De ja vu....no, this has nothing to do with Paris!

The news hit me like a ton of bricks. I'd seen this happen before a couple of years ago. Back then I wasn't worried for I was constantly around him and could see my 'touches' in a lot of his pranks, arguments and the way he wound my sister up like a tightly strung guitar. It all brought back some strong memories. Memories of my mother's strong hand to be precise. It was all very amusing and even a little helpful, for I could bust him just when he wasn't expecting it and in ways he hadn't thought of, for I had the benefit of hindsight and knew exactly what I, as a budding teenager would have overlooked.

I also knew that the moment I moved out of Dubai, my influence on him would diminish to some extent and he would go on to become a good boy and all would be peachy. The call from my sister proved me wrong.

I moved out of Dubai a few days into 2008. So, I haven't been around the fellow for a quarter under 2 years. He's only met me at my engagement and wedding subsequently. The import of that call from my sister was that he has begun eating thayir sadam exactly the way I do, almost 2 years later! I was, understandably shaken, but not stirred. I was secretly thrilled that my lineage will continue, that my eccentricities will continue to live on. Until last night. Now I can be openly thrilled!

Allow me to explain. I've mentioned before, that I have always loved writing, but until I started this blog, I've never had the discipline to sit down and write. As a teenager, the only writing I could get done was called homework or something like that, and that too only got done with a gun pointed firmly in my direction. The moment the bally homework got done, I'd be out of the house before you could say, "Jack Rabbit". My ultimate fantasy those days was to have a secretary to dictate to, who would write in my handwriting, while I played cricket or tennis or football or whatever it is that I wanted to play.

Unlike me, thankfully, my nephew is not a lazy bum and he has decided to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard as the case may be) and has come with this thoroughly likeable and frankly honest account of his trip from Fremont to Seattle while visiting my other sister. I couldn't help but reproduce it below:

"One fine day, my grandparents, aunt, uncle, cousin and I set off on a trip to Seattle on the evening of the 3oth of June. We drove for approximately 2 hours before we reached our first destination - Red Bluff, where we stayed in a well-known hotel named Best Western. It was very comfortable. We stayed for the night until next morning when we vacated after a good dose of cereal, bread and pancakes for breakfast. Barely half an hour passed when we entered into a long stretch of scenery on both sides. Saumya chitthi took control of the car and we were heading along to the day's planned destination - Mount  Shasta followed by a visit to the famous Crater Lake.

On the way we spotted a Chinese restaurant in which we had an enormous lunch where I mainly stuffed myself with large amounts of  Tofu, a Chinese souvenir to show the expertise of American chefs on Chinese cuisine: they had made it so well. We resumed our journey (Chitthi still at the wheel) afresh with food, toward the beautiful snow-capped Mt. Shasta (formed due to volcanic activity). It was quite a long journey but we made it pretty fast and had lots of time to gaze at its scenic beauty with eyes glued to the pair of binoculars I had brought along with me.

While climbing up we almost went hurtling down the cliff if it had not been Chitthi's sharp eyes and a big boulder at the end of the road! We laughed heartily at the near escape and my granddad and I started piling up more rocks along the edge of the cliff. We paused for a few minutes to take in the fresh air and stunning view of the mountain from that area. We took a few pictures, imaginarily pushing the boulder which we owed our lives to. We were quite low in gas and made to enter a gas station as soon as we descended from the mountain into a small village at the base of the mountain. After refuelling the car we resumed the journey toward Crater Lake which is one of the deepest freshwater lakes in the world with a depth of about 2000 feet below sea level. Upon reaching there we witnessed the natural beauty of the lake and soon found out, that its diameter was 5 miles across and was created by the action of volcanoes not unlike the formation of Mt. Shasta. When we looked down into the lake from the magnificent vista-point provided, it looked like still water but it was actually a trick played on the eyes. After many pictures (Keena included in most of them) we tore our eyes away from it and continued the journey downwards.

I dosed off while Chitthi drove through an unnaturally silent and lonely road for 3 hours without any sight of other cars and reached the yet another cosy Best Western in a village called Rice Hill. All the pictures we took had been uploaded on the laptop by Sri Chittappa who had brought it along with him. Keerthana who had had a tremendous time (with the exception of a lot of visits to the toilets in different places!) and was jumping around on the bed apparently thrilled with the sight of the mountain and the lake. I too was enthralled by the visit to these two famous landmarks and was eager to visit more of the planned sites. So next day as per schedule we started off in the morning toward the big city of Portland where we saw a very large port with many ships and boats dotting the bay. The view was outstanding from atop one of the bridges that we used to cross the port and we could see miles and miles of water surrounding us on our sides. We crossed the bridge and entered the main city of Portland where we entered a store named FRYS ELECTRONICS where we searched for a suitable laptop for my grandparents since there was no policy of tax in the state of Oregon in which Portland is situated quite unlike the regulations of San Francisco. It was the 4th of July, widely celebrated as the American Independence day."

I've not edited anything other than breaking it into a few paragraphs. At his age, I know I suffered from a horrible case of bad spellingitis and it warms the heart to see a clean essay from a hyper active photocopy of myself. Keep it up Sid! I'm proud of you and keep eating thayir sadam the way you are now!

P.S.: I can't help but notice the emphasis on food in his essay. Yet another trait of mine?

DON'T do that!!!

Eureka! It struck me like a bolt of lightning. The magnitude of the conspiracy boggles the mind. The clever deception by Church authorities and naïveté of the public which fell into the trap with their eyes open truly is something to admire.

No, I'm not talking about the latest book by Dan Brown.

What I am talking about is how the Church at Notre Dame is trying to shake its "Hunchback of Notre Dame" image. The Church belongs to an elite, elusive and nearly extinct genre of tourist places in Europe - one where entrance is free.

On approaching its hallowed grounds, I was getting ready to whip out the dusty old wallet and dish out the dough, just like I'd done at every other place in Paris. In return for this eagerness, I was greeted by the icy glare of the attendant at the entrance who muttered something in French, which I initially understood to mean, "You don't have enough money to sniff the air around this place, let alone coming in and looking around." The insult hit me so hard, I brought out the plastic in response - I'd rather live the rest of my life in debt than be insulted by you! Same icy glare, temperature reduced by a further 2 degrees.

Now I was perplexed. This was the first place since the road-side dhaba on NH47 just outside Perundurai that refused to accept a credit card. My super fast brain quickly deduced that the attendant must be trying to convey something. I frantically looked around for help and found it in the form of a notice pasted on the wall, in English, that said "Free Admission." Aah, the bloke was actually saying I can walk in for free. Nice.

Just below that sign and all way into the main Church hall, there was the symbol of a camera that was struck off. My keen sense of observation told me that this means, in return for letting you into the Church for free, you agree not to take any photos and peace and happiness prevail in the world. This was confirmed by another notice in writing that said so in as many words.

Those who know me would agree that I'm a stickler for rules and abide by all laws, as long as they are convenient to abide by, so the camera was promptly dumped in the bag. That's when problems started. Apparently, either I was eagle eyed to have spotted 4 million signs saying you're not allowed to take photographs or every other visitor in the Church was blind as a dingbat. The place was swarming with cameras, all with flashes blazing. Good thing this was Church, were it some other place, all it needed was some music for a new entrant to think he'd entered a discotheque of sorts with funky strobe lighting.

Stifling the urge to start dancing and controlling rage is an exercise I wouldn't recommend. That's exactly what I did. I began questioning why (mostly) honest, (mostly) law abiding citizens would want to so blatantly ignore the photography ban boggled the mind. When the dust settled, I concluded by blaming digital cameras behind the outrage. These small, handy little blighters almost talk to you and goad you into getting click happy.

However, even after I returned to London, I was searching for answers. This morning, I hit the jackpot. As I was sitting on the Tube, travelling at 5 MPH, it struck me. Tell a person there's wet paint on the wall and they will always touch it to make sure its wet. Telling a child not to break the window is the most certain way of making sure it is broken. Similarly, after being taunted for years about the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Church suddenly found out that nobody wanted to take any photographs of an ugly thing. So, at a brainstorming session, one bright spark must have come up with the idea that putting up signs of "No Photography" would certainly result in photographs being taken by the millions, simple, clear reverse psychology.

So, while everyone else came back with this:

I came with this: 

There is a problem with my theory though. The hunchback of Notre Dame might be trying to re-invent its image, but what about the Lido? The exact same thing happened there the previous night. There is a photography ban at the Lido while the show is going on. Fair enough, considering the show is exotic and a work of art, you don't want it all over YouTube. Further more, the last thing Lido authorities want is for a dancer to get distracted by a rogue flash and trip over his or her step bringing the house down, for all the wrong reasons. All clean, undisputable logic.

However, here's the important part. While the Church at Notre Dame has a reputation to correct, Lido is no hunchback, Lido is associated with beauty, among other things. Thinking about the Lido shattered by theory on reverse psychology, somewhat... until I had a hard think about the Lido's runaway photographer - he was Indian. Then it all made sense again. They were two separate incidents, Notre Dame is still trying to shake its image, while at Lido, the photo was just an Indian thing - we don't follow rules, simple!

Follow up: I now save £20,000...every month!

It is common knowledge that I saved £9,970 (£10,000 depending on how you look at it) by buying an, ahem, 'not so original' Rolex watch. Some might argue that it's not a big deal and that by buying an air ticket as opposed to buying the plane itself one can save somewhere in the region of $19,999,000 (assuming the plane is a small second hand exec jet and the ticket is a long haul one. There is no real upper limit on the amount you could save. However, you can sell the jet after the journey and recover some money out of it and the same can be said about the Rolex.

This week, I discovered I've been saving around £20,000, on average, EVERY month, for the past 288 months, that's around £5.76 million. With that kind of money, I should be richer than my wildest dreams... to date. Sadly, I'm not. This is a matter that's worth some deep introspection. And introspect is exactly what I did. Why didn't I save that kind of money? Where did I go wrong?

Some really deep analysis later, I realised something profound. In order to save money, you should have not spent it on something and in turn, in order to have the choice of not spending money on something, you should have had the money in the first place - present or future, which, sadly, I do not. Having made peace with myself on my shortcoming, I decided to spin a tabloid isstyle tale to the world (kuppura vizhundalum, meesaila mannu ottalai and all that) on how I am saving the money.

On a related note, have you heard of the Russian billionaire* who gets into a limousine in Moscow, gets stuck in traffic going to the airport, jumps into a jet and flies 6-7 hours to London Heathrow airport, gets onto another limousine, gets stuck in traffic coming into central London for a couple of hours and 2 hours later does the same thing all over again to return to Moscow?

For just two blessed hours, this monumental idiot spends around a day in travel! What does he do in those two hours - he gets a haircut. That's right, he gets his mop cropped and to do that, he comes to London all the way from Russia. Makes you wonder:

• Is there a serious dearth of barbers in Russia? Have all of them gone digging oil wells to make said moron richer still?
• Does this guy have anything at all to do in life other than getting his hair cut?
• Is this barber better than Veluchamy who used to trim my mop in school?
• Don't even get me started on the 2 hour long hair cut. If there was a way to burn my hair in a controlled manner that would rid me of extra hair in 10 seconds, I'd willingly burn it, without a second thought. I can't sit on a barber's chair for more than 15 minutes (of which I nap for 10).

The haircut itself doesn't seem too over the top to begin with (pun intended!). The reporter of one of the newspapers that came out with this story took it and in his before and after photographs, I can't really make out any difference, it looks like the hair wasn't cut at all, and it had additionally been tumble dried for good measure.

For the money you pay, according to the barber himself, you get his services for the whole day. I immediately have problems with that:

• not to be offensive, if I wanted to hang out with barbers, I can do it for free with any of the barbers I've had so far right from Veluchamy to Imran, thank you.
  
• if a Russian oligarch wants to hang out with his barber rather than his I'm-a-bigger-snob-than-you golfing partner, there is a slight problem with society at that level.
• Not only is the guy (the barber) being lazy by only servicing one client the whole day, he's actually minting money out of this!
  

Apparently, one of the highlights of the 'experience' is that you get to eat the meal of your choice WHILE your hair is being cut. Who does that? Tell that to my parents! They don't let me eat anything AFTER my hair is cut before I shower, let alone while! Imagine this conversation:
Barber: "what would like to eat, saar?"
Me: "I'll have a caviar salad, thank you"
Barber: "Will that be with or without dressing, saar?"
Me: "Without, please"
Barber: "Wokay saar, but you do realise that we cannot avoid garnishing it with hair?"
Me: trying not to be sick.

* while I could find the link to the £20,000 haircut story online, I couldn't find the link to the particular story I've referred to here. Please bear with that

P.S.: We very often tend to dismiss the work done by hairstylists as petty and demeaning, it is not. Having said that, a barber by any other name is just a barber, just like a bean counter by any other name is just as boring. What offends me is the obscene money that is spent on the act of keeping said mop clean.

P.P.S: I admire this bloke for he is making more money doing over the top work than any of ever will! Who knows, for one day, he just might engage my employer to audit his company's books with me being the audit manager, so might as well suck up to him :)!

French for Dummies

Being a person who has just returned from Paree after a rather grand 5 nights and 6 days, I can say I'm a bit of an authority on French, if I may say so myself.

The French language is beautiful, eloquent and poetic. There is one small problem with it though. Any poor soul who lands in France without an a French degree will be completely lost, at sea, helpless, you get the drift...

This is exactly what happened to me, I can't understand French even if my life depended on it. All I know is "Parlez vous France" means understand French or something similar to that, so I would tell any Frenchman trying to converse with me, "No parlez vous France" and he'd look at me like I ate a toad in front of him.

My long stay in the country helped me learn the ways of the French and their language and I have come to a simple, yet very effective method of learning French. It might sound very complex and difficult at first, but when you understand what I'm saying, it will be a piece of cake. The trick is as follows:

"In order to converse/write in French, one must append the fifth letter of Anglais alphabet to a word population comprising 95% or thereabouts of the Anglais language."

For those of us who grew up reading _______(fill in the blanks with any topic) for Dummies, it translates into this - add the letter 'e' to 95% of the words

in English and you have French. If you really want to become a French literary figure, you would only have to add a whole lot of letters in between each word and simply forget to pronounce them. Confidently silence critics by saying they are silent letters.

Memories of a drama by Crazy Mohan came flooding back to me when I heard the French pronounce words. In it, a superstitious Crazy Mohan's (his name in the drama is Sivaram) wife concludes that the name Sivaram is the cause of all their woes and promptly calls a Nameology expert in to change it. Names suggested ranged from Savaram to Savam to Sivaaraajxtpm. With jxtp being silent letters in the last name. At that time, it sounded extremely far fetched and funny, however, in France, no one would have batted an eyelid to a person with a name like that pronounced Sivaram. Here are a few prime examples:

• Fresnes (a place name) is pronounced Frene
• Val d'Europe (a mall) is pronounced Val d'hope
• Montevrain (another place) is pronounced Montevrey
• Calais becomes Calay
• English becomes Anglais

Sitting a quiet place and brooding on life makes you wonder how much of money must be wasted by the French. Just imagine, on the road they have huge signboards where precious space and materials are used to point you in the direction of Fresnes, when all you need is Frene. In fact, I bet a French book of 500 pages would come down to around 200 if the silent letters are eliminated. Think of the environmental impact of this! Come to think of it, do you think the French language is in its present state because of classic French writers who tried filling pages?

London to Chennai...by train!

On the 14th day of the 8th month of the 9th year of this millennium, I boarded a train at an unearthly hour at London's St. Pancras International station. In my sleepy, groggy mind, I had no idea that in a few hours, I'll be one of the millions of people who have travelled from London to Chennai Central station. By train.

Allow me to give you some perspective. The normal flying time between London and Chennai is 10.5 hours, and that's if you get a direct flight. I covered the distance in 2.5 hours flat.

Before I start gloating over the achievement, could someone please tell me if Chennai has been renamed Paris? I'm aware there is a Parry's inside Chennai, but have they named the entire city after that corner? I ask, because, when I got down at Chennai Central, for some strange reason the name board read Paris Gare du Nord. I was going to Paris for a holiday with the wife, so you may say, if it said Paris Gare du Nord and you wanted to go to Paris Gare du Nord, it must be PGdN. Wrong. It was Chennai Central, I'm sure.

Here's why. We got onto the platform and immediately noticed the following:

• It was almost uncomfortably warm;
• None of the sign boards were in a language we could understand;
• The tracks were littered with, well, litter;
• The station was extremely crowded;
• The people looked at us as with more than a hint of suspicion; and most importantly,
• The toilet at the station charged us 1 Euro to take a leak in a dirty, smelly loo.

Now tell me, was I wrong in thinking I'd dosed off on the wrong train and somehow landed in Chennai Central? I only realised I'm at the intended destination when I left the station. There were no auto drivers fighting over who got the honour of my business.

Once outside the station, we had no doubts in our minds that we were indeed in Paris. Except while driving. The city was reasonably clean, well laid out and the buildings were simply amazing. The roads were comparatively wide (you must remember, I'm comparing the roads to London where roads are no wider than an old man's komanam).

However, Parisian drivers are a different thing altogether. They have the patience of a bee in a bottle - much like their Chennai counterparts. If you don't start moving at a brisk pace the microsecond the signal turns green, you can be darned sure that the driver behind you is going to glue his/her hand to the horn. This comes as a bit of a shock considering I've come from England where the drivers would allow you to complete your tea party and say tally-ho to your friends before a polite toot to draw your attention to the fact the signal changed to green last year and you're holding traffic up.

Quickly recovering from initial confusion and shock, I made swift progress and landed up in Disneyland, where we were lost in the magic of the place, with only the heat reminding us of Chennai.

PS: I just got back from a foren trip, so I am going to write a number of posts on crazy things that happened/occurred to me while in Paris :)

The art of doodling

Its summer, the sun shines, occasionally, the birds chirp all the time and life is generally hunky dory because everyone in Europe is in some other country on holiday. Especially bosses. So its all good.

Clients tend to take holidays too and generally the priorities of the big bad world of business shift, not everything is due yesterday and there are less fires to fight. So now is when companies bring out the artists in their employees.

With the focus shifting partially from business, companies now use this time to train their employees. Accounting standards that have long been forgotten are refreshed, ways of auditing that are alien to you are taught and expected to be applied.

However, none of this interests me more than to help me earn my 3 square meals a day. What I would really like to do is to spend a day after each training course analysing the doodles each person has indulged in during the training.

I'm not quite sure what it is that triggers the scribble happy hormone in the body, is it the free paper, free pen, free coasters or the extreme boredom of a classroom session, one will never know, but without exception, everyone doodles. I'm sure it would make an interesting case study on doodling trends. We could probably learn truckloads about the employee from what they doodle.

Some are inherently artistic and draw exquisite pencil sketches while pretending to take notes and listen, others who are less gifted, like me, simply settle down to identifying fancy, out of this world ways of writing/signing their own name.

During the 8 hours I was in training this week, I would have signed my name at least 450 times (I kind of lost count around the 300 mark). The person sitting next to me put Picasso to shame with around 4 master pieces while two others on my table tied their cross-knots duel at 30 each.

So tell me, what do you doodle when you're in training? Answers which even vaguely imply that you listen to the lecture will be taken with more than a pinch of salt.

How (not) to run a marathon

This post, much like the rest of me, is terribly late. This seems to be marathon season, full marathons, half marathons, 24, triathlons, 24. Except for marathons of the 24 variety, of which I am a veteran, I admire the tenacity and discipline marathoners of the physical exertion variety display, whether it is for a cause or simply to prove a point to themselves.

A recent case in point is my sister who just completed her first half marathon.

Most women, particularly Indian women tend to use childbirth as an excuse to lay off exercise and conveniently blame children for their being unable to shed weight (I know I'm going out on a limb and being very stereotypical here, apologies to all hurt feelings). This, in many cases, is a valid and true fact - one that I find very sexist since men cannot use the same excuse for not losing weight. I digress. My sister has always been an oddball fitness freak of nature in the BBC household (BBC for those who are wonder what it is, stands for Bala's Belly Corporation, an affectionate nickname my father had when in school). So it comes no surprise that this freak was the one to complete said marathon. Kudos to her and I find myself sadly short of words that adequately describe how I feel.

You know what I think about marathon runners? They're nuts, dumb, don't know the ways of the world. Don't get me wrong, but there are marathons that are run and marathons that are participated in. Most marathoners fall into the former category, yours truly falls in the latter. That, I believe, is the smart way to do it. Sure, with the right training, one can run the whole distance, but what if one does not have to run, but still finishes the marathon? So how does one participate without the road runner act? Simple, take an auto rickshaw for part of the way.

Allow me to explain. When I was in school, we were required to run a torturous 10km run every morning come rain or snow (unfortunately snow never came to Lovedale, but rain did come, in bucket loads). The route was as circuitous as it gets. We'd have to start off from Top Flats and literally patrol the school campus and come back via Junior School to Senior School. Now, the distance from Top Flats to Senior School is 500 metres, why one would take a 10km route in the first place was beyond me, but no one listened to me. The genius in me, on this occasion, was suppressed. That, however, did not stop it altogether.

A group of around 6-7 of us would amble along at the very end of the crowd making sure no boy is left behind, wounded or otherwise eaten by a passing leopard. In a gratitude-less world, this free, selfless service was rewarded with reprimand from KB, the physical instructor. However, reprimands never stopped us from doing what we loved, service to society, so this happened every morning.

One day, said genius had an epiphany. Every morning we pass the school garages and the school auto rickshaw would just be starting off on its daily milk run. Why not save the environment a little bit by taking a ride on an otherwise empty auto rickshaw? So we all piled in. We would have travelled the sum total of 549 metres when the vehicle was stopped, by none other than KB. What's worse, the checkpoint was right outside my house.

Like most teachers, KB had lost his sense of humour and ability to recognise genius somewhere around year 33 of his career. Needless to say, he did not take kindly to our little act of innovation and we were made to kneel down for half an hour, outside my house. It was a case of so close yet so far.

So, I ask my sister, you were the clever one in our family (and I've always been the black sheep), pray, why didn't you take an auto rickshaw on your half marathon? Shortage of 'ricks in your part of the US of A?

Nevertheless Saumya, I'm proud of your achievement (despite running like everyone else in the marathon)!