Never Say Die.....

Smoking Hypochondriac: Doctor! How do I begin? You know the graphics the damned Minister Ramadoss promised to put on cigarette packets ($#@#$%#& ... )?
Doctor: Yeah! I know. He did promise. But they have not appeared so far have they?
Smoking Hypochondriac: I don't need to! Coz I have already seen them! And the graphics on the package if they ever come will be too late!
Doctor: How come? That's strange!
Smoking Hypochondriac: I had a chest pain and a severe bout of coughing so I saw a chest specialist.
Doctor: And?
Smoking Hypochondriac: Well, he told me to have a chest X ray taken. And I did!
Doctor: Then?
Smoking Hypochondriac: The lungs! It was all rotten- I swear! Though the X rays were too hazy for me. And I fear I have ulcers in my mouth!
Doctor: Really? We need to do a check up and run some tests pronto! (Praise Ramadoss!) On the lighter side if what you say is correct we could send your chest x rays to the cigarette people so they could put it on their cigarette covers. The best graphics ever, I bet. You could even make some money that way! (Praise Ramadoss!)
Smoking Hypochondriac: Doctor, I also fear I have a stroke coming! I am dying, Doctor! Please help me!
Doctor: Now, now, be calm. Let us run those tests first. (Praise Ramadoss!) Don't get so excited. We are there to help you out.
Smoking Hypochondriac: And doctor, I am out of breath. The cigarettes did that to me. And I never suspected!
Doctor: OK... Let's put you on oxygen for half an hour. And I shall add an expectorant to it, so breathe easy. (Praise Ramadoss)
Doctor: Why don't you give up cigarettes, by the way? That's the best option you have right?
Smoking Hypochondriac: It's too late Doctor. Every time I think about my afflictions I reach out for a cigarette!
Doctor: Ok. First things first! First the chest x rays. Then oxygen and the decongestant; after that maybe some oral application for your mouth, and maybe we could do put you on some medicine to prevent that stroke you said was coming. (Praise Ramadoss!)

Will this happen to all of us one day?

In honor of the perpetual net surfer

Birth of a SalesMan

We have all had a brush with salesmen. You find them selling lottery tickets, mobile phone subscriptions, credit cards, bank loans, even safety pins and rubber bands; they promise you everything under the sun.
While travelling by the evening train to my hometown on Saturdays,I happened to come across a very astute salesman selling CDs which he claimed contained every single legal form you would ever need in your life - right from passport application forms to legal documents for your dying will. Presumably he had downloaded the online forms from government sites and burnt them onto CDs and then packaged them neatly in sealed covers with his photograph on it and a blurb saying that he held the patent for the contents within.
He started his promotional address with a challenging question - how many on the train had travelled to the state capital just to get hands on a legal form they needed for some urgent procedure or an application form for a government job?
With his CD, he claimed all that would stop. Every single form under the sun was now available on his CD- his patented product, he repeated. If the customer did not have a personal computer they could visit the nearest DTP center (found at every nook and corner of my home state mostly in the business of printing wedding cards and promotional brochures) where they could get a printed hard copy of the soft version.
Clever move I would say. Lots of people do a lot of unnecessary travel in their lifetime just to procure a necessary legal form - since the government is not yet so tech savvy and printed forms are the norm. If forms are available online, you wouldn't know the site to download it from and even then they were subject to frequent change and get outdated at a whim.
I saw things in a different light.
Procuring the government forms are only 10% of the pain. Forms are subject to frequent changes, almost once every year, as I mentioned earlier.
But the main headache is filling up these forms. The entries on goverment forms have very ambiguous and dubious titles which only the scribes sitting outside the goverment forms can discern and fill. If you attempted filling government forms by yourself, you would have to fill a couple of them until you came up with one which you presumed had all the correct entries. Even then, there was always the risk, that when you got back to the office to submit the form, the clerk in charge would dismiss your application with a shake of his head pointing to some entry which was wrongly filled in your carefully filled up application, and ask you to re-enter the details on a fresh form making you lose your time, money on a new form and more importantly losng your position on the never-ending que where you were. Filling up income tax return forms, filing for a fresh passport or a PAN card are big headaches that most would gladly pay an agent to fill up, paying a king's ransom in the process.
The salesman was playing up on those fears and he did get quite a lot of customers- many of them quite well educated, mostly middle aged gentlemen and old couples. when the salesman added that some young budding entrepreneur could also set up a small business just printing those forms from the CD and selling them to needy people who would otherwise would have to travel to the concerned government office to procure it. Some country bumpkins thought this was a good idea to make a quick buck(you see employment is still a big problem in my native state), and a few more CDs were sold.
I saw this partiucular enterprising salesman every single Saturday evening when I travelled home, for a couple of months, until one fine day, he simply vanished - perhaps sensing his game was up, afraid to face the ire of the more frequent travellers on the train who might have seen through his scheme guaranteed not to fail! These entrepreneurial salesmen!

Five Point Someone- A perfect 10

It seems I have been moving from Chetan Bhagat's (India's most widely read English author according to TIME magazine) less promising books to the better ones. I started off with One Night at the Call Center; on which I commented because I felt I had to, on his take of Indian Call Centers, since I am familiar with the BPO industry; moved on to his latest book, The 3 Mistakes of My Life, which I felt was utter trash and did not deserve comment, but finally discovered a gem in his first book, Five Point Someone - a book which he describes as, what NOT to do at IIT.
This book is well written so I wonder how I missed reading it in the first place. The plot and storyline of his book comes out as pretty realistic which describes life in the IITs but could pretty well be a scenario in any one of our Indian colleges.
The college where I studied in fact had many similarities to what he describes in his book.
Our college principal's daughter, was something of a college starlet and there was not a single desk in our college classrooms that did not have her name inscribed on it with pen or carved out with a blade by some daydreaming Romeo in the middle of a boring college lecture. Chetan Bhagat's character Neha, who is Professor Cherian's daughter in the book could pretty well be her equivalent.
Then I know a close friend of mine who never wrote a single exam without having a nip of whisky in him (just to loosen up his tension as he said!). But unlike our protagonist, Hari, in the book who found that vodka in him before the college vivas was an utter disaster, this friend of mine passed every exam that he wrote with flying colors!
The book pretty well captures how domineering, intimidating and bookish college professors can be, except for the rare one who truly inspires and will go to any lengths to help out a hapless student. He pretty well describes how boring college life, with inane lectures would be, without some of the colorful characters you would find around any campus.
The book is pretty well a mish mash of romance, comedy, dark humor, passion and a lot of laughs and he uses language pretty well to his advantage, sometimes resorting to Indian English. His mastery over description is captivating. For instance there is a scene in which Chetan describes Hari's interest in Neha's bare legs against her car's brake pedals on their first encounter- writing "how erotic a girl's naked feet on metal can be"!.
On the whole, a pretty wholesome book and I can say one of the good books that has come out of an Indian author without being too academic or classic. I would say populist literature without being too cheap. Worth a read, once, maybe twice.

The Scientific Disclaimer

Imbibing scientific temparament into oneself has been hammered into us time and again.
We are being spammed by results of scientific studies almost every day - on the net, in newspapers, on the TV, and in magazines too.
I came across an interesting study on how the world's most expensive coffee comes into being.
The initial discussion is how the Asian Palm Civet eats raw coffee berries which are defecated by this exotic creature, the beans then washed, and sold as coffee beans to make the world's most expensive coffee with a unique taste.
The study seems to suggest that the bean undergoes some sort of transformation within the civet's digestive system which gives the bean its unique flavor.
Then as a footnote, the study adds - the taste is unique quite probably because civets only forage on the most ripe berries and later excrete the seeds eventually used for human consumption.
Thank good for the disclaimer - now we can view things in a different perspective.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak
Another study on a completely different topic claimed that pregnant women under stress bore children who had a much lesser IQ and had learning disabilites. The study was carried out in Alaska at a storm shelter where offspring born there were found to have a much lesser IQ, because their mothers were stressed up due to the natural calamity, the report said.
Then the disclaimer - the study carried out on pregnant women at the storm shelter, belonged to the lower strata of society and perhaps it was but natural that their children should have lesser IQ and poor coping skills.
Thanks to these disclaimers.
Red wine some researchers argue is good for the heart in small doses. But another study goes on to say that to get the right dose of the "good chemical" in red wine, one would have to imbibe the drink in such a huge quantity that it would be mortally fatal to an imbiber.
These pros and cons on every subject under the sun have been made public.
Scientists have been mixing up the cause and effect of phenomena for ages. And results of studies that could mean almost anything have been put up as venerable scientific studies.
So next time you read the results of a scientific study somewhere, take it with a pinch of salt.
Poetic license should not not be a word in the scientist's dictionary!

Courtesy - The Funny Malayalee Again

I am sure most Malayalees have heard of this one, but I am recounting it here just in case someone has not.
A prospective father in law was interviewing a prospective groom for his daughter in a sleepy old village in Kerala.
"Do you smoke?", was the elderly man's first question.
"No, I don't sir", replied the young man. And added in a low voice,"Except when I drink!"
"So you drink too, is it?", asked the old man sharply.
"Yeah, I do that, but not too often, except When we sit gambling cards below the coconut trees at night!"
The old man was agitated."So you gamble too, is it?", he pursued.
"Well, not often", replied the young man. "Except the nights when we plan a raid on the rich man's house to steal some gold!"

Babel Fish

I am going to start this post with a joke.
A man and wife with a small kid walked into a store and started talking to each other. To everybody around it sounded worse than gobbledygook.
One person in the crowd was a bit intrigued and asked the man, "I never heard that language anywhere. What language do you speak?"
The man pointed to himself and said, "I am Chinese. So I talk to my kid here in Chinese!" And then pointing to his lady companion, he went on,"This is my wife. She is Czech and she talks to our kid in Czech! And we both, husband and wife, talk to each other in English, coz that's the only language both of us understand!"
"Thats really strange!", exclaimed the third person. "Communication in your family must be a riddle!"
To this the Chinese gentleman smiled and said, "Yes, we call it Chinese Checkers(pardon the pun)!!"
Well reality is not always far behind fiction.
Coz we speak 3 different languages in our home. All the time!
It all started when our father was posted to a remote public school in the sugar belt of Western Maharahstra, when we were still small kids.
The local children knew only Marathi(yes, not even Hindi!) and our only way of communicating with them was through that language, which was even on our curriculum.
We picked up the language and were soon able to speak the language fluently.
Later as we grew up, we moved to Eastern Maharashtra, were the locals speak a kind of pidgin Hindi. We picked up that as well and adapted it as our mode of communication between us brothers. Our parents communicated with us in English, we answered back in Hindi and they themselves spoke to each other in our native Malayalam, which we understood very well, but did not speak or write.
Even when we grew up things did not change.
We brothers still speak to each other and our parents in hybrid Hindi with English words thrown in for good measure. Our parents speak to us in English with lots of Hindi words, while they still talk to each other in Malayalam, which we can grasp as well!
Wondering how all that silent interpretation and translation goes on in our heads?