This is part 2 of a series. First part is below

Saturday morning is here, and I’ve calmed down dramatically since my mouth accidentally promised to go to the GYM on Saturday morning. I’ve managed to convince my soul, my brain and all my other schizophrenic voices in my head that it isn’t going to be so bad, we’ll just fake it. My plan was to fake it all the way, and just pretend to go to the gym, and take a detour through the mall. Plenty of timepass places in the mall to keep me busy for an hour.

And so, I got ready to head out when the wife stopped me.

Wife: “Aren’t you going to take your GYM clothes?”
Me: “Eh?”
Wife: “You know, your exercise clothes. I hope you’re not planning to exercise in your jeans!”
Me: “No no, of course not. I just forgot, that’s all. So, hmm…. Do I have any gym clothes?”
Wife: “No, You don’t.”
Me: “Oh, no! Then I can’t go to the gym! Man, I was looking forward to going, but unfortunately now I can’t. I guess I’ll just sit and watch TV then…”
Wife: “… but I bought you some GYM clothes yesterday!”
Me: “Oh? Well, OK then. I guess I’ll have to go to the GYM in that case.”

And so, I trudged out of the house, carrying a plastic bag with track pants and some T-shirt. I walked across to the mall. Malls are so much fun. I first went to the food court and ate bhel puri, then bought some ice cream. I found a store that had an XBOX kept for demo, and I played at the XBOX for most of the hour (after finishing the ice cream,  of course). I did some more time pass, and before you know it, “gym time” was up. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday morning! I could do this every day! And the best part is, the wife things I’m at the GYM. Am I a genius or what?

Just as I walked back into the house, the wife switched off the TV and comes up to me to find out how my first GYM session had gone.

Me: “Oh, it was awesome! I enjoyed it tremendously!”
Wife: “Really?”
Me: “Yeah. I did some exercise and it was all very easy for me.”

I was feeling good. My brilliant plan of skipping gym was making me feel very proud of myself.

Wife: “So, you ran on the treadmill? How fast did you run?”

Having rarely run to anywhere, my brain wasn’t entirely aware what speed people usually run at. I began thinking: “Well, lets see… Airplanes take off at 200 kmph, but when people run, they don’t take off, so they must be going slower, so…”

Wife: “Well?”
Me: “35!”
Wife: “35 kilometers per hour? That’s very good!”

What do you know? This is going rather well. My ego is feeling good. It starts blabbering…

Me: “That’s nothing! I also went to the lifting-maching-thing and lifted 40 kgs weights.”
Wife: “That’s impressive!”
Me: “Ha! That’s nothing! The GYM instructor was so impressed, that he said I am a complete natural, and ShahRukh Khan and his precious 6-pack had better watch out!”
Wife: “Really? So the instructor was very impressed huh?”

The wife is nodding and paying attention to my boastful claims, and that strokes my ego even more. Man, this is fun! I’m starting to get carried away…

Me: “Ha! That’s nothing! The weight lifting thing was so easy for me that I asked them to put on more weights, but they ran out of weights! I even answered my cell phone while lifting the weights in one hand.”

Wife: “Very good! Then they were all very impressed then!”
Me: “Oh yeah yeah. It was a breeze… HaHaha! I left the other people gasping!  They must have been thinking: This guy has natural gym talent!”
Wife: “Really? Well done… Here, let me take your gym clothes. They must have gotten dirty, no?”

This was a really big clue that the wife knew something that I had missed. But in that moment of self-heroism, the huge clue completely missed me. My ego was enjoying the show-off so much, that my brain failed to notice such a big hint. Unfortunately ego wins over logic every time.

Me: “Ha! The GYM was so easy for me that I didn’t even work up a sweat! Look at the clothes, they’re as good as new!”
Wife: “So, you spent the full hour at the gym?”
Me: “Yeah. All of the 60 minutes! In fact, the instructor got tired at the end of it, you know, fetching me weights and putting away dumbbells and all that stuff.”
Wife: “That’s very interesting. So do you remember Janavi from the 3rd floor? Her husband was also going to join today?”

Uh Oh! Something is not right.

Me: “Yeah yeah, he was there too. I saw him. I said Hi! Nice chap!”
Wife: “So, apparently, he went there, but it turns out that the GYM is closed today for renovation.”

Oh, bugger! Crap crap crap! How could this have happened? Why didn’t I go and at least PEEK at the gym? I would have found out that the GYM wasn’t open today. And oh my God! All the stuff I said earlier! This is a very bad way to get caught! No No No!!!! Hopeless Hopeless! And on top of that, my brain makes a half-ass attempt at recovering from this impossible situation:

Me: “Did I say I went to the GYM? I actually meant I went for a jog AROUND the gym. Yeah, that’s what I meant!”
She’s giving me The Look.
Me: “Aahh… I mean… I was going to go to the gym, but… err… I mean… hmmm…. Have you lost weight? You’re looking FABULOUS!”

As you’ve probably figured out, I’d dug myself into such a deep hole, that escape was impossible. And now, because of my big big mouth, the wife takes me “walking” around the apartment every night. 4 rounds! But the worse part is that I still haven’t got a plan to avoid watching the movies, which is how this whole thing started in the first place!

Moral of the story? “Don’t talk about the GYM. It’ll always get you into trouble!”

• 11 Comments

Regular readers will know that I’ve been desperately trying to avoid watching movies. My several previous plans (plan 1, plan 2, plan 3) have not been very successful, and even my writing harsh reviews (Race, Saawariya, Om Shanti Om) have not done anything. Things were getting desperate for me when it seemed inevitable that we were going to watch “One Two Three”. I decided I was going to put up a fight this time.

Wife: “Tickets are available for the 10:10 show Saturday Morning”
Me: “I’m sorry, I can’t go. I have something to do Saturday Morning”

I could tell that this surprised the wife. My usual Saturday morning plan is to sleep till 10 AM and “forget” to take a bath, so this was obviously something new. The only problem was that I didn’t have any “plan”. I had to think of something really fast.

Wife: “What’s so special that you can’t come to the movie?”

I hadn’t expected her to ask the question so directly. My brain was running in hyper-fast mode.

Me: “Aahhh… I am, actually, a little busy… eerrr… because I’m going to… aaahhh….”

The wife had started to give me THE Look. I think she suspected that I’d give some fake reason to try to get out of the movie. This was not good. Now my excuse had to be even better! Even as my head was trying to think of a good alibi, my mouth blurted out:

Me: “I can’t go to the movie because I’m going to the GYM!!!”

WHAT!??!???!!!

My brain was like “Excuse Me?!? Do you even know what that means? GYM?”
And then my soul was like “You know that is against the religious principles of Adityaism, right? I’m not going to the GYM. You’ll have to go without me!”

The prospect of my soul leaving me because I went to the gym was a grim one. I really like my soul, nice chap. As I was thinking about how to get out of this mess, the wife interjected. She seemed very happy.

Wife: “You’re going to the gym? How wonderful! Which gym are you going to?”
Me: “Uuhh? I mean… yes… yeah, the gym over there… Talwalkars… Right opposite our building.”

Thankfully I had recalled that there indeed WAS a gym in the mall opposite our house. If I had failed to name the gym, it would have been the end for me.

Wife: “Wonderful, wonderful! Oh, I just remembered something! Actually… What a co-incidence!!!”

Oh NO! What had happened now? Had she also signed up at the same gym? Was she going to come to the gym and make me run on the never-ending-running-machine-of-death like a mad scientist does to his lab mouse? I imagined me running on a hamster wheel… just round and round and round for all of eternity. A shiver went down my spine.

Wife: “You know Janavi? 3rd Floor? I was talking to her and she said her husband was also going to start going to the GYM from Saturday. The two of you should go together!”

Phew! At least she wasn’t coming. I couldn’t recall who this Janavi or her Hubby was but that was the least of my problems right now. Bigger things were already happening. My brain had called an emergency meeting of all the schizophrenic voices in my head, and they were already planning a revolt. My soul was giving a speech to them in my head.

Soul: “We will not tolerate this indignation! Our principles MUST be upheld. We MUST fight….”

This was very bad news. I could have said so many things! Why did I have to say that? I could have said I have a meeting at office, I could have said I had an appointment with the investment agent, but noooooo… I had to go and say “I’m going to the GYM”. Hopeless! Hopeless!

What am I going to do now?

[Update: Part 2 is here]

• 5 Comments

I met my dear friend Chitradeep Chetty the other day at a local pub. A few of our friends and Chitradeep and I had gone out to catch up on the latest happenings, since I hadn’t met Chitradeep for a long time. Chitradeep is a lot of fun to talk to, and the amount of sophistication he brings to a conversation increases directly with the amount he’s had to drink, so it is always a good idea to meet him in a pub.

Chitradeep before drinking:
“…and the brownfield project we implement is done using J2EE and WebServices backend talking to ruby on rails running on 8080…”

Chitradeep after 4 mugs of beer:
“…these bloody politicians I tell you… They should all *hic* lock up the *hic* ….err….. lock up the … hmmm …. *hic* … What was I talking about?”

Chitradeep after 8 mugs of beer:
“…and the cockroaches are going to invade our living rooms, so we should buy flat screen TVs to prevent the movie box office collection! HIP HIP HURRAY!!!”

And so, soon enough, Chitradeep had sufficient amounts of alcohol in his blood stream, and we were having this very interesting discussion where he was telling me why it is a good idea for NASA to run a space shuttle on AA batteries when something else caught his attention. I noticed he was distractedly looking over my shoulder. I turned around and saw the dance floor – and a beautiful girl dancing there who had obviously caught Chitradeep’s attention. Chitradeep was always the guy to take action, and the several beers he had consumed definitely helped lift his spirits. He excused himself, got up from our table, and started heading straight to the direction of the dance floor. I was wondering if it was a good idea to let Chitradeep talk to a girl in this state, but Chitradeep had an air of confidence about him. It seemed like he had learnt some new secret moves, and nothing in this world was going to stop him. A dude brimming with so much confidence should not be stopped. If nothing, it’d be great entertainment for the rest of us.

And so, we watched Chitradeep as he made way to the dance floor. He walked up straight to the cute girl, and much to our shock (and consternation), started dancing.

For those of you that don’t know Chitradeep, his dancing skills are approximately the same as that of a banyan tree. But when he started dancing today, it was something else altogether. His new dancing style can best be described as a hybrid between a traffic police and a scared chicken. He raised one arm, made a stop signal, jumped and turned 180-degrees, and then raised his other arm, bringing both arms above his head, and hopped two steps like a frog. In this short sequence he managed to get the attention of the DJ, who skipped a beat or two in the utter shock of seeing a maneuver like that on his dance floor. But Chitradeep wasn’t done yet. He then swung his right arm round and round (while holding his left hand still) like a fast bowler whose action had gotten stuck, and, moments later, started swinging his left arm in the same round-and-round motion as well. He did a variety of such inexplicable actions, that the rest of the crowd actually stopped and started watching his antics. It was clear to to the crowd that this dude was either a sheer genius or a sheer idiot, and either way, they had stopped in their tracks and were watching this spectacle with great interest.

And then the most shocking thing happened – the cute girl that Chitradeep was after found the whole dance routine incredibly amusing, and came over and started talking to Chitradeep! Man! I can’t believe his luck! How could the cute girl have liked his monkey-mating-dance routine? Anyway, Chitradeep talked briefly to the girl, and then returned to our table with a greatly satisfied look on his face.

Me: “Man! I have no idea how that worked!!!”
Chitradeep: “Naa… She’s not my type!”
Me: “Why? What happened?!?”
Chitradeep: “While I was on that dance floor, I had a great moment of inspiration – A moment of deep awakening! I have discovered the true purpose in my life!”
Me: “From that monkey dance?”
Chitradeep: “YES! I’m going to go and help the tigers! They were calling to me while I was dancing there.”
Me: “Dude, that was the crowd laughing at you!”

I’ve heard of stories of strange things happening on the dance floor, but this was the first time I heard someone having a enlightenment-type moment! I tried to tell him that it was the beer that was speaking, but nothing I said could change his opinion. In a moment of (apparent) awakening, Chitradeep had decided that the tigers of the world needed him more than cute girls did, and he was going to go and stay in the jungles to help save the tigers from extinction. Well! That was the end of that!

On an unrelated note, another friend of mine is taking a break from work to go and live in a reserve forest to see if he can help do anything for the tigers. Here’s wishing him (and the tigers) best of luck!

• 6 Comments

The Universe behaves in very mysterious ways, and Women even more so. There are several things I don’t understand about this world – Theoretical particle physics, Aristotle’s Philosophy and why women buy so many shoes. I’ve researched the problem extensively, and I’ve developed my own explanation to understand the freakiest of all phenomenon – Why do Women buy so many shoes?

I’ve had the pleasure of studying this phenomenon up close. The wife has a full size wardrobe for shoes alone. She has more shoes than I have clothes. Heck, she has more shoes than I have games for my PS2! That got me thinking… What could possibly explain the need for women to own so many shoes?

My first hypothesis was that shoes are very useful as attack projectiles, deadly accurate and easily throwable. They even carry a strong message of feminism apparently, that is adequately conveyed to the unwilling recipient of the projectiles. I used to think that this is a very good form of offense, until I discovered the secret to dodging these harmful projectiles. In all honesty, I didn’t discover this technique, Neo from the Matrix did. He figured out he could dodge them by leaning backwards and waving your hands until the shoes passed safely overhead. (He later used this technique to dodge bullets, but they seemed to have missed the shoe scene in the movie). You should all try it the next time you are confronted with flying shoes. I can assure you that it works reliably.

As I was thinking of this, I also discovered that the shoes can have a more efficient use. You see, the shoes are in a sort-of symbiotic relationship with clothes. See, the ratio of clothes to shoes is a delicate balance, and the dynamic system (sometimes called “a woman” in layman terms) is constantly seeking this equilibrium. Sometimes the system overshoots on the clothes side, and to compensate has to buy more shoes and vice-versa, oscillating in a more shoes -> more clothes -> more shoes motion. It is believed that the system eventually converges onto a stable state, but this has not yet been experimentally observed. The value of this ratio is not known, but legend has it that the universe will explode if someone tries to evaluate it mathematically. This gives you the illusion that more shoes are being unnecessarily bought, but that of course, is not the case – The system is merely trying to adjust itself to equilibrium.

I was struggling with this question for several days when the solution occurred to me out of the blue – It just hit me! Women buy so many shoes because they want to help the planet and our environment and to stop Global Warming! That’s right. I was confused at first too, but then I figured out the logic – See, the more shoes you have, the more space they occupy, and the less space there is for the CO2 to occupy. Therefore, by occupying volume, they are preventing the CO2 from occupying all that space and are thus reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This is such an insightful discovery! I had no idea that shoes were so good for the planet! I urge everyone to go out and buy more shoes!

• 5 Comments

I drive through the silent darkness, all alone,
If I don’t see you in time, I’ll surely break a bone!
God knows what was in the mind of your maker,
All hail thee, You are the mighty Speed Breaker!

Unmoving on the road, you lay in your slumber,
10-to-1, even the mighty buffaloes you outnumber!
Instead of warning us to be careful and slowly tread,
Why do you put up a sign that says “Hump Ahead?”

And then there’s your cosuin, the infamous pothole,
Seems like you’re a part of the Indian road’s soul!
As soon as the rain comes I hear you cheer,
‘Cause in infinite numbers you can now appear!

God only knows why the hell you exist at all,
Slowing down traffic that’s already in a crawl!
Only bike guys with girlfriends really like you,
They brake sharply and come a little closer too!

• 6 Comments

I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, and you can all believe me when I say I’m a bad movie expert. And this movie “Race”, is the best of them all. In the worst possible way.

Race is not one bad movie. It is many bad movies all rolled into one. This movie has so many twists and turns that it is a total wreck. The story goes in one direction, crashes into the wall, then reverses, then goes into another tangent, only to smash head on with a cow, then the story gets on a horse and rides around the town and then the horse collapses and the story then hitches a ride on a spaceship to go into the 7th dimension by which time its back at the starting position and goes into an infinite loop. Even if by some miracle you managed to understand that description, you will still not understand just what the hell the movie is about!

I think the writers of the script came to work every day, forgot where the story stood yesterday, and asked “What kind of movie should we write today?”, and went on to ignore that  too and wrote whatever they felt like anyway. The result is a story that goes from tragedy to comedy to car chase to love scene to item number to god-knows-what in under 3-and-a-half minutes, so thoroughly confusing the actors that they have no idea what’s going on, and the director can’t figure out the story either, so he’s asked the make-up man to direct the movie while he goes and reads the script for the 73rd time, trying to figure out why a horse that won the race is actually the loser but a winner in retrospect, while the writers are at a party, and a drunk one says “Lets bring back the dead hero“, and the second writer says “You mean like bees saal baad?” and the third one, more drunk than the first says “Naa, lets not wait so long. Lets bring him back just like that!”

The writers of this movie have written such a spectacularly incomprehensible story that they could have written a text book on 3-dimensional vector mathematics – I would have understood equally little of it. I think the invention of the pen is to blame for it all. The bollywood writer must have seen the pen and exclaimed: “You mean I can write down whatever comes into my head and that will become the story of a movie?!?? This is soooo cooooool!“.

The sensational stupidity of the movie is matched only by the songs. The director must have given the writers the job of putting 5 songs, and the writers had no idea where to put the songs, so they put it in randomly in the story, because hell, who’s going to understand the story anyway? This leads to the unmistakable bollywood style song-dance-movie which progresses like this:

Saif Ali Khan: “How should we pay the bank $100 million?”
… Song & Dance featuring item number shot in a dance club / corn fields of switzerland / a beach in Miami …
Secretary: “I don’t know how we can get so much cash.”

But the biggest problem the writers must have faced is when to end the story, because, the story just keeps going on and on, with absolutely no conclusion in sight. Even at the absolute end, there is yet another twist, that indicated the horrifying possibility of a part “2″ of the movie. In my humble opinion, the right place to end the movie is right after the starting credits – because the rest of the movie adds absolutely no value.

• 18 Comments

You folks will remember that the wife and I were hunting for sofas a while ago and it was a horrendous experience, but we finally managed to agree on one particular sofa, and we bought it. The thing is sitting in our living room now, and the wife is very fond of it, and takes rather good care of it. The other day, I was sitting on the sofa and drinking my morning coffee. The cup was a little hot, so I kept the coffee cup, filled with coffee, on the edge of the armrest.

I can already hear several of you (especially the ladies) sneering and saying – “Don’t keep the coffee cup on the sofa, it’ll fall!”, and, coincidentally, that’s exactly what the wife said at the time too. But you know, I don’t really subscribe to that viewpoint that coffee cups filled with coffee should not be kept on sofas. I mean, I’m not entirely convinced about this whole gravity and falling-objects thing. The story of Newton and his apple sounds very suspicious, and I have reason to believe that it may be a staged hollywood fake! That’s right folks, this whole concept of gravity is a fraud. More on that some other day, but as I mentioned, the wife was not too happy with my keeping the coffee cup on the edge of the sofa’s armrest.

Wife: “Don’t keep the cup there. It’ll spill!”

I was trying to be a little smart then, which, by the way, always seems like a mistake only in retrospect – and always a good idea at the time. I started playing with her, pretending to have spilled the cup, saying “whoops…. hahaha… oh! I almost spilled it… hahaha” etc.. etc.. I even moved the cup closer to the edge, and and waved my arms about the vicinity, pretending to knock it over. The wife gave me The Look. But it was rather amusing at the time.

Just as I was playing the “oops I knocked it over… hahaha…” game, my phone rang. My phone is usually somewhere on the sofa, and I turned around, trying to look for it. At that moment, the entire universe suddenly decided that it would teach me a lesson. My elbow accidentally touched the coffee cup (full of coffee, if I haven’t already mentioned it).

As soon as my brain received the message from the receptors that contact has been made with the coffee cup, which I had kept at the very edge, it caused a level of panic in my brain that hasn’t been seen before. All my brain’s processes – from heart beating, phone searching and sub-concious dreaming – all of them jolted into alert and tried to catch the coffee cup as it toppled over.

But it was too late. From the corner of my eye, I could see that the coffee cup was well beyond its equilibrium state and was on its way down, towards the sofa, and was going to dump the full load of the freshly made, hot coffee right on the sofa.

Oh, Crap! This was the end of my life.

The 25 years that I’ve spent on this planet all flashed in front of me, as the coffee cup was completing its irreversible journey from the edge of the armrest to the sofa. I prayed simultaneously to the Gods and SuperMan, hoping someone will come to my rescue, but, as is the case in most such situations, no help was immediately available.

The cup fell on the sofa, spilling over half of the coffee on the sofa, then bounced once, turned 180 degrees and fell off on the floor. The wife was watching this whole scene from her vantage point from right across the sofa. The cup hit the floor and shattered into several hundred pieces.

Silence.

Deafening Silence.

It would probably have been appropriate at this time to apologize and clean up the mess, but my brain, in its infinite wisdom, after searching over the near-infinite space of excuses, decided to send the signal to my vocal cords to say the following:

“I don’t know how that happened!”

Once my head overcame the stupidity of the previous statement, it had no option to brace for the inevitable moment that follows such accidents – The utterance of those three dreaded words by the wife, the three words that are the declaration of defeat, the three words that indicate a life long fall into slavery, the three words that will always haunt me for all of eternity, the three words that cut through me like the blade of a ninja sword:

Wife: “I TOLD YOU!!!!”

As you can probably imagine, the rest of the evening didn’t go very well. Luckily, there was no violence, but an infinite amout of gyaan was handed to me, and I fully expect this incident to be recalled and invoked on every possible occasion in the future as a conclusive demonstration of my incompetence.

• 13 Comments