Chronicles of a Jongleur

While cell phones have become as common as that ubiquitous roll of beedis, the sheer proliferation of these instant connectivity devices has also opened up a whole new industry catering to cell-spam. Indeed, hardly 20 minutes had passed after the activation of my brand new prepaid Airtel line when I was barraged by a torrent of unrelated messages, all promising to better my miserable life in one way or another. I can understand if its targeted advertising, but I somehow don’t understand how making an offer for cheap liposuction can appeal to my senses. There was another one about looking for playback singers, and a third one promising me the heaven (and hell) if I subscribed to one of their uber low interest credit cards. Duh!

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?

News channels seem to be the rage nowadays- you cant look beyond three feet before you run into some form of news channel or another. Reminds me of the times over a decade ago when BBC ruled the roost in the news arena – now you have the NDTvs, Headlines Todays, Headlines Yesterdays and half a dozen other equally weirdly named news channels on the picture tube. Add that to a handful of politically motivated and mud-slinging news Channels in Tamil, and your entertainment quota for the day is more than satiated. Everyone wants to be a reporter nowadays, from the very pimply faced fresh-out-of-school graduate to the retrenched high school teacher, all of them wielding a microphone and shouting away his/her story of the day.

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.