There comes a time in every married man’s life that he is faced with the difficult prospect of having to cut tomatoes. If you have had any experience with vegetables, you’ll know it is a painful and difficult experience. I’m sure making someone cut violates some fundamental human rights, but I’ve not been able to find the relevant law yet. I’m still working on it.

In the meanwhile, I’ve come up with some innovative strategies that I’ve been using over the past few months to avoid getting assigned any work, especially cutting tomatoes. I call these strategies Pretty Effective Tomato Avoidance or PETA.

Strategy #1: The preemptive denial
The preemptive denial is a very effective strategy, but it needs to be executed very delicately. The core of this strategy is to avoid getting assigned the cutting of tomatoes in the first place by making oneself seemingly unavailable. And for this strategy, I must extend my most sincere thanks to Mr. Lalit Modi for creating the Indian Premier League matches. You see, the IPL matches are all highly optimized for PETA (Pretty Effective Tomato Avoidance). All matches are in the evenings, exactly during cooking time, the time when you are most likely to get assigned tomato duty.

Here’s an illustration of how to use this strategy:
Pretend to be deeply engrossed in the match while simultaneously keeping an eye on the tomatoes.
As soon as the Wife approaches the Tomatoes and is about to say “Can you please….” scream like this:
“WOOOHOOOO!!! Hohooo!!! WHAT A SIX! This McCullum dude is awesome! Did you see how he hit through the line by picking the ball of the bowlers hand and turned his wrists along with the anticipated spin on the up? Too much….”

It is important that you use the appropriate cricketing jargon so as to make it convincing that you are really engrossed in the match. If you don’t time it right, then this will happen:
Wife: “Can you please cut the tomatoes?”
If you forget to scream at this point, or if the wife completes her sentence, you will have to respond
You: “The Tomatoes? OK, I guess…”
GAME OVER.

Strategy #2: The negative learning variations
This strategy has existed for a very long time and is already widely practiced, but I have come up with some innovations of my own here. Basically, the strategy involves doing such a bad job that you don’t get asked to do it again. But this is not as easy as it seems. You have to be quite thorough and meticulous in doing the bad job. You have to do a good bad job, otherwise it won’t be bad enough and the tomatoes will come back again the next time.

To do a really effective and efficient bad job, you foremost need to have a calm mind and think clearly. The first strategy involves taking the Tomatoes, and saying that you just saw an amateur jugglery show on TV and have learnt how to juggle. You then take a few tomatoes and throw them into the air, and let them fall and generally make a mess. Bonus points if the tomatoes fall on the sofa, because if that happens, you won’t be allowed anywhere near a tomato for several years. Mission accomplished.

Another useful variant is to say that you saw a show on Discovery Channel that showed how to properly cut tomatoes using a food processor. Now, if you try to cut tomatoes using a food processor, it makes a royal mess (and some tomato soup, but no cut tomatoes). Don’t ask me how I learnt that you can’t cut tomatoes using a food processor. Anyway, when it is realized that you’ve made a mess, then you won’t be asked to do it again. Success!

Strategy #3: Gross incompetence strategy.
This is actually an extreme version of Strategy #2. In #2, you demonstrated that you can’t be trusted with tomatoes, but this strategy takes it to the next level by demonstrating that you can’t understand instructions. You have to act and behave like a complete idiot. Again, this is not as easy as it seems, and it takes a lot of will power and discipline, although it comes naturally to some people like me.

According to this strategy, when you are asked to cut tomatoes, walk up to the fridge and take out some cabbage. Then proceed to cut it. Experienced foodies will immediately realize at this point that cabbage and tomatoes are not very substitutable, and that annoys the hell out of the person in charge of the cooking. So much that they will do the cutting of the tomatoes themselves.

Another way this can be accomplished is to do the following. When you are asked to cut tomatoes, run down to the local grocery shop and buy 2 Kgs of tomatoes. Now you have twice as many tomatoes, and none of them are cut, increasing the ratio of uncut tomatoes substantially. It is my repeatable experience that this almost certainly leads to you not being asked to do ANYTHING again, which is really the jackpot.

Now that you’ve learnt all the PETA tactics, go ahead and use them. I wish all of you a tomato-cutting-free life!

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I’ve recently been presented with a very serious moral dilemma. At office, a new gym recently opened this week, and it is on the same floor as my desk is. But that’s not the problem. I have enough will power to resist the nudges and bribes that my team mates have been offering me to go to the gym. The problem is in fact, a more serious one.

You see, the gym has several treadmills that have a TV on them along with a cable connection. And that means Cartoon Network too! This is a serious ethical issue in Adityaism. You see, going to the gym is a sin, but watching TV is a virtue. And unfortunately, thanks to the deteriorating moral fiber of society, increasingly more technological advances of the 21st century are mixing sin with virtue.

But, as is allowed in my newest religion, I am allowed to take only the good parts of all the things and ignoring the parts that I don’t like. I’ve been trying to figure out how to watch the TV on the treadmills without subjecting myself to the humiliation of exercise. I’ve been thinking for several days and I came up with a couple of plans.

Plan #1:
Fortunately, the chair that I have at my desk has wheels, and I thought I could just push the chair to the gym and sit next to the treadmill. I even thought I could put up my feet on the treadmill’s dashboard (you know, the part that shows your heartbeat and stuff) and watch my cartoons.

Plan #2:
My second plan was to put up a web cam on the treadmill and hook it up to a computer and broadcast it to my desktop. This way, I can enjoy the cartoons in comfort at my desk without going anywhere near the evil place. I even planned to take one of those tall stands from office that they keep the whiteboards on, and mount the webcam on top of that. It even makes the correct angle to catch the TV properly on the webcam.

Unfortunately, both my plans flopped. Apparently, there is a evil monster guarding the first level of hell (he calls himself the “gym instructor” though), and he laid out some rules which didn’t fit my plans. He wouldn’t let me sit in a chair in his gym, and he certainly wouldn’t let me put up a web cam on a stilt next to his precious treadmill. And so, I came up with THE MASTER PLAN to defeat the evil monster

MASTER PLAN:
Since the instructor’s two conditions were that I needed to be ON TOP the treadmill with the treadmill RUNNING if I was to watch TV, I decided I was going to satisfy both his precious conditions, but in my own special way. I’m going to wear ROLLER-SKATES to the gym, and stand on his stupid treadmill. The treadmill can run as fast as it wants, and the only thing its going to move are the wheels of my Roller-Skates.  All the cartoons I want to watch, and without even breaking a sweat! Muahahahahahaaa! Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

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A friend of mine works at this cool company that’s created this new social networking thing. Its called LifeBlob, and a part of it shows what’s called your “Timeline”. Its basically a history of stuff that happened to you it uses that to link up people. Its pretty cool actually, but that’s not the point of this story. When I saw this thing, I got thinking of my own life’s timeline. I tried to document what all I’ve done so far in my life:

1982: Born on Planet Earth. A lot of things went wrong that year.

1983: On my first birthday, I was telling stories apparently. No one else understood them, but it seems I myself found them incredibly funny.

1985: First day of school and I tripped and fell on my head on my way to class. Had to skip school that day. I bunked my first ever class on day 1.

1988: Pushed my Sister into a bucket of Gulab Jaamons that were to be served at my Aunt’s wedding.

1989: For the hell of me, I can’t figure out how to write the cursive letter “s”. I hadn’t seen Taare Zameen Par then, else would have claimed to be dyslexic.

1995: Introduced to computers through “Dangerous Dave” and “Prince of Persia” video games. I’m totally hooked.

1996: Set fire to my computer, literally, with smoke and all. I was trying to overclock the CPU because my computer wasn’t fast enough to play Doom. Tried to convince Dad it was a computer virus that burnt the motherboard and melted the CPU without success.

1998: A friend and I co-invent the reverse-proxy method of attendance acquisition. Forget to get a patent on it, now everyone uses it.

2000: Time to decide between Engineering and Tobacco farming. I pick Computer Engineering. Big Mistake.

2002: Bomb hoax at college, incidentally, on the day of the exams. I swear I didn’t do it, but if it wasn’t for that call, I’d definitely have flunked.

2004: Bought a PS2 on ebay with my first salary.

2006: Lost 6 Kgs on a trip to China because I couldn’t find anything to eat.

2008: Writing blog posts on a Friday night and trying to figure out how to get all this online on the lifeblob site. Yay! for all things 2.0!

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If you’ve been following the IPL, the tickets at several stadiums went on sale today. Check out the details of ipl tickets here. Pretty reasonably priced, in my opinion!

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It’s nearly one year since the wedding day, and it has been a very interesting learning experience for me. I have made the startling discovery that there is a secret code-language called “wifeese” that the wife speaks. It sounds and has words just like regular language, but has hidden meanings that take a lot of time to decipher. I’ve figured out quite a few of them, and here I present to you the “Top 5 Wifese Statements and what they really mean”

At number 5, we have: “There’s nothing on TV today. *yaaawwwwn*”
What it really means: “I’m really really bored, so stop writing your stupid blog and take me out to dinner tonight. You married me, not the blog, damnit!”
This one was pretty obvious for me to figure out because if you didn’t get it the first time, progressively agressive statements get made until the last step, which is to get hit by a thick book in the head.

Number 4: “Hi Sweetie…. How was your day?”
What it really means: “I got us tickets to the latest movie for Friday Night. If you try to resist or make up an excuse, you won’t get breakfast for a week.”
I had to learn this the hard way, after my several attempts at avoiding the inevitable friday night movies. I’ve come to realize that breakfast is much more valuable than spending 3 hours sleeping in the theatre.

At number 3:  “How does this dress look on me?”
What it really means: God only knows.

Heck, I think even He won’t know how to answer this question. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not really a question, but more the signal of an impending storm. Kinda like if you see a shark swimming towards you. It’s too late to do anything about it.
And at Number 2: “Do you have a minute? Can you come here please?”
What it really means: “Cut these tomatoes.”
The first few times I was called like this, I rushed expectedly, hoping it would be some new gift. But like Pavolv’s dogs who figured out what the ringing bell really meant, I have come to figure out what that invitation really means, and try to avoid it as much as possible.

And finally, we have The Top Wifese Statement And What It Really Means:
Number 1: “We’ll Talk about it later!”
What it really means: “We will stop discussing this issue now, and I will wait till you forget about it, and when the actual time comes I will convince you that we had talked about it earlier, and you had agreed to go with what I want to do.”
I totally didn’t get what this really meant for a long time. I always thought that the matter will duly come up for discussion later and promptly forgot about it. I began to get suspicious when I “discovered” that I had agreed to buy the wife 7 pairs of shoes, a sofa, a dining table and had also “volunteered” to vacuum the house twice a week.

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Back when I was in school, maybe 5th standard, the teachers were always trying to “Develop My Personality”. For some reason, they believed that everyone should be an “all-rounder”, and my complete lack of mastery in even one of their standard fields (marks-scoring, drawing and a bunch of other inconsequential fields) must have been worrying them.

So, when it was the time of the annual school fest, the teachers tried to persuade me to join the debate competition, and when I resisted, “volunteered” me to participate in it.

There was little I could do to resist it at that point, and found myself up on stage with 4 other participants. I was bored as hell, but the teachers had also forced the rest of the school to sit there as audience to watch the showdown. Making kids sit down silently when they all want to go play cricket, and making them listen to 4 kids argue about things no one has any clue about. Oh, this was going to go very smoothly.

The moderator opened up some slip, and read out the topic “What is the best way to stop pollution?”

Predictably, the other 3 kids got hyper, and starting fiercely arguing amongst themselves:

Kid #1: “…and the buses are spewing out black smoke. If I were the Prime Minister, I’d ban exhaust pipes in vehicles. No exhaust pipe, no black smoke…”
Kid #2: “My esteemed friend makes a very good point there, but river pollution is a bigger problem. The oxygen levels have fallen to 2% over the last few years, and the fish…”
Me: *yyaaaawwwwwnnnnnn*

As the kids started discussing whether small fish can swim fast enough to avoid the sharks, who had apparently come to the rivers because the seas were getting polluted too, I was slipping deeper and deeper into sleep. To fight off the urge to lie down on the stage and sleep, I thought it a good idea to speak up in the debate.

Me: “The real problem is some kids that fart all the time in class. The farting is an enormous source of air pollution around the school”

The audience let out a collective gasp. For a second, everyone was silent trying to figure out if I was being serious. Everyone started looking at me. This unexpected attention, for some reason, charged me up even more, and I felt like continuing to talk…

Me: “That’s right! I don’t want to take names, but some people whose names rhyme with Dakshay should be questioned every morning about what they’ve eaten, and if…”

Some kid, presumably Akshay, screamed out from the audience:
“Well, it’s better than wearing stinky socks everyday!”

Now this remark was clearly aimed at me, but Kid #1, who was well known for stinky feet took it personally, screamed back, but this time at the audience instead of his fellow debaters: “At least I take a bath everyday, unlike my esteemed friend Rajesh, who…”

At this point, the debate became enormously interesting, with the introduction of a flying shoe into the scene. The flying shoe originated from somewhere deep in the audience, and the previous owner undoubtedly did not regret loosing this shoe because it was really really stinky. It landed right on Kid #1’s podium and knocked it off. But instead of going on the backfoot, he jumped out of his podium and went to face the audience head on…
“Ha! Your socks stink so bad that even your shoe can’t stand the rotten smell!”

No sooner than he’d finished saying this, another 100-page notebook was hurled from somewhere deep inside the crowd. The teachers sensed trouble at this point, and one of them came out on stage to try to control the rapidly deteriorating situation, but the damage had already been done. Several water bottles, class work books and homework books were hurled in the general direction of the stage, with the owners of these books only too glad to get rid of them.

The event was talked about for days later in a very negative light by the teachers, but I thought it was a great success! The entire audience got involved in the debate in the only way the knew how: By throwing crap at the stage! They should have declared me the winner!

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Q: My room mate is very dirty and lazy. He doesn’t do any work around the place and just contributes to making it dirtier and smellier. He’s so lazy that I don’t know what to do. How do I get him to be a little more clean?
- RC

A: You have the wrong idea about laziness, my friend. Laziness is a virtue, not a vice. It is a common misconception that evolution’s law is “Survival of the Fittest“. The modified, 21st century version is “Survival of the Laziest“. Look at the tigers - They have to get out and go hunting for food every day. Hard work. We humans just have to move a few fingers to call Dominos and food shows up at our doorstep. Guess which of the two is becoming extinct?

Laziness should be celebrated. But don’t get fooled into thinking that it is easy. Laziness is a special skill that you have to work on. It takes dedication, perseverance and most importantly lots of will power and self-discipline. You should also refuse to clean up your apartment. Be even more messier than your room mate. Leave the dishes unwashed and clothes dirty. The one who gets affected by the stinky smell first looses, and your goal is to not be the looser. As you can see, being lazy is hard work. But as Socrates said: “Victory comes to those who persevere the longest”. So go forth, by strong and be lazy, until your roommate caves in and cleans the dishes. May the light of Adityaism be with you.

Q: My hubby recently tried to pull a stunt on my by trying to miss his GYM class, and so I’m trying to take him out for evening walks. But he keeps resisting, and always wants to watch TV. What should I do?
- TW

A: You know how they say: “It takes a criminal to catch a criminal”? Well, I think in your case, you have to use the same strategy. Try to go into your hubby’s shoes. If you were a lazy couch potato that always wanted to watch TV, what would you do?

If you think for a little bit, it’ll become obvious that you would want to sit on your sofa and watch TV all day. And there’s your answer. The one keyword that is the root cause of all evil in this world, and that has literally brought death and destruction to our civilization.

The Sofa.

The presence of a Sofa in your living room is what is making your hubby want to watch TV. I don’t suppose you bought it, did you? If I were to guess, I’d say you went and bought a sofa (maybe a Dining Table too?) and because of that your hubby doesn’t exercise. You have no one but yourself to blame. Buying sofas is the greatest sin known to mankind, (unfortunately it has not caught on with womenkind), and since you have performed such a big sin, you must now perform the Adityaism ritual to cleanse the evil spirits.

You need to buy your hubby a 56″ LCD HDTV with remote control. Once you do this, you have to let your hubby watch the TV for 12-and-a-half years, and then your will be forgiven of your sins. Don’t waste time - Go and do it now!

Q:  Have u ever understood the ibibo ad? “Don’t be a balti” ( wtf does that mean !?! )
- RXP

A: You know, I didn’t get the ad the first time either, but then I used my superior reasoning and logical abilities and figured it out. ibibo actually stands for “I Believe In Baltis Overall”. It has a deep philosophical meaning.

See, the Balti, or the empty bucket, is a metaphor for the vast expanse that life is into which the ocean of experience dips to fill the bucket with the water of friends. Therefore, the social network of the balties connects you to your inner self (with your bucket spirit) and takes you through the shower of wisdom and you then treat the balti as a reservoir for dirty clothes (a metaphor for intellectual purity).

It’s quite simple when you get it.
If you would 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 a secret!

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