Your Personal Disguise Bible:Guide to Surviving the Society

The kind of things you do, not to be branded a social outcast:

You smile whenever and wherever possible,even though you hate that person.As soon as you understand that the person chattering in front of you is just some flesh bones and has an empty skull for head,you smile even more.DO NOT discuss and DO NOT try to explain.Sample this: the person talking to you uses sentences like,"I hate this country,it is so filthy"," municipality guys suck, they can't keep this place clean!" Relax, that person might not even be aware when the last Municipal elections were, worse yet which Municipality he belongs to.
Make people believe that to you 'chilling out' means idling out in a lounge, smoking up hookah and quaffing down mugs of beer and discussing which girl is going out with which girl or setting up the singles in your batch!
Sitting idle in your house,listening to some music, playing some blues on your guitar are so un-cool(oops,should have used multiple 'O's and dropped the 'S' for 'Z',still trying!)
When you visit a new place be sure to check out for the pubs and eat outs and other 'cool' places first.

Places of interest as defined by the Ministry of Tourism(read popular tourist destinations) etc totally suck (see, I am picking up!)
Start wearing tee shirts with prints of hard core death metal bands and say that you have been listening to them since the time you were a kid,even though you must have heard their just a week ago.

Say that you love Kurt Cobain and Bob Marley and buy posters or tee shirts of them smoking up.You need not know that they never quite endorsed marijuana,weed or even grass.If you could get one poster or anything in print of the Jim Fitzpatrick's version of the Guerrillero Heroico,sorry Che Guevara you are stylish(could you spot the twinkle in here?!).Forget the fact that you do not know if he was a communist or a marxist,worse yet which country he hailed from or what he stood for.
Start watching those obscure Korean and Japanese or even Hollywood movies, stock all of them on your portable hard disk and start writing and talking about them on public forums.
How much so ever you like and/or want to talk about,DO NEVER mention the name of any Indian movie,in any language,worse yet those in South Indian languages.
Buy and flaunt all the latest gadgets you see on any top tech website, else you are technologically illiterate and supremely uncouth!
Just a call-and-text mobile phone proves that you have just walked out of your jurassic aged cave!You are a dumb tramp if you think a tablet is a medicine,cell is biological,iPod is a vegetable and chips are edible.
Your gadget cool-ness index is directly dependent on the processing speed of your laptop or the storage space at your disposal or amount of data that you download or a million other things that would not make any sense to my granny.
Buy one DSLR and post photos of an ant crawling up a leaf,a random smiling kid on the streets,clouds in the sky,hawkers etc with some pathetic postprocessing(preferably some selective coloring etc. using Picasa).Club it all together in an album,call it something with a 'Random' in the name somewhere and post it on Facebook.Start your own photography fan page on facebook,call it something using the words: Photography, Clicks and/or Creations and ofcourse your name.
These should get you going on the path to becoming socially acceptable.Once you are there it is just plain cream.And if you go on to becoming some superstar in your own league do append your learnings onto this for the benefit of other not-so-socially-hit people.

Cheers,
The Yo Man!
The Author of this post is still an amateur and intends to inculcate more and more such popular and 'cool' techniques.For free seminars please mail in your details to kktech@gmail.com ,with "I am so Coool" in the subject line.

Non-Sense of Humour

Long ago,when I was studying my engineering,I had read a news item wherein a fine arts student,Chandramohan from the Maharaja Sayajirao University was arrested and charged under sections 153B and 295A for the said depictions of some gods in his own way.Which I would say should be referred to as his own renditions of his Gods!Then a few other popular references that,to me, have been pretty disturbing could be a Taslima Nazreen for Lajja or a Salman Rushdie for Satanic Verses or a million more.Time and again a person's right to expression has been tied down with the bureaucratic chains.There can be no state that can say that it is a developed one if it has so many curbs on free press.The reason we call it 'free press' is because of the fact that they can report what they see.(let us not discuss, poor reporting and masala-fication of news here).Our loyalty to anything borders on the lines of fanaticism.Religious,regional,ethnic,cultural,caste-based even a simple emotion like love;anything, we have to lay down the 'my way or the highway' rule.If we want something we get it else we protest.A near 100% of our protests involve one or all of these: slogan shouting,window breaking,bus burning,if that doesn't work we resort to the next level that involves strike and more often than not,a total shutdown of the machinery.If it has to do with the entertainment industry we call for a ban on the movie/play/actor or a heavy censorship,which would anyway kill the movie.

Let alone art we cannot even handle humor in a mature way.The 'cattle class' tweet by Shashi Tharoor,which in a way,if not directly, cost him his ministry is still etched fresh in our psyche .His indication was to something miles apart from what was made out of it.Things that we hold in supremely high esteem should not be criticized,be it something mighty obvious.But no, you dare not say a word against them.We are never open to discussions.Our sense of humor may sting others but when and if it even remotely comes down to us,we unleash hell,show the world how crass we can get. We watch so many foreign production talk shows on television and laugh at their jibes on their actors yet get pissed when something similar happens here.We get furious and release a press statement with the words culture,respect,women,dare,sad,India distributed randomly across sentences.Maturity in thought and humor reflects in the intelligence throughput of the state.We are a great nation(well that is what we like to call ourselves) with a rich history and a beautiful culture which is the envy of the world,then why do we react the way do.

I was talking to one of my friends,when she mentioned to me that Russell Peters had,apparently, made some remarks which,as many believe,are not in a very good taste. One of the main reasons why I decided to voice my views about this,here and now.Well,knowing his genre of comedy,I was not expecting anything new or alien.I later read that he had slung some mud on Hindi movies and some actors and actresses.

This is how we reacted:
We demanded a ban on the movie which featured him,and is currently in the cinemas.
We asked for a ban on him from entering the country.
We started doing what we do best(read often) ,start calling names and abuse him.Statements like,"Russell Peters should die".

What sort of a big and mature nation reacts in such a manner?First things first,every individual is entitled to his own opinion and he has every right to speak it out.Now,here is where the,"speak responsibly" part comes in.That would be a different story altogether.

This is how we could have reacted:

If someone chooses to say things that we do not like,ignore him!
If the popular media doesn't like what he said,they should refrain from giving him coverage,at all.
Better yet,pay it back,in his own currency.Think of innovative and witty ways to get back at that person.

Well,there are a million other ways.Also,what we tend to forget is the fact that movie making is an art and art is any form is liable to criticism.Honestly,hasn't anyone from the north ever criticized a Tamil/Telugu/Kannada movie?I can quote a dozen examples,randomly without much digging!A majority of people all across India find the movies of other languages,silly and their actors dumb.So,why did we get so offended when someone pointed out the same thing,yes,that was tad brutal,yet!Inspite of the likes of Shahrukh Khan mocking the South Indian style of movie making and its characters,the movies are made and they continue to reign at the box office and ring the cash registers.Just because that is what pleases the audience.That is how simple the proportion is.What someone said against our leading actors or actresses would never deter us from going and buying a ticket at the counter,ideally on the first day of release.Yet,we continue to over-react!

It is high time we show the world how a nation with a history spanning thousands of years and a population of over 1.2billion thinks and talks like.If we say we are mighty and mature we should as well act and react so!

Suggested Reading:Bandh and Associated Telangana Fiasco,art?