Butter Chicken for the soul (Humour, Indian style)

By Mahesh Ramchandani

`Butter chicken for the soul' is an Indian writer's funny, zany, satirical look at technology, flush tanks, off-beat cinema, dentists, extra-terrestrials, women in science, etc...The book cocks a snook at a wide range of topics and holds up a funny mirror to them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mahesh Ramchandani
• Release date: Jun 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476338866

Book preview

BUTTER CHICKEN FOR THE SOUL

(Humour, Indian style)

By Mahesh Ramchandani

Copyright 2012 Mahesh Ramchandani

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License notes

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Table of Contents

Just kidding

Two kinds of journalists

Get a grip

It always rings when you're in the loo

Women in science

The tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth

Sex, violence, and the visual medium

How to get the hang of non-mainstream cinema

The launch of small things

The future is bright and very weird too

Balancing wrinkle-free pants with white pointed shoes

Let's all scream for ice-cream. Slow ice-cream, that is

Help, wrap

SOS. I'm. not. interested. in checking. my. Facebook. Page

Life's a bum deal for a humour writer

This way to heaven

Against the nuke tide

The other ten commandments

Nuts about it

Love in the time of equality and economic reform

What do you say after you say hello to a deconstuctionist?

The stars, sex, and you

About the author

Just kidding…

Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler and other tyrants in that league must have been cuddly and loveable children at some point. But look what they grew up into. In spite of knowing all this why do people have kids?

I love kids. I like mine gagged and blind-folded when they come over to visit or are within a radius of 500 metres from where I am. De-gagging them is safe only if they’re out of the abovementioned radius and in the neighbourhood of, say, France or some other deeply wooded country in Europe.

My sister has 83 kids although if you were to ask her how many, she would say two. They live abroad and having them over every millenium can be a real pleasure, especially if you’re in a deep coma. From time to time, depending upon the flavour of the day, the souls of Mike Tyson, Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan and other giants possess their bodies, after which everybody is subjected to a bad hiding or regaled by the latest hit on the charts. When these 83 kids team up with their 492 cousins who freelance for an international terrorist group (and have so far successfully deluded everybody into believing that they number only three) we have at home what resembles the long, chariot race shot in `Ben Hur’ played in Fast Forward mode with the horses fired up on high-quality LSD. By the time this little mob has finished dismantling the house for a fresh plaster-and-paint job, it looks like a surreal Salvador Dali-marries-Ram Kumar painting. A futuristic battery-operated pink car, with one of its wings torn and flapping, whines in the corner stuck against what was once G.I.Joe’s head, now separated from its body, while in another corner small, racing cars crash and smash into each other to the gleeful whoops of a 500-plus strong audience. Pillows and sheets, bearing cake and peanut butter, defy gravity and attain flight as a shower of yellow plastic arrows rains on the walls and the ceiling. The wreckage would inspire a rewrite of T.S.Eliot’s `Wasteland’.

Let us now take a close look at two of my sister’s 83 kids. The younger one, aged 3, is deeply interested in Particle Physics, particularly the particles that make up my imported, spring-loading, target practice gun and its round, green pill-like bullets. His adventures in Quantum Physics have proved categorically that with a little persistence all matter can be made invisible and reduced to its most basic form i.e.energy. He is convinced that this energy can be further broken into finer energies hitherto unknown to the leading scientists of the world only if his mother would desist from discouraging him in his quest for knowledge and forcing him to eat dinner instead. However, his talent for making matter disappear does not apply to food and milk, but he’s working on it. A bright future in the de-construction business awaits him.

Another curious phenomenon that has been observed in the presence of the two brothers and is now being attributed to their hidden magical powers is `Reverse Manifestation’, which is the ability to draw utterly useless objects from the bowels of the house, objects that have been given up as lost, missing or stolen. Old telephones, wires, videocassettes that will easily fetch over 800 million rupees at any antique auction after 4,000 years get to see the light of day, photo albums with sepia pictures of deceased relatives who must have been re-born more than twice already are brought out of musty, mothballed cupboards.

My other nephew, all of seven years old, now a senior Particle Physicist himself, is presently engaged in the task of knowledge-gathering and attaining a higher awareness about the fabric from which Shahrukh Khan’s `K3G’ kurta is made and other equally important matters. An abiding interest in economics and matters pertaining to finance have helped him amass wealth received in the form of gifts from assorted uncles, aunts and grandmothers. This wealth is stored and guarded closely by him by keeping one hand in his front left pocket and occasionally shifting funds to other undisclosed locations such as the back right pocket. In another day and age, the pockets of boys his age yielded insects in match-boxes, eggs, and dinosaur stickers, but this young man, like others of his generation, has discovered that there is nothing you can’t convert cash into including match-boxes with insects. He hopes to settle down in the near future with either Manisha Koirala or Twinkle Khanna. Yes, times have changed….

Sometimes, as I lie on the terrace, looking at the stars in the sky, and pondering the big mysteries including `How come pickles don’t get spoilt for months?’ `Is Kajol happy with Ajay Devgun?’ `What is the probability of everybody in the world having Chocolate Mousse for dessert on the same day at the same time?’ I wonder why people have kids at all. Is there a tax rebate I don’t know about, are there special discounts on luxury goods for manufacturers of children? A wise man once said: `Children are god’s way of saying that he hasn’t given up on the human race yet.’ Actually, `Children are god’s way of saying--Don’t bother to sweep the floor, it’s going to look like shit in two minutes anyway.’ So why, why, why…Because eventually, they’re all going