Monday, November 29, 2010

If God studied to become a Chartered Accountant: A tribute to the new Indian English author



I am greatly inspired by the young Indian English author. Their highly imaginative tales of adventures in IIT, IIM, FMS, Nirma, Thadumal Shahani, Choksy high school etc. fascinate me. The variety they think up is astounding. In this fit of inspiration, I myself have written a book. A book about the wonderful journey of a CA student. This is how the back cover of the book reads:

Raghu is a dreamy 18 year old whose dream is to become a CA and enter the high-flying world of drawing T-accounts. However he has no idea that this super-exciting journey is going to lead to him travelling to Baramati, staying up nights to solve the mysterious puzzles such as how to audit a cinema hall, dangerous brushes with the pre-test examiners and sleeping with his boss’ daughter
On his journey he makes some interesting friends: Alok who can’t stop studying, Ashok who can’t stop studying, and a mad and mysterious fellow called Rocky, who can’t stop studying.
Where will this dangerous journey lead Raghu? How will he escape his boss’ wrath? How do the complex relationships among these four friends evolve? And finally.. WHO IS ROCKY?
Some snippets from the book:
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It was Saturday night. Like every Saturday night, Raghu, Alok and Ashok sat together studying for Sunday’s pre-test. For hours they debated on a single question: what is the difference between substantive audit procedures and compliance audit procedures? Rocky walked in, glanced at them and walked out. WHO IS ROCKY? The three decided they were hungry and that “they must eat”. But it was 4 in the morning, and they had no money. Alok had a mad idea, “Our office has a safe for petty cash. Boss gave me the key today to take money for ROC filing. Why don’t we break in through the window, take money from the safe and go eat something? We can replace the cash tomorrow”. Ashok suggested they make maggi at home. They ate maggi.
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“Why didn’t you boys point this out before? This is shocking”, said Batlivala aloud without covering the mouthpiece. Then he immediately switched to a polite tone, said niceties into the phone and hung up. Raghu and Alok’s boss was on the other side. This wasn’t the first time Batlivala screwed them like this. The boys did point it out before, but they couldn’t say anything. After all, Batlivala was their client. He was real mean. And his fart was really smelly. They were at the client’s office auditing, and this guy was making their life hell.
That day, they got their shot at revenge. The client was a pharma company. Some of their sample drugs were kept right there in the office. It was Batlivala’s tea time. They knew that he went to take a leak everyday just before he took his first sip. They waited for him to leave, and quickly but quietly stole into the store room. They looked at all the boxes kept there, and found a very interesting label on one box. Under a name that sounded greek was the word ‘laxative’. They quickly opened it and took out one bottle. Alok couldn’t stop smiling. He kept thinking to himself, only if Rocky were here..
The pair stole back into the office, rushed to their desk and wrote on their audit query sheet: “Test check of sample medicines revealed that expiry dates on some samples had already passed”. Raghu gave Alok a high five. “NOW he’s had it”, he said.
Who is Rocky?
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So this was the story of the four friends. They went on in life to become upright citizens. Raghu’s parents eventually found a nice girl for him and got him married. It was only a coincidence that she was his boss’ daughter. He slept with her soon after they got married. Alok works with an audit firm. He resolved his differences with Batlivala. Ashok wanted to do something completely different, something offbeat. He now works in indirect taxes. He still loves maggi. They never found out who Rocky really is.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Perfect Timing


Smashed skull, pool of blood, mangled limbs and lifeless eyes. That’s how Soumitra thought he would look five minutes later. But what did he care what he looked like once he was dead? And the morbid visual wasn’t some kind of daytime nightmare; it was just a writer’s way of seeing things. His mind still thought like a writer sometimes, although he wondered if he was even entitled to call himself that anymore.

Utter despair.

When Anagha left him two years ago – it would have been three in two days – Soumitra was devastated. His wife and his talent were all he had. Anagha had seen him through when he lost his mother in an accident. She was a lovely woman, Anagha was. Lovely, and caring. And he let her go. He knew it was also partly his mistake. He tried very hard to win her back, but she had mentally left him long ago. That year after Anagha left was the worst time in his life – until now.

Somehow, he stayed alive. After what seemed like forever, he finally decided to give himself another chance. He still had his words. He would write. Write for his readers, write for himself. Drown himself in his work, and he would forget her. And so he took pen in hand again.

But it was too late. He just didn’t know what to write. All he could think of were some obvious everyday observations and colourless characters that even he failed to remember the next day. It was terrible. This was not a mere writer’s bloc, it was a pathological paralysis of his creative faculties. He kept trying harder, but it just kept getting worse.

When he woke up that morning, realization dawned. It was almost two years, and he had written nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not a novel, not a short story. Not a word. Nothing had changed since last night, but his world came crashing down. He knew he had to accept his fate. He had lost the ability to write. He was nothing now. He had run out of money, he was alone, he had no talent and he didn’t even respect himself anymore. It was a waste of a life. There was no use living on, merely surviving. His life had to be ended. That was the only thing left to be done.

And there he stood, on the roof of his building, staring down at the road sixteen stories below. He waited a few seconds to feel his last feelings, but in vain.

Then he jumped.

Inspiration is a funny thing. Try as one might, it never comes when it ought to. It’s like cool breeze on a summer afternoon. One can sit at just the correct spot near the window or walk around in the garden, but one can never wish it to come. It comes at its own whim. It is thrilling when it comes, but one can do nothing but agonize till it itself decides to come.

A free falling object would take between three and four seconds to hit the ground from top of the sixteen storied building. Inspiration struck Soumitra after the first second. He had a full two seconds to get under the skin of his character. It was beautiful. It should have been obvious to him all along. Once he knew his protagonist, the story was easy. It probably ran in the back of his mind during those two seconds too, but in the fourth second he just knew what he had to write. The whole tale lay there, spread out on the road in front of his eyes.

During the fraction of a second before he hit the ground, Soumitra coouldn’t decide whether to die a happy man or a disappointed one.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

A time in life..


Investment banker Beer tanker Beatlemania Leaving India Long hours short hours Moving on Main hoon Don Nikon D40 House's dirty IIMA memories Friendship vagaries Sherlock Holmes Florence Domes Dev-D Bevdi Kala Ghoda Gucci Prada Pitch book Elusive cook Little niece Yummy peas Psycho landlord Major chord Monsoon treks Drinking Becks Housing loan Old iphone Lost blackberry George & Jerry Quantum mechanics Big swinging dicks Bald roomie Sufi Rumi Shrinking pants Aggressive ants Van Gogh Fungus on dough Pune trips 40 bps Barista LCR Gabtun & TR Baddie matches Huge chess Receding curls No girls Karaoke flop Airport drop Times square Same fare Original script Pope's crypt Inglorious Basterds Sarci words Marathi cinema Complicated pharma Missing umbrellas Good fellas Dr. House Austrian cows Business class Eurail pass Sangeet-natak FCCB Joey & Phoebe Don't need wife Majjani life!!

Thursday, February 25, 2010

The 5 a.m. drill


Sushil stood in front of the lockers and considered whether he should do it. The locker in front of him was open – a lot of boys left their lockers unlocked. Who was interested in stealing their dirty underwear anyway? If he left his little polythene bag by the wall, someone was sure to stumble on it. And if someone found out it was his, it was sure to get kicked around. Finally, he made up his mind, kept his bag in the empty locker, and gently closed the door. He looked around. Nobody. No one there to notice that little Sushil’s stuff was in an unlocked locker. Thank God, he thought.

He gingerly stepped out of the locker room and tiptoed to the shower. Mom always said it was a good habit to shower both before and after a swim. Of course, mom was far far away, but somehow obeying her rules made Sushil’s hostel life less lonely. Sushil was relieved that Piyush and his friends weren’t around when he was moving about only in his swimming trunks. Piysuh always made fun of his ‘thin biceps’, and all his friends laughed and teased him endlessly, until he cried. Mom had told him that the only way to deal with bullies is to tease them back. But he was afraid to do it, because then they would beat him and he had no friends to take his side. That boy Piyush, even had a knife, which he hid somewhere in the grounds. Sometimes in fights, he would brandish the knife like they did in movies, as if to threaten his opponent.

Sushil always wished mom would take him away from the boarding school, but she said she couldn’t, and that he just had to make it through another year, before he passed out. About 390 days, Sushil’s countdown reminded him. He didn’t like studying, because he could never understand anything. The teachers scolded him for being lazy and the students found him boring. But the worst thing about school was Piyush and his friends.

He was ready to descend into the water. He first splashed some water on his tummy. The water was always too cold. But he knew that if your tummy gets used to the cold water, it becomes very easy. He shivered a bit, and then put his left foot into the water.

Piyush always teased him and made him cry. He was the leader of that horrible gang. He was tall, strong and loud. He made Sushil’s life miserable, and Darshan’s arrival had turned it from miserable to absolutely unbearable. Darshan was a man who was an ex-student of his school. He had come back to school for a few months, to improve the physical training for the boys. On the first day he came, he took a drill at 5 am, and made the boys march. He told them fitness was very important. And when they were all standing in a line, he walked up to each one of them and told them if they looked fit.

Sushil was now waist deep in the water, at the shallow end of the pool, and wading through it. It was nice and safe here, in the crowd. Once you swam to the deep end, you were visible from everywhere in the pool area.

When Darshan had walked up to him, he poked him in the stomach and Sushil buckled down. Then the devil stepped back and addressed the whole class, “Look, we have girls amongst us today” and the whole class burst out laughing. Tears welled up in Sushil’s eyes but he struggled to hold them back. Since then, Darshan made fun of him at every opportunity. And Sushil’s luck was such that Darshan also took a liking to Piyush. Now, the lot of them, the man with authority, the bully and his gang all turned Sushil’s life into a never-ending nightmare.

Sushil planned to make one quick trip to the deep end, freestyle, so that he would be back in seconds. He was preparing to dive horizontally, when they heard that shriek. It must have come from far away, from the hostel buildings, but it was very sharp and everyone heard it.

Half an hour later, the boys had gathered at the staff quarters, at the last house in the last row, staring at the dead body. It looked like Darshan’s throat was slit when he was asleep in the garden chair outside his house. It was more likely, however, that he was drunk, and lying unconscious there, and not asleep. Soon enough, the teachers arrived and began herding the boys away towards their hostels. The police was to be called and nobody was to touch anything. So far, nobody had noticed that the body had one finger missing.

Sushil didn’t know what to feel. In his mind, he went over the details once again. Locker no. 402. Yes, that was Piyush’s locker. The cocky boy never locked it. None of his own belongings were in the polythene bag. The bag itself wasn’t his own. The knife he had dropped casually inside the bag. The finger, however, wrapped in a dirty cloth, he had placed carefully at the bottom of the bag. The same finger with which Darshan had poked him in the tummy.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Oh! Those beautiful eyes...


Oval, white and moist background. Sometimes patterned with red zigzag lines. Black, round, squiggly thing bang in the middle, or in some unfortunate cases, somewhere to the side. Shift your gaze a little to the side and there’s some wet red exposed skin there. The unfortunate cases will need to shift their gaze elsewhere, I suppose. Anyway, so it’s not even a wound, it’s just how it is – red, exposed flesh. Look around a little more and there’s weird hair emerging from right next to the exposed flesh.

That’s how it looks when you go close enough to the mirror. People, it’s time to look yourself in the eye and face the truth: Eyes look hideous.

The truth is that ‘beautiful eyes’ is just a myth, a decoy invented by men to compliment women without sounding indecent. There is the unimaginative “You have beautiful eyes”. But there are many more ridiculous eye-related compliments, particularly in India, where women’s eyes are compared to a deer’s eyes, or to fish, or other likenesses in the fauna. Being animals themselves, men could get only this far.

And yet these compliments work! Thank god and thank those poets who thought this up, because I really don’t think we would’ve got beyond Adam (or Abraham’s family at the most), had men been honest with their compliments. Imagine:

(Adam meets Eve)
Adam: Err.. duh..hee hee
Eve: Excuse me?
Adam: You have beautiful !@#$%^. Just like a cow’s
Eve: That’s the end of our race, Adam.

(Adam loses race).