Sniff. Cough. Wheeze.
Quite pleased with this longish cover story in last weekend’s Lounge. Too long to cut and paste the whole thing here. But here is a little amuse bouche of the story and a link to download the pdf of the two-page spread.

Have a terrible cold. So don’t expect anything cheery for a day or two. Or week. Sigh.

—

The telegram is dying

After a century and a half of binding the country together, the messenger of the masses is slowly becoming a remnant of the past

Shruti Chakraborty and Sidin Vadukut

On a recent weekday evening in south Mumbai, the Central Telegraph Office (CTO), a stone’s throw from the raucous Flora Fountain traffic circle, is abuzz with noise—not of customers but carpentry work. CTO, one of the district’s many heritage buildings with solid stone facades, humbly stands in the shadow of the considerably taller Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) office behind it. The MTNL office itself is overshadowed by the even taller and more imposing Videsh Sanchar Bhavan tower next door that houses VSNL offices. The three form a pecking order of telecom offices—from the swanky Tata-owned building at one end to the sad, sorry old CTO at the other.

Finding the telegraph counter in CTO means walking through an unmanned metal detector, past a dark, gloomy foyer, which is being converted into what looks like a modern bank with counters and glass partitions between them, and into a narrow corridor on the right.

There is not a single customer in sight. When asked for a telegram form, there is a moment of hesitation before one of the two employees behind the counter gets up and hands a piece of paper through the slot—it is a telegram application form that doesn’t look much younger than the CTO building itself.

“The telegram business has gone down a lot. Before, we used to send 1,000 a day. Nowadays, we get 100, sometimes 200,” explains a portly man behind the counter with a smile on his face. He counts the words on the filled-in form handed to him, checks on a laminated sheet of paper for the charges—Rs26 for overnight delivery of a 22-word telegram to Delhi—and then he hands back a counterfoil.

But when he checks the billing machine at the counter, he looks a little embarrassed. It was a few minutes past 5 in the evening, the end of a working day, and the Mumbai CTO had only sent 37 telegrams the whole day. Visibly upset, he quickly says: “We will send more today. We are open 24 hours for your service you know. Maybe some more people will come.”

In all likelihood, however, they won’t.

—

You could read the story online here. But I’d rather you download the PDF here. And no there aren’t any jokes in it. So for your daily dose of amusement you may want to revert to the dependable people at Newsmax.

One of the nicest features of social networking site Facebook is the ability to check out hot babes who are friends with the women who work in your office intermingle with other professionals in the same industry and swap ideas on, in my case, writing and publishing and so on.

Another wonderful thing about Faceboook is how, with just a few clicks of your mouse, you can leave a private message for the missus but unfortunately, due to the three million potential places to click on the Facebook page, you screw things up and update your status to the following:

“Darling, I have cleaned the kitchen like you wanted me to. But I may have lost that box of mysore pak that was in the fridge and I was allowed to eat a small piece at a time. I have no idea where is it. Also I have a tummy upset.”

But my favourite feature in Facebook is the facility it extends to individuals like you and me to get to know ourselves better. For instance it is only after the advent of Facebook that I learnt that of all the characters in FRIENDS I am most similar to Chandler Bing:

You may have a hard and sarcastic exterior, but deep down you have lots of emotion and sympathy, and know how to make a relationship work. You are a loyal friend, and a fun guy who knows how to have a good time!

And then tragically it added: “You also have some Ross in you.”

Read together in rapid succession this was disturbing at so many single and double entendre levels.

Nonetheless Facebook has told me so many things about myself. And all through the clever use of such multiple choice questionnaires that somehow peer deep into my personality: I have recently come to learn, for instance, the following:

1. If I was one of the seven dwarves I would be Fatty
2. If I was a character in Sholay I would be the water tower
3. If I was a character from the Tolkien books I would be a nameless orc that died a quick death from blunt force trauma early on in a pointless ambience-creating battle
4. If I was a product marketed by Apple Inc. I would be a pair of replacement iPod headphones
5. And finally if I were a popular Indian management guru I would be… (sigh) … Arindam Chaudhuri

This insight has helped me immensely in my day-to-day life. Just yesterday, for instance, when the missus told me that all the guys in her office were fit, wore formal clothes to work and shaved everyday I told her: “But I am the number one in international exposure and I gave you a free laptop for your birthday dear!”

So last night I decided that I must make a questionnaire also so that, like me, readers like you can also gain great, deep understanding into your personalities. For the purpose of this personality-revealing questionnaire I have decided to use the context of the latest industry-farmer controversy in Singur in order to isolate personality types.

Please answer the following questionnaire as honestly as possible. Mark the first options that satisfies you. Do not spend too much time thinking over the answers. It will only corrupt the accuracy of this instrument. (Giggle giggle. Instrument! Giggle.)

A. Which of the following is your favourite colour?

1. Pure, intense red.
2. Anything but red. Red is the colour of corruption and incompetent governance that has strangled the people of this state for far too long. I HATE RED. In short, anything but red. I will kill anyone who picks red.
3. Minimal Moroccan Yellow, Sicilian Sky-blue, Thrifty Tahitian Tangerine and Midnight Black. Limited edition available in Vector Value Violet. (Author’s note: Option C has been asked to tone down the marketing spiel.)
4. 900 acres. Non-negotiable.

B. What immediately comes to your mind when I use the term “Parizaad Limesodawatersweetnosugarbottlewala”?

1. I do not know the answer to this question. My cadre will approach you for clarifications. (Author note: This is the right answer.)
2. This is a stupid question. We have burned your house down. We have saved our farmers.
3. Parizaad is one of the teeming masses of this country that worked for years and years without being able to purchase an affordable means of transportation for herself and her family. Now finally I will be able to…(Author’s note: OK ENOUGH WITH THE PR ALREADY!)
4. My secretary. Or maybe my cousin. It can be so difficult to tell for our people you know.

C. If three people can do a piece of work in fifteen days and seven people can do a piece of work in eleven days, then in how many days can 24 people do the same amount of work in 4 days?

1. Lunch break. Will open at 4:30 pm. Very briefly though.
2. You are going to employ only 24 people? TWENTY FOUR PEOPLE? What will the other starving masses of this country do? Bund has been declared with immediate effect all over the country by which I mean Kerala.
3. Forget how much work there actually is to do. Imagine a world where you can go to your work place in your own, low-cost, high-mileage, laughable-quality vehicle that is… FOR GODS SAKE NOW!…
4. Let me rephrase that question: If three people can do a piece of work in fifteen days and seven people can DO THEY HAVE 900 ACRES TO WORK ON?

D. John walked four kilometres towards the west, then six kilometres to the north, then three kilometres towards the east and then two kilometres again towards the west. How far is John from his starting point?

1. Ideologically John has strayed too far to the west. We see no point in supporting John any more. We have all withdrawn support. Except Somnath Chatterjee… bastard.
2. John is standing on fertile farmland that has been stolen from farmers. We give him a five second head start. 5…4…3…2…
3. With a kerb weight of just 600 kilos and a 623 cc engine, distance is never a problem for my… CHHUP!
4. John has not managed to go anywhere from his starting point. He is right where he was when he started. If I were John I would be giving up hope by now. And god only knows what John’s vendors must be thinking. This is all such a bloody waste of time. Oh no. That Gopal Gandhi is coming.

E. Just one last question before we reveal your hidden personality: The Trichy-Cochin Express starts from Trichy at 6:30 PM. The Aleppey-Bokaro Express starts from Aleppey at 7:25 PM. Both trains are approaching each other with a relative velocity of 200 kilometers per hour. Which train has a pantry car?

1. This is a high level decision that I leave to the supreme body Brinda Karat. Ha! Kidding. I mean Prakash Karat and Politburo.
2. Nonsense! When I was Railway Minister both trains were redirected to start from West Bengal. There is no need for car when there is train.
3. Speaking of parking and maneuvering, did I tell you how because of a steering radius of just three meters I am able to easily… SLAP!
4. Yediyurappa!

Score key:

Mostly 1’s: You are a wizened, old veteran of the communist establishment with many years of experience in administration. You are clean, relatively of corruption except for that one incident involving land allotment which, in the light of vast numbers of CPI(M) cadre available at your beck and call, we don’t think was anything more than a mistake in accounting. Or maybe a typo.

Mostly 2’s: You are an inspiring leader for many thousands of people trying to shirk off the yoke of Communism in West Bengal which stifled industrial development. Instead you promise a new future where the same people, now refreshingly yoke-less, will prosper thanks to umm…err…wait…one minute… Will prosper.

Mostly 3’s: You are the world’s cheapest car. (We mean that you cost the least. Not in the sense that you regift things you get in office diwali hampers.) However it looks like that you will make the Tata Group lose so much money that they will start transferring funds to your project from TCS. This will enrage TCS employees who will one day walk into your factory and lynch you en masse. Oscar Fernandes will then say something completely inappropriate.

Mostly 4’s: You are one of India’s most respected business leaders. You are always impeccably dressed, smart looking and clean-shaven. But you also remain unmarried. Are you thinking what we are thinking? What we are thinking is this: You may have some Ross in you.

Many of you think believe that us blogger/writer/journalists live lives of luxury and excess. What with the traveling, the informal work attire and the fluffy deliverables. “Maybe this week I will write a piece on the potato!” is what most of you think we are thinking about all the time with our feet propped up on our tables and pint bottles of Carlsberg in our hands. No meetings to attend, no spreadsheets to crunch and no reports to file.
But alas the truth must be told. Our lives are not all milk and honey. We do not live merry lives. And this current economic downturn is hitting us very hard indeed. To highlight this I present the photo of a note the maid left on our refrigerator door a few days ago. Merely the act of embedding it here is causing tears to well up in my eyes.

Look what the global melt-down has done to the Domain Maximus household:

Merely a diet of pulao and nimbu pani is what fuels this blogger. Have mercy readers! I am accepting donations in the form of cash and Nintendo Wiis.

Okay now I need to go get another Carlsberg.

p.s. The other blog has a little graph you might like to check out. Especially if you have an MBA.

It is astonishing how much innovation is happening in the field of human waste processing. People are obsessed with inventing new ways to… err… process excretions. Like the new pocket toilet for women. Toilet. Pocket sized. For women. Oh yeah. Awesome. Gag.

Muammar Gaddafi is crazy. His son is crazy. His son is called Hannibal. His son beat people up with a belt in Switzerland. Gaddafi hates Switzerland. Gaddafi wants to BAN/ABOLISH Switzerland. I like.