Bangalored Times

Everyone thinks the term bangalored refers to Americans losing jobs to India.
All I can say is hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Get real, jobs are just a front to conceal the real assault. Slowly but surely, we’re taking over every language of the world. We’ve already made serious inroads into English, and French and Chinese are also on their way to getting Bangalored!

Here are some of the words that the rest of the world has lost already to our city.

Jolly
Pronounced jarley, it is a compliment maids pay you when you give them a bonus. I thought my maid was accusing me of giving her counterfeit notes, till I realised she was speaking in English.
Systematic
This is not an adjective or adverb when used in the service stations of Bangalore, but an independent noun. Small objects have systems, large mechanisms have systematics. For example, car ka systematic kharaab ho gaya. Here's an acknowledgement from a male dominated industry that size does matter.
Meals
If you use the term to mean the plural of meal, you're sooo 90s. You go to thali restaurants and order one meals.
Manchuri
China has lost a part of their culture to Andhra restaurants in Bangalore. Akin to a collection of unmentionable parts of dogs, a plate gobi manchuri is a perfect accompaniment to Andhra meals.
Déjà vu
Rechristened Deja View in concrete and steel! A residential complex off Old Madras road now wears the term in shining letters. I guess it must mean that residents look out of their balconies at the end of a long day and enjoy a refreshing view of Deja.
Rights
Not what the oppressed fight for, it’s what parking attendants chant to you with the accompaniment of whistles when you’re backing into a parking spot. Rights, rights, pheee, rights. And when they do that, don’t, whatever else you do, wrestle with your steering wheel to turn. Rights means straight in Bangalore.

pleeeease, make the journey more rewarding

‘On my way’ has to be the most commonly used text message ever, remarked a colleague a couple of weeks ago, as he checked his mobile for news of a tardy team member.

We smirked and settled down for a long wait.

‘On my way’ should constitute a punishable offence, not for the sender’s lack of punctuality, but for his or her lack of imagination. Come on, if you’re going to be late, the least you can do is to be entertaining. Not only will you keep our blood pressure in control (laughter being the best medicine as Reader’s Digest told us even before the dot com revolution was a dot on the horizon), it will actually help you become more truthful as well. All of us in Bangalore know that nothing is as entertaining as the truth.

For example, try ‘On my way to running down miniature acrobat sliding through giant earring’. The city’s best gymnasts aren’t at Beijing, they’re at every traffic signal in the city, gyrating and bobbing to give your text fingers fodder.

Or after a drizzle, you could text – ‘on my way out of Ulsoor lake which has cloned itself at Sadashiv Nagar. Instead of cursing you, those of us cooling our heels would spend the next hour comparing impromptu lakes we have braved in the past.

If you’re new to Bangalore and mms enabled, messaging solutions await you at every road sign. Besides dozens of signs that say ‘Hump ahead’ (it takes a newbie a while to figure out if this is an announcement or a request), road signs will always tell you exactly how far you are from various destinations. Of course you won’t know what those destinations are, as names of places are usually written in Kannada. Try ‘On my way to a series of marathon humps’ or ‘On my way to getting lost in translation’.

If you were about to say that you can’t punch in long messages while driving, save yourself the effort. All of us know sms lingo well enough to decipher that when you say ‘on your way’ you’re probably on your way to the rest room at the office.

looking for treasure in the wrong places?

Everyone I know loves public service ads. They win awards, make great forwards and spark off interesting conversations.

But that’s not all that public service ads are meant to achieve, at least ostensibly. What they are really supposed to get from you is a sacrifice. A public service campaign almost always wants you to give up money, a habit, a vice, a convenience, a comfort or an element of your social status.

To complicate things, there are different levels of sacrifice. Here are a few, based on what you have to give up.

Clearance sale sacrifice: These are campaigns that ask you to donate to a cause or to report a problem. Great bargain! For the price of a telephone call, a few drinks or clothes you wouldn’t be caught dead in anyway, you get to become the fairy godmother of the underprivileged. The fact that so many ngos are flourishing is proof of the fact that this category of public service ads work.

Fair price sacrifice: This is where you’re asked to stop using something, say a brand of lippie or t-shirt, to discourage the abuse of children, animals or the environment. While your ego might twitch a bit at being deprived of the coolest logo on your chest, there’s a built-in escape clause in the form of options. There are other brands on the shelf, and another ice age will have to dawn before you have to expose the world to your parched lips. The result? Several companies have backed off from these evils and are even advertising the face.

Daylight robbery sacrifice: Give up something you love, need or want or suffer, demands the campaign. Hey did you see that great anti-smoking/drinking/drunken driving ad, you ask your friends as you light up, order another round of drinks and look for your car keys.

It’s funny, that when it comes to public service advertising of the third kind, creative people get it sooo wrong. In spite of all the hard hitting campaigns featuring orphaned children, dead horses and scary messages, India still has 120 million smokers http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/97238.php. And 40% of India’s road accidents are still caused by drunk driving http://www.rediff.com/getahead/2008/jun/16msg.htm.

Is it because the otherwise successful people who work on these campaigns see public service as a totally different ball game from selling products? Or because the objective is more often the means (to be different/hard hitting/creative, etc.) than the end? Is it because there are no clients with an eye on targets and results?

What if public service campaigns that demand an expensive sacrifice used the principles of selling expensive products?

Hmmmmm....

i want my junk back

On Friday night, I produced some noxious junk. A friend and I were at our favourite pub, and had got past the social niceties to that lovely moment when you usually settle down to a cosy chat.

That's when I did it. About 5 minutes into the cosy chat phase, I made a remark about her marriage. Not only was my statement embarrassingly true, it was as insensitive as tweezing an eyebrow with a wrench. What made it worse was the way my friend tactfully steered the conversation around my remark, like she was stepping around dog poop on a pavement.

I want my statement back.

And while I'm at it, I also want to take back the 4-letter word that slipped out my mouth last month, while telling a funny story to a friend's mother-in-law (the ending wasn't funny, that's one place I'm probably never getting invited to again). And that despicable salwar kurta my aunt had given me and which I had promptly donated to my maid... I want it back with retrospective effect, before the day my aunt visited and my maid wore it to work...

If there were a return policy on the rubbish we say and do, the rules would be different from store policies. Firstly, the seller (eg. me with my foot in my mouth), would have absolutely no grumpy clauses about coming back in 24 hours or avoiding busy saturday mornings; on the contrary, it would be a homecoming complete with open arms and a fatted calf. Then there's the issue of damage - you wouldn't worry about damaged merchandise, your concern would be about the damage it has caused to the unsuspecting receiver.

And the last issue is of cost - if brain surgeons came up with a way to erase the memory of actions or words from receivers, they would make much more money than cosmetic surgeons who pump stars with silicon. And the steep fees wouldn't have to be paid by patients, the people with tongues that run away with them would be more than happy to bear all costs.

I know I would, if I could get back all the rubbish I've said, and never mind the market rates.

u got junk mail

In the last few weeks, I've realised that I've turned into a digital rag picker. My cursor has been wading through page after page of hits on junk - I must be the only person in history to go beyond page 5 on google search.

But it's been worth it, here are two of the latest gems I unearthed.

One is the term upcycling - which is the practice of taking something that is disposable, and transforming it into something of greater use of value. Besides describing a useful concept, the word has the additional advantage of adding tact and intellectual quotient to everyday conversations. For example, if you don't want to tell a colleague that his presentation sucks, you could say "Your presentation is a perfect candidate for upcycling!"

The second gem is the picture above - by artist Sandy Schimmel. She puts upcycling into practice by creating art out of junk mail and flyers. Enjoy.

straight from the trash can

Dirty White Trash (with gulls) by Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

These artists from England create sculptures out of heaps of garbage collected from the streets of London. When light is projected on the heap, meaningful shadows appear on the wall behind the trash.

It's not you, it's me...

If you think it’s hard to find the right man, you've obviously never looked for parking.

Here’s how a typical parking game goes.

I see a parking spot from a distance. This one is definitely not engaged, I whisper to my car. My car purrs in anticipation, my heart sings, because we’ve found THE ONE.

Then seconds later, wham!

Dumped by a drawing of a miniature cockroach shaped scooter that signals two wheelers only.

What makes parking spaces so choosy? It’s not like we’re looking for a lifetime commitment, we’re totally ok with one day stands.

My car and I have been rejected because we’re not residents of a building.

We’ve been passed over because we weren’t bright enough to become doctors at a hospital or ambitious enough to be CEOs.

We’ve been spurned because we don’t shop at certain stores and because we don’t like raw Japanese food.

We’ve failed to make it to second gear because it’s the wrong time of the month (not being bitter, I’ve seen designated parking spots for even days and others for odd days of the month).

But here’s one that took my breath away. Dejected by so many failures, I didn't have the confidence of the white car to make the first move. But the spot was chivalrous enough to pose for me while I took a picture.

One day, I will be ready to get close to this one... once I dig out out all my old moral science text books and become a better human being.