I Have Read That Somewhere

The title of this post is with reference to a book that has been written by a certain Aswath Venkataraman, who, according to wikipedia is "the author of the book I Have Read That Somewhere. A Tamil Brahmin hailing from Ranchi, Jharkhand, Aswath has lived in Bangalore in the recent past, having done his graduation at RVCE and MBA at IIM Bangalore."

Popularly known as Kodhi, a nickname he bestowed upon himself as a dedication to the leper community, (much to the chagrin of his granny and quite a few of his other relatives), our man is quite the dude who deserves all the good fortune he has had, and then some.

When I started writing this blog of mine (which now has four loyal readers in all), I had assured him that I would someday write a book review for his masterpiece and hence this post. The book review is not being written out of courtesy, or because he is the only person that I know who is a published author, or because the book has me as a character in it.

Well, maybe the last part isn't entirely untrue.

Nevertheless, the book is available either in leading bookstores (failing which they will get you a copy if it is out of stock because of its huge sales volumes if you would only be kind enough to order a copy) OR it can be purchased online here - I have read that Somewhere.

This book had been written by Kodes for his muse, something which will be very evident for all those that buy their copies and read it. It is a semi-autobiographical account of his life, along with that of the lives of some of the other people that he had come in touch with during his college days, and it is very esoteric in nature.

In reading I have Read That Somewhere, a very discerning reader will get the feeling that Douglas Adams meets PG Wodehouse meets Joseph Heller meets Shashi Tharoor to collaborate and conspire in writing the book.

Reading the book and understanding the various esoteric fundae embedded within each line of the book will have different effects on people of different sexes. The women will be gravitated towards the author, for his brilliant prose, wanting autographs just like some women wanted that of Shane Warne's (as captured by the paparazzi), while the men will become much cooler on getting to read the book and can try and woo all the women that don't want Kodhi's autographs or are not interested in him. The number of women that would fall under this particular category would be extremely small, smaller, in fact, than the number of regular readers of this blog.

The book also has a lot of hidden quizzing fundae that will appear in each of Kodhi's quizzes that he shall conduct for the next five years of his life, or until the next book that he is currently working on comes out, whichever is first and hence will help you get a lot of money if only you are willing to invest a paltry sum of INR 250 towards this worthy cause.

Surely, dear reader, you wouldn't want to shirk away from a chance to catapult yourself into the league of elite quizzers in Bangalore, getting a lot of cash and goodies as prizes in the bargain, just because you are unwilling to part with that measly sum of 250 bucks?

If you had clicked on the hyperlink that gave you information regarding the online availability of that book, you would have had a sneak peek at some of the names of characters in the book, namely OWS (One Who Should/Shouldn't Be) Smelt, Johnny Smith, Fat Bastard, MalDog, MalDini, Electric Chair, Toad, Sperm, Vanity Fair, Damien Tears and so on and so forth. For all those of us that have had a penchant for giving nicknames to everyone that we come across in college, this book is a must read, for the simple reason that it either will make you nostalgic or will give you fresher ideas to use for giving out nicknames.

Incidentally, there is only one character whose name in the book is the same as his name in real life. That would be yours truly. I know not why the author did it, but I am touched.

The book begins with the first day of college that Smelt, Maldini, Johnny Smith and the others attended - St.Brutus' Secure Center for the Criminally Insane and the Insanely Criminal (SBCCIIC) and follows the life and times of the characters till the very end.

The leading lady, Monica Maldini, who gets enough footage in real life, has a granmmaw who is more skilled than the librarian at the Smithsonian in being able to recall and instill advice to her son Cesare, Monica's paw, through quotes from famous books, whose locations on the bookshelf along with the appropriate page number and line numbers is instilled within her, as if she's a supercomputer or something. Douglas Adams' Deep Thought has serious competition.

The author also manages to pacify Animal Rights' activists through his book by including a three-legged dog named Tripod who plays a pivotal role in the story.

Each and every character is based on someone that the author has met in real life, and hence the book is all the more colourful and funny in its dealing with situations, simply because its an accurate representation of actual events with a bit of artistic license thrown in.

The precocious author has also made an HTML version of his book, complete with a cast of famous celebrities that will play the leading characters if the film rights to his book are sold, and this version of the book is available only to a select few.

I personally find no point in extolling the virtues of the book because anything I say will not do justice to the good book that our man has churned out, and very much like what was said about the Matrix, you have to read it for yourself.

Rush to your nearest bookstore and get your copy now! Or contact the author at kodhus.bewarus@gmail.com for more details.

Dear Kodhi, Happy 24th.

Parsimonious person still wants birthday present inspite of all this.

Urban Travelling

Come this long Diwali weekend, a whole lot of people from Bangalore who are residents of places elsewhere are getting ready to take that long train/bus/plane/bullock cart journey back home, hoping to spend substantial quality time with their near and dear ones.

This is one of the phenomena that I have come to observe with irritating regularity about these long weekends, where it becomes very tough to move around. One can't visit restaurants in the afternoons or evenings because they are choc-a-block full of holidaying families, who are taking a welcome respite from their regular cooking-at-home ventures.

The regular bachelor's bastions are blatantly violated and most of us ordinary dudes that subsist on some decent wholesome high-calorie and high-fat, absolutely non-nutritious food have to resort to other means to subsist, incuding our own cooking, at the very worst which under most circumstances can be more dangerous to health than eating at a roadside stall.

Travelling aroud becomes a problem as tickets everywhere are booked in advance, and any sort of travel even to a short distance needs to be undertaken at one's own peril with no guarantees of being able to reach the destination on time, if at all reaching the destination can be considered a possibility.

The prospect of travel is quite a luxury for the average middle-class Indian family, that resorts to only particular instances during which a long family trip can be undertaken. Tell me about it, I've had first hand experiences, that have, like every single thing I can associate with family in retrospect, been among the most fun times I have had in my life.

As times have changed and people have higher purchasing power, and as the very concept of leisure is kicking in with greater force as people work harder than they are supposed to, more weekend getaways are in the offing and the concept of day-tripping has become very relevant in today's scenario, specially with the IT industry techies that have cars and money to burn on fuel.

Its nice to take a weekend trip and go off and have fun, but travelling all the days in a week can be a major pain in the ass.

Just the other day, a friend of mine had come over to visit me, and he and I decided to take a random bike ride in the dead of the night to visit the Coffee Day at Whitefield. A natural aversion to all things 'hep' in general and to the Coffee Day brand in particular was not a deterrent for me to want to go visit the eastern part of the city that I had lived in for the past two years, that I had not yet seen so far.

We set off at around 12:30 AM on the bike and after scrounging around for some fuel at a petrol bunk on Brigade road that was open all the time, we were well on our way towards ITPL. Its funny, but I hadn't till then seen the two major places that has placed Bangalore on the tech map - Electronics city as well as Whitefield and ITPL, where most of the major IT firms have setup shop.

I guess the comfort of being ensconed on an office on Mysore road, far away from the maddening IT crowd, being so close to my home back in Mysore had brought in me the inertia that prevented me from going to see those places until that fateful day when my friend and I had a whole lot of time to kill.

The bike ride, in some ways changed some part of me forever. The discussions that he and I had ranged from our country's socio-political scenario to Jennifer Love Hewitt, and we had a fun time all in all.

At the same time, the ride to Whitefield and its assorted areas in the vicinity was something that made me realize that I have a strong sense of intuition, because I now knew why I wasn't anxious to go visit the place and see it at all.

Dusty roads after the Marathalli road - Outer Ring Road junction across that narrow bridge, being flanked on either side by these bleak and dreary apartments that were under construction, and that would be hell to live in for the occupants that would be willing to pay a high price for posh accommodation at such a 'pristine location' on a desolate stretch of road that otherwise was choking with traffic was what met my eye.

The term - 'concrete jungle' was never so applicable before, and the true extent of how Bangalore has grown really kicked in within me as I saw the place. I must confess that there is nothing as depressing as urban travelling in Bangalore.

I feel a great sense of outrage at the fact that a lot of my contemporaries have to undertake that long and dreary journey on a daily basis to earn a living. As techies in the Indian IT industry, they do form an elite bunch of people with above-average salaries, and are mollycoddled no end so far as the privileges conferred upon them are concerned, but the mind numbing journey that one needs to take both ways, leaving no time for actually having a life outside of work makes me angry.

Angry, for the simple reason that our countrymen, who have so much more potential than to actually dance to the tunes of a master offshore who is looking for a low-cost alternative solution to meet his business needs, are forced to do nothing but, while there is a lot more that we can do and accomplish on a personal or a professional level if only we have the time and are given ample opportunities to make some for ourselves.

It is either a testament to our resilience or our ability to do anything for the sake of a few dollars more (choose your own viewpoint) that drives most of us to undertake that long journey each day, day in and day out, without respite.

This is not intended to offend those that work so far away, its merely an attempt to empathize if it is necessary. However, it might just be so that people working so far away are used to this and are thus not too affected by the long bus journey.

Hope things will improve someday. Maybe then, a visit to the Whitefield Coffee Day can actually be undertaken in the day time without having to worry too much about traffic.

Until then, count your blessings.

The Importance of Being Hari Sadu

Not so long ago, Circa April 1983 AD, something happened that changed the course of my life forever.

I was born.

As is an obvious ritual among most Hindu families, there was a naming ceremony held for the then-new born kid, whose parents were hoping that he'd be the apple of their eye. The apple, it turned out, had lots of maggots in it, and parts of it were rotten.

The kid was named twelve days after he was born, after his paternal grandfather's brother. This summary ritual was followed by the ear-piercing that made the child holler uncontrollably, though he was able to use these piercings later on in life as footage to put on ear-rings for being 'hep' and to unsuccessfully impress 'womans' and all that.

Technically, he was supposed to have been named after his grampaw (Dad's dad), but if his father had followed the rule, then everyone in the immediate family would have had a torrid time differentiating between kids that had the same name or some permutation or combination or modification of that particular name. Plus, it (the name, I mean) had been taken already.

Prudence followed.

The kid's father then decided on naming the child after his father's brother because he (the kid's paternal grandpa's brother) did not have any children of his own.

Some people would consider it unfortunate that he did not have any children, because he was and his wife (my favourite grandma) still is among the most awesome examples of human beings to have walked on this earth.

An optimistic school of thought, propounded by a wise boy led to a statement being made about how it is disastrous to even attempt to improve on perfection, and hence the matter of their not having children was summarily laid to rest once and for all.

For those still bewildered, that kid being spoken about is yours truly.

Having a name that is quite a mouthful was something I had been accustomed to forever. Plus the fact that its not a straightforward common name (when seen in full) led to a lot of mispronunciations, some of them quite outrageously funny, including one which made me sound like an explosive, and one more which made it sound like my name was directly derived from the scientific name of the common mulberry-leaf-munching silkworm.

There has also been an instance of a school teacher attempting to commit Hari-kiri....oops, I mean Harakiri with my name, leading to entertaining verbal jousting between her and me, and the emergence of my insolent side , and consequent low marks in my Hindi tests and exams.

After giving up on numerous attempts that a lot of inquisitive people have had regarding the origin of my name, and telling people that I am not a Bong or an Oriya person, and having to explain my roots, I finally gave in to temptation and have been cooking up stories about where I come from ever since.

If you've guessed where I come from, you're right. 100 percent. I assure you.

Cut to 2005 AD when Naukri dot com comes up with this advertisement ridiculing the name Hari. They could've picked up pretty much every other name, and an obvious choice would have been Raj or Vijay, given Bollywood's propensity towards naming heroes with such names.

Seriously, its going to be a frigging cold day in hell before the leading people in Bollywood will all, without exception have names that are more unusual like Ajatashatru or Dheerendra or Ramanujam and all that. Bollywood names must be popular north-Indian types names with a maximum of two syllables.

In any case, the ad that was out was funny, it did two things. It catapulted naukri dot com's recall status to a very high level, and a lot of people were talking about that ad for a long time. The second thing was that the advertisement had long-term serious repercussions on a varied host of people most of them named Hari, and some of these outcomes have been quite funny.

I am not sure if this is an urban legend or not, but some school kid apparently sued the job site for having made him the butt of jokes in school, and the teachers did not spare him either. So our poor other Hari sends a court petition and the entire IT industry, that already frequents the jobsite and knows the site layout like their intranet portal, if not better, chance upon this email forward and it does the rounds all over the place.

As one can imagine, I got this forward sent many times over, with me too being invited to join the defamation suit bandwagon and ride on their gravy train.

One of the other really funny outcomes of the ad was my old man actually saving my name as Hari Sadu on his cellphone. Yup, its true. I've not been a good kid, apparently.

Sometimes I thank my lucky stars for not having been born 10 years later, or else the kid might have been me. I have seen and heard enough not-so-nice things being said about me to know that everyone else is screwed in the head and that I am as normal as normal can be. Low self esteem is a myth dispelled by two years of work in the IT industry. Things might have been different had I been 12 or 13 years old instead.

The ad has been so powerful in giving me footage as well. A day trip to the Namdroling and Sera monastries in Bylakuppe led me to this Tibetan restaurant called Olive. The proprietor of the place was a nice chap named Tsering, who chanced upon us in a talkative mood and rambled on, entertaining us with tales of trekking and Dharmasald and all. After settling the bill, when we were about to leave, we traded visiting cards, and our man looked at my visiting card and started off, 'H for.., A for....' . It still is quite funny.

Instant recall in Bylakuppe guaranteed if I ever want to thulp the best fried momos south of Dharmasala, thanks to the naukri ad.

Orkut (if you don't know what this is, congratulations. I swear.) has this community that I was invited to join, which was called 'all Haris of world', where every other donkey named Hari who was on the site was probably present.

They have these absurd community posts such as 'Hari's favourite colour', 'Hari's favourite actress', 'Hari's most compatible sun-sign', 'Hari's favourite ballet dancer', 'Hari's preferred brand of underwear', 'Hari's favourite position from the Kamasutra' and all that jazz.

Not being a part of the community, I am not sure what havoc that ad might have caused among those morons that I have been unfortunate to have shared my name with, but it will be excruciatingly funny to follow up on, nevertheless.

For all its worth it, I think the ad is a brilliant one. Instant recall and powerful message.

All the people in the world with access to this ad, put up your hands and shout out......H for.....

What the hell, as comments, come out with your own versions. I am sure you're quite the budding creative geniuses.

Be bold, post anonymously :)