Eurozone crisis – Mahabharata style
From an intellectual Skype chat …
Sujaykumar Bedekar: it's not pretty mate, the market right now Amool Paranjpe: whats going on? Sujaykumar Bedekar: return of the drachma, i suspect Sujaykumar Bedekar: making olives the official currency, maybe Sujaykumar Bedekar: of greece Amool Paranjpe: that seems inevitable Amool Paranjpe: damned if u do damned if u dont sort of situation isnt it? Sujaykumar Bedekar: yes Amool Paranjpe: it probably sounds very simplistic and naive Amool Paranjpe: and possibly incomplete too Amool Paranjpe: but how did they ever think a single currency with variable fiscal policy was ever going to work? Sujaykumar Bedekar: aah, hindsight Amool Paranjpe: its like saying lets all share a bowel but we'll all individually decide when to take a dump Sujaykumar Bedekar: lol Sujaykumar Bedekar: it's a bit like draupadi and her 5 pandav Sujaykumar Bedekar: and sahdev gives her aids Amool Paranjpe: hahaha Sujaykumar Bedekar: and fcks everyone up Amool Paranjpe: hahahahaha Sujaykumar Bedekar: i think this conversation is share-worthyAmool Paranjpe: yes yes i agree Amool Paranjpe: that was a pretty good one Amool Paranjpe: sh*t it had me in stitches Sujaykumar Bedekar: heh
… and share I did
Comrade, Sir!
Here’s Bill Bryson in “Notes from a Small Island” talking about Britain and Communism -
It has long seemed to me unfortunate – and I’m taking the global view here – that such an important experiment (Communism) in social organization was left to the Russians when the British would have managed it so much better. All those things that are necessary to the successful implementation of a rigorous socialist system are, after all, second nature to the British For a start, they like going without. They are great at pulling together, particularly in the face of adversity, for a perceived common good. They will queue patiently for indefinite periods and accept with rare fortitude the imposition of rationing, bland diets and sudden inconvenient shortages of staple goods, as anyone who has ever looked for bread at a supermarket on a Saturday afternoon will know. They are comfortable with faceless bureaucracies and, as Mrs. Thatcher proved, tolerant of dictatorships. They will wait uncomplainingly for years for an operation or the delivery of a household appliance. They have a natural gift for making excellent jokes about authority without seriously challenging it, and they derive universal satisfaction from the sight of the rich and powerful bough low. Most of those above the age of twenty-five already dress like East Germans. The conditions, in a word, are right.
It manages to poke fun at Communism, Britain, Russia, East Germans and a whole lot of things without being offensive, and conveys something which seems so obvious in hindsight – writing at its supreme best.
Eat this
Cannibals are great humanitarians.
I don’t like my mother-in-law. Me neither, pass the salt.
Son, how many times have I told you to not talk when you have someone in your mouth?
We’re social people. Just last week, we had our neighbours for dinner.
Our favourite game: Swallow the leader
My doctor gave me indigestion. How ironic.
Ooooh, check out the legs on that one.
I hope these jokes are not in poor taste.
Originality Nazis – Some of these are not mine.
List will be updated subject to further inspiration
A-Zee
After months of internal haggling, fatwa politics, boardroom battles and a lot of back-stabbing (and a couple of suicide bombings), the Al-Qaeda has finally named Egyptian Al-Zawahiri as Leader after Bin Laden’s Death. With the ending of this phase of uncertainty, Al-Qaeda stocks (KSE ticker: AQH) surged by 53%. (source: BBG)
"Who's #1? I'm #1! Who's the man? Ay-man!"
S&P upgraded Al-Qaeda to a punchy ‘B’ rating with Outlook Positive, making it a better investment than Pakistan and Greece. Explaining the upgrade, an analyst said, “A-Zee brings with him a dearth of experience in the bombing and terrorism domain. His natural savviness on the camera has been amply demonstrated, and his appointment is a shot in the arm (literally) for recent efforts towards attracting disgruntled youth whose numbers are going up each day. His contacts among the Taliban and the ISI make him the perfect pick to help AQH usher in a new era in Infidel-cleansing and Jihadism.”
A-Z issued a eulogy for his predecessor last week, saying he had terrified the US by hiring those kamikaze pilots a decade ago and will continue to do so in death. He then let slip that Mr. Obama had in fact died three years ago of gonorrhea, but then tried to cover it up by saying ‘lol jk’. A-Z declared his intention to follow in the footsteps of Mr Laden and to bring glory to his name. “To show my commitment, I promise to double my harem by the end of this week. I will also update the stash of porn Master Commander Laden ji had. My biggest regret will be that he was unable to see all the glorious new stuff out there.”
A wikileaks spokesman had this to say on the new development – “Told ya.” To which someone said – “Who asked you?”
Mutate!
Saw X-Men: First Class yesterday. First thoughts -
- Magneto is super cool. He’s just below the Panda in terms of ‘awesomeness’. He has a magnetic personality in more ways than one, no wonder he attracts so many followers. The helmet he wears might be good against Prof X, but I doubt whether it’ll be able to withstand bouncers from Holding/ Garner/ Croft/ Roberts.
- Professor X (who apparently is called ‘ex-Zavier’ and not ‘Xavier’) is a preachy, condescending pain-in-the-backside know-it-all with an unhealthy obsession with purple lip gloss. It’s a miracle that the X-Men end up staying with such a manipulator for so long.
X-Men is quite a sexist name. Surprised how come no one has cribbed about that yet.
- Mystique is for sure what we call a late bloomer.
- I feel distinctly inadequate now, given my complete lack of any abnormalities/ talents. It would have been nice to have had at least an extra finger or a luminescent nose**, just to show that I was not falling behind in the evolutionary race.
- Given my current work profile where I essentially go and ask people to pay back the money they owe us, I would like to become a mutant with superb recovery skills. My name will be ‘Vasooli’. My catchphrase will be ‘Show me my money!’.
- I would not have complained had the movie gone on for a couple more hours. It was quite ‘First Class’. Top Class. A-1. Raapchik. Fattack!
** Clearly, Hrithik Roshan and Rudolph are advanced specimens of their respective races
Password Angst
T-20: You have 20 days until your password expires
“Peace, leave it for another day”
T-10: You have 10 days until your password expires
“Ten. That’s like more than a week. Laterz”
T-1: <no alert / missed alert>
T=0: Change your password. NOW.
“Whoa! Windows XP, Y U No give warni … nevermind. Purrfect timing though, just when I had to do something really important …
<Enter new password>
The New password should have at least two special characters, three vowels, four consonants and five numerals. The alphabets and the numerals should be non-consecutive, non-repeating. You cannot recycle the last twenty passwords you have used, or the hundred odd iterations you tried for those twenty.
The new password has to contain at least some part of the Latin name of an animal. The animal chosen must be from a different phylum from the last twelve ones.
Attempt1: Too simple
Attempt2: Too simple (Lol but that was funny)
Attempt3: Dude. Seriously
Attempt4: Nice try. This is your neighbour’s password. Use something else.
Attempt29: Abuse aimed at Windows/ XP/ Bill Gates/ Microsoft is not acceptable as a password. I do feel your pain though.
Attempt 51: Great success
Please re-enter username-password to login
T+0.01: Oh … wait. What was the password I finally entered? FFFUUUUUUU……
T+0.02: <Request New Password, resigned to fate>
Sigh. Every. Single. Time.
1. This would probably look better as a Meme-comic, if only I didn’t suck at art in general
2. Here’s a handy link for those people who dread passwords like I do
Deja Bose
1997:
Me: “Ek baar na ek aadmi hota hai. Uska naam hota hai na Devendra Kumar Bose <pause1 for effect> … DK Bose” <pause2>
Rest: “Umm … ok? So?”
Me: “Uski maa usko baar baar bulayegi to kya hoga?”
Rest: “DK Bose DK … <sinks in> Ohhhh … lololololol”
2005:
Ekta Kapoor’s Kya Kool Hai Hum, a blue-goateed Raj Zutshi giving instructions on the phone -
RZ: “Please, Airport announcer ko bol dena, Mera naam DK Bose hai. Last time ulta bol diya, kaafi problem ho gaya tha.”
Me: “Whoa! Deja Vu!”
2011:
Delhi Belly, a bashed up Imrann Khan fake-croons -
“Saabun ki shakal mein / Beta tu to niklaa kewal jhaag … Jhaag … JHAAAAG/”
“Bhaag-bhaag DK BOSE DK BOSE DK BOSE / Bhaag bhaag DK BOSE DK bhaag!”
Me: “Umm … meh”
At least the song is catchy.
Zindagi ke safar mein …
A ‘Senti’, as defined by people in IIT, is when a person voluntarily or under duress starts rambling on and on about how he’s going to miss people he’s spent ‘haseen lamhe’ with and who’ve given him the ‘best days of his life’ and all that.
This post is not that kind of a senti but more of a realization. A signpost, if not a milestone, which almost passed by unnoticed.
A fellow buzzed me last week – chap from my department in IIT (Aerospace). I’d been his TA in my final year in the Department Introductory Course (DIC – *snigger*), he said. I hoped that I had imparted a lot of wisdom and made the department interesting enough (well, tolerable enough) for him and his batchmates. To be honest, the TA-ship was one of the most enjoyable times in my academic life and i probably learnt more about the course then than when I did it the first time round. He told me that he was also the TA in his final year for the same course, was just passing out and was going to join (wait for it) a bank-offshore office.
Sure, there was the dual sense of anonymity and deja vu. But I also realized that with his batch passing out, the last batch of undergrads with whom I would have shared time in my stay in IIT was now exiting (excepting a few unfortunate ones, of course). In spite of being fairly detached from my college/ hostel/ department, especially in the past few years, it still made me just a little bit sad. Teensy weensy bit. And it also brought back this post I’d written when my B.Tech. batchmates passed out in ’06.
Time flies. And how!
Keeping Track
“So Sujay, how many kids do you have?” With a colleague due to deliver in a month or so, babies are a daily topic of discussion on my desk.
“None that I know of,” I said. And then they all lol’d.
Now, this made me think of the paternity case they discuss in the ‘Harvard Law School classroom’ from Legally Blonde. Before you judge me, I have to point out that I made this reference only because I saw the musical by the same name quite recently and it is still fresh in my mind.
Ed: Just read this a second time: my ‘disclaimer’ doesn’t really absolve me of anything
Glory Glory United!
I’ve *never* posted anything related to the one thing I’m most passionate about, because I tend to get too verbose and digressive when I’m talking about Manchester United. Hopefully I’ll be concise with this post.
I don’t quite remember when I started following the club. I do like telling people that it was the 1999 Champions League final versus Bayern Munchen, when they we went from 0-1 to 2-1 in the last 2 minutes of stoppage time, but to be honest I remember very little about that match. In fact, I don’t think I even watched that match live. I became a fan sometime in the early noughties, when ManUtd were not even playing that well. This was when we had massive a$$es like Kleberson and Djemba-Djemba dominating the headlines and contributing to the disappointment. That was the era of the Arsenal ‘Invincibles’ (oh how I hated that team!). I went to my personal mecca – Old Trafford – for the first time in 2007 when I got a chance to go to the UK, but I didn’t catch my first match there until Mar 2009, when ManUtd came back from a 0-1 deficit vs Liverpool to win 2-1.That was without doubts one of the happiest days of my life.
I could go on and on about my (unhealthy?) obsession with ManU, but I will narrate instead this Q&A from my first (and to-date, touchwood, the only) job interview I’ve ever been forced to sit for. Hopefully it will illustrate my support for the best football club in the world (massive debt notwithstanding)
Interviewers: So you said you are a big fan of Manchester United? Why is that so?
Me: When I see Rooney or Scholes run back 40 yards to defend a ball … when I see Sir Alex Ferguson (SAF) get steamed up for conceding a goal even if he’s winning by 3 goals, I know I’m witnessing passion of the highest order (this was sneaky, ’cause I knew that my prospective employer’s motto was ‘Passion to Perform’). I know that if I’m able to achieve even half the level of their enthusiasm and determination, I’ll end up doing something special in life.
…
Q: So if you we gave you the chance to invite any 5 people for a nice little dinner, who would they be?
Me: Firstly, I would invite Rajat Gupta (who was a bigshot in McKinsey back then in 2006, and who’s ended up being a controversial personality in recent times). He was an adviser to George Bush at that time, which must have been a fairly interesting position.
Second, I would invite Brajesh Mishra, who was the Defence Secretary of India during the Pokhran Nuclear tests and Kargil War, and would have been a fantastic personality to pick brains.
Third, I would invite Angelina Jolie (I had watched Original Sin the day before) for her UN-related work. <Pause for effect and for interviewers to snigger.> And because she’s so gorgeous. She’ll bring something different to the table.
Fourth, I would invite Sir Alex Ferguson, because I continue to be amazed by his motivation and drive. I just absolutely have to know what he’s thinking about when he wakes up in the morning to go to the field and when he goes to bed at night.
Interviewers (there were two, both seemed to be enjoying this): And who would the fifth person be?
Me: Well, whoever between the two of you is going to foot the bill!
——
I write this just after Man Utd has defeated Chelsea at Old Trafford, pretty much securing the EPL title in the process. When I see a 70 year old Sir Alex going absolute bonkers over the victory and actually bowing down in respect to the Stretford End of the stadium for their vociferous support and determination, I can’t help but feel pride and respect welling up inside me. They tell me that I’m one of those fair-weather supporters of a club which had the maximum number of matches shown on TV in India.That I can’t really support a club unless I have some connection with it through birth or naturalization.
Tonight, I just don’t care.
