A friend of mine got married recently, and before he jumped into the dark abyss that is euphemistically called “married life”, he came to me to ask for some advice. Seeing that I have some experience at this marriage thing, he thought it would be a good idea. Ha!

For a minute, I experienced an elated feeling of Schadenfreude – The pleasure of happiness derived from the suffering of others. Muahahahaaaa!

Asking me for married life advice is like asking a Tiger for advice on how to escape from predators. Not only is the tiger likely to screw you over, but you will also be staring down two dozen razor sharp teeth when you realize that you’ve been given incorrect advice. You know you are being had by the tiger, when it gives advice like: “The best way to escape predators is to use reverse psychology. Approach the predator with boldness, walk up confidently and say something like ‘I ate your mama for lunch, you big ugly beast’. That should save you from the predator”.

I was thinking I’ll give my friend advice like the tiger from the story above, but I was overcome with feeling of pity for the poor guy. I mean, he’s been already handed a death sentence, and he’s going to suffer it the rest of his life without me needing to make it any worse for him.

And it is for this reason, for the benefit of entire mankind that I have decided to come out and give some honest advice for all those guys out there who are on the fence. What follows is the great wisdom from the holy book of Adityaism. Read it, and you will be set free. (Either you or your soul will achieve Moksha, but there are no guarantees).

1. Do everything you can to get out of doing household chores
Back in the day, when guys would get married, they would get a lot of dowry that would make life awesome! These days, you get household chores that make life miserable. There are hundreds of things to do around the house, and if you break down and do EVEN ONE CHORE, then its the gallows for you. Doing just one chore is an admission that you are capable and competent, and that is an image you can’t afford to keep. You must do everything to display your incompetence at the fullest, so you don’t get asked to do any work around the house.

2. #1 doesn’t work. Hire a cook, maid instead.
No matter how hard you try, the one thing you learn in a marriage is that you can’t win. I think it violates some quantum mechanical laws if you win an argument with your wife, so don’t even try. The easiest way to get out of chores is to hire a maid and a cook to do all the household work. You know what they say: “Liberty comes at a price. About 2500 rupees a month.”

3. Never agree to a joint bank account.
I have learned from the wife that some women have a very strange understanding of finance and money. We’ve had many conversations that have raised some philosophical questions about how the world works. For example:

Wife: “I bought two sarees instead of one!”
Me: “What? Why?”
Wife: “Inflation”

Wife: “I was walking by the mall, and I bought a couple of bottles of the perfume ‘Chanel No. 5′ today.”
Me : “Why did you do that?”
Wife: “To improve liquidity.”
Me: “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
Wife: “Yes it does. I read it in Femina.”

There are many more tips, but not enough time today. I might write a book about this someday, but for now, I have to go now and put the clothes in the washing machine.

• 7 Comments

My dear public,

I was on my first class Singapore Airlines flight to Hong Kong for my bi-weekly vacation when I heard about Satyam’s so-called fraud. This is a big tragedy for all of us, especially me. I’ll have to cut my vacation short and come back to my office to reassure my employees, because the employees are worried that my company may be next. Silly employees.

Every few years, a CEO slips and makes a mistake and  gets himself into trouble, and the rest of us have to bear the consequences. But this drill is well-rehearsed. I will now call an “all-hands-meeting”, just like every CEO in the world, and stand in front of 10,000 employees and hand out the usual drivel : “Our business continues to remain strong, and we are well focused. We will continue to concentrate our synergies on leveraging core resources to develop competencies and deliver the best value added services in the industry setting new benchmarks while constantly innovating our balance sheets”. But Ramalinga Raju’s stupidity is not without consequence. I will now by able to buy only a 21-carat diamond for my wife for our half-yearly anniversary instead of our usual cruise in the Caribbean.

Most people don’t really understand the world of CEOs. What CEOs really do and why they are paid so much is such a big mystery, but I can’t see why it should be. CEOs do a very important job, and they get paid for it. Delivering balance sheet innovation is one of the key responsibilities of a CEO. CEOs spend all day strategizing and synergizing (day dreaming), talking to customers and understanding their core problems (playing golf), managing employees and setting direction and vision (telling fairy tales). What comes out of this process at the end of every quarter is called a “balance sheet” (fictional short story with lots of numbers) that drives the stock price up (Caribbean Cruise!).

Many young and aspiring kids ask me “How can I be like you?” and I tell them only one thing. “Have an idol in front of you. Follow his work!”. Personally, my idol is Andrew Sullivan, who was the big boss of AIG. His resume speaks for itself : Wrecked a $100 billion company, drove it to the ground, threaten to take down the entire global economy down with it, then convinced politicians to give AIG $200 billion dollars of taxpayer money, then spent it on a 5-star resort and hunting trip in Europe, all the while getting paid millions of dollars in salary and bonuses.

Bonus. For wrecking a $100 billion company.  Bow down and worship him, he’s GOD!

So, in conclusion, my dear public, don’t get too worried with all that is happening around you. You just focus on getting up in the morning and going to work, clocking the hours all month for just enough money to pay your EMIs and don’t get your head into the world of big money. Leave that to us CEOs.

I have to go now, the air hostess is bringing the 4th course of my 7 course dinner service. ‘Till next time!
The Anonymous CEO.

• 2 Comments

Bollywood never makes the movies that I want to watch. My ideal movie would star Altaf Raja singing his soporific songs, his wife then gets frustrated and kills him. He is then reborn as Himesh Reshamia and comes back and avenges his death in the previous birth by singing to her, and she dies of a ruptured ear drum. Now that’s a movie I’d pay to watch.

Instead, we decided to go to this “Rab Ne Bana Di Joodi” movie. Watching the promos, I thought the story would be something like this: SRK has a daughter who is not getting good marks in her college, so he puts her in a dance class, and she wins consolation prize. The End.

But NOOOOOO! The heroine, who is indeed young enough to play his daughter, is actually HIS WIFE, and the movie is the same story as a 1960′s flop-movie-love-story. The movie theatres should introduce a new feature, where at the security gate, you can leave your intelligence and innate sense of logic, because god forbid if you carry your common sense into the movie theatre, it will try to hang itself watching this movie. The central point of this movie is the assumption that the heroine cannot recognize SRK without his pink glasses. I mean, COME ON!

Instead, it seems, SRK keeps making these same old same old love stories that nobody really understands. His appeal has now dropped below Mithun Chakraborthy’s, as is evident from Rab Ne Bana Di Joodi. This movie is just a remix of his last movie “Om Shanti Om”, with all the remotely interesting parts removed. It features the same endless song featuring a bunch of bollywood celebrities, the same jokes that were used in DDLJ and the same my-monkey-is-constipated “emotional” scenes that have become trademark Shahrukh Khan fare. If you ask me, SRK’s stock is at an all time low, and he should now just liquidate his assets and go into retirement. If he instead keeps making these movies, the government will have to bailout us, since watching this movie will certainly send you into a personal emotional recession.

You have been warned!

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The Wife and I recently were on a vacation in the Maldives. Beautiful country – Lovely beaches, resorts on private islands, a villa on the beach and all that, but that wasn’t what was fun about the vacation. It seems that the whole country is just about 1 meter above sea level. And that makes the entire country’s population freaked out about global warming. Global Warming. Entire Country! What fun!

Now, regular readers will know my intellectually strong position on the topic of Global Warming. So we were walking around the capital city and the tour guide was showing about 8 of us tourists around. He was punctuating every sentence he was saying with gyaan on global warming and how it was going to destroy their country.

Guide: “Global warming is a real problem! The millions of tons of CO2 dumped in the atmosphere is destroying the planet!”
Me: “HA!”

The wife gives me a little nudge followed by a stare. The guide gives me a stare too.

Guide: “… and moving along, we have here an organic waste recycling plant!”
Me: “Why don’t you just feed the organic waste to the fish? I’ll bet it tastes like food to them!”

Everyone turns around and looks at me. I point my finger to my head, telling the rest of the crowd how brilliant I think the idea is.

Guide: “We want to be as green as possible. They say in 50 years, the sea levels will rise and bury our country under water!”
Me: “Relax man. In 5 years, everyone will forget about global warming, just like they forgot about the ozone layer, El Nino and acid rain. And even if global warming is true, you can just move to Russia, since all that snow will have melted and that hell-hole will become livable, thanks to global warming! Hahahaa!”

It turns out that there were 2 Russian couples in our tour group. They gave me such a cold stare that my blood froze. Man! What the tundra does to humans! Anyway, for a bunch of people that were out on vacation trying to relax, this bunch looked rather worried. It seemed like I was the only one having fun! I turned to the wife to share with her this insight, and she gave me the YIIKU look. (For the un-initiated, that’s the “You Idiot! I’ll Kill You!” look)

Surprisingly, our guide ended the tour early. I wonder why. Anyway, later that day, we went to dinner at a restaurant in the resort. After dinner, the waiter came with the bill, and it said 400 US Dollars!!!! Now I was pretty sure we didn’t eat that much, so we must have had a lot to drink. Either that, or the whole country was in this together and decided to screw me. Lovely place though. I highly recommend it!

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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

With so much fear mongering and news coverage about the global financial crisis, I thought I should step in and make it clear to my readers what is really happening. When things go wrong on an epic, never-seen-before scale, you can always rely on the Pointless Wanderings blog to bring some clarity, continuity and calm into your lives. So, without wasting any of your time like all the news channels are doing, here is a quick FAQ.

Q: What’s happening, like, really?
A: Nothing much, I’m doing good. I saw the movie Rock On the other day and it was the….

Q:No, about this Global Financial Crisis thing. What’s happening there?
A: Oh, like that. Hehe… So what has happened is that the global financial system has ground to a halt. The LIBOR has shot up, the CDOs are frozen, and the Fed is promising to buy Commercial Paper now, to let businesses roll over their short term debt.

Q: Huh?
A: OK, here’s a simpler analogy. Imagine a giant airplane mid air. Now imagine that its run out of fuel. And imagine that the plane’s landing gear is damaged. And half of the wing is broken off. And the pilot is drunk. And you’re over the Indian Ocean, 500 kms from land. And the water is infested with sharks.
That’s the state of the global economy right now.

Q: But aren’t the governments going to “bail out” all the banks?
A: Not really. The word “bail-out” is actually a cricket metaphor, as in “taking the bails out to dismiss the batsman”. What the government is calling a bailout is actually a massive nationalization of all the banks. Earlier, only evil dictators and socialist governments used to do it, but now nationalizing banks is suddenly in fashion, because everyone else is doing it.

Q: But that’s not what all the analysis on TV says. They’re saying that the governments are “rescuing” the banks.
A: Before I can answer that question, lets first understand what “analysis” means. Its actually an ancient Greek word, meaning “The process of pulling things from one’s ass : anal-lysis”. All the talking heads on TV are pulling stuff from their behind and filling up the time because the producers of their news programs have to show something to fill time between the ads.

Q: So, how did all this start?
A: This all started with the sub-prime crisis. The sub-prime crisis happened when the traders on wall street could not come up with prime numbers (you know, like 7, 13, 39 etc…), so that they had to settle for a number that was lesser than a prime number. Hence the word sub-prime. What happens when you use numbers that are less than prime numbers is that your mathematical models break down, to the point where you have to divide by zero. And the division by 0 causes all hell to break lose.
You can try it on your calculator. Try dividing any number by 0. The calculator will show an error. That’s what has basically happened in the financial markets.

Q: So what is going to happen now?
A: Well, nothing much. A few more European banks are going to collapse, followed by a huge set of layoffs in the financial sector, which is going to hurt the IT outsourcing companies very hard, and that’s going to trigger a recession everywhere. Entire countries like Iceland and Argentina are going to go bankrupt.
Other than that, everything is going to be OK.

Q: Oh My God! What are we going to do now? What can I do to survive this crisis?
A: You probably should start learning some skills that will be useful when the world goes back to the pre-industrial era. Use the checklist below to determine how likely you are to survive this financial crisis. Answer each question with a YES or a NO

1. I know how to grow my own vegetables and rice
YES ____    NO ______
2. I have some carpentry or blacksmith skills
YES ____    NO ______
3. I have the capacity to do physical labor, and don't just sit in front of a computer all day, a skill that is entirely useless when the world runs out of electricity
YES _____   NO ____

If you answered YES to at least one question, you should survive fine. If you answered NO to all of the questions, now would be a good time to read the wikipedia article on farming.

• 8 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