Obsession with Home Improvement

My wife always finds some reason or excuse to go to the Departmental store. Like for instance if I didn’t wash my car or if we needed to patch the ceiling, she will immediately put her slippers on and call out “Let’s go shopping”. I guess from so many male readers reading this line that I am not in a minority group.

I hate sarcasm and more than that hate the 3 most used sarcastic words in English “You do it”. You must be wondering why even a third rated super market in your locality is always crowded, well it’s because we males are afraid of those 3 words. Men hate to do anything themselves except getting lost in the car or watching cricket on TV. So the “Y” chromosomes in this planet have adapted to dislike the concept of sharing house-hold work with our wives.

What really baffles me is why all these supermarkets are carrying a big section for home & kitchen appliances, vegetable stalls when every 9 out of 10 families prefer to eat out. I presume that the shop owners are obsessed for success since even if we prefer to eat out, they tap the female instinct to shop unnecessarily. I have never seen my wife return empty handed from a super market, even if she doesn’t like anything in there she may buy a new fair of silver ware when we hardly eat at our residence.

The supermarket folks are very intelligent; even if we are not willing to cook inside our kitchen they come out with products to mordernise or remodel our kitchens. The only best thing I like about this idea is that every time when we either remodel or mordernise the kitchen, we make sure that we dump those 23 million cockroaches and 43 million lizards out of the kitchen. Perhaps my wife buys those cheeses, breads and cement concretes which stay for inside the freezer (roughly for 43 years) for the roaches to feed their colonies.

Another interesting fact is that these home improvement shops and restaurants are always full of guys who are instructed by their wives to modernize their kitchen or shop unnecessary grocery items. Even at 10:30PM when the store wants to close you will see many guys leaping and diving to enter before the shutters go down. If you don’t believe me, then try to get a vantage parking place at 10:30PM in a super market. After these call centers, I assume the next thing which is 24/7 is the super markets sales counter.

The recent trend is really disturbing, families go out buy houses than rent them so that they can go and shop for home improvements, furnishings, kitchen accessories. Not long ago, my friends used to say “Why waste your money on renting a place when for the same you can buy one. Thus you create equity out of it.” Now, seeing the queue in front of these home improvement shops and super markets, I guess my friends are creating equities for these SHOPS.

On a trip one day to the home improvement shop, I had to visit the restroom. The rest rooms in these shops are always located in the next available planet or 2 miles from the entrance. I walked right through the shop which had sections like plumbing, nuts ’n’ bolts, PVC pipes, bathroom accessories, marbles, tiles, clay, soil and hardware clothes etc. Upon reaching the rest room I find that I can not enter it. It baffles me if so many guys are out there buying these accessories and building a home but can’t flush a single toilet. Perhaps the only solution which I can think of for this problem is that we out-source this work too.

My Son's Driving Turns Me Neurotic

My sons learning to drive and he is really terrific. He is just 4 years old.

Well every parent would love to see their kids learn to drive as long as the vehicle which they drive is manufactured by Fisher-Price and moves in pace with a mega serial. One thing which is safe is that the Fisher-Price set comes with toy Fisher-Price people who are unlikely to swear when you are driving rashly.

Technically from the perspective of a parent, there is no difference between 4 and 18 year except that when is 4 you have more control over him while he is driving his Fisher-Price manufactured Ferrari. Recently when I looked into my driving license I found that according to the law, whenever your child reaches 18 he is allowed to apply for a license and drive an actual car on the actual road with an actual speed of 60 KMS. This puts a big shrill down my bone marrows since I keep seeing him drive, on a daily basis, between the bed room and the kitchen.

According to the law, when my son is 18 he shall be allowed to drive a vehicle with a restriction that he be accompanied by another person (preferably over 40) who has a valid driving license and is not Salman Khan. [I rather let my son drive on the road and kill people than drive on the foot path.] So I request the government to make this restriction a bit stricter by saying that he can drive along with a co-driver, 2 Supreme Court judges, my mother-in-law and a child surgeon.

This is not to hint that my son drives badly but the actual people on the road are worse. My son today follows all laws which are prescribed in the driving learner’s manual and I am afraid. He drives at correct speed; shows hand signals, slows down while turning and honks at my wife while crossing the kitchen etc. My worry is what if my son starts to believe in the manual and tries to replicate this in the real world?

Motorists in Madras believe in some sort of a black magic curse would fall upon you if you follow the driving code and display speeds ranging from Formula 1 to Concorde even while trying to park in a busy shopping mall. If this is not a deterrent to you then I wonder how all these drivers receive calls on their cell phone only when they drive, perhaps their wives are calling them to give instructions on how to come back home. “Swerve left and hit the auto out of the road; turn immediately to the right, 2nd flat is our house, B-A-N-G … The Green one is a garbage lorry you hit, I am wearing a RED dress”.

Veteran Chennai drivers like me precisely know who to go about this system. For instance it is OK to park in the middle of the road; to rush after the Red signal has come. It’s OK to go through the RED as long as you can remember when it was YELLOW. Never to follow an auto-rickshaw because following his wheel makes your head spin. How is my son going to learn all these tricks?

What worries me a lot is that, he may want to drive one day (guessing from his passion for speed in his current Ferrari). My urgent requirement is that there be some kind of a summer camp between school holidays where in they teach you these tiny driving tips which will save many parents from becoming neurotic patients while watching their kids drive. I hope some event managers are reading this piece and start thinking in those directions while I stop typing since my son is approaching me in his Bulldozer @ 250 MPH

Note: Fisher-Price Bulldozer manual says it’s advisable to drive to a maximum of 10 MPH only.

Further Note: The bulldozer is driven by trained child drivers below the age of 4. Never try this at your home.

News As The TV Covers Them

Not long ago the average TV viewing people had very high regards for media journalist who are covering useless news but today this regard has gone way high. Basically I would like to say “It’s rotting”. When I say “it’s” it is referring to the news content and when I say “rotting” is it based on the shockingly new development within the TV channels in covering the top headline of stories that are happening around you and me.

Let me dissect what would happen if hypothetically a news item such as “dead frog found in school canteen” arrives and how would this story be blown out of proportion by these media giants in search for lousy TRP ratings. Let us assume that the story was that a school watchman had ordered a combo meal and noticed that the “Paneer” was chewier than it ought to be. So he spit it out and found it was a piece of a frog. More frighteningly, the head was missing and the watchman was violently trying to vomit food that he had since he was 14.

Before the channel crew members and other innocent bystanders could arrive, the school canteen manager has a tug-of-war and finally takes control over the frog and refused to surrender it. If you knew anything about Indian media journalist, then you would know what happened next, namely, crew members materialized from no-where. Then a group of experts in frog and frog related diseases appear, now it becomes a real head lines for the day and the viewers could be left with frightening visuals of the dead frog, a vomiting watchman and 5 experts wrestling between them. There has to be one lone outsider fanatically shouting slogans like “Stop cruelty to frogs, eat lizards instead”.

With this as a backdrop, the news channels will then form a short documentary featuring interviews with those related to the incident such as the watchman’s second wife, a tea shop owner next to the canteen, the canteen manager’s son-in-law and the school principal. Each of them gives their 10 cents worth of wisdom when the nation is facing economic crises and slowdowns. In-between these documentaries they will show clippings which zoom-in and zoom-out of the actual plate which had the dead frog. Some channels will use latest graphics to recreate the frog in the plate.

In the mean time, the journalist would think and come up with interesting angles from the legal point of view, animal rights and carbon footprint analysis. A PIL would be filed with lawyers stating to the canteen manager that “the frog is vital to the case and that they are to maintain custody of the frog to insure it’s not lost, or damaged or consumed till the case ends”. In reply to this the advocates for the canteen manager would reply “At present we can’t reveal the exact location of the frog but wish to convey that it is being tested by a reputed multinational laboratory at an undisclosed place.”

As soon as we viewers loose interest in this news line item, the channels start their next round of attack. They create a nation wide SMS poll consisting of 32 people well trained to keep sending SMS. They are highly skilled in choosing different options using latest scientific methodology involving “Inky Pinky Ponky” and “Shaat Bhoot Three”. News with charts stating the same numbers in 1000 different ways will be repeatedly aired. They would create headline stories like “Did you Frogget your lunch today”, “A frog in the box”. These stories will be followed by discussion panels answering burning questions related to this incidence like “Are today’s frog suitable for meals?”, “Is the canteens safe for lizards?”, “Face the Nation: Frogs or Onions, which is cheap?”.

By this time the frog issue would have reached to such a height that the parliament would be rocked. The opposition parties would start to blame the ruling party and stall proceedings for 3 days. They would then bring out facts that in-fact the canteen manager was linked with the ruling party and was employed using false certificate for his caste. This would bring the anti-reservationists into the picture and the whole of the media would be having a ball of a time.

Why forget the stock markets, all the restaurants and hotel stocks would have nosed dived and market research analysts would be talking about this deviation. In my opinion anybody who has a nice suit/coat and knows few jargons such as “correction”, “market fundamentals”, “global cues” would be hired by these channels as a market research expert.

While all this is going on, the poor watchman who had tasted the frog and the canteen manager who served the frog would have been pushed to oblivion. Both of them, not to be shocked, would have in their short time of fame enrolled into some opposition political parties and would be campaigning for the next general election. I wouldn’t be shocked if the canteen manager was elected to the health minister portfolio.

This whole drama ends when another headline story is created namely a 14 yr old student wanting to elope with his math teacher. Anyway this ends my point of view on today’s responsible journalists who try to bring news as they occur without distortion. Perhaps I have a different perception of what they show nevertheless I can’t stop watching them on a daily basis for entertainment.