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…