Someday, today will be nostalgia

Over the years, the tam brahm has been stereotyped in more ways than one. Most of the stereotypes are true and nothing to be ashamed of. If we were all alike, there would be nothing to write, nothing to gossip about, nothing that will make us stand apart from each other. Here are a few observations about the state of marriage for a tam brahm. First, in a tam brahm wedding, very few people are actually interested in the wedding. What they are really interested in is who is going to get married next. If you are single and in your twenties, you are doomed. Inevitably, you will find these maamis , who act as scouts and whose lifetime goals consist in finding out the following: a) What’s your age? b) When do you plan to get married? c) Are you going to the USA? d) Are you traditional? e) Are you dating? Somehow, they will find out. And before you know it, a suitable suitor will be flashed in front of you. Your time starts.... now. Second, if you are a boy, ...

This must surely go down in the country as one of the most unproductive weeks. In the sub-continent, where cricket is akin to a blood group, every match is analysed to oblivion. Step into the chai shop and they are talking of whether it should be Nehra or Ashwin. Step into the swankiest restaurant and see the well-heeled people acting like their true selves. Go to the saloon and you would think the barber could stand for chairman of selectors. And this is not even on match day. So when the Indo-Pak clash became imminent, everyone went agog.  Agog over where to watch the match. It isn’t about cricket anymore. It’s about the booze and the food and the venue and the crowd and the bets.  As the match winded down, an inexplicable sadness descended upon us. The match everybody was waiting for was over. Never mind that India won. Who knows when this moment will appear in our lives again, throwing us into a collective tailspin? When offices declared a half day. When people stoo...

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...