Pitch!

Have you seen how things or places that say they bring world class services to India usually show some foreigner enjoying the arrival? Doesn't this go against the very purpose of the argument? Not that I am a great fan of Mukul Keshavan's take on Indians and especially males but let's face some facts here- why would you show an Indian enjoying some thing that is already normal to him? If someone said in the 1980's that they got authentic Chinese food one would laugh first and in case if you survived the scare and tried what was being offered you'd have gone, 'Hmm...Maybe this is Chinese.' Not anymore.

If you want to show something international at an intersection near me then please put a face that I can identify with. Look at this picture from Vatika Group's website about an Italian restaurant in Gurgaon. The only person in the pictures is far from what you'd expect. Why? Every time I see some builder talking about world class amenities in the neighborhood residential complex they show me happy foreigners. This has become so natural now that no one notices anymore. Sharda University- and you thought nothing could beat Lovely Professional University...well think again. Anyway Sharda's top brass is all gora. They got foreigners, I can live with it; the foreigners are doing radio spots urging you to come to Sharda, I can still live with it but what I can't get over is an individual calling himself an international marketing guru who believes in Sharda. Here's Johnny now!

There is some really bizarre about 90% of Indian adverts. I don't know how we end up winning the Golden Lions or Silver at Cannes on a regular basis. Have you seen any of the motorbike ads? They all look the same boys’ fantasies being lived by men. Of course, it's utterly simple to sell a bike that way but I'm just thinking aloud here. We were at the receiving end of the Aussie brunt when it came to Indian students. Imagine the Nivea fairness cream ad where you have three foreigners including Matthew Hayden who is dumb stuck as the local lad walks away with the girl. Subtle, eh? Telling the gora that we can beat you in, no pun intended, all fairness? What I don't get in the advertisement is that the dude’s claim to fame is family business. I'd think twice about a gal who walks with you for your family business pal.

I once read a book called Life's Pitch and loved the way it got a simple change in my attitude. Pitch is what makes all the difference. All around us there are numerous examples of crazy people. It takes all kinds to run the world you say but I think it's time some of them were given a break. Who is going to listen to Maneka Gandhi the next time she pleads some poor animals case when her son is allegedly off to do away with an entire community. Without being too generous to Ms. Gandhi...I propose Sundays off for the Vodafone mutt!

Image: Vatika Group

Total Eclipse

That photo of foreign tourists making a beeline to the campsite to observe the solar eclipse got me thinking. Is it that the average Indian is a bore who won’t make any effort to see some thing like a phenomenon or just that we have seemingly better things to attend to. I mean there were Indians too who made an effort to see what was termed the eclipse of the century; which troubles me as the bloody century is only nine years old, but it didn’t look like they were half as crazy as the foreigners.

If I scratch deeper I might come up with a couple of reasons why we don’t make the effort but that would be largely about me. I, for one, won’t make half the effort for a quarter of the things that happen around me. Don’t get me wrong I have put in gargantuan thought to numerous things like meeting up with people who bore the hell out of me, doing things in the name of charity, showing up at places where “people” expect you to be but that was a thing of the past. I’m a firm believer in doing exactly what you feel needs to be done. Some times you learn from experience and mostly bad experiences but you do get my drift.

Now the question that boggles me is that does this transformed approach seep in to other facets of one’s life? Some months ago I was enjoying a nicely made Som Tum or Raw Papaya Salad. As I munched on the Thai goodie I wondered if some crazy American were enjoying it he’d have packed his bags and gone off to Thailand to learn the damn thing. In addition he’d have written a book on how to live life in the slow lane and enjoy every sickening moment. I went back and checked out the salad on the Internet and Google taught me everything I needed to know about raw papayas. As I sat through I couldn’t help but wonder, was it that simple now?

Had we started living so many armchair experiences that perhaps reality didn’t matter?

If not Thailand I could have gone to some fancy Thai joint and tried to do some thing about my extreme fascination with raw papayas. There are so many things that one wants to do before cashing out. Perhaps racing the Monaco Grand Prix, live like a recluse in some Japanese village, work on an oil rig, race snow dogs or whatever the hell they are called in Siberia, cross imaginary boundaries like some whacked out spy or maybe even go a Walkabout…no not really. But thanks to Hollywood I don’t mind missing out on eclipses now. I have had it with people gushing about F1 so that takes care of my need for speed. I read Pico Iyer and didn’t enjoy his time out in some obscure part of Japan, so Soyanara it is. Hmm…I should stop being a tourist!

By the way do try the Raw Papaya Salad…it was worth the thoughts!

Of Anger and Michael Jackson

Some think that I get angry too often. But that isn’t the problem. What irks them is that I usually don’t need any reason to get angry. Of course, I don’t agree. I believe that my cynicism permeates through and comes across as anger. I used to get angry about a lot of things. Since I quit smoking, been three years, things have been different for me. If you ask me now days I just don’t get as pissed off as I used to in the late 1990’s. I got angry last night. I was trying to catching something on the TV to put me to sleep. I could have finished the Elmore Leonard that I am sifting through these days but the lure of the idiot box was too strong. I switched it on and saw people eulogizing Michael Jackson on seven out of the ten odd channels that I frequent. I would have endured it but I lost on Stevie Wonder, Kobe Bryant and the others talking about the gloved one. Instead I saw one big boned African American woman, whom no one knew (she introduced herself as Congresswoman from some state, yak yak, yak) talk about MJ. Not only that she finished her ten minutes of stage time and actually saluted the departed!

No one talked about the nut job that Michael J. had become and why would they. Isn’t it funny that even hushes tones were amiss when he started transforming into a freak show in the mid 1980’s. Its one thing to separate the man from his crime and think of him in objective terms but even in his bizarre death no one said that he should have been chastised when his skin started turning white. Peter Pan syndrome anyone...I think he was more like Pinocchio replete with the nose and all. I loved his music. I still feel happy when Beat It plays some where. I can’t help but tell anyone who’s standing next to me that Eddie Van Halen played the crazy riff on the number or how Martin Scorsese directed Bad or how one watched the video time and again to spot Wesley Snipes but the fact remains that the man was a nut job. How screwed up was he that he actually has white children- not his sperm; the surrogate mother didn’t contribute anything besides her womb; the kids look as lost as any white child would be in a non-white part of the town.

But the changed man that I am, I started to look for something good in the bad. Let’s see. The Staples Center where the memorial was held looked like some part of Gurgaon. Don’t get me wrong even my friend agreed and she knows places. OK. Let’s see…hmmm yeah OK…it’s good that MJ passed over or else he’d have suffered more. But does that count when you do crazy things without coercion? Oh we’re looking for the goods. Yeah! I still have the original Thriller LP from my father’s collection. It’s in mint condition and a friend thinks that ebay needs to be graced by a visit. If watching reruns of Friends wasn’t enough seeing people talk about Michael Jackson as if he didn’t do anything crazy was strange. For a minute there I thought he’d almost moonwalk his way out of the coffin…