Arnab Goswami declares himself winner of all past & future Newshour debates

Satire... 

New Delhi: Arnab Goswami – the famed conductor of and primary noise generator on the daily Newshour debate on the Times Now news channel – today declared that he was the winner of all past and future Newshour debates. Mr. Goswami made the claim in a debate today on the channel when a panelist questioned his authority on the issue being debated.

It was a normal noisy hour on the Newshour debate on the topic of whether the NDA government was better or the preceding UPA government, when suddenly, reacting to a question from Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewalla, Mr. Goswami declared that he was the winner of all past and future Newshour debates and thus had authority over any and every issue. This led to another round of simultaneous speaking by three of the five panelists with no one able to understand what was being said. According to eyewitnesses at the studio however, it seems Mr. Goswami kept enunciating repeatedly, “You question me? I am the winner of all Newshour debates… I am the winner… I am the winner.”

Tadapit Bannerjea, a C.R. Park resident and regular viewer of Newshour, said, “I usually watch Newshour because it generates so much white noise that it covers up the sound of the disco next door and I can sleep in peace. But today I could not sleep… Ornob-da has finally said he is the winner! We are all so proud!”

Reportedly, Mr. Goswami will conduct the show from today onwards wearing a sash saying “WINNER!” in bold.

http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2016/01/arnab-goswami-declares-himself-winner-of-all-past-and-future-newshour-debates/

Rahul Gandhi claims ‘Vendetta Politics’ after getting a mosquito bite in Parliament

Satire...

Akbar Road, New Delhi: A day after being released on bail by the Delhi High Court in the National Herald case, Rahul Gandhi today claimed that he had further evidence of vendetta politics. Accompanied by his mother and Congress party supremo, Sonia Gandhi, Mr. Gandhi rolled up his pajamas to show a clutch of red spots on his upper thigh, which he told the reporters gathered around were mosquito bites.

Even as Ms. Gandhi averted her eyes from her son and stared ahead slightly abashed, Rahul tore into the BJP blaming the majority party for the mosquito bites. “The BJP has been releasing mosquitoes near where I sit in the Parliament,” he said to reporters who had gathered around him. “That is the reason we keep rushing into the well of the house… to avoid the mosquitoes. Else we would not stop the functioning of the Parliament.”

“They were clearly RSS mosquitoes, because even when I kept telling them – ‘Shoo‘, they kept returning,” Mr. Gandhi said. “Only RSS mosquitoes are this intolerant.”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/12/21/rahul-gandhi-claims-vendetta-politics-after-getting-a-mosquito-bite-in-parliament/

Company selling bottled air to sell both bottled tolerance and intolerance in India

Satire...

New Delhi/ China: ‘Vitality Air’ – the Canadian startup that recently started selling bottled fresh air in China – today announced plans to enter the Indian market too. However, the company said that the market for selling a couple of other commodities was larger in India than bottled fresh air.

“We will launch bottles of both tolerant and intolerant air in India, “Sam Jones, CEO of Vitality Air said. “We have seen that people in India do not care too much about dying from side effects of pollution. Instead we have found the chemical formulation of both tolerant and intolerant air molecules. After inhaling these molecules, an individual is likely to become tolerant if he uses our tolerant canister and vice versa for the intolerant canister”.

When asked about the timelines of the launch, Mr. Jones said, “We will launch it when the next Parliament session starts. That way, Members of Parliament will be able to gift these canisters to each other in the session”.

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/12/18/company-selling-bottled-air-to-sell-both-bottled-tolerance-and-intolerance-in-india/

Kejriwal blames Earth for rotating too fast after he slips in bathroom

Satire...

New Delhi: Arvind Kejriwal today came out with a scathing statement after he slipped in his bathroom while bathing. Just a day after claiming that Modi/ Jaitley were responsible for the CBI raid on a Delhi government bureaucrat, Mr. Kejriwal blamed the earth for rotating too fast as the cause for him slipping.

“Go and tell Mr. Modi that his strategy will not work”, Kejriwal said angrily to a bunch of reporters gathered outside the Delhi Secretariat. “Today for ten seconds, the earth seemed to rotate too fast and that too in the wrong direction and I slipped while taking a bath”. When someone in the press asked Kejriwal if he had suffered from an easier to explain attack of vertigo, Kejriwal refuted the claim and said, “It is Modi… We have proof. We will show the proof soon”.

Meanwhile, Congress protested in the Rajya Sabha and blocked functioning of the Upper House as usual blaming the BJP for Kejriwal slipping.

“The RSS has done this earlier to me too,” Rahul Gandhi said. “This strategy of intolerance will not work in India. We will protest against this for the next few days, before we find some other topic to protest on.”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/12/18/kejriwal-blames-earth-for-rotating-too-fast-after-he-slips-in-bathroom/

Driver invested in National Herald without telling us: Sonia Gandhi

Another one in the latest Salman series. Couldn't resist. Satire.

10 Janpath, Delhi: Boldened apparently by Salman Khan’s acquittal in the 13 year old Bandra hit and run case, Sonia Gandhi today claimed that the National Herald case too involved the Gandhis’ driver. Speaking at a national meet of the Congress party today, Ms. Gandhi said that Tadapit Kumar, Rahul and her driver of fifteen years, was the actual investor in National Herald and not the Gandhis.

“I want to confirm today that it was our driver, Tadapit-ji, who had given the Rs. 90 Crore loan to acquire a controlling stake in National Herald,” Ms. Gandhi said, amid cheers and applause from the crowd of Congress party-men at the meet. “”Tadapit-ji did so without informing Rahul or me, and his only mistake was that he happened to once share a cigarette with Mr. Subramanian Swamy’s driver, post which Mr. Swamy started falsely implicating us in this case.”

“It is the intolerance of the Narendra Modi government that they are targeting innocent people like us, whose drivers happened to innocently invest 90 Crores in a company,” she continued. “We will raise this issue on the floor of the house.”

http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/12/driver-invested-in-national-herald-without-telling-us-sonia-gandhi/

Delhi man buys car with square root of negative two on the number plate

Satire...

New Delhi: Faced with the prospect of having to use unreliable public transport for up to three days a week, Tadapit Kumar, a software engineer working for an MNC in Gurgaon but residing in South Delhi found a novel way to solve his impending woes. Tadapit traded in his old Honda City for a smaller car with square root of negative two on the number plate.

“I have to travel twenty five kilometers every day from home to office”, Tadapit said. “The only way I can do that by public transport is if I change three buses, or change two buses, take the Metro and then take one of those congested shared autos… or walk to work… none of which is an option really with a boss like Chaddha who expects me to be in office by 9:30 sharp and cancels my attendance if I come in at 9:31. So, you see, I had to do this number plate thing”.

“Square root of negative two is an imaginary number – far from being even or odd”, Tadapit said. “Any division by two will lead to an imaginary result… hence, for all mathematical purposes, my license plate and thus by extension my car too has to be imaginary”.

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/12/11/delhi-man-buys-car-with-square-root-of-negative-two-on-the-number-plate/

Salman Khan not only innocent, but a virgin too: Bombay High Court

Inspired by the acquittal... Satire...

Mumbai: After acquitting Salman Khan in the thirteen year old hit and run case, the Bombay High court claimed that Salman or ‘Bhai’ as he is popularly known, was not only innocent but a virgin as well. The almost fifty year old Salman had claimed to be a virgin on Karan Johar’s eponymous show,‘Koffee with Karan”, a few years ago.

“The court case proves a malicious intent to malign the image of Mr. Khan who is as innocent as Robert Vadra”, Justice Joshi, the presiding judge at the High Court said in his order acquitting the actor. “This court strongly believes every word that Mr. Khan has uttered as the gospel truth, including his claim of being a virgin.”

‘Bhai’ fans celebrated the verdict with victory processions throughout the city. Several of them agreed with the Court’s assessment of the actor’s virginity. “Itne busy aadmee hain bhai… karne ka time nahin toh milega hoga,” Vikresh, a Bandra resident said, while distributing laddoos.

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/12/11/salman-khan-not-only-innocent-but-a-virgin-too-bombay-high-court/

Faith in corruption restored with Salman verdict, black money begins returning to India

Satire...

Mumbai: On the same day that the Bombay High Court acquitted Salman Khan of all charges in the infamous Bandra hit and run case 13 years ago, a little over thousand crore in black money returned to India. Businessmen brought back black money parked abroad, convinced that the no one would prosecute the wealthy and the well-connected.

“If Salman had gone to jail, we would have lost faith in our judicial system”, Babu Yadav, a Bihar based businessman said, using his country-made pistol to shoot in the air, in celebration. “Just like the High Court has asked the police to prove that Salman was drunk, we will ask the government to prove that this money is black. After all, the color of this money is still the same”.

Investors pumped money into the the stock markets as well and the Sensex rose by a 1000 points as a result. Foreign investors returned to Indian equities, some of them confirming that with Salman now free, ‘achhe din’ were finally here. “We are happy that Mr. Khan is free,” Mark Mobius, CEO of Franklin Templeton said, “and we congratulate the Modi government wholeheartedly for finally festering a culture of tolerance. What best to counter claims of intolerance than letting off a murderer?”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/12/11/faith-in-corruption-restored-with-salman-verdict-black-money-begins-returning-to-india-sensex-rises-1000-points/

Book Review: The Bro Code by Matt Kuhn

One of the many attempts to cash in on HIMYM mania, The Bro Code shouldn't be read unless you get it as a PDF for free in your mail box like I did a few years back. Sucker that I am, I still bought the paperback and was thus, thoroughly disappointed.

The Bro Code is really a long blog post and not a book. You can read it in thirty minutes... and eventually the overuse of the word 'Bro' in everything is sure to get on your nerves.

I read it with another book at the same time (Reluctant Fundamentalist), that's why I managed to tolerate it. Read alone, the book is probably worse.

Book Review: Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

As I read Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, which I admittedly purchased only because I had been shaken by the Gone Girl movie and the fact that it was on a decently hefty discount on Amazon, I was reminded of a 90's author who wrote dark, often disgusting books - books that you could not turn your gaze away from, even as you read while growing increasingly disgusted. Chuck Palahniuk.

Flynn is more refined in her storytelling - her 'unreliable narrators' start off as reliable, balanced, put together people with average American lives (in both Gone Girl and Sharp Objects) - yet the darkness that follows reminded me of Palahniuk's characters.

A very interesting read - and I wonder if Flynn will agree that her writing is Palahniuk inspired. Or maybe I am drawing a comparison simply because they broadly use the same narratorial technique. The only reason this is a three and not a four star, is because I had broadly guessed the ending and half the fun of reading a thriller is in the climax.

Dark and interesting nevertheless.

CEO fired for not using enough CEO-catchphrases

Satire.

Bangalore: Dooggy, a startup that recently raised a million dollars in funds from VCs here in Bangalore, has confirmed in a statement today that it has fired its CEO. Tadapit Prasad, an IIM-A 2000 passout and a Unilever alumni, was apparently fired since he never used any of the usual catchphrases CEOs are associated with.

“We are a startup that does pet dog makeovers and very few people take us seriously”, Sachin Dutta, the founder of Dooggy said. “So, we hired a professional CEO because having someone who is ex-IIM-A and ex-HUL just makes it so much simpler to get funds from VCs. Before we hired Tadapit, VCs would just laugh at us. In fact, Sequoia called us to their office just so they could laugh at us”.

“It worked for a while and we even got a million dollars in funding”, Dutta continued. “But soon we realized that all Tadapit had was the ability to manage our business and none of the showboating we needed from a professional CEO. He didn’t play golf, wear cufflinks or Rolexes. Most of all, he never used phrases like ‘lipstick on a pig’, ‘let us double-click on that’, ‘where the rubber meets the road’, etc. It felt like our office peon Jayaprasad had learnt English and gotten 15 years FMCG experience… there was no CEO type feel”.

“We will now hire a CEO who is truly CEO material”, Dutta concluded.

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/10/11/ceo-fired-for-not-using-enough-ceo-catchphrases/

Enticed by PayTM coupons, man recharges his phone for one crore

Satire...

Bangalore: A mid-level manager based in Bangalore was shocked to learn that he had recharged his prepaid connection for crore rupees over a year. Apparently, Tadapit, the management professional in question, had been so engrossed in seeking the best deal online and recharging his mobile balance every day that he lost track of his bank balance.

“There is like a new coupon code that PayTM or Freecharge kept sending me every day, so I kept recharging my phone. I got so addicted to it that I didn’t realize how much I spent in recharging my prepaid balance,” Tadapit said.

“I only got to know I had recharged it for so much when someone from Airtel called me and told me I would get their Diamond Care package because I had over a crore in my prepaid balance. It seems my prepaid balance crossed even that of Sunil Mittal,” said Tadapit while showing us his prepaid balance.

“I don’t know how I am supposed to use this prepaid balance. If my wife comes to know about this, I will be in trouble for sure. She asked me for an expensive gift for her birthday and I refused somehow saying that we could save on that money for future. I have to come up with some good excuse now,” he said in a hushed tone.

“Not just that, the company has given a Airtel 4G female representative as part of this Diamond package, who keeps bugging me about upgrading to 4G or proving that my mobile internet is faster than Airtel 4G,” he concluded with a miserable look on his face.

http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/09/enticed-by-paytm-coupons-man-recharges-his-phone-for-one-crore/

Village feeling 37.281% more secular after meeting both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi

Satire...

Patna, Bihar: Villagers in Dhibra Village in Patna suddenly felt more secular after Sonia and Rahul Gandhi spoke at a rally there. While this was not the Gandhis’ first rally in the run up to the Bihar elections, political scientists on Times Now believed that the levels of secularism rose because the Gandhis were not sharing the stage with any other political party.

While the Congress pegged the rise in secularism due to their efforts, a BJP spokesperson rubbished the reports. He threatened to ban meat, beef or something similar in the area to prove his point.
When this Faking News reporter spoke with a few locals, it turned out that most people had been so mesmerized by Rahul Gandhi’s speech that they had forgotten their religion.

“Bhaiyya, Kapil Sharma ek taraf aur eeh Rahul baba ek taraf”, a villager said.

“Our dreams of seeing a comedian speak at close quarters have come true,” another said. “We had only seen these people on TV earlier.”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/09/20/village-feeling-37-281-more-secular-after-meeting-both-sonia-and-rahul-gandhi/

AAP to get Somnath Bharti’s dog to bite dengue mosquitoes

Satire...

New Delhi: After allegations of Somnath Bharti getting his dog to bite his wife surfaced, AAP supremo and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has promised to use the dog to rid Delhi of dengue-causing mosquitoes. The dog called ‘Don’ would soon be pressed into service, Kejriwal promised.

“Somnath Bharti might be a dead weight for the AAP but at least we can use his dog”, Kejriwal said, in a press conference. “Only AAP provides a platform for its members’ pets to serve the nation as well. Can BJP and Congress do something like this?”

“We will get ‘Don’ to roam the streets of Delhi with Somnath shouting instructions behind it in tow, to get it to bite Dengue causing mosquitoes,” Kejriwal concluded.

Meanwhile Mr. Bharti refuted allegations that he could his dog to bite anyone by instructing it to bite police officers at a police station. When the dog refused to comply, Bharti proclaimed his innocence in response to his wife’s allegations. He said however that Kejriwal’s plans just might work since ‘Don’ happened to attract mosquitoes wherever it went.

“If anything, Don will attract all the dengue causing insects of any area to itself,” Bharti said.

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/09/21/aap-to-get-somnath-bhartis-dog-to-bite-dengue-mosquitoes/

Employee gets 5% salary hike but attends 400% more meetings after getting promoted

Satire...

Gurgaon: A software engineer working for a Multinational Company in the city confirmed that while he got a 5% salary hike on getting promoted, he was attending 400% more meetings. Tadapit Kumar, a ten year veteran at an MNC software firm, however seemed to be quite pleased with this arrangement.

“My company has not promoted anyone, citing recession for the last seven years,” Tadapit said. “So I am happy to be promoted and to get a 5% hike. Most of my friends here have taken a pay cut this year to continue working here and are busy polishing their profiles on Naukri.com.”

“Yes, my invitations to meetings has gone up 400%, but I am happy about that too,” he continued, in response to a question from this Faking News reporter. “I sit in a corner and play Solitaire or browse through the Naukri.com profiles of the people in the room and occasionally make statements like ‘Yes, let’s double down on that’ or ‘Can we have a detailed review on this… this slide isn’t enough?’ etcetera. This is what I had been missing all those years.”

http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/09/employee-gets-5-salary-hike-but-attends-400-more-meetings-after-getting-promoted/

Comparisons with the Meluha Guy (The Legend of Ramm Series)

I must say at the outset that I have not read the Ishvaku book - a book that will supplement Amish's Meluha royalties and sustain his great-great grandchildren. My version of the story does not start with or eventually merge into the Ramayana and is not a justification or rendition or version.

'The Great War of Hind' is my attempt to understand God and his designs on the world - why He did what He did. I had two epiphanies before I began writing the book - One, what will happen a thousand years later when archaeologists dig up Marvel's comics? Would they not think Aquaman or Spiderman were the Gods of our times? Now what if we were to extend this argument to all the mythological pieces we now... if everything that we have every been told was just a story.

Second, I like to think God despises and despised/ came to despise mankind. And so, I imagined our world thousands of years ago, where God tried to balance mankind off with demons (or animals as we know them today). Set in this mix, my story of Ramm and Hanohman and Rahvun developed slowly - known characters set in an unheard-of story.

Think of it as another episode of a childhood show, as another comic book starring your favorite childhood characters. The idea is not be in the Meluha guy's tail-wind : I wrote this book more than 2 years ago... That's how much us mere mortals sometimes need to wait to get published. (My awesome publisher had quite a backlog unfortunately.) So, I would possibly even pre-date the Ishvaku storyline.

Anyhow, it's a free country. Read what you please (ideally my book).

Or read them both and confirm my suspicions about my book being better.

Cheers!

The Great War of Hind (Legend of Ramm #1)

Map of Hind 12015 BC (Legend of Ramm #1)

Prologue: The Great War of Hind (The Legend of Ramm #1)

In the beginning, there was no such thing as heaven or hell. All that there was then, was earth.

I speak of a land far before time – far before the concept of time. When men and gods coexisted – lived and died and fought and loved. People thought of time in breaths and moonrises and winters; and if they missed one – say a breath or a moonrise or a winter – time simply ceased to exist. But, for the sake of chroniclers and people who shall doubt my story, I shall state that we were of twelve thousand winters before the coming of that messiah many call Yesus. 

It is unclear how everything our world as we saw it came to be. There were only stories and songs and poems passed down from generation to generation; hymns sung at festivals or lullabies that put children to sleep. 

It was said that God created man. I shall not dwell on this story for I do not know how or why or when and I will not submit myself to conjecture. All that I know is that once God created man – whichever God this was – He could no longer bear his creation. So He created a new race to destroy humankind. Having set this race upon men, God retreated to the mountains, far away from his creations. Men came to know this race by many names. In our kingdom, we called them demons.

My name is Sanjaay and I shall tell you the story of how our world came to be. There are raconteurs and mischief-mongers in our ranks and I have no doubt they shall pervert the truth with their self serving versions. The events of history – this history of our land– shall thus inevitably have many versions, doubtless. I was there with General Ramm, I fought by his side and at the very end when I left his service, and he confided in me everything – even his deepest darkest secrets. I began to write this book, this memoir of the great man that once was, when my body was no longer fit for soldiering but my mind was still robust. I travelled far and wide. I met gods and demons alike; sons and wives of men long gone – just so the world may know full well the truth about our times.

And so it was that thousands of winters ago, that earth as we knew it – as I knew it – came to be, with man and God at absolute odds.

In my time, we called our land ‘Hind’. 

A land of gods and men and everything in between. 

Employee promoted for explaining the family tree of Peter and Indrani Mukherjee

Back on Faking News after a long break... Satire.

New Delhi/ Gurgaon: A software engineer was recently promoted to the post of Vice President after being able to explain the family tree of Peter and Indrani Mukherjee, immediately after catching the story on TV news.

Tadapit Kumar, an employee with TCS, who had been on the bench for almost a year was dismayed though at the prospect of having to do real work soon.

Devdas, Tadapit’s ex-peer and now reportee said, “Tadapit managed to understand the entire structure of the Indrani and Peter Mukherjee family web and explain it to all of us within thirty seconds of the news breaking on TV. Our CEO was so impressed that he promoted him on the spot.”
Tadapit Kumar, however, could not have been less thrilled. “I was on the bench for a year chilling out,” he said.

He added, “Now they have made me a VP. That’s how bad shit happens. What if I get rich and famous and happen to marry a girl like this Indrani lady who will kill her own daughter for having a relationship with my son from some other marriage, now?”

“The only reason I even understood the news piece so quickly was that I thought the reporter was talking about Rani Mukherjee,” Tadapit sadly concluded.

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/08/31/employee-promoted-for-explaining-the-family-tree-of-peter-and-indrani-mukherjee/

Pak destroying brand value of ‘ISI Mark’ with 2 terrorists caught in a month: India

Satire...

New Delhi: After a second Pakistani terrorist was caught alive in less than a month, India blamed Pakistan today for destroying the brand value of ‘ISI’. Sajjad Ahmed, the Pakistani terrorist caught on Thursday, had been tasked with setting up a base for Lashkar-e-Taiba in Rafiabad, some 76km from Srinagar, in India.

Speaking at a press conference, Prakash Jindal, spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office said, “We are extremely dismayed at Pakistan not taking their job seriously. Clearly, the recent crop of terrorists could do with better training – they can at the very least try to not be caught alive. We need better professionalism from Pakistan, after all we have captured two terrorists alive in less than a month.”

Referring to the ISI he said, “What will be the brand value of our ISI Mark if Pakistan’s ISI becomes a joke? The name itself signifies best in class, and the Pakistani ISI clearly doesn’t deserve an ISI Mark anymore. They managed to hide Bin Laden for five years and now they cannot even manage one shoddy terrorist. Maybe they should change the name?”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/08/31/pak-destroying-brand-value-of-isi-mark-with-2-terrorists-caught-in-month-india/

Inspired by OROP, IIT students demand “One Man, One Girlfriend” (OMOG)

Satire...

New Delhi: Inspired by the One Rank One Pension (OROP) protests currently on in the capital, male engineers from IIT Delhi held a candlelight vigil (in broad daylight) to demand ‘One Man, One Girlfriend’. These aggrieved men, most of whom had believed IIT would be a place to hit on and pick up girls after reading Chetan Bhagat books, took up the vigil after only one of them made a girlfriend in the first year of college.

“I am tired of going to fests to try and hit on women all of whom seem to have these mysterious ‘boyfriends‘,” Tadapit Prasad, a chemical engineering student said. “The only reason I wasted two years of my life at Kota and fifteen years of my life before that was so that I could get into IIT like Chetan and have sex. However, the only benefit of IIT so far has been the high speed LAN with a
high density of shared porn… And that too, this government wants to ban!”

The students raised slogans for OMOG and burnt effigies of both Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi.
 
http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/09/01/inspired-by-orop-iit-students-demand-one-man-one-girlfriend-omog/

Acknowledgements: The Great War of Hind

It is customary, I guess, for authors to thank people. It is out of this custom alone that I thank people here; and not because of any sort of gratitude!

Jokes apart, I grew up on books. Even for our meager means, my parents never refused me a book, however expensive. My love for books has grown so much that till this day, I find it difficult to enter a bookstore and exit without a book in my hand, as also equally difficult to not enter a bookstore if I have spotted one. Thanks, thus, to my parents for buying me all those books and thanks also to those authors who have shaped my thinking and taken me to their own worlds – various, variegated and vibrant.

I must say not a day has passed after If God Went to B-School was released that people haven’t asked me and irked me with questions about my next. It is almost like people constantly pestering a newly-wed couple when they are going to have a baby. I am thus thankful for all those who asked and thus pressured me to birth this one. The labor pains were horrendous – not least because I have a mind and energy sapping day job.

Most of this book was written in the backseat of my Alto with Ram – my driver – weaving in and out of traffic on the nightmarish jam-ridden journey to office. (I bet you have never seen a ‘chauffeur driven’ Alto.) I thus attribute any and all spelling and grammatical errors to Ram’s jerky driving style. Over the past ten years in an effort perhaps to keep Delhi authors writing in the backseat of their cars, the state governments have grown road coverage by 30% while vehicles have gone up 3000%. I must thus thank profusely Delhi’s own Sheila Dikshit and that UP politician who has that big hideous expensive handbag and elephant sculptures to her credit and their respective governments as through Kanwariya, monsoon, weekly accident, traffic police barricades, ill planned road/ flyover/ metro construction, VIP movement and random inexplicable traffic jams, they have almost singlehandedly ensured that this book got written. My vote is and will forever be for you, ladies!

I am grateful to all my friends, colleagues and fellow human animals, for their stories & their banter. In no particular order- HK, MG, Avtar, KV, Vijay, Bajrangi, Anshul, Dharam, Rajat, Nauty, Sikka, Khulla, Bengali, Sartaj, Lisa, Varsha and Shilpi – people I met and befriended during my education (which is mostly fraudulent). Also thanks to all the friends I made at work (no particular order again) – KDK, Yaka, Cartoon, Sashi, Deutsch, Doshi, Doshi’s wife, Ashwin, GTJ, Rungta, Chulbul, Pratyush, Taufees (actually the entire Citi MA Batch of 2010), Monz, Shahani, Nirajana and Aman. Thanks for making me laugh and laughing at me and my jokes. And thanks for letting me observe the human animal so closely.

Thanks also to my array of friends and family members– all my masis, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, aunts, neighbors– all those who bought If God Went to B-School and having read it, were kind enough to say kind things about it. Several of them actually bought more than one copy of the novel, almost as if it were a collectible. Eternal gratitude.

I will also hold an eternal grudge against the many people who I presented copies of IGWTBS free of cost to and who did not read it. You are the reason I will never gift a single soul a single free copy of this one. (Good looking women might be exempted from this rule.)

Special thanks to HK who went through the various drafts of this book, kept my spirits up and most importantly, kept my cynicism in check. Well, at least she tried. Also she is, till this day, quite sure that someone is going to sue me. Eventually.

The highest praise in my mind for If God Went to B-School came from one of my mother’s best friends who told me that reading the novel was like listening to me talk. 

Sarcastic, bitter and cynical. It tells me my writing has a voice. Perhaps.

Jokes and tomfoolery aside and as always, infinitely grateful to my parents, all my teachers and God.

Best,

Vaibhav

PS: If I have missed thanking you here and you feel wronged, please do email me at vaibhav.a10@fms.edu. I’ll be sure to thank you in my next. Or to write back explaining to you in painstaking detail why I am not grateful to you. If I do not email you back, it means you have hitherto sent one too many emails with pics of cute kittens or babies or monkeys or ‘Forward this to 20 people and you will meet the love of your life near a green dumpster today’ and I have blocked your email ID. I spent one whole week at a foul smelling dumpster and no one – ‘love of my life’ or otherwise – ventured near me. 

It was singularly disappointing.

The Legend of Ramm: Words for the Wise

My obsession with the gods is almost as old as my fascination with the written word. At the age of fifteen, I wrote a short novella as a project for our Creative Writing course in school – a story of about twenty thousand words about the interaction of God, man and Hades and I must say that that seminal idea forms the crux of this story. I was disappointed with this short novella and felt at the time that I had done terrible injustice to a potentially beautiful story (though my teacher at the time was suitably impressed and wrote ‘Gripping narrative!’ at the end).

But to give credit where it is due, this idea is, in fact, born again from the concept of historical fiction I encountered not more than two years ago. I read Phillipa May Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl followed by the Game of Thrones series and then the Empire of the Moghul series by the husband-wife duo which goes by the pen name of Alex Rutherford. I realized that such stories harnessed the image and the back stories of all the heroes and historical figures we have in our minds and having bolstered them, feed them right back to us. The greatest limitation of an author is to get his readers to imagine what he writes – to see his world as he sees it – and with heroes (and gods) already known to readers, the task – though tricky – is somewhat easier.

The birth of this novel was in a dream. I saw the image of a man, a monkey and a demon, and they simply sat beside each other looking at me silently. I felt as if they were waiting for me to re-imagine them and tell their story again. After all, all our epics and prayers are but stories written to bind us in a particular faith; all I have done is to give these characters a new story to make their home in.
I have to say here I had no intention of hurting anyone’s religious sentiments. For the sake of all glorious religions in our world, I will go as far as to say that all the characters mentioned in this book are entirely fictional; yet if you find your faith shaken by this story, then maybe your faith was never strong enough to begin with.

This novel, if studied by a historian, would perhaps prove to be terribly anachronistic. I have used techniques of warfare that range from ancient Roman to Mughal. The army structures are modelled on the manner of the Mughals, simply because it seemed a more colorful and intricate way of organizing an army to me. I have gleaned information on wars ranging from Greek conquests to Carthigian, Roman conflicts to Mongol successes to the Mughal wars and finally, to the more recent World Wars. And though you may not find it explicit perhaps, all the battles in this book are a mix of all my learnings as I studied warfare.

This story is just the beginning of the legend of Ramm. I realized, as I began to write it, to cram it all into one book would be a grave injustice to the reader. There are questions left unanswered in this book, but rest assured they shall be answered in the next. So having read this, I implore you to be at peace. Your hero, Ramm, and his concomitant villains are safe in my hands.

Until he returns again…

The Great War Of Hind (Legend of Ramm #1): Cover Launch

...And so comes to fruition a dream that was borne two years ago.

Auntie who told Rahul Yadav to not drop out from IIT feeling vindicated

Dedicated to all the nosy aunties in the world... Satire!


New Delhi: In the aftermath of Rahul Yadav being asked to quit from Housing.com, the firm that he founded in 2012, his fifty year old auntie called Satvinder Bir Singh Bhalla today said, “I told him so.” Ms. Bhalla spoke to Faking News from her Kirti Nagar residence.

“When Rahul’s tauji told his mausaji that he was quitting, our family driver came to know as our family driver and Rahul’s mausaji’s driver are friends,” Ms. Bhalla said. “I immediately picked up the phone and called Rahul’s father, telling him what a big mistake this was. Everyone in India is dying to get into IIT and here is Rahul who is getting out.”

“Ab dekho jee,” she continued. “Had Rahul completed his degree, uski naukri kahin bhi lag jaatee… Infosys-Shinfosys, TCS-SheCS, jee. And now he is on the road, without a job.”

“That’s why I have told Manpreet and Gurpreet to not look up to their Rahul bhaiyya,” she concluded. “Even if you are Rahul, you can either be Rahul Dravid or… Rahul Gandhi.”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/07/06/auntie-who-told-rahul-yadav-to-not-drop-out-from-iit-feeling-vindicated/

Book Review: Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi's Last Battle by Mark Tully, Satish Jacob

I have recently gotten hooked to Indian history again, after a few years. To be honest, except Guha's "India after Gandhi", I wasn't aware of any good book on India's history post Independence. And I have recently come across around five...

I read 'Amritsar' right after Kuldip Nayar's fantastic 'Emergency Retold' and loved it. Mark Tully and Satish Jacob take the reader behind the facade of the players and play-makers in the great Punjab game of the 80's. Tully/ Jacob lay bare the machinations behind the Bhindrawale movement - making crucial revelations such as the Congress and Akali hand in creating the monster. 'Amritsar' is a thriller from start to finish; Tully/ Jacob keep the narrative taut from the start - discord in Punjab to finish - Indira Gandhi's death.

Delectable read.

On my reading list next, Manoj Mitta's 'When a tree shook Delhi'.