The failure of language (TFoL) among ordinarily smart people

Human beings believe themselves to be smart. They believe they were put on the planet to rule over it. To facilitate this ruling of the planet and all that resides within it, humans created many things. Among them, one that many believe to be a crowning accomplishment of the species, is language.

We have hundreds of languages. We have spent millennia perfecting the syntax, building vocabulary in order to make it easier to identify things or to specify things (Orange as opposed to Mandarin; lemon as opposed to lime: that lime green car is a lemon). We have developed dialects and special words and colloquialism and rhetoric and code and puns and sarcasm and sign language and it is now so ingrained that we see language in everything (unspoken language? body language? artistic expression? language of the eyes? the language of love?). So much so that anything we don't understand is deemed to be a language of some sort that needs to be deciphered.
 Whether it can be or not is immaterial.


Everyone communicates using some form of language: people speak and people listen (occasionally anyway). Communication is a sum total of speaking, listening and comprehension. Take away any one of these three and you have a failure of communication or a failure of language.

Our lives are spent wading through this torrent of language that keeps coming at us. We are neck deep in it. Some swim in it. Others sink in it. Everyone is in it. It seems to be the fabric that keeps the world as we know it, together.


Language has become code for life. We lead complicated lives. This code is meant to make things easier.

And yet.

In certain circumstances, language fails people.

These are smart people and they fail to understand simple language: the connection between speaking, listening and comprehension fails.This phenomenon is The Failure of Language (TFoL or Tee-Fall).


In these situations, people demonstrate three things (a) a clear ability to hear what is said, (b) a clear ability to understand each word that is being said and (c) a clear inability to comprehend what is being said.


Imagine this: You meet a bunch of people for dinner. Some you know, some you don't. Some know you and some don't.

It is mostly an uneventful meal: a bit of over ordering, small talk in loud volumes, retelling of old anecdotes (or new-telling if you don't know the group); anecdotes that can be fascinating or meandering or both, based on the skill of the raconteur. We have all been there and you know what I am talking about.

The evening reaches a part which is not the end, but as Churchill put it so well, it is the beginning of the end. It is now that the uneventful evening starts to become eventful.

People slowly start to contemplate what it is they want - another glass of wine or maybe a cup of coffee. They think. They talk. They discuss the alternatives:

"Wine anyone?"

"I want coffee"

"I'll have a glass if you'll have a glass"

"Shall we get another bottle instead..?"

"I think we can get another bottle"

Another glass or bottle of wine might get ordered, but that is all an elaborate dance around the elephant on the table.

It is fundamentally a question of dessert.

Everyone wants dessert. No one wants to order dessert.

Author's note: The reasons for this peculiar form of behaviour are only slowly becoming clear. Apparently there is a widespread belief among people nowadays in the Great Accounting System in the sky, but more on that later when research is at a stage where it can be shared.

For me, It is time for dessert, because I have a keen understanding of this very ancient Law of Meal Completion: For a meal to be deemed to have been completed, the last course of said meal needs to be a sweet one.
The corollary of said law states that unless a sweet course is eaten, the meal cannot be said to have been completed. It is akin to consummating a marriage.

From bitter experience, I have evolved a modus operandi.

First, I ask for the dessert menu. Loudly.

Upon receiving the dessert menu, I proclaim to no one in particular but everyone in general if they have a willingness to order dessert. Generally, I receive no reply or at best receive some half-hearted, barely audible "Not really" or "I shouldn't really" or better still "You go ahead".

I then proceed to ask, in a very audible voice, and after making certifiable eye contact with each individual on the table, "I am ordering dessert. Do you want to order a dessert FOR YOURSELF?"

People decline. I then announce to everyone in particular that I will not share my dessert. If you want to order a dessert, order your own. People ignore this. Or snigger at it. Or listen to it with a slightly startled expression. People who have been to dinner with me previously listen to it stoically.

This is typically the point where TFoL has already occurred.
The exact point of occurrence is hotly debated among researchers, but what is widely acknowledged is that by this point it has happened, but not evident.

I then proceed to order dessert. With an extra fork.

My dessert arrives.

This is the point where TFoL (The Failure of Language) is demonstrated. 

Some person who was living under a rock for the previous ten minutes while the wine-coffee-dessert dance was going on grabs a spoon and asks me for a bite.

I am astonished.

"Did you not hear what I said earlier (practically stood on my chair and shouted like a town crier)?" I am perplexed. "I-do-not-share dess-erts." I repeat for his benefit. I say each syllable, just to be sure.

"I don't want to share. I just want a bite." He says moronically with a flourish as if making a winning point in a debate.

"Then order a bite. I really don't care what you order." The entire table shifts uncomfortably.

"I can't order a bite!"

"I really don't care what you can or cannot order."
"There is a reason this restaurant does not serve desserts in bites. Something called Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ). The minimum you need to order to eat is what I ordered and just received. My satisfaction demands that I eat all of it. Not a bite less, not two bites less. You want something, order it."

"C'mon! I just want a bite."

"And I don't want to give you one. It is not personal, I just don't want to give it to anyone."

"I don't understand what the big deal is!"

"Can't agree with you more." I reply. "Let me not stop you from ordering one just for yourself then."

There is silence for a few seconds while the idiot contemplates the injustice meted out to him by me. If his neurons had more of their kind to interact and explore reality, he would realise that it wasn't me who was to blame but fate for making him an heir of Mac Flecknoe.

He makes another valiant attempt.

"Can I just have one hazelnut?"

"I might consider it if the Chef admits to putting an extra one on this plate."

"What difference would one hazelnut make!" He still manages to sound incredulous.

"Why are you pining for it if it wouldn't make a difference? Stand up for what you believe in man!"

He has the look on his face he would reserve for the perpetrator of a hit and run on his favourite pet.

"But you asked for an extra fork...!" he wails.

"Yes, and I will stab you with it if you continue."

I eat the rest of the dessert in silence and in peace.

_______________________

As my fame has spread, invitations to meet groups of people for dinner at restaurants are now limited to close friends, my Wife tells me. Just when I thought I was getting closer to finishing my research on the topic. On the bright side, I don't need to order an extra fork with my dessert.

Why I do not blog anymore: Why is it called the irresistible force paradox and not the immovable object paradox?

The Answer to the question posed in the first part of the title is a hard and convoluted one. I could think of No Better Way to answer it. So here goes.

As an aside, the answer to the question in the second part is quite evident, as will be quite evident shortly.

So, here goes [take two]

Writing, as with many things in life, requires practice. I am out of practice. I will tend to ramble. I tend to ramble anyway. Now I will ramble decidedly, in an unpracticed manner. Or I will ramble in a decidedly unpracticed manner. Practice makes perfect, so you can safely assume my rambling will be quite imperfect. Does imperfect rambling score over perfect rambling? Is this a question for the ages? Or the Sages?

Here goes. [take three]

Here went.

First, let me get something out of the way.

There is a reunion happening later in the year. I last posted a blog just before the previous reunion. Over the years of not writing, I thought (nearly, rashly, promised myself, something I almost never do) that I would write again before the next one.

The reunion is almost upon us.
LSD. Last Sem. Desperation. Hence.
Here goes. [iv]

I have been told (people have told me) that my writing is marginally better when I write about matters major or minor concerning my family or between me and my long suffering wife, who is also my long suffering muse, the inspiration behind my life, my window of perception, the doors to my soul, the mother of my children, who watches me bumble through life, without guffawing too loudly.

One must take what one gets.

Many blogs might not have seen the light of day had she not been around... because quite frankly, most likely neither would I. Most of my life would have been spent sleeping the hours of the day away.

So at long last here goes. [v]

My curtailment from writing. Why did it happen? Was it an acute form of writer's block? Was it something more sinister?

Hordes of people have been clamouring for answers. This is for all three of them.

The answers to all these questions lie in the law of evidence.

Each country has its own system of law. This system decides what is admissible as evidence or argument in a court of law and what is not. This is a very crucial aspect of the law since the outcome of justice often hinges upon what can be said or produced or evidenced. Lives can be at stake.

Now coming to me.

I am by nature, as I have confessed many times before, a very lazy person. Exceedingly so. I absolutely abhor doing things. I am perfectly happy with things getting done as long as the doer is someone outside of my corporal self. If there are do-ers and do-ees in the world, I am the non-do-ing-er.

Before I got married, I used to be known as the immovable object.

We all know, of course, what happened when the immovable object (me) met an irresistible force (my wife).

The immovable object bought a bicycle and started cycling to work three times a week. And on the Sundays that he was not swimming he went on hikes with said irresistible force.

Apart from these decidedly corporal activities that she induces me into participating in, there are also things that I need to do around the house - apart from of course as I have mentioned in previous blogs - taking care of spiders, lizards and other vermin, ensuring the toothpaste tube is perennially top heavy and of course making sure her smartphone is working as she would want it to.

Beyond all these onerous tasks and duties, there is one more: the dreaded To Do List.

It is a magical substance that is entirely made up of things that have an innate ability to squirm themselves out of the tenuous, ephemeral, fit-for-dandelions-only-vice like grip of my annoyingly easily distracted mind. It is made up of things that continually keep extricating themselves from my consciousness. These magical beings are thought-shifters and shape-shifters as is the TDL. Now-You-See-Them-Now-You-Don't.

The moment I am reminded of them, everything is crystal clear - I remember how we first spoke about me doing it, then when we next discussed a couple of weeks post how I would go about doing it, then when I was reminded to now-start-doing-it and then how I was best placed to do it and then a few days following that conversation how she resignedly sighed and said she would do it and save me the hassle and how I resolutely said that I and only I would do it and that I was firm and that it would be done and that I absolutely insist and then followed weeks of peace and nothingness till suddenly IT IS THERE AGAIN!

The strangest most utterly astounding fact is that I don't even know what IT is!

These lists are written in invisible ink on invisible paper made up of invisible tasks that come to life and visibility (in the reverse order, maybe) only when my wife chances upon them - and me together.

Previously blank pieces of paper - I could have sworn it was completely blank - suddenly have a neatly labelled list with items 7 and 19 struck off as having been done. Done. Done. DONE!

Who did those two? Was it me? Why did I start at number 7 and then jump to number 19? Did I strike them off as having been done? Can you do handwriting analysis on horizontal lines? Am I an amnesiac who is sleep walking through life doing items 7 and 19 on To Do Lists?

Why only those two and why are both those numbers prime? Why only Nitrogen  and Potassium?

Am I under some sort of spell? Am I under the thrall of some latter day Dr. Mesmer? Is there a me from a parallel universe who comes across and does things for me? Specifically things 7 and 19? Why is he not doing the rest of the things? How do I make him do the rest of the things? Why are there multiple "It's" on my list? What is this list? Am I...? Who am I?

When at first My Irresistible Force asked me about the TDL, I tried to bluff my way out. Then I tried to rationalize my way out - first to her and then to myself. Then I tried to fight my way out. Then I tried to squirm my way out, but the story repeated itself. There was stuff. And I was not doing it. After I said I would. Everything was clear as day when we speak and later, just hours later or maybe minutes later, I am unable to say what IT was that was IT.

Then I figured. There is a way. 

These things can pass. There is a way out. There is a way around darkness. More darkness.
I saw the light.

They said in a lot of old murder mysteries that there is no murder (and consequently no murderer) till the body is found. The perfect crime might be one where there is no body.

I had to be busy. Very busy. Too busy in fact. My wife will never ask me to do something if I am too busy. She loves me too much for that.

I had to remove all substances that could be perceived as evidence. Evidence of time. Evidence of intelligence. Evidence of thought. Evidence of the capability to remember Anything and consequently evidence that you could also remember IT. Evidence that one could do Something and consequently that one could do IT.

I took the easy way out.
I got rid of the body.

If I didn't have time to write blog, I must be very busy indeed.



Final note: I still haven't figured out what IT is.

The Private Lives of Lifts

Every day I use lifts, though I haven't been able to figure out why they are called 'lifts' because not only do they lift me up, but all too frequently let me down as well. They could possibly be known as Downward-Upward Mobile Platforms, but sadly, DUMP didn't make it. They are everywhere and almost everywhere are known as either lifts or elevators. In that way, they could be said to be uniting the world, creating uniformity. On the other hand if Jonathan Swift were to write Gulliver's Travels today, "Lift" and "Elevator" could quite adequately substitute for where to break boiled eggs from as the reason for the feud between the inhabitants of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Lifts, hence also have the potential to be divisive.

In my life so far, I have come across some pretty strange lifts.

A few years ago I used to live in Bombay. In an old building in a relatively old but posh part of town. The lifts in that building were awesome. In the first few months, I had a rate of lift capture and desired destination achievement of less than 50%. Which meant that in less than half the times that I entered the lift was I successful in getting to where I wanted.

How? You might be tempted to ask. And why, the sharper reader might be inclined to ask did you have to capture lifts?

Let me describe the lifts first. They were old, generally genial, sometimes cantankerous folks, with metal grill doors that one had to physically pull in order to effect ingress to or egress from them. Due to their advanced years, they had memory for exactly one instruction and that too was wiped clean when the grill was opened.

Imagine this:
You get ready to go to work, take your bag and reach the lift lobby. You press the button summoning the lift. In due course protesting and creaking, it arrives, slightly irate at being made to work so early in he morning. You wrestle with the doors and and get in closing the doors after you and start to look for the button for the ground floor. Between this closing the grill and pressing the button you wanted, you chanced fate. If before you pressed the floor someone from another floor pressed the button calling the lift, the lift was captured. No matter how much you pleaded, cajoled or pressed the buttons, it would unerringly take you to that floor as punishment for your tardiness. In the first few weeks, I was captured quite often. Then I caught on and even became a master hunter. Me and my flatmate invented a game by which one would keep score of the number of people captured in a set number of 'takes' each. The person with most captures won. Of course, when you were getting late for office, it took a great deal of practice and hand-ear coordination to both capture a lift and also to ensure that it took you down in time.

That time in my life was particularly fecund when it came to quirky lifts. In my office at that time we had an otherwise nondescript brace of lifts that had been designed particularly peculiarly. For starters, there were two capacious lifts designed to cater to a building that extended to exactly two floors above the ground. And then they quite peculiarly ended such that you had to walk the final half of a flight of steps to reach office.

Another memorable lift I encountered during that period was one that catered simultaneously to two buildings. It had three doors and space for four humans (the rusted plaque said six), sardine style, one of whom was perched on a stool and was the lift attendant. He knew the intricacies of managing the lift. This lift had apparently been built between two adjacent buildings that shared a common wall but were of differing heights overall and differing ceiling heights within floors as well. There were metal grills on three sides and one opaque wall that had the panel of buttons. Years of use had rubbed off whatever arcane symbols had originally resided on those buttons. The lift was also a quadrilateral with all four sides unequal. Between one opaque wall and the smallest grill was wedged a stool on which was perched an ancient, reticent man. He looked not unlike the last surviving caretaker of the Holy Grail. When you entered the lift, you told him the name of the establishment you wished to visit (never the floor, since these things did not matter) and he would press a few buttons and nod and tell you where to get off. Sometimes the entire journey might be a full half-yard, where you would be between floors on one building, seeing only feet near your head and only heads near your feet and be at the proper floor on the other side. I imagined, limbo would be like this - all evidence pointed to you being upside down, but all evidence was incorrect.

This old gentleman was the only person who knew how to operate the lift. Once when he wasn't there, the lift door was padlocked.

Though increasingly I see 'vanilla-cloned' lifts, all is not lost. The lifts in my apartment building have some character. If ever there is a competition for Synchronized Lifts at the Olympics, I am sure the lifts in my apartment building would win hands down.
There are three of them (one being the substitute) that most gracefully descend upon you, the floor marker allowing you to track their stately progress across floors completely in tandem. I can almost imagine them doing gentle, unsmiling, satisfied high-fives on each floor as they make their progress towards you. And when finally they do arrive, the doors open simultaneously, one set welcoming you in and the other grinning coyly at you, winking. That happens when you are lucky, when the grand dames decide to pick you up in the first place. Else they play tag up and down the building while you watch forlornly, trying to fathom whether the four minutes spent waiting for the lift are an investment or a waste and whether you should
Now
Finally
Take the stairs.

I don't even know what convinces them to pick me up on most days.

In fact I have met quite a few lifts that went a long way towards convincing me that they are intelligent beings with a perverted sense of humour. One of the reasons I am convinced that lifts are sentient beings is because just like some other commonly found sentient beings (people) on our planet, each lift is an individual with its own character, its own idiosyncrasies, its own nuttiness. Don't get me wrong, I am not against lifts, at least not so much as I am against people. And all lifts aren't cranky. There are some exceedingly good ones as well.

I can just imagine my lifts saying to each other "So what's the secret word for today?"

"Lilliput." "We'll go once he says that."

Or maybe, they are aliens hiding in plain sight, studying humanity for some nefarious purpose like taking over the world by stranding huge populations of humans on high floors of buildings, leaving the ground relatively easy to take over. Maybe. We'll know soon, one day. I think for a start we need to remove all cameras from lift lobbies.

Cricket and Shopping

The other day, a very weird thing happened. I had never experienced anything like it in my many-many years of happily married life.

The story went like this:
It so happened that my wife needed to buy something, a rather personal sort of gift for a close sort of friend who was sort of getting married. We were to meet her in the evening. The evening was about three hours away. Now my wife is a person who thrives on planning. In fact, she plans so much and so well that if you were to ask her what we would be doing on the third Sunday of September, she could tell you that I would be taking my son for a haircut. Mind you, that is still three haircuts away, but she knows. Now on the afternoon in question this very woman wanted to buy, on the spur of the moment, a present for a close friend. The said present, had not yet been decided.

Till now, there is nothing extraordinary. We all keep wanting things. I want to see the dark side of the moon, my wife wants to buy a little something over the course of an afternoon. There is nothing wrong with wanting, it is what has largely moulded our society into its present shape.

Well, we landed up in the general vicinity of that ubiquitous institution of consumerist-modernity: the mall. Whereupon, my wife immediately wanted to go in and buy something for her friend.

I scoffed at the idea.

You must realize that 'scoffing' at a wife is no joke. And if the wife in question happens to be your own, it is positively something worthy of a gallantry award. It takes a lot of courage, this scoffing at wives.

Early in a marriage, men end up doing a lot of 'scoffing', but as time goes by, they realize that to scoff reasonably and intelligently, one has to be correct. This 'being-correct' gene, nature has cruelly deprived most men of. This leads to another problem. Most men believe that before marriage, they used to be correct about everything. This is an illusion. Before a man gets married, nothing matters very much and most contentious issues are either bets on who can eat/drink the most or discussions about batting averages, both easily resolved.
Being correct is very much a function of circumstance. When it doesn't really matter, anything is correct.

So, as I mentioned, I scoffed at the idea of her buying something with only three hours to go to the dinner. The facts were on my side:

• The 'buyee' was a close friend
• The decision of what to buy had not been taken
• The clincher was that given travel times and the fact that we needed to pick our son up in an hour and a bit from a class meant that we practically had about forty-five minutes in which to make the purchase. That is about the time it takes my wife to rev up her shopping engine, to sort of get warmed up, exchange pleasantries with the staff and tell me where to stand and to be visible.

All the above told me that this was a very good opportunity to scoff at and I scoffed at it.

She said she only needed fifteen minutes. After taking twenty seconds for my patronizing chuckle, I allowed her twenty minutes.

Within fifteen minutes, we departed having paid for and acquired a bit of merchandise that was deemed a suitable gift.

I was stunned, flabbergasted, astonished, shocked, my brain was addled...fifteen minutes? FIFTEEN MINUTES?! That is generally the amount of time my wife can expound upon the relative merits of two heads of lettuce. An avid shopper she might be, but even when she has decided on the the need that needs to be fulfilled and a shopping expedition launched to do the needful, chances are it will not be successful in the first attempt. Or the second. On an average, she requires about four separate trips before buying a non-grocery article. Which is what has given rise to a new term - the Shopping Campaign.

But here I was with very much the same woman, having acquired a non-grocery article in fifteen minutes. It seemed to me as if my entire life till then was a sham - all those years spent in shopping malls could have been reduced to a few minutes. My head swam.

I leant on the car for support.

How could this happen? How did this anomaly in the Universe open up so suddenly? Would this be the norm from now on or was it just a freak incident, against all natural law? I just needed to get an answer.

I am proud to say that after weeks of thinking and evaluating, I have solved the problem.

A few days ago, I was trying to explain test cricket to an American. He didn't get it, but wrapped things up by saying "You must love shopping with your wife."

It was an epiphany. He was right. Shopping has been modeled very much on cricket by wives.

We just watch the game. Women apply it to life.

The more I think of it, the more it seems to me that cricket must appear to the uninitiated much the same that my wife's shopping appears to me. As I have mentioned previously, she is an avid shopper, and shopping for her is not just the purchase, but the entire process is at least as, if not more, important. In fact, the entire approach to shopping is one that seems to imply that it is a test of character.

The similarities between test cricket and shopping are undeniable. To the uninitiated, both seem interminable, boring and pointless, with too many rules to truly understand what is happening and hence enjoy the game. Modern Test cricket, fortunately, lasts for a maximum of a mere five days. Buying a pair of shoes on the other hand might go on for weeks, with buying cabbage, cosmetics, clothes, sundry gifts, exercise ball, these-are-not-those-shoes being a side-effect. You might have only these sundries to show for the efforts over the said few weeks.

Ultimately, one is looking for closure. In Test cricket, closure exists in many forms after playing for seven hours a day (breaks included) for five days: a team might win (with the other losing as a direct, inseparable consequence), they might end up as a tie, where both are deemed to have won and neither lost, or as is the most common result, there might be a draw. It is this aspect that leaves non-cricket watchers flabbergasted and the question "Five days for what?" is often raised. But then cricket is more about the playing than about the winning.

Similarly shopping: It goes on forever, for large parts of it the activity seems pointless and after all that effort and time, one mostly has groceries to show for it.

Next day, repeat the process. A fair number of repetitions will finally give you a win, that is cherished for times to come.

Ever since a game of cricket has started to be played over three hours to yield a result, I have seen distinct changes in shopping patterns of my wife as well. While that might not be the real thing for her, it has resulted, on occasion, in drastically reduced time spent shopping. This respite though is only temporary. Just as test cricket is the real deal, I do not think these small excursions will ever supplant the continuously ongoing campaign to buy a proper pair of shoes for a woman.

Paradise Lost

I suffer from the Calvin syndrome - the Calvin with the tiger called Hobbes - all my real talents are undervalued. I am really good at doing nothing, but no one, not even my own wife, the love of my life (who married me following my tender entreaties involving among other things psychiatrists, loony bins and permanent postings) allows me to fully explore and exploit my talent of doing nothing. She is not really concerned that this talent of mine is getting wasted, in fact, she is fully up in arms against it. She treats it as if it were some kind of pestilence that should be eradicated. Consequently, my backside and our couch have grown further and further apart in recent times, getting to spend hardly any time together.

Things were not always thus, though.

I don't know why precisely it came to be, but early in my marriage, my wife made a rule (unilaterally, I must hasten to add), that when I was watching cricket, she would generally pester and nag me, but with no real intent of making me stop watching. Maybe this rule had its roots in the fact that my father-in-law is an avid watcher, maybe it was formulated because my wife read in a how-to-manage-husbands handbook that this was an essential to make husbands feel 'in control', but the fact remained, if I was sitting in front of the television watching cricket, she would, more or less, let me be.

Cricket is the ideal game for doing nothing. At worst it lasts for three and a half hours and at best for five days. When someone said he thought cricket a form of organized loafing, he never had in mind the millions of people watching it from sundry couches at home. It is a game built so that the 'doing nothing' of men has a structure to it.

Initially, my wife even took interest in the proceedings when I was watching cricket.

"Who's playing?" she'd ask.

"India," I'd say. 

"Who are we playing against?" she'd ask.

"Australia," I'd say and then we'd both settle down to watch some cricket. Me, for the whole duration of the match, she for installments of five minutes. Unless something drastic is happening like us winning the world cup, she finds it hard to sit and watch for more than a twelfth of an hour. She is extremely interested in winning, moderately interested in the game.

This rule of letting me watch cricket was not a declared rule, mind you. I happened to chance upon it through trial and error. I discovered that whenever I was watching cricket, things would turn to "I'm taking the kids out" rather than "You take them swimming" and shopping expeditions would be deferred to later "When the match is over" etc. etc. It was not all smooth sailing though. In reply to "Who is playing?" The answer always had to be "India" first and then someone later. Stuff like Brazil might have worked initially, till she wised up and realized that only about eight countries play at any genuine level of competition.

For the record, I never actually tried Brazil. Even Netherlands was subject to an audit that I barely came out of thanks mainly due to their having beaten England in the recent past.

Once I said that Sri Lanka were playing Zimbabwe. Nothing I said after that could convince her of the supreme importance of the match to the cosmic health of our known universe and alas! I was dragged off the couch.

The pocket of civilization that I inhabit, is one of extreme refinement. I can subscribe to about five different cricket channels, all of which show nothing but cricket or related programmes all day long. They also show repeats of old matches. Old matches can be anything that was played before I was born to something played in the morning today. Repeats, as any sports fan knows are hugely entertaining, more than the actual match on occasion, since the result is already known, you have none of the real time heartburn and threat of imminent crushing disappointment. All you need to do is to enjoy the game, savour the major moments (29th over just watch the cover drive), bask in the glory of victory and salute the game. Most reruns involve our team winning, if you subscribe to the correct channels.

And this is how I spent many a glad evening through my life. After marriage, it changed to watching only matches involving India, and this had a good run too. Till one fateful day. It was one of the happiest days of my life and also the day I can trace the loss of Paradise to.

My team had reached the final of a major tournament in a long long time. The build up to the entire tournament had been special. Me and my wife had watched a lot of these matches together. She could name and recognize players even of the opposing sides. She could name upto five different ways that a batsman could get out. She supported the late night matches all the way till the final. She broke a habit of a lifetime and watched all six hours of the match.

We Won.

Jubilation.

Two Weeks Later.

The euphoria had died down. I was sitting peacefully watching a repeat of the match, internalizing it, savouring it, remembering the key moments, reliving the excitement without thought of impending doom this time when my wife came and sat with me.

"Another match?" she asked.

"Just watch," I said, trying to be a little enigmatic. I was sure she would love to relive the night of glory again. "Sachin is going to hit two fours in the next three balls."

"Didn't we just watch it last week?" She asked, a little unnecessarily, I thought. "You remember every ball!" She said rather accusingly.

"Yes, we did, but it was nine days ago, not last week." I said, settling down peacefully, "Enough time to forget the nuances."

"How can you watch this again? You already know what is going to happen!" She exclaimed.

"Well, yes," I said, "But this time there is no pressure."

"Seriously?!" She said. "Seriously?!" It was maybe a question, maybe an exclamation. I never know. The only other place I have ever heard it on is on American television serials.

We went shopping that evening. And that was the day Paradise was lost.

From that day on, whenever she sees me watching cricket, the first question is "Is there a tournament on?" Followed quickly by "Are we playing?" Rounded up by "Is this match live?"

Sharing knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. You never know when something might come back to be the bane of your existence. Had I been a little economical with the truth and kept my mouth a little shut, one never knows, I still might be watching the second final of the Australian tri-series of 2009.

Paris Mysteries - Wine, Food and Toilets

I just returned home after my second trip to Paris, both visits about two decades apart, give or take. The first time when I landed there, accompanying my parents, I knew four things about France: they fought in the first and second world wars, they ate snails, they spoke French and they had the Eiffel tower and Mona Lisa. Paris was large, crowded and confusing, not aided by the fact that my parents (completely) and I (mostly) were vegetarians. Before going there I always wondered what people who ate snails looked like. I knew the answer before my second trip even began. They looked, well, like me.

Anyway, the week that I spent in Paris this time in the company of my wife, was something utterly diffrerent. It was a truly romantic getaway. We fell in love again and again. With the crepes, the wine, duck confit and various small patisseries. Some things had changed though. The Eiffel tower looked a lot smaller than I remembered it to be as a ten year old, as did the Mona Lisa (Small-ish in front of the other works housed under the same roof).

Having spent a week sampling various types of French food, I came to the conclusion that the French missed out on a business opportunity of staggering proportions. They could have become the preferred outsourcing partner for food of their neighbours from across the channel. Imagine some 60 million people eating three times a day at 3 Euros a meal. The math says it would have been nearly 200 billion euros a year. Even if you discount half of that due to the various Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi eating joints, there would still have been a potential 100 billion euros to be earned. That is definitely not a sum to be frowned at.

The English Channel is unique in that either side of it houses arguably the best and unarguably the worst food in the world. I can't fathom how that came about, especially given the intertwined history of both nations over the past thousand years or so. Had it happened early enough in history, the English would have been deprived of one of their most powerful colonising impulses and India might not have got railways till much later. Anyway...what was not meant to be..

My wife and I adopted a tourist procedure that was quite new to us - that of walking around, with no specific direction and only jottings in the margins of hotel notepaper to guide us. It was a most refreshing way of getting to know a city. The first day, we started early, had a huge breakfast and before ten were out in the streets of Montmartre, walking around, looking for a place to eat. The cafes were just opening. The chairs and tables were being set in the very Parisian way where everyone faces the street. I have seen this only in two towns - Paris and Ho Chi Minh City. Anyway, the cafes were opening and what should the first customers do but enjoy a glass of wine or beer. At ten in the morning. And none of them seemed to be in college, in fact far from it. It just didn't seem  right for ten in the morning. But then, these things grow on you and by ten thirty I was sold, having my first glass of beer washed down with my first glass of wine of the day, since there was catching up to do.

We liked the trial of the first day so much that we repeated it every day from then on. Basically me and my wife were eating at intervals of (what now seems be) every twenty minutes. Copious amounts of food. We walked the streets, saw a good place (often the result of laborious research by my wife followed by a less strenuous search for it on the map by me), sat down and ate. We repeated this about five times each day. Considering we were in Paris for about five days, we must have had, by a conservative estimate, about twenty meals. When we didn't eat a meal, we would stop at a patisserie and order something by the simple method of pointing at it in the display cabinet. We ate all sorts of things that we didn't know the names of, but which were all uniformly divine. Well, some more divine than others, but then when one is in the realm of divinity, relative divinity is just petty quibbling.

And if I failed to mention it earlier, or if my previous remarks were in any way unclear, the food was wonderful. Even as I write, the word 'wonderful' doesn't quite seem to convey the 'wonder' that the food was full of.

The people were friendly and helpful and generally well dressed. And thin.

That leads me to the main mystery that we unearthed on our trip to Paris. How can French people eat the food that is served in the country and stay thin? It seems impossible. I have a theory. And it involves the wine and the non-peeing.

As I said repeatedly, not too long ago, the food was awesome. Eating their food and looking at Parisians leads me to conclude that the inhabitants of the city do not eat there. Most people are thin. The food definitely does not in any way possible assist staying thin.

We know a French couple here. One day the daughter asked her mother for French food. She immersed her potatoes in cheese and said Voila! She said the secret to French food was to put lots of cheese in everything. One cannot remain thin eating that food. But Parisians are thin, which leads me to think that there must be layers to this mystery. Maybe the wine is a factor. So, presumably if one started to drink early in the morning and ate that divine food, one would not gain weight.

Maybe. Maybe not.

This brings me to the final element to the mystery. Toilets.

There is an acute scarcity of public toilets in Paris. Acute. There are street signs leading to the nearest public loo, in some cases from as far as a couple of kilometres away. And if this is a free public toilet, it is stated there in big bold letters. And if you are unlucky enough to have to pee and have not been able to find a free toilet, you might end up paying 2 euros for taking a leak. Two euros in the place I live is the equivalent of my lunch on a workday. To top it all, the people I found queuing up outside all these toilets were mostly foreigners. Which possibly means that the French have either decided to call toilets something else as a practical joke or that not taking a leak lets you stay thin.

Imagine what a diet that would be. Start your day with French wine. Eat four meals a day of French food. Do not take a leak and you have lost four kilos in a fortnight.

If my wife permits, I am keen to carry out this experiment. Downsize me! with French food. 

Creating the Mythical Beast through changes in Communication

Marriage is a great thing to be in. There is companionship, there is friendship, there is support, there are children, there is a fly in the ointment. Okay, there are a few flies in the ointment, but today, here, I am talking about one specific fly. Communication. Between husband and wife. We both seem to speak different versions of the same language - supposedly well understood, common words that mean entirely different things to people who have vowed to stay together for better or for worse.


"Nothing," a man says. He means precisely that. Nothing. Zot. Zero. Aught. Cypher. Empty. Blank. Void. Null.


"Nothing," a woman says. I won't comment on what it could mean, but can safely say that if Tolstoy were a woman and decided to write War and Peace, she could just have written "Nothing."


This vast chasm in the meaning of words does not arise, as many people term it, due to a variance in wiring between the female and male brains or due to gender differences arising from distinct roles played during the infancy of our species - hunters versus gatherers, etc., etc. Don't get conned by all this. It is all misinformation. Women can speak and understand the language that husbands, boyfriends, brothers communicate in perfectly. After all how hard can it be to interpret the ideas of a mind that is incapable of keeping more than one idea afloat at a time? And that too a mind that has a total library of some five ideas. 


It very inconceivable. It is unbelievable. It is done for a reason. To keep men in a constant state of bafflement. On tenterhooks. To constantly feel they as if they are treading on eggshells.


Why do women do this? Control is part of the reason.


The major reason is that women in general and Wives in particular have an Agenda. The mis-communication is merely a means to a larger, sinister end. All women actually belong to an ancient sisterhood that is in search of a mythical creature - the perfect husband (pH). Millennia of search without any one in billions getting to say "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" made Wives turn to another avenue - Creation. Like alchemists of yore who tried to turn lead into gold by doing all sorts of things to it, wives try to turn what they have found and married into what they want - a perfect husband.


When I first learnt of this, I tried to figure out what this pH is. The descriptions are fairly misleading. The perfect husband seems to be a normal human male, but if you look at the purported feats of this 'normal' being, from the sounds of it, he should have a hundred arms and legs, a thousand ears, a few dozen heads, no ego (once inside home) and with a brain that runs the birthday/anniversary function of social networking sites on an online jewelry store catalogue platform. And these are just a few of the things that this pH does. 


I concede I do mildly exaggerate, but it is merely to demonstrate the sheer weight of expectation that is piled upon husbands. The wife that I am pledged to, despite having more than a passing interest in baubles, would rather have me be more responsible. How? I ask her. I am already responsible for everything that goes wrong in our house. If I was more responsible, I'd probably be incarcerated.


In all my studies on the matter, I have discovered that there is a philosopher's stone for the alchemical metamorphosis of a normal husband to a perfect husband. It is called "Setting Expectations," or since everything now has to be able to be done, men need to do expectation setting.

This small two-word phrase is possibly the most convoluted two-word phrase that mankind has ever encountered in its short existence of half a million years. On the face of it, it sounds very simple: I simply need to set expectations. And then all would be well. Or at least most would be well.

My literal interpretation doesn't work, naturally. 


Does expectation setting mean that if I told my wife right at the beginning of the year that I intended to forget the anniversary, everything would be all right? Apparently not. This is not expectation setting. This is a recipe for disaster. 
'Expectation Setting' actually means that I need to do what needs to be done, as desired by the wife.

It leads me to believe that a Perfect Husband is ephemeral. It cannot exist for more than an instant in time and this existence is brought about on a deed-to-deed basis, but the legend of these deeds is distorted in the common generational memory of Wives and pinned one one hapless, non-existent creature. And the burden of this memory is shared by all husbands as a collective responsibility. 

In short, between us all, there is a perfect husband around.