The End of Exile

After three years of Covid-imposed exile, I finally made it to my momma-land GOC (God’s Own Country, or as in some interpretations, God’s Own Cakoos) in July for a short trip. More than the mind-numbing pre-trip bureaucratic procedures, what got my goat was the nail-biting wait for the RT-PCR test results.

You see, I had considered myself to be a cool cucumber throughout my life. Exams, exam results, job interviews, job, none of these things ever unnerved me much. I remember a Tamil friend from college days, who would visit my room on the eve of exams to relax. He will come in with his eyeballs popping out of their sockets, almost touching his soda glass specs, and veins on his forehead taut and about to burst. But then, he will see me dragging on a filter-less Panama cigarette and playing cards with another friend, an even cooler cucumber, and all his tensions vanish. Eyeballs pop right back in, bulging veins disappear, and the man is ready to take the exam next day.

That was me before I encountered RT-PCR test. The clinic was going to send the results to my e-mail the evening before the day we were flying. I was irritable all day long, barking at my kids, and generally being an a$$*ole. At around 6pm, the mails came. I don’t know if my eyeballs were touching my glasses, but it was one of those rare moments in my life I was totally tensed. Adding to that tension was the fact that all four of us had to clear this test. I clicked on the links one by one 陰性, 陰性, 陰性, 陰性…All negative! Collective relief all around.

The trip. Narita airport had the feel of a funeral parlour, but transit at bustling Singapore Changi was fun as usual. Thirontharam Hawai Adda looked and felt the same as I remembered it from 2019. The city streets also appeared to be more or less the same as before, and some places still had the bombed-out Fallujah feel with lots of rubble. Oh, it was good to be back. The first couple of days were spent meeting family and friends in the immediate neighbourhood and eating parotta, beef, appam, mutta curry, etc. Then it was time to attend to some unfinished business from three years ago involving government offices, banks, etc. Surprisingly, most of those worked out well. The government staff were mostly un-rude (if there is such a word) and reasonably helpful, which was unexpected, to be frank. I really wanted to get things done this time and was willing to pull some strings if needed, ditching my convictions. So, it was a pleasant surprise when everything went smoothly without me using my connections or greasing any palms.

The only weekend was spent in Kochi with my college mates. We drove to Kochi in a friend’s vehicle to avoid public transport and the risk of contracting some new pox. My friend, I believe, took his license from the KSRTC driving school. He drives his Innova car like the drivers of the killer express buses of the state transport service ‒ threateningly, recklessly, and with utter disregard to rules, road conditions, and passengers. The man looks like he is on a mission, though nobody knows what it is. 

Anyway, we reached Kochi safely and spent some quality time with friends and the brews brought from various parts of the world including the sake I took from Japan. One major disappointment, though, was the food: seafood to be exact. Kochi, the Queen of the Arabian Sea, is famed for seafood, but for some reason the place where we stayed served us something that felt like blubber dipped in batter and fried. I started cribbing about it, and seeing that, my influential local friends went out and found an exotic small shop selling matthi fry (sardines), prawns, idiyirachi (pounded dried beef), etc., which went a long way in assuaging my feelings and making me fall in love with Kochi again.

On the way back, my maniacal friend gave the wheels to me as he wanted to sleep. I was still in Japanese mode of driving, trying to stick to my lane wherever there was one, keeping distance with the vehicle in front, etc. This, obviously, was annoying to the local drivers, and probably even some pedestrians, who were wondering “ii ma#$an ethu konathinnada vandi odikkan padichathu?”, which could be loosely translated as “where the f*#k did this a$$*ole learn to drive?

Well, here I was, stopped at a red signal while heading out of Kochi, when a police vehicle came and stopped near me on my right. In most countries this would be against the law, because it was straightaway blocking the oncoming traffic by being in the opposite lane. Green light comes on and the police vehicle blares its siren and cuts across in front of me. I obediently drive myself into the ditch, which serves as the shoulder in most GOC roads, to let him pass. Behind him went a government car which had a board saying, “High Court Judge!”

Now, I know that we shouldn’t judge judges just because they break the law. He might have been rushing to deliver some late-night judgment of national importance. Maybe, it was related to that actor showing his butt on a nude photoshoot, which riled many people in the country. To be sure, that actor was cutting into the action of the Jain monk people, who probably have a monopoly on butt-show. The rule says that not every dumbo can show his or her butt. The judge hopefully will decide “independently” as to who can show their butt, upon giving due consideration to the ruling dispensation’s whims. Remember, judges are important people who can throw the book at you using words like infructuous, Suo motu and mutatis mutandis. So, I quietly drove out of the ditch to continue with my journey.

There are couple of things you learn early on in India. One is to not diss on gods, religions, or religious people. The retribution will be swift and harsh. If at all you want to say something, it should appear to the religious person as you’re dissing somebody else’s god. Religious people are OK with that. Another thing you learn is to keep quiet against the powers that be. The state can do whatever it pleases using all of the tools it has at its disposal including the army.

The Supreme Leader of the country, for example, is a man who boasts one of the biggest breast sizes in the world at 56 inches. This is probably second only to the 57 inches of Arnold Shivajinagar, popularly known in the West as Arnold Schwarzenegger. Interesting trivia ‒ Shivajinagar is also an actor like the Supreme Leader, though not as good. As a thespian, Shivajinagar is limited to action hero roles, whereas the Supreme Leader is famed for his ability to pull off any given role. Angry middle-aged man, tortured soul, grieving husband, mountain-dwelling ascetic, weatherman, military strategist, economist, mathematician, birdfeeder, you name it – he has done it, and done it with elan. To top it all, he is also a real-life crocodile Dundee-ji.

Sorry, I went off on a tangent to praise the Supreme Leader. I was discussing how you should not say anything against those who rule over us. This is true even for regional leaders in many states. Many of these leaders have special organs similar to the large breast of the Supreme Leader. Some have double or multiple organs. And they all have cult-like followers. For instance, the Supreme Leader only has to snap his fingers and the cult members will carve you up. Well, maybe not snap his fingers, because snapping might bring the cultists out of their trance. Could it be dog whistle? I don’t know. The opposition party representatives also have organs, but they mess up in putting the right organ in the right place and often end up, for example, with their heads in their posterior orifices. That is why people call them the dis‘organ’ized opposition.

Anyway, I fervently hope that our law-breaking judge was able to save the country and deliver a landmark infructuous decision as to who can show their posterior in public. My reverie, meanwhile, was broken by the maniac sleeping in the passenger seat, who was wide awake now and ready to drive. With him at the wheel, we had an uneventful journey back to Thirontharam with our hearts in our mouths, and the foul taste of an eminently forgettable dosa from a restaurant in Kottarakkara.

Despite the two food-related mishaps (blubber fry and dosa), on the whole it was a short and sweet trip to GOC with kappa, fish curry, idlis, dosas, vadas, bajis, appams, idiappams, puttu, patthiri and of course the national dish of parotta and beef fry. Moreover, thanks to the much-improved services at the village, taluk, and corporation offices, I was able to accomplish a lot on the personal front. Next time around, I hope to stay for a much longer period.

 

P.S. My maniacal friend is not exactly that bad. From a local perspective, he is a normal driver with the optimum amount of animal instinct necessary to survive on the roads there.

 

The P--p Chronicles

My toilet 

Everybody has something or the other that they associate with a childhood experience or event. It could be a happy or a traumatic experience, and I’m no different. A few days ago, I was driving home with my elder kid, when he changed the music in the car to an old Malayalam song collection. It’s been a while since I had listened to Malayalam songs in the car, as the music system has been in the control of my kids. There are days I go around listening to gangsta rap (collection of my younger one), and to be honest, I kinda like it. You can’t really argue with profound lyrics like “She just bought a new ass but got the same boobs (same boobs!). Other words that repeat often in many of those songs include the common verb for the act of fornication and its variations, the term for female dogs, etc. - terms which are not generally approved by Arsha Bharatha or other cultures.

The fact is, kids don’t discriminate in terms of what they listen, and that, I have to say, has helped me to broaden the horizons of my musical interests too. My boy listens to all kinds of genres including old Malayalam and Hindi songs. By old I mean really old, for him. I can’t understand how a 16-year-old can feel nostalgic about the 1960s, but he does. He introduced me to Dean Martin’s “That's Amore” and “Buona Sera,” as well as many Japanese enka songs of yore. He also listens to opera and was obsessively listening to the Three Tenors for a while. It is a cyclical thing for him, and when he switched the music from Andrea Bocelli crooning “Con te partiro” to Janaki pining “Anjana kannezhuthi” for the lover who fails to turn up, I was not surprised.

So, there I was driving and listening to some melodious mallu songs from the 1960s and 70s, when the song “Ashada masam athmavil moham” came on. Now, this is a collection I had copied from a friend a few years ago on a visit to Trivandrum, but hadn’t yet listened to fully. I didn’t know this song was in there. This was a song that brought back a traumatic childhood memory. When it came on, I was instantly transported back to the mid-1970s, to a flower show at the Women’s College in Trivandrum. I was with my mom and her friends, who all came there with their kids in tow to see flowers! From what I remember, I was not interested in the flowers, and was too young to be interested in women, though it was a women’s college and all.

Anyway, I went walkabout and while goofing around got separated from the group and got lost in the milling crowd. Discombobulated, I walked up a grassy mound and was anxiously looking around when I felt some tribulations in my tummy. “You have to poop… here and now,” said my brain. I started bawling, trying not to let that thing out, but there’s only so much you can do and eventually it happened. So, there I was, on top of a grassy knoll, “Ashada masam, athmavil moham” blaring from the speakers at the venue, tears streaming down my cheeks, saliva drooling from my mouth, snot from my nose billowing in the wind, and a warm cylinder of poop slithering down the back of my thigh. And, anal sphincters walking by laughing at me!

I’m sure that this was the highlight of the flower show for them. Let’s admit it. Nobody likes or remembers flower shows. It’s something that happens in non-happening places, which was what most places in India were at that time. Nobody goes around saying, “hey, do you remember that red rose we saw at that flower show?” But I’m sure a whole bunch of dumbos who saw me that day still remembers that flower show and reminisce once in a while when they get together saying, “Do you remember that flower show in the 70s where that miserable kid was pooping on a hill. Was hilarious, wasn’t it?”

Anyway, my mom showed up in the nick of time before I went batshit crazy and took me to a toilet, cleaned me, washed my soiled shorts and put them back on, ditched the rest of the flowers, and took a taxi home immediately.

Looking back, I think my mom, in spite of having a master’s degree in economics, lost a golden opportunity to “monetize” her son. I was practically a vision on a hill. With a little effort, she could’ve promoted me as some kind of incarnation or saint. People do fall for that kind of $hit, y’know. If she had done that, I might have been an Our Patron Saint of the Holy Poop or a Swamy DoodooAnanda Thiruvadikal now, raking in the moolah by dishing out $hit advices to anal sphincters around the world. Didn’t happen. But, as they say in the ancient scriptures, “no point in crying over spilt gaumutr”. Which is even better in the original in Sanskrit – “गतस्य गोमूत्र पे शोचना नास्ति”!

Incidentally, near the place where I exit the expressway, there is a company called Unco Inc. (U is pronounced as in the Indian name Uma). Unco means poop in Japanese. Japan is famously non-anal-retentive about poop. It gave the poop emoji to the world. There are even text books that use unco to teach kanji characters to kids. So, it’s not surprising that such a company exists in Japan. The company apparently sells stuff like t-shirts, shoes, etc. with the poop character on it. And, they do have a lofty goal. World Peace! with poop! Go figure.

In these troubling times, when the whole world seems to be going up shit creek without a paddle, let’s hope they succeed in bringing peace to at least some parts of the world. Their car does bring a smile to my face whenever I see it.

 

PS: A few days ago, a post on a futuristic public toilet in Tokyo popped up on my timeline. I have been in love with the toilets in Japan for a long time now (a post from 2014). The one I have now lights up with a soothing blue glow inside the toilet bowl when I open the door, and does a cleanup of the washlet nozzle and bowl. I like it here. I think a civilization should be judged by how it poops, because that is the only function a human being enjoys from birth to death. In that regard, I think Japan is at the pinnacle. I know some of my friends in India like to say how everything was there in our land thousands of years ago, but this is one thing where I'm willing to put my neck on the line. There were no such toilets in Arsha Bharata or Arsha Greece or Arsha Mesopotamia or elsewhere. You could say our gurus used to sit in the Himalayan rivulets where the gushing water automatically cleansed their bums, and it could technically pass off as a natural washlet. But then, there was no blue light. When you think of it, I wouldn’t mind trying that out on a Himalayan stream. Whitewater pooping instead of whitewater rafting. I’m sure many would pay top dollar for that.

Do Frogs Fart and Other Philosophical Questions

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – Arthur C. Clarke

The scream pierced the Trivandrum night. He was holding this chest and screaming. His grandfather, a medicine man, had bequeathed him that ancient chest. The chest was called “Chest Z,” because right from ancient times people in Travancore were using English alphabets to denote variables and unknown parameters. Nobody knew what was inside the chest and the old man never gave a hint. He was in the attic holding Chest Z within seconds of his grandpa croaking, trying hard to open it. Nothing worked. He was going crazy screaming, when suddenly, another old man, probably a relative he didn’t know existed, appeared near him and told him the secret behind the chest.

The chest is locked with a magic hymn – a hymn that is made up of seven farts of a dodo bird in varying frequencies. Not only that, there is a secret sound in between, which certain trusted sources have said, is the wet fart of a gastric brooding frog.

“What the #$%&?! Where do I get these creatures and their farts? Who told you this?” he began panicking. The old man smiled and said, “There are books by NASA which cover this in detail, but they have kept it a secret. They stole from us, y’know. You have heard of Alibaba and the open sesame cave thingy, right?”

He nods.

“Same technology. Where do you think they got that from? Us!! Where do you think they got the knowledge to develop this voice recognition software and all?”

“That’s all OK, but where can I find this dodo and the brooding frog,” he wondered, but the old man had disappeared.

He had an idea. He flipped out his smartphone, which works like magic. You open up this thing called Google and type in “dodo bird” and you get all the information you need on dodo. How does it work? It’s f$%&ing magic. You can even say “brooding frog” and this nice-sounding lady will tell you everything about the frog in English.

And the information was shocking. Both the dodo bird and the stupid frog are extinct.

The old man mysteriously appeared again and told him, “Don’t open the chest. It will destroy everything here” and disappeared.

Possible, he thought, the f#$%ing thing is filled with farts. Must be toxic by now. Scream....

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Are we in frikkin 21^st century or what?

I sometimes sit and brood and some people think that I’m thinking deep philosophical thoughts. They’re right. I have questions all the time. “Do frogs fart?” was one such thought. Luckily for me, Google God gives me all the answers I ever need. It is magic.

Apart from the Google God, I have a thing for gods who protect their own asses. You see it quite often in the aftermath of a natural disaster. A god figurine that was left untouched by an earthquake, or a place of worship that survived a tsunami when all the blooming worshippers living around it were washed away, or a tsunami that bypassed the god and destroyed everything a few kilometres away. These are the gods I love. Parochial, territorial and selfish. Just like us.

Anyway, get ready to be destroyed, because the Supreme Court wants Chest Z…no Vault B of the Padmanabha Swamy temple opened. The court probably thinks it is a bar in a city, for which it gave permission to open. The question I asked in this post on Devaprasnam from 2011 still stands.

Is the lord going to destroy Trivandrum? Or, could it be the area under the erstwhile Travancore kingdom (parts of which the lord anyway ignored when the tsunami came) or is it going to be Akhand Faarath that is going to be destroyed if the Supreme Court order is carried out? Scary!

Woaa, Thanna, Thanna

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. - H.L. Mencken
 

There’s another election around the corner. It is an interesting time and I was planning not to endorse anyone. Not that it matters. In the USA, influential people will endorse one of the candidates, which could get the candidate some votes. Given my influence, or lack thereof, I usually decide to sit tight and enjoy the show.

 

Things suddenly changed a few days ago. The rant gods smiled at me slyly. And I bowed and crawled and did the complex hand movements involving middle fingers to appease them. Because…

 

The Big Jumbo Party of all decided to bring in a guy boasting the most slap-worthy cheek south of the Vindhyas as their candidate in Trivandrum. As you all know, the Big Jumbo Party, led by the Grand Poobah, is the biggest party of all in the universe. If you have a mobile phone and you look at its keypad at a particular angle, you get enrolled as a member of that party. They had built up a humongous fan base in Trivandrum through that technique and has been planning to enter the legislature leveraging that base.

 

Until now, what was preventing them from capturing the State was the fact that “they party with a difference”. Unlike the other parties in Kerala who party with booze, babes and beef, they party with milk (A2 milk from vedic cows), banana and honey. This never went down well with the locals, who enjoy their tipple with onion fry garnished with beef shreds.

 

It was all going to be different this time around. Many people had finally ploughed deep into their heart and found the latent bigotry buried in there, and were slowly getting comfortable with it - justifying it, defending it and at times ready to kill for it. This was going to be the coming out party (with A2 milk and all, of course).

 

Then Sreesanth happened. After meticulously going through their huge fan base in Trivandrum, the Big Jumbo Party found that none of their local payalukal stood a chance. In fact, not many from the erstwhile Travancore state (also called Pappanavan’s land) stood a frikkin chance, as they are commonly considered as scoundrels. So, cocksure of themselves, they have decided to import good, decent people, mainly from Kochi and beyond, to represent us poor suckers.

 

Now, this is not new and you shouldn’t blame them for taking a cue from the other groupings who have tried and succeeded with outsiders for long. The old, used-to-be-grand party brought an UN super commando all the way from New York and we all fell for it. Before that, the left had the long-haired dude from the north, and recently another guy (who miserably lost) who, though technically from Trivandrum, could’ve been from Mars.

 

To be sure, the pickings are slim for all parties. There is a sickening parade of jaded celebrities on all sides. You really don’t want to endorse any one. Maybe, we deserve to get it good and hard. Still, I had to rant against this man-boy, who brings only one image to mind - of a crying face -, and the sound of a slap that reverberated from Kasaragod to Kaliyikkavila. For #$%’s sake, he is not even the best cricketer the state has produced. That is going to be Sanju Samson (OK, I'm obviously biased here). So, at the polling booth, look at the other options, a NOTA perhaps, or a name that sounds like the person can say, “Woaa, thanna, thanna”.

 

P.S. He, the Kochi lad, is going to make Kerala into a Gujarat apparently. A quick google study threw up the following numbers.

 

                                                Kerala         Gujarat

Poverty rate                                7.05            16.63

Literacy rate (female)        93.91 (91)      79.31 (70)

Sex ratio                                    1084             918

HDI                                           0.825           0.599

GDP                                        $58bn         $110bn

Pop.                                           3.3cr            6.0cr

Households w/o toilets                 5%             43%

Infant mortality                            12%             44%

Life expectancy                             74             64.1

Scroll Down You Heartless, Type Ahem

Most days I get up in a reasonably neutral mood. Get up, poop, shave, send out some GMs, get the kids up and ready for school, etc. Routine stuff, not necessarily in that order. Well, except for the first one. You have to get up first. Pooping and then getting up would be disastrous. Would like to kick the bucket before reaching that stage. Some days I am a bit cranky, but never once have I woken up in the morning in a euphoric mood. Never have I got up with a “Yay, I’m gonna kick ass today” spirit. Maybe I should get some of that kickass mojo somewhere, keep aside reason and scepticism and try going through the day in false high spirits. Maybe not.

I am also put off by motivational bullshit messages and stories. Especially stories, almost all of which turn out to be fake. Today’s “true” story was about a kid called Robby who played Mozart’s Concerto #21 for his mom who died of cancer. Conveniently, Robby died in the Oklahoma City bombing. Inconveniently, there was no person of that name among the dead. There is some profound hidden message in there from the Lord, which I am supposed to grasp to enrich my life. However, I never understand such messages. I need clear, simple explanations straight up. I am dumb.

For example, during the recent floods in Chennai, you kept seeing messages such as “Save them O God!” or “only God can help them now”. Based on the generally accepted definition of God, it would have been this very being who unleashed this floods on Chennai just some time ago. Why would he now want to save Chennai? For some prayers and offerings? What kind of a psychopath would do such a thing?

Then there’s the “Scroll down if you’re heartless; or type Amen” postings on Facebook with a picture of a child with no limbs or of a pregnant woman who is dying from cancer or a guy with an extra testicle. You see half a million people liking or typing amen. Heartless, I usually scroll down. How does this work? Suppose the picture gets a million amens, will the extra testicle disappear? I have no idea. I am yet to see a picture of a kid with a caption, “thanks to your million amens, this child has now grown back a full set of limbs”.

And, this just in - the Vatican has come out with an announcement saying that Pope Frank has approved a second miracle for Mother T, who is now in line for sainthood. Wow! A second miracle. Apparently, a Brazilian man was cured of multiple brain tumours by Mom T.

Is this reproducible? The Vatican’s benchmark for sainthood appears to be pretty low. If you’re doing a scientific experiment, you have to be able to replicate the results, many times over, for it to gain acceptance. Here, it is just two “miracles,” and you’re a saint. I hope the Vatican comes out with the exact procedure as to how to pray to this lady – go to her church, say some verse a million times, type amen on another cancer patient’s Facebook post, squeeze a goat’s balls, break a coconut … on a goat’s balls, etc. I’m sure people will do all these and more, as long as you give them some kind of guarantee. For instance, if your goat has only one testicle, your survival rate will go down by 25 percentage points, or something like that. But then, that would be science.

“Science is Life,” thus wrote our PM on a digital wall a few months ago in Abu Dhabi, one of the pit stops of his travelling roadshow. It was an excellent thing to say in one of the top non-scientific regions in the world today. He could’ve said “Vedic Science is Life,” but he didn’t. He is shrewd. He was in town recently, almost. The town was “grazed” by him. It was the most disappointing PM visit in my memory because the only good thing during such visits –the roads getting fixed– didn’t happen. He landed at the airport, flew out to a nearby town to meet some religious dudes and flew back and flew out. In between he gave a few minutes on the tarmac to the Chief Honcho and other ministers to discuss the state’s issues while he was walking to the plane. He is a busy man, and he also knows that these pols don’t have their fingers on the pulse of the people.

Because couple of days later, he had lots of spare time to sit down and talk with a person who definitely had his fingers on the pulse of all nations - Google CEO Sundar Pichai. His company comes out with that data every year and this year also the top searched person in India was the porn star Sunny Leone. The throbbing pulse of the nation.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all

 

Mythology, Sacred Cow, Beef Issue

I am a big fan of mythologies. I grew up listening to stories from the Hindu mythology told by my dad, uncle and aunt. Then my dad gave me a book called “Balakathamaalika” (in Malayalam), which had Greek, Egyptian and numerous other mythological stories. I read about Jason and the Argonauts, Hercules, Ra, Thor, Charlemagne, Lancelot and King Arthur for the first time in that book and became fascinated. I still have that book and sometimes read it to my sons.

I must reiterate here that I totally love myths; myths that tell the “stories” of men with supernatural powers, and of course supernatural beings. Most of these stories are from ancient times, hundreds or thousands of years old, passed down from generation to generation.

My beef, however, is with the recent myths – Hindu myths - that are propagated as facts. Hindu mythology, it appears, is still evolving. I am not sure whether this process started with the advent of the Hindu right government or whether this was behind the rise of the right into power. The problem with this new myth creation is that it appears full of bovine excrement, unlike the ancient stories written by people with great imagination for that time.

Every once in a while you get a forwarded message of how something great was done by a Hindu sage zillions of years ago and how everybody got up and bowed, etc. These mythmakers are also obsessed with the NASA, for some reason, as if it gives the story some legitimacy.

Some of the stuff I found interesting:

NASA recorded the sound of the sun and it is the great mantra Aum, says a YouTube video with an American-sounding voiceover. For one, NASA didn’t record the sound of the sun. Some scientists at the University of Sheffield recreated the sound by turning some visible vibrations into sound and speeding up the frequency. And it doesn't sound like Aum. It sounds more like a wet fart passing through a stringed instrument (sound of the sun.)

There is a guy called Dr. Gopalakrishnan, who is apparently some big-time scientist who taught the sahib a thing or two about something. He says things like the Vedas were made a UNESCO World Heritage, whereas the Bible and Quran are not. Deceptive half-truths, but gulped down by his fans as absolute truths. Some 30 Rigveda manuscripts were accepted into the “UNESCO Memory of the World Register” (note the difference in name), which has numerous other such entries including the Convict Records of Australia and the Communist Manifesto, not to mention biblical or Qur’anic items. This venerable Dr. is also obsessed with NASA. In a speech, he talks about a visit he made to the NASA, where he saw, “with his own eyes,” every American space scientist listening to Vedic chanting while working. Can’t argue with that, can you? Personally saw thousands and thousands of American scientists listening to Vedic chants. Probably the rap version, sung by Tupac Shakur; after he died.

Then there is Cap’n Bodas, who was cited in an earlier blog here(ancient Indian air travel), and his interplanetary machines, which were presented to the world at the Indian Science Congress. The book the Cap'n cites is probably written in the 20^th century. There are some funny videos out there, with the customary American voiceover, which are quite detailed. So, it must be pretty easy for one of these “vedic engineers” to cobble together a flying machine based on that material. It even says what the pilot should be eating! I am waiting.

Another one I received recently was how Edison went all the way to England to get Max Mueller to blab for his first gramophone recording. Sailing across the Atlantic for a recording! Pretty routine thing for those days, I presume.

“Hey, Max, want to say some bullshit into this contraption I made?”

“Yeah, why not? Why don’t you get  on the next boat and hop over Ed?”

So Edison went across the Atlantic to Max who spoke the first verse of the Rig Veda in praise of Agni, in Sanskrit. At the end of it all, the entire audience stood up as a mark of respect to the ancient Indian sages. And, probably also because their asses were burning as Max screwed up in invoking Agni, who set their seats on fire. It was a rigged veda show, because Edison’s first recording was some shouting and Mary had a frikkin li’l lamb.

Why do they come up with this bullshit stories? As a country, we have enough to be proud of and enough to be ashamed of too. Why do they want to build this false sense of great pride in some mythological stories and plain stupidities by portraying them as science? I have no idea, but anyway thought I will do some myth-busting.

Stay with me for a few more lines. This is important for me. I am worried about the beef issue in this country. I like my beef. I have tasted the best beef in the world. Kobe, Matsuzaka, Kuroge wagyu, and Angus. I have had Brazilian churrasco and also the fibrous chewy beef from cattle that walked all the way from Pollachi in Tamil Nadu to Kerala. So as a beefeater it worries me that I might not be able to do so here in the future.

While thinking about it I checked out how cows evolved. I learned that all cattle are descendants of a few animals domesticated from wild ox (aurochs) 10,500 years ago. What we have here in India is mostly Bos taurus indicus, which at some point of time became holy. Then this thought struck me –“Do the other species qualify as sacred cows?” Y’know, a Holstein or a Jersey? So, I googled and hit pay dirt instantaneously. They are not sacred! Eureka! Only the Bos taurus indicus is sacred! Says da bovine man Shankar Lal, who is the president of the Akhil Bharathiya Gau Sewa.

Here are couple of links.

Cows can fight crime - Indian Express 

Kamadhenu Nagars - Economic TImes 

As per him saatvik (virtuous) Indian cows can reduce crime, reform convicts, prevent evil thoughts, etc. whereas milk from, say, a Jersey cow has devil in it and has poisonous particles that make you think impure thoughts resulting in increased crimes. Whoa!, and all along we thought it was the guys drinking alcohol who were committing crimes. It was the milk drinkers. (Nothing related, but reminds me of the Ghost who Walks ordering milk at bars, and the stoopid Kerala government which has shut down the bars here).

Shankar Lalji is planning to build cowsheds in schools, conduct exams and courses on cows, a university to study cow science and do Gau Kathas in temples.

“Holy Cow!” I thought. Not because he was doing these things, but because I suddenly saw a way out of the beef conundrum we are in now. If Jersey and other species of cows are impure and are not considered as cows (not by me, mind you, but by Mr. Shankar Lal), there ought to be no problem in killing them for meat. It is just like chicken. Another animal that can be eaten. To be frank, these foreign species are more meaty and succulent than the bony Bos taurus indicus. I hope we can import more Jersey cows and other varieties and sell them as Jersey meat. Everybody, including me and the crazy beef fest holding bozos in Kerala, can breathe easily now. Problem solved. Brilliant. Wow, I won't be able to sleep today. Thanks Shankar Lalji.

Garv se Kaho "What?"

Foreigners new to Japan initially find it hard to understand the calendar here. According to the Japanese calendar, this is the 27^th year of the Heisei era, which started in January 1989 when Akihito, became the new emperor following the death of his father Hirohito. Hirohito’s era from 1926 to 1989 is called the Showa era and he is now known as the Showa emperor. This is used officially too, so you should know how to convert from the Gregorian to the Showa (I was born in the Showa era!) or Heisei when filling in your date of birth in some government form.

The Gregorian calendar has the birth of Jesus as the starting point. How did they come up with that date? Don’t ask unnecessary questions. We demand unquestionable faith. Coming to the current era, we, now have a chance to devise a new calendar.

I recently found out that I may not have been proud to be an Indian till 2014. This was revealed by our prime minister, who is now the “greatest leader of the greatest nation on the earth”. That sobriquet, till recently, was owned by whichever douchebag was the president of the USA at that time. So, at some point of time in the past Nixon and GW Bush were the greatest leaders of the “free world”.

Now that mantle has been appropriated by Mr. Modi, if you believe the noise in the Hindu web world. Global leaders are kowtowing to him (though it is our leader who is going around). Everybody is respecting Indians (except maybe Indians). We have reached superpower status where we can project our *#$% into other people’s affairs and get away with it like the USA (we could try Maldives? Maybe not). Canada gave Indians visa on arrival (VOA) status (Don’t try it. It is the other way round. We gave VOA to Canadians). Perhaps if we repeat it enough times all these will come true.

With nothing to be proud of pre-2014, we ought to divide our calendar as BM and AD, i.e. “Before Modi” was elected PM in 2014 (hereinafter “AD 1”), while retaining AD but altering its meaning to Anno Domini Nostri Modi.

“Hey, hey, what about Gandhi? Surely you can be proud of him!” You might ask. Well, what about him? Look at him. The man was walking around in a loincloth. Was it a designer langoti? Was it monogrammed with his initials MKG? In gold? No. I doubt whether the langoti even had the black dots and lines the dhobis put to identify clothes. On the other hand you won’t catch our PM in the same dress twice. Pretty soon he will have the RSS musclemen in designer khaki knickers (made in China).

“How about the Gupta period? Y’know, the Golden Age blah, blah we learned at school”. Stop asking questions. We’ll instruct you on what to learn, do, eat, think, wear, etc. in due course of time. Just follow our lead. The last time we were close to being proud was about 7000 years ago when we had intergalactic space machines and our gurus were doing head transplants. Got it?

So, now I am a proud Indian. Proud of things we are instructed to be proud of. Proud of the fake Macaulay minute of 2-2-1835 in sepia print floating around in the Internet, where he saw a super country when he travelled the length and breadth of India. Did he come down to Trivandrum? If he did, he could have seen my great-great-great grandmother walking nude waist up because it was a great period and feminists were having a “Free the Nipple” campaign of their time, and not because of some crazy caste rules, as the fake historians would make you believe.

(What Macaulay actually said)

There is a right-wing narrative being slowly scripted now, of what a super race we are (were), of how we had invented everything that had to be invented, of how all these foreigners looted us, etc. Some of it may be legit, but quite a bit are based on dodgy historical interpretations and on mythology.

And it is being implemented stealthily and incrementally. A beef ban here, a new history book there, a religious nut in an education board here, a dress code there, a false quote (Macaulay) in social media here, a fake Vivekananda smart-ass riposte to a white man there. It is slowly building up and at some point of time it will reach the critical mass needed to engulf a naïve public who is taught not to think for themselves and not to question authority. The modus operandi is somewhat similar to the right wing in the USA, where the Christian right (in some States) wants the Genesis to be taught as science along with evolution. So, it is possible that in the near future we might be taught there is nothing to be proud of Gandhi, Nehru or Tagore, or that we did the first live television broadcast of a major war thousands of years before CNN brought the Gulf War to the living rooms.

Any which way you look at it, we are screwed.

We will be screwed left, right and centre – by the lame and limp left; by the rabid, rampant right; and the corrupt and clueless centre. And, to rub it in further, we’ll be screwed all over by the corporates, for whom these three exist.

A prime example is Trivandrum. Mr. Modi, the Calendar Divider and the Generous, recently gave a billion dollars to Mongolia, which has a population about the same as Trivandrum district! At the same time, these three groupings (the left, the right and the centre) are falling over each other trying to screw Trivandrum, whether it is over a mass rapid transport system, the Vizhinjam port, a waste management system or any other development whatsoever.

My only hope is that one day Mr. Modi the Generous will throw some spare change our way from the air when he flies over our airspace to some distant land.

 

Paramour of the Nation, Earth Hour, etc.

When you live in what is essentially a police state, clumsily camouflaged in democratic garb, you have to be doubly careful about airing your views. Especially when that police state is slowly but steadily going down the theocratic path, as is happening in India. I think almost all countries are police states to a certain extent. Look at the USA, the biggest “spreader of democracy” in the world. Look at how a black person was shot dead from behind by the police recently in South Carolina. If it had happened in India, there would be big hue and cry about human rights violations, blah, blah by the foreign media. In the USA’s case it is just an officer “executing” his duty.

Well, I’m least bothered about countries whose democracy spreading fervor is largely dependent on access to oil reserves and other self-interest factors. It is the theocracy that is spreading its tentacles in India that has piqued my interest now. Every other day a new swami or swamini comes out of the woodwork with wacko solutions for the problems we face, and not all of them are from the fringe. Some are reigning ministers in the central cabinet. One guy, Baba Ramdev, who was caught cross-dressing once, has a cabinet rank in Haryana. His yoga apparently can cure homosexuality and even AIDS! I hope the Indian government lobbies for a medical Nobel for this guy.

Another guru said we have to make the cow as the mom of the nation. That raises interesting possibilities. We already have a guy as the pop of the nation. Now if a cow is going to be the mom, where does that leave the bull? The paramour of the nation? The bull excrement is hitting the fan and scattering around the nation rapidly. And no one can stop it.

Maharashtra recently banned beef based on questionable interpretations of our religious and cultural traditions. The Aghoris, who could perhaps be considered as the real spiritual guys in India for the way they renounce all worldly things, are said to eat human flesh. They smoke ganja and drink liquor too. They are a part of our culture, whether our globe-trotting, a/c-loving gurus and matas like it or not. An Aghori (harmless in most cases), eating human flesh, can roam around free with his skull and other ghastly paraphernalia, while a Malayali (harmful at times!) in his lungi in Mumbai might end up in jail for five years for eating some heavenly beef ularthiyathu. Go figure.

I hope one day we get a prime minister who is a devotee of an Aghori guru. National weed – Ganja; National flesh – human; National plate – skull.

A few weeks ago, Rinpoche, a close friend, posted a message in our WhatsApp school group asking to turn our lights off for one hour on March 28. Rinpoche, a bleeding heart liberal if ever there was one, always wanting to help the poor, the destitute and the old, posted that with good intentions, because, you guessed it, he is also worried about the environment. He was taking part in a global movement called the “Earth Hour”. This is one of those highfalutin ideas about which I am always sceptical. A group of guys in the developed world get together and do something symbolic accompanied by big hype. Then it becomes a global movement. The resources, not just energy, that these countries consume (waste) is what gets my goat every time I hear such gimmicks. Conceited grandstanding, that’s what it is, by a bunch of people who have wrought more than enough damage around the world through their imperialism and their meddling in other countries’ affairs. Per-capita power consumption in most developed countries are 5 to 10 times that of India. We are already enduring many “earth hours” a day in scheduled and unscheduled power cuts. So, let us know when you are ready to do an Earth Month, or at the very least an Earth Week.

Aisatsu-mawari – In Japan, when you move into a new location, you go around saying hi to your neighbours with a small gift to introduce yourself. A new person taking charge of a company or a department also does something similar by visiting clients and all other departments. This is called aisatsu-mawari. Our prime minister has been on an extended aisatsu-mawari, and at times it seems he is on a permanent aisatsu-mawari. Our man was recently sighted in India preaching to his choir. He said his government was for the poor. Well, we know that, don’t we? All governments are for the poor; i.e. the poor corporates and the poor oligarchs who fund their elections. In his speech, he asked whether it is wrong to think that each citizen should have a house to live in. I don’t doubt his sincerity (if it was a Congress PM, we would have laughed our freakin pants off). However, like his exhortations on toilets (see potties in Gujarat), his track record in tackling homelessness during his 13-year reign in Gujarat is nothing to write home about. Gujarat ranks 6^th by population and 2^nd by percentage of homeless people among the major States. Maybe, he would be better off adopting the Kerala model for everything else other than sucking up to industries and swamis.

 

P.S. In the meantime, back in God’s Own Cakkoos, the railway god appeared to complain that the high priest (our CM) and his coterie are denying him the chance to shower his metro blessings on the people of Trivandrum and Kozhikode. This blog knew that nearly four years ago in 2011 (see monorail, yay!).