None of the governments of the world will allow any independant body to inspect the gold reserves of respective countries to verify the claimed holdings. Gold has a value as long as it is hoarded by countries and individuals and, in my view, the most worthless investment. If all countries put on sale their gold deposits the price of gold would crash probably to the price of iron!

The USA can have a deficit of 450 billion dollars because of the huge amount of US dollar bonds in circulation. Last year US Govt. Bonds in circulation were US$ 4,348/- billion (US$ 4.3 trillion). Of this US$ 2,917/- billion by non US institutions and governments. This constitutes 65% of the total US bonds in circulation. In simple terms the USA in enjoying other peoples and countries money at very low interest with very little security. Many of the countries of the world that claim to be anti American are the very countries that invest in US bonds. If the rest of the world really wants to bring the USA to it’s knees all they have to do is to get rid of all the US bonds that they hold.

Similarly, the stocks of companies the world over are traded on highly inflated values that are purely notional and artifically kept high by using mutual funds and investment banks to hoard a major portion of the shareholding to create a low floating stock. The mutual funds and investment banks have a cosy relationship by selling to each other to generate profits. This can carry on smoothly only as long as the money keeps flowing from the banks. But the shares also have a saturation point beyond which no profits can be made. So the banks started diverting their lending to the property market, which, too not only reached it’s saturation point but went below the value of the balance amount due from the borrower!

What I am trying to prove is, that the economic model brought about by capitalism is ultimately doomed to failure because it is based on premise that values will keep on rising, which can never be the case as a saturation point will eventually be reached sooner or later. Trouble is, as long as stock and property values keep on rising, no government tries to cap them down to reasonable limits because everybody profits from it.

What’s the immidiate solution?- Go back to barter trade because the money the world has is being produced from thin air and is being pumped into bad assets and will make even the good money disappear.Be prepared for a long, long depression.

So how do you and I the common people on the street tackle this depression? Tighten up your purse strings, spend only if necessary. Collect as much spare cash as you can. When the stock market has really reached the bottom then pick up the companies with good financials and be willing to wait for a couple of years. By then the capitalists of the world will be able to ramp up the economy and the share market. When the value of your investments rise more than five times the original then promptly dump the shares because the next crash/depression will be waiting in the wings because public memory is short and the same mistakes will be made by the so called “brilliant” economists and ceos of the capitalist world to bring the economies of the world to their knees.

Remember being rich does not necessarily mean being satisfied!

Fortunately, it was around this time that I came upon the movie Scarface on cable TV. Being a violent, profanity laced film, it had to be heavily censored so as to allow it to air at times when school children everywhere are returning from school and switching on their TVs. I was quite fascinated by this man with a scar on his face, not unlike mine, and seeing how he responded to questions about his scar changed my approach altogether. “Where’d you get the beauty scar, tough guy? Eatin’ pineapple?” he was asked. Pat came Al Pacino’s slightly whiny voice, “How’m I gonna get a scar like that eating pineapple?” And I laughed in glee and wondered to myself, Yes, how?

So from then on, everything about me became about pineapple. I got the scar eating pineapple, auntie. I fractured my arm while eating pineapple, teacher. I can’t go to school because I fell sick eating pineapple, Mummy. Telling someone that something happened to you because you were eating pineapple throws them off completely and shuts them up. And especially at that time, in the midst of pineapple season, where one of my favourite fruits was staring at you wherever you went, there couldn’t have been a more fitting explanation to give nosy people. Thus, everything was taken care of by the glorious pineapple.

But then, something happened to pineapple. It was a few days later that a friend and I came upon a ten rupee note lying on the school ground. Of course, had either of us been alone at the time of the discovery, we would have rushed to the school gate where there’d be a hawker selling plates of cut pineapple and bought ten rupee’s worth of the germ-infested fruit. But since we were together and being kids, both of us wanted to show just how much better than the other we were, we somehow agreed that we would do the right thing and give the note to the principal.

The time when all this was happening was a short while after school had ended, when almost everyone had gone home. But still we went ahead to the principal’s office, on perhaps the most well-intentioned mission of our lives. We found the principal sitting in his chair, stroking a little cat next to him. Most people would find that strange - but after you were in his office for a while and noticed that among his pets were a couple of scorpions and something slimy that you’d feel crawling up your leg and God knows what other exotic life forms, you’d see that the cat was the most normal thing about him. “Yes?” he asked us as we stood there watching him. We explained to him about the dirty ten rupee note, and made a subtle mention about how we were doing such a wonderfully right thing.

He sat there still stroking the cat, bearing a striking resemblance to Marlon Brando in The Godfather - another movie featuring a still whiny-voiced Al Pacino. He looked at the note for a while and with a slight smile on his face, he took it. “Ah yes,” he said as he put the note into his pocket, “that’s very thoughtful of you boys.” Feeling the need to explain just where the money was going under the stares of two innocent lads, he said, “Yes. I’ll put it in the Poor Boy’s Fund. Your thoughtful action will make a poor boy very happy. You can leave now.”

And so, we were taught what could have been another important lesson if things came to an end at that point- the kind of lesson that stays in your heart well into adulthood, the lesson that you always fell back on later in life when faced with tricky situations where doing the right thing comes at a great cost. But life isn’t like that, see - life never knows when to end things and so always ends up ruining a perfectly decent conclusion. So it was that a few minutes later as we waited outside the school for someone to pick us up we saw the Principal and his cat walk to the pineapple stand, where he took a dirty ten rupee note out of his pocket and bought himself a nice big plate of juicy pineapple. As he ate, with juice falling down on his cassock, we heard him say to his cat, “I’m such a happy Poor Boy, aren’t I? Too bad we don’t have a ‘Poor Pussycat’s Fund’, eh, little pussycat?” and chuckled happily at his wit and went back to his office.

This too would have not been a bad place to end, with me and my friend left to mull things over, and think about how we’d just had our innocence ripped out of us by our own principal. But even that wasn’t to be, as now the process that had begun had to be completed and every last bit of our innocence needed to be actually stamped our of our very souls. The scar on my face had not yet healed completely, and my friend had been one of the few left to ask me about it. “How’d you get that scar?” he asked me.

Doing my best impression of a whiny-voiced Al Pacino, I replied immediately, “I got this scar eating pussycat.” Almost instantaneously I realised that I had made an error, understandably influenced by the encounter with the principal and his pussycat, but that wasn’t all I realised - as at that moment, all the various whispered dirty things that overexcited pubescent runts discuss among their closest friends which had been fused into a disconnected mess suddenly uncoalesced into one strikingly linear narrative that brought forth the true meaning of those words from Scarface, a meaning that was yet untouched by the said pubescent runts’ whisperings: “I mean, I got this scar eating…oh my god!”

~

Which brings me to my subsequent decision of responding to all questions pertaining to what I wanted to be when I group up with “Head of the Censor Board.” And why wouldn’t I want to be that? I could watch whatever I want without the slightest guilt; and more importantly, revel in the all powerful feeling that I and I alone controlled what was appropriate for others to watch. And if my job forced me to to sit down with a stack of film reels containing borderline pornography, then by God I would do it willingly, perhaps even with a large grin on my face and drool flowing down like a river. That’s how committed I would be; people everywhere would say, “He truly is a workaholic, that man. But what is that in his pants?”

And when I am bored (as if that’s possible!), I could think of ridiculous substitutes for dirty words — but mostly I’d just stick to inserting names of various fruit whenever something that could harm a schoolboy would pop up. You know, just to mess with his excitable unformed mind.

For a start - is the olympics really fair? I certainly do not think so. The rich/developed countries spend phenomenal sums of money is training their participants. Many of the sports like rowing, sailing and equestrianism are very elitist and expensive. (The last olympics had a total of 186 medals for rowing,sailing and equestrianism). Then , many of the events look downright stupid to me. What is the sense of having events like the shot put, javelin, weightlifting and discus? What’s so great about throwing an iron ball or a spear or a round plate as far as possible? Only the first three in each contest are given medals. So what happens to the majority over 80% who lose? What about the 10% who come in last and embarrass their respective countries? The percentage of participants who end up as heroes would be less than 10%. That means at least 90% will return to their countries disappointed and unhappy as they have wasted years of their prime life.

Like the beauty contests held every year, the olympics can never truly represent the best sportspersons of the world. It is just simply a money making machine for the sponsors, the sports goods manufacturers and the gambling industry. The colossal amounts of money spent by the host country for the massive stadia and other facilities could have been put to better use, but then most countries are running up massive deficits to sustain themselves (nobody knows how China manages its deficit, even their defence budget is not known). That means every citizen of the country hosting the olympics is subsidising its cost.

To me, the olympics is a wasteful extravaganza that the world can ill afford. The olympics is purely eltist and for the benefit of the minority rich. The rest of the world could’nt care less.

***

A textbook writer is a fascinating individual. It can be said without much doubt that textbooks are among the most effective instruments of molding the unformed, clay-like mind of a young learner into something resembling modern art. This in turn points to the highly important role a writer of such textbooks plays, and sadly, it is a role that has gone unnoticed and unappreciated for far too long.

To put an end to this, The Alarmist contacted one such writer - a topmost one, in fact - who readily agreed to an interview. A middle-aged balding pot-bellied man, he was very open and expressive in his answers, which proved to be of a highly intriguing and ground-breaking nature. The interview follows:

First of all, we must express our gratitude towards you and all other textbook writers out there. It is your textbooks alone that help gather the various strands of a learner’s mind and bunch them up into one confused mess.

Why, thank you. Our policy is to motivate the learners by confusing them as much as possible. This is easily done through throwing a vast quantity of unrelated facts at them, so that what sticks, if anything at all, is essentially un-relatable to anything else in their lives. This forces them to use their minds to un-confuse themselves - this of course results in just the kind of intellect we need - intellect that is constantly finding confusion where none exists and ignoring other more important matters, which goes a long way in helping us do our jobs with almost no distractions.

But has this been successful?

By all means, it has! See the kind of people we have around us. Switch on your TV and see the overexcited and shouty newscaster covering a pointless story that that has nothing to do with anyone. And that’s not all that these textbooks have given us. Of late, when switching on the same news channels, you will find two or more newsreaders sitting there, when it is obvious that only one is needed for the job. So while one reads the news, the other looks grimly at us like a nitwit. So this ‘nitwit-ization’ of new readers is also another valuable contribution of textbooks, as their brains are so overloaded with confusion, they cannot read more than two lines at a time without frothing at the mouth. But there has been one ill-effect, it must be admitted. Some students of these textbooks get so confused that they drop out of college altogether and take to prostitution, alcoholism and drugs. The first two we don’t really mind, but something must be done about the drug addicts.

Is there a plan yet?

Of course. We are dedicated textbook writers, we plan out solutions for problems even before they prove to be a problem. This leads to a misconception that we don’t do anything about other problems that do somehow crop up - we’re just busy preventing future problems, you see? With this particular problem, we concocted the blazingly good idea of hiring these drug addicts to provide our illustrations. ‘A bird which would have been killed by a stone in a bush has been instead trained in karate to kill two birds with its bare hands’, as they say.

Yes, who hasn’t heard that old chestnut before. But lets move on: So, what are the results of this blazingly good idea?

Oh, there are many. But to show you, I just brought two. Here’s the first:

As you can see, this is very good indeed for a drug addict. As seen in the illustration, these illustrators seem to think that cats go around performing acts of vigilante justice on poor farmers who depend on buckets of milk for their sustenance. Further, the cats actually talk to the farmer, but being mere cats, they have been unable to master punctuation. As if that wasn’t good enough, the pot-smoking illustrator is so wrapped up in his own created conundrum of whether cats can actually think of such things, he sits and wonders for hours about it, even doing a self-portrait in the process, illustrating how confused his curly haired head is. Which, it must be admitted, is a very good point to bring up in a textbook.

Yes, it is rather good. What else have these pot smokers come up with?

Ah, here’s another:

The illustration, I believe, says it all.

Yes, it does. But just for fun, explain to us what it says.

Well, it is basically just an extension of the first illustration I showed you. See, these illustrators are so darn good, that one illustrator wants to illustrate further on another illustrator’s illustration. While the former brought forth the point about vengeful cats who talk, this one goes this other way and illustrates a bird actually talking to the illustrator. Therefore, even as the illustrator is thinking about whether traditionally non-speaking things can talk, a bird flies in and actually talks to him directly! But ironically, as he is busy thinking, he does not notice that this bird is talking to him.

Yes. It is really quite illustrative - perhaps the most clearly illustrated idea I have come across. So what do you hope to achieve with this plan?

The goal is simple: firstly, to reduce our own workload. As a picture tells a thousand words, so merely five illustrations in one textbook means we need to write 5,000 words less than we would normally write! Secondly, when a learner comes to know that a drug addict is responsible for the illustrations, they obviously wouldn’t turn to drugs themselves if they decide to drop out of college. In fact, all of them would now enter into only alcoholism and prostitution. Which is a good thing.

Very well. So what next for the textbook writer? I mean, since your workload has been reduced greatly due to the illustrations, does this mean that you and our team are working in other areas?

Well…I can’t really say much about that. But I will say this: a man, unjustly imprisoned by the white man, is about to be freed by us. That’s all I can say. Thank you.

***

So there you have it. But also in the magazine, was another article which grabbed my attention, and since I’m on the subject already, I thought I should follow the wise old saying about the karate-trained bird mentioned in the interview above and share this other article with you as well:

Daring Prison Break-out in SA
In an incredible feat, a group of scholarly-looking men managed to break into a prison here and escape with one of its inmates. Sources say that the authorities are ‘completely befuddled’ by the incident, and most befuddling is the fact that the people who performed the daring escape repeatedly referred to the inmate as ‘Mr. Mandela’. Investigations are on to find out just how such an act could take place, and sources close to the investigation state that they are just beginning to uncover a sordid web of alcoholism and prostitution. Authorities are however quite certain that the lives of the members of the escape team are in grave danger, having just freed a violent and dangerous criminal who lacked even the slightest desire to reform himself.

But my no-exam phase ended abruptly today. And while I stand by my frequent statements that there’re no redeeming features about examinations in general, this particular exam, astonishingly, did have a few things worth taking away.

While some might think that I hit it off with the girl in front of me by supplying her answers to questions she didn’t know and am now going steady - assuming ‘going steady’ means my steady supply of free answers in return for a steady supply of forced acts of affection - well, those people are completely way off. For starters, the girl in front of me is actually a woman who is the mother of two, and didn’t need any help from me. Apart from the time she wrote that the opposite of ‘ram’ was ’sita’, that is - but even my help there was pointless. “It’s not ’sita’, it’s ‘ewe’,” I told her. “No,” she replied, “that’s the opposite of ‘me’. Idiot.”

Actually the silver lining about the experience had a lot to do with the centre that they gave me. Now a ‘centre’ is the place allotted to you for your exams - seemingly the point of this is to give you a place that will be most convenient. My past exam experience did nothing to give me this impression, however, as reaching that centre consisted of an hour’s journey by train, then an auto-rickshaw ride of 30 minutes.

But this year, they somehow got it right, as my centre was not only ten minutes from my home, but was also the college that I had been going to for a year until I never went back and then dramatically opted for the college-at-home thingamajig. Among the many reasons I had for doing this, there was the college’s practice of taking ‘donations’ which is just a glorified term for the prostitution of education. To spell things out: they, the college authorities, were the pimps, a seat in the classroom was the fetching prostitute, and we were the equivalent of middle-aged balding pot-bellied clients seeking one last thrill and willing to pay any price for it. In keeping with the analogy, the whole business was a seedy affair where the transaction would quickly take place in a dark room where the pimps would make you feel vaguely ashamed and then would smile a brown smile, wink and say ‘All yours!’ while pointing in the general direction of the classroom.

Now I’m absolutely sure that you get what I’m saying, because as we all know, the very mention of the word ‘prostitute’ has an effect similar to putting ice down one’s back, while one looks around with a guilty expression and makes a subtle effort to pay extra attention to what exactly is being said about prostitutes. (Hello, middle-aged balding pot-bellied person!) But enough of prostitutes. To get back on topic: I had to pay a donation. Nothing earth-shattering there. But the amount that I had to pay - that’s another matter altogether. You see, people paid donations depending on their performance in the previous exams - the better you did, the less you paid. I had done extremely well. So why was I paying the same amount reserved for those who teachers lovingly called ‘duffers’ and ’stupid idiot who will never amount to anything in life and because of whom I am suffering from piles, although what connection he has to my predicament isn’t clear, I’m sure there is one’?

Was I really a piles-causing duffer? Well, that blame, I’m relieved to note, goes to a language called Kannada, after the forced study of which for ten long years, I still don’t know the swear words of. It turned out that I had just barely managed to pass by around 10 marks. So thank God my examination centre for that exam was that awful school where supervisors are so batshit crazy that they actually want to help students in their dishonest endeavours. But it must be noted that I was very rarely dishonest at exams, and only in times of utter desperation. It fact, it can be said that I never had a moment of utter desperation until that Kannada exam which had me staring at my question paper trying as best as I could to calculate the marks of what I knew in such a way that I could be assured of passing. It was while staring at said paper that it was suddenly pulled away rudely from my cold trembling hands and replaced by one where a few answers were filled in. And even with that little ‘aid’ I wasn’t sure of passing. I ended up just scraping through, and this had the effect of bringing down my average score considerably.
So it was that I was immediately labelled ‘duffer!’ against my will, and this, more that any price that I had to pay, was what enraged me. And further, it wasn’t just the fact that they robbed me while somehow convincing me that it was the right and proper thing to do but that when we actually got into the college, they one day had a mass meeting with all the newly admitted students, and unveiled the plans to construct a massive structure within the premises. “This,” they said with more pride than they could handle, “will cost us 20 lakhs! If we’re lucky, it’ll be ready in three year’s time.”

Just what we wanted to hear. The money that they stole from us was being used to fund the construction of a building that would be ready only a year after we had left the college, apparently so that they could accommodate about double the amount of piles-causing duffers to enter into the college, thus allowing them to gather even greater amounts of donations to fund more buildings. Ah, just brilliant.

And so, me and my foolish pride left the college a year later.

But time passes, and time heals wounds and makes past adolescent emotions get all fuzzy and appear pointless. This was the case with me, too, as when I entered the premises of my examination centre, I kept questioning myself as to whether the whole walking out affair was worth it. See, I told myself, it’s not that bad. Look at all these hip young people standing around looking cool. And look at the girls! Where were they when I was at this blasted college? Perhaps had I stayed, I might have been in a position to have jealous fits about some girl who never agreed to go out with me in the first place, instead of merely appearing for an exam.

That’s the point when I saw it - a sight that sent such happy thoughts scrambling for their lives: the new big building, the one that cost them at least 20 lakhs, fully constructed and standing there magnificiently before my eyes, a building that was way better than any of the rundown sheds we were put in like big stupid woolly sheep. And true to my assessment, they were already at work at another big beautiful building, judging from all the bricks piled up against the wall right next to the new building.

That was when it hit me. A plan, a most glorious plan! My 1 1/2 years of concentrated plan making had sharpened my plan-making faculties to the point where I was constructing a plan without even being aware of it. And so, completely effortlessly, came my plan to make right all the wrongs that college did to me, to get back what was rightfully mine.

***

When I got home after my exam, dragging my bag behind me, my mother said, “What’ve you got in the bag - stones?”

“No Ma,” I said, “stones aren’t worth anything. What I got is bricks!”

“Bricks?” echoed my father.

“Yes! The bricks that my money - well, technically your money - paid for! You know, that donation they made me pay? Oh, but don’t worry - this isn’t all. I’ve got four more exams, and by my calculations, four more bags of bricks should cover it nicely!”

A moment of silence passed and my parents exchanged glances - glances that to a son could mean anything from tear-inducing pride to bright happiness. Lucky for me, they spelled out the meaning of the glances:

“Remind me again why we let him stop going to college?” one parent said to the other. “All he ever does now is come up with these crackpot schemes that never work!”

Evidently, they didn’t think much of it. But just wait. Four exams more, and I’ll have enough bricks to build a neat little construction of my own to live in, free from everyone and self-sufficient. Then we’ll see whose plans are crackpot.

Dear Textbook Writer,

I have thoroughly enjoyed this year’s textbooks. They have brought me much joy over the three months that I have studied them. They are for the most part imaginatively written, and strikingly illustrated. In particular, I was touched by the eloquent appeal contained in one of the textbooks to put an end to the Cold War. The description of the horrors it has caused and the dangers that it can very well result in was chilling, to say the least. It is frightening that even now, after all these years, even after entering the new millennium, this Cold War still continues. It seems to have become so commonplace that one hardly ever reads about it in the newspapers anymore. The same goes for apartheid in South Africa and the wall that separates Germany. And poor Nelson Mandela! My heart goes out to him and I pray that he will be released from prison soon. Perhaps someday, thanks to being educated by these textbooks, someone might do something about it.

But apart from this, there was just one minor flaw that I came across: it seems that the texts for some of the illustrations are missing. An illustration, by definition, must illustrate something, and when the object of illustration is absent, it ceases to illustrate. But often these illustrations just show up out of the blue, with nothing to justify their existence. Rather than just disposing of such well thought out and expertly detailed illustrations, I firmly believe that they should be kept, and accompanying texts added to them which they can illustrate.

I realise that you must be terribly busy, writing all those textbooks out there, therefore I have taken it upon myself to type out some texts which the above mentioned illustration will illustrate superbly. I have also tried to keep the tone, language and other such things in agreement with the rest of the text, so they will fit right in.

Following are the illustrations that I write about, and my texts for them:

***

Explanation For Weather Changes

Weather change is something that has flummoxed mankind for centuries. Several theories has been postulated over the years, most particularly the past two decades. The best theory that we have at present is the Magical Snouted Neuter Creature (MSNC). The MSNC functions like this: whenever an area is in need of a good watery downfall, the MSNC is summoned by an elaborate ritual, in which the elder most people of an area take part. Together they sit and eat large amounts of mildly psychotropic herbs, calling out, “Oh heavenly sexless creature, please, we need new weather! Come here with thy wonderful snout, and bang thy wonderful drum, and make those puffy things in the sky gather round thy head!”

The process can take anywhere between 2 hours to 2 days, depending, among other things, on just how mild the psychotropic herbs are. Then, MSNC appears.

The elders have reported that the MSNC is a very happy creature, although it sometimes performs acts that might seem disgusting to feeble human minds. It even jokes good-heartedly about its disarming lack of any genitalia. As MSNC begins to work on gathering the clouds around its head, the banging of its drum is heard far and wide, inducing fear in the hearts of humans.

However, the elders have reported that MSNC has been missing for the past two years, leaving them bereft of any control over the weather which could potentially lead to unmitigated catastrophe. The general consensus among them is that it has been kidnapped by one Al Gore, who has used it exclusively for shameless self-promotion and to bring himself into the spotlight so that he can get a good, even tan.

The success of Prehistoric Man

Prehistoric Man had realised that if he were to have any chance of ever being described as something other than prehistoric, he would have to grab the attention of the Prehistoric woman, with whom it would be possible to create other Men and Women who were not as Prehistoric as he was. This proved to be a difficult task, as Prehistoric Woman found him disgusting and ugly (see fig. 1) and refused to go near him. This was perplexing, as Prehistoric Woman was no Monica Bellucci herself, and even constantly beat him with a beating stick:

But, he persevered. After trying all sorts of things, like bending over backwards, walking on his hands, gifting her big juicy mangoes, he found that that simply straightening his pose worked somewhat (see fig. 2). This ushered in the phase of slightly less prehistoric man. After a while, woman started to drift away, looking for something better, and particularly, less hairy. This led slightly less prehistoric man to take the drastic step of removing all the hair on his body but leaving the top of his head, bits of his face, chest, armpits and groin area as hairy as possible, for reasons not yet understood. Then he came up with something called ‘clothes’, also not understood, and stood with an arrogant smile on his face (see fig. 3). Woman, amazingly, went crazy for this, thus ensuring the continuation of homo sapiens for ages to come.

***

So there it is. I do hope that you find it useful and that it can pass whatever quality standards you might have set for your textbooks.

Yours Faithfully,

Avid Textbook Reader.

(And in deafening confirmation that my efforts at initiating change for the better as opposed to sitting in my comfy chair in my underwear, smoking a pipe and complaining were truly the right thing to do, I received this heart-warming reply from Textbook Writer him/herself:)

Dear Avid Textbook Reader,

It is with great gratitude that I write this letter to you. I too had noticed that some of our illustrations lacked any object to illustrate; in fact, I had almost removed these illustrations for a brief revision of said textbooks. But, simply due to your uncommon interest in maintaining the high quality of our books, these illustrations will be included, and yes, with your acutely observed texts.

In this age when people in the cyber world revel in poking fun and making ill-conceived jokes about our books, knowing that there are individuals like yourself is truly heartening and makes it a privilege for us to do our duties.

And yes, we are indeed quite optimistic that we shall see the end of the great evils of the world prevailing today that you mentioned, namely, the Cold War and Apartheid - if not in our lifetimes, then surely in yours. And don’t tell anyone this, but a group of our highly dedicated team of Textbook Writers is planning a deadly prison break-out mission for Mr. Mandela - keep your eyes peeled!

Respectfully,

Textbook Writer.

Well, that’s some imagination some of you have. But no, the answer is completely different: I had turned into something of a successful social activist. And since success is nowadays measured in the willingness of the media to take interest in you, well, I have that too!

The following is a recent article published in the monthly magazine, The Alarmist. They get their name from their distaste for Al Gore and his constant alarmism, and they seem to be one of those satirical magazines. But anyway, they got my name right!

Here it is:

Things People Do To Get Laid
The male youth of today have it especially tough when it comes to the female youth of today. The latter have seemingly come to realise that the former are largely a bunch of twits who will do just about anything to get laid. But that hasn’t stopped the male youth from trying harder and harder as they grow older and more frustrated.

First there were the few who took an idea thought up by someone who was undoubtedly luckier with the females, and then milked it for all it was worth. Yes, the Earth Hour, where an entire city is expected to turn off all their electric lights when they most needed it and play games of who-passed-that-smelly-gas in the dark for an hour. Obviously, barely anyone took part, but it didn’t stop the media from putting their teenage pimple-ridden faces on your TV screens, which if you happened to be watching on mute, you would have sworn they were saying, “Please, I haven’t had any in years! Give me a chance!”

It is possible that the fiasco did in fact help them in their objective, as there couldn’t have been any other reason for another bunch of male youth getting together in another city and doing the same thing all over again, while people rented ultra-powerful spotlights to beam into the sky and blasted heavy metal music for the entire hour.

And then we have the present, where a sizeable gathering of like minded male youth are doing their best to start some sort of movement for, as they see it, the betterment of society. Their target? Those extra long spoons that have acquired the name “Amitabh Bachchan spoons.” As seen in the accompanying figure, the spoons have acquired the name due to the ratio of its length to that of a normal spoon equalling the ratio of Amitabh Bachchan’s height to that of a Normal Man.

Their aim is to collect as many such long spoons as possible and dramatically cut each of them down to a more normal size. In the words of their leader, Rolando Alvares, “We want to show that we shall no longer tolerate these long-tall type people; Amitabh Bachchan in particular. For too long have they drawn attention away from us normal sized people. I mean, you see a tall freak and an averaged heighted person side by side, you automatically are drawn to the tall freak. In this way they have been dominating all possible competitions, events, the arts, etc. Again, nothing illustrates this fact more than Amitabh Bachchan himself: my research indicates that he has probably been in every movie and every advertisement made in the past five years. And most importantly, they get all the good ladies, too, even the normal heighted ones who, frankly speaking, should be ours by birthright. So what we want to say is: Go back, Amitabh Bachchan. Go back to…Tall-Man Country or something! Then hopefully other long-talls will get the idea and go with him.”

On being questioned on nature of the movement, he said, “People need an object to be the symbol of what they stand for. Like with Gandhi and the salt. A common, identifiable object is necessary, and what better than the Amitabh Bachchan spoon, which everyone possesses for the purpose of getting to the bottoms of pickle jars, the frog eggs and noodley stuff at the bottom of falooda glasses and such?”

Further, he had this to say on the momentum that his movement has gathered: “It is to be expected. There has always been discontent about these long-talls, and for the first time, this anguish has found an outlet.”

And does he have any regrets on the movement so far? “Absolutely not. Well, just a small little regret: I was expecting more females to join us in this bold movement, and the fact that there is not one female among us is of mild concern. Perhaps it is due to the spoon being called an Amitabh Bachchan spoon; had it been called a Sushmita Sen spoon, I would have had females all over me. Obviously, the same principle applies to the female situation too, and our movement wholly recognizes that. So hopefully they will join us soon.”

But unfortunately, the above mentioned developments in our lives has affected the quality of leadership in the world today. Let me now touch upon leaders of different aspects of our lives.

1. Democratic leaders: This decade has produced the worst possible leaders of government ever. Look at George Bush and Tony Blair, both of whom claim to have received a message from God to invade Iraq! Look at the current Indian Prime Minister, who exhibits a wimpishness unsurpassed by any other leader. Democratic leaders the world over are ruling on the basis of bare majorities or coalitions. Show me a single democratic leader this decade who has resigned on moral principles. We have reached a culture of “I scratch your back if you scratch mine”.
2. Autocratic leaders: These guys use the might of the state to stay in power, and do not hesitate to kill the opposition as in Zimbabwe and the countries of former USSR.
3. Religious leaders: Leaders of all religions especially the major ones are equally responsible for the mess the major populations of the world finds itself today. Why do the major religions of the world have so many off shoots of the basic religion? (e.g.: Christian: Catholic, Protestant. Muslim: Sunni, Shia). Most of the wars have been fought on the basis of religion. Just 40 years ago the Catholic Irish and the Protestant British were at each other’s throats on the basis of religion. The major religions categorically state that their respective god is ONE. Then why are they so many offshoots of the same religion? These leaders are willing to split their gods for retaining leadership.
4. Industrialists: The amount of awards given by the business media makes sure that almost every industrialist gets some award or the other. Don’t they get enough already by way of huge salary, commission, dividend, expensive vehicles and premium furnished accommodation? When their companies do badly they blame it on the market environment. But when they do well then they get all the business media to flaunt they achievements as if they did it single handedly.
5. Corporate leaders: All the major corporate entities of the world have thrived not on the basis of good corporate leadership but purely on the basis of subsidies extracted from their respective government on the excuse of creating jobs, and on getting interest free finance from the stock markets by way of inflated IPOs. If the IT industry is doing well in India it is primarily because of the totally lopsided wage structure (getting American hire rates while paying a tenth of the normal American wage)and the lower taxation levels. The top IT companies have earning per share in excess of 1000% yet they want land at concessional rates and extension of tax free status.

In conclusion, it is my view that today every leader is a bum, because no current leader is willing to stand up and be counted. Every leader today is hopelessly dependent on so many factors that sometimes they have to literally grovel their way through life and end up being slaves of the system. If a leader seems to have succeeded it is only because he was at the right place at the right time and not because of true leadership qualities. Sadly enough, because of the rapid technological developments it will now be impossible for a true leader to develop in this century because more often than not these technological developments are used for the bane of mankind by the so called leaders of this world.

How was your birthday?

How was my birthday? Be thankful you didn’t ask me “How was your happy birthday?”, because then I would truly have exploded and have hot brain chunks thrown in your lousy hair. Sorry, I didn’t mean that. You hair really is lousy, though - and I don’t mean in the sense of being infested with lice, but more like inferior and worthless. Funny isn’t it - you can call anything except hair lousy without feeling the overbearing need to explain just what you mean. But back to you and your lousy hair. Do something about it. And just because it’s dead tissue, it doesn’t mean you can’t improve the ‘quality’ of it - just like a piece of metal which you can polish and make it look less like something that was used to unclog the toilet. But that wouldn’t really be improving its quality, now would it, since as all you’ve done is make it look better. So you really can’t improve the quality of your hair then. But please, at least make it look a bit better.

But seeing as most people stop referring to it as your ‘happy birthday’ after they turn six, there wasn’t any danger of my exploding anyway. But still, the word ‘happy’ wouldn’t be the best one to use in relation to my birthday - and yes, I will tell you why.

It began three years ago. It came in the shape-shifting shape of my eldest brother who seems to have put a decent amount of effort into his hair, the locks of which frequently dangle tantalizingly all over the place. It’s astonishing that, although he may not have ever said the words, I always heard “Oh my hair! My wonderful, wonderful hair!” whenever I looked at him. He had at that time concocted this whole silly idea of uprooting his life, moving to another country and then snipping away those hanging roots to erase any evidence of the old country. We didn’t know what to make of this plan. Only few of us really knew why he was going in the first place, and I wasn’t one of them. But still, he was going, and he seemed pretty serious about it, and so he went.

It was a terrible occasion. Not because it occurred to me that I would no longer be able to stick chewing gum in his hair while he was sleeping in increasingly frequent bouts of jealousy - that was pretty difficult, too - but because he had picked the day right after my birthday to fly away like some strange long-haired birdfreak - which, incidentally, is the shape that he specialised in shifting into. And well, you can imagine the rest. Birthday? What birthday, people asked, when they came to our house precisely on my birthday. We’ve come to bid BirdFreak farewell. Who is this little turd, anyway?

But once they were told who I was and that it was the day that I was born, they made pathetic attempts to better the situation. “See, LittleTurd” they said, “we brought you cake!”

“Yeah? Then why does it say ‘We’ll miss you, BirdFreak’ instead of ‘Happy Birthday, LittleTurd’? And evidently somebody already seems to have eaten a bit of it.”

“Well,” they continued with their lousy defence (see, no explanation needed), “obviously no one would eat something with the word ‘Turd’ on it, would they? But since the derogatory word doesn’t appear on the surface of this cake, we helped ourselves to a slice. See, it all makes sense now, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I lied. Although an admirable attempt to ignite some remote spark that just might eventually lead to something that would replace my stolen thunder, it never had a chance of succeeding since they had fallen for my trick and failed to notice that my name wasn’t LittleTurd - anyone who really cared would know that it was, in fact, BigWalkingTalkingTurd. Yes, I am also a shape-shifter.

So he stole my thunder once - no big deal. Right? Wrong, as this thunder-stealing turned out to be an insidious plot to, well, steal my thunder for the rest of my life. After all the talk that ‘this bird has flown, and for good’, we found out that the bird had merely flown away so the said bird could return with another bird to accompany him. No, they didn’t come back a day after my birthday - just to throw people off, they instead decided to kill two birds with one stone and land on a day that followed my parent’s anniversary and simultaneously happened to be my sister’s birthday as well.

And then began the wedding plans. After much thinking, it was decided that it would be a great big joke to have it on the date that he had left this country the previous year - which you, if you have somehow managed not to acquire lead poisoning from sucking on the points of your pencils over the years because you noticed that if you wrote with a wet point the writing would be significantly darker than with a dry one, should be quick to note - still remained annoyingly a day after my birthday. Sure, they wished me and all that - but there was most certainly an ever widening stream of interest flowing towards the marriage that was to be. Thus, the thunder was stolen yet again.

Then came the next year - which is also this present year - and while everyone expected that their anniversary would remain a mild thunder-stealing apparatus for the rest of our lives, they had other plans. Cruel, insidious plans that he somehow managed to include his wife in as well. After some mind-bogglingly complex calculations and impeccable timing, they managed to do the only thing that was left to do to finally steal my thunder for good. Yet again, right on the day after my birthday, a big round baby ball was born whose first act was to look at me and laugh an evil, blood-curdling laugh.

And so time went by and the baby ball made rapid progress on the road to undeniable cuteness and an almost sickening sweetness. And with first birthdays being the grand occasions that they are, I was simply told, “Ah yes, it’s your birthday, is it? Well you’re not a kid anymore so grow up and stop expecting people to be extra nice to you, for God’s sake! Here, now look after your nephew for 30 minutes. And since you’re such a grown up now, I’m sure you can deal with a little urine and poo. Bye now!”

Oh, and before I finish off my answer - don’t worry about sucking on the points of your pencil. The points aren’t even made of lead, so if anything, you should be suffering from graphite poisoning - of which one of the symptoms might just be not only having conversations with oneself, but also going on to publish it as if it was something to be proud of.

Next is the judicial system. Either the prosecution or the defense is lying. So, logically the party who loses the case should be proceeded against for perjury, right?

Following on are the corporates. They lie just about anything through their PRO and advertising. They spend most of their time in giving each other awards for doing jobs for which they are paid too much anyway. The rest of the time is spent in bullshitting gullible investors about how they went about managing their work successfully.

Advertisers shamelessly make tall claims while promoting the products they advertise. A case in point - why do advertisers use the most beautiful models to sell beauty products when the models are beautiful anyway - lying through the skin - right?

What about Diplomats the world over. They occupy the most expensive real estate in the major capitals of the world. All the ambassadorships are on the basis of how close you are to the ruling establishment. All ambassadors are trained in putting forth (read lying) exactly the opposite of what the respective country’s real intentions are whenever there is a clash of interest.

The film and TV industry really amazes me. A major proportion of the films and serials are based on blatant lies and exaggeration, with many of the plots being downright stupid. That is why most of the general populace tolerates lying in real life too.

The major Religions of the world lie on two basic issues: Life after death and Sex. To date there is not the slightest bit of evidence to prove life after death. Religions tend to make our existing life miserable in order to prepare for a non existent afterlife. Sex too is falsely promoted as meant only for procreation and not for pleasure. Thus the most pleasurable act in the world is totally ruined by religion because then nobody would invest time and money in religion - right? If people were properly educated about the joys of sex with all the attendant precautions the population problem would have been solved years ago.

People running governments the world over have to consistently lie their way around, simply because most are run as coalitions. Our present government is the perfect example of how to blatantly lie your way out of inconvenient situations.

Celebrities like filmstars and sportpersons for the sake of easy money, shamelessly promote products which they would rarely use. I make it a point never to purchase a product promoted by a celebrity.

How then do we tolerate the present situation where lying has become a virtue? Simple, just take it for granted that all leaders of the ruling establishment, religions, and the corporate world do not have the evidence to prove their statements/policies hence they have to lie. You just require common sense to realise that you have the intelligence to see through the lies of the world and live your life as you deem it to be fit and satisfying. It gives you a very great satisfaction that you know that these guys are lying - that’s the crucial difference!