Studious sycophants and why lack of mental exercise is highly important

College life is full of examples that you would feel obliged to tear your hair out at or (preferably) kick someone in the balls for. These examples are usually cooked up by some of those no good dilettantes sitting around in one large circle in a dingy room rapt in their rather pointless conversations on absolutely pointless topics. These people, who I must admit, are now some of my closest friends and well wishers, are brilliant, because they possess a myriad of talents, chief among which is NOT STUDYING.

Yes, NOT STUDYING, those two magical words form the epitome of the zenith of the apogee of the height of talent that collegiates seem to (mostly not) possess in abundance. In short, it is something laudable and concomitantly rare in most college students. At least in my college. Not studying is something that no one in my college seems to be able to accomplish successfully. Which makes those who can, something akin to living legends. Mostly, such people enjoy the respect and adulation of the mob, as well as rather limited successes which are magnified by the degree of (lack of ) effort they might have put in. TO put an end to any digressions, and get to the most elusive of all topics, the point. As such, this is a LIST post, and is one of the easiest to write about, because lists just write themselves don't they??

Here's why NOT STUDYING makes so much more sense than...well,everything else:

1. Not studying makes people believe that you have other mysterious, and very impressive talents. Such people are in awe of your prowess at almost anything, this might include being able to drink water through your nose, or being able to unfasten a bra with just one hand...

2. If perchance, you lack abovementioned talents, then people naturally assume you're cool, a dude, or equivalent euphemism...just because you don't study means you must be.

3. You can laugh in the face of danger, your HOD, your PhD mentor, your (highly successful) peers, a buffalo (if you're high enough on ganja) or a laughing hyena (if you're low enough), or a 16 wheeled TATA ZX-1 truck (if you're suicidal enough or high enough on ganja).

4.You have enough time to blog on absolutely any topic, this including the insect who met his tragic end one day while scaling your LAN cable or that weird M.Tech. student across the hall..

5. You get better grades than the guy next to you, even though you only studied for an hour, and he was up till 4 drinking coffee and working out solved examples and bugging you with doubts like,"DUDE,What's the square root of pi?"

6. You can play stupid ass computer games, and pretend they are real, and debate on them with a gusto reserved for oil price hikes and attendance shortages.

7. If you decide, one day, to hang yourself no one would notice until some guy says,"Abe, khana khaane chale?" to your corpse.

8. While in a fit of alcohol induced soporific ramblings, you stumble upon the secret to life, and forget all about it two hours later..only to remember it two years later while you drink yourself to death after no company would recruit you because they called you for a series of interviews, and you didn't study for any of it.

9. Most people would envy you, and those who didn't would be too busy studying to care anyway.

10. You can make lists out of absolutely anything. Yes, that means anything.

What India could buy with all the black money

And this was inspired by: http://www.visualeconomics.com/what-bp-could-have-bought-with-all-the-money-they-lost/

Right click on the image to save it. It won't popup as a full size image immediately. But you can zoom in.

Of Gods and Godmen

Religion, lets face it, is simply a means to control the people of this world. It was invented, yes invented and not discovered, in order to make humans feel a little less insecure about their place here on Earth. It was a convenient fiction, cooked up by over zealous raconteurs as they looked to the sky, and deduced the existence of god from nothing more than a few strands of lightning, and stars shaped like bears. What it meant however, and the people who invented this realised it soon, was POWER. Unbridled, untrammeled power. Because, humans, you see, are suckers for a good fiction, and like to feel warm and cozy in the belief that there's in fact an invisible man in the sky..watching over us and so on...

These rather deceptive people managed to rule over us, for a couple of millenia. But then something remarkable happened. God was replaced, just like that. He was replaced by what some have called the biggest force known to man, MONEY. And these people, who had hitherto had the utilitarian value of money, POWER, found their power to be a derivative of, rather than a function of money. And no matter how much they'd cry, no matter how they lambasted the apostacy of the common man, it wasn't coming back. No chance.

But they had hit upon a concept here. A large number of people equals a large number of money. This concept has been highlighted very recently by an enterprising young baba. This enterprising young baba owns half of the hearts and minds of this country, and also a considerably large Scottish island. This baba owns 8 companies registered through an intermediary which do not employ anyone or produce anything. But lets rewind, this baba controls a lot of people. Consequently he has a lot of money. Consequently he believed he had a lot of power. Until now of course.

Now he can just make threats about the number of people he can raise at short notice. Now he can just bandy about numbers like 11,000 and pretend like this rag tag militia can conquer the world. Baba Ramdev then, is acting like a typical teenager, who just got his ass kicked by the neighbourhood bully. Baba Ramdev, then, has suddenly received a culture shock, and a massive one.

You see, he got his concepts wrong, and massively. The reason why he has money is because of the power he exerts on people. Not the other way around. He doesn't have enough money to change the world. He has a shitload of money, but that just isn't enough, he can't go around throwing money at people, recruiting them to the army he is building. Most people who join his army would do so out of quasi nationalistic fervour, or as is more likely, out of coercion. They would be good for just one fight, and would disperse rather than destroy anything.

Most news channels have launched a propaganda war against him, which means now he would have to recruit from places which do not have televisions. This also means he could now brainwash people against popular media, and call it a conspiracy theory. He could now tell people he is going to be murdered, and end up being martyred, for the sake of the nation.

All for what? The issues that he has brought up, of black money and the like, were brought up as recently as a month ago. This has been resolved, and concrete steps have been taken. The public was swayed, and most people denounced the government as being weak and venal. Now, out of nowhere, comes this almighty preacher of yoga, and decides, all of a sudden to become the only means of salvation for Indian black money stored abroad. An issue which was suspiciously close to the pulse of the public two months back.

Why isn't he championing AIDS treatments, which he says can be cured through Yoga, or a cure for homosexuality, which he says is a mental disorder caused by that perfidious perpetrator of all evil, the WEST. Either of those would earn him the Nobel prize for sure. Why does he now insist on coming up with an equally ludicrous scheme for a problem which is already on its way to resolution?

Banning of 500 and 1000 rupee notes won't solve anything. And neither will rebellious civil wars involving 11000 armed men. There are no shortcuts to power, and this is what he has to realise. In order to gain any real power, he has to stand up and contest proper elections, just like every other thug, crook and vandal in this country.

Priapic Pastimes and Deceptive Deodorants

So, the government of India has now banned a sexy deodorant commercial. This, barely qualifies as news. And the fact that I read this on BBC's South Asia website is testament to the complete lack of earth shattering events occurring in Asia after Osama bin Laden's (rather accidental) death. So now, we are treated to the blazing rhetoric of (really sad) government employees, which is passed off as breaking (rather questionable) news. Parenthetical interruptions aside, they really have taken the Wild Stone commercials off air..and increased the popularity of WS deodorants, and sales, by a massive percentage.

Which is brilliant!! These defenders of morality,so called bastions of Indian culture, basically have no other work to do than sit down in front of the TV all day long, and surf through those salacious channels (MTv, FTv, Vtv, and other devilspawned entertainment) looking for the least trace of nudity or other objectionable sexual content. So these idiots, who happen to be highly paid government servants (no surprises there), can lay down the line.

Whatever happened to rights here. The right to free speech, free broadcasting, most importantly, free FUCK. I mean for God's sake, people in India fuck. Like crazy bunnies on steroids. WE did not attain a population of 1.3 billion by sitting on our haunches and waiting for storks. And yes, deodorants are meant to attract women. NOT cows/ pigs/ rodents. So yes, if a deo company implies that using their product would help a man get lucky then, it is a sensible , albeit lascivious ad.

And while the people who enforce such bans think pheromone is a species of mountain gorilla, and are busy trying to find which finger is lodged up their ass, most members of the (semi)knowledgeable public also support the enforcement of such bans. After all, they have kids at home, and kids are at an impressionable age, and of course they really shouldn't be taught about how they got made in the first place. And that really bad (really really embarrassing) SEX talk, that most families avoid. Not that it has anything to do with the sort of deodorant their father might have used anyway.

To face facts, Body Odour is a big turn off anyway...and deodorants have every right to be sexy. And there will always be government employees, with fancy sounding titles and designations, and characteristically, if not eponymously little work to be done.

Other than staring at overtly sexual ads for personal grooming products. And shaking their heads at a pair of boobs or legs, and going tch tch. And deciding that deodorants truly are the work of the devil.

And wondering about why they never got any, back in their time...