Scratch your skin, there’s a criminal!

I like this statement by Pablo Escobar’s son that “we all have nuclear energy … we all are potential criminals”.

If you haven’t yet read the story of this son of a gunslinger trying to seek mercy for his dad’s sins, from his victim’s children, please read this.

I am still not sure about the intentions of Sebastian Marroquin, the son of perhaps the most feared-hated and the most powerful drug lord in recent times. His dad was, as most of us know, the head of the Medellin Cartel, which they say had an 80% share of the world’s cocaine trade in the late 1980s, most of which was meant for consumption in the US, a sober country with an even more sober foreign policy. Poor guys, they didn’t deserve to be over-fed!

Escobar, we all know, died a fart of a death in 1993 after enjoying ruthless power for years in Latin America, especially Colombia, the country of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (his novel (reportage), News of a Kidnapping, will give you a fish-eyed-view of how much the icon-writer himself is enamoured of the lives of criminals like Escobar). I believe it is in that country’s culture to respect such people. For that matter, it is in every country’s culture, every regions’… some of you may get a fair idea of where I am headed to )

I still can feel  the weight of that statement—we could’ve been criminals. It is that we tend to divert our energy to doing things that we assume are productive and creative. Nuclear energy, he said that, and we all have it.

Having said that, I don’t know whether this son—who looks like an alcoholic with a insatiable appetite for beef and bimbos—is trying to lure the world into believing that his father’s sins are just his father’s and not his. We know that sons of such monsters enter the fray much early—in fact, they are taught and trained to. Any resemblance of that training at some our own family-dominated (non-narcotic) business houses is inescapable. Sixteen was what Juan Pablo Escobar, now Sebastian, was when the cartel his father built was crushed to pieces and pieces and pieces. At that age he was too young to be a drug lord, but old enough to be the drug lord’s scheming, womanising son. Yes, I know these people!

I will give him benefit of the doubt, but a senior police officer in Bogota won’t: he says the son was also directly involved in the drug business, killings, etc.

Well, diversifying the way you do business from criminal activities to something that is seen as acceptable (despite all its meaningless) is what Micheal did after Godfather Corleone died. But Sebastian, unlike Michael, in no fictional character with a touch of reality–he is a real character with a touch of fiction that the media is foisting on him, that’s what I feel. And that makes a sea of difference. Also, Michael’s dad, Godfather, was against drugs and that, even as mere posturing, helps (in hindsight) elevate your social ranking (CSR will take care of the rest). Again, Sebastian, if he intends to build a business empire, will have to start from scratch. But as someone said, nothing is impossible!

Now, all that thing about the late Don calling Sebastian “my 14-year-old pacifist son” because he allegedly “challenged” his father over killings, etc. looks like fiction to me.  I know these are the phrases (from the stupid horse’s mouth) that most feature writers fall for—to please their editors (who think they are the next big thing after Truman Capote or John Updike or Tom Wolfe).

Finally, coming back to the statement that “we are all potential criminals”, I guess we can take him without a pinch of salt.

It is true of (maybe) you and (certainly) me.

I can see the train station from my bathroom window

The new train station near my place is just 50m away. Maybe 60 or 70. Not more. Hardly 100.

From the station near my office to my office, it is another 50m. Maybe 100.  That’s more than 150m a day, and it is longer than the distance I walk now to work, but that is ok.

It is much cheaper….

I can’t do it today because today I am working from home, but from tomorrow I am go to travel by “Metro” to work and back.

Hi Metro, Goodbye Meru.

Fly away!

Denzel Washington says with an “I’ve-survived-like-nobody-else-has-done” expression that “it is very difficult but very important to transcend the places that hold us”.

The movie is Hurricane, based on the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter.

It is wasteful to stay back and resist transcending the places that hold us.

Yes, the places that hold us.

 

 

 

She had no business being there!

Last night she kissed me on the back of my neck (with a passion that could be as old as the apes and older than empires).

But I was swifter than she may have thought. And there was blood. She was dead. It was a female mosquito beauty.

She lay in a pool of blood and regret.

To tell you all the truth, I hate these mosquito repellents more than the mosquitoes — they are more or less useless.  In fact, useless to the extent that last night I had to wake up from a “Misty” dream to repel the mosquito attack while the repellent was still on.

It was one damn good sweet dream in a long time: I was playing (or maybe just watching) beach volleyball with Misty May-Treanor. Life is a *itch!

Yawn, yawn and yawn

Dawdling through the day at home, alone, thinking of nothing significant is what most people call day dreaming. When I was a kid, and that was long years ago, my grandmother used to snub me for even a morning yawn. To yawn meant you were inclined to daydream. “Daydreaming is the most unproductive thing in the world.” I was taught by her and others in the family who learnt this reasoning from her the hard way.

And I grew up with the conviction that I am an asshole of a sinner because I daydream.

I couldn’t have put it mildly.

Now that I am one of those grownup men I thought then was a distant phenomenon, I think it is ok to sin because your body and your mind will show you mercy.

Last week, I realised fully well (I was away from work for four days) that daydreaming not only helps you calm down, but it is also as good as meditation which you can’t do for hours and hours unless you are one of those saint types (I am not one). Daydream, you can do it even while cooking and the food will still taste good.

My advice: devote at least three days in a month or two months to 3-5 hours of day dreaming (you can still cook, bathe, wash and make love). Leave your mind blank and let dreams enter. It is like Pranayama.

Don’t just daydream, daydream big!

It’s always ok to lie …

A friend insists that I must tell the truth about something to someone. But I am not going to do that.

Why not is a big question I found tough to answer in the beginning. You may cause hurt to that someone, but you have to tell the truth.

Come on, I ask, can’t I replace that truth with silence?

No, says the friend, because silence may be golden but it’s short-lived. Truth, on the other hand, is eternal.

Whatever. After two days, I decide that being reasonable or being true to yourself isn’t always good.

When you know a little too much about a certain situation, you find it hard to open up. That is my experience. It is better not to speak unless you don’t want to mess things up.

And (:-) there’s someone else who thinks alike.

“Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.”

Thanks, dear Ludwig, you philosophers have all the answers to silence whoever tries to sound philosophical.

I am happy. I hate these bitter-dark debates. Gimme a break.

Soccer is Diego Maradona

Last night in Montevideo: Uruguay vs Argentina 0-1.

So wake up you jealous-sweet skeptics, wash your face with a nice face wash and grin (and bear it). Argentina, the country of Che Guevara and Diego Armando Maradona, will play World Cup 2010 in South Africa. 

Now coach, then captain (1986), Diego, I tell you, isn’t destined to walk away the meek way.

Media critics must now leave him alone–he is a guardian and let’s trust him (Like Prem Udayabhanu , I believe the Penguin impersonation (in the last match versus Peru) is highly symbolic and a moment frozen in time.)

“I am black or white, never grey in my life,” Diego says. “This is a victory for the whole of Argentina, except the journalists.”

I like it.

Road rage in Delhi

This morning they wrestled and boxed like an unhappy gay couple. Their faces were bloody long before the Delhi cops came, and their shirts had disappeared. The hungry-looking policemen waited for a while before both of them fell to the ground with palpitating groans.  They sounded like wheezing cats or perhaps those asthmatic pigeons that used to live in the very high roof of my ancestral home where I’d lived as a kid.

It’s a pity. After sharing the first 8 or 9 punches between them, it looked they both wanted someone from the 100-or-more-strong crowd to jump in to stop them. They would’ve still tried to break free and exchanged verbal insults, in a show of false courage, but they would’ve found such a gesture grand. But none, me included, stepped ahead. I regret it, but I’ve my reasons why I didn’t want to do it this time. I won’t even talk about it here. I just want to say there are numerous hazards involved in intervening in a street brawl, especially in a city like Delhi. And we all know it.

They are alive (I think they are) because they’re young, in their 20s. And they looked more or less equally strong or weak.

It is so easy to die if you can’t prioritise how to fix minor car scratches. Like a dog, I mean.

Fitness according to Prem Udayabhanu’s doc

Swim against the tide. That’s what Prem Udayabhanu loves to do when he is in the mood to do it. The question his pessimistic detractors often ask is, how often is he in the mood (stop sniggering there. We are talking about swimming)? Well, not very often is the answer I, a friend and an eternal optimist, can give.

But that not-very-often moment is here. The Reuters veteran, who is of late researching on the economics of ageing (informally), has joined a swimming club in New Bombay.  Like Paul Newman in The Color of Money, he wants to swim, stay fit and stay ahead of age-related competition (and complications). But unlike in the movies, 38-year-old Udayabhanu doesn’t believe in too much talking. “If you wanna do it, do it, don’t talk,” I remember him telling one of his beloved classmates, Harachand, some 8-9 years ago.  It wasn’t Clint Eastwoodish, but it wasn’t bad. 

Btw, I love Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money).

Let me digress a bit again before I return to swimming against the tide (of ageing).

We were talking about Sir Udayabhanu wanting to be fit and ruthless. Fit is the real word. In Kerala, there’s a provincial interpretation of the word. In fact, I have written about acquired meanings behind words in one of my earlier posts. Let me not revisit it in detail. Let me just tell you that in Kerala, when they find you sloshed, they say you’re “fit” (I don’t know if this interpretation exists in any other language. Maybe it is there in Tamil, too).

Well, let us now come back to the mandatory medical certificate that Udayabhanu had to submit at the New Bombay swimming club. Thus said the medical report, reports Mint’s star corporate writer Baiju Kalesh (he is a reporter at heart, with a nose for everything XXX): ”Fit 24×7.”

Udayabhanu (and some of his very sober gurus) calls Mr Kalesh “India’s best”. Now we know why.

Nobel fitness

Artist Sumedh Rajendran can be very very caustic at times. His jokes are like slow poison. They kill, finally.

Here’s one gem: he says he heard on “some” TV channel that Obama has won the Nobel for physical fitness.

And he says this without a smile. Imagine, not a stretch of it!

I asked him again, laughing my ass off, is he sure?

He vouches he heard it that way on “some” TV channel but doesn’t remember which one — Nobel in Physical Fitness for Obama, the most muscular US president in recent memory.

Again, he says it without a smile. Not a millimeter of it.

I want to LMAO again ))