Fueling Thoughts

With age, a man sheds two things; the hair on his head and so-called friends! The ongoing ScamDemic has had me blocking a few Covidiots who were daily sending me a barrage of scaremongering messages. Likewise, I had to tell a couple of "Maskista" Karens to Fuck-off, also reminding them that I am not their hen-pecked husband to listen to that chiding tone. Which reminds me how fed up with their sermons and pretensions, I used to get rid of my female college mates exactly the same way, and they always angrily retorted back" No wonder you don't have a Girlfriend" as if my single hood and inability to take their Bullshit was interconnected. But, they probably had a valid point! Without going deeply into the topic of masks, government flip-flops on the subject and over 50 medical (peer-reviewed) papers, which I collected that say that they mostly don't -  the main factor causing this current divisive rift is really about not their effectiveness but the subject of...

About 24 years back, after motorcycling across India for 6 months as a voluntary mechanic with an international group (I will skip over the part covering loud rampant sex or riding dead stoned);  I was unable to sit in an office cubicle again.  So I took up on my ambition of becoming a journalist except that sans an MA degree in English or a Mass Communication diploma, I wasn't going to land a  gig in any local publication even if I had the writing skills of Harold Robbins.  So I started freelancing to build up a portfolio, which was writing 2000 words for  250 rupees and trying to cram it with at least 3 photographs as I was paid 100 per image. In a few months, my articles became a regular front-page feature on the supplements of the largest local English daily of the region.  One of my ardent fans was a  professor of Linguistics or was it Folklore, from Gauhati University who always complimented my pieces whenever he met me. One day he asked me from ...

  The Russians love the French phrase “Cherchez la femme,” popularized by Hugo, implying that most trouble, directly or indirectly, is caused by women. Their women use it with equal fervor, because beneath the façade of female solidarity, they actually despise one another. In my case, those words should be embossed on my walls, mirrors, and coffee mugs. Most of the women I’ve met over the past 28 years have collectively inspired me to write a punk-rock version of Rod Stewart’s classic " Some Guys Have All the Luck ." Only my anthem would open with: “ Some dudes get blowjobs, others the whack jobs - no prizes for guessing where I belong… ” Misogyny? Sour grapes? Trapped by unwanted pregnancy and bamboozled by child support? Did the ex-wife take it all? False rape accusations? Nooo… sir. It’s far more insidious. I could, of course, rant for hours about a recurring theme with women in my life: “I rejected you earlier to sleep with or marry someone else, but now please feel sorry...

  I recently read a story about lenders adopting intimidating techniques on loan defaulters, no thanks to the precarious economic condition in India for the last few years,  now conveniently explained away by the government as the fallout of the COVID-19 ScamDemic.  Well, despite not being a loan-taker, my car instalments being paid 10 years back, I still found myself on the receiving end of such harassment several times.  The first started when I added a friend's wife on Facebook, who had apparently defaulted on a car loan more than a decade back and fled town. The recovery agent followed her FB account as it had no privacy settings, next found my phone number from a job site where they were registered as an employment agency and unleashed 24-hour harassment via intimidating calls demanding her number and address. He even cited my home address, threatening to come over physically. It took me a day to discover that they got my contact details from the  India job...

India has some of the filthiest cities in the world,  no thanks to a dysfunctional socialistic and corruption ridden municipal service, lack of civic amenities and an almost universal lack of civic sense among her citizens. Indian cities occupy  22 positions among the top 30 dirties cities in terms of air pollution in the world with Delhi being the most polluted capital. Yet, what surpasses both our filthy air and toxic waterways in the amount of venom my fellow Indians are capable of spreading online the moment they feel the country's image or prestige is undermined.  Well, to be honest no one really gives a flying-F about the country, otherwise she wouldn't have been in the state she is in, but for most of my fellow Indians whether the domicile variety of the economic migrants (sorry ex-pat is strictly a white-privilege term) the equation for nationalism and self-respect is per the following formula: My ancestors were great = My Country is great = So I should be respect...

Okay, I know it looks and sounds FaceBookish, but it's been my guiding principle all my adult life, the same applies for professional relationships as well.  Nobody is perfect, and we all have to deal with difficult and demanding people or clients. Nonetheless, it takes a more than a certain amount of unreasonableness, malice or entitlement to make it toxic. I have seen time and time again that a 2nd chance never works out, in fact it fizzles out even faster than the first...  So to the rubbish bin of relations it is... And some people are sent there right after the first meeting...to hell with the potential business opportunity lost!!

I grew up during the last vestiges of the Cold War in a place the least affected by it in any way.  There it was Reader's Digest readers who "knew" that the US was the land of the free, and those who purchased Soviet books on everything from Russian folk tales to Marxism and Physics textbooks, sold at a price lower than the cost of transporting them.  At times the dividing lines merged.  I always detested the feel-good Reader's Digest, viewing it as covert American propaganda, which as an adult I learned that it in-fact was, same with Nat Geo and Popular Mechanics. But the key word here is "covert."  With no television, it was a battle of government radio stations on short wave. BBC was still held to be truthful, till they exposed themselves much later during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, lying even more than the US outlets. VOA and Radio Liberty for propaganda against the Soviet Union, and Radio Moscow for laughs.  However, none of the cold-war rhetoric c...