Someday, today will be nostalgia

Our roads aren’t complete with the numerous morons that dot them and ensure early onset heart disease and shorter life spans. So here are the nominations for the Indian road moron hall of fame: 1. Yo man dude: Yo dude is of the belief that he is god’s gift to women. Never mind that she is seated in a BMW, he believes that he can sweep her off the uber comfy seats and ride away with her into the smog filled sunset. Hence he accelerates and tries to catch her attention. Hence he goes from 0 - 60 in 15 seconds, only to come to a screeching halt at the next signal. Moreover, yo man dude doesn’t find it stupid to attempt a wheelie in the middle of a busy road, jeopardizing the lives of others. May he find an attractive nurse to wrap bandages on him when he ends up strapped to a hospital bed. In the same vein, we don’t wish him a speedy recovery. 2. The wanker honker: You cannot escape this species, however hard you try. It is their second nature to have their hand on the horn, ev...

--> One of cricket’s finest ODI innings ever played was one every Indian fan wishes was never played in the first place. For on March 23, 2003, a certain Ricky Ponting took it upon himself to single-handedly annihilate a billion Indian dreams. For solace, we keep returning to Sachin’s masterclass from the same tournament where he greeted Shoaib with a six and treated the rest with disdain. To me, the 2003 world cup ended there. I want to blank out that final. All thanks, again, to a certain Ricky Ponting. To an Indian supporter, praising Ricky Ponting is akin to siding with Pakistan in an Indo- Pak encounter. But Ricky Ponting could have all too easily been a fallen hero, someone who burned out far ahead of his time. Cricket is littered with such tales of supreme talents that placed mammon and the bottle before the game, when all they while it should have been the other way round. The fearsome Andrew Symonds comes to mind,  his career having derailed over the ...

Plagiarism. It’s all around us. Business wars worth millions are fought between two sides claiming originality. A pretty young author sees her new found fame evaporate just as fast as it came. If one were to really reach deep into the recesses of one’s mind, one would chance upon various instances of plagiarism in our otherwise uneventful lives. It all begins innocently. A chance glance at your neighbor’s answer sheet and you discover something amiss in your answer paper. Hastily corrected, you forgive yourself for this one time faux pas. The next exam, the glance ceases to be just a glance. You exercise your neck muscle a little more. Only to realize that students all around you seem to have something in their papers that mysteriously isn’t present in yours. And thus you begin a journey of ingenuity, lateral thinking and saving your face. At the risk of not returning answer sheets the way you received them, copying is by far one of the greatest tools devised by mankind. Th...

If you see my parents, they look like the quintessential arranged marriage couple. After nearly 35 years together, they still take care not to touch each other while posing for a photograph and my mother’s smile dangles precariously between a smile and a grimace. But this image discolours the truth a tad. Some 40 years back, they met at work, fell in love and got married. The talking point of the union being mom’s status as an iyengar and dad’s as an iyer. Simply put, the iyers and the iyengars are two castes of the Brahmin community, each, when given the chance, profess superiority to each other on all counts. If you listen closely, an Iyengar talking about an Iyer will say ‘Iyer a?’ in a condescending tone. And vice versa. Mom tells me that when she told her dad about the marriage, he vowed to stand by her at any cost. Dad never told me what happened, but allow me to hazard a guess. His mother (my grandmother), threatened to go on a fast unto death. My dad threatened to go ...

You know the funniest thing about a sex survey apart from what it reveals? Everyone wants to read them but no one wants to take them. They plant in your mind seeds of doubt and cause you to double guess - that innocent looking girl, could she really have a naughty side? Maybe I should really start checking my partner’s cell phone bills. Largely, these surveys conform to the ‘everything you wanted to ask, but couldn’t’ format. A population of more than a billion serves as a precursor to one truth - we may be shy talking about it, but are sure as hell doing it with great aplomb. Over the last decade or so, a few national magazines have an issue dedicated to this cause – the annual sex survey. In them, you get facts such as which city has the highest rate of extra-marital sex, the percentage of people who have tried a particular sex position, among other such libido enhancing revelations. But the sex survey can do so much more than just elicit letters of wrath from readers, induc...

By chance, dad and I took a new road on our walk and were headed toward a tried and tested place for breakfast. Lo and behold, a new, very appealing darshini that went by the moniker ‘South Thindis’ beckoned. A very appealing mural greets you and the fare is good. Dosas, idli etc. and they make akki roti and ragi roti after 11 or something. This chance discovery led me to wonder – how many ever darshinis are there and how many ever you visit, we could always do with one more. The darshini phenomenon isn’t present in any other city. If you are starving in Mumbai, you can always stop for chat. Alas, Bangalore is not blessed in this regard but the humble darshini more than makes up for this lack. Try finding a reasonable place for grub in an area like Indiranagar or some such other posh locality. At their worse, they serve bad coffee.How do you judge a darshini? In my opinion, by the quality of their masala dosa and coffee. If the dosa is crap, the darshini is fit to drown itself in ...

Some one year back, Bangalore welcomed India’s largest mall, gave it space, electricity, water and land amidst all the aforementioned shortages. In the last decade, this decadent mall culture has crept up and before we know it, every major road in all cities seems to have been bestowed with them. Another avenue for us to do some window shopping in style. As if a mall in the midst of a half dug up road, submerged in a cloud of vehicle smoke and surrounded by retarded motorists adds to the beauty of the moment. When Thomas Friedman said the world is flat, everyone seemed to nod their heads in unison. And in the last decade and a half, we seem to be in a terrible hurry to import outside influences without raising an eye brow. Major food chains have found their way into our daily existence and some of the fares they dish out are a delight to the palate. In the same spirit, if we assiduously made an effort to also import their dignity of labor and sense of civic hygiene, and lane disc...