My Name is Paan

This was written some time ago, but may still make interesting reading.

My  Name Is Paan (MNIP)

The two idiots Farukh Khan(FK) and Taran Joker (TJ) are watching the preview of their forthcoming release MNIP.

“Shit! It’s a lemon. It’s a dud. It’s a big effing flop.” Taran is fuming. “Who told you and that girl Pagol to ham so much? “

“But you always ask us to ham  on your TV show –Toffee with Taran(TWIT). So now we have forgotten how to act naturally. “ FK.

You forgot it long ago, after you made ‘Kabhi Ga Kabhi Na.’

“Ok ok.” Farukh says... “no point in finger pointing.  How do we avert the disaster? This time the distributors will surely kill me. I barely escaped their suparis after the near fiasco of ‘Pub me banadi Phodi’”.

Taran laughed. “I knew this was going to be a difficult movie to sell. I have already talked with our friend Udao Thokle who has agreed to boycott the movie and create a big controversy provided you open your  trap wide enough to put your foot into it”.

FK – “ That’s easy.  But how do we release our movie if Udao boycotts it”?

Taran – “I have thought of that. Our young CM Alok Wahan has promised to take stern action if Udao calls for a boycott. He will stop Udao from stopping our release”.

FK – “ But Alok has never acted in his life. How will he act decisively this time”?

Taran- “Don’t worry i have thought of that too. I have asked prince Rajul Thandi to light a fire under Alok’s chair so that he jumps up and does the needful. Rajul will also tell him that Narayan Kane and Gilasrao are waiting for Alok to make only one wrong move so that they can stake their claims for  the hot seat.”

“my god, Taran, you are really a genius. How come it never shows in your movies”?

“Shut up. Does your stupidity show in your movies”?

“OK OK Taran. But how do we still sell the goddamn movie? What about the critics”?

“Oh. That part is simple. The Trade Pundit is already enjoying a five star holiday in the Bahamas after filing his five star review of MNIP. The other reviewers will give us at least three stars out of politeness which is enough for a good opening”.

“You seem to have sewn up the Indian market but what about the overseas markets”?

Taran – “The usual tamasha yaar. You and Pagol brush up your chemistry and go on a world tour. Remember to use only three sentences. My name is Paan, I am an Indian and I want to meet the US president. The Europeans will think you are Amir or Sallu and throng the multiplexes, the NRIs will think this is about India and flock to the DVD parlours and the Americans will be curious to see the idiot who wants to meet the president whom no American wants to meet any more”.

FK – “that’s gr8 Taran. But tell me wont the moviegoers realise that this movie is a half star pile of dung”?

“They will. Of course. But by then, we would have smashed all the BO records of ‘3idiots’.  Then if somebody cribs we shall claim that the people have not really understood our movie properly like our  last lemon ‘Kabhi Phaluda Na Kehna’. Also, I have already purchased two awards for you. You only have to not only dance at the functions but also host the whole shows and keep the public amused”.

FK – “that’s easy . i will keep hinting at our real relationship, mock Shahid, Salman and Saif and shovel dirt on the Bachpan family who will thank me secretly for the free publicity.

Ok. Now that everything is tied up, call that buffoon Phoney Lever. Tell him to bring some fresh jokes. He can accompany us to the swiss bank. I want to laugh all the way.

'WIND BENEATH MY WINGS’

'WIND BENEATH MY WINGS’

Since my child hood I have been having this vivid recurring dream of flying. I am running away from some hoodlums who are for some unknown reason after my life. They are slowly gaining on me. I try to run faster but can’t gather speed. I am becoming more and more desperate by the second and the desperados are catching up with me. I frantically jump up and down. And suddenly as I jump up and flap my hands, I take off like the Harrier. Even then, the pursuers are running with me on the ground. I gain altitude slowly and then I am also able to navigate around more easily. I fly over treetops and power cables and go over tall mountains.  Again, as suddenly, I start losing height.    I look down and see my tormentors still running. I keep kicking down with both my legs and pressing down the surrounding air with both my hands. Sometimes I am able to lift off again, sometimes I can’t. When I descend to the ground in utter panic, I see the goons rushing towards me and to my horror I realise that what to talk of flying, now I can’t even run. I am frozen in fright like a rabbit in front of bright headlights. I try to cry out for help, but no sound comes from my mouth. With considerable effort, I am able to shout in a very small, choked squeak.  This is the time when I normally wake up, often drenched in cold sweat, sometimes weeping in a noiseless shout.  

            I have been having different variations of this dream over the years. On some occasions there is a girl with me whom I have to carry when I fly; normally I am all alone in my fancies of flights. At a few times, there is a body of water underneath when I am flying, or there is a snow capped mountain. While flying, I occasionally rest on the treetops. There are times when I am soaring high effortlessly like Icarus easily steering clear of the trees and the power cables. At times I find it difficult to extricate myself from the maze of power cables surrounding me. Normally there are no other animals on the ground. However, the trees are often full of different birds making their own cacophony/music. The owls and bats resent my intrusions very much and express their displeasure by screeching and squeaking and shrieking shrilly. But sparrows go about their singing without missing a flap. Often, the dream is so vivid and the experience of flying so exhilarating that I feel convinced even after becoming half awake, that I can really fly. There are days, rather nights, when I know that it’s a dream. But I am so ecstatic flying about effortlessly that I don’t want to wake up and miss the experience. Over the last few years, the frequency of the dreams has waned considerably.

            Now that I am approaching my twilight years, I find it funny that I had such puerile dreams for so long. But I am also in a way sad that I am past the age of dreaming. I have become very melancholic and nostalgic. This is the time when the realisation has finally dawned that I may have really lost my wings. I can’t even dream of flying any more.  Did someone say that you become dead the day you stop dreaming?

I have, however, not yet given up hope completely. I still go to bed with the fervent desire that the mobsters will come chasing me again and out of shear desperation, I shall be able to lift off, to save the fair maiden clinging to my side.

Xerostomia

XEROSTOMIA

She walked into his life, like a sliver of bright sunshine into a dark room in a gloomy winter morning. She always brought with her the freshness of dewdrops on the rosebuds, the laughter of angels and the divine music of the seraphim. She flashed him a sweet smile whenever they crossed ways. She rustled around in crisply starched cotton saris smelling of detergent and ponds dreamflower talc. He was totally smitten. Every time he crossed her in the corridors, on the stairs or in the courtyard, his heart would be beating wildly, his palms would dampen with cold sweat and beads of perspiration would line his forehead. His mouth would suddenly go dry with no drop of saliva to swallow/ moisten his parched lips. The acute dryness in his throat ruled out any comprehensible verbal communication. The only sound coming out of his mouth on such encounters would be a feeble helpless croak.  He even found a word for his condition in the dictionary “Xerostomia”.

            He tried various ways to overcome his shyness/dryness of throat. He tried chewing gum (it only tightened up his jaw muscles more), lozenges, Hail Marys, deep breathing; but nothing seemed to work. Finally, he accidently came upon a simple solution. A swig of water was found to be the panacea for his episodal Xerostomia. It appeared to work effectively, at least with others.

He started carrying a water bottle everywhere and kept his eyes peeled for her so that he could take a quick mouthful of water before coming closer and make some intelligible conversation. Numerous climbs up and down the staircase, sneaking around corners and loitering in the corridors were futile.  Finally, one day, suddenly, he saw her approaching from afar and his heart missed several beats. He managed to take in a sip of fortifying aqua pura before she came close. She flashed him her usual radiant smile. He opened his mouth confidently and his voice rang out loud and clear “Good Morning Teacher”. 

The Curious Case of the Missing Y

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING “Y”

I went for my nth public function yesterday. One gets lot of time to ponder over the quirks of life while sitting on an uncomfortable dais for long periods. Some things at these jamborees always bug me.

Ÿ  Why do we always cram the podium with so many people?

Ÿ  Why the chairs on the dais are kept so close together that whenever somebody has to get up to receive the bouquet, or hand it over to somebody else, or make a speech, he has to get up, push the chair back and wriggle out. When he returns, the process is reversed. Pull chair out, squeeze in and pull chair back in and sit. And while he is doing these contortions, the two distinguished guests on his two sides have to get up to escape being trampled on. There is every possibility that you get home with a sprained back/ankle.

Ÿ  The dais also invariably has a pin/nail/tack (which is use for affixing the table cloth) protruding just in front of me which is always trying to prick my thumb or rip my new pair of trousers in the most inconvenient place.

Ÿ  Why do they write your names on the nameplates             only on the side facing the public? Whenever the honorable guests are requested to take their places on the dais, there is a scramble and confusion ending in the guest of honour sitting in the distant corner and the assistant deputy secretary of the society taking centre stage. Thankfully, the chief assistant secretary discovers the mistake and there is another scramble and then everybody is finally seated satisfactorily only to be requested to get up and do the ceremonial lighting of the lamp. I always happen to wear laced shoes on these occasions and have to untie and tie my shoelaces in quick succession in full public view, while everyone else on the dais is waiting patiently after having taken off their slip on shoes/open sandals quickly.

Ÿ   Before you have recovered from this ordeal, the most toneless and shrillest wonder in the town is let loose on the gathering in the form of a prayer. I always feel, the goddess Saraswati (goddess of arts and music) must be suffering this spectacle with cotton wool in her ears and with the choicest ones spewing from the mouth.

Ÿ  Then comes the MC(master/mistress of ceremony) and I could write a book on their shenanigans. The MC comes fully armed with the history of the town, the purpose of the function and a repertoire of four or five jokes/couplets/anecdotes etc; and launches into a long monologue ending in thanking all the dignitaries on the dais for sparing their valuable time in making the function a grand success. By the time he/she is through with the intro, nobody has anything left to say. So every subsequent speaker has to refer to him/her before repeating the same platitudes.

Ÿ  Then comes the ritual of garlanding/presenting bouquets to the dignitaries. I am fully convinced that here the garlander is more important than the garlandee. On one occasion, after about 25 persons garlanding the various people on and off the dais, they called, Mr. so and so ex MLA or something to do the honours. Mr. so and so asked “whom should I garland?” and the organizers said garland anyone, it does not matter, or something to that effect. 

Ÿ  Despite their gift of the gab/garrulity/verbosity, all the MCs always manage to get my name wrong. My name for the record is R.J.Ghatey. I am invariably called Mr. Ghatge/Ghadge/Laghate/Dhote or Ghatekar(some people assume that all Maharashtrian names must end with a kar). If someone manages to get it right, they goof up with the initials. In any case, they all the miss the ‘y’ while writing it down. Ditto with my designation. When I was a DGM (Dy General Manager), I was invariably called a Dy. Manager which is four rungs below. I secretly wished someone would call me a general manager by mistake. They did, once, when the great man (my boss) was sitting right next to me on the dais. I contemplated whether I could crawl under the table cloth, but there were too many pesky mosquitoes buzzing around in that space to risk it.

Ÿ  Often there are so many guests on the dais that the organizers have to invent fancy titles to massage everybody’s ego. And the MC manages to mix up all of them. I have been a ’Special Guest’, ’Guest of Honour’, ‘Chief Guest’ and ‘Distinguished Guest’ at the same function.

Ÿ  Then the speech making starts. Normally, the least important person on the dais should speak first and they should move upwards in the ascending order. But most functions follow a much more chaotic format. So you don’t know when you will be called to speak.

Ÿ  After every speaker the MC keeps repeating whatever was said for the benefit of the audience (which must be so stupid that everything has to be explained twice to them). And keeps requesting every speaker to make it short. (No one takes him/her seriously anyways.)

Ÿ  At the end, someone is requested to propose a vote of thanks. God forbid if that somebody happens to be a budding/fading MC. Then he/she goes on to repeat all that the MC and the other speakers said, interspersing it with his own five jokes/couplets/anecdotes. Finally he thanks all the speakers for keeping it short and calls it a day.

Ÿ  Phew!  Hence, in this case of the missing ‘y’, the MC did it.

Zeitgeist

ZEITGEIST

There are times when after a night’s sleep, you wake up with an alert, fertile almost febrile mind with a lot of interesting thoughts, ideas and quotable quotes swirling around. Beautifully formed sentences on the previous day’s “breaking news”, or snippets gleaned from the numerous newspapers read, or some pseudo philosophical/spiritual thoughts flow effortlessly like rhythmic patterns from the magical fingers of Ustad Zakir Hussain. You wonder at your own felicity and brilliance. You feel you should get up and record these gems for the benefit of mankind (?) or at least for posterity. Alas! By the time you awaken fully, you are already late for the morning walk and your mind is already forming your responses in the first video conference of the day. The literary masterpiece simply evaporates and disappears from your subconscious slowly like dewdrops from the grass blades on sunrise. 

While sitting down to write a blog of indeterminate length on any subject starting with the letter Z, originality is the first muse that deserts you, followed closely by felicity, grammar and eloquence not necessarily in that order. You finally dust up the dictionary and start reading all the words starting with z.  

This is how I stumbled across zeitgeist which I had happened to look up recently. I have been wondering lately what the presiding spirit of the present era is. Is it greed? Is it money? Is it hedonism? Is it materialism? Or what?  It is difficult to pin down. May be I should approach the question in a different way. By using the ancient Vedic philosophy of “Neti Neti”, by eliminating what it is not. 

            It is not upliftment of the downtrodden. People seldom stop to look down, not even to see what they are trampling on. They are always in a tearing hurry to get by the shortest route to the next destination, next project, next assignment, next promotion, next boy/girl friend, next divorce, next tummy tuck, next rave party, next visit to the shrink and so on. No time to think of our social responsibility. 

            It is not love for one’s country, patriotism, jingoism or whatever, unless it comes to indo-pak encounters of the cricket kind.  Otherwise, it is I, me, myself; then my family, my extended family; my sub-caste, my caste, my religion and then again I, me and myself and so on.

            It is not pursuit of knowledge. We cram from text books and forget all of it after puking it on the exam papers. We bluff our way through interviews; depend on our juniors to do ‘research’ for us, prepare talking points for us and write our reports, presentations even our self appraisals. I have seen some people sleepwalking through a banking job, right up to retirement without gathering as much as iota of experience/expertise. Jargon and subterfuge can help you get out of the tightest corner. “Let me run it past/bounce it off my team/boss”, “let me sleep over it”, “this needs to be looked into in greater detail”, “have you benchmarked your data with the best in class”’ I could go on and on.  You get the drift. The cruellest of them all is “does it conform to CVC guidelines”. You can kill any project with this one.

            It is not, definitely not honesty, integrity, honour or any of such old fashioned virtues.  We bribe/give donations to the schools to admit our kids who cheat, with no little help from their teachers, in board exams so that the child/his parents/the school can boast of a good result. Same process is repeated in college/B school till the child is, with some help from the well connected grand uncle, ensconced into a regular job. On the first day at the job, esp a govt job, the poor boy/girl is taught the various original ways of using everyday things like a diary (to be left at the far corner of the table in which the visitor can slip in some “chaipani”), the table (more under than above) and the desk drawers (has anybody seen the desk drawers of RTO officers in the evening?).

I could go on and on but my daughter wud impatiently say “ooookaaaay dad. Don’t exaggerate. And what did your generation do? What was their zeitgeist?”

I started reminiscing about the spirit of our growing years in the 70s and the 80s. Those were the days of mediocrity and deprivation. We did not even have technicolour dreams. Every middle class boy aspired to become a doctor or an engineer and land a decent govt/semi govt job. (Girls wanted to study arts/home science and land a doctor/engineer in matrimony). Getting a four figure salary and driving a bajaj scooter was the ultimate aspiration. The movies reflected the angst of the suffocated youth in Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young man who revolted against the rich man/the system/the oppression. 

The neta-babu raj had the nation by its unmentionables and the licence-permit raj had a stranglehold over the industry.  Only the Bombay Club, which had a cosy relationship with the babudom thrived in the unlevel playing field. Youngsters dreamt of an India without Indira. But socialism did not really excite us.  It was either the egoistic Ayn Rand and her material objectivism or good old hindutwa which captured our imagination. The emergency rudely woke up the lotus eating masses from the travesty of democracy which was not by the people, neither of the people nor for them. The decline and resurrection of Mrs G was over in a blink and the nation was back to business as usual at the Hindu rate of growth of 3.5%. The bureaucrats continued to rule the country. They had to deal with the minor inconvenience of having inept and corrupt political masters and pesky subjects, which they did effortlessly. In the IAS academy they were actually taught not to extend their hand first while meeting aam aadmi (ordinary citizens), as they were the ruling class. Their mindset was aptly expressed by a friend who left a highly paid job to be a babu. He said “In our country, the danda (cane) of the Mai Baap sarkar (govt) has conjugal rights over the backside of the Aam Aadmi and I want to be the one to wield the danda and not the one to expose my behind.

And then came the big crossing of the Rubicon when the good doctor Manmohan Singh unleashed the triple whammy of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation on the country and nothing was the same ever again.