This blog post title is a good example ofhow I learn something new and amazing about Indian culture every day. I thoughta tawa was used for the cooking purposes. Littledid I know that this contraption is actually for holding all that Indianculture together. Did you know this? I did not know this. I think so this iswhat makes Indian women so great so hats off to you gals and congrats on yourhot iron girdles, thank you for your efforts in supporting Indian culture.
I now want to talk about one of my favoritepastimes. This is something I used to do a lot. I don’t do it as much anymore,not because I ‘learned my lesson’ but because I don’t go out as much. If I did,I’m sure I’d still be doing this. So anyway, sometimes when trying to be allbadass and ‘one with the people’, one goes to rough and tumble places like teakadais or hotels, where we eat on banana leaves! This is often done so you cantell people later about how you are so badass you sometimes eat off banana leaves. If one is very lucky, one will spota small child, cleaning or washing up in the local eating vicinity. After beingsatiated and satisfied by a ‘common man’s meal’ which one can write about laterthat might (fingers crossed!) be picked up by a foreign publication, one callsone of these small children over. Small child is busy working but will come ifyou call them because that’s what they do. You ask them their name, ask themwhy they aren’t in school, and then (my favorite part!!111) you launchinto a very big lecture about how education is important and small personshould go to school, study hard to get first rank, learn computers and Englishand achieve great things. I would often say things like ‘when I come here nexttime, I don’t want to see you here. You better be in school!’ I was totally notcoming back but small person doesn’t need to know that. It’s important to givechildren something to hope for and telling poor kids that I’m coming back givesthem hope.
If some adult was locally available, I liked to pull them up too,pointing out the many schemes and special measures available to help children‘like that’. There’s reservation for poor folk! Free textbooks! Free laptops!It’s so EASY to get educated and be more better! But you have to work hard! Youhave to work hard to get this easy education! You have to work hard at working hard and work hard because you have to work hard. I am not poor (thangod!) but I can speak English so I feel totally qualified to tell you what you should be doing with yourself. Clearly you don’t know all thisso imma sit back and tell you all about it while I wait for some transportationto take me back to civilization.
This was my favorite pastime for manyreasons- it made me feel smart and good about myself. It made me feel like I‘made a difference’, that there will be one less uneducated child in the worldbecause of me- I didn’t even have to do anything, I just had to talk like Iknew what I was talking about! I liked to believe that my advice also helped tofight poverty in some way because if poor people were more smart, they’d know thatpoverty is a bad thing, right? And they wouldn’t do it, right? Later on, when I needed to argue with peopleabout Indian topics, these kinds of incidents made me feel like I am qualifiedto talk about things.
The idea of poor folk winning at life andteaching these poor folk how to win at life is a wonderful topic for cinema-some of my favorite Tamil movies are about this. I can’t tell you howheartwarming and empowering it is to see movies where poor child woke up early,cooked food for sick mother, studied by candlelight while rocking baby sisterin arms, then went out to work three jobs, ate one meal a day, and did allsorts of mad studying in between that equipped him with the skills necessary tofight corruption and smack the brown off English-speaking chicks in jeans. DidI mention that by earning two paisa a day, he was able to become a millionairewhen he was big because he didn’t waste his money on bad poorpeople things likealcohol and beedis? And he beat poverty! In two hours! I mean if he can do itin two hours, what’s with all the poor people in real life? Why are they goingto movies and buying cell phones when they should… be doing whatever it is poorpeople are supposed to do to make them not poor?
This pastime of mine was a good thing to dofor fun, especially when the small child in question was photogenic. And itcertainly makes great fiction, esp. when you write about third world countrieswhere people are third world and stuff but then they work hard and become first world winners. I’m just not sure if one should write how-not-to-be-poor internet articles about it though. Gene Marks has received a lot of slack for this article and I feel like none ofthis fallout would have happened if this had simbly been timepass kept outside the internet or if it was a fiction piece or best of all, a Tamil movie. ATamil movie is always a good option because you can include song and dancenumbers, fight sequence and we always appreciate it when people use technical computerwords like Google.
Now let us talk about RuPaul. I wasinformed that I shouldn’t blog about RuPaul’s Drag Race anymore because menaren’t supposed to dress like women because they are supposed to dress like menbecause they are men. Also my blog posts which are incomprehensible on a goodday somehow disintegrate entirely when I talk about RuPaul. And anyway, Logostill isn’t letting nonAmericans watch the show online but they let us see theMeet the Queens clip for the new season? So that we can all feel bad in ournonAmerican countries? So I will just say #TEAMSHARONNEEDLES!!!11 Season 4 is going to be CANCELLED!!1
Now I want to talk about Kalasala song from Osthi. I like this song because LR Easwari soundsnice autotuned and the chorus is great slow-motion walking music. Although there alsoseems to be a dog panting in the middle and it is little unnerving to hear T Rajendar screaming Ikada Ra Ra into your ear. According to this clip, LR Easwari isthe Asha Bhonsle of the South. Is LR Easwari some indecipherable thing that canonly be understood in terms of Asha Bhonsle? Or does this mean that Asha Bhonsle is the LR Easwari ofthe North? I cannot able to understand this. Similarly, I cannot able tounderstand when people say that Bengaluru is the Silicon Valley/ Boston/Manchester/Greater Matcham Scratchings in Lower Market Snodpicket of India. Or that Chennaiis ‘the Texas of South India’. What does that even mean? It means ‘ohai! Imentioned Texas so that I can tell all you coll people that I have been toTexas, which is the Chennai of the United States.’
Anyway, the Kalasala clip also says thatT. Rajendar is the RD Burman of the South. The accepted practice is thatwhenever someone mentions T. Rajendar on the internet, you have to immediately linkto a ‘t rajendar speaking english’ video and go lol at t rajendar speakingEnglish lol. Instead of doing that, I would like to share this interview clip which actually features Simbu and some other dudes but it also has T Rajendarso it’s basically just all about T Rajendar talkingdancingsingingmakingastrologicalpredictionmakingpoetryplayingdrumbeatboxingtakingoffwatch and everyone else gets reduced topieces of furniture that sometimes talk. I’m not sure of this proves that he isthe RD Burman of the South but anyway. I remember once I heard T Rajendar speakingduring election tyme and he said ‘Vaiko, nee oru psycho’ and I went lol butalso felt bad for Vaiko but not very much so. #kalasala #thankyoupiratedvisumoviesforevaforsendingthisclip
I would now like to say bai with thisGolden Tweet from Shahid Kapoor.
‘Too bloody random ... So seize everymoment n juice it ... Cause it'll never come back ... Work hard always did ..Party harder ! Loca style’
bindaaz4lyffe muthafuckaz
