unday ka funda

17Jun09

it has been said that when reading some work of self-expression, a reader will form a mental image of what he believes the writer must be like. an idea of how the person may be your grandfatherly storyteller on a rocking chair addressing spellbound little kids or a young man in a coffee shop charming a bored waitress. it has been said that as the reader familiarizes himself with the works of the author the picture gets sharper and better defined to the point that on running into the writer on the street, the reader says “oh hello, abdullah” and the writer looks at him searchingly and says “hi..?” and the first guy says “i’m hamid, a fan of yours” and the second guy smiles and says “oh you are, are you? thanks, but you’re probably the only one” and the first gentleman says “oh no that’s just not possible” and these formalities concluded one remarks about how hot the weather is and the other says it’s not the heat that bothers him, it’s the humidity and they shake hands and part ways and go home and tell their wives stories that begin with “hey, guess what happened today…” and at this point the respective wives interrupt and ask if their respective husbands remembered to bring the groceries and very soon two sets of neighbours call the police to report cases of domestic violence and some sleazy journalist with a coffee stain on his shirt submits an article to the editor about two unconnected deaths resulting from domestic squabbles in the city and the editor writes an editorial which no one reads about the rising incidence of wifely revenge in the past decade and, because she’s a supporter of the cause, presents it like it’s a good thing and the world in its callousness ignores the whole event and no one realizes that all that happened could have been avoided if the reader hadn’t developed this spectacularly accurate impression of the writer’s appearance in the first place.

now i’m not what you might describe as the zaheer abbas of the blogworld, churning out voluminous amounts of print just like he churned out the runs and if some indian supporter will ever pun on my name, pronouncing it as ab-bas (translated as “now that’s enough”) it won’t be because of the quantity of my output but because of the quality. however, if you are reading this, the chances are high that you have formed an image of a very personable young man, handsome to a fault, displaying every quality that you might tick yes against if you are the kind of blonde bombshell who maintains a checklist titled “dream guy” – and i’m not going to delude you – you’d be right. be that as it may, i’m not the kind of person who risks death at the hands of his wife (even though i don’t have one) so i move around town in a perpetual state of disguise so people who have read my stuff normally don’t recognize me and express disbelief when told that the little thug standing suspiciously in the corner avoiding eye contact is actually the great and mighty xill-e-ilahi and only nod knowingly and issue ohs and aahs of comprehension when the hostess leans forward and whispers “eccentric one, he is – but it’s an awesome disguise, no?”.

the tragedy is that most of you are products of a time when there is an unhealthy appetite for what you believe are the facts. in olden days when people hadn’t invented laughing gas because they didn’t need it, facts were a mere formality often ignored by the general populace and everyone clapped when peter pan asked them to do so if they believed in fairies. but you just need to have the geo news channel. so despite the disguise and the eccentricity there are those among you who will still want to have the “facts” about what kind of person i am. and since doing what’s best for you isn’t exactly part of my job description i will continue to drop important hints to you on the subject. today’s hint was in the title of this post.

among other great statesman-like qualities that i may or may not have, one of the more important ones is that people do not hesitate to forward me emails containing recipes for omelettes. yes, omelettes. i’m told that among the 11 different ways to make this pakistani delicacy one of them results in a fish shaped product while another results in the formation of a ball shaped monstrosity that masquerades as your breakfast. the creator of these recipes is a lady named hafeez, something which would be odd enough in itself, but is nothing compared to the fact that she uses an urdu verb of her own invention, “karkaraein”, which is a phonetic description of how the eggs should be sounding like at a particular point in the cooking process – “kar kar kar kar kar”. now while it worries me how knowledge of this fact will affect that mental image you have of the iceman – spare a thought for my mental image of this miss hafeez something. if i ever see a woman in a straitjacket and a dupatta walking down constitution avenue in islamabad, i’ll probably go up to her and say “oh hello, hafeez” and she will look at me searchingly and say “hi…?” and i will say “kar kar kar kar kar” and run away.

yes, that’s the kind of guy i am.

________________________

i once forwarded people links to a website created by a saudi arabian death metal band. i can’t find that email and i can’t remember the band’s name. can someone help out?

Filed under: ramble, the sweet stench of life   |  6 Comments

of hamoody, who wouldn’t shut up and got what was coming to him

16Jun09

at this point in time i am attending a presentation on the things a guy can do in abu dhabi. do i really need to be told that corniche probably means beach?
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blame it on the hashemite bloodline if you will, but as a rule, i like kids. of the human variety. admittedly, i am not the type to volunteer to babysit at your place and the pockets of my jacket are full of strepsils and panadol for myself not sweets and candy for children i meet. i am not the desi santa claus. but if you bring your baby to a party and it doesn’t wail in my ear or relieve itself in my near vicinity you’ll probably see me waving at it or pulling faces and generally doing other idiotic things to elicit a smile. that’s the good thing about these demonic little angels. they have the ability to make us drop the armour of our feigned sense of propriety and behave like we might actually do if this was a world without boundaries. if you really want to profile a person, put a baby in their arms for fifteen minutes.

not all the babies in the world, however, follow up the “demonic” bit with the “little angels” bit. there are good kids. there are bad kids. there are kids who swing from one extreme to the other like kamran akmal’s batting form – the case springs to mind of the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead and who, when she was good, was very very good, but when she was bad, was horrid. i forget her name but we learnt about her in some history lesson back in kindergarten. probably a relative of mary. (yes that’s the one who had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow; and everywhere that mary went that lamb was sure to go). anyway, i would like to suggest that the young man known as hamoody is such a child and has the potential – when he’s being good – to be very, very good but sadly our acquaintance was rather short and during the brief period which we knew each other he displayed rather more consistency than kamran akmal, or the little girl for that matter, and remained focussed on getting a nod of approval from the antichrist himself.

we met, like most gourmets do these days, in a burger king outlet.

if you have never seen a four year old in a sparkling white kandoora and kiffaiyeh, trust me you have no idea what the term cherubim is supposed to signify. however, when the aforementioned cherub is running amok in a fast food joint, loudly repeating one of the few obscenities in the arabic language i am familiar with, all the while managing to avoid the two filipina nannies diving for him underneath the tables and behind the trash bin – well, to put it mildly, cherubim is not the adjective that comes to mind. especially when, in one of his less inspired moves, he decides to barrel into you while you are juggling with your tray and executing a rather complicated weave between hamoody’s abaya-clad mom and two behemoths from sudan.

now i am not the lissome reed who the winter wind passes idly by, harming me not, but i am also not the kind of warrior you unhorse with a wooden sword. four yeard olds, no matter how admirable their speed and for all their other merits, are not generally known for being the ones who brought down the iceman with a single charge. however, far be it from me to decieve you by saying that the suddenness of our contact did not have a profound impact on the both of us. before hamoody, i had a tray in my hands. after hamoody, i had none. before me, hamoody was a hyperactive arab kid wearing a kandoora and a kiffaiyeh in a state of high velocity. after me, hamoody was an arab kid wearing a kandoora and a kiffaiyeh considerably handicapped in his search for the usain bolt’s world record by the fact that he was also wearing 500 mililitres of diet coke. in what was probably the only moment in my life that an arab woman has expressed shared sentiment with yours truly, hamoody’s mom and i broke out in laughter at precisely the same instant that hamoody started crying. i’m not sure why she was laughing but my outburst was caused by the fact that in her superior knowledge of the use of english phrases she chose “thank you” as the most appropriate one to apologise for her son’s behaviour.

yeah, well, since burger king reimburses you for such diet coke dunkings, she’s very welcome.

as a matter of prudence, i would advise you not to name any upcoming masculine progeny “hamoody”.

unless, of course, you hair designer can get him to sport a little curl right in the middle of his forehead.

______________________

ana oreed al ghada. yalla salam.

Filed under: the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  11 Comments

a bulldozer called caterpillar

27May09

when i was still in school i had a crush on this girl in my class who was pretty well sorted in the looks department. unfortunately, she had a disturbing preference for the rugged bad boy type with a rolled up rizzla in one hand and a gunshot wound on the other which left granny-glasses me pretty much out of it, my rather expensive bouquet of red roses on valentine’s day notwithstanding. she ended up witha  rather ridiculous wannabe ruffian with the even more ridculously wannabe sobriquet of kashif t.t. – t.t. of course being the necessary addition to every goonda’s name in karachi after it was popularised by the mqm activists of the nineties (most of whom are now dead). there were others too (mqm activists i mean, not her boyfriends – though there were some of those too but not in this context) with names like commando, langra, kalia, dada and tiger but for some reason none really captured the public imagination like “t.t.” did. i shudder to think what would have transpired if i’d been more serious about the lady under advisement. i mean i can picture myself with a wilder hairdo. maybe even a leather jacket in a karachi summer. but going around town and introducing myself as abbas champion or something along those lines would not be exactly my cup of tea.

i bring this up because i’m thinking of launching a teeshirt range with vivid pakiland style rickshaw names emblazoned on the back.

(not that that has any relevance to the thug element in karachi but one likes to jump from one subject to another without the formality of rational thread. after all, if one can’t expound gibberish on one’s own blog, where can one? not everyone is an elected representative.)

so where were we? yes,  the teeshirts. teeshirts with rickshaw names. however, there is a slight problem.  i’m suffering from a decrease in temperature of the feet about the whole affair. consider. you walk along a crowded arab boulevard – ok lets get real, a souk, there are no boulevards in arabistan – wearing a black teeshirt with a blue triangle on the back which reads in large garish urdu script something like “aakhri grenade”. on the one hand it might look pretty cool. on the other you might look like an absolute idiot. so i’m not proceeding with this venture until i can get at least four other people to join me in an excursion to poondi paradise (otherwise known as mall of the emirates) clad in a manner similar to the one described above. you can have your pick of names, though. i recommend dollar ki talaash, tehelka and aafat. if you’re a girl you can have main kinoo kinoo dasaan mein kithay challi aan?. or anything else. let me know if you’re in.

__________________

in case you aren’t already enlightened, i recommend you put a ceiling on your daily sugar intake. a slush is lush, but three berry cocktails in two hours is pushing it. my brain will explode in about 23 minutes and i will expire, regretted by all.

also i will meet my maker with a purple tongue.

ay daavar-e-mahshar mera naama-e-aamaal na dekh
is mein kuch parda nasheenon ke bhi naam aatay hain

Filed under: ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  21 Comments

tom, [heuristic analysis check] and harry

24May09

i’m pretty sure we all know the guy who designed the parental control tool for the kaspersky security thingy on your computer. this is the kid who sniggered like an idiot when you read allama iqbal’s shair

palatna, jhapatna, palat ker jhapatna
lahoo garm rakhnay ka hai eik bahana

in a comprehension passage titled warzish ke fawaid back in your fifth grade urdu class. he grew up to be the teen who thought beavis and butthead were the modern day p. g. wodehouse. at age 22, he was born again and joined the hizb-ul-tahreer and swore to rid the world of all lewdness and impropriety.

which is why my kaspersky’s parental control had issues with a wikipedia search for emily dickinson.

if you didn’t get it, i’m certainly not explaining it.

_______________________

when i was a teen, which let’s admit it, wasn’t exactly last week; being cool wasn’t something you needed a twenty year plan for. oversized teeshirts, baggy jeans, nike bandannas and an ability to quote eminem could do it if a propensity to wear flannel shirts and carve “kurt cobain lives” on school desks  or pronouncing yves saint laurent the way they do on ftv didn’t. and all that was required only if you couldn’t wing through with a fake american accent.

then some twerp made cable tv affordable and what was available only to the elite became mundane and everyday.

so the heretofore cool people had to come up with a new way of being cool. they commissioned a bunch of indus valley students (who we all know get a better gpa if their name is pashmina jade khanzada than shaheen sheikh) to come up with a cool thing and that’s how the current culture of idiotic names in pakiland was born.

in case you’ve lost me, let me take you a little way back in history.

if you are my age your mom has a good chance of being a razia, zubeida, zehra, rabia or saadia. or something from more or less the same genre. meaning that if it doesn’t have a meaning like peace or gift or honorable or decency; then its probably the name of some historical character who embodies all those virtues and more besides.

on the other hand, if you are my age and have kids, your daughter is like to be named something as out-of-the-box as you can possibly come up with – like tamara or manizeh or aabgeenay or mishghan or even scheherzade. bottom line, you ensure that whether or not you know the meaning, the name is sufficiently rare enough that your kid has no chance of ever finding a key-chain with her name on it at some souvenier shop in murree. and if your parents are enough of an influence to have a say in the naming of your kid and recommend something more orthodox like zainab or fatima you’ll probably ruin her life by getting it spelt as xeneb or phatimah on her birth certificate.

(people, you know who you are)

but that was then and this is now. obviously most people aren’t happy enough at the idea of having cool kids if their parents were uncool. they want to be cool themselves. and so if you’re a mukarram and want to be cool, you become mike. or like the asghar and naheed couple i met a few months back who go by oscar and nancy and explain this idiocy (my word, not theirs) is beyond my comprehension (their word, not mine) as i am “not from the states”. well, maybe not.

but i am cool enough to spell my zill-e-ilahi with an x. nyah na na na na.

_______________________

while it is not true that i ever took hallucinogens or was committed to a mental health institution for schizophrenia, there is nonetheless a grain of truth in the statement that i once thought i could sing. of course, having a voice that nostalgically emulates the crows of karachi at their best does not help to a very great extent. and the fact that someone reminded me of sajjad ali on friday night meant that throughout all of saturday’s aimless dubai drive my companions were subjected to my rendition of his cult classic, bolo bolo. which means that my sore throat is nothing compared to their sore ears.

_______________________

in other exciting news i found a bunyan tree in abu dhabi. it is quite rightly looking (and, i suspect, feeling) ridiculous in the middle of the desert.

yes i have no idea why i wrote this blogpost. boredom and a listerine high will do that to you.

Filed under: poetry, ramble, the father of dhabi, the greater depression, the sweet stench of life   |  6 Comments

i’m your huckleberry…

21May09

it is an undisputed reality that val kilmer is cool. he has to be. he played a dude called the iceman before i got famous. but if coolness was an art form, he was pablo freaking picasso when he played doc holliday in tombstone.

that is some one-liner.

if pressed, i’d have to admit losing your job isn’t without its silver linings – though perhaps i can only say that now that Alhamdolillah i’m no longer part of the great unwashed. for one, you have the freedom to carry out nocturnal foot patrols of abu dhabi humming alexander rybak’s fairytale and spend the days pretending you don’t have insomnia by watching lousy chick flicks all alone in the theatre without having to worry about someone watching you buy a ticket for a renee zellweiger movie. also, giving interviews isn’t as boring as some people make out.  there’s always a new excuse you can come up with for “wanting to leave your current employment” like getting transferred to sierra leone or inadequate supplies of coffee in the kitchen or limited access to the washroom due to the credit crunch.

other than that, not much.

(of course, there’s no better feeling than having friends stand by offering moral support. so guys, i don’t really know how to thank you but thanks. the prayers, wishes, words of commiseration, muted farewells, emails, swearing sessions, references and everything you did is what really kept me going. i owe you something more than a blogpost.)

but, fate, i’m your huckleberry.

or at least i’m the iceman.

Filed under: the father of dhabi, the greater depression, the sweet stench of life   |  5 Comments

the legend of nosmo king.

22Mar09

when all else fails, there is always apple juice.

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which brings me to the subject at hand. one of the many things people don’t know about auditors is that they do not really like to be the boring geeks no one acknowledges are related to them. seriously. your average auditor, were he given the sobriquet of  “hot-rod” or “mustang” or something similarly cool (”iceman” is another one that comes to mind) would probably be so delighted that he would die of happiness, if such deaths were medically possible. and this lack of cool factor obviously makes for frustrated existences and high potential for serial murdering and kleptomania and addiction to breaking news alerts on the fantasy channel known popularly as geo news.

in a nutshell, auditors are lame nobodies.

and they work very hard (and very unsuccessfully) to change that.

it is therefore not surprising that at client sites choc-a-bloc with gorgeous interns and management trainees, it is natural to see two or three bespectacled hunchbacks in pinstripe suits walking the length and breadth of the goddamn office thirty two times a day to get cups of coffee that they do not touch just so that they can get a load of unauthorized poondi. it is easy to spot them even if they take off their jackets and straighten their backs in an effort to fit in and be inconspicuous because the way their eyes rove and the lewd grins that break out on their faces are eerily reminiscent of the expressions that you might expect to see if you offloaded a bunch of 14 year old taliban in the lingerie section at debenham’s.

and yet, not all auditors are crude. at least not visibly so. some manage to sneak into designated smoking areas and choke on a cancer stick or two while striking up conversations by asking for lighters or matches or whatever and taking it from there. it is, of course, a well known fact that there is no camaraderie like that between a  smoker and another, the three musketeers be damned. however, anyone in the manufacturing industry will be able to tell you that no matter how pristine and pure their product may be, there is always some sort of byproduct which is considerably less so. dairy farms, for instance, also sell manure. and it is the same with these acquaintances that are developed beneath a cloud of grey smoke. they breed ill health and unfitness and bad breath and other similar tragedies that are simply not acceptable for people who are already inflicted with the curse of being those most reviled of all human beasts, auditors.

in an even smaller nutshell, i’ve gone cold turkey. three weeks now and none the worse for wear. except that as a non-coffee drinking/ non-smoking individual i am now entirely useless in the arab eye and my chances of ensnaring a hot lebanese chick have gone down to one in 345,789 and my chances of ensnaring a rich emirati chick to minus 273 degrees celsius – better known in the science world as “absolute zero”.

this exercise, the de-dunhilling of the iceman, if you will, has sparked mixed reactions among what the pakilish media calls “civil society” (which means that there must also be an uncivil society and it is probably this variant of which i am a member). the nonsmokers have welcomed me to their ranks with much the same attitude as the prodigal son was recieved by his unprodigal parents – essentially one more guy in the non cool faction means that the faction, as a collective, gets a little less uncool. the smokers have mourned the loss of an ever available bic lighter and the cynics have refused to accept the permanence of the situation until this sacrifice bears fruit, like long black hair, an additional six inches in height and the disappearance of my myopia. by and large, the common assumption is that there is a girl involved in the picture.

which goes to show that the psychology of the individual is hardly a closed book.

kipling, who is supposed to have known a fair bit about both, said “a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke”. but what would he know. if i had been told to quit, i would have been the same petulant spoilt brat that i am and doubled my intake. all it really takes is a raised eyebrow followed by a glance of absolute disdain, to make you stop your contribution of carbon monoxide to the environment.

and the world spends its billions on the kyoto protocol.

__________________________

by june i have to get back into some semblance of middle distance running form. hundreds of years ago i used to be the 1500 meter man who dreamed of breaking el gerrouj’s records. i am now about as likely to do that as i am likely to look down into shaquille o’neal’s eyes and call him “little man”. but i shall try nonetheless. from the first of april, i shall hit the track.

nosmo king is back. and so is the dream of the three minute mile. wish me luck.

Filed under: office cribs, social networking, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  26 Comments

‘tum eik “fast” larkay ho.’

15Mar09

that life is a roller coaster is a fact disputed by few people other than the idiots who voluntarily watch horror movies at the theater at midnight with their obviously terrified girlfriends/wives in tow. however, most people who have ever been on a roller coaster or are blessed with a basic understanding of physics or have had the common sense to realise that trimming mustaches does not make our president any less of a hoodlum will admit that everything on a given roller coaster moves at the same speed with the possible exception of the comparative heartbeat rates of normal humans like me and snake-handling, skydiving, street-racing psychos like this person because for pete’s sake, its the roller coaster that’s moving, not us.

but people, especially female ones (assuming that we are willing to concede that females can be considered to be people), are normally not blessed with a great deal of intellect.

and so it is not entirely beyond the pale of credibility that i ran into an old classmate who believes that i have somehow managed to out pace the speed of time and cross into the thirties while leaving her and the rest of the classmates three years in the past. when i pointed out the little loophole in her theory she countered by saying that its not her fault that i look more like i was her dad’s classmate than her own. that this begs the question on how her dad managed to sire her at the ripe old age of three is not something we will dwell upon but it just goes to highlight the point raised in the second paragraph of this post. however, i do have to concede that this is actually a recurring theme and not a one-off incident. in fact, if you were to go by the number of karachiites who express shock and awe at the rapid advancement of my age you would assume that it was only a couple of years ago that i was some main draw in the our version of vaudeville for all the “babyface” roles that are otherwise played by 49 year old midgets with thirteen facelifts and nine nosejobs on their CVs.

this is not the case. admittedly, i haven’t looked like i’m sixteen for several years now. but then i haven’t been sixteen for several years and i probably won’t manage it again because the resemblance to brad pitt notwithstanding, i’m not benjamin button (and wouldn’t want to be either – who wants to love a sixty year old cate blanchett when you’re eighteen?). and so to reassure myself that this is just a karachi-centric phenomenon particular to sentimental people who want to remember me forever as i was in my golden years; i have been running the “iceman as a senior citizen” experiment for the past few months.

the scheme is basically a simple one. someone asks me my age and i say 39. they give me an unbelieving stare and i say “did i say 39? i meant 36″. at this point they normally ask me to produce some id or tell me to go to hell and ask someone else how old i am. a few will linger on and offer bets on how i am not a day over 26 (very complimentary, thank you ahmed, ahmed and incidentally, ahmed) and a couple have asked me for the secret to my youth. the point being, that i do not look older than what i am. quad erat demonstradum. why then, do those who know my age insist that i do?

please elaborate.

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i have also been asked by those not in the know why i have been acting like someone stole my cow (a very urdu expression for which i have no history – i would not be depressed if you stole my cow, believe you me) and why i am currently undergoing a renewed qawwali appreciation phase, something apparently that gived credence to the belief of the iceman-is-over-47 segment of society. well frankly, qawwalis are probably the most underrated part of our cultural legacy and the only intangible substance capable of giving me a high.

with the possible exception of the scent of tommy girl coming from the right person.

and that, incidentally, is the answer to the other question.

_____________________________

speaking of cosmetics and other related things, i am planning to dye my hair purple. it give a rather dignified air to gentlemen of my advanced age while keeping them within the loose bounds of what is defined as “with it”.

and if teen literature and ask abby type columns and the esteemed advice of my syrian barber, ammar, are anything to go by, a makeover is just wat i need to turn my life around. so purple hair will get me a new job with higher pay (probably as a bartender) and a bunch of new girlfriends (i think ammar was decribing the standard thirty-something lebanese hag who you run into every time you enter a lift, but hell, you can’t get much better than that when you’re a 53 year old mallu).

baby steps. but i’m moving on with whats left of life. no complaints.

Filed under: ramble, the sweet stench of life   |  12 Comments

the plot thickens

06Mar09

the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men,
gang aft agley,

robert burns – 1785

Filed under: fudge   |  5 Comments

“hum faqat zaib-e-hikayat thay…”

28Feb09

as cycles go, few are more vicious than the one the self-pitier finds himself moving in. he pities himself into a state of misery and then the misery leads to fresh self pity which leads to more misery. et cetera et cetera ad nauseum. but thats just masochism. even the self-pitier knows that a shake of the head and a determined set of the jaw can change the world.

sometimes though, fate really does hate you.

and no, you can’t make me stop feeling the way i do. but there is a thing called tact.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  5 Comments

me tarzan, you jane

22Feb09

i don’t correct typos. this is an ego issue. and one of faith. what i mean to say is that checking for errors is the work of a lesser man than the iceman and, frankly, i just don’t believe in automated spellcheckers. plus that’s the only thing that keeps my works of art from being perfect and i know how jealous you all are of my achievements.

but – as usual – my first paragraph has nothing to do with the rest of the post. like the great grey giant who lived in the great grey castle on the great grey cliff over the great grey sea. nopes. this post is about confessions. yes i know that theoretically speaking you can see the tag but most of my readers are too myopic or distracted to notice these things so i had to put in print. also there is the fact that i have not yet framed the next sentence.

i should’ve been a spy. not just because i’m the dashing, debonair, bond type hunk but also because much as i pretend otherwise – especially when met in person – i’m addicted to profiling. those of you who have met me and have lame enough existences to remember our first meeting may have noticed my version of the karachi checkout head-feet-head searchlight glance. this, contrary to popular belief, is not a result of my astigmatism. it’s just a 15 year old habit of forming initial characterizations by choice of footwear. the eyes hover momentarily around the waist as well to take in the belt (if applicable) and finally refocus on the face to take in eyewear, headgear, jewelry, makeup, hairstyles and any other reference points available. by this time, 2.8 seconds into having made your acquaintance, the offices of hussain & co., professional profilers, have prepared a file detailing assumptions of ethnic origin, age, education (quality not quantity), family background, individual taste and estimated annual income. in the next phase, which lasts around a minute, data gathering is done through analysis of voice patterns and frequency of eyeball movement. this study corroborates or negates assumptions of ethnic origin and education and provides further insight into confidence levels, forcefulness of personality and personal integrity. in phase three we carry out a detailed study of body language including the way shoulders move when you walk, which hand you use to pull out your chair, which way you tilt your head, how you cross your legs and whether or not you fidget in any way. in stage four the analyst is given more leeway to exercise independent judgement in choosing reference points for analysis. and so on so forth. by the time an hour has passed we have a dossier on you that is thicker than the one interpol has on an old chap named osama something and its probably way more incriminating.

the problem with this is that other people do it too. and one knows this. so its virtually impossible to not be analysing oneself at the same time to try to get a glimpse of the file marked top secret in your head.

and this is where i always come short. consider. footwear: (sneakers, sandals or if you’re lucky, loafers = overly casual, laid back, potential to get too familiar too soon). thick glasses (granny’s favorite nerd – or gaming addict, whichever is worse), most probably sporting an unmaintained five o’clock shadow (slob), unkempt hair (slobbier) cut by the same stylist that cut waheed murad’s hair in the sixties  (old fashioned/conservative/liable to slap a coffee table announcing “maa, mein b.a. pass ho gaya“)… and so on so forth.

the problem is that this assessment is wrong on so many different levels. about the only thing correct in it is the fact that i am liable to claim success in b.a. exams while slapping coffee tables, largely due to the facts that i don’t believe in coffee and am enough of an artistic bachelor to be called a bachelor of the arts.

and this shatters my belief in the infallibility of the hussain profiling matrix. which means that the frowning ape in flannel shirts and timberland boots i keep running into on the corniche could possibly be a better man than the axe murderer i take him for. or that the  filipino waiter at my barber’s place who struts in his high heeled shoes in a manner reminiscent of 98,437 lebanese chicks that i can name (they’re all called either reem, oula, bana or haifa) and several that i can’t, is possibly not a snotty faggot. or that zardari is not, in fact, a donkey.

you see the dilemma.

so, like, i need another hobby. something i’m better at.

lebanese chicks, maybe.

speaking of which, zeenat has resurfaced. only she’s moroccan now – in the interests of realisticness (i’m about as likely to be a lebanese chick magnet as i am likely to be a, well, pakistani chick magnet) – and has achieved rebirth over a translation request. to cut a long story short, i asked for a translation of an endearment i overheard during my latest eavesdropping escapade and somehow it got attributed to my non-existent girlfriend who over the course of the conversation acquired moroccan nationality, french education and a liberal arts degree from the sorbonne, not to mention the  rather unimaginative name of leila, which is no small achievement considering it took about two and a half minutes for that rich history to come out. what’s funnier is that arab dudes who know me actually believe the story and have been dispensing advice on how to handle these “modern moroccan girls” which include offers for background checks and telling me to insist that she master the jordanian dialect as that is the only one i will ever pick up. i have also been familiarised with the golden rule that i should never date a moroccan girl who works for the airline industry as apparently, if you’re a girl, moroccan and work for emirates, it goes without saying that your morals are as loose as a fishwife’s tongue.

the things you learn in arabistan.

Filed under: confessions, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  11 Comments

ee bholro aahay.

15Feb09

ulm, baden-wurtemberg, germany, may be the kind of backwater you never visited or wanted to, but people with i.p. addresses originating from there have wandered on to this blog so woe betide thee who disrespecteth the place.

even though it sounds like something my industrial sized stomach rumbles when the occupation rate dips below normal.

anyways, whether or not you have figured it out yet is irrelevant but the wise readers back in ulm (yes of baden-wurtemberg, germany) have realised that those who meet me and those who read my stuff are normally two distinct subsets of the human race and it is only very rarely that the two worlds are allowed to collide and unleash the madness. which is a roundabout way of saying that you probably haven’t met me in a professional capacity.

of course, the use of the term “professional” is a double edged sword. while it pumps one up and clouds the horizons of self doubt enough for a guy to believe that the mundanities of his life actually have meaning and that the draft from the airconditioning is not really the slipstream of the world passing him by; one must also wake up to the realisation that the fools one works with, or, to be more precise, the fools one works for (because it goes without saying that the said fools do not indulge in the colossal waste of time that we call “work”), are probably also blissfully under the same delusion that they are in fact professional in some sense of the word. but i digress.

what i was trying to say was that if you ever met me in a  professional capacity and asked me to explain some obscure aspect of generally accepted accounting principles or international financial reporting standards, i would – assuming i could not convince you to ask someone else – probably employ what is known among elite mensa members as the “poultry farm model”. this basically involves a hen, an egg and a cage. these three things are then used to simplify the complexities of the never ending treatises known among the experts (and the idiots) in my field as the international accounting standard on employee benefits or or the amendment to ias 1 puttable financial instruments and obligations arising on liquidation – though, for the record, a hen is actually a biological asset as defined in ias 41.

the reason for this, of course, is that when you simplify something to an absolute extreme, the nitwit asking the questions cannot ask further questions without exposing himself or herself as a nitwit. and among auditors and accountants even people with intelligence quotients similar to the mean winter temperature of the south pole (i.e. negative) know that if you are exposed as a nitwit you are finished. so they abstain and leave you to relative peace which is actually just a lower degree of misery. for example, someone starts asking questions about the indicators of impairment of a class of assets and you say, “ya akhi, have you ever heard of a chicken with alzheimer’s?”

you create a successful poison for your enemy and you forget about creating an antidotes.

so when someone oversimplifies their argument or throws in ridiculously inappropriate analogies you’re often left gasping for breath much in the same way that you leave them when you’re explaining the finer points of accounting jargonese. so you’re talking to this guy about gender equality and he is vehemently disagreeing, claiming that such beliefs are not only the type that cast doubts over my masculinity – offering me some of that jinjeer herb which you get at every lebanese place and is supposed to be the absolute cure for what the hakeems in karachi call mardana kamzori and advertise cures for on virtually every wall in the city – but are also extremely idiotic. to prove his point he asked me a question which left me stumped by virtue of its absolute irrelevance – would you let a monkey drive your bus?

now i am not a posessor of buses, or of monkeys for that matter, and so this is a contingency that i am not exactly prepared for – but i do like to conform to accepted societal norms. as such, i probably wouldn’t let a monkey drive my bus if i had one. unless if it had cruise control. but how that is relevant or possibly linkable to the issue at hand is something that boggles the mind of even the author of the bemaina. but all joking aside, i found that offensive. i mean, i can’t speak for other people, but at least 50% of my parents are female.  and i’m a staunch unbeliever in darwin regardless of gender so the association of women with monkeys left me baffled.

i’m sure at least some of the readers of this blog (other than the guy who logs on from ulan bator in mongolia) have somewhat similar perceptions on the place of women in society. i mean i know the highly educated corporate executive making in excess of USD 200k a year who describes his chartered accountant wife (love marriage, no less) as the woman who makes his chapattis. there is also the dude who explained that among the many faults of his ex-wife was her refusal to respect him (she tried to walk beside him instead of behind him where her rightful place was). so tell me, what exactly is the story with this macho crap? what is it that your dad does that your mom can’t?  educate me.

__________________________________

it was at this point in writing this post that i was interrupted by a phonecall from a friend trying to figure out how to download realplayer which consumed eighteen minutes of my time and totally ruined my train of thought.

girls are idiots, capable only of making chappatis.

_________________________________

having said that, there has to be more than just chappatis to a species that can hunt for hours in a crowded shopping mall for that top while you just flop down on the bench and try to recapture your breath. gentlemen, trust me, when it comes to shopping, they are not the weaker sex.

_________________________________

the title of this post encapsulates my entire vocabulary of the sindhi language and its grammar and delicate nuances. just thought you’d like to know.

Filed under: aurat, office cribs, ramble, the sweet stench of life   |  20 Comments

…tujh se milnay ke baad, dilbert!

08Feb09

the answer to most things in life has been found in literature. how one defines literature, however, is important when analysing the previous statement. if a variety of definitions didn’t exist, half the pseudo-intellectuals  in the world who parade around bragging about their post graduate degrees in subjects which never got them more than an excuse to curl up in a corner and read a classic would lose their street cred. but that’s besides the point.

comics are literature. more than shakespearean classics can ever hope to be. i mean i have never, unlike macbeth’s wife, seen blood on knives and the like or, like shylock, pestered venetian businessmen for pounds of flesh. i have, however, often had trouble restraining my fist of death from turning a troublesome manager inside out and throwing his desk off the top of the office building.

when i was a kid my favorite comic strips used to be big nate and ziggy. not because one was about a smart loser or because the other was about a loser, period; but because they were hilarious. then i grew up and started understanding why the mothers in the family loved baby blues so much and why the working class citizens didn’t start the day without dilbert. and then after i grew up i became what people call a corporate leech when being complimentary and a lot worse when not. an auditor.

i don’t know much about scott adams but i think he was probably one of those recording angel types in a past life and spent most of his time around people of my ilk. there is no other way he could have known so much about my life. consider the following.

about the only thing wrong in that panel up there is that i don’t even try leaving at seven. its more like nine. yes, post meridian.

and then there’s this perfect explanation for my physical condition.

most appropriate though, is the following explanation for my perpetual singletonism. i don’t think shakespeare could have said it better.

if you too are a denizen of the corporate jungle, find your life chronicled at this site. enjoy.

Filed under: office cribs, picture, the sweet stench of life   |  23 Comments

of pregnant silences and abortions thereof

04Feb09

it has been said that attempts at creativity, like writing, revive, and occasionally even resurrect, the dying (or dead, depending on how deep your faith is) brain cells that are the collateral damage of the mental exhaustion that goes along with the husool-e-rizq-e-halal policy that is the bane (and also the salvation) of my brothers-in-faith and, more precisely, my brothers-in-faith-and-profession in the four to six month stretch we loosely call the busy season. there is also the fact that the loss of focus can be at least partly attributed to external depressants like that traitor called fate and his machinations to interrupt the orderly flow of my largely regretless single life by injecting large quantities of regret in the form of certain someones showing up where you least expected them – or wanted them; there obviously being more truth in the rule of “out of sight out of mind” than there is in the one which goes “absence makes the heart grow fonder” – but fate and its machinations are not something i like to dwell on not only because that merely shatters my own belief in my guiltlessness but also because the public image that i force myself to live up to is one of unbounded carefree-ism (if there is such a word) and happy-go-lucky idiocy since that, to put it in bollywood producer terms, is what the public wants to see.

i was assuming sentences in excess of 150 words like the second of those two would also help me get there, but sadly that is not the case.

and so, while random recollections of events in my life hardly qualify as creativity – unless of course you concede that abstract art is, in fact, art; and we all know that i will concede no such thing – writing this blog is about the only thing i do that garners public attention apart from my renditions of ali azmat in what can be most politely described as “the voice that came a generation too early” and perhaps more accurately as something that sounds more like ali azmat’s hair dryer (and yes i know he’s bald) than the man himself; i am trying to rehabilitate myself by writing this monument to inanity in order to revitalize body and mind which, if i am not mistaken, is the precise job description of that empty can of red bull in the dustbin.

at least i’m not the only one failing to live up to expectations.

(just so that you can’t say i didn’t warn you, red bull is not suitable for the species of man known as phenylketonuric. apparently, you’re supposed to know if you fit the bill.)

but we were talking of expectations. and dearth of talent in the performing arts. and someones who refuse to be forgot. and unconnected as they all seem to be, you can make a story out of that at any time of the week. yeah, we were also talking about creativity and bollywood productions. and even if i didn’t expressly mention it, of reality. which is just another creative bollywood production along the aforementioned plotline. even if it isn’t sponsored by red bull.

so you come to the point where it’s between the two people and the chapattis and ridiculously delicious paalak chicken. and the innocent seductiveness of those open tresses. and the eyes. and being in the same situation again where there’s so much to say and so much to take back and not doing either and bottling up what you feel just like you did ever since you were informed that such feeling are not welcome and cannot be reciprocated and should not mess with the order of life for the party of the second part. and the losing of balance that naturally comes with these things. and while “why regain it?” is the typically cheesy bollywood response that sounds appropriate at times like these, you don’t think that way after you’ve successfully negotiated teenage and “because i can” ceases to be a legitimate reason for things. and the way all these sentences seem to start with “and” as if the last one left volumes unsaid. which it did.

but i wasn’t going to write about that. not because its not writeable per se, but because there’s no point. and in any case these things look better coming from a ghalib or a faiz because they at least knew how to say what was meant to be said. no sir, madam, or whom it may concern; i’m supposed to be the funny guy. the guy who can be a phenylketonuric and still drink the red bull. the unsuitabilities which may result, of course, being solely for the entertainment of the masses. and so the recountings of my life as detailed in this chronicle are the ones narrated by the xill-e-ilahi in a parallel universe where everyone wears rose tinted glasses and everything is fun and even the marble tombstones in cemeteries have limericks inscribed on them.

i, on the other hand, am not made of marble. but that’s that.

let us look, therefore, at the funny side of things as we always do and move further back in history by two weekends.

my name, as most of you with intelligence quotients knee-high to a very short ant will have figured out, is not muzaffar. unfortunately, not everyone believes that. i always knew there was more to my never attending events in my parents’ social circle than just not feeling like it. there must have been some subconscious realisation that meeting a bunch of old fogeys who assume you know precisely what other old fogeys you haven’t seen for 13 years are up to will call you a muzaffar. now this might be totally acceptable if your name starts with saleem, ends with warraich and has a mustansar thrown in the middle. but when you have a name like mine, being called muzaffar is just not on. and even if that could have been forgiven, being addressed as “ama mian” is totally beyond the pale of acceptability. but circumstances always contrive to push me into situations where i accept invitations to gatherings of this sort and so i humbly expressed my consent when more or less ordered to show up at one of the old uncles’ places a couple of fridays ago.

now all this muzaffaring and ama mian-ing takes its toll. under normal circumstances i’m the guy who remembers you had a purple keychain when you were in the third grade that had a very taiwanese looking tom and jerry on it. but when i’m irritated i tend to mix up the “funerals attended” and “grandkids’ aqeeqas attended” index cards in my head. and so i very calmly told a bunch of shocked geriatrics that a certain ali rehbar passed away a couple of years ago. i then redirected my attention to the dum ka qeema and parathas which are the saving grace of such events before i realized that everyone else on the dastarkhwan had pretty much frozen stiff. a quick assessment of the situation led me to the realisation that infallible as i may be, i had made what my four year old nephew calls a boo-boo. even rowling admitted that magic cannot bring back the dead. so now that i had killed off a hale and hearty dude who looks irritatingly like jon voight would with a beard; i had to stick to my guns and keep him dead. these situations are not easy to maneuver out of. so i described in great detail the story of a sudden heart attack and shocked kids and the like, sparking a long discussion on the causes of heart disease and blood pressure and health care in desiland and of course a unanimous consensus on the virtue and many merits of the deceased. at this juncture, i casually interrupted asked the senior citizen who had raised the initial inquiry how he had come to be acquainted with the late great man.

he worked here with us, beta.

no he didn’t. he spent his whole life in karachi.

of course not. he was here for 13 years

which ali rehbar are you talking about?

which ali rehbar are you talking about?

and so the dead were resurrected. so much for jk rowling. rebirth is ridiculously easy when i’m the one who kills you.

i wish my own dead brain cells would realize that.

Filed under: desi, fudge, ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  9 Comments

lost in transformation

26Jan09

for some unexplained reason – though it’s probably because i’m the personification of eternal youth – no one believes i’m 34 if i tell them. which i’m not. but that’s besides the point.  of course no one really believes i’m 12 either but just so that i look dumb by association rather than dumb because one is dumb like the people who visit this blog looking for the late nazia hasan’s phone number or how to keep their shirt tucked in (believe it or not, that’s the most common google search for this blog after “nida aqeel’s paintings”) ; these people tag me to fill out memes or whatever the damned things are called. that i actually bother to respond shows that i celebrate be-nice-to-dumb-animals-week around 52 times a year. also that i don’t have anything bearing semblance to a life. but that is something i’d rather not dwell upon.

bottom line, in case it didn’t register, is that i’ve been tagged. whoopee-de-do.

fortunately, the theme is a familiar one. randomisms. the idea, according to owl, is to do the following

Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 16 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 16 people to be tagged.

like anything about the last 116 posts on the blog was not random.

anyhoo, here goes.

1. i do not believe armed burglars can turn into goats. or anything else for that matter. i bring this up simply because this is a popular belief in nigeria and i have been told that apart from george clooney and arjun rampal, i also look like olusegun obasanjo. and thats not very charitable of the general public.
2. i used to be the skinny, pimply nerd in high school.
3. i am the decidedly unskinny, unpimply nerd nine years later.
4. for the past 27 years i have pulled grass out of the ground every time i’ve sat myself down on a green patch.
5. for the past 27 years i have sat myself down on a green patch a sum total of 371 times in daylight and 87 times at night.
6. i quote statistics about my activities (or lack of them) with great conviction.
7. point number five does not necessarily explain my complexion.
8. my standard alias for crank calls, practical jokes and police interrogations has always been asif. if it was you who sang athra baras ki kanwari kali thi on the speaker phone for the sani-e-tina sani ki talash program, then maybe i owe you an apology. but, for the record, your voice sucked and asif and his buddies had a hell of a laugh.
9. after decades of research i have made the discovery that socks are more comfortable inside out than er.. outside in.
10. i can laugh in 47 languages, cough in eighteen but sneeze in only one.
11. the first time i opened the batting for my team i made 64 of 23 balls including two sixes and four boundaries. i never scored more than 25 after that at any number in the lineup.
12. fourteen years ago, i took two wickets in an over bowling slow left arm to a bunch of kids even more myopic and uncoordianted than myself. to date, they remain my total career tally.
13. apart from my brilliant umpiring, points 11 and 12 remain the highlights of my cricket memories.
14. i don’t like football because i never understood the offside rule.
15. i am not half as funny as my writing and i admit that’s not saying much.
16. i have allowed myself to be talked into a baking showdown next weekend where my chocolate cake will be competing against one of the best ever baked and i have no clue on how to bake anything but red clay bricks.

if anyone thinks i’m tagging sixteen people, they’ve got another think coming. anyone who reads this post is tagged.

you’re exempt if you can give me a doable recipe for chocolate cake.

to hell with it. i’ll just buy one, deshape it and claim its mine.

Filed under: confessions, tagged by somebloggerelse   |  25 Comments

teri meethi baatein…

13Jan09

there are, among those who are in the loop, certain standards by which life is meant to be led. certain things that have to be accomplished before they die, appearances to be maintained, compliments to be received, etc etc. and these are all things of quality, which, when mentioned to educated, knowing audiences, inspire oohs and aahs of approval, nods recognizing a similarly ambitious soul and a general concurrence on the sanity of the individual.

if i was ever in the loop, i swear no one told me.

so my list of things to do before i die has a piddling three things on it, none of which i am ever likely to accomplish, viz. scoring a six off glenn mcgrath via a reverse sweep; winning a game of pool left-handed; and throwing a water balloon at sheikh rasheed’s face.

if that weren’t enough to throw reasonable doubt on my sanity, what is likely to have me straitjacketed in today’s world of psychotic dieters and ever spreading vegans is my unabashed and unfettered love for cholesterol. to further damn myself after admitting to this obviously cardinal sin, is my unabashed and unfettered hate for exercise. you’d think that if it was really all that important they’d at least make it easy to spell. but there comes a time in every man’s life when he decides that he really wants to get back in that pair of jeans which he has so lovingly folded and stored in his closet. and so, much as it my hurt him to do so, he has to either snub the cholesterol or dabble in exercise or both. now it is no secret that if pushed – or even if merely patted on the back – to choose between a chicken tikka and boiled broccoli i’d choose the tikka any day of the week. it is also no secret that i have attempted more or less everything that wasim bhai has been seen doing in public including bowling no-balls, swearing at teammates, faking an accent and voluntarily giving autographs (and yes, i only really came into my own when i attempted the swearing at teammates part). so i put on my thinking cap which incidentally turned out to be the hood on my er… hoodie and wondered exactly what he did that i don’t do and it hit me. he gave stupid answers to pretty legitimate questions while jogging around a park. and so i lifted myself up and placed myself on the corniche all set to tell anyone who asked me where  the nearest atm is that i don’t smoke. unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. you cannot be sitting on a bench and have people come up to you and ask if you don’t get tired because by sitting on the bench you, for some reason i haven’t figured out yet, give rise to the perception that you do get tired. you have to actually do the jogging bit that wasim bhai did so famously back in those days in lahore.

and so i started jogging a couple of weeks ago.

this might’ve been an achievement if i actually managed to do it without sounding like a battalion of dobermen catching their breath after running up a hill. or if i managed to cover two hundred meters without looking like the hero’s sidekick in a punjabi flick who has been shot 38 times in the gut and still makes it across half of cholistan only to die at the hero’s house before telling him who shot him. or if i managed to cover two hundred meters, period. life, however, is a son of a bachelor, and there’s nothing easily regained that was so easily lost. and so if at two am you are for some reason meandering around the corniche and see what reminds you of the stereotype hollywood undead guy with the beergut coming at you rasping hoarsely, do not freak out. its only me. instead, come up and ask, “xill-e-ilahi, aap thaktay nahin?“

to which i will probably answer with the same words the legend had for mohammad yousuf when he ran him out.

“@##@&&^!“

_____________________

in case anyone was wondering why i named the post what i did, blame a certain extinct pakistani band that went by the name of music math for making a song of the same name which for some reason has entrenched itself in my head and refuses to get lost.

Filed under: ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  11 Comments