Busy busy day. Lots of work in the office and then the final after. So not enough time to whip up a post of any substance. But nonetheless two titbits that might get the thought process moist as the day goes on:
1. Spare a thought for the south indian friend who listens to the song from Darling and is scandalized:

“Aa khushi se khud khushi kar le!”

Obviously right? Is there any other emotion when you’re… you know…

2. Spotted on a shopping trip to Pheonix Mills. Every weekend the missus and me drive away to Phoenix Mills, walk up to the Marks & Spencer’s showroom, sigh for a few moments, and then zip around it and all the way upto the Dollar Store next to Phoenix Mills.

This weekend we spotted this example of astounding, by which I mean ridiculous, branding. The product is a hair vitalizing shampoo with Vitamin E and Panthenol. (I never use shampoo without Panthenol for your information.)

And what do the geniuses decide to name it?

Voila!

Now be a darling, take the afternoon off and go watch the match. I’ll be at Sport Bar @ Phoenix Mills if anyone’s wondering.

Dear Mr. Flintoff,
It was my privilege to see the India – England Twenty20 match last night live on TV. You will agree that it was quite a memorable match of cricket especially because India won and once again proved without doubt that England should restrict itself to inventing games but not actually expect to win any of them. This is a small selection of such sports and games for your perusal:

– Football
– Cricket
– Tennis
– Hockey
– Rugby
– Badminton
– Anything that involves running (except running industry to ground), throwing (except throwing up outside pub) and jumping (except jumping on head of supporter of rival football team).

I am not trying to rub this into you in any fashion except that, when I really think about it, I am.

But while I try to wipe the grin off my face I also want to highlight the crux of this correspondence. The essence of this letter is to prevent you from committing again, the very grave mistake you did yesterday.

I am referring to that moment before the nineteenth over when you walked up to Mr. Yuvraj Singh and told him something that made Mr. Singh very very angry. If I remember correctly Mr. Singh approached you rapidly with cricket bat in one hand, I think right, before the umpire restrained him and saved you from buying a new English face post-match.

Of course we all know what happened next. Mr. Singh went on to thulp six sixes in the next over which was lovingly presented to him by one Mr. Stuart Broad. I do not know how this comes across in English but in most parts of North India they would say that “Yuvaraj Singh made England’s mother and sister into one…”

I know you are now regretting this move and wished you had not riled Mr. Yuvaraj Singh so.

Earlier today it occurred to me that you may have committed this folly because of a certain ignorance of the finer aspects of India’s great ethnic diversity.

So I have taken it upon myself to inform and educate you on how to avoid such mistakes when playing against India again.

The first thing you do, when you feel garrulous on the field of play, is that you gently check up on their surnames.

Let us take the case of Yuvaraj Singh.

If you observe carefully you will notice that his surname is Singh.

You can do it. Try again.

When you observe this surname on an Indian person in a competitive setting, such as a cricket match, traffic or in a crowded disco, you do not rub them the wrong way. In fact you avoid conversation at all costs. I would go so far to say that you complement them on their looks/wealth/health and relieve the location of your presence immediately.

While I am not a Singh myself I have had the opportunity to interact with several Singhs many of whom, inspite of my jokey, sarcastic demeanour, did not impel me to undertake critical surgery of any kind.

But that is because I said NOTHING. NADA. NIL.

This is a very good policy to follow with Singhs.

Singhs, by and large, are some of the most jovial people in India. They love a good meal, heady drink and back slapping good humour. They work hard at whatever they do, party all night to the most infectious music and believe in living life to the fullest.

I know some Singhs who have two washing machines at home: one for washing clothes and the other for making Lassi. (True Fact.)

But within this merry, albeit cholesterol full, demeanour hides a race that can rapidly combust when angered. When the average Singh has been driven to wrath he often throws things, throws things at things and sometimes drives things through other things. Such one other thing, once I observed, was a tractor.

And it’s not just action but also words. And whatay words!

Rivaled in his insulting fervour only by a hardcore Chennai Tamilian from a suburb like Washermanpet, the average Singh can run through entire generations of Flintoffs, bestowing individual terms of endearment, without ever using the same abuse twice, or waiting to catch his or (this is the scary part) her breath.

I am, incidentally married to a lass from the Punjab which contains many many Singhs. Whenever I leave laundry lying around or forget to pay the Power bill she immediately updates me of my responsibility by reminding of who I am, where I came from, what will happen to my tender parts and where I will end up in the long term all in one succinct, crisply delivered sentence that would make an average member of the Barmy Army fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness at which point she may let him off with a minor rap across the knuckles with a fridge or sofa.

She also has this fearsome backhanded slap across the face that you hear moments after it hits you because, when sufficiently angered, her palm moves faster than sound.

You may also like to know about one Mr. Navjot Singh Sidhu who used to don India’s blue many moons ago and is today a well-known cricket commentator and TV presenter of ill-repute.

Mr. Sidhu once had a minor tiff with another individual in a traffic-related situation. Now I am aware that Englishmen also get into traffic tiffs and then resolve it by hurling abuse at each other or a little pushing and shoving.

Mr. Sidhu, after due thought and introspection, killed the other man. Kaput. Khallas. Phineesh.

Which is why you should be thankful that Yuvraj Singh hit that ball for six so many times rather than, oh off the top of my head, your kneecaps.

And finally I must tell you about an old friend of mine in engineering college. A Singh of, until this incident, mild repute.

Somehow it transpired that a friend of his was made fun of and minorly slapped about by a ridiculous fellow in the NRI quota who, like you, was unaware of surname based profiling.

My friend, on hearing of the news, walked toward the perpetrator’s room, picked me up on the way to clean up after, along with a large hollow concrete brick the size of Gladstone Small and barged in.

He swung, I jumped up, perpetrator passed out, he missed and the brick proceeded speedily through an entire wooden bookcase, right through a Sony stereo system and a stack of CDs before ending up wedged well between my legs. Thankfully it missed my belly by a few inches and hit me full on the cojones (ka-ho-nees).

At the time it was not much fun. Over the weeks we learned to laugh at the whole thing but not too much because I had bladder control issues for a while.

So, in closing, I ask you to refrain from such verbal excesses in future. Currently we have Mahendra Singh Dhoni, R.P. Singh, Harbhajan Singh and of course Yuvraj Singh in the team. And perhaps in time, because there is no logic or cricketing reason to do so, BCCI may pick VRV Singh as well.

Keep your trap shut.

Namaste London,
Sidin Sunny Vadukut

p.s. Next week I will write to you to tell you why you should also be wary of South Indian Cricketers even if they are named after popular breakfast and tiffin items.

Picture courtesy Cricinfo.com

With great pleasure I announce the newest showcase of my mirthful prose. My weekly column on Rediff!
Click here to read the first installment. Its called “Laughing matters” (I wanted ‘Tuesdays with Sidin’… sigh…) and here is a snapshot of the homepage with the column in big blue hyperlinky letters. To me at least.

Yey!

(As seen, with minor editing, in yesterday’s Businessline.)
Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with an HR professional over a cup of coffee and get to know her side of the Young Manager dilemma.

The Young Manager Dilemma is what we call the entire superset of problems that HR and the new manager seem to have with each other. Let me explain.

Not enough pay, the manager says. The business can’t afford it, HR replies. Crappy food in the canteen, the manager says. That’s why we secretly have a separate contractor for the HR team, they retaliate. I don’t see my career going anywhere, the young manager cries hoarse. Stop bothering me when I am playing Solitaire, the VP HR responds. I would like to move into Marketing as that is my long term career goal, you email the Manpower team. We have a Marketing Department?!!, they immediately retort.

Indeed over the years many small, medium and large level problems have deeply rooted themselves, in a morale-debilitating minefield of sorts, between the people in HR and the young, new managers.

My friend prefers to call this explosive family of issues ‘The Young Manager Dilemma’.

“They are NEVER satisfied you know” she said slowly shaking her head side to side. “Nothing you do is ever good enough for these new managers. You do this much and they want this much.” She first holds her hand about a foot over the table and then extends it over her head.

She is right of course. Young managers can be a pain in the backoffice. I myself have given many an HR professional sleepless nights with my incessant questioning and clarifying.

“But I still don’t get why I can’t encash one week of leave right away! I haven’t used them and it clearly says in the HR Manual that I can encash leave I don’t use…” I once ranted and raved.

“Yes. But you need to work enough to earn your leaves!” the HR guy retorted in a lame attempt at defense.

“So why don’t you calculate that and tell me sir…” I told him as I walked away pleased with having raised an important issue during my orientation program.

But much of this tension is just due to the unbridled ambition that many of today’s new managers approach their jobs with. They are eager to perform and I know this because many of them keep forwarding me emails with advice on how to easily improve my performance as well.

Alas the blood is hot and the manager is young. That is a volatile combination in addition to being an unnecessarily melodramatic line for a humourous newspaper column.

My friend suddenly looked up at me her eyes screwed up in anger and her eye brows furrowed together severely. She calls this her ‘Retrenchment of several employees in one go’ face. She said: “These fellows should be glad that they are not in China you know. Listen to this true story that happened recently.”

You may check with the Xinhua News Agency for full details of this fascinating story that will lend much mirth at HR conferences all over the world for years to come.

This occurs at an automotive parts manufacturer somewhere in China. Besides making excellent automotive parts that, in US Dollar terms, cost just one-tenth of US manufactured parts if you exclude the product liability and patent infringement law suit costs, the company also espouses a most unique Corporate Policy.

Simply put the policy states a method for handling any dispute between a senior and his subordinate. According to the policy if a subordinate disagrees with something a boss tells him he is immediately fined on the spot. A second offence means an even greater fine. At the third offence the employee is fired.

This actually happened to an employee recently. And she is now taking the company to court.

Now take a moment to let this sink in.

We are not talking about a serious offence here like setting fire to the SAP server or passing something you shouldn’t have through the paper shredder like, say, the VP Finance.

In this company you CANNOT contradict ANYTHING that bosses say. If they say “I think we should brand this product Fluffy Puppy!” you are NOT allowed, as per policy, to correct them and say “But the product is an industrial garbage compactor.” Instead you are supposed to nod along and agree.

Now some of you might say that this is not at all surprising coming from a country like China which is pretty popular for their authoritarian government. I could go and on about various anecdotes from the Chinese style of government but the fact remains that the Chinese press suffers from a dearth of high quality writers in English and I fit the bill perfectly.

Now I would like to see how some of our new managers would deal with a situation like that. Where, when you need to contradict top management, you can’t fill in a form, fire out an email salvo or convene one of those 360 degree feedback meetings. All you can do is mutter to yourself very quietly and go back to your little cubicle.

“Now if only they would expose our young managers to some of these cruel work environments before they started working. Then I’d like to see how many of them turn up and crib at work everyday.”

My friend in HR was working herself up to a frenzy.

But I guess she is right in a way. We all do tend to get a little too caught up in our personal goals and forget what a good thing we have going for ourselves here. And sometimes it is OK for things not to be perfect at work.

For instance let me talk about my very first job. I was recruited to setup a material testing lab which, about fifteen minutes after joined, was scrapped by the top management in Bangkok.

So I sat around with nothing to do. For months. It drove me nuts. And no one there seemed to care.

Today, however, I have learned from my impetuous ways of old. Of course I still get a pay check from that employer even years after I decided to no longer go to office. But they don’t know that.

Most importantly, I am not cribbing.

And my message to you is this: Maybe you shouldn’t too.

The rains have all but resolutely bid farewell to the green shores of Kerala, leaving behind bits of tar all held together with a vast continuous networks of potholes some the size of minor sovereign European Principalities.The roads back home are the worst I have seen anywhere for years. Actually ever.
And I know a bad road when I see one. I have been in and out of the Imax here in Wadala for three years now.

So while we drove in our ever dependable and severely over-air-conditioned ’84 Ambassador to Thrissur we were tossing and shaking like fresh martinis on a cruise ship.

Our destination is the sprawling Bishop House Complex that lay vast on one fringe of Thrissur city. (The locals always call it a “town”. I personally see no reason to not elevate its status by a notch. It has enough ATM’s, multi-cuisine restaurants, and KFC-copycat fried chicken outlets to vouch for city status.)

The motivation for this trip is the long overdue marriage of one of my most eligible bachelor cousins. The swashbuckling youth works in the gulf and is bordering on what most Mallu parents consider perfect marriageable age: 3 years from date of issue of work permit by UAE government.

Unfortunately for him his lack of enthusiasm to get married is directly proportional to his parent’s eagerness to slaughter a few thousand chickens as soon as possible for the wedding feast and then serve Royal Challenge secretly in storeroom upstairs. Otherwise what will people say? And how much will random people drink?

Things are further complicated by the fact that the parents of the local single lasses no longer have the thing for the NRI that they once used to have. It is a sign of the times that the youthful NRI, prized mallu marriage material of decades gone by, have now been relegated to a pitiful mid-table slot in the marriage league.

Engineers, MBAs, Software professionals, Bankers and even, sigh, Chartered Accounts, have successfully overtaken the selfless homesick gelf-kaaran in the knotstakes.

So my valiant cousin now finds himself spending his latest Kerala-side annual leave perusing maidens. Honestly speaking he is not one of those “super model into the Birlas or no way Jose” type guys. All he looks for is a simple but capable girl who will argue a little with mother-in-law but not too much.

The parents of the girl on the other hand need to see the Family Visa and Employment Permit right away in original or attested copy.

The guy has now been through so many wedding brokers and ladki-dekho visits that he actually now knows all of the single Roman Catholic Syro-Malabar women within a 20 kilometer radius of our little village by face if not by height and last obtained educational degree.

With just weeks left in his leave we had finally decided to take the next drastic step in the process:

Check the “files” at the Bishop House.

The Bishop House is a misnomer for what is really a large complex of Church-related offices and buildings that are laid out in the vast estate around the bishop’s house. (Archbishop really. Yet another reason to call Thrissur a city if you ask me.)

And one of these offices is the Family Aspostolate Center that has been established with the sole purpose of making socially-acceptable arranged marriages as painless as possible.

This means everything from marriage training, marriage planning, post and pre-marriage counseling, childbirth issues and so on.

But the most important function the FAC serves is to be some sort of clearing house for, literally, hundreds of single boys and girls to exchange profiles, meet each other, and ease the overall alliance finding and closing purpose.

The jewel in the FAC crown is, without doubt, the “files”.

After we parked the Amby under a tall and slightly aslant coconut palm, Dad and the cousin proceeded into the FAC office. The missus, mom, the sis and yours truly waited in the car. How long would it take?, we wondered in folly. How big would these files be after all?

Apparently they were like Ullyses, that masterpiece by James Joyce that I bought many years ago and still try to gift away with dignity.

Dad quickly ran out after ten minutes and suggested that I help poor cousin instead.

There were three files on the table. Cousin was flipping through one. A man and women went through the other two taking down notes feverishly.

Thankfully they left after a few minutes and I sat down with a file, mentally rolling up my sleeves determined to get the cousin I Do-ing in a fortnight tops.

The file had a hundred or so folded and well-creased leaves. Each double sided leaf had a photo of the lady in question on one side along with a remarkably detailed profile of the lass and her family. Height, weight, marital status and so on.

The other side was infinitely more intriguing. One half of Side B had an educational profile, followed by a description of any physical handicap the lady had and then a furrowed-brow inducing entry called: “Family Share”.

This field was then filled in with a number which I guess was in rupees.

I have a tingling, and self-esteem reducing, feeling that this was an indication of the amount of dowry the family was willing to pay. The D-word is illegal but you know how practical these Mallus are.

“Family Share” wink, wink nudge, nudge.

Then comes the good bit. The second half of the leaf indicated what the lass, by which I mean her dad, was looking for in a guy.

“25-28” seemed to be the age band of choice for grooms.

A single mallu male around 5 feet 9 inches tall would have no trouble in finding a match going by the entries in the “Desired height” field.

“BTech, MTech, MBA, MCA, IT” is by far the most highly desired job/career profile when it comes to ladies in the Thrissur area. I guess you’d have to peel the women off an engineer-MBA working in Infosys.

But this has no correlation with what they want their hubbies to be earning every month. Just one profile demanded a monthly income greater than 15 grand.

“Must be god-fearing, hard-working, well-educated and caring and loving”.

“Will make any compromise for the right man from a good family with great ambition.”

“I intend to continue working. Should have no issues with my traveling.”

One file through, the cousin had already worked out his personal algorithm:

1. Look at height
2. Check out desired age band
3. Desired education/job profile
4. Look at photo
5. Note down contact details
6. Repeat

I ran above mentioned algorithm on my own file.

The highlight for me in the course of this Girl-Google was when an excited looking man approached me and asked me if I was looking for a suitable alliance. I told him no and he looked disappointed as he walked away.

I repeated this incident to great laughter back home. The missus was much amused and suggested I actually go and meet a nice Manju or Sindhu for myself and let her off the hook. I laughed at the time but have subsequently decided to tap her cellphone and am concealing video cameras as we speak.

Soon the entire family was huddled around files noting down names and numbers. Some of the highlights, in terms of names, were:

1. Little Flower
2. Filsy
3. Milcy
4. Roshial
5. Another Filsy (The odds??)

Soon we were joined by another group of elders, this time going through a boy file.

Whisper whisper, nod nod, note note, flip flip.

Three files later, just as were ready to leave, one of the counseling sessions got over and dozens of eligible boys and girls streamed down a flight of stairs, past the file browsing areas and out into the little garden outside the FAC.

When we were done with our shortlisting and walked back to our car we spotted the singles outside in awkward little couples all over the place: the guys nervously sitting on concrete benches, their knees flapping away to and apart in that manner of batsmen waiting for their turn. The women chewed away on dupattas and sari pallus petrified of conversation.

Some sort of matchmaking process, I guessed, was going on.

Later that evening we called up Thresya, an all round favourite choice for all of us, only to find that she had enigmatically left the number of a laundry as her contact.

We had, alas, better luck with Filsy. Cousin will be meeting her later this week.

Fingers crossed.