How to Make Enemies and Offend People , livre ebook

G. Sampath

HOW TO MAKE ENEMIES AND OFFEND PEOPLE
Contents
About the Author (or Who the Hell Is This Offensive Individual?)
Introduction
I. OFFENDING THE WIFE
A Flat in Aisa Paradiso
Wife and the Art of Film Appreciation
When Sari Seems to Be the Hardest Word
How to Be Positively Negative
Watching Mama with Papa
Remotely Out of Control
Am I Turning into Pacman?
Where the Books Go When You re Not Reading Them
Should Bongs Be Fried in Mustard Oil?
Wife and the Art of House-Hunting
II. OFFENDING MYSELF
How to Become a Swamiji
Revenge of the Bathtub
Screaming into the Screen
The Importance of Being Depressed
What s the Story, Morning Fury?
How to Be Spiritual in Haridwar
Killing Is Fun When It s for a Cause
III. OFFENDING WOMEN (OTHER THAN WIFE)
The Delhi Police Guide to Making Women Rape-Proof
Why Are Male Virgins Worth Less Than Female Virgins?
When the Shit Hits the Sky
Are All Women Complete Loonatics?
IV. OFFENDING BIG PEOPLE
Why Not Make Arnab Goswami the PM?
Ten Questions You Wish Somebody Would Ask Sachin
How I Installed Anish Kapoor
My Conversation with Niira Radia
Can We Have the Pesticide Menu, Please?
Nurturing the Scamsters of Tomorrow
So Who Would You Like to See Disappeared This Week?
The Porn-ab, Pissy and Kapsi Tapes
Shouldn t Ajay Devgn Wear a Bra?
V. OFFENDING ANYBODY WHO IS WILLING TO TAKE OFFENCE
The Ten Qualities of a Model Employee
How Gross Is Your Gross Domestic Product?
Love Can t Buy You Money
Mumbai Needs More Traffic Jams
An Exquisite Evening at La Caf Asafoetida
Kabhi Khushi Never Gum
Will You Please Brand Yourself, Please?
Finally We Know What India s Poor Really Want
Are You a Delhi Person or a Mumbai Person?
How Much Entertainment Does a Man Need?
I Want to Dedicate This Song to Myself
Buying a House Is Like Hotel California
Thank You for Not Calling
Murakami in Malayalam
To the Water Station, Slowly, Slowly
iWish iCould Live in iCloud
Joke 124A
Getting Away from Getting Away from It All
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
About the Author
(or Who the Hell Is This Offensive Individual?)
As you must have deduced by now, his given name is G. Sampath, though he has been called various names by various entities in the course of his illustrious career as an attacking opener writer. In his earthly existence, Sampath is a Delhi-based journalist and columnist.
His humour pieces have appeared in Daily News and Analysis ( DNA ), First Post , Mint and his own private blog that nobody else is allowed to see. The discerning reader will discern in his work a unique and insightful perspective not only on the major social, political and cultural issues facing the nation, but also on the major physical, emotional and psychological issues facing the author at any given point in time.
Before embarking on his media career, Sampath worked in the publishing industry, serving as Chief Exterminator Editor, Indialog Publications. He s also worked as a schoolteacher, copywriter, spiritual consultant and washing machine salesman.
To Freedom of Speech and The Right to Offend
Introduction
ARE YOU OFFENDED YET?
It is always an honour to be asked to write the introduction to a book, even if it is your own. So I would like to begin by thanking myself for giving me this opportunity.
The first question that comes up with a book like this is: Why? Am I a star journalist, like, say, a Vir Sanghvi or a Barkha Dutt, honourable individuals, both of them, that the world would be interested in hearing about my intra-marital squabbles? Or am I a literary giant, like, say, a Chetan Bhagat, that every little fancy fluttering through my head must be trapped and pinned in a crap book? Or am I just God s gift to humanity, and this book my modest attempt to leave, for future generations, a compendium of timeless wisdom in hardback, paperback and electronic formats? If you are as intelligent as you think you are, you would have had no trouble guessing the correct answer.
Now that you have the answer to why, you are, doubtless, dying to know the how. Let me begin where it all began: at the beginning.
As my father never tired of telling his precocious firstborn who, from an early age, showed amazing talent and aptitude for nothing in particular-everybody is good at something. If you are very good at something, he said, you can use that to get whatever you want.
As a kid, I didn t see much sense in his theory because all I wanted was to eat as much as I wanted, sleep as much as I wanted and play cricket as much as I wanted-and all three I obtained without really being very good at anything (not even cricket).
But after I had adulthood thrust upon me, with a job, wife, EMIs, etc., I began to see what he meant but was too shy to tell me openly: if you were really good at something, it was easier to find mating opportunities, which is the first thing you really want as an adult representative of your species, and also the second thing, the third thing and the last thing.
For some people, their special talent, for instance, could be twirling a spherical object vigorously. Shane Warne belongs to this category. Thanks to his special talent, he could mate joyfully with thousands of female humans. For others, their special talent could be thwacking a spherical object with a long club. Tiger Woods belongs to this category. As we all know, he mated joyfully with thousands of female humans.
As for me, my special talent lay in making one set of people laugh by pissing off another set of people. I realized I could do this by cracking insensitive, sadomasochistic, exhibitionistic, quasi-sexist, politically incorrect, scatologically correct and genitally erect jokes. But the path to self-discovery for me was long and tortuous, and I am yet to mate joyfully (or sadly) with thousands of female humans.
I first got a vague sense of my (dis)ability when I was in college and desperate for a mating opportunity with a particular female human who I considered an ideal receptacle for my rare and unique genetic material. She was what the laity might term beautiful . But like all beauties, she too had a flaw, which wasn t so much a flaw as an irritant: she wore bottle-green braces over gums that were inordinately fleshy in an attention-seeking sort of way.
But I loved her unconditionally, a mode of romantic engagement Himesh Reshammiya would endorse many years later. So I decided to apprise her of my heart s desire through a 436-line poetic tribute, titled Ode to the One with Her Teeth behind Bars .
I took care to embed in the poem a powerful and unforgettable messaging point which I crafted after extensive consultations with my literary predecessors such as Yeats, Keats and Oats. The message was: My love for you is as deep as the Pacific s vagina (viz., the Mariana Trench) even though your mouth in half-open position resembled exotic sea fauna.
The ode also praised her various robust assets in state-of-the-art, value-added lyrical style that I had benchmarked favourably with Tennyson, as exemplified by this line:
To muse and brood and taste your magnificent mangoes Two handfuls of fruit in cups of bras Gazing at them my member rose and rose Shall we go now and screw on the dung-free grass?
As it turned out, she was a student of dentistry, and could no more appreciate premium quality lyric poetry than Mother Teresa could appreciate Celebrity Sex Videos. For the first time in the history of romantic poetry, a love poem became fodder for a sting operation. The handwritten copy of the poem-the only one ever made, and which was hand-delivered to her by a trusted intermediary-found its way to our HOD, who was also our creative writing instructor. And he read the whole thing out in class.
Subjected to a public besmirching of private emotions recollected in tranquillity, I sank lower and lower into my seat as the class guffawed at every line. I covered my face in shame. How can anyone find heartbreak so funny? How will I show my face in the college after this expos ? If I cannot even become India s poet laureate with a rich and variegated love life, what other career option am I left with?
But I need not have worried. As some cackling classmates patted me on the back in hearty good cheer, it dawned on me that most of them had no inkling these lines were the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. What had so offended the potential mother of my offspring, the HOD presented to the class as a funny piece of writing. I began to detect in the all-round mirth not so much derision as appreciation. My love was lost, but my love s labour was not-it was a vocation gained, and an assignment completed.
With time, as making people laugh/angry became my preferred form of attention-seeking behaviour, I carried it into life outside the campus, where it should have paid rich dividends but did not. Unlike my college, the real world was not an all-male institution, and was full of holy cows, serious people and other creatures dying to take offence.
Pusillanimous soul that I am, I never set out to offend anybody. All I sought was some positive appreciation from the people around me. But the negative depreciation happened anyway. And I learnt to accept both eventualities with equanimity as recommended by the famous management guru Sri Sri Marcus Aurelius.
Yet it never ceases to astonish me that important people, who presumably have pressing matters of national importance to attend to, have no trouble spending hours every day googling for anything remotely offensive about themselves. And they are all waiting to pounce on me.
This understanding came to me one warm morning in January 2012 in Mumbai when I was sitting in the office of the newspaper where I was then employed and pondering hard on what more I could do to help my employer make more money and in such a way that my boss gets all the credit for it.
My thoughts were interru