A taxi ambles lazily to a halt next to you as a girl rolls down the window facing your side of the street. You are the only pedestrian on the foothpath just then. You look casually up to the taxi and notice the passenger. If she were greeting you with a smile, she'd be a delight to greet back.

Bingo!

She grins broadly at you and calls out for you.

"Excuse me? I need some help. Would you mind?"

You're a male being asked for help on a dark street by the Gateway from a girl who looks respectable enough not to approach a stranger for help unless she needs something genuinely. Perhaps she's going to ask you for directions. You oblige.

"My 80 rupees is getting less in the fare," says the girl in a tone of excellently contrived guilt and embarrassment. "Could you please help me out?"

== Boing ==

The first time when this genius tried her trick on me, I wasn't carrying my wallet. I did have a pack of cigarettes that cost me 110-bucks but I knew she wasn't going to take that. I shrugged and walked off.

Yesterday, she tried it again- exactly one week later.

== Boing ==

If you're going to the gateway and a pretty chick grins at you and asks you for Rs 80, tell her you've heard from the DismantleBrigade. She'll not understand what that means, but she'll ask the cabbie to drive off. That I can assure you.

==Boing==

Note 1- The quotes in this diary post are verbatim. Those are the exact words she uses.

Note 2- Issued in public interest.

Note 3- Let me know if she asks you for 80 bucks too. This is one hillarious chick!

Can someone spare the world of these outlandish fashion-loving monsters, please? The media is swarmed by them and they are swarmed by the media! Nobody has any use for them; if you think stitching a few strips of cloth that barely manage to cover the model's breasts is an expression of creativity, then you'd better start nominating porno for the academy awards! At least, porno makes no pseudo-intellectual pretences!

It's the same level of anti-establishmentarianism that creates journalists with an acerbic liking for public ouctry. Why should anyone question why a monument is being erected as a tribute for the hero of the land? Those who have no faith and those have no heroes should not waste the time and hurt the sentiments of those who do. He who has faith cries just as often as he laughs; he who has no faith can do neither. My sympathies for your wrecked home Mr Ketkar, but I can't imagine any other outcome of your meaningless writing.

The only difference between you and that mob is that you are a vandal disguised with a pen. The true essence of a "free democracy" is not in being able to opine on anyone, lashing our tongues and pens like irate wagon drivers lash their whips on horses, but in mastering the art of leaving each other alone. And although the second hand that goes the distance to strike the clap is the clapping hand, one has got to wonder why did the first guy extend his hand in the first place!

==DB==

Maximise hits to maximise ad revenue.

Sounds like what Faisal must be psychotically chanting all through the day when he sits in his office (does he have one?) and devices new, increasingly evil tactics to lure poor innocent members into the unending trap of writing and commenting.

(The background fills with the evil laughter of a man who is determined to achieve the sinister goal of maximising revenue).

== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==

The simplest, yet arguably the brightest, tactic was to introduce ads in the middle of reviews. I know how absolutely exasperated I was when that started. Jasmine and I exchanged half a dozen emails, each one of mine being "Stop inserting those smelly ads in the middle of my reviews" and each one of hers being, "As per company policy we cannot process your request", as though she was some sort of pre-programmed talking doll. (Don't feel flattered, Jasmine, I haven't seen you yet).

Before that we had "Star Writer" and "Hall of Fame" and "Review of the Day" and "Hot Reviews" and all those endlessly e-goodies that were up for the grabs here on MS. You thought you were being recognized? You thought becoming a star writer was some sort of achievement? I'm afraid not. You were just a victim; a victim of an advertizing gimmick, which made more and more vulnerable people write, which lured newer and newer members to try hard, thereby keeping the hits on MS high.

Do you feel used? I don't think so. Your e-best friend Jasmine would never "use" you for her selfish motives.

== == == == == == == == == ==

Do you really think, Faisal, that the diary posts and the gifts feature is going to bring your website up in terms of the number of visitors? Think about it!

What does your home page title-line read? Consumer reviews on products, products, products.... Something like that, right?

And what do you have displayed on the front page?

Someone who writes a poem on life. Someone who writes a poem on "Oh look! I'm a logoleptic rat in my house with no life so I thought I'd write a poem on love!".

Think.

Hard.

Fast.

== DB ==

What do you think?

Anti-incumbency brings BJP back to power?

What's better?

Idiotic, medieval BJP in power or Congress, the Kings of Garbage, allying with the left for five more years?

==DB==

There are two kinds of people when it comes to perceptions regarding language. The first kind, closer in nature to you and me, is of those who use language as a tool to convey meaning (or anything that can be safely confused as meaning). The second kind is those who do the same thing as the first, but with a difference. Instead of just merely conveying meaning, they like to "dress and decorate" meaning with their language in an attempt to draw the attention of their audience to specific facets of "meaning" that they believe are more significantly meaningful than the rest.

When a loser enters the first category, the result is albeit amusing, but in a pitiable sort of way. Than you gets the feeling that someone hitted him with a hard stone making him fell to the ground with birds flowing around his head. When a loser enters the second kind, the result however is purely hillarious. Because all of a sudden, your verticality gets converted into your horizontality with the consequent catharsis of blood and other bodily fluids overwhelming your neurological balance into a state of pure bodily pandemonium.

How relevant is grammar in everyday life, really? You get hurt, whether you fall or whether you fells. Things would perhaps get ugly if you said "someone is felling me" but until that time everything goes well. If you take grammar very seriously and insist on correctness all the time, then the number of things you have to keep in mind- prepositions, articles, singular and plural, tenses and verbs and what not. For example, any sentence that starts with "If" must be complemented with a clause that starts with "then" (not "than"). Otherwise, it's a fragment, not a sentence, and the clause does not have a transitive verb.

So now see this.

I am boy of 20 year old age who isn't legalized to drinking alcoholic beverage. But I still have it the every week and nobody caughts me. That makes complete sense from the point of view of deriving meaning from it. Yes, perhaps you wouldn't want that to go down in your diary post where Such Sen lurks just to save your a-s from comments that sort of deface the usual backscratching "Oh what a lovely post you have written which I read with my brains switched off and stored in chloroform" comments that you usually would prefer.

In my personal opinion, except for presentability, horrible grammar does not really affect anyone of us in our daily lives. If you're thick skinned enough to ignore the scorn and general patronization that people with poor language skills are subject to, then you have a wonderful life ahead of you. You are then empowered to express your "believes" and your "thinkings" with complete carefreedom.

So why do we have grammar? That's a very interesting question. I am certain you will agree with the fact that some kind of grammatical structure is essential to keep the language flowing and to create a sort of "template" for comprehension.

For example: "Was entering Ram house the Laxman when time six the of" would perhaps serve as a good "sort out the words to make a complete sentence" exercise but if we started throwing words randomly on a regular basis, the result would be www.MouthShut.com.

But beyond setting up a sort of rhythm of expression and providing a discipline or 'template' for comprehension, how much of a role does grammar play?

A simple illustration will explain. There's something called the "Royal order of Adjectives". So when you are talking of a "big, round, yellow, sun hat", Messeurs Wren and Martin would both collapse in horror if it were not "big, round, yellow, sun hat" and were, for instead, "round, yellow, sun, big hat".

What conclusion do we reach? It is better to use grammar as a tool then to think it is some kinds of handcuff, which we has to obeys. I wouldn't particularly enjoy a situation where every punctuation mark, every word, the tense of every verb were under scrutiny. At the same time, I wouldn't want to be a loser pretending to be some kind of "typocrat" (Sanjoy, love you for teaching me that word) and scribbling longwinded, mostly absurd strings of non-rhyming non-prose text ("poetry").

The fine balance is typical for every individual and you can't have a rule of thumb for anybody. But that balance has to be found and obeyed by each one alone while at the same time respecting someone else's (granted, with a little bit of wit, sarcasm and scorn).

Think about it.

Today is a Sunday. The last day of the previous week. It is a holiday. Wow. I feel truculent. I feel obnoxious. I feel cantankerous. I feel insipid. I feel lackadaisical.

==

Hey, trying out random shi* from a dictionary is fun!

==

Did anyone notice how bloody often the Mumbai Indians were misfielding yesterday? Not a single time did I see them collect the ball in their hands when say the deep 3rd man or someone chased it to stop it from reaching the boundary. It was completely ridiculous. Almost as though they had been instructed to misfield. I've never seen such terrible fielding in my whole life.

Except of course, when I was doing the fielding. Pardon my conceit.

==

So what does this mean for Mumbai Indians- we're out? Please don't say that!!

==

Remember my Kangaroo post?

Here's a picture. Take a look. It's actually real.

====Note to the Reader===

The poet of the below stanzas declares his willingness to suffer lifelong imprisonment if even by accident any sense can be made out of the verses

==redaeR eht ot etoN===


There, the open sea thunders,
    Lashing and plundering the rocky shore,
Like the agony of the broken-spirited,
    Like the gigglesof a wh0re...

       Beneath the turbulent surface lie,
    A million drowned and dead,
       Beside the turbulent surface cry,
    Old men selling brown bread...

The simple agonies, the complex laughter,
    The bubbling gurgles of a tornado,
The imposing whirlpool that goes deep like,
    The bellybutton of a gigolo...

       Alas, the sea with its great vast glory,
    With its many shades and shapes and forms,
       Is but a worthless mass of water,
    Like a bunch of mating worms...

For in spite its brilliant glory,
    It is wet with salty rushes,
Like a forum formerly meant for minds,
    Cluttered with meaningless verses!

==!smeop gnitirw pots ,sreggub diputs uoy llA==

Ah, Faisal, that's a non-liner equation in 2 random variables. You don't expect to solve it without supplementing it with another? You know that any set of equations in "n" variables can be solved only if the number of equations equals "n". Lesser than that and you cannot solve it!!

== == == == == == == == == == == == ==

I miss the old MouthShut.com

That's all I wanted to say.

== == == == == == == == == == == == ==

Now to something more interesting.

I work in a shipping company that specializes in containerized cargo export. The tales you get to hear are WEIRD!!

== ==

Container reaches Melbourne, Australia. Customer trucks it to the outback to his warehouse. Fourteen days later, we receive an email from our Australian colleague.

"Dear Mr. Phansalkar

We regret delay in repositioning container. It appears that the container remained open after cargo extraction overnight. A herd of kangaroos have now made it their home.

Animal authorities have promised to free it from the menace in a week's time (including period for sanitation and quaranteen). Until that time it will remain in their custody.

Please advise M/s Noble Shipping regarding so.

Regards,

Felicia Williams.

PS: I am really, really, really not kidding."

===================

Beat that!!

 

Have you ever wondered what happened with the Nandigram issue? I suppose it was a little more relevant to national concerns. Of course, I don't intend to say that the potentially homicidal tendencies of Indian sports heroes is anything trivial, nor is the dressing sense of "imported" cheerleaders something we can neglect. Who can tolerate a cricketer slapping another and making him cry or half-naked women dancing in front of an audience predominantly of young teenagers (who, by the way, have ingenious ways of accessing porn anyway)? But still, I felt like committing the terrible crime of drawing your attention to violence in a poor part of the country that neither you nor I would ever visit for a vaction. Has anybody wondered what happened with Nandigram?

My sincere apologies for this savage reminder. Is it not terrible on my part to bring to my reader's active memory the story of something so hopelessly grim and serious? I do understand that you are so doused in gruelling nation-building activities all day in your meagerly comfortable office. I do understand the burden of responsibilities you carry and the fatiguing duties you discharge. Identifying the best swimming camp for your wards and escorting them up and down to their ceramics class or SSC tuition can in no way be regarded as "routine, mundane jobs". Yet, I wish to ask you. Have you wondered what happened to the poor of Purlia district in West Bengal?

Ah, but with the potentially communal, anti-national activities of the fundamentalist BJP, the actions of a Communist Party in a pocket of eastern India (where is that?) are quite puny thing to become anxious about. The free press of India and the highly liberal, secular people of this nation have finally realized the truth behind these obsolete fundamentalists. We have unveiled their nasty intentions of bottling up and preserving progressive India in the balm of a morbid, prosaic value system called "Hindu Culture". What an offense! What barbaric, savage machinations!

Sorry. I'll come off it now.

I think we all have to realize that our endeavor to become a "liberal, progressive" society does not end at blaming the BJP, snubbing Hindu protagonists, welcoming convoluted expressions of "sexuality" (which is a euphimism for lust) and flooding our value system with borrowed extracts of myriad cultures, reducing us to caricatures of human beings, like having a human hand to the right, a hooved arm to the left, a chicken leg below the hooved arm and a clawed foor to the other side, all with a shark fin at the back. The idea of a "free press" is Utopian, but not reality. Does "free press" mean that the press is free to do and say anything, to allow itself to become propaganda machines for whoever that bids the best?

In the late 80s, the government started a scheme to disburse money to the poorest distrcits of the country. Purulia, West Bengal was one of them. In 1987, the poverty ratio of the district was 40% (40% of the rural population was below the poverty line). In 2007, the ratio was 85%. When the press covered this, the Communist Government of WB declared that the official statistics were wrong. They re-surveyed the district and published that the true ratio was 30%.

The end result is hard hitting for those who live in Purulia (but just a figure for us). Rs 1000cr worth of aid allocated for the district were re-allocated because WB openly declared that Purulia was not so poor as to need it.

Of course, it's far more interesting to make fun of the BJP's Rama-setu talk than it is to report this. Or the fact that not one suit has been brought upon anyone involved in the Nandigram massacre. Nobody has thought of creating an outcry at the statement made by the WB government that the actions of the CPI(M) members in Nandigram were "morally and legally necessary".

I sound like Arun Shourie. I sound a little crazy.

Well, if being one of those people who want a bigger picture makes you crazy, then I guess I am.

My sincerest apologies about the length of this write up. Please return to to discussing cheerleaders; or Harbhajan Singh; or the economics of Tashan and their goof-up with multiplexes...

Have a nice day...

PS: Tell me honestly. You turned to this post only after reading the title, didn't you? Let me ask you a very personal, almost insulting question, pleading you not to take offense. Would you have opened it had it read "THE COMMUNIST PRESS OF INDIA", which was the original title I'd intended for it?