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Thursday, April 22, 2004 I've moved!!! The madness continues at VishalPatel.COM !!! See you there... [ posted by Vishal @ 5:32 AM ] [ ] Sunday, June 29, 2003 The Indian government could make a lot of money if they turned Lucknow into a gambling city. Gamblers are by and large a superstitious lot; at Caesar's Palace, touching the snout of the of the she-wolf statue is believed to bring good luck on the table (or roulette wheel, or slot machine). So wouldn't gamblers just go bonkers over a place that literally spells Luck, Now? Think about the amount of tourism, revenue and foreign exchange that would be generated if only the government pulled that stick out of its ass and did the only logical thing — promote Lucknow as an international gambling centre. Come, give us your money! It's more fun than sitting at home and setting flames to it! Gambling is, however, just one part of the whole scene. Had India been undivided, we would certainly have captured another booming industry by promoting another well-known city as an world-famous prostitution capital. I'm talking, of course, about the city of Lahore. With 100% of the gambling and prostitution markets squarely in our backyard, think of the influence India would sway at the United Nations! Still, there's no use ruminating. Lucknow is in India, and Lahore is in Pakistan, and both countries should enter into a sphere of healthy competition in terms of advertising and promoting their respective attractions. More productive than fighting. If chiefs-of-state from either country are reading this (as is their habit), please give me some money. You're welcome. [ posted by Vishal @ 2:17 PM ] [ ] Friday, June 27, 2003 "Bhai sa'ab, time kya hua?" asked Corny. This seemingly innocuous — indeed, painfully polite — way of asking the time did not obtain the response one might think. It was late at night, and the passerby looked at him quite strangely before replying. "Barah baj gaya". Exactly midnight. He walked away quickly, glancing back at Corny from time to time. Of course, it wasn't the time so much as the fact that Corny was riding piggyback on Yohan Vaid's back. The street was pretty much deserted, except for the rest of us watching from a vantage point. Nor was this an isolated incident. Once you get them going, people are rarely eager to return to the world of sanity. Variations on the same theme were tried out for a good half-hour or so. If someone can lend me a video camera, I plan to film this the next time around. Stupid cable services. Stupid Internet. My pathetic connections of late have led people to compare my blog with bad sex, people I care deeply about and would never wish bad sex upon. Suleiman did an admirable job of hosting a posting, without coasting or boasting, but inane rhymes do not a triumphant return make. Therefore, I advise you to check out this website. Fooled you, that last link was not really a link at all, just an underlined word. The site I want you to see is this one here. Fooled you again. By now you're probably fuming, laughing and yelling at the same time, causing a whole new emotion called falafeling. Only a site that is incredibly bizzare in its reality and surreal in its straight-edge marketing can save you from riding piggyback on deserted streets. Grateful are we, therefore, that there exists a market for products like this one, for what else shall we talk about over cocktails? [ posted by Vishal @ 12:38 PM ] [ ] Saturday, June 14, 2003 Vishal asked me to write a "blog" entry for him. I agreed. His reason: Lately Sonali Bendre has been camping over at his house, and he obviously has duties to fulfill with regards to her. I'm guessing he's also lazy. My reason: I too have ceased to "blog" these days, and so i'm compensating for my crappy "blog" by making Vishal's "blog" crappy also. So Hello then everyone. My name is Suleiman. I will be your pilot for the day. Please feel free at anypoint in this journey to ask my assistants Raghavan and Sailesh to get you anything you might desire. Of course, since R & S are fictitious there is a large probability that you can keep on desiring those 27 bars of 5 Star chocolate until you make your next trip to the banya. Speaking of banyas, does anyone remember Ashok Row Kavi going on the Simi Garewal show and calling Mahatma Gandhi a bastard banya? I do. It was damn disrespectful. But that is the double-edged sword of free speech I guess. I understand these days that our friend Mr. Patel's "blog" has acquired something of an international flavour to it with my fellow Canadian bloggerers and some random firangs being regular visitors to it. As a result i'm assuming that you international types won't get a fair amount of the bullshit references that I might include in this (going-to-be-quite-lengthy) entry. Fear not, you can just post curious comments about them that a hopefully rejuvenated Vishal will reply to, thereby killing two of his stupid little birds with one stone. It has only been 2 and something paragraphs and i've already run out of ideas and lost interest. It's quite pathetic really, since Vishal asked me to write something that would "start him up so that he'd never stop", and in a true RollingStonesesque fasion I seem to have lost the plot and gone on a long, drug-induced ramble about gay Mumbaikars and little shops. What will I spew out next... "Dhobi Action (I Can't Get No)" ?? The underlying principle behind all of this is that these days, most of the people I know (including myself) seem to have lost the motivation to do anything useful. And by anything, I mean everything. Look at me for example, I spent the past 2 weeks barely going to class, lying around in bed, watching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies, and eating. Vishal i'm sure has been chatting to various unknown women across the internet, making Maggi noodles with cheese, and going around harassing all the watchmen in the neihgbourhood in his Group X : Arabian Rap Sensation accent. These two idiots Raghavan and Sailesh, have for the past month been peeling 12 potatoes a day, on which they proceed to draw faces in felt pen, after which they take these potatoes and flush them down the toilet. As you can imagine, many areas are now lacking potatoes, and the BMC has been singeing my gotas about all these potatoes blocking the drainage pipes. In short, no one seems to want to do anything? Why try and bend a ball like Beckham, when you can sit at home and eat Aaloo Gobi instead? I'm still not making any sense. I don't know if I ever will. In fact I don't know if i'm even supposed to, which is probably why I think Vishal ased me to "blog" for him. Now he'll look at his "blog", feel quilty for letting me fuck up his reputation, and blog frenziedly for the next 22 years. Yes I know I typed "quilty" instead of "guilty". I was going to correct the mistake when I realized that "quilty" is a much better word. It is a word that describes the feeling that you have when you're feeling very blankety. But in sooth, tomorrow you will wake up, brush your teeth with some Cibaca (Colgate is like sooo yesterday), read the Asian Age while taking a poo, and then shower with Hammam (if you have a bath too many times using Hammam it is alleged that your skin will turn green and you will turn into some kind of lizard and run away). But then after that, when you have sat down to drink your tea (Why didn't Brooke Shields marry James Bond? Because she didn't want to become Brooke Bond) and eat your Kellogg's Prosties, you will reach a moment of realization. In one grand moment, the epiphany of all epiphanies, you will realize that you entire life is a joke and a complete waste of time, that everything you do means nothing, and that your mind actually belongs to several 20 foot tall space monkeys who look suspiciously like Indian politicians. One of these elite, mind-controlling band of monkeys is a particularly aged yet fearsome, powerful baboon who goes by the name of Bal Oon, although he is generally referred to as Balathaheb. It is his life's plan to make the whole world bowdown to something called the Chapati Shivachi. This was of course revealed to me in a dream. Ask Vishal, he too foresaw the disaster of the Chapati Shivaji, leading him to write his famous article about the future ubiquitousness of the Chapati Shivachi. He was almost destroyed for it one day, when Balathaheb's henchmen arrived at his place of work, the publication of another elite monkey - Maghavrao's Scindian Express. But enough now of my distasteful, witty, brilliant humour. I think I have filled up enough space to make it seem like some amount of thought went into this crap. I leave you with some lines from a great song. Raghavan! Sailesh! Hit it! "When I go to Kamat's to eat, After i've eaten my dosas and six idlis, And i've spilt some chutney. Then i'm sitting here cleaning with my Rin and Surf This damn stain won't come off. I can't get no, oh no no no. Arrey arrey arrey, that's what I say. I can't get no Dhobi action, I can't get no cleaning traction. 'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try. I can't get no, I can't get no..." [ posted by Vishal @ 6:11 AM ] [ ] Thursday, May 29, 2003 I recently fulfilled a childhood ambition well, no, not really when I did some voices for a Carmen Sandiego-esque video game. From what I gathered, the player travels back in time to the Indian freedom stuggle and gathers clues and stuff. My character was a rather violent arasonist, but I had fun doing the whole thing, especially when I had to do voices for the high-tech speaking machines. Speaking of high-tech speaking machines, my mom gifted me her old cell phone today, having upgraded to a better model. Now, I don't really like cell phones much alright, I've called them evil tools spawned and propagated by an incestously capitalistic society and frankly speaking, I don't see myself as a cell phone kind of guy. Still, it'll provide an interesting diversion in Mahabaleshwar, should the antics of my fellow travellers be too weird / boring / smelly for my taste. Yes, in less than four hours, I'll begin to get ready to leave for Mahabaleshwar, where a bunch of friends and I will be staying at another friends bungalow. This group of dudes is a motley crew to say the least; and a bunch of very, very strange people to say the most. I shall attempt to discover a cybercafe at the earliest, and hopefully present a short travelogue of sorts on this very page. Watch the skies. [ posted by Vishal @ 1:37 PM ] [ ] Wednesday, May 28, 2003 I Yes, yes, I know. II My Internet service providers, which I shall not mention here out of decency¹, became increasingly aggravating of late. Eventually, they introduced bandwidth limits... I had a mere 400 MB per month limit, which was the highest they offered they had the gall to call it the "Zoomer" account and which, at first, I figured couldn't be that bad: "So I won't download large files... a couple of songs here and there; maybe some funny clips. Hey, the month will be over before I know it, and I'll have MBs to spare, that's how cool I am." Apparently I'm not that cool. After a week or so of playing Quake deathmatches with my friends, I checked my account status to discover I had just 160 MB left. Needless to say, this too soon expired, passed on, and went to that great fibreoptic bandwidth in the sky. Happy ending to all this, though; after weeks of using dial-up, I think I've found a cable operator that's solid gold. While we're on the topic, I'd also like to add something for the benefit of those guys who've never played Quake online — do it. You and your other testosteroney friends connect over the Net, meet in any one of countless maps, and blow each other to smithereens. It's brilliant. ¹I will, of course, mention them down here: It's Satyam Online. Avoid the buggers like the plague. III I've been acting in a play as well... a new production called Helpdesk. We had a few readings around town, and hopefully the full theatrical production will be put up soon as well. Go to this page and read the piece at the bottom of the page for a general idea, and click both here and here for different pictures of the cast in full costume. As you can see, my hair has grown quite a bit of late. IV Enough about me. What's new with you? [ posted by Vishal @ 1:03 PM ] [ ] Saturday, April 26, 2003 I once suggested to a friend an idea for a cool invention that could help people with colds and runny noses. Nose tampons. Little things that you can just slide up your nostril. They'd absorb the stuff, leaving your nose feeling unclogged and you feeling fresh and sniffle-free. Of course, you couldn't breathe. I had the advertisments all worked out. Can you imagine? Little cross-sections of nose profiles, with an animation that shows blue liquid being absorbed. And then a clip of a big Mexican dude with a moustache and sombrero riding a horse with these two little tampons up his nose the dude's, not the horse's, although come to think of it, the horse should have them too and going yi-yi-yi, arriba! waving his sombrero around and cavorting in the sun. Anyway, it turns out that this isn't just a flight of fancy, and nose tampons actually do exist. My friend Nikhil who lives on the top floor of a laboratory, but that's another story just had an operation to open out a nostril that had been jammed for years, and has one up his nose as we speak. It does exactly what you'd expect — soaks up stuff and leaves him feeling fresh and free. Question is, why wasn't this thing advertised more, and whatever happened to the Mexican dude and his horse? [ posted by Vishal @ 11:52 PM ] [ ] Saturday, April 19, 2003 Trying to study for these blasted exams has messed with my head quite a bit, and I find it increasingly difficult to compose my thoughts logically, coherently and hippopotamus. This might, in part, explain my silence of late; but I thought we could talk for a moment about something I learned because this site is nothing if not educational during one of my suburban excursions. It's about something called rickshaw etiquette, something that "townies" like "me" are "apparently" ignorant "about". That last sentence was an experiment demonstrating how inverted commas can quickly become annoying. We must learn to use this power wisely. Rickshaws, for those who've never been to Bombay, are small three-wheeled automobiles capable of carrying three passengers and one driver. They're also called ricks for short, and they're great fun to ride because they're open at the sides and there's always a chance you might fall out. They're much like camels — impossible to describe, no photograph can do them justice, and yet you know one when you see one. Cheaper than taxis, rickshaws are limited to the north of the island, the suburb of Bandra being the southmost they can aspire to. Here we see a full-grown specimen in its natural habitat:  So if you ever find youself in a rickshaw, remember this etiquette lesson: the two people on the sides sit back, and the person in the centre leans forward. Apparently this creates more space and makes everything more comfortable. Unless maybe it's the person in the centre who sits back and the people on the sides who lean forward — I forget. So call me a barbarian. [ posted by Vishal @ 9:29 AM ] [ ] Sunday, April 13, 2003 When I looked at the computer clock I realised I'd spent all night studying. Maybe it was the sunlight streaming in through the window. I walked across the room and turned on the television, and the cool breeze of the air conditioner felt good against my face. I looked outside and saw the city unfolding up ahead. Some birds has built nests around the house, and here and there I could see them through gaps in the trees. There were buildings everywhere, and some were very tall. If I was on the terrace I might have seen some Victorian structures. From here I could just about see the ocean because of the new giant buildings that had sprung up almost overnight. In the distance, beyond the water, one could make out broad flat mountains. The television stood out in the warm light of the room. I flicked through channels feeling both bored and hopeful about finding something good. Something on one of the channels looked like a bullfighting arena. I watched it. There were no bulls, and the stadium was empty. There were only two people, a man and a woman. The man was a dull Indian movie star and the woman was someone I had not seen before. The way she moved and sang she gave the impression of being one of those saccharine Indipop singers who show up every now and then. It was a music video. The scene changed to a medieval Indian village and then again to the bullfight ring. The dull Indian movie star was dressed like a matador and the woman tossed him a rose. They danced foolishly on the steps of the stadium with a group of people behind them. The people who made the video had hired the entire estadio just to shoot a few seconds of their people profaning that cultural landmark. I wiped my face and wished I had some more jerez in those big leather wine bottles. I wondered what Hemingway would have said. [ posted by Vishal @ 7:48 PM ] [ ] Friday, April 11, 2003 Made up the following joke in bed last night: Nice shield you got there, Zeus!It cracks up the classicist in me. Incidentally, if you want to diversify the drunkard in you, I can't think of a nicer way to do it than with some sexy booze wallpaper. [ posted by Vishal @ 7:26 AM ] [ ] |
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