So, since CNN-IBN is one of the few channels that offers a respectable quality of live video streamed directly in real time, I tuned myself into one of those umpteen talk shows that serve no other purpose but to dig out old controversies and create new ones. One of them had Karan Thapar firing away at Rahul Bajaj on a million things. Now, to be absolutely candid, I respect Karan for all his journalistic abilities, but am also turned off by his wannabe-Larry King style of questioning that somehow seems to suffer from a credibility perspective. Rahul Bajaj – here was one self made (well partly inherited) billionaire tycoon that avoids the public eye with such passion that only a select few of us actually know a lot about him. 

The interview started bang on the wrong foot right away, Karan questioning Rahul’s political motivations (he is a nominated MP) while amply (and rightly) pointing out that Rahul had only a few months earlier had rubbished any talk of his role in politics. That was the beginning of 15 minutes of eminently forgettable amateurish entertainment. With Rahul, vehemently denying that he “was not a politician”, and Karan prodding him a little bit more, the show started to look like 2 school boys fighting with one another over who gets to bat first in their third grade cricket match. But to my horror, the tycoon stooped to such abysmal levels of pettiness that few people would dare to in front of national television. Consider this portion of their interview:

Rahul Bajaj: I have not got into politics. If I got elected in a party ticket or if I decided to work for a political party if I decided to work in villages if I decided to make slogans of garibi hatao, with no desire to do that, all that I will not do. I have not taken any obligations from any party. I don’t want to be obligated.

Karan Thapar: Mr Bajaj you are wonderful with words but the problem is that you are short on logic. Parliament and being an MP is part of politics.

Rahul Bajaj: Where did you go to school Karan?

Karan Thapar: Is that relevant?

Rahul Bajaj: It is very relevant because your logic is illogical.

Karan Thapar:If it is relevant I will tell you. I went to Doon School, Cambridge, Oxford and I know a lot about politics.

Rahul Bajaj: I went to Cathedral, St. Stephens, and Harvard, slightly better than you in every respect. So I understand logic. But I am a humble man unlike you.

Really guys, this is NATIONAL TELEVISION for devils sake, don’t relegate it into a bickering contest. Even with all my dislike for Karan, I couldn’t help feeling sorry at the man at the other end parading immaturity and arrogance with the swagger of a roadside bully. Here is a man, who purportedly went to Harvard to do his MBA, and really came back doing absolutely no justice to either his alumnus or his image. So what if he made a billion if his repertoire doesn’t include that fundamental trait called humility? Does a billion bucks in your kitty automatically give you a license to throw tantrums at will? Or does being an industrial heavyweight automatically make you intellectually superior than other common human beings? And please, I cannot but not help in comparing you with N.R. Narayana Murthy or a Dhirubhai Ambani or even a Warren Buffet for that matter and not help feeling disappointed with you.And I pity Harvard, whose reputation built up over four hundred years has been brought to shame in a matter of 24 minutes.

Mr. Bajaj, if you think you “won” in this interview, you are wrongly mistaken. You may have “won” (at least you believe so) the argument, but you certainly didn’t win any brownie points for people’s respect. You ended up in the unenviable position of portraying yourself as a callous, arrogant and bullying heavyweight with absolutely no trace of humility, compassion or modesty. People like cannot but imagine you as another swaggering goonda, using the power of his bankroll to muscle your way into people’s garages. And I know extrapolation is incorrect and improper, but if this is the same way in which you wield your power inside the boardrooms of Bajaj Auto, I feel sorry for the poor employees who have to wear their fake cloaks of sycophancy as they submit themselves to the moods of their torturous warlord.

“Hamara Bajaj”- yeah you wish. 

PS: The entire transcript of the interview can be found here . For those with broadband connections, feast yourself to this parody here . The video is even more hilarious than the text- I promise.

3-8 – Stand up on a stool next to daddy marveling at the ritual.

11- Try to be your very own Einstein using Daddy’s discarded blade on your palm to see what a shave feels like.

11- 13 – Envy those who are starting to develop the first strands of facial hair. Even make fun about it.

14 to 16- Keep repeatedly getting told that I resemble a Tibetan goat. But too scared of external reactions to take the plunge.

At 16 – 7’O Clock Ejtek sans a razor tells me what it is to be grown up.

At 17 – Gillette Presto is the greatest thing ever made for manhood. Its now an 8 rupee obsession purchased once a month and used once a week.

20 – Gillette Sensor arrives from the US of A – courtesy a 4th cousin of mine. Save it for the big cultural night in college.

22- Natural progression to Sensor Excel. Hell it has to be done thrice a week now. No wonder girls haven’t been looking at me much all these years.

24 – Gillette Mach III is a price shocker. But hey, smooth is the way to go, isn’t it why the ad shows two ladies cuddling a hunk fresh out of his shave?

25- Schick Quattro now, heck 4 blades doesn’t seem to make that big a difference these days. Or is it just me turning into a grizzly?

Now – Gillette Fusion – Five is the way to go, microfins et all, and these things are starting to look like items from a jewelers store these days! Oh wait, there is also a 6th blade at the other end to “trim and carve the way you want it to be.”

What’s next?

Today was my Albert’s (my colleague) last day at work. Typical of any leaving employee, he began making his farewell rounds at about three in the afternoon, stopping by to say goodbye to a few other colleagues, secretaries and the likes. After a circuitous path that probably involved three or four pit stops for coffee and donuts along the way, Albert finally made it to my desk just as I was packing up for the day.

It was after the typical pleasantries of “Take care dude, great luck in your career…yada yada” were exchanged, that I mentioned – “Hey Albert, the next time you are in India give me a shout. We can catch up on old times.”

Pat came the reply – “Well, I am not sure. Quite a few of my friends advised me to visit a few other countries before stepping into any third world ones like India.”

Say What?

I was too stunned to issue a repartee even as Mr. Wannabe Marco Polo rambled on with his inimitable swagger. He lectured on – “ I had a few friends who visited India and they were taken aback by the experience. It seems there was this huge parking lot where there were hundreds of children and sick people living on the street (apparently in the slums of Mumbai), somewhere in Mumbai. One of my friends spent two months there and didn’t like it at all. Somehow, I don’t think I can withstand such an extreme cultural shock either.”

By now I was seething with fury, not so much at his indignation or derision, but by the fact that for all his proclaimed technical capabilities, the air-headed prick did not have the basic fundamentals of cross-cultural communication. I didn’t want to ruin the bastard’s last few minutes in his first job by (rightfully) pointing out my displeasure at his acidic statements, and let him go. And I fervently hope that this is the last I will ever see or hear of him again. Period.

This incident obviously triggered a chain of thoughts in my head that seem profound in retrospect – that a person of Albert’s pedigree (he is a native Hong Konger who passionately dissociates himself from all things Oriental and proudly proclaims his American citizenry), can proudly wear the stripes of his adopted country on his sleeve along with a stubborn contempt for anything non-American. He can also consider himself suitable to remain perched on his uber-pedestal of condescension and simultaneously denounce “other countries” as being ineligible to enter into his paradigm of the civilized world.

On the other hand, the incident generously stoked my temper and made me passionately patriotic while mentally trying to defend the country I have always loved. And I guess this feeling extends to the general desi populace as well, we canvas our pride (and faith) in our country and its system somehow convincing ourselves that we are doing our best in changing the face of India – by being OUTSIDE it. We gloat in the lifestyle that America offers us whilst bitching about what could have been if we hadn’t sold our souls and had stayed back in India. Once in the land of milk and honey, we parade photographs of our exploits across each and every one of the forty eight states we have visited and even put them on our résumé’s as though it were some sort of achievement. On the other hand how many of us even know the capital of Arunachal Pradesh, let alone even CONSIDERING a visit there?

This is where the average desi morphs into the likes of my friend Albert- both remain short sighted at different levels. While ignorance and immaturity might explain Albert’s supernatural levels of arrogance, narrow mindedness and obstinacy to look within ourselves and introspect cloud our beliefs. Surely we were taught to be better people?

On a separate note, I would like to personally welcome Albert a few years from now when he makes his grand entry in Bangalore, to train the “third-world” person who will eventually take over his job. Because baby, what goes around, will eventually come around.

* On a separate note, Microsoft seems to have left no stone unturned in its bid to bulldoze all its webspace  with the “Live” moniker.(Trivia: Microsoft and its subsidiaries own some of the larget web real estate spots in cyberspace. www.microsoft.com is technically the largest website on the planet.). CNET has this interesting article on how this attempt at re-branding its entire suite does not seem to have made a mark on user’s minds. The “Live” avatar of Hotmail at first glance does not seem to be totally smooth, but they still need to figure that people on dial-up lines are going to be tearing their hair out as they wait for an eternity for pages to load up. Those on alternate browsers can forget about even sampling various Live services; MS still seems to want to impose Internet Explorer as the de-facto browser for most of its web applications.

* Speaking of major web-mail services trying to adopt a desktop-application look and feel (a-la MS-Outlook or Thunderbird), one thing that puzzles me is the number of months (or years) the folks at Google, Yahoo or MS choose to keep their services in Beta. Honestly, whats the fun thing in letting your users know that you have been in beta for the last thirty three months? And going by the looks of it, every Web-2.0 (or whatever) company seems to think that a miniscule “Beta” next to their banner heading is some sort of fashion accessory (Think Flickr, Zoho,  Orkut, etc.) . Or is it just a legal loophole to prevent irate users from suing the damn company in case  they (the Web 2.0 company) mess something up?

And how subtler, more refined or charming sophistication can never make its way into the typical desi male on the threshold of the 5th decade of his existence.

At the risk of sounding flaky HC, here is your very own desi dude trying to stand up and submit a rather delayed rebuttal (Hey I just got through reading all her archives!) on behalf of his very own desi brethren. Here’s my two cents- for what its worth.

Let me start by saying that typical desi males (for I cannot vouch for firangi variants of the male species), has stashed away memories on what he presumably recounts as the formative years of his existence. I for one, have not met a single person who did not feel that college years were the most rewarding years of his life, irrespective of where and how he spent them. That glow of been there, done that and had a whale of a time does not ever dim out and disappear, it merely steps into the sidelines and quietly takes its place among other feelings that evolve out of age, maturity and circumstances. Simply put- it’s a form of nostalgia that goes beyond mere definition.

We write mile long emails filled with bromide everyday not so much because our lives are now mundane and unworthy of type space, but merely because thinking about memories and people we shared it with triggers off a second youth within us. One that we wish could be replayed over and over again. I will have to beg to differ with you again, for pecking away amateurish jokes at 40 or wallowing in the memories of inane nicknames is NOT a reflection of hyper-immaturity. It is NOT about living within the confines of the comfortable college-coterie of backslapping friends and PJ’s. It’s just an extremely unrewarding attempt at reaching out and trying to make a connection with a world you would never wish to leave behind. It can never totally quite equate to anything else.

And I find it hard to subscribe to the fact about these individuals leading unfulfilling lives, or for that matter that they are challenged on multiples areas of maturity intellect and IQ. It’s a blanket statement based on the (very) limited sample size of an e-group. As is with any sample, I am sure that a few of same people cracking those demented jokes within the confines of a bulletin board in fact are tremendously articulate, responsible and conversation-worthy. Some may even be extremely erudite, and a few of them may actually be great family guys. And I am in no doubt that a handful may in fact boast of greater achievements than merely parading their university admit letters from two decades ago.

I believe any type of generalization is inherently flawed HC, and you leave precious little in way of substantiating your inferences about your ex-classmates being abnormal people with short-circuited brain receptors and exceedingly redundant lives. Sorry, I simply can’t understand why this (and a multitude of other points you have observed) can make them seem “exceptionally pathetic” or equate to the “state of jejune juvenilia”.

I think you write some great stuff HC, but on this occasion, I think you were a tad off target.

What do you do when all the people you know – from the best buddy you shared a samosa with to that older cousin whom you confided your heart and soul to, to the pesky grandmother next door and even the milkman start pestering you about your job, salary, marriage, return plans etc.? It takes a lot of effort in dealing with different people in the loyalty hierarchy who are essentially bombarding you with deeply personal questions that you would rather not want to face, let alone answer. There are other equally impertinent questions that increase my discomfiture levels tenfold- Why are you working there and not here? What is your designation? When are you going to become “a manager?” Ad nauseum.

I have realized that the best way to tackle such eminently avoidable questions is to, well, avoid the questions and avoid the people who ask them. For no level of courteous dignity is capable of quenching the curiosity levels of these pesky folks. Sometimes I wonder if my attitude is a manifestation of expectations that come from (a few) years of living abroad – a subtle but undeniable expectation of individual privacy. But there are occasions when you have no choice but to provide an answer, which will inevitably be dissected and analyzed at length after you have boarded the plane out of Madras. A piece of counsel for my fellow bloggers- answer everything in as vague a manner as you can. A confused audience asks lesser questions.

And I realized that it’s no longer possible to distract the elder folk under the pretext of describing life in America. Almost everyone who is anyone has an offspring(s), an in-law, a neighbor, an aunt or a pet skunk etc. who is currently working in Silicon Valley (as a hypothetical example, take a look at the Matrimonial section in the Sunday edition of the Hindu). Or take a walk through the alleys of the crowded concert halls, now that it’s the peak of the December music season- you will be amazed how many intersecting discussions there are on topics ranging from the merits of the American Interstate and demerits of Medicare as well as about four hundred thousand different descriptions of Yellowstone National Park. Most lead dual lives- six months of playing with their toddler grandchildren in Palo Alto followed by 6 months of bitching about how rude the daughter-in-law was to them. Some of them have even state of the art hearing aids and designer Casio watches. Its not uncommon to walk the Parks of Luz Corner (for the men) and the slimy streets of Thanni Dorai Market (for the women) and hear extended discussions about how fair(sic) their grandchildren are because of the weather and how cute they sound with their devastating accents. And so on. Anyway, I digress.

Having bitched enough about myriad topics, its time to reflect and rationalize. It’s during such discussions that you suddenly start to feel the unbearable heat of our social structure, our responsibilities and commitments. All of a sudden you want to scurry back into that huge abyss that is America, away from the “heat, dust and grime” of “Indian society”, of nosy relatives and curious neighbors. And once there, you start the same process all over again – of dreaming about that next great trip to India, where you can hope to “spend some quality time” with friends and relatives alike.

It’s a sunrise cycle that never ends, for the laws of gravity always pull one side towards the other. Each side will continue to remain green “er”, and the pendulums in our souls shall never cease to oscillate. After all we are all one and the same – opportunists of trapped in different grades the human form. And driven by the wonderful euphemism of greed that we shamelessly masquerade as ambition.

I am still clueless about the modus operandi of this scam. How on earth do these scamsters manage to get hold of our numbers? Is our privacy being sold to some half assed idiot who hopes there are enough gullible folks out there to fall for his tricks? Even more intriguing is that all these spam messages seem to come from apparently legitimate phone numbers. One of these days I have to call back and say, “Hello, this is the law enforcement division of the Chennai Police. We are going to arrest you under Section 3A45 of the Indian Penal Code……..”. Hopefully no magical wireless virus automatically will get automatically downloaded onto my device and start broadcasting away the phone numbers of my three dozen uncles and aunts.

And its not just these cell phone folks who are into it, everyday I get bombarded by at last twenty five different calls offering me all sorts of things ranging from low interest car loans to home delivered toilet cleaning fluid. Seriously.

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Staying with the same topic, the other day I was at one of the NRI oriented private-public banks which are essentially resurrected avatars of their once loss making ancestors. I am sitting with this banker who is in the process of taking down various details to open up a godforsaken account (These days you need passports, ration cards, voter cards, freedom fighter cards, pro Congress cards, blood and spit samples in order to be considered legitimate), when another harrowed customer walks in and takes the chair next to me and starts firing away questions about home loans, mutual funds and whiskey stocks.

Now we are sitting in a mini table that seats four people and I am in the process of describing my annual salary when this happens. And the funny thing was that everyone went about their business as though things were normal, and I was even urged to generate some other body fluids in the presence of the now grouchy customer. And hell, the bank bugger was simultaneously trying to carry on disparate conversations with two different customers, unaware that I was getting livid by the minute. That was when I decided enough is enough and told him that he either hold an uninterrupted private conversation with me, or else he can go to hell.

You guessed it, he told me this was the way THEY dealt with customers, and yes please, if I was not happy about the arrangement, I can go to hell.

So folks, didn’t we always get told that conversations with lawyers, doctors and bankers were fundamentally confidential? Was I expecting too much?

Which brings me to the quality of these Larry King wannabes- pretty faces aside, most of them have no clue whatsoever about time caps, voice modulation, relevancy of answers etc. The accents and jargon are even more atrocious – what with the Bandra verbiage intersecting paths with a locally trained and incompletely acquired Oxford-esque / Boston-esque baritone resulting in a torrid cocktail of incomprehensible junk. Hopefully the more seasoned professionals can lead the way in training the twenty somethings in the essence of brevity and clarity – accents be damned. Hell, I feel more comfortable understanding  Rajdeep Sardesai interviewing P.Chidambaram  than I ever did with the folks yakking away on CBS.

And every idiot on the field seems to be aspiring for the central newsdesk wherein he can sit and fire away challenges with aplomb to dhoti-clad politicians and glossy filmstars.  Even better if you can have your own chat show- complete with heavily made up socialites and failed pop artistes. Someone needs to tell them that becoming a media person does not offer you  a short cut path into the people’s popularity charts – at the end of the day, its individual excellence that is recognized and rewarded, not sporadic flashes of brilliance in the midst of collective mediocrity.

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What’s with educated folks taking society for granted? One example to moot- every morning a suave middle aged man in Ray-Bans and a Reebok jogging suit drives up in his very own Honda City to one of the more prominent parks in the city. His daily exercise consists of a half an hour walk around the park during when his mouth is subject to unbridled vocal damning of how the city is going to the dogs. How the politicos are corrupt, how the quota system is a pain, how the roads are in a mess, how the slums need to be burnt and their residents hounded out of the city and how pollution has reduced his highly needed longevity by a couple of decades. Fair enough- he is a man is entitled to his own opinion. His contribution to the “cursed mechanism of India” though? 5 minutes of uninterrupted urination on the outer walls of the very park he walks – he even asks if you want to accompany him. With the job done, he happily hums his way to a restaurant nearby, completes his daily dosage of frothy filter coffee before driving off in his swank car again.

The routine repeats every single day- and though I have happily begged off his company, I feel an uncontrollable urge to hack away the bastard’s penis reproductive engine, and dunk the bits into his damned filter coffee. Doesn’t basic toilet training transcend across all barriers of affluence, education and above all, fundamental expectations of cleanliness?

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On a side-note – Its amazing how much the PSU’s have lost credibility in the midst of some heavy privatization in our country. A while ago, travelling by Indian Airlines or getting yourself a phone line from VSNL was a source of pride and envy. Nowadays things have come around a full circle – when was the last time you went to the local post office to apply for a telephone line? Or travel by the “mofussil bus” en-route to your honeymoon in Ooty? Doesn’t Airtel Broadband sound inherently cooler, reliable, trustworthy and user-friendly all at the same time? I am not sure if its some high profile marketing by the private sector that’s doing the trick – but PSU’s have suddenly become notorious for gross mismanagement and unforgivable inefficiency even in the midst of some major image changes (Indian, BSNL, SBI etc.). And they seem to be surviving on first timers only, which by the way is not a bad business model in itself considering the fact that over 800 million people are first timers to most of the changes sweeping over rural and urban India. But for most of the city folk, fattened on an advertising diet of screaming billboards and sleazy ads, the private sector has become the de facto way to get things done.