Batman Vs. Mahabharata

In the US, anything you say can and will be used against you, although that never stopped anyone from being a loudmouth. In India, anything you say can and will offend someone – again, not that it stops anyone. We Indians tend to get offended very easily, and the fact that we live in an era of political correctness, 24-hour news coverage and social media outrage only highlights that fact more starkly. We’ve been offended by people, books, movies, music videos, tattoos, songs, websites, animals, road signs and just about anything else that you can think of. Until now, though, we were only offended by what someone said or did. Thanks to Bharat Mata Ki Jai, we’ve now found a revolutionary new way that involves being offended even by what you don’t say.

At first, I cursed social media because it seemed to bring out the outrage far more quickly, far more frequently and far more stridently than was the case earlier. From debates on nationalism to celebrity break-ups, everyone was getting offended and expressing outrage all the time. But getting offended isn’t a new phenomenon for us, and it’s just as well that people are venting on social media. It could be worse. A lot worse, in fact.

While there is no historical account of when Indians first started getting offended, my guess is that if we ever did figure out what all those Indus Valley Civilization edicts were trying to say, it would be on the lines of “Must throw stones at neighbour for criticizing my cow.” By the time of the Ramayan or Mahabharat, getting offended was commonplace. Because there was no social media to vent on – you vented by cursing the person who offended you. And no, this wasn’t the swearing “Fuck you, asshole!” kind of cursing, but the prophetic “One day, just when you're happily married and at the peak of your life, you'll suddenly turn into a big ugly frog and lose your kingdom” kind of cursing.

Sure, the Ramayan and Mahabharat had fascinating tales of moral and political dilemmas; a lot of life lessons and an epic good vs. evil battle, but what really struck me were the curses. People were always getting offended and cursing. It was rampant, wanton and utterly out of control. Someone offended you by drinking water from your glass – you turned him into a lizard; someone offended you by looking at you funny – you turned his seventh son into a lizard, and, most crucially – someone offended you by disturbing you while meditating – you turned his entire family into lizards for the next seven generations and made him lose his kingdom and all his wealth.

Almost every story in these epics begins with either a curse or a boon. In fact, one of the kings got cursed for shooting a deer while hunting because, guess what, it turns out that the deer was actually a sage who had taken the form of a deer. How the king was expected to know this is anybody’s guess, as is the question of why the sage was in the form of a deer in the first place. Presumably, it was because he himself had been cursed. A majority of the cursing was done by the sages, although other elders and authority figures also felt free to throw in the odd curse or two. Perhaps that’s why we still have a blind reverence and fear of elders and authority figures.

I’d read somewhere that since America, like, didn’t really have any history or culture, it was the superhero stories that had filled up the mythology-shaped hole in their lives. In which case, I must admit that their mythologies are a lot more commercially viable, if altogether more predictable because the villains are always trying to destroy the world. However, as Batman comes back for yet another instalment in Batman Vs Superman, it takes me back to a question I’ve often pondered over – do the people of poor old Gotham city love Batman or hate him?

Now, the obvious answer would be that they love him because he has saved them so many times from total destruction. Yet, it must be pretty tiring being a citizen of Gotham. Think about it – every three years or so, your city is destroyed to within an inch of its existence. Your stadiums are blown up, your water supply is poisoned, your streets are completely frozen, your trains crash into skyscrapers, and other acts of a similarly colossal scale of destruction befall your city on an alarmingly regular basis. And it isn’t just the destruction – even the villains are different. Not for you the humdrum, everyday villainy of a drug lord or a mafia don – the villains that your city gets are altogether more colourful and sinister – the sort of characters that would make your regular villains look as menacing as a cuddly koala bear or a cute kitten.

Before Batman came along, Gotham city seemed to be doing perfectly ok for itself. Sure, they made it look like the city’s moral compass had gone awry and it was on the brink of destruction. Crime was at an all-time high, the police and judiciary had been bought over by the criminals, the politicians were utterly corrupt and the average citizen felt helpless and unsafe. I mean, come on! By that yardstick, every Indian city has been on the brink of destruction for the last 20 years. There was nothing unusual about Gotham city - it was all very tame and run of the mill. Yet, once Batman was in the picture, along came a dastardly villain with great charisma and an ingenious plan to, at the bare minimum, destroy the city of Gotham. I can imagine the average Gotham citizen, who would’ve been thrilled the first time he got saved, being quite tired of it all by now. Each time he'd see that Bat Signal in the sky, he'd groan to himself and brace for a fresh round of large scale destruction.

And the rest of the world would brace itself for another round of social media battles on whether the Batman franchise had been enhanced or diminished!

PS - Speaking of drug lords, that Mexican fellow that got captured recently thanks to Sean Penn – ‘El Chapo’ – does his name translate to ‘The Chap?’

Object Surrender

Whatever happened to those Russian children's books?

Those who grew up after liberalization may not know this, but there was a time when, geopolitically speaking, India got into bed with Russia and, if not go all the way, at least engaged in considerable hanky-panky with them. Officially we may have been these fence sitters who were part of the Non-Aligned Movement, but there was a lot of Russian action we were getting on the side. It all started with Nehru and his fascination for Socialism. The Russians were only too happy to capitalize on this and over the next few decades, they enthusiastically palmed off flawed economic models, pointless 5 year plans, dodgy defence equipment, inefficient heavy machinery and some drop-dead gorgeous children’s books.

In many ways, the Russian books created a sort of alternate, more chaotic and less linear world compared to the one populated by Enid Blyton. While Enid Blyton books were warm summer days, golden sunshine and picnics by the beach, the Russian books were bleak grey skies, endless wilderness and shadowy, mysterious forests. While Enid Blyton books were neat sandwiches, lovingly wrapped tuck hampers, scones and treacle (now that I’m grown up, I know what scones are, but am still mystified as to what on earth treacle actually is), I can’t remember anyone ever eating anything in the Russian books. While Enid Blyton books followed reason, had lessons learnt and comeuppances delivered, the Russian books were arbitrary, random and chaotic, a bit like life itself. Oh, and those illustrations. While the Enid Blyton illustrations were direct and almost textbook like in their simplicity, the Russian illustrations were breathtaking, surreal and seething with an underlying manic energy that jumped right at you.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love Enid Blyton books and feel they should be made mandatory reading for kids today – but the Russian books appealed to a different part of the imagination. The Enid Blyton books were like the early Beatles, before they turned to drugs and went all counter-culture – clean-cut, fresh-faced, short haired and full of that cheerful, good-natured optimism that envelops you in a warm embrace with its catchy infectiousness. The Russian books, on the other hand, were like the Stones – longhaired, bedraggled and messy, cigarette dangling from one mouth while coolly gazing into the middle distance, enticing you with the mysterious allure of the forbidden.

Along with the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War sadly also heralded the disappearance of all those Russian children’s books. While the truth of life is that objects keep disappearing – there is also a way to acquaint yourself with you a whole new world of objects. The catch is that it involves getting married, which may be a deterrent to a lot of people. Like with any other major life event, there are a lot of changes that marriage brings about to one’s life. And most of these are ones that you’re prepared for since you hear about them all the time – either through the movies, friends, families, helpful advisors, unsolicited advisors and other media. What you’re not prepared for, though, is a whole lot of objects suddenly coming into your life that you didn’t even know existed. Or even if you knew of their existence, you never really saw much point to them back in your bachelor days. Here, then, are just a few of them, in no particular order:

Reed Diffuser & Other Aromatic Thingeys

As a bachelor, it never struck me that a house needed to smell good. I mean, sure, you wouldn’t want it to smell like a pigsty, but as long as you were fundamentally hygienic there was never any threat of that happening. Now, if you hadn’t washed clothes in a month or were hiding a dead body it was a different matter, but my bachelor days weren’t that messy or adventurous. Marriage, though, has introduced me to a whole range of products that make the house smell good, for no discernible purpose. Reed diffusers, aromatic candles and tins containing delicately perfumed gelatinous blobs sprout up in hidden corners of the house, wafting subtle fragrances of lemongrass, patchouli and other exotic ingredients I hadn’t heard of.

Bedcovers

When a bed sheet got dirty, you just washed it in the laundry and put it back. Now, there is another bed sheet on top of the current bed sheet to keep it from getting dirty. This is called a bed cover. Theoretically, you could have another bed cover to keep the original bed cover from getting dirty and this could go on in an endless loop, but thankfully it stops at the bed cover.

Cushions & Cushion Covers

After religion & patriotism, cushions & cushion covers are among the biggest scams perpetrated on mankind. Of course, I exaggerate – cushions never killed anyone. Much like communism, though, cushions sound like a great idea on paper. “Sofa not comfortable enough? Add some cushions and sink in!” In practice, the cushions lounge about idly on the sofa, looking pretty and decorative, but the minute someone actually uses the sofa; they’ll toss the cushion to the other side.

Cutlery & Crockery

Of course, I’m not suggesting that I didn’t use cutlery & crockery before I got married. The difference, though, was the attitude towards them. Before marriage, it was functional and utilitarian – something you needed to eat your food with. After marriage, it’s a work of art, something to be drooled over, hankered for, sought after, admired and cherished. Also, it’s no longer just plates and spoons and forks – it’s tea sets, dinner sets, soup sets, starter sets, serving platters, serving trays, serving spoons, assorted bowls and ceramic whatnots.

I could go on with the list, but an instinct for self-preservation and domestic harmony means that I shall stop now.

Multigrain Madness

I think it’s the Multigrain bread.

It sat there this morning, staring back at me from its customary position on the breakfast table. The Spartan ruggedness of its rough, craggy surface hinted at a new era of deprivation and restraint. The bland, in-your-face brownness made you yearn for the warm, golden excitement of toasted white bread. The dry, almost parched sensation as you bit into it, just lingered in your throat and settled there; a sullen, lumpen reminder of the luxuries you’d forsaken in the pursuit of health. The broken, grainy texture as you swallowed the bread harked back to bygone eras of hardship and suffering, the kind you only remembered as black and white pictures in history books or on television documentaries. With all those people lining up in the streets for bread during times of great hardship like the World Wars or the Great Depression.

It’s the Multigrain bread indeed.

That little, brown square of doughy sustenance, resting innocuously on my plate, ominously symbolic of the healthy lifestyle changes that I could no longer escape from. Beaming with undulating pride, gloating with the aura of victory, suffused with the warm glow of triumphalism. Ah, so you’ve finally admitted defeat, old sport. You’ve joined the brigade of the health freaks – it’s a lifetime of multigrain bread and skimmed milk and green tea and meals that are devoid of joy and carbohydrates.

While it may look like I bear a sullen resentment towards Multigrain bread that led to the rant above, this really isn’t true. The truth is I don’t even dislike Multigrain bread. Sure, it isn’t as good as white bread, but it isn’t bad at all. There is an inherent, satisfying crunchiness that gets enhanced when toasted just right, there’s a discreteness to each bite that feels deliberate and definite and there’s a rugged, earthy texture, a grainy-ness as it breaks down between your teeth, which gives you an outdoorsy feeling that breaks through the urbanity of day-to-day life. Within the universal maxim that health and taste have an inverse equation (the healthier a product, the less likely it is to be tasty), Multigrain bread is really quite all right.

If I had to pick a healthy breakfast item I didn’t like, it would be Oats. Yes, that soggy, amorphous and lumpy mass that sits apologetically in your bowl, begging to be eaten before it coalesces into an even more congealed and inedible collection of misshapen agglomerations. Its white, characterless demeanour and spongy, sticky elasticity ensures that it’s almost always partaken in stony silence, with only the odd disgruntled snort breaking the funereal pall. Like a sullen teenager, it’s angst-ridden presence and air of self-loathing alienation sucks the joie de vivre right out of your morning as it glares back at you with insouciant indifference. So why eat the damn thing, one might reasonably ask?

It’s probably a combination of vanity and the fact that I don’t want to end up like one of those obese Americans that get wedged in the doorway each time they decide to get out of the house. I’m not in the carefree 20s any longer, and the general lack of any form of exercise has begun to make itself visible in the form of a slight yet embarrassing layer around the waist. In simple terms, it’s a paunch. Since I don’t dress like a gym-going Delhi-ite, it isn’t very noticeable to most people, but I know it’s very much there, lurking in the shadows, expanding at a pace so glacial you think nothing’s happening until one fine day it suddenly assumes an enormous proportion and it’s too late to do anything about it.

So I’ve made a few changes towards a healthier diet, although it all falls in the token gesture category. It’s the beginner, entry-level, lazy everyman type changes - so while there’s skimmed milk and multigrain bread, one isn’t going to the extremes of health bars, protein shakes and egg whites. While salad is attempted for the first three days, the biryani backlash strikes on day four and by the weekend you let yourself go completely; a decadent, hedonistic orgy of calories far outstripping any minuscule gains made by any early-week restraint.

In short, it’s the kind of selective giving up of stuff that wont do you any good at all, but will at least make you feel like you haven’t stopped living. At the same time, there is the satisfaction of feeling like you’ve finally done something about it, a sort of moral victory that you can bask in even if it wont make any real difference. The problem is one fine day someone might come along and tell you that you were wrong all along. Like it happened with cigarettes. Imagine this - it’s the 1950s, and even though advertising is fairly new, you can see through most of it for the guff it actually is. So you don’t fall for the macho imagery projected by the Marlboro man or the adventurous spirit of the Camel chap. But then you see a Doctor come in an ad and say that smoking’s good for you. I mean, it’s a Doctor, for god’s sake – and you’re hooked to the damn thing, until a couple of decades later everyone concludes that it actually is harmful for you and lung cancer is only a matter of time. How would that make you feel?

Every day, someone somewhere in this world decides that something tasty is bad for you. Eminent researchers and august organisations are continuously classifying and reclassifying what you consume into different levels of good and bad – like processed meats were recently reclassified by the WHO as being as bad as cigarettes and alcohol. And if this isn’t enough, studies are conducted with the express purpose of confusing you even further by saying that there’s good fat and bad fat, or good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, or that multigrain is pointless if it isn’t also organic and so on.

I’m no longer even sure. Maybe it wasn’t even multigrain bread. Perhaps it was wholegrain bread all along.

Doggone Cats

As an outsider to the world of fantasy novels, I’d always painted Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings with the same brushstroke. You know, magical lands, bearded old wizards in robes, dragon-type creatures, a valuable artifact that everyone is after…that sort of thing. Little did I know how wrong I was – true fans of the fantasy genre are a passionate lot, and you don’t want to be at the wrong end of this passion by ignorantly categorizing Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings as being “pretty much the same thing”. Howls of outrage, shrieks of disagreements and threats to sever ties of friendship are just some of the outcomes you should be prepared for in the event of such an extremity.

The Lord of the Rings fans consider themselves to be the original and true fans of the genre – the ones that took to fantasy before it went mainstream, the ones that are truly immersed in their little world of fantasy, even if it isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Harry Potter, to them, is a dumbed down version of the fantasy genre to make it more accessible to a wider audience – but it isn’t the real deal. It’s like the cricket obsessed guy that’s wary of a girlfriend who only gets excited about India-Pakistan matches, or those Metallica fans that look down on people who say they like Metallica because of ‘Nothing Else Matters’. On the other hand, to a Harry Potter fan, the Lord of the Rings fellow is a pretentious snob who only looks down on Harry Potter because of its popularity – the way you’d disown a fashion trend in college if it became way too popular and even the uncool kids started wearing it.

It’s the kind of mistake that people in the US political circles always make. Whenever a US politician makes a South Asia trip, they’d club India and Pakistan together – to them it’s all the same “Brown skinned people, spicy food, chaotic streets and crowded countries.” To us, though, it’s flabbergasting. How can you hyphenate us with Pakistan? We’re a peace loving, democratic and cultured lot with a growing economy that you must invest in, whereas they’re war-mongering religious nutjob terrorists on the verge of utter collapse.

Like India-Pakistan or Harry Potter-Lord of the Rings, it’s the same with cats and dogs among most people I know – loving cats and loving dogs are mutually exclusive activities. A dog lover would wax lyrical about dogs being a picture of affection and loyalty, while dismissing cats as aloof and selfish. A cat lover, on the other hand, would deride dogs as being dumb and too much of a slobbering mess while praising cats as intelligent creatures that were a study in stately, regal indifference. You had to be either a cat person or a dog person – you weren’t allowed to be both. Somehow, that never made much sense to me – while I fancied myself as more of a dog person, I quite liked cats as well.

Maybe it was a bit of an underdog (or undercat, perhaps!) thing – I genuinely felt bad for cats. I think it all started with Tom & Jerry. Unlike most people, I was a wholehearted Tom sympathizer. Jerry was no helpless mouse; he was a smug, sadistic bastard who knew that Tom would never catch him, and derived great vicarious pleasure watching poor Tom fail spectacularly in his ill-fated attempts. Even if Tom did catch Jerry, that bulldog would suddenly appear and thrash the living bejesus out of Tom. The worst was when Tom would try to woo a female cat. He’d suddenly start talking, and with a suave French accent at that – how cool was that? Is there anything that resourceful cat could not do? And Jerry, instead of allowing Tom to enjoy that one little sliver of happiness in an otherwise hopeless existence, that one fleeting glimmer of success in a lifetime ridden with crushing, bitter failure, would go out of his way to ensure that he’d ruin it for Tom. As I grew older, it was the same with movies. A dog would be the hero’s best friend, a dog would be the protector of the hero’s family, a dog would help you get through the snow, a dog would attack the bad guy just when he was about to kill you – well, you get the picture. A cat, on the other hand, would just sit on a villain’s lap and look evil. Somehow, traditional media didn’t have any affection for cats.

And then the Internet came along. Sure, it’s changed the way we work, shop, interact with people and spend our free time, but it’s cats that have been the biggest beneficiaries of the World Wide Web. Suddenly cats were playing the piano, looking grumpy, tap dancing, engaging in pitched battles with household objects or simply doing nothing at all – and people were lapping it all up. Raved about on Youtube, followed on Instagram, merchandised as mugs and T-Shirts – cats were all over the Internet while dogs were still only email forwards.

This is all a very long-winded way of coming to the point of what was originally intended as a post about deciding on a pet. While reasonably fond of animals, I’m not of the zealous animal lover disposition – the sort of person who’d turn vegetarian or crusade for animal rights at every given opportunity. A bit like how most people would like an ideal relationship to be, when I did come around to the thought of a pet, the pet-human equation I sought belonged more in the casual, no-strings-attached end of the spectrum. Sure, I’d play with the pet and have my share of fun, but I wasn’t signing up for too much of the maintenance part – the cleaning up, the regular walks and all the other daily rigours and rituals that having a pet would entail. A cat, then, seemed to be the ideal starting point – a happy equilibrium of reasonable fun and low bother.

Disclaimer: As anyone who’s ever been married would’ve guessed by now, all this was just post-rationalisation. The truth is that The Missus is fond of cats, so a cat it was.

Once again though, it turns out I was sadly mistaken. The happy equilibrium was merely a mirage – the cat we ended up with was shrill, attention seeking, opinionated and clumsy. Calling her “a study in stately, regal indifference” would be akin to describing a Quentin Tarantino movie as a gentle, non-violent paragon of filmmaking. Now, if only an Internet sensation and a lot of money could be made – redemption could be at hand!