Our Take on the Indian Grand Prix!

Annoying jabs at random people, pathetic attempts at humour ; yup, we’re back after a heck of a long time. It’s just that we could’nt resist it with the country falling under the spell of the whole Formula 1 craze.

Attendance at the Grand Prix was much greater than expected. Most probably ‘cos it was an excuse to not go to a theatre and watch RA-One. But with all the publicity that was out for that cinematic sack of donkey-crap, the chequered flag probably had black and white on one side and that now-dreaded picture of Shahrukh Khan Chamak-Chaloing away to glory on the other.

Ever heard of the man who let his personal airline go into debt so that he could enter a car-race? That, ladies and gentlemen, is Vijay Mallya, owner of Force India racing. Never heard of Force India? Figures. They were overtaken in lap 3 by Rajnikanth on a tri-cycle.

 The funniest part of all this were the usual sponsors queueing up to add their name to the latest sporting bonanza. The staid Indian Grand Prix soon became Bharti Airtel Formula 1. Imagine if India entered the global sporting market. You’d probably see the Dabur Chyawanprash English Premier League where all spectators get a tube of Odomos and a free Aircel simcard on entering the stadium.

Everyone’s favourite man, Sebastian Vettel ran off with the trophy once again and it was kind of amusing watching 81-year old Micheal Schumacher getting out of his wheelchair, waving goodbye to his great grandkids,coming over to India and battling it out with Narain Karthikeyan (Indian, proud of him) for 19^th place. Guess some people just do not know to get out when the going’s good.

 The greatest part of this with respect to India is ofcourse, that it was the first grand prix to be held here! Yes, the Buddh Circuit up in Greater Noida was the venue for all the thrilling action. Being India there were ofcourse dogs running across the track, autorickshaws overtaking Jenson Button at 315km/hr, Baba Ramdev hunger-striking ‘cos of all the noise. We even saw Schumacher pass Rs.200 and a sly smile to the race officials. Somethings never change.

But all-in-all the comments of the race officials about the race in general were highly encouraging. The main drawback according to them was the traffic blocks around the circuit which prevented the racers and audience from reaching the venue in the first place. Seems Lewis Hamilton had to change two buses, an auto and finally run 16 kilometres to reach the venue. Typical. 

 One of the memorable moments of the race was of course maestro Sachin Tendulkar waving the flag at the end.

 Sports in India? Yup funny story.

Our Take on Party-sponsored College Politics

It's like something out of a highly illogical Quentin Tarantino movie. Guy slogs for a couple of years, guy gets into famous engineering college, guy goes quietly for 2 years and then guy suddenly transforms. In his opinion, he becomes an inspired mundu-wearing action machine, fighting against the forces of evil with sharp knives and an even sharper tongue. But in actual fact he becomes a loud-mouthed, unshaven terminally insane maniac who goes around arguing with other similar terminally insane maniacs that appear to pop up all over the college. Yup, that's college politics for you.

Its actually pretty amusing standing aside and watching a college turn from dignified engineering institution to a potential shoot of Planet of the Apes. People running around with blades and sticks, pretending to be some weird cross-over ninja society and other guys with blood flowing out of every inch of themselves, looking up as if they'd just been martyred at Jallianwala Bagh or something. What nonsense.

Striking in an engineering college is nothing less than an art. Everyone involved in this intellectually stimulating exercise has a uniformity about them. The facial expression, one that's somewhere between that of an angry rhinoceros and that of someone in the last throes of chronic indigestion.

The clothing style- An adequately ketchup-stained shirt, the amazingly symbolic mundu (was used to strangle your opponent in the first engineering strikes), and a beat-down pair of chappals should ensure that you look like the perfect deranged young politician.

The wonderfully endearing slogans shouted out by a crazy nutcase with a voice like that of a steam engine with a shortage of coal, followed by the repetition of the same slogan by the mob of accumulated nutcases tagging along behind him. It seems like the slogans have a fixed template that goes 'Pullane Pullane _______ Pullane'. They just fill that dash for each strike.

When the stock of cheesy slogans runs out, its time to bring out the heavy artillery, fearsome weapons that will kill rather than harm...blunt compasses, tools from the mechanical lab, hockey sticks. Yup Osama would have been proud of this stash. Any future Al-Qaeda expansion plans will now know where to look for prospective candidates, ones with B-Tech degrees no less.  Protestors of a more primitive bent of mind may choose to pay homage to the stone age by hurling pebbles at each other. Sreesanth was probably the president of some political party, the way he's bowling..

A lot of protestors during college strikes, are hauled off to jail. But from a behavioral point of view, maybe a caged zoo would work? 'Cos when you think about it an engineering guy faced with an opposing party is not all that different from a hungry baboon faced with a sack of ripe bananas. Expect police officers to come next time with a couple of tranquilizer guns and stuff.

And what's with the names of the college political parties. Just random permutations of the English alphabet? Check this sentence out- The KSU and SFI met the DYFI and ABVP heads along with the AISF and AIYF who talked with the ABCDEFG. To use a cliché, what nonsense!

Our Take on Baba Ramdev

Recent times have also witnessed the onset of the greatest daring duo on the Indian canvas. That of Baba Ramdev and a certain Anna Hazare, combining to take down the villainous Government of India ( at least that’s what they think). What has actually happened is that a movement that had caught a lot of eyes for its novel message and Hazare’s leadership has been shamefully ground into the dirt by the designer Jaipuri chappals of Ramdev.



This man Baba ‘Badass’ Ramdev succeeded in capturing the nation’s attention by announcing his deep and passionate desire to fight against corruption in India and taking up a hunger strike to achieve that aim (he must have researched feasible causes for which to hunger strike against on Google). The idea of a yoga guy telling economists of the stature of Manmohan Singh how to manage money is about as weird as an anorexic model applying for liposuction. Ramdev says that if black money is brought back to India, poor people will get benefits! This, being said, by a guy who owns a private security paramilitary force, a couple of private airplanes and an island. They say yoga does wonders for you. Now we know what they meant.



Ever heard of the yoga master with political ambitions who went on a hunger strike against black money? Seems like something a stand-up comedian would say? Yup some things can be seen only in India, along with extravagantly moustached terrorists and fearsomely caveman-like cricket players.

Now, since the trend has been set, people can hunger strike to get whatever they want. Because yeah sure, if Gandhi did it why can’t I? Maybe Ramdev will take the next flight to some beach and make salt or buy it from Reliance Fresh or whatever. Crazy guy.

In the midst of the police raid on his loyal followers, what did the heroic, dashing James Bond of Indian yoga do? Attempted to run away draped in a salwar kameez. A cross-dressing revolutionary, no less. Again a first in India. Next time, he will obviously have to keep up to his high standards and so has signed a deal for a supply of Kancheevaram sarees when he takes out his next strike against global warming in 2013.

Ramdev in his detailed and exceedingly insane letter to the premier of India demanded that “ English should be replaced by Hindi in entirety within India “. The letter was obviously written in english by someone who actually knows how to write, definitely not our guy here.

When faced with the fact that his main assistant is an RSS head, his main disciple is in the inner circle of the RSS and the woman who escorted him to stage was a becrazed RSS activist, Ramdev was surprised when questioned if he had any affiliation to the RSS. Oh my god, wonder why anyone would think that.

The cost of the Police raid- 5 lakh rupees.

The cost of the Ramlila Fasting Ground- 1 crore rupees.

The tale of how a glorified fitness instructor held the world’s largest democracy to ransom and became an overnight celebrity- Priceless.

Our Take on Engineering Entrance Examinations

Cut back around 30 years to the 1980’s when a school-kid ran back from school, splashing a few puddles of water, gulped down a glass of tea, ran out into the sun and rain to enjoy a hard-fought game of cricket, got into a couple of fights on the way back, whistled at the opposite sex if you’re a guy, got whistled at if you’re a girl and thoroughly enjoyed being your age.

Now to the present day when kids in standard 6 have to rush back from school to their target-IIT courses (imagine 6^th standard children being seriously told the uses of sine-cosine integration)after which they’l have 2 hours of mind-numbingly boring physics tuition by a spectacled guy who thinks that he invented physics in the first place.

Then some idiot guy on a TV channel will encourage weekend classes at some institute to which all the kids would be sent to, on the assumption that all great engineers and inventors in the world like Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison became great by taking coaching at TIME or MATH-IIT. All of which is to presumably get an engineering degree (whether you’re suited to be an engineer or a cook or a jihadist terrorist, in India, first you have to take an engineering degree).

So after 6 years of experiencing twice the workload of an outspoken Jew in a Nazi camp, the kid finally sees Devil himself looming up before him- the Entrance Exam! Half the world’s rainforests are cut to provide enough paper for 10 lakh kids to pit their wits against each other.

 IIt entrance tests are changed up every year to prevent short –cuts from being discovered. One year there’s multiple choice. Next year they put true or false. The year after that, they brought a 10 option bonanza to choose the right answers and make things as complicated as possible. Soon they’ll add tasks to be done followed by a vote-out with a few bikes thrown around the exam hall.

A friend of this blog-writer has suggested that the Kerala state entrance has given added priority to high school marks presumably to even out the sex ratio in engineering courses. Soon like the badminton federation of India and FIFA’s new rules on woman players, engineering females will have mandatory skirts and all to make the whole thing more glamorous.

 And after 6 hours of soul-splitting torture, the exam comes to an end. Then it is but a short wait to the All India, followed by State exams followed by a thousand other sources of engineering nonsense.

 

Just when peace of mind looks to be around the corner, the results are anounced with all the impact of a coconut on a bald head. The joy of successful parents would suggest they were able to bring down Osama single-handedly and the despairing sorrow of parents who cudn't bring up Einsteins suggest the end of the world as we know it. 
Then it is time for parents to visit their relatives to show them their bespectacled knock-kneed skeleton of a son who huffed and puffed to get to that holy engineering seat. The relatives will then reluctantly congratulate the skeleton while explaining that their kid couldn’t get through because ‘the test had out-of-syllabus questions’, ‘it was raining that day and he got distracted’ or the most ironic of the lot ‘engineering isn’t worth all this hype’. Both sets of parents will exchange nervous laughs and then relapse to awkward silence.

Times when kids smaller than ripe watermelons are made to slave like burdened donkeys. Times when a game of cricket followed by a cold lime juice in summer is a luxury. There are some things more important than 10 percent GDP growth rates J

Our Take On the Latest Season of IPL.

The image of a fallen Sourav Ganguly, who wasn’t wanted by anyone in the IPL auction, who then rose up from the ashes, padded up for the Pune Warriors, walked out into the blazing sunshine, the eyes of a cricket crazy nation on him AND…………….got out for a duck.

Symbolic of the anticlimax that the IPL has become. One would think that you would become bored of a couple of months of guys coming on and banging the sphere to all corners of the ground day in and day out. It’s as if even the names of the players are tailor made for entertainment. Where can you see a Gayle playing against a Blizzard anywhere else other than on the radars of the meteorological department or maybe in a crazy video game?  Seriously, Chris Gayle batting like he did wasn’t all that surprising as it was made out in the media to be. If you gave a giant, humongous monster of a West Indian with a strike rate of around 5000 a hard wooden bat and tell him to get on with it, what did you expect?

Even Poonam Pandey got bored and had nothing to say before the IPL final. Rumours are that she’s somewhere in Haiti after a few failed promises during the course of the world cup ;-) And does M.S Dhoni know how to lose? It’s getting increasingly monotonous watching him win everything in the world while coming on at the end of the match saying something to the tune of, “The boys did a fantastic job. I thought it was a good pitch. The opposition (including Pakistan, Sri lanka, Australia, Kolkata, Pune, Newzealand, Shanghai, Kwung Pow and every other place in the world) played well but bad luck.”

 I wonder if MSD could lead the Indian football team to the world cup. The way this is going you’l probably see him giving Cristiano and Messi a few stopovers and crossing it in better than Beckham, lifting the Cup and congratulating his ‘boys’ all over again. Yawn.

Also the renaissance of the greatest orator, on par with John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, continues - Navjot Singh Sidhu. If NATO had employed this guy to talk to the Libyans, Gaddafi would have ended up tearing his hair out, sending a few planes up and bombing the guts out of his own house to end the misery. A mistake by NATO, that one.

IPL -4 also threw up talented youngsters like Wriddhiman Saha, Ambati Rayudu and Prashant Parameshwaran. The guys at the literary department of Oxford are probably going nuts trying to pronounce these names. Lasith Malinga would’nt look out of place in a jungle, hunting vengeful rhinos by picking up pebbles, yorking them, and breaking their feet.

There are also rumours that Kochi is going to shift its home ground to Ahmedabad. So, in effect if they play a game in Chennai, their away ground will be closer to them than their home ground. How amazingly well-planned out. Might as well have made the home ground in South Africa or someplace.

And is anyone getting the eerie feeling that the IPL is becoming more like the English Premier League with every season? Players getting transferred, home and away games. So much so that R.Ashwin, the young spinner, compared his Chennai team to Manchester United! Imagine Alex Ferguson pulling on a Lungi while rooting for L.Balaji and plotting a Strategic Timeout. Lol.

Wonder what inventions we’l have in IPL 5. The way it’s gone, we might have a few more cheerleaders, the umpires might make their entrance while moonwalking, the Somali pirates may be hired to catch the attention of the crowd, and at the end of it all Dhoni would be grinning all over his cup. The Indian Volleyball League is coming up. Anyone interested?

Our take on India's list of top 50 most wanted terrorists....

For all those of who appreciated what we do, We are back again..

This time around we'd like to be very serious and put forward our thoughts regarding issues of national importance. Did any of you happen to hear about the glorious LIST OF MOST WANTED CRIMINALS published recently by the effi(ng)cient govt??. So god darn efficient that some of those in the list were actually caught years before the list is actually published. All those who blame the govt. and home ministry should look at the bright side of things. I mean, how many countries can boast of a police force that can arrest criminals even before the govt. orders them to be arrested.

The govt. now stands accountable for this mix-up. Imagine if Pakistan starts to mock us about our glaring incompetency. I mean, how bad would you feel if Chris Gayle made fun of you cuz ur not fair(No, i did not mean that our neighbour is a talented batsman). Home minister P.Chidambaram has a very lucid explanation for all that transpired which he, like a genius, summed up in two words. Printing Mistake. How very enlightening. Mr.Chidambaram probably uses a printer that was ordered by Kalmadi and co. I think our govt. believes in numerology. How else would they come up with such a presentable number of 50. Even people from rainforest of Amazon know that there are more than that. Maybe the govt. doesnt WANT the rest of them because they are getting what they want, if you know what i mean..

Yeah. So the big picture right now is Mother India looking like Mallika sherawat(guys, that iss bad by the way!!). One of the guys in this insidious list was selling saris in thane. lol. One has to wonder if this little glitch will affect his credibility as a salesman. Another is already in jail. This is what happens when you dont update your database regularly. Why dont they put one of the Infosys premiers to work on it. There are a lot of them, right. The list is up for scrutiny. My bet is that at least 2-3 of those in the list are MLA's or MP's in the country.

Some parliamentarians put forward a US-like attack on pakistan to flush out Dawood Ibrahim but were later made to shut up by others with a working brain. They simply dont realise that with our virtouos and efficacious media, a feat of such magnitude is impossible to achieve. Mainly because the surprise element of the surprise attack will be nullified by 24*7 updates on army movements.

The govt. just showed the amount of intense neglect and laxity that it puts to tackle our biggest problem. With such an incredibly prodigious govt. governing I can rest assure and proudly say that India is in safe hands (of those in that list..)

Our Take on the Royal British Wedding

On a wonderful April day, we laze on the couch and switch on the Tv and... BANG!! BOOM!!

We're hit by drooling men and women, Marching bands that put a full-volume Lamb of God song to shame, a blindingly outrageous bridal gown whose cost would almost equal the national income of Zimbabwe, and numerous hot-blooded programmes on even the affairs of the groom's mother, a certain Ms. Diana.

The media frenzy in Britain suddenly shows the much criticized, monstrous Indian media as dignified angels. The men with the cameras are shown to be running behind the bride-to-be Kate Middleton like a pack of rabid Alsatians faced with a tasty bone.

                        Photographer of the London Times



Just the fact that the bride-groom happens to have descended from the queen of an almost dysfunstional monarchy, has resulted in the tax-payers money being thrown about like grain for the birds. Million dollar worth royal airforce aircraft was used as some kind of remote controlled toy for the viewing pleasure of the married couple. There was even a one hour heavily contested prime-time debate on BBC Entertainment as to what the bride would wear for the wedding! The world just gets more puzzling by the day! If this is the situation when the Third in line crown prince marries, its shocking to think of what would happen if the Queen was to get married once again! That should be the end of the British economy.

Stands to reason some of this hero-worship must pass onto India from the nation we once used to call the British Raj.

This kind of thing is somewhat comparable to the frenzy generated when the Indians won the world cup. Even substitutes who barely crossed the boundary rope were given apartments that normal people have to work lifetimes for. Just a matter of time before Dhoni has enough money to buy India.

And the guest to the all-important Royal Wedding? None other than one of the greatest minds in the world, the symbol of enlightened mankind! David Beckham! That's like holding a Nobel prize presentation ceremony and inviting Sreesanth to give away the prize. Not to mention, Beckham's wife, an ex-spice girl, who looks to have all the vocal capabilities of a bronchitis-affected crow.



It has been said widely that the newly married couple would set off a wildfire of advertising and marketing campaigns. A few readily come to mind :-



The aftermath of the Royal wedding would be quite hilarious. It has been said that the honeymoon is a gloriously solitary time where a couple rediscovers love and togetherness. Hah, good luck with that on this one!

The Royal honeymoon

Wonder what frenzy there would been in India if Manmohan Singh's kid decided to marry. Yeah, that should be a good one. How dumb can a nation get?