Don't be that guy - Jan

Don’t be that guy who thinks street food is unhealthy

Our parents, teachers, doctors and other noble professionals right from our childhoods told us that street food is not good for our health and that we should not eat pani puri, bhel puri, masala batani, samosas, kachoris, bajjis, peanuts, bhutta, pieces of raw mango, amla, pineapple and guava on the roadside because they might be unhygienic.

Yes, it is true. We would be better off by completely avoiding them but what we have done is we replaced the unhygienic roadside food with a more hygienic combo of Lays, French fries, kaati rolls, burgers, and aerated drinks at fast food joints and there lies the irony.

The worst thing that can happen to you if you eat pani puri of questionable integrity is an upset stomach and maybe a little inconvenience to roommates/family members for a couple days. That is it. It is completely treatable and our immunity system may even get a little robust in the process but regular consumption of processed foods like chips, French fries and colas give us obesity, makes us susceptible to heart disease, diabetes, kidney problems...

You see the difference?

If you eat pani puri twice a day for five days in a row, your body tells you're doing too much pani puri. Your stomach makes a 'I-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this' noise on the sixth day and you'll automatically stay away from it for a few weeks. There is no such biological red signal for too much Pepsi.

Street food is unhygienic. Fast food is unhealthy.

Middleclass doublethink

Don't be that guy who drives a super bike in the city

Just because your bike can go from 0 – 60 in 5.2 seconds doesn't mean you should do it on Bannerghatta Road. Dude, don't get me wrong. The bike your father gifted you can zoom at 220 KMPH on an abandoned airstrip and that is awesome. It literally inspires awe in my mind.

Having said that, I feel it is my duty to point out that on city roads you come across as a source of attention-seeking noise pollution. You may want to work on that. The way you startle uncles on Honda Activas by overtaking them in your typical rich kid my-dad-has-connections-so-I-can-hit-and-run-and-no-one-will-arrest-me driving style doesn't help at all. You may want to work on that too.

Don’t be that guy thinks anyone who hasn’t shaved in 2 weeks is depressed

No, they aren't. They're just too lazy to shave.

Don't be that guy who promptly changes the date at midnight

It's the next day only when
i) You have slept and woke up
OR
ii) There is sunlight

Don't be that guy who tells the driver how to drive

This happens a lot doesn't it?

Some people just instinctively take that responsibility to critique the driver, constantly giving him constructive feedback and instructions to the driver... “overtake the bus” “nice turn” “ikkada left” “speed breaker” “switch to the right lane” “now slow down...” “look at that asshole!” “horn kottu.. horn kottu” “put 4th gear” “goyya undi choosuko” “Tchah! We would've crossed the bridge by now if you switched to the right lane then.” ...

Self-appointed captains of the ship these people are. And while parking or reversing... the only time when the driver actually needs his help, they're on their dumb phones!

Don’t be that guy who dislikes cats because they are not loyal

Okay, what makes you think that animals should be loyal to humans?

Why do humans deserve loyalty from animals? Look at what you are doing to us. There are barely any large mammals left on the planet. Those that are still alive are imprisoned in “National parks” and “Forest reserves” where you poach them one by one. You kill them for their fur, for their horns, for their teeth, for their ivory, for their skin, for their balls and sometimes just for fun. These things are not even required for your survival! That is why animals in what you call "the wild" don’t trust you.

And look at the lives of animals that obey you. Bulls for instance have evolved in nature to graze all day in large groups on open grasslands occasionally defending themselves from a hunting tiger or a pack of wolves. You domesticated them and for the last ten thousand years, you’ve been cutting off their balls, making them plough your fields, pull your carts and generally torturing them for your needs from the moment they are born to the day their bodies are too old for that kind of slavery. And after you extract everything from them, you replace them with the next generation. It’s the same story with chicken, horses, pigs, sheep, donkeys and pretty much every species that is obedient to humans. This process gets unimaginably horrifying with the rise of mechanized food production. This is what happens to animals when they trust you.

Dogs are the only species to have benefited from showing loyalty to humans. Dogs not your best friends. They are your only friends. The rest of the animal community considers them back-stabbing sons of bitches anyway.

Hey, we don't use that sort of language on this blog.

What? All dogs are either bitches or sons of bitches. It's biology!

Psst. Check this out - http://win.blogadda.com/view-blogs-voting/humor_satire/gtoosphere/

Don't be that guy

Going by Flawsophy’s Via Negativa principle, there are two ways to become a better person. There is the MAXIMIZE GOOD way i.e. you are inspired by people of great courage, integrity, perseverance, wit, charisma, compassion, empathy, humility, kindness, magnanimity and want to be like that. Or you can simply MINIMIZE BAD by trying to ‘not be an asshole’.

Our mythology, popular culture and even self-help books are full of MAXIMIZE GOOD stories of inspiration, determination and the triumph of human spirit but (unfortunately) there isn't much emphasis on the MINIMIZE BAD approach.

Most of the challenges we encounter in the course of our mundane lives are domestic in nature where the stakes are not big enough to force us to “Rise to the occasion” and be a “hero” in the traditional sense. These domestic encounters however leave a lot of scope for people to act like assholes and get away with it and they do it way too often.

I believe that the world will be a better place if everyone consciously avoids being ‘that guy’ who does ‘that thing’.

Don’t be that guy: The Lift Caller

I was in a Schindler’s Lift the other day with six strangers and this fully grown man walked in talking on the phone. It wasn't an apologetic hushed “Okay… okay… I’ll call you later. Byebye” phone call. He was talking on the phone like a boss giving a full-fledged Knowledge Transfer session on the tax saving investment plans he has purchased in his 8 year old son’s name.

Everyone says Indians have no respect for other people’s privacy but they’re all wrong. We are yet to respect our own privacy! Respecting other people's privacy comes much later. I mean look at this guy. He walks in, stands right in between six awkward strangers and has a personal conversation like he was strolling in a coconut grove in Amalapuram.

It didn't end there. Once he was inside the elevator the phone’s reception got worse. A normal person under this circumstance would think, “Oh, I am in a metal box that is dangling in midair in the corner of a tall, large building. I should probably hang up and call back later when I am not surrounded by these creepy elevator people” but not this guy! This guy believes in freedom of speech in its purest form – noise.
 

Don’t be that guy: Obsessive Compulsive (Missed Call) Disorder

Don’t be the guy who gives 80 missed calls in the 90 minute span when his girlfriend is away from her phone. If she’s not answering the phone, she is probably busy with something, or having dinner, or sleeping, or watching a movie, or reading something, or just doesn’t feel like being on the phone right now. Women have a life outside their relationships too, you know?

As a general rule, do not give more than two back to back missed calls unless large numbers of people are dying in a short span of time (like an earthquake or a Zombie apocalypse).

And girls, stop counting the number of missed calls as a measure for how much he misses you. That is pathetic. If a guy is spending an hour of his free time giving 40 missed calls, it clearly means that he has no hobbies, no interests, no imagination or thoughts of his own. Why do you even like him?

Don’t be that guy: The Street Parkers

When it comes to parenting, parents really suck

I do not wish to contend C2's statement. I would just like to add that society sucks too because there are some things which even parents cannot control.

This gentleman in our colony for instance has two cars but only one car parking spot, so he parks his second car on the street. (It is amusing how people buy cars without figuring out where to park them). Now that he has parked his car on the footpath, it becomes his marked territory. He also gets furious at anyone who doesn't treat that space with the reverence and respect he thinks it deserves.

Thanks to gentlemen like these, there is an endless line of parked cars on every footpath on every street in every colony of every city because of which kids cannot play cricket because “the ball might break something”, cannot burst crackers because “it is too dangerous”. Edu penkulaata (Pitthu/Satoliya), Guti Billa (Gilli-danda) and a hundred other street games are not even in the vocabulary of the next generation because "if something happens to any of the cars, whose father will pay?"

What used to be a nimble, lively, and defining aspect of childhoods in our culture is now a parking lot – a cheap parking lot.

And then these car parkers meet up in social gatherings and reminisce in nostalgia, “When I was a kid, I used to play on the street all the time. In fact during summer vacations, we used spend more time on the street than inside the house… this generation kids toh… they spend all the time in front of the computer and Xbox only baba.”

More to come: http://gtoosphere.blogspot.in/2013/05/dont-be-that-guy-either.html

I call this piece "Advertising"

Do you remember Television advertisements from the 1990s? All they sold back then was Lifebuoy soap, Annapurna Atta, Tata salt, Bajaj Chetak, Meera shampoo (featuring a homely looking housewife who had trouble managing her daughter’s long mane), Parachute Coconut Oil, and Chandana Brothers sarees, “suitings and shirtings for mens!” (Yes, suitings and shirtings, that is exactly what they used to say)

I am personally embarrassed that these were the coolest things we Indians consumed back then.

Thanks to two decades of neo-liberalization during which India first shone and later grew, the nature of advertising significantly changed. Look at the prime time ads. Only things like Volkswagen cars, Luxury holiday resorts, L’Oreal products, smart phones, Reid n’ Taylor suits, credit cards, mutual funds, frozen idlis (unfortunately, they exist) and luxury paints are sold.

Cars, insurance plans, lifestyle products, housing loans and electronic gadgets. Who do you think they are selling this desi version of the American dream to? The middle class can’t afford Volkswagens and 3D TVs. The rich people probably already have them. It’s us – the upper middle class. The real product being sold is a culture of passive consumption where everything is on sale and everyone is sold out. And wow, how proudly we’re buying ourselves into it!

A Tale of two templates

It is not just the portfolio of products. The ads themselves look quite “international” if you notice. "International" in this context means that every model from that little girl in the Rasna ad to the dusky A-list Bollywood celebrity look almost Caucasian and act hyper-sexual over things like coffee, mango juice, second hand cars, bathroom tiles, cement, switch boards, new cable connection etc. If aliens are watching us through a telescope, they would think that our women have thing for plumbing and electrical outlets!

So what kind of a mind does it take to come up with ads like these? Again a lot of guesswork is involved here but I think every copywriter on his/her first day at office is taken into a dark room and is given a crash course on what I call The Copywriter's Model of the Human Brain. According to this model, the human brain has four major areas of activity:

This model dictates that the best way to sell anything is to equate it with sex. That way the guys will not complain and it is easier for the copywriters too. The feminists may rant about it on the internet but who cares about them?

In the unlikely event that they don’t want to use sex to sell, there is another strategy. I call it The Abstract Jingle. This is how a typical ad looks like:

A bunch of rural looking school boys rush towards a sandy open place in the evening. They throw their slippers in the air and run barefooted and divide themselves into teams. One boy tosses a coin to decide who bats first. A soulful jingle in Hindi plays in the background...  

The kids are completely immersed in their game invoking a nostalgic bliss of simple joys from  simpler times. A kid hits the ball and another kid takes a great catch diving to his left in slow motion. The soulful jingle continues… 

And while all this is happening, the viewer has no idea what the ad is trying to sell. This can be an ad for anything. That is the beauty of the Abstract Jingle. There is no way for the viewer to know until the last frame, what the product is. It is this suspense that keeps him hooked!

In the last frame of the ad, if one of the boys grow up to be Dhoni, it is an ad for Reebok. If the kids wear a Team India shirt, they’re promoting Nike. If they are refreshed by a sip of pure water from a nearby lake – it is either Kinley or Hero Honda or if Tendulkar appears holding a bottle of Coke... See, the Abstract Jingle is simple yet versatile and it is completely recyclable.

The Internationals and the Abstract Jingle, these are the only templates for ads there are today. I didn't complain all these days because I don’t watch TV but the same ads started streaming on Youtube and I can’t even skip them. So now, it’s personal!

Image courtesy:  http://www.polyp.org.uk/cartoons.html which has an amazing collection of editorial cartoons

P.S: Why is it that an ad always streams faster than the actual video?

The Ads must be Crazy

I know I haven’t updated in a month. It is mostly because I was on a 6-week holiday (yes, for 6 weeks!) mostly at home with my brother working on a secret project. The holiday was awesome and the secret project is now scrapped... so happy new year!

The first NRI thing my brother did after coming to India was to get all psyched up about cricket. He made me watch a test match on TV! The cricket was awesome but the broadcast... well let me sum it up for you. Watching cricket on TV in the IPL era (2008 onwards) makes me feel like a loser. Here’s why…

Ads between overs

First of all, we have to watch the same ads over and over and over again! As a kid I used to do it all the time without getting tired or irritated. I wonder how I did it back then. I must be pretty dumb as a kid to not question that practice!

As If watching an ad for 50 times is not annoying enough, Akshay Kumar features in every other ad selling everything from gold loans to cheap mobile phones! It’s the price we all have to pay for being cricket fans I guess!

Have you noticed that soft drinks are not advertised during cricket matches anymore? I wonder why. Have they reached market saturation or are they being outbid by the insurance companies? I really want to know because cola fights were much more fun compared to people asking you to buy insurance, cars, cheap mobiles and paint.

Speaking of paint – why do they have to sell so much paint on TV? Since when is painting your home the most romantic thing in the world? It’s is a horrible activity that involves squeezing the furniture of one room into the rest of the house and then repeat the exercise for each room. Also fresh paint stinks!

In the pre-IPL era ads were shown strictly between overs. In the IPL era, it is the cricket that is strictly between the ads.

Sabotage

The simple joy of watching cricket on TV is now sabotaged by these corporations who are selling the middle class viewers an Indian version of the American dream where everything is for sale and everyone is sold out...

The broadcasters of the gentleman’s game are like gaudy, tasteless pimps and cricket is their bitch!

You Can't Win

The worst thing about this kind of exploitation is that there isn’t much we can do to fight it. We can’t hit the streets to protest. It would look ridiculous! Besides, the editorial columnists will remind us that there are far more important things to worry about.

This is it folks, there is nothing we can do to stop them from insulting us. There is nothing we can do to make them treat us with a little respect. We may blog the hell out of the issue but I am sure the corporations will continue showing the middle finger in the middle of the over and there is nothing we can do! And that is why watching cricket makes me feel like a loser.

P.S: Cartoons courtesy: Satwik... You should totally check out his comic strip on cricket, Taking Guard - @ http://takingguard.wordpress.com/

@Indibloggers: this post on indivine -- http://www.indiblogger.in/indipost.php?post=45535

A finger for each ring

The fundamental problem with marriage is that it comes only in one size. As far as legality is concerned, matrimony is a monopoly product supplied by the government! From what I observed in Hollywood and American primetime television, the proposal is more important than the marriage itself! I am not sure if normal Americans are like that but going by the Daily Show (with Jon Stewart), it seems so!

I am no authority on marriage but I don’t see what experience has to do with giving advice so here I go.

My advice to guys planning to propose:

Don't.

My advice to guys who don’t follow my advice!

Now that you have planned to take the plunge (against my advice) you should know a few things about the intricacies of proposing.

1. The marriage proposal is supposed to be an ambush, you have to do it where they least expect you to. Choose public places so that it would be difficult for her to say no.
   
   
2. The most important thing is the engagement ring. The ring is usually hidden to add an element of surprise, there are however no rules governing where to hide it.
   
   You can hide it in a bouquet of flowers or hide it in her dinner, in a glass of champagne or her pizza dressing, in her chocolate ice-cream but don’t hide it in the bill! (In another world, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for a romantic comedy… the waiter brings a $10,000 bill for a $100 meal. The girl looks into it and finds the cost of the ring included. Then she looks up a little confused and finds our loser kneeling down and proposing)
   
   
3. Don’t take the above point too literally. Hide the ring only in food, drinks or flowers but not in things that concern the other end of the digestive track because it might end up looking like this.
   
   
   
   
4. Don’t do it on the phone, or email or SMS. To give you a sense of proportion of how stupid it looks:
   
   
   
   
5. Don’t be completely honest, you might end up looking like this.
   
   
   
   
6. Don’t do it in a sports stadium because in case you are rejected, it’ll take some 15 years to get out of the trauma and by then your kids will be old enough to find this video in youtube.

Statutory Warning:

Do not take unsolicited career, relationship and medical advice from an amateur cartoonist.

New Year Post

P.S: Happy New Year

Se7en random things about me

I've been tagged by apnerve last week in a "meme" and now I am supposed to propagate this "meme". This is apparently called a "Seven-Random-Things-About-Me" meme.

Rules: As per the rules of the game, I am supposed to paste the rules of the game... so here goes

* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they have been tagged.


History: Basically some self obsessed narcissist nutcase got bored and decided to write some stuff about himself and wanted to ensure at least 7 people read it and this was subsequently propagated by more self-obsessed nut cases and now is my turn. This theory also satisfactorily explains the technical term meme(ME-ME).

The common complaint is that people don't track back and I think I figured out why. As per a weird mathematically proved theory of social networking, every person in the world is connected to every other person by not more than 7 acquaintances. By this rule, Osama Bin Laden is going to be tagged and he will write the 7 things about him which will eventually lead to his capture and the person responsible for his capture gets a cool 5 million dollars. (Looks like our self-obsessed-bored-Narcissist blogger actually happens to be an OverAmbitious-OverOptimistic-SelfObsessed-Bored-Narcissistic blogger!

Now the 7 RANDOM things about me...

1. I day dream of myself as a person who will eventually make a couple of national award winning movies, retire by 40 and teach in the high school from where I studied in Rajahmundry.

2. Like all other great artists from time immemorial, I painted the last supper too.

I think Judas "nailed" it there

3. I HATE my gmail ID.

4. To not like a song composed by Rahman for me is blasphemy.

5. I am proud of my recently acquired photography skills even though most of the credit should to the gorgeous European landscape: http://picasaweb.google.com/mail2g2.rdl

6. I accidentally voted for the congress party in the state assembly elections recently.

7. I think se7en is a really big number.

Here are the people seven people I want to tag

1. pavan - because his blogs are very interesting and it is time he wrote something funny.

2. scott adams - because I have been every blog entry of his for the two and a half years.(btw he blogs almost everyday)

3. KD - because I want him to read my blog.

4. samhita - because it was after seeing her blog I felt like I should have one too.

5. Ashok - because his blogs makes me wish I had the ability to appreciate poetry.

6. prachur - because I am running out of people I know who blog

7. apnerve - because I want to see what happens if I tag him.

Es'sense' of humor

Ever wondered how all those funny guys come up with all the funny stuff? I did... in fact I have been doing research on that for one month now. Now most people I know laugh when I use the words "research" and "me" in the same sentence (even before I finish the sentence). May be it has got to do with my rather offbeat research techniques. For instance my research in humor goes like this. I try to figure out how I come up with funny stuff and then generalize the results on how all the funny people come up with all the funny ideas. "A rather controversial method" you might say. The surprising thing is that this is nothing new. Sigmund Freud did this all his life and he is now considered the father of psychology!

Sense of humor is an interesting paradox. It has no funny definition! Also, the notion of sense of humor changes with the gender. A guy is said to have a good sense of humor if he has the ability to make people laugh. A girl is said to have a good sense of humor if she laughs at whatever the guy-with-good-sense-of-humor says. I know it is unfair but yes, it is pretty easy for the girls, all they have to do is laugh!

Speaking of research, some topics are easier to do research on than others.



I'll illustrate most of my research findings in simple sketches because sketching gives me a lot of pleasure:


Here are some of my research findings illustrated:

Sometimes, giving pep talk to depressed bald people can get quite tricky. Even humor might not help.