Of Designer wears, Limousines, and after parties!!!

It’s that time of the year when the Oscars are due in another 8 Weeks and it is but natural for you to be misled by the title and think this is a blog on the red carpet antics of celebrities who grace the biggest entertainment event. Well, you are mistaken; this is all about a bunch of 17 years olds planning to celebrate the end of their 12 years of rigorous intellectual pursuit. The ‘end’ I mean, not the achievement of the same.

The whole concept of farewell parties in schools is taking a leaf out of the Prom nights in the US; after all they need to be indebted to the people who gave them the Instagram, Google and Snapchat. Guess, you guys must have got a clue that this is a rant by a 17 year old’s father coming to terms with the build up to a farewell party looming large in the horizon along with the Oscars.

These days I try very hard to avoid beginning a sentence with ‘When I was your age…..’ but unfortunately get drawn into that time and again. Well this was one of those times. I sat back and reminisced on my farewell parties. I had 2, one in my year 10 since the school at that time had classes only till year 10 and the other in Class 12.

I remember the Class 10 farewell quiet distinctly for the fact that we were the first batch to arrange for the video recording of the proceedings on a VHS tape. A disruption of sorts, some trendsetters, we were in those days. The irony is that after 3 decades I am still trying to trace that tape which none of us have seen. Apparently there was one copy and it had to stay put in the Head Master’s room.  My class 12 graduation afternoon (no nights then) consisted of a piece of cake/Pastry (Colonial appeasement), a Vada (to bring in the local flavor) and a samosa (to please the public hailing from north of the vindhyas) followed by thirst quenchers on a hot Madras afternoon….a diluted glass of Rasna, from the colour of which, we could actually calculate the concentration of the drink. So this kind of acted as mock Chemistry practicals too.

Ah!!! Enough of the boring 80’s, let’s move over to the more happening millennials and their celebrations. If the first 4 paragraphs sounded like the script out of a Satyajit Ray / Adoor Gopala Krishnan movie you ended up watching on Sunday afternoons on Doordarshan the next few will sound more like a Rohit Shetty film.

Haute Couture was a term that was normally heard in Milan but the last few days it is doing rounds within the four walls of my household. The farewell suddenly became the doomsday looking down upon us, being the proactive family we are we were equipped with the wear for the farewell the last time we visited India and we made a Tarun Tahiliani out of our poor Shankar, the neighborhood tailor. Alas! little did we know the colours or trends of last vacation were no longer ‘in’ and they were in the end of season list six months down the line.  Move aside the Taruns and Sabyasachis, it’s the after party time, and we need the Donna Karens and the Pradas in the shades that are in now. And so the hunt continues.

Kids booked Limousines from the stables of top European brands to reach school on their day, forgetting that it was M/s Ashok Leyland that safely brought them to school all these 12 years. Well they all learn from a leader who loves to sell the make in India concept while secured in bullet proof German car!

The world has come a full circle, and this is definitely not a rant, but introspection on the evolution of the nature of celebrations. If we were trend setters arranging a VHS recording of our farewell 3 decades back, applying the same logic of inflation that is applied to finances, we need to apply an inflation factor on the aspirations and accept that these kids have not gone overboard with their celebrations.

As they celebrate like there is no tomorrow, I wish to remind them that the memories of a farewell are even sweeter when they ‘fare well’ in their lives ahead!

Blending, Branding & Bollywood!

We come across branded celebrity nuptials more often these days. The branding starts with a hashtaged  name blending of the couple. The first time I came across this trend was when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie decided to live happily ever after and the world called them Brangelina!!! Though now the brand is hyphenated. Then came our Bollywood friends aping their Hollywood cousins and the first on the list was Virushka which was an amalgamation of the names of celebrities from two religions in India Bollywood and Cricket!

Initially I was impressed at their creativity only to realise later that there were online tools like couple name generator like an anagram generator that could churn out combined names of couples in various permutations and combinations.

Later on I learnt from my daughter that there was a term for this in the millennial lingo and was called ‘shipping’ or ‘ship’.  You could ship two romantically linked couple by co-joining their first or last names and flaunt it as brand. The convenience of publicizing their union was also simple. All they needed to do was to prefix a hashtag to their ‘shipped’ names to set sail on the sea of eternal bliss. Some though turned a Titanic half way through.  I’m sure the Sailing fraternity, which is an otherwise boring male dominated profession were more than happy to be romantically linked to the union of celebrity souls in love. The ‘shipped’ hashtags started trending on the social media sites and the numbers that followed them eclipsed the numbers that attended their wedding.

That is when the Malayalee in me woke up? This was an art we conceptualized generations back, We were the pioneers at combining names and our ancestors were the ones who started this trend of naming not themselves as a couple, but their offsprings with some lovely combination of their own names. Once they took this a tad seriously we had some interesting names doing the rounds, the best of which was Shitty, named after Shoshama & Ittycheria. Had the tools like the name generator been available then, we would have had an entire generation of Malayalees with esoteric names. Baby naming was so easy back then, a child born to an Aleyama and Varghese could be named Arghese…Close to Nargis!. Being born to Thomas and Gracy, had they followed the trend I could have been named Thoracy which sounded more like an acute throat infection.

Today almost every other Bollywood celebrity couple release their hashtaged ‘shipped’ names months before their big fat Indian weddings, that does not happen in India any longer. But picking the right one can be tricky, Virushka had Virat taking on a partial Anushka as the second half of the name and sent a message to the sorority that the husbands can take their wife’s names as surnames, then came Deepveer, now we can also argue that Ranveer let Deepika take the lead…the latest couple on the block is Nickiyanka which was a Transcontinental shipping liner altogether. The American with a small name managed to fit in his entire name into the equation though it sounds like the name of a Russian Gymnast.

Soon to be released is Hashtag AliaRan! Could well be the ‘shipped’ term for Aliya & Ranbir. Not sure if it sounds right though!

Wishing all the ‘ships’ and those ‘shipped’ a wonderful voyage irrespective of the tides and the icebergs they may encounter and make sure the hyphen does not split their brand.

#metoo Vs #humbhi

#metoo vs #humbhi

This is definitely not going to be one of my more popular blogs. I am going to be accused of being judgmental, chauvinistic, an alpha male etc. In fact the very mention that such a blog was a work in progress drew the ire of the ladies at home.

Well, irrespective of all the brickbats I’m bound to receive, I intend expressing my perspective.  My apologies if I directly or indirectly hurt any sentiments in the following paragraphs. You may choose to leave the blog right away.

#metoo movement is opening up many a Pandora’s Box recently in elitist India namely in all the woods prefixed with Bolly, Kolly, Tolly and the likes in India, though it started off with Holly ironically one ‘l’ short of holy. This awakening in India is almost a year after it happened in the US. The time lag between a developed country and a developing one is understandable; since a social issue is no Apple IPhone to be launched simultaneously. There is a lot of difference between ROI (return of investment) of an American product and an ROI (return on interest by public around on a topic of social cause).

While I’m respectful to all the allegations brought forward in the #metoo movement in India, I need to warn future generations of aspiring celebrities to be wary of the world around you. Being a celebrity is much more difficult than climbing the corporate ladder from the lower rungs unless you have big family name towing you. Please do not be as naïve as the scion of one of the first families of Bollywood who claimed after years she was subjected to difficult situations in a place as public as an airport when all she needed to do, was to scream, since her father at that point of time would have used all influence possible to bring the perpetrators of the crime to book and ensure they are wiped of the face of the entertainment world. Now why she didn’t do that is not left to anybody’s imagination but hers?

There is another celebrity who often offers incentives to bare herself in skin and thoughts with the sole objective of encouraging the sports teams in India to perform better ends up accusing a co-star with dubious records in such matters. Well, I acknowledge that every profession new, old, or the oldest has its own dignity of labor. The fact is that, that dignity should never be exploited.

The question and the definition of consent needs to be discussed and understood by all and a teacher in California recently tried to decode the same trying to educate third graders all about consent so that they don’t end up suing people decades later.  This is certainly a step in the right direction, however what was taboo in in one generation is no longer in another.

 

That’s a quick guide to help our children learn about consent. Unfortunately this chart is being taught to third graders now. Today giving a hug is a form of greeting that is just as acceptable as a handshake was two decades back. I’m sure none of the kids these days ask for consent before they hug their friend irrespective of the gender. So apart from the third graders who are taught these consent rules everyone who has hugged without consent can technically sue the other for inappropriate behavior in the years to come, more so if he or she goes on to become a celebrity.

It’s time we turn our attention to the sizeable population of women who are going through hell every day in rural India and other parts of the world where internet and English are yet to penetrate. These women are oblivious to the #metoo campaign and the attention it is mustering miles away from them. They go through this at the hands of family members, friends and elders irrespective of their age every single day. They are always not fortunate to live to narrate a once in a lifetime incident decades later. The reason they hide this from the society is more a matter of survival than it is for the celebrities who are subjected to this. The ‘revenue’ model is different in both; the decision is between the ROI of just trying to live / survive while the ROI in the case of celebrities is to live better and longer. We need a campaign to bring these rural women out of their misery. #Humbhi / #Wetoo instead of #Metoo would be more appropriate.  Since metoo would be translated in Hindi as mehtho… which roughly means I am the way I am? That shouldn’t be the case!

Let’s pledge to bring up our sons to be respectful and daughters even braver!

The Death of Memory!

Two years to the dawn of a new century that witnessed the anxiety of being able to boot up your home PC at the turn of the century, also saw among other things the extinction of the wisdom of many a grandmas across households, the extinction of the reference sections in libraries, the extinction of Mr. / Ms. Know it all’s in the class rooms, in short the extinction of the beautiful world of memory.

It also marked the birth of the high bandwidth know it all’s, the virtual gurus, the tell- me-all friend,and the dump-your-memory friend.

Overnight one was enlightened about the what’s, why’s, when’s, which’s, how’s of the happenings around us. We were the so called empowered society when a toddler all of 2 hand held us to the world of information overload at the turn of the century and at a click.

A generation that grew up being told that Knowledge was Power was elbowed out by a generation that claimed Information is Power as long as the electrical power and connectivity existed. There is a world of difference between knowledge and information.  Sadly the speed at which information was disseminated was more important than the quality of the information that was being spread. The advancements in hardware kept pace and ensured they facilitated uninterrupted dissemination of ‘uncontrolled’ information.

All this happened because one Sergey a Russian and Larry an American decided that they would bid adieu to the cold war, their countries were at and give democracy a new twist and empower mankind with information.  Democracy sadly gave freedom to everything except the right to uncontrolled information.  Uncontrolled information sounded nice but when the source of uncontrolled information passed its early life entered adolescence and crossed over to the teens, now out of the teens realized uncontrolled information was irresponsible information too.

As we suffer from various health hazards associated with poor lifestyle and eating habits as a result of our consumption patterns we also suffer from an acute information obesity / disorder due to the consumption of junk, so called intellect influencing steroids like misinformation, disinformation and mal-information that are so beautifully camouflaged under empowerment or right to information.

The facilitator of all this, turns twenty today, and hope they leave the teeny tantrums behind and focus on a more responsible dissemination of information. The brand became a verb before they reached the responsible 20’s and hope they remain a responsible mental verb.

The need of the hour is a mature and responsible GOOGLE. We need exponential efforts in 100’s as the name suggests, to help foster a responsible society.

 

Many Happy returns of the day Google… thank you for returning all our queries till date.