dravidan gabtun

Nowadays, Gabtun never ceases to be in the news. I guess he is trying to overcome his disadvantage in power and money (compared to DMK and ADMK), by using the media to the fullest.

A memo was sent to all his party members instructing them to refer to him as 'Dravidan Gabtun' in all future communications. This is in response to Karunanidhi's allegation that Gabtun is not a true Dravidan. Gabtun has promised to defend his Dravidan heritage during the one year anniversary of his party. I can't wait for the stupid response to a stupid allegation.

Managed to watch Sudesi over the weekend. The director had tried a cheap imitation of 'Ramana'. Thanks to Gabtun, there were lots of unintentional comedy scenes. The real story
started only in the second half. Till then you had to watch the antics of Gabtun as an unemployed do-gooder who talks about duty and hardwork to doctors, teachers, policemen and
anyone in the vicinity with a functional set of ears.

You can check out
this page for a fair and balanced review.

There was one scene, where Gabtun is supposed to be working hard on his PC, while his mom is talking about getting him married while he is young. Guessing from Gabtun's appearance in the movie, his mom was either visually handicapped or didn't have a firm grasp of the concept of time. He was just scrolling up and down on the programs listed in the Start menu,
throughout the scene :) I guess someone tried to teach him how to teach MS Word or some other advanced software, got psyched by Gabtun's PC knowledge and constrained his actions to the Start menu.



Currently, all the three major parties are slugging it out in the Madurai mid-term elections. DMK and ADMK are pouring their money into the constituency. Gabtun is trying to prove that he is the king of Madurai. I hope Gabtun doesn't get too involved in politics and give up on movies. He shouldn't the deny the need of Tamil movie fans to see comedy movies on a regular basis.

the origin of baguth

Whenever you cram hundreds of restless college students with fertile imaginations together into close proximity, you are sowing the seeds for creating a rich dialect. BITS Pilani was no different. Thanks to the fact that students came from all parts of the country speaking a cacophony of different languages, it was inevitable that linguistic cross-pollination will occur.

To an outsider, seeing a Kashmiri guy addressing his close friend as machan or a Telugu guy using the choicest Ghati swear words or a Tamil guy applauding a Sachin shot as khoobsurat will create cognitive dissonance. I, for one, was totally confused in my first month in Pilani. Inspite of the constant fear of getting ragged, I was amused to see the linguistic contraptions of my seniors and would burst out giggling in front of them. Creating new words and phrases for describing the mundane events of BITSian life seemed to be one of the favorite pastimes on campus.

The prime examples of such phrases were the ones that were used to denote each other's linguistic origins. North Indians were referred to as Choms. Chom is allegedly a village in Bihar that boasts of 100% illiteracy. Tamilians were referred to as Illads. Apparently, the Tamil word that most registers in the ears of non-Tamil students was 'illai-da'. Telugu guys were referred to as Gults - the short form of 'gu-lu-te' which was the reverse of 'te-lu-gu'. When you see the fervor with each linguistic group admires the BITSian name given for them, you will realize why Gandhi suggested that India should be demarcated along linguistic lines.

This sets up the context for the origin of 'baguth'. Each group of BITSians had their own system for rating jokes cracked by a member. There was the ever-popular 'Choice A-B-C-D' system. A, B and C were given on the usual merit basis. Choice D had the special meaning - "I'm laughing only because you are my friend and I don't want to lower the gang's respect in front of the people from other gangs".

In SpiceTooth's wing (he was one year junior to ChennaiToChicago and me), reviews were quick and brutal. Good jokes were applauded and recounted to other gangs in the mess. Bad jokes were dismissed with a variety of renditions of the word 'bad'. Silly bad jokes were dealt with a quick, surgical 'bad joke'. Atrociously bad jokes got the sheep-bleat-like verbally stretched-out response - 'baaaaaaeeeeeeeddd joke'. There was a guy called 'Kaathu' Sivaraman, who came up with the idea of attaching a new Hindi word he learnt to 'bad'. The Hindi word was obviously 'baguth'.

For painfully thin guys like Kaathu, who couldn't endure the windpipe-taxing extremes of 'baaaaaaaaaeeedddddd', 'baguth bad' became a verbal shortcut. Over time, just the word 'baguth' was used to crush the hopes of the next Vivek-wannabe in the gang. Over some more time, 'baguth' came to be used to denote extremely bad judgement in other areas of a guy's behaviour.

We will have to thank SpiceTooth for bringing this word from Pilani to Chicago, as a legacy of his BITSian days. I'm sure that this not the end of the journey for this potent word. It will manifest itself in various forms and social settings. Heck, it might even get its own wikipedia entry. But I sincerely hope that no one from this gang names any offspring as 'baguth' however ugly the baby turns out to be. That will be truly 'baaaaaaaeeeedddd' behaviour.

amudha loves ila

Vettaiyadu Vilayadu was one of the better movies I watched in recent times. It's a sad state of affairs in Kodambakkam when a Kamal movie becomes a good movie due to the lack of competition. Kuruthipunal was amazing with Kamal and Nasser performing at their best and the story giving equal importance to the hero and the villain.

I thought VV would be a similar psychological thriller after seeing how the director Gautham hyped it up. But he spent too much time on the love storyand scampered to finish the movie at the end.

VV could have been better if they had shown better police techniques. For e.g., Kamal could have used the FBI Criminal Profilers to find out that the killers were gays based on the following facts(?!)

1) They watched Padayappa four times for Abbas

2) They tried to make Kadhir remake 'Brokeback' in Tamil as 'Kathal Malai Mogam'

3) They killed their school Biology teacher after she said that only heterosexuals can reproduce normally

4) They had a Prashanth poster in their apartment

5) They forced their TN medical college to introduce doctor coats in pink.

Phinance Paramasivam!

Let me tell you about the story of a little boy who grew up wanting to be a real doctor. He used to play with stethoscope, plastic syringes and such. And then one day, his cat accidentally scratched him. The little boy saw his own blood and fainted. Well, that was the end of the doctor dream. But very soon, he saw a small gadget that had all sorts of colorful numbers and symbols on it. And when you pressed random combinations of these numbers, it gave out wonderfully unexpected results. He saw his dad using it to do the monthly bills and his mom using it in the market to calculate the cost of 26.56 grams of garlic. Even his sister used it to smack him on his head. The little boy had just discovered the calculator and his calling in life. He knew what he wanted to do, he thought. He would grow up and be a calculator operator.

Unfortunately for him, he turned out to be an extremely bright student. He always stood first in class. No, I didn't mean he was the first boy to stand up. I meant his test scores. He cracked his state board exams followed by the engineering entrance test. Elite colleges like Anna University, REC, BITS Pilani and Angaalammal magalir munnetra college offered him a seat, with built-in potty seat and beer holder. And as it so often happens in India, faced with pressure from all quarters, our boy had to gulp down and burp his dreams of becoming a calculator operator, and went to BITS Pilani to study Engineering.

But in BITS Pilani, our boy was introduced into the wonderful world of Controls department. He volunteered to do the accounts for them, and very soon the department came to rest on his slender shoulders. He had discovered his second and ultimately satisfying love - Microsoft Excel. He loved filling in those boxes with numbers and readjusting them till the credit and debit columns matched exactly, and his eyes were bleary.

And when he moved to America, he found a 'baguth' gang that liked nothing better than to party and spend a lot of money. It was no surprise then that he took on the role of doing the 'phinance' (finance) for this group as well. He went one step further and used the power of the world wide web to upload spreadsheets on the internet. His service went beyond mere math. By managing accounts so efficiently, he had prevented all the heart ache and broken friendships caused normally over money-related issues. The group could happily throw away money and never wonder if they were ever going to be compensated. Somewhere among the giga terrabytes of data in the cyberworld were a set of numbers that accurately held the gang's account information.

These days, he has taken his love for phinance to new levels. His mastery over Microsoft Money is complete and absolute. So much so that he writes his own help manuals and refers to them. Every cent he spends is accounted for. Suddenly he started worrying about budgeting, planning for the future and crap like that. Things came to a head when he refused to take lap dances at a strip club in Vegas because he had saved the money he did not have yet to buy a Palm 650. It was another thing that he ended up spending way more on the dances and still bought the crappy 650 which makes concord takeoff level noises anywhere near civilization.

These days, you can see him poring over accounting books in his bid to earn a CMA or some such acocunting degree. In his spare time, he's building his own spreadsheet tool that would directly take data from scanned bills and receipts and would automatically assign and split them up among the right people. He says this uses his education as an engineer and his passion for accounts and phinance.

So lady and gentlemen, let's give a warm round of applause to our hero, for finally managing to juggle his passion as well as his profession. For bringing a sense of order to a haphazard group. And for his selfless service to the world of numbers. And let's give him his new name from henceforth - 'Phinance Paramasivam'...