Some people think that arguing is pointless and it is not “constructive”, but I beg to disagree. Firstly, there is that incredible entertainment value, which I think is very under-represented. Then, if you are arguing about a sensitive topic with someone who holds their opinion dearly, there is this sheer joy of annoying, then frustrating, then angering the person you are arguing with. Seeing them go through this progressions is one of the few best things of like that are still free. Arguing is a skill, and today I will teach you the most important points.

Be Condescending
Being condescending is the best way to push your opponent from frustration into anger. Effective body language is the key here. One of the most efficient techniques I’ve seen is to yawn with your mouth open wide. You have to get the timing right - Break into the yawn just as the opponent is making an emphatic point. Another technique to use is to tilt your head and let it rest on your hand - As if you’ll fall into sleep if the opponent makes one more boring point.

The above two techniques are what I call “Passive Condescendence“, where you passively show how disinterested you are. The second type, called “Active Condescendence” is also very useful. Here, you want to trivialize your opponents’ statements and rubbish them. Example:

Victim: “… and so, if we have to do something to stop global warming, or we’re all going to die!”
You: “We have to do something about your squeaky nasal voice first, or I’m going to go deaf!”

Victim: “…and that’s why education is so important to one’s life.”
You: “How can you make such a stupid statement? You must be “educated”. Hahaha!”

Use rhymes and “profoundities”
You’ll think I’m kidding, but using rhyming constructs adds a lot of force to your argument. “Might makes Right!” has a certain sound to it that makes everyone feel like it’s true.  Also “No Pain, No Gain” sounds more true than it really is. Using a rhyming first syllable also helps: “Mind over Matter!”, “Hire and Fire”. Using such phrases can make it sound like you know more than you do.

Another trick is to use “profoundities“. Notice that this is using profound statements, not the same as “profanities” (Well, you can use profanities as well, and it sometimes helps to speed up the argument to its logical conclusion - A fist fight). For example, anything said in Latin sounds Profound like “in vino veritas” (”there is truth in wine”) sounds much more convincing than when said in colloquial form: “I want more booze”. This actually goes for any classical language. Anything said in Sanskrit also sounds more convincing - “Tawa Murkham Asi” sounds much more convincing than “You’re an idiot”

When cornered, challenge all assumptions
Occasionally, you’ll find yourself cornered by a logical argument that you can’t get out of. That’s only a problem if you believe in logic. (Believing in logic, by the way, is optional) If you find yourself in this situation, you can have some extra fun by denying all assumptions. Be careful when you do this, however, because in my experience the next step after this is usually flying projectiles that can cause bodily harm. Denying assumptions is easy, philosophers have been doing it for years! Example:

Victim: “…And so our impact on the environment is real”
You: “What is real? It’s just signals your nervous system is sending to your brain. Your brain is creating the reality, which means reality is in your head. That’s another way of saying reality is just your imagination”

Einstein: “…and that’s why the earth revolves around the sun”
You: “Or, it could be an illusion created by the curvature of space-time according to the theory of relativity. Seriously, Einstein, you should read up on this stuff.”

You can tell that I’ve thought about this very deeply. I get a lot of time to think about these strategies when the wife kicks me out of the house for using them on her. That’s also, incidentally, when I write most of my blog posts.

• 4 Comments

[This is part 2 of a story. Part 1 is here]

We spent that day very gloomy, with the prospect of a confrontation with the Principal looming large on our heads because we had lesser than the required 75% attendance in one subject. An encounter with the principal was not going to be a pleasant affair, and it would probably turn out like this:

Principal: “Welcome! Welcome! I hear you have not managed to get 75% attendance?”
Us: “Sir, sorry sir, but I had a brain surgery and Chitradeep had severe amnesia. We couldn’t come to college because of our medical condition sir. Here are our medical certificates!”
Principal: “Ha! A brain surgery and severe amnesia? That’s not a good enough reason to miss college. You are going to pay for it!”
Us: “Sir.. please sir… please…”
Principal: “You will write ‘I will not miss College 7 million times’ and promise your soul to eternally be my slave. Muhahahahahahaa! (evil mogambo laugh)”

Thinking of this sent shivers down our spines, and I started to panic. I wanted to get out of this desperately, but there seemed to be no hope left. Chitradeep, on the other hand, seemed strangely calm about the whole thing.

Me: “Dude! What are we going to do?”
Chitradeep: “Don’t worry man, I’m going to fix this.”
Me: “How?!?”
Chitradeep: “Look, the attendance doesn’t get sent to the University until the end of this week. If we can somehow steal the attendance register and modify some records, we should be fine.”
Me: “Are you out of your mind?!? How on earth are you going to get hold of the register? It’s impossible, it’ll never work.”
Chitradeep: “Trust me, this will work”

How could this plan work? There was a better chance of our Principal baking us a pineapple cake than there was of this plan working! But Chitradeep’s confidence surprised me, and I knew that he’d pulled stunts like these before so I went along with it. It turns out that there were a couple of other guys in our class with the exact same problem, and so we teamed up. That evening, we had our first strategy meeting, where this plan was hatched:

Step 1: Chitradeep and I were to sit in the first bench.
Step 2: The other 2 guys (who would be sitting in the last bench) would call the prof and ask some “doubts” to distract him.
Step 3: Chitradeep would steal the register.
Step 4: Success!

Fortunately for us humans, the presence of a “plan” is very reassuring, however impossible it might be to achieve. Satisfied that we had a “plan”, all of us slept soundly that night. The next morning came, and the first class was going to be Computer Science, where our master plan was going to be executed.

Chitradeep and I took up our positions in the front bench, right at the battlefront. Being so close to the firing line was definitely dangerous, but one has to be brave during missions like these.

Soon, the Prof walks into the class carrying our target - the attendance register. He absent mindedly puts it on the table, just a few feet away from us. Oh! I could reach over and grab it this instant. But the Prof is standing right next to the table, looking at the entire class. He’s looking to locate the usual trouble makers, no doubt, but we are just below his radar this time - Sitting in the first bench. The prof has an enormous belly that protrudes out that sometimes makes me wonder if his center of gravity is outside his body. But this is not the time to think about these things, the belly is right now making us invisible to him.

Suddenly, the Prof shouts out:

“What is the difference between a packet and a frame?”

Oh, no! This is going to be one of those “firing” classes, where the Prof asks random questions pointedly, and if someone can’t answer, he asks them to get out of the class. Usually everyone pretends to look busy and hide their heads into the textbook to avoid being called up to answer the question, but this time, it’s different. A hand goes up from the back bench, apparently a volunteer to answer the question. Who would do a stupid thing like that?

I look back, and see it is one of the guys in our plan. Oh, no! He’s going to create a distraction, and he’s going to sacrifice himself to give us an opportunity. Oh! What a noble thought! He’s as good as dead, but hopefully he can stall the Professor long enough for us to get a shot at the register. The Professor is surprised some one is willing to answer, but that only brings a big smile to his face - He’s going to massacre the poor lamb in front of the whole class, and he’s going to enjoy it!

Prof: “Yes… My dear, fellow. You think you can answer?”

The dude from the back bench gets up. The Professor is slowly moving towards the center of the class, away from us. But it’s still to risky for us to go in now, if the prof just looks this way, we’ll be caught red handed.

Dude: “The difference between a packet and a frame…”

He is purposefully answering slowly, trying to draw the professor in. The Prof has reached the middle of the classroom by now, and is standing at the central aisle.

Dude: “… are rather simple. Namely, they have some structural qualities that create some…”

Chitradeep leans forward to judge how far the register is for him. He can almost reach it. The Prof has moved up 2 paces, just beyond the first bench.

Dude: “…similar differences are remarkably similar. That is to say, there are similar differences between the two…”

The Professor is walking very very slowly. He’s just out of direct sight from us. This could be the chance. Chitradeep moves to the edge of the bench. The Prof has to move just one more step forward…

Dude: “…and they are, as namely, in the following order, starting with the first difference, which is…”

The Prof takes a step forward. Chitradeep, in a flash, gets up, extends his arm towards the attendance register. He is now fully stretched, and his hand just about reaches the register. He picks it up in one smooth motion and recoils his entire body along with his outstretched hand to come back to his original position, with the register firmly held in his hand. The entire class has seen this brilliant gymnastic maneuver by Chitradeep, and he would have received a standing ovation from the class had the Prof not been there. The dude, who’s been successfully stalling and drawing in the prof, heaves a silent sigh of relief.

Dude: “…that the packet is not a frame because the frame is not really a packet.”
Prof: “What? Are you telling a story from The Mahabharata? Get out!”

Chitradeep is so pleased that he has managed to steal the register, that he doesn’t notice that the Prof has cut up the poor dude and ordered him out of the class. It hits him when the Prof makes a 180-degree turn to return to the front of the class. Chitradeep looks at the register. There it is, he has successfully stolen it. But now what? What are we going to do with the stolen register?

The Prof has turned around and is heading back towards the center of the classroom. He has only a couple of steps before he comes to the front, and he’ll have to turn towards us afterwards. And Chitradeep is sitting there holding the attendance register.

Oh, this is definitely going to end in disaster.

Apparently, we got so excited about stealing the register that we forgot to think about what we’re going to do after we stole it. That’s the trouble with plans - There is always something that you didn’t think of.

The Prof has a big smile on his face, no doubt pleased about his latest kill. He takes one more step and is now almost at the front of the class. Chitradeep is still holding the register. That’s it. We’re as good as dead.

Just as the Prof reaches the front of the class and turns towards us, Chitradeep executes another super-swift maneuver that truely shocks the class. He already has the full attention of the class because of his previous maneuver. Chitradeep, in one fluid motion, lifts the register up, turns it 90-degrees with his left hand, and with one smooth jerk, flings it, horizontally, like a bullet, towards the window. He has thrown it with the precision of a Zen master throwing a sword, and the register, flying flat towards the window, passes neatly through the bars of the window, and disappears cleanly out of sight, out of the class, and out of the 3rd floor window.

The class lets out a collective gasp. The Prof notices the gasp.

Prof: “Yes… That should teach you students to think before answering questions. If you’d have studied Section 2, Chapter 12, Paragraph 13 on Page 123, you would have known the difference between a packet and a frame!”

Everyone is processing what just happened.
The Attendance register just flew out of the window.
That means that the prof doesn’t have the attendance register.
That means the prof is not going to be able to send the attendance records to the University.
But the prof has to send the records anyway, otherwise he’ll get fired.
That means that prof will have to create a new register.
That means that everyone will now get full attendance, because there is no old register.

And that is exactly what happened. The Prof and the rest of the staff were too uptight to admit that the attendance register was missing. How can it disappear? It must have been that careless Computer Science professor who must have left it in the parking lot or somewhere. In the absence of the attendance records, all the students got full attendance the in the subject.

All’s well that ends well. In this case, all was particularly well because all the college students got the pleasure of eating Bhel-Puri neatly wrapped in sheets from an attendance record that had mysteriously fallen from the sky, right next to the Bhel-Puri guy’s cart. I can tell you, that was some of the best bhel-puri I’ve ever had.

• 16 Comments

Chitradeep seemed rather tensed as he walked into class that day. He is usually a very cheerful person, to the point of being annoyingly cheerful, so if he was feeling down, it usually meant something was wrong. He came down and sat next to me. It was still the first class of the morning, and the teacher had not walked in to the classroom yet.

Chitradeep: “Man, aren’t you nervous?”
Me: “No, not really. Should I be nervous?”
Chitradeep: “Yeah, the results are going to be put up on the notice board today.”

I’ve never seen Chitradeep nervous of results before. He’s a really smart guy in an unconventional sort of way, and has always managed to keep his head well above the water of the academic ocean, and as far as I know, he’s never drowned in it before.

Me: “Don’t worry man, you’ll pass.”
Chitradeep: “I’m afraid I might have made a miscalculation. And that miscalculation is going to cost me my 75%.”
Me: “You’re going to flunk the whole exam because of ONE miscalculation? Dude! Did you write the same answer for all the questions?”
Chirtadeep: “Exam? I’m talking about the attendance man! They’re going to put up the yearly attendance aggregates today. If you haven’t attended 75% of the classes, you’re going to FAIL THE YEAR!”

Holy crap! Attendance. I hadn’t thought about that. In many aspects, attendance was more important than the marks of the final exam. The final exam marks would help us get a good education in the future or some vague thing like that, but attendance could fail us NOW! Besides, calculating attendance percentages, and making them right out to 75% was a skill we proudly claimed we had. Besides, calculating attendances was a mathematically intensive operation. Formally, it can be stated as the following problem:

“Under various external constraints like playing snooker 2 times a week, going out to birthday treat-lunches and watching movies first-day-first show, optimize the number of classes needed to be attended in every subject so that the percentage of classes attended is as close to 75% as possible. This is also a dynamic system, subject to externalities such as proxies, profs-not-showing-up and mass bunks.”

This kind of optimization is called “Operations Research (OR)” these days, but I’m pretty sure the techniques were invented by college students looking to maximize the classes they could bunk without getting into trouble.

Anyway, the prospect that we had an attendance shortage scared the crap out of me. A shortage meant severe implications, socially and academically. From the college’s perspective, if we had less than 75% attendance, we were required to pay a fine, a rather hefty one, to get the exam hall ticket. That was the best case scenario. The worst case, of course, was that the principal would invite our parents over for tea and ask them to explain their son’s apparently inexplicable lack of interest in academic life. Inexplicable, that is, to the principal, not to our parents, who were already suspicious that something fishy was going on. If news reached our parents that we were loafing around instead of attending college, it meant dramatic cuts in pocket money.

The social implications were even worse. The attendance percentage was somewhat of a status symbol in our college. On one end were the 99% attendance students, the nerds and social outcasts, and the other end were the below-75% folks that were so incompetent that they couldn’t even plan their attendance properly. The golden number was 75% - The person with that kind of attendance was THE popular kid in college. He got the respect of everyone - from the chics to the local bhel-puri guy.

And so, because of the high stakes involved, I was very nervous. I’d appointed Chitradeep has my “Chief Attendance Officer” (CAO) for this year, meaning he was taking care of all my attendance requirements. If he had made a miscalculation, it also meant that I was in trouble. We waited (and prayed) desperately, and as soon as the class got over, we rushed over to the notice board. By the time we got there, there was already a very large crowd there. People went in, saw their attendance and returned pleased. Conversations were generally cheerful:

Dude #1: “How much did you get, man?”
Dude #2: “75.45%. You?”
Dude #1: “Congratulations, man. I got 75.21%.”
Dude #2: “Arree wah! Party! Party!”

But I had a bad feeling going in. My sub conscience could sense that something was wrong. And sure, enough, proudly standing on the list, was my name and Chitrdeep Chetty’s highlighted in Red!

02 - Aditya Kulkarni   - Maths - 75.5% Physics - 75.11% Chemistry - 75.21%

   - Computer Science 74.1%

14 - Chitradeep Chetty  - Maths - 75.2% Physics - 75.57% Chemistry - 75.62%

   - Computer Science 74.1%

I felt like I was watching Devdas again - That inevitable sinking feeling of doom. Oh, it was unmistakable. My whole life suddenly flashed by me, including the Computer Science classes, which I had so badly flunked in! This was the end…

[Update: Part 2 is here]

• 15 Comments

Living in a house inevitably means that you’ll have some share of the household chores assigned to you. The situation is particularly bad if you are lazy, and even worse when you are a follower of Adityaism, which requires you to NOT do work. But fortunately, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of the counter measures we can use to avoid doing any work around the household. Here are some very useful tips:

1) Ask a lot of questions
Asking a lot of questions is a good strategy to use when you are assigned some new work. The person that has assigned the work to you is probably using the common misconception that “Give a man a fish, he’s happy for a day. Teach him how to fish, he’s happy for life”.

This saying is obviously not true, because if it were, we’d all be fishermen. Clearly, we are not. Therefore, it can’t be true. Quite simple.

But sometimes, your opponent doesn’t believe in logic, and can’t be convinced with the above logically correct argument, so you have to use a different strategy. You have to make your opponent so frustrated with questions, that they should think “I’d rather give him the fish!”. Example:

Wife: “Can you cut some Tomatoes and Onions, please?”
Me: “OK. How do I cut them?”
W: “Well, with a knife of course.”
Me: “Do I have to use a chopping board?”
W: “Of course!”
Me: “What if I cut myself?”
W: “You’re not going to cut yourself.”
Me: “Do we have emergency bandaid, just in case? Besides, it’s pretty late. Do you think the hospital will e open?”
W: “Just cut the Tomatoes, OK?”
Me: “I think we should call the hospital and ask if they’re open.”

… and so on, until your opponent cuts the Tomatoes.

2) Argue
This technique is a variant of the first one, only more aggressive. Use this technique when the first one doesn’t work, and you are cornered. The difference is, this time you have to push the opponent into a state of frustration. This works best if you counter every question with another question. Example:

Wife: “Can you cut some Tomatoes and Onions, please?”
Me: “Why?”
W: “So that you get Sambar to eat tonight, that’s why!”
Me: “Can’t you just use the food processor? Why do I have to cut it?”
W: “Because the food processor doesn’t cut it into small pieces”
Me: “How am I going to cut it into small pieces?”
W: “Do I have to tell you EVERYTHING?!? Start with a horizontal cut and then slice it”
Me: “Are you sure that’s the proper way? I read somewhere that cutting tomatoes causes it to loose important vitamins.”
W: “JUST CUT THE TOMATOES!!!”
Me: “I think I’m going to look up Wikipedia for “How to cut a tomato”. I’ll be right back.
W: “AAAARRGGGGGHHHHH!!!”

3) Reverse Psychology
This is a dangerous technique, but if you can pull it off, it is very effective. The idea is to get your opponent to feel extreme sympathy and pity for you. Bonus points if you push your opponent into a guilty feeling. An easy way to do this is to make it seem that you are doing something super-important, something that matters more to the universe than the chore. The trick to achieving this state is proper body language - That means cute puppy eyes and a voice that seems like you’re almost going to cry. Example:

Wife: “Can you cut some Tomatoes and Onions, please?”
Me: “Um? I was just going to call our broker and talk about our investments.”
W: “Really?”
Me: “Yeah, it’s tax season, and we need to make the proper investments and save for our future.”
W: “That’s true.”
Me: “Have you finished your tax planning under section 80CCC and applied for Premium Deductions on your IT declaration?”
W: “Uh… Huh… Hmm… Err… What does that… I don’t know…”
Me: (deep sigh) “OK, I’ll take a look tomorrow. Do I have to do everything? Aren’t you worried about our future together? Isn’t our financial security and independence important to you?” *sniff* deep sigh…..

… and you’re done. Your opponent won’t bother you for 2 days after this.

Do you have any more techniques?

• 20 Comments

This week, we return to solve the world’s problems with Aditya’s Advice Column!

Q: How does one console a colleague who has been given a pink slip (the IT MNC is on firing spree), conveying him that this company is doing nothing but body shopping and u are lucky to get that, albeit a successful career lies ahead of you.
- A
Hang on a second… Why would you console your colleague who has gotten a pink slip? He has just been freed from the drudgery of daily slavery. He doesn’t have to get up early in the morning and get ready to go and spend 12 hours driving through traffic only to end up in a windowless office breathing recycled, cold air and pretending to be busy, just to get the daily wage, only to hand it over to the banks as EMIs. He gets to wake up late, have a nice, fulfilling breakfast and play video games all day! Who has the better life?

If anything, the person that got the pink slip should be consoling you. Have you heard of anyone that’s working on a salary that got rich and successful? No Sir! ALL the top 10 richest people in the world were not daily wagers. J.K. Rowling, Shah Rukh Khan, Maria Sharapova, Rakhi Sawant, Scott Adams - All the great people in this world said goodbye to their corporate careers and did their own thing.

But all is not lost. You can earn your pink slip too, if you work hard enough. Resist the temptation to do any work - Be careful and miss deadlines and make sure your code has lots of bugs. If you work hard enough at this, you will receive the pink slip. You can speed up the process by going to your manager and point out that you are “just another resource” and you are not “a teamplayer aligned with the goals of the organization”. That might help.

If all else fails, you should DEMAND for your pink slip. The pink slip is your birthright and no one can stop you from having it!

Q: What comes first: The Wife or The Blog?
- VM

This question makes the assertion that the analytical knife can be sliced through reality to create distinct, compartmentalized entities that can be labeled as implied in the aforementioned question, but as the philosophers of yore have abundantly pointed out, such an enterprise is not without its obvious follies. In retrospective hindsight, this dualistic view - of subjects and objects - leads to logic traps and draws victims through the sub-concious perturbation of the irresistibility of the dialectic method, but one should be cognizant of the quality lost in such an exercise. In summary, such an inquiry into the nature of the continuum of reality only draws the response of moi, that is to say that the contextual space of the question begs to be expanded to gain any substantiative response towards increasing one’s knowledge.

Q: Everywhere preferential treatment is metted out to womens in transport vehicles, whether its in state bus or share auto, how should one respond to a female who wants to grab your seat just bcoz she is a female and be given first citizen status.
- AB

I know. This is starting to become a real problem! I don’t understand why women get these privileges. I even heard that in some middle eastern countries, women are not allowed to work! Why can’t I have that right? It would be so cool:

Wife: “Aren’t you going to work?”
Me: “I’m sorry I can’t.”
Wife: “What?!? Are you expecting me to be the sole breadwinner while you laze around at home?”
Me: “Can you go to office and call me? That way I can put you on mute. I can’t hear what Tom is saying to Jerry on TV.”

This is shameful that we men are getting sidetracked while the women start running this world. Hilary Clinton, Mayawati, Barkha Dutt, Rakhi Sawant - Only a few names among the hordes of women that are cornering all the power in their plot to take over the world! I think it’s time that we men started a society to counter this.

M.A.D - Men Against Distractions. That’s what we should call our club. This club should be engaged in the fight the evil women who are distracting us so that they can take over this world. To make our club successful, we should come up with some catch phrases and sound bites so that we sound smart on TV. I’ve come up with a few initial drafts:

“Just because we can’t see 34,432 shades of blue doesn’t mean we can’t see the truth!”

“Men - No beauty, but lots of brains!”

“We may not have have hundreds of shoes, but we do have our dignity!”

Can you folks think of more?

If you’d like to ask a question in Aditya’s Advice Column, send a mail to advice@pointlesswanderings.com. Don’t worry, your identity will be kept confidential.

• 6 Comments

Getting married is very stressful these days. Apart from the 48-hour wedding ceremonies and rituals, there’s the near-infinite shopping and preparations that go on for months together. And don’t even get me started on the cost of the whole exercise.

Even after all this pain, the whole marriage ceremony passes by like a blur. The only thing I remember about my wedding day is that I was hungry, very hungry, but the punditji wouldn’t let us eat lunch. He insisted on me saying something in a language I didn’t understand. I’m pretty sure that he was swearing at me in Sanskrit, but I can’t prove it.

Anyway, I think the world is now ready to see progress in the institution of marriage. And so, in the footsteps of the great social reformers of India like Vivekananda, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Rakhi Sawant, I’m proposing a radical reform to the ritual of the marriage!

Marriage 2.0 !
Marriage 2.0, as I call it, will incorporate the best of social networking and the internet age phenomenon, and by using real innovation, will also drive down costs!

The central part of the whole marriage ceremony will be a AJAX website created for your marriage. It will contain your photos and a feature will allow you to send an email to all your friends and relatives with the “e-wedding-invite” so that you don’t have to personally go to their houses and invite them.

The Marriage ceremony itself will be cut to 10 minutes, and will be web-cast live on the internet. There will even be a conference-call number for people to dial in if they want. This way, your friends and family can be a part of the ceremony without traveling. They are even free to keep their phones on mute and discuss yesterday’s cricket match without inviting stares from the punditji like in a real marriage!

Gifts & Presents
Gifts are the most important part of the marriage for the bride and groom. The website will contain a list of all the things that the bride and groom want, and people can register on the website and make donations towards the “Gift Fund” that will be used to buy stuff from the list. This is a win-win situation for everyone. Instead of getting 56 different types of wall-clocks, the bride and groom and get stuff that will help them with their married life (Like an XBOX for the groom and a life-time subscription to Cosmopolitan for the bride).

The website will also allow you to track how much money each of your friends and family have contributed, so that you’ll know how much to give when they get married.  This is the killer feature of the website. Everyone is going to LOVE this feature!

Eating and Dining
Eating is the most important part of the marriage for the guests that come to the wedding. This is where marriage 2.0 is taken to the next level. Instead of driving to a far-away marriage hall to eat the wedding food, guests will get to go to their own favorite restaurants and eat whatever they like - They can collect the bill and upload it to the website and get reimbursed for the dinner. This way, people can eat what they like and later tell the bride and groom how great the food was at their wedding.

Many of you are already thinking how to game this system - You say most people will go to a 5-star restaurant and order the most expensive butter naans. But I’ve thought of a solution to this problem too: There will be a limit to how much you can get reimbursed, and that limit depends on how much contribution you’ve made to the “Gift Fund” section of the website. This way, your guests have the incentive to make the maximum donation, so that they may get to eat at a good restaurant. Clever, no?

Gossip
Another important part of a wedding, I’ve been told, is the gossip about who wore what, and which saree was not going with which jewelry and what was looking gaudy on who. To enable this discussion, guests will be required to get dressed up in their fancy sarees/suits and upload the pictures to the website. These pictures will be available for everyone to view and comment. There will also be an online forum where guests can login, review the pictures of the other guests and then proceed to gossip.

This is obviously such a great plan, that I’m thinking of making it the default way people get married in Adityaism. Just think of the time and money that will be saved if everyone moved to Marriage 2.0! I think building this website for Marriage 2.0 will be a good plan for a startup company. Maybe I should quit my job and do this fulltime?

• 11 Comments

Oh dear friend, where have you been?
Since the burst of 2001, you’ve not been seen!
We can feel you now with a tingling sensation,
We’ve missed you my friend, Oh dear Recession!

Most people will welcome you with crying sobs,
You come to town and take away our jobs!
You show no mercy, everywhere you strike,
And away goes our annual salary hike!

With you comes your distant cousin called “Cost-Cutting”,
And away go free snacks, team lunches and “on-site visiting”!
The CEO will now send a mail about tough “market-conditions”,
That means more billable hours and “forget your promotions”!

What is going to happen with my car and house EMIs?
I think it is time to say to them my final goodbyes!
I pray to you, spare me from your deadly whip,
Please don’t bring me the dreaded pink slip!

• 4 Comments