Seemandham..continues

Oops!! I dont have any plan to procreate again to do justice to the above title. If you haven't read and COMMENTED on the previous post on the same topic, you can click here to read and then COMMENT!

Commenting on the topic of seemandham, I must say that the festivities and the ritual are no different from the 1043 other rituals you celebrate in a tamil brahmin household. This time around I was wise (nothing to do with the ageing process) enough to stay back for 3 days after the function, to reclaim the real estate that I lived, slept and ate in for years.

If I could comment on how it is like, the living space on a day like that would be occupied by junior, senior and executive C-level vadhiyars who could be differentiated by their distance from the central homa kundam. The closest (and hence C-Level) is always the executive vadhiyar. Another id is the fact that they sport more gold/diamond/platinum/unobtonium rings than the rest of the jama (colloquial for a seemingly calm yet unruly crowd). The C-Level is not necessarily the senior most in age. It all boils down (in the barrels of ghee used to grow-fy the homam) to how capitalistic you are! So thats so much ado about how my living space is occupied. Needless to mention that the semi-permanent fixtures like wooden tables (with plywood top), tea table (with an even older plywood top), diwan (with slightly handicapped legs) which otherwise encroach the living space in my house are moved to enighboring houses (without their permission).

The place I sleep is where the junior and mid-senior vadhyars sit (along with their improvised bags that once used to be polished white nylon packing material based rice sacks).

The place I eat is tharu-maarized by a cookmani maami who is referred through kallidaikkurchinkedin by the meg-avia-lomaniac mama of my mom. She, a host of black ants, left over coconut scrappings and an assortment of poorly cooked south indian excesses like avial, thalaga kozhambu etc. occupy the space where I normally sit n eat.

To cut the long story short, I hate functions organized at my home because they make me feel like I am a guest and there are some other enthusiastic "they" who invite me into my house after having arrived as guests. I love their hospitality but its weird to be 'welcomed' into your home. It just makes so alien a place.

The best part of such functions is that how easily i give in to believe that, by being sincere about repeating the hymns and verses from holy sacred vedas whose meanings are neither known to me or the C-Level, we could actually make the kid solve the puzzle of the universal theory that defines everything in the universe (well, that wont still define why my dad's fetish for making our house a dumpyard has grown exponentially..Gah I hate going into my own house now). Hope dad and the readers wont mind that comment.

There is a part in the seemandham where you pour a few liters of cold water on your wife in open space and she just needs to take them all on her. I couldnt imagine a better way to exert my husbandality on a hydrophobic person like my wife.

If getting up in the wee hours (3 am) is not enough to make you feel like a south indian boy eating colesaw stew in a remote german hotel in a snow-ruinned european outback, the seemandham function also tests your hand-eye-ear and bum coordination with routines like "take this quasi-ring like thing made of grass on this finger of that hand and move it in this direction from that direction three times while adjusting your bum to ensure that the veshti doesnt fall off".

At the end of it all, when it's really over, people already start to leave and you end up chauffering them to bus stands and stations (with genuine love and lot of tiredness).

I would anyday stay in an alien country and celebrate our rituals with our micro-waved payasam and head home to have a lot of time to do nothing than be a guest to my home invited inside by fellow guests.

--- For those visitors to the blog from google who came searching for punyajanam, seemandham, mallu aundie sex, avial, avani avittam, ashwin ramasamy or ashwin ramaswamy, here is to say that I dont have anything against "comments". We can sit and talk it out. So feel free to "comment"----

Enough NDTV and SRK!

Are you targetted because you are a muslim? I know you have said No already, but anyway I am asking you - circa 08 feb 2010 (7 08 PM IST) , Barkha Dutt NDTV

I cry when our boxer loses a match - circa 08 feb 2010 (7 09 PM IST), Shah Rukh Khan on NDTV

People! This is it. I have had enough of NDTV, Barkha Dutt and Shah Rukh Khan.

Let me however do my part to highlight the acting talent of the superhero (SRK) and supersobby (BKDutt)

BKD: The world knows you are among the best Indians!

SRK: (blowing his nose): I feel sad that I need to come on TV and say I am an Indian

BKD: What do you think about the mumbai taxi fiasco (Way to go Barkha. You need to create more and more Aamir Khans who shall have opinions about everything and we need to see it)

SRK: Why did Bal thackrey not call me? (What hypcratical moral ground that is? Why wont you call him..Duh!)

BKD: Are you cynical ahout bollywood? Should they not have principles that they have to stand up to? (Thats the way it is BKD. How to create news when there isnt one 101 from BKD)

SRK: We dont have principles on thursdays as thats when the prints go to theatres (BKD, leave him alone at least after he has said this)

BKD: Will you be in politics?

SRK: I hope I need not become one, coz I will make so many changes (Dude, how about changing the way you act?)

SRK: We are idiots and Banana republic

SRK! I wish some NLP trainer deciphers your eye movements and tells that what you were saying were all BS!To hell with your publicity stunts.

BKD! How I wish there's DD news in my country! I dont have to watch your team's offsite gala at Davos or Dr.Roy's uber-important show with SRK and Karan johar or your sentimental sobs about injustice done to the first indian (SRK).

Gahhh!!! I never knew there could be an orgasm in being deceitful, self pity and playing to the gallery.

Prequel to a Seemandham!

Caution: This is a long post. If your bladder is full, you may be called "A man/woman of immense wisdom" for once in your life, for clearing it before reading this post.

A year of relocation, scandals and recessions later, if I look back proudly, the only productive thing I had done was to sow the seed (note the singularity in it) for a mega-show of our lives. "Ramasamy (Re)Productions" proudly announced a new project a.k.a kid on the making. After a couple of years of evolving through various stages like "^&* for dummies, career unsettled unsamalifications, "try panindu thaan irukoms" to parents, the project went live.

With such historically important achievements, its just natural that we get together as a family, adequately (ginormously and gigantically) represented by kith,kin and everything! The flight was un-eventful, but for the amazing demonstration of gastronomic pull displayed by my wife, aptly reasoned by the baby she was incubating. Acceptable reasons apart, I wont be surprised if the airlines beats the global trend in declaring a profit this quarter, with my wife's generosity in buying all liquids, solids and in between that could be eaten. Wife: Keep up! Lets raise a tarzan!

We landed in the ende keralam high class urinarium a.k.a trivandrum airport. As usual the chief medical oooficer (the malayali "O") handed over a form asking us to swear on God Malayala Bhagavadhi that we dont have sali, pitham, swine flu. We all did. Some did with a sneeze, some did it with pitha vaayu. We all then proceeded to the queue for immigration, which is only slightly better managed than kalaivani theatre which was recently visited by Chechi Shakeela for its wholesale patronage to her movies.

At this point I make a mental note that I need to change my passport photo. In those days when I dint have any resemblence to Surya, I had the passport done. The immigration "O"fficers refuse to believe that i am the same guy on the photo and not a cheap impersonator on the loose. I had to sing a low octave draggin note interspersed in my english to make him believe that I am afterall a ambil malayali who cannot do any harm.

With that, a few annoying hops to reach the luggage and an amuzement at the lack of courtesy among fellow indians later, we left the urinarium a.k.a airport. Shook hands with dad and his friend who offers normally to drive the car (the second hand shake was lethal, realized only later when my eyes burnt of snuff particles). The car was woefully unprepared like the srilankan batsmen facing the delhi pitch. The 30+30+8+8 kgs suitcases and rmkv free bags realistically need an over-speeding ARC parcel service container with the anumar branded logo. Instead i trusted my own indian ingenuity and my dad's. The latter was the problem. My dad and his friend had quietly hatched a plan to revolutionize munnirpallam's information ecosystem with an imported first generation Pentium I processor "powered" desktop monument and chose pricisely that day to ship the contraption in the same car. With a couple of botched attempts make everything co-exist, the car speaker fell apart. When things dont go together, be it telengana or the luggage, its better to keep them apart.There are somethings money can't buy. For car speakers and everything else, there is my mother's SBI ATM card kept safe in its card cover, kept safe safe in (what else) GRT handbag!

Mammoty and yesudas kept irritating with oft-repeated words like ambalam, punsiri, madhuram, pranayam etc in an annoying song after song sequence in FM till I mustered enough energy to tell appa's friend mama to shut the music system (which I realized he dint know how to). I discovered some acrobatic skills in reaching out to the music system from the back and had to re-repeat it till we reached home, as I tried in vain to force the A/c to behave and not fog the vision of the driver who already drove like villan adiyaal drivers in movie climax scenes.

Thank God, my dad's adamant yet right belief that tying neem leaves around the stomach of my pregnant wife, would save her from the evil did work. She did survive the road rage.

---Prequel Ends---

Why is media molesting me?

Looks like there is a "Molest India Movement" going on.

I search for the definition of "Molestation" in google (coz, till recently I thought it was some kind of a clinic where they remove excessive moles from the body and donate to people who dont have enough). So where does the search lead to? http://www.molestation.in/

Anyway..the indian origin of this website apart, what caught my attention is, the definition of "molestation". Apparently its not a mole bank as I thought.

Molestation is the sexual exploitation of a child or a woman by an adult for sexual gratification or for profit.

My sympathies are with the Ruchika family and kudos to them for continuing their pursuit of justice. But why me?

I end up waking in the middle of the night feeling that Burka Dutt is putting her friendly arms around my shoulder to console me for the whole state of affairs my nation is going through. I dont even know whether to tap my wife's easily reachable side to ask for some water. Though we are legally married and there's no sexual intent, women seem to be hyper-hot about men in general and rathore in particular.

An "activist" appears in TV today and says "Men's lower half of the body is more active than the upper half". Thats Malestation in its fullest display. In the same show, there's a newly reported molested woman shown in a silo. One could easily make it that she was silo'ed not because of identity concerns but because she was reading a script given by the channel. The anchor is pouring all her emotions (no sexual intent in that very normal phrase) into her questions to this newly molested and the responses are read out of the script. Well, the pour didnot stop where it had to and the anchor went on with few questions that were not in the script and the newly molested was searching the papers for the answers..The technical glitch came to rescue!

Then there were footballers who dint know the difference between a football and a spicejet airhostess' posterior, apparently!

I dont get this. if the media has to conduct the trial on TV for every rape, molestation and site-adichan cases, they may well start NDTV molestor or such channel to save the women 19 years after the damage is done. For the rest of us who would like to know the Indian GDP, weather and cricket, let there be some respite!

While I completely detest the "lets play it to the audience" media, there are some appreciable things that media did not do this time

-- Constructed enactment of actual molestation event (which they have started offlate. Check the next time someone is murdered in Gurgaon. A mini-skit will be re-enacted in prime time)

--They didn't ask Aamir Khan for his opinion. These days he has opinions growing like arm pit hair

--They didn't do a quickie psycho-analysis on a molester's mind with some russian educated indian psychiatrist and his lab rat

-- Thank God, they did not call Renuka Chowdhury and Jeyanti Natarajan for a woman's right debate. They normally have caustic comments that would put a malester to shame!

I hope the PR and Law worlds do not take it from where media leaves it. I hope they dont have a "molestor pack" - Free FIR filing, prime time spot, twitter publicity, celebrity support quips all rolled for a starting fee of "x".

God please provide justice to Ruchika family or cut my cable!

Indian & Tamil Baby Names

When we were in the US, the prime job of expat (or the more lowly "immigrant") wife was to get impregnated. Before rebutting this as a cacophonic rattle from a male chauvanist, check the (anecdotal) research done by me and my wife.

-- Wal-marts carry more pregnancy wear in immigrant-dominated neighborhoods

-- Immigrant Ph.D. scholars who are married understood the concept of normal distribution better than others (by remembering the sight of his pregnant wife lying on her bed)

-- Immigrant middle aged men carry prams for shopping while others don't(which points to the recent past behavior of having been "creative")

I can go on with such ground-breaking "anecdotal" research findings. The point is, more immigrants and particularly Indians, were busy in generating the "Gen-next" in the US. Its a moot point that, smart ones do it to get citizenship. As we 'The Ramasamys' are outliers, we obstained from the typecast.

With the economic crisis hitting the world, I decided to contribute my new found free time (from not having clients to sell to) to creating something new. With no easy money found in VC's and no garage to start a business, I decided to create a succession plan for myself.

The point of going down the path of having a kid is, apart from being a result of productivity, it keeps the creative part in you, engaged.

Think about naming a kid. Its both exasperating and creatively indulging. I somehow loathe names like Ananya, Pranav or Rohan. They are on the verge of becoming so common place or too pseudo-cosmic or downright bollywood-ish, in that order.

Another issue with such names, say like "Akanksha", is that when someone asks what it means, I have to churn out a receipe like answer which may go like "Well..it means conquest..it also means self-respect and peace". The sarcastic guy in me would extend the conversation to imaginery extremes like "It's actually 30% conquest, 29.3% self respect and the rest is peace..If you reduce conquest to 12% and increase self-respect to 52% or heat it with little more butter and cilantro, what you get is "Akshaya"!"

Well, then what is "Akshadha"?

Oh..oh..Akshadha is what you get when you bake the same combination instead of frying it.

The rationalist in me thinks that such "meaningful" names may lose their relevance after the first round of letting people know what it means. Beyond that the kid will grow up to be know for what it is than what it's name stands for (except that a boring date could be salvaged with a customary question of 'What does your name mean"?. I have tried this line on many a woman and the dumbness of the responder is directly proportional to the length of the explanation given).

The rebel in me also wants to protest and stand by real tamil names like poongodi or esaki muthu, which are simple, native and godly in some cases. But my wife would have none of that. Her grouse is that when I am named Ashwin in 1980's, why should the gen-next be named "Anguraj". Point taken!

My suggestions for naming the kid with a gender neutral name like 'The Great" (with the surname, it reads as "The Great Ashwin") are being discarded as intolerably narcissistic.

I could strike a neutral ground and stick to simple names that are neither too native nor too meaning-intense and yet godly, like "Sambasivan", "Neelakantan" or "Paripoorni", My wife wouldn't have that too..

Till we hit upon a novel, evergreen, meaning-un-intense and simple name, I shall sign off to make chapathis, for my wife is ready with the roller (which serves multiple un-intended purposes).

Buy One..You sorta get something free!

We went to the country's biggest, crowdest and cheap-indianest consumer electronics show, where they were showing windows 7 hanging around (giggle) and all that! It was pretty packed that one could get abs exercise just by squeezing around through the shop tents.

Our point of being there or re-there was to buy something. Well, Duh! Something meant something to us because we havent been buying anything for sometime now. So we went there on Friday. Now read the intro sentence.

I havent seen thirupathi but I imagine that's how the line would be where laddus are dispensed with. With that crowd and no versace touting 23 something slim beauty nearby, I decided that I may reach the show only when my wife's sleeping time has reached..a.k.a 9 PM. To my pleasant surprise, the queue moved faster than my bowel unloading speed, which is almost eual to escape velocity these days. Only that at this kinda rush we were actually relieved unlike when I rush it out in the loo, my wife actually says she might want to use the swine flu mask for the first time!

To cut the long queue and story short, we boarded the free (and hence packed to the extent that I can explore the breadth of a Pinoy nostril with my elbows) shuttle bus. We had a rousing reception with rhythmic drums of (mostly) indian crowd banging at the doors to let them in and a flustered european crowd trying to leave the scene before the crowd does the same act at them with a different intent. We decided that it is not worth it to make a mental review of disappointing fashion sense of mid 20's asian crowd while risking our lifes to the mostly arrogant wags of the local police.

I persisted the next day and we did go to the consumer show. The car-walk-metro-shuttle-walkethon itself is enough for us to lose interest on anything that needs pedestarian abilities. We being suckers for good deals, persisted and decided to buy an LCD Tv. Rather it should read like this - We being suckers for good deals, I persisted and I decided to buy an LCD Tv when my wife decided to sit somewhere.

The sales guy in one shop, which is curiously named as Jockeys and still sells TVs and not underwears, was quite convincing. Inspite of his lies that I would find a review about the TV in CNET (which I checked immediately), I decided to buy the tv for the reason mentioned in a complicated sentence in paragraph 2. Unreasonable as it may sound, I asked for a DVD player and home theatre free which they promptly refused to give. To prove the might of a customer at a buyer's market, I proudly walked to the neibouring booth (owned by a gujju NRI) and bargained for a deal which would have made them liquidate the owner's stake in the company.

After several attempts to wriggle out a worthy bargain (read: Free mp3 player..nothing more fancy this time) I realized that its not worth it to haggle more, which my wife had a premonition about and hence had never participated in the whole process. A seat for the bum is worthier than being a bum in 2 shops, in front of irriated and sweaty sales guys, said her wisdom laden looks.

Finally we did buy an LCD tv, with a nokia phone (that model which rajasthani milkmen carry in their armpits) along which came 15 free coupons with a chance of winning a trip to bangkok, a city that stinks and that which we dont enjoy anyway.

In any case, I am waiting for the results of the raffle which will be published in the website, while my wife has decided that its worth using the time sleeping than looking at the results in their website!

Shoplefters

When we landed with our bags in this part of the world, we were told to take "Ponni raw rice" one quintal gunny bags for our measly little belongings that wont cross 10 underwears and an equal number of outerwears. We were told that we are going to a "shopping paradise" and hence its required to be prepared for the loot.

Well.. We have seen all those malls & the mall-u families who fill those malls with their india imported ungils and aundies. Some malls are big, some are bigger and some are never ending like, for the lake of better pejorative, namitha's waistline!

If I may publish idiot and illadhavan's guide to shopping in this region, I shall recommend the buyer to look for McDonald's where one could buy an icecream cone for 1 buck and a burger for 3 bucks. We make it a point to ask for obscene quantity of sauce and tissue papers. My wife actually believes in rip won winkle style of contributions - Get from the rich (McD) and give it to the poor (Me & Her). Hereby we pass a decree not to think about this post when you ask for tissue paper at our house.

That self-served benevolence apart, we dont find any such acts directed upon a poor asian buyer here. The malls are brilliantly architected and the shops inside sometimes look like magnified diamond cut swarovski crystal holes. lavishness does find a new meaning here. So when we walk into one such shop with 500 of 50000 watt designer lamps, gillette mach 3 shave touting pinstripped suit wearing armenian sales guy and a 6 ft tall Yves Laurent perfume wearing, overgrown "you know what" displaying sales woman, you hardly get the attention you seek as a customer. Especially since you and I are customers who haven't evolved beyond Arrow shirts and (at the max) giordano pants, with a monthly salary little less than what the native kids spend on pizza and Wii games, your existence is ignored like watervapor in air.

That said, even with the attention if it ever come by our way, I would never spend 5000$ on a watch or 2000$ on a suit. Not that I am not worth it, but my customers or co-workers dont deserve such a marqueely dressed sauve man from mars, or so I say till I really can afford.

Till then, diwali shopping in India in megamart ho!