7 Ways To Make a Fool Out Of Yourself In Chennai

If you are one of those people who derive masochistic pleasure in being humiliated in public, Chennai is the perfect place for you. Here are some ways to get high on embarrassment like never before! Warning: you have to be new to this city.




1. Try to negotiate auto fare in front of a whole group of auto annas. The great Indian education system would not have been able to humiliate you as much in 20 years as these guys do in 5 minutes.


2. Go to a Saravanna bhavan or a Hot Chips and ask for a 'Cheese Masala dosa' or 'Schezwan Dosa'! The waiter’s dirty looks will make you wonder if you accidently asked for his great grandmother's ashes.


3. Get a Citibank credit card and tell people about it. It is equivalent to saying; I gave Rs.100 to an autowala let him drive off to bring change. You have been taken for a ride!


4. Show up at a multiplex on a weekend and ask for tickets at the ticket counter!(In Chennai they should have common counters for tickets and popcorn. That way the counters will have something to sell on weekends.)


5. Try to get the bus conductor to return your change by talking to him in Hindi/English. You won't get change. What you get instead is never worth the change.


6. Go to a liquor shop and ask for a bottle of Kingfisher. Just try! You’ll come back home with a bruised ego and a bottle of ‘Bullet Beer’.


7. Call up people in other cities and tell them you have awesome plans for the weekend! Wait a few minutes. By the time their laughter subsides, you will feel that acute pang of embarrassment!

Face the Book

Considering the amount of time we spend on Facebook, it is not surprising that we leave traces of our personality online. Here are some tips and techniques that can be used to judge a person by his Facebook account.

Seven Facebook Thumbrules

1.  Any girl who puts up Katrina Kaif’s photo as her own display picture on facebook is no Katrina Kaif!

2.  The quality of a person’s social life is directly proportional to the amount of activity on his wall. If you can generate a hundred ‘likes’ by simply posting a smiley, you’re a rock star. If you need witty quotes and hilarious videos to generate the ‘likes’ you’re still doing fine. If you posted a picture with your cute little nephew/niece’s or declared “Just skydived out of a plane and landed on the Taj Mahal” and still generated two ‘likes’ and a comment which says “Long time no see” then you really need to start paying people to be your friends!

3.  Any change on facebook will be vehemently opposed! There will be communities like “A million members here and facebook will roll back the changes”. People will put up angry status updates. This will continue till the next change when people will suddenly pretend to love the old change. By now every feature of facebook has been opposed. It is now a collection of things we once detested! Facebook developers are currently working read hard to come up with the next despicable thing for the world!

4.  If Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’ is to be believed, an average person knows about 150 people. This is about the number of people he/she can have a strong social relationship with. Therefore subtract 150 from the number of friends a person has on facebook to come up with a factor called “Fake Friend Factor”. FFF gives you a good idea of how pretentious/diplomatic a person is. Upto 500 FFF is a reasonably fake person. If you have an FFF of over 2000, you’re probably an actor. Beware of people with FFF greater than 700. They could be con artists!

5.  Being tagged in photos is a great joy. However 2 out of 3 photos you are tagged in would be a part of an application such as “My sweetest cuddliest friends” or “BiRtHdAy CaLeNdAr!” or “Winnie the Pooh’s Coochi coos!” or a B school event poster that one of your friends is trying to promote.

6.  Six out of 10 people are incapable of spotting a spam link even if the link says “Go ahead, click on it, this is not a virus, this is a very good link which will transform your PC into a mixer-grinder!”

7.  Nine out of 10 status updates on facebook are reposted. “Repost this if you have the best dog in the world!”. “Repost this if you are computer literate enough to repost”. Recycled jokes from Chuck Norris to Rajnikant to Anna Hazare, from Bill Clinton to Tiger Woods, from George Bush to Sonia Gandhi. Old and clichéd sayings (Light travels faster than sound that why people appear brighter blah blah blah yawn!). Super emotional (almost gay) verses about friendship and love. Therefore please repost the link to this blog to continue the glorious facebook tradition!

Skill Set Extraordinaire

MBA teaches you various skills of great use in the real and the virtual world. I have previously shared some useful tips about an extremely valuable skill in a post. This post goes far beyond that skill and tries to make your life seem less miserable in an MBA program. In fact these skills make B School life very comfortable for a lot of people I know.


Seven Skills an MBA Student Must Have


1. The Central Tags: An MBA course is likely to ruin your social existence beyond recognition. Offline, this situation may be painful, but it need not appear so on your networking sites. Learn the art of pushing through the crowd to be able to score the central position in every photograph being clicked. Parties are often remembered (only) by the photographs taken of them. The party would appear to be revolving around you and you would appear to be having ‘A Blast!’ Tip: Not using a deodorant and dancing to real fast numbers helps secure that coveted position! You can always photoshop the surrounding disgusted faces later.


2. No Shame No Shame: This is what Rocky Balboa would be screaming had he been an MBA student. A true MBA student has the audacity of calling an assignment for which he didn’t even think of moving a muscle, his own, and happily claims marks for it. He leaves his project work to some guy in the group and keeps himself occupied with spamming social networking sited while the other fellow burns dawn oil and yet has the guts to look into the toiling fellow’s eyes in the morning and ask him whether he has finished the assignment and if he could explain it briefly.


3. Spontaneity in PPT: The art of presenting slides that one hasn’t prepared, or gone through, or even bothered to look at. Skip any lines that you don’t understand and explain every word that you do. You may not be able be make the effort of the person who made those slides, worthwhile, but you may yet be able to save your face and that of your group. If you can’t figure something in those slides, ask the audience in the name of an ‘interactive session’.


4. Multi-slacking: The skill of being able to watch a movie, listening to a song that your roommate is playing, constantly keeping an eye out for any ‘likes’ to your latest comment on facebook, talking to the guy who came in to borrow money from you and forwarding a text message, at the same time! It helps you be extremely entertained, particularly before a test.


5. Team Work: Understanding that teamwork is a strategy which helps the mediocre benefit from competent people. It is about division of rewards without division of labour. Since most MBAs are Mediocre But Arrogant, it is in their best interest to incessantly promote teamwork. So don’t even draft a mail without consulting your TEAM.


6. Statistics and Quantitative Techniques: You should be able to forget all your payables and remember your receivables and also work out the dismal possibility of actually receiving them. You should be able to calculate the cost/benefit of every atom of work that needs to be done before you do it (or don’t). You should be able to compute your popularity index before you try to gain favours from others which you don’t intend to return. You should be able to quantify all favours you grant to people, and multiply them with the largest possible factors. “When you owe people money, they remember your name.” says a friend who is perpetually in debt. He somehow always manages to calculate and reduce his odds of being thrashed! Calculations help your basic survival!


7. Most important skill: The ability to survive the great people at MBA who are bursting with above skills. Sarcasm helps!

The Rejection Seat

Being rejected by a lady is like being hit by an exploding bullet. Even if the wound heals, the shrapnel still remains embedded in you. This post is a tribute to all my brave friends who have faced bullet after bullet with honour and have in turn, given me the courage face the fire (a significant number of times!). Here is a collection of some rather great rejection lines that have been thrown at me and my friends. They are as painful as they are true. We have had numerous post-mortem sessions trying to fathom what exactly the girls were thinking when they shot us in the heart, (I have put their thoughts in brackets.) and what they gained out of it. All we gained were the following scars.


 Seven Painful Rejections You May Have Faced


 1. “I never thought of you that way.” (Let me see, I have thought of you as a free transporter, assignment finisher, food sponsor, concert tickets arranger, agony aunt and yeah, bodyguard! Have I ever thought of you as a boy? Ummmmm.... nope! Sowie!)


 2. “My career comes first!” (Ooh cool that’s a nice nick name I’ve come up with for that super good looking senior: Career Kutcher! I’m awesome!)


 3. “Look, it’s nothing personal but I only date good looking guys.” (See how subtly I put that across? Am I a sweetheart or what?)


 4. “I’m just not ready for a relationship right now.” (I have to go shopping and then get a haircut damn-it!)


 5. “You are one of my closest friends and I can’t risk our friendship.” (Hey wait, let me keep him on a standby while I wait for my price charming! Let’s give him some hope.) “But I never want to lose you!”


 6. “It is against my religion!” (Ewww, you dog food!)


 7.  “Do I know you?” (Oooooooooooh, shiny!!)

The Seventh Post

It has been 4 months since I started blogging. Not much has changed since. People, as they did before, still get surprised that I can write. “Yes I can write.” I tell them with the proud grin of a four year old. In the last six posts I have received as much appreciation as criticism. I also found some genuine compliments like “Dude that’s actually good!” a little disconcerting. Most of all, the blog managed to get 700+ hits which are about a hundred times the number of hits I had expected! It has been a great experience and I thank you all for the support and encouragement.


Seven Things I Learnt by Blogging


1. A blogger’s life revolves around the ‘number of hits’ on his blog. A blogger would do anything from spamming on Facebook communities to commenting on popular blogs to secretly using other people’s computers to hit the blog a few times (since your own visits to the site are not counted) in order to increase the number of hits. I even summon my Orkut account from the dead, to help me get a few hits. (Warning: If you come across my blog link on the website of a ‘performance-enhancement drugs’ company, it is pure coincidence. I did NOT promise to buy their products if they got me a few hundred hits!)


2. Every blog should have a theme. I realised this after my blog got dropped from a blogging contest in favour of a blog about the different sizes and shapes of turds. If you have nothing to say when people ask you what you write about and you say “Everything!” people usually think you’re another crappy poet or the guy who puts up nauseatingly emotional quotes on Facebook that get a hundred ‘likes’ from girls. From this point on, the theme of my blog is HEPTA-MICRO-SOCIO-ECONOMICS.


3. More trading happens in the blogging world than in a stock market. Everything here is quid pro quo. You read mine, I read yours. I’ve had to read 700 different blogs to be able to get the 700 hits on mine!


4. I desperately need to reduce the length of my blogs which has been growing exponentially since the first one. I have had to change my tagline from “Short but not sweet” to “About Everything”. I have started meeting people who tell me they could find time to read only a portion of my latest post. And I would have conveniently ignored these signs, had a close friend in his very honest opinion about the length of my blog, not said “Increasing? I though the length of your posts was decreasing and that is why you started publishing seven posts together!”


5. Having a blog has no awe value whatsoever. Not even a 6 year old thinks it is amazing anymore. The 6 year old probably has a blog more popular than yours. Saying that you have a guitar or a 12 megapixel camera is more impressive even if you don’t know how to properly hold either. Saying “Have you read my blog?” evokes the same response in a room full of people as a hand-grenade without a safety pin does. Do not be surprised if someday you hear something like: “Oh you have a blog? Big deal! Oh wow you have a phone? Awesome!!”


6. I realize I may have gone the Ayn Rand way on my blog a few times after I received comments like “Dude that was amazing. I didn’t understand much of it but whatever it was, it was great!”


7. Never commit to a number of things that you’ll say. If you see the last few points on my posts you would notice that I am always stretching to reach my committed seven things. I wish I could change this blog to a-couple-of-things :(

Celebrating Celebrities

Here is a list of my favourite celebrities (fictitious and real) and the reasons why I am a die-hard fan of them.


Seven greatest celebrities!


1. Harry Potter: The protagonist of the most exciting series ever written is also a great conversation starter, ice breaker and a brilliant instrument for hitting on chicks without the risk of appearing gay (no offense to twilight fans!). Overuse of harry potter may however be disastrous.
Boy: I must be in Flitwick’s class! You’re charming!
Girl: Well then i have failed miserably because I was trying out vanishing spells on you.
Boy: Ouch! You must be confusing my heart with a phoenix. My heart is not the thing that regenerates after burning!
Girl: Rowling on the Floor Laughing!


2. Katrina Kaif: She is the most inspiring celebrity on the planet. She proves that you don’t need talent or wit or even the basic knowledge of your work to succeed! You can make it big without it all. She also proves that persistence pays! I would take this opportunity to congratulate Katrina for finally getting her first facial expression right in ‘Rajneeti’ after struggling in the industry for seven years. You’ve earned it girl, you’re an inspiration for us all!


3. Sourav Ganguly: Never mind that he has had a few disgraceful exits from the team. Dada, as his fans call him, is still God! I wasn’t a huge fan of dada until a Bengali friend and a diehard Dada fan made me realise why people worship him. “Dada never disappoints.” He said “Dada either plays as expected, or when he scores some runs, better than expected!”


4. Himesh Reshammiya: If you hate his nasal voice, his catchy but irritating songs and his relentless narcissism, you’re not alone! Hundreds of online communities with thousands of members hate Himesh Reshammiya too. People made Raavana statues with beards and caps, stopped naming their kids Himesh, and gave rise to WWE superstars like HHH (few people know that it stands for Hardcore Himesh Hater). I hated him too until one day I was invited to a couple’s third anniversary celebration. Throughout the party they never even looked at each other. I wondered what kept them together. It turned out that the only thing they had in common was hatred for Himesh. I suddenly started admiring and hating Himesh at the same time. Cheers to Himesh Bhai for uniting the world in mutual hatred!


5. Barack Obama: He is the original hope generator! He gave people hope and became the most powerful man in the world. He gave the nobel academy hope and won the nobel peace prize. I put his book beside my fish bowl and my goldfish jumped out of it hoping to be able to fly. There are now get-well-soon cards being printed with his photo on them with messages like: Hope all your teeth grow back! Here’s hoping success for his first music album: Hip Hoper!


6. The country club president: I don’t know his name but he tries so hard to be a celebrity by being present in every single one of Country Club’s advertisements. He’s a little fat, has a Rajnikant hairdo, wearing sunglasses and smiling at you with his thumbs up while saying “Welcome to country club”. Nobody actually acknowledges him as a celebrity or a model so I would like to honour him with celebrity status on my blog. He sure is entertaining!


7. Woody Allen: He is perceived as an intellectual but is not very well known. He is someone who is witty and cool. He is also the perfect celebrity to validate your original quotations. Pass off your own quotes as those of Woody Allen and see them appreciated much more than they deserve to.
“The toppers think the others know nothing. The others think the toppers know nothing. Unfortunately they are all right!”
- Woody Allen


Use discretion though. The following quotes may not exactly be convincing.
“Da difference between da localites and da hostellites is dat da hostellites ROKK. LOL!”
- Woody Allen
Or
“’Seven things’ is the freshest new blog on the net. It is like freshly brewed coffee from the plains of Costa Rica.”
- Woody Allen

Sleeper Hits

A fourteen hour train journey in a sleeper coach in India is probably more entertaining than the entire LOTR trilogy (and is only half as long) provided you meet some fascinating people. Here are some people who make the hassles of travelling non-AC, totally worth it.


Seven Fascinating People you meet on a train!


1. The Vuvuzelas: They are usually old. When you first see them, you pity them for having to travel alone at that age, however soon you realise that their family is in the adjoining compartment. They are alone because they are strategically planted in your compartment. They would have a constant frown on their face which would not change even for the small kid who regularly brings them something to eat from the next compartment. Every few minutes you see them move their thigh a bit, make a thunderous vuvuzela sound and straighten up without altering their frown by a micrometer. They even reply to your questions (Could I switch on the fan?) with the vuvuzela sound!


2. The Statistician Patriots: They will convince you with their 3 hour long monologue, that corruption is the single greatest challenge that this country faces. They would furnish the latest (generated 7 seconds ago) statistics about people and their behaviour and propose strategies to change this country by 90% (whatever that means). When the TTE (train ticket examiner) arrives, they take less than 7 seconds to slip him a 100 rupee note to speed up the seat allocation process by 200%. “It cost me 50% more last time!” They’ll tell you later with a huge grin.


3. Gold-Fingers: They would probably be sitting next to you. They have a mutant nail on their little finger (could be an inch long). The nail would keep probing every orifice on and around their face looking for gold. However after passionate searching, once they have found the gold, they just flick it away with the indifference of a monk towards treasure. Your journey suddenly becomes exciting, trying to keep yourself away from the projectile of the relinquished riches. You mind also stays busy trying to keep the gold-finger away from your body.


4. Chhota Kotler: He’s young, about 25, a little naive and has just started a new business of making stuffed toys. He is carrying pictures of his products and is trying to show them off to everyone in compartment, the neighbouring compartment and to the TTE. Everyone patronizes him. The statistician patriot gives him some advice to reduce the costs by 50%. The gold-finger runs his prized asset all over the pictures before handing them to you. Even the vuvuzela chips in by trying to give a squeaky sound effect to the picture of a stuffed squirrel that you are watching.


5. The Lady Boys: Even the strongest dudes shudder on hearing the sharp claps marking the arrival of the lady boys. They extort you and there is nothing you can do about it. Your biceps and your ‘contacts’ are rendered useless once they start calling you ‘mere SAROOKH’ and blow kisses at you. You simply pay up. Sometimes you may get flattered when they call you “Aamir Khan” and decide to give them 10 bucks extra, but you tend to change that decision a second later when you hear them call Mr. vuvuzela, “Hrithik!”. Nothing scares them except perhaps Chhota Kotler who tries to make them see his stuffed-toy-pictures!


6. The Snipers: They never sit by the window. Their mouths are so full that when they talk, all you hear is gurgling. After continuing in gurglish for a few minutes they finally decide to give their drowning tongue some space by leaning over your shoulder and letting out spittle jet with the accuracy of an archer fish, right out of the window. From about 2 feet away they manage to empty their mouth without spilling a droplet on the window bars or your shirt. It’s an act that deserves a standing ovation. Better entertainment than Ripley’s!


7. The Wandering Targets: They show up at 4 am with their stereophonic chants of ‘CHAI CHAI’ and collect more abuses than orders. Their true value however lies in the reactions that they invoke. The vuvuzela greets them in his signature fashion. The statistician patriot sleepily mumbles a strategy to reduce the Chaiwallah’s kin by 90%. The gold-finger, disturbed by the commotion, tries to find comfort by setting his wild animal free and Chhota Kotler wakes up with a start and rummages through his bag to find the pictures before the Chaiwallah disappears!