Not so open, not so much a letter.

There’s been so much brouhaha revolving around regionalism lately and if you’ll excuse those painfully alliterative chain of words, I’m gonna add my twopennybit here.

It started with an open later (read http://raagshahana.blogspot.com/2011/09/open-letter-to-delhi-boy.html hereinafter ‘original blogpost’) but if you go into the linguistics of the term used, you’ll see the author was pretty closed in terms of her take on the subject. It’s one thing to point out and to an extent even make fun of regional quirks but quite another to generalize and mock it on a public forum. While I appreciate the wit and the sarcasm and a whole lotta tongue in cheek innuendos, the substance and the sentiment was banal and pretty demeaning. If the world was a generalization based on individual experiences, Kalmadi would be printing his own notes, Dravid would’ve made the champions league a test match feature and Maradona would promote coke snorting as recreation during half time. Well the point I’m trying to drive home is that it isn’t. You can’t stereotype a category of people based on your individual interactions with them. You can’t define and restrict a part of India to accommodate them in your textbook of thoughts. The country, it’s people(their eccentricities notwithstanding) and their existence is much too large a concept to be type-casted and reviewed individually. Didn’t the whole country rush to Gujarat’s aid when the Earthquake shattered the state ? Don’t we all lick our spoons clean after finishing a plateful of chaval and kaali daal ? Don’t we gawk in awe at Rajnikant and his theatrics ? Don’t we all unite under Lokpal Bill proposals, Slut Walks, Anti Terrorism Stands and various other pink chuddies when the time comes ?

I must also mention how articulately a certain somebody has responded to the letter while maintaining absolute political correctness(read http://www.lavanyad.com/madmomma/?p=6298 hereinafter ‘comeback #1’) while a very anal retentive somebody else has tried in vain to retort with an equally regional rejoinder(readhttp://openlettertoopenlettergirl.tumblr.com/ hereinafter ‘comeback #2’)

If there were to exist such hard felt and cogent boundaries between regions and regionals alike as expressed by the sentiments in the original blogpost and retort #2, inter region marriages wouldn't happen, you wouldn’t see Gujju Thali places in delhi or Chaat corners in Bangalore, Dhoni wouldn’t play for Chennai Super Kings and one would pick a local beach spot over goa for a vacation plan. Not discounting the cheap liquor and easily available contraband in Goa,  you wouldn’t want such a thing happening, would you ? I’m sorry, the contraband bit was a comic twist that didn’t really fit in, but please appreciate the sentiment.

It is in this context that I support complete rejection of abject regionalism and vouch for the One India concept that certain adverts on TV were about. Tout Ensemble such regionalism IMO is just a divide which is sometimes of political convenience and sometimes comic relief in the form of the aforementioned blogposts.

Necessary Disclaimer :This post is coming from someone who was born in Bangalore, has lived in Nagpur, Baroda, Aurangabad and Bombay. He thrives on Maharashtrian and Gujarati food, sluuurrrps on sindhi kadhi, loves going to bangalore every year, wants to end up working in Delhi and is enthralled by how pretty Punjabi women are, has more bong friends than he can count(it’s not my fault they diverge and proliferate like that!) and cant imagine college without them, thinks the best voice he’s ever heard belongs to a north easterner who lives in his block and spends most of his time(and enjoys it) in the hostel with his friends who are staunch UPites-even to the extent of being told that his hindi has acquired quite a UP touch to it, so there!

Of words and other play.

Of words and other play.

Phonology has always amazed me. It's amazing how similar sounding words can be misconstrued in so many different ways and can yet find themselves an inappropriate yet fitting context. Take for instance the predicament of the musical fish who loved choral riffs, or mickey-acting goofy and chasing minnie skirts.
Colourfully put, I'm not intending to discuss the why's and the hues here, but my mediochre taste in such areas notwithstanding, shades of everyday life are laced with multiple interpretations. I heard a good one recently, where people were talking about botched denims and how people wearing them should be thrown off the jean pool. Speaking of clothes, i'm going to patent my taste in shirts with a collar id. You should too, yes you should. Fuck off, suit yourself, you can't have everything tailor made. Heh !
Now before i hit overbored mode with my lousy digressions, lets get back to the central theme of this almost pointless exercise in wordplay.

My point is similar sounding words are easy to manipulate, almost always unintentionally. Like how the dumb patient had issues with his elementary canal. Elementary would also work for chemistry, where ionic bonding between atoms and eaves exists and NO is actually compound, statements or otherwise ;)
Moving on to women and physics, ever noticed how species of the gender in question get charged and lose their spark at such amazing frequencies ? No wonder electricity is a scale-her quantity! Mathematics has it's share of quirks as well, if you've noticed almost every math lecture sees a general deviation from the thumb rule, often leading right up to the middle finger and resulting in other such sign conventions. Then there's music, Ah music ! With complicated guitar chords that make you go "G sus !" and other drummings and bassless monotones that constitute essentially what every wordplay loving musician has a punchant for.

That aside there's an entirely different genre we call double entendres. These are phenomenally more genuine and if possible, more fitting. For instance, i laughed out loud when a friend of mine unintentionally made a statement talking about how the bangalore airport shifted base, or when a funny alter ego left me in splits ! Imagine a solar eclipse ruining your day and leaving you to moon about how you hate being left in the dark. Imagine people alligating footwear companies about how there's a lot more to converse and how it doesn't end at crocs. Like i said, the scope is unending and the scoop lies in how one eyes cream and settles for a lower and often more derogatory form of humour. The Russians knew it, they preferred the freezing animosity of the cold war as opposed to a simple ice breaking session with the americans. The Red indians knew it, they isolated themselves to escape from a third perspective into racism. I kinda know it too, so i'm gonna stop now.

That's that. Now for sexual innuendos. Sentences are incomplete without double meanings and other carnally funny connotations. It's weird how they turn up everywhere, innocuously or other-vice. Sigmund Freud would tell you ! Needless to say, it's a hard topic to stay abreast of. They date back to several thousand years and are rooted deep in the anals of enlish language. Everybody knows about tiger's wood and how his 19th hole leaked it to the media. Science has it too, there was a recent study on how simple harmonic motion results in an award winning wiggle, there that's getting to the bottom of things. Not a rearity, just goes to vindicate my point !
This is where i shall call it a day and hit the sack, or er not. In a nutshell, heck wait, no nuts and let's not even start talking about shells, clams and suchlike !


Liked it/disliked it ?
Diss-cuss !

2012012012012012012012.

This is largely influenced by the much overhyped feature film that unsettled many,and disturbed many more(I mean seriously,why do they keep talking about breast enhancements ? :| )

Replete with a wide array of natural disasters,each more devastating than the other and an equally devastating taste in dogs(chihuahuas ? WITHOUT Paris Hilton ? Seriously ?) this movie was set to put forth to the world what was to come in a couple of years,or so they professed.While in all fairness,the earthquakes,megatsunamis,volcanoes and Ash storms did seem frighteningly real,the element of reason was a concept lost on the producers.

The incredulities of the movie apart,The prospect of what might really happen in 2012 still scares me like nothing else,well except paranormal activity,but that doesn't count. I digress. The Mayans,the duffers that they were,knew this for over a thousand years,yet did absolutely nothing about it.No rescue mission,no plan B.They couldn't even effectively communicate their findings to the rest of the world,leaving information in cryptic calendars and handing over the responsibility to characters like Nostradamus, who could put my digressions to shame.

Apparently,Judgement Day has been known for quite a while,interpreted differently by different folk.The norse called it Ragnarok,and theatrical as they are they pictured a muilti limbed mega sized monster making Humankind extinct. Catholics had a more peaceful version, they called it the apocalypse, which etymologically means unveiling. Being poetic to the level of outrage they described the gory,watery end of the Earth as a peaceful opening of the curtain to heaven.Abrahamic relegions,talk about a messiah,who will usher good people into heaven and the sun swallows the moon while the little dog laughs to see such fun and the dish runs away with the spoon,or er something like that.

While they all point in different directions,the central idea remains the same.The world is gonna end someday.We can only hope That someday is in a different time and a different place and wakes up as a different person :|
Or that it's in a galaxy far far away.


And now before i get carried away and start talking about Quentin Tarantino,let's consider our options with regard to this phenomenon. Let's start off by presuming the world is not gonna end(It just cannot,the Fifa world cup in Brazil is in 2014,wait for your turn apocalypse).Nope it's not happening.No this is not denial,no it's not,nope,Damn you.

Okay,say the world does end ? Is that so bad ? I'm sure we can find wormholes and pigeonholes and loopholes in the space-time-continuum or assholes who'll find them for us.Or we could just go back 20000 years and point and laugh at naked junglepeople who didn't know about fire. Best Case scenario,let's just sit and wait for that Savior dude to come with a much bigger ark than Noah's.Noah was a dumbass anyway,why couldn't he just squat the mosquito when he had the chance? Or,more practically,nations could pool in their resources and make a mega sub station suspended over the middle east with uncrushable titanium pipes extracting oil for fuel.Or better still,let's trust the movie, save up and have a long winter vacation in Africa three years hence.

Doesn't look too good does it ? Hope for the best. I'm not too worried,only I am. And no,I don't intend to confuse people with conflicting statements.Let's just call me an oxy-moron and move on to the next dimension :|

Meat the Buddhists.

It's common knowledge that Asians eat everything under the sun. Insects,reptiles,you name it they've digested that. For reasons of simplicity,let's just talk about converted Buddhist monks in Singapore. Yeah,so apparently these people have developed an alternate cuisine to bring about a via-media between their religious and culinary quirks.

What do you get when you mix Buddhist vegetarian regulations and ferocious oriental taste buds ? You get Yuan Xiang non vegetarian vegetarian food,which in layman terms means mock meat.

What these ingenious,almost hypocritical fellas have done is developed chicken satay,sweet and sour chicken and an array of seafood made entirely out of wheat and tofu. Sounds ugly,doesn't it? It tastes uglier.

Being a self imposed vegetarian (at the risk of being called a veggina one-two-many times),I was nervous about how good it'd taste. Not that i haven't eaten chicken before,i used to gorge on it when i was a lot younger apparently,before a hot chick family friend wise crack'ed about how she could hear a "cluck cluck" sound in my tummy and scarred my impressionable mind forever. That and her tank top,I remember vividly.


My digressions aside,as far as this case goes,if a spoilt appetite and an aftertaste of cold feet are anything to go by,the food sucked. Miserably.What's funnier is how a Malay couple in the next table were smacking their lips after a meal of sweet and sour chicken(that tasted like a refined version of apsara's non dust eraser cooked in a gravy that'd put MTR's ready made subzis to shame) which i tried later on and regretted.If you've switched over to Buddhsim,bloody well eat what the usual Buddhists eat.Why would anybody want to subject themselves to this kind of torture and pretend to like it ? My intention was pure curiosity which loop the loop'ed into subsequent disgust,partly because it wasn't edible and partly because I wasn't allowed beer as i was underage.Don't let the banners mislead you,while although they make the food look good i'd reckon these buggers had better give up pseudo vegetarianism and leave beauty to be skin deep only(pun intended).


Anywho if you're a fan of seafood,I'd suggest you head straight to the seafood counter and give this category a skip,maybe a hop and jump too.And while you're at it,Don't miss out Singapore's interpretation of a tandoori roti and their ice creams,those are brilliant !In all fairness,it's a lovely country and makes for an awesome holiday destination.But the next time I'm there,I'mma stick to pizza,french fries and ice cream.

Tout Ensemble,It's only us Indians who can misinterpret world cuisine and still make it taste fantastic ! ;)

:|

Finally,after more than two years of procrastination fueled by generous amounts of encouragement and a couple of "put it up already you lazy dawg"s,here goes nothing !
Tada !