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......
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......
posted by Hari Shenoy @ 9:58 PM
6 Comments:
i agree-gree! esp about-> Reality shows and horrible Ads.
another modern era plague - the droves of new singers trying to pull off a hit but suck so bad!! They spoil all the fun in watchin muisc channels!
avast ye
very very funny post. too tired to think of any better compliments :)
Too Good...especially the Horrible Ads thing.. ha ha.. Keep posting more like these....
:) :) :) still laughing.. help me stop...
i agree.. especially with
9. Cell Phone Ringtones
7. Fanatics of any sort
i don't agree with..
2. Bad Blogs and ..
at least you have the choice of not (ATYHTCON) subscribing to the feed.
8. Reality TV Shows
ATYHTCON owning a TV.
3. Insensitive News Reporting
ATYHTCON getting newspapers.
5. Stupid Advertisements
serviced by following 3. and 8.
4. Krishnamachari Shrik'k'anth and Mandira Bedi's cricket commentary
could have been shortened to just :
4. Cricket
(but that's the major classification under which most of No.7 come :)
some of the humor is getting quite banal. but the content of ur posts n' delivery is sooper dooper.
excellent!! this is your best blog so far.. well atleast it's my favourite
arclzvv
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