(Reprise)

This post was originally going to be titled “Your truth, my truth, teri maa ki-.....”. Catchy ain’t it? Anyway, it’s been over two-and-a-half months since I last posted, as the more astute (or bored enough to check regularly... you decide) among you would have undoubtedly noticed.

This one’s going to be extremely scattered and all over the place. Bear with me.

And that is the sad state of my present blog-rust. In fact it’s so bad that I’m still a fair bit from even starting up on the point of this particular post and yet, I’ve run out of things to type. Let me try and trace my footsteps. Right. Here we go.

Circa October 2010, I hit upon the idea to try and save up and make a trip to Australia to catch a Big Day Out show in Perth. Why Perth? I haven’t a clue. And when those plans went from musing to actual planning, I got home to check out airfare and just happened to check my mail first. Total coincidence. What I saw on my screen blew me away and scorched my retinae. Could it be? Fuck going to Australia. This is what I’m going to be doing, I told myself. Watching almost every single band I love perform at one place (and that too on the edge of the earth) would have been awesome, no doubt. But the subject matter of that email I saw referred to something that was happening in my own backyard. On my own turf.

The decision wasn’t exactly difficult and my bank account was extremely grateful to me. Every single day leading up to this particular thing was no more than a stepping stone — something to do till the day rolled around. Weekends were immaterial. The holiday season wasn’t important. New Year’s Eve didn’t mean diddly squat. I was waiting for my own personal big day out.

And then it came.

January 13, 2011: THE PRODIGY live at Palace Grounds, Bangalore!

The extent of foolishness that went on before and after the show is something that’s far too much to go into. It’ll require a separate post. And yes, the show was blindingly good. But amid all the mirth-making and coming to life of something for which I’d been waiting so long, were some extremely profound moments, one of which will help this clumsy post lurch a little closer to its point.

I believe it was some time between very late in the night on the 12th and very early in the morning of the 13th, when (for some unGodly reason) we were sat around discussing a particularly prickly topic in the subcontinent. That’s right, kiddies... The K-Word. So one of my cohorts begins detailing a particularly self-righteous, moralistic and over-simplified rant he’d heard in the very recent past. That got me thinking about how a ton of people ardently believe in these supposed universal truths that are based on debatable, inconclusive and flimsy grounds.

An example. “The Indian Army is always bad” is a favourite universal truth among hot topic activists, armchair pundits, media students and so on and so forth. I’m not even going to go into the extraordinary lengths to which these people go to justify the senseless massacre of innocent villagers, policemen etc. at the hands of “disenfranchised parties”. To ensure that I get to my point in the near future, I am going to refrain from indulging in a self-righteous rant of my own about this issue. How lucky you all are!

Moving on... there were two such “universal truths” (albeit nowhere near as conflicted) that I’d been mulling over the last couple of days. The first has to do with cowboys. We’re all familiar with the shouting and yelling that greeted the release of Brokeback Mountain, with all these dissenting voices belly-aching about how it was wrong to portray cowboys as gay. Dig deeper and we found that conservatives in Utah (for instance) thought it went against “traditional families”. Someone as cool and macho as cowboys can’t possibly be portrayed as being homosexual, Cletus, his maw and the entire deep south yee-hawed. And then, Hollywood, as you all well know, has nearly always without exception, propounded the idea of the cool, smooth-talking and the epitome-of-all-things-masculine cowboy. It’s the WILD West, not the Mild West, after all.

But wait, just a damn second.

Who the hell decided that cowboys were so cool? And the next inevitable question is, if cowboys are so cool, why aren’t goatherders considered cool? Why aren’t farmers considered cool? Why don’t kids get plastic combine harvesters for Christmas? Why don’t they dress up as millers for Halloween? The real cowboys are often lazy layabouts who take naps while their cattle graze and then herd them back and that’s the end of their day. Historically, I believe cowboys were cowards too. I mean who the hell goes with a revolver and shoots people armed with nothing but sticks and maybe bows and arrows? And then tries to act like the victim and complains, “Damn Injuns got me” or something like that.

The other “universal truth” is far more newsy and far more fun. For time immemorial, I have seen men, a majority of whom were British, go on and on about this particular institution (I suppose it would be a fair way to describe it). The level of understanding of this instition that you possess defines just how much of a man you are. If you have little to no comprehension of it, you are roundly pilloried and mocked. If you call the institution stupid, you see the scrawniest of folk jump up in its defence with fire in their eyes, all set to defend their institution and its way of life. And honestly, this aforementioned institution is fairly simple to understand. Simple enough for a wee kid to understand.

It is for that reason that I don’t get why a guy who has been a virtual legend in his field would be stupid enough to cling to that particular institute and its supposed exclusivity... So much so that it would cost him his job. Give me a moment while I find a suitable way to dispell this "universal truth". How do I put this? Err... Let’s try this.

To put it very simply:
OFFSIDE IS A FOOLISHLY SIMPLE RULE!! There is no glory in claiming that you understand it and that imply that women don’t. Even LBW is a harder thing to understand than your fucking offside. Keep in mind that I’m not talking about refereeing or umpiring, where you need to watch carefully to see if it is in fact offside or LBW. I’m talking about knowing how it works. So to all of you who still think that offside is the holy grail of masculine understanding, I say this: If you really want to be smarter or show the world that you’re smart and they’re dumb, try and work out how Duckworth-Lewis is calculated.

Spare a thought though for poor Andy Gray. Take a bow, son. What a stupid way to get fired.

A surreal return to VfB for sure, but worry not, normal service will be resumed soon.