I Want To Make Fraudship With You

Unless your name is Kapil Sibal, I think you’ll agree with me when I say that the internet is awesome. It is a place where even the most degenerate, depraved and desperate souls on the planet can find sanctuary. But enough about Orkut.
And just like the real world, the internet isn’t safe from scams. In fact, it’s worse, because we’re more used to fraud in the real world. The signs are obvious. For example, you know you’re being suckered when you’re paying ‘chanda‘ for festivals, or voting for the Congress.
I was reminded of all this recently when this paper carried a four-part campaign on online safety. I like how such campaigns begin with cautionary tales that go something like this:
Priya Rai (name changed on request), aged 24, was just an ordinary girl going about her day when she signed into her Facebook account. She was browsing through her albums, creatively titled ‘RANDOM CLICKZ’, ‘PARTYYY!!! LOLZZ!!’ and ‘AFTER PARTYYY VOMIT! YAY!’, when she realised that something was terribly wrong. This was because a truck had rammed into her stupid face. This happens when you check FB while driving.
It surprises me that even after all these years, people are still clueless about basic online safety. Then again, if you’ve seen kids or old people use the web, you’d understand why. For example, my mother is a very smart woman, but I think she believes that the internet is run by a magic goblin network. (I had to explain to her that it’s actually operated by Chinese kids living inside your computer.) Thankfully, here’s a set of FAQs that might just help:
Q. I am on Facebook. How do I protect my privacy?
A. First, delete your account. Then fly to California, lobotomise Mark Zuckerberg and feed his brain to Myspace users.
Q. I’ve put up my phone number online. I also like to check in to various places using Foursquare, thus broadcasting my location details all day. Is this safe?
A. If by safe, you mean ‘something that attracts emotionally-unhinged heavy-breathing enthusiasts with easy access to mineral acids’ then yes.
Q. I am a mother of two teenagers. I sent them friend requests on Facebook six months ago, and they still haven’t accepted it. What do I do?
A. This is not your kids’ fault. The BMC accidentally hit some transmission cables while digging, so your friend requests leaked out and could not reach your kids’ computers. They’re currently lying in a pothole in Marol.
Q. I have an e-mail which says that I just won 750,000 British pounds in a lottery. I just need to send them my bank details. How do I proceed?
A. The recommended procedure is that you march up to your boss, spit in his face and staple your resignation letter to his nipples.

Q. I am a 15-year-old boy. My friends in school morphed my face on to Poonam Pandey’s body. Everyone makes fun of me now. What do I do?
A. This is known as cyber-bullying and can be quite traumatic. But you know what’s more traumatic? Being stabbed with a compass wielded by your oversized classmate who started shaving in the fifth standard. You kids have it easy. Suck it up and get back at bullies with better Photoshop.
Q. I’ve heard of cyber cafes installing keyloggers on their PCs. What’s that about?
A. A keylogger is software that stays invisible while recording whatever you type. The information thus gained can be used for malicious purposes. For example, do you really want everyone to know that your last search term was “balloon fetish”?
Q. Haha. Shut up. Surely there’s no such thing.
A. Look it up if you want your childhood destroyed.
Q. Dear Friend, you should try our herbal penis enlargement pills today.
A. I’m sorry, I don’t know what a ‘herbal penis’ is.
Q. Can I buy three packets of those pills please?
A. Oh hello, Mr. Sib – (THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HAS BEEN CENSORED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA)

                                 

KOLAVERI DIDI

                                                         
As India's favourite insane asylum outpatient, Mamta Banerjee celebrated the first year of her reign of terror and darkness, the kind folks at Sardesai TV had a bright idea. They decided to stop shouting for a couple of minutes and hold a Q&A session with the newish overlord of West Bengal. And then, in a scenario which even a casual viewer of a badly plotted sitcom could foresee, during the session, the minute someone asked her a real question, Ms Banerjee not only refused to offer an answer, but for good measure called the person asking the question a Maoist (as you do!) and then walked out.
It takes real talent to share a stage with Sagarika Ghose and still come out looking like the crazy one, but, if anyone can accomplish this arduous task, then it's the Commie Crusher of Calcutta. This is what happens when you surround yourself with yes-men and don't allow any contradictory opinion to even wander near your frontal lobe. Maybe if she left the padded room they keep her in once in a while there would be hope that maybe one day she would have a tiny grip on reality? It seems that delusion is an important part of public life in this country.
Perhaps it is why human tub of lard and Information and Broadcasting minister Kapil Sibal was able to stand on the 'sacred' floor of Parliament and be able to claim, with a straight face, that India is perhaps more liberal than even America or Western Europe. So liberal it hurts! So liberal that we ban books without reading them. So liberal that we send the most number of takedown notices to Google. So liberal that we deny visas to foreign journalists who are critical of our policies.  Maybe he actually does believe the constant obfuscation he offers in lieu of real answers?
Although, that was nothing compared to the travesty that was the 'celebration' of the three years in government of the second iteration of the UPA. That is like throwing a party to commemorate that drunken night three years ago when you had a one night stand with a random person and they gave you syphilis. Though no one was surprised because this government has turned tone-deafness into an art form.

Not only have they spent each excruciating day in the past three years muddling from one crisis to the next, they are so barren that every time some wayward ally threatens to pull the rug from beneath their feet, a small part of you kind of wants them to go ahead with their threat so that this mass of diseased puss pretending to govern the country for the past few years can finally be put out of its misery. Only a deluded party would look at the drubbing it received in the assembly elections, held in the country's biggest state and try to convince itself that it was not a repudiation of its policies; that it would have won the elections had it not been for infighting. That it decided to stay the course is a testament to the long distance relationship between reality and the leaders of the Congress party.

    

Of course, if we had a proper opposition they would capitalise on such brazen incompetence. However, our principal opposition party is made up of a rag-tag bunch of jokers — bereft of any ideas — who cannot even stand the sight of each other yet still persist with the pretension of being a cohesive unit only because of their unmitigated and naked lust for power. An opposition party which continues to offer nothing but empty, unproductive gestures instead of any legitimate debate or any useful policies. The opposition parties in this country are so weak and helpless that they forcibly ceded their space to desi Robin Hood and his merry band of tax evading, expense fudging, and invective throwing minions.
Now, nobody currently embodies the collective delusion of our political class more than P.A. Sangma. A politician who was important for a few minutes in 1996, and is on what many observers would describe — if they want to be really, really kind — as a quixotic quest to be President. In his shamelessness, he has even managed to sell out the very people whose interests he claims to care for. According to Sangma, letting him mangle English words for five years in Rashtrapati Bhavan would right all the wrongs of the past.
The profound distance the North East has felt from the mainland, the years of being ignored by the central government, it would all be fixed if they make a guy, who even members of his own party aren't aware of, the President. The most incredulous claim he has made is that a President Sangma would bring down Naxalism and hurt the insurgency. Yes, a President Sangma would also find a cure for cancer, fix the imbalanced gender ratio, singlehandedly bring an end to the corruption that ails the country and make it rain cute puppies and edible confetti all the time.
Which brings us back to Mamta Banerjee. She ended her week by leading a protest against the government. This was an act of such bravado that it caused a fissure in the space-time continuum. Even though she is in government both at the centre and the state, she figured that the best plan of action would be to lead a procession against both these entities. Usually she is just judge, jury and executioner; however, this time she was both Chief Minister and the Leader of Opposition. There was even an awkward moment when she, in her capacity as chief minister, called herself, in her capacity as leader of opposition, a Maoist.
Somewhere in famous people heaven, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are looking down on her and going "Even we can't cure this."

                                                                  

Don’t Talk About Sex Baby!

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Why So Snobbish?

A long, long time ago, the first humans set foot on Earth, invariably stepping in sabre-tooth tiger poop, because the BMC was inefficient even back then. The human race then adapted and evolved from cavemen who asserted their superiority over their lesser brothers by bashing their heads in with a rock, to the more refined specimens of today, who have learnt to identify the weakest of the species based on the phone they use.

At the forefront of this phone snobbery are two major camps – the Android fanboys, who gloat about the superior tech that allows them to access weed and stripper-related apps, and Apple fanatics aka Mactards, described by sociologists as being ‘absolute tossers’. (There are also Blackberry fans, but they just sit around picking lice out of each others’ fur.)

Of all the phone snobs, I find Mactards most amusing. I’m not talking about regular Apple users – I mean the ones who make it a point to refer to their phone as their ‘iPhone’. The common noun is swept aside to make way for the Grand Proper Noun: “Call me on my iPhone”, “Text me on my iPhone”, “My pee-pee is smaller than my iPhone”.

This is about as classy as referring to yourself in third person. Would you like it if Parag Sawant did that to you? Parag Sawant most certainly would. Parag Sawant  thinks this is fun. Parag Sawant is the son of God. Parag Sawant Parag Sawant . Parag Sawant Oh, and in case you didn’t get it, Parag Sawant  .

This battle took on farcical proportions recently, when Instagram, so far an exclusive iOS app, launched a version for Android. For those of you who just woke up from a long coma, Instagram is an app that allows you to take pictures of your food, add various effects to them and then share them with other lovers of half-eaten-food photos. Mactards all over the world welcomed the Android version the same way you’d welcome the arrival of cockroaches. In your mouth.

I would totally understand if the Apple fanboy stand began and ended with ‘I’m better because I can afford to buy more expensive stuff and you can’t, nyah nyah nyah!’ That’s pretty much the cornerstone of capitalism, and it’s fine. But no; they act like they built their own devices from scratch. Dear Mactards, all you did was walk into a store and buy shiny things. You’re like a Gujju aunty at Tribhuvandas Zaveri. Get over it.

Another kind of snob I don’t understand is the Militant Meat Eater. Now I love a good beef chilli fry as much as the next guy, except that I don’t, because the next guy is the kind whose love for dead animals is second only to his love of spitting at vegetarians.
Go out for a meal in a mixed group, and there will always be that one idiot who thinks it’s hilariously original to go on about ‘ghaas-phoos’ for twenty minutes. I suspect that these repeated jibes have led to the rise of crazy vegetarians. Case in point: the Jain-infested areas of South Bombay, such as Walkeshwar, wherein eating meat in your own home can result in you being evicted. The trader communities that own the area equate meat-eating to some heinous crime, like murder, or paying taxes.
I’m a realist. I have no fantasies about living in a world where people aren’t trying to show off their superiority using any metric possible. Snobbery is an inescapable human trait, like lying, or watching  porn videos. I just think it’s wrong to judge someone on the basis of their phones or dietary preferences. Why use cellphones or food as tools of hate, when you can judge people based on their spellings, honking habits or their belief in astrology? Feel free to send in hate mail if you disagree. Parag Sawant will read it on his IPHONE!!!.

A Totally Useless Guide to The Budget

This has been an important week for India, what with Mamata Banerjee biting off the Railway Minister’s head for doing his job, followed by Pranab Mukherjee presenting the Union Budget in an accent that can only be described as ‘Bengali man coughing up a hairball’.
As expected, the country was assaulted by a barrage of information as news channels went into hyperdrive, beginning with speculation about the budget that showcased experts with the predictive skills of a roadside fortune-telling parrot, which was followed by a detailed analysis of how the UPA could have done better (Answer: By resigning)
As regular people, I know that you need a real expert to cut through the clutter and the jargon, and tell you in lucid terms, what the budget is all about. I believe that I fit the bill, given that I often stumble upon business channels while surfing, and even watch for a few seconds if the anchors are hot enough(its not imperative for a MBA to watch it seriously). You can’t go wrong with credentials like that. So let’s begin with a simple Q & A format:

Q. What is in the briefcase that the finance minister brandishes about in Parliament on Budget Day?
A. Antacids, porn films for Karnataka politicians, and a signature cologne distilled from the tears of the middle class.

Q. Ooh, porn. Tell me more.
A. The titles include ‘Fiscal Fantasy’, ‘Subsidy Studs’ and the classic, ‘Plug My Deficit’
.
Q. What is the history behind the budget?
A. The practise started in 1728, when the King of England asked his financial adviser to tell him what the Crown’s money would be spent on. “Silly wigs”, said the adviser, and there was much rejoicing.

Q. I can’t watch the budget. Parliament sessions are boring as hell.
A. Not if you play the Meira Kumar Drinking Game.

Q. What’s that?
A. Do a shot every time Meira Kumar says ‘Baith Jaaiye’. Very soon, you’ll find yourself stumbling about, shouting inanities and basically making a Digvijay Singh of yourself.

Q. What are the key economic issues that India needs to focus on?
A. From an economic point of view, it is imperative to uncover the origins of that thing growing on Lord Meghnad Desai’s head.

Q. I am a 22-year-old man from a respectable family. I like to touch myself while watching Baba Sehgal videos. Will this affect my married life?
A. Dude... Wrong blog.

Q. What do you make of the FDI debate?
A. It’s no surprise that Congress leaders are gung-ho about FDI. Always have been. They chose Sonia, didn’t they?

Q. What are the long-term measures taken by the Congress to protect Indian farmers?
A. The long-term idea is to let them die, and then hope they’re reborn as something whose existence is less wretched, like lepers, or the guys in charge of waxing Shekhar Suman’s chest.
Q. That’s disgusting.
A. Wait till you hear his jokes.

Q. What about the BJP? They claim to be fighting for farmers.
A. Yes, but their strongest idea involves leasing out Nitin Gadkari as a scarecrow.

Q. Is it true that Rakhi Sawant visited the Parliament on the first day of the budget session?
A. Yes, this actually happened. Next up, Poonam Pandey to strip at the Supreme Court.

Q. THIS BUDGET SUCKS! YOUR MOM IS A TRAMP! I WILL SET FIRE TO EVERY HAPPY MEMORY YOU HAVE AND TAKE A DUMP ALL OVER YOUR SOUL!
A. Go away, Mamata.

Flash What Yo Mama Gave You!

Mumbai learnt an interesting lesson this week, i.e. a flash mob does not involve a bunch of angry web designers wreaking havoc through rollover ads. Nope, a flash mob is completely different. It’s a group of people that gathers at a predetermined place, does something bizarre, and leaves in a jiffy. For example, Parliament.
When done right, a flash mob is art, it is randomness and most importantly, it’s a great way to get Youtube hits without being a cat that plays the piano while doing the Hitler salute.
The Mumbai flash mob, performed at CST last Sunday, was all this and more. Two hundred everyday citizens, between the ages of 4 and 60, broke out into a choreographed dance at CST, after which Anil Kapoor scared the hell out of white people by going all Ram Lakhan at the Golden Globes… hang on, I may be a bit confused here.
No, the flashmobbers danced to ‘Rang De Basanti’ (which is Punjabi for ‘Suck on this, you Kolaveri freaks’) much to the surprise of commuters whose idea of local train music so far had been confined to bhajan groups that could make God turn atheist.
Now at this point, let me clarify that I’m not one of those overly happy people. Not while I’m sober anyway. You know the kind I’m talking about – those upbeat dingbats who claim to be high on life, vomiting sunshine and rainbows every time they open their mouths and generally going about their day as if they’d just woken with Sharad Pawar’s bank balance.
Having said that, when I watched the flash mob video, I couldn’t help but grin like those very idiots. Seriously, just look at the people in it. What’s the one thing that you notice? Yep, that’s right – some of the dancers are hotties. No wait, I mean they’re happy. Even if it’s just for five minutes, everybody at the station is happy – the dancers, the commuters, the pickpockets – everybody.
Let’s be honest here. If there’s one thing that Mumbai needs (apart from flyovers, wide roads, a metro network, more AC buses, a drainage system that was designed for not more than just four Englishmen and their pets, and politicians who have more brains than the aforementioned pets) it is random bouts of happiness like these.
It takes a special kind of Mumbaikar to look at VT and think, “I want to get 200 of my friends and dance in front of the toilets here.” I applaud that Mumbaikar, Shonan Kothari, and also request her to pass whatever she’s smoking. Of course, as far as stations go, VT was the perfect venue. It has character and history and is an iconic Mumbai location, unlike, say, Dadar which is a station built entirely out of rotting vegetables glued together with sweat.
The video reminded me of the last time I saw Mumbaikars erupt with unabashed joy. This was right after the World Cup victory. The sky was a riot of colours, with people singing, dancing, laughing, getting smashed, making out with strangers – it was like a Punju wedding on steroids. But since we can’t fix, I mean, win a World Cup every time, I’ll take these little substitutes instead.
Of course, not everyone shares my enthusiasm. There are many who’ve been cribbing about the quality, nature and purpose of the flash mob (this was after they managed to spare time from their busy schedule of kicking puppies) Ok no, if you’re one of those people, I wish you could lighten up. If not, may Kolaveri play in your head till your brain explodes.

WHY DANDIYA WHYYYY?????

Every now and then, I like to sit back, relax and ponder some serious philosophical questions such as, “What is the meaning of life?”, “Why do some people always have moist palms?” and most importantly, “When did people decide that it would be fun to whack two sticks together to the tunes of a band whose musical style seems to be ‘Bollywood hits as sung by a cat that is being skinned alive’?”
   
So clearly, I’m not a big fan of dandiya, or as Gujaratis like to call it, ‘mating season’. Think about it – just like birds and animals that surface once a year and strut around, showing off their colourful plumage to attract potential mates, Gujju males too emerge at night, decked up in attire that makes their usual Charagh Din shirts seem funereal in comparison. And then begins the dance, wherein they make the women go around in circles until the blood flow in their heads is all messed up, causing them to willingly hook up with guys called ‘Viral’, ‘Pinal’ and ‘Anal’. (I imagine that names like these would render kids celibate for life. You might as well call them ‘Pustule McFungus’ or worse, ‘Amar Singh’)

If you think I’m exaggerating about the mating season bit, then you underestimate the power of repressed hormones. A cursory glance at news reports will tell you that there is always a surge in the sale of emergency contraceptives during this period, so unless i-Pills are exceptionally tasty, you know what’s happening. And so do many paranoid parents, who resort to hiring detectives to trail their child. This makes me feel truly desi, because only in India would parents willingly hire strangers to stalk their kids.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against dandiya – I just find all festivals boring and/or annoying (unless we’re talking about beer festivals)
For example, Holi overstayed its welcome when I realised that I could use the holiday to sleep, instead of spending it trying to scrub half of China’s lead output off my skin. And since many of my friends agree, the only other option is to spend Holi smearing colour on the faces of neighbours I last spoke to in 2005 or so. In terms of social awkwardness, this would rank right up there with ordering Chinese food at a ‘Free Tibet’ meeting.

Now consider Diwali – a festival wherein we worship some of the biggest names in the pantheon i.e. Big Bazaar, Vijay Sales and Croma. No seriously, I hate the shopfest this season has turned into, as opposed to when I was younger and actually got to learn about my culture and my roots by blowing things up.
(I gave up on crackers altogether as a teenager. I’d like to say it was for environmental reasons but honestly, it just got boring. And now that I’m older and wiser, I use that time to focus on the things that really matter, like Scotch and gambling)
In fact, a lot of urban youngsters now pick their celebrations based on two factors: the amount of preparation required, and how blasted one can get. This explains the rise in popularity of foreign festivals such as St. Patrick’s, wherein all you need to is a functional liver and the desire to live with bad decisions.

You also have Indians celebrating Thanksgiving, thereby displaying an IQ lower than the stuffed turkey on their tables. And post-ZNMD, many people across India decided they wanted to celebrate La Tomatina. This sycophancy never works the other way around. I don’t mean to condone irrational abstinence, but you’d never see a bunch of Spaniards give up meat and alcohol for a month because the moon is in the wrong place.
These Scroogeisms aside, I do wish you all a Happy Navratri. I genuinely hope that you find peace and happiness but most of all, I hope you find a dandiya location that is far, far away from my house.