The Towel Lovers

A 5yo turned up today after taking his shower and had an important question-

"Appa, we always use the towel on clean body washed with fresh water. Why should we ever wash it then, isn't it always clean??"

I mumbled something along the lines of "erm..you know ..wet towels are.. well, bacteria and germs like to grown on wet towels, so we should wash and dry them in the sun!". He listened but seemed unconvinced.

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Some 20 years ago, in my bachelor apartment, my roommate tortured me with the same logic and I had to live with a large slumbering presence of a bluish-grey humid towel in the room, which could easily go unwashed for months, and looked like mushrooms could sprout out of it any moment!

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There exists this small but thought-provoking tribe of people scattered across the world, who refuse to wash their towels due to the above-mentioned rationale -

The Towel Lovers - who cannot stand a day's separation from their favourite towels and would not let them undergo a rigorous wash!

The Curious case of the Misplaced items

I have a used SIM-card, a file of document-photocopies and some imported snack goodies that were left behind and need to pass on to an aunt. 

Just today, I left my spare car keys in my cousin's home that we were visiting and my uncle had forgotten to take back his purse that he gave me for safe-keeping during a outdoor ritual. It's still very safe with me, but only 150km away. Planning to meet them again soon enough to return those.

My humble suggestion to improve one's social life - Leave Stuff Behind!

Not in random places, but in your friend's or relative's homes.

Then you realise it or they find the item that's left behind after your visit.

Then you plan another visit (or they do) to return the objects to its owner - a perfect excuse to meet them again, depending upon the criticality or urgency of that item.

Lost and Found items can help in Finding Lost connections!

The Midlander

There is this permanent resident in the mid-section of my middle-aged body, applying for citizenship. It's case has come up for hearing today.

Name: Tummy

 "I moved in here long ago, contributing to the overall well-being, a certain look of prosperity and draught-resilience for the host body, and planning to settle down for good. 

How can you still be ashamed of me and wish I go away? Please make fat-shaming a punishable offense. I'm not any illegal migrant, but it was you who allowed me in, during times of dietary excess and let me grow and prosper! You should instead think of integrating me with the rest of the body and make me feel included, and give me voting rights (over what we need to eat in the next meal) considering what I bring to the (dining) table!" 

Highly Indiscriminate Terminator - HIT 3 movie

What would be an appropriate movie to watch during an old-boys get-together? A fast paced action-thriller/police investigation of serial killers, would be a good default candidate, right?

This is how we chose to watch the movie HIT-3.

I'm not going to delve deeper into the plot involving a ruthless cop, who is hell-bent on tracing a notorious cult of depraved misfits and rebels who like to sever their victims with surgical precision and harvest endocrine organs for entertainment, in a heady mixture of dark web and pharmaceutical conspiracies, about which ordinary people would not know anything, anyway.

What really impressed (depressed?) me was finale - action sequences that lasted for about an hour. First, a few innocent victims had to be sacrificed with gruesome deaths. Then some bystanders had to be gored to death, to demonstrate the level of evil of the group of Psychotic Villains. Then, a fight-club style brutal elimination of few characters in a boxing ring.

Then started the spectacle of how the hero-cop facilitates the escape of innocents, by eliminating about a few hundred of those psychotic villains(PVs), one by one. It was like watching an iteration of the Final Destination series, except that Death takes a human form. 

The sequence was thrilling and comical at the same time, resembling some video game where zombies are killed without much thought. Imagine the few hundred actors who played the PVs, walking into the movie audition only to hear a one-liner role description -

"You will be running into the hero, one-by-one, in a narrow corridor of a dilapidated palace set, where he will kill you in one of the 250 methods we could think of, and your average total screen time is about 3.5 seconds"

Prop request -

"We may run out of fake blood during the shoot since we would pour it all on the hero's white blazer, shirt and even underwear banian, so please BYOD (bring your own death-make-up) like some sachets of tomato ketchup diluted in water for your chosen gruesome injury leading to a swift death. 

What actually happened was, while watching all this carnage on-screen, my friends were falling victim to the mindless violence by falling asleep and finally, only two of us were left as the last men couch-ing - myself and the dude who recommended the movie in the first place.

'Overkill' - would have been a perfect movie-title for this production that pretended to be an investigative thriller initially, but ended up as an exploration of the 250 weak-points in the human body by which one could be fractured/bled/maimed/amputated/guillotined on-screen.

The movie is highly recommended - only if you are in a murderous mood for your own reasons, on a random weekday. For all others, look elsewhere!

Behind every man

 When I compliment a man for some really good choice of clothes or designs and patterns that suits them superbly, a very common response I hear is "I didn't choose it, my wife/partner chose this for me!"

"Behind every sartorial man, stands a woman"  (who pushed him to checkout something new at the try-out section!)

Three days of Bhim

How often do we think of the burly muscleman of Mahabharata? One of the trio (alongside Hanuman and Balarama) from our epics that wannabe pahalwans - young boys aspire to become when they grow up, after watching TV episodes of Ramayana and Mahabharata?

Day 1

While on an unhurried visit to Gorakhnath temple, Gorakhpur, I noticed an isolated room, housing a huge statue of a slumbering giant. With no English notes around, a stranger explained the Hindi placard that mentioned that Mahabali Bhim who came to visit Mahayogi Gorakhnath fell asleep while waiting for his host, who was in deep meditation. When he woke up after days(?) the ground beneath him had sunk by some depth due to his heft! The statue was placed in the same depression and honours the famous hulk.

Day 2

I got curious about this story and wanted to learn more, so was reading some sources online about Bhima. One of them spoke about how he pissed off Duryodhana so much with his effortless strength and toyed with him and his brothers, that Prince D decided to get rid of him by poisoning his meal during a feast and rolling him off into a river. 

Our big man consumed it all and suffered - let's safely say a bout of mild food-poisoning and felt drowsy and was soon pushed into a river. His presence in the river-bottom disturbed the tranquil of water snakes who in terms bit the intruder multiple times.  As luck would have it, the venom became anti-venom for the poison and neutralised it like an acid-base reaction! Soon our Bulk-Hogan woke up and went back to do greater stunts and muscle-inflicted mayhem in future wars.

Day 3

Had decided to visit the prolific publisher, Gita Press of Gorakhpur without a clue of what to expect other than shelves of religious text books. To my utter surprise, I was guided to a quiet gallery consisting of hundreds of high quality hand-drawn artworks depicting various religious and spiritual themes, including Ram Leela, Krishna Leela, Avatars of Vishnu, Siva puranam, etc some of them 300 years old coming from artists all over India. 

I only knew the significance of few works, but without English titles, I could only second guess or appreciate the art - till I found this work which would make sense if you have read everything so far -