Lessons, Captain taught

This Pongal, I was at home. My first Pongal at home, since I left school. My cousin Arun had also come there. As always, the channels had a lot of movies as part of their Pongal programme lineup. This of course, included all the first time on Indian TV…movies, which we would gladly forgo, if given a choice of watching either those or Andy Warhol’s Sleep (which is a ten hour film that focuses on a sleeping man, and only on him.) What interested us, however were the movies of the most beloved son of the soil, that the Tamil speaking populace have ever seen (trumpets, drum roll, bomb blasts throwing up colourful dust in the background)Captain Vijayakanth- a man whose exploits, include among other things, fighting evil Pakistani militants or saving the nation from the clutches of an immoral minister, whose partners in crime are international mafia bosses or terrorists who threaten to wreck the national integrity of our motherland. He is forever the honest cop. The one man, who is an answer to all vice in the society.

Most people tend to think that he is the greatest comedian ever to have starred in a Tamil movie. Well, for that matter the greatest comedian to have starred in any movie. I was one too, till very recently. Then I decided to take a Captain’s never-mind-if-it-is-bloodshot-eye view of the whole situation. It was, quite literally tough to step into Captain’s robes, for they were too many sizes too large for me. So, I decided to wear my own clothes and take the view from you-know-where. Then, it was more of a vermillion haze in my mind.

When it all cleared up, I knew I had found the answer. The method to Captain’s deceptive-if your-eyes-aren’t-as-bloodshot-as-his madness. Captain’s movies portray him as the ultimate man. It is a mocking parody on the millions of superheroes of the West and their zillion make-believe superpowers.

An average moviegoer who would believe that James Bond (Pierce Brosnan, in Golden Eye) could have an acceleration due to gravity of 20 m/s², finds it hard to believe that Captain could melt a huge block of ice with just a stare from those bloodshot eyeballs of his.

Captain’s computer skills are, well, to say the least the stuff that legends are made of. He is the world’s first and only red-eye hacker who has hacked his way into typing in the Windows Media Player and erasing an upper layer to reveal what is within, (after jooming, of course) in Microsoft Paint. This is of course, an extremely well thought of take on those wiry nerds one gets to see in English movies who hack into just about anything that they like to. The make-believe factor here, is that the guy is normally a brainy chap, who is romantically challenged and avenges that by hacking into some of the most improbable places. So who said, you cannot hack into WMP and type into it? Just that Gates and Co. overlooked it. It took the genius of Captain to figure it out .How, we shall never know. After all, Captain is entitled to his intellectual property, which he might probably share with the other sons of the soil who live by his tenets in those eighteen villages, and not with doubting cynics like you and me. ‘Prove me wrong. If you can!’, he says.

Another topic on which there is a divided opinion among people is on his choice of heroines. Some feel that they are half his age, while there are those die-hard cynics who believe that Captain is something like four times their age. However, everyone accepts the fact that he is roughly seven times as heavy as they are. Needless to say, this is Captain’s moral science education (albeit, in a very teasing way) to the West. He wants to imbibe in people like Michael Douglas the Tam values that he holds, on a higher pedestal than his life, or his sister’s life (who invariably marries the villain and dies at his hands after being separated from Captain), or his wife’s life (who normally lives till the end to see Captain accomplish his mission), or his parents’ life (who walk naively into the villain’s trap, but are rescued in the end) , or his dog’s life (that he doesn’t usually have) and so on…

Then come his dancing skills that would make 50 Cent feel like Fred Astaire. Here’s a man who could make his jaw dance to the tune and let the remaining part of his body wobble as it would please. For the proponent of the Captain’s Jaw form of dancing, he is extremely modest about it and prefers to examine spinning tops on bellies, instead. The clever take that Captain does here, is to silently mock at the pop divas of the current era.

There is also an unverified fact that he holds the record for uttering the most number of di’ s in a given song. Researchers put this value to be around the perimeter of Captain’s belly, in centimeters, rounded off to the nearest natural number, which is presumably, a very large number. This is Captain’s answer to all those Gangsta’ Rappers who drop in a pointless yeah at the drop of a hat. The comparison is particularly interesting because the number of times the latter say yeah in any given song is said to be equal to the perimeter of their tummies. So as they say, a belly for a belly and a di for a yeah.

The greatest things about Captain are his fighting skills. Be it catching a hand grenade and throwing it back at the baddie, or gravity defying mid air miracles, Captain is on home turf. His other achievements include electrocuting electric current with his mind power, having piloted 342344 planes to safety after the pilot had been fatally wounded, giving a 20 minute sermon that changes an evil terrorist into a peace-seeking monk, delivering a wise judgment to about 4567882 cases in about eighteen villages, in a little over three hours, fighting about 157 bald headed baddies per minute in each fight sequence, using bare hands to finish ‘em off even when there is a gun with him, being the foremost upholder of Tam values, and so on. In fact, he is said to be on every Pakistani terrorist group’s hit list as enemy number one. All this, of course are real happenings, as opposed to his other deeds which serve more as a lesson on life and moral principles.

The next time you see Captain, don’t even for a moment, scoff at his enormous belly or his bloodshot eyes. For behind all that, is the mind of a man whose primary mission in life is to teach ethics to the value-deprived social order that we live in today.

Of New Year wishes, text messages and disturbed sleeps...

This post must have been out at least five days earlier. But then, I decided to wait until I got my computer in. So since three times two is six, i have got a new comp in my room. That was about three days ago, when TJ suddenly said, OK we'll get a comp today and whooooosh... there was a comp in both our rooms after making us poorer by a few grand. So, I have this ergonomic keyboard and all, and it's amazing fun to see that the text appears the way I type it and not otherwise as with the one back home, the one that seemingly has a mind of it's own.

New Year time is when people actually rediscover most of their friends and relatives and then suddenly you have an assumed lost fifth cousin coming up with a nice e-card to your mailbox, or some not-seen-or-heard-of since last January aunt who never fails to remark how much you have grown since your fifth birthday calling you up. All in all it feels good to have people remembering you. This New Year, I got quite a few wishes on my barely six months old mobile phone. One of them, however was an anonymous one, which ran to about two-and-a-half screens. It sounded extremely nice and wished me well. Now, apart from feeling happy, I also felt curious, very curious. I mean, no one actually spams you with nice messages. Spams are mostly corny, but this one was nice. However, packing my bags for college got the better of my curiosity and I promptly forgot about the message, until about six days back when I saw it again while I was lazily looking through my then congested Inbox to see what messages that I could delete. So there was the message, my sim-card had been recharged and I got my curiosity back!

Then I did what any curious person would have done. I messaged the author back asking who he was. My message was something like :

Hi there, New Year wishes to you too. But then… may i know who you are? Your name is not in my phone book.

Five minutes and thirty seven seconds passed. (OK kidding! I did not time!) and then my mobile beeped the Walk of Life and I knew, the identity was to be revealed in seconds. With bated breath and sweaty palms (OK that did not happen either!) I opened the message. It said

Vijay Kumar!

Osarsk!

Infy!

TTYL

I have to tell you two things here. One, I did not realize that it was past midnight when I sent him that message. Two, I did not know what TTYL meant!

Realization dawned on me- that the anon well-wisher, was really Vijay. Unluckily for him I still had not realized that it was past midnight. With the true delight of having discovered the identity of my anon well-wisher, I sent him another message.

Hell, sorry da. I had the last digit of your number wrong.

And this time there was no reply for fifteen minutes and fifty seven seconds (I timed this time around!) and it still had not dawned on me that the time was now closer to one than twelve. So, I was really concerned and all, and also thought it would be nice if Vijay reads my blog and all. So I sent him a message asking him to read my blog sometime, you like when he is free or something. I also asked him btw what does TTYL mean.

Vijay by now was well and truly like the his silver screen namesake, as played by Amitabh Bachchan- the angry young man! He sent me a reply that went something like,

It means talk to you later. And not at this royally uncivilized hour. Send your reply to this tomorrow. Shall read your blog .

Of course, I was clearly a sane man and it was really clear this time that it was a royally uncivilized hour. So I decided to do what most civilized people like me do- I went to bed!

The next day was largely uneventful, as in devoid of any event. We generally waited for the prof to turn up. And he didn’t! This was in two classes out of the four that we had that day and the remaining two were spent, half asleep past the halfway mark!

Then I came back and did what one generally does if one had woken up at 5:30 that morning and gone for a real refreshing morning jog ( needless to say, I did that!)- I slept. I was still sleeping when I got a call from some vague number that looked almost like Vijay’s number (the right one) but for the second last digit. He was, visibly (whatever that is over the phone) angry because some message from my number, that apologized for having got his number wrong had reached him at 12:30 last night.

Even the marginally bright reader would have figured out what had happened. From Vijay’s perspective, there is this school junior, some six years younger than him, sending him a message asking him who he was, in the middle of the night, and then about twenty minutes further into the night, a presumptuous one from the same guy asking him to read his blog! And the other guy, for no fault of his gets a message from some vague moron (reflecting the ideas of the receiver, have no congruence with mine!) telling him that he got his number wrong. And then, there was I.

Impatient to tell Vijay all about this, I did just that.Apart from being deliriously happy that someone actually interrupted my sleep he sent me a series of interesting responses

It was not midnight y’day dammit. It was today and have not slept ever since. Remind me to wake you up one night.

There you go Vijay, if you are reading this, you might be reminded of a task whiling it’s time away, in cold-storage. (You’d better leave it that way, though!)

This was followed by another one that went like

And don’t tell me you had the nerve to send that apology note In the night itself. I’ll skin you alive. @#$%^&* thank your stars I was a good 20 miles away. Else you would have been a would-have-been.

And then there was a lot of friendly banter that followed for the next couple of hours that included each of us wishing the other eternal impotency and a pleasant stay at hell. And then, I guess both of us were tired of messaging each other. Of course, I need not be telling you here that the next day, he read my blog and was highly impressed and…

And the clock says it’s time to go now.