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!

• 13 Comments

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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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!

• 4 Comments

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

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