Comment (Or Not)

I read something just now, and it created absolutely no desire in me to comment on it. No opinion, no feelings, no pithy comebacks, no derision, no admiration, just a blank. I can't identify with it at all. And I know this is not just happening to me alone. I also recently wrote something that got no comments at all. I could be writing something so fabulous that it went completely over your heads. Or not.

Someone asked why I don't comment on his posts. I think I said I could be so low in my reading skills that it went completely over my head. Or not.

What makes people decide to comment ? I thought about this for a while. I think, to the person reading, it has to feel like it addresses him. The tone, vocabulary level, style, choice of topic, degree of clarity all have to make him feel it is intended for him. I may have a clue here. Or not.

Like this - You're on a bus, sitting next to strangers, busy in their own thoughts, and you decided to say something aloud, a comment about the scenery out the window. A nice well-dressed family of trees, standing guard over a lake with little waves playing about, flashes by.

You look out the window and intone, loud enough for your neighbor to hear - "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in getting new contact lenses".

You think he heard you? It's hard to be sure. He may give no sign that he has. But perhaps he has heard you, and now what he's asking himself is the question: Is this guy talking to me, or to himself? (So, in all probability, did the 27 people who read your post, but refrained from comment).

If he stops pretending to be asleep, and looks at you, you can be sure he heard something. But perhaps not all. He may have caught just the last few words 'getting contact lenses', and is now under the impression that you're a Bausch and Lomb salesman.

You have to assure him you're not selling anything, or this conversation is over before it started. So you nod helpfully, and provide the context for your sudden outburst, by way of saying to him "Albert Camus. I believe that's what he said about journeys".

You think he would know who this Albert Camus is? You think he cares? If he rolls his eyes, or pretends to fall asleep again, he may not. But if he talks back to you - "No, I believe that was Proust. And he was talking of new eyes, not lenses" - it may mean he's interested in journeys, or new eyes. Or not. He may be thoroughly bored of journeys and new eyes. And strangers who want to talk about journeys and new eyes. Either way, he's still a mysterious stranger about whom there's much more left for us to learn.

There is one thing no one wants or expects a mysterious stranger on a bus to do and that is - Snuggle up closer and say, "Your lenses make your eyes so much bigger". If he does this, it's a signal to get off the bus pronto. That sort of guy is likely to send you 15 private messages in an hour after reading your one post.

Let's hope he doesn't do that. More likely he considers the conversation over, even as your misquote has been put in its place, and start fiddling with his cellphone instead. At least you know he's heard you, and understood you.

But what if he said nothing in return, and just glanced sharply at you, and returned to peruse his magazine? How do you find out if he agrees with you, or dislikes Camus, journeys or lenses? Or that his native language is Tulu and he speaks no English? Or that your accent was so bad, he thought you were speaking Tulu?

At this point, there is likely a temptation one must resist very firmly - to poke him in the ribs and say, "What did you think of what I said?" That sort of thing will at best get you thrown off the bus, and at worst... well, the worst depends on your neighbor's creativity, size, and tools at his disposal.

You may want to call his bluff about being too busy with his cellphone, too interested in his magazine, or too sleepy to respond. But that will just get him all riled up, and he'll be forced to take it out on you. It can get nasty. You can wait for a while, to see if he's going to respond. You can wait forever.

Or you can adopt a simpler, clearer style that everybody is familiar with: - "I thought I recognized you from somewhere. Are you somebody famous?". There is little chance anybody famous is sitting in a bus, instead of a limousine, but you can try. A slim possibility exists he may never have heard that line before, and will find it refreshingly original, and be moved to say so.

You could change to a more popular topic - "Ever hear that one about Rachel Welch and the Pope in a boat?". You may get lucky this way. Or not. That joke has been around for a while, and it may have gone stale. You can simply move to the next seat and start your work afresh on another busmate. You may fare better there. Or worse.

If you have been ejected by an entire bus of passengers without mercy, you don't have to give up and fade away. It is helpful to remember what David Hockney said - "Art has to move you, but design does not. Unless it is a design for a bus".

Or not helpful. It all depends on what that Hockney was talking about. I have no idea. I just like to write.

What if these movies were made ..

I was looking at an HBO schedule, and I think Hollywood is running out of ideas. I think they need a new way to freshen up tired old plots. And the thought crossed me, as I read the names adjacent to one another, that individually they all stink, but some of them might make original movies when thematically paired with the next in the list.

Conspiracy Theory+ Vanity Fair
Tagline: All is fair in love, war and conspiracies.
Mel Gibson runs paranoid through stiff-upper lip Victorian society.

Vanity Fair+ Troy
Tagline: All is fair in love, war and ancient Greece.
Brad Pitt is a spirited social climber in ancient Greece, way too obsessed with his looks.

Troy+ Bad Boys
Tagline: Watcha gonna do in ancient Greece?
Two guys, one a henpecked family man, the other a dashing ladies man, combine forces and shoot it up among ancient Greeks.

Bad Boyz+ Inside I'm Dancing
Tagline: Watcha gonna do, except live life like you mean it.
Two guys, one a henpecked family man, the other a dashing ladies man, shake up a condescending Home for the Disabled.

A Match Made in Heaven+ Seed of Chucky
Tagline: Deliver us from evil matchmakers
Olympia Dukakis is an evil doll who tries to matchmake her son into marrying her nurse, so more Chucky movies can be made.

Men In Black+ Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous
Tagline: The last (swim)suit you'll ever wear
Sandra Bullock goes undercover to find out why aliens from Third World are winning so many beauty titles.

Miss Congeniality+ Twelve Monkeys
Tagline: The future is history. So is Sandra Bullock's career.
Sandra Bullock must stop the The Twelve Monkeys who are time-traveling terrorists from unleashing a deadly virus, which will put a stop to beauty pageants once for all.

Farenheit 9/11+Tales from the crypt
Mike Moore makes Tales from the White House of Horrors.

The Last Samurai+ An Officer and a Gentleman
Tagline: It will lift you up where you belong. (That's in Japan)
A wayward Tom Cruise goes to Japan, to become a man, with the help of a Geisha girl, and some ass-whupping Samurais.

Man-Thing+ Rambo
Tagline: When nature fights back, its fighting for it's life.
An unstable Swamp monster begins a one-man war with a small town

Rambo + Mean Girls
Tagline: This time he's really fighting for the right to sit in the cafeteria without getting bitchslapped
An unstable Vietnam vet must must use all his skills when starting a one-man war with a bunch of mean A-list high school prom queens.

Catwoman+ Romeo must die
An avenging cop falls for the Catwoman, a drug baron's daughter who is a cat-loving lesbian. Now he must die for it.

Coming to America + Batman
Batman is a masked Third World superhero trying to use his superpowers to sneak past immigration without a visa.

Batman+ Disturbing Behavior
Well, we've already got the Jack Nicholson as The Joker in Batman, who is disturbing enough. No need to make this movie.

The School of Rock+ Exorcist
Jack Blacka is a teach who tries to get Linda Blair to sing, but her voice sounds uncannily like a hoarse man, and now an exorcist must cure her in time for the school rock concert.

Enter the dragon+ Something's gotta give
Diane 'the dragon' Keaton and Jack 'I'm never giving up acting" Nicholson are maritalarts ..oops martial-arts experts.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason + Bourne Supremacy
Bridget and her diary must find out if the man she married is really a trained CIA operative with amnesia, or simply a husband who's come up with the ultimate excuse for forgetting their anniversary.

Barb Wire + The Spongebob Squarepants movie
Tagline: Dont call me babe! Dont call me Bob, either. Its Spongebob.
Kiddies will love this. Pamela Anderson as bikini-bottom clad mercenary in Bikini Bottom, hometown of SpongeBob, helping him track down ...whatever. With Pam in bikinis, no one will remember the plot.

Rambo III + A cinderella story
Rambo - the chickflick. What more can I say?

"Gat-Wail-Soon, India" - The Yellowmail Scheme

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"Gat-Wail-Soon, India" - The Yellowmail Scheme
I recently happened to catch the latest Munnabhai movie (Lage Raho Munnabhai), and I have to say - The Get-Well-Soon card tactic of non-violent protest against corruption has an inherent appeal to all us Native Indians.

First, sending a get-well-soon card to a corrupt official is doable by even the most cowardly. Public cowardice is the reason so many get away with corruption. We call ourselves non-violent, but what we really mean is we shy away from confrontation. Sticking a stamp is much easier for us shy dissenters than shouting slogans.

This way, the mail flow increases, we end up boosting our antiquated Postal system. Maybe they'll even print specially colored Munnabhai cards just for this one purpose of drowning corruption. If this movie was from Disney, someone would have already thought of this, franchised it worldwide, and I'd find these cards being sold at the theater exits on my way out.

The cards have to have a distinct color, so as to stand out from your everyday mail. I would suggest black as the color, but owing to difficulties of writing on black paper, and legal interpretations of "blackmail", I pick a second color : Yellow. Yellow is the patron color of cowardice, and yellow is the "gat-out" card for soccer.

Simple Yellowmail statistics provided by the Post Office will keep our more corrupt law-givers and businessmen in the hot seat. You can hide your ill-gained bribes, cash and assorted 'wadding gifts', but how can you hide the bags and bags of Yellowmail arriving daily at your doorstep? All the neighbors and their maternal-cousin-from-Ludhiana will know your shame.

One day, I predict the Yellowmail system may reform our current electoral process. We replace our voting booths by Yellowmail, and we vote by mail . Its a knockout-round - the candidate that gets the least Yellowmail (and therefore the most honest fellow) wins!!

Just one thing we must remember - Yellowmail is not hate-mail. You can also send hate-mail in any other color, but Yellowmail must be reserved for protesting against corruption. It is our non-violent (sorry, non-confrontational) way of saying - "Yellow, Yellow, Dirty Fellow" to that junior bureaucrat who's holding our paperwork hostage for money.

Gat-Wail-Soon, Dear India. We wish you a speedy recovery.

Secretary or General ?

Shashi Tharoor, one of my favorite authors, and Under-Secretary-Genl, is up for the post of UN Secretary-General. Pending completion of Kofi Annan's second and final term, he will be the official Indian nominee.

Given the ineffectiveness of the U.N. in its founding mission of peace-keeping, I wonder if this is an honor or not. Even the name of the post is ambiguous about the powers it carries. Will someone please tell us what's a Secretary-General? Is he a secretary? Is he a general? Is he a secretary to a General, or just a secretary in general? If he had a secretary of his own (and I assume someone heading a large organization comprised of many member nations could afford it), what would he or she be called? I can see a lot of letters to the Secy-Genl are going to be re-routed to the secretarial pool at the UN. Incidentally, this absolves the Secy-Genl for any shortcomings of the UN. The man has to get complaint letters before he can fix 'em!

An article by Tharoor, the author of the Great Indian Novel, describes the post as a 'secular Pope'. Other interesting requirements of the job - the Secy-Genl has to be 'politically celibate without being politically virgin', and work with the aspirations of the Big Five while being above them. So in addition to being a secretary, the post also calls for 'celibate but not virgin'. I think I've seen that same job description at the local temping agency.

Now its a big bug for me that Tharoor is not viewed as a serious contender to the Thailand Deputy PM Suriakiart Sathirathaith, Sri Lankan diplomat Jayanatha Dhanapala, and South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon.

Personally, I think Tharoor has an excellent chance of winning, even with all these contenders. Let me explain. If it is secretarial job, as I strongly suspect it might be, Tharoor as a writer will surely surpass others at typing. The others won't even know where the carbon paper goes in, I'll put my money on that.

The only serious threat is Pakistan's nominee Mrs Maleeha Lodhi, High Commissioner to UK. She has the additional attraction of being female, which, it has just occurred to me, secretaries almost always are. Drat!


(written when Shashi's nomination had just appeared in the press)

Is it still called pre-marital sex, if you plan to never marry?

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Uma's youngest brother-in-law has a theory: Women over a certain age, if still single, will become bitter and frustrated. All women need to be married to be happy. Now, never mind that he's single, and plans to remain so forever. Or at least until he dies.

So now woman has been given an expiry date. Like fruit, we will Ripen and Sweeten, Soften and then eventually go Sour. Is there a Rotting phase?

He has various predictions of what will happen to Single Women once they grow older. I will list them in order. The first and most commonly mentioned is Seriously Lonely. This, again, does not apply to himself. I do not know how he plans to avoid this. Or maybe it is just a semantics thing. Men are Seriously Alone, and women are Seriously Lonely.

Next is Desperate. Like Uma's niece, a young woman of 20 says, "I don't want to marry right now, but someday I will. I don't want to become like those Desperate aunties in their forties who haunt gyms ogling young guys". This one stumps me. I ask you, if a woman has remained single by choice through her lustful teens, twenties and thirties, is she likely to start 'ogling' in her forties decline?

Uma's other niece, the older married one ponders the question, "What do single women do for sex?" So many funny answers come to mind, I think this could be a popular board game. It was hard enough to keep a straight face saying "The same as married women".

The last stage mentioned by the brother-in-law is Bitter and Frustrated. So what exactly is involved in the B & F phase? I can't figure out. Write nasty letters to newspaper editors?

I don't know when exactly, but also somewhere on a single girl's agenda is the Plotting of The Downfall of the Married Friends, by Seducing The Husband, and/or Corrupting The Wife With Her Single Decadent Ways. This was proposed by Uma's mother-in-law, and accepted after being seconded by her single son.

So all this predicted activity is bound to keep a single girl busy, eh? That's a consolation. At least there may not be a Seriously Bored phase.

More on what a girl wants

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Honestly.
The most consistent line I blurt before backing away is "We just don't have anything in common". And it was true.

"I can't see why he would be interested. He doesn't know anything about me" I complain to friends. ("You're female" is the wrong answer, even if correct).

I've seen other women talk about what they want. Seems like women want all kinds of things from men.

The guy merely checks to see if you are breathing.

Here's a typical conversation...

Guy: Wanna go to the movie with me?
Gal: I cant see you in that way.
Guy: Why not?
Gal: the guy should know what I want
Guy: So what do you want?
Gal: I want the guy to know.
Guy: Know what?
Gal: What I want.
Guy: What do you want?
Gal: I told you already.
Guy: You said you want me to know what you want.
Gal: That's right.
Guy: So now I'm asking you, what do you want?
Gal: That's what I want you to know. I want you to WANT to know what I want.
Guy: Yes, I WANT to know.
Gal: Good.
Guy: So what DO you want, really?
Gal: If you REALLY wanted to know, you would know already. That's what I wanted, I wanted you to know. That's why we can't go out.
Guy: Do you have a sister? I don't mind if she's retarded. In fact, I think I'd prefer it.

And that's why I cant see you in that way. I knew you'd end up going with my sister and becoming a brother (in-law).

Solomon Grundy - The New Twist

Back when we were children, we never realized there was more to this character called Solomon Grundy in that poem (Solomon Grundy, Born on Monday, Christened on Tuesday, etc etc), than met the eye. I present the true story here, of which we've heard only the vaguest details before..

SOLOMON GRUNDY - THE ADULT VERSION

It may be true what they say of Grundy
That Solomon was born on Sunday
But the Y2K glitch
Hit the computer which
Recorded his birthday as Monday

For Tuesday his christening was set
But on Monday the father won a bet
The horse that won
Was called Solomon
And so is his only son, to date

Why Wednesday he wed the rich widow
He explained to the press in front row
"Twasn't for bounty
Of which I have plenty.
But a little more never hurts, you know"

On Thursday, he said he was feeling fine
With his new wife as he sat down to dine
Its amazing how ill
You can get, with a pill
Of something they call strychnine

The doctors found him worse on Friday
To live, gave him no more than a day
"Better make up your will
And pay us (here's your bill)
There's nothing one can do but pray"

On Saturday his poor heart did cease
Said his widow to the local police
"He poisoned my drink
But before he could blink
I switched 'em, may he rest in peace"

On Sunday, they laid him six below
His tombstone to read as does follow
"A week's a lot of time
To plan a nasty crime
But next time, I'll shun the rich widow"

(Apologies to any children who might be reading here for shattering your innocence )

Infinite Monkey Theorem

For some reason, I remembered the infinite monkey theorem today.

An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite amount of time and typewriters will eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare.

This statement usually attributed to scientist Thomas Huxley, who supported the Darwinist theory of evolution. I always wonder why he named Shakespeare's, and not his own books, in this cause. Was he afraid his publishers would take him at his word, and give his next book advance to monkeys? We'll never know.

Researchers at Plymouth University haven't found any signs of such yet. They let loose a bunch of monkeys with a keyboard. The monkeys played around with a single letter SSSSSSSSSSS and then urinated over the keyboard. I guess if they had played with the letter B, you could assume they were getting pretty close to "To B or not to B", but as it stands, it's not Hamlet.

Not satisfied, someone is running a Monkey Shakespeare Simulator on the web. Everytime you visit the page, your PC's spare computing power is used to create some random pages, and checked against the bard's works, to see if something matches. (For a rant on how impossible this project is , you can listen to Brett Watson.) But I am skeptical for a different reason.

My feeling is, frankly, that this is a mistake. Even if they end up simu2lating Shakespeare, what good does that do to us? Nobody really needs any new Shakespearean comedies. Why not simulate the next Harry Potter book instead? JK Rowling can call it a day at the office, and go shopping instead.