Shopping woes

I hate shopping. Almost everyone who knows me knows that I do. Very few, however, know why I do. Considering that I have burdened my readers with all the secrets of my life, I see no reason why they must be spared this one. After all, by now they have become long-suffering even if they had not started off by being so. 

The problem for me is that I am badly scarred by multiple choice questions. When I go into the mall for picking up what I need, I find myself facing up to multiple choice questions again. Do I pick the toothpaste that will strengthen my gums or the one that will whiten my teeth? Do I pick the one that will help me crack walnuts with my teeth or the one that will salt my teeth and wipe out germs? Or do I go in for the more exotic version that will drag that girl from the other side of the bus to me by her nose? 

I draw on all my knowledge of decision-making under uncertainty – culled from a couple of years of sleeping in a management institute and a decade and a half of management work - and pick the most effective method to make the decision. I close my eyes and, pointing at each brand in turn, intone “Inky Pinky Ponky..” 

Having successfully managed the decision I move on to the next. I need a deodorant – and how badly I need it anyone who has spent time in my vicinity can tell if only he can stop gagging at the memory. Here the problem is not so much in the different ways in which they will help me. The funny thing is that a deodorant is expected to rid you of smell but all deodorants sell on the basis of what they will make you smell like. All of them, however, have the same effect – they draw girls to you like flies. 

Make no mistake. I like girls. The problem is that I cannot really see how too many of them at the same time is an enjoyable experience. It would be much like being caught in the middle of a cat-fight – with the scratches to show for it. But, if you will use a deo, that is an unavoidable side-effect. I use my trusty decision-making tool – closed eyes; “Inky Pinky Ponky..”; yup you got it right in one - and pick a deo. The sound of giggles behind me makes me turn to see a few Pretty Young Things staring at me. Uh! I had hardly picked up a deo and it had started working its magic! 

I walked over to the next rack to pick soaps. This is actually a very unnerving thing to buy for me. Almost all the world and its aunt seemed to have produced a unique brand of soap. That becomes a problem because my decision-making tool stops before I am through a tenth of the available choices. What was the option here then? I cudgel my brains and come up with a brilliant idea. I shall repeat it ten times and pick the one on which my finger stopped. I close my eyes and start. By the time I finish, there is a whisper, “He is such great fun” from behind. I turn around to see that I had managed to quadruple my following of PYTs – all without even using the deo. The problem was that the PYTs seemed to have acquired a male following too. So, my trip to the next rack seemed more like a procession. 

I was into the soft drinks now. Having repeated my usual mantra ten times over at the last rack, it was too boring to use it again. The good thing about my decision-making tool was that any nursery rhyme would do. So, I closed my eyes and started, “Old Mother Hubbard..” 

“But you said he would say ‘Inky Pinky Ponky.’”, came a shrill voice from behind. 

“Shhh..” 

Oh! God! So these PYTs were following me because I was a figure of fun! I dropped my shopping basket and went rushing out of the mall. 

So, now you know why I hate shopping!

Heaven in Hell

“Take care of these nitpicking administrative details without bothering me, He says”, muttered the Gatekeeper with an apprehensive look upwards. “It would be easy enough if these mortals really believed that the ways of the Lord are unfathomable. Unfortunately, they say it and then proceed to try and fathom them. What is worse, they actually believe that they have fathomed them and who is saddled with the job of providing them the Heaven that they think the Lord promised them? Me!”

Sometimes the Gatekeeper envied his nominal subordinate - the Hell Warden. It was so much easier when your job is to keep your charges unhappy – they were much less likely to be very particular about the way in which they were made unhappy. For example, the Hell Warden had no problems about souls refusing to be unhappy because they were being deep-fried in oil rather than roasted in fire. Keeping people happy was near impossible. People – even after death – were so finicky about what would make them happy.

The Gatekeeper sighed. Time was when there were almost as many versions of Heaven as there were people and he had been run ragged trying to satisfy all of them. Providing Valkyries for one lot, houris for another, tournaments for a third and dealing with accusations about differential treatment had been Hell in Heaven for him. That lot of souls had been transported out (and only the Lord knew where – the Gatekeeper made no pretence of having fathomed His Workings) and, now, things had settled between clouds-and-harp, navel-contemplating and houris. He had expected the sinecure to last but now this!

What in Cosmos was an Internet?

* * *

“No Internet here and you call this Heaven?” The voice of the latest soul to enter the Portals of what the souls called Heaven echoed in the Gatekeeper’s mind. Jagannath -call me ‘Jack’ – had just about finished the orientation course and this was his reaction. The Gatekeeper had made the mistake of assuming that he would settle down but his constant complaints and extolling of the virtues of the Internet had created so much discontent that he was now forced to deal with the issue.

“What in Cosmos is an Internet?” asked the Gatekeeper of Jack. Before Jack could even draw in a breath, the Assistant Gatekeeper chimed in.

“Boss! That is the latest craze in Hell! You know the mandatory one hour of fun enforced in Hell? Well! The Hell Warden introduced Hellnet and it has caught on like…” his voice trailed off after he belatedly recognized that the light in the Gatekeeper’s eyes was wrath and not approbation.

“So! Even Hell has the Net but Heaven doesn’t? What sort of inefficient system are you guys running anyway?” asked Jack.

“God save me from eager-beaver subordinates”, thought the Gatekeeper. Now that Hell was known to have what this impetuous soul wanted, there was no choice but to provide one here as well.

‘So be it. You people can put in place a Heaven-Net”, said the Gatekeeper. Somehow, he had the vague feeling that his troubles were just beginning.

* * *

Heaven-Net, 3G mobiles, Apps! The place is abuzz with words that he had never heard of, thought the Gatekeeper. The Gatekeeper was complacent, however. From what he understood of the Net, this craze would peter out soon. After all, there was no money and no individual relationships in Heaven, which seemed to negate most of the uses of the Net. Further all knowledge that souls treasured were not applicable or even interesting since there were no nations, no wars and no trade disputes.

The thing that seemed to have taken the place by storm, however, was something called Soulbook. Souls from all over the place were exchanging messages with each other.

“I am so happy today”, said one soul. “So am I” commented another. “I am happy too” said a third.

“Never thought I could play a harp so well”, said a previously tone-deaf soul. “Neither did I” said another.

“Clouds can be truly comfortable to lie on”, said a relaxed soul. “Quite! Fluffy and soft” said another.

Souls exchanged audios and videos of their harp-playing and cavorting on clouds. They exchanged games like Ascending-the-cloud-ladder and Navel-contemplating. The Gatekeeper waited for this craze to peter off.

As indeed it started doing. After all, after you have read the fortieth comment about how happy someone is, heard the sixty-seventh great harp recital and read about the comfort coefficient of the clouds for the zillionth time, it is difficult to raise any enthusiasm to switch on the mobile and start reading the same things all over again. The souls had started to realize that when everyone is happy and equally as good at everything there is actually nothing exciting to communicate.

Before the Gatekeeper could rest on his laurels, however, catastrophe struck! Jack had hacked into Hellnet and, even though their audios, videos and apps would not open or work in Heaven, messages from their Soulbook became available.

Excitement, somehow, seemed more preferable to happiness for these modern souls!

* * *

Jack was back again.

“Look at these messages from Hellnet! “Being sautéed today”! “Beelzebub coming over with a nice salt-and-pepper dressing for my burns”! “Today two imps missed me with their pitchforks! Yippeee!” How much fun they seem to be having! Looks like that is Heaven and this is Hell!”

“Ever heard of gallows-humor?” asked the Gatekeeper, wearily.

Jack seemed not to have heard.

“How about this game - Become Hell-Warden? Seems so interesting. Apparently there are six to seven levels with prizes for completing each level. There are so many comments flying about this game. The games here are pathetic. Why can’t you get that game here?”

“That is not allowed. We cannot have games of violence and unhappiness in Heaven”

“Censorship in Heaven! I would never have believed it. Looks to me like I have to go to the consumer court about this. This place does not live up to its billing”

“I am the only judge here”, said the Gatekeeper nastily. His patience was at an end.

“We will see about it. Let me put out a message on Soulbook and you will have an uprising of souls like you have never seen here before. We will see who the judge here is then.”

The Gatekeeper was aghast. Never had he faced a situation of a Heaven-full of souls in unrest. Something had to be done about this.

“Look, let us be reasonable. You think that Hell will be more pleasant for you than Heaven. I will try to arrange to transfer you to Hell. You, on the other hand, should remain silent about this whole matter”

“Done!” said Jack. After all, why should he not get what he wanted? The other souls seemed content enough with things here unless they were stirred up. Who was to know if the rebellion he stirred up would not peter out if the Gatekeeper was firm or wily enough to procrastinate?

“I give you one last chance to reconsider. Things that are interesting when talked about are not enjoyable when experienced.”

Jack looked at the Gatekeeper disbelievingly.

“All right! I will arrange for you to go to Hell soon. If within a month you choose to come back, you can. Else, you will be a permanent resident there”

“I will never come back!”

Never has more certainty been shown than when one is talking about something that one neither knows nor has any reason to know!

* * *

“What is in it for me?” asked the Hell Warden.

The Gatekeeper was in no pleasant mood. He was irritated with the Hell Warden for having put in place this Hellnet and setting off the whole issue. His assistant, who had accompanied him, was another source of irritation with his ill-advised enthusiasm for the Net.

“Would you like to spend some time as an inmate at your place?” he asked silkily. With a meaningful glance at his assistant, he continued, “I have someone who is eager to take your place.”

Both of them blanched at the thought of what an angry Gatekeeper was suggesting. The Gatekeeper smiled inwardly with satisfaction. Keeping a multitude of souls happy was not a job that you could be happy in and you had to take your satisfaction where you could get it.

Three days of stubbornness was all Jack could manage before he was back in Heaven. No matter how galling the thought of admitting his foolishness, it was not worse than what Hell had done to him in those three days. Playing Becoming Hell-Warden was fun and sending and reading interesting messages was exciting. It was what happened the rest of the time that did not bear contemplation.

“Believe me guys! The only thing Heavenly about Hell is the Net. The rest is sheer torture” said he with a shudder.

The other souls looked at him disbelievingly.

Words and Meanings Again

There are words that did not exist before and have been created since. Then there are words that meant something else in the past whose meanings have morphed beyond all belief over time. When such a change occurs over your own lifetime and the meaning of a word as you learnt it in school no longer applies now it is a very traumatic feeling. This once I mean to share that trauma with you - and no amount of pleading about how reading anything here is traumatic enough is going to help.

There was this nice little word 'gay', which meant happy in the halcyon days of my childhood. Now, apparently, it has been appropriated exclusively to refer to people who prefer their own gender for sexual activities. Things have come to such a pass that English teachers at school have trouble convincing students that when Wordsworth wrote "A poet cannot but be gay" in the 'Daffodils' he was not making any sweeping assumption about the sexual proclivities of poets. In these intolerant times, I am confidently expecting processions of heterosexual poets burning effigies of Wordsworth with shouted slogans of "Gali Gali mein shor hai; Wordsworth gaddar hai" for having ruined their chances with girls by this generalization about their sexual preferences. Simultaneously another procession of the - err is 'differently sexed' the politically correct term? - would indulge in a similar activity vehemently protesting the slur that they were harboring poets within their ranks. The life of words is indeed fraught with a lot of drama.

Attitude, I had always thought, was an attribute of the mind. To me, it meant the way you approached life or certain situations. Wrong, it turns out, in the modern age. Attitude apparently means the way you style your hair - have it stick out like the bristles of a mop; shave the scalp to see a glimpse of how you will look in the future without wigs; make it appear like a freshly plowed field with nicely symmetrical furrows; color it as though you had been painting your house and forgot the turpentine; whatever. It could also mean what you do with your facial hair. Depending on your 'attitude' you could either leave hair on your face where it is anyway difficult to shave off or you could leave it where it makes it difficult for you to shave every day. This rather novel definition of attitude - as something that comes out of the hair-stylist or beauty saloon - was a real shocker to me and I still have not completely digested it.

I really cannot claim that the word 'loser' has changed drastically but the emotional content attached to it has morphed beyond all recognition. A 'loser' in my youth meant a guy who had tried and failed. A 'loser' nowadays means a guy who is a failure. Both seem the same to the guys of today, apparently, but to me there is a world of difference. To illustrate, I once participated in a 100m running race at SPIC - only because I was a trainee then and all participants in the sports events were given the day off. A full day holiday for a mere one minute exertion sounded attractive. The first heats in which I participated all the other contestants had crossed the rope by the time I finished 'running' the first 50 meters. I was summarily called off in order to allow the next heats to progress. I came over to a great sound of laughter and declaimed, "I was the man behind all the victors". That was that! I mean, I lost the race all right but SPIC did not call me the next day and chuck me out of a job for being a 'loser'.

A 'loser' - when used to mean 'a failure' - ought to be applied only to a person who has the wrong attitude and  has lost all gaiety. Huh! Wait a minute! I do not mean to say that a failure is someone who has changed his hair-do and re-aligned his sexual proclivities. Whenever will I master this new lingo?

The Crazy Algorithm of Love - A Book Review

'The Crazy Algorithm of Love', published by Frog Books, is a debut novel by Rajrupa Gupta, who is a good blogger friend of mine. I am normally wary of debut novels for a few reasons. The first is that, in a romantic novel such as this, debut authors tend to focus mainly on the central characters and the other characters and relationships are very seldom fleshed out. The second is that the climax that closes out the book appears like a flash of thunder without being presaged by any event in the book. Sometimes the romance itself is sugary enough to give you diabetes.

It was a pleasant surprise to read this book. I did have an idea of Rajrupa's capabilities as a writer in her short stories but it is difficult to estimate the ability of an author to maintain interest over a novel based on her short stories. In that sense, I was delighted to find that she had written a book that was pacy enough to maintain interest from start to finish.

The stand-out facet of the book was the natural manner in which the book describes the one-step-forward two-steps-back nature of the courtship dance between the main protagonists with the mental turbulence of the female protagonist vividly described. The cyber-crime climax of the story is seamlessly weaved in to the rift between the couple and does not come as an unexpected jack-in-the-box kind of surprise. Rajrupa has also brought to life the atmosphere of an IT company as well as fleshed out relationships between the female protagonist and her mother as well as her boyfriend's father quite well. The story, therefore, reads like a description of real life happenings rather than incidents occurring in the life of cardboard characters.

A couple of flaws, however. The first one is probably more a question of my taste. I do not much favor what people have taken to calling Indian English. In this book, since the story is told in the first person from the point of view of the female protagonist, it may be true to life. I, however, feel that proper English does not jar anyone whereas this sort of English does tend to jar - at least for purists like me. It is, maybe, a trend of the times and I may be the outdated person here.

The other flaw is that there is a small portion of the story that is told from the male protagonist's point of view while the rest of the novel is exclusively from the female protagonist's point. It breaks the flow of the novel at that point. It would have been better if the author had found an alternative way to bring in those happenings which happen outside the knowledge of the main point-of-view character.

Those, however, are minor hiccups in an otherwise eminently readable book. If you are looking for a pacy read in the romantic genre, this may be the book for you.

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