ArchiveDecember 2007

It was one of those dinners that happen way too infrequently nowadays.
Fungus was there. The author and the missus. Pastrami completed the four-umvirate even though he was only half the man he is normally. Bags under his eyes. Shoulders slumped in exhaustion. Mouth pursed in that weird way of those who have worked 36 or so straight hours on an investment banking deal that will yield rich dividend in time.

(While I sympathized with him, inside I leapt for joy. The more he worked, the more he made bonus and the more he paid for Long Island Iced Teas at the Hard Rock Café. He rounds his credit card bills to the thousands you see.)

Alas money is not everything. Nothing can buy back sleep once lost. Not even a lucrative buy back option. (Got it? Got it?)

But also it was Pastrami’s birthday celebration redux.

Earlier this week he had spent the night of his actual birthday hunched over his laptop at the office doing the things he does on tough deals. Making term sheets, creating spreadsheets, downloading porn, playing Poker on Facebook, hitting on the ladies in HR. They call it ‘the grind’. A party had been out of the question till the deal had been closed and both parties signed on the dotted lines.

Thankfully a couple of days later he emerged from his professional tapasya an exhausted but satisfied man. A quick round of phone calls later we were all at Tamnak Thai. Heinekens were being sipped. Pastrami was awake but looked grim.

Normally, regulars at this blog will know, Pastrami has a tendency to slip into precarious predicaments. There was the infamous time when his family realized he was gay. Also I did poke him in his eye once with my stylus.

But this time we assumed him grimness came from just having worked like a dog all through his birthday.

“Pastrami the usual?”

“Hmm…”

Thai green curry and steamed rice. The missus, another veggie but one bored of Thai green curry all the time, demanded a change. She ordered a refreshingly different Thai red curry.

These veggies I tell you…

Fungus wasted no time in ordering a herd-killing spread of lamb, pork and chicken. All cooked in the Thai fashion with generous helpings of lemon grass. Also much chilli.

We dug into our food with feverish gusto. (Note: The food would reciprocate fiercely the next morning. We are talking Krakatoa here. Lava. Pompeii. It still hurts. Freaking magma.)

Pastrami continued to be silent. He chewed in slow motion. He was completely quiet except for a brief moment, which gave us hope, when he asked for a diet coke. But he went back into his shell again.

“Dude. Something wrong?”

“Hmm…”

“Bad day at work…?”

“Hmm…”

I reached for the Thai Red Curry. The missus dissuaded me with the pointy end of a fork between the third and fourth knuckle.

“Arrey yaar. What is this reticence? Why don’t you talk to us? We are your friends no?” I said fighting back tears bravely.

“No I don’t want to. It’s embarrassing.”

Whoa! Embarrassment and Pastrami? A blog post loomed. If only he would open up. And I could type.

Fungus chirped up: “But tell no? Sometimes it’s good to share things with friends.”

Pastrami took a deep breathe. And then narrated his short but lively tale while we sipped our Heinekens and tried not to think of permanent tendon damage.

Pastrami had been called to attend a meeting with his boss late the previous night. The meeting was at a client’s office and it had something to do with Corporate Finance or Slump Selling or some such topic I remember flunking with aplomb.

The whole team, some seven or eight people, stuffed into a small conference room. Once everyone was settled Pastrami’s boss flipped open the laptop and began the presentation. Pastrami was expected to note down the client’s reactions and questions.

A few moments into the presentation Pastrami notices that the client CEO’s laptop screen has quickly moved into screensaver mode. The way they sat in the room, only Pastrami could see it.

The screensaver was a version of a recent Swimsuit Calendar. The CEO had one of those VAIOs with 19-inch screens and vivid life like images on the LCD screen.

Pastrami is only human. He was distracted. In the beginning he pulled his eyes away to the excel sheets and models and Powerpoint on the large projector screen. But in time he began to anticipate each model on the screensaver. The way her hair blew in the wind. The way the sand stuck to her bum. The way her voluptuous…

“Pastrami! What do you think of the slideshow? You’ve been quite interested in it! Which parts did you like?”

The client CEO boomed with a smile on his face.

“What?” Pastrami frantically clutched at conversational straws.

“What do you think of the slideshow? Anything you liked in particular?”

“Well…”

“Don’t be scared of your boss. Give me your honest opinion…”

Pastrami figured this guy was a real stud. Not harm in playing along if it meant the deal would go through.

“Well I really liked Deepika’s picture. Sheetal was a little too aggressive if you ask me. That little tigress! Sarah Jane would have rocked. But that’s just my opinion. Ha ha ha!”

The room reverberated in deathly silence.

On the drive back Pastrami’s boss spoke to him: “He was referring to my…”

“I know…”

“You thought?”

“Yes…”

“Oh shit…”

“Yeah…”

“Little Tigress… damn…”

“Hmm…”

Just as he ended the story the Tamnak Thai people brought in the cake we had ordered for him. There was a candle on it that had already been lit.

And around the candle our message:

“Happy Birthday Pastrami! May 2008 be your year with the LADIES!”

He flinched.

We winced.

“Happy Birthday Pastrami!”

“Shut it…”

Sigh.

p.s. Do a good deed today. Sign up at GiveIndia and support one of the certified NGOs there. You don’t have an excuse not to.

Do you have friends who are totally, totally on a different wavelength?
Sure you guys get along just fine. But sometimes conversations tend to get bizarre very soon. I don’t mean different wavelengths in the sense that you work in consumer banking and they work in investment banking. No I am talking about the situation where you work in consumer banking and they work in mixed media impressionist sculpture or something.

Let me explain.

There is this dear friend who is the highly creative advertising-media-design type who does a LOT of work for JAM Magazine. She is quite the brimful of ideas. And I mean ALL the time. Now these advertising types have brains that work at a completely different level, (electron orbit?), compared to the regular moderately imaginative brain that I have.

When you ask them for advice or inputs on things you do so expecting an avalanche of creativity to be let loose. It’s as if they just wake up in the morning, spend an hour thinking up a few hundred creative trains of thought, and then spend the rest of the day just launching them at the least suspecting MBA types who still can’t get over the genius of VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP.

Question in office: “How do we give the magazine a new look?”
Regular Sidin answer: “Let’s get a new font, increase the visuals and jazz up the cover a bit!”
Arty Lady’s answer: “Let’s chop the magazine to a square, punch a hole down the centre, print text down the diagonal and string it up at newsstands.”

At the time you try to hold a straight face while wondering what substance makes the brain works that way. But most of the time you envy the insane coolness of their ideas.

So yesterday evening I am sitting hunched over the laptop wondering what to get the wife on the soon-to-be-here first wedding anniversary.

While I may be tall, dark, handsome, have immaculate chest hair and nearly odourless sweat, gifting has never been a strength of mine. I suck at it. And when it comes to gifting women I take that sucking to plunging depths. So, in a moment of weakness, I asked Arty Lady for a anniversary surprise idea.

The mystery is this. She doesn’t even pause to think. It’s as if her brains has ideas for any possible scenario just cached in somewhere. Without as much as a pause to suck in air she launches into the description of a plan unlike any I have heard before:

“Sidin what you do is this. First I will give you the number of a friend. He is a broker for elephants and other trained animals. You book a nice big elephant for your anniversary day. You then rent a good Indian prince type Sherwani. You dress up, take the elephant, go to her office and wait with the animal till she comes outside after work. Then you pick her up and begin a slow yet extremely regal elephant ride to South Mumbai. On the way you can stop at a cafe or something and share a coffee of some kind. Leave the elephant prominently outside. You must have booked a table at the TAJ for dinner obviously. Then you take the animal right upto the entrance of the TAJ. The valet’s face! The idea is to give the woman an experience she will never ever forget for the rest of her life. Awesome no?”

I paused for a second in order to retract chin and a lion’s share of tongue from the floor.

“Yes. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. Elephant. Awesome. Very good. Give me that bottle of water please…”

“What were you planning Sid?”

“Handbag…”

p.s. Still open to outstandingly creative ideas that do not involve large creatures that can tenderize you for timepass.

Afficianados Aficionados (just like fans but with better teeth and gold credit cards) of this blog will be well aware of the many changes that have taken place to Domain Maximus over the last five years or so. It all began as an email newsletter which ran for a year or so before finding a very happy home at sidin.blogspot.com. The blogspot site saw the blog mature, find itself in a Zen sort of way, and settle down to the sporadic rhythm it has now.
And then in May of last year I moved everything to this whatay dedicated domain. With rising traffic and a more vigorous freelance writing career I figured I needed a better, more personalized showcase of my writings. The wordpress platform gives it flexibility and customization that was simply unimaginable on Blogger. But apparently more than that has changed on this blog. Sob.

Middle of last week I came across this link.

The Blog Readability Test ‘apparently’ goes through the content on your blog and determines the education level required to understand what’s going on. This is a fun thing to do for the avid blogger unless, of course, THIS is what the site had to say about the very blog you are on right now…

Hmm. Elementary school. Damn! And here I was, thinking Whatay was all about erudition and insightful humour and intellectually enriched conversation.

Apparently we are all little kids with leaky noses and tiffin boxes.

But the slap in the face was yet to come. (And I WILL tell teacher about it too!) Guess what happened when I typed in the trusty but forgotten blogspot url:

DAMMIT!

What has happened to Domain Maximus? Are any of you sensing a general lowering in intelligence levels? Am I using one word where I should use a paragraph with footnotes? Shorter sentences? Perhaps time for a post on Shakespearean Insights into Metaphysical Particle Dynamics?

I am at a loss of words here. I feel dumb. Waah! Waah!

Can I go to the bathroom now?

Geeeaaaaaaaaaweewaaaaaaa…
Ah! Nothing like getting up after a truck load of work and then stretching and screaming in relief no?

No seriously. I actually do that. The wife hates it. Apparently I never did it before marriage. “You have changed Sidin!” she says while I download photos of Matt Damon and take large printouts.

Anyways it’s been a really tight couple of weeks and I’ve finally managed to salvage the time to bring your attention to an evil which is slowly eating away at the very social and moral fiber of our society. Something that is beginning to rear its evil head more often than it ever has in the past. A vile presence that sits like a benign granuloma on the spinal cord of our society and restricts the blood flow of unity and communal harmony to the population centre that is our brain stem leading to the subacute sclerosing panencephalitis that is mass cultural myopia.

(Many many House MD DVDs. Sorry.)

But before that, I would like to say that henceforth each blog of mine will come with a little banner for GiveIndia embedded in it. GiveIndia is a website that makes it easy peasy to donate money to your charity of choice. They don’t pay me money to do this, of course, and I hope the High Networth Engineers and MBAs amongst you will rise to the occasion by clicking through and doing your bit wherever you see fit. Charity begins at home page no? (Ha!)

So where was I? Ah yes mass cultural myopia.

What’s with this sudden upsurge of national political correctness? Haven’t you noticed it? When suddenly people are afraid to say what is blatantly obvious? Just so that they avoid the possibility, however minor, of offending someone.

Of course political correctness can be convenient in certain harmless situations.

“Of course your baby is lovely! No the moustache is cute.”

“No no. That is a good IIM too!” (Guahaha.)

Yet nothing drives me insane like one of those media reports, especially on TV, where they try to pass off “People from two communities had a go at each other yesterday with sub-machine gun fire. Riot police later controlled the crowd from a distance using only mind power as made famous by the Bapna brothers in Competition Success Review.” instead of just coming clean and admitting that the Buddhists and Bahais are at it again.

First there was that Aaja Nachle thing. And then the Sikhs of Lucknow filed cases against poor Anilbhai. And now the recent discoveries about my cellphone.

What did you say? No idea what happened to my cellphone? None at all?

Sigh. Socially networked society it seems. Citizen journalism will change our world they say. Pshaw!

Texting messages is one of the great modes of communication of this day and age. After a hectic day in the office nothing warms the heart like sending a message of extreme naughtiness to the wife. But then “Darth Vader Woman in HR” is just next to “Darling” in the phone book and often hilarity ensues due to digit-al mishaps.

So imagine my chagrin when I discover that the Brick, as I affectionately call my P990i when I wear hip hugging jeans, has a predictive text input that is so prudish that it makes an Indian parish priest look like an American parish priest.

Let me explain.

My cellphone uses what is known as a T9 dictionary. This is the thing that gives your predictive text input thing work. So you don’t have to go punching forever on your teeny mobile keypad to get simple words out. (Try doing the phrase “I was flabbergasted when I perused the entry for appendicitis in an encyclopedia my dear Parthasaarathy!.”)

Yet I know the smartest people who don’t get the hang of predictive text input. High funda software engineer processes Laplace transforms and does Matrix multiplications in his head over a Hazelnut Cappuccino. But tell him to sms you what he’s sipping and watch the genius sweat over his keyboard.

But all the difficulties of T9 pale in comparison to the indignation I felt when I discovered that the Brick comes factory-installed with a dictionary that has all the good words pruned out of it already. Is this another sign of the moral decrepitude of our times?

I am afraid so.

For instance when I am thoroughly angry with someone I need to send out a message like “NO! YOU are a dial head!” This is because the word I am looking for (rhymes with drick) is not available on my phone. The closest available choice is ‘dial’. I could call it Richard. But that could become an annoying habit.

You’ve been late with a column submission and got beaten black and blue by the newspaper person? The best you can do is “I got batch-slapped by that Hindu person again today!” This is because my phone does not believe in the existence of the female of the canine species at all. “Where do puppies come from?” is not a question my phone ever asks itself.

No reference can be made to the posterior region of the human body with any suitable word except ‘booty’and ‘butt’. Words such as ass / arse / fanny / back-end / doublebubble are simply missing from the T9 dictionary. If this was before marriage I would have asked aloud in agony: “What is wrong with the posterior for god’s sake? I think it’s mighty fine and deserves wide appreciation!” Today I have no interest in such things at all. In fact you should ignore this last point completely.

I cannot call anyone a ‘moron’, ‘nincompoop’, ‘imbecile’, ‘slut’ or even ‘dufus’. All perfectly good words in the English language. But my phone will have none of it. Apparently such words are beneath it.

Instead it cheerfully throws up such conversational gems as ‘incontinence’, ‘Hilcote’, ‘tundra’ and my personal favourite: ‘hernia’d’.

‘hernia’d’

Definition: The situation of having a hernia thrown at oneself at great speed without warning.

Use in a sentence: “Sidin was writing a poem about the Asiad, could not find a rhyming word for some time, before he picked up his phone and observed ‘hernia’d’.”

Important Note: Be EXTREMELY careful when sending T9 composed message to any girl named Rashmi.

Yes my phone has ‘screwdriver’. But no mention at all of plain old simple ‘screw’.

As you can this has shaken my faith in the world at large gravely. Who knew such a vile conspiracy was afoot within the bowels of the mobile phone industry?

Is this happening to your phone as well? Is the phone trying to prevent you from speaking freely? Is it curbing your freedom of expression?

I think we should form an Orkut group and fight this immediately. When I pay for my phone I should get it complete with a full quota of words whether they seem unsavoury to the phone maker or not. Let us put an end to this menace.

Or as my phone would say “I’ve had enough of this asap. Time to kick some cps!”