhere, for nothing less divine could have made such a site. It was time to dig out his old e-mail address JB_007@hotmail.com which he had formed to ask his cousin studying in Texas to get him a cowboy hat, apparently the mail got lost before reaching him, as he never replied to him.

Project Orkut was initiated. He realized that his normal persona was not going to help him pick chicks, not in the real world, not online or alien. He needed a new personality, a character that was smooth yet restrained, cool yet sophisticated, someone who got all the women but wasn’t trying too hard. In short someone exact opposite to him. And this only meant one man, the legendary agent from MI- 6 with his numbers as 007. In his excitement he didn’t even notice the typo when he named his profile as JáMěs BōnG. It was now time to flesh out the rest of the profile. Of course he wasn’t actually in horse breeding and fast race cars but he would have been if he had the money. And of course he didn’t play polo and squash or was in body building but he would surely like to and he hadn’t read, War and Peace and all the 16 sonnets of Shakespeare but he would someday. Orkut was the place where you weren’t bogged down by your current circumstances and could be all that you aspired to be. The real tricky part was the ‘About Me’, this was like the heat tempered, 108° drill bit of the drill which would penetrate the material. So he decided to extra research on that finally he came with his masterpiece. If Mrs. Sequiera had seen this she would have surely kissed him, he mentally made a note of looking up for Mrs Sequiera or her even hotter daughter on Orkut. Here it was – 

Hello there cute and charming gals and girls

i would to u make new friend and im introducing about my self ..
Im a positively possessive attitude that fuels the undying zeal to work for broader prospects puts me where I am today. A young lad hailing from Asansol who has seen the dark side of the life only to light up the future. A man with proven track in intelligenze (I study in Jadavpur University, 1^st year B.E.) and dreaming of one day to have one my own software company. I like guns and fast cars and my Martini shaken not stirred.

By the bye my name is "Jishnu banerjee" with 18 ears of experience on the earth. I would like to make friendship with u if u are interested please add me or feel free to call..
Awaiting for your reply

P.S. - I wrote this 4 years back when Orkut was cooling down and the star of Facebook was rising. But today I thought what the hell and posted this. Coz I wanted to post something on my blog just for the heck of it. I had a whole series of these planned earlier ,  next one was - James Bong : From Calcutta with love.Might still do it if enough people 'Like' this.

And of course there was no intention of making fun of Bengalis (this time), but just James Bong rhymed with James Bond, so I'm sorry for doing this.

P.P.S - I plan to continue my 'Murder She Thought' Trilogy (ooh I love this word - Trilogy) but I'm stuck up on one plot point here and not able to resolve it. I will get back to it as soon as I do. Mental note to self - Get all these ready before you start writing a story and don't get ideas mid-way.

Night

“Nights are too good to just sleep through them” – Anirudh Singh Chauhan

There is something strange and mystifying about the night. It makes the most ordinary sub-urban residences look like the den of most sinister crimes and fornication. Lonely street lamps cast long and dark shadows. And pipes become snakes, bushes become monsters and the old watchman is the cloak and dagger.

The night makes me realize the triviality of ourselves. Just as the street lamp is a small speck of light fighting a losing battle with the omnipresent darkness coming in from all sides to engulf it. Same is the case with us; we are just tiny specks in the big universe trying to sustain ourselves through the play of cosmic forces in whose plans we don’t even figure.

Then the sound of a wailing siren of an ambulance rips through the shroud of silence in the night; unrelenting and inconsolable, like a mother who just lost her child. Someone somewhere is dying. Someone somewhere is beating his wife in these nice quaint houses, someone somewhere is getting drunk to force himself on his girlfriend behind those pretty curtains, someone somewhere is wishing for his mother-in-law never to wake up from her sleep in those spic and span houses. Because that’s what man is. A predator; and night is the time for predators to come out. Night is to man what the grass is to the viper. The grass sways with the wind, is soft to touch and is easily trampled underfoot; but it the grass that hides the viper till he comes close enough to strike.

But that is only the part of the charm of the night. It shows you the pretty moon and twinkling stars which the sun hides from you every morning. But the night is also concealing, it respects your privacy. The night is quiet, it respects your peace. And most of it all it is adjusting; it only lets you see what you want to see. Somewhere in this night only a woman is sleeping in the embrace of her soulmate convinced that no sorrow can touch her. Somewhere in this same night a kid is burning the midnight oil, sacrificing his tonight convinced that it’ll bring him a better tomorrow. And somewhere through this same night a man is driving towards his loved ones convinced they’ll never be apart again. Night is to man what a shield is to a Knight. It protects him of the brutality and the sword of his day life.

But most of it all night is to man what day is to the earth. It makes us possible to make sense of him. There are no masks, no pretentions in the night. No makeup, no corsets, no suits to hide behind. Nobody to keep up the facade for, no approvals to take for his actions, no opinions to be formed by his speech. The night doesn’t conceal anything about a man, it reveals it. In the dark man is his true self.

In an Absolut world - 2

Continuing on my vision for an Absolut™ world I think the following points should definitely exist in one –

If you have driven around in any of the Indian Cities sooner or later you would come across to what has been termed as the 'Hand of God', it's when you are doing 60 on a empty road suddenly a pedestrian pops in front of you and shows the stop sign with his hand like a traffic policeman and crosses the road. If you get too close he won't mind shouting at you a few obscenities, because he actually expected you to freeze wherever you are, doesn't matter if it wasn't the zebra crossing, it even doesn't matter if the vehicles have the first right on the road and it still doesn't matter if the vehicle hit him or her the vehicle may lose at most a few spare parts but he may lose his life. But no, you should stop dead in the tracks for you have been shown the 'Hand of God'

Well in an Absolut™ world there will be some reward points for running over the hand of god pedestrians. If some khadus looking uncle tries to give you the hand when you were happily cruising at a good speed listening to favorite song, don't brake, in fact step over the pedal and run over the bastard and get a pat on the back and reward points for doing so.

Have you ever come across a skinny guy wearing faded jeans and chappals and a tee shirt which says "Sorry girls, I only date models" or an overweight, spectacle wearing, hair tied in bun girl wearing a tee shirt saying 'Rock Chic'? I have, and there's nothing more annoying than that (except maybe the TV Reality Shows)

In an Absolut™ world these kinds of tee shirts will require a prescription from a stylist or at least some kind of qualification in terms of dress sense. This way at least the tee shirt and its message won't be de graded.

Now we are living in world where there are no poor people, just some people at the bottom of the Pyramid, there are no Muslims in our country either but some people belonging to the minority community. People have also successfully overcome the difficulties of the handicapped persons, by giving them some physical or mental challenges.

In an Absolut™ world a spade would be called a spade, a short person will be called short instead of vertically challenged. And when I will lose all my hair on my head I would be bald and not cranium coat deprived or some shit like that. No politically correct Euphemisms!

Since the Tiger survey came out which said only 1411 of them left people across the world or at least on its third most populous country i.e. Facebook really came together and worked seriously towards conservation of the tigers. They joined communities of 'save the tiger' campaign, clicked the like button on the 'save the tiger' pages some even went on the extra mile and copy pasted 'save our tigers, only 1411 of them left' as their status message. I really can't tell how many of them think the tiger poachers would be cowering in their home seeing the sheer size of the members of 'save the tiger' community on Facebook or how many tiger hunters were in their friend list who would have a change of heart after seeing their heart wrenching appeal to save the tigers, I really really have no clue. And there is no dearth 'Good Samaritans' on Facebook there are people clicking like on 'save a girl child', 'reduce poverty', 'don't indulge in nuclear warfare' and what not.

In an Absolut world the whole of Facebook would be monitored by the government and every time somebody joined the 'Save the Tiger' community immediately they would be served a summon for 50 hours community work in the forests where the tigers resided. Whenever someone liked 'Reduce Poverty' they would have a sum of Rs 10000 deducted from their bank accounts to help the poor. That they would realize that if you want to make a change in this world don't click on random buttons which makes you look cool & socially considerate and costs nothing but in fact do some actual work.

And lastly something which is very close to my heart. In an Absolut™ world anybody who ordered mixed a scotch with stuff like Thums Up or Coke or Sprite and then claimed something like "Yaar kasam se waise to maine bahut daaru pee hai lekin ye saali Scotch to bahut Smooth hai" would be shot on sight. The scotch master died blending this stuff for you and while he was busy working on the aroma, palate, and finish of this golden liquid you were pouring cola over it! And for people who ordered truck loads of snacks like Peanut Masala and Tandoori Chicken etc. along with doing the aforementioned to further kill the taste and aroma …. Well for them let's just say I might have to get medieval on their ass.