Super Saturday

August 18, 2009

This Independence Day, I achieved two long-standing dreams.

The first was at the Landmark Quiz Chennai. We (me, Skimpy and Kodhi) won it.

The three of us have been taking part in the Landmark or Odyssey quizzes since 2004. We’d do our August 15/ January 26 pilgrimage to Chennai and just miss qualifying, or qualify and then come last. This year, we qualified. We didn’t get knocked out. And we were on brilliant form, cracking questions throughout the quiz and peacefully winning.

We then went into the all-India finals, and ended up losing by one question, but so it goes. No Enthu Da is now established as a quiz team. We have a reputation. Another couple of years like this, and we could start getting name recognition like QED or Mama Machaan Mapillai. Sooner or later, we’ll win the national round too.

That was dream one. The second dream got fulfilled just after the Chennai round, when the three of us were interviewed by the Chennai local news channel.

Reporter: How does it feel to win?

Kodhi: One of the things in life’s to-do list has been checked off.

Reporter: So have you been quizzing lots before this?

Wimp: Yes, we’ve been coming here and trying to win for five years now.

Reporter: So how do you feel on Independence Day? What does Independence Day mean to you?

Me: Freedom is awesome! It’s great that we have freedom and now we should help other countries with freedom too. To the north you have China being high-handed so we should support free Tibet.

Why was this fulfilling a dream? Well, the news channel is a joint venture between NDTV and The Hindu.

Abusing The Hindu in The New Indian Express is one thing. Expressing pro-Tibet opinions on a Hindu owned media outlet is one of the greatest hacks I’ve ever pulled. Now, as with the Landmark Quiz, it’s time to raise the game – the new goals are to win the national Landmark, and to somehow write an anti-China or anti-CPM oped in The Hindu itself.


Commerce and Kansa

October 6, 2008

Kodhi sends in the following SMS:

There is a furniture shop called woodpecker which has lines like “No Children Section” and “Kids are parents responsibility especially in case of damages”

What gods. Finally a business establishment which goes to clear and unambiguous lengths to make children and parents feel unwelcome. Businesses which lead the way like this will have their deeds celebrated in song and ballad wherever Kansa Society members gather.


More Fuel on the Mommyblog Fire

January 8, 2008

Two points:

First, Falstaff is a cheap guy. He talks about Coase and childfree-airline tickets without referencing me.

Second, a more important point about mommyblogs in general.

I’ve been discussing this point with junta, and the consensus seems to be that kids will become irritating when they are given too much attention. The more attention a kid gets from its parents, the more it thinks of itself. It becomes spoilt, throws tantrums, and eventually the Kansa Society has to be called in.

This is also probably the reason why kids in Delhi and Chennai are the worst behaved. They’re brought up in environments full of doting female relatives. Jobless doting female relatives, who do nothing but stay at home. In the case of Chennai, because they actually are unemployed, and in the case of Delhi, because employment for Delhi women usually means fraud stay-at-home stuff like garment designing. With non-stop attention lavished upon it, the kid becomes a monster. While in Bombay, both the parents are off at work, the kid has to fend for itself, and grows up a clean and sober Goregaon type personality, with excellent social skills, and a bindaas attitude. In my months in Bombay, I saw Gujew aunties abusing Landmark for stocking books. I saw people expectorating with enthusiasm. I saw Jain monks in a fistfight. But I never saw kids throwing tantrums.

I have seen this with my own nephews and nieces also. The one who curls up with a Roald Dahl and generally doesn’t talk is the one whose parents are a doctor and a physiotherapist, and who therefore hardly see him. On the other hand, the Nephew Who Bites has lived his entire life with a stay-at-home mother, a stay-at-home grandmother, a drop-in-practically-ceaselessly grandmother, and a father who is an ameer-baap-ki-bigdi-aulaad, and so doesn’t need to work. Between these extremes, I have a soft-spoken and well-behaved niece whose parents run the nine-to-five gamut. And where I’m concerned, Ma and Papa used to just leave me alone and whack me every once in a while, and I am now a model of manners, rectitude, decency and sobriety. So much so, that people refuse to believe that I’m Punjabi.

Anyway, the point of all this is that a surplus of attention turns kids into monsters, fit only for slaughter by the Kansa Society.

And when it comes to giving kids too much attention, mommyblogging is the pinnacle. Think about it. You devote an entire blog to the kid, and nothing but the kid. And while in the normal course of things, the kid forgets the attention it gets as an infant, here the attention is public, archived, and up to be accessed at will. The Little Emperor generation created by the Chinese one-child policy will be as nothing compared to the generation created by mommyblogging. Legions of spoilt brats will stalk the nation, thinking too much of themselves.

Mommybloggers have a lot to answer for.