At times, I
want to be Sivan. Not the destroyer god with three eyes, though I wouldn’t mind
having that third eye. Especially when driving. Would love to incinerate some
of the f#$%ing maniacs who magically appear in front of me when I am driving. The
other day, driving from Rama Rao Lamp towards Palayam, easily one of the widest
stretches in the city, my smooth progress was blocked by a woman on a scooter, two guys on a bike and a small van (engine power = 0.005 Mhp; Mhp
denotes “Miniature horsepower” a new SI unit I just made up) all cruising in
sync at 25 cm per hour, occupying three lanes – three f#$%ing lanes. Oh, for
that third eye! Oh, for that frikkin’ third eye!
Lady on
scooter, blissfully unaware of the havoc she’s causing around her… Poof! Ash!
Guys riding
bike, carrying a sack, probably filled with 10 rupee notes given by the bank in
accordance with the 56th RBI regulation of the day… Poof! Gone!
Low Mhp, make-in-India
van loaded with PVC pipes… Poof! Smouldering f#$%in’ embers!
And just for
the fun of it - lady in small car going in the other direction, head barely
visible, knuckles white from strangling the steering wheel… Poof!
I’d gladly give my eyeteeth for that third eye!
Enough
ranting for now. Let’s get back to Sivan.
Sivan
appeared before me some five or six years ago. I don’t remember exactly when. It was
about six in the evening, and walking back to my house I saw him sitting
forlornly on the steps of this deck-like extension of my dining room.
I went up to
him and said something like “Yo, ‘sup Sivan?” in Malayalam.
Sivan is hard of hearing and in the twilight he could barely read my lips, but
he replied. It was more of a statement. “I don’t have a place to sleep.” Till
the previous day, he was at a neighbour’s and apparently he had had a tiff with
the lady of that house. Sivan is always having tiffs - with walls, with stray
dogs, with guava trees, etc. And from what I learned, he has switched his
residence a few times in the last few years after having tiffs with the house
owners. I shrugged and pointed at the deck and that’s where Sivan has been for
the last five or six years – the longest he has stayed anywhere in recent
memory.
Sivan does
odd jobs in the neighbourhood like cleaning yards and dehusking coconuts for,
literally, peanuts. He won’t accept more than 200 rupees at a time, which is
probably enough to cover his food expenses for two days. No financial planning
for him. His material possessions (he has the key to the shed in my yard) has
increased to two bundles now, and for some reason he has a fetish for
footwear. His footwear collection is reaching Imelda Marcos-esque proportions
with 7 or 8 pairs of sandals of different hues lined up by the deck.
So, what
I’m getting at is that Sivan was the one person I knew who was not affected by
the Supreme Leader sucking cash out of the system. No banks to go to, no 500 or
1,000 rupee notes. Sivan didn’t care. And I wanted to be Sivan. I know that
demonetisation is so 2016, but I started writing this piece back then and
couldn’t complete it (as I was standing in the queue). Please bear with me.
Another
thing that has been bothering me for some time now is the words being used to
describe our rulers by their devotees. We have a supreme leader with a 56-inch body
part and a state leader with dual organs. I haven’t heard anything yet about
our mayor, who seems to be busy doing nothing. It’s possible that he too has an
inordinately long organ – a 12-metre long small intestine, perhaps – and his
devotees are waiting for the right moment to publicise it.
Anyway,
with all these talks about organs in the air, I suddenly felt a nagging doubt
about the adequacy of my organs. Being a science-oriented person, I immediately
went for the tape measure and set about measuring myself. I am a reasonably big
man. I’m six feet tall and can oscillate between well-built and fat f#ck in the
space of few hours. The tape went around my chest and said 108! Wow! “I’m the
biggest! I’m the biggest!” No, wait. That is in cm. Converted, it was just 42
inches. Pathetic. My self-esteem went poof like the lady on the scooter in
front of my third eye!
I needed to
come out of this dire situation and that’s when I got this idea of calling up
the Central Statistical Office. They’re good with numbers, I had heard. The
voice at the other end was brusque, “What’s your problem?”
I explained
my problem and there was a smirk at the other end.
CSO man: “Where
did you start your measurement from?”
Me:
“Seerow…sorry, Zero..that was my mallu accent acting up..y’know unguarded
moments.”
More
smirking at the other end. Was that for the accent? Hmm.
CSO man:
“Well, there lies your problem.”
Me: “What?”
CSO man: “Try
starting from 15.” Click.
It worked.
I’m a 57-incher now. My self-esteem zoomed. I was on par with Arnold
Shivajinagar.. sorry Schwarzenegger!
I was
happy. That was all that mattered, and as luck would have it, I had unwittingly become part of
the hottest trend sweeping the world. I plunged headlong into the “alternative
fact-ory” movement.
Though I
wrote headlong, it was not that I didn’t think about it at all. I did get some
insights from friends who made me see the light about reading such “alternative
fact-based” news. The fact is that such news made them happy. These are good people,
and like good people in many countries, they’re constantly worried about their
country going to the dogs. Especially, dog forbid, to dogs from a different
religion or dogs of a different colour.
So, when
they hear that a decision by their supreme leader (also known as the “master
stroker”) has led to a drastic fall in cancer incidence in Rarotonga, which was
verified by NASA’s sister organization NAUSEA (National Absurd & Unverifiable
Story Excretion Agency,) they go overboard with happiness. They also altruistically
spread that happiness around through WhatsApp and other media. Once it is
posted in three WhatsApp groups, it becomes a universal fact. (Also, stop
smirking at the word stroker. I didn’t mean that!)
Well, you
can’t blame them. He is a Cisco Certified National Leader (CCNL). He came in
fifth initially, but after some time, was revised upwards to third. More happiness.
Cisco promised $100 million investment in India after giving the certificate.
Unbeknownst to us, Cisco had promised 100 times that, i.e. a $10 billion
investment in our bad-ass neighbour up north in China. Guess Xi Jinping pings
at a higher level.
Then, there
is Jason the Yankee Hindunaut. His greatest advantage is that his identity can’t
be tracked down easily, unlike say, a Mark Tully. Jason is what they call a double agent,
a RAW CIA agent. In his day job, he is the run of the mill CIA agent, but at
night he turns into Trishul Subbu (scary rudra veena bgm). Happiness all
around, again.
Now since I’ve
jumped into this happiness-generating alternative factory movement, I thought I
should dredge up my own stories from the interwebs. That is the great thing
about this movement. There are no leaders. Anyone can come up with anything. If
someone contradicts you, all you have to say is, “that’s your opinion.”
Ultimately, everything boils down to your pursuit of happiness. So, here’s an
alternative factory product.
Godse didn’t
kill the pop of the nation for his Muslim appeasement as propagated. Some
people say…could be Jason. I’ve been reading things on the net and lots of
people are talking about many such things. In fact, I’m going to come back here
and cite myself... well, some people say that Godse might have been a lovechild of
a Ghandy, and was acting out his primal id to eliminate an imaginary father. Look
at the names – Mohandas Ka"RAM"chand Gandhi and Nathu"RAM" Vinayak Godse. Scary,
isn’t it? Incredibly, if you rearrange Nathuram Vinayak Godse, you get “u a
very matka gandhi son”. These are things the mainstream media and the biased historians
don’t ever ever want you to know.
So, don’t
be fooled guys. Come aboard. Pursue happiness. Create your bubble.
