Let’s directly talk about the Elephant in the room. Has anyone ever spared any thoughts about Husbands who are still stuck at homes while their wives go to office daily if the wives work in the Essential Services Industries (can have acronym Esi., but jobs aren’t that easy, of course)?
I doubt! House-Husbands (in these times specifically) are a rare breed. Most families where both Husbands and Wives went to the office are still Working from Home (how are people still tolerating each other is beyond me). Might have gotten rather used to it! Households, where wives were predominantly home-makers, are in a dilemma, whether to be happy that husbands are at home full time or be sad that husbands are at home full time. But, House-Husbands are not in large numbers, are they? They need to be appreciated for their efforts, isn’t it? But poor House-Husbands don’t know anything because they didn’t choose their lives to be this way. This just happened. Who can help them out? Who can put them out of their misery? Who can empower them and alleviate their pains? Nobody.
They say that Print is dying. Which is technically correct, print has always been dying ink onto paper. But sadly, digital media is actually killing the newspaper. Not because everyone now has a mobile phone with Internet and everything is available online easily. But because the quality of newspaper hasn’t increased much and admit it, it is difficult to hold while you are on a commode, unlike your phone which is so easy (until it slips from your hand and…)
The print is actually dying faster nowadays because new age websites which present content in lists and bullet points have become immensely popular. Their motive is to break down the story into 35 points or average IQ of the reader (whichever is lower) to make people understand the point the news is trying to make. Now since I am a very happy going (jolly?) and optimistic person, I don’t like to read sad news only. Enough of killing, corruption, crimes against women and hatred against creed, caste or religion. I expect a piece which is full of satire, wit, and name calling of anyone with whom I don’t agree with. So to find genuine humor in a newspaper, either you have to read a Hindi newspaper where all news items are deliberately presented with a headline which unintentionally sounds funny, or you have to find lighthearted humor pieces online.
Online there were funny blogs and funny columns. Then there were sites like Faking News and Unreal Times, to name a few, which were doing a fine job but their problem was that people didn’t read anything apart from first 8-9 words which happened to be their headline. But they surely had wit and good humor if not the best. Then in the last couple of years, new websites came up which you won’t believe, that they could blow your mind the next minute you log onto them. I wouldn’t share their URLs because hyper-linking is endorsement but I will give slight hints which might appear as Buzzfeed and their desi copy paste jobs like scoopwhoop, etc.
Ok, serious stuff from this line: These websites present comedy (and sometimes pictures from email forwards of the late 90s) with lists and have GIFs or just normal photos accompanying the 2-3 word text. This is because pictures are louder than words, we all know that and editorial quality of such websites is almost zero, why write text when you can post pictures. One of the common topics they touch is nostalgia by posting lists of 298 things you could do in the 90s but cannot do now. Or 85 radio advertisements which people miss nowadays because they don’t listen to the radio much. Or 36 types of people who are sexist because 24 hours a day they all talk about 36 sized people. But the lists and GIFs or normal pics with 28 pt sized text in Impact font with a stroke of 3 pts. are just for distraction. The best part about them are the headlines. These headlines might make you cry or blow your mind or make your limbs dysfunctional. The template for these headlines is so brilliant that it can never go old.
Now my point is that such websites are killing humor, shamelessly. They are making a reader keep his/her brain aside and laugh where they tell them to laugh. There is no subtle hidden humor which can make you smile. They have content which begs you to LOL by reminding you 25 things you might find funny but they aren’t but since we have added GIFs of emergency cute animals in them, they surely have become adorable.The reader doesn’t have to implement even a bit of the gray cell to read some genuinely good stuff which doesn’t accompany any picture. (like this text, hehe). The attention span had already taken a hit by those 140 character websites and now the sense of humor or the HQ or Humor Quotient has shattered into 128 pieces which got mixed with the brain which had blown a while ago. I tried giving them some attention but couldn’t laugh at it, in the same way, I cannot laugh at sitcoms which have a laughter track in them. Where are the good old pieces which tingled your funny bone and also shared the horrific news by mellowing them down to the level of humor? What happened to subtle humor which changed your opinion about things without making you go through pictures which take a huge amount of time to load on your mobile if you are inside a loo and you have only 2G?. I hope people move over these lists and come back to the real deal of text and larger attention spans. Amen.
So, if you didn’t read anything above since there were no bullet points or ordered lists, the summary is this: Humor is dying. (Same as the headline. Did it blow your mind?)
P.S.: My last post on this was an NSFW comic. I loved making it because it incorporated elements from few of my fav. web comics. Though, most didn’t understand that. Can’t blame because you like spending time on 9Gag more than the sites from where they curate stuffs actually.
New Delhi. 12th June 2013 by Anonymous_Journalism_by_Broadband
In an absolutely inexplicable set of events, Twitter users across the country hung the news portal site FirstPost by overloading it with comments citing their frustrations due to lack of outrage generated on Twitter.
June 11th day was the most unusual day in the history of microblogging site Twitter as there was no event through which Twitter users could fetch any hint of outrageous material to carry out their daily Twitter duties. Normally, a day on Twitter is initiated by ridiculous statement by a politician or a molestation or rape case in NCR or the weather of Bangalore or snow in Chennai or some act by a Bollywood personality in Mumbai or a brilliant performance by Ravindra Jadeja or an Apple event or any event which can be made fun of, literally. But nothing of such nature happened on 11th June. Twitter users had nothing to comment, trend or even play contest yesterday. Even the irritating handles which carry out quizzes were busy in their rare but mandatory real-life activities.
‘I have nothing to outrage today. As I have already outraged over nothingness of outraging, I am getting frustrated more and more.’, tweeted a twitter celeb with handle @Psychedelic_Sundaram.
Similar tweets of frustration were seen from most of the users in India. This build up of frustration took its toll on the news portal FirstPost which usually runs on the content generated by Twitter. As there was nothing on Twitter which could have helped journalists on FirstPost to write an article, they put up an article which stated ‘How boring Twitter had become and is this the right time to pull the plug off it!’. As soon as this post was tweeted by their handle, Twitter users across the country got irked and start commenting on FirstPost’s website. This created a frenzy of comments as everyone on Twitter, as they had nothing to outrage upon, jumped on to the website and crashed its server.
The editor sensed the situation and asked all the staff of 3 people present in the office to evacuate the building faking a mock fire drill. He was caught saying that he feared that people like KRK could attack their office in angst. Rest of the staff was working from home, as usual, couldn’t even post their attendance of the day because of the server outage. As per the last reports, the IT admin team have restarted the servers and meanwhile a pub related incident has occurred in Gurgaon. IT admin believes that since at least something outrage worthy has happened, people might get distracted from the site and get back on to Twitter doing the best they can do, that is to outrage.
Not just Sherlock Holmes, but we all think and react in subtitles, citations and labels. I mean whenever we meet someone, we draw conclusions (or rather our hypothesis) out of the people, first, by their physical appearances, and then by their voice and lastly by their names. Tool-tips emerge from all the places possible from the person we’re interacting with which enables to us make an impression of that person in our mind. No? Try imagining at least for author’s sake. Now this mental picture of stereotyping was pretty fine and fairly accurate till the time we decided to jot them down, in our so-called religious text and named the Chapter as ‘The Classification of People’. In India, we conveniently call it ‘The Caste System’. Basically, the Hindus were divided into 4 classes, namely:
Brahmins
Kshtriyas
Vaishyas
Shudras
Of course the list is in order of their decreasing importance in status. Now I am not going into their history and its pros and cons. There have been disastrously long debates over need of reservations and all that. But just recently, I came across one Twitpic which showed ‘some’ people in a ‘certain’ city were following a weird filter to allow only Brahmins to buy property. There are societies everywhere who want to have people of a certain castes living as neighbors. Totally thumbs up, yo!
Only Brahmins
Unlike other bloggers and intellectual people, I am not here to show my outrage against this, for the record I find this as narrow minded as rivers of Rajasthan during summers. Rather, I am here to help people discriminate others in a better and systematic way on the basis of their color, religion, caste, creed or sex, etc. which we had studied in Civics. Yep, you read correctly, I am here to help people differentiate people.
So it has come to my notice that people are not able to differentiate people properly. People can judge others instantly but not always they’re right. You can get a lot if you get to know a person’s name. The mind traverses the binary tree of your whole khandaan instantly after your name is fully heard. Here’s an example.
If you hear the name, you first think about the surname. North Indian, South Indian, East Indian or West Indian. Now suppose the person has a name which is less than 20 characters. Then, the person surely is from North. If the person has all the gods name in their name, South Indian. Now, the person could be amongst BKV or S (caste-wise). Ok, Brahmin. Which kind of brahmin? Because, yes, there are millions of kinds of Brahmins. Heh, and all think that they are superior brahmins than the other. OK, you are superior, fine. What’s your Gotra now? Ooh, you don’t know? Tch. There are millions of Gotras too which further classify the kind of Brahmins. I am sure, this has something to do with structure of Universe and Atom. First you are a Brahmin, then, Vaishnav Brahmin, then Bharadwaj Gotra, then some Sub Gotra A, then Sub Sub Gotra B and so on, just like Galaxy, Solay System, Planets, Atoms, Nucleus, mesons, quarks, etc. Posh, totally. So if you planning to fall in love, make sure the person you are going to like falls in your caste. Another point, just the caste should be same, not the gotras. If Gotras are same, your young ones might be born with super human capabilities or x-men types nature. If you are planning to give house on rent, make sure the new tenants are of your same caste, otherwise whole vastu can conspire to bring your name down in the society. Make sure, when you go to a restaurant, the cook who has prepared food for you is of your same caste too. The chicken you have ordered, should be born and brought up in the house of the person of the same caste. And even the chicken itself should be of same caste, gotra optional.
But sadly, many young people don’t know all this. Blame it on their school or Facebook. They have totally absurd perception about castes and sects. Like in Western-Central and Southern India, some people generally believe that if a person doesn’t want onion in their food, they are asking for Jain food. Utterly wrong. I am not a Jain, I kill insects. But still I am a vegetarian and don’t want onion and garlic in my food, officially. While, many Jains I know have onion and garlic compulsorily in their diet. Will they go to hell? Time will tell.
So I have come up with an idea of Entrance Test. Entrance Exam for Castes. We can call it JEE only. ‘Jaatpaat Entrance Examination’ or ‘Jaathpaath Entrance Examination’ to make South Indian people understand. This should be a written test and only if one is able to score 75%, then only one should be allowed to called a certain caste person. After passing the written test, one might go for further verbal session where you have to display your mettle verbally too. Suppose you are a Brahmin and you are Yagyopaveet (thread) wearing one, you have to show all the kreeyas which you are supposed to do. There are many kreeyas but most popular ones are Early morning, brahma muhurat one and one sandhya vandan. If you are not doing this, your brahmin title can be relinquished. Now, suppose you are a lower caste person and want to upgrade your caste. Well buddy, that is not possible in this birth but unofficially, you can pwn the upper caste person by using the magic wand called as Reservation for SC/ST and OBC. That helps and you can use the same wand for your kids, even if you don’t need it financially but who cares, caste is important.
For those, who want to capitalize on this and open coaching centers, please contact me. I have many people around who excel in telling the religion and castes of people just by looking at their shoes or nails if the person is not wearing any shoes. Also, thinking of creating a startup who supports IVR which helps people in determining each other’s caste before getting into a phone based Long Distance Relationship.
And oh, what is your caste anyways? If you are not eligible, I demand you to unread this blog now itself.
