I think it was Winston Churchill who said ‘No pair of glasses is rosier tinted than the ones we wear to look in the mirror.’ It was either him or my istriwallah , Marimuthu. He smokes cigars, too, from time to time, so my confusion is understandable.
Anyway, given below are a couple of examples that prove the point emphatically.
We’ve all met this guy. Or a version of him. He’s had a cushy life, he’s sent off two thankless kids to some dubious university in Australia or Rwanda. His wife, the poor thing, is searching for a humane way to bump him off. And you have to listen to him because he’s paying for the drinks. It’s only a matter of time before he rubs his belly affectionately as he laments the passion he gave up on as a young man.
‘You remember, no?’ he says with a faraway look. ‘How I absolutely loved cricket [it could just as easily be music, cycling, wig-making or proctology], and totally lived for it. My only regret in life is giving it up. And all because of Dad, sigh. He said he’d commit suicide if I didn’t take over the family business. If only I’d kept at it, I would have played for India. Pucca.’
Notice how anyone who gave up his ‘passion’ is always the guy who could have been the next Sunil Gavaskar, Shah Rukh Khan, Vyjayanthimala Bali or Milan Kundera? Never the next Rohan Gavaskar/Kamaal R Khan/Yogeeta Bali/Sirish Kunder.
You want to interrupt at this point, but you don’t because he’s serving good single malt. You want to say ‘I think not. That’s not how I remember it. If memory serves me right, you were astoundingly bad at cricket. In fact, you were 13th man in a team that didn’t have a 12th man. Which means, if one of the eleven couldn’t make it, they’d have picked Pankajam Mami, in whose compound we used to play, ahead of you, to open the attack. What family business? Your daddy was a loan shark. You were recruited as his henchman. You ‘gave up’ your ‘passion’ because you are a greedy and lazy and used to be called thevangu in school. And had you continued pursuing your ‘passion’, the highest you could have made it would have been dry-cleaner of Team India’s uniforms. Now calm down and pour me another drink.’
Similarly, I’m totally done with these author bios that you see on book covers, blogs and social media pages. I came across this one the other day conjured up by a woman I used to know.
‘Antaryami Kunjumon Bhattacharjee is a trained classical singer who, while not writing, alternates her time between Vietnam and her cottage in the hills. She is also a painter, and teaches Aikido in her spare time.’
No, you’re not.
Your real name is Muniyamma. You made up your current name by choosing random names from Hoichoi and Mallu movies and stringing them together. You couldn’t write your own laundry list if it was dictated to you. By ‘trained classical singer’, you mean you listened to an M S Subbulakshmi tape on an electric train. And, as far as I remember, your only Vietnam connection is that your father worked as an extra in Sivaji Ganesan’s Vietnam Veedu . Also, just because you beat up your old boyfriend once with a can of Nerolac paint doesn’t make you a painter. Or a self-defence instructor.
Now stop it. Stop it, I say. All of you.
Krishna Shastri Devulapalli is a satirist. He has written four books and edited an anthology.
