Chennai Hating for Dummies

Dear People of various kind who come from all sorts of places that have one thing in common, you want to hate Chennai but you don’t know how. All you can say is “Chennai Sucks” on twitter, blogs and forums/websites i empathize with you and i feel your pain.

Here are some pointers that will not make you look like a fool that you may be for real, instead it would make you appear that you really do have a valid reason to be hating Chennai. If you follow the instructions i give you carefully in this blog post, you would look cool amidst your Amitus Abeyarus kind.

If you follow my 5 points you will certainly be someone. Someone whom people think have some masala in their talks and its not pure gas, the ones that come excessively post a couple of butter parathas & aloo mutter.

1. Auto’s in Chennai suck, they fleece and cheat people and they are rude to them. Really, this is possibly the best point one can make against Chennai & you cannot find a valid rebuttal from none of the losers living who live in Chennai when they try defend their city as and when you abuse it. I mean why do you care that there is a language issue and you cannot bargain with auto-karans (wallas) like them stupid Tamils do and get a better deal. You cannot bargain in Tamil & that’s the end of it. You are too holy to ask some dark skinned smelly Tamil guy on the roads who maybe friendly enough to speak to the auto guy for you and help you with things but no, not really needed. Keep your fair skinned supremacy to yourself and don’t let them blackenese get close to you. Why do you need to use the public transport, especially the trains which are far less crowded than Mumbai or the MRTS which is a fabulous facility when speaking of public transport. Auto’s are bad, its a historical fact that cant be changed tomorrow and Chennai needs to be hated for that, now go get it!

2. Nobody speaks the National Language of India, “Hindi”. Yes, unruly, uncultured, ill mannered and unpatriotic Tamil’s. No it does not matter that India does not have the concept of National Language and Hindi is not the national language of India. We have Official Languages and Hindi/English which definitely is but so are the regional languages of the state that are official languages for government communication as well. Its okay, do diss Chennai for this. You can’t find a madrasi complain that no one speaks Tamil in New Delhi or Mumbai but so what? Despite the fact that tamilnadu has never been invaded by any of them mughals and they have never had the need or come under the circumstances where they’ve had the need to communicate in Hindi. Those non-hindi speaking Chennai’tes are definitely country brutes and they deserve all the flack they get.

3. The Chennai weather sucks. What do you expect? Its just like the bleady food they eat, its hot as hell! Yes, people in Chennai have no control over the weather, it is naturally so because that’s how the topography works out to be. Chennai is hot and sultry and its humid and its complete turn off for anyone. Chennai people do not have a weather machine to control their weather, nor can the north indians control their uber freezing winter but what the hell. Chennai is hot and chennai sucks and its your birthright to complain and insult chennai for something that it cannot help change or that it did not cause in the first place.

4. Chennai food sucks! You cannot get good dhal and roti here anywhere. It does not matter if the population of Chennai majorly consumes rice. You have the right to hate dosa (btw its ‘dosai’ actually) just because, well you need something to hate so why not? No paratha’s, no aloo ghobi. Chennai food sucks. Why? Because it does, period.

5. No hot girls in Chennai! Can’t see them tight salwar wearing big round booty showing jean clad girls in Chennai. Nor can you talk or make comments obscenely at girls in Chennai roads without getting thrashed. Even the prostitutes you find here are so black skinned and dirty. Yes, Chennai has lesser of the sexual harassment on the roads and the violence as well but who cares. You cannot find girls that show skin, nor can you find good prostitutes. Chennai Sucks!

There you go. If you follow these five pointers and build on top of it using your creativity you are one of the elite Chennai hater who would be respected and admired in the internet on communities on orkut named Chennai Sucks which have awesome topics to discuss like “Lungi Hatao Poongi Bhajao” that elevates your intellectual capabilities to the stars.

Chinna Saroja, Golu and Death

Death is a great equalizer. I do not have great memories of everyone i’ve met in life but some people stood out. They stood out because they were the different ones. Some called them weird, some called them unfortunate and some called them fools. I call them victims of culture based off religious ideologies. The example i will present is a fantastic specimen.

When you live in a Brahmin community you are never short of women named “Saroja” around you. Its one of those famous brahmin names along with “Baby”. Chinna Saroja (Chinna means Little in tamil) was a famous character from my childhood days. She and her husband were a unique couple. I guess i think his name was Kutti Raman (Kutti means small in tamil) but i really don’t remember it that well. Her husband was the silent one like teller in the Penn and Teller show. Chinna saroja ran the show pretty much and her husband nodded, always.

Chinna Saroja and her Husband were distant relatives. They were quite rich, or rather used to be. They had it all. You can imagine them to be one of the differently rich landlord Brahmin family types. They had business, they had acres of land, farms and pretty much everything going for them in life with the exception of children. They did everything they could in this world to have children. Every doctor money could buy and every type of medication.

Of course, they did perform every pooja for all the hindu gods in the text books and off the text books. I say off the text books because a nun and a father in the lourdes church conned them and made some money claiming jesus was a hindu god and he could help with child birth. So did a gentleman from the venus mosque claim some islamic fairy to be lord ayyappans daughter and made a quick buck. My grandfather put an end to these things with the help of a few other people and of course the cops and i will reserve that incident for another very long blog post. Nevertheless, they had no children.

Saroja and her husband adopted. I really love it now to think of the fact that they were liberal enough to go to an orphanage and adopt a random child. Folks from my community / family pestered them to adopt a “Brahmin” child so that i is not subject to the thought processes of a “non brahmin” child. Many a poor family had even tried to sell them a child one could not raise due to poverty. Nevertheless, they adopted a “non brahmin” child, not one but five. The children were happy. Of course they adopted into the ways of a brahmin family system as well. They were vegetarians, spoke the brahmin accent of tamil and one could hardly recognize them if not told.

Once the children grew up they returned the favour. They drugged their parents and made them write off all the property they had to these five adopted children. With mother-loads of money in their wallet the children split and fled in different directions except one. He lived in the same house as their parents brought them up. This son was the kindest of all. He did not throw the parents on the streets like one would expect. He made them household servants instead. They did all the cooking, washing and cleaning and in return were fed 3 square meals a day, without any pay or benefits.

Saroja reminds me not because of her painful state of life but because how she made merry for everyone by making fun of herself. Every year during Golu, she would go around homes in town visiting the Golu setup. As customary as it is, she would sing. Everyone loved it, not because she was fantastic a singer but she was horrible a singer yet nothing or no one stopped her. I explicitly remember the same song she sang year after year. It went something like…

“Gundu Saroja, Baby Saroja, Kulla Saroja, Chinna Saroja…”

Those were the chorus lines. It basically meant “Fatty Saroja, Childlike Saroja, Short Saroja, Small Saroja”, it was a tamil song. Her own composition, apparently. You cannot forget that face because it resembled exactly like that of this Chettichi doll in this image. Unlike today’s women even in their late 60’s, back then women did not shave, they did not use lazer or wax their lips, skin etc., Turmeric was the only option used on the face to prevent hair growth. The yellow of turmeric made her mild moustache stand out blonde and it would look so funny we kids exploded into laughter the moment we saw her. All the kids would gather around in my house from our street when she comes over for Golu.

She would take the small amount of money, the blouse bit (clothing to stitch a blouse) and the fruits and other things that were given when you visit ones house for Golu. Saroja lived her life for Golu, if you asked me. She had her moments, and it was clearly meant for those famous lines of her multi platinum local number sung at Golu, every year.

She passed away one fine day in sleep. Her husband was even more broke when she was no more. He came one fine day and said he was starving and his daughter in law feeds him no more. My aunt and my mother used to take pity on him and feed him lunch everyday. He would sit at the verandah and eat food out of a banana leaf. The hunger of a man 80 odd year old man who has not eaten for a whole day will show. I felt bad for him.

One fine day he came and he presented a neat “Pallanguzhi” instrument made of teak wood. It was a famous game back then before ludo and trump cards defeated old board games. He wanted to sell it and my aunt brought it for Rs. 20 from him. That was the last we saw of him. A few days later we heard he died during sleep on the pavements, right outside his house. Thaththa (Grandpa) went to the burial ground and offered his “vaaykkarisi” (dropping grains of rice on the dead persons mouth before setting on fire) before he was cremated.

I don’t believe in celebrating religious festivals or practices. I somehow was reminded of Chinna Saroja looking at the doll in my house Golu today. I think i will change my mind and make an exception. I will celebrate Saroja, her husband and their life history. I hope there are other people who remember them today. I really hope…

Air India aka North Indian Racist Pig

Allow me to explain the rather racist title. Aren’t there racists in south india? Of course, yes. Our chief minister is a fantastic example for this. What happened in air India, however is something worth mentioning. This post is in no way intended to take a dig at north Indians or insult any racial community but just named for the sake of calling a spade a spade. I find this attitude of companies that have no context sensitive approach to things completely insulting and pointless.

The story goes like this. I fly to Singapore often. Almost every month for work reasons. I always fly Singapore Airlines. Their service and professionalism is one of the best ive seen in times from any company or service provider. Luck sometimes does not favor you. Its one of those times when a sudden Singapore travel was scheduled i did not get tickets on Singapore Airlines in the last minute and good old Air India came to the rescue. Thanks to recession the 3000 rs. cheaper ticket compared to jet made Air India the default choice.

Never in my life have i seen such “i don’t give a flaming fuck” attitude in a service that it just beats the crap out of me. I’m writing this blog post barely 2 hours after i landed in chennai after my Air India flight. I don’t want the forget the spec of gems i was thrown at in the form of service so let me bring up as many star pointers before i forget them…

1. Chennai is the capital of Tamilnadu. Tamil is the Official Language of Tamilnadu & Chennai. Singapore has close to approx. 1/3rd tamil population, tamil is an official language there as well.

2. The crowd you are serving is all tamil crowd. Not one north indian passenger, not one white/black/asian/hispanic passenger.

Given this context what is the need for an out and out Hindi announcement on the PA system. The facial expressions of half the people in the flight was blank. They were oblivious to your communication as our politicians are oblivious to accusations and shame. Why can’t you use some common sense. Singapore Airlines is not even an indian company. The first thing they do when you get on their flight is a tamil announcement. All their menu cards are tamil too. Actually they’re written in Tamil/Malay/English.

I find it highly irritating when someone tries to coax a language down someone’s throat when its 100% irrelevant to a given context. I agree with the fact that Hindi is our national language and its a responsibility we should carry to know it. Personally i do but it is unfair to expect every tom, dick and harry to do so because you are dealing with india. A country where the number of official languages recognized for communication across states is 14. Its not like you really want to spread hindi an shit. You even switched OFF the safety announcement when the hindi version was playing, bravo!

I have many more wonderful pointers to discuss but all of it will make this post a long and boring one. I will follow this up with another exclusive “Air India” bashing post.

And yes, i will also add. All of the crew in the Air India flight spoke good galeej tamil but preferred to speak hindi and spoke tamil only when responded to in tamil or say a blank response. Seriously WTF?!

Amen..

A handbook of exceptional quick lies

Yes, exclusively for the Indian family as well. Are you anything post 13 and below 30? Are you Single? Are you the one who happens to have girl friends? Are you the one that happens to be from a conservative tambram, catholic or muslim family? Do you find it painful to find explanations everytime you step out of the house?

Well if you have been answering yes to atleast 2 of the above questions then you are in deep shit?

Does it take impossible amounts of convincing to get your girl friend out of the house and in the last minute she banks out and excuse’s herself "parents won’t allow me to go out in weekends" sort of unbelievable shit!

Well wonder no more. The answers to your prayers are right here. I shall soon come up with a paperback book called "A handbook of exceptional quick lies". 20000 right lies you can fling right out of your pocket and not only get out of your house post 7 PM. Not only that, this WILL get your girl friends out too! Yes, its true and its time tested and it hardly fails.

For example, you plan a night show movie with a gang of friends at work. Living in chennai or any city for that matter you know how hard it is to get evening show or matinee tickets. Now your gal friends wont come out of the home because anything post 7 PM is taboo.

Well here is the deal. Call your girl friends Landline number. As always her dad, the bloody villain will pick up the phone. Now quickly tell her dad "Hello uncle, how are you? I’m fine. I could not reach sheetals mobile so called the land line. Can you take a message?"

At this point of time the curious bastard will be more than happy to know what the hell you are going to tell his beautiful daughter. Now comes your nuke…

"Please ask sheetal to get the Black Mamba Project report for the meeting with Vice president we have tonight at 9 AM PST"

Now her dad is like "What meeting? She never told me?"

"Oh yes uncle, we have a performance review meeting and our team has won the award for the best performance for this quarter. We may probably get a pay hike if we impress the VP in the meeting with our presentation and sheetal has done all the ground work."

Two things. Daughter will probably get a pay hike, daughter may get an award. This sucker will do anything to get his daughter to go to office.

Infact you can also use this opportunity to go pick up your girl friend from her house since it will be late in the night.

Imagine this, 8 pm pick-up from home. Dinner + movie at 10.45 pm and then go clubbing at 3 AM after the movie and back home by 6 am next morning.

The only small downside is you need to wear formal clothes when you start out of the house. That’s okay. We are all used to carrying different set of clothes and changing in the restroom. Women are experts at this and you can take advise from your girl friend.

This is just ONE EXAMPLE, one of the more inefficient ways to get the girl friend out and you out of the house. Imagine how the super efficient ones that are available only when you buy the book, would sound like. Buy my book and you have 19,999 more of this wonderful treasure of knowledge.

So hang tight and watch this space. Arriving in a blog near you….

As for NRI folks, dont worry. Amazon deals are underway to sell atleast 87 million copies in the USA and Europe alone.

Bookmark:

Fully Hyd Apologizes

Phew, i’m so damn saved. I’m just so happy i don’t have to go to court and the police station again all over and run around like a rat on opium. Fully Hyd’s CEO today called and apologized for the usage of the picture.

Contrary to my expectations he was not rude and in fact quite honest and apologetic about what happened. The last thing i wanted 2 days before a melbourne trip was a pending legal issue on my head and im so glad it went through fine.

Flickr Copyright Meetup at Mocha

Off late we have been extensively hearing more and more of the Indian media flicking images from flickr and not agreeing to compensate or even provide credit in almost all cases.

I would like to organize a peaceful human chain, possibly hold play cards too for display and let the people know what is happening. I’m confident the media will not cover this but even if we can get one news channel to do a small piece on this or the local community free news papers like say "mambalam times" or "t.nagar talk" to write about us, we could reach out far and wide.

I’m also planning to file a "Public Interest Litigation" in the high court against the rampant press abuse of copyrighted flickr work and lack of clause in copyright laws from the dimension of internet and technology as well.

I would like to schedule a meeting this sunday at 3.30 PM at Mocha in Khadar nawaz khan road, nungambakkam. Please attend this meeting. This will be an informal start-up to get this moving and we intend to discuss everything. Right from the human chain event to the PIL to our rights in terms of copyright.

Sorry if you are outside chennai. I would love to see some of you if at all you are travelling to chennai this sunday. I will keep my blog updated and keep you out of chennai’ers posted on this.

Laal Bindi

Shan ain’t Single anymore, sorry guys. I know i broke your hearts, i can see broken hearts floating on the marina sea shore as i drove home today. But hey, that does not mean its all that bad. I was shooting exclusively for her wedding engagement today and of course yesterday for the Henna Ceremony at her house.

The forthcoming series will be from this set, i finally have some work with my macro lens after 2 long years of it collecting dust in my camera bag.

The Bindi or the "pottu" as it is called in tamil is a critical decorative element of the indian woman. I decided to get a close up of the bindi shan had while the women drew arabic designs on her hand with henna (marudhaani).

Canon EOS 400D with the Canon EF 100MM F/2.8 Macro USM. Aperture Priority, F/4 at 1/200th of a Second, ISO100, Canon Speedlite 430EX fired and bounced off with a diffuser, Manual 1/1, Tripod.

Vaiko Meets Obama, makes pictures to prove it too!

Photo Credit: Shekhar Krishnan

Apparently Vaiko thinks none of us read the newspapers or do not know who Barrack Obama is. Its either than or he was smoking ACID when he asked for this posted to be printed.

For my dear Caucasian, African-American, Latino, Spanish, French, European, Hispanic and whatever the race from you are and if you do not know who Vaiko is, take it from me with faith. He is an asshole. For starters he supports the LTTE and then the list is endless.

Apparently vaiko met obama in Chicago when he was in one of his official visits to the US of A blowing our indian middle class tax money. Now the trouble is, indian people are hard to convince on some of this shit and hence vaiko did the obvious. Guess what? Yes, he made the picture himself.

Words of Wisdom - #1

Dilip says "the day nobody honks like they’re cumming at the speed of light when the traffic signal counts under 12 for green, that day india is civilized."

Pehli Nazar Mein can go fuck itself!

I was sitting at this pub last night and they were playing desi night and the song was "Pehli Nazar Mein Kya Jadu Kar Diya" and i thought, "what an amazing number!". I’ve heard this before on a couple of friends/colleagues caller tune and i did not like this song much but listening to it in a club in full quality was like Christmas for me and it made it, i became a fan and i downloaded this album today (RACE) and listened to it.

I was trying to see how the video for this fantastic number would look like and i found more than what i was looking for on youtube. I know i may be late by weeks or months and this is old news but still……

You may download the Original Sarang Hae Yo from here.

In the wake of copyright infringements that haven’t really made me a happy person and knowing how the Indian Copyright Act, 1957 and its amendment, the last one being almost 9 years ago in 1999 (after which the Internet changed everything and its existence this act is oblivious about) being such a joke, i just thought i would let the few people who listen to Hindi music and probably love this song, its stolen…

It’s someone else’s hard work that’s been lifted just because you are a brown man here and your vague laws protect you from prosecution…. i feel it very unfair and very painful. I don’t know what i can as an individual do. I took off this song from my MP3 player and i updated it with the Original Korean song, i care not if i don’t get the language. To feel love, words are not a necessity. The though i think is enough with the wonderful feeling.

I’m thinking i will spread this message to everyone i know so that they are listening to a thief and this is stolen shit. If that sense of guilt could help, i guess that makes my day.