Somebody has to do those ads

Whenever I take a trip down memory lane (a really short walk for me!), I remember my Wonder Years, that period of time in my life when I realized that I was not good at anything, apart from getting millions of zits on my face, giving Alfred E Neuman a major complex, and getting into trouble at school as well as at home for delinquency, while most of the other people I knew were either great at sports, academics or at hitting on the women whose attention I somehow never seemed to attract.

It was a different matter altogether that I wasn't too bothered about getting their attention, and this fact has been stated, not as a case of sour grapes, as one would conveniently like to think, but just as a means for me to set matters straight.

I also remember that time in my life for another important reason. When I hit class 9, our faithful, 9 year-old black and white 14 inch Philips TV finally breathed its last.

After innumerable tube changes, after changes in the springs of the mechanical system of the TV console that enabled us to switch channels (we had 6 of them), and after a whole lot of time spent on searching in vain for the 60 channels that our cable guy said he provided, while we were able to see only around 23 since we had no S-band, the TV had shown us the last of its monochrmoatic oeuvres.

One fine day, my Dad, who is an extremely patient person, finally decided that he had enough of this, and without anyone of us in the family being aware of it, went out and brought home a Samsung 21 inch colour TV, with 'superhorn' technology and all that jazz, and I remember that day as being among the happiest days of my life.

Never before had I thought that I would have been able to fall in love with an inanimate object, but my TV changed all that. My blood would boil with rage, every single time someone who pretended to be really smart called the TV as the 'Idiot Box'. Now that was a case of sour grapes, if there ever was one!

One of the best things about the telly was the advertisements. With a world-record short attention span, yours truly could all but sit and watch a sitcom or some serial, unless there was some lesbian action in it, and given the Uma Bharatis and the the Sushma Swarajs, founders of the EOTEB (Enemies Of Testosterone Expression Brigade) were all against showing the right kinda stuff on TV, one had to make do with single servings of inane stuff courtesy of the ads.

To conform to the "grass is always greener on the other side that has the golf course outside your office that only the high profile clients can play on after paying big money to your corporation so that you can sell your souls out to them" idiom, I somehow have viewed people in a lot of other professions with serious envy. People in the advertising profession are prime on my envy list.

Right from those typical Amul utterly butterly ads, to the Pepsi-Coke cola war ads, to the really 'cute' dairy milk ads, I was fascinated by all of them. I still like quite a lot of them, specially considering the fact that I am without a TV for most part of the week, and the only things that I can watch on the telly without having to worry about the continuity are them adverts, and the occasional football game, only if my family decides not to take revenge on me for having been so possessive about the remote, sometimes even taking it to the loo in order not to relenquish control of it.

There is this very interesting blog that I chanced upon, courtesy of a colleague's recommendation, and its got a whole host of interesting ads by all the leading agencies along with the author's critical comments and other fundaes on the same. Do check it out.

However, there is one side of advertising that nobody seems to really care about. Do you recall all those ads that have people advertising for products that cast grevious doubts on their personal hygeine?

Spare a thought for people cast in ads such as the ones for itch-guard, ring-cutter, for the various anti-dandruff shampoos, and all the other ones that have them shown as subjects who don't have high levels of personal hygeine, who don't take care of themselves, and have gross infections in unmentionable places, or are complete idiots.

Take the case of this celebrity anchor as well, who goes from door to door, inspecting the lavatories of common people and claiming that he can clean their toliets better, armed with the latest in toilet cleaning equipment.

You and I, as discerning viewers would have the option of switching channels, but imagine the sheer agony that the better halves of these people have to go through under the most normal of circumstances.

Here is an instance where our man has to go meet his prospective in-laws. A pretty ordinary event for most people taking the matrimonial plunge.

FIL: So, ******, what do you do for a living?
Stud: Sir, I work on the small screen.
FIL: Oh, you're a big star? Which TV shows are you on?
Stud: No sir, I just do a lot of advertisements for TV.
FIL: I watch TV 24/7/365, come to think of it, your face seems familiar! You're the guy in the itch-guard ad with the painful groin rash, aren't you?
Stud: (wishing he'd taken to begging instead).

Dignity of labour is one thing, being in a potentially embarassing situation with every single step you take is something altogether different! Some computer generated skin infections on screen, which has a close up of your face on it as well, can seriously hamper your chances of getting any, unless you go to some country where those ads are not telecast.

This reinforces my thinking, that the true enlightened ones are those who are behind the scenes, and behind the screens as well.

Somebody has to do those ads. Better them, than you or I!

Fight Club

This is your life, and its ending one minute at a time.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

Brilliant stuff, this.

Also, blatant plagarism. I know, but I take pride in the fact that David Fincher's Fight Club is one of my all time favourite movies, and I wouldn't mind quoting it till kingdom come.

Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and the amazing Edward Norton, who I confess I'd be crazy about had I been a woman, is a revolutionary movie, which is so awesome that one could watch with riveted interest even if one were subjected to sleep deprivation for four previous days in a row.




Here is some interesting trivia attached to the movie in general. The movie is based on a book written by Chuck Palahniuk, who is an acclaimed Gen-Y genre writer (now don't ask me what that means, I myself am clueless about it), and has belted out controversial book after controversial book, and has a major cult following in the US.

There are also some theories that the movie/book has been lifted off from Calvin and Hobbes, and that the two main characters along with the character of Marla Singer played by Helena Bonham Carter are actually the adult representations of Calvin, Hobbes and Susie. This seems to take random conjenctures to extremes, with such a hypothesis, and thats all I've got to say about that.

The extremely disturbing reason why I am writing this post is to highlight the fact that "Fight Club" is now out in Hindi.

It has heroes.

Four of them. (At last count, based on the promos.)

Two heroines.

And songs.

Aaarrrgh!!!

I'd much rather watch arbitrary movies such as "Khopdi-the skull", that have people dressed up in costumes they stole from some children's fancy dress competition auditorium changing room, with shady dialogues that even a three year old could make fun of, and heroes that even I look better than, and heroines that...well...the less said the better, you know.

I am not part of the crowd that pooh-poohs Hindi movies, while praising English ones because its 'cool' to do so. I am more subtle in my pseudness. I genuinely like quality stuff regardless of the language in which the movie is in. You should check out my Swahili and Esperanto movie collection someday, and you'll know.

I also think Bhojpuri movies rock. Bhojpuri movies have come back with a bang, and their revival will be made a case study in some B-school in 2010. A leading news magazine featured an article on the same, where they even spoke about the use of high end technology such as sync sound, slick editing and computer graphics.

It is rumoured that production for a whole host of Bhojpuri movies catering to the multiplex crowd in various unspecified secret locations has started in earnest.

They've used high end computer graphics, licensed from major Silicon Valley tech graphics vendors to do many wonderful things to the movies. The graphics can hide the flies buzzing around the cast's heads and hide the spittle that comes out of the hero's mouth every single time he speaks. Sound editing blanks out the mooing of cows in the neighboring cowshed, which shares its wall with the studio.

There are some wonderful cost-cutting measures in place, that this film industry has ingeniously employed. Whenever they want the hero/heroine's close friend to be respectively murdered/molested, they don't hire people as villans, but merely incite the local goons by spreading rumours that the soon-to-be-victim has passed comments regarding the hair that grows out of Laloo's ears.

There is nothing more blasphemous, in the humble opinion of the village heads, who decide to uphold the prestige of their fallen chief minister, and the alleged wrongdoer is dispensed with faster than you can say 'Gaai ka tabela', with the entire sequence shot on camera, thereby easing additional charges on the director's pockets.

Why doesn't mainstream Hindi commercial cinema try and borrow some lessons from their supposedly lesser cousins, rather than try and re-make classics from Hollywood and from the yesteryears as well???

Movies such as Swades, Rang De Basanti, Black and so on stand as testament to the fact that the creativity of the film industry knows no bounds, and can hold its own against the slick production houses of Hollywood, in a few years to come.

"Welcome to Fight Club. If this is your first night, you have to fight."

OR

"Fight Club mein aapka swagat hai. Agar aap yahaan pehli baar aaye hain, to aap ko yudh karna hi padega."

The choice is yours. Go figure.

Bring on the hits!

For all those that haven't noticed, there is this nondescript site counter at the bottom left corner of the post on my main page, right below the 'power blogger' button, that tells me the number of hits I have on my site.

The site meter also goes on to explain the various details of all the people that have chanced upon this blog, the location they're in, the time they've stuck onto this page, and so on and so forth.

I know you're yawning, but read on, this post gets interesting.......

Firstly, a small request, bring on the hits! More power to blogger, and more readers on whom I unleash my blog. Thats it with the shameless self-advertisement for this post.

Secondly, another small request...do subscribe to the RSS feeds, but please, please do visit the site too, so that "the site counter hits the roof", to use an extremely popular expression that I came up with three posts ago.

I have, for the first time since installing the site-meter, actually clicked on the link and I have seen a lot of vague places that I have got hits from. For all my international readers out there, I will now move on to leaving personalized messages, so that you keep coming back for more.

To my single reader from Taipei, Taiwan:
Me speake Englishe too. Me speake lotsa languageses. Me want to bomb mainland China if they repeate the 1962 War scenario. Me fully on your side. Me shalla tone down me grammal for your leading preasure!

To the two Aussies and the New Zealander who must've accidentally stumbled on this site:
Dudes, I know you're CIA operatives who've just flown from Langley over to Auckland and Brisbane just to prove that you're some random surfers, while actually trying to see if my blog is a recruiting ground for the News Channel that flicked the name off my blog. For the last time, I am a inconsequential software engineer who's probably going to stand at attention everytime one of your relatives who is probably working in a major IT company in the bay area snaps his fingers. Don't bother. Stop wasting tax dollars. Use it instead to buy more duct tape for George W when its really going to matter.

To all the European people that visited this site:
I am not an anti-Semite, and shame on you if you are ! You cannot find links to Ashtanga Yoga classes that Pattabhi Jois conducts in Mysore, though I hail from that place. It doesn't matter if you're so hot that you're contributing to global warming, I will still not be able to help you. Send me a pic though, and I might...just might reconsider. Contact me at bogus_email_address@sitedoesnotexist.com.

To all my readers from the US:
I know you all are Desis. The present generation of Yanks can't read for nuts. The present generation of American kids want to outsource their attendance requirements to the poor village student in Byratanahalli. (Imagine, the spelling bee finals without Desis would have had them spelling the "mass" in mass destruction, for the top prize!)
The CIA operatives fly to Australia and New Zealand so that they can hoodwink me into thinking they're not really interested.
Keep the flag flying high! Jai Hind! Pump in more dollars into our economy through FDIs and FIIs, and raise the level of our GNP. Yeah, baby!!
Also, lets gun for a second generation immigrant grandson of a Desi to be the 63rd President. Thats much better than whats happening currently, with George W Bush cost cutting on his speech writer's pay packet by hiring Laloo's speech writer, with only a poor translator converting the speech from Bhojpuri to English. Outsourcing is here to stay, lets take it to their shores!
Also, since your poorer cousins back in India cannot afford iPods at the prices that they're being sold here, please do get one each time you return to the motherland. Vinayak Kamath, my iPod getter, my many thanks to you once again.

To those in the middle East:
Go here. For the very last time, I will not accept Osama's tapes. I don't give a shit about terrorism. PLEASE treat your women better. (I see more women flocking my site now...click that firefox "go" button to reach my URL. Go baby!).
Please get this clear - Camel is the ship if the desert. Clemanceau is the deserted ship.

To those in Africa:
What the hell!! I thought you didn't have electricity there!!! (There are actually no hits from Africa!)

To everyone in India:
Well, high speed internet access at your company surely rocks. So does your taste in blogs. I commend thee for that. Kutz, thanks for the link on your blog. You've quadrupled the number of my readers. Now there are 8 people in our country who actually access my blog.

To my Dog:
grr-woof-woof...grr grr-rowf (I will get your favourite dog biscuits next time I come home to Mysore, sorry for the delay).

Thanks, and hope you've had a good read.

The Lord of the Fly

"The Lord of the Flies" is an amazing book written by William Golding.

Any resemblances between this post and that book, save for the tweaked title, surely means that some *@&*&$ has managed to lay hands on my blogger ID and password.

This evening, when I went to the john to take a leak, I chanced upon the inspiration that has enabled me to pen down this post.

There was this guy who was trying to talk on his phone, that unfortunately for him, probably rang when he was in an uncompromising position.
When I entered, I saw him trying to tuck his shirt in with one hand through his fly, while attempting to hold a conversation with somebody, presumably important.
He looked like a contortionist straight out of the Guiness book of World Records, trying to satiate himself in some vague auto-erotic fashion, and since his back was turned to me during his entire exercise, I had the good fortune of not having to stifle a Cheshire Cat-like grin.

He is now officially deemed as "The Lord of the Fly".

The men's room at the office is a very funny place to be at. Kinda brings every dude out there, be it CEO, or entry-level programmer, on the same level playing field. If you've got to go, you've got to go.

The true meaning of 'metro-sexual' a.k.a 'pansy' is something that is brought out in vivid detail here in the men's room.

The very same macho techie with ripping biceps and a tight t-shirt bearing the caption "Look - I've not bought a new shirt since class 3!" can be seen staring intently in the mirror at close range, trying to count the number of pimple scars that his facial make-up cream has failed to hide. Sometimes without being observed, the subject might even use Vernier's callipers to measure the thickness of his sideburns, and call up his hairdresser Sylvie (or whatever else he calls his cross-dresser 'personal stylist') to demand a refund for a shoddy job done.

All my life, I have been under the false impression that women are the ones who spend a lot of time in front of the mirror. After being in the corporate environs for a little over a year, this misconception of mine has now gone out of the window.

In my defence to the above statement, though, I have never paid too much attention to my looks. Its not because I look like Adam Garcia, but mainly because my family did a good job of shielding me from finding out how I look for most of my life. What happened when I finally did figure it out is material for another post.

The essence of the matter is that they ensured that there never were too many mirrors around me. I was made to believe that the chubby, healthy kid on the cerelac cartons was actually me, and since there were so many snaps of me circulating all over the country, they didn't exactly feel the need to take some more of them.

Hence, I subsisted, and still continue to do so, on the barest minimum of items necessary for personal grooming, if such a term is applicable to me in the first place.

A comb (rarely used), deoderant (used in the absence of having had a bath, essentially - all the time), hair oil (unopened, but lying there nevertheless to prove to Mum that her instructions are being followed), shaving equipment (used only when passport pictures of mine have to be clicked), and of course, the nail clipper, just so that my tooth enamel doesn't look worse than it already does, and also because I can't chew the nails off my big-toe, a la the contortionist Fly lord.

You can imagine the surprise on my face, when I find out that my grooming equipment looks like a scaled down travel kit for most of my other contemporaries. Without wishing to divulge the various places or the various people concerned, I can vouch for the fact that I have seen atrocious things like 'Fair and Lovely' (before 'Fair and Handsome' came into the market), a whole host of deos and perfumes (one or two at the max, I can understand!) and even some hair-removal cream at some of my friends' houses.

Truly hair-raising to see all this in a guy's closet, specially when his dwellings are laden with clothes unwashed for days, with mould and fungi growing on them, and the whole place smells of socks.

This has led me to come to the conclusion that I have been relegated to being an old-timer, so far as keeping pace with the latest trends in fashion is concerned. I'm so glad I am not ever going to be considered a 'metrosexual'.

Now that men in general have found strong parallels between metrosexuality, and being labelled a pussy, the hoi-polloi junta has now come up with some other vague thing called 'ubersexual', which is again a redundant synonym, just because the common person speaking english is not really all that well versed in German. Eventually, the page 3 motley crew will resort to more and more obscure terms, borrowed from lesser-known languages such as Yiddish and Swahili to have their say, and to vainly try and convince the ordinary male out there that he is 'mbwanesexual' or 'mazeltovsexual'.

Long live the page 3 crowd, for they make our insignificant lives seem less ordinary in comparison!

by the beard of the Prophet!!

A good friend of mine, after reading my blog, (which I so shamelessly advertize because I want the site meter hit counter to hit the roof), said that I am not fit to be a political critic, because of what I wrote about the freedom butcher, and his nefarious activities.

He mentioned that if Calvin were a political critic, this is how his blog would look like. *More shameless self advertisement, that!*

If blogging be the in-thing for shameless-self-promotion-without-a-cause, read on.

The convtoversial depiction of the Prophet's cartoons have ruffled many an unkempt beard. The kind of saliva and froth that all the hard-liners and clerics have generated, berating the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and all the other news papers that have committed this sacrelige, is enough to fill the Dead Sea twice over.

In case you haven't checked out the cartoons, I suggest you google at your own risk to find out. If I didn't know it was the Prophet who was being represented there, I probably would have thought it was some random vague cartoon, of someone depicting the Arab stereotype, probably some super-rich Sheikh who had enough money made from camel butter to fund terrorism and maintain an entire harem at each oasis where he'd pitch tent, at the same time!

Jehadis martyr themselves in the hope that they get to make sweet love to virgins in heaven, after having sacrificed their lives for blowing themselves up, and a lot of fun was made of this aspect of their school of thought in the cartoons!

Judging by the way they're conking themselves out, I think its quite a distinct possibility that the Supreme One might have approved the proposals by the development authorities there to construct a separate Martyr's heaven, (which will be an absolute replica of the current one, with one exception - auto hymen-repair wands sold at wholesale prices) so that their bawdy fetishes can be satiated far away from all those people that dilligently follow all the rules to get there.

In short, customer satisfaction is probably rated very highly in the after-life too, considering how viable its becoming for people to want to get there.

Karl Marx once said "Religion is the opiate of the masses". Guess he didn't assume his off-hand statement would mean so much and more in the present day scenario. There are religious fanatics everywhere, for every single religion that exists on the planet, with Buddhism and Jainism probably being the most notable exceptions.

Hail to the Bodhisatva, and to all the Jain Tirthankaras.

Coming back to where I think I started off from, most people have this favourite expression which goes "By the beard of the Prophet", something I came across first in a Tintin comic. I am filled with wonder about how something as sacred as the beard of the Prophet can be spoken about so openly by each and every person who knows the expression, and use it for the most trivial of things.

"Mom, I swear by the beard of the Prophet that I have not enrolled in the Islamic Jihad as their official human landmine detector. I just lost my legs playing football when someone tackled me hard!"

Hazrat Bal, in our very own Kashmir, supposedly houses a single hair on the head of the Prophet (though he is always turbaned, and might be bald for all its worth it!), and such a storm was created in preserving the shrine and its sanctity, thereby ensuring that the terrorists who were holed up inside could relax there for a lifetime, if only their supplies lasted that long.

The Indian commandos supposedly were more careful here, as compared to the way in which they executed Operation Bluestar to bonk off Bhindranwale, or how they managed to rescue people at the Swaminarayan temple in Gujarat, and yet, you have everybody having the chutzpah to talk openly about the Prophet's beard. Isn't that blasphemy?

Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators of South Park, for those who came in REALLY late)probably don't have fatwas issued against them because nobody in the middle-east is cool enough to simultaneously be a hard-liner cleric and appreciate South Park at the same time. Or maybe, its just possible that since these two gentlemen are berating all religions all and sundry, nobody is criticizing them.

In the 30s, when the Jews were depicted as being hook nosed, wearing frock coats, with ringlets around their side burns, and extracting money from the poor Christians, nobody seemed to bother. In fact, the typical stereotype of a Jew till date remains as that of someone who is extremely cunning, and someone who is, in all probability a stingy money lender, who goes all out on the day of the Sabbath, just because its the only day of the week that his missus is obligated (yes, according to the Torah) to give him any.

If the Muslims want to take revenge on the Christians, the best thing that they could possibly do is to use their eye-for-an-eye, chop-hand-for-theft rule, and draw cartoons of Jesus, and Jehovah, and all the apostles, and St.Peter and God himself only knows who else.
The only problem that I see with this approach is that a whole lot of people would probably say "been there, done that." Nobody can make as much fun of the immaculate conception as Trey Parker and Matt Stone did (them again!), and you should probably check out this link, again at your own risk.

http://www.lyricsdownload.com/south-park-the-most-offensive-song-ever-lyrics.html

Humour is an essential part of life, and without it, our lives would be mundane and repetitive, boring to the max. A lot of catastrophic things would happen, if humans didn't value humour. Douglas Adams would not be revered like he is now. FRIENDS would be a porn serial (which is not so bad, if Matt Le Blank (sic), David Schwimmer and the third guy whatzizname were thrown out of the picture to make it a lesbian orgy), Sex and the City would live upto its name literally (also not a bad thing), and most vitally this blog would have ceased to exist.

For all those that dispute the last statement, I have nothing to say. I refuse to waste my time trying to come up with an insult for such....well...see, I refuse to waste time!

Finally, nobody makes fun of the blacks the way they themselves do, and no brother reading this blog is ever gonna get offended by this (borrowed from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket):

How do you stop five brothers from raping a woman?

Throw them a basketball.

Until next time....