Domain Maximus

Expect more details soon!

P.S. The wife says hi!

There comes a time in the life of a blog when the author sits back and thinks “If seven people can do a piece of work in five days then in how many days can three mallus do the same amount of work but this time if the factory is shifted from Gurgaon to Cochin?”

Can the answer be half a million? Perhaps.

This author can also not be faulted if he sits back and often wonders why God (Knopfler) would give him so many organs in pairs. He (the author) is often philosophical, sometimes whimsical but always well intentioned. He would be open to selling one of his kidneys if push came to credit card default shove. For how much?

Can the answer be half a million Gandhis? Perhaps. (Throw in a PS3 will you?)

So here I am rambling away. You the reader thinking “What the…?”

Well there is a purpose dear friend. For if you leisurely scroll down this page till the hit counter emerges on the right you will see a number. What number could it be? (Hints galore…)

Half a million? OH YEAH BABY…

WOO HOO. Balle Balle Shaava Shaava. Throws your arms in the air like you jusht dont care…

For this blog has finally, after what… three years?… logged up half a million hits. HALF A MILLION! Not bad eh?

And all thanks to you and the hundreds of people out there who linked through to me and clicked on Domain Maximus every once in a while even when I was AWOL, flamed me, left vile but amusing comments and were jolly good in general.

I love you all. Mwaah Mwaah. So from my side to all of you here:

Hey hey hey. Forgotten me already have you? Thought I was gone for good? You are very, very wrong but then I won’t blame you. Its not your fault really. How were you to know that I have been terribly busy with things of a rather personal nature. Of course I will share it with you, no secrets between reader and author on this blog, but not right now. The time is not right. Patience I tell you. All in good time.

But what I CAN tell you is that I have joined a gym. A proper one with treadmills and exercycles and dumbbells and spindly things with weights and handles and steel and chrome and all. Yes I have joined a gym all over again.

Sigh.

Avid readers of this blog, yes all three of you, will know that Sidin Sunny Vadukut has always been most robust when it comes to matters of the waist. He has always enjoyed a good meal of tandoori chicken, rotis, dal makhani and custard followed by a soup and main course and has often been described, in friends circles, as ‘cuddly’, ‘well-fed’ and ‘cute in a healthy sort of way’. If anyone looked at me and quipped that the pounds were gathering around me in little jiggly ripples of cheer I would merely, and coolly, shrug them off the first time and then roundhouse kick them in the face the second. (Well not as much roundhouse kick as smother them between my elbows. I can’t actually lift my leg that high.)

It was not a bad life really. With the right wardrobe of loose Fabindia kurtas and open-minded draw-string pants I was managing to maintain my self esteem nicely. (Yes there was that incident in that Air Deccan flight. But I ensure you I did not mean to get stuck like that and delay the onward sector by two hours.) Nothing to complain really. And yes pass me that Dal Makhani please. And a nan please. With BUTTER!

But of late, because of this personal thing I was referring to earlier, I had to wear a lot more of those stodgy inflexible formal pants. So off I went and bought myself a few pairs of regulation navy blue and dark brown formal pants that no self-respecting man’s wardrobe is complete without. (Unless you are Bappi Lahiri perhaps. But I doubt even he respects himself. Awwa awwa it seems!)

Then two weeks ago I suddenly noticed that something strange had happened to my pants. My feet went in alright and the shins and knees managed to enter without incident. Things began to get a little ‘testy’ higher up. By the time the fabric had been pulled up to my waist things were looking very very bad.

When I mean ‘tight’ I don’t mean hold your breath in and slip in the button’ tight. Oh ho ho no. I mean ‘scream in agony, get at least one hernia and pass out’ tight. I immediately did what a man had to do. Especially if he wanted to stay one. I ripped off the worsted wool, settled into a lungi and let out a sigh of relief among other things.

Except for one pair of jeans, which I could fit into by getting my roomies to hold the pair up open while I jumped feet first into the cavity from the dining table, the rest of my legwear lay crumpled around my bedroom laughing at me mockingly. Nothing irks like a deprecating length of corduroy.

(Enter hip-hop type loop here. Rap following lines…)

Things were getting out of hand.
And my waistband.
I was forced to understand.
No more room to expand.
No more the gourmand.
Between long term health and death unplanned…
this, mofo, was the final stand.

(End loop. Wait for women to get off you and applause to die. Continue.)

The very next day, after a pizza lunch, I ran to the gym next to my place here in Wadala. I stepped in with a heavy heart, a heavier wallet but with considerable determination.

If you are one of those people who like economics a lot you will note, in addition to the fact that you have very few friends, how several economic theories are based on human beings being
‘rational’. This means that they make logical decisions, are predictable and that he or she is a ratio or quotient of two integers, usually written as the vulgar fraction a/b, where b is not zero.

Well then, step into any gym, go stand next to the billing area and you will see why the above reasoning is absofreakinglutely wrong. A gym membership is to disposable income what a blackhole is to light, a Vadukut is to spicy fish curry and a Bush is to crude producing nations without democracy. These memberships grab impressionable young men and women in their evil sweaty tentacles and suck them dry till the victim is left with no personal wealth except small change and Sodexho passes in awkward denominations. (When this happens you can only either have Idlis or Murgh Mussallam and nothing in between. It sucks.)

Yet, in spite of the inevitable financial challenge, everyday thousands of young men weighing millions of kilos fork out hajjar for gym memberships. And they do this with rosy visions of high impact cardio programs, macho free weights routines, six-pack abs and, most importantly, for a decent shot at the hot dietician who comes in once a week.

But for a person like me, with the aerodynamic quality of a teakwood sofa-cum-bed, the gym, alas, is the last resort. I just had to regain the perfect posture and endless stamina that had abandoned me, after years of neglect, sometime in kindergarten.

So there I was. Melancholy yet intense. Sitting in a chair while I waited for the gym manager to initiate me into my gym routine. He was going to measure every measurable dimension of my body and then weigh me. After this I was supposed to get up, step over all the tiny pieces of my self-esteem that lay scattered across the floor, and go meet the dietician who would go over my readings and give me a review.

Her eyes ran over the tiny ballpoint pen measurements while I looked at the weighing scale sitting ominously in a corner smirking.

Is Sidin’s weight loss too big to solve? Will he ever be able to regain his self confidence and esteem? Will he ever be able to fit into his flat-fronted corduroys again? Will the dietician see the sensitive human being inside the cellulite? Is she single? Will Sidin ever write part two of a two-part blog?

All that much more in Daily Exorcise – Part 2… Coming soon…

Overheard earlier today during an interview:

Interviewer: You understand that this job involves interacting with corner shops and retailers and wholesalers and really the lowest of the low…

Woman applicant: I understand completely. It is a challenge. But as you can see in my CV it is a challenge I have faced successfully before.

Interviewer: Hmm. But I hope you are aware of the… you know… sheer dirtiness involved in this profile. Street-work is tough and can be a total turn off for a lot of people… most people…

Woman: Oh no no no. (Gesticulating with both hands for effect) I love interacting with people. In fact when I meet these types of people… I just dont get turned off at all… in fact I get really really turned on! Really turned on! (Face huffing with effort…)

Interviewer: Er… ah… yes of course… ok…

One lakh eleven thousand words (Minor edits and additions expected). My book is complete!  <Clenched fist pumping in the air in triumph!>

Bookstands here I come! Sneak previews after a preliminary round of proofing and re-drafting. A month behind schedule… but what the heck.

Now onward ho with the The Monday Mumbaikar! <New name and core team to be announced in a day or so!>

The other day I got a call from a long-lost friend of mine from college. And, as I always do when old college friends call me, I quickly asked him if he had seen a pair of burgundy and orange swimming trunks. I had lost them in 3rd year and have never seen them since except for a chance encounter in Bombay airport. Alas he had not and all he wanted was to check if I knew someone called Boris (not actual name) from Kanpur (not actual place) who may have studied with me in business school (not an actual school). He was apparently carrying out a secret background check on Boris for matrimonial purposes.

Let me assure you these are some of the most awkward phone calls you can ever receive. Even the most fun-loving (meaning mildly criminal) of people turn into massively self-rightesous zombies when they need to verify a person’s marriageability. Now my friend, who we will call Friend, had miraculously turned into this malicious Jesuit from the Inquisitions. Every aspect of Boris’s personality was ripped apart for the merest trace of moral weakness. The conversation was terse and highly unpleasant.

“So does Boris drink?”

“A little bit…”

“Good god…” said Friend. (Flashback to college when Friend routinely downed 7 bottles of beer and a couple of bottles of a whisky at a sitting. He even opened them sometimes.)

“But not too much, he was just a social drinker…”

“Thats how they all start. A few drinks in college, then a couple on the weekends at work. And before you know he is a wife-beating criminal…” (Friend conveniently forgot the time when he had one too many screwdrivers, picked up a cricket bat and beat the living daylights out of a goalpost. They later settled out of court.)

“And does he smoke? Tobacco? any of those other unspeakable plants?…” (To this day in Trichy they talk of the Great Smog of 1999, which was traced to Friend’s room. He had smoked his way through a whole 4-kilo sack of premium fresh, run out, and was imbibing, out of desperation, the vapours of unwashed bed linen when we found him.)

“Nope nothing I knew of…”

‘Hmm… I will need better sources. Sources who have more concern than you do for a poor girl’s future…” (Friend holds the record for maximum arrests for eve-teasing in Thuvakudi police station history. A women’s college was out on a “March for Literacy” and he was arrested for 43 violations in the space of 37 minutes. A plaque in the station commemorates the event and is a popular tourist attraction)

“But Boris is a nice guy. You have nothing to worry…”

“I will be the judge of that. And finally for 25 points did he have any affairs, romances and intimate interludes in college I should be aware of?”

“No da just the usual fooling around with the juniors…”

“Good god!! Sidin how can you speak of this so lightly??!! Wake up man!! Boris is a blackguard and a vagabond!!”

“No no he is a wonderful guy. Absolutely brilliant guy. If I could I would have married him!!!”

“What? Now you say he goes the other way?”

“No what I meant was any woman would want to marry him. He is a highly eligible bachelor…”

“Are you saying my little petunia is ANY woman for you?…” (Petunia was Friend’s nickname for his sister. In turn she called him Tinku)

“No no sorry sorry…”

“Hmm… fine… and please dont tell me he is one of those porn junkies…” (Sometime in second year the college was moving to bring down an illegal construction adjacent to my hostel. Only to discover that it was Friend’s bound collection of debs and playboys.)

“Well…”

“ENOOUGH!! No I think calling you was a big mistake… I know other people from your business school too you know…”

“But…”

“No I have heard enough…”

“Ok I am sorry yaar..”

“And just so that you know… I DO HAVE YOUR BURGUNDY SWIMMING TRUNKS…”

“Noooooo… sob”

Been terribly busy for weeks. Weekends packed with too many things that I do not have time for on the weekdays. But there is some light at the end of the tunnel now…

Sidin