our lady of the pink patrol

31Oct09

admittedly i have been somewhat lax in our online reminiscences of the life of my royal majesty, leaving you to pine for updates but everything worth having is worth delaying so that the demand supply ratio works in the favour of the supplier. i’m sure warren buffet would approve of my market strategy.

when you think about it, or rather, when i think about it, there aren’t many people in the world who come up with original names for places of worship. this is probably because creativity in matters of faith is often considered a no-no of the highest proportions; hence while you will see the world bearded index crossing one billion in your lifetime, you will be hard put to find the mosque of blackbeard anytime soon. or, for that matter, the basilica of the celibate priest. and i have no problems with this. because once it starts, there’s no telling where it ends. i’m not sure i want to worship in a motorsport themed mosque sponsored by ferrari – even though most of my worship revolves around a common theme involving a ferrari 599, a supermodel, good relations with the aforementioned, etc, – essentially your standard achhi see eik garee ho, larki us mein pyari ho concept.

however, i have digressed from the subject at hand. not that there’s anything you can do about it – but still. to get back to where i was coming from, my point was that all indications to the assumption notwithstanding, the title of this post has as much to do with the blessed saint of breast cancer preventation as it does with my liking for orange teeshirts. no indeed. this is about the curious preference certain arab ladies display for pink nissan patrols. to put this in perspective, this is something like an armani leopard print bulletproof vest or snakeskin stiletto construction boots. and yet, such a vehicle is not uncommon enough to stand out in a car park in abu dhabi – and if it does, it’ll only be because its owner managed to find a parking spot, which was, for the record, one of the undocumented tasks of hercules (the only one he flunked out on, by the way).

life in abu dhabi has innoculated me against many things. i no longer register surprise at the sight of a guy with an eighteen inch long beard walking with two abaya-clad females into a cinema to watch a teen dance movie at 12 am for example. i give only a passing glance at ludicrous displays of daredevilry on the roads involving 8 pre-teen kids and a landcruiser coasting on its side on two wheels. i will probably not go into cardiac arrest if i see a nokia phone with a skin made by de beers or tiffany’s. and so on so forth. so leaning against a pink nissan patrol in one of the parking lots on the corniche to take a break during my midnight biped sojourn is not exactly akin to hitchhiking my way to helsinki, even if it isn’t the posture you picture when you think of my majesty.

what is unusual though is to find out that the owner of the said pink nissan patrol is in fact a member of the male species. let me put this in perspective. the arab race is very, well, arab. especially if they are from what i call the persian gulf (at my own risk – they call it the arabian gulf). it would be hard for you to find eighteen adult khaleeji males who do not sport at least a stubble on their chins. it would be harder to find eighteen who do not enjoy a good football game. it would be impossible to find eighteen who do not walk (regardless of their frame) as if they were either strutting around for a mr. olympia contest or as if they were wearing extremely uncomfortable underwear. in short, they are from a world where men look like men and rohrshach images look like ink blots and cucumbers look like cucumbers because that is what they are.

so a guy in a pink nissan patrol in red skin tight jeans and pink form-fitting teeshirt with a hairstyle that looks like a bird of paradise’s tail was, to put it mildly, unexpected. unexpected, but not inexplicable. after all, every man has an inner rainbow -  it just shines more brightly in some (especially if they’re from makran) – and his was just one of those tragic cases. except that you do not expect a guy like that to be able to snare a flaming hot french chick who pops out of the other side of the patrol making the nissan patrol look like a jack-in-the-box designed by yves saint laurent. but we all know what makes the world goes round….

ladies, follow the money if you will but, for the sake of everything holy, follow it to the kind of guy who looks like hes trying to get you not trying to be you! i mean, red jeans? red jeans??!!

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in other news sure to shake you to your very core, i have started the mission to obtain a driving license. someday this will form the basis for a whole series of very funny posts (if you find my brand of humour funny, that is) but right now its just too painful to write about.

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i have no clue why i started this post. let me know if you do.

Filed under: fashion issues, ramble, the father of dhabi   |  7 Comments

theres something about mary(am)

01Sep09

as a rule i keep my friends and family separate.

this is not because i don’t like my family or because i like my friends too much but because if you’re a desi the way you categorise relatives is already very complicated without throwing in the friend card. let me explain. there are different names for all varieties of uncles and aunts and qualifying factors for cousins based on whose kids they are. there are different names for all the different conceivable types of sister in law for example (sali for wife’s sister, nand for husband’s sister, bhabi for brother’s wife, devarani/jethani for husband’s younger/elder brother’s wife, salhaj for wife’s brother’s wife and so on). don’t get me started on the varieties of mother in law (yes, there’s more’n one type). this is all over and above the reality that we have huge families whom we actually keep in touch with – and this is a contentious issue because according to some people we keep perhaps too much in touch with them, with marriages between first cousins being as common among desis as beards are among the taliban. so you might have a case where your mom and dad are the progeny of two sets of brother and sister who were cousins themselves – making you your own first, second and third cousin.

and then you have friends. think that’s easy? not so. parents’ friends are normally “uncle” and “aunty” but if you’re from a more urdufied family they become specific uncles and aunties like xyz chacha if the dude’s your dad’s friend and abc khala if the chick’s your mom’s friend. all your elder sister’s and elder brother’s friends become bajis and bhais respectively. if you’re a nice desi boy partying with friends in some nightclub you might suddenly be embarassed by a hot nineteen year old coming up and ruining the whole effect by recognizing you and calling you bhai and claiming to be the younger sister of the guy who partnered you in the three legged race back in third grade.  this is how it works and this is why being desi is being desi even if you get rid of the oiled back hair and the sweaters your grandmother knitted for you.

so yeah. as a rule i keep my friends and family separate.

however, all rules have exceptions. which is why, i rather confusingly to most people, have a friend who is a few months my junior who is technically my neice. the issue is further complicated by the fact that for some obscure reason i have never hesitated to introduce her to anyone we might run into when we’re hanging out at a sheesha place or restaurant, as exactly that - my neice. in any case, she claims i look old enough to be her uncle which is, at some level, quite insulting but this is more or less mitigated by the fact that she claims she’s overweight despite being in roughly the same weight class as gandhi.

[iceman's 798th law on women: if they're fat they'll pretend they're slim, if they're slim they'll pretend they're fat, if they're of average tonnage they'll ask you if they look fat and get irritated at however you respond to that question]

anyways, if you know me, you’ll be familiar with the poultry farm model.  so there are good eggs. there are bad eggs. there are eggs which do not tend to either extreme. and these characteristics are all relative. i imagine an ostrich would not be too pleased with a chicken sized egg in its nest. a sparrow would be delighted. and so it is that this neice of mine would not win a popularity contest in my family. this is not because there is inherently wrong with the egg. no, the shell is wellshelled, the yolk is decidedly yolky and there is many a nest in which the egg would be more than welcome to mama bird, not to mention papa bird, grandma bird and the retarded second cousin bird. however, in our dynasty, a female egg of her variety fits in as well as an african-american adapts himself to the working environment of the ku klux klan. but this is besides the point. in a nutshell, you would be hard put to adopt the fact that we are related as an article of faith.

anyway, as it happens, having concluded a meetup at batuta’s son’s place where she had thoroughly out-sheeshaed and out-cigaretted me by a factor of 87 to 1, we realised that she had left her keys in her car and since i was being picked up by a friend at any rate it was decided that we’d drop her to her place and that she’d ride back with her husband to pick up her car or whatever.

he came. we boarded. she navigated. he drove. we arrived. she offloaded.

silence.

[pause]

more silence.

i’m not sure if you’ve had the experience of watching what is supposed to be a soap opera on that disgrace to televsion history, star plus, but if you have, you will be familiar with the use of the dramatic pause to convince the audience that there is perhaps a deeper meaning hidden in the crap being enacted on screen. it is at times like that the audience shifts uneasily in its seats waiting for the bombshell to come from the hero’s dying father’s doctor only to have him announce its only a seasonal flu and that the old dude will be on his feet by the end of the second commercial break. this was similar to the feeling that i had while i waited for him to digest whatever it was he was digesting.

 

him: bhai, yeh kya tha? (bro, what was this?)
self: kya kya tha? (what was what?)
him: matlab, yeh kaun thi? (i mean, who was she?)
self: meri bhaanji. (my niece)

this prompted another pause. meanwhile imran khan requested someone to dance for him on the speakers. i gathered he had one of those typical desi dishes which take a while to digest.

him: nahin. yeh tumhari bhanji nahin thi (no. she wasn’t your niece)

he went on to give me his thesis on how it was impossible for this lady to be my neice because based on his assessment of my family if she had really been related to me, (a) the girl would not have entered his car in my presence with a couple of packs of marlboros in her hand, (b) the girl would not have entered his car and (c) the girl would not have been in my presence. given the way the royal family is supposed to operate (and indeed comes close to operating) this assessment was not way off mark and in fact almost impossible to challenge. however, few people, if any, have ever challenged my ability to respond convincingly to any argument other than the one that pakistanis have to be insane to have tolerated sultan rahi in one movie, let alone 804. so i started explaining that she wasn’t a very close neice, just one of the many neices a man gathers over the course of a lifetime when he interrupted and informed me that i could blabber all i want but nobody so “english” could possibly be related to me.

[curtain drop]

i am not by nature any way “english“. i am not even english in that i normally speak in english – i don’t. i prefer urdu. i admit that most people who know me would probably laugh and tell you that there is obviously some misunderstanding, you must be talking about another iceman, if you told them you have been reading my blog in english for four years now (i wouldn’t believe it either. no reader has survived my entire archives). i do not act english, eat english or look english. yet it makes no sense that someone who has known me for seven years would have formed such strong ideas on what type of people can or cannot be related to me – despite knowing that i have relatives on the pulpit and in the pop music industry.

and so i have decided i am getting a makeover (after eid of course. there’s no way i’m showing up as iceman v2.0 in karachi). this makeover will involve purple hair with streaks of blue, a sculpted five o’clock shadow, remodelled eyebrows and a decidedly fake american accent.

i’m thinking pink teeshirts but that would need a lobotomy not a makeover. also that would probably make me the first person to aspire for the throne of delhi while clad in hues of pink since razia sultana around 730 years ago. and that would be a no-no.

the things one does for a throne (and also to come across as slightly more english).

Filed under: desi, desi history, desi-ism, fashion issues, ramble, the sweet stench of life   |  16 Comments

my cat does not have nine tails.

19Aug09

apart from the few iranians who claim that friday is named after this persian chick named farideh (and i want to place on record that i have nothing against iranians – as long as they’re female), most people agree that the etymology of the word has to do more with venus than any other woman. of course, me being me, my fridays don’t work out that way. normally i just spend them sleeping off a red bull induced sugar crash or getting a further tan (yes, its possible) on my biped sojourns of the land of gazelles. however, instead of worshipping the goddess of love, beauty and fertility like any proper roman (not that there’s anything roman about me if you ignore the fact that i’m a roman polanski fan) would do a few thousand years ago i spent the last friday – well frinight – falling in love with a whole bunch of goddesses of the persian variety and since i can’t comment on love and fertility, lets  just concede that the female of the persian species is superhot – even if she wastes her life in blissful ignorance of my existence.

but this post wasn’t meant to be about what i did or didn’t do on friday. as anyone with any knowledge about the goings on in the life of icemen would know, its the mondays that count. and adhering to this policy, the incident of the week took place on a warm monday evening.

in case you  aren’t aware of the way things work in the icemaniverse, the rule of thumb is that if there is a malluesque gent peaceably putting away fried drumsticks like theres no tomorrow in the food court of some mall while checking out the be-denimed rear of some decidedly non-malluesque female, its usually his majesty himself. this is not because i am some sort of sociopath who choses victims based on whether or not their chopped up remains would fit in the trunk of my car – i don’t possess a car (not even a driving licence) – and if i did it would probably be a hatchback, thereby eliminating all of womankind with the possible exception of little bo peep – its because i’m your average hormonal young man and that’s what we do. and also, i like drumsticks.

in normal cases, supermodel lebanese types don’t join me on my table and ask me if they could perhaps buy me a drink. and, true to form, this did not happen this time either despite all my attempts at telepathic thought suggestion. however, i think its now more an issue of aim than effectiveness as the telepathic thought suggestion did work – only not on the desired target. as it transpired, i was joined at my table by the man who had been created with the post of light-bulb-changer-at-the-sistine-chapel in mind. he looked like alam channa would have looked if alam channa had not stunted his growth by smoking charas at shahbaz qalandar’s shrine as a boy. indeed my first thought at seeing him was that here, finally, is the man who keeps rochester’s big & tall in business.

it is bad enough to be joined by a man at your table who blocks your view. it is worse when he is around nine and a half feet taller than you. it is even worse when he is joined by a lady who looks like she gave megan fox the tightest contest for the part in transformers since miandad hit that last ball for six in sharjah in the days when women for me for foggy concepts and normally irritating beings liable to pinch my cheeks and shriek “mashallah he’s grown so big!” as if i could possibly have been expected to grow smaller. it is a fact that a certain type of person ends up ruining the image of an entire race. for instance, no one really likes lawyers from quetta because of ali ahmed kurd. rawalpindi has not been what it was thought to be since sheikh rasheed started getting elected from there. and it is in a similar fashion that the reputation of good looking women has been blighted by those of their members who have wasted it by getting married – more specifically by those who have wasted it by getting married to people other than me. and it is into this latter category that mrs. channa fell.

if you are a woman living in modern times you will have a vague idea that the modern day preference among men – apart from patrons of pashto cinema - is a woman who, while she has curves, is more akin to a winding mountain trail than a roundabout. and this is why there is such a thing called the atkins diet. however, i’ll let you in on a secret. while we appreciate the effects of your voluntary starvation and self torture in the form of decreased female surface area – there is on occasion nothing more delightful than the sight of a gorgeous woman digging into a plateful of fried wings the way that platefuls of fried wings are supposed to be dug into; eating, of course, being a spiritual activity in the same class as transcedental meditation, dervish-style-dancing and apple juice consumption. such a situation wherein two like minded souls could have been fused into one over an act of unwavering faith in the right of tastebuds to satisfaction was rather dampened by the presence of said lady’s husband who was towering over me with the same sort of menace that nanga parbat exudes to those watch it from the fairy meadows in northern pakistan.

it is hard enough to avoid laughing when a guy of the large economy size has a voice like a canary and uses it to drone unceasingly about the high temperature and humidity but it is virtually impossible to do so when his wife looks at you and rolls her eyes to indicate that this is not a special performance but regular programming. and it is not a good practice to laugh when the guy you are laughing at is seated a foot and a half away from you. however, if the long line of icemen from which i am descended is not known for one thing it is a lack of presence of mind and when the guy started turning a fine shade of plum at my mirth i said, “my friend if you think this is hot, you have obviously never been to multan” which calmed him down somewhat. but the problem was that his wife (i’m assuming they were married ‘coz she had a ring on the appropriate finger and i dont see why a dainty thing like her would be dating a behemoth like him) continued her policy of silently guzzling the chicken wings and rolling her eyes every time the big guy said something ridiculous – and the guy subscribed to the sheikh rasheed school of oratory so you can imagine my predicament. because the next thing he did was bitch about the crowded environs. and i said, “my friend if you think this is crowded, you have obviously never been to multan“. then he started on the traffic in the city and i said “my friend if you think the traffic here is bad, you have obviously never been to multan“. to the casual reader this might suggest a certain lacking in the art of conversation but i laugh loud and i laugh long when i do laugh and the steroids had obviously snapped a few circuits in this dude’s head. in any case, it worked.

when i left i shook the dude’s hand, invited him to multan, rolled my eyes at his wife and stole the napkins provided to them by the establishment. he looked decidedly confused and this time the wife was the one who burst out laughing and i hightailed it out of there leaving her to provide an explanation – like maybe “if you think he stole your napkins, you’ve obviously never been to multan“. but i didn’t stay to hear what she said.

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i need to practice my farsi. man bayad farsi ro bishtar tamrin konam.

Filed under: ramble, the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  18 Comments

kadi tay hans bol vay…

02Aug09

got a comment  a few days ago from a kid named khawar on my about page saying, more or less, that i’d be less uncool if i wasn’t an auditor. to add insult to injury he addressed me as abbas bhai. in his defence, i don’t disagree. as a class, auditors are the second most uncool people in the world – outdone only by second cousins. and yes i’m fast approaching my sell-by date so the bhai bit was actually more velvet glove than iron fist. i mean, he might’ve gone the whole nine desi yards and called me “uncle”. and i have realised recently that when i celebrate the rare good shot when playing pool by dancing with my cue stick, i attract more attention than the teenage punks who wear jeans and teeshirts of hues that would make them more welcome at a community meeting of the macaws of the amazon forest than they would’ve been in the blue denim and checked flannels of my youth.

old age, in a nutshell, is catching up fast.

and that’s when you realise that there is actually nothing on that list of things that had to be done that has actually been done yet. i haven’t been on that safari yet. i haven’t camped in the pantanal yet. i haven’t jumped out of a plane or gone scuba diving yet. i haven’t even got over my phobias of heights or deep water yet. i’ve only just started experimenting with hot beverages (which reminds me, the current top five are oolong, jasmine, gahva, cappuccino and doodh patti).  i still can’t do the tango. i still can’t speak persian. if i got into a boxing ring today with an armless geriatric on a wheelchair my money would be on the wheelchair. the only possible notch on the gun butt is the nadal-murray match that i attended – but that was in the city i’m in and an exhibition tournament so i don’t think that counts. what i need is an adrenalin injection. a charge up. or, as a friend put it, a kick in the pants (and – before you ask – i’m not looking for volunteers for the last interpretation).

they tell me that the guys in peshawar university drill into pineapples insert charas and cigarettes and use them as  a group bong of sorts. maybe thats what i need.

only i’m allergic to pineapples, not into charas and in the process of giving up smoking. life. it ain’t easy.

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but i do have personality.

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which brings us back to the original allegation. the one i agreed with. and i have agreed with it in the past as well. refer here and here and especially here.  see, its a publice service thing. auditors are boring, granted; but we’re boring for a reason. when the first stereo system and typewriter were expelled from the electronic garden of eden they landed on earth and got married. their offspring are known as stereotypes. one of those young stereotypes was a hunchback who wore thick hornrimmed glasses and a tie clip and moved aound in his pinstriped suit with a boxfile under his arm. he mumbled and when he wasn’t mumbling, he stuttered. and because no one really liked him he moved from one corporate cave to another in search for the right time to drop his cv and become something like his brother stereotype – the accountant – in that cave. the poor guy is dead now but his memory lives on in the minds of YOU PEOPLE. and so, because of our great respect for the fact that no one likes having his or her bubble burst and brought out of fantasia into the real world, we comply with the stereotype; replacing our spines with curved rods and keeping the pinstriped suit business afloat in these troubling times….. or not.

in all honesty, i have no idea why most auditors are such lameass people. i just concede that most are. but then, most people in general are lameasses. auditing or not auditing has little to do with it.

i hereby call for the public execution of all people who believe in stereotypes. i have been supported in this call by stingy memon businessmen and nerdy techie types. who else is buying in?

Filed under: the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  15 Comments

ssss…. as in sucking

29Jul09

one of the most elementary examples of unbigoted racisms as described in the iceman’s guide to anthropology and other theories you shouldn’t believe is that one has a belief in the superiority of his languages over all others. this despite the fact that as per my understanding the sons of adam continued to speak the same language wherever they went only shifting to local dialects when they grew up and got married (which is why the words for mother and father sound similar the world over - maata/pita in sanskrit, madar/pidar in farsi, mother/father in english, mater/pater in latin – but the word for wife is different everywhere) which in turn means that, as usual, women are the ones to blame for everything that went wrong; especially when it comes to communication gaps despite the fact that women are the ones who carry out 80% of all communication (what? you never went on a date?) and 100% of all uncommunicative behaviour (what? never had a woman refuse to tell you why she’s ticked off at you?). but, be that as it may, the theory still holds. which is why sindhis talk condescendingly of other languages while claiming that they have the sweetest refrain in undumb humankind, punjabis claim copyrights to mysticism and tragic romance which would not have been possible in other tongues, the urdu speaking remain convinced that they are unmatched in the richness of tradition and lyrical flow and pathans glare and say something like “laka dum dama kay koray!” and brandish an ak47 in your face so that you humbly acquiesce to the superiority of the pebbles-rolling-in-an-earthen-utensil over your own language, whatever it may be. since i’m sure i’ve lost you by now maybe its time to get back on track and tell you that the idea was to inform you that i continue to act like my mother tongue, urdu, is the language they will speak in paradise – it wouldn’t be paradise otherwise – and have an unshaking belief that in hell the lingua franca will be malayalam.

this attitude had created a sense of superiority and over confidence in my approach to the arabic classes that i’m taking these days – especially since the arabic language doesn’t really contain much that has not been adopted in urdu – and so was totally unprepared for the shock that i was about to get. picture a class of nine people who think they’re adults including four pakis in their late twenties, one filipina, one zimbabwean, one norwegian and two australians. thats enough accents to make life hell for a voice recognition software programmer as it is. then picture that same programmer trying to decipher their accents when they attempt to speak a language that defies human attempts at its pronunciation with phonetics ranging from the sibilant hissing of snakes to the guttural growling of wolves. compound this, if you can, with the pakis trying out their arabic amidst muffled snorts of laughter as the australians insert letters unheard of in any language spoken on earth and mars with their renditions of the first half of the alphabet.

sounds like fun so far, doesn’t it?

you’re not factoring in a sudanese teacher who for all his wealth in the elusive talent of arabic teaching has a classroom demeanour eerily reminiscent of stalin in a meeting at the kremlin of the subcommittee on poppy field taxation who have come back with the unfortunate news that the invasion of afghanistan will not be carried out for a few years to come. to further complicate things, his approach is defined by one word and one word alone – mastery of phonetics (ok thats three words). so his teaching of the alphabet is full of examples of english words with approximating sounds like alif sounds like the aa in “after”. this goes well until he looks with a suggestive glance at the filipina that could’ve been included in a pictorial guide of looks not to give when flirting: for dummies and announces that the sound for suad is a prolonged “s” – and his example is what inspired this post. and his example for the hard “t” a few minutes later was “tongue” which left us in no doubts about maulana tharkee’s bedroom fantasies. and if you have any idea of pakistani reactions to innuendo you can imagine the snorts of mirth that sounded like firecrackers going off on shab-e-baraat in karachi.

about the only thing i have learnt so far is that if i have to pronounce the prolonged guttural “a” of ain with any accuracy i have to retch with sincerity but not quite puke.

learning languages is fun. the iceman is happy.

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speaking of language, you might want to give some insight on karachi slang on the abbasbytwo blog.

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i am becoming addicted to emirati style qahwa. this is disturbing because i have been an enthusiastic and untiring critic of the practice of drinking beverages when they’re hot. nonetheless, to give them credit, they’ve got the right idea on how to make a kickass pick-me-up which is more than fir for human consumption.

they use pakistani saffron in it.

Filed under: the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  7 Comments

the law of the excluded middle

21Jul09

lets face it. i was once a pseudointellectual type.

at one point in time it was considered cool to have an air of iconoclastic existentialist angst about oneself, a perpetually wrinkled brow and a tendency to speak about the world with an affected air of superiority. to complete the image you had to listen to european classical music, watch spanish movies without english subtitles and know how to correctly pronounce the names of karl jung and soren kierkegaard. 

i survived for about a week and a half and than i gave it up – largely because it turned out that the girl didn’t look very good close up (she bleached where she should’ve electrolysed) and had a himesh reshammiya type of nasal voice to boot – but also because the rainbow centre guys gave me wierd looks every time i showed up for another boring spanish movie. however, the brief sojourn introduced me to the beautifully named law of excluded middle, which, like everything philiosophical, is just a grand way of saying there is no gray area (you are either an idiot or you are not an idiot – you cannot be anything in between – hence, and this is my own addition, you are an idiot).

in recent years the law has acquired a new meaning. it means that the middle area has to be excluded from decision making. you do not, actually cannot,  indulge its whimsies which often border on the absolutely unreasonable – like mandi followed by chocolate cake. or prawn biryani and fried pomphret. or paaya until you drop. you get the picture. as wodehouse said, the lunches of several years have caused my chest to slip to the mezzanine floor. so i’m more or less off cake these days. however, this is not what keeps me away from birthday parties. especially kids’ birthday parties.

i am not normally a party animal. sure, i’ll come for the poondi (and the shrimp) if you invite me and eighteen etihad stewardesses on your yacht for the weekend but i probably won’t regale them with my rendition of the macarena. i will not be your first choice for emcee-ing at your sister’s mehndi. the last couple you will run into at the 400 at fairmont on a thursday night is the iceman and his girlfriend, iman ali. and yet i would more willingly be in that position than in that of ronald mcdonald with eighteen unruly kids pulling his hair and nose in eighteen different directions at a birthday party where the cumulative age of those eighteen is probably less than eighteen. but the angel in charge of my destiny has a sense of humour which is more liaquat soldier than anwar maqsood. and so it is that i have been conned, blackmailed and coaxed into attending parties for more people under the age of two (offspring of relatives and friends who, alarmingly, are all my age) this summer than i have attended for myself in nearly 28 years of existence.

lewis carrol – now there was a philosopher! – has written the book on good parenting. and he’s done it in four lines. if more parents followed this creed there would be fewer problems in modern society and, probably, there would be no sheikh rasheed at all. he says,

speak roughly to your little boy,
and beat him when he sneezes.
he only does it to annoy,
because he knows it teases.

this is pure genius. if only the unfortunate mother of the little twerp who spilt his mirinda on my jeans this weekend had the common sense to subscribe to this practice, she would not have had to watch the horrible spectacle of an almost black man turning slowly red with anger and giving her son a glare that would have impressed medusa herself. and she would not have had to watch history repeat itself with more urgency than might be considered proper when the idiot managed to drop a second glass on my foot four minutes later despite having been stationed at a table half way across the room. however, modern mothering is all about raising pansies and the creed en vogue these days is that rods are more important than children and should be spared, any potential risk of spoilage among offspring notwithstanding. and modern fathering, apparently, is about slapping me on my back with a wide grin on your face, saying “ah well, kids will be kids”. in more reckless, carefree days i would have punished the child suitably – probably tying his shoelaces together or accidentally bumping his head into the cake – but a civil servant has to show more restraint and bearing in these trying times or the whole fabric of society will collapse.

i did, however, manage to slide a plate of half eaten ice cream cake on to a chair a second before his father sat on it. accidentally of course. revenge is mine, says the lord, magar waseela to insaan hee bantay hein.

aur banao defective maal. uloo ke pathey.

Filed under: the father of dhabi, the sweet stench of life   |  7 Comments

for the want of a nail

15Jul09

imran khan was never my idol – even though i was one of “imran’s tigers” in the shaukat khanum fundraising thing and had an autographed picture to prove it – that slot, as cricket goes, has always been wasim akram’s. there was always something special about someone whom even imran khan called the prince of pakistan. the unique, ball concealing action, the incredible variety and then there was that almost unbelievable mastery of swing. ahh, that was swing. inswing, outswing, reverse swing, even both ways swing in the same delivery. blasphemous it might be, but “god’s left arm” was the most appropriate title. divine intervention is the only explanation for what his deliveries did on their 22 yard journey to the other end of the pitch. admittedly, i speak with the fervour of a religious convert – which in some ways i was, substituting cricket for coppola’s the godfather as the ultimade code of modern  life at the ripe old age of 17. wodehouse said that golf, like measles, should be caught young. the same applies for cricket. you catch it at an old age like i did and you spend the rest of your life spouting statistics, fuming over selectoral decisions, watching youtube videos of matches you watched live at the stadium, and piercing voodoo dolls of pitch curators who messed up. ok, maybe you won’t start youtubing. but that’s besides the point.

the current pakistani team, world champions of the most idiotic format of the game (though i’m not denying that i enjoy every second of it), like me, are wasim akram fans. they are such great fans that they decided to play this test series as a tribute to the greatest left arm bowler in the history of cricket. of course, they could not emulate him on the field. that would be like asking every reporter in the world to jump from rooftops wearing blue tights and faggoty red underwear just because they have the same job description as clark kent. so like a drunken abstract artist will paint a curved brown line and try to convince you that it is a bounding gazelle, this team decided to swing from outstanding to pathetic and back several times over the course of the series to represent wasim bhai’s inswinging yorkers and those magic deliveries that would crash into your pads after you’d shoulderd arms in the belief that they would swing the other way. and in a beautiful tribute to his delivery to croft that even the umpire didn’t understand (it swung both ways!) the team went from sensational collapse to spectacular fightback to sensational collapse again in the second test.

the snowball that became an avalanche

i am in pain, in pain. i hope they rot in hell.

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in other news, the collaborative blog on karachi by halai and yours truly is up. visit, read, enjoy.

Filed under: cricket   |  10 Comments

buddy you’re a young man, hard man…

08Jul09

…laraz jaata hai aavaaz-e-azaan se

from queen’s east/west fusion track on coke studio’s thirty-third season.

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no, i had nothing to to do with the hashish they found in mussafah.

and this post was not written while under the influence of anything stronger than the shai haleeb that the tea boy, hidayatullah the blessed, manages to plant on my desk every two hours despite my insistence that i have brought my pepsi, thank you very much. nor is it the natural outcome of breaking up my sleep into two sessions of two hours each and trying to catch the remaining four hours while ostensibly awake. and even though i’ve found that it is actually possible to sleep with your eyes open – what do you think kamran akmal does behind the stumps? – the couplet above was not composed during a night(or day)mare. no. this comes out one of my memories of a school i never attended, regurgitated into pixels on your screen because of an email from the other abbas on the blogosphere, who, probably because he shares my name, is a helluva nice guy.

millions of years ago, i was a teenage kid trying to conform (and i know the last three words are redundant but i like to boost my word count) and was constantly frustrated by the fact that i actually preferred my faded dolmen centre jeans and kholapuri chappals to my ridculously overpriced levi’s and uncomfortable caterpillars. but i was from a “cool” school. and if you’ve lived in karachi and don’t know what a cool school is, your school obviously didn’t qualify. the identifying trait of cool schools is that apart from the fact that they have kids in every class who actually want to play basketball – not because they’re more than 5 feet tall (they often aren’t) – but because that way they can show off their nifty new air jordans and three hundred sizes too big chicago bulls teeshirts (yes they have the nba tag) and the fact that one in every 2.79 girls has blonde streaks, wears her jeans painted on and has a cellphone in one back pocket and a pack or marlboros in the other and the fact that they all have sports teachers who tell their buddies scandalous fantasy-realities about their young charges when they meet up with the said buddies for chai paratha at cafe pyala in north nazimabad; is the fact that all the cool kids at these schools know all the other cool kids in all the other cool schools in karachi. so if you’re natasha or altamash from bayview high you will know phareed and zulekha (zookie) at kgs who will know meeckaal and sahar at the centre who will know sikandar (alex) and sophie at karachi american and all of them will know that the beige versace top that momo wore to rascheed’s birthday bash at french beach was probably a fake because she’s such a loser and a wannabe and her dad’s only got a corolla and did i tell you about the rx8 my dad bought me for my sixteenth?

to the rest of the world, or at least those beyond the bridge, these kids are as much of a novelty as intelligent life forms in the national assembly. and just as they have a name for the idiots of the hallowed houses of parliament (its unprintable as this blog is suitable for family viewing) they have one for these kids too. they’re called burgers. now while i would like to say that the word shares an etymological history with the term “bourgeoisie”, the words share little besides the fact that they both refer to the delusional upper classes of elitist karachi though you use the latter if you’re a pseudointellectual journalistic type working for dawn news tv and the former if you’re a maila reporter type working for geo news. and as you are no doubt aware, who the hell wants to watch news in urdu anyway? we don’t even understand it. and in any case the guys at geo news are all such wannabes in bad imitation lanvin suits and no taste in ties and don’t even get me started on the fashion gaffes committed by the women they have and can you believe that fat guy who goes and stays at people’s houses for the day who asked shahid afridi if his bmw is an amreekan car and by the way did i tell you about the rx8 my dad bought me for my sixteenth?

sami shah, the only pakistani english language stand up comedian i know of, wrote an absolutely hilarious piece some time ago about his experience at the old grammarians’ annual mela and the ridiculous tinge these events have started to take nowadays. his experience with grammarians is almost exactly the same as mine except that i probably remember mine more than i should and then there’s the little problem of actually having thought that these guys were cool back in the days when i was that teenager trying to conform. and in their own idiotic way they were. what’s being cool other than having people believe in the myth that you are? so despite the fact that i’d probably bop my pepsi bottle on the head of the next hot blonde type who says kal mein nay paon se magarmach mara – magarmach is cockroach, right? despite having spent all her life in my very urdu city – or punch in the face of the close friend who thought iqbal’s bekhudi was written by junoon – or clip the ear of the pot smoking dunce who thought mohammad ali johar was the name of the math teacher – or beat the “cultural” type to death with her dkny sandals who thought that abida parveen’s gharoli was the best pushto song she had ever heard - i wouldn’t have those people out of my teenage years for anything. failing to fit in with them made me the man i became and i’m not entirely dissatisfied.

note: the author’s only saying that in a belated attempt to assimilate with the cool group but he won’t succeed because he’s a wierdo governemnt official type and a wannabe and from a one car family, speaking of which, did i tell you about the rx8 my dad bought me for my sisteenth?

Filed under: ramble, the sweet stench of life   |  14 Comments

anything hitler can do, i can do better

07Jul09

of all of nature’s mercies, the greatest is the sindhri mango. the next is cricket.

alexander the great (326 BC) on the shores of krokola (now karachi)

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oscar wilde, while discussing cricket, once complained, “it requires one to assume such indecent postures“. to the best of my knowledge, ijaz ahmed was slightly after his time but clairvoyance is not a modern discovery, after all. not that that’s relevant. and ghalib wrote often and exceedingly well about mangoes. but much as i like mangoes (and the works of ghalib for that matter), mangoes do not like me and i try to abstain as much as is possible in order to deprive the medical community of possible cash inflows. this policy of the mango government – my status as persona non grata i mean – has resulted in mangoes not making it into the plotline of my next novel (which is also incidentally my first) despite my firm belief that mohammed hanif’s a case of exploding mangoes was the best one in the english language coming out of pakistan that i have had occasion to read (which really isn’t giving it the credit i’m trying to give it, but what the hell) – unless of course you count rushdie as pakistani (who should probably be taught as a modern literature thingy in universities, his blasphemy notwithstanding). this is not to suggest that my work-in-process is anywhere near to being in the league as rushdie or hanif’s works of art or even that of copywriters for pakistani tv commercials (goray goray gaal, hai yeh stillman’s ka kamal… lagta hai chand zameen per utar aaya) but maybe some googling dunce working for one of the bigger publishing houses will pick up my name with theirs and somehow an advance of us$ 100,000 will make its way into my bank account. you never know. these things happen.

but yes. to cut a long story short i am working on that novel. and yes, the plotline revolves around my two favourite subjects, karachi and cricket. and yes, before you ask, it will be in sentence case. i can pretend to be e. e. cummings on my blog but i don’t think it will go down very well in print. but writer’s block is settling in with a disturbing sense of permanance - like sanctions against north korea, only more effective.  the tone so far is surprisingly not remotely funny. which makes sense, seeing how i’m trying to write a comedy. the punchlines will come the day i decide to go all russian and dark and sombre. the actual problem though, is the research. i didn’t know i didn’t know anything before i started writing what i thought i knew. this will take a helluva lot longer than i thought it would.

_________________________________________________

in other news, as if the pakistani team didn’t have enough rats in the batting lineup (as i write this, they are handing the first test to the sri lankans on a plate with not watercress but molten chocolate cake around it), our national carrier has imported rats from birmingham to add to the population of islamabad (probably to replace the president – which is actually not that bad a deal).

only on PIA. unbloodybelievable.

Filed under: ramble   |  5 Comments

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   |  7 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?
______________________

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   |  12 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.

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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.

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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.

01Apr09

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