Connect the dots

Whoever thought of this deserves the Best To The Point Title For An Eatery award. The suspense in the three dots after eat makes it the clear winner in its category.

Over and not out

There are very few jokes that i can think of and chuckle to myself. Most of the time, i watch comedians for the way they deliver a joke and i find my dose of humour in the way it’s expressed. For instance, i love it when Bill Burr laughs at his joke because i find the part when he’s unable to control his grin really funny. Similarly, i admire how Kenny Sebastian makes the most of silence before dropping the punchline. I’m a sucker for nuances. At the same time, my joke delivery sucks. I end up laughing the most while telling a joke. Very rarely do i manage to complete the intended joke. I’m usually covering my face on the table or rolling on the floor holding my loin. However (read however the way Louis CK would pronounce it), there are some jokes that i’ve come to cherish because of their solitude value. The kind which no comedian told you but you remember anyhow. The kind that doesn’t even require an audience and you can smile to yourself thinking of the hilarious scenario.

Presenting to you, ladies and gentlemen and the majority, one such piece to marvel.

People gathered outside a TV shop watching a cricket match involving India (of course; Indians are Indian cricket fan, not cricket cricket fan) and one more man joined the crowd. As is the norm, one is expected to ask what the score is. But this guy asked, “Gavaskar out ho gaya kya?” (Gavaskar is still batting or out?) To which, the surprised crowd turned their attention to the newbie and one of them replied, “Gavaskar ko out hue 25 saal ho gaye. Tu kahaan tha?” (It’s been 25 years since Gavaskar got out; he's retired now. Where were you?) The newbie matter-of-factly said, “Jail mein.” (Prison.)

Don’t know why but this silly joke cracks me up. Every single time.

Core issues

I was recently discussing how corruption is all around us. The plague has reached a point where you wonder whether it’s as essential as oxygen or it’s something that we can do without. I tend to believe that both the options could be mere possibilities. And the reason i say so has something to do with our association of corruption with politicians. Logic gets harmed when we can only imagine politics as the source of corruption. You know why? Because it’s not. Corruption is in every sphere of human influence. Politicians are maligned because they make great news. Corrupt individuals give rise to corruption. We often hear how the system is corrupt when the opposite is true. Individuals in a system are corrupt and these individuals function in coherence with their greed. More interestingly, corruption has very little to do with money. It’s essentially an exhibition of power. I can get you this or that done but there is a price to pay. Since the price can be paid in money most of the time, a signature of authority gets an appropriate tag. However, many a times, corruption creeps into a system without the individual noticing it. For example, you are being corrupt if you are using office printer to get printouts for personal use. Better still, you can be held for corruption if you are using staple pins that was ideally meant only for office use. See? That’s how the practice gets into picture but we brush it off thinking it’s not a big deal. Maybe it’s not a big deal but it makes front page headline when that practice is raised to the power of 1000 or more.

An apple a day

During my kindergarten days, there was a book in which a boy was shown sitting on a fence with an apple tree behind him. The apples were low-lying and i used to wonder how nice it would be to have apples within your arm's reach. I had to wait for more than two decades to fulfill my childhood dream. Just to give you a background check, apple isn't native to India. The Britishers brought it along with them and found the cool hills suitable for its horticulture. Coming back to my story, i visited Ladakh in 2013 and saw apples trees for the first time in my life. To make things sweeter, the fruits were hanging really low. They were reddish ripe and i didn't waste any time in plucking one and belting it. I guess it felt nice... but not for long. I was on my second apple when i started feeling nauseous. Within seconds, i was puking and to complete the cycle of life, i was throwing up at the very base of the apple tree that i fed myself on! Apple hasn't been the same to me since. I've been avoiding that fruit thanks to what my mountain sickness did to me that day. Which is indeed an interesting development for a child who fancied greeting an apple tree someday in the early 1990s.

Misnomer of a colourblind

Ever heard an Indian (preferably northerner) calling a fellowperson (preferably northerner) racist for making a joke on another Indian (preferably southerner)? The joke could have been about anything ranging from unsavoury colour to weird accent to body hair. Even if you change the geographic belonging of the three characters, still the common factor would be the use of the R-word. Is it really racist of a northerner (or a southerner) to make fun of a southerner (or a northerner) with an insensitive remark? How can we determine the difference in race on the basis of the states one comes from? Especially when it’s obvious that the racial distinction in this case is based on appearance? For some inexplicable reason, darker skin tone is associated with the southern states while lighter tone is granted to the northern ones. Moreover, is it fair to say that the dark-looking Punjabis are racially distinct from their pinker neighbours? Similarly, aren’t there are fair people in south India? (No, it’s not just about the Aishwarya Rais and the Hema Malinis of the world.) Isn’t race a much deeper anthropological subject? There are too many questions here and a lot many more equations to handle. Our misguided sense of distinction, if i’m not mistaken, comes from the Britishers who ruled us. They saw us as blacks and we tamely accepted the term, overlooking the fact that many of us were wheat-ish. There was no scope for brown or grey in the colonial era; only black and white please. After our colonisers left, we turned on each other for amusement. Arts played a key role in bringing us together as countrypeople, true. It also gave birth to unchecked misrepresentation. For instance, post-independence, Bollywood kept on stereotyping the so-called Madrasis in their movies. (Calling the whole of south India Madrasis was similar to calling the whole of north India Kashmiris.) This gross caricature went on for decades to such an extent that nobody bothered to correct the powers-to-be in the Hindi film industry. There’s a very popular interview of Mehmood by Shekhar Suman where the former calls south Indian women black. Nothing wrong with that if it’s factual. Colour doesn’t determine the character of a person but the problem is in his tone: the degradation in his voice to crack wannabe jokes on the “blackness” of south Indians makes you want to call him racist. But then, there’s another problem here: his disdain for a particular skin tone doesn’t really make him a racist in India. He’s a colourist who happens to be an ignorant fool.

Urban poor joke

Q: What’s common to Katherine Hepburn, David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo and my grandma?

A: All took/take cold bath at night.

The only difference being my grandma did so because she couldn’t afford hot water all the time. Scarcity of fuel perhaps. Also, she wasn’t keen on fighting against ageing like the rest of the three were/are.

Begane naamkaran mein Abdullah deewana

“What's in a name? A controversy by any other name would smell as tweet.” - Shakespeare

Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan had a baby boy yesterday and decided to name him Taimur. And Twitter India lost its digital shit. In an ideal world, it’s nobody’s business what the parents name their kids. But then, we don’t live in an ideal world and Saifeena comprise a universe that fall under the label celebs. Whatever they do is going to be microscoped; something they fully understand. That’s the price of fame everybody from Hollywood to Bollywood pays. When Kimye named their child North West, there were tweets/jokes floating all around. The same happened when Beyonce and Jay Z named their ward Blue Ivy. Apparently, normal names are for normal people and celebs aren’t perceived as normal. They are considered a notch above not only in their lifestyle but also in their outlook. Which is why it’s understandable how Taimur managed to create a buzz on social media—in tandem with mass media, of course; partners in crime—to such an extent that his name trended for over 24 hours. That’s no small feat. The boy is not even a day old and he sticks to the list like magnet. Even Virat Kohli’s excellence doesn’t let him trend for a day. People’s attention keeps diverting and so do the trending topics. As far as Taimur is concerned, the initial response was a mix of aha and horror, which eventually graduated to hmm and shock and ultimately to ahem and wow. So what really triggered this extreme reaction? For one, Taimur, a variation of Timur, is a historic personality best remembered for his conquest as well as brutality. His Islamic agenda is well-documented and he figures in the top-10 list of mass murderers in recorded history. Taimur is of Turkic origin and signifies strength. It is indeed a rare name at least in Indian context. In a simplistic manner of speaking, he stood for bloodshed but then which great conqueror of the past didn’t? Mao alone was responsible for the death of over 50 million people and he wasn’t even a conqueror! Names like Darius and Xerxes are popular in Iran although both are pre-Islamic and were marked by terror. Omar is a popular name in the Muslim world and means exactly what Amar does: immortal. Similarly, a lot of Arab kids are named Saladin even though the great warrior was of Kurdish origin. Ashoka was an exception in the sense that he gave up violence after butchering villages after villages, thus ensuring his legacy is less tainted. Speaking of whom, we need to understand how significant one-word names are different from the ones with a surname attached. Famous names from history like Buddha, Paigambar, Akbar, Che, etc are words either embraced by or entrusted upon the individuals in question. You hear Mahatma, you think of Gandhiji. (You should ideally think of Phule but that’s a different debate altogether.) This might explain why you’ll still find kids named Adolf in Germany or Augusto in Chile; a different surname becomes the safety net. One-word names like Taimur or Aurangazeb are independent to the point that you automatically think of those two historic figures when you hear such names. Saifeena, in their defense albeit they don’t need to defend anything, can say that they don’t care about Timur or what he did. But that’d be a lame—no pun intended—explanation, especially for a couple that hails from an industry that binges on established names. After all, the nicest part of this pseudo-controversy is people are suddenly interested in "the most boring subject" called history.

“I hope I trend on Twitter someday.” - Timur’s last words