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.

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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.

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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.

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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