My first novel, My Friend Sancho, is now on the stands across India. It is a contemporary love story set in Mumbai, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. To learn more about the book, click here.
I am currently on a book tour to promote the book. Please check out our schedule of city launches. India Uncut readers are invited to all of them, no pass required, so do drop in and say hello.
Resentment is allowing someone to live rent-free in a room in your head.
You might say that the whole world lives rent-free in our heads—but in the daily-activity room, where we sit everyday, we choose who gets to sit with us. We choose whether it’s sunny or cloudy, whether we’re happy or pissed off. So the next time you’re in a bad mood, look around that room: there’s a guest there you need to eject.
Ebert’s post, by the way, was a reaction to the moving feature on him by Chris Jones in Esquire. (Both links via email from Peter.)
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And yes, if I get bored of being a novelist, I can always turn to writing self-help books. With the help of an elegant polyster robe, a PR firm, and a few days of not shaving, I could even become a Godman. I can see myself gathering my disciples one day and saying, ‘The day has come, shishyo. The day has come for me to take you, once and for all, to Nirvana!’
‘Yes, guruji, yes,’ they shout, excited. A few of the women start moaning, rapturously remembering the private lessons I have previously imparted. I walk over to the side table. ‘Are you ready?’ I ask. ‘Are you ready for Nirvana?’
‘Yes, Guruji,’ they say. ‘Nirvana! Nirvana!’
I press the ‘play’ button on my iPod. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” starts to play. Happiness flows into the inner room.
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Update: Arun Simha writes in to point out that Ebert’s quote is a variant of the line in this piece:
Ali has been living rent free in Frazier’s head for more than 25 years…
That’s not Ebert or even the author of the Ali-Frazier piece; it’s an old classic from the Alcoholics Anonymous lexicon. (Ebert’s written about his drinking and recovery years on his blog.)
Stephen King referenced it in one of his interviews about his sobriety journey, Clapton used the line in some of his post-sobriety interviews and it’s been kicking around The Rooms since the time of Bill W and Dr Bob.
I guess Ebert kept the quote rent-free in his head, then. And why not? It’s a good one to hang on the wall.
Posted by Amit Varma on 09 March, 2010 in
Miscellaneous
Semen is not only nutritious, but it also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties. Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food.
Deepthi thought I might find this WTF, but having never tasted semen, that is clearly a matter I can’t comment on. It might be an acquired taste for many straight women and gay men, and I certainly wouldn’t want to pass judgement on that. Also, if this turns out to be a semenal moment in culinary history and semen becomes a popular ingredient, it might prove to be a valuable diversion for young men’s energies, and crime rates might dip. The positive externalities of wanking, and all that. The possibilities are endless.
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Before you sully your mind by thinking of jokes related to semen cuisine, let me get this out of the way. Man sits at home by his phone, tapping his fingers, getting really angry. Finally he picks up the phone and pressed ‘redial’. The phone rings, and someone picks it up.
‘Hello, this is Urban Tadka, how may I help you?’
‘Dude, I ordered a semen biriyani from your restaurant one hour ago. It’s still not here. How long will it take?’
‘Not very long, sir,’ the guy at the other end says. ‘I’m just coming.’
The world seems to be split into roughly three different types of people: Those who have a passion for nothing, those who have a passion for one thing and those who have a passion for everything. This way of categorizing is not to cast a value judgement onto any particular group. My informal observation is that aspects such as intelligence, courage, moral fibre and wisdom seem roughly evenly distributed across all three of these groups although it may initially not seem that way. It’s always difficult trying to describe a group with an insider’s perspective if you’re not an insider but I’m going to give it a try… [link]
I think I fall in the second category: I have a passion for “multiple ‘one things’”. Two of them are story-telling and poker, and my passion for both could be considered, quite simply, a passion for understanding human nature. And that is so all-encompassing that maybe I fall in the third category. Whatever.
Mohit sent me an SMS a couple of hours ago informing me that this year’s edition of Gladrags Mrs India is sponsored by Unwanted 72. Isn’t that just delicious?
The line of the day, which I want to see on a t-shirt before I die, comes from the great Mahinder Watsa:
Why have a walking stick if your own penis can oblige!
I especially love the touch of having the exclamation mark at the end of the rhetorical question. Immense panache. The quote is from here, and is part of a recent development in Watsa’s writing—he’s actually beginning to indulge in wisecracks. Consider his crack here about how he thought only frogs were green—or his advice here to “eat any vegetable you like best and with every bite think a sexual thought.”
The questions, of course, are as clueless as ever. Still, we’re over a billion people strong, and the stork sure didn’t bring them.
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Ouch. Did I just write, “Consider his crack here...?” Somebody hit me.
And imagine being the only human in a country full of hippos. I can see you in a cage in a zoo, mournfully contemplating what might have been if humans were the dominant species, when the zookeeper hippo and his hippo girlfriend put on some music and start dancing outside your cage.
Understanding measures of arousal is paramount to further theoretical and practical advances in the study of human sexuality. Our results have implications for the assessment of sexual arousal, the nature of gender differences in sexual arousal, and models of sexual response.
I guess boring wins. I wonder what academics do on vacation.
Posted by Amit Varma on 05 January, 2010 in
Miscellaneous
Michael Crichton has an engrossing piece up in Playboy on how to win domestic fights. He writes:
Here’s what I don’t understand. If you were going to spend your life in physical battles — bar fights, or boxing matches, or whatever — you would almost certainly get some instruction. You might hire a coach, do a little training. At the very least you would learn the fundamentals: how to punch, and so on. Such instruction would make sense to you.
But the same people who feel the need for instruction in boxing will instantly join in a verbal domestic argument without a moment’s thought about what they are doing, let alone any real training.
Yet verbal fighting, like physical fighting, is a skill. Domestic fighting can be learned. One can become very good at it — although almost nobody is, because almost nobody thinks it’s necessary to learn this skill. Many men don’t bother because they erroneously believe that women are more verbally skilled and emotionally nimble than they are. But whatever the reason, most men just jump into a domestic fight, adopting the fighting style of their fathers, or various people they’ve seen on television.
If this method has been working for you, then you don’t need this article. But if you find you are coming off badly in your fights — if you are uncomfortable fighting — if you avoid fights, or dread them — if you are afraid of seriously hurting your opponent — then you better read on. Because you need to get a little balance. Do a little roadwork. Build up your wind. Work on your mental attitude.
And above all, learn to win.
If you’re a man, I recommend you read the full piece. If you’re a woman, um, please don’t. You guys already whip us at this every time, and don’t need any instruction. Go shopping or something.
A rather bizarre study carried out by German researchers suggests that staring at women’s breasts is good for men’s health and increases their life expectancy.
According to Dr. Karen Weatherby, a gerontologist and author of the study, gawking at women’s breasts is a healthy practice, almost at par with an intense exercise regime, that prolongs the lifespan of a man by five years.
She added, “Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female, is roughly equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out.”
Yes, that comma has no place in that last sentence—but hell, which man wouldn’t pause after a thought like that. Indeed, I am so inspired by the mere thought of staring at boobs for good health that I now offer you, with apologies to William Blake, a little ditty:
Boobs, Boobs by Amit Varma
Boobs, boobs, so upright
In the forests of the night,
What masculine hand or eye
Could resist thy fearful symmetry?
Forget the distant deeps and thighs
Forget the lustre of the eyes
Your thought alone makes men perspire
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Under the choli is thy heart
And when thy heart begins to beat,
Your bosom heaves, I feel complete.
Boobs, boobs, so upright
In the forests of the night,
I come to thee, I come to thee
I’ll tear thy bra and set thee free.
If you go to Vile Parle station, you will come across the following sign stuck between two ticket windows:
There is much to admire here, but I am particularly intrigued by “mobile bill queries.” Imagine the following scenario: A wife notices a suspicious number on her husband’s mobile bill. She hands it over to Prakash and Sunil to investigate who the number belongs to. Prakash delegates the job to Sunil, who calls up the number and says, ‘Madam, you have won a free Videocon Washing Machine! Please give me your name and address and I shall send it to you.’ The name and address is duly handed over to the client, who discovers that hubby dearest has been surreptitiously calling his mother.
One week later, the mother calls up Sunil and says, ‘Ok, where the fug is my washing machine? I fired the maid because you told me I’d get a free washing machine.’
The maid, meanwhile, is sitting with Prakash in a seedy cafe. She asks him, ‘Do you mean everything you say, my love? Can I really trust you?’ Prakash smiles. ‘Of course I do, dear. Why don’t you hire a private detective to find out all about me. He he he.’
(Picture via Mudra Mehta, who graciously blanked out Prakash and Sunil’s numbers so that they aren’t swamped with queries. You lot are a sordid bunch, I know.)
Johann Hari, writing in The Independent, weighs the different arguments for why we are so obsessed by celebrity:
The second argument is more interesting. It suggests that we are hard-wired to seek out Big Men (or Women) and copy them. Think about the hunter-gatherer tribes that we lived in a few minutes ago (in evolutionary terms). Those ancestors of ours who identified the most powerful or abundant people in their group, worked their way into their entourage, and imitated their ways were obviously more likely to survive. Seeking out celebs had an evolutionary advantage – so they passed this instinct on to us. The people who thought it was dumb to act this way dropped off the human family tree.
This is ultimate causation, of course, not proximate causation. No one actually thinks that copying Kamal R Khan or Rakhi Sawant will help them in any way. But the instinct that draws us towards such celebs was shaped, in prehistoric times, by the evolutionary advantage it bestowed. This would also explain the existence of groupies: if you’re drawn to the fittest man in the tribe, you’re likelier to end up with kids that have the same genes that took him to the top—as well as those that drew you to him in the first place.
This also explains why a show like Bigg Boss is so damn popular. Sure, as a character argued in My Friend Sancho, it lays bare the human condition and all that—but also, by showing celebrities in their unguarded moments, it takes us closer to them than we would ever get in real life.
Celebrity, thus, is a virtue by itself. And it’s self-propagating—if you get minutes of fame for something or the other, you’re quite likely to get two more minutes because of the first five, and so on. You could end up, as the saying goes, famous for being famous. Such it goes.
Posted by Amit Varma on 30 October, 2009 in
Miscellaneous
The London Telegraph has a list of “10 of the most important” immutable laws of the internet. Some, like Godwin’s Law, we all know about. Check out the rest—if you’ve ever engaged in online discussions, you’d surely have come across them all.
I particularly liked Poe’s Law:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.
I’ve long believed that Indians are irony deficient, but perhaps I was being unfair—maybe it holds for everyone. The earliest example of satire being mistaken for the real thing that I can think of came from Ireland, after all: Jonathan Swift‘s awesome essay, “A Modest Proposal.”
I’ve often made the point that parenthood is a massive responsibility, and way too many people become parents before they’re ready for it. Well, here are a few things that validate that belief:
Exhibit one: A Shiv Sainik named Kailash Patil had named his kids Uddhav and Raj after the now-warring Thackerays. Well, Patil is now pissed at the party because they denied a ticket to the candidate he supported. So is is renaming his son Uddhav to Anand. Who knows, if he later ends up in the Congress, he might change Anand’s name to Rahul. Imagine what all this does to the poor kid.
Exhibit two: An Australian baby of Indian origin gets eczema. Her dad, Thomas Sam, happens to be “a college lecturer in homoeopathy.” No doubt driven by hubris and dogma, he insists on treating her with homeopathy alone. Her condition becomes worse, and turns into a “severe skin disorder.” Her father refuses to change course. The girl dies. The parents are arrested—and I recommend that instead of getting a lawyer for themselves, they take Phos1M or Arsenic Iod. Anyway, what’s the point of my sarcasm now? The kid is dead.
Exhibit three: I’ve blogged about this before, but today was the first episode of Pati, Patni aur Woh, so I was reminded of it. What kind of parents would rent their babies out to a television channel? How can they live with themselves after doing that? What will their kids feel about it when they grow older? I’m baffled. Normally I’m a sucker for reality shows—but this one’s just a bit too bizarre.
On the subject of mass protests, the world’s most famous community organizer has this to say:
I was always a big believer in - when I was doing organizing before I went to law school - that focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people’s lives is what really makes a difference and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally, is not really going to make much of a difference.
I’d say that applies to candlelight vigils and online petitions as well, two forms of protest that more and more urban, middle-class Indians seem to be taking to. In general, they’re useful only as far as they make the participants feel good about themselves—and give randy young men a chance to hook up with pretty Leftist chicas. Apart from that, if you really want to be useful, get the municipal corporation to clear up the garbage outside your housing society. I doubt lighting candles will achieve that.
An example of an online petition that does address a specific local issue is Vishal Dadlani’s petition against the new Shivaji statue. The petition states that the statue, “estimated to cost Rs.350 crores, is an unnecessary expense for the exchequer of the Government of Maharashtra.” This is a very good reason, but I’m sure that Ashok Chavan, our chief minister, travels economy class, just as his boss Sonia Gandhi does. Honestly, that’s all the austerity you can expect from them.
The age-old battle now finds a fertile battlefield, where both man and cockroach can be captive for up to 10 minutes at a time—Mumbai’s local trains. Mumbai Mirror has a story on how commuters have started carrying insecticide with them to battle them pests. I particularly enjoyed this quote in the piece, from a chap named Amit Khosla:
While travelling on a Kalyan-CST local, I saw that somebody had stuck a piece of bread inside the light fittings. Several cockroaches were trying to get to it and, in the bargain, some fell in the lap of a senior citizen who was napping near the window seat. He woke up with a start.
The sudden movement startled the cockroaches, which ran helter-skelter. All the commuters nearby started jumping here and there to evade the roaches. There was complete chaos. It was several minutes before order was restored.
Much fun. In a rush-hour Virar fast, though, there would be no space to move, let alone jump here and there. Indeed, if two cockroaches landed on your head and then started copulating under your left nostril, you wouldn’t be able to move your hand enough to brush them away. At most, you could request the cockroaches telepathically to move, at which they’d probably reply, ‘Hey, dude, kindly adjust.’ Such it goes.
Australian authorities said two girls lost in a drainage well system used their phones to update their Facebook statuses instead of calling police.
Friends who saw their status updates then called the cops, who rescued the girls. An emergency services spokesman quoted in the piece is pissed because he thinks the girls should have called the cops first, and then done whatever else they wanted. He should realise that the girls were probably busy. Having posted their status updates, they were surely busy taking pictures for their wall. Priorities, you know?
A research has found that sharing a bed often led to poor quality sleep as people were regularly disturbed by their loved ones during the night.
Speaking at a special seminar on sleep at the British Science Festival, Dr Neil Stanley, a sleep expert at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, said: “A normal double bed is 4ft 6inches wide. That means you have up to nine inches less per person in a double bed than a child has in a single bed.
“Add to this another person who kicks, punches, snores and gets up to go to the loo and is it any wonder that we are not getting a good night’s sleep?”
So if you and your partner spend 8 hours sleeping, it could be argued that you spend one-third of your life kicking and punching the other person, and snoring to keep them awake. And obviously they’re then irritable through the day, especially in office, where they punch and kick their colleagues, and snore when their boss is giving them a lecture. So they lose their jobs, become alcoholics, and one day, in a drunken brawl at the bar, break a bottle over a rowdy’s head, who promptly dies of choking on the biscuit they were chewing just at that time. Your partner goes to jail, and finally, finally, you’re sleeping well again. But maybe you shouldn’t have fallen in love in the first place?
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I like the bit in the piece where the researcher says, “No one can share your sleep.” So true. You can share everything else with the one you love, but for better or worse, your dreams are your own. You sleep alone; and you die alone. All that companionship is like light in the darkness—and always the light must go off.
All hail the differences between men and women, revealed masterfully by what they search for on Google.
After reading the left column there, I feel bad for women. The searches reveal the naked truth: men are all horny animals. It’s a shame, and I’m sorry. I’m feeling really, really awful. In fact, it could be argued that I need a cuddle.
This is the best first line of any news story this week:
The attempted armed robbery of a Russian hairdresser became a three-day sex ordeal for the would-be thief, leaving him with torn genitals and a Viagra hangover.
Apparently the dude tried to rob a hairdresser “in the town of Meshchovsk,” but as she was pretending to hand over her money, she “used her karate skills to knock him to the ground and tie him up with a hairdryer cord.” Then she “locked him in the storeroom… stripped him and cuffed him to a heater with a pair of fluffy pink handcuffs. She then fed him Viagra and raped him several times over the next four days.”
I’m not sure whether I should feel sorry for the guy—especially after reading the last line of the story. I mean, who needs a frenulum?
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Does anybody else think that this might just be a metaphor for marriage? Ok, no, just a thought…
Sunil Laxman points me, in a discussion on an email group I’m part of, to the Aryan Code Of Toilets, as prescribed in Manusmriti Vishnupuran. Delightful stuff, especially if one has loose motions and there’s no time for the mantra one is supposed to chant before one, um, finds relief. And the post-toilet routine is also interesting. For example:
* After defecation the “Linga” (generative organ) is to be washed once, “Guda” (anus) to be washed three times, the left hand to be washed ten times, and the right hand seven times, and both the feet to be cleaned with earth and water three times.
* After defecation the water pot was to be held in the right hand and was to be used for cleaning.
* The “Linga” was to be rubbed once with earth and the “Guda” rubbed three times with earth. Then both washed with water. This was to ensure that there is no odour left in the body.
* After this one should pick up water with right hand. One was advised to pick-up fist full of earth. This was to be divided in three parts. With the first part it was laid down that the left hand be cleaned 10 times and the right was to be cleaned with the second part 7 times. The third part was to be used to clean three times the water utensil.
Magnificently elaborate. But I suspect generations of good Aryan boys got a bit carried away by the ritual. They washed the Linga once, and they rubbed it with earth once—and it felt, um, good, so they rinsed and repeated.
And to prove that we are a virtuous, traditional society, they do it to this day.
An anonymous study of 2,000 British men and women concluded that out of all jobs, computer geeks make the best lovers.
They were found to be the most selfless in the sack, the most adventurous and more likely to use love gadgets.
Seventy-eight per cent of techies that were questioned also claimed that sex toys were part of their love life.
Eighty-nine per cent of them, though, believed that the phallus was a sex toy.
Okay, fine, I made that last line up. But really, the methodology of the study is suspect—from the article, it seems that it was based on questions asked to these men. Like they’ll tell the truth. Nice try. Duh.
And bloggers were not part of the survey. I’m sure they would have found that bloggers are even better in bed than IT workers. For starters, they’d be able to do it several times a day. How’s that?
And ya, I know, Twitterers, if that is the term, would do it even more frequently. But it would be over too quickly. Where’s the fun in that?
In a Facebook conversation where I was moaning and agonizing over the brilliant Adam Lambert not winning American Idol, Salil Tripathi pointed me to this splendid commencement speech by Ellen DeGeneres:
I love the guy on the left of the screen. He’s having a good time.
It seems that nice guys can finally rest easy as scientists have discovered that bad boys do not always get the girl in the end.
A study of a South American tribe that once had the highest murder rate known to anthropology found that the most aggressive men ended up with fewer wives and children than milder men.
I’m not sure how the journalist who wrote this can draw the conclusion in the first sentence from the results of the study as reported in the second sentence. I’m sure nice guys in that South American tribe “can finally rest easy,” as if they were stressed out all this while, but why that study has any relevance to the rest of us beats me.
But journalists need pegs, so there we go: Nice guys finish first.
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In this internet age, ‘nice guys’ can be ‘bad boys’ too. Blogging and Twitter and even Facebook help us to create online personalities for ourselves that often have little relation to who we are in real life. Much fun comes just watching this in action. But that’s a subject for some other post.
On behalf of my friends over at Landmark Bookstore, I’m pleased to inform you that the Landmark Quiz makes its first appearance in Mumbai this year. It’s already an annual event in Chennai, Bangalore and Pune, and Mumbai’s quizzers have long awaited its arrival here. Well, here it is. The details:
Quizmaster: Navin Jayakumar
Date: May 1, 2009
Venue: St Andrew’s Auditorium, St Dominic Road, Bandra.
Head over to your nearest Landmark outlet to register. Navin is an excellent quizmaster, and his quizzes are invariably fun for the audience, not just the teams on stage.
My team, Jai Santosh Ki Maa, reached the final of the Pune Landmark quiz a few weeks ago, and we’ll be hoping for better on home ground. Come and give competition.
It just struck me that in his famous 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, David Foster Wallace is basically teaching Vipassanā. Without the cheesy music.
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I suspect if I bump into either Wallace or the Buddha in some afterlife, I’ll get beaten up for the above observation. ‘I’m a total non-violent kind of dude’, the Buddha will shriek as he chases me with a spectral katana, ‘but you really pushed the limit here.’ After a while, tired, I’ll stop, and he’ll swing and lop my head off. ‘Told you to be mindful,’ he’ll say.
Early one morning, as the clock strikes five, Salman Khan steps out of his house. He’s wearing a tracksuit and sports shoes, and attached to his arm is a nifty iPod. He starts playing his Himesh Reshammiya playlist, and begins to jog.
Salman jogs. Himesh starts singing “Aashiq Banaya Aapne”. Tere bin sooni sooni hain baahein/ Teri bin pyaasi pyaasi nigaahein/ Tere bin bin asar meri aahein/ Tere bin.
Salman begins to run. Tere bin lamha lamha sataye/ Tere bin bekarari jalaaye/ Tere bin chain mujhko naa aaye/ Tere Bin.
Salman begins to sprint, sweat pouring down his bare chest inside his tracksuit. Aashiq banaya-aa-aa/ aashiq banaya-aa-aa/ aashiq banaya aapne!
And then, when he’s really engrossed in the song, Salman feels something beneath his feet. Damn, he thinks, Mumbai’s roads suck.
Just then, someone starts shouting at him. He switches off the iPod and turns around. It’s a pavement-dweller, a woman, standing there and screaming at him. Then Salman looks down at her feet and realises what he ran over: two other pavement dwellers. This woman’s family. No wonder she’s screaming.
“Hey, lady, I’m sorry,” he says, in that weird accent that passes for foreign in some of his films. “I didn’t mean to run over them. But you should chill, you know. I’m saving the planet. What’s a pavement dweller or two in that cause?”
“Saving the planet?” asks a blogger who happens to be there, leaning against a lamp post. “What do you mean, saving the planet?”
“I’m running to lose weight, man, I’m running to be more slim. So I’m saving the planet.”
After years of trying to suppress his sexuality—an “emotional blockage” that “really warped my personality”—he allowed himself to fall in love and have sex. It was on a trip home that he finally told his parents he was gay. His mother paused and said: “Oh my god. I’d better make a cup of tea.” His father wept. Sullivan had never seen his father cry before. After a while, he said: “What’s wrong? I’m fine.” His father replied: “No, you don’t understand. I’m crying because of everything you must have been through, and I did nothing to support you.” Sullivan says now: “It was the most honest expression of love I have ever heard.”
Are you a Gujju? Find out at Mudra Mehta’s blog, where she lists the essential qualities for being a Gujju. Much fun—I had known all along that there no Gujjuness in me, and that has now been confirmed.
That said, I’m a huge fan of Gujjus. All you need is a little beef in the undhiyo, and such a rocking time can be had by all.
The comment of the day comes from a private email message from Aadisht (quoted with permission):
Earth Hour makes every place look like Delhi.
This was with reference to these wonderful pictures of Earth Hour forwarded to us by Sanjeev. First you see those pics with the lights on; then you click on them, one by one, and the lights go off. Beautiful.
Who could have imagined, 20 years ago, that I could sit here on my desk in Bombay and see the lights go off across the world like this?
Posted by Amit Varma on 01 April, 2009 in
Miscellaneous
I once heard Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Zeke talk about just how hazy our understanding of numbers really is. His way of putting figures into perspective was the following example:
1 million seconds ago: last week
1 billion seconds ago: Richard Nixon resigns
1 trillion seconds ago: 30,000 B.C.
I thought it was a fabulous illustration and one worth sharing.
Quite.
Posted by Amit Varma on 25 March, 2009 in
Miscellaneous
"Some scientists have argued that during a recession, men desire fuller figured women,” writes Casey Schwartz at The Daily Beast. She cites studies that show that “changes in the state of the economy can influence what men find sexually attractive in women—and when the economy’s bad, it’s good to be fat.”
I’m all for well-built chicas, because well-built chicas tend to have substantial bosoms, and I’m totally okay with that. But before you go and dig into that bucket of chocolate mousse (or jalebi, or ice cream), consider that economies work in cycles, and recessions generally turn around. So when the economy’s looking up, and men start preferring thinner chicas, will you be able to lose that weight? Will you, like the economy, get on a cycle?
My personal advice: To hell with men, just go grab that mousse. Your pleasure should not be hostage to the expectations of others. You only live once, so binge.
There. Isn’t that tasty advice?
Posted by Amit Varma on 17 March, 2009 in
Miscellaneous
There is a Facebook meme going around in which people have to write 25 random things about themselves, and then tag various other people. Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with my list now. I can’t help but point you to Ol’ Bill Shakespeare’s list, though. (Yes, this meme’s been around!)
My favourites:
5 Sometimes I thinke plays are all Talke, Talke Talke, and wish for a cart-chase scene. I tried one in The Merry Wives, but it looked like Shitte, so I cut it. The men playing the horses were so Pissed at me.
14 On the topic of dating, my daughter Susanna loues to remind me: ~Jvliet was only thirteen! And I remind her that i) she was Italian, an impulsive race ii), she was actually played by a middle-aged Eunuch named Ned, and iii) she died. That always shvts her right vp.
23 Euery time we do the Taming of the Shrew, some pvnter wants his Money backe, because we don’t actually show a shrew getting tamed.
There’s potential here for a whole series. Let me offer you a sampler:
Nero: “I’m good with the lyre, but my fiddling needs practice.”
Aurangzeb: “I actually think these Brahmins walking around shirtless are quite… hot!”
Lalu Prasad Yadav: “I, um, like cows.”
Karan Johar: “I like girls.”
Pramod Muthalik: “I have a folder in my hard drive called ‘Paris Hilton’. It is 125 GB.”
Even Mahinder Watsa gets tired, it seems. In his Ask The Sexpert column, he was recently asked, “Where exactly should one insert his penis?” He began his answer thus:
“Log on to Google and ask your questions.”
Immense confusion awaits the poor soul who asked that question.
Responding to my post yesterday in which I’d spoken of “the enormity of what [Chetan] Bhagat has achieved,” reader Mohan writes in:
I have been told numerous times that ‘enormity’ must not be used in the sense of ‘enormousness’, and that it is closer to ‘an outrageous, improper, vicious, or immoral act’. Is this general language Nazism, or is there something to this?
Of course, if you meant it as a subtle hint that Mr Bhagat’s doings were really wicked, I’m completely wrong!
Um, no such hint was intended, and I’m sure Mr Bhagat is not a wicked man. And I stand by my use of ‘enormity’. Merriam-Webster offers us four definitions of the word, of which the last two are:
3: the quality or state of being huge : immensity [the inconceivable enormity of the universe]
4: a quality of momentous importance or impact [the enormity of the decision]
These are definitions that have existed for very long, and, from what I can gather, are far more common in usage than the ‘wicked’ meanings of the word. That said, Eugene Volokh cautions against using ‘enormity’ because people may assume you mean “wicked” when you mean “enormous”. Fair advice.
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I’ve written about language snobbery before, so in that context, let me reiterate that language is an evolving thing, and it is dangerous to get stuck to a fixed notion of what words mean, or what kind of usage is acceptable. In a discussion I was part of in an email group in December, a lady protested at the use of ‘decimate’ to mean ‘wipe out a large proportion of’, when, as she explained, the original meaning was ‘kill one in every ten’. The original meanings of words interest me greatly, and they’re useful in quizzes, but when I am actually speaking or writing, I don’t care what a word originally meant. What matters is how the word is used today. And here are accepted definitions of ‘decimate’:
Merriam-Webster—3a to reduce drastically especially in number [cholera decimated the population] b: to cause great destruction or harm to [firebombs decimated the city] [an industry decimated by recession]
WordNet: eliminate, annihilate, extinguish, eradicate, wipe out, decimate, carry off (kill in large numbers); “the plague wiped out an entire population”
There are hazaar words like this, that meant one thing in the 19th century and mean something else today. Which sense would you rather use them in?
Posted by Amit Varma on 09 March, 2010 in
Miscellaneous
