Open letter to Baldev Sigh from the movie ‘Apne’

Namaste Uncleji!

When we first met you, you were resigned to spending the rest of your days bitterly obsessing over winning that boxing trophy/belt/whatever. You didn’t even realize how your single track obsession has ruined the lives of everyone else in your family. Especially, both your sons. They might put on a brave face in front of you, but on the inside, they’re probably rueing the day that they were born.

Let’s begin with the eldest. Why are you so hostile to him? Why do you expect him to fight your battles? Did you want him to continue to give up the best years of his life trying to achieve something that you failed to? Okay, I get it. You’re an Indian. From a village in Punjab. You want your son to follow you into the family business. Which he did! For some time. He gave you the best years of his life! (-ish). His best, mate-attracting, child bearing, years. He let you waste his precious putting-in-the-hard-work-that-you-can-only-do-in-your-20’s years. And then he went on to do something that seems like an alien concept to you: provide for his family. It’s because of him that you can spend all your time shadow boxing with your demons. It’s because of him that your wife doesn’t have to spend all winter knitting sweaters and mufflers to sell at the local bazaar or spend her summer washing your neighbour’s dirty utensils. It’s because of him that you live in a big-ass house in which you and your best friend/#1 fan/stalker get to reminisce about the good ol’ days. Instead of going “Thank you son! You’re a fucking national treasure,” you don’t even bother to TALK to him? What the hell is wrong with you?

As for your youngest spawn, do you realize that your he lost his arm because you were out trying to be the youngest-boxing-champion-who-looks-like-an-eighty-year-old? That itself should have given you pause, Mohammad Ali. Anyway, one day, a miracle happens. His hand recovers! A person who had made peace with the fact that he is going to have to spend the rest of his life with only one hand (do you have any idea how difficult it is to both masturbate and manoeuvre porn with just one hand?) is then able to use BOTH HIS HANDS. A life changing event! Something which only happens to perhaps one in a trillion people! A lesser man would have counted his blessings and lived happily (albeit a little bitterly) to the end of his days. But, as we all know by now, you’re not a lesser man.

So you start training your formerly handicap son a week after he starts recovering from his disability. Good call, father of the year! You put him through a gruelling physical regimen for a dangerous and useless boxing championship which he, on paper, has no chance of winning. Again, let’s remind ourselves that HE WAS LIMITED IN HIS MOVEMENTS TILL ABOUT A WEEK AGO!

Now, after your hard and vigorous training, which would not have been good for his newly un-paralyzed hand, he finally enters the local boxing championship, defeating the last guy who betrayed you. A more mature man would have realized how hard he has pushed his luck, but as we established in the beginning, you aren’t a mature man. You are the sort of person who interprets the recovery of his son as the last opportunity for you to finally be able to tick the last item on your bucket list. If god didn’t want you to emotionally blackmail your offspring into spending their youth trying to accomplish your unrealistic goals, then he wouldn’t have ordered his stork to drop them into your glove shaped house.

So you finally set sail to “America,” for the “international boxing championship” which no one has ever heard about. HOW PRESTIGIOUS CAN IT REALLY BE?

Anyway, unrealistically, your son keeps winning. He even manages to reach the finals! Then, something which everyone with even a pea brain could see coming happens. He ends up in the ICU! It hasn’t even been six months since he regained the use of both arms and you pushed him into doing something which even stronger people who can use both their hands are not able to do. Best Dad ever!

After you send your youngest progeny to battle between life and death, you start training your eldest son again. SERIOUSLY? He’s fifty years old. He can barely lift a handpump anymore and you want him to fight a boxing championship against someone who is at the top of their game? And you think you can train him to do that in one month? Even David Blaine is going “Dude, that is some crazy shit.” Do you want to relegate all the women in your family to go back to sewing and knitting for the rest of their lives?

However, thanks to the big bookie in the sky, the biggest miracle in the world since you having a career happens and your eldest son wins the championship. Phew! I hope that makes you happy! Couldn't you have just stuck a sock down there like a normal person instead of almost destroying the lives of the unfortunate fruit of your lions?

And if you think that your eldest son won the trophy for you, then you’re a few bottles short of a full crate of Bagpiper soda. He did it because he realised that if you didn’t get your “prestigious” trophy, you would’ve lived long enough to make his children fight your battles.

In short, paaji, you’re a terrible father!

History’s greatest monster!

Also, what’s with all the overacting?

Down and Out on Hope Street

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Human beings love new beginnings. It makes for a great personal narrative! We want to leave our past behind and not be bogged down by it. We want to be a better person than we currently are. We want to have the perfect reply when confronted with a taunt -embedded with the truth - masquerading as joke. But we couldn’t think of anything at that time and now it’s too late. We can’t really change the past but we can always imagine living an inspirational life in a distant future. And there is nothing more inspiring than ‘a fresh start.’ And there is no better time than December to take stock of your life and convince yourself to begin anew. We seem to think that the year has only eleven months and December is the waiting period between the current year and the next. A whole month of being in limbo. December is like the child nobody cares about because he neither gets good marks nor can he play any sports.

There is something about December that turns everybody contemplative. We like to imagine that we spent the year actually doing something other than meandering through our life wondering where it all went wrong. So we try to quantify our whole year. We start making lists of everything that we’ve done. And coincidently, whatever we liked turns out to be the best the year had to offer. Top 10 things I could have done to improve my life instead of watching everything put out by HBO. Five things my grandmother said that were racist but I pretended were adorable. Thirty Thousand things I wanted to tell my boss but couldn’t because he’s a raving asshole and is the reason I die a little, everyday.

There is something about December which makes people overestimate their capacity for self-improvement. We make promises to ourselves that we know we won’t be able to follow through. And yet we still make them because hope is a flame which never burns out. Suddenly, we think that we’ll rise above our own mediocrity to start losing weight/quit smoking/stop re-tweeting compliments. We don’t want to begin the new year as ourselves. We want to spray some magic dust and turn into someone better. Even though the odds of that happening are even more remote than Sachin Tendulkar ever playing another one-day international, but hey, stranger things have happened, right?

There is something about December which makes everyone nostalgic. Suddenly, every old memory is drudged out and even people in their early twenties remember their childhood with a loud sigh and a fond head tilt. Did you really have the best time of your life when you were living in a socialist dystopia with one teevee channel, no internet and a twenty year wait for a telephone? Are you really sure that everything tastes better with a dash of poverty and a smidgen of desperation? Let’s face it. Everything seems better in hindsight. In reality, your childhood sucked. What’s so great about being a child anyway? Everyone tells you what to do; you have to pretend to feel guilty while blowing away your parent’s money on useless things like textbooks & tuition and you have to bribe your driver to make sure he doesn’t talk about all your recreational trips to your neighbourhood ‘Wine & Beer’ shop. If I wanted someone else to make rules for my life, I would have joined a religion.

There is something about December that turns everybody sincere. Maybe it’s the realisation that they’re getting closer to death or that they’ve already had a drink or two but even the most cynical people will sit beside you at a party and tell you about their hopes and dreams until you realize you’ve been listening to them drone on for an hour and you fake a phone call to get out of the conversation. It’s like everyone is going through the existential angst that you usually hear about in a Coldplay song.

There is something about December that makes people want to share its end with the whole world. For some reason a large percentage of people prefer to bring in the new year in a room full of strangers, eating cold food and drinking watered down alcohol, while being “entertained” by out of work performers. Sounds as exciting as a hernia operation! So many plans are made to be broken. And most of the time, even if you try to follow through on them, you end up not reaching your destination because of a traffic jam and you begin your fresh start with a road full of hostile, resentful strangers while trying to assure your empty stomach that you will be at your destination shortly as you calmly rue the day you decided to buy the tickets to your local rotary club’s “rocking” new year bash featuring some generic Punjabi pop song yeller. You sit there and contemplate how this came about and where it all went wrong.

Just like Mother Nature intended.

Have a great new year! Probably going to be just like the last one, but, whatever.