Month: September 2010

I was in Manipal to give a TEDx Talk recently. Find more details about it here. The experience was exhilarating to say the least.

It all started with an innocent little mail in my inbox one day. It read:

Dear Sir,

We invite you to speak at TEDx Manipal to be held on 21st September, 2010. Please find attached the Speaker Invitation package, also let us know if you have any queries.

With your brand of humor and satire, we think you will be an amazing last minute addition to our event.

We first wanted to get Russel Peters, then Papa CJ, and then we tried Vir Das and when all three refused to move their ass, we are trying to get you to speak at TEDx Manipal.

Please don’t consider this as a formal invite yet. This is just a heads up for you – in case Rahul Roshan of fakingnews.com also refuses citing a busy schedule.

We will get back to you once Mr Rahul refuses. Looking forward to having you on board our esteemed panel.

Your sincerely,
Siddharth (I could reveal his full name, but don’t want my readers issuing a fatwa against him)

I read the mail and was mighty impressed with myself. I walked up to the mirror and said “Good Morning, TEDx Manipal!” a couple of times.

My wife knitted her brows and asked me, “So, what is the new gig? What is this new Manipal thing?”

“I am going to Manipal!”

“You have me, our daughter and your in-laws to feed…who will bring home the proverbial bacon. Besides, you are too old for college.” It was Rekha speaking …always worried about the long term security & stability.

I said: “Aree bhaagwaan, I might be giving a TEDx Talk there. Aren’t you excited?”

“Organizers should never invite for a speaking session based on the written word…they are going to repent their decision,” Rekha replied before walking into the kitchen.

That’s the good thing with my wife, she always finds out innovative methods of motivating me.

After a few days, I got another mail from Siddharth:

Dear Sir/Madam (just in case you have undergone a sex change in the interim),

Mr Rahul Roshan of fakingnews.com is playing hard to get. While we can sense that he is faking it…as he does with all of his news items….we can’t do much about it. Under the new circumstances, we invite you to be a speaker at TEDx Manipal.

We are handling the travel expenses of all of the TEDx speakers, but making an exception in your case since you are an exceptional speaker. You can book your own travel and be there in time for your Tedx Talk. Please remember to book your return tickets for the same day you arrive in Manipal, for we are making an exception of you when it comes to accommodation as well.

**If Rahul Roshan of fakingnews.com stops faking it in the last minute, we might cancel your talk but will give you the permission to sit in the audience as a guest attendee.

Looking forward to hearing your talk if Mr Roshan doesn’t come on board.

Your sincerely,
Siddharth

Jokes apart, my tickets were finally booked and sent across to me. I was to travel with Roshan of fakingnews.com from Delhi to Manipal. If you have never traveled from Delhi to Manipal, let me tell you that it is an arduous journey. One takes a flight from Delhi to Mumbai or Bangalore, then takes a flight from Mumbai or Bangalore to Mangalore…and if your flight doesn’t fall into the valley immediately after the runway at the Mangalore airport, you drive down in a cab to reach Manipal.

On the way to Manipal, while Rahul was sitting next to me…I was snoring away to glory. Though Rahul doesn’t admit it…I know for sure that my snoring inside the aeroplane inspired him to write a blog post for fakingnew.com….titled: Railways passengers to be fined for farting and snoring inside coaches). To ensure I didn’t come to know of it, he did three things…he back dated the post to Feb 2010, he changed the location from an aeroplane to a train and then….added farting as a nuisance too. What cheeky bugger, this Rahul!

Anyway, we were put up at a hotel called Orange Suites in Udupi. Just in case you didn’t know Udupi is a small town right next to Manipal.

On day one, I met up with few of the other speakers like Rashmi Bansal, Prof Prabhat Ranjan, Nakul Shenoy, Somen Dawn, and Prakash Shesh for dinner.

The problem with spending time with intelligent people is that one has to act like an intelligent guy. Here are some of the statements I used at regular intervals to act like an intelligent guy:

They definitely could have done better with the resources available

This is just not acceptable considering the booming economy

I have my own thoughts on this, but I would prefer to reserve it for later

I tend to disagree there

Aung San Suu Kyi should be released immediately

Having successfully faked my intelligence, I finished my dinner in peace.

The next day, we were at Hotel Valley View, the venue of TEDx Manipal…and I was to be the second speaker. The problem with being one of the initial speakers is that you know that the audience hasn’t exhausted its tomatoes & potatoes. I took the risk, and agreed to be the second speaker.

So, at 10.30 a.m. on 21st September 2010…I was standing in front of an audience of 400-450 students holding a mike in hand. Some famous guy had said that at various times in your life your whole life will flash in front of you. What he didn’t say was that it could flash in front of you even when you were standing in front of 400-450 students who looked up to you to deliver the best TEDx Talk ever.

“No, I am not shivering!”

Yes, those were the first lines I managed to utter. The crowd laughed…they thought it was part of the planned speech. My knees started knocking…the crowd thought it was planned as well and started clapping. The mike slipped from in between my sweaty fingers…the student audience clapped again.

I don’t know how the next 18 minutes went…I do remember that everything was dark around me (but my eyes were wide open) and I was hearing students laughing and clapping in between. My speech was supposed to be on what corporate are all about – and I vaguely remember that it was supposed to be funny.

After 18 minutes of talking, I remember saying “Thank You!”….and the moment I said that…I started breathing again. And when the MC got the mike from my hand and said, “Thank you Mr Jamshed for the so-so speech,” I sighed and was happy that the worst was over. To top it, I had survived.

Before I left the stage, I looked around to see what the students had thrown at me. There were quite a few items: 7 tomatoes, 4 cauliflowers, one completed answer sheet of the Radio Electronics exam, 2 eggs, one engineering book titled ‘Instrument Engineer’s Handbook’ authored by Bela Liptak & one jackfruit.

Many speakers came and went after that…but my thoughts were only on one thing. Will the TEDx Manipal organizers post the video on the web? Unfortunately, the answer was yes…so I came up with my plan to sabotage the video.

I walked up to the video grapher and said: “How much are these videos worth?”

“In cash or kind?” The videographer sure knew his Economics.

We Rajans aren’t that bad with Economics either, so I replied: “In cash. If I can buy you in cash…it is as good as me buying you in kind.”

“Yeah, maybe. But what do you really want?” The videographer leaned over to see the stage. Perhaps, he didn’t want to miss out the antics of the last speaker – Mind Reader Nakul Shenoy.

“How much will it cost me to buy you? I want you to tell TEDx Manipal organizers that the videos didn’t get recorded at all.” I was a hard bargainer and I knew the price I was willing to pay.

“Hmm…can’t really put a price to it,” he said and continued to decipher Nakul Shenoy’s antics on stage.

“Why so? Don’t you have needs? A new TV maybe…a new sofa?” I insisted.

After a long discussion (mostly one sided) I came to know that videographers are difficult to buy. They can be rented…but not bought.

It has been three days since, and we are all back to our respective lives.

But I have a few things up my sleeve – like organizing an accident when the videographer goes to the Manipal Institute of Technology to deliver the videos – but till then, I live in the fear that soon the video will be up and yours sincerely will be exposed.

*BTW, I did give two autographs after my speech was over. I just wish, it wasn’t stage managed by the organizers to make me feel happy.

I will never forget how I tasted liquor for the first time.

The biology teacher (whom I had a crush on, and thus went on to score 87% in XII so as to impress her) informed us that the next day we will be dissecting frogs and one of us had to volunteer to bring in a spoon-full of alcohol for the whole class. This apparently was to anesthetize the frogs before we went about dissecting them.

Being the one that wanted to impress her most, I volunteered saying there was a lot of alcohol in my house and I could bring some. The next day, I washed a bottle of Glycodin cough syrup and walked up to my father: “Pa, my biology teacher has asked me to get some rum.”

“Rum? Why, can`t she buy her own if she wants to drink?”

“No pa, this is for the frogs.”

“Frogs? Since when have the frogs started drinking?”

“No pa, we are dissecting the frogs so we needed alcohol.”

“Like the sewage cleaners? Who usually get drunk before starting work because of the stench involved in cleaning a septic tank?”

“No pa…this isn`t for the students but for the frogs. We want to anesthetize them before dissecting them. So, that they don`t feel the pain.”

“Ohh ok. Take some from the Old Monk bottle that`s already open.”

After his permission was obtained, I filled up the Glycodin cough syrup bottle. The next day when I walked into the school I felt as the most powerful man in school – I felt I was the principal.

The dissection went on smoothly, except for that one bhramin guy who decided his religion was more important that scoring marks in biology.

After the school was over that day, I approached my classmates. “Guys, what do you think…shouldn`t we all take a sip each?”

For once, the decision was unanimous. All of the 16 boys wanted to drink, but when we said that drinking will happen in the abandoned old school building, the three girls who had wanted to drink dropped out. Who cared, any way.

We all ran to the old school building and congregated in the abandoned men`s toilet. It could comfortably hold six people….but we were sixteen and NOT complaining. Before we even opened the cough syrup bottle, we were already high from the stench emanating from abandoned washroom. I think they stopped cleaning the washrooms six months before they were abandoned.

After about five minutes all 16 of us stumbled out of the abandoned men`s toilets ….and I have to admit that all were wasted. Nine of 16 the guys who started drinking that day are still drinking – 19 years later.

After the baptism had happened, I was a regular. My father didn`t know but we both used to share the same bottle. When I thought that the chances of getting caught were high…I would add water to the Old Monk rum bottle.

Till I got a job and moved out of the house, my father didn`t realize that I had been drinking from his bottle. Though, he had started complaining that Mohan Meakin, the makers of Old Monk rum, had stopped focusing on quality. I didn`t have the heart to tell him that it wasn`t Mohan Meakin Breweries fault.

Till my father passed away in 2006, he believed that Mohan Meakin went thro` a bad patch of four years when their quality dipped – and he thought it could have been due to a change in management.

When I joined The New Indian Express, I met a dude called Krishna Kumar. We became drinking buddies. Our drinking was once a week – on Saturdays. If we didn`t have 17 rupees each, we couldn`t go for a drink that week – and there were many occasions when we couldn`t. The Infographic below explains what this Rs 17 were spent on:

Back then, I was staying at Ambal Lodge in Cross Cut Road in Coimbatore and Krishna was staying in Ramanathapuram (near our office)…and depending on where we were drinking, we would piss in front of the respective land lord`s house. The fact that we would roam around the streets drunk on two pegs of Old Monk till 10.30 p.m. before pissing ensured that we never got caught. Phew! Those were the days.

After two years in Coimbatore, I moved to Chennai in search of greener pastures. Now I had more money, and also two credit cards to flaunt – Standard Charted & ICICI Credit cards.

In the early 2000s, there was a chain of Dhanalaskhmi Wines in Chennai that we would frequent. Now my drinking partners were my friends Dennis & Madan. Since I had enough money (and the credit cards), I could afford to get drunk on beers – in case you don`t know…it takes more money to get drunk on beer.

When Dhanalaskshmi Wines closed down, we shifted to Peninsular Bar in T Nagar, Chennai. Here is where I learnt the art of swiping my credit card without feeling guilty. The more I got drunk, the more I swiped my credit cards for my drunk friends. By the time I was ready to get married, I had 1.7 lakhs out-standing on my credit card….all accumulated by drinking.

Now, we didn`t do daring acts after getting drunk….though, once in a while we would walk up to the Marina beach and pee in the waters (Note: Don`t blame me for the water in the Marina beach being salty…it was salty even before we peed in it).

With time, I shifted to Gurgaon for even greener pastures. Now, I earn quite a bit and can afford Single Malts…but my drinking sessions aren`t as exciting as they used to be. I spend family time with the friends I really care about…and drinking has become a means to socialize & build contacts. The topics of discussion are almost always negative & leave a bad taste in the mouth – which even the best of beers can`t wash away.

In fact, I wouldn`t be surprised if after I leave a drinking session, some of the folks I was drinking with point at me and say: “What an ass!”

To tell you the truth, after each drinking session I end up thinking: “Not as much fun as the time when I only had Rs 17 in my pocket!”