Of Governors, Grievances and Conveniences!

Let me tell you a story!

I know what you are thinking.

This buffoon already talks a lot and now he is offering to tell a story? Lord have mercy on our souls.

True. The lord should have mercy on your souls. Especially because of the story I am going to tell highlighting the high-tension drama happening in this nation.

Once upon a time (convention dictates that I begin all stories like this!), not so long ago, there was (still is) a man called N D Tiwari. He had held various positions of utmost importance in his long and glorious career spanning more than 50 years. Tiwari’s latest (and sadly ultimate) position was that of Governor, Andhra Pradesh, a state that was literally about to be torn in two.

NDT

Tiwari’s sense of dedication and devotion towards his work has always amazed everybody. For instance, when he was the governor of Andhra, the Telengana issue was in the initial stages.

“What can I do to prevent the fomentation?”, contemplated Tiwari one night.

The interesting part of it, as sources close to him describe it, was that he was getting drunk and watching Baywatch’s Pamela Anderson expressing her opinions on movable and immovable assets. It was then that a light bulb glowed over that bulbous head of his and “Eureka”, he exclaimed.

“You Rekha?”, he asked her while acting. If one observes the video closely, the lip-sync could be seen. But alas! The nation completely failed to see his heart’s purity and began dissing him. What Tiwari expected though, was achieved. He delayed the Telengana issue by almost 2 months by hogging the spotlight for himself.

You Rekha!?

“I mean, an 85 year old man getting an erection was something the people had to see and understand”, he was later found confiding to his personal aide, trying to explain his noble deeds. What he didn’t expect was also achieved. He did not expect to be sacked. He tried protesting to the higher ups about his true intentions, which sadly didn’t work and later he resorted to the age-old technique of language bias.

“It might have worked in my grandfather’s time and one had to try anyways”, Tiwari was found cribbing later, nursing a glass of Scotch.

So apart from trying to bring into light Tiwari’s holy intentions, what else am I getting at? Where is this story going? Read on..

In the neighboring state Karnataka, 2 days back some illegal mining issues have sprouted wings and have taken flight. The opposition of Congress and JDU are so against the issue that they are spending whole nights in the assembly away from kith and kin, trying to find a solution to this problem.

Highly placed sources believe that Tiwari, the nation’s Playboy (ah! the irony), is behind it all.

One of the MLAs involved in the scandal tried to contact Tiwari to ask for a solution and he had coolly quoted “Women are the root and solution to all evil”.  And since he was after all an Indian MLA, he quickly grasped Tiwari’s point and he too had an affair, taped it, and was about to air it, focusing all attention on himself and diverting the attention of the masses when his wife found out.

She spread the news among her clique, which included all the wives of the other MLAs and now they are all under suspicion at home. When 2 days back one wife went as far as threatening the husband with poisoning his food, he had no other option but to find a solution.

"Hell"mets Save us from our wives!

And thus the ingenious plan of spending the nights in the assembly as long as the Centre orders a CBI probe, which, knowing the speed of events in this great nation, could take weeks. “Let us hope they cool down before that”, one MLA was heard saying, about the wives.

Peace! Let's Sleep...

And why is the Karnataka governor so concerned? He has a wife too doesn’t he?

Why will India never win the football Worldcup?

I have been an ignorant person most of my life. It was only about 2 days back that I got acquainted to the advent of social interactive sites like Twitter, Facebook et al. The fact that I didn’t know Englees till then can also be a possible explanation for my late arrival. But I am here and in the world-cup season too or at the end of it.

I began my online journey by following a few people on twitter. So after the finals which culminated with a victory for Spain courtesy Iniesta, I was excited. I wanted to tweet to the world what a beautiful game it was. How both sides battled it out really well and ultimately Spain’s quality and persistence on the ball got the better of the Dutch. (Of course Twitter allows only 140 characters per tweet. Therefore I wouldn’t have been able to say all this in a single tweet and it wouldn’t have made sense had I broken it down. So you could say that I was thinking of cool shorter methods to express my feelings.)

At the same moment, I was also sure that the whole world, which included the people I follow, will also be tweeting something along similar lines. I couldn’t have been wronger! (Except for now where I am wrongly using the word wronger. But I know it’s wrong which actually does nothing except probably reduce the irony of the situation.) Enough of me putting mokkais! Let them do the talking :

Sonam Kapoor : Spain won.. Woo hoo.. The hotties are gonna remove their jerseys now.. (her tweet read thus and since she is one of the hottest females in bollywood according to me, I might show partiality. Hope you understand..)

Imagine this scenario. It is a women’s football match and after the match is over, Amitabh Bachchan (to whom we will be getting to shortly), tweets Sonam’s above mentioned brilliant tweet. A huge hue and cry will be raised all across the nation won’t it? Women’s group activists slamming him in every street. Well so why are women allowed to drool over topless men? (This has got nothing to do with India and the worldcup. I was just ranting.)

the hottie is gonna remover her sh..er..whatever...woo hoo!

From this, what we infer is, as long as Indian women are interested only in the looks of the players who play the sport than the sport itself, more men will be buying Emami fair and handsome rather than sweating it out in the field.

Amitabh Bachchan : T56 -Paulie Baba zindabad !! Didn’t kick a single ball and lifted WorldCup (his tweet read thus.)

So do you think Bachchan actually saw the match? Does he like football? What does he think of how boring the game was? Or was he trying to be funny? And a lot of other such questions can be answered from this single tweet of his. See his amazing brilliance. It’s what we call “jeans”, I mean, his father was a poet after all. So Bachchan learnt to succinctly present all his views at a very young itself.

T56 Terminator? You tell me!

Paulie Baba Zindababd he exclaims. Now I don’t know who Paulie is but Baba was a flop movie as far as I remember. So one of the most recognised faces in India tweeting about how an octopus’ prediction helped the octopus lift the cup has greatly increased the football fervor in our nation and as I type this at 3 45 in the morning, I see kids with footballs rushing and tackling each other outside my window. Hats off for spreading the word and increasing the interest in the game.

The above two mentioned were actors (the first one was a hot one at that). It does give them a right to tweet pointless things doesn’t it? Or tweet something stupid or superstitious. I mean, nobody cares. Not even me! I am writing all this because right now it strikes me as ridiculous. But later on, on giving the issue further thought, I will probably conclude that even if they had tweeted useful stuff, some football gyan or something completely essential, nobody is going to take them seriously (the down-side of being in the movies and not in politics). But this one is unforgivable. The most followed Indian on twitter. An intellectual should think twice before tweeting thus :

Sashi Tharoor : Hats off to Pablo the Octopus. No Indian astrologer has yet managed a 100% track record like him. Congrats2Spain. Trivandrum is celebrating! (his tweet read thus)

His next tweets were good useful stuff. I am not denying it. But what has pissed me off is Paul seems to garner more attention that Villa or Torres or Iniesta or Cassias. So with this superstitious attitude, may Paul save us all! (too lazy to add a pic of Mr Tharoor. Google it will ya. Sorry Mr T!)

You might want to ask me why I, Vadivelu, care so much! The funny (or is it funnier) thing is I don’t. It just amuses me to watch you pakkies and amuses me further to tell you this! Haiyo Haiyo!

Einstein’s Size Zero!

Who is an ideal woman?

Whoa! Whoa! hold your horses (kuthiraingala kattupaduthunga)…I do not want you to describe how gentle she should be, what an awesome mother she should become, how much brains she should have, what kind of commitment and dedication she should possess or how she should be in bed! Let us keep this at an “eyes-only” level and keep the other esoteric things out of the discussion.

I call the other things esoteric mainly because of the fact that women, according to me are magical. Only a select group of people can understand them and I do not belong to that exclusive clique. I said let us not get into these things didn’t I? Sorry folks, can’t help it…I wanted to pour out my peelings. The mysteries of women-kind elude me and things that are beyond our grasp, distract us the most.

So yes, where was I? Eyes only.

This means who is an ideal woman based on looks. Beauty. But here again, one has to take a moment to curse Albert Einstein and his wretched concept of relativity, which applies to everything in this universe, thus making beauty again relative. While we are cursing Albert, we should also praise him a bit. Why? Simple my friend…if one has enough sense to understand the beauty of relativity(even though beauty is a relative concept!) , one will learn to respect other people’s opinions.

Relativity! 😛

I talk a lot don’t I? I mean, where am I going with all this? How is this even related to size zero?

Good Question. By elucidating relativity I hope I have made the reader understand that beauty is not a world-wide uniform criteria. Then what next figure? (ah finally we approach something that relates to the title).

Figure! It is also slang for babe in Tamil Nadu. 36-24-36, the magical numbers that make the boys go gaga over the ladies (gaga over the ladies! I am brillian aren’t I? if you still didn’t get it, its Lady Gaga! sigh!). But again figure is a relative concept. Down here in the south, where I hail from, men have always been enamored by rotund women. Not fat mind you. Calling our women fat offends us and we are an extremely touchy people. Call our women fat and you’d wish you were never born.

Jo!

If one takes a moment to go through the heroines who have made it big in Tamil cinema, one would agree with me. From Padmini, savithri to Banupriya, Kushboo and recently Jothika and Anushka, our women have had curves. They were babelicious.

Sweety!

So finally, the message to the society? Of course…otherwise what is the point of writing something.

All girls who are dieting trying to achieve the elusive size zero, we don’t care. In fact it is not healthy even. It makes you look sick. Be well fed and watered women, bells will ring when we see you. And yeah, do not go about demanding 6-packs!

sick and ugly!

Chippu my ass!

To the uninitiated, chippu is a term I coined in one of my movies for using in a punch line which goes like : Chipu vandhuruchu chippu! It is a different way of pronouncing the Tamil word “sirippu” which means laughter. It is a world known fact that I make people laugh. But here is something which I read recently in a magazine which made my stomach ache, mainly because I laughed so hard!

The penultimate line in the previous paragraph is what, we in Tamil Nadu, refer to as vetti bandha. It is a simple combination of two terms vetti and bandha, but the situations to which it can be applied are infinite. Vetti literally means jobless and bandha is slang for show-off (also peela, peter etc.). Since I am jobless and showing off my own prowess by stating then and now again that I make people laugh, it is known as vetti bandha. To know about another kind of vetti bandha, read on…

There is this guy. Now our guy is the founding member of this party. This party has now joined forces with this party. And I read an interview given by our guy recently. Our guy is very head-strong. He had once claimed that he will never form alliances with other parties. But sadly, he seems to have realized that there is no point in him being in politics without an alliance.

“We have 15% of the votes. We are a force to reckon with. While forming the alliance, I asked for 132 seats for my party. They refused. But after a bit of struggling and haggling, I managed to make them accept to offer my party a slightly lesser number of seats, 32. This shows the magnanimity and the golden heart of the mother, who is the other party’s chief.”

Forget the fact that 32 is slightly lesser than 132. Read the next sentence again. If I remember right, our guy has torn to shreds this mother of whose magnanimity and heart, he spoke so highly of. And haggling? Seriously, blaady paalitics! dirrtty paalitics!

After reading this piece of vetti bandha, “chippu vandhuruchu chippu”!

Vada Pochae!

The story of the going vada!

Vadai is a south-Indian snack… a savory snack to be more precise. Pochae is a tamil word meaning gone. Like for instance, Gone with the Wind can be translated as kaathoda pocahe, where pochae is gone and screw kaathoda for the time being.

Now after pochae with the wind, if any of you are thinking about a similar biological phenomenon where you leave something that goes with the wind, you are what I would define as an echakala eethara!

Now that we have wiped that issue off our hands, let me enlighten you about the origins of this phrase. (kelambittaaingayya * 2)

Once upon a time there was an aayah.

Aayah, up until recently was used to refer to a person’s grandmother, not just the females in schools or other places who maintain your bathrooms for you or the derogatory sense in which it is used today.

So yeah, this aayah took great pride in her abilities to prepare the best vadas in the surrounding 18 pattis. She was so proud of her vadas that she would sit there making them all day and eating them all by herself.

Historians have tried for eons to find out whether she has had any customers but no luck. They seemed to have hit a solid wall beyond once upon a time there was an aayah! Thus the conclusion that she ate all her vadais.

A kaka (crow) saw this aayah and her vadais and his beak began watering. I must use my ability of flight, flick a vadai and enjoy it in the topmost branch of one of the trees that abound the forest, he thought. So the kaka went zzzzooing in a dive, of which a fighter plane would have been proud, put mud in the aayah’s  eyes and successfully grabbed a vada.

Tada…mission accomplished. He perched himself on the highest branches of a tree and was about to dig in when he heard someone calling him.

“Yo kaka! kaka!” (it was a fox, standing at the foot of the tree)

Balancing the vadai on the side of his beak, the kaka goes “You talking to me?”

“Who else do you think?”, asked the fox.

“How is one supposed to know you dumbass! kaka is a common noun. You could be calling my great grandfather for all I know”, retorted the kaka.

“Oh dear bird, forgive me if I have offended you. I hear that you have the most beautiful of voices and can sing the best of songs. Sing one for me?”, said the fox.

The crow glanced down at the fox, took the vadai from his beak, placed it under his foot and sang a..well cawed. The fox was taken aback.

“How did you get so clever? My mama told me how she fooled yo mama by using this technique”, said the fox.

To this, the kaka replied, “Only you have a mama or what?” and the fox looked up at the sky and said : Vada Pochae!

Tank you! Tank you!