I had a dream....

.....not in the Martin Luther King Jr.'s revisitation of the emancipation proclamation for civil rights for African Americans in the mid 1960's in the US sort of way, but more like a badly produced episode of MAD TV, shown in flashback.

I woke up (in my dream, as I was obviously sleeping, or, maybe pretending to work at my desk, can't remember which of the two) with a lump on my head. My first thought was that it might be a cancerous brain tumour, but I suddenly realised that the skull is thick enough to hide the fact that brains have either swollen up or shrunk in size, which is why Albert Einstein and Puff Daddy both look like members of the human species.

This is the sort of lump that one gets while having a particularly painful conversation with someone you'd rather avoid like the plague, or when you're writing an exam that you've got no hope of passing, even if you copy verbatim what your neighbour has written, because his head looks bigger than usual too!

However, when I opened my eyes, and everything was again in focus (again, in the dream), I saw that I was somewhere on the outer-ring road in Bangalore, can't really say where, because it all looks the same. I was surrounded by four guys, two of whom had hockey sticks in hand, and two others who were standing with arms folded.

Given my build, which sometimes can put a concentration camp Jew to shame, even if those guys were wearing LIFW outfits, I'd still not find it funny and be extremely shit scared.

Anyway, goon 1 had my wallet in his hand, and he took out my debit card from it and gave me a sheet to fill up.

WTF??

A sheet??

Yes, it was a sheet, which looked very much like a curriculum vitae, except for that it contained details like "debit card number, passport number, mother's maiden name, date of birth, cell phone number, present address, permanent address" and all such stuff.

One of them goons said "We're taking your wallet anyway, so you need not fill up the numbers and stuff. We'll take care of that. We'll even take a passport sized pic of yours from your camera phone, and then take the phone itself."

"I don't have a camera phone! I just graduated to a colour display Samsung phone recently!!! That too, because it was available cheaply!!!"

Thud.

Thbbbpth.

The first sound was that of one of them kicking me.
The second one was of the wind being knocked out of my sails.

"Bastard, you don't have a camera phone??? Now we've got to wait to rob some fellow who has one to take a picture of your face!!!"

"I didn't know you'd want one, else I'd have purchased one yesterday itself!!"

More Thuds. So much for trying to be an insufferable smartass at the most inopportune of moments.

Story of my life.

Since the wind was already knocked out of my sails, there were no "Thbbbpth"s. I just groaned in pain.

Well, I actually hollered like one of the really enthusiastic people in an IIM interview GD, but thats beside the point.

"Anyway, fill in the important details right now and then we'll be on our way."

These guys were sounding ominously like those chaps that take your credit card applications, but tell you with a greater level of politeness that most of the details are merely academic and will be taken care of later on. All they want is your signature and a copy of your payslip.

"Why are you adding insult to injury by asking me to fill in all this??"

"Standard operating procedures. We get everyone to fill this. Thats why we're gonna break your bones after the written work is done. You've got no choice but to comply."

I figured they wanted all the details so that they could get access to my stuff long after I had cancelled my card, by spewing out details like my current address and cell phone number and stuff. I thought it was very smart on their part, and that maybe they should've instead started an IT software firm or something.

Then I suddenly realized that it was MY dream, and it was I who was being so smart. Maybe I should start my own IT firm or something. God save NASSCOM.

I dilligently filled in everything, and with the most mournful look ever, like the kind I give to the pizza hut guy when he doesn't fill up my pepsi glass to the brim, or gives me only one packet of chilli flakes, I handed over the sheet to the goons.

Two of them were scrutinizing the form, while the other two were doing warm up exercises with their hockey sticks. I could only imagine the sort of treatment that I was going to get after getting the treatment from them, and was hoping that the nurses in whichever hospital I'd land up in were cute, and would be net-savvy enough to read my blog to increase the sitemeter counter, if I gave them the address.

In the middle of my prayers, one of the goons called the other three and pointed at something on my form. I could see startled looks on their faces, and hurried animated conversations. It was like a team India group huddle after they just dismissed Ricky Ponting in some not-so-important cricket match.

In a couple of minutes, they broke the huddle and one of the goons thrust the sheet in my face and said - "Are you sure you've filled in the correct details here?"

"I swear I have."

"Do you really work for XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXXX ??"

"Yes, I do. Should I change my job?"

Goon 1 had this extremely apologetic look on his face. He said - "We didn't realize that you worked there, or else we wouldn't have robbed you at all!! In fact, here's our visiting card, in case you wanna work part time with us. We sure could use the able assistance of someone like you who works there."

The other three goons were digging into their pockets, and after they took out their pink handkerchiefs and their yellow handled pocket knives, all sorts of loose change and notes of small denomenations tumbled out of their pockets.

"Here", said goon 2, handing over all the cash in a small pile, "this is all we have, but we hope it tides you through till payday. We wish we had more, though. I'm sorry."

Whoa!!! Holy shit!!

Time to wake up!

The Ten Plagues of the Modern World

In the ancient times, in some BC, according to the Bible (and more recently, according to the Prince of Egypt), Moses freed his people from the clutches of Pharoah Ramases II, and ensured that the Hebrew race got freedom.

A direct consequence of this was the creation of the Ten Commandments, the legend of Mount Sinai and that of Jericho, the origin of the phrase 'Manna from Heaven', the creation of the state of Israel (the first time around), and of course, the plethora of interesting quizzing fundaes associated with such a monumental event.

The method used by Moses to 'persuade' Ramases II to 'let his people go', was by unleashing the ten plagues on the land of Egypt. Those ten plagues were:

10. River and other sources of water spewing out blood
9. Reptiles
8. Lice
7. Wild Animals
6. Livestock diseases (the birth of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy)
5. Unhealable boils on people
4. Hailstones mixed with fire (and hence the origin of the fire'n'ice cocktail)
3. Locusts
2. Perpetual darkness
1. Death to the first born (Passover funda)

Seems like God wanted to unleash upon Egypt the plagues, like the Billboard US countdown wants to unleash songs upon us.

Anyway, now that I am done with the filler part, where you've hopefully had a thing or two to chuckle about, lets get down to serious business as I propose to go about unveiling the Ten Plagues of the Modern World.

In the truest sense, there can't be an analogue to what befell the Egyptians in whatever BC, save for maybe what might happen to the Americans and other developed nations if they decide to move the BPO industry from India to China to further cut costs so that their expenditure goes into negative on their balance sheet. (Some pseudo-complex pseudo-fin pseudo-fundaes, need some economics student unfortunate enough to have stumbled on this blog to help me out!).

However, here's an earnest attempt to start somewhere, again, in the countdown fashion.

10. George W Bush

A certain Osama Bin Laden would agree. So would a certain Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Manmohan Singh, John Howard, Ariel Sharon, Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin, though they'd not come out and say it openly. I have made enough fun of him in one of my other posts, and too much abuse would be redundant.

However, a certain Jug Suraiya is certainly rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of this guy committing much more stupid mistakes.

A certain other person, (name withheld on request), who happened to be the Dean of the Harvard Business School in 1975, holds the record for being the one to have rubbed his eyes in disbelief for the longest ever time (31 years and counting), for W having got an MBA from Harvard.

9. Cell Phone Ringtones

and cell phone singtones, and the polyphonic ones and the monophonic ones. It seems as though the most sophisticated of people are unaware of this simple little thing called the 'silent mode' into which they can put their phones into, specially when they're in public.

The train journey from Mysore to Bangalore and vice versa that I undertake every week, with incessant regularity, fills me with dread, for the chances of not coming across some retard wanting to listen to his shrill ringtones for the 375th time that day and drowning out the sound of a Children of Bodom song being played at full volume on my ipod, is next to nought.

8. Reality TV Shows

Sure, I sometimes like it when people I don't like are miserable. Don't you?

But to make a public spectacle out of the lives of poor unsuspecting people chasing their dreams and wanting to make it big, and enjoying their misfortunes is just downright grossly voyueristic. Had everything been hunky-dory, without such people suffering a loss of self esteem later on, or if everyone was given a good chance of chasing their ambition without a million cameras up their ass, they might just have been able to give things a better shot.

At the end of the day, there is just one Indian Idol. The remaining participants who nurture dreams of making it big on the big night are discarded faster than yesterday's newspaper!

7. Fanatics of any sort

Dr.Rajkumar dies on 12th April 2006. On 13th April 2006, 9 other people are killed in associated incidents of violence.

Dr.Rajkumar, being the thespian he is, deserving of all the fanfare, is duly accorded all that and much more. But nobody gives a shit about the nine other people who were inadvertently killed in the sporadic incidents that took place subsequently.

One of them was a cop with a wife and two kids.

These guys are just the tip of the iceberg. Terrorists of all kinds, people who profess their love for a particular language by tearing down signboards of innocent businessmen wanting to make an honest living, people who murder in the name of religion, people who promote a particular section of society just to return to power and so on and so forth, are all fanatics whose ideologies need to be given a wash with carbolic soap.

*sigh* I wish there were such a thing as a non-violent Hindu Fundamentalist.

6. Livestock Diseases

Some things never change with time.

The position of this particular plague has not changed since times immemorial a.k.a whatever BC.

Mad-Cow, Avian Influenza, the Backstreet Boys fan-club, they all are just different manifestations of some or the other livestock disease.

5. Stupid Advertisements

The only times I have ever cursed my TV, is when I have been subjected to stupid ads.

Some dude pops a few grams of some dumbass pan-masala and gets enough cash and enough balls to buy the East India Company.

Celebrity anchor cleans toilets to prove the toilet cleaning liquid he endorses is the best.

The Fair and Lovely, and off late, the Fair and Handsome ads, about which the less said, the better.

Finally, this one in newsprint, the killer - "Dare to think beyond the IIMs...."

4. Krishnamachari Shrik'k'anth and Mandira Bedi's cricket commentary

Apart from appearing in Fair and Lovely ads, where, he's thankfully not given a chance to speak, and in some vague print ad endorsing glasses, Shrikkanth also generates revenue by putting expert commentary on some TV show called the fourth umpire. His contribution as a cricketer notwithstanding, the way he speaks and dishes out the stuff he has to say makes one wonder which is the lesser of these two evils - Hindi cricket commentary, or Shrikkanth's cricket commentary in English?

Mandira Bedi on the other hand, with her eye-candy attire, which is not really the best way to attract more women towards watching the game, although thats apparently the primary reason she's there in the first place, thinks that she can get away with arbit comments about anything, and pass it off as legitimate commentary.

I'd have a tough time deciding what to watch, if the TV showed only stupid advertisements, and these two talking on the only other channel screened.

3. Insensitive News Reporting

John Abraham is travelling on his bike on second gear at 20kmph. He comes across a stationary lamp-post which he slightly nudges and suffers a fall. He is admitted to the hospital just to be on the safer side. To document this, you have a plethora of news reports, including some "breaking news" stories, which trace his progress step-by-step. Some even take picture of the nurse who has the bandage gauze and the cotton along with the neosprin ointment, which will later be applied to him.

The Lakme India Fashion Week happens for the umpteenth time in the nation's capital, and all the 30 minute news bulletins have a compulsory feature of this spectacle for at least seven minutes, showing models dressed up in outfits you'd never ever wear even if you were playing pretend-transvestite in the confines of your bedroom on a boring weekend.

The farmer suicide tally due to governmental ignorance hits 400+ at the same time, and except for a conscientous journalist's endeavors on the op-ed page of the Hindu, not many people would have been made aware of such a thing happening in our country.

Terrorist attacks in Kashmir are also relegated to a few lines of coverage, since they're as frequent as George W Bush's goofed up comments.

Why doesn't anybody give a shit about real issues anymore?

2. Bad Blogs and even lousier Blog Owners

Go here. Thats it.

Heh.

Gotcha suckers!!!

1. Himmesh Reshammiya

I am not kidding. Someone with his taste in music creation, his taste in attire (specially that cap he wears all the time, even while having a bath), and his sensibilities so far as using women in music videos is concerned leaves a whole lot to be desired.

Nobody has yet pointed out to him that he's big enough to fit the entire screen, and he need not dance, and he needn't even have all those supposedly hot and attractive women around him, simply because they cannot be seen.

The strain that my aural senses have had, due to what he calls his 'music', is the stuff that aspiring ENT specialists can soon make a case study of.

For those that thought they could've left a smartass comment about how my blog can be included in the list, please refer no(2).

Until you visit again......

What a Wonderful World....

This was something I wrote at the end of 2004, when I had come newly to Bangalore, and was not really sure if it was worthwhile enough to rant about the overtly-hyped up life of a 'software professional' (the most frequently used oxymoronic malaprop in the English language) .

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WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD

The alarm, as usual, never failed to wake me up. Today was no exception either. I was, as always, in two minds when I woke up in a groggy state about whether I had to laud the person who invented the device, for it ensured that my day would at least start off as planned, with me waking up at the time I chose to, or, curse him with the most profane of invectives for having reduced my highly valued somnolence to nothing for yet another day.

Unfortunately , I had no time for such thoughts since I had to go about my daily routine of getting ready to go to the office. I am just another one of those hundreds of thousands of individuals in a city whose name has off-late been made into a verb with connotations that are not complementary, per se.

I ran through breakfast as I was reading the morning paper that was, as usual, filled with a lot of bad news about wars on terror and wars on wars on terror and about railway accidents and capsizing boats and God only knew what else, reinforcing within me, my self concocted axiom – ‘good news is no news!’

My workplace was about four kilometers from where I stayed and I used to walk the distance and back, for the sake of the exercise as well as for the sake of the economic viability of the exercise. Every single day, during those walks, I used to unsuccessfully try to discover an oasis of serenity and sanity in this whole desert of madness that lay sprawled about, trying in vain to sense sights, sounds and smells that would try to lower my ever-compounding cynicism regarding my environment.

The whole cynicism thing began once I started living in this city, experiencing first-hand the steady deterioration in all the values that allegedly made us sentient. People seemed to go about their business in a zombie-like fashion, profit in whatever they ventured in being their sole underlying motive. Not that it’s a bad thing to do, unless it’s the only thing one wanted to do, and here, it was more the exception than the norm to do otherwise.

That was probably the reason why I valued animals more, admired them and respected them no end, they weren’t so fucked up as the ‘dominant’ species. The stray dogs lying lazily on the road side without an alarm to wake them up, bothering only about what they would eat next, and not about finances, house rents, deadlines, commutes and the whole rigmarole of trying to earn a living, albeit in most cases, unsatisfactorily. They did not need counseling by shrinks or self-proclaimed holy men for their mental health or for achieving the peaceful countenance that they had when they slept.

I consciously tried to avoid looking at the people as I made my way to the office, trying to be oblivious to the traffic, the shops, the over-flowing trash cans, the contrasting attributes between people of various economic states and lot of other such depression-triggers and instead focused on the signs of life about me.

The trees, the birds, the cats and the dogs, the occasional pig or two, the revered holy traffic obstructions – the cows, the sheep and goats were what grabbed my attention. It was really sad that we wanted to claim ownership of all these animals and tried to justify their exploitation by us, saying that they served the greater good by serving us.

Today, my walk was interrupted by a goat that I saw on the way, bleating pitifully, since the bundle of hay that I had assumed was for its consumption, was just out of its reach. It was tied to a telephone pole. Nobody around seemed to be paying any heed to the goat’s plight, and I decided to push the pile of hay towards it. The goat started munching the hay happily and I patted it on its head. I noticed it had a white patch on its forehead, right between its eyes. It did not seem to object too much to me patting it, for it was probably too hungry and was busy eating.
I walked away from there, leaving the goat behind, with a feeling of happiness, thinking to myself that I had, in a very small way made it happy. Guess I am very selfish that way, doing things for others that make ME happy. I walked on, with Louis Armstrong’s ‘what a wonderful world’ playing on in my head.

At the office, it was the same old nine to seven routine, with tea breaks, lunch, mail checks and internet surfing, not to mention the life saving music playing in my headphones being occasionally disturbed by what was, in a vague sense, referred to as ‘work’. What went on at the office, in general, also reinforced my belief in the dwindling of intelligent life in my vicinity and I was desperately hoping that the phenomenon was not contagious.

I read on the news websites that Islamic militants had beheaded more foreign hostages in Iraq, and were threatening to kill more and more people in the days to come. I resigned myself to the fact that this vicious circle that Cain first started off by reducing one-fourth of the world’s population ( if Genesis is to be believed ) would only end when everyone came in contact with the wrong end of a gun, with the sharp end of a sword, with weapons, targeted at the destruction of individuals or at the destruction of masses, or, worst of all, as was the case in this fabled city, due to cerebral atrophy, that came about as a direct consequence of being the minions of Mammon.

As evening came and was slipping by, I left the office, tracing backward along the same path that I came along, occasionally glancing at what I could see of the heavens up above, the stars, as were taught, twinkling like diamonds in the sky. Occasionally, I say, for its not really a pleasant prospect to be hit by the unconcerned, merciless traffic whilst indulging in star gazing.

My thoughts, once I got my physical self outside the four walls of my cube, once again resumed their bouncing off within the padded walls of my head, strait-jacketed, unfortunately, by societal norms. It was pretty much the same thing I used to think about during the mornings, making attempts to conveniently ignore what there was around me that I did not wish to see. I suddenly remembered my friend, the goat, and I thought I would comfort myself by patting him again, and walked briskly to where I had seen him tied before.

When I got to the telephone pole, he wasn’t in sight, though the rope was still there. Thoughts of his escape came to my mind, and I looked around to check if I could see him prancing around somewhere. It was only during my search for the goat that I noticed something that I had conditioned myself to be oblivious to.

Right opposite the telephone pole, on the other side of the road, was a butcher’s shop, with a goat’s head on display, a carcass hanging on the meat hook in the shop.

I knew, even before I looked to check, that the head that lay there had a small white patch between its eyes.

I closed my eyes, trying in vain to stop the stream of tears welling up inside, walking back home sadly, thinking ‘what a wonderful world………’

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Instinct, basically!

Instinct:
"Inborn pattern of behaviour often responsive to specific stimuli"

Basic:
"Of Primary Importance"

There are many meanings of the word, but this one is the one used in most contexts.

However, when basic is allied with 'ally', it throws in a while new term into the picture. One which infuses dread into the minds of all those people with a reasonable vocabulary, one that is used as a popular conversational catch-phrase or a random filler while talking.

Yup. 'Basically'.

Along with a whole host of other terms, this word has also crept up into corporate jargon to such a great extent, that some people who are in the recruitment industry will actually give you more 'leverage' while you go ahead and apply for a plum IT posting. The copious amount of senseless jargon does not 'add value' under any circumstance, but the speaker generally assumes that he becomes much more cooler, and feels much more in place with his peers, who also speak this way to try and fit in.

College slang, on the other hand, is cool. No two ways about it.

Even when you're sixty-five and balding, it can get you brownie points with your grandchildren, when you narrate to them funny instances about how smart you were in college, and about how you came up with esoteric utterances that bamboozled everyone but those in your immediate close circle.

Chances are, they'll think you're off your rocker. But you'll gain a newfound respect from them. The fact that they'll think you're off your rocker anyway is a given, given the amount of time you've been around.

In fact, there is even some firang woman who thought it was cool enough and came up with a PhD thesis on IITM lingo. Read more about it here.

Coming back to jargon, there is more of it than you could imagine. Its a mind-boggling thing, how people sit at their cubicles pretending to work, while doing something as utterly wasteful as conjuring up arbit jargon, or worse - blogging. Heh.

Phrases such as 'like', 'if you look at', 'in terms of', 'actually' and the currently ubiquitous 'per se' are thrown around with gay abandon, pretty much like vitriolic anti-Israeli statement at every Palestinian birth, wedding and funeral ceremony. Nevermind the fact that the most elementary nuances of grammar have been discarded. Nevermind the fact that it will not make any sense whatsoever even to the person who made these profound utterances.

Catch phrases are here to stay, and can be exemplied by this particular snippet I actually had to endure during some status meeting (the last one I have attended, since the past five months).

"See, basically, this week I had to actually implement this yada yada yada per se, though like, you know, if you look at it in terms of yada yada yada, scheduled status yada like, means if you look at it per se objectively yada yada. So, basically, if you look at, like.....yeah." (Silence, I wait to run away, catchphrase man waits for applause. To think he was hired for his communication skills is as probable as I was hired for effectively using my time at the office to write code.)

Catch phrase genius actually ended his statement to the entire team with that very line. Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Leave apart sentence completion, I doubt he'd even recognize correct grammar if it looked like Carmen Elektra and was naked, hanging upside-down from a tree and staring right at his face.

And to think people wonder why everyone wants to leave the IT industry in droves, like lemmings on one of their mass suicide drives. If you're a techie, chances are, you'd never even have figured out the fact that I even began the previous sentence with a coordinating conjunction, which is not strictly correct, in the truest sense of language usage.

Of all the things, 'basically' is basically tolerable, since a whole lot of quizzers 'put' that sort of expression anyway.

Among other things I want to rant about are the fact that Basic Instinct has a sequel, and its called Risk Addiction. Talk about milking a fourteen-year old phenomenon to the max.

The phenomenally famous Catherine Tramell crossing and uncrossing her legs was the stuff that had fuelled the adolescent fantasies of all red-blooded men. The movie also had fond memories for a whole lot of other reasons.

One of them was the fact that my dumb C's partner-in-crime, Rana and I managed to win the mech section 'B' batch of 2005 dumb C's championship restricted to four teams with one round to spare. The 'championship' was conducted under a failing tubelight outside our college block due to the fact that classrooms had to be closed, and when Rana enacted the movie, imitating the crossing legs pose, there was only one thing that came to mind. Two seconds later, we were entitled to enough cash to buy and share a 1.5 litre Mirinda bottle. Yay!

For that matter, for a whole lot of people who know who Sharon Stone is, that is probably the thing she's most remembered for. This movie was also on my must-watch-when-folks-are-not-at-home movie list, given the fact that our telly was in a place where anyone could walk into the room at any possible time, which meant that I had to exercise the utmost amount of caution I could muster.

I had to contend myself with watching the movie on Star Movies, which, as a matter of policy, stopped the screening of steaming hot movies, EXACTLY at the very time when I hit puberty and was most keen on watching them. Renting the movie from a video store was suicidal, given that Mysore is a very small place, and something as innocuous as farting loudly on the street parallel to the one where your house was located, was enough for concerned ladies to call up my Mum to give her suggestions about issues related to my digestive tract ("He might not be too old for Woodward's gripe water......." - get the picture? ).

Under those circumstances, when concerned video parlour guys were wise-asses who knew your Dad well enough, it was courting disaster to actually want to rent an adult movie, let alone a porn one. Resourceful classmates, coupled with the thirst for knowledge, eventually resulted in being able to watch all the right stuff without too much trouble, thank God.

The version I saw on star movies was hugely edited, and Sharon Stone's famous scene was so badly mauled, that as soon as she began uncrossing her legendary legs, there was a cut, and her legs were crossed the other way. To compound my misery, the swear words and the other dirty stuff that she supposedly said (I still don't know) was all blanked out.

Due to all these censorship norms, Basic Instinct on Star Movies ran for 13 minutes and 26 seconds.

Anyway, here we are, fourteen years later, with the sequel. With all due respect to people who like watching extremely old post-menopausal once-upon-a-time-extremely-hot women on screen pretending to be horny, the entire idea sucks! If I ever were to bring myself to watch the movie (unlikely, unless we had an office team outing to the theatre), which I'd do only if I had nothing else to do and someone was giving me a free ticket, free Mirinda, free pop-corn, free transport to and from the multiplex and some good company, I'd probably be sitting and counting the wrinkles on Sharon Stone's face, as opposed to focussing on the movie.

One could draw similar parallels about people trying to cash in on erstwhile popularity for a last ditch attempt. Here are some examples:

• Gary Coleman (of that American sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, yup, the chubby cute African-American kid) running for the post of Governor of California in the 2003 elections and coming 8th
• Ramanand Sagar's Ramayana, which ran on and on and on and on. It was supposed to end with Sita being consumed by the earth after proving her chastity in the trial by fire, but Sagar thought it was actually convenient, and with appropriately long flashbacks, even had a further addition of episodes, including the ones with Luv-Kush.
• Sabeer Bhatia starting arzoo.com (though he must be lauded for his entrepreneural idea, all the same)
  
• Real Madrid still selling t-shirts like hot-cakes, despite performances that are so dismal, that their fans will require a chicken soup book dedicated to them.
  
• Finally, a certain Arnold Schwarzzeneger, whose most famous statement till date 'I'll be back', running for the post of Governor of California and actually winning it!

With that, you'v reached the end of this post. So, basically, if you look at, like....

Count your chicken before they get bird Flu

Bird flu, cutely referred to, by guys who want to pick up 'chicks' for closer examination as 'Avian Influenza', has taken the nation by storm. The devastating effects that this disease has had on the collective conscience on the consumers of chicken and the flag-bearers of non-vegetarianism is a case study to behold.

The extreme misery that people have to undergo due to bird flu, has been much more severe than the effect that a lot of natural calamities have had, mainly because this has been such a pan-South Asian phenomenon.

Count your chickens before they get Bird Flu, by Haridumb Chowdree is a book that examines this whole issue from a very partisan perspective. The author chanced upon this shrewd eventually-to-be-popular title while making fun of someone whose name he dare not mention, in case he gets sued himself, like a lot of other smart and well educated people have.

The book, which will be published if the author manages to make some time out of signing autographs for coming up with such a wonderful title, promises to be something that heralds a paradigm shift, in so far as mixing up poultry and strategem and management theories and coalition politics and coffee brewing is concerned. The author wants to have this cool concept of saving paper and pretending to be an insufferable-know-it-all about five topics instead of the usual single topic that most people generally write advice books about.

Haridumb doesn't want to be profiled any further, because it would be 'detrimental to his persona as an upcoming know-it-all-author', and wants a shroud of secrecy to envelope his being, so that people can get more curious about him, being an anti-thesis to 'empty vessels make more noise'.

Conforming non-Conformist ass.

Apart from incubating such stupid authors-to-be, another grave effect that Avian Influenza has had on the world of publishing is its impact on the "chicken soup for *.*" series, by Jack Canfield and Mark Hansen. Chicken soup is popularly termed as Jewish penicillin (a quizzing funda done to death), and hence the series. You have a whole range of chicken soup books, supposedly acting as an anodyne for people hurt, depressed, requiring motivation or for people who are losers with just enough money in their pockets to buy one of these books.
The sales of these books, whose target market segment is not too bright, as can be obviously seen, have plumetted downwards, after the outbreak, with people wanting to stay away from anything 'chicken'.
No wonder nobody watches Fear Factor Pakistan specials nowadays.

The following lists the actual titles of some of the Chicken Soup books:

1) Chicken soup teenage trilogy. I am suddenly getting morbid visions of teenage chickens being subjected to a matrix like environment, with tubes through them, drawing their energy until one fine day, they end up dead on a plate.

Wait.

If some urban legend mail is to be believed, thats exactly what KFC supposedly does.

2) Chicken Soup for the Horse Lover's Soul part 2.

Go figure. 'Horse Loving'? Part 2??????????

3) Chicken Soup for the Latter-day Saint Soul.

Whatever.

Now, on popular demand, here are some chicken soup books that might become in vogue in the future, if someone actually takes the trouble to write them:

• Chicken Soup for the soul who has got the video ipod but is now broke because he/she cannot buy the quicktime player advanced version that converts his/her videos to itunes format
• Chicken Soup for the Real Madrid fan's soul
• Chicken Soup for the Call Center employee's Soul (who has the misfortune of having to put up with a desi at the other end of the line in the US, with the desi switching to his/her vernacular to bug the poor employee some more)
• and finally, Chicken Soup for the Chicken's soul (Bird Flu afflicted chicken special edition)

"chicken" word counter - 19 only. Someone reminded of Michael J Fox in the Back to the Future trilogy here?

Anyway, until next time, cluck cluck!