'WIT'ness me

'Wit' is now, arguably, the highest form of social currency. One memorable phrase, a sound byte,  is all we need for an impactful conversation. There seems to be a tremendous pressure to come up with 'punches'. Keep missing the opportunity for a 'wiseass' comment and you tether perilously close to being branded 'the Bore'.

Twitter seems to be at the forefront. With its character limit limiting any sort of meaningful discussion, it has become a place for masters to show off their buffoonery and for the apprentices to learn from it.

I remember reading a story back in school. The narrator in the story confesses mugging couplets of famous poets so that he can recite them at the opportune moment and earn himself some appreciation. As desperate as the narrator may sound; how I wish for those deep meaningful couplets, now endangered by puns that play with English sounding Hindi words.

I know. Trends come and go. And it is pointless to ponder. I know too, that my inability to come up with punches of my own is fast resigning this post into the classic sour grapes category. And yet I quixotically plea for everyone to reconsider this madness.

I would have not cared, had this cancer been localized only in group conversations. But this phenomenon has metastasized to every domain of my life. Almost all of my conversations are devoid of things that I treasure so much. Care, affection, sincerity;  all gone. All I see is humor and that forced restriction/alteration of a conversation eventually cheapening it into a 'punch' line.

They have even taken my beloved movies. Long has the time gone where the protagonist delivers a truly moving dialogue. The sort of a passionate dialogue which stirs something within you. A dialogue that makes you ponder.
All I get now is a religious adherence to the below sequence.
1) Hero looks into the camera (I know I am deviating but surely others too would find this blatant breach of the fourth wall a little annoying)
2) The music stops
3) Hero delivers the punch line
4) The background music goes nuts mirroring the orgasmic hysteria of the cinema watching audience.


 A well-meaning open debate is endangered too. No respect for differences in ideologies. No awareness for the everchanging flux of white and black that engulfs the prominent personalities of today.The nuances of figuring whether the person in question is indeed the right shade of gray. What I  get now is a solid unbreakable wall that guards and separates the  'Bhakts' 'AAPtards'and 'Sickulars' (Such pun, much wow).

And then there is burnout. With Twitter users thinking about the new pun, day in day out; with sarcasm being the symbol of anti-establishment in every tv series; there is only so much of new material that people can come up with. To drive an analogy think of the poor scriptwriters that have to write one episode per day nonstop for the Indian family comedy shows. The quality of wit in the posts is now reaching the quality of humor in 'Taarak Mehta ka Ulta Chashma'. ('Chalo Garbha Khele' followed by maniacal laughter.)

On my feed some time back, few people shared '10 reasons why you should not be friend with a northeast/gujju/stereotype person' template with the caption "Loved the sarcasm'. The template, for the lack of a better word, is saying exactly opposite of what is meant to be said. For e.g. 'they are all well mannered '  will be replaced by 'they are not well mannered'. How is this sarcasm? It looks like one of those exercises that we used to do as a kid.
 Q ) "Ramu aalsi hain"
A) "Ramu aalsi nahi hain"
and even there you would get only half a mark. Use antonyms, our teacher would have said
A) "Ramu mehnati hain"


But even if I leave everything aside what really hurts me is the lack of personality. There are snippets of good punches or witty lines that are being copy-pasted into every conversation, like codes. I remember getting a WhatsApp message from my girlfriend and I know she means well. But I can't shake up that feeling that I have seen it as a tweet, meme or something else.

Every new year I send a mail wishing new year greetings to my friends. And almost all of them write back saying how happy they were to receive it. And I know people enough to know that these replies are genuine and not a mere formality.The mails I send, are no literal masterpieces. They are just messages remembering the past and wishing a better future. The fact that they make the receivers so happy give me a bit of hope. The fact that their reply's too are devoid of puns slangs and popular phrases makes me believe that there is a way out too.

But then maybe there is nothing to worry about anyway. Maybe it is all just ramblings of a bored mind. maybe I am just getting a little old. By the way, did you notice the heading of the blog . Playing on the most memorable line of Mad max. Pretty witty , no?

Grand ma

My mom called me on 1st of January. Her usual effervescence conspicuously absent from her voice. 'Dadi is in ICU'.She said. Kidney failure.

Having ruled out Dialysis because of her advanced age, the doctors had given her at best; another month or two. Ma asked me to book a ticket in next 2-3 days.

'Meet her once while she is still in senses'

But I knew it won’t be that long. It is impossible to explain, but I knew. So I booked the flight on the same day. I landed in Ahmedabad at 8 PM. It would be another 6 hours of bus journey before I reach home. I called in my mom to let her know that I have got the bus. The sadness in my Mom’s “hello” was enough to convey the message. My grandmother was no more.

I took it way easier than anyone expected me to.Hell, I took it easier than I expected myself to.

No doubt her advanced age (She was 86) made it easier. That she died painlessly (Cardiac arrest); instead of the slow torturing death that kidney failure had in store; was a big consolation too. But that was not all.

I always pitied my grandmom. A product of her time; she married early and studied only till class 6. She came from a rich family and so did my grandfather. Though I always find it hard to believe; but it is hard to argue given the circumstances that she would have lived a luxurious life.

But I never saw that version of my grandmom. A lot changed by the time that young little 'married' kid turned into my 'Dadi'. My grandfather was suspended from his job. And my grandmom and my father have gone through the horrors of watching my granddad squander all his money on his many vices.

“Why did,’t “dadi” stop him.Or at the very least why didn’t she set apart some money for herself.”. I always asked my mother whenever she told the story of the squandered wealth.

And they were intriguing stories. Nothing less than a Shakespearean tragedy. A tragedy brought upon by one man’s vices and one woman’s lack of steel. The fact that people in the story were people I knew made it all the more fascinating.

My grandma was a very social person. She always greeted everyone with a smile and a dollop of blessings.I never saw her angry. Not even once. I guess all she wanted was peace. Never having the will to oppose, she would willingly agree if someone criticizes someone else in front of her. However , If that “someone else” came to know about it and confronted her, she would swear on a billion things and deny it all.  I am sure that if by wretched luck she was ever confronted by both the conflicting parties at the same time,  she would have found a way to deny everything and bless both of them. Lying came easy to her; avoiding confrontation even more so.

She may have been a simple minded person but she was resourceful too. Money being a constraining factor for most of her latter life , she devised ingenious ways of getting some of it on her own. She would sell gas cylinders at higher prices to people who did not have one. She did so by not using her quota of cylinders and by also buying it from other people at the subsidised price. I think everyone was in on the game but no one really minded.They might have been amused by her entrepreneurship skills too.

She also figured out a way to cash in on her blessings. She would bless people who did not have a kid and then would ask them to pay the money to the Ganesha idol sitting at her home, when they get the good news.The blessings were bound to be true in some of the cases, thereby making the “Ganesha” richer. Many do believe that the success rate was way too high for it to be a case of pure chance. Who knows, maybe she did have some magic in her after all.

She committed the most innocent of dishonesty and I believe no grown man in his right mind would have grudged her that. However to a child with an abnormally extreme sense of right and wrong (me) these acts were abhorable.

And this is how I remembered my grandmom .Don't get me wrong.I loved her still. I was not a cold hearted bastard . And even if I were, I think her praises and blessings would still have passed through. I loved my grandma and I can say that without a trace of doubt. But it was a love mixed with pity and a faint whiff of disgust. It was a complicated potion and growing up my grasp of grey was never that strong.

Five days have passed since my grandmom died and all of us in the family have been extremely busy arranging all the rituals. So busy that none of us had the time to contemplate grief. Today a social gathering will take place which is to be followed by a meal. Tents are being set up to accommodate people. To be honest i think an arrangement of this sort is not required . It is after all  a weekday and I do not expect a lot of people to show up.

I am wrong. Lots of people come and then some more. People I have never seen before. And I can see that this is not the“let us go or it will look bad” crowd. They are genuinely sad. And I wonder how can a simple person like her have such an impact.

The time has now come for people to speak up . Everyone is talking about how kind she was. How she always greeted everyone with a smiling face. Some are recalling the days when they were going through a rough times and she consoled them saying it will be over soon . And lo and behold ! it did. My brother in law mentions that no one from my family has invited him to the household like my grandmother.

And it dawns on me . These people are not in awe of her because she had some divine powers which turned her blessing true. They knew her for what she was ; a simple person who had a smile for everyone. And they were in awe of her because that is indeed an extremely rare quality. Life had been hard on her. Some would say, and I will agree ; extremely hard. It would have been so easy to become bitter and blame everyone around. But she chose not to be bitter. She chose to be loving.

I have no doubt that she would have shed many a tears for her slipped away fortunes and there would have been times when she would have felt a strong sense of helplessness. She would have been angry too. She was supposed to be a rich spoiled princess. How did all of this happen.

But she never let it get to her .

She often said ; in a tone that was a mix of sadness , hope and serenity “sukh dukh kya hota hain . agar maano to sukh hain na maano to dukh hain”

She chose to be happy . And therein lies the greatness of my very simple grandma.