L. K. Advani to endorse Sandhi Sudha

My satirical form continues. No clue where this is going or for how long.

In a press conference last night, BJP has announced that Mr. L. K. Advani would now function as the brand ambassador of ‘Sandhi Sudha’ – the famous oil for joint pains, whose low grade ads starring Govinda and Jackie Shroff have been airing on late night TV for quite some time now.

“You see, Mr. Advani has not been in power for almost ten years now and with Narendra Modiji becoming the new face of the party, it seems unlikely he will ever have a job,” Meenakshi Lekhi, the BJP spokesperson said. “This is the best way of keeping Mr. Advani employed and to also give him a chance to earn some money, given that he will never be the Prime Minister and thus, never get to do any scams.”

Mr. Advani apparently has been using the brand for quite some time now. An inside source in the BJP told us that he started using it four years ago, after Nirmal Baba advised him, “India ka Prime Minister? Sandhi Sudha lagao. Kripa aegee.”

Mr. Digvijay Singh, a senior Congress leader, who is another famous customer of the oil (having once even tweeted “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah Sandhi Sudha!”) was quick to deny any association with the product. Distancing himself from the product, Mr. Singh said, “No! I have never used Sandhi Sudha. We only use secular products.”

Investigations by this Faking News reporter have revealed that the brand tried to reach out to the almost fifty year old Shah Rukh Khan as well but the actor was apparently busy trying to clone himself in Bombay.
A spokesperson for the Congress had this to say: “We condemn all communal brands.” When questioned about Ms. Gandhi’s opinion on the matter, the spokesperson said, “We have no clue but she must be unhappy.”

 http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2013/07/06/l-k-advani-to-endorse-sandhi-sudha/

CBI lets off Pawan Bansal after he says “God promise”

Third post on Faking News in three days. Here's hoping the spree continues!

A CBI Spokesperson has revealed in a press conference today that ex Railway Minister Pawan Bansal was let off as an accused from the railway postings bribery scandal after he said, “God promise! I did not do it!”

“We have clear CCTV footage of the statement made by Mr. Bansal,” the spokesperson said. “So we have decided to let him go as per the proviso in the CBI Rule Book which allows politicians to be let off on saying ‘God promise’ and er… as per instructions from Madamji.”

When asked why the same proviso was not applied in other cases such as that of the DMK leader Kanimozhi who was jailed after being chargesheeted by the CBI, the spokesperson said, “Aiyyo! She kept saying something in her Tamil accent and we could not understand anything… so we chargesheeted her. She finally said ‘God promise’ in court, I think, which is why she has bail now.”

Questioned on the case of Narendra Modi’s possible chargesheeting in the Ishrat Jahaan encounter, the spokesman said, “We are reviewing the case right now. Narendraji Modiji said ‘Bharat Maata kee kasam’ and we are checking with Madam… er… the Rule Book if that can be construed as ‘God Promise’.”
However, as per the spokesman, Mr. Modi might have had his fingers crossed behind his back and a crack team from CBI was reviewing the footage of his interview to check the same, as “everyone knows fingers crossed behind back makes the ‘God promise’ invalid.”

This Faking News reporter asked the spokesman if the proviso applied to politicians’ relatives as well. “No no no no,” he replied emphatically, “It is much tougher for relatives. They have to say ‘Red Cross, fingers crossed, same to you, back to you, with no returns.’ It is not as simple.”

 http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2013/07/05/cbi-lets-off-pawan-bansal-after-he-says-god-promise/

Congress to visit IIMs during placement season

Two in two days... another satirical piece. 

The Congress party has decided to visit the IIMs for placements this year- HRD Minister Kapil Sibal said today. The job on offer would be that of a body double for Rahul Gandhi.

“Rahul baba likes to visit the wealthiest countries of the world every month to study poverty there and apply the principles to Amethi,” Sibal said in a press conference today. “And whenever he is gone, there is either a national calamity or people like Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal come out and make some new allegations against baba. So we have decided to hire a body double for Rahul baba from one of the IIMs- someone who can stand silently beside Madamji in public outings and make token gestures like flagging off trucks without causing much hullaballoo.”

Reacting to a question at the conference about the ethics of such a move, Mr. Sibal fumed, “All the best leaders in the world have used body doubles. Look at Saddam, Gaddafi… why should we be any different? After all, we have been using computer generated animation to represent Manmohan Singh on national television for a long time now and no one seems to have noticed!”

Taking a potshot at Mr. Modi, Mr. Sibal said, “Now who is doing work for the economy now, eh? Congress is the one doing real Bharat Nirman… we are the ones creating real jobs like this!”

Shyamlal, a final year student at IIM- Indore and also the placement convener for the institute, is looking forward to Congress visiting the campus and has already marked the job as his dream role. “Whoever is selected will just have to stand and wave and cut ribbons and take aerial surveys when Mr. Gandhi is away on his world tours,” he said. “How difficult can that be? It’s a dream job!” he gushed. According to Shyamlal, people at the campus have already started preparing hard for the role- by standing for long hours in front of the institute’s toilet mirrors with an expression of confusion on their faces or reading up on bees and hives.

When questioned on the development, the computer generated 3D hologram of Manmohan Singh flickered wildly and said meekly, “Theek hai.”

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2013/07/04/congress-to-visit-iims-during-placement-season/

Congress to pass ordinance to trademark the word Pappu

My satirical contribution to FakingNews. Written late at night dead tired from office... ignore the one or two grammatical inconsistencies please.

In a recent development, veteran Congress leader Digvijay Singh has revealed that Congress has trademarked the name “Pappu” and an ordinance will soon be written into law to enforce the same.

Mr. Singh, who had inexplicably tweeted “Hahaha! Pappu can’t dance saala” on the day “PappuCII” started trending on Twitter, said that an empowered Group of Ministers would be meeting soon to discuss the addendum in the Indian Copyrights & Patents Act of 1887. Mr. Singh revealed that the motive behind the move was to ensure that Rahul Gandhi was not called by a name as derogatory as “Pappu” but by names that fostered sycophancy better within the Congress party such as “Baba”, “Yuvraj” or “That Congress Dude”.

The ordinance is reported to allow everyone named Pappu in India to change their names within a year of being written into law, failing which they would have to pay a service tax of Rs. 10,000 every year for use of the name. The option with the non Congress Pappu’s, as per a source in the Gandhi household, would be to either pay tax or be known by their Aadhar Card Numbers. Pappu Prasad (or AIH1234PA as he will be known after the ordinance is passed), a vegetable seller in east Delhi, had this to say to us: “This is grossly unfair! How is it our fault that some useless Congress leader is being called ‘Pappu’?”

Mr. Singh also told this FakingNews reporter that people who had already used the name “Pappu” in a derogatory manner would be taxed Rs. 10,000 each for each use as the ordinance would be, like all great Indian laws enforced by the great Congress party, retroactive in effect. As per the calculations of this reporter, the tax hit to the BJP would be the tune of crores and certain outspoken TV journalists like Arnab Goswami are also expected to be taxed. Expectedly, Arnab Goswami launched into a tirade against the Congress Party and refused to pay up, unless the Congress promised to run their ‘Bharat Nirman’ ads (spoofs) on his channel.

BJP Leader Meenakshi Lekhi had this to say to this latest development, “But what about Rambo? Can we go ahead and trademark that as well?”

Meanwhile, the middle aged youth leader in question scratched his head and said that he was unavailable for comment.

http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2013/07/03/congress-to-pass-ordinance-to-trademark-the-word-pappu/

Why India needs its poor

Well, this is a pseudo intellectual thought that I have been harboring for a few years now.

A lack of poverty in India does not augur well for business. As we have seen with the NREGA that when the poor get paid to not work, their incentive to participate in the millions of unskilled jobs in big cities- as construction workers, sweepers, rickshaw pullers- reduces significantly. This drives up the cost of business in the cities- which in the absence of a robust farm/ manufacturing sector are the country's only growth engines.

With agricultural growth defunct and incremental manufacturing capacity kept in check by poor infrastructure (think power cuts), red tape, inability to free up land for setting up hubs, perpetual policy paralysis, etc., all the poor could do earlier was become slaves to city dwellers: drivers, maids, security guards.

But when NREGA gives them an option to stay in their villages and earn money for sitting at home, the cost of labor in our cities goes up- which means the cost of business goes up. It also means that millions of people now have the purchasing power to upgrade their diet beyond basic foodgrain and this ramps up inflation for all of us which makes our central bank raise rates, which in turn makes our growth nose dive.

If India needs to grow the way it is growing right now (with negligible farm and manufacturing growth), it needs its poor to stay poor. Maybe grow poorer.

Three

I look at this blog sometimes... a mere shadow of the lively acidic volatile blog that I kept in my DCE days and miss my younger, more carefree days. When there were less excels, less trackers, less presentations, but almost as many idiotic people around me. There is perhaps a moron to non moron ratio that nature maintains delicately, through Group Discussions, Interviews and Offer Letters.

In the name of the Polymer Science and Chemical Technology Course at  Delhi College of Engineering and its concomitant doofuses, Lord, let me be sarcastic again!

Or perhaps, corporate setups train free will, intellect and individual thought out of people. Anyway, I like it this way. I have been with some very smart people at times (in my SFS/ DCE/ FMS days) and sometimes you cannot really keep with their sense of humor (jokes mostly cross reference three or four different difficult to read books).

It will soon be three years of corporate slavery.

I hope my wit survives another year.

Killing Bin Laden

When you work in a big organization, things will- more often than not- go horribly wrong. If you work in a huge organization- more often than not- not only will things go horribly wrong but when they do everyone will begin hunting for that one person that took that final call before everything caught fire.

When American Navy SEALs went in to eliminate Osama, multiple things went wrong. One of their helicopters crashed. None of them landed where or how they were supposed to land (one helicopter crashed; the other one had to disembark its passengers outside the compound instead of inside). There were walls and metal gates where there weren't supposed to be any.

So your helicopter has crashed; none of you are where you were supposed to be.

You can scream and  bitch and mope and point fingers.

Or you can go ahead and kill Bin Laden.

The next time your copter crashes just think of it this way. Everything might have gone terribly wrong but there's still Bin Laden to be killed.

Tuesday morning randomness

It is amazing how sometimes words are more potent than images. 

Reading Rutherford's Mughal series right now, among other things. Mesmerized and learning a thing or two as a writer.

The magic of words

There is this game I like to play with people who have read the novel. I ask them what does a certain character in the book look like?

It is amazing how almost everyone I asked this question described Bastard as tall, possibly dark, muscular/ rugged/ huge. Hari has been described as average looking, medium height, possibly with slight paunch. I am summing up here and there- for example, some people would have only said average/ okay looking for Hari while others would have said "not too tall not too short"- and I am adding up the comments.

The amazing thing is if you read the book carefully, I have described only and only one character's (Scooby's) physique (as tall and paper thin).

That, my friends, is how words conjure a character image.

That is the magic of words. :)

The survival of the mediocrest

In politics as in the corporate world, only the mediocre thrive. 

The sharpest people will move out disgruntled by the slow pace, the convoluted arm twisting required to push something down for the greater good, the backroom politics behind every puny little decision. The worst will, of course (most likely), be weeded out. 

But from the ashes shall rise the mediocre... the ones too afraid to take a call, the guys who play safe and yes-sir their bosses, who in every project will build a backdoor exit for themselves should it backfire. In places clogged with egos, testosterone and penis envies between the high & mighty, it is the mediocre who shall rise like creeps and vines clinging on to each and every word of their power drunk bosses, following without questioning- completely devoid of original ideas.

However mediocre people are good in the sense that they will do very little harm to the cause of your organization should you have a reasonably intelligent leadership (which you might not). The fact that they will do very little good is a sidenote of course.

And your company or your country is in serious peril if you do not have an intrinsic process to weed out/ rehabilitate the worst which in most cases doesn't exist.

Waiting for the rupee to touch Rs 60 to the dollar as our government- a veritable jungle of mediocrity- fusses and fumbles!