Do you have friends who are totally, totally on a different wavelength?
Sure you guys get along just fine. But sometimes conversations tend to get bizarre very soon. I don’t mean different wavelengths in the sense that you work in consumer banking and they work in investment banking. No I am talking about the situation where you work in consumer banking and they work in mixed media impressionist sculpture or something.

Let me explain.

There is this dear friend who is the highly creative advertising-media-design type who does a LOT of work for JAM Magazine. She is quite the brimful of ideas. And I mean ALL the time. Now these advertising types have brains that work at a completely different level, (electron orbit?), compared to the regular moderately imaginative brain that I have.

When you ask them for advice or inputs on things you do so expecting an avalanche of creativity to be let loose. It’s as if they just wake up in the morning, spend an hour thinking up a few hundred creative trains of thought, and then spend the rest of the day just launching them at the least suspecting MBA types who still can’t get over the genius of VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP.

Question in office: “How do we give the magazine a new look?”
Regular Sidin answer: “Let’s get a new font, increase the visuals and jazz up the cover a bit!”
Arty Lady’s answer: “Let’s chop the magazine to a square, punch a hole down the centre, print text down the diagonal and string it up at newsstands.”

At the time you try to hold a straight face while wondering what substance makes the brain works that way. But most of the time you envy the insane coolness of their ideas.

So yesterday evening I am sitting hunched over the laptop wondering what to get the wife on the soon-to-be-here first wedding anniversary.

While I may be tall, dark, handsome, have immaculate chest hair and nearly odourless sweat, gifting has never been a strength of mine. I suck at it. And when it comes to gifting women I take that sucking to plunging depths. So, in a moment of weakness, I asked Arty Lady for a anniversary surprise idea.

The mystery is this. She doesn’t even pause to think. It’s as if her brains has ideas for any possible scenario just cached in somewhere. Without as much as a pause to suck in air she launches into the description of a plan unlike any I have heard before:

“Sidin what you do is this. First I will give you the number of a friend. He is a broker for elephants and other trained animals. You book a nice big elephant for your anniversary day. You then rent a good Indian prince type Sherwani. You dress up, take the elephant, go to her office and wait with the animal till she comes outside after work. Then you pick her up and begin a slow yet extremely regal elephant ride to South Mumbai. On the way you can stop at a cafe or something and share a coffee of some kind. Leave the elephant prominently outside. You must have booked a table at the TAJ for dinner obviously. Then you take the animal right upto the entrance of the TAJ. The valet’s face! The idea is to give the woman an experience she will never ever forget for the rest of her life. Awesome no?”

I paused for a second in order to retract chin and a lion’s share of tongue from the floor.

“Yes. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. Elephant. Awesome. Very good. Give me that bottle of water please…”

“What were you planning Sid?”

“Handbag…”

p.s. Still open to outstandingly creative ideas that do not involve large creatures that can tenderize you for timepass.

Afficianados Aficionados (just like fans but with better teeth and gold credit cards) of this blog will be well aware of the many changes that have taken place to Domain Maximus over the last five years or so. It all began as an email newsletter which ran for a year or so before finding a very happy home at sidin.blogspot.com. The blogspot site saw the blog mature, find itself in a Zen sort of way, and settle down to the sporadic rhythm it has now.
And then in May of last year I moved everything to this whatay dedicated domain. With rising traffic and a more vigorous freelance writing career I figured I needed a better, more personalized showcase of my writings. The wordpress platform gives it flexibility and customization that was simply unimaginable on Blogger. But apparently more than that has changed on this blog. Sob.

Middle of last week I came across this link.

The Blog Readability Test ‘apparently’ goes through the content on your blog and determines the education level required to understand what’s going on. This is a fun thing to do for the avid blogger unless, of course, THIS is what the site had to say about the very blog you are on right now…

Hmm. Elementary school. Damn! And here I was, thinking Whatay was all about erudition and insightful humour and intellectually enriched conversation.

Apparently we are all little kids with leaky noses and tiffin boxes.

But the slap in the face was yet to come. (And I WILL tell teacher about it too!) Guess what happened when I typed in the trusty but forgotten blogspot url:

DAMMIT!

What has happened to Domain Maximus? Are any of you sensing a general lowering in intelligence levels? Am I using one word where I should use a paragraph with footnotes? Shorter sentences? Perhaps time for a post on Shakespearean Insights into Metaphysical Particle Dynamics?

I am at a loss of words here. I feel dumb. Waah! Waah!

Can I go to the bathroom now?

Geeeaaaaaaaaaweewaaaaaaa…
Ah! Nothing like getting up after a truck load of work and then stretching and screaming in relief no?

No seriously. I actually do that. The wife hates it. Apparently I never did it before marriage. “You have changed Sidin!” she says while I download photos of Matt Damon and take large printouts.

Anyways it’s been a really tight couple of weeks and I’ve finally managed to salvage the time to bring your attention to an evil which is slowly eating away at the very social and moral fiber of our society. Something that is beginning to rear its evil head more often than it ever has in the past. A vile presence that sits like a benign granuloma on the spinal cord of our society and restricts the blood flow of unity and communal harmony to the population centre that is our brain stem leading to the subacute sclerosing panencephalitis that is mass cultural myopia.

(Many many House MD DVDs. Sorry.)

But before that, I would like to say that henceforth each blog of mine will come with a little banner for GiveIndia embedded in it. GiveIndia is a website that makes it easy peasy to donate money to your charity of choice. They don’t pay me money to do this, of course, and I hope the High Networth Engineers and MBAs amongst you will rise to the occasion by clicking through and doing your bit wherever you see fit. Charity begins at home page no? (Ha!)

So where was I? Ah yes mass cultural myopia.

What’s with this sudden upsurge of national political correctness? Haven’t you noticed it? When suddenly people are afraid to say what is blatantly obvious? Just so that they avoid the possibility, however minor, of offending someone.

Of course political correctness can be convenient in certain harmless situations.

“Of course your baby is lovely! No the moustache is cute.”

“No no. That is a good IIM too!” (Guahaha.)

Yet nothing drives me insane like one of those media reports, especially on TV, where they try to pass off “People from two communities had a go at each other yesterday with sub-machine gun fire. Riot police later controlled the crowd from a distance using only mind power as made famous by the Bapna brothers in Competition Success Review.” instead of just coming clean and admitting that the Buddhists and Bahais are at it again.

First there was that Aaja Nachle thing. And then the Sikhs of Lucknow filed cases against poor Anilbhai. And now the recent discoveries about my cellphone.

What did you say? No idea what happened to my cellphone? None at all?

Sigh. Socially networked society it seems. Citizen journalism will change our world they say. Pshaw!

Texting messages is one of the great modes of communication of this day and age. After a hectic day in the office nothing warms the heart like sending a message of extreme naughtiness to the wife. But then “Darth Vader Woman in HR” is just next to “Darling” in the phone book and often hilarity ensues due to digit-al mishaps.

So imagine my chagrin when I discover that the Brick, as I affectionately call my P990i when I wear hip hugging jeans, has a predictive text input that is so prudish that it makes an Indian parish priest look like an American parish priest.

Let me explain.

My cellphone uses what is known as a T9 dictionary. This is the thing that gives your predictive text input thing work. So you don’t have to go punching forever on your teeny mobile keypad to get simple words out. (Try doing the phrase “I was flabbergasted when I perused the entry for appendicitis in an encyclopedia my dear Parthasaarathy!.”)

Yet I know the smartest people who don’t get the hang of predictive text input. High funda software engineer processes Laplace transforms and does Matrix multiplications in his head over a Hazelnut Cappuccino. But tell him to sms you what he’s sipping and watch the genius sweat over his keyboard.

But all the difficulties of T9 pale in comparison to the indignation I felt when I discovered that the Brick comes factory-installed with a dictionary that has all the good words pruned out of it already. Is this another sign of the moral decrepitude of our times?

I am afraid so.

For instance when I am thoroughly angry with someone I need to send out a message like “NO! YOU are a dial head!” This is because the word I am looking for (rhymes with drick) is not available on my phone. The closest available choice is ‘dial’. I could call it Richard. But that could become an annoying habit.

You’ve been late with a column submission and got beaten black and blue by the newspaper person? The best you can do is “I got batch-slapped by that Hindu person again today!” This is because my phone does not believe in the existence of the female of the canine species at all. “Where do puppies come from?” is not a question my phone ever asks itself.

No reference can be made to the posterior region of the human body with any suitable word except ‘booty’and ‘butt’. Words such as ass / arse / fanny / back-end / doublebubble are simply missing from the T9 dictionary. If this was before marriage I would have asked aloud in agony: “What is wrong with the posterior for god’s sake? I think it’s mighty fine and deserves wide appreciation!” Today I have no interest in such things at all. In fact you should ignore this last point completely.

I cannot call anyone a ‘moron’, ‘nincompoop’, ‘imbecile’, ‘slut’ or even ‘dufus’. All perfectly good words in the English language. But my phone will have none of it. Apparently such words are beneath it.

Instead it cheerfully throws up such conversational gems as ‘incontinence’, ‘Hilcote’, ‘tundra’ and my personal favourite: ‘hernia’d’.

‘hernia’d’

Definition: The situation of having a hernia thrown at oneself at great speed without warning.

Use in a sentence: “Sidin was writing a poem about the Asiad, could not find a rhyming word for some time, before he picked up his phone and observed ‘hernia’d’.”

Important Note: Be EXTREMELY careful when sending T9 composed message to any girl named Rashmi.

Yes my phone has ‘screwdriver’. But no mention at all of plain old simple ‘screw’.

As you can this has shaken my faith in the world at large gravely. Who knew such a vile conspiracy was afoot within the bowels of the mobile phone industry?

Is this happening to your phone as well? Is the phone trying to prevent you from speaking freely? Is it curbing your freedom of expression?

I think we should form an Orkut group and fight this immediately. When I pay for my phone I should get it complete with a full quota of words whether they seem unsavoury to the phone maker or not. Let us put an end to this menace.

Or as my phone would say “I’ve had enough of this asap. Time to kick some cps!”

After I was done with a little bit of research for this blog post I was left even more nostalgic, warm and fuzzy than I started. But let us cross the water when we come to the bridge shall we?

Regulars to this blog will know that once in a while, four or five times a year tops, I write a little post about growing up in the Middle East. It is almost entirely based on my own life with little… err… social commentary and random observations as with most other posts.

(I love that phrase. Social commentary. Makes me sound so Arundhati Royish. Page 3 BUT in Fabindia clothes.)

This is one of those posts that non-bloggers keep cribbing about. "Who cares what happened in his life? Besides the incident in the lingerie section at Shoppers in Bandra of course. The rest is utter crap."

So where was I. Ah yes the middle east.

The time is the mid eighties. Back when the middle east, by which I mean Abu Dhabi in particular and the rest of the UAE in general, belonged to no one in particular. The locals knew they needed outside help. The outsiders knew they were making certain trade-offs in life when they moved in and there was a pleasant, incidental and largely observed-with-satisfaction equilibrium in relations between the various ethnic communities.

Think of it like one of those multi-ethnic chawls they used to show in old hindi movies and new TV serials. Except here everyone minded their own business. None of that melodrama with the families fighting and the sikh family mediating and all that.

This is actually a trickier situation than you think. Especially for the media. What programming do you have on TV? Which languages? How does one cater to the Petroleum engineer from Dallas, the accountant from Lahore, the engineer from Bombay and the building supervisor from Dhaka. (This is well before the Filipinos flooded the place and taught us desis what kick-ass lifestyle was even with salaries of less than thousand dirhams a month.)

The most cosmopolitan TV channel was Channel 33. Dubai’s official non-arabic channel.

I use ‘non-arabic’ for a reason. This was because they played all kinds of programming: English English (Fawlty Towers), American English Upper-Middle (Full House, Charles in Charge), American English Lower-Middle (Bill Crosby, Different Strokes), Gameshows (Blockbusters) and, the point of this entire blog, Bollywood Masala. (Okay there was also wrestling, english football much before ESPN made it cool, and nightly news bulletins with fifteen minutes of news and fifteen minutes of names of pharmacies open for 24 hours.)

Thursday nights was Hindi Feature Film night on Channel 33. Dad had halfday on Thursdays and this meant we spent a few hours after lunch helping him water the plants, vacuum clean, dust, fluff, fold, align at right angles and so on. (He is a little bit of a freak that way. He used to wipe clean each individual leaf of each plant every weekend. We had to sit around and help him. Which explains why I am so easily amused. He has now bought plastic plants and on a fortnightly basis bathes them under the shower. Please don’t ask.)

Around five or six in the evening we would move to the living room and begin fiddling around with the TV antenna. This was a box behind the TV with a dial on top. You moved the dial a little and then waited while the antenna, perched somewhere on top of the building, slowly motored into place. (It seems high-tech and lavish to you. But we were big Bill Crosby fans if you know what I mean.)

Channel 33 was on TV while we nudged the antenna a little this way and that. Sometimes it took two hours to get it aligned perfectly. (Meaning that, with any more static, we would routinely confuse Mandakini with that guy who played Samba. The cool anglo-name guy.)

Finally after dinner we would sit with bated breath for the movie. ( I don’t think Channel 33 ever published movie details till actual showtime. The newspaper listing simply said "Hindi feature Film." Also "Wrestling". "Football". Hulk Hogan? Aston Villa? Tito Santana? No way of knowing. Full and full suspense only.)

The movies were all mid-late 70s and early 80s classics.

And thence we begat our knowledge of all things Indian and filmy.

There was no ambiguity of characters in the movies those days. There were the good guys and there were the bad guys. Both disagreed on everything. There was the rare traitor who, unsuspectingly, would change sides at the last moment. But we knew who it was halfway through the movie because of the way he kept speaking or smiling to himself in every other shot. But there was none of the gray fellows whose loyalties are wavering till the end. That was blasphemy back then.

Many movies would start with the credits playing over a ‘negative’ clip of the ‘Aha!’ scene: the scene where it becomes clear how Amitabh is actually Rishi’s brother and Pran killed their father raped their sister, threw their mother’s head against a corner table and scared away the domestic help. Also there was some funda about Kumar Gaurav also which we do not recall because, let’s face it, no one ever gave even two flying !*#$% about Kumar Gaurav.

This might seem all regular and usual for you guys. But for us NRI kids who knew our India from the CBSE and biannual leave trips, it was pure, unadulterated awesomeness.

We quickly got our hang of the formula though. Even when you were six years old you knew that the kid running on the road will grow up into the hero. While running on the road. That the first non-cabaret song will be the one that brothers identify each other with in the timber mill. Or ice plant. Or dockyard.

Brother one: "Tum. Yahan. Kaise?"
Brother two: "Auto. Frauded meter. Bastard!"
Brother one: "Dey! One movie. One social evil."
Brother two: "Sorry"
Mom: "Kheer anyone?"

We knew without doubt that it will take the hero one month and four songs (one random first meeting, one disco type campus number, one semi item dream number, one impressive youth festival seductive number) to convince Kimi Katkar to go out with him, but exactly ten minutes to convince her that he is actually reincarnated and that his family in the pre-life was massacred by a bald man with a pipe and baggy cap and related to Kimi by virtue of being, according to her statements, ‘her father’.

Shortly after her tacit content to their liaison it would begin raining and two hibiscus flowers appeared on screen and gently quivered in the wind in metaphorical fashion. (In one mallu movie they used a dead lizard. Symbolically. I think. I hope.)

Of course her dressing sense rapidly changes from ‘screechy flourescent slut’ to ‘salwar suit with enticingly large back window’ as soon as they decide to go steady.

We also gleaned that the harder the hero gets beaten up as a kid the longer his revenge action sequence will be in the end: The Vadukut Inverse Thulp Theorem. "This one for my father" SLAP "This one for my mother" SLAP "This one for the little girl who lives down the lane" SLAP "This is fun! I can do this all day!" SLAP

Also someone always had to walk down the stairs clapping slowly during the climax scene. This was one of the great scenes of 70’s to 80’s bollywood. One that is sorely missed in movies these days. This was also signal for you to run to the loo finally after holding it back for some two hours. (Few advertisers wanted the SEC C Indian (Malabari) demographics. Sometimes Konica, Masafi, Al Kabeer and such like. Vicco Vajradanti on tape rentals.) After the clap a speech was due by someone and, in any case, we never knew enough Hindi to get those long speeches anyway.

Young Sidin: "Daddy… err… what is the meaning of Izzat lootna?"
Daddy: "Umm… err… talking to women impolitely and without any respect."
Young Sidin: "Oh. Nothing at all to do with the fact he just ripped her blouse of?"
Daddy: "Of course not…"

There are a million more such cinematic axioms from the 70s and 80s I could jot down. I’d actually begun to forget many of them.

But the fact is that as I saw Om Shanti Om at Imax a few days ago, all of those memories came flooding back to me. Cringing when the villains thumped the little kid while hanging his valiant policeman father. Punching the air when the hero wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and suddenly found new strength to fight. Clapping and screaming when the long lost brothers came together, settled their differences, jumped into the jeep and sped to the villains hideout amidst funky music and bongos. Holding my breath while the suitcase with incriminating documents flew in the air from heroine to hero just missing finger tips of bad man. Feeling a little jealous when a lucky child star roughed up a minor villain with  cricket bat.

For me OSO stood for everything that was good and great about old-fashioned heart-pounding Indian cinema. Call it parody if you will. Call it slick spoof. Marketing gimmick. Anything you want. But while watching OSO there were moments when I felt all those things again. When those axioms came to play again. Sure Karz’s ending song was better. But when was the last time in recent memory you saw a climax to a movie like that? Reincarnations are timeless! And I just knew there HAD to be a supernatural angle to it.

Next to me, in the theatre, there was an elderly couple. Both probably peeking into their fifties. The husband whistled and danced in his seat while his wife tried to hold him back smiling herself. All around us people erupted in laughter as Bollywood star after Bollywood star poked fun at themselves on screen. I may have whooped a few times myself.

OSO was not about Shah Rukh or Deepika. It was not about any individual or song or six-pack abs or anything. OSO was about a world and style of entertainment that probably has little space in our lives today. A style which politely asked us to keep our minds and troubles and hopes outside and step in for a few hours of pure escapist pleasure. Trash the movie and our kitschy heritage all you want. But no one landed a punch like an Amitabh scorned. No one has ever since proclaimed the greatness of mom dearest like Shashi Kapoor.

And really no one can dance on a giant rotating record wearing a silver jumpsuit and get away with it again quite like Rishi Kapoor did.

But what do I know? I was an NRI kid with his chin on the floor and his eyes glued to a grainy National TV screen.

And, sob, this is what my research on Channel 33 uncovered: Some three years ago the government of Dubai quietly shut-down Channel 33. Apparently the expat communities now had their own TV channels on cable and satellite. No more could they find a role for Channel 33 to play for the migrant hordes. Why keep afloat a universal voice when the more passionate individual ones are doing better?

And with that another pleasant memory of childhood had disappeared as well. But thanks to OSO, not entirely.

Viva La Disco! (Trumpets! Funk! Bongos!… aaaaand CRASH CYMBAL!)

Sniff.

Sometimes you just can’t have enough reasons to like somebody’s blog no? Well here’s one more to read DM more often.

If you are a fan of rock music or like concerts and music dos in general then you might want to drop in at the JAMCAT concerts in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune. Four simultaneous concerts in these four cities with performances by awesome bands some as good as (Warning: Hype ahead) Dire Straits!

Dee-tayles:

On Sunday Nov 18 @ 6.30 pm in these cities:

Bangalore
St Joseph’s Boys School, Museum Rd
Bands playing: White Noiz, Junkyard Groove and Motherjane

Delhi
College of Vocational Studies, Sheikh Sarai (south campus)
Bands playing: Prithvi, Them Clones and Parikrama

Mumbai
SNDT college ground, Juhu
Bands playing: The Works, Gaurav Dagaonkar and Zero

Pune
Elysium, Koregaon Park
Bands playing: Black, Brute Force and Agni

Thanks to the people at Bindass and LG you can print out as many invits as you want and get all your friends to turn up as well. Feel free to post up in company noticeboards, insti lanboards, engg. colleges etc.

Also fancy going to space? Turn up early (3-ish) for Bindass Go to Space auditions.

Click on www.jammag.com for your ek dum muft invites.

p.s.: Actually it makes good sense to turn up. That way concert goes well. Sponsors like it. Rashmi makes money. She gives some to me. I donate half to a noble cause (Dominoes)  and the rest for my expenses. Which makes me need to freelance less and blog more. Which you like no? So really if you love yourself at all you have to turn up.

You owe it to yourself.

(Well yes there is an alternative. You can just send me money. But that strategy doesn’t seem to be working for me at all outside the family. Chalo, I am off. I need to donate blood for cash. Cough cough. Sigh sigh.)