Open letter to my young PJU friends

Dear young PJU friends,

Our nation is faced with a threat. A threat that is somehow generic, subtle and evil at the same time, one that escapes definition except via rhetoric. 

Today I salute your courage for having chosen to fight this unequal battle against injustice, rationality and dictatorship. 

The coming few months are not going to be easy. You will be targeted by the same non-specific forces. They will not leave any stone unturned in trying to extract specificity and logic from your speeches. They will try to humiliate you by asking you if you have anything concrete to say. Clarity has always been the last resort of the oppressor. Every effort will be made to wean you away from vague melodrama and even force you to attend to your coursework for the only reason that you are still students. Do not fall prey to these forces.

You are the torchbearers of our collective hope and the future of our country, or what is left of it once you take charge. Your educational background in subaltern studies and postmodern Kenya is starkly relevant to contemporary India. And your idea of separate nation states wherever there are insurgent(s) is amazing. 

As the lyricist Sameer once famously wrote

dil dil dil dil main tere pyar me khoya main saari raat na soya main kya karoon

Do not sleep, my young friends, till you win back the broad hazy sense of freedom that you so love.

Long live the revolution

Another bahut krantikari

The man whose wife didn't know English

Subtitles
Ramanujam (in English) : My little darling wife Janaki, how wonderful these numbers, how profound their meaning...
Janaki (in Tamil) : What's wrong with you? What language are you yapping in?
R : Why, my dear, it is Tamil, of course. Don't you see how sing-songy I'm being? And so full of quaint phrases. It has got to be Tamil, my little heart.
J : (Oh crap, we must be in a Hollywood movie again) I have no idea what you're on about. Is that English you're speaking?
R : Of course not, my love, how profound the stars above. As if Goddess Kaalilakshmi's blessings adorned the saree of the nightsky...
J : (This is probably the TB hitting his brain) Er...By the way, if we're newly married, aren't I like 10 years old now?
R : My sour little sweetheart, look at the heavens. Look at this little tree, it has 3 leaves. 3 is such a beautiful number. Oh Janaki, Oh Janaki. How beautiful these things. The weather is pretty good, maybe we should do an animal sacrifice or two and call the snake charmers for a quick round of black tea and scones. How I love speaking in my mother tongue Tamil. Oh Tamil, how identical you are to English, if not for the singsonginess and the weirdness.

Priyanga's publicist makes it to Times magazine's top 100 most influential list

It is definitely the 'time' to celebrate as Priyanga Chopda's PR agent Dilip Sharma made it to the global 'Top 100 most influential people' list published by Times magazine. Dilip has been making waves in the past couple of years which saw him take a mediocre performer all the way to a lead role in a US Series and as if that weren't enough, to pop star status. Rumor has it Dilip's now trying to arrange a challenge match for Piggy with Magnus Carlsen as well.
In the citation on the website, Times offers generous praise for Dilip's work. "This is an extension of our 2006 cover when we gave 'You' the honour of being most influential, for controlling the information age. We've realised over the past 2 years that this information's not controlled by You but by hardworking publicists like Dilip. 'You' basically know shit and You deserve Piggy. Just a couple of months back, You had no idea who she was and now 2 million of You all be like 'oooh she so awesome', and that's all Dilip's work" it concludes. Donaild Trumph's publicist made it to the list as well.

PJU launches 25 year integrated MA programme

Encouraged by the response in mainstream media that its students are getting, Pandith Jawharlal University today launched an integrated 25 year MA (Leadership and Public speaking) course in the national capital amidst much fanfare. The first 10 years of the programme will be on-campus, and expose the students to some undisclosed conceptual constructs that would be vital to succeed in the second phase i.e. a quick 10 years of leadership training. The last five years is called the 'fiery leadership' training and there would be a module focused on fieriness, said the press release issued at the event.
Youngsters like the 45 year old Kamhaia Kumar and Oomur Khaleid, 43, rejoiced at the launch and said that migrating to this integrated course from their ongoing 10 year sociology masters, would give them an extended period of time at campus, where their skills would be fine-tuned in their upcoming formative years. Some political parties may nominate their youth wing leaders to pursue this programme. Shri Ragul Gandy, when asked for his comments, however, said that he would consider himself too young to undertake this course and would first learn the ropes in small baby steps. The Student Union President, Shri Sheetal Rashid, 85, had to skip the event to prepare for her BA finals.
The press conference was interrupted by a PJU Student protest rally showing solidarity with a little known movement called Gurgaon Azaad karo, which seeks nationhood for Gurgaon to solve its traffic problems.

FIlmfair takes back Fardein Khan's award, says 'India's become intolerant'

Joining an increasing number of writers and poets who have returned honours and given up positions in recent weeks, Filmfair awards today announced that they are revoking Fardein Khan's 'Best male debut' award for the film 'Prem Agan' given back in 1998.

"We are very afraid in the new India. It is intolerant of religious diversity, mediocre performances and stuff like that. This is not the free India of 1998 where we could give the award to just about anyone", said Filmfair's official spokesperson.

"This is our small way of revolting against the growing intolerance. We protest the restrictions on freedom of expression in the country today. We'd in fact given this award to encourage more facial expression in his subsequent films but that clearly didn't work out for us"

Filmfair's governing council earlier passed a powerful resolution protesting the killings of noted rationalists in the country and miraculously enough, not only did that bring back the dead, the perpetrators found themselves behind bars as well, as a direct result of the signing of the minutes of this meeting and subsequent scanning and uploading on their website.

More hate mail - queues

This post is dedicated to hating two types of people a)those who are in front of you in a queue and b) those who are behind you in the same queue
a) Those in front - the 'deep customisers' : Murphy's law does all the set-up for this act - you are already in the slowest moving queue leading to a counter staffed by an introspective ticket agent. This is when each person ahead of you decides to engage in a complex customised transaction with the hapless ticket agent. Or just enquire about a complex customised transaction and discuss for several hours before arriving at the simple one.
'We are 8 of us and we'd like to sit in 3 equal groups. 2 of us want to be between 30 and 40 feet from the screen. 3 of us are actually a couple and would like to sit together...blah. Aisa milega kya?'
'Nahi. Front row, Saath me 8 seats. Chahiye ki nahi?'
'Picture acchi hai? Chal rahi hai?' and so on.
Now imagine this frustration multiplied 8 times. That's a wedding buffet for you. The person ahead of you in the queue is invariably a perfectionist to the point of OCD. Needs to get the quantity on his plate exactly right, down to the last microliter of dal and the last particle of rice. And when a few extra ml of dal pour into his plate by mistake, you can see the disappointment writ large on his face.
'How could I screw this up? I just spent 5 minutes on this dal-pouring activity at the expense of these 100 people waiting behind me patiently and hungrily. And still poured excess dal on my plate. My career as an accurate wedding-buffet-portion-size measurer-and-eater is over - I'm finished. Oh wait! Let me redeem myself by getting the exactly right sized Paapad from this collection of 1000. Not this one, too big. Not this one, too crooked' etc is what must be going through the fellow's mind.
b) Those behind - the 'perpendiculars' :You finally get your turn to buy your ticket after the deep-customisers in front of you did their thing. The guys behind you are a different category of pain - they are the perpendicular queuers. As luck would have it, ticket agent goes off on a two minute break leaving you waiting. Guy just behind you also walks up to the counter and stands on your right, guy behind him moves up too and stands to your left and so on. Standing close enough to you so the ticket agent wouldn't be very clear who's first when he returns. The queue is now officially a perpendicular one also called a standard Indian queue. All of them squeeze a palm with money in it into the counter when the ticket agent returns. And simultaneously issue instructions to the ticket agent. The ticket agent now shifts to a more competitive process where the most aggressive get serviced first. The only way around this is to become a really fat and heavy person and retain your position right in front of the counter so there's no doubt in the agent's mind when he returns from the break.

Hate mail

I'm grateful to the law of the land which comes between me and what I would like to do to these people.

1. The fight of the century has just gone by between Mayweather and Pacquaio and like everyone else who missed the fight, I start searching for highlights online. I look for reasonably long duration videos. I land up on a video titled 'Mayweather vs Pacquaio full fight highlights May 2, 2015'. Very promising indeed at a duration of 51:25 minutes. But no, it turns out to be a video of the dude in the pic shooting himself watching TV while waiting for the fight. Note - it's not a video of the fight. It's not a home video of the fight showing live on TV. It's not a video of the dude watching the live fight on TV. It's a video of the dude watching some random crap on TV before the fight. And uploading this as a video of the fight. Why? Why?

2.  I read about Messi's spectacular goal against Atletico Madrid. Not too much into league football but something like this makes you get on to youtube. Guess what, there's a video titled Messi goal against Atletico Madrid, with the date. What could go wrong from here? I click it and am immediately subjected to really poor graphic design (in pic). So this was a dude who was playing soccer in PS-2, probably a 200 kg fat slob who last saw sunlight in 1995, who thought it was important to upload his PS-2 crap on youtube. Why not? I could watch recordings of other people's body of work on their PS-2s, all day. And he uploads it under a false title that would make people watch it. For about 2 seconds i.e., before cursing him, maybe leaving a nasty comment about his women relatives. Why? Why?