"Size 0" Syndrome

Nowadays a grotesque epidemic has struck the female population of our country. With the histrionic publicity of figure reduction of an almost megalomaniac Bollywood heroine, the “size 0” syndrome has spread like wild fire amongst the girls, across the country.

Girls and ladies across the country are busy making out time out of their busy schedule, which are mostly filled with verbiage sessions and beauty treatments, to rush to gymnasiums. Nowadays, the ladies are least pecuniarily concerned when it comes to shopping or maintaining their aphrodisiac figures.

Ladies’ gym is a curious place to visit. It manifests such a wide variety of curios that can put a connoisseur (who is ) visiting Louvre, to shame. If anyhow you happen to browse through a gym’s brochure, you will notice three prominent features mentioned there.

First one being the “Hall of Mirror”. This feature is just like the hall of mirror we usually see in entertainment parks, just that here it is used in a mendacious manner. If you are fat, the trainer will make you stand before a mirror that will emaciate your reflection.

Second feature is “Aerobics”. It happened so, at the advent of this “size 0” epidemic, few cognoscenti from this field met and discussed that if you are charging 200 to 500 bucks for something, it would be ignonimous to call it “Jumping and Punching”. So to make it mellificious and to make it the “in” thing of the haute coutre , they decided to call it “Aerobics”.

Third feature being “Stem Bath”. For taking steam bath you are required to sit in a room where steam will be emitted. Girls being credulous, believe that they will emerge with immaculated skin from that chamber, but once you are inside it, you get the actual feeling of Hitler’s gas chambers. This chamber gives an odious feeling of how the vegetables feel when we put them in a pressure cooker over a burning stove.

The gym is a place where you get to meet a variety of characters. You will meet solicitious girls who conjure a feeling of contrition at the thought of eating junk food. There are others who react in such a manner at e weight loss of less than quarter of a pound, that their weight reduction deserves a salvo. These ladies act in an omniscient manner conveying quixotic advices with slapstick alacrity and a dash of pleonasm.

The trainers at gym sleight at every other occasion and expertly use the art of equivocation for telling the opprobrious exercising ladies about the increase in their body weights.

If there happen to be a feminine plebiscite in our country, then one law I am sure is going to be enforced- right to go to gym whether or not its financially feasible.

If................

In ethics class so many years ago

Our teacher asked this question every fall:

If there were a fire in a museum

Which would you save, a Rembrandt painting

Or an old woman who had’nt many

Years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs

Caring little for picture or old age

We’d opt one year for life, the next for art

And always half-heartedly. Sometimes

The woman borrowed my grand-mother’s face

Leaving her usual kitchen to wander

Some drafty, half-imagined museum.

One year, feeling clever, I replied

Why not let the woman decide herself?

Linda, the teacher would report, eschews

The burdens of responsibility.

This fall in a real museum I stand

Before a real Rembrandt, old woman,

Or nearly so, myself. The colors

Within this frame are darker than autumn,

Darker ever than winter – the browns of earth,

Though earth’s most radiant elements burn

Through the canvas. I know now that woman

And painting and season are almost one

And all beyond saving by children.

Poet-Anonymous

Lessons for the Lesser Mortals

“If music be the food of love, play on”. Simple idea, but no so simple grammar: why “if music be ” Rather than “is” ? The short answer is that “be” here is an old fashioned use of the subjunctive mood, where we today would use the indicative “is”. A longer answer is that this simple idea has landed us in two tricky quagmires of English grammar, the subjunctive and the conditional sentence. A reader’s email dropped me in them last week, asking whether he should write “if I was” or “if I were”. Here are some guidelines to firm ground.

The conditional looks simple. “If I were a rich man… (the condition), I’d … (the result).” But it has traps. You meet a sentence like “If Mountbatten esteemed Nehru, he esteemed himself more.” This is’nt a conditional at all : the last viceroy’s self admiration did not depend on his view of Nehru. In fact, it’s a pretentious imitation of French. Shun it.

Beware of such shortened conditionals as “should I discover that …”, “were I smarter …” or “had I known…” . All these substitutes for ‘if’ are idiomatic, but all others smell a bit of the past, especially in speech. And not even poets should imitate 17^th century Andrew Marvell’s plea to his mistress – “Had we put world enough, and time, this coyness, Lady were no crime” , where ‘had’ simply means “if we possessed”. Yeats did it in “Had I the heaven’s embroidered clothes”, but we lesser mortals should steer clear.

As for the subjunctive, few of us use it and often not even grammarians can tell whether it’s being used or not. That’s because in every verb except “to be”, where it substitutes “be” for the indicative “am”, “is” and “are” – the two moods are identical, except in the third person singular : in place of “I go”, “he goes”, “we/you/they go” , the subjunctive uses “I/we/he/you/they go” all the way through. A famous passage in 1611 translation of the Bible has St. Paul writing : “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels …”. Is that “speak” indicative or (more likely, in high flown English in 1611) subjunctive? No one can be sure.

Still, where the two can be told apart, should you use the subjunctive? Not in conditional sentences. “If music be the food of love” is fine for Shakespeare, but “if the bus leave on time (instead of leaves)” would sound as affected in today’s Calcutta as it is improbable.

Yet every rule has its exception, the one raised by that reader’s email. In phrases like “If I were wise” or “If I were you”, that “were” is a bit of the subjunctive. It’s bizarre : it refers to the present , not as one might expect, the past, and it always implies that the condition is unmet. But it is definitely preferable to “if he was wise” or “if I was you”.Both forms are acceptable (and with any other verb than “to be” you don’t have a choice); but “were” is better than “was”.

P.S. :- This is an excerpt taken from Telegraph, composed by Steph Hugh Jones.

The Happy Prince

Few days back, Prince William was in the limelight – not for some heroic deed but for a (according to me) zany episode of buffoonery that he committed – as a means of his chauvinist attitude, he landed a militia helicopter in the backyard of his girlfriend’s mansion. What would this chimerical attitude of this gentleman of aristocratic upbringing imply? What kind of role model does Prince William present himself as to the Gen X? Is it not an act of chicanery on his part to dabble with national property? But who cares? After all he is a prince.

Nowadays, the definition of aristocracy has wizened to the extent that in the name of Kings and Princes – what is left is a herd of yokels whose cupidity and avarice has made them materialistic zealots, who are busy wrenching money out of their own people to quench their thirst.

It would be quite churlish on my part to badger the image of a PRINCE by presenting examples of charlatans such as Prince William and Prince Gyanendra (of Nepal).

Shri Ram and Buddha are princes of yore. Don’t we have such heroes in Kalyug? Surely there’s some respite to the prevailing jungle raj. Prince Jigyel Ugyen Wang Chuck of Bhutan is one such example. This young prince, when he was aged 19, left the luxuries of Oxford to join one of the militia groups of upper Himalayas to protect his country from intruders from the Northern Terrains. Nowadays, at the age of 24, he is accosted by political and social groups from all over the world to speak in conferences. He gave a lecture in the Asiatic society (UK) emphasizing on the revival of art and culture. This gentleman is a follower of Buddha and is a staunch believer in liberation theology and is an internationalist. He is the only person in the present political scenario of decoy and counterfeit who can save is country from a gradual decadence or a debacle. I have a genuine deference towards his actions and speeches. I would like to suggest novices like Rahul Gandhi to take a leaf out of his life before sitting on the Prime Minister’s throne.

With Love to Mrs Clinton

The two big issues faced by the super Sam are racial discrimination of “Blacks” in the society and the inequality of status of women in the so-called male-dominated society.

The latter problem I presume, is rather poised to become bolsterous issue following Mrs Hillary Clinton’s act of abnegation from the Presidential electoral polls. The issue raised by her during the electoral campaigns seems quite an aberrant one provided the fact that the status of women in United States of America as compared to the Arab countries and the Third World countries is quite high.

The freedom regarding speech, freedom to work, to study and freedom for all other social amenities essential to life that the Western women are accoutred with is a strike contrast to the women of Mid-West Asia and other third world countries whose women are supposed to spend a major part of their lives in the aviary of an abominable institution of marriage.

These women are badgered by their obstinate husbands and in-laws. Day-in and day-out they have to brook the cathartic and acrimonious nature of their in-laws without being allowed to speak a word against the transgressors. My suggestion to Mrs Clinton is she should descend upon her callous cavalcade in one of these households so as to justify the actual meaning of Misogyny.

For the last few months, she had been openly executing her bigotry oratory. She attacked her opponents in highly acrimonious terms, all the time, complacently relying upon one notion-misogyny. Her followers too, abjured their rights to vote as she quitted the presidential polls- commiserating it as a sign against misogyny. But for a split second, if these reverend ladies would spare a fragment of their cerebration and divert their uncanny grey-cells on the actuarial surveys produced by WHO- they will discover that theirs’ is the country with the highest female literacy rate and highest female workmanship in the service industries, thus reducing these advocates of misogyny to the mere strata of buccaneers who would wear any disguise for fulfilling their avarice.

"Inter"VocaboPolitics

The present US presidential campaigns and the Indo-US Nuclear deal has made the last days of Bush regime in US look like an interim. The whole world is worried about who is going to hold the reins next but no attention is being paid to the current jockey.

Interim implies the intervening time. Tracing back to the history of the word ‘interim’- it stands for the truce pending a General council between German Protestants and the Papacy in 16^th Century. But in the current scenario the truce between the Democrats and the Republicans has given rise to an interregnum, interestingly, not in the host country where the elections are being held but among the sycophants of the US.

Ultimately in the recent interlude of the electoral pantomime, one of the contenders have decided against being internecine and instead has cleverly intercalated herself as an internuncio, so that even after the Black King will be crowned she can still interstate her position as an internationalist.

So enjoy the play till it goes on.

Life in a Metro

This post is not a review of the Bollywood film, in fact through this I would like to convey my experiences of daily life in a Metropolis.

A general idea that people have in their minds about the life in a metro is the life goes on a fast-track with a lot of frenzies. I being brought up in a small sleepy town had this idea infused in my mind that life in a big city like Kolkata is so fast that people rarely get to see their children. But after spending the four most formative years of life in this metro I found it is quite the contrary, maybe this is because of the fact that I am/was a student and I stayed with a family that found reasons for gathering and rejoice, no matter however small the occasion is. But that is how most of the people here are like. Be it India’s victory against a paltry team like Bangladesh or be it Big B’s next block-buster, their alacrity for celebrations is beyond any normal person’s imagination. A celebration need not be a huge party in a multi-star hotel. It is a small gathering in a household with some good home cooked food (Bengalis have a flair for good food) and a never-ending “adda “ session.

Bongs are like this. Bong is a newly coined term for Bengalis. It stands for those who are characterized by their typical chauvinist attitude teamed with an indolent attitude towards their profession.

Cricket, football and politics (both national and state level) are what they virtually thrive on. A high-quality tape-recorder would accept defeat when compared to Bongs, because even a tape-recorder has to stop at the moment when the cassette is over but a Bong would go on with his (mostly) enigmatic views on topics that range from nation’s security, to oil prices, to despising present educational system, to the brand of chappals that should be worn during rainy seasons. Sometimes they will actually make you wonder what would have happened to the country had these Bongs and their precious comments not existed. These beguiling discussions emanate irrespective of place and time or the persons who are participating in them. Wherever more than one Bong is juxtaposed- be it in bus, in train, in auto or even waiting in queue outside a doctor’s chamber, these discussions are bound to creep in.

The discussions are unique in themselves. They are started with a topic which is perversely changed in due course of time by the speaker(s) when no one finds any point to show-off their punditry on the subject or when there happens to be more dissidents on the subject than there should usually be. In the end all these discussions take a preposterous turn when the speakers become utterly discordant.

Bongs’ allegiance for the political party they vote for is something that can be rarely seen in any other state. Whether it is to commiserate for the victims of the recent industrialization fiasco or to exhilarate the wrong done by BCCI on their very own “Dada”, they have only one way to show their disgust- prodigous strike (mostly headed by Mamta “didi” Banerjee). This city is governed by a set of polito who are busy in sardonically diatrinbing the opposition for the “Bandh”s and the opposition busies itself in criticizing the ruling party for its insensate polity, thus giving rise to a political pantomime.

All these and so many other issues that the aboriginal Bongs fathom to live with, yet they are cheeriest people I have ever come across who carry an undefined determination in their heart.

Otherwise how would you describe the actions of a desparate lady picking bricks from the street for building her house.

All this along with the blatant and plangent noise of the traffic which no other Calcuttan can parry makes life in the Metro all the more foxy and exciting.