thalaya picchukanam pola iruku!!

"Na sonna mari pannikalai na aathuku varathe!!" My mom screamed at me
before i left. I can imagine what you must be thinking now. That i
would have told my mother that i love a girl, and that i am going to
marry her. If that were the situation, my mother would have killed me,
not yelled at me!!!

Anyways, what i am about to tell is far away from that. Ever since i moved
into our new house about three years back, it has been a nightmare
trying to find a good barber for a haircut. Enna paavam pannineno
avaalukku, each time they spoil my already mediocre looks in a
different way. Since my younger days, i have been wanting to sport
sideburns and a 'mushroom' cut. Thanks to my genes, sideburns is not
a problem. In a typical mushroom cut, the crop is closer around the
sides than at the top. If the step is deep, the rear view of the head
seems like a mushroom.. ;);) Hence the name. A more coarse vesion
of it would be what i call the 'chatti cut' (chatti means earthen pot in tamil). Imagine inverting a pot over ones head and shaving off the
remaining portion. Thats it!! Anyways, i was crazy about the refined version only.. ;);)

What i am going to narrate now is one of my first tragedies. :(:(
A couple of years ago, my family decided to go on a vacation, also
known as pilgrimage to the rest of the world, to an unending list
of temples, most of which people would'nt even have heard of.
My mother then yelled at me saying that i better cut my hair short.
That was when she spoke the first line of this blog..
Ennathan punyam theda ponalum, vaaliba vayasula pattai, naamam ellam
poda thonathu.. scene poda than thonum.. ;);)
I wanted to sport a neat, light mushroom cut. So i went to the barber
nearby and said "anna, mushroom cut pannunga.. step light a pothum."
As if he was Jawed Habib's assistant, he nodded his head. I went and
sat there as an unwitting subject. The clumsy manner in which he
handled the scissors raised some doubts about what was going to happen,
but still i kept mum. He sprayed a litre of water over my head!!
Appo confirm aaiduthu.. thanni thelichu vitutaan!! :(:(
He did what he called a nice n trim haircut and i ended up looking like
'red' ajith!!! Athuku apram 'varutham illa vaalibargal' sangathula irunthu,
naane pinvangiten..

Several such mishaps later, i was fed up and then decided to stop
going for haircuts and grow my hair instead. For those who have'nt seen
me, my hair is pretty wavy. I thought i could grow it upto chin length.
Maintaining long hair is'nt so easy, and i was too lazy to do it.
The last time i touched hair oil was years back, when i broke the bottle.
After a few months of scaring my hostel wing-mates, i decided that the
forest up above my head needed to be deforested. This, being a special
case, i decided not to goto a normal salon-wala and chose a hi-fi chain
of salons. The place itself gave me some courage and confidence that
it wont be a disastrous morning. The 'hair-stylist', as they call
themselves, arrived and greeted me. After i told him what had to be
done, he smiled and asked me to take the hot-seat. I was surprised
when he did not take a pair of scissors. Instead he took out a small
hand-held lawn-mower and ran it several times on my head. At the end of
playing around with some gadgets, he informed me that the job was done.
I was left with some hair on my head, if not none. He had managed to spoil
my coiffure even with hi-fi gizmos!! Someone i knew said that i looked
like an 'egghead'. That was it. I decided to be in thalai-maraivu for a
few days till i had enough hair to do some patch up atleast.. ;);)

I look at this as a drawback of urbanization. Villagers from the most
remote places that don't even exist on the map come to the city thinking
that they would prosper here. The beauty parlor and salon owners employ
them simply because they are cheap and they claim to know the job. Greedy
people!!! They don't even bother to train the new employees. One barber
asked me if i would like to have a 'pung'. I gave the same puzzled look
that you have on your face now. It was then that i realised, he was
referring to a funk!! Panchayath kitta aala maratthuku adila 'crop'
pannindu irunthavan ellam city salon la velai pannina ipdi than aagum!!!
En pozhappa sirippaa aakarthe, ivaa pozhappaa pochu!!!
Cha.. madras la ma%@u pudunga kuda theriyadha aatkal nareya irukanga!!!
Ithellam enga poi mudiya pogartho.. Luckily for me, i am leaving for the US
next month and so wont have to worry about bad barbers.. atleast hope so..

on infinite weight and gravity

Change is something we all see around us. Almost everything changes
over time. I was just thinking on the changes i have undergone in the
last few months. I have lost a bit of my 'Great Wall of Shyness', put
on some extra pounds by the tummy ... Loads of changes. But none
like one of my friends.He paid a visit last week and told me about his
experience a few years back. I wont say out his name because its
classified. I heard even aliens are out to hunt him down..


PS: This is a corrupted version of the story.
Please check out the pure n sensible, abstract n
divine version here. And don't complain if the
director of ATM copied his story from that place..
I suggest that you read the 'original' before you
read this poisoned version below...

""Second death of Newton!!!""

Thus spake... the upcoming director Shankar..

"""Till very recently i never thought gravity existed. All this while,
people gave me so many examples to show the presence of gravity.
One example was about throwing a fruit upwards and watch it fall
downwards after a momentary stop. Since i have an extra kai, i don't
wait for the fruit to fly away upwards, i catch it midway itself and
gobble it UP. So finally it didn't fall DOWN. Thus i gave such
intelligent counter-arguments for every explanation people gave about
the existence of gravity.

But, certain events transpired in my life, as i tell you, which changed
my stand on the existence of gravity. Throughout my life, a happy,
full meal never happened for me. In functions i go to, i made sure i ate
at least two unlimited meals. But in this function i attended, they made
the meals limited. I was at the brink of sinking into a depression and
almost fainted because i didn't get my quota.

You see, whenever i am hungry and i am asleep, i ensure that i go and
buy food at least in my dreams. This was one such dream. I hate eating
at hotels because the table is usually small to eat on. So i get only parcels.
Since i wasnt very hungry, i took only a truck to get the food. I was
going at 12kph on ECR, because that was all the truck could go. Some
people said that the truck is overloaded, and hence due to the weight,
it isn't able to move fast. I took this as another case of people preaching
about gravity. Only i knew the real reason for the super speed of the
truck. If i remember right, out of extreme hunger, once i had eaten
a tin of bananas. Pieces of the tin were stuck between my teeth and i
needed a toothpick badly. So i used the gear lever.

As i was driving, the road suddenly gave in and started sloping
downwards. It then became a tunnel and then turned left. I didn't
remember what happened after this. Anyways, when i told my brother
about the dream, he laughed out loud and said "Poda loosu. Unoda
weight thangama, road odanju tunnel aaiduthu. Thats why it caved in."
His explanation supported the existence of gravity. At the peak of my
anger, i felt like eating him up, but sentiments made me settle with a
few kgs of sweets.

Anyways i forgot about the dream, till few weeks later,when my family
planned an outing to mayajaal. We took the same ECR that i took in
my dream. And then the road indeed had a tunnel which turned to the
left. At that instant, all the forgotten parts of the dream came back to
my mind. To my shock and surprise, the dream was happening.. all of it!!

At the end of the tunnel, there was a barricade that i crashed into, in
my dream. I felt a small vibration but then neglected it as i thought it
was my stomach, rumbling in extreme hunger. It was then that i got a
phone call from my parents that a catastrophic tsunami had caused
immense damage to coastal areas near chennai. Within a few days, people
were attributing all sorts of reasons for the tsunami. All of them revolved
around gravity, tectonic forces and other stuff. Yet again, till date,
only i know the real cause of the tsunami.

Now you must be wondering if that made me realize that gravity
indeed existed. You are wrong. It was January end when i had my
mid term exams. I had got zero in physics, because chapters involved
gravitation. Then the teacher slapped me hard and said " Dei madaya..
sadly, gravity surely exists. Otherwise, idiots like you who have
nothing inside their heads would have flown away long back and
the world would have been a better place!!" That was the turning
point in my life. From then on, i believed entirely in gravity. Because
i didn't want to end up floating somewhere in space. What would i
do for food there??? """


After this, i seemed to agree with the teacher. Of course, i knew
right from the start that gravity existed, but didn't know that there
would be so much to it. A song came to my mind then..
'Un kutthamaa, en kutthamaa...'
Ennathan sonnalum, there are some things that never change..
As long as it doesn't change, people can, and will have fun at its cost...
Its all in the game....