The wife and I were discussing the meaning of life the other day, and she was a bit surprised when I said that “The purpose of my life is to buy a BMW 7 series car!“. That she was surprised surprised me, because everyone knows that the ultimate goal of life is to buy luxury cars. I haven’t confirmed it with the Dalai Lama and The Pope yet, but I think they agree. (Just FYI: The Dalai Lama has a Land Rover and The Pope owns a modified Range Rover.)

Anyway, as the discussion progressed, I made a very persuasive and passionate argument explaining my position. I think my argument was very logical and consistent, but the wife disagreed, and her exact words, I believe were: “You’re full of nonsense!!”

So here is where I need your help, faithful readers of my blog. My brilliant argument for buying BMWs is below. Read it, and tell me whether you agree with it or not! Make me proud!

Argument for buying fancy expensive cars:

We can generally agree that I am young and foolish. And young and foolish is the best time to buy expensive cars, because if I become old and wise by the time I buy a BMW, I will know better than to waste money on ostentatious display of automotive excess. If I gain wisdom before I gain a BMW, other priorities of life like owning a house, saving for retirement and children’s educations will take priority over my precious BMW. Therefore, it follows that the main priority of my life should be buying a BMW.

There is an advertisement for an insurance company, I think, that shows a young man wanting to spend money on himself, but doesn’t because he ends up thinking about his wife, his kids etc… You know what happens to that man at the end of the ad? He jumps into a river! I don’t know if he drowns or not, but the important thing is that he doesn’t get his Mercedes.

No one wants to drown in a river. Therefore, one must strive to buy a Mercedes as soon as one can to avoid a tragic end like the man from the advertisement.

So, my dear readers. Are you convinced? Is buying a BMW the sole purpose of life? Let me know in the comments!

• 21 Comments

All characters in this story are fictional. Any resemblance to persons living in Bangalore is entirely co-incidental and non-intentional.

There. Now that we have the legal disclaimers out of the way, I can feel free to tell the story.

So, since the last time we checked in with Chitradeep Chetty, he’s been off to the jungles of Bandipur several times and has photographed several tigers. He’s also been showing off these pictures, especially after some of them got published.

A couple of months ago, he invited me, the wife, and a group of other friends to go to his sasuraal (bandipur). He said it would be great, he could get us inside the forest and we could see tigers and other wildlife. It sounded interesting and off we went.

So we’re in the forest on a safari. The forest itself was actually quite beautiful. There were lots and lots of trees and flowers and branches and leaves… but no tigers. There were 8 of us, and after a while, we started getting impatient, and started chatting about the good old days. This upset Chitradeep.

Chitradeep: “Sshhh… guys. Don’t talk loudly in the jungle.”
Me: <in a hushed voice>: “Why?”
Chitradeep: <getting more annoyed, dripping with sarcasm>: “Because the tigers are talking on their phones and you are disturbing them. Huh!”
Me: “That’s absurd…. How are the tigers getting signal here, deep in the jungle?”

There was an awkward silence that followed, where everyone wanted to laugh, but Chitradeep was staring us down, and we settled for a hushed giggle.

We continued to wander in the jungle, and we occasionally saw some birds. And then we saw a big buffalo type thing. It looked just like the buffaloes you can see on the streets of Bangalore, but apparently this one was special, so we all respectfully nodded our appreciation. After a while, we went and waited by a watering hole, hoping that some wildlife will turn up.

We waited, but apparently the animals were not coming. We began to speculate why.
Me: “Why aren’t the elephants coming to drink?”
AJ: “They will come to drink after an hour.”
Me: “How do you know?”
AJ: “Happy hour starts then.”

More hushed giggles and more staring by Chitradeep.

We waited for some more time, and the elephants finally came. It was pretty cool. They were so big and majestic. Several of them, including 3 cute little baby elephants. They came to the water, hung around there for a while and socialized. (With each other, not with us.)

And then, they started to do something crazy. They started picking up mud and throwing it on themselves. Disgusting. That too just after washing themselves. The baby elephants were also rolling in the mud, covering themselves up with dirt.

Me: “That’s disgusting. Why are they doing that?”
Chitradeep: “They do it to protect themselves. The mud acts like a sunscreen to their skin.”
PR: “It doesn’t seem to be working. Look how dark their skin still is.”

More giggles and more staring by Chiradeep.

We started moving along the jungle track when suddenly the driver jammed on the brakes. He shut off the engine. Chitradeep Chetty turned back and motioned us to keep quite. Silence. Just the sounds of the jungle. Everyone is frozen in their seats. We’re all frantically looking around to see what we have run up against. Chitradeep Chetty gets out of the jeep gingerly. He’s stepping very carefully away from the Jeep. He turns back and motions us to come out the jeep slowly and without making noise. We walk up to him. Silence. He points his hand to the ground just around a bush. We peek our heads. And there it is.

Tiger droppings.

I’m like: “What the hell?” and Chitrdeep is all excited that he has seen tiger shit today. It’s like once in a week occurrence here in Bandipur, apparently. After excitingly starting at it for a while, we return back to the lodge, all the while Chitradeep is in high spirits, and as soon as we reach, he goes off to discuss today’s catch with his jungle-lodge buddies.

So, to summarize our trip: We came, we saw, and we smelt.

Anyhow, the trip was quite fun. We saw a few more animals, several peacocks and still more elephants. But no tigers or leopards. Chitradeep Chetty has assured us that the next time we come, he will make sure to schedule a meeting in the tiger’s calendars.

Update: Check out Chitradeep’s wildlife photos here, and judge for yourself if this is a scam!

• 5 Comments

Update: Before/After image added at the end!

The Wife ordered me to get a haircut the other day. I usually follow orders, but with this particular order, I was hesitant. You see, I hate going to barbers. I have this (somewhat unreasonable, but highly plausible) feeling that barbers are agents of an alien army, and that they are just waiting for the right time to start their war on us humans. I don’t want to be in the barber shop when this happens. You’re laughing, but I have plenty of evidence for my theory (more on that in a later post).

Anyway, so the wife was getting increasingly frustrated with me over this, and the more I resisted, the more insistent she became. Eventually, to break the deadlock, she came up with a new idea.

Wife: “Why don’t you go see a stylist?”
Me: “Eh?”
Wife: “I’ll get you an appointment at one of these upscale cutting salons. You’ll enjoy it. They’ll give you the five star treatment!”
Me: “Ohh… I don’t know…”
Wife: “I’ll take that as a ‘YES’”.

And so, she got me an appointment at ‘Javed Habib’ the next day. I resigned to me fate, thinking “How bad can it be?”

I’d obviously never been to a “stylist studio” before.

As I walked into their “shop”, the staircase was full of life sized pictures of small heads with large amounts of hair on them. Even their lounge was stuffed with magazines like “Style Today” or “Hair Haute”. Overall, they’d managed to create a overwhelming atmosphere of intimidation that was designed to keep regular people like me outside. But I had broken through! They were not going to be happy.

The receptionist greeted us. “Welcome to Javid Habib Ma’am”. She greeted the wife. Then she looked at me, unsure of what to say. “We have valet parking outside!”. Great. She thought I was the driver.

“I know. I’ll remember to tip later.”

Shock on the face of the receptionist. Disarray on the face of the wife. Confusion on my face.

Nervous laughter everywhere.

Receptionist: “Right….Heheh… This way… err… Sir?”

She led me through the studio to meet the “stylist” who was going to work on my head. This dude was something to look at.  He had a super-fancy hair style, with lots of spikes and channels running all over his head. Quite a sight.

But the minute he saw me, all the blood drained from his face. He couldn’t believe a peasant like me could show up at his fancy studio.

Stylist Dude: “Err… Sure, OK. Why don’t you sit down” he says to me. I obidiently sit down. He runs his hands through my hair, presumably trying to come up with a plan of action for my makeover.

Stylist Dude: “Do you use badam oil?”
Me: “To drink or put on my head?”

I meant it as a serious question, but he just laughed it off, thinking I was trying to be clever.

Stylist Dude: “Do you apply any gel?”
Me: “Gel?”
Stylist Dude: “Or maybe some Conditioning Serum?”
Me: “What is Serum?”

And that was too much for him. A grave expression of shock came over his face as he exclaimed “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT SEREUM IS?!?” He stopped what he was doing, gave me a scandalized look, wondering if I were a caveman that had time travelled to the 21st century. Everyone in the studio stopped what they were doing and started staring at me.

Me: “Huh…I know what a comb is. Lets start there.”

He turned to the wife with an exasperated look. He had clearly given up on me. My wife rolled her eyes, as if saying “Look what I have to put up with everyday”, and then proceeded to talk to him directly. The two started discussing what style I should wear, whether step-cuts and swirls and asymmetrical length cuts would suit “My Look”. After several minutes of careful deliberation, they decided on a style for me. I was out of the loop for all this time, mostly looking at the ceiling trying not to make eye contact with anyone else. I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying, but it sounded like intelligent conversation to me.

After everything was decided, he got to work. For the next 45 minutes, he clipped and chopped, alternately muttering curses at my poor old barber and instructing me to “grow my side-locks another 5 mm” or “use egg yoke 5 minutes after taking a bath”. I just nodded along.

Eventually he was done. He seemed pretty happy, and the wife seemed happy too. To be fair, I was looking presentable for once. “This is good!”, I thought. That feeling, however, was short lived until he presented me with the bill, that was more than what I’d spent on shampoos and haircuts combined for the past 2 years. I reluctantly paid, and left, somewhat happy that I had got a makeover and had a swanky new hairstyle!

I must point out, however, that the style disappeared the next day, and however much I tried, I couldn’t comb my hair the way he had, and I just can’t make it look like the day before. My hairstyle is back to the state it was – uncombed and haphazard.

Update: Here’s my before and after picture!

Hairstyle BeforeAfter

• 17 Comments

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

We eagerly popped in the Basic Instinct Video CD into the computer driver, and eagerly started up the computer to watch what was rumored to be the greatest movie of all time. But the computer just frustrated us. It was too slow to play the cutting-edge-at-the-time MPEG video that was on the disk. The computer constantly stuttered and jerked, and couldn’t  manage to play the movie smoothly. Getting your hopes up and meeting with disappointment like that is very frustrating, and encourages people to do stupid things. We knew that we had to make the computer faster, and that there was a setting on the motherboard that would boost the speed of the CPU all the way to 66 MHz. I suggested we should enable that setting, so that the computer would become faster, and we could watch the movie. But my friend was skeptical that would work.

Friend: “If the computer could run faster, why would Intel make it run slower on purpose?”
Me: “Because Intel is stupid. They probably don’t know it can run faster.”
Friend: “What? But they made the CPU! How can they not know?”
Me: “Look… Do you know how your Kidney works? The kidney is inside you, but that doesn’t mean you know how it works.”
Friend: “Hmmm….Good point!”
Me: “Of course! The CPU is just like a Kidney. We’re just making the kidney do whatever it does, only faster. Its that simple!”

And so, we shut down the computer and flipped the switch on the motherboard, and started up the computer. The computer booted up fine, and when windows started, we started the movie. This time it played brilliantly! SUCCESS! HAHahahaha!”

We settled in to watch the famous “Basic Instinct” movie. I ran to the kitchen and quickly made some popcorn, you know, to make the movie experience more authentic.

The movie started. Just 2 minutes into the movie, my friend started sniffing around, trying to smell something.
Friend: “Do you smell something burning?”
Me: “Its just the popcorn.”
Friend: “No… I think something is really burning.”
Me (lost in the movie): “Shhh… This is the good part… Look…”

Sharon Stone, the heroine of the movie, sits down on the chair in the police station and lights up a cigarette. The policeman asks her a question and… FLASH… BLUE SCREEN!

The computer crashed! The screen reads “Windows has encountered a fatal error and has shut down to limit damage to your Computer!”. What the hell? Limit Damage to the computer? What damage?

Just then, from the corner of my eye, I see a white smokey thing coming out from the back of the computer cabinet. Uh Oh. This is not looking good. I open up the case of the computer to see what’s smoking inside the computer. The case is very hot to touch. And just as I take out the side cover of the computer… BOOOOM… a fog of white smoke comes out of the computer!

Me (Coughing) : “EEiiikkees!!! WHAT IS THIS!!!!”
Friend: “Cough.Cough… I think someone is coming… COUGH COUGH!”

The timing couldn’t be worse. My parents have just returned back home. I can hear them as they walk in.

Dad: “Something smells weird… Something is burning!”

He walks straight into my room. By this time, I’ve had the presence of mind to pull the power cable off, but its too late. The room is filled with smoke!

Dad: “WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?!”
Me: “Hi Dad. What’s up? How is Murthy uncle?”
Dad: “Is the… Oh No! Is the computer burning?!”
Me: “NO NO! Technically, its only smoking…”
Dad: “THE COMPUTER IS SMOKING!?!?!”
Me: “Well, look at the bright side. At least I’m not smoking! He heh.”

My Dad never finds these kinds of jokes funny.

Dad: “How did this happen?!?”
Friend: “I… I think my mom is calling me. Bye then!” and he ran off
Me: “Ummm… Actually… I… I set windows screensaver to “Fire”, and the fire…JUMPED OUT… and hmm…. I mean…The virus must have given the computer a fever and… maybe… eerrr…”

In retrospect, I should have blamed it on a short-circuit or something, but if I had that kind of presence of mind, I’d be a different person altogether. Anyway, after that, my Dad put me to computer classes, because he thought I should wreck other people’s computers before trying it at home.

You know how they say that there are lessons in failure? I learnt my lesson that day too. “Always have a believable excuse ready before starting off on any project”. This mantra has served me well over the years!

• 11 Comments

Back when I was a kid, I used to get a lot of toys as gifts, but they never used to last. I loved opening up my toys to see what’s inside them. My dad used to get me toys, and I used to pretend to play with them for a while until my dad was watching. As soon as he went inside, I used to take a screw driver and open them up, and fascinatingly dissect all the parts inside them. Of Course, I could never put them back, so when my dad used to ask what happened to the new toy he bought me, I used to say that our kid next door stole them from me. The poor kid got a bad reputation, and I got new toys.

Anyway, this fiddling was not limited to just toy cars. My Dad had just bought me a brand new computer. This was way back in the late 90s when computers cost more than a years’ supply of household groceries. My dad thought of it as an investment though, since he figured that introducing me to new technology would pique my curiosity and help me learn lots of new things. He was right, I did learn a lot of new things. Mostly cheat codes to games like “Prince of Persia” and how to find secret levels in “Dangerous Dave”.

After the computer was around for several weeks, I started to wonder how it works. During this time, they used to teach us “Computer Science” in school, so I figured that the teacher would know. So I went and asked her if we students could open up one of the school computers to study what’s inside it.

Me: “Teacher, can you open up the computer and show what’s inside?”
Teacher: “Why do you want to see what’s inside? I already drew the block diagram on the board yesterday. What were you doing then?”
Me: “No, I mean, can we see what’s REALLY inside. There can’t just be 3 boxes called “ALU” “CPU” and Memory… there has to be cooler stuff inside…”
Teacher: “You’re not supposed to open up computers!”
Me: “Why?”
Teacher: “Because there are viruses inside!”
Me: “You mean computer viruses? But…”
Teacher: “Yes, computers have viruses inside them just like dogs have rabies inside them. If you get one of those computer viruses, you could fall sick and DIE!”
Me: “Oh?”
Teacher: “That’s right. These are the real things that they don’t teach in your text books. Listen to me!”

I took what the teacher said to heart, and got really freaked out. I mean, rabies was bad enough, but what would happen if I really got a computer virus? Scary stuff! I decided never to open up my other toys, God knows what other viruses are inside them.

That feeling lasted about 2 weeks, before I was itching to open up the computer again.

I had a friend in my class who was also interested in these kinds of things. The two of us gathered the courage one day and decided to really open up the computer to see what’s inside. The opportunity came when my parents went out one day, and my friend and I were left alone at home. We decided to take the big step.

I got a big can of cockroach killer spray (in case any viruses jumped out), and then proceeded towards the computer. I had the screwdriver in my hand and my heart was thumping. As I screwed apart the back of the computer, my friend was starting to panic.

Friend: “What if we die?”
Me: “At least we’ll die bravely!”
Friend: “Should we get a flashlight? I’ve heard that the dark monsters are afraid of light. The viruses may be too…”
Me: “Keep quiet… Just be ready with the cockroach spray of something happens…”

I unscrewed the cabinet from the back, one screw at a time. When all the 4 screws came out, both of us looked at each other, prepared to face whatever monsters would jump out of the computer. I slowly removed the side cover plate out and……..

It was absolutely brilliant. There were no monsters inside! Just a beautiful collection of multi-colored fans, wires and cables. At the bottom was a big circuit board, with literally thousands of shiny metallic wires soldered. It was like a giant city for little electronic chips. Our experiment was a success!

Before my parents returned, I had screwed the side panel back on to the computer. We decided never to mention that we had opened up a super expensive, delicate piece of sensitive machinery to my Dad. He would have flipped out.

But since we had opened it up once, we couldn’t just stop then! We kept up with our guilty pleasure of waiting till there was no one in the house, then secretly opening up the case and going through the insides of the computer. One of us would constantly be on the watch near the door to warn if someone unexpectedly came back. Once we had our fill, we’d careful hide away all evidence of our actions, and hide away all the screwdrivers and other jumpers we’d removed from the computer below the bed. I guess this is what the other kids did with their Playboy magazines.

After a few weeks of this, we’d learnt enough about the workings of the computer to know about motherboard jumpers and clock speeds. I remember thinking at the time that the motherboard looked ABSOLUTELY nothing like what the teacher was telling us was inside a computer. It was like telling kids that there is a giant chariot pulling the sun across the sky everyday, and the kids believed that, never asking any questions, just believing. I became convinced since then that my school was a big fraud.

Anyway, so this was the time that the Video CD arrived on the scene. One small shiny silver disk contained a whole movie! Someone told us that we could watch the movie on a computer, provided that we had a fast enough computer. My friend, the same guy that helped me open up the computer, got hold of one of these disks containing the movie “Basic Instinct”. We’d heard a lot about this movie, and wanted to check it out ourselves. So, as usual, when there was no one in the house, we popped the CD inside the computer, and waited for the good times to start.

Update: Part 2 is here

• 9 Comments

After my previous encounter over negotiating household chores went down the drain, I was thinking of new ways to try and get out of the drudgery. I really really hate cleaning the table after dinner, and I was summoning all my creative forces to help me on this one.

After cleaning the dining table yet another time, I sat down all exhausted in front of the TV. The news was coming on, where the TV news anchor was making a big deal about rising inflation.
TV anchor: “…and with the rising prices of petrol and food grains, it is the poor aam admi that is suffering…”

Me: “That’s stupid. The inflationary pressure is being created by the central bank trying to hold down the rupee to aid special interest exporters groups and not to mention the fiscal deficit created by the absurd agricultural and commodity subsidies meant for… you guessed it… the poor aam aadmi. See?”

The wife gives me a blank stare.

Me: “You don’t see?”

As soon as I said that, a profound understanding of the universe hit me. In that moment, I had the deepest inspiration o my life. It came to me like a bolt of lightning, and I suddenly saw the world crystal clear, and my brain had it all figured it out.

Economics! The impenetrable fog of misunderstanding that permeates our lives, the key to confusion and obfuscation.

Me: “I just had a great idea!”
Wife: “Really? What?”
Me: “Lets have an auction for all the household chores!”
Wife: “Excuse Me?”
Me: “Yeah! Like how the government auctions off the spectrum to the Mobile companies.”
Wife: “Ooo… I don’t know…”
Me: “This is a great idea! We’ll write all the household chores on a piece of paper, and then we can bid on them!”
Wife: “Is this like the time when you tried to convince me that the XBOX is an investment?”
Me: “THE XBOX IS A VERY GOOD INVESTMENT!!! WE SHOULD BUY 2 OF THEM! But anyway, that’s not what this is about.”
Wife: “This sounds like another of your schemes!”
Me: “No, really. It’ll be a fair and genuine auction. Here’s how it works: First, we take some fake money…”
Wife (voice dripping with sarcasm): “Real auction, fake money. This doesn’t sound suspicious at all…”
Me (ignoring, completely excited): “…and then we write “I won’t do chore XXX” on pieces of paper…”
Wife: “…wait… I thought this was about doing chores, and not avoiding them…”
Me: “and then we bid for the pieces of paper. At the end of the auction, I won’t do all the chores that I bought, so you have to do them and vice versa”
Wife: “Wait… This is ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense…”
Me: “No.. No… Think about it. It is completely fair. Since both of us have the same about of fake money, we have equal buying power, and we can buy chores that we REALLY REALLY don’t want to do, but we can’t buy them all, so we’ll have to do SOME chores…”
The Wife is holding her head and giving me THE LOOK.
Me (still not getting the hint…) “…and the price of the chores reflect the marginal scarcity… of.. the… err… hmm… Why are you holding your head? Headache?”

SCORE!!! Economic Theory: 1 Common Sense: 0

After much convincing and explaining, I finally managed to convince the wife that this was a fair scheme to divide the housework and it would work perfectly. I started writing all the household chores on pieces of paper, and lined up some fake monopoly money, and we were ready to start. This was going to be fun…

[Update: Part 2 is here]

• 11 Comments

“You don’t do any work around the house!” the wife said, making no effort to hide her obvious displeasure.

A conversation that starts like this is rarely going to end agreeably, and at some level, I already knew that. But my consciousness thought it could squirm out of this one too, just as it had done for the last 25 years of its existence.

Regular readers of this blog will remember my brilliant strategies to avoid cutting tomatoes that has worked with reasonable success. Being lazy and avoiding work is a high risk strategy, because you may end up doing more work that you’re trying to avoid (I’ve discovered this through my extensive experience in this area), it is the morally right thing to do. As the great Socrates once said:

He who strives to be lazy,
Will live life nice and cozy.
Doing do work, that’s just crazy,
That’s the secret of life my dear rosy!

Translation: “Lazy == Good”.

I decided to take the path shown by enlightened souls like Socrates and Deve Gowda, and was ready to stand firm by the principles I believed in.

“No more excuses. From tomorrow, cleaning the dining table after dinner is your work.” the wife said.

This is one of the great injustices of life that nobody focuses on. A dining table takes costs a fortune to buy, not to mention the several years of visiting furniture shops. After doing all that for the dining table, you’d think the wretched thing would be grateful to you, but NOOoooooo! You have to clean that damned thing. What injustice! The media should be focusing on these real issues – issues that matter – instead of just going about hyping irrelevant things like Global Warming.

Anyway, I was in a no-win situation. I simply looked the other way and said “hmmmmmm……”

“You’re also going to make the bed from tomorrow”.
“I protest!” I say feebly, without any conviction in my voice whatsoever.
“That’s fine. You can protest all you want. But just get the work done.”
“I don’t want to make the bed. I don’t like to do that.” I said, trying to make a squeaky voice to gain her sympathy. I’m going to try and push my luck to see if something comes out of this conversation that is certainly heading towards a showdown.
“Well, that’s too bad.” The wife says, not biting my sympathy maneuver.
“OK, I’ll trade that with you. You make the bed and I’ll do some of your work.” Brilliant! I had found an opening, a way to wiggle out of this!
“What work of mine can you possibly want to do?” the wife says, in a deeply cynical voice.
“I’ll clean the table after dinner today.”, I say. Getting close… one more strike and…
“But I’ve already cleaned the table!” she says, exasperated.
“And whose fault is that?” I say, triumphantly.  SCORE!!!!

For the casual observer, it may seem obvious that this argument had gone in my favour. I could have almost said “Hence Proved!”, and the force of logic and reason was with me. But logic and reason don’t count in situations like this, apparently. The wife then proceeded to PROVE to me, in her own special way, that I was going to do both chores in the house for the next month.

This battle had been lost, but the war has just begun. I started to hatch my next brilliant scheme…

• 8 Comments