Glory Days

I had a close friend who has found me out after fourteen long years. We used to be in college together. We took our first jobs together in the same place. We were roommates there for almost two years.To put things in perspective, there were no secrets among us back then, no question was taboo. We could even compare, um.. lengths. (No, there was no such thing called homophobia in those days. In fact we had never known a gay person.) Some time in 1992, he left that job and later, drifted. He attended my wedding the next year. Never seen him since. After two longish phone calls of small talks and a round of who's who and where among common friends, how many kids you got in which grade, mail exchanges and some such games people play, he proceeds to ask me " Dude, did you drink your wife's milk in the days when she was nursing? I mean willfully, not accidentally?" Top that for originality.

The good Doc.

Immense entertainment value bit of news this.

One feels a little sorry for the good doc. No, I've no sympathy for pervs and I'm not one of them, for the two of you who'll be reading! But , c'mon now, this is the sort of thing happening all the time these days. Date rape, fake identities, taking advantage of the coy Indian woman desperately seeking love, romance and a life partner ... so what else is new? The news in the item is the startling perversions of the good doc, that he would feel the urge to watch a cricket match after inflicting 10 inches of pain ( you know where), that he would ask the victim "How do you feel on your suhagrat night?" One feels a little sorry just because our good doc was a legit GP who was otherwise doing fine ( a quick google search reveals he's listed on the Newham recorder too) who got busted probably only because he couldn't take it a bit easy and had to go the whole hog ( I mean anal rape, O My God!) on the very first date. I think he could have gotten away like so many other bastards, if only....

Pardon me my bad taste. But we live in India. Here we're used to news items like the Nithari killings and villains like M.S.Pandher. This Tangotra sod looks like an amusing old punk, in perspective. Lastly, the profile of young desi professionals( in UK?) who had no sexual experience whatsoever sounds as phony as a three GBP note.

I just dropped in ( to see what condition my condition was in)

I was shopping in of these retail chain stores at a big mall. For the most part, I live in a small place which has yet to see corporate retailing. Thus whenever I go to a real city, I try to visit the malls. Just for the heck of it. I'm not a big mall rat or something. I stock up on groceries that I don't get at my place, mostly herbs, spices, sauces, cheap imports. So, while doing this I saw a young couple shopping for diapers. A jumbo pack of diapers. Maybe a pack of 30, costing, what, maybe an equivalent of $10. It was then that, I saw for the very first time how large a pack of diapers can actually get. The largest pack at the store had dimensions like 1'x2'x2'. One might need help to drag that babe home. Looked like it had a few hundred pieces inside. I didn't read the pack labels closely. Instead, I started thinking.
Hmmm, so this is the American way of life everybody says we're moving to. Hmm, wait! How long do you think these pack will last for a family with one child? ( Unless it's a joint household, chances are only one will be potty untrained at a point of time?) Now if that pack is meant to be consumed over a month, or even two, the baby would have to be in diapers 24x7.
Call us poor people. We never kept our baby in diapers in the daytime at home. A diaper was used only when going out or, sometimes during the night, when one was not in the mood to change nappies. I thought the idea was to let the kid feel that pissing in one's pants causes a lot of discomfort and encourage it to raise alarm before letting go. Thus started the early lessons of potty training .Now, if you take away discomfort from the whole affair what do you get? A three year old pre-nursery bloke soiling himself at the drop of a hat, perhaps?
Actually I was thinking like poor people. What difference does it make in the long run if a baby is potty trained at the age of two or four? None indeed, except in the bottomline of m/s Johnson & Johnson.

Money matters matter

Strange are the ways of lucre, ain't it?
Today, this 8th day of December 2007, I predict that the Bombay Stock Exchange sensex will touch and surpass the 22000 mark in a matter of weeks. Sure, I won't put my money on it, but no analyst ever does. There are reasons behind my prediction, and I wouldn't have made the same a mere two days ago.
For the first time in six months, the once hot and lately pitifully out-of-favor IT stocks are generating buying interest. Market players and fund managers are making muted noises about them being the value buys of the season. It's now only a matter of time before fresh money enters the bourses to fill that value gap. And then it can only go up since power, infrastructure , retail, construction, metals and banking are so strong already.
Wait a minute, why am I writing this? I am no analyst. Nobody gives a hoot for my predictions. So it isn't about prophecy. This post is about the abundant entertainment I had reading and watching the prophets over the years. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against their breed. (Though I might, because I once nearly lost my inheritance listening to them. I was naive and innocent then and Ketan Parikh was milking everybody dry, for those who remember.) Nah, they're good fellas, all. Nice and well scrubbed MBA and CA types.Good show, Gul Tekchandani, Bharat Shah, Rajat Bose and people. I have forgiven you all since 1999.

Like I said, you can't really fault them analysts and experts. They are programmed, by training, to bullshit us. Envy them I do, however. They seem to take a holiday everytime the stock market notches back 5%. At least you don't get their usual soundbytes in those times.And they seem to be always high on opium. Sorry OPM. Other People's Money. They tell you stories, they sell you stories. The India story, the growth story, the turnaround story, the re-rating story.They work,and you PLAY. The value play, the momentum play, the speculative play. In their enchanted world of jargons and high funda, you are soon inducted into beauties like "some volatility is expected" which translated to English, means you might bleed through your arse. "There is still some upside left" roughly means a few small investors will still be duped into this stock, and the absolute stunner : "market breadth has opened up and retail participation is better", which means it's time for operators to launch into a genocide.


But the elite among the elite, the absolute king of entertainment in this line of work is the creature named the chartist or the technical analyst. Basically he's the statistician of the pack.
He is the super-psychic who sees double shoulders, triple bottoms and twin peaks in a two-dimensional graph of movement of a stock. He is the one who will tell you this stock has resistance at 232, 241, and 259 on the upside and support at 223, 211, and 199 on the downside. Among these supports and resistances some will be strong and some weak.
Then, on the same breath he will expound: once the stock closes above 235 it will try to breach 252, which is the three month moving average for the scrip. One should enter above valuations of 234 with an interim target of 247 and a mid-term target of 267 and a stop loss of 227. Note that he's covered all the bases. And moreover, you might wonder, as an ignorant person, what's wrong with buying the stock now at 226 since it looks so promising? Don't ever make that mistake, it is beyond your comprehension and therefore, suicidal to outpredict the king.
Lastly, from my humble experience of shedding blood in the bourses, and from a blog post I read sometime back, I will recollect this story. Hope you'll like it.

Once upon a time in a village a man appeared who announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for Rs. 10. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys went out in the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at 10 and as supply started to diminish and villagers started to stop their effort he announced that now he would buy at 20 rupees.

This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to 25 and the supply of monkeys became so that it was an effort to even see a monkey let alone catch it.

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at 50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business his assistant would now buy on behalf of the man.


In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers, "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at 35 and when the man comes back you can sell it to him
for 50."

The villagers queued up with all their saving to buy the monkeys.

Phir na woh aadmi mila na us ka assistant........... Sirf bandar hee bandar.....rah gaye..

Now I know. Why nobody reads my blog and nobody ever leaves a comment. On the other hand, there's elation at being on the same reading level as Greatbong.

Is Bebo trying to look like Paris? Now, we all know she's shedding everything there is between her skin and her bones (and fast) just to look right for the bikini scene she's going to shoot for Tashan. You can read about it here. If my humble opinion counts for anything, she now sports a drawn face, sunken eyes, cheekbones that can slay, lifeless skin that makes her look ten years older for her age and is in general looking like she is preparing for a remake of The Witches of Eastwick. Or Death Becomes Her, if you will. Oops, there I go again. Courting mayhem from her fans.
Please refer to these pics. Courtesey wallpapers.com and santabanta.
Like we all know once again, Paris was gifted with this anorexic bone structure. And Bebo, with the genes from the khate peete Kapoor Khandaan. There's not much fun in dragging on this lame comparison anyway. One only wonders whether going the Paris way, our dear Bebo will end up in jail, which is of course, way better than ending up on the coroner's table, judging by the way she's started to look.

I used to be an ardent follower of the Bengali literature scene during my school and college days. Of late I seem to have lost touch. Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay used to be one of the big favorites. In one of his short stories, called Prateekshar Ghar or Waiting Room if I remember correctly, he touched upon a line of thought. I bring this up because the thought has visited and revisited me and many of my friends throughout our lives. Simply put, the author was looking through the eyes of a bunch of unemployed youth who do nothing but fritter away all day sitting in the little used waiting room of a railway station in north Bengal. They play cards, smoke bidis, raise all sorts of topics to discuss, like, do house lizards ever drink water, the question that begins the story. And in the middle of this unhappening, gloomy scenario, the protagonist asks himself : Has susomoy ( the good times) passed away, or will it come sometime in the future? Or, the crux of the question, is it here right now, the time they are frittering away? Don't know if that comes across as intended, but for those of you who didn't read the story, let it be told that there is no moral high ground here. The question is profoundly introspective without being preachy. Throughout our lives whenever we went through dull phases, and God knows they were aplenty, this question came back to haunt me and some of my friends. The boundaries so often blur. Today's gloom when looked back at tomorrow, may seem like bliss.Or vice versa.Think about it. Better still, read the story if you haven't. I believe these are now available in translation too.

In the next decade, which marked the beginning of the Mtv era, we gave a new phrasing and twist to this concept. We divided our waking life into three types of timescapes: Njoy, timepass and getting bored. Needless to elaborate, the Njoy moments were few and far between. Most of us have lives of steady boredom punctuated by intermittent timepass hours.But like I said, hard to tell them apart. In absolute terms.
Important thing is to take stock and ask oneself the question, what time is it?

Sitting in a corner of the living room and feeling a bit melancholy. Early evening, late autumn, in an industrial town in the great Indian outback. Could've been anywhere in the world.