Been There Bungled That

A piece of news: my book Been There Bungled That is being published by Random House.

Been There Bungled That is a funny look at our everyday journey through life – navigating career, managing relationships, encountering people and traveling outside our comfort zone (physically and metaphorically) – through the eyes of the fictitious Jags Srinivasan.

In a way Jags is a reflection of me. Many of his fictional fumbles are based on my real-life ones. Like him, I studied engineering not out of passion for the field but because I made it into a good engineering college. However Jags and I are not alone in this regard. A large section of my class applied for engineering because that was what you did after school. And if you secured admission, you went on to study engineering (though ‘study’ may be a strong term to apply to what I did in engineering college).

However, even with my strong penchant to goof things up, I would have found it difficult to stumble through five distinct careers in one lifetime. After a brief stint in engineering, I settled upon marketing and have restricted my bungling to this field ever since. But I’ve made Jags jump from engineering to consultancy to advertising to marketing to banking because it’s funnier that way. And while ‘truth may be stranger than fiction’, fiction should at least be funnier.

Which brings me to the next point: Been There Bungled That is unabashedly a humour book. It may offer you pearls of wisdom that redefine your life and make you a better person, both physically and philosophically, but most likely it won’t. However I hope it will make you laugh. And that’s not a bad thing, I say. Consider how many things don’t make you laugh today. The price of onions, corruption in high places, corruption in low places, delayed flights, stressful job, pollution, irritating co-workers… I could go on, but you can read today’s newspaper to get a better idea of what I’m talking about. If George Mallory climbed Mount Everest ‘because it is there’, I write humour for the opposite reason: because it is not there in everyday life, at least not in sufficient quantity to enjoy.

As a famous person said – or if he didn’t, he should have – ‘Humour may not make the world spin but it will help keep you from spinning off it.’

If you would like to read the book (and you missed all the links I helpfully provided above!) you can pre-order it here.

“Thank you for not apologizing”

A few days ago, I was to meet my wife at a mall at 6.30 p.m. but what with having to deal with a few delicious last-minute emails at work, it was 6.50 by the time I reached there.

“Thank you for coming early,” I said.

“I didn’t come early,” she said coldly. “You came late.”

“Yes!” I said enthusiastically. “Thank you for waiting.”

She didn’t take it well. “At least have the decency to say ‘I’m sorry’,” she said in a clear healthy voice that carried to nearby shoppers.

“Don’t embarrass us in front of all these people,” I hissed, lowering my voice. I clutched her elbow and took her to a secluded area in the mall. “Etiquette has evolved, woman. You need to keep up with the times. It’s no longer chic to say ‘I’m sorry’. The right form nowadays is to thank the other person for the inconvenience.”

“What nonsense are you talking?” she said.

“I don’t blame you for not understanding,” I said. “I myself picked up this new form of manners only in the last week.” I began to relate what I had learnt.

The problem with tennis in America

In my youth – that is, a few years ago – America was known for Big Business, Disneyland and Tennis. Having observed (with mild amusement) British aristocrats in white flannels and full-sleeved shirts moving sedately around the court and sipping tea afterwards, the Americans took up tennis with gusto and soon began to dominate it. In the eighties and nineties the US had so soundly established its supremacy over the game that it was difficult to find a non-American male player in the top 10. Today things are reversed: Sam Querrey, the highest-ranked American man, is at Number 20!

When I visited the United States two weeks ago, I came face-to-face with the problem with tennis in the country. I landed on the weekend of the Rome Masters 1000 tennis finals, a much-anticipated repeat of the phenomenal rivalry between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Obviously the first thing I did, even before ironing my shirts, was to check out the room television set.

“Wow, digital!” I said and began looking for Tennis, the only channel showing the match. After clicking through the hotel’s 43 channels three times, I rang the concierge.

“I can’t find the Tennis channel on television.”

“Which channel, Sir?” he asked.

“Tennis.”

“How do you spell it?”

After I helped him out, he checked while I waited.

“Sorry, Sir. We have many options: entertainment, sports, news, travel… we just don’t seem to have this particular channel.” His tone conveyed a hint of reproach at my unreasonable, exotic request. “Perhaps you’d like to watch the action-packed thriller Taken 2 available ‘on demand’?”

Rajnikanth and the Japanese

In Tamil Nadu, we worship our film stars (in many cases literally: by building temples, installing their images as deities and actually conducting pooja). And of course among all the stars we adulate, Rajnikanth has a special place of his own. This macho hero, who can fell twenty rogues with one punch and cause a building to collapse by simply blowing hard on it, is revered in every nook and canny of Tamil Nadu, loved elsewhere in South India and pretty well-known even in the rest of the country. But I always took it for granted that the super star’s popularity, like the big rivers of the country, stopped at the shores of the nation.

“Do you think,” a friend asked me a few years ago, “Rajnikanth has fans outside India?”

I shook my head.

“Well, he does – in Japan!” he said.

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “That’s like telling me the Japanese have suddenly started eating uttapam instead of sushi.”

“They may not have taken to uttapam”, he said, “but they’ve definitely taken to Rajnikanth in a big way. In fact,” he continued when he saw me still looking sceptical, “Rajni’s 1998 film ‘Muthu’ was the first Tamil film to be dubbed into Japanese: it was released under the endearing name of ‘Mutu: Odoru Maharaja’ and it grossed a record $1.6 million in Japan.”

A man of principles

I’m a man of honour who lives by a few moral standards. One of these is: squeeze the last drop out of every rupee. Left to myself, I’m able to adhere to this principle. For example, though I frequently miss breakfast when I travel, I don’t do this if breakfast is included in the room rate. Sometimes, when the meeting organizers insist on “starting bright and early”, this means reaching the breakfast area at 7.15 a.m., a time when I’m less awake than hungry, groggily loading up my plate and eating my painful way through it. I do this whether I have paid for the room or my company because it’s the principle of the thing, not the money. Or rather, the money is the principle, not whose money.

However I’m often thwarted from following the path of honour by my wife.

Many parking lots in Singapore require drivers to display pre-paid parking tickets with the date and time of parking punched out in half-hour slots. Last month my wife requested me to drive her on a specific shopping errand. At the parking lot, before punching holes in the ticket, I turned to her.

“Will you be done in half an hour?”

“Why?” she asked.

“So that I can punch the appropriate time in this parking coupon.”

“Oh, in that case, make it one hour – to be safe.”

I explained that it was more important not to waste a punched coupon than ‘to be safe’ but she stuck to her estimate, so I punched two half-hour coupons worth 50 cents each and accompanied her to the shop.

Man's quest for beauty

Man has always been besotted with beauty in his beau. But with the woman moving from kitchen to boardroom, the child becoming more mature – or cheeky – at a younger age and the inanimate object becoming sleeker and technologically advanced, it is only appropriate that man is no longer stuck to this hidebound, restricted notion of beauty. He now desires it for himself.

After writing about this phenomenon (in my usual incisive fashion) last fortnight, I met an old friend Sumit Chatterjee at his club. Chatterjee, careful about his appearance even in college, had become increasingly dapper and well-groomed over the years; therefore I was surprised to see his shaggy look today.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did you lose your razor? Are you waiting for an auspicious day to buy a new one?”

He looked annoyed as he softly ran his fingers around his stubble-bearing cheek and chin.

“I don’t use a razor any longer,” he said coldly. “I use a beard trimmer.”

“That’s not a beard!” I corrected him. “Grow it two more weeks; then call it a beard.”

“I have no intention of calling it a beard,” Chatterjee said. “It’s fashionable stubble. Have you typed ‘Brad Pitt images’ into Google?”

Beauty and... where's the beast?

In my early days of living in Singapore, I remember sitting through the movie ‘Beauty and the Beast’ with difficulty: the film had lacked that drama and pizazz necessary to hold the raptured attention of an action movie buff whose last cinematic experience had been ‘Mission Impossible II’. I had got suckered into this outing in the first place, along with my wife, by a friend whose children had been pestering him for days to watch this Disney entertainment. “Let’s all go,” my friend had said to me enthusiastically on the phone, “I understand it’s fantastic.” Later I learnt that he had understood this, not – as I had assumed – from some eminent film critic of the New York Times, but from the very six-year old twins who had wanted to watch it in the first place. Talk about a biased sample! Anyway where was I? Yes, I was walking out of the theatre with relief that this particularly move experience was behind me.

“How did you like the movie?” my friend Ravi said when we exited.

I smiled gently to convey: “It was awful, but I’m too polite to tell you that.”

He interpreted it differently. “Exactly! I loved it too.”

“Me too,” said his wife Rita. “But the concept of ‘beauty and the beast’ is no longer valid.”

My God! I thought, don’t tell me watching that drivel wasn’t enough: we’re now going to analyse it too?

The internet in your face, literally

The mobile phone came into our life several years ago and immediately began to shape it.  No longer did we have to give our spouse an estimate of when we’d be home before we left the office. If our children wandered off in a crowded railway station while we were not looking, we could locate them in an instant. And we could tell our boss that we were stuck in traffic on the way to work when, in fact, we were still at home, preparing to shave. Having shaped our life, the mobile phone then began taking control of it. It became swifter, sleeker and smarter. I’m not sure if we correspondingly became slower, sloppier and stupider, but we definitely became increasingly dependent on it, using it to take pictures, find our way, communicate on email, buy movie tickets, check in for flights, read a book and – every now and then – make a phone call.

Till a couple of years ago, my wife and I used to lament that our teenage daughter spends far too much time on her mobile phone. But now everyone is behaving like her.

The other day I went out for a boys’ night out. The plan was to meet Ravi Bhaskar for a drink and then have dinner with two other college friends. When I got to the bar, Bhaskar was already there, a drink at his side. He was deeply engaged with his smart-phone.

“Hi Ravi,” I said.

“One sec,” he said, head down and fingers scrolling.

“Hi!” he said after a few seconds, looking up briefly before turning to the screen again and flicking feverishly with fingers. “Just checking stock prices.”

A healthy Mediterranean diet

As we sat down at the Mediterranean restaurant, I beamed at my wife.

“Why did I suggest we eat out tonight?” I asked.

“Because you love food?” she said.

“Yes, yes,” I said with a trifle irritation. “But why did I suggest this particular restaurant?”

“Because you love Mediterranean food?”

“That may be true,” I snapped, my good humour vanishing, “but it’s a stupid answer.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I thought it was the obvious answer.”

“It’s so obvious, it’s stupid. When I ask a question like that, I’m not really looking for you to answer it.” Then I shook off my irritation. After all, I thought, my wife had shown previously that she is sometimes not very perceptive. She misses the subtle nuances of conversation.

“Let’s try this again,” I continued with a smile. “Why did I suggest this particular restaurant?”

“I have no idea,” she said and smiled sweetly. “Please tell me.”

Well, she may start slowly, I thought, but she surely picks up the cue fast.

Compulsive Clickers

“We’re visiting a museum this evening,” my Korean colleague announced grandly during a recent meeting in Seoul.

“What kind of museum?” I asked, excited at the prospect of perhaps seeing ancient Korean relics.

“That’s a surprise,” she said.

Aha! I thought, we’re going to the National Museum of Korea, known for national treasures like the Pensive Bodhisattva statue and the Gyeongcheonsa Ten-Story Pagoda.

Therefore my disappointment was acute when we entered a building filled entirely with gruesome objects: drawings on the floor, portraits with parts jutting out in an unseemly manner and sculptures in grotesque postures. It is called the Trick Eye Museum, the trick being to place yourself in close juxtaposition to each object and have a picture taken by your companion and then reciprocate the favour by taking their picture. These pictures will capture you doing odd things like picking coins being poured on to the floor by a character in a picture; standing on top of a huge can of Coke; interacting with an animal protruding from the wall; and eating food being offered by some idiot in a portrait. I had myself photographed in a couple of silly situations but on the whole, the Trick Museum left me feeling tricked.

A bright disaster

While I have sometimes been led astray in my shopping – like when a careless flight attendant recommended a watch for my daughter without first ascertaining her age – and therefore made bloomers that have provided merriment to the family, my wife has always had the devil’s own luck in shopping. She manages to buy stuff that, somehow or the other, turns out to be really nice (eliciting responses like “Oooh! What a pretty dress – thank you, Amma!” from our daughter).

But a few days ago, she compensated for years of chic sophistication with one mighty blunder when she had the light in our living room changed. We were expecting guests for dinner and I had dutifully stopped on the way back from office to buy drinks and nuts. It was dark outside when I reached home, but when I entered the door it was like stepping into the afternoon sun.

“Whoa!” I said. I looked up at the ceiling light in the living room and was blinded.

“Hi!” Normally my wife’s voice clearly rings through the house and into the corridor outside. But I barely heard her this time – her voice was so subdued. And thanks to being blinded by the light, I could barely see her too. The vague blur in front of me might have been her or the cupboard.

I took out my sunshades from my bag and wore them. “Ah, there you are. Why the razzle-dazzle?”

“Is it too bright?” She sounded distressed. “I called Achai –” our electrician-plumber-handyman and frequent house visitor “– because the earlier light wasn’t bright enough. He suggested we change to a more transparent lampshade and brighter bulbs.”

The living room was lit up like a football stadium on the night of the Champions League Football finals. I could almost hear the roar of the crowds.

A good reason to laugh

Today many people employ the iPad to start, and sustain, a social conversation. As the host at a party I attended recently pulled out his iPad, the people sitting near him moved over and clustered around him like thirsty deer around a small pond. I walked over too, my curiosity aroused.

“What are you discussing?” I asked.

“Laughter,” said the host, turning to me briefly, “I was showing them something on the subject.”

“Fantastic!” I said, excited that I could casually mention that I write a humour column. It’s usually difficult to bring up this subject because the typical party conversation topic is cricket or politics or that killer combination, the politics within cricket. If someone says, for example, “When Australia put on a spinner in the fifth over, I knew we would win,” I find it a little odd to say, “Same here. And talking of spinners, did you read my article last Saturday about how I missed my flight by acting too clever?”

So when the opportunity was suddenly tossed plumb into the middle of my lap, I was quick to take the cue. “Talking of laughter,” I said smoothly, “did you read my column last week about how the English whinge about everything?”

“No,” said the host, “Where is it posted?”