Walks into a bar ...

This is a series of rather random 'walks into a bar' jokes. they are the product of boredom and too much hot chocolate. there are many more where that came from. I am most proud of some of the last few. If any of these affect your political sentiment, then remember, ill be in a cave somewhere, rubbing my hands with glee.

Narendra modi walks into a bar. well, not really, since Gujarat is a dry state.

Narenda Modi walks into a bar. well, not really, he, insteadm  talks a lot about building a road towards a bar.

Narendra Modi walks into a bar. He has a rum and coke. this is an insinuation of his religious upbringing and his stance against the free propagation of minority religions in India.

Narenda Modi walks into a bar. After a few shots of jager he walks up to Morgan Freeman and repeatedly shouts, “we need more motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane”

Narendar Modi walks into a bar. Its an iron bar. It strikes a deep wound into his forehead. this is interpreted as karmic justice for evicting tribals in the name of industrial development.

Narendra Modi walks into a bar. Rajdeep Sardesai calls this hypocrisy and brings up the 2002 Godra riots as precedence for Modi’s negligence in government. Not a single fuck is given. Sardesai is a twat.

Narendra Modi walks into a bar. There is wifi. He updates his facebook status. Mark Zuckerberg pretends to care.

Narendra Modi walks into a bar. He sees bottles of carlsberg lying in the corner. his initial reaciton is disgust and derision over the absence of kingfisher from the indian markets. he then proceeds to start a campaign for cleaning

Narendra Modi walks into a bar. This is seen by political parties as a sign of approval towards a drinking culture and ever since, there has been a reduction in interventions from extremist political parties into bars. Haha, lol no.

Narendra Modi walks into a bar. He stays there for three days.

Narendra Modi walks into a bar. This is appeasement to western culture and will not be tolerated. Raj Thackeray is told to shut the fuck up.

Narendra Modi walks into a bar. It is a genuine break from his hardwork on policy matters and economic reformation of the country.

Steve Jobs walks into a bar. The complete setting of the bar counter is changed with the whole establishment having only one central table. Generations will now refer to it as making a dent in the universe.

Atal Behari Vajpayee walks into a bar. With great difficulty.

L.K. Advani walks into a bar. He stays there for a few decades. he was very keen on getting the managerial position, but never quite made it past deputy.

Sonia Manero walks into a bar. A while later she gets a powerful last name. An even longer while later there is economic downfall in the country. (brevity, my friend, brevity!)

Rahul Gandhi walks into a bar. That  empowers women.

Arnab Goswami walks into a bar. Why? The nations, really, no, seriously arnab, the nation, just absolutely, couldn’t give a flying fuck.

Exploding Cuttlefish

Ive had my fair share of surrealist humour for a while and the lovely thing is that they just never run out of lobsters. Sorry, I mean telephones. Oh, wait, no, rabbits. Bird. Plane. World Trade Center.

This is the absolute peach of a fact with surrealist material, you can get away with anything. Seriously, you can make fun of a cripple with a speech impediment and it'll soon be a 'classic' as long as you look drunk enough. You can talk about Mother Teresa's lack of engagement with the moisturiser market and it'll seem like fair fiscal analysis, just if it's interspersed with images of Jesus trying to waterski wearing a Borat mankini (tell me you dont want to see that, tell me the three of you trying to read this whilst guzzling mugfuls of rocket fuel).

Don't think I have no idea of sensitivity. I know that the last statement was offensive, to Sasha Cohen fans. And to the producers of the movie, who will probably sue the Catholic Church for trademark infringement. That's really where the political correctness and censorship of comedy debate should move towards, more sketches and stand-up that look like the creators were on shrooms sold to them by Speedy Gonzalves (that, is NOT, racial stereotyping).

The other thing appealing about surrealism is that you have a bizarre self-critical process. Laughs are no longer based on being edgy, clever puns, observational dexterity (felt like a fancy phrase). Now its just, hey, how crazy a thing can you say. The trade-off is that you say the craziest possible thing that nobody latches onto it and you are sent to an asylum (the only policy to stop Robert Rankin from flooding bookstore with anti-hamster propaganda), but you take a while and few genocides to get that cuckoo. Most of the time you are just writing about cats in jetpacks discovering prescription medicine for Alzheimer's patients.

If by now you are a tiny bit lost, then its fine. The whole point of the rest of the post was to make the 9/11 joke go down with more ease. And it wasnt a good joke to begin with so it took 2 paragraphs of uninhibited nonsense to wash it down. I guess sometimes I just never know when to stop. Hence, Im qualified to write How I Met Your Mother.

The point I've tried to make poorly is that if you want to tell people a thing they really dont want to hear, then sandwich it between many things they really don't care to understand. Then by the time they've realised what the actual subject matter is, its three weeks later and they're in a laundromat with instructions to the dryer written in Swahili, and they might just think you have a point. So the real question I'm trying to ask is, do you get extra air miles for flying on september 11?

12 reasons why this listing business is a bit much

This is rant. Although, if i need a disclaimer, this probably isnt a very convincing rant (clearly, im no John Oliver). again, if you came here for a list, you are going to be disappointed on several different levels (then, you have material to write '39 ways in which people misuse the word "meta"' or whatevs else). But, seriously, that phenomenon, if anybody can care is getting a bit out of hand. And sometimes, even cracked.

The whole purpose of listing was to somehow have a tangible connection between people. to give the reader a 'ah, even other people have this issue' feeling and not 'who the hell are these people'. Exhibit A: 29 things only people with glasses go through. TWENTY NINE! TWENTY NINE! holy shit, they are glasses not the philosopher's stone. And the sheer inanity dripped from these random tidbits with badly placed gifs of Deepika Padukone doing a fantastic llama impersonation by just being.

I think (because by this point, dear reader, you might have realized that accuracy or any form of coherence is forbidden in the post. Ooh, look rabbit!), one of the reasons was 'you get called chashmish'. well, no. on account of not being born in 'kuchh kuchh hota hai', i havent been referred to as 'chashmish'. no. just, ok, no. Another was that the world looks blurred when you take them off. Well, wasnt that clever. Thats just a description of the basic functions of glasses. Nothing special, seriously, not even an extra X chromosome (thats a very roundabout dark joke, if I was famous, I might have had protests outside my house)

But annoying gifs and obvious descriptions aside, this format is least conducive to chuckles or whatever you go there looking for. The ones with specific locations or particular movies is just pointless. Those who've seen said movie/are from place mentioned will find these obnoxiously tedious and others have no idea of the context.

Alright, so rather scattered rant over. This was very futile indeed. And i dont even have a video of tiny hampsters eating tiny burritos to compensate for this. Drat! 

Bullet Wounds and Dynamite

There's been a near supernatural aura around this year's Nobel peace nominations and the buildup to the award last Friday. Jon Stewart turned pantomine for that one night, prodding that deadly combination of white guilt and media aggrandization. Amazon probably drowned in request from places  like North Carolina ordering in their prized copies of 'I am Malala', a title that's preciously close to being a palindrome (that, frankly, was a dabble in the irrelevant). Most copies will spend eternity gathering dust, much like the statuette or medallion in the great decorated halls of OPCW.
There was a mad flurry articles in the Guardian, NY Times, and the 3 pages Huffington post dedicates to something that isn't Miley Cyrus's arse (I stole that joke from Jimmy Kimmel, that is how little effort I'm putting into humour for this piece). A subset of those claimed that it would be wrong for Malala Yousafzai to win the 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize for peace. Quite a few others claimed that Malala's win would have signified a triumph of western celebrity, and thus, deviate her from her cause. Here, I seek to do one or both of 2 things: firstly, and most importantly, I'd like to put it out there that the making of a Western celebrity wouldn't really be so bad for Malala. Secondly, a considerably more subservient and derivative point, almost to the extent of being a corollary, that the award to OPCW is a waste of humanity.
Right, so getting to it. The west, whatever that term may encapsulate, has a love for celebrity. For that sad story which they can 'awwww' over and feel better about the lives they think are miserable. The elimination of some rathher overweight contestant from X-factor or the plight of rape victims in Congo, it doesn't really matter, its the same hormonal rush followed by paste satisfaction upon having somehow, telekinetically, contributed. However, there is a tangibility to this claim to betterment that the awwwwers have, because it seems clear that massive corporations have harnessed the power of awwww by making people pay to text a vote for whomsoever Piers Morgan has bashed that week. And the cause of people like Malala, or Dr. Mukwege from Congo, could really benefit from similar tactics.
Her appearance on the Daily Show and the link to the MalalaFund exponentially boosted the monetary contributions from Americans and global fans of the show. A rise in sales of her memoir would also allow her a greater coffer with which to actualize the dreams, hopes and other intangibilities that would remain as such if it weren't for the increase in money. It is exactly in this venture that a Nobel would be bloody useful, to make people believe in the legitimacy of the cause, since, if the Swedes believe it, it must be good.
The other bit about awarding it to OPCW for I'm not sure what. Giving it to Mukwege's clinic in Congo would just make a much bigger financial difference, allowing a better influx of machinery and skilled workers.
The recent past has seen quite a furore about the Nobel committee's decisions with the peace prize, most notably for Barack Obama's hope and change and words. The prize hasnt lost legitimacy or status, but its becoming increasingly hard to understand the merit of the award. It would've been nice to see Malala give post-award interviews and see some suited agent make a tonne of money for all the books and pens she spoke about at the UN. Making it a panto won't be so bad.

Show me the Funny

Tiny rooms. weird lighting and the everlasting wait. There really isn't much to distinguish stand up from any other artform in terms of the build up to the act, but there's a surreal charm to the whole package. Stand-up, for me, had an immediate connection, a sense of purity like Colombian cocaine (read:coffee), and it all 'clicked' (a phrase I relate more to ignition that to art).

My introduction to stand-up was through a host of panel shows, DVD's and skits, the classic way. However, there was something different about my reaction to stand-up as opposed to other things I've tried like music, poetry, etc. With either of those, it was always a compelling need to reach some benchmark, or play a particular piece. There was never an innate connection, that one extra step where true happiness met a pot of gold with a talking monkey. But with stand-up it seemed like that'll all change. Largely, because it demands the least amount of paraphernalia, and im lazy to the bone. I quite liked the harmonica and thought of giving it a try, but couldn't be arsed to buy and/or learn. With comedy I just decided to think up some jokes, but them in an order decided by the cosmic justice of 'eenie meenie and miscellaneous other names that rhyme' and voila, there was my cauldron of embarassment, waiting to be showcased.

So it all began (like last week or something, this is just poor story telling) at a nice little pub in central london. The city boasts of phenomenal open mic nights, where first-timers are given a free shot to do whatever, whenever (well, within the five minutes). Being the second to last act didnt help, with a plethora of material to listen to, while running that one horrible pile of dust masquerading as a joke in your head.

Mustering the courage to not just hiss at myself for the length of the set, I somehow pieced the one-liners with the longer build ups and ran in a few circles for a bit. The audience reception was fantastic, which essentially was the impetus to pick it up in the first place. Ah! the thrill of making people laugh. If only I could do that through this post.

Yenna, Something, Blah!

Sundays are horrible if you've gone the whole morning  without an espresso, when Katrina Kaif starts to look like Bar Rafaeli. it is now theoretically impossible to open a webpage without Shahrukh's Khan's holographic image dragging you to a theater to watch the shambolic casket of racism that is Chennai Express. This is probably the umpteenth attempt at trying to make sense of the neuron killing machine that is a Rohit Shetty movie. So there have been articles, comic strips, lampoons, reviews scribblings on the back of a pigeon, graffiti written with saliva that have either praised and/or decried the phenomenon of marketing louder than a Punjabi wedding about Bollywood's official horror show.

This post claims to do something a bit different. Like not claim to be funny (no pretences, also), talk about how irrational the movie is (but its fun no, LOL, play badminton) or why that sequence of dance steps has been imprinted onto my occipital lobe even before the release. This is just a simple step back, to ground zero to see what it is we are going crazy about.

Clearly, Chennai Express doesn't announce itself as a film of the French independent era caliber. And everyone somehow excuses it for that. For the amount of money that even the spot boys on the set would make, you'd expect the movie to rebuild the Amazon rainforest. The idea here is simple, its not enough to take the public and squish them into a giant mass of zombies (unless they're on an island in Goa with a Russian Saif Ali Khan), calling it just 'fun'.

Why? you might ask. Yes, the two of you who're bothering to read this. Well, because its not like these movies are a new wave or provide a break from serious cinema. This IS serious cinema. Its come to the point that when silly lightbulb dances, a whole host of stereotypical nonsense and an objectified lead female are what is normalized as the 'expected' routine, there is very little impetus for anyone to make a movie that has two bits of sense in it. Its created a massive vacuum, which prevents any innovation or artistic credibility.

Moreover, its nefarious (haan, because humour nahin toh ek do angrezi ke bade words!) to acting and cinema in society. It trivializes the problems, like the bigotry that residents in North India face, if from any other part of the country. It legitimizes viewpoints of those who haven't been exposed to new ideas and are big Bollywood fanatics. This 'ah! its a no-brains movie so let it go' attitude needs to stop. There may be jokes in the next piece. Till then: Mind it. 

The Apotheosis of Tushar Kapoor

This post is what I think 'randomzzzz 4' facebook albums should be made of. You know, the kind that are about 'collage lyf' and 'mah besties <3 XOXO' (an emoticon that is acutely like a one-dimensional game of noughts and crosses. and since when does an X look like a hug.) As a clear forewarning it has nothing to do with Tushar Kapoor, which takes the grand total of people disappointed to 1 (his mum).

So the previous post was about gender sensitivity and this is an agglomeration of things that pop in and out of my head. For starters, a pure unadulterated hate of Katrina Kaif. Her extreme provocation leads to commodification of women while she, in blissful ignorance, continues  to  whilstfully jalao beedi chillums with the teeli of husn as the national bird of America (read: Sanjay Dutt) tries to find an expression that isn't a  2 parts remorse and 2 parts heroin with a dash of bomb blast (yeah, no subtlety there). Her fans counter this hate with astute argumentation from a metaphysical standpoint of 'kya raapchik maal hai yaar', but even that is baseless. Every time she emerges from the sea, shakes head and droplets fall on champu looking guy, a part of me dies, for she isnt even pretty. Yes, there, I said it. She's just white. Take a moment to mentally darken her (not blacken, because Race issues, and Saif Ali Khan doesn't like that) and there is nothing left swoon over, expect for her blatant disrespect for the Hindi language.

Even though its free, I can't spend time and space on that waste of cells import. So lets talk about how ugly Ashish Nehra is. He looks like Chewbacca shagged Sharad Powar (try, try as much as you want, but that image is going nowhere. btw, powar's the taker). And he bowls like an R.K. Puram kid with Down's syndrome. Or one that didn't clear JEE, whichever's worse.

Telangana  happened, giving Punjabis more states to call 'Madras'. That last sentence was a vague attempt to direct this post somewhere reasonable. England is still facing its weird speaking criminals to fight for an urn. And that too in a sport 12 countries care a monkey nut about. That didn't even need exaggeration. Some Kate chick gave birth, and they named the baby 'Pippa's Arse'.