POTS! It’s such a PITA!

Just incase you are wondering what was that absurdity up there, you’ve probably not joined the chat race. And if you think we are going to discuss earthenware and Immoral Traffic [Prevention] Act here this week, I’m willing to bet my entire month’s salary that you’re seriously losing it.

For the uninitiated, that headline, especially the acronyms, holds the power to save your neck. Imagine a scenario where you’re chatting online with your buddies, bragging about your day’s exploits and/ or making plans to skip school/ college tomorrow and go watch the latest flick at Vajra Cinema. Just then the Good Lord decides to play spoilsport and in walks your dad/ mom, their eagle-eyes fixed on your computer screen and their verbal talons ready to pounce on you at the slightest provocation. You know that but your friend doesn’t, and chances are his/ her next message may get you grounded for the rest of your life. So what do you do? You simply type POTS [short for Parents Over The Shoulder, which means my parents are watching, I can’t really talk] or POS [Parents are looking Over my Shoulder] or P911 [P = Parents and 911 = Emergency; in other words, either drop the subject or watch the language].

That, my darlings, is the magic of chat lingo/ acronyms. Not only has acronyms taken over our chat rooms and applets and given the Queen’s language a run for its ‘standard’ vocabulary, it has also proved its health benefits. Besides negating the need for typing out entire words and sentences and preventing ‘chat wrist’ [if tennis players can have tennis elbow, chatters can have chat wrists too!], the ‘code words’ also keep out parents from eavesdropping, thus saving the chatters’ hide.

Gone are the days when the word ‘avatar’ was restricted to religious ideas. In today’s virtual world, an avatar or AV is a graphical representation often used in chat rooms to depict a person who’s in the room and chatting. And BIBLE? Well, it stands for Basic Information Before Leaving Earth. But hey, your parents don’t need to know that, right? And if they’re under the impression that you’ve suddenly found god and decide to hike your allowance, there’s nothing like it.

During a chat session with a sexy siren [who in all probability is a fat, hairy, married guy with a fake AV], you are forced to be AFK [Away From the Keyboard] for a while to take a leak. Upon your return, you see your brother has not only taken hold of the computer but also exchanged email IDs with that ‘girl’, you mentally - and also verbally if your brother is less muscular than you - label him a PITA [Pain In The A$$]!

And what do you say when a virtual stranger tries chatting you up? DIKU [Do I Know You?]. From its humble beginnings, the word ‘beg’ has today also taken the form of an acronym standing for a Big Evil Grin, which you flash after saying UY [Up Your you-know-where] to an irritating chatter. Wicked, huh?

If you receive an online message that reads GAL, it doesn’t mean other chatters are enquiring about your gender. They are simply offering you an unsolicited advice - Get A Life. Ouch! And if they say FU and you can’t figure this one out, you shouldn’t be online.

And when you read an entire article ODing on acronyms and chat jargons, fail to make head or tails of it and realise a little too late that you could have better utilised the time spent reading that useless article, that, my friends, is a clear indication that you should GAL.

JK [Just Kidding]!

Midweek, 11-17 October, 2006

ATTACK OF THE ALPHABET

I’d written this piece some time in February for the second issue of CATSCANNED, a fortnightly magazine edited by fellow blogger Bald Head Ate The Hermit. Found it in my hard disk earlier today while cleaning up my PC and thought “why not post it here”. So here it is…

‘Letters bring joy, write a letter today’. Thus reads an advertisement promoting the virtues of writing conventional mails. Though electronic mail has definitely relegated ordinary mail to the lowly status of ‘snail mail’, the advertisement does make sense to some extent. That is, if you are thinking more in terms of characters of the alphabet and not whole written messages.

Though our subject matter here can make no grandiose claims of bringing something as profound as joy to mankind, it definitely can make a chuckle escape our lips. A little act of omission, a slight change in the sequence of letter placement and, voila, there you have it – a perfect case of the printer’s devil glaring at you from a signboard.

While they can turn out to be nothing more than eyesore sometimes, those misspelled words, on other occasions, can lend a whole new meaning to the sentences that can amuse or abuse the reader, depending on which side of the fence you are on. If the guys entrusted with the job of painting signboards are allowed to have their way, they can sure come up with some rare gems. A few samplings are presented below for entertainment purposes only.

One of my personal favourites comes straight off the menu of a cafeteria along NH 31A which promises you a bite of ‘French Fried’. Yup, you read it right. The recently renovated café has a shiny flexboard menu right above the counter. There it is clearly stated in black and white, right below the picture of a plate of fries – French Fried. And then they wonder why foreign tourists hardly visit the joint anymore! Goodness, why would anybody want to be caught endorsing cannibalism in this politically correct age?

Gangtokians, it appears, are pretty adventurous when it comes to trying out new cuisines. Somewhere downtown at Tadong, there are people who offer ‘Cattering’ services, or at least that’s what the signboard outside the office declares. Now, does that mean they cater to the feline population or cater feline thingamajig to us?

Seen woven on a nylon doormat: Wellcome. Should this ‘footnote’ left there by the door deliberately by the host be interpreted as “Now that you are here already, well, come on in; what the hell!”

If those traffic police had their way, they’d strip us of our right to run around the Hospital Point. I kid you not! Not that we’d be running around there anyway but a signboard below the pedestrian overhead bridge says “No Right Trun”. Since the dictionary does not acknowledge the existence of the word ‘trun’, we can safely surmise here that the sign means to say No Right T’Run, albeit in a slightly archaic style.

One signboard that has still left me scratching my head for the past many years is the one near the SNT bus terminus. It boasts of a telecommunication giant having reached ‘Internet in all Distrist’. Is that… err… does that mean…err… Oh, whatever!

Signboards are not the only display cases for such bloopers. Both print and electronic media can be quite fun, or scary, if one is slightly attentive. Very recently, a television channel bungled up big time when they accidentally replaced the first letter of the word Chief with a ‘T’ while mentioning the political head of the state. After the headline made its first run in the news scroll, the mistake was realised and promptly rectified. If they had constituted an award for the biggest blooper of the year, this one would have bagged it hands down.

It is amazing how a simple slip of fingers, careless omission of a letter or our fetish for abbreviating words can end up with unprintable words/ phrases finding their way into print sometimes. Two unsavory samples: pubic [public] opinion and horny [honorary] secretary.

“It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your breath away” sang the Bee Gees. Words, especially those distorted by the printer’s/ painter’s devil, do take our breath away sometimes, but not necessarily in a sloppy, sentimental manner as the band crooned. Letters make up words and words are powerful tools. When carelessness creeps in while handling these magic characters, what we get is an attack of the alphabet. The letters go all wobbly and trip over each other, and cafeterias start selling French Fried to Frenchmen; and when someone’s chief ends up being someone else’s thief, it’s time we started paying a wee bit more attention to the way we spell.

Catscanned, March-April 2006

That 90s’ Trend

WARNING: There are chances you may come across too many exclamation points in this piece. And there are chances some anti-exclamation mark pressure groups might send the Editor an excruciatingly long petition against the unnecessary use of this punctuation mark by this weekly and ask if we have run out of ideas on how to gracefully use other punctuations! But let me assure you, the subject matter demands that almost every sentence in this article ends with an exclamation point. Also please don’t expect the subject matter to be dealt in a chronological order. I’m just too mentally traumatised to recount the fashion trends of the 90s as well as its major flubs, some of which I myself have committed!

1990s sure was a strange time, with strange fashion trends and equally strange fashion flubs. And I shamefacedly admit to having committed quite a number of them myself, including strutting around town wearing a pair of spandex tights, known during those days as ‘cycling shorts’! What was I thinking! That I was Axl Rose minus the stubble, bandana, and Jack Daniels? Jeez!

Those were the dark ages when sporting a Tibetan terrier hairdo was considered cool. Ah, those not-so-glorious days of side-parting, straight long fringes completely covering one eye, painfully tilted necks [to keep that fringe hanging over that particular side of the face] and the resulting stiff neck at the end of the day! After my pet Apso saw that hairdo on me, the bitch insisted on getting a crew cut. How mean is that!

Topping the list of other popular hairstyles that had once swept Gangtok was Crew cut, a hairdo sported by delusional guys who, after an overdose of Vietnam War movies, believed they were in the US Army. After the release of Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore starrer Ghost, getting the short Demi Moore crop was a must for every ‘cool’ school girl while every other guy wanted an Aashiqui cut a la Rahul Roy. Sales of shampoo, as well as lice killer potions, shot up like crazy that season, I’ve been told.

A denim jacket worn over anything, even formal pants [!], was another fashion statement back in the 90s. My few attempts to make such a statement in school got too loud for my teachers’ liking, resulting in a couple of quick detentions and the eventual confiscation of my prized denim jacket on charges of repeated offence. Soon, it became cool to wear torn jeans, jackets and bags started sporting ‘patches’ and our fashionable people became walking billboards for anything from the US Postal Service to some obscure oil company in the UAE!

But the determination of fashion-conscious peeps hell-bent on wearing a tight pair of denims during those Lycra-less days was amazing. If getting into those awfully tight pair of ‘Jeans pants’ was an ordeal, getting out of them was a mission almost impossible. Groans, grunts and frantic looks thrown around to see if there’s anyone to lend you a hand, or two, to get you out of that contraption. And all that pain for what purpose? To make yourself look like a ridiculous replica of Big Ethel, with the denim covering your knees protruding as if your knees were on Viagra! The results were more disastrous on a pair of bow legs.

Other horror-inducing fashion rages of the time were baggy pants and shirts with bat wing-like sleeves [I plead guilty to having worn these absurdities], puffed sleeves, Iron Maiden t-shirts, jabar-jasti ko denim bell-bottoms [regular denim pants cut open at the seams and a V-shaped piece of cloth, known as ‘rockets’, sewn in between to make the ‘flares’], fluorescent clothes that made everyone go blind [thanks to MTV], platform sneakers that elevated you to new heights with layers of rubber soles, and fake Doc Martins that threatened to weigh you down by their sheer weight besides giving you corns. And then there were the days when people walked the streets of Gangtok wearing combat pants and boots when the nearest war going on at that time was in the Arabian Gulf! Thank God, PVC clothing failed to find a market here.

Missing an episode of Beverly Hills 90210 and Fauji starring a young Shah Rukh Khan was a cardinal sin, so was addressing your friends by their full name. Those were the days when geniuses like us were too mentally preoccupied to spell out all the syllables in a name. So Mahesh became Max, Savitri became Savvy, and Thupden became Thups! If names were a race, we’d be looking back at those times as an era marred by genocide.

Then somewhere around mid-90s we saw a late emergence of the grunge fashion [seems like it took the trend some time to reach here from Seattle]. This was the age of the ‘anti-fashion’ fashion when we proudly went around looking like we just rolled out of bed in oversized plaid flannel shirts [in summer!] worn over t-shirts endorsing heavy metal bands. The look was not complete unless the flannel shirts were accompanied by dirty denim pants, a wallet chain [optional], a pair of dirty canvas shoes and a thatch of equally greasy hair. This trend continued until the time hip-hop street fashion took over in the fag end of the 90s.

At least the good thing about those days of horrible fashion trends was that they lasted for quite some time before they became ‘oh so last season’. These days, the fashion changes so rapidly that in a couple of months’ time, someone might be writing a somewhat similar piece on ‘the unthinkable fashion trends we followed last season’ here and demanding a barf bag at the uncomfortable thought of his/her fashion flubs of last season! Baarrfff!

Midweek, 27 Sept – 03 Oct, 2006

How Not To Say What You Mean

That title up there is lifted right off a dictionary of euphemisms by RW Holder I had picked up from Raman’s private little kingdom, a.k.a. Rachna Bookshop, sometime last year. In fact, it was the book title that had grabbed my attention in the first place, simply because it sounded more of a goat than a sheep. While most ‘How to…’ paperbacks normally offer to give us the lowdown on how to say what we mean, here was this mean fat hardbound that promised to help you unlearn whatever you’ve learnt so far.

But am I going to wax eloquent over this dictionary that I hardly use? No. So why did I waste an entire paragraph talking about it? Because the subject matter of this piece is our tendency to resort to euphemisms in our feeble attempt to make an offensive or awkward situation less offensive or awkward. Besides, I happen to really like that title.

So, heading straight to the crux of the matter, let me ask you - have you been paying attention to our politically correct conversations lately? We no longer get straight to the point. We take a roundabout, sugarcoat our lame conversations with unhealthy doses of artificial sweetners and just leave a hint of what we actually mean. The end result is a large number of words, which get the message right across, are jostling to get themselves enrolled in the list of endangered vocabulary.

Take for instance the word ‘fat’. It is an inoffensive word as long as it is strictly uttered in context of Garfield, the comicstrip cat. Want to lose a female friend? Try telling her she’s become fat. And if someone asks you “Do I look fat?”, the correct answer always is a straight-faced “No!” If honesty is still your best policy [even in this age!], you can still get away without lying with a little help from an inoffensive ‘fat’ word substitute – ‘healthy’. The slightly bolder ones can try ‘you’ve put on a little bit of weight’, but at your own risk. Reaction to this statement varies from person to person.

Wrinkles. Another endangered word. In a civilised conversation, you don’t bring out that word. Ever. Even the cosmetic companies have learnt from their mistakes. Anti-wrinkle creams are no longer packaged in that name. They have now been rechristened ‘anti-aging’ cream. It’s the same thing, come to think of it, but it sounds a little less wrinkled.

But our double standards come to the fore whenever we see a possible piece of art or photograph featuring an old, wrinkly face. In such arty-farty instances, the face is not marred by wrinkles but marked by ‘character’ that ‘comes with age’. And while we spend a small fortune to get rid of wrinkles on our faces, we pretend to find pleasure in drooling over the very wrinkles on someone else’s face.

Petite. Another word that makes me laugh. Though many opt to use this word to describe themselves, the fact remains that using an exotic sounding French word does not make one ‘not short’. ‘Oriental’ is another word. Nobody uses the word ‘Mongolian’ anymore. I tried doing that on my blog a couple of months ago and was reprimanded by a fellow blogger. Mongolian sounds ugly, uncool, I’m told. Oriental, on the other hand, suggests something exotic. Huh? Okay, let me try this. Petite Oriental lady. Hmm… Short Mongoloid. Eww… Maybe that blogger was right.

Half-pants and chappals sound boring, ugly and uncool. And no person in his right ‘fashion-conscious’ mind dyes his/her hair anymore. Hair dye is for grandma and half-pants [or hap-pen] for our country cousins. Cool cats like us wear shorts and flip-flops and colour our hair.

Fashion and looks department are not the only places were euphemisms abound. It even finds its way to our mundane everyday life. Like for instance, irregular power supply is labeled off as ‘temporary inconvenience due to repair or upgradation works’. Ditto with our present state of internet service, or lack thereof. Bad, slosh covered roads due to ongoing governmental construction works? Well, that’s another ‘temporary inconvenience’ we lesser mortals have to suffer in the larger interest of the community.

Playing right now in my Winamp is Depeche Mode’s Enjoy The Silence. “Words are very unnecessary…” I guess that’s a cue for me to stop.

Midweek, 20-26 September, 2006

GENERATION SMS

When the fate of the world rests on SMS judges…

Somebody’s going to be crowned Miss Universe this September and somebody’s going to land a major gig with a rock band in a reality TV show. And trust me, it’s not going to be the prettiest or the most talented contestants. Ask me how I know that and I’ll tell you. It’s called the SMS age, my darlings. This is the new technology-driven Dark Age where any dimwit with a cellular phone and a television set can play judge and decide the fates of a lot of smart, pretty or talented people.

Come to think of it, it’s a sad sad situation. Earlier, it was just a bunch of cocky people who sat at the judges’ table and decided who should win. The good thing in this scenario was at least they knew what they were doing, or at least they thought they knew what they were doing. Now, it’s total chaos with people with myopia selecting the ‘face of the year’ and people with 90 per cent hearing impairment choosing our singing idols. All hail the power of SMS votes.

Let’s take a sample of the thought patterns of an average SMS voter: Enki minki ponki… okay, maybe I should vote for Ms. I-quit-my-regular-gig-to-take-part-in-this-competition. If she loses, what will the poor thing do? No, wait! There’s someone here more miserable. He’s lived all his life in a trailer truck. Maybe he needs to win this more than anybody else here!

The deciding factor here is not who is the most worthy contestant that really deserves to win; the parameter is set on who needs to win the gig more than anybody else. So, most often than not, what happens is that a contestant in a rock band audition may get the most number of SMS votes based solely on his/her sex appeal while a contestant in a model search show may get booted from the competition because a majority of the voters decided that they didn’t really like her Puerto Rican accent.

The TV channels, so-called hep magazines and newspapers can go on calling us Generation X or whatever cliché they intend on repeating till kingdom come. The fact remains that this is Generation SMS, raised on unhealthy doses of reality TV shows and SMS opinion polls where we choose our ‘idols’ with the might of our phone balance.

What’s even shallower than that is that we have continuously voted out the best candidates for the job – be it to hold the title of the most beautiful woman in the universe or to be our rock ‘idol’ – and settled for the second best or even the mediocre. Why? Simply because our ‘emotions’ came in the way of better judgement, or because we didn’t know any better. I guess that’s what popular opinion means.

Last I heard, they were letting the viewers select actors to play some characters in a soap opera. What next? Are we going to line up our politicians in a reality show and watch them gang up and connive against the strongest contender and then send our SMS votes for the most camera-friendly to lead our nation? And are we going to vote on whether or not there should be a war in Iraq? God save us from SMS votes. And from ourselves!


At the time of going to print, the author of this column was busy participating in an SMS opinion poll. The question was “Have SMS polls taken over our lives? Type ‘Y’ for Yes or ‘N’ for No.” As expected, she typed ‘N’. At the last count, she had hit the Send button 33 times!

Midweek, 13-19 September, 2006

Welcome to My Wasteland

It’s been some time since I’ve been toying around with the idea of posting the stuff I usually write for local publication[s]. But somehow the idea of posting them on my Mockingbird blog didn’t appeal to me. Maybe I’ve been told one time too many not to mix business with pleasure. Still what I do for work is not far from what I do for fun [as you’ll notice in the succeeding posts, I somehow manage to write the crappiest of things and still get them published - and paid too!] Yet I wanted to maintain some sort of a balance between work and play [if that's possible].

That's the reason I've created Wylde Wasteland - 'Wylde' being one of the pseudonyms I've been using for many years now, and 'Wasteland' because this blog is certainly going to be a wasteland where I’ll host my eternal crap-fest.

So while I'll continue what I've been doing all these months at my usual hangout, this space will contain the absurdities I come up with for a living.

Now, let’s get wasted!