Chaddha Saab’s 444

I took your advice. I am moving out of the bug-house. Yay!

For the uninitiated, here’s a shortened version of what I’ve been going through: I moved to Delhi a month ago and I’ve been living in a house room that is crawling with insects, bugs, reptiles, rodents, dust, dirt, spiders, cephalopods, earthworms, leaves and pods; the first eleven from the depths of Hell and the last two from a weird tree in the courtyard.

I’m finally moving out!

I wish it were that simple, right? As it happened, the Insect Palace’s landlord refused to give me my security deposit back – 15,000 bucks – and claimed that I hadn’t given him a month’s notice before moving out. I fought with the old raccoon and after a fair bit of verbal jousting, he agreed to pay me 70% of the money. He wasn’t happy about it. Neither am I, so I’m gonna trash the place today before leaving! I have some spray paint cans and eggs in my bag! Yay!

Anyway, I started the hunt for a new place yesterday and came across Uncle Chaddha. He seems to be a perfectly harmless 70-year-old retiree living in a peaceful location. He’s got a huge house and a nice little car with which he drives his meat-mountain wife around. I met him and he showed me his studio apartment on the 2nd floor, and I liked it immediately. It’s got a nice terrace, a decent kitchen, a sturdy bed and two of the basic necessities of life – a television and an air-conditioner! Better still, I didn’t see any bugs! Yay!

So, I paid him some money today and I’m moving in this evening. Weirdly enough, his house number is 444. This morning, I started thinking that there must be some history associated with this number. I did some research and found only two relevant hits – 444 is the number of the Devil’s cousin and 444 is a lucky number for Malaysians. You wouldn’t believe it but I googled “insects 444″ to cross-reference my worst nightmare with a potential new one, and found nothing of interest. Yay!

Anyway, that’s an update on my life. Living away from home has it’s own thrills. And it’s share of weirdness.

How To Kill Your Landlord

After having a major fight with my conscience last night about whether to move out of the zoo I’m living in, I slept fitfully, trying out different options to hunt down and kill the rats that were wreaking havoc in the house. It’s not healthy in the first place. So, my instinct is to get the hell out. But slowly, the realization dawned on me that these rats were super-advanced than their dumb cousins in Bangalore.

They had evolved from being scavengers to being fine-diners; they hardly touched any of the rat poison pellets I’d left for them around the house. That’s when I made the decision to leave them be and focus instead on hunting down and killing my landlord.

My landlord is a stupid ninety-year-old fucker, who thinks he’s still young enough to drive a car by himself and lift a huge slab of granite all by himself. In hindsight, I think I should’ve let him do those things and let nature take its own course. But waiting for the elusive heart-attack takes a lot of patience, more than what I have.

So, I decided to take down two birds pests with one stone and came up with a brilliant scheme, worthy of a jail sentence just for the thought. Here’s how the four-step scheme works:

1. Buy a rabid dog.
2. Get the rabid dog to bite the old fucker.
3. Get the rat to bite the rabid old fucker.
4. Attend two funerals.

I was so pleased with myself that I went in search of a rabid dog this morning. The hunt is still on. I wonder why I keep having flashes of Hannibal in my head.

So, as you can see, I’ve been busy with matters of life and death, which is why I’ve been so inactive online. I hate myself for not having the time to respond to the comments and not having time to read any other blogs.

And I also realized that this is a great money-making scheme. If any of you want to kill your landlord, then get in touch with me. I charge by the hour.

PS: I’m not a professional killer-for-hire. I only kill landlords who are stupid fuckers. If you want me to kill anyone else, then I’m not interested.

PPS: If any law enforcement personnel are reading this post and raising their eyebrows and planning to come and arrest me, then I have two words for you fuckers – “Eat Doh-nuts!”

H-2-O!!

Image Courtesy: IBNLive.com

Well, the day that all science fiction fans have been waiting for has finally arrived. Our lives are never going to be the same again. Check this out: http://tinyurl.com/lcjwuo

For those of you too lazy to click on the link, the story is that some engineering students from Bangalore have developed a technique that boosts the mileage of a petrol-driven vehicle by up to 25% by adding water! Well, not exactly ‘adding’ water to the fuel, but by some weird contraption that splits the water into it’s constituent hydrogen and oxygen. You breathe the oxygen and the hydrogen is burnt as a clean fuel.

On paper, it looks like a very feasible idea, doesn’t it? People have been doing research on this for decades, and now, a few kids who haven’t got a job due to the recession came up with this? Hats off, I say!

According to one of them, they are now focusing on how to modify this ‘hydrogen-cell’ so that an internal combustion engine can be totally replaced and vehicles can run on water instead. 100% water. Hmmm…

I thought about it for a while (4 seconds) and came up with a few scenarios that are possible if this were to happen for real. After reading this, I’m sure you’ll join me in urging these kids to back off and leave things as they are and not upset the delicate (economy) balance of the world.

So, in the future, if these kids master the art of making a vehicle run on water:

1. The world economy will collapse because most of the money floating around these days is oil money.
2. No one would need petrol or diesel or LPG anymore. Everything that works with a fossil fuel will be replaced by ‘Water-Cells’.
3. Internal combustion engines will become obsolete and all the existing vehicles in the world (close to a few billion, maybe) will become pieces of art, overnight.
4. The price of water will skyrocket – gone will be the days when people would spare a glass of water for a thirsty stranger. They’d rather sell the stranger their stock of petrol!
5. Religious Hindu fanatics will claim that they knew ‘Water’ was holy all along and that they warned us of the day when the whole world will doubly dependent on water.
6. Physical exercise will be abolished as we tend to drink more water after.
7. Water will be replaced by alcoholic drinks on dinner tables.
8. Speaking of alcoholic drinks, they won’t last very long because they contain in major parts, water.
9. When it rains, people would kill their neighbors to cover a larger area of rain-water-harvesting- apparatus.
10. Pretty soon, everyone would stop moving and remain at inertia to conserve body fluids and reduce the amount of water intake.
11. People who sweat will be stoned to death and their body’s water drained before burying/burning.
12. Inactivity and insufficient water intake will soon result in severe health issues in everyone – people would die and no one would care. IV fluids will be nothing more than a picture in the book.
13. The Earth will go through a few ice ages and evolution would happen again, when some creepy caveman discovers fire by rubbing two stones together.

Do you want this to be the fate of the world? Don’t even dare to go there! Stop your research immediately!

PS: On the other hand, there will be a lot less pollution, so we won’t die of global warming after all.

It Came From Beneath The Sink!

When I saw the house for the first time, I fell in love with it. A quaint, small, cozy building, it has a nice courtyard with a cute awning, birds chirping on the trees all around the house, not a single honk from traffic and not a footfall to be heard at night. So, I had little hesitation in deciding on it and paid the advance and moved in. My first home away from home. In Delhi.

The first week was great – sitting out in the courtyard’s stillness, blanketed by the heat and sipping on cold beer or hot tea, doing nothing but waking up in the afternoons and watching movies all day and going out for midnight walks seemed like the perfectly natural thing to do. But just like all the horror movies, the terror struck only after the initial few weeks of blissful ignorance.

It started with a few stray houseflies that I swatted away. Then came the bigger, meaner (but benign) black ants. I tried to get rid of them but in vain. They were closely followed by an army of red ants that seemed immortal. I was beginning to go through the denial-but-agonizingly-slow-dawning-of-truth phase that most protagonists in horror movies go through. That was then the rats struck.

Two big, fat bandicoots running amok in the courtyard and the house, and me running in circles behind them with a piece of wood or a shoe or a pressure cooker almost made my weekends. I was about to give up and resign to my fate, when the worms attacked my clothes. The heat and the dampness made a whole load of laundry the perfect breeding ground for a weird kind of big fat white worms who ate through the cloth and made merry. I threw out the whole load of laundry and now, I need to buy new clothes!

Any bright ideas, anyone? I think I should move out…

Where The Hell’s My Paper??

Bah!

I’ve been trying to wake up before 6:30 am for the past one week and catch the newspaper delivery kid and ask him to deliver newspapers to my house. Ignoring the badly constructed previous sentence, each time I woke up either too early or too late. And more frustrating was when a car cleaner from across the street took pity seeing me standing outside my gate each morning and waiting for the elusive newspaper kid and offered his services.

“But I don’t have a car,” I told him.

“Oh, you were standing next to that car each morning, I thought it was yours,” he said, not hiding his disappointment.

“Listen, has the newspaper kid come yet?” I asked him, offering him a cigarette, which he took quite readily.

“Oh yes, yes. He comes at 7:00 am sharp, everyday,” he said puffing away like a man with a minute to live.

I glanced at my watch. It said 7:07. My head still hurt from the four hours of sleep I had had that night after a Harry Potter marathon, which began at 5:00 pm the previous evening and ended at 3:00 in the morning.

“Okay,” I told him, stubbing out my own cigarette. “When he comes tomorrow morning, will you please ask him to start delivering to my house too? It’s that one,” I said, pointing to my gate.

“Sure, sure,” he said between drags. “I will tell him. Are you sure you don’t have a car that I can wash?”

The next day, I woke up at 11:00 in the morning and found that there was no newspaper. Today, I made it a point to wake up at 6:00 am and stand outside my gate like a sentry. I did, after three hours of sleep and constantly reminding myself to stop watching so many movies. I leaned against the gate and watched people walk by with their dogs, wives, husbands, boyfriends, kids, cycles, garbage and newspapers. There was no sign of the newspaper kid. The car cleaner from across the street went about his job as if he didn’t know me and avoided my eyes and my waving hands as if he were blind.

I still don’t have newspaper delivery at my home and I’m too lazy to walk up to the market three roads away to buy one. Energy expenditure is something I abhor.

Decadent as I may sound, I think I’m gonna have to do something drastic or illegal to get this working.

Bah!

The Curtain Creep :)

To put it mildly, my Hindi sucks. When I was twelve, my mum enrolled me in a spoken Hindi class in the next road (in Bangalore… Oh, Bangalore… I miss Bangalore… Mmmmm, Bangalore…), and I did reasonably well there. I gathered a few essentials of the language from the stick-thin teacher who was more content at passing lewd remarks to the girls in the class than teaching me the difference between chattis and chabbis. (To this day, I used to spell the latter as ‘Chubbies’ and thought it was a kind of diaper.)

Anyway, my recent move to Delhi forced me to dream about those horrendous days of Hindi classes and my mind struggles to come up with passable phrases by which I hope to get by. I speak with a funny mix of English, Kannada and English, much to the consternation of the auto drivers and the vegetable vendors – Swalpa doodh kodi, please – being my favorite so far. (Tr: I need some milk.)

Last night was my first Saturday night in Delhi, and I made use of the opportunity to visit the Lajpat Nagar Central Market. After pouring over Google Maps and figuring out the shortest route to the place and confirming with a few people as to what the best bargain would be for an auto ride to that place, I set out at seven in the evening. I was hoping to see a few of the city’s famed beautiful women and get some essential shopping done as well.

After haggling with the auto driver for five rupees in my broken Hindi (I think he thought I was speech-impaired and took pity on me), I reached the Market with no incidents. I gobbled up some road-side junk food, thanked my lucky stars that I was a foodie, and set out to do some shopping. Barely ten minutes into my mission, the Curtain Creep struck havoc in my life.

“Dekhiye Sir, plastic curtains sirf e-sixty rupees wonly sir,” he yelled in my ear and thrust a white plastic sheet in my face. I stopped in my tracks and let out a small scream, for he had startled me. For an instant, I thought someone had draped a sheet over me and were kidnapping me!

“Kya hai, bhaiyya?” I demanded. (What is it, brother?)

“Plastic curtain, sir,” he repeated. He was a thin man with a drooping mustache and I couldn’t see what he was wearing because he had plastic curtains all over him – different colors and designs and lengths. The one in his hand was white with a few black patterns matching the rising sun. It looked ridiculous. He was staring at my face. I knew he could make out I was an outsider. His eyes lit up. “Wonly hundred rupees sir!” he said.

“Huh? You just said sixty!” I said, aghast.

“E-sixty? Nahi, sir. Wonly hundred rupees. Very e-strong, sir!” he said and pulled at the curtain in his hands as if to demonstrate their strength.

“Nahi, bhaiyya. No curtains,” I said and started walking away. But he wouldn’t give up so easily. “E-seventy rupees, sir,” he said. “Aapke liye best bargain, sir!” he said. (Best bargain for you, sir.) I shook my head and looked away, still walking. He followed me for the next twenty minutes, reducing his price by three, four and five rupees. I paid him no heed and people started to stare at me. We must have looked ridiculous. He started chasing me when I started to run. I gave up and turned around and said, “Look, I don’t need the curtain! No curtain, bhaiyya!” And I ducked into a nearby shoe store. That was when he started threatening me.

“Agli baar aaoge tho no bargain!” he screamed, standing in the street. (No bargains for you the next time you come!)

“Agli baar nahi aaonga, bhaiyya,” I said to myself, glad that I got away from the Curtain Creep. (I won’t come here the next time!)

“Baahari raho!” he said and stomped off. (And stay out!)

So, there it was, my first threat in Delhi. It felt so good! Actually, come to think of it, I could’ve made some good use of the curtain, but then, I was forbidden to enter that place. I think I’ll stick to English from now on.

The Move To ‘Dilli’ :)

The monster was hideous. It sprang out from behind the dark orifice in the dimly-lit room and clawed at me, threw balls of fire at me and finally, drove my health to below zero and killed me. ‘Game Over’ was the message I got before being redirected to the main menu. I’d been playing Doom 3 for well over an hour before I was killed. I sat there staring at the blank screen and wondered what I was doing here in Delhi. In a whirlwind decision, I threw my life out of gear and followed my heart to Delhi – with the hope and anticipation of something magical. And a lot of confidence.

Packing up my life in Bangalore in two suitcases wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Not many people knew about it. I didn’t know about the move for sure until the very last minute, and as the train screamed and chugged along, leaving Bangalore behind, I knew for sure that I was on my way. I may never see my hometown again. I may never see my country again after this year. For all that’s in store for me, I’m sure it’ll be worth it. Sometimes, the heart needs to decide rather than the brain.

So, that’s how it was, and those were the thoughts in my head as I stared at the blank screen of the computer, sitting in a small, cozy one-room apartment in the South of Delhi, the sweat pouring out like rivulets from every pore of my body and the over-sized cooler trying it’s best to beat the stifling blanket of heat.

I am in Delhi. Starting a career afresh is not that hard if you know what you want to do. For those who know me, I’m still going to be a PR guy, but I’m also going to be something much more. Every night, I open my wordpress editor and think of words to write. Nothing comes to mind that seems remotely interesting. Today, I made up my mind. I am going to rename myself something really strange if I let this blog die and God’s my witness.

A cold shower’s calling me now. It feels so good to write again.

Wanna Beat The Recession? Quit Your Job!

I’m back! I’m alive! And I quit my job!

Yay! So, here’s what’s been happening in my life so far:

1. I quit my job.
2. I’m thinking of doing something to sustain my existence.
3. Been working 80 hours a week with no sleep on some fascinating new projects.
4. I’m thinking of starting a new blog in addition to this one.
5. I have been partying majorly.

Life’s been good. No complaints. I’m back and I quit my job!

This is perhaps the best way to combat the recession and all that the recession brings – work pressures, tensions, ridiculous deadlines and high blood pressure. Not that my job had any of these – on the contrary, we did quite well in the slump. I just thought that my time was due.

I’m back to being a regular blogger now. I’ve received death threats, mainly from Alice, who wants me to start writing something again. So, here I am!

Yeah, Yeah… I Know!

I know, I know… I’m dead. That’s why I’m not updating this space and haven’t been available online and haven’t done much online of late. I died in my sleep during a dream in which I was dying in my sleep.

However, I have the power of reincarnation (what with me being God and all). So, if you’re patient enough, you might see me resurrect myself soon. In the meantime, if you happen to glance out of your window and see someone running naked, then it’s probably me.

Play safe! I’ll be back!

The Stupidity Index

Over time, we have evolved into something resembling a cross between an upright chimp and a hairy stink ball. I’m not kidding. Have you counted the number of hairs on your body lately? You’ll be astonished.

Anyway, when Charles Darwin wrote the ‘Origin Of species,’ he overlooked one major fact – The Stupidity Index. Scientists at the MirrorCracked Labs, who were tragically killed in a laboratory experiment a few months ago, were working on the concept in inborn intelligence. (This is the reason the MirrorCracked Labs’ blog has been neglected. I lost seven of the most reputed scientists in a freak accident, when they were testing the inflammatory properties of compressed natural gas.)

During the fire, all the research data was lost and the entire lab complex was gutted. While sifting through the debris, I found a half-burnt paper titled ‘The Stupidity Index,’ which explained why every single human being alive today is as stupid as a doorknob. People who don’t agree to this fact are living in denial.

Excerpts from the paper:

[...] We are all born with a Stupidity Index of 3. The scale is from 0 to 5, where 0 is the least stupid and 5 is the most stupid. The scale is explained thus:

I am at 4. What about you? Assess yourself. You’ll be surprised to know where you stand. I apologize for the quality of the image. The fire nearly destroyed this too.

PS: Please observe a moment’s silence for the tragic deaths of the scientists of the MirrorCracked Labs. And go get drunk. They’d like that.