Women's aisles are Men's Kryptonite (well, they weaken yogi)

Just the other day I was told (gently of course. By a friend that cared) that the pores on my nose looked like craters. Fortunately, they make this nose strip thing for exactly this, and so I decided to go buy myself a nose strip from the local Target. Now, I must clarify that Yogi is by and large a very clean person and all that, but beauty products don't appear very high on his shopping list. And when they did make an occasional appearance, there was the obliging lady-friend who would take care of it. God bless these women. I mean, I'm sure they did it partly out of self-interest - no one wants to be seen with the Indian guy with meteorite craters on his nose. But still, that meant that beyond knowing that these nose strips were somewhere in the ladies aisle, I didn't know much else. And being single and all that, it meant that I had to wade into uncharted territory.

See, this is where men and women are different: women would have no problems going into the men's area. In fact, some of them insist on choosing our underwear (I think the pink ones with winnie the pooh are SO awesome honey; I think you'll look great in them); these women have no problems digging through piles of men's wear until they see something that they approve of us wearing.

We're a little different. First of all, I really don't care if you buy read or black underwear. Or pink or fuchsia or teal or indigo. Buy whatever makes you happy. Just don't drag me along. I start sweating when I'm surrounded by bras of various sizes and shapes; I feel like a giant perv, and the inquisitive/critical glances that I get from matronly woman who are trying on their giant beige undies make me feel all the more so.

This is also true for the cosmetic section. I will gladly admit, I am not one of those metrosexual types. I have never had a pedicure and never will. I stick to one set of body washes and one shampoo/conditioner combo thing. I know there are specific washes and lotions for various body parts, but really, I don't want to bust 17.99 just so the undersides of eyes look the exact same tone as my ears and smell of musky daffodils. Perhaps this makes me less attractive, but so be it. What that means is that I feel discombobulated in that area of the (already discombobulating) superstore.

So when I needed to cure the craters, I swallowed my unease and headed over to those aisles. Sure enough, by the time I reached, my stomach was already in knots. I flew by the aisle so quickly the first time that my eyeballs barely registered anything more than a pastely blur.

"Well, perhaps they just thought I was walking past on the way to another more appropriate aisle", I thought, and so I took a deep breath, swept back my wet hair, and gave it another go. This time I took the "I'm just perusing the aisle for something that my lady friend may need" approach. I walked slower this time, but then midway I made eye contact with a middle-aged overweight woman who was comparing hair removal creams. She had headmistress written all over her. I think I gave her an uneasy smile and she glared at me. I hightailed it out of there is two seconds flat.

But I wasn't going to give up, so I went up to the second floor, looked at some sports goods (to make sure the lady moved on, and also to surround myself with happy images of baseballs and cheap golf clubs), and then sauntered back down. This time I decided to give it the harried "man, I know what I'm looking for, but I only have three minutes, so I better focus and be quick" fly-by. This was more of a deliberate walk down the aisle, eyes focused on the various products, with more than the occasional shrug (as if to say I don't know whether this nose strip is for my skin-type) and the head shake (this Target is crazy - why don't they have my specific nose strip brand?).

No luck. Worse, the damn woman was still there, now looking at elbow cream or something.

So I went and finally looked for help. Turned out that there were three dudes emptying out shelves in the very next aisle. Great, I thought. Dudes who are comfortable with this shit. They can help me! And so I walked up to them and opened my dry mouth to ask them where this thing is, except I realized I didn't know what it was called (I know now, but I had forgotten then). I stuttered about for a bit - I think I came up with nose-hole medicine amongst other things - but then after some wild gesticulation they figured out what I needed. Except THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHERE THE HELL TO FIND IT EITHER OR WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE.

So it was myself and three equally embarrassed Target employees carefully strolling down the same aisle, carefully, in formation (lest we get separated from each other). This time we looked up and down with military precision. We weren't exactly sure what we were looking for but I vaguely remembered it was a small pastel green cardboard box, and we all agreed that it would have the words nose strip on it.

By this time, I was becoming a regular at that aisle. I was the regular perv who had no business there. I mean all the women had seen me before, and they all sighed and shook their heads before turning their attention back to their eye-lash elongators or nose-hair tweezers. Except this time I had come with reinforcements and so I felt better about the whole deal. I was Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator. My three new friends however, not unlike the guys that get capped by the predator in the movie, were way worse off than me. In three seconds, their shirts were plastered to their back because of their perspiration. Their breathing was heavy and labored, and they didn't look above the bottom three shelves for fear of making eye contact with the ladies in the aisle.

I think one of them finally bumped into hair-removal lady and muttered an embarrassed apology. I think that finally did it. The woman turned to us and asked me: "CAN I HELP YOU, YOUNG MAN?" All four of us cowered. My brothers crept behind me and pointed in my direction wordlessly. This was exactly like 4th grade when all of us were in the cricket match where a window got broken, but it was me that actually did the breaking, a fact that was quickly pointed out when we got hauled to the Principal's office. I gulped.

"Uh, nose strip things. We were looking for them"

"Was that what you were looking for?"

"Yes, ma'am"

She turned around, took a pastel green cardboard box from her shopping cart and thrust it into my hand. "This is what you need. It was the last one they had."

I nearly hugged her in a teary embrace of relief and gratitude. An angel had descended that day and had touched me. I turned around and saw my comrades crying on each other's shoulders. The band of 4 brothers patted each other on the back and shook hands; we all had a story for our grandchildren, we said. We had survived.

And I ran out and kissed the oil-stained floor of the parking garage and wept.

The stomach bug in India story

I fell sick with the flu a few days back (the ordinary un-swine-like variety that no one seems to care much about these days), and my granddad passed away recently, and so as I was sitting around sick, I thought back to a little health incident that happened a couple years ago when I went to India. You may or may not know this, but seasoned veterans of trips to India always keep their first couple of days after landing empty, you know, just "to adjust to India". With good reason.

In 2007, I went home to welcoming and loving grandparents after four years of uninterrupted gastrointestinal softening in the US/Europe. You already know I love them, but there's a good reason that my dad left home at the age of 16. That good reason would be my grand mum's cooking. Now, I'm not saying that Bigamma, as we call her (with more than just a little dash of awe and fear), was willfully harming my dads health, but I have heard him say that the food he ate at boot camp was the best he'd ever tasted up until then. Again, it's not that Bigamma purposely destroys every dish she lends her culinary skills to, but it's just that cooking is pretty low on the priority list for a subset of women in this world, and Bigamma happens to be honorary secretary of that club. So she tends to get distracted by other things on her to-do list, say, oh, I don't know, gardening or calling relatives while the okra fry goes from green to brown to a very carbonized black. I can say with some confidence that my granddad's acute sense of smell prevented our house from going up in flames on more than one occasion. But then again, as she says, "it's all the same once you swallow it", and my granddad lived a healthful life until the age of 87, so maybe she's right. (Though I'm pretty sure my prostrate has grown a couple millimeters with all that okra fry)



But in addition to this, my grandparents have mango trees that give us hundreds of really delicious mangoes the size of your head every summer. The reason that this, along with with my grand mums cooking, counts as a health hazard is two fold -
1. eating more than three mangoes a day gives you the shits. Trust me, I know this from personal experience.
2. Flies and other tropical bugs love to sit out on mangoes that sit out in the open.

Now, the only reason that there would be mangoes out in the open is that my grandparents tend to hoard the best mangoes. This is a problem because all the mangoes plucked are the best mangoes, and our refrigerator can fit only about a
hundred. This means that every summer, there lie about four hundred mangoes in various stages of decay around in the kitchen, which attract anywhere between ten and a thousand variously shaped and sized members of the insect kingdom at any given time, all of which somehow find their way into Bigamma's accommodating menu. It's almost as good as pitching a "To Let – no rent for three weeks!" sign for pathogenic microorganisms in that little space between my stomach and duodenum.



So it was with some trepidation that I went home to Bigamma's kitchen in the late summer of 2007 (my parents were in the US, where they could only pray for my survival from afar). Sure enough, there was my grandmum beaming over a hearty lunch comprising cut mango, mango curry, mango pulisheri and mango avial - these are two South Indian dishes that also taste great, but are never made, without mangoes in my house - to go with rice. And mango juice to wash the lot down. Now I have been extremely critical of my "America returned" relatives, especially when they kick up a row about eating home food, so I was keen not to be just like them. I remember trying not to count the flies (dead, alive or somewhere in between) that adorned the various dishes, and instead trying to give them a quick wave-off as I pretended to reach across the table for the mango juice. They eyeballed me warily but didn't move. I stole a quick glance at Bigamma, but she was still beaming at me, so I took a deep breath, said a quick prayer to the mango (and duodenal) gods, and dug in.

To tell you the truth, I didn't feel a thing until late in the evening. The food actually tasted great, and so, throwing caution to the winds (I actually had the gall to think I had gotten the better of those bugs), I also wolfed down a couple of mangoes after dinner, and went into a jet-lagged, overripe-mango induced stupor...

...

The first sign of food poisoning is a cramping feeling somewhere near your ribs. It starts off mildly, like someone's gently kneading your spleen. It's the kind of thing that you roll over, stretch, and it goes away. This is dutifully does. And then it returns after about ten minutes, except this time, it feels like someone has thrust a pair of hot tongs deep in your midriff while squeezing all the contents out of your gut with an iron vice. The automatic (and only physically possible) reaction to this is doubling up in pain, but while lying paralyzed in the fetal position while screaming in pain and sweating might evoke pity in the most hardened of professional torturers, it does nothing to pathogenic microbes. Plus the bacterial strain that my grandmum lovingly cultured in her fruit incubators were especially nasty critters with absolutely no compassion. They do what they're supposed to do, which is colonize and spread.



And now that they had successfully colonized by insides, how did they spread, you ask?

Ah, well, there's a reason the transmission of these bacteria occurs by what's called the "fecal oral route". Oral is how they go in, and well, fecal is how they get out. The cramps, as my uncle who's a successful doctor, but somewhat unsympathetic relative told me with a wise shake of the head, were a sign of hyperperistalytic spasms, which basically meant that the bugs wanted to head out the exit pronto. I had no problems with bugs exiting my body; what I did have problems is with the frequency and urgency with which they did it (very frequent, and very
very urgent). When you have a rash on the back of either thigh from too much contact with the toilet seat, you know you have the shits pretty bad. When you actually get sphincter cramps, you know you're in deep, deep, deep, uh, shit. The irony is that I was writing a paper on superantigen induced food poisoning, so I knew exactly what was going on throughout. So I guess it was a learning experience, but of all the things I need not have learned first hand, this ranked pretty high. I guess I should be glad I wasn't doing research on flesh-eating necrotizing bacteria of the rectum.

So anyways, that was the summer of 2007, when I was in deep, deep, deep shit for a good ten days. As I sat alone this past week, sick and in pain with the flu, thinking about this sordid episode, I remembered being struck by two things. First, it was the ignominy of having to explain to the multitude of relatives - there were hundreds - who had come to visit you that you had to take a shit every eight minutes. And then there was the deeper discomfiting realization that I had become the very Indian I used to deride when I was a kid. The coconut. Brown on the outside, and unmistakably white on the inside...

More HOW CAN SHE SLAP ME?!?!?? - what it teaches us about Indian men

All I've been doing is watch this video OVER and OVER and OVER. And OVER. YOU HAVE TO SEE THE VIDEO TO GET THIS ESSAY (you can scroll down for the embed). This is one of the gems on the Internet that keeps giving. But one thing that struck me today, and I'm going to share this with you because I think it's important, is how the video reveals the four different character types of Indian men:

1. The wannabe-alpha-but-really-wimpy-ass male: The protagonist. He's alpha enough to say something snide to the woman, and get mad when he gets slapped, but that's about it. All his machismo ends with the return slap. The rest is downhill. Watching him get his ass whupped is especially enjoyable given how his masculinity, on full display when he hit the woman, simply evaporates into thin air. What we're left with is a bruised and battered (both body and ego) whimpering fifth grader who has to get led out of the studio so he can change out of his soiled pants. This is he kind of guy who will take you out to an expensive restaurant, wine and dine you, promise you the earth and skies, and then will go completely limp in bed. Most likely to go to sleep in a fetal position, with you comforting him and shushing him quietly to sleep as you sip warm chocolate and bemoan your lousy choice for a date.

2. The angry young man: Epitomized by Amitabh Bachchan in the '70s, this would be the co-host of the show, who, miffed that his hair-trigger lady co-host got bitch-slapped by an even more hair-triggered wannabe-alpha-but-really-wimpy-ass male, gets into the act. Under the guise of defending the honor of the above-mentioned lady, all that pent-up anger resulting from his miserable love life, unhappy and impoverished childhood, and retard agent who put him on this dumb-ass show in the first place, gets poured onto the weaker and soon-to-be-sorry ass #1 character-type dude. The quick transition from broken TV English to the choicest of Indian cuss words reveals how quickly the thin veneer of bollywood polish can be stripped away under appropriate circumstances to expose raw testosterone. This is also the guy who will take your clothes off, whether you want it or not, two minutes after you've gone back to your home with him after the date, and then will rough you up while telling you that you wanted it this way. You will most likely have to head into work for the next week with a couple extra layers of make-up to hide the bruises.

3. The beta-and-a-half: You may have missed this, but look at the video again. Now spot the guy with the pink shirt and brown shorts. See what he does? Runs right in and kicks type 1 in the nuts when he's on the floor. And in the face. And in the ribs. Then he runs away, just in case, you know, the guy who's getting mauled by #2 types might get up, run after him, and whup his ass. And then he comes back (because you know, his transferred anger at the co-hosts robbed honor comes in waves), and when #2 is totally down, punches him again and then again beats a hasty retreat. Happy that he's gotten to actually beat someone up, he can now run back to his boys and spin tall tales about how he destroyed a goon with his bare hands to protect the honor of a fair maiden who was being harassed by above said goon. This is the guy that will constantly snipe at you and watch other men watch you throughout the night, occasionally beating them up when he's had enough to drink. And then blame you for it. This is also the kind of guy who will have a vasectomy and wait until you get pregnant before he tells you about it.

4. The thoroughly beta male: The second contestant who didn't get bitch-slapped. You see what happened to him? Yep, watch the epitome of virility and manliness slink out of the frame at about 0:20. A true survivor. You know, when Matthew talks about the meek inheriting the Earth? This is the guy first in line. His bravery and presence of mind give me goose-bumps. Oh, there are way more men than you think who fit this bill. Except you'll never know because you never see them, unless you have the misfortune of getting arranged to one of them. In which case good luck, because he's going to jizz in his pants when you touch his hand. But even if you aren't married to them, and even if you can't see them, know this: they're watching you. And imagining you naked.

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BONUS: (yes, today was a light work day)

1. Check out the short but well-done Millie Remix.

2. The surprisingly entertaining Techno Remix.

3. The Indian TV Remix that delves deeper into the incident and involves other players.

And the ultimate overkill mix, the How can she slap me Insane Edition.

Update: OK, response to the comments:

1. You asked about the foul-mouthed woman. I am in no way defending her actions. I think she was totally out of line. It was bad enough that she yelled at the dude for no reason (really, the F-word on TV? In response to someone saying he didn't want to talk to you? I don't know yo... I have women tell me they don't want to talk to me, all the time. I don't go around telling them to f-off...), but then to actually bitch-slap the dude? m-m-mm. Bad form. Totally tasteless. But then again, you get slapped by a woman, you walk off, or you restrain her or something. (When I get slapped, I turn around an take a bow for the audience. And then make a hasty exit stage left) But to slap her like that? (notice his shoulder, hip, everything went into that pimp-slap). That is not kosher at all...

2. What category do I fit into... Ah, that would be the rarest of rare, one-in-a-million, diamond-in-the-rough, hidden category #5. Example, the producer of the show. In the midst of all this ruckus, this is the dude in the Hawaiian shirt behind the camera with his rum and coke and Cuban cigar, watching this whole thing unfold with a giant smirk on his face. He is also the guy making a bunch of money off of this sordid show. And is also probably banging bitchslap woman for all she's worth.

I'm that guy. Of course, minus the money, shirt, alcohol, nicotine. And bitchslap woman.

Numbering and lettering your socks is NOT O.C.D.

A friend of mine noticed recently that my socks had little numbers and letters on them (under the toes). He asked me what it was, and I told him, quite simply, that I number AND letter my socks. He looked at me with a certain amount of amusement and/or disgust and/or pity and told me that it was OCD.

Now I know what Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is - its when you can't stop washing your hands, or you keep fretting about whether you turned the oven off before you left home, or looking at all your baseball cards before you go to bed every night. Let me tell you why numbering and lettering my socks is not OCD, aided as always with a little schematic. The numbers enumerate the socks obviously, and the lettering is L (left) or R (right).

Case 1 (top) is optimal: I am wearing the "L" of the "nth" sock on my left foot, and the "R" of the "nth" sock on my right foot. All is good, and the flowers smell great.

Case 2 is a common mistake made by slobs who don't care about how each sock looks. No, I am not just talking about pairing a brown sock with a black sock (in which case you are probably single, live in your mother's basement and masturbate excessively. Or you have an IQ of 150 and are working on quantum physics. Either way, no excuse. You are beyond saving, and I am not wasting breath on you). I am talking about multiple pairs of socks that, when brand new, looked identical. Here is a pairing of an "nth" L sock with an "mth" R. There is no cause for physical discomfort, except that you may have worn the "nth" pair with your new brown shoes on a sweaty day, causing a mild brown coloration on this pair, while the "mth" pair may have no such discoloration. This causes pseudo-asymmetry, which is a no-no; further, if the socks have gone through variable wash cycles, you will now be wearing socks that are variably stretched and/or worn out, and if you can't feel variably stretched and/or worn out socks on your feet, you have the hide of an elephant.

Note: I do not have baby pink socks. For that matter I don't have powder blue socks. These are for the purpose of illustration only.

Case 3: By far the most important reason I do this. Note that I have switched the letters, so now I am wearing an "R" sock on my left foot and vice versa. Obviously this does not matter the very first time you buy the socks because they are symmetrical. But with time, what happens is that your big toe stretches out the sock on side only - the right side of the left sock, and vice versa, as you look down at your feet. And so out of the blue, if you wear your "R" sock on your left foot (as illustrated here), what happens is that: a. Your big toe is now constricted in the little bit of fabric that was originally meant to hold the little toe, and b. Your little toe now has a ginormous cavity it has no hope of filling (yeah, I know there's an R rated joke here), and so what
happens is that the extra fabric folds over, jams in between toes, or tries to hide in the crease under your little toe (bleaurgh. It hurts to even write this). Again, if you have a buffalo's sensitivity in the foot region, good for you. I however have sensitive feet, and this extra floppy fabric is extraordinarily vomitous. It makes me go limp waist down and makes me want to feed my feet to a mad hungry pitbull. It has all the pleasantness of a long sloppy wet foot sex session for someone who doesn't have a foot fetish.

Incidentally, the same goes for socks that have been interchangeably worn so that they are now symmetrical (having been assaulted by both feet) because now they are symmetrically loose, with symmetrically floppy fabric that wants to hide in the creases under your toes. The very thought makes my toes curl, although to be fair, I only have vague memories of this feeling of discomfort, sometime before puberty. I think I had a tough time getting my mum to agree that a little marker ink that had bled from my socks to the other clothes in the load was only a minor inconvenience...

Anyway, so that's the reason I do this. As you can see, perfectly reasonable. You should try it too, if you don't do it already (in which case we should have a beer and yell at all the cubes around us).

WHY WE MEN HATE DANCING

My roommate just got pulled out of bed (midway through his law school assignment) by his girlfriend, and got dragged to her new swing dance session. Now, I love this woman; she's adorable and all that, but the guy can't dance if his life depended on it (by his own admission), and its 9:30 pm on a cold windy rainy winter day. I just saw them trot out the door - well, she trotted out and he shuffled out into the cold, looking like a broken man in his pajamas and slippers who just wanted to lay in bed and write his law school thesis...

So I feel compelled to sit down and write this post on behalf of all of my fellow brothers who absolutely HATE dancing but still go, because, well, we're awesome (and we're hoping you'll be um, nice afterward). Well, as usual, here it is in list form.

WHY WE MEN HATE DANCING.

5. Women come in all shapes and sizes. This might look like it's stating the obvious, but nowhere is the difference in height and girth between you and a random woman more apparent than when that random woman is your dancing partner. Its bad enough having to try to twirl our woman around without send her crashing into someone else. But when we're up against a woman who's 6'7" and 320lbs (4'6" and 92lbs is equally bad), it sucks balls. I've had to twirl a really tall woman, and it nearly broke her neck and made me look like a poodle reaching up for a dog treat. I also had a tough time finding another plus-sized lady's hip. She finally had to put my hand in the general area, but I could tell she was all miffed. Too bad, woman. It would've helped if you have ONE concave curve somewhere.

4. Women come in varying skill levels. Its OK if she's worse than us, because then we can do little tricks and make her think she's opposite Fred Astaire. This is good for our ego, which we like. But this doesn't happen often, given that all women seem to have had at least 500 hours of intensive dance training under their belt at birth. So instead we get a woman who's just danced with the instructor and is all pissed off because she's now stuck with the lousy Indian dude who is trying, but still sucks. You know how sometimes you go on a crappy date and you just want it to end asap? Well, that's how these women act. You can tell they would rather swallow rusty nails than dance with you. Well, screw you woman; I wanted to be at home and watch football. And all that dancing with the instructor isn't going to get you shit. He was checking out my ass all this while.

3. Women outnumber men 10 to 1 at these events. Obviously, I thought that swimming in this sea of estrogen would be awesome. And initially, it was fun mingling with multiple women. But very soon it dawned on me that this also meant that I would NEVER get a break from dancing. I would just have finished five minutes of unpleasantness with the girl with unshaved underarms, and there would be ten others staring at me wide-eyed and transmitting massive "pick-me-for-the-next-dance" vibes. So I'd have to go with someone, and then someone else, and then someone else, and half hour later, I'm all worn out and bruised up, and sure enough, there's hairy girl again, looking at me beseechingly...

2. We hate leading. Hate. Hate. Hate leading. Listen, you're the ones all about dancing, why don't you make up some bullshit moves and lead me along? I don't care. You're all about women's lib and equality and all that anyway, so why don't you go ahead and take over the reins on this one? We genuinely won't mind, I can assure you. Instead, we have to think of something smart every seven seconds so that you don't get bored. And all you do is play along and stay mildly amused until we think up of the next trick. Its this neverending battle to come up with neat dance moves (which we men will always lose anyway, since the gay instructor dude will always pull some bullshit trick out of his ass which will make everyone ooh and ahh) that tires me out more than anything else. First, I get dragged out to waste time when I should've been on my couch watching the game, and then I have to bear the responsibility of keeping you (and your stupid dance crazy friends) amused? Go adopt a kitten or something.

1. But the number one reason men hate dancing is: WE JUST DON'T GET THE POINT. Listen. We don't enjoy this shit. Its a big fucking waste of time. We hate the music, because its usually gay shit that they should outlaw outside of old age homes and English-as-a-second-language barbecue parties. We hate the overenthusiastic women who swoon over the instructors. We hate that there's only water and no beer to rehydrate. We hate the excuse of "well, its a good workout!", because we do bench presses, bicep curls and 10k runs if we want to work out, thankyouverymuch. We hate the "you can be close but not too close to the other girls" rules that you make up before dance class. If the woman's hot, I'm copping a feel. But most of all, we hate it because we're wired differently. The only reason we dance is so that we can sleep with one of the dance-crazy-yet-coordination-challenged women who think we're awesome, or, if we're dating a dance-crazy woman, so that we can sleep with her after we get home. For most of us, all the sex we get is purely out of pity, so even though its incredibly demeaning, sort of like throwing us a dog treat, we do it. Because, as much as we hate dancing, we like sex even more.

So ladies, go ahead and abuse us. Insult us, drag us out at unearthly hours, embarrass us in front of gay instructors, critique our technique, make us dance with random women, but please, please, remember why we're doing it. And give us a little pity.

The Red Square story - my experience at a Russian/Ukranian bar

I had heard about this Ukranian bar/restaurant called Red Square from my Russian friend Stan. He told me about how this one time he was having dinner at this place on a quiet weekday, and the place gets taken down by a SWAT team. Seriously. People were eating, and all of a sudden the doors come crashing down and a bunch of commandos take over the place, arrest the owner and a couple other people, make everyone stand up against a wall and give them a rigorous pat-down. They shut the place down. "Some illegal activity. Ukranians." said Stan with a shrug at the time.

So when I found that the place had reopened in the middle of Baltimore, I had to go, naturally.

A friend of mine said he knew the bartender well, but he bailed on me so I went alone. The Red Square seemed innocuous enough from the outside, so I opened the door and stepped into darkness. Once my eyes got back, I realised I was in this dimly-lit room that looked like it had been a dungeon before someone decided to throw in a few cheap tables and some ragged upholstery (all red of course). I swear I could smell old dried blood from past torture sessions. On either side of the door I'd just walked in were bouncers with fists as big as my face. The restaurant was completely empty except for one table where there were a couple of men sitting in grey double breasted suits smoking cigars, with swarthy bald dudes built like tanks standing at their shoulders. By this time my insides were already beginning to churn a little because I had clearly walked into a meeting where these guys were either deciding how best to smuggle in the next consignment of rolex watches or deciding which rival gang member's knees to break. I tried a friendly wave but they ignored me and went back to discussing shattered patellae. I walked over stiffly (to conceal the mild trembling) to the bar anyway, because by then I had decided to drink something at this place no matter what. Plus with images from the dungeon in Pulp Fiction flitting through my mind, I genuinely needed a drink.

At the bar, there was this one very worn out Slavic looking woman in high heels and a leather and fishnet kind of dress that strained to keep her fat rolls in check. She gave me a quick up-and-down, decided I had no money for whatever service she was going to offer, and went back to smoking what smelled like old sweaty feet. Behind the bar, there were three more Russians/Ukranians, one of whom had a barely concealed shoulder holster. I tried not to stare, but they were friendly so I started chatting a bit. Turns out their names were Vladimir, Oleg and Leon (I'm not making this up) and they had a total of twenty teeth among them. I tried shaking Leon's hand, but he apologized and said he couldn't; he held up his fist, which was swollen and bloody. "Fight", he said by way of explanation. I gulped, but mistaking my anxious look for worry about his well-being, he added "You should haff seen ze other guy!", and all three guffawed in unison. To further drive home his masculinity (as if this were necessary), Leon showed me some of his scars. He has a 6 inch gash on his jaw from a knife fight in Uzbekistan. The most I could muster was a half inch scar on my thumb from cutting myself while making a glider in 7th grade, which I showed him with gusto and some pride. The three grunted, but I think it was politeness more than genuine appreciation.

I decided to open the menu and talk about the food to try to change the topic to something less testosteroney. We decided to get me some bliny, which is like a crepe. After he yelled out my order in Russian to the Slavic woman (so I guess she waited tables too) Vlad realized I needed a drink, so he asked me "Vot beer you vant? Ve haf zigz beers", and he pointed to a row of bottles dutifully named "Beer No.1", "Beer No.2" all the way to "Beer No.6". Since I was still a little scared to ask too many questions, I asked for No.6. and get a three-quarter liter bottle of what actually turned out to be a pretty decent porter. It tasted like it was about 20% alcohol though, and I knew I'd have to man up and down the whole thing in front of these guys. So while I knew I was heading for a killer hangover, it did soothe my frazzled nerves a bit (it was probably killing cells in my liver and brain as well, but hey). I noticed Leon was looking at me expectantly, so I took another swig, tried not to wince, and mumbled something appreciatively.

But Leon wasn't done. In a very lets-cut-the-crap-and-see-if-you're-a-real-man kind of tone, he asked me "Ssso you vont zome REEYAL russian drinkz?" and I think I nodded. So he put down a shot glass, reached under the bar, pulled out a glass AK-47 and actually "shot" me a gigantic vodka shot. I got served a 4 ounce shot from a gun. I must've turned white (I'm not sure what this means for Indian people - maybe a weird ochre) because they all chortled mercilessly. This had gotten the attention of the mafia gang at table 1, so they stopped and started looking on expectantly, and now all of a sudden I was the scrawny Indian dude in the spotlight ready to be the joke of the week. That made me all incensed, so, as the ambassador of some 1 billion people, I took a deep breath and downed the drink. What followed is pretty undescribable, but the closest I can get is that it felt like someone tied a pound of garlic and a dead sewer rat to a cactus, set it on fire and shoved it down my throat.

But I'm proud to tell you that it stayed down. Sure I coughed and hacked and burped fire, and my nose was running and my ears were ringing, but the drink stayed down. I looked at Vlad in semi-disbelief and suppressed agony, and through bleary eyes I saw his gap-toothed grin, as he informed me, "Thet vass garlic vodka."

I stuffed my face with the bliny that had arrived to save my esophagus from certain annihilation, and decided that I had had enough Russian/Ukranian cultural education for the day. I got up unsteadily to pay up, but they wouldn't accept money (really), so I staggered out of the bar, completely smashed but happy and somewhat proud of having passed the Russian/Ukranian man test.

ps: ALL my bodily secretions smelled of garlic the next couple of days. Garlic Vodka is not for the faint of heart.

The Drivers Licence Story

When I turned 16 (yeah, this story is OLD), we had to get me a licence. Now, I had already been driving for a bit, so I didn't really need formal lessons, but in the city that I was living in at the time (Madras), one of the requirements was that you needed a licenced instructor to sign off on a sheet that said you had taken 12 classes. Ordinarily, like SO many things in India, this can be done quickly with an appropriate amount of money exchanged under the table. But my dad doesn't do bribes (he's one of those). Instead, he sent me packing to a driving instructor. The one closest to my home happened to be "Dhanalakshmi Driving School". Dhanalakshmi is the goddess of wealth; pretty suggestive that we should have just paid the money off, but my dad was determined to get me formal driving lessons. So I enrolled for my 12 classes at Dhanalakshmi.

The "school" was a room that was about 8' x 8'. There was a desk, a bench for visitors, and a folding chair for the owner and head instructor, a potbellied unshaven drunk with red baggy eyes and an inadequate combover. I think his name was Mahendran. He seemed a little disappointed that we didn't just pay up and ask for his signature. But he did accept the money with a devout glance towards the eastward facing wall, which was covered with pictures of a variety of gods and goddesses (he had his bases covered) and agreed to teach me the basics of driving in India. All this seemed to satisfy my dad, so we left with instructions to come back the next day at 6 am.

I showed up at about 6 am at the shack, and there are a group of about half a dozen dudes already there. They were a bit older than I was, dressed in their Sunday best, and were looking around nervously. I understood immediately - these guys were also here for lessons, but for them, driving was going to be an occupation, their means of earning money, as opposed to what it was for a spoiled brat like me. Mahendran seemed to understand this as well, because he treated me very differently from the rest of them. The first thing he did was to send a couple to the gas station with a canister and just enough money to get half a gallon of gas. He then sent another dude to a shop to get a few lemons, and yet another couple to get rags and a bucket of water. They all shuffled off dutifully, and Mahendran and I were left alone. We eyed each other somewhat uneasily, and then settled into a mutually agreeable silence. I looked at the car that Mahendran owns, the pride of Dhanalakshmi Driving School. It was a white 1965 HM Ambassador, which looked more than a little weatherbeaten. There were rusty patches, and at least 3 layers of different shades of white paint peeling off. I also noticed it had a behind-the-wheel manual gear box. Great.

Once the guys showed up, he made two or three of them clean the windshield and wheels of the car, while he popped the hood open. I took a peek inside and immediately wished I hadn't. The thing was basically a bucket of rusty bolts. It literally looked like little bits of engine would fall off if we stared too long. Mahendran then took the canister half full of gas, fastened it to a small shelf on the inside of the hood with some twine, and shoved in some tubing that ran to the engine. Apparently, this was to be our fuel injection system. But we hadn't pleased the gods yet (which by now, I was really counting on to deliver me back home in one piece). To this end, the guy pulled out an incense stick from his pocket, lit it, and went around with it in front of the god wall and the car, chanting unintelligible prayers (he did look a little drunk from the previous night). He then extinguished the stick and saved whatever was left it for the next day. Finally, he had one of the minions place four lemons under each wheel of the car. This done, the eight of us (yes, eight) bundled into the car, with Mahendran at the wheel. With a last whispered prayer, and with an emphatic crunching of the gears and crushing of the lemons, we were off.

(... to be contd. in Pt. 2)

Survivorman Vs. Man vs. Wild

If you watch Discovery channel, you have probably come across these two shows some time in the recent past. The premise of both shows is basically that there's a dude in the wild and he's up against nature. Using his skills and smarts (which he helpfully shares with you), he survives. End of show. However, as I hope to lay clear in this post, there are some basic differences between Man Vs. Wild and Survivorman. As always, here they are, in list form.

1. * Survivorman is an actual expert on survival and a filmmaker. He remains the only producer in the history of television to produce an internationally broadcast series entirely written, videotaped and hosted alone. His real name is Les Stroud.
* The star of Man Vs. Wild is a wanker who went to Eton and is a son of a Tory. He owns an island and lives on a barge on the Thames. His goes by the neauseatingly wannabe macho name Bear Grylls. Sort of like the midget who calls himself Andre the Giant.

2. * Survivorman ACTUALLY goes into the wilderness all alone for a week. No camera crew. He lugs his own stuff (50 lbs), and only has a satellite phone that connects him to civilization in case of emergency.
* Bear f*@#ing Grylls has a camera crew with him at all times. Yeah, he pretends like he's alone, but really, there's a camera guy. And for all you know, an entire film crew and caravan with a hot water bath and scantily clad blondes right behind the camera.

3. Survivorman doesn't do stupid shit. If there is a straight line of distance 100m connecting point A to point B, you can be sure that Les will walk the line, traveling a distance of no more than 150m.
* But not Grylls. Bear f*@#ing Grylls will have to climb a cliff, jump a ravine, plunge through rapids, swim through whirlpools and bear hug an anthill to get from A to B, travelling (and mostly flat-out running) for 3.5 miles in 28 minutes of an episode to get from A to B.

4. * Survivorman doesn't eat crap just for the sake of eating crap. To be fair, he sucks at catching anything, so he tends to eat mostly bugs for 7 days, but he's OK with that. He sets traps, usually nets nothing, complains a lot, eats a few termites, and then moves on. For anyone who has actually tried catching any sort of animal, you know that this is pretty much how it goes.
* Bear f*@#ing Grylls on the other hand will eat crap. First of all, there always just happens to be a newly dead mammal of some sort in his path (killed by his behind-the-scenes coterie, no doubt). Then, he walks up to it and eats its most disgusting innards. Why eat dead skunk bladder when you can eat its thigh, I wonder. I have also seen him eat a "just dead" zebra with no hands. you have a knife, you idiot. Use the f*@#ing knife. He also drinks his own urine. Pees into a bottle and then drinks it. As anyone who knows the basics of survival training, you DO NOT drink urine straight. You make a solar still. Sure enough, in the one episode where Stroud was dehydrated, this is what he did. I have also seen Bear f*@#ing Grylls squeeze water out of some animal's dung and drink it straight.

I guess what pisses me off is the melodrama that Grylls tries to inject into the show. Why drink your own urine 5 minutes into the show when you have dudes a few feet from you drinking Dasani. I'm sure you have some too off camera. Jackass. (I also read that he faked some of his locations, but I am not sure of the details). But more importantly, you're misleading people. There are safe ways of adventuring, and genuinely useful tips that you should know to increase your chances of survival. And then there are stupid ways of doing all this shit, which is EXACTLY what Gyrlls does with his infuriatingly whiney out-of-breath accent. If people do get stranded, they're going to remember watching this idiot eat maggots off a dead sheep, and they're going to get themselves killed.

So, help us all out, Bear f*@#ing Grylls. Learn from Les Stroud. And if you can't, I hope the next time you jump across a chasm, its a really really deep chasm. And that you misjudge the distance.

Update: Got to love youtube. Bear f*@#ing Grylls is a fraud.

A few notes from the men's room

Let me start off by saying that I understand there is quite a bonhomie amongst women who make field trips, arm in arm, to the ladies room every day, and use trips to the lavatory to make their most important and enjoyable conversations of the day. Well, men are different - we have rules. You may or may not know the rules of the men's room. For those of you who don't, read on. For those of you who do, and for men reading this, here's a refresher. Men, tell me if I've missed something.

1. Flush. There are few things as nauseating as a urinal full of, well, urine. You see that little lever? Try giving it a gentle push downward. Whoosh! Dark yellow pee magically replaced by sparkling, clear water!

1a. Coming to think of it, there is one thing more nauseating than a urinal full of urine. Pubes. If I walk up to a urinal and it looks like a barbershop floor, it makes me want to vomit. Listen, I don't care if you're a Samson-type dude whose strength depends on his nether regions, but you either do some trimming at home, or you clean up after yourself. Leaving hirsute calling cards is repulsive.

2. Don't talk. its OK for a quick "Hey, whats up" on the way to the urinal. But once there, I really do not want to discuss the weather. I'm there to empty a kidney; I've got weather.com if I want to know what the weather is going to be like. No, not even football. If there was a conversation going on before entry into the rest room, it can take a break for half a minute.

3. Don't make eye contact. There are only two acceptable things to look at when you're taking a leak.
a. The business hand.
b. The wall directly in front of you.

To aid comprehension, I have included a quick sketch.



It is OK to:
Look away, at nothing in particular. This is completely kosher.
As above, looking at the business hand or at a point in the wall directly between your eyes is also fine.

It is not OK to:
Look directly at the person next to you, even if there is a conversation (which there shouldn't be)
Look at your neighbor's business hand. There are states where this can get you killed.

4. Wash up. Enough said.


These are the basic rules. But there are other things that you really should be doing to make your daily public micturatory trips pleasant:

1. If there is someone at the urinal, leave a spot between you and him if you can. Again, attached is a simple diagram to illustrate the point.



1a. If you have to be next to someone, do be mindful of your feet. We know you don't need to spread your legs 4 feet wide to get to your giant penis, so quit it. Its not classy, and thanks to Larry Craig, paves way for a potentially distasteful situation.

2. You are at the urinal to take a leak, not to pass gas. Gentle tinkling interrupted by thunderous flatulence is undesirable. If you suspect your toot might pack lass bark and more bite (especially if you've just had eggs), it would be highly appreciated if you could hold on. No need to make the men's room smell like your lunch.

3. If you so desire to wash your mouth, do so gently. Hacking up greenish phlegm from the deepest recesses of your lungs is unpleasant to watch and even less appealing to listen to.

4. Don't be a diva. You are indeed allowed to spruce up so you can impress the lady that's waiting for you on the other side of the door. You get 15 seconds, which is sufficient for a quick fix. Anything more than that is in bad taste. Too much primping can result in willful flatulence from your fellow urinal user, just to spite you. In this case alone, making the urinal (and you) smell like a fish sandwich is OK.

Hopefully this little write-up has been helpful in clarifying some of the little things that make life enjoyable.

Thank you.

Update: As veggie belly rightly points out, there is also this little thing about aim. Now, men are apparently way better equipped at this than women, but that being said, yeah, you have the equipment, now use it to aim well. i.e. INto the urinal, not ONto, or around.

Why I hate my foot surgeon

As you all well know by now, I'm having issues with my foot. This has meant that I have had to go to the foot surgeon a couple times. My foot surgeon is an asshole. Given my generally low tolerance for assholes, it shouldn't be surprising that I have developed a deep seated hatred for this man. However, given that he is supposedly taking care of my messed up foot, I can't quite strangle him in his office. I can, however, launch into cyber-invective, which is exactly what I'm going to do in the form of a little list titled:

Top 5 reasons I hate my foot surgeon.

#5: The Hospital. I'm used to East Baltimore, where I have walked in the Johns Hopkins ER with a broken ankle and had to wait for hours on end, because people with multiple gunshot wounds kept getting wheeled in. I almost felt guilty about having a painful appendage. Here, in wealthy suburbia, the kid in front of me had a skinned knee. A skinned freaking knee. (Presumably by kneeling in the one square foot in his 10,000 sq.ft. house that his parents neglected to cover in Persian rugs). My toe was a bloody mess barely hanging on to the rest of my foot, and I had to wait for his little jerk and his mum (who looked as if her kid would have to be amputated knee down). To be fair though, they sent him packing pretty quick. The other thing is that only way you can get to this hospital is by cab (20 bucks), and I happen to draw the really talkative guy with really bad eczema from Action Cab Co. every time. Not that I have a problem with friendly people, but he gesticulates a lot, and bits of his skin keep floating down on me. This makes for a somewhat uncomfortable cab ride.

#4: The patients. The only people in the waiting room are old people. We are talking about really old, ancient, miserable senior citizens. About a dozen of them in various stages of decay, mostly confined to wheel chairs, that make McCain look like a young stud. They're watching Judge Mathis trying to decide if one woman keyed another woman's car or not. The program is interspersed with ads about wheelchairs, medical malpractice lawyers and medications of various types, which these people watch avidly. I cannot tell you how unnerving waiting in this room is. It feels like each time someone gets called and goes in, there's only a 50% chance they'll come out alive. The room smells and feels like a mortuary. A lot of them are seeing the foot doctor to treat bed sores, so I am not going to go into a detailed visual description of the scene. I understand that none of this is their fault, so I can't be mad at them. Instead, I close my eyes for the most part, and pray that my death comes quick and painlessly.

#4b: The dude is also the foot surgeon for the local penitentiary, so on one of my visits, we had prisoners in shackles walk by, surrounded by armed posse of sheriffs. But I've already written about it here ...

#3: The nurses. When I think of nurses, I think of warm, compassionate, somewhat elderly women, who are really good at taking care of the little things that make you think of mum. Sure there's the occasional hot nurse, but I never get them. Either that or they want to have babies with the more good-looking people in the room. What does not come to mind when I think of nurses is a bad-ass biker dude, mustache, tattoos and all, who treats your toe like a rusty drive shaft. This surgeon guy has helpers from hell who bandage my toe badly enough to make it hurt for the next two days non-stop. But we do have an entertaining talk about the tattoos, so that helps numb the pain a bit.

#2: The doctor is a prima donna. He twirls about with an entourage, and generally gives you the impression that you should be licking the floor that he walks on. He also has autographed pictures all over his ofice of C-level celebrities that have had their toes fixed by him. I bet they have a seperate non-funereal waiting office and hot nurses or those people. After a 2 week wait to get an appointment with him, he spends about 12 seconds on small talk, then goes to work on the toe (see #1), tells me to continue taking care of it the way I was going to anyway, and then to come see him 3 weeks later. 12 minutes in all. I'm sure he's going to bill my ass for a whole hour. Its all a giant scam.

The #1 reason I hate my foot surgeon: The torture instrument. My second appointment, he sits at the foot of the bed with his biker-nurse at his shoulder, and pulls out this steel thing that looked like a miniature ice-cream scoop. (The handle is normally sized, but the scoop end is about 4mm x 2 mm). And then he says "This might be a little uncomfortable". I bet both of them were smiling behind their face masks. The basement scene from Pulp Fiction flashes in front of my eyes, but I tell him to go ahead. And then the rat bastard proceeds to scoop out bits of flesh/scab/tisue/congealed blood/pus from my foot. Now, my toe might have been in bad shape, but my already jangled nerves were on high alert. So the second he touched anything, pain would sear through my body, and I'd have to plead with him to stop. This would be greeted by a look of contempt and disdain, followed by a spray of a "local anesthetic" to the area. The damn thing had to be cold water, because the pain was as excruciating the next time he went at it. And the next time after that. By the 3rd or 4th go, I was in a cold sweat, shaking and biting on my palm and begging for a wooden spoon, or a shot of whiskey, something (I get nothing. Bastards). Fortunately the guy had to go see his next failed sitcom star, so after a few minutes of digging around, he stops (only for biker-nurse to wrench the toe around while trying to wrap it in seven yards of gauze).

And then they let me go. I stumble out a few minutes later and hobble off to the taxi rank. I spot a familiar Action Cab Co. car, and crutch faster and faster till I reach it, and fall gratefully, sweating, weeping, shaking, into the waiting arms of eczema-man...

The Student Papers story

Here's a little piece of advice: No matter how smart you are or look, no matter how many lives you are going to save with your stellar research, no matter how far and often you travel, if you're an International student in the US, DO NOT FORGET YOUR STUDENT PAPERS WHEN YOU LEAVE THE COUNTRY. I did, just this once, in 2004, and boy, did they do a good job of making sure I never repeated that mistake again...

Here's the story.

This is their first trick - no one says a thing when you leave the US. Not a whimper. Just a "Hello sir, how are you. Have a nice flight." No mention of student papers. so you leave the US, fly by the national airline of some breakaway Soviet republic because they offer you the cheapest tickets even though it means three days of flying and six stops in countries that have landing strips in the middle of meadows. And you finally land wherever you're going. For my story, this was England to meet a soon-to-be-extinguished flame (which we are NOT going to discuss today). Now this whole flame story was burning strong back then, so I had a great three weeks without so much as a thought about the case in the bottom draw of my closet, which is where my student papers were stuck.

At the end of three glorious weeks, I head back to the States. We land, and I walk right up to the people at immigration counters with my passport in hand. I stand in line, looking at the people in front of me, the counters, and America proper in the distance, beyond the glass doors. Sure enough, I get pulled out of the line at random ("Uh, security procedures, sir."), and get sent to another line that also has randomly chosen people. They're all randomly chosen brown men. We're all standing somewhat nervously now, because our line clearly has beefed up security, a couple of not-so-friendly dogs, and their even more not-so-friendly handlers. Plus there was a huge poster of the twin towers burning with the caption "Never to forget". Aware that we were being watched really closely, I ignore the overwhelming urge to scratch my butt, lest they think I've hidden something up there, and try to look like a confident, erudite, yet non-threatening intellectual. I think I ended up looking confidently constipated.

Anyway, one of these officials walks past, giving individual passports a quick look through. Soon its my turn, and I hand mine over. He takes a quick look : "Kedar eh? (he pronounces it something like Kaydaah) Rhymes with Al-Qaida, eh? Haw-haw-haw!" I laugh nervously, but the line inches forward, so he lets me go without any further ado. The poor sod behind me is named Mohammed Iqbal, so that calms my somewhat jangled nerves. Eventually though, its my turn, and I put on my best smile, determined to be friendly as I walk up to this lady. She looks like a pibull that's just lost a close fight.


"Hey there, how are you doing dear?"

"Passport please."

"Uh, OK." And I hand it over.

"Student papers."

"W-what?"

And then she takes her eyes off her desk and looks at me. Right into my eyes. Through my eyes into my brain. And through my brain stem into the depths of my soul. I feel an icy fist take a vice-like hold of my insides.

"Student. Papers."

It takes about a second for my neurons to fire off three quick messages to my brain :

1. She wants your student papers.

2. If you don't have your student papers, you're screwed.

3. Your student papers are in the bottom draw of your closet with your underwear.

and then with the finality of a denial-of-visa stamp :

4. You're screwed.

The cold sweat, nausea and the giant block of ice in the pit of my stomach follow, but I manage to stay standing and stammer out "B-b-but I-I dont have my p-p-papers on me..."

Now I don't know whether she signalled by hand, or pushed a button, or blew a whistle - I was busy witnessing my life flash in front of me. Either way, I was surrounded by blue shirts before you could say Terror Suspect. The one guy is busy whispering to the others, obviously about how my name rhymes with a terrorist organization. I want to shove his baton up his poetic ass, but I realize I'm the one in trouble so I try to keep a brave face on what is a rapidly deteriorating situation.

So they lead me to the "holding area", which really is a euphemism for "Jail cell where we interrogate terror suspects trying to gain entry into and cause harm to the citizens of the United States of America". On my way there I see they've set the dogs on my backpack. Everyone in all the lines is trying to get a better look at the
potential terrorist that the vigilant immigration officials have successfully nabbed. They make me sit in the holding area. It wasn't quite the cement bed and iron bar look that I was expecting; there were a couple of couches and even a potted plant in the corner. Plus a couple of copies of "Immigration handbook for foreign nationals" on a table, just in case I wanted to read what was in store for me. I'm glad there are a bunch of rules, because the cops who had guns looked like they were itching to use them. I pick up the immigration handbook and pretend to read it. The way I saw it, I was going to be sent back to India on a rowboat, forever condemned to live my life in disgrace, forever known as the bright kid who threw away a promising scientific career because he forgot a piece of paper. Either that, or I was going to the Baltimore Supermax correctional facility, sure to become a man-bitch for Bubba. I pray for the rowboat.

Finally two cops come up and start talking to me. They want to know everything about me. I mean everything right from where I was born to what I'd had for lunch. And they do this classic good-cop bad-cop thing. McBride is the pleasant one (he tells me to call him marty). Lopez is the bastard. Each time this guy is yelling about how I can't trick him and how America is such an accommodating country and people like me are screwing it up and making his life miserable his eyeballs are an inch away from mine and he spraying bits of half-eaten doritos all over my face. I'm thinking the sonofabitch or his dad probably jumped a fence to get here, but I try to be as contrite and polite as possible. After a bit he takes a break and he leaves to go to the next room, leaving the door ajar. I'm sure he does this on purpose, because I can CLEARLY see a box of latex gloves and vaseline on the table. And this is where I have to admit, I really, really thought things were going to end badly. Missing papers or not, the possibility of a detention center rendezvous with Lopez and his vaselined glove was not the way I thought I would be welcomed into this country. Marty must've seen my ashen face, because he moves over to block my view and continues his questions about my work. This is where I get a gigantic break - as we chat he mentions his wife was treated for colon cancer at Johns Hopkins. I immediately tell him that my work may some day help find a cure for cancer (it won't, but I was doing all I could to avoid Lopez and his glove). We start chatting about it, and as luck would have it, Marty buys all my crapola, and leaves to talk to Lopez. Both come back, and Lopez grunts "OK, you get your one call". He's clearly disappointed he didn't get to do a cavity check.

The rest, fortunately, was easy if not quick. I called my landlady, an absolutely wonderful lady, and she rummaged though my underwear to get my little case that had my papers. She brought it over to the airport, and three hours later (glove box and vaseline untouched), I stagger out of Baltimore-Washington International airport and head back home. The air never smelled sweeter in the free world...

This is a dog named Lexus. I hate Lexus.

Some of you already know that I have a pretty low level of tolerance for all animals. In fact the reason I'm vegetarian is that I dislike animals enough that I don't want them anywhere close to my intestinal tract. Now, I don't hate all animals equally. I only have moderate hatred for cats, or even intelligent dogs, as long as someone else owns them, and they don't mess with me. But no animal has incurred my wrath more than Lexus, a dog that my roommate has had the accursed role of sitting while its real owner is having crazy uninterrupted sex with her new boyfriend in the Bahamas or something like that.

Lexus is an Italian Greyhound. Of all the breeds of dog, the Italian Greyhound is probably the most wretched. There are dogs that come close, like chihuahuas or miniature poodles (of course the case may be made that I hate the owners more than the dog, which may be partially true). But they don't match up to Italian Greyhound. And even within this breed, Lexus is in a league of its own. There are multiple reasons why I have pure undiluted hatred in my heart for this dog, not all of which are its own fault. For ease of comprehension of what landed Lexus at the absolute top of my shit list, I have divided my list into three parts - unfortunate selective breeding, crappy training, and other:

A. Unfortunate selective breeding

You know that no God in his/her right mind would create something so ghastly. A bunch of twisted freaks, for their own sadistic amusement kept breeding Lexus' forefathers with her foremothers in one crazy canine incest-fest after another until we got this monstrosity.

1. Lexus has spindly-ass legs. They are like little swizzle sticks that move stiffly and with no coordination, resulting in the weirdest dog gait I have seen. It also bounces up and down without its legs bending at all. This is not intriguing; it is downright vomitous. I have to often bite my hand to prevent myself from grabbing any one of its legs and snapping it in two. And then twisting the broken half free and shoving it up its ass.

2. Lexus has no body fat. Which makes its torso as ugly as its feet, but also makes the damn thing shiver when the temperature goes below 72 degrees. It quakes visibly.

3a. It has a really small head. Which fits neatly into my palm, making it a perfect object to test my ability to crush things in my palm. Also, as a result of 3a, we have
3b. The eyes of this dog don't fit well into its sockets, and protrude out by an alarming (and needless to say, extremely visually disturbing) 1/2 inch. Which is like a bonus for my skull crushing game: As you squeeze the brains out of this dog, when do the eyeballs pop out?

4. They don't bark - they yip. Very often. At nothing in particular. I'm sure the dog keeps noticing stuff that excites its walnut-sized brain, but this can be extraordinarily annoying when it notices exciting sruff at 3 am and I'm trying to catch some sleep before work.

5. They are on a constant caffeine-like high. Combine this with points 1 and 4, and it means that you get a constantly hyperactive jumping and yipping little piece of shit. It also means that you have to focus hard to make sure that well-aimed kick actually lands on its ugly face.

B. Crappy training

Now, not only does Lexus start off at a huge evolutionary disadvantage, it also has the misfortune of being owned by a completely irresponsible and mentally and emotionally deficient individual. This may well be extrapolated to all people who won such fucked up freaks of the inbred animal kingdom; they are usually vain, insecure, intellectually deficient and emotional trainwrecks. And for some reason, people with this exquisite combination of god-awful personality traits tend to get dogs like Lexus.

1. Lexus hasn't been potty trained. Not only did this dog test the limits of my gag refles with its mere presence in my house, but it also took a giant dump in the middle of my room (with all its deficiencies, if you took a look at that dookie, you'd realize that the only thing that works - and it works like a mother in its stunted body - is its digestive tract). Now, if you ask your friend to dog-sit your dumb mutt, the least you can do is make sure that the stupid thing doesn't take a shit on your friends' roommates floor.

2. The dog tends to wander while in the process of peeing. I don't know how it does it, but it does. And so now we have streaks of fluorescent yellow dog pee all over our floors. In all rooms. So, when you're teaching fido not to take a shit in your friends house, please also teach it not to pee while walking on its spider legs.

3. The thing is an aggressive sonofabitch when you're eating. It doesn't beg by looking at you longingly, it actually jumps right at our elbow, trying to snag scraps of food from the table. So if you have to eat you actually have to physically block it from getting its sloppy snout into your food. One little advantage is that you do get to elbow it in the face, something which fills me with immense happiness.

4. It scavenges bits of food from the floor and trashcan. I'm sure it also drinks from the toilet bowl, even though I haven't caught it doing so. I hope it licks its owners face all over with its filthy tongue that's been everywhere.

5. It doesn't answer to anything. I finally gave up yelling "Lexus" a few days back, and had to start growling, barking and snapping at the thing. You can't make the dog intelligent, so you have to lower yourself to its pathetic level of intelligence. After a couple of days of this, I think it has finally cottoned on the fact that I may have less than warm feelings for it.

C. Other

1. Lexus is ugly. The entire breed is ugly, for sure, but this one is exceptional. The dog on the Wikipedia page looks acceptable. This one is the canine equivalent of a cross between Steven Tyler and a cracked out Amy Winehouse.

2. Lexus is stupid. There's only so much brain you can fit in that small skull, but as far as the intelligence curves for Italian Greyhounds go, this one is way, waaay on the left. The dog runs and actually retrieves random stuff when you fake throwing something. Plus one look at its face (go ahead, take a look at the pic that I have helpfully attached), and you know there are just empty cans rattling behind those vacant and bulbous - and weirdly fluorescent) eyes.

And finally

3. Lexus is very affectionate and has NO memory. I've kicked it, poured water on it, rubbed its face in its own feces, chased it around the house while making angry mad dog sounds, and it still tries to play with me (It is somewhat scared of my dog avatar). You may think this is endearing, but all it does is make me think of more ways to kill it in the most painful way possible. I have a long list, but that list is mine, and mine alone.

Unfortunately, I can't actually kill the thing, because my roommate's friend may get mad, though really, she ought to be thankful. So I write instead, in the hope that somehow this form of catharsis will make me feel better about the smell of Lexus' dog shit emanating from my carpet. Maybe it'll work.

Maybe.

Harold and Kumar go to the NASCAR race

Now, America is a land of many, many experiences. But there are few experiences as truly enlightening as a NASCAR race. Now, people who don't know NASCAR would tell you that its just a bunch of cars on steroids running around in circles and occasionally into each other (yes, you F1 snobs, I'm looking right at you). Well, it's WAAAY more than that. Now there's absolutely nothing that can equal actually going to a race, but after my most recent trip to Dover, I decided to tell you my

Top 10 reasons why I love NASCAR


#10 Size
This thing is HUGE. Dover is a 1 mile track and can seat 160,000 people. Thats a LOT of people, and they're all having fun. You can fit 10 football stadia into Dover Downs.

#9 I represent India
About 159,000 of these 160,000 people are white. So when Tim Lee and I show up, its the "Harold and Kumar circus" that's come to town. The burden of being ambassadors of 2.3 billion people is crushing. We speak impeccable English, and make no references to computers or graduate school. Also, no Osama Bin Laden jokes.

#8 The flyby
At the end of the national anthem (which everyone belts out - while eyeing me suspiciously), jets from the nearby Air force base scream overhead. At 300 feet above your head, they give you mild heart tremors. Very good to jump-start your love for this country.

#7 Weed
There's lots. You can take a walk in the car parks, especially those a little away from the field, and literally swim through clouds of the good stuff.

#6 Cops
Oh, they know. But they don't care. Also see #3.

#5 The race itself
Now, I do like racing. And so for me, watching these monsters whiz by at full throttle is pretty cool. My eardrums will never be the same, but thats OK.

#4 Chicks
NASCAR chicks are something else, I tell you. I befriended a couple this last time, an they were begging us to finish their beer. Which is really fantastic, and almost as good as them begging us to, well, you know.

#3 Alcohol
In the land of NASCAR, beer flows like water. I mean, it might be natural ice/bud light/MGD for the most part, but hey, who cares? They let you take your own beer to the stands, yo. (Hear that, NFL and MLB?) There was also this one time when off-duty cops had brought a breathalyzer. Sure enough, it turned into a competition of who would blow the highest, with charts and bets. I blew a 0.25, much to everyone's amazement (I wasn't staggering. Yet), and they all celebrated by, of course, giving me more beer.

#2 Rednecks
RVs with 8 by 6 foot confederate and US (and of course, #3) flags, pickups with bullet holes, cut off T shirts, sun burn, mullets. You get to see the whole thing here. But you know what, these guys are the most fun fans I have ever come across. Seriously. Way cooler than any other sport. With all the craziness that comes with the territory, I have never seen a fight, or even raised voices. There is a certain core decency with these people that is truly endearing. Sure, a bunch of them think that India and China are near Iraq, and they would rather stroll across the track during a race than vote Obama. But basically they're all right. If you're cool, they're cool.

#1 the Dover Monster.
The Eiffel Tower and pride of all NASCAR fans. Yep, that's a life-size car.

The Rock Concert story (2004)

From another mass mail (unsent, I think)

... which reminds me of my other adventure; the American rock concert experience. I have been to a few of these now, so I feel the need to tell the uninitiated about what happens. (Even if you aren't a rock concert virgin, read on anyway; this section will contain the word boob). Anyways, there are a couple of things you should know.

1. The air at any rock concert will be saturated with the smell of weed. You'd think with all the brouhaha about marijuana, there would be some control. There isn't. Which is OK if you're trying to bum a joint, but not OK if you're an ex-asthmatic actually trying to get a look at the stage through the haze. Short and shallow breaths work though...

1a. Watch out for the puddles of spilled beer/vomit/urine. There's a lot of alcohol at social events in America. And a rock concert is very social.

2. People will be dressed funny. Weirdness of attire is a function of hardness of music, as a general rule of thumb. Also when in doubt, wear black and include some metal. if you show up in bondage attire (whip and all), paint your face white and color your mohawk electric blue, you've arrived, baby.

3. Watch out for the surfers. Crowd surfing is becoming a bloody pain. Instead of people going from the front to back, its the reverse these days. Which is bullshit, because people are just hoping to get their asses carried by other people all the way to the stage. So as you face the stage, watch for flailing arms and legs as people get flung on you. Move if you can (there was this guy built like a house next to me and he kept throwing these surfers from 8 feet high. One chick was in mid air when the crowd in front of her parted, somewhat inexplicably. Chick met ground. S-p-l-a-t. She didn't crowd surf very much after that...)

4. Moshing. You need to know this to survive. Sometimes, in the middle of a concert, people will, for no apparent reason, start moshing. Now this isn't your usual jostling for space in front of the stage, oh no. This is people throwing their (and others') bodies around epileptically, to convey their heartfelt appreciation of the music, with scant regard for their own - or others' - safety. As this happens, well meaning and more sane people form a ring around these dozen-or-so morons and watch the fun unfold. If someone gets clotheslined and lands on you, you do your bit and helpfully push the poor sod back into the fray so he can get piledriven by some other socially maladjusted idiot. Alcohol numbs not only the part of your brain that makes decisions, but also the bit that senses pain, apparently. Awesome for the Indian dude who drew the short straw and had to be designated driver for the day. There are some rules, though. Punching and kicking is frowned upon, unless in retaliation, and biting is definitely a no-no, unless its between two lusting adoloscents (though with all that moving, you might rip an artery out, so masticating on your girlfriends neck is probably ill-advised as well).

5. You will see boobs, and sex in the bathrooms (you need to be lucky for the latter though). This bit is the revenge of the ladies. Since they cant mosh - well, a few do, but they're usually scary or ugly or both, and you don't want to see their boobs or have sex with them, unless you have NO other option - they will flash the star on stage. Or you, if they're drunk enough and don't know the stage from the parking lot. Either way, you get to see some. Or a lot. Which could be good (drunk hot college chick), or very, very bad (old ugly drugged out mosher lady).

And in the midst of all this, there's some poor guy whose trying to belt out his angst-laden lyrics while gyrating earnestly on stage hoping to convince you he's doing his best to justify the 50 bucks you coughed up to be there so he can pay for his next coke binge.

Fun, no?

Yr 1 of a PhD (2003)

I used to (and still occasionally do) write mass emails to all the people in my address book. This used to piss them off endlessly, and now I see why. I dug this email out from way back, and I present this gem of bad writing to you.

I used to be one angry kid back then.


So you've been wondering what I've been up to?

PhD, Hopkins, Baltimore. Waste of time and effort.

For all the work (yes, there was lots), I barely broke the curve in most exams (for the record, I didnt get a single A+ ; these were handed out to 5 people out of some 180, and we had about 15 asian students. So I didnt even try.) but I was enthusiastic enough in class that people invented a card game where the backbenchers would bet on most questions asked, worst dressed, loudest in class etc. I'm proud to say I was a star card ("most questions asked" category). Always the popular one...

Not so popular with the TA.

Me: Uh, you know, I could give you something really nice if you give me an A on that exam...

She: Scram,kiddo.

Me (persistent): Ahem, you know what they say about Indian men...

She: Yep. I know. THEY'RE TINY. HAHAHAHAAAAAA.

Me: Sod off.

I got a B-.


Still, as part of a PhD, you get to do a lot of lab work in addition to cramming or meaningless exams. I'm doing Immunology, so this has involved (at different times) staring at flourescent cells for hours on end on a microscope in a dark subterranian cubbyhole, injecting afore mentioned cells into the tails of very uncooperative mice - this, being a novice, I did horrendously - and then analysing survival curves, which basically means you watch the mice waste away and die a painful death as a result of your experiment. You note which day each one died, and plot these data. All this will somehow magically become a cure for cancer few years from now.

In addition to all this, there is this steady stream of

- talks (where you go for food and sleep/pick your nose for an hour as some idiot blathers on about how he's been wasting his time and his boss' money and ended up with crap results anyway),

- presentations (where you watch ingrate colleagues stuff their faces with free food and sleep/pick noses in full view for an hour as you try to explain to the imbeciles on about how hard youve been working and utilising your boss' resources in the pursuit of higher scientific goals),

- journal clubs (all of us pseudointellectuals trash some poor sod's data)

- lab meetings (we trash each others data, but more politely)

- happy hours (sad meetings of lab rats where we drown our sorrows - mostly ruined experiments and singledom issues - in an ocean of alcohol to the sound of 80s pop) These are the only gettogethers that last way more than an hour - unless you have a gel running - and where you learn more about anything than anywhere else. Lurid gossip about co-workers? Happy hour's your place, baby. Boss ran out of money? This is where you cry your heart out. Plus of course, all the women look vastly prettier after 4 beers...

So thats pretty much how a first year in a grad program in an elite university in the US looks, academically.

Right now, I'm settling in one of these labs (the only one that would tolerate me), working on something called "antigen presentation". The learning curve is steep. Of course, I've made a great start - I screwed up my labmate's experiment by swapping labeled tubes (honest mistake, I swear), and I also got caught by my boss looking at a pic of a naked woman - an attachment sent lovingly by one of my moron middle school friends. So clearly, they love me here already.

And I got 5 more years of this.