The first fleeting taste of Japan felt like the answer to some unspoken question. For through whatever curious affinities propel us towards people or places we have never met, I have always been powerfully drawn towards Japan. Ever since boyhood, I had only to glimpse a Hokusai print of peasants huddled under driving rain, or to enter the cold beauty of a Kawabata novel, to feel a shock of penetrating recognition.

…..And though I knew almost nothing about Japan and had never had the chance to study it, I felt mysteriously close to the place…..

From afar, Japan feld like an unacknowledged home.

Reading through these lines of Pico Iyer’s from his book, The Lady and the Monk, I couldn’t help but feel goosebumps at how precisely he had encapsulated the feelings he felt towards a place he had never been to before. I confess that I feel the same way, albeit about a different place.

The very thought of being attracted to some place on earth towards which you have no reason to be connected to is quite irrational, but it is wonderful when someone else shares this very feeling of irrationality.

The same goes for people too, the only difference is that you have to meet, and in your first few interactions with them, you know for certain that you’ve made a friend for life. True, the probability of getting along with people depends entirely on the type of person you are, but what I am referring to is the instant connection that you can make with a select few, that results in a life-time of friendship.

I seldom quote on posts, but this one was totally worth it. I have read half the book, and I recommend it highly. But don’t take my word for how good it is, pick it up and knock yourself out!

Sometimes, one gets to wonder what the outcome of these attacks would’ve been had our civilian population been trained in some ways to act in the face of such adversity.

While I am dwelling solely in the realm of the hypothetical, it seems like the right time to be asking such questions. Would it have been possible to apprehend the attackers and prevent them from doing further damage if we’d been trained to respond to such situations? Would they have thought twice about opening fire when they’d have known that their chances of success would be thwarted by some of our actions?

It is in such circumstances that the whole funda of reserve duty, as put forth by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) seems to make so much sense.

If there is some way of ensuring that all able-bodied Indian men (and willing women) undergo some sort of training, either at the city or the community level, and have some sort of law or amendment to ensure that this becomes mandatory, we’d have alert citizens who’d be able to respond to occurences of such incidents in the future.

Additionally, it would also increase our reserve strength (or bench-strength in TechSpeak), to be called upon as and when required.

However, what KP said once fine evening when I had met up with him still resonates in my head – ‘when you don’t do it for the money, you tend to do your best job’, and this is probably why I consider this site as my labour of love.

Churumuri article on the excessive media hype surrounding the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Churumuri article on how India should follow Israel’s footsteps in its steps to counter terrorism.

Churumuri article on the 2006 FIFA world cup, when I was north of where all the action took place circa July 2006.

(As a disclaimer, the post titles are given by KP, while I supplied the content which he has, in some cases edited to make it better.)

Mouthing curses at fundaes that encompassed the ‘joy of Christmas’ and the ‘festive spirit’ and ’seasons greetings’ and all that nonsense, I decided instead to log on to the net, and while headbanging to some brutal Spice Girls music, churn out another free patent idea that any enterprising person can take up and claim to be his own and make money out of it.

After all, its all about the dum dum da da dum dum.

Anyhoo, the idea that I have is another one that has its roots firmly embedded in outsourcing, and if you’ve been bothered enough to read the topic in question, you would have a fair inkling of what this post is all about.

I have seen Santas on TV, and on how a lot of idiotic hedonistic kids in the West and more recently even over here in our country have turned towards toy stores and other places where they make a wish by sitting in Santa’s lap and their hapless folks are then forced to buy whatever it is that the kid demands, while the store goes laughing all the way to the bank.

Most of the places usually hire some fraud guy who has to wear a cotton pillow around his midriff, while at the same time also stick a fake beard and glue it tightly to his face, lest some stupid brat pulls it off, exposing him as a fake Santa.

After a recent dinner with Monkee at Koshy’s, we both chanced upon a Surd wearing a Santa hat, that has provided to be the inspiration for this post, along with the fraud ‘festive season’ that is upon us.

The older Surds have a natural predisposition towards being bulky, and religion forbids them from cutting their hair or their beards, and once they’ve become old, their hair would naturally turn grey. (You see where I am headed here? Good!)

My proposal is to hire old looking Surds and give them some training at call centers, to acquaint them with nuances that only a department or toy store Santa Claus would have the misfortune of knowing, and then fly them off to the US or other places where St.Nicholas’ services are in demand.

With some proper accent training and a possible body odour revamp, they could be the next wave of outsourcing that takes away jobs from skinny idiots on welfare who masquerade as Santas, thereby making us more universally despised in the Us than we already are. More power to outsourcing.

In addition, it would also provide the Surds in question a good trip to the US along with their families in the twilight of their life. This could also be fodder for another one of those cheesy life insurance ads.

n the true spirit of expansion, should the number of old, bearded and corpulent Surds not suffice, it is also quite possible for the more adventurous orthodox Jews in Israel, specially in Mea Shearim and other orthodox right-wing settlements on the West Bank to actually join our Sardarji counterparts in this venture, just to add more variety to the whole enterprise.

Based on an article I read in the Hindu on Thursday,29th November, this operation is going to take the form of a media campaign in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, promising to offer rewards to any information that will lead to arrests and / or convictions of suspected war criminals. If what we’ve read in Fredrick Forsyth’s Odessa File has an iota of truth attached to it, the Nazis were given blank Argentinian passports which they utilized to their utmost benefit when they were fleeing the wrath of the allies.

Those that didn’t escape had Nuremberg to look forward to, with the allies as well as the disgruntled and highly oppressed local populace ensuring that swift and painful retribution was handed out to the Nazis, most of whom came up with the standard defence of how they were ‘just following orders’.

An operation of a similar kind was launched five years ago in Eastern Europe, in the states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, and was instrumental in unearthing what is considered to be some significant information regarding the present whereabouts of the war criminals.

Assuming that the Nazis were aged 20 in 1945 when the second World War ended, they would still be at the ripe old age of 82 during the present day. However, an age of 20 is a highly conservative assumption, because the ones that would have actually been higher up on the totem pole of the final solution implementation would be much older than 20, and hence probably passed on to another place where, hopefully, some higher form of justice would do what the Israelis failed to do.

Suchnews, of how war criminals die peacefully in their bed due to natural causes after inflicting unfathomable horror on a certain section of society in their country six decades ago shakes the very foundation of faith that us Good Karma gluttons somehow seem to subscribe to. If they don’t reap as they sow, then there certainly is little point to doing good, or so it might seem superficially.

Fortunately though, selfish people that do good only to increase the amount of Good Karma points that they can accumulate are also armed with a powerful conscience that removes any semblance of doubts one would have of the choices made and the subsequent actions taken in lieu thereof.

After that vitriolic tirade that involved my wanting to kill four different types of people with irritating habits which, if implemented would cut down Bangalore’s IT industry workforce by half, I have returned in a short span of 48 hours with another post, lamenting the state of traffic in Bangalore city, and on another fatwa imposing rampage.

Proper implementation of these fatwas and the corresponding punishments shall result in the other half of the IT workforce being eliminated, giving us a dual advantage of providing employment to those people that are seeking it, while reducing the population of our country by a certain percentage at the same time. Less traffic, easier to ride bike in these crowded streets. Hooray!

A friend of mine had made an interesting observation about how traffic in Bangalore suffers from an identity crisis. Two wheelers seem to think they are pedestrians, with most of them treading along footpaths rather than on proper tarred roads. Cars and other big vehicles on the other hand seem to be under the impression that they are two wheelers with the ability to manoeuvre through the tightest of spots while turning at awkward angles. Pedestrians, on the other hand think they are like trucks – huge and indestructable, as is evident from the way they tend to walk on the roads.

But traffic Fatwas are pipe dreams that will be relegated to oblivion once I churn out three more blog posts, rendering this particular post to the archives section that those normal people that are lazy wouldn’t bother clicking to view, being content with reading the first two lines of each post, determining that their IQ levels are much below the cut-off levels desired to read, appreciate and truly enjoy the content s of this post and subsequently navigating away to some other blog that might be infinitely boring but one that they can connect to.

In any case, for those of you that have still stayed on despite reading the build up to yet another tirade, here is a list of traffic offense related fatwas I wish to issue when I become the Supreme Dictator of the country.

1. The first set of people that deserve to be abused are the traffic cops themselves. Just day before yesterday, I was travelling towards somewhere in Koramangala and had to stop at the traffic signal at the forum, for I had to turn right at that T junction but missed the green by about three seconds. Normally conscientous, I stopped my bike, much to the chagrin of some other junta behind me who weren’t as conscious of following the rules while those idiots on my left whizzed past even as the signal had turned red and traffic from the other side was revving up to move.

   Amidst all this chaos, our honourable traffic cops chose to cut the signal to get to the other side, from another lane, proving to be such a pathetic example for people who have no qualms about not following the rules.
   Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

2. People who use high beam lights within city limits are candidates for the guillotine. Their indiscriminate bright lights cause the unnecessary generation of iodopsin in the eyes of those that are unfortunate enough to travel in the direction opposite to the ones where said fatwa receivers are headed.

   Cars of the future should be equipped with some standard equipment that automatically disables the high beam button within city limits and will ensure that it can be used only under circumstances pertaining to flashing lights so as to engage in overtaking manoeuvres. The highways are good enough for those random sound and light shows.

   (Inclusion of bikes with wolf-horns as well as other shrill horns is strongly being considered for inclusion in fatwa issuing edict)

3. A fatwa needs to be issued against those lovely people who honk randomly when traffic is at a standstill near a signal, with about sixty more seconds to go for the light to turn green. What in the name of the Lord are they trying to communicate to other people standing around them when they go about on their horn blaring spree is something I fail to understand.

   We need snipers stationed near signals so that these people can be dealt with appropriately enough.

4. The fourth category of people are those that jump signals at night or when they think nobody is watching. If you don’t want to follow rules, then your friendly neighbourhood sniper awaits you, failing which you should move to some other country where traffic rules are more lenient than the ones in our land.

   It is shameful, the way these idiots in fancy cars or on fancy bikes (and EVEN in non-descript forgettable vehicles as well ) go about jumping signals, while their full family is in tow, just because it is past ten and the probability of traffic from the other junctions crossing at the same time that they do has diminished significantly, though the possibility still hasn’t been reduced to nil completely.

5. The fifth category of junta to make it to this superelite list are not those that ride on vehicles, but those on foot. This issuance is targeted at the new type of creature out there that I would like to call the ‘nonchalant pedestrian’, who deserves to be run down, if anything.

   If you’re Indian, jaywalking comes as naturally to you as being a polyglot would, if your mother tongue is not Hindi or the local language of the state you reside in. It seems as though we have, as a collective people grossly misinterpreted the concept of the zebra crossing and that, to date in Bangalore seems to be the one stretch of road on the roads I’ve travelled where I have seen the least number of people walk across.

   Interestingly, apart from the total lack of usage of the zebra crossing path, the number of pedestrians that tend to cross the road is also in direct proportion to the speed at which one would be travelling on the said path.

   We all are used to jaywalking, and I have no hassles or grouses against those that run across the road after looking carefully and do their crossing swiftly. The nonchalant ones, who ostensibly want to be run over, are those that amble across slowly even in the face of oncoming traffic, without a care in the world, as though navigating through the significant number of vehicles that constitute Bangalore traffic is like a walk in the park are the ones that make me want to run them over.

   If life was like a Roadrash game, you’d know what I would be up to! The idiotic college kid wanting to impress some random chick, the former beauty queen who still thinks she is a traffic stopper in looks though she would be in girth and gait and (my favourite) the idiotic techie looking busy on his cellphone chatting up with someone who is trying to sell him a credit card with an ID card dangling around his neck to prove his superiority over those that aren’t doing what he does for a living are the top 3 candidate types for being run over.

If anyone reads this, and also wants to help add to this fatwa list, it would be fun. Volunteers for snipers invited. Candidates who have had work experience in the MARCOS, Sayaret Matkal, SAS or Delta Force would be given preference over others, though enthusiasm from all quarters will be appreciated and suitably rewarded.

Kindly reply within the comments for your opinions as well as applications.

Drive / ride safely and if you’ve read this piece, maybe there is something you’d like to do if you don’t follow traffic rules and ride your vehicle or walk on the streets the way you are supposed to. ]]> http://harishenoy.com/blog/2007/11/traffic-fatwas/feed/ 5